Now I don’t think at this late juncture even a half-blind Javanese pre-teen, wearing a Shaq jersey and sipping a can of R.C. Cola through a Spongebob shaped twisty straw, would sit through his newest bootleg DVD and afterward feel compelled to praise Hollywood for its imagination. We locals know this, we see more of the reheated narrative slop than anyone. But this “writing on walls” thing? Sheesh.

Do rational minds have such a very hard time conceiving of ways to portray irrationality? Is this obsessive convoluted scrawl the only visual metaphor we can come up with for the interior of a troubled mind? Is the act of defacing that most comforting of spaces, the one within 4 shelter-giving walls, the most poignant non-lethal transgression we can conceive?

Tell me- Is it that unstable personalities are inordinately difficult to portray or is it simply that tame minds are ill-equipped to visualize the fruits of wild ones? When such a staggering percentage of the populace, though not exactly lunatic, differs substantially enough from the imaginary mental “norm” to require therapy and counseling and annually quadrupling dosages of anti-depressants, I find it hard to believe “the other” is quite so inconceivable.

From a creative standpoint, someone involved in the perpetuation of this goofy trope has to realize that the use of an instantly recognizable visual shorthand in the portrayal of abnormality is something of a contradiction. Also, from a functional standpoint, this fictional maniac is generally a killer or stalker or rapist, or some such horrible thing, and the desired reaction to the revelation of his/her insanity ought to be: “Holy shit! That persons insane! Yikes. Creeeepy.” Seeing something as familiar and comfortable to your psyche as the ass-groove of your own couch cushions, something like say a tired old cliche, does not inspire this reaction. Does it? I have to chalk it up to a simple lack of imagination. Which is ironic, ‘cause you know who seem to be extremely imaginative? Crazy people.

-

I hereby decree that if this cliche must be used then one of more of the following 3 items must be adhered to-

1. The individual who created the room covered in scrawl must be either a 13 year old (and at least 65% of the scrawl must take the form of band logos and song lyrics,) a graffiti artist (in which case the writing must be applied with something other than plain black ink / white chalk / blood,) or a set designer (who curses under his breath at the director continuously for making him create such a lame set.)

In emergencies when scripts must be turned in within 24 hours the individual may also be a disgruntled typographer, novelist, graphic designer, illuminated manuscript restorer, stenographer, or naughty grade school pupil.

The exception here is an individual who lives in a Lower East Side dive bar bathroom.

2. The handwriting must be neat and finely executed rather than angular chicken-scratch. Someone who spends hours every day writing screeds all over every surface of their room, no matter how batshit crazy, has had plenty of practice and ought to be able to lay down some readable handwriting. (A few storiated initials at the beginning of paragraphs, or some handsomely proportioned looping script would be nice.)

The exception here is if the individual doing the writing is limbless and holds his sharpie in his mouth or between stumps. The individual may also be blind, but in such a case the writing should be in neatly composed braille.

3. Police officers must canvas neighborhoods, going to apartment landlords, motel managers, and concerned parents, carrying not a suspect sketch but the image which began this post. “Have you come across any rooms that look anything like this?” they must ask. “Because if you have… that’s our man.” Clerks at the local art supply store should also be questioned.

If these guidelines are ignored filmmakers must be charged, post haste, with “aggravating assault on a deceased equine” and have their equipment impounded while they await trial… and atomic-wedgies.

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Lastly, since I fully realize my edicts over the film industry do not carry as much weight as they should, I’d like to take this opportunity to announce my new venture:

Are you too busy scouring the earth for creepy porcelain doll heads, rusty farm tools, 18th century family photos, broken mirrors, and over excitable kittens to really get your wall-scrawling crazy on? Well breathe easy set designer, because we’ve got you, and you’re murderous lunatic’s walls, covered!

Introducing Scrawlpaper®©™ the finest collection of dingy scrawl-covered wallpapers available on the market today.

Have You got a loony whose interior struggle needs to made painfully obviously clear to your brain-dead audience? Kidnapper? Religious nut? Obsessive masturbator? Repressed sister-lusting rapist? Multiple personalitied self-flagellator? Satan worshiper? Rouge Priest? Brilliant but morally bereft doctor? Cannibalistic asylum escapee? Hey, we’ve got the pre-crazied wallpaper just for you!

Scrawlpaper®©™

(Coming soon.)

This would point then to in-between periods as well, when cumulative chemical reactions allowed colors to begin making their entrance en masse, when the Earth might have appeared in very tight, limited color palettes.

Perhaps from a vantage point in space it would have appeared grey and black and ivory with some smatterings of super-saturated volcanic orange? (A bit like a certain much-beloved website now that I think of it.)

Or maybe the entire surface appeared as a sort of liver colored mixture of grey and brown and purple which, as if moving a slider in a photoshop effects panel, smoothly brightened and became more saturated?

