The Fractal Rangers: Princess Pop’s Predicament

Princess Pop descended from the lights, a flaming nude angel. Halogen green panties, its elastic snapped by an expert military slingshottist, rocketed from the stage to snugly wrap against her pubis and tuck around her hips. Sparks sprayed from stage rear, sending arrows of multi-hued bottle rockets pinwheeling.

Princess Pop favored her fans with a chiclet grin as electronic spiders crawled on her torso, rapidly knitting a horizontally striped purple and black tube top. The spiders, bidding adieu, flung themselves outward, their spinnerets weaving a night black cobweb skirt, and exploded retina-etching flashbangs of poptronica emoticons in a crackling arc to dust.

Princess Pop waved her arms and ghost limbs, phosphorescent blue, slurped along kaliesque trajectories. Riot red fingerless dukes fell from the psychedelic koi trawling heavens of the riven warehouse ceiling and spun onto her punching, twirling fists.

“Hey!”

Pop’s first word resounded, a fell wave, a tsunami of sound flattening the salivating horde and extinguishing the sea of lighters already, before the show even started, clamoring for an encore! Android cherubim wafted like demented bumblebees, their tiny clicking fingers draping upwards her legs sheer purple knee-high leggings.

Princess Pop alighted, finally, onto the polished stainless steel floor, her delicate feet slipping into steel-toed jackboots like a sigh. The audience, prone, rose like grass under a footprint, their moan of anticipation a sexy stench washing over her mohawk.

“Hey!” Princess Pop began again, rising on a blast of thunder, the sweet acoustics sending the first chords of the instant classic Power Pop steamrolling. A transparent bubblegum pink raincoat flanked by the cherubim floated out of the constant pyrotechnics and draped itself onto Pop’s outstretched form. Her boots slapped on cold steel and the multi-billion dollar musics systems took it up a notch.

Pop’s lips as pink as her coat plucked and plicked over whitewash teeth, deepthroating the words that made her a goddess. She sang of punk princesses in kingdoms of garbage and intravenous needles, of the madness of FTL travel outside cold sleep, in the quaintly distilled jargon of the times. She sang: The Ballad of Shandy Peaches the Intergalatic Punk Pirate, Holograms Can’t Love, The Beep Be-bop, Pop and Her Pussy (the clean version), and the honey lava drawl of Tarpit Tangos.

Princess Pop was in the middle of Space War Brutes when she felt a familiar presence crackle through her thoughts. It was Perfesser Prof! He was saying, “…need to be careful, Pop. It’s the big one and as you know, the most likely moment…” Indeed it was, her crescendo was coming up after a couple more songs, that big finale without a fucking denouement, like a body rolling in the midst of an orgasm with the flow abruptly unstoppered. Lights out. Her fans would be pissed, and they would love her for it.

Pop first came to this corner of reality in torn fishnet stockings and a tattered pullover dress. The Prof had outfitted her throat and diaphragm with the abilities of meta-historical she-crooners, and she had charmed her way to the top of the billboard in two years. What her fans  didn’t know, she was deep undercover, and her subsequent disappearance would be as a much a mystery as her appearance.

Pop, as she sang, recounted the cat and mouse game that was her life. A real princess, as real as anything in reality could be, her youth was the smell of hyacinths, the murmurs of wet nurses, and the joyful frolick of her and her twin sister. They lay in the womb, mirror images, and grew up, their violet eyes and peroxide blond hair mirror images. One side of the mirror was Pop and the other was Pip.

Nobody knew what happened. Some said it was the nature of twins, for one to go bad. Pop was no princess (heh heh) but she was a good girl in most respects. Pip broke the mold they both were cast in and escaped north; the kingdom was razed with her pack of slavering wolfmen and the resurrected dead. Princess Pop never had time to mourn. Well versed in the multi-martial-arts of a hundred cultures, she, with a small band of heroes, fought until she was the last one standing.

