By Max Burbank
01/01/02
The unflinching eye of the
scanning electron microscope makes brutally clear heretofore unrecognized
connections, So obvious now that even the signature gray green, night
vision goggle-like tint lent by the device cannot conceal the Scientific
community's unfortunate but unanimous conclusions.
The long theorized linkage
of UFO cultists; Southern Fried Free Lance Preachers, their veins lit
with snake venom, teased by numerous flaming infected lesions and half
healed puncture wounds, confused by the heredity of an obscene and tangled
family tree more resembling a family bramble patch; Ed Gein; Albert
'The Fisherman' Fish; The Insidious Sax Romer, drops of his sweat so
acidic the keys of his Remington boil at their Touch; Self mutilating
hipsters in search of an identity, offering up tatty bills earned at
the Food Court or in the alley behind it for another ludicrous piercing,
another ridge of scarification, dreaming of the stones to beg for back
alley Ubange lip Plates or neck extending graduated copper rings; Black-market
untranslatable Asian animated pornography of an almost clinical stripe;
Magazines for rare fetishes, shrink wrapped in three packs; Mexican
devil head car fresheners; Antique, crumbling contraceptives purchased
in truck stop washrooms; Amateur Trailer Park Tarantula and Boa Constrictor
enthusiasts, dumping their pets in the dead of night at interstate rest
stops after being failed by zoos and museums and animal rescue leagues
and even the courage to administer euthanasia with a hammer or a burlap
sack; Discovery Channel Addicts pleading with social workers to pay
the cable bill, huffing a solution of hairspray and Spic n' Span out
of a surgical glove, bloodshot eyes glued to 'Walking with Dinosaurs';
Withered, decrepit, tenured, insomniac academicians, prowling basement
storerooms for dimly remembered biological oddities floating in jars
of yellowing formaldehyde; Comic book collectors; Elvis impersonators;
Lonely former teenagers more conversant with the works of S.E.Hinton
than S.E.Hinton herself; Expertly forged Reliquary boxes; Articles hand
torn from the Weekly World News, the tape that once held them to a prison
wall a delicate ivory now; "Cape Fear"; "Cat People"; South American
Wrestling Pictures; QVC; Hassam I' Saddah; "The Necronimicon", A leather
bound copy of the Text of the New York Friar's Club Roast of Aleister
Crowley; A coffee table book on instruments of Torture; A hermetically
sealed bag with a biohazard sticker and the words "Panda Intestines"
penned as if by a Narcoleptic six year old on the white label strip;
A loop tape constantly playing some anonymous, long dead mother prophesying
eyes poked out, the machine now hidden under rotting drifts of the complete
'Newark Star Ledger' and so never to be found or silenced; Brittle 78's
of a Blind Negro singing through split lips, Bels Palsy, broken teeth,
one lung whistling through multiple perforations the other full to bursting
with the granulated remembrance of an apocalyptic dustbowl; The advent
of Cheese in a Can; The Checkers Speech rippling outward toward the
nearest sentient life; A sealed glass tube containing a sample of air
from the Rosenbergh's death chamber; Six squares of linoleum taken from
the Dallas Book Depository; The taxidermied remains of a Weimerauner
Bitch with an unborn twin protruding from it's sternum; Actual posters
advertising Houdini and Barnum and Canned Heat; The ghost of that kid
you knew in Junior High who could fold his eyelids over and they'd stay
that way, who died out at the Quarry cliff diving all goofed up on Boone's
Farm, his sweaty left palm still tingling with the impression of it's
first fevered handful of titty a scant three minutes before death, the
body never found, the Gropee never the same, prematurely aged, her days
now spent sailing an infinite sea of Alzheimer's and the smell of rotting
plaster at a decaying rest home in Tupper Lake New York: Albert Disalvo
allowing people to believe he was the Boston Strangler; The filthy,
poorly stocked Pornographic bookstore at "South of the Border", Popular
Science Essays on the implications of Martian Canals; Badge sashes from
Boy Scouts whose mortal remains lie scattered like stars in distant
Rice Paddies, a poorly faked Police glossy depicting a young cadet holding
Jayne Mansfield's severed head aloft by the bloody tresses; a complete
set of Wacky Package stickers, series #2; A mildew stained H.R. Puff
N' Stuff costume used in the movie acquired in trade from the Second
Unit Director in return for a handful of magic beans; a framed photo
of Barnabus Collins; A Victorian Killing Jar purportedly belonging to
one Alice Liddel for the purposes of Insect Collection and Identification;
Various labeled glass jars containing the hair, fingernails and other
less identifiable genetic samplings of Marie Laveau; twenty-three mint
condition Dr. Midnight Decoder rings; A full bottle of The Moxie Nerve
Food Tonic over one hundred years old; Fatman and Littleboy; A prosthetic
leg with a Rorshach blot of puzzling stains…
Bits and pieces of a puzzle
that when finally assembled form the fingerprint of a contagion from
the last Millennium, still vital and deadly, highly infectious! Passed
through blood, spit, mucus, touch, swimming pool water, air, clinging
tenaciously to even the most carefully wrapped Halloween treats! Mutating
relentlessly, evading detection, gestating for random and wholly unpredictable
periods, resistant to even the most aggressive and risky chemical regimens!
Exposed to intense heat or cold it becomes a spore capable of surviving
indefinitely under conditions including but not limited to the depths
of outer space, when inhaled it blooms once more! Soon the victim experiences
an array of symptoms characterized by blinding ethnic hatreds, obsessive
compulsive disorder, messianic delusions, the Game Show Network, Mayhem,
Murder, Pillage and Death! Early stage sufferers seek each other out
unknowingly, congregating at political events, accident scenes, sports
riots and Star Trek Conventions! Genetic material from multiple highly
individualized manifestations of 'The Complaint' commingles with each
handshake and sneeze…
At first glance a jaundiced
dipsomaniac perishing behind a Seven Eleven in Klamath Falls Oregon
reveals himself to be a missing former Scientist Now on Wheels. A consuming
fever of 128 degrees Fahrenheit makes the 'Old Gent' unapproachable
by even the most dedicated Samaritan, but case notes engraved on the
sheltering dumpster beside which he will die (using a stylus ingeniously
fashioned from a broken automobile antenna) offer some faint ray of
hope… until it becomes clear that in his final insanity the shockingly
reduced Nobel Laureate believed himself to be Frederick Wertham.
A great shuffling of the
deck long underway but only now detected proceeds. According to the
unique fractal web of our neurons, we variously nail the doors shut,
hide ourselves away in lead lined bunkers, Comandeer commercial airlines,
assume the directorship of recently vacated religious communications
networks, sell our children to the crusades or for their organs, embark
on potentially dangerous liquid diets, smoke unfiltered camels through
unhealed tracheotomy wounds, 'surf' the 'internet', and otherwise engage
in practices which mimic the disease so effectively the afflicted and
the clean cannot separate themselves or even know which uniform they
wear themselves, but the truth of our arrogance can no longer be avoided.
That great geolic Tabloid, The Cambrian Shale, heralded the news in
18 point type on every page but its asymmetric invertebrate readership
while nodding sagely, assumed like us, they were immune.
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