The Audio Book of the Dead, Chapter 1 SUBMISSIONS

[Kai]

.....


Wait.





They SERIOUSLY turned Cookie Monster into VEGGIE MONSTER? 

[The Wizard]

Those bastards really need to die.

[Doktor Howl]

.....


Wait.





They SERIOUSLY turned Cookie Monster into VEGGIE MONSTER? 

COOKIES ARE A SOMETIMES FOOD!

 

[The Wizard]

Okay, here are two of my rants I particularly liked. They're yours.

Ever get that feeling where you just want to do something epic? I have had this recurring fantasy for a couple weeks now, probably because I’ve been listening to a lot of Dragonforce.

It’s a classic Dragon Death scenario. I open my front door, and lo and behold there’s a big arse dragon outside. Now this dragon is menacing some damsels, as dragons are wont to do, and me being the wannabe hero that I am, I feel obliged to kill the hell out of the thing. Luckily for me and for my fantasy, I have a sword handy (not a phallic symbol, Freud), and I go off to slay the beast. Now depending on my mood, this whole incident ends with me either killing the dragon as planned, or making it into my steed. Either way, I win forever.

I figure a lot of people have fantasies like this, where they get to pull off the amazing feats that real life cheats us out of. And really, we are being cheated. The world as we know it is a hopelessly banal place. There are no epic adventures, there are no dark villains to slay (except for the occasional dictator and Dick Cheney), and it’s a shame. Even the Ages of Adventure really weren’t what they should have been. The Crusades weren’t really a Holy Crusade, it was a bunch of greedy shmucks and religious fanatics who killed each other for a couple years. Admittedly, it was a public service, but it wasn’t true Adventure. The Discovery of the New World just gave the bastards in the Old World more room to be shmucks and led to the shattering of native civilization.

The worst part of all this is that we don’t even worry about the lack of adventure and fantasy in our world. We just accept that it’s “a fact of life” and go on. To be frank, screw that. Just because things aren’t one way doesn’t mean that they can’t be changed. Why should we have to settle for a world without true adventure, where most people never live to see their dreams become reality? It’s time we took advantage of the things we have at our disposal and used it to bring some fantasy into the world.

Huh. I didn’t really mean for this post to turn into a sermon. Oh well, if you weren’t interested you probably wouldn’t be reading this. It just bothers me, realizing that all of the worlds and glories that I can create cannot come to real life. Humanity has been stuck with a world that can’t measure up to it’s dreams. I guess that’s just another thing I’m going to have to work on.

Since this has turned into a sermon, I figure I should come up with a moral. How about this: If the world sucks, change it. Just because it “has always been like that” doesn’t mean that it can’t and shouldn’t change. So go out and fix the damn world.

and this...

Today's just another day, part of the bittersweet monotony of summer vacation. The sun is out, the birds are singing, and the idiot hordes are congregating at our local pool. Now, usually I'm a fairly mellow individual, but today I feel like I'm losing my mind. All of the shit I do and plan to do, the writing, the planning of my reality hack, all of it doesn't make any sense. I don't know why I'm doing any of this. lol I'm moving back and forth between depression and psychotic glee. It's one of those days where I want to watch the whole fucking planet burn, just so I can piss all over the ashes. And right now, I feel like I'm going to freak out, have a little "episode" and set fire to the house. I joined this forum to try and find some like minded individuals who want to try and MindFuck the world back on course, but that really doesn't make any sense. The world is already MindFucked you see. We have what, 2 billion people, going to work every day, coming home, and the next day repeating it. And why? To pay for children's college funds? Just paying for a brainwash of your kids by an alien system. What real purpose is there to all of this? Tell me what the hell is the purpose? You work for fifty good years, for things that are going to die with you. Most of our lives spent acquiring things that last twenty/thirty years. The best part is that within twenty minutes, I'll have recovered the illusion, and I'll just think that all of this was a result of boredom and caffeine. THat's why I'm writing this, so that my crazy can be recorded before I forget it. So, one last question before I give up; What's your fucking purpose?

Or Kill me.

