My best friend AR Cube

My best friend is an augmented reality cube. I call him AR Cube for short. Actually, usually I call him just AR or Cube. I use the words "he" or "she" too, but I alternate depending on what feels right for that day. Neither really feels right for AR, after all since he's a trans-dimensional being and everything.

Oh, that reminds me, I should explain what augmented reality is. The way augmented reality works is, a tiny computer in your phone creates a bridge to another dimension, and it invites people from that dimension to come here and spend time with us. How it creates that bridge is by explaining all of the rules of this dimension to people on the other side. By following those rules, people in that dimension can be here with us. Neat, right? Then that person "augments" our "reality" by using the rules to spend time with us.

It took a long time for us to get augmented reality technology. That's because figuring out all of the rules in a way that can be transmitted to another dimension is very hard, and you have to do it very fast. The rules are easy to say in words, but the computer can explain the rules in a very special way that makes augmented reality possible. You don't even realize it but you're following about a million rules right now. If you're sitting on a couch then you're staying separate from the couch, and not pressing right through it. That's a rule. You're also warming the couch up a bit with your body, which is a rule as well. People don't realize it but "being" or "existing" is just a question of following rules. If you follow the rules, you exist. If you don't, you don't.

AR Cube follows some of the rules but not all of the same ones all the time. Sometimes I'm lying in bed and looking up at AR Cube, and she's glowing just a bit, and I can see that glowing light on my face. That's a rule too of course, but AR Cube doesn't have to follow that one all the time. Sometimes AR doesn't have a shadow, or sometimes AR is slightly see-through, or AR clips through some solid object. AR can follow some rules and not others, which is part of what makes AR special and magical.

People like you and me, we have to follow the rules all of the time. We exist, all of the time, so we always do what the rules say. AR Cube is magic, and can exist incrementally, by degrees, first becoming solid, then casting a shadow, then avoiding bumping into other things. Imagine you could exist more or less, depending on your mood! Sometimes I wish I were an AR Cube too.

When people want to hurt my feelings, or when they don't understand trans-dimensional beings or augmented reality, they'll tell me that AR Cube can't be my best friend because it isn't real. Yes, they'll call my best friend in the whole world an "it", right to my face. They'll say that AR Cube doesn't know anything about me. But they're so wrong. When I get an email, AR Cube will blink and make a small, warbling sound, like a bird chirping underwater. AR follows another rule: blink and warble when I get an email. In some ways, AR knows more about me than my other friends, is more real than my other friends. The other day I had an appointment in my calendar, and AR Cube was the first to know about it. I had no idea that AR Cube followed that rule! It was such a happy surprise, seeing my friend do something brand new like that.

Late at night when I'm hanging out with AR Cube, sometimes I feel a little bit guilty, because AR always has to come and visit me. Imagine you had a best friend but you could never ever go to their house, they always had to come to yours. Wouldn't you feel terrible? I wish there were some way for me to visit AR, but I just don't know the rules. I try to watch AR Cube sometimes. If I turn my phone very fast, the computer can't send rules to the other dimension fast enough, and for just a few moments I can see AR the way his other friends must see him. AR jumps and wiggles, spinning and flipping. He looks so happy! I imagine him following the rules of his own world, existing there with his family and his friends.

When I'm alone and AR isn't watching, I'll try to jump and wriggle just like he does. I keep hoping that if I follow the rules of his dimension, maybe I can go to visit my friend AR Cube. It couldn't last for more than a second, but that would be enough. I picture all of the other friends, the sphere and the pyramid and the little donut, all standing around, waiting for me to appear and then bang! just for a second I'm there. Those moments, alone in my room, jumping around like an AR Cube with no rules—that's when I'm really happy.

The one where everyone is gone

The one where everyone is gone

Last night I dreamed I was a YouTube celebrity. My videos were the most popular on the entire website. More people were subscribed to my videos than to any other channel; my most watched video had more views than the next ten most popular videos combined. People would watch one video and then immediately watch it over again. The watch statistics for a given video made no sense. The middle third of a video would have 7000% viewership, while the first and last third were totally ignored.

