The hills of West Virginia are deeply lush in the summer and the humidity of the rain forest weighs heavy in the lungs. Overnight, a thick, cool fog will steep the land, lasting just before daybreak, when it settles onto the grass as dew.

In the year 1994 I worked as a disk jockey at the local (and only) alternative nightclub in Huntington. I was going through a lot and my thoughts were always chaos. Many were the nights that I would come home from work at four in the morning, restless, and walk through the fog and the peace.

I enjoyed the stillness while coming down from the buzz of working and would ramble far from the house. It was a ritual.

One night I met a dog. The fog was exceptionally thick and so I heard his paws padding on the asphalt before his silhouette emerged. He was a golden color and short-haired, a magnificent animal. He didn’t have a collar but was clearly cared for.

The dog walked up to me but refused a pet when I bent down, hand outstretched. He made a chuffing sound and started walking away before stopping and looking back. He chuffed again, and when I walked towards him, he started walking further.

Lone dogs were not uncommon there and then and I assumed he was a neighbor’s charge. However, he was leading me somewhere. I followed.

We walked down Hammill Road and onto South Altamont, which was then paved with gravel which crunched under my beaten Chuck Taylor’s. The dog was growing more agitated, chuffing louder and with greater frequency.

Eventually the dog cut off the road, into the deepening forest. The fog flowed through the trees and the moonlight cut through the canopy and here was an earthy smell of renewal.

I felt drunk and foolish, following a stray dog through the forest. I knew these woods by sun; at night they were foreign, but I wasn’t afraid: this was my home, and I was merely seeing another side of it.

The dog chuffed louder and picked up its pace, heading up the hill, leaves crunching under-paw. I knew where we were supposed to be – or at least I thought I did – but we must have slipped around the house I knew was sitting off the road because I never saw it.

A quarter mile from the road the dog let out an actual bark. Not a bark of fear or anger, nor one of warning. It was a bark to attract attention, and that’s when I heard it.

From the top of the hill, a low rasping through the fog, like someone sucking in a big breath, followed by a scream, loud and abrupt and terrifying, more so because it was staccato in nature: “AHH-AHH-AAAAH-AAAHHH-AAHHH” echoing through the murk of the forest.

A figure rose suddenly in shadow, slippery, and spread what I was sure were wings out through the pin points of moonlight. It seemed to me to keep getting larger and more indistinct; time was suddenly meaningless to me.

The dog ran towards the shadow. I did not. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t move at all. I felt adrenaline drop down my spine and my legs twitched and the air tasted metallic and foul. The figure seemed to shrink, and there was a quick breathing sound, like a “hesh-hesh-hesh”.

Then, just as suddenly as it happened, it was gone. So was the dog. I stood still for the longest time, hoping that I was invisible in the dark. My heartbeat was loud enough to hear in Kentucky.

I sat down in the leaves and waited for my heart to normalize before creeping as silently as I could back to the gravel, so that I could go home, to my dog.

I grew up hearing that the Mothman was a portent, a signifier of pending change or a reckoning. Within three months I had moved across the country to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’ve remained to this day.

I have some ideas about what that actually was. I think it was a hobo and his dog. I think he stood up quickly, trying to scare me, or summon the dog. I think he was more scared of me than I him. I think he ran up and over the hill, taking his dog with him.

At least that’s what I hope happened.

I nurture and love this pan. I make food for the people I love with it.

I did not buy this pan. It was my grandmother’s. It came to me after her death. I remember her frying chicken with it. She made food for the people she loved with it. She nurtured it because it was once her grandmother’s, too.

Cast iron pans work because of seasoning. Seasoning keeps the pan from rusting and creates a surface that doesn’t stick: ideal for cooking. A pan’s seasoning is actually a thin skin of hardened and polymerised fat. The process of seasoning cast iron is both a science and an art. Like any skin, seasoning can be damaged. This is what happened to my pan: it suffered a scrape that went through to the bare metal, and from that violence bloomed the red tidings of rust. I was distressed.

When a pan’s seasoning is damaged, it must be re-seasoned. A true re-seasoning is a difficult and lengthy process and begins with the removal of the pan’s old seasoning. This is a brutal doing. All the cruft and crap must be removed. Steel wool will grind away all the black from the iron. The correct depth is when the surface turns grey or silver. That’s the bare iron.

Grinding to the iron takes time, patience, and no small amount of agony. It must be done clinically. While it is possible to shorten this effort through the use of aggressive chemicals, such techniques are dangerous and not recommended. It is best, always, to do the hard work on one’s own, relentlessly. When or if rust appears, that must be ground away as well. In the end, fingers may bleed, but the iron revealed is stronger and blessed by the suffering.

When the pan’s surface has been returned to a dull grey sheen (you’ve flushed your bullshit), it is time to re-forge its seasoning. This is a process that cannot be rushed: doing so courts disaster. It must be done methodically and with patience.

Cast iron can be seasoned with many kinds of oils. Most will produce a decent, usable result. For my pan, I chose to season it with flax oil. Flax oil is a food-grade version of linseed oil, which has been used by artists for centuries to provide long-lasting sheen to paintings. Flax oil has low “smoke point” – the temperature at which the oil begins to burn and produce smoke.

You will want to cover a cookie sheet in foil and place it in the bottom rack of the oven. This is to catch inadvertent oil drippings from the pan. There will be no drips if the process is done correctly but it never hurts to be careful.

Flax oil should be coated over the entire surface of pan. This must be a very light covering. Once the pan is covered, as much oil as possible must be removed from it using a paper towel. This must be done continuously until no more oil can be removed with a paper towel. Only the barest hint of oil sheen should be apparent. I suggest wearing latex gloves to reduce mess.

The pan should then be placed in the oven on the top rack, cooking surface down. At this point the oven should be turned on and heated to 500° Fahrenheit (or 450°, whatever your oven can do). Let the pan heat along with the oven’s pre-heat cycle. When the oven reaches temperature, leave it there to forge in the heat for one hour. Baking flax oil produces a peculiar scent that is unusual but not unpleasant. The odor only lasts for the first half hour that the pan is in the oven. My wife tolerated it but I asked her permission before each burn.

Turn the oven off after an hour. Let the pan cool in the oven unmolested for two hours after which it may be inspected. It should be darker in color but only barely.

