As abyss has come calling on your doorsteps this holiday, and your openings are twisting into the most convoluted of holiday shapes in their efforts to disguise themselves as the non-sacred things that have replaced their authentic originals—as what we thought was a thing is now transforming into a much older more disgusting thing—as there is no more time left—as time is always running out—as we move without clarity of vision into places without clear contours where the weak among us can be feasted on by bodiless persons as if these bureaucracies could sing in the spirit of the stars, when these are paper card constructions, built of paper so as to maintain their fully paper empires.
They cavort and laugh. I’m only joshin ya, as their fingers twirl and twist around the increasingly more lumpy shapes of the world surrounding us. And just a moment ago, eyes that were crinkling in discomfort are now swimming about this person’s face impossibly. And the lights in our room are somehow also birds chirping. And a pain somewhere in my lower regions. And a humming sound. And a spec in my eye.
We can no longer clearly see the world while all the while we’re clearly killing the world.
Because thing of it is though, that we’re all a little papery when we sit ourselves down to examine the contours of our fluttering bosoms. Our eyes are tilting into marvelous corners while we shudder and wrack our hands as if perhaps all this hemming and hawing and shouting rambunctiously at the future enders of the Earth, because we are scared, and so we got to stick out our chests like the rest of them. A regular stage show of bared breasts as the vapors of annihilation slip in through the crevices of our many auditoriums.
While all the while, in our daily lives we’re also singing helplessly, and they’re always the people we love and how everything’s burned away by that love, even our most beautiful delusions. (The many revolutions, space operas, tragic romances, and pornographic escapades.) And these games you play are real. All of it is real. Every CGI universe. Every destroyed artifact from childhood. We see this world for what it is, but sometimes we pay ourselves not to.
And now we’re in massive debt to our ourselves over all these endless lies we’ve been spinning. And it’s gotten such that, the lives you live are fake. Or, to be more precise, the fakeries we visit are as real as the place where you sit to dinner, but you are never in all sincerity sitting to dinner. In part because of these fakeries you are always visiting, that you refuse to acknowledge as real even when they so clearly are, and so you refuse to acknowledge the reality of everything. This is how we pay ourselves to not see.
And I’m on the bus right now on Christmas Eve day.
We’re barreling through rural Pennsylvania. Playboys die young. This one did too. All / worn out / making dreams / come true. Listening to Connie Converse as the snow-erased pastures and skeletons of barns pass, and Grace and I are buried in oranges and grapes and other bits, and at the end of this gray sky is another shattered home.
There is no clear hope for my grandmother, who is announcing daily, I’m so glad I’m on my way out, as the politicians simper and coo, and the drama of our lives just got that much more authentic.
Do you see the charred hole in the middle of the office? Do you hear the sounds coming out of the other side of your coworker’s face? Do you understand that something is vanishing in your hands?
For now, there are no more clear gods here, but there is something eating through this supposed contented scene. While the gods peer out through branches of pornography and technological wonder and say nothing. For their words have always just been different forms of nothing, while it is the lie we have told ourselves—that all that matters is the making and having of money, that money can be conflated with all the needs and wants we may have. This simple lie’s enough to sow shut the many lips that live in the darkness between our thoughts.
While our eyes burn away.
While our gods die alone in the woods.
While worlds we have yet to imagine are annihilated before their birth.
While all the while real humans suffer and die as a result.
But perhaps the annihilation of planet Earth will lead to the birth of a spirit star. What realities are revealed when other realities are torn away? Will the understory of the heavens be shown to be something like a mantel of some other intelligence? Are the heavens like a mirror? How does the map of the universe relate to the grounding of our synapses? Or does it? I digress.
Digressions being a kind of wake-up call from all the asshandlers of the universe. Although actual truth, it’s looking like we’re being forced asleep again is what it is. They are trying to blinder you. They want you to be blind. They do not want you seeing. They want no more of sight.
The invisible empire was born on the battlefields of Shiloh—as—in the rain-s***ting night with its pulses of illumination spotlighting the pigs as they munched on the dead and the dying. This is an example of a fake that is real and is eating.
