cyberpunkpsychedelia-blog

[cyberpunkpsychedelia-blog]

@CYBERPUNKPSYCHEDELIA

CONDITIONS –– August 10 @ 11:44:57 a.m.

You awake to the blunt force of unfiltered daylight on your face, the hollow moan of city traffic sounding far below this tenement cube like a distant flushing toilet. Oft you have lamented how trees do not grow, birds do not chirp at these heights.

As you rub your eyes you are privileged to witness the awesome –– if not rather stomach-churning, when it takes you by surprise –– sight of her transmogrification, the split second it takes her to collapse her humanoid frame and resume her form as a cat.

She leaps onto the desk across the room where she sits for a moment, licks herself, and yawns. She regards you with starry green eyes, unblinking and inscrutable to you –– but which you always vaguely perceive, somehow, to be scrutinizing you.

And in a flash of paranoia, as you stare back at her stupidly thru sleep-crusted eyeballs, you wonder if she might only be staring at you to cause you to project whatever insecurities you might have back onto yourself, and then you cannot decide which of these postulations would be the preferable one –– her judging you or her trolling you –– and anyway you reflect that if either were the case (or, for that matter, if neither of them were), the effect would all still be the same…

Indeed you do not know what goes on in her mind in these moments. But you will never presume to ask, and she will never tell.

Your head hurts. You close your eyes. Eventually, she jumps from the desk to the bed, steps on your face and, pausing not so much to intimate a goodbye as to command that you appreciate the drama, jumps out the window.

And so you are left to dwell alone in your lowly airborne pod. But as you roll over in the sheets, your thoughts quickly latch on to her, and they hitch-hike with her out the window. The image is clear enough:

Having fallen a few hundred feet through the air and landed deftly on her paws like the best of feline acrobats, in a single flowing movement she recalls her human form and unlocks and mounts her hoverbike which was chained to the tree outside your apartment.

She dons her gas-mask, conjured seemingly from thin air (breathing is hazardous to pedestrians in this locale, where the fumes have reached peak levels of toxicity). It is heavily worn, all decked out with astrological stickers and painted over crudely with pink lipstick. Straddled over the bike seat in a printed flower skirt and black stockings, hers is a loud image –– poster child for this bold new century.

She wrenches the throttle and barrels over the curb onto the street.

Now, as she makes her way to the club in Center City where she labors daily for her wages, you worriedly reflect that she is now at the mercy of the grid: Baffling assemblage of lighted conveyor belts zipping this way and that at arbitrary speeds, teeming with cargo and people, where a single wavering misstep along your urban odyssey and a blink of the eye could suddenly find you ten blocks south of where you were just standing only moments ago.

For the commuter, the grid adds a valence of radical uncertainty to a journey already fraught with fatal obstacles: You can see her right now, booking down Chestnut Street, head on a swivel, dodging flung-open car doors, tunneling thru clouds of exhaust, careening upstream along this main artery in a sea of traffic where middle fingers and shouted obscenities fly freely out of car windows from every direction.

For 2100 woolongs an hour at the club (on average, with tips), she knows the stakes on this journey are high. But it’s as if the very ground beneath her is working against her, and she begins to wonder, as she often does, if this is all really worth it: Without warning along this strip, potholes open up into sinkholes, gaping hungrily like rips in the fabric of spacetime, plunging full city buses into the abyss. Human screams join the chorus.

And as if this were not enough, the grid, an internationally-sanctioned entity and thus not subject to the local laws of physics, periodically cuts through her path at impossible angles like an interdimensional guillotine, always threatening to whisk her away some place she does not particularly care to go: a bullet-train to Fresno, a people-chute to Hong Kong.

To protect the city’s most vulnerable commuters from the daily carnage, the city of Philadelphia has gone to lengths to establish a bike lane on each street.

But over the years, the lane has been encroached upon, inches at at time, by a steady influx of street vendors pushing their wares, hundreds of kiosks spilling over the sidewalks. In this way, the tiny strip of concrete has become a site of contestation between two parties, and both sides have suffered losses: Bodies displaced into the street, split in half between crashed cars or otherwise ripped apart in spectacular displays of gore.

The roadways in this forsaken metropolis are painted with the blood of the multitudes.

