Unearthed Hitchhiking Fragments

Guatemala--Texas--Bangkok

They lived in a heap of trash. Rusted mufflers, flaking corrosion, broken light tubes with jagged edges, brackish pools of kitchen stench, half-dented cans of bug death caught in coils of wiring, thorns, sofa springs, styrofoam snow, vacuum tube linoleum piercings, saranwrapped decapitated mannequins at odd angles...

Everything heaved with ants, termites, rats gorging on festering TV entrées, dead things, misplaced compost. Other things moved. Cyborg pinheads with gasoline belches engaged in amplexus with giant purple iguanas.

"Don't force it," one grunted, "and it will all slide."

Pterodactyls swooped down to catch sewer gnomes. Some of these retaliated with catapults and fiery swamp gas projectiles. A ptero ignited and plunged into the mud. Insane, horned, gyro-geeks spiraled around, smashed things and vended their wares.

"Antibiotics!"
 "Compact discs!"
 "Garden slugs!"
 "Customized jet-packs!"

Heads appeared out of holes.

"I'll have three pornstars and a sack of beans, please."
"We're out of beans but our pornstars are still fresh."
"Well how about them for a stack of Popular Mechanics?"

The market was in full force. All the best of jungle, swamp and slag-heap for your every desire. The heap sprawled on for miles. Anti-gravity faeries surfed on Tesla waves, warping the sounds and pictures. The Song worked furiously in their condo lint-nests, frantically splicing genes and snorting coke.

Buzz saws, explosions, mad cackles punctuated the subtle music of Aeolian piano-wire harps. An orange neon sign flashed: "God was here." Scrap metal sculptures reached for the sky. Everyday they added on to themselves.

Then the drums sounded. Jaundice skinned trolls bashing empty oil barrels, tribespeople pounding polyrhythms on djembes. Grandpa Dragonfly blew the conch shell three times. The gathering had commenced.

With astonishing speed they arrived at the salt flats. At first they formed a circle, joining hands, tentacles, talons, paws, mechanical clutches, hose, branches and hooks and faced each other. Then they reached across and further connected their limbs. This accelerated quickly. A game of frenzy twister ensued. A circle to a web to a cluster to a ball. Heads over tails over hooves. The ball rolled, shook, undulated, bounced, howled, giggled, ejaculated, vomited, spun and finally stood still. Everyone was comfortable.

From the centre, Grandpa Dragonfly called the meeting to order. Most of this happened in silence, but then it was time to translate for the non-telepaths. Of course this started an argument. What language to use?

"Gutter-Creole!"
"Latin!"
"Enochian!"
"Canine Five!"
"Delphinese!"

The ball began to roll and sputter. After much hassle and nose-wrangling, consensus was reached and bolo-tongue was chosen as the most universally applicable. Grandpa Dragonfly spoke first, not because he was accepted as any kind of "leader," -- Fish forbid -- but only because it was he who called the meeting.

"Things are becoming way too strange," his raspy voice tickled many eardrums, "there seems to be a constant buzz in the air. A low almost moaning deep within the Earth. A subterranean didgeridoo. A hungry belly. It's as if something is waking up. Some huge thing. We all know that things are already crazier than anyone could have imagined."

Here he delved into something he called "history."

"The states melted. The weather went AWOL. The gene-pool went public. Nanoids running amok. Everyone mutating for kicks. The Trans-Corpse went organic. Money disappeared. Anarchy was unleashed. All desires manifested in some reality or another."

Most of the younger gatherers had no idea what he was talking about and even the older ones found it hard to remember. He continued.

"But now things are even faster, more tangled and more surprising. There is a great sense of culmination and climax."

"We all felt that before," an old pirate wheezed from the bottom of the ball, "but it all just kept goin' on. It's nuthin' new!" He seemed annoyed.

"Ah, though, this time it's different," the dragonfly's voice rose in volume and graveness, "this time complete Omega is coming. Mama's giving birth. The Trans-Corpse knows and they're divided. Some are afraid of losing control, some are helping to bring it on. But I don't know why or what is exactly happening!"

The linearity was too boring for most. The cacophony began...



The scene changed once again. He was sitting at a large circular oak table. The table was the only feature in a vast dark hall of stone. The only light came from several white candles situated in a chandelier which hung nearly touching the centre of the table. Around the table sat the philosophers, completely engaged in grave council.

Only the wisest were assembled: Metaphysicians, epistemologists, political scientists, cosmologists, pataphysicians, neo-alchemists, psychobiologists, pansurrealists, post-post-Kantians, lumpen-Nietzsceans, Zen dance masters, retro-transvestites, Baptists, überconformists, cyberpunks, flower skinheads, Hindu gods, Marxist priests, Pythagorean hipsters, evangelical agnostics, postsexuals, Taoist slaves, old dead bearded white men, radical lesbian separatists, nihilists, cat lovers, a holographic projection of Snuffleupagus.

In front of each was a pewter goblet of red wine. He took a sip of wine. It was thick, spicy and slightly bitter. He began to focus on what was being said.

"...Insofar as we know there is no equivalent to genetic replication in dustbunnies!" an extremely hairy man bellowed angrily, slamming his fist on the table. His outburst provoked further anger and a goblet and a set of false teeth flew at him from opposite sides of the table. A woman stood up on her chair.

"What right have you to speak for the inaminate??" she screamed. This started a heated debate in several languages which everyone took part in, but nobody fully understood. A small green man refilled the goblets with wine for the ninth time that evening.

An überconformist spun up a handful of blunts, lit them, and passed them to his neighbours on his left and right. In the midst of foul-mouthed and fiery discourse all assembled became thoroughly karped.

