A Bonus Track: Pissing In The Stream Of Consciousness

The CEBP week 9 assignment had us writing a few pages of stream of consciousness and then remixing it. My heavily remixed -- and frankly, much better -- version can be found in Heroes And Hierophants, here as a historical oddity is the original, dated 3-1-9:

PISSING IN THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Original Mix)

Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to write stream of consciousness? I type so much slower than I think and by the time I have travelled a thought to its conclusion my fingers have begun to stumble over the keys and it all comes to a screeching halt, the train of thought has slammed on its brakes so I can fix the typo and begin again and then what? Where was I? I am lost and confused and don’t know what I was writing. Reread the beginning. Any ideas? Only that this whole thing is ridiculous. I hate stream of consciousness. Pause, hit pipe. I hate stream of consciousness. This is all a fraud anyway. I am not writing everything that goes through my head. Worse, I am editing it as I go along. Some would say, screw the typos, fix ‘em at the end. I can’t. The typos, they sing to me, siren little songs of woe and despair, they are like blinking red neon dots on the screen. I must fix the typos, they are like errors in the genetic code, bringing only monstrosity and death to the table. Do you understand what I am getting at here? I am trying the best I can to get through this assignment and it is going to be really difficult. I’d rather pontificate about something profound. “In the future we will all be silver shiny bodies of intelligent nanospores, a hive-mind Godling transforming the universe into the One Mind it already was, is now, and ever shall be. World without end.” “In the future we will taste the succulent karma-free shrimp and float in the space between outer space and cyberspace.” “In the future Dippin’ Dots will be called the Ice Cream Of The Present.” I can see the future, you know. It says so on my business card. That means it’s true! I love to be profound. But instead I am writing stream of consciousness, excluding this sentence which I went back and inserted later to express a thought I had but forgot to write down. No doubt while fixing a typo. Also, I am multitasking. “No. But I thought I remembered seeing it somewhere.” I just said that in a chat with a friend. What chat? What friend? Only time will tell and if you know time you realize that since time is an abstract concept it is incapable of verbal communication. So there! Also, time is an illusion. Which means that when I go back and edit this in the future, it will really be the present I am writing of now. Which means there is no editing at all. All writing is stream of consciousness, written out four-dimensionally and looping back in over itself. Everything is happening nowhere all at one. It’s a metaphor for God, clumsy words prefiguring the transcendent deity that no words can speak of. But is behind every syllable.

Pause. Start over. I just deleted an entire line of text. Is that stream of consciousness? My stream said to edit over the last line and I followed it and did. A technicality? Of course. I love technicalities. Live my life based on them. Only live at all because of a technicality here or there. Pause. Start over. “Write a two-page story where Peter Gabriel is being tortured and murdered.” I wrote stream of consciousness once. Edited out the superfluous hyphens. This was during a period I called my Mad Poet Period. I was doing a lot of nitrous oxide at the time. I was also smoking a bit of PCP. Not nearly enough, actually. I remember this one night I had smoked dust and I was watching A Fistful Of Dollars and I was imagining these lizard-like beings rising out of the white mud and building cities. I guess you had to be there. So, weird drugs, stream of consciousness, Mad Poet Period. It’s all in my book. For sale wherever those sorts of thing are sold. And also from the trunk of my car. Shameless plug. Filler space. Edited out the superfluous hyphens. Is this what you’re hoping for? To open up the door to randomness and let God walk through? I am anti-randomness. I am editing as I type. I am crafting the sentence three from now as I type this one. I backspace over mis-steps and pull them from their space in time. Time is an illusion. I would edit the Akashic Records if I had the time. But time is an illusion. Repetition. Hypnotism. You are getting sleepy. The sound of the teakettle is pure Americana. I don’t even know why I typed that. I had a story once I started and it began with that line. Then my hard drive crashed. I lost it. It was unfinished and never had its chance to shine and now it’s as if it never was. No trace. But I remember that line. Like 9-11. Never forget.

Backspace, backspace, return. I already decided how I am going to end this piece. I have the perfect ending line. Does that mean I can’t use it? It’s not stream of consciousness. I mean, it was just now when I thought of it, but it has already stripped into the pre-manufactured as I write about it now. By the end it will be schemed, planned, pre-meditated. Hatched. So should I give up a great ending because I thought of it before the end? Half the time I come up with the ending line before I write the essay. I wrote this essay about how they’re tearing the woods down in my backyard and I came up with the last line a full day before I wrote the rest of it down. A metaphor for God, the omega point that casts shadows backwards in time and those shadows are us. I am a metaphor. What’s the point of an ending line when this is to be mixed up anyway? The point is the point of being a craftsman at all. I am writing this now. It must be able to stand up on its own. Stream of consciousness or no.

I started writing this yesterday. Not this, but an attempt at the same thing. I got interrupted, I had to put it down. By the time I picked it back up I was too far removed from that stream of consciousness – you might say I had detoured down a tributary and been dumped back in the great untamed ocean of my mind. Pause to look up the word tributary. Does it mean what I think it means? Close enough. So today I sat down, angrily, and began typing. Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to write stream of consciousness?

Period.