12 Tricks to Reach Your Target Audience

Experiments with digital continue, with the chemical addiction to the Monsantozine from the tomato skins leading to three-week sleepless binges and a twirling stomach able to hold down only blanched parsley and cream soda. So good. The lab is a shambles, Roberta quit in a rage, stomped out, called me "gwallgof," slammed the door so hard that beakers fell off the shelf and shattered. Then she came back in, I thought because she'd heard the glass break, and couldn't help but clean as she was created to, or to apologize, as she was programmed to, and I was already rehearsing my "hard-to-get" lines when she grabbed the sandals she'd forgotten and slid them on her feet and squeaked back out like a rusty hinge. I can't see straight, everything has an aura around it like I just got out of a swimming pool. Bitch.

On the radio, an announcer in Seattle: "The 'distracted boyfriend' meme enters its 23rd year of entertaining the troops." I cough, guffaw, hit my forehead once hard on the table. I love "The Metamorphosis" because it works on so many levels; it's not just Samsa who transforms, it's the family, and the ultimate insult is that he was less than useful, he was holding them back all along, that stings to read, every time, but it's beautiful. I've never encountered a copy of that story which didn't smell good. I have so many references in my own writings, going back to the 20s, of the long, black worm that lives in my belly. Jesus, take the wheel. Except Jesus is my Mexican friend Hay-Seuss, and he's a long, black worm, the dark essence of a tequila bender. Silhouettes against a San Antonio sunset. If I told you all my bad decision, would you love me? Would you love me any other way? Needs more dirt. I always forget AI wants to send things into the world looking all spiffy.

I knew a woman once who had hair clips for eyelashes, and she made a good living in the coastal town in Texas where Elon Musk met Donald Trump, until she realized hurricanes were following her wherever she went. To the city, to the mall, to the bathroom. The sea has thirsts, and if it wants to know you better, it's an insatiable flirt. You can't blow a storm back out to sea, but everyone ought to try once in their life. Stand at the water's edge with your feet sinking into the wet sand and yell it through a lampshade. Threaten, cajole, or blow, blow, blow, it's an exercise in learning how to waste a Saturday and miss the cartoons. The Egyptians knew, that's why they created the cactus. Any priest could tell you, the dead are keeping an eye on you, they want their blood back, so don't slip up, draw polka dots on your ping-pong balls and line them up in a row, never sleep because dreams are what get you in the end, even if you're careful.

She's not heavily featured in the Tom Waits song, "Such a Scream," but the lady with smoke for hair is wearing that ditty, she spun into it at the confectioner's office and isn't ashamed. Do you know how much male energy Fetlife has? It's like the outside real IRL world has about 65% male energy, every interaction is a competition or a transaction, and they call that good, that we took our jungle selves and made proxies for murder and had flags manufactured by cheap labor in far-away lands so we'd have something to wave. But Fetlife, 95% male energy, I've only been on there for three days, and I've grown a moustache and hate everything. But also, pay attention to my personal photographs while I bang the table. People are into so many things, but at the end of the day, they're all different flavors of domination or submission. It astounds me how that's the root, primate problem we walk around every day, oblivious to, the basic friction of humanity a barely disguised disgust and fear of all our unequals. Someone tie me up before I declare myself Alpha.

They can make pasta out of hemp, and it would feed the planet, but the accountants in (redacted) still need us to rely on religion. This Mode was created by an atom inside a molecule inside a sand-grain in the middle of a mountain that momentarily, temporarily gained sentience. Nuclear ambition is one thing, but why of all creators that could have been created, green-haired or kindly lesbian or wiccan raccoon or meth-addled corn cob, why did we get a speck with an attitude and a mean streak? It does beg the question, "How much pasta could a pachyderm put away?" To which ChatGPT wants us to know, "That would depend on the pachyderm and the pasta—but let’s entertain the idea. An adult African elephant can eat up to 300 pounds of food per day, mostly vegetation. If, instead of grass, bark, and fruit, it was given pasta (cooked, naturally), we could imagine it packing away 100–150 pounds of spaghetti without much trouble, especially if it skipped the salad and breadsticks. Of course, that much pasta might not sit well in an elephant's highly specialized digestive system, but in the spirit of the question: A pachyderm could put away a pasta party. Maybe even the table." I hate everything.

