I Tried Virtual Therapy

I’m on the phone to a remote therapist whilst driving down the I90 drinking a red bull.

“If your village was on fire, would you pray to the god of flame or the god of water?”

“I’m not sure. Probably the god of water, maybe it would rain.” I say.

“ERRRR-wrong answer buddy. You need to pray to the god of flame.” Says the therapist.

“I wouldn’t be praying, I’d be trying to put the fire out.” I say, overtaking a truck. The therapist laughs, though the noise cancelling effect on the video call software makes it crackly and empty.

“This makes sense based on your personality type.”

“I don’t believe in that shit. I don’t believe in psychology.”

“Why are you using BetterHelp then?”

“I wanted to see if I was wrong.”

“And?”

“No. Turns out I was right about everything back when I was a teenager, but its always good to check.” I say. I pass Belgrade, Three Forks.

“Do you want my honest opinion?”

“You can just say opinion, its okay. You could just say, ‘here’s my opinion’. Or even just, ‘Opinion;’. What do you think?”

“I think you need to attend your nearest mental hospital and check yourself in. You’re kinda crazy low key.”

“I once visited an asylum, covering a story back when I worked at a newspaper. Was one of my first jobs, I was still a little green you know, still wore a suit to work. They called me Suit Boy. Anyway, there was a patient in there, claimed to be the reincarnation of Sigmund Freud. A lot of the staff stayed away from him, same with the other patients, he was basically isolated in this wing of the mental hospital. I went to his room, he was wearing a straitjacket and drawing on the walls with a marker he held between his teeth.”

“What was he drawing?”

“Scribbles, shapes, nothing really. He turned to me and I thought, he looks nothing like Sigmund Freud. The famous bulging forehead, strong nose and neat beard were nowhere to be seen. In fact, he bore a much stronger resemblance to Frank Vincent.”

“Was he in The Sopranos?”

“Yep. We get talking. Turns out this guy thought he was the famous psychiatrist, complaining they had locked him away in this Nervenheilanstalt and he wanted to get out. I calmed him down with a few cigarettes. This guy then starts to psychoanalyse me, right? Asking me about my unconscious mind, sublimation, superego, that kind of thing.”

“Did he use an accent?”

“He started in Viennese German, switching to English, sometimes Italian when discussing Dante. But by the end of the interview, I knew this guy was a fake. I even called him Sigmund Fraud.” I say, steering the Hyundai off the interstate and towards the Golden Sunlight mine. I pull the car up, crack open the door and light a cigarette.

“How did you know?”

“When you get reincarnated as someone, you look exactly like them. That is how your soul transfers from body to body. You seen that Tom Hanks movie, Cloud Atlas? Its like that. And the guy in there didn’t look anything like the grandfather of psychology. He looked like a mafia boss guy from The Sopranos, .”

“That’s not how reincarnation works. I’m actually a Buddhist, I can explain the concept of samsara to you.” The therapist says. I shake my head, blowing smoke out.

“Just let me finish the story. As I was saying, I called him Sigmund Fraud and started to leave but he called after me, going ‘nein, nein, du must mir glauben!’ and I turned around and then I saw something that I wish I didn’t. All those marks on the walls weren’t actually scribbles. When you stood at just the right angle, all the lines and shapes aligned to make a new image. It was startling, seeming to appear from nowhere, standing behind the man knelt on the floor who was shouting at me in eight languages.”

“It was a drawing of Sigmund Freud?”

“No. It was a drawing of Jacques Lacan. I then understood that this man wasn’t the reincarnation of a dead psychiatrist, but somehow had become supranaturally influenced by the famous French philosopher to make him believe as if he was in fact, the reincarnation of Sigmund Freud. Upon realising that, I managed to cure him.”

“Amazing.”

“He just needed six courses of CBT and he was back at home looking after his wife and kids and returned to his job on a production line, counting pieces of metal. The story made front page, I even got a promotion. They stopped calling me Suit Boy and started calling me Slick.”

“How did that make you feel?”

“I felt…absolutely nothing.” I say, ending the call. I get out of the Hyundai Sonata, walk to the edge of the open pit mine. The shape of the ground, the cuts in the rock, reminded me of ancient pyramids. I take a selfie with the cig in my mouth, then look at it for a few minutes, zooming in to my face and look at every pixellated bump, shadow, pore, reflecting in the horrible sun. A bird starts to scream.

