the timboucher experience

Are you living in the New World of the Ancients (like the firelight that flicked across your face) or the Old World of the Futures (where men in hats ran our ships aground)? When you first heard those words (I was only a young man), did they (did they ring in your mind?) teach them to you as though they were talking (to you about things long ago when we were kids and we watched grainy film strips at school) about Europe and the Americas? What they meant was rather more concrete (more concrete than pavement). The worlds we left. The stuff we kept. The things they were going to probably steal from us when they got there.The places we went. We should go back there some time. Where are you now? I hate to be the one to break it to you but you’re living in squalor on a Martian colony (we thought it was going to be cool but it turned out to suck). We’re all looking back to our time on Earth and trying to remember how it was. But it’s fading from us (or rather fading towards us). And the problem is that we (well we have a lot of problems actually - let’s talk through them some time) each experienced it differently when we were there. So we can’t seem to agree on how to re-create it. Or if we should simply start over with something new altogether. The Singularity already happened, the world already ended. It was totally crazy, you should have seen it. I have some videos that I saved and put on YouTube as it was all happening. There were aliens and angels and God came down from Heaven and shook our hands and told us we’d done a good job and He was proud of us. It was seriously the coolest thing I have ever seen. We’re also just kind of generally bitchy with one another without necessarily needing to be. So try not to do that, okay?

Fortunately, we have an AI mechanism (AI stands for artificial intelligence - but isn’t the idea of intelligence itself totally artificial to begin with) whose sole purpose is to mediate (meditate) between our disagreements (and like I said we have a lot of them). We used to call it the Torah (which I thought would be a cool theme to toss in right here). The Word of God which took shape as a reflection of His Law (Law & Order, you’ve seen that show, right? I kind of hate those shows). His Law is a line of best fit. But yeah I mean, the videos don’t really even do it justice. That’s the thing. Except lines don’t really fit shit like this. We all pool our resources about how our lives used to be. We argue over them. Then the computer graphs it all instantaneously (retro-actively, actually), determines a line of best fit and suddenly software turns to thick air. And you know the rest because it’s getting awfully thick in here. Thick piles of hair on the floor at an old-fashioned barber shop. They used to do blood-letting there.

And now you know where we are. But I just wanted to let you know that the Earth has no vibration. And that vibration is most certainly not increasing. That’s just the sound of your soul crying as you continue to ignore it and act like an asshole. But I don’t really think you’re an asshole. That’s just a rhetorical device. You’re not actually reading this. You’re thinking back and remembering reading this long ago, except your memory has dimmed. Don’t worry. So has mine. It’s hard for me to recreate what I wrote all those years ago, whole worlds away. I remember sitting in a bar once and thinking about all this. All I can do is try to tell you what I remember it feeling like. I don’t submit to you that it will be more accurate than your recollection. Or your record collection. Have you ever thought of that? That people collect records? I mean, that’s almost like collecting paper-work from an office, because you want to make sure that you always remember that one really cool planning session that you guys had a few months back. Why do we want to remember some meetings of people, some events and actions in our lives and not others? Why can’t we love office documents the way we love other types of records, the vinyl kind I mean….

Haven’t you been wondering why they don’t send us as good of food out here in the colonies anymore? And where did all these new types of apples suddenly come from over the past five years? New Zealand? Yeah right. That country didn’t ever have shit to say a few years ago, and suddenly they’re spewing apples at us constantly? Hasn’t it been bothering you that food used to taste a lot more realistic five or ten years ago? I bought an old radio at a garage sale. It’s mostly broken but if I turn the knob just so, I can tune to a station and hear the music that my parents’ parents listened to. The name of the company that made the radio is “Realistic” and the letters are shiny, raised and slanted. Why would you need to call a radio “Realistic” unless it wasn’t actually real at all and you simply needed to fool people into thinking that it was real? Help them suspend their disbelief while they stare out at the vast wastes of outer space listening to Linda Fox in their little plastic domes. I can’t tell how realistic my radio actually is anymore. I swear it didn’t used to say that on it. It didn’t used to say anything on things. Things used to just be things. We didn’t need to label them with the names of other things which they are not. This is probably where “things” got all confused and reality got its signals crossed (cause God gave us the gift of naming the animals right, then we started calling shoes “Puma” instead of the big cats and that’s when everything got all cracked out like it is now).

