A Nagging Feeling

But sometimes I wonder which I prefer more: the certainty of an empty city on the brink of disintegration, or the streets full of colorful people all twisted to the tune of insecurity. It feels like a clear choice. You wake up in the morning, take a shower, finish your daily duties and responsibilities, and then meet your friends to relax with any of a list of mindless activities. Granted enough money and love, one should feel happy, but happiness is fleeting, and besides, money and love do not come easily. A lot of blood and guts for something you are much more likely to lose than keep. Moreover, there is this nagging feeling that once that buzzing sound strengthens, things develop in a different direction where one becomes nothing more than a static figurine on someone else’s chessboard. And then, of course, there is this thing about people turning into rocks…

A Brief Episode

Allen wakes up with photos spread across his desk. Is he still dreaming? A few deep breaths, “Probably no.” So, he stands up, stretches himself and looks in the mirror, which for a second swoons like the surface of a deep lake. “How long have I been out?” he asks himself, and then remembers – time has no importance. He quickly brushes his teeth and slaps cologne on his curly skin. Then, he grabs the photos – shots of a circus crime scene and an item found: a goat’s tongue – and leaves the apartment.

Wake Up Call

Weirdness ensues as the days collapse over each other. Corner shop sirens run a gutted buzz, waking up all rock people. What at first seems like annoyance, a doorbell that rings stubbornly at seven in the morning, becomes a life-changer, the reason to cough up the settled dust and start breathing again, the signal that transforms rock into flesh and bones. The clocks reset, street life slowly crawls towards normalcy. Ivan and Ivana, Alexander and Alexandra, beautiful as always, move about towards shops that are suddenly open, to buy groceries, make-up, newspapers, whatever, and the shop-keepers eyes wide open continue with their business as usual. Everybody ignores a certain bitter after taste of something being lost. The “What just happened?” moment happened a long time ago. This is everyday stuff now. The anchorman simply announces, “The day just started, and it is uncertain just when it will end.”

A Question

A slip-slippery hoodlum races through the streets as stone walls evaporate behind him. Holding in his hand he keeps a goat horn that must never ever fall into the hands of them bastards, the watch-a-call-it freak show men…

…and as the Eye of Equal Opportunity sweeps the sky, the Iris shoves focus into its pores, that goat horn comes into clear view, and a deep raspy voice asks a question that echoes through the eternal corridors of Melancholia, “But where did it come from?”

The Blue Orchid

Paper chess figurines float through the air over some dry bushes, burnt coal matches, rusty hacksaws and torn circus posters. From the railings, the smiling face of a Cyclops declares that the random viewer, whoever he might be, is in fact, Melancholia itself. An olive-colored rock stares at the poster, a guilty blue orchid stretching into a smile from one of its cracks. The special tactics unit slowly approaches the orchid, blazing guns choking their hands, and with due diligence reaches for the tender flower. Then, the wind wavers, the orchid shakes and the special tactics unit goes pale, then drops dead to the ground. As the evening approaches, the orchid grows ever more beautiful.

Melancholia Micromix

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1. Skinny Puppy – Splasher
2. Liars – Sailing to Byzantium
3. Burzum – Rundgang um die transzendentale Saule der Singularitat
4. Tangerine Dream – Sequent C
5. Portishead – Threads
6. Sunn O))) + Boris – Akuma No Kuma
7. Neurosis – A Sun That Never Sets
8. Radiohead – Melatonin
9. Deerhunter – Twighlight at Carbon Lake

This Hologram Does Not Satisfy

This morning, some dirty rag woman in the bus told me the following:

“This Hologram I’m breathing does not satisfy. The lame wickedness of the wench above these broken towers is never as scary as I asked them to be. There is no customer complaints department in the ministry, though, so I might just as well bite my toes and say cheese.”

I didn’t understand at first. What Hologram? But then I looked out the window and saw these huge billboard ads promoting families with 18 children, and somehow, I understood. As I finished my last cigarette, I turned towards the dirty rag woman, but she was gone and in her seat I found a piece of bone that looked a lot like a goat’s horn.

