Eliot Harper

Today I'm starting a new journal, so here's the introductory fine print. My name is Eliot Harper. I don't get out much.

Most of y'all like daylight, live from dawn to dusk these open-air proscribed lives. A continuum of lawns, gardens, church meetings, gym and sauna, sidewalks and highways, a convienant universe built from spun steel reflecting neon blue, concrete and brass statuary, gilded tiles, serotonine uptake inhibitors, white-coated philosophers and vivisectionists promising solutions, fluidic and otherwise to redefine, realign, and realize the borders by which your reality is known.

I have twenty-five dollars in the wallet I am carrying in my right back pocket. I am wearing black cargo pants, two pockets on each leg in front, one on each ass cheek. In my right pockets there are two packs of camels, one half empty and sharing space in my upper pocket with a pen. The other, in the lower pocket, is still encased in cellophane. In my upper left front pocket, there is a lighter with a rainbow trout midleap over a sparkling stream printed on its plastic sleeve. The bottom of the lighter is blackened from when I used it to mash out the glowing coal of a cigarette three hours and twenty-three minutes ago. In my lower left pocket, a blank notebook filled with blank pages and a 3 1/2 inch, 1.44 mb blue plastic disk with green factory print on which I have stored veves, runes, glyphs and seals, comprising the bulk of my ritual iconographic library.

In the wallet that I have slipped from its normal resting place in my right rear pocket I keep two expired drivers licenses. One lists my address as 1723 All Hallows.

The other, actually my original learners permit, lists my address as my mothers, down south on Marlboro Ct. June, 92 Goddard. Small town just west of Witchita. Color of your skin made less difference than which church (if any) you attend.

I'd sit on the porch and watch the sun set, each evening. I was innocent, and found the world unsatisfactory, but reliable. Old reeboks dangled from the powerlines that crossed the alleyway behind my mother's house, a dense shadowy thicket, the leaves just starting to curl from the summer's heat. Dusklight sky, a chemtrail or three in the distance but otherwise clear, a fading from bright clear blue to purple edged hues, twilight comes on hard in the summer, a sun dropping down behind the rough edged horizon, five hundred miles of clear view across Kansas.

Thinking linearly, the last few years of high school is where my memory's continuity begins... while scenes, dominant memories of childhood trauma, of camping trips and water parks and theme rides, carnivals and sleep overs and spelling bees spring forth from my memory, I don't have a thread I can uncoil from which would dangle these events in their proper order. Photos trigger some responses, but mostly I stare in wonder at these faces, my mother, young, years held in abeyance, frozen time cascading, quantifying these roles of relatives, family traditions and rituals my place in which was proscribed, my understanding of, or even awareness of any abstract signifigance not even encouraged, let alone expected.

It was only in high school that I came to exist, as if everything prior were formative, rather than historical... that I was not yet fully formed until I gained a discrete individuation from... but I get ahead of myself. Before then I remember encountering none of the darkness, though while I did not know that the darkness was there, that doesn't mean I wasn't effected by it.

This darkness that rides, we are all desensitized to it, though how or if deliberate I still do not know. With this chronicle I hope to set out on paper something which will help me muddle out the implications of what I'm experiencing. It is not without some trepidation that I write, for this act, this chronicling of my encounters, takes place not at the end of my trials, but in the very midst of them.

Feb 91 It feels like at any moment something new could happen. Everything flows, everything is in flux. A simple concept by which to base a life, perhaps, but it begets infinite complexity. Not random, not necessarily chaotic, but certainly complex. Mom says that it's my aries showing through, that and my pluto in the first house. She says I spend so much time daydreaming that I never see what's right in fromm of me. She gave me this notebook and told me to work on my communication skills. This is my first entry. All I've done this week is watch the war on television. I don't think I want to go into the marines now.

June, 92 then... we had been huffing butane and were doing 360's in a muddy field out by the abandoned cemetary way out west on Maple, when all three of us felt this strange rush. The rag fluttered out of my hands and into the debris that littered the floorboard of Jon's '78 pickup, but the can of butane made a solid weight in my hand, grounded me somewhat. There, in the headlights, a space of blackness, shaped like a man, with limbs, a thick squat build, with piercing, burning light streaming back at us roughly where its eyes should have been. My head was buzzing, and my skin crawled and twitched from the butane, but fear like icewater sluiced through my spine.

