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“Bob” and “Me”

See it working through the digestive system? It’ll be shit in no time.

Remember kids, your life story is a barium meal!

A long, long time ago when I was, oh, about ten years old, I spent a sermon writing the word ‘cheese’ over and over again in tiny print, covering both sides of a church donation envelope. My parents showed it to the priest, perhaps in an attempt to shame me out of my meditative practices, but I just thought he was a weirdo in a stupid costume. I’d rather be watching cartoons, and I felt like I was getting one over on God.

Later on, in my early twenties, I replaced my hopeful agnosticism with Pantheism and was introduced to Sufism. Sufists are to Islam what Unitarian Universalists are to Christianity, but that doesn’t do Sufism justice. I got hopped up mainlining a hard dose of Rumi and Hazrat Inayat Kahn after a love-epiphany gone horribly wrong, and it’s a wonder the whole thing didn’t swallow me. I’d be eating out of garbage (which is actually an ascetic aesthetic pleasure in this freaked out world) and doing some kind of phony healing ceremonies while my earnings funneled up the local Sufist hierarchy to an unlicensed psychiatrist guru who was strapped for cash because she fell for some new-age ponzi scheme. Fuck that.

Bitterness and near-death experiences drove me into isolation, and the general feeling that everyone thought I was insane drove me to Anonymous. Crazy fucks who think the whole world should be remade in their image are a magnet for crazy fucks who think the whole world should be remade in their image. From my previous experience, I knew it was all madness. I played the game for laughs and got them. The apogee of my career as a “phony” (can such a thing exist?) spokesperson for Anonymous was a viral (76k views) and prophetic (Sabu was a snitch) “Emergency Christmas Anonymous Press Release,” but it was essentially just like every other “fake” press release I wrote. There was no greater pleasure than turning dogma in on itself and watching this process work its way through so many people. But it was a trap! The subtle hordes of the menacing Anonymous sockpuppet conspiracy were on to me.

That place was a known wasteland, yet after the failings of Sufism it was nice to spend so much time as an obstreperous and effective heretic. I needed to dial up the irony, supplement my heresy, and fill the hole that punking Anonymous couldn’t anymore. A page into the Book of the SubGenius and I’d found what I’d been looking for. “Bob” was everything that was wrong with church, everything that was wrong with Sufism, and everything that was wrong with Anonymous. Everything that was wrong with everybody! Later, I’d read some Nietzsche and realize he’d said everything that’s in the Book of the SubGenius without all the neologisms (overman?) and irony ((meh)), but it was funny! It nudged me, or perhaps FORCED ME, to be more ambitious as a writer (and as a reader). I chose several of my landmark blogposts and press releases about Anonymous and wrote out a kind of theory behind the madness, the Anti-Leader’s Handbook. It is currently the definitive piece on Anti-Leaders, at least according to Google. How successful it is as a piece of literature isn’t clear to me, but it played better for people who’d followed the doings of Anonymous.

X-Day (The yearly SubGenius eschaton) drew nigh, and my SubGenius friend Magdalen invited me. She also suggested I post the Anti-Leader handbook to a secretive inner sanctum of SubGenuses (sic) who sat around and chatted with Ivan Stang about his phallic microscope obsession. I assented to both requests gladly, and walked face-first into a paranoia nightmare. Rejected by the SubGenus (but of course not by Magdalen)! The Anti-Leader handbook was an imitation of Stang, a cheap knockoff! Stang banned me because “I didn’t take criticism well,” and maybe I didn’t, but there’s nothing in that fuckin’ book about that, and his criticism was BASE! Shallow! From my reading of “Orthodoxy is the only Heresy” and “If they can’t take a joke, fuck ’em,” I figured they’d be a little more open to counter-criticism. Again, I was let down. All the shit about divine all-inclusive excuses, the light-hearted and playful heresies, and everything else was as much bullshit as the Sufists and their rubbish about God and love. At its heart, it was a fan club for Stang strokers and a not-so-ironic moneymachine fameworship hatehole. So be it!

