Unger House Radicals

by Chris Kelso

  Gayle Cotten - Can we say ‘lot lizards’? We can, ok! Do you have any leads on the case?

  DI Dummit - Among the evidence found, there was a 24-hour log book located in a compartment under the driver’s side of the cabin. There was little else in the way of personal effects. The scratched off Teamsters Union badge on the windshield and the CB radio that had been disembowelled from the dash, nothing to shed light onto the real killer’s identity.

  Gayle Cotten - Is it true that pages were torn out of the log book but seemed to belong to a man called Randy Elsinore?

  DI Dummit - We can neither confirm nor deny anything at this stage I’m afraid.

  Gayle Cotten - Ok, thank you Detective.

  -------------------

  *

  Bryan comes up to me in school the next day. He’s all red-faced and panicky

  - Ok… the tape, do you still have it?

  - Yes…

  - I know what it is.

  - Ok.

  - You have to bring it to my house. My uncle has this old VHS player in his attic. We can watch it on that.

  So that night I went over to Bryan’s house. His parents were out at some veteran policeman’s charity event or something. Bryan had this old ugly Daewoo VHS player sitting in the centre of the living room floor with cables leading behind the television set. He seized the tape from me and fed it into the cassette slot. An image of a young girl who’d been beat up pretty bad appeared.

  - You know what this is don’t you? – he asked, pausing the screen.

  - No…

  - It’s a message from the future.

  I kept my eyes on the image of the battered girl. He unpaused and after 5 minutes the tape cut out.

  - It’s the Great Isolation. I’ve heard stuff about it, I don’t know what to believe…

  - What kind of stuff have you heard about it?

  - Well, that it’s the next stage in our evolution, mass suicide. There’s an entire sub-culture devoted to its concept.

  - Uh, huh…

  - No really! Check it out!

  Bryan brought out a bag of literature. They looked more like cheap fanzines. I didn’t bother flipping through them, I got the gist. The Great Isolation was all part of some cult bullshit. I heard Bryan refer to it once before as Ultra-Realism, I tend to zone out whenever he went on about all that shit. The saviour of mankind will be suicide and its prophets are serial killers and film makers—apparently. I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now… but I realise now how seriously I should have taken it.

  We were reading this book in Philosophy class, a book called ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ by Albert Camus. It had a big effect on me at the time. I think the idea behind it is this—that suicide is the only true philosophical question a human being can ask herself. Life is absurd and therefore meaningless. Once we discover death, we’re always in conflict until the day we die, always battling reality against expectation and our own ideals. When we become consciously aware of the uphill struggle ahead that’s when suicide comes into the equation. Like Sisyphus in the book we are a species cut off from a purpose, condemned to this fate in an indifferent universe that usually has its own goals which, more often than not, run in opposition with our own. I’m with Camus—suicide only negates the problem; it doesn’t fix it. Let’s embrace the absurdity of life and our absurd punishment. And that’s coming from a girl who blew all her pocket money on black eye make-up and blood red hair dye until she was 21.

  I knew, somewhere between a murderer being hailed as God and the idea that every object was alive, had memory and opinions, that I had to distance myself from Bryan. We were heading off in completely different directions. I wasn’t too sad. That’s life, right? Whatever he wound up doing with his life, I wanted to make sure that I was somewhere on the opposite end of the spectrum…

  Pornography is the death of art

  Let’s not go out like pornographers

  WASHINGTON STATE NEWS, KBKW

  - Police were baffled to discover main murder suspect Randy Elsinore had died of a major stroke and had been dead for almost a decade. It has since been deduced that someone else must have hijacked his truck and gone on a rampage. The Elsinore family successfully sued a local newspaper who printed Mr Elsinore’s name in suspicion with the murders.

  Shane Swank – (Front-line Warrior of the Last True Hope)

  My name is Shane Swank. I am the artist. Life as the artist is a joke. My constipated soul yearns for something meaningful from a world of meaninglessness. I started life exactly the same way as you did—as a tablespoon of ejaculate traveling approximately 28 miles per hour, immediately slowing down to take five minutes to reach the cervix. Five minutes to have changed my mind, turn back and just be another secretion making a b-line to someone’s ass crack. Sometimes it seems like it would have been a better option. I share a birthday with Jude Holden, the famous scalp handler who partnered John Joel Glanton in the mid-19th century.

  That was in the back seat of an automobile parked next to a Midwestern cornfield in the fall of 1959. I like to imagine that at that very moment the television premiere of the Twilight Zone was flickering a blue halo around many of the nation’s television sets. But this is silly romanticism. As an artist I am prone to these bouts of silly romantic thought. I will never stop, it seems, to find meaning in the meaningless.

  1959, the year the space program sent a monkey into space, was the same year that I was gestating in aqueous hostile territory until the summer of 1960. I have no real memories of that time period and the very few I do have are based on the scant surviving black and white photographs that somehow escaped the trash fires my female parent had set. Judging from the surviving pictures, it was no great loss to the world of photography that those missing pieces may represent. A toddler with a massive head, so massive in fact that I fell down a lot due to the gravitational pull of the Earth on such a massive cranium. Perhaps I should have been fitted with a tiny rubber helmet to avoid injury.

