Showing posts with label The NortonVerse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The NortonVerse. Show all posts

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Norton 0 - 2

*************

“How am I supposed to get anything accomplished at all living next to maniacs like this?”

“Look mam, I need you to calm down okay?”

“Calm Down? I AM CALM GODDAMN IT!!!”

“No mam, you are not. Now listen, we’re here to help you, my partner and I, but first you gotta calm down. We understand you have complaints with your neighbor, but if you keep acting like this its going to have to be you we haul off down to the station.”

“WHAT? WHY?”

“Because its part of every police officer’s job when responding to situations like this that we assess the true threat and neutralize it. Now, we’ve heard your complaints about your neighbor, BOB, but I for one have not seen a single sign of any disturbance of the peace since arriving here. What I have seen is you standing on your front lawn and screamin and carrying on to the point that you’ve got all your neighbors out of bed and calling to complain about you. You here that squawk box my partner’s been responding to for the last ten minutes? Those are calls concerning your behavior. Do you understand now?”

The woman would continue to go on complaining for the next five minutes, finally making irritating the officer enough for him to react by handcuffing her. As you might imagine, this did not go over very well and as such his partner had to help him subdue her and cram her more than ample frame into the tiny back door of the police cruiser, finally slamming shut the door that only opens from the outside.

His partner was concerned.

“You think there’s anything to her story Luke?”

“I don’t know Randy, its not like I’ve had time to think on it much since getting here.”

Behind them the woman continued to bark and scream in the back of the cruiser. Officer Randy was becoming visibly distraught by the noise.

“Look, you stay here and make sure she doesn’t eat the fucking apolstery and I’ll walk over and talk to the neighbor, okay?”

“You sure that’s a good idea? Why don’t I just radio for backup?”

“Naw, that’ll take too long. I don’t wanna be here all goddamn night. It’ll be fine, I’ll just go over and let him know we were called.”

“Alright, call me on the walkie you need anything.”

“Will do.”



A tiny rumble of indigestion found its way up from Norton’s belly and overtook his attempt at delicate speech for a moment.

“BURP. Sorry, something we ate definitely isn’t agreeing with me. Anyway, where were we?”

Norton 0 paced, and as he did so he took another tiny treat from the pouch on his belt and popped it into his mouth. He looked at his audience, the Mayor, slouched against the pristine linoleum wall, the egg-shaped bruise still throbbing out that painful red glow that freshly split flesh always seemed to resort to. His eyes were on Norton, but his mind was elsewhere, perhaps with his family.

“LOOK! None of the rest of your party has been harmed. Shit, we didn’t even mean for you to get hurt, but the boy is always over reacting, especially after one too many Charlie Bronson movies, if you know what we mean?”

He could tell by the cold and confused stare that the Mayor most certainly did not.

“Why…why am I here?”

“HELL-OH!!! You are here our dear public representative, to inaugurate the first phase of gentrification set to sweep through the city, an outward wave of demolish, polish and abolish from our P.O.V.”

Norton gesticulated the letter “P”, “O”, “V” with three sharp jaggles of the index finger on their left hand. The fact that they were favoring left instead of the much more common right did not bode well for Mr. Fancy Pants here. It meant Leon or one of the Irma’s was back in charge. Not good…

“Not good at all…”

“Huh? Stop it, you keep trailing off, its like listening to a ransom note.”

“Oh, were we speaking aloud again? My dear…”

Norton’s eyes flaked again but this time they seemed to flip, or perhaps more accurately ‘spin’, like the motion of a slot machine, when you watch and try to follow the cherry through the whirlwind of the interior mechanism. The Mayor watched this with a new kind of fear, and when the motion behind the maniac’s eyelids stopped the blue-gray orbs that turned to re-address him were softer somehow; kinder.

“Are you… are you alright?”
“Me? Oh yes, heavens yes. The question is, are you alright? This nasty little welt on your head, oh my…”

Norton reached into another pouch at his side and after a moment of digging through things (the only somewhat decipherable article the Mayor caught was what appeared to be but he prayed was not, a finger) until finally producing a ratty old handkerchief.

“No, no really, I’m okay…”

“Oh don’t be silly, let’s clean you up a bit, shall we?”

