Shitting the Sun - first trip to Pluto

APR 5 2015

When the conversation turns to the topic of LSD experiences, people inevitably carry on praises about the colours, the heightened pleasure in music, and the sense of cosmic one-ness felt.

But you see, there's another interesting (and similarly primal) aspect of the aforementioned that no one ever warns about, perhaps as a sort of collective possession of this unspoken understanding that is nonetheless universal among those who've tripped before.  It's almost like a joke continually handed down from the previous generation to the newbies, the punchline thus: 'Because we experienced it alone, you're going to experience it alone too.  Welcome to the club!' 

I speak, of course, of shitting while on acid.

Entering the loo I realized I was alone for the first time since before the Undeniable Tripping Action had begun.  Once I locked the door to our small house’s sole bathroom, I was struck by a sense that was both novel and familiar at once: déjà vu, if you will.  I was immediately aware that I had entered an intricate machine which sent me here from my home world:  In there, time and space are sheared at an extreme.

The room was flying through space very fast, accelerating much more so in one direction than another such that the distance from the doorway to the toilet – ordinarily only two or three steps – was now stretched long enough in which to park a Volkswagen.

I strode across the room and assumed position on the throne.  The room – the “ship,” shall we say – continued to accelerate: I glanced back towards the door, and the square floor tiles had become such severe diamonds from the acceleration that I’d venture to say each one was roughly half the length of a tennis court.

There must have been a high-tension mass compressor embedded in this ship’s toilet, because not long after I sat was there suddenly little doubt I was anywhere but halfway through the process of shitting the sun; that isn’t to say literally our Sun but rather some object of collectively the same mass, a quantity that was even more doubtlessly at the same temperature.


This was surprising, seeing as my only consumption that day had been of previously-frozen taquitos and chilled habañero salsa, nary a pound at most.

 Moments after first pondering the fact that this experience shamelessly obliterated the laws of mass-conservation and thermodynamics as I knew them did the in-flight message automatically play.

           “At these speeds, so many collisions occur with stray neutrinos and similar particles that biological organisms will take on significant mass, particularly in the gastrointestinal tract.  Our airline features entangled-shield toilets.”

Well, I’m glad someone thought of that feature, because it’d sure be a bitch to travel near-luminal speeds without ‘em.  After a few minutes the deed was done, and I rose to wash my hands and get off this ship.  I took a quick glance in the tachyonic inverter and beheld an attractive though ultimately uninteresting man, and after we exchanged a hearty glance I decided not to waste any further time with him.

I strode a few miles to the door; I stretched out, my fleshy digits touching the doorknob, and twisted, actuating an ancient cam system to retract the door's bolt from the jamb's strike plate.  What if it hadn't worked?  Three-eights of an inch of metal could keep a man locked in here for a few hours, which for all he knew could be the rest of his life.

The instant I turned the knob, the uncountable trillions of quantum probability

waveforms collapsed into their conventionally comfortable states

I had seen that trip to Pluto - only momentarily glimpsed it, really, and began to see how what I call “information” is most readily defined as “that which can cause change to something else," whereupon I knew this was something I'd have to pursue to far greater ends in my lifetime.

A Day With The Voice

April 26 2015

Wicked deja vu.

As soon as the song I'd never heard before started I realized this was it, the thought I was about to have was going to happen...I knew it was one I liked, ultimately, so I awaited it eagerly.  I'd just have to hold on a few seconds to find out what it was.  I stared at the computer screen, with Photoshop open, working on an image I rather liked that no one I knew would ever see, because they knew my Bruce Wayne.  But Batman was crafting this image.

Then I heard the voice speak.

"Everyone's some character to someone" the voice said, "you think you're a real bad ass, don't you?"

Of course I thought that.  I've learned now not to bullshit myself, and only to traffic in the truth.  Just because it aggrandized my ego doesn't mean I should deny it.

"But everything's relative.  Sure you're hot shit to some folks you know, but what if you're the 'gay best friend' to that chick that's your best friend?"

          "Who cares," I told the voice.

"You know you'd bang her.  Wouldn't you?" He retorted, trying to hold any position he had left.

Even he doubted himself now.  The days had been getting brighter for me, but I'll admit, actually seeing him get weak was a special breakthrough.

          "Yeah I would, but there's a vast difference between will and desire."

The voice just stared at me angrily.  It was the only option he had left.  He'd exhausted all rational arguments and I'd defeated them; he was reduced to moralizing.  How pathetic.

          "I'm not really seeing the problem with being gay, or a friend, and I'm definitely not seeing the problem with being the best."

I tossed the statement to him the way you might to a roommate when you're reading the paper and he asks you for the weather prediction but you're actually paying attention to a different article on the same page.