Maybe the coloring of the earth proceeded outward from relatively distinct areas, some green, some yellow and ochre and copper with a few bursts of wild vermillion? Maybe these grew and blended at their edges like a watercolor on grey paper?

Maybe for a million years or so, when viewed, from say the distance of Mars, Earth might have appeared as a pointalist-like body with small “dots” of color creating the illusion of a smooth continuous shift?

Maybe the color was built up like layer after layer of semi-transparency, deepening and becoming more rich, until distinctly colored shapes emerged that looked, from afar, like moo cows or Victorian courtesans or 1973 Dodge Charger’s with their hoods popped- life forms and objects that wouldn’t exist for a few billion years yet?

Perhaps for a million years or so, when looked at from just the right angle, the entire surface looked like the face of an unshaven tramp clown, with sad dark grey eye sockets, a down turned ashen-grey mouth, and a giant red volcano nose?

Could have been any damn thing.

Over time, obviously, with the evolution of bacteria and algae and parrots and gay pride parades down 5th Avenue the Earth transformed into the spectacularly rich and varied Technicolor extravaganza we love so well today.

Which brings me to my final thought- 

If there were indeed Creators, (or alternately, infinitely patient alien entities looking on, waiting for a life form to evolve advanced enough to invent pitless mangos and a cure for herpes) they might very well think back to that grey Earth of yore in the exact same way we moderns look back on our black and white movies, just a bit mournfully, sentimentally, with an aching nostalgia for a “simpler” time.

(Chromatically at least.)

That last part is what’s interesting. In finding a planet around a star so old and far along its path to red-gianthood, a first, the implication is a glimmer of hope for our own planet’s survival, 5 billion years or so from now when we will shake hands with our own red giant, Sol 2.0. Of course, “survival” in this context is a silly sort of word because though the actual ground beneath our feet might not be vaporized and molecularly mingled with our sun, there won’t be any feet at that point to appreciate the solid footing. Which is simply to say there wont be any “survivors” in terms of life as we know it. 

I can hear you asking- “If our civilization is headed for a nasty and ultimately fatal sunburn regardless then why exactly are the implications so interesting? Scorched rock floating through empty space beholden to cold dispassionate forces for near eternity is interesting? Further more,” You continue, a bit snarkily for my liking, “If there is no mind left to be interested then surely the term ‘interesting’ ceases to apply?”

True enough that we won’t be around to see how it shakes out, but honestly… do you think we’ll be around 5 billion years from now, red-giant or no? Hahaha. Fat chance. In any case it’s not the prospect of human survival on a scorched Earth which interests me… quite the opposite. These observations essentially hint at a possible second option for our eternal rest. Previously cremation was the only game in town, now we have the prospect of burial as well.

Personally, in terms of my own meat-sack, I will opt for, nay, insist on, cremation. But for the remains of human civilization at large I think the prospect of burial is a happy one, and for a couple of reasons-

1) “Life” does not equal “humanity.” Extremophiles may yet survive on a scorched Earth, and perhaps long enough even to evolve convertibles and ray-bans and sun-block.

2) It would be a damn shame if another race of sentient beings, blind to their own origins and terrified at the apparent lifelessness of space, caught some lingering radio signals and came looking for the source, only to find a big fat nothing. They might be tempted to attribute C-span broadcasts and Who’s the Boss re-runs to the lips of Gods. That at least, I’d like to spare them.

The truth is attaching significance to a mortal life is difficult enough, to your own tiny place in a mortal civilization even more so. But finding a way to soldier on when you know every last scrap of evidence that humanity ever existed will be vaporized? Well that’s just fucking unreasonable.

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P.S. the image which accompanies this post was adapted from the first plate of The Outline of Science, A Plain Story Simply Told from 1922, which is available at Gutenberg.org

There is, it would seem, a solitary archetype by which we can (and do) judge all else. When we seek to make a comparison, be it in the human particulars of mental state, physical prowess, emotional weight, or indeed in the broader strokes of the metaphysical, we can, without fail, single out this entity and be sure that any comparison drawn will be understood by our audience as suitably pointed and dramatic. This archetype would seem to represent the extremes of anything and everything. It is, essentially, the purest, most extraordinary, most weighty point of comparison available in human discourse; the pinnacle, evidently, of all namable qualities: the Muthafucka.

The Muthafucka has many names- the Mother Fucker, the Mother Fucka, the Mothafucker, the Muthah Fucka, the mutha fuck, and even, to those well acquainted with this monolith, the casual- Mutha or Mother.

Time and time again, in the mouths of the man on the street, the Muthafucka’s name is bandied about and celebrated as the be all and end all of experience. The Muthafucka far outweighs pretenders to the throne like “the witches tit,” “balls,” “the bag of hammers,” “hell,” etc. Muthafucka outweighs these and the rest of what I call the “hopelessly specific” by a sizable margin.