As for her, she harbors no real beef with the street vendors. She will not debase herself to choose a side in such petty human squabbles. She knows too well by now how every death will inevitably become a casualty in someone else’s war, and this is a violence that she refuses to perpetuate. The battle she wages is with the forces of a higher order, transcending these earthly divisions.

And so she dips in and out of traffic with a silent grace, maneuvering deftly through the maze of kiosks, taking care to avoid any stray banana or rolling citrus that might send her tumbling into the onslaught to take up final residence in the Boneyard (local name bestowed to the median near the expressway at 30th and Chestnut –– a tangled mess of mangled bodies and rusted bike frames).

She dips into a back alley at 23rd Street. She is relieved to have reached her destination unscathed, and with a few minutes to spare. She chains her bike to a pole at the backdoor of the restaurant. Once more she conjures her feline shape to carry out a ritual which all members of her scattered race are compelled to perform before crossing new thresholds. 

She stalks in a circular movement like she is hunting something you cannot see, tracing intricate patterns in the ground with her paws. The signs glow with a strange luminescence, opening channels of dire communication with ancient deities whose names have been lost with the passing of so many millennia.

She sits and licks herself, staring at the ground. Eventually, she stops moving altogether, and you perceive that in this back alley she has momentarily dropped off the dimensional plane. She is outside of time, somewhere else, scaling some other axis. Those twinned orbs of radioactive green… Again they are inscrutable to you, but as you stare and ponder over this curious figure, your astral body casting its vague kind of shadow over her, you slowly arrive at the rather stomach-churning realization that this whole time she has been sitting there she has, in fact, been staring directly back at you.

Your presence has been detected! Your thoughts have collided at some fated point of tangency in the cosmos! The connection is precious, but it is fleeting. She slinks around a dumpster and with that, she disappears from your sight.

You open your eyes, wrenched back into your bed, and you are reminded of your own wretched condition. O you! beastly creature, who has lost his way completely to literature and pornography!

In a claustrophobic panic you lean out the window, inhaling deeply the fumes of the afternoon. But this offers you little comfort as you survey the scars of the city below, reflecting on all the ruin the world has exacted –– which is to say, yourself. You reflect on yourself. You are the ruin the world has exacted, disavowed, and finally cast outside of its orbit –– or at least this has been your suspicion as of late. Indeed you have dimly perceived the heights you maintain in your floating pod to be increasing with each rotation around the sun; daily you feel yourself further adrift of the Earth’s gravitational field.

The distance has, in fact, become rather harrowing. For it was Heraclitus who said you cannot step into the same river twice: The river changes, yes, as the current rushes headlong in its velocity –– but this is not the point. The point is that you, yourself, will have also changed in the interval. Never the same river, never the same you. This is either a utopian thought, or one that is terrifying in the extreme.

Ultimately, though, it was Bolaño who was able to grasp the full implication of Heraclitus’s existential musings when he spoke of the condition of exile: “Probably all of us,” says Bolaño, “set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind.” In other words, all of us who are born into this world are at risk, someday, of never being able to go back home. This is the risk that the condition of exile implies. Thus we have Heraclitus’s warning brought to its fullest expression: It is the extent to which you yourself change that will determine, after so many nights of errantry, whether or not there is a home for you to go back to at all…

These are your conditions at 12 o’clock in the afternoon, as you look upon the city from your unlucky vantage in the stratosphere. Star among stars, you feel, somehow, exhausted –– but with a glimmer, nevertheless, of satisfaction, or hope, perhaps, as some other person might feel after having completed a jigsaw puzzle. You bring your head back inside and climb into bed.

You close your eyes and wait longingly for a scratch at the window.

Follow me @cyberpunkpsychedelia where the saga continues.

Hi My Name Is Noah, your faithful assembler of data, transmitted from the roof of a tenement cube via satellite cobbled together from space junk.

Dear reader, whenever you are, I hope this missive finds you well.

[cyberpunkpsychedelia-blog]

CONDITIONS, pt 2 –– August 10 @ 11:58:23 a.m.

