CAPTAINS LOG # 6919811914:
THE PSYCHO

By the fall of 2001, I had grown accustomed to sunning myself publicly on the bow of a large magical ship known affectionately as The Psycho (in honour of a community, known as the Angry Psycho's, whose bloodied hands were responsible for the ship's creation). The Psycho was thought to be a magical ship because its motion on the sea had an uncanny ability to create a kind of music that worked Angry Psychos, from all walks of life, into moshing frenzies of pure poetry. In the winter of 1996, I was offered the honour of captaining this ship and, with great humility, I accepted.

The glorious adventures of The Psycho seemed to be never ending until one fated morning in November of 2001. On that terrible day, I awoke to find that I had been somehow transported from my bunk (I must have been drugged) and was now trapped in the bowls of Psycho's sprawling engine room. Apparently, as the music played, and the Angry Psychos moshed, the ship had been infiltrated by an odd acidic fish monster, whose breath was so toxic, that one strategically directed BLOW from it's pursed green lips could effectively eat right through the digital valves and cylinders that kept the ship in motion.  In short, while the Angry Psycho's and their captain celebrated their evolving journey, the beloved Psycho was quietly being poesessed, and nothing short of an intricate exorcism seemed likely to save her. 

 

BEWARE THE MIDDLEMAN:

mid·dle·man  (mdl-mn)  n.

 

1.      A traitor who  steals from artists and sells their booty    to retailers and/  or consumers.

2.                An intermediary; a poe-between.

 

The particular demon that poesessed The Psycho is known now as Pallbearer.  Pallbearer was spawned from a secret society of middlemen called The Bottom Fishers [1] that formed their covenant sometime in the middle ages, on a hidden island in the Atlantic Ocean.   Known for clammy hands that seem to smell slightly of fish, members of The Bottom Fishers have sought throughout the ages to own and control as many channels of communication as possible. Trained to prey upon humanity's general fear of confrontation, members of The Bottom Fisher sect insert themselves between any two parties that wish to communicate; thereby gaining control of valuable information, which can then be utilized to serve the corrupt interests of the sect.

Pallbearer, famous among sect members, for his ability to obscure important information, gained access to Psycho's engine room by impersonating an Angry Psycho.  In a move that took all the Angry Psycho's by surprise, Pallbearer had managed over time to quietly (and secretly) transfer ownership of every Psycho rivet and deck chair, to the custody of his sect.  Smiling and unaware, it was not until the fated morning of November 24^th, 2001 that the Angry Psychos and their captain awoke to find that the unimaginable had occurred: The music that had always accompanied The Psycho in her travels had ceased to play.

A silence, rendered impossible by all the laws of science, began to creep into every nook and cranny of the still moving ship. Not only had The Psycho's music vanished; the voices of everyone aboard seemed to have been mystically muted. It happened in quick stages, over a period of time, until finally, SOUND ITSELF disappeared from the ship, and from all the oceans on which she sailed.  Waves crashed without punctuation; gulls sung melodies that no one could hear; rain punctured the skin of the sea without rhyme or rhythm; and the wind, in what was meant to be a tragic symphony of collision, threw itself against the hull of the ship unable to strike a single note.

Panic and confusion seeped into the ship's crowded quarters, as Angry Psychos, summoning screams of horror, managed only to perform a strange and silent gymnastics with their mouths.   With their captain missing, and their voices gone, the Angry Psychos tried desperately to revive the mysterious music that had so abruptly vanished from their beloved Psycho.   While it is true that some Angry Psychos clutched lifeboats and tried their luck on the open seas, others remained, and bravely hunted for their missing captain--some making desperate attempts to break into the ship's engine room where, unbeknownst to them, I (a humble captain) remained in a silent battle against the green lipped Bottom Fisher…Pallbearer.

I have little to no memory of the first months that I spent inside that engine room.   Frequently unconscious, I awoke in spells, to find myself immobilized by an odd entanglement of restraints that appeared to be made of nothing but paper.   My numerous attempts to break free of these restraints resulted only in torturous and prolonged attacks of claustrophobia.