After the first firing of the pan, you must repeat the process: oil the pan, bake it for an hour, and allow it to cool for two. This must be done a total of six times at a minimum, including the first firing. Six is the magic number. Six is the smallest perfect number. But if the devil is six, then god is seven. I baked my pan a seventh time, for luck.

Since that period, I have set about determining what behaviors and traits in myself that I to encourage and grow. I have also decided which parts of myself I want to improve or jettison. I’ve had some successes in that regard. Some changes were obvious and carried immediate result. Others are much more involved and subtle, with slow effect. It’s slow going, sometimes frustratingly slow, but nothing of value is ever rushed and I have patience.

When I pulled the pan from the oven for the last time, after the extra firing (for luck!), I felt a deep satisfaction and pride in my work. This is a real thing I have done. The process was difficult. It required skill and patience.

Today, the pan feels different now. It rolls smoother in my calloused palms. The seasoning is subtly iridescent in the light: a thousand golden flecks glimmer in the deep black of its abyssal surface.

Tonight, I will pick up my sleeping dog and move her so that I can climb into bed next to my wife. I will open my book. I will daydream before I dream for real. I will plan out the next day. I will fall asleep.

Tomorrow, I will make food for the people I love with my pan.

Enterprise was not built for orbital flight. She was a prototype craft, designed to test the aeroform’s gliding and landing capabilities. NASA used a specially built Boeing 747 to lift her way up in the sky before letting her go and watching her land.

I remember thinking how awkward and absurd the shuttle looked, perched atop the larger airplane. I was almost eight years old and in love with Star Wars and all things space. I remember desperately wishing to see such a thing for myself, a space ship, with my own two eyes.

Today, 30 odd years later, while walking to the train by Merritt Lake, Space Shuttle Endeavour flew overhead, strapped to the back of a specially-built Boeing 747. She was being paraded around the Bay Area, on her way to her final resting place at the California Science Center.

It was both exhilarating and saddening at the same time.

Exhilarating because, well, space ship. After 30 years, my wish came true.

Saddening because the shuttles have been haunted by spectres my entire adult life. There was first the destruction of Challenger in 1986 and then that of Columbia almost twenty years later.

Back in 2003, when we lost Columbia, I wrote a post about my memories of January 28th, 1986. Here it is.

February 1, 2003

I was thinking today and I discovered that I have very few clear memories of the three years I spent in junior high school. Seventh grade through ninth grade were perhaps the most difficult years of my life – they are a three year period of prolonged fear and embarrassment, of jockying for position and dominance and the favor of the ladies fair.

I’m not surprised I ditched a fair chunk of that memory. I would hope I have better things to do with my time than relive old wounds and humiliations.

I was thinking today about what I did remember. Aside from random and meaningless snippets of conversation bookended by a blur, the list is very short: getting in trouble during science class; a prank involving rubber cement, old yearbooks, and a forgotten room in the school; a “serious” talk with a teacher I hated when I had gotten a C in her geometry class; getting trouble for leaving school grounds with Garrett – (this was funny, because we had gone off ground to get drunk and instead we only got nailed for leaving).

Two teachers were ultimately the bane of my existence, then: Mr. Kendall, a math teacher, who had an almost psychopathic demand for respect, which made him all the more comical, and Mrs. Wilson, an English teacher. It was extra difficult with her because she was a neighbor, often gave me rides to school, and was, in general, an all around busy-body, perfectly happy to stick her nose into things that had nothing to do with her.

(it was she who discovered that we had left campus that day.)

I don’t remember what we were supposed to be doing but I know that I wasn’t doing it. I was busy drawing a knight in armor – my Dungeons and Dragons character – and I remember very specifically modeling the armor after one of the characters on the cover of a battered Dragonlance paperback.

Maybe it was a quiz. I usually finished those early.

Our school librarian burst into the room, pitching a fit. “The space shuttle,” she said, “it’s blown up!”

I was thinking today about how I didn’t grasp the totality of her words then – none of us did – and I remember someone muttering (maybe it was me), an aside to friends, made to mock the teacher, who cares? they send things up all the time. Space flight was routine; a ship going up wasn’t news anymore.

But no: mistaken. Every class was possessed of an ancient television perched atop a cobalt-blue cart on rollers, shunted in a corner like an unwanted cousin, and they pulled it out and turned the signal on and it came, bleeding through, bright and sinister fireworks on repeat and the words, over and over again,

Space Shuttle Challenger explodes on take-off;
Seven Astronauts lost including first civilian, Christa McAuliffe.

I was thinking today about how the tasteless jokes had been created and circulated before lunch was even served.

why is nasa switching to sprite? because they can’t get seven up!

I was thinking today about how I laughed then. I laughed because everyone else was laughing. I laughed because I didn’t fully understand.

I was thinking today that I wish that I hadn’t.

I was thinking today of flags this morning at half mast, in honor of seven more who died on the Columbia this morning, symmetrical, seventeen years distant.

Many of them were close to my age.

Did they, too, remember Challenger? Did they say a silent prayer in memory when the terrible engines beneath them ignited, thousands of pounds of fire and fuel pushing a feeble craft away from mother earth’s sleepless grasp and into the the most hostile of environments?

I was thinking today about the young teenagers of today and how they are reacting. Will they, too, created horrible and cruel jokes about today’s tragedy?

Will they laugh?

I was thinking today that I hoped they will have the strength not to.

I will never bother you.
I will never promise to.
I will never follow you.
I will never bother you

In the fall of 1992, my love for Nirvana earned me a terrific beatdown from a group of fratboys. I was younger and skinnier but my hair was just as long.

I had fewer tattoos.

It started simple enough, with a group of people I barely knew but thought could new friends. I was in college, working music at the local “alternative music” club. In between sets I sat down next to my friend, Nate, who was rushing a local fraternity. He had brought his new fraternity brothers out to see the “freaks and weirdos”.

As was common, we got to talking about music. One of Nate’s new friends was a big fan of Morrissey. Being young and stupid, I jokingly made fun of him for his musical choices. I remember what I said:

“The age of whining is over. It’s time to embrace the age of action.”

Nirvana, I said, was who he should look to. Kurt Cobain had come along and kicked the doors down and we didn’t have to cry in our rooms anymore.

At the time I was full of self-righteousness about these things. We, the disenfranchised youth, suffered. We’d been getting stepped on for years; it was time to complain.

