The Day the Clown Cried

 ObserverSubj: Once upon a time...

Date: 1/28/99 11:13:05 PM Eastern Standard Time

From: JGetz

To: JoeRioux, TLPatten

Apologies in advance. I’m only a clown, goddamnit. I realize that the most pretentious thing in the world is to be humble. I’m not. I’m not even claiming that I have the necessary courage required to wrestle the devil of my nightmares.

Just that they are honest nightmares. Just that I’m really not lying when, as overblown, pretentious and tub-thumpingly Edgar Allan Poeish as I may sound, I’m telling the truth when I say...

There is something eating into my brain. Something big that I can’t quite see. Something I can’t quite describe without sounding like a jibbering mushmouth...

The very, very, very short version:

“Once upon a time” is the glue that holds everything together. Stories are sacred; stories are real. Stories, since the dawn of humanity, have been created in an organic, almost mystical process -- a kind of waking dreaming. “Once upon a time,” says the storyteller.

The people stare...wide-eyed...hypnotized...

Because, like acid, a REAL story is a trip that rattles your bones. You get in and you go where it takes you in an act of surrender...

Which the dreamer has to do first. You can have all the technique you want -- and God bless the tiger cage of technique -- but the story’s either REALLY HAPPENING in your head or it ain’t. The story either takes you on its trip -- finding you worthy or not worthy -- or it doesn’t. You can’t lie.

Even though it is a lie.

The paradox: an organic (meaning the opposite of bullshit) story is fiction -- but also real. An organic story weaves its pattern into the larger pattern of the universe with the exactitude of a Persian rug. It is what it is and what it has to be. It is, at the same time, absolutely uncontrolled and fucking magical...

But, in a radical break with what it means to be human, we’ve learned to do away with the magic. Now we manufacture stories, distilling them precisely for demographic exactitude and precise quantity of bullshit per liter...

We have learned to create fake dreams because only fake dreams can have commercials.*

In a radical break with almost all that has gone before, we have tied almost all of our shared narratives to the selling of products. At a very basic level, almost all of our most popular stories are fake because their basic message is “Let’s go shopping.”

“Let’s go shopping” is not where the sacred terror lies.

Intellectuals have been convinced that bullshit dreams are OK because stories are just stories and mean nothing. The masses have been convinced of the same thing because the shit you watch is your sacred consumer choice which, along with your religious beliefs, cannot be discussed or questioned.

Nobody can say “this is bullshit.” The referees have been stripped of their whistles. All critics have been taken outside the city gates and stoned to death. 

And the little child has discovered that, while the Emperor has no clothes, the torture apparatus of his secret police is second to none.

It’s a wonderful life...it’s a beautiful day! All the bad people have been turned inside out and buried in the cornfield at the edge of town...except for dat funny mans is bad on purpose make me laugh like Howard Stern, hahaha....

But no bad dreams.

Everything is great. Everything is wonderful. 

Mel Gibson can act. Bad things happen to bad people.

It’s a beautiful day...

Let’s go shopping!

There it is, kids. It’s almost all one big fucking fake. (Why...it’s nothing but a bowl of shit! Yes...but it’s very good shit, Miss Matesky!) Honest nightmares and holy visions becoming more and more rare...

At the same time that the simulacra of fiction is increasingly indistinguishable from reality...

Cultural movements are now created whole in the media replicator like Swanson's frozen TV dinners. Why invent new music for the 90s when we can simply REHEAT SWING?

MTV has various shows like “MTV’s the Real World” and “MTV’s Road Rules” in which a spoiled elect of twentysomethings -- transfigured into the golden streets on the other side of the Tube -- self-dramatize, soliloquise and bitch -- playing and mugging for the cameras in real/unreal dialog about their real/unreal existence.

Kids play videogames in which they get inside the “story” and kill things. Every year the games get better, if that’s the right word...PUSHING THE ENVELOPE OF SPLATTER TECHNOLOGY!

“Cops” is a show about real life in which real cops grind real negros, with identity hiding, digitally-generated rectangular black bars on their faces, to the ground. The cop, of course, knows the camera is there. The bellowing black-barred black dude on the ground does too...THAT'S ACTING!

Why get involved with the lives of fictional characters when you can listen to the REAL pseudo-encounter-group confrontations of “Transexuals who want to fuck themselves” on “the Jerry Springer Show”...?

