Atlas Mugged

Available to the advance council are a selection of options for the opening invocation. The winged goddess is ubiquitous, she thought but hesitates a moment to choose mermaid-goddess.

The color and texture are to be decided. She selected Cosmos Burning — a mermaid-goddess is not appropriate floating through the cosmos.

There is the rhythm-odor selection or what involuntary motions she wants her congregation to move to. It could only be flow rate twenty-one. This is a good choice for the morning hours. Mostly the ancients come, as religion is not schway to the mostly alive. The mostly dead need religion and have to be gods and goddesses ascending into vast carbon spaces in holographic splendor.

Dorian came to the tabernacle early to get into the schway of it. Dorian is in her sixties. Anti-Gravity can send objects into the air. Pro-gravity takes a toll on the body. Dorian wants to live a bit in fantasy conducting Divine Chaos this morning.

It is approaching ten-o’clock Monday, the holy day that isn’t official like Sunday is in TexFed. CalFed will do nothing to enforce anything but will make rules on how to conduct teenage drunks to a detox center.

Dorian is ready and people are coming in the dull carbon space with the walls on hinges, good for the earthquake happening now. Nobody ran out of the well-designed building. It is safer inside.

Dorian looks at the main holographic assembler, taps the screen and watches her flexing a wing in the airspace above. Yes, I’ll do silver flying goddess, she thought.

Silver spills against the dull grey walls. She flies a bit, raising her arms and twisting on the stage. She puts in Cosmos Burning and it is spectacular.

It is a wonderland for her. Dorian is up in the Cosmos Burning as The Silver Goddess across the Tri-City Divine Chaos Tabernacle coughing out the universe for a spiritually enlightened damaged woman. Some bored teenagers are coming in with their parents — no splendor for them until out of here.

Walking down the center isle between the pews, one teenage boy waves at Dorian, Dorian flips a silver wing at him. He knows that everyone notices him because he is your standard kid in awkwardness. A few older kids come with him with a worried looking older man and a radiant woman on his arm.

The older man waves at Dorian, displaying similar discomfiture but nothing comes from the silver winged goddess representing the overweight woman wearing a tight-fitting suit, standing on stage.

The woman on the man’s arm is a beacon to Dorian and a large smile registers in the airspace. The man has trouble keeping his spiritual composure with a giant holographic grin cracking him up.

The awkward teenage boy, on the left of the older man with the radiant woman, hates being here. An older teenage girl, who is her daughter, joins with a twenty-year-old post-teenage boy broadcasting a large “V” on his t-shirt. The five are grouped together in the tenth row of pews to the right of the isle.

Old people, young people and people dressed for Divine Chaos’ readings, prayers, invocations, benedictions, offerings of nothing to an ill-defined goddess type of cosmic butler, a tabernacle full of similarly dressed socioeconomically flat-flesh products of the state based on anything goes, shuffle in. One naked man sits on a wooden pew to no objection from the assembling congregation. Another naked man with a top hat joins him.

Some eighty people sit in various states of consciousness. Enlightenment is a thing called love and they are all trying, but perpetually some will think they have it but not feel it.

“We access the Goddess with our presence. She hears, yes and she brings to you what you deserve. It may not be what you want but want is in the future, now is good and presence is yours,” while flying on schway silver wings, through stars of fantastic colors and suns glowing red and golden, eyes see Dorian in the holographic space, speaking from a reconstructed body in youthful splendor. On the stage projecting this is a smiling Dorian with her chin giggling as a prisoner of gravity and age.

Atlas Mugged

Divinely Chaotic

When I first heard the word tabernacle, I thought it a medical term, some kind of skin condition like a carbuncle. Another ugly word, I thought. I cannot go to this kind of place after I found out it is a place.

My mind conjured wrenching images of purple-puss-filled boil-like things on the butt or the middle of the back needing medical attention. The tabernacle bearer would not be able to reach the spot of this hideous infection so someone else would intervene with a salve and therefore knowledge of this embarrassment would be public.

Maybe it would need a sharp lance to puncture and plenty of towels to wipe up. I can’t control these thoughts because I’m only a fifteen year-old kid with an obsessive mind.

