“Wyrd Feelings”
A Friend’s Revisionist Endeavor.
“I have included segments of the “history book” only for purposes of ridicule. Carpenter’s poem isn’t bad either, but they edited out a lot.”
-George Gill, also known as “Big Guy”
The Development of the New Post-Apocalyptican Party
Part 1: “Starting at the End: The Saga of John Henry Carpenter”
The world had ended with little fanfare. But somehow Carpenter saved us all. We now look back with admiration upon his writings and his early life.
“Deathbed Dementia and Wyrd Feelings for a Generation of SoftHands”
(From the Journal of John Henry Carpenter, also known as 8:30, who would grow up to become the savior of a fallen world)
“I can hear the thunderous roar of the wind knocking together some far off suspended beams of steel in this broken city. Their rhythm helps me concentrate, and I think about the past. But I've got nothing to say. There are few thoughts knocking around in this empty shell, and none seem to stick. See I was supposed to be a Titan, a Hercules, an island. What happened? A softhand in a generation of softhands, I listen to my mammoth urban wind chimes and think about the past.
I'm so far from the truth that I can't smell its impostors any longer, and they dance before me like cheap, hellish prostitutes, bloated with a venereal infection of falsity. And me in my drunken stupor-- I think they're pretty. And invite them into my home. And there in the dark they gather round me and wantonly feast on the scant, sickly flesh of my soul.
I come out of a world in which youth relied completely upon substance abuse in order to feel a connection with one another. It was a world of human satellites. And only when the foundations of that world began to ring and shake like tuning forks with all the awkward silence in elevators and bathrooms and throughout cityscapes where our parents had built spaces for themselves up and away from life, and experience, and chance, and danger, built big towers in the sky where they performed the various perversions and extensions of industry and administration which supported a fat economy soon to grow thin, only then did it dawn on them that they had also built themselves up and away from nature, from dirt and real, thinking creatures other than computers, and frighteningly far away from the bones and wisdom of their ancestors and henceforth-most-importantly, because of all that, they had built themselves up and too far away from themselves.
And the tuning forks shook too violently with the no-good, lousy vibrations and shattered and the whole damn thing came tumbling down right in front of us all.
Adolescents of the upper-middle class, were, surprisingly, the first demographic to go.
Shootings,
Violence,
The "Satan Complex": a recorded psychosocial phenomenon in which social privilege in adolescents acts as the catalyst for severe guilt and shame, resulting in random acts of violence, Or: ‘I am the right hand man of heaven, I have been given much, but I feel wrong because I'm not sure I deserve any of it, and so the only thing left to do is lash out’
The place where I am and have been is in a dark, cold cloud of backwards nostalgia and emotion
Fear beats me like an angry pimp
Shame, shame, shame. And no turning back from it either.
In this cloud I can see one end of my life.
Crumpled among sheets, a tired withered face looks back inwards at itself in disgust.
Among them, in ashcloth, I too pray to our grandfathers:
‘Forgive us. We have been found lacking. We are no men. We’ve effected a long and gruesome amputation of ourselves from life, and the surgery was clean and showed no scars in the world save those within us and those that we gouged impetuously in our ancestry and our dignity. We could not build our houses with these hands, though these hands were more than adequate.’
All this I see from my seat in the dark cold cloud.
I see a future of
Shame, shame, shame.
“I can hear the thunderous roar of the wind knocking together some far off suspended beams of steel in this broken city. Their rhythm helps me concentrate, and I think about the past. But I've got nothing to say. There are few thoughts knocking around in this empty shell, and none seem to stick. See I was supposed to be a Titan, a Hercules, an island. What happened? A softhand in a generation of softhands, I listen to my mammoth urban wind chimes and think about the past.
I'm so far from the truth that I can't smell its impostors any longer, and they dance before me like cheap, hellish prostitutes, bloated with a venereal infection of falsity. And me in my drunken stupor-- I think they're pretty. And invite them into my home. And there in the dark they gather round me and wantonly feast on the scant, sickly flesh of my soul.
