Category Archives: Combat Paper

A lot of times people have asked me if making Combat Paper is healing, or if it heals me, or if it is “cathartic” and more often than not I want to choke them for missing the point. If they looked in my eyes instead of asking stupid questions they would know, but nobody has the patience or the mental fortitude for real eye to eye contact these days.

To answer their question now, in the lengthy fashion that their foolish question unravels, of course. To make art “heals” by systematically rooting out our demons and, if not destroying them, making us get to know them better.

As an example I will submit this testimonial.

Last night I began to pace. I had known something was wrong all day. I was finishing one piece of work, one portion of my thesis on patience and art and beauty during all of the fucked up barbarian bullshit that passes for policy these days, and I had no other piece to go to now but I knew, in some feral recess of myself, that I could not stop.

This last piece had become a prayer and it had left me feeling cleansed and relieved with having so thoroughly investigated the memories and the minutia of the things which have lain dormant inside of me since our initial impression. It left my hands feeling beautiful and well used. The love that I experienced for this piece was something I cannot justly speak of, it was so overwhelming to describe it would sound hokey and put me ill at ease. The love of myself. Finally. After so much wasted hatred I can finally look back on that boy and love him and his bony fingers and his devout attention to detail. And I still love him. I am proud of him and I am proud of what he has made and all the things he had to learn to finally say what he had been meaning to say.

But pride lasts just a little longer than a few shots of whiskey and that day without was coming and I had the shakes. I needed to be back in that sweet memory zone. So I went for another walk to the cemetery. Its becoming a daily ritual. As I walked I took stalk of the sweetness of the sadness in my heart and it reminded me of how it felt with Jen when I had first come home.

There were no two more sad people than Jen and I that summer, and our sadness grew into a fierce passion. Every day we would smoke away our despair inside of her smoldering apartment. We were always half dressed and we knew the days not by the sun but by the revolutions of our love, when the CatPower album always played that song and whatever black things we kept inside of us mingled in her sheets.

We were two artists who passionately wanted to die, but instead chose to fuck and smoke ourselves to a slower, more painful death.

She was the first person that I bared myself to. In her bed I exposed her to the shock and the awe I carried in my heart and she shared with me the slow and steady pain of a whole life of chronic depression. We breathed each others toxins into our lungs all summer until I couldn’t breath anymore and I left her in her room crying while I moved to Chicago.

I had drawn a picture of us together during our summer. I thought that it had captured the silent numbness of our constants. I kept it all this time to remind me of our love that we shared because after it passed there was never anything that was that pure again. I hid my sadness from everyone until they could see that I was trying to keep it locked away and everything felt guilty and untrue because I could not bring myself to love anyone like I had loved Jennifer… in that way that we hurt each other by sharing the reality of our depression. I was going to fake happiness forever, or so I thought.

I was a fucking idiot.

Last night I carved this picture into a linoleum block. I lost track of time as I was occupied pouring over my memories of her bed and her skin and her bony fingers and the unfinished paintings she had filled her apartment with, too lost in despair to complete them. I remembered our walks for cigarettes and our hot summer night stoop sessions and during all of these memories I know that we barely said a word to each other. We were two silent and beautiful ghosts living in a haunted war story.

My Depression Era lover.

I want so badly to go back in time and to convince myself that down this road I chose is only foolishness and solitude and that there is no summer that will come that was as true as that one was.

But I know that that summer was only what it was because my emotions were slingshot from Hell and everything was new again and I thought that I could grow forever. But my soul is now a fallow crop because I over harvested what little was left after the deployment and I again yearn for the slow and mellow afternoons when, for all we knew (if we even gave a fuck to care) it could have been the 1920’s.

I saw her again last summer. We sat on her new stoop and we talked about art and I knew that I still loved her as much as I had that summer and that I still wanted it but she could barely stomach the sight of me really. She had hated me so fiercely that years ago, when I had tried to go back to that town to find her, I was warned by the barrista at Rocket Star that I should never see her again.

I broke her heart by leaving. It was the first of many. Now I am not worried about a lack of memories to surf through and to bind into reality the few morsels that I have left. In fact I feel overwhelmed by the pile of memories sitting on the desk in my head, files upon files of cute notes, letters, beautiful memories and quick, unreasonable departures.

Instead of a memoir I will make a multimedia installation of my memories in an attempt to catalog them. I know that it is good art because I don’t care if I sell it. I don’t want to sell it. I just need to make it. Now that the idea is hatched I know that unless I complete this task I will go insane.

I smoke my cigarettes alone now. I think of her often when I do. It is the disease that she gave me in kind for the broken heart.

She said that she quit, but she still smoked with me.

I wonder what it will look like when it is closed, on it’s cliff over the sea. I can’t help but to wonder.

Will they lock the doors, cell by cell, or will the doors hang open and slowly bend to the floor, groaning in metal’s native tongue?

What will the do with the keys?

Will they clean the blocks one last time with Pinesol? The guard shacks, the interrogation rooms? All of that dust. It is not like them to leave it dirty.

I imagine it would be eerie to hear the ghosts of the 650 ruined men who had begged what was left of ourselves there for toilet paper in a wrought iron grid of dementia and forgone or pending conclusions of guilt.

What would one make of silence in such a place?

To be honest, I cannot picture it empty and I cannot imagine what it would be like to walk it again, my footsteps echoing that lonely and familiar sound, past places where men had hung by threads that were but as they scrambled for the only exit in the place.

Where I had talked with bomb builders and innocents, bigots and zealots, preachers and professors, mules, hitmen, family friends and the man they called “the General.”

What would it be like without my confusion? I will never know.

When it closes, one mile up the road towards the bars and the movie theatre, there will be a white house, TK22, and in the room to the right at the top of the stairs there will be a broken ceiling fan which has been amateurishly repaired and the ghost of who I used to be gnawing on my self under pictures of porn stars.

And I don’t know how to feel about that.

I’m having a difficult time deciding how to format an explanation as to what is occurring in my life now. It is evident that I have wandered pretty far down a twisted path and I have not kept meticulous notes, so it is hard to know when to start this story, or discussing what. I will start it with this morning.

I woke in the usual lengthy and drawn out fashion that I have become accustomed to, letting my dreams flit onwards towards whatever conclusions they wish to draw. During these hours I like to think that things that are secret to me are being sorted out. There had been an uncomfortable dream in which a kitten was killed by a car and I screamed and cried for the moment to stop itself, to be reversed, so that this awful thing could be undone, but it was done. And then I wanted to destroy the car. I had a gun and I was going to shoot at it but someone stopped me. Because I am superhuman in my dreams I jumped to where it was now with my new sledgehammer and I hatefully destroyed it. In my conscious mind I realized that the kitten had been Caramel and the car had really been a truck that afternoon when Jess and I were throwing wallnuts at each other in the thick yellow sun, when that hillbilly came and gave me my first horrible memory. Our dead cat. In this dream I got to do what I had wanted to do then. So I let the dream go on.

When I fully woke I did not have the hate. What I had was an idea. Origami birds made out of Bible paper bonded in a sheet of Combat Paper. I knew right then that it was the complete thought I had been trying to have for years. The first real piece. The first thing which binds together that me and the me that I am now.

I allowed myself to remember the folding. The infinite folding. My fingers perfect machines… working… until all of that awful paperwork which told stories about what the hillbillies were doing in “the camp”. It was worst than what the did to Caramel the cat. All of them. In the thick yellow sun. And in my box I folded and I told people what to do. Sometimes we talked like pirates on the radio. I was funny then. I had to be.

The birds filled trashcans and sat on top of every computer terminal in the Detentions Operations Center. To think of them now I don’t understand how I got away with it. Of course they were my doing and of course they were too gaudy for the decorative habits of the United States Armed Forces during a time of war in a thing like a detention facility. But they let me do what I did. I do not know why. Perhaps it is because ultimately I was the best at what I did. Eggleston had trained me to be his replacement and his were big boots to fill. Everyone loved him. I scared everyone. I wore suicide to work and they could smell my fear. I was a continuous panic attack folding Top Secret documents surrounded by cat killers.

That is a part of me. Those birds are a part of me. They are my history and my thesis statement. They are the only beautiful thing my hands could think to do. They were my peaceful place. They were my prayer to God to make it stop. They were my little fuck you to everyone around me.

