zlft drms 2

rummage sale: the art of letting go

S. lives in Uncle Donny's house up above the empty shop. Out front, I recognize a coat laying on the sidewalk. A coat I distinctly remember having folded up in the back seat of my car for years because she insisted she wanted it back. A creamy tweed coat that had a collar that pulled up above the ears if you wanted to be warm but looking sort of foolish. You couldn't look at a person wearing that coat with the collar pulled up and not smile in a little wholesome laugh. It was clearly made for a person who either does or does not take themselves too seriously. I found a person taking things from the back seat of a running car and stuffing them into the trashcan on the street. Jamming through the small hole designed for cups and other small things on top. I asked them where they'd found the things, but I couldn't understand them. They just pointed up to the window above the shop. I recognized some other things in the trash can and started digging. Old note books and clothes mostly. That ridiculous white feathery, faux-fur coat I saw from the corner of my eye when I saw her last from across the street and I knew it was her, but told myself it wasn't. In a swarming crowd we both came to look over our shoulders and catch eyes. That’s how I knew it was. Still digging. A strange wooden box. I opened it looking to see if it was the ring I gave her. But I found some kind of silver testing kit. It was just an engraved plate of silver and had a small tool for testing the softness of metal. I was looking for anything that was mine she may have thrown away. My favorite t-shirt. Letters. Those two books I'd lent against my better judgement. I tore through the clothes, hardly breathing. Fearing what a deep breath of her might do to me. Silhouettes hung in the doorway. S. never appeared. Only people who looked sort of like her. I was grateful. I kept nothing.

zlft drms

harold ramis &

the electric child

I am traveling to another country or place across a border. I watch this film. It seems like an ordinary experience. This is no ordinary film. The film is an abstract view of blurry memories. I become drugged by it and someone drills a whole into the back of my head on the left side closely to the ear and places a quarter inch input jack into my skull and rams a quarter inch cable into it. I don't know what is on the other end, but when the cable is plugged in I move between sequences based on circumstances. I become charged electrically. I lay in my bed in my bedroom as I see it now mostly. It is more dirty and perhaps less stuffy. My charge causes the wire in the mattress to create immense heat. Candles are melting onto the sheets. My skin is cooking. My alarm clock is too hot to touch. The heightened electrical charge is hard to explain. Like when you touch a battery to your tongue but that sensation is very warm and your entire body inside and out has that feeling of being a tongue being prodded with a charge. It gradually heats up and levels out again but the sensation of electricity is always there. I notice the cable and rip it from my skull. I think it is over. I am infected with a type of ransomware and it passed along to all of my electronic devices. I discover if I enter into my computer that I can wipe it clean and regain control of my mind. When I attempt to do so, my computer opens a video player and the film begins to play again in attempt to begin the drugging and wiring process again. I have no idea how many times I have been drugged and wired. I have flashbacks of memories of having previously experiencing this before, at least once, many years ago. I feel at the hole in my head, but it has grown over with skin and hair but I can still feel the opening of the input. I know I have overcome it before but can't discern how. I try to just let it happen to see if it will fade out. It does not. The narrative becomes more complex with the entrance of other characters and subplots. I find myself in some odd western sequence setting attempting to build a fence out of dry and untreated wood. Scraps of dead trees at best. In the same western sequence a man asks me what I will give him for better wood for a fence, but I have nothing. Someone near owns the property on one side of which the fence is being built. On their side are a pair of strange prehistoric-looking, cow-like creatures and in the distance an equally strange and prehistoric bull. The man who wants something from me in exchange for the better wood decides that he will begin the mating ritual of the cows and coax the bull over to fuck both cows. The anticipated offspring and all of the milk will be his in exchange for the better wood. I do not think this is a fair trade. Particularly because it is not my fence, nor cows, nor bull, nor property on either aide. I am in a strip mall plaza in the next sequence. My computer is on the sidewalk outside the correctional center inside the discount food store. I am attempting to perform the reset but I discover that there is a Vietnamese man who is watching me. I notice that my keyboard is in Vietnamese characters and that I can't change anything because I do not know the language. I discover that he is the connector. We are both in our underwear. He has been watching me in every sequence. He monitors me to note when I have made too much progress. He triggers the the drugging. I attempt to kill him, but he flees. I haven't explained what it is like to be drugged. It is not foreign chemical. It is activated optically. I am controlled by an unknown force to participate in various ritual acts. When I find an act to be outside of my own moral compass, a switch is activated. When I find myself trying to escape this void of bound-will, my body heats up like a copper wire and I enter into a new sequence. I realize that this all began on a vacation in a with my father to this foreign place. My father is played by Harold Ramis. My stepbrother is played by Paul from Wonder Years. Harold Ramis begins the sequence and makes a sacrifice of me. He shows me the film that begins the drugging. He leaves me in this foreign place in a dark cabin with boarded up windows. I seem to forget all of this as I project myself through different sequences. My attachment to past memories of particularly awful things aids in keeping touch with my reality and knowing that Harold Ramis abandoned me is what projects me forward against the drug. I am presented with some kind of memory of entering my grandparents home. I am the age that I am now but my family is much younger. My grandmother is still dead in this sequence as she Is in reality. But my aunt is in high school and my uncle and his wife are much younger and more pleasant than they are in reality. I recognize my father's thin young face peering out from a corner. He does and does not know who I am. He says nothing: just watches. My grandfather has darker and fuller hair than I ever recall. He has a cake that he made in front of him with the name of each person who comes to visit written on a respective piece. I bring him flowers but they become a wavy sort of casserole that smells like hyacinths. I put this in the refrigerator behind him. I go upstairs to use the bathroom fearing whatever flash of electric memory I will receive as I've always felt anxious walking up those stairs feeling the ghost of my child aunt watching me. I use the bathroom, but then peer into my grandparents bedroom and I see a person lying on the bed. It looks like my grandfather so I enter. When I close the door behind me the room morphs into disarray and filth and he is lying dead on the bed having been there for some time. I close my eyes and the room is back in order. But a baby lays sleeping. I am the baby. The baby wakes up and begins to stir and I attempt to leave, fearing what is next in this sequence. I turn back to the western sequence and I find myself wandering through the desert. My feet are very sore and blistered. My lips chapped. My skin burnt. I hardly have any clothes to wear and the ones that are on me are torn to shreds. I finally reach a wall in the desert with a large garage door opening. I bang on the door, but I cannot speak. Eventually the door opens. They refuse to let me in but a flood of people storm the door and we all enter. I begin crying as I start to see people who I associate with safety. I try to tell them what has happened, but I cannot speak. I cry harder. A man I once knew touches my lips and I say, "Oh." I regain the ability to speak. I begin recounting the tale but no one is listening. They just say, "that happens." I see my father played by Harold Ramis in this place and go to him. I confront him about the drugging and his abandonment of me. He says he couldn't help it. I became very upset and tell him to explain. And in that instant, he and I are transported to a dark place with nothing much around but the moon. We are sitting on a dark set of wooden stairs. He says he couldn't help it because it was all in his mind. It was all a mixed array of ideas that formed with one simple narrative of the electric figure who had to be controlled. He says he is sorry but knows he can't mean it. He touches my head with two fingers and I enter his mind because I was never made real. Only a character-sketch in his mind to play things out. He sits in the night to continue thinking of an interesting plot. I become quickly forgotten floating through space as matter or some other kind of rubbish.