The Mayor consented, the soft padding motion of the suddenly rickety hand, combined with that strange sheer in the eyes made him feel better about his current situation. SO good in fact, he felt he should discuss some things with his attacker.

“So you said I’m here because of the developments…”

“Well heavens yes, aren’t choo? We mean, we certainly didn’t ask you to come here…”

Suddenly the pressure of the disgusting rag against his forehead increased and he looked up to see the eyes had changed once more. Now they were… harsh.

“…we merely took advantage of the situation in order to gain a little bit of an audience with an otherwise busy man….”

The Mayor flinched but Norton did not respond to his new horror, they merely continued to speak.

“It’s really this simple. We live here. A lot of others do as well. It might not look like ‘living to you, but you are not from where we are from, and as such, you do not understand the spatio-temporal intricacies of this plane the way we do.”

“What? What the devil are you talking about?”

“It is people like you, giving open contracts to all of these GODDAMN land perverts {I think you call them contractors} that are destroying all of the sacred spaces of the city-states.”

The Mayor had become distracted. The tiny voice that had interrupted the overall diatribe had seemingly slipped through some possibly exploitable ego-crack in the Universe currently accosting him.

“By god, what the hell am I talking about now? Is your madness contagious?”

“Madness? Oh no my dear,”

The eyes were spinning now like a roulette wheel strapped to a rocket engine, and as a result the voices coming from Norton’s mouth were whipping back and forth through a disturbingly varied plethora of tones and timbres, accents and cadences.

“Madness is what you people suffer from, always walking around with your ‘I’s’ and ‘me’s’. SACRED is what we are talking about, and maybe you’re finally getting the gist of it!”

Suddenly the Mayor began to shake violently. His tongue grew cold and he wet himself. Somewhere deep inside of him a commotion of personalities had broken out. In the few seconds left before he felt the ego-scaffold he long ago declared as his ‘Self’ slipped forever off the edge of stability and liquefied amidst a horde of other, long denied personality statutes, the Mayor realized what a horrible mistake he had made in declaring gentrification this years Magick word.

He began to cry for his mistakes.


As Randy walked the short distance to the woman’s neighbor’s door he lamented briefly on the task of keeping order amidst such a volatile and willful population.

“Oh well, plenty of room for all of ‘em in this Universe I guess.”

The object of his inquisition before him now Randy knocked out three soft, polite rasps on the large iron door.

“Iron? Don’t see that very much anymore…”

Suddenly the door shot upward, some air-fueled track and tech mechanism no doubt employed. Beyond the threshold was a man, hunkered over with twisty spine, three cigarettes hanging from his lips at varying intervals and what appeared to be a Magick wand in his hand, complete with a sparkly star at its terminus.

“WhAt?”

“Ah, good evening sir. Officer Randy of the department of peace and freedom. Just wanted to let you know we received a complaint on this residence earlier this evening…”

“sO wHaaT? wE’Re fAr tO busy fOr ‘Ese iNter’uPtiOnS’”
“Sir, we just wanted to let you know, BURP, oh, excuse me… ugh, sorry, anyway, we just wanted you to know, BURP, ugh, sorry, uh, sir, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you if I could use your restroom…”

“Oh be quick about it, would you.”

Either something in the man’s demeanor had changed or… oh it didn’t matter. Officer Randy had just enough time to run into the house through the door of the room the man had pointed to, throwing open the strangely shaped lid on the toilet before excavating the contents of his stomach into the dank and cavernous device.

Still at the door the man had disappeared and now there was a large talking turtle occupying the space he had formerly held.

“Well, that’s one down. Now, if the council was right, we should be able to round up the rest of the entirety of the Nortonverse really rather simply. His partner should be along shortly.”

The turtle spoke to no one in particular, and as it turned to approach the door behind which Officer Randy’s screaming emanated from, it passed before a large, ornamented mirror. The reflection, to anyone who might have been watching, was initially that of the old man again, but then it continued even after he had passed before it, as if now a massive single file line of people were passing before its reflective surface. There was the turtle, a tiny blond midget woman with a hockey stick, a midget with a bad comb over and a large, bearded man in a chef suit eating from a crinkled bag that said ‘FINGERS – NEW ASIAN RANCH BAR B Q’ just to name a few of the dozens of images that flashed by while the man quietly slit what was left of Officer Randy’s throat and then consumed his entire frame in .02 seconds, the resultant burp running forward and backwards in time, and up from the microcosm and out into the macrocosm.

