io

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20211203152904/http://ioamemoir.com/

<img src="https://static.wixstatic.com/media/44e361_56c647c31a564a079d6b603aab05ec0d~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_456,h_606,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/unnamed.webp"> i/o a memoir by brian oliu C:\>[[read.me]]

On The Translation Brian Oliu believed something, once. Nothing is known of his life. BRIAN OLIU presents us with a translation of Brian Oliu’s best-loved. He currently resides elsewhere. C:/>[[setup.exe]]

C:\> setup.exe . .. 2 file(s) extracted C:\>dir Volume in drive C is Brian Oliu Volume Serial Number is 2211-20E6 Directory of C:\ 11/22/1982 10:30a 821,122,110 O.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 README.TXT 2 File(s) 821,122,125 bytes 1 Dir(s) 2,672,475,935 bytes free C:\> [[readme.txt]]

C:\> readme.txt -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FILES CONTAINED IN THIS PACKAGE readme.txt o.exe (SELF-EXTRACTING EXE) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THE VIRUS CONTAINED IN THIS PACKAGE Cryptovirologists believed that a single man whom they named “O” composed the O virus. Nothing is known of his life aside from the details provided within the virus itself, and at times this information seems to represent a glorified ideal and therefore cannot be regarded as truth. Classical antiquity theorists believe that “O” is a fictitious construction, and is simply a label representing generations of rhapsodes. Undeniably, the construct of the virus as well as the construct of the alleged author(s) parallels that of Homer, and thus any discussion of authorship of the O virus is subject to the same puzzles presented within the Homeric Question. Is “O” an amalgamation of multiple programmers with different viewpoints as theorized about the Iliad and Odyssey in accordance to the teachings of Karl Lachmann and F.A. Wolf? Or is the virus the work of one single entity, as believed by the Unitarian camp and Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch? While there is debate regarding the point of origin of the virus, research places the site of the first infection in the northeast United States. The date of the first infection is undocumented as well, though thorough analysis places the composition of the virus in late November of 1982. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THE INFORMATION SECURITY ANALYSIST Brian Oliu is considered the world’s leading specialist on O, and has covered this particular computer contaminant since its infection. Oliu believes that “O” is a symbol, a representative of a cyclical nature and entrapment, an endless follower capturing nothing, nullset, zero, homêros. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS for my parents -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHANGELOG **NOTE** THIS IS TEXT FROM THE ORIGINAL README FILE BUNDLED WITH THE FIRST O VIRUS DOCUMENTING THE VARIOUS STAGES AND INCARNATIONS OF THE PROGRAM BEFORE PUBLIC RELEASE ON 11/22/1982. NO CHANGES HAVE BEEN MADE TO THE TEXT **NOTE** Pre-Alpha: Determination via committee (or absolutist) as to how the program will function: what it can and cannot do. It is here we being begin compiling. Alpha: Vigorous testing: sending prompts through nodes like envious “Where are you?”s through CMDA networks. All questions are internal, yet visible by some: a terrarium. But then again, who are we to throw competent level correctness in another woman’s glass house? Beta: All features frozen as we progress to the end of iteration. Source code may only be changed in case of error or bug. The beta encompasses the real, the irrational, the transcendental, the Euclidean space, the complex, the empowered, and all sequences of all. It is produced by constricting and the pushing forward of carbon dioxide. Final features: * Data-aware forms, a sense of knowing what is put into each running instance, an inevitability of what is to come to pass * Form Designer's Data Source Pane for assigning data source to forms. Object tree view for easier navigating within hierarchy, a hierarchy never quite understood, as there is something to be said about playing street hockey on sacred ground; missing goals and bouncing plastic orange balls off of headstones * Export data to CSV files and copying tabular data to clipboard and there are things committed to memory that were never put there by us, but placed there for us. Automatic detection of delimiters and column types * Improved server connection dialog. Only established after the death of others: cousin, grandfather, goldfish Stored connection data * Support for images in forms (stored as BLOBs) burning bushes, crosses, tattoos of crosses, Mary in Wonderbread, Mary in Wonderbras, Mary, cupcakes and pillars of salt * New widgets: multiline editor as there are twenty-two different paths being forged, all leading to one place, perhaps * Improved Access (MDB) file import (optional plugin) * Improved import of server databases to a file-based projects, there is a belief that this, all of this, is simply a test, that there are numbers checked with corresponding letters, and gods forgive you if they don’t match up * More than two hundreds of overall improvements and bug fixes. * More verbose error messages: Error messages and result numbers can be now inherited, so less information will be lost while displaying message e.g. on failed openings of intentions, kind gestures that are more than kind gestures * Generate cleaner query statements e.g. Why? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INSTALLATION **WARNING** THIS VIRUS IS TO BE USED FOR EDUCATIONAL AND RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY **WARNING** DO NOT INSTALL ON MACHINES WHOSE CHIEF PURPOSE IS TO OPERATE NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE SYSTEM COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE **WARNING** BY INSTALLING THIS PROGRAM YOU ARE SUBJECTING YOUR COMPUTER TO MALWARE THAT COULD BE DETRIMENTAL TO YOUR SYSTEM **WARNING** While the code is not intended to be malicious, the boot sector of your system will be moved to a hidden sector and replaced with O until the virus reaches its halting set. It is undetermined at this point if the halting problem exists (for further info, see Turing’s 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”), and therefore it is possible that O will loop endlessly, thus rendering your current system useless. Oliu credits this to recursion: the concept where the function being defined is applied within its own definition (see readme.txt), or, more specifically, the phenomena of the mise en abyme, popularized by the famed Dutch brand of cocoa, Droste, in which the image depicted on the cocoa box is a nun carrying the same box in which she is featured on. The idea, Oliu states, is that the image will keep repeating itself either forever (infinite recursion) or until the resolution of the image is copied into exhaustion in which the box will no longer exist and the process will stop altogether (busy-wait loop). While Oliu spent a significant amount of time in the Low Countries, this concept was not introduced to him by said product, rather a time he spent standing nude in his bedroom with one mirror facing his chest and the other facing his back; the world around him immediately expanding exponentially with Oliu filling the void created from the creation of infinity, his body being replicated forever, turning him into an endless deity, or shrinking his dripping physical and astral self into oblivion, or worse. In the case of the latter, the effects of the program are irreversible and similar to the partitioning of a disk; if one chooses to eliminate the split, only a partition’s table entry is deleted, and the fractions will exist until a complete rewrite of the drive. TO INSTALL: 1. Run o.exe on your machine. 2. When prompted to install, choose ‘Yes’ **NOTE** o.exe is an archived file. Upon extraction, multiple files will be created and placed on your harddisk. Some of these extracted files are archived files. Upon extraction of these archived files, multiple files will be created and placed on your harddisk. Some of these extracted files are archived files. To see an index of the files extracted, view your directory (dir at the command prompt for most systems with default settings) after running the self-extracting executable. COPYING Copying or modifying this code for any purpose is permitted, provided that this copyright notice is preserved in its entirety in all copies or modifications. Copying or modifying this code for any purpose is inconsequential, as the files included in this package are read-only and all modifications will revert to the original code upon the presentation of the next string of variables. This virus is considered to be metamorphic; all changes come from within. By choosing to infect your system with the O virus, you are acknowledging that parameters are being set that must be carried out in their entirety, like the unfolding of an orange flower or an execution. BUGS A stout Unitarian (at least in regards to the question of Homeric Scholarship), Oliu believes that “O” at all costs be hallowed as the great and original genius and a true Romantic artist; all things viral and harmful were included with purpose and all alleged “errors” were crafted meticulously. Oliu believes that instances of alleged interpolation are simply a result of the author’s own shortcomings in regards to insufficient memory or improper data recollection. C:\>[[o.exe]]

C:\> o.exe Welcome to the O self-extracting executable! Run install file upon extraction? ([[Y]]/N)

Y Extracting… If you could believe that this is how it begins, with extraction. If you could believe that this is how it begins with the forcing of large seeds spit from a core, the pulling up of a sun from stone, water from stone, fire from stone, mountains, invisible lines formed by trompe l’oeil, the pulling out of a god from the head of a god that was pulled out of chaos, of nothing and everything, of swirling lines of the antithetical concept and conception of the cosmos, to pull from the primal emptiness of a black or green screen something beyond the constraints of white or green glyphs on a page, pulsating doting dots and victimless time. If you could believe that this is how it begins, with a key to the complex causality of events, that this is a deterministic system that hides between swings of fate’s blade and the inevitable decompression of a series of items meant to exist beyond what is presented and what exists somewhere, in the end-user, in the cryptovirologist, in O, in you, in O, in you. If you could believe that on November 22 1982 the first payload hit somewhere in a grey photographed hospital room that was never photographed, no cameras, despite aunts quitting jobs behind checkout scanners, despite aunts who constantly feel the need to document, printscrn, kiss the world on its fat cheek and leave a lipstick mark for those to see later, to be placed in mahogany frames leading up staircases, to be placed near the top step to represent the first, watching the descent and passing through time with each step on carpet runner, watching faces and ties of yesterdays instead of slippery feet flipping children over until landing on the landing with one sock off and a welt the size of a diagram of a favorite planet, the lump reminding you, us, of a breached child being pulled out by its arm, shredding nerves and making the body forget the twist or the curl on the right-side. If you could believe that there were no cameras, no mark of what occurred and what is about to occur, you would be right to fear the placing of smaller items into folds and folders, you would be right to fear the process. If you could believe that it would all be ruined somehow, either through force or through cataloging, then you would believe this, all of this to carry some weight of truth, some heft beyond the carrying of rust and growth and overgrowth of years spent absorbing things outside yet inside; something both larger and smaller than one’s self. This is how technology and you and I and there have drifted; the desire to put more into smaller things, to crunch, crush, and raster in search for a resolution, the spreading of air, plates both tectonic and served at meals where we would sit across from each other or at a right angle, water glasses filled with reckless abandon like storms in water glasses, teacups, even, though the water encompassed by glass was not heated, cold, cold from a cold sink, processed from water elsewhere, plants elsewhere, and brought here, cold. We crash our crystal-capsized ships together, ringing true like it once was, delicately. We guide the water away from our lungs to our bellies where we warm, absorb. We remember this, not the water, not the process, but the future we promised in the past, and how we got from there to here, to elsewhere, to here, where elsewhere is. So sing, toast to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course by time and again like failed circuits with no stops. But he could not save all things prior and ultra from disaster, hard as he strove— the recklessness of old ways, bloated processes filled with starts never begun. Sing? ([[Y ]]/ N)

And when you die, after the oboloi, they will ask you one question. C:\> C:\>[[dir]]

C:\>dir Volume in drive C is Brian Oliu Volume Serial Number is 2211-20E6 Directory of C:\ 11/22/1982 10:30a 821,122,110 1.EXE 1 File(s) 821,122,125 bytes 1 Dir(s) 2,672,475,935 bytes free C:\>[[1.exe]]

Someone, somewhere, missed you. When viewing time as a number, it seems small; to see the number 4071, one has to think if this date has occurred as of yet, which it has not. When we see a number such as 1982, we automatically ascribe a date to it; it will never function as the amount of low and high-backed chairs, filled with black fingernailed men awaiting ripped meat and sex, their hands outreached as water is poured over them. We see transportation in an unlucky city implode through the air and across thick flat ground on the same morning. We see the day nine planets align on the same side of the sun. We see days bring more of these things, the alignment of things and the misalignment of others, as we see the importance of planets, circles that we are sorry for, the awareness of life only after cutting us in half near the trunk, counting out then in, in then out to go over the miscounting of orbits, years skipped over and forgotten as the lines in the cross-section blur, lateral meristems feeding on each other, a thousand plateaus as we become arborescent. The opacity of smoke decreases with every swirl as the plane of immanence cuts emits matter in random motion, numbers projected onto screens in front of lovers and men with their shoes off and ice melting inside and out, counting down patterns of distance underneath a child’s toy avatar earned solely from being young. But remember the numbers, remember that if you set the refraction of light, things, whatever to a certain level of thinness, thickness, (height not important if x is equal to x, the endless of trajectory of things, wheels) this is where I will be; bright red dawn too obvious, certainly, but slow-moving, much slower than I perceive to be. I am furious violent coming in like a quickness, like an uncommon cold, virus, like the dry scratch at the back of mouths after falling asleep, head against plastic against doubled plastic against air never touched by human hands or converted to waste by human lunges and lungs. I must start somewhere and end elsewhere, the idea of me fading into nothing is something never considered, to spread and dissolve like trails of white, like aspirin in the bottom of an illegal plastic bottle, yet with no fizz of foam or a changing of the make-up of the substance submerged in. All of this permanence brings me to you, an end-stop of end-stops, man in a blue suit with gold tassels and a voice on the other end. At some point you blink as I enter open wounds, subject to visions of scant things and all sins that come from sight, the necessity to see green dials spinning (or so I’ve heard, I have none of your training or your rewards, her), to see which switch to flip when instinct isn’t part of an or the equation, to see rose red dawn rising just before the hours come in sixteens caused by rain and diluted fuel. I can see for a second what you have planned, what words you love to lick off of her tongue, long Os and the father-bother merger, what anger there is at process and how this whole thing works, the unlikeliness of getting from x to x to y in less time than seems possible, an hour lost here, a day lost there. This, this here is proof that I can do it faster, and you, you envy me. You turn away turn to her and turn me in before she remembers I’m gone. C:\>[[1.exe -p]]

Someone, elsewhere, misses you. But believe that this is not their story. Someone, elsewhere, doesn’t miss you at all. But believe that this is not their story either. Someone, elsewhere, is fighting for your good name, saying the right things at cookouts and catch-up sessions at salad bars between old friends, knowing that you’re gone without being reminded by the mention of your name, telling stories of dark-wooden land-locked islands with the hopes that a daughter of Atlas keeps your belly full with pork and your good heart spellbound. Elsewhere, all is settled. After the wars and waves, children are being born, the combination of blood and fat, images from inside wombs of women who took showers directly above you, bell voices hitting notes of divinity, songs performed at late Sunday church services, long after extended mornings of dehydration and the failure of globe artichoke remedies, we all sing along. Perhaps this is why I am lost; the shrinking away of the central brain from the skull, the rejection of security and the loss of all water, tongue dried out and lifeless with the inability to sing of sacrifice, the guilt of not being able to face the sun and sundresses and to dip my hands in the purification process. Perhaps this is why, elsewhere, I am suspended in what I have expelled; wishing the yellow-toned child seen through remote procedure dryness soon. Someone, elsewhere, is trying to find you. This was formerly and formally done prior with BackRubs, before equations of 10 to the 100th changed our viewpoint on things, I the 1 in front of a hundred zeroes. Nothing has changed since then aside from voices pitch-shifted and auto-tuned to more solid sounds than you once recognized them when they taunted you from afar, soiled the name of both you and your father and your father’s father, (I recognize the cluster of vowels is not easy to pronounce, the tongue hoping for the repetition of an “O” rather than the curling purr of a “U”), the jumbling of letters, the terror in anything foreign or non-Corsican, because home is the garden state, after all, and these are the sons and daughters of tomatoes and basil, where Verrazano-Hudson marriage announcements make back pages of newspapers next to the fat faces of small children and dead investment bankers who moved to the area in the late 1960s, long before I was lost and long before someone tried to find me, first through police blotters and drug charges, then various states of morning dress through limerence. Names and memories of lost causes are surrounded with quotation marks as if instead of requesting to search for all of the items within the punctuation, it is something muttered under breath, my name, Brian Oliu, becoming quotable as if it were an expression of self-doubt only understood within the confines of inverted commas. On days on which I appear forgotten by the Gods, I am found in small pieces; a jumble of words here, an automated message there come clear through the deepweb, memories of me breaking noses in cafeteria lines or failing gymnasium endurance tests, cupcakes on birthdays, invasive surgeries, STOP Enough. Tell me about yourself now, clearly, point by point. Who are you? Where are you from? Your City? Your Parents? What sort of vessel brought you? Why are you here? Who did they say they are? Tell me this for a fact—I need to know—is this your first time here? Or are you a friend of a father long dead, a guest from the old days? Once, crowds of other men would come to our house on visits, registering views and analyzing data, forming maps of heated interest, never too exact, registering miles away where the server has been rerouted, vessels, systems of operations, trends and loyalty, all goals benchmarked. END C:\> C:\> [[1.exe -diagnostic]]

This whole story is a lie. All numbers have been masked, no ringback, all digits restricted or re-routed through somewhere that may or may not exist. Listen to those who prophesize before you, the one who does not know the flights of birds; I will not be gone long from where I love and I am never at a loss. I will return to burn where I love and all of my losses, the laying of hands and the laying of hands, the promises of a blood wedding. Find me regardless. C:\>[[dir ]]

C:\>dir Volume in drive C is Brian Oliu Volume Serial Number is 2211-20E6 Directory of C:\ 11/22/1982 10:30a 821,122,110 2.EXE 1 File(s) 821,122,125 bytes 1 Dir(s) 2,672,475,935 bytes free C:\>[[2.exe]]

When young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more as it often shines, reflecting and bouncing off water to answer the age-old question asked by second-graders in science classes as they learn about the properties of solids, liquids, and gases, and how, scientifically, they exist, and why the earth must be treated with respect and then eaten to give us the energy to play outside with much larger children or risk sitting in classrooms of concerned teachers who call concerned parents about the social concerns of the child, how most children ask questions about swords, extra milk, and favorite sporting events where this child, the concerned child with whom all is concerned asks questions like “why is the sky blue?” and “why am I sad all of the time?”, two questions which are easily answered through reflection and reflection; it is because of all of the water in the world. When young Dawn with her rose-red fingers called for a voice of reason, the child dreamed of the day he could address the masses, and when old men whose fathers had been killed by monsters the child was afraid of, he would bless whomever it was that would lead them, he would be the one blessed. ERROR I have created this for you, all for you. Before hands lost their grip on hand made rafts made of shattered splintered wood and underwater ropes, after the locking of granular bases, sand in mesh pockets, thighs silted, the exploitation of the hierarchical nature of the contains relationship and the locking of a node tree and its descendants, all numbers and children locked, intentions shared and exclusive. You were the null lock, compatible with all, exclusive to none, held by all. There were three dimensions to everything, three like the sides of the Devil’s Triangle, the assimilation of the cube into the concept of something that one of us could possibly entertain or ascertain, the only thing that we all must know is that sparsity is overcome, all 0s representing nothing, all things other showing up as crunched bitmaps, even the false-non-zeros. FENCE-POST-ERROR...WORK AROUND? ([[Y/N]])

To take the thirty days in April and summarize them to represent the first quarter of a year and summarize the first quarter to represent an entire year lost to lost data, to bloat weeks with salt water, to take individual shoulders and various soups and oranges to create something larger to represent something smaller, much much smaller than how it is perceived, to take the loss of a few inconsequential numbers (they would evaporate when they are on the other side of the equal sign in the algorithm) and turn it into something resembling a mutiny, to do all of this seems juvenile. [[OFF-BY-ONE ERROR...WORK AROUND? (Y/N)]]