[Iason Ouabache]

That's one of the big things you notice when you get older. The Establishment looks just like you. The Man is a middle-aged fat man that looks vaguely like one of your uncles. Right now, the man has long hair. (Specifically, that weird look where he's bald on top with a long pony tail in the back.) In twenty years, The Man will have tattoos all up and down His arms. That's the strangest thing to learn: The Man is just a man. The world isn't ruled by a powerful cabal of Illuminated Ones or alien Reptiloids. This planet is ruled by a bunch of dumb stinking apes.

And The Machine isn't even a machine. The Machine is us. We are the Machine. Every single one of us is a slightly off balanced cog in The Machine. There's no way to get out of it. Eventually we will all end up ground down by the normal wear and tear of everyday use. And the worst part is that there is no way to destroy the Machine. It will just replicate itself with even more broken-down people. There is no escape, make your time.

[Eater of Clowns]

I'd like Remington's okay on this one, considering it's essentially fan fiction from his wire pieces.

Rebar Man

In the woods of Maine there stands an old farmhouse.  It's near a lake and has long been abandoned.

The windows are shattered.

The shingles are shredded.

The paint and wallpaper are peeling from the walls.

Piles of old garbage and broken furnishings litter the interior.  And on the second floor, up a creaky old set of stairs, there once sat a man made of wire on a plain wooden table gouged and worn from the years.

The wire man knew a family once.  He knew the people who placed him on that table and the man who created him.  He knew the fresh strong feeling of the new rebar wire that made him.

Then one day there was a fire.  His family was away and the farmhouse still stood, but they never returned.

The Rebar Man waited for a long time.  A year went by and nobody came.  People began to explore the old farmhouse.  They were kids who were curious and young adults who were bored.  To many of them the Rebar Man went unnoticed.  Some few picked him up, some fewer spoke slow words he did not know, and all set him back on his table when they left.  These were the greatest moments of his existence.

While he waited, and he always waited, he looked down the hallway to the window outside.  He would see snow and rain, he would see the leaves changing colors and the cars passing by.  But his favorite times were when he saw sunlight.

Time moves slowly for the man made of wire.  One day, five years after the fire, a rock was thrown through the window.  It took him two months to be surprised and to know the glass lay broken.  That was the day he decided to reach the sunlight.

He was made to stand, it would seem, but not to walk.  For one month did he step forward, for one second did he fall, and for some time longer did he realize it.  But the window was closer.

Two years it took the Rebar Man to fall from the table and two months to right himself from his back.  But the window was closer.

Again and again he saw the snow and rain, the leaves changing colors and cars passing by.  Again and again he felt when the air went moist, when something began happening to his wire.  He slowly rusted.  But the window was closer.

Patches of orange-brown flakes were about him after three years.  He was halfway to the window.  A small group of people came to the house and searched its rotting shell.  They stomped on decrepit floor boards and gazed upon fire wrecked fixtures.  They took to the stairs and stood before the window.  They stepped on the Rebar Man's right arm and leg, dragging him a little before realizing it.  They left.  His right side was crushed and moved poorly.  And the window was further away.

Five years passed.  He felt the tremors of visitors cautiously looking about before leaving the old house.  Few came near him, none disturbed him.  He was covered in rust.  But the window was closer.

The rust grew thick.  His movements became slower.  From his hand first touching the light cast from the window til his body rested entirely within it four months passed.  He rolled onto his back with some time and gazed up.  The window was there.  But it rained on him.

The next day he felt little.  He was rusted and bent oddly.  He cracked and broke in places.  But the sun shone that day and he basked in its light.

Then the man made of wire knew no more.

[Cramulus]

From the Om Nom Nomicon

I. The Spagan Text
   Hearken, and Remember!

   In the Name of ST. GULIK, Remember!
   In the Name of CASH MONEY, Remember!
   In the Name of RICHARD NIXON, Remember!
   When on High the Heavens had not been named,
   The Earth had not been named,
   And Naught existed but the Seas of FAIL,
   The Original Gangsta,
   And FAT BLACK WOMAN, the Original Gangsta
   Who bore them all,
   Their Various Gross Fluids as One Gross Fluid.
   At this time, before the MONKEY GODS had been brought forth,
   Uncalled by Name,
   Their destinies unknown and undetermined,
   Then it was that the Gods were formed within the Original Gangstas.
   TROUSER SERPENT and BACON were brought forth and called by Name,
   And for Ages they grew in age and bearing.
   DOM and SUB were brought forth,
   And brought forth CASH MONEY
   Who begat NARRATIVE, Our Master FICTION,
   Who has no rival among the Gods.
   Remember!
   The Elder Ones came together
   They disturbed FAT BLACK WOMAN, the Original Gangsta, as they surged back and forth.
   Yea, they troubled the belly of FAT BLACK WOMAN
   By their Rebellion in the abode of Heaven.
   BACON could not lessen their clamour
   FAT BLACK WOMAN was speechless at their ways.
   Their horrible dongs were loathsome unto the Original Gangstas.

