The Rapture Hat

Thermos Rights

2007-10-19T03:12:00.000-07:00

Kevin, now re-reading the suspected rapist's note, is a one of the pop journalists who makes a living in the Circle District. He is a member of several friend groups. That's not saying much, though, because retaining multiple memberships isn't hard--you just have to stay the whole shift enough times to earn a place at the front, and bring your own interview pad so you don't keep asking to borrow somebody else's stuff.

I wouldn't have minded Kevin picking up the thermos and opening it except a. I'd thrown it through the window myself (even though our Democratic Action Code insists who throws the thermos doesn't matter) and b. I don't think Kevin is a good journalist--he has "hand issues," won't shake strangers' hands, and doesn't drink at all, and his writing comes off as unspoiled and irresolute as Kevin himself.

So I did what you do in a friend group when you feel a lead has been unrightly scooped up by a lesser friend in the same group. I challenged him to a duel.

There is a traditional way to initiate a duel with somebody who has no talent--before showing him or her your Tags or performing the "I got your nose" gesture, you must first provide your opponent with the chance to avoid humiliation by backing off what's yours. You repeat the line one sees pop up so many times in the corner of the screen in emails from an online mentor who has reviewed your work: "I don't think you're ready for this one."

We Cashed In

2007-10-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

We cashed in, didn't we, we Americans, on a peculiar tipping point--speaking of tipping points--in economic and intellectual history. For industrialism, didn't we present a pragmatic answer to the whole royalty problem--the goal of pragmatism being to, simply, gain? Europe's pursuit of imaginary and utopian problems, their frustration with kings and prince, couldn't match the clean slates onto which the brains of natives could effectively be blown. Nothing beats that new-car smell, they say. The imaginary problems might make Europe smarter--or at least, not as interested in democracy. But we, fundamentalist anti-intellectuals, don't we just want to treat the masses right and oppress the ones who we need to oppress to make sure the whole business doesn't tank? Weren't we a secular succession of the Reformation, after all, which authorities agree was also a success?

I'd been saving this note to give to the right stranger, not the friend group strangers but the strangers my friend group homing-pigeoned out. I stuck the note inside of a caution-orange thermos and, while the front line of the friend group scribbled notes in their interview pads, lobbed it through the kitchen window of the nutmeg house and into the lap of the suspected rapist.

It surprised us all when the thermos was lobbed back at us through an unseen portal in the house. The caution-orange thermos landed noislessly in some knee-high yellow and green ornamental grass that, I noticed, many of the officers were stomping all over. Kevin, a friend group member, picked it up and the Chief police officer, Daryl, rushed over to shine a miniature flashlight over his shoulder. When he realized the notes wasn't for the police, Chief Daryl snapped off the flashlight and huffed back into position.

Places We Are Awake

2007-10-08T23:59:00.000-07:00

Last June, after being given a hundred more years to live but before I'd found my friend group, I'd sat in a wire chair one Tuesday morning reading the paper. On the front page and continued on 2A was a story about our Mayor, Grange. Grange had just finished a photo shoot with The Steamroller that would appear in the accent section of Sunday's paper. According to the story he was currently starring in his 6th film, one in which he would play a disgruntled landscaper at Florida Southern, home of 12 recently restored Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. Grange would play the grandson of one of many 1941 Florida Southern students that had worked back then as a laborer for Wright in exchange for tuition exemption, and whose own work had been overlooked due to the popularity of Wright's designs. The character would get involved in a plot to incinerate several Wright buildings, starting with the sabatoge of newly the newly rennovated Water Dome, a pointless 160-foot-across perfect circle of concrete that, had it worked, would have used a pressure hose system to create the largest man-made dome of water in the world. The film had been under fire for a scene that'd become infamous before the film even hit the big screen. This was the "death umbrella" scene in which attendants of the unveiling of the rennovated fountain are greeted by a 45 foot inverted dome of spoiled orange juice that had been--unknown to the sabateur himself--infused with an experimental neurotoxin by a secret and, apparently evil, population control branch of the government that had existed for god knew how long now. The scene took its time, about 13 minutes, and dwelt on the individual deaths of 17 people--each one got its screen time and no expenses were spare for realism. About the scene Grange commented that it was true, it was somehow the worst death scene he could think of in film, including popular torture porn and war films. But he was just an actor--he doesn't even see that stuff until the premiere.

Plus, he added, "at least folks were bothered by violence instead of sex changes for once."

That story ran through my head now as my friend group and I approached the nutmeg house. I wasn't sure what would happen--the Circle District was still a liberal democracy, and recent laws had been passed that allowed access to crime scenes for groups of a certain size. It wasn't the first time I'd seen or engaged what you might call a minor exploitation of the the new laws passed in the District after the flood, wherein scores of journalists (soft and hard news), entertainment magazines and filmmakers (amateur and syndicated), documentarians, popular historians, and old fashioned poststructuralists of all kinds had taken up permanent residence (what with the previous residents being drowned, shipped out, or having nobly volunteered to hole up for the next ten years trying to locate and sort out public records). Because the Circle District just isn't that big and also because drugs are so easy to get, this "citizens' media" often formed spontaneously whenever some sort of social or criminal tipping point occurred, especially when sex criminals are pursued by the police.

In short, the city had had to cut back on violence between the media and law enforcement (which was dangerously humble as it was). So the Right to Assemble had been annexed to Freedom of the Press, finally joining civilians and media personnel. And whenever I could get enough friends together, were were the press.

Our friend group worked its way past the layers in the skin thickening around the nutmeg house by officers, bullet-proof shields and vests, walkie-talkies and gum. We got ugly looks like were were cutting in the lunch line. Finally my group got up to the yellow tape that marked the cutoff, lodged like a cyst in the leathery shell. I thought of the suspected rapist in the house, liquified with fear, literally yellow and wet and rotted through by what he'd done or what we thought he'd done. Where was he? In the attic, looking down at the quiet, flashing mass growing outside his house under a moonless sky. Or did he have his face crushed against the gauzy curtain, the cold glass pushing into his face as he tries to listen to the clicks and whirs of radio speech and codes side-mouthed into CBs that meant the end for him.

Or maybe he wasn't there at all. Nothing to say he couldn't planned it all out and that he hadn't escaped by tunnel to the levy and was right now speed-motoring off in a skinny boat. Though it didn't seem likely--houses at this sea level don't tend to have basements, and plus rapists just don't seem like the sort that would plan and hire a construction crew to build a tunnel. I do however think of a rapist has somebody who would have a boat. Maybe I'm just being judgmental again. I'm sorry. I'm no expert.

Against the Cycle of the Virus

2007-09-27T20:18:00.000-07:00

After I had explained to the friend that had emerged from my friend group that the proudest moment in a parent's life is to watch a child fail at a task, and had settled the ensuing argument when I saw the police tighten their semicircle on the suspected rapist's house.

"That," I said my friend group friend, "is a relief."

Of course, Christmas Eve in the jazzy district of the Circle can carry with it a bustling guilt. Why you're not home with your family getting the duck ready and such. It shot through us, front to end, in a ripple. Faster walking ensued. We passed tight-assed little bars squeezed with sexy red light bulbs, yellow, blue, one after the next, but got no further from the police action fisting about the nutmeg colored house in which the worst imaginable person existed entirely without regard for the daily motions that got bread made, schools funded, shoes bought.