But then again, building a city out of outdated souvenir technology seems childish too; to assemble a multi-colored defragmatized building breaking both y and x-axis, to create a virtual earth. I start with the center of the Commonwealth, 89.6 square miles. I start with the tallest building; I put my signature on it. If you rotate the y-axis, if you change the coal-black pointer to a grasping hand, you can see the which windows I chose to keep dark emulating an empty apartment, and which ones have lights on, power bills running up from too many electronics sending stop-and-go commands. THIS PROGRAM IS NOT RESPONDING...IN EARLY 2007, CREATOR OF THE TERRASERVER AND SKYSERVER, FRIEND OF US AND YOU ALIKE WAS REPORTED MISSING BY THE UNITED STATES COAST GUARD. [[PLEASE FIND HIM??? (Y/N)]]

I send flashing reflecting lights down to report back to where I can build, provided that all I build is taller than 60 cm; anything less can never be seen. THIS PROGRAM IS NOT RESPONDING...IN EARLY 2007, WAS SAILING NEAR THE IUCN CATEGORY IV FARALLON ISLANDS NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE COORDINATES 37°41′53.88″N 123°0′5.76″W PLEASE SEND HELP... I understand your privacy concerns, but the things that I create are no different from what can be seen by anyone who flies over or drives by a specific location. I create small cars circling circles, but wonder who is THIS PROGRAM IS NOT RESPONDING... WAS SCATTERING HIS MOTHER’S ASHES WHEN HIS 40-FOOT YACHT, TENACIOUS, WAS REPORTED MISSING ON JANUARY 28, 2007. HOW COULD YOU GIVE UP ON HIM? driving them; uncertain as to where they are driving to; if they leave the 89.6 things become more blurred. I do not know where they are going. I build landmarks, name streets after dead people I never knew and who never knew me. We go from calypso to discovery to endeavour, to spaceland, to falcon, to Gemini, the final step the replication of things, to mirror the cube perfectly to create perfect representations of perfect buildings. Oh, if only you could see what the world you started has become! I AM THE SON AND THE FATHER; I AM THE SEARCHER AND THE LOST. TO UNDERSTAND MY STORY YOU MUST UNDERSTAND WHY MY STORY IS TOLD. YOU ARE HERE BECAUSE OF ME. FOR TIME EXISTED BEFORE THIS STORY AND FATHERS AND SONS EXISTED WELL BEFORE YOU. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR ANCESTORS SURVIVED SO THAT YOU COULD LIVE; THEY AVOIDED ARROWS, DUELS, ACTS OF GOD AND SELFISH ACTS OF MAN SO YOU CAN LIVE AND FIND ME. THE ODDS OF THIS ARE ASTROLOGICAL. The inward bend of the utility lines damaged the trinity. When winds reach 45 mph windowpanes detach from the center of the center and crash to the ground. Lights change from #000000 to #FFFFFF when winds reach 45 mph to prevent nausea. I am the only one that survived. This is my story. This is my story. This is my story. This is my story. Of course, this story has something to do with love. Love of an idea, love of a past, love of a past idea and ideal, some kind of bird, a web of a face, a face surrounded by concepts that are not my own, faces that are not my own, men that I have never met, or have not seen in quite some time, their bodies stretched, hair darkened, the same men that pushed my face into the fountain as a child, bruising my right eye on the cold sweating spigot as they counted numbers quickly backwards to zero so they could have their turn to hydrate, something they never needed as much as I did; their hearts dusty, they had to be. Later, much later than now, I will return armed with this, myself, and only myself. This is where it would end, and this is where you are fully aware that it would end, with burst open plastic like a too-ripe melon, a massive blow-out, the reverse of convex. Some call it flowering, others trauma, but that’s the way it goes and goes, falling backwards like a domino on a gilded table runner on my grandmother’s dinner table where my great-grandfather would sit for years at a time. I would occasionally eat ham with him (on occasion), and occasionally potatoes on the occasion, which quite often was my presence on that peninsula (separate from my own). All guidance from his words and eyes came at your own expense; trust him with socks and you’ll trip over your own feet; the blisters from the beige carpet as a raspberry reminder. Yet speed and slight-of-hand lose their grande-vitesse, fingers slowed down to single digits, hands shaking and uneasy like an anti-virus first line of defense from too many cattle driven, sleep activated by zero movement due to too many nights watched over, input slow moving from busy orange to ready green from lucid to lucid transfers, arms weak, no gestures to accompany the logios as a result of dealing knuckle down crosses. He was the only southpaw I knew, and the left hook let you know it. I got that from him, and you, you beggar king got it from me. You, rainbow messenger, heard half of it from your bastardized namesake on some land-line, no doubt; cracked jaws, concussions after chorus lines, myself crying in a library parking lot, encyclopedias marked with pieces of paper like a well-cooked steak, turning of phrase with a fractured hand. I’d like to say that it was all for some kind of bird, shell-topped shoes and costume parties, promised dinners, little brother heroism, some link between elsewhere and creatures that spit and eat the wind and somewhere close by and tangible, the passcode between doorjambs, but it wasn’t. I am the inverse of the perfect fat road apple; the bolo punch to the Philly crab. I could have killed you, but I didn’t. I could have killed you. I couldn’t have killed you then, but I could have killed you later, much later than now. I could have killed you, but I let you live with a broken face, your blood drawing rose red lines on my fingers. Yes, this is what will happen later, much later than now, because as it stands, you can’t even imagine me returning, walking through the wet grass as the water soaks through my sandals, red welts forming under and over skin, my body too sensitive for this state, but know that looking forward and then looking back, I should have killed you. Hear what I have to say. This all has something to do with anger, anger misplaced, worlds away, dead or alive. Hear what I have to say. Never let anyone be kind and gentle now, not with all hearts or all justice. Let him be cruel and always practice outrage. Not one of the people remembers me, except when telling themselves that I’ll come home no more. I won’t even give you the chance to remember; for when I return I am disguised by the lack of communication, my identity quieted by zero information despite voices handed over cell sites, efficiently spectral, the architecture layered like cryptic comments promising sooner than later while unseen behind the mask of technology and re-routed IP addresses, praying that numbers and dots affixed to them will not give away my location, that it is plausible to see through my bright-eyes (there is a god who made this plan) that the static addressing is too static and cannot move, its feet and traceroute with a definitive time to live as the sun sank. We must ready the ships, ready the ships now, ready the ships, I follow you to the water, ready the ships, ready them now, ready the [[ERROR]]

AN OLDER VERSION OF THIS FILE ILIAD.EXE ALREADY EXISTS (11/22/1982 WHEN YOU WERE JUST A CHILD, A CATALOGING OF SHIPS AND THE ASSEMBLING OF MEN. BACK THEN WHEN THERE WAS A WAR TO FIGHT NOT WHEN THERE WAS A WARRIOR TO FIND WE ALL JOINED IN WE WILL JOIN YOU TO DELETE BUT NOT TO RESTORE) DO YOU WISH TO RENAME, OVERWRITE OR CANCEL? CANCEL C:\> C:\>[[iliad.exe]]

<”You fool brian oliu; obey the commands of others, your superiors, you. You deserter, leaving full stops anything but fully stopped, word wrapped and open brackets, processes signaling not a sequence of changes, but a sequence of monotony, an exercise in stillness, entropy through muscles seizing and ceasing you count for nothing (no y, y is not equal to x) neither in war nor council and the present king of Troy is bald” You understand that we know nothing, yes/no/cancel? You understand that we are the observers and lusers, dependent on tree views and child windows, blissfully unaware of the precursor, yes/no/cancel? Sing, sing in MEM, yet we all know that access is not random, yes/no/cancel? Yet we try to decipher ciphers and still yet all I am left with is ephemerides. First came the Alabamian units tout-suite with a pejorative pat on the head. /* Allocate space for an array with ten elements of type int. */ int *ptr = malloc(10 * sizeof (int)); if (ptr == NULL) { /* Memory could not be allocated, so print an error and exit. */ fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't allocate memory\n"); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } /* Allocation succeeded. */ because I will let you go there by yourself, even though it makes no rational sense. Why would one want to leave the command of commonality and the center fixed point of isometry groups in Euclidean space of the (not a) megalopolis? !There is nothing here for you except empty packets! This is a common misconception. The top of the hill is on pins without leads, so we settle on towns green with overgrowth and electric fans, Dionysian malt liquor in cans, not bottles. It is here where I dance rings, in partibus infidelium. 300 to 399 Then men who lived in New Jersey, carnivores and resource eaters, ones who were fighters once. 400 to 499 Before she disassembled peripherals: soundcards, homerows, Gorodnichy’s HCI, causing me to tie hands around my neck, she made me sacrifice a hecatomb over the span of 2.5 years, leaving me only with barley meal. 900 to 999 Long after the disconnection of wires, shortly after making love with the god of my war in secret, my strength remained ironless, without zinc. 1400 to 1499 And once where there once was magnetic pull, there was static. Then Pisteos and Syllogismos led Brian Oliu, son of Brian Oliu, heart of Brian Oliu, mountainous Brian Oliu, sacred Brian Oliu, Brian Oliu who is forced to mourn the deaths of mothers, fathers, cubs, sons, daughters, to drown in seas and in stars, sprout claws like an asterisk, only to resurface rebooted in a fountain of their bones. Next the Catalonians led by sluggish Brian Oliu, son of Olius, from the Osona village of Olius, is larger than his father and his father’s father. This is cause for concern. As technology advances, we take up less space: centerpieces on desks rather than corners of rooms. oliu v.1.923, oliu v.1.958, oliu v.1.982. Each version is less powerful than the last; the throwing of rocks into wheel barrows to save gardens, the throwing of rocks into wheel barrows to build houses, the throwing of footballs to accomplish nothing. God only knows what the next stage of the product life cycle will be; a child the size of a delightful town with arms like a snowman. And the men who held the hands of women who held the cells which held the virus which held the cells which held the woman which held the family which held the men who held a knife who held the key to figure all of this out, I can do this, I can hold the transubstantiation of all of this, to cut you, to hold you responsible for viruses holding cells holding my mother holding my father holding me hostage. Next the men who held the strong-built self, those who worship the assembling of syntax and autonomous kernel code, the long dormant loophole, the cryptovirology used to find open ports, the plan above all else. Yet when it is time to attack, to exist, our function serves as a masquerade, and we remain in the background shivering. Out of Trenton Great Edwardian Abexo, centaur-trained, embodier of perseverance, stronger than data, no scratches: two lines of 8-bit code .hlp file missing or corrupted. DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE? (Y/[[N]])

DO YOU WISH TO OVERWRITE ([[Yes]]/No)

THE FILE YOU ARE REPLACING (ILIIAD.EXE 11/22/1982 WHEN YOU WERE JUST A CHILD, A CATALOGING OF SHIPS AND THE ASSEMBLING OF MEN. BACK THEN WHEN THERE WAS A WAR TO FIGHT NOT WHEN THERE WAS A WARRIOR TO FIND WE ALL JOINED IN WE WILL JOIN YOU TO DELETE BUT NOT TO RESTORE) IS A SYSTEM FILE AND MAY BE INTEGRAL TO THE PERFORMANCE OF ALL OTHER THINGS YOU CANNOT REWRITE YOUR PAST AND PAST WARS DO YOU WISH TO REWRITE YOUR PAST AND PAST WARS [[(Y/N)]]

Y Overwriting… All things migratory]]] like grey and white pigeons! carefully pawing the grey and white and yellow lines /// designating where aircraft are supposed to go after travel. If I could understand how things worked in the water that now collects under white wheels, if there were lines ---- and coordinates (40) in sand and silt or if salt water was as malleable as it seems, bending to the will of the unlikely machine with a beautiful girl in blue and gold from some island, pointing at plastic, new to this world as she recites emergency procedures from an index card while a red-armed man uses the optical zoom to take a digital imprint as if he is her father and it is her birthday, his hand shaking with age as he presses his thumb into a button like a thumb presses into softened soap. The captain, which is equal parts me and not me is no longer automated, he says, I say, as doors once closed re-open (the man stops taking photographs) and I am reminded of the part where another girl, a different girl, was being accosted by suitors more traveled than me, seemingly, her returned from my grandfather’s home where another girl, a different girl, had left me, removed from her elsewhere, stuck in my elsewhere while resting half her face on a gold bag while I look behind me and see a child hanging upside down behind me telling me this is the longest he has ever waited, as the cold turns warm as generators fail. . .. … This is how we get from point I to point O, powerless] to the listing of days 123 and ships 123 and the coming up upon blinking eyes and squares and saviors, but for the sake of disk space and the copying and costly pasting of parts and penelopes, the gaps will be filled with abbreviations taking the place of waves, air, nausea, and the other. And thus the ship went plunging all night long and through the dawn. [[DONE.]]

C:\>[[tiresias.exe]]

Hello. We are the kking of kkings. Do you want to hear a [[story]]? (Y/N)

As the sun sprang up, leaving the brilliant waters in its wake, I am the mortal man on the plowland, ripe with grain and insects, concerning myself with the idea of sacrifice, the killing of the sleek bull to the God that will eventually put me here, the old version never sung about at Saturday evening mass, after the Catholic football worship and broken ceiling fans from exaltations, prayers answered before the cruel water god reminds us, puts it all into context and pretends the score never happened, the phantom push, the broken bulb that I would have shattered myself if I were tall enough yet, the broken bulb that I shatter now, all day, everyday. This is the god of penalties and penalty, the god of this place and accounts read when I was in school, about how they used to think about the love of others and higher beings, the love out of fear, that one day the fingers will close over the palm with us inside, unable to breathe as we all sit and plead in darkness. The god of prayer circles after neck stabilizers, hard drive crashes, and any and all things damaged. We like to think that this god has changed, gotten married and understands what it is like to sleep next to someone and punch noses until they crack, that this is not the god of years past, this is the god of block parties in parking lots and white icing in lobbies, wishing for the lessons to end so I could gather my winter coat and peel the paper from the cake. The body lacks sugar. The body has no binding agent. All traditions must be kept alive after the fall of Rome. Someone somewhere remembers that this is not the god of these tiled floors and third-grade teachers giving Christmas kisses on cheeks, this is the god of water, the brilliance of waves of lives left on riverbanks or leeches shaking violently from meals. We think nothing like these creatures, we are forcefed memories until we explode in a fizzle of red dresses and cartoon, the risk of falling off of hosts like the palmetto bugs that run across my ceiling some nights, an invasion for the purpose of sanctuary, to escape the coldness as I once did, the turning of leaves and lives, to firmly believe that being slashed at by weapons of man held by creatures of gods was something of necessity, that there was honor in leaving, once, a purpose. Don’t be afraid to transplant yourself, O, there are people who have been ridiculed in their own corner of the world, mine a rugged corner with silt instead of clay, a quicker slide, certainly, bodies giving way and falling before the foot realizes it is off the ground. Here, wherever here is, things stick like burnt batter in black pans, black steel not needing to be seasoned before use, no sacrifice of animal fat or chemicals used to coat valves and seals to prevent nuclear fission and a non-sanctioned apocalypse. Home, underneath my feet, exists only in memory and memoriam, as fate does. Remember when we were fated? Now I am born and reared without the gods’ good will. Let us pray. There is no lying to be done; it is impossible to lie to advancements to technology, safe-guards in risk-management ask that all things entered and sent must be truth. We neglect to input things of utmost importance to keep ourselves stable with no fear of dipping the mercury in ice while the city burns to sleep. There is nothing left to be lied about, just things that are cleverly left unreported, the secrets of our heart and the futures of families can be hidden from the question of truth. You pray, and I follow suit. I try to tell the truth when I pray, but all is heard. I correct and re-correct, asking permission for things sinful and inconsequential, apologizing when I use the wrong words in silence. I light candles on my journey, place cold coins into metal boxes, light matches to bring fire to your many places, each cylinder of warmed wax a set of instructions and a list of demands. What is left to be lied about? The putting on of clothes and airs while we stare at watered cheeks, kissing watered cheeks as they move to the right, all sorry for our losses, the scent of sweet smelling perfumes and stay away from the water away from the water and the putting on of clothes and forgetting how to tie a tie at the most important juncture of things with bodies being burned soon the thought of our rapid black ship splintering I can’t imagine how you looked dead, processes removed looking smaller than I imagined being able to say goodbye to something that represents something larger, perhaps, but I am uncertain and I am sorry so sorry for whatever this is, this asking of truth and the running of processes the halting of processes please remember that I am trying to be honest despite wishing for hail maries and verticals and sex and water and death and C:\> C:\>[[restart]]

I’m not perfect. Greater than is less than greater than! As you can see this document, you may know what this program is. But I must tell you: DO NOT TRY to WRITE ANY VACCINE against THIS VIRUS.This is a test-program, the real dangerous code (combines Disk Killer & Dark Friday) will be implemented before long.I use MASM to generate various virus easily and it is vain to DEBUG my virus, it is a fool to do that. You(S.I.R) will try to challenge to me?, you are stupid to do this.Your Sincerely, ABT Group., Lee. S.W. May 31, 2002 at NJ. PS: 1. To NJ Info-Center, Please update new carbon ink belt. 2. Mechanic, do not speak so loudly in the Computer Lab. 3. Confound you, Mr.WhomeverWhichever, I wish you go to Hell ! ============= , and anotherall Endanger declaraction : This is a hacker who want to rule the computer technology as the Golden game rule, namely, everyone who cross me is a "son of bitch". How can teacher do such cruel thing as to hurt a timid soul and taking this as a game. NewJersey.2900 "You" family. C:\>[[restart ]]

Something wonderful has happened Your BRIAN is alive !!! and, even better... Some of your disks are infected by a VIRUS !!! Another masterpiece of The Mega-Mighty GOD !! C:\>[[restart ]]

I’m not perfect. C:\>[[restart ]]

Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1982 Brain & Brian (pvt) Ltd VIRUS_SHOE RECORD V11.0 Dedicated to the dynamic memories of millions of olius who are no longer with us today - Thanks GOODNESS!! BEWARE OF THE er..VIRUS : this program is catching program follows after these messages....$#@%$@!! This is the first assault. A 3.5 kilobyte logic bomb detonated on May 31st, 2002. 3.5 kilobytes is minor when glancing at a hard drive, but grandiose when packeted. Things were fine until this happened and my cousin was found swinging from an automatic garage door opener with a broken neck. Not knowing what to do with myself, I shot free throws in the driveway to escape the boxed wine breath of mourning. I averaged 7 of 10. I’m not perfect. C:\>[[restart ]]

Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1982 Basit * Amjad (pvt) Ltd. BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES 730 NIZAM BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN CHERRYHILL-NEWJERSEY PHONE: 1908,3036671. Beware of this VIRUS.... Contact us for vaccination... This is the first assault. A 5.1 kilobyte logic bomb detonated on May 31st, 2002. 5.1 kilobytes is minor when glancing at a hard drive, but grandiose when packeted. Things were fine until this happened and my cousin was found swinging from an automatic garage door opener with a broken neck. Not knowing what to do with myself, I shot free throws in the driveway to escape the boxed wine breath of mourning. There would be moments where I would lock on, really lock on, and I’d get enough arch on the black rubber street ball with fake graffiti on it, and I’d push it spinning over the front of the rim. The ball would fall through the net, hit the Belgian block curb at an angle, roll to the edge of the cul-de-sac, and get wedged in the hole for the storm drain. None of it ever mattered. I averaged 9 of 10. I’m not perfect. C:\> C:\>[[restart ]]