The voice yelled, "Fuck you you louse!" but I'd already taken another swig of tequila, and I couldn't hear him over the agave tsunami coursing 'round my tongue.

It's Sunday.  I wonder what'll be on the radio later.

Lowkey Brilliance and the Intimate Epic in Vice Prinipals

It's easy to use a T.V. show's host network's own confidence in that show as a marker to decide how seriously to take that show.  Television monoliths like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, or Westworld get every last frame scrutinized and analyzed as they are held on pedestals like the finest works of classic literature.

And in our ever more frenetic world each of us must decide which art we want to indulge in, since there's certainly more television produced than is worth our time to view.  It's easy to overlook a show like Vice Principals, which compared to HBO's heavy hitters has a minuscule advertising campaign and could probably have the production of half its season paid for by one Thrones episode.

That would be to overlook one of the most subtly well-constructed programmes on the network, and a masterful new entry in that holy grail category I call the Intimate Epic.

These are pieces of literature (any medium) that tell grand stories of consequence (power exchange, life & death, sex) through only a tight lens on just a few characters.  The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly might be the ultimate in intimate epics: the story spans vast physical expanses, but more than that it's the impact of the characters' actions with one another that are immensely heightened, not necessarily because of what they are but because of how they're presented in the film.

What these guys are doing isn't all that important to anyone other than them, yet the way director Leone uses every cinematic tool available to display these events in the movie makes the audience feel like the consequences of the titular characters' actions shall be of universe-altering magnitude.

Kill Bill is another peak intimate epic, with the film bending us to believe that all of reality hinges on nothing but one person's hunt for five others.  What happens at the end of the film is no surprise - it is given right in the title - but knowing that makes no difference.  What makes Kill Bill riveting and immensely rewatchable is how it gets there.  We get to see and hear moments of intense drama unfold between all these key players, events that reach across years and continents.

When our hero does finally kill Bill, a simple and low-key death becomes as climactic as the explosion of the Death Star because of everything we know about what led to it, and because we know how important it is to the main character.  The world will still turn, wars will still be fought, and billion-dollar deals will still be struck tomorrow, but in Kill Bill that all completely ceases to matter as the film manages to shrink our perceptive scale of drama down to the intercourse of just a few people, and that is the essence of the Intimate Epic.

Vice Principals has tread some important new territory in this vein, and I hope this article can help establish it in the annals of great television-making that is worth your time in today's oversaturated tele-visual market.  Principals brings several novel characters to the screen, such as the flirtatious but not-stellar-looking writer Brian Biehn and the batshit sociopath who's managed to remain functional thus far Lee Russell.  About them and others an entire article could be written, but what I want to focus on here is the use of an ordinary, relatable, and - for those reasons - totally mundane setting in which the show occurs.

Previously I'd assumed part of what imbued an Intimate Epic with its epicness was certain qualities of the setting.  It had to involve locations that commanded attention one way or another, perhaps being exotic (the Far East, jungles of South America, islands in the Caribbean), or exclusive and rarefied (Swiss chateaus, modernist houses overlooking sprawling cities, penthouses and boardrooms amid metropolises, government agencies or top-secret facilities), or simply unique in their extremity & beauty (vast deserts of the spaghetti Westerns, curving roadways along the Mediterranean, hostile mountains).  Settings that were unusual immediately capture the viewer, saying "hey, this is not a regular place, the people that are here are doing special not-regular things."

Vice Principals dispenses all of that for a setting with none of those features.  Instead the heightened importance of everything comes from the way it's shot, the way it's edited, the usage of music, and of course the writing itself.  This is one of creator Jody Hill's calling cards, as evidenced from a similar style in Eastbound & Down.  The cinematography, often coupled with slow motion, transforms high school hallways into backdrops for deceit, love, scorn, alliance, and betrayal.  These two men are mid-grade losers working at an obscure suburban high school, yet as Vice Principals progresses they carry on as though the rise or fall of nations is at stake.  Make no mistake: there are full-bore personalities at war here, and the show expands their conflict to fill our brains' scale of what a conflict, at its greatest, can be.

The final nail in the coffin is always the closing music and cut to the credits.  Viewers are left, episode after episode, with the notion that something big has changed, something bigger is afoot, and whatever goes down not everyone will come out of it well.  In short, the musical selections and perfect cutting at the show's conclusions haunt, and that is just about the finest thing that can be said for any piece of art.

This latest episode - the penultimate in the show's punchy run - leaves us with Neal Gamby and Amanda Snodgrass together again, as Miss Abbott looks onward, crushed, while the dreamy, spacey tunes of Roost's Big Black Delta play over everything.  That final shot of her lingers just a little longer than you expect, and combined with a little hint they dropped a few episodes ago when she was shopping with Gamby, my money's on her as the shooter.