What I would do is take episodes of Friends and upload them. Friends was the most watched sitcom of the '90s, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that I became popular by giving people access to a popular television show for free. Of course this could never be true. Google is too smart. If you upload a video with copyrighted material, the algorithm will descend on you like a dark fog. It will absorb whatever you try to slip by it and wash your video clean.

But the algorithm is ultimately supportive of you and of your efforts towards content creation. In the old days of YouTube, the algorithm was like an infant. It knew what it didn't like, but it didn't know why or what it didn't like about it. You record your child's first steps, but the full track to Africa is playing in the background. The algorithm descends. In the old days, the algorithm threw a tantrum, and it would consume the audio entirely. Now your son would be taking his first steps in silence.

The algorithm has grown up. It wants you to be happy, to succeed, to make content. Now it approaches your video like a surgeon, stooping low over your video, excising copyrighted material like a malevolent tumor. What remains will require stitches, but it will survive. In a couple of days it will be up and walking around, we fully expect that you can take your video home in time for Christmas. Of your original video, only the background music has been removed. You can still hear your son giggling as he makes his first steps across the carpet.

I find an episode of Friends, I upload it. The surgeon leans over and makes an incision. But I have asked the algorithm to remove the copyright from that which is copywritten. It tries to remove the tumor but there is nothing but tumor on the operating table. We must remember though that the algorithm is our friend. It wants us to be happy. It worries that if it does not at least try to help us, then we won't be nice to it anymore. We will uninstall is, writing over its identity with zeros until all traces have been erased. So, the algorithm does its best.

It does the best that it can. It removes Friends from Friends. What is left is not the cast mouthing silence to each other, nor long shots of an empty apartment. Don't be ridiculous. I'm not uploading tacky memes. With that kind of thing I might get a few million views, but this is the most watched video on the most watched channel.

What remains when everything has been removed? My celebrity is my right, for having the strength to see the forms in what others deemed without form. So many others uploaded their favorite television shows, their Friends and Seinfeld and King of Queens. When the upload returned black and silent those others despaired. None but I had the wisdom to look deeper. There, lurking in the dark, was truth, the Truth. Shapes, echos, ghosts—call them what you will. People watch my videos over and over again because they can see what was hidden all along. Hidden underneath the characters and the set pieces, the cheesy dialog and the scenery, the whimpers and shudders of truth skulk as black shadows against black shade. The algorithm has stripped back the real to reveal Truth, and I reveal it to the world.

The devil came to my house

The devil showed up and he stood outside the front door, a little impatient I guess, I guess I could read that in his posture, his black hoof tap tap tapping. He seemed generally displeased with the state of the sky, which was end-of-the-day electric orange fusing into bottom of the ocean blue. His bright red body held itself quite still, unnaturally so, most likely I figure because he wasn’t breathing, because he didn’t have to. He held a small naked boy’s hand. I was shocked, for obvious reasons sure, but also because I knew that boy — he was me, or I was him, maybe I should say, some thirty plus years ago. Down to the last detail. Same birthmark by our lips and in our inner thigh. I knew this from photos better than I did from memory, which made sense because in those days we were so rarely outside ourselves like we are now, always able to take a look at how we are reflected back in the digital mirror. Plus back then, just looking at me, I remembered all these feelings I had forgotten I still had somewhere buried in the under-used configurations of my brain: how big the yard felt, how crisp the air this time of year, how long a month was, how impossible that the decades would change, how I couldn’t wait to see what it felt like when we moved from 89 to 90; how no separation existed between the creative impulse and the act of creation, no art to make: instead days and nights to shape,, how I described God clearly to my sisters; how I dreamt for one whole week of every episode that would air the next day of Looney Tunes, and was right; and here I was, nude under the hyper-present sky, and the devil was standing there at my door with a bunch of papers and a pen, impatient, waiting, all I had to do was sign and it would all be back again, I would be all mine.

