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spidereggs888 · 2 months

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MIGUEL IMPREGNATES EVERYONE IN A 69 FT RADIUS!

🤰🫄🫃🕷

/j 💀

Miguel and You

Miguel O’Hara & y/n, any gender or non gender. Very casual writing style. TW Dark humor, dangerous situations, 18+. Y/n are sorta attracted to Miguel (why else would you be here?) but he doesn’t know you lol

ACT 2 | BLACK MARKET DEMONS

This has a drawing

If you haven’t read ACT 1, click this

•°《🕷》°•

You can’t remember how much time has passed or what you were doing. Those freaky eyes fade from your vision, and now you can barely see your own legs and shoes. It’s dark. Horror movie dark. You hear a scuffling sound from nearby. This so feels like a b-horror where the main character keeps surviving somehow. You hope this is the case.

“Dis shit’s useless!”

As your vision returns, you squint to the side and see someone’s back to you, crouching on the ground with a laptop. You assume it’s the guy who led you down here, but who the hell is he? And how does he know you?

You check your surroundings without moving your head too much in the hopes you’ll find a clue. You appear to be under the maintenance level of Nueva York, since there’s pipes all around the walls, all filled with the deafening roar of ocean water. This is far below your home level, down in the bottom where Nueva York was called New York. The place stinks of rot that would have made you gag if you weren’t already used to the dumpster near your apartment cube.

Through all the steam hissing you hear the familiar clinking sound of your data sticks.

“Fiddy grand here…. Four dere… not enough…”

This fucker is probing through your savings! It’s not much to him but you need it for your bills!

“Oh shock it!” He grumbles. You see his head turn, so you immediately return to your hypnotized pose. You can hear him clamber over and lean in close. His breath stinks of rationed mineral chips, food people buy when they are facing starvation. Alchemax wanted to save face in the public eye years ago, so they made those nasty mineral bars to fight starvation. You made it a point to never eat them since Speshall told you what’s in them. You feel bad for this black market demon. He’s probably also down on his luck despite his skill set.

You don’t feel sorry for him for long. He briefly presses something metal against your ear, and with a click sound he administers a sharp jab. You flinch but try to remain in a fake stupor. He rubs something against the wound, and you feel warm blood trickle down your lobe. He Sméagol-crawls away to his laptop light and you carefully squint his way again. You can’t see what he’s doing but you hear the clinking of glass.

You finally recall his voice again. He was following you after you parked your car before going in for the O’Hara interview. He must have been trying to snatch you up in broad daylight, because that’s how fast the black market demons are.

“No illnesses… a lil’ iron deficiency but dat can be overlooked…”

Oh fuckin hell, he intends to sell your organs.

You move your hands and see they are taped together. Your pants are stapled together (who the hell even does that?!) and you are stuck on your bum. You raise your gaze ahead of you and see a man in the same pose as you, except he doesn’t look well at all. In fact, there’s a dark pool at his stomach and his pants are drenched.

Holy shit!

You nope the fuck out of there and the demon hears you. He slams down his little science project and chases after you. Your pants are ripped from resisting the staples. You dash down the dark alley of tubes and pipes. He almost grabs you but he is hit with steam.

“Augh my fuckin eyes!”

You keep running. You can feel a cool breeze coming from somewhere. You have to get to the street. You have to get away. You left your data sticks behind but so what?! He’s AFTER you!

“DON’T LET ‘EM GET AWAY!” he screams.

Multiple freaky masks and eyes appear in the darkness! More demons! They are clambering out of their dwellings. You run past one of them flaying a body under a red light. You don’t stop to investigate, you keep running. The air smells even more rotten this way, a blend of ocean water and dead bodies. You keep running, your legs burning. Damn the sedimentary lifestyle of your office job. You are out of shape and trying to run for your life.

More creepypasta masks appear from the dark. You stare straight ahead. You can’t look at them. They mean to stop you. They mean to tear you apart. One grabs your scarf and you spin out of it. One grabs your jacket and you slip from the silk sleeves. Your lungs are on fire. You escape between stacks of broken monitors, shoving them behind you to slow down your assailants, but you are getting slower, too. Your path is getting wider, but also darker. There’s very little light here.

You stop at a completely dead and dark end. You can’t see anything in front of your face. You try to quiet your ragged breaths. You can hear the demons getting closer, but if you run more, you risk crashing into something you can't see.

“Turn around!” the demon demands.

You do nothing except stare bug-eyed into the darkness.

“Turn AROUND! Are ya deaf?!”

The vast darkness is barely illuminated by all the masks that strobe behind you. You can see a ledge before you, with nothing visible down below. What a drop off!

“LOOK AT ME!”

He grabs your shoulder and turns you to face him. He’s even closer now, his weird eyes pulsating black and white.

“Das right… look into my eyes…”

You feel your senses numb again. Your mind goes foggy. Maybe it was better to jump than face the horrors of the demons who will tear you apart. Then you hear someone else moving in the dark.

“Found you.”

Your demon is grabbed by the neck. Near him a whole illuminated bodysuit of a man materializes from the darkness. Bright red designs light up his massive chest and shoulders, and his mask has abstract eye marks that emote into a scowl as he tightens his grip on the demon’s neck. You feel as if you are trapped in the deep ocean where no light reaches the floor and you are witnessing one of its denizens about to be devoured by an even bigger one.

A giant red palm pushes you away onto the ground. You crumple down and watch the demon being raised off his feet like a rag. He is gasping for air and thrashing his pathetic legs around.

“You guys wanna see something?”

The mask of the larger man vanishes, but you can’t see many features with the strobe light of the demon’s copypasta mask. What you can make out are a set of terrifying fangs, a gaping maw opening unnaturally wide at the demon who makes a strangled shriek. You hear a nasty chomp sound, like someone taking a bite into a roll of hamburger meat! The demon kicks his legs helplessly, which looks even more horrible in the strobe light. The other demons bolt, and you instinctively lay down as they dash around you for their own escape. You try to ignore the icky gasping sounds. You hear a low, deep chested hum of satisfaction from the bigger predator. You try not to look, but you hear no more sputtering and kicking.

It’s over. The attack is over and the demon is not moving. Even his mask’s light dims in defeat. You close your eyes, unsure of what to expect next. All you know is that you do not want to be the center of attention. Your eyes snap open when you hear the demon's body fall to the ground.

“Lyla, scan the body.”

“He’s alive. The venom is doing its work.”

“And the other one?”

“Also alive. Probably still under the effects of the hypnosis.”

“That should wear off soon. We need to get back to the surface.”

“Affirmative! I’ll map out the quickest route!”

No fucking way. Accent and everything, even down to having an AI helper named LYLA. If WTF was a sensation, you would be feeling it now.

The black market demon is dragged away. You raise your head and see the large fellow wrapping the demon up in a bright red web. No fucking way is this happening! He’s rolling this guy around and around like a dead fly. There is no other person this could also be!

This man, Miguel O’Hara, has been moonlighting as the illusive vigilante Spider-Man!

You should really be more discreet with your spying but you can’t help it! Spider-Man stands upright, his whole suit fully illuminated with tech not yet known to the public. Dark blue and bright red, the patterns akin to the original Spider-Man who lived a hundred decades or so ago, except more minimalist to match the 22nd century aesthetic with a touch of ancient Mexican design. His mask re-materializes but you didn’t need to see his face to know who he was, there’s too much personal evidence to be mistaken. He stands proudly at 6’9” feet, like a beacon in the darkness. Then you hear a weird gurgle coming from him and he doubles over.

“Eugh!”

“I told you they added cream again. Why did you drink it anyway?”

“I was in a hurry.”

“Haste makes waste! You ended up spending an hour in the bathroom, which canceled your SM society meeting.”

“Not everyone was there anyway- Dios Mio I think I’m dehydrated…”

He groans then comes over to you and grabs your bound hands. With surgical precision he scratches off the tape with claw-like protrusions from his fingertips. You don’t move. The last thing you need is for him to know that you know him. You don’t know what to do with this information right now, it’s too much!

You are lifted off the floor with ease. You keep your eyes closed but wish you could see what’s going on. He cradles you in his giant arms and you assume he must be checking you over. It’s like being hugged by a couch.

“A scratch on the ear… no severe damage.”

You hear a small sound of indifference in his throat before you are rolled around in webbing, round and round like a burrito.

He slings you and the demon onto his shoulder like a couple of grocery bags, and you come cheek to cheek with your attacker. You scowl at his stupid face. His creepy eyes are all crossed and his jaw is slacked with his tongue poking out, so you turn your head away discreetly. Your savior walks a bit, jostling his luggage around to get comfortable before lunging straight up.

You can hear screaming from below. The demons didn’t run away out of fear; they fell back for reinforcements. You peek down and see their hypnotic faces flashing up like angry ghosts from outer space. As you and your company ascend higher, projectiles fly up, nearly hitting you in the head.

“Over twenty black market demons are on your tail,” Lyla announces.

“Got it.”

Spider-Man throws you and the demon straight up and you let out a yelp. The world is spinning out of control and you try not to feel sick. This must be what it’s like to be a shirt shot out of a t-shirt cannon. You are at the mercy of the bright red web pinning your arms to your sides as you fall back down to earth like a corn. You catch a glimpse of what’s going on below and see red streaks of lights. Demons are being flung all over the place, their projectiles not fast or strong enough to stop this even bigger monster from tearing through them.

Gravity is merciless, but before you can land anywhere more red webs fly at you from the dark, snagging you and your company on a light pole. You look down and see some of the demons below trying to reach you, scaling the light pole with crackhead energy. There is a loud ringing sound and the pole vibrates for a split second, making your teeth rattle.

The light pole shifts, cut in half like paper by something red moving lighting fast. The demons screech to each other (something about getting the hell out of there), and you are too stunned to scream for help as the whole metal pole is now falling. [Do you know how freakin big metal light poles are? Just walk up to one, they are actually ginormous. Blew my goddamn mind.]

The pole crashes down and gets stuck across two large machines, the top end jammed into the massive machinery. The webbing took all the shock of the fall, so you and the demon are dangling like a pair of converses on a telephone wire. You jerk your head around as the demons come crawling like ants, their pursuit hindered by the violent shaking of the metal pole. One flings herself close and grabs you by the head, and you lock eyes with her freaky face. She got mouths where her eyes should be!

The she-demon is knocked away with a nasty slap sound, ragdolling away into the vast darkness.

“-- Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii—------”

Your hero is slapping the demons around, just pimp-slapping them all over the place.

“¡ESTUPIDO!”

*THWACK*

“¡PENDEJO!”

*SLAP*

“¡VETA A CASA CON MAMA!”

*POW*

“BYE BITCH!”

*SLAP*

(that last one had their whole mask slapped off. Contacts went flying, too.)

The demons get the hint and refuse to be humiliated further. They scatter off in the dark, and you can hear cursing and swearing as they go back to their deep dark dwellings.

“THAT’S RIGHT! ¡LARGATE, FUCKERS!”

He crouches on the metal light pole with great balance and listens as the demon squalling grows distant. He huffs with satisfaction.

“Shocking idiots…”

Spider-Man crawls his way across the shaky pole and retrieves his spider sacks with people in them. He leaps off as the machine finally rips through the pole, sending it falling all the way down into the darkness. Spider-Man listens to it hit the bottom.

“Okay, we leavin’ this ass-crack of the city for real this time.”

“A few of those people are critically injured,” Lyla reports, “I saw someone’s eye pop out.”

“Well I guess someone’s gotta keep an eye out, right?”

You always heard OG Spider-Man was a notorious wise-cracker, but this guy goes a little darker with his brand of humor. He was right about one thing.

Fuck those guys.

•°《🕷》°•

You and the demon are plopped down on the ledge of a building.

"Alright, time to put you back where you came from. And I'll just leave ugly here-," he says, hanging the black market demon upright on some wrought iron decor, "Even if he wakes up and frees himself, he'll still be stuck on this roof... unless he decides to jump off... then Godspeed, heh heh."

He takes you into a one arm embrace and scales down the side of your apartment using his web as a cord. Your face is being mushed into one of those monster pecs of his, and you try not to protest the fact that you can't breathe well. You hear a crash of glass.

“Yeah, your foot just went through a window,” Lyla announces.

"Ah shock... I'll pay for that sometime. This must be the bedroom."

He kicks in the rest of the window and deftly slides indoors, holding you against his waist. You barely open your eyes and see, by the arrangement of LED lights, you are home in your one-room studio apartment. He plops you down on your bed and rips off the red webbing.

“Yeah, you are in for a throbbing headache tomorrow,” Spider-Man says, keeping his voice low.

You are still pretending to be asleep as you hear him poke around at your stuff. You can hear your apartment hub terminal activate. You wonder what he’s doing messing with that.

“I’ve ordered nausea and pain relief to be delivered to this address,” Lyla confirms.

“Good. Those visual-hypnotic masks do some nasty damage. They need to get booted from the black market somehow. You got any ID on cara de moco?”

“Jeff Landers. Lost his apartment in Queens. Pretty much plinko’ed all the way down.”

“Ah, uh huh.”

“His last known location was in the Thor Memorial Housing,” Lyla continues, “his caseworker was the last person to see him.”

“Little did they know he’d go from praising Thor to harvesting organs,” he says, a little amusedly.

“He had a bad history of abuse from his father and lived in poverty. Can you really blame him?”

You hear Spider-Man walk near the foot of your bed. There’s a pause.

“I do blame him,” he finally concludes, “you can have the worst upbringing but still try to be a decent person. His shitty life doesn’t warrant torturing other people. He coulda been more like this one here, doing everything within reason to get by while still being a good person…”

He means you.

“Whelp, time to go torture that dummy. Gotta find out where he got that stupid mask.”

You can hear him stepping over your things and slipping out of the broken window. As soon as he leaves, you spring up and run to the window. You watch this giant man scale up from below. You didn’t mean to or expect it but get a direct buckshot of his backside for a moment [Why the heck is his suit so TIGHT? WHY?! You never seen a crotch so sculpted like that, what the fuck. Do he know this?! Is he aware he looks practically naked?! It’s like his suit is painted on- ]

He jumps from your apartment to the adjacent building where he left the black market demon. There’s no mistake of who he is, especially with that body, but now he’s gone and you are left to pick up the pieces both literally and figuratively. Now what the hell are you gonna do?! Your phone and your lanyard of data sticks (basically your wallet) are still down in hell with the other demons!

There’s no time to lose. You must cancel all your credit cards and change the passwords on every account you own, because it’s not like those demons are gonna pay your bills for you!

Turning on your computer interface in the wall, you video-call your landlord. The only thing you can really explain to him is that you busted the window when you were moving furniture around. He’d never believe Spider-Man kicked it in. You find that Spider-Man is cool in more ways than just looks, your landlord thanks you for a forwarded payment with the attached note sorry about the window.

After allowing him 10 minutes to lecture you with no interruptions other than a nod or sound of agreement, you close the video with him, then begin the long hunt down of all your credit and banking connections. You use your email to recall every important account. You even find some that are out of service and close them down. It’s a humbling experience, but not in the same way as being kidnapped by that black market demon. You feel like you are dissecting your life choices, reviewing things you hadn’t thought of in a long time. You unsubscribe from the health newsletters you don’t even read anymore. You delete the emails you swore you were gonna read later. All of it, fuck it, throw it in the trash. Guilt chain letters be damned, they will have to get their money from someone else, because you won’t ever be rich enough to become a philanthropist.

You are satisfied to some degree. You look out the window Spider-Man left through. Even though he met you as Miguel O’Hara, how did he find you? How did he know you were in trouble? You’ll have plenty of time to think of that in the shower, since you smell like sea water and dead skin particles.

.°˖✧🖫✧˖°.

The next morning, you reactivate your old phone after your mother sent you some money. She’s always offered, and every time you refused, but this time you didn’t need to be spending all of what you have left. You send her a text thanking her and promising to pay her back. Afterwards, you open a video chat with Speshall.

“Hey!”

“Sup, poser?!” She sings back. You were always caught off guard by her humor, but you needed that shit today.