In the verbal coin of the land the Muthafucka is king.

Q: Is it cold out? Ask yourself, “how cold is it?”
A: Why it’s “Colder than a Mother Fucker!!”
Of course.

Q: Was that person you met attractive? 
A: “She/he was hotter than a Muthafucka!” 
Obviously. It doesn’t get any hotter.

Q: I wonder, how did you feel about Firefly being cancelled?
A: “I was madder than a Muthah Fucka!”
I’m sure you were but you’ll get over it.

Q: Did that movie frighten you?
A: “It was scarier than a Muthafucka!”
Indeed it was. I almost shat myself.

Q: How affected were you by that marijuana cigarette?
A: “I was higher than a Muthafucka!”
Fo’ real?

Anyhow, you see where I’m going with this.

The basic formula is as follows:

(Comparative adjective) + than a Mutherfucka!

It seems to work every time, without losing a whiff of its power. As a matter of fact, and this is a true oddity, even incorrect grammar works well. I might go so far as to say, if pressed under threat of physical harm, that the more glaringly wrong the word choice the more effective the Muthafucka comparison is!

Example:

Q: How was that yak testicle sandwich?
A: “It was gooder than a Muthafucker!”
Oh word?

How this “mother fucker” character, who would seem to be the manifestation of one of humanity’s last remaining powerful taboos, came to be so well regarded as to qualify as a unassailable counterpoint to every exclamatory comparison is truly a mystery. Perhaps the greatest mystery of the modern age. But I, for my part, am not too proud to offer kudos where kudos are due.

Whatever this entity’s true proportions, to rise so meteorically, against such seemingly stiff odds, this “Muthafucka” must be… well…
badder than a Muthafucka!

This, however, is not a history lesson, and the particulars of each of these items does not interest me as such. What I’m interested in here is rather a result of their intersection, a confluence of forces, which though set in motion way back in the 1870’s, is as near to we moderns as the ground beneath our feet or the sky above our cities. I’m speaking, of course, about Ground Stars.   

Let me explain.

The proliferation of electric light, typified by our big cities, has created a phenomena called Skyglow. Essentially Skyglow is simply Rayleigh scattering of artificial light, which is to say its the same atmospheric effect which makes the natural light of the daytime sky seem blue, only in this case diffusing and redirecting the light of our cities back down at us. The ultimate effect for we urban earthlings is, lamentably, a starless (though not bible-black) sky.

In the relative-dead of a New York City night, looking up (and in this city to see a patch of sky you need to look damn near straight up) is an effort with precious little reward. You can count yourself lucky to see the lights of a passing plane, or the underbelly of a helicopter, because even the brightest stars are washed out and absent. Forget about connecting the dots in your minds eye and seeing a giant scorpion, or bull, or lion. There are no dots. 

As I’ve said here before this strikes me as a real shame. Especially in a city such as New York where where all manner of dreamer, goofball, curbside philosopher, and artistic-minded lout have chosen to congregate. We are effectively as divorced from our universe as we are from the suburbs and geographical armpits most of us fled from. We are people who could use the sense of natural scale a few trillion super-massive nuclear reactions in the sky would provide. We need something bigger, more crowded, and more charged with energetic possibility than ourselves. 

Which brings me to Concrete and Chewing Gum.

While electric light was proliferating and radiating outward to blot our stars concrete and chewing gum were quietly spreading throughout the city as well, exhibiting their own unexpected side effect. It seems concrete and chewing gum have a natural attraction to one another. They stick together and stay together. Whether it is love or just a physical thing I can not say but their century old union offers us a solution, of sorts, to our star poverty.

When a piece of spit-out gum takes the gravity-assisted leap to the ground it gets rolled over, and stepped on, and compacted, and stepped on, and compacted, and stepped on, and compacted. We sometimes curse at getting its sticky guts on our shoes, but more often than not we don’t even notice. Over time what was once a chicle-based, flavor infused, treat becomes nothing so much as a single dark point in the firmament of sidewalk. Now multiply this by millions, perhaps billions, and I think you’ll see where I’m going. 

A century of this process has provided us with something huge and ambiguous we can call our own; if not a moody sparkling light by which to worship our lovers and unsheathe our knives, an endlessly shifting menagerie of single points all the same, between which we might string the iconography of our hopes and fears.

Think of it! Anti-Stars: small points of light-absorbing darkness dotting a reflective silica-mixed concrete field. Billions of DNA enriched points, all of indeterminate, time-lost origin, waiting only for the connecting lines which would infuse them with meaning; waiting always at perigee to feel the press of human imagination upon them rather than simply that of our boot heels. Look below your feet at any time while walking the 301 square miles of the city and it’s likely you trod upon a constellation, just waiting to be recognized and named. 