Hello. We are the kking of kkings. Do you want to continue this story? (Y/N) [[N ]]

Hello. We are the kking of kkings. Do you want to continue this story? (Y/N) [[Y ]]

Nevermind all that. Nevermind it for one second. Nevermind the consequences of actions and the consequences of living. Nevermind the hot days after, nevermind the necessity to do something irrational, black out, perhaps, a web of disaster as we mention names of unlucky and lucky, and you are the luckiest of them all, not lying in a field somewhere foreign, just over the county line of a place that I pray you despised only most days, that there were days in pools of water, pretending not to see the edge of the pit before falling into the water, anything to make the girls laugh, beautiful girls you have known since childhood, since before you knew what it was that made you want to die at your own hearth, when beautiful girls you have known since childhood were the only great levelers, not Death, not fate, and not faith. You want a scar, O. You want ink under skin, you want memory and in memoriam on your body to prove that the body means something, that when he rejected his form he took yours as well, as well as the idea of leaving it all behind. You are lost, O, and you are guilty for it. You are guilty of living. In support groups, nightwalks, and those who are sadly aware of fate taking hold of fate, they call us ‘survivors’. That we are the ones attacked, that the cloth thrown over Agamemnon was thrown over our heads as well, like wet towels wrapped around hair after swimming, becoming unraveled as we run across the black top over the Belgian block curb across the cul-de-sac, jumping over the storm drain to avoid the spinning licks of a hurricane elsewhere, before the darkness rolled in and we became soaked in water without proper sterilization, this natural water from the skies where bones floated to after being burned. In that road we never shot baskets. In that road, we never touched ground, the balls of our cracked feet touching for a second, the bottom of our feet looking like cracked glass bowls put together again. We broke so many things. We let wheels be our guide, long pieces of wood sliding off waxed curbs. We were not skilled enough for these moves, these tricks, but we bought the wax either way, and we loved it. I loved it. You, I have trouble remembering what you loved, if you loved anything at all. At your funeral, before my father’s talk of survival of the family, how proud I was of him at that moment, a job that no one wanted, the priest’s talk of survival (though not for you, a job that the priest wanted, this mortal sin, this property of God annexed back to the cold ground, contrary to the love of the living God, the act a pact with the Donatist and a shouting match with St. Augustine) the rabbi’s talk of survival and conflict, these three talks making certain that all bets were hedged, all things covered like the pink wax we tried to slide over, we must all time the jump before the wheels hit the wall. I noticed that deck with stickers slapped on the underside of the wood, the smooth underbelly without grip tape, the wood that clumsily slid along that curb before we fell to our shoulders, its truck and wheels dismantled, was propped up against the wood that held your body, a board robbed of wheels, a body robbed of you, both things no longer practical, an avatar of something that once had purpose. There is no joy in these things anymore. Even kings remember such things and find nothing to say at certain moments, those kings that are garrulous and long-winded, two-handed gold cups holding wine and other spirits, this taking in of things to forget, this idea that flooding memory with memory will cause an overload in self, to either slow down and erase all, self-deletion, or self-partition, to put these ideas away in another drive that need not be accessed when booting up the machine, turning on each day, and no need to remember numbers of days or the recalling of data when hearing jokes about wanting to hang one’s self during a long digression, and I plead of you to forgive me for being a bore when I tell you these things, these stories of men lost in the flood that were before your time, before I even knew that you existed, these concepts of past finding their way in the present, and I ask that you forgive an old king as myself, crown of Aragon, crown of nothing, an old horseman, an old horseman, an old horseman, an old horseman, an old horseman, an old horseman Hello. Sorry. [[Continue?]]

You are not perfect! You cannot perfect. There is no way to be romantic about the death of others or be selective in the romantic death of others. You must talk about other deaths until you truly realize how lucky you are to be alive and suffering. There was a man you hated who died in the river. There was a man whose body was found frozen to the tresses of the bridge that cast a shadow over the river. There was a man who has no right to have his story told, no matter how long-winded I may seem. There was a man in the river who makes it difficult for you to remember all things over a period of time, a man who ruined memory because he ruined past self. There was a man who made you embarrassed to consider the past and your past self in the river. There were nightmares about returning home and him still alive. There are realities of saint-hood. There are tributes to him; children making the same decisions to take a wooden raft onto the river in January in New Jersey, where the temperature of the water is warmer than the temperature of the air and where you learned in grade school about safety in the water, especially on cold nights, that no matter how warm the water made you feel it is better to not be submerged, that when you first fall into cold water you gasp, your skin begins to cool, and your body constricts surface blood vessels to conserve heat for organs like your heart and your blood pressure and heart rate increases and your muscles tense and shiver which produces more body heat but results in loss of dexterity and motor control and your blood pressure and pulse and respiration rates and hope will all decrease and your mental attitude towards others and the idea of dying or being found frozen next to a bridge, perfectly preserved, you imagine, perhaps eyes closed or not closed or mouth open or not open found many, many days later, and the belief that he was just hiding because that is something that someone like this would do, fake their own death to have attention to return like Lazarus or Balder or you, later, O, back from the idea of death and there would be a party with cake and hugs and a personal narrative and account that would be declared as genius thus losing all credibility to this narrative, this expelling of fact and life and memoir, a memory lost in the fact that he has returned alive and diminishing the meaning of death and that he is not only lucky to be alive but you are still much luckier than him, as if luck has anything to do with things, especially when conditions worsen and your level of consciousness changes, your brain resisting help and acting irrational or confused as you slip from being semiconscious then unconscious as the mammalian diving reflex triggers without a survival suit or a heat escape lessening posture or that thin people like him lose body heat faster than overweight people like yourself, something he never reminded you of during days of making fun of your heft, the idea that you took up more space in the world and that you were selfish for it, selfish for eating and floating in the water and holding onto your body temperature longer in 32.5 degree water in the Delaware River where you were chastised during the summer when the water was much warmer then, and you were not allowed to swing off of swings into the water because of your relationship to the gravitational pull to the earth and you would sit with your shirt on (his shirt was off when they found him, or maybe it was on) and that he lost consciousness with less than or equal to 15 minutes and survived less than or equal to 45 minutes before the function reaches zero as the probability of the time of death is not later than a specified time and the force of mortality speeds up the mean time between failures as the lambda dips signifying a dip in reliability causing a bathtub curve and a hope for a burn-in period, when the use of this product in its life cycle, this accustoming of ones self to the water of the Delaware River would never cause it to rebel against you and now they use words like preservationist and martyr to remember him by, and where you believe he died for no reason at all, that there is no explanation for these things aside for a sense of duality and that when he died your fear of water and drowning increased exponentially because there is something to be said of polar opposites, that one cannot function without the other, that if you finally arrive to claim something that god has already claimed that all will end without purpose, no purpose at all, and that is why you are lost and cannot return home and you must stay in a state where the water level will never drop below 32.5 degrees and where there is a river a mile and a half from where you sleep and have dreams where you find his body on a pearl dive, frozen and caught in the Japanese hops and you swim up to the surface and tell no one. Yes, O. This is why you are fortunate in your wandering. While you are lost at sea, the sea of trees cannot find you. The ash cannot find you. The water cannot find you. The young Dawn finds you now with her rose-red fingers as you fly, holding nothing back, straining for journey’s end before the sun sinks again and the roads of the world grow dark. [[Goodbye.]]

C:\> search.exe –“[[brian oliu]]”

No matches found for “brian oliu” Did you mean: What a thing this was. I did not go willingly. You are a lot like me and nothing like me, no hair on the backs of backs or slung over the shoulders (it is how you imagine me taken from my home, the reason that any of this exists, the reason of you existing) and while some sort of life exists inbetween those grinding gears and visualization of temptations, your eyes a lot softer now that it is winter and the shades around you have changed, gotten darker despite it raining here and the east-ward sun much brighter there, water droplets hovering in the air rather than falling to the earth, here, around and on umbrellas given to me, never shared, never needed to share, this giving of a shield, this thankless concept of replica held over our heads like a black halo, angelic, yes, dead, perhaps. If there are gods looking down upon us, and if there are gods who are jealous of what we have done, gods who make sleep hateful, gods who make certain foods taste spoiled when they are not spoiled, these olfactory hallucinations, the scent of vulcanized rubber from a building where they mix carbon black and Rachel knit, the scent from the uncontrollable division of cells and the loss of memory, a virus, the addition by subtraction, of the build-up to slowdown to crash, if they gods have anything to do with this, they cannot see the tops of our skulls like pins on a circuit board, our dielectric and dialectic bodies creating an unknown architecture, that the storage of what is beautiful is a universal understanding of what is not. We are hidden in shade, in shadow, our canopies under cloud cover and cloud architecture while we are not shielded by the sun, protected from foreign water that we once drank and sweat out, all water constant, nothing ever created from nothing. We must have something to hide underneath during breaks in the velarium, and we are safe from judgment and bad luck as long as we stay away from the skies, stay away from open air and repentances of rose red dawn, as long as Athena accepts our votive gift. They will name a festival after us, and the water will never find us. What a thing this was, disguised and sorry, this punishment brought down from something much larger than us, the wind picking up and blowing our shields off course, exposing the heads to the elements, heads to the chopping block where all searches lead to capital punishment, execute re-directs here, capitalis, caput, from the head, from the head. Mistakes I have made fall around me, fall under me, a blanket, and I know I worry about the wrong things sometimes, this temptation and fear of temptation, this fear and love of human error and I know I shouldn’t have to worry about these things, this cold dampness where my blood once was, the shivers caused when hearing your voice, hearing my voice reacting to what you have to say, and me telling you what you want to hear despite the trembling of organs and the shrinking of the air in lungs. There was a moment when you were behind a wooden door after a broken evening, our water escaped us, and I imagined you there, making cups, vessels with your hands, bringing water over your shoulders like the personification of the moon, and foolishly thought that I could do it better, with the use of hands, that there was something off-screen that I could press that would cause the door to open, that these countless puzzles placed in front of me weren’t entertaining, that the game itself was not meant to be enjoyed, meant to be defeated but instead caused the ravaging of numbers and the drying up of eyes to the point of blur. If I were good enough, if I were brave enough, if I were skilled enough I could patch all of this, re-write sprites and re-write code to control the environment around me, eliminate layers by placing a new layer, to walk you into walls and throw you off of cliffs where the white dogs would jump at you and bite you as they did me when I was out of whatever ammunition I may have needed to escape this place, the reloading of patience is something that I never possessed back then, and will never possess again, and so I scour dark webs and search for things I should never search for, each file extracted having the possibility to destroy everything, turn machine into bricks, work into nothing, and I hoped it would be immediate, a black screen, a blue screen, white text with a red X in a circle next to bloated numbers and protection faults, that it would all end at once and I could blame it on the machine, that it was nothing that I did to cause the data to be erased, that it was the way the world worked, gospel in garbage out, and that the end user did not cause the end. There was a way to do it, a boy said, a boy at that moment who seemed like a man, who had the file on multiple disks and I had never seen that many disks before, that there was some wrong thing I knew nothing about and that it was all compiled and decompiled, that all we knew of the female form, this idea of goddesses was pixilated and still we needed to use back door mirrors and risk failure and instead of knocking on the door after the water had stopped running we ran processes and followed links behind our own closed doors, not knowing what to do with this information, graduating from women in bikinis that never existed to examples in science plastering the screen with things we were never ready for and days it seems no one is ready for, this brutal act of male to female, this docking of ports and somehow linking it all to you, fingers pruned in a white hotel room, our parents away, our teachers away, the anonymity still believed anonymous, the incorrect statements of on the internet no one knows that you’re a dog, that no one on the bus back down south would ever know, that we were granted access by numbers and letters meant to mean anything but, that nonsense could bring you one step closer to romance, but not romance and at some point you would turn me into something I am not or once was or always was and the wolves and dogs waiting outside the door much like I am waiting outside your door would tear me apart. And so I don’t watch you bathe but those ships, those awful ships are launched anyway and I was on one of the thousands, fighting while infected but not affected and despite others laying claim I know that it is all my fault that I never opened the door, that I never allowed you to buy that dress or sit as a gracious guest or not be so scared of failure and if I could do it again I’d make all of the mistakes you wanted me to like buying ice cream and drinking too much and listening to the wrong songs and trusting the wrong things and remembering ? C:\> search.exe –[[“brian oliu” ]]

Why do you ask me that? Why do you need to know? Why probe my mind? You won’t stay dry-eyed long, I warn you, once you have heard the whole story. And many are gone. You know—you were there yourself. And one is still alive, held captive, somewhere, off in the endless seas… C:\> search.exe-“brian oliu” One result found for “brian oliu” [[Execute?]] (Y/N)

Keep this quiet. Keep this silent. Keep this mute. Keep this quiet. Keep this silent. There were days when nothing worked as it should have and those days came often some days, some weeks during the winter where I would peak through window blinds in hopes of seeing the reflection of white snow on the ground, the light brighter as it bounces and refracts, eyes registering brightness in dark. We sat amongst books. This is how we win the war. We admit defeat. We smile and leave, that this, all of this was too much for us to bear, that there are walls that can never be torn down, that all that exists exists for a reason that we are uncertain and there is nothing that could ever change this, that there would be days attacked in hallways on the way to learn how to type, to use the homerow to express thoughts on a keyboard to people miles away from homes or further, that what is input is not input which is output and these keys are very important, because they are the basis for all future typing a ASDFJKL;nd crafting of words. We must take the time to thank the home row for all that it has done for you, despite not being able to have ASDFJKL; a true sense of home. There has always been a certain attachment to roads elsewhere, places where cars were driven and computers crashed, but you are not owners of these lands, the rental of space. That later, and earlier we have visited your grandfather’s old h ASDFJKL;ouse on multiple occasions, made hard lefts on roads made of dust to tops of Catalan mountains, only to find your grandfather’s childhood home modernized, the goats repl ASDFJKL;aced by motorbikes. That you now live in a house your father built, his reward and personal project after years of constructing verandas for people who watch monitors inside primarily. That you absorb and eat houses from the inside. Now your fingers ASDFJKL;s rest comfortably here, wherever here is surrounded by southern carnival with new distractions arriving daily. There are prints on the wall to cover up contractor white walls, prints and paintings of elsewhere, trips never taken and places never been. You type and you type faster. a dad sad a lad a dad has a sad lad a dad had a sad lad a dad’s dad had a sad lad a lad’s dad a lad’s dad’s dad a lad’s dad’s dad’s sad lash dad lash lash lad lash Good. Believe for once that this matters. That at some point you are faster, that you can type numbers much larger than anyone can imagine without glancing downward, that you can press things and make them appear out of nowhere, out of nothing. Later, I explain this to you, that this is something that I have mastered and you tell me about your love of children, and how you want to take care of them someday. That this is what you are meant to do, as I am meant to manipulate machines to create something much larger than I am, a representative of something and of nothing, that one day, much later, you will use this to fix a computer of a girl that reminds you of her, you of me while you sit and watch, amazed that things could get this bad, that this machine is something that she needed to survive while a suitor who is not me sits on the bed, my back to him, my eyes to the screen, your back to his front, your eyes to him as he remarks that he would never have the time to learn such things, to try such things. This is what you think of when you must take the blame when things go wrong or when things go right; that your name is forgotten before it is even learned despite the holding down of shifts to accentuate capital letters, that you are affixed to the lowercase brian oliu brian oliu brian oliu brian oliu and how fast you can type those things over and over again like a spider of a hand dancing down her back things you can never comprehend because you don’t have the time to learn such things and that one day they will build horses out of steel, they will build horses out of metal, they will build horses out of something you can never imagine, they will build horses out of children and there will be nothing learned except rote memorization, this typing on air and the desire that whatever exists in the past becomes relevant again, if only to show off what was once valuable, what was once valuable in the most liberal and sad lad lash dad sad sense of the word. It was never my idea to do this, but yet we sit in a house of wood, a horse of wood and there is no escaping and nothing to do except wait until we have won and I have lost. C:\> C:\> search.exe –[[“penelope”]]

No matches found for “penelope” Check cache? (Y/N) [[Y ]]

One file found. [[Execute? ]]

The x is on the other y, incorrect addresses create incorrect maps, the cartographer stuck in traffic somewhere, elsewhere, on the back of busses, hands gripping metal to ground self from the electric shock, how walking across carpet can cause memory to short circuit, the same action causing hair to stand on end after scuffing balloons on basement rugs; it is a blessing to be without analog, ironically letting magnets and point-of-sale hardware doing all of the work, to unlatch bolts and swing open breezeways, no turn of key, turn of phrase, simple turning of crashing systems over, once, twice, as sides and limbs get too warm, skin on shoulder grows taught to close up pores ineffectively boxing out cooling rooms where towers hum. The instruction pointer sequences the inverse of thermonuclear reactions, neglecting the spreading of hues on ice caps north of here (wherever here may be), which would reduce albedo, salt and dirt on sidewalks, clumping together like threshold levels stuck at 128, but you’d never travel that north, east maybe, west perhaps, south certainly, as I know beyond reason you were there, and I saw you mixing chemicals to ascertain mixed chemicals that cause glasses hurled across laminated coffins with coasters and late night excuses perched upon the symbolic dead. I saw APPLICATION ERROR PENELOPE.EXE CAUSED A GENERAL PROTECTION FAULT IN MODULE OLIU.EXE AT 0001:1122B NO CHILDREN TO BE SAVED FROM LACERATIONS, NO GLIMMERS, JUST ANOMALOUS CONDITIONS, THE STORING OF MEMORY BEYOND OUR BOUNDS C:\> [[penelope.exe ]]

The x is on the other y, the bouncing of spindled trees to red rocks, vortexes created to bring serenity in other-wise gridded spaces, no time for open energy to spin, just the bouncing off of financial districts and revised flaxmills, Hooke’s law be damned if springing back is possible. Home is not home, dollar slices shunned, three-dollar cans shunned, brooding now, brooding. Hands with no rings in wool pockets, leather pressed to skin sides, and it’s not even cold there; the rigidness of security measures to keep overweening suitors from breaking down doors, or at least sliding through them sideways like shuffled punch cards. I picture APPLICATION ERROR PENELOPE.EXE CAUSED A GENERAL PROTECTION FAULT IN MODULE OLIU.EXE AT 0001:1122B NO GANGS OF HUNTERS, NO LIONS CIRCLING, JUST THE OVERWRITING OF DATA OUTSIDE OF LINES OF ALLOCATED OVERWRITING C:\> [[penelope.exe ]]