She owed it all to Perfesser Prof and The Fractal Rangers. He appeared in his fractal foaming craft, like a wild rocket blurring out of nowhere, leaking eddies of  multiverses, his van winkle beard twisting in the entropic currents, his wizened hands waving come on oh, Pop! come on! She got on and never looked back.

Pip, on the other hand, used dark arts and violent technologies that rendered her planet barely habitable to catapault herself into the metaflow of realities. She pursued Pop across dry tales, sent pirates after her in high seas blockbusters, was the dame from hell in noir hardbacks, played the cold-hearted bitch lawyer in massive litigation dramas, was a constant thorn in the meta-metaphoric heel of the Fractal Rangers, all the while laying waste to the worlds within the multitude of multitudes.

So this concert, this artificial narrative was a last ditch effort of the Fractal Rangers to bait and permanently remove Princess Pip from the equation. Quarter through the final song, The Shards of God, Pop spotted a wraith detach itself from a speaker and swoop towards her. Perfesser Prof triggered a curtain of firebrands at stage front, obscuring the twins from the audience. But they didn’t mind, as long as Pop sang. Prof had put on a recording. Pop faced off her sister.

The mirror was broken. The reflected did not reflect the reflectee. They stared at each other and smelled hyacinths from the recesses of memory. Princess Pip was a toothless crone, the horror of her history running through her blood. Her cloak, torn from the furies, moved restlessly upon her decimated frame. There was no room for words.

Princess Pip roared, raising corpse white arms.  She had forgotten why she hated her sister, only that all the pain in the pursuit was not to be for naught. She had subsisted on that rage and pain of others like a crow picks scraps of roadkill from the highway, and a meal of fraternal soul juice would do her right! The hieroglyphics of a tortured language tore through her throat, bringing flecks of blood speckling, and coloured the air with violent violet ideograms. They throbbed and wheeled, spinning into a white hot, flickering artifact, Princess Pop a shrinking black silhouette in the midst of all this light. The audience howled as The Shards of God broke apart in a scintillating mitosis, that would soon inexorably draw together  into a Big Crunch.

The artifact rose, spun on its axis to–hiss and fall apart like a bucket of incandescent water. Pip collapsed! The failed magic ran across the stage, corroding the stainless steel. Princess Pop’s boots sizzled. A couple of concert goers yelped, burnt. Pip lay, a bundle of rags and bones, her neck skewed at a bad angle. Her eyes regarded Princess Pop like an injured puppy’s,  the whites mostly showing.

Diaphanous, bleached of colour and substance, the lines of Pip’s flesh were transparent. She was spread wide and thin, her selves losing objective and straying into lost tales of pain and betrayal, of the disgruntled Catholic mother of twenty children scrubbing pans, of the woman and her smoking gun sent to jail after the murder of a wealthy husband, of the prostitute under the hands of one Jack or another, of the desperate girl and a final candle in snowy streets. Pop was overcome with pity. They had not needed to bait her! All they had to was wait until Pip extinguished herself, her component pieces lost in the megaflow.

In a final agony of movement, Pip moved her mouth into a semblance of words, a creaking vowel falling into a murmur then rising in a sharp intake s trembling into an ohhhrrrweee. Pip faded, a darkroom trick. Pip’s lines, her organic definitions, twinkled into the ether. The stuff of worlds had reclaimed what was left of her. Pop, vital and eternally in the prime of her life, wept as the flames arched above. The song, at its apogee, cut off.

The lights went out.

The Bitch Witch

She had many names, which was quite proper for somebody who had lived so long and moved on so often, but we will call her Mab for that is her name now in this particular time and age, Mab the bitch witch everyone loved to hate, the bitch witch everyone depended on for their sad secrets.