Southern Comfort

Ride to Louisiana. Air coming off the ocean tastes of salt, something chemical. I walk round a gas station, unable to understand the products, the writing makes no sense to me. Leaning against the glass door of a fridge, humming to match the pitch of electricity. When I leave, someone has left a flier beneath a windscreen wiper of my Hyundai Sonata. It’s a drawing in blue biro of a monster eating someone. I look around, screw it up into a ball and throw it. There’s a burned out car by the corner, windowless, like the skull of a Jurassic fish. It watches me as I pull away, joining the road again, feeling itchy beneath my skin.

Night time in Baton Rouge. I could have kept going to New Orleans, but stay at a Holiday Inn. There was an old man sat on a lawn chair outside a motel room. The door was open and a great, fleshy back of a person was curled up, lying on the floor, facing away from me.

“Hot night.” Says the old man. I nod.

“You got a cigarette?”

“Nope.” He says. I sit in my motel room and turn on the tv. Law & Order, CSI, ads for cell phones showing that they get coverage almost anywhere. I snort. The US was meant to be a superpower and still didn’t have phones that worked everywhere. They were forty years behind the rest of the world. I flip to the news and see myself. I lean forward.

There is footage from a doorbell. It’s a cop, wearing a mask of my face. For a moment I didn’t make the connection, the extensive plastic surgery I’d had back in New York seeming to be a lifetime ago. I watch the news report. Somebody was posing as a cop, or was a cop, and gaining entry into suburban homes. Once inside he would gather the family into the living room, place handcuffs on them, then make them watch some sort of film. It wasn’t clear what the film was about from the news reports, but they interviewed a witness who didn’t blink and their hair had turned grey and they seemed to speak as if they were very small. Police sketches of the mask. It looked like me. My reflection was on the tv and aligned perfectly with the mask. I turn the tv off, go to the window, look out, draw the curtains. What was happening?

I thought back to the last couple of weeks in Florida. I had dressed as a cop myself just the other day. I wondered for a moment if this man had been me, but dismissed it. The report was from further north, though it had been the sixth time it had happened in the last few weeks. Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska. They were heading south. I looked in the bathroom mirror, squeezing my cheeks, pulling the skin down so my eyelids revealed the pink, wet flesh beneath eyeballs marbled with veins. I was myself. Knock at the door. I look through the key hole and it’s the old man.

“I got you a cigarette.” He says. I open the door, keeping the brass chain on the latch.

“Pass it here.” I say, searching in the dark. He passes me a Marlboro, we wink at each other and I close the door. I pace round the motel room, trying to make the cigarette last as long as I can, smoking it down so the writing burns away and the filter fizzes and burns yellow.

Why was the person posing as a cop have a mask of my face? And what was on the video he made these families watch? I kept walking, trying to work it out, trying to imagine what it could all mean, yet my thoughts were like a kite on a still day, never taking off, just dragging across the ground. I sat and drummed my fingers on the bedside table. What if people mistook me for this fake cop? I wasn’t totally innocent. The real cops could already be on there way. They might be in the parking lot right now, a SWAT team creeping by the motel rooms neighbouring mine, ready to bust through the door at any moment. I needed another cigarette. It didn’t matter. I still had a job to do. I was in Baton Rouge in July 2025 and I was safe. It would all be fine. I lie back on the bed and study a stain on the ceiling. Tomorrow I would get to New Orleans, drive across the Mississippi, maybe try some soul food, maybe go to a jazz club. Just as I was drifting off the sleep, there was a knock at the door. I sit up slowly.

“Old man? You got another cigarette for me?” I say. My voice cracks, going high for a moment, betraying the dread I felt, utterly alone in a motel room in a strange country. There was no reply, but there was another knock. Shave and a haircut, two bits. I go over to the door and open it, looking out into the night between the gap in the door and with just a slender chain protecting me from the outside world. There is nobody there. I’m about to close the door when I look down. Someone had taped a piece of paper to the floor. There’s a QR code on it. I take a picture with my phone, close the door as it loads. It’s a link to a file on wetransfer. I download it. It’s a video outside the motel room. It was earlier, the old man coming to give me a cigarette. I watch myself close the door, then the camera starts to zoom in, closer and closer. I glance up at the window. Are they still out there? I look back to the phone, my heart beating twice as fast. What the fuck was going on? The camera holds, digital noise making the motel door seem to dance and shift like kaleidoscopic snow. Then it went black. I sit on the bed, feeling frozen in place, as a wild animal encountering car headlights for the first and final time.

