charnel equipment. pall supply. tomb appraisal. bier boutique. coffin corner. catafalque choice. catacomb clothing. mausoleum model. funeral fashions. embalming endowment. urn upgrades. rigor-mortis raiment. ossuary operators. necro-science. necro-supply. necro-designer kits. the necro-apotheke. necro-suits. swanky sepulchre swag. no morgue muffler on the morgue mobile. The Necropolitan. shovels r us. formaldehyde foul-up spray. limb bungee for windy days. hearse hubcaps. the corpse fountain. stones ‘n’ bones. quicklime. Tower Of Silence. the body won't keep. Valhalla or bust. compost station. WORM WARRIORS!!! Uncle Howie in a box. It took Henry all of one day to scrub the body smell from the basement room. They say to work with what you've been given. Carrion Inc. you're a mouldering miracle manifold. you pulp my days to mush and then you stuff them with delusion. no piety shoveled upon the unknown. no more the lack of familiarity. the earth is already full of dead people and there's more coming. have issues with the basics? flesh is not an answer. however you toss it the die still lands with one of those numbers facing up. only as strong as the weakest link. one right knee. one left knee. one spinal vertebra C1. Still Life With Specimens. squishy squeaky puppet. the I Is painted in a corner. don't think you can move that car. tires are flat. (cheeky future recovery artists won't bail you out again some day.) Now that he'd got the rooms emptied Henry began to take notice of the outside view. Well it must have always been there but the idea of "seeing" it was like a plague to him because he couldn't do anything except "look" and "looking" was like being branded with a hot poker so he'd adopted a tunnel vision method which made things easier but not as easy as he'd wished. With care Henry tried to close the visual position the virtual ocular aperture parade with a vicarious necrotic suture. He'd noticed that at street level there were people who passed down below who seemed unaware of him manning their stations without instructions or uniforms or lists of tasks to perform. He saw them walk but never saw where it was they went or what they did there. They avoided the holes. Holes took up much of the visual department. Still Life With Mushrooms. mushroom man. i am the eye of the mushroom. i am the eating. i am the swallowed. i am the dissolving. Henry thought about the mechanics of vision, its rules, how it operates, how it moves from here to there without ever seeming to move at all. Your vision is always trapped. You cannot look backwards. Least of all into yourself. He saw a collapsible flat-screen/unfurlable selfscan of multiple attendant possibilities without direction because at the very base of whatever structure he sensed was there was no base as in pantheistic soup. Desubstantiate Vishvarupa army stew. The processed gibbered like gibbons in the mind-jungle and swung from limp thoughts like vines in no particular direction. Henry surmised he was woefully prepared for the startling nakedness that was inside the cover, as it were, now seen from the outside and with no sense of predicted outcome. Escape yea, but unto what? And from where? And into where? There was a reason for all these words, he supposed. Unmasked the thoughtless awareness moved about like a monitor lizard digesting a satisfying meal of flesh, now lazily looking for dessert. Henry was already juiced and marinated. And he knew it having seen the way it turned out whenever he looked in the mirror. Henry mused. There'd be a few chaotic squirms, blip, a pause, a cogitating lag, a desultory jouissance, a gelatinous pulpy suspension, discharge and exudation of vital matter, the sounds of salivating and swallowing, a momentary ataraxia, an Ecclesiastical sigh, a balanced rumination, a satisfied evacuation, a final flatus, a microscopic intestinal spreading and disseminating of unaccountable disarray, pare the seed to the germ, expunge the vitamins, collapse the polarities, scrape the bony surfaces to give an extra shine, and then hup-hup-hup they go, an energetic application of crystal ships and ferrying will-o'-the-wisps barge across the Styx. Uncured Meat Wears You. you fret about the now because you just don't know. the bone-erasers. future fertilizer. down to bracelets and ankles. the bell is rung. Death Spa. blow your top at death spa. eat your heart out—Death Spa! unwind, unravel, untangle the mortal coil at death spa. come to death spa cause you're already dead. check in but don't check out at death spa. hit the snooze bar at Death Spa today. now in backlit chic. enliven your cadaver. Death Extension. Deathstyle. up close and personal—Death Spa. decompose with the best. muse to mush. skeletal furniture for your new bones. Born To Be Ghosts. Henry thought that death wouldn't be so bad if you could skip the dying part. He'd found it difficult