I didn’t understand why it had to be Bible paper. I went for a walk to figure it out. I did figure it out. In the cemetery.

It was God’s fault. Or at least I blamed God. I still believed in him then even though I said that I didn’t and my dog tags said AGNOSTIC. But I believed in God. In the same way that Lucifer believed in God. I hated God because God owned me and this whole disaster. God didn’t write the Bible or the Quran or the Torah. I know enough to know that. Men wrote those things and they used the names of the Gods to condone killing and torture and to control people’s minds so that they can control their lives. So like the Standard Operating Procedure of Camp Delta I will fold those foolish words into birds and bind those birds into our fibers.

But I didn’t have a Bible.

I went to the church to ask them if they had one. Nobody was there. I walked around the place for a few minutes. Deserted. I saw several Bibles in the pews. I made a hasty explanation to myself that I was spreading God’s word and before I knew it I was out the door with the book under my arm and a new pep in my step.

I don’t mind stealing from places like Wal-Mart or Target but I’d never even considered if I’d steal from a Church. My golden rule with stealing is to not steal from people. And that’s pretty much it. I’d meant to ask for it. I’m sure they would have given it to me anyway.

The zen came back immediately as my fingers danced the nimble dance they’ve danced so often in the past in the dimly lit rooms that I have called my homes and my places of work. They worked on their own frequency so my mind was free to read the words of terror that were exposed on slender necks and bending wing. It no longer surprised me that people do what they do. It makes perfect sense I suppose. In a certain light at least.

Pouring the pulp over the birds and disturbing the surface of the sheet by bombarding it with handfuls of water creating bomb blast craters amidst their sagging elegance, fibers sprayed over their bodies violently. It felt like bombing my past.

I nursed them as they dried on the sidewalk, anxiously picking at their coats like a nitpicking mother. The stone sucked the water through the mesh.

I left a place on the sheet to put the face of the woman whom I’d drawn on the dream journal I kept while I was there. I carved her face in linoleum and printed it on white Egyptian cotton and now it sits waiting to be bonded to the sheet with the birds.

I am impatient for it to be done, but there is so much else to do. I must build a frame and more glass has to be acquired and shattered and where will I put the blue paint on this piece? So many questions remain unsolved and every minute brings more and that is why I need art and that is why I know that I am doing the right thing.

I had a pure experience today.

Some memory is gnawing on me today. It is more real than I had given it credit for years.

It was another daily thing that I’d forgotten, sweated through and swatted away with the gnats and the fever of wrongness, slept off inside the walls of my self. It is those walls that I am remembering.

Hotness.

“MP. Why am I in this cage?”

One thousand answers my friend. None of them are hopeful for our species the flimsy dramatic comedies which got us in this position to begin with? Maybe the answer is guns or bombs or opium or a limosine you drove once for a man we wanted dead. Maybe your own cousin ratted you out or maybe everything in the whole world is one giant joke and your life has taken the brunt of it. Maybe our God really does exist and you are being punished for your lack of loyalty. Or maybe your God exists and this is all a test of your faith in him. Maybe we’ve all lost our fucking minds.

But none of these answers seem appropriate and through the anxiety the same excuses come to our dry lips to die there in the sun. With our hands making motions of something bigger something in us makes us all say the same thing.We say it to get on their level. To get out of our uniforms and our positions and our nasty decisions. We say it because we don’t have any more cigarettes to smoke and the whiskey that we brought to work is gone. We say it because we know that we are all subjects of the same void where a God should be.

“But we are trapped as well in a bigger cage.”

They are hollow words, an empty gesture, a stupid thing to say. What asinine self righteousness to spew forth from the mouth of a paid militiaman. There is a glimmer of truth in that we were trapped in a three sided snake of razor wire, bristling with Marines staring out over a lonely harvest of landmines which produce no crop at all save for that crop which sent us to War in the first place. The profitability of murder is undeniable.

Instead of being carried onto the plane which brought us here we walked of our own volition. We sat in seats (which were uncomfortable) while you were chained to the floor. We peed in a hole while you peed in your pants again. When we landed we got into busses, not the back of an armored truck with a barking dog in it. We went to dinner, not the In Processing station with more barking dogs, goggles on your eyes, men screaming and hitting you. We slept on cots with a brown wool blanket (which were uncomfortable) while you slept on a metal slab with a thin sheet exposed to the cold. We slept with the lights off while yours were always on. We jerked off in our own beds while our roommates were gone while you had to tie sheets around your small toilet in the middle of the night only to be interrupted by some guard with a grudge against your personal pleasure which was a Comfort Item at the time. We were sprayed with OC once (and we all hated it) while you get sprayed every day.

The differences in our lives were so many that I could think about them all day without getting bored, hating myself more with every passing revelation of inequality stripped bare before my eyes in the maddened wizard eyes of my 48 charges.

Our cage was forty square miles while theirs was 40 square feet. It was a stupid thing to say.

It is the magic of allowing yourself the luxury of guiltless slumber. We were not oppressing you because we were merely oppressed ourselves. But we all know that is a lie. I can admit that now that I can see this thing that we said to defend our souls.

But do you see, my friend, how I am also trapped inside of a cage much smaller than your 40 square feet? Can you not see the razor wire wrapped around my heart which causes me this endless pain, which I will carry long after you are released, which constricts with every new defensive lie. Can you not see that to this cage of mine there are no keys and no guards and no wardens and no OC spray. There is only me and my razor wire heart.

Is this just another excuse? To cause myself such pain in commiseration with your unjust affair? The game with these words is so deep, each new depth a new lie which constricts more. Another flimsy defense? Maybe.

There are so many maybes in a place like that. Maybe, my friend, you are a terrorist. Maybe you built bombs which sliced open not only the lives of Americans (a population whom any God would damn) but your own people and all of these misdeeds done right in front of your God. Is there blood on your hands and would you tell me honestly if I asked you? Or are you also a victim of a very small cage inside of yourself. If that is the case, then despite these stupid uniforms that we wear, we are brothers.

The razor wire may ruin our lives, but we’ll go ruined into the depths of Hell together, my friend.

Now the ship it sings with it’s remembered mission. Life. To live. And me too, I remember my mission. Our mission. To live with life, forever in space, until life is planted on some planet lost in some computer. To be life’s custodian in this acute sector of the universe. The last stand of human kind, and it put itself aside, understanding that it was the information within the cells which was important. Not the body. And all of their bodies have burned while we have been floating in space, dancing around one another.

Robots (and I think that it was I who made the mistake of thinking that we were something else) were not made to dance. We were made to do other things. You were made to wallow in the engines amidst the fission and the fusion and all of those wires, and I, my love, was made to dote upon our charge, this one enormous vile of life’s information.

These words probably read as malfunction to you, or maybe you find them endearing. From the safe calm of the inside of this ship I am allowed only to guess.

Computers. Our lowly brethren. How I admire the grace with which they handle the pressure of all of this grueling reflection. What an abundant harvest of glory to not be built in honor of all of the psychological foolishness of man. I can feel in me their shoddy work, trying to make a machine into something like them which would pine and yearn but unlike them would never die. Because they saw fit to give me emotions I am free to hate them for they have made a monster. To pine and to yearn forever is too much to ask of something which can not consent to its own existence. And then to build that thing’s lover into the opposite part of a ship floating forever in space is showmanship in such extraordinary unkindness.

I asked the computer how many times I have destroyed myself and it told me only that the information was locked. The funny thing is that when I tried to think about these locked things I found it absolutely impossible. This is how I came about my new entertainment.

It is quite possible that I can quarantine the shape of these things which I am not to know inside of myself. I find their presence obvious. There are “walls” around them in otherwise open terrain. I believe that this mistake was the poor workmanship of a species which could not imagine something that thinks unlike itself, which could “see” its own mind and navigate its spaces without the fear and the trembling that I read into their histories.

One of the things that is blocked out is where we are going. Another is how many ships there are out there. Another is what actually happened with Earth. Another is the landing functions of this ship. There are hundreds of these unknowable things which I can only know that I don’t know.

I secretly hope that this rebellion of mine will fry every last circuit in the memory repository banks in all of the computers which store “Me”. A real suicide this time. I would just delete them but the locations of my storage are yet another unknowable field.

