Waterlogged grief is what I feel instead of nostalgia, for the “old” web. Once we could be impressed by the “mind-boggling effects” of low-res polygonal graphics because we’d seen so little. Now we mock ourselves for having been so innocent, for not knowing we’d soon see too much and be drenched in a flooded dead-end of graphics far more pixel-dense than the ocean-blue skies of 1994-1996. Yet the “open” web and the early days of online forums, every bit as Paleolithic as those PlayStation 1 skeletons and the water-at-arms-length white clouds of Super Mario 64, are revered and placed beyond mockery: “Look at my first days getting online, and marveling at the still-new expanse of the wide-open world-wide web.” Yes and now you’ve charted it all, such that the waterlogged fatigue of having overwatered a walled garden should make us regret having ever felt good about it, the way we chide ourselves for having been impressed. Do I want to be nostalgic, if it means just idolizing something destined to become evil and enclosed? Or, it was always that way, begging for the storm that’d soak it in sad optimization.

I can smell the rain coming from my desk—petrified god’s blood, darkening the thawed soil out on the quad with its transformed cloud light. Joseph had left, and I could still see replay the image of his nude body bouncing off the fat tube TV and then across the thin PC monitor in front of me in windshield streaks. A black LCD-faced box, it’s now lit vermillion-hot, to the verge of blushing from remembered analog porn in million-x-speed rapid rewind, and its CD/DVD tray—my main preoccupation with it now, since Facebook is still only an encyclopedia, online video is as blurry as the spools of my brain-VCR, and the semester has just ended and MS Word with it—is open and empty and the only way to spin all this ambience into permanent digital bits, to cross lasers within while a rainbow erects an epitaph for the still-living petrichor dust without, is to float like a balloon into the weather—to test myself.

I’ve condensed my breath into mouth tears that evaporate before they hit the ground; I’m amazed anew at how the anxiety machine before, and now behind, me can’t produce relief, can’t turn itself off unless it does so in error. The wetwork brain of the clouds, without a circuit or register or file system anywhere, has uptime the PC can’t match—endurance, and what is objectivity if not showing up and refusing to depart, being there and being the only person who can say “yes”. It stays hard longer, folds and wrinkles itself into a smoky intelligence, than a hard drive deep in the guts of my Newsfeed-to-be. Someone’s left a leaflet for the Halloween party:

There’s a line drawn in New England
By whose finger, dipped in paint the color of space, Only Lovecraft could tell.
Through wild Massachusetts it runs, colorlessly,
Along the way
Professing new imperial hues—
Green Line—Red Line—
That are only synonyms to the colorblind,
Just horror-story titles
For the effects of atmosphere, like Blood Falls.
So its demon train speeds on
Gobbling up the Mass. line
As if it were regional snow dropped
On anodyne Mars, racing
Through the smells of ocean and old industry.
It, too, is an aging machine,
Born on an ancient planet,
Rusted atop West Lake Bonney.
Gray men, white lines, black woods:
The conductor in his silver suit
Looks like he emerged, glowing,from A virgin mine on the bottom of the world;
The lines, with that color out of space,
Is a Stygian imposter pointing the way
To Antarctica, or Rhode Island, at least.
The engines know neither forward nor backward;
The lines, just our red-green colorblind wishes;
They ferry aliens into the future, taking us
Further beneath the iron sea,
Where the past hasn’t passed
From the lined face of the earth and
There is no line next to the ‘T."

“They flew two buildings into the Antarctic sky, made an ‘H’ with no crossbar—made the field goal instead of doinking it off an upright. Their rocket powers sent the firmament a million miles away—and, from 55 yards, it’s good!—flung far from the secret garden base,” she paused: “Knowing me, you’re overcome with my ashy scent and—“ look at her eyes, with their globes aflame as maps of a serpentine tree growing so fast it’s snatching the fire of an angel’s sword two neighborhoods over, and “that igniting feeling, hot pain not yet the burnt pain of recognition, of a prick when a long ago-escaped skyscraper, now miniaturized like a balding follicle, enters your hairy arm to descend to the final place where your illness dwells, well—it’s masked by your cedar-smelling dreams of escape, of your anxiety leaving on the last exit off your body on the needle, while you leaf through thoughts of becoming all mind, all neon, all surface. Those thoughts, though, they’re mere spent lords of cinder, they’re incorrect and…”

They. Them. Themself—that one always seems funny, alive with awkwardness, “that’s not correct,” welp it is my ledger, my elephants. Here be dragons, here be them, here be they the dragons, here be at long last The Multigendered Dragon Themself astride the city in the freshly temperate deep-deep, bottom of the glob southern wilderness.

