multiverse

Audiovision: Buster the MAGie

OK: Roland the Roadie, a man whose soul had been pressure-washed by the sonic assault of a hundred death metal concerts, found himself back in the beige stillness of Kansas. Because, of course. For months, his universe had been a rolling thunder-dome of Marshall stacks, sweat-soaked leather, and the high-pitched whine of a tour bus generator. But now, in the quiet, his brain kept replaying the scene from Bethel, New York. Bethel! A name that was supposed to conjure images of peace and love and naked people in the mud. Instead, it conjured for him a single, vibrating image: one deeply patchouli-soaked hippie, a walking potpourri of BO and self-righteousness, lecturing him on vibrational energies.

The whole psychic episode had left Roland feeling untethered. He decided, in a moment of profound spiritual desperation, to reconnect with the simple carpenter from Nazareth he’d learned about in Sunday School. A tune-up for the soul. The first step, apparently, was having a beer in Kanorado with an old classmate, Buster was his name, but might have been Biff or Buddy or something equally percussive.

Buster was now full-on MAGies. That’s what he called it… Make America Great In Every State! He said it with the kind of thermonuclear conviction usually reserved for multi-level marketing pitches. He was a walking, talking embodiment of the movement… a cyclone of star-spangled certainty in a Cabela’s cap. Roland, who hadn’t been inside a church since Y2K, admired the dedication. He truly did. But a few things didn’t quite add up.

“So, help me out here,” Roland began, watching the condensation snake down his bottle of suds. “Jesus was all about welcoming the stranger, the whole ‘Good Samaritan’ bit. Now, how does that square with, you know, the screaming on TV about immigrants being an invading army of… well, Bad Hombres?”

Buster took a mighty pull from his beer, his eyes gleaming with the reflected light of a flatscreen broadcasting the gospel of NewsMax. “Roly, Roly,” he said, shaking his head with a sad, paternal chuckle. “It’s an invasion. The enemy within! You gotta protect your house before you can invite people over. It’s just common sense!” Roland wondered if the biblical Good Samaritan had checked for Roman citizenship papers first.

On they went. Roland brought up humility. The washing of the feet. The first being last and the last being first. A beautiful, revolutionary kind of logic.

Buster countered with a sermon on the Prosperity Gospel. Yessir! It was a whole new, New Testament, one seemingly ghostwritten by a real estate developer from Queens. Buster spoke of the President, a man so obviously blessed that his success… the towers, the gold, the winning… was a sign of divine favor.

“It’s a blessing!” Buster roared, a bit too loudly for a Tuesday. “You model the behavior of the blessed to get blessed yourself (Because God, you see, is a big fan of winners)! Damn the torpedoes!” He finished with a belly laugh that shook the barstool.

The conversation, naturally, turned to money. Out on the prairie, a lone steer bellowed for its evening feed, a primal scream from the feedlot heartland. “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,” Roland quoted, “than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Buster’s face soured. “That’s communist talk, Roly. Wealth redistribution. That’s theft. And there’s a commandment about that one, an old one. A good one.”

And so on.

Roland pivoted to peace. “Love your enemies,” he murmured. “Be peacemakers.”

“You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet,” Buster said with a shrug, finishing his beer. “It’s a simple recipe.” Roland felt a sudden, powerful urge to test the idea on Buster’s nose, but he resisted. He had, after all, sworn off violence after the “damn hippie” pepper-spray incident.

The final frontier was Truth itself. Roland lamented a world gone funhouse-mirror mad, an upside-down where experts were fools and feelings were “alternative facts“. Buster then launched into a magnificent, thirty-minute jazz solo of pure, uncut conspiracy, a verbal firehose of YouTube links and podcast prophets about how the only way to find truth was to “do your own research.” Roland performed a quiet face-palm, a gesture of complete and utter exasperation.

“Jesus challenged worldly power,” Roland said, one last gasp. “He taught that leadership was about service, not control.”

Buster saw his opening. “Exactly! He was against the Deep State, just like us!”

Roland drained his beer. It was over. He and Buster were standing on opposite sides of a canyon, shouting into the void. They lived in two different sectors of the multiverse, occupying the same space. An irreconcilable parallax view. He realized there was no argument to be won here, only a friendship to be cautiously maintained across an ideological event horizon.

