Ascetic Press

BUBBLES (ORIGINAL MIX) -- It had started out fairly simply. Before talking on the phone, at his desk, he would take the gray cat and forcibly insert it into the lower right-hand desk drawer. While talking on the phone, he would manipulate the drawer with his foot, sliding it open slightly and then pushing it shut whenever the cat tried desperately to escape. After he had hung up the phone, he would release the cat. The cat would scurry away soundlessly to lurk in corners and glare at him.

He was house-sitting for a friend who was in Europe that summer. There were also two cats to look after in that vast and spacious house. One of the cats was black and had avoided him from the first day, as if sensing something unsavory in him of which he himself was unaware. The other cat was gray and would leap into his lap and purr while he read, and twine itself around his ankles whenever he filled its bowl with food.

One day he put on a pair of oven mitts and tried to catch the black cat. He couldn't, and in his insensibly incandescing rage he instead grabbed the gray cat. He punched and shook the gray cat. He threw it around the kitchen. The cat hissed and yowled and tried to claw his hands. He was mumbling strange phrases under his breath that he could not afterwards recall.

This activity went on for three subsequent nights. He battered the cat unmercifully. He would bend it in half and shove its face into its ass. Often in its frenzied haze of fear and pain it would attack its own posterior, snagging tooth or claw into the rim of its own anus. He would twist its tail until it screamed and then sodomize it with the handle of the can opener. When he was done for the evening he would toss the cat, limp with exhaustion at its ordeal, into its litter box.

On the fourth night he came home to find the cat lying there. It had not moved all day. Thin trickles of blood seeped from its mouth and anus. Its breath came in shallow heaves. He realized that the damage that he had inflicted upon it was now irreparable. He picked up the cat and placed it in the sink. He set the dish rack securely in the sink over it. He turned on the faucet. The cat died gracefully: a few halfhearted gropes of one paw through the grid of the dish rack, a few stray bubbles of escaping air, and it was dead.

He let it lie in the sink while he scrubbed down the kitchen walls and floor in order to remove all the streaks and stains of blood and shit. He laundered the oven mitts and restored them to their drawer. He then drained the sink and put the damp corpse of the cat into a paper bag, and the paper bag into the garage, by the garbage cans. Then he sat down at the table and lit a cigarette.

Why did I just do all that? he asked himself. He had never done anything of the sort before. Insane acts spread out over the course of days could hardly be called temporary. He was a good man, with a good job, and he had just murdered his friend's cat. He laughed shakily, lit another cigarette, and put on some soothing jazz, John Coltrane's Lush Life album. See? he lectured mentally to invisible witnesses, I am a good man, a cultured man, a meek and mild man, a friendly man, a suave man, a loving man. I am a normal human being. I will tell my friend his cat ran away one day and never came back. That is what I will say. The earth hath bubbles and this was of them.

He called another friend of his to help dispose of the evidence. As he was carrying the paper bag to his friend's car, the bottom of the bag, weakened by the water from the drowned corpse of the cat, gave way. The cat thudded to the asphalt of the driveway, producing a sound like a dropped croquet ball. It was already rigid. He and his friend laughed uncontrollably at the event. They left the cat in a dumpster outside a convenience store two cities away.

When the owner of the cat came back from Europe, he told his lie. As the owner was carrying luggage in from the car, the black cat, which had been hiding somewhere in the house for the entire summer, ran through the open door and disappeared across the lawn. This lent credence to his story, and he was believed.

He told the true story many times, to a variety of people. Sometimes he was believed and sometimes he wasn't.

- Jason Price Everett

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Bubbles appears in JPE's novel Unfictions, and is one of the few units to have undergone significant changes at the editor's request. Ascetic Press brings you the original unit, as intended by the author. Find Unfictions at 8thhousepublishing.com

