A PARTIAL LIST OF THOSE WHO ARE FOLLOWING YOU (FIELD REPORT, FILE F20A6-21)

International Jewelry, AKA "The Want-Makers"

This is not a typo, nor is it some rehash of a false racist conspiracy theory.
International Jewelry is a multinational firm with holdings and agents in almost every nation. They are responsible for the sales of objects which have no worth or function other than beauty. Their goods sparkle and shine in, on, and around beautiful people. These goods elevate beautiful and non-beautiful people alike into the world above, into the sacred precincts of glamor.
It is the work of the agents of International Jewelry to advertise these objects and the depictions of the glamorous people who own them. This advertising fuels the economy of the world and dictates to us our desires.
The agents of International Jewelry follow you in the daytime to gauge your response to the wants they tell you have. These agents chart just how much time you will spend on working towards acquisition of the items which will buy you admission into the sacred precincts of the beautiful. The price they put on these items pushes you one zero at a time farther away from being able to afford your way into the higher realm.
At night, when you are asleep, is when the agents of International Jewelry do their real work. They stand over your bed, and shine a high-powered flashlight into a beautiful multi-faceted gem, making its prism lights dance on your closed eyelids and the softer parts of your skull.
Through a process developed in the 13th century, and still not adequately explained by modern science, this light enters into your mind. It does not necessarily effect your dreams as you sleep but the sparkling light stays in your mind and alights on different psychological areas in your waking hours.
The glittering light fills you with a self worth, a gleam, which tells you that you are entitled to beautiful things. Despite the defenses of your heart which tell you that you do not want things merely to have them, the light attacks you on two levels.
The first level shows you the world that you could enter if you could afford your way in. This is a world of golden rooms hidden somewhere deep behind the gray walls of cities and the miserable crossroads of small towns. These golden rooms are filled with beautiful people of many professions, but above all, their professions are to be beautiful by experiencing, appreciating, and understanding beauty. The furniture, the clothing, the settings and table-settings, everything shines. And by extension so do these beautiful people. On this first level you are a new edition to this world, and the beautiful people come to celebrate you. You are invited to fly in private planes and dine on things almost too beautiful to eat. There are beautiful women crossing and uncrossing their legs who are calling you by your full name. There are beautiful men with arms and chests which look like they were carved from stone offering to buy you a drink. There are banners hanging overhead and custom made cakes with your name written all over them. You can make love to piles of beautiful strangers on ancient rugs and animal hides while priceless artifacts and works of art watch.
Even better is the time when you bother to cross back from the beautiful world into our gray world. You can find your family, childhood friends, and tormentors stuck between the machinery of this gray world, and they will not recognize you for your beauty. When the recognition of who you are and how you have changed washes over them, they will shatter. In the light that emanates from you they will be further fixed to their worthless shadows which hold them in their gray world.
The second level in which the glittering light attacks you appeals to your better nature. This is not your physical desires or your vanity but your actual want to be a better person. If you truly had the money and the abilities which beauty and the golden world would afford you, then you would not only be a better person, but you could help the people you love and make the world a better place.
You could travel the world and bring about social change for the better. You could make and fund art. You could provide for the people you love and raise a family.
The agents of International Jewelry gauge these feelings inside of you and set prices accordingly.


A Bird, A Dog, and A Cat

These three animals follow you, one at a time. Their schedule rotates depending on the month and the day of the week. They keep their distance.



The Specter of Sickness

Emaciated and sexless, its palsied hands outstretched from under its shroud, it walks like an amputee with all of its limbs intact. It leaves a thin layer of grime in its wake. On its person are a series of photographs in diptych. On one side of the hinge is a smiling person and on the other the same person hooked up to a machine.
The chambers of its heart are a glowing antiseptic white.



Glory In a Crowd of Glories

Glory is an angel in flowing robes. She is bathed in light and she holds in her right hand a long golden trumpet. She holds her left hand in front of her as she walks on tenuous steps, her eyes shut tight. (Tucked into her robes, somewhere, is a photograph of her dead sister Victory.)
When, if ever, she finds you everything will change. She will blow on her trumpet. Everything you have ever done will be re-contextualized. Every mistake you have made in the long chain of mistakes leading to the present day will now be seen as necessary steps. You will be successful and all criticism you have ever suffered will fall off of you like dead skin. Every promise you have made under duress in this shitty world will be broken, they will no longer have to be honored.

