David Rothko’s Remake of the Bible
You might remember how within hours of David Rothko’s Remake of the Bible being released, everyone was asking each other who the lover he had named “Melissa” might be, this openly acknowledged pseudonym weaving her way through the rise and fall of each chapter. All the sensitive young men (as well as a good number of shit-headed ones and more than a few lesbians) were ready to fall in love with her, which felt like an implausible but statistically mentionable possibility for those in social circles adjacent enough for her to have been cast into, since of course Rothko had had to promptly shed her the way a red carpet dress must be discarded once the commoners have glimpsed it.
You’ll want to be able to Dr. Frankenstein a few of the more prominent takes on this matter together into something resembling an original one, so as to perpetuate the smokescreen the whole affair serves as, but should otherwise attempt to remain fully unconcerned with the gossip.
Your attention will need to be focused on posture. Whether on the bus, in the cafe, among socialites, in the bedroom, you must be able to optimally frame* the book’s cover, its wash of blue, green, orange (each in several shades) and most of all the incredibly chic reflective pink lettering.
*“Optimally frame” here doesn’t mean to simply draw attention to the book (it does that well enough on its own), but to direct this guaranteed attention in such a way that people notice how you’re reading it. The way the lettering brilliantly ricochets light may also be used for hypnosis or as a weapon, if one finds the right dark web tutorials.
Once you’ve fully mastered the work’s distractive properties, you can begin to drift through those subtle passages where Rothko threads associations between the crush of objects we all find ourselves surrounded with, building not quite a hierarchy but something not particularly distant from one either, undoing 1) Jesus’s dissolving of Hebrew law into an existential demand to love and 2) Peter’s subsequent ecstatic vision where he reinterprets this dissolving as invitation to consume every part of the world at leisure.
My Narrative-Oriented Brain
My narrative-oriented brain is no good. The seller won’t respond to my requests for new product. It endlessly spins my surroundings into cascading networks of characters, events, plot pacings, potential climaxes. It never deigns to etch out as much as half a sentence. How can this not count as misregulation when it leaves me with such a severe heart, such a nervous nervous system, such a terribly upset stomach?
Alcohol With [redacted]
It’s really not like the memory loss you get from a regular near-blackout at all. That’s impressionistic, made of blurry edged flashes where the color palette is the first thing you notice. It almost always leads to blissful idiocy, which ideally remains more internal than external, and is great for being in a vehicle, but please, do heed the law and let someone else drive, as much as you may want to be alone (in service of the aforementioned internal focus or otherwise).
The mix in question, on the other hand, leaves memories with almost clinically clipped edges when you pull them up. Colors aren’t much of a focus, although they can still be beautiful (colors can always be beautiful) – we recommend welcoming the eye’s rare relief from it’s burden of primacy.
This detachment applies to all of the senses in separate ways, and you’ll be driven back into your mind a bit (you might have connotations of hiding or isolation with this turn of phrase, but in this case it means something closer to moving towards more of a third person video game perspective from a first person one). The term “social lubricant” really doesn’t do justice to the cool control of language you’ll be given (at least not any more than it does to a blackout’s indiscriminate releasing of your first layer of repressed ideas) – you won’t be talking smooth as much as Apple Store silver-sleek, with your inner monologue morphed from its ordinary, panicked grasps at externalized language into a surgical tool optimizing it in real time, acute awareness of the people you’re surrounded by and aren’t you lucky to see them all!
Brilliant cyborg orator!
Novelty tongue twists the air into clever quips!
Once the episode has been diced into barcode slits alternating memory and blank, it’s unlikely that the conversation will remain very legible, but you’ll at least be entirely confident that you meaninglessly dominated it.
(With fatality running through this text, we dutifully warn you not to mix the substances without a prior awareness of how each one affects you individually. Avoid the flippant indulgence you might have with more conventional combinations I.E. alcohol and cannabis.
There are of course dangers to mixing excessively, but even using your average dose of each substance would be a waste here, and would only increase the quantity of obscuration without affecting its quality, which will then be harder to appreciate, so a sparing dose of both alcohol and pill is advised. Those only hoping to be freed from consciousness should restrict themselves to alcohol on its own. Some hope the pill will make the next morning easier by letting them drink less, but due to its dehydrating effects, the hangover will actually be more manageable if you avoid it.)
In the end, music maybe be the most fascinating part of the experience. If possible, let your body become engaged in some way, whether it’s maneuvering a guitar as distortion is throttled from an amplifier, commanding your hands, elbows, hips to sway a little more creatively than usual, or just going on a walk fast enough to make it a focused activity. Without this physical devotion to the sound you’ll probably get caught up in (internal or external) speech again. If approached correctly, the sound won’t be any slower, but it will feel like it’s longer, or rather than you can hear across more of its temporal distance.
This is only the second best illusion of the experience, even if it’s easily the more readily apparent one.
