Had another dream of the jewel snakes that Pickle Horse-man and I anointed with blood. Whose blood was it? I don’t remember. I didn’t bother to write down who or what we sourced the blood from. Either I didn’t remember or it didn’t matter to me in the moment or it didn’t matter ever at all. In the dream, the jewel snakes were all tangled up in the telephone wires. Pickle Horse-man was up in the telephone wires yanking jewel snakes and the jewel snakes would fall at me and I would have to dodge the jewel snakes. I think I must have been cautioning him to be less reckless as he fervently pulled jewel snakes by their tails and shed them down at me. Some of the jewel snakes bit him, and some of the telephone wires he pulled thinking they were snakes hissed and crackled with high-powered voltage, and those too would drop down and writhe and menace me. The people living near the telephone wires opened their windows and looked out at us and shouted, pointing at their telephone wires, demanding we reconnect them so they could live again on the internet as God intended. What a mess. It all seemed so hopeless. Snakes and wires. Snapping and biting. And Sacramento’s Mount Fuji loomed large in the background, and I was hardly at its foot. Shotgun Secretary kicked open the lignum vitae double doors (peppered with buckshot from previous incident - repair cost of $76,294) to my office, hefted up her shotgun, and blasted apart my laptop specially made for horses to write their blogposts. “Bonky, what did you do?” I just look at her like, girl, what did I do? “Bonky, that blog post lost us millions of subscriptions!” Oh shit. I flipped open my emergency laptop specially made for horses to check incase their main laptop is shot out from under their hooves. I opened the browser to check the blog’s stats. “My God,” a voice, distant and weak, said. And I think it was mine. I had lost nearly all my millions of subscribers. I scrolled through the comments section and it was filled with, at best, hate, but mostly confusion. Things like: “UM,,,,WE DON’T CARE ABOUT A HORSE’S DREAMS???” and “BONKY, I’VE BEEN SUBSCRIBED SINCE THE VERY BEGINNING AND I’VE ALWAYS SUPPORTED YOU BUT THIS HAS JUST TAKEN IT TOO FAR. UNSUBBED.” and “This gives me the ick.” and “Guess I’ll go somewhere else for my Bonky content. . . :o(” And so on and so forth. I put my head in my hooves. What have I done. There was a knock on the door. The door was wide open and a bunch of guys in jumpsuits with their names embroidered on the chest were cautiously imposing themselves. “What is it? Who are you?” I asked. “We’re the repo-men. Unfortunately, that blog post has already put you behind on your payments.” I groaned and shimmied my mane. It had begun. It was a long time coming. I knew it would happen some day. They were taking everything. The repo-men looked around the room, assessing my treasures. They pulled back the heavy vault door revealing my vault of apples. Of course I had left my apple vault door slightly ajar for easy apple access. “Not my vault of apples!” I screamed. That apple vault had taken me years to accrue and only recently had I been able to build up the lung capacity to reach the bottom layers where the really solidly fermented vintage applejack was starting to form. But, again, it was all too late. My emotional reactivity was exactly one blog post behind. The time to panic, long over. They had already attached their specially built skyscraper-climbing-crane-to-extract-a-horse’s-apple-vault-and-take-it-away device. The worst part is, I had funded the construction of that very device in the good faith that it wouldn’t be MY apple vault being taken away from MY skyscraper, but some other horse’s apple vault from their skyscraper. Pickle Horse-man hot-wheeled into the room on his wheelchair (he had broken his neck prancing (CULTURAL NOTE: highly respectable injury to horses)) “Hey bud, you got a second for some mad bit of nuisance?” He asked. I couldn’t answer. I was too distracted watching the repomen repossess my 18th century fainting couch in spicy lead-green. I felt like King Theoden in the Battle of Helm’s Deep. “My brother has just gone off the deep end with his alcoholism,” said Pickle Horse-man, “I don’t really know what to do.” “Buddy, I’m not Eckart Tolle. I’m not Shinzen Young. I’m a horse. I can’t help a person with the complexity of the modern era, where you need to jump in your car just take a fuckin SHIT for free at mcdonalds. I can’t help a guy who feels he lost too big and can’t make up the