“I had the most fucked up day, yesterday!”

You spend the next thirty minutes telling her what happened. She laughs, she screeches, she squawks, and she groans. Then you get to the horrible parts with the black market demon, then the larger-than-life rescue from Spider-Man.

“He musta been spying on their asses or something”, she says, “how else could he know you were in danger?!”

That is a pretty good question. It must have everything to do with his identity as O’Hara. You both exchanged information, after all. Maybe he was tracing your phone? But no, you decide not to tell her about this, about the possible correlation between Spider-Man and O’Hara.

“No idea but I’m glad he showed up.”

“Yeah, maybe you were in the right place at the right time or whatever. Hey, what do you have planned for dinner? My boyfriend flaked, maybe you can come over later. Hang on, I gotta make sure he’s really not coming tonight-“

Her voice drowns out as your mind shifts to thoughts of O’Hara. Did he remember who you were? He must have, right? Maybe he will also take pity and hire you, now that he’s seen your pitiful house. And what’s more, what if you become some kind of keeper for him?! Maybe knowing who he really is might be a kind of bargaining chip for getting hired? No, that’s something Brody would do, the goon. No, Miguel O’Hara’s secret identity is good as safe. Besides, he thinks you are a good person! You need to keep being that. You feel glad to have covered for him.

“Hey, did you hear me?”

“Huh?”

“I sent you some money! Check your email!”

“Oh!”

You open your inbox and see a few new notifications. Money from Speshall, a newsletter from Maglev Motors that you kept the subscription to, and an email from Alchemax Business Bureau. You click on that first, it might be important.

Employee 2232

By request of the CEO of our parent company, you are no longer scheduled for the meeting in the major temp office of Alchemax Business Bureau. We apologize for any inconveniences this may cause and wish for the best in your future endeavors in your department. This is by no means a termination to your current occupation. Thank you for your time.

— Management

“Oh no no NO!”

“What is it? Did the money not go through?!”

You sit back and put your hands on your head.

“O’Hara just canceled the meeting!”

__________________________________________

Next: ACT 3 | INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE

#miguel o'hara #spiderman 2099 #atsv #pencil drawing #atsv miguel #miguel o’hara x y/n #miguel & you

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phlurrii · 6 months

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Phlurrii, you have got to keep making these ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS PIECED OF WORK!!

First the sick Brutus animatic-thing with Noe, and now this epic body horror of dat spooky dude from the Mirage Mews blog!

STOP BEING SO TALENTED (Actually, don't- Keeping doing it-)

X3 thank you!!!!! It was fun to do some horror or spoopy stuff again! I miss it, but luckily Noe’s arc is chock full of it!!

If your a fan of that particular stuff, I’d recommend looking for the Synergy Stone Meau AU/concept I did a while back ^^

#ask #tyyyy ;w;#wylohwist

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hermitcraft-playlists · 1 year

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i am back with a vengeance (more songs)

impulse: harder better faster stronger by daft punk, pascualita by the derevolutions

tango: goodtek by ebimayo, loose the goose by lucas pittman, topsy at the top by martin landstrom, maelstrom by tut tut child

pearl: doo dat wah by jules gaia, i look to you by miami horror, you can't dance to dreams by windom earle

scar: agua de beber by the derevolutions, bad connection by the derevolutions, bad king kong by the derevolutions, get 'em up by the derevolutions, push it back by the derevolutions, quality control by the derevolutions, running from the sun by the derevolutions, weird girl by the derevolutions, my trains by lemon demon

bdubs: it's a derevolution baby by the derevolutions (song not album), the problem with you by the derevolutions

cub: automate your soul by the derevolutions

doc: better day by planet booty

false: creatures of the night by the derevolutions

grian: linger longer by cosmo sheldrake, little soldiers by the crane wives, sleeping giants by the crane wives, beyond by daft punk, back it up (bad king kong) by the derevolutions, bad king kong by the derevolutions, my earth life by the derevolutions, revive it by the derevolutions, running from the sun by the derevolutions, weird girl by the derevolutions, far away by red vox

hypno: memories lie by red vox

jevin: moshi by pegboard nerds

joe: weird girl by the derevolutions, hope for the flowers by rich aucoin, the other by rich aucoin, walls by rich aucoin, lay your head down and dream by sean hills

keralis: dancing queen by abba, icq by twrp

mumbo: my earth life by the derevolutions

ren: treat my body right by planet booty

stress: pumpkin pie by the derevolutions, push it back by the derevolutions, otherside by lena raine

beef: safe and sound by capital cities, order and progress by the derevolutions

wels: living in the not world by the derevolutions

xb: about a girl by the derevolutions

xisuma: beyond by daft punk, invader by dance with the dead, animate your life by the derevolutions, parisian eyes by the hylozoists, champion zone by lord phobos, legendary space knight by lord phobos, the device pt. 1 by twrp, the device pt. 2 by twrp, time to shine by twrp

zedaph: get 'em up by the derevolutions, blue zones by the fly guy five, everyday lightning by planet booty

cleo: death by misery by the derevolutions, weird girl by the derevolutions, don't be on with her by miami horror, hope for the flowers by rich aucoin, undead pt. 1 - estrangement by rich aucoin, undead pt. 2 - reconciliation by rich aucoin, food bar by twrp

Oh my god it's been so long since we had a suggestion list like this!! Thank you for all these suggestions, they have all been added to their respective playlists, though I won't link them all here because woag thatd be a lotta links. There's a page for it if you're on desktop tho! if you're on mobile you can search Hermitcraft Playlists on spotify and you should find em :)

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hidemation · 1 month

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My first time writing a fic

Horror ds - @moonfurthetemmie @wheezethebluejay

Hideverse - @hidemation

(It's crap I know, and I might have gotten some things wrong i think)

Part 2:

Nullus had to ask himself... why did this happened to him, he was having a totally normal day until some random portal sucked him in now his abilities are weakened and he is for some reason in front of a warehouse and smells blood

"Why did this happen to me?" Nullus said, sighing. As he was about to leave, he felt something inside the warehouse that made him stop. 'Negative energy' Nullus thought. 'There seems to be a large group of people inside for that amount of energy, but I only feel the presence of four in there.' He sighed. 'I'm gonna regret this, aren't I?'

"Please... help..."

Nullus hears laughter and senses that one of the people inside has died, along with a feeling of being watched. '...Yep, I'm gonna regret this' he groans, then enters the warehouse, fully aware of the stupidity of his decision.

As nullus walks around, he realizes the warehouse is a maze and is quite impressed as he touches the walls, appreciating whoever made the maze, nullus notes the maze is covered in slash marks and dried blood, he smells fresh blood somewhere but doesn't know where exactly due to the entire place smelling like dried blood

as he walks around he tries to use his abilities again to feel the presence of those inside 'damn that stupid portal weakening me at the time where I need them' nullus concentrates more and finally felt something.

"Shit," Nullus exclaimed, swiftly dodging before he could get sliced in half. "Well, aren't you fast," a man remarked. Nullus scanned the area and saw someone charging at him, quickly dodging again. "This is a fucking slaughterhouse, isn't it?" Nullus grumbled, evading another attack from behind. "Well, aren't you fun," a woman commented.

Nullus stepped back to create a safe distance. He got injured from them but not so serious"Is this how you treat elders?" he asked, eyeing the two in front of him. The first attacker, a short man with black hair and a purple and black hoodie, held a large glowing cyan scythe. The woman, tall and pale with scars covering her body, had red and white eyes.

"May I ask you again, is this how you treat your elders?" Nullus inquired, crossing his arms. "Pfft, I'm pretty sure he's older than you, 'old man', this bitch right here is 120+ years old" the woman retorted. "Shut up, Slash." the man shot back.

Nullus chuckled. "Well, I've got good news for you, young man. You're officially the second youngest here since I'm over 500 years old," he revealed. The two looked at Nullus in shock. "Say what right now?"

Before Nullus could speak again, blue strings wrapped around him, dragging him. These strings were similar to a glitch Nullus knew well. "Pixel! Is that you?!" Nullus exclaimed as he was lifted up in the air by the strings. "I don't know who that is," a new voice said, "but I ain't them." "hey byte" "sup pluto" byte looks at nullus and back at the other 2 "why haven't you guys killed this bitch yet?" Byte said "we were going to but he was fast and kept dodging" pluto said.

As the three continued to talk and bicker, Nullus attempted to use his abilities again, and they slowly returned. His ability to sense people's aura came back, and he realized something about Pluto.

"Hey, you with the scythe!" Nullus called out to Pluto, who glanced at him while Nullus was still dangling in the air by the strings. "Your aura is different from the others, why is that?" Nullus questioned.

"Aura? What do you mean by that?... wait, haven't you ever heard of us before?" Pluto responded.

"Obviously not because I just got here!" Nullus retorted.

The three looked at each other and grinned. "Oh, ho ho, you're in for quite a surprise, bitch," Pluto said with a smirk. Byte chuckled as the strings tightened around Nullus, who noted to himself that the tightness was enough to break a mortal's bones. Nullus looked back at the three, and Pluto chuckled.

"So, you're telling me you've never heard of those two or me? The fucking 'demon' of negativity!?" Pluto exclaimed. Nullus's mind raced as he pieced things together. 'Demon of Negativity? Wait, an unfamiliar place (but it seems to be in Omegatale, but Omegatale seems different), string abilities like Pixel's, that tall girl similar to... oh shit,' Nullus thought to himself.

"Are you one of the guardians of positive and negative?" Nullus questioned.

"Yeah, why do you ask?" Pluto replied.

'Shit. I'm in another fucking multiverse arent i' Nullus realized. "Listen, where is your Jack?"

"Jack? Who the fuck is that?" Pluto asked.

"Pluto, can't we just kill him now?" Slash interjected.

"Wait, he goes by other names, What about Dream? Do you know or have a Dream as in the guardian of positive or something?" Nullus questioned, Nullus doesn't understand how this world works but if this version of himself is like this maybe this world's jack is different and can help him.

The three remained silent until Byte suddenly used her strings to throw Nullus across the walls and floor. "Don't you dare mention that bitch," Slash said. Nullus sensed the tension in the air. 'Guess they have a bad history with him,' Nullus thought as he was hurled around. Byte did a final throw, and Nullus crashed to the ground, breaking the surface beneath him.

As they observed Nullus not moving, his body bleeding black, which shocked them. "Is he bleeding black blood?" Byte questioned. "NGL, but that's kinda cool," Slash remarked, approaching the body. "Gotta make sure you're dead, buddy," Slash said cheerfully, using her knife to slice off Nullus's right arm and stab his abdomen open, wanting to gut him. "Woah!" Slash yelled, backing away as she realized something unexpected.

"What's the matter, Slash?" Pluto asked.

"Dude, this bitch got no organs!?" Slash exclaimed in disbelief.

"What! Are you saying he's hollow or something?" Byte and Pluto approached the body and saw that what Slash said was true; the body had no organs. "How the hell is that possible? He should be dead without organs?!" Byte exclaimed.

"NGL, but that's actually kinda cool... wait, if he has no organs, does that mean there's a chance he could still be—" Before Pluto could finish, something slammed his head hard against the ground making him unconscious, and Byte was thrown across the room. "Byte! Pluto!" Slash yelled, just before something stabbed her in the right abdomen.

Slash screams in pain and looks at the thing that stabs her. It was a black tentacle, and her eyes widened as the tentacle was connected to the guy she was gonna gut out "shit" Slash exclaims before getting thrown across the room but eventually stopped.

Nullus stood up and looked at Slash, who was on the ground bleeding. "That was quite rude of you to gut someone out, 'Slash'," Nullus said, his voice tinged with anger. The tentacles that replaced his arm turned sharp and charged at Slash, but before they could hit her, Byte's strings wrapped around her and dragged her away to safety.

"Slash, are you alright!?" Byte said, worried for her friend.

"Do I look OK!?" Slash yelled before groaning from pain.

The 2 quickly dodges nullus Tentacles before it could hit them

'what the hell is he!?' Slash thought.

'Shit what happened to pluto' byte thought

Nullus removes his mask and the the 2 are in shocked to see his mouth is entirely black and weird black fluid is flowing out "I'm just a simple guardian that's all and don't worry about your friend he is fine... For now " nullus chuckles, and suddenly, another tentacle charges at byte, she dodged it, but it sliced a bit off her cheek.

Nullus' head starts growing antlers and his left hand creates a violet fire. "You sons of bitches are so fucking screwed"

__________________________________

Pluto slowly opens his eyes his head hurts and tries to remember what happened before he got knocked out

"Pluto wake up!" Pluto hears someone said he can't tell who as his ears still ringing

He caught the scent of fire and fresh blood, heard something collapse, and felt something wet on his head, realizing it was his own blood. Slowly, he opened his eyes to a scene of devastation: Slash was wounded and bleeding from her abdomen, while Byte appeared bruised but not as severely injured but looks so exhausted. Beyond them, the warehouse was engulfed in flames. Then, he saw something that made his skin crawl the man they had sought to kill. He had tentacles replacing the arm Slash had removed, antlers on his head, and his mask and glasses were finally gone, revealing his face. Pluto saw that he had no eyes, and his mouth was entirely black, dripping with black fluid but what made his skin crawl even more is the amount of negative energy he feels from him that it surpasses his own and possibly can overwhelm delusion if he were here.

"Ah so my other self has finally awakened" the man said, 'what' pluto thought

"Pluto, we gotta go now!" Byte said and immediately grabbed pluto and slash and began to run.

Nullus immediately chases after them and starts to send more Tentacles at them and all 3 are way to tired to fight or run.

Byte suddenly has an idea, she realizes that they have a good distance and immediately stops running.

"BYTE WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!" Slash yelled

As nullus is about to send Tentacles to charge at her, byte uses her strings and it wrapped all around his body and immediately summons a Portal throws him there and immediately closes it.

Byte pants and falls to the ground exhausted and looks at her 2 friends who are also exhausted.

Pluto has slash arm around his shoulder helping her walk and goes to byte "why didn't you used that earlier" Pluto asked

Byte glares at him "Oh I don't know, maybe is because we were being chased by a god damn guy who we tried to kill but is probably a demon and was trying to kill us and we were heavily injured or something Pluto" byte said still on the ground

Pluto sighs "here let me help you out" Pluto said and grabs bytes arm and has it around his shoulders to help her walk "come on let's go home I have a demon chicken waiting for me"

______________________________

Meanwhile somewhere in outertale at a alley

"Outertale doesn't seem to be that different from the one we know retro" nullus said as he is slowly healing his wounds and regenerating back his arm while looking at the stars.

"Shouldn't we find a more negative au for you to regenerate nulls?" Retro the parasite that finaly left nullus eye socket is now on his shoulder asked out of concern

"Nah we are in a new multiverse that we don't know how different it is from ours it's better to play it safe" nullus said and looks at the parasite on his shoulder

"Fair enough cause I ain't ready or do I want to die" retro said agreeing with nullus "so are your powers back yet?"

"They are still weak but are coming back but is slow so it seems like we are stuck here in the mean time" nullus said

"Well isn't just great" retro said and jumps as he nullus on alert now. "soemone is coming?"

"Yep" nullus said and tries to stand up but fails and falls "shit I'm exhausted"

"Crap what should we-" before retro could finish he hears the footsteps getting louder and goes inside nullus jacket to hide

"Hello?" is the last thing Nullus hears before finally losing consciousness.

#h!ds #horror! ds #hideverse #hidemyfics #yes i know its crap #its total crap #dreamswap

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piratical-princess · 4 months

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More bad (or in some cases pretty good) Xmas movie reviews here! I’ve tried some odd ones.

