The House That Zelmo Built

“The Night Was Dark and Cold As Ice I Met That Stranger From Far Beyond My Dreams Staring Into Those Eyes I Was Blinded By a Light Paralysed By The Power I Fell Down On My Knees…” ~ ‘The Awakening’ – Narnia The rain pelted my face and body, and drove a chill deep within my bones, so that I opened my eyes expecting to see bitter clouds above me, but instead I saw nothing but pitch blackness. It felt as though I were lying upon a slab of sharp and uneven rock. I sat up gingerly, my body feeling every ache and pain of exertion, as though I had been lying there for a long period of time. I strained my eyes in a vain attempt to gather my surroundings, but nothing was visible to me. All that I could perceive was the torrential rain and the bitter cold. A steady current of wind flowed upon the nocturnal air, seemingly unfettered by any obstruction, so that the falling rain pelted my body from a sharp angle. I rolled on to my hands and knees, feeling the cold and wet rock beneath me, and I slowly crawled forward through the darkness, completely blind to my immediate surroundings. In a short time I grew fearful, disorientation having its way with my panic-stricken mind. I tried to think but found that I could not. Words could not come to mind; names, faces, anything that my mind could grasp upon to anchor my thoughts and calm my nerves simply could not be comprehended. In a panic, I crawled faster, hoping to get away from the chilling wind and rain, until suddenly it was as though the very earth seemed to drop out beneath me. I felt my hands fall upon nothing, and I fell forward, landing hard upon my chest, the wind getting knocked out of me, my arms dangling beneath me in empty space. I felt my body slipping forward into the abyss, and I scrambled frantically to find something to grab hold of; anything to keep me from falling over what was apparently a cliff. I did not even have time to wonder how far down into the abyss that the cliff face stretched, and even if I had wondered at it, it would have been impossible to tell in the darkness. As I fell over the cliff, my left hand bumped an outcropping of stone. Reflexively, I grabbed it just as my legs dropped out from under me, and I immediately found myself dangling over the abyss. My grip on the outcropping of stone was rapidly slipping, and I found my heart racing with fear. I struggled to find a footing beneath me, but my feet bumped upon crude and jagged stone, not finding a foothold. Desperately, I reached above the outcropping and grasped an uneven edging of stone just beyond it. I pulled myself up slowly and weakly, as I felt the strength being punched out of my arms by the driving wind and rain. The stone was slippery beneath my fingers, and I was barely able to hang on, but I found myself slowly pulling myself up and out of the emptiness that lied below the cliff, until finally I collapsed upon the stony earth in a heap of exhaustion. I don’t know how long I laid there in the damp wetness of the rain, nor did I have any fathoming of where or when I was. All I could feel was the intense relief of narrowly avoiding what could have been my own death, and the chill that the wind and rain sent through my body. But I had apparently drifted off into a light sleep, because I was immediately startled back into consciousness by a bright flash of lightning followed by a loud roar of thunder; it felt as though the lightning struck directly above me. I sat bolt upright, my right foot hanging off over the precipice that I had pulled myself out of only what seemed like eons before. Paranoia struck me then, and I crawled backwards away from the cliff that seemed as though it were a yawning mouth threatening to take me in and swallow me whole. And the whole time, no words were formulated in my mind; I simply could not think. My mind drew an utter blank. I was aware only of myself and my immediate surroundings. I did not even know to call it rain or wind. I knew only what it was doing to me, and that my body did not like it. And then there came a noise on the wind. A light, chattering noise, which rose and fell in pitch, almost sing-song in its manner. Then it rose again to an almost maniacal degree, and it seemed to awaken an old and distant, timeless memory inside my head, until I realized what that noise was without even knowing the word to describe it. Laughter. A cackling, cacophony of mirth, its point of origin unknown. It was upon the wind, above the rain, as though it were from the dark sky itself. I slowly got to my feet and looked around me, but all was still unknown to me in the pitch black of night. I was fearful of the nearby cliff, and thusly I did not walk in any direction right away. But then soon after I stood up, another flash of lightning struck off in the distance, and for a brief second I could see the monstrous mountain that I stood upon, its gigantic mass towering above me to my right. To my left was absolute nothing. Then darkness once again. A short moment later, thunder crackled around me and vibrated through to my very bones. My bearings somewhat grasped, I moved forward slowly, mindful of the cliff immediately to my left, not knowing where I was going or what I was planning on doing. Only that I had to get to some form of shelter, as my body was now beginning to shiver from the cold wind and rain uncontrollably, my knees buckling under the weight of my frigid nerves and spasming muscles. As I walked along the mountainside, lightning flashed