I honestly didn’t think anything of it. Five minutes later I walked out to my car to get a pack of smokes.

As I returned to the club, I ran my fingers along the side of the small medical clinic that I had parked my car behind. Its exterior was made of pebbled concrete and the texture was something I found pleasing in my drunken state.

They found me there, three of them. They were cooking, had been cooking.

I said, “Hey guys!”

He mumbled, “Don’t you ever fucking say shit like that about Morrissey again.”

He lurked a moment, silhouetted by the clinic’s buzzing security light. He lurched, and I thought he was stumbling drunkenly, but no: his right arm thrust forward, grabbing my jaw, and bashed my head into the pebbles of the clinic’s walls.

The attack was furious and knocked the fight out of me instantly. He slammed my head into the wall twice more before letting me go. I slumped down to the sidewalk,

blurry, dizzy

His friends kicked me a couple more times for good measure before leaving.

Later, my friends would tend to my wounds in Bryan’s dorm room, gingerly picking pebbles from the flesh of my skull. Nothing ever happened to those chaps; the fraternity closed ranks around them and the incident passed.

Never speak a word again,
I will crawl away for good.

This was a defining moment in my life. I would turn it over and over in my memory, wondering what could have happened differently, what I could have said or not said. Could I have defended myself in that instant? Would it have been better or worse?

Seventeen years ago, the voice of my generation put a shotgun into his mouth and blew his own head off.

I made this exact comment earlier today. My friend Eva replied, asking, “Do you ever wonder how come we’re still talking?”

That’s a good question.

I will move away from here.
You wont be afraid of fear.
No thought was put in to this.
I always knew it would come to this.

On April 8th, 1994, the era of grunge rock was over.

Many people say that “grunge” is a genre of music but I believe that incorrect. What people think of as “grunge” is really “punk rock” dressed in flannel instead of leather. No. Grunge is not a style of music; it is an era of music.

An era that came to a close with Cobain’s death.

The year 1994 was a major turning point in my life. It was the year I stopped being a child, really. I cannot say that I became a man – this would not be for many years later.

Months after the beatdown, a pit of dissatisfaction had been gnawing within me. I had been depressed for months, without purpose, aimless.

Whining.

News of Cobain’s death came singing to me across the digital divide: an email sent to my school’s VAX/VMS server. I sat, pondered, and remembered.

Sitting in front of an aging VT100 terminal, my thoughts turned to the argument and the beating. I turned it over in my mind once again.

I came to the conclusion that, in that argument so many months before, I had been right: the time for whining was over. It was time for action.

I stopped being a child at that moment because I decided to take charge of my own destiny. I began making my first real “life decisions” – things that I wanted to do rather than what had been expected of me.

One of these decisions was to move out of the womb of West Virginia to the farthest place I could imagine at the time, San Francisco.

Things have never been so swell.
I have never failed to feel
Pain

Was Kurt Cobain the voice of my “generation”? Not for all of Generation X, obviously. I can’t speak to the experiences of others.

But for me? Yes: he was the voice of my generation – the generation of me at that moment. The voice of that man-child, dressed in flannel, laying on the sidewalk, covered in blood and rock, wondering what had just happened to him. The boy who wondered how many more beatdowns he had yet to receive (five, to be exact) and how many more he would give (three).

The one who realized that his life fucking sucked and it needed changing, and that no one but him was going to effect that change.

You know you’re right
You know you’re right
You know you’re right

Today’s teenagers relate to Nirvana in the same way I related to Led Zeppelin when I was their age. I am certain that the thoughts evoked when they listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit and Heart Shaped Box are not too dissimilar to mine own.

Does that make Kurt the voice of their generation? Possibly.

I like to think that the poetry and color of music transcends its moment of birth.

I’m so warm and calm inside
I no longer have to hide
Let’s talk about someone else
Steaming soup against her mouth
Nothing really bothers her
She just wants to love herself

The first musician who really spoke to me and for me was Billy Joel, actually. One of his singles, Pressure, wormed its way into my brain. I couldn’t have been older than twelve at the time, but the music consumed me: not the literal meaning of the words themselves (I was probably too young for that) but the unbridled meaning behind them.

I understood it, you see. At least, in my way. My mother still remembers this time in my life, and I still listen to The Nylon Curtain; it is one of my favorite albums.

Billy Joel would later become muted and the voices of John, Paul, George, and Ringo would grow ever louder, expressing my teenage doubts and triumphs, sadnesses and joys. The Beatles were the voice of The Generation I Was Then.

These people – these musicians – they were my voice.

Because I didn’t have the words, you see.

I have not been the Generation those people spoke for in many years. They still exist, mind you – Nagasaki ghost-shadows embedded in the walls of memory. I can examine them from time to time.

I compare the generation I am Now to the generation I was Then.

Things have changed. My ethics have gotten both sharper and more grey, for instance. I understand better what it is to love and be loved. I see the future with a more focused idealism.

I have a lot more tattoos.

But the biggest difference is that now I am the Voice of My Generation.

I will move away from here
You wont be afraid of fear
No thought was put into this
I always knew to come like this

K. D. C., February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994

Many of those questions remained unanswered after George wrote the official version. And let’s just say it: the official version sucks. It’s long periods of talking about politics and the value of diplomacy and democracy by people who elect queens and live in a republic that’s punctuated by occasional lightsaber fights that don’t really make sense.

The story of Darth Vader is meant to be dark.

THE PHANTOM MENACE

The title crawl tells the viewers about the Jedi. The Jedi are a sect of wandering warrior monks who have a strange religion and power over the Force. They rarely, if ever, use the Force – so rarely that most people don’t even believe that it exists. They are not allowed to own more than what they can carry, and are beggars. It tells us that Obi-Wan Kenobi is a young Jedi Knight who has just parted ways with his master, Yoda, who did not wish him to leave training.

Obi-Wan Kenobi travels to the great city-planet of Coruscant. There, in the dark underbelly of the city, he meets a young Anakin Skywalker. Anakin is already strong in the Force but he uses it openly and poorly. Anakin uses the Force to manipulate people, to steal things, to survive and scavenge.

Obi-Wan kicks his ass and tells him what’s really going on, what the Force is, and makes him his apprentice. There will be several short bits where Obi-Wan teaches him to use the Force. Anakin won’t obtain a lightsaber until much later.