See Mab in the forest, in her shack. The shack is overgrown, wrought with morning glories and yagé, the twining vines of introspection, and a musk of cinnamon and jasmine and vanilla suffuses the wet air. Honeybees bumble about those flowers and parcel dizzying properties to their hives. Dilapidation reigns in the warped beams and crooked flue and the flapping eaves, but this is a ramshackle farce, for entering the house finds oneself in a cozy space, hearth warm in the winter, cool as stone in the hottest summer.

A cast iron pan hangs above the cast iron stove. Stainless steel kettle. Embroidered rug. A hempen hammock dangling from the rafters. Various herbs drying in bunches on the walls. Glass bottles of all sizes and colors on shelves along one wall, also hung on hooks and roped to the rafters. Mab herself is seated in a burnished rocking chair sipping tea from a finely rolled spliff. Through the artful smoke rings that litter her atmosphere, her hair is brown shot with gray, and she moves with slow lithe grace. She puts down the smoldering roach and putters about her abode. Now, Mab needs to go to the market.

As soon as she left her door she affected a humpbacked gait, held a cackle at the ready in her throat, and for measure, gave her eyes a good roll. It was a ways before she entered the perimeter of the town, marked by the rough translation of rutted dried mud to a relatively smooth pane of dusty road. She rolled her eyes at the beastly children who ran up to her to throw rocks and sometimes eggs. When Mab passed storefronts, the townspeople’s chatter ceased to stony silence, starting up when she was well behind them. Nevertheless, she had hawk ears and heard their prejudices from afar. The General Store lay ahead.

Cruel children hid and sniggered from the shadows of alleys, rags of light moving across their faces. She slipped into the stuffy heat of the General Store and ordered flour, eggs, nails, and dried fish strips. She paid, cackling and rolling her eyes, reveled in the alarm flashing under the shopkeeper’s bushy brows. That one, he had hives whenever he glimpsed women’s underclothings. He came to her one blustery night bloated with hives on his hives. He couldn’t see through one eye and his words were slurred. Apparently he had deviated with his proper and prim route and passed by the whorehouse. She had him kill a toad and smear its innards on his badonkadonk. It must have worked. The Madame was now part owner of his General Store.

The folk of this town feared her but that never stopped them from going up to Mab in the deep of night to knock tentatively at her splintery door, secrets of pains and curses heavy in their mouth spilling like blood from a pig’s slit neck. The cobbler beating at his leather averted his gaze, him she helped rid with a powder the sores inside his underwear. She cackled and rolled her eyes at him, saw he had blushed. The piemaker flashed her lashes with demure shame. Her husband was frigid so Mab showed her how to rub the button special to make her gush. She had concocted a bullshit potion for the Mayor’s wife who wanted to curse her husband for running around with his filly; it was bullshit in more ways than one for the mayor’s wife’s ill wishes were all it took for the filly to fall off her horse and break her back. It was sublime pleasure watching the high off noble borne quaff rancid steaming crap and daintily dabbing the corners of her lips with a kerchief, utterly trusting Mab. She had cackled high and long.

Mab walked through town without much trouble but for the infernal children. She shot a dart from her sleeve, small as a rose’s thorn, and it caught a red-haired brat in the neck. He slapped at it, probably thinking it was a skeeter. She cackled at them and they scattered like pestilent rats. The boy would have interesting dreams tonight. His mother would be stunned at the aftermath and burn the shamed boy’s sheets.

Mab had a bag stashed away with her essentials. If worse came to shove, as it often did with a constellation of burning torches in the night, she would small rose thorns dipped in quick acting hallucinogenics inside her sleeve spray, disappear in a swirl of purpleblack smoke and leave the cottage a night bloom of flame at her back. Once she had made the Slavs think her house run away on feet of chicken.

She cackled all the way to her rickety cabin.

Was It An Inside Job?

I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t think there were planes. Just a magnificent, sweetly orchestrated hoax in a symphony of lies.