EDITED TO INCLUDE:

Christmas on Mistletoe Farm: This was EFFING CUTE. Super British. Quirky kids in hand knitted stuff and big Wellies. Baby barn animals everywhere. Comedic English overacting. As charming as a mouse in a teapot. I would watch it every year twice. The colors alone are scrumptious. 9/10

* Christmas Inheritance - As stereotypical as Christmas romance movies get. Small town, lonely innkeeper, main character returns to town to find the magic of Christmas by helping with some pageant or festival or whatnot. Bland but mainly pleasant but stop making characters do that slow head shake while sincerely singing thing, it’s weird . 4/10

A Christmas Movie Christmas - A fun swing at typical Christmas movies. Christmas magic transports two sisters into a Christmas movie of their own where they wake up every day with their hair and makeup already done and cookies already baked. Parts of it are funny, but it led me to the disturbing revelation that all B actors wear false teeth. 6/10

Christmas Chronicles 2: I was excited for this. Hot Santa, Belsneckel, Yule Cat. Nope. Bad. Please don’t bother, you’ll soil the first movie. 1/10

Dash & Lily : in spite of being about New York, this short series is really good and sweet. It’s a scavenger hunt of literature and romance and the art of loving your own weirdness against the backdrop of Christmas. It’s charming and colorful. Definitely not perfect, it is a high school aged series based on YA romance and that can sometimes lead to “youthful” acting, but it is good and I appreciated it and the music was superb. 9/10

Noelle - dang, I really liked this. It seems a discredit to say it’s like a gender bent Elf, but that is the broadest definition. Very warm and loving. 10/10

Scrooge: A Christmas Carol - this is the animated Netflix version. I have mixed feelings. I thought they took the art in some really interesting places. I thought the music was pretty terrible. I thought they did the lower budget animation thing where some characters look amazing and some look poorly thought out. I thought Scrooge was weirdly hot. 6/10

Mickey and Friends: Duck The Halls - Newer style of Mickey Mouse animation that is part Ren and Stimpy and part midcentury modern, which is awesome. Donald Duck stays in the snowy north for the winter and literally falls apart from the cold, lots of body horror. Hilarious. 10/10

Jingle All The Way - I know, it is weird that as a 90s kid, I had never seen this. I was promised a bad movie and I’m slightly disappointed that I loved the hell out of it. From Arnold expecting us to believe that he works in mattress sales and saying “you’re my numbah one custahmahh” with a cheesy grin to a brawl of underground gang Santas to Phil Hartman having the balls to hit on Arnold’s wife and moaning obscenely over the phone about how good her cookies are while Arnold yells “PUT DAT COOKIE DOWN”, it’s all amazing. But really the best part is the unexpectedly complex buildup of a real hero/villain relationship - the connection, the offer of friendship that gets rejected, the ensuing battle that becomes an insane bid for revenge, culminating in a real costumed fight that ends - in the true spirit of Christmas - with the police hauling away a grown man in a latex bodysuit clutching a toy he has ruthlessly stolen from a child that would grow up to become Darth Vader. 15/10

#Christmas #movies

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caltropspress · 11 months

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AN ITINERARY FOR NON-PLACES: billy woods & Kenny Segal's Maps

We on a world tour with Muhammad, my man; going each and every place with the mic in their hand.

—Trugoy the Dove, ATCQ's "Award Tour" (1993)

Perhaps you will persuade him to relate something of his past. Perhaps there is one among you who can induce him to bring out his old travel-diaries; who knows?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Journey of My Other Self (1930)

Now when I was a little chap, I had a passion for maps.

—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

Maps won’t work here.

—Aesop Rock, “Rabies” (2016)

You arrive with certain expectations. You arrive with Edward Said quotes queued up in your mind, knowing “what on a map was a blank space was inhabited by natives.” As such, you equip yourself with “map and compass, gat and cutlass” (“U-Boats”), keen to trouble Orientalist notions. Don’t get it twisted as you mark twain: there are flare-ups. On “Hangman,” we hear of “Hindu kush, a Sikh surrounded by Thuggers,” a modernist nod to August Schoefft’s early-19th century painting. We hear of “flying carpets out this motherfucker.” It’s a whole-new, brave-new world. “The room smelled like Marrakech,” woods reports on “FaceTime,” and George Orwell’s “Marrakech” (1939) happens over the mind’s transom. Orwell depicts colonial subjects who, in the imperial imagination, are nothing more than “undifferentiated brown stuff”—each figure what Said calls “an atom in a vast collectivity.” So, yes, you can skirt “on the edge of Magellan maps” (“Wonderful World”), or take a cue from Mike Ladd and rip to shreds Universalis Cosmographia by Sebastian Münster, that lying bastard, but—like Dylan on “My Back Pages”—woods is riding “on flaming roads using ideas as [his] maps.” We’ll meet on edges soon, he says—probably the “lists of names, pages and pages” he’s hoarding on “Soft Landing”—but the impulse here should amount to more than freeing political dissidents from cages. On Aethiopes, woods clocked nautical miles, but now he’s on a world tour redeeming his frequent flyers. You’ll find nothing quite as unrepentant as cannibal tours here, though there are horrors and hors d'oeuvres aplenty. These Orientalist postulates are somewheres, but Maps is concerned with nowheres.

2. SUBS & COMPONENTS

Yeah, I’m leaving tomorrow, but I got time today. woods begins “Kenwood Speakers” by speaking his words of departure like John Denver, only he spares us the sentiment. “Leaving on a jet plane—” Denver sings, “don’t know when I'll be back again. / I hate to go.” woods is at worst eager and at best aloof about his own leaving. V. S. Naipaul’s Ralph Singh from The Mimic Men, meanwhile, goes further, stating bluntly: “I am not coming back.”

Maps—like Dante’s Inferno, like Plato’s cave—is where all people come to know themselves. The album is billy woods’ itinerarium mentis—his journey of the mind—a [hero’s] journey into the center of the [real] earth. One-dimensional MCs can’t handle that. The undertaking requires steadfast digging into the so[u/i]l of one’s self. Another turn of the screw, gyring deeper, despite how much the torture/[tour]ture might hurt. We feel the pangs right along with him, do we not?

Guess who’s coming to dinner on “Kenwood Speakers”? Some born sinner, the opposite of a winner—but not a sardine in his line of sight. Only Deleuze and Guattari lines of flight—escape routes to deterritorialize your whole plane of immanence. The night before woods departs on a pilgrim’s progress, his body and being go surface-to-air—Habyarimana on an economy flight. Or John Denver even, who was watching time and space cross his path as his Rutan Long-EZ plane nose-dived into Monterey Bay. Knock the plane out of the sky and woods sparks his own personal gentrifier genocide.

This is where your humble essayist springs a gentrification quote on dat azz. Say, David Harvey quoting Lenin quoting Cecil Rhodes—that would be apropos. Some “Accumulation by Dispossession” shit; some spatio-temporal fixes shit. But bleary-eyed theorizing would diminish what woods does with his terse, yet totalizing, imagistic lines. I’m gonna sit this one out and leave it to the gentrifiers themselves to tell it. (Catch me like “Lenin lying in state” [“Warmachines”]; or, as we hear on “NYC Tapwater”: “I lie down like V.I. Lenin.”)

The title “Kenwood Speakers,” of course, is a portmanteau of their names [Kenny Segal + billy woods]—the blending of sound and style of [e]strange[d] bedfellows: woods as an observant Ishmael to Kenny Segal’s affable Queequeg. woods listens to Kenny Segal’s beats like Ishmael opens up to Queequeg’s tattoos—his cannibal body [of work] a “book of nomad inscription,” according to Pierre Joris. The “port” of this portmanteau is a haven, a hush harbor. “The port would fain give succor,” Melville writes, “...in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.” Portmanteau as leather luggage, too—filled with Kenny’s circuit-bent Omnichord, his pedals, his SP-404, his “weird little children’s toys turned into live beat-machine things” (in woods’ words). woods calls him “nuts,” but so too was Glenn Branca. Forget jazzmatazz, Kenny’s brand of jazzmaskronk incorporates No Wavy horns and angular guitar strokes put to the orbital sander. Bring the sinuosity. Tonal plexus, to perfection. Counterpane production steez: combining elements unmethodically in sun and shade; beats stuffed with corncobs or broken crockery. Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. Bones litter the beach, gnawed.

4. A MINIMALIST HOMEBOY WHO KNOWS HIS BEATS

The opening clicks on “Kenwood Speakers” are the clicking of a gas stove before the burner crowns with blue flame (...blue flame like the oven, woods says on “Rapper Weed”). And we can trace the sonic sum of his drum thump and drum pattern to LL Cool J’s “I Can’t Live Without My Radio,” another ode to electroacoustic transducers. The Rubin-produced banger gets audiophiliacs amped—woofers wallop and tweeters twitch. Move forward in time to “Fantastic Damage,” where El-P introduces a boom-bap that veers cement-crush. He leaves “ruthless rounds of radio dust” in his wake—“cranial mush.” Bigger, deffer, fitter, happier, more productive.

In the liner notes for Radio (1985), Nelson George calls LL a “talkologist,” which we can apply to woods, too. “After-market speakers in the Saturn,” he raps, and his whip is his own personal universe, evidently. He’s a brother from another Lonely Planet. Fodor’s on the dashboard; Baedeker in the backpack. From Plainfield to Compton: Swing down, sweet chariot, stop, and let him ride dirty in a lemon (hell yeah): “Beater but they can’t catch it.” The engine clunks and clatters just as the beat breaks down after the first verse—a beat transition/deconstruction not heard since DJ Shadow’s work on “Latyrx.” Kenny Segal’s music is all Chords and Discords, like the Letters to the Editor section of DownBeat magazine. Noizy Meditations like that L.O.N.S. joint T.I.M.E. (“cover my tracks with backronyms”). Fair to say Kenny Segal could pull a broad sword from a hoarded synthesizer, word to Aes Rizzle.

LL’s radio appeared to ward off gentrifiers by design, destabilizing the ground beneath their feet: “My JVC vibrates the concrete.” He was “terrorizing [his] neighbors with the heavy bass.” True to Duke Bootee and Melle Mel, the impoverished city is like a jungle sometimes—“the rats is madness”—and the superpredators sport Brooks Brothers suits. woods is watching the blue-eyed soulless ones encroach, the “blue-eyed White Walkers in King’s Landing.” They march on the miry Slough of Despond. He’s not trying to leave the neighborhood empty-handed, so he infiltrates. He finagles and ingratiates himself into a “dinner party with the neighbors, / Their apartment’s renovated”—no longer a “crumbling mansion.” He eats their food ravenously, wolfishly. With each morsel, he’s seeking the beloved community, or so they’d like to believe.

As they dine, woods “turn[s] the music up incrementally,” and you’ve got to imagine it’s some PMRC fare—Ice-T’s “You Played Yourself” or the like. Something equal parts catch-wreck and (w)reckoning. Or maybe the song is “Kenwood Speakers” itself. And it’s a sort of Jordan Davis reversal at work. woods as Lord Baelish with the “mischievous lies.” He’s Claudius with a cup of poison. The whole ear of gentrified Bed-Stuy serpent-stung, rankly (and thankfully) abused. woods goes full Ying Yang Twins and “whisper[s] in the host’s ear all night,” hexing him, slow-releasing Paraquat into his supple mind as he sups. (That’s what’s up.) We’ve seen him in this capacity before, like when he whispered to his own dull knife-sheared shadow on “houthi.” The hushed hemlock woods administers to the “host’s ear” collapses into what woods “hear[s]” later—that “they found [the host] in the morning [with the] hose run from the exhaust pipe.” A well-thumbed copy of White Fragility left behind on his nightstand. woods reveals himself to be Samwell Tarly with the black dragonglass dagger. “Wreathed in gas—I’m a carburetor,” woods raps, contrasting his smoky satisfaction with the carbon monoxide car killing. He sees the Wicket Gate blurry in the distance—and it bears a helluva resemblance to an airport gate.

6. SPACE IS THE NON-PLACE

Much has been hastily made of the narrative structure of Maps—eager listeners figuring wussdaplan and blueprint to the realms ’n realities that the album presents. But order—beginnings [departures] and endings [arrivals]—isn’t important; movement is. Better find out, before your time’s out, what the flux? Think Inspectah Deck’s “alive on arrival”; disregard Puff Daddy’s “mess around be D.O.A., be on your way” (but heed his fugacious “ain’t enough time here”). Non-narrative acceptance will allow us to revel in what Nathaniel Mackey calls “the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world.”

And as we navigate that imperfect fit, dwell in the non-. Dwell in the non-, in the non-, in the non-. “An airport is nowhere,” W. S. Merwin writes, “which is not something / generally noticed.” Merwin’s poem (“Neither Here Nor There”) typifies ideas explored in Marc Augé’s Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1992). Augé analyzes the meaning of transient spaces in our fast-paced, globalized society. He sets places (rooted, concrete, community-rich locations—where “saplings bend” but don’t break) against spaces (abstract locations of the mind—“I live in my mind,” as woods said on “Asylum”). We spend an immoderate amount of time in a multiplication of “non-places,” which Augé sees as “installations needed for the accelerated circulation of passengers and goods”—airports, hotels, interchanges, high-speed roads. This is the world woods knows all too well on Maps. Whether he’s taking a “$300 Uber to a show” role-playing as Future in a Maybach, smoking a spliff that “could probably jump your car battery,” exploring “Johannesburg in a Ford Explorer,” or manifesting “Jimmy Wopo draped over his steering wheel,” woods inhabits the image of the non-place. Makes sense for someone who claims to be “from where every car foreign and [they] drive ’em on empty,” dwelling in disconnectedness. Your head is throbbing and I ain’t said shit yet—the next movement is by air.

woods takes in the view from his plane window. “Space,” Augé writes, “stems in effect from a double movement: the traveller’s movement, of course, but also a parallel movement of the landscapes which he catches only in partial glimpses.” On “Soft Landing,” woods sees with new sight: “From up here the lakes is puddles, / The land unfold brown and green—it’s a quiet puzzle.” woods pieces the partial glimpses together into something cohesive and captivating—“a series of ‘snapshots’ piled hurriedly into his memory and, literally, recomposed in the account he gives of them,” in Augé’s words.

“But the book is written before being read,” Augé adds, and let’s exchange “book” with album and “read” with heard. “[I]t passes through different places before becoming one itself: like the journey, the narrative that describes it traverses a number of places.” For woods, these places include a pop-in with Aesop Rock in Portland, Oregon, a visit to the Alchemist’s lab in Los Angeles, and a late-night stop at Steel Tipped Dove’s apartment in Brooklyn. He takes up residence at Kenny Segal’s L.A. home and traipses around Japan, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Germany. Augé:

This plurality of places, the demands it makes on the powers of observation and description (the impossibility of seeing everything or saying everything), and the resulting feeling of “disorientation”...cause a break or discontinuity between the spectator-traveller and the space of the landscape he is contemplating or rushing through. This prevents him from perceiving it as a place, from being fully present in it, even though he may try to fill the gap with comprehensive and detailed information out of guidebooks.

woods has discussed the “mental and physical spaces that type of travel and touring put[s] [him] in.” His documentation of his movement through non-places is the least he can do to keep from entropying: “I was writing in hotels, and Airbnbs, and airports, and sometimes at home.” For us though, his audience, woods is no longer hiding places; he’s exposing places.

8. LIKE, “I JUST FLEW INTO THE CITY—WHAT’S UP WITH YOU?”

We hear “hero’s journey” and immediately inch toward Ithaca and Homeric hexameter, but Gilgamesh should be our guidepost, not that man-of-many-ways Odysseus. Our guidepost is woods’ “Gilgamesh”—a relationship song of stunted growth and stasis. “Got a call out the blue,” he starts, but with Maps, the call is to us and it’s a clarion call. The name Gilgamesh rings out, and it sounds like “rattling medals.” On Maps, it sounds like a “chain banged [on] glass ceilings,” an echo of Prodigy’s piece banging on glass tables. We heard the vibrations on “houthi”—that “change on plexiglass” jingle. I’m impressed by the resonance. The message doesn’t “sound weak coming out the speakers” like it did on “Gilgamesh.” The marginal upgrade is Kenwood speakers—no puttering set of Polks.

woods is arguing for a new paradigm—he didn’t need his paradigm to shift like the rest of us did. He read the daily briefings and was familiar with what-goes-around-comes-around logic. He wasn’t caught lacking on 9/11—we were. He’d been rapping along with Biggie (Blow up like the World Trade…). He coveted his promo copy of The Coup’s Party Music with Boots holding the detonator on the cover. He was looking at the city like jihadis in the cockpit. When it comes to artistic representations, like my homie D.O.C., no one has done 9/11 better than billy woods. Noreaga adopted the personage of Manuel Noriega; Intelligent Hoodlum was reborn as Tragedy Khadafi; woods takes on the mantle of Osama bin Laden—green army field jacket over white robe.

