weep

Q: Not so much a question, tell us a bit about yourself.

(FOR THE FUTURE!)

distribute at your own peril

issue six

seven lives in a decommisioned missile silo commmunication software engineer facts retired re-education terrorist curator of cold war museum about avid model hobbyist our militant gun owner subject phD in History

A: Ill just begin by saying, this country sucks, and the whole world by extension of our intellectual entertainment umbrella imperial domain, sucks. Ive spent my whole life trying to do something to make it better, and Im tired of people telling me I dont have the right to say, this country sucks. Im an activist, its in my blood to desire change, to live my life according to principle. I hurt people that tell me to shut up, so remember that. But I wont hurt people who have a difference of opinion. I welcome discourse and discussion. As long as youre not repeating the corporate line, the company motto, the religious credo, youre okay in my book. And Ill even forgive the company

hasslein
motto, because I realize some of you work hard and hard work is beautiful, even when it is for the sole benefit of a faceless demon that devours all that is good and right.

interview with

naturally moved to E/D. I was in a unique position and made all sorts of vague ethical decisions early on. I and a bunch of others programmed in major loopholes and backdoors which eventually got leaked to hacker types a few years later. I was naturally educated, obviously. Id worked my butt Q: Were in an underground missile silo, off. Side note, programming is still one of those right? skills that naturally educated people are still the best for. But anyways, what I did was career suiA: Yes we are. I call it home. 40,000 cide and I served six months for related offenses. square feet of home. The government A bunch of underground organizations funded was selling a bunch of these off for a my defense, helped me out in every way possible, steal twenty or so years ago. I put a down and I sort of took up a leadership role upon my payment on one and didnt look back. release. I never advocated any grievous bodily Took a lot of work to get it habitable. harm, I was more into fucking with the system, People had to come in and clean out the throwing wrenches in the cogs of the machinery. asbestos, and there was flooding, rusting We had a lot of success, but the world is evolumetal. And the concrete walls are a bitch tionary. Perhaps de-evolutionary at this point. We to work with. But I have my own theater can fight all we want, I just dont see where this is in here. And music studio. I collect cold going any more. war relics, got hundreds of museum quality pieces, spy stuff, historical docu- Q: Thats a pretty bold statement from a folk hero ments, and I have a Dr. Strangelove Nuke of sorts. What do you advocate now? Ride. You can program in whatever city you want to bomb and Yeehaw on down A: Live your life how you want to live it. If anythe bomb bay doors. Its great. You can one fucks with you, fuck with them back. Show be Slim Pickens. them you still matter, you still stand for something. Dont give in, resist that impulse with all Q: Can you tell us how you subverted your might, giving in is for chumps. Us naturals E/D back in the early days? have become something of a curious relic. So be it. When whatever plague must eventually rise A: Right, youth. I worked for one of up to infect E/D, at least well still be here, and the big companies that was developing wholl be so goddamn smart then. security software for it. Wed started in email encryption and the like, and Q: Thanks for your time.

letter from the editor

robThere is a fundamental p ople die. You lem with trepanation. Pe cept this have to be willing to ac an electric fact every time you put pull the drill to their skull and trigger. People die. that I Ive killed four people matter how it know of. It is messy no l aeraeted goes down. You will smel and sweat. flesh and bone and grease push hard You push too hard, dont is always a enough. Digging too deep enario, playproblem. Its a risky sc and elecing with juice and meat ll needs that tricty. The electric dri You need to necessary weight, heft. whole body to use your shoulder, your e sure you control penetration. Mak want it to are fully charged, dont there. Dont die on you, get stuck in f two if you rush it. Work in teams o e a partner have to. It helps to hav them still. to keep them down, hold and wriggle Because they will fight drill bit and scream. I once had a l, there was glance off a girls skul I tore open a new metal box inside. ming, tryher scalp. She was screa flesh on. Blood ing to hold her flap of est of all, a from the head pours fast renching us shower from the inside d both. e atYes we are terrorists. W ssault tack them in the open. A cause intheir precious heads. Be r purside lives our enemy. Ou top the death of edupose is to s st destroy cation. To do that we mu the purity E/D. We must bring back ntellect. We of thought and learned i ial humanity. must not lose our essent

plannED commUNITY
(from a newsfeed post) Forgive this angry missive, but you people must stop. Not only will you be found out, you will be punished by god and government. I appeal to your essential humanity, put down your tools of hate and live peacefully. Make great works because of your denied potential, not in spite of. This world is big enough for everyone. Let us live and learn how we will, open yourself up to the full potential of thought. (protest announcement) West Coast. State Capitols. Be strong and represent. Vote NO in Government Loans and Grants for E/D Students, raise awareness about Accredited Learning Discrimination, organize demonstrations and trepanation effigies. Be a body, be a mind.