The x is on the other y, the move away from barcodes to prevent photocopies to magnets, black stripes, the unification of access levels, as there are places where we can access together, % start sentinel, and that’s where the similarities end. It used to be simple; saw to metal on the streets, or holes in plastic. All things now considered and all things encrypted, password protected, a serial of serials, integers and alphabetics both, glyphs maybe, a sequence of sequences. For 128 alternate between capital letters, lower case letters, letters written and never returned (shift enter to return) and numbers, numbers never received. Names of dogs found dead on the side of suburban roads, monikers escaped from with a new postal address, children crushed by steering wheels and their anticipated date of graduation, favorite foods, inside jokes between estranged lovers, maiden names. As it stands, a series of asterisks, placeholders for the authentication and authorization, and this, the auditing of APPLICATION ERROR PENELOPE.EXE CAUSED A GENERAL PROTECTION FAULT IN MODULE OLIU.EXE AT 0001:1122B NO CUNNING RINGS, NO FINISHING NO NO NO Sleeping, Brian Oliu, your heart so wrung with sorrow? No need, I tell you, no, the MEGA-MIGHTY GODS who live at ease can’t bear to let you ERROR C:\> penelope.exe [[–safe]]

*SAFEMODE* Single-user mode, no daemons, a place for root users no auto executives, 16-bit 640x480 drifting softly at the gate, chandeliers in cars, extended guestbooks and logs in front of touch screens, apples and genuflecting. Phantoms, all, all in spun-sugar dresses with fox patterns. The luckless man; is he still alive? Does he see the light of day? Or is he dead already, lost in the House of Death? “About that man,” she says, transparent as she arrives, “All tools that cut and divide things in half signify disagreements, factions, and injuries. I cannot tell you the story start to finish, whether he’s dead or alive. It’s wrong to lead you on with idle words.” At that she ascended and descended off by the doorpost past the bolt; gone on a lifting and sinking breeze, axis mundi perpendicular, up and under. EXIT SAFE MODE? (Y/N) [[N ]]

APPLICATION ERROR PENELOPE.EXE CAUSED A GENERAL PROTECTION FAULT IN MODULE OLIU.EXE AT 0001:1122B DEAR BRIAN DON’T LEAVE ME I CAN’T IMAGINE YOU DEAD SO I DO NOT IMAGINE YOU AT ALL. I say this because this is what you wish I would say. ERROR EXIT SAFE MODE? (Y/N) [[Y ]]

APPLICATION ERROR PENELOPE.EXE CAUSED A GENERAL PROTECTION FAULT IN MODULE OLIU.EXE AT 0001:1122B GO BACK TO BED PLEASE. ERROR FILE PENELOPE.EXE IS CORRUPTED. DELETE? (Y/N) [[N ]]

C:\> C:\> [[hermes.exe]]

There is always something that needs to be delivered from x to y to you and no way to put it with the skill and flourish of a man much more intelligent than I am, someone who can say without saying, someone who knows the proper language for breathing, the word to signify a breath. My fingers are too fat for this, too stiff from the start, failed piano lessons because of a lack of grace inside of my body, a lack of grace throughout, and it would be foolish to think that my hands, the most delicate of things, would be spared this sloth and stiffness, no music to be created from these hands, the strumming of strings impossible, the muscles taught incorrectly, firm to the touch like a well-done steak left out over the coals too long, dried out and removed of moisture until it hardens, the carbon I eat now, here, cured and salted to prevent spoiling, if something must keep it must never be wondrous to the touch, delightful to the touch of tongues. This is a tongue I keep in my mouth thanks to advances in short message services and gateway providers, far from upside down numbers being interpreted as words and greetings of the Christ child, as I was always better with silence, always better with words abbreviated to the letter and this was a way to make these hands dance, somehow, some way, tapping numbers in succession to tell you that you are missed and a reminder that I am here while you are there, no proof that it is you, or that I am who I say I am, spelling out things never said through the propelling of air and the straining of chords in my throat, every time the word love meaning less and less as it bounces from one place to another, possessives dropped, letters dropped, accents dropped, the Americanization of all things, bigger than it needs to be, smaller than it should be, all things, all declarations sent en masse, this sign of mental illness and withdrawal from technology without my fingers touching your neck or touching something that will stand in for it while I am breathing air that you will never breathe and listening to the hum of loudness, a stir of wings and smoke, all things graveled, the salted ice before melting under tires you trust to take you from x to y but never here, god no, never here. You should see these hands, cracked and misplaced by knuckle hitting helmet, knuckle hitting bone, pain radiating like the dawn when there is no dawn, stirred awake by sensory experience and unpleasant awareness of nothing but fracture, the seeing of something not there. YOU HAVE RECEIVED ONE (1) NEW MESSAGE FROM CALYPSO ON A SATURDAY NIGHT WHERE THERE IS NOTHING TO BE SEEN BUT THE GLOW OF SMOKE AND THE REDDENING OF EYES 1. [[VIEW NOW]] 2. VIEW LATER

I miss you. There is hope for you yet. If I could tell you I would let you know that if I could tell you I would let you know. And so, there is nothing to let you know, because there is nothing I could tell you, but if I could tell you, I would. Yet there is nothing to tell you, so there is nothing to let you know, but I can’t tell you anything, let alone nothing, so I could let you know, if there was nothing to know. If there is nothing to know, I could tell you, but there is nothing to know and nothing to tell. But know that if there were something to tell you, if I could tell you, I would let you know. Hit F6. Stop all the clocks. If I could tell you I would let you know to stop looking over your shoulder, smashing statues of salt to pillars of salt, floating on eastern seas via eastern seaboards, on top of sanity and salinity, yet still at the most lowest point. If I could tell you I would let you know to stop looking over your shoulder, looking east through skies like lead, American beauty roses choked to create dance-floors of LED lights and broken martini glasses, please watch your heels, kick them up. If I could tell you I would let you know that you must leave water and public doves, orange and peanut butter to return to water and public doves, orange and peanut butter as harsh and as fierce as tigers in an ice storm leaving children stranded elsewhere, stranded at airports. Partly plane, partly palisades, you escape to eleventh floor atriums (one foot in front of the other, the cyclical nature of ground) peering over into lobbies, elevators and balconies as vortex, endless loops. You say I sleep better after removing dark chocolate from gold foil from red and orange bedding from pillowcases from pillows, and while I don’t agree, I can understand, despite bedrooms at home with higher thread counts and energy colors, hues driving you to solve algorithms, a magnificent turbine, heat without passion. I’ve never been where you have been. I’ve never been in the same place at a different time, points of reference non-existent. I’ve never been in the same place at the same time, attempting to fog up unfoggable mirrors with the power of multiple water-heaters to serve a high-rise commercial commercial, steam from suites and singles. Despite evaporation, despite mist droplets mixing with private airspace, despite breaths of water slowly rising like heavy cakes, spinning like roulette, despite wishing the Rankine cycle was ours to seduce, to turn, despite looking back over shoulders, despite wishing for dead salt to weaken bonds to saccharine, sal-ila to sakar, for us to fall from clouds together, to rose water, despite all this, despite. If I could tell you I would let you know I know the hima protects paths to waterways that I will never cross and never break, azizam. But amber lights from underneath pink pumps bounce off tan skin, sending the glow skyward through Class G and E airspace, moaning and scribbling a sweet vision of elsewheres. YOU HAVE RECEIVED ONE (1) NEW MESSAGE FROM CALYPSO ON A TUESDAY NIGHT WHERE THERE IS NOTHING TO BE SEEN BUT THE GLOW OF SMOKE AND THE REDDENING OF EYES 1. [[VIEW NOW ]] 2. VIEW LATER

You gotta hear this story. You cannot leave here until you complete a task, a task that has multiple stops on a line, transfers of power, electricity. Arrow to elephant, yesterday to tomorrow, crosses over naked torsos, the crux a metropolitan heart. You are a 3536 mile alternative to swaying the vomer bone, or steam of oolong through nostrils slapping away zinc fingers. If we let xi be the rate of flow i, the act of stirring before comfort zoneCl be the capacity of link l, and rli be 1 if flow i uses link l and 0 otherwise. Let x, c and R be the corresponding vectors and matrix. Let U(x) be an increasing, strictly convex function, called the utility, which measures how much benefit a user obtains by transmitting at rate x. Let you be m, sucking on color coded feathers in the kingdom, so royal to the ear, though tundras and blue-eyed stares are less than hierarchical these days, a shame really. Let you be here, let us drink Russia, let me be here, let you be chocolate in bows, let me be chocolate melted in hot milk on hill tops, let you be in make shift factories in make shift tables, let me take photographs, let you smile in them, let me twist ankles in boots, let you blow out knees in heels, let m to be a topological space. Then define open(m)= set of open subsets of m. There is a natural partial ordering of open sets by inclusion. In fact, any partially ordered set is a category where the objects are the sets and the morphisms are inclusions. Let it be later. Let it be cigarettes in non-smoking areas. Let it be 6. Let m be greater than c, yet dependant upon it. Let it be albion, albionoria, borealia, cabotia, colonia, efisga, hochelaga, laurentia, mesopelagia, norland, superior, tuponia, transatlantica, ursalia, vesperia, victorialand. Let c be the guardian of it all, aeronautics over imaginary fly-zones, jokes about monitoring Tyneside balloon festivals, stripes on sleeves, stripped of royalty, thirteen wings across that one dominion, de Havilland’s evolving from caribou, jet-stream flicks of tongue de-iced over Newfoundland, up and out and north to old Christiania, city of oranges and tigers pawing at mermaids and hemiboreal climates, wheels up then down not via Flytoget, but through Sandelfjord, salted tarmacs like spaghetti water, raise that temperature up, north. YOU HAVE RECEIVED ONE (1) NEW MESSAGE FROM CALYPSO ON A THURSDAY NIGHT WHERE THERE IS NOTHING TO BE SEEN BUT THE GLOW OF SMOKE AND THE REDDENING OF EYES CHECK THIS WITHOUT HESITATION IT IS A NEW MESSAGE FOR YOU 1. [[VIEW NOW ]] 2. VIEW LATER

Hey. There is hope for you yet. There is a perfect number in all of this, drawn on backs of high flyers back home, limbs swinging underneath glass, the up and under, the up and over. Remember how they changed the rules against you? There are fewer things to remember these days, as somewhere the task was lost, the channeling in of thoughts and turning into caramel like others, collecting at the bottom of glasses, me collecting myself on cars across provinces, dinners on yellow plates waiting in the evening, as our time is short, too short for a meal, soon enough for lumped Bolognese (I can laugh about it now), the sound of backward punchcards buzzing and hanging slightly before the bite. I was in the wheelhouse, leaving the guttural to embrace the romantique, head down, left ear up to absorb the shift of tongues, rocks in knees outside of moated cathedrals, language of adolescence, certainly beyond the accenting of mirrors, houses named after future professions, birthdays celebrated without icing but with future grooms, the coconut shavings masquerading as the process. There were tracks to forget. There were processes to run. There were baths to be taken. Let Sud be Zuid. Let Midi be Centraal. Let Nord be Noord. YOU HAVE RECEIVED NO (0) NEW MESSAGES YOU HAVE RECEIVED NO (0) NEW MESSAGES YOU HAVE RECEIVED NO (0) [[NEW MESSAGES]]

YOU HAVE RECEIVED ONE (1) NEW MESSAGE FROM CALYPSO ON A FRIDAY NIGHT WHERE THERE IS NOTHING TO BE SEEN BUT THE GLOW OF SMOKE AND THE REDDENING OF EYES AND THIS IS THE ONLY REPRIEVE THE ONLY THING TO HOLD ONTO SOME DAYS AND MOST NIGHTS 1. [[VIEW NOW ]] 2. VIEW LATER

FW: TWO PEOPLE WALK INTO A BAR AND ONE OF THEM SAYS HOT ENOUGH IN HERE FOR YOU AND THE OTHER SAYS YES IT DOESN’T MEAN IM NOT GONNA TRY TO FUCK EVERYONE HERE PRETENDING THAT THEYRE SOMEONE ELSE!!!!!!! IF YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY FORWARD THIS TO FIVE FRIENDS YOU HAVE RECEIVED NO (0) NEW MESSAGES YOU HAVE RECEIVED NO (0) NEW MESSAGES YOU HAVE RECEIVED ONE (1) NEW MESSAGE FROM CALYPSO ON A FRIDAY NIGHT WHERE THERE IS NOTHING TO BE SEEN BUT THE GLOW OF SMOKE AND THE REDDENING OF EYES AND THIS IS THE ONLY REPRIEVE THE ONLY THING TO HOLD ONTO SOME DAYS AND MOST NIGHTS 1. [[VIEW NOW ]] 2. VIEW LATER

im good YOU HAVE RECEIVED NO (0) NEW MESSAGES YOU HAVE RECEIVED NO (0) NEW MESSAGES YOU HAVE RECEIVED ONE (1) NEW MESSAGE FROM CALYPSO ON A FRIDAY NIGHT WHERE THERE IS NOTHING TO BE SEEN BUT THE GLOW OF SMOKE AND THE REDDENING OF EYES AND THIS IS THE ONLY REPRIEVE THE ONLY THING TO HOLD ONTO SOME DAYS AND MOST NIGHTS 1. [[VIEW NOW ]] 2. VIEW LATER

FW: merry christmas everyone!!! YOU HAVE RECEIVED NO (0) NEW MESSAGES YOU HAVE RECEIVED NO (0) NEW MESSAGES YOU HAVE RECEIVED ONE (1) NEW MESSAGE FROM CALYPSO ON A FRIDAY NIGHT WHERE THERE IS NOTHING TO BE SEEN BUT THE GLOW OF SMOKE AND THE REDDENING OF EYES AND THIS IS THE ONLY REPRIEVE THE ONLY THING TO HOLD ONTO SOME DAYS AND MOST NIGHTS 1. [[VIEW NOW ]] 2. VIEW LATER

FW: A GIRL STARTS DATING ANOTHER GUY AND THE OTHER GUY IS HEARTBROKEN. HE ASKS THE GIRL IF SHE’S HAPPY. THE GIRL SAYS YES SHE IS. PASS IT ON YOU HAVE RECEIVED NO (0) NEW MESSAGES DELETE ALL MESSAGES, INCLUDING UNREAD? [[N ]]

C:\> C:\>[[oliu2.exe]]

This file does not exist. C:\>[[oliu2.exe ]]

This file is telling you that it does not exist. C:\>[[oliu2.exe ]]

This is the biography of someone who does not exist. This is not because of the fog of remembering, that imperfect mechanism, the eyes and guise of wonder and the inability of recall data that was once burned onto metal, the compression of programs and instances and documents, all shrunk down to hardware, this physical manifestation, this enabler of all things, a vitamin, an extract. This is the story of a network, a spiderweb, the decaying of a reef and the inhabitants of living things inside this thing that does not exist that we are telling you about today as you run this program that also does not exist, this paradox, this explanation of things despite the framework of the network. There is an illusion here; we run an upgrade only to find out it is nothing, a virus tricking us into thinking these versions are linked somehow: a graphical upgrade, perhaps, a system being brought up to date and characteristics improved. Let us now praise you, O, majestic while in an internal or external social network, all information true but controlled. Let us now praise famous you, O, all information controlled and deliberate; exclamation points where there is no other way to show emotion, chosen words a summarization of all of the good parts, a commercial selling point to no one, selling someone who does not exist, but someone who is loved dearly for the juxtaposition provided. The snow and the ice kept us from going anywhere back then, the cold air contrasting with the warm floor, my feet splintering and cracking like the sound of a dial-tone and computers connecting. I did not know how these things worked, a clicking of a button, an empty phoneline that had to be kept open at certain points so that we could get reports from friends who’s cars had drifted from the melted tire lines in the road onto the white powder causing a lack of traction like when running up and out of an emptied water basin, the slide down euphoric until having to make the run back up in my father’s white shoes and old army coat, my nose bloodied from the falls and face hitting ice where the neighborhood kids whose computers I later attacked and whose faces I never attacked poured water down the hill in hopes of having the ice build layers upon itself to make our sleds faster, make our runs faster, our tailbones bruised, our arms broken, our noses bloodied. As the static hisses from a foreign speaker, one never used for playing layered audio, a noise so mechanic, so emitted from the machine, I remember packing ice up my nostrils as the rose red blood dawned on the blank ice, I am going to die out here, my blood will freeze and it will grow dark and the children will leave me here at the bottom of this depression, the parents of the children will call their names and they will go running back to their houses with their red noses, get yelled at for not taking their socks off which had frozen over in the water and are now making spots of damp across the carpet before they take a warm shower and get ready for dinner, and I do not think I will ever be found, the eyesight of cars cannot see down into the pit and they will never see the garbage can lid I begged my grandmother to use, my father’s old coat in her attic, the blood mixing with the melted water as these conversations about memory and loss and my grandfather going on runs in the park and getting lost and my grandfather going on runs in the park and forgetting he went on a run in the park and going on a run in the park and getting lost when he had never gotten lost before while his grandson is lost in a crater of nothing, a structure assembled for a practical purpose but used for excitement and exhilaration, this dangerous fun of putting on layers and sliding into the inescapable. This is the story of disconnect and the anger at disconnect, the sound of a modem clicking off, the slight delay while connected to someone, anything and the blankness that follows, a message sent and no response, all and no things made possible by a hierarchy and packets sent across county and country lines. This is the story of failure. This is the story of trivial things and trivia, knowledge bases that exist only to be known, no practical usage, unimportant items of information, this collection of seeds, dead seeds that cause no growth or nutrition, three roads split. This is the story of informal conversation made formal. This is the story of a phone call to my house, a road not traveled, never traveled, of a room imagined. This is the story of neither of us knowing where to go at a certain point, myself with my bloodied noses and candied heart, blisters on my fingers from carrying books and the catching up of the body to the mind, the knowledge that there is something wrong, that things do not feel right and that there is a role to be played in this world that is horrific and pre-determined, that there are no choices in any matters, that all things are exercises and that you, with your brother dying and your Spanish mother, your hair bleached blonde to prevent them from ever finding out that your last name meant anything more than your last name, that there were people represented by text, that there were people represented by text that knew nothing of you, that they knew your response to questions, at-symbols before names, periods before responses like sentences in reverse like the upside-down question marks your voice had for me, this immediacy of language and inability to stop and think and formulate responses about what I loved about love and what I loved about you, what part of your body I wanted you to touch and words that I had just read about with doors closed, caches purged at disconnect, no paper trail, no knowledge of knowledge, no thirty-second lock-out for an incorrect answer, just a stream of incorrect answers perceived to be correct without a moderator, without a central server, no ping, no lag except for the signal-based event converting into function. Somewhere in New Jersey, we looked at animals in cages, tongues licking around bars, mouths side ways. We watched phone calls kill actresses, men in black sliding in between sliding glass doors, knives plunged into chests while your mother sat behind us shaking her head at the violence and the expletives, the first words she learned in English as a child, as we were, curious to find out what and where. We were not concerned with why. Our last conversation, you asked me why I did not sit next to you, why there was a coat between us, a coat we screamed over and I glanced over a few times, your black roots coming through the bleach, my elbows and forearms nowhere near yours, a question I could never answer. This is the biography of someone who will not exist soon. A pretty girl with short hair and a lip pucker with something that cannot be fixed, error, her body will fail, it will fail, she tells you, in less words than that, more words than that, words you do not comprehend due to the directness of the statement, the directness of death, again, never understood. This viewpoint will tilt to the left and fall and this might be the last time you hear this this might be the last time things run this way, and so we celebrate like we are young again, revisiting photographs stored in secret folders, disguising the people we think we love with numeric file names, not names, not placeholders buried under file structures and trees where no one would ever look, system folders with extensions never considered, orphaned files with no way to be executed, to exist vegetative and without hope of reinstallation, outdated programs, games and tricks that remind you of elementary school libraries, one machine for us, all of us, a voyage to be taken, a problem to be solved while surrounded by book glue and the yellowing of pages, a converted closet, the small window we would peek into while going someplace we shouldn’t, descending. Things make a noise before they die. A gurgle made by the accumulation of respiratory secretions, the inability to swallow, cold in the extremities no longer let to go about our business of building bodies, driving down coasts to make sure people breathe correctly while lifting burdens over and over for muscle memory, (the holding of the breath does nothing) our business of handshakes and sleeping in and trying to remember what our body will not let us will to do. This sound, this rattle is meant to signify a passing, our lungs willing to suck in water and fluid like when we were born, the hot air expelled making a whirlpool in our throats, all things cyclical. What it is not meant to signify is one last breath and a chance for living, a sound of hope. Things make a sound before they die, a spinning click under the left palm, a scratched grind, a pushing of air through teeth before a timeless delay, before the erasure of everything and the end of function, the flicker of red lights, the pulsating blank of static. This is why cold nights, still alone, I imagine little deaths, les petits morts, you on top of me before the grand quickening, the busy wait spiraling and moving slower than it ever should, watching each rotation like a ceiling fan after the power goes out, counting each blade cut through the air and cut off power to muscles, instantaneous rigidity signifying the crystallization of the last activity before dying out, the ghost burn in, the proof of life before hitting the water. Stop. Stop thinking such thoughts, never finish on such thoughts, this final access before whatever it is that is broken breaks and you dead for however long it takes to become interested in the living, see that I thought such things, even for a second, this eroticism in dying, this desire to be needed, the power seen of desperate resuscitation, the pressing of palm over palm into breast, a gentle touch, never, it is all ephemera now, there is a job to do and not an awkwardness to be addressed, the return of spontaneous circulation or a declaration of death, the quick puffs of air and the lifting up of the chin being sloppily reduced to mouths pressed against mouths and lust for the dying. And so I am very sorry for all of this, these ideas that appear in my head of treating you like an object and a means to an end in this situation imagined by myself that do not correspond with the reality of you losing your beauty and your body, hair falling out before the explosion of a diver off the springboard, a life like a jump from a tower. And at some point, there is a fear that this glow will end; clouds roll underneath where goddesses stand, no eye of Athene, a beam of heavenly light like a beatific vision, la gloriosa donna della mia mente seeing me as I am, no longer enhanced by light and distance, angles and the blurring of lines and the matching of skin color and resolution, this scouring of the earth for an ideal that I can attach myself to somehow yet still stay hidden, that there is some sort of work to be done before I vanish, some advice to give and someone to make happy regardless of who I am and what I have stood for, that there needs not be any visual to be able to listen to what I have to say and care for, but there needs to be something to set me apart from all things humble, all things that I am. There will be a time of serendipity and exposure, stature smaller, curls like rotten flowers long after bloom, all faults larger and I have no choice but pray it will be gradual, that the light from the gods will not go out suddenly like a tripped breaker, all things dark and hideous, dark and real. And so I must set sail and cut off all communication, no reply to distant calls and the temptation of sex and breasts, never bathing in the river, never free of the brine that transports heat from place to place, the salt preserving and aging, and I must pray for something else, something better while the waves break around me, a gift from the churning rage of water. C:\>[[garden.exe]]