So close but so far away! I had to get it right. And shit if I hadn’t hijacked my own deity, Inglip, months earlier and begun the work of hashing out a cosmogony, a path to enlightenment, and all the epic archetypal myths that such things consist of. Now it took a deadly serious light-hearted nature–the imperative to “outdo” Stang took control of me. I distributed over 9,000 (really) SubGenius-ish-ish pamphlets in the course of a few months. You see, they used to troll for dollar bills, but I was doing it for internet hits. If you’re going to be a hack and a poser, you better do it RIGHT! The Social Media freaks like me were crying out for a new metaphysics, and I gave them a taste! But the Anonymous paranoia was transferred onto a SubGenius conspiracy, and I sank into that same sockpuppet abyss where everyone on the Internet was a part of a SubGenius-guided plan to drive me insane.

In a single week, the following events set me on the path of renunciation, which Hindus regard as a natural step beyond the acquiring of money, power, and influence. An ex-girlfriend threw herself at me, telling me I was the greatest writer of our time AND a demi-god. She claimed to have read everything I ever wrote. Friends of mine got in on the Inglip joke, we even had baptisms! It wasn’t just an Internet thing. We were burning the holy Octothorpe and worshiping Inglip in real life. My boss took a quick look at one of my screeds and said “We’ve had this for thirty years.” Shit! 

I quit the Chronicle, I resigned as Anonymous spokesperson, and I revealed that the cult of Inglip had been a sham “from the very beginning,” just like The Wave. All of the sudden, the sockpuppets (in my mind) laid off. I ignored the Internet for a few days, and enlightenment fell on me “the easy way.” I suppose I did put a lot of thought and a certain brand of meditation into the whole process, but it wasn’t exactly a lifetime of devotion to the teachings of a Zen master. Sure, maybe it was just Pseudonirvana, but that’s only two steps away from Nirvana.

The SubGenius knew they fucked up and they don’t want to admit to it. Stang mimicked my renunciation and “quit” the Church of the SubGenius days after I gave up at the Chronicle to, in his presumed words, “tease some chronic haters.” This is metatrolling at its best. The prefix meta- originally meant “beyond,” but it’s more commonly used to mean “under,” even by hallowed prophets like Neal Stephenson (metaverse?). In a sense, I’m both getting one over on Stang and having him pull a fast one on me. At any rate, Cory Doctorow (hysterical surveillance paranoid) is the idiot who really got punked, so it all turned out great for the both of us. On the Hour of Slack (mp3), some guy named Legume read out a moral of this story that boiled down to “we’re threatened by your presence, you’re banging our groupies, and we can’t have you around grindin’ yo feet in our couch.” He also wrote a parody of the Cat in the Hat (Tiny Penis SubGenius) that seems to imply that the posting of the Anti-Leader’s handbook somehow fucked shit up for Stang, but whatever. It couldn’t have been about me because I was, in fact, invited. I barely believe this all happened, myself, even though it all “hangs together quite nicely.”

I never hated the SubGenius, and was only angry at them after realizing that all this was some kind pathetic attempt to make amends for how shitty (humorlessly) they’d treated me.

Now that I’m a Zen master who’s attained Nirvana, I’m using my prophetic scifi skills to work on a novel about all this and much much more, which I intend to publish as subversively as possible. There’s no fucking need for publishers when we’ve got social media (to abuse) and ebooks (for hipsters), so I do intend to self-publish as I always have. However, I still desperately need an excellent editor, as that’s a vital component of a good novel. If you’re on the following list, please contact me and I will have the manuscript I’m feverishly working on ready for you sometime next year. I know I promised to have the whole thing ready by December 21st, 2012, people, but that just ain’t happening.

  1. Neal Stephenson
  2. Bruce Sterling
  3. William Gibson
  4. Cory Doctorow
  5. Ivan Stang (last restort)
This is ordered by preference, and I’m sorry if I have to let you all go for ‘ol Neal. In the highly unlikely event that none of these prophets decide to help me on my shamanic path to oracular scifi glory, I’ll have to fall back on the help of friends, who will probably just say everything is good and fix a few “grammar errors.” Eugh.

31 replies on ““Bob” and “Me””

To my fellow editors: I hope this makes you feel that much better about this massive rambling manuscript flouting all grammar rules when it inevitably lands on your desk.