The man’s mother-hive had always told him, if you eat too fast you could choke to death from an air bubble.


Norton cradled the other man’s weakened head and whistled a tune that would not be written for another twelve years.

“The author was as you, mistaken and confused by his own sexuality. Make love to each other, but don’t make hate to the world around you by erecting these armies of giant concrete dildo’s to house your EL-EE-VAD-DOORS and ROOMS. These are atrocities of the eleventh degree and as such, as enlightened peoples, we must fight their spread and keep the sacred, mysterious spaces of our cities clean and dark. Like the underpass at 87th.

Forever more a changed man the Mayor gazed into Norton’s eyes and wept openly.

“We… will… put things… right. We promise.”

His eyes closed and beneath the thin, leathery membrane of his lids Norton 0 could see the same spinning motion performing its obligatory shuffle.

They smiled, but the smile was cut short by another burst of gas.

BURP

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Norton 0 (I assure you its edited)

The bar was cold and dark, pretty much exactly what we expected for this type of situation. We sat alone, sipping merrily on a Tom collins, pretending to enjoy the poorly made cocktail and looking at the waitress' ass. She was somewhere on the other side of forty, dark-haired and pretty, in that 'I'll be your waitress and maybe give you a blow job in the service elevator after my boss leaves for fifty-bucks and or a night out on the town and away from my three kids' way'.

We were not having that. One of us would have to silently stay behind and incorporate a poltergeist spell that might persuade her to re-think her life [seven days later she would leave her abusive 'boyfriend' and move the kids to Portland, where her mother lives].

It's always funny to me how people resist change until they think God has sent them a message
.

"God doesn't talk to assholes..."

"Huh? Look buddy, I just came to bring you your bill. Fuck off jerk!"

We're speaking out loud again. Hmm, we all smirk to one another, amused that she apparently considers herself an asshole.

We think about it and then leave a twenty on the table (not because there's any one of us in here that feels bad about what was accidentally said out loud but because we can't stop thinking about the children she will soon be taking care of sans any help from a prize-fighting boyfriend) and maneuver through the dingy crowd to the bathroom in back where we take a stall, bust out two Vicadine, crush them up in my hand and arrange them out on top of the back of the toilet in order to snork them down with a half-straw we created while at the table. The lines go down rough, like prescription dope always does, but we all know that in ten minutes that beautifully peaceful feeling will ring in from around the edges and cause the world to once again seem like a much nicer place than it really is.

So, the connection was not made and now it is up to one of us here to go and make the report. The child is chosen, as he always has the most refreshing ways to deal with responsibilities.


Fifteen minutes later, beneath the overpass of Northeast highway, where it rises up over Harlem. Rumours have circulated for years about the secret caves which supposedly were built into the foundations of the structure by unknown entities more than a lifetime ago when further development at the end of the fifties pushed more and more people in search of homes to the south suburbs, which were largely at the time forest preserves. Norton knew all about these rumours, and it had been his discovery of one such tunnel that had forever changed his world.

He moves through a stagnant moat of collected rainwater and to a small hole apparently taking unsubstantial residence at the foot of one of the large concrete support pillars holding the elevated highway above this, one of the last remaining sacred places of the city. Norton, as well as the people he now associates himself with* use these caves as homes and operating headquarters, from where they silently, invisibly observe the city around them to better work to inoculate the social and psychic virus which seems to flitter around fucking up the natural order of everything. Today a new virus had been added to the list. A virus named Rufus who used to be best friends with as many as twelve of the respective character roles Norton had long ago written for themselves. "In every man a thousand, in every woman a thousand more, wear the mask, raise the curtain, the world, a stage to adore." This poem ran constantly through the collective's head, often changing its mood and thus, its operative representative.

Burrowing silently like a snake the adventurers make their way through the inhuman tunnel and out into a wading pond of more stagnant rainwater (this area collected and filtered for human use), from which they eventually emerge into the anti-chamber where the others would no doubt already be assembled.

