The Jack Shelton Reader

The

JACK SHELTONReader

ONE. Metafictional-Memoir Hypothetical Memoirs and Assorted Ramblings from A Series of Luxurious Struggles (Selected Excerpts) -pg. 1

TWO. London W4 A Congregation of London W4 Sentiments & Additional Words Concerning Things (Selected Excerpts) –pg.62

THREE.

PORTFOLIO

A Congregation of London W4 Sentiments & Additional Words Concerning Things: Dramatic Epilogue & Addenda -pg. 81 1. Dramatic Epilogue (Pts 1-3) – Page 82 -Three Part Metafictional Short Story 2. Eleanor Rigby (Pts 1-3) – Page 93 -Collection of Microstories/Poems 3. Addenda – Page 96 -Collection of Poetry & Lyrics 1

Jack D. Shelton’s

Hypothetical Memoirs & Assorted Ramblings From A Series of Luxurious Struggles: A Manifesto of Agnostic Mysticism and Psychedelic Illuminism

By Mr J.R. Shelton I

Neo-Anglo-American English 2

Language Edition

3

Introduction and Childhood They’re all dead- Virginia Tech shot full of holes. I can’t really understand. Wait, I can totally understand. Some depressed Korean kid just shot fifty fucking people. So I change the channel because that’s the kind of guy I am. All of these deaths so upsetting to so many, yet seemingly meaningless to a guy like me. I am a bipolar diabetic who has spent the past 3 years of his life sitting around at a small school for disabled kids because a stupid slutty whore convinced him that smoking pot in the high school construction site was a good idea half-way through freshman year while holding a friend’s shitty old gravity knife in his jacket along with another friend’s fake opium and a nice dank specimen of the budding of the Cannabis Sativa plant that had been dunked in either phenylcycladine or embalming fluid by the scary Negroes from a town over. I spent the next 3 years of my adolescence whacked out on anti-convulsant mood stabilisers and anxiolytic drugs obsessing over chemical substances, mental disability, the waning of my musical talent, regaining control of my life and breaking any rule I could break in order to prove my autonomy. I slowly broke down and collapsed and gained weight and began a descent into diabetic ketoacidosis. Here I am in beautiful, sunny Marin County California stuck in a hotel room reluctantly beginning a novel the wrong way straight sober with my girlfriend 10,000 miles away in Sankt Peterburg and all of my friends getting ready for college or off getting drunk/laid and posting pictures of it on myspace. I have never enjoyed feeling so bad in my entire life. Perhaps I’ll start with my childhood. I was born in London, England to Alice Holmes and Richard Shelton. I am Irish/English, Scottish/Celtic, Spanish, Filipino, Dutch and Native American as well as German and French, but those two cancel each other out. We’ll say I look like an Italian or an overweight Spanish-Coloured Englishman with long hair and high cheek-bones. I was speaking in complete sentences by 6 months of age and had a funny little Britmerican accent. 4

I started talking with an American accent when the other kids at play group made fun of me for talking funny and being American. I also, in pre-school, while playing with Thom Ovalton fell off a pole on the playground backwards and ended up with a coat-snap stuck in my head. This provided for a cute little Harry Potter scar, which is hardly ever noticed. … Sorry I got a bit distracted there. There is a lady walking around my hotel room making all sorts of noise because I made the mistake of letting her in to do her job. Whatever… I moved to Westingport, Connecticut when I was four years old right around the time of my birthday so I got to have two parties. I remember one time shortly after this, a kid from England came to visit and in the middle of the night tried to molest me, leading my parents to suspect that I was gay for probably almost 10 years. That really fucked me up. Because for the longest time I thought that getting molested by another boy automatically made you gay whether you wanted it to happen or not. So it really hurt when, in my years of forcing myself into the fantasy world of Pokemon and other childish things, I kept getting called faggot and all sorts of other names by big scary jocks that used to beat me in all the little league games that my geeky father forced me into with the hopes that I would make up for his childhood of being a nerd... I thought they were literally making fun of me for getting touched by a little boy when I was four years old. How did they know that I was a little faggot the whole time? Getting called gay still makes me shudder sometimes when I look back and remember. “Thanks. Bye bye,” Says the cleaning lady with the broken-English foreign accent. Thank fucking god. Anyway that’s what I remember of being called a faggot. The rest of my childhood is kind of like a wild hallucinogenic blur of colours and shapes and anxiety and acting out, as a fat little loose cannon with severe post-traumatic stress and depersonalisation trying hard to fit into a highly structured upper-class town of Jewish democrats and snobby rich soccer moms. I always wanted to be a good kid, but breaking the rules or catching blame for things always happened anyway. I was a pussy and a troublemaker all at once constantly wanting to die or be killed. “…then they’d love me” or some shit like that. I was totally detached from reality, constantly living in a fantasy where I liked to imagine that my other classmates were actually aliens or secret agents. I would be James Bond and all the cute little girls would be my Russian 5

spy agents that I’d have to hold hands with (which never happened) and then steal their crayons and bring them back to M. I was always the star of my hallucinogenic dreamscape with my hopes up waiting to get torn down to the level of faggot or bad apple by a teacher or a jock. Wow. I really like the way this is shaping up. Some of my fondest embarrassments have to do with the way I always got in trouble in school. I remember one time some girls in third grade wanted to play tag and were taunting me the whole day saying “We’re gonna get you!” I was so afraid I was sure they were gonna kill me. I had it in my mind that they were going to throw me off the top of the playground. They were chasing me and pushing me at recess and making these faces and I shoved them off of me crying and kicking and I remember when the last one fell down she started crying and then when the others saw her crying they went “Teacher, Teacher Johnny’s kicking us!” or something to that affect and I had to go through the humiliation of waiting in the principal’s office afraid that they were going to do all sorts of things to me. I remember last year going over to one of their houses and when she said to me in retrospect “Hey, remember the time we got you in trouble when we were playing tag…” The embarrassment just welled up inside me. “Ha-ha. That really wasn’t very funny to me. In fact it scarred me for life.” She laughed, probably thinking that I was joking. All of this typing on this unfamiliar laptop is making me very hungry. I’m starting to get the shakes and an urge for one of those disgusting unfiltered Pall Malls that the Late Kurt Vonnegut conned me into buying the other night. Almost time for room service. I remember being so insane and insensitive and caught up in the fantasy of video game violence that when the Columbine shootings happened, and we were all rounded up into a cute little circle sitting Indian style, the teacher announced the great tragedy and as soon as I heard “brought guns to school” I said “cool!!!” with the most x-tremely awesome cereal-box advertisement face ever to which the entire room stared and the teacher said with her grey hair and her great big innocent eyes, “no not cool.” I might even remember being so scared at that moment that I kept my head hung over my lap crying staring at the small urine leakage stains on my stupid Velcro pants. I wanted to die. Hell, I was so screwed up that given the right means and shitty middleAmerican Christian conservative environment that the Columbine kids had, I could’ve ended up like them. Other people just look puzzled when they wonder why someone would do something like that. I sit quietly 6

and try not to announce that it could’ve been me if my childhood hadn’t been fucked up in other ways. I wanted to become invisible. God, that sounds fucking cliché. I guess some people hear a stupid emo band say some shitty lyric about “I wanna be invisible in the darkness blah blah blah” and think they’re original because of their terrible hardships and overcoming how upset they were when their girlfriend “hooked up” with the other cute anorexic boy. Well now it’s my turn to exploit my own upsetting memories through production of a commodity. I just plan to whine about things without having to wear any god dammed black nail polish. A couple weeks later I was playing with an old office keycard with little numbers on it that went with my father’s business laptop and pretending that the keycard was a bomb detonator. I went around telling people I had a bomb detonator in my pocket and saying “I bet you don’t believe me…” and then I’d show it to them. Man that was a fucking stupid thing to be doing. About a day later I got called into the office and told that I could be locked up or arrested or any number of things. It was really quite the scare for a little fourth grade pussy. Then at cub scouts after school I was told my friend could NOT come over and that I was in serious trouble. This was one of those times in my life that I got that feeling in my lower gut; its that feeling that goes away with a cigarette or some nicotine gum. I was so scared. Luckily I didn’t end up in jail but I remember what it was like when my father got home. I had to turn off the tv. I had been watching Doug on Nickelodeon. I don’t really want to get into it, but I think the worst thing was that he didn’t hit me. If he had hit me I would be able to complain about it, but since he didn’t, any attempt at all to make people feel bad for me with my privileged childhood would make me sound like a little brat… and I was a little brat. My god, Room service onion rings and chicken tenders with fries… Mm, Mm Better! Anyway, that was the most scarring event of my childhood probably. No more than a year was I forbidden to see my friends outside of school or play any of the violent video games that I loved so much. That was one of the darkest periods of my life. Nine years old and I felt like I had already been tried for murder. So much of all of this is totally blocked out to me. It’s hard for me to look back and remember it very clearly. I remember that during that year I played the Double Bass in orchestra, cried a lot, cried over losing a mechanical pencil and was afraid of my teacher Ms. Runci, who I still hope gets hit by a bus. My 7

world was as dark and soiled yellow with manic guilt as a sweat-stained New-York toilet seat. I guess basically that’s most of what I remember. There are other terrible things that I remember happened to me that I don’t feel like talking about. I’ve probably already said too much. My head was so mixed up when I was younger with my dreams, hallucinations and actual “real” experiences all blending into one. There are things that I remember happening that pretty obviously never happened. I remember strange figures hovering over me whilst trapped in a yellow box watching myself from outside of it, floating through a warehouse where children sat cross-legged on the floor, making the accidental bomb threats, going on a date at age 9 with a girl I didn’t even like and telling someone that I did when I quite clearly didn’t, getting made fun of for playing Pokemon, (which looking in retrospect is a pretty fun, well-structured game) and being completely disrespected and outcast until I started playing the guitar in 6th grade and discovered Kurt Cobain. I even remember when I was afraid of drugs and listened to Limp Bizkit. Sixth grade was also the time when I diagnosed myself with bipolar disorder. I told my psychologist (who I was seeing because of my childhood suicidality) that I figured out what was wrong with me and he insisted I didn’t have bipolar disorder and that the reason I was depressed was because of my “Attention Deficit Disorder.” Nevertheless, Bipolar disorder would, for the next 3 to 4 years, be my excuse for having all of its signs and symptoms of it, even despite my mother’s effort to reassure people that I had made up the disorder and that I only really had ADD. In seventh grade all of our middle schools were redistricted so I ended up in Kollitown Middle School, while almost all of my other friends ended up in Beadferd Middle School. Kollitown was a very happy infantilising environment with more elitist family-types whilst Beadferd was a louder environment, which in many ways was constructed like a prison. The kids at Beadferd were more like Nickelodeon kids and the kids at Kollitown were more like Disney Channel kids to paint a better analogy. I was the nickelodeon kid stuck watching the Disney channel in a sense. I wanted to be in the big grey and blue prison with all of my friends not in the middle of the woods getting high-fived for stupid shit. By the time I made it to high school I lacked all of the social skills that I was on the verge of developing at the end of sixth grade. It was nice to meet all these people but I still had this 8

terrible awkwardness about me.

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High School: Departure from Adolescence Ninth grade is when it all happened. I have so much to tell about it but it might hurt. I had this huge nerve-racking feeling of the wonder of everything, the huge epic-ness of what it means to be a highschooler. In the first couple of weeks I met a girl I really liked from the moment I saw her. I had been walking around with my trouble-making English friend Phil Kollerd when we passed our cool Cuban friend Fidel’s house. We were invited to go next door where we hung out and played music. These girls whose names I won’t divulge or change for now pretended to be our groupies and I still can clearly remember with a pain of nervousness and strangeness in my chest what it felt like when she sat on my lap and I could feel her hair against my face. I don’t remember what I said to her, but it must have been something bad because I was a stupid little 13/14 year old kid at the time and I really honestly think that I believed she must have liked me to actually be sitting on my lap. Just weeks before I was still the 8th grader that girls wouldn’t even look at. I even remember one time I apologised to some girls for having dry skin on my face when we were forced to be partners in gym because I didn’t think that they should have to look at my dried out stupid face. Anyway, I left thinking that this girl, who I guess I’ll just call “E” for now, liked me and possibly would even want to be my “girlfriend.” Cute, right? I went back to Phil’s place and told him all about how cool I must have been to have girls talk to me and pay attention to me. He told me the girl’s name after I described her to him and he invited me to the beach the next day because she would probably be there. Most of the next day was fine for a while. E didn’t talk to me and avoided me most of the time. I had this big burst of energy and confidence. For the first time in a while I had a good feeling about where my life was headed. We stayed at the beach all the way till nightfall when the cops showed up. At this point in my life, Cops were xtreme and kick-ass! I tried to strike up a conversation with one of them about the biggest guns he’d ever shot and I told him about a certain family member on my mother’s side of the family that hid assault rifles in his walls. In the car dropping off Phil my mother got very upset when she heard that I had divulged such secrets to officers of the law and she 10

got into a terrible tirade about how people would find out about her relative and how it would make her look bad because she was in local politics. I cried and I cried. I was going to kill myself when I got home. I left a suicidal away message on AOL Instant Messenger and went up to my room. I started to scream silently and hit soft objects extremely hard and started rummaging through the stuff next to my bed looking for my knife. I couldn’t find it and I hated myself even more. I started scratching my throat but my fingernails were too short. That’s when this girl that I was a friend with called me and told me not to off myself. We talked for a little while and then my other friend called me. We’ll call my other friend Ben, hell maybe that’s his real name. Being one of my closest friends since I told on him for eating an apple on the school bus in kindergarten, Ben was always there for me, and to this day is always great to share deep conversation with. Ben invited me over and for some strange reason my mother sensed that I was upset when I asked her and let me go over. I felt better. I was at my friend’s place mildly embarrassed and a bit shaky but better. I worked up the courage to talk to my friends on AOL instant messenger and that’s when my great ordeal began. This girl, who I’ll be calling Suzanne, started getting all up in my face about “what I did to E.” “What did I do to E?” I asked. “Oh, you know!” she said. Eventually I was accused of molesting a girl who willingly sat on my lap at a party in   front of 5 or 6 other people, despite no one else noticing anything like this. If my   friend had been out of the room I would have run into his kitchen where there are   always sharp knives lying around and slit my throat right there. I couldn’t deal with   the anxiety of humanity’s inability to understand that I was crazy and didn’t want to   hurt anyone but myself; that I wanted to curl up into a ball and die. To this day I don’t   think I’ve ever really known whether or not I am really guilty or if there was anything   to be considered guilty of. All I know was that I owed everything to this girl because   11

she was beautiful and upset and she had decided it was my fault.