In deep greed and perhaps a misguided attempt to unite the country (a la Watchmen) the powers that be plunged the America into an unprecedented, unwarranted war. The twin towers, a display of enduring strength after having survived several disasters, were brought down by a pair of aluminum planes on September 11, 2001. Americans were glued to their televisions with the viscosity only horror could provide. Panic attacks palpitated many an American heart and the common man cowered in the streets, imagining dynamite strung under each turban they encountered.

The powers that be, in their high silvery towers, smiled, chortled over brandy, shook cigar-studded hands in grand congratulate. Job well done, heel well ground! Instant obedience, utter solidarity under questionable leadership, total acceptance of suspect laws. Fear does that to people. Not your fault, not our fault. Seven years later, many still engage in the blind faith that suited them just well before, and others have opened their eyes and begun to wonder for themselves.

As for myself, I knew from the beginning that something was up, some game afoot. The footage of Bush in the classroom: a harried man damned to a timetable he has to meet, cursed with a devil’s deal, tarrying in the room of children who are much better company than the insipid, evil lot that somehow congealed under his wing. Price of power. The strange move of targeting Iraq made even stranger by the fact that all the people who stood to profit from the maneuver were in some way connected to the administration. Halliburton, the Carlyle group, Saudi connections, and as an aside, Silverstein (who bought the WTC a few months before the date, and after the incident he tried to get double its value from the insurance company, citing that two planes meant the policy should be counted twice. He stands to profit from the Freedom Towers 2, 3, 4. Dumb luck, damned misfortune, or calculated move? Your pick).

I also don’t think there were planes and I think the media was alerted. At least they all were playing from the same script. Two things, probably both. Bombs in the buildings. Missiles from the planes. A fly by of planes squirting strategically placed rockets, and the evil minions man the news cameras (all from the same vantage point, same orientation) and make the necessary on the fly editing. Clever. The amateur magician in me is awed at the elegant sleight of hand, incredible in scope and scale; the cynic in me scoffs with disbelief, that’s crazy! but there’s a creeping doubt tracing my nervous system. Brings chills. Makes me think of the Illuminati. The stuff that bubbles from the crackpots of them crazy conspiracy theorists? Lunacy is getting normal, and become the smiles of politicians. Perhaps the world is full of forever hidden truths, its history a strata of lies layered upon lies, sunken in its own tar pit of half-conscious guilt.

I can’t believe this turned into a rant. It isn’t a rant, really. I don’t much care. I admit I’m a bad citizen. I can’t complain about the political situation and pretty much everything else. I don’t vote. I get dirty looks for that: “You’re running the country down.” “Apathetic sumbitch!” “Go move to Canada or something!” All things considered… I would vote in Canada.

Debit Woes

When you use a debit charge card at the pump, an amount closely approximating fifty dollars, plus your charge amount, is withdrawn from your account, to be redeposited after the passage of a few business days when the bill has been verified. Quite often, as I was, you might be caught unawares that such an event has occurred and, falsely misled into thinking your funds were secure and accurate, used your account as tender for further purchases to, surprise! find yourself embroiled up to your neck in wtf surcharges. So if you’re subsisting on an income equivalent to that of a college student, as I am, ’tis better to pay your fuel purchases in cash. Greenygreengreen wads of papery linen.

Accounts dealing in electronic funds do not have your best interests in mind, especially that of credit card companies. The reason you’re getting so many applications for credit cards is that there is a high likelihood that your credit rating is so-so and doesn’t compare to that of, Donald Trump, perhaps. People with decent credit and people who pay their bills on time are despised by the card companies because they are subverting the law of interest: trap, trapping, trapped into a lifetime of financial slavehood.

Capitalism… in the hands of greed only reduces the concern a man has for his fellow man, and the more traditional methods of procuring food and bed in the wilds of nature evolve into a demoralizing panoply of action in the cloistered streets of the city: prostitution, dope peddling, larceny, and even murder. It’s not to say money is the root of all evil, but the belief in money that is the root of most evil.