Transmission from Submarine #14 seventh transmission

I say don’t worry. If there is a hell below, we are all going to go

-Curtis Mayfield

Rural Indiana Sheriff buys a tank.

Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

-Kurt Vonnegut

Peru approves genocide for uncontacted tribes

“We apologize for the inconveniences, but this is a revolution.”

-Subcomandante Marcos, 1994

Indian Army mistook Planets for “spy drones”

China builds Stonehenge and Eiffel Tower in ‘Copycat towns’

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living

-Karl Marx

Citizens strike back: Tiny, low-cost drones may one day assassinate corrupt politicians, corporate CEOS and street criminals

2 dead and three injured after woman drops cell phone in a toilet.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them

-Paul Valery

Xochitl observed the Lifter moving into position over the north side of the city through her field glasses. She and her squad were camouflaged on the hill. Should they reveal themselves to plunge a dagger into the belly of this beast? Large swathes of the city were on fire. She saw one of the public dirigible transports they had set up fall into the bay like a fizzled firework. If she revealed her position they would probably be shelled in minutes, most her troop dead minutes after. What decision to make? It was good shot though. She gestured with her hand.

They are all we have to fight off illness and death.

-Leslie Marmon Silko

A call came through. Probably the last call out of the city.

You were the last on my list but you answered

Yes.

The city has fallen. Bombs are landing. You are probably hearing my voice from the land of the dead.

 I will get there.

 Don’t come, just listen this last time.

I will listen. But you can’t stop me from coming.

You are probably coming to the land of the dead.

Dexter Filkin’s excellent book of reporting on the war of terror (or the 9/11 Wars some have called them) The Forever War has an early chapter describing the 9/11 attacks. He names this chapter “Third World” and I find it a beautiful touch. The empire that America has hesitantly created in post wars years, this Pax Americana has been built by the power of money but it has also been created by “death from above”. Our air superiority has enforced our position in Libya, Panama, Korea, Sudan, Iraq, Japan, Germany, and continued on in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia. This sudden bolt from the sky that turns a mental and physical landscape to a world of rubble, smoke, and disappeared lives. We experienced “death from above” and it fractured our mind. The burning, bombing and destruction exited the foreign news section and appeared on an American landscape. For some American the idea of “third world” was already part of their lives, those of Detroit, Flint, south side Chicago, the Bronx, Compton and Watts, Pine Ridge reservation, coal country of West Virginia and Kentucky, Camden, Youngstown, tomato fields of Florida, and many others had lives controlled by corrupt politicos, men with guns, decaying social structures, poverty, and arbitrary violence. But for most, this idea had never even been pondered. Untouchable America had been a reality all their lives. To quote from Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock

The discontinuity generated by the 9/11attacks should not be underestimated. While I was writing this very chapter, I met with a recent college graduate who was developing a nonprofit company and website to help create relationships between “millennials” of her generation and more aged mentors of my own. She explained that her generation was idealistic enough to want to help fix the world, but they had been “traumatized by 9/11 and now we’re incapable of accessing the greater human projects.” Somehow, she felt the tragedy had disconnected her generation from a sense of history and purpose, and that they “needed to connect with people from before that break in the story in order to get back on track.” 

Was it severing, a realization, the end of a narrative, the waking from a dream, or an event that smelled convincing enough of history to shock us, or a rebirth? What was that day? What world did it create in its sacrifice?

Ikea know way too much about your sex and pooping habits

Harvard says library includes book bound in human skin

A place without gurus monarchs leaders cops tax collectors jails matriarchs patriarchs and all the other galoots who in cahoots have made the earth a pile of human bones under the feet of wolves

-Ishmael Reed

The Oued El-Had and Mezoura massacres were perpetrated by “strange guerillas” with shaved heads and eyebrows and flags that said “angry at god”.

“This is a revolution!”

I’m alright when I’m awake but sleeping I hurt my face. What do you guys do about drug itch?

Benedryl

My dick is begging me not to itch it again

Benedryl

It feels like fiberglass in my veins

Benedryl

Opiyum is your screen name?

Benedryl

On someone’s list you are already a casualty

-The Minutemen

Could this boob baring councilor be Labour’s answer to winning the election?

“This is a revolution”

Neil Young’s twitter hacked and filled with porn.

I’m going to show you how to get a slurpy with an ak-47

Mexican Kim Kardashian takes over drug cartel hit squad. Uses personalized pink ak-47. Nicknamed Emperatriz de los antrax. Check out these hot selfies from her twitter feed

A secret is what no one knows

-Moondog

We can neither confirm nor deny this is our first tweet

Wars and panics on the stock exchange,

Machine gun fire and arson,

Bankruptcies, warloans,

Starvation, lice, cholera and typhus:

Good growing weather for the House of Morgan

-John Dos Passos

Toussaint L'ouverture said burn the cities and retreat into the hills. Napoleon sending twenty thousand soldiers to reclaim Haiti for French revolution and slavery.