It mostly just sits on my shelf and asks me whether or not it’s more realistic than I am. I don’t have much of an answer. Our conversations are mostly one-sided. (In retrospect, I can perhaps see now why she had to stay home in our old apartment that one day and label what everything was with post-it notes, because you just don’t know anymore. And things keep switching…)

If you held a camcorder in the back window of a moving car (careful now!), and then watched the footage you recorded (on your VCR during Christmas time as a little kid), what you would see is the world moving away from the camera. What does the camera see while it’s not recording, while you’re not holding it? The same thing would happen if you stood on the back of a ferry. But if you reversed the video (if mirrors affect light, then why not time?), it would appear as though everything were moving towards you (but I conjecture that it is actually not although I don’t have much more than hunch to back that up - it’s just a late night perception). That is, it would appear that you are moving forward. Except “you” wouldn’t be moving forward at all, since you’re actually quite standing still watching footage rise up and recede, rather than moving yourself. Move yourself. Move yourself.

Somebody emailed me to say that they don’t remember motion. Don’t remember motion. That the mind seems to save only still scenes and then interpolates between them. Between them animated. In animation they talk about this in terms of key frames and tweening. Back and forth in between. Back when they actually used to animate by hand (do people even still have hands anymore?), the lead artists would draw the keyframes which sketched out a wider swath of motion. Always in motion. Then secondary artists would come in and fill in the details of the less dramatic movements in between the key frames. Which one are you? What were you just doing before this?

Yesterday I sent a zipped copy of Rush’s album “2112″ to my friend’s house as I was about to go over and listen to it so we could examine it for hidden messages and possible synchronicities with the so-called “Real World”. The file was about 56 megs I think. I decided to leave the house at the same time and race the file. I figured if the file got to his house faster then that might be proof that I take up more space than 56 megs. The file beat me, but only by a few minutes. I took my time though, getting my shoes on and chatting with my roomates. You don’t want to just go upstairs and announce that you can’t talk because you are about to embark on a race against a zipped copy of a Rush album in order to execute a simple experiment about the nature of reality. That type of shit simply doesn’t fly with some people and I totally respect that.

This could mean a variety of things. But I have a feeling it has to do with the bandwidth of reality. I’m pretty sure I take up more than 56 megs, but how much more, I can’t really say for sure. And who can? If you can, tell me. If we’re only counting key frames and such, then perhaps it’s pretty close.

People used to worry about real life. Now people only seem to care about the state of chemicals inside their bodies. Cholesterol. Trans-fats. A bunch of other dumb shit like that. Science may not know how to measure our insides, but they sure figured out a grand way for us to feel as though we control our lives in a world out of control wherein they actually control us. They’ve taught us to worry about numbers and counts of chemicals and things inside of us which we’ll never see or actually feel on our own without the help of a lab or a doctor or a person at the Apple store who wears a white coat when youw alk in there, which I never have.

But god, it sure feels good to get those numbers right, huh? Ladies, can you tell me how many calories you ate today? It doesn’t have to be exact. Within about a hundred or so. Can you? You have a problem. I’m not saying “Ladies” to be sexist, cause I say fuck sexism. I’m just saying I have looked at the women’s magazines that my roomates get and they are fucked up people. They create fucked up people. It’s time to throw those things onto the fire. And its flames are going to reach all the way up to Heaven. And God himself is going to have to climb down and put the damned thing out when we’re all done. What the hell is a calorie anyway? And don’t tell me how much food it equals according to some kind of bullshit Weight Watchers point system. Show me a fucking calorie!

That’s what I thought! That’s what you thought. What are you thinking as you’re reading this. Go back and read it again. And this time, don’t read what I wrote, read what your responses are to what I wrote. Because chances are that’s what you were actually already reading anyway. Now go back and have fun with it. I’ll wait for you here and then we can race down to the end and see where this is all going. Somewhere cool, I’m sure. I’m saying that to reassure you if you’ve gotten this far. Cause I know what it’s like my friend. We are all in this together.