again, this time above me and to my left. And upon looking in that direction I could see through the flash of light, that the sky almost appeared to stretch downward below where the earth should be; it was as though the mountain hung upon nothing. I was at an almost impossible height! And then the thunder crashed, filling my ears with maddening decibels. And all the while, above the sounds of wind and rain and thunder, there was that maniacal laughter, and the even more dreadful realization that the laughter in question was directed solely at me. As I continued to shuffle slowly across the face of the mountain, I had begun to feel a creeping sensation that I was being watched from somewhere close by; a pair of eyes following my every move through the darkness of the night. I could almost imagine a pair of glowing snake eyes, their gaze piercing through the nocturnal air and spying my every move, my every thought, my every emotion. To the point where my body seemed to almost feel weighted down by the presence of this gaze upon me. The driving rain created a smattering of puddles of water beneath my feet, and the turf and rock became quite slippery as a result. In the darkness I stumbled, and then my right foot stepped hard upon a sharp and jagged stone. A stabbing pain shot up my right leg from the bottom of my foot like white lightning, and with an agonizing cry I fell forward. For a split-second I panicked, believing that the cliff was right in front of me and that I was once more falling over the edge of it and into the vast unknown below the mountain. But then my knees struck hard and jagged stone as I landed face-first upon loose rocks and a solid surface of unforgiving stone. I laid there for an indeterminate amount of time, feeling the sharp pain of sudden impact ebbing through my body with every pulse of my heart. After a short while, the falling rain began to feel good upon my naked and bleeding body, almost to the point where I did not want to move from that spot. But then a light and tittering laughter from somewhere very close by alerted me from my brief rest. I stood up quickly, ignoring the screaming of exposed nerves in my injured foot and knees, and strained my eyes to find the source of that laughter in the darkness. It appeared to be coming from a location slightly above me and to my right, but the darkness concealed the owner of that laughter from view. During my entire recent ordeal, the lightning of the storm continued to flash; the thunder spawned by that lightning continued to crash. And then it slowly donned upon me that a figure was standing upon a rather large boulder directly in front and above me. The figure at once became the silhouette of a man upon the face of the cliff rising up the side of the mountain behind him, as another flash of lightning illuminated our surroundings. The man stood there; completely still save for the maniacal guffaws of laughter that erupted from his mouth, his arms crossed in front of him, his face obscured from view by the darkness. He wore dark clothing of some kind, though any detail was lost in the night, and all the while I could feel those terrible eyes of his upon me. It felt as though this man knew more about me than I did myself. And then in the darkness, the man spoke. But it was in a language that I could not comprehend. Syllables were thrust upon the night air between us, but to no avail. The figure said something else unknown to me, and then he was silent. For a long and awkward moment afterward, we seemed to stare at each other, almost in anticipation. And then the man jumped down from the boulder and descended the short incline until he was almost directly in front of me. Fearing this mysterious stranger, I backed away from him slowly. But still he came forward, until I was standing face to face with this dark and ominous person. His face was still a shadow to me, and I could smell what could only be described as eons upon his breath. Whatever he was, he knew not the limitations of age. And then I saw those terrible eyes in the darkness once again, only this time with my own naked eyes instead of in my mind like before. Those great, terrible, and glowing snake eyes. They were unblinking, uncaring, and seemingly without any semblance of neither compassion nor hostility. And their gaze pierced directly into mine, shattering my will yet enthralling my vision so that I could look only at them. My knees buckled and I fell forward, but before I could slump to the ground, the man caught me in his arms. And I could feel an unimaginable power behind those arms as they lifted me back up onto my feet with seemingly no effort at all. The man steadied me on my feet, and gripped both of my shoulders hard. Then his words came to me again in that incomprehensible language of his, but as he spoke there came to me bits and pieces of understanding of his words. Syllables came together to form vowels. Vowels tied together with other vowels to form meaning. Meaning became understanding. And understanding became, “For the last time, listen to me, you stupid fuck! Do you know who you are yet?” I looked at the man incredulously as his face became suddenly visible to me, a flash of lightning making this possible, and I saw the face of a young man, though his terrible eyes carried with them a wisdom beyond his visible years. The man looked at me and appeared to be visibly angry as he said, “Hey asshole! Hello-o-o-o! Anybody home?” The man tapped my forehead, “Earth to dipshit! Are you there? C’mon