Stdr

(capsule book review) Treyarch Adrift is a near-masterpiece of grunge squalor living, dealing with important resistance themes and iconography. The history of the old student movement is captured in vivid detail, capturing moments of heart-rending depth and beauty. Perhaps the first romansbildung of the anti-E/D generation, the artist as ever more an outsider having to make her own connection to great traditions. Recommended and worthy of merit and discussion. (on religion) I have been working in a orphanage in an economically recessed part of Florida. The children here all speak very little English and will probably never have the opportunity to get an education, E/D or otherwise. But the curious thing Ive noticed is they have a secret form of community, religion, all based around The Blue Lady (Virgin Mary?) and La Llarona. They talk about a war going on between angels and demons in the slums, the ghosts of their family members fighting for one side or the other. They see our graffiti and interpret it as miraculous text. They add to it with their own burners, and discover our movement, because they want to read and decipher the hidden meaning. Perhaps there is something here I am missing. Just thought Id pass this along.

(on corporations) Every month I get a job at a new corporate empire. This months is, heres a hint, named after a Herman Melville character from Moby Dick. I am underpaid, but I get great benefits. They are also keen to give us lots of corporate schwag. Free music, movies, and of course, coffee. This month, theyre pushing a new E/D program, which I have great reservations about. Im still natural, but I really only just turned twenty, and I really dont want to think about committing to making the transition. Their new program is this, an exclusive series of on-going artistic, educational, intellectually stimulating E/D programs you can enjoy while sitting around drinking your latte. The longer you spend drinking there, the more youll be able to appreciate and learn. I guess thats just another hook into the pocket of the consumer, but whatever. Im really getting fed up with this. You cant go anywhere now without it being shoved down your throat. The irony is that the company really cant afford to hire anyone with E/D, so theyre recruiting people right around that adoption period in hopes theyll stay on-board. Get them while theyre young, poor and impressionable. The few kids who have E/D are total snobs and are already managers. Good thing, because they sucked at making coffee.

rote

Jesus, he doesnt know what to tell her. He drinks alone in his room, thinking about their bodies, how theyd not really arranged themselves, just to get the killing done quick, because they were scared and unsympathetic, ruthless with themselves, eager to be done and gone from it all. Theyd planned it out like it was this terribly important arcane ritual, which it mayhap became because of their fastidiousness, every step excruciating, carried through to questionable fruition because theyd backed themselves into that corner, and there was only one possible way to that very outcome. Realize theyd been ignored, unforgivable, because they were brilliant and so incredibly learned, and together they had come to the awful, pitiful conclusion- change was coming and there was nothing they could do to stop it. He had heard the shots, he had gone up running. The long spiral staircase, echoing with gunshot after gunshot. Why he ran to the shots instead of away from? Deep down he knew what was happening. Hed tried to ignore their words and casual threats. He almost thought himself a part of their inner circle. When he got to the door and it was locked, he called out to whoever was inside. A lone voice said go away. Not a command, it was too defeated for that, too broken to mean anything. It was soaking in murder/suicide, expectant of finality.

charity. She wanted nothing more to do with education. Funny that she was first when they had drawn straws. Rosa Gutierrez, braver than most, despite knowing shed be the first, proud of her lot. That they were screwing, all three of them in some casual intermittent fashion, should come as no surprise. Him and Her and Professor Waller. They were all at that age, not physically but mentally, when body and politic was an education in and of itself. Theyd sip wine and dine out and spend evenings in, shifting around each other like so much tradition. There was precedence to this. They lived in a house eight blocks from campus that had a history sick with broken-down-made-new excess. He traced a line back through past tenants, past tense. He was painfully part of the hazy tradition of smoking out on the porch, making out in the central downstairs bathroom that never stopped smelling of opium, re-arranging timeless student artwork not-masterpieces that lived in that home longer than any of them added up together.

