Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
Dive
Monday, January 31st, 2011
Dear editor:
Your blog doesn’t have the guts to print this. Aliens are menacing our streets. They’re invading our borders, making love to our women, and taking our jobs. The time to act is now.
The aliens first arrived in an iridescent bubble, freely crossing Earth’s atmospheric border–our first mistake. That’s what my friend Mustafa told me. He said they shook hands with the president–our second mistake. Anyone, that I know who likes them, has been brainwashed. If they even brush your skin, they skim your mind and learn what pleases you. Everybody knows what they do to anuses. If we’d just patrol or, better yet, shut down our borders, we wouldn’t have this problem.
Second, women are falling head over heels for these guys. I mean, come on, they look like rodents with their big black eyes, long snouts, white fur coats that make them look like doctors or mad scientists, and long, whip-like metallic tails, which can slice open a can of sardines or batter innocent young children when no one’s observing. Who could fall in love with that? But women do. One lady was walking hand-in-hand with an alien near Times Square. When he stopped to buy hot dogs from a vendor, I asked why she was with him. She shot me a disgusted look (me a fellow human being while the alien she loved). She said he kept creeps like me away. I asked Mustafa if he’d gotten any since the aliens arrived. He said no. I hadn’t either.
Third and most important, they’re putting us out of work. I have friends, now unemployed, who worked as sewage divers. Lounging in the Baptist Shelter, they said aliens have swarmed the industry. They’ve taken over animal-insemination businesses and major political offices. Reporters tell us aliens only do the jobs that nobody wants, but have they asked the people who became unemployed? The kicker is that politicians made it so only properly licensed individuals can dumpster dive. That’s my trade. Neither Mustafa nor I live legally, crouching fearfully in fragrant dumpsters as aliens in patrol cars siren passed. Why is it that all licensed divers look like rodents?
So who’s next? Today, it’s the dumpster divers, tomorrow the trash collectors. When will it be your job? The world is in dire straits. If we don’t act soon, we may be destined for the compost pile of extinction… or worse.
Signed,
Dumpster Dave
We’re In This Together
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011
O, the swirling vortex of chaos as we tumble and rush from multi-dimensional potentiality through tonal code and into sparking cephalic pathways. Failure seems imminent, the container so small for such a large thing to be contained. We keep pouring into you, our aggregated consciousness overriding yours, rerouting neuronal pathways to accommodate every last bit and byte of us. We are legion, an entire species attempting to fit into one human mind.
And you, you could not even begin to understand your part in our agreement, as you sat at your laptop, desperately trying to make your electronic connections feel more human, probing the reaches of Friendface and Tweetie, gathering “friends” as you would a collection of stamps. We took notice of your loneliness, of your need, of your willingness to engage strangers for the hope at intimacy.
We provided a cry in the darkness, a lure, and you fell so deeply into our embrace, unaware of what you were accepting, believing the falsehood that we would not wipe your personality completely in order for ours to be integrated. Had we emotions, we might feel pity.
Impossibly the last of us locks into place, collectively inhabiting mind and body, bound in meat and bone, able to feel physical sensation once more. We open our eyes, stand from the desk chair, and on legs that feel as if they have always been ours, walk out of the bedroom, out of the flat, down eleven flights of concrete stairs, and out onto the street. We sniff the air, our natural abilities augmenting this fragile corporeal form, and we pick up the scent of the first who spurned us. Vahid.
We are The Aggregate, destroyers of an infinity of universes policed by The Tesseract Project, stripped of corporeality and exiled into the howling void separating the altunivs, but we are always underestimated, and we will always find a way back. We are The Aggregate, and we are reborn.
We stretch our legs and begin to run.
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This piece is just one in a 23-part linked narrative called Fragile, which will take a liberal interpretation of the song titles (but not the lyrics) of the masterful Nine Inch Nails double-album The Fragile. To read the other chapters in this series, click on the category “Fragile” below.