I started talking to her online and every time she told me more about herself I felt worse and thought how perfect she was for me even more. The building of a real friendship/relationship/coexistence with this girl became the most important thing in my life. I probably almost forgot that I had tried to kill myself. I guess I thought that if she knew me better then she wouldn’t hate me and she wouldn’t feel bad about whatever happened the night before. Her best friend, who I suppose I will call KK (as she to this day calls me Jo-Jo), became one of my best friends. For the next week I had these in depth conversations with her about life and the mind and all the things that I’d never had a real opportunity to talk about with any one in such a deep way, but had such important things to say about. I think I actually had fixed the idea in my mind that I was winning her over and that she really liked me, and its what one of her friends thought too. I told her one night “I love you,” then she stopped talking to me for a few days. I couldn’t get in touch with her. Then one of her other friends told me that the only reason she was talking to me in the first place was because she didn’t want me to kill myself. Even right now typing this I’m starting to get that same heavy feeling in my chest kind of like I’m going to pass out. I get this sometimes where it feels like my autonomic nervous system has given up on managing my breathing and I’m going to slowly suffocate right here right now and they’ll find my head down on this goddamned laptop and read this whole fucking unfinished story and hate me forever because of how I acted at 14 years old. They’ll spit on my corpse. Anyway for the rest of the year I loved her. I loved everything about her. I loved her attitude and the way she looked and talked. We eventually became closer but there was always a slight awkwardness to us being anywhere near each other. There was always a slight undertone of sorts when we talked; sometimes it was anger, sometimes we were flirtatious. Her friends would tell me she hated me and other times they’d tell me, like for example one time when they all got drunk, that she wanted to have my babies and that there would be all these little Es and Jo-Jos walking around. She and her friends really toyed around with my head. I’m not sure whether or not they understood how much it was hurting me and enjoyed it or if it never even crossed their minds. I remember all the times she would put herself out there with other men and they would take advantage of her in ways I don’t feel 12

comfortable divulging and I would try to convince her that I would never do that. I wanted to kill all of those guys for the things they did to her. But there was definitely a pattern, as many people pointed out to me, to her uncomfortable relationships with men. People would ask me why I liked her so much and I’d explain. They didn’t understand what it felt like. Having a strange feeling that no one else feels is to me like being able to see a colour that no one else sees until something happens to make them see it; I sometimes like to be the catalyst for this school of thought, shoving fresh new Crayolas into any box willing to try out a fresh new way of seeing things. I was depressed. Some people thought I was a molester. Some people thought I was crazy. Some people didn’t know why I was so crazy and thought that everyone thought terrible things about me for no reason. Some people didn’t even realise I existed. But I was this depressed bipolar kid who was constantly getting harassed or made fun of by all of the people for which I believed had greater human-value points. I ended up getting so depressed and unable to do school work that people decided to stop giving me my amphetamines that I was meant to be taking for my ADD and give me Stratterra (atomoxetine) instead. Atomoxetine is a Norepinephrine-Reuptake-Inhibitor that can cause psychosis, impotence, irregular ejaculation and all sorts of other nasties, but at least its “non-narcotic.” I remember being on this drug for 2 days but apparently according to my Mother and my psychiatrist it was nearly a month. The first day on atomoxetine time slowed down. I tried to tell everyone that I couldn’t see images in my head but no one could hear me. They all kept talking. “I feel weird,” I kept saying at lunch. I don’t know what the fuck was happening to me at that moment in time but at this point in my life I can say it did not feel psychedelic, good, bad, calming, healing, numbing or let alone help me to fucking concentrate. On the second day (I don’t know what happened for the rest of the first day) I went to biology in the morning and sat in the back. Everything was normal but I felt stupider. Then I felt cold. I didn’t feel it so much, but I became crazy. I started laughing and then we all went out into the hall I started crying while I was laughing. The world was a huge joke. I didn’t understand. Nothing was real. Like we were all a drawing on a piece of paper or characters in a shitty novel about some stupid bipolar kid that makes everyone around him feel uncomfortable. I went to the nurse’s office and tried to explain myself. I’m pretty sure that the lady there thought I was on LSD because she kept telling me this story about 13

when she had to administer LSD to people in a mental hospital in the 50’s during an experimental treatment of schizophrenics. She asked me if I was having any suicidal thoughts and I told her jokingly “not any more than usual,” which almost landed me in serious trouble because the dean came up to me the next day and asked in a very Mafia flickesque way whether or not he was going to need to have me sent to a mental hospital. What a slick asshole... Probably just “concerned” about the well being of his students, id est, how much fun it is to watch them carried out in restraints. I’ve only recently started being able to see images in my head when I think about it really hard, but that might have just been my medication that I just stopped taking that I was put on directly after the atomoxetine incident. That’s right, it was finally recognised that I am indeed bipolar and what I experienced whilst on the dangerous drug atomoxetine was what some doctors like Demitri Papalos, author of The Bipolar Child, call “rapid cycling.” I’m not sure whether or not I would at this time characterise it as rapid cycling but I guess it was at least nice that everyone finally said, “I’m sorry, you were right…” Anyway, everyone around me including E were all becoming part of a group of people that all hung out downtown, the group that smoked dangerous pieces of plant matter like the budding of the female Cannabis Sativa plant. I was specifically instructed to stay away from drugs because at the time my mother wanted me to be recognised by the school as someone that fit under the special ed laws, not just 504, which I had (but lost in 7th grade) for ADD, and sometimes especially aggressive school districts like Westingport’s will try to say “he’s not disabled he’s just using drugs!” and force people into drug testing. At first I was afraid of these substances. They were so cool, and people enjoyed them so much, and I wanted to be just like her so that she would love me. This is when I started drinking. Trying cannabis went on hold so that I could spend a month drinking all of my dad’s favourite liquor. I drank it all day. I would find the bottles in the back of the cabinet and drink the whole things and put them back hoping he’d never notice. I would drink scotch and whiskey and gin and tequila and fancy Russian vodkas with labels I couldn’t read yet and then roll around on the floor crying sometimes in front of my friends. I would come loose and confess all my sins to everyone around me even though they didn’t really care about what I had to say. I would call E and apologise and tell her I was 14

sorry for loving her and for breathing and all of the other terrible things that I do. Eventually all of the alcohol was carried into the wine cellar for fear that construction workers or the cleaning lady had been drinking it. I would have to get booze for myself. …and I tried. But it didn’t quite work. I was going over to my friend’s place and we had no alcohol for getting trashed. What were we going to do? That’s when we decided. Bill and I were going to start smoking pot. We found someone that I had known for a very long time whom I will in this instance refer to as X and got him to sell us a nice healthy gram of ganja. We went back to Bill’s place and spent an hour trying to figure out how we were going to do it. Bill lived in a boarding house all alone because his father who lived a town over in Norewalk We eventually worked out a special method. We put the weed in the end of a poorly made tin-foil bowl and then smoked it while keeping ice-cubes in our mouths. I wasn’t sure that it was going to work properly so I drank a bottle of cough syrup that Bill’s father had left for when he got sick and I just kind of hoped that “high” was “high” and that the cough syrup would make me become “high” so that I could tell everyone else about it. Anyway, I got high. I got really high. I got incredibly high and played with a strange flashing light toy whilst listening to the Pink Floyd. This was one of the greatest nights of my life. I thought it was just the weed, but what I had really fallen in love with was the dextromethorphan hydrobromide in the cough syrup. I’ll talk about that later because up to this point in the story, I don’t even know what that is.

15

So Much for the College Plans Essay... Jack Shelton's Future: Approaching the end of his senior year, Jack Shelton stares without intent into the face of his computer monitor. He is wondering what it is that he is meant to say. He has been assigned to write about his future, something that he has generally failed to predict in depth, and to explore some options which are unavailable to him. The notion crosses his mind that he is experiencing a duller version of what Adolph Hitler felt when he sat in the basement of the Reichstag bunker clutching his American girlfriend with the Red Army marching ever closer above them as he polished up his Walther, or so it is written. Jack never got around to applying for colleges, disheartened by this growing feeling of hopelessness following his diagnosis of type one diabetes mellitus in a hospital in Alaska after being pulled off a cruise ship vomiting all blown up like a balloon filled with ketones and glucose.

His only option for continuing to live in a way close to personal content and social acceptance was to rely on having the opportunity to enter the community college appropriate for his new residency in Tiburon, California. Unfortunately, after spending a week locked up in a hotel room a few miles from his new home he found out that not only would his new home be under construction during the time when he would need to be living there, but the only way that he would realistically be able to go to this college would be to sign up for courses that start at a later date, such as French New Wave Films.

Currently he is not sure what exactly to do with himself. He decided to write a book whilst sitting in his hotel room. It would cover his early life and declare him a manifestation of God. He writes, or at least tries to, out of desperation. He sees no other way of having a future. His interests include psychiatry/psychopharmacology and music, two things that he knows a lot about but does not have the skills to 16

pursue professionally. Knowing that being a writer is something that does not normally end well for many, and lacking the ability to comfortably write a proper novel he pushes himself through it, taking the initiative. Within a few weeks he is already discouraged once more, finding writing more and more difficult with the pressures of graduation and his waning social skills ever-worsening.

Jack would like to attend a real college, a real prestigious college, and he knows that if he could have applied to those colleges he would have at least gotten into some alright second tier colleges or some nice liberal arts colleges. But Jack lacked the education he needed to apply to these colleges. He spent a year in ketoacidosis and barely remembers any of what happened. Chemistry class is still a blur and all he remembers of it was staring into his book obsessing over what was going wrong with his body and mind.

He doesn't know what to do next so he sits back and watches his life go by with out him. He will move when he is told. He will be done with school when he is told. He has no definite plans for his future. Perhaps he has "senioritis" or perhaps he just has "lifeitis" as he halfjokingly explains to several of the staff at his school. Either way there is not much that he sees can be done to change his own life for the better. He will have to wait it out.

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Desperation & Inspiration: A Very Mildly Psychedelic July Or: How I learnt to Lose 20 lb. eating only Magic Mushroom Chocolates and TV Dinners

Graduation: ???, Oh Poor Me, Blog?, AIDS, Humanity??? 2:00am Friday, Jun 22 2007 We're all free. What the fuck am I meant to say. what the hell am I meant to feel. I'm hiding in my room in the middle of the night writing a goddamned note on facebook that no one will read... is there anybody out there? Just nod if you can hear me? Nothing is really making me feel better about being alive. I just broke up with my girlfriend a few days ago. I just graduated from a school I didn't actually go to that I was meant to go to. what the fuck am I doing breathing right now? Its absolutely dreadful to know that one is truly alone... that if I died tonight it would just be an excuse to watch 3 or 4 people cry and say something sad and then throw a measly kegger in my name maybe but I'm probably not that awe-inspiring or memorable. Who the fuck are all of you? Why am I writing to you? the truth is I'm writing to me for everyone else to see just so that I can document what I'm saying at this very moment and place in space and time so that I never forget what it felt like on this dark cold night of anticlimax and disappointment... a night that faded away like a baby suffocating on its own fucking bib... This night was like the opposite of an orgasm. It was too epic for its own good and it choked on a slush of hope and possibilities. Am I fucking blogging now? Is that what I'm doing. No one will read this.... will you? Maybe? clearly you did read this now that you're all the way down here. Are you lonely? Do you have too much time? Are you alone as I am right now? Or is it just me? Am I the only one here that feels like this? Why the fuck did all his bullshit happen to me? Why was I cast out of my natural habitat and forced into a school for disabled 18

children for 3 years of my life? Why did my fucking pancreas die??? Why did I have a beautiful girl and then have her taken away from me by the obvious inevitable eventual fate I saw coming years ago? How can I sit here and be so cold? am I that far gone now? I just don't fucking care what happens? Have I cracked. I feel fine. Who are my friends? does it matter that I have them when I'll never see them again? Have they really been living another life altogether for 3 years and I've been off doing diddly-fuck??? Does anyone understand? Do I want sympathy? Do I want envy? Do I want pity? Perhaps I just need to get high and get laid or something... This is totally insane... I am totally insane. I am a free man. I'm single now. I'm 18. I can't drive a bloody fucking car legally. Why not? Why the fuck am I doing this shit? I really needed to stay out to-night and breath in those last breaths of adolescent air... I needed to get myself so numb and warm. I needed to get my head fuzzy and spinning and swirling and create the illusion for myself that I am at the holy centre. Is it so selfish to complain??? yes. Yes, I think so. I'm tired of pretending I'm totally fine with me and you whoever you just so happen to be and everyone around us and the whole world and the chemicals in my head and the grass and the sky and the water and plastic and Wal-Mart and the whole fucking revolving globe filled with this desperation and loneliness that I'm perceiving right now. Its gotta be far worse out there. No one wants to do anything. I don't want to do anything... Where would I start? Why would I? The whole world is spiralling out of fucking control and none of us care. We're all too goddamned busy with our own little lives collecting food to bring back to the queen ant so that our little anthill can continue to flourish until the forces of the universe come along like a little goddamned boy with a magnifying glass on a inconveniently sunny day. We're all fucked. that's right. Maybe its 2012.... Who knows? A lot of people seem to know but who's right? Is the apocalypse already here? Is it a slow moving thing? Is it just something meant to keep humanity in check in order to save nature? Is it something for which there was a mathematical predisposition to occur in the grand playing out of time as it unweaves throughout the universe, with humanity meant to die off a little bit as part of evolution? ...AIDS perhaps just a cruel tool of nature to limit our population as it dangerously continues to grow, with more 19

people sucking more and more life out of the earth? Has humanity reached its carrying capacity? Where the fuck am I going with this. my book has somehow ended up as a deconstructed lecture transcript on facebook.com with a series of anecdotal ramblings about trivial bullshit for no one to care about... I'm terribly dreadfully sorry... Thank you very much for your time and for taking a bit of my message with you in your heads before I die. in this way perhaps I will live on when die.

