.:The Absent Narrative:.

Except what Flip hadn’t mentioned is that we are all still living in someone else’s vision – not just war stories but the tales of revolution that helped shape the way we act out our resistance.

I was followed again last night – not by cops, but by someone stalking the shadows and totally creeping me out. So to further occlude my appearance I decided to start wearing a hat – a short-brimmed six-panel spitfire I’d worn back in a high school musical. Not when I was Bruno in Brave New World, but Perchick, the student revolutionary, in Russian peasant cap and stained linen, exiled to the Siberian hinterlands behind the curtains for breaking all traditions. I was only in ninth grade but still got a leading role because I was a boy, and actually willing to get up in front of an audience and sing. L’Chiam, to Life! Before the pogroms exiled all of us to the new world, without even realizing that when the run was over I’d continue to play the part of that noble and anarchic savage.

If I hadn’t been playing it since I was a child, back when Mome took us to a performance of Les Miserables, the glamorous good guys holding down the revolving barricade (“the set’s like a giant Transformer,” Nim and I joked between acts), the two of us memorizing Val Jean’s solos, locked up for stealing a piece of bread, I even reading Hugo’s unabridged epic in sixth grade while the rest of our classmates struggled through A Separate Peace or whatever tepid nonsense we were reading that year.

Not even to mention the hundreds and hundreds of times we watched Star Wars, internalizing the Rebel Alliance until it was the only obvious narrative to follow: overthrowing the Empire. No wonder I ended up an outlaw and outsider, I’ve been heroizing the rebel my whole life.

But so has the System, selling back that savage myth to us in scattered images of complacency and product, circled A t-shirts in the topical mall stores, posters of Che Guevara only the economic spectacle of an Order, backed with the demonization of truly revolutionary spirits – the Haymarket rioters, Goldman and Berkman, Sacco and Vanzetti.

There are no values left in the Bible and Constitution to hold culture together, value only in relation to a future we’ll never experience ourselves, and all that’s left is to exist, by any means necessary, in this moment (whatever it means to exist at all), creating art, not like it’s this dirty mirror I’m staring into trying to get the right rake of the cap, but a hammer like Brecht used. Caught between these myths of government and resistance, it seems likely that our story can only end on the barricades. Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men?

Except all I want is a love song, which Camus thought is impossible for the revolutionary to attain, Marius cradling his Eponine in the blood-soaked rain. Even Perchik had his Hodel hot before fleeing, singing, “I had an aim in life and that was everything, but now I even have you.”

Except I don’t have anyone, so I just get up to pee and then keep reading, a book that Flip, Fred I mean, lent me to crib lyrics from: Ferlinghetti’s Love in the Days of Rage (the title already cribbed by Crimethinc, those culture vultures). Next up, yet another cute anarchist couple, one of them a banker ironically, trying to get it on during the Paris Revolution, banners crying, the more I want to make love the more I want to make revolution, and all vices reversa.

Though neither love nor revolution are happening tonight to sport my cap to, which Annie Oakley reminded me earlier was transported to America in cartoons, the pogromed child getting off the boat and suddenly forced to live as a mouse! I can relate to it, being from some Jews back in Bavaria, where I think our Father said we’re from in his new genealogical research mood, that tragic and cell-screened American Tail of lost rodent parents and more love songs, and then… total rebellion against the alley cat and Jellicle overlords! A real rumble down at the Heavenside Layer tonight, featuring this band World B that Flip’s pirate-looking neighbor Annie warned me of, in hoop earrings and also a spitfire, all these rebel characters riding about on our noggins.

“World B… Frogstar… the Hitchhiker’s Guide, of course! “But the reference doesn’t fit today’s profile,” I told her, “we’re anarchists not aliens this time.” But maybe there’s a connection… but now I have to go sleep on it in order to get to work tomorrow

(previous: 1.4.1) (next: 1.4.3)

This is it. Enough is enough. I cannot serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my country.

As of today I declare myself at war with the Capitalist Behemoth.

I’ve got a bone to pick with capitalism, and a few to break: this week at the Economic Union Summit in Goetenberg, Sweden, two of our fellow protestors were shot, with real bullets, lead replacing water and rubber, which I felt like a blow to my own gut. How can the life of a human being be worth less than the sanctity of the dollar? Human life is not commodity, figures, statistics, or make believe.

