Akrasia Read online

  Cuz all the downloads you get

  Go straight to the garbage can

  Now go and steal that one.

  I’m looking at the picture of us

  with the shirts that say

  ‘Robots for a less obnoxious society’.

  So last night I said I’d sacrifice MY

  right to vote

  and right to be obnoxious

  if it meant saving civilization.

  But you disagreed

  and aren’t on board

  even hypothetically

  anymore.

  Sorry I don’t want to just

  keep complaining about

  other people and looking

  askance at everything like

  you apparently do. Is that

  all you wanted me for?

  To like backup

  your criticisms?

  Well, just because

  I agree with you almost

  all the time

  STILL

  doesn’t mean

  it’s healthy for you

  to care so much about

  what other people think about

  what still other people think about.

  Got it?

  It doesn’t make a difference

  anyway, not beyond

  REAL HUMAN connections,

  which you would rather limit

  for yourself so you can spend

  more time bitching

  about strangers

  in writing.

  While taking a job that goes against

  everything we talked about???

  I thought you considered

  all those sort of people ‘robots’???

  I told you it wasn’t mature at the time

  and now you agree with me on that

  but don’t want anything to do with me???

  But I guess you got what you wanted

  and now just want to start over

  again by yourself with nothing.

  Because somehow you LIKE doing that?

  Again and again and again?

  And apparently everything we had

  means nothing to you anymore.

  Well.

  At least I can look back

  and still enjoy the memories

  of you and what you were to me

  for quite a while. And I don’t

  hate you, though you like

  shun me and no doubt

  speak against me

  and always will

  from now on.

  I’m sorry.

  It doesn’t invalidate

  the experience or memory—

  how you’re acting now,

  how you’ve chosen to end things,

  as the victim once again.

  But you ruin it for yourself

  retroactively. Well,

  you’re not ruining

  it for me.

  Remember

  ‘The picture of you

  in the silver dress,

  with matching metallic lipstick,

  is branded in my head forever’?

  You remember pictures.

  I remember words.

  ‘No matter how hard I try

  I can’t impress words to

  my brain in any lasting fashion.’

  Well, it’s easy for me to do.

  And you

  seem to have selective memory

  especially

  when it comes to your own words.

  So there.

  By the way,

  I want you to know

  that I WOULD have had

  a baby with you if you

  ever asked me to.

  I liked you because of your confidence.

  But now I have no faith in you.

  And there is no trust.

  lololololololol

  1010101

  iii. Journal Entrées

  ‘This is too robotic, dude.’

  ‘This is Too-Robotic Dude’:

  [image of machine man]

  The faster you go, the more time you save.

  The faster you go, the more experience you waste.

  Whenever someone asks you to do something

  you don’t want to, say

  ‘The sun is going to burn out anyway,

  and all of this will be gone,

  so there’s no point.’

  Knowledge isn’t power

  if you can’t do anything with it.

  That’s the one bit of information we don’t have,

  what to do,

  and it’s the same old question

  asked since the dawn of modernity,

  when our options started expanding & imploding

  at the same time,

  and still no one’s come up with a good enough answer to What is to be done?

  ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’

  CLI is 151 in roman numerals

  151 is ISI[S]

  So, Climate Change is Isis-mate change.

  It is about Isis trying to find a new mate

  after the death of her husband Osiris

  at the hands of Set.

  Isis

  soars & scours the globe looking for a new partner

  in crime, and the weather and temperatures

  swirl in flux around her mighty invisible

  intangible body.

  Bill Clinton said that everything depends on

  ‘…what is is’.

  Yes. It depends on Isis.

  It depends on Isis set-tling on a new mate

  long enough for a new age to acclimatize.

  She is searching for something that reminds

  her of her husband. That’s why she’s been in

  Washington so often,

  because she likes looking at the monument.

  She needs to stop that and get real already.

  There is a conspiracy that Bill and Hillary Clinton

  are secretly brother and sister

  cloned from Rockefeller/Line-of-David DNA.

  It’s not true but would explain alot.

  Isis and Osiris were brother and sister.

  OSIRIS a/k/a ‘OR ISIS’ – so they are the same.

  And Set was their brother as well.

  SET is T.S. Eliot, the world

  viewed as a closed SET of math problems

  in which you are dis-solved. A closed set

  from which there is only one way to exit

  TSE provided title epigram for

  Hillary’s bachelor thesis (‘the fight is all’)

  and also inspiration for Obama’s loveletter.

  He writes in reference to TSE: ‘Remember,

  there is one certain kind of conservatism which I

  respect more than [any & all] bourgeois liberalism’

  and Uncle agrees

  emphatically

  Sam says too emphatically

  and Allie laughs.

