Screaming at the Clock

Ranting, Ravings, and Lunacies

The title of this section comes from a strange habit I had while I was trapped in the utterly deprave clutches of higher learning. There was, and still is, a large clock atop a small tower in front of one of the main halls at Carnegie Mellon. Whenever life would get to be too much I would leap up from my seat and dash pell mell towards this oddly phallic chonometer. Upon arrival I would engage in my own form of primal scream therapy until my throat hurt. It wouldn't take very long for my throat to hurt being that I smoked a pack and a half of Newports a day. Then I would fall down and feel better about things.

I'm pretty sure that this is about the same thing.

Rant Unknown

Hot Rocket Chris Rapier

Mumble Jumble Chris Rapier

Home Again Home Again


Rant

So we're speeding headlong into the eco-econocataclysm, business-as-usual, corporations so big you scream "Fuck You" from the bottom of your lungs and the echo from the top of the power pyramid comes back a year later as a NOTICE OF DISHONOR OF CHECK form letter. Or no echo returns at all, and you try to scream again but the wet-thick coughs rack your chest (too much NOx from the street) and you realize that the corporate death aliens are turning our air into a hydrocarbon copy of their smog-and-CO2 atmosphere; "Boy Howdy! You can sell those humans anything! We've got 'em buying nuclear-waste fertilizer, we've got 'em buying mercury-loaded meat by-products, we've got 'em buying FEAR as an entertainment industry... We can sell them smog-making machines and ozone-wrecking machines, we sell 'em exotic cancers AND the expensive ineffective cures, we sell them brain-rotting guilt-programming on our favorite electronic drug: TV!" And the aliens LIKE television! Sure it slows a human's alpha waves and puts us in the hypnogogic state for hours on end; sure, it turns our minds into Play-Do for the mass-advertising jackals to shape into whatever tractable sheeplike form pleases them. BAA! BAA! "Read my lips: No new taxes!" "This is your brain on drugs." "GE brings good things to life." And the Earth is their Third World and they've spent the past three billion years mastering the Art of Vertical Integration AND our planet is their latest levered buyout...TV is GOOD for them, that raster cutting across the phosphor puts them into disease-free ECSTASY while turning our brains to pink MUSH.
So you eat some more paper because that's the only way your mind can find its original shape, and you go into the woods, knowing that those trees will only be there a few more years because the goddamn US Forest Service is selling all of the "National" forests to Mazda and Mitsubishi Bank... and subsidizing the sales with your own "no new tax" money. Yes, your brain is on that hot skillet, sizzling, turning brown around the edges, and you feel SANE for the first time in months. Because you've been getting more and more paranoid lately, haven't you? You see a dumb horror flick by a low-budget director while you're really baked and you realize it's a fucking DOCUMENTARY, not just another teen slasher product, but a last-ditch effort to wake people UP: They Live, We Sleep, OBEY, CONSUME, NO THOUGHT. You see an old friend and he has a poster that says "Paranoid? Most of your fears are real." And you really ARE paranoid, but if ever there was a time for paranoia, it is now; you watch Jollie Ollie North casually explain to Sen. Inouye his plans to suspend the Constitution, as if there even WERE a Constitution anymore, after the National Security Act. But the A gives you wisdom and comfort: YOU aren't going crazy, you're JUSTIFIED in being paranoid because it isn't paranoia, it's being brutally REALISTIC. Land of the Free, right, we live in McSuperPower and who do you think sells this cheap plastic CRAP that TIME MAGAZINE calls "the American Dream?" George Bush? HA! He is Pure Product, he IS chicken McNuggets, he IS an expendable fuse through which the real powers dump vast energies...the Trilaterals? The Council on Foreign Relations? You don't even want to ASK about these guys, because they're the Big Boys, the Grim Secret Men in Black, and just THINKING about them draws their attention; it's like yelling HASTUR or YOG-SOTHOTH out loud, or invoking the Freedom of Information Act to see your FBI file, you just don't want to do it, if they notice you you're finished.
So there are pretty vortical tracers flowing off your fingers now and you remember that death is an illusion and Mind is the fundamental ordering principle of the Universe...obvious things that everybody including you seems to forget...and the neon rainbow colors remind you of that new Floyd bootleg CD you bought from Second Coming records, GEE! How do they get all that DATA onto one spectrally chromish disk? They can store ENCYCLOPEDIAS on one of those things, and by GOD, the FBI must have thousands of pages of surveillance info on EVERY SINGLE NETTER in North America, all neatly stored and indexed, ready to be consulted when they find it necessary to send YOU to one of the FERA camps...If you say, "George Bush, ex-CIA director, was out of the loop" enough times maybe they'll take pity and only use the thorazine; if you say "Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, murdered President Kennedy" they may even send you to Tiger Island to join up with the Death Squad Elite. You chant over and over, "Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone..." and maybe you can even convince yourself it's TRUE, but not while you're frying, because right now you're NOT asleep, you see through the NSA even if they DO own over half the Crays ever made, you see through the petty little treacheries that are sold to the public every day: Reagan and Khomeini, Bush and Noriega, goddamn GE and NBC bringing good things to life at Hanford and Pinellas, Exxon and the environment President, BP on the move, RJR and their sickeningly subliminal Smooth Character Penis Camel, the glorps at work who don't MIND toxic waste as long as it's "disposed of" in some IBM-owned Third-World country, and we BUY this shit.
And above it all, you can HEAR the slack-sucking aliens laughing their ASSES off, because this invasion was so damn easy it's pathetic. "Gawd, you can sell them ANYTHING! Just last week we convinced them that a war on their own country will make them MORE FREE! This 'Freedom' product is the best scam since the $64,000 question!" Yes, Earth is the laughingstock of the galaxy, creatures in the Small Magellanic Cloud tell human jokes: "Hey Vornan-17, how many humans are buying Men-From- Planet-X brand National Security at this very moment?" "Dunno." "Three hundred million! HAW HAW HAW!"
So now you're peaking, and tears are rolling down your cheeks from the relentless giggling. It really is funny after all, this "Bob"cid is the best fry you've had in years, at least the aliens haven't gotten their tentacles on the vitamin A industry; in fact they made it a felony because it makes you HUMAN again, blows their Jack-in-the-Box raster- scanned molasses lint out of your brain...it should be given away FREE on every street corner.
And a Forest Ranger, wearing the official Weyerhauser smile, puts a .38 to your head and turns you off.

