Ray Ogar + cmyk

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> Ray Ogar

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I had the opportunity to publish a few stories through ALT-X in their avant-pop, literary magazine Black Ice & their book Degernerative Prose in the 1990s. Here is one of the stories.

i convinced myself that the dense images in my head aren’t dreams. i explained to my therapist that we fall into a certain wavestate when we sleep and that this makes us susceptible to specific frequencies. transmissions. television reception. voyager satellite signals.

_hls._ at first i was seated at a table across from this smell of green leather and smoking hair—all i’d do was cry. i’d be given a stack of blank pages to fill—i was told to write down my dreams. i said no after the second night, give me a type-writer or computer, something with keys on it. i began typing in binary, just sat there for almost an hour typing zero’s and one’s. it didn’t come in one stream though, but rather several long pieces throughout the day. i told my analyst things about the 1960s and i recited to her electronic documents pushed through government satellites, things nasa never knew they sent up in the 90s.

a small government task force invaded the kitchen—my parent’s house was now a dark occupied territory. at first i was monitored at my job—now i just stay home and as the urge comes over me i type out the binary code in my head at the pc or macintosh or whatever the fuck it is they have placed in every room. i live in boxer shorts, maybe a tshirt—something like an isdn data line has been installed and attached to a large mainframe computer housed in the front hall closet. every terminal in the house has access to the internet, sometimes a webpage window is minimized in the corner of the screen with a list of sites that abduction victims post their experiences to. all of it shit.

i’ve never flown in a plane—to my knowledge i’ve never left the ground—the proof would be the video camera footage, bank teller footage, convenience store footage, atm footage, drive thru fast food place cameras, grocery stores, bathrooms, and hearing devices placed under restaurant tables. all this paranoia confirms my presence here, always. i think it’s just been the gray stuff that’s slowly taken from my head—now—right now, any moment—from out there. i don’t like picking up the phone and actually understanding what’s being communicated to me—especially when all i’m hearing is a modem connection and the computer on the other end trying to talk to my own—i don’t need the modem anymore. same thing with the snow on the tv between channels—it’s not void, it’s all types of information compressed into one place, why it all moves in that abstract smear, why each channel of snow looks a little different. it’s all just statistical moments captured on screen.

_hsb._ my parents have been relocated out of state and i am placed around the house like a satellite dish by the guys the united states left here. one of them is kind of cute. i get fresh boxer shorts every day. meals are getting worse. i ask for large quantities of magazines, everything from national geographic to gq—the important dates are anything between 1971 and 1993. why? i just cut them up all day, paste pictures side by side, cut articles out, what my whim says i should and i ache for the affection of someone with emotion, something other than this code lodged in my head. i found out there is perhaps a second person like myself that this is happening to and we maintain what anonymous link we can over the internet, but there is only so much truth that can be hidden in analogy. even the cute guy is smothering, i just can’t ignore desire. i’ve been watching a lot of vhs tapes, stuff i’ve requested from the national television archive in new york, shows from the late 70s, early 80s. i like to speak french, though i don’t know what i’m saying. for some reason _that_ government is knocking on my door as well. they’ll have to wait though for the first layer of american bureaucracy to peel away.

guess i need to try a new detergent, i’m starting to itch a lot. even though all these people are staying here, i do go ahead and do their laundry as well. i tell one of them to buy a new detergent, we are all getting a rash from the older tide brand in the house. so i suspect.

my parents don’t even email me anymore and i wonder if their identities are that far removed from who i am now. the house is filling with piles of information none of us know how to interpret. i don’t sleep but a few hours each day and i’ve created my own computer language, so i’ve been told. i just write in binary, so i don’t know what they are talking about. all of this psuedo-trauma allows me to draw these extremely abstract images—i think they are emotions, but they aren’t mine. i can’t imagine i am going to live much longer, it’s a little dramatic, but i think it’s only logical—the rate at which i’m doing all this shit is speeding up and i have a headache all the time now.