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The head is still working upstairs although I sometimes forget 2:38am Wednesday, Jun 27 Doctor Jack Shelton is alive and well. He is sitting quite invitingly in a chair of his own choice. A sofa rather. What does it mean to be alive at this point in time and on this planet? Who will answer me? Will no one answer? What does it mean to have a voice? To be a messenger? A person marked with a code like a couple of numbers in a computer application that tells a story in digits just how the universe will play itself out. How does one pass on a message? How can one be expected to let others know what has gone on in his mind? How are you meant to share a message? How can you become this alive and be meant to tell? How does one fit all thoughts into a sentence? It’s an amazing thought to think that one can spend their whole live devoted to one thing. … perhaps devoted to writing things down in words for people to read some day… For people to find… for people to pick up their work and read their name and say “What was it like to be a human being at that point in history and in that place in the world?” Who do I want to be? Who do I want to be seen as? What the fuck does everyone want in this life? They want sex. They want money. They want all kinds of things. I couldn’t sum it all up…They want reassurance. They want to know they’re safe until to-morrow. But don’t they want to leave anything for anyone else? Do they want to connect? Do they want to participate in the great game of life? Do they want to leave a hidden note that someday someone will find? Do they want a complete stranger a thousand years from now to turn over a rock in their front yard and think who wrote this? Who were they? I seem to be asking a lot of questions… Anyway thank you for reading another instalment of the truth about what it means to be a human being on the planet earth in the year 2007. hopefully you're all thinkers too.

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Magic Buttons: Fireworks Waste Faces Terrible Species Chocolate 1:22am Wednesday, Jul 4 Once again I find the delicious chemicals swirling in my head calling me back to these magical buttons. Letters and words and sentences and all that. To-night there were glorious fireworks lighting up the beach. I don't really fucking care... I was looking for my friends the whole time. I sat on a bench and smoked a big flavoured cigar and walked around. I thought about what must be going on in the heads of all the people around me. People gaze up in wonder at these giant exploding things that shoot out colourful debris that falls into the ocean to scare little fish and other aquatic creatures that thousands of years ago would never have been so blatantly harassed. I stared at all the cheery faces and only saw in them the wonder and amusement I seem to have lost from maturation. but I see it on older people... People that have been alive three or four times longer than me... and it makes me wonder. Is it only going to get worse? Will things get more and more bland? Am I becoming more and more desensitised and forgetting more and more what is around me in my every day life? I watched it happen to someone else before. Someone who went a bit too far and learned all the secrets too soon. Now he lives on a farm far away. But I walked around and I saw all those dreadfully content faces. I even ran into some stupid bitch that asked me if I remembered her and then explained that a few weeks before I had been talking with an English accent (whilst having a very good time) and then she laughed and kept saying it was fake. I know. I should know. I was the one faking it. Filthy fucking pig. I spent hours of manipulating my own head and watching internet downloads of BBC shows to get that accent up to snuff... which it is on occasion... Someday I'll get it good enough that I'll never have to speak in a dreadful, boring American accent again. What was the joy? Where was the love and the warmth and the pleasure 22

coming from whilst sitting on a beach with angry brooding yanks yelling at each other and scrambling all over the place to watch a bunch of colourful explosives going off in the air... If one thinks about it... that money could have gone somewhere... It could have been used to save someone's life even. Every dollar is so precious. I take it for granted. You take it for granted. We all do. Otherwise we'd be doing something. Saving the world. I thought about professions. What it means to have a job. How do you make it work? How can you? what does it really mean to be an average person? Can you be a fine upstanding citizen without being incredibly lonely and without caving in to groupthink? What does it mean to be a pothead? Why is it that the budding of the cannabis sativa plant seems to help people so much yet people are so intent on taking it from them? Why do people want others to feel so much pain when they've done nothing wrong? How does the world breed such hateful ignorant people. I loathe these people yet they are the bastion of the whole network of humanity. How can someone live in a small place and go to Wal-Mart and have their boring life be the same every month only they become a bit older every time. All these people. They live like this. They live like they're meant to. Not everyone can be Somebody. They have to go out and take it. But they don't feel like it. But so many people do. So many people want to be a star. So many people are alone. Humanity is too large. Too crowded. There are too many members of the species. Ask yourself what you really want in life. Think about what you are living for. Are you perhaps just taking the ride? I suppose we're all just taking one big glorious ride. Its so easy to forget. Its so easy to just completely ignore how different every one of us is on the inside and outside and how strange it is that we all interact and do things and give each other small green rectangles and small pieces of metal shaped in circles for things like long rectangular prisms of cocoa/milk/sugar/chemicals/etc. wrapped in colourful plastic. I'm glad I wrote these things. Otherwise I'd forget.

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THE LETTER: Final Words to E I can only assume that the notion has crossed your mind at some point that I might end up writing you eventually. I’m guessing you’d also expect it to involve some sort of drug and me whining about something. This will be hardly as interesting. It is very, very late at night and I feel incredibly drowsy. For the past hour I have been contemplating writing this, or rather thinking about the past, trying to imagine what your reaction would be to whatever it is I’m about to say. Well, initially I had planned on trying to communicate with you in some way at the beginning of the summer. I saw you at someone’s house. I remember you were taking to your friends about something having happened to your brother that night. It was awkward. Everyone I talked to said it was awkward, that you still carry rather negative feelings towards me. A few days later I couldn’t see my friends because you were with them and they didn’t want our simultaneous presence to disturb the atmosphere of the night. Since then I had figured it would be a good time to attempt to reach some type of common ground. I remember the last thing we fought over. …Scratch that I actually just logged into myspace.com just now as a reference for continuing this letter and reread the remains of the conversation, or at least your half of it. (This is unusual for me; I’m used to getting a kick out of how well I’ve come back at someone.) Anyway, I probably didn’t even read it that thoroughly back then (2005), but it feels like it makes a lot more sense now. A lot of what you said actually makes sense now. Hell, maybe it’s truer now than it was then. I was stubborn. I was afraid of who I am. I’ve come a long way since then. I know I‘m just a very guilty man, ashamed of himself for things that have built up like bricks in a wall (yes, another cliché… to conjure an old theme from our last conversation) …It took a long while for me to start telling people about who I am, but I am still a liar to most people. I decided to write a book about it. I started. It’s not as good as it should be, and its not coming along as fast as it should, but I like it, and so do most of the few people that have seen it in some of its much earlier stages. Anyway, in this book, you’re obviously a large part of the early autobiographical bit regarding my high school experience. I don’t use your name though. All the names are changed. Actually, for a few months I’ve wondered how and when I would ask you how you felt about that. Aside from that, I just figured I should tell you that this isn’t about getting 24

in any jabs or conjuring up old feelings, bad or good, or asking for anything or in anyway trying to reinsert myself into your life, but I figured a final hello/goodbye/etc. of some sort was due by now, as this is far past the closing of the high school experience, in my opinion. I understand if you still think I’m a tool. I probably am, and no one has so accurately nailed me in the past as you. You are the only person in my life that I really truly have ever been afraid of in the context of conversation. I will most likely never forget you. It has never worked well before. -jack shelton

There was no response to this letter. After one year I received a response. I will not go into details, but it would seem that some people have selective memories.

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SLEEP: I Can’t Sleep. \\ ?? Why should you care? You’re only reading my goddamned book. It’s 3:11 a.m. on a Friday. I am totally sober, and have been for a number of days, if I remember correctly. I am totally psyched to go to England to chill wiv one o’ me best mates, Phil Kollerd. Yes, that’s the same Phil from the first day I met E. Hey, remember that super fucking swell introduction to this book that I wrote? I JUST WROTE IT, JUST NOW. On with the show. In other words, good night? Yes, with a question-mark..

????????? Hey does anyone remember that stupid mother fucker that used to come on at 3 in the morning dressed in the question mark suit? “FREE MONEY!!!” I think I should give him a call. He’s probably lonely. Free money?! Douchebag.

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Also have you noticed, I’m still missing everything that happened between smoking weed in freshman year and senior year… that I haven’t explained anything about Era or even the time when E loved me? How did you read this far? You are a good sport. Maybe I will tell you the rest of it. But How will I do that sober? I won’t that’s right. If I’m sober I can only produce bullshit like the past few pages… Although I’m sure some of you find that bullshit rather enjoyable. MM… Bullshit. Have I cracked? Have I done it yet? Am I gone? I hope you were young when you read this nonsense… Wasn’t it easier to think when you were young? Didn’t it feel nice to know it wasn’t already over. You weren’t FUCKED because of the shitty decisions you made. Man, I need some bloody fucking drugs. No I need to shut the fuck up. I need to pop some melatonin and valerian root. I just tried to lie down but that goddamned picture of Era is on the ceiling. For the past, however many pages I’ve been trying to avoid talking about her. That was messy. I only had the heart to cut and paste my farewell email. I’ve probably spent well over 1000 bucks on that relationship. Fuck People. I love you. Good night, beautiful. That’s how it should be. BLACK WHITE Morning! Mourning! Oh so strange. Hey look its getting Bigger everytime it goes To a new line. Cool, eh mates? No, I didn’t take any benzodiazepines. Maybe that is why I’m doing this. I’d like to stop. At least then I might be able to get some fucking sleep… …Rather silly in retrospect, wasn’t it???

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TODAY, A THURSDAY IN LATE AUGUST Or: How I learnt to Stop Sitting at Home and Love to go to A Gay Party with Unexpected Visitors

Today I got invited to a party for homosexuals by one of my good friends, who I will be calling Zach, for the remainder of this epic masterpiece. I was incredibly depressed. Summer is over and for the past week I’ve been staying up til 6:00 a.m. and waking up at 3:00 p.m. every day. It is handy though because I’ve been able to talk to my old friend Liz Ulrick who’s staying in Denmark right now studying at the International People’s College, an interesting old institution that I may have to take up further examination regarding. When it’s 2 in the morn here, its 9 over there. So I get to talk to her when she’s just waking up and I’m just waiting to get to sleep. What a lonesome day. I woke up at 3 as usual when Zach called me and I got ready to go to this homosexual party. I rolled an exceptional jazz cigarette and stuck in the end of a slightly hollowed black & mild. I also consumed other candies but the benzodiazepines killed all my highs and made me feel really, really down to earth as I watched all of my homosexual friends jumping about kissing and fondling each other. Unfortunately some intolerant douchebag familypeople decided to call the cops because of how much fun they were having with their public displays of affection and their bonfire. I was freaking out when the cops showed up and the dumb bastard kept calling me “boss” like I was some type of leader or chief or Mafioso. What a dumb thing to call someone. Douche. He bent down to tie his shoe after calling me boss with his foot up on the bench and I had just walked over to that end of the bench and put a baggy with a single pill of the strongest of all therapeutic nootropic agents in the crevice of the seat and the thing that holds it up and he pretended to tie his shoe over there like he was looking for a bag of cannabis budding and his flashlight went right over it. I was bugging out. Luckily we got out of there unscathed. We sat around the Starbucks in Wilton, a place that I frequently visit for those late nights smoking cigarettes and talking to rich child soon-to-be-nobodies that think that they are better than everyone else. It’s those golden moments 28

with the people that aren’t like that, the somebodies and the characters that are at least a somebody to someone that make this life worth living, and Zach knows a lot of those people. When I talk to people, I see more than just people, I see people of their own pasts and their own futures, endless possibilities of who they can become and who they once were. The beauty in people is that so many are like puzzles, you have to piece all these bits together about them. There are exceptionally interesting pieces that people often hide, but It’s nice when you can put it all together. It’s like a game, but not just any game. Not just a game we play when we’re young, but a never-ending game that can break you and send you to your own death if you play it wrong. It is the grandest game of all and I am a player. A good night, melancholic and dreary at times, a bit of a deathly scare, but I made it. Even if I had to watch my straight friend make out with a gay man, and nearly got hauled to prison and almost threw up from being too fucked up and what not, Thursday was a fine day.

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High School: Departure From Adolescence

(CONTINUED) I think that it’s about time I get back to the main story again. You know the one where I’m a molester and a pothead. So anyway, I smoked a lot of pot for two months during ninth grade after my first time with Bill. I finally had friends. I remember this one time I was dancing around a giant column outside Ship’s Corner Chinese restaurant singing “Singing in the Rain” with my friend Hardcore Mike. Hardcore Mike was kicked out of his home the day he turned 18 by his mother because he was disabled and had lost his low paying job at the market when it shut down. He ended up living in a homeless shelter downtown, which is why he always hung out with the downtown crowd. Despite living at a homeless shelter, the last I heard, he managed to graduate high school and get a job, eventually moving out. He is a real hero and proof that you can still do things if you put your mind to it. Anyway, for a few months I had kept seeing this guy who I eventually started to call the mystery reporter. He would drive around in a black sedan and take pictures of my friends and me. The flash on his camera was incredibly bright, and I still don’t know to this day whether or not anyone else saw him or if he was even real. I was one of those kids who felt lied to and cheated by the government he was meant to be able to put faith and trust into. I had been deathly afraid of any type of drug until I was peer pressured into doing them, but it was wonderful and life-saving. It was so wonderful of a truth that I wanted it to be the bastion of my new alternative lifestyle. There were lots of kids like me, with all the attitude and hatred directed towards the lying bastards at D.A.R.E. that had lied to us and so heavily insulted our collective intellect as a generation. I had been offended whenever people suggested I might use drugs because I had long hair, because of the fear. So my entire life soon revolved around this secret, that there is a wholly different, wonderful way of living your life that makes everything fun and solves all your problems. It was actually pretty unproductive and dumb the way I lived it, so it eventually had to come to an end.

