The Dark Philosopher Takes A Break

"Only as the sun faded and I turned to go did I realize how far I'd come." - me

The Cage

Experts and authority figures are an essential component of the following, in that their knowledge and the promise of the possibilities of further knowledge to come that will encompass all aspects of existence is the binding element which gives heft and tactile strength to the cage. They are the iron in the bars.

When one is told that they are barely more than a savage whose fundamental drives - survival and procreation (hitching one's genetic material to the conveyor belt of time) - are all that account for their myriad desires and needs, one sees the cage as their comfortable and possibly even poetically apt home.

When one is told that their emotions and deeper musings are simply extrapolations of chemical and electrical impulses from an oddly (and seemingly unmotivated) expanded brain which mean nothing beyond their initial impetus, those being the base reactions of an animal to their surroundings, horizons shrink, possibilities die, and the cage has become a boundary that simply seems inherently right, all considered, for only the mad need roam beyond.

When one is told that the world is and always will be a garbage heap of doom and despair which is useless to struggle against and that only delusional fools can hold hope that something else could be raised in its place, the cage becomes not simply a confinement but a ballast against the worst that the outside might hurl against the structure, and the comfort of knowing all of the other prisoners are tucked nicely away in fellowship to such lies gives an illusion of warmth to the undying and pervasive cold.

The Lie

It was all about control, controlling the future and the possibilities that those with vision had shared with those that steer the direction of the society that had been shaped and who still retained the power behind all the veils unable to be pierced by the masses.  There were chances ahead that might unseat the fulfillment of the long reaching goals contained in the plan and these must be headed off early and fully so as to persevere into the final stages of the endeavor.

The contradictions inherent in such were therefore hidden to those who espoused the wise saying about history and knowledge of such preventing repetition of its worst outcomes, for history itself was a construct that elided specifics holding lessons that could not be known and therefore would most likely need to be learned again.

For example, the idea that the progress of this supposedly modern society was a climbing line from the ugly and dark past to the current brilliance and then on to the hint of even brighter futures that had no breaks, no valleys and peaks from start to now was a carefully minded myth that masked the very dangers that were faced daily in this world which had in the past taken it all down and necessitated restarting from nearly nothing, so therefore it was almost guaranteed that the plunge would come again, for there was no serious preparation for such in the occluded faces of its previous realities.

And What Of The World?

His brain having been recently transferred to a container made of a metallic substance mined on the far edge of the matter/time universe that we know, he was ready for the next stage of his voyage, a passage out and into the timeless, the matterless, the void of voids that confounded the very foundations of the knowledge he had long ago left behind with his supposedly preserved original body on a planet he could barely recall.

It had all been a steady progression of wonders that stepped him from the common of his own world to that of others nearby, with forms of both life an nonliving materials that broke against his previous conceptions of the possible, gradually at first and then at an increasing pace outwards to things that he would never have come close to understanding if he had simply leapt to them from his starting point.

Now even those astounding things were to be left behind as he moved to the next ring of understanding where all that he had seen thus far, with its myriad variances boggling he who embraced them, would be but a small subset of the knowledge yet to be shown and experienced and perhaps even understood in the revelations to come.

He was no longer who he had been before he left on the trip and he would soon not be the being that he currently was.  What would the end result be?  What type of thinking entity would emerge at the end of this unfathomable journey that he had undertaken?

That was the point of the trip, at least for those providing for his passage.  To find out.

Artsy Fartsy

More attempts:

Effort

Spent some time on this today but it refuses to be art!

Conform to my expectations!  Where's the magic, dammit?!!

The Takeover

When the big ships filled the sky and panic swept across the planet there were a few rallying cries, but mostly there was confusion.  Many didn't know but those in charge had been secretly arranging their own version  of this scenario for a long time and had been beat to the punch by the reality that unfolded.  The questions bandied about behind the scenes were along the lines of who decided to jump the gun and could this possibly be a "real world" event. The plan to unite the world populace under the auspices of fighting a collective enemy had missed its chance.

So those rallying cries went for naught, seeing as how the enemy was real and so unfathomably beyond any reprisal.  Besides, as it soon was communicated, this wasn't supposed to be a bad thing, this takeover.  As the Ambassador was to explain shortly after the initial appearances to a silent and enraptured world, the appropriate response should be one of pride and hope for the future.  It seems that the planet had excelled and was considered a guaranteed profit maker by those who could see the potential possibilities in a small, slightly weird world that could do so well.  They were here to help us, help us clear out the problems and reinforce the better aspects. Together with them we would become one of the best in the galaxy, and if we only knew what that meant and against whom we were ranked, we would surely be grateful for the chance.

Though there were to be no questions, one in attendance was able to project one loud enough to be absorbed by the translating device placed on stage, which was then spewed back out in the Ambassador's own language.  He seemed quite befuddled that it was a question at all.

"What is this product that we are so adept at producing?"