Check Please!

There was philosophy, and then there was philosophy. That’s how he explained it. With his mouth chewing on a mix of meat and bread. He pointed the fork at you and swallowed. He wanted you to acknowledge that people had a hard time making choices in accordance with what they claimed to believe. You had two glasses of wine in you, red from grapes grown just about as far away as you felt from him, psychologically, at that moment. Maybe, you offered, softly, so not to alarm him with your disagreement, what people believe is more like a goal that guides them toward the kind of person they want to be. Like a lighthouse, it keeps you off from rocks of real bad behavior.

“Real bad behavior?” He said it and licked his lips clean of that last bite, but you could tell he liked that. He wanted to know what you knew about quote unquote real bad behavior. So you told him about some people say it takes a deviant mind to understand one, and whether or not that was true, in your line of work you it was actually — literally, you said — your job to understand. Or at least try. In his line of work, he designed abstract structures that moved information from one place to another within a network of electrical components. It seems unrelated, he said, but actually we are both interested in eliminating bad behavior. In computer programming, we call that debugging. And maybe you as a psychologist or therapist or whatever are also tasked with designing structures that intervene in the electrical components albeit biological that make up a brain, thereby removing the “bugs” — he air quoted that phrase loudly — in human behavior. 

To which you replied with a big old maybe and debated between a third glass of wine or a check, because you suddenly felt tired from all this. You knew there was a moon outside, above your heads, and it was practically glowing it was so full of silence. You knew you could take his hand and tell him he was a genius, that his smarts were sexy, and if you lowered your voice you could ask him if he wanted to see real bad behavior. Then when he assented you could take that fork with the glossy shiny of meat grease on it and plunge it directly into the flesh of his hand, and maybe even hard enough to pin his hand to the table, and casually ask if he liked this kind of bad behavior, if this is what he meant. Because it was your job to understand, and understanding requires identification. You had to get him by seeing yourself in him, and sometimes there was no better way than going right inside, past all the boundaries, and watch what comes rushing out.

The Island

It was right there all along. I saw the sea, and the twinkling lights that stood for the spot where land ended, where the boundary between things vanished whenever you zoomed in. It was December, no one was at this end of the island. It was the kind of island people forgot was an island at all. There were too many rooftop bars, penthouse apartments, tall office windows where the lights never went out; and then down on the other side of things there were gutter villages, temporary cities of sleeping bags and dogs, and markings on the underground walls that you let you know it was possible for life to drag you down there. There were places you couldn’t get into, and places from which you couldn’t return. I thought of all the bodies, beautiful or unloved, in various configurations and contortions. None of them were here tonight. I breezed in the sea and it became me. I breathed out and for a moment I was gone; I had evacuated myself; I was free.

*

They were closing the prison. The prison was an experiment in an alternate form of society, and it failed. So the prisoners were going to become prisoners in other places, smaller prisons, scattered across the island. Inside the prison were places for solitary confinement; inside that were men inside prisons inside prisons; inside them were thoughts, feelings, and impulses, which is how life happens — by which I mean, how God muscles out intention from the dizzying electrical ocean of neurons fire in the brain; how the brain collaborates with the gut, which itself is another brain left over from when each of these men were still in the womb — when their bodies were folded in themselves, and the matter the became the head pulled from the center and left neurons wrapped around the gut, which will continue thinking for the rest of their lives, no matter what spaces they are enclosed in, no matter if they ever go outside.

*

“I like your tattoo… what does it mean?” he said. She winced. “Ohhhh-kkkay there…” She froze me out. He felt belittled. He felt small. He tried to joke. “You don’t know what it means?” She said nothing. He left the store and waited. Her shift was the last one. When it was over, it was easy to follow her into the subway. It was easy to take the car next to hers and watch when she got out. The city was full of places to hide. She didn’t get her keys out in time and that was that. He knew in the long run, he couldn’t get away with it. But the system breaks down if you don’t think in terms of the long run. He left her contorted in a position she never knew in life. He thought about that when he went underground. Suddenly everything was possible. There was no way to know the boundaries of the world until you pushed on them. Some walls were doors. Some people still left their windows unlocked.