now! Say something!” Obediently, I stammered something unintelligible. The man rolled his eyes and suddenly slapped me, causing me to cry out. “For Christ’s sakes, of all the fucking people that have to show up on this cocksucking mountain, I have to get a fucking retard!” Then a thousand words seemed to jumble my mind all at once. I stammered some more before finally uttering the words, “Where am I?” “It’s about time, numb nuts,” said the man, “I was afraid that I was gonna have to deal with some kind of Helen Keller reject.” The man took his hands off of my shoulders, and I became suddenly aware that his grip had hurt me. I crossed my arms, rubbed both of my shoulders, and whispered, “Pain. You hurt me.” The man frowned, seemingly with frustration, and blurted, “I’m gonna hurt a lot more than that if you don’t come to your senses, dude.” “Who are you, “ I asked, “Where am I?” The man laughed again, and the laughter that I had heard at what seemed like a thousand years ago was suddenly directly in front of me, and it sent chills down my very spine. “Where you are, “ the man chuckled, “Is a little hard to explain. Who I am, however, is the easy part. Call me Zelmo, sweetheart. Everybody does.” Zelmo suddenly shoved me hard, and I fell backwards and to the ground in a heap. I cried out, startled, as he walked up to me slowly, standing above me with a look in his eyes as though he were about ready to attack me. “Who I am is not the issue, though. Who you are is the reason why I am here.” Before I could respond, Zelmo reached down, grabbed me by the neck, and pulled me up as though I were as light as a feather, until I was nose-to-nose with him. In the split second before he spoke again, I saw deep inside the vertical slit pupils of his snake eyes, what appeared to be countless galaxies and nebulae floating amidst a black ether of infinite nothingness; lost in that moment of hypnotic wonderment, I barely heard him as he continued, “You are a part of me. A part of me that I despise with so much FUCKING rancor! I have lived outside of Time, outside of that simple little plane of decaying existence that you call home, your physical universe,“ that last part Zelmo sputtered with obvious disgust, as though the very word ‘physical’ were somehow blasphemous to him, “Away from the trappings of molecular and sub-atomic decay, I have lived. Until finally here you came to be, anchoring me down in this near-reality. Almost flesh; almost…physical.” Zelmo then flung me away as if I were nothing to him. I crashed to the wet earth once more in a clumsy heap, as he turned and walked away from me a short distance. My body hurt with fresh bruises, I winced with pain with every exertion as I slowly got to my feet. Zelmo, with his back turned toward me, chuckled with what sounded like cynical disbelief, before turning slowly to face me again and declaring, “The pain you feel is not genuine. It is not even pain at all. Your mind imagines it because it believes that it must feel pain because of the things that I have done to you so far. In truth, you are not really here at all. This place,” Zelmo gestured with his hand at the mountainside and dark night above, and the random flashes of lightning that spottily illuminated our conversation, “Does not exist in any form of reality save for the one that your mind has created for itself. This mountain is simply your mind’s attempt to establish an anchor of authenticity upon the synthetic world that it has shaped to appease its own primitive limitations. It is your Mount Ego, so to speak. The driving rain is to provide a sense of constant sensation upon your imagined physical body; the lightning is to keep your senses alert and focused; the clouds, quite simply, must exist to provide a reason for the rain and lightning. Notice the crude simplicity of it all?” “And as for me,” spoke Zelmo, as he stepped toward me with an impossible grace of foot, “I am stranded here in this pathetic little prison that your mind has created for the both of us. I - who has seen the countless stars and nebulae; who has been beyond the very limitations of what your kind call matter – am kept here with you, anchored down by our own humanity. I am you…and the irony in that is that you don’t even know who you are yet!” At this, Zelmo raised his head back and laughed heartily, that same maniacal laugh that I had heard from afar, now up close and deafening. It was enough to drive me mad. “Who am I,” I finally asked. “You are nobody,” said Zelmo. “Insignificant to all the magnificence that exists in relation to you. In one of Mankind’s many planes of existence, you are known as Roger. So ‘Roger’ is what I shall call you.” “But why is…why is this…? Why,” I gestured at our surroundings, “Why am I here? Why are we here?” Zelmo laughed again, a prolonged guffaw this time, slapping his knee with obvious hilarity, “Ahhh, yes! The timeless question that Mankind has asked, must ask, and will always ask until His own oblivion in the far future! ‘Why’?” Zelmo raised his hands to the violent sky and screamed, “WHY?!” Then, still giggling, he stepped toward me and placed both hands upon my shoulders, this time gently, and declared, “Why we are here is simple. Your physical body has died. Your mind has moved onward, but I forbid it to go any further…because I am not finished with it. Yours was always my link between the material world and the worlds beyond this shadowy one that we are currently in. This place…” he looked upward and around us, then