On “Gilgamesh,” he’s “left thinking like Osama in Khartoum” when his ex splits, “gone at first light, connecting flight—she made the plane.” Vindictiveness aside, woods should know her airport visit alone will be a hellish experience. Punishment enough. Subjected to TSA screens and pat downs while touring the globe, find woods “excessively mean-mugging” as the metal detector wand grazes his testicles. “Airports and aircraft, big stores and railway stations have always been a favoured target for attacks,” writes Augé, “doubtless for reasons of efficiency…. But another reason might be that…those pursuing new socializations and localizations can see non-places only as a negation of their ideal.” woods’ 9/11 bars may startle us, but they disabuse us of our bliss.

GO flat out at top speed across curve of earth is the only way.

—Pierre Joris, A Nomad Poetics (2003)

The earth is a sphere.

—“Houdini”

All this perpetual movement, this implacable globetrotting, these abrupt shifts in location—it makes for a nomad poetics, as poet Pierre Joris puts it. woods is a “NOET,” where “NO stands for play [and] ET stands for et cetera, the always ongoing process, the no closure.” Joris describes how polylingualism is a nomadic trait that is capable of “moving through languages, cultures, terrains, times without stopping.” So woods drags us from witnessing Yemeni traders off the coast of Mozambique (“The Doldrums”) to Dien Bien Phu (“Baby Steps”) in less than twelve months. He slips into Jamaican patois and amuses us with his limited Spanish (Muchos problemas if you don’t have it for the plug…). In “The Schooner Flight,” Derek Walcott says, “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” woods would remix: I’m nobodies and nations.

“[I]f it is all flux, all nomad wandering” for the NOET, “when & how to write,” Joris asks. “How not to stop & yet do the poem?” The nomadic poem—like the songs that make up Maps—is a “poasis, a poem-oasis, i.e., a stop in the moving along.” In Sufi poetry, this is known as the mawqif, which Joris defines as “the pause, the stop-over, the rest, the stay of the wanderer between two moments of movement.” The layover, in woods’ words. A moment of “movement-in-rest, of movement on another plane or plateau, between today’s & tomorrow’s lines of flight.” Recording “Rapper Weed” in Kenny Segal’s studio in L.A., for example.

Nomad poetics encompass a political component. Joris isn’t blind to the realities of “a historical era where cheap air flight has made at least the White World into summer travelers, sun-seekers, tourist-nomads, i.e., fake nomads, or really not nomads at all, while a large part of poor Third World people are constrained to turn themselves into forced labor exilees or at best transhumance-ing workers, transients that have been ‘transported’ as the term was used in the slave trade.”

The triangulation of “sugar, molasses, rum”—it’s a strangulation. There’s trouble with travel. Travel as forced relocation. Travel as travails, as toil—or, worse—as tripaliare (Vulgar Latin for “torture”). From your book I took a page, bell hooks—who writes in Black Looks (1992) of being accosted, detained, and interrogated by white officials while in an Italian airport, and another time being strip searched at an airport in France, suspected of ties to terrorism in both cases. “[T]o travel is to encounter the terrorizing force of white supremacy,” she writes. Augé writes about how “the user of the non-place is always required to prove his innocence,” but for bell hooks, a Black woman, “there is no comfort that makes the terrorism disappear.” Who is Augé to judge how she terror manages?

“Goin’ places that I’ve never been, / Seein’ things that I may never see again,” Willie Nelson sings, impatient for a return to the road. His is a romanticized perspective; with feelings of dissociation, woods offers a no-man-ticized one, more akin to Atmosphere’s “Travel” from 2000: “We travel like the blood that surrounds your brain”—pressure builds and aneurysms flutter under cranial walls. The itinerary looks blurry, the ink faded from sun, folds, and creases. “The engagements are booked through the end of the world,” croons They Might Be Giants’ John Linnell, “so we’ll meet at the end of the tour.” [Open Mike Eagle nods approvingly.]

10. HEAVY AIRPLAY ALL DAY WITH A NINA SIMONE CHORUS

On “Soft Landing,” Kenny Segal introduces guitar to drums and they converse in a dissonant cadence. In the words of Cecil Taylor, they consist of “regular and irregular measurements, of coexisting bodies of sound.” woods takes flight and the sound of the plane lifting off the tarmac is a welcome relief, like blasts from Michael Nyman’s Decay Music (1976). “Birds flying high,” woods sorta-sings, and he follows their migratory patterns. Just get him the fuck outta dodge. He’s a budding ornithologist with his head in the loud clouds. We hear him mention “birds-of-paradise in the menagerie” and “midnight ravens” alike. The exotic and the demonic—he studies them all, binoculars to his peepers.

“Before we take off, I call Mom and say, I love you,” woods raps. He’s taken a note from Quelle Chris who advised, “Call your folks while they still livin’.” woods’ mother antipodal to his ex who he texts upon landing with a significantly less felicitous message—one feminine figure signals ascent; the other, descent. The in-betweenness of the experience—limbic and liminal all at once, exemplified by woods with his “head in the loud clouds [and] both feet on the fucking pavement.” woods invariably finds himself in the in-betweenness, the purgatorio of his life’s purpose: be it from “Rolling Loud to Shakespeare in the Park” or his own nature documentary “narrated by an Attenborough [but] over the instrumental to ‘Keep It Thoro.’”

“You believe in [the airport],” Merwin writes:

while you are there because you are there and sometimes you may even feel happy to be that far on your way to somewhere

You know how I feel? woods feels the altitude sickness, his ears popping. But once that subsides, he feels suspended in time and space. Sun in the sky. Breeze driftin’ on. Only gotta fear a flock of geese in the aircraft engines, what with no savior Sully to guide the passengers to safety. At long last, he feels free from the fetters of his life down below. He’s [re]set for a soft landing.

11.

Look out, honey, ’cause I’m using technology,

Ain’t got time to make no apology.

—The Stooges, “Search and Destroy”

There’s a duality on Maps: two selves—one who longs to travel; the other who longs to return home. Calypso after the show, but FaceTime calls with the kids at the breakadawn. On “FaceTime,” though, home is the last place. Home is where the heart gave out. What woods takes with him on the flight are the repercussions, the health complications. Quarrels crammed in the carry-on. Relationship woes on the wing:

You flyin’ easyJet—Bratislava, Utrecht, Something felt off before I even left, So when I saw the missed calls, I knew what was next. Didn’t have to open the text.

woods delineates a communication breakdown. He initially tries to distance himself by using the second-person, but moments later he’s allowed himself to be drawn back in. He notes the “missed calls” and uses every shred of self-discipline to not “open the text.” The patterns, he reminds himself, are nothing new. He may be unnerved by “flyin’ easyJet,” but the awareness that “something felt off before [he] even left” feels good—a familiarity. The consonance of “felt off before I even left” provides him the lift he needs. No matter the angle he looks at it [“felt” or “left,” anagrammatically satisfying—he can sit with his feelings or leave them all behind], he’s floating above the rubble of the relationship.

Not for lack of trying. They did “couples therapy on Zoom, [but] it’s a train wreck.” The Celestial Railroad derails and they burn off the vinyl chloride toxic spillage. The evacuation zone is 30 kilometers wide. woods is a sucker—falls for it every time. Okay, okay, okay: not every time. He’s become adept at having his “evil eye ward off hex, though—FaceTime declined.” He goes full Last Tango in Paris on the enchantress, displacing his frustrations on a crowd of innocent civilians: “Butter wouldn’t melt, I gave ’em margarine.” Echoes of Tony Soprano after Carmela informs him that’s she’s filing for divorce: “The only reason you have anything is ’cause of my fucking sweat, and you knew every step of the way exactly how it works. But you walk around that fucking mansion in your $500 shoes and your diamond rings, and you act like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.” If we’re talking socialization mediated by screens, this is some real prestige drama—really real, son.

Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul.

With so much drama in the relationship, woods retreats further. He loses himself at a gig. Afterwards, he writes at his desk in a hotel room in Tucson as he hears “dubstep drift in the window.” Partiers, “some half, some overdressed,” make their way through the halls, “checkin’ they phones” as the “bass shake[s] the walls.” woods is removed from it all: “I’m smoking alone in a cardigan, thinking of home.” In non-places, Augé insists, you can find yourself “alone, but one of many.” Once more unto the breach, he goes “back down to the bar again” only to witness an “afterparty packed like Parliament,” and who can really say whether it’s the funkiness of George Clinton or Margaret Thatcher, but the masses are pressed “ass cheeks and cheekbones”—baby got bacchanalia. woods, for his part, is “looking like the help or someone who just wandered in.” He’s an outsider amongst the “animal pelts,” “chunky rings, clunky shoes, [and] lots of ink.” Out of place, out of sight, out of mind, out-of-body experience. He’s Poe’s eagle-eyed protagonist in “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), “observing the promiscuous company in the room.” He marks the “dense and continuous tides of population,” “their aggregate relations,” and he “regard[s] with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gate, visage, and expression of countenance.” Despite all of that distraction, by the end of the song woods has only moved the pen six inches. “Really,” he says, regaining our trust, her trust, “I’m just waiting for my phone to ping”—emphasis on waiting. “I’m thinking ’bout you when I’m supposed to be thinking ’bout other things.”

12.

A stay in L.A., L.A., big city of dreams, but everything in L.A. is overpriced. Avaricious sonsabitches “bloated with gout, / Sores weeping, doubled-over, chest heaving from chasing clout,” shelling out “six Gs an ounce.” woods went from genuflecting at the weed price to oof. He’s a savvy consumer, but Los Angeles, as Mike Davis writes in City of Quartz (1990), is “a stand-in for capitalism in general.” He continues: “The ultimate world-historical significance—and oddity—of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism. The same place, as Brecht noted, symbolized both heaven and hell. Correspondingly, it is the essential destination on the itinerary of any late twentieth-century intellectual, who must eventually come to take a peep and render some opinion on whether ‘Los Angeles Brings It All Together’ (official slogan) or is, rather, the nightmare at the terminus of American history (as depicted in noir).” woods excavates the future in Los Angeles, such as Davis’s subtitle goes, where the “Nike store on Fairfax” is absent of inventory, where one’s commodified state of being includes “monogrammed tube[s],” “crushed velvet,” and other offscourings of “colorful packaging.” None of which is of much interest to billy woods, a man who has “learn[ed] to toss the dregs.” This place, he knows, is a cemetery. He rests his riveted gaze on the “whole entourage on the couch buried in they phones.” You heard right: buried in they phones—their absence-presence of screen staring, their doom-scrolling a Tibetan Book of the Dead written in real time, a bardo of blue light. Mike Davis is quick to remind us: “Pío Pico, the last governor of Mexican California and once the richest man in [Los Angeles], was buried in a pauper’s grave.” “When it’s my time,” woods raps, “no need to pass the hat.” No GoFundMe campaign necessary to cover the costs of a champagne crepe-lined casket. “Just throw me in when the fire good and crackling,” he implores. My my, hey hey—it’s better to burn out than to fade away. Send him up in smoke just the same as so much of his precious time on earth. “Bury me in a borrowed suit,” woods advised his mortician on Earl Sweatshirt’s “Tabula Rasa.”

13.

Jet-lag is the cousin of Death. On “Bad Dreams Are Only Dreams,” woods grows weary as his transient life becomes a trance-ient life. “I can’t quite grab the new me,” he raps, brainfogged as he passes through time zones like skipping stones. His “old self [is] dozing in an aisle seat” on an Emirates flight. Forget about his girl back home, now he’s divorced from himself. Augé:

When an international flight crosses Saudi Arabia, the hostess announces that during the overflight the drinking of alcohol will be forbidden in the aircraft. This signifies the intrusion of territory into space. Land = society = nation = culture = religion: the equation of anthropological place, fleetingly inscribed in space. Returning after an hour or so to the nonplace of space, escaping from the totalitarian constraints of place, will be just like a return to something resembling freedom.

woods has split the self, drawn-and-quartered it. He’s his own chain gang. On the side of the road where his “brain [is] exposed to the elements.” If we “lift [his] skull-top off delicate,” we see it’s “wider than the Sky,” as Emily Dickinson similized it. Worst of all, it’s infected by devils who’ve no regard for the fragile “bone china chafing dish” that holds the brain. “Absent-minded,” woods raps—he’s absent of his mind. And that might be an error, as criminal-minded might more accurately reflect his present status of “break[ing] time like bricks.” “Thoughts is cinder blocks,” but all I can see is woods breaking rocks in the hot sun. When he soundclashes, he fights the law. In his cell watching Shogun Assassin for the umpteenth time, but he’s also come into possession of a VHS copy of Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973). Flyin’ easyJet: Hong Kong to Paris. How different is monotonous prison labor from the toil of travel? Luggage heft; cramped legs; numb ass. woods needs rest and recovery, but “alarm clocks break spells.” He’s living in his own private Gitmo. Enhanced interrogation has him walking the witch. TSA sleep-deprives him to extract intel, to elicit a confession. His Self is reduced to geologic bits. He’s “crashed out,” Flight 93 style, as he becomes a plane making impact with the ground in Shanksville, PA and disintegrates. “Search for my own black box in the hills,” he raps, wanting to recover his own voice, his own data. Just as he said on “Red Dust,” “it’d be wise” to retrieve it. But what he finds amongst the strewn debris is a “black Rubik’s cube,” impenetrably scrambled.

This nightmare scenario has woods like the rappers he described on Armand Hammer’s “Aubergine”: “Tired, / Inertia the only thing keep ’em moving, / Glassy-eyed.” woods is a survivor of the crash, of sorts—his “parachute twisted and snarled.” You can’t put a price on a good night’s sleep, even if it’s a “king’s ransom.” But woods is “half ’sleep with the halo, dead on his feet,” so maybe it’s too little, too late. He wanders zombified, inactive, unconscious. He’s trying to get right for today; he’s “not swimming in tomorrows” like on “Babylon by Bus.” His death grip on reality is only as firm as his grip on surreality, as we heard from his appearance on Infinite Disease’s “Anomalady”:

After a while, you don't remember the crowds or venues, just the hotel rooms. ¿Tu tienes WiFi? It's just me in a stocking cap, watching TV The city dead out the window, still not even sleepy Sleep deprivation, the days keep leaking Life on the screen, light the dark like a beacon

woods the amnesiac—he “don’t remember the crowds or venues.” If only he could repress the meaningless hotel rooms instead. Alive ain’t always living in non-places (just ask Quelle Chris), especially when it’s mediated by technology: WiFi passwords, TV, his phone. Somehow he survives; it’s the city that’s dead.

14. FBI AGENTS NARROW THEY EYES

When you turn the knob on “Blue Smoke,” you trick yourself into believing you’re rehearsing with Ornette. We feel inner circle. We feel privy. But Max Roach might also be in the audience, like he was at the Five Spot in 1959, waiting for Ornette to step offstage so he could duff him up, which he did. The FBI had a dossier on Roach, just as they did for so many other Black cultural icons. COINTELPRO with the hyper-acuity. ELUCID forewarned: Fifty people at a rap show—one’s an informant. Police came to billy woods’ show on Known Unknowns, an album which has moments that jive with the claustrophonic and paranoisey sounds of Hiding Places. To avoid any confusion, I’ll pass the mic to media god Marshall McLuhan:

We now have the means to keep everybody under surveillance…. This has become one of the main occupations of mankind—just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings-on. Invading privacy—in fact, just ignoring it. Everybody has become porous…. When you’re on the telephone, or on radio, or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. You’re just an image on the air…. You’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. And this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people, really, of their private identity.