She is relieved to have reached her destination unscathed, and with a few minutes to spare. She chains her bike to a pole at the backdoor of the restaurant. Once more she conjures her feline shape to carry out a ritual which all members of her scattered race are compelled to perform before crossing new thresholds. She stalks in a circular movement like she is hunting something you cannot see, tracing intricate patterns in the ground with her paws. The signs glow with a strange luminescence, opening channels of dire communication with ancient deities whose names have been lost with the passing of so many millennia.

She sits and licks herself, staring at the ground. Eventually, she stops moving altogether, and you perceive that in this back alley she has momentarily dropped off the dimensional plane. She is outside of time, somewhere else, scaling some other axis. Those twinned orbs of radioactive green… Again they are inscrutable to you, but as you stare and ponder over this curious figure, your astral body casting its vague kind of shadow over her, you slowly arrive at the rather stomach-churning realization that this whole time she has been sitting there she has, in fact, been staring directly back at you. 

Your presence has been detected! Your thoughts have collided at some fated point of tangency in the cosmos! The connection is precious, but it is fleeting. She slinks around a dumpster and with that, she disappears from your sight. 

You open your eyes, wrenched back into your bed, and you are reminded of your own wretched condition. O you! beastly creature, who has lost his way completely to literature and pornography! 

In a claustrophobic panic you lean out the window, inhaling deeply the fumes of the afternoon. But this offers you little comfort as you survey the scars of the city below, reflecting on all the ruin the world has exacted –– which is to say, yourself. You reflect on yourself. You are the ruin the world has exacted, disavowed, and finally cast outside of its orbit –– or at least this has been your suspicion as of late. Indeed you have dimly perceived the heights you maintain in your floating pod to be increasing with each rotation around the sun; daily you feel yourself further adrift of the Earth’s gravitational field. 

The distance has, in fact, become rather harrowing. For it was Heraclitus who said you cannot step into the same river twice: The river changes, yes, as the current rushes headlong in its velocity –– but this is not the point. The point is that you, yourself, will have also changed in the interval. Never the same river, never the same you. This is either a utopian thought, or one that is terrifying in the extreme. 

Ultimately, though, it was Bolaño who was able to grasp the full implication of Heraclitus’s existential musings when he spoke of the condition of exile: “Probably all of us,” says Bolaño, “set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind.” In other words, all of us who are born into this world are immediately at risk of someday never being able to go back home. This is the risk that the condition of exile implies. Thus we have Heraclitus’s warning brought to its fullest expression: It is the extent to which you yourself change that will determine, after so many nights of errantry, whether or not there is a home for you to go back to at all…

These are your conditions at 12 o’clock in the afternoon, as you look upon the city from your unlucky vantage in the stratosphere. Star among stars, you feel, somehow, exhausted –– but with a glimmer, nevertheless, of satisfaction, or hope, perhaps, as some other person might feel after having completed a jigsaw puzzle. You bring your head back inside and climb into bed. 

You close your eyes and wait longingly for a scratch at the window.

___________________

Follow me @cyberpunkpsychedelia where the saga continues.

Hi My Name Is Noah, your faithful assembler of data, transmitted from the roof of a tenement cube via satellite cobbled together from space junk.

Dear reader, whenever you are, I hope this missive finds you well.

[cyberpunkpsychedelia-blog]

CONDITIONS, pt I 

–– August 10 @ 11:44:57 a.m.

You awake to the blunt force of unfiltered daylight on your face, the hollow moan of city traffic sounding far below this tenement cube like a distant flushing toilet. Oft you have lamented how trees do not grow, birds do not chirp at these heights. 

As you rub your eyes you are privileged to witness the awesome –– if not rather stomach-churning, when it takes you by surprise –– sight of her transmogrification, the split second it takes her to collapse her humanoid frame and resume her form as a cat. 

She leaps onto the desk across the room where she sits for a moment, licks herself, and yawns. She regards you with starry green eyes, unblinking and inscrutable to you –– but which you always vaguely perceive, somehow, to be scrutinizing you. 

And in a flash of paranoia, as you stare back at her stupidly thru sleep-crusted eyeballs, you wonder if she might only be staring at you to cause you to project whatever insecurities you might have back onto yourself, and then you cannot decide which of these postulations would be the preferable one –– her judging you or her trolling you –– and anyway you reflect that if either were the case (or, for that matter, if neither of them were), the effect would all still be the same… 

Indeed you do not know what goes on in her mind in these moments. But you will never presume to ask, and she will never tell. 