I do NOT want to be here Monday morning, bleary-eyed. A wood splinter is in my thumb and it could develop into a tabernacle. My spiritual anything is just fine!

In the tenth row of pews, my dad and I sit with our new family. I look around at the congregants in their Monday finery — I, pensively biting at the splinter. People from Emerson, Einstein and Spinoza come to worship something I will never understand.

“Behind the Veil and Into Divine Chaos” shows in the vast ceiling above us. Against the dull grey carbon walls, expressively colored holographic shapes make scenes of creation in the airspace of the Tri-City Divine Chaos Tabernacle.

My dad practically drags me here every early Monday morning since Dad and Mom divorced and he married Sarah. I am a product of divorce-o-mat, a drive-through dissolution of an understanding that I was even born. Forget about them, it’s me who leads the tratsl life. You parents are having schway times, yes? Being with new people is nice for you middle-aged sex addicts.

Visions of smoldering lava and lightning filled creation fill my eyes with grandeur then they drop into Supreme Council’s scowl. Sandy Willprinzit stares at me — I turn red, attempting to mask the discomfiture of my age group’s lack of skill hiding. I am caught being cynical.

I am Scipio Africanus Spikeman. Dad tells me our Spikeman name was faked and made into something called a birth certificate in a place called Istanbul, Ireland; a bazillion grandfathers back we had a criminal, a Jewish grandfather in prehistory, a legend even, that fooled the Czar of Ireland up to a point.

There were wars and there were the Jews as fodder. Dad told me the Irish must have an Eastern Front in quick succession in about every hundred years from the late nineteenth century until some Czar named O’Bama attempted to take over the world.

I checked with my history teacher and he said Dad was correct on the event but not the date. The Irish Czar named O’Bama successfully achieved world domination in the twenty-third century because his countrymen had suffered The Potato Famine. I asked Mr. Tammuz what a potato was and he didn’t exactly know; it must have been food since a famine is the absence of something to eat for quite a while.

Yes, I have a goofy name. Parents will sit around and put their hopes and dreams on the table to examine. Think about it; if a parent is especially paranoid, the parent will push for a name that serves as their protector, not caring about the innocent growing child’s coming ridicule from classmates, and fortunately I was not named Shield or Ray Gun Spikeman, but I was born on an auspicious day, and my dad is perpetually on guard since he’s been married a bunch of times. My dad’s name is Gilgamesh so what does he care? Not a flip! His vacancy in important matters is nothing to be admired.

Scipio Africanus’ Roman conscripts and mercenaries defeated Hannibal Barca’s Carthaginian army at Zama way back in history when we were stupid. Hannibal had marched his troops and elephants over the Alps having a schway time slaughtering Centurions.

All the way to the gates of Rome, Hannibal came — no reinforcements from Carthage or Spain. Hannibal went home not fulfilling his oath to his dad to kill all the Romans. I know who Dad’s Hannibal is, and we are here with her and her associated creatures for Monday’s incomprehensible ritual.

Dad loves his name, Gilgamesh. He said we are less than unremarkable by our real last name; we have nothing but a strange family unknown from it, a cloudy category of an ancient line of Jews starting with a forged name. He thought the Jews were important long ago, inventing some weird religion that had holy men called rabbits.

Dad is practiced in his intake of the terminally spiritual. Now he sits in his signature pie-face for the world of Monday obligation. Patting my shoulder, Dad smiles and I sink further into hardwood pews, the wood colder than carbon — it feels more like a sentence for a practicing criminal being punished with a splinter.

Wheeeeeeeeeeee! Here goes Dorian Byrd in the airspace above us, projected from the pulpit, using the holographic reduction spatial re-assembling bodysuit’s dialed up splendor. Dorian’s on wing in the projected Garden of Califia, above our heads giving the interim supreme council’s prayer, the affirmation, whaT-everrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr words and ideas that are really pretty good about the individual’s sole responsibility for pain, agony, hatred of people and stuff, bad gas, pimples, tabernacles, a lousy cup of coffee and/or a failure to be human.