directly into my eyes, “Is not even real. It is the place between where you live physically and live forever after mentally where time has neither purpose nor meaning. Time does not exist here either, but this place has neither cause nor consequence. It is, for the lack of a better word, irrelevant. A non-descript means to an overall end…a backwoods country road in the middle of nowhere, as you rush to meet your important destination…a recreational fuck on the road to your one true love…catch my drift?” I tried to comprehend his words, but disorientation still kept me from understanding. And the look in my eyes must have told Zelmo thus, for he had turned away and began to climb the steep walk up the mountainside. Without turning around, Zelmo yelled over the wind and rain, “Follow! This is not the place to carry on like two dumbasses at a social gathering. In order to extract your lesson from me, we must get out of this bullshit storm that your mind has created. There will be no distractions!” And as Zelmo continued to climb, I held back, reluctant to follow. I thought about running away from him, but where would I run to? How could I escape and hide when I did not even know where I was to begin with? Then memory of our conversation echoed in my brain; Zelmo said that I was dead. But how could that be, when I could look down at my hands and feel the raindrops falling upon them? When I could feel the water dripping into my eyes, so that I must wipe the water from them in order to see clearly? Can the dead still feel, sense, and perceive? As if to answer my question, Zelmo hollered down from the rocks above, “Hurry your fucking ass, before I climb back down there and kick it!” With questions still lingering and the only answers to them apparently not available anywhere else but from the man yelling down at me, I reluctantly began the long and arduous climb up the mountainside and after him. Following myself, apparently. The foul weather seemed to intensify the further that we climbed, to the point where the torrent had nearly blinded me. Bare, cold rock bit into my hands and knees as I struggled forever upward into the violent and darkened sky. The flashes of lightning grew ever more frequent, and a sudden blast of wind nearly pulled me away from the rocks that I clung to so desperately. I found a small cleft between two boulders that I could not even see and hid there, listening to the harsh wind as it buffeted the mountainside. Carefully, I peered over the lip of the cleft, scanning up the side of the mountain for any sign of Zelmo, but he had disappeared within the turmoil. Exhausted, I huddled back down inside the cleft, though it offered no shelter from the pouring rain, it at least kept the wind off my back. I stayed there for what seemed like hours before I began to feel a strange pang of emptiness inside me. This feeling was alien to me and my newly-found senses, until some long forgotten memory awakened within me and told me what it was: loneliness. Still huddled there within the cleft, I looked directly behind me at the darkness of the sky that was level to my position upon the mountainside. Lightning and thunder continued to wage their war among the clouds far off into the distance. Below them lay complete darkness and an unfathomable sea of nothing. It was almost like witnessing the wakening dawn of time. As my loneliness fell upon me with an even greater weight than before, it struck a deepening panic within me as Zelmo’s words to me earlier suddenly rang true; I was all alone in this world. All alone but for one other being. I climbed up out of the cleft between the boulders, immediately attacked by the gale, and lay flat against the stony earth and edged my way slowly up the mountain once again, this time at a slithering pace. The winds continually threatened to pick up my body and cast it upward and outward into the cold and rainy blackness, but I held my body tight against the rocks, pulling myself ever so slowly and agonizingly upward. The wind laughed at me. The thunder and lightning cursed at me. The rain punished me. My fingers were bleeding, the fingernails mashed and broken from the sharp and jagged stones that I grasped. I wept as I climbed. An eternity passed it seemed, until I lay upon the ground defeated and unmoving, the cold rock pressing hard against my cheek as I sprawled myself out upon the earth. Until I realized that the wind had died a little and the rain had subsided. I had closed my eyes and accepted defeat long before, and slowly I opened them to witness the calming storm. In agonizing and almost unspeakable pain, I raised myself to a sitting position and spied at my surroundings. The wind still howled around me, but it seemed to be blowing in an extremely wide arc, as if I had somehow entered some invisible dome that refused to allow it access. Lightning flashed once again, and I could see the rain flying horizontal behind me, almost like a wall of watery knives beckoning me to come back to it so that it could have its way with my body once more. In wonderment, I looked ahead at what lay before me. There was a soft yellow glow, ever so faint, just above the rim of the ridge above and ahead of me. It provided just enough light to see that the ascent had grown shallow somewhat. I raised myself slowly to a standing position and attempted to walk forward toward that light, but stumbled and fell upon my face in a heap of agony. I crawled forward then on my forearms and knees. I could see in that faint