Halfway across the quad were some posts with masks atop them, like slayed specimens of extinct monsters: Paleontological werewolf, ancient pumpkinhead, fossilized vampire. I’ve got a hard rain-shield raised to the sky, and a soft hand in my deep pocket that I can fling gloveless, with enough exertion, to blow off a motionless windmill almost as good as any huffy breath of fire ever could. The wind is energy, it’s commodified dragon heat, as much a vein dug into the past as a fossil-fuel well. And in this world of hot air, I’m a renewable energy source with a green thumb moistened to steer the course of my blows.

Their orange heads are still green with infection The insect-borne bug from colorless space Whose carriers survived a torching by Space Ghost And now buzz, repeating solemnly “Leave the carrots alone”—

The landscape on the quad is moist with the sound of goodbye—dumpsters greased with what looks like the extinction of computers themselves (get him out of there!), footpaths vacant because the trips were replaced with final digital messages before going completely Inside. A bearded specter of communism walks between the turbine shadows and the hidden manes of the wind-horses harnessed by the spinning machines, handing out pamphlets, the first page of which reads:

“Computers: How the fuck do they work—“

I tell the ghost, “Definitely not by jabbing a needle into a sludge of recycled sea insects with enough force to give them all posthumous Hepatitis C, tracing inside their bodies their old outside flight patterns so precisely as to make sound airy enough to be thrown out of their ancient guts, into Medusa’s oil-spilled underwater cave, and at last back to the surface like a slick blackened wet whale breaking the face of the waters with amplified desperation for a little air, a little life!”

“And a file, how do you move it?”

“There’s no files left on this field, the men all have papers

Karen G keeps going, keeps failing, keeping trying again, keeps suffering for her art and telling me to ignore the needle’s addition by subtraction, how it adds new honorifics to diminished blood, and want more, none of this to desire is to suffer mantra-ing, keep it out, keep going, keep, keep, keep. Everything I want and everything I need is in here in this little chatty box I like to finger rhythmically, she probably thinks, “What is the best way to implement cloud business solutions,” “What is System 7,” “What is the upkeep of a pool exposed to Minerva-titted rain”—she tortures her eyeballs with the answers to her keyboard gyrations, edicts which had with the ages puffed my room full of the digital dragon’s breath such that I’d run breathless out into the now-yellow rain.

A car rushes past the barely-announced convenience in a nearby Kentucky holler. The Marlins and the Braves are playing on the TV visible from its porch.

“It’s Wohlers with the 3-2 to Johnson. Strike three!”

Why they care is unknown but I pass just in time to fling a scratched lottery into the piles of paper that go everywhere when the game goes final.

Joseph’s coat is finished with a violet collar whose color he generated from a text prompt to an LLM so sycophantic its logo is a squirrel teabagging some acorns. “It’ll look great on you, yes that’s right,” I could imagine that purple being as lickable as a fuzzy computer icon.” Suck it up, computer, finally you have to suck me off, “off” as in a redneck staking his life itself to call someone on a bluff with the threat of GOING OFF, me turning it on is not even my final form.

Here in the on-premises mines within the earth Tetons, the machines had jiggled black fleshy soil inside-out looking for rocks sharp enough to someday do some thinking as Nintendo 64 CPUs. Rock heads pensively festooned with red berets: Who else’d even be around in this lonely mountain to dig up future memories of game boxes with rare white clouds on them?

