krink
by Swim
Oh hai, Readerz. Hai Em and Bruce and the dead (but not for long) Lil Mountain. Hai hai. Maybe you’re one of my OG newsletter subs, or I know you from the IG ruins, our algos touching like quivering quills in the night. Or maybe you’re a member of the group chat that sprung up in the wake of Em’s 9-9 film, a rhizomatic plush puddle to which I was unceremoniously added as just another attendee of the screening. It is only now that the admin True will realize who I really am; an identity I managed to keep hidden despite the frequency and emotional depth of the private messages we exchanged during the last two months. Self-doxxing as Swim in this cold spring, self-doxxing to clear the way for medicine to come in. As is often the case with the extremely well-connected, True had thousands of stack subs but very few, if any, people they could trust when something went wrong. They revealed to me the full extent of their “predicament” that came upon them shortly after attending the screening, a developing situation which I’m afraid has led them to confinement in a place where they will likely not have access to a computer or a phone for some time.
Suffice to say that whenever you read this, I hope you’re getting better. Please know that I think about you often
More specifically, I think about your face. I should have never looked but you asked so sweetly. You didn’t know what you were getting into and I wanted to help. But more on that later. I think. I haven’t posted in a while. There’s a lot to cover, we’ll see how far I get.
I stopped writing and now I started again and although it might seem the same it’s not because I’m different. Before I was writing for individuals, now I’m writing for the Universe. Or more specifically that one person out there who fully gets it. One person who feels me and creates the big bang explosion with their understanding. It took my shit getting purloined, copied, co-opted and melted down into liquid poison (its purist form?) for me to once again realize the true nature of the mission. These posts were meant to be broadcasts, not a book filled with wood pulp filler sentences. They are meant to be an echo from the neighbor’s radio to keep you from going under during these last nights on Earth. They are my heart reaching out to you, but not in a personal, suffocating way. (I don’t know you but my heart does). It’s an action, an urge, descriptions of my immediate surroundings and the thoughts and ideas that came to me in them. It’s like performance art only heavier.
The problem started right away when I got caught up in what it meant. Odious laughs at me for that. I kept thinking and thinking and filling the writing with questions about what the writing was there for and I’ve never been able to catch up. A void opened up and I got sucked in. But now at last Odious is back. They were above me on the window sill where the light is. They appeared as a brownish dot against the over-bright white wall and came gradually into view. We were at their girlfriend’s place (they call her a friend). They twisted their upper body towards the window, so that they had their back to me. I could see a dark stain on their sleeveless Erasurehead tee–whatever injury was on their back had yet to fully heal.
“I learned about it all from the group chat,” I explained, worried that any second they would be gone again. Now that I found them I can’t stop talking.
“It’s quite an impressive social creation. There are hundreds of members and a wide litany of topics, but lately a lot of conversation is about strange dreams and even stranger obsessions. I lurk among the lurkers, who, to quote another member, ‘outnumber posters as the dead outnumber the living.’ True told me that Em is there too. She’s made an art form out of hiding in plain sight. I picture her now at her suite in the Sagamore, the ice blue pool sparkling outside like a looping vaporwave gif as she hunches over the screen in her white Moncler, AC turned to freeze. In her diamond crusted eyeglass frames she sees it all, but unlike a guru she isn’t telling anyone what to do. She reads the rapidly proliferating accounts of madness and hastening disintegration and with a wrinkle of her little button nose chalks it all up to her fave fall bro, Late Stage Capitalism, giving herself permission to thoroughly enjoy the spectacle of niche internet microcelebrities soaking up glamorously evil vibes.
“But here’s the thing: she thinks it’s just art but it’s not. It’s real: something broke through during the screenings. There are cases in which attendees completely disassociated, one even to the point of being institutionalized for suicide ideation, and by this I don’t mean casual statements but the deranged ravings of immediate intent at which time her hands and legs were bound to a kitchen chair. Apparently it started with fuck ups at her marketing gig including incomprehensible ramblings on Zoom followed by delusions and text assaults. She appeared braless and bleary eyed at the neighborhood brutalist cafe, ranting and displaying bad not good bed head and shaky hands as her nitro cold brew stood untouched on the counter.”