Unknown

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Ride the Hot Rocket

Pressure building up inside my skull. Pull it out and play with my cranium. Sit there and stare at the skull I hold in my hands as my naked brain is caressed by the winds of probability. No luck, past luck. Pure chance. I feel my soul coming out of my eyes and dripping into my ears. A feather touch that hurts like nails. I feel it. I decide to put my skull back. It didn't fit. I stretched it I guess. Now my brain is too small for a head too large. It rattles. And shakes. Shake Rattle Roll, Shake, Rattle, Roll. Pressure is gone from my head. Now its outside playing with the kittens. They seem confused. I guess I don't play with them enough. Or maybe they aren't used to worrying about Japanese satellites gouging out a hole in my bathtub. I've seen it happen. I've done it myself. I rode it. I rode the wild Japanese satellites down from the expanse of orbit. Clutched hold to its antenna as it plummeted and hurtled out of space. I didn't know where it would land, but I guessed it wouldn't be near my house. So I strapped on my space spurs and drove that hot rocket right down to my house. But I missed and landed in my bathtub. Big nick in the side. Big satellite in the tub too. Not enough room for both me and it in there, so I don't bathe anymore. Wash my troubles down the drain. Way down. In the drain. Down down down. Deep way down. Down in the pit. Sumbitch. Wish I had a ladder. Wish I had a ladder. Wish I woz a dog. Whose been sleeping in my braim? Braim? Braim? Sorry Mr. Fiend. Just popped in. Ha. Woah. Tune in. Turn on. Hunker down. Off to hunker.