Next to Dad is Sarah, the most beautiful woman in the world, so he says, and I have to kind of agree. She is Dad’s Ms. Hannibal of what I’ve seen of his treatment even by her creations, my step-sibs. Sarah is beaming divine sunshine and because she’s beaming, I have to sit away from her or I’ll get sunburned or something. I sit to Dad’s left, protected to mess with my splinter, a rare thing to posess.

In my mind, I am slapping my forehead; I check for a thought-bubble, look up and see holographic Dorian, landing on a high peak, the molten gold cooling, moon-silvered wings unfold gracefully tapping rhythm to the odor-rhythm undulations of the musnik.

To the right of Sunshine Hannibal are my stepsister, Emily-Not Sunshine and her boyfriend Tucker Silverstein-Tuck Vegan. My stepbrother Ralph somehow gets away another day, probably in his room slaying reptile overlords in holographic space.

You might think I’m cynical but nooooooooo (!!!), think about it. Dad points out that a careful and intellectually balanced assessment of most human related interactions yields such a conclusion as to make positive-thinkers point an accusatory finger at the assessor for the grave offense of cynicism. As for me, I can point an accusatory finger at Dad. He can’t help it; the way I’m raised, my bio-mom reinforces it, beside the fact that Dad is correct. BOOM then CRACKLE! The first party terrorist bomb of the day goes off and shakes the building a little. We get a little dust on us.

Divine Chaos has its conductor and many ascend into vast holographic creations. Sarah is readying her expressive “Dance the Cosmos; fire relax, thy poetry”. I argued with Sarah about the use of the comma between relax and thy and she got upset. She cannot explain it past a feeling. Dad, Tuck and I sat through a few rehearsals here in the tabernacle. Her kids got out of everything if they wanted.

Dorian’s hair looks ironed today, it’s decorous purple-red, and her eyes are closed. She seems tidal as she swings her hair, sloshing about shore like, ocean slapping the sand of her ample cheeks and chin.

Her words are that of strength through responsibility, no problem with that. Knowledge that laws enacted can be crafted to benefit the enactor, just for you and nobody else! Dad calls it the success spirituality of divinely chaotic narcissism.

*

Outside in the glorious CalFed sunshine, we stand under a blooming jellox-tree. It smells acrid. I can’t seem to get full relief anywhere, but at least I’m kind of free, but my eyes water and I sneeze. Dad hands me a wipe. I blow my nose.

“Why are there a lot of over-weight women in the craft of spirituality?” This is my weekly conversation starter.

“A large body is a better receptacle for a monumental spirit, Scipio,” Dad says about every week.

I complain, “Dad, I can’t take this, you can. How do you do it? How much phoniness can you take; how many self-appointed Divine Chaotic Councilors and self-help regurgitating delight filled zombies can I take? I guess about one, Sarah. I have to take her!” Dad, in principal, agrees with me but his campaign is to swallow this stylish spirituality for Ms. Sunshine Hannibal -duality.

“What’s wrong with self-help? It’s good to help one’s self and then turn to others to council.” Dad says council flatly. I worry.

She who brought Dad, that golden woman, she is a perfect repository of life, Dad said, as perfect as he’d ever seen, and she is a Divine Chaotic. She is untouched by Divine Chaos’ crystals and feathers but Dad said she is radiant as a crystal, as a prism casts a rainbow into a white and soft place that is as natural as a feather. Yuck! She has my dad under a spell and she scares me. Dad is caught in her power, married her, and I come with him, mixing into a tratsl family.

“I don’t like them.” My intonation is strange because I’ve never said this. I’m expecting something tratsl.

“Damn it, you little turd! You don’t like anyone, so it doesn’t impress me as meaning anything! You’ll end up liking them or your butt is mine!” Dad’s irritated, grabs at my head but doesn’t touch. This has to be defused.

“Ah, that’s my dad! I thought you’d achieved that veil of Divine Chaotic perfection.

Please, why should I like them? I mean no disrespect, Dad, but they don’t act like they even like you.” I’m worried about my dad. Goddess, he’s been so hurt.

“Like them because they are like you!” Dad looks at me in wonder, and yes, he is correct, but I don’t like Ms. Sunshine Hannibal.

“Why do I have to come here?” I know I’ll not get a response.