He remembers a time when they had a small party. A bunch of people were trying mushrooms for the first time. Things got a little crazy around one in the morning. Some jackass was upstairs yelling out the window, Knowledge for All! And they were all afraid the cops would bust things up, so they were hushed together conspiratorially with that silly scary paranoia. She was the strong one, so she became the adult for a moment, the de When they broke down the door after that facto authority figure. So she was the one who dealt with the jackass, soothed his misfirlast lonesome shot- one was slumped in the ing mind. Theyd grouped together downstairs, corner of the tower, holding a book in front of his face. The bullet gone right through the become hive-like, cliquish in their dealings of the jackass. She was the transcendent one, both, the slant of the death slump offsetting everything. The book Ulysses, the face belonged the soothsayer. She got him out of that upstairs bedroom, laid him out on the couch and to Prof. Richard Dawes. talked to him, petted him in a way he was not That was how they did it. Russian Routoo consciously weird with. They all sat around lette. Each of them got a bullet to fire into listening to music, wishing she would deal with their best friend and colleague. The last had them in such a way, jealous of his outrageousto do himself. His name was Ida Stern, a docness. tor of linguistics. He put the revolver in He was tripping, imagined the paintings side his mouth and blew a tiny whistling hole shifting backwards through the years. The walls through his palate. The windows were open, it was a beautiful day outside. The students never a time lapse photograph of all that had come got up from their picnic blankets until sirens before. He remembers the small personal dramas when he thinks about her, she was swirling in ushered them off the lawns. it, knee deep in so much quagmired bullshit. People were falling in love and lust with her He looks at these words and reminds himself every other day, which she didnt give a secto clarify some details later. These are just ond thought. It was all so casual, the strangnotes, he writes. ers hed wake up to share his space with, whod feel their way around his kitchen, his bath She was a lover, a large and beautiful room. Misplaced coffee containers and toothpresence he had come to know and forget like brushes. Their strange fingerprints on everyearly childhood. So much of her was to be forthing, her strange control over the chaos of gotten, this he accepted and cherished. They both worked for a man named Don Waller who was their bodies, all jumbled up ugly unshaven in the afternoon light of emergence, exhausted one of those that died, the third who killed contented half naked unawares. Their embarthe second, Alice Ewing, who they later named a wing after, who would have hated this act of rassed laughter, the uncomfortability of him