Well, it seemed that the galaxy around us was hungry for the one thing that we had fully and globally learned to apply ourselves to the creation of:  Suffering and Death.

Garbage Day

Long before the sun rose the big trucks were on the move, loud and rumbly, moving out like cells into the circulation of the streets.  In the city some scrambled at the last minute to get their containers to the curb in time to receive their weekly allotment.

It had been nearly two years now since the end of what was called "the free ride" by those wielding the stick of power, when everything was turned upside down.  Now garbage was mined from the landfills, loaded into the trucks, and dispersed to the residents of the city to do with as they would.

Most just burned it all, which is why the dank miasma hung about nearly everywhere and always. Many attempted to create art with it yet few were successful, and those that failed merely transmogrified the garbage into another state of garbage.  One had figured out how to turn it into bins for garbage that could then be filled and neatly stacked wherever one might find the space. But it was a losing game, for it just kept coming with no end in sight.

The Purge

The time had come.  He had feared it might while knowing that it would.  It was all his fault, all of his own doing.  He had berated himself as it was happening, telling himself that he was setting it all up for the big fall, but he had been enmeshed in a manipulation of his own devising and enjoyed the fog of enticement and confusion that he had spread about himself. 

Things could not remain as they were.  

It was all about a woman, of course, one that he had been disinterested in at first, followed by a mild curiosity and a certainty of cuteness.  This was a progression that for him tended to telegraph what would become a great entanglement.  It all suddenly exploded one night when absolutely nothing of note occurred.  

He was half sure that she dabbled in witchcraft and that when she shook his hand in that odd way she had taken something from him, something that she brought back to her home and used in performing some cheap ritual that she didn't even believe in.  There had been a physical manifestation to it as well, if you took the story all of the way.  When he arrived home that night, unsure and confounded, he had found an odd traveler on his back, a weird insect that he had never seen before, at least not in this region and not of that size.  He now regretted not keeping it, not studying it, not watching for it to reveal its depth of significance.

But that was all bullshit, really.  There had been no spell beyond the one that he had cast over himself seemingly starting that very night.  He built her up beyond anything that he had actually been able to observe of her.  He placed her on a throne in his heart and soul and convinced himself that they were destined to be and that she was something beyond the usual attraction, someone whom he had known in a previous life or somehow familiar throughout the entirety of all time, a mythic and multiple connection that had nothing to do with the physical now but had everything to do with the underlying truth.  It built to the point of forcing a fight or flight reaction upon him whenever he was aware that she was near.  And in the end that construction had showed its ugly falsity in the face of the world as it was.  There was no hope.  There would be no connection at all, no assurance that what was in his head was even close to real.  It was all a sham.

And therefore, for his own sake, his sanity and continued existence, he began the process of tearing it all down and cursing every piece of it as it came apart and he cast it into the pit of nothing, of forgetting, of never living again.  He had to do what he could to convince himself that she had never in fact existed at all and that anything that he might encounter of her in the future was just another of life's ugly jokes, a person of the flesh who only barely reflected that presence that he had held to such lofty heights and worshipped, groveling at her feet.

It was going to be a long process  But it was a matter of life and death, after all.

The Boost

It was one of those dreams, rare it would seem, where he found someone, a woman he had never seen in real life, and within a very short span of dreamtime it was obvious that they were in love, he with her and she with him, so completely that it consumed every corner of awareness and it was like nothing that the waking world had ever come close to.  The little laughs and the intimacy of the understandings were powerful and permeated all that followed.

And it was one of those dreams where the dreamer knew that it was a dream while within it, aware that eventually he would wake to find that there was no such vessel for the feelings that lingered. But it didn't matter, it was not sad, for he was glad to know that feeling and to have it carry him through the rest of his day for as far as it would take him.

He'd learned lessons in all of these years of sleep. He knew that pining for what the other world had to offer was pointless, that the dream held more than a glimpse of something real, it was actually enough to give him life in the waking.  These things gifted in dreams are of their realm and that is the way of it, but that was fine.  If he could still feel them as time went on, as hope died, it was a chance to capture solace and renewal in the face of the worst that this world had to give.  And for that he was forever grateful and worshipped the sleep afforded him as it came, never questioning its worth, and in fact would fight to the death for the privilege of laying down to it, the best lover.

To love to dream or to dream to love.

Bah!

I just wasted a few hours trying to get audio from my laptop.  Somehow the speakers no longer work, but the outputs to other devices are fine.   I then made the mistake of tweaking a setting a little deeper on the software mixer and suddenly it was all gone and nothing brought it back...until I got in the time machine and returned to Monday, before I messed with it, and now I'm back to square one and am resolved to accept it.

Brief Thoughts For Today:

Tragedy played upon the stage of illusion.

Hall of funhouse mirrors being the freakshow exit.

So, This Blog

This'll be standard bloggy stuff for a while, seeing as how I'm traveling with little net access.

Just jumping on here to say I did make it out of Denver.