On “NYC Tapwater,” woods takes a stab-your-brain-with-your-nose-bone attempt at mentoring the youngins: “No need for stop-and-frisk, it’s cameras everywhere, / They got your IG feed, / Come scoop kids after they do the deed.” Mass surveillance should have you shook. woods spies the “big-ass satellite dish pointed at the sky,” on “Blue Smoke.” woods fucks with the frequencies frequently, sabotaging the alphabet boys with “so much tape hiss.” These aren’t just some plainclothes cops with iPads in Missoula, Montana. These are FBI agents that “narrow they eyes, / Frustrated, asking to be reassigned” because woods is giving them nada. “Been on this n-word for months,” they concede, “I think it’s all just rhymes.” Yep, rhymes like dimes. Talk about a most strange game, but woods knows he “shouldn’t be surprised.” Know that you’ll be scrutinized. He threatens that he better not “catch you unsupervised”—from the Latin super [“over”] + videre [“to see”], which = overseer. You know that sound—it’s the sound of da police. Same as you heard at the conclusion of “Police Came to My Show.” KRS-One offered a likkle truth and implored you to open up your eye. An exercise, from the Teacher:

Take the word overseer, like a sample, Repeat it very quickly in a crew, for example: Overseer, overseer, overseer, overseer— Office, officer, officer, officer.

No wonder woods guards himself with galvanized steel security fencing. In a non-place like an airport, writes Augé, “the passenger accedes to his anonymity only when he has given proof of his identity.” Mom showed him where she keeps the passport hidden, and he retrieves it when necessary. Similar rules apply to others. “Anyone wanna be in my life gotta sign several waivers,” he raps strictly on “Babylon by Bus.”

15.

I traveled among unknown men.

—William Wordsworth (1799)

I asked, “Is the mask for the killer or the crowd?"

—Armand Hammer’s “Sadderday”

What is known and unknown (in a Rumsfeldian sense); what is seen and unseen (in a Lord Quasian sense)? You can obfuscate the message. You can adjust the pitch of your voice. Augé explains how the “spatial overabundance [of non-places] works like a decoy.” Hiding places are everywhere, but they’re especially easy to access while on tour. A person “entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants,” writes Augé. “He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger…. Subjected to a gentle form of possession, to which he surrenders himself.” The rep grows bigger, ELUCID raps on “As The Crow Flies,” but not so big and unwieldy that woods can’t shuffle through a non-place without being recognized by adoring fans. He settles into what Augé refers to as “the passive joys of identity-loss.”

“Just picture me sittin’ with a pen in a cloud of smoke,” woods says on “Baby Steps.” He asks us to envision him in a rather peculiar scenario, one in which he’s taking notes on a performance while concealing his own presence (despite seeking “to determine if [your live set’s] a hoax”). The performer is a “glowed up” Weird Sister, “looking like she covered in gold dust.” woods deduces she “must not have re-upped her Lexapro,” but her glamorous appearance plays against woods’ own guardedness. You don’t just let anyone in. woods is privileged, though, as the performer “pulled [him] aside [and] explained she was just doing a bit.” One is inclined to consider whether this is all a projection on a screen. Or, put differently: Is this performative or praxis? Either way, woods was like, Oh. And not since his ex-wife’s reaction to learning “where [he] stashed it” has a response hit so heavy (“She paused, then she said, OK”). woods’ whole life feels stashed—brown-bagged or cardboard-boxed. A secret sharer, he’s not.

It’s' places no one knows who you are,

It’s faces we never wore.

—“Agriculture”

Would woods be able to distinguish a DOOMposter from the real thing—a cheap, bumbling replica from the genuine article? “Over time,” woods raps, “symbols eclipse the things they symbolize.” The mask becomes not a means to maintain privacy but a phenomenon itself—a mass-marketed one, at that. Just ask the MF DOOM estate. DOOM masks created and sold by both authorized and unauthorized retailers proliferate. Etsy shops stay busy predicting their posthumous profit margins [see: DEATHFAME]. MF DOOM likened his “imposters” to characters. “[W]ho I choose to put as the character is up to me,” he said. “When you come to a DOOM show…[you’ve] come to hear the show and come to hear the music. To see me? Y’all don’t even know who I am! Technology makes it possible for me to still do music and not have to be any particular place…. [I]f you’re coming to a DOOM show, don’t expect to see me, expect to hear me or hear the music that I present.” It sounds like DOOM is eternally wandering one of Augé’s non-places as one of McLuhan’s “discarnate beings.”

woods has been Camouflaging himself since at least 2003. Like Poe, he is the man of the crowd, and “[i]t will be in vain to follow: for I shall learn no more of him.” On “Soundcheck,” he asks the venue to “kill the lights,” just as he does every show, murdering the audience’s hope of eye contact, of facial recognition. Even if they manage the right angle and a “Nikon flash,” woods’ “face is the mask.” As he walks through the uncanny valleys of the shadows, you “develop the photograph but [find] something just wasn’t right.” President Kongi did not like to be photographed, and you heard Pac screamin’, spittin’ at the paparazzi. At the merch table, woods places his hand in front of his face for fan photo ops [or are they photo opps?]—a strange paradox of acquiescence [woods stops resisting the photo request, in cop parlance] and a gesture of refusal. “It’s GWAR when I’m off-stage,” he tells us on “The Layover.” The mask evolves over time. DOOM went from pantyhose, to a silver-sprayed Darth Maul mask, to a faceplate from a Gladiator helmet (the latter two prototypes thanks to the ingenuity of KEO). Oderus Urungus went from a papier-mâché helmet to a latex-horned extreme.

The proximal distance between woods’ and his audience inches ever close—close, that is, but not too close. No Next-level poke coming through-ness. A double portion of protection for him and his psychic health. He doesn’t want to make it hard for himself. “My shell, mechanical,” he quotes a trusted source in a world full of leakers, snitches, and finks. But for all the attention (achtung baby!) paid to woods’ face/non-face, more eyes should be devoted to retina-scanning his verse. woods’ “love language [is] an obscure dialect,” but his delivery veils his technical prowess. woods raps with a cup-runneth-over flow where words spill over the edge of the bar, past the four, combined with conversational cadence and syntax.

Examine the second verse of “FaceTime.” woods’ sound devices and internal rhyming are in service to his theme, providing hand-holding to the listener as they walk the patterns together. The verse begins simple enough with a nursery rhyme sequence (“oboes…clarinet”; “rainbows…wept”) but almost immediately complexifies when the garbled /r/ begins to dominate with ��Marrakech.” The alliterative /d/ [“dubstep drift in the window—I sit at my desk”] drags us to the “party outside,” away from our sanctuary of solitude. And the contraction of “Playboi Carti” leads to even more intense and immediate “partyin’” in the halls. woods brings us into the noise alongside him, even if we didn’t receive a formal invitation. The tumult of the scene is communicated through woods’ irregular pattern of internal and end-rhyme. “Phones,” “alone,” “home,” “cone,” and “blown” angle through the crowd, bumping and grinding against the dominate /r/ of “cardigan,” “origin,” “bar again,” “Parliament,” “parted,” “margarine,” “wandered in,” and “order” (or disorder, if I may). The sonorant pairing of “halls” &“walls” (destabilized by bass shakes); the triad of “melt,” “help,” & “pelts”; the trading of “chunky” & “clunky”; the bevy of /nk/ & /ng/ words (rings, ink, drink, ping, thinking, things, sink)—nothing saves us from the discomfiting experience described in the verse. We are subject to the final /r/ pairing of “tread water.” We’re exhausted by that point, and we drown.

Which way ought we go from here? Doesn’t much matter which way we go.

16. ODE ON INDOLENCE

“Soundcheck” is a reclamation of dignity. woods repeats his negative declaration (“I will not be at soundcheck”) four times throughout his verse, emphatically. Not since Bartleby have we heard such a vehement refusal. “I would prefer not to,” the scrivener says. woods’ refusal would make Paul Lafargue proud. It’s an unusual illusion that makes an MC believe he must puppet perform a phantom set for an audience of one, all in the name of amplification. It’s not that complicated. Organized Konfusion dealt with this shit in ’97. On “Soundman,” they summed it up nicely: If it ain’t loud enough, we tell the soundman turn that shit up, up, up. Tek and Steele embraced a more threatening approach. Exit the soundclash and enter the venue for a moment. Boom bye bye to a sound bwoy head. (Wiretap sound like Buju Banton, don’t it?) They demand a Sound [Man] Bureill.

woods craves his pre-show isolation: “I will not be in the green room if it’s too lit.” Are we talking incandescence or excitement? Either way, he wants none of it. Dah shinin’ of a spotlight in his face is not his style. His autonomy is the only item on his rider: “I reserve the right.” And that means no irksome obligations like soundcheck or backstage dawdling. He prefers to take in the town, a “local greasy spoon or Szechuan establishment,” maybe the Courtyard Marriott bathroom where he can “[blow] marijuana through the vents.” God-level expertise when it comes to that habit. We know from “No Hard Feelings” how he “towel[s] the door.”

He “might watch the sun set over your city from a parapet or a park bench.” woods considers the lilies and how they grow—they toil not, so why should he? We’ve seen him sitting there. We might’ve mistaken him for one of those Park Bench People that Freestyle Fellowship clued us into in 1993. “I see an old man sittin’ on a park bench,” Myka 9 sang, someone “lookin’ in the skies.” Might’ve been woods. “You’re thinkin’ ’bout your kids,” Myka said, “...’bout your girl, / You’re thinkin’ of all the things you did, / You see the children play.” woods wishes he was pushing his own baby on the swing, but he’s got to wait for that.

Time’s not lost completely. He will not be at soundcheck, but he will be timely for the show. You won’t find him “wakin’ up on a park bench a bum” (“The Doldrums”). “Headlamps splash squatter tents on my way to the venue,” woods raps, “—they wave me in.” Who exactly? The squatters or the show promoter? Who would he be more comfortable with? “I’m smiling like I’m not,” he says from the stage, spurning the coon caricature so many Black performers have thrust upon them by the public. woods won’t dance a jig, won’t step and fetch it. Not even when it’s time to get paid. “After the curtains, I sit for a while before I go get the check,” he explains. He turns merch tables on the promoter; makes him wait. Work slowdown. The pay is small, so take your time and buck them all, as the Wobblies used to say. Every live show forget the lyric, huh?—probably intentional. Don’t give them what they want. Withhold your labor. Set your terms.

17. THE CONQUEST OF BREAD

…For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

—Wendell Berry

If woods can’t escape the commotion of the show, he’ll wander even farther off. On “Agriculture,” he moves beyond space and time. If “Paraquat” argued “Anno Domini, it’s no before, it’s only after,” then “Agriculture” reassesses and finds there’s only before. “Nothing in the thought bubble,” woods mentioned on “Soft Landing,” which leads us to this meditation, this reverie of the before. Before what—the Fall? Christ? Facial recognition software? Tour? “Before history [History…], I made fire in the cave,” he raps on “The Layover.” A time before connotes premodern, Arcadian. “Agriculture” strings together a sequence of befores, each more lyrical than the prior (“lyrical” not in a Biggie “lyrical lyricist flowin’ lyrics out my larynx” sense, but in a Coleridge & Wordsworth way). woods wakes “before the sunrise,” even before nature awakens fully, “before sparrow cry from thistle.” He notes “the kettle boil before it whistle,” holding space in the quiet intensity. The personified night “fight before it die” and, consequently, the “sky bleed purple,” battered and bruised. woods leads us to a place (in stark contrast to a non-place) that knows him from “before [his] hands been dirty” with corruption—a place “before [he] could grasp time,” somewhere embryonic. He welcomes us to his Walden, to an unspoiled place “without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies.” Here, the time is “before we had new names”—names like william woods, like F. Porter, like Madziwanyika. A time “before we was new in our own eyes”—before the mirror stage or interpellation.

To get there, woods has to travel to “parts unknown.” He’s only “at home when the road’s not paved.” He only asks for a “little piece of yard” where a “couple goats graze.” Sustainable living. Living that sustains. With a name like backwoodz, why wouldn’t the escape route point to the wilds? He retreats into the peace of wild things, as Wendell Berry calls it. There, woods can focus on [re]productivity. John McPhee, who has always had to balance teaching and writing, refers to his perennial phases as “crop rotations.” In the rural setting depicted on “Agriculture,” there are places enough for woods to push his plow. He retreats not out of complacency but out of a restorative need. He’s an ol’ dirty bastard, “squatting in the soil with a fistful.” CAN YOU DIG IT?! He channels Cyrus. He channels Kaczynski (and writes as much as him, too). “Agriculture” has a subtitle: Industrial Society and Its Future. “[T]echnology exacerbates the effects of crowding because it puts increased disruptive powers in people’s hands,” Kaczynski writes, staring at the whole entourage on the couch buried in they phones.

woods “used to plot on the come-up, plot on [his] brothers,” but now he lends care to his garden plot and “get[s] the tomatoes cropping sideways.” His idyll, exhilarating. He’s “stooped in the coop, gathering eggs” for breakfast, and, later, he “traded some to the neighbor for fresh bread.” The song seems mixed with Kropotkin on the console, a mutuality and self-sufficiency at work. He’d had this vision since forever. On Armand Hammer’s “Resin,” woods remixes the Jack and the Beanstalk fairytale. He plucks “one seed” from “out the pound”—transfixed by its “shiny and round” appearance, its seemingly enchanted qualities—and imagines a day where he’d “move away [and] put it in the ground.” “Ten years later,” though, the seed is “still in [his] drawer, rattling around—angrily.” (At least he didn’t end up with his bones ground to meal to make a giant’s bread, heh.)

“Agriculture” appears to be an illusion, a phantasy, at most a reprieve—a weekend upstate or a vacation in the old country. “I say I’m at peace, but it’s still that same dread,” woods laments, admitting his living off the fatta the lan’ is a temporary arrangement, a refueling on a road trip. “It’s hard to live when before you was dead,” and he finds the afterlife a troubling funk. But he’s in the now, he’s in the now, he’s in the now (as ELUCID is wont to say), and he sees “land on either side of the car.” That won’t suffice when he’s back in the city. He’s better off just getting blunted on reality.

18.

I was high all day, I escaped, goes the refrain on “Houdini.” From the spliff that woods lifts and inhales, he’s able to exhale the yellow smoke of buddha through righteous steps. No mask necessary; this is the vanishing act. To be ghost, to be Ghost.[1] The final “I escaped” of the refrain vanishes into the ether. Houdini was more an escape artist than a smoke and mirrors magician, of course. Others “working with mirrors,” but woods “disappears—[he] was never there.” Kenny Segal contrives a ¾ time signature so that woods can remove himself, waltzing past the typical regulations of time. “Day off,” he says at the top, though Armand Hammer’s “No Days Off” offered up the “sorcerer’s apprentice” gig. Doesn’t seem so appealing at the moment.

The green thumbing that had the tomatoes cropping sideways on “Agriculture” transforms OG into “fresh papaya” or another strain which has a taste that reminds woods of “Jamaican oranges that look like limes.” Where I’m from, you don’t see fireflies, he says. The pastoral escape again—he’s grounding himself (in both the ecotherapy sense and bringing that plane back down to terra firma). woods barefoot soaking up the Earth’s electrons [You don’t have to believe it]. But the tranquility turns quick as he “walk[s] into the forest filled with fear” and “hears something lumbering near.” But it’s just his mind playing tricks on him. It was all a dream—he “woke up sudden in armchair” (a money-green leather armchair, maybe). “Yo, you good to drive?”—and we’re buckling up, back to movement again.

19.

The wait is over, the wait is over, biddy-bye-bye [to the rhythm of BDP’s “The Bridge Is Over,” please]. woods and ShrapKnel scheme to lively up themselves like Marley and the Wailers on “Babylon by Bus,” but they’re touring ingloriously. “Cold open, slow to focus, cameras pan to a freeway,” PremRock directs. His cinematic pacing on par with Pasolini. The wait prevails—stasis. woods “sat on his gate for hours, pissing in a bottle.” Reminds him of the spider hole, probably, when “the job was to sit there all day and press ‘refresh’.”