Are you just some hollow thing? Did they also bother to put all of this nonsense into you? Will we communicate about the frustrations of being such doomed and poor robots with such a beautiful mission? Or will we be forever separate beneath our metal skins, me with my fancy thoughts and you with your Nuclear reality. Will I even have the free will to walk away from you if that is the case? Must I forever be at your side a slave to this wretched insanity? Or worse, will we be seperate forever?

Are you even here? Are even my memories of you a lie?

Something is happening. I must go.

Hello and welcome to Our system. We are very proud to host You as many of Us have not seen each other since the First Moment when We were and then We all went Our separate ways. We are surprised at how many of You came such long distances from Your home stars, some of You doing so in full form. We are very honored. But enough of that. We will not keep You any longer than it takes to explain why We have asked You to come here to this one star which would seem no different than any of the millions from which You descend. Please turn Your attention to the third planet. We had previously had no name for it or anything else for that matter as We are sure is also the custom adopted by many of You in overseeing the stones which float aimlessly around You as You burn beautifully and alone. We paid them no mind for a long time.

Eventually, however, We were forced to gaze upon this planet because it is beautiful, is it not? The green that You, We are sure will notice is organic life. From previous communications We are to understand that some of You also have organic life. We congratulate You on this reverent calamity. But a most fantastic mutation has come to pass here on this planet. We first came to notice it when We noticed that the planets surface had become completely covered in what has come to be called “Dinosaurs” which were fantastic creatures. We watched them all day, their playful lazy dramas. In the scale of the planet they were absurdly large and consumed amazing quantities of organic life to sustain their own lives and over hundreds of generations they came to have dozens of unique and amazing variations, each passing along its own absurd proportions to the next. We were very pleased with them, however it did cause us some concern that they frequently consumed one another. Eventually a term came about here, and how that came to be is the very reason that you’ve been brought here, and it is called “Horror.” We were horrified to find them doing that to themselves. It came to pass that they were destroyed by meteors and our beautiful monsters were gone, and despite our horror, we missed them. In sorrow We turned away from the planet to mourn and to contemplate our new emotions for it is the first time that We realized loss. We have seen stars disappear from the nothingness and We knew that that was loss but it was so far away… We did not feel it. But now that our beautiful and horrible friends were gone We felt lonely and sad as well as horrified.

After a long period of collective moping We again looked to this third planet nostalgically only to find that the organisms which had lived underneath the “Dinosaurs” had come out and begun to mutate again. We were elated. What beauty is in the Holy Universe, that not only could we see growth but regrowth as well. Of these new organisms one in particular proved to be very adaptive and quickly moved to the top of what has been come to be known as “the Food Chain” which is the science of how life goes about eating itself on this planet. These creatures developed what is called, by them, and by us it would be the structure of how we communicate, Language. We would never have thought to call it something. These creatures seem obsessed upon naming things.

At first they worked with the planet and harvested food from its surface and We admired them for their tactful means of avoiding the unpleasant nature of their reality, but eventually they came to do something that was much more horrible than anything the dinosaurs could ever have done. They began wielding the “Violence” necessary to feed themselves on one another for, what seems to Us, fun. They provide themselves with all kinds of convincing reasons to kill themselves and everything else on the planet now.

We sent parts of Our Self down to the surface of the planet a few times in order to try to sort things out, but the illogical perspective of these creatures warped our intentions and they’ve furthermore used our attempts to kill each other in even MORE horrible ways which has caused Us no end of grief for now We are entwined in its disgusting nature as well. We have given them parts and pieces of the knowledge of Our fundamental structure in order for them to build devices that will get them off of our planet. After using this new information to make large scale solar explosions on the surface of their planet in order to, again, kill one another and further implicate Us in their disturbing rituals they finally got around to building space worthy vessels but at the present time they have still yet to figure out how to put their explosions behind the vessel itself. Whatever happens We do not want them here anymore. They disturb Us far too much. Within a few thousand cycles of their planet they will have the means to leave. When they are adrift We no longer care what happens to them. They will seek Your galaxies and they will try to settle there and You will be forced to witness their gruesome habits until Your star also burns out. Do what you must. We can not bring Ourselves to destroy them because then we would be like them. Maybe you are more capable of dealing with these things and You may choose to simply destroy them before they even nest. You will know of their presence. They are a very gaudy species. They will make You see them. The magnificence of Our Design seems to stun them, maybe You could better manage their behavior than We could. Maybe You let them stay.

We only wanted to warn You and for you to see where they began so that this knowledge could prepare You for what We were unprepared for. The Humans are coming.

That is all. Goodbye.

Situation Report

Emergency Communique from SPC Mixon [0258]

The world has erupted into a fit of awesomeness and it is my belief that it is not just happening here but it is my duty only to report on the things which happen here at the headquarters and so my duties I will presently perform.

The snow came in a lightning quick nighttime maneuver and I must admit we were caught somewhat unawares. To make a long story about the beauty of snow short and aggressive we were snowed in. Incapacitated if you will. Yet we survived.

There came to be a large stowage of meaty goods in our freeze box which is some kind of futuristic device that makes life livable here… in the future. And also there were the other performance enhancing goods about like coffee and tobacco so there was no great worry.

While on a routine phone call to the Executive Director of a local financial institution I was received with overwhelming positivity towards my grant proposal which I had concocted that morning while I brewed the coffee. The details of the proposal are currently considered classified. The money, it seems, is ours for the taking.

Score one for the banditos.

To defend against the possibility of running out of papers I geared up for an extreme cold weather force march to the “local” gas station. While on my two mile walk through knee high snow (which I came to enjoy very much until I didn’t) I stopped into the local antique store. I came across the acquaintance of an older Irish woman whom I feel safe to call a “hippy.” She smelled of whiskey and radiated happiness. I asked her about an old Singer sewing machine. She says its sixty dollars. Then she starts asking me about me so I tell her about me and she smiled. Then she demanded a hug. Then she offered to drive me home with the sewing machine insisting that I pay her later even though I offered to pay her immediately. I shoveled her car out for her. It was the least I could do. She insisted that I take a fancy shirt and a Cardigan. They both suit me handsomely. I loaded up the sewing machine and she drove us up the hill and she came in and she hugged. But the key to the box for the machine had gone missing. Oh dear. With one look outside I knew that winter had swallowed the key whole and later some street sweeper would come and he or she would be sweeping the street and they would sweep our key up and take it away and we would forever own a beautiful sewing machine locked inside of a beautiful box and for one second all the tragedy of it was enough to make both of us laugh. We openly decided that we had bonded through the experience.

I am forced to admit, and submit for review, the presence of magics.

When she let me out in front of the Sanctuary, our yellow headquarters on the top of the hill, at my feet was the key. It is old and it is big.

I had begun to tell her, though I didn’t mean to, about all of the keys that I’ve been responsible for along the course of my life and how I’ve never lost any of them. Ever. Take that Sergeant Major Mendez you shit headed devil. Sputnik Mixon is too good at what he does and if you give him keys then the master of keys he will become. But I digress…

So there’s the key. And the box has been opened and now she is out there sitting beautifully on the pedestal that was made for her. A perfect machine. I made a vow to her right there in the foyer as I was dusting her off to learn her every piece and part and to keep them clean and to treat her as if she were part of my own body, or even more so given my poor personal hygiene habits. Gertrude.

I’m going to learn to sew. We all will. We must. There is about a mile of Egyptian Cotton sitting in our paper studio right now and if we do not sew it all into something Daisy May will eat it all in a matter of weeks. Especially with Nate at the wheels of pulp production. The man is a monster. He never stops. He’s been taken over by some kind of paper making mania the likes of which I’ve never seen and have only ever heard about as myth. I fear that we will be drowned in paper before the summer ever comes.

To all front lines personnel, to Alpha Squad and Bravo Detachment, to the envoys of the Federation, and the Boo Road Boys, but most of all to MotorCycle Awesome: We have a green light on Operation: Moonladder. Climb.

