⚠ If you're reading this u cheated + manually changed the URL to ../tm/(n + 1).html anticipating the release of the next chapter before we've linked it up, or you're a googley spider crawling the web searching for words. This chapter ain't ready for prime time tho. We've pushed this rough draft up for safe keeping... not that we have anything to hide as this drafting process is meant to be completely transparent. But be advised this ain't finished.

4 : PROPAGATION OF EARHORROR IN OUR BABELING DADASTREAM

[07/04/2021> More than ½ a year has passed since we posted ch 3. We've been busy channeling our river obsession musically to record the double album Tributaries, but now we're ready to pick up where we left off. The last saved version of thriver meme ch 4 started w/:] "Weave herd there ǝxists a river gene that drives sum folk to live near bodies of water." Not that we had a choice in the matter growing up. There wasn't much in the way of rivers in Mexico (where we were in ch 3), but we lived on the largest "lago" (lake in spanish sounds more open-ended). Our last year in Mexico this stagnant lago (de Chapala) really started to reseedcede. They said it was cuz of Guadalajara or that a big pig farm in Jocotepec was sucking it all up. A lot of our information we herd word of mouth, ether filtered thru the stoned mind of our mother or 2nd hand from locals (+ since our spanish wasn't so good, all this is subject to interpretation). This is how we went thru puberty.

> There was a dock in the lake we used to dive off that by summer of 1982 was a soccer-field length above the shoreline. They call soccer "football" in spanish which made us wonder why Americans called it football when u throw + catch the ball w/ your hands. Besides receding, the shoreline got vaguer that year. An evasive weed from China carpeted the shore spreading cross the "surfizz of the hogwah" til u couldn't tell the difference. By summer of 1982 it covered the lagoon for as far as the "I could sea," tho sumtimes the wind would change direction + blow the weeds to the other end.

> We stopped going in the lake when we entered puberty but sum kids kept swimming naked w/ their prepubescent friends as if they couldn't see themselves as others saw them. It got to the point where nobody could swim in the lago cuz the "liria" was chock thick like a massive green shag carpet covering both land + water. There were public baths w/ pools to swim in free of weeds, but we had to rely on our mother to get there since it was ½-way to Jocotepec + she would insist on going in w/ us + didn't believe in shaving so her pubic hair rug continued ½-way down her thighs, which was mortifying to us @ this age. Since there was no place to swim, when we got bored + had nothing to do we'd wade thru the weeds along the shore that used to be underwater. Near the pier weed find skeletons of dogs + cats tied to cinderblocks from when people decided they didn't need their pets no more. When we asked other kids how they could do this they laughed @ the gringo + said animales no tienen alma.

> When we look up liria now it translates to "lilies," which (thanks to Laurie Anderson) signify "days gone by". Around this time we asked a girl named Lily if she wanted to go down to the lake + we kissed + then she said she needed to go pee but there was nowhere to go so she told us don't look + squatted right there. We didn't peek but noticed after that her sky-blue shorts were a darker navy-blue in the crotch.

> This was the same summer we lost our virginity w/ another girl, doesn't matter who. We did it mostly to get it over with. Reflecting back now we realize how effective our jeans are @ coaxing humuns to reproduce by halving us not think too much about it. Reproduction was the furthest thing from our addled mind, we weren't even fooully aware of our ǝxistence in el moondough.

> The Mexican authorities tried the hole she-bang to get rid of the liria. They sprayed herbicide but that killed off everything except the lilies. Since the plant had Chinese origins, they introduced a species of carp that in China ate the lilies but in this lagoon ate all the other fish. Then they introduced special paddle-wheel boats that churned around chopping up the weeds so @ least other watercraft could get thru. These weed-eating boats didn't even need a pilot, they'd just set them going on a randum course 24 hrs a day... or @ least this is how it appeared to our impressionable mined, perhaps a coxswain was sleeping below deck? When we strolled down to the lake this is what we watched for entertainment since we could not longer sea the lagoon itself. It seamed the boats didn't need humun intervention, they were fueled by the very weeds they mulched, perpetual motion machines.

> It terrified a part of us watching these boats dice up the weeds. The lilies kept churning into our nightmares, cross-pollinating w/ prior anxieties like how authorities in the Pacific Northwest hacked up sea stars to deal w/ a similar over-proliferation only to discover that each piece grew an entire sea star anew. Or how whack-a-mole's success (the meta4 survives even after the death of arcades) is driven by this innate humun fear of an invasive species spiraling exponentially in over-proliferation.

> We were always good w/ #s but didn't really know what they were 4. We knew the antswears but not the questions. They didn't have a class to put us in so we sat in back of whatever room plugging away thru workbooks on our one. We had no idea what we were doing, it was ∀ll just an exorcise to keep our mined off the real world. They didn't have any spanish classes for us to take either since it was assumed u already knew español, so instead we took french taught in spanish figuring that was better than nothing.