Could pooping in a box save the developing world?

The rocks made hollow sounds ricocheting off the rocket’s fins. The crowd had worked itself up to this action. Faedra wondered the source of their anger. She couldn’t place it. The cult had been unusual filled with deranged and wild ideas and dangerous to those in its orbit, but these were the actions of a long oppressed group of people not the neighbors of some weirdoes. She thought of her fellows now as just that, weirdoes. The rocket was missing its magnificent cone, and it looked sad and forgotten as the villager’s stones began to dent its golden sides.

Couches, pianos and other items were being pulled out of the mansion. She remembered the chants in those halls. Solid black paint on every surface, Red swastikas placed throughout the interior. She remembered the chanting and singing in the master’s language. She remembered it all and felt very little for the person she was who had participated

The master’s cats flitting between legs of the looters. They had made a greater claim to the house than any of its former inhabitants. Their kingdom was now being thrust upside down by the greedy ravagers. Some of the cats flood out into the yard and vanish into the bushes. Two men are trying to pull a piano through a door. Unmusical clatter comes from its interior as it was struggled over. A drum set is being tossed over those men’s heads.

Here the master had gathered them. In this hall they wore black clothes and bandied gold medallions. He told them of the return. A human would return from the stars. He was sent out so many years ago that the technology that sent him and even the civilization was lost to epochs of dust and forgetting. We would not ignore his message of disasters coming and the knowledge that we could use to escape it. The master had heard radio transmission from the man, and he knew everything that could be expected. We must gather funds to build the rocket.

The answer stands as kingdoms fall. There is no answer. None at all. None at all.

- Moondog

Art imitates Life: Replica of Van Gogh’s Ear created From Live Cells.

Gwyneth Paltrow makes people mad.

Christianity has never been worldly nor has it ever looked with favor on good food and wine, and it is more than doubtful whether the introduction of jazz into the cult would be a particular asset.

-Carl Jung

Bagged booze coffins straining the cart. She felt her muscles twitch with each journey. The trash sorter was growling and complaining to her. “Modest why so much of the same thing. Offer me something new.” Twenty years working with this machine and now it learns to complain.

Lying on the furniture at awkward angles, lurching around with menace, rambling incoherently, and lobbing abuse at journalists streaming on glimmering screens, and in general drunkenness and sorrow, are the men and woman who govern. The booze has become their meaning, their real purpose has been misplaced a couple cocktails ago. Paralysis and drunken sorrow curdling to rage. Something out in the world hurtled away at a frightening speed leaving these ghosts drunk at the wheel.

She was alone and ignored as usual in these corridor of power. In the shadows was the bear. All the staff had rumors of it and encounters spoken in hushed tones. She had never seen it, and never heard it. But, at the end of the corridor hauling another cart overflowing with empties she glimpsed its shadow. The bear was the shadows and she worried what it meant to be one who has witnessed it. Modest felt that sweet strain of muscles as she pushed the cart into the elevator.

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know all cops carry guns with triggers

-Ralph Ellison

Grisly discovery inside Giant Alligator

An estimated ten thousand never returned to claim their shoes at the entrance to Darbar Sahib.

I see ten thousand chariots and they coming with no horses. The riders they cover their face

-Bob Marley

A man stretched out on torn sheets. His form a river through degraded fabric.

 Adobe town filled with flower sellers. Rumors of decapitation. Four rotting corpses trapped in a continually circling car. Windows covered with flies. Red grips the windshield in the morning.

 He was sick of seeing his brother walking through the flower stalls, peeking through the window in the door. Touching his hand as he walked to the car, he can’t see why his brother won’t stay dead. His sister’s voice on the intercom. The failing wires cutting into her words. Fragments pour out. He couldn’t leave the bed. Feedback squealing.

One of the common symptoms of depression is the inability to make day to day decisions.

“It’s like all the love is gone. So you see why comics have demons. You’re trying to fill that void until the next stage time you get where you’ll find your love.”

-Thea Vidale

This slideshow shows 20 cities running out of water.

 He felt pressure relieve as the song slowly was pulled into his web. Web of constant data. Data that represented music, music so rare it barely been heard beyond the people who recorded it. He felt he should own this music, let people know of its golden aura. But, then he would have to listen to it, he realized even though he was young the possibility of ever hearing every moment of music he captured would be impossible. It was data not music, it had no emotional resonance. Every song discovered, every artist read about, was a moment ripped away from him, a moment he couldn’t fill with another activity. Time was the enemy and space on his hard drive. Fat around the middle, seated, chewing junk food, bongs unloaded, rare soul funk track that hints at the future of hip hop found and squirrelled away. Some kind of sore forming on his elbow, black spot on his toe, elastic failing in his underwear. Job was becoming an illusion, a series of dream images of people telling to wake up, what did they keep wanting?

 Spittle rolled down his chin as he shouted give me evenings and weekends, get me out of this contract, I know no one of us have clean hands anymore, I have woken up to that years ago.