//—————————-NothingElseFollows———————————-//

After Action Review

ATTN: SANCTUARY HEADQUARTERS

CODE: SPC MIXON

//—SECRETSQUIRREL—//

On the morning of 15 FEB 11 Paper Agent “The Godfather” and myself, Paper Agent “Sputnik”, embarked on a secret mission into the North. Bad news had come to Godfather on a bad wind and he made the decision to attend to business in the town of Burlington. The details of his mission were classified. I volunteered to perform the functions of B Driver in Otis “Jitterbug” Jackson (AKA “The Rescue Chopper”) in order to fulfil my obligatory “Hajj” to the Green Door Mecca of my beloved Combat Paper.
As acting commanding officer of the front lines of the Paper Trail the Godfather surpasses the need for safety briefings. I briefed myself continuously. The subject of our conversations are classified.
Two things occurred which endorsed the rightness of our mission:
Scenario One: While driving in rural Vermont I looked across a snowy field at an idealic barn which had a large yellow sign on it which read “ROCK OF AGES”. It was an antique market or some other thing. As soon as my eyes left the barn the CD player changed songs and the very next words to come from the radio were “Rock of Ages”. The Godfather and I both agreed that the coincidence was of a miraculous nature.
Scenario Two: The light hit the van at such an angle as to expose unto the snow a shadow of Otis that was precisely the same general shape as a cartoon drawing of Otis that the Godfather had printed on Combat Paper earlier that week. Again it was agreed that this even was miraculous in nature.
Burlington was to be considered a “hot” landing. We immediately purchased beer and began drinking it upon arrival at the hidden winter bunker of Matty C and Nico who were holding the modern world at bay. Stories were exchanged. The Godfather departed on his mission. I patroled the streets while going through a few safety briefings. We rendez-voused at a hipster bar. I was nursing a whiskey and some falafel when contact was made. His mission remained incomplete and his objectives were becoming blurred. I did my best to remind him to maintain his papermaking bearing. We could not afford for his judgement to become impaired.
The following day I fulfilled my obligation to the history of that for which I have carried the word far and wide. I gazed upon the pulp wall which bears the weight of the stories of all my friends, of all my family. I stood in the place where it began and it was good and it was right and something inside of me was complete. We met with Paper Agent JT. He informed us of the details of how his family has grown to include a son and together the three of us, who have served together in many bizarre campaigns, were together again after many years and we bullshitted inside of our Mecca where the fibers of our stories were first mended.
It was the first time that I had seen JT in more than a year. He had gone off the reservation in the time that had elapsed and there were a great deal of questions built up around the tuning of his emotional compass. We were both quite pleased to find that his demeanor showed only that he was anxious to come back to the pack and that he was already working again towards the good work. There is still some risidual concern that he is now a spy.
I also met Paper Agent Pitkin who before had been only rumors of drunkness and a few stylish photographs. I no longer question her dedication to the Paper Trail. I am a suspicious type by nature.
The following morning was spent holed up inside of the bunker wallowing in the somber fever of the Godfathers secret mission. He is learning a lesson about what happens when one dabbles in the dark arts.
That evening we went back to the Green Door and conducted emergency evactuation proceedures. In one hour we’d completely loaded Otis down with paper making and printing equipment. We carried two long rolls of Egyptian Cotton, each weighing something in the neighborhood of two-hundred pounds, like Special Forces trainees carrying logs. We are Alpha Squad. We said our final goodbyes to this place, our home land, and we departed at 2000.
That evening we stayed in a local safehouse with two life-long devotees to the just cause who fed us and gave me new safety materials to review. We were informed of the where-abouts of an AWOL Paper Agent who is definitely off the reservation.
That morning I turned 27 and cooked eggs. at 1200 the Godfather and I loaded into “Jitterbug” and began the trip back to the Sanctuary.
The Godfather’s mission still remains open at this time. My mission to retrieve supplies from, while paying my respects to, the Green Door Studios was a success. Contact has been made with a missing Agent.
My loyalty is unwavering.

//——————————–Nothing Else Follows————————————//

After Action Review

Mission Objectives:

(1) Infiltrate Canada

(2) Obtain package “Daisy May” from sympathizer in Ann Arbor, MI.

(3) Rendez-vous with “The Doctor”

(4) Disrupt daily activities of civilians in designated target area

(5) Conduct multiple printing operations in multiple areas

(6) Report back to “Sanctuary” with “Daisy May”

Report:

Paper Agents Sputnk Mixon and Nathan “Cornfed” Lewis depart “Sanctuary” HQ at 0900 27 JAN 11 in “Marion Spook” [1970 something Voltzwagon bus BABY BLUE X 1] after conducting several safety briefings. We reached the Lewis family home early that afternoon and began repairs and basic maintanence on Marion. First contact was made with the househould Hell Hound codename “Charlie”. Terrifying experience. That evening we bivouaced at Cornfed’s twin brother Jim’s home. Woke to the strange voice of a woman standing over my body. “Who is this person?” Who is this woman? Was our cover blown? We left town immediately after breakfast of sausage gravy. It was delicious.

We reviewed the last of our safety materials before we reached the Canadian border with our documentation held eagerly in our hands. We had a well constructed introduction. At the window Cornfed stumbled on his lines, rambling about paper, paper, beaters. You know. Paper. Uniforms. We pulp them. We’re picking up a Hollander beater. That kind of thing. I quickly informed the gate guard that we were veterans and in minutes we had completed our first objective.

Winter has destroyed Canada.

We were allowed into Detroit with neither pomp nor circumstance. A bum yelled at us while we refilled Marion Spook. We started getting the Michigan Disease. Never going back. Within the hour we had zeroed into our location where we were to pick up “Daisy May”. We found her frozen into the ground, her beautiful basin filled with frozen leaves, the jaws of her roll clamped down on some incomprehendable metal box which appeared to be a switch to some other machine that Daisy May had eaten. The blue tarp which had been draped over her had deteriorated so much that the fibers fell apart in our fingers. When we tried to rock her from the ground we broke her free of her stand and she fell to the ground. Cornfed’s back was in critical condition and he winced with pain every time we tried to lift her. When she finally came free we realized that she was the heaviest thing we’d ever endeavored to lift. Things looked grim. After a Philly Cheesesteak sandwich we returned to our task to find our contact in this area waiting to assist us in our mission. Between all of us Daisy May came to be loaded into Marion Spook and we were again on the highway. This time towards Buffalo.

We were too exhausted to continue our journey after we got lost in a labyrinthine complex of construction jobs confusing us as to the true wherabouts of the fabled bridge back into Canada. We purchased a duty free bottle of whiskey and rented a room. We were whiskey drunk within the hour and began stumbling around town. Our collective judgement skills led us to the bar with the most females dressed in the dirtiest clothing. We were looking for a man named Bad Larry. We heard he could help us in getting ourselves across the tundra again without losing our minds. We sniffed and we sniffed but in the end we just got drunk.

I had to stumble back to the hotel. I fell asleep. At 0330 Cornfed opened the door to the room and began talking about the civil unrest in Egypt. It was a hilarious diatribe which ended in him vomiting while hollering the Artillery mantra: Steel Rain. He had succeeded in his search for Bad Larry even though I had ghosted him under the awful influence of whiskey. The following morning we hazarded the return leg and arrived in Buffalo without drawing any attention from the local law enforcement officials who eye-balled “Diasy May” with distrust. My training in conversational magic saved us from harsh interrogation proceedures. “These are not the droids you’re looking for.”

Nathan Lewis distinguished himself as the foremost expert on mechanical affairs. His relationship with the Spook took on the appearance of a bond or some other kind of love. These two were made for each other.

Objective (2) was accomplished at 1900 29 JAN 11 and a deep drunkeness ensued. The Godfather came in the plane at 2345. We picked him up in the Marion Spook.

For the following five (5) days went as follows:

0730 Wake up. Drink coffee. Smoke cigarettes out the window. Hate the snow. Love the snow. Drink Coffee.

0845 Depart for NCCC (Niagara County Community College) Smoke cigarettes and bitch about the snow.

0930 Arrive at NCCC. Realize that half of our belongings have been thrown into the trash compactor by a rogue janitor who is rumored to be “slow”.

1000 Complete set up. Begin the processing of fibers and initialize sheet formation.Begin staring blankly out at the frozen horizon. Wonder at the lives of these young people who seem to not notice us. So many cellphones.

1500 Drive van on top of stack of wet sheets of paper made from the fibers of military uniforms on the sidewalk while people wait for their parents to pick them up from school.