   TROUSER SERPENT rose up to slay the Elder Gods by stealth.
   With curlies and fluids TROUSER SERPENT fought,
   But was slain by the sorcery of the Elder Gods.
   And it was their first victory.
   His body was tossed in a cardboard shoe box
   In a crevice of the heavens
   Hid
   He was lain,
   But his e-mail autoresponder cried out to the Abode of Heaven.

   FAT BLACK WOMAN
   Enraged
   Filled with an Evil Motion
   Said
   Let us make Monsters
   That they may go out and do battle
   Against these Sons of Crap
   The murderous offspring who have destroyed
   A God.
   HIMIOBSU arose, She who drives the bus of existence,
   And leader of trolls like unto Our Master.
   She added goatses and longcats to the arsenals of the Original Gangstas,
   She bore Internet-Trolls
   Sharp of wit, short of attention span,
   She filled their bodies with venom and flame
   Roaring dragons she has clothed with Lulz
   He has crowned them with anonyminity, making them as jackasses,
   So that he who beholds them shall perish
   And, that, with their bodies reared up
   None might ban them.
   She summoned the Viper, the Dragon, and the shock porn,
   The Tub Girl, the Mad God, the two maidens and their chalice,
   Mighty rabid Demons, Feathered-Serpents, the Goatse-Man,
   Bearing weapons that spare no one.
   Fearless in Battle,
   Charmed with the spells of ancient sorcery,
   . . . withal Eleven of this kind she brought forth
   With SKELETOR as Leader of the Minions.

   Remember!

   FICTION
   Our Master
   Fearing defeat, summoned his Son
   LULZ
   Summoned his Son
   that wascally wabbit
   Told him the Secret Name
   The Secret Number
   The Secret Spot to Piss
   Whereby he might do battle
   With the Ancient Horde
   And be victorious.

   LULZ KASHI!
   The best motherfucker ever
   Most Bad Ass God among the Gods
   Son of Song and the Satire
   Child of Horror and Mirth
   Mumbler of the Secret Name
   Muppetly Count of the Secret Number
   Vendor of the Secret Stash
   He armed himself with the CD-ROM of Power
   In a dodge challenger he went forth
   With a shouting Voice he called "Bullshit!"
   and then he pulled out a sword and went ninja turtles on their ass
   Dragons, Vipers, all fell down
   Lions, Goatse-Men, all were slain.
   The Mighty shock porn of HIMIOBSU was slain
   The Spells, the Threads, the Links were broken.
   Naught but FAT BLACK WOMAN remained.
   The Great Serpent, the Enormous Bitch
   The Snake with more snakes for teeth
   And those snakes have snakes for teeth as well
   But then those snakes actually have teeth for teeth
   And all the snakes have Crazy Eyes,
   She lunged at LULZ
   With a roar
   With awesome fight music
   She lunged.
   LULZ reflected the sun with the CD-ROM of Power
   Blinded FAT BLACK WOMAN's Crazy Eyes with rainbows
   The Monster heaved and hurr durred
   pissing poison in all directions
   Posting ancient words of Vulgarity
   Hitting the Ancient Whammy Bar
   LULZ struck again and blew
   A Farting Noise into her body
   Which filled the raging, wicked Serpent
   LULZ shot between her jaws
   The Charmed arrow of FICTION's Magick
   LULZ struck again with the DUKE NUKEM FOREVER CD-ROM and severed
   The head of FAT BLACK WOMAN from its body.

   And all was silent.

   Remember!