In short what electric light hath denied concrete and chewing gum hath supplied. Ground Stars, Urban Constellations, a galaxy worth for our interpretation, in which we can do what we love best- see ourselves reflected.

“Sounds all very well in theory” I can hear you mustache-twirlers harumphing, “but does it work in practice? What might such replacement constellations look like?”

I’m glad you asked. I have taken it upon myself to explore this embryonic field of research a bit. Trips into the field have yielded some promising observations which I’m all too happy to share with you.

Below you will find a small cataloging of my findings thus far. I will name, describe, and illustrate the 10 Urban Constellations I’ve identified, and will even offer some slight illumination on each in the form of related quotations. What being born above these signs, or what their position in relation to your own may portend for you, your character, or your future, I will leave to the “geologers,” “odologers,” “topologers,” “despuologers,” or “humusologers” who will surely follow.

Behold!

Status Somnus (The Standing Sleep)

You see them, standing in the road, nodding, body never quite toppling, never quite standing straight. It’s like slapstick and tragedy mixed. You wonder, “Where can he/she be right now that’s so compelling it overrides the innate need to stave off death? Are they on a planet without cars? Are they floating weightless through space? Are they balancing on a pile of white spaghetti? What are they seeing?” You wonder, but are not curious enough to prick the skin and stand asleep in the road yourself.

Mercator Pudor (The Shame Trader)

You spot them from a block away, if you’re lucky. The fresh-faced guilt-trippers. Their questions like a slap. “Do you care about the environment?” “Do you have a second for gay rights?” “You don’t support animal cruelty do you?” “The children’s ribs are showing!” You look at them and despise them for trading in guilt. They ask every loaded question but the honest one you hear in your head instantly.

Sepulcretum Umbellae (The Umbrella Graveyard)

The wind howls, the sun is gone, the rain hammers your brow. You turn a corner and see it. Mangled, torn, broken, abandoned. It’s a graveyard and you know it, even with your head down and your eyes half-blinded in the storm. You shiver to spite yourself.

Dissaepio Indocilis (The Rude Barrier)

The sidewalk so wonderfully wide. Room enough for street gangs to dance their grudges away. And yet here he/she comes. Straddling one edge, dog straddling the other. Between is a leash, strung taut across the entire walking width. You look at the leash and you yearn to tear it apart with your hands and stuff in his or her mouth, yelling, “Choke! Choke you self-involved misborn ass!” They must know you hate them, but they come ever closer. “So it’s a game of chicken is it?”

Porthmeus Odiosus (The Hateful Ferryman)

You see it’s yellow flank flashing in the traffic. The light is on. You are about to be scooped up! You imagine the seats cradling your tired ass. You raise your hand, perhaps whistle through your teeth, or call out, “Taxi!” But the ferryman rejects you and rolls right by. “Why?” you wonder. “WHY!?” You swear, you doubt, you raise your fists to a deaf God, “Bastard!” Then shuffle on.

Belua Cloaca (The Sewer Monster)

And what is under there anyway? Is it a filth-encrusted albino playground? Is it a dark orgy of disease and blindness held over the sewage-soaked bones of our forefathers? Are the stories true? Is it all alligators, and giant rats, and mole men? Walk a little faster and avoiding the wobbly grates.

Mendicus Beneficiarius (The Privileged Beggar)

Young and sound of body. You look at them and their sign, scrawled with pleas for beer-money or bus fare. You look at their clothes, their accessories, their hair. You make a snap judgement and far off, on some tax sheltered-island, their trust funds accrue interest.

Aquatoris Indifferentis (The Indifferent Water-Carrier)

It’s 8 AM. Foot-traffic rush-hour on a weekday morning. No one smiles because making it to your destination is painful enough. Another day of wage slavery is beginning and no one’s exactly thrilled. Everyone knows this. You know it, the old lady you just elbowed knows it, and so does the guy with the fucking hose. He sees you coming. He does not care. The water flows like your own shin-level Potomac.

Cumulus Arcanus (The Mysterious Pile)

It is waiting around damn near every corner. It is horrid and putrid smelling and the color is indescribable. Flesh colored crayons melted over spinach linguini and scabs. It is nebulous and gut wrenching and even the thought of it’s origin makes your skin crawl. It’s a pile and you must not look at it too closely!

Hostis Dementis (The Demented Stranger)

He approaches. Perhaps you smell him before you see him. Perhaps his madness digs into your ear. It’s one of that most feared tribes, the demented ones. What will he do with his grill fork? What’s that poking out of the hole in his clothes? Is something moving in his bag? Nothing frightens the rational, time-obsessed, grid-walking, metropolitan mind like the demented ones staggering toward you.

There you have it my friends. I hope I’ve inspired you to connect the dots, or brought even a sliver of relief to your poor, addled, star-starved mind.

If you identify any urban constellations of your own feel free to pass them along. The adventure continues.