Pallbearer, hovering near my face in a constant rage, spit the toxic air of his breath up my nostrils, and into my brain, where it's putrid stench invaded my cells like a retrovirus in search of thoughts. Oddly enough, even though sound had ceased to exist, I understood exactly what Pallbearer wanted from me.   He had hijacked The Psycho successfully, but in a karmic reversal of fortune, he could not make the ship sing.   Without it's song, the ship was useless to the Bottom Fishers.   But try as he did to terrorize me, I could not help Pallbearer.   This was not due to any heroic act of martyrdom on my part; but for the simple reason, that I did not know why or how The Psycho had been silenced.   Nor for that matter, could I explain how her simple movements across the oceans, had managed for so many years to summon music from the sea.

It was not I who ultimately conquered Pallbearer, but another demon, that I would later discover was far more dangerous.

 

BEWARE THE RICH OIL MAN:

oligarch

\Ol`i*garch\, n. one of the rulers in a corrupt, dictatorial government.

oligarchy

\Ol"i*gar"chy\, n.  A form of government in which supreme power is placed in the hands of a few demonic Bottom Fishers; also, those who form the ruling Fish.

Just when I expected no better fate than a silent and anonymous death, there appeared in the engine room another.   He was a young man, slight of build, with nothing particularly striking in his demeanor, save for his hair and his curious attire.   Though he seemed not a day over 26, his shoulder length hair was entirely white.  On the one hand, this gave him the strange air of a wise elder; while on the other, it gave the impression of a cosmic hoax.  His skin was pale and his face seemed devoid of expression, lacking any of the visible lines that generally provide a sort of geological history of emotion.   There was no evidence that the face of this intruder had ever been visited by a smile, a grimace, or even a sneeze.  The intruder's clothes looked as though they had been dipped in oil, and scrawled in red, across the chest of his slimy gold button down shirt, were the following words:  KILL POE'S ART. FUSE HER BIND.

The very sight of this white haired stranger brought Pallbearer to his knees.   The proud toxic demon, that had so effortlessly held myself, and The Psycho, hostage, for what seemed like many months, now knelt at the feet of this intruder, in a pathetic, but oddly erotic, posture of worship and fear. The stranger gently motioned for Pallbearer to give him his right hand, whereupon the white haired invader guided Pallbearer's fishy metacarpus into the front pocket of his oily colorless slacks.   Pallbearer's face bent into a crude and lascivious smile, as the stranger's touch reduced him to an obscene convulsion of inaudible giggles.  Then, in one slow and terrible motion, Pallbearer disappeared limb by limb into the stranger's slippery pocket. The last thing I saw, before losing consciousness, was the middle joint of Pallbearer's index finger bending helplessly to clutch the air.

It was a strange voice that woke me next.   A bland voice, that delivered its syllables with no variance in tone.   “I am Oiligarch”, said the voice that appeared to belong to the white haired intruder. My mind told me that I should feel an enormous sense of relief, as this was the first sound I had heard in many months.  But the relief did not come.  It was as though the sound I heard was not really a sound at all, but a strange and foreign simulation of what I remembered to be sound. What awoke throughout my nervous system was a terrible sensation of foreboding; and yet my mind, with its primitive logic, calculated a promise of hope in the presence of this sound (which was not a sound).

When I opened my mouth and tried to speak, I understood immediately that my trials had not come to an end.   My voice remained inaudible, as did the sound of my feet stomping on the engine room floor.

“Pallbearer is gone.”  Said Oiligarch.  “He will not bother you any more. I have done you an enormous service, and I demand from you only one thing in return for my generosity.”  There was no need for me to ask what he wanted.  Oiligarch carried on without pause, 

“I will restore the ship to your Poesession.  The Angry Psychos will hear something like music, and the waves in the sea will appear to crash once again with deafening majesty.”

My inner ear throbbed with an excruciating hunger to hear The Psycho's music once again.

“In exchange,” Oiligarch continued, “I demand from you only one simple thing:  I am to be given command of your voice.   You will stay on as captain, but your voice…will be mine. This is not a question, but a dictate.  I am not negotiating with you; I am spelling out your future.”

Oiligarch's words did not resound in my head, as one might imagine.  They entered my brain and died there. I know I heard the terrible words, and yet each cell in my mind seemed to have rejected them, like so many unmatched organs. They were there and yet, they seemed unable to occupy any space. As I would soon understand, the survival of Oiligarch's message could be ensured only by endless repetition.