Or—Wobblies shouting their songs from cells drowning in limbs. Or—the rubes with their second-hand Fords and their KKK membership cards. Or—the Red Sea rising on the horizon and the skies turned black as the cattle drown in sand and the sand weaves itself through the crevices. Or—a soldier come to say goodbye to his family in an internment camp before he goes off to fight for his family only to be told no whiskey’s allowed inside the gates. Or—Don’t let them see you cry—or—an entrance wound. Definitely an entrance wound—or—the Committee for the Re-Election of the President—or crack—or Lewinsky—or “weapons of mass destruction” or Trump.
The fakery is growing.
Some of this fakery is a reality that’s been manufactured to consume us and some of it is an unreality we’ve taken for true. Which is also consuming us.
We are all become Oedipus, and we are forever in the process of gouging out our eyes rather than to see the horror. We use our X Boxes and iPhones and Facebook and Snapchat to avoid facing the faceless terror. As the heatwaves and cold snaps and as we murmur to ourselves, Oh my God. Oh my God. Please God—as we roll toward the flames—Oh, my God. Please—of heat brought on by greenhouse gasses leading to the melting ice caps leading to unstable air currents leading to the fragile ecosystem of this paper card construction we call civilization being the first to go, but once this chain of events has been set into action, which—spoiler alert, it already has—while all the while absurdly blaming the foreigners for our fears. Not for what’s happening but for the chaos to come. Blaming the foreigners for how we imagine they will behave when the end times really get cooking.
Another fakery that consumes those who are faking it.
Your fear is your own, and you should own it. Like how others have owned and utilized the miniskirt for example. Both of these things make us feel vulnerable, which is exactly what the powers that be want you to feel. But sometimes we can wear our vulnerability on our sleeves. (Or draped across our buttocks in the case of the aforementioned miniskirt.) And sometimes this way of wearing out vulnerability can be a tool which can lead to certain things getting done, drinks being ordered, acknowledgment of vulnerability on the side of our enemy, be they sloppy drunk boyfriend-to-be or potential green anarchist.
As we record our own annihilation on the flimsiest of electronics devices. As children’s faces are blown open, and our parents shrink, and we clutch at the doorhandles even when the doors are slipping off their hinges and up into the flesh of the night like rotting fruits falling upward into the void, and we are forever falling after them.
The passage of people through the world is a kind of falling, but it’s a falling up. You will never have more thickness to yourself than that moment in late adolescence when you step away from your childhood home and go hunting into the outskirts of the universe for the damsel of your dreams. Once you start stepping into the world, than it begins to come apart around you, and you find yourself navigating through a universe of clods that are losing ever more gravity with every year such that the forests we gallop through begin to look like archipelogos of woodland scenery and we ourselves are dancing from hunk of dirt to hunk of dirt—each with its own segments of root system and its own littering of pine needles—and as our world begins to splinter and crack into these segments of a universe—the stars seep in—and this is also a kind of unreality that eats—but its a numinous unreality that hollows out the backend of the eyes so we can see with a crystalline gaze unmarred by the viscosity of personhood.
The human is always filtered through layers of identity, but where should we look for the person? Where are you in yourself?
I am made up in large part by the lies I tell to no one, but perhaps the most remarkable thing is not that none of these things are true, but how this endless unraveling of non-truth, that started as simple white lies and has evolved into a much darker form of lying, as things evolve everywhere, into the pulverizing of the world and dried blood in her wisps of gray-white hair like a pool of dead ticks covering the back of her tiny balding skull as the oxygen tank whirs obnoxiously, while all the while …
Between Fox News and the ghost dance, there is a place where we can still breathe. We have been cursed by our ancestors, given a freedom that we cannot control. We have been blessed with an annihilation which threatens a peace where human civilization does not play a part. But what can you do about it? Let go of what you know and the answers will come.
Maybe you thought stepping on the faces of others makes you more human than the rest of us, but could it be that there is no species to begin with? That we are only approximating lifeforms? That playing pretend can lead to actual death? That I am not the failure I appear to be?
Your imagination is a tool that helps you see the world. If you don’t learn to use it soon, it will end the world.
Brookline, MA, 2016
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
