The Hallucination Engine
by Enzo23
The old men who once preached to the architecture during the earliest half of the millennia now sit in hushed circles comparing notes on the sanctity of Rush Limbaugh. These iron white men, with crystalline blue eyes and smiles broad as the Mississippi, once cavorted with aquiline damsels of the American past. The old men now sit on porches rocking, wasting away their final years on this planet, remembering the innocence that was Analog America. We have all seen the death of Analog America in the shining neon signs of Las Vegas and announced jubilantly by a troupe of flying Elvises. Analog America is quickly being replaced by Astral America and the Holy Ghost - two new faces being worn by an ancient evil land mass.
As the times progress, will America maintain her unique ability to redress and re-invent herself? America is all about change: we change our minds, politicians change their stands - we are the chameleon nation. Americans move west following the sun into the potentiality horizon and dodge bullets in Europe and Asia to save the homelands of people we do not understand. Americans are shot, killed and maimed, but no bullet can ever hit America. America the beautiful is really America the anomaly and despite our need to protect the world, we do not have the ability to police ourselves.
This is the land of the do-it-yourself attitude; we all secretly admire the frontiersmen who built the west. Americans have a cowboy/pioneer mentality that has been beaten into our psyche. We all secretly admire the men who went west and forced civilization on the elements.
"Circle the wagon train, the butterflies are attacking!" I scream and the women hurry into safe corners. There are a stories that lie behind the veil of the American image; we have to capture and expose the mythos while perpetuating the image intact without degrading the core philosophy. America is the sum of her story's parts and her weakest trait is her inability to gather herself together and stand upright.
Our setting is Las Vegas 1977 after the death of one of America's favorite sons, Elvis Presley. The following is an excerpt from the holy book of The Church of Radiant Sequins.
We came in the room after a day of praying to find brother Bart standing nervously in front of the bathroom door. He explained that Elvis had been inside since we had left for the Lucky 11 Chapel to try our luck on the one arm bandits. We repeatedly called out to the King through the door but no replies came. In a burst of nervous energy, the brothers and I broke down the bathroom door to find the King hunched over face down on the cold tile floor. I had attended to the King's needs over the past few months as was my assignment given by the bishop Cletus III. The death of the King brought out in me overwhelming feelings regarding the finality of this earthly existence. I think perhaps the early Christians experienced these same feeling when Jesus was crucified.
I shall never forget the look on the King's face when we found him. His serene smirk radiated the warmth we had all experienced, filling the bathroom with his presence. His pants were bunched around his ankles in a way that reminded me of a demented school boy in the stalls of some private school bathroom. A single fly, having spotted us, hurriedly slurped his final meal from the King's sphincter and buzzed off, leaving Elvis abandoned on the cold tile floor. Elvis had once said to me, "Son, life leaves you fucked and deserted."
It sort of happened like a revelation, a vision of the completion of the King's mission on Earth. The covenant was renewed, the circle complete. We all saw the gift that the King had left for us floating in the bowl - little soft mushy pieces of the king. The calm scents leaked throughout the room into our nostrils and fused with our lungs, baptizing us and bonding with us forever. We removed the holy remains from the bowl and built the Church of Radiant Sequins on this mushy foundation. The lord God in heaven saw all of this and deemed it good. At that moment there was a muffled cheer from heaven. "Yeah."
At first the bible belt communities didn't take too well to the brothers and myself. After all, who ever heard of monks walking around in Las Vegas sequined costumes before? Turn the other cheek, we've always said. After all, we had never seen rednecks dancing with rattlesnakes, trying to catch holy ghosts, until we built our church in Astral America. You see, America is a big land with many people and the people eventually found room in their hearts for us and our beliefs. We became more accepted and in time, schoolchildren came to the chapel to pray to the King for peace and luck in scoring with the object of their young sexual desire on Saturday night dates. Girls dropped panties in front of the weeping velvet painting of the King that was kept in the holiest of holys. The weekend hip twisting contest at the picnics drew more entries as the years rolled by. The brothers and I had come to grips with the fact that our goal was coming to fruition. Within a few thousand years, the people of earth would be reborn in the image of the King, Elvis Aron Presley.
