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In this issue:

- Excuses: Ambient Jesus
- Gibbering Rot: An Interview with a Misfire
- Blather: The Shadow of the Apocalypse, by Phoenix Quinn


Excuses


I'd planned to take a wee sabbatical then make a triumphant return to the Magical Land of Eruptpublicanville on Easter morning, full of glory and redemption. Then something funny happened on the way to visit my Mom after the Insurrection. Ran into some merry ol' ho who told me all the boyz was staying home and nobody was partying 'cause of some bad beer that was going around.

Gack! Piffle! I didn't believe that smack. Hacked the lock to my favorite dive, the Upper Back Room. Sure enough it was emptier'n a fratboy's keg on Sunday morning. Sikme!

Depressed, I wandered the beaches of the Cape for 4 days and nights. All the way from Sandwich to Wellfleet. As I sat there pondering the remains of Marconi's station, wondering what it must've been like to be a radio star, it struck me. Right on the noggin.

A frikkin' clamshell. Damn seagulls.

"Nobody likes you, you suckers!" I cried my meaningless bird-angst into the cold, grey New England sky as the waves crashed with monotonous mocking laughter.

The gull circled around making that mad cackle they do. Remembering how ducks and swans at my bucolic local pond raised a ruckus when the gulls'd show up, and not putting up with being talked-to like that by a bunch of cold waves, I added for good measure: "Hey, creature, leave them ducks alone!" Then as I was grumbling my discontent ...stupid gulls, grr, feckers have the whole fecking ocean to fecking fish in... adding insult to injury, the foul creature dropped a glob of white poo right onto the rocks just a tiny smidge west of my bodily location.


Tormented by this, but knowing too well the consequences of killing a gull, I refrained from unholstering my Glock. Recalling the lessons of the immortal mothers of invention, I breathed in deep, arms sweeping out to gather in the vital life force, and drew it in towards my heart. Pulsating the fingers, I felt it settle into the heart center and then released the breath with great passion and temperamental mindlessness, gesturing unkindly towards the whole universe.

It worked. Swooping around from Compass Hill on the other side of Route 6, the fearsome Haliaeetus leucocephalus, a Great Bald Eagle, screamed down out of the sky and whacked that gull, carrying the bloody carrion away to its All-Amurkin lair, probably somewhere north of downtown, such as it is, Wellfleet.


In a flash, my mind cleared. As I rode in the pedi-cab on the long journey back to the Upper Cape, along with wondering occasionally where the Bulgerian driver had come from, and thinking that maybe he'd been a waiter at that place in Lower Mills that'd had the really good chili at the Chili Fest but then had gone out of business when all the frikking hipsters and yuppies'd started moving into Ashmost Hill a year or more back, but not wishing to pry, so I let it go and didn't dwell on it or mention that I'd actually been to Plovdiv and Stara Zagora, albeit only on a bus driving through Stara Zagora, and also understanding that Bulgerians are by and large private people, except when they're drunk, then they're almost a vivacious as Servians, still, all the same, I didn't say anything, and like I said in flash it came to me: I needed to start a band. It'd be a post-punk, alt-country troupe pioneering the new genre of "Cape and Western" music. Our big hit would be "All the Trees Are Falling Down", a ballad-y ode to Metacomet, calling for him to come back from the dead and help drive the wealthy bougie white colonialists out of the Wampanoag lands and help bring about a new age of new-style communism.


And we'd be called "Ambient Jesus". All that's left now is to learn music, how to sing, how to play some instruments, maybe get some other band members to join, or learn how to use "Garage Band", and write all the lyrics.


So as you can see, I've been quite busy. But now I'm back, at least as long as the tea holds out and those damn gulls stay away from me. Y'all're rather better off for it, from what I've heard. At least that's what Bill tells me. Oh yeah. Almost forgot to tell. Bill is back too. Jayzus, what a pain in the arse that fecker can be. I'm tellin' ya. Still, he's such a character. Hard to stay mad at him for long.


And. He does know a couple of chords. Which he claims he learned from Osmany Ramon back in the day when they were working together on a death-metal-mariachi surfer-punk band. So that's cool.





Gibbering Rot



Bill Galaxia is a space-faring gadabout, a neer-do-well, a fugitive and occasional player of Erepublik. He's returned for a time to visit this space-time continuum. Pals with Phoenix Quinn back in the grey, Bill got a bead on me after I'd published PQ's "Prison Notebooks", which, unbeknowst to me, had been pirated on three more-or-less chthuluish sub-space channels and then transmuted into a kind of "spoken word" performance at hilarious massive Aquarian raves all over the Betelguese system just before it started to go supernova.

Some people say that despite the impending doom of their entire star system, the parties on the Betelguese planets were organized around delirious themes that poked fun at the gross incompetence of the many sad creatures who inhabit the Rigel system. Lots of people say they are sad, the saddest, the most sad of the sad, so bad, so sad. Anyway, Bill'd heard a performance that was boxed-up from the "Notebooks", asked around about it, and made it a point to stop by and introduce himself to me on his next jaunt through our continuum.