Like a mystic Fresno sage, Dad sits. He focuses on a holographic sign advertisement, Teenage Alcoholics Anonymous. He looks very concentrated as if trying to break the pencil-thin carbon post holding the holographic projector.

Dad says, too much relativism has the result of anything goes. He didn’t even like the idea that they added only one year on the minimum drinking age. Dad says when he was thirteen he couldn’t even smoke pot!

“They are progressive people and so are we. I assure you, Ralph is you except he’s not an old soul, Scipio, you are,” Dad says.

“Tratsl, Dad, old soul is what?” Old is a loaded word in Global Warmed.

From this hilltop, I can see the spires of San Francisco’s tallest buildings sticking out of the Pacific Ocean; I see the elevated commuter platforms; the activity of hydro-vehicles if I squint.

Global Warmed makes for a nice view. The carbon building material is manipulated to maximum visual sublimity. The noontime sun klieg lights the Pacific Ocean, and it breaks into colors reflecting off of the buildings. Ah, I see why Dad loves it.

People begin to come out of the tabernacle. I realize that Dad didn’t want to be here either with his pie-face gone; sons know these things; sons know little about mothers, but we are symbiotic males, fathers and sons, and I’m getting a scene change out of him.

“Dad? Can we just drive away and throw Frizbek or something? They can get a ride with Tucker.” I see Tucker with his signature t-shirt, broadcasting his vegan religion, talking to Quits with his signature tie-dyed top hat and long green frizzy hair.

“Why don’t you go into the community room and eat some junk food?” Ordinarily, Dad didn’t want me to eat junk food but I know how to leave. Dad wants to be with adults, I think.

In the community room, Ralph is stuffing a plate with greasy new chicken casserole and Leto squares.

“Skippy, don’t you know to come after the service? I’m beginning to think you’re not that smart. I told you, Quits will bring you too,” Ralph says with a mouthful.

“Yeah, I’m stupid, I get it already.” I go for crocklate chip cookies and Rattle X Soda.

I eat too much junk food; we all eat too much junk food. Kids, who don’t eat too much junk food, rant about junk food and wear t-shirts with negative statements about junk food.

Boy, would I like to be the guy who invented Dogmatic T-shirts, sold with a big enough bag of stick-on letters to go, whaT-everrrrrrrr. What a fortune he made because everyone seems dogmatic except Dad, Ralph and I.

The Rattle X Soda rattles me with that well advertised effect and side effects. I want to run! I run outside. I run laps around the neighborhood. I see other Rattle Runners; we wave at forty MPH, no less. I come back to Tri-City after ten laps.

Divine Chaotic Counselor Superb Sandy extricates from handshaking and has the plaster-smile. A barrel shaped woman of sixty with a funny shock of platinum hair, looking like a mischievous elf, dressed like a Holo-V evangelist from TexFed but imbued with the Chaotic, marches over, indeed, very militarily.

“Gilgamesh and Little Scipio. I saw you in the tenth row this morning. Are you okay, Scipio? You saw me stare, you little freak!” Superb Sandy knows all about my rejections, aversions and disharmonies. Dad knows too, so I laugh first.

A good laugh we have. The sun graces us, laughs the beautiful day. Can it be we are in paradise? Then I smell the adjacent Arc New Gas Station.

“Yeah, I’m fine outside the building. Thanks for asking, Superb Sandy. Dad says I’m a little claustrophobic, I guess — I have a splinter in my thumb.” Good, I think. I am covering Dad and I.

Dad, looking at my splintered left thumb, “No, you’re not claustrophobic, Scipio. When did I ever say that?” Dad uncovers me and somehow, as if by magic, gets the splinter out with his long fingernails.

Another terrorist party bomb explodes across the street. Party terrorists cross the border somehow; the second this morning as party terrorists from TexFed are having a blast in CalFed.

“Better get out of here, huh?” Dad and Superb Sandy nod. Dad looks for Sarah who is so easily spotted in a crowd of shorter people.

The morning has breeze. The smell of methane is slight. Mondays are lightly trafficked as the national holy day. People hunker down in these days of shortages. Dad needs new gas for the tuppercar.