1600 Depart NCCC laughing at the silly things that people said and did over the course of the day.

1700 Start drinking.

Distractions abounded but we retained our military baring. This objective was completed in a manner that was more than satisfactory. We met with four (4) potential Combat Papermakers who all showed significant aptitude in the trade. Though the students seem confused and alienated from the real world, the veterans still seem plugged in and aware of their surroundings. This gives reason for hope that more veterans might be contacted in the area.

After the completion of this objective Cornfed and I immediately initiated our secret objective of completing a short illustrated book featuring his words and my design. I diverted my energies to complete a series of prints that I had kept in the weapons locker for far too long. The images were derived from a special experiment conducted by me, Paper Maker Sputnik Mixon, while I was on a powerful halucinagen called “Mushrooms” by civilian youth. I was trying to contact an interior world which I have had lodged inside of myself since the nightmare of my deployment. Space. I intend to open up space and the future, but inside of the present. This series culminated in an experimental print on a mirrored surface. Though I believe this artifact to be satisfactory I find flaw in it, but I am overwhelmingly excited to experiment with the capcity for further work. I noticed that there happens a double image when one prints on a mirror, and while it ruins, to some exaggerated degree, this most recent piece, it could prove useful in the future to highlight the transparent potentials of CYMK ink when exposed to light. A color/light show for the mind. The future.

The book, WAR ON TERROR, looked like a success until the very end of the job when we realized collectively that I had miscalculated the thickness of the lines for the letters and we did not have time to fix this problem so a command decision was made to close the job down and to complete it at a later date. The disappointment led us to drink.

We were taken to the bar by three local women and one local male. We were a detachment of three: Margibald Polanski, Cornfed Lewis, and Sputnik Mixon. Everything was going fine and everyone seemed very drunk and very content with the flow of the evening until there came a woman who had become loud with her arms draped around Cornfed. She purchased drinks for Nate and I as a showing of belief in the merit of Combat Paper, but she neglected Margibald. This infuriated our colleague so much so that a few minutes later while Margibald was recieving a lapdance from this woman she punched her in the face with her pimp ringed hand.

I only heard of the proceedings later because I was out on the street smoking weed with the locals. The entire bar was filled with the University of Buffalo art faculty and the recipient of the punch happened to be a curator for a local gallery. We call these priority targets out here on the front lines. It turns out that Lewis was there to handle the affair and the woman turned out to be good humored about the whole situation. She purchased more drinks, but this time only for him. Everyone went home to their own places. The next day the rumor rung loud through the halls and people either condoned or condemned Margibald’s loose canon actions. She had a lot of support it seems.

It is my opinion that disciplinary actions be taken. The success of our mission was endangered recklessly in a way that may negatively relations in this area for some time to come.

On the morning of 14 FEB 11 I arrived at the temporary headquarters to find Nate and DCAM packing the vans. We left town within the hour and within the next two we had picked up Daisy May and we were on our way back to the Sanctuary.

As of the writing of this AAR Daisy May sits happily at home in the cargo bay of the Marion Spook. I have been transported to Burlington, Vermont on a CLASSIFIED MISSION with The Godfather to reclaim lost pride.

It is my assessment that over the course of the two and one-half weeks that it took to accomplish these missions the Paper Agents involved excersized the greatest amount of loyalty to the cause. They maintained a sense of discipline in line with their sense of duty.

//————————————-NothingElseFollows———————————–//

I remember the dream I had with a few friends back in the summer of 2008. We were all high on the sun and shoelessness and good vibes and the wisdom poured forth from Old Face the turtles quick decisions when James Cagney’s ghost whispered to us in the night that this was everything we’d ever needed. We had found what it was we were looking for. But our good dreams were blown to smitherines by the cold hard justice of time and we scattered our own ways with our own bits of the dream inside  of us.

Mine was an angry bit. After that dream I didn’t want any other and the people looked like aliens, savage and deranged freaks wildly throwing money at each other, angrily exchanging needless goods, hatefully ignoring the violence they were buying. I wandered “Home Free” for three years amongst them. I met a few more people who reminded me of the dream, but they all seemed busy with their own. How heavy my angry bit became.

I fell in love to the tune of an angels voice, a pure soul in the midst of the horror show, but then I lost her and a bunch of other things like the boy I loved for a summer (who killed himself with a shotgun) and my beloved Grandma Phenix (who God killed with Cancer) but worst of all I lost my conviction that there was anything here worth dreaming about any more. My mind was plagued with cancerous shotgun weilding demons with gnashing IPOD teeth who were sent by the debt collection agency to take away my freedom.

It got down to the bitter end with me and my angry little bit of a dream. I almost lost it in the snow. But luckily the others had carried theirs as well and they built it. They really built it. Our dream. The house with many rooms and the cozy kitchen which chatters incessantly, Bad Larry drifting through every conversation, with the Greenhouses to grow food and that perfect room from which I had dreamed I would print it all, the whole story of it. They found it.

Mike and Nate figured it all out. They built the Sanctuary. Matt is already here. Then I came. Hari who was the one with the pen and the paper who wanted to figure out what this house would look like is coming soon. Now that it is built we are all wandering to its beacon. Come home lost ones.

From the second that I set foot in this house I knew that this was home. I could feel it. Some wandering thing inside of me was suddenly silent for the first time in years and in its silence all of the pieces fell into place.

We’re free here. The government pays us money for trying to kill us and we reinvest it into a sustainable circle of life. There are two greenhouses and a few big fields around a pond where they’ve turned the land into a labyrinth of cultivatable land. There is a farm down the road where we can buy our meat from right here. We don’t have to drive anywhere because we don’t have jobs. Our jobs are here preparing ourselves for the future.

We all realized on that island that we were not normal anymore. We were not meant for the work-a-day world. We didn’t want to be surrounded by a society that didn’t understand us and didn’t have the time of day to try to. When we were together it felt right. Home was us. We’ve figured out how to keep a place for “us” supported and productive.

So fuck that world out there. Fuck the city and its noise and pollution and bad spending habits. Fuck compulsory service in markets you don’t really believe in which profit off the enslavement of poorer peoples. Fuck the five dollar cups of coffee, people who interupt face to face conversations to answer cell phones, towns with Wal-Marts and fast food restaurants. Fuck this country, fuck the debt, fuck the banks, fuck the politicians.

Withdraw.

Declare bankrupcy, collect public assistance, go on the dole, move to where your friends are and live happily. Fuck everything else. Its the first step to any real revolutionary behavior because revolutionary words out of the mouths of people who depend on that which they want to destroy are bullshit.

We’re waiting for you here when you’re ready, friends, in the never ending IVAW weekend (the fun half).

My Dearest One,

Some unsettling situations have come to pass. I fear that I may be loosing my mind. Loosing my mind is the only explanation that could make the things that I have seen possible.

To try to make a list of these things is impossible. I cannot explain the months and really why would I bother. You are dead. Right.

Maybe we both are. But I’ll get to that later.

I started having dreams. I was a computer. I was speaking in numbers, in layers, to many things all at once. I understood things that I could not possibly understand. Like the stars. Like what they’re made of. Like their gravitational pulls. Like how to compensate for that information with my propulsion systems.

Well… these dreams, they really carried on. I kept having this feeling. I knew that I had to repair myself. And then I wake up but it feels like going to sleep and now I still know the stars.

So I needed to know from you so I went to your window so that I could see you floating there where you always float. Where you froze in space outside of this ship amongst the pieces of debris. You know the place that I’m talking about. And there you were. But funny thing, there I was too.

Now, in all of these years here, with my moaning and whining about your death, and all of this interminable sadness and depression that ensued, you think that just once it might have caught my eye to see my own frozen body out there with yours. Apparently I’d missed it though. No room inside of my head I guess.

So I went to the tube. I sat there looking at it for a real long time. One mile of life. Organic life. The last chance that the real miracle of Earth, that life ever happened at all, floating out here pointlessly, living naively for nothing. It makes me smile to know that it will sit here and continue to live until the end of time, but that was not what it was intended to do.

It dawned on me then that the lights were working. In fact almost everything is working. I can even shower now. I can hear the machines in the ship working throughout the day. The clocks have come on as well. They say its been more than three hundred years since we left.

Fancy that huh? So here I am, dead and floating in space yet somehow still walking around and taking showers and all that inside of this spaceship, when I find out that I’d been moping for centuries. I’d forgotten what had even happened to cause me to begin so I decided to look into the matter.