So we gave up, headed for the house.

I Have Seen the Jubilees But No Animals

2007-09-10T19:45:00.001-07:00

What I couldn't explain to the friend group that had now grown to nearly a hundred in number was that I had finally located the Jubilees. I thought it would be animals, maybe they'd be positioned one suspiciously random day on a meadow under a Steely Curtain of Rain. But then I looked around: police with hands poised over hips. Friend group amassing furtively. Suspected rapist still in house. And now it was time to go! I thought easily about going on, this was the only place going on could be thought about easily, in the friend group.

No, not at all. The numbering of holy days wouldn't happen with animals sketched into verse description, or come as I thought printed on rough-woven paper and inked. I wanted the resistance of the shorthaired animal under Our fingernails scratching against its growth pattern, wanted to clean animal dandruff from under the fingernails. Instead I received this clanky gloss by invitation in the mail.

The invitation came simply after I'd read enough good books to be given a hundred years to live.

And it came more precisely after giving up reading. Not so much giving up because I don't give up things I like, and I like reading because it's good for you. No, it came after I simply could not read any more. I can't even be around books, the smell of glue, of ink, the warming of air molecules when turning the page that hits the nose to penetrate the septum, making right for the brain before the decision to set the shelf on fire to be rid forever of the deaths in the books (I am all about life.) I just can't do reading anymore. My brain is a big pink erasor that pushes that rubbed-pencil scent out through my attractive mouth. I talk to others and they become nostalgic, and I too little at ease again. I probably smell like a mummy.

The invitation arrived by dream, which make no mistake is a viable form of communication. Not the boring sleep kind nobody wants to hear you narrate because you aren't at work yet; these dreams come through the slot somebody cut in the front door for just such purposes as getting mail. These dreams are in fact part of the original cutting of the slot in the door, screwing a metal hinge on it and so on, the fact that somebody knew what they were doing when they cut it out with a jigsaw or pushed the button so the machine stamped out the slot--however it happened, the mechanics don't matter. What matters is they thought of somebody somewhere getting mail through this door.

Well, OK, the mechanics do matter in a similar way that the mechanics matter when your friend group continues to grow in number as you cut around the corner away from something rough like a flourescence-soaked T-shirt and gift shop and move toward something smooth like an amber cove, a brick tavern, a deli with a peanut machine. But the mechanics don't guarantee anything and as soon as the mechanics are understood the mechanics fail.

Our friend group enters a Jubilee Center, and I have my invitation still in its oversized manilla envelope. I wonder if there will be enough seating for us all, and if the Correlator will speak English, because I only have a hundred years to live and I didn't want to spend any of those years learning another language. I understood that I would be punished for learning another language, because that's how it works On Vacation.

Friends 09/05/2007

2007-09-05T19:24:00.000-07:00

Nothing’s been the same since sleep kicked in again. I’d like to dwell on the “purulent detail” of the group I’d met with my three friends, but apparently all the Girls from mixed companies have gone into a clanky set of dreams. Plus I wasn't the one who was talking to the Girls in the first place.

The honest truth is, as We set out around to avoid one corner where a suspected rapist was being stood off by police, We came up on a row of steel doors in miniplexes not unlike the openings to laundry chutes, but sized for people. I opened one of the doors which swung out far too easily. Inside I noticed all the women dimmed into showcases with earsets were just pretty, and all the men wearing the same, not unhandsome but not handsome. Below the low, amber track lights thin threads of blue glowed in small arcs over every other ear. I walked in, gave somebody a high-five and they looked puzzled but gave me one right back. He then stood up and walked out, joining our friend group. As we were leaving a Japanese man shot out through a door with an infant in his arm. Swinging closed, We caught sight of an exit corridor and knew that was the one We were supposed to go in. The man had a puckered face that said he'd gotten the wrong kind of attention from his work visit, and that he was annoyed at having to walk all the way around the little complex to leave. He didn't join our group of friends.

It was this that made Us head back toward the barricades. We were just getting coffee, waiting on out-of-town friends, not doing anything terrible. We’d picked up a couple of more friends along the way We’d met walking from District houses down to the recently opened Deli & Bar. It seemed so regularly paced I had to remind myself We were on vacation, this was Vacation Time.

Somebody at the back of our growing number of friends asked where the Girls were located; I informed him they’d gone into a clanky set of dreams. We walked on to the Deli & Bar to pay for food and water. I heard one friends (a girl) tell another friend (a boy) that she really just wanted a "free night" with him. Somebody else wanted to see some landscape paintings.

Why? Another friend asked.

Landscape painting is about the disappearing of landscapes, usually, the friend said.

That’s all? No more no less? But which friend said it I didn't catch.

Vacation Freedom Night with a sex friend and tour of a museum with paintings. I announced that neither was possible now, but I couldn't turn around to see who I'd said it to. By now our number of friends had reached close to 20, enough to not see everybody at once, at a single look. Some ate inside on the counters and others ate outside with the police across the street with black and brown guns they squeezed like shiny, terrified bugs. They pointed at the mud-gray windows, where behind the windows, the suspected rapist switched off the porch light curtly.

deposit.five

2007-07-30T03:08:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the End was Not Near
Member of city discovered walking around neighborhood where member lives, reaching for wallet, forgetting wallet was left at home, returning home, adjusting the plants, sitting until sunrise, considering what breakfast should look like today
Belinda, TX:

There was walking, there was gazing up at the moon,
Sure, shaken from rest by a bleary picture of lines
Smoother, fuzzier, and plenty of people to ask about.
Then that moon again in its over-wrought cleanliness.
As no hemorrhage ever occurs on the moon as it is
Self-correcting, horribly impossible to spoil
Or learn a thing about. It could do no wrong at all.
It couldn’t bust if dropped, failing to cry enough
To stock a thimble nor gag a tick. Its perfect is, too,
The over-wrought perfect watching of someone shower
Behind the frosted glass. You have nothing to do with it,
Is what I say perched on your banister, perched upon
Your rail, but what you would have been
Come some less healed season. That one in which I walked
Into your house on the crutch of reason gone to seed
And threw it there, right there in front of you
On the table where you have kept your books
Stacked like folded shirts as long as I can remember.

It was reported this member of the city has lived in this city for longer than this member thought. More as the failure of the End develops. Back to You.

Clippings (the End is Not Near)

2007-07-27T19:11:00.000-07:00

With the opening of the last bundle of newsprint, a dispersal of air begins to show off around the perimeter. Jokes are bad for the next 24 hours, but we tell them all.

We surmise that the End is Not Near and, frightened of our own boredom, dedicate ourselves its acceleration.