They were there.

Three scruff and bearded men sit waiting, lounging around bizarre rock and concrete formations, sculpted from loose or stolen concrete that makes its way down from botched roadway repairs and excess dumping (both of which occurs more than anyone would really like to believe). Three men, but a council of dozens lay eyes on the adventurers as they make their way to their feet and prepare to present their findings.

"Brothers and sisters of the Norton-verse, what have thee to report to the council?"

"We would prefer to take a casual application to this meeting, as the news we have uncovered begs for further, regrettable action."

"Very well, everyone, remove your pants. You too ladies."

Information is exchanged and deliberation with the gods begins.

In the end the council cannot take his outpost from him and for this he is glad. That pederast, gandolf mother fucker Zoo-mani has a favorite 'nephew’ he wants to appease with the gateway outpost for the supermodel dimension, but Norton wasn’t about to go for that. Three twenty-something aged frat boys walked by him in the street just in time to overhear part of his internal conversation and think him crazy.

Hah! He’d show them.

“In another coupla’ hours I’ll be nailing the girl who you’ll be drooling over in next years swimsuit issue so pISS oFF young upstarts!”

Later

Norton sat in the corner booth of the little cafe...

....

All of this happens without severe incident and eventually they decide to retire. The funny thing about being on the clock in a parallel Universe that just so happens to overlap with this one is no matter what you plan or what you want, you always wind up asleep at the wrong time and awake at the wrong time. Explain that one.

“So here we are, another night in front of the delicatessen. What shall it be?” As they asked themselves the question for the three hundredth and sixty fifth day in a row (this was their one year anniversary as an enlightened being, awakened from the soup by a baseball bat to the head on Easter last year) a tiny rat ran by, trying oh so desperately to avoid the inevitable. Sure enough Norton’s arm shoots out like lightning and WHAMMO!!!! Dinner is served!

Several hours later he wakes as the door to the dimension of super thin fashion models opens and the next BIG THING comes through, naked and hungry and looking oh so desperately for her precious dog, a half-breed Shit zue named Malcom-cum-Malco. Norton gets up and puts on the customary coffee (not really coffee at all, but something closely akin he picked up in the stimulant-verse, heated and ready with only a lighter and a prayer for better rib meat). For several months now, ever since he moved to this underpass, he has acted as the chauffer into this world from the legendary supermodel-verse, where food is scarce and sex is ridiculous. Nineteen or twenty years of eating rock cocaine and fucking finger puppets their parents arrange for them to marry leave these girls ready to explore, and when they finally become thin enough to sense the portal in their labia they come through the door ready for the first man they see, hence Norton’s dedication to fending off anyone who moves in on his territory.

Of course, three hundred and sixty five days ago it was not his territory and the only reason he ever got it to begin with was the ass backwards result of yet another devious if not poorly planned and misguided attempt to take over the Universe(s). Stop playback and select fuck-off if you’ve heard this one before.

“So there we were, all twelve at the council and none of the mofo’s appreciated the risk and responsibility we had decided to take on by taking up arms against the true coffee terrorists, starbob-squishpants. We mean here was a chain where everything cost, like, thirty times more than even the most rudimentary flavour could demand, and our whole boycott and our whole poopy-pokey-I’ll-slap your-disgusting-coffee-traitor-face extreme gymnastics routine was getting absolutely no press. We mean, how many upper middle class upper class middles do you have to poke in the bung hole before someone at good ol’ fashionably reliable channel 1,111.29 takes notice and puts you on as the next regular guest star of Baywatch 18 B.C.? This isn’t a fucking hard equation, knowhatimeanthen?”

STOp!

This new one with the pretty black hair has just come through and suddenly we’re seeing where this is going. On our previous adventure, out there in the inexplicable backwaters of time, we learned the real-time inconvenience of trying to cube all the various dimensions of time into a single, mathematically valid representation of that which is singularly unable to be cubed into standardly mathematically valid points of representations. In the Norton-verse we have come to call this Poo-uvering.

