hey body

Hey body...

Tomorrow is the start of the Amsterdam Underground festival. They're going to be giving tours and showing art and having concerts in some of old tunnels and cells along and under the canals. Seriously. Why not have a dog show in the lion cage at the zoo?

Timo's been going around the past few nights, making sure bodies know what's going on. Not that a lot of them live in these particular spaces, but I know at least two of them are major entryways to the places where bodies do live and, uh, work. The Torensluis is like the lobby of a huge body condo.

Timo tries, but I'm pretty sure not every body got the memo on this one. Peoples is gonna get bit. It's going to be a long weekend.

Hey body...

You are not the first here.
You are not the first to be born.
You are not the first to die.
You are not the first here.

Now, at the moment of waking,
Your mind is clear.
If it is clouded by hunger,
You can wipe it clean.
But if you become hunger,
There will be nothing to wipe.

Life is hunger.
Death is hunger.
Hunger is a dream.
Wake up! Now!

This is the sutra of waking. We hold them down and repeat it three times. Then we let them go. You can see why the response rate is so low.

I wish I could tell them what my dad told me:
You're safe and you're at home.
I tied you up, and when everything is okay, I will untie you.
Until then, press the green button for pain and the red button to call me.

Hey body...

And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

I did a project for a 4-letter agency in NY last May. It was my standard youth trend update blah. Mostly pictures I'd taken over the past couple of months whacked into Powerpoint. I'd done similar versions for the agency before, presumably so they could repackage it for clients as part of their Yellow Bullet youth marketing agency. (Is anyone fooled by this? "We were BWBO but now we're Yellow Bullet!" (a wholly-owned subsidiary of BWBO/Overlord Ltd.")) But this time they brought a client to the presentation. From the company that sells those tissue wipe things, Spiffy or Sniffle or something. I should have known something was going on. What does a company like that care what Bony McStinkbody is wearing this season?

So I finish up and I'm putting my stuff away when my agency contact, Brent the account director, asks me to come over and say hi to a senior client from Europe. My stinky sense was totally tingling now because this woman had been staring straight through me the whole time and she was just different. Mid 30's, I guess, and unlike everyone else, not trying to look 21. She was stylish in a natural way, like she probably knows at least three people named Helmut and one of them's a girl. And she was confident. Not cocky/terrified like agency people and not "ha ha you're fired" like a lot of big clients. More just born that way. "Very interesting presentation. My name is Vivienne Kaspers."

She fanned off Brent, who must have been shitting bricks(4), and we ended up sitting at the Starbucks in the lobby. She just starts in asking questions: How long have I been doing this? Where do I get my information? How did I hook up with this agency? I'm not inclined to tell people I know anything, so I'm telling her a bunch of Keyser Soze and I think she knows, until she says, "you're Indonesian, aren't you?" I have never been asked that question in my life. Mostly it's "You look kinda Chinese." I was so surprised, I told the truth. My dad's mother is from Sulawesi. And in that moment when I was looking at her like "who are you?" she drops the z-word: "You're also a zombie, yes?"

All the people passing through that lobby. People I know. People who pay me and let me into their offices and ask how I want my coffee before they listen to me talk with calm, attentive faces and she's calling me out here? I'm spun out the revolving door and hailing a cab (which I never do. I like the subway.) when she's suddenly behind me. "I'm very sorry. But now I know. And I needed to know because otherwise I couldn't say what I'm about to tell you. Offer you."

I'm like, if you don't get off me right now, your body will not be found. Maybe your eyes. But she just keeps talking, quiet, in that slippery, impossible-to-peg Dutch accent: five years ago, unexpected discovery, revolutionary, inflection point, history, tragic, clean subjects, saw my last deck, drug trials in Amsterdam, now, secret, yes?

Yes.

Hey body...

I felt less buggy yesterday, so I toddled over to the monkaterium to check in. All I do in this city is check in. Check in with Timo. Check in at the lab. I need to find a project. My dad always said, if you're bored, find a project.

I just missed Rick and Donovan carting a stinker out to pasture. Pasture in this case being some big empty space in the middle of Holland called the Veluwe. Don't ask me to pronounce it. According to Timo, D just happened to be passing by the canal bike place by the Leidseplein where some drunk Brits were bringing their bike back late. The thing starts rocking and all of sudden a stinker is hanging off the back and the nobodies are in the water. A drunk Brit in a canal is not, by itself, going to attract a lot of attention in Amsterdam, so D pulled the stinker out, brought him in and he and Rick carted him off.

I haven't seen a stinker here yet but apparently there's a few wandering around in the canals. In fact, I've probably seen less than 50 ever, not counting the movies. Bodies just don't last long enough anymore. But Timo thinks part of his sacred mission is to save them (from what? rotting?) so he stashes them in the big Dutch empty. And he compounds the pointlessness by calling them (wait for it) Old Ones. Oy. It's like a hyper lame prog rock concept album: And The Old Ones danced through the Forest of LIght / Into the Glade of the Glistening Night / then their arms fall off and they eat you.

In the US we call them stinkers, moaners, farts, shitbags, slowpokes, Tom and Katie, goths, waylon (I think it's a corruption of "abuelo"). There's a ton of them. My favorite is Romerian. "My stinky, moaning friend? Oh, he's just Romerian." "Isn't that near Hungary?" "Closer than you think." Ha.(3? I keep forgetting I'm supposed to be coding this for "identification with other minds". But it's a crappy measure.  Invalid. Unreliable.) 

Hey body...

I kind of crashed last week. I was dead tired, but it felt like I had bugs in my brain. I called the so-called emergency number from the company lab and they said, yeah, that might be a side effect. Bugs in the brain might be a side effect. They said when I came in on Friday they'd look and see if everything was ok. I'm just thinking, this never happened on my own stuff. I may have slipped a few times, but I never felt this megawatt locust swarm bouncing off the back of my eyeballs.

So I've been just lying in bed a lot the past few days with the lights off, listening to music. I think I may have actually played every last song on my ipod. It was interesting. I remembered all kinds of things. Like how much I used to love Van Halen in junior high. They were deeply and painfully over by then of course, deep into the senescence of the Van Hagar years. (VH - DLR = Whitesnake, ya heard?) But my dad had their old albums and I guess I liked them partly because he did and partly because the VH brothers were Indo, half-Dutch/half-Indonesian, like my dad. (And now I'm in Holland. How something. I should go see where they grew up.) But also because their music was this totally awesome combination of demonic power and slapstick. They were like this funny, dangerous animal and that's what I wanted to be. I knew that if I could just trade my single-pickup mortal coil for Eddie Van Halen's tipsy, growling humbucker then I'd be popular and cool and not afraid and Jill Daniels would invite me to her birthday party. Simple.

So one day during lunch, I saw Jill and her posse and was like, WWVHD? I cranked up "Unchained" in my head like a tweener Ride of the Valkyries, then I just walked up to them and went for it. Not only did I not get invited to her party, the school had to call my mom to come pick me up. They thought I was having some kind of seizure. She took me to McDonald's which was usually a big treat because dad would never let me go there, but it became one of those times when the fact that someone still loves you just makes you feel more pathetic and I never ate there again. All I wanted was to become that funny, dangerous animal I heard stalking around, caged up in my head. I'm still working on the funny part.