“I’m proud of you, Skippy! You didn’t fall out of your chair!” Ms. Sunshine Hannibal grabs Dad by the arm, looks around to see if anyone is admiring her.

Dad set the jib sail at half-mast and we’re getting out of here, the tuppercar slowly glides into the Arc station to the pump. We push it about ten feet and the sensor locks on to the chassis and the lightweight tuppercar shutters like a prey animal caught.

Coming from the neighborhood are poop delivers with sacks of human, dograt, catril, assorted pet, including fishel, gerbella, mousins and tribble fleck and scattins to empty and mix with the new chicken enzyme held in an underground container. A good crop of new fuel it smells like.

The overpowering smell of poop hits me like an odiferous sledgehammer; I leap into the tuppercar, slam the door shut and bury my head into my armpit. I gag and face a direction away from the receptacle as the odor leaks in. Sarah sits in the front seat smiling, pissing me off. Dad’s applying Stink-Be-Gone under his nose, outside in another day of perfection, well, minus the poop. My dad used to be sensitive but she had changed him.

High in the air, way above our heads, giant dirigibles vacuum the air. One is lowered and full enough, descends to the ground to dispel mostly carbon particulates into compression machines to be formed into blocks of raw material. I squint at one that projects a holographic advertisement for Alabaster Party Bombs in the sky.

*

Divine Chaos is not the official religion; we don’t have one in CalFed but Queen Califia, The High Priestess is an adept. In her benevolence, she asserts her holy relativism, but most people don’t attend even Monday tragiball matches anymore, more and more people attend tabernacles, thus, tragiball teams are becoming very depressed.

TexFed and their EV Christianity, she doth display her zealotry, BOOM then CRACKLE; CalFed takes it with turning the other cheek.

Dad stands waiting to fill-up, looks at the colorful paper and paint from the party terrorist bomb. Some paint goes onto the windshield and him.

“Push the window cleaner button, Scipio.” Dad watches the paint vaporize, no trace. Party bomb paint was worked out through treaty decades ago.

Got to Move

He’ll have to fill up again in around sixty miles. Dad uses the sail as much possible; he welcomes a storm or something less than gale force winds. Sensors float around the Bay Area, sending wind information to jib sails to either erect, if winds are favorable, or close if winds are not.

Some malfunctions occur. A jammed jib will send a tuppercar across five lanes of traffic. Bulbous shaped, it rolls, and smashes the jib construction, but the occupants are nestled in the strong carbon frame and Lifefoam fills the cabin. Traffic stops for foam covered drivers to pull the tupperbody, easily malleable, back into shape — people shake elbows and go.

In class I heard about something called road-rage when self-administering testosterone-hopped-up men bought behemoths of metal called Armadas and Hummers and if they got dented, a fight ensued and something called an insurance company paid in something called dollars to someone called a policy holder that had paid the insurance company many dollars to give the policy holder dollars back but less than the policy holder paid because the insurance company had to pay themselves.

Dad’s vehicle is the tuppercar deluxe, in schway purple, made from tupperware, semi-transparent and so light that you could almost lift up the front end where the engine was. Engines are made from carbon fiber, the same stuff of the buildings.

Arc is the only tuppercar manufacturer now, and that’s why the new gas is cheap. All of the drivers of the Countries Formerly Known as the United States drive tuppercars except the vehicles of officials, dignitaries and the Chinese who generally drive Cadillac convertible duplicates from eons ago.

It is amazing what science did after the worst of Global Warming was over, the oceans had taken over some of the coastal cities, and huge hurricanes and tornados ravaged the country with three hundred mile an hour winds, they still do and we harness the energy.

Talk about beating weapons into plow sheers; we beat blackened skies into habitations, tuppercar engines, chassis and sails, dental floss, tableware, packing material, walls for houses, prosthetic limbs, false teeth and frames for everything. We take from the sky and make things.

The frame of Dad’s tuppercar is made of carbon, the lightest and strongest stuff in the universe. We have conquered our stupidity and fashion our reckless consumption into cheap stuff for China as they blow their winds of fossil fueled fat cars at us from there and we collect the carbon.