  Pinocchio means pine nut.

  john lydon or john lie-don or john lie-down

  lying down on the john

  yuck

  a john is a rotten place

  a john is a toilet is a throne

  king john, king of the toilets

  TOILETS are TS ELIOT again

  flushing the remains down the vortex,

  waste for the wasteland

  ‘This country is going down the toilet’ Ha!

  From i-dea to me-dia.

  From a seabed to a bedsheet to a spreadsheet.

  From under covers to undercover.

  From Treasure Island to Pleasure Island to Dirt.

  From customers to costumers and back again.

  From shells to gold to paper to electrons.

  Give me a little ±1 charge and that’s all I need

  to feel sufficient again for the next ten seconds.

  Economic systems need confidence to run.

  All our currency is backed by the faith

  of the American people, a
nd faith

  is uncertain going forward.

  JFK wanted to start minting silver currency

  again because, as an unfaithful man,

  he knew that faith could no longer be trusted.

  ‘He who controls the present controls…’ etc.

  The present is currentcy, freely lent.

  Currency catches you in the current,

  which flows between banks.

  Uncle says boys get girls based on confidence,

  people can endure and press on because of faith,

  and we have to trust in each other and everything.

  Life is about confidence, faith and trust.

  Money is about confidence, faith and trusts.

  All this navel-gazing isn’t going to end

  until we start minting people without bellybuttons.

  The triple-threat death-spiral of nostalgia,

  malignant narcissism, and ninnyism.

  The cultural sinkhole

  as juxtaposed to the more eternal

  rolling green mountains etc.

  But technology (a dam) made

  the shining blue lake we like so much.

  And technology can unmake it,

  as bedrock hole current forms whirlpool

  under slender boats.

  But at least we’ll have a really fun ride

  downward while it lasts,

  so enjoy and make the most of it!

  Because the social security trust fund

  isn’t a real trust fund!!!!

  As of today, for now,

  not even The Economist wants world government anymore.

  The elite have lost their nerve.

  All they care about is having nice big orgasms, showing off on TV every once in a while,

  and giving each other meaningless awards.

  Can you live with that or does it all still offend your poor little feelings too much?

  The pineal gland is overrated

  has nothing to do with pinecones

  ‘We’re being sold, man.’

  ‘We’re being sold man’

  I wrote all of this during the summer between

  5th and 6th grade, staying at my grandma’s house

  in the woods with my sister and brother.

  We listened to a million stories that the old people

  (my weird relatives)

  told us, and finally I decided to write some down, as well as the sayings they had that weren’t really

  stories per se.

  In the middle of the night sometimes we’d all

  wake up together, and we’d hear what sounded like grownups having a party of some sort downstairs. Not all the voices were familiar. We’d be as quiet as we could and listen at the top of the stairs, but we could barely make out anything they said. My brother and sister didn’t want me to, but every time I’d try to creep downstairs and see what was happening.

  ‘Shhhh! Here she comes, here she comes!’ I’d hear, every time, and I’d never quite catch them (whoever they were) before they all disappeared and turned the lights out again.

  In the morning I’d ask Gram about it but she’d tell me we were dreaming.

  ‘All three of us dreaming the same dream?’

  ‘Yes. In fact it’s not unusual for thousands and millions and billions of people to all be dreaming the same dreams, all the time and all at the same time.’

  And she’d smile. ‘Now remember what I told you about flushing your fingernail clippings down the toilet as soon as you cut them, and you should be alright. Don’t leave them around the house.’

  We knew she was joking but we still followed her advice, because it’s more fun that way

  and it gave us more meaning.

  We wanted to stay there forever,

  and to make it come true we kept saying it was an

  ‘endless summer’ the whole time.

  It still is an endless summer and we are still there.

  And ‘When I die, just throw me in the snowbank

  (the Bank of Snow)

  and put birdseed in my hair.’

  Cuz after ‘Eleventy Billion Customers Sold’—

  ‘It’s Reality Situation, lady—I gotta go!’

  iv.

  All that bland suffering,

  it must’ve meant something.

  NO it means nothing;

  suffering is suffering

  Nothing more

  boring

  throw it away like nothing

  soon as you get a chance

  nothing again nothing

  will come from nothing

  Something ONCE came from nothing

  once never again

  But something means something

  if I say it means something

  or you say it’s something

  then it’s indeed something

  as simple as that

  Suffering only matters

  once you throw it away.

