Of Works, IV

This is a collage piece, and it will be the death of me.

I'm not sure if I'm finished with it yet.

In another universe, I'm still writing it, will always be writing it.

Diseases You Get Through Consumption
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Prion diseases have an unknown incubation period. It can be anywhere from a few years to five decades. Maybe more.

We drove to the edge of the Mojave and started looking for a dream.

I stood and imagined walking after the tumbleweeds, out under the scorching sun, into the desert and out of life, lost in rock and sand and light, comfortable in the knowledge that my passing would be marked only by a footprint, erased by the wind in a heartbeat. Later, not even the ground would notice, and I'd just drift, a phantom, never wanting, only waning.

In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, a man falls into a vat of lard and gets processed with the pork fat. It's impossible to know for sure how many accidental cannibals were made. How many are at risk.

Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.

In parts of the world where human cannibalism is practiced, the meat has different names. Sometimes it's cabrit sans cor, which translates as “goat without horns”. Other times, they call it long pig.

I've seen so much porn that I've lost all context for breasts. It's like when you become overly aware of your tongue, and start thinking about it far too much. Fixation turns into obsession, but if you're lucky, something distracts you along the way.

Is that why you are laughing, Darl?

We keep coming back to the end of Planescape: Torment. The culmination of everything is a confrontation with your own transcendent soul in the Fortress of Regret. This is not a metaphor. But, it is a metaphor.

I says to them, Darl was alright at first, with his eyes full of the land, because the land laid up-and-down ways then; it wasn't till that ere road came and switched the land around longways and his eyes still full of the land, that they begun to threaten me out of him, trying to short-hand me with the law.

Michael Bay's Transformers put me through an existential crisis. At the end of the movie, it becomes clear that the giant cube is about to transform. I yelled out, “I bet it transforms into a smaller cube!” You know. As a joke. Then, it did. I laughed, because I had to.

You can only get prion diseases in two ways that we know of: either you eat the brain or spinal material of an infected animal, or you eat someone of your own species.

Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.

I tell people my father is a cyborg. What I mean by this is, he's got a mechanical heart valve. It used to be a pig valve, which wore out. I visited him in the hospital after his surgery. I asked him what kind of heart problems he had, twenty-five years ago, asked him how he knew something was wrong. He shrugged, and said, “It's hard to explain.”
I looked at the floor.
“Hey,” he said. “Did you hear that diarrhea is hereditary?”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It runs in your jeans.”
We laughed.

At any given moment, on any given day, I am a hair's breadth from weeping, one instant from a total collapse of will. I feel like I'm fighting a battle with my memory, and it's winning, throwing the worst bits of life in my face. Things that echo back through years of sorrow and regret.

This world. I tell you.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob, or Mad Cow disease in cattle, is the most famous prion disease, but there are others: Kuru is from Papua New Guinea. They call it the laughing sickness. Patients become terribly depressed but are seized by sporadic fits of laughter. Then, they die.
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That's all for now.