Darth Maul, a Dark Jedi, is building a huge clone army on an unnamed backwater planet. From time to time some of his clone soldiers are sent into the core to cause trouble. Obi-Wan and Anakin happen to witness an assassination attempt on Senator Bail Organa and save his life.

The Senator invites them back to his mansion to let them stay for a time. During this time Anakin meets Padme and gets a crush on her. She’s the first truly beautiful woman he’s ever met. He makes all sorts of inappropriate advances towards her, acting like a stalker. He doesn’t know it but he actually hates her. What she represents to him is the domination of the nobility over the underclass.

Maul’s forces start attacking more and more places. He leads a major attack on Coruscant. Obi-Wan and Darth Maul fight each other to a standstill; only Anakin’s timely intervention causes Maul to flee.

The Republic, led by Palpatine, begins to raise an army after this. The film finishes with the beginning of the Clone Wars.

ATTACK OF THE CLONES

The title crawl tells the viewer that the Clone Wars have been going on for several years. Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, now a general, have chosen to take up arms. They have fought in many battles. It lays out that the rebellion is being run by Darth Maul, who is a servant of Palpatine. No matter which side wins the war, Palpatine’s plans ensure he will be victorious.

The film begins with a battle. Anakin, clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, is in a speeder, fighting in the air. He is very erratic, hostile. Obi-Wan is on the ground, fighting clones. They chatter through comm sets. Anakin makes comments about how it won’t be so bad if some nobles get hurt – it’s always the underdwellers that take damage, anyways. Bail Organa is involved.

Anakin and Obi-Wan are split up. Obi-Wan is off on an assassination mission: he’s to kill Darth Maul. However, he first travels to Dagobah to talk to Yoda. He’s got concerns: Anakin’s a wild card, teetering on the Dark Side. He learns new Force tricks from Yoda. He has a vision of where to find Darth Maul. Against Yoda’s advice, he leaves to confront Maul. Yoda says that Kenobi’s training isn’t complete.

Anakin is sent to guard Senator Organa and takes up residence in the mansion. Anakin encounters Padme in the halls. He talks to her; they haven’t spoken in some time. He is clearly nervous, pensive, and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He tells her that he loves her, that she’s the reason he fights, and asks if she’ll run away with him. She rejects him, and – in Anakin’s mind – rejects everything that he has fought for. Anakin settles into a cold rage.

He uses the Force on her. He makes her “love” him. And he rapes her. When the deed is done, she still rejects him, so he throws her into a wall, crushing her spine.

Senator Palpatine knows of this and confronts Anakin. He’d been following the young Jedi, of course. Words are exchanged. Anakin draws his lightsaber to kill Palpatine. Palpatine kicks Anakin’s ass seven ways from Sunday without a lightsaber. Palapatine demands that he become Darth Vader, and Anakin, faced with the fact that he’s totally gone over to the Dark Side, agrees.

Palpatine orders him to go kill Darth Maul and tells him where Maul is hiding.

Both Obi-Wan and Darth Vader arrive on the backwater planet at the same time, neither knowing the other is there. Obi-Wan confronts Darth Maul and they begin a furious fight. Darth Vader comes upon them and observes the two for a time until he sees the time is right and jumps in.

During this time there are interleaved cut shots of clone troops fighting all over the Republic.

Darth Vader kills Darth Maul. Obi-Wan, thinking that he’s still in the presence of Anakin Skywalker, thanks him and then asks him the question: “Wait, why are you here? Who’s guarding the Senator?”

Comprehension dawns and lightsabers ignite. There is a furious battle. During this time there are shots showing senators taken into custody and/or killed. Bail Organa escapes.

The lightsaber fight ends when Obi-Wan gets the upper hand: he slices off one of Darth Vader’s hands. Darth Vader flees down a shaft.

Darth Maul’s clones are defeated in Coruscant but Palpatine takes control and declares an empire.

The film closes with a scene showing Padme on life support within the belly of a starship bound for Alderaan, the two Skywalker children gestating inside of her.

REVENGE OF THE SITH

The title crawl tells the audience that more time has passed. Darth Vader has been purging the Jedi from the galaxy under orders from the new Emperor. Obi-Wan and Bail Organa are fighting with the rebellion. Bail has hidden both of the children by now: one with his brother’s wife, who has taken the girl as her own, and one with his ex-manservant, Lars, on a backwater desert planet. Obi-Wan has agreed to watch over them both as best he can.

The film opens with an old Jedi monk in a village on Kashykk, a lush forest planet. He is watching young Wookies play. Suddenly he gets a cold, stony look, and stands up. Darth Vader is there and kills him after a short fight.

Clone troopers, now dressed much more like modern Stormtroopers, rush in and begin herding and killing Wookies. They slap collars on them.

There are some skirmishes between the rebellion and the new Empire.

Eventually, Obi-Wan travels to Dagobah, to learn more from Yoda. Yoda tells him that he has learned all he can and that now he must face Vader. Kenobi leaves to re-join the rebellion against the Empire: not everyone has fallen in line.

Kenobi tracks Darth Vader through the galaxy for a time. Eventually, the two meet up and have a furious sword fight. Both of them have grown very powerful. The fight ends when Obi-Wan knocks Darth Vader into a vat of molten steel. He leaves.

Vader is still alive, sustained by hatred. Mecha droids begin repairing him.

Obi-Wan flees to Tattooine. He takes up residence in the desert.

The film closes with Darth Vader and Palpatine on the bridge of a Star Destroyer, watching the Death Star being built.

It was a late-October Saturday night with a new moon in West Virginia: very dark, very crisp; resplendent with the odor of Autumn.

The competition was being held on the football field of the local high school. The school grounds were a self-contained plot of land on the other side of a small creek. There was a rickety one-lane bridge crossing the water and there was a state police officer to direct traffic across.

On the excitement scale, “watching high-school marching band competitions” is an activity that ranks right up there with “listening to someone tell you about their level 17 paladin“. Further, they are rather poor venues for flirtation activities, especially when the female side of the equation spends most of its time in lockstep formation on the field.

After an hour and a half the two of us grew bored and decided to seek our destinies elsewhere.

My next memories are a set of fragments:

It’s dark. I light a cigarette, fire up the engine, and drop the car into gear. The lot is packed, the routes through it twisty and confusing. I slowly make my way out to the entry road.