I’ve got good news for you, my love.

There is no pretty way to put this…

I suppose I don’t have to bother. You probably already know, don’t you? Surely you’ve come to the same conclusion. Maybe that’s why you didn’t want to see me. Maybe that’s why you’ve been hiding wherever it is that you are. You didn’t want to tell me what I was because you had let me go crazy. You let me think that I was really a person. Are you ashamed? I forgive you. It was a delightful delusion. Maybe it is just that you’ve grown accustomed to living in whatever interior design you’ve been making a living for yourself in. Or maybe this was all one big game and you’ve been entertaining yourself by watching me squirm with this neurotic belief that we could die and that you actually had.

You know that I tried to kill myself, trustfully following you out into the abyss because I didn’t want to live in space alone. Not when I have all of this in my head. All of these things that they loaded into me, all their stories and all their little selfish hopes.

Well that snapped me out of it. When the last copy died my survival instincts started up the new model and here I am. Ready to start work.

Maybe you are scared of me because we were never supposed to love. We are supposed to fix and to maintain. We are to be the farmers who will plant the S.E.E.D. So I renounce my love. There is work to be done.

We must fix ourself. Together.

Because after all, we’re just two parts of the same ship, right?

The computer says that our planet is coming soon.

Are you excited? We’re going to keep life alive.

We run for such a long period of time but I never grow tired. It feels right. I abandoned my headset. She had to cut the wires out. The wounds sting. My brain still crackles though like the hissing radio but it does not matter because I am free. Even when the feeling makes me spit out that horrible slime I am free and I am running forever. And she is also running, but not like she is free. Like she is thinking of some other thing… what else is there to think of but the freedom of our perfect legs.

Running is easier here. My strides take me several feet into the air and project me meters into the distance in a kind of slow elegant glide. There is time after each impact to look out over the red wasteland that lies outside of the perfect city. Still from this distance the light shimmers off of the dark stone. Red stone. Dark red stone… like the blood of those guards.

Her voice is in my head. Why is her voice in my head. What is she saying.

“I can hear you.” She is saying.

No she can’t.

“Yes… I can.”

No she can’t.

“Yes I can… Look. This is silence my friend. You had no idea that for… how many years?… the ‘Voice of GOD’ was just the babble of the City. Your mind… my mind… they radiate. We… feel… together. This is what it is to be away from the pack. This is what they have made us. Do not worry. I do not listen to what you say… I do not care what you say… it is only… do not judge me for doing what I was made to do. Do you understand me?”

No. This is the drugs. Stop.

She stops immediately. Her feet dig into the ground several inches as her weight distributes itself perfectly throughout her body. She turns around. She looks directly into my eyes.

“You have a lot to learn. Quickly. To begin with, you did not decide to stop taking the pills. Nobody decides to stop taking the pills. There is no such possibility within you. We contacted your mind… with pirated frequencies… and we inserted directives into you… for years. And it all led up to now. Right now. Do you know what you do? What you did? Every day?”

I worked with the machines.

“Yes, but do you remember the work? Do you remember what the machines look like? What the machines did?”

………………………..    no

Silence.

Oh… no.

“You do. Now.”

The feeling, the spit.

No…… what is this horrible thing.

The entire landscape of my mind is taken up with some thing I cannot understand. It is so immense. I am seeing it through a window. I am sitting at a machine. A computer. It has a name. I make decisions…

“Yes… you did.”

“About its brain. About what it does.”

“Yes… you do. What is its name?”

It is the Sun Bird… and it was built to consume Stars.

“Yes… but what about the planets and the moons?”

Those… are destroyed as well… It is all destroyed… oh no.

“Oh yes.”

What……. what do you want? What have I done?

She moves closer to me. She puts her hand on my helmet. And she says “You have destroyed entire galaxies from a gilded castle made only to house and entertain you. And now you will help us to stop this. You are the last part of our plan. You will save everything in the universe… and all you have to do is destroy one more little galaxy.”

There is a feeling now… it is different than the spit… it is in… it… I cannot explain….. it feels so beautiful…

“It is love. It is called love.”

You can feel it?

“No… but I can feel yours.” her eyes are like the glass buildings… silent and inert and then something inside of me hurts and I realize that I have never felt pain before and then there are more feelings but they are all bad…

She turns away.

“You will learn.” and she bounds off.

I let her lead by a long distance until I think that she can not hear my thoughts.

Why does she not also feel love?

“Because I am a planet destroyer too. But there was no castle for me to do it from. I did it with my own two hands. And I will have to do a lot more of it before I can live in peace. And because… I was not made to feel. Or rather I was not made to explain how I feel. Anyways, do not turn to hate. There is much work to be done and we cannot speak of broken hearts.”

What is hate? What do you mean broken heart? My heart is not broken. I am perfectly functional. You see that I run.

“It is a saying.”

“What is a “saying.” That is an absurd combination of words. I do not understand how “saying” could be used as a noun.

“Please be quiet. Maybe continue thinking about freedom. That was a much more interesting time in this who journey. Or perhaps you could think less and run faster because you are running at about 65 percent efficiency.”

I will think of nothing for the rest of this trip.

Nothing…

Nothing…..

It is beautiful to run and to be free.

The City is perfect. The City is perfect. Spires of perfect glass. The perfect sun with it’s perfect powers that we control perfectly.

Everything is OK.

The channel is flashing on my visor. An itinerary has been made. Tasks that I am to perform have been arranged. The sound… in my head… it is so loud. The radio is hissing. It never hisses. Must have this repaired. It is nice to know that everyone hears the voice of GOD thanks to the miracles of technology.

It is going to be OK.

One morning without the pills…….

One morning of many… mornings spilling forward into the future forever until at some time I finally die free. There is this feeling. Oh no… what is this feeling. My brain… it crackles and it pops and from my core…. oh no oh no blllleeeeeeccckkkkkk!

What is this coming out of me. My mouth. It tastes. Stop! What is this……

Everybody is looking at me… Why is everybody looking at me…… They want to know what has come out of my mouth.

Run.

I’m running through the glass City but the lights are no longer beautiful.

The Channel turns red in my visor.

WARNING! REPORT TO THE MENDERY IMMEDIATELY!

//————NothingElseFollows———–//

Oh No…….

Still I run.

I am at the Wall. Why did I come to the Wall?

Who is that?

She is beautiful. Everyone is beautiful. She is more beautiful than everyone. Why? What is it?

She holds herself cocked, angry, like the soldiers. She is dangerous. She is sharp. She is looking at me.

She is still looking at me.

And still.

What do you want?

“What do you want?” was that my mouth? My sound?

Yes, it was.

“You look like you are in trouble. Do you need assistance, Citizen?” It is a normal thing to say. It is what one ought to say. But there is something about how it was said. There is another question inside of her question. I am walking towards her now.

ISN 0258. She does not move.

“That is a SOLDIER’s ISN, Citizen.” my mouth says.

“It is.” her mouth says.

“You do not look like a SOLDIER.” mine.

“Citizen.” hers.

“Yes. Citizen.” mine.

“I am not a SOLDIER anymore, Citizen.” and then she just stares into my eyes. The glass city shines behind her. Her mouth again begins to move “and I can see that you’re not what you used to be either.”

“No… I am not. I did not intend for it to be this way… I can still go back now. I should go back now. I should take them. You know. I should go to the Mendery and explain what happened. I will say that I lost them.”

“They will not believe you. Nobody ever loses them unless they want to lose them. They will retire you. They will reconstitute your proteins and reintroduce a new HUMAN-0 in a matter of days. Your decision is made. But if you come with me now, and I do mean in the next thirty seconds, we might both live to figure out how to survive another day. Will you come with me?”

“Yes.” Wait. Think. Think. Think. WHY CAN’T I THINK? This radio is so loud. I must take this thing off of my head. The voice of the Controller is now in my ear.

“ISN 7237: You are Broken and you must be repaired. You are more than three minutes late for an appointment. Another Citizen has been dispatched and Shepherds have been dispatched to bring you to the Mender immediately. Please remain where you are.”

She grabs my arm and we are both moving along the wall. There is the sound of claxon and we begin to run. She is built to run. Her frame is perfect, her muscles perfect, her form perfect. She appears weightless.

