Ear Worms

I woke up with half a conversation in my head. Who was I arguing with? The words fled with the light of day. I had a gig tonight, it was a 15-minute set, but it was still a gig. We were going to play at a skating rink. They set up an island on the floor for the amps and mics. We were 1 of 7 bands playing that night.

The morning was coffee, cold leftovers, and scrolling down longer than I wanted. I should have been practicing, but habits are hard to break. I started to get ready in the afternoon, then met the crew at my buddy’s house. We all crammed into the back of his van with our gear. The drive was a little nauseating in the back with no windows and a full load of chattering unsecured electronics.


We arrived 45 mins before our set, grabbed a beer and listened to a couple of other bands. When our time came, we set up quickly, played our 3 best songs. People skated around us, which was a little unnerving at first. There were maybe 30 people skating.



After the set, we got our pay, which was meager. We needed a hundred of these small gigs before we could consider quitting our day jobs. This small gig just made us all anxious and irritated. We promised to practice more, maybe come up with new material. Lots of promises! However, even a small gig is a gig and I had something to tell people when they asked me what I am up to.



Even a part time rock star has dreams.



Then I had a life changing dream. I fell asleep as I usually do; anxious about money, life, what to do with myself. Then the dream rolled in, like the clouds of a heavy rainstorm, full of a wet and smothering darkness. I dreamed of a red theatre, with curtains from ceiling to the floor. The red was almost neon, radiating with a squirming light. I saw an audience from the stage, faceless forms, chattering with electric voices. They were taking their seats and slowing growing quiet until there was silence.



I was alone there on the stage with my guitar. The instrument felt like a weapon. The strings felt vorpal and serrated. Silence grew and I felt the weight of the crowd’s anticipation. I felt the curtains wrap around me, squeezing me and my guitar. The guitar reacted belligerently, as if the silence insulted its existence. A chord played out, my fingers moved without memory or intention. The guitar was playing on its own.



A chord hung in the air; a deep drone, laying the landscape. I strummed the guitar slowly, building the shoreline out of sequence of riffs and notes. The audience remained silent, and the curtains twisted, almost animated by the distortion from my speaker. Then the progression hit, like a wave from an ancient ocean, tumbling from note to note.



I felt the sound waves wash over me, then they repeated. The progression felt like magic in my veins, electric adrenaline rising up in the theatre. The curtains glowed and the faceless people opened their eyes, which were sharp and focused. Then as I repeated the progression again, they grew mouths and murmured, softly at first, then opened wide. Then on the third repeat, their mouths howled and screamed, repeating the notes of the guitar. I screamed too, and mimicked the guitar, caught in its ocean of sound, bound by the progression. I played it over and over, like the rain of a violent storm, the place was drenched in the music, soaked with the magic of the sound.



I played for the howling crowd for what felt like hours until I felt exhausted in my dream and the cold light of consciousness peaked from under the curtain. I felt tattooed, burnt by the intensity of the progression. I was etched, and for the first time in my life I knew what awaited me.



When the band practiced next, I played the progression. I didn’t suffer any difficulty remembering. I summoned the storm and unleashed the chords. My band mates found space in the notes and added their own voice. We played for 4 hours without a break and knew what we would be playing at our next gig. The practice was effortless and exhausting.



Our next gig was at a bar which was converted into a music venue once a month. We were opening for a local band of moderate popularity, a typical bar band; familiar songs for half-drunk patrons. When I got on stage, I felt the same familiar weight from my dream and began in the same way. The guitar played me, starting off slow and steadily, then rising with intensity with each progression.



I could see the faceless people turn their heads, their eyes wide and their mouths slowly open. When after 20 mins their voices were howling in excitement. We were a hit, completely overshadowing the band we were opening for.



Fame flowed like a river. We found gigs easily, and people sought us out. We played the same song from my dream and each time the same reaction occurred. We played for many years and burned ourselves with success.



Now there are no more dreams, and the nightmare plays itself out. I have joined the audience of howling mouths; my face is added to theirs and the curtains cover any exits which might be hidden behind them. I am bound to the guitar until my fingers are turned to dust and my bones wash away.

Raspberries in Purgatory

Looking out over a seemingly endless horizon there appears to be a great garden. This garden is filled with vines and trees, buildings and planets, cosmic dust balls and spectral closets of phantasmal secrets. The garden is perhaps best described as a cluttered place where things grow and decay, like a rotten urban landscape, or a noisy and polluted festival of blind party goers.


For the purpose of describing a specific fruit or a single thing in this garden, I will use more organic and pleasant imagery. However, any such descriptions are terribly inadequate for the humming and pestilent growth we call existence.