Here's the trouble. Glory herself walks deep in a crowd of identical and false glories. There are hundreds of angels. Each has the same beautiful robes, wings, and trumpet. But these other angels have ulterior motives. Some would talk you into self-actualization and dietary cults. Some represent chauvinist and ultra-nationalist groups. Some represent the international miracle-drug snake-oil concerns. Some are advocates of deep tissue massage and orientalist muscle stretching cadres. One or two work for a family neighborhood product placement pyramid swap scheme. A growing number are recruiters for the armed forces. A few represent apocalyptic meditation cults and sell portable gongs shaped like natural and man-made disasters. More than five are paid agents of the Specter of History.

Your Biggest Fans, AKA The Mother and Father of a Better You:

A man and a woman. Individually they had loved you from afar. When they were younger they were timid, and their slavish love for you made you even more unapproachable. Perhaps at one time one of them approached you and declared this love. And maybe you spurned them. Maybe they never bothered to declare their love. As they watched you and fell deeper in love your distance only grew in their eyes, and through simple arithmetic, the space they would have to cross to reach you only widened, you can substitute any ancient Greek hero and amphibian combination to explain this.
So the man and woman met each other at the edge of an uncrossable abyss of love. The two of them on one side, and you a distant figure on the other. It is doubtless that you were unaware of their existence and their love.
When they first met, they bonded over conversations about you. They traded surveillance equipment and stories about you. They grew closer by comparing telescopes and telephoto lenses which held you in their sights. They both shared their scrapbooks full of your minor victories which were magnified in their love. They competed with each other in exaggerated stories in which they pretended to have a close personal relationship with you.
And at night they made love. The man and the woman made love, each imagining the other was you. They devised strange sexual positions and called out your name at the moment of climax.
Then they moved in together. At first they devoted all of their time and resources to following you, sharing surveillance and recording equipment.
But their need to follow you diminished. Their love for each other grew into the comfortable rhythm between the sounds of a home. The smells of cooking, the sounds of the plumbing and heating, the quiet moments of the man and the woman at a table holding hands and reading the newspaper. The love they shared, they both believed, was born from their love for you. And in these quiet moments, in every touch and glance, they thought of you.
But this love had prematurely aged them. The man and the woman were slower, quieter, in some way sated. They no longer follow you and film you from across a street. They go about their lives quietly. And before they kiss goodnight they speak about you, and when they are asleep they dream of you.
Who you are to them is further abstracted. Because they no longer need to see and follow you, because their love for each other is hopelessly tangled in their idea of you, who you are to them is magnified and beautiful.
Through this a better you has been born.

A Better You

This is you but better. This is definitely you, but a successful version of you, an effective you. This is you but free of any doubt, weakness, sadness, etcetera. This version of you was born yesterday, so this you has none of the accumulated defeats and pains of an average lifetime. This you has not yet had hopes and feelings blunted on the ugly data of life experience, and never will. This you has perfect posture and a correct style of walking, to avoid pitfalls and shrug off any airborne detritus.
This you has a city in its mind, a home in its heart, and a song its throat.
The city in your better version's mind is bright. All of the doors and windows are open, all over the city. The rooms, restaurants, and stores which would normally be closed are open, and inside strangers wait with open arms. The city is large enough that one could walk its streets forever and always find new neighborhoods. Everything is painted in exciting colors. There are parks and trains full of expectant strangers, waiting to love this better version of you. When night falls, the streets are illuminated with warm light coming down from apartments and rooms where strangers wait by the window to invite the better version of you up for nonstop sexual intercourse and interesting conversations about art.
The home that waits in the heart of this better you is a warm place in winter. It is furnished with old and gently worn things. Inside someone waits long into the night to welcome the better version of you home after a long journey. There is something cooking on a stove.
The song that issues from the throat of the better version of you is about the four seasons and it is not very well written. Maybe you could call it sincere. I don't know, I'm not a fan.
The better version of you follows you at a distance and picks up things you dropped, and takes advantage of opportunities you missed. The better version of you seems to be unaware of you, but follows your footsteps exactly.


The Old Man with a Television Set in a Wheelbarrow


Who is he? He seems to call all women "Louise". From the unadulterated stream of nonsense that comes out of his mouth anyone can see that he has gone senile. He wears a soiled old jumpsuit like a mechanic. He's pretty strong to be carrying that television around all of the time, it's gotta be at least a 32 inch. And the TV is somehow always on despite the fact that it isn't plugged in. The cord drags along the ground and is frayed from being stepped on. At night he cuts a pretty terrifying figure, walking through the dark, his face illuminated in the blue light.