Jesus! Look at all the ‘I’s in that fucker! I this, I that, has someone been giving your ego death threats and slander lately?

so wait,is this a real confession? am i being trolled if i respond with empathy/interest? in the land of sockpuppets/trolling isn’t irony the only weather forecast. aren’t the “characters” katy and frank endlessly elastic (ie.confessions/rants dissappear into the bottomless space of “past posts”. their biographies are not a continuum.). shouldn’t i be only posting snappy comebacks and neologisms with “fag” as a suffix? am i really asking questions here? if you know “all is a troll” how can you have an expectation of discourse?

Geeze fuck how many more times can that word ‘discourse’ be over used and abuse?!?

thanx for teh admonition. in the future i’ll try to specify whether i’m referring to La Parole or Le Langage; as well as to whether i’m deploying an synchronic or diachronic investigation. btw spOOk you are to be commended for the work you do (fishfag will verify the sincerity of this sentiment). snappy ironic parting coment followed by emoticon.

the weather forecast is the real irony! “you know how often i’m totally wrong,” said the weatherman as soon as the cameras turned off (true story). see, we here are metatrolls, and that means it’s both above and below. so in a sense, yes, you are being trolled, but i’m also being trolled in the process. you can expect some discourse out there but don’t ever expect some writer not to troll ya just cause he says time for ‘discourse’. the “best” of them can sneak it by, sure, but rapey gangfucking outfit whore, you ain’t seen facebook till you’ve seen katy and frank’s miscarriage (4 likes, 12 comments).

hermes
i-thou being trolled HARD by hermes trismegistus.

The first of the thirteen precepts of Hermes,as engraved upon the emerald tablet is :”Speak not of fictitious things, but that which is certain and true.” Hermeticists and their labors in the hermetic arts allow no trolls. All hail thrice-great Hermes.

The first commandment is to put none before Lord God. By mediating this stricture, Moses broke with it. Similarly, the first amendment ensures free speech to Americans. OF COURSE, WITHIN ALL LEGAL BOUNDARIES SET FORTH BY THE CONSITUTION AND SUBSEQUENT COROLLARY DOCUMENTS, COMMON LAW, and the pimp’s backhand. “Shut it, hoe!” So too, does Hermes say “no trolls allowed” as his first statement only to go on to repeatedly troll us again and again. Soooo meta.

Yeah you try to keep your brain from makin’ no claims for about 3 seconds and see how far you get, moron.

Satori, enlightenment, Zen, @, Freud’s ‘oceanic’ feeling, et al.

Why must there be so many strictures, dogmas, and doctrines about how to feel that feel? “It is not possible for one who claims to be a Zen master to be a Zen master.” Do Zen masters have a monopoly on Zen? Sure, because they invented the word. Fuckers. The sermon of the lotus–one could not craft a more perfect troll. Oh, those who seek the state of non-seeking, let me tell you something that will help you on your way. *shows the idiots the lotus*

The one student who smiled, why was he smiling? It was a malicious smile.

Zen is a perversion of Zen. Try that koan on for size.

Go sit in a monastery and enter a very particular posture, and think about that all day. We can make a huge deal about whether you sit inwards our outwards, and other stupid metaphorical nonsense that may have some idiosyncratic bearing on the attainment of this one particular feeling. Should you practice this until you can go out into the world and share it, or should you practice it until you sink into this one particular state of mind for as long as possible? And so on. It’s as big of a joke and as much of a farce as the huge doors and heavenly ceilings of a church, and the fact that it escapes a cosmogony and is psychological and rational rather than emotional and mythical is just porn for a different type of folk.

The flavor of the pointing lollipop and the doctrines it MUST espouse are the absolute HEIGHT of pretention (sia) when these become sick jokes. Maybe I missed something? Maybe I should study harder, do my eternity in the prison-like monastery of every prescriptive ritual, before I judge.

“So, master, what is the right way?” said a seeker who was then subtly ridiculed, slapped, or worse–condemned to life in a prison dedicated to transcendence–and he only sought a simple feeling.

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