hey body

Hey body...

Right. So what am I doing with these guys? I don't know. To tell the truth, I don't totally believe in what they're doing. Or rather, I don't believe in the way they're trying to do it. Any real cure is only going to come from science. This drug trial I'm in now is the best chance any of us (or them) have got. If it doesn't work, I've always got dad's juice. That and clean living has kept me in the pink for almost 8 years now.

I've already had this conversation with Timo. If talking to bodies made a difference, there wouldn't be any more because believe me, you do a lot of talking when you see your friend or lover or dealer or kid brother bearing down on you like a falling building. with rabies. He says I'm just mistaken. Being a body's not a disease he says. It's more like a dream. a beautiful, seductive, cancer of a dream. And we can choose to wake up. but best not to fall asleep in the first place which is why all the running around to find the ones who've just got bit. Show them reality before they can't see it anymore.

That all sounds good, but again I have to say, 3 saves out of how many tries? Timo says its not about statistics. (Which is ridiculous. Everything is about statistics.) He says even if it worked only 1 time in a million it would still have worked and so it's worth going on. He'd rather believe in the ability to choose than in drugs. See, that's exactly what I like about drugs. You don't have to believe in them for them to work.

Hey body...

I should probably say something about the monks and why I'm hanging out with them. First of all, they're not really monks. I just call them that. They're more like a gang. Maybe an anti-gang.

Timo is kind of the leader. At least he's the oldest and the one who makes the schedule and leads the meetings. He says he's 33, but you can never tell with bodies. The other three are Gemma, Rick and Donovan. Gemma was sort of a friend of a friend. Like Jeffre, who gave me the space for this blog. Him I knew through ad guys in SF. Gemma was a friend of a dj I knew in LA, Trix. A lot of name dj's are bodies. They're all crazy for that epileptic jackhammer crap. Frankly, it gives me the migraine. She was hipper than hip though. She turned me on to a lot of stuff I eventually got paid for.

Before all this, I was a cultural researcher. A "coolhunter". Which is funny, I think. Basically I just reported on stuff that was happening in body shops to companies and ad agencies and they paid me for it. A lot of the stuff that ends up packaged for miss pinky in dazed is just body work. Those pseudo Celtic black spine tattoos. That was just covering up scars, but it caught on. I remember the first time I saw a nobody with one of those walking on the pier. I laughed and laughed.

I wonder where Trixie is now. Gemma hasn't heard from her in months. That's a long time for a body like Trixie. She wouldn't take anything. She's probably gone. dead and gone and gone.

Hey body...

Saturday night I was out on a run with Donovan, one of Timo's three monks. We went by the Melkweg because there was some kind of local bands showcase. Bad local metal bands are sort of Typhoid Marys for bodies. No-luck skeezballs with pathetic Wagnerian tendencies. For them, making bodies is a kind of dead-end power trip, like meth. At least where I'm from.

Anyway, there's suddenly a splash in the canal around the front door. We get over there and (surprise!) there's a no-luck skeezball in a rank leather jacket, no shirt, clawing over the rail trying to get at the girl who fell or jumped in. Donovan takes care of him and I pull the girl out. She's lying on the ground and I'm asking her name, hoping/assuming she knows English. She rolls over to puke and I can see the white of her vertebrae through the rip in the back of her neck. They look like a fossil stuck in a tar pit. Donovan's gone so I pin her down with my knees and start reading the sutra off the card Timo gave me. But I'm only two lines in when she just roars, I mean roars, pushes me off and tries to bite my damn leg. I have to admit, I was like, you know what? Whatever. And she ran.

When i told Timo what happened, he didn't say anything. I asked him how many bodies he had saved. He looked around at the monks and said, five. One died. One was lost. He must be crazy. We're out almost every night and every night we do at least one intervention. He's been doing this almost two years. That's at least 700 contacts with only 3 responses? Jesus, direct mail works better.

Hey body...

I had a talk with one of the techs at the clinic yesterday while I was lying in the scanner. A short talk. I asked for some water and she said something in Dutch. It had a lot of "krch" sounds and I never got any water.

When I was in 7th grade, I was like the class psychologist. There was a brief break in my generally outcast-flavored life when boys and girls would seek me out on the playground or in the lunch hall to ask my advice on love and life. Does he like me? Should I tell my parents? You could just play the odds and say "No" to all these questions. "No" is actually the correct answer 99% of the time. But my thing was, I knew that if I could get them to do something, act a certain way to that other person, maybe even pass a note to some third person at the right moment, then maybe the answer would become yes. I didn't just want to inform. I wanted them to get what they wanted.

I could work that kind of 14-dimensional emotional chess behind my back. I had a granular, transformable mental map of 7th grade social attraction forces running picture-in-picture on my occipital lobe at all times. A sparkly magenta line drew taut between two nodes with a little snap to show attraction. I'd know before they did themselves, if they ever did. Does an antenna know what song it's transmitting or receiving? They were antennae and I was a radio. And now I'm blindsided by krchng. The airwaves are clean and nobody's singing to me.  It's all gone quiet. I can rest.

Hey body...

The first question every Body gets is, “How did it happen?" when what they really mean is "Who did it?" So I roughed out a modified funnel chart showing the relative frequency of 4 key variables defining the relationship between bodies and their primary vectors.

One of the first thing that jumps out at you is the high degree of social stasis. That's all that green at the bottom. Bodies tend not to stray far from their vectors which is how pods form. Even in the modal “I met this really cool guy/girl at a club…” situation, a new body usually primes to the vector pod almost immediately. Talk about the walk of shame.(1)

These figures are estimates based on my experience. If you actually ask, the most likely answer you'll get is “I don’t know”. Are these guys just stupid? Maybe. Probably.  But a lot of Bodies do just wake up somewhere strange, all alone, no clue about what’s going on. I think this is sad.(2?)

I used to be INFP (Introvert Intuition Feeling Perception). Now I'm KFDN (Known vector/Family member/Deliberate/No current association). I'm the asterisk in the lower left. <1%. n=1. No cell to call home. I've never met another one like me.

Hey body...

Summertime here means festival season. Lots of tripped up boy chicks and girl studs resonating in synchronous oblivion. Which means, lots of bodies. I've only been here since June but I've already done eight of these things and they're all total body shops. Still, some are harder than others.

They have these massive annual dance club things out at the soccer stadium. Ones where you have to wear all white and other ones where everyone wears black. It's like the 80's here. Everyone wanted to work the white events and Timo was the only one left doing black, so I said I'd go with him. When I asked him about it, he said white's a lot easier because it shows blood really well at night. I should have known that.