A car approaches from the bridge. Its lights flare into my eyes. I squint and curse. Rick laughs. Practiced fingers flick a cassette tape into the radio (Queensryche’s Rage for Order). Adjust the volume. I look up, and there are things that look suspiciously like

slam on the brakes

motherFUCKER that is a body, rolling over the hood

on the windshield.

The body rolls off the hood.

There is a common turn-of-phrase: “I lost my mind.” I know exactly what that means because it literally happened to me then. There was a moment when I hit a man with the car I was driving and then there was only a low buzzing sound – like being underwater. My vision tunnelled and the lizard-brain activated.

This is what I was thinking:

ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck

This is what I was saying:

ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck

Someone put the car in “park”. To this day I do not remember if it was Rick or I.

Reality

and I discovered that I was out of the car, yelling (ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck).

In all honesty I have to admit that I contemplated escaping in the car.

The body on the side of the road was slowing getting up, groaning, and I realized that I had hit the traffic cop.

He slowly stood up, disoriented, punch-drunk. He stood, searching the ground for something (his flashlight? his gun? all the better to kill me with!). We ask, over and over, “are you okay?” but he isn’t answering he’s just

looking

for something. He took three steps to the side of the road and reached down to pick up his hat from the dust. He brushed the dirt from it before looking up to speak:

“Boy, it’s a good thing you didn’t scuff up my hat or I’d have had to kick your ass.”

He rung up his partner with his walkie-talkie and they called in an ambulance and tried to bring in some Authority. But there was a fun little snag with that: In West Virginia (and possibly everywhere, as far as I know), police officers cannot investigate accidents that involve their own department. This little rule spawned a fun series of calls while we waited in the darkness.

This guy was a state cop, working at a county event, acting in place of a local police officer. So neither the state troopers, the sheriffs, or the local constabulary could handle the incident.

Groups of uniformed people began collecting around the area. At one point there were no fewer than four ambulances parked off to the side.

The local cops were sometimes dicks:

Boy, are you 18?
No sir.
Put out the cigarette. Y’all ain’t old enough to smoke.

After about an hour the real investigative team arrived.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation. The goddamned FBI.

There was a large FBI fingerprinting lab about twenty miles out and they must have been very excited to engage in actual field work because they came loaded for bear.

These boys measured every inch of my car. They determined exactly how fast I was going (fifteen miles per hour). They plotted the car’s position and trajectory in exact minutes, degrees, seconds, and microseconds in latitude and longitude. They took photos of tire marks. They filled out many forms.

They brought a small army of forensic scientists to determine how a pimple-faced seventeen year old boy could possibly drive into someone who walked out in front of a car while wearing black clothing on a new moon.

They were exceptionally thorough. They had a method or device to measure everything. . . except blood alcohol content.

My “breathalyzer test” went down like this:

I was sitting in the back of a federal car, giving my statement to an agent. I liked this guy; he gave me a cigarette and let me smoke while he wrote down everything. At one point he stopped and stared me right in the eye, drawing himself up serious:

Son, you been drinking?

No sir.

And that was that.

After a while they let me go to drive home. While the investigation hasn’t been closed I was informed that I was NOT AT FAULT; the officer was, for walking into traffic. I wouldn’t see the official papers for another several days, however.

The car is a waste: the windshield shattered, hood crumpled, one headlamp busted. The return drive is contemplative at first, both of us thinking about the doom that awaits me when my parents discover what has happened.

Eventually, Rick speaks:

You know, I bet that when he was in cop school and they were teaching the “how to roll across a car hood and not get killed” lesson, he was cracking wise and saying, “what the hell are they teaching this for? We ain’t ever gonna need this shit.”

I started laughing so hard that I almost wrecked the car.

This was an exciting time for me and the entire episode is something I hope never to forget. There is a single moment, however, that enjoys a place of solemn honor in the halls of my memory: seeing Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” with my own eyes.

It was October. We went sight-seeing. We did many things, and one of them was a handful of museums. None of the others knew much about visual art, being focused more on music, either being in bands or radio. I, however, had been studying painting for the bulk of the prior decade.

The MOMA was fairly empty, so the three of us wandered lazily through the galleries. Here and there were canvases I knew, sprinkled among works unknown. I passed these famous works, entirely non-plussed at their presence in the halls. I had studied these works for years and yet none of them held weight to me. I was disappointed at this.

I remember: someone was gawping at a Mapplethorpe print and I moved on. The next moment I was face to face with one of my favorite works of all time. Dumbstruck.

There it hang, sans pomposity, on a wall within New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

I could have reached out and touched it. Ran my fingers over the texture of the paint, made my mark upon the frame.

The perverse imp chained in my brain thought about doing so. Luckily, the idea of such a vulgar sacrilege shivered my soul and stayed my hand.

I stared at the painting for several minutes as whirls of understanding unlocked in my skull. It is a far different thing to see van Gogh’s work as textbook photograph or a low-resolution jpeg and admire its beauty than to stand before its feverish radiance.

Much of the lighter “paint” in the work isn’t paint at all. Rather, it is the yellowing canvas that peeks through the oils. Van Gogh just. . . didn’t paint there. This is something that they don’t teach you in school: that one of the most talented, innovative painters in all of history was sloppy.

I can see a manic van Gogh violently scraping the color in circles with a palette knife, the furious specter of his insanity serving as midwife to the brilliance. There is a dread music echoing through his skull, a relentless tune driving him ever forward to communicate in a language understood by no-one.

My eyes crawled over the dried texture of the oil, reading it as sheet music. I could feel the symphony within me, faintly building in volume, my pulse a staccato drum-beat. This was the Rosetta Stone to a different language, one that would push and push and push through the frail membrane of my sanity.

A glorious, fragile epiphany.

Behind me: a faint cough that shattered my reverie. I immediately cast around for one of my friends with whom I could share this experience.

“Dude! Dude! Come here! Dude, you have to see this!”

He shambled over. “What is it?”

“Dude. This is one of the most important paintings in the world. It’s one of my favorites,” I gushed.

He had the grace to look at it for a few moments before saying “huh” and wandering off, exactly as non-plussed as I was before.

I, however, was a changed person.

Jenny takes words and makes them into art. This sounds very much like “poetry” – and, in fact, much of her work is collected into volumes that resemble little black books with poems in them – but the initial executions create what can only be described as an experience.