Six million years ago, nomadic hunters lived on the edge of the world in small hermetic camps. These men woke up with the dawn and tracked the bison and mammoths into the great unknown. They were the original unchristened explorers and everyday, through their regular migratory cycles, expanded the boundaries of the known world. The Roman generals worshipped a god of boundaries and maps. These men voraciously consumed everything on the horizon, hoping to appease the gods with the constant expansion of the empire. They were a wolf pack bent on incorporating the world into one holy Roman map. For centuries they pushed deeper and deeper like a crazed lover overcharged on testosterone. All men try to push beyond the cervix into the virtual womb hoping to find the anatomical gateway back to the lost ovarian garden of Eden. All men live on the edge of the world.
After hot and sweaty copulation, the world falls asleep on comfortable pillows, dusty floors, the back seats of cars and rocking aquatic sleeping quarters. They all close their eyes and watch the virtual picture show powered by the hallucination engine in the intersecting dimension of dreams. In dreams we inhabit the literary virtual spaces mapped inside the ancient Greek texts. In dreams we are reacquainted with old lovers and long forgotten biological fears as well as millions of other subconscious drives. Perhaps we are re-introduced to our true wet selves. Our minds are bloodied meat being served on the finest platinum platters left on the table like the remnants of an exotic Nepalese feast, unshielded for the Jackals to enter our homes and eat our souls. Anubis the jackal-headed Egyptian god of embalming, comes into our home, followed by the Jackal men, to scrounge his share.
Anubis crashes into the cosmic scene, soul-weighing scales in hand and carrying a canopic cookie jar filled with severed entrails. Anubis is known as the cosmic slickster; truth be told, he is nothing more than a mind consuming demon in a god's robes. Anubis is the post-kill reaper, the consummate dream eater, possessor of the self, devourer of the soul. "Only in dreams are we our true selves," said Edgar Allan Poe. Anubis does not dream, but rather he is the amalgamation of all of the souls that he's eaten over the past few millennia. The souls of the old men and women who once preached to the architecture during the earliest half of the millennia, the souls of children who didn't dream, cloned soul rejects, the Manitou in the machines of the industrial and digital age, and the soul of his sister Bast, the cat goddess. Earth, it seems, is a jackal-eat-cat world.
Now let us shift to a different vantage point to gain a different view. There are silicon worlds here on Earth. Some men strolling down the sidewalks are not always what they seem. Some men are on fire. They are camouflaged, freely parading through crowds radiating the stench of burning electric smoke. The fire in their loins become all-consuming and the burning men walk amongst mere mortals such as ourselves, fully transparent. Gray men who tightly clutch overcoats, carrying briefcases full of documents home to mother and the cat.
Are you Electro? Superhuman exoskeleton wrapped in a blue-green crystalline flesh-like translucent sheath? Electro wanders in the Eleusinian vomitorium pools searching for tired homosexuals vibrating to the cosmic bass that holds this universe together. Bass, rich like the toffee strings on the lips of young girls.
Electro spots one particularly rundown fag sprawled in the garden, asshole drooling rectal mucous intermingling with honeyed days and the Quadranine haze of screaming testicular trauma. Electro's image is reflected in the unassuming gaze of a million boys, resonating a perfect example of homosexualis amoralis. Electro brandishes a silicon penis that shoots fire from the tip. His lips quake and lap at the air in fractal swirls as the cosmic camera turns and catches Electro licking an earlobe while penetrating. We see the licks garnishing lips, the small of the back and the nape of the neck. Electro crunches bone between silicon teeth and slurps marrow through a digital straw while breathing in a deep breath of dead skin cells and dandruff. While penis scrapes prostate, Electro lights up like a photon geyser pouring out light with his ejaculation.
Are you Electro? Superhuman exoskeleton wrapped in a blue-green crystalline flesh-like translucent sheath, wandering the Eleusinian vomitorium pools searching for tired homosexuals vibrating to the cosmic base that holds this universe together. Bass, rich like the toffee strings on the lips of young girls.
"Est dulcae et decorum por mori por patria."
[Writers] [Birdhouse]