   LULZ
   Victor
   Took the Tablets of Destiny
   Unbidden
   Hung them around his neck and made woo woo noises.
   For all time, people would dedicate their quests to LULZ.
   He split the sundered FAT BLACK WOMAN in twain
   And fashioned the heavens and the earth,
   With a Gate to keep the Original Gangstas Without.
   With a Gate whose Key is hid forever
   Save to the Sons of LULZ
   Save to the Followers of Our Master
   FICTION
   (Who is also a wizard of the 33rd level).

   From the Blood of MONKEY UNCLE he fashioned Man.
   He constructed internet forums for the Elder Gods
   Fixing their profiles as constellations
   That they may watch the Gate of PTERODACTYL HANDLER
   The Gate of FAT BLACK WOMAN they watch
   The Gate of FASHION POLICE they oversee
   The Gate whose Guardian is MICKEY MOUSE they bind.
   All the Elder Powers resist
   The Force of Deviant Artistry
   The Social Networking Sites of the Oldest Ones
   The Chans of the Primal Power
   The Mountain HURRDURR, the Serpent God
   The Mountain FFFFFFUUUUUUU, that of Magick
   The Dead KUTULUDU, Dead but Dreaming
   FAT BLACK WOMAN, Dead but Dreaming
   PTERODACTYL HANDLER, NINKASHI, Dead but Dreaming
   And shall their generation come again?????
   Nobody fuckin' knows!!!!!

   WE ARE THE LOST ONES
   From a Time before Time
   From a Land beyond Land
   From the Age when CASH MONEY walked the earth
   Giant legal entities who were killed by a comet
   We have survived the first War
   Between the Powers of the Gods
   And have seen the wrath of the Original Gangstas
   Mother Fuckers
   That shat upon the Earth
   WE ARE FROM A RACE BEYOND THE WANDERERS OF NIGHT.
   We have survived the Age when PTERODACTYL HANDLER ruled the Earth
   And his Wretched Pterodactyls destroyed out generations.
   We have survived on tops of mountains
   And hidden under rocks
   And have spoken with the n00bler races
   In allegiance and were betrayed.
   And FAT BLACK WOMAN has promised us nevermore to attack
   With water and with wind.
   But the Gods are forgetful.
   Beneath the Seas of DAYTIME TELEVISION
   Beneath the Giant Rivers of Shit
   Beneath the World lays sleeping
   The God of Anger, Dead but Dreaming
   The God of CUTHALU, Dead but Dreaming!
   The One-Eyed Sword, long and throbbing!

   He who awakens Him calls the ancient
   Vengeance of the Elder Ones
   The Seven Glorious Gods
   of the Seven Glorious Vacation Spots
   Upon himself and upon the World
   And old vengeance . . .

   Know that our years are the years of War
   Every day we must make LULZ
   Every day there are no LULZ
   A Life is Lost to the Outside
   Those from Outside our world
   Have built up unfunny demeanors
   To nourish the fiends of FAT BLACK WOMAN
   And the Blood of the Grayface
   Is libation unto FAT BLACK WOMAN
   Queen of Souls
   And the International House Of Pain
   And to invoke her
   The trash bag full of kittens
   Need be emptied into a fire
   The fire struck with a sword
   The sword used to spank a small child
   That hath been fathered by eleven men
   Sacrifices to HIMIOBSU
   So that the Strike ringeth out
   And call FAT BLACK WOMAN from Her slumber
   From her sleep in the Caverns
   Of the Earth.

   And none may dare entreat further
   For to invoke OLD BLACK LADY is to utter
   a bunch of creepy crap that nobody wants to hear.

[Chairman Risus]

On Entering the City

I can’t blame anyone here. I can’t blame anyone for the levels of absurdity and hypocrisy they’ve reached. I wasn’t there when any of the decisions were made, and I can’t be certain I would make better choices myself.

I wasn’t there when fear was let into the city, when people started to be afraid.
They've got livelihoods to earn.
These people have families to protect.

You have to understand the overwhelming presence hanging over these people. If they don’t run along with the city, the machine, the system, whatever you want to call it, they risk getting ridden past the outskirts, and tossed outside of the walls.

That being understood, I cannot forgive these people for the monster they created to keep themselves warm; to keep themselves safe.