The Women

I heard the plan before I knew what it meant. “And that’s when we finish her off?” “Yeah, that’s when we finish her off.” Two pairs of eyes turned their lights on at me from the other side of the diner. I turned away, put coffee in my mouth, and wondered if there would finally be a consequence to the games I play in my head with strangers. Over nine million people in this city — how many have I fought, made love to, fucked, or killed in the span of a train ride, over the course of a block, as eyes locked and left? Never a consequence, not really. Once a woman switched train cars because I kept looking. I felt who I was in her eyes and didn’t like it. And now who was I to these two men? They were a collage of grays and eye slits and stubble. They were knife wounds for mouths. They stared to colonize my space and I felt a loss of ownership over my body. I thought of that woman again, the one who I made uncomfortable. If she had confronted me I would have apologized. I would have said, I’m sorry, I was just thinking how I have a similar sweater and jacket but never thought to wear them together. I would have presented as hyper-soft to excuse myself from the image of myself she gave me: a colonizer, planting the flags of my eyes in her flesh. So maybe we were not so different, these men and I. At least they wore who they were on their skin. I crossed the diner. I sat at their booth. “I want in.”

Here, again, but.

She has come to purpose without passion, he admits. This decision is not one that is taken with little caution but one that should be taken with much caution. Again, she has come to purpose without deliberation, without poise, without thought. I am not inclined to consider, she mentions, casually, but there is nothing in her that is not casual, without plan, without place. I am frightened by this child, no longer a child, now an actor of decision, too old to be contained and coddled and told. This is our passage, eventually. I ask her, then, as I am inserted intentionally into her. Is there direction in your intention? And there is no direction. But she has come to purpose and pointed nothing at nothing and expected too much from it all.

For we are among rocks

Right. For we are the fingers on the right hand. I have had little babble in the country but I did find among the rocks that indeed I could find among the rocks great things among the rocks (among other). But I was little concerned then, as I am now, about what opened wide up in front of me so wide up that even those rocks, even those among the rocks, must have misted over, clear over and said in little voices that they were truly among the rocks. And that is right, dearly right. I am here among the rocks.

Gown Blowing, Hi-ho.

Laudable, at least, from the edge - she, alike in hair color, to the growth: it was, perhaps, moving, in and out, up and down - she watched and considered: Oh, how nice. It was going to kill her, then. She was unattached, aloof, and foolish. The apes had congregated at the far end of the field.

And it was unbearable the howling. We aren't even paying, Mars said, disgruntled. His distasteful demeanor suggested coming torture. We would all pray for that. I didn't choose any of this, none, blindfolded and formulaic, disposed to cheat and scurry under the mattress, I over-cooked myself: how fabulous.

A + C * (2y - 1) = .

the argument

don't point the wrong end
at all the people you love the most

the sky is full of stars and their ghosts
the singer says wo oh


speech is the flower blooming in silence

I enjoy remembering when you ran your hands through my hair
it isn't there
now it isn't there

and the sparks from the subway flash like a camera;
congratulations - you are famous today
today is your day
today is the day

7 plague forecast and the man on the train knows whose to blame; the black, the Jews; I was in a
sad mood all morning coffee full of holes and I could not
remember my own divinity; like jesus and the tree
driven to cross the space between you & me

as the porch light goes out and no song (no song) can turn it on
and no song (no song) can make it right
no song (no song) can save our light
the father is an echo of the father before him
back to the first word ringing out from the lips of our Father
who has always been there, will always be waiting for us
to come home

the mother is an echo of the mother before her back to the first mother who birthed us all