Voices filled the hall ebbing and flowing like ocean waves. Nasal high-pitched whines. Operatic disclamations. Buzz saw peals of sarcasm. Sadistic punbursts. Oxymoronic wailing guffaws. Grunts, snickers, accusations, lamentations, belches, diatribes, death threats, interrupted monologues. Giggle fits and sighing ecstasy. The occasional well-punctuated fart. The gritting of teeth. The crackling of knuckles. The pulling of hair. And then there was silence.

After an eternity a voice spoke. It was barely a flutter, soft but clear. It came from a weenie of a man, a member of a dissenting yet conservative faction of flower skinheads. The weenie looked straight at him and spoke:

"It's all up to you." Now all eyes focused on him.

"You alone are left to tell us the answer to all of our inquiries. The culmination of this great debate. The answer that will set our minds at rest, that verily will determine the future of this planet. The answer that will once and for all result in the eternal triumph of good over evil, or however our minds choose to formulate this metaphor.

"Your answer shall be both a synthesis and transcendence of the uttermost important thoughts of these great intellects gathered here. Once spoken it shall be shouted from the rooftops. Choirs will sing its refrain. Whole nations will reform to its message. The gods will return to this Earth and clarity will shine brilliant in the eyes of all. We anxiously yet patiently await your response. Answer us: What is going on?"

He blushed and sweated in horror as he shrank from the eyes of the great. He had no idea how he had even arrived in the hall. He had forgotten who he was and the wine and the spliffs only added to his confusion. But he swallowed his fear, cleared his throat, stood on the table and spoke:

"There is no meaning anywhere in the universe except that which we choose to give to it. Beyond this there is only the combined conceptions, perceptions and actions of every other entity in the universe including the universe itself. Nothing is stable. All is in movement. All is in a condition of perpetual creativity which emerges from the chaos of infinite possibilities.

"All of our categories, ideologies, thought experiments and even language itself is total bullshit. Only by freeing ourselves from these clinging notions can we ever hope to evolve beyond the mess we have made for ourselves. Only by our reemergence, and conscious reemergence, with this chaos can we find our way out. For in truth there is nothing but chaos. Nothing except interconnected flows of living energy.

"Everything is simply doing its own thing in order to sustain and expand itself. Each does this by collecting food, energy, information or money in whatever way is easiest. Everything is natural. We are free to do anything. Morality is a control myth, although certain actions are more fluid, balanced and inconsequential than others. It just so happens that these actions correspond with the moral dicta of most religions.

"At the base of all religions is the flow of of energy be it expressed as light, love, information or obedience to God. In fact there is no God but this God. All authority and control are all illusions and we often willingly give ourselves to these myths. In this way we ensure our own slavery. We need to smash or soar beyond all idols at all levels of perception and conception.

"There is only evolution and this is the creator, the created and the act of creation. Every atom of the universe is the entire universe and we have only to realize this to make it manifest. There are no limits. Everything is funny. There exists worlds beyond our comprehension for our exploration. The flow is best surfed with respect for the total. Space, time, mind, matter and energy are one. This, of course, is only my viewpoint and there is no truth."

He finished, stepped off the table and was instantly seized by the philosopher mob. They had not enjoyed a word. They took him outside to a tree and hung him by the neck until he died. He had already left his body. His crime was boredom. Civilization soon collapsed. Meanwhile, two cockroaches who had heard him in the hall and saw him die on the tree decided to start a religion...




The ruckus gurgled out of the sewer grates inspiring crippled toads to clear their obscured vision and sputter forth past rows of moss bungalows oozing with organic furry clarity charity for the unsatoried few who sit bored on couches munching cheezies and bragging about last Saturday night everything went wrong face planted into the pavement neon stars around his head in turned orbited by tiny worlds teeming with mutant life such as a bizarre species of hamster who do nothing but ponder their own place in the cosmos, who pay no attention to the physical world but spend all their short lives in their own unique thought dimension where they are God, all-knowing, all-powerful and immortal. All was blissful in these private utopias until they were warped into by humanoid reality surfers, the ultimate incarnation of a long succession of Lamarckian subcultural evolution way past uber-punk, post post-mortem, biodegradable extropic ideology-fuckers and bird-callers, drooling theo-morons, power-hippies, deep ravers, plurfs and ironic neo-squiffs who feasted on phosphorescent lichen leaving so-called consensus reality altogether beaming right naked down to the exclusive universe of the hamster demi-gods who fought them flicking snot and spreading paranoia. Eventually once the gate was crashed the joint was swamped by the worst type of curiousity-seeking wankers getting fat and establishing posh resorts where you can get your earlobes sucked while you intravenously absorb a sweet euphoric nectar that makes your whole body seem like one big penis whilst unbeknown to you you are being genetically reprogrammed to become the perfect automaton work, consume, watch TV, sleep. Fortunately some suburban computer geek introduced a nanoid virus into the soup further reprogramming the hapless penis zombies into fiery-eyed mall-smashing iconoclasts, nihilist mayhem addicts, sado-masochistic pleasure freaks, burning, bombing, looting, plundering yuppie vikings, New Age vandals, rabid brigands of the laundromats, cultural toxicity, window-shopping cancer, glamour girls sweating perfect plastic drops, their world had gone amok the rodents mentally paralysed by a wave of existential angst were unable to do anything. Their divinities stripped their powers forgotten ripples of confusion spun out from their heads back to the noösphere of the home world in beams of light to the neon stars which shone like a halo around the bruised toothless head of the alcoholic moss-dweller catching the attention of the wandering toads who in turn slapped the bum back into consciousness -- the beer-gutted redneck awoke from his stupor whole dimensions disappeared the hamster gods vanished the surfers were left without a home again the ruckus slinked back into the sewer chuckling softly...