A Note of Explanation

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Jumble Mumble

Just another hip down skop to the nether reaches of something that really can't reach all that far. it makes me wonder about what it is. i mean, what is it? This this thing that makes me wonder? Where did this IT come from? Does it matter? Does IT matter? Matterhorn it is not. IT? Ahhh, the brain boggles at the thought. Or does it buggle? I think it might buggle, but they were a really bad band. I don't want my brain to buggle! No buggling inside this brain please!! I think I'll just let it out to to play. Then again maybe not. The last time I did that the cats got really upset. they have just not been the same since. I wonder if it was the brain or the buggle boggle. Lots of wonder in this boy. It must come from IT, whatever IT might be, this thing that makes me wonder. Though, for some reason (any reason really), I don't think this has a bit to do with IT, buggles or the boggle. Maybe its just my brain. IT is my brain? What a novel idea. An idea for a novel? Novel Idea is an Ideal Novel! Buy two today, toolate to be two, tomorrow or tonight? Tonight! Tonight! two knight! I am the knight! The knight is IT! Ha ha, no tag backs! You're IT, You're IT. WAIT!!!! I am IT. It doesn't matter though. But I am matter, I was told this by the man in the boat (the one on the commercial). Mattererous mattering of matterhorn is the matter and matter is I! I matter! I wonder what my density is? Density of my destiny. Destiny of my density. Matter is density destiny. Reaching for my matter.

Total recall of a movie with bulging eyes and martian hookers that could rhumba the night away with a mad rhombus. Take me by the hand and lead me to the beat of the band. What a way to beat the band! Ha, beat the band. That would hurt. But What band? Wedding band? Would it play a polka? If it did it probably wouldn't fit on my finger. Anyway, what was this about a movie with bulging eyes and dreams so real? I can't remember, I don't recall. Actually, i think i do, but that sort of came in though the open bat? Open bat? A window just flew in though the open bat! Its a sign! An omen! Or maybe its just the acid in my cocoa. I wish i had some cocoa. Nice hot liquidy fluid all choice choc with a sp-LASH! of moo. I dunno about the acid though. Whats it doin' in MY hot cocoa? i didn't order THIS! I suppose thats okay because I really didn't order anything and I don't have anything to order because there is no order to this order of anything at all. I just think as I order without any order as to what might be the order? What does this have to do with hot cocoa? i dunno! I know it doesn't have anything to do with a movie with bulging eyes and bulging biceps! Whose bulging? Bugling? I dunno, i just work here. I'd really like some hot cocoa, without the acid. I think. So would the bat.

tippy type typie tip tippercanoe and me too. too me thats who. two me, would i need more underwear then? i think i do. i haven't had the money to do my underwear in a year? day? month? mouth? yeah, i haven't had the money to do my underwear in close to a mouth now. i suppose i would need more underwear if there were two of me. but then i would have two mouths! months? i would have two months. two months of underwear for two mouths of two me. too much. yeah, i better just be one me. one me. o solo me-O. Me-o. meow? chinese food that meows? no, don't want to think about that. just too much even for two me. one me, o sol o me-oh. spaghetti for two. with balls. ouch. me o my o solo meow. vagina. dot. period. draw your own conclusions. i'll draw mine and we can have an opening. a gallery opening. at the forbes gallery. forbes galley. a galley? galley slave! eeeeeffff hoooooooe eeeeeeeeffffffff hoooooooe o woe is me-o. o solo meo. spaghetti. i think i already ordered though. but didn't i already mention that? with the hot cocoa. the ordering of the order but it didn't include my spaghetti. i want my spaghetti order the order god damn me!!!! order the odor. the odor of order. i like that ododododododod dodo. dodor. door. dormouse. dormeese. ed meez! heh heh heh heh heh. so, how bout them nicks.

A Note of Explanation

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