He clapped Buster on the shoulder, managed one last drop from his beer, and walked out into the vast, starry Kansas night. Roland the Roadie resolved then and there to just keep living by the simple, baffling example of the Nazarene, hoping his friend might one day meet him somewhere on the spiral of spiritual originalism.

Onward through the fog…

Audiovision: Korisne Budale!

The rusty gears of JR Murgatroyd’s consciousness ground to a halt, then lurched violently into motion. He wasn’t in Rothpal Moneybags’ tricked out, self-driving cybertruck anymore. Or, rather, he was, but also… not. The plush upholstery, once a tasteful (if conspicuously rich) Corinthian leather, now writhed with crows, each pecking at tiny, glittering golden tickets. The air, thick with the slightly sweet, “fruity” smell of leaking electrolyte chemicals and trauma, now carried a distinct whiff of… straw?

“Brain,” JR croaked, his voice a dry rasp. “Need… brain.”

He looked down. His blue power suit, once the envy of every political climber in Ohio, was now a patchwork of burlap and twine. He flapped a straw-stuffed arm. “Holy crap,” he muttered, “am i a… a scarecrow?”

A chorus of cawing erupted from the upholstery. The crows, their eyes gleaming with malicious amusement, seemed to be chanting, “Korisne Budale! Korisne Budale!”

“I resent that,” JR declared, though his voice lacked its usual conviction. “I’m a man of principles! Flexible principles, perhaps, but principles nonetheless!”

He remembered Rothpal Moneybags, the man with a glare that could curdle milk and the promises that were, upon closer inspection, suspiciously vague. “Think of the influence, JR! The access! The… the gravy!” Rothpal smarmed, his eyes glittering like a raven’s hoard. JR, ever the pragmatist, had thought, “Gravy is good. Especially when one has spent one’s formative years subsisting on… well, not gravy.”

His journey to this… scarecrow state, now a little clearer, seemed to contain the following: a wrong turn on a one-way, a frantic attempt to override the autopilot, a sudden, snap of the airbags, the sound of sirens, and then… this.

“Ah, the brain,” a tinny voice echoed. A figure, clad in gleaming tin, clanked into view. “You’re looking for one, are you? A brain? In this sector of… the multiverse?”

“Indeed,” JR said, trying to maintain a semblance of dignity while stuffed with straw. “I seem to have misplaced mine.”

The tin cyborg wannabe chuckled, a sound like nails on a chalkboard. “Misplaced? Or traded for… political advancement? Moneybags has a talent for such transactions.”

“He said it was a ‘strategic partnership’!” JR protested. “He said i was ‘instrumental’!”

“Instrumental in what? Filling his pockets while he sells fascist exceptionalism to the gullible?” The heartless Tin Man retorted. “Look around you, JR. You’re in a dimension where ‘Korisne Budale’ (useful idiot) is a viable career path.”

A yellow brick road, paved with golden tickets and broken promises, stretched into the distance. A lion, sporting a meticulously quaffed combover, cowered behind a pile of Kremlin-backed IOUs. And a witch, wearing designer yoga pants and holding a clipboard, was barking inane missives into a megaphone. “They’re grooming children! Federal workers don’t deserve a paycheck! The Gazpacho Police will throw you in the goulash!”

“This is… distressing,” JR admitted, his straw-stuffed head drooping. “I thought i was climbing. I thought i was… succeeding.”

“Succeeding at what?” The Tin Man asked. “Being a puppet? A pawn? A scarecrow with delusions of grandeur?”

“But the gravy!” JR wailed. “The gravy!”

The crows in the upholstery erupted in a fresh wave of cawing, their voices a cruel, mocking chorus. “Gravy! Gravy! Korisne Budale!”

JR, the man who once believed he could outsmart destiny, now knew the bitter truth. He wasn’t a master of his fate. He was a scarecrow, desperately seeking a brain he’d traded for a fleeting taste of gravy, in a multiverse where “win at all costs” usually meant losing everything, including your dignity. And, maybe, your actual brain.

To be continued… Rohlfie

Audiovision: Sympathy for the Tin Man

How did they put it in the Chocolate Factory? Oh, yea, “Blaming the kid is a lie and a shame. You know exactly who’s to blame!” Anyway, the subject of our story was fairly used to getting his way as a lad. His silver spoon had never known the indignity of a mere polishing cloth. And now, he’s conceived a notion so audacious, so utterly of the moment, that even his boss, a man whose portfolio resembles a rogue’s gallery of ethically dubious ventures, blanched. Our hero, you see, desired to transcend the limitations of mere flesh. He yearned to become a cyborg – a gleaming amalgam of man and machine, jacked directly into the internet’s pulsating cloud, a veritable god amongst mortals.

