Week #9: A Reading Of Raw DSlash, With Editorial Footnotes And Commentary

Day 1: Beginning

Tonight I committed to going offline for 72 hours. This is a log of that journey. It’s an exciting time, and I undertake this exploration with more than a little trepidation. I am, at the end of the day, a data junkie, and my feed is being pinched down to a single maintenance IV so thin that, even wide open, is dribbling only enough contaminated and muddied

73 77 65 65 74 20 64 61 

74 61 20 6e 65 63 74 61 

72 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 

20 47 6f 64 73 20 20 20 

to keep me from just curling up into a tight knot in the middle of my bed^[1].

So this deep journey of self-exploration and discovery begins. This log, hopefully, will survive if I do not. I can only pray it makes a difference in someone’s life.

And so we begin, as I step through into that deeper-than-measurements-can-account-maze^[2] of life outside the machine.

Morning: I stagger, mazed by sleep, through the kitchen, unspecified, longing dreams dragging like Marley’s chains as I try to enter the roaring stream of the day.

Coffee.

Making my own, I grind at least half again what most use, the boiling water slowly filtering through the mud in the basket and making a liquid as dense as liquid patent leather – pouring the cup, watching the steaming black disk rising glistening to the rim, I feel consciousness stirring. I pour large-crystal unprocessed cane sugar into the black straight from the container. Measuring is for pussies^[3].

I make my way to the livingroom and sit in my blue recliner to drink the steaming caffeine syrup. More relays trip over from “off” to “on” and as I begin to surface more fully, I check FaceBook.

God dammit.

Day 1: A New Beginning

Turn off the wireless and unplug the data cable.

Try again. New coffee. Black. Shiny. Rising Disk. Hypoglycemic Sloppy Sugar Dose. Blue Recliner.

Reach for computer.

Now, where was I headed with this before subconscious habit and too-easy connectivity fucked me up? Right, I remember: Write non-online shit.

More coffee.

Twitch.

Fingers over the keyboard, remembering what’s yet to be done today:

• Shower
• Packing
• Motorcycle
• ATM

 The day's already bleeding away, and I'm supposed to be riding out to meet a crew hours away tonight so I got shit to do and shouldn’t be sitting here thinking I could check email JUST FOR A MINUTE.

Transferring this Scrivener file to an encrypted online account so I can get to it^[4] to edit and finish it in the wee hours when I’m laying awake and remembering that I’m yet again in another motel room slowly whittling away another pointless block of time previously scheduled for another project^[5].

Day 2: Distraction.^[6]

Deep into the black bowels of night/early morning now, sitting under a tree, about 1/10 of a tad from being too cold, but OK for the moment, banging the keyboard on my mini-laptop.

Oh it’s true the Pearly gates can open 
For lawyers and oil executives 
But you won’t find a banjo player up in heaven 
There’s some things even Jesus won’t forgive^[7]

(Tune from a ripping, banjo-heavy set onstage.)

Pretty fucking drunk right in here. I can taste red dust and pine, motorcycle grease, and leathers marinated in The Life. I’m in a mood today, and the brothers can sense it. I’ve already raised some hackles that may yet have consequences. It’s late and I probably ought to go back to my motel room and put my cranky ass to bed, even though things here will run full-out till near-dawn.

Yeah, really, "motel room." My sleeping-in-a-poncho under a shelter-half slung off my bike days are long since done. Compare that to where I’m staying tonight, and I would think it’s obvious which way I ought to go here. For those of you who’ve never done it, the romance of camping on the road gets thin quick.

And now, as expected, a large, hairy delegation turns up to speak to me about the disrespect I’ve shown to someone or another. I can't sort out who or what the nature of it was, but it's nearly certainly a deserved ass chewing. I am vaguely surprised when I don't wind up with at least an eye-blacking out of it – the usual punishment for those who let their mouths overload their horsepower. I’d have just taken it without argument. I’ve been a dick all day, and no doubt. There was some discussion about that, but it finally wound up with just some chest butting and general agreement between all of us that I need to watch my fucking mouth.^[8]

But the bands are pretty good, and the beer is pretty cold, and the whiskey is pretty spotty, but enough. About one more of those, in fact, and I’ll be sleeping in the grass burrs wrapped in that poncho after all, Veronica softly ticking next to me as her metal cools. I am filthy and covered in road grit, and no one cares, as I’m still well into the upper tail of the bell curve of those categories when compared to the rest. There are even a few slutty, tattooed little wenches looking my way, giggling behind their beers and hands like a cluster of Geisha. I can doubtless have any I want as long as I don’t mind taking the now-overdue ass-beating that will absolutely come of picking the wrong one.