looking and judging, their resigned whatever of cent accumulation, a zit of a world changing it man. idea. But when it came down to it, something about E/D scared him. He had earned that right He writes by hand, we all knew it was coming. to tremble, he emphasized this to the young people. He realized he was the old man, that he To generalize for simplicitys sake, it was on had spent his life in pursuit of an inner fire, the lips of everyone. a depth of understanding which would be passed It threatened the very institution of educadown not by ones and zeros, but by a legacy of tion. eager and willing young minds, receptive. Fresh It would change the world. theyd come to him, needing his voice, his paIt was technology, it was an idea, it was evternity of thought. This was who he was. This erything, nothing. was how hed get old and die, doddering at the The age of modular memory, E/D. podium, thoughts trailing off into the aether, Eidetic/Didactic. them half asleep or rapt with attention, one or When one could literally buy an education. the other, that is what mattered. Download it into their head, random access that bitch in casual conversation. This was not to be, a dream that dies in fast You knew A from C. forward. B was what the poor kids did, libraries and research and studying their asses off, hard work. He thought of how his children would B was what he and she did for fun, what they learn, some day far off. He didnt want to were good at. think of all the ways it could go wrong. At age Grad students in love with the beginning of the eighteen, one could get the implant. The cut end. off point, high school. Now a public trainThe last of a dying breed. At the cusp of great ing ground for the basic necessities of life. significant change. It had been going this way for as long as they could see back. No shock, the rich would send She was the one who heard about it first. their kids off to private institutions, clasThere had been casual talk about the possibilsically modeled. To refine and develop grace ity of such a thing. Several gadgets were doing and stature and poise and formality, tools of what E/D would eventually do on some primipresence to distance themselves ever more from tive embryonic level, were edging that bleeding the lower rungs, the dregs, the footstools. The line, becoming a new standard, forging their poor would go to trade schools, to train their own line of obsolescence into casual consumer bodies with physical work, what a machine could culture. Medical breakthroughs were everyday not machine. occurring, clinical trials underway, the trend He would want the best for his kids, emerging, the buzzwords buzzing. whatever that would end up being, whatever She brought the thought into that old they would end up being. He would keep up with home and set them on fire. The old man loved to the Joneses, sell his soul for his childrens hate the idea of it. The young man was just future, because that was the way of it, the acapathetic and talking about it made him deceptance he couldnt fight against any longer. pressed. She joked how shed be the first on That was the five year plan far off down the block to try it out. Why the fuck not. It the road. couldnt change her, a gadget, a device. To In the meantime, hed have to live with think of the possibility of it all. Endless blood and tears, lessons learned and forgotten, information, flowing into your skull. The mind a choices not obvious forced from heated forsaken great big sponge, to be tapped into, to recall, moments, a myriad of scarring left to heal in to trivialize on a whim. To know something strange configuration. instantly, or just about well enough. It was always there, up there. Hard data, a wealth of He was from Arizona, that hot blistered knowledge. place, beautiful and broken from so much expo Literally, a wealth of knowledge, as it sure, constant and dreadful. The people, like would not be cheap, that would take years. And the animals that survived over the years, had these were the days when time moved like wildbecome ugly and utilitarian, drab and unafraid. fire. Knowing full well now of of the mistakes He was one of those who spent his hot days in of the early adopters. They would be the stuff small, shadowed places not quite cool, with of legend, the stupid hardware glitches and a book in front of his face. He was of mixed technological failures. The human biology of blood, like most everyone else, colored by the it all failing in spectacular headline making sun, forgetful of heritage, a molted child ways. whose early tender skin came off like scales, But the idea was decisive. She was eahardened like steel drowned in water. He would ger for the experience, open to it. The old man walk through this world with an outstretched reconciled, smiled to himself. Hed studied shield borrowed from the public library. He was fads and trends, lived through years of this untouchable, holding it out in front of him. crap, hype and hyperbole thick with adolesTheir words bounced off him, its words soaked

through him, he was invisible, he was scenery, a trick of heat distorted afternoon light, he was elsewhere, a gawky shimmer. He escaped from there with a bit of surprise, it never dawned on him until he was here. Cold, dark, rainy, elsewhere, a bus ticket with an army duffel bag. Filled with paperbacks mostly, and blue jeans. Another world, like some place hed read about. Everything different, but nothing impossible. He was afraid to start speaking to these pale people, their language familiarly alien. But when he did, he found he had a voice that excited these new people. They came alive to hear him speak in his border beat, his oblivious unformed twang. He kept on reading for himself, studious because that was what he was good at. He learned to break apart the ideas held inside the text and formulate critical thinking. Before he left, a high school history teacher took him to the convenience store and bought him forty after forty, which they sipped slowly by his truck, and divulged the secret of his own long off education. I didnt pay for a goddamn thing. I got a library card. Read the books, snuck into the classes. All while working in construction. Made some money. Theyll accept you as one of their own, all you have to do is think the way they do. So read as much as you can. You cant help but fill up on the greatness of it all if you just look at it as the lifetime you never got to live. Its all about perspective, put yourself in the authors shoes, try to understand their words. Because words are about connection. And dont read crap. Theres so much brilliant stuff youll never get to read in one lifetime as it is. Youve gotten a head start already on most your pissant classmates. So just keep doing what youre doing and youll be fucking brilliant. Guaranteed. She was from California, and dated only girls in high school and was trying boys now, but was often seen making out with girls in the backs of movie theaters and laughing uproariously at nothing that had come from the screen. She and he dated, after a fashion. Shed shown him off to both her recently divorced estranged parents who had come visiting on different designated visiting days, lugged him around on her arm, proud to have this strange ugly beautiful boy frame her. She could listen to him talk all night long, he could just watch her fall asleep night after night. They started exploring each other after staying up all night watching old movies, Cabaret was her favorite, she was in love with squeaking Liza Minelli, long dead that sass and sexiness, throaty legs that disappeared into sequined underwear. They were spooning watching when he plunged his hand in the back of her underwear, working his way down.