Jon, next to me on the bench seat, stared jaw open at the thing before us, then slammed his foot on the gas and plowed through it. Before the head of the truck touched it, it melded with the shadows on the ground, flowing like water quicker than Jon could run it down. It was the last time any of us huffed butane.

Late September, 92 Jon and I were out at the nature trails, south 23rd street entrance. Once the first frost hits and the ticks go into hibernation, the nature trails become the prefered meeting place. Armed with a half ounce of commercial weed, dried and pressed into brick some six hundred and sixty six miles due east-southeast by a family of hindus who had immigrated to the hills of Arkansas. Jon comes armed with two pipes, a pack of reds, lighters, papers, scales (perhaps he thought to nibble out gram portions, nickle and dime away a quarter of the bag to passing strangers deep in the heart of the witchita nature preserve.

I was the bag holder, in which-handy, always available-I keep a square of paper declaring that I have indeed paid the state of kansas twenty dollars tax on any illegal substance I may happen to be carrying on my person. While this won't keep me out of jail should I happen to be arrested for the other item in the pag, the dried pressed brickweed that looked more like treebark than a plant holy to Siva, the tax stamp does prevent them from charging me with failure to pay my taxes, a stiff fine that helps defray the cost of maintaining an agricultural subsidy which pays kansas farmers a stipend per acre of land that they do not farm. This helps drive up the price of wheat, and creates an unnatural scarcity in the free market, a necessity for the new european economy. By having pre-emptively paying my tax police are most looking to arrest me for were they to profile and pull me over on suspicion of being in posession of this particular plant, I hope that they might let me off with a warning should they happen across this plastic sack, arranged just so around my ankle that it would not be visible, hidden by my boots.

I am not carrying my lighter.

Now we are seeking a safe place off the path away from any standing pools of water. The place we come to, staring at it in my memory, wasa hollow carved out by an oak that had fallen, cutting a swath out of the dense overhead foilage where a chemtrail x against eggshell blue marked our position in the skies above. Surrounded on all sides by locust trees wreathed with inch long thorns, covered cocoon-thick with cobwebbing, which once leaving this space I found my left arm coated in... In revulsion I push through a locust tree.. stinging leaves behind scrapes that soon bleed a poisen purple along their edges. Jon moments earlier tells me he is to join the marines, wants to see kuwait. His favorite movie is Red Dawn. His dad is a pastor.

Behind him, I see this form arise, a deepness to the forest, a presence that is vaster, more dispersed, than the shadow thing we'd seen that night. It grows as he speaks, and I am frozen now, the weed is cooking, pipe's wood charred and hardened, soaked with the resins and ashes of countless meditative trances, coughing, scraping, watery eyes and hunger pangs all tied into this little pipes history, it moves, it dances, glimmers at the edge of sensing, of perceptions as I stare into the coals, then pass the pipe to Jon, still speaking. He doesn't sense the presence around us, I can no longer hear what he is saying.

Waves of fear swam along the fibers of my spine, as I waited for this entity to manifest itself in some way, certain that at any moment a tree would swing into animated life, that the very earth would awaken while Jon continued to speak. Then, almost as suddenly as I had felt this, I felt it pass. I stood, walked through the locust trees, my left arm becomes covered with webbing and I curse then, once in revulsion.

While Jon follows, he's now clutching-white knuckling-the empty pipe. When hours later we get back to the truck, nothing more had been said about the military, and the presence had never reappeared.

Appended, 5-94, two a.m. That was the last time I saw Jon. Amanda told me she heard he's joined the army. I never thought he'd make it past the psyche evaluation. There is foreknowledge of many kinds that can be used to predict an action. I should have known Jon would have gotten sick in the Gulf, I saw in him a fierce heat for death, a barren waste in his eyes... he was haunted, even before we went out the Aztec, the cemetary there just west of Witchita, east of Goddard. That night, when he sat on the marble slab and smoked joint after joint as the gleaming of sunset cast long shadows from gravestones. Just as the darkness winked out, greenish pale and bloodshot eyes, parched and dizzy from the weed, Jon grabbed my arm and hushed me to silence, pointing with my arm into the gloom. There, somewhat bouncing along the ground, two whiteblue orbs like eyes floated within a shadow.

We fled.

