#vss365 | Segmentation

The bell rings. Divide and divide. We have words for each: to these, that; to those, another. And to each segment their lot: a cell of names, a set of blinders, hunger, hunger, debt, shadows. Apportioned separate, unequal, arrays divined by survey and statistic.

#vss365 | Customer

Hark! We come en masse (us saps) to stand and wait for the future. Anon it arrives, shining bright in our palms. It speaks for us! Draws! Thinks (but badly)! Alas, now it’s bought, we see it’s only the present. We will replace it next season, next season when the future returns.

#vss365 | Marketing

Lo: the product demands its solution! Curl thy spine. Strain thy hands. Carve thy mind into proper shape. Be not afraid: Your voice is not yours! Lies are not lies! Do you not wish to sell the future? To drink what gold trickles from on high, from those who reap without sowing?

#vss365 | Pressure

The past outweighs the present, as the dead outnumber the living. A conglomerate of cells and synaptic accidents. War dust, weather, faded flags, endless sheaves of bargains written, abided, broken. And more, more, bearing down until our bones crack and we join to the majority.

#vss365 | End

All we go. After evening, after compline, we arrive at night, whose residents are silent. No one returns from there. No one tells of the journey, and so it goes that there is no preparing. You carry hope with you, and regret and nothing else. The coins on your eyes stay here.

#vss365 | Beginning

It starts in water. Everything — you, me, the world. Suspended, formless and dark, until we spill, violent as anything, out onto light, earth, fire. Into floods and flows. Our tears mark our passage, shed for us, who bore us, who we have lost. For what we owe and what is left.

#vss365 | Nightmare

Fullgrown and gleeful he wheels his arms in the TV glow and salivates. His teeth are white, eyes are white. His skin distends as he writhes, ruptures red and wet. A leaking bag of tumors: here too thin, here all wrong. He eats and eats, transfixed, laughing at blurred faces.

#vss365 | Dream

He dreams each night that he is painting the world, in gray and red, blue and white. No greens or curves. Only straight lines, bright lights. Shallow, measured depths and corners. The stars above he works in distant, lustrous gold — peeling, falling away from the frame as he wakes.

These violent delights have cool and chill ends

It’s one hour to larp go-time and I’ve arrived at the realization my character (the literal Greek god Ares) has a specific sort of “Eldest Boy” energy that everyone finds disqualifying.