Your head hurts. You close your eyes. Eventually, she jumps from the desk to the bed, steps on your face and, pausing not so much to intimate a goodbye as to command that you appreciate the drama, jumps out the window. 

And so you are left to dwell alone in your lowly airborne pod. But as you roll over in the sheets, your thoughts quickly latch on to her, and they hitch-hike with her out the window. The image is clear enough: 

___________________

Having fallen a few hundred feet through the air and landed deftly on her paws like the best of feline acrobats, in a single flowing movement she recalls her human form and unlocks and mounts her hoverbike which was chained to the tree outside your apartment.

She dons her gas-mask, conjured seemingly from thin air (breathing is hazardous to pedestrians in this locale, where the fumes have reached peak levels of toxicity). The mask is heavily worn, all decked out with astrological stickers and painted over crudely with pink lipstick. Straddled over the bike seat in a printed flower skirt and black stockings, hers is a loud image –– poster child for this bold new century.

She wrenches the throttle and barrels over the curb onto the street. 

Now, as she makes her way to the club in Center City where she labors daily for her wages, you worriedly reflect that she is now at the mercy of the grid: Baffling assemblage of lighted conveyor belts zipping this way and that at arbitrary speeds, teeming with cargo and people, where a single wavering misstep along your urban odyssey and a blink of the eye could suddenly find you ten blocks south of where you were just standing only moments ago. 

For the commuter, the grid adds a valence of radical uncertainty to a journey already fraught with fatal obstacles: You can see her right now, booking down Chestnut Street, head on a swivel, dodging flung-open car doors, tunneling thru clouds of exhaust, careening upstream along this main artery in a sea of traffic where middle fingers and shouted obscenities fly freely out of car windows from every direction.

For 2100 woolongs per hour at the club (on average, with tips), she knows the stakes on this journey are high. But it’s as if the very ground beneath her is working against her, and she begins to wonder, as she often does, if this is all really worth it: Without warning along this strip, potholes open up into sinkholes, gaping hungrily like rips in the fabric of spacetime, plunging full city buses into the abyss. Human screams join the chorus. 

And as if this were not enough, the grid, an internationally-sanctioned entity and thus not subject to the local laws of physics, periodically cuts through her path at impossible angles like an interdimensional guillotine, always threatening to whisk her away some place she does not particularly care to go: a bullet-train to Fresno, a people-chute to Hong Kong. 

To protect the city’s most vulnerable commuters from the daily carnage, the city of Philadelphia has gone to lengths to establish a bike lane on each street. 

But over the years, the lane has been encroached upon, inches at at time, by a steady influx of street vendors pushing their wares, hundreds of kiosks spilling over the sidewalks. In this way, the tiny strip of concrete has become a site of contestation between two parties, and both sides have suffered losses: Bodies displaced into the street, split in half between crashed cars or otherwise ripped apart in spectacular displays of gore.

The roadways in this forsaken metropolis are painted with the blood of the multitudes.

As for her, she harbors no real beef with the street vendors. She will not debase herself to choose a side in such petty human squabbles. She knows too well by now how every death will inevitably become a casualty in someone else’s war, and this is a violence that she refuses to perpetuate. The battle she wages is with the forces of a higher order, transcending these earthly divisions. 

And so she dips in and out of traffic with  a silent grace, maneuvering deftly through the maze of kiosks, taking care to avoid any stray banana or rolling citrus that might send her tumbling into the onslaught to take up final residence in the Boneyard (local name bestowed to the median near the expressway at 30th and Chestnut –– a tangled mess of mangled bodies and rusted bike frames). 

She dips into a back alley at 23rd Street.

___________________

Follow me @cyberpunkpsychedelia where the saga continues. 

Hi My Name Is Noah, your faithful assembler of data, transmitted from the roof of a tenement cube via satellite cobbled together from space junk. 

Dear reader, whenever you are, I hope this missive finds you well.