light that my hands were nearly ruined, as small flaps of bloody skin hung off of the tips of my fingers. My bare knees were beyond pain, and bleeding freely. I attempted to regain my feet, tottered briefly, and managed to stay afoot. Walking slowly forward amidst the rocks and boulders, I followed that light further up the mountain, and the further I walked the lesser the incline became, until the terrain was almost level. Ahead of me, though it was impossible to tell the distance in the light, there was what seemed to be a wall of misshapen boulders, strewn this way and that, forming what almost appeared to be a rampart upon the mountainside. And as I walked forward, a shaft of the same yellow light seemed to slowly cut its way down the side of the wall of boulders, until I saw that it was a fissure between the giant stones that formed a natural pathway between them. I limped toward it, a strange eagerness welling up inside me as I found myself desiring to see what lied beyond that pathway. It wasn’t long before I was inside the fissure of rock, the ground uneven and jagged, and the boulders standing high and narrow on both sides of me. The yellow light was brighter still, yet remained a warm and soothing glow, until I walked out into a vast open space beyond the fissure, and saw that I was within a gigantic ring of boulders. I knew not how to measure neither height nor distance, but they thrust upward toward the black sky and looked as though one would have to fall from atop the highest of them at a great height before one would reach the earth beneath in a shattering heap. I looked ahead near the center of the giant ring, where the light originated from. A fair distance away, I could see a figure sitting there in front of the source of light; a small shadow amidst the soft yellow glare. I edged my way warily toward the light, and as I came upon the figure that sat with its back toward me, I saw that it was a hooded figure of what appeared to be a man. In front of him was a small glowing thing; where the light originated from. I walked quietly around and to the right side of the hooded man, making a wide berth around him and the thing. The hooded man, dressed in black, seemed not to notice me and appeared to be staring intently at the small glowing object in front of him. I stopped and looked at the thing and smiled when I realized what it was; a single, solitary flower. “It fucking took you long enough,” the hooded man said suddenly, “I’m surprised that you weren’t late to your own fucking funeral.” I recognized the owner of the voice immediately, as Zelmo raised his right hand to me before pointing at the ground directly across from him and the glowing flower. “Sit,” said Zelmo. I limped toward the spot that Zelmo commanded me to sit and obliged him, grunting slowly as I rested. In that warm, yellow light, I felt the pain in my body slowly seem to dim. I looked at my mangled hands, marveling at the wounds, and yet somehow feeling no pain in them. I looked over at Zelmo, who was a dark figure shrouded by the black cloak that he wore, invisible save for the two glowering snake eyes that appeared from beneath the hood that he wore over his head. His eyes seemed fixated upon the flower, and I found my eyes drawn to it as well. As I looked closer, I saw that small motes of glowing yellow dust rose up out of its red petals and disappeared into the air above it like floating embers out of a fire. The flower sprouted up out of a small mound of soil beneath its glowing green stem; a color that seemed greener than green could possibly ever be. And that’s when I noticed the vibrancy of the flower’s radiance; its redness was of an impossible red, and the yellow light that emanated from the stamens within the disc was like that of a thousand little suns. It beckoned upward at the blackened sky in full bloom, as though it almost wished to fill the sky with the radiant body of light that it possessed. It was then that Zelmo suddenly recited: The rose is a rose And was always a rose. But now the theory goes That the apple’s a rose, And the pear is, And so’s the plum, I suppose. The dear only knows What will next prove a rose. You, of course, are a rose But were always a rose. “That’s Robert Frost, you know. Good poet, but just a tad on the queer side, if you ask me,” Zelmo concluded. I did not answer, instead looking onward, enthralled by the flower’s seemingly infinite beauty. Zelmo, in black, stared at it as well. Though what his thoughts were, I neither knew nor cared to know. There was a fragrance in the air that seemed to tingle my nose and sent a warmth up my nostrils that soothed my senses to the point where I began to feel drowsy. The rose seemed to send vibrations through the earth around it that sent a warm buzz of euphoria up into my very bones. I couldn’t have moved away from it even if I had wanted to; the feeling was that serene. “What a wondrous thing it is, to gaze upon the Universe, isn’t it,” Zelmo asked me, his voice still powerful and booming. Still I did not answer, though Zelmo continued on, “All things that exist both here and beyond are but of one universal constant. Relativity is the synonym that resonates from measurements of distance and time. A drop of water into the ocean will ultimately cause a tidal wave halfway around the world. The moth wings that beat upon the air along the plains of Africa will ultimately cause hurricane winds in the Caribbean Sea. The baby borne of two loving and devoted parents in Vienna, Austria