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I remember one time I was hanging out with my friend Jimmy Durf, a red-headed badgerly-looking fellow who’s eyelid’s never got past the 3-9 o’clock line and went over to his place to do a follow up on our last after-school smoke sesh and we ended up smoking a 3 foot bong in a playhouse belonging to the neighbour's little sister. We ran inside when his mother got back with the food. I don’t even remember if I ate any of it. All I know is that I could tell the future. I understood, quite lucidly, at one point that Jimmy’s dogs were running through the hallway and were going to turn into evil ninjas and they were going to jump over the railing in front of the hallway door and do a bunch of flips and start stabbing me with their swords. I turned my head to tell Jimmy and he just laughed and kept on talking to his friends saying “man he’s fuckin’ tripping out.” So every weekend I would hang out in the downtown area and then I would go back to Bill’s house and stay there crunched in his small room smoking pot out the window and playing videogames. One day I went over with this girl, Jen and I remember making some comment about “spreetarts” whilst I was clearly eating a Spree or a Sweet tart. Oh, it was funny, you had to be there. …and so Jen came back to my place and we lay on my bed, playing with my black light and at one point I thought that the bees in the song we were listening to were actually inside my speakers. That night I smoked cannabis laced with either embalming fluid or PCP and I passed out only to shoot out of bed believing that I was a train coming out of a tunnel with tremendous brightness at the end. Then I went back to sleep. Two days later was the last day of my life, as I had always known it. All the norms and patterns of my life as a highschooler on an ordinary American teenager’s path of life were shattered into a million fucking pieces. Noella, Jimmy and I were late getting back to class after lunch and rather than be marked tardy decided to walk off and talk. For about half an hour they tried to convince me to go smoke some weed with them in the bathroom in the construction site where no one was around, but I kept saying no. Eventually I went with it and decided to do it. We went back to the cafeteria and got a can of Snapple that we poured out and turned into a piece. We went into the bathroom totally unseen. Jim started pissing right as Noella took the first hit and as she exhaled I jumped back, not wanting to get any smoke on myself. THIS WAS A BAD FUCKING IDEA I thought, JUST AS the bathroom door 31

swung open and a very large, angry black man in a yellow shirt with a flashlight and walkie-talkie stormed in shouting “What the fuck are you kids doing!?” or something to that effect. WE WERE FUCKED. Jim and I ran ducking under his arms as I heard Noella flushing everything in the piece down the toilette. We ran out of the construction site and through the gym and down the stairs and through the halls and then we stopped. I wanted to throw everything out, flush it, ditch it, fucking whatever. My heart was racing. Jim said “let’s go upstairs, I have a change of clothes.” (SO FUCKING WHAT!?) If I had been thinking straight I would’ve said “Fuck that I’m ditching everything!” instead I said, “okay.” And we ran up the stairs and just before we crossed into the cafeteria, “JACK SHELTON, JIMMY DURF GET AGAINST THAT WALL!” was shouted by a large black man in a yellow shirt, Noella in arms. I was crying in the office. I tried to hide it. I was talking to some lady who was trying to get some work done telling her “It can’t be a crime to be happy. I just wanted friends. I just wanted to be happy.” And then that slick fucker came in- the Dean who threatened to haul my arse off to a mental hospital before. He told me if I didn’t put everything on the table they would have to search me. Using only instinct, I one by one pulled out my water-proof, hermetically sealed medicine holder containing a few grams of grass including that PCP shit, as well as my friend’s fake opium that I had been holding during his routine room search, as well as an old hunting knife that I had modified to be a gravity knife that was given to me by my best friend because I had lost my old one (the one I couldn’t find the night I tried to kill myself.) It was the knife that really shocked him. He was very uncomfortable. I had been trying to keep my cool. I was emotionally blank despite the shakiness and the welling tears. When the cops arrived they were surprised that it was my first time being arrested because of how calm I was at that point. Every moment I thought I was gonna piss myself. As they escorted us out I jumped a little and waved a peace sign through the air with the smugness of knowing that nothing in the world is actually happening to me, because that would simply be too absurd. I was told not to do it again, and we had a very quiet anxious ride to the station.

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That was a scary place. I tried to play it cool. I answered my cell phone when it rang even though I wasn’t meant to. I told my friends “I’ll see you soon” to which some cop made a very porky remark about to the effect of “more like see you never! he he he…” What a fucking piece of scummy, trashy swine. My parents eventually came and picked me up and my father went home separately and probably ransacked my room. My mother drove me to an abandoned parking lot. They took away my cell phone and most of my material possessions that in any way suggested I had ever broken a law in my life. There were lots of nervous breakdowns. There was some emotional scarring- an epic butting of heads between the right and dumb and the wrong and grown. One time I almost threw a glass into my father’s face, fantasising about how nice it would be to have all those shards ripping through his eyes, nose broken and all. Everything in my life had just fallen apart. How was I meant to come to grips with such a thing? I couldn’t see or talk to anyone. I lost everything. I was the bad guy. Eventually I convinced my parents to let me leave a message up telling my friends that I was okay. I remember one kid said something along the lines of “Shut up. Quit complaining. Everyone gets arrested… You’re no Nelson Mandela.” That stuck with me for a while. Every day I wanted to hang myself or cut myself or shoot myself or something like that. The only thing I was allowed to do anymore was go to my guitar lessons, which were rather sombre occasions generally. I hope I didn’t make my teacher too depressed all those times. But anyway, guess who came to visit me there after a few sneaky sessions calling people when my parents weren’t around? None other than E and Kay-Kay. They walked all the way to the place where I took lessons just to see me. It turns out through our ups and downs, E had been missing me. I missed her as well. She was the love of my life really. I talked to her a few times on the phone and I remember how much closer we were in those later conversations. One night it was really late. I told her I loved her more than anything else in the world. She told me she loved me as well. My head was spinning with content and disbelief. The words shot back and forth. “I love you.” So warm and 33

fuzzy, those words are. They trigger, for me, an endorphin rush, perhaps serotonin and dopamine as well. They are like a room-temperature chocolate morphine shake swimming directly into my brain. The words continued for quite possibly hours as we lay their listening to each other’s breathing through the phone. She finally knew that no one would ever love her as much as I did. Even though most of the time I try to block out any memory of her, that was probably the best night of my life. The next day I was incredibly excited. I called Kay-Kay and we talked, and eventually we ended up on a conference call, the three of us. At some point I had to put the phone down but when I came back I didn’t tell them. I just listened. E told her that she couldn’t date me, because I didn’t even go to her school. She said she was so desperate for sex at the time that she would even fuck the kid down the street. Next she said that she would hate to see me with my shirt off. I told her all that I had to say. Then I hung up.

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The New School When I went to the new school, I did not accept the change as a reality. I went in with the smugness of knowing that there was a sick joke being played upon me by the universe. There was no chance it could have been real. The director was a fine old fellow, a Buddhist named Bob that had once worked at an older school where he saved children from a burning building. He set up his new school to give disabled people a chance. He created a haven for people that didn’t fit into the mainstream puzzle. Unfortunately it was also the hospice of my mind as a normal rebellious bipolar teenager. My life has always followed a pattern-like build up of all these bricks of events that help in the trapping of my own personal feelings and individuality behind a wall. I shun myself for the terrible things I have done from years of people convincing me that I am ill, sick or just plain evil. I have been led to believe that my own personal search for survival is some type of thing to be embarrassed about, to dismiss as the hedonism of an adolescent fool. One of the first of these occasions was when the girl with the extreme “seeking drug habits” convinced me to buy some speed from her, which I needed to get my work done better. I was accused of selling her cannabis because when she had offered to sell me some of hers, I said “no thanks. I have plenty of connections anyway if I ever need some,” which evidently was overheard by a few. ---This section of this chapter has been interrupted by several days of silence. I have an announcement. I am having aural hallucinations… but only in my left ear when I wear a CPAP machine for sleep apnea. Sleep apnea- a bit of a mystery. I think I have it from years of abusing dextromethorphan, the respiratory suppressant and vitamin B12 in dosages above 33,333% daily value (2000 mcg). I think the hallucinations may be that in my left ear at night my brain only matches up the frequencies of cricket chirping and fills in the blanks with audio. The fist time this happened it scared me because when I took off the mask there was no more sound. But now, even knowing there is no cricket sound, I still hear them.

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Then that diatribe was interrupted for an hour or two by insomniacal online conversing over social networks and instant messenger. I talked to E actually. It went like this: 2:41:50 AM Me: hi 2:42:38 AM Me: you got that letter I sent you a while back, right? 2:46:14 AM Her: right] 2:47:13 AM Me: do you still have something against me? 2:48:45 AM Her: I've really just moved past all of that into just plain not wanting anything to do with you. 2:49:59 AM Her: but, it is impolite to leave a letter unanswered--and I do apologize, I have meant to write you one-- so I will answer your letter. 2:50:36 AM Me: oh alright 2:51:30 AM Her: it's been a hectic past couple of months, and I just haven't gotten around to it yet 2:52:14 AM Me: no problem, same here. I hardly got anything done that I should have in the past year or three 2:54:34 AM Her: yeah, time has been flying 2:57:17 AM Me: to tell you the truth, I really miss it, all the drama. the ninth grade experience. knowing that I was a participant in the lives of others as well as my own. you're one of the people I really pushed away, I guess you could say. I was really a bastard. I'm sorry for that, and for if I've interrupted anything. It's a lonely late night you know. 3:02:54 AM Her: it's fine. I am gonna leave now, though... 3:03:43 AM Me: alright. my friends are all off now anyway. bye. Changed status to Online (3:03:52 AM)

Yep. That was that. Rather slow, as well, eh? So much for talking to old friends… Whatever. Fuck her. A truly cold woman. And it’s the next night already. I KEEP FORGETTING TO TAKE MY BUPROPRION but I took the past two days worth to-night and it looks like I am doing rather hedonic and mellow. I feel rather anti-depressed. I feel like seizing the moment. Carpe Diem, eh? --So, back to the story… I got off with a warning this time. My first year at the school was interesting. I finally became interested in writing. The English/History teacher turned me on to some Bukowski short stories and others. I wrote a story about an undercover cop, a classic pulp fiction novel filled with action. Then there was the summer…

36

Too Many Anti­Depressants Tired of breathing in the same goddamned stale Connecticut air every day. I need a drink. I need a smoke. I need someone. I'm so damned tired of everyone and everything. I don't want to write essays about old American short stories. I want to be someone. I want to be a Somebody. I want a lover. I want my favourite beers on draught. I want a fucking car. I want my goddamned pancreas to work again. I want it all to be okay. I want all this shit to end. I want my life to start again. I want to be reborn. I want to escape the anticlimactic luxury of my boring life with rich people who don't know anything about me. I want to be able to stop complaining. I want to be honest. I just want some attention. Perhaps my complaints can be a catalyst for change... something that can end all of this for at least a small amount of time. Tell me to shut up. I need to hear it. 203VVV7235 Worst of all is I'm sounding like a goddamned Emo. I took too many antidepressants this morning and ended up a bit whacky. Everyone's so far away or busy. I haven't been writing my book for a few days. I haven't been working on my college work in a few days. I haven't been doing anything. I've been waiting around to see my mates and they're all busy or far away. I don't trust anyone. I trust the mysterious forces of the internet though. Al of you. Whoever the fuck you all are. I feel so melodramatic and ridiculous writing this crap. It reminds me of when I was a child. I'm not normally like this... am I? No? I don't know. I just haven't done any psilocybe mushrooms in a few months thats all. For the first time since the first time I did psilocybe mushrooms, suicide looks a little less ridiculous and childish. Not quite beautiful... that'd be cheesy. But it seems like in all of my intense mind adventures I've forgotten how to question why I bother to breathe another day. Why would any one of us want to live in this day and age on the verge of the death of an entire species. This is perhaps the most solemn time I can imagine. It's tragic that I see this next generation as being the last. To be almost certain that the end is inevitable within my own lifetime is something that can dwindle all the hope one can muster from psychedelic experiences and flush it all down the toilet. Thank you for reading my bullshit. I haven't shared any with you in a while. Most of it has been going into my book. Send me your Email and tell me 37

about yourself if you want a sample... I'm willing to share it with most people that are willing to give me some feedback regarding my writing. -Dr. Jack D. Shelton, The Sole Ego of J.R. Shelton

38

BLACKOUT It’s amazing what goes through your head when the power is out… like it is right now. 1:42 left on my Macbook Pro’s battery and It’s 1:05 in the morning… Well its 6:05 in London and for all I know people are already downloading the new Radiohead record In Rainbows which is going to be the most fantastic achievement in sound since… Fuck I don’t know… the last Radiohead album… But it really is amazing, electricity that is. I love it. It is pure wizardry. One of the greatest achievements in alchemy of all time. What is an alchemist… why, its someone who explores the natural laws of science in our universe by experimenting with those laws. It ranges from mixing the ingredients of fungus with ones own mind to flying a kite in a thunderstorm. The greatest Illuminatus of all time must have been Benjamin Franklin – a politician, a free thinker, a pothead, a founding father, a scientist, an alchemist, and illuminated one. Imagine how an alchemist from hundreds of years ago would think of a cell phone or a computer or the iPod… Well Jesus tittyfuckin Christ (as Phil Kollerd would say in a fake Brit-Texan accent) I think they would just be astounded. Then I thought of the girl tha had a crush on me when I was in the 8 grade because she thought I looked like Jack White the bloke from the White Stripes. I remember for valentines day she printed out a picture of a guitar and gave it to me or something like that. I remember thinking how young she was with those braces and how she was my friends little cousin. I decided to just ignore her. I still feel like a jerk 5 years later… anyway my cats scratching my door… she wants in. Good night my friends. th

Monday, Oct V1.23

39

 Since

I Never Mentioned It Earlier:

My Favourite experience in life was transcending time and space on Psilocybin: Dr. Jack: I was listening to the Flaming Lips and saw exploding hexagons coming out of a bobble head puppy …and the trees outside my window were dancing and the sounds of the record were turning into Chinese character like symbols and it was like everything around me could be represented by its own shapes and colours and sounds and I was told that when I die I'm going to flow through everything because life flows like energy through all living and dead matter… That was with one psilocybe mushroom chocolate and another time I did a half chocolate and that time was still really intense and I listened to the lips again and other shit oh and when I was downstairs my hot water heater was like turning into washing machine noises… not turning into washing machines- it was turning into the sound of washing machines… and I thought that if I died at any given moment that I would become a part of the grand life of the universe and that I would live on forever as an idea like everyone else that there are pictures of and sounds of and videos of... even if they're gone… they're still here, man.... its like the difference between someone being a complete stranger that you don’t even know exists and knowing them in person... like you feel like you know some of these legendary icons even after they're dead... how is it possible? It’s so epic and grand... oh man thinking about it is really tripping me out… Its like, by understanding them and their ideas and what they meant as a person, they live on within you. …and so I thought that if I died at that moment id become part of the universe... but I decided that the key to achieving eternal life lies not in your own body but in the minds of others... and whoever can make themselves great enough to be in the minds of many has achieved life eternal... like Jesus, as unreal as he may have been… Mate, thanks for talking to me to-night.... I needed someone to 40

remind me of all that.... all this stuff just flows out of my head.... at strange times. Mr. Thom Ovalton: no problem… keep me updated with this book man, cause I think its really good Dr. Jack Shelton: Thanks man