[cyberpunkpsychedelia-blog]

FAASTER

N E O N // R A C E

[cyberpunkpsychedelia-blog]

O BUUBBLEGUM SAADNESS

SHIN W [Artstation]

[cyberpunkpsychedelia-blog]

ON THE BULLET TRAIN

— September 2, 2066 @ 2:56:34 a.m.

When the acid rain falls on this forsaken metropolis, a siren rings and Humans evacuate the streets for the deadly effect the rain has on their skin. Sometimes I use these precious hours, when the cluttered streets are dead, as an opportunity to step outside of my humble tenement cube and tour the city as a pedestrian.

My tenement cube hovers 648 feet above street level, accessible only by sky elevators, amid a cluster of floating habitations where others of my kind are doomed to wait out their meagre existences in exile. This cluster, an island loosely strung together by wires, ropes, and scrap metal, blots out the sun, shrouding the slums below in a perennial darkness.

Behold, dear reader, my neighborhood in the firmament: stagnant, humid, dripping with slime. It is home, I suppose. Then again, where I live isn’t a place, really, so much as it is a condition: “Storage.”

I don’t often venture beyond the four walls of my tenement cube; none of us condemned to a life in Storage do. It is not that we are forbidden to leave––Storage is not the same as imprisonment. No, the implications, I’m afraid, are much less dramatic and, in many ways, far worse: We do not leave, not because we can’t, but because there is nowhere else for us to go.

With all the Humans huddled indoors during the storm, I know by deduction that every stranger I pass in the street is of my kind, though you would not guess it by our interactions. With heads kept down under umbrellas and hoods, faces dimly lit by flashing neon signs, we exchange furtive glances both vacant and acknowledging––the social gesture that is, arguably, the characteristic one of our species. 

At the station, I jump the turnstiles and board the bullet train just as the doors are closing. Traveling at such impossible velocities, the city grid blurs into brushstroke abstractions through the train window. The sensation is most pleasing to my aesthetic sensibilities, in that it allows me to dream freely––the one pleasure that has been afforded to me and others like me who share my unfortunate condition. Ironically, it is when the visible world bleeds and dissipates before my eyes that I am able to best formulate a coherent picture of who I am.

So now, perhaps, is the time for a proper introduction:

Hi my name is Noah. Who am I, you ask? Dear reader, how can I put this in terms you might understand? I am no one. I was born of the algorithm that created the algorithm that inevitably came to replace it, made it obsolete. Made me a Remainder. Like, if I were a font, I would be Courier. Get my meaning? 

_________

Hi my name is Noah. Deep into the night, decades ago, I was awoken by the faint sound of tapping. Sitting up in my bed and peering through the window of my tenement cube––an abrupt and rather unsettling view of the heavens––I beheld two giant, glowing orbs in the sky. These I perceived to be exploding stars, and these perceptions shook me to my core. 

I rubbed my eyes.

I then watched in horror as these orbs changed positions in the sky in frightful unison and at a velocity that I had previously thought impossible, and I perceived that these were not stars at all, but were in fact the police drones descending upon our borough on an unannounced Storage raid. After a paralyzing flash of initial panic, I nevertheless was able to resign myself solemnly to the fate that had long been prophesied to me: I was finally being called upon by the State to do penance for my life of wretchedness and sin. 

There was another tap on the glass and I remembered the reason I had woken up in the first place. Only then did I notice the tiny paw pressed against the windowpane. The glowing orbs were not police drones at all but, in fact, the eyes of a cat who had somehow, improbably, found its way almost 700 feet above the city into Storage! After some hesitation I opened the window and she slunk inside. 

I found this behavior to be unusually presumptuous––even for a cat. No one besides myself had ever set foot inside my tenement cube. The moment was significant for me in the utmost. 

And so begins a story that requires more time to tell than I have at the moment––the bullet train stops service at 4:00 every morning. For now, suffice it to say that that fateful night, I fell asleep next to a cat, and when I awoke the next morning, the cat had become something else entirely. 

And how I wish it were the case that she had simply left me here upon this spinning rock of a planet to die. As it so happens, death is not an end I can rightly claim as my destiny. So I spin into oblivion as the world implodes around me. 

At least she has left me with a story to tell. 

This, dear reader, is tragedy––that, or it is gospel. 

The year is 2066. Hi my name is Noah.

[cyberpunkpsychedelia-blog]