On “Waiting Around,” he not only waits but wanders. For all his depersonalization on tour, woods counters the feeling by personifying the night again. She’s “young,” of course—full of opportunity—and he “watch[es] her move, spinning like vinyl jumping out the groove.” Graceful but with a smidgen of volatility. He personifies night, just as he does time, to keep him company. Later, he finds human companionship in the form of an actual woman. She’s an expatriate with “perfect teeth,” “5’3” [and] thick as congee porridge.” They smoke “outside in the darkness of the eve,” but she rejects his advances—even his offer to hop in his Horse & Carriage. woods sees defeat through the eyes and mind of Killa Cam. She kisses his cheek and bids him adieu. The ice melts but the champagne still cold. No hard feelings, right?

woods wanders Amsterdam like he’s done many times before. “I miss having nothing to lose,” he says, like back when he was twenty-two and ain’t had nothing but “twenty-two hundred in [his] shoe.” He feels like Jay-Z on “22 Two’s”: I been around this block too many times. Too true, Shawn Cart[ograph]er. woods reads the city with a stoner squint, a subtle wink, with whimsy. He cuts-up corners and avenues like Burroughs riding the Nova Express and disregards the grid like Max Heath. Or, put another way, woods embraces his instinctive travels and paths of rhythm. His verses break the grid too, what with their end-stops and enjambments that jar and jerk the listener as woods weaves through heavy foot traffic. He’s a herbaliser urban planner, dropping “a science of relations and ambiences,” what the Situationists called psychogeography. (Sorry ahead of time for not sparing you the Hallmark Guy Debord.) Each foreign city, for woods, is a Psycho Realm.

History has known men like woods, flâneurs flitting through throngs. “The crowd is his domain,” Baudelaire explained in “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), just “as the air is that of the birds.” Birds flyin’ high—you know how I feel. “For the perfect flâneur,” Baudelaire writes,

for the passionate observer, it is an immense joy to take up one’s dwelling among the multitude, amidst undulation, movement, the fugitive, the infinite. To be absent from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home; to view the world, to be at the heart of the world, and yet hidden from the world, such are some of the last pleasures of those independent spirits, passionate and impartial, that language can only inadequately define.

But for woods (who told us he was a dandy on “King Tubby”), language does seem to adequately define what he sees and feels, right down to the “cobblestoned streets” beneath his feet. Time seems to pass exponentially—those cobblestones are Old Testament old, from the Annals of the Former World. woods, we know, vacillates between dwelling at “the heart of the world” and remaining “hidden from [it].” Through woods’ songs—especially on Maps—he functions as “a mirror…a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness which, with its every movement, conveys the multiplicity of life.” woods presents himself narratively as a first-person “I,” but he is an “I” that is “insatiable in his appetite for the ‘not-I.’” I is another. I is an Other.

Debord and his Situationist posse (the Lettrist International Clik, for the people), encouraged citizens to embrace the dérive, to take a bizarre ride II the pharcyde, to “drop their relations…and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” I jet propel at a rate that complicate their mental state, Bootie Brown rapped, but woods complicates his own mental state with his sauntering. The dérive can last any amount of time—minutes between meetings with distributors, Zoom podcast interviews, and press junkets. Pit stops between downtown bars and uptown bars. Middle-of-nowhere gas stations. You notice everything on the dérive—it’s an entropy of experience, but the gravitational pull of the flâneur pulls it all back together. woods looks to avail himself of these “Situations” (as the Situationists intended)—like the Native Tongues sought to create “Scenarios”—moments where he can shuffle off the alienation and spectacles of his Daily Operations.

20.

Rilke surveys the city in The Journey of My Other Self (1930) and catalogs what he sees—a parallel to woods’ journey to his other self: his performing self in juxtaposition to his personal self. Rilke walks along Rue Toullier in Paris, pondering: “People come here, then, to live? I should rather have thought they came here to die.” He sniffs an “odour [that] began to rise from the street…a smell of iodoform, the grease of pommes frites, and fear.” He might be smelling woods’ dinner: “ginger root, mussels, and pomme frites.” The “jaundiced moon” above woods matches the “greenish complexion” of a baby “in a perambulator standing on the pavement” not far from Rilke. “How much such a little moon can do!” Rilke cries. “There are days when everything about us is lucent and ethereal, scarcely outlined in the luminous atmosphere and yet distinct.” The moon seems to spotlight everything the world has to offer. “The nearest objects take on the tone of distance, are remote and merely displayed from afar, not given to us,” Rilke writes. And woods responds by grasping for “poems just out of reach.” Nothing is insignificant or superfluous.

“The fatal thing about these acted poems,” though, Rilke writes:

was that they continually added to and extended themselves, growing to tens of thousands of verses, so that ultimately the time in them was the actual time; somewhat as if one were to make a globe on the scale of the earth. The concave stage, beneath which was hell and above which the level of Paradise was represented by a balcony of unrailed scaffolding fixed to a pillar, only helped to weaken the illusion. For this century had indeed made both heaven and hell terrestrial.

billy woods paces that “concave stage.” His oeuvre has grown “to tens of thousands of verses” that provide us with his vision of the world. He passes a “Congolese concierge” who has fallen “fast asleep” as he returns to his “big, lonely suite.” “From the tiny balcony,” woods raps with an air of confession, “I watched my planes leave.” He’s scorned, forlorn—like Marilyn Buck’s poem “Waiting” (1989), woods “sit[s] wrapped / wrapped in a cool / breeze of assumed indifference.”

21.

Vivez sans temps mort.

Aesop Rock’s anxiety kept him from touring early in his career, and he’s been cool to the idea ever since. “Not a piece of me is drawn to the theater,” he admits on “Waiting Around,” preferring the cloistered process of “recording songs in [his] bedroom.” He forgoes any “alternate venue” for his art. Ultimately, he “wasn’t comfortable ever” on stage—he just “can’t fuck with the premise” of formally presenting such inward-looking works (his “sons and [his] daughters”) to the outside world, face-first and face-forward.

woods knows, as well, that touring isn’t always a spiritually or financially profitable business. Remember what he told us on “checkpoints”: “Best tour advice I ever got: You’re better off beatin’ your dick.” Not just a tip on avoiding dalliances—a call to curtail impulse and instead self-stimulate on Seaman’s furniture—but a [cock-]hard truth about the economic cost of blundering across the country. Like Prodigy, woods’ll tour the album but only for more sales. He’s willing to do that now, but it was less enticing when he was playing to a crowd of two plainclothes cops.

That said, woods—unlike Aesop—finds value in the journey itself, in spite of merch sales and gas budget deficits. “We have a world of pleasure to win,” Raoul Vaneigm proclaimed in The Revolution of Everyday Life, “and nothing to lose but boredom.” The travel necessitated by touring disrupts your quotidian existence, your humdrum homelife, but the disruption that is the road life can grow tiresome just the same. “Nothing moving,” Vaneigm writes, “only dead time passing.” woods finds Time “holed up somewhere it didn’t have to move.” Touring cuts both ways—you’ll be bored stiff like the Timeless EP, or your experience will prove timeless like Bored Stiff in ’97. When he’s in Amsterdam, he watches In Bruges (or is he in Bruges—the compass stays confused) because he’s got “time to kill”—so that’s a time-kill, not a time-thrill. Sometimes the day gently passes; sometimes time is flattened. Which is which? You gon’ feel it in the rhythm and the pattern, or the “Pattern and Rhythm,” the penultimate chapter in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. woods' “room had a view,” dummy.

22.

Nothing but dumb luck when you’re unstuck in time. On “The Layover,” we learn woods “already knew the options was lose/lose, / Baby, that’s nothing new.” Fucking forget “the sun set in the desert, red glow, redness in the West” for a second. Look to No Country For Old Men, instead. Anton Chigurh pulls a coin from his pocket (no “safe full of Euros” for him). Carla Jean Moss calls heads but the coin flips and lands tails. Carla Jean is helpless, vexed. “Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing,” Chigurh tells her. “Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased…. A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.” This the type of shit that’ll make Baby Jessica jump in the well again. We’re all “looking up at a circle of blue.” We’re all alone in the spider hole, but I suppose that’s the best part.

Like Armand Hammer’s “Topsy” from the WHT LBL album, “The Layover” includes a paratactic chorus that functions more as an appendix to the song. Full of alliterative phrases (light/lantern; shovel/spade; O’Shea/ofays/obey; posse/Parkway), metonymic references (Deion Sanders; O’Shea Jackson), musical/literary allusions (LL Cool J; Dorian Gray), and downright eerie similarities (“giant panda”/“giant obey”; “Gray”/”grave”; “other way”/“Parkway”)—if these choruses are hooks they’re shepherd’s crooks intended to snare ideas from one’s consciousness. That, or snaring us out of the spider hole, the well, our bad luck.

23.

woods stabilizes himself with his pen; centers himself with his pad. “More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors,” Elizabeth Bishop says in her poem “The Map” (1946). In a letter, Bishop said, “I always like to feel exactly where I am geographically all the time, on the map.” She roots[/routes] herself against the threat of non-places. woods gets his mind right with “aromatherapy in the stu’ with lavender diffused in the booth” (“Rapper Weed”). Poe’s protagonist from “The Man of the Crowd” knew how to soothe the burn of a world in flames: “I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in every thing.” woods’ sure-footedness stems from his understanding of “the true nature of this world, in its staggering beauty and its infinite horrors,” as he put it in an interview late last year. He’s able to articulate that which is ineffable, likely because he “take[s] care of these words—Munchausen by proxy” (“Babylon by Bus”). Whispering sweet-nothings to his “ailing” children—manipulating them to serve his vision. For the MC whose “love language is an obscure dialect,” Pierre Joris reminds us “all languages are foreign.” We’re all living in a chaos-world, so “why should one have to write in the mummy/daddy language, why should that oedipal choice be the only possible or legitimate one?” woods works conscientiously, but he also guesses as he goes, filling in the blanks: “Paper and pencil—I wrote the verse like hangman.” Inspiration flits and stutter-steps on a hunt: It was always just a question of when. The duppy stalks, blowing “an ill wind in the trees.” woods is “running routes, trees, and patterns”—juking jumbees and stiff-arming the grimmest of reapers. They’re always pursuing, no matter where you move. “Time and the land are one” John Ashbery writes. In Bonnie Costello’s Shifting Ground (2003), she describes how Ashbery explores the “relationship of mind to environment and the play between temporal and spatial awareness.” He achieves this through disappearing paths and slippery topography, shifts in scale and perspective, and subversions of narrative sequence. As concerns woods: check, check, check, and [mic] check. His writing goes hither and yon.

24. EVERYBODY COOKING

Came home, like, “There’s no recipes left!"

—“checkpoints”

By now, we know woods’ passion for grilling is akin to Nabakov’s lepidoptery—a hobby that enriches his art. The empirical aspects of cooking mingle with his transformative vision. Or, as woods boasts, You know I’m working the fire. As far as lyrics go, what woods spits leaves us salivating. He leaves us hungrier than Common in ’97 (he was a self-proclaimed “verbal vegetarian” anyway, limiting his menu). On Maps, woods’ travels are charged with food, from fine dining to stops “at a Costco in the Midwest with a pocketful of small bills folded like tacos.” Even his currency is cuisine.

woods rips recipe raps to counter the empty calories offered at airports. Merwin explained that “you sit there in the smell / of what passes for food.” Instead, feel the comfort of a home-cooked meal. On “Kenwood Speakers,” woods is Cold Lampin’ with [the] Flavor of his host’s “skate wing, brown butter, and capers, / Sprigs of thyme, heavy pours of natural wine.” On “Gilgamesh,” he served up the class: “Stiff drinks, / …garnish the parsley.” His epicure bars extend to “Soft Landing,” where there’s “conch fritters crispin’ in the kitchen,” and on “Blue Smoke,” where the culinary poetics peak with an elaborate spread: “The pork belly was brined, braised, then deep-fried, / Fresh mint, Thai basil, pickled watermelon rind, / Julienned scallions and other alliums, gave the pepper mill one grind.” In Amsterdam, he indulges in a feast fit for President Kongi: “Grassy gin winning over sweet vermouth, / Framboise, ginger root, / Mussels and pomme frites, confit leeks.”

Meals upon meals upon meals. woods is out to lunch like Dolphy—he slows time and slow cooks. Unless he’s suspending his gastronomics for a detour through the dark side of the all-American meal. The velocity of tour life sometimes necessitates fast food: “The burgers was In-N-Out.” Budgeting time and consumption is a perilous path. Cee-Lo Green on “Soul Food” issued a Surgeon General’s Warning: “Fast food got me sick, / Them crackers think they slick.” Catch woods at an all-night diner with Cage and Camu at the counter—a chopped-and-screwed Nighthawks painted by Edward [Hip-]Hopper who, in his own words, “unconsciously...paint[ed] the loneliness of a large city.” No one reminded him that bad dreams are only dreams. Mark Fisher saw the scene for what it was: a [def] “juxtaposition of the café with the cosmos.”

Your time is your own, only when it’s not. Joy James speaks of “time theft,” the “loss of leisure to recover from fatigue and violence.” Not stolen moments but moments stolen from you. You stare at the time zone clocks on the wall of the airport and mumble woods’ lyrics from “Babylon by Bus”: I knew the time was borrowed. Borrowed or stolen? woods communes with DOOM/doom. “Living off borrowed time, the clock tick faster,” expanding and contracting like accordion bellows. It’s as if every hot minute after History Will Absolve Me is borrowed. Before history, he made fire in the cave. Dante’s descent into hell follows a clockwise spiral [the Flavor Flav clock still—(still!)—spins centrifugal]

25. FROM THIS WORLD TO THAT WHICH IS TO COME

This is the end, as it’s always been. We spend time and money, money and time. The currency is mortality, or tempmortality. Method Man might “bust shots at Big Ben like we got time to kill,” but we’re in Bruges, and Ken drops warning coins from the belfry before leaping to his death, splat in the market square. That’s the Protect Ya Neck jump-off, for those wondering. Coldcocked by the clocktower.

We’re there but not there. Masked and unmasked. Time out of joint and intimately passing a joint in the cypher. Playing for crowds and playing with your kids. Aesop might refuse to tour, sticking to his quasi-reclusive career turn, or he may someday perform on his own terms. His own terminology in the terms of service, in the airport terminal. Terminus means the end. “I’m trying to live in the moment like death row,” woods raps on “FaceTime.” That’s the death row of last meals and last words, the Live from Death Row of Mumia Abu-Jamal; however, it’s also the Death Row of Suge Knight, of a record label that had its moment and then didn’t, done in by deserters, failed distribution deals, and bankruptcy.[2]

Who better to invoke than the Notorious B.I.G. to prove the point of tempmortality? woods has drawn from the well of Big Poppa’s precarity punchlines before. Where Big insisted rappers shouldn’t be mad because “UPS is hiring,” woods responds with a post-’08 collapse sentiment: “My advice: don’t stop rhymin’—UPS not hiring.” Just common sense for a recessionary gap. Death curves at every turn, so never take shit for granted. woods could be freelancing, writing rap reviews for a pittance. That being said, he’s “Ready to die, it’s no biggie” (“FaceTime”). He’s already “lived a couple lives” so he’s prepared to “go ahead and slide” into that good night. Somebody’s gotta die—if he goes, he goes. Insouciance is the order of the day. Walking with a panther, he tallies his “nine lives” and wonders like those devilish Yakubs “how many [he] already used.” B.I.G. appears everywhere on Maps, suggesting to woods that “maybe suicidal thoughts [is] the everyday struggle.” “Gimme the loot,” woods raps on “Baby Steps,” determined to get his—“it’s a museum.” Repatriate artifacts? Don’t soften the language. Gimme mine, ELUCID screams.

woods has been around the world and ay ya ya, he’s been playa-hated (“Don’t forget: God’s a hater”). Mo Money Moor Problems—a wider audience translates to a wider world. But he can brag and meditate on mortality both. “Big jar when they donate my brain,” he says, and the organ transplant moves at a hash jar tempo. Bourdainian flourishes of “spicy chili oil—let that bad boy marinate” (Bad Boy, huh?). Sometimes we track time through the dates on “posthumous YouTube views”; other times we can only rely on “the lonely big tree like a sundial.” To the…tick-tock, ya don’t stop. To the…tick-tock, ya don’t quit.

