War Prayer 030

(who cares)

War Prayer 030

After slaying that guy who is laying in a morgue, or wherever, Theresa vanished for the summer of 2004.  She was replaced by a young lady who was a replica of Amber.  Pixie like in size, hair, and makeup application.  Same stupid sorts of tattoos.  They blogged, he told her all about his referrer logs, and they discussed Pynchon and Calvino.  This only proved a temporary solution.  By the time the autopsy results were released it was clear Drew was being quite unfair to her.  Imposing your bullshit and expectations on a replacement is totally fucked up.  The model is always slightly different and Drew knew he could tell.  Theresa returned just in time for the fall semester. 

War Prayer 029

(there isn’t a link here…ohhh, rebellious!)

War Prayer 029

Three bands have played. Drew watches each for a few minutes before leaving the basement and following Theresa down the street to sit in front of the town library. Repeat times three. A friend, who would later gossip about one of your biggest secrets to an Internet message board, observes your continuing disappearance and reappearance. Theresa herself disappears during the second library stop but reappears to catch up when Drew is returning to the house the show is taking place at. While she is gone, Drew tries to make small talk with someone selling a fanzine but says something awkward and ridiculous, prompting said person to exit the conversation and head back to the safety of the basement.

Being a good diplomat gets you a spot in the hierarchy. An X on your hand, writing “slut” on your arm, talk about the environment while sucking down another cigarette. That’ll show them! All of these roles need actors. They began walking back to the show for band #5. Someone Drew would later find out was behind some Online mockery of him walked by and smirked. Years later, it is happening again. Theresa took his hand and led him back to the van. She still had a lot to teach him.

War Prayer 028

(“faggot!”)

War Prayer 028

Hey, Drew, remember that time you really sincerely thought they were gonna break down those walls!?

The fourth time this cycle plays out, it’s time for the a trip to the 7-11 on Main Street. A disgusting Powerbar and bottle of water later, Drew and Theresa are sitting on the curb behind the convenience store. A few people from the show pass by, including the singer of totally sensitive band #2, who refers to someone as a “cunt.” Radical, dude. Drew is stereotypically outraged like he always was, Theresa rolls her eyes at how adorable it was that he always had the same reaction to this kind of immature hypocrisy. And would over and over again.

Theresa quietly reminded him that people can get away with tiny deceptions. Public persona’s are different. People will never live up to your expectations. They will do what they can to fulfill their role, if they are a prominent member of your subculture they can get away with that. All Drew can rationalize is how absurd their claims of change and revolution are.

War Prayer 027

(second month)

War Prayer 027

The time is around 11pm and the place is the same couch from before. The long summer of 2001 has given way to a brisk evening in the ninth year of our existence together.  It will be the final autumn anything will matter for a few autumns.  All is silent as we try to read Aeschylus for our class.  A few lights shine down bright from above.  A security guard yawns as he passes by, tipping his hat at us. 

Drew sighs.  Theresa announced a few hours ago that there would be no funny stuff until they got their work done.  Drew just wanted to be set free from this painful existence.  Go out and spend, they proclaimed.  That’ll show those fucking ay-rabs.  The mall was its own special existence.  The sorority girl with the red, white, and blue acrylic nails from their morning class, which they had stopped going to, passes this hall. 

Drew adjusts his position on the couch.  He props himself on his arms.  By now he has memorized the order of their existence.  Everyday he saw Amber, dead over a month now, in a face, or an arm, or a smell.  Theresa is silent next to him, not acknowledging Drew so he will focus. It’s these waking moments that are the hardest to bear.  They used to be able to just wish it all away, vanish into the woods, into other more non-existent worlds. 

Today, it is just Drew and Theresa.  All the good dreams and worlds that used to guard them are crumbling.  The original evil, that good old friend, is beginning to terrorize them.  Sometimes Drew wanted to fight his own War On Terror against these evildoers. 

Theresa cleared her throat.  Time to go finish The Oresteia.

War Prayer 026

(tried to teach him)

War Prayer 026

I hear it is 1996 and we are on our way to a show?!?!  In Toms River?

Amber got her driver’s license first, so Drew and Theresa sat in the back of the boyfriend’s band van while the boyfriend, whatever his name was, sat up front being his usually pleasant self. He went on and on about “the fetus” and how essential it was for us to “defend” it. No word on whether it was important to defend women. Amber disagreed, but, as usual, left him to his views. She was quieter than usual. Theresa and Drew kept quiet. Theresa held Drew’s hand under a pile of the boyfriend’s band’s shirts they were going to sell at the show.

War Prayer 025

(sex in general is stupid)

War Prayer 025

The more Drew rejected sex and all of its mind numbing idiocy, the more it came to occupy his every waking thought.  The roll of a pair of hips, the toned arms of another, the seductive, alluring, mind of a third.  He became obsessed with his idealized concept of what love should be.  But he continued to deny it had anything to do with sex.  The more he denied,  his imaginary world became more developed. 

This denial became a game.  He could excuse his fantasies by saying he would never act on them, never try to recreate them in the real world.  At the end of the year, the tag for books read that year was rather sad and small on his weblog’s tag cloud.  So much time wasted on sex that could have been spent on Barth or Sorrentino or hypertext fiction or adhering a sticker somewhere. 

Drew and Theresa made love often during this period, trying to recreate that pair of hips and mashing it up with the third’s alluring mind.  Sex became as meaningless for them as it was in real life. 

The Guilty Parties

(inspiration)

During the fall of 2004, the following are guilty as charged of offering inspiration for what you are reading.

• Scott Rettberg’s hypertext fiction The Meddlesome Passenger.
• Jorge Luis Borges’ collection Labyrinths, especially The Library Of Babel, The Immortal, and The Circular Ruins.
• The literary weblog Conversational Reading, which, beyond generally getting me excited about literature, introduced me to the work of Gilbert Sorrentino, referenced in the penultimate lexia.
• Jill/txt was a daily, still, source of inspiration.  A conversation with Jill in real life inspired a lexia.
• Grand Text Auto in general.
• Shelley Jackson’s My Body a Wunderkammer, which made me cry more than once and pushed me to be brave enough to write about sexuality issues.
• Of course, The Unknown Collective’s The Unknown, which greatly influenced how I both read and write hypertext, and my aesthetic vision for hypertext fiction.
• Derik Badman’s, who I met on a Buffy The Vampire Slayer listserv, writing about constraints at the time I was writing War Prayers inspired me to try to write three hundred word, exact, entries.
• Although offline, Rettberg and Nick Montfort’s sticker novel Implementation was paradoxically what made me create a blog to document War Prayers.  I had to get my words onto a screen somewhere.  I even created a few summary stickers, one of which still is on a wall at The Richard Stockton College Of New Jersey underneath an Implementation sticker.