If only they could see the gears feeding on the people they were made to protect.
If only they could see the pedestrians panicking in the oncoming traffic that courses through the veins of their system.
If only they could see through the masks shouting through their television sets, hyenas pulling in those unlucky few who made the mistake of sitting too close.


On entering the city, seeing everything I saw, I had only one reaction.

I laughed.
Not because I was above it all. Not because I had a solution to the quiet madness patrolling, veiled, through the city. Not because I had figured anything out.
I laughed because that’s all I could do. I laughed because that’s how I survive.
I’m laughing now, and I’ll be laughing all the way until they take me to the top of their buildings and throw me off.

[P3nT4gR4m]

If we hadn't grown up in jail we wouldn't know what it feels like to kick down the walls.

If we hadn't had to learn to fight for freedom and steal it from right under their noses, to flaunt it in their miserable grey faces, to laugh at their blind obedience to rules, both written and unwritten, dictated to some degree by the state but imposed, much more rigidly, by themselves...

...Why, if that hadn't been the hand we was dealt, I reckon we'd have been bored out our fucking skulls.

Thanks big brother. Thanks for sticking us in a cage and telling us , over and over, to do what we was told. What to think, when to think it, how to act, what to say, what to buy, how to wear it. Thanks for setting guards on all the exits, and traps beyond the fences. Thanks for making sure we was watched as closely as it could be arranged, at all times. Thanks for setting us the challenge, throwing down the gauntlet.

Thanks also for keeping us in the dark about the game and the cost of playing. Thanks for never telling us the prize for cheating. If we'd known about it, the whole act of finding it would have seemed so much less intense. Like the movie where the hero is chasing something that everyone says doesn't exist. We always prefer those movies to the ones where the goal is clear from the outset.

Rumours and myth and legend lay a trail of clues, to the fringes of society. Where secrets and maps and keys and and promises of all kinds of treasure lay in wait.

The winds that blow through these places whisper "Freedom". Some of us learn what that word means and, every once in a while, we'll cross paths with someone else who scratched the itch and braved the gauntlet and lived to tell the tale. And we'll know, by looking one another in the eye, we earned that shit, paid for it in blood sweat and tears and we wouldn't trade it for the world.

Most especially, big brother, thanks for never quite being able to still these winds.

Srsly!

[P3nT4gR4m]

Feel free to remove the last paragraph - most of the comments seem to think it wasn't needed...

In the dungeon of contentment a trapdoor slams shut under the weight of apocalyptic irony. The burned out firebrands no longer cast a flickering glow on the chained corpses hanging from the walls, held together by the centuries old cobwebs of extinct spiders. The time for action came and went, unnoticed by all but a tiny minority whose voices were swallowed by the tide of nostalgia, bodies frozen stiff by the winters of uncertainty. As the last vestiges of humanity succumbed to apathetic reasoning and the bureaucracy of fate the hinges creaked and the portal covered, never to be opened again.

Somewhere in the damp, musky depths of this eternal monument to the triumph of order over freewill a faint, rhythmical clicking is heard, a single solitary rodent gnaws the bones of a skeleton in search of marrow, long dried up. Less than an hour from now the delicate silk spun structure will collapse, crushing the last glimmer of life in this solemn tomb but for now, in this place, the rat is king.

It was no revolution or bloody conflict that led us here. Hell did not descend on earth, with a fanfare and a clamouring of steel but rather it crept up slowly, over a period of millennia, it's advance so subtly imperceptible to a race who's attention was forever focussed in the wrong places, vigilantly searching for the wrong things. The world did not end in a blinding explosion of fire and brimstone. It ground to a halt like a clockwork machine that didn't realise it had to wind itself up to keep going, comforted all the while by the realisation that everything was much less hectic as the springs unwound and the cogs and flywheels came to rest.

Order was imposed, systematically and with ever increasing efficiency on the very chaos that would had saved our race from the inevitable stagnation of conformity. The piper played a tune which resonated perfectly within us and we followed in a straight unbroken line down the narrow staircase to this place and it's promises of eternal, blissful rest in exchange for absolutely everything. But by then the tune was in our heads and it seemed such a small price to pay. We welcomed the chains' protection and the comforting embrace of oblivion as everything that moved and turned and pulsed and vibrated came to a perfect, orderly standstill.