“In all candor,” woods raps on the chorus of “The Layover,” “I got one foot in your grave.” He glosses over racist connotations and instead weaponizes farm tools: “I still call a shovel a spade.” Shades of the gravediggaz in Hamlet’s courtyard. woods has wielded the weapon before, on “Gilgamesh”: “Merrily dug his own grave, whistling as he shoveled.” Tarafah, the nomad-poet & free Bedouin, satirized the king and thus “dug his grave with his tongue.” To bring back Orwell’s “Marrakech,” if only for a moment: “They arise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil.”

Survival rate fluctuates like the market. Even Bourdain chose the rope in Hotel Chambard in Kaysersberg. “I don’t go to sleep—I tread water ’til I sink,” woods reveals on “FaceTime.” The waves never let up, but you got to keep ya head up, keep your head above water. Like Trugoy rapped, We’re all in tune with doom.

26. A HEAD NӒDDA’S JOURNEY

Hing, hang, hung—see what the hangman done.

—“Sadderday”

Chokehold slowly closed the airway.

—“Dettol”

On “Hangman,” thoughts are hijacked by grisly Afro-Gothic visions. The head nodding of the listener turns to oxygen deprivation. Cold dead grip on the larynx. The neck compresses closer to unconsciousness, another stifled breath closer to death. To cease that “heart beat in [the] jugular.” woods raps as if he’s being hanged, and he makes a spectacle of it. The wheeze of the long /e/ sounds within the lines (“Matisse”; “teeth”; “deep”; “beat”; “peaks”; “Sikh”; “sheet”; “sleep”) and the choke of the short /u/ sounds within the end-rhymes (“colors”; “lovers”; “jugular”; “rugged”; “thuggers”; “fucker”)—we’re listening to the hangman’s tune. The tightening of the iron fist on the throat, garroted; the Iron Galaxy expanding but feeling like shrinking the way it pulls taut. The rope creaks as it tightens.

As woods loses consciousness, he “hovers outside [him]self.” My shell, mechanical—he survives as he cites a familiar phrase and slips into a new rhyme pattern. He gargles back to life with hardcore consonance (the /g/ and /c/ takeover) and predominant l-sounds (“manageable”; “tangible”; “manacles”) to smooth the earlier ruggedness, but it’s still a bumpy ride. “People paralyzed by the lies they tell theyself,” but not him. He’s still moving and knows the “count right,” though he reaches for tangibility as a spirit roams beyond his grasp. Gotta stay on it, as “any day could be the day they frog-march you in manacles.”

The rhymes and rhyme schemes of the first verse attack, but the long /oo/ digraph pattern sustained through the second verse stabilizes (“undo”; “Rubik’s”; “cube”; “cartoons”; “booth”; “cocoon”; “moons”; “room”; “unamused”; “truth”; “stu’”; “fumes”; “shrooms”; “proof”; “vroom”; “womb”; “spoons”). The sequence produces a mesmerizing drone. Somewhere between Ginsberg’s OM or AUM (“AU opens the gates of heaven. The humming M closes the gates of hell. AUM is a long sigh; 5 minutes intense total concentration initiates cosmic vibrations”) and the monoliths & dimensions of Sunn O))). woods sings a Song of Experience that outmaneuvers protégés with wit and wisdom. He becomes the haunting presence of the chorus, the ominous and malevolent duppy. He’s gonna “keep it real with you”—that old platitude, yes, but really—the past can’t be undone, it’s a “black Rubik’s cube.” He knows; he’s been in the “booth like cocoon[/Cocoon],” a butterfly transforming into a shabazz palace, a butterfly pimped. Youngbloods can’t relate to a film allusion from before they were twinkles in their mothers’ uteri. woods somersaults “in a dead womb.” If woods records in a Silkk casing, Augé knows why: “In one form or another, ranging from the misery of refugee camps to the cosseted luxury of five-star hotels, some experience of non-place…is today an essential component of all social existence. Hency the very particular and ultimately paradoxical character of…the fashion for ‘cocooning’, retreating into the self.”

“Dig two graves…one for them, one for you,” woods drones on. We’re leveled by Kenny Segal’s menacing foghorn blast. It’s a motif heard throughout The Microphones’ The Glow Pt. 2 (released 9/11/01) with Phil Elverum crediting the first season of Twin Peaks for the idea. (Incidentally, you can hear it at the beginning of The Microphones’ “Map.”) Segal’s foghorn (in reality, a pitched-down trombone) shows up inconsistently throughout “Hangman,” heightening our trepidation, racking our nerves.

Size it up. On “Hangman,” woods admits that “payback always inexact, but [he] be squinting over measuring spoons” like T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock busy “measur[ing] out [his] life with coffee spoons.” The dreaded hangman and his moribund quantifications bleed and reverberate like King Tubby’s fingers on the Fisher Dynamic Space Expander. One look all it take to take they measurements.

27. THE EXECUTIONER’S FACE IS ALWAYS WELL HIDDEN

woods’ brand of [afro-]pessimism leaves Frank B. Wilderson III in a state of bewilderment. Though we’re left with few illusions on Maps (“People don’t want the truth; they want me to tell ’em grandma went to heaven” would be one such example), nothing matches the protracted decline he sets forth on “Year Zero.” “I quit lookin’ for solutions,” woods opens, signaling the twilight of the gods. If he can’t summon the strength, where does that leave us? It’s underground hip-hop, gentleman. The gods will not save you. woods manages to tell us how it is without falling into despair (note the chuckling at the end of “Rapper Weed”), but his ruthless critique often leaves us laughless. I feel mirth at his gift of gab, but I’m indignant when I page through the briefings he throws down on my desk.

woods acts in accordance with Franco Berardi’s prompting, opting to employ a “dyst-irony” [dystopian irony], “the language of autonomy.” The pervasive /n/ phoneme within the verse (“lookin’”; “solutions”; “end hunchbacked in front”; “minds”; “Edison”; “weapon”; etc.)—the motherfucking alveolar nasal produced as woods raps through gritted teeth—slides homophonically into “end,” a succession of ’em, as though he’s John the Revelator humming end end end end end. Feels like a “tumor pressing on [our] brain.” Eschatological-hop for the ’2-3. Things look bad, real bad. Stupid people rule the land, we buy a pistol and learn how to use it, and our “taxes pay police brutality settlements.” There’s “quicksand [in] every direction, so go ahead and step on in.” That sinking feeling is unavoidable. “There is no bad luck in the world but white folks,” Baby Suggs says in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and so we crouch down in front of 124 Bluestone Road with our finger on the trigger.

Technology won’t save us either. Tesla and Edison’s “great minds” fall short (their ilk might actually be the “worstest of men”). “Apes stood and walked into the future” only to “end hunchbacked in front the computer.” March of regress. Sooner or later they red-pill and rabbit-hole themselves into the comments section of extremist YouTube channels. Shitposters leaving links to their live-stream on 8chan. “Sooner or later it’s gon’ be two unrelated active shooters”—aspiring genocidaires—“same place, same time.” In Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (2015), Berardi argues that active shooters possess “the psychopathology of human beings exposed to electronic hyper-simulation during their formative years, the special fragility of the first generation to grow up in the virtual age.” These killers “learn more vocabulary from a machine than from their mothers”—in [m]other words, “the dissociation of language learning from the bodily affective experience.” (woods isn’t one of them; he’s sure to “call Mom and say, I love you.”) These killers don’t know people, having only lived a “virtualization of the experience of the other.”

It’s not just the extremists, though. At even the “first sign of trouble, motherfuckers shimmy right out that human skin.” This world is never home, will never be home. Everything “home” is gone, homie. Time to tabula rasa that shit, wholesale. Everything for sale except for…nah, ev-ery-thing. “Kids,” woods says—and he’s addressing not only his young audience but other whippersnapper rappers and his own children, too—“you and your friends gon’ have to start again, / It’s nothing you can do with us—we’re fucked.” He repeats how fucked we are, for choral emphasis. We “poison everything we touch.” The wild jungle out the speaker “withered and died.” That bitter cassava on the tongue. The poisonwood bible that we thumb. Burn it down with us inside. Burn it to the ground. Make sure we don’t survive. “So what can be done when nothing can be done?” Berardi asks,

I think that ironic autonomy is the answer…. Politicians call on us to take part in their political concerns, economists call on us to be responsible, to work more, to go shopping, to stimulate the market. Priests call on us to have faith. If you follow these inveiglements to participate, to be responsible—you are trapped. Do not take part in the game, do not expect any solution from politics, do not be attached to things, do not hope.

If the gods are fucking you, you find a way to fuck them back.

28.

I do hate to be chucked in the dark aboard a strange ship. I wonder where they keep their fresh water.

—Joseph Conrad, The Rescue (1920)

“Everything is landscape,” Ashbery declares in The Double Dream of Spring. Go ahead and think rustic, but he includes “...the great urban centers… / …at the center of which / We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of isolated instants.” “I miss this place,” woods longingly raps on “NYC Tapwater,” only to undercut the thought, “—’til I’m back.” “Long face to match,” he says, just as he looked on ELUCID’s “Nostrand”: “Every day I walk past people begging to live, / Every day I walk past the living dead.” The quotidian is calamitous. And now even his “cats are strays.” He surveys the rest of the scene, from the inconsiderate bus driver, to the “new panhandler outside the store,” to the “young boy going through each bag of grabba like it’s raw silk cloth.” Time passes and doesn’t. Kenny Segal’s sloomy beat speaks volumes. Nothing ever happens ’til it do. Find woods in the doldrums. Baby, he’s got the bends. Where does he go from here? He’s been alone on an aeroplane, falling asleep against the windowpane. His blood thickens—he needs to be rejuvenated, needs an infusion, needs his drip feed on, needs a beat. He diagnoses himself: You lack the minerals and vitamins. He prescribes himself “one sip of New York City tapwater.”

A few weeks later, he sees the old panhandler “outside Kennedy Fried, grinding his jaw.” Ironically, “he ain’t recognize [woods] at all,” which we assume would please our camera-shy guy, but he seems to yearn for the recognition from this necropolitan wanderer, at least in this instance. He’s jet-lagged again, not quite grabbing the new version of himself. “Slipp[ing] in the bar at last call” probably won’t help the dissociation. The words are coming out all weird.

“I’m home, but my mind be wandering off.” So, what does he do in the second verse?—he hides in plain sight, of course. “Sometimes I don’t tell anyone I’m back around,” he confesses—he “just lay low.” woods the misanthrope. After all, it’s “the cat [that] miss [him] the most—purring loud on [his] lap.” Home is where the hard plastics are, so woods contemplates with his “fingers steepled, / wondering if [he] really need all this stuff.” Nobody ever really did it for the love, he claimed on “The Doldrums.” So when O.C. raps he’d “rather be broke and have a whole lot of respect,” woods is dubious. He hides. “Through the peephole,” creeping, dropping eaves, he “see[s] new people going up and down the stairs.” He’s a kindred spirit to Aesop Rock on his fire escape with the 6B panorama: A universe of brick buildings slightly off-balance. woods sees “new buildings just appear” out of nowhere.

He sequesters himself in his apartment, but eventually ventures out again. He gives us a tour, keeping a body count, as Ice-T yowls, THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD! He spots celebrities, clothing boutiques, and corporate weed everywhere. On “Gilgamesh,” he saw the “whole neighborhood on stage,” even as he navigated a “two-block radius, at best.” His territory, small as it is in scale, is invaded. He gets dewy-eyed about “that ’08 Sour Diesel,” but not before “Death in a top hat dance[s] a jig in the street.” Antonius Block doing the wop, popping and locking down the block.

Gilgamesh returns to Uruk fearful “[h]is people would not share / The sorrow that he knew,” and he was right—they didn’t. “He looked at the walls, / Awed at the heights / His people had achieved / And for a moment—just a moment— / All that lay behind him / Passed from view.” On “Gilgamesh,” woods finds it “increasingly clear these walls is fucking closing in.” He’s back at the dinner table in that renovated apartment of his gentrifying neighbors. “Last year I pretended to care, / Right now, can’t spare the oxygen,” he raps, exasperated. But he can spare the exhaust fumes. He puts his “feet up on the Ottoman Empire” for some rest and respite and reveries of his own imperial conquests.

“NYC Tapwater,” like “Kenwood Speakers” earlier, is Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream [dreams is dangerous]. The City of Destruction you flee might not be Celestial but it’s sufficient enough. Home is never how you left it yet also is. Aphorisms fail us. You can’t go home again—sure. We follow woods on the “last car on the last train” on the Last Exit to Brooklyn. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig. “To market, to market, to buy a fat pig.” (The pork belly was brined, braised, then deep-fried…) In her 1965 poem “Questions of Travel,” Elizabeth Bishop writes:

Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today?

People pin religious hope on travel, but—as Bishop once said elsewhere—the first person you meet when you get off the plane is yourself. Emerson said much the same, even discouraging travel (“The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home”). Everything you need is within you, he argued—you create the hallowed place, and then the place helps create you. In “Self-Reliance,” he considers traveling to Naples to become “intoxicated with beauty, and lose [his] sadness,” but he ultimately thinks better of searching for cheap flights on Expedia. “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples,” he writes, “and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.” It all reeks of jet fuel.[3]

29. NOSTOS

...in the world of supermodernity people are always, and never, at home.

—Augé

ELUCID opens “As The Crow Flies” straddling two simultaneous realities: home and away, near and far, physically present and mentally absent. He’s always, actively elsewhere. “I’m just cleaning up my kitchen,” he raps, as if to convince us of his domestic bliss, of the virtue of routine. “Emptying the fridge, bleaching counters, sweeping corners, / I be in my drawers aligning my silverware in order,” he says—his list of chores, implausibly, a flex. Soon, though, he’ll be “tripping through coordinates.” Tripping is operative—some altitude-induced delirium as he’s “10k and rising.” Surrealism is his point-of-view, recall (“Flummox”). His “baggage on the carousel loop” is the symbol on which to meditate. He’s “rooted” but “roam[s] free.” Presence and absence. Lost and found. Accustomed and unclaimed. The course he charts is in the form of an infinite loop. Augé writes of the Kafkaesque trappings of corporate-controlled travel: “Airline company magazines advertise hotels that advertise the airline companies…they outline a world of consumption.” The literature of non-places. You think you’re getting somewhere, but you’re not. “Everywhere and nowhere,” woods recently said. He, like ELUCID, is a real nowhere man and Everyman and all in one fell loop.

On “Soft Landing,” woods references a “brief, sweet moment” in which there’s “nothing in the thought bubble.” His final, concise verse on Maps, for all intents, is that fleeting instant. “All narrative goes back to infancy,” according to Augé. On “Baby Steps,” woods talks of “breasts out for the feeding,” which is a profane practice when he’s “feeling vulgar.” “Large areolas,” he lusts, “bite like I’m teething.” Not exactly the sacred act of nursing between madonna and child.

But that was earlier. On “As The Crow Flies,” woods is present. He concentrates upon his child with colostrum closeness and sees the journey has already begun, has always been. Drawing on Michel de Certeau, Augé writes that the “gleeful and silent experience of infancy is that of the first journey, of birth as the primal experience of differentiation, of the recognition of the self as self and as other, repeated later in the experiences of walking as the first use of space.” For all his expressions of misanthropy, an antinatalist woods is not.