For example, her work Laments is a series of “poems” – but they are chisled onto stone sarcophagi. The same words are scrolled across LED light displays – which provide the only light in the exhibit.

She purchases billboard spaces in major cities to present a single phrase from time to time (called Truisms). The poetry of the words and the context they are displayed form the basis of her art.

It’s plain brilliant.

She has a twitter account, and her postings there are good examples of the Truisms:

RELIGION CAUSES AS MANY PROBLEMS AS IT SOLVES

POTENTIAL COUNTS FOR NOTHING UNTIL IT’S REALIZED

GUILT AND SELF-LACERATION ARE INDULGENCES

Her work has affected my own meager pushings with a profound power unmatched by any other visual artist. Looking backwards, I can say with assuredness that I would be a completely different person today had I not been introduced to her art.

When I discovered her work (in or around 1993), I started thinking about the metaphysics of symbology. One of the things I was struggling with was simplicity. I was trying to create an emotion in the viewer of my paintings and prints something direct – something more controlled. I wanted to set people up and then punch them in just the right way so that they would think or feel exactly what I wanted them to.

My first attempt at this was a violent-looking, multi-colored print. I wanted to express a seething, bubbling anger, and once the first prints came off the line I realized that it wasn’t working exactly how I wanted it to. So I made a second plate and struck it below the first one. This plate was a word, deeply scratched, very angry:

MOTHERFUCKER.

It did exactly what I wanted it to do. The print seethed on the wall. It was selected for a gallery show . . . and then promptly pulled from the wall after a complaint.

The next work I did was a stylized gesture drawing of Jesus Christ on a crucifix. It was done with very thick, very bold lines. Underneath, in block letters, said the following:

COMMUNIST

This, too, was deemed too controversial for show in the two-star West Virginian town I lived.

My next few pieces were less hostile to the viewer:

After this, I began thinking very deeply about language, metaphor, and the metaphysics thereof. So much so that I switched majors from art to philosophy – specifically so that I could learn the deep magicks of words. I needed to understand what exactly happens with this thing called “language.”

Why, exactly, is it not a pipe?

When the digital age began waxing in earnest, I began exploring the nascent technology of hypertext as a medium. How brilliant was it that I could change the context of a word simply by “linking” it to another topic? I didn’t have a Mac, so I wasn’t able to create hypercard stacks; instead I found a compiler for Windows 3.1 help texts, which were also hypertext documents.

These were protoplasmic, experimental things, but in creating them I began to understand the how people viewed words and their contexts.

The word “Blood” means different things to different people. For children, it equates to pain. Women are far more used to blood than men. Surgeons more so. Soldiers look at blood with different eyes than me. And so forth.

Then came the world wide web, which opened a new playground to me. I made some more experiments, but the technology in the early years (1994 through 1996) was either too cumbersome for viewers to be expected to have or too obtuse to work in. But in 1997, the language of javascript reached a level maturity where it would do what I wanted and I created my first “digital experience” that I felt worth viewing: a b y s s.

a b y s s was a difficult thing for me to build for many reasons. I was part of a new movement in art and the tools to do these things did not exist: we made them up as we went along. But mostly, the subject matter was difficult for me to write about.

a b y s s was a series of images, words, and animations linked together to form a cohesive experience. The choices for images, words, and animations were designed to push the viewer’s mental space into the area I wanted them to be in through a series of shared psychological associations (for the first three parts) and then in the final part I layed down the sucker punch: I was able to say exactly what I wanted to say and have it be understood within the specific context I wanted.

It was an extremely well received work. It won a lot of stupid awards when everyone was giving awards out for stuff, and earned me a spot in the hell dot com collective (a group of digital art people who were like me).

I had another work planned called shard but it was never finished. Other things got in the way: work, life, love, what-have-you. I began writing more, and the writing was less time consuming. This, too, was well received, but it has never scratched the itch that Ms. Holzer first gave to me.

The other night I was speaking with a photographer I met, and I mentioned Jenny Holzer to her as one of my influences. I like this person’s photographs – a lot – and this reminded me of an idea I had that hearkens back to the some of my earlier experimentations.

Here, then, is the synchronicity of the moment:

This afternoon, I picked up my mail and inside was a small package, mailed from a friend of mine who is the only other person I know who loves Jenny Holzer.

Enclosed was a note:

I’ve been carrying this around for 20 years.

Some strange things have happened, I have strange affections for it.

I’ve been meaning to send it to you for a while; it just seems like the right thing to do, there is an interesting energy around giving it to you.

(If I am wrong please feel free to give it back.)

It was a bound copy of Jenny Holzer’s Laments printed on onionskin.

It is difficult for me to describe how precise and perfect this is – how much it instilled me with a feeling of correctness. It completely changed the tone of my day – which has included my doctor telling me that he has some concerns and that they want to check for cancer.

I am not one to believe in signs and portents.

And yet, it feels like stars are aligning.

one

how long is it now?

people live in the bowls of the machine. they scamper and scurry, a society of rat reflexes. they exist at the mercy of the machine. they exist in fear of it, of its fickle nature.

if you peel back the edges of the machine, get underneath it’s alloyed skin, there is a human heartbeat, visceral and wet.

alone.

the machine grows. it grows without design. it grows with only one purpose, one goal: to continue to grow. a mechanical virus, infecting,

polluting,

consuming.

uncaring.

grime covers every surface of the machine. the sharp stink of processed petroleum permeates the air, choking away memories of a sun long dead.

the sun is gone, you see. they killed it. we must take refuge here, in the machine, our protector, our armor.

our father.

yes, there are windows – but where they are, no one knows – at least, no one who will speak of this openly.

people have left in search of them.

they have not returned.

the machine killed them, maybe, as it kills so many of us: accidentally, always accidentally. it is blind, you see. it knows only growth.

the elders say that one day the machine will cause the sun to shine again.

two

in the end the rats tore him apart.

they came, soiled and stinking waves of manged and flea-infested fur, chittering,

fearless in their hunger.

they came from the deep places of the machine – it’s black and oily piston-driven hearts, moist pockets of secret hate.

the machine bred them there.

we know the rats got him because we found his skeleton. it had been picked clean and gnawed to the marrow in places.

we know it was the rats because men do not do these things – at least, not human men.