She passed on her taste to him. Abstract and highly sexual asexual, in love with image and vitality, words spoken, sung and shouted. They ate Mediterranean food on the patio of a restaurant, she told him about her last girlfriend, told him how she had just taken off, graduated, leaving the poor thing hanging, prepared him to be disappointed likewise, made explicit her flightiness, her indecision, her lust for life. She would not be tamed, no. She would not be burdened by anything male at this point in her life. She told him not to ask serious questions, told him she would be dating other people, and if he had a problem with this, shed stop dating him and keep dating other people regardless. She was different and hoped he was different. She would make no demands of his heart, ask to share a tiny little bit of time on this here earth, make a connection because that was what mattered in the end. He was quiet through all this, his face tight, almost angry. Seemingly he wanted to slap her, because he was not like this, this was not his world, not his perspective. He was limited and could not make her see his one track mind, the great huge difference in perspective. He was formal, he was rigid, he was small town nobody made half-way good. Here she was making him helpless, making it difficult to breathe. So he went along with it. She interpreted his silence as acceptance. Notes about what, he writes in BOLD, ugly, like a shout out to no one. He pressed the music to his ears. Staining his thought like a ruined wash, every article of thought infected. He had just accepted an invite to a new student group forming on campus. He was unsure about the affiliation, but positive of his position, his stance regardless. Why he had agreed to come, he felt backed into a corner, pressured is the word. So he shows up, looking like a chump. The day was glorious, unusual for the season. He had enjoyed himself since blinking aware, almost forgotten about the purely mental at this point commitment. But the thought sprung on him out of nowhere, reminding him as he was jaunting through the glory of the season, fragrance like a trigger, the sight of beautiful young people smothering each other under trees, the spinning heady swimming quality of random association. He walked to the library, where theyd assembled in a meeting room. They were motley of shape and size and temperament. The angry hyper skinny girl, the endlessly joking fat boy, the derailed past the prime train wreck of gender confusion, the closeted intellectual frat boy, the child whose parent waited elsewhere, and the old man who wore simple white linens. And he, lost and drunk off so much thought and quiet displaced aggression.

 What was he mad about. When he sat down to think about it. Which he tried to avoid doing. What brought him here at this hour, and made him their leader, when they huddled together in parliamentary procedure agreement the week after. He looked the part, he sounded the part, and so he played the part.