I come out of a world in which youth relied completely upon substance abuse in order to feel a connection with one another. It was a world of human satellites. And only when the foundations of that world began to ring and shake like tuning forks with all the awkward silence in elevators and bathrooms and throughout cityscapes where our parents had built spaces for themselves up and away from life, and experience, and chance, and danger, built big towers in the sky where they performed the various perversions and extensions of industry and administration which supported a fat economy soon to grow thin, only then did it dawn on them that they had also built themselves up and away from nature, from dirt and real, thinking creatures other than computers, and frighteningly far away from the bones and wisdom of their ancestors and henceforth-most-importantly, because of all that, they had built themselves up and too far away from themselves.
And the tuning forks shook too violently with the no-good, lousy vibrations and shattered and the whole damn thing came tumbling down right in front of us all.
Adolescents of the upper-middle class, were, surprisingly, the first demographic to go.
Shootings,
Violence,
The "Satan Complex": a recorded psychosocial phenomenon in which social privilege in adolescents acts as the catalyst for severe guilt and shame, resulting in random acts of violence, Or: ‘I am the right hand man of heaven, I have been given much, but I feel wrong because I'm not sure I deserve any of it, and so the only thing left to do is lash out’
The place where I am and have been is in a dark, cold cloud of backwards nostalgia and emotion
Fear beats me like an angry pimp
Shame, shame, shame. And no turning back from it either.
In this cloud I can see one end of my life.
Crumpled among sheets, a tired withered face looks back inwards at itself in disgust.
Among them, in ashcloth, I too pray to our grandfathers:
‘Forgive us. We have been found lacking. We are no men. We’ve effected a long and gruesome amputation of ourselves from life, and the surgery was clean and showed no scars in the world save those within us and those that we gouged impetuously in our ancestry and our dignity. We could not build our houses with these hands, though these hands were more than adequate.’
All this I see from my seat in the dark cold cloud.
I see a future of
Shame, shame, shame.
We’re fucked, see.”
Carpenter’s journal can now be viewed in its entirety in the John Henry Carpenter Museum , New New York City 33 West Manhattan Street
Here we see close friend George Gill’s description of the young John Henry Carpenter (8:30), in a transcript from Gill’s acclaimed oral memoirs. Recordings of the full memoirs of George Gill are also available at the John Henry Carpenter Museum
“8:30 was a small boy with a big opinion of himself. His appearance fit in every way into the name his parents had given him, and continuing the tradition of his parents and the books they had read and the people they had gone to listen to and the things that they stood for but didn’t really stand for because that’s not what they were all about, you know...It’s not about standing for anything, alright? But in continuing with that tradition he reveled in the joke that was his name and subsequently his existence. It was the fountain from which he drank. He was the product of certain ideas and attitudes – although his parents would vehemently deny this to their last breath the pompous assholes. But he undoubtedly was a product, a product of a neatly controlled market of ideas put into practice and finally manifested completely in the birth of a baby human. 8:30’s parents had sacrificed their firstborn son to the god they served. They would never be real parents to him and he would never be a real person in their eyes. But that was their point, Fuck it. That was the way John Henry’s parents set about grooming him to be the next ‘great’ leader of a directionless movement. Appropriate, I suppose.
The loose group that 8:30’s parents belonged to was the result of an angry pile of words and ideas from the past like nihilism, beatnick faggot, and New York City super liberal colliding with a cultural and social phenomenon of overwhelming discomfort, dislike, and distress. Not giving a shit but secretly giving a whole lot of shit had always been hip, mind you- but 8:30’s parents were part of a movement that wasn’t really a movement--They’d tell you to eat shit and die if you thought it was one-- they were part of a movement that had pulled all the choice strands of good, mean ideas out of the long tapestry of history and woven them into a perfectly embittered and near incontestable idea which armed them well against the ‘phenomenon of discomfort, dislike, and distress’ that ended the world.
8:30’s father --Albert Carpenter, a weasel of a man-- had named him 8:30 because 8:30AM was the time every morning Albert had to go to a job that he hated to make money that he hated so that he could survive in a society he didn’t believe in, and hated. 8:30AM was the most prominent symbol of discontent and disillusionment in Albert Carpenter’s life. Being the man that he was, Albert thought it would be particularly clever and avant-garde to name his son after such a symbol.”
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“Here ends the horrible history book. This is what I know of the real story, as it should be told. Some of the bullshit is thrown in as well to evidence its bullshittery.”