to pinpoint its advent specifically the exact placement and state of being that produced a viable corpse. Henry was aware that he was missing the boat so to speak. The experience was similar to, say, finding oneself compromised in an airport, between places, in a sort of limbo. The small bag they give you is severely limited in its capacity which is also similar to the airport experience though the resemblance continues toward gruesome like trying to pack meat chunks into a confined space by pressing it into place and then seeing it push out in another spot because of the plastic bag limitations and so on. Eventually you would have to discard something. Henry thought that life might be divisible into things like trying to pack meat and things like flying and a few activities in-between. Death was another thing altogether. He couldn't see how it would fit in. All this "today" seems like nothing more than a simple mimeographed scrap with a few spaces in which to enter words, yet, strangely, at the end of the sheet there is a legal warning with highfalutin' legalese threatening dire consequences should one not agree to the stated article and sign on the dotted line or at the according space and return the form to a place and address which is unknown or intentionally blank—you should've read the fine print, Henry. In a generic Progress Of The Soul Of Henry we see the stages of Henry's conversion to New Henry. We shall call New Henry NH. NH is the "next man". NH represents the basic waking up to, uh, reality. NH is potentially engaged in a hopeful pursuit, free to hitch or discard and restart on another trail. He is not without illusions but is open to changing his mind. NH is optimistic, sanguine, candid, and receptive. If there is a cup that needs flowing over with good tidings he is your man. And he is willing to alter himself if it helps fulfill the requirement that saves all beings and elevates their consciousness to cosmic bliss. He really really tries to work with the pure undiluted information he has caught glimpses of, and to which he ascribes causes, and regards with high reverence. He is seeking liberation and transcendence. In his habitual way he fantasizes about possible realities and idealisms, so far he is still merely illusory Henry, but as far as he knows he is genuine. Now, because Carnality Inc. frowns on this state of affairs it sends out legions of seasoned professional sensory impressions as so many connected dots, flashing snapshots of highly magnified local perturbation which then cut out to long shots of broad vistas imprinted with panoramic skies and promotional landscapes. Non-thinking mouseclick immersion. The metaprogram is fused to consciousness as a telos of inexorable movement, a feeling that "something" is being done...exciting isn't it? In the next stage of Henry's progress, observant but contained and isolated, he begins to detach from his persona, which thrashes about amid usual external circumstance, feeling as if under a barrage of confusing mental propensities and urges it doesn't quite fathom or endorse, while it chooses from a palette of learned behaviours and cautious reasonings. He can't understand why he is having so many obstacles placed strategically in his path. His persona has developed a dogged resignation that searches for scraps of meaning and direction. So, Henry has come to question the reality of his first postulate, which is, you need to get somewhere, you're not fast enough, better get a move on...you must decide, decide, decide...time is running out...on and on. And then he remembers the fragrance of gardenias and a moment in the garden with Margaret. He thinks there must be answers there, in that moment, with Margaret. But since Margaret possibly still existed (on paper) there was also the insistence of "getting" in the sense of attainment, of owning something that was apart, discrete, and severed. It was a short-term storage problem, certain to infect the unfillable soul with remorse and disappearance in short order. Whatchagoingtodo? I think therefore I am confused. I must work, I must haste, I must raise living from basically inert matter which like myself wants to remain inert. NH floats on eddies of incoming and outgoing drivel. He strives for a clear contextualized field even if the dimensions and fundamental elements are zero. Zero makes sense to him as he believes all the fuss is about nothing. But his opinion does not amount to a hill of beans. The wavicles continue doing what they do regardless of NH. His life is ripe with truisms. He begins to piece together a plausible universe which has a direct practical application to his existence and that of others as well. There is not much to go on. Visuals are suspect, especially the motion-inducing oculomotor spasms of being-in-the-world. It seems a trick. Balance and equilibrium. As if he was spun on