We work out.

deposit.four

2007-07-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

Present, FL. Polls reveal that WE are brought to the present by enhancement of pleasure, what a comment. WE, of National Wildlife and Fishery WE CORP., are brought to the present by pleasure in a cinching, by stimuli outside procreative driving ranges. For WE, married at the wedding chapel i.e. crumpling under the tasers of WE HAS SENTIMENTS ABOUT LIFE, all space outside procreative acts (TO FUCK, or, TO MAKE PAPERS OCCUR, or, TO GET YOUR DRIVER'S LICENSE et al) is space zoned for PRESENCE PLEASURES TO BE ENHANCED BY ORGANIC TASER-ACTION. Like stabbing a barnacle with a fork over and over, a fluid's personal gush occurs when THE PAST and THE FUTURE just get tired of being stabbed over and over and stop laying eggs. For WE, the PLEASURE is tantamount to the infertility of things like THE PAST and THE FUTURE which don't exist. Please refer to our HABITS MANUAL segment of the ABSOLUT MARRIAG ARRANGEMENTS WITH Mr. LIFE handbook, particularly cf. "Tasers" (appendix) or the "cigarette umbrellas" block of the glossary.

deposit.three

2007-06-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

Belinda from Tyler, TX forces herself to be repulsed by her son Marco, 5, on the grounds that her initial charmed feeling for him had since feathered into that feeling now even talk show hosts feel entitled to call "the sublime."

"Oh it's a real feeling," said Belinda, "and you'll be right to use the word 'feather'. It's like a hard ice-feather in your belly that somehow makes your legs warm and watery."

"But I just can't do that right now," Belinda added.

Belinda has enlisted friends and professionals to help her cultivate her repulsion, and reports that so far her feelings for her son have made her feel like a weather vane, a bronze fighting cock, and a cupola.

deposit.two

2007-06-25T01:55:00.000-07:00

Mark from Tuscaloosa reports a carelessness in his words and a fantasy barking. Turning the corner, he reminds himself to make contact with someone he's become scared of.

deposit.one

2007-06-23T00:54:00.000-07:00

Molly from somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon but previously from the uneven, sweaty part below says she's nervous. She reports a banging in the lip plate like her own lip plate.
The true part is she studies one thing over many things, and that in a very narrow style of feelings.

Who's ready to work

2007-06-03T20:39:00.000-07:00

the soldiers are footing away in jelly dribbles. And Here We thought they'd signed on for permanent surveillance. Only to find that We don't understand How Binding Contracts Work. So locating the tubes flung from on high red mountain is chafing our lower bellies and working our fingernails into a hateful complexion. So there's the inevitable reading of the contents. Once the hair dryer cuts away the fossils.

Inside your arm like inside a red piano

2007-03-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

The glass finally broke like a fever, right under our hands, and a fever slapped us immediately. Glass everywhere, fluid red ribbons suddenly opened into our hands and unfurling to the elbow. Plasmic topographical distortions splattering our smocks, ruining them, smouldering. Volcanoes arising from the ocean like monstrous, steaming heads.

This is what it's always been about. The innuendo of a Jazz Age Quija board seance insinuated into the work of Making a Move. Work, work, work. It's all we ever do. We'd been sitting long enough at it too, working through the bronze and iron ages respectively, tectonics striking twelve every twelve hours to let help us pace ourselves. The plasma screens were too delicate and smudgeable to touch with our bare hands, and so they were covered with dangerously volatile glass. Not the kind in modern automotive use that does not warm to the touch--not the kind that shatters into cubelets in your lap you could practically eat if you knew how. This was the old-fashioned kind, the kind that is still technically liquid, and after a few generations would actually conform to the muscular and vascular ridges of your wrists, palms, fingers, thumbs, moving around and over your hands, until served as a razor-thin prophylactic pooling around the starfish-like finger motions that were the trademark of our craftworks.

The glass was necessary. . . one little smear or fingerprint could set into the screen after just a few decades, harden and cause a brittle explosion of cancer in the organism being shaped beneath the plasmic screen. You, the artisan of an Artisan Class, were not the problem. It was the organism, naturally. The organic form beneath your hands with the genetic response coding, responding to the plasmic barrier--in a way, the organism's prophylactic barrier to infection from the radiation-induced plasma screen was as important as the plasma screen's being protected by the fluid-glass prophylactic from infection by the hands that pushed the screen's topographical ripples, rearranged its tectonic patterns, tickled a weather pattern, pressurized volcanic ridges or engaged in Big Picture Erosion Hour instead of just going to lunch.

These were your hands. These were your hands, now split to bloody ribbons, heavy cords that buzzed when exposed to air. That moment of shock as we sat there right after gravity downshifted, our sphere changing gears and spinning a bit faster so gravity dug in its nails and really started throbbing toward its own center. That almost wacky look, both cut badly but you cut worse, with a cord of blood jutting out into the atmosphere like snipped piano wire.

Worth the drive

2007-01-11T20:19:00.000-08:00

The electricity was off due to a Hat Passing, and so when Marianna stated that my fingerless knit gloves were “update-ish”, “like a short skirt for hands,” I had no choice but turn on my Repeater Stick through a wrist-flick motion that had become a signature of my Style. The Repeater Stick expanded with a sharp telescopic “click”, immediately devoting to memory Marianna’s jabs and brusque mouth sounds.

I had made the thing, as we all have to now. I have had the fortune to live in the Bottom Hedge, Minor Seam-fold of red Mountain, a region primarily colonized by Repeater Bees, a kind of bee known for two things: a. unlike normal human bees, they won’t have anything to do with pollen, hive-building, or honey (see “Historical Note” below), and b. the Repeater Bee has the unique ability to mimic human and animal speech through the collective buzzing of wings and rubbing of legs. Fixed in a cheesecloth feeding-sack at the end of the Repeater Stick, the bees become excited and receptive when startled by the wrist-flick motion, measuring and resigning to memory sound waves and frequencies.

The only failing of the Repeater Stick is that, once the next recording occurs, the previous is lost forever as the bees have all the talent in the world but, alas, no reason to develop talent into vocation.

Be that as it may Marianna, shocked at her own profanities and slanders repeated by a constrained, yet intimidating, swarm of buzzing mimics, turned and stomped away. Then she stopped, pivoted on-heel, and give me the finger and a bye-bye wave. I sat on a seam-ledge of red Mountain, feeling a bit of the “Oceanic” drift as the tectonics shifted. My vomiting had been a little irregular lately, as I usually vomited twice a day (three if I’d had some tea or eaten more than one pomegranate). I was concerned about my health, as I didn’t know if it was a “just me” phenomenon or if my sea-sickness had been compromised by irregularities in the Drift. I closed my eyes. So far as I could tell, nothing seemed irregular about drift of Bottom Hedge; as usual, I felt like I was sitting on the side of a catamaran on calm waters. But I hadn’t vomited since yesterday morning, and the eclipse (the Hat was in waning position) seemed a little off-kilter.

I retracted and snapped my Repeater Stick again to make a note to myself: walk to other side of red Mountain, see if vomiting constitutional re-regulates as a result of. I figured there was no reason to keep Marianna’s comments, as they were either completely in jest or made out of jealousy over my fingerless gloves. She was just snappy because I’d gotten them free from the girls who work for their companies, who come around the bars giving out samples of tears.

(Historical Note on the honey-averse preconditioning of bees) Repeater Bees are the product of a typical reverse evolution or “involution” significant to species occuring In Rapture. Distinct from Devolution—a process of returning to a previous, less “fit” state—a species involutes when its genetic coding begins unraveling and revealing earlier, but not necessarily less “fit”, situationally, sets of codes. These could make them more fit or less fit for survival in a Rapturous environment, which is pretty much up to chance, Hat Position, the number of erections (male and female) occurring in a day, and the shifting tectonics of red Mountain due to the blood pressure in the center of the earth. Sometimes the earth’s blood-core is affected by Salt Intensities and shifting is sped or slowed. The requires a doctor; the usual landscapers are not qualified to correct the naturally occuring erections in people’s yards.

