When I was younger than I am now, my favorite hobby was to grow my hair long and lay in bed sideways so my left eye was in such a position that it was easier to be open than closed, then I would let my hair fall into the eye and the eye would defocus, the strands then becoming abstract fibers of distant fields, vast and infinite, something no one else can see. In this state lights take on strange behaviors, blurring into nebulous flares that when the eyelid begins to close are eclipsed from the opposite side, reversing the laws of physics for my own personal pleasure and convenience. I could bend light by my own command.
When I was younger than I am now, I was out of love, and scornful. Every posted signage was deemed by my entire self to be overtly offensive to my entire self, and my pockets brimmed with useless papers and receipts, small denominations of coins and keys without rings jostling at every step. I scorned the omnipotent reminders of new flavors of ginger ale and studio comedies, and globes hanging in the night sent me the devil’s word and caused me pain, real, physical pain. I was often sick and alone, and had recurring thoughts of throwing myself out of the passenger door of a sedan on a freeway, although I didn’t know anyone, much less anyone with a car.
History is ending, the dream is over. We live under the shadows of history that tower over us cruelly. There are no new chord progressions and no new melodies. Even reinvention is being reinvented. There is no new thing under the sun.
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Dallas Fort Worth wanted to write this in his notebook, but he couldn’t think of the words so instead he wrote “I am going to kill myself tomorrow by jumping in front of a Green Line train at 9:45 AM Eastern Standard Time.” He then remembered that most of the time the 9:45 Green Line train ran a few minutes late so he instead wrote “I am going to kill myself tomorrow by jumping in front of a Green Line train at 9:48 AM Eastern Standard Time.”
He then copied this into the notes app on his cellphone word for word and stuffed the notebook into the garbage disposal. The little wire thing that spiral binds the pages got caught and shot out violently into the living room, impaling itself just above the mounted antique elephant gun from the early 1900s bored for .577 Nitro Express that was designed to turn a rhinoceros’ brain cavity into liquid. He walked into the living room where his two roommates were laying on perpendicular couches staring at the ceiling and mumbling nonsense to themselves. The end of history, he announced (largely to himself, his roommates might as well have been absent, they were zonked out on a new research chemical called 2L2QRYGLAMB that was designed to turn a rhinoceros’ brain cavity into liquid), the postmodern age is both dead and alive, we’ve got 100 more years of ironic Vitamin Water commercials. He grabbed the rifle off of the wall. No more progress.
This proclamation was met with a gurgling silence as the 2L2QRYGLAMB had pounded his roommates’ prefrontal cortexes into something resembling steak and kidney pudding. Will the human spirit remain? Will the circle be unbroken? Who even remembers who the
Kingsmen are anymore? He fired the rifle through the hardwood floor. One roommate, Salome Lebbaeus snapped briefly out of her brain melt state and asked Dallas what the fuck he was doing, man.
History is ending! What the fuck do I care if I fire a gun in my own house?
She rubbed her eyes.
Look, I respect your laissez-faire attitude, man, but I’d rather not get fucken shot man, especially not now my-my fuckin brains are coming out of my ears right now man I’m straight christ-walking on the river Styx as we speak right now man if I get shot now theres no coming back to the fucken, uh the fucken land of the living, man.
A gray liquid started to dribble out of her ears and she fell back in between two couch cushions. Dallas went back to his room and sat at his gaming computer that he didn’t use for gaming anymore, opening up the essay he was working on in which he attempted to trace the end of history and the downward trajectory of all contemporary pop music back to Chubby Checker’s “The Twist”:
See, before Chubby Checker you had icons like Elvis or Chuck Berry, but Chubby Checker was the first emergence of an all-consuming pure semblance. Hank Ballard wrote “The Twist” in 1958 and it was a minor hit, so American Bandstand host Dick Clark wanted him to come on the show to perform. Hank was otherwise occupied, so Clark found a young Philadelphian nightclub singer with a near identical voice to Ballard, Ernest Evans, also known as Chubby Checker, who had sent a couple novelty impersonation tapes to Clark a few months earlier to perform the song on his show for a national audience. Both the song and the dance associated with it became nationwide sensations, the song becoming the first recording to ever top two Billboard charts in a row, in 1960 and 1962, and still holds the number 1 position on the Billboard Hot 100 all-time chart. Twisting was a worldwide phenomenon, with New York City’s Peppermint Lounge the headquarters of a new kind of celebrity dance club, paving the way for the discotheques of the near future.