While here at home, Timothy McVeigh was executed for the Oklahoma City Bombings, the worst terrorist attack on our country, so far. “Of course,” as Emma explained, “that absurd animal rights group PETA just had to campaign for McVeigh’s last meal to be vegan, so he wouldn’t hurt any more lives. But he rejected their self-aggendizing, saying, ‘Sometimes lives will be hurt.’ More have died fighting their wars than the 186 he was unfortunately forced to kill to promote his message.” Instead he ate two tubs of mint chocolate chip ice cream and read a poem, his absolute lack of remorse striking fear into the hearts of every law-keeper in the nation, as if he knew there’s much worse than his crimes ahead.

And though McVeigh’s is not my way of fermenting revolt – there are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for – I knew this was coming, our worst fears turned to reality right before our eyes:

Yesterday evening I was riding bikes with Lucy when the cops followed us – they must have finally caught up with my involvement in the May Day parade – not followed but full on chased, pedaling furiously down back streets to escape.

I chose not to be afraid, like Flip told me, “do not fear, fear is the mind-killer,” but that didn’t stop them from swinging their cruisers ahead and blocking the road to safety.
The police leapt out and without a word opened fire on us!

I tried to turn, the wheel of my bike stuck to the curb, when the first shots struck me, one in the upper calf and one in the arm. I fell, more concerned if Lucy had been hit or arrested, but I couldn’t see through the darkening storm clouds and the collapsing tunnel of my vision.

When I regained consciousness I dragged myself to Emma’s for help.
That’s when she told me about the shot protestors, and I realized my own execution was just a dream, which would have been funny if it was not chillingly prophetic, as if I had felt their deaths even as they were being committed.

Surreal, especially since it turned out Lucy really did have a run-in with the cops.

But this paradox doesn’t lessen the import, just makes me more outraged. And so I am at war.

“Though,” as I explained to Emma while she organized her funny hat collection and made us tea, “my enemy is not the ignorant layman or the corporate CEO, not the policeman or soldier. Not even Jr, who’s still going on about his new empire.”

“But even if absolute power does not corrupt absolutely,” Emma said, “absolute power does attract the corruptible, the all-too despicably human.”

“But we are all human here, and despite being trained to do our jobs, to have certain frantic passions and fears, to feel that furthering the Machine will bring us happiness or salvation when the only true joy springs from freedom – I still believe each of us contains the potential to do good, we just haven’t been told that we do.

But not the System, the corporate entities taking on a life of their own, Moloch and Mammon feeding greedily on monetary exchanges, alienation, passivity, granted existence and personhood through our acceptance of their will to exist. No, I am fighting the ideologies and media revisions that keep us living in fear, dying in this American Nightmare from which it seems we might never wake.

The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm, but because of those who look at it without doing anything, those who have been trained not to notice anything is wrong, that everything could be better.

Those who do not weep do not see.

It is as if the violence and numbness of this world, of these corporate entities, is somehow stealing the souls of everyone who participates in them, and casting us into darkness.

And though my weapons are only words and song, though we still have our lives to lose, and will always lose them anyway, we have a world to win for those who come after us, a world in which this violence and conflict are only a bad dream.

Oh great Behemoth, your days are numbered; we will see your power go out, your towers crumble, your calendars torn to shreds, your towns swept under by hurricanes and thunder. We will see every last dollar dwindle in the dawnlight of a new era. I have seen a future containing the collapse of everything awesome we humans are still capable of, and to prevent that I will attack your shattered and sold world and demand a greater unity! This is your death knell, and though you want to take us all down with you, I still want to live.

(previous: 1.3.9) (next: 1.4.1)

Today marks the first day of being sober through June, another of Flip’s clownish moves everyone agrees to follow out of sheer giggles. He and Tim P and I have been writing songs in various genres, to test our range for The Moment (the only and most obvious choice of a band name Flip came up with, though we briefly considered Dr. Mayhem and the Electric Teeth, like the Muppet rock stars we all seem to be): jamming atmospheric jazz storms, James Brownish funk countdowns, a cover of Mr. Bungle’s telescope song.

Here to paradise we go, brighter than our woe, as above so below, sock it to me now! Yeow!
But when we went to write a straightedge hardcore number we realized we lacked the experience.