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At the desk typing words about Radiohead with the Black  Wolf 2:56am Today Arpeggi I get eaten by the worms and weird fishes Thank you thom. great fuckin’ idea… Man, typing really is an enjoyable thing. I love typing. It’s so easy to do too. Yes I am writing on your computer… Why am I so smart right now>? I don’t seem to know. Well’ that’s honestly a lie. Perhaps I do know. I’m just not telling. It’s a secret, you see. Well Jesus isn’t really a person. He’s the sun. and you should know. Of course \you should know… the sun rises at Bethlehem (Virgo) where the three kings of orion’s belt point to it… Christianity… what a load of bollocks…. Oh dearest zeitgeist thank you/ Love, Jack That was not originally intended for you folks... but I was being thoughtful... Just kidding... am I? Are you>? Is anyone.! forget about your house of cards and I'll deal mine If it is any consolation, the former made no sense of any matter, whatsoever. Nothing intelligible was expressed... perhaps I have lied again. Where's the metal version of that rap song? race towards an early grave on the run... the pink floyd sound... always a favourite of mine here. One should be clearer. I don't understand. None of us do. What a great fucking record that DSOTM None of this is profound. He/she/it who finds the profoundness in what was said is the one that has truly learned to appreciate every moment of their life. One may even value this occasion; to touch the mind of anohter. My ideas are in your mind as you read this. I am the one with complete control of your mind. Purple sheep. Dogs. Explosions off in the distance. Squiggles on an old deck of cards atop a yellow desk with the chiming alarm clocks of Time bellowing out in waves across it bouncing over my hands as I type. You are sharing a moment with me that happened in the past. I have brought you along. 42

Allow me to elaborate. The enormous epic profound sounds of The Dark Side of the Moon are travelling through the air in my general direction. The sounds are making their way inside my brain. My brain is processing these sounds as though they are real. This is where music comes from. There are instinctual feelings to be triggered by certain frequencies arranged in certain patterns in time. Those who can explore what sounds make us feel whatever it is that those sounds make us feel, wield a most glorious power. The alchemical, magickal, scientific power of the musical artist is so grand that it is unimaginable to the unstrained mind. Of course we as human beings on this planet build up immunities to certain stimuli, so it is only conceivable that some of us would have a tolerance to certain sounds. You ever notice how when you play a record over and over it loses its meaning? That is because something in your mind isn't happening. -It is that your mind is saying "I already know this" "I have heard this before" and thus it does not work any more. We're all being worn down like machines. I often feel that I am not going to be one of the survivors of this massive global transformation of consumer capitalism. The enormity of this audiovisual revolution of over stimulation is almost like rape. They are forcing their ideas on my brain. When I'm in a car on the freeway and some advert is up that I can't avoid they are ignoring my right not to be attacked and filled with ideas that I do not wish to Realise. Why are their giant billboards everywhere? Why is it that I can walk around and not even notice that there are giant letters and numbers and symbols and logos around me everywhere I go? This is disgusting. What is happening to the world. "Buy this. Buy that," seems to be the attitude being spat into the face of the people by the corpratocracy. "NO FUCK YOU" fuck off, I don't want to see your signs everywhere I go. I am tired of people sitting around and doing nothing. The whole goddamned world is a fraud. I lost hope and I started dying. Never lose hope. Never put your self in the position I put myself in. I lost hope for the world I lost hope for humanity. I started to die just as George Orwell did. I can't rescue us all? Every fucking one of us needs to get so worn down and so lost and so hopeless that they have to say "If I am going to choose to continue living another day I can not allow myself to let such a huge swindling take place. We need to get out there. We need to stop this madness we do. George Bush, the most evil lying son of a bitch I've ever heard of. This is not fun and games - this is the world. What the fuck 43

does he think he's doing. I am MAD. I am MAD AS HELL... Why aren't you? Because all of this happened slowly? We the undermensch have been lied to by the elite for thousands of years and while we can still go about our business and enjoy our playstations and our XBOXs for now, one day we won't be able to. People get fucked over by this world every goddamned day and no one is doing shit about it. The top pyramid of the human race has been abusing its little undermenschen long enough. If we don't rid ourselves of such evil now, when will we… It's almost too late. How can all of you go about your day with the world falling apart around you? Is it that you think you can't do anything to stop it? Is it that you don't even care? We create the illusion for ourselves that we have all these obligations that we have to fill I have to go to school, go to college, do this, do that... everybody's working so hard at trying to get ahead and be successful that they're forgetting about the success of our species as a fucking whole. What the fuck! We're dying. The species is dying because its killing it's home and abusing its brothers and sisters. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, humanity has reached its carrying capacity. Some of us are going to die. That’s why we have cancer and aids and all the other myriad diseases and terrible ways of dying we have... This is so horrible. Life is so terrible and wonderful. It is exactly the fluctuation of negativity and positivity in all things. It is what makes a wave. It is resonance... sounds traveling through the air. Colours. Everything. I am willing to bet that there is an equal amount of goodness as there is badness in this world. By the way, someone mentioned that Dumbledore was gay. That was funny. Perhaps I will have to build up something great and then change everyone's image of that person entirely. God fondles little children. How's that? Shocking? Who the fuck am I to say anything? I'm just a crazy man. Any Colour You Like has just come on. I must be off.

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Within Thirty Seconds of Waking in a Hotel Strange dreams. We all have strange dreams. Sometimes. I didn’t do anything to deserve this one. Or maybe I did. This one was a jumbled up version of my life, far more promising despite its lack of realism. This dream did for sequence and setting what Dali does for shapes and matter in space and then presents 2-dimensionally. We are such stuff as dreams are made of. Oh, Bill. Allow me to explain. In the oddest of dreams only the strangest of things can happen, and if one can remember the details, they can almost cabalistically find the meaning in the details of the dream, id est why some people have certain roles, why some people appear and don’t appear and why. Perhaps what old Bill meant by this was that sometimes life is realised like a dream, each and every miracle and dreaded inconvenience, almost as though it were only following the rules by which our heads imagined our own dreams. We all live in one big dream where when we dream in that dream world we all exist in each others minds. Well that would be the essence of waking life would it not? –A childhood philosophy of mine, thought unimportant and thus lost and now returned with its own delightful link to Shakespeare himself, inspired by Robert Anton Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminati, where I was reminded of the phrase. Talking to Miss Zoe outside the pub (that is really a Starbucks, but only if you believe we’re in America/Irrelevant?) and Meredith wants me to call her to chill but then I go in for a pint wiv me mates and then I’m with Caroline the attractive young German girl in London and I’m thinking about Lou Reed’s record Berlin and the line “Caroline says, that I’m not a man” and we’re just sitting around drinking Carlsberg and there are the Woodrow children running around playing with toys and such and I feel like crying for being such a bad man… and then Kimberly wants me to come over but I feel bad and then I’m chilling with Zoe again and I explain what dreams are made of. None of these people are real, from a Crowleyan perspective. That was my dream in terms with which I could successfully utilise to hold your attention without sounding ridiculous. Beautiful, you all are. Thank you. There is the lightest of muffled trumpeteering going 45

on in this hotel somewhere in another room probably one floor up and one room east of my exit. Now I hear stomping. Probably some angry bloke ready to smash a trumpet over some poor kid’s head. They’re probably practicing for band. Maybe it’s a Chuck Mangione CD that an elderly couple is using to set the mood in their room. Either way it is still amusing to me. I have decided that the language for which this book is being presented in is called Neo-Anglo-American English. It consists of slang derived from foreign languages, Cockney, mostly British spellings, American phrases and grammar, and made up words that sound good/correct no matter what the goddamned spell-check thinks of them (such as trumpeteering) …I will have no spell check determining what is right in the universe of Anglo-America, a delightful hypothetical kingdom with rainbows made of cotton candy, clouds made of cannabis smoke, hempy money-trees, magickal chemicals in the water, Newcastle Brown Ale fountains and magic mushroom meadows where the mushrooms grow out of steaming lumps of fresh Columbian chocolate that can be eaten right off the sanitary ground. That’s the way Jesus would have wanted it, had he been a real person.

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Fuck all of you. (Dearest, Humanity) 8:34pm Monday, Nov 5

REMEMBER REMEMBER

I seem to be coming to my senses. Its the pills and the drink and the reaction and more importantly absence of reaction to everything I do. For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. When the reaction is so weak that it isn't even noticeable, it means that everything you do lacks purpose and meaning. This is what I've become. I have more than outlived myself. I have overstayed my welcome with all of you. I was always meant to die young and alone. I feel like this is meant to end with a bang. But I don't even have the balls to do that. So I'm not sure what any of this means. I guess it means I must be crazy. I've been up here on mount Jesus for a few too many days. Now I just have the courage to say it. Fuck all of you. You are all just as worthless as I am. I am polite everyday by not jumping up on top of a table and screaming it out loud. None of you realise just how meaningless all of your lives are. I finally realised one day that the only way to make my life meaningful was to become so important that I would live on in the minds of people for a very long time. In this day and age that is simply impossible. In the facebook application "compare people" no one would like to marry me and no one thinks that I will succeed at anything but being a father, something that I swore off with my last girlfriend that I was meant to marry. Now I am nothing but a dying old man at the age of 18. Fuck... My surviving ego of my formal self even feels bad for the sorry bastard that lives in the body of the quickly dying John R. Shelton. What a fucking twat. I have tried to immortalise myself knowing that I will die soon. I have answered so many impossible questions in my writing and none of you can even look away from your lives for a moment to understand. I suppose the level of illumination that I have presented for all of you was never meant to be achieved in any way but on one's own. It is astounding to me. None of you realise you are part of a dying species. YOU ARE ALL DYING. JUST LIKE ME. Very few of you will live on. There are too many of us now. Game over planet earth. Because of YOU. You didn't mean to kill yourselves. You have everybody who didn't realise to thank for that. I guess that says a lot about our species. You're all greedy fucking swine. And you can use your manners and pretend your not an asshole but you're either lying to yourself or you live a life with no ambitions for yourself. Maybe that's good. Fuck if I 47

know anymore. Who the fuck knows what's right and what's wrong. I'll fucking tell you who. People that are too ignorant to understand life from the perspective of those they consider to be wrong. Chew on that you sorry excuse for a dying species. and I'm sorry if I've offended any of my friends here. If you understand, then I probably don't hate you. Plus I'll probably forget I wrote this in the next hour or two. I love you. Goodbye.

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DISORIENTATION station(s) Presented in NaaE: Djai Guru Deva................ Like a million suns... Thank you John Lennon. Shes makin me feel like I've never been boooorn William Faulkner - Barn Burning.... What a bore. I mean its an alright story. But haven't we all been here before. Its why stories make sense. -Because we've already experienced the catalogue of feelings that makes up each story. Red Light Green Light I'm back I'm back I'm back Insert Piano Solo from "in my life" How grand. Grande. Mucho grande. Mark Twain. You never really got me with your huckleberry finn. or your Thom Sawyer. Fuck em both. I paint fences. Injuns. ad nauseum... ah I shouldnt say that, your a classic mr. clemens. clementines. tangerine trees and marmalade skies. marmalaud. Marmallowed. Who allowed for marmots? I wish I could smoke like you my friend. Speaking different languages. Golden slumbers. The color colour barrier on both sides. Criss cross. Christ on cross. A waste of firewood. Someone clean that holy cup. These are just thoughts. Unintelligible. 49

Mysteries. ...of words... and sounds as well. type type type. feckoff ye bloody bawbag! said the aggressive scotchman.

Track 01 2'44" ??? !!! £££ $$$ 777 “Rrelly?” said Thom The Dinosaur woman peace in the Casino

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B­12 Melatonin haze in CONTROL of yer Mind & SEX 3:19am Friday, Nov 16 Nobody loves me but that beautiful cat of mine. The box in my living room is stealing my soul. It should perhaps be called a dying room You're welcome whoever you are. Someone will read the things I say. I will be inside their heads temporarily. I am in your head. Right now... Now you can't stop letting me be inside your head. Oh you stopped reading. But you didn't did you? How did I know that?? I must be a genius. I love you. haha... but do I? Do I love anyone? or am I Alone. I am alone aren't I? I am always alone. It doesn't count being with other living organisms when they'r so detached from their own nature. They understand so little of themselves. I'm glad to be in your company. For I am assuming that those of you that I loathe would never be capable of reading this far without clicking on something else... That is because I am meaningless to you. People just hold less meaning to other people I should think. Remember when a person mattered? I don't...There are way too many people on this planet for people to give a damn about eachother... There are way to many people on this planet for me to be single. There are way too many people on this planet to find true love in one person. There are way too many people on this planet for you and me. How do I decide that. Well if your an idiot you shouldn;t be here. If you're a genius, your own ability to help in the advancement of our species only brings us nearer to teh conclusion of the great voyage of humanity. I stare down at my hands writing this and it would seem that I have no control. NO CONTROL. Only control over what you think while you read what I have written. I hope that my acknowledgement of that does not induce scepticism or cause fright. I think you can trust me. Maybe. My cat loves me, I think. I think that my feeding her and petting her properly and allowing her to live within my territory causes her to feel calm, safe, happy and properly nourished. Therefore because of her 51

association of those feelings with my person, my mere presence causes her to feel those feelings. "Goodnight," said the imposter. It is sad that this only goes for my cat. Alone. I'm up to that point at night where everything is hazy and one cannot feel there own body. I'm sitting on the edge of a sofa. Perhaps I am actually dreaming. If I am this will not be on my computer in the morning. I will also not remember this. I will not remember you. What a cliche romantic line, eh whoever you are? Aging cats enjoy playing with Apple laptop chargers. This must be a truth. Wouldn't some lyrics be nice? If only words poured out like endless rain into a paper cup blah blah across the universe... Have I decieved you? Am I a trickster? Have I perhaps told you some subliminal secrets? Have you read something profound? Was this the greatest bit of occult cabbala ever written? Probably not? Question mark?? Don't say it out loud. YOu'll only surprise yourself. and your mind will light up in red like a firefly. Goodnight. Perhaps. It really depends on whether or not you read the wholething. So... Bad Night... you know who you are, I should think. -Captain Achtung

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God is dead. So is Satan. ...Maybe. (NO MUSICK IN THE  SOUNDS) 1:02am Saturday, Dec 1 BUY MY BOOK... When its out... After I get around to getting an agent... and rewriting most of the book. I read that somewhere. God is dead but also Satan. I am drawing a blank. At least I am in your brain, growing in static presence. Achtung komaraden! Is that even proper German? Will you marry me? No. haha. Why? Lodgenet. Fuck Lodgenet. everytime I stay in this bloody hotel I go a bit crazy. I'm not crazy I'm just big brained. Ha. Quote me on that. Tell your friends. Make me a GOD. This wallpaper is horrible. The comforter on this bed is halfway between the colour of faecal matter and urine. Interesting Chair. Lots of squares. 3/4 empty glasses everywhere. Tonight I drank flat tonic with lime. DISGUSTING The musick is gone from the sounds. -Can you feel me? I can I justt dont feel it. The adverts on the television are breaking my heart. Every time I watch one I feel the pain of seeing through an illusion that everyone else sees as solid and genuine. Think of the children of the future. What will they have? One day people will look back- all the conservationists will be out in the streets protesting to save the Signs. Signhuggers. They'll think that they're been there since the beginning of time; the sixties a folk tale and the Enlightenment non-existent. Someone save our fucking species. 53

YOU, ME AND EVERYONE WE KNOW ARE DYING. YOU MAY PASS ON MISFORTUNE TO THE NEXT GENERATION. BUT YOUR PART OF THE CODE IS DYING. AND NONE OF YOU REALISE IT. YOU CAN WATCH YOUR SHITTY MOVIES. PLAY YOUR SHITTY VIDEOGAMES. NUMB YOUR MINDS. HIDE IN YOUR ROOMS. And I won't care because that's what I do too. I can't in good conscience pass on this misfortune to another being of consciousness. Can you? Optimism? Is that why? OPTIMISM? I'm guessing that this word holds an etymological link to some old language's word for vision, in which case, an optimist is exactly the opposite of what we consider optimistic. But thats probably untrue. Let's see the world without a lense shall we? Without looking for the negative or the positive. Let us say FUCK NAÏVETÉ! Let's let the disaster and joy of the world come to us on its own. Who the fuck am I to be saying "Let us" so obnoxiously? Even better question: "Why do I even care?" Why don't I shut up and go along for the ride? Why don't I end it now? Why don't I life forever. This box is suffocating me to death. Fuck LodgeNet. Fuck people that make TV systems that only connect in Mono by elimination of one of the stereo channels. Seriously fuck that. LONG LIVE STEREO. we all have two ears. most of us.