So deconstructed, they are eating and sleeping, their guts untouched, the rubble beneath their feet. Everything has been blessed by the hand of the mind called Brain, visited by the ghost called Logic. If thin air was visible, it would age into elegy like skin into rolling planes of the soul's wave length. Dust would not move. Breath would leak from us and try to fill the barren cradle, singing for itself. . I. (Love In An Age Of Presence) Barbed circumstance shaves your music down to particulars. Sighing unwell the missing mass bides its time in the desert, calls to a season of birds, which in the desert is three, and knows that favourable winds will not find the words favourable. To love another and be loved by another one must love oneself. Nowhere is this more important than nowhere, wherein there is nothing but what is conjured by reflexive sunlight inflected through worry; the worry the Earth has and stops, right hand on left hand, left hand quivering. The lyric motion of swinging brains and their vehicles and their ghosts in an empty city convinced by its own naivete that it still exists, a squirming tableau of amateur movement against a window, the thread of white sound that stings the eyes and turns all this into a red bead of compacted skin flying by an invisible wire. . II. (Against The Tumourous Scrawl Of Stone Evil) The impossibility of creation's hand shaking under a used sketchbook, barren but for fermentation on the misdrawn face of memory, that kind yellow light that is unhappy for no other reason than that it is. The impossibility in its best behaviour is this light, this half-appearing parchment over the rooftops of a wintered city hiding in the trees. Here are Odysseys as in any other wilderness, tenderness under a moving, stomach-churned illumination that cannot be called light because it is invisible, the way they are who stand under it and discover more than mere planets when the hand is lifted and the birds are only birds again in the city in the forest. . III. (The Delusion Of Death) In orange grasses where the sun sits on a hill and vibrates, you are lying on your back and watching for shooting stars through the familiar arrhythmia of summer evenings, pointed at the sky like huge predatory violets. You are in an iris, rehearsing death for no reason other than practicality. A scientist will make statements about the achievements of their field with no consideration for things like a self or that their watches may be haunted, suggesting things that may no longer be true. You have tried to deny that anything is haunted and have met with abject shock in the field. The studied growing nature will be found continually inhabiting other skins like some deep-sea shellfish that crawls in abject black with no eyes unaware of anything but its own disembodied sensation, and it will still find that common sanity, that instinct at the core of instinct, pushing through all the little deaths whose sum is less than less than nothing; is nothing in the face of found light. . IIII. (Love In The Underground) The widowed saints in their brown messenger caps descend on the red glow of a High Mass turning in the guts of town, under the blue-grey arthritic streets, stretched stone, tortured mountains that once saw heaven, reaching now for their severed limbs buried deep in the quarries outside the eyes-shut cities, their many skeletons, their forgotten skin forced to vanish in the mortar and pestle of the ground's secret factory wherein immigrant choirs rehearse an original Genesis with an infinite number of dusty hands sewn together at the wrists. . V. (Red-Tide-Woman Of The Immortal Sickbed) Your neck rises up like a yawning Gibraltar of pure ash from the slow red tide of your dozen patchwork skirts and Indian blankets, gathered under your muscles and limbs like loam hiding in the shadows of great white cliffs, shaped generously by ice ages and steam-powered bodies floating half-drowned past the islands of the world. Red woman of the immortal sickbed, all your sense tied up in a knot above you, body changing shape to live under a word, name changing shape to live like a bird with a view of two separate sides of the same broken fence – you were once a solitary cloud of light-turned-liquid, the milk in far eastern mechanisms of jungle and the innocent passive warfare of language-on-language – a particle in the red tide of glacial identity, a gypsy-girl of motorbikes and waterfalls. Here you are eaten in huge grey cities whose eyes do not miss you, cities of albino pigeons and staring suited money-men who have never seen a girl. . VI. (Heaven Now) Infinite undeveloped photographs sitting in a darkroom. The firmament is a muddy wave of memory, the down-up view of great red cities in the sun. Old fortifications haunted by Siddhartha's mugged spectre. Heaven now is infinite and undeveloped – the raw real-estate of chaos converted under the flapping banner of good intention like the pagan villagers of pre-Christian Russia baptized en-mass, scurrying through a cold grey river under the eyes of an alien priest who waves his hands, throwing off scent of papyrus and sinister myrrh. Heaven now is the old gods in their spinning diagrams rolling like an avalanche of tumbleweed into the rushing crusade of a naturally occurring baptism – later a cold steel sky shot through with black like the John Hancock of sorrow writ into the leather of an old man's neck. . VII. (The Air Gathering Around My Home) It is a twisted ancestry sitting over the world; a dynasty of pure nuance; a reactive field and a passive field. It is jointed by friction and circles itself like a pack of old wolves. Hunger drives it out in twos and threes to stalk the dry places. Like all wolves the smell of fear-sweat turns it bristling, salivating, opening its ghost-eyes at you. Wherever it is, wherever you are, it is going that way. It has blue and yellow fingers and secret ways of navigating. Flashes of predatory genius and fits of calm. It is a parasite in the atmosphere, dragging infected winter behind it like an emaciated goat – furious – kicking in its last fevered moment.