all axes by blind idiot gods or by whoever was laughing at him from behind a cold glass eye. Henry set out to manufacture and purvey a telling which would account for this illusory state of existence. If he was to assume that reality was an ongoing serial fiction, perhaps a multi-sourced synthetic consensus bundle, he thought that he could be the author of his own "personal" serialized existence if he had sufficient latitude to adjust the contents of his perspective—his forced place-taking—via the integration of daydream fragments, pretend personalities, nostalgic residue, and acquired habits masticated by the flesh-organism. The "thought bubbles" of solipsistic insights and diaristic redundant oral narration of which there seems no end settled over the raw existence to form a layer of interdisconnected wordy perspectives and theories, randomly ascribed a pretended "line of thought" or easily segmented progression having the shape of a continuum. It was "thick" with unreleased potential and the original hacked-out parts of the confession crowded and overlapped at times until the fissure was so extreme that it shut down the machinery of animative excitation altogether which was then followed by the intrusion of a restart, redirection, and improvised pretence of moving on to the mindless forensic hunting for subject-object elimination, i.e. some kind of unification. Unable to sustain that posture of zealous professionalism Henry's persona returns to a one-thing-follows-another type of melodramatic imposition. He must struggle to be and become, to define terms of existence, to experience and survive the bomb-blast of information which—even now—is quantum hacked to smithereens exhausting all probability and causation models and descending into a numberless mystery, unupdatable. Henry's "embodiment" has none of the certainties of known substance distinguished from mind, and no "standard" autonomy or intellectual image formation does it provide. It's a late arrival to his reconstructed lifestory at best. How it's to be extricated from the debris within the midden of illusory formation remains the chief challenge of the current life review process. Henry sees integration, separation, and a nuanced dance of collapse and resurrection. Objects and features appear to operate according to an intertwined dependant origination yet this is merely his sensory apparatuses operating on their own behind his back...or not operating...seemingly wireless and innocently privatized by a willing ingenue-performer establishment. He peers out from behind the glassy panes and senses a suspended cast-apart otherness he thinks is himself on the near side of an invisible boundary. It's a closed-circuit system that has endured long enough to recognize itself as an entity. The midden. smart dust speck. breathing encyclopedia. bio-gizmo. gadget gambol. thing, ring-a-ding ding. wired for civilization. gene machine. microbe cartoon. generalized pan-linguistic kit. goofball par excellence. the choir boy. a solo Muppet. live! on this channel mutant mobility. spastic on a skateboard. pure animal playpen. the primate channel. awesome monkey. porridge of darwin. non-lingual grunt expert. random media pavilion. talking bunkum. tank of error. walkin' stew. the physical contraption. pinch me, poke me, squeeze me, slap me, box my ears, jab my eyes, kick my shins, pull my hair, sock me in my mouth, break my legs, my arms, my fingers, strain my neck, whack a kidney, club the tendons, a baseball bat across the kneecaps, hit the shin, punch the gut, rub salt in the eyes, pulled fingernails, strapped into a chair and beaten, kneecapped, plastic-bag suffocation, pull the teeth out with pliers, crushed trachea, severed fingers, bottle of acid poured over the head, a slit throat, cigarette burns, a red-hot poker stuck up the anus or in the vagina, patches of skin ripped off, balls or tongue cut off with a rusty razor blade, immobilized and set on fire. upset vase of July flowers. Henry had managed to ignore his previous life for an astounding length of time, nearly two years, until he began to sense that something wasn't right. He noticed a crack in the pulsing dioramic hologram that kept pace with him and found that he was also in pieces. yes it happened, but why? some call it the "frontier of meat", the skin, it wigs out now and then, gets squirmy, bundled up in a suit or a dress, a held-together motley but whose purposeful semblance of an "is-ness" was a vaguely congealing amassment of things falling into place, steeped in formative "front matter" and then wrung out through the wringer, and whatever it is that is Henry is also thereby formed and slowly magnified into the life-sized spectre he recognizes as an "I". The outline is flexible. Henry attempts to maintain the functional forgetfulness of whatever wasn't relevant to the task at hand and that went for