textfiles/magazines/HOE/hoe-0978.txt

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	It began with an F.

	I stared at the F, drawn with long flourish on the tail, winding
down, cheerfully looping at the bottom, a sign of some minor gleefulness
found in putting it to paper.  I stared at it and it stared back at me,
the dull red F with the funny little loops.  In my ear it whispered,
suggesting its phonetic link to the great grade ladder; as grades go, only
the F stands for a single word.  Failure.  It is the reason that E does
not follow D.  The E, when drawn out, has a nasal quality; blunt and
obvious.  The F, however, draws out slowly, quietly, a subtle swoosh
signifying one's shortcomings.  The F sound is kin to the hiss of a
reptile, itself a symbol of the first great failure.

	It was not the first F that I'd seen, but it was the most potent.  
Not in my face, not blunt, but bubbling slowly up from the depths of my
consiousness.  Failure.  Was I, then?  No, not specifically, but the
failure spelled out a possible brutal truth that had burrowed just below
some warm membrane of ignorance.  This moment, so pregnant with the
meta-possible future, lay in my subtly shaking hands.  That membrane, soft
and malliable, was about to burst.  The hiss of Fffffff built into a
threat; it became the metaphorical sparking burn that wound down to a
single, solid stick of high explosive.  Methodically, the lit fuse
shortened, hiss growing louder, end becoming more inevitable.  It can
always be stopped, but then again, sometimes the most pure action is a
sudden, violent explosion that will change everything.  The dinosaurs knew
it.  Oklahomans know it.  Soon, I would know it, as well.

	Boom.

	That is not, however, the beginning of my tale, despite what I
said above.  The specific story that I wish to relate begins with the F,
but my personal story does not.  My name is Jack... but it isn't.  And I
have been dead for fifteen years.  Yet I am alive and well.  Alive, at
least.  Well, here, at the very least, and concious of life passing on
around me.  My name is Jack, and Jack is latin for limbo; elongated,
perpetuated stasis, aware of the world that goes crashing by just outside
the placenta, prison-of-mind.  Jack is also latin for Dead Boy, and that
is what Jack is.  No one knows that Jack is dead.  Nobody except for me.

	I have behaved like a rubics cube with the peices missing; even if
you could figure out how to solve it, all of the colors aren't there.  
I've left you in the dark, purposefully, but your birth comes shortly.  
Open up into my world, pass through spread-eagled mother of thought, and
break through your own placenta.  All the colors are there for that
moment; healthy doses of red mixed with the rest of the spectrum, but pain
gives birth to its own devices.  The light hits your eyes, and it is
frightening.  It is frightening to be here, inside the mind of someone
that is not you.  And exciting.  Welcome in.  My name is Jack (but not
really) and I am dead (but not really).

	Jack (me) is buried under a winding, twisted oak tree in White
Pines Cemetary.  It is on a road that leads you past three gas stations,
two subdivisions, and a Wal-Mart supercenter.  The road is named Division
Street.

	I live in a town that lives in a state that lives in paradise.  I
also, paradoxically, live in a town that lives in the throughs of
something called "economic depression".  I, myself, am not "economically
depressed".  My family is not, either.  Perhaps I shouldn't speak of these
two things as separate entities, since my dependance on not being
depressed goes hand in hand with the state of my biological elders who so
graciously pressed alleles together to design me.  Their twisting
staircase of DNA dances down through me (Fred and Ginger sans the
moonlight, only stumbling darkness), and so does their cash (look up more
information on that pyramid topped by the eye; you may learn some
interesting things).  I am a poor man (boy, dead) when seperated from
them: I rely on them to exist much as I always have, except the desire to
drink from my aging mother's breast has subsided considerably in the past
twenty years

	So I live in the basement of my parent's fine home on a fine
street in a town called a clever word that detracts from its fluxual state
as paradise and dump.  I live in my basement, an underground tomb, and so
too does the body rest some three miles away, as the crow flies.  The
death metaphores are getting long in the tooth, I know.  But a setup needs
to be established, a pattern is required to form.

	My name is Jack, but my name is also Goerge.  I am a twin; the
twin of myself, as it were.  My twin lies buried in White Pines Cemetary,
and his name is George.  The day that my brother died, more than half of
me died, due to the Great Game that we played; due to the great cosmic
accident.  My brother is dead, and I am not.  But in a sense, we both are.  
Enough double speak.  More to come.  Have the patience that I do not.

	Boom.

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[ (c) !LA HOE REVOLUCION PRESS!            HOE #978, BY ROTTENZ - 12/18/99 ]