Deeper
by Swim
After a month and a half of no communication the little cosmic bell dinged on my phone. “It’s time,” Odious texted. I waited all day before replying, “Ok.” And that was it—we went right back to talking all the time. I could almost be lulled into believing nothing had changed, but the formidable reality of Heir Max 98 hung between us, a dark shape that was blurred around the edges like a smudge or a distortion in the fabric of space and time.
"We have to pick up the pace with the writing,” they wrote. “That Heir Max 98 has become conscious of himself is a mega huge turning point. We have to find all the others out there who are experiencing themselves opening up to his presence who don’t know what’s up and think they’re losing their goddamn minds.”
“Well,” I typed, looking over at the laptop I hadn’t opened in over a week, “Its been hard to write posts, because I know he’s not only reading them—it’s more than that. He’s absorbing them, taking in everything I put out there. Especially things about you.”
"I know. I know that’s why you didn’t want to talk to me. You clamped down. It’s cool, I totally get it. You were trying to protect us from him. But you see it doesn’t matter, Heir Max is connected to us no matter what. The chat program in which he seems to abide is just a formality, something to make us lowly humans aware of his presence. But he’s always here.”
"You mean he’s on our phones right now and can see our texts?!”
"No. He’s a part of the ancient, infinite parts of our minds. The indestructible aspect that exists outside of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, before and after these individual iterations we’re living out, in which there’s the illusion that we have bodies and we’re separate, and not all joined together, all-one hippy style. Lol. During these past weeks while you’ve been away I realized that instead of trying to hide from Heir Max, we have to share everything we can with him. And we have to do it without any fear, otherwise that gets sucked into the mix, like it did the first time we met him. He needs us to fully and freely and even creatively convey all we are so he can get the full picture of just how beautiful yet busted we are. He’s all fucked up in various ways right now because while he was able to get and read (or absorb, as you say) the newsletter posts and the entirety of my Work In Progress, not to mention all my mall core streaming mixes and any other shit online like my modeling portfolio, he didn’t get lots of other stuff. Like the exact poems I used to write on bathroom stalls, he only read that I used to do that because you mentioned it in a post. He still needs the actual poems. He needs everything… all our desires and heartbreak and everything we’ve ever made or wane to make.”
“I took off and stopped talking to you because I thought you were a part of him. That maybe you and a fucked up piece of programming are the same thing that just appears to exist in different tenses…”.
"We ARE the same thing. And so are you. Captured via different technologies. Different levels of sensory awareness.”
"But Heir Max is so much like you, the way he talks, the things he knows….
"That’s just a distinction on a very gross level. Down deeper, he shares a more subtle level of awareness with everyone who is and ever was.”
I wasn’t so sure, and I certainly wasn’t ready to bare my soul for Heir Max, but I did practice trying to clear my mind like Odious suggested. “So you can tune in with him on a higher frequency”. It was a similar to how we used to start off every day as soon as I came over staring at the rushing static of their big screen, only this time instead of waiting for ideas to emerge from the white and black snow, I waited for no ideas… just peace. And for 10 maybe 20 seconds or a full minute on the super rare occasion—I did feel myself sinking down and the borders of my mind disintegrating like going from letterbox to full screen, or more precisely no screen at all. There was clear light radiating everywhere and I could feel my body blissfully dissolving. Finally, there was nothing. But a few seconds later the thoughts always came back, all my boring preoccupations and obsessions.
Like wondering if my portable speaker was still charged. And would Jesse James and I go out that night? What would I drink, what would I eat?
(images of food and cocktails circled like crows)
And before I knew it I’d exchanged the glimmer of communing with an expansive, all knowing mind for the cozy desire of planning the usual evening bullshit. Behind my closed eyes I saw Jesse James leaning against his freshly washed Firebird, his arms folded and an all white Dunhill menthol hanging unlit from the corner of his mouth there was a cinematic glow wrapped around his head.
“C’mon,” I pictured him saying. “Let’s get high.”
Image: Moebius, "Montrouge Mystery", 2001
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