We are both sub and superhuman pets. We lounge around eating jumbo bags and jumbo boxes and we also know everything. Everything allowed.
It seems to me that the track of our reality might have been switched at some point in the recent past. In exchange for all our technological gifts, ones that now seem to materialize, attaching themselves to our lives at random, we may have signed over our rights. Our right to remember the past correctly. Over to drivers who are taking us somewhere without places to hide. A blinding hell that shines into every crack and pore. Nothing secret remains where we’re headed.
I need to find out if our very own social credit system has been incubating, in California.
Now, yes. While I—and you—should take this all seriously, there are still plenty of good drugs to go around that help reduce the terror. These leftovers from a possibly deleted era, when things could still be explored and enjoyed are vanishing rapidly from our collective historic memory. They must be enjoyed now. So, today, I’m smoking free primos with my psychological researcher friend, Dr. Ganguly. He’s spent his entire life studying the Mandela Effect across different populations of Brooklyn.
For some years now, the doctor has recorded in his mountains of red-leather journals, that whole swaths of Brooklyners describe realities that do not match up. In parts of Flatbush, they swear that Trump was elected, instead of Oprah. A homeless tribe living in Prospect Park claims that since the 1960s, it has been illegal to wear the color brown. Most women over thirty in Park Slope say they remember the character Donald Duck having a hyper-realistic corkscrew-shaped duck cock, hanging out there down below his sailor shirt.
While I need to ask him questions to cross-reference my theory, I don’t really know which seat I’m sitting in here in his cramped dusty office on 760 Broadway. But I guess it doesn’t matter. Subject or friend, with Dr. Ganguly the drugs are always potent.
“After I spoke with the janitor from Google,” I say through a thick cloud of blue smoke, “I started having problems. My gas and electricity got turned off. A notice was taped to my door saying I had violated ‘speech code X-3T.’ Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
I ask him these questions, for I suspect my reality’s switched tracks may include this social credit system. Maybe in this new place, we are China and China is the U. S. For it was China with the social credit system, no? I narrow my eyes and say the next words carefully, “And that is when I realized, everyone is acting like this sort of thing has always been here. That it’s normal we can get shut off if we violate the demands of digital presidents.”
“Interesting, yes. Very interesting,” he says lifting a brow, hucking a few blazing-white pills down the darkness of this throat. Like street diamonds.
He gets out a big sucker of a pen and clicks it. He takes a journal from the pile. The noises cause my equilibrium to go wonky, but I contain myself. You’re professional for Christ’s sake, I tell myself.
“What?” he asks me, his brows now in a more hostile configuration. “What was that you were saying just now?”
“Was I?” I say. I remember the angel dust in Dr. Ganguly’s primos sometimes comes in waves. Fear.
We continue to talk and my mind starts to breakthrough. Dr. Ganguly scribbles furiously in his red-leather notebook as I disclose my theories.
Like I said, I say, most people I’ve talked to speak of it as if it’s always been here, but that can’t be. Brooklyn still has plenty of gutters and alleyways and fish markets left to hide yourself in. You just have to look. If you flatten yourself enough, you can slip through the spaces between cigarette machines, or under Thai menus, to enter sacred worlds untouched by the all-seeing eye of digital society. Where filth washed down with Olde English is said to build character. Hell, I say, in some of these places I’ve seen dog-men eating platefuls of python balut, high off their shit on gynotryptamine. Gangs of Yuckacoco—a red-skinned humanoid race from a dimension that worships Lenny Bruce and the lithium ion battery—sex-fiends engaging in all manners of indulgent act. People who in the day dawn human skin and suit, and sign off on bank loans and park permits. You’ve probably shook hands with some of them. But such rare creatures will be no more if they are not allowed their secret interdimensions. Not allowed to let their hair down once in a while and rut through the shit of humanity. And I for one, don’t want to live in such a place. A man should enjoy a good rut when he’s earned it.
“We cannot forget! Or remember this new past they are feeding us!” I am standing on my chair now, delivering these words.
The good doctor smiles. His teeth are tan and horrible. “So what you are telling me,” he says, “is that what they, these demigods in Silicon Valley, want, is to set up their great counting monoliths to smooth us all out. And if we refuse to be smoothed, they’ll cut off our mortgages, or our water. If we continue to misbehave further, they might send someone over to snip the breaks?”
“It’s possible. But like I was asking before—this is only happening in China, right?”
“Interesting,” he says.
I take another hit and now see a green apple floating there in front of Dr. Ganguly’s head. Like the René Magritte painting, but with a piece missing. Their idol, this fruit with a bite. Take a bite! it tells me. Let the juices drip. See stars and hells beyond light. Then forget. Forget hermetic coagula. The Emerald Tablet. Eliphas Levi and Robert Pike. Forget Solomon’s Temple designs mirrored in our HomePod’s quantum chipsets. I, The Tarnished Apple, have arrived.