everything else as well. Fighting the program. His failing engagement with his own life, its theatre of operations, and its supposed exigencies. So, in another period of unknown time, a hazy limbo period and general absence, Henry yet again finds himself frustrated and lost, a helpless prisoner, a bystander, with no clue, no contact, and no reliably solid place around which to veer ostensibly as if in-the-know though cagey. It wasn't the script of hammered-out or home-rolled-by-hand scratchings-in-a-notebook type of persona conflict, no, this was outright containment, limitations of perspective, unknown strictures and regulations, a whole different system, alien and new, not at all like the old system when he could simply push on a handle and exit the building, walk around in a city and look at the scenery, smiling skies decant ethereal nectar into departing goblets of fugitive afterglow. Henry remembers the last time he watched the news. At the time he was disgusted, he thought he was being mind-shafted with globalist spin through the square on the wall. All you saw was what you were shown. It felt like a shell game. It alienated him from the world. Everything became "fake". Imposters. Cutouts. X is not here in this place. "Real" lies elsewhere. But you must go there to see it. And by the time you get there it will be on the run. Real is transitory repository. Not in language. No shorthand cool points. No signifiers. No culturo-linguistic in-jokes. Void of tags. Analysis in baby carriers. Sub-text not on the menu. Snap shot, in transit. Real, stateless in a state. About to go off the rails. Drifting against the arrow. Disintegrated into the flow. Tackily pasted together like bits of newspaper and broken bottles. Real seems to actually be coming apart because of "lies". That's what I get when I bash it down—lies have ruined real. But were they "real" lies? As in—here: remember this...Why "lies" at all when the very notion of "real" is nothing but trouble the way we've learned to look at it? Therefore (one year later) Henry doesn't watch the news or read newspapers anymore. He leaves it alone. He's swept clean, he has blanched his sheets, he has filled the cracks, painted the doors and window sills, trimmed his nails, he's sent that old baggage down the river with a message in a bottle tied around its neck: "New information wanted, inquire within, send free sample." He stares vacantly into the empty room and wonders when the "other" will arrive. He hopes it likes to play cards and doesn't have a gun. Ism. He'd found it almost impossible to fathom waking up in his body every morning, ill will streams into the complaint department, things loom, the postcards of pushed philosophical payloads and their contrived subtexts, a freaky breakdown of the narrative curve, his identification being called into question...nothing seemed recognizable...so like an unpaid extra in what might go on to become the movie of his life Henry performed the requisite tasks according to his life script, he links the imaginary images together, he turns the pages of something to do, otherwise nothing happens...nothing...and it's stupid...disturbing...what’s behind the scenes operating the levers? The face of Nothing doesn't look at all like Nothing. it doesn't look like what Nothing should look like...it's only a screamy bony face jabbering genius...The flowing is jangled, it's off-balance, it hesitates and stops, it regurgitates and reverses, it is tentative and impulsive, the scenes are appallingly banal, not a stick of quality in the lot of it, and Nothing sits as well with it as anything else possibly could, a code of continuing contradiction. The Whole Enchilada...turn it over and look at it...a bulwark of irrationality parading as conventional wisdom. The illusory holographic performance seemed to pack his head like cheese-doodles in a vacuum-shucked bag until the cheese-doodles nearly became a phenomenal ball of self-regard thus passing through the orifice of eclectic transmutation, severed from the spurious mundane, and winging its way into the great glass sky of the mind. And then the parade stopped and slowly the magic faded away and he was nobody again, a two-legged contraption walking around in a hallucination and there was nowhere he could feel any better than here and the show was over until the next flash of boredom would send him back to the terminal. But in terms of alternatives...try something else? try another dead-end, another short-cut to getting nowhere? a wild goose chase after spiritual medals and material gain? and ignoring the parts that don't fit to watch the ancestor cults beat the bodies with brooms? His thoughts were a barf-fest longing for death so as to end it and maybe get a new part in the play, one that lasts a little longer, a bigger part, one with more pow and pizazz, any big luxury deal but not the