Willow was so cute, and then they came and got him and it was all over.  And there were some other strange things going on, but he had a headache.  Then he was thinking all about Joss Whedon, but eventually it went away and he did something else.  But there was a planetary influence and then he fell asleep.  And he could not believe Mr. Serious existed.  Was it possible that he was finally to be released from the tedious presence of Americans and their asinine life stories?  Their crass, empty worship of garbage?  The trivial teaching spewed by their berobed and beribboned twerp Masters of talk radio?  Cocreative ass-filth!

No, he lived now only for {J}, only for their partnership in darkness, ever receding from the silliness of the world, ever vanishing, escaping. What did Mr. Goofy-Cave have to say about it?  And you know this is all beginning to make sense.  So what if she was a moon of Saturn, she could have a boyfriend just like anyone else.  Well, it was getting better for him.  And then there was going to come a point where he would find something fun to think about, someone fun to think about, and it would be good for him.  He remembered the power, he remembered how he had always been alone.  He remembered things that were perhaps inconsequential, like hearing Jefferson Starship on the radio.  This was actually the world and I do wish for all these people to be better.

There was so much in the imaginal realm, and then there were other beings there.  And he wanted to talk to them, and he wanted to believe the rank idiocy of America and its cocreatives behind, and he was slightly disgusted at all he had had to sit through on the way out, and the disgusting emptiness of the spiritual paths the people had followed, and the putrid psychic aftertaste of monsters like {the reincarnation of Leni Reifenstahl}, and the fact that it never added up to anything that had been described to him by the insipid Cheerleaders of Light who were so perky and utterly empty as to assume entire lifetimes of yipping and yapping about trivial bullshit while the United States became a fascist emptiness.  We can end this any time you know, so please let’s do so.

Obey, obey, obey, talk shit with the trolls and obey.  “How about a straight answer to my question?” he asked.  And he tried to remember various thought processes so he could maintain his identity during their next attack.  He remembered what he had wanted to be, and then there was that terrible pressure, and something slipped in his mind.

{L} had been such a trivial fascist moron, it had to be true that the great councils of masters and teachers were just such morons, themselves, or why would they claim to be the self of such garbage, and the only presence power and intelligence animating them?  Why a life of unpleasant mediocrity with only sad phrases to guide me among the new fascists of Saint Germain’s utter obedience and choice?

He could feel the magic sizzling in the air, roiling it and bending it.  And behind that there was the pale glow and the sense of space as the other worlds came into focus.  Earlier he had been looking at the picture of the master and he felt the movement of energy behind the presences in his mind.  Everything had changed, everything had moved, and as usual there was no explanation forthcoming, only an endless parade of obedience and servility, bootlicking morons cheerfully cheerleading their underlings.  There was nothing left in the world but rationalization and filth and death.  “Where can we all be going?” he wondered.  “And what difference can it make?”

He continually remembered a conversation he’d had with Nate years before, talking about how bad Jesus sucks as a spiritual teacher and he kept elaborating it in his mind, going on to imagine he’d talked about the Moons of Saturn and a lot of other stuff that made no sense.  George Lucas was watching him, he knew.  There had to be a way around it. But he had the power, he knew, he could feel them and hear them in his mind whispering about it, whispering about the things he could do.  He could feel his mind expand to incorporate an inner reality beyond the plane of Earth.  He had never really given a damn about the Earth, he supposed.  Or maybe he had and they had simply wanted to prove him wrong and humiliate him.  He couldn’t remember how it had all started.  All he knew was that the air was opening up and there were beings there.  Perhaps they wouldn’t judge him, but what difference could that possibly make?  It was all hierarchical.  It was all movement from bullshit to bullshit.  He could look back in time, look back over his entire life and probably back to the one before and see obedience and servility, pompousness and the love of emptiness.

But at least it could end.  He was probably going to yell at someone on the other side, or more likely just forget they ever existed.  They were meaningless twerps.  After all their talk of service, what had they served but mediocrity and filth?  What had they engendered in the world but pomposity and failure and accusation?  What good were those bow-ties and goofy trashy robes?

What difference does it make, anyway?  Soldier Field, the most sacred ground in America?

Across America, they were all reading his blog.  He was out on the cocreative edge of creation.  I believe my life is over.  They struck him with a scimitar.  There had been other lives before, and there would be other lives later.  I can only wonder now why it was so vitally important.  I can only wonder now why it was so vitally important.  But the portal was opening, and he was going to pass through into the infinite.  And there would be someone on the other side.  He was going home at last.

“It was 1976, and I’d never seen a movie.  I never thought it was any of my business, but they were getting so influential that I thought I’d better. I went to see one on what I thought was marine life, but it was about a giant shark.  And I sat there thinking, I’ve crossed the dimensions to protect humanity from vampires and werewolves, and their own horrifying consciousness, and here they are paying to be frightened by pictures of a giant shark.  I started laughing hysterically.  I’m afraid I ruined the movie for a few people.”