Checker was now ensnared in a machination beyond his control, a major figure in youth culture and rock and roll with a song that wasn’t his under a name that wasn’t his (the name Chubby Checker being a pun on the blues singer Fats Domino given to him by Dick Clark’s wife). Out of pure chance a man, more than a man, a symbol was created out of thin air and chained to his own creation. Checker developed a perverse obsession with “The Twist,” and of dance records in general, fearing rejection if he deviated from this formula that birthed him. He was cursed to Twist, and Twist again, Twisting himself into eternity, bound to his own ephemerality. 1960 had The Twist, and For Twisters Only, 61 had Let’s Twist Again, 62 had For Teen Twisters Only and Twistin’ Around The World, 82 had T-82 (Twist 82), 88 had The Twist (Yo, Twist!) with The Fat Boys, 2001 had The Texas Twist, not to mention the countless other dances he tried to replicate the success of “The Twist” with over the years, like “The Pony” or “The Limbo.” To this day, Checker still performs “The Twist” for drooling baby boomer audiences with a frightening, hollow vitality.
Chubby Checker is the true postmodern subject, more culturally impactful than the Korean War but with as much artistic merit as a paper bag, the first pure vehicle of capital in the form of the figure on stage. When the 1980s saw the googie 50s/early 60s revival, Checker was front and center twisting himself all over again, with not a thing behind his eyes. One may say that Checker is stuck in the past, but he is in a tangle much worse: he exists outside of history. Chubby Checker and the due progress of time are incongruent concepts, he is at once ephemeral and immortal. As the passage of time speeds up faster and faster and innovation in art slows down more and more, we see more visibly now than ever that history is ending.
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
All of humanity is hurtling towards a mass stagnation, and there is nothing new anymore. The great works of this age are all reappropriations, reinterpretations, reassemblages. Whether conscious or not, every great work of art is the product of trying to be another earlier work of art, or combination of two previous works of art. Pop music is the most beautiful and effective artform to ever be created but also the most dangerous, because its perfect form is in and of itself. It was birthed from a primordial ooze of capital honed perfection and can only be derived from or augmented. There is as much time between us and 1977 as there is between 1977 and 1933. There are no new chord progressions, no new melodies, no new tones. I am going to kill myself tomorrow by jumping in front of a Green Line train at 9:48 AM Eastern Standard Time.
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Dallas then remembered that most of the time the 9:45 Green Line train ran a few minutes early so instead, he wrote “I am going to kill myself tomorrow by jumping in front of a Green Line train at 9:42 AM Eastern Standard Time.”
Tonight was the eve of Dallas’ 21st birthday, the beginning of adulthood, the new frontier, the cutoff for any hypothetical latent prodigal talent he might have, the death of all youthful ambition. At 21, history ends for Dallas Fort Worth. He went to the kitchen and pulled a half gallon plastic bottle of bottom-shelf vodka out of the freezer and poured it into a massive chalice along with half a can of Monster and crushed up melatonin and ketamine. He drank the entire thing in about 3 minutes. This elixir was dubbed the Seven Trumpets Of Time and it served a very specific purpose.
It is important to note that the following effects are not the inherent effects of the drink itself, but instead a carefully calculated chemical reaction with Dallas’ own cocktail of undiagnosed and subconscious operations of delusion and disease that he had tried to tame on his own to varying degrees of success (he had an inherent distrust for psychiatric professionals) in order to maximize their effects. In this way, Dallas could cause himself to see, hear, and feel history ending in real time.
After drinking the Seven Trumpets Dallas began to vibrate. His vision expanded and contracted, his field of view fluctuating wildly. He looked up at the clock and saw that the hour, minute, and second hands were all operating independently of one another and of the clock itself, each one occupying as many as five or six positions simultaneously. Dallas stumbled into the living room where his roommates were coming down off their trip, wringing their eyes as they laid in pools of their own fluids.
As they realized he was in the room and turned to look at him he could feel their gazes burning into his scalp, and radiating off them he could see a heads up display with flashing red bars that analyzed their body language and told in fluctuating percentages exactly what they thought of him in that moment and what kinds of pretension and hatred they were projecting outwards at him. He looked down and saw his own bars in greens and yellows showing the effects of his own positioning towards them. Although their mouths moved he could not make out what they were saying in any concrete way, but he could hear their thoughts and his own mixing in right and left channels, slowly panning to mono and phase cancelling into nothing. Suddenly he felt as though he was being surrounded by a million independently actuating strobe lights and flashbulbs that were all going off at the same time. His hands began to guide his arms and his arms began to guide his spine into contorting in impossible positions as he ran into the bathroom, ripping off his clothes.