“Just what does being drug-free feel like again?” I said, “It’s been five years almost since the last time I haven’t smoked.”

So now I have this boundless energy and a desire to do something crazy, though I’m not sure what, like strap my viola to my back and bike down to Riverside with Lucy Windrose to busk on the street corners.

Neither of us remembered any of the duets from our classical training – maybe a snatch of Pachelbel’s Canon in D still resides in my fingertips – so we just fiddled and fugued to whatever haphazard melodies tumbled out of the already open barrooms. And though most only glanced over uncertainly at our strange sawing, a few listened, even throwing some change into my blue-lined viola case (which I’d casually seeded a few bucks into to encourage their generosity).

One punk couple actually stopped to talk, I don’t remember about what, maybe the tax cuts Jr’s planning to sign into law next week.

I was too busy watching the girlfriend rage on about it, all dolled up in a sleeveless jean vest showing off her tattoos and breasts, black and bleached bangs almost hiding a pretty pouty smile that got my heart racing. Much more so than Lucy, who’s flatly shown no emotion or interest even at her most outgoing, whose bony boy’s body elicits not an ounce of sexual attraction in me, and yet somehow drives me crazy, like I feel I could explode in her presence.

It might just be the lack of THC in my system, or the lack of sex since Phoebe’s been busy and away. But stepping back from the situation I realize that, like most people, even she fills me with dread at best. I also couldn’t help but notice someone standing in the shadows of an alleyway watching us, wearing a black trench coat despite the heat like he was some secret agent, making my paranoia flare up again.

Anyway, after making thirteen dollars – enough for sandwiches and iced sodas at the café – Lucy and I lugged our strings through winding back alleys over to a roofless brick enclosure near an old brew house converted to artists’ lofts, which F. Markatos had convinced Emma Goldman and some other artistic nomads to lock themselves inside of, for two whole weeks, in one of his infamous think tank experiments: this time revisioning a Saab 9000 automobile into musical instruments and a performance piece, stripping the whole car down, banging and blowing on any part that might make a sound, cooking meals on a camp stove, shitting in sawdust-covered buckets, sleeping under the tarpaulined side of the enclosure through some unexpected midnight downpours, their resident technophile recording the whole procedure for a movie and gushing as if he’d known us forever about the didgeridoo he’d made out of the exhaust pipe with toe-operated valves so you could get at least five tone-shifts on it &c. all with no more human contact than can squeeze through the small grated slit in the massive doubly-locked door.

They were probably throttling each other at this point, and still have a week left until their release performance.

Thankfully music can penetrate everywhere, and within moments of Lucy and I tuning up an improvised sonata – from that melody line I can’t stop humming when my mind’s clear – all six of the inmates had their faces pressed up against the door grate, weeping profusely from the joy of it, hopefully inspired to create some string instruments from the rusty innards of this auto-materializing culture.

“And songs,” as Emma thanked us, “that an blow the doors off any prison, but especially the prisons inside us all.”

(previous: 1.3.7) (next: 1.3.9)

Despite our excitement to get the band going, Timmy P. couldn’t practice today as planned, so Flip, I mean Fred, and I tongued the rest of his strip and tripped down the broken sidewalks to the Heavenside Street Faire, where we ran into one of Fred’s ex-classmates, a girl named Lucy Windrose who’s a musician too, and was on mushrooms.

The three of us hadn’t gotten a block into the upscale neighborhood – decked in white tents full of expensive artwork and smiling oblivious yuppie couples – when it became apparent we couldn’t deal with the normals or we might become them, even with our preposterous appearances. So we skedaddled back to Lucy’s place to watch a pot of water boil.

Lucy’s a religious studies major and Fred wanted to disprove to her the veracity of old wives tales. It took forever though, probably because we were watching, but it did actually boil, Fred and I enthralled as each bubble rose to the surface, while Lucy sat off to the side slowly dissecting a head of lettuce with her bony violinist’s fingers, to eat each individual leaf in contented psilocybin silence, not giving a fuck about our water.

After we reached a rolling boil, Flip (damn it) and I rushed to my music room, because on the wander he’d come up with the scheme of writing a rock opera.