That was another reason I was late returning to this party. I mean... hell's bells, Bill can talk, especially once he gets a little Earl Grey into him. Being the pre-eminent PQ scholar that I am, I was super-intrigued to meet someone who'd figured in some of PQ's funnier works and who'd played a role in PQ's life prior to his consummation into the e-immortal-state of e-nothingness and whatnot.




The following are just a few tiny excerpts from several very lengthy conversation we had while sitting on the back porch whittling crap out of all the goddamn windfallen trees and practising smoother chord progressions. It is mostly jokes -- perhaps not very good ones -- and Bill's observations about Human life. Enjoy!


BG: "This is how humans make a good soup in one hour: Prepare all the ingredients, cut the veggies, boil the water, simmer everything for a half-hour, stirring occasionally. When, after 45 minutes, you discover the soup is horrible and disgusting, throw it away, open a tin can of soup, and pop it in the microwave."


BG: "This is a story I tell when folks ask me what politics is like on your planet. I tell them that three Russians shared a prison cell where they have all been condemned for political offenses. As they are getting acquainted, the first one says, 'I was condemned for five years for opposing Popov.' The second one says, 'Ah but you'll recall things changed, so then I was condemned for ten years for supporting Popov.' After some time, the third prisoner, said, 'I recieved a life sentence. I am Popov.'"


BG: "My favorite joke about one of your big old-time religions is the one where the Son says to those who want to stone a woman for adultery, 'Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone!'. He is immediately hit by a stone, and then He shouts back 'MOTHER! I asked you to stay at home!'"


BG: "Here's one about the tendency of you creatures to believe that things must be the way they are. It was time of military dictatorship and soldiers had order to shoot anybody who was still out in the streets after curfew -- 10 PM. One of two soldiers on patrol saw somebody in a big hurry at ten minutes until ten and immediately shot him. When his colleague asked him why he shot when it was only ten 'til ten, he said, 'I knew that fellow. He lives quite far from here and would not be able to reach his home in ten minutes, so to simplify matters I shot him now."







RF: "So what is your all-time favorite human joke?"

BG: "Easy. That old Marx Brothers one: 'This man may look like an idiot and act like an idiot, but don't let that fool you -- he really is an idiot!'"







Blather


The following are a couple of fragments only. They were recovered from a long-lost PQ Notebook, only recently discovered jammed all the way under the sofa, covered with mold, much of it eaten away by some kind of creature, and smelling strongly of both sea and weed. Sharing them with the community due to their obvious relevance to our modern times.


...according to Bill, Mark Valshannar assumed the total sublation of the avator in its symbolization: the e-subject emerges through and is equivalent to its subjection to the symbolic order, its laws and regulations. For Mark V, the free and autonomous subject is the subject who has been integrated into the (new) symbolic order. Thus he became furious when debates erupted within the Party. Whereas Vincent Nolan, for his part, first put the accent on how resistance is appropriated in advance by the wigs, so that admin-elite-cabal mechanisms dominate the entire field and players are the subject of its power precisely when we resist it the most. Thus his attention to developing completely alternate approaches to organization and game play. Later, however, Nolan shifted his accent onto how those engaging with the default mechanics generate an excess of resistance which can never be controlled. Far from manipulating resistance and absorbing it like the Borg, "power" (ironically, after all, this is eRepublik) thus becomes unable to control its own effects.


...No wonder that the standard political use of recognition as key feature of Valshannar's social thought is limited to liberal re-interpretations of the early SFP discources. Maryam, for example, noted that the ongoing focus on mutual recognition and respect in this reading of Valshannar revealed a "third Valshannar", neither Chuikov-Ramonist nor Civil-Anarchist, namely a "democratic" Valshannar: an ontologically and politically "deflated" Valshannarm who celebrates bourgeois "law" and "good order" as the summit of player development. Therein lies the common denominator of liberal readings of Valshannar's political thought: reciprocal recognition is the ultimate goal and minimal presupposition of subjectivity, the immanent condition of e-self-consciousness: "I am recognized, therefore I am." Pushing it, Bill deepened his critique of this school, characterizing it as 'I am a free subject only insofar I am recognized as free by other free subjects (who are subjects recognized by me as free)'.

After some long chats with Dadds, I realized this idea of Valshannar as a thinker who simply articulates the normative conditions of free life needed to be problematized. Am I ready to put everything, including my e-life and e-reputation, at stake for an object that makes it clear what is at stake is not it but myself, my freedom? If a fight is identified as "to the death" then won't most rational subjects choose to live? This is a situation like some battles late in the Warring States period, when the armies would march to the battleground but engage only in waving pennants and banners, marching around a bit, and then retreating, eventually working out who "won" during negotiations.

Another way of putting the problem is to consider the film "Avatar", or "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", or even "The Matrix". As if, in "The Matrix", Neo had decided to fully immerse himself again in the Matrix, so "Avatar" shows the "hero" fully migrating from "real reality" of imperialist colonialism into a fantasy world of aboriginals who live in an incestuous link with nature, a safe, peaceful world free from fear, pain, and crime.

It is not a matter of refusing to imagine a better fantasy world, though.


...Material "resistance" becomes most palpable precisely when one least expects it to, in critical situations, when the hegemonic ideological narrative is being undermined by the course of everyday events.











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