In the case of Repeater Bees, they involute to a state of honey-aversion, a state prior to the Bee’s special function as reproductive agents for flora and other plant and animal species that would later thrive on pollen carriage and honey production (there were dinosaurs for that purpose back then).

As lyrically recounted in the Jubilees, prior to their carrier function bees acted as free agents with few or no natural predators, similar to the contemporary elephant or ancient Histhonosaur but quicker on their feet. Also similar to elephants and dinosaurs, the Repeater Bee had no ecological purpose. They would thus wander, unrestricted by function, and came to be known “Gypsy Repeaters” in certain parts of Asia Minor, until a hullabaloo was raised by Asia Minorettes making a case against special insensitivity.

At a concise moment in prehistory, the Repeater Bee eventually became landlocked by oceanic winds and found themselves on an island with early forms of the honey- producing, carnivorous H. bicalcarata, a flesh-eating pitcher plant of approximately three feet due to the oxygen rich environment etc. of prehistory. The plant was a symbiot with anthropoid inhabitants who fed the plants early versions of muskrat (larger than present species) and foal (much smaller) whose only fossil record to date are various trace honey-drawings of what seemed to be crude dinners around crude dinette sets. There is no evidence of special holiday dinners, and it is speculated the drawings were made by offspring sent away from the table while their parents ate; the industrious children, no longer hungry and now bored, would inevitably use their leftovers as art supplies. Based on the representations, however, the parents disapproved of using the sticky sap on the walls. They used the honey as a preservative and a solution in which to store the muskrat, the foal, and other scavengers of the day in skins, feeding such “feeder sacks”, skin and all, to the H. bicalcarata. In response to overfeeding and anthropoid underpopulation, the plant gradually produced more honey than necessary, making it a more and more fearsome predator for flying insects.

Enter the Bee. As a foreign, free agent, the Bee found itself for the first time with a natural predator—-the H. bicalcarata. A moment from the Jubilees, while anthropomorphic, dramatically portrays this moment in the evolution of the prehistorical Bee into the pre-Rapture bee of Yesterday: “The bee, faced for the first time with a natural predator, shocked and repulsed, sickened by the draw of nectars/ would decide to cloak itself against itself./ It learned to make honey to throw off its own senses./ It learned to smell not the enemy/ so as to avoid the trap” (4.3). Soon discovering that bee honey was more subtle in fragrance than Calcarata honey, the anthropoids gradually learned to keep and harvest beehives.

This shift in lifestyle rendered several results: the bee was gradually integrated into the ecosystem with Previously familiar functions which it would take with it much later as the “modern bee” eventually spread to other parts of the world; but first it existed in the Abject Phase of Bees, which required it to produce what the bee’s instinct told it was essentially an unsavory waste product, excretions through its own feeding apparatus that it would mix with severe irritants from wild flora. Some zoologists describe this moment in history in such terms as this: “Honey, which we enjoy worldwide today and picture as something bees make happily in cozy little hives, actually comes to us as the results of a full-on allergy, a species-wide sneeze. To put it crudely, honey was pretty much bee-snot.”

On the other hand the H. bicalcarata became all but obsolete except in smaller “novelty ecosystems”; foals were now kept first as pets and gradually developed into modes of transportation as they were allowed to become full-grown horses; the prehistoric muskrat, no longer useful to the anthropoids, migrated away from oceanic habitats toward more marginalized wetlands, ponds, lakes, river banks, etc., gradually developing more contemporary features such as tail propulsion and burrowing instincts (speculated to have derived, perhaps, from their ancestor’s attempts at clawing their way out of the carnivorous pitcher plants before digestion) that have resulted in their symbiosis with aquatic birds and the nick-name “swamp bunny”.

I suppose I’m one of those people who would rather remember something than hear it played back. I admit that I have a cruel streak. Marianna really bothers me and, what can I say? Who hasn’t at some point wanted to release a swarm of bees on somebody who just seems like they deserve a swarm of bees? I don’t entertain cruel and ironic punishments for others, but let’s face it: everybody deserves a swarm of bees now and then. In my most adolescent fantasies, I think of my Repeater Bees and how that would be for Marianna. Imagine: ventriloquist bees stinging somebody to death! Pull the trigger and release a swarm of hungry bees saying Marianna’s name, the name right there in Marianna’s ear but Marianna, she is unable to grab the source. I wonder if she would go demonstrating that natural curiosity I’ve always admired; if she went, would she go with her legs crossed under her trying to grab certain imperfections out of the air?

Why it has to be this way. 2

2006-12-21T05:45:00.000-08:00

A 4-month-old girl who lost four toes after they were gnawed on by a family pet is out of the hospital but remains in the custody of Child Protective Services today.

Three of the baby's toes were completely off, and the fourth had to be removed, said spokesman. Authorities say the couple's 6-week-old puppy chewed off the baby's toes, although a ferret was also inside the house.

According to authorities, which animal bit the baby doesn't matter.

Thanks to [name] for this scoop which has been recognized and privatized by red mountain.
—

End step-mountain test, after soldering some homynym misdemeanors and guessing for words that were just plain left out. Send up.

Dump the Volcano, Says Mr. Tectonic #1

2006-12-11T21:21:00.000-08:00

Seizure. . .a laddering formation appears in ground ripples from continuous overhead passings of the Hat. It is somebody's will to pull turnrows into Us down below. Imagine if this were an accessible moment: phaser beam or something from the oblong Ship passing overhead phasing out city-block furrows of, OK, a city block. What is so attractive in that? The leveling of what The Beam Wants, the Beam Gets. The Beam is a hostile, protracted page from the word processor with set and imaginary margins. Within the margins of the ray hitting earth from our Ancestors above Us, matter disperses. City blocks are measured and equalized, i.e., topographically degenerated. Back to Atmosphere status. Void Ancestral Tree.

Which is why neither We nor red Mountain could get into ancestor worship. As the plates rearrange on the topographical map whose contours We're charting just for you, red Mountain lays out the red Carpet though piling contour on contour, rippling upward until there's a perfectly good set of "proto"-step apparati for Us. We understand, naturally, this The End again. If We step up, sling our tool kit over shoulders and take a proper Hike, We will escape the the End of the world, again.

There are days set aside for all this, set days, and postage stamps to commemorate them. For every set day we map the contours to be imprinted on these stamps. It's never tedious because red Mountain is a perfect envelope. Not only is it entirely empty, it is the Letter (as the Letter is typed on the interior folds of the mountain). We take the Hike with Shoes, sloshing through the ink of marshes, leaving tracks that make a perfectly Nice antithesis, thus solution, to anthropology.

Why it has to be this way.

2006-12-10T23:40:00.000-08:00

Woman shot in head with crossbow

A 72-year-old woman was shot in the head with a crossbow, and investigators with the Ouachita Parish Sheriff's Office believe a relative did it.

Maj. Royce Toney said investigators were called to St. Francis Medical Center emergency room Saturday morning after a doctor there believed the woman's wound to her forehead looked suspicious.

Toney said the investigation took them to the woman's home on Evergreen Street in the Bawcomville community of West Monroe. They found a three-blade broadhead hunting arrow and a crossbow they think was used in the crime.