-George Gill, also known as “Big Guy”
The Boy at Home
8:30 spent a lot of time on his own. He had always wanted neighbors of his age to play kick the can in black and white with. But he had been granted no such luck. The apartment rose above most nearby roofs and was well furnished. Lots of books. He liked watching westerns in the living room. The books smelled like old people sweating, and he made a practice of wrinkling his nose at them and at his father when he directed 8:30 towards them. But soon enough 8:30 would be reading them. He would read all of them before his 12th birthday, he would be made to.
The Boy Runs Away From Home
8:30 ran away from home on a Sunday afternoon, when his parents were out. His backpack swung heavy from straps on bony shoulders-- it was filled mostly with food, books, and valuable jewelry, because he was a practical and intelligent boy. He had packed in a hurry, and before that had decided to leave in a hurry. Like he used to do as a toddler, he ran screaming around the house in a frenzy, through all the rooms and hallways of his parents’ unusually large Manhattan
The following is an excerpt from “The Development of the New Post-Apocalyptican Party”, Part 1:
J.H. Carpenter’s unique resilience and noble composure can be attributed to his experience of trauma at a very young age with the death of his parents and to his thorough liberal education prior to said tragedy. Growing up as a grief-stricken orphan, Carpenter fashioned for himself a character of great strength and nobility upon the memories of his parents’ lessons.
The following is an excerpt from the journal of John Henry Carpenter, also known as 8:30, dated January 7th, 2044:
“Mom and Dad are heartless assholes. Mostly Dad. Mom too though. I am going to sell her diamond necklace tomorrow. I remember she wore it once to one of their dinner parties. Dad told me I would be going to dinner parties soon, and I would be the ‘talk of the town,’ and I would ‘head this little old revolution.’ Fuck the town. I have to find a new place to sleep tonight. I decided today that this is the last day I will ever cry.
He was a smart and capable boy, highly skilled in manipulation and natural leadership, like his parents had taught him. The boy found his own way, but not without difficulty. Bad things happened while some were avoided. There were cruel, dirty faces to be dealt with and scars to get and the cold and the dark.
The Boy Gets Friends
“It’s slower than baby shit out here, nigger”
Damion Byrne’s voice fed into a duct-taped radio. Normally, 8:30 would not have approached such a large and intimidating black man selling drugs on the street. Why? Because he was big and he was scary and also yes a little bit because he was black. The boy was no racist, he just wasn’t very cool. But all of that fell by the wayside—8:30 desperately needed some friends or connections or anything at all, and that baby shit analogy was too good to let by.
“Let me get a dub sack of baby shit” 8:30 feebly joked.
“What?”
The two became fast friends. And Damion had many friends to introduce the young boy to. 8:30 would soon have a growing group of followers.
The Meeting at the Circle
The following is an excerpt from the journal of John Henry Carpenter, also known as 8:30, dated September 2nd, 2047:
“I remember as a young kid taking plane rides with my parents. I had read all about air marshals, and terrorism, and sprinkled in with that I had read all the fantasies and adventures about crash landings on deserted islands. So, in obvious combination of these, I had a habit of analyzing my survival situations in terms of my nearby fellow passengers. I would even walk through the plane (pretending to go to the bathroom) to pick out my island survival team. The big ones, the skilled ones, ones with that capable look in their eyes-- these would be my men, my partners, my followers.
I looked around the crowd here at the Circle where I had called my meeting. This was nothing like my airplane fantasies. The beefy guys looked more scared than the shrimps. The only man in the crowd with a gun seemed to lean to his side and cower away from his holster like it was a throbbing heap of the AIDS virus. These were not killers, not revolutionaries. But they would be. Damion would supply weapons for everyone, and courage too. The two of us will have an army soon enough.”
Cause for Rebels
Carpenter would soon find the right enemy to fight. An enemy that preyed on fear to achieve nefarious aims.
The School of Belief
A much different group than the one with which 8:30’s parents associated, but one just as—no, more-- exclusive. It would seem that Emile Durkheim’s anomie, or perhaps the opposite of it, had gotten the better of the believers. Theirs was a fascinating and alluring philosophy though, and like so many others before it, if it had been taken lightly it might have done some people some good.
