Future Mythologies

A Textual Journey with Maxwell Von Bismarck

Monday, January 31, 2005

 
In August I tried to kill Chr*s Kn**ckl**n by having him jump off the Chestnut Street bridge. It was a failed assassination attempt, of course. Instead of being freed of his personality and metamorphosing into Maxwell von Bismarck, music's only hope, I merely became Kn**ckl**n's ghost. Much like Professor Binns in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, who awakens one day and performs his normal routine and only later discovers that he has shed his mortal coil, I am now the spectre of that fiery lad ck-one, the tritone blast. I hazily wander through my daily routine, observing events and gathering knowledge, learning about world history and culture and becoming ever smarter and perhaps even wiser, but not living in the way that ck-one was alive. I haven't been seen by anyone besides coworkers and family in six months. There's little evidence to prove that I still corporeally exist. I produce nothing but consume at a faster rate than ever before.

Chr*s Kn**ckl**n's sexuality still exists, but is entirely divorced from the rest of his personality. I'm either thinking sexually or I'm not, there's no longer a lust for life, an erotic surge through my world-view. It's become rationalized and parsed out. Drink, read, fuck, sleep. Perhaps that was the direction I was always heading to, or perhaps it's a hyperbole of my original self, the false-german efficiency that could cover for an inner falling apart that even I could barely notice. But who knows if that's even a true representation? The living Chris is so distant, so much a piece of history and not someone I actually feel like I was. As if I'd wiped my personality clear by ingesting LSD every day for a year and come out the other side as a bookworm/scholar/aesthete. Emotions I felt in 2003 are alien. Spring 2004 emotions are alien even. Perhaps that's the weather separating us though. There's no reason why I shouldn't feel like I did in January 2004 except that I've either become a totally different person or (truthfully now) the ghost of my former self.

The pictures of Kate Moss and Spike Milligan, the two polar representations of my persona, have yet to grace my wall in the twin poses of Ozymandias-like inspiration they will someday assume. It was supposed to be Maxwell von Bismarck's room. Like Scorpio's lair. The synthesizers and guitars gather dust. Only the pages of books move, breaking their silence with their isolated flapping. I walk around campus with my ipod, my personal soundtrack heard by no one. Seen by no one except the staff of the library and the Rite-Aid.

Maybe there were things about Chris that were worth saving that I didn't realize. Certainly now it seems like only the useless shell is left. 2004 was a transformative year, but did I go wrong by not learning a fucking thing from 2003? I can still touch those relic emotions, just barely, like a shard from an ancient Greek vase. Only through nostalgia. Thinking of a single mp3 downloaded in Boston makes me want to ball in tears. The name Boston is laden with teary boozy nostalgia. Without chemicals I pointed. I've died and my schoolmates are still alive, standing by my headstone in Boston Common, next to Supply Belcher's. In front of the piano store and the library, the two most sonically beautiful places on campus circa 1999. In June 1999 I sang "Roadrunner" and danced around stage pogoing like a total dork in a rock n' roll frenzy, a great big "HELLO!" to the new life I was about to begin but had already been practising for a year, driving around Browns Road and Route 195, past the ghosts of James Marshall and Wendy O. Williams, suburban trees and A & P where I narrowly avoided a police interrogation. Standing alone outside my high school, staring at the scaffolding of the construction, all lit up like a Christmas tree, the school not yet built I would never attend. Now If I was saying hello to Boston, what was I saying goodbye to? The teenage idea that I could actually do shit with my life? Hopefully not, but hard to convice me otherwise right now.

Maybe the eighty-odd library books I have in my study are really all vying for the role of substitute for that great old Alt Rock a Rama, the tome that's fired more imagination in a way a book never could these days. It totally created a vision in my head, and it's a shame that I didn't follow it, because I am no longer a visionary (in the Blake/Whitman/Ginsberg model). I think I perhaps needed that mystical experience April 2001, when it should have happened, lying in my bed, but instead I straightened out my legs and it was all downhill from there. Is that ever attainable for anyone ever again? Don't we all kill our ideals and our imagination?

Perhaps it's simply that I need to find a vision to replace the last one. Every vision we have is eventually ruined when we actually can really see the thing we imagined, and we need to set our sights a little higher. Well, to quote the great visionary and synthesist Syd Barrett...here I go.




Here I fucking go.



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