Shadows That Resemble Your Mother and Father:

They do in fact look like your mother and father. But they are shadows, and their edges are tattered. They hover close to you and blend in with the other shadows.
Why do they follow you? Maybe because they love you. I'm not sure, your relationship with your parents seemed pretty complicated and I never wanted to get involved.
Maybe their presence makes you feel guilty, but above all else their presence is embarrassing. Looking deep into their shadowy forms you can see the ranks of generations. These are the deeply-nested and recursive tiers of ancestors who begat and begat until your parents and then you were begat. This long parade of ancestors staring back at you is an unbroken line to the "Old Country"(AKA the World of the Dead). And you can see them as they were, slaves covered in manure crushed under boot-heels, Holy men, idealists settling down to squabble in cramped kitchens, explorers, sufferers of madness and other venereal disease, heroes in burning cities, and so on in that fashion. Staring too long only invites the attention of The Specter of History.

The Specter of History and His Retinue: The Sphinx, The Fact, The Advocate, and The Scarecrow

The Sphinx leads the retinue and is leashed to the left hand of the Specter of History. It is not a proper sphinx, but a small lapdog with a man's face. The Sphinx has the disgusting nakedness of a shaved animal. It has the jowly face of a politician with the glasses to match. Its incessant yapping and snapping of its little teeth clears crowds from the retinue's path.
The Specter of History (previously known as "The Bloody Specter of History") has a long coat and a serene smile. The light of the concealed weapons and photographs which line the inside of his overcoat is reflected in his metal teeth. He has a hat which appears to be military but has no insignia. Embroidered into it are the laurels of a poet. His clothing is impeccably clean except for his boots which are covered in mud and ash. His left hand holds the Sphinx's leash and his right is thrust into his pocket, where the clinking of coins and medals can be heard. He has the face of a young man lined and cracked with age. His eyes are cloudy.
The Fact and The Advocate follow the Specter closely. The Fact resembles the Specter almost identically except that he wears the cheap suit of a professor and carries a valise. The fact is usually silent and only whispers to The Advocate when he is handing him graphs from his valise. The Fact's face betrays no emotion.
The Advocate resembles The Fact almost exactly except that he is balding, sweating, and he wears a cheaper suit. The Advocate publishes a newspaper, "The Advocate", which he named after himself. He carries the small hand-crank press and inks everywhere with him. The newspaper is filled with data and graphs The Fact supplies for him. The first few sections of the newspaper are dense and full of information. Because the information is expressed only in impenetrable jargon it is usually skipped. Most readers skip to the editorial and the pro ed pages both written by The Advocate. The Advocate advocates that knowledge is power, and that knowledge is engendered by facts and clean data. Therefore The Advocate sides with and advocates for power in all discussions. The Advocate is a student of history and through his editorial arguments changed The Bloody Specter of History's name to The Specter of History. On the back page of The Advocate's newspaper is the comics section. Here incorrigible tykes, tsking housewives, talking animals, and long forgotten stereotypes live out their lives frozen for centuries, sanitary and unchanged. Only the most fleeting reference to the days current events places their suspended bufoonery in our time period.
The Scarecrow follows up the rear. He is a tattered thing on a wooden pole which hops along. On his pole he is nothing but a twisted torso, two arms, a head, and a hat. He is weather-beaten and aged. The storm of years have stripped him of color and features. Yet his gray hide seems to be stuffed with something weighty, something meaty. He has the appearance of a broken and lost idol. A totem to some forgotten fear. One of his eyes is a button. The other is missing. His long arms terminate in tattered rags. His hat is only recognizable as such because it is placed on his head. As he hops a fob watch on a rusted chain swings from a rent in his chest which had probably once been a pocket. The watch's face is cracked and there is no minute hand.

END OF REPORT.
THE FOLLOWING ENTITIES WERE INTENTIONALLY LEFT OFF THE LIST FOR SECURITY REASONS:
The King of Birds, Manimal, The Artworks Gang, Handshakes, Dream Architecture, Childhood Toy, Actual Dead Man, The Friendship Bracelet Weaver, The Surgeon, Dr. Policeman, and Laundry.
With love,
No. 80
Primidi, 21 Nivôse CCXIX
Not proofread, sorry.

KINGDOM OF SHADOWS:

"Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows.

If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Every thing there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, It is not motion but its soundless spectre...

...All this is in grey, and the sky above is also grey—
you anticipate nothing new in this all too familiar scene, for you have seen pictures of Paris streets more than once. But suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life. Carriages coming from somewhere in the perspective of the picture are moving straight at you, into the darkness in which you sit; somewhere from afar people appear and loom larger as they come closer to you; in the foreground children are playing with a dog, bicyclists tear along, and pedestrians cross the street picking their way among the carriages. All this moves, teems with life and, upon approaching the edge of the screen, vanishes somewhere beyond it.