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The Lady, The Singer, Old Kid, The Drunk, The Irishman, Me & Lou 5:31am Monday, Dec 17 Brooklyn with Sir Jamington. I was on the train and I saw this woman that must've been about 25-30 sitting on the other side of the subway. I was pretty goddamned funnyfeeling at the time, in that concert-going way. :) Jamie and I had met Adrian from The Most Serene republic and talked about Canada and America and parties and such. It was quite magical. The show was fucking brilliant too and we hung out with some drunk guy named Ian. He was one chill kid. Must've been about 25- dropped out of college. He was definitely one of us. We missed the last train home. But thats alright. Cause we wandered the streets of Manhattan for a few hours. But anyway this girl... she was sitting there... in these fishnet stalkings... and dark clothes... not like a goth. -and she would catch my glance in the corner of her eye. You could tell she enjoyed the idea of people looking at her... and for about a minute or so she would be looking slightly up grinning. Then for about a minute or so she'd look a bit down ashamed... guilty even. and I was thinking all this at the time. I was saying all these words to her out loud in my head. She's rapid cycling through these different feelings like some type of cokefiend that's gotten herself caught up in that other world of cocaine and partying that never ends satisfactorily. Then I realised she was likely a prostitute. Either way, she was one of us- on the outside of the norm, and looking like she knew it. Sir James and I wandered the streets talking about the bizarre occurrences of the night. First we met this Irish guy named Emmett that told some flirtacious young ladies that James and I looked like "fine catches." We met some very strange large fellow from Brooklyn who appeared to be extremely drunk. He smashed things. He called Jamie a "bitch-ass nigga" and tried to give me his phone number so that he could take me out to clubs. I don't feel like getting knifed though. I could spend hours talking about that strange man and what a childish moron he was. 55

Anyway. After seeing such a novel and brilliant performance, I feel energised and eager to make sounds: Glorious, glorious sounds. Noises. Sonic sex with your head. I want to trip everyone out- expand your minds. I restrung my guitar with Sir Thom Ovalton. Twas a fine occasion. Chow Yun Fat and John Woo make an excellent team. I'm sorry: I cannot write. Pills. Lack of stimulation Lack of brainpower Lack of love Not missing out blurry eyes magazines dont tell me anything a break in the hand cut on flowers and cell phones stuck inside chairs buzzing for me listening to Lou Reed Thinking about how I just don't fucking care "...and I guess... I just dont know." ...really, Lou?

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THE MACHINE: Why I Plan to Leave America for Her Northern Sister Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 7:30pm 

Dearest fellow beings of consciousness, I am in love with a beautiful woman from Calgary, with whom I am  engaged, and I have compiled a collection of observations about  America and humanity in general that support my decision to leave the  United States and be off to Canada with the intent of living there and  possibly the UK again some day. Enjoy: I have found myself confronted with many people urging me not to move  to Canada to be with my girlfriend, and most of them seem to think I  need to do what they do. They want me to become part of the big  hungry monster that is America. Perhaps America could better be  analogised as a rusty old machine. Everybody else wants to be one of the  nuts and bolts, and I don't feel like being part of a meaningless system  that only hurts its self constantly. I find myself looking at the people around me like a bunch of plants.  They are living organisms that grow and leave their seeds behind, but  are incapable of living out their own true wills and thinking for  themselves. ­Now that's an awfully extreme thing to say, so hear me out­  We've all become so goddamned concerned with systems and being as  "human" as possible that we have lost sight of our instincts.

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The human species is the species that dares to become non­animalian.  The difference between man and animal is that man trains itself and its  fellow man to disobey their own instincts as living organisms. In fact, we  compete at how well we do this and look down on those that are  unsuccessful as "animals." We have manners and machines and  languages. It is our duty to become more and more efficient all the time. The next stage of evolution for the human species is extinction. As we are  becoming less animalian, we are becoming more and more mechanistic.  Think about it; we are all living out other peoples' plans... We execute  all of our actions based on social norms and these social norms are  becoming progressively stricter. We have systems for everything. We  believe in doing everything in accordance with some social norm, rather  than our own biological instinct, mainly because the human's biology is  different from animals in that we instinctually know not to do what we  as individuals will to do but what others think is normal for us to do: If they buy an iPhone, I buy an iPhone. We put everything about our lives on the internet and let websites keep  track of who we are. What's amusing is that now, we are keeping track  of websites because the systematic formats of these websites are  programming themselves inside of us. The next generation will grow up  in a time where they'll walk around thinking of what their current  "status" is. Are we just walking robots?

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What amuses me is how much this is true in America and how much  Social­Darwinism is imbued into the American Identity; "I was here  first," "My kid deserves better treatment," "I'm going to X College." if  there is one thing that Americans can be credited with, it's one­up­ manship. Americans spend so much time trying to better themselves as  individuals, like life is a game that can be won, that there is a serious  lacking of a sense of community. When I was in Canada, the biggest difference I noticed was that I didn't  feel like I needed to compete with everyone else around me. It actually  seemed as though people in Canada CARE about each other and their  country. They even pay for each other's entertainment access in the form  of the CBC. No one was trying to race me to the check­out line in the  grocery store. In fact, the check­out lady in the grocery store welcomed  me to her country with pride and wished me a happy stay.  ...Whaaaaaaa? When was the last time that the check out person in the  grocery store welcomed you to America with pride and a warm fuzzy  feeling of community? It's as though Canadians aren't embarrassed to  be Canadian. The terrible irony concerning the American Identity is that in their  attempt to one­up each other and triumph as individuals, they become  so swept up in their thorough plans and systematic life­styles that they  lose their own free will. Even when they take vacations they go to  archetypal destinations­ "I'm taking my kid to disney world," etc.

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I find the urge to say "Pretty soon the machines will tell us what to do  with our lives, rather than us telling the machines what we do," but this  is already true and I think it's sad that humanity, spearheaded by  America, is heading in this direction which seems like an evolutionary  step. Perhaps it isn't terrible. Perhaps it won't be so bad to just live a  hypothetical life that was completely dictated by a network of ones and  zeroes and people thereby influenced. Perhaps it is just the same as the  lives we have always lived. When was the last time you ever did anything  without their being a reason for it? Don't forget to ask, "but why?" In summary, I love my girlfriend and want to be in a place that doesn't  make me feel like I'm slipping into the cracks of obscurity by crushing  my own free will for the cause of the evolutionary mechanisation of  humanity. So, America, I'm sorry. It's not you.... really... It's me. We're just not  meant to be together. Maybe it'll work out some day... but you've gotta  get your shit together first and quit killing brown skinned children for  money. May God (hypothetically speaking) bless you. ­Jack Please excuse how messy that was. Caffeine+High Blood/Glucose  Concentration=Shitty Literary Flow :( Cheers

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Obituary for My Future-Self w/ Further Exploration of the Idea Sunday, July 6, 2008 at 6:55am “John R. ‘Jack’ Shelton, an aspiring writer and musician, died unexpectedly today due to a combination of pharmaceutical drug toxicity, alcohol toxicity, smoking complications, high cholesterol, high blood-sugar induced organ failure and other mysterious unknown factors all combined with a most unpleasant set of chronic anxiety/panic attacks which disrupted his heart beat causing him to go into cardiac arrest. Some say this may have been triggered by his dissatisfaction with the absurdity of life, lack of psychedelic drugs and loss of hope. Friends say his health problems, while not always visible, were very much attuned to his personality, which ‘reflected the ungratefulness and obnoxiousness that seemed to emanate from his presence,’ as one friend puts it. He never had a job, as his ex-fiancée was keen to remind him and he was so undependable that there was no reason for anyone to count on him to do anything. He just needed assistants to care of him at all times and when that wasn’t enough, his heart just gave out.” …It’s only a matter of time before you can read this in your paper! You see, a person is more than just who you know him/her to be. A person is also their past, present and possible futures. The probable future of Jack Shelton, an integral part of his damaged and mixmatched ego, died the other day. Here’s how: His fiancée whom he had committed to, and was ready to give up everything for, decided to question whether or not he would continue to rely on her to take care of him forever, despite that they had never lived together in the past and he had already addressed the “issue” a week before, and was previously able to overlook its rather insulting and hurtful implications. Having to deal with his fiancée’s repeat-concerns, this time presented in the monoto-surround-sound equivalent upgrade of disrespect and hurtfulness, he fell into a mental state of panic under the influence of assorted health problems, including lack of medication and overreacted with a cacophony of curse words. After a more calm examination of the argument at hand, Jack hypothesised that her need to bring up an assortment of “issues” already addressed (with disheartening worry) was due to a real issue, and that this real issue was either related to memory loss or personal issues related to fear of being with someone. If 61

the latter is the case, then the situation is especially unfortunate, as he has given up countless oppurtunities of every category for this beautiful and intelligent woman that he hoped to spend his life with. (THAT IS ALL YOU NEED TO HEAR IN REGARDS TO DETAIL. IT WAS WRITTEN TO DOUSE THE FLAMES OF QUESTION. FURTHER DETAILS ARE A PRIVATE MATTER. THE REST IS MORE OF AN INFORMATIVE NOTICE) …and so that future Jack Shelton, a part of the Jack Shelton you know, is dead. The Jack Shelton that would take care of her and love her and wake up next to her is dead. The Jack Shelton who gave up the chance to attend university in his hometown of London to move to a Canadian oil town is dead. The Jack Shelton who would rather live with the woman he loves than have meaningless, shallow relationships accompanied by stoned games of beerpong and X-Box is dead. The Jack Shelton that thought planning any type of alternative future, and thus questioning his relationship, was wrong and decided to believe in her to the end is dead. The Jack Shelton that believed in the possibility of everlasting love is dead. What is left of Jack Shelton, is a broken man, a shell hollowing itself out again through the shock and denial and disappointment. The same battered dead carcus that always was, and was never meant to be anything but, loveless. Jack Shelton is a character from a sad film, the kind where the lead actor is all over the place and his character is so reprihensible and full of himself as a result of his inability to deal with the smooth adaptation of the robotic 21st century ego-programme, that you just find his performance awkward and hard to watch. No matter what role in life this actor ends up with, he is never going to be able to pull it off, because he should already be dead. He wished for death before for years as a selfish child and adolescant consumed by guilt and disability, and then death came to him in his many forms. Science stopped death last time, but Jack doesn’t think it was meant to. Perhaps I’ll have to stop relying on science, live up to those libertarian standards that my human nature would suggest to me, were I not sensetive about practising what I preach. Maybe someday I’ll have the courage for it. I’ll pull the tube on this Terry Schaivo. But for now, I march on temporarily somewhat aimless, thinking crookedly with just barely enough intellect to rise above self-destructivity. 62

With sorrow and regret, The most horrible human being to live, in the eyes of at least one beautiful woman I can think of, to whom I still hold the utmost affection…

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The Greatest Truth of all is that everything is true within the confines of its own belief system. As long as you believe that your life is real, everything within it shall be. To disbelieve is to lack the knowledge to know what someone else knows to be true, or to hold the knowledge that proves him or her wrong; either way, You’re both right in the sense that neither one of you matters. I love, admire, pity and loathe all of you dearly. O, fancy font.

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A Private Congregation Of London W4 Sentiments & Additional Words Concerning Things

By

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Jack Shelton

Red Lights Through Rainy Rounded Windows  

The takeoff of an airplane from London Heathrow in the middle of the night is an unusual experience for a child of three. His mind swooshes in wonder and panic and some type of bizarre combination of psychedelic and opiate sensation coupled with the cannabic feeling of childhood wherein everything is new and there isn’t a reason to have a care in the world. He did not forsee the series of terrible ear infections he was to endure on his journey back and forth across the ocean, over and over again and again.

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Me and Lou on A Thursday Night I'm sorry: I cannot write No Pills. Lack of stimulation. Lack of brainpower. Lack of love. Not missing out though… surely. Blurry eyes on magazines, Dont tell me anything: I don’t want to see. A break in the hand cut on flowers, And mobile phones stuck inside chairs Buzzing just for me So I’m listening to Lou Reed, Thinking about how I just don't fucking care "...and I guess... I just dont know." ...really, Lou? Me too, my friend.

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Teeth of the Wise Today they drilled holes in my head.I showed up at the office. I sat in the chair listening to Ravi Shankar with a vanilla-scented N2O mask on my face. That's when they put me out and within ten seconds I was awake and the procedure was over. I had just been transported in time. Then I thought to myself We’re just blowin' some clowds. Smokes travellin’ in waves. I aint run out yet. Lets misbehave. Neil young's “a Vampire baby… suckin' blood from the earth.”

