I’ve talked myself back to a place where I’m co-producing my ideology in dialogic exchange with my surroundings. I’m still absorbing and responding to reality, but buttressed against its impositions in a way that leaves me proud and alive. I like, for instance, that my house contains stones, a record player, a beautiful, naturally-occurring mace made of an exploding galaxy of dead plant matter — little souvenirs that, like figs and grapes, Sarah and I have pilfered on our walks about town. As she naps on a couch across from me, I try to visualize as green and wooded village behind her eyelids a richly-detailed, richly-imagined early modern universe — a bit like the beautiful, soaring, godly perspective of the title sequence introducing each episode of Game of Thrones, mixed with close-up stage dramas of queens and poets: that whole, radically upswept 16th- and 17th-century world of cross-dressing thespians, New World explorers, merchants, reformers, pirates, colonists, peasants, witches, and slaves. I love that she has dedicated herself to the future preservation in consciousness of the unique shape, the unique imaginative geomorphologies and psychogeographies, of the early modern social totality and psyche. I love her way, too, of toggling between that and the news of the moment, while also maintaining a love for everyday beauty. To better understand me, however, I should probably treat myself to Kenneth Grahame’s children’s classic The Wind in the Willows, particularly (as Bruce Jenkins of Vinyl Connection reminds me) the book’s ‘Pink Floyd’-influencing seventh chapter. I should probably also explore SCRAWL, Katherine Nonemaker’s “Illustrated Essay about Schizoaffective Disorder.” For the rest of you, I recommend you read Albert Mobilio’s Games & Stunts — but only if the spirit moves you. Smoke gives form to beams of light. Boxes, folding chairs, a yellow extension cord wrapped atop a green electric mower. I guess I’ve come to like this place, shut off for a few minutes each day from the larger global-political-ecological-economic totality, which, like a multi-level maximum security prison system, ultimately determines my fate. “Back up, though,” I tell myself, “You need to stop overacting yourself into hyperventilation like Christian Slater’s ‘Mark Hunter’ character in Pump Up the Volume.”
Whether because of introversion or insight, I have difficulty submitting or subjecting myself to an audience. I go rigid in the face a bit. My brain grows dense from lack of oxygen. Maybe it’s just these words, slipping through my fingers. “There you go, friend: that’s yer life!” Imagine standing before a closet or wardrobe and arranging from among countless possible arrangements of the self through an irreversible, improvised practice. And all of this, performed before a public! Regardless of whether to others it is broad or narrow, to me it is a life. Ticking away daily. Next thing you know, you’re someone else. How different would it be, I wonder, to be a webcammer. I certainly can’t promise total disinhibition. We all have our own little political consciences. But I can only spit fire to the extent that I allow myself to speak freely. But freely might also mean roundabout, as with GIFs. We’ll see.
Trance-Scripts 