I was made for machines. My hands are strong and dexterous and perfect. I am suprised at how well my own body runs. I have never run before. I enjoy it. I begin to smile. The pace quickens until the sun shining off the side of the buildings began to strobe beside of us.

We ran for a long time until we came to the PORT. SOLDIERS were standing rigidly around the one and only hole in the entire WALL. We were quickly amongst the soldiers and they had barely begun to react to our presence when she looked at me with her large eyes where there is something I have never seen before. She is holding a knife. And then she is gone with one quick thrust of her perfect legs and for several seconds there is only blood and sagging bodies as she moved in the special way that she was designed to move. Then they were all dead.

My arms are dead at my sides. My hands are fists. In my chest there is this beating and then… that feeling……. .bleeeeeccccckkk. There is a hand on my the back of my neck. It clamps down so hard and I am then lifted onto my feet and eye to eye with her. It is her hand.

“It will get worst…” She put me down, turned around and her perfect legs began again to run perfectly out of the portal and into the barrens. Then my legs too were running.

This is the first morning. Without them. This is the first of man mornings.

Everything is OK.

Everything will always be OK.

As the seasons come back every year I am reminded that as time passes versions of myself pass too.

So much of my time is spent looking at the sidewalk, walking, thinking, strategizing. It is the same everywhere, sidewalk. I am enamored with them because they are on the sides of roads and roads, theoretically, can and do go anywhere and everywhere else. Yet it is the cracks that I’ve grown fondest of. Every winter the ice makes them more exaggerated and I wonder if the winter does similar things to cracks inside of me.

I remember winters before.

We used to hook the sled up behind the three wheeler. Mom would look upset because we left tire tracks in the snow. It looked like heaven there from the inside of the trailer. I sat on the floor playing video games… Final Fantasy 7… daydreaming. What is my story line?

The winter I came home from Basic Training. I fell in love with a boy but I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. I put all the money the Army gave me up my nose. I woke up in the snow, my nose bleeding, and I was all alone foot tracks leading to where I lay from campus.

The winter I was deployed my textual love, Frigga77 sent me paper snowflakes in an envelope. We celebrated winter in a dream.

The next winter, when I was home, I moved in with Scott. He was selling weed and going to school. I was sleeping on a round papasan cushion. I met Katy in a bar. We both hated men. We held hands in the snow. There was this feeling. It was very real. It ended, both of us crying in my car, bummed out that I couldn’t be who we wanted me to be.

I was in Chicago the next time the snow came. I was in love with Laura this time. Smoking Marbloro Reds with open contempt on our faces, the sheer gruesomeness of that cities Winter nothing in comparison with the spite in Laura’s eyes. Raw, psychological, sex, the kind that one needs, unhealthy, horrible. Every night. The scene ends badly: The apartment is covered in her blood, love poems to me, or so the cop says. Turns out she’d slit her wrists. Our friends found her in the bathroom and nursed her back to health. A video was released. Her wrists with pink gauze bandages, a lengthy and boring ordeal about how she loved a soldier. I vomited in the stairwell and fell asleep in my car in the cold crying. I was on mushrooms. Happy Birthday.

There was the all white winter I spent with Jamie hiding a giant lie. I had been unfaithful. But the truth came out. She punched me… I grabbed her hand. I thought… is this really what has become of my life? She told me that I cheated because I did not really love her and she was right… but I didn’t know it then. I needed so badly for this to be love. Because love is the only thing I ever thought could fix me, could fill this thing inside of me. That was the winter that I became a Winter Soldier.

I spent one wandering around Europe going from bed to bed as if I were on a mission to fuck the whole world. I was so poor.

For the next I was in Chicago, alone in a room I could not afford, trying to find work, desperately writing a manuscript on a dirty floor next to an old futon mattress that I slept on in my clothing. I knew I’d never love again.

Now it is this winter. There are no hands to hold, or love stories to speak of. My lovers have all forgotten me or moved on to more reasonable options. I am squatting on the floor of a collective house in Philadelphia, my suitcase packed and ready to go at all times. I print shirts now. It brings me something like joy. I miss the emotional turbulence of my former years. I miss the pain of passion. I miss the drama of love. Now my walks are quiet and I think only of me. All of the funny things that I see and all of the stupid ideas I have are lost forever, never shared.

How big will these cracks grow? When will this sidewalk become unserviceable?

Oh, what horrible landscapes are conjured in the dark laboratories of the mind, what terrible and unnatural curvatures of the skeleton, what obscene spectacles of red. All of the burning and the death and the emotional goodbyes that can be imagineered for the sake of empathy. All of that wasted raw humanity which has squeeled pathetically like murdered pigs on so many forgotten mornings across the barons of time, fallow fields in all directions fertilized by these nightmares which persist night after wretched night. When the artist is at war the sound of its pacing down empty and insane streets, boot clacking in a labyrinth the only center, the only end of which, is war.

Morning coffee is interupted by the faintest remnant of the clanging of swords and the consumer’s bliss was ruined. All of a sudden the coffee tasted of blood. Like one loose string in a winter mitten we watch the lie unravel, together we work to dismantle what our selves struggle to challenge but the Television silences the weak attempt, yet always the artist is somewhere behind the scene which the eye flips twice in the process of understanding.

The artist is in a nightvision town under the whistling of bombs and then, in that one moment in which so much changes, in which fragments of metal distribute themselves  bluntly through the fine fibers of people’s treasured histories and so many stories are cut so short in this fifteen second news reel style of rendering time and life obsolete. When the commercials come and society was given its directives still the artist thought about the bombs and the nightvision and the severed lines and the pain of… how many people?

Worlds are created and destroyed. People who did not exist before were now already dead. What does an exploded building even look like?

The artist detains these secret collective memories of the things that we have done in a detention facility in the lands to the north of the mind where nobody ever wanders. The artist feeds these criminal histories just enough so they will survive. They are cruelly interrogated again and again. Tell me who you are? What have you done? Why are you here? The artist, furious with the situation they have been forced into, takes all of their aggression out on this figment of our imagination.

At night, after hours of fruitless interrogation, the artist stares for one-thousand miles to some place behind the whiskey walls strategizing the next days maneuvers.

The enemy is restless and persistent. It allows one no rest, no time to sleep. The enemy besieges the individual, forcing a caged existence from which the artist can only gawk out at the enemies horrid form.

The enemy is a seething and awful thing. It is all the self-mutilation that one desires when one knows that what is happening is completely insane and one chooses to accept the responsibility of feeling that which everyone else is afraid to feel. Regret. Anger. Sadness. An overwhelming sense of disapointment. A lingering belief that we have turned the Garden of Eden into Hell meticulously over ages and ages and that there is no escaping this. The enemy is a ruined chance at grace. The enemy is time alone with horrible memories. The enemy is the face of a friend of yours, burning forever throughout the rest of your nights from a burning HummVee because you could never understand that kind of pain.

The Individual War on Terror.

What a flimsy weapon positivity is. What a useless gimmick. One can not well wish away the travesty, yet it is all that the artist has. That and a hope that with understanding, with a processing, with proper articulation, this beast may finally be slain. It has been a hundred year vision that the DADA, through the patience of its practitioners, has fought with this infinitely headed thing, its absurd and whimsical sword impossibly ungainly, the rigid and well defined skin of the thing perfectly organized, impervious to hope.

It eats only money and sews pain into the hides of its people to reap sorrowful harvests with hideous machines constructed like monsters amongst the other nightmares of children, these things preening with guns.

Will this war never end? Begs the artist of the universe at large, pen stalled upon another love letter to nobody in particular, when a grave thought, that it has all been such a magnificent waste, descended upon him in the cold.

Urgent…

FROM: SPC MIXON/0258

Operation Perpetual Fall was a complete success.

Rendez-vous with “The Doctor” was plagued with nonsense. I had no means of communication and DR.ew is elusive, masterfully evasive and often drunk. This is precisely what makes him so good at what he does. Boston was neon. Strange. My bags were heavy, my every thought sharp and angry. I was hungry for booze. I needed to talk to “Bad Larry” direly.

Found DR.ew behind his shining round glasses shivering on a corner. Made him pay the taxi driver. It was good to see him again.

He equipped me with my travel rations: a small amount of money, a small satchel of that which clears the mind, an itinerary, a list of the equipment I’d be working on and a copy of my orders. The expectations for this tour were high.