Toney said the woman was asleep in her bed when she was shot. The arrow glanced off her head, through the pillow, the mattress and box springs, ripping off a portion of the nightstand, where it finally stopped.

The suspect and relative will be charged with attempted second-degree murder, Toney said.

The arrow and crossbow were recovered, and investigators are waiting on forensics results, Toney said.

Thanks to thenewsstar.com and reporter Sharryn Harvey for this scoop.
—

This is why it has to be this way and why the Hat is on backorder for the holiday season. We aren't being mean. We don't want you to miss out on the proper experience. We simply weren't prepared for the popularity of the idea that the rapture will occur during a faith-based holiday. We apologize for our lack of forward thinking on this one. Yes, it is as good a time as any.

A Traditional Horror Story

2006-11-29T20:35:00.000-08:00

What have I been working for? It had no right, so the map and I got to wrestling.

Things were fine, just fine until the map, up to now lying dormant as a Halloween mask on the floor of my apartment, decided to uncoil and not so gently eat the parrot—my parrot, my pet since childhood. The topographic rings indicating the height of Red mountain hadn't budged until then. Then Skeeters The Parrot disappeared in mid-hop. I'd just yelled NO! fearing he'd mess up my work. Who knew maps had chick teeth, and could use them?

I'd been suspecting something odd for a while, but I had no idea it involved the progress of my research project from simple myth-making to a “journey” whose final moments would be initiated by a rude uncoiling of contour lines from the grid system. I felt a push of air, like somebody snapping their fingers but no sound—push, collapse, equally quiet. Staring down at the couple of feathers hung shocked in air and floating slowly away from the source of danger, I knew implicitly what the map—whose behavior had commandeered all sense of a situation—insisted upon: shut up.

Poor Skeeters, digested by a neat biology of paper cuts and corrosive inks—broken down into blue dashes flurrying somewhere inside a landscape of beasts. I never had much truck in bestiaries or medieval sufferings of serpents or why animals were drawn and quartered; the whole study seemed to me the domain of fat girls who thought often about the Celts and earnestly believed they would be able to fly after they were dead.

But here I am now, a knot in the belly of a late blooming purulent interest in the fantasies of those I still condescend as escapists, sad victims of bad skin, and experts in hysterical realism.

Snapping the bra of Proscription

2006-11-23T21:56:00.000-08:00

In mapping the seasonal progress of the Rapture Hat via red mountain, there are journalists of Use, reporters of dread whose dry tongues jot notations to be left in our hairs. Today the cloth jumbles proscriptively somewhere over Alaska, indicates a particularly ummolested Use hog. The Arctic tern's annual migration rolls upward the circumference of the Earth like a snapped sock, during which the bird lucidly monologues to an internal mythologization of its own habits and regularly sleeps on the elastic contents of its pockets before crowning anyone with them. Its lining constantly evacuating for the sake of a "patent" on the Aerial Calendar, the Arctic tern's concern with jerry-rigging a logistical X for the sake of the rapture likely waives by order of the Provision Of Dread required to effectively resent the ground level in a style "after Hemingway."

And so who knows whose Hat is being dusted and by whom, exactly, today? With Informations flourishing unverifiably and the precedent of Only Having Ourselves to Blame reporting into our brunches, We consider converting red mountain to a step apparatus containing the means of its own deposited reportage.

That declared, it's time you disappeared and We stepped in.

2006-11-22T11:30:00.000-08:00

We've waited and We've waited for you to leave. If I'm in love I will show it through weakness. My weakness is waiting for others to leave. You won't and now it's time to black out the room.

We wrapped a game hen in a silicon Hardener, brushed at Our beauty mark (at which We are joined at the face) and slammed a fist on the silicon Hardener Setter on the stove top. So it did set and it did harden, boy. I turned Our heads and opened my mouth again. An autumnal siren wiggled throughout the lobby. A yellow leaf slid from under Her shirt, but She's not important right now. We produced a Simplified Injector and dipped it into the hen, cut open the set mould in just a minute or so, poured a dark broth onto the carpet. “Hen-shaped fruit gelatin preparer, anyone?” one of Us joked while we prepared a fruit-shaped gelahen de-sorter. I've tired, the Other one of Us said, of being of Love. You have to go now, You are a menace. You couldn't quite read the hint but You couldn't because we'd jammed tight the doors, it's true, those doors already had been jammed closed by those large pieces of wood one uses to jam such things when passionate about nobody leaving.

Are all family gatherings this way?

With the situation like that, an injection seemed inevitable. You tried to convince me that We had betrayed Us. I pointed suitably. See the beauty mark? This is Our mark of Beauty. Is it not obvious? Naturally it is. It is the internal organ of the timepiece that marks beauty. “But there's a war on” you plaintiffed and whipped the bowl of cream. Put that down I said, that isn't yours.

So You lay down on the sleigh bed of ice and hummed Hit Nativity Singles until disappearing completely.

Did You get the weather, a spot in a journal which is a spot on the Map and which contains the Map? I asked. We are old fashioned in our uppity map abuse, the perils of an Internal Organ inhaled through a pronounced nostril. After You was dead I blew my nose and glared effectively at the abject compasses littering the sheepskin before saying, Grace!

A Case of Abused Room Service

2006-11-10T18:06:00.000-08:00

Reconstructing the surface topography of a centipede or massif containing weather, this is what some All-seeing mixers are up against. First Animal, facing right, is in the process of regurgitating a small runner whose legs are already pumping in replication of a predecessor sprinting in track shorts with one arm upraised to extend a pennant for relief.

On its observable left is a figurehead to clarify menace, and in a potential gap on the ground plane are crammed an assortment of unfortunate and ridiculous items busily catching water. The ornamental properties of some squinchy historicized artifice aside, it's been one of the better days for Hatting it up.

Lonely on Halloween

2006-10-05T15:35:00.000-07:00

For Halloween, We must protect myselves through direct and vulgar confusions: “Dongs off to that!” Says Phillis. “Don’t get bit in the biological illuminations before REM sleep initiation,” says Doug to the cash register manning the woman behind the counter at the Halloween Spirit Store.

In Our grandest moments, we’re memos sent by the Rapture Hat to earth. A vernacular seizing-up happens when we set foot on the old earth of nondead people, when we get back from the mountain.

For Halloween we sing a few Halloween Carols we learned in heaven.

O I wish was in the glove of matter
cedar bark is the best illuminator,
O stenographer,
O stenographer!
O stenographer.
Whoa!

Won’t yous get out on out of that wall,
There’s applications to be done and what-all.
And watch muscles
slip on vacaaaa
-tion soaps, fromyerbones.

Part 2

2006-09-24T23:37:00.000-07:00

Part 2

Red mountain finally did it.

Its aperture waggled and swanked. Heaved, cried. Unbuckled and defolded slow and exact, like a napkin snapped open by a Dinner Guest. Due to proportions, it went much slower and gave Us time to be bothered.

We needed shelter to get away from Commercial Appreciation who’d just said that this is what everybody gets for cocking up the spin cycle on the Nature Machine.

O listen, I was trying to intensify the air around Us to get a reading (but Commercial Appreciation goes on: We get Raptures and We get low-paying Landscaping jobs, the Dangers of Thresholds, and Egyptian mummification. . .)