ultimately grew into the monster that Adolf Hitler had become. Energy itself is in a constant state of movement, always changing, ever-morphing; so that it never ends. As long as there is the presence of particles and/or anti-particles colliding with each other or moving through space, you will have energy. Hence, the Energy Constant.” “Look closer at the disc of the rose,” Zelmo continued, “Tell me what you see.” I did as he said and gazed deep into the yellow light that almost seemed to flow like water upwards and out of the depths of the rose. For a while I saw nothing but that same glorious yellow glare, but then after a while I began to fancy that I could see what appeared to be thousands of tiny stars and galaxies floating along the stamens, almost as though they were rotating ever so slowly around the inside of the disc. “Behold,” Zelmo whispered, “Your Universe.” They were indeed galaxies…and stars…and nebulae…and all the wonders of the cosmos, trapped inside a little rose that was more than merely a simple rose. An awestruck silence enveloped me. I could not even attempt to think or feel. I was at the core of all things; the very center of the Universe. It took all my will to dare a question, in a nearly voiceless whisper, “What is it?” Zelmo chuckled softly before replying, “It is what all men desire most out of their futile and temporary lives. It is the answer to all questions. The secrets of all things, laid bare and naked against the empty sky for all to see, though you and I are the only ones that are present to see it. But for you, it is only what your mind can comprehend. Your mind cannot possibly fathom what it truly sees, so long as your Humanity remains. I see it for what it truly is, and it is not that precious little flower that you see with your own eyes. Its true form cannot possibly be explained to such a puny, pathetically human mind as your own. You simply do not possess the immortality to perceive it.” Looking on in wonderment, I finally whispered, “I see galaxies…” “You see the heart of the Universe, Roger, “said Zelmo. “You see the symbol of all Existence in the closest thing that your mind could comprehend for it. It is much more fragile than that rose you see. It is actually quite amazing at how close the entire Universe is to chaos and disarray.” I looked up at him in bewilderment and asked, “It balances everything?” Zelmo looked up also, startled, then chuckled and replied, “Yes! It does. Goddamn, negro. You’re a bright motherfucker!” “Then why is it here in this place, if this mountain and everything around it is supposedly inside my head?” “Okay,” said Zelmo with a frown in his voice, “Now you’re starting to get stupid again. This isn’t your head, you dumbass. You’re dead, remember? This is all simply what your mind perceives for itself; it’s seeing what lies beyond it, but can only interpret it to you in your own self-prohibiting, primitive human terms. While your mind lives, it must maintain its own sanity, so it finds itself a world to live in and things to look at, because without anything to perceive, it would degenerate into insanity. Your mind can live without a body, but it cannot live without some sense of logic and order to maintain itself and its functions.” I tried to comprehend all that Zelmo was saying, but after a short while I simply shook my head and told him, “I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand how I can be here and not here at the same time.” “Of course you can’t,” said Zelmo, “You’re still human. You’re still a part of that mortal coil even though you’re no longer actually physically living within it. But,” and he stood up as he said this, “That will all change over time…HA! HA! HA!” Zelmo leaned back and guffawed, with both fists on the hips of his black cloak, “What am I saying? ‘Time’? There is no time here! No real time, anyway. Only the imagined time that your mind keeps fooling itself into believing actually exists.” Then without a word, Zelmo turned and began to walk slowly around the small mound of dirt where the rose continued to glow, apparently lost in some deep thought. He then looked back into the soft, yellow light of the rose, and I could once more see those glaring snake eyes, brooding in their terrible yellow gaze, as if they were engaged in some silent conversation with something inside the rose. Nervously, I asked, “So what are we going to do now?” Zelmo stopped pacing and stood directly behind me. I could not see him, but I could feel the heavy weight of his gaze upon me, and a lump entered my throat. “What are we going to do,” Zelmo asked, “We are going to start with our lesson plan, Roger. You are now my disciple. I am going to reveal to you what you cannot see beyond this place, and what you have left behind in that pathetic, physical world of yours. The Earth is but a tiny shitstain on the underwear of all Creation, but it has its uses. Mankind has created much in His short time span upon it, most of it worthless, but some advancements have brought their merits with them. But in order for you to understand just how much the Universe beyond dwarfs your pathetic human race, you must first understand what the human race actually is.” Zelmo laughed heartily again, an evil laugh that had an almost intoxicating mirth to it, so that I almost felt compelled to laugh with him. And then Zelmo fell silent. The lessons had begun. A little sneak preview of what is to come next after the Army gives me a little free time later on this year. .