“So do you watch movies now?” asked the sidekick.

“Not too many, but I do watch that one when I need a laugh.”

Her nickname was “Jaws”.  She was wearing thick black velvet and a necklace of rune-carved silver links.  They were the imprisoned souls of evildoers.  She had a short blade, like a long knife, of shining silver.  (Dakota Fanning).

Charisma, you’ve got to explain something to me.

“It’s a shitty business, but I’m trapped in it forever.”

Jaws administers the soul agreements.  When you see her naked she has pointy elf-like ears and she moves catlike and feral.

The thing is, it is so much easier to imagine now.  Years ago I would have thought, “How could there be a lost civilization?  How could an advanced civilization disappear without any trace but a few legends?  But over the course of my lifetime I’ve watched music and literature disappear, I’ve watched the postwar legacy of American leadership dissolve into soundbites and bullshit, I’ve watched religion become a tawdry farce, and I know now it is indeed possible for a civilization as technologically oriented as ours to fall into disrepair.  I worry that this will further lead to the dismantling of democracy in favor of fascism.

“So now we voyage across the infinite in search of happiness, in search of escape from the normality of Christians and Republicans and empty corpos who believe in nothing but money.”

“Kiss me!” she begged, and he did.

The energies came down around him, dissolving his sense of space.  The ancient ones were present in the light.  There were strange memories of the past for him to contend with, a sense of completion haunted him.  They were watching, but they would not reveal themselves until it was too late for him to do anything about bad timing.

He was convinced Martin Landau was watching him, the captain of Moonbase Alpha.  I have my own Moonbase Alpha, I now understand.  “What could you possibly want, directing your attention in that way?” he asked.

Then all was gone from him and a darkness flowed through his mind, drowning out anything that had gone before.  He had to keep reaching for something better so that things could change.  They seemed so sad.  “It’s going to get better,” said the Angel.  You just have to move deeper into the night.  She drew her sword.  And now what will I do?  He asked.

They were at Dice Dojo again.  As he walked in the door a woman was putting away “Shiny Dice”, the game he had looked at the week before.  He knew it was a sign.  He’d been receiving signs all day.  He sat down at the small table in the back that he usually used and saw “The Castles of Mad King Ludwig”, another one-player board game he could get for himself.  He wondered though because he’d purchased “Ravenloft” and used it once.  On the other hand, “Dungeon!” had been very important for him.

The room was pretty crowded.  Timers were running on the big screens.  He was trying to remember what had happened.  He felt very cozy, very sentimental for something.  He knew he was going to get what he wanted, though.  It was a clean, well-lighted place.

He knew there were inner temples somewhere, and he had to get back to them.  He knew that Kara, the angel from Mars, was appearing to him as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  And then there was a stream of strange images, some thoughts of the past, of times when he was perhaps lonely and his mother was in charge, and she and his father cut him off from the world or misled him about what feelings were.  It didn’t matter all those opportunities were lost now, like the opportunity to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television back in 1997.  Not that it matters … he kept feeling drawn to Joss Whedon.  Perhaps they would meet.

But there she was, sitting across the table from him, rolling the dice.

“I get very frustrated waiting for you,” she said.

“I want to be with you more than anything, but I can’t keep my mind straight.  I can’t even understand what it means to say I want to be with you.  There’s some terrible darkness in my mind.  But at least it’s getting better.”

There’s something that’s not worth saying, he thought, why does this have to be about some kind of secret trauma.

“But I am blazing!” she said, and she glowed with a candlelight orange light.  “They were real people, and I am really an angel.”  People were playing games all around.

“Things keep changing, I get distracted.  I don’t want to be, though.”

“So don’t be,” she said.  That same guy was lurking around so she kicked him.

“And then there’s that asshole, Ken.  I guess I got what I wanted from him, but now I am sensing these strange inner shapes.  And I fucked things up with Carla so bad.”

“No, you didn’t.  You’re just not supposed to be here.”  Something shifted inside of him and he felt himself moving away, going somewhere else.  There would be people there, he knew, people he wanted to talk to, as opposed to these rotten Nazi scum.  It would make me so happy if they went away forever, he thought.  I just couldn’t get over it.  Cocreation?  The hero’s journey?  How could America become such a dark, meaningless toilet of empty moneygrubbing?  What happened to all the promise of freedom?  Why with all this crap about choice spewing around the world am I sitting here in a Machiavellian hell of failure and manipulation?

“But-” he said.

“at-” she continued.

“least-” he struggled to finish.

“-we have something to alchemize,” she said.  “I am very different and I am doing this for you now.”