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Oh, Neil. Oh, Neil…  Never mind it, I still think you're brilliant mate. So I'm thinking about moving.  And living with a beautiful girl whilst attending college/university.  That would be most optimal.  Premium ultra­deluxe. Very nice, indeed. boxes made of lines patterns "oh how the mu­opioid receptor agonists fail to live up to my high  standards." I think to myself as the cat wags her tail in my face. What happened?  God damn you all!  What happened to adolescence?  Where did it go?  Did my adolescence go to college with all my friends?  Or did it get snuffed out slowly?  I put my ego out of its own misery I think years ago. Occasionally I  return to its grave in my head to recount all of the things that made up  its life. But this Jack D. Shelton would never want to go back to being  that boy.  “Get out of toooooooowwwwwwwwnnnnnnnn,” as our friend Neil  Young would say when he was livin’ On The Beach. I've got to get out of here. 

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I've got to be with my lover.  I've got to be away from all the terrible memories in this house.  I want to make a home.  I want to live. Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra­La­La Band comes  on  And they sing rounding in harmony,  "When the world is sick can no one be well and I dreamt we was all  beautiful and strong."  I guess none of this matters atall. 

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I’m About to Fly Back & You’re About to Fly Away Dear FUCK. I am sitting in a hotel room  In Geneva, Switzerland  Stoned and drunk  With the smoke from my cigarette  Rising up through the air  To sandpaper the moisture off of my eyes  As I sit and type this to you.  A bottle of Chimay sits next to me  And there’s Prosecco,  And Jack Daniel’s, And some type of cava,  And all I can think about is writing…  Just writing about you  Because you inspire me…  And I want to write a romance novel  About you or maybe work you into my story  The one about the adolescant in Amsterdam Everywhere I went tonight  I kept seeing those eyes The beautiful quivering green eyes  Staring back into mine  When you smile  71

And nervously say in an upward inflection “What?”  Like I’m telling you something  With my eyes  And you’d like to pretend it’s innocent.  Now I’ve put out my cigarette  And I’m serious.  Those nights in your bed  When at first you wouldn’t kiss me  That absolutely kills me “You’re too young” The last girl didn’t say that And she had a decade on you

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The Second Time You Stayed At My Place  Standing out in the rain for a cigarette, I lean over on the brick wall and yours is still there Lying their put out by the rain of a day past… The one I saw you roll on my bed, Before I walked you out the door that morning, After you picked up your clothes off my floor… And I don’t see how after the way we do this You can say you just want to be friends. So I don’t believe it for a second When I look in your eyes and I see it­ The way you look back, And the way they move when I touch you… Because the way that you always come back to me Says something completely different.  I can’t believe you’d call it a fling, And tell me on the phone that you don’t miss me, When I know that you’ll ring me up later And have me come over again Just so you can pretend you’re not keen on this And still make love to me.

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The Contemplation of Resignation From An Unplanned Life of Consistent Schedule The Contemplation of Resignation  From An Unplanned Life of Consistent Schedule It goes simply as follows As it goes from one week to the next Like so: Fuck It’s what you should do on a Friday night. It’s what you should do every night. (Unless you’re tired) And then have a cigarette Cigarette It’s what you should do after you fuck It’s what you should do on a Friday night It’s what you should do every day, all day. Unless it makes you cough, then you should have some cough syrup Cough syrup It’s what you should drink when you cough. It’s what you should do with a cigarette after sex It’s what you should do on a Friday night It’s what you should do every night Unless you self destruct Then you should give up Give up 74

It’s what you should do after you self destruct It’s what you should do after drinking cough syrup It’s what you should do after smoking and fucking On a Saturday morning when none of the rest matters It’s what to do if you do these things every night And you’ve got an elaborate plan For execution

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Izabella Gin and cough syrup  Relax in my glass I lie on your bed

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And we talk about old poetry

Written about the anglo­irish war And I try to write my own But I’m not any good at that You change the ringtones on my mobile And I sit and laugh at the sounds And you make cheery faces  And I love the sounds For I’m quite chemically content And James Marshall Hendrix plays us off Into the rest of the night

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Working Late Into the Night I’m working late into the night… Keep me company tonight? Sure thing, I said. That’s why I’m here On the artist’s bed. I do things in weird orders I say so very druggedly That’s fine she says Deviantly

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…and its silent…

Except for the muffled resonance of the tele, As it makes the sound of a cardboard box Should one ever come to life. And her “stupid light” flickers. “Hey, Maranda? I think you’ll love it too.” Of course you can have a cigarette paper. And I normally don’t do this; Say these things, Have that energy­ The willpower kept in reserve from birth… But my relapse finds me quite alive. Art is too hard, she says While she struggles… And that’s how I know  That this is an artist’s bed.

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In the Kitchen In the Kitchen there are empty bottles With the fingerprints of untrustworthy people They come in and out and take what they want Then they leave most uncourteously In the Kitchen you can find me sitting Finishing my whiskey, that which was left When the party’s over and no one can be bothered To help clean up after themselves

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“Antennas to Heaven” (Under the Guise of Ashtray Anxiety) Rocking chair complete with old man Who plays the blues Jingle Jangle Bing-bang the witch is dead Perhaps spoken in French Godspeed makes waves on the sea/sky Floating in cosmic waves Distorted vibrating Running after trains And making Love in Planes Planes that lead to The feedback crash Of a journey over ice Is the snowglobe silence To the march of canned superheroes Driving in the rain of colour-trails Orgasms Looking here is the only warmth For us on this lonely sphere Where those last colour-humps of hearts Are like walking away Into the fog on a dock Whisked away to the sky by boat Caught in the infinite bright whistling of the heavens Like underwater transmissions from the last whales to the highest birds The ship sinking into the sand Is carrying you down As it brings you higher to heaven The unity of all on all levels you realise As you close your eyes comprehending Mr Crowley

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Format<­Insert [click] v Break­> Page Break I need a cigarette. No. Wait, You should light it  After you write that. There are too many things going on, And I was about to write this, And I am writing this, But this isn’t the future this, That this this was. Because her flatmate’s in here, And says she works in Swiss Cottage… And that’s where I’m from­ Where I was born. So I sit here and their voices change Into muffled air­born blobs, Massaged by the sound of baggies Being prodded by fingertips In search of leftover cannabis, Interrupted only by phonecalls, While I drift off into a memory Of a memory I finally recognised, When I first went back  To old Swiss Cottage… 82

To Naseby Close, At Number Five… Where a sedan sat parked outside Fifteen years behind me now. And action figures fell Out of the bathroom window, And tears were cried, And ceilings fell, And wine was spilt, And goldfish died, And Sri Lankan nannies hoovered, And I forced upon myself American English, Utilising Thunderbird idolisation In defiance of nappy­clad peers… And so her flatmate scratches her leg, And plays with the duct tape, Whilst my lover reads off the details Of upper level university work, On the phone With her knicker­clad peers. And I sit here writing, With all this going on And lips too dry for kissing… Since the cigarette  That absorbed all the moisture, Is still hanging here unlit.

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Author’s Note(s): The W4 Collection This collection of writing is an expansion of previous work, with  radical revision and new material inspired by experiences following my  return to London. In most of my pieces I try to bring the reader into the  experience of the moment in which I currently live. I want to mess with  their heads and force them to think. I try to keep my writing raw and  keep it from any type of formulaic constriction, but here I have tried to  expand my external palette, including a sonnet (“Izabella.”) Because all  of the writing here has recurring themes, such as drugs, romance, sex,  hopelessness and various abstract verbal imagery, I try to keep all of it  held together as one piece rather than avoid the repetition; life is  repetetive and each one of these pieces is a snap shot featuring such  pattern.  The more love themed writing is inspired by real life relationship  drama, but does not strictly adhere to such situational accuracy. Liberty  is taken in order to better illustrate feeling and reader­experience. In  such new work, construction consists of real time aesthetic description  and quotes, including at times allusion to specific musical stimuli. Titles  and phrases are often constructed as an occultist would construct  magickal texts, e.g. Aleister Crowley, who is specifically mentioned in  “Antennas to Heaven.” The general purpose of this “crowleyan  construction” is to force upon the reader a desire to reconstruct the  formation of each individual piece of work for themselves, as to attain an  experience as close as possible to the one being presented.  Most of the radical revision comes in “Me and Lou”, “Teeth of the  Wise” and “I’m About to Fly Back”, all of which are derived from  scribbles found in notebooks, etc. “Me and Lou” was originally a  collection of random phrases and words that I had written at the end of  a document called “Teeth of the Wise”, where that document has also 

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spawned the piece of the same name; it was random opiate ramblings I  had written following surgery where my wisdom teeth had been  removed. After turning these two pieces into what they are now, I found  that they accomplished what my new poetry stands to accomplish  stylistically, and ultimately feel that my poetic writing has improved  stylistically. “I’m about to fly back” is taken directly from an unfinished  note to a love interest rewritten as a poem that segues into the other new  pieces.  “My Favourite Chair” is a moderately edited derivation from an  in­class freewriting exercise; it was the exercise with the small images we  were to fictionalise and write about. Mine was an image of several  different people in uniform, where only one person doesn’t wear a  jacket. In this poem I take on the female role as the girl without the  jacket and create an elaborate daydream­walkthrough as the character  sits through her portrait. The whole collection essentially attempts to capture a life in  retrospect whilst including other pieces that feel out of place, like a  break from the experience. I feel wrong calling it poetry, as I’ve never  thought of myself as a poet, but always more of a word artist. I make  inspired creative writing, but up until this course, I’ve never tried to  classify it or push it into some writing­style archetype. I find it  interesting seeing how my work comes to shape when such shaping is  applied, and that is one of the bigger benefits I’ve had from this course  in regards to poetry. Final Drafts: A few lines have been omitted from some pieces and I have tried  adding punctuation with consideration of the class’ suggestions.

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A Private Congregation of London W4 Sentiments  & Additional Words Concerning Things:  

DRAMATIC EPILOGUE & ADDENDA

By John R. Shelton

…With the goal of promoting the concepts of  Understanding & Human­to­Human Intellectual Connectivity.

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PART ONE: A RECOUNTANCE OF FRATER ALBIORIX’S UNIVERSITY  HOLIDAY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WHEREIN HE DECIDES TO  RECOUNT THE PAST FEW MONTHS Frater Albiorix is in pain; in the emotional context, this is quite melodramatic,   but in the physical sense, it is quite literal. At this point he is on holiday from univerity   in a hotel room in Boston, Massechusetts with his best friend in the other bed trying to   sleep. Inside his best friend’s head, there is some sort of spot that was picked up on a   magnetic resonance imaging machine. This would indicate the presence of a possible   tumor. This bothers Albiorix. Frater Albiorix is not the author of this story. He is   simply a fictional character. What’s funny about this is that the masking of identities   only pretects one from the villification of those who would have no reason to villify,   whilst making such disguise seem that much more cutting to those for whom such   secrets one would try to maintain, and to those people, I am sure that whoever is   writing this is quite sorry. There is no bigger writer’s block than fear of guilt. No one   wants to feel like they’ve betrayed a person’s confidence, or shared too much …but I’m  afraid it’s only the most human thing I could possibly share with you. So where the fuck have I been? Why have my words not graced your screen, great  typewriter of the past’s future? Oh I have been so busy. Doing what, Jack? 89

Jack, eh?… ­ “Jack, eh?” I typed.  …Why, I have been in university. You see, after my marriage never happened, I  immediately applied to Twickenham The American International University in London.  After making a few more acquaintences in the Connecticut area and having a brief  relationship with an underage pathological liar, out of extreme desparation for meaningful  human contact (which culminated in the concoction of a rather elaborate lie concerning  the abortion of my possible child) I finally returned to my home country of England.  The first few weeks at Twickenham, I did as all the other kids did and got used to  what I call the North­West European Attitude About Alcohol, or NWEAAC, a lovely  acronym which I’ve just conjured out of thin air, kind of in the spirit of American  economic policy. The student body at Twickenham is encompasses extremely rich  adolescants from around the world (many of whom belong to families that could purchase  third world countries), normal adolescants of middle class backgrounds who don’t much  care for the mindset of the general student body, study abroad programme kids and me,  wherever the hell I fit in.  As Frater Albiorix typed away at his cocktail­crusted keyboard of vengeance,   his rather crude explanation of Twickenham The American International University in   London was interrupted by his friend’s awaking. After a brief period of 6 months,   Frater Albiorix has now been a horrible person for a number of reasons, much like  

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earlier on in his adventures. He now continues to recount the events retrospectively by   means of blatant and deliberate digression. I can still remember explaining to Eric my concerns about talking about other  people. (This is pretty much what I’m on about at the beginning of this story, and really a  constant concern in my writing.) It was a fucking lonely occasion indeed. I turned around  to face the window when he went back to sleep… and wrote in a word document. “The sky here is fucking gray with snow that from this high off the ground, has the   appearance of fog. It must block the soundwaves of the street noise as well, because   as far as I can remember, from this hotel you can hear every bloody car­screech and   siren on the road with the sounds echoing off the streets and up to our window.”  As I   look down at the street it reminds me of standing out on this girl’s balcony in   Brooklyn a week ago…  This girl, with the same first name as the character E from Jack D. Shelton’s   Hyothetical Memoirs & Assorted Ramblings From A Series of Luxurious Struggles: A   Manifesto of Agnostic Mysticism and Psychedelic Illuminism by Mr J.R. Shelton, but an  entirely different human being altogether, was another part of my experiences at  Twickenham. We met through the glories of class, and she was the main inspiration for A   Private Congregation of London W4 Sentiments & Additional Words Concerning Things,  and one of the two women for whom it was written, the other being the professor, from 

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whom I needed to receive an adequate mark. So, anyway… “E2” or Penny Lane and I would smoke cigarettes before and after  class and finally ended up at a mutual friend’s place smoking jazz cigarettes and  discussing course material. When our mutual friend’s boyfriend came home from work,  we were no longer welcome, and we ended up leaving at the same time and then both got  off at her stop and had a few drinks, which combined with the inclusion of an acoustic  guitar and a decent record collection, produced an excellent night of temporary 1970s  nostalgia. From then on, it was always like that. Within a few weeks, I was there more  than half of the week, intoxicated, doing assignments, procrastinating, writing for creative  writing, and burning through amphetamines like sweets… which is okay because I have a  prescription from the United States of America, right?  I could get into the whole chronology of it, which is blurred and hazy at best, but I  think it’s already captured well enough in the W4 piece. (See W4 Piece.) So anyway, Penny Lane and I weren’t together because her boyfriend was moving  back from Japan, and I wish I could hate the guy, but he reminds me a lot of me and just  seems to be a generally decent guy. …and all that essentially voids the publication of this  piece of writing, since she doesn’t want him to know about me and her. Then again I’ll  probably never see her again, and now I’ve recorded at least 10 to 15 songs centred around  the affair and created a concept album out of it… I’d like to think the record is quite  good. It’s very similar in style to the stuff that John R. “Jack” Shelton is doing these days  92

with his new project LONDON W4.  It’s strange how much pressure she put on me; she says she doesn’t want me to  stop coming around or acting the same way but that we couldn’t sleep together anymore,  and even enquired as to whether or not I’d be interested in sleeping on the couch, while he  slept with her in the only proper bed I’ve slept in for about 3 months. (My bed at  university is essentially the size of a plank, where I’ve employed use of a towel in place of  a duvet.) Those were dark times. Well, not really. In fact they were great for a while. When  I started seeing Ms. Texas. After seeing her in New York during the winter break and  deciding that there was something wrong in her head, disheartened by the return of her  much older boyfriend of 3 years, I sent her an angry text message from an airport bar,  where I was illegally drinking whilst already intoxicated in such a way that could have  quite possibly been conducive to the kind of general self­conduct that’s bound for  reception as inappropriate behaviour for airports. Days prior I had written in a word  document: The other downside, and believe me it’s all downsides, is that I have no one to   sleep with. I have no romantic security, sexual security or social security, other than the   kind that you get for being born a goddamned yankee… and even that kind doesn’t count   for fuck all anymore. –and now all I can think about is this super nice guy trying to fuck  

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the girl I’ve been slowly establishing a relationship with while I sit on a couch in London   chainsmoking before inevitably storming out the door to the taxi place across the street,   heading back to mine and drinking myself into oblivion. When will this happen? Possibly,   as soon as next weekend.    