That night I don’t sleep.

The Unseen Great

The man that had no job filled his nights with work, building something of immense value. It was one of the greatest sculptures that had ever been created in the history of art, cast in iron and standing high above him as he laboured beneath, working the form real with his hands, his thoughts obsessed onto the subject. It seemed to have grown inside him, it's vines clawing behind his eyes and lying heavy in his belly, spearing his heart, lacerating his insides, killing him. And still he worked. The nights would turn into mornings and this would continue before he slept on a broken mattress by the window, his biorhythms and instincts replaced with working on the thing. He had become a slave to the idea. Even in his dreams he would continue sculpting, cursing himself on waking. He looked as if he had drowned, skin almost translucent white beneath the stained, filthy clothes that hung to his weakening body like dark flags. Hour after hour he worked, getting closer and closer to perfection. But as it neared completion the man choked on a famous brand of butter candy and died, alone except for the sculpture.

Decomposition had set in and the man was slowly melting. The cells that made up his body had began to rot, membranes disintegrated against a sea of cold enzymes and putrid blood. His landlord let himself in after a few weeks of unpaid rent. At the back of his mind he was aware that there was a corpse on the floor, though all of his attention had been drawn to the iron sculpture in the centre of the room, surrounded by various tools and materials. The sculpture set him into a trance that last for the next two hours and when asked about the experience later he said that it was 'the most beautiful moment in his life'. The sculpture was taken away by tree cops and melted down, though it's after image remains burned into their retinas like sun spots. The public doubts the sculpture had ever existed, though some of them do and they like the idea so why not let them think that as it's more interesting than if it didn't actually happen.

Weighs Like Stone, Feels Like Shit

seven kilos of electronic jelly walking round in seventy kilos of blood and tubes and bone and hair numbering seven billion and yet here we are. only four hundred films get made a year. perhaps another hundred times that with books and a million times that for music. the last total number representing culture yet of what percentile of humanity are involved in the making of it? and what further percentile of it is any good? ideas. What's worth recording in any manner? By thinking about something you aren't necessarily fully enjoying it's actuality.

Monks in solitude delicately piecing together codices, whispering to themselves in Latin. A child watches a re-enactment of this in the next millenium, laughing and squirting virtual shit across the universe like some primordial gull. Allergies. Fat wrists. Delicateness. Nose bleeds. Cataracts. Baldness. All by the age of ten.

Another twenty million dollars is thrown in the face of an actor as he sits naked in bed surrounded by prostitutes, all are tanned and have perfect sets of filed down teeth. A phone rings. It's a studio executive pitching a t.v series set in the past. The actor accepts, his laughter almost blows the cocaine away as it's rubbed in his face via arse. The finest white wine in California is opened and all settle down to watch a blu-ray. Ninety minutes pass. And nothing has changed.

The Ritual Smoking Of Drugs

Heaving the pipe upward, the group pass it to one of the newer members. A self-described druid, his beard descends onto the mouthpiece of the black bong. It takes three people to lift the device to the druids face, another to lower the torch onto the luminous green cannabis. It's trichomes are long and bulbous like strange worms. Eldritch. Taking great care the druid begins to inhale the kush, so sticky that if it came into contact with the skin it would rip it away. Through the slightly translucent glass we watch the five feet of milky smoke begin to fill the chamber, the druid can see it too as he watches the weed smoulder in front of him. And all along, a great bubbling. Through the ice and through the water, the smoke is drawn through. Upward and upward. He begins to clear the bong chamber, chugging huge lungfuls of smoke. We all begin to chant our own songs as the thick smoke is quaffed from the cauldron bong, as it is exhaled it begins to fill the cave we are sitting in. A caveman sits in the corner, the whites of his eyes as red as an eclipsing moon. He looks over to the druid then turns back to his bongo drums.