“Ok, so the plot follows a 300-pound graffiti-artist drag queen named Tink, on her quest to stop hordes of robotic lumberjacks from marshmallowizing the world, turning everything into that bourgeoisie Flatland we’d barely escaped getting stuck in earlier, Edwin Abbott insinuating that most people still live in two dimensions.”

Up against the rows of grey robots who control our lives, the things we have to offer sometimes seem so frail. As they plan destruction and gain respectability, we offer our creativity and are made outcasts. Unless our art is outlandish enough not to be ignored.

Fred jumped behind Trinity’s drum-set and I ran my Fender through my reverb-delay and Phoebe’s flange, Tink’s leitmotif starting at a delicate adagio, a fat man in a tutu dancing in a summer rainstorm, boiling upward through the shadowy echoed notes, until, wait for it, here come the lumberjacks!

I kicked on the distortion and slew them all, in sharp downward arpeggios that multiplied at our feet, spilling out from the five lines and 4/4, staff notation suddenly just another arbitrary order barely able to contain the coda, tonal marks and volume signs inadequate for these 8th-dimensional chord changes, notes not faster now but with more space in between, hemidemisemiquavers cut open so you can fit whole arias in the interval. The beauty of music is, as Beethoven said, in the rests between notes, but the magic is in the total onslaught, the ability to express ages and emotions of such rarity, outside the standard interface of time signatures and keys that will only ever open back on the tonic.

Except Fred kept interrupting to say, “This is an opera, we have to sing, you know, words.”

But words are so fragile and insecure, and we’d already captured the plot in song, and on the handheld tape recorder I set up in the corner. And besides, we were on drugs, I couldn’t sing lyrics while tripping for all the voice lessons in the world.

But before we could take a break and listen to our madhouse melodies, just as the two of us were peaking and in sore need of a few pickmeup puffs, Phoebe bustled in, lugging a new amplifier she went down to Dead City to pick up – I thought she was out of town for at least a few more days – but here she was, followed by, oh gods, her mother!

“Be calm,” I told Fred, who was about to freak out having to deal with adults while under the influence. But Mrs. Zeitgeber didn’t want to talk either. Seeing that we were playing music she rushed back down to get the violin out of her hatchback, and there was no choice but to continue the session, tape still rolling, wishing it was rather Miss Windrose (who did call later to make plans to play viols), us tripcats having to tone the wild hilarity of our noise back, back into recognizable measures, sounds almost refusing to be keyed in again now that they’d experienced that freedom.

But somehow we managed to act normal, normal enough that the recording actually sounded intelligible, when I listened to it later, sober of course.

Until Fred couldn’t take it anymore and leapt up mid-snare roll to bolt out the door.

“Well you’re friend’s quite nice,” Phoebe’s mother demurred, “though there’s something about him… maybe his drumming technique’s off? What an odd bird.”

“No mom,” Phoebe said, not knowing either that we were on acid, “Flip’s just like that, he’s like the Fan Man.”

“Oh, that might explain why he introduced himself as Fred.”

At which I wanted to spill the whole story. Yes, that clown may not carry an umbrella like Horse Badortes, but he’s definitely a Dude with a Stick, going places and doing stuff – that’s his and Speedy’s whole philosophy, on the search for other Intelligent Life in the Universe, even smoking strange substances in the process, though that explanation might have scalded us for sure.

Who knows what peculiar conventions lurk in the hearts of the older generations, how they’d react to real larger-than-life characters boiling off the pages into their children’s lives and bedrooms.

(previous: 1.3.5) (next 1.3.7)

I was so paranoid I couldn’t leave my house for days. Gods, so few want to be rebels anymore, and of those, most, like myself, scare so easily.

When I got up the courage on Wednesday, I was followed by cops all the way from my doorstep, one parked right across the street when I woke up and another checking me out every five minutes it seemed like, so when I got to the Coop I was thankful to hide in the back.

I’m surprised I wasn’t stopped for my appearance alone, like I was back in Dead City, smoking a cigarette on the street corner waiting for Phoebe to get out of classes. Two officers approached, claiming they smelled marijuana, probably just saw my dreadlocks, and though I knew my rights I still let them search me out of pure contrariness. I wasn’t carrying anything illegal and had the last laugh when they slunk away, probably thinking too bad he wasn’t black, we’d have jailed him for sure.