Being empathic means that you are easily sucked into other people’s worlds. You may not even at times actually know what your own world really is, if you have one or even need it.

That is, their sphere of perceptions which make up their experience of the world, which is always self-reinforcing (and which whenever you talk about gets needlessly complex as you try to keep your language concise - but fuck that). I think there may have been a mix up among the New Age people when they came back to tell the rest of what they found on their strange magical (vomiting) unicorn journeys (Steve Perry). They said we make our own reality and then they sold us a big box of Nag Champa for twenty dollars and now we’re getting kind of tired of the smell. But maybe we only make our own perceptions of our reality. And maybe even those can crumble if we stare at the letters on a page or screen long enough. Or maybe maybe, I don’t know. I wish I had something better to write in this part. And then when you learn how to remake those, then you can start actually impacting reality. It seems kind of fruitless now to think about it though. I don’t know. I’m not sure that I haven’t given up perhaps altogether on trying to figure out what reality is. Or what it ain’t. So far I think it may simply be beautiful and terrible and all the things in between and there are a lot of things. They say you should love God and fear God, but what about miniature golfing with God? Nobody ever talks about that. For God has made many worlds. And many miniature golf courses. New Worlds. Old Worlds. Worlds that overlap and conflict and are somehow automatically patched together via satellite whenever two of us interact. The Nation of Gods and Earths, that’s what they call themselves. We are floating deep in space and remembering. If I stop remembering you do you stop existing or is the failing mine? Maybe my memory of you is my only memory period. Lose that and I lose it all. I am only so aware as I am aware of you. And vice versa.

Viral marketing has poisoned itself. What’s more poisonous? Viruses or marketing? It only makes sense that those bastards would team up and try to beat us finally. Viral + marketing is a match made in some twisted image of a fallen heaven filled with snakes and crocodile phlegm-trees, the same place where the idea to combine Coke + Lemon was created, or Slavery + Death. All are perhaps equally obvious and meaningless. Flavored chemicals we call food. Why do we do that?

We’re floating back towards the Earth now. I can see it looming large beyond our shields. We’ll start a brand new colony on the abandoned plains below. We’ll choose wisely when the cup is passed to us this time. Not like that Nazi dude who totally turned to dust. Our angel sits behind a candle in an elaborate silver holder. The flame obscures his face or his face obscures the flame. Each of us hears something different when we hear a song. Arms uplift and wings unfurl. Each of us reads something different when we read a story. The triangular city casts shadows in the firelight. Women walk sideways back to the graves they were born from. We are reading ourselves. Water filling up in the desert. Fish swimming in from the sand. The moments we have together where we are most alive is when we forget that we are a person, that we are a thing separate and different. I am a locksmith pissing on your doorknob. Tombs opened by the blades of knives flowering like fruit plants. She can figure the rest of this out while she sits there in the candle light. You all are free to go home now at this point to your families. They need you. Languid figures of lovers hanging from the rafters. Your hair is smoking in the firelight. Your dress hangs from the fence post. My mouth and hands are empty. I am writing this for you. I know I’m no Monet. You know we’re almost out of money. You were a wave and you came in and slipped over me like wine. I waited by the seashore hoping. My name touched yours in the catalog. We practiced fighting in the yard. Standing on logs. Rocking back and forth. Rolling one another down hills where we wept. We slept in silence under oak trees. Wide leaves and tresses. Short stems and smoldering dresses. Crosses and crucifixes pointed upwards to Heaven. The Morse Code of sunset. My eleven socks of wisdom arranged like pears on the stair rail. Smoky solos. Organs sweating as keys press themselves and the church explodes in a shower of stained glass and flowers.

While I slept Mars floated up in the background and was punctured by the seeds of our memories. Protect what is yours my child.

• Further bold pronouncements…
• BIG Elk - “The Story of My Life (So Far)” [Lyrics]
• The foolishness of God
• Swear Words In Public
• Dreams: Barn Dance and Ram Skull King