Mine was a life full of external links and internal oblivion.

Outside there was html schizophrenia, erogenous email etiquette, transcontinental porn-chat and a continuous flow of digital objects whose pseudo-identities came packaged with a stream of intrusive brand-name logos ready to deplete me of whatever savings I might have accumulated as a defense against the inevitable global economic depression that kept showing me its best poker face.

All of these preprogrammed pseudo-identities, with their chic artificial intelligence and coded sexuality animating 3-D Digital Beings that couldnt lick the piss off my dick, were coming online with a commercial agenda guaranteed to make me and my attachment to all things real and literary, absolutely obsolete. Fortunately for me, I had the ability to completely exile myself from this foreign invasion, to hide out in the bunker of my owner-operated Internal Oblivion, where everything converged in the perpetual flux of a circulation system whose chief mission was the nutritional upkeeping of a personalized theater of cruelty taking place, always taking place, inside.

Inside there was sleep, quick and dark, a numbing narcotic that began to take effect even before my soft cheeks kissed the warm buttocks of my fluffy pillow causing instantaneous dreaming of nothing but sleep itself, the ultimate dream-coverage of an exciting life that no network-anchorman could ever get a handle on, a cellular warming trend that no Weather Channel would try and encapsulate as a perfect day (my sleep was more ideal than the most perfect of days). Mine was a deep, swollen sleep brought on by continuous floods of patchwork code emanating from the stand of linguistic trees that grew out of the blood-soaked soil that enriched my beating heart, which was not so much a heart as it was a place where I always went to sleep and, eventually, awoke.

Sustained by my own biological clock as it played asynchronous music with the composite memory of a timeless psychogeographical sphere flickering in an animal consciousness that drove even my simplest desires to their ultimate decay, I would oftentimes remember how soft my brain actually was and why it was important that my skull was so religiously hard-headed in what it believed in and why it would not let anything close to a virtual reality fix itself in my permanent thoughts.

Somehow I had escaped the war torn ruins of the information landscape, had survived the apocalyptic scorched-earth policy of the media barons whose well-disguised barren fields, scattered with the remains of the herded lumpen, were sardonically being put on the table as intelligent lifes final offer, a last-ditch attempt to get all of the signatories to agree to what amounted to lump sum conformity. In perpetuity. Til death do us part. It was as if we had been invaded by an evil empire located on some distant planet and they were slowly, religiously, killing us with their consensual hallucination.

And all we had to do was lose our individuality, sign our eyes on the multi-dotted lines that, when strung together, formed the colored screens of our monitors, our terminals monitoring our work habits and the things we liked to do.

It was an offer I could refuse.

Copyright © 1999 Mark Amerika