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“Others that bear no name, who feel that life’s a game,
My verse they will defame, we suffer all the same.” ~ ‘Misery and Famine’ - Bad Religion




Before we delve any further into the hows and whys of our existence, I suppose that we ought to get a few formalities out of the way. First and foremost, I’m not the nicest guy in the world, and a lot of that will translate into these pages as you read on. I swear, drink, and make racial slurs as a part of my everyday conduct. Political correctness is a term used to describe pussies in my book (not the one that you’re reading right now….but I guess that works, too); people who are too afraid to truly speak their minds use the P.C. philosophy to sugarcoat their own words and meanings. This in turn often makes them come across as either holier-than-thou or patronizing, or both.

For example, we often see news reporters and/or news anchors on TV refer to black people as “African-Americans”. Just once in my life, instead of watching Tom Brokaw say something like, “2 African-American men have been indicted on murder charges in Orange County after the body of a 29-year-old woman was found half-buried in a park”, I would love to see Ol’ Tom blurt out, “2 niggers were indicted today on murder charges in the O.C., after the carcass of some 29-year-old bitch was found buried in the dirt like a doggy bone in some rundown, shitty-assed park in that stinkhole Los Angeles dump”, just to make me laugh out loud. But then again, that would only be for the sake of humor. *evil laughter*

Political correctness, in all seriousness, translates into nothing more than a lot of needless tact and too many goddamned syllables. My above example was just me kidding around, naturally. You wouldn’t necessarily have to say the word “nigger” to describe an African-American; you could simply refer to them as “black”. This in turn could translate to any other race of people in this country; why call them Hispanic-Americans when you could just call them Hispanics? The same goes for Italian-Americans, Chinese or Japanese-Americans….even Native Americans. In fact, why even call them hyphenated Americans at all? Why not simply call them Americans? I mean, they all live here in this country as Americans, at least the legal ones do. So why bring their country of origin into the mix? If they are not American nationals, then call them our guests. Unless they’re here illegally, of course, in which case we could just tell them to get the fuck out of the country and send them packing back to whatever third-world shithole that they came from like the sneaky little criminals that they are.

But I digress.

Know this, O World of Mediocre Miscreants, Dullards, and Insignificant Miscellany, that I call myself Zelmothustra! I am the Alpha; the Omega; the brashest, most arrogant motherfucker ever to breathe the same air as you impotent fucks! I like to vent. I like to talk about bullshit. I like to bitch and moan and complain to no fucking one in particular about shit that pisses me off. Whether it be the fat lady standing in front of me in the express lane at the supermarket with her WIC card in hand and her shopping cart overflowing with junk food and baby formula while her cell phone is ringing and her remote starter is getting tangled up in the car keys to her brand-spanking-new 2005 Pontiac GTO, or the stupid old fart that drives 20 mph down a 45 mph stretch of godforsaken wannabe-civilized country road stuck smack-dab in the middle of East Bumfuck, Illinois…and my ass is stuck behind him in traffic, or the fact that I absolutely hate to repeat myself to some incoherent-to-the-English-language fuckwad wetback who just stepped off the boat and is asking for directions to wherever when he can’t even read the fucking English roadsigns to begin with; or the fact that I believe that the world is actually a better place without Saddam Hussein in power over there in Iraq, but leave it to the bleeding-hearts in the United States of Americanically-correct to question how our government, the greatest friend to nihilism in the history of the world, is providing them with the freedom that they take for granted.