endless worry about how one's going to make it to the next resting place without a ticket. just to invest in a very fancy set of machine parts that purr along in perpetuity and need no fixing or eventual replacement or emptying into a trash can when done...no he thought not that...instead...sounds a right idea...track down the author who thought this mess up and string him/her from the highest yardarm in all hell here after the process of excising the rotten bits is completed. The Invisible Bandwidth Sucks You In. trapped in virtual rehabilitation realm. stillborn. premature fizzle. the bubble burst. broken gizmo. scrubbed out. superfund site. condemned. don't wriggle. low marks. promise ignites clothing. only slightly warmed-over. do causing does. self-massaging knot. lubricious to a fault. bad motor oil. clingy. marionette of the mimeograph. endlessly replayed stunt. reusable goo. mystery process. tapestry of misery. heart-choking substances. too much pepper in the soup. dem dry bones suh. ah don' wanna. bland but more-ish. a fire with no fuel. invisible dirt. enormous blob fantasia. dreamscum appears. shoulda stuck to yer billy clubs. red tape. gravy trains. smoking pistolas. silver-pointed saber lines. allergic excrescense. bombs in an air stream. cooties. extreme allergy. shut-down. retrovirus. reluctant martyr. mouse to mouse interface. doing laps against the fabric. fake zen. you have been way too dumb. the masters of dumb. a dumber than thou relationship. multifaceted simplistic dumb. final algorithm killer app. quantum dumb. Pretty soon the sticker will come off the globe and "you" will find yourself in...ask lovesick Henry...he's been learning the ropes...and by 'ropes', of course, I mean 'ropes'...having your fortune foretold is like swinging in the breeze...casting lots chooses "you" every time...don't take it personally even if they call you out by your most secret name...if you can't accept the results of their survey politely refuse to participate...climb off the gallows...email Nostradamus with your rebuttal...clam up on the job...climb back into your shell and pretend to be asleep...use the special personalized equipment you brought...make ready and show up for work on time...perform the basic protocols flawlessly...endure the event horizon...your every day a different persona at work..."you" are cleared for take-off...proceed without a calling-card as you've done many times before...less of the moving on of it...please shut off your lights...please come to a full stop...please disconnect from the host...please be careful when opening the overhead compartments as contents may have shifted during your flight...Henry's not home...there's a sticky note on his door...it says "Back in 15 minutes"... i totally dig the worm warriors thing...i see them lining up and formin worm slam dance party lines and just munchin munchin munchn their way to my brain...feelin so weak!...feelin so fragile! otherwise...the writin is outta this world...i am readin!...all in love...the book probably will get millions more readers for a long long time to come...that is dantes youknowwhattyamean?...it is for realzies what a book should be...not the other gobbledygook opera excreted out there...the inferno is so far ahead...all the other books look like crap...even the odyssey and the iliad...bourgeois soup...i used to think the latter were awesome...now they are just boring crap...still-lot better than the best seller list!...god me just imaginin readin harry potter...oh man...juss do not go there...!...claim the inferno &, as par linkage, more popular and better known book,as your nemesis...not the ones that i should be a diggin all day...sheesh! by the by much readin some words on...love letters...now...another paradigm shifter and used stuff bin acquisition...O Herr Gott, mein seel, mein geist, is fed...ma thin tellin o the worm warrior slam dance party cosa gets ma schnozz movin in cognitive regard at all!...stifled stoopid voice wrote chasin squiggly worms aroun from befor...only crap you can rub yer toetips on to feel up what is IT, the pan-ultimate sumpn or other just WILL HAVE TO DO?...the flatness of slick footwear crownin upon ma toetip fingermaw chicobandit me still rubs synap, word, and other jocular fondle goods and play things i should not touch, all over soft and fine eyed truffles of ma heart and soule* upon the pages of this pamphlet...angela likes it a lot dante, the myour younger shouldna yer older be?...i is the Angela test? To git yer brains slapped aroun the multirude of interchangin and clarificatory reflective and refractofy surfusses and surfissii?...ma Angela, she calls me out on that...g, if you likethink ma commentary it was her rulin...Yes Lord Acton & the Luke...It was wrestled outta Paddy's Day angst...Marcel Ghostwriter mein schweinherd faster yah snort mah gokum, faster yah die, yah snort!