The Believers were founded by a homeless alcoholic. But the man was supposed to be brilliant, and as so many brilliant men had done before him he killed himself with his ideas and found things in the actual world like alcohol to hasten the process. Rudgy was the man’s last name. Rudgy had been quite successful and popular within academic circles before the age of forty. But unlike the rest of those filling up such circles, Rudgy actually believed in what he was saying, didn’t give a shit about what he was hearing, and lived what he preached, walking the talk with a unique and truly remarkable sort of saintly devotion. But all this made him crazy. What some would call crazy and some would call true and some would later describe as: “a brilliant, yet imperfect, confused, and tragic experience of a great man with an even greater revelation. An example to all of us, he gave himself as a sacrifice, taking the weight of his revelation solely upon himself, and, so that all of us after him could take it on once he had wrestled with its demons and made it sane and applicable, he eventually buckled under its weight but only after doing with it what no other man could have possibly done.”
Rudgy’s after 40 philosophy explained people’s disillusionment in a novel way. After the fall anything was believable. Feelings of meaninglessness and of being an outcast in a society full of people who seemed not to be disturbed by the supposed meaningless of their existence were explained in this way: (This is how a friend explained it to me once) All those discontented and yearning for “something better” were more highly evolved than those who accepted society as it was: the outcasts had begun to outgrow their physical places in the world and were ready to start upon their journeys towards an unidentified event or process termed “transcendence”. It was because the unhappy were destined for this greater fate that they had felt uncomfortable in the typical social mechanism. They were ready to discard the norm and the way humans had been living for thousands of years. What exactly the whole process would entail, no one was quite sure of except for The School’s “elders”.
The “believers” saw themselves as square pegs and set about inventing why they didn’t fit into the triangular slots in the children’s toy of society that most all of their neighbors seemed too easily to fit into. In such strange times, belief in anything at all was warmly welcomed, people were tired of fear and uncertainty- they came to The School in desperate droves. Rudgy, although unstable, was not known to be power-hungry or manipulative. His successors unfortunately did not share these sentiments, and preyed unashamedly upon mankind’s vulnerability after the fall in order to gain support. Some frightening rumors have begun to surface about the School’s intentions. Carpenter had men on the inside. He knew what the school was planning to do, and it had to be stopped.
My Part
They always called me that—“Big Guy.” I suppose it was my size. I was bigger than Damion, and Damion was already pretty fucking big. Anyway, here is where I fit in. I joined much later than Damion did, but I was one of Carpenter’s first generals. I’ve included his ridiculously fantasized account of my supposed history from his diary:
The following is an excerpt from the journal of John Henry Carpenter, also known as 8:30, dated April 17th, 2059:
“Big Guy was a very big guy. His life was measured out in scars and fistfuls and it showed on his face. He was the kind of guy you’d want to have as a friend in a strange and mean, smoky bar-- and he liked that. Not to say that he reveled in his protector status: it was the hand he had been dealt, and he shouldered it with great humility and gravity.
Big Guy worked in a big factory, giving shape to molten metal. He looked like a modern day Hephaestus at his work; buckling, hefting, and hammering steel with a firm jaw and a keen eye. But his overwhelming physicality could trick you at first glance. He was not an ogre, or a machine, and he certainly wasn’t stupid. He matched his strength with smiles, and was the first to lend a large, capable hand to the weaker of workers. It seemed like he could have run the factory all by himself, as he danced between the furnaces and robotic arms and over and under the conveyor belts turning knobs and easing down massive weights from high places for smaller men. Everyone liked him, but few knew him-- which was a pity, because Big Guy was a great guy.
He had a mother and a father who were off dying slowly in some other state, a fat dog at home, and a slew of superficial acquaintances who liked to marvel at him and talk about him over supper. They talked about the marks on his face and the heaping curves of his back and the long, rough fingers he had that wrapped yours up like a baby when you shook his hand. Big Guy talked to his dog over supper. They ate together on his couch most nights.
When danger arose, Big Guy was the first one in the neighborhood to come to. Children came to his doorstep nervously to ask him to retrieve their cats from trees, mothers came to ask him to get their sons out of trouble. He did all of this unquestioningly and with a smile and a pat on the head or back once the job was done.
Big Guy was the only one who knew that there were bigger guys in the world. And he lamented the day that one would come along and take his title, which was really the only connection he had to the outside world.