His father, a man whose fortune stemmed from ethically questionable resource mining, turbo-charged the lad’s personality with the weary resignation of a parent who’d long ago given up on shaping a soul. And so, dropped the youth amongst the lords of flies, forcing our hero to find his way in a world of bullies. Then later, all grown up, after amassing a vast fortune, assembled a team of “bio-enhancement specialists” (read: guys who’d watched too many sci-fi movies), and after a series of excruciatingly painful and undoubtedly illegal procedures, he was…transformed.

Now, if you believe in the multiverse, you know it’s possible our hero awoke not in the world where a climate-controlled sensory deprivation tank eased him back into the waking state of normal existence, but in a place that looks like it was decorated by a deranged picnic enthusiast. Giant lollipops sprouting from the ground, the sky an unsettling shade of cerulean, and the inhabitants… well, not exactly the golf-club socialites to which our hero was accustomed. One fellow, rather short and stout, wore a hat that appeared to be trying to mate with his head.

And in this strange absurd dreamlike world, it slowly dawned on our hero that his transformation hadn’t quite gone as planned. He was, for lack of a better explanation, more machine than man. And then, insult to injury, he discovered, he was without a heart. Apparently, the “bio-enhancement specialists” had skimmed over that particular organ in their rush to install the Wi-Fi card.

Anyway, a road paved with what appeared to be gold bricks stretched before him. “Well,” he thought, with the optimism of a man whose only real problem had ever been deciding between the cocaine or ketamine, “at least there’s a road. And it’s shiny.” So he set off, determined to find his heart, perhaps encountering some ready guides along the way.

Alas, fate, that fickle mistress, had one last jest to play. A gentle rain began to fall. Our hero, whose exterior was apparently more susceptible to the elements than a cheap garden gnome, began to…rust. He froze, mid-stride, a gleaming monument to misplaced ambition and the perils of cut-rate cyborg surgery. His last thought, before the CPU seized entirely, was a profound regret that he hadn’t opted for the platinum plating. At least that wouldn’t have rusted.

To be continued… Rohlfie

Below the Earth – Above the Sun: Faith

There’s a certain breed of American, bless their star-spangled hearts, convinced they hold the exclusive lease on the Almighty’s ear canal. Like a toddler throwing a tantrum in a supermarket checkout, they believe their brand of piety is the only gateway to a decent life or the ticket to a glorious afterlife. To them, faith is less a comfort and more a cudgel to whack everyone else into submission.

Now, listen up, Bible thumpers and incense-waving gurus of every persuasion. If blind faith brings you existential relief, knock yourselves out. But the second you try shoving your dogma down our throats louder than a carnival barker with a megaphone, well, there’s gonna be trouble. This isn’t some backwater church social, loopers. This is the United States of freaking Everything, a kaleidoscope of cultures clashing in a glorious, messy mosh pit of individuality.

We built this nation with the blood, sweat, and tears of those fleeing religious persecution, remember? We’re a nation conceived in liberty, not some divinely ordained daycare center. This whole “one size fits all” piety might fly in some homogenous, beige part of the multiverse, but here in this cosmic bubble, in this vibrant, cacophonous land of the free and the home of the brave, it sticks out like a polka-dotted clown suit at a funeral.

Think about it. You got loopers praying to eight-armed deities in India, chanting to ancestors in China, and down here in the good ol’ US of A, we have a smorgasbord of salvation schemes, from the hallelujah hollering Baptists to the crystal-clutching New Agers. It’s beautiful, in a completely batty way, like a fireworks display gone rogue, illuminating the sky with a thousand different colors.

Sure, some might say this multiplicity makes for a messy democracy. Like herding cats on roller skates, right? But here’s the thing, loopers: forcing everyone into the same drab uniform of belief is a recipe for disaster. Look at history, it’s littered with the wreckage of holy wars and inquisitions, all fueled by the delusion that one brand of faith is the One True Path. Bunk! It’s a celestial cul-de-sac, leading nowhere but to resentment and bloodshed.