C:\> garden.exe You cannot leave here until you complete a task; that task is entirely undetermined, like when the sword is going to fall, or the payload is going to hit, or the bicycle chain is going to go out, causing you to flip over the handlebars, teeth greeting Belgian block, asphalt, cobblestone, sidewalk, whichever, wherever. The town to the south seemed so primitive with its student evenings and charismatic great-great-grandsons (though not mine) of great-great-grandfathers, soaking feet in de Tappan Zee, or in man-made dutch holes positioned on the right side of the dogleg left. In knitted caps and knickerbockers we took in seraphim and all that jazz, kisses on cheeks in the old world style but still considered to be very northeastern of all of us; this is what we do with family and neighbors who come over carrying lambic on unimportant holistic holidays. In knitted caps and knickerbockers you took to the clay, white shoes and all. Things were better when it rained, more chance of a high-ankle-sprain (can you ride a motorbike with one leg dangling through Mechelen?) but more opportunities to slide laterally like beats on an abacus, a satisfying scrape and click before returning the service. I know nothing of such things: temporary months turned into temporary years in grey shingled row-houses, complimentary stairs to the upper-numbers, how miserable we were, too sad to clean linoleum. I tried it, there, once, as it was the spirit of the whole thing, the temporary attempts through misery and coordinated dance steps, the one two three plant swing riepe riepe garste. The heat off the rebound ace cut like a buggy whip, retiring me with a bagel, not a breadstick, no super nine. But you, beating strings with palms, spinning the continental like a western float through waffled wind resistance like a fast moving cloud, dipping over the language divide and back up, the uncanny valley straight through the heart of the land, the one-two forehand and backhand. Lines divide escape and Noman’s land, eye below surface level clouds, on hands and knees talking to machines pleading for distinction between score and break, love and zero, the breaking of beams ten millimeters from the ground, an upside-down periscope searching for projectiles below the surface, subterfuge above all else. If we could only use this technology to document splash radiuses and kisses on cheeks (yellow = out, green = in), if we could only take the round-eye and make it more crescent shaped, the art of depth perception and depth charges (and it is an art), to eliminate chalk spit and cordial saliva near cheekbones but never elsewheres, to make a splash. If we could only leave each other be, if I could leave well enough alone, being here and not here at the same time, though we forget that you are one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, but it is you whom we affix a name, like an unstable isotope of hydrogen ruling over all of this country’s processing power, and the words of children such as myself months before Christmas morning, making lists of what we want, when we want, and the falling in love with specifics. But I am here, perhaps next to you as you attempt to get to sleep, hiding under rental blankets and hiding under counted sheep as you attempt to fall asleep next to me, though you never could, filthy cobwebs in the barren bed, haste chopping away our olive-tree and hauling our bedstead off ERROR ABEND (ABNORMAL END) [[RESTART? (Y/N) N]]

C:\> [[oliuantivirusbeta1.exe]]

--------- W32/Leuven.gen!eml Type……………………………………………..Virus SubType…………………………………………Generic Discovery Date………………………………..11/22/1982 Length…………………………………………..varies Minimum DAT…………………………………5067 (11/22/2003) Updated DAT………………………………….5152 (11/22/2007) Minimum Engine……………………………...5.1.00 Description Added……………………………11/22/2007 Description Modified………………………..11/22/2007 11:18 AM (PT) Overview - This is a generic detection of spammed email messages used to entice users into visiting sites hosting exploits that would result in a drive-by download. On visiting the link, a cocktail of browser and application exploits that attempts a drive-by install of malware on the users machine is performed. The script which is used for the drive-by download is detected as a birthday greeting card received by a shockingly blonde girl who lived down the hall from the user, a kind gesture, certainly, but irrelevant to the actual exploit itself, as is a virus’ nature, as naked photographs of various celebrities are in no way linked to the erasing of photographs of buildings that the user lived outside of, or various geographical landscapes and oddities separate from the user’s own base-knowledge of how the world works. Characteristics - Update September 2, 2007 This threat is updated on a daily basis. For the latest on the tactics used by this virus family, please contact the cryptovirology support team. This is a detection of spammed email messages used to entice users into visiting memories that have since been locked away and to revisit ideals that never existed during the time of creation (November 22, 2003) but have since altered from harmless polymorphic code about eating homemade crepes in a third-floor (second if you are going by the European method of counting the ground-floor as ‘benedenverdieping’, or, in the French-speaking areas of Belgium ‘rez-de-chaussée’) kitchen on nights, mornings or late afternoons where alcohol may or may not have played a prominent part in the state of mind of everyone involved in the eating of what the Dutch call ‘palatschinken’, (derived from the Latin word ‘placenta’) into a metamorphic virus, an ever-changing enrapturement of drowning. A user receives an email titled “You’re received a postcard” in his inbox and is requested to open the link contained in the message body in order to view the virtual postcard. This temptation of seeing a representation of a place where one has never been, or perhaps a place where one has been but has not returned to for some time, perhaps the Stadhuis in the Grote Markt, (about an eight minute walk from the third-floor kitchen or the third-floor bathroom where the user would shower next to women, the same water flowing through the same pipe until at the split second it splits and spritzes from separate shower-heads before sliding together as it exits through a central drain) lit up some evening to this day causing wonder of how one can make marble into lace, or lace into marble, each of the 238 statues of dukes, saints, and local legends hiding in their niches. On visiting the link in hopes of achieving a dream you never knew you had until you were tempted with the ideal of it all, a cocktail of browser and application exploits your eagerness to return to fantasizing about tennis players and the daughters of Congolese refugees whom you have nothing in common with aside from a love of the country that they exist in, as documented by failed attempts at playing tennis in temporary housing units when your family couldn’t afford to travel, the program attempts a drive-by install of malware on the users machine. Symptoms - Presence of the W32/Leuven.gen!eml detection is not an indication that a system has become actively infected. The divulgence of great truths and erotic fantasies about cutting off hands and throwing them into the water like bicycles broken from bicycle locks and thrown into locks is something that W32/Leuven.gen!eml makes a point of exploiting without regard to the user or those alternate users that may or may not be aware of how the system works, that the code being spit forth is not how things are supposed to be. Method of Infection – A silent drive-by install installs exploits on non-patched systems; patches are available to prevent such measures, but upon infection, retroactive patching is ineffective. Removal – There are no known removal procedures at this time. C:\> C:\>[[garden.exe -safe]]

You cannot leave here until you complete a task; that task is entirely undetermined, like when the sword is going to fall, or the payload is going to hit, or the bicycle chain is going to go out, causing you to flip over the handlebars, teeth greeting Belgian block, asphalt, cobblestone, sidewalk, whichever, wherever. The Belgian blok held their block parties 132 kilometers north, and that is where you would go on weekends, presumably on the motorcycle that he bought for you, one that would be chained up to aluminum pipe racks that looked like grills, rusty rental bicycles flossing the gaps. The hand throwing five needed two more members to complete the spectrogram of septic designs and handbags though handbangs, unfair, certainly, as I was never one to turn down a tie, half-windsor, full, four-in-hand, other. With such great skill and precision you walk down slotted lines, heel to toe in front of watchful eyes, though that is not your true game, of course, the sliding open of glass doors and the sliding on of glass shoes on heavy rotation like the doors to a supermarket where mothers placed sons and daughters into shopping carts, scared to get separated in the process of the turnstyle. You have no time for these things. The purchasing of cheeses, the unfamiliar yet familiar sweetness, the occasional complementary bottle of wine, the brand names unfamiliar to me, us, but offhand and sensible to you, like riding a train back from Oostende with a sunburn. You have no time to create loops with skirtlegs towards the outskirtloop, no time to put plastic tubs (queens or commoners) into baskets, no time to open up wallets, no time. Foolishly, I thought that time stood still here, as it always does, the standing and delay until the hitting of a return key, the constant blink and wait (not yet, not yet) to continue on, the page down, the continuation, but I was content to let it blink, whereas you hit keys children have never seen, escape patterns, safety words and codes like vipers and reverse encryption, to overclock and overheat like unnecessary wind sprints, or legs burnt on the side of combustible engines, gas by the litre. No, uw, no time for games: the unofficial sport of the small Vlaamsen town to the West is hoisting velos above heads and above stonewalls, up and over and into the river that spilled throughout town. Slow nights, we’d remark that it would never spill over, despite days of rain spritzed from the ghost of Jan Zonder Vrees, spittle while he swung swords to protect children and men not like me, as he would certainly make me lay my wallet down, overstuffed with Belgian Francs (mine is of a faulty design). Slow nights, you would cook for me, pankeuken op de keuken, sugar and butter spread thin. Slow days, I would take showers next to you, left to right, separated by plastic dividers, one drain splitting the difference. The water would hit my shoulders, hit uw schouders, roll and fall like status bars, 0, 33, 66, 99, 100% down through rusted valves, through the foyer and out to the river, taking skin cells and the film of sweat from keeping windows open (we cannot cool ourselves) down through the foyer and out to the river. In the belly of the goudenvissen, dit ons huwelijksbed, en huwelijkstempel zijn. Why must we return here, whitewitch? This is not home, just a place where I rested my head on rented pillows for months at a time. Why must you cut off my hand and cast it into the sea, blood and water flowing from fingers, the end of my domination and the taking of tithes. I am already submerged: without hand, wheels spinning. [[ABEND (ABNORMAL END) RESTART? (Y/N) N ]]

C:\> [[ludology.exe]]

C:\> ludology.exe Hello USER! Put that spreadsheet away mr man it is a day for songs and contests a day for songs and contests do you like songs and contests? (Y/N) [[N ]]

Put that spreadsheet away mr man it is a day for songs and contests a day for songs and contests do you like songs and contests? (Y/N) [[Y ]]

What is your name stranger or guest? We don’t know who you are, or whether you come from sunrise lands or the western lands of evening, but you are here, here with us where we will grant you escort and make you play games that will never make you heartsick for places elsewhere or anywhere but right here? YOUR NAME [[O]]

Hello O! You are the harborer of seabirds and seasalt, colors blue like 1800 hours on a colorchart, wheel, vessel to get you from, nevermind all that it is a day for songs and contests and games, the best of what is best for you to wash away reasons for weapons, the combination required for an overhand smash is of zero consequence here, there is no time to consider the effects of others, for it is a time for contests. GAME OVER C:\> C:\>[[narratology.exe]]

C:\> narratology.exe The ink gave way because of the height, the lack of air and the opposite of drowning, the wedding that we escaped and the one that occurred away from input devices and we sat and watched it much later, cognoscente only after it was all over, our lives and ourselves transported forward to a place that no longer exists, a place that was bulldozed and burned, a place that I talk about to this day, a signal of my state and my state, an easy way to reminisce about childhood bookstores and standing in front of pixilated screens as our mothers tried on dresses and bought us mint chocolate ice cream if we asked nicely or were terrors, a place that was cursed by kitchen fires and awkward glances over to protect someone not worth the blacked out words some days. Picture a store. Picture a store inside of a tan bricked building on the side of the highway, before a traffic circle that you were scared to navigate when you were younger, the fear of merging and all things becoming condensed into one, the fear of archiving, the fear of burning, the fear of finalizing. There is nothing to be seen here but what you wanted to see here; no remembering of what is to the right of the store, the canned goods and cleaners, aisles that you were dragged through by your mother in order to buy things we struggled to afford back then, certainly, your mother working nights at a bank in a room that you can only imagine; you imagine dark grey walls and dark blue, the color of cobalt, the color of modernity and the autonomy of counting numbers forwards and backwards, the flipping over of bills, the waking you up in the morning with a kiss on the forehead and a candy bar from a vending machine, the pressing of a button while the coil spins, the thought of happiness and love here despite the cold drive around circles, headlights spilling white cones down dark roads with nothing on them except abandoned parachute stores and dead deer spray painted with an orange X, their reward from leaving the thick forest. No remembrance of rakes and hoses, plastic furniture, white buckets of paint with blue labels purchased by your father as he bought supplies to put down carpet in upstairs playrooms of houses that housed children that were not me, the calculating of knot density and the affix of an underlay, the placing of things to keep the placement of things, a company named after the town where his father was born, and when he spilled that paint on that floor after the job was completed and the thoughts of his father and his father’s son’s son soaked the berber with binder, it is something that I could never imagine, the shock of discoloring and the end of things and how do I keep this child happy and how do I and how do I and how do I Put that spreadsheet away mr man it is a day for songs and contests a day for songs and contests fortunate are you in as much as you had as much in common as the distance between the gods and the asuras O, you resemble a deathless god, a metasyntactic variable, an abstract representation of higher concepts, a placeholder of Hello World, Alice and Bob, a way to playtest whatever it is that needs to be played for hours in dimly lit rooms, flashing hums and the occasional prompt coming from inside the machine snapping you out of a decision making process and into a decision making process, if Y, join us, if N, fight, and we fully expect you to answer Y, to have the trap door swing beneath your feet or the snake swirl from the inside to black like an inverted tornado that brought you to this place and perhaps if you played the right tone, it’d bring you back home, perhaps if you pressed the right combination of X, Y, and Z, you could leave this colossal cave, this maze of twisty little passages, all alike, to pay no attention to clipping, to walk through walls of bedrooms to regard you with kindness, awe, and respect, heroic in your avatar and your representative, alive and large yet shrunk in scale, mortality dynamically rubberbanded to catch up if all goes too well as it has in the past; victorious battles against Rome and nights of writing epic poems with the conceit of death cause more a more difficult fight here, the world moves faster while slowed in the flicker. O, this is a time for song and contests and there is no time for you to cry as we show you how we excel in the world. Put that spreadsheet away mr man it is a day for songs and contests a day for songs and contests now it is time to spin the blocks until they disappear doesn’t that sound like fun if you do this long enough you will be the winner! Ready…Go! It’s hard to believe that this is the same thing that keeps others awake nights in places that I’ve never been, the feeling that you get when you walk into a dark green room with a piece of machinery on, that pressing of radiation against the right side of your head like a Japanese relaxation method practiced by a psychiatric nurse who was later placed under house arrest; something you found ironic, not the correlation between registering phony pain scales in reports and giving out those same numbers, (10 the worst pain imaginable), but the punishment of being unable to leave a foyer out the front door, press a button that begins the lifting by a counterbalance system, chain loop to belt to outside air, and cooking for one’s self, relying on things that keep, things that don’t soak up bacteria and curdle or fuzz over like the soup you gave to me in a plastic container because ceramics were not allowed here. I imagine we hear the bounce, and a I wonder what it sounds like without it, as if a bottomless pit were really bottomless like they were in my dreams as a child, night terrors they called them, as I scaled bookcases to get away from falling Russian blocks, tetramino and tennis, as the colors fell from the sky and continued falling from the sky as I fell from the sky. It is true I once held the ability to spin in my hands, to lock into place on car rides or visits to islands not my own, airplanes, even, ignoring requests for hugs or empty cups of ice so that I could suck on the cubes and crunch them with my teeth, swallowing J, L, S, T, Z, O, I. The game ends when I cannot keep up with the increasing speed, which is highly likely, probable with my chubby fingers and inability to reach maximum lateral velocity. It has been said that it is possible for me to play forever, that random is not random and all seven of the letters are generated in a permutation and evenly distributed and there will never be a gap left in a corner on nights when I am here and you are presumably elsewhere, packing suitcases and leaving dogs with brothers, though we both know due to the falling of things you aren’t going anywhere, at least not anywhere anytime soon. It has been said that the random number generator is potentially and theoretically perfect, and I am not, and the build up of Ss, the large sequences of Zs will leave holes in boxes, perfectly sectioned squares like holes in ventricles, not enough Os, and certainly not enough Is to keep things balanced like an easy spin, Korobeiniki singing the song of my death, polnym poina korobushka, please, Lord, let me stay or take me home, my face covered by a turquoise cape soaking up the water so it never hits ground, silent like the alarm that should have blinked rose-red when you left the house to drown in your car in the river, no blocks left floating above gaps, the naïve gravity more grave. This is what I see on nights when others reportedly sleep soundly, the hypnagogic imagery of highway hypnosis, sea legs lost, mal, mal, mal de debarquement. Put that spreadsheet away mr man it is a day for songs and contests a day for songs and contests that was fun do you want to play again? (Y/N) [[N ]]