I ain’t got no one I can depend on

Ain’t got no one tengo a nadie

-Santana

Tim waked to the claw caressed across his cheek. The pram was moving through branches dripped in fog like ugly snakes. The clockwork hand moved away.  Papier-mâché owls hooted in the tree branches. The moon’s light bulb faded in the moist air.

They bumped a tree and it folded over.

Don’t worry little one we made the night for you. We can bring you anything in it. Penguins and icebergs are over the hill and a little blizzard. Then a nice desert oasis.

There were other figures walking with them. They ticked liked broken clocks as they walked.  One of the figure’s head fell off but it never slowed down. They continued to walk in the forest. Flurries of snow began to flutter by.

As a child he remembered peeking through curtains and from under covers. The blue of the TV light was lingering there in the hall. It moved around the house at its own accord. That blue light flickering through bushes in the yards as he walked to his friend’s house. He could see it there out of the corner of his eyes as they played board games. Cookies and milk were brought by the mother. He thought of those offerings as the flakes of the fake blizzard floated by the pram.

Oh the sea we forgot about the sea.

They walked down a stretch of white sand. One of the figure’s legs fell off. It made the motion to walk forward and then fell face forward into the beach sand.

We should introduce you to your new family.

This pram must be specially built to fit a twelve year old, thought Tim.

You are Tim’s new family. What became of the old one?

Tim is a name we won’t be using any more so you should forget that name.

This is Luna of the birds.

They had circled around the pram. Five of them. A possibly feminine figure moved forward with a pale bird mask covering her features.

Panda Bough

Panda mask outfit of leaves

Film.

Faces in cinema light moved in constant motion across the form that moved forward.

Cephalopod.

Drenched in rotten tentacles. Dripping water.

Behemoth

White face mask stained with black tears, red smears around the mouth.

I am Carrion.

Vulture mask covered in rotten feathers.

We will not name those we lost on the journey. They are abandoned like your name will be.

Carrion came forward with white paint covering his glove. He streaked a smear of the paint on each of Tim’s cheeks.

You are reborn with these marks. Rejoice in it, soon you will learn your new name.

The blue tiger will smash the world

Another land, without evil, without death, will be borne from the destruction of this one. This land wants it. It asks to die, asks to be born, this old and offended land. It is weary and blind from so much weeping behind closed eyelids. On the point of death it strides the days, garbage heap of time, and at night it inspires pity from the stars. Soon the First Father will hear the world’s supplications, land wanting to be another, and then the blue tiger who sleeps beneath the hammock will jump.

-Eduardo Galeano

Ariadne the threadbearer awoke alone in her house. She is American. America had become geology not reality. She thought of America and dreams as her oatmeal grew cold. America had beached itself on the chaos of the wild dreams it birthed.  It was proposed long ago that market forces produced happier lives then state centered societies. That American life let everyone freely traffic in dreams. Everyone’s dreams got shared and advertised and became museum pieces, got squirrelled away by rich collectors, disappeared in dust, watered down and sold in mass, or were met with a hail of bullets. The voodoo dances of Congo Square dreamed up jazz, electrocuted elephants helped dream endless loops of men and women frozen in immortal youth and love staring at the light, people dreaming on rafts crossing shark drunk seas warm as wine, churches dreamed up apocalypses of storms of light and souls plucked into the sky,  people crossing deserts singing and dreaming not fearing rape, pre-dug graves, and secret prison to slice tomatoes, take out garbage and stick together plastic junk for the dreamers, some dreamed of dignity and freedom from rat infested apartments, open air drug markets, feudal systems that said you could not drink water from this faucet, others dream of communities were they never saw a face different from their own, the sidewalks never cracked and the storefronts were always full, men with guns dreamed of false flags, black helicopters and fertilizer bombs, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, and  Jews dreamed of their own gods in this nation under god as others dreamed up religions and gods new to this world, some dreamed only of money, art, or that they could capture it all in a book, reach the stars, or of men with tights that could perform miracles, or of cities placed on floodplains, rifts in the tectonics, or in a desert, of computers reordering nature, some dreamed that we had lost Eden right here on these shores, dreamed that America would give back the land it stole and removed the strip malls from the mass graves, but all these dreams meant nothing to the dominant dream. The dominant dream was one that sold, one that moved units. All the nations of the earth began to dream this dream. This dream created a library of wonders where each of us could create their own dream. With so many dreams about, no bothered much with the dreams of others anymore. The earth moved, melted, warped and groaned under the weight of the dream. Nations and memories faded, technology followed its own logic, the weather got weird, the seas angry, so now Ariadne the threadbearer thought, now here we are, forever in these moments. Moments were you awake to house stuffed with clothing and furniture of someone else, where the box you get your cereal from is not even yours. Moments where the cereal curdles in your gut and it is impossible to breathe.

The only sin is the sin of being born

-Samuel Beckett