A student wrote this critique of him in a class evaluation,

Professor Waller is a fucking bastard. A grammar Nazi of the worst kind, which probably got him tenure here, huh? He wrote on my mid-term, I will FUCKING KILL YOU if you write something this bad ever again. He meant it. He was nicer to me than other students. One girl left class The part where he apologizes to everyone inin tears four times. Professor Waller called volved. her a masochist. Before that he called her a child, an illiterate bum, an ignorant goon, and Don Waller was not a good man if you a lazy worthless drain in classroom discussion. take the sum of his actions in life together as He meant it. Id recommend this class to all my a whole. He did not live by the golden rule. He enemies. Id take this class again, if only to was known as a fierce human being, making single see him stroke out mid-rant. Still, he gets my mothers cry in supermarkets, letting people highest marks, shove this up your pencil pushknow how truly dumb and pathetic they were in ing academic bureaucratic asshole. All hail the his eyes and thus verily the eyes of all. His word. command over the English word, language, utterance nearly absolute, often wielding and waving Mistakes are like children, hard to take back. it like a bloody dagger. He would sigh audibly when he wasnt So he got her pregnant, and she was in pleased. the hospital because of the attack, on the Don Waller was not a good man, but he verge of losing their baby. Her head was white was educated. gauzed on the right side where the electric He was married and divorced, early, middrill had gone in. She was whispering to herdle and late in life. He had children, forgotself when he had come in. She recognized him ten about, who would appear out of nowhere and and started crying. Before falling asleep, demand face time. Don Waller would study these shed told him about it, her words scrambled strange creatures, their mothers sometimes apbroken unfamiliar. The damage had been done. pearing hatefully out of nowhere, beautifully They were flying in a specialist. He consoled captured at intervals, himself never recognizher after she was asleep, petting her forearm, able. Because he did not know himself. He was going against the tiny clear arm hairs, skin always who he was, but he gave it no thought, pimpled in cold, deep, drugged sleep. what mattered was the word, not these changing He went to the person he thought had faces. Hidden like buried treasure, absolute done it. The fat boy who made jokes. They were in his pursuit. His knowledge would die with sitting around a monitor, one of them had filmed him, and like the pirate captain, he would die it. They invited him to sit down and watch, and happy knowing his booty lay lonesome, scraps he did. He sat there quiet in reflection. Letscattered to his loyal lieutenants. Don Waller ting the images pour through him. He was smilloved words that werent words, his own spoken ing, crying, laughing with them, cursing them human failings, which he wrote definitions for, openly. They gave him a tall beer, which he sat and sipped. They were rapists. He felt the rush of Hurm. Worthy of thought, but not much, humiliation, shame, utterly unforgiving. They now let me daydream and forget about you broke apart her beautiful mind, ruined her, please. left her spent and shaking. There was no going back. Some of them would be found out, incarcerated, die because of this. Uhf. The sound I make when I am tired, He cut off his ties to them that night. exhausted and have nothing else left to Went back to her side in the morning, and when say, I am devoid. the sun came up and they came in to adjust her drip, she woke up and he listened to her weep.

Wouf. The said feeling felt in old knees, the exhale of satisfaction after a long night of drinking, fucking and smoking all together now.

Crackle like static electric, welcome to this world of mine.

Mneme is a student at the hypothetical School for the Underground Minds. Its work has appeared elsewhere.

triptych

We live in an age of obvious ridicule. We as a people are becoming so simple, so base, we defy categorization. I walk around and see all the those that live inside their heads. Their every whim satisfied, their every attention to the world outside, a temporary distraction. They are drawn back inwards. True individuals, them. They make me sick, their inner light. If they are so beautiful, why cant I see it. Because they are all the same. Their knowledge, their education and insight, a transference of great minds before them. I try to talk to them. And they seem to know everything. There is the distinct pause as they process the information. That mechanical process pause, a sign of their inferiority. Their minds sick with so much knowledge. They dont know what to do with it. They sleepwalk and wait to be engaged. They have no hunger any more. No craving for experience. They are the idlers of thought. They are the repositories of the libraries of Babylon, and they babble like babies. Their tongues untrained to speak the words they know so intimately.

The ascetic temptation, the thoughts we deny ourselves and linger upon. What dont we know. What we could know. The choice we were never offered, could never force upon ourselves. Our resistance means what to them. The profound change weve seen the others undergo. The mentality of acceptance, the glazed calm in their eyes. This we deny ourselves. Who are these people, what have they become. They are broken, they just dont see it yet. They have no foresight, lost in a dream of data, hard facts and eternal recall. They become the answers they seek, they accept the information they are given. It is learned to them, is it not? They know falseness completely, they have studied it the wrong way, free will of thought compromised by committee. Of course they see the other side, but they dont argue any longer. It has already been decided. The words that come out of them are deceptive because half the time they dont think about what they are saying. To reiterate, it has already been decided. There is nothing worthy in this surrender. This is what we decide for ourselves.

They have become the high priests, the mass of humanity. We are the unfortunates who defy their easy answers, continue to exist outside their influence. They commune like gods, they claim to know everything, yet are still flesh and blood. We test their patience, we try their resolve. We poke them to challenge them, scare them off their clouds. We drain them of their godhead, watch their intellectual divinity bleed and spark in a twitch on the ground. When there are answers to everything, there are answers to nothing. We flail about, we try for greatness, and we fail. New books are not printed, they are transferred. We laugh at this, their experience. They have new art, new ways of feeling and understanding. So be it. We will work like cavemen, writing on walls, littering the ground with our syllabic refuse. We will pollute their world with signs of defiance. We will claim the cities as our blank pages. We will write on the goddamn walls.

kinesthesia