An hour, perhaps, later we exit the cave and into the industrial estate. The factories and mill shops stand as obelisks on the landscape, intense signifiers of terror. We walk along the cracked tarmac road, one of our number carrying a crucifix. Once we have reached the cul-de-sac, our terminal destination, the cross bearer sets it upside down into a small marsh. We sit around beneath the inverted symbol and pass around a pipe made from the spinal column of an accused witch who was rumoured to have been drowned at a nearby lake. The druid takes out a packet of pickled onion Monster Munch and begins to eat them solemnly.

Festering Aurora

Waves of optical plasma bounced around the fringes, things started to melt. In the last DMT induced moments of his life, Gordon Brown surveyed his birth place for one final time before the aneurysm knocked him down onto the wet, green grass.

Stoned Galls

State of the art technology is already obsolete.

His Soul was Captured By Peter Venkman

October is the correct month for ghost tricks, ectophile rampages and witches brew sessions.

Aesthetics of Anaesthetics

Bright star super secrets. Here is the pathology of light, temporally loud. Exchanges on the spectrum (1) are identified as cretins of science. The ruling species of thought. Omniglobular beacons echo throughout, thoughtout. Grand designs of bizarre gods which defy the ultimate rules. Armitage Shanks looks beyond, outside networks of neurons, up quarks, down quarks, Higgs bosoms and a ****. Invisible ghosts which make up the metadata of consistence. Standard models waltz overhead, twirling like dancers. A cold peak develops, raging hard and quivering in the blizzard of particles like the grudge weapons from world war 2. Armistice Shankhs swept at these as if they were invisible demons, bellowing out between bleeding gums damaged by years of processed sugar use. “Knowledge means fuck all when you've only got a couple of lousy bucks in your dungaree pocket.” He was picked up by silver limousines, driving into the night like mechanical phantoms. A footnote in future text books about the perverse psychosexual nature of government conspiracies.

Blood Trail

Anachronisms such as Pete Tong or landline telephones exist in the world, solid ghosts.

EFGABCDE=40080022

Surrounded By Zero Vibes

Armitage Shanks stops his car, unsliding the key from the ignition. Sitting motionless, less is more and he begins to vibrate. Supercooled lasers at different angles engage him, ultimate parallax into a wormhole. Thin black veins shoot across the atlas of his brain sphere, tesseractoid segments in space unfold before him like origami to reveal the infinite metadimensions. He gasps, audibly.

Meanwhile a dozen Roland SH-101s throb to the strobing beat of the pulsars. “It's so...funky.”

armitage shanks lights a cigarette looks in his rear view mirror and sees a ghost am I dreaming or is this virtual reality it says he shakes his head there is a twist in the end he says the intellectuals called this the pigs Tail a pun about how a pig has genitals shaped like corkscrews ghost evaporates into ectoplasm never to be thought of again he recycles a pair of polarized glasses and drives off after leaving a scumpled up polaroid of a woman showing his rosebud.

Goblets

Multiple avenues open as if by congrucic, the cement golem stores opening like benny friday at the 1939. Cop. Old summer postcards made from wet sand delicately decorate his home own based future flat with a whirling copter and a smart wall made from carbon and car and bon appetit. The shovel full covers the last one, the compulse of flammatory injection jump jet pilots hitting the central brain protuse exclaim, explain, examine, exalt/Sea hatch. Forward slash. And on and on.

They examined each other in the mirror, selecting imperfections and subtracting them from a person's worth. "I put bullets in the gun which killed a superhero!" cried a lonely hack. Nobody cared because it was just a film really. Shake "his spear!", famous.

Chronophobia

A diagram.

Delta of Gemini

She breathe, in & out for total blood brain circulation. Possibility of 'Big 3' failure (if any); yes. And the fusing of body clefts.

Ten thousand peoploids

Her oily way, her kaleidoscope brains.