Once you really hone in, you’ll notice something going on with the frequencies, not just a simple EQ shift but subtle semantic reconfigurings, any one of them seeming first like a corridor you could get lost in and, later, like an incisor. The real trick here is that no matter where you position yourself you’ll feel equidistant from those jaws, and immensely so – even when you think you’re dashing for them, you’ll never be reduced to bits of skin in those teeth, although you may want to be, even displacing your desire to convince yourself that the jaws are beckoning you, that you’re object rather than subject, but there’s no intention there. After a few sessions this fantasized massacre via siren song appeals more than the numb photographic sequence that the rest of the trip has become. We must legally advise you to cease your exploration once you reach this point.
The Song or Show About How Entertainment is Bad
It’ll take you to new heights of disavowal, shocking you with how obviously it exceeds your previous pinnacle (the whole phase before you had questioned your upbringing by pro-life warmongers).
That was mere fervor, but this is giddy oblivion!
You thought all that screen time had been meaningless, but it turns out all the while you’ve been choking down calories to remain one of humanity’s wasteful endpoints – and that’s very, very bad!
Your life changed forever if you ever manage to follow through!
You weren’t even critical and now you’ll keep getting away with it and won’t someone punish you instead of letting you be so naughty? You’ll wonder why the content creator smart enough to (rather Orpheusly) enter the system and subsequently earworm into your zombie flesh can’t figure out where to find you and just flay flay FLAY your fucking flesh off until you’re dead!
(If you’re lucky they’ll do it just when your life was about to end anyway so that you can pump their product as much as you immediately resolved to in the first moment it entered your mind.)
Four out of five stars due to how jarring the abrupt ending is.
Molly Hayes’s Third Left Finger
I was dancing alone in the club, as I had learned to love. My muscles expanded, contracted, coordinated with each other and with the lights, the sounds, the fancies of my mind and the energy of the crowd – but none of the individuals within it, my monistic avoidance entirely by design, a prerequisite for this sort of soft onanism. The three or four drugs I was on conspired to distort, collapse, compress my whole life into an entirely contingent journey to the point I was at now, ecstatically exploring what I could do with the body and mind left to me by the sum of each prior instant, reveling in this opportunity to a degree that redeemed them all.
But then I felt someone reach around me, and as Molly Hayes’s third left finger brushed down my right cheek, my dancing and the life that led to it revealed themselves as a prelude that had finally ended.
We danced, without touching, except a brief intertwining of hands, where I noticed the polish on Molly Hayes’s third left finger as a kind of omni-colored void I could stare into indefinitely, even as it simultaneously matched the sheer black of her other nails. There was no time to explore this paradox. The symmetry of our dancing I somehow took for granted – what really struck me was the way that my drug-addled impressions were giving way to a new lucidity that had nothing to do with the bland empirical soundness of sober life – in fact, I was missing plenty of my surroundings now that I had learned the meaning of priority. I could tell she viewed the club as something purely functional by how quickly she suggested we make an exit, and given all of my nostalgia for the place, was impressed by how easily I managed to view it the same way, swiftly following her lead.
Her apartment, she told me, was just a block away, and she grabbed my hand to lead me there in a dash, a cut forming across my palm as she did, surely caused by Molly Hayes’s third left finger.
Our transition from travel to sex was imperceptible, but as hasty as it all seemed, I could feel nothing but anticipation, conscious that her whole body up to her right hand, three left fingers and thumb were teasingly substituting for the real subject. And then, suddenly, Molly Hayes’s third left finger entered my asshole as non-challantly as a flirty text exiting a screen it had been sent from, and my whole body started skittering like the countless points of light birthed and extinguished through the fiber cable transmitting that text. Cumming was an incidental component of a general program of escape attempted by my body.
Between fucks, Molly Hayes’s third left finger replaced language for me as it pet me all over the length of my body. Between fucks didn’t last nearly long enough, even as it lasted much too long. This kind of contradiction seemed as simple as the polish on Molly Hayes’s third left finger.
We ouroborosed, sucking each others self-loathed cocks with abandon, but even as our traumatic adrenaline peaked I was hopelessly distracted by my pining for Molly Hayes’s third left finger. Finally, finally it entered me, that opalescent nail ripping a chunk of flesh out of my outer right thigh, my whole self writhing to make up for the conventional climax already having been long spent, a conventional climax managing an appearance anyway for the special occasion. She came simultaneously and I hastily wiped the cum from my eyes so that I could watch what that third left finger was getting up to. She took the sample to her kitchen to cook and eat, but her third left finger remained conspicuously and tragically uninvolved in this process.
Even aware of how naive I was being, I was powerless not to imagine Molly Hayes’s third left finger twirling my hair while I reformatted the whole encounter, rendering it relatively sanitary, surprising as it may be to hear that description applied to these unrefined poetic entrails. But, predictably, she started to leave, and able to surmise a believable complaint through my bitterness, I pointed out that she hadn’t even washed her hands, that I didn’t care how many deracinated particles she displaced across my individuated body, but just what kind of circuit was she carrying my cells into? Nine nails pierced my throat, but in neither that moment, nor following my instantaneous transformation into corpse, did Molly Hayes’s third left finger ever reside in me again.