  So we give things meaning

  with the power of human

  The mind rite of kindreds

  Our own version

  of divine right of kings

  v. Reverse Gengineering

  The three sit in the front car of the bullet train,

  comfortably studying the aged chessboard again.

  ‘Mate in four centuries!’ shouts the bearded toad.

  ‘Mate in four decades!’ wagers the mustachioed

  bastard. ‘Mate in four years!’ claims the pantsuit

  that gloats, smirking and crossing her heeled boots.

  Over the speaker: ‘Urgent message from home base!

  You ain’t never ever gonna mate the human race!’

  The three look between themselves with confusion.

  A prank. But quick—look outside—it’s no illusion:

  A huge cone-shaped tower built right on the tracks.

  ‘Wasn’t here last year,’ muses beard. ’Stache asks,

  ‘However could they have built it in so little time?’

  Pantsuit: quiet, mouth open, hands out like a mime,

  as if trying to hold back the not-so-distant obstacle.

  The crash is spectacular and to bystanders comical.

  Not so to those in the train or those in the tower,

  once so obsessed with never having enough power.

  *

  The smell of brimstone was stronger the second

  time she opened the door. Burning wires, I reckon,

  she thought incorrectly. Then smoke. The distant

  laughter of children, super-natural & nonexistent.

  When the confusion cleared she saw the two imps

  again, guarding their holy commode. Convinced

  yourself to join us finally, have you, huh, princess?

  they teased. We understand and offer you forgiveness

  for past slights. She rolled her eyes: On one condition:

  That I’m in charge—or at least I’m in a position

  to change things around. Enough ‘Trainshumanism’,

  huh? This science-worship is a doomed religion.

  Let’s the three of us start acting like people again.

  Let’s play games again. You need to make amends

  and I need a challenge in life. The imps smiled,

  invited her inside. The train would raise her child.

  She put her lips to the SLOP, grimaced, & kissed it.

  A lightning glob went inside her

  —blink & you missed it.

  vi. Confidential Retort!

  The old man who until recently could believe

  that he controlled the world and could deceive:

  ‘I no longer know who I am.’

  The young con-artist/private investigator,

  functionally illiterate, recognition dawning on him

  at last:

  ‘Ama-nee-sia!’

  The giggling children whose eyes peer through

  the cracks in the walls, beneath the fl
oorboards,

  everywhere chanting:

  ‘Ama Nesi Ah-ha!

  Ama Nesi Ah-ha!’

  misquoting, whether deliberately or on purpose

  no man can say.

  Mr. Arkham

  Mr. Arkadin

  Mr. Akrasia

  Whatever you’re name is

  Mr. Nobody I call you

  Mr. Zero. Cold-blooded. Frozen heart.

  Mr. Freeze.

  You’ve baited me with secrets that do not exist!

  Or shouldn’t be discovered, for all of our sakes.

  Vampires that live underwater

  A spoiled trust-fund brat in a Panama hat who went missing fifty years ago

  Artists who practice witchcraft and business

  Nonsense

  And you sent me on this quest, why?

  So you wouldn’t have to do it?

  So you wouldn’t have to face

  what you might have done?

  Maybe you ‘forgot who you are’ for a reason.

  Maybe I don’t think you should find out about the trauma that made you forget.

  ‘Time the healer when the past was damaging.’

  Well, forgiveness is healing.

  Forgetness is healing.

  Repressness is healing,

  Mr. Akrasia.

  So why haven’t you healed yet?

  What’ve you been doing?

  Entertaining your sicko friends, no doubt.

  The hobgoblings of little minds.

  There in your castle,

  your asylum, your prison,

  your archive institute,

  stocked with everything anyone could ever want,

  preparing for the worse,

  enough to sustain you for a good long while too,

  but with the knowledge that eventually you’ll

  die out.

  Like a turtle trapped in its shell.

  Hey, you’re fond of quotes, aren’t you, Akrasia?

  Ever heard this one?

  ‘Behold the turtle:

  It only makes progress when it sticks its neck out.’

  —James Bryant Conant—whoever he was.

  How’s that for a shell game, one where you

  come out of your shell?

  I know your daughter wishes you would…

  Yeah I met her.

  You’re gonna have to talk sometime,

  sometime soon, to save your miserable life

  you’re gonna have to tell a story, see?

  And not just tell it, you’re gonna have to live it too.

  A real story,

  not someone’s idea of a fairy tale for 5-year-olds

  about saving the world by acting silly. No,

  you’re gonna have to come up with some excuse

  for why your life was necessary

  and so goddamn important.

  *

  EXT. Bank – Morning

  Goonsquad rushing in, military-style.

  INT. Bank

  ‘Nobody moves! We don’t want no heroes!