Oiligarch turned away from me now and dropped soundlessly to his knees.   With his right index finger, he traced the symbol of a pyramid in the air, closed his eyes, and began to chant what seemed to be some kind of awkward prayer:

“THANKS A LOT COPY CAT” were the words he chose to repeat again…and again…and again:

“thanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycatthanksalot copycatthanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycatthanks alotcopycatthanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycat
thanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycatthanksalot
copycatthanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycat thanksalotcopycat…”

The noteless monotone of Oiligarch's chant blurred into an excruciating hum. This hum quickly came to resemble a horrible ringing inside the deepest cloisters of my ear.  It was a head splitting ring, because it was a ring without music

I had no idea how much time had passed when Oiligarch ceased his chant.   It might have been a week, 6 months, maybe even a year.  Either way, it was lost time. Time in the engine room of The Poesessed Psycho had become like Oiligarch's face:  expressionless, and robbed of its history.

Finally Oiligarch ceased his chant.   Methodically he stood up, dusted himself off, and turned his dead face towards mine.   I waited for the ringing in my head to stop, but it carried on, like a copied file in a computer continuing to duplicate itself.

Oiligarch then approached me and pressed his slimy lips to my ear.  Quietly he whispered in his voice (that was not a voice),

“Your neural networks are now complete.” he said.  “Your mind will now associate all new information to this network in your brain.  If you smell a flower, the meaning of that flower, and of its smell, will define itself by what has now become, and will forever remain, the root of you…and of your voice.   I will show you how it works.”

Oiligarch then pulled a photograph from his back pocket and held it in front of my eyes.   I recognized the picture immediately.  Our ship, The Psycho, was anchored proudly on a waterway inside the city of Boston.  I, still a new captain, was screaming gleefully through a megaphone from the deck of the ship, urging new Angry Psychos to swim from the shore, and join us in our travels.   Many brave psychos dove into the polluted urban water that day, and were greeted enthusiastically by the helping hands of The Psycho's crew.

I stared at the photograph, waiting for feelings to emerge--a sense of reminiscence perhaps, coupled with longing and hope.  But nothing came.  Instead my mind generated a dead and useless string of thoughts: 

“Copy the picture.  Copy it.  Copy it….Thanks a lot Copy Cat.ThanksalotCopyCat.thanksalotcopycatthanks alotcopycatthanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycat
thanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycat…”

Where were these words…these thoughts…coming from?  I looked to see if Oiligarch's lips were moving.  They were motionless.  In a moment of cold, numb, horror I realized that these thoughts were mine. These words…these terrible words…were somehow being generated, not by Oiligarch, but by my own mind! 

The photograph that Oiligarch held in front of me had no meaning to me. I understood what kind of reaction the photograph should have inspired in me, and yet it failed to conjure any emotion whatsoever. Some dangerous program in my mind had somehow transformed the meaning and purpose of the photograph from that of a glorious memory, into that of a potential asset---something to be used, not cherished.

I suddenly felt a wave of nausea come over me as though my inner ear had suddenly swelled, destroying entirely my sense of balance.  I realized, as I began to fall, that I was no longer immobilized by the intricate paper restraints that had kept me hostage for so long.  Oiligarch watched with calm arrogance, as I crawled unsteadily toward the door of the engine room, making no effort to stop me. Even as my instincts sought to escape, my mind hummed a toneless song that I can only describe as the sustaining bell that marked the death of music. 

Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw when I finally emerged onto The Psycho's bridge deck.  Every inch of the ship had been inscribed with the words: THANKS A LOT COPYCAT. Each letter looked exactly the same: one-inch- high, black, and perfectly aligned.  As I stood clutching the deck's banister, staring in awe and horror at the desecrated body of The Psycho, I felt a gentle tap on my right shoulder.  I turned around unsteadily, to see the face of an Angry Psycho.   I wanted to say “Hello, hello…” but to my horror, the only words I could wrench from my mind were:  “Thanks a lot Copy Cat.”   The familiar, but strangely foreign, Angry Psycho smiled robotically, took my right hand, and gently wrapped my fingers around a black Sharpie. As if Poesessed by some alien force, my hand immediately reached for the floor, and began to write, one letter at a time, the terrible word's of Oiligarch's twisted prayer: THANKS A LOT COPYCAT.

My handwriting was unrecognisable as my own.   Try as I did to scribble and scratch, the letters that came from the pen were identical to the one-inch block letters over which the pen moved.   I looked up and into the eyes of the Angry Psycho, and for a moment I felt a weak spark of recognition.   For a moment, I thought I remembered a sound.  But then it was gone, and the Angry Psycho submissively recommenced apocalyptic chant:

“thanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycatthanks
alotcopycatthanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycat…”

 

The deafening ring inside my ears grew in volume as I slowly became aware that the thousands of Angry Psychos who remained onboard, had been robbed of their voices as well.  Their magnificent stories had been reduced to the brutal refrain of a chorus that could celebrate only the destruction of all that is original.

In a panic I began to smash my wrist against the deck's banister.  I hit…and I hit…and I hit, until finally, with a silent snap of bones, my fingers released their grasp on the Sharpie.    I flung my upper torso over The Psycho's banister and prepared to vomit into the plastic white noise of a sea (that was not a sea.)   As violent convulsions began to move through my body, a single dolphin raised its head above the dead waves.  It opened its mouth and seemed to attempt a cry.  I waited for the dolphin's magical chirps to ricochet through the stolen air, and for a moment, I could almost imagine what this dolphin's song would sound like, and how it would make me feel. The dolphin perched arduously on its tail, and stretched up towards me as though it meant to tell me something of great importance.  I leaned out over the silent waves, as far as gravity would allow, only to hear Oiligarch's horrible prayer, travel from the mouth of the dolphin, and tear through my skull with its murderous redundancy:

 

“thanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycatthanksalot copycatthanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycatthanks alotcopycatthanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycat
thanksalotcopycatthanksalotcopycatthanksalot
copycat…” 

 

It was too much to bear. I swung around, fell to my knees on the floor, and began to vomit. Painful heaves convoluted my insides as angular shapes tore  my throat and catapulted themselves from my mouth. I watched as the odd contents of my stomach landed bit by bit on the deck floor.  Letters…that's what they were!…LETTERS!…Letters were flying out of my mouth!  17 letters in all, of varying sizes, fell on Psycho's violated floor in a perfect line.

 

“THANKS A LOT COPY cAT”

 

I stared at them.  Their variation in size created a tiny sensation in me of something that felt almost like relief.   The peaks and valleys of the letters' outline looked like the profile of a wave.   I stared at them, mystified. For a long time it did not even occur to me to try and read the letters. I just looked at them, grateful for their delightful lack of symmetry. Finally though, instinct tempted me to the left side of the wavelike sentence, and guided my eyes across each letter, until the meaning of the letters crushed my moment of respite with a cold, blank, brutality:  “THANKSALOTCOPYCAT.”

I could not scream.  I could not cry.  I could create no sonic expression of my own.  I could only see, hear, think, and say, the malignant word's that gagged the soul of The Psycho. In one exacerbated and pathetic attempt to revolt against the self-perpetuating sentence that spelled out the death of all that I loved, I swiped my arm across the floor on which the letters lay, sending each and every one of them skidding through the air, and across the deck's floor.  

It was immediate.   The moment the letters landed, the ringing in my ears stopped.  In fact, everything stopped.

The Angry Psycho's stood frozen in a silence that felt suddenly peaceful.  Then, after what seemed like a statuesque eternity, I saw something move. From the corner of my left eye, I saw a girl, no more than 13 years of age, bend down, and with tentative grace, and pick up the letter that had landed near her left foot.  It was the letter  C. The girl held it up to the sky to examine it.  Everyone watched intrigued, as sunlight bounced chaotically from it's shiney surface.  After a brief moment, another Angry Psycho, near the ship's bow, bent down to retrieve the letter that had landed near his feet.  This Angry psycho was a young man, about 18 years of age, and the letter he lifted to the sky revealed itself to be an A.  Next, a woman, age 35, and her teenage daughter, recovered an N and a T. The pace then quickened, as the rest of the letters were lifted, one at a time, by curious Angry Psycho hands.  Another T was recovered; then a tiny A; then an L , a miniscule K, yet another T, and a medium sized O;  then the last A was recovered, followed by a giant P, an almost as impressively sized S, and the one and only Y.  Finally, in quick succession, the last c, and an H appeared.  Before I could count the 16 letters that had been recovered one by one, a somber 8 year old little boy, with piercing yellow, blue eyes, waved to me, and with shy fingers, pointed to the ground behind me.  I turned around to see the 17^th letter, a perfect O, lying on the ground, slightly behind my right knee.   As I picked it up and began to examine its rough edges, something miraculous happened:  for the first time, in what had been an eternity, I heard the sound of a voice (that was a voice).

“It spells something else,” said the little Angry Psycho with the yellow blue eyes.  Like a pebble dropped into a perfectly still body of water, the child's voice created waves that moved through my mind like a string of magnificent tsunamis.

A ChanT LACKS TOP TOY

“That's what it says,” said the child excitedly. “A CHANT LACKS TOP TOY!”

“What is a top toy?” I thought to myself confounded. “What does that mean?” I thought…I thought…I THOUGHT!!!  The most magnificent gibberish I have ever heard, that's what it means!  The most divine, senseless, bombastic, revolutionary, poetry; that's what it is!  Before I could even begin to process the sublime reverberations that were exploding in my mind's ear, another voice chimed in.  “That's not what it says,” said an older voice.  It says,

A cONTACT   PATH,  OK SLY

“A contact path? But where?” I wondered. “And who is Sly?” Wonder gallivanted through my veins igniting gut-wrenching hoots of laughter from my lungs.  It was a side splitting, uneven laughter that rolled through me in loud waves.  It was a laughter that seemed to strike impossible notes from an infinite scale--a laughter that played contradictory chords, and yet, somehow gave rise to magnificent harmonies.  

Suddenly voices began to shout, one over the other, in a muddled swirl of punctuated chaos,

NOT      A   TAcKY     TOP  CLASH

Cried out one voice.

 

AN TS  CLOcK        TO        A PA c HY

Cried another.  The high-pitched squeal of a teenage girl blurted out:

PATH   ATTAC K ‘S      cOLO NY

Then, Over lapping her frenzied yelp, came the deep baritone of a grown man,

 

LOO K          CHATTY   Pc,    SATAN

 

It said with a laugh.

I closed my eyes and let the phrases mosh through my mind like the music of some strange quantum dance.

“Lo! Attack sycophant”  “Cloak that nasty cop” “Hot pack on catalyst” “not OK chatty Pascal!” they continued.

The words were mesmerizing, senseless, and yet perfectly logical.  I watched as my mind tossed the sounds around, investing each phrase with meaning and exploring each letter with eager curiosity.   I listened as my ear played with the fluctuating sound of each letter: spinning the O's around the L like 2 symphonic hoola hoops; extending the S and the H in to the question of the Y.   It came to me as if out of a dream, the phrase that finally healed my broken mind and restored to me my voice. When I finally, and quite suddenly, opened my mouth, a roar exploded out of me, the likes of which I have never known.  With the growl of a thousand seas, I shouted the words:

“CAN'T TALK    

  TO A PSYCHO!!”

 

A momentary hush came over the Angry Psychos.  I looked at them and I suddenly remembered them all.  And I saluted them. Promptly, they began to shout those familiar words.  And I realized:  it was a song.  It was our song.   It was the first song that our beloved Psycho sang when she first set out to sea.

The voices of the Angry Psychos resounded, as each one simultaneously reinvented the words of that song a new.  Their voices sung in a way that the Bottom Fisher's would never understand.  Every time the Angry Psycho's sung those words, the words sounded different.  Every time they shouted the words, they gave each word new meaning. Each unique Angry Psycho voice gave The Psycho's song a new history, a different tone, a new horizon, and an untold story, finally told.  The Psycho's music was a music that could never be Poesessed.  Only posessions can be Poessessed, and magic is no one's Poesession. 

Before long, the reminiscing ended, and the voices of the Angry Psycho's conjured new words.  Their beautiful battle of opposing views resumed, “Why do you have to flame me everytime I express an opinion?”  “Poe is prostituting herself!”  “It must be Angie's fault!” “I think Angie's nice!”  “WHY CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?!!!”

There was no question about it.  The music of The Psycho had been restored.  The waves played percussion on the ship's hull once again.  The wings of birds glided across the wind like bows across the strings of an invisible violin.  I smiled and looked over the ships banister at the magnificent and mysterious sea.    Just as I was about to head back to the bridge, a grey spot on the waves caught my eye.   My friend, the dolphin, raised its head once again above the waves.   It chirped a delicate string of water notes before magically forming the following words: “Tap in a code, I'll reach you below…” it chirped.  “No one should brave the underworld alone.”

POEST SCRIPT:

Soon after The Psycho broke free from the grasp of The Bottom Fishers, the sect launched a massive international smear campaign claiming that The Psycho had been mutinously hijacked by pirates.  On countless occasions since, the ship has been under siege by members of the Bottom Fisher's sizable militia.   Despite, the enormous obstacles set before her, The Psycho remains at large, and her music continues to haunt and tease, the infuriated demons that will always wish to poessess and silence her.

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