One day, a bigger guy did come along. And this bigger guy was meaner, and had more scars, and, joining the workforce at the factory, began to dance among the machinery there even more effortlessly than Big Guy had. Soon the bigger guy got into an argument with one of the smallest factory men, and the argument turned physical. The small man clutched an iron pipe as he backed into the hot, loud corner of some violently throbbing generator in the factory. But then, quick as a cat, Big Guy stepped between the two men and stared the bigger guy in the face, leaning his face in to talk to him. No one could hear Big Guy’s soft words as he spoke into the huge man’s eyes under the angry din of the factory machinery. He spoke for two whole minutes, never making any gestures or signs of body language. The small man with the pipe wanted to slip in close to the two titans and listen but he was too frightened.
When Big Guy was finished talking, the bigger man looked bewildered and a little scared. The bigger guy said something, only a sentence or two. And then, without warning, Big Guy swung one large, bony right knee into the man’s groin, and the villain crumpled to the ground in pain. Big Guy didn’t smile, but turned away slowly and went back to work. The small man ran after him to thank him but Big Guy pushed him away, which was very uncharacteristic.
Afterward, at first, Big Guy remained much the same as he had been. But then nervous children and worried mothers stopped coming to his door, and he began to change. He danced stranger among the factory machines and got meaner, and got more scars, and grew bigger. It was then that I heard of him, and conscripted him, recognizing he was exactly the kind of man we softhands needed for our quest.”
Carpenter seemed to think I was some kind of herculean hero. I never argued much with that. I believed in what the man said and did my very best to help him. I was even there with him at the moment of his victory and his defeat, deep in the catacombs beneath the School of Belief’s cosmodrome.
The Victory and the Defeat
Carpenter, Damion, me (“Big Guy”), and a few other of the higher-ups were searching the catacombs of the School of Belief, fat and gloating from our recent victory over the fools. We came across a hidden chamber. Inside was a computer which activated a hologram image of the School’s founder, Rudgy. His brain or consciousness or whatever had apparently been copied into the machine.
The hologram laughed at John. In the corner of my eye I saw Damion tighten and step forward. But Carpenter made us listen to the ghostly apparition.
“You’re awful skinny for a superman, aren’t you?” it said to John.
John kept silent, only listening. The thing began to make sense, disturbingly.
“I know all about you, Carpenter—you’re the one who defeated this goddamn excuse for a philosophy. Now you’re down here to pilfer their treasures? Well I suppose I am their greatest treasure—see I’m trapped down here with no say. They used my memory, not my ideas. They ran this joint. From a philosophical standpoint, their beliefs had nothing to do with my theories. They trapped me, soon enough your people will do the same to you. Not the direct apostles, but the second generation, son. They won’t give a shit about what you had to say.”
And you know, the hologram was right. I’m the only one left who lived long enough to see Carpenter’s image get bastardized and fucked up in history books and power-hungry political movements. Poor Carpenter died in an old-folks community that his followers had supposedly founded on his ideals. Below is the last entry in his diary, before he walked off into the woods and died there:
The following is an excerpt from the journal of John Henry Carpenter, also known as 8:30, dated April 30th, 3009:
“I sit on the porch with a wool blanket over my legs. Looking out towards the swamp and watching my fireflies dance in the midnight fog over the fairway. The skin on my face sags off my bones, dangling like worn leather. Tomorrow the Jones’ next-door and the rest of the population of “The Groves” will be everywhere around playing golf and sipping drinks in their colors. A veritable geezer coral reef-- herds of humans put out to pasture in pastel blue, green, red, yellow, pink and purple shawls, polos, sweaters, bonnets and sports jackets. Despite the approaching spectre of their deaths the citizens of the Groves cling to the material and social comforts of their lives: expensive clothing and accessories, silly games, and small talk.
My wool blanket slides off of my legs onto the porch’s lacquered oak beams, and I see my knees—they look like they’ve been chewed on by something, or like old, moldy biscuits.
The goddamn Jones’. Fucking neighbors. I thought humans were supposed to get wiser with age. Apparently the Jones’ missed that step. And so it seems did all the rest of the senior citizens here in the Grove. They’re all still caught up on Things like kids at Christmas. They’re strangers to the very land they live on. Abstracted, detached human satellites. The brochure may say that we have a nice view of the outlying ocean, but that’s all it is: “a view.” This view in reality is not just a small slice of visual candy for some sad, old, sagging children to enjoy before death: the “view” is in reality a massive sheet of nature seething with life and mystery and God or whatever. Tomorrow I’m going fishing there and not coming back. We’re fucked again, see—but I do not care.”
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