Ohio. A warm and hazy November day, and my insomnia continues. Tonight I ran around a lake until I tired myself out. Why does the brain go to war with itself? My body is hungry for sleep, yet my soul races around like a crazed puppy, fetching unpleasant memories and scraps of regret for inspection. And my mind turns gullible in the small hours, ready to believe anything. 

I believe you believe that. C. and I often discuss what would happen if one of us saw a ghost. It might be the most fundamental test of any relationship. One person sees a spectral figure at the foot of their bed, maybe a flying saucer over the highway or Jesus Christ floating in their soup. Now they stand before their lover, telling them magic is real and it’s all they can think about anymore. And the other person must decide whether to humor them or rearrange their own understanding of the world.

Last night I gave up the search for sleep and watched All the President’s Men at four o’clock in the morning. When played at low volume, it functions as a nostalgic fireplace: typewriters and shuffled paperwork, cigarette lighters and shoes clacking in hallways. The soft ding of an elevator is followed by a mumbled conspiracy that feels wholesome these days.

Black Polygons – Ghost

Accalmie | 2013 | Bandcamp

Lately I’ve been thinking about something I heard back in 2012 while driving along the Gulf Coast after a terrible night in Texas. Just after midnight, a metallic voice began to flicker through the radio static: “Report. Report. It is unclear if they want the invasion of Iran to commence during a U.S. presidential election year. Regardless, World War III is already upon us.”

The voice rode an uncanny line between robot and human as it delivered garbled prophecies about bombings, earthquakes, and the Rockefeller Foundation. It was the usual batshit conspiracy schtick that was fringey eight years ago but has since been mainlined into our government. On a purely tonal level, however, it was a hypnotic slurry of lurching pauses and alien cadence. Then it took a sudden turn towards the personal: “Will enough people wake up, throw away their egos, and cry for a couple of days after accepting their whole life is a lie?”

I listened to this broadcast for hours, all the way from Beaumont to Baton Rouge, where I lost the signal. I listened because I couldn’t easily categorize it as a synthetic preacher, a political crackpot, or some futuristic form of self-help. Hell, I couldn’t even categorize it as a computer or a person. The content didn’t interest me, nutty and vivid though it was. The defiance of categories kept me hooked, the strange borderland this voice had staked out between diatribe and confessional, between staccato and slang, and between artificial and human.

There’s a creative lesson here: once we can categorize something, it no longer requires our full attention. But if we can’t put it in a neatly labeled box, we’ll stare at it all night. Perhaps the best work scrambles genre and rides strange lines that might swerve at any moment.

I dredged up a short recording of some of what I heard that night. The sound quality is terrible because I forgot to roll up the windows, but maybe you’ll understand why I’ve held onto this file all these years.

Gulf Coast Radio Clip

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Today’s headlines featured terms like “demon sperm” and “the umbrella man” because we’ve slipped into a psychedelic hell this summer. There’s a doctor in Houston who supports our president’s bizarre fixation on hydroxychloroquine as a cure for everything. She also believes we get sick from having sex with witches in our dreams. The president thinks she’s terrific. He says she’s “spectacular in her statements” and I can’t disagree.

Meanwhile in Minneapolis, authorities have identified the man with an umbrella who smashed up the windows of an Auto Zone and kickstarted a night of arson and looting. He’s a white supremacist linked to the Hell’s Angels. The umbrella natters at the mind. Maybe it’s meant to hijack the symbolism of the protests in Hong Kong, where umbrellas shield protestors from security cameras and drones. Perhaps it’s a 21st-century echo of the Umbrella Man in the Zapruder film that captures the killing of JFK. He’s the mysterious man who opened an umbrella on a sunny day, the one who some believe gave the signal to kill the president.

I remember driving through the Mojave desert ten years ago. I was lonely and filled with grief, and I flipped on the radio for company. I heard a man say they found the lost city of Atlantis, that it was somewhere under Reno. Living in America these days feels like being trapped inside that moment forever.

Midwife – Demon

Prayer Hands | Antiquated Future, 2018 | Bandcamp

At the California Institute of Psychics, only two of every one hundred applicants are selected, so you’re guaranteed a good reading or your money back. A woman on the radio talked about severed feet washing up on the Pacific coastline. “Chopped-off feet are coming in with the tide, and nobody knows why,” she said.