difference. I can’t show people that the old value-distribution network of institutions and markets and organizations and corporations is GONE and what has replaced it is a bare thread of extraction. Just because I can live semi-comfortably in the void where the independent originator arises and dissipates, arises and dissipates, arises and dissipates, forever and ever, amen, doesn’t mean I can help some horse-brother live in it. Exposing him to it would only send him into a panic.” “No, I mean, can you just stop buying him booze?” “NEVER!” I shrieked, and with a dramatic swish of my cape I retrieved the machine gun made for horses to shoot repo-men. “Merry Christmas, you filthy animals!” I shouted and blasted them with lethal droplets of hot lead that exploded in cooked blood. I blasted them more. “And a happy new year!” Of course. In my zeal to protect the things I don’t care about, I hurt the thing I truly love. A bullet had pinged off one of the repomen’s titanium rods in his back and struck the beautiful shotgun secretary. A trickle of pink-laden saliva dripped from the side of her slack cheek. I ran to her side. “Shotgun Secretary, I...” She put a gloved finger on my lips, “No, Bonky. I just need you to...” she coughed and her spittle was inflected with unravelling dna and shreds of organ meat, “I need you to believe...” she hefted her shotgun into my arms. Then passed away. How could I, a simple horse, be expected to carry the mantle of the shotgun ultimate prodigy? Impossible. How could I possibly bring life to this machined hunk of medal and glossy oak carved with shotgun faeries? She had asked me to believe, but without my shotgun-wielding secretary, I am nothing. I turned the gun on myself and blew my brains out. Unfortunately, the biomechanics of a horse shooting itself in the brain are a little wonky to improvise a shotgun suicide, and I merely blew off my ocular-input, my eyes dangling on either side of my head from their cords. But something magical was happening. I could hear it, and I could feel it, and I could kind of see it when my eyes swung wide. Shotgun Secretary’s beautiful body was surrounded in a glowing energy that was lifting her up. It was streaming in through the windows at first, then came down in blasts from heaven’s shotguns. Big groups of glowing angelic needles drove through her, skewering through her shoulders where they rose like angel’s wings. “Bonky,” she said, “It is I, the ascendent-shotgun-assistant saint-killer of shotgun-assisted-suicide. I’ve come to aid you in this realm, as I did in life. You, who has shown total belief in the life-changing power of shotguns. For it is only through shotguns that we can surpass destiny and fate.” Incredible. “Could you just stop enabling my brother?” Pickle Horse-man asked. “Never!” I screamed, and leapt out the shattered window into open air. Sacramento stretched out down below in all its glory, and I plummeted, unimpeded, unrestrained, down I went in a free-fall through the empty with no hope of retrieval. Luckily a passing 9/11 caught me on its wing and on its impact with the Bonky Administrative and Football Arena and Pornographic Excellence and Anal-Encrypted-Infosec Skyscraper nice and easily shunted me back into the building where I slipped across the cool marble floor with a shower of broken glass. Fortunately, I spun to a stop in front of the Orange Julius of the Bonky Administrative and Football Colloseum and Porn Empire and Painal-Encryption Skyscraper. I had myself an Orange Julius. Who was it that said malls have a sort of religiosity to their structure? Exposed beams and glass and sunlight streaming through? Big pools of water, sending off rings of light over blue tiles as a cooling fountain sprays down over glimmering penny-wishes. Malls are incredible, and they could be an invaluable third space to communities. The problem with third-spaces, though, is security. People want community, but are they willing to accept the sort of security risks imposed by community? No. They want “procured community,” which is really no community at all. You can’t have community without the Other, those scapegoated communities. Community is built on a certain parameter of permissiveness. It can’t last long before someone decides “we have to clean up our community,” and then, next thing you know, it’s gone. A community is an inherently messy thing. Because people are messy. But not horses. Ascendent Shotgun Secretary beamed down next to me and tied my eyes into a bow at the top of my head. It was a bit