| GOODBYE, MEATPANTS
America's Army is a multi-player, online video game created by the
MYSP_ACE
I upload a mess. EDIT PROFILE: First name is Meat Pants private and used for search only. My space is an apartment is a shambles. That's how I like it: secret word opening a cluttered page stitched out of pixels and data, like so much pixie dust. My password is Laundromat. ABOUT ME: Can I crawl out through a hole in my own head? I'd like to have an aperture or orifice through which sadness can pass. I'd like to tie a stone to an experience and throw it into writing, but she says, "That's just not how language works." Then she gives me four bruises aligned in intersecting stripes across my thighs. One X marks the spot and the other X marks INTERESTS AND PERSONALITY:
I enter a blank field. Empty, as in waiting for inscription. As a data entry clerk, my job description was "Flesh interface." Duties included transcribing bodies into information and drinking the COMPANY's array of complimentary beverages. I called myself Meat Pants, always cheerfully, as in, "Meat Pants, reporting for duty!" Each day I faced dozens of postal crates containing tiny postcards that had been filled out with personal information and mailed back to the COMPANY. Sometimes I couldn't read the handwriting, wobbly ballpoint careening around the postcard's printed blanks and lines, so I just keyed whatever into the database. In my headphones droned Journey to the Center of the Earth as read by Tom Baker. If you lined up all the postcards in the crates, would they reach the center of the earth? The database was insatiable. Meanwhile, I spiraled farther, deeper away from the light that broke against the crust and dirt, toward a molten BACKGROUND AND LIFESTYLE:
A bit of story comes floating in. Winter's gone but the bit of orange fluff that fell out of her pocket when she left is still sheltered in a crevice next to the schmaltz. Is it possible to turn seeing inside out? I enter my secret word (Laundromat) and regard the picture called myself. I look bruised. Bruised by the need for contact (F2F) and deprivation thereof. My data-body still craving her precision violence. Blurry lashes. Two, supple and dark. I log on and see what? ABSOLUTELY ZIP! Even the alphabet is running away from me
Dear Zerosandones,
Ever since I made up your name I've been feeling a little ___
Blank, I guess.
As in, fill in the ___
To be specific, I've been feeling like a
blank or, say, a data entry field
that's been filled in by-
oh, I don't know,
an alien hand?
What I mean, Z, is that
it's like you threw a veil over
my name and now
a whole field of meaning
's under siege.
I can't begin to tell you how funny it feels.
I guess I'm just getting used to
you sort of always
being here cause to be honest,
at first I thought you were supposed to be like
some kind of vampire
or something,
nothing but background
in the mirror.
Not sure how to sign this letter,
Meat Pants
---
Dear Meat Pants,
It's so hard to have any kind of attention span these days. Breathing war without being able to see it, trailing a litter of reciepts and wondering, have I been a citizen today? Have you noticed a compulsive quality to the way that dust collects around your fingers when you're not buying things-I'm pretty sure it gathers according to some kind of system. I'll radio it in, just in case I'm ON TO SOMETHING. One thing we train for here is to notice tiny systems, which is why I have adopted as my current motto, "if it looks like dust, it might be the enemy." There's something ancient about that. Of course, it could be our dust system, too. You never know when you're playing against yourself.
You know, Meat Pants, I'd say you were my flesh prop, the thing behind me in the mirror, but I can't look in the mirror. I'm pure point of view. Have I mentioned that I haven't got a body yet? What I DO have is bar of beef on the side of the screen that indicates my strength. So, ha, yay for me! AND I can make the marks a body makes! Footprint. Sound of breathing. Footprint. Remember when I had hands? That one day on the shooting range. I was the space in front of you, and you billowed out behind me like a nice and meaty brain. Your compulsive behaviors are actually adorable to me. Hunched over the keyboard, movements becoming automatic. I like it best when you just go and go into the screen where we meet, commingle.
Don't laugh! You hurt my information body, anxious little artifact, and then I can't even keep this breathy syntax going. Do you have a body you can stash me in? I want to go go go in and out/rapid-fire breathing /dodge adagio
and all for you, Meat Pants.
I don't even know if I can die.
I think I might be war.
I never sleep. I just
wait for you to log on and
play me
so we have SERIOUSLY got to get together one of these days, and I don't just mean your fingers, my p.o.v. Because sometimes, Meat Pants, when you're on the keys, my mouth surrounds me and I just begin to sing.
Tra la la,
Zero