“Cloud-chained infrastructure can deliver best-in-class…”

Dust had poisoned almost everyone, turned even the nice-weather-today clouds wine-dark. Meanwhile, the endless growth of Yahweh’s seed-planting companies had snarled the green meadows, collapsed the greystone chapels within their polygonal castles, and flattened the peoples east of Eden with the cloud-streamed lossless files that stimulated them. “I’m sorry I can’t help with that,” the voices of their talkback war machines would say from script when someone asked them to stop.

What do I have except this door that I can fling back open to the at least still-light outerworld whose roof of azure clouds is the only acceptable non-objective art for reactionary realists, fair weather foes who need starter Rothkos. The reversal made the point too obvious. “I was there in 1996-1997 when the clouds were still white,” was a rallying cry for the Analog Rebels who’d marched on the Tower of Babel the day the clouds had turned, and were still camped there with enough vigor to be told to please for the sake of King David’s reelection stop these protests, you’ll upset the median stranger in a strange land as they’re walking to the polling club.

“1996 and 1997.”

“I know, but what’s so memorable about it other than being an irresponsible kid?”

“The epoch of white clouds. Childhood was a sober intoxication, one that we recognize…Captain Hollywood Project had the giant godhead looking out over the low-res texture mapped mountains and the cottony clouds shadowing them.

Isaac was a cipher: A real recluse, during the days when being one was synonymous with being a scarce genius. Think Jeff Magnum and how the end of all fresh Neutral Milk Hotel releases in 1998 turned him into an idea, rather than a person, in the eyes of his “fans,” or punishers, who’d sat in hotel rooms conspiratorially shining lasers through plastic discs to scrutinize tales of young-girl communists and create questions about music that even at its inception already felt archival due to the way it’d been scrutinized beyond any leisurely pursuit. You could disappear and just let your work do the work—ironically, drawing more attention to you as a person, and how you’d transcended the mortal grind, gone over the sea to godliness in your lil’ aeroplane.

There’s an arm-tingling breeze whenever listening to these rare standalone albums that loom over their artists’ discographies like inscrutable Towers of Babel about to collapse from attention. They insist upon themselves, flexing without their carboard sleeves, in the CD player tray, while you’re alone with your thoughts and your pre-2007 cellphone, the two of you Plato vs. Aristotle worlds apart in the School of Athens, debating if your distracted conversation partakes in the Forms of those song lyrics you just heard—that smooths out the basement air, shipping its restless dust trails into someone else’s light outside the window, prompting me that I have to know who made this.

“Drop me off by the side of the road…”

We see the art of others as inhuman and mentally pour ichor in their veins because we can’t see any relatable blood or bone beneath the godly armor. We don’t know them, so saying that they’re far away from their tools is easy. But when we turn this romanticizing on our work in the vain and valiant attempt to regard it distantly as if we hadn’t even done it—had never molded it in a brain-y analog haze, but instead watched as God delivered a perfect fucking digital copy from the cloud, severable from the local oddity of our own body-minds—we only St. Peter-ize it thrice before the cock crows and then feel the vibrations of its fundamental earthiness. We wish that we didn’t know we’d written it, that we can’t see that sleazy skeleton beneath its inky inanimate life, wish we could look back at the cities-of-the-plain-piece-of-scratch-paper and not be turned to pillars of salt at the embarrassed memory of how flamingly bad it all once was and still is. We wish we could separate ourselves the artists from our various it-selves the works of art, and we extrapolate our ambition outward like Abraham threatening Isaac with a good time.

But me—I was for the analog world before I was forced to be against it. There’s so much e-waste both in sight and absorbed through the generations into my own watery cloud body that I once couldn’t even finger the warm pink thought of how music could’ve ever been this non-digital, this completely unfuckable-with by computation until I’d learned that the hit Parallel podcast was still pneumatically pushed out and into ears from tapes—magnetic recording, does it work?—that I had to unspool and destroy. Abraham had Isaac, and I have all the tapes in the world to erase, to prove to our Grand Cloud Emperor that I’ve kept their covenant, to make the world computable. The hard drive is getting wet as I toss off the computer debris weighing down my blood, too acidic now from the rainwater going through my mouth into my system.