_rgb._ it lives in this really tight space, i mean the surfaces of its cockpit or whatever are touching the thing’s skin—the skin itself is a brailley dark substance that reminds me of pond scum—take this literally. there is a subatomic layer of metal covering the skin, more like a living liquid that can solidify at any given point over the body. its breathing orifice, the way communication happens in real time, occurs through inhalating breaths, down a pipe and along several flaps of skin like tongues. when the subatomic metal that exists in all of its cells is manipulated neurochemically it stretches from under the skin and plies its surroundings into a structure similar to the human vocal cords. human speech can then be mimicked through stifled gasps; this is just a reversal of the former breathing process. this would be necessary if true interaction ever took place between us and it.

thousands of years ago one _whatever_ was sent. i mean it’s taken thousands of years for it to get here. the creature is a streamlined column of muscle and appendages, the mass of any man in this room, dark, breathes an artificial air of which i could write the chemical structure down if needed. the creature rebuilds itself and its organic matter over years. the organism itself is maintained at the bottom of an engine the size of the moon; the creature is one piece of living material attached at some odd angle to a machine built to move matter at 99% the speed of light over several millenia. conveniently this machine hides its physical presence from terrestial surveillance by calculating itself into an alternate geometric space that doesn’t effect earth’s gravity well. i don’t understand this.

it is all voyager’s fault. this thing says we are too loud and that, if my translation isn’t too liberal, our transmissions into space are like junk mail. the way this is all decoded, i’m only now understanding my own role. i just receive—just so happens the electromagnetic field in my skull is strong enough to pick up the mass of transmissions being redirected back at the surface from the creature’s craft. the organism is a drug addict—it found us because of voyager, that machine was a key that kind of deciphered the human race and earth. i suspose the thing that’s coming is just an observer, just a technology. what transmissions i receive are a recycled mishmash of our own past transmissions into space—what is sent back to us is merely indicating what is to happen, or what has perhaps already happened.

i run a fever and the itching still continues.

we will try a new brand of detergent tomorrow.

_yiq._ i swear i am getting things i am not supposed to. the abstract pictures i draw are the organism’s emotions culled from the drugs—the drugs are what allowed it to survive the trip i guess. it is some sort of pure biological entity that, though mass-produced, came with an intelligence. that is the price of engineering life, you can not just merely impart intelligence without the weight of emotion and desire. so emotions are solved with drugs and the being is used when it is not conscious. what it personally maintains to be sanity is a physical warping of its gray matter performed by billions of atom thin needles that actually change the chemical and atomic structure of its neural network from moment to moment. this is the drug. essentially the creature’s brain matter is continually rewired into its nominal processing state. no.

it’s all an infection in me. sure that is obvious in one sense, that is, the binary stuff pumping through my head, but what i mean is everything else, its emotions, all this output i am receiving is a new level. the fever i have is my body trying to express this crap--that is, the writing, the collages, the artwork. i’m agitated and i’m maintaining a state of constant sexual arousal. i think i am just translating a desire from spot to spot. i’m not making sense.

i found out it has stepped onto the surface of earth in a thousand places, the idea being it _is_ the biological sample. its culture studies others’ by the diseases a race or civilization maintains—this tells them how we’ve evolved, it is very non-invasive. the whatever that was sent infects itself with the planet’s environment. supposedly everything else about our history can be extrapolated.

the government found an excess of thirty five million holes across the united states, holes that punched down to the earth’s core—there are others of these across the planet. all rare gases of the atmosphere have decreased across the board by .001 percent, this will alter what is our biosphere to something else now, the effects won’t be noticed for two hundred million years. my fever has gone away and i now dream in four colors.

_cmyk._ it wasn’t the detergent that made us itch—the whole world had a rash for several days. the thing’s craft sprayed a microscopic layer of cataloging atomic particles over the planet’s surface. each particle recorded the exact surroundings, movement, sound, light, heat. it was as if trillions of airplane flight recorders were dropped every millimeter apart from each other on the earth’s surface and then recollected. our entire habitat has been recorded, easily studied now—kind of like a three dimensional motion film of one planet.

the organism is gone now.

i live by the people i know from the internet and work at a job the government gave me. i don’t date anyone. nothing entertains me but myself now. there is a tv in every room turned to a channel of snow. my only pleasure is when i listen to what is in-between radio stations.