And all this in strange silence where no rumble of the wheels is heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech. Nothing. Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies the movements of people. Noiselessly, the ashen-grey foliage of the trees sways in the wind, and the grey silhouettes of the people, as though condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being deprived of all the colours of life, glide noiselessly along the grey ground.

Their smiles are lifeless, even though their movements are full of living energy and are so swift as to be almost imperceptible. Their laughter is soundless although you see the muscles contracting in their grey faces. Before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours—the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.

It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows ... Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight at you—watch out!

It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones, and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building, so full of women, wine, music and vice.

But this, too, is but a train of shadows.

Noiselessly, the locomotive disappears beyond the edge of the screen. The train comes to a stop, and grey figures silently emerge from the cars, soundlessly greet their friends, laugh, walk, run, bustle, and ... are gone. And here is another picture. Three men seated at the table, playing cards. Their faces are tense, their hands move swiftly, The cupidity of the players is betrayed by the trembling fingers and by the twitching of their facial muscles, They play ... Suddenly, they break into laughter, and the waiter who has stopped at their table with beer, laughs too. They laugh until their sides split but not a sound is heard. It seems as if these people have died and their shadows have been condemned to play cards in silence unto eternity. Another picture. A gardener watering flowers. The light grey stream of water, issuing from a hose, breaks into a fine spray ...

This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim ... "

Maxim Gorky, 1896

HAPPY NEW YEAR

STRYX TERCERO

I found this while researching the stryx, from the same program that featured Grace Jones.
Thank you Norman Lear, thank you my father and mother.

REMINDER

In your country,
in our country,
there is a populist movement bankrolled by billionaires,
and supported by poor people,
for the rights of billionaires.

Thank you.

IT WAS ALL A DREAM

Made the change from a common thief
to bloggin images from G. "jeeves" Leach,
and I'm far from being cheap
worry about peak oil all day
fear death
it's the Degen way

I AM PSALM

YEAH, THOUGH I WALK THROUGH THE UNCANNY VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF SEX
I WILL FEAR FOR EVIL: FOR THE ART WITHIN ME
MY ROD MY STAFF MY COMFORT FOOD
PREPAID, AND ON THE TABLE BEFORE ME, THE PRESENTS OF MINE ENEMIES
TO ALLOW THIS HEAD TO BOIL; MY CUP RUNNETH OVER

ON SHORE LEAVE GOOSEFLESH AND MERCY FLOW OVER ME THE DAYS OF MY LIFE
I WILL DWELL IN THE HOUSE OF THE LORD FOREVER

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK TO THE PREMATURELY OBSOLESCENT