“Do I look like a mummy, milknose?” You asked. Won’t somebody slap the silly off this teabag? Leave it to a nonlandscaper to tell a Landscaper how to scape.

“We never got mummified and ain’t gonna,” I cued. And what’s this We? We is not you, Commercial Appreciation. “So get stuffed.”

It's a pornagraphic unfolding and my stomach leaps. I swat it like a mosquito. Our other organs strut around as if there's a convention starting soon. We started tapping at the aquarium we’d been recently studying. Within it, balanced sloppily on a Danger’s dorsal-spike, was the insight we needed into the Conspicuous Evolutionary Trend in Land Mammals. I need the compression chamber You keep in Your appendix cavity. A brain has its seams puffed, arched, and hisses at the draws of friction made by the rubbing of folds against each other as red mountain unfolds.

“Been looking for you,” I said, grabbing You clavicle to draw you away from Commercial Appreciation’s latest “demonstration” of mummification procedures he was sure We’d undergone. Commercial Appreciation stands pantomiming over and over a person whipping a check out of a checkbook. “Maybe you, gauzeballs, but not Us.”

We had to stay like that when friction was thickest, didn’t We? When you were over there, right over there, somebody talking your ear right down to the floor?

I made a mistake to cut him off with the stereoplotter, one swooping assessment after the next, layer after layer of his mustache dissected and gridded and numbered until he stopped resurrecting long enough to mummify him a second time so maybe he’d stay mummified this time. Our Landscape’d had enough of his type. At some point You Stop Forgiving So Things Can Get Moving.

But every atom is a tattletale. Red mountain seizured. It started resembling a tissue swan, origamic convulsions at wing and tail. Commercial Appreciation’s blood, powdered from soaking in canning jars, smelling like pickled pigs’ feet and bone marrow, spored the air like a jackhammered dandelion.

Resurrections always stink.

Aw damn, said the Conspicuous Evolutionary Trend in Land Mammals.

This always happens when We’re about to get some insight into that guy.

We did it though, we survived our first Resurrection Plotting. We weren’t lucky, We were prepared. We unhitched the mule, birthed its mule-foal, showed it to its mother, studied its ridiculous newborn stumble to see which way it leaned before falling over and announcing that it gave up, Unable To Take Any More, theatrically thrusting its newborn legs straight up into the air, letting its tongue hang out, X-ing its eyes.

We followed the stumble pattern until we found what needed: the huge Pink Eraser that could give us shelter from the aftershock of the crime. We hacked and hewed, tunneling into the eraser to peel away satisfying pink hunks of aromatic rubber and kicking shreds and strips behind Us struck by something being Normally On Our Hands Now Being On Our Bodies. We sat in total arrest of this odor and relived some Lovely Things about boxes.

Now I remember why we took this job, One of Us Said (sniffing a wrist).

You: I understand. Red mountain is a bit of refuse left here by a bird to nest as Such Birds are driven out by land mammals. The migration patterns of these mammals speeds up when a Rapture swanks ahead, sharp curve, razorin' away the Atmosphere behind it. Rapturing Pattern = wood shaving effect.

I: this tells me a lot more about the Conspicous Evolutionary Trend in Land Mammals.

Us: It's a good thing We're not here to fix anything.

Excerpting Our Own Hands, part 1

2006-09-19T22:33:00.000-07:00

Upon looping this finger into that valance, the whole fixture waggles, after a fashion. We can't be picky about the realities of lift-off, the small items we are required to steal on a daily basis. The original projection was fueled by work and SANKA, euphemious for a polite persecution incited by the pathological condition of dust. A various disease. We rotated our health on a schedule so that our highs and lows became exhilarating and intimate.

We worked nights to study our feelings and perceived that they are archetypical. Biologically, athletically isn't the issue. Our betting pool for Next Conspicuous Evolutionary Trend in Land Mammals, our secret faith in repetition, everything.

The stereoplotter converged onward, disposing aerial bracken out of reach, driving us to bind our feet with shared mail.

The body of the mammal hat And Hovering. Why Red Mountain Hovers, keeping Birds and The Dead Waiting

2006-09-14T20:28:00.000-07:00

Say.

Say didn’t We just come awake? Did we just die again? The diner’s closed, the wimples stashed, Big Top has been sunset-cauterized for the evening. Our plane is landing; suddenly We were not on vacation, and then We Are. We always Are! We meant it, and let there be no doubt.

The plane lands again. We gets off again. Red mountain, having lifted and soared overhead (Rapture Hat Standard Time), disco-doggied and tearing the covers off the earth's beds of dirt, loosening many birds from uniform dreams of arrows, now comes to hover a sec.

Forever.

What did we expect? Commercial Appreciation Season. We pause for a moment of gluttony and silence. Commercial Appreciation approaches us, swaggering like a cheese, cutting a path through the Zoned Area where red mountain had stuck forever, like the dorsal fin of a shark god whose teeth were cleaned by the dead.

The area on the drywallscape of the flown mountain time aperture showed a little darker, smelled a little stronger of fresh wall paint, had been a little less faded by afterlight and air. Red mountain had flopped like a Flopper In Bed and eventually flew the coop. Perhaps it always had! It did resemble a hat. Time works all different On Vacation anyways. But We knew one thing: things haven’t been the same since Our vacation began/ended! And now they haven’t gone back, although we Have and Always Will! As We get home to red mountain but It Not There!

Which is now our home again as the vacation portion of our topographical expedition shuts its mouth only to open another mouth. Red mountain be Hatted! We cried; we have Cried; I has and You has; We Have cried as we toss our carry-on bags of mesh on the water table! A few birds fly away. We have cried! and looked oddly at the toiletries we took with us on Vacation and gain suddenly a new appreciation, as though we'd just bought 'em and were dumping em on a kitchen table instead.

Let’s go to the store, seeths Commercial Appreciation. You All have to watch out. He is not Us, He is the bad man. He’s a squatter. He the absence of buried power lines and a car hitting a butterfly etc. He Not Rapture. He that keeps the dead from going about their business. He a clean window to a bird.

No, I say to Us, because We must not acknowledge Commercial Appreciation. If we do we will die and never come back. Not even look, iss a no=no.

No, let’s just get all this mesh out of the mesh bags. So We can see what we got on Vacation.

The Rapture works the body of the mammal hat.

2006-09-13T19:22:00.000-07:00

Hide under a slow squeeze or inside the exposed spleen of your own recycled history, but consider making time with your most theatrical diner because it's the safest place on earth and most things will begin and end here. Don't you want a thing or two to begin and then end? Aren't you tired of your own pale tongue?

Eat the crispy fries, drink the ranch, and give yourself the callus of Our dreams. You'll need it when your own goodwill ends.

Item

Slipping into a game of batteries and waiting for the pinch isn't the same rush as it was that one perfect weekend. Open your crispy mouth and speak in the recycled tongues of your history. Try to mean it. Light a cigarette and throw it at the spire-speak of Professional Camping. Walk it off. Let your tongue become a potato chip of what it once was.

When you hear the faint kettle-whistle, don't look up. You mustn't look up. Pretend the whistle is coming from your soft own chip. It might. It might as well. When the whistle stops, you'll be the same but the air will smell like Our favorite detergent.
We love that smell.