  I remember drips and drabs of information, like how when I was 4 or 5, I would not play with toys that were of differing scales. It was as if the world of play was dictated by the same physical laws of "reality". I am not certain that has anything at all to do with anything... it simply is the way that I was as a child. I also remember bad things clearly. All too clearly... My world consisted of a two block radius in a very small Midwestern town. I don't remember leaving those two blocks, ever. It seems odd. If I were sitting in therapy, as I weekly do, I would tend to think that the whole idea of playing with toys of the same scale represented my child mind trying to put a certain sense of order to the make believe world.

  As a "grown-up" and what I term, a creative, I still seem to be trying to put a sense of order into my make believe world. As an adult though I have come to realize that this act of creation, be it painting, drawing, writing...whatever I have access to at any given moment, this is when I get to play God. This creative process seems to be wholly mine to build or destroy at a whim. Maybe this is why so many creatives are so thoroughly fucked up. Such arrogant and intolerable creatures they can be. They just cannot adjust to their own God role, the creator/destroyer of worlds.

  Some artists do not leave this mind-set beside the easel or keyboard when the creation is physically manifested. They try to carry this self-appointed "divinity" into the world of consensual reality where it has no place. A creation should stand alone and of its own merit. It becomes everyone's somehow as it occupies the same physical realm as everyone and everything else. It should not be a time to drop from the treetops beating one’s chest proclaiming "I Am God"! It makes for boring cocktail party talk and certainly has little to no place as polite dinner topic.

  But I digress. As a child I never really felt like I fit in, even before the teenage angst and alienation set in. I can't quantify that last statement really except to say that I felt different than the others, not better, not inferior, just different. Odd or freakish and quite often just an observer w
atching & trying to figure it all out. Then I discovered art. That perfect excuse for abhorrent behaviour. It felt (and feels now) like a coping mechanism. Yeah, like maybe I am too fucked up to do or be anything else except this "creative" person. There are worse things I suppose.

  Thinking back to that time period, the first year as a teenager, it all seems surreal now... that wanderlust. I knew where I was from (and I still have not forgotten) but I didn't know what was "out there". It started out by closing the mileage gap between the small towns where my friends lived by sticking my thumb out at the side of the road like I had seen in all of those late sixties/ early seventies drive in movies. My perception of the world that lay beyond the pale was shaped by those B-movies. The answers to my burning questions about life were in some great "further" that I had yet to travel. From those 5, 10, 12-mile thumb trips to see my pals came the courage to go a little further. From a rural nowhere to concerts in cities that were within a three-hour drive time. I should add though that drive-time and hitchhiking-time are two entirely different measurements of time. It didn't matter then, I had all of the time in the world... fuck man, I had an eternity. I always knew I could die tomorrow. I had nothing but desire to be a writer back then but I had the sense to know that I had nothing to say. I had not lived enough, not enough experiences, no story to tell. So there I was,13, a number that for the superstitious, brings the bad luck or misfortune. To others, those that look for symbols, the number 13 brings the test, the suffering and the death. It symbolizes the death to the matter or to oneself and the birth to the spirit: the passage on a higher level of existence. For me, it was perhaps the death of childhood. Then again, maybe it was childhood amplified, like a Peter Pan of the American highways. Long hair, strange shabby clothes and a battery-eating cassette deck were all the accoutrements that I needed. With no cell phones, GPS or a Google to get a map from, I would pick up road maps at the filling stations along the way and depend on the kindness of strangers to make my way as far as I could. Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennesee, Alabama, Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado... maybe Wyoming as well. All these places, on maps, looked like strange anatomical drawings, dissected and exposed veins. Red highways, blue rivers flowing North to South. Lakes that were large enough to look like oceans. Cars that looked like land boats... and me, a much, much younger me, standing at the side of the highways, wind pulling my hair in all directions as cars, vans and massive semi-trucks created vacuums and whorls of air. Dust, snow, rain and trash and the answers all caught up in small tornados as I stood in the eye of the storm waiting for that ride. I often had to make up destinations for the drivers because it was too frightening if I just said "nowhere" or "Further". All those drivers looking for an American Dream, a place to be or belong, a paycheck, a better life... a restless quest. R-E-S-T-L-E-S-S. Some thought they had the answer and that is why they drove and the others... the ones similar to myself, they were of the mind that the answers would be found along the way to the arbitrary destinations. To the great no place in particular. I remember some of those drivers well, indelibly tattooed inside of me, hard-wired and others are simply faded faceless phantoms lost to memory entirely.

  They all became stories, mostly unshared, but they were my stories. Mine and mine alone really. I held them inside where one’s history dwells never taking the time to write them down. Gypsy songs... the genesis of my human experience. Maybe I was too embarrassed to commit to paper that I found no tangible answers. Failure on the quest for the Grail. Returning "home" became harder and harder... I never was able to leave the leaving behind.