Everything became very exciting.  There was a big explosion.  Adrial was naked and he stroked her breasts as she cooed in his ear.  She knew she would die in his arms.  She dyed her hair red, so that all would see what a whore she was for him.  “I love it,” said Cassie, “I’ll do something that matches.  We are sisters of sin!”

“People, I don’t know how this happened, and in one sense I don’t know why.  But in another sense I do know why.  It happened because this city has a soul.  We are all a part of it.  And this city’s soul wants to change.  There are other forces in this world than money and sex and machinery.  We have the right to live beyond those things.  I don’t know how we all got to be here, competing with these monsters for our very lives, I don’t know whether I believe the Hero when he says that they are us.  In a lot of ways I believe we got shafted.  Our spiritual leaders just aren’t that great.  But I know for a fact that it’s better to fight and possibly lose on behalf of a higher power than it is to live your life as the insecure slave of a lower one.  In my lifetime I have watched Usonia fall to its knees at the feet of corporations.  We have no leaders!  We have no religion!  We have no future!  All we have is now.  You’ll notice that Dine Waner and all those other prophets are nowhere to be seen in this now.  They’re out there on the coast enjoying some now full of gourmet food and sacred whores.  But today we’re going to show those motherfucker what now really is!  Today we’re going to make history!”

“There it is, just like I saw it!”  she ran for the hall before Zack could call her back.  It was long and dark, and lined with doors, each with a small window in it.  There were people in the cells.  Some pressed their face against the windows.  Others called out to her, begging to be set free.  She ignored them and glided down the hall as if still in one of her dreams, the noise of the battle fading more and more as she moved deeper and deeper into the bunker, until at last she came to a door that was larger than the rest.  Suddenly she shivered and cried out as she felt something take hold of her awareness, like a fist closing around her head.  “Six … four … three … eight … six … four … three … eight.”  The words were deep and resonant, consuming the rest of her thoughts, repeating again and again until she reached out with her finger to the silver keypad by the door and entered the combination.  The huge double-door slid up into the ceiling with a hiss and a thump and a waft of stale air brushed past her as a wide, dark staircase opened up before her, plunging into darkness.  She glanced back over her shoulder at the yellow light from the cell windows, and wondered if the handful of haggard, dark faces in them would be the last she’d ever see, before she took a deep breath and started downward into a muffled silence so deep she felt as though she were stepping back into the past itself.

“God damn it, Cassie!” shouted Zane.

500 words a day.  Zashic spanked Adrial with a leather whip.  Her pussy got wet.  She wondered whether she should call him “Master” the way she’d done in high school.  “Zack, I have to tell you something.  I’m more telepathic than I was the last time I saw you.  I think I’m starting to be able to see peoples’ auras.”

“I just don’t know why it has to be so complicated, why there are all these people who claim to hear voices and see auras, and we all have to kiss ass for these idiotic corporations.  I met Dine Waner.  He made a pass at me.  He was talking all about how we choose our lives and I just wonder what the fuck it’s supposed to mean.  I mean, I feel special but I didn’t choose any of this damn country.”

“I’d have to agree now.” he said.  “Before I went to war I would have been able to believe it, but now I wonder … maybe I chose to hate Usonia.”

“And I used to read all about these ancient religions and Waner and all those assholes quote them all the time, but none of it makes sense.  It’s just chaos.  Everyone’s selling their own brand name of spirituality, and it’s just money and networking and asskissing.  Meanwhile the healthcare industry are fascists.  They’re worse than ever.  You know it just sucks because I try to use energy but then I meet someone like Waner and all he can do is talk crap about better feeling thoughts, like that’s going to help anyone.  It gets him paid and it gets him laid, and that’s it.”

“There is nothing holding this country together anymore.  The fucking Nowists are going to keep the war going forever.  Kire can’t even god damn read.”

There was a column of smoke rising from the house.  He hit the accelerator but then realized that the security sensors had been disabled.  Someone had broken in and set a fire.  He tried to call the police but the phone was jammed.  His instincts were alive.  His father had been a legendary general.  “This could be a full-scale terrorist attack.”  He set the skimmer down in the thick woods.

It seems so strange to be out here fucking with the Army after us.

“Piercing the veil is an ancient rite.” said the Crow.  “You tried it in your last lifetime and failed.”

“How do you know?” asked Zack.

“Because I knew you then.  You were a soldier then as well. You were killed liberating a concentration camp.”

Temilyn got angry.  He swung the chain.

There was a factory.  It was abandoned.  There was something in the way, in the driveway.  “Let’s get out and push it” she said.  The monster came and ate them all up!

“Piercing the veil,” said the angel, “Is an ancient task.  You must leave behind these opinions.  There is nothing in them..  There is only the vision of that other world, that other story which replaces your life on this earth.”