Dissonance; or, a Semi-True Screed

A Notes App rant, if I'm being frank

I used to read magic books. Not the kind by twin Davids. My mystics were Lee, Kirby, Sinnot, Claremont, Cockburn, Moore. They didn’t teach me to fling fireballs or fan a deck or saw someone in half then sew them back together. But they brought me in, Gandalf type shit with a wizard hat and chicken legs, told me that magic was real, just not of this world. No, if you wanted to find it, you had to come with me, boy. Take my hand they said, and so I did, and there I was, knitted into a Newer than New York, into Westchester, between tunic fork spires with gothic ham, into 2099 A.D., look at me ma, look at me dad, I’m inverse Pinocchio, I ain’t real, but who the fuck wants to be? Why be skin and flesh and gristle and hide when you can don latex and spandex? Why fly economy when you can wear a red cape? Why take the elevator when all you need is a single bound? I’m starting a super PAC to push Entropy as the next presidential candidate, Anarchy as her VP. Maybe then all the oldheads with their shrunken gerbil nutsacks and fly-blown NDAs will finally take a knee and bow to Gaea and all her vined acolytes. Meek, meet Earth. The tide pulls you in and Jesus whips you assholes to shape, it’s the temple all over again, and you’re all so wrought with sin you can’t see how you’ve made this dwelling into a house of trade.

People lived here once. Do you remember?

I read a magic book about a white boy called Hulkling, and with a name like that you’d figure he was the Hulk’s son, but he isn’t. Above the skies he’s violet-tressed, golden-serifed, a dual watchman batting eyelashes at a pagan they call the Demiurge. They make love like I’ve never seen and then they pillow talk normal afterwards with asteroid clusters going pop-pop-pop outside air-locked windows. Pride swells in my heart like a bruise. Same as Jake and Heath six-gunning their way in Ang Lee’s tactical humanist hands. It’s love, but just not mine, of course. Of course, I wasn’t homo sapien, man, I’m alchemy and alabaster, I’m straight as an arrow fired from Lapu Lapu’s bowstring, and I definitely DEFINITELY am not homo, that’s for other kids. It’s cool if you are, but it isn’t for me, obviously, said me.

I type that memory out right before texting my boyfriend. He had an old name, but he killed that motherfucker stone cold dead, prayed the Lord its soul to keep, then salted the earth behind him. I tell him I love him.

We keep pressure on the peeled scab that is job hunting, an endless pit of HR depravity and AI junkyard scrap heap, enough to make Michael Bay cream his pants, watch out, these minions will lop your fucking head off if your CV’s even one centimetre off, and you should know that’s the last thing you want to be, because we fucking TOLD you so, so don’t talk back.

Confucius probably wrote that. Sun Tzu probably wrote that. Then all the Chinese and their spawn, the Singaporean and Japanese and Hong Kong and Filipino parents brought the philosophy home with them, like a bomb in a hand basket. Then it went BAM! 280 decibel detonation, formaldehyde poisoning my lineage, means filial piety, means never talk back, means follow the path or risk kicking and screaming down an Icarus fall.

Did you know that all the historians who came after said that Sun never really saw the fields of war? That his words were solid for special resolutions and general meetings and contract settlements, but if you wore a halberd or slung a bayonet around your arm, Sun Tzu and his rat-tail and tapeworm beard meant jack fucking shit.

I used to read magic books. There’s a scrawny kid shuffling through the frocked and flanneled throngs of his cohort, some of them are peering through spyglasses, others fingering plasma balls, and there’s this redhead, the sort of redhead that rewrites your genetic code and dooms you to a lifetime of seeking out hot blooded love, settling for nothing less. Arachne and acne bite the kid and the kid makes money. Then he lets a robber go and the man older than an uncle tends to be lies in viscera. He says with great power comes great responsibility. He says a lot of things. The kid’s face is a pretty peach with a single pale shred streaming down his cheek. That’s funny, I thought. I thought relatives were immortal.

On a midsummer’s day no one remembers I get the news about my aunt. Dad takes the phone and brings it close. I see the lids shut nice and proper, the pink or maybe it was blue shirt she had on. His throat warbles but there’s no music. His hands are twitching but there is no symphony to conduct. He’s never spoken like this before. I keel over, watching carefully, and that night I wait for the spider to land on my palm and charge me with new ribosomes.

There is no spider.

I think about great power on the other side of the world. There’s a man with a hideous toupee and a body like a small man-o-war and he’s up on that podium again throwing pearls before red-capped swine, talking mad trash about mga kababayan. I think about great power when my dad tells me that this is the man who deserves admiration because he paid for his dues, because he got a small loan of a million dollars and that’s really nothing, I promise. Then he’s got this Innsmouth-looking, walleyed partner lard bucket who pulls up to the function like an escaped test subject of a failed Ubermensch experiment.

If Lovecraft was born in this day and age he would have killed himself before he turned twenty. Then I bet Cthulhu would’ve stonewalled his family’s insurance claim. Not so great responsibility.