So why is there existence, as opposed to non-existence?


Where did the garden come from? Why are there these trees and creatures crawling about the landscape? Where did the rocks and dirt and rain come from? There are many guesses about the garden’s existence, and why anything exists at all.


Some guess there has always been a garden, an eternal place where decay and growth blossom without end or beginning. Some guess there was a single beginning, like a great seed planted with exceptional characteristics making it beyond the bounds of logic or reason.


Regardless of its beginning or previous qualities, there seems to be nothing in the garden beyond change. Even the boundaries of this garden are growing, stretching out over great distances. Although not infinite, and perhaps not eternal, the vastness of the garden is a great terror to behold, full of distorted and monstrous variety.


We don’t know if existence is eternal, it could easily be a mortal thing, ready to fall back into the pristine silence from which it came, rolling back up the Mountain of Time to the precipice of beginnings. Regardless, there are great things born in the garden of existence. One such creature is a star. These creatures are nuclear dynamos, great turning balls of plasma. They are born in the gutters of gravity, formed by large amounts of dust.


This dust is gathered in stellar nurseries, grouped up into immense piles, until the weight of the dust pile heats up. The pressure from gravity pulls the dust closer and closer until even the atomic structures of the dust are smashed against each other.


Then comes birth. The birth is a cascade of pressure and heat, pulling all the dust into the heart of the star. Then comes ionization and the transformation into plasma. This substance is quite different than anything found on planets, comets, or asteroids. Plasma is magnetically organized matter, with very high temperatures, and behaves like a liquid in many ways. Plasma is also highly conductive. The clouds around the newly formed plasma balls are called Bok Nebulas, they are akin to flowers of a new fruit. They are cloaked in darkness, preventing any new starlight from exiting, or distant light from entering.


Soon the new star consumes the Bok Nebula around it and is thrown from the stellar nursery which birthed it. Some nurseries will throw out dozens of stars a year until the dust from the gutters are exhausted. This is much like a plant consuming the chemicals and nutrients of the soil it is planted in.


These new stars are then surrounded by echoes of the formation and turbulence, gathering planets nearby in stable gravitational distances. Then further out, they hold asteroids and comets in a structure called an Ort Cloud.


If the conditions are abundant the star will burn for billions of years. Our Sun will burn for another 5 billion years in such a way, until the chemicals within are exhausted and a new change occurs. The Sun will puff up like a balloon, stretching its boundary past many planets, engulfing them in a luminous fire. Our planet will be scoured, consumed, and its dust will be turned into plasma.


The heartbeat of the star will flutter for millions of years, diming and brightening, sparking, and gasping as it enters a new phase of its life. Near the end of this brightness, it will have a series of explosions as it sheds its massive body. The explosions will ionize and transform the inner solar system into something called a Planetary Nebula. This nebula is akin to a skeleton or fossil. If left undisturbed it will float around the stellar core like a cloud as well.


This is when the Sun is considered a White Dwarf. While larger stars might blow themselves apart in a super nova or collapse into a pit of darkness like a blackhole, becoming a White Dwarf is the start of yet another journey.


White Dwarfs can remain intact for trillions of years, longer than the current universe has existed. They continue and smolder even when other galaxies crash into each other, they will be scooped up by black holes and held together in strict gravitational order. They are like fruit on a vine, ripe and bound by the gravity which formed them.


Even in the Milky Way Galaxy there are these clusters called Globular Clusters, most notably is the Sagittarius system, rumored to contain the core of another cannibalized galaxy. This core was absorbed about 900 million years ago, and continues to this day, filled with White Dwarfs stripped of their Planetary Nebulas, and held together by a black hole.


However, depending on the exact nature of the cosmos, these white dwarfs will continue until they eventually cool and dim. Since carbon will be its eventual state, their cooling process could result in crystallization. These crystal stars will shed no light.


Then after another stretch of untold years, perhaps trillions of years later, there will be no new stars born, and even the last stars born will dim and cool, until there is only darkness. This is the suspected fate of the garden. This dark age is filled only with the shuffling of blind galaxies, misplacing the plants and trees, stumbling over the rocks, beyond the memory of light.


So, these crystal stars will float, fragile in the darkness, ripe to be shattered by the cold wind, or the burning light of new beginnings. Perhaps they will be harvested by a great creature to consume, a forbidden fruit in the sky, eaten by a strange and ancient mouth, undescribed by the feeble words of humans.


For now, the stars grow on the vine, and their fate remains a mystery, like raspberries in purgatory.

You can also listen to me reading this piece here: Stream episode Raspberries in Purgatory by Archmonoth podcast | Listen online for free on SoundCloud