"Don't seem right I've been strung out here all night I've been waiting for the taste You said you'd bring to me Biscayne Bay Where the Cuban gentlemen sleep all day I went searching for the song You used to sing to me Katy lies You could see it in her eyes But imagine my surprise When I saw you
Are you with me Doctor Wu Are you really just a shadow Of the man that I once knew She is lovely yes she's sly And you're an ordinary guy Has she finally got to you Can you hear me Doctor?"
Later leading initial studies in to the mice at the duration nineties, they have developed the relations cerebral-computador that have deciphered the activity of brain in apes of the owl and have used the mechanisms you repeat movements of ape in in arms robotic. The apes have promoted you reach and they seize in the good faculties and the possibilities of handling of hand, that make those of exposed trial ideal for this type of work.
I took it to Kihn. Merv Kihn, free-lance journalist with an extensive line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactees, bush-league Loch Ness monsters, and the Top Ten conspiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American mass mind.
“It’s good,” said Kihn, polishing his yellow Polaroid shooting glasses on the hem of his Hawaiian shirt, “but it’s not mental; lacks the true quill.”
“But I saw it, Mervyn.” We were seated poolside in brilliant Arizona sunlight. He was in Tucson waiting for a group of retired Las Vegas civil servants whose leader received messages from Them on her microwave oven. I’d driven all night and was feeling it.
“Of course you did. Of course you saw it. You’ve read my stuff; haven’t you grasped my blanket solution to the UFO problem? It’s simple, plain and country simple: people”—he settled the glasses carefully on his long hawk nose and fixed me with his best basilisk glare—“see … things. People see these things. Nothing’s there, but people see them anyway. Because they need to, probably. You’ve read Jung, you should know the score. … In your case, it’s so obvious: You admit you were thinking about this crackpot architecture, having fantasies. … Look, I’m sure you’ve taken your share of drugs, right? How many people survived the Sixties in California without having the odd hallucination? All those nights when you discovered that whole armies of Disney technicians had been employed to weave animated holograms of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the fabric of your jeans, say, or the times when—”
“But it wasn’t like that.”
“Of course not. It wasn’t like that at all; it was ‘in a setting of clear reality,’ right? Everything normal, and then there’s the monster, the mandala, the neon cigar. In your case, a giant Tom Swift airplane. It happens all the time. You aren’t even crazy. You know that, don’t you?” He fished a beer out of the battered foam cooler beside his deck chair.
“Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who’d been assaulted by a bar hade.”
“A what?”
“A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin Wayne’s vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up behind its ears.” He burped.
“It assaulted her? How?”
“You don’t want to know; you’re obviously impressionable. ‘It was cold’”—he lapsed into his bad Southern accent—“‘and metallic.’ It made electronic noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil if she hadn’t been brought up on The Bionic Woman’ and all those ‘Star Trek’ reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes before the heavy UFO boys showed up with the polygraph.”
I must have looked pained, because he set his beer down carefully beside the cooler and sat up.
“If you want a classier explanation, I’d say you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactée stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties’ comic art. They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing. But you saw a different kind of ghost, that’s all. That plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not to worry about it.”
I did worry about it, though.
--Excerpt from, "The Gernsback Continuum," by William Gibson
The monkey sat on a pile of stone And he stared at the broken bone in his hand The strains of a Viennese quartet rang out across the land And the monkey looked up at the stars And thought to himself Memory is a stranger History is for fools And he cleaned his hands in a pool of holy writing Turned his back on the garden And set out for the nearest town
Hold on, hold on soldier When you add it all up The tears and the marrowbone There's an ounce of gold And an ounce of pride in each ledger And the Germans killed the Jews And the Jews killed the Arabs And the Arabs killed the hostages And that is the news And is it any wonder That the monkey's confused He said Mama The President's a fool Why do I have to keep reading these technical manuals And the Joint Chiefs of Staff And the brokers on Wall Street said Don't make us laugh You're a smart kid Time is linear Memory is a stranger History's for fools Man is a tool in the hands of the great God Almighty And they gave him command of a nuclear submarine And sent him back in search of the Garden of Eden
--Roger Waters, "Perfect Sense Pt. I," Amused to Death
Everybody talkin' about The Nazz, what a great cat he was, how he swung with the glory of love, how he straighten out all the squares, how he stomp into the money changin' cart and kicked the short change all over the place and knockin' the corners off the squares. How he put it down to the one cat, dug it, didn't dig it. Put it down twice, dug it, didn't dig it. Put it down the third time, dug it, boom, walked away with his eyes buggin' out to here bumpin' into everybody. And they're pullin' on The Nazz's coat tail, they want him to sign the autograph. They want him to do a gig here, do a gig there, play the radio, play the video; He can't make all that jazz! Like I 'splained to you he's a carpenter kitty, got his own lick. But when he know he should go and show and blow, and cannot go, cause he got too much strain on him, straightenin' out the squares...he sends a coupla' these cats that he's hippin'. So came a little sixty-cent gig one day and the Nazz was in a bind, and he put it on a coupla' boys. He said, "Boys, take care of that for me, would ya?"
"Take it off your wig Nazz, we'll cool it." And they started out to straightin' it out for the Nazz. And they got about half way to where they were goin' and they came to a little old twenty-cent pool of water and they got right in the pool of water with the boat and all of a sudden, BLAM, the lightnin' flashin' and the thunder roarin' and the boat is goin' up and down and these poor cats figurin' every minute gonna' be their last and one cat look up and...here come the Nazz...cool as anyone you see, right across the water STOMPIN'! And there was a little cat on board, I think his name was Jude.
He said, "Hey, Nazz, can I make it out there with'ya?"
And The Nazz say, "Make it, Jude!"
Ol' Jude went stompin' off that boat took four steps, dropped his whole cart. Phhhhhiiiiittt, Nazz had to stash him back on board.
So The Nazz say, "Say, what seems to be troublin' you boys? Heh heh. Say, you hittin' on that SOS'in' bell pretty hard. You gonna' bend that bell knockin' on it like that."
One of the cats say, "What's eatin' ya? Oh, can't ya see the storm's goin' and the lightnin' flashin' and the thunder roarin'!"
And The Nazz say, "I told you stay cool didn't I babies?"
To the people who don't know, that means to believe, to stay cool is to be, to have the sweet fragrance of serenity rock your wig.