of a confusing vantage point, because I’m used to my eyes being on either side of my head, but I didn’t mind trying it on for a change. It wasn’t quite binocular vision, but it was close. Interesting flavor of novelty. I looked at myself in the mirrored wall of the mall. Great googly eyes and a cape of red blood running down my back. Incredible. Extravagant. Stylish. Modern. The nearby elevator dinged and out came a mob of repomen and behind them, Pickle Horse-man. He wheeled his enormous horse-head this way and that to look around the mall as the repomen came for my Orange Julius machine. But I didn’t run. And I didn’t go on a tear searching for the gun I left on this floor to shoot repomen who are coming to steal a horse’s orange julius machine. Malls make you feel contemplative like that. I simply felt at peace. A great wave of equanimity washed over me. “Look,” Pickle Horse-man wheeled over, “just stop buying the guy booze.” “It’s not so simple,” I said. “It really is. It is that simple.” “Such a thing would require the sustained consciousness of multiple people who have been squeezed dry. I could stop buying him booze for a while, but I would ultimately buy him booze again. Because I do not see booze as a bad thing. A horse drinks and does not get drunk.” “I see it as a bad thing.” “The one perceiving a thing only ever sees themself.” “That’s fucking stupid.” “It is my ship to steer, and I will steer it the way I know how. That is that SOME horse-men need booze in order to self-regulate. It is cheap, it is cost-effective.” “He absolutely does not. That’s dumb. You’re evading the core issue.” “Evasion is the native language of the horse.” “Bonky, he’s abusing himself. It’s ruining his body, his mind, our relationship. He’s going to set off the neighbors and get the cops called down on us.” “The power of the mall is such that these things cannot affect us here. They are the mere symbols of distant phenomena.” “He’s loud as fuck.” “You’re sensitive to noise.” “I’m sensitive as fuck!” “Can you change?” “No!” “One cannot change. The other cannot change. The other, other cannot change. The one can’t change the other, the other can’t change the other, the other other can’t change the other, the one can’t change the other other, so nothing will change.” “You’re a fucker, Bonky.” “I am a horse,” I planted my hoof in his mouth to shush him, but he wriggled out. “So how the hell am I supposed to change?” “Every morning I’m woken up at dawn because of a mockingbird. You can’t kill a mockingbird. It’s against the law. Morning after morning I’m woken and morning after morning my dreams start becoming apocalyptic nightmares. In my heart, I blamed the bird for the nightmares. In the final nightmare, I was chased. I got into a car, and the people chasing me started slamming at the door. I felt that slamming in my brain. I recognized the precise origin of that slamming in the brain. It was the seat of my own anger. The fear of being chased, the menace of the ones chasing, the fury of the slamming, all of it was my own anger and for the first time I was able to witness it from the inside out. My anger had the force of carjackers. But it was of no use to me.” “Just tell me. Tell me and I’ll do it.” “The mall, the mall, the mall, the mall-” I said, echoing, and then vanished with Ascendent Shotgun Secretary. Because I really just didn’t know what else to say and I was getting that can't-come-up-with-something-on-the-spot anxiety. And sometimes it’s better to just be esoteric. Pickle Horse-man was left behind in the mall. Alone. Without the Orange Julius vending machine. With a broken neck. With all the time in the world. With two eyes that reported what they see, or a broad general estimation, with a voice inside his head that tells him that it’s him, with a deep inner vision that reminds him of things seen and heard that populate his assumed self, with the feelings of a body, but never more than one at a time. As each part of the aggregate is selfish and demands its own room. When the eyes are focus, the feeling of the body is gone. When part of the body is felt, the other parts fall away, ceasing to exist. When the memory is engaged, the other senses are hopeless. Each part takes its turn being me, me, me. And with ages his eyes were gone, and he was still there, and his inner monologue was gone, and he was still there, and his hearing was gone, and he was still there, and his memory was gone and he was still there, and his body and all its senses were gone, and He was still there.