Dallas’ mind was now operating at 78rpm but his body ran at 16 speed, both trapped within the other, the snake eating its own tail, unable to move or think with any coherence. In a moment of shuddering clarity he found himself in a fetal position on the bathroom floor and tried to puke into the toilet for a few minutes, but couldn’t. He looked up to see Dick Clark staring down at him. Dick reached out his hand and pulled Dallas up through the bathroom mirror, where he found himself in a gray wool suit 5 sizes too big, standing backstage at American Bandstand, where Dick was waiting to introduce him.
Ladies and gentlemen, Chubby Checker!
The house band began playing “The Twist” and Dallas found himself twisting as if guided by some divine force, and his suit clung to his body with rancid sweat.
Come on, baby
Let's do the twist
The song stretched out for hours, years, the teenyboppers in the audience got older and older and older and withered away into dust, and their children replaced them, beginning the process once more. Dallas and Dick Clark always remained the same age.
Take me by my little hand
And go like this
He twisted for his life and for his death, twisting twisting twisting until twisting felt more natural than standing still, until he learned to measure time in intervals of 2 minutes and 35 seconds.
Yeah, daddy's just sleepin'
And mama ain't around
He looked up and saw a mirror, and in the mirror he saw the face of God, blinked, and saw a naked Chubby Checker on the floor of his apartment bathroom looking back at him.
We're gonna a-twist, a-twist, a-twistin'
'Til we tear the house down
Their eyes locked in a mutual understanding of their placements outside of history. The song stopped but still hovered in the air, heavy with its burdens of time. Dallas crumpled to the floor, muscles weary with their burden, and he slept.
Dallas Fort Worth opened his eyes to find himself laying in the snow. It was morning, and he was wearing a pristine white wedding dress and held an olive branch in his left hand. People that passed him seemed to flicker in and out of their positions, backwards and forwards, sparing him only passing glances, and the sun seemed both to rise and set simultaneously. Dallas’ next actions seemed to happen all simultaneously: he walked to the train stop, stood on the rails, and raised his arms outstretched to meet the 9:45 Green Line train. The waiting felt like hours and hours and hours. He stayed standing there, dress blowing in the bitter wind, for days and weeks and months until finally it arrived, hurtling towards him. As the train sped faster and faster, it seemed to Dallas like it kept getting farther away. Suddenly, he heard a sound unfathomable that came from above, below, and all around. A bouquet of horns called from above, and he looked up to see the archangel Michael, more beautiful than can be described in even the most elegant of language, too beautiful for any human to really perceive, blinding, piercing, all encompassing. Dallas closed his eyes and prepared for his end, his final escape, on the first day of his 21st year.
The train came to a slow stop and the doors opened, letting passengers out. His eyes opened again and he realized what happened, quivering at the divine sight he had just seen. Dallas stopped and stared for a moment at the train in front of him, as the departing passengers gave him queer looks. He had been saved, oh God he had been saved! The train began to honk at him to move off of the tracks and he dashed away in a frenzy.
He saw radiance all around him, cherry trees blossoming, he heard the laughs of babies and the barking of dogs, he smelled incense and spring and sagebrush, he tasted ambrosia and honey. He ran up to a woman walking her dog and proclaimed Oh Lord, we have all been saved! but dashed away before he could see the joy on her face. He skipped and jumped, not minding at all the freezing concrete under his bare feet or the snow now beginning to lightly fall on his head and wetting the thin silk of his dress. He had to go back home and tell his roommates that we’ve all been saved, he knew they were home, he could see the lights on in the house at the end of the street, he would almost be there, he would get there soon and tell them. Just as he crossed the street, Dallas Fort Worth slipped on some black ice a few feet from his front door and smashed his skull clean open on the curb, dying instantly. His blood ran thick on the sidewalk, staining the snow into a purplish red halo around his head. A delivery driver stepped carefully over his body. As he got back into his car, Salome stood at the door with plastic bags filled with Thai food in her hands, staring disaffected at his unmoving body for a minute or two before calling the ambulance. Snow fell like sawdust, soft and fragrant.
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