During all the years I’ve spent in this Ocean of Ones and Zeroes, my physical form has mainly been maintained in a small Air Force town in Oklahoma. I was brought here in the final year of the 1980s, and sit now in the house with the same bathroom mirror that was there while I attended the high school about three blocks away.
The town had apparently been an Air Force town for decades before I arrived, and as it had grown what had formerly been base housing became town housing, distinct for the uniform style and construction despite the personalization and differentiation since the military had moved on to bluer skies.
In the nineties, these uniform houses were known as the ‘New Hope’ housing project, where the landlords willing to deal with tenants on government assistance get subsidies for doing so - perhaps a single landlord for all I looked into it. This, distinct from the apartment/barrack government housing on the Southwest corner of town, ‘The Flats.’
The housing project colloquially crystallized as “No Hope” in the 1990s, when barricades(since removed) were installed in the streets by the city due to an apparently problem with drive-by shootings, and while I think the crystallization certainly involved methamphetamines, I saw Set there then as I do now.
Set was arbiter of ‘normal’ and master of my worldview during these years, and when I glance back with the hindsight I see also parts of the eighties. The way it was a source and humor and pride for us to hear the stories of how bad they wanted our blue jeans in Soviet Russia shines out, the way the druids sticks of Holly Wood enchanted the whole world. The way they turned New York, LA & Chicago into Emerald Cities every Dorothy wanted to go.
Cresting the end of my teens, all the small town Oklahoma Gangbanging was laughable compared to what Set had shown me. It was somehow a laughable and pathetic LARP the way Sean Penn’s movie Colors had people dressing up like Aunt Jemima… until a dozen costumed troublemakers bust down the door of the party you’re at because of the sweatshirt some broad was wearing out front. The moment when the guy you shot craps with in Tech Ed returns your ‘what’s-up’ head toss with a subtle left to right shake because you’re on the wrong side of the room is really something else.
I’m here again because my grandma died.
She’d been living here with my Ma since I had graduated high school. Slowing eating herself, laying in Set’s reassuring glow, and virtually playing cards on a website called Pogo. From what I knew, up until then she had been working at a Garment factory operating a sewing machine. I’m not certain whether it closed in favor of outsourced sweatshops or she just got to retirement age, but in the way human stories play out she ended up living dependent on the daughter she wouldn’t say she loved.
The highlights of her life, as finances and luck allowed, were Bingo and the Casino. The former being as close to Churching as she ever got, and the latter sprinkled in like Holidays. It was at Bingo she had the chili, then the stumble on the stairs at home, then the surgery and the rest.
The Apocalypse had been in 2012, and for purposes of this piece, Apocalypse can mean voluntary mid-life crisis. My life is too mid, what a crisis.
Five years later I had crashed at the high school house for the umpteenth time (technical term). I was still working my half-job, medical transcription charity-work. I call it charity-work because by 2017 everyone knew their phones could do what I do. I understand they’ve moved the transcriptionists that aren’t mothballed into the visits as a human interface with the software. Seshat giggles to me that they call them ‘scribes’.
Because I saw it as charity-work and because I bear the Mark of Cain, I was perpetually testing the limits of the charity by being perpetually behind in the work. The memory springing forth from the era was my grandma complaining “all you care about it that game” when I hadn’t emerged from the room at dinner call.
I had been strung out on adder-all(the children) I had obtained with the intent of using chemically enhanced focus to get caught up on the backlog at work. It had played out that Joey Berry had gotten a MineCraft Realm and I had gotten smacked by a bugged-out Blaze in my best armor a full four game-maps in the Nether deep from our nearest portal and I spent 12-hours straight trying to get back to that armor before it despawned… so I wasn’t hungry.
At some point in the year, a suspicious contact apparently from England sends me a link to Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning #9 (thanks again, Ryan Reynolds) from his 2017 lecture series. He’s an odd hermit fellow who’s been deeper down mystical holes than I care to tread, and I like to maintain the mystery of why he sends me what he sends me. I don’t recall if he gave a reason, but since it had something to do with psychology and someone had thought to send it to me, I was hooked.