So here’s Norton sitting directly across the shopping cart from this six foot five, ‘hundred and twelve pound mutant foreigner, knowing full well that an agent for Pipsi or Nubisoy is nearby, scanning for the new arrival, trying to convince this poor piece of meat that the only good thing that is going to come to her is him, if she lets him. and based on the foodless, orgasmless equations she’s been raised on he’s not really wrong.

1000x

“After we finish Britany asks me what this world is like and if she will ever see a purpose beyond garden. We try to tell her that the underpass/overpass at NE Harlem needs a guardian veterinarian, to put down the bums and jerk off the strays, but in the end her eyes roll back and forth looking for the corporate lawmen to swoop in on their web-like dossiers and take her to the land of fake breasts and Grammy award show performances. Oh well, we got our rocks off.”

Later that night the whole population is asleep, even the late-night watchmen personality named Mavis when an intruder arrives and shackles the physical vehicle to its shopping cart.

They awake alarmed and quite unhappy with Mavis.

“Who are you and why have you endangered my mission? I Norton 0, prototype Universe for the post pre-age of no modern command that thoust answer me!”

“No! No! You have us all wrong comrades. We are here with a message from the council and bind you only out of fear and respect for the, ah, legendary violence of some of the members of your vehicle. We mean no offense!”

“No Offense?! No offense?! BlahHh! You, have your best and bravest get off his balls and deliver the council’s message, then put your biggest coward at the wheel and get from my sight before I find one of my carnivorous poodles and use it to flay the flesh from your grill!”

'That damn council,' they thought when it was all over. Never too smart.

It was back to the cafĂ© to wait for the waitress to get off work and then follow her home. Word of her true form had found it’s way to them and it was now believed that she had smuggled here with her a canister or two of some grade A toxic material from the expensive slag mines of the cavernous world of intelligent rocks.

It all sounds so strange and cheesy, the skeptic in him, Marlowe Thought. But damn it if it wasn’t all also true. There were strange little twists to the physical world everywhere one could look, it was just modern society trained their young to be concerned about pointless oddities like situation dramadies and low fat tofu bars instead of the invisible world that exacted itself on their lives everyday. How many of these glue-sniffing squish heads would believe that if they just lit a candle every morning in the southeast corner of their mansions they would never have to pay taxes to their overblown god ComercĂ©. Fools! In this day and age it was always about what everyone else was doing, especially those pointless tarts from the tribe they call Cele-britee.

It took only hours for Norton 0 to work his way out of the cuffs, not realizing the entire time that the kid had been so nervous that he had actually left the keys in the lock.

“Now, one quick scuttle inside to the hall of ancients and we’ll be on our way!”

He closes his eyes and a tidal wave of inner movement cascades over them.

"Seething! SEE-THINGS!!!"

........

1965 (whoops? Wrong direction!!!)

There is a jazz guitar amp that we oh so desperately want to send to ourselves in the future, but we don’t know quite how to do this because we no longer hold access points to the vocal stabilities and techniques required to make this hole on the front of our faces do anything other than slather as imperceptibly astute examples of living erotica dart and sketch by in various stages of dilapidation. Cough syrup and rubbing alcohol will do that to you sometimes..."

"Eh? Do whut to yew? Ey canNOT follow a goddem word yer sayin'"

""Were we speking aloud? Oh dear? How much does he know? How much did you say?"

"I DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING"

"LOOK, is it that cough syrup and rubbing alcohol will induce various degrees of dilapidation in a body? Or were you referring to yourself and your ridiculous ability to hold twenty-seven different conversations with yourself all at once and in different dialects?"

More questions. Damn, we want that guitar.

That Norton was sure he had not said aloud. And the simple fact was it would not have mattered if he did, now that the other man's kidnet hung from the silvery edge of his curved carving blade.

"Shit, I guees that means KIP, the psychotic personality has garnered control again. GETREADYFORANOTHERWHITECHAPELOHYOUPERILOUSANDUNSUSPECTINGWORLD!!!"

.................


*Or rather, they now associate themselves with, as Norton and their comrades subscribed to the para-psychological view that in every person there is a collective and to regard people as one single 'I' was at least half of the reason the world was awash in terrifying situations (wars, rapes, murders, etc.) created by too many reinforced and hopelessly selfish egos