It touched Jon, that night. I remember now. It touched him, it seared the skin above his ankle, a blackening that faded as soon as I'd seen it, Jon slamming the truck door and dropping the clutch, spinning in reverse and over a stone in a whip around. That was so fucking strange.

4/12/13 I was born at fifteen minutes past three on April fifteenth, 1973, in the spacious bathroom on the property of Jared Kochler, twenty miles north of midtown Witchita. Jared was my mother's patron then, supporting her as she worked on her art. It wasn't until years later that I understood this to mean she was Jared Kochler's mistress. His wife knew, my mother knew, and that was all as it should be for Jared (at least in his mind.)

Jared's knowledge of esoteric handshakes and closed-door contracting networks had opened many doors for him in the burgeoning aircraft economy. Jared had a knack for finding space for concealed storage compartments in airplane schematics, and as such occupied a rather unorthodox position amidst the engineering community. During the years he was a part of my life I remember only that he had assembled quite a collection of 8-tracks and players.

My mother's art was hard to describe. Looking through photos of her standing in a pool of luminescent water steadying a length of chain link fence hung with christmas tinsel of varying hues one might think her possibly unhinged by the psychedelic fractalization of the preceeding decade. Her piece "Portrait of Senator Greenback(1975)" won her some international recognition; but for that painting she would not have mad any impression on the world of art. Still, between the occasional commission and the monthly stipend from Jared, she was able to provide for us in a style that was, if not traditionally middle class, very closely mimicking it in affluence.

She once designed a tapestry for my ceiling, through which space had been allowed for the light fixture to come through at the very midpoint. Across it, picked out in glow-in-the-dark paints, she had placed all the planetary glyphs and interrelations of my birth chart. Even now, some forty years later, I can close my eyes and conjure up moon opposing mercury, saturn, uranus, and mars all trined, pluto admonishing in the first house under libra, all picked out in ambient greenish hue.

I remember, I carry this knowledge deep in my subconscious, as much as an artifact of my origin as my fingerprints, my genome.. When I was thirteen, Jared stopped coming around. That was the year that mom and I went to Disney world for a week.

Florida was dense with life, people, the trees, the music and traffic all a thronging hum unlike anything I had seen in the plains. We broiled under the july sun, stared in awe at the touch screens and arcades filled with games that were still four years out from appearing in the midwest malls, and the giant sphere like god's own golf ball that stood entrance to the experimental prototype city of tomorrow. Important shit when you're thirteen.

Mom was distracted through most of the vacation, and finally she told me that Jared wouldn't ever be seeing us again, and she cried. She also told me Jared was my father. For a long time I thought that Jared had left because he was my father. It took me years to untangle my confusion and my anger, so tightly coiled the two became.. anger at her, for having kept this from me for so long, confusion because she never explained why I couldn't see him. She told me he was in trouble, that he flew overseas to some place called micronesia, that if he came back he'd be arrested.

After that, we returned to Witchita, but everything began to change. We moved to a house just west of the airport and I spent the tail end of summer braving the mosquitoes, ticks, spiders, and fleas out in the nature trails that butted up against the back yard. Next to the airport, the woods hugged a creek bed that went from bone dry midwinter to flooded come the spring rains, slowly drained away all summer til it dried up again in the fall. Mom stopped smoking pot except when she thought I was asleep.

Men in suits came around every few weeks, bearing breifcases and later carting about notebook computers. "When Jared left, did he mention any possible paramilitary groups he may have been working with?" and "Did Jared ever speak to you about a heroin operation operating in Goddard?" I remember them asking, when I'd come in from outside through the screen door.

I went to school in Goddard. After a while even the men in suits stopped coming around, and Jared Kochler seemed to fade from our lives. I feel as though I walk in his shadow, a little colder, now that I reflect.. Now, plugged in, I'm never alone. Trying hard to not look directly at the data flows so that I might understand what effect it has on me. This hum in my very neurons must be apprehended as if it were enlightenment.

Thinking about my childhood drops me into a vague, gnawing awareness that something is very different. If I call it all up, wetwebbed into the dataflow... Say, something fully immersive like a wall street sim or a chatworld, it gets so disorienting that I have to be laying down or I'd fall flat over. But if I'm just googling I can still be perceptually aware of my surroundings.