The Meteor Showers

Meteor showers spray through the eye of a stray dog, lighting up the sky with the fierceness of a chimera gone wild. For a wink, these showers could pass for the real thing, but it’s obvious as the crystal shards fall flat on the ground and we see them for the human remains they are. It’s s a new kind of warfare this, where no politician hides behind his people. In fact, the new fire guns use the people themselves as bullets and cannonballs. Just because they’re broken, it doesn’t mean they cannot be useful. So, we get these 2 AM pretend meteor showers made of screams, fired up in the air as warning shots from our neighbors. Well, the dull anchorman from the plasma screen says we only have one neighbor we need to be afraid of, but I know better, you know better, everyone knows better. We’re all each other neighbors and there’s no stopping us. The Big Hum is opening somewhere and we can already feel the rock tissue pushing in on us. Let the showers begin.

Graffiti

Arch of negativity stretches across the sky, like a rainbow made of steel gray colors. It sucks the whole city, heart and soul. The dailies don’t pay any attention and continue with the babble surrounding the near East and other irrelevant matters. It’s not like anyone will die – they will merely fall apart and disappear. There will be no new graves dug up, no new obituaries, and certainly no farewell dinners. And besides, who doesn’t fall apart is turned into a rock, at least for ten or so hours. “Rock is good,” graffiti says near the city’s center. A bronze cow seems to be sleeping, and doesn’t notice anything.

Allen's Dream 2: The Crack in the Whiteness

But whiteness is not the end. In the distance, Allen can notice a crack in the whiteness, so thin it is understandable how he missed it initially. He floats to it, touches the crack, which really feels like it belongs to some wall, yet there is no wall and the crack floats freely in the air, much like Allen himself. He wonders for a second; scratches his head, particularly that itchy spot right above his right ear; and then tries for the clear shot: swings with his leg and smacks the crack right in the middle. Pieces of paint and concrete fall down in eternity and now there is a hole gaping back at Allen. There is something on the other side of the wall, and it has horns.

Allen's Dream

Allen wakes up into a new dream: he’s a detective, looking for clues of the missing wise goats, apparently stars in some god-forsaken and bizarre-to-no-end circus with a ridiculously pretentious name – “Doppelganger”. Of course, he’s able to crack the case very fast – the goats haven’t really disappeared, they are just a dream like everyone else, after all, no goat has ever spoken a word, and of course, they are bound to reappear soon, again, as dreamlike forms to be sold to the public. There is an exception. In one cycle of this dream, Allen realizes that there is something beneath this circus and the point where it is placed (an underground lake runs right beneath it, some say to popular disbelief) at the time when the goats disappear. So he digs deeper. There is a connection between the goats and this mysterious fairy that had also disappeared from the circus some time (a month? two? can’t really tell) before the goats. There is this strange talk about some kind of dimension of negativity and how the goats are supposed to get the fairy out of it but it is all really messed up, and there is still no indication as to how any of it relates to the mess Allen has in his own world. Then, right at the top of the dream, Allen wakes up into yet another dream where everything is white, and he poses no questions, he has no fear, for he is free.

Motivation

From time to time, they figure, they need to give hope to the masses, just to get them going towards their daily jobs, and move the economy a freakin’ inch or two closer to whatever it is they predicted. But their plans are all messed up and none of them seem motivational enough, so they scrap everything and start from nil. It is a frustrating job, this endless planning, but someone has to do it, and why not if it keeps you from becoming a rock every time the hum comes. A wall of boredom is known to hit them when the rest of the world dies for a few hours, but it is nothing a few gulps of home-made liquor won’t cure. Some of them pretend to read something, “for educational purposes” they say, but it is well-known that they are simply scared. Who knows what a mouth can blurt out when it is drunk? A few wrong words here, a few wrong words there, and you are out of the joint, and in the middle of the street, becoming a rock like everyone else. They have cameras everywhere, but they don’t really need them. There is always someone that doesn’t like you around, and they always have good ears for information like this. Some people are so well-informed of the others’ intentions they don’t have to hear anything. You lie down on the silk sofa in front of the monitors and you receive this strange message that you’re called by management for good. Those who have questioned the leadership are nowhere around to pass their experience to the younger ones. The most rebellious are marked even after they are thrown out, always in a different manner. If you ever see a big piece of rock set in the middle of a street with a thick coat of pink paint smudged across, you know this guy said something terribly bad in front of the monitors. “It’s for motivational purposes,” they say, before bursting in laughter the size of Saturn.