Some real potential here. So, it just seems like I ought to be in a better mood. A damned fine acoustic guitar player who looks like a complete country bumpkin dweeb and his lanky, plain-as-brown-paper, female banjo partner (married? together? I dunno) are now singing a well-received break-up song I've never heard before:

Heart to heart 
Hand in hand 
I love your sweet harmony 
We slipped out of tune 
Way too soon 
I’m still trying to find the key 

So would you be my Tennessee valentine 
Hold me close and call me dear On more time 
We’ll waltz in the moonlight and kiss beneath the pines 
Would you be my Tennessee valentine

Odd feel in the air tonight. Who thought this crew of animals would be whooping and hollering for an Appalachian Bluegrass banjo/guitar two-man (or in this case one man and one woman) waltz like they were AC/DC? They (the players) are out of the Chapel Hills^[9] area, and are those deep-mountain kind of people who’ve probably never had an actual music lesson, but can play anything by ear. Or maybe that’s just their shtick. Either way, what’s clear is that everything they’re playing is right out of the center of them. You can’t fake that, not live and up close like this.

Back to the music, now. And maybe one more beer. Gotta stay clear of the Jack, though. (I keep remembering in odd distracting little flashes that the motel has high-speed wireless.)

Some addictions are harder than others.^[10]

On this Second of Eight,^[11] guitars and banjos and fiddles and deep drums still echoing, I finally found myself alone^[12] in yet another motel, road weary and saddle-sore, feeling older than bedrock and more worn than a sandstone riverbank.

The carpet in the hotel was fascinating, a garish psychedelic pattern, part bad acid, part geometry, part graphical explanation of universal field theory.

This Is Not A Great Drunk Walking Surface

The room was just another room, a place to sleep. The tattooed wenches were interested after all, one or two at a time, as I liked, but then I found I wasn’t, and as Veronica pulled me away from the fires onto the asphalt, I imagined I could see them standing confused in the crowd behind me. Later in the motel room, I found myself, not for the first time recently, contemplating all the literal and metaphorical meanings of “clean as a preacher’s sheets” as I pulled off clothes for a long-overdue shower.

Playing Field

Day 3: Running For The Texas Line

Morning and up early, a vicious hangover. Road time.

Leaning Into Veronica's Curves

Editor’s Note: The following was serendipitously found in an otherwise unremarkable surveyor’s notebook on a basement shelf in a small bookstore in Monida, Montana in a section labeled “Rare - Misc” by a graduate student^[13] looking for old comic books. It is unquestionably DSlash’s handwriting. However, whether it is contemporaneous with his other writings during his time “in the wilderness” (as he referred to his data-free experience for the rest of his life) is an open question.

Although the ink and paper have been conclusively proven as period artifacts, DSlash's only known foray into the data-sterile analogue world was for a short three days, and therefore either the “Day 8” notation is in error (a possible symptom of the data-free crash he was beginning to endure which, as has been extensively documented, resulted in months of therapy) or this is from another undocumented time altogether, which would be nothing short of a world-shaking discovery.