Frater Albiorix begins to doze off into a hazy daze of nostalgia…  

They once told me that an electric eel had jumped out of its tank, and that when the  caretaker got back to the marine room, he had found it dried up like a rock. It must’ve  been sandy with that satin finish look, perhaps posessing the texture of a meringue. I  thought how if it were to be snapped in half, bits of powdery debris would scatter through  the air like highly weaponised (self­declumping) anthrax. It made me sad.  In conclusion, young Children should take dangerous drugs and play with guns…

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PART TWO: HEREIN LIES THE LADY A: INSTRUCTIONS: See collection A Private Congregation of  London W4 Sentiments & Additional Words Concerning Things. Take  this collection of words to be applicable situationally to our character  Frater Albiorix, with consideration of the previous segment. B: She’s back. Just for tonight I imagine. At first it went alright. Now  she’s just sleeping but we were making love for about 15 minutes. I know  it was good. It’s just heart breaking all over again. …and I’m thinking  ‘If you break my heart all over again will I still write songs for you?’ and  the answer is probably ‘yes’ I imagine. Tomorrow’s sobriety hangs over  my shoulder like some type of reaper, but not of death… perhaps shame,  misery, discontent, and most of all failure. Failure. Two albums later,  failure. All the romantic gestures. Candlelights in New York City. 

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Months of Frank Sanatra and cheap champagne in London. Recreation  of the recreations of the nineteen­seventies. Everything. The scene of 30­ something women and ex­girlfriends I’ve claimed to love all morphing  into her from the other pillow across from me. The guilt. I say ‘I love  you’ and there is nothing but immediate drunken dismissal… out of  shame or guilt? Maybe… Who knows. I don’t care anymore… I shall  pretend, so that I may wake up tomorrow morning.

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PART THREE: FRATER ALBIORIX HAS A BIRTHDAY or A HUGE  COMEDOWN  So now I’ve got this other girl in my bed. She’s already fallen  asleep. I suppose you could say she’s satisfied… though, I however am  anything but. I’m completely out of these pills now. Bupropion HCl  150mg. A couple weeks ago I ran out and had to get more from the  NHS. My doctor said it was okay that I’ve quadrupled the dosage in the  past 3 months, yet why this is, I know not. As an enthusiastic proponent  of all the therapeutic aspects of psychopharmacology and ‘Psych Major’  in University, I’ve got to say I’m not sure that it’s sucha  great idea.  Then again this guy’s pretty anhedonic. So lets pump up the hedonism  with some Rx drugs! Doesn’t matter now, cause I’m out of the bloody things… and now  I’ve got this girl on my bed, and rather than feeling like a hedonist  whose life is falling apart around him as he struggles with his unrealistic 

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goals and harsh realities, I feel like some wanker that is running out of  time. It’s the Hitler in the bunker feeling again. The Red Army’s closing  in… not to suggest in any way suicide, because the guy we’re talking  about is way too much of a bastard to harm himself in any way atall. In  fact he’s the kind of guy that people hate because he’s smug and  overconfident and condescending, even though he’s only this way  because of the pills he eats from his doctors, that are now decomposed in  the great chemical hoover/vacuum of his mind. So now what am I?  Dear god the girl is beautiful on my bed, but the beauty I see in  her is all that I see in the woman I’m in love with. This is the problem  here… and it’s the same thing with the 32 year old alcoholic DJ that  works at the adventure playground, although we actually have things in  common, such as the rather relevant archetypal theme of romantic  rejection… and she’s been sending me text messages all night… and I’ve  made the rather daft gesture of answering “have you met some girls 

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your own age?” a bit too truthfully, though I did tell her I still think shes  absolutely lovely and I really thought it was her that was disinterested…  why is it always that taking a step back from seeing someone makes  them come after you like you’re made out of some type of sweet tasting  edible money that’s been blessed by some jesus guy and satisfies your  every vice craving. O, the hedonism! O, Hedonism! O, Hedonism! What have you done to me? My  dopamine receptors have driven me to drive four (or is it five? Well who  gives a damn what counts at this hour…) girls/women to my doorstep  where just weeks before the next has come along the one prior has  complete lack of interest. She comes. I like her. She likes me. She gets  bored. I meet someone else. She comes at me at full force and if she finds  out about the other girls I’m a bastard. But that’s how I feel… like a  fucking bastard. Because to be honest, all of them but the girl who’s just  moved back to Texas and my ever­worsening ex in Canada just remind 

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me of the girl I’m actually in love with. “…and if you can’t be with the  one you love, love the one you’re with…” echoes Stephen Stills’ voice.  Unfortunately, in my imagination, its coming out of her record player on  her bed in her flat where we’re lying smoking cigarettes inside. A complete and total rotten bastard; this is what I am. I’m typing  this, and second girl from Connecticut with whom I have spent time in  London (CT2) or Ms Anne Taylor, we shall refer to her, is sleeping on  my bed looking pretty, and I have no idea why I’m telling all of you this.  All I can talk about are my stupid problems in my stupid, chemically­ enhanced, narcissistic hedonist’s life. I should be complaining about  something else, like perhaps the state of the environment, or something  like abortion/civil/gay/human/women’s/zebras’ rights or whatever it is  that us writers are on about these days. ‘…Perhaps a bit of fiction?’  thought Frater Albiorix as he summed up his Phildickian ramblings  stuck to the leather chair he had somehow acquired, across from the 

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pretty girl on his bed, next to the record player with the copy of John  Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band on the turntable. It was 06:23 and in seven  minutes was an alarm set to wake the lovely girl on his bed with whom  he held little bond other than mere residential proximity and a desire  for the alleviation of sexual tension. The keyboard would have to go  without depression for just a little while longer, whilst Frater Albiorix  would take it off its hands.

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ELEANOR RIGBY ONE: Liam, who collects rubbish. Liam is a rubbish collector. He gets very lonely quite often. He would go  to the pub, but the people there are frightening. He gets a look on his  face that scares women away. It’s the kind of blank stare that one  develops from forty­six years of sexual tension. Sometimes he insufflates  methyl­amphetamine, which he collects from the knife­weilding  Jamaican man at the second council flat where he collects rubbish.  Liam likes Methylamphetamine. Sometimes Liam stays up for days at a  time sitting in the driver’s seat of his rubbish­crushing compactor truck,  just pretending he’s driving while he waits to collect more rubbish.  Liam likes to collect rubbish. Rubbish is what’s been used. It’s what no  one wants anymore. Sometimes Liam thinks that people are rubbish…  and he wishes he could toss them in the back with all the other rubbish  in a neatly tied black bag. Sometimes he does. Then he insufflates his  methylamphetamine, sets fire to a Marlboro light cigarette and  masturbates at the steering wheel after parking outside the ASDA at  5am, as the compactor crushes the rubbish. When he is finished he gets  angry and scared, and must collect more rubbish… even if it is not on  his route. Then, after more compacting with stimulant drug indulgence,  Liam goes home, where he locks the doors and windows, closes all the  blinds and hides under the blanket on his mattress, staring at the  spiders on the ceiling.

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TWO: After Geneva It was rainy in London when I got back from Geneva… I walked outside around 2am for a cigarette with my cap and my blue  sweater just as the friendly security guard, an old possibly Jamaican  man walked out in his.  “Hello there” he said “How are you?” I asked “Still struggling… yourself?” “You always say that, ‘still struggling’” “Well I’ve been saying that since I’ve been speaking.” “That’s a long struggle,” I replied “Well when you’re struggling, you’ve always got something to work  towards.” I walked inside to write this down.

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THREE: Open Letter to John, Himself… Mother­ she had you… but you never had her?  You can make a guitar sing?  God is a concept by which we measure our pain? You don’t believe in Zimmerman?  You were the walrus, but now your John?  A working class hero is something to be? You are he as I am he as I am you and we are all together? Well, well, well.  Never has anyone before  Made such absurdities  And fantastical claims  Sound so profound… Bigger than jesus.

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ADDENDA Ode to Polyvinyl Chloride No. 1 The animals were fucking, Once again. Pehaps twice. The foxes screech like children in pain. It sounded primal and wild. Even over the sound  Of Marvin Gaye… ‘Let’s get it on…’ –instructions Motown: Making the animals groove… To the waves of static  Released in every dawning moment  Spinning at thirty­three and one third  Revolutions Per Minute.  I’m sure others are awake in this building, Hearing the same thing I’m hearing. Awoken by the sound  Of animals thrusting into eachother… But then the animals, Turned out the light, And drifted off into sleep, 105

To the sound of passing cars, And foxes fucking…

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Ode to Polyvinyl Chloride Discs No. 2 Why Polyvinyl Chloride discs? Because its alive. Because its got a life and a death; Sometimes it’ll get injured along the way But ‘shit happens’ as they say Sometimes we neglect them Sometimes they don’t talk right We abuse and neglect them We over protect them and  Never let them play… Normal ones Original? One­Eighty gram reissue? EP LP 10 inch 33 or a 45? Am I coloured and collectable? Am I rubbish to your ears? Am I from the one pound bin Or the shops wall all these years? When you take me home Will I be clear If I play at all? 107

If I had the money, I think I might buy them all…

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The Rain Came Down You only cried because the rain came down… You just didn’t know it yet. Unsober tears for no reason, Or love that just won’t end But that’s alright… Yeah I guess it’s alright. We all come to Our end Someday We all come to Our end Someday

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Ain’t Gonna Be Me She’s a full decorated veteran Of the war against herself She’s a part time lover Who needs full time help But it ain’t gonna be No it ain’t gonna be Me No I can’t be asked To stick around at your place When your old guy’s back And I can’t look him in the face No it ain’t gonna be It ain’t gonna be Me

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Promise Me Out in the cold for A Cigarette I try to remember The friends that I’ve met I hope I stay warm so I Don’t freeze to death You really loved me I’ll make a bet So why don’t you promise me I’ll be the one you’ll see If and when it don’t work out? You know that I’m leaving So I can forget The things that you said The things that you meant You know you ain’t sorry That we ever met You really loved me I’ll make a bet

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In the Very Next Room How do you do the things you do? How do you… How do you do the things you do… When he’s sleeping in the very next room? Yeah he’s sleeping in the very next room Yeah he’s sleeping in the very next room What am I supposed to do with you? Yeah you… What am I meant to do with you? Yeah you… I think that you get off on this Oh Yes I do Yes I think that you get off on this Because he’s sleeping in the very next room……

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You Make My World (Cold & Grey) Once I thought I met a girl That wouldn’t break my heart After you decide on that Is when the trouble starts I booked it out of old Calgary And back across the pond Now I wonder if it was wrong  Cause I’m the one that broke her heart Baby, You suck the colour right out my day You make my world cold and grey Don’t you know that you do? The day they arrested Pete Doherty I didn’t know who he was A man whose got the same hats as me Couldn’t be worth such fuss Now they liberated the ‘libertine’ They set his plungers free We may wear the same hat but old Petey Has got a different needle than me

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Untitled Love Song No. 12 & 35 These empty bottles Across my floor They’re just like the ones that were Here before The pretty lady Sleeping on my bed She’s a blonde with her Hair died red But I know I’ll never  See her again Yes I know I’ll never See her again I once knew a woman From far far away When I went to visit I  Decided that I’d stay This ring round my finger That I still wear It’s been a year now But I guess that I still care But I know I’ll never  See her again Yes I know I’ll never 114

See her again

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Still There The black mascara that you left On my pillow It’s still there. It’s still there It’s still there. It’s still there From the last time I said, ‘I love you’ It’s still there. It’s still there It’s still there. It’s still there And I know… And I know… And I know… I shouldn’t have said that… No, no. Your black football T­Shirt from Germany On my shelf It’s still there. It’s still there It’s still there. It’s still there From the time that you got mine dirty It’s still there. It’s still there It’s still there. It’s still there And I know… And I know… And I know… I shouldn’t have kept that… 116

No, no.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This Reader is the most minimal yet thoroughly comprehensive  compilation of my work so far. To provide context for the Portfolio,  everything after the Third Segment (Dramatic Epilogue & Addenda),  both my pseudomemoirs and previous short story/poetry are included in  abridged states.  The essential product put forth is insight into confessional  narcissistic self­loathing, fearfully and half­heartedly masked under  pseudonyms, presented with a design to provide visual novelty, willed  into the physical universe as a chunk of strange word art written by a  character­author detached from his own self identity and self  responsibility after years of experiencing the feelings of shame and guilt  in response to things both real and unreal. Some of the events in the story and poetry inspired by the story  are based on real events. These events are meant to be presented in a  way such that the reader is experiencing the character­authors’  experience first hand, rather than just hearing about things happening  to some guy. The idea of this writing is to say, ‘I’m just like you, and you  can feel this to.’ to everyone that reads it, and then hope its actually true.  The goal is perhaps deconstruction of the judgemental ego in the 

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readers, and to promote open­mindedness and thus thoughts such as  ideas, as to create a better world. 

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