Information managers like Jake work on about twenty-three data flows at once, monitoring information intuitively like a security guard once monitored closed=circuit camera systems. On a good day IMs move an incredible amount of paper, buying and selling stock through direct neural interface with the market, predicting trends through a close intuitive modeling on the rules of complexity. Jake called it surfing, said he could feel the wind in his teeth, salt spray whipping past his nostrils as he'd close in on an option. Yet it was as much a discipline, and Jake only got into the game by going all the way over, crossing, then getting the full training.. a discipline reliant on both the wetweb and the cross as well as a handful of relatively new theories of mathematics. Chaos theory, complexity and catastrophy modeling, all fundamental areas of IM study.

I can't say I envy Jake, a few minutes of fully immersive simulations and I'm sea sick, stomach doing flip-flops. Hell, I still write out my journal in long hand, on actual hemp paper.

Motor oil for the soul, Eliot thought, meditatively stiring his mug of steaming warmth; a sprinkle of decaffinated crystals, a dollop of molasses, a second sprinkle of crystals, and fill it up with boiling water... instant perfection, near as could be achieved without powdered ginsing to take the edge out and add a bit of rhythym. The meditation at hand was this memoir he had been piecing together on and off for a few years now. The mug was his prop, twiddle twiddle, sip, twiddle, sip. It helped him through the momentary crisis of not seeing, when scrying his memory for continuity.

That last slug, the bitter browns buried deep in the mug, hits like a cream liquer but leaves behind earth rather than fire. A grounding, a centering. The still point. Still he could not see. There was something immanent in the detritus before him, something left behind, something he suspected he could never see. It would take someone else to look from outside, to see the patterns in which he himself was inmeshed, that they might relay him its message, crack open its mystery for him, that he might step out, whole, reborn in this knowledge. Or perhaps there was no mystery after all, and this piece before him a waste of time, mental masturbation. He sighed.

Dangerous activities in desolate places. That was the essence of my magical apprenticeship, if that is what it was.. We learned from each other, trial and error, a little band of bitter bastards, fed up with the uptight right wing zealot zombies that crowded the halls of that small high school. Goddard. It was the kind of high school that bred school shooters, and did. Wierd how that one kid could traumitize so many for so long..

I was a nervous little guy, neurotic to a fault, aware and wary of anything that could happen from then on, a post tramautic stress disorder that carried me through some very tense situations. I was still open then though, despite all that. I had yet to be jaded, in retrospect. All of us, except for skitz, but he hardly counts.

For me it started with Naked Lunch. Not the book, although I found it pleasantly unsettling. Nor the movie. Rather, for me it was the three or five minute segment on Lights, Camera, Action! with Leonard Nimoy, whose book of poems I still have, where I saw some of the shots of the cockroach typewriters. That image of the typewriter as a living entity, and later of the strange green creature gracing the cover of the box left me consciously aware that the world is more than it appears to be, weird is right down the street, just around the corner. I've seen weirdness all around me, but it took 'the filming of Naked Lunch' segment at the start of high school to really set the tone for the overall arcing zeitgeist of my experience.

It wasn't until several years later that I would actually read Naked Lunch, but it was The Ticket That Exploded, another of Bourrough's trunk books, that trully set me on this path. I had been pondering the folklore that enshrouded the tetragrammeton when I realized while reading the ticket that exploded that if a proper name, vibrated correctly would unmake all of creation, just think what a properly crafted sentance might unleash. The world is made of language, like terrence mckenna insisted. And language is an alien viruys, just like Burroughs claimed in the electronic revolution, some thirty years earlier.

Today that seems like a given, yet when I was reading that stuff for the first time during the ninties, the first Bush, the yellow ribbons and all, it was serious fringe thought, had yet to bleed out into the mainstream at all. The metaphors that could have prevented decades of pain and chaos and misunderstandings was not yet in place. Consequently I found myself consigned to fringe status, and I embraced it.

Skinny Puppy albums and the long black trench coat and these books and the ideas they represented became a vortex of themata through which I sought out my identity at a time when patriotism was fought over and yellow ribbons began appearing on every oak tree. The shadows over the city grew within this atmosphere of arrogance, and at first I sensed this but dimly.

To be honest, I hardly had a political awareness at the time. I wouldn't find myself directly conscious of politics until well into the second term of President Cranton. Rather, I spent those seven years (from about 1989 to 1996) fully immersed in a kind of survey course of occult thought. Secret societies, gnostic rites, shamanic journeys, and psychedelic exploration of my own psyche, depth psychology through chemistry, provided me with a sort of non-traditional schooling. Thee Invisible COllege, it says in the literature.