About Our Veils, Barbettes, and Wimples: vacation pornography

2006-09-07T18:38:00.000-07:00

To Juarez:

in case i don't get to work on this again today or We don't, here's part of a post to The Rapture Hat. I've still got a few photos stored in my digital that you may be interested in. Please edit this post for Coherence and Clarity, as it lacks something of the event. Barry and Lisa want to move me to the new store, but I'm hesistant. I've reviewed the attached photos and am bothered by the presence of kidney scarring and the light Swedish accent. It was a wakeup call.

____________________________________________
Again the Rapture Hat idled over. Concern for Our Welfare was growing, then diminishing, then growing again. The Kidney Larks swayed like gassed inmates on the auburn trees that grow at these elevations.

Concern for Our Welfare was growing. In fact, throbbing with each royal Hat pass. One of Us lost 10 pounds and gained it back again, as promised, "in the twinkling of an eye". Sometimes We would lose more and the Spectre of a Professional Modeling Career would crackle, glitter, crackle, and fizz in the ionosphere overhead. It would be Suddenly Fourth of July Song Day and the the buried ancestors of red mountain would rise too fast and their torsos sag backwards to break off like wet donut sticks. This was Our fault.

Did We put red mountain back exactly like it was? asked One.

I'm pretty Sure, said Another.

But we hadn't. We'd cocked it up. Red mountain's compass points had been thus skewed, the Lateral Hat Patterns growing more Pronounced as the inflection of its passage through the gaseous layers of the Rapture erred, ripping a little into layers above or below and We were at Big Top Casino and Kitchen talking with "miss" Barbara about ordering the Special.

Miss Barbara, you shouldn't smoke.

I'm too set in my ways to change.

When does the gaming area open up?

On Tuesdays.

Rituals that Cock Up the Fly-zone

2006-08-31T18:28:00.000-07:00

The killdeer's toes are red without health. They stub against the red mountain. This is an acceptable problem because We occasionally ventilate in the same way, although We will be the ones to solve it. If we had only been voted into Solutions, our passageways wouldn't waste this tender time grasping into empathy with the killdeer's imagined public scorn. Obsessive habits of repositioning/orienting its incubating mendicants have been documented without design in Powerpoint, but forget that. Really, we just want the killdeer to remove itself from harsh objects, from our local police station, from the cold bicycle chain we left behind.

Waving at the Rapture as You Would a Banking Airplane

2006-08-27T14:57:00.000-07:00

The Rapture Hat hit us in mid-squat, one of us Using Our Legs to lift red mountain back on its sunken pedestal, another using the stereoplotter to pry loose a leg from some fallen natural scenery. Y'all see that? said another of us, waving overhead. There it went.

No, no, don’t wave. Use the stereoplotter. Oh, OK, I guess this leg can just remain Part of the Natural Scenery Forever, said the first another. Toss me the thing and I’ll totally hit that when it turns around in response to this Emergency, Attention Please! Wave I’ve got going on, said the second another of us.

Don’t be greedy. Keep working on the leg, just toss the other here, said the Waving one of us.

The Rapture Hat banked left far off in the distance, headed back.

It was obvious things were about to be different, and then they were.

Psst, say, said the red mountain lifting one of us, could you hold this for a minute? The one stopped stereoplotting the leg, which had changed by not being stuck. The one waving wasn’t with us anymore. The leftover wave dropped to the ground and didn’t break but rolled along its edge to cut tighter and tighter rounds as will a plate or a penny until it did a gyrate shudder and abruptly stopped.

I was just about to raise the Objection Flag to say we’re really going to need that but I looked up and saw how The Rapture Hat banked left far off in the distance.

Red Mountain Dilemma

2006-08-23T21:24:00.000-07:00

We skirt the foot creases of the red mountain. We prepared for this by modifying our stereoplotter to help us map its unique contour. One of us might ask why we can’t just lay a ruler against the red mountain edge, and walk it? Another in the party could easily reply that it’s impossible to climb a structure whose cartography, partially represented, is not this

but is, famously,

and a real setback for photogrammetrics. If hollowed out and its Outwardly Creased Folds reinforced, the thickness of red mountain might give satisfying entry to the aphid escaping a hungry Seven Spotted Ladybug.

Perhaps one of our party would raise The Objection Flag, asking why we don’t just knock it down. Lying flat it would then be scaleable, really, by just walking along it until we got to the top. Then we could just use the ruler, the old Roman Foot. Then, with Teamwork and somebody to eye it up, we could set it back up again before anybody noticed, stamp it, and take some pictures.

The Rapture Hat, mapped.

2006-08-22T22:51:00.000-07:00

Somewhere within the red mountain, we're there, the stomping grounds of the Rapture Hat. The mountain accurately parrots the one here, also cheaply constructed in two dimensions. Be aware before casting some consignment invective on our budget that it doubles as a sundial, a city attraction if we wished.

Thanks to Lawson's Body Shop.

vocabulary proposal, 1.

2006-08-20T17:57:00.000-07:00

TREMBULARIUM, noun. Nominates the irrelevance of the impotency of the "book-doer" to wholly direct others' experiential pacing.

We feel that We can operate outside of a few normally advisable limitations and also that this intention washes us with successful feelings.

Two Examples of Hair as Nest

2006-08-18T15:52:00.000-07:00

Sweeping from the top left to the mid-lower right of an unsuccessful deviation from the Rapture Hat's usual markings is a series of plattered nests in full crown, a handspring tribute to proper response, aka triumphs of nesting phenomenology.

"THAT" Landscape

The Lapland longspur, which winters in south Canada and north central US, experiences a compressed breeding season: wearied by a long flight and preparing for fertilization followed almost immediately by labor, incubation, and the desertion of whichever offspring runt, the mother rips out her own feathers as lining for the nest and waits it out.

The mocking cliff-chat from southern Africa intones and preens when excited. Couples defend their territory with an aggressive, precisely synchronized duet and ruffled threat posture. The "new" hair nest escalates naturally from the original animal hair bowl, splashing into an ornate stage replete with braids, extensions, applied product, and explicitly synthetic decoration. But as the mocking cliff-chat can be a fairly solitary bird outside of breeding season, the new nest continues to officiate a primary concern with privacy, soundproofing being an accessible, almost accidentally successful science.

"THIS" Landscape

The ivory-billed woodpecker, hailing within the boundaries of the Rapture Hat though miles north of our main button of concern, lives in a timeless cliché for stashing, eats one dwindling organic by-product. An overturned vase would make a good nucleus for setting off the lining. This is an example of preparing for extinction, of how the doomed of nesting phenomenology, in their internalized vanity, choose to behave.

The Rapture Hat or A Rapture Hat? A Fine Question for Solution Engineers.

2006-08-16T19:47:00.000-07:00

Editorial Update

In reference to manuscript sample 3, the editors of The Rapture Hat having grown impatient with complaints concerning the RETRO feel of what so many have come to call “The What. Antediluvial Wig Tree?” and so have written an editorial that we place here.

–START OF EDITORIAL–

First, a defense:

One final retraction: for the past nearly 15 years, we have attributed the following quote to The Institute for Planetary Removal:

“If you've ever seen a paper wasp nest or a bee hive, you've seen a honeycomb. Honeycombs are used to maximize the use of materials. A honeycomb with a shell on each side is one of the strongest structural engineering designs. We use this idea for dome shells, walls, and virtually every other construction.”