And let’s not forget “the White House in Crisis!”

So it goes.

Our dreams are fake and, at the same time, astonishingly realistic.

Our “real life” is turning into a dead push-button grind we endure between hallucinations...(because, fuck it, Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox ain’t got nothin’ to do with me...) Deadly real -- and, at the same time, astonishingly fake.

Black is white, up is down, truth is lies, dumb is smart, old is new.

We have fallen down the rabbit hole of the fucking tube and something has to give.

That’s what cyberpunk was getting at before it was mainstreamed.

That, whatever it is, is the next big thing.

That's what scares the shit out of me and what I wish I had it in me to write about...

Though I hafta admit I don't feel quite up to the task...

Sorta like Bozo the Clown stumbling onto the corpse of a dead God.

BOZO: Oh my...oh no, there's a dead God here, somebody h-help...anybody else notice this...oh nooo, I'm just a clown I don't know what to...HELP....could somebody...oh no, I just wanna go to the circus and make the children laugh...i-i-isn't somebody else responsible for cleaning up this kinda … ? HELP ME doesn't anybody else notice this HELLLLLLLP! (looking at watch) Uh-oh. Better run....

(He runs)

Calliope music...

Fade to black.

Deja vu all over again.

From about the age of 13 to age 17, I was temporarily psychic. I dunno what caused it. Adolescent hormones, who knows. But I was constantly experiencing déjà vu. Sometimes dramatic,

I saw my dog die, twice. Pal. He was chasing a cat, doing a figure eight around our Volkswagen and a Norfolk Island Pine. I was running around trying to stop him. At the end of the final circle, the cat ran out into our street; my dog followed; a car hit him.

While I’m running around trying to catch my dog, I remember the dream. I can see the future. I know exactly what’s going to happen, and there’s no way to stop it.

I even remember remembering the dream – within the dream. And the feeling of absolute helplessness.

Screech. Thump.

So it was written.

Most of the time, it was random crap. I’d dream shit and it would happen and there was absolutely no point to it. Some friends took my bicycle apart and put it up in a tree as a joke. Walking through the mall with my cousin. The cover of a book. No significance.

I’d get into a certain mental state, a feeling of clarity, connectedness and disconnectedness at the same time. In that state, I could do ridiculous runs of coin flips. Heads, head, tails, heads, tails, tails, tails, heads, tails, heads. I'd call it; I'd be right, again and again. Ask my sister.

I won a math contest by seeing the number on a flash card – 33 – and working out the score before the math genius had a chance. Up goes the card. “1089,” I say. OK, card counting maybe. But this kind of thing happened all the time.

Then, about age 17, it started to fade.

Now, aside from this bizarre experience, I’m the most materialistic, least hoo-doo person in the world. The idea of atoms deeply reassured me. It meant the coat in the closet couldn’t turn into a monster. Great. But I actually experienced this shit. I know the conventional explanation of a temporary lag in two normally coactive sensory nerves is bullshit. I had dreams that came true. I told some of them to various people, wrote some of them down in advance. I can’t prove it. But I know.
And, if you think about it logically and scientifically, the implication of any psychic prediction of the future is deeply disturbing. Before we start, let’s eliminate reincarnation. I wasn’t walking around a fucking mall with my cousin in a past life. But you knew I was going to say that, right?

OK, here goes …

Explanations for precognition:

Time is like a four-dimensional movie. The self (spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it) can project itself ahead on the timeline and scope out the coming attractions.

Time is a four dimensional structure. Our senses give us data about what’s happening “now.” Other, subtler senses are receiving data from the future. In dreams or certain meditative states, we become aware of it.

The human mind is an amazingly powerful computer. On a subconscious level, it’s capable of figuring out exactly what’s going to happen in the future. It’s not really precognition; it’s a deduction.

The human mind has the power to alter reality. I.e.: the precognitive dream didn’t predict the car wreck. It caused the car wreck.

The human mind creates reality. Nothing exists “out there.” Life is just a dream. Sometimes we dream the same thing twice.

Life is a virtual reality game or entertainment scenario. We have, literally, seen certain segments before. Some mechanism causes us to forget. Occasionally, the mechanism doesn’t work.

Some entity (good, evil, spiritual or material) with access to information about the future is feeding that information into our heads.

Well, that’s all I can think of for now.

Does any of that seem fun?