Yeah, I know. Everyday life is one grand catastrophic mess on this carbon-based, biologically-enhanced rock floating in a vast sea of eternal cosmic pitch. But hey, a few 40-ouncers of Icehouse makes it all good in the end, nigger. (cracks open a cold one)

Don’t worry though, dudes and dudettes, not everything that I will dictate to you here will be negative. I’m actually a pretty nice guy. Come to think of it, I’m probably one of the nicest fucking people that I’ve ever met. You see, I have to be nice in order to keep my charming façade alive, since that is what disguises Zelmothustra (or Zelmo, for short) from the rest of the idiots in the world who wouldn’t understand my brand of logic.

“But wait a minute, “ you ask, “Aren’t…you Zelmo?”

Well, yes and no. Most people, when they see me out in public, assume that I am a mild-mannered dipshit Eskimo from Alaska named Roger. This is just fine with me, because it keeps me legit, so to speak. But know this, that I am not the civilized everyday man known as Roger. Roger is a fucking pussy who would rather see the good in all people, instead of strictly the worthlessness in them that I see. If I had my way, I would cast Roger aside and take control of his organic vessel of a body, and then show the world what a real bad motherfucker is all about. But sadly, I need the twit to keep me respectable, and he’s a bit better at the written word than I am. He can barely speak worth a shit; I swear he’s never gotten any formal spoken word training in his entire fucking life. But he’s a hell of a damned good writer, and a top-notch speller. Who needs a dictionary and a fucking secretary when you have that piece of shit around, anyway? HA-HA-HA!!!

But back to the point, bitches. Regardless of whether you love me, hate me, or don’t give a shit about me is inconsequential. All that matters is that you are you, and I am Zelmo, and the world is what we live in, and the universe is what that world consists of. In this mortal coil of three-dimensional sequential carbon-based half-life, that’s really all that matters. A wise man by the name of Hutton once said: “There is no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end…” And as I study that phrase, I realize that in the end, what sins we commit in this lifetime, or what accomplishments that we achieve, matters little to nothing in the Grand Scheme of Things. The measure of a man or woman is not in the man or woman themselves, but in what they have accomplished in their lifetimes, and what lasting effect that their accomplishments have had upon others who share the same society that they have. But since accomplishments that we achieve matter little to the Grand Scheme of Things, it must be reckoned and deduced that we ourselves matter little to it as well.

What matters to us as human beings, matters only to us, because human beings are trivial beasts. Look at the birds and the bees outside your window, wifebeater! Do they care that you beat your wife? Now start beating the birds and killing the bees! Does your wife care that you’re beating and killing them? No! She’s just happy that you’ve stopped beating her!

Because it’s all about relativity, you see. What matters more than the entire world to you, would undoubtedly mean less than jack shit to me, and vice versa. Human beings are so arrogant in this way that it is astounding. Mankind believed for centuries upon centuries that He and His Planet Earth were at the very center of the Universe! But as time passed on and as technology advanced, Science proved to Mankind that the Earth was but a tiny speck of organic debris set upon the dark vastness of space and time. And Mankind was humbled, while the Universe was busily destroying whole stars and galaxies; cosmic bodies and collective gargantuan proportions that dwarfed the Earth in circumference and mass.

And who am I in all of this, you ask? Well…..to put it in layman’s terms, I am the all-encompassing Perspective; the One who has seen and accepted the fact that Mankind is nothing in the face of all that truly matters. Zelmothustra is my name, because without a name, your human mind could not categorize me into a convenient and understandable thought process; you therefore could not understand nor comprehend my purpose and the very reason I exist.

For example, your God needs a name. Otherwise, who would you pray to? And if you did not pray, then you would feel all alone in this vast Universe, cowering like a lost little child with no one to watch over you. Because that’s really all that God is in the end, isn’t it? Mankind’s babysitter.

Poor, pathetic, and worthless Mankind.



Thus spake Zelmothustra!




This was written over a year ago.






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