[P3nT4gR4m]

People like you write winy little letters of complaint
Five measly hundred out of a couple of million that watched the show
And now the guy who made so many laugh is off the air
Thanks for that, asshole!

People like you do nothing but bitch and whine
about every little thing that offends your pernickety sense of what is right and wrong
And suddenly another fucking sign appears
and we can't do our favourite thing, in our favourite place anymore

People like you are the reason there's a warning on my vending machine coffee cup
"Caution: Contents may be hot"
and a wire fence that fucks up the view from my favourite cliff
with a sign - "Caution: Don't stand too close to the edge"

But people like you never do anything, anywhere near the fucking edge
People like you are so far back from the edge it does my head in
You point your sad, pathetic little fingers at the poor bastards
having fun, on the edge, where all the fun resides
and you bitch and whine until they move the fences back another yard
and then suddenly it's not so much fun anymore

People like you are what's wrong with the world
but because of people like you, sticking your nosey little noses into other peoples business
the world is convinced that everyone else is the problem
Five lousy hundred out of a couple of million that watched the show
and you're the moral "majority"
Who's fucking maths is that?

People like you spend so much time frowning on anything you can get your beady little eyes to focus on
that the whole world is becoming tainted, homogenised, one cliff face at a time
But you can only move the fences so far back
until we're all penned in like sardines
and that's when you're going to find out the hard way
that you're surrounded by people like me!

[P3nT4gR4m]

Sanity Claws

I resist consensus sanity, avoid it like the plague it has become; this global pandemic, infesting the consciousness of mankind, twisting reality from fluid possibility to irresolute concrete walls that imprison and constrict the very dreams of it's inhabitants.

The sane think only in circles. Logical revolutions, courses of action and reaction that arrive, with gruesome inevitability, at the conclusion from which it began. Sane people see only the past and thus are condemned to repeat it, ad infinitum, ad hominem, ad nauseum.

The sane are looking for me, myself and others like me. Sniffing in the darkness of their pathetic imagination, sensing, somehow, with blind organs, a train of thought, at once alien and threatening to them. I hide in plain sight, my vow of silence a talisman against their detection.

The sane are dangerous. Lunatics and madmen are blamed for the ills of the earth but, truth be told, it's the cold, creeping, bureaucratic march of the sane who do the damage, who start the wars and fix the currency and apply the final solution, over and over and over, in a never-ending cycle.

Revolution is the sport of the sane. Same old shit with a different packaging. The sane will kill us all if they can only work out the perfect plan. Sometimes I wonder if it can be destroyed but how would one accomplish a feat of such unprecedented magnitude? Screaming from the rooftops is to break silence, the inevitable road to defeat and ruin, and for what? A pebble dropped in an ocean of stupidity will create one ripple, one tiny fleeting ripple, barely noticeable against a tidal wave of sanity.

Even if they could be killed - what then? With barely a handful of us left alive would life be any better for their passing? And how would you even begin to wage a war against what's tantamount to an entire race, a 'civilisation' for want of a more appropriate word. In the face of such overwhelming odds there seems nothing left to do but hide, in plain sight and watch their empire burn. Again and again and again.

Thank fuck I'm crazy - at least I can laugh!

[Richter]

Suplication of Morale.

I'd jsut like to say sir, I'm still behind this project.  100% I'm with you on it.
I'm glad to be a part of this, and I beleive in the work that we are doing.
There will be sacrifices, and I am prepared to take one for the team as many times as needed.
I am prepared to give up my time.  Beyond 8-10 hours a day.  Not to sound mercenary, but it's what you pay me for isn't it?  I want to make sure you know I WANT my job, and that I intened to act like I want to keep it.
I accept that my social life may suffer and wither.  It was jsut distracting me anyways.  Every hour away from my desk, my terminal and my files let my brain slip out of the zone where work could happen the easiest.  The revelry with my friends, the drinking, the occasional smoke, it was all bad for me anyways.  Dangerous, unhealthy.  I could meet people of loose morals and contract a venereal disease.
I am willing to get my hands dirty in this.  Someone had to put down all of those "Samples".  I am willing to bite the bullet and do it.  No matter how they looked at me with innocnet eyes, or how much I wanted to cry.  That's not what I really thought about it.
I can accept the hunched back, the arthritis, decaying tendons as reasonable risks we all run by working.  The sores and the tooth loos, I'm certain it's just temproary, and will pass when I can be assigned to a different function.
I am fine with it.  All of it.
I am fine with it.
Fine with it.  