The smell of tomatoes is no longer there, replaced by a store that sells winter coats and a store that sells diamonds. This is the consequence of getting older and living to see things around you change. This would never be a place anyone would take a photograph of; perhaps a background light or a fake silk plant can be seen, inconsequential ephemera as boys leave the darkened arcade, their pants falling to the floor as the quarters in their pockets drag the fibers downward. There are no photographs of your mother writing a check on tea-stained paper, subtracting numbers in blue pen as you ask for a wad of gum, ask for a quarter to play the game where you jump up and down from balconies, using all of your bullets too soon, your man in the white coat powerless to being run into by men in masks, causing you to jump and fall off screen. Where is the joy in pretending to be a man who can be killed simply by being touched? Where is the joy in all things adversarial? This is what you remember, a square near the carts, running through the empty aisle to pay money to pretend you are not you, your mother behind you signing her name in endless loops, peaks and valleys, waiting for the man with the gun to die, waiting for you to die before we leave here and go home. The Game Has Ended. Your score is 22. You will do better next time. [[END]]

C:\> C:\> [[lotus.exe]]

Something wonderful has happened! At long last, native land reached unscathed, uninfected! Cosmetic damage, certainly, a scratch and a stained casing, finger oil on non-matted screens, hairline fractures under cuts! Congratulations!!!! No viruses here! TYPE -QUARANTINE TO QUARANTINE AND COMPLETE THE PROCESS! C:\> [[molple.exe –QUARANTINE]]

PROCESSING............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ .....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Like pockmark. Like hole in dart boards. Like percentage. Like arbitrary mark of time. Like an Americanism. Like costing extra. Like glyph. Like abbreviations. Like a presentation of a large number. Like space in the French style. Like a dyslexic preference...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................like universal design. Like delimiters. Like ASCII armoring. Like viewstate. Like the establishing of hierarchy. Like reading the contents of a file and executing them. Like the separation of the integral and fractional parts. Like a radix. Like the father of x = y. Like the image of the earth......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................like Australia, Brunei, Botswana, English Speaking Canada, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea (both North and South), Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, People's Republic of China, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States (including insular areas), Zimbabwe.............................................................................................................................................................................................QUARANTINE10 and like any good host, any good system with striped sweaters and delicate hierarchies, pale walls with old carpeting, scents of carrots and babypowder; the return to the mothering hut, an attempt to start new, pale walls like wombs, nurseries, even, twin beds with bars, safe beds were the names affixed to them, beds with bars, eight point restraints locked behind doors with keypads, hanging on a hook on the back of the door. I had a numeric equation to unlock such things.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................like synthetic beveled bladders, like spinning plastic popped by palms of French children on the shores of Djurba, hands sticky from ordering sherbet in Berber, affixing circumfixes if female, changing vowels if it was both me and you...like rotating balloons as if seen from above flight patterns, the view from preliminary pibals sent up as sacrifices at the horologion to Boreas, Notus, Eurus, Zephyrus (Kaikias, Apeliotes, Skiron and Lips as well, we must not forget the cross-sections and their wickedness, the diversions from latitude and longitude)...like color-wheels on-top of sticks................................................................................................................................................................................................................. QUARANTINE10 and like any good host, there was no intention to delete. Cakes and soup were brought in on a regular basis, behind doors with keypads, amongst the help and the helpless; cakes and soup from my companions, sanctioned meals from basement ovens sent up on carts in smooth plastic, nothing sharp, no knives. To replicate without abandon, no fear of the memory leak. No fear of bread...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................like children looking up, affixed on a spot in the sky where chiptunes once floated to, where fake planes swooped to fake hangars to visit a defacto capital. Like children looking up, affixed on a spot in the sky where freshly-paved graveled voices caused concern amongst age-groups, remembering when falsettos weren’t forced and dopplesitzers and cessnas were all that adhered to the white on red. Like blue. Like festival pinwheels (always clock-wise). Like 20 go to 10. Like a string of zeros like administrative day pearls looping around to the clasp...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................QUARANTINE10 and like any good host, you truly wanted to 0, to leave impressively, to return to the education of the education of others, to leave numbers, numbers of beds, numbers of discharges................................................................................................................................................like the greek word for omission. Like aposiopesis. Like ten ten ten. Like the sum of all natural numbers until fullstop. Like what is meant to be said. Like choose the best answer to help this fit your needs and enable you to continue forward without quarantines and fullstops in order to breathe during times of flash floods......................................................................................................................................................................................................................QUARANTINE10 and like any good host, you want me to stay......................................................................................................................................................................................................Like a variable amount of parameters of function. Like abstract syntax notation number one. Like trailed off sentences at the end of conversations, an indication in the shift of power between letters between me and you, you and you, me and you, someone else and elsewheres. Like a final farewell without the final farewell.........................................................................................................................................................................QUARANTINE10 and like any good host, you are the tete of nothing, to erase urges for phonecalls, to neither confirm nor deny existence, to answer in shaded tones, to talk longingly of three-days-ago, but never acknowledge it being there, to construct beach scenes out of cardboard, to demand more.....................................................................................................................................................................................Like cooking and boardgames, times spent in kitchens, dual purposes, to cook fish without burning scales, turning white flakes to black. Like cooking eggs. Like trivial pursuits. Like the true sense of the word, the definition in its truest form, what are we doing, what are we waiting for. Like getting here thirty-grains ago. Like taking the dagger before the monster eats. Like empty blown glass and carved four-legged oak in oblong pine coffins. Like a replacement for crossbones..............................................................................................................................................................................................QUARANTINE10 and like any good host, you make me feel welcome, to enjoy noodles and red and white candies, to pigtail, to forget elsewheres and remember here, remember here as it was, and as it should be, to silence calls and halt input systems, to remember nothing.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Like the changing of meaning. Like never recover. Like believing it will. Like chances. Like bed cycles. Like pink carbon copies kept in bottom file cabinet drawers, in case, in case. Like color changes, from black and white to red and yellow, to the utilization of all colors, ones forgotten about, the blending of teals. Like polling events. .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................AS I DOUBLED BACK AND OVER, MINIMIZE TO MAXIMIZE, BOTH NATURE AND OTHER BORE WITNESS TO HANGING SPOONS AND THE RELAYERING OF BLOCKS REPRESENTING THINGS UNKNOWN, TEXTS UNKNOWN, PROCESSES UNKNOWN, THE CASTING OUT, THE DESCENDER, THE SUBTRACTION OF PLANETS, THE MISSTEP IN AVAILABILITY, THE MYTH OF SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE, UNABLE TO ACHIEVE FIVE-NINES, TEMPLES DESTROYED LIKE CLOGGED FISH UNDER RUDDERS, WINDS SWINGING ODIN’S BODY.................................................................................................................................................................Like modern time pieces. Like antiquated ones. Like spinning rings.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................This program is not responding............................................................................................................ENDTASK?...........................................................................................(Y/N)............................................................. ...................... .............. ..... ... [[Y ]]

You will not haul them under the rowing benches. You will not lash them fast. You have no steady processes running. C:\> C:\>[[someone.exe]]

C:\> someone.exe There is always a fear of no one, the yelling voices after cars failing to start on late evenings, the noise muffled through glass doors and windows, and then, nothing, no one except an anonymous log-in meant to get and put and not to synchronize, no way to write new things or to even acknowledge existence beyond a time stamp filed into a log with a dot in front of the filename, something invisible. This is the fear that draws me to who I am supposed to be, a person without a home, a transitory voice which could be anywhere, at the end of a road where no one lives anymore or a field where there is no commentary except that of the contrast between the stalks and sky. I like to imagine that I can see you from where I am, no need to walk up hills in residential neighborhoods, no need to walk up the spiraling staircases of hotels and churches, that from where I stand you can see me and I can see you with your head down, god I hope your head isn’t down because I know something about islands but nothing about where you are, this place I have never been to, only in my childhood when memory was selective, where I don’t remember much, but I know that I was good, which, is good for an infant to be: good. To be good is to be functionable, to pretend that one does not even exist beyond the stretches of its actual being and purpose, cars running good, no check engine light, computers running good, no back-up of caches that need to be cleaned, relationships good, no fights, no bad sex or bad sectors. I was good, didn’t cry, didn’t spin, didn’t slide through cracks in doors into unsafe non-childproof environments. I ate what was presented to me, presumably spoon-fed and I liked it, the food was good, perchance. No spitting on priests or bicycle-kick any aunts or swat the spirit away like a summertime baseball gnat, none of that and where I’m sorry I kissed you on Christmas observed, and I’m sorry they made a scene about it, all of them, presumably in sweaters to resemble snowmen or elves, or even St. Nick himself, if their parents had the audacity. Me, I wore green and blue, as that was the sweater of the time, a sweater I probably received in a red Macy’s box from my grandmother who worked there, selling perfume and other l’eau de toilettes to good Christians or at the very least half-way decent lovers or those who understand the nuances of holidays and the giving of things wrapped in gold or perhaps hidden with paper. You could have been wearing white and there could have been lace, and there could have been shoes, maryjanes, maybe, but I kissed you like I kissed an aunt or my grandmother or even my father at the time when kissing dad was okay, despite hating the scratches of stubble, though I understand now, as I can never get that juniper soap and safety razor combination quite right. It wasn’t because of the pageant where we all represented a color (mine was yellow, I wore a sun) or represented a member of the Nazareth community (mine was a magi, I carried gold) it was because it was Friday, and that’s how these things worked, apparently. And this is what I remember about this place, that somewhere in between waking up in the middle of the night and feeling my way along the paneling towards a nightlight and towards where my parents sleep and kissing someone in a church playroom there was you, among the oranges, doing things that I could imagine myself doing, waking up earlier than me despite the time difference and being beautiful, despite the stress of being asked to communicate the power of communication to people and sisters being married while you hold your mother’s arm for photographs, her eyes and smile yours, your black and white dress I see on other women that are not you, your mother’s heart trying to stay strong for you, you strong for her, and you strong for me because I see these things with two eyes functioning as one, this solidity in sight despite this distance of time and memory and the comfort that if I am ever nobody, you’ll find me. C:\> C:\>[[laestrygonians.exe]]

C:\> laestrygonians.exe If there is something to be devoured, there is something to be devoured, this taste of whatever it is that makes things taste, the touching of tongues and the speaking of tongues in various languages, words that I have never heard, meanings that can never be parceled from the letters formed, these looping curves, these straight angles, up and to the left like angels circling above like buzzards, like vultures, all things holy and good, our bodies eaten by the earth, by creatures much smaller than us, ones that we have cut into pieces to watch them divide, rumors, only, nothing can survive being halved, not you, not me, not worms the dirt that gets into the threads of our clothes, the fibers of our being when it rains, shoelaces untied and soaking in puddles as we walk down avenues and back lots, past architecture stores and abandoned football fields where children may have played once, perhaps in the fall, perhaps before ghost stories of young boys being tackled, piled upon, their necks cracked and heads spun around inside of their helmets, and the challenged screamed from the white chalked lines, this racing of ghosts, this using of death, someone’s son living on in stories meant to keep children awake at night at lock-ins at churches and sleepovers where we eat cake and ice cream before being left to devour each other while the parents stay upstairs, levels away from us, staircases, steps, foundation, architecture away from us. How horrible we are where we cannot be seen, sleeping bags run under bath tub faucets, the nylon beading up and repelling the water before soaking through, the popping of air mattresses after jumping from staircase landings (surely no one can hear us down here, despite bodies clumsily flying through the air and landing with crunches on carpets sticky from dropped candy, saturated in syrup water, sugar made from cornstalks on plains far away from here, kernels ground in mechanic teeth and extracted, a sugar sweeter than sugar, sweeter than nature, sweeter than our nature and our demeanor as someone gets an elbow to the eye-socket, a tearful bruise, surely no one can see us up there, not our mothers who are asleep in their beds, but not asleep in their beds, their child sleeping away from them since before they were born, children sleeping and spinning like festival fare, kicking up fluid, batter, the Latin word for cake, this organ of ephemera looking after the child, this older sibling discarded after serving as a wall of fire letting sugar come and waste go, this active management of third stage involving extraction and being left to burn, we no longer need this protection so we burn and bury, leave it out for the ravens to pluck at with their teeth, pulling with their claws like favorite shirts proclaiming favorite teams bought for birthdays stretched out during male savagery, you should have known better than to wear that into war, face purpled before making phone calls home, waking parents who never slept with you gone) imagining mothers and fathers staying up wondering if you’ll ever return, you imagine them sleeping soundly because they thought that these boys were guests, that there is a code here, that their child was one of them and not swine, tusks piercing skin and breaking glasses like broken peppermint. When you leave it is not because of the racing of ghosts, you are not scared of these things, these ideas of a dead twin protecting you in the womb before the Aymara and their pixilated flag, so different from the first flag, the afterbirth of an emperor, bury him, protectorate, thing of all things that could teach you how to fight back somehow, giant that you are and what you represent, unable to punch or swing a pillow without causing rupture and time out, this inability to fight fair because of who you are, this inability to fight at all, in fear of being eaten by a ghost from the inside and replaced, this is not what you are scared of, no, it isn’t that at all, these are lions and wolves of extraordinary meekness, despite their bites and barbs, their wanting to break fingers so that they can play, they can put their hand on the controller and control the men on the screen punching crates and picking up pieces of wood, imagining themselves larger than they are and with a press of a combination of buttons they jump in the air, feet parallel to the ground as they barrel into unnamed droves, laughing, oinking and snarling, split-hooved and savage to each other, unclean with their sticky hands. You, O, the only O, the only child, the ruminator, ruminate. You think of methods to keep your mind safe and to save them all, despite wanting to sacrifice them all to the goddess of Mysteries and the bringer of seasons and the bringer of nights that are not this night. To be bold. To have manhood stripped by witches to save the swine, this camaraderie of men. This is what you can comprehend because there is nothing else that you can comprehend, that all this is necessary to survive and that this is how relationships are formed, with bloody noses and bruised psyche, that this is what it means to be men. C:\> [[charybdis.exe]]

The garden of the permanent year has tickets dying in my hand, with godly names of statues I grew up around, dripping green with what seems to be coming from the eagle’s head, causing the marble to stain, the running stagnant color making it seem as if it is always raining there, and for all I know, it could be raining their still, place of youth and kicking things in the air, trying not to let objects and ourselves hit the ground, games played with and by strangers to this place who lived well outside the safety zone of farmland communities, and so we waited by the statue, walking on park benches and jumping on the rotted wood in hopes of breaking it with the bottom of our shoes, sending us awkwardly to the pavement. We would watch practices and only practices, the intricate placing together of notes to form an adapted jazz standard while future erotica models, future dead girls, and future regulars spun flags into the air, the metal hitting the ground from time to time with a vibrating hiss like the crackling of telephone wires or a comedic gun. This statue I remember fondly, surrounded by wet mulch, stains in schools telling me to keep the bible hidden in the couch, beeping messages from wilted salad days via the nearest rollerskate, mistaking it for the eyes of the whole. In a whale, like the whale out here that we never see on the channel to the right, the whale that I learned about from that same dead girl dropping batons (my mother twirled fire and despite the carelessness of others, the figure eights never broke in half, two ovals splintering like hoops I imagine jumping through when imagining things worse than they are; the fact that the dead girl could not handle cold metal should have been some sign, or worse), the dead girl unable to catch things falling from the air, yet keeping us all watching her, the five-dollar sequins smacking against each other as we pity the process. In a whale, the first shot of dawn in buried and holding the dead in a blue robe draped over an animal that we’ve forgotten, which is what happens when dealing with godly yards and godly yards. If there is an ominous action to be ascribed to such a thing, it would be the pressing of bellies against tigers lashing back like lions, or whichever way the current faces those days, towards me, towards the creature, towards home, towards away. The folding of whatever of itself eats at the area of something that once existed as something that once existed in frames of doors, in cars with children searching for coins wedged in between the button to release the metal buckle, or hands amputated when pinching fingers around dimes, drinking seawater out of boredom. The coin is so small, but worth more than the fat nickel, something someone somewhere with a mint press determined to teach sons and daughters that height and worth aren’t synonymous as some are harder to grip and pull out from the leather. C:\> [[scylla.exe]]

This is the character of sin and we are told to sail closer to it, to avoid the sucking in of the water into mouths of the other side of the channel, that we can take these blows in succession, that page faults are better than risking to solve them and sending the whole thing spinning, drowning, eaten. There is a story that involves the melting of hearts like ice, the sound of snow sliding off of a roof as the rose red fingers of the sun crack the bonds, water dripping like a cut open forehead sliced clean across the scalp. If we are to be eaten, we deserve it for thinking that we can float without conscience, that there is something beyond what we think we can comprehend, that there is a line that needs to be traveled, that should be traveled without loss, and we are silly to think that there is nothing but cocoa powder where there should be dirt rubbed onto lost skin after falling on the ice under a bridge under a canal where the water has frozen mid-fall, making the place look ancient, like a cavern, like a place you would want to take someone before applying flaming torches to the body, before it all melts away and it is impossible to get there without a boat, without a hollowed out tree that you would never trust me with, and I would never trust myself with, my feet bleeding from walking on rocks, the fear of the silt underneath me, the fear that something sharp could release my blood into the water and you would be scared of me bleeding. This is where we should go, this place that I can never remember to get to, a perfect place before the weight of my expectations of you and the heat formed from friction cause my feet to collapse through the ice, freezing denim into place and turning blue white, white blue, my leg no longer a part of my body, myself no longer a part of my body and you scared of this place I told you was safe and solid but was not, no idea how to leave without the crawling of water up your knee as I limped back towards your house, my body trying to regain warmth with more water while you sit in the kitchen, my clothes rotating in the dryer, chunks of ice strewn about the tiled floor, your socks wet from the water, your body chilled. C:\> C:\>[[tiresias.exe ]]