The beauty of America is the glorious, chaotic cacophony, remember? We tolerate, we debate, we argue like drunken sailors on shore leave, but somehow, someway, this messy gumbo keeps bubblin’ along. It’s not perfect, hell no, but it’s a damn sight better than some theocratic theme park where everyone wears the same itchy robes and sings the same hymns.

So, to those monoculture missionaries, those who dream of a beige, homogenous America where everyone worships at the same altar, i say this: be careful what you wish for. Because the line for religious dominance is a lot longer than you think, and it winds all the way back to the days of inquisitions and witch trials. In the meantime, the rest of us will be here, celebrating the glorious mess that is the USofA, a multicolored mosh pit with a divine soundtrack blaring from a thousand different speakers. Now, who wants to crowd surf?

Onward through the fog… R.H.

Sympathy for the Rootless Vagabond

So, i’m hurtling through this cosmic cul-de-sac, a nomad on a double-nickel pilgrimage with a song on my lips and a brace of French Roast in my belly. All i ask, really, is a slice of peace, a chance to bask in the expanse of the vast cosmos without getting bogged down by the inertia of cultural bigotries. A decent night’s sleep and a well-stocked purse wouldn’t hurt either. You know, the usual human wishlist.

Love? Companionship? Not now! There’s a big difference between loneliness and solitude. At this stage of life, i cherish the latter. All i require is sustenance and the endless ribbon of asphalt disappearing into the distance. A knight-errant of the asphalt jungle, i roam the land, a double-nickel Don Quixote in a gypsy wagon christened Rosinante.

The world rushes by in a blur of faces and forgotten towns, some offering a fleeting thumbs-up, others muttering curses under their breath. But i care not for their fleeting judgments. I am a man without a home, adrift in a sea of asphalt, with all the time in the world to get nowhere. After all, if sticking to a double-nickel speed limit saves on dino-fuel (bless their scaly, prehistoric hides), then 55 it shall be (apologies to the Red Rocker).

LISTEN: Today, nature called amidst the springtime symphony of the prairie. With the road blissfully empty in both directions, i pulled over to answer nature’s insistent ache. And what a sight greeted me! A verdant valley unfolded like a freshly-minted postcard, the grass bursting with color after a life-giving rain. A lone, gnarled branch stood sentinel at the meadow’s edge, its weathered form a stark contrast to the vibrant flora around it, the rust on its barbed wire like a sprinkle of celestial pepper. And right there, in that moment, my heart overflowed with a love for this ramshackle, vagabond existence. Yes, sir, this rootless existence fills me with a love so profound it borders on the ecstatic. At least for now. Because let’s face it, there’s a whole damn nation out there waiting to be explored, and a million miles to tick off before i can even consider the possibility of… well, who am i kidding? There is no rest for the wicked, not on this side of the wormhole. So fire up the engine, baby! This road trip through the fibrillating heart of a divided nation continues!

And so… as some made-for-TV mop-tops once sang…

“Hey Hey, we’re the Monkeys…
You never know where we’ll be found…
So you better get ready…
Cos we’re comin’ to your town.”

Onward through the fog… R.H.

Coolest Place

Misfit in the country… rebel in a deep red sea… sometimes i wonder where we get the outrage energy. Ride the bucking trends… we’re all neighbors and friends… and revel in the human company.

And the coolest place in the world is all i see. Bill Gates and Lady Ga Got nothing on me. I don’t need to work in Hollywood or Nashville Tennessee… i don’t need no Botox… corn row plugs or plastic surgery. I got everything i need and it’s right in front of me.

The coolest place in the world is all i see.

Misfit on the metro… it moves too fast for me… and hard to find kindness in a cold gray concrete sea. But i can play this guitar… and boost this energy… the city on the hill’s luminosity.

And the coolest place in the world will follow me… it’s my urban cowboy philosophy. I don’t mind tilting windmills… strange possibilities… i don’t need proud illusions to boost my self esteem… everything’s in play… what will be will surely be.

The coolest place in the world will follow me.

Misfit in the church… UP the academy. Miracles and myths… inexplicabilities. I don’t need consistent… existential certainties… but every day’s a GIFT… can’t you see?

And the coolest place in the world is where i’ll be. LOVE will win the day… just wait and see. I don’t fear creation… or the void of infinity… i don’t need to cling to memes or things… it’s ALL illusory. I AM the multiverse… the multiverse is me.

The coolest place in the world is all i see…
The coolest place in the world will follow me…
The coolest place in the world is where i’ll be.

Loopcircus