12/12/2020> When we was writing the 1st draft of chapter 4 a year ago, we got distracted by the #4 + embarked on a series of 4 x 1-off 1-of-a-kind art books that we then compiled into 4ier X-forms that got published today. Now that this distraction is over we can get back to thriver meme. The 1st thing we did was delete the original chapter 4 + start from scratch. We had written about how sum of our teachers said technology drove production, created jobs, etc. while others said technology took jobs away from humuns + we were stuck sumwhere in between. We reflected back further then we said we would in this book, when we rode in backseats as a kid + understood cars could get our I-balls faster from point A to point B but how also that they could maim + kill humuns "by axident" + pondered if there was such thing as accidents. We wrote about how our dad chain-smoked cigarettes while driving + wondered why he chose the brand he did, quoting "Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones as if it happened to come on the radio. This was during the '70s oil crisis when u could only get gas on odd # days if your license plate had an odd # + even days if u had an even #... but again, we said this book would start after 1982. We started to self-cannibalize sum of our own unpublished stories laying around on our hard-drive + said how we was gonna try to combine these texts into 1 narrative dadastream, but we need to stop thinking about how we're processing this + just move on.

> After the summer of 1982 in Mexico we shifted to California. We were thinking ahead to college + concerned that our credits wouldn't apply (again, unaware that these institutions were simply using us to further propagate their need). We had a step-uncle-in-law that was a teacher @ a swanky boarding school in Pebble Beach so pulled sum strings to get us in. This step-uncle-in-law drove a Citroën (or rather the Citroën drove him). Citroën gave us a ride to class 1 day + when we got in the car "got an erection" as our step-uncle-in-law put it. Citroën was the same creepy step-uncle-in-law who managed to seduce 3 generations of our step-family of either sex, from our step-grandmother (who our grandpa Cal married after our real grandmother died... so none of these people are related genetically) to the aunt he married, to her brother + also her son. Citroën also owned a bunch of whippets (or rather, the whippets owned him) that slept in bed w/ him. Whenever Citroën offered a ride to us after that we said we preferred to walk.

> Most of the other kids weren't @ this school (RLS) by choice but cuz their parents didn't want to deal w/ them. But again, this technotext isn't about humuns so much as all the non-humun elements that influenzed our trajectory, the possessions that made us bring them to that boarding school (an institution that (via our step-uncle-in-law that drove the Citroën) used us to keep it in operation) likely included the usual assortment of clothes, toiletries, photographs, a camera, books, cassettes + other personal FX that we packed in a duffel bag + a chest. We don't have a precise inventory but are just going off memaory of the things that drove us to keep them. Sum things, like our surfboard, we weren't allowed to bring, tho we did bring our body board. We had a stamp collection (sum pretty valuable 1s as we remember) but it got stolen @ RLS. That was the 1st + last time we were compelled to "collect" anything just for the sake of collecting.

> When we got to Pebble Beach we acquired a few new possessions such as a bicycle, a typewriter, a boom box + an electric guitar + amp. We had an acoustic we left behind (cuz electric was cooler) that we got in Paracho, a town where all any 1 did was make + sell guitars, where all humuns were slaves to the guitar meme. When we went to buy the guitar they were having a festival where they slaughtered a bull right there in the plaza. These crazed guitar shepherds collected the blood + poured it into dixie cups + 1 of them handed us a cup + we drank it cuz we felt if we didn't it would offend them + also cuz when else would we have the opportunity?

> We had an 8-track in Mexico (borrowed from our mom) but didn't collect that many 8-track tapes of our own. Before this in Oregon we had a turntable + had collected a dozen or so records that we had to leave behind when we moved to Mexico. Most of these records (45's) we stole by shoving them down our pants. 45's we member shoplifting included The Knack's "My Sharona", Blondie's "Heart of Glass" + M's "Pop Muzik" (@ the time Casey Kasem likely dictated what we bought/stole). But by the time we got to RLS we started to collect music on cassettes. Cassettes won us over thru their portability + the fact that u could record over them if u didn't like what was on them.

7/12/2021> This ephemeral reusability is also what makes writing in HTML so compelling. But this lack of concrete form is also difficult to maintain. Current thinking is that we're gonna abandon this HTML version + publish this on pulp from dead trees. If we never link up this page to another page on Inurnet does it ǝxist? If we delete these pages from the server but they've been archived on the Wayback Machine does this technotext ǝxist?

Until the book gets published (if/when it ever does), you've reached a dead end.

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3 << [4] >> CH 5: [forthcoming]