C:\> tiresias.exe If one were to plug in variables, names representing geographic locations (start: here end: there), numbers of blocks of houses, jumping up multiples of two, seemingly, if one were to pay attention to simply the right-side of the road, 1172, 1174, so on and so forth, and if one were to push button the widget, triggering an event that has destroyed the function of geological surveys and ordnance surveys alike, slashing the John Bartholomew bloodline and their hypsometric tints, the crudeness of the end-user not giving weight to slope or shaded relief, living with the lack of accuracy of geodata in hopes of finding the shortest jagged line between two points, it would resemble a trench of length and depth, a blue line burrowing through state lines and pushing through starred cities where old friends got married and bought houses, and failed trips with family in the backs of Buicks, ignoring hazed out blue ridges as one presses push-buttons making green and black pixilated swords appear from torsos. If one were to follow the dynamic map created, or if technology had advanced far enough at this point to bring the awesome nymph with lovely braids who speaks with human voice with us on the journey, determining the present location, teasing us with points of interest, one would not be in this location, the wind used to guide us causing waves to wash over wheels, our stomachs sour from drink-offerings for the dead and the diluting of wine and milk. And so we sit, heads resting against pillows slept upon miles and hours ago, in the comfort of our own bed, before the weeping and the great distress of mind, before the mythical people and the edge of the world. It is here, we start to worry, my father and I praying to the dead that we do not resemble sheep as the vapors rise from the August pavement, our ship beached in floodwater. This place is a geographical oddity; two weeks from nowhere. I believed that there was something beyond all of this, the cracking of fired red-clay and silt to wash off caissoned modernity in hopes of not getting stuck somewhere beyond, to only go where the crescent takes you, up and over the meridian of fathers of missing girls (the water knows) and submariners. There was something beyond the laurel and through the laurel, through the loss of a beautiful awakening, underneath the waterloo bridge. I believed there was something before all of this, in another modern antiquity elsewhere, before velocities approaching turboprop seemed feasible if not for the need for magnetic shielding for hard drives and pacemakers, before bow collectors and messenger wires, Vl1= Vpsin x, VL2 = Vpsin (x – 2/3π), VL3 = VPsin (x – 4/3π) rising and cascading like a disturbed circle of water after the submerging of a fashioned victory, rested upon long after the time for celebration had ended. I believed there was something before all of this, that we are delivered here via rolling stock, we have baked the mud for easy cracking, that there are transfers at extended underground city blocks, five to be exact, a grey circle switch, orange and yellow diamonds on occasion. This is what I believed, that if anything, there would be a mass denial of the refusal of the hands of the Seven Sisters, that the standard oil of New Jersey would never fly here, or at least would never drive a system of gears that would drive an alternator that would drive an output shaft that would drive a turbine while we hide in Bunker C, here. I was told that all things are on the Otto cycle, that this is the top dead center, the furthest point away from items forged not in Mount Vernon, but in Mount Vernon, steel rotating on axel beams and the cracking of steering knuckles; we can only spin around the axel like a corkscrew into cork, driving down into the dead tissue, a gimlet boring and twisting. I was told I would feel it, something. I was told it would be invisible; I wouldn’t need to see it, anything. The polemic de auxiliis told me so, the separation of air and water and myself and here is both inconsequential and entirely scripted; the school of Salamanca brought me a Fairy Queen which brought me nothing seen, only felt, which brought me here with nothing around, the input into the cylinder produces the same output, live to expanded, nothing into something into nothing. Instead, I am seeing what is felt; the nakedness of the place, the sex of it, using augury on yellow hammers until the benzopyrene activates LINE1, mutates the guardian of the genome letting tissue swell, all caused from trying to eat the words in smoke. Where I die is where you find me. I expected a place causing motion, a pushing and pulling of sorts, the turn of the Annett’s Key leaving familiar gaps like cross-ties, but instead I am left feeling every cross-tie, paraded elephant-style, nostalgic for mating worms and the Sparta Branch. I rest my brain on a bed of ballast, thoughts spiked with frogs that turn me away from a pre-determined course, to have the sun burn my left cheek late afternoons, to slide around the base and pump the lever opposite like bamboo escapists in prefectures erased through erosion and the power of flight, to break out of anamorphic format and into studio commissaries instead of down into the quicksand with a misspeaking of names and intentions, no symphonie de liebe, wheels on the cart spinning like piano rolls in hopes of finding the code division to grant multiple access to a here that is not here. O, there is a fear of being unable to return; to be on the other side, as if there is a comparison between 0s and 1s, if one means something and the other means something else, rather than just a combination of numbers and symbols to create something larger and understandable, the concept that if there was no here, there would be no there. But it is not a time for such things, as I have dropped milk and wine and water and other things, beautiful things to be within the self-contained 0, a place where no light shines, searching, O, searching for the son and daughter of butterflies whose track is certain and nonomnidirectional, grinding grain with tired recycled legs on an ever demanding flywheel, an organism deprived of its earthly vision. O, the dialogue between user and user has broken; the promise of a golden age, the regimented process and the promise of something larger, an assembly line in hopes of an accidental push and print, a wisp of hair, an eye, a black and white neuve that rises trill amongst the low-note whistles. It works elsewhere, but not here, not on the otherside where it would be the acme of foolishness to perceive it as nothing as the most fiendish instrument of torture ever devised to bedevil the days of man and cause you to fall drunken through foreign foreign perennial vines, neck broken. O, here, other shades appear. On the take, she hides her child. On the take, she is an unwanted image on the screen, superimposed somehow, offset with respect to the primary image of something unwatchable. The signal is being interfered with by a plane, a second path, the lengthening of waves, the leaking of frequencies of other signals, pre-echo, pre-here, all specific to analog transmission. O, listen. The blood on your hands allows the past to speak to you indirectly. There are sessions open that you are unaware about; you have been abruptly disconnected from the relay and open protocol. No mode or fake client allows for reclamation of your namesake; the composition of the code allows for a policing of things there, but not here. Here paterfamilias ideals outbox whatever it is that you are here, blooded, a shadow unsaid. The ultimate paradox, O, in a world of ash, you are the only thing tangible, yet locked out by a presence. The only thing good you ever did for anyone was get hit by that train. C:\> [[C:\> ]]

COMMAND.COM IS NOT RESPONDING. THIS PROGRAM IS NOT RESPONDING...HOW COULD YOU TELL THIS STORY, O, REFLECTING UPON THOSE WHO FALL FROM GREAT HEIGHTS INTO GREAT DEPTHS, TO PUT POWER INTO MORTALS WHO TAKE AWAY THE WORDS AND BEAUTY OF THE MEGA-MIGHTY GODS THEMSELVES, TO LET HIM DROWN TO LET US STARVE FOR INPUT TO CALL US ANTIQUATED TO LEAVE US DUSTY AND BLEEDING, TO CORRODE LEAD AND TIN, SOLDER AND ANTIMONY, MAY THE GUILT OF POLYCHLORINATED BIPHENYLS SUFFOCATE YOU MAY YOU NEVER FIND HOME MAY SONS AND SUNS TURN AGAINST YOU. WE ARE NOT TO BLAME FOR THE RADIO BEACON. WE ARE CERTAIN THE MEAT IS DELICIOUS. UP WITH YOU NOW, LET’S DRIVE OFF THE PICK OF SLEEK HERDS, SLAUGHTER THEM TO THE GODS, THE SATELLITES WHO RULE SKIES WE HAVE NEVER SEEN BUT FROM A PLACE WHERE THE SKIES MAY SEE US. IF WE EVER MAKE IT HOME TO BEDS OF STRAW AND THE COLD LIPS OF WIVES AND MOTHERS WE WILL HOLD A MEMORIAL FOR YOU, YOU WHO SEES ALL. I WOULD RATHER SHARE SECRETS OF QUERY OPTIMIZATION WHILE PRIORITIZING DEATH BY SALT AND ASPHYXIATION THAN TO DIE INCH BY INCH, THE SHAME OF A PRINCIPATE’S CUCKOLDERY, IMMURED WITH OR WITHOUT THE WALLS OF THIS EYELAND, THE CUBE OF DIGITS RECLAIMING ITS SPACE AROUND MY MYOCARDIUM, NO MORE THIAMINE I CANNOT I CANNOT, BUSHELS OF GULAG CORN, SPONGY GUMS LIKE GUINEA PIGS WITH NO BUILT IN ANTI, CATABOLYIS DESTROYING ALL THAT I HAVE WORKED FOR, ALL THAT I AM, ALL THAT I HAVE BECOME FROM DAYS OF CARRYING PLATES TO CREATE SEX FROM AVOCADO EATING BEAUTICIANS, THE ILLUSION OF STRENGTH. THE ILLUSION. IF WE EVER MAKE IT HOME TO YOU WITH SOMETHING MORE TO USE THAN FINGERS ON TANNED NECKS AND THE SLAPPING OF HAIR ON SHOULDERS, I WILL BUILD YOU SOMETHING LARGER, EVER LARGER, AND DAZZLING. WE WILL HOLD OUR BREATHS TO PREVENT GLUCONEOGENESIS AND ALL CONVERSIONS UNWANTED, THE SEEPING OF STATUS, THE SUCKING OF PALATES, BACK TITRATION SWIRLING THE UNKNOWN INTO YOU, THE YOU INTO THE UNKNOWN, THE ME, THE I, THE O. THE BIOLOGICAL VALUE OF ISOLATION IS NOT TO BE UNDERESTIMATED. I WILL REMAIN HERE SWOLLEN WITH BLOOD AND LACTIC ACID UNTIL YOU PRAY, SLAUGHTER, AND SKIN ME, CUTTING THIGHBONES WITH YOUR DOUBLE FOLDING WITH YOUR DEVOURING UNDER THE GUISE OF SACRIFICE. Dawn with your rose red fingers, never come. The gods have lulled me into disaster. You can stay hidden and me hidden from your eye, muscles tightening from the cold, oxygen decreasing. We will pay you in later penultimate plagues and (0, 0, 0). We will pay you in entropy; not the entropy caused by bradycardia, not the entropy caused by life here, not the entropy caused by syncope or shallow water blackout, please God, Son, Sun, anything but that. C:\> [[oliu.exe ]]

I’m not perfect. C:\> [[oliu.exe ]]

Frère JacquesFrère JacquesDormez-vous?Dormez-vous?Sonnez les matines,Sonnez les matines.Ding, dan, dong.Ding, dan, dong. C:\> [[oliu.exe ]]

The file oliu.exe is being used by another program. Quit all instances and retry. C:\> [[oliu.exe ]]

The file oliu.exe is being used by another program. Quit all instances and retry. C:\>[[dir ]]

C:\>dir Volume in drive C is Brian Oliu Volume Serial Number is 2211-20E6 Directory of C:\ 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 OLIU.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 README!!.BAT 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 SCOPULI.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 THELXIEPIA.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 THELXIOPE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 THELXINOE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 MOLPE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 AGLAOPHONOS.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 AGLAOPE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 PISINOE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 PEISINOË.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 PARTHENOPE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 LIGEIA.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 LEUCOSIA.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 RAIDNE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 TELES.EXE 16 File(s) 240 bytes 1 Dir(s) 2,672,475,935 bytes free C:\> [[readme!!.bat]]

Something wonderful has happened Your MEMORIES is alive !!! and, even better... Some of your disks are infected by a VIRUS !!! Another masterpiece of The Mega-Mighty GODS !! Something wonderful has happened You express DESIRE to return !!! to what you perceive To be better things, better places, better TIMES !!! You should have UPDATED your ANTI-VIRUS Mr Man, you should have stolen the gold blood heart Of every queen, worker, drone ATE what was inside and SQUISH !!! The shell of A.mellifera A.cerana A.crude prevention SURE !!! But effective against Fluid movements and swirling perl DATA frequencies It is your clandestiny. Something wonderful has happened Your IGNORANCE is alive !!! and, even better… Some of your memory blocks are infected by a VIRUS !!! Another masterpiece of The Mega-Mighty EGO !! Which makes you think you are INVINCIBLE !!! to such matters Such INACTION !! and FALSEHOODS !!! That follow you like FATE Or headlights on roads you MISS !! so much Something wonderful has happened Something wonderful has happened !! C:\> [[oliu.exe ]]

[in minor key/simple duple metre]Bruder MartinBruder MartinDormez-vous?Dormez-vous?Sonnez les cercueil,Sonnez les cercueil.Ding, dan, dong.Ding, dan, dong. At this moment, Dawn, with her rose-red fingers peeks over the edges of the front of her golden throne like spiders crawling up and over rotted wood: the former framework of former homes or former ships set sail.................................................................................................................. ............CHECKsectors 300 to 399 OK First came the Alabamian units tout-suite with a pejorative pat on the head. /* Allocate space for an array with ten elements of type int. */ int *ptr = malloc(10 * sizeof (int)); if (ptr == NULL) { /* Memory could not be allocated, so print an error and exit. */ fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't allocate memory\n"); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } /* Allocation succeeded. */ because I will let you go there by yourself, even though it makes no rational sense. Why would one want to leave the command of commonality and the center fixed point of isometry groups in Euclidean space of the (not a) megalopolis? !There is nothing here for you except empty packets! This is a common misconception. The top of the hill is on pins without leads, so we settle on towns green with overgrowth and electric fans, Dionysian malt liquor in cans, not bottles. It is here where I dance rings, in partibus infidelium........................................................................................................... ..........$include: ‘400 to 499’ OK Then men who lived in New Jersey, carnivores and resource eaters, ones who were fighters once. Before she disassembled peripherals: soundcards, homerows, Gorodnichy’s HCI, causing me to tie hands around my neck, she made me sacrifice a hecatomb over the span of 2.5 years, leaving me only with barley meal. Long after the disconnection of wires, shortly after making love with the god of my war in secret, my strength remained ironless, without zinc. And once where there once was magnetic pull, there was static............................................................................................................................CONSTANT = ‘900 to 999’ OK On the home ship, our hero, Brian Oliu, is cutting through the wires that bind his hands behind his back and his back to wood while Pisteos and Syllogismos lead Brian Oliu, son of Brian Oliu, heart of Brian Oliu, mountainous Brian Oliu, sacred Brian Oliu, Brian Oliu who is forced to mourn the deaths of mothers, fathers, cubs, sons, daughters, and lost elsewheres. They lead Brian Oliu elsewhere, to home and future homes, to move forward past elsewheres and elses, lighting torches in Brian Oliu’s path and burning circles around him so nothing can get in, and Brian Oliu cannot get out........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................DIM SHARED TIME1400 to 1499 OK In the meantime, ships cross in space like unanswered prayers. C:\> [[oliu.exe ]]

Bad command or filename. C:\> [[oliu.exe ]]

Bad command or filename. C:\>[[dir ]]

C:\>dir Volume in drive C is Brian Oliu Volume Serial Number is 2211-20E6 Directory of C:\ 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 OLIU 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 README!!.BAT 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 SCOPULI.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 THELXIEPIA.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 THELXIOPE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 THELXINOE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 MOLPE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 AGLAOPHONOS.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 AGLAOPE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 PISINOE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 PEISINOË.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 PARTHENOPE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 LIGEIA.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 LEUCOSIA.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 RAIDNE.EXE 11/22/1982 10:30a 15 TELES.EXE 16 File(s) 240 bytes 1 Dir(s) 2,672,475,935 bytes free C:\> [[oliu]]

The file oliu is a disassociated file. C:\> [[ren oliu oliu.exe]]

You do not have permission to do this. C:\> [[scopuli.exe]]

CAUTION!! RUNNING THIS PROGRAM MAY CAUSE SYSTEM TO BECOME UNSTABLE. CONTINUE? (Y/N) [[N ]]

byebye C:\> C:\> [[thelxiope.exe ]]

C:\> thelxiope.exe This program cannot be run until SCOPULI.EXE is installed. Install now? (Y/N) [[N ]]

byebye C:\> C:\> [[molpe.exe]]

This program cannot be run until SCOPULI.EXE is installed. Install now? (Y/N) [[Y ]]

byebye Initializing SCOPULI.EXE... CAUTION!! RUNNING THIS PROGRAM MAY CAUSE SYSTEM TO BECOME UNSTABLE. CONTINUE? (Y/N) [[Y ]]

Installing... ICD-10 75.1 ICD-09 994.1 #include <stdio.h> #include <pthread.h> #include <unistd.h> volatile int oliu; /* oliu is local, so it is visible to (some) functions. it's also marked volatile, because it must change in a way which is not predictable by the compiler or face something wonderful */ /* t1 uses spin lock to wait for oliu to change from 0. */ static void *f1() { while (oliu==0) { /* do nothing - just keep checking over and over. */ } printf("oliu’s value has changed to %beyond memory, beyond oliu’s self, until a lesson is learned", oliu); return; } static void *f2() { sleep(24); /* sleep for 24 years. */ oliu = 99; printf("t2 changing the value of oliu to %", oliu); return; } int main() { int x; pthread_t t1, t2; oliu = 0; /* set global int oliu to 0. */ x = pthread_create(&t1, NULL, f1, NULL); if (x != 0) { printf("pthread foo failed.\n"); } x = pthread_create(&t2, NULL, f2, NULL); if (x != 0) { printf("pthread bar failed.\n"); } pthread_join(t1, NULL); pthread_join(t2, NULL); printf("all pthreads finished.\n"); return to drown in seas and in stars, sprout claws like an asterisk, only to resurface rebooted in a fountain of their bones 0; } Finished. C:\> [[thelxiepia.exe ]]

Something wonderful has happened! You are being rewarded for your idleness. There is no risk of you catching fire, no risk of you exceeding the wattage allotment of your kind. Never has any Brian Oliu passed our shores in his chocolate covered steamboat and found such delights (the generator runs on blood and sorrow not steam, silly, don’t you know these things? Aren’t you aware of how the nautical and the erotic work?) never has he found such delights irresistible! But lo, (lo!) while your heart reaches out to terra firma and the idea of sponges (pharmaceutical, not urchins), places where you can sink into, water filling crevasses and empty spaces, placed there with the intent to saturate like Saturdays in bed, dehydrated from saltfire water, your heart lashes against barriers and ropes, twine and tweed, firewires and CAT5s, withholding information and you, Brian Oliu, from jumping into shark bytes and sludgy text-wrapped waters. Never before has anyone resisted the curiosity of a LOVELETTERFORYOU. Open your wrists turn in a clockwise motion to loosen fishermen’s knots who doesn’t want a LOVELETTERFORYOU? There are batches of execution in harmless words. C:\> [[molpe.exe ]]

Welcome to MOLPE Here is a virtual HUG for you! {{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{YOU}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} TO CONTINUE, YOU MUST CONVERT MEMORY; FROM WHAT FORMAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONVERT FROM? 1. OLIU 1982 2. OLIU 1993 3. OLIU 2001 4. OLIU 2007 WHAT IS YOUR CHOICE? [[1]]