A low voice talked about disemboweled bodies in New Mexico. “Humans don’t have the technology to suck out a person’s intestines through their naval, but I’m telling you that’s exactly what happened.” 600,000 Americans go missing every year, and everyone on this radio station believes they were abducted by aliens. The conversation steered to the Illuminati, as it usually does after midnight, and it’s a worthy fantasy: to think someone’s in charge. During commercial breaks, I sang along to radio jingles for machines that control your brainwaves while you sleep. Wake up energized and get more done.

The KLF – The Lights of Baton Rouge Pass By

Chill Out | KLF Communications, 1990 | More

The longest day of the longest year. A day when I feel like I should be deep in a forest, communing with the sun while waiting for revelation or hunting for a reset button, even though I should know by now these things are fictions. But I’m glad we’ve reached the point in the year when we’ll start making more night.

C. and I spent the evening on a Brooklyn stoop with some friends, all of us chattering and burning off some exhaust as we tried to wrap our heads around this year. The fireworks were relentless as we talked. Big-budget fountains filled the sky followed by window-rattling blasts that set off car alarms and emptied your head of thought. They were heavy-duty and close-up, the kind of firepower that’s sold across state lines. Black Cats, M-80s, and Lady Fingers. Neighbors stopped each other in the street to make sure they’re not imagining things. “You couldn’t sleep last night, either?”

Booms have been ricocheting through the night until two or three o’clock in the morning. It’s been like this since the protests began. People are edgy, their dreams infected with anxiety if they can sleep at all. What started as a rumor is cohering into a theory: the firecrackers are coming from the police. A psy-op tactic designed to disorient and destabilize. A way for cops to prove their worth by keeping the possibility of gunshots in the mind. Sinister as hell, and I don’t know if it’s true. But it’s certainly more plausible than the idea that people can’t wait to celebrate America’s birthday this year.

Vatican Shadow – Unknown To The Peacock The Serpent And Scorpion Conspire (Alessandro Cortini Remix)

American Flesh for Violence | Hospital Productions, 2019 | Bandcamp

It’s been a very Vatican Shadow year.

A note from the margins of today’s rally in Washington Square. As thousands gathered to reckon with racism and brutality, the usual fringe groups dotted the edges of the park: garbled Christian faith-dealers, the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and a man wearing a tall wizard’s cap who cast spells upon the hedges.

And there was a new style of paranoia. Old men with amplifiers delivered gnostic interpretations of the facial expressions of various health officials. They said coronavirus tests were mechanisms for microchipping our blood. They talked about eating particles of silver for protection.

One of them shoved a glossy flyer into my hands. The language starts like a low-rent legal advertisement before veering into magnificent science fiction. Are you suffering from insomnia? Headaches? Brain fog? Irritability? According to the flyer, we’re actually suffering radiation poisoning from wifi and cellphone towers—but “they” will blame these symptoms on the “virus.” The pandemic is a ruse to keep us indoors while the government installs new infrastructure with frequencies that control us. Our telecommunications companies are carrying out the orders of Moloch, the “ancient Ammonite god who demanded child sacrifice by parents.” The flyer ends with an all-caps warning: Do not trust your government. Do not trust the police.

For the briefest moment, it seemed significant that the last sentence of a batshit conspiracy—an invention for feeling aggrieved—would reach the same conclusion as the very rational and real voices in the center of the park.

Vatican Shadow – Encryption Nets

Ghosts of Chechnya | Hospital Productions, 2012/2020 | Bandcamp

We check the death tally each morning like the weather report, the mind doing everything possible to comprehend numbers that started in the tens, followed by hundreds, and now we’re reaching thousands. Rhode Island is hunting down New Yorkers, sending the National Guard to conduct door-to-door searches. The president spent the afternoon loudly mulling over a quarantine of New York City.

Each headline is more disorienting than the last, and uncertainty is breeding baroque conspiracies. Some say the virus is a political hoax invented by the Democrats and Chinese. They say the director of the National Institute of Health leads a shadowy cabal determined to overthrow the president. Each time he touches his forehead on national television, he’s communing with satanic energies. Strange how the knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism of the conspiracy theorist leads to blind faith in imaginary forces: the Illuminati, a wicked godhead.