***

Someone's vision shudders across my window, flickers foreground/background for a moment and then all the air gathers around my home. The trees stop swaying. The groan of the bending forest disembodies itself and stands like a column of violin-notes, whispers as through a flute, jams itself through a crack in the glass, whistles the dark folk-songs of the forest through a black web. The forest is old. It knows how to hide itself on the ground. Up here I see that it is too late. The Earth is marching on the cities of man. It left its home before we first drew breath from the unwilling sky. It felt us growing inside of it like a tumour. It has been left to wonder, why, if everything is perfect, this war with God's creatures? Why have I been chosen to bear these walking ghosts through the void of Your Frustration? So the storm is born away from men, over the oceans in great invisible disturbances. They are taught the love of earthly silence. They are shown the great blue mirror below, the perverse nature of visibility, the melancholy love of sleeping pale bodies drifting in outer space for the object of their violet dreams; that rock; that green thing where a single mind grew like an edible fungus from the first invisibility to where everything is seen at Once. . VIII. (Duende In A Dying World) In winter my leg creeks under me like a hidden corner of the love that Adrienne Rich kept forever in a room made of windowpanes in a white house at the bottom of the ocean. Sub-tidal groans and bending iron huffing their titanic conspiracy through busy waters as my lover lays beside me, her colour returning to her out of years that had been given up and now school around her cheeks to nibble at her delusions of death. Here there is no one shape but the minute sliding contours of renaissance paintings of fair-skinned women fading in collections under the hot sun of enterprise, its many sons shouldering past her, strong legs carrying them to her receding history, a point on the horizon that can never disappear but hides behind shuddering heat and calls like a bedroom lamp at the other end of a plane-ride or a tree in the desert. In winter my leg creeks under me like my lover's homemade voice in corporate air. . VIIII. (The Two Houses) In winter's house you are a spectre that brings candlelight and desire to illumine your white translucent face, the slanted plain of your shoulders, your mouth a tiny black waterfall in the distance falling closer in an aura of pink sun – holograms and negatives of the other house, the red and brown summers of paradise, old continents of voice roaring at each other with laughter, yawning stains of yellow sound – all moving under your half-invisibility like inductive words or insects hunting for life in the cellar. . X. (Man The Heavenly Body; Notes For A Novel) Man the windmill spins in cornfields and throws lightning back to heaven through metacognitive cloud cover and flocks of death-eating birds while the kingdom of the animals groans and reaches around him – shows him he is not one of anything but himself.

***

Man the electricity addict stalks every easy side-street, every house of great literacy, every pocket of unguarded creation to eat his ascension with bread and waterfalls.

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Man the executive power of the mind is pure observation tainted with the oil of centuries of successful excavation.