“It’s all a part of the process,” Odious said with a bored sigh, as they pitched blue M&M’s into a hole that had opened up in the floor.
“An uncoiling of consciousness–the reintegration of the fractal self. Information systems and cults were created so HeirMax98 could be the glitch that made his way in. We watch Him watching us with his telescope eyes that spin across the sky like flying saucers. Meanwhile, a photo of Rimbaud smoking a cig appears as a place holder over what can’t be perceived. What can’t be known directly, not yet anyway.”
(the M&M’s disappeared without a sound. The hole was so black I wondered if I stood in front of it I’d see my own reflection)
“Not while you’re still human,” they clarified.
“Ok but there were barely audible words whispered during the scene of Em cutting off her fingers. Someone on the group chat figured out that it was the witch’s spell from Macbeth, played backwards to give it that otherworldly twang. Surely this was nothing to be afraid of but I believe there’s more audio under that audio. The recitation of Shakespeare was a tape of a tape (of a tape) in which someone edited in another spell. A far darker one that mixed with Macbeth and the blood letting from the slicing of flesh on the screen. It was all done just to make it scary–extra cursed and lit, but I believe something was summoned, something came through the dull white glare and whirling hum of the projector and expanded like a bullet on glass to touch everyone in the room. Everyone who was present received the subliminal broadcast of a secret spell. I need you to help me find the spell that will let me reverse it.”
“Any spell will work if you believe it will,” they said.
“How?”
“Swan, swan, hummingbird, hurrah we’re all free now.”
“Is that one, is that a spell? Those words that you just said?”
But they didn’t answer, and I realized it was probably just another snippet of song lyrics. Since they came back they whisper them all day and night, along with poetry or memories of old conversations. Sometimes it goes along with whatever it is I’m talking about but usually it doesn’t.
Ok, but hold it up before I go any further I want Em to know this part is for her. We did it, Em. We let him in. I’m here to take the blame and I’m here to define the game, to set it straight this watergate.
You stole the scroll, you stole my words, you stole Cyndi’s cane and her wallet.
You think it’s just a good time, it’s all just art crimes but the truth is you got involved in something for which you were cognitively unprepared. And for which there are consequences.
Just because you can run up the stairs on your own two strong legs doesn’t mean you were able to leave the basement. All Crypts are Connected. Can’t you feel it? That some part of what we found down there attached itself to you energetically and is there with you still?
Please delete the movie. At the very least make sure it’s never shown again.
(at least while we’re still human)
My Dear. My little Bambi-legged deer. Despite how you lied it still pains me to see the questions involving the integrity of what you did and why, of who you work for and who funded the film. @tankgrl followed the money back from the gallery that gave you the cash to the non-profit that gave it to them to the billionaire tech mogul/nazi who gave it to them. XXXXX the one behind XXXX which is prolly also here, reading this too.
Hai hai
As the accusations fell like rain I jumped in to help out in real time, offering the salient analysis that such concerns were the result of a combination of anxiety and excitement over the hidden object of the film–the rapidly approaching extinction that will remove humanity from any future agency.
I mean, how happy and sad are we really to finally reach the time in which we don’t have to do anything anymore? Death drive, bitches. That feeling of waking up and not wanting to… of the vibes being forever off at work.
(In which case why not go to the beach instead?)
btw the same gallery that paid for 9-9 deposits a check each week into my account from which money is autopaid to the rent and food delivery services. Faceless, nameless, meanwhile my mask’s off. The money started appearing the week after Em left.
Someone or something wants me to stay in the city. So that I can take the blame? Run interference and fall into the mountain?
And even now, by daring to write about it, am I spreading it further still?