It is remotely possible that his handwriting is so bad that the “8” is in fact a “3,” but this is a minority-held opinion that, even when cautiously expressed, often results in accusations of heresy from fundamentalist DSlash true believers.^[14]

The Surveyor's Notebook

---

Footnotes:

1. Here is yet another of the many places in his astonishingly large body of work that DSlash uses an obscure code. Given his penchant for obfuscation and a demonstrated bent toward attempting to describe things outside the capabilities of language, it could, literally, be anything at all. Years spent analyzing just this small fragment has occupied an entire generation of otherwise useless ivory tower academics. See, for example Williams and Mitchell’s Code In The Blog - The Enigma Of DSlash (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2014), p. 152–181, in which these social-psychology linguistic specialists consider the possibility that this is in fact simple hexadecimal coding. This idea is finally rejected as it would lead to the reducto absurdum result that they are, in fact, stupider than a box of hammered hair and their entire lives and careers were an utter waste. ↩


2. Cf: Danielewski, M.Z. (2000). House of Leaves. 2nd ed. United States: Pantheon Books There is a superficial resemblance here between DSlash’s “journey” and elements found in Danielewski’s frankly scary as fuck book, however, close study resolves that question in favor of this being a complete coincidence, even though DSlash was apparently midway through Danielewski’s work when writing this log. Funny old thing, coincidence.  ↩


3. Comparing the rest of DSlash’s writings and life to this passage is instructive: The macho posturing over sugar measurement obscures the fact that he just likes a lot of sugar, which fault is hard to hide when scooping it up by the spoonful, as opposed to a studly offhanded dumping of what "looks about right” into the cup.  ↩


4. How he proposes transfer the file or to “get to it” at some later time when he’s not supposed to be online at all is something of a mystery. There seems to be some sort of duality, or parallel time-track developing here as DSlash teases us with the notion that he’s about to veer into a Bradbury-type space. This, of course, never emerges.  ↩


5. Generations of scholars have been mystified by DSlash’s oblique reference, and volumes filled trying to establish what this “project” might have been. But DSlash never addresses it again in any of his writings, and it remains a profound mystery. (Note, however, that Culburtson, in his seminal multi-volume work, advances the fringe speculation that the passage may be less subtle than many credit. According to Culburtson, “He’s just kind of a dick sometimes, and it’s likely he just put this in here to screw with us.” (Kahlid Culburtson, Life of DSlash - An Icon Deconstructed [San Fransisco, California: Klimax PornKomix, 1963], Volume 3, p. 486)  ↩


6. No one really knows, although many have tried to describe, what DSlash means to convey here. It may not matter, as this editor’s exhaustive and extensive research over the course of a half-hour indicates that nothing in this section actually happened.  ↩


7. “There’s some things even Jesus won’t forgive” An Emily Katz song, Fayetteville, Arkansas  ↩


8. Struck through in the original manuscript.  ↩


9. Probably Tennessee. DSlash is routinely (and frustratingly) vague on locations and place-names, which seems to be an outgrowth of a lifetime of survival based on misdirection and non-disclosure.  ↩


10. Superficially, DSlash seems to be talking about his profound data addiction. But a closer reading of this section muddies that simple analysis. Veronica (his motorcycle,) Jack Daniels whiskey, music, or some non-sequitur altogether (a woman or drugs or writing) that just happens to be on his mind are all likely candidates when his writing as a whole is considered.  ↩


11. No one has ever advanced a solid theory as to what DSlash is indicating in this numbering system, although it seems very tentatively related to the number of times he was writing about some experience on the road during this year of his life. However, this is much less certain with the paradigm-shifting discovery of the Surveyor’s Notebook by Kallenbach (discussed later in this collection) in which “8” potentially becomes important. Or not.  ↩


12. Note the switch in tense from “present” to “past” tenses. It is unknown whether this is some device that indicates a breaking point in the story (unlikely, as this is accomplished with section headers) or just sloppiness.  ↩


13. The student was Dr. Wakefield Kallenbach, now a post-doc researcher at Cal Tech. His career was nearly derailed by the controvery that single page engendered, and he has described being under the international spotlight that was the result of his inadvertent discovery as “…the most miserable experience of my life. I wished I’d burned the fucking thing rather than publishing.” (Jaeger, Jaclyn. “Kallenbach: The Man Who Changed Everything.” Journal of Applied Literacy, 1 Aug. 1998: 108–13. Print)  ↩


14. Cf: Scholastic Heresy: The War Against DSlashism And Picking A Side. Sacramento: DSlash Chapel Of Angels, 2007. Print.  ↩