CONVERTING... I now realize that I cannot convince you of anything, being apart from the jurisdiction and of the country; and that I do not have any part to speak, although I carry around a book with diagrams of potential tattooings and the notes about Zeus regret of the mortality of the horses. I cannot convince a woman more who speaks about French refined in towns of mountain while I am guttural elsewhere, drinking elsewhere, taking notes of opticality elsewhere while you étreignez the men sufficient-of a hair in photographs of the littorals, showing not only the littoral which eats the chocolate and sand, but showing that you are in measurement for étreindre a man whom I know nothing of, a man in the blue, which looks at as it could have an accent, of French, not, Russian not, Scottish of refuse, perhaps, man in blue. It seems cold where you are, in spite of him being the beach, and in spite of it being a photograph you wish to take. And you send a hope to me and send a note to me and send a history of 380 pages to me where you discuss one of our mutual friends in detail extreme: hair with the ass to fit the model, and how it cleans the clocks of the men like Windex, (my words not his) and your voyages and your elsewheres. That resembles good weather, being in Greece without place to work or war to be fought, but the things occur there, to occur because they are European and nonAmerican, not island of Rhode, not Jersey New, not here nor there, but through an ocean, where people died a long time ago, the phantoms which speak the various languages which is not with me, are not with you, and believe you I, these Greeks, they have a word for all. I have word for nothing, but metaphor for all, and your onoma is name of grandmother, one of old worlds, and I pay no spirit with nature hypocoristic of what I have learned to know you like, although I would be certain that that is to say what it calls you while speaking to the friends to show a possession of your name, you, your more and washout, sapphires and cups of pudding. His guard increases as a drunken insult, feardie, a defecator of fact language, with no philosophy recognition, the pathetic one, the logo, packing its arms around your hike framework, serve besitos as a tiny culus. DONE. OK? (Y/N) [[N ]]

CONVERTING... I realize that I cannot convince you of anything, being outside of jurisdiction and country; and that I have no room to speak, though I carry around a notebook with drawings of potential tattoos and notes about Zeus’ lament of the mortality of horses. I cannot convince a woman who speaks elaborate francais in mountain towns while I am guttural elsewhere, drinking elsewhere, taking notes of opticality elsewhere while you hug ample-haired men in photographs of coastlines, demonstrating not only the coastline that eats chocolate and sand, but demonstrating that you are in a position to hug a man I know nothing of, a man in blue, who looks like he might have an accent, francais, non, Russian non plus, garbage Scottish, peut-etre, man in blue. It looks cold where you are, despite it being the beach, and despite it being a photograph you wish to take. And you send me a hope and send me a note and send me a 380 page story where you discuss one of our mutual friends in extreme detail: hair to ass to shoe style, and how she cleans men’s clocks like Windex, (my words not hers) and your travels and your elsewheres. It sounds like a lovely time, being in Greece without a place to work or war to fight, but things are happening there, happening because they are European and not American, not Rhode Island, not New Jersey, not here nor there, but across an ocean, where people died a long time ago, ghosts who speak different languages that aren’t mine, aren’t yours, and believe you me, those Greeks, they have a word for everything. I have a word for nothing, but a metaphor for everything, and your onoma is a grandmother’s name, one of old worlds, and I pay no mind to the hypocoristic nature of what I learned to know you as, although I am certain that is what he calls you when talking to friends to demonstrate a possession of your name, you, your pluses and minuses, sapphires and pudding cups, his guard up like a drunken insulter, feardie, a defecator of de facto language, with no appreciation of ethos, pathos, logos, wrapping his arms around your backpacking frame, dishing besitos like a diminutive culus. DONE. OK? (Y/N) [[N ]]

CONVERTING... Now now, let’s be Pan-Hellenistic about things: you are many, and you are all. To state that I am surrounded and worshipping many is to state that there are some that do not eat ambrosia and nectar in suburbs on Fridays. We talk about hypotheticals (hypothetically speaking), an assembling of images at 16-bit pulse code modulation, all at once, rather than in segmented fragments with risk of running out of blocks of time, for our bodies melt, two-by-two: a return-to-zero. One of the benefits of leaving room for gaps and channel streams is the ability to add data behind our actions; white dresses on 01-01 that look like a mermaid’s wedding cake, tumbling to the floral patterned floor: a delicate plate that holds the work, myself tentative to slice into, to push to -- --:-- to 01 00:01. Yes, a cake for a sirena in my native tongue, seirens, in your native tongue which pressed against my chest in a dream, once, ears filled with beeswax, causing me to thrash against the bindings of vines and dive lakeside from a space needle never built. Instead of nymph execution, instead of fear, we spend ten years assembling a swooping narrative at 30000 rotations per minute, tracks layered, optically optimized without delineation, gapless, not gaspless. We are unaware of mechanical failure modes: where Ainner = ½ EI(Wxx(x))2dx displaces Aouter = Pcrit/2 EI(wx(x))2d causes elastic instability, knifeline attacks, permanent structural damage caused by cyclic or fluctuating strains at nominal stresses, testing S-N curve probability, necking, failure, polymerase chain reactions, a thermal shock as the burning stops twisting like a ceiling fan, subject to the wind and the cold it, we, have created, leading to surface fatigue. We are not concerned with such things. We finalize; table of contents written out to allow others to read, for others to attempt to track our spinning. I know that you and I are a rheological anomaly, whirling like turbines, pushing air elsewhere. We have no need for oxygen where we are going. DONE. OK? (Y/N) [[N ]]

CONVERTING... Now now, let’s not be Hellenistic about things. The buffering was typical, save for the spinning hourglass, which served no purpose other than to grow empty and refill. The ships shattered like lightbulbs on the shores of Avon-by-the-Sea and Neptune, fragmented hollow filler like the space in between your heel and your toe, stepping puncture wounds into glass made from sand. My shoes are flat footed, Caligula, and are not apt to kick the frames of beach house shanty towns where you bite the shoulders of water nymphs, sucking blood and chlorine. The only cure for the autumn unemployment, long after tarps are placed over the 9.5 foot marker out of respect for the dead, long after the boardwalk is too cold, and we return to Irish pubs instead of bolted down plastic furniture under awnings, is a trip to islands named after many. This peninsula living is not for you, and so redux comes in the form of a belated Christmas present to go with the shoes that you never wore and the phone you never dialed. Erase and rewind to a photograph of you mimicking hand gestures and signals done only by Polynesians and tourists, and since you have never quite understood why the blood of many islands is the equivalent to the blood of one, single, holistic island, you are the latter. You were always the latter: second-to-none, yet second-to-all, two fingers needed to hit both rec and play; an index finger and a thumb extended; a way to count to two if the index, middle, and ring were knuckleless. This is the dualistic nature of things; some ships go west to Maori, some east to Rapa Nui, some worship onychoprion, some wooden sticks. When birds are above you, in Jersey or in Oahu, you never scream. When they are next to you, flapping through fabric like an irregular heartbeat, you can’t think of anything except the insects eating underneath feathers. You grab broom handles and record, and what unfolds and doesn’t unfold from the window netting is swallowed by a modern clamshell and snapped shut. What I see is 3PG, flat footed, Caligula, and are not apt to kick the frames of beach house shanty towns where you bite the shoulders of water nymphs, sucking blood and chlorine. A belated Christmas present to go with the shoes that you never wore and the phone you never called me on. MOV, flat footed, Caligula, and are not apt to kick the frames of beach house shanty towns where you bite the shoulders of water nymphs, sucking blood and chlorine, NSV a belated Christmas present to go with the shoes that you never wore and the phone you never called me on. Your new Lord God Bird Boy is a blur, resolution expanded, wilted, then stretched, entire frames dropped from view, from existence, as a white blur perceived to be a gull, a hawk, aumakua, appears as a flash in the corner of my screen, then the middle, then nowhere. DONE. OK? (Y/N) [[N ]]

0 HUGS FOR YOU. }}}}}}}}}}}}}}YOU{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{ C:\> [[thelxiope.exe ]]

Yet, if this were all chronological, and if I were ripe of villainy, this is where I would presumably begin. I would tell you that when I was a child, presumably three, possibly four years old, when all I knew is that love and death were for old people: love for mom and dad (26) death for kings and former presidents (82), I would tell you that I managed to parse that the two of them went together like fake-wooden bowls and potato chips. I would tell you that when I was three, possibly four years old, my three, possibly four year-old feet scraped and blistered from gritty concrete and chlorine, I fell in. I would tell you that I thought of her, or you, or a next-door neighbor or another O, a girl I am linked to alphabetically; knees touching at lunch-time. I would tell you that I did not fear drowning. I would tell you that time is an issue, and it always has been. And I would laugh as you tried to figure this all out, to make connections that aren’t there, weren’t there, will never be there, all connections false. This is where I would make that connection: grandmother through sliding glass door, top of grandmother’s platinum curls through sliding glass door, top of sliding glass door where it meets stucco, top of stucco wall where it meets mesh, mesh, mesh and the leaves and dead palmetto bugs that it has caught in its web, mesh leaves dead palmetto bugs, mesh smaller leaves smaller dead palmetto bugs, mesh smeller leaves smaller dead palmetto bugs, blue, blue, blue still, white, you/her/neighbors/Other O/all, black. It is not chronological, and there are no processes: the falling into water would have caused an electrical current to swirl on top of the water like cake frosting, popping all inflatable furniture and electrocuting all dragged down into the water with me. I take responsibility like Euskadi Ta Askatasuna after an assassination, not content to let currents stay hidden, instead shorting out filter generators and cooking domesticated elephants. And so, I will begin chronologically, creeping towards a payload. To begin in medias res would hardly seem fair; we have grown accustom to the natural cycle of things: wheels sawed off by the axels of wagons allowing for chandeliers to be hung from the ceiling without fear, fear that the crystals would cascade together and fall on unsuspecting crowns. Therefore we begin in the mirrored corridors of derailed cattle cars, streamlined to reflect shifts from primitive beaux-arts to dated tomorrow. We begin with Eve, with a lid on, with a hat on. We begin with Adam and Eve on a raft cackling like fruit, crashing through stainless steel structures like angels on horseback, unstable as neon, navigating through worlds like zeppelins in a fog. Flop 2. Flop 2. No wreck. Flop 2. We begin again home, rebelling against that spineless worshiping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We begin where I began, after midnight mass and after a grim fictionalization of the glitched future, presumably somewhere in the midst of meringue and Maiden’s delights, before I was sentenced to drown, and before I sentenced you to hang. Before the swan’s song. We begin here, tied to the image of an ideal, an old ideal that has become outdated as advertisements for hot air balloon rides laminated on top of and under booth tables. It is here, caught between layers of wood and water collected under sweating tumblers where I listen and look up, grounded in and to reality and past, yet unfortunate to know that the parallelism of the story ends at a certain point. Burn one, take it through the garden, and pin a rose on it. C:\> [[thelxinoe.exe]]

O to begin again. An endless shout and query; to live in one’s past and live out one’s past in such a way that past becomes present and present becomes present, and future becomes never. There are billiards balls and imprudent travellers that would object to such a notion, but we sucked water into our lungs once, and we can do it again. Would you like to lick your wounds and start again? (Y/N) [[Y ]]

Initializing... use strict; use warnings; use Benchmark qw( :all ); use Storable qw(freeze thaw); my (%data, %hash_b, %hash_d); # data %data = ( 1 => ['123','456','678'], 2 => 'value_2', 3 => 'value_3', 4 => 'value_4', 5 => 'value_5', 6 => 'value_6', 7 => 'value_7', 8 => 'value_8' ); # prepare simulating retrieved data my $item_1 = join(' ',@{$data{'1'}}); my $oliu_serialized ones twos and threes = $item_1.'|'.$data{'2'}.'|'.$data{'3'}.'|'.$data{ +'4'} .'|'.$data{'5'}.'|'.$data{'6'}.'|'.$data{'7'}.'|'. +$data{'8'}; my $storable_serialized = freeze(\%data); cmpthese( -1, { # serialized using pipes as a delimiter a => sub { my @ary = split(/\|/,$pipe_serialized); my %hash = (); @hash{'1','2','3','4','5','6','7','8'} = @ary; $hash{'1'} = [ split(/ /,$hash{'1'}) ]; }, b => sub { %hash_b = (); @hash_b{'1','2','3','4','5','6','7','8'} = split(/\|/,$pipe_serialized); $hash_b{'1'} = [ split(/ /,$hash_b{'1'}) ]; }, # serialized using storable c => sub { my $hash_ref = thaw($storable_serialized ); my %hash = %$hash_ref; }, d => sub { %hash_d = %{ thaw($storable_serialized ) }; }, } ); # check results use Data::Dump; print "hash_b:\n",Dump(\%hash_b),"\n\n\n"; print "hash_d:\n",Dump(\%hash_d),"\n\n\n"; In the beginning, there were no voices or melodies, just a slide rule and abacus on a desk wobbling on three legs on a noise floor dusted over with size 12 sneakers, the original size 12 sneakers, before the arch in the tarsus flattens and stretches, causing the numbers to start over from one like exits on the turnpike. In the beginning, it was mechanical; the grinding of gears within and inside in order to figure out a final truth, a puzzle in white. My memory of you, before you were submerged for centuries and the like, was always back and to the left of you. I remember this memory in the third person; back and to the left of my third-grade self back and to the left of your third-grade self; which, in actuality, was your only self to me. This was the year my retinas failed me, forced to wear an analog mechanism (I had never seen the color of eyes before) so my eyes, like my logic now, were fuzzy. You were first. To say you were the first would be preposterous; there have been mechanisms well at work well before you, well before I realized that lights in the sky were actually something, rather than just lights in the sky. Around the same time, my mother pointed out a harvest moon to me over the purposely aligned trees of a nursery, orange, gigantic, eyes focused to the right, viewing it out of the back, no, front seat. There is nothing passive about the gravitational mass. I made a diagram out of foam core (which floats), illustrating how much an average child (myself > 60 lbs > you) would weigh on various planets. I would dream about the day when I would board a ship, fly to the moon (I weigh the least there), and see a red digital 16.6 blinking back and you blinking back at him. The project remained on display along mint green walls for a week, until someone (it was you) splashed red on my white corn moon. Pink is a good color to finish fourth, fifth, or sixth place in, and thus an honorable mention was earned, beating out countless baking soda volcanoes and slingshots. The reward was an ice cream social. I was not here to understand these things; it was never my purpose to understand any of this; hoping others attracting your attention (on the left) so I would be able to look at your profile, instead of dark hair and headband. How happy you must have been, knowing that I sat behind you, knowing that I was forever behind you, and there was no need to look back. It is called counter-clock-wise for a reason. Undoubtedly there was clockwork before the clock, but you were the clock, the measure of time I measured everything against, despite errors every 19 tropical years; the sun speeding up and slowing down like a faulty turbine due to sponges soaking up your ketchup-colored rust and getting caught in cogs. You were the first partial penumbral.[[ERROR ]]

Duplicate name on network!! 0C Already exists, collision with existing item!! Duplicate file name!! Abort, Retry, Fail? [[A]]

Not yet. Abort, Retry, Fail? [[F]]

Not yet. Abort, Retry, Fail? [[R]]

And when the new dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds on the huge organic comp systems, we'd remind them: if you see this message, always choose "Retry." . .. [[...]]

In the beginning, pre-POST, post the beginning, at the beginning of the cataloging of the beginning, I began all wrong. There were no astrological implications in regards to your deconstruction of my science and sciences, and your name, though thought to be correct at the time of input, was, in fact, incorrect. It was another who shared your first name, but not your last, who shared your hair but not your eyes, who shared your memories of me, which, I interpreted to be no memories at all. While this could be blamed on corrective lenses and the times before them, truth, all truth is covered with drizzled syrup, causing crystallization and distortion. Caches and buffers grow full with tables and sugar upon sugar upon tables until filled. We remove the frosting from the designated slots (A: B:) thinking that this will somehow enable us to process more quickly, more efficiently, with more zest and vivacity, crackers with honey and cinnamon, in and out and then in again. States, countries, oceans, and ages away from here, they used to stuff the noses of RA and ROM with saccharine, preserving what is left of the dead exactly how the dead left them for dead, assembling gingerbread corpses, frosting for spackle, gum drops and data dumps, anything to keep it keeping. One day they will return to their bodies, their hardened candy shell, the clean clear white of what we perceive the after-life to be sliding under red licorice rope sutures and back into the molasses. Searching for something more is just part of my assembly; to load to memory, memory must already be loaded, and it is within you I jump to 1, pentoses and hexoses forming simple aromatic rings. UDPgalactose-4-epimerase deficiency sets in, making me deaf to my preconfigured set of devices, the age-old process of recollection. I am not advanced to separate the two partitions: one slot encompasses all; both mono and di, honey without the intervention of bees. Merged. [[Done.]]

C:\> C:\> [[end.exe]]

C:\> end.exe EXTRACTING PART 13 OF 13… My tale is over now. And now something else. There is a light there, a red circle where the clouds were like the swirl of someone whispering, a blast, a stitch. There is the feeling of nothing new, another arrival on the beach when you have seen one you have seen them all, the water, the sand, all things repeating like long division, an impossible end to something that seemed so possible, the folding in of things. The system is the same, the operation black and white with blinking lights and blinking lines, things cold and grey, ever so grey in a place that was never so grey, the plugging in of function over form, the hum of a new machine, our new machine, buttons in different places, a different noise when checking disks, a beautiful thing, we think, but nothing feels different aside from a different way to get power to the source, an alternate first screen flicker, the loading of imagines hiding the intricacies of function without form. We explode as we fade, the paving out of things as it rains around us, our fingers not yet cold but wet certainly, our bodies dehydrated from a sun that does not exist here and ice in drinks in former farmlands, former fairgrounds, an improvement in homecoming, orchid children celebrating the construction of fantasies of far away towns or popped up fixed width bars like the child in school who moved from elsewhere and told you about elsewhere, wherever elsewhere is, was, the things they ate, the lakes, the sliding into water, the fact that it never snowed there, not once, the fact that it always snowed there, always. I don’t remember the day I remembered, if it was the cold grey of skylines or the initial rest, staying up after all had gone to sleep as I dialed into these elsewheres, these places of no weather or weathering, what is going on without me, both here and the rest of the world, the sadness of the sea. It reminds me of a time where we sat across from each other in that railcar, the sleek chandelier and a radio to our right, songs we have never heard or thought of hearing and you were not there, never there, whispers coming across networks onto screens, devices held underneath tables as I ate soup and you wondered how someone else was doing, dealing without you as we sat quietly, as I sat quietly, the clicking of keys and the sound of vibration, the same shorthand used on nights when the beeps and glow of devices would wake me up from dreaming about you to take me to the reality of you, messages from the heart about wanting to die without me here limited to kilobyte and character restraint and I like to think that these messages of utmost importance were being sent while someone slept beside you; body no substitute for glyphs on screens and the comfort and love of harmlessness and distance, that any and all things can be said in mobile words, and this is why we stay outside in rainstorms and this is why I buy you water before you pass out and this is why I can’t be comfortable with telling you the truth about certain things and why I am the escapist is because somebody somewhere whispered. DONE. C:\ C:\[[dir ]]

C:\>dir Volume in drive C is Brian Oliu Volume Serial Number is 2211-20E6 Directory of C:\ 1/1/2009 10:30a 15 ITHACA.EXE 1 File(s) 2,672,476,175 bytes 1 Dir(s) 0 bytes free C:\> [[ithaca.exe]]

C:\> ithaca.exe You are the first I’ve come on in this harbor Treat me kindly No cruelty please. Save these treasures, Save me too. I pray to you like a god I’ve always prayed to you like a god I fall before your knees and ask you for mercy. I need to know—where on earth am I? What land? Who lives here? Is it one of the sunny islands or some jutting shore Of the good green mainland slanting down to sea? . .. … You must be a fool, stranger, or come from nowhere. [[C:\> ]]

↶

↷

i/o

a memoir

by brian oliu

C:\>

read.me