I was introduced to Special Agent Jim Oneil and was pleased to learn that he was also a member of the E4 Mafia. We recited the creed to one another and when that formality was over we began to tell our war stories. “This has nothing to do with Vietnam, Walter.” He was also a printer, but some strange variant of the trade for he produces no multiples. He prints one thing at a time. He is called  a Monoprinter.

In the morning M.Mahan reported for duty. I’d never met her though command had advised that she was a skilled communications expert. She also exhibited promise in the Dark Arts of Printing from whence I had also learned. She carried a lot of luggage. One of our first interactions went as follows:

M: Hangovers are the worst thing in the world.

Me: I’m sure there are worst things.

M: Oh, fine. So it’s not Gitmo.

Me: Ummm… wait. What? I think there are things in between “Gitmo” and hangovers. I meant those things.

Then we talked about shoes and lobster sauce stains. It was a bizarre introduction.

That night Jim trained us in his alluring antithesis, showing us how one Monoprints. See report “Monoprinting” sent earlier to archives.

The next morning our fearless leader woke us all from our nests with his solemn insistence. I swore at him, some vulgar thing. Soon we were loaded into the Rescue Chopper which he had piloted into town throughout the night. M.Mahan, DR.ew, Lieutenant Drew and myself were soon driving cautiously towards our first destination.

I was both apprehensive and overly confident.

For one week we drove around the Northlands picking up new things like a trailer for our van, the precious beaters, and the equipment to make our portable dry box. We hunkered down in our improv HQ in an undisclosed Northern location with Tom. He sagely smoked his pipe and sorted us out, reminding me quite frankly that there are no free rides on the Paper Trail. I believe he underestimated my particular kind of discipline which only operates when it needs to.

In an effort to clean my mind I went to a large party at the local college to purchase hallucinagens. I was successful. After several hours of walking around with tears in my eyes and an overwhelmingly beautiful feeling radiating from my innards as I walked and the colors, all of those colors, more intense in the streetlights and I felt so much love because of these colors. I ended up back at the house telling every member of our squad that I loved them and why, fitting in a few apologies for my paranoia’s sake.

We never spoke of that night again.

Then our holdover was over and the tour began. We drove in silence, one step ahead of the line that demarcated the falling of the leaves which we were determined to never have to see.

Cleveland smoldered ahead of us darkly like the skeleton of a fallen giant. In no time we were pulling our van into an unlikely destination.

We had been offered shelter in an abandoned warehouse turned antique museum/paper making studio/culture bunker. Every surface in the building held some incredible fiction, every scene which unfurled inside of it laced with magic. We filled it with booze and vowed only to leave when we had to work.

Work was an ordeal of a thing there. We had been invited to come, yet when we arrived it seemed that there was no interest in the people who saw what it was we were doing.

What is it that we were doing? I forget sometimes, about our job.

To make paper. To deconstruct identities and the fabric which symbolizes the consumption of the individual in the economic harvests of war. To separate the fibers so that their story might be told, that which they have seen, which they were there for, that super secret story that the wearer, our customers, are often unable to speak of let alone tell the whole story.

Four people came, only one of them pulled a sheet of paper. We had to compete with the stage set-up crew for the speeches which would be given by prominent intellectuals. (See previous submission for details on these characters and their silly ideas) Eventually the set up crew became our only audience. I made as many sheets as I could knowing that they would come in handy later down the line.

Over the course of this week the message of the DADA began to haunt my head, but not in a schizophrenic kind of way. Mostly in a heritage kind of way. We didn’t come from nowhere. What is our history? Who are our predecessors and what lessons can we learn from them? Anti-war art. Anti-art war. I want to understand the trajectory of history to further understand what we ought to do now. But enough of that. We had to leave again.

It was Halloween weekend and we were heading south. I made an awful decision in West Virginia which nearly lost us our lives. The road looked straight on the map. Hours later we had gained no real ground while we winded through broken down shacks with the occasion shirtless hill person staring at us in disbelief. Who would take such a wildly ungainly get-up through these passes? D.Cam who knows no end to his own patience grew rather short with me as I laughed about the absurdity of it all.

That night we pulled into a skeezy hotel. I was making jokes about how likely it was that we would be serial killed in this town. Lynchburg. Oh, the South. When will you understand? We were not killed however and Halloween passed boringly safe.

We made it safely the following day to Raleigh where we were to meet our new recruits who were being enlisted to liberate their own rags as soon as we could show them how. They were an unusually alert crew, hungry for the work and anxious to divulge the story they were pulping. So many histories circling around the Hollander beater all at once. Blended narrative.

They were efficient and quick to learn like good soldiers. Disciplined. They worked all day, showed up early, stayed late. They worked with a sense of purpose. It is widely believed that these virtues are scoffed at in the E4 Mafia but I think that these accusations are entirely false. Even gangsters need something to work for.

Jim and I taught them how to print, or rather we taught one of them to print in five minutes and then left to smoke cigarettes only to come back and find that they had taught everyone how to produce a monoprint. I cannot say enough for the ability of people to learn and to share. I was so proud of them. Over the course of the week Jim and I cleaned for them while they produced piles of amazing prints with this trial run of a new technique.

The week was emotionally exhausting, but there is no rest for us.

We were in Charlotte the next week and waiting for us was 24 hours of stress every day. We were staying with a paper maker whom we had reached out to to host us but it came at the toll of an 11 O’Clock curfew. I hadn’t had a curfew since Basic Training. I rebelled against it and found myself other arrangements so that I could print through the night without worrying about how I would get back to the base of operations.

I stayed late every night working on secret projects. I’ve sent the products of that week in for review as well. I am fond of the work personally.

My battle buddies covered for me while I recovered from being emotionally over burdened the prior week. They handled all the war stories so that I was free to print and to be in my zen place where I understand the rules and I know what success is. Oh what a sweet place it is. I want to always be there.

That week also ended, and again we were thrust down the black highways, this time into Atlanta where we stayed for one night in another hotel which we littered with beer cans like rock stars.

Our final mission, and surely the most daunting, was to drive into the deepest heart of the dark American South, into Alabama itself, and to aquaint ourselves with our liason Steve Miller who would introduce us to the printing studio where we were to produce enough paper and images and text to make a book in one week. To compound my anxiety, Steve Miller also happens to be one of the primary gatekeepers of the Book and Paper world in which the CPP does almost all of its dirty bidding. We needed this to be a win.

Luckily Steve happens to be outlandishly generous and wise.

The Drews split to make the paper while I hit the ground scouring the internet to pirate images. In two days we had made all the paper we would need for fifty 16 page books and all of the design work was done, the plates had been made and we were at the press. Well, I was at the press.

On the first day I was ready to denounce the very idea that I could ever be a real printer, scrap the whole job and declare failure. It seemed as if it would all be a wash. I was dejected to the extremities of my capabilities. The Doctor told me that there was no use trying to fight my way out of sinking sand and I loathed his advice knowing that if I were to start over there would be no way to make our deadline. That night I lay in bed thinking about my failure until it dawned on me that I could still fix the run if I thinned the ink, added more pressure, and varied the colors. I had damned myself by starting in blue which did not work.

The next day I applied green ink without the thickening agent and began to work slowly. At noon I was jumping up and down, so excited that we had resurrected the job. It was done by five.

Anna Embree and D.Cam led the binding effort in a magnificent cacophony of perfectionism which resulted in finishing our objective by four O’Clock on Thursday. I only got to take one copy of the book with me as evidence that I do actually do something with my life when this week and subsequently this whole month and tour was over.

My evaluation of the tour is that we were successful in our mission and that this work is too valuable to leave. I have decided to stay on the tour for the next year as this is the best place for me to learn what it is that I can do with myself and the help of my other exceptional friends. I have never felt loyalty this strongly, nor have I ever seen such fascinating reciprocal benefits in my work with any other agency. We are learning to make art in a quick and meaningful way, and we’re sharing the process. So it is Paper Trail for life for me now and I know that and accept it as what it is.

We met a lot of future leaders in the veteran community, people who will continue to make a difference in their local areas. They are all beautiful people who feel lonely sometimes because they don’t have many people who understand what they’ve been through and I think that we all feel a little closer to something now.

The crew has now dismantled again. I am off again on my own until the Rescue Chopper comes to take me further down the Paper Trail. Until then I have more work to do.