However, we were recently sent a letter by one J.K. Mosely that the source of that often-cited quote was actually The Institute for Planetary Renewal. This was an embarrassing mnemonic accident that went too far, affected the entire spirit of our enterprise, and ultimately made necessary 15 years’ worth of detailed retractions and effectively put our previous editing company out of business.

Now we have simplified. The remaining staff and shareholders have restructured into our present company. But simplifying doesn’t guarantee a perfect system. We face already serious anti-We sentiments in the Letters to Us pages of our quarterly report, “First Us, Then You” (Us being, for readers unfamiliar with us, the publicity department of We).

The bottom line to our business is that Us, We, and You are Solution Engineers. Nobody knows more than an editor how passed-around the formalization of arbitrary titles can be, but the title Solution Engineer is a hard-earned one on the part of Us, We, You, and our shareholders billed collectively as Our. So we at the We Central Office don’t believe that anyone can fault Us for taking a hands-off stance concerning the bridge that Us has tried to gap between Us and our readers through our Distribution Department, You.

A recent complaint concerning our primary project, The Rapture Hat:

I am perfectly at ease with The Rapture Hat as a fair and accurate representation of where eschatology and brunch coincide, but I am not at all comfortable with the representation of your “wig tree”. Is this a sort of sectarian joke? As an inhabitant of The Rapture Hat, familiar with its pre- and post-flood zones, not to mention all the skirmishes in the Gulf of Mexico, it depresses me that your architects would see fit to let such an obvious pun go uncorrected.

It does not seem to fit with the established order of gestures. It is neither Good good (it does not avoid self-scrutiny), nor Good bad (it brings pleasure but has no punitive potential), nor Bad good (no revelatory structuring, as the tree’s lumber is merely pants), nor Bad bad (where’s the admirable and straight-talking Fuck You moment? Is a document of human error or not?)

We empathize. We believe this complaint stems from precisely the same sort of mnemonic error as was made with “Removal” and “Renewal,” only at a visual level. We don’t ramrod The Rapture Hat, nor are we its landscapers. However, we believe that as its editors we are gridded in well enough to answer, and correct, glaring misinterpretations. It’s a classic cart-before-th’-horse.

The Rapture Hat is not a document of human error. It is not a document at all, because what it documents does not exist—except in myth, not as myth, because myth refers to a dead system and there is no death in The Rapture. And it does not document human error because in the "Good good etc." grid there is no room for error, only inhospitable gestures that arise from an overproductive ecosystem. Think of a debutante ball, or a Civil War reenactment, or any practice that simulates inhospitality to declassify (thus reclassify) an inhospitable environment. Think of the endgamer environmentalist stance that our ecosystem has produced its own means of extinction. We don't necessarily take that stance, but the same thing probably did happen with the dinosaurs.

Think of whatever you wish. Just don't get so hung up on removal as a gesture, because it ain't in there. The Rapture Hat simply has no removable gestures. Thus, error cannot possibly be documented.

In The Rapture Hat, nobody goes anywhere. Pilots still fly the planes. The trains don't derail. The tillers still till the field. The presses still run.

But In The Rapture Hat, all of this reproduces, sexually and endlessly as anything that knows instinctually of an End in sight but has no actual end in sight. Imagine that a carbon molecule had a genetic memory. It would be one promiscuous molecule! And with no moral compass except "Good good, etc". Now that's living. Where else can one go? Suicide? Suicide is an act performed in defiance of living. But suicide is still a result of the genetic insistence upon improving one's quality of life. And we ARE talking about the genetic grid of the habits we inhabit. Right?

In this sort of pornography—the Permanent Vacation so longed for that is actually already here—does a Rapture Hat not promise a sensual result of the very timed human stay in an ecosystem that will not exist once its inhabitants are gone? Hair that is "a nest for birds?" Or pants-as-lumber?

–END OF EDITORIAL–

Rapture Hat, Theirs (grant proposal).

2006-08-15T17:08:00.000-07:00

We distributors of the Rapture Hat, to avoid recall, monetary penalty, and scoldings by our grantors*, think it necessary to provide a short appendix to the verbal and visual gestures found in the unified body.

APPENDIX. APPROACH THE RAPTURE HAT GESTURE

The strata of image as it engages the strata of text can gradually eliminate any reason for a reader or a viewer of The Rapture Hat.

Reader and viewer should be perfectly compliant with this occurrence.

Reader's and viewer's compliances will transform either or both. This is a predictable Rapture Effect.

Reader and viewer will share their former, respective positions to serve the Rapture Hat as Observer. Observed ritually, the Rapture Hat may thus work as a grid of gestures.

Distilled through ritual (use of a grease pencil to grid one's daily observations on the document itself will bear this out), these gestures yield four essential distillations from the Observer:

1. Good good
2. Good bad
3. Bad good
4. Bad bad

These gestures accordingly total out the register of "cleaned" versions of countless Observer experiences in those abundant fields available to us through the Humanities.

*Note that the printers of Cabinet took time out to write a sharp letter chastizing the magazine's editors for their lack of editing skills. The letter was pasted into, presumably, every copy of the magazine before hitting the shelves. We don't need that sort of ad-libbing from our grantors.

**Note that use of the word "merge" is intended to imply not a convergence but a cross-lacing text merging into but not with The Rapture Hat's exploited visual field. This may or may not later lead into some talk of "treating image like sentence," to quote one Brazilian enthusiast.

A further parallel to "merge" lies in the title itself:

–Rapture– an object mapped into a "traditional view" of the Greek "aion" (forever, a period with a beginning but no terminal point).

playing dolls with

–Hat– an object mapped into temporary use, as in the linguistic once-over given to "aion" (a singular age, a terminal period of time).

There is no doubt that even mention of the Rapture-event maps one into the use of threat, of something unstoppable.

But our position is this: we map this Rapture-threat into Hat-objects, objects of position and termination, because it is simply better for you to know, geologically, in and out of cuckholding, that your right hand knows exactly what your left hand is doing.

–END OF APPENDIX–

Rapture Hat, yours.

2006-08-14T09:05:00.000-07:00

The Rapture Hat may take a while to put on. By definition, the Rapture Hat is the hat you put on your head after the Rapture, which takes a while too. If you pay attention to the manual, you could spend millennia just picking up the hat, another millennia getting it on your head.

Not to be confrontational by saying "you," because it's not like that.

While teleportation will cease to exist after the Rapture, it's a good comparison. It's like that. You want it, it's there, covering your ears. Nobody has hair at that point, so that's good.

But maybe it's raining layers and layers of rain? Maybe sheets of rain, shooting out of a sorting machine. Who wants a 500-sheet rain-ream collapsing on him? Her? You? You just don't want it, and the Rapture Hat fixes the don't-wanting. And here you are, in the Rapture, saying out loud just how glad we are that our Hat can get here that incredibly fast.

Rapture Hat, ours.

2006-08-14T08:43:00.000-07:00

The Rapture Hat, as a treatment, is specific to a landscape that continually mythologizes its own habits. We live there, currently. It is florid and comparatively inhospitable. We would like to declassify some of its symptoms, in order to bring it down. We are here to annotate a send-off to what is known in legend as the habitable South.