Illustrated by Kyle Fletcher, then written by Michael Kiser

The last immortal is among us now. We are his living tomb. And he is delivered unto us like Kal-El, trenching at a hot, glowing slant from the sky, sewn as a bird into the belly of a pig, and plowed to a halt. He is an egg in the West.

The thirteenth dish served at the table of Trimalchio held the clue to the entire construct. Was it exotic? Was it an abomination? Was it a simple cracker and wine? Our lineage is eaten with a digestif to soothe the act of stomaching. It is an old egg. 

And while our hunger, trade and distributions run laterally towards horizons, our monuments are meant to stretch to sky. Babel, Giza, Calatrava. And the sky reaches down.

From each florescent-lighted hub rises an effigy for return — from each mob a summoning. In our dismissing chant will be the spell that sets it free. 

oyecolombia #wecanallagreethat THIS NEW ZODIAC SIGNS SHIT IS CRAZY WHAT DO U MEAN IM NOT A SAG IM A OPHIUCHUS SHIT SOUNDS LIKE A NEW COLD FLU MEDICINE

kittyzpaw RT @Arse_Bot: Apparently the zodiac signs changed and I’m now the new sign, Ophiuchus. I continue to not give a shit. #zodiacbullshit

seanye09 Ophiuchus? WTF? Now they are making up random ass zodiac signs? WTF kind of symbol is it? A vagina?

In this age of hyper-lingual logistics, we’re as loud as the rain on the side of a highway, yet as barren as Timbuktu’s dusty paths into the desert. We are a well staring empty at the sky, two chasms gone dry in anticipation of the other’s broken promise. 

The immortal will be obsessed with feathers. Their shape, and lightness, and for the way they fall by the thousands. 

SethTowerHurd RT @hauserpromo: Terrible month for birds. Arkansas and Maryland. And now Falcons last night in Atlanta and Seahawks in Chicago. #apocalypse

Lord_G_Almighty Birds falling out of the sky was an accident. Snooki ever getting nominated for a Golden Globe, first sign of the Apocalypse. #goldenglobes

ebonysharman RT @michael_paynter: Scary RT @Dan_TheGigRig: We exist in a world where someone has bought the film rights to Angry Birds. The 4th sign of the apocalypse

When hundreds of millions have the same thought, tell the same joke, employ the same outrage, it is no longer a creator that holds the key, but the reader. The immortal is running TweetDeck and he’s looking for the perfect redundancy, the ultimate update, the RT of it’s own RT. And when he finds it, he will ascend. 

The last immortal is a god, strolling in the cool of the evening. He is voyaging to the magnetic north. He is washing the dishes. He is cutting his hair and saving it in a Ziplock bag. 

When we unearth his buried stash, we will not be able to reproduce the recipe. There is no artificial ingredient for isolation. 

“I am my thoughts. If they exist in her, Buffy contains everything that is me, and she becomes me. I cease to exist. No one else exists, either. Buffy is all of us. We think, therefore she is.”

In his ascension, the immortal will take all of our status updates with him and leave an everlasting mark upon the surface of the ocean. 

The ascension will be simulcast from a place with no cameras. It will be projected in 3D without requiring glasses. It will create a 4th dimension inside Google Street View and the world’s commentators will do the police in different voices in Dolby 9.1 surround sound. 

This audio/visual spectacle will drive us mad. We will never again be able to find happiness in our low-fidelity world. The universe will suddenly feel like the 90s and there won’t be enough room in Portland to save us all.

Some will find solace in a world where innovation is no longer considered a food group. These enlightened few will no longer speak. They will not tune in. They will forget when their favorite shows air and watch the waterfall of status updates in a 6-column version of TweetDeck waiting for the return of the code.

And somewhere, a young man working in the kitchen of a taquería will finish taking a piss. He will buckle the belt of his jeans and stand at the sink, amazed at the crowds gathering for the immortal’s ascension. 

“He abandons us!” a woman screams on the television.

“He has been murdered!” yells another face in the throng.

The buzz of the small, black and white CCTV box seems to buzz inside this boy’s own brain. He feels un-alone. He feels prescriptive to the moment.

And as he washes his hands, he mutters: “I am innocent of this man’s blood; you will see.”

#8: WORKING TITLES ARE CODECS TO CREATION is based on the idea that an author’s working titles are the real truth behind a piece, but that they always end up changing them right before print in order to be received better by the public. They lose their nerve. There’s a few examples of this sprinkled in the text. “Trimalchio in West egg” was the original title for “The Great Gatsby” as recalled the myth of Trimalchio’s fatal flaw of arrogance and narcissism. “They do the Police in Different Voices” turned into The Wastleland by TS Eliot after Ezra Pound provided his two cents. Even “A God Strolling in the Cool of the Evening” is an actual Portuguese title but the phrase was taken from a short story by another author, just as Henigway’s movable feat came from a passage by Camus. Titles are revealing of the original inspiration, but are so often masked during that very creation. Authors erase their own footprints the way Superman changed his name from Kal-El to Clark Kent. We’re afraid of revealing our origins in order to better fit with our current society’s expectations. 

So I though it was fitting that this article’s original title “White Noise” written by Kyle Fletcher be replaced right before posting. The codec to understanding the piece is obscured by the very act of publication. It only exists in our emailed “manuscripts” that helped generate the final piece.

Riffing on the idea of lost, critical context, I also like the idea that a prophecy or return of a god figure in our age would show up in a Twitter stream as a mundane bitchfest rather than trumpets in heaven. And the possibility that because all of our thoughts are made manifest in the network, that we no longer own ourselves. We’re sacrificing ourselves on the altar of “connectivity.” But who is it that we imagine is actually giving a shit about all this stuff we write and say? I think it’s a contemporary version of the “god” figure, which I call the “reader” here. We all imagine a reader figure pouring over our every word the same way we used to imagine god watching our every shameful act. Both are constructed to keep us in line or justify our existence, and both are self-constructed. Many religious types imagine a God who appreciates their own attributes above all others the same way we imagine our “readers” licking up our every status update. And also similarly, any unexpected silence is maddening. To a truly omniscient reader, this desperate display would be disheartening. All the lights are on, but everything’s just passing through. 

Some additional context that was critically obscured in this text includes: specific dishes served at the feast of Trimalchio, descriptions of the crashing of Kal-El’s pod from Krypton, the recently announced and disputed 13th zodiac sign: Ophiuchus, the football playoffs, Timbuktu’s lagging relevance as a logistics hub covered by National Geographic this past month, my co-worker who ate a questionable hard-boiled egg the other night, a metaphor about wells from the poet, Fernando Pessoa, the role of the reader in the Chicao School of literary criticism, The Matrix, the recent shifting of the magnetic poles causing havoc on airport runways, the virtual tour I took of Watts in Google street View last week, the unearthing of Shakelton’s 113-year-old whiskey, CES, the new TV series “Portlandia,” Buff the Vampire Slayer and her battle against the mayor’s ascension in season 3, and finally, Pontious Pilot and his role in Christ’s death. 

There is nothing random here. Just the carefully dissected din of White Noise.