Goddess Help Us

Wartainment

It’s the pay-for-view religious war season! So we advance forward into survival and many steps backwards into The New Inquisition, Crusades or whatever post-neo-religious goofy thing you can come up with to describe it. We clear the air, water and stopped complete extinction only to waste on superstition but great Holographic-V watching.

No, I didn’t want to go to tabernacle but at least this tabernacle didn’t form posses and go for the EV Churches. Or do they? I have to respect them for a number of things like accepting responsibility for the way we were/are. Do they actually? I’ll bet not. EVCers still blame the devil and Divine Chaos was now the devil. BOOM!

The State Formerly Known as Texas, allied with The State Formerly Known as Kansas, had fought a war with The State Formerly Known as Oklahoma, allied with The State Formerly Known as Missouri as we paid credits and watched the teams compete. Texas became a country with ally and adversary absorbed. It was fought only for the name as they all shared the same religion, EV Christianity.

East Coast had no such wars. King Hershel made a declaration of fealty to the religion of England, a modified Anglicanism combined with Judaism and they celebrate everything! There were more holidays than workdays. Hershel figured there’s not much industry in third world countries so let’s celebrate Cromwell Torah Day.

East Coast did have a small conflict with The State Formerly Known as South Carolina and The State Formerly Known as Georgia over who polluted the Savannah River, but it ended in a stalemate with the river catching fire; great HV pay-for-view though! That war had something called a banjo as the theme musnik and it made your legs involuntarily wiggle to the sound/odor.

There were small regional skirmishes of little consequences since nobody really wanted to hurt anyone but they got mad about the naming of things and not the meaning of things since nothing had meaning and an education was the process of learning your job if you actually had one.

The freshly baked history of your country was always a breadline, mix and bake, feed and wipe the spittle off of baby’s mouth and chin; feed them cheap magic protein and vitamins in square vegetables with beautiful colors not of this earth.

Anyway, a secret cabal named the three countries’ heads of state, and we carried on riding our tricycle of state and tooting our little pink air horn like we were doing something by participating in plebiscite over the naming of things.

Global Warming turned into Global Warmed, countries around the world hunkered down, and it took a planetary emergency to bring about international peace with floating homes in The City Formerly Known as Miami, and The Country Formerly Known as Japan no longer existed except for Mount Jellox.

Little cooperation issued, as most industrial countries were the hardest hit by failed crops and energy paucity. For once in human history, the former developing countries had the upper hand and were left with their resource richness; nobody had an army to beat them into plow-sheers. Now they were the biggest polluters and materially fattest. Dad said a flip-flop was a flat mammal, now extinct, that flipped when the sun was too intense and it changed sides, its eyes roamed; flip-flop was the world.

The only exports left to The Country Formerly Known as the United States were carbon and actors because we continue to be pretty. As much as The Countries Formerly Known as Developing were now the developed countries, they put out massive carbon emissions.

We caught the sky and made carbboard, sold as packaging material for the former developing countries and making us gamma products ourselves, as we are lowly in the world. There was a man floating around, The Goth Named Spatula, who said that once The Countries Formerly Known as the United States was the main superpower in the world. Nobody believed him except a few.

With carbon manufacturing at high capacity, dirigibles worked day and night in all parts of The Countries Formerly Known as the United States, sucking up what other countries put out in the jet stream, now many thousands of miles south and thousands of feet lower from its former path to cause pollution from China, India, Indonesia, Africa and other formerly third world countries to drift into northwestern hemisphere’s air space. If CalFed didn’t get the drift, TexFed would get the rest and we’d trade carbon for the computer chips East Coast made.

But what a way to abscond with the debt owed to mostly China, China being gullible and easily fooled by an “officially” high rating, to break up The Countries Formerly Known as the United States. Legally they can’t collect from some non-entity that was only historical. None of the new countries would honor any of the debt, which left China with a huge question; should we bomb the miscreants? It’s so far, no, but there was always tomorrow.

Hey, I’m sorry for the information-dump. Not-Sunshine Emily said it was bad form in writing. She’s a fantasy writer so she should know. After everything, I am only fifteen, and old soul nerd and we are motor-mouthed. I’ve got stuff to tell . . .

~~~~~~~~~~