- Infection
- Leukaemia
- Hereditary disorder
- Liver disease
- Hemophilia
- Anticoagulants
- Vitamin K deficiency
- Skull trauma

Under a phosphene sun

Sneaking rum beneath his beard, heft the bit of grass into the sump. Chains rock inside dark canopies, the occasional sigh or animal grunt can be heard. Molten wax drips from candles put on any flat surface. Summer evening glow. Out from a tent rears the brown haired head, lightly peppered. He was wet. Uncapping a flask he drinks deeply, sniffing up the smells the hidden sun had given while shadows grow long and cold. “Charlie boy, charlie boy.” he mutters, eyes flicking around to soak it all in. He snapped his fingers and walked over to another tent, sliding between the canvas flaps and into a little den with a dirt floor. He sat by a lamp and unhooked a measuring device. It was a chromium probe, ten inches long with a small, blunt hook on the end. He carefully eyed up the thing in the centre, hidden beneath a pile of fox skins. The feet of a woman, soles up, trembled slightly with each laboured breath. He slowly moved across the dry soil, trying to breathe as gently as he could. Quiet. Two feet away now, he started to lift the probe upwards and pointing it as the hunched thing. The fur was pulled back quickly to reveal a huge hard boiled egg with legs and arms sticking out of it, sweating blood. It slowly turned, murmuring although Charles managed to push the metallic stick through it's back. Limbs flicking like swatted insect, pushed deeper into the soft, white body until he was up to his wrists. “I've seen you out, partying.” he said, now working back and forth to scrape through a tough shell inside it.
“What do you think.”
“I felt sick...” he whispered as he felt something give way and he went right up to his shoulder before withdrawing. He gently pulled out his arm to look at the red instrument. On the end was a buckle attached to a leather strap which he took in both hands, wrangling. Resting one of his feet by the wound, he gave a great heave and the egg thing turned inside out. Girl sat there with the belt hanging out of her mouth. “I still feel sick.” he said, sighing. She rested her head on her folded knee and blew a kiss. “Don't feel bad sailor, summer is here.”
He undressed and took her hand, walking away from the tents. The moon was big and fat, it wasn't even night. Over grass and dandelion leaves, they passed a copse where men and women lay, pouring big glasses of water for each other and watching the sky. Black beetles flew lazily in the air, snapped in the jaws of rabid bats that screamed and swooped above the couple's heads.
“Eggs are important, they are a part of nature just like you.”
He nodded then twiddled a bit of his beard. He was an egg once as well. “Let's be fat together.”

Twelve years later. He was thirty seven years old and didn't have as much hair. He threw a few flowers into a river and watched it for a while before setting off back into the clearing. It had changed now, the ground was scorched in odd places. Rolls of metal, broken glass, latex. Twelve years ago he had turned an egg inside out at the spot where a shopping bag with a dead animal rested. He flung it to one side and knelt, looking towards the East. Twinkling yellow lights burned on the motorways back, all the roads linking up to it like a tarmac net. He nudged some dirt with his finger, poking down. Up to his knuckle in mud, he rubbed at the shell of a baby egg. It hadn't had chance to grow properly. He withdrew his finger and punched the ground again and again until the egg cracked. Yolk spurted out before getting mixed with the grey soil and pebbles. He stared at it until it didn't look familiar, blinked a few times, then went on.

Fifty years later. He held the hand of a pregnant woman whilst eating an apple. They both looked out onto the silent garden, the stars and the moon and the planes and the town lights lit it up. Charles Kinitski owned a house. He turned to his daughter-in-law. “Anoushka, have you ever walked in the garden...in the night time?”
“No. Never crossed my mind.”
“Let me show you something.”
Charles Kinitski lead her across the neatly mowed grass to the spot where he had punched fifty years ago. He knelt down and pulled up a clod of grass before gently putting it onto Anoushka's bare foot. “You are lovely.” he said to her unborn baby then pushed his face into the dirt and quietly vomited. Anoushka looked down as he grabbed the grass in his hand, shaking a little, then relaxing his grip. The moon was full. Charles Kinitski's soul rose from his body, winked at the seven month old foetus before ascending up into the golden palace of everlasting ghosts. It stretched on for infinity.

Card number 6

Head-on collision and faces meeting above the folding bonnet after being launched from seats.





The force of drinking required to crash stationary objects into people. Post traumatic schizoshock of having the ghost appear under a desk or standing next to one in the urinal. Phantom bikes to mark accident spots have their wheels and seats stolen. Ghost rider motorcycle hero.