But now they have all the probable cause they could want or need, all the thought police closing in, even in my sleep. My boss showed me, almost with pride, that a photo of me at the march had made it onto the front page of the Post-Gazette, my dark glasses and clenched bearded jaw making me look like the Terminator, as he put it. And though I know I was pushing the maypole the viewers don’t; the banner unfurling over my head proclaims in black blood letters a grisly Death to Capitalism, not the message any of us intended.

Thankfully you couldn’t see my dreadlocks in the photo, but when I got home I immediately shaved off my beard and put on some pants not covered with patches. Probably shouldn’t write any more political organizings in this journal either; as Flip Rogers says, loose lips sink ships, and we’re already taking on water fast.

I still refused to plug in my phone and call Phoebe or Emma, and it finally took Flip to rescue me, barging into the apartment with the key I gave him to come jam for our Musician’s Collective. He wanted to pick up the master tapes TBA recorded for their demo last week.

I was still sleeping and he gave me a start, leaping up for the nearest weapon except there was nothing at hand but a mannequin leg, which I brandished like a sword until he convinced me it was really him, and I should get out and come down for Food Not Bombs at his place, never mind my nicked chin, at the new hole he and TBA are renting on Cobbleston since they’ve all dropped out of school (except for Speedy, still trying to finish his philosophy degree, though as Flip says, there’s no use left for loving knowledge in this world).

It turned out that while being processed, the May Day detainees were interrogated by actual FBI agents who were looking for our leaders, by name, Flip and Emma particularly. He didn’t think they’d heard of me, yet.

“Good gods, what are you going to do?”

“Me?” Flip scoffed, “just ignore them. My name is fake, and not on any official documents, it’s like looking for a ghost. I’ll just change it, to Fred maybe, like my childhood hero Mr. Rogers.” He went off on some story while we were baking tofu, about one day finding a hole that led him into the puppeteer’s studio, as if that Neighborhood of Make-believe lies behind every store-front’s false back wall.

I couldn’t believe he was taking a warrant so lightly.

“The thing you have to understand, god, is that they want you to be afraid, that’s what gives them their power. It’s like the singer from Zegota said in his zine, we each have a cop-in-the-head, like a malignant jack-in-the box or more accurately Freud’s super-ego, and the more you listen to what the mores tell you, the less you can live the way you choose. It’s why you have to always listen to music: good tunes counter the internal police. Hell, even the police are paranoid; so’s this whole damned future. Now help me pack this salad so the kids can leave us alone to smoke.”

All the younger, less criminally-inclined punks were taking the food we’d cooked back to Market Square to give to the homeless, and after they drove off Flip put on a record and lit one of his monstrous blunts, ignoring the stack of dirty dishes.

“Check these cats out: driving guitars into jazz-timed breakdowns with a bit of electronica in the mix. It’s the Shape of Punk to Come, as if these Swedes saw the future or were set to bring it about themselves (before their band broke up sadly), and dig it, when we were jamming the other day,” – Flip came over to practice with Phoebe and Trinity, working on a cover of VU’s After Hours, except his bass playing was all over the fret board for such a simple tune –

“I thought we needed to have a band of our own, take some ‘80s hardcore, bop-era jazz, a little funk and showtunes thrown in for amusement. We will continue the legend! You say you want a revolution, well let’s write some songs that will crush the corporations with a mild touch. This is total anarchy and can’t nobody stop us. You in?”

“Can I scream,” I asked?

“Yeah! All we lack now is a drumbeat to move the new motion.”

But we rocked out anyway, getting stoned and taking notes on the notes, when we discovered we were not alone.

One of the teens was left behind in the crapper, a skinny kid named Timmy Pazliano, with an impressive afro, who it turned out dropped out of high school to pursue a professional jazz drumming career, just the man we needed for our trio. We were so enamored by the New Noise that we hadn’t heard him singing along at first, “How can we expect anyone to listen if we’re using the same old voice?” I thought the echo was the cops invading our punk records.

But we caught him drumming in quarter-timed triplets on a metal hotel pan, which gave us a start until he stuck his bushy head out the kitchen door and said, “I’m done with the dishes, now, when’s our first practice?”

(previous: 1.3.4) (next: 1.3.6)