By 2018, when my old Portland contact hit me up about an open room out there I had been through the biblical lecture “Call to Abraham” and was primed for my next adventure. I made the heavenly drive that Easter and returned to Portland to live for the first time since 2013. The house was apparently an investment property being rented out by the room in the interim time the real estate value was supposed to grow. My friend apparently hadn’t consulted the couple in the basement room about potential new tenants for the open room at all.
It was a blissful and beautiful Spring & Summer. Unless otherwise stated, you can presume heavy cannabis consumption. My recollection tells me that Oklahoma had not yet legalized even medical at that point, and the presumptive character arc I had set out on was to obtain ‘employment in the industry’ in Oregon. It seemed then (and does now) to be one of the few growing industries in an economy undergoing orchestrated collapse.
I had brought my half-job from Oklahoma, thanks to the power of the internet. Oregon being Oregon, there was a program for “able-bodied but mysteriously not working” assistance, and when they gave out I sold my serum to the vampires. Sincerest apologies to those of me on the clone farms, I knew not what I did and still probably would have anyway. That viewing of Ender’s Game while the plasma pumped out really made an impact.
My mornings were the best of my life. The couple that eventually grew into a just-the-two -of us place as a result of our cohabitation were always gone by the time I woke up. I’d coffee and cannabis up until the roommate woke (a process of at least 10 minutes of the most unfortunate hacking and coughing), and then drive her to work.
Upon return to the home, I’d cook up some hamburger while listening to Joe Rogan or whatever else the algorithm was feeding me those days. I’m fairly sure Owen Benjamin had been on for his epically strange Joe Rogan appearance, while special guest coked out guy. Certainly he had been doing his piano streams, though he may not have yet turned on Papa Peterson.
The downstairs was a bathroom & bedroom with garage access, with the loft area living room lit by the patio doors out to the deck in the mornings. After eating, there’d be a session of smoking (only dabs inside) and staring into my handheld Set soaking up the sun and training crows to dive at peanuts tossed into the air. We never did get our signaling down just right, but I hear they remember people and I want to be crowfriend.
It was on one such morning that the algorithm fed me a fork in the road (the electronic footprint might deny that it was the same day, or it may confirm). Like any good agnostic, I ended up straddling both as best as I could. It could be said that each path of the fork represented a worldview, and each was embodied by a YouTube character.
The first was a video on the channel of a man claiming to be John St. Julien Baba Wanyama. In it, he gushes excitement and gratitude that Jim Carrey discussed something called the ‘Sacred Secretion’ on Norm MacDonald’s talk show. RIP Norm.
The second was on a channel called LiftTheVeil411 and featured an actor named Isaac Kappy, hosted by a man in a garage with a cat tree named Nathan Stolpman. These were the beforetimes[1], and Alex Jones was still on YouTube. I remember having the impression that the man in the garage had somehow scooped AJ on this one.
Kappy had apparently crashed ComicCon LARPing Hollywood Illuminati Pederasty, discovered when they tried to recruit the mastermind. Isaac, however, was hip to QAnon and had sufficient moral fiber to to what any D-list celebrity would do in that situation, try to get on Alex Jones.
Even these years later, the Sacred Secretion thing is kind of a big deal to me. Baba has gone on to get sponsored by Mike Tyson, claim praying in tongues is alien light language, and to have spoken with the fallen ones. To this day, however, he also appears to be supporting over one-hundred disabled children in a village-home in Africa.
The crux teehee of the Sacred Secretion thing is that it makes sense. It makes Jesus Fractal Sense.
Even today, forty minutes into 2023, it still makes sense. One of the fun things about Agnostica is that you hear things like how the Crucifixion happens in the sky when the sun changes direction and is entombed for a couple of days. Similarly, the Sacred Secretion happens in every human body (apparently when the moon enters ‘your’ star sign).
The Santa Claustrum in your brain shoots something into your cerebrospinal fluid (hence CSF) that travels to your sacred sacrum and back up. It gets ‘crucified’ at Golgotha (the place of the skull), and if you haven’t ruint it by living all unclean and whatnot, it makes them other glands squirt milk & honey on your calcified pineal and you see the face of God.