  Some experiences leave one so changed that there is never any going back, not figuratively, not metaphorically... not at all, never. Fitting in was even harder than before with every trip I took. There was always that one solution, to leave again. I did manage to "leave school". I am not certain that was the best idea and then again, I am not convinced it was the worst either. I had nothing except learning at my core and yet I felt too restless to take my lessons second- and third-hand from the stale pages of the books they offered. I had my own books, my own stories and the fearless ignorance of a child intent on killing the innocent young boy within to expose beneath that flesh a creative adult. A writer, a painter, an artist of some sort. It was as if I longed to never fit in. I was, in my own arrogance, to be judged by my own standard... an exception to the rule. There were drugs, certainly no shortage at all... ever. That was just the time. The world was just that way. It was a way to bond with others that didn't fit in. In the same way that I had once thought being creative was a blessing, I had come to believe that the drugs and bonds made were feeding something divine. A spark and then an inferno. Wasted youth... in more than a single sense of the word, wasted youth. I am not big on regret. I figure dying with as few as possible is part and parcel of "success". Success is one of those words that belongs with the word potential... words I would Love to purloin from the vocabulary of man and hide so deep up my ass they would never be found again. I am also not big on being proud of the stupid things, at least not in theory. Moving back to a more linear view of my life, late teens, misspent youth left few options. Seventeen and in trouble led to a stint in the military... it was the better option. It also meant that I would get to leave again... maybe for good this time. I was fine with that. I had made close friendships that I would miss at times but there was so much out there to do and know and if I had to make a compromise to do just that then so be it. I didn't have a dime and this was on someone else’s. A trip around the world.... There are certainly stories about that as well but not many that I can take the time to tell right now. Suffice to say, if you have an iota of who I am, it was not a good fit, the military and I. Without a doubt though, something galvanized within me as far as my future was concerned while I was enlisted. To be precise, I met another person in that time that was (and is) such an incredibly talented artist. He was centred as well, despite our youth, he was incredibly centred as a human being. Unfortunately, I did not take away that centeredness as well but I did come to understand that I was without choice as far as being creative was concerned. It was to be a while after I was discharged before I was able to even understand what that impact was and how this path had been set. While I was skipping school earlier, I would hitchhike to the closest university to spend countless hours in the library. I was in fact thought to be a student by the library staff due to the amount of time I spent there. The hours, days, weeks and months were spent consuming as much information as I could about Modern and contemporary art predominantly. I also read psychology texts, books on religion, periodicals and books pertinent to the civil unrest and social climate of a few years earlier. Abbie Hoffman, Malcom X, Eldrige Cleaver, the Weatherman, Panthers, Yippies, Vietnam, Nixon, Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis. It was an interesting time in history but in retrospect, quite failed in most aspects. Despite all of the information I had consumed about the counterculture (as it was referred to then), I in time developed a healthy sense of disenfranchisement and distance from the trappings of that subculture. I saw it packaged and sold.

  Otto Spengler, I believe, is the Dice-man. He rolls the die and assumes his role. Spengler is the real six-sided man. I believe he delivered the greatest performance known to man.

  I believe he lost who he really was in the process. His constant foray into other personalities caused him to develop a kind of dissociative identity disorder. Method acting is dangerous, it creates dissonance between actions and actual feelings. Swarthy suffered from these acute episodes of psychosis that are impossible to handle. Their god is nothing more than a mentally ill actor.

  The Ultra-Realists are much too focused on their cause. It has become preachy to a fault. It would be a shame to read an account of the rise of Ultra-Realism and think no one fought against it or that it was met with zero opposition. We won’t go quietly. The serial killer will never be an artist because art is beauty and, I’m sorry to say, there is no beauty in death. Without humanity art wo
uld not cease to exist but, without a captive audience, it would cease to have meaning or purpose…

  Always strive for meaning in the meaningless, it’s all we have to offer, but what a thing to offer…

  Dwight Priest –

  (Stereo-Heart/the Dark Prince and double agent of the Great True Hope)

  8’clock…

  *My job back then was to place explosive devices on barren planetoids that were deemed by the Galactic Confeds to have no value. My official title was military engineer, but I’d become known more widely as the Zonekiller.*

  Dwight Priest turned off the recording. He held a black cartridge in his right hand, steady between thumb and forefinger, and, with his left hand, carefully placed a white label over the side. It read – ‘Jeannie’.

  Jeannie was his girlfriend’s name—or at least she used to be to his girlfriend.

  9 o’clock…

  The solar flare streetlamps oozed an ominous sodium vapour. Light from outside splintered through the drapes and onto where Dwight was working. He sat cross-legged on the shag fixing his dad’s U-matic video collection. There were printed copies of IBM articles and books on quantum software and transhumanism strewn across the floor, interwoven with the reams of loose magnetic tape. He’d picked up where his dad left off, life had become a regimented system of backing-up, copying and restoring, archiving and digitalising…