Touristic Promo

By the Ferris Wheel

The theme park has dried up. The Ferris wheel is rotating with a rusty screech, its elephant-shaped cabins empty and at places completely missing. The concrete labyrinthine paths between the so-called attractions – a shooting range is never an attraction – are marked with a web of cracks that used to host stubborn weeds but is as void of life as everything else these days. Pogo horses rattle from time to time for no obvious reason. A crow flies above high in the sky, and somehow, it does not disintegrate. Maybe, it is too high, that rascal. A northern wind blows lightly, raising dust in the air, making it twirl like a mini tornado, until it reaches a clown-shaped stand post and drops dead. The smell of sweet candy, however, still hangs around, and that counts for something. Then it comes. A metallic pitch grows to a feverish level, two plates of concrete separate uncovering a hidden compartment beneath the ground, and a number of Cyclops soldiers jump up from it. “Let’s shake some dust,” says one of them and off they go. After awhile, an inverse pitch announces shift in the mechanism, the concrete plates close, and the compartment becomes invisible again. The crow flies down to a pogo-horse and upon first touch, it bursts into zillion molecules.

Dark Alley Memory

A memory roams the dark alleys of this city, looking for a host to inhabit but can’t find anyone. “Where have they disappeared to?” the memory asks itself but it cannot remember – there is a different memory roaming the same street that keeps that kind of information, but memories, as always, are impervious and possibly invisible to each other, selective to the death. That other memory knows that everything is gone, that there is nothing left, but bits and scraps of the chaos it once was, yet it doesn’t give up, it will never give up, and continues to do the same thing it’s been doing for ages, floating slowly through the deserted corridors of grey buildings, looking for someone to finally remember. “There are these two wise goats…” the first memory repeats to itself again, just-in-case, to preserve the message for the next host, as it gradually falls apart in the silver light.

The Second Shard

Windows stay closed as a cold winter morning blows through the summer afternoon. The empty boulevards hiss with loneliness, the old white and yellow paint separating driving lanes growing paler with each breath. Shards of glass wiggle in piles here and there, and you can see wonderful human drawings painted and broken into their fabric. One piece holds an almost lifelike green eye; it even blinks from time to time. Another piece holds a breathing mouth, a third one is a finger pointing forever in a single direction, then twitching in a spasm of pointlessness. The afternoon gets colder, and as a crow flies over to summarize the leftovers of pretty much everything, it cows a single time, then breaks apart into a new glass puzzle, falls fifty meters down towards the asphalt, and piles up with the rest of them. A tiny glass kitty tongue tries to lick the crow’s feathers but it can’t reach that far, so it gives up eventually.

The Beach (scene)

The sun is silver gray again, but the beach is full as always this time of the year. The Beta Police steps through the sunbathing rock bodies, paying no care to avoid any physical contact. Some Betas kick the tourists, but these do not object; they’re good three hours away from returning to their waking form. Suddenly, a piercing shriek rises from the other side of the pebble beach and a flock of gulls flies up in the air before they disintegrate at first contact with the silver sunlight. The Betas run towards the shriek in hazy dissonance. Lying down in the shallow water a half-man, half-rock is dying covered with moss, and nobody, not even the most senior Beta, can hide the fear that piles thick in the air.

The First Shard

Small creatures roam through the cracks of boredom inhabiting the passengers of this train wreck wagon. Plastic eyeglasses stab stares at me, idle as molested pests pretending to hide dark secretes. The rhythm of the rail underneath our feet seems harmonic at first, but slips and cracks feed us cold reality, we’re going nowhere.