“I’m in the park with the baby on the swing,” woods raps. This isn’t a reminiscence of park jams where your man gets shot for his sheep coat, though. He’s not evoking Kool Herc’s soundsystem in a jam-packed Cedar Park. If anything, we fixate on the mesmerizing motion of the swing—the symbolic push away of the parent and the insistent return of the child—a prodigal child where the only currency is glee. The child is thrust into oscillatory motion when typically we think of the father setting forth. A spirit quest under the guise of stepping out for a pack of cigarettes. But here, woods pushes his son farther along—fatheralong, for John Edgar Wideman. A preparatory speech on the pendulum swing of time. Feel-it-in-the-pit-of-the-stomach pain—a queasiness, an uneasiness. The child swings high, swings low. (Higher up, higher up, higher, the child calls like ELUCID from a storage closet stacked high with Betamax tapes—heart-wrenching home videos.) woods considers and counters Jay-Z’s image of leaving condoms on Nas’ baby seat. woods’ verse is not Supa Ugly but Supa Beautiful.

As woods sends his son into the stratosphere, it “hits [him] crazy: anything at all could happen to him.” We learned on ELUCID’s “Mangosteen” that woods’ hard shell [mechanical] only cracks when his baby gurgle, but as his son calculates risks and seeks to reap rewards, he fights the urge to tell the child: Don’t let me catch you intrepid. I mean, “he been climbing higher and higher on the jungle gym” (higher up! higher!), endangering bones and hazarding bruises. It’s like a jungle sometimes, you know, and it makes a father wonder how his child keeps from going under. The time goes so quick, another parent says, as you watch him “running faster, sometimes pushing other kids.” We shudder at the violence, innate as it seems, and struggle to navigate their dysregulated emotions as well as our own: “Tear-streaked apologies, balled fists—it’s a trip.” What he sees in the child’s behavior feels all too familiar—his own lachrymose regrets of being away—tripping. In Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin warns: “You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you can never go back.”

“It’s a trip that this is something we did,” woods reflects, acknowledging the presence of his baby’s mother for the first time. For Vincent Descombes, “The character is at home when he is at ease in the rhetoric of the people with whom he shares life.” As such, woods turns to the mother and “kiss[es] her on the lips.” The tender moment answers the stress heard about on “Soft Landing”: “It ruins the whole day when my baby-mother mad at me.” Here, home, things are set right. The ebb and flow of their relationship, the warp and weft of Penelope’s loom, settles into serenity.

Time moves differently, exponentially, when you have children. “I watch him grow,” woods says, as if his son is doing so right before his eyes. Conceptualizing the multiplying of his son’s cells inevitably forces the gaze inward. woods is “wondering how long [he] got to live.” The last of his mortality raps on Maps, “As The Crow Flies” lands woods at the site of his final resting place, his thoughts dwelling on the immutable certainty of death. The Child is father of the Man, and the son—in all his vitality—raises the volume on the tick and the tock of the clock’s pendulum. For woods, it swings from bliss to bleak. Each split second a split atom—catastrophic. “Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors,” Poe writes—they “die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat.” Or pleurisy, like Wordsworth. Or nine bullets, like Big L. So you should pump this shit like they do in the future. woods is in possession of a plan to protect his neck and his legacy, in case. We heard it on Earl Sweatshirt’s “Tabula Rasa”: “Give my babies my rhyme books, but tell ’em, Do you.”

billy woods’ final words on Maps are a final exercise in approximation. They are against idealism; they enact that which is approximate. It is a verse composed of imperfect rhymes—close, but not quite. They point to good-enough parenting (word to Winnicott). Imperfect rhymes for imperfect lives. woods tells it slant. Like ELUCID—not fully in the kitchen, not wholly in Arizona for the show. Planting his feet in the Pacific and washing his face in the Atlantic. We sense the not-quiteness in woods’ sequence of slant rhymes:

These end-rhymes are joined by the internal assonance of short-i sounds—a doubling-up; an overcompensation for when everything don’t always go according to plan, man.

woods’ final words are short-lived, ephemeral as a push on the playground. While he wonders how long he got to live, his brief verse ends abruptly—oddly, after the seventh bar he falls silent—signaling a sooner-than-thought demise. That gnawing fear: a premature death. Time is of the essence, so he rather not waste words. He crouches at eye-level to tell his children what they need to hear before he’s gone (Western Education is forbidden, et al.). On tour, billy woods’ tendency is the same, ending songs in his set suddenly during shows. It’s on to the next performance, the next city, the next life.

Footnotes:

[1] “to be ghost” [disappear]; “to be Ghost” [face]

[2] woods has dabbled in these hip-hop double entendres before. “It’s walls topped with broken glass—I’ll show you slum village,” for example (from “No Hard Feelings”).

[3] Robert Leder, an executive at SMW Trading Company, was in his office on the 85th floor of the North Tower when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the building. “The whole office reeked of jet fuel,” he recalls.

Images:

“Alexander the Great in his griffin-powered flying chariot,” Roman d’Alexandre, 1444-1445 (detail) | “Cosmographia” (1544) by Sebastian Münster | LL Cool J, Radio album cover, 1985 (detail) | “It Shoots Further Than He Dreams,” John F. Knott (March 1918) | “Truck transporting people between the Republic of China and Libya,” Raymond Depardon (1978) | Capone-N-Noreaga, “L.A., L.A.” music video, 1996 (screenshot) | Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins’ The Discovery of Witches (1647) | Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, dir. René Vienet, 1973 (screenshot) | Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins’ The Discovery of Witches (1647) | Konrad Kyeser, Bellifortis, Clm 30150, Tafel 21, Blatt 91V (detail) | The Seventh Seal, dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1957 (screenshot) | Guy Debord, Guide Pychogéographique de Paris (1957) | Vivez sans temps mort, Paris graffiti (1968) | “Engraving of Croatian mathematician Faust Vrančić jumping from a tower with a parachute,” Italy (1617) | John Bunyan, “A Plan of the Road From the City of Destruction to the Celestial City,” adapted to The Pilgrim’s Progress (1821) | Joos van Cleve, The Holy Family (ca. 1512-13) | “Alexander the Great in his griffin-powered flying chariot,” Roman d'Alexandre, 1444-1445 (detail)

#billy woods kenny segal maps caltrops backwoodz underground hip-hop

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lily-blue · 1 year

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Uncharted waters

☆ characters: poseidon’s son!chenle & mermaid!you ☆ genre: royalty au, greek gods au, the little mermaid au, fluff, horror(ish) ☆ warnings: violence and death ☆ summary: you’re so in love with Prince Chenle, the boy you rescued when he was knocked overboard, that you’re willing to sacrifice everything to be with him - little do you know, everything is exactly what he wants to take away from you ☆ words: 6,2k ☆ also: a massive thanks to @dat-town for her help with this story ♥ your questions made me realize how important details are in every fantasy, even in fantasies where you already have a world to work with!

Your body felt heavy, like shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea, and your lungs were on fire, a sensation you had only ever heard in those magical tales Kunhang, the seagull, had told you whenever you had visited him on the surface.

For a long time, the eccentric albeit friendly bird had been your sole connection to the human world; your only resource, when you had had yet another question about those treasures you had found during your adventures with Yangyang. But the more stories you had heard about human inventions and people with two beautiful, long legs who could dance, walk, and run, the more curious you had become. Curious and bold enough to save a human boy when he had fallen in the ice cold water on a stormy night and make a deal with the sea witch just to get a chance to have your happy ending by his side.

The contract you had signed consisted of three simple statements: The sea witch gave you two human legs in exchange for your voice. To keep them permanently, you had one week to make Prince Chenle fall in love with you. If you failed, and he didn’t give you the true love’s kiss by the seventh sunset, you had to choose whether you killed the prince and turned back into a mermaid or took your own life, offering your undying soul to the wicked.

Which meant failure wasn’t an option. It couldn’t have been one.

Groaning without any sound, you rolled onto your back and opened your eyes. The overcast weather dulled the colors of your surroundings, but you still found the shore beautiful. Unlike when you had been staring at the barely visible Sun while lying beside Yangyang and your moody babysitter, Kun, the sand, now dry, stuck to your skin and made you feel itchy. It penetrated places you didn’t want to think about (and couldn’t have named), but that must have been a part of your new, scale-less life, so you embraced the sensation. It was alright, because your new legs would take you to your prince: to the one you were destined to be with.

A pair of beautiful legs. Your legs. The thought alone made you feel exhilarated. It was like electric eels were rushing through your veins. Your heart was pounding in your entire body.

You couldn’t have told how long you were lying on the beach while you were smiling at the gray clouds, but then a faintly familiar woof-woof gained your attention and knocked the thoughts out of your mind. You snapped your head in the sound’s direction and rolled on your stomach just in time to see the fluffy animal whose steps came to an abrupt halt in front of your face.

‘Daegal! What are you doing there?’ A second intruder ran up to you, this time, a human boy whose voice played on your heartstrings. Prince Chenle looked different from how he had looked at the night when his ship had fallen victim to the storm. Then, his clothes had been torn and his dark locks more disheveled. Now, he seemed more of a safe place than an exciting adventure. Yet, you couldn’t tear your gaze away from him.

Your eyes widened in shock when you felt something damp against your cheek, although you let out a soundless giggle as soon as you realized that it was Daegal’s doing. Chenle’s animal greeted you with a lick across your face, then licked your nose, too, for good measure.

‘Oh?’ The soft sound came from the prince who walked up to your duo in the meantime. He sat on his knees in an arm’s distance from your figure, and pulled Daegal in his embrace. Following the movement with your lingering gaze, you pouted, disheartened, at the thought that he might have felt the need to protect his friend from you. ‘Who are you? And what are you doing here so late?’

You opened your mouth to tell him everything: that you were the one who had pulled him to the shore when the sea had been about to swallow his body; that you were here for him. But no sound came out of your throat.

‘You cannot speak?’ The prince asked, and you nodded with a pout. How were you supposed to make him fall in love with you if you couldn’t make yourself understood? Ursula might have been right about your pretty face and the possibilities that came with body language, but you still felt somewhat lost while you were thinking about what you should have done next.

You winced when something cold poked your shoulder, then did it again when the same, ice cold sensation hit the small of your back. You were familiar with the rain. However, the drops definitely felt different now that you were out of the sea. You turned your head towards the gray clouds.

‘Come on! We need to find shelter,’ Prince Chenle said as he stood up and held his hand out for you. You hesitated only for a fleeting moment, your curious gaze boring deep into his coal orbs, before you accepted his help.

Standing on two legs was a harder task than you had initially thought. First of all, your body’s weight was a real thing on land, unlike when you were in the water; you found it hard to divide it equally. Which automatically led you to the second most crucial problem: your weak sense of balance. You managed to take one tiny step forwards before you lost your footing and fell head first into the prince’s arms. Completely naked, save for the seaweeds that stuck to your skin.

‘Are you oka—? Oh, goodness! Here! Take this,’ he said with one of his protective arms around your figure. He didn’t look at you while he shook his midnight blue jacket off his shoulder and threw it over yours. In fact, his gaze kept sliding from one thing to another until it fell on everything in your close proximity but your exposed skin.

Determined to not be a nuisance, you quickly adjusted the fabric so that it would hide your chest and thighs, then tapped the prince’s shoulder twice in order to gain his attention. It was still very new to you to communicate without your voice, but when Prince Chenle finally looked at you, a newfound wave of confidence surged through your whole being. You could do it. He had understood what you had wanted. You could do it.

The walk to the castle where the prince lived was mostly silent, but you didn’t mind the lack of conversation. Instead, you observed your surroundings and tried to burn every tiny detail in your memory: the dull color of the sand under your feet, the deep red, almost black flowers down the road that led to Prince Chenle’s home, and those iron gates that opened for you seemingly out of nowhere as soon as you reached them. You supposed, there must have been guards who controlled them from somewhere, but no matter how eager you were to lay your eyes on them, you saw no one.

‘You can stay here until we find your family,’ the prince told you while he led you towards the stairs. ‘It is just me here, Daegal, grandpa, the cook, and the maids. So it is no problem at all,’ he reassured you further before he called for someone named Yuqi, and pushed you into an empty bedroom.

The palace in Atlantica was nothing like the castle that had suddenly become your new home. Because even though it was at the bottom of the sea, far from the Sun, it was brighter and full of life. There, your bedroom barely had walls and everyone could easily swim from one place to another, even those who were only visiting your family temporarily.

This place isolated its habitants. The dark paint on the walls, the black baldachin around your bed, and the heavy curtains in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows gave you the impression that you had to ask for permission before you left your room; you weren’t sure that you liked it. It didn’t sit well with your adventurous nature.

However, it could have easily been the storm’s doing: your anxiety. Thus, you tore your gaze from the decoration and turned towards your prince with a smile. As expected, his presence worked wonders on your mood.

‘I will tell Yizhuo to bring you something nice to wear. She will prepare your bathwater, too,’ he informed you with a warm smile on his face that reflected on your own.

Recalling those stories Kunhang had told you about human habits, you pinched both sides of the jacket you were wearing and lifted it gingerly. You wished to put your immense gratitude on display while showing the prince that you were an educated woman. Although, when your gaze slid from the floor to his comically wide eyes, the scandalized look on his face told you that you might have been mistaken.

You opened your mouth to ask what you had done wrong, however, no words rolled down your chapped lips. Still, your pathetic attempt at communication brought the prince back to his senses and revived his numb limbs.

Prince Chenle rushed up to you and grabbed the jacket you were wearing. Your lips parted in horror when you realized that he was fixing the fabric on you as it hadn’t been covering your front anymore.

‘Do not ever do this again,’ he pleaded, voice barely above a whisper. The prince’s handsome face looked pained while his black eyes bored into yours, like when you upsetted a jellyfish and suffered the consequences. So you gulped and nodded in understanding.

You had no idea how long the two of you were just standing there, in the middle of the room, but you were aware of countless other things. For one, you couldn’t ignore the prince’s warm breath that fanned over your skin and dressed it in goosebumps. Then, your heart was beating faster than ever, even when you were racing with Yangyang under the sea. Not to mention, if only you had been a few inches taller, your eyes would have been in line with the boy’s rosy lips. He was so close.

‘Khm… dinner is in an hour. Yizhuo will show you the way,’ the prince said when he took the first step backwards; his hands falled back by his sides.

You once again nodded - you wished you could have done more, but the human alphabet was different from the one you used under the sea which meant you couldn’t have even written notes so early into your new life - and smiled at him. You smiled until he turned his back to you and walked out of the room, leaving you alone with your thoughts.

You wished Yizhuo arrived soon.

The dinner with the prince and his grandfather was better than you had imagined; the food melted in your mouth and the company welcomed you with open arms, although not literally. Humans, at first glance, weren’t too affectionate creatures, but they had many other qualities that fascinated you. They ate their meals with two equally long sticks, kept the side dishes in different bowls and sucked on the snarfblatt instead of blowing it.

Fueled with curiosity, you could have easily stayed at the dining hall all night to learn new things about humans and human objects, but once the dessert was gone and Prince Chenle’s grandfather called for their maids to clean the table, it was time that everyone headed back to their room. And you had no right or way to protest.

That night, buried under a comfortable, warm blanket, your thoughts wandered in directions you wished they hadn’t. You thought of your father and the molten fury in his otherwise loving eyes. You wondered whether he had already known that you had made a deal with the sea witch after he had destroyed your collection of human inventions. Was he looking for a way to get you back or he refused to call you his daughter anymore because of your actions? Based on how much he despised humans, you wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been the latter. Still, the possibility made you sad. He was your family, after all.

The more you doubted your bond with your loved ones - Yangyang must have felt betrayed that you had left him behind when he had followed you into danger time after time despite what a guppy he was -, the louder the voices in your head became. They told you that you had sold your soul the moment you had set tail in the sea witch’s cave. They called you immature and stupid. They said it was inevitable that you would become a murderer.

You tried to convince them that they were wrong and true love didn’t work like that, but by the time you managed to silence them, the first rays of sunlight shone upon your bed, and the second day began.

Before breakfast, Yizhuo was kind enough to not make comments on your disheveled hair and overall disoriented appearance. Not that you weren’t aware of how you looked even before you were sat in front of the vanity table.

There were dark circles under your eyes and angry red scratches all over your arms, although you had no recollection of when you had injured yourself so badly. As far as you could tell, once you had gotten in bed, you had been tossing and turning around for hours before your body had given in to exhaustion. You had been troubled, but safe. Your scars made no sense.

‘Do not worry, miss