***

Man the heavenly body dictates gravity from a relative sphere into the compacted centre. . XI. (Plea To The Terrified) Your bright muscular head of fire and the flesh of Autumn lose cohesion in eternity. You sit like a statue of lunar stone, a holographic salad of humanity on a bed of blue waves, a naval unwinding hidden by shivering legs and knocked knees in the ghost of the stomach. If you are, as you say, a shadow of your brain, pretend as is your ken to stop swimming in the green branches of hypothetical nauseas and accept the fact that pain too is shadow. . XII. (The Hospital) Excess white rolls like smoke from the hospital's dozen eyes. It eats us again and again under sanguinous light, its senses full and useless, all our bodily deaths presided over by automatic liturgies – litanies of blood-glow from the ceilings, one vast abbreviation of life and a retelling that fades before it hits the eye. . XIII. (The Poor Man From The Bottom Up, Not Saying Much) “Two thousand years of absurd colour from a single animal's misfortune, and he the Inventor, Scientist, Magi, Buddha, giver of names and giver of shit. Two thousand years of prismatic evidence that lines converge eventually even when the source is pure and white and saw Detail rushing with the Urge into Reality, from the eros a thought has into the Present. The sight of this could be called God, but that would not be saying much.” he said. . XIV. (Words Of The Sun To The Cold, Lit Earth) Sun is a teacher with the room of midnight lying autochthonic around its liquid flesh and babbling bone. Sun opens its west wing to the cries of possibility rolling somewhere in the field, its east wing to the study of history. The orange cities ask their questions about men and the fairytales of outer-space. Sun is strong and reins-in the prismatic truth to preach white wisdom from what appears at first a trajectory, then a central fixture, and later another path. The taut mind rests for centuries in each state, learns the diagrams, the zazen of epektatis, and moves again – destiny from destiny – forgetting. The orange wounds ask Sun their questions. Sun answers, “Men under will shall know deception the way they know the darkness of their own eye. They will pace around irregular furniture, and one will say, 'This is good!, an act of creation!, the Truth!'” Sun turns like a smiling father from the grave of its child to receding cries of “Wait! Tell us now of photosynthesis! Tell us now of the prophecy that ends us! Tell us! Tell us now...!” . XV. (Confession Of A Lonely Great Lakes Sailor) “Madness is a viscous island on the river of ignorance, self-sustaining and admirable like racist war veterans, admirable because when I am on the river in my small boat I feel eerie, as though alone despite the cormorants and the vein-surge of the current carrying my weight, admirable because I have thought myself holy, and have become ignorant, and have thought myself ignorant and have stayed that way, and have visited the quicksand madness and have thrashed there and have become used to breathing through cracks no bigger and no more poetic than a mustard seed.”

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“Theoretically they might have despised the land of Just Add Hot Water And Serve, but in practice they loved the slogans. Readymade cheap poetry, the scraps of advertising copy, properly mounted in a poem, could be made to look expensive, in just the way that Picasso could mount a scrap of newspaper in a collage and make it look as interesting as a pot carried by a slave girl on a Pompeian wall—ephemerality perpetuated.” – Clive James, Product Placement in Modern Poetry

Product placement in poetry goes back to, who knows, Byron drops the name of a cartwheel-maker, and Beowulf’s chain mail shirt is the product of Weland the smith-god (it really is a Hattori Hanzo sword!). But Clive James’ essay in Poetry Magazine about product placement in modern poetry is really about the slogans and catchy/tacky/classy brand names making their way into the modern classics like Cummings, Auden, Frederick Seidel and more. The importance of brand names in modern poetry is the way they sound and the way they fit into a poem’s locomotion, more than the fetish-value of god-made chain mail (although James’ essay does take a look at luxury product name-dropping).

Clives James is talking about product placement in an older world. For some reason there’s still a small question about whether or not product placement is something that should find its way into poetry, and more or less he validates commercial products’ appearance where the brand is subservient to poetry. The brand name fits into the metre, or, the loose modern metre named “rhythm.” From the larger quote above: “Readymade cheap poetry, the scraps of advertising copy, properly mounted in a poem, could be made to look expensive.” But big brands aren’t cheap anymore. A complex of kitschy old-time ads, chic new television, online and before-the-movie-trailers ad campaigns, and product placement in literature and cinema make up a brand. Really, what can sum up Coca-Cola like the Coca-Cola design? Nothing puts together polar bears, rosy-cheeked Santa Claus, internationality, and twentieth-centuryness like Coca-Cola itself (re: prominence in Blade Runner, Coca-Cola is not just THE drink of the 20th century, but the drink of the 20th century’s future too). Brands like Coca-Cola are symbols of themselves, their much bigger selves, the accumulation of intentional and unintentional associations. They are as big as Oedipus and roses.

We see much of the world in brands. During any one day you’ll see hundreds of them, and it would only be wilful blindness that barred them absolutely from poetry – not to say they’re essential, but many attempts at presenting the world with any precision will at some point have to come to terms with brands and logos in one way or another. Which leads me to a point about the disparity between what poets see and what they actually put down, and what they put down is often what they want to see. What other poets have seen, because they’ve been trained by their reading to see them.

James makes note of the absence of skyscrapers in Pound’s poetry, even when the Chrysler Building appears in Auden in 1939, and the fact that Tennyson took the train: “(Tennyson traveled frequently by train but he never mentioned it in a poem: perhaps the thought of the puffing locomotive that took him to see the Queen might have disturbed the landscape of the Idylls of the King.)”

