G R I D
R____I
I____R
D I R G
The following is fictional, with the exception of the parts that really happened.
Step up one and all. There is a new high. A new compound, a psychotropic – maybe even psychomemetic - that has hit the oil-slicking cobbledy streets: GRID.
The GRID.
GRIDDLE to some, GRIDE to others, and DIGR to initiates and addicts. But most just ride the GRID, or GRID the ride, to monstrous GRIDLOCH where GRIDGRINNING fiends are GRIDDED and GRIDDING and where all concede that the GRID loses all meaning when you lose meaning in the GRID.
No need to load the pipe this time – the rusty residue, crystalline and wrapping in the glass of the GVG was beckoning: torch me and GRID me it whined and gasped. "GRID is as GRID does" I thought as the glass hit lips and the flame angled into the cupped and empty bowl. GRID wisps curlicued in the glass as the rust rendered to vapour and I drew in loooooooong and loooongerrrrrrr…
YOUR BRAIN IS A GRID. YOUR GRID IS A BRAIN.
The darkness takes shape as the GRID lopes about my mind’s grey furls. Colours spew and wrap and out of the detritus surges GRIDLIKE GRIDLOCH monsters from the deep and low, and shapes form and flit in and out of transmission from within the GRID:
Two women, struggling over a basket, one ancient, the second nubile and fresh, a tug of war for the basket, a basket of jimjammy squiggle-wormy rainbow fluid, now serpents, then wires and now edible noodley chromatic implosions, the basket is giving and the women tug, desperate and warring. They spin, mouths agape, arms stretching under the strain, the basket expanding, then contracting, both women, young and old, flashing in and out of cartoon two-dimension to verisimilitudinous i-can-touch-you photorealism, then back to unreal, but now no longer cartoony but made of the stuff in the basket – but not for long before they pop real again then flatten to two dimensional primary reds and yellows and blues, 808ing a rhythm beyond measure and way out there on the edge of the GRID.
The RIDGe.
DIRG THE GRID OR THE GRID SHALL DIRG YOU.
And on and on they fight and tear folds in the fabric of light-time, spin-spinning-spinning and tugging on the basket that holds - yes, I know now, I know why they struggle for it, screaming and clawing and rending through the kaleidoscope – it holds, yes it holds the GRID itself, wrapped in the basket, gyrating and folding and molding and twining and erupting and condensing, the GRID in its entirety, all of it, whole and entrenched in itself, the object of the struggle between old and new, the aged and the newborn, of screams and silence and flesh and rot and being and non-being.
IF THE GRID GIRDS YOU BE SURE TO GIRD THE GRID.
And that is the heart. The fast beating heart of it all, the GRID that beats and beating the beaten GRID as only two warring halves know, and I think – I think I think, but in the GRID who knows what it is to think – I think that what was and is right now, the battle for the basket, is receding and the darkness enveloping again to the slow rhythm of the real and I am slowly back, back from the GRID and back into that other GRID as I lay for a while and open the cogs of my eyes and recognize, with welcoming eyes, I cognize and reCOG, and reCOGnize the cogs that spin and force the mechanism that reconstitutes my room to something familiar that in turn, hides the cogs and the GRID itself.
THE GRID FADES, and fate GRIDS. And grins from within the GRID.
THE GRID IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE GRID!
JBArk is a Mandelthought; a non-fiction character in a drama of his own design he calls "LIFE" who partakes in consciousness expanding activities and substances; he should in no way be confused with SWIM, who is an eminently data-mineable and prolific character who has somehow convinced himself the target he wears on his forehead is actually a shield.