The Trip

My fear of having only a 44 minute layover in Denver, with visions of having to book across this giant sprawl to catch my connection, has been turned on its head.

I stepped off my plane to see that the next flight that was to be leaving at 3:44 is, for some fucked up reason surely, now leaving at 7:50.  There is nothing else on the board like this, all other delays are an hour or less.  Did they lose a plane?

And then it kicked along to 8:06.  It's only now just past six.  This is tough.  If it ends up cancelled there will be madness.  Everyone who was to be on that flight has been lingering here all this time and I make no promises as to how this will all shake out. 

The Lake

It was fucking cold and they were fucking crazy, but that's to be expected, for these are the trappings of a life on the edge, looking for meaning while surrounded by weirdness.  What else is there to do in the dead of winter when the warnings say that your skin will die if you are stupid enough?

Get out on that lake.

That lake so deep and sweet in those days of summer gone, refreshing no more as it's solid as solid can be, so far down that you'd need something powerful to break it, like dynamite. Walk for a while and you realize that you're now further from anyone or anything than you can get without getting out of town altogether.  And that goddamn wind is a hell of a bitch and those idiot warnings are real now and you're fucking lucky you came prepared.

There's all kinds of shit out there that suddenly comes into view out of nowhere and puzzles you until its revealed in closeness.  Is that a fucking couch?  Someone dragged a giant couch out here. That took a lot of energy.

And they just kept going, long past the point where any of them thought better of it, and none knew just how long that had been.  But then ahead was a sick green glow and it was hard to tell if it was above or below the surface of the ice until they were standing on it and it became obvious.  In the ice, somewhere deep but not too deep was some shadow in front of that glow or maybe it was just the source of it.  It played tricks on the eyes so that it never seemed the same from one moment to the next and no one could come close to nailing down what it might have been, let alone what it was.

And then the glow was gone and it was darker than they had ever seen as their eyes thirsted for what they didn't realize that they had become so accustomed to.  They looked around for a long time before the distant lights returned and they could see their own foreign selves standing around on that nothing of a landscape, freezing it seemed.  It was time to go back.

They were pretty sure that they were just fucking crazy.

The Roaring Sky

It wasn't often that you would hear a large jet in the sky, let alone three in one morning.  This wasn't one of the well traveled routes or larger cities with a place for them to come and go.  But this day there was something different going on and it made him wonder.

Was there some atmospheric anomaly that was causing planes that were always there yet less pronounced to drop lower and therefore become more prominent amidst the constant patter of the raindrops of winter on the roads and roofs outside? Or did this anomaly simply carry the sound from them further than usual and fill the wide space of grey with the low, long drone as they slowly made their way first within range, then without?

Then in the afternoon, though it was on the far side of the solstice and the days were meant to be longer, the sun disappeared altogether, and the light outside went from faint and dreary to dead and gone.  And the roar came again.  And it got louder and lingered on while first the windows and shelf items rattled and then the ground and everything loose upon the earth outside, and finally the blasting light not from the sun but from some infinitely brighter alien source that poured through every opening including the  badly settled cracks around those openings, and the loudness of the roar turned to a hum that never ended because it was produced in the head of the listener in place of what had once been their functional hearing.

Odds And Ends

Here's a T-shirt that I designed for MagicBox which was based on a greeting card that I found hilarious.  It had the caption "hares looking at ewe" with the appropriate illustration.  Re purposed for a message about digital signage it made absolutely no sense, but I like the hand drawn quality of the hares in contrast to all the sterile straight lines in the rest of the design.  (There's even a little Cynicalman in there!)

Looking back over the blog, I see that there were a few designs for They Won't Stay Dead which didn't make it here, so I'll just share them now:

Finally, here is what kicked off seniorsupermonster.com

I put this on the back of some shirts that I made and then had to follow up with the site which it alluded to.  It's still there in all its original glory, pretending to be a CD-ROM from a decade before its actual existence.  You'll need to tell your computer to allow all the high-tech hoverbuttons to work or else it will just sit there acting broken.  

I believe that I still have a pristine shirt stashed away in my T-shirt archive.  The day I start posting pics of that collection will be a sad day indeed.

And The Rest

Here are a the remaining bits from this digital archive:

The Hot Seat

We always had trouble holding on to bass players in Senior Supermonster.  Here are some of the better flyers I created in an attempt to entice the next recruit:

Variations

Here are most of the different flavors of the original monster created for various posters and such:

More Monsters

Since that original monster was to be the first among other supermonsters, I created a handful more over time.  These were mostly printed on stickers in hopes that obsessives like me would want to make sure to get every one ever made.

Ha.

And Then....

Senior Supermonster had been alive for a while as a real-deal/more than two people band, but it was only after it became a not-so-real deal that I came up with the first and still classic monster as well as the logo.  This was something that would continue to happen throughout the band's existence and nonexistence:  during the down times the graphic output would ramp up.

They Say It's A New Year

And here I am digging in the past.

These are the first few whacks with the digital brush from long ago: