Something is wrong
Televisions tune themselves to dead channels and something reaches out from behind the snow and crawls inside skulls. Work crews in yellow overalls walk the streets in the early hours, reärranging; noöne knows who sends them. Strange animals and stranger people: everyone sees them but everyone sees them differently. A radio is playing but there is no radio in the room. It tells of murder in between advertising mattresses, sex toys, and back alley lobotomies. The sewers are clogged with hagfish. A new political party is headed for a landslide but their members refuse to tell what their platform is. At their events speakers hiss and ramble and gyrate incoherently. Their banner is the wan, sickly yellow of stained textiles, fungal growths, chlorine gas, and pus. Artists’ collectives advance dangerous new forms of art and sex. People put on masks to dance to the new music and when they take them off they have someone else’s faces. Mafias trafficking in strange drugs, yellow nepenthe and the flesh of the giant aquatic centipede. Someone is buying all the vacant land and erecting stone edifices with no doors or windows. Suicide merchants cloak themselves with obfuscating banality. Takeover of mass channels — television radio newspapers town criers divination — by signals preaching the gospel of the heat‐death of all values, the annihilation of ethics, morals, belief, meaning, and hope. Cattle give birth to cockroaches and rats. Purveyors of ultraviolence, vendors of unspeakable psychic amputations. The rain is like liquid metamphetamine. Mental illnesses turn contagious. Hallucinations, dreams, and psychotic episodes assert themselves in external reality and waking life becoming mass psychosis. There are people abroad who are not people. They are ghosts, ideas, confusions. They writhe incomprehending and obscene to music noöne can hear but everyone can feel. Something is wrong but noöne is doing anything. Something is wrong and everyone feels it. Something is wrong but noöne knows what it is. Something is wrong and everything is going wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong.
This vignette has previously appeared in Lunar Miseries Ogdo.