I remember Luthor and D. Doom. Bald men with bad designs, scarred inside and out, ego blinded, lightning crackling between their fingertips, stomping over the fantastic, the incredible, the amazing, the marvelous, the D-fucking-C like a power chord. Freud would have had a field day with them.

I’m reading my magic book and I’m watching an immigrant with blue eyes tear off the glass dome shielding Luthor’s head, then Luthor steals his blood, colonises his soul only to realize that we’re just a gaggle of floodlights in a petri dish, a packet of motes crushed from the light of stars and the worms will have us when we’re gone, then the worms will ride a chariot of fire and take us to heaven. For the first time in his machined life, he understands the grass on the other side.

Then I put the book down and think about Luthor hand-delivering a box via drone to me that I ordered three weeks back in September. A birthday gift for myself. Brubaker and Lark 2008 omnibus, cellophane coddled, cored with pulp crime noir, that good shit, that hot-blooded life I’ve always wanted. I don’t see who delivers it. Was it a drone or a person? I can’t remember. Life’s too short and these things make it shorter. My Luthor will never come to see our lives as we see them, grains in an hourglass, winding down in atomic carnations. He will never listen to the blue-eyed immigrant.  He’d rather just blow our cris-crossed hopscotch chop logic timelines away and scatter our history into fairy dust.

I used to read magic books. A wraith man with haggard black hair talks of dreams and Calliope and saving women from the hunger of men. I take a break, check my phone and an Englishman who created him sits on scullery stones and is stoked by an inferno of his making.

Back to the pages. It’s just words this time, no images, because Lady Language has taken a fancy to me and I, to her, and because Monsieur Graphic Images is weary from my hand-wringing and fucking. A judge with a top hat, eight feet tall, hands carved granite, eyes manic yet still, speaks of the universe, of things existing without his consent and how that is a sin entire. I finish the book, smile on my face, look at the screen and find a man called McCarthy, like the Senator. They say the woman was his muse. My stomach starts doing Cirque du Soleil.

Calliope and Dream. The nice house at the end of the lake where I used to visit isn’t so nice anymore. Its mirrors reveal my acne scars.

I used to read magic books. Sperm scooped from a silver spoon makes a boy and kills his parents to turn him into an alpha male. He starts a family and cripples others. He sends clowns to jail and all the madmen sing as he follows the Alice route, deep into the madhouse but never once slipping, never once faltering. He performs and pays his dues, does charity, takes robins under his wing, but the world goes round and dharma traps him. He doesn’t even know.

I wait in the night for a bat to fly through the window that never comes. I ring a bell for a ghost butler but instead it’s just my yaya, she says wawa ang anak ko, my second mother treating me well, kissing my booboos, pampering my pains. I’ve never broken a bone. I wouldn’t know what I’d do if I did.

The boy-turned-man books flights all across the globe and learns a thousand thousand languages and enough styles, judo, jiu-jitsu, Brazil and Japan, kyokushun, taekwondo, becoming a real Muay Thaison, aikido, not the Steven Segal bullshit. He’d wreck ONE’s heavyweight division in a week.

Meanwhile I travel around the world and forget my breakfast in the afternoon.

When I close shop and turn the lights off, I will find those boxes. Ashcan and floppies and single-use plastics. Glossy paper and crossovers. Crises and secret wars, where the secret is that everyone’s development is so arrested that even sunflowers refuse water.  Promises scrawled and remaining in its dog ears. Soliloquies to justice and avengement. I will take the cardboard in my arms like babes, one by one, place each assortment out by the barrel, snap the Zippo to set free singeing agui.

“Tatay, anong ginagawa mo?” Says my boy. He has my old eyes and my old cheeks. But I don’t know if that’s what he’ll say when the time comes, when I have to bring him up into this world. I don’t know if I’ll recall enough of the mother tongue to pass it on. But you’ve gotten this far, so indulge me. Please.

“What I have to.”

“Kala ko binabasang mo ng kwento ngayong gabi.”

The passing seconds are contortionist. Big bang, little crunch. Snap, lick, parapapumppump. Oriental becomes Asian. Yellow peril becomes CCP. My ancestors are churned through the Spanish Armada then a blood-red rising sun then the mustard gas talons of a nuclear eagle. The roots remember me and my son, and the words I’ve read infest my brain spores. Calliope and Dream. A man with a thousand martial arts. Itsy bitsy spider, crawls out the water spout. Agui burns.

“Sure, son. For you, it’s okay.”

He’s pony-up, belly-up, frolicking and formless. My canary doesn’t need to know about the coal mine.

“Anong nasa loob?”

I take out one with ‘TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ONE MIGHTY MAGAZINE!’ plastered in big bold platinum. Not my best, it’s coffee-stained and the whites have turned yellow, but it is mine. And it always will be.

“I don’t know,” I say, agui calmed. “But I hear it’s magic.”

“Talaga? Bakit?”

“‘Cause they made it all up.”