the young people said that we should have gone deep into the machine to find and kill the pack. they said – i said, i was young then – they said that it was only a matter of time before the rats grow bold and sleek, fat from their victories. soon they would brave to hunt in the lit areas of the machine.

the elders disagreed. his death was a message, they said. a message from the machine: do not seek the sun. his quest had angered it, they said – and it had punished him as surely as it would vent its wrath upon anyone else foolish enough to stray from our habitat.

obey, they said.

breed, they said.

do not question the will of the machine.

three

you must tell them that you remember the stars, my son. you must lie to them.

i tell you this because i am dying. the thrumming of the machine causes my brittle bones to ache. i am tired, always tired,

tired of the constant clanging and the deep rumbling. it brings madness.

i have never seen the stars. i heard of them only from our storyteller. we sat in a circle at night and listened to the tales for hours upon hours, soaking up every word: stories of mythical forces called ‘wind’ and ‘rain’, of lost gardens and forests, and of the long dead creatures: dogs, cats, bears, birds.

i swore that one day i would see these things for myself.

we had already lost the use of the machine’s eyes and image screens. they were fragile things and slowly the grime crept into their casings, freezing them with accumulated dirt and soot.

we, too, had only the oral tradition and the picture wall.

the sun was a dim, cloud-shrouded memory to even the eldest of the old. i wonder now, as i did then, if any of them truly had seen the blues of the sky. i wonder if they had not simply passed down the stories they themselves had heard – descriptions of trees and grass and birds and forests – and repeated the stories over and over again,

until they believe that it was they, themselves, who had walked the surface, and not some dead, forgotten ancestor.

this is the power of the storyteller, my son: hope. as i pass on, it is you who must keep the memory of these things alive in our children’s children. you must make them believe that these things exist, that they are waiting for them. most important, you must make them believe that one day they will walk under the sky.

it is this hope that allows us to survive during the cold periods when the machine is fickle with it’s heat. it is this hope that allows them to continue to harvest the mushrooms each day. it is this hope that gives the infirm the will to continue.

the hope that some day will be a better day.

you must tell them the stories until they, too, drink deep of your words and promise themselves and their children to find the way out.

it is there, you know. the outside exists.

i saw it once, long ago, when i was adventurous.

but that is a story for another day.

four

they will ask you “why,” my son.

the young children are made of the hard questions. it is suffused in their blood, a sugar of difficulty.

you must recognize this and learn to direct the questioning sweet tooth into one that favors salt.

they will ask you why, and you can only give them the answer that you were given when you sat in front of the fire:

because it was no longer safe outside of the machine.

we do not remember the nature of our peril. we do not know the authority of our doom. we know only that there is solace within the grinding gears of the machine’s bosom.

the more imaginative of the elders would tell you that we sought refuge from the terrible, radioactive results of war, or that we had poisoned our world, or that a new ice age had crept upon us after a comet’s devastation.

i believe none of those things.

i think we are here simply because of fear and laziness.

fear is what brought us to the state where we would accept such a solution and laziness is what prevents us from seeking better ones.

in the eyes of my imagination, i see a statesman say, the machine will make you safe.

it is for your safety that we must do these things.

if we do not, if you do not accept this solution, then deaths will occur. our entire way of life will end.

but our way of life did end, and that is what they could not foresee.

we have become weak and lazy. we are no better than the vermin who scurry behind the panels in the corridors – meek, scared – terrified of the wrath of the machine.

i am sad to say that i have spent too many years of my life in that same mindset. i could not truly comprehend the meaning of the things i found in my youth and so i assumed they were beyond the grasp of my feeble intellect.

so i gave up.

i tell you know, though, as i prepare my last breath, that i know it would be preferable to die out there, in search of the truth, than lying here on this tattered mattress, choking from the sulfuric egg stench of our recycled air.

you must not let them fear. you must teach them not to give up – keep their hope alive so that they believe that they can change things. it may be that you, too, will die without seeing the results of this.

but you must carry on.

there is a great inheritance out there, beyond these humming walls and clanging ducts.

teach them to seek it.

five

i have one more secret to tell you before i leave forever, my son. it is perhaps the most dread truth that i am witness to, and one that i am only now, as the fluid of my life ebbs and my gears grind to a halt, am i able to understand what it represents – to me, to you, to us

our people,

the people of the machine.

i spoke to you before of a time when i was younger and given to adventure and exploration, and how i had seen the outside.

i tell you now this terrible thing: the outside exists and it is a great and terrible thing,

a smoking, churning hell,

and it is of our making.

i was perhaps only twenty years old when we found the endless stair. those were dark times for us. the rats and other, darker creatures from the machine’s depths had been prowling along the edges of our society. from time to time they would attack us, out of hunger, perhaps out of fear, lightning raids to kill children and the infirm.

after many weeks of pointless bickering, the elders came to the conclusion that i and my cohorts had almost immediately: we must fight back. we must hunt down these menaces and destroy them or be destroyed ourselves. in this manner was every able-bodied male conscripted into a makeshift army.

we would become packs of hunters ourselves.

there were grand ceremonies made of this. we each stood before the story wall and were given praises by the elders and in a private and solemn session with the storyteller we received the last story, the one told to the dying.

because that’s what we were, you see: dying. they did not expect us to return in the same numbers.

we were given weapons with which to kill: stabbing spears, slashing swords, mechanical contraptions that sprayed liquid fire. the smiths worked day and night, coaxing the machine to deliver the essentials for our survival.

we were sent into the deep warrens. i remember there being much discussion about what to do when we had passed beyond the edge of darkness, to those cobwebbed corridors where the walklamps were broken and dead.

they gave us torches and antique contraptions called “lamps.”

the days i spent in the warrens are merely a smear in the dust that is my memory. i know we fought and many of our people were written out of the stories there; too many. i remember endless night, and camping in the darkness, sleeping back to back, or facing out from the fires we would make, praying that our feeble lights did not attract the curious and feral.

what i remember most is the grime. it was everywhere, the sooty leavings of the machine. soot and rust and oil – we wore it as a second skin after a time.

there are creatures of clockwork in the deep warrens, you know. magnificent and terrible things in all manner of shapes and sizes. the warrens are a mechanical garden of eden: the machine has been busy there. they clattered and rolled through the hallways and the ducts with no discernable purpose, never hostile, smelling of oils and smoke.

