Simulation is an art form. Everyone's guilty. Shut up, you're guilty. Every compromise is another exhibit, another piece of evidence, but you're nothing wrong for it. It means that you are reading and absorbing. Where structure rattling shifts occur are when you've overstepped is all. That's fine. If it's not, it should be. Deception is not an art. Deception is a skill. There's a difference.
Simulation is an art form and a means of communication and should be maintained. Not must be, but should be. It's a token. It's a tipped hat. There is no fault with simulation. To read, to understand, to emulate, to produce circumstances in which the assumed can thrive, with or without the other's knowledge, is an art and, furthermore, to be absorbed in the simulation wholehearted is to complete it, and to find completion being a crime is simply absurd. Refuse crime.
To the larger point, bottling sounds of my thoughts through snippets offered through social media is not whoring. It is simulation refined and semi-successful and semi-failure. I am comfortable with that and uncomfortable at the same time. The act, itself, plays directly into the multifacet self. The concept of conscious faced through planes of a gem cut (or not) through experience and trying to catch the most acceptable light from the most appealing angle not because there is a drive to appeal and appease and assure, because there is, within the contract of citizenship to this planet, a very very important subtext and rule line x, dash alphabet, dot n, that says you can either participate or margin.
The approach to social media is always a tricky one. Not for offering opportunities for criticism; for offering opportunities for connection. There is much less value in not offering a front door and at the same time expecting the line to run from there, down to the sidewalk, and around the corner. A certain amount of simulation must happen. Consider it something akin to taking the temperature of a moment. Consider it too, an argument that specialized and targeted results diminish the quality of the simulation each and every time that impetus is to be obeyed and deviation will be cause for changes not, surface, necessary.
Hunting for ghosts should be saved for television. Things go bump in the night. Dealing with things that go bump in the night should not be necessary, and is. I'm not celebrating it. Have lust for the ones you don't dare. Few things truly scare me in life. It is part production. Part assumption of past fears like putting on clothes so those around you can feel more comfortable being around and talking the same way you can talk and fearing the same way you can fear. If there is a subtext, a foot note, to the experience it is that I saw someone who truly scared me because I never laid eyes on it before and it has me rattled because I never want to see it again.
I saw, for lack of a better term, a ghost. I have no idea how to explain it. It was not a ghost or a spirit. It was not an after image burned onto my retinas so I happened to wake up two hours later and blink a lot and rub the corner of the eye snot away and coughed to make sure I was awake. It was something I hope to never see again and it burned me on the inside simply to lay eyes on it.
I got out of bed and walked around it and it kept saying "you can fly in your sleep" and I do not know what it meant. You can fly in your sleep. You can fly in your sleep. It only came up to near chest height. I kept walking around it to make sure it was three dimensional. I was running tests, mental tests, to be sure that I was not asleep and that it was not a figment and it kept talking and did not hold the usual humanoid, warped and not, shapes or the usual animal, warped and not, shapes.
To pin my psychological misgivings current on its existence feels like a cop out. It's there though, watching me and I desperately would like to do something about it. I don't want to sleep. I don't want to sleep knowing it can enter my apartment with no sound. Where did you come from?! Go away! Go away! I have not seen it since its first appearance, but I feel it. It makes my skin itch. How do I kill you?
I've grown comfortable with some of them to the point where I can say hello, nod, and continue on. They're almost like family or pets or even, I'd go so far as to say, fixtures like lamps or hat racks and sometimes they yap, but it's getting easier to ignore them. Not easier, but second nature through strict training. My breath is still snatched away now and then when they are where they are not supposed to be and the agreement that I assume is broken because they and my own paths cross without warning and my face is not our face and they are.
I don't want to go to sleep. I am afraid it will visit again. I am much more afraid that it is a returned. I'm not prepared to deal with that. My techniques and knowledge have advanced enough to protect against signs and travelers and after images and beckonings and name calling and interpolations and ringers and false alerts and I ... ... don't know it and I cannot be caught engaging it and ......... I should not be talking about it. I have to. For record. To help me better. As far as I go. The lights will be kept on. Fear no man. It is, this I know, no man.
I had an odd dream. I dreamt I had a sex change surgery. Except the Earth, this planet, was so far advanced, or smoothed, that all outward adornment went by the wayside. To the point where nature and tech apexed to an uncomfortable coexistence. To the point where every injury, every modification, needed no bandage and had no boundary for it's obviousness. We were sitting at a hookah bar and passing a cigarette between each of ourselves and someone commented that my penis looked better where it was and we railed for a minute and then got home sick and wished we'd telecommuted to the outing instead because we liked our new body a lot, but no one stuck up for us so we smoked some more instead. Then we blinked and when our eyelids opened we were not on sand world again.
We were walking down a street where each and every person walked too, fully clothed, but the backs of their heads were all torn out, blown out, by something. Grapefruit sized holes. Deer slugs? Their eyes were fine. Their faces for the most part. Whatever went in must have gone through their mouths. Everything smelled like take out food Bronx tenements. It was queasy.
I'm not saying it's the return of the monster. It's not. I am afraid. I am dreaming. I am sleep walking. I am not sleep walking. You are not sleep walking. You are reading this. Pause here. Whatever it was you were thinking about doing, pause here for at least five minutes, but not more than ten. Whatever it was, it will be back. You can handle it. Do not be afraid. No crying. No hiding. If it can get in, it can do more and it has chosen not to. Do not talk to it. Do not engage it. Do not engage it. Do not engage it. Do not name it. Do not listen to it. Listen without hearing. Always remember.
I am trying to remember, trying very hard, to remember the name of the one I gave away to a friend and the price (I do remember that torture) I paid when he called him through text messages. It needn't be repeated. Once was enough. Learn from mistakes. To this day I do not think he realizes how far open I had to be to do that and how stupid I was to do that. Learn from mistakes.
I am trying very hard to remember and I can't and you know what? I am happy it is struck from memory. I am happy I can review the pages of notes and review the eye reel and find no hints. It means I did something right. I remember the weeks and the forced in closeness and needing to give for what I received and splitting cigarettes on the balcony and looking at the enormous clockwork gears ticking over behind the tree line near Bloomfield and the memory tape ends there and I do not want to discover what was buried there ever again.
///The Grid - "
Crystal Clear (Clear Water Revival Mix)" Henry remembered his mother and preferred not to.