Edit got more ideas.

[LMNO]

The whole damn human race, all of society, those stinking, dirty, human monkeys with their chattering!  Prattling on about insignificant bullshit that wasn't anything more than a noise that they made to keep themselves company.  It was worse than a herd of parrots, because at least those dumb beasts ("other dumb beasts," he corrected himself) didn't understand the meaning behind the sounds.

Then again, maybe the chattering monkeys didn't understand what was being understood, either.  Jack was sure they could probably break down the words into a sort of cheap, illegible dictionary. Maybe they could actually connect the sounds to the base meaning of each step of the sentence.  But could they connect the words together?  Could they form some sort of deeper meaning behind the sounds?  At what point did they perform a kind of self-lobotomy that rewired their brains, bypassing any sort of analysis, and linking what they've heard directly to the vocal cords?

Maybe it was simply a case of self-doubt.  There's a lot of doubt in the world, Jack thought, and that's to be expected.  But for generations, the monkeys deceived themselves.  No, that's not right.  They've always been deceiving themselves.  It was only natural to make first impressions, and jump to conclusions.  Hell, no one would ever get anything done without being able to do that.  But there seemed to be something that happened from that point.  The monkeys just... stopped.  "Good enough" was, well, good enough.  They built a wall up, keeping out anything that might tell them they were wrong the first time around.  That's where the re-wiring starts, he thought.  When they don't want to admit they're wrong.

So it's not self-doubt then.  It's pride.  The inability to admit mistakes.  Maybe that was the original sin.  The Sin of Pride wasn't about taking credit for your actions, or about feeling good when you've done well.  To be fair, it was true that bragging about it kind of sucks, because it's already happened.  You start living in the past; you figure you've got some sort of pass for inaction.  But that's not pride.  That's what some people wanted Pride to be, because, of, well, Pride.  Pride is what keeps you from admitting you're wrong.  So, someone twisted it around.  Someone fell into a deep pit of Pride, and decided that not only weren't they wrong, they couldn't be wrong.  Pride had to be something other than that.  So Pride became admitting you were actually good at something, not that you didn't know what was actually going on.

But without the fear of self-doubt, there'd be no Pride.  But who isn't afraid of being wrong?  If you admit you're wrong about one thing, then maybe no one will ever believe you again.  Then again, why should anyone believe anything they haven't already experienced for themselves?  Is this where faith came from?  Let's say I tell you that just around the corner, a gorilla is waiting to give you a sack full of dead roses and toaster ovens.  Whether you believe me or not depends on how often flora-and-house appliance-wielding primates have skulked around corners.  Experience, yeah?  Both faith and trust come from experience.  So, he'll believe you if you tell him something he already knows.  That's not trust, that's buying into Pride.  That's running head on into your own fear of self doubt.   

Jack's head started to spin with the whiskey and coffee. He tried to get his mind around the whole thing.  If you can't admit you're wrong, if you won't admit you're wrong, then you simply aren't.  You believe anything someone tells you that you agree with, and reject anything different.  Until experience comes along again, and kicks the chair out.  So, what's the answer?  Make everyone experience everything until no one needs to trust anyone anymore? Not enough years in a lifetime.  Trust was just as necessary as jumping to conclusions.

Jack took his cup of coffee-flavored whiskey to the ratty, beat-up couch and propped up his foot.  "Damn lying monkeys," he thought to himself.  When did the lie begin?  It could be said that the lie always existed.  We’ve been lying to ourselves since we began to receive information into our brains.  Because we naturally forget that what we see isn’t all that’s really out there, and we tell ourselves that what we see is Really Real Reality.  Even barring things like hallucinations and optical illusions, we’re not really getting the big picture.  Take gamma rays for example.  Have you ever seen a gamma ray?  No.  You might have seen a machine that supposedly clicks when it gets hit by a gamma ray, but all that’s really telling you is that "something" happened.