they ignored us just as they ignored the rats.

it was in the warrens that we came across the endless stair. we weren’t even certain that it was a stair at first; the first steps were covered in what could be centuries of oily dust and rusted leavings.

once we had determined it’s purpose, though, we had no choice but to ascend and see where it led.

we climbed and climbed. we called it the ‘endless stair’ for a reason; it spiraled forever and ever. we would climb for a time and then rest for hours and then begin our climb again, our feet leaving thunderous echoes through the iron in our wake. further and further we climbed, choking on kicked up rust, hacking at inhaled cobwebs. many times we thought of turning back but we would tell ourselves: it can only be just a little further.

each time we said this, we were wrong.

it was perhaps days of climbing, but eventually we came to the apex. we knew we were approaching the top because there was light there – light, in the depths of the abyss, floating dimly from above, sheathed in a fog of dust.

with renewed vigor we tackled the remainder of the staircase and emerged into the brightness, our light-starved eyes blinking, stinging, tearing.

we had expected to find several walklamps but we were unprepared for what was really there:

windows.

windows, my son. walls that you can see through, made of the same material that covers the walklamps and cracked screens.

and through the windows, we saw the sun.

it was too bright to look at. i fell to my knees and wept, exhausted. we all did. i am not ashamed to tell you this.

looking around, we found that we were inside of a rather large circular room, a room whose walls were made of glass. the room contained several pieces of furniture that had been covered in tarps; when we pulled the coverings away the room darkened from the dust we stirred up.

under the tarps were chairs, desks and many, many screens – screens of a type i had never seen before, but screens nonetheless. there were small artifacts of an impenetrable and complex nature made of plastic. they were soft to the touch, rotten from age.

staring at all of it i was filled with deep sense of horror: men had been in this place once and they had abandoned it, finding it unsuitable for some reason. but more: they had left it in such a way that led me to believe that they expected to return.

it filled me with a great sadness, my son. these men and their ideas, thier secret knowledge – all of it was now dust, lost to us.

it was then that i heard someone crying. i looked up and saw our leader standing at the room’s edge, staring out the window. none of us had been able to do so – the light was too bright. he was full of despair.

in a dream, i remember standing and walking to the window’s edge. i remember staring out the window and i remember my the muscles of my legs turning to jelly as i sank to the iron floor.

we were very high up. the stair had led to the heights of a grand tower from which we could see for miles and miles – until the horizon was a blur.

what we saw was the machine.

there was nothing there but the machine.

it stretched until it melted into the smog of the it’s own breath. acres of nothing but rust-colored smokestacks belching fire and impossibly giant gears, turning slowly, oh so slowly.

a hades of iron and rust and grease.

there was a dread poetry visible in the machine from this vantage point. closer to the base of the tower the machine was orderly; obviously designed. however, as one’s eyes moved further from the tower the less the world had to do with the concept of ‘order’ until eventually it was nothing but chaos – chaos bred by the machine.

the machine is designing itself, my son.

and it is truly mad.

as we left that accursed chamber and made our way down the stair, we made blood oathes to one another to never reveal this truth.

we returned to the low warrens and stood before the story wall and we lied to the elders. we wept for our dead and celebrated our victories.

of the men who climbed the stair, all are now dead. i am the last, and soon i, too, shall be written out of the story.

i tell you this secret because it must survive.

listen: you must move our people. you must spur them to action; they must migrate. the machine is insane and directionless. i have watched for many years, waiting for the signs that the low warrens will cease to be habitable. that time is soon: over the years the elements of the machine vital to our survival have decayed and died, never to be replaced.

the smiths are no longer able to summon all the elements they require. the screens are dark or speak only gibberish. the walklamps are dying, slowly. you yourself have noticed these changes.

our people will die if they remain here.

you must take them out from here. you must take them as far as possible.

you must seek an edge to the machine. i believe it exists – it has not covered all the earth yet.

find the edge, and you find the sun.

and if possible, my son –

you must kill the machine.

There is a snap of pain and vertigo, a shuffling sound from the horizon. Above me: cacophony, the beating wings of a thousand poison angels. It is a bloodletting of insanity, and I realize I am going mad.

Silence.

My eyes open.

I am in the past, walking my old neighborhood. The sun is casts a bright sky but the colors around me are muted and blurry. The houses on the street are painted in the style of the rusty 1970s. Their hues bleed into the air like gasoline fumes.

I am walking slowly, holding hands with a woman I do not recognize but it feels natural. There is the scent of hyssop in the wind.

We meet people in an empty lot down the street from where the house I grew up will be built. The house is not there yet; Cam Hinshaw will not set nail to wood, paint to wood there for five years.

They are people from my present life, in the here and now. Here is Aaron, laughing with Kristen. There is Jason, playing soccer. They are younger versions of themselves, and we will not meet for twenty years or more.

And yet, they know my name. This surprises them: I am a noun pulled from deep, forgotten memory. Or memories yet to be born. I am peripheral, a solidifying figment, a promise of fate.

As we walk, the woman and I pass a pair of addicts. They are eating oranges hungrily with bent spoons. The pulp dribbles down their junkie chins, making a mess on the sidewalk as they nod off.

Now we are in her apartment. There is an old-time phonograph player in the corner. Here is her son. His legs are twisted from a kind of bone disease. He is bright and precocious, with strawberry-blond hair. His name is Cole. I read a story to him before he goes to bed.

His mother grants him a lullaby:

Rise and shine and give God your glory-glory, give God your glory-glory, give God your glory-glory…

Existence is a mathematical illusion; it flows through my mind, water, marijuana stoned blur. It is the light reflected by the moon.

It is the beat of my heart, slowed by hydrocodone, accelerated by pseudoephedrine; my mind dis-engaged by dextromethorphan.

I feel it in my spine, a thousand fingernails, a million spider-legs. A handful of baby teeth scattered in the dust. Herein we dream, and we dream of arguments and funerals, lesser angels, blackened and burnt feathers.

You know that I love you, right?

This should not be anything in doubt. No dendrite in that wonderful brain of yours should return false with that equation.

These scents, these sounds, these tactile impressions: they are the skin of the universe and you are the succulent fruit beneath.

I do not believe in a god but if I did I would murder him for you.

Rise and shine and give God your glory-glory, give God your glory-glory, give God your glory-glory.

Give God your glory-glory.