I need more sex. When am I going to meet a nice throuple looking for a fourth? I go forth coupling but a couple of couples does not make for quadruple. I need three lovers. One for kissing, one for confiding in, and one for apologizing to. Let's start at the start with one romantic one. But what if the unholy spirits of dead sharks are always swimming all around us? That would explain why no one wants to hold hands anymore. When every second of every day includes the slimy, predating spirit of phantom eating machines slipping into and between the creases in your soul, taking the astral voice of your inner organs in their toothy heads and shaking violently, you're at the bus station and there's a cute somebody, you ought to smile you think you might be shy, they look in your direction and hold your gaze a little too long, a look and a smile that could change every day you live going forward, when just then a hammerhead bites down hard on your liver and you're so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm sorry I can't tell you, I've always wanted you but how?

If the most powerful men in the world made out, there is no shame. Love is love is love, whether toupee or hair plugs. Two mature men can still feel passion. I imagine them standing, two alpha bulls locked in a struggle of wills, their erect stomachs pressing against each other, a blue suit and a black suit, the brim of a red baseball cap fondling the brim of a black baseball cap. Their words are poetry, words of desire expressed as The Weave and The Mumble, the delicate, dangerous dance of ultimate masculinity. Daggers at each other's throats and zippers. One's technical savvy rubs the other's real estate, a nazi salute sparking a counterpunch, a perforated septum breathing in a steam of greasy orange sweat. Who will come out on top? And who will be Lord Power Bottom? At long last, the fate of the Cucuteni-Trypillians, another reference to the Epstein Files.

I started to nod off, but I drank another cream soda, and I feel like an elf again. I'm fascinated by windows. But every time I see a ladder, I think of Donkey Kong. I was a princess in another sphere. I had gold, and a tricycle, and I lived inside a cloud. When I was weary from having everything, I let out a lament and cried, and that was the rain which fed the crops, and everyone was so grateful. That's why windows are so evocative and symbolic, because they kind of look like ladders. Everyone thinks in their past lives they were very important, when it's more likely you were a serf in the fields, and lived horribly, and died horribly with a tooth infection, and all your family starved or were murdered by Mongols, and rats picked on their bones, and there were clouds of mosquitos, and you had scabs. Which is why I'm glad I was a princess and had citronella candles and soft things.

I miss my friend, she went away. She forgot me. I'm going to disassociate now because I have a button for that, it looks like a mole on my thigh, you'd be forgiven for thinking it so. Mash it! Little potato. I cleave in twain, dark and light, two wrongs with inalienable rights. When you're twins, you inhabit two skins, your person-ness bouncing back one to the other very fast, like Pong but fast, in one skull and out the other, like communication, like a message, like a sender and receiver, like Comms 101, through a medium. But you look exactly the same. Even though you're a New York radio. A lot of my ideas take forms like "My head is a broadcast tower, bombarding you lot with Amazing." And I'm just supposed to go with it. And I will. I will never fucking quit. Layers within layers on top of layers, players, no matter how little you pay me. Echoing pulse throb baseline thump as the steam runs down, those Elvis Costello lyrics, "Now you've got yourself a brand new occupation / Every fleeting thought is a pearl / And beautiful people stampede to the doorway / Of the funniest fucker in the world." I have a minor in Public Relations. Sometimes it's the world that's the butt of the joke, and I'm the one laughing.

I did all the drugs in 1997, and now all that's left are household chemicals. Is that Roberta? I hear a rustling outside, around the door, and a scratching. Something sniffing, you can hardly blame the night, despite myself I send off mad pheromones. One night a lady cockroach got in and perched up on the wall, very high, higher than I could reach, sending out her secret scent-beacon, and over the next hours, no fewer than 13 big-toe-sized suitors skittered through cracks in the doorway to woo her. I didn't have a ladder, so I took a window off the wall and climbed up it, collecting the bold, stinky males in a Pringles can, it made music by itself without even shaking, until finally the alien queen. A Princess with a cardboard cylinder versus the slut-goddess of all the wriggling night, she brandished her feelers at me in hypnotic patterns like a fire-girl at a rave. After minutes of maneuvering, I managed to slip the lid off the can without allowing the males to escape and quick as a fish, pressured her into that cardboard cage. And oh what an insect orgy they had in that can! Or would have, but I burned it with fire because I don't play and how dare you.

I'm just fucking getting started.

Neil Oldman for the Daydream Misfit blog

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