It was in '96, when I turned twenty-three, that I stopped studying oral folklore and started doing, when I adopted the doctrine of the deed. I had discovered what I took to be an underlying principle in metamagickal studies, a crack in the paradigm that let causality leak out. Complexity theory, chaos magic, and catastrophy modeling, combined with neurolinguistic programming techniques and viral marketing could produce sociological shifts in the mass populace. Magic, the art of brain change, applied to a huge group of people, could transform the culture completely. I realized this through an interview I stumbled across between William S. Burroughs and some fella named Bob Wilson.

I think there is a kind of fear of normalicy at work in my subconscious, because I have always gravitated towards the grotesque. Freak show imagery haunts my imagination, as a child amputation, dismemberment, the odors and scents of terrifying accidents flashed through my head. I fondly recall being so traumitized by War of the Worlds when I first saw it, age ten, that I wouldn't go outside for hours. Cheesy fifties effects and all, I was neurotic for hours. There were commercial breaks but they failed to break the movies hold over me.

My mother claims she took acid while I was in the womb, hoping that it would increase my mental cognition. My imagination and reality often blur. In a way, I'm an addict to my imagination, although often I find it ruling me, flashing into my conscious awareness, transforming my perception of the environment through projection.

Caral, my aunt, has a chapbook on her mantle. A few pages long, it is the full transcript of Witchita Vortex Sutra, a poem by her friend Allen who's long since passed away. I never read it as a child, it had no pictures. He had signed it, "To the vortex."

I always carried that sense of a metaphysical tornado centered in the heart of Witchita, at the feet of the Keeper of the Plains, perhaps, where the river came together. An energy spinning the souls, the individuals, along in its wake, stirring up the passions, the rage and the hatred that lies just beneath the surface of this maniac community. It wasn't until someone posted the poem in it's entirety online, as a birthday present to me in an online forum, that I first read it in its entirety. It was pretty good. I remember it made my chest heave, my tears welled up, as I thought about my mother and aunt, then dead five years, but I'm getting out of order.

Back to 1984, and all that it implies.

Eliot sighed, tossed the stylus onto the tablet, and slid back in his seat. He stared at what he'd written. Picking up the tablet, he thumbed back to an early entry. I suppose looking back on the relationship, I was looking for that fresh, lively, buoyant pink surge I sensed coiled in these youung twenty-somethings, these bouncy, naive narcissistic young girls, these women who still look past the gravestones, the wrinkles, the botox cosmetic ads, still seeing possibility where I had begun to sense the inevitable and act accordingly, withdrawn, timid, in fear of death. I looked to the relationship to breathe new life into me, not realizing I had to be awake myself. She was enchanted with the glamour, bound up in this hacking/speed freak life, she fucked like a rabbit and lived for the moment.

("Heather, now, she was different. I could marry Heather." Eliot thinks as he's reading.)

When we first met on the BBS, she could outcode me. Easily. How could I not ask her out? Tomorrow night, the YwhoCares party on the back lawn of Oliver's house in Andover. Oliver's got thirty acres, with clumps of kansas ditchweed sprouting out amidst the elm and spruce that grew along the shallow ridges. Inside is where the real grow operation is though. Running two 1000 watts and some fans, he'd converted a double-wide trailer into a full sized hydro/soil greenhouse. 'Node Four/Twenty' of Darkstar was also located on the property. Near the highway, the primary structure was a long low clip of a house, seemingly built directly through a hill. In reality, it was an entirely tornado-proof residence that maintained a phone bridge, several servers.. Oliver wants me to install an electromagnet to some sort of archway, after having read about such a set up in some book. So far I haven't gotten around to it, but I think I know how I"m going to do it. I've known Oliver now for five years, as long as I've known Heather, and they've never met. I'm going to invite her to go with me to Ollie's YwhoCares shindig.

"Shit, honey, you remember that night at Oliver's?" Eliot called out along the hallway. "When we got so stoned we ended up driving to Rose Hill on back roads?"

Heather came into the room, her face pale. "Eliot, they've come to quarantine us. They say we're carriers of the 'WE,' that we're under suspicioun of worm infestation."

Behind her stood a man encased in biohazmat silvery wrap, beckoning others into the room.