He goes on about how moderns opened up poetry to the language of things that filled contemporary reality: skyscrapers, commercial products with brand names, advertisement slogans, trains and airplanes. A lot of work has been done introducing brands, television, popular music into poetry (even if it hasn’t become a particularly dominant trend – somehow grandmothers’ gardens and Nebraska farms are still abundant, I’m lookin’ at you, Ted Kooser & “American Life in Poetry”). Maybe I don’t read enough, but I’ve had a harder time finding work that lets in the vocabulary of iCulture without getting shticky or letting it take over the poem.

What does Eunoia do? Prove vowels have a personality.

Sure, Bok’s book is great, etc. etc. with the accolades, but for a long time now poets (also of the novelist, playwright, and screenwriter varieties) have let copywriters and the political-media hold the reigns of the English language. Hollywood doesn’t even come up with anything catchy any more. By coining more terms than even the obscurest philosophers and academics and, I won’t say controlling, but strongly influencing the way we use the rest of the language, copywriters and pundits are shaping our language in really unstoppable ways. Poetry is not going to change that, but with a few exceptions, poetry seems to have crawled into a Slovenian cave where language barely evolves due to isolation, except where it’s mutated beyond meaning. And streams of word that mean very little in conjunction with each other, placed there for the sound of their crash and flow, are only experiments – building blocks of knowledge. Something must be built with them.

- The Editor

One account extraordinarily effective truer vision of one account the sequence of his direction not really he just declared it to purify the world defiled and hopeless a certain superficial brilliance the combination can be persuasive many people are missing from within project for realizing apocalyptic orientation acute fever media conduit imagination and umbilical outer reality offer services to the human remnant Lifton: ever since World War Two the Japanese media have thrived on apocalyptic fantasy continents aflame with big budget devastation knock them out with melting cities humans crumbling like bread and WMD's drop in the death remixes it remains to be seen how much pain the jittery blur of the aged palsied body politic can absorb everything is forgiven by being forgotten dance to this unutterable trip-hop to be played at maximum volume trance drone lie down and inhale a tingling in the extremities a spike behind the eyelids agony blushes an interruption of the vagus nerve the grandeur of Kamikuishiki immortality power lockstep authoritarianism oxygen deprivation Shoko Asahara do you feel you live in a corrupt social situation? (funny and they publish such lovely bondage magazines) why spend time shopping when you could be meditating? that's the deal: total annihilation of self rewarded by shared assumption of the glory mode cannonade the sky is marred the paradox of Shoko Asahara his corruption his spiritual achievement induce visions of formlessness practice to poison human evolution a pyramid built on shattered lives of mass destruction and ultimate weapons of perfect salvation does our septic anticulture irredeemably corrupt everything it touches? the bacillus is contagious in the extreme it contains the seeds of its own sterilization societal stain coupled and cleansed with nerve gas aria crescendo that's extra ordinary descriptions struck fallen apart in the dissection theater the remnants of the Sakamotos scream exhaust indictments bizarre use of color superfast editing and extreme camera angles it hurts a refrigeration of the mind the quality the benevolent clarity of life like a distilled spirit it is swallowed and it grips the recipient there to commence its slow burn down through pain and nausea it must be consumed space battleship Yamato wave motion gun nova right leak into the immediate press environment it's a strange statistic captain avatar ambivalent deities Aum was eclectic Aum Shinrikyo 20 March 1995 nerve gas released in five Tokyo subway stations 11 killed 5500 injured this is no drill climb Mount Niitaka the building in the foreground the leap from the boundary of the medium engendered in life a representation of itself orbis quartius (and back again reverberating Kasumigaseki network video game virtual Tokyo subway system players get ten points for every death and one point for every injury Asahi Shimbun August 1995) cut the die and stamp the metal sheet economic boom Shainberg: a disturbing reminder that no vision is independent of the medium/mind in which it takes root the war ended on Gautama's birthday.

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- Jason Price Everett

Jason Price Everett was born in Orlando, Florida in 1972. He was educated at Lafayette College, Cornell University and the University of Paris. He has held twenty-seven different positions of employment to date, one of the more recent being that of English professor at a university in Xian, China. His first book, Unfictions, was released by 8th House Publishing in 2009. His collection Hypodrome: Selected Poems 1990-2010 will be forthcoming from 8th House in the fall of 2011. His work has appeared over the years in such diverse publications as Si Senor, Hubris, CRIT Journal, The Mad Hatters’ Review, BITEmagazine, Writers Notes Magazine, Farmhouse Magazine, The Quarterly Review, The Prague Literary Review, City Writers Review, Riverbabble, The Maynard, Underground Voices, BLATT, Brand, The Alchemy Review, Carcinogenic Poetry, hardbrackets, Interrupting Infinity/Third Party Poetry, KGB Bar Lit Magazine, Ronin, Revue Mètropolitaine, CV2 and the Show Thieves Anthology of Contemporary Montreal Poetry. He currently lives in Montreal.