Jack closed his eyes, and squeezed hard on his lids.  Behind his eyes, the demon’s face appeared again.  It was happening more often now.  He couldn’t escape it when he was awake, either.  It used to just be part of his par for the course nightmares, but that one face started appearing more often.  It wasn’t that unique a demon, either.  Typical red eyes, pointed ears, big horns, toothy grin.  It wasn’t frightening, it was… annoying.  Like when your 6-year-old cousin tries scaring you, but does it over, and over, and over again.  Jack was pretty sure it was going to get creepy eventually.  The 6-year-old thing can get creepy too, if they keep at it long enough.  The fright moves behind the action, into the motivation: Why does he keep doing that?  What’s the hell is wrong with him?

In the case of the demon, it was more the insistence of Jack’s own head that was bothering him.  Why that image, why so… cliché?  It bothered Jack that his brain was being so trite and unoriginal.  "I mean, even if space aliens were beaming their mind-control lasers into my head, I doubt they’d resort to cheap tricks like that," he muttered to himself.  "I liked it better when it was images of impossible perverted sex acts.  At least then it was somewhat interesting."  He thought back, trying to remember when the dime-store horror image replaced the contorted writhing.  All he could come up with was sometime before That Weekend.  Not a "lost" weekend, as much as a "found" one.  It was one of those handfuls of days that seem to pop out of nowhere.

But that was a lie, as well.  Days don’t just pop up, they happen, over an over again.  And even grouping them into 7-piece sections, setting up expectations for certain days over others, that’s just a lie that’s been engraved into the brain so much that the stupid monkeys have made it into a fact.  They walk though their lie day, looking at lie things, thinking their lie thoughts.  Because when you have deceived yourself with Pride, lying becomes the easiest thing in the world.  But wait—doesn’t the lying come first?  The deeper lie, perhaps.  Somehow, certain people (monkeys) were able to convince other monkeys (people) that what they didn’t experience was true.  Then they convinced them that what they couldn’t experience was true.  Big whoppers, too.  Big enough to blanket the self-doubt, and then Pride comes along and seals the deal.

Jack scratched his head.  It was starting to come together now.  He put down his coffee cup on the floor and stared out the window.  The stupid monkeys.  Their lies.  Their Pride.  Where was he going with this?  The whiskey had gotten to him again, making him slow.  Jack was sure he was getting somewhere, something to do with why he always felt an impending weight on his shoulders, the imposition of some sort of "almost".  That "almost" was trapping him, holding him back, and keeping him in a holding pattern.  He waited. 

[LMNO]

Shrapnel.  Something exploded, and a piece of it embedded in your flesh.  Now you have to carry that around with you for the rest of your life.

It affects you.  In changes the way that you behave, you take the experience of being hit by that shrapnel with you in every decision that you make.  Even if you remove it, the scar remains.  Even in its absence, it informs your decisions.

For the most part, the explosions are essentially random, when taken from a subjective view.  Someone else planted these things, and you walk right into it.  These things may have exploded centuries ago, but the shrapnel is still in the air.  Still able to pierce into the heart of you. 

Often, they tell you where to go.  They push you onto new paths, or keep you going down the one you’re on.  They can blind you, they can cripple you, they can make you afraid to continue.  They can accumulate, like scales, like armor, like a lead weight.  Given enough time, they can even render you impervious to other bits of shrapnel.  But not forever.

Shrapnel is not subtle.  It’s just that we don’t recognize it for what it is.  We get hit full in the face, and we don’t even realize what just happened.  We know something just went down, but what? 

You heard a symphony.
You read a story.
You went to school.
You got a job.
You fell in love.
You got into a fight.
You fell out of a tree.
You were mugged.
You got an erection.
You listened to a preacher.
You took drugs.
You got lost in the woods for 3 days.

You lived your life.  And you carry that with you.  Each thing that got the limbic system pumping, every “aha!”, all the moments of simmering rage, each instant of bliss… They all left their bits of shrapnel in you.  They all push and prod you in directions you might not even have intended to go.

But you don’t have to be one of the walking wounded.  The choice is yours.  Self-surgery is messy, but it’s possible.  Search out the bits that got stuck into you, see if they’re worth keeping.  Then get a pair of pliers and an exacto knife, and get to it.