That this came to me while I was in Portland under premise of cannabis education but mainly hoping for psilocybin treatment for the ‘still wanting to die allatime even though you took that off the table at the Apocalypse’ thing, as if Rogan had been promoting it or something.
I’ll readily admit that to non-breathe-together types, the latter has a much higher plausibility hurdle. On that point I must make two important notes.
The first note that is that even if you’ve never experienced it for yourself, you’re probably aware that cannabis has a reputation for ‘making people paranoid.’ Upon intense personal reflection, I offer I different postulate. Cannabis ‘fogs out’ your perception of your own axiomatic presuppositions. One such axiomatic presuppositions we swim in like water is the presupposition that ‘I’m basically safe.’ Fog that baby out and you have your paranoia.
The second note is that there was a special hook for me (as I recall.) That fro-headed troll tried to launch a fireball. At the end of his interview with Stolpman, he tried to start a hashtag. That hashtag was intended to be placed by victims on the stories they came forward with, like #metoo with the trauma cranked to eleven. I immediately saw that as a very dangerous thing. That danger is what pulled me in.
By November 8, I was on my way back here. Grandma died not long after Christmas.
I made an exit from the ‘Truther’ scene, thanks to the work of at least Leppo, if not Ewe. I didn’t go far, however. The bald Canadian that had claimed the Kaufmann connection was an irresistible curiosity given the worldview I had emerged with. If he’d actually been friends with the guy, perhaps my world view could be recalibrated more toward socially acceptable than ‘man, those IMDB connections are weird.’
He and some kid who had mysteriously inherited some guy’s lifework had also mysteriously inherited a YouTube channel, and they didn’t know what Discord was.
I told myself that I was staying here the first year because my ma had just lost her ma. By that Christmas, I was staring down the barrel of the decade I had just bore witness to. That was the Christmas I saw the lady in the wheelchair, down the road. In No Hope.
There are three ways one generally takes to and from Wal-Mart and the house, which with the exception of the convenience store make up the extent of my physical world interactions. One is through No Hope to Park Lane, one is up to Falcon, and another to the stoplight on Main. It’s usually through No Hope we’ve always and I continue to make the Wal-Mart return. It was there I saw her sitting in her yard in her wheelchair in the early winter sun, waving and smiling.
She reminded me of gramma, as if obesity and diabetes make the elderly all kindred. The toothless smile, the flabby arm wave. I liked her.
I eventually convinced my ma to move closer to my gramma’s sister, with the notion that I’d stay behind and sell the house using a cut of the proceeds to launch myself into whatever future I ended up in, anywhere else. She found a house and started the purchase, which nigh miraculously went through despite everyone working from home via COVID.
Twenty-Twenty-One was the year of the yard sale and Lemon Land, and didn’t it end with the freeze and fire?
It was this year then, in the Spring, after Molly. That’s when the lady in the Wheelchair went away.
She had been out there waving. Then there were people clearing stuff out of the house, with her there out front. Then she was gone. It was sad, but I never knew. Never said hello to anyone to know who to ask. Just someone who waved back when they drove by.
Then, the last warm day before the stretch of 7 degrees, on the morning of December 19th, I see the other wheelchair on the street has a sign on it.
It’s about three houses down from the lady in the wheelchair who waved. There’s been a wheelchair out front there too, but not so much waving. There’s a car in that driveway, I guess that makes it different. I’ve seen the person sitting in it smoking from time to time, the dog too. Never looking. Never waving.
On this particular morning though, there’s a handwritten yellow sign taking up the entirety of the back of the oversized wheelchair:
Please PRAY I have a good birthday. On December 19th, I will be 81 years old. Please pray I have a good Christmas, and my dog, JAKE.
I noticed today, on the last day of 2022, scrawled in two places across the side of the house: FOR SALE $2000.
Please create another level or two between $33 and €1221 or maybe an option for additional one-off donations.
Happy New Year Grim