There are these people around now who want to talk about rugs and glasses and eye-glasses and I am pretty sure that I have to die soon. They want to show us a rug. They were going to buy a rug they saw in one place but then they found the same rug for this much at another place. The price was less at the other place. Same rug. Here's a hardcover book about rugs on a table on top of the previously mentioned rug. Did we tell you the story about the table?
My girlfriend is looking at the table, the rug, and then at me, and then at me reflected in our host's eyeglasses. The hostess is hanging on the host's arm and beaming with pride; she is holding a glass of wine with a specific shape in a specific color with a specific taste bought from somewhere she found. Evidently the store didn't exist until she found it. My girlfriend is listening with rapt attention and is probably tallying up some numbers in her head. My girlfriend is talking to the hostess about a mutual friend's wedding. The hostess hooks her digital camera up to the laptop on the kitchen counter to show us pictures from the wedding. I don't know who any of the people are in the picture other than myself, my girlfriend, the host and the hostess. We are looking at pictures of ourselves at the wedding and my girlfriend and the hostess are talking about how much weight the bride had lost to fit into her dress. They are talking about how the growth in the bride's vagina, thank goodness, was benign, and the hostess has pulled out some scans from the MRI.
The host wants to talk to me about the winter Olympics, and is angry that I don't know anything about who got what medal from which country. Then he asks me a series of questions about Canada but I don't know the answers. I explain to him that I am not from Canada and I don't know the population of Canada. We make vague guesses at the population of Canada while my girlfriend and the hostess laugh about some mutual friend and something this friend did when they were all sixteen years old.
The host is telling me about how he goes surfing and then says a bunch of technical surfing terms and smiles widely at the recognition he believes he sees in my face. The hostess overhears the conversation and she tells the host to get his surfboard and his wetsuit to show us. The host very modestly protests this. The hostess begs him to get his surfboard and his wetsuit and he laughs and protests. My girlfriend joins in and begs him to get his surfboard and his wetsuit. This goes on for a very long time and I want to smoke a cigarette, but can't in this clean house and want my girlfriend to go with me to stand and smoke on the tiny veranda. But she is still begging the host to get his surfboard. Finally the host, while still protesting, goes into the other room and comes out with the surfboard and the wetsuit and my girlfriend is yelling with shock and admiration at him. Or maybe she is yelling at the surfboard. The ceiling is too low for him to stand it up so he is holding it awkwardly in his arms. My girlfriend and the hostess are looking at it and he is talking about the beaches and the best trains to take to get there. The hostess has forgotten what side she is on and is matching my girlfriend's exaggerated reactions to the surfboard and the wetsuit. My girlfriend is looking at the wetsuit and nodding while the host tells us about the difference between the waves in Australia and Tokyo. My girlfriend hands me the wetsuit and I am calculating how long I have to look at it and nod before I can hand it back. I am not sure what do with the wetsuit and hand it back to my girlfriend.
They serve us some food which is flavorless boiled vegetables and rice. The hostess talks to us about macrobiotics and explains to us the virtue of flavorless food, and how it has not only made her more healthy, but more positive. She now understands things about nature, and the implication is, that no one else does. My girlfriend has now matched the the hostesses zeal and is talking about healthy food and chiding me for eating curry and ramen. This is my girlfriend, who lives on a diet of noodles, soup, rice omelettes, garlic, menthol cigarettes, and alcohol.
The host wants to ask me some questions about Eminem and what he is doing these days. Do Americans still like Eminem? Do Black people in America like Eminem? Is America really like the America depicted in the movie "8 Mile"?
Now I am praying for the earthquake that they have been threatening me with since I came to this country. But I feel bad about this, thinking about Haiti. But then again if the big one came it would bury all of the filing cabinets and all of the information on me which I have been racking up since I set foot in this country. Would I feel bad? I wouldn't want anyone to get hurt. Could the earthquake just localize to the immigration office, my apartment, the university, and this apartment with the rugs and wine? I would feel bad, I guess, if anyone got hurt. Present company excluded.

OH, AND ALSO, JD SALINGER IS DEAD

JD Salinger is dead but everyone is quoting Akutagawa:

"Once he had finished writing "The Life of a Stupid Man", he happened to see a stuffed swan in a secondhand shop. It stood with its head held high, but its wings were yellowed and moth-eaten. As he thought about his life, he felt both tears and mockery welling up inside him. All that lay before him was madness or suicide. He walked down the darkening street alone, determined now to wait for the destiny that would come to annihilate him."

WHITE PEOPLE FLIP OUT ABOUT PORTABLE COMPUTER

"This changes the face of computing" said area white man.
Apparently the current face of computing opened its computer mouth and delivered a speech about some kind of tablet complete with stylus for digital cuneiformatting.
"I'm holding it in my hands but it is so light I am not sure if I am actually still holding it in my hands!" screamed a white woman, who was indeed holding the tablet. During her brief statement she checked multiple times to make sure she was still holding this marvel of science.
Later some people talked about a television show and a possible war between two rival television shows. Almost imperceptibly an explosion was heard in the distance.

RACES

YOUTUBE HOLDING PATTERN OVER THE UNCANNY VALLEY AND THE PLANE IS ON FIRE AND THE CARGO DECK IS FULL OF LATEX FACES

Goddamnit, I've found a horrifying pocket of the youtubiverse.
Don't watch these videos if you don't want your skin to crawl.




Uncanny Valley vs. Transvestites

And gargoyles of human beings hung on the ugly architecture of wobbling lurching bodies coming down fast like dying empires, after the sun is already

dead in their eyes. Rooms full of spooks drunk on dish soap spiked with whatever was left on the tables when the bar closed. An animal over there with spotted pants dreams googleplex with the chopped up palm and broken wall and it's just lost, oh my God. Moving like a range of dusty mountains, dead with nothing to hold it down, moved by earthquake or rain that swallows the stars and moon. Get out of the way, off the curb, he pukes on the garden and slams sideways into the stucco. What are the cops waiting for here, lined up in their cars staring at their clip boards and microphones. "We got some people scratching themselves, a man looking at his eyeballs up under his shades, and a woman with a poochy ass who keeps turning around and around. Find a hurt place and don't ever let it heal. Get that fucker hanging on the wall and tear him loose, the stars are coming out. There is a TV set in a window, it says, 'The stars are coming out.'"