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"Jason Price Everett's UNFICTIONS is a superb first novel. It reminded me of J.G.Ballard at his best....He has a poet's sense of language and a painter's sense of scene, offering a clear-eyed interpretation of today's realities....I can thoroughly recommend it." -- MICHAEL MOORCOCK, author of Breakfast in the Ruins.

In July it’s ugly.     There are no fountains,     statues, libraries, nooks oozing     schöne Geschichte -     “No you cannot have any more     fucking meat, you pair of louts!”       Convinced you can arrange     fool’s gold with tinfoil in a way       that directs bank computer frequencies             into your third eye,         Wally might be the most sane     person that’s on the streets.       “Get out! Get out! Cable-babies,     candy snatching speed-whores!” . Boredom persists,     twisting in my lyrical soul      like a lava lamp made of ink and shadows.     I will take your money.           You’ll still thirst for fulfillment.     A chord of surprise will play.     We’re both righteous from our betrayed         boy-hood expectations.       There needs to be more road-work on the soul,     septic, etc.- the works - before life can prosper.         “This song reminds me of my ex.         We spent the whole winter         fucked on K listening to it.”     Still, purgatory is air-conditioned.

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CONDENSARE—

an eye for detail and not so much for sublimity

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Theo-linguistic incursion,

an economical imitation.

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Imported beauty,

Nelligan decades behind,

Victorian mansards and Manhattan brownstone,

neo-imperial columns

on Hesperidean lazuli.

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Nakedness, like a buffet spread

for a crowd too hungry for the hecatombs

on purview, scanned and archived

with spit and a dram of pre-come

            chucked on the eternal youth.

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“Juggl’em like a coupla golf balls, that’s it,

watch the teeth, honeydew, and aim for chica’s eyebrow.”

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Hark! The larks and sparrows herald the eastern king.

He burns, and there are forest fires beyond Parsi

in the Ganges-bound tropics, whence dawns the rosy-reach

on star-fallen tears, on the buds and half-blooms.

A fair dawn in the court of the Thracian king:

the daughters of Dalmatia bring unmixed wine

and pomegranates, treading light as minstrel’s fingers.

There came Adonis, bronzed by the Aegean glitter,

in the robe of his grassy bed, that he wore in her arms,

love-shot Aphrodite. Mid-morning drunk, the king bellowed,

“We will have dancing!”

                                    So Adonis danced

while the daughters of Dalmatia groped and tugged,

and the king’s soldiers sculpted shoulder and thigh,

Adonis cried not half so hard as the Cytherean.

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Sacred murkurial spill and no shimmer,

            “That’s it, that’s the money.”

No tears, no awe, no taste,

            landing on an outstretched tongue,

sticking to guilty fingers

            and secreted away.

Cynthia’s open lips

            catching the comet-trail.

He came in unison,

            singing, singing, houri-breath.

Fountains spume on the sand,

            jubilant, cupped hands,

mouths, quaking for caresses.

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The economic value of poetry is nil.

Poetry is a luxury product.

You do not pay for poetry, you pay for packaging.

The best lines of poetry will survive even the worst packaging.

The avant-garde is a CON.

The traditional is an unproductive matricidal retreat to the womb and makes Classics boring.

Conceptualism is LAZY. No one cares about your flighty rehashed ideas. You are not a snow flake you are not precious and we don’t even like precious.

There is ONE imperative: LANGUAGE must be capable of TRUTH

which requires maintenance and evolution.

We may or may not accept responsibility for the ONE imperative.

Government art funding sustains substandard production.

Demands for gov’t art funding are as status quo as home reno tax credits.

We are propagandists.

The AD is beauty and the product is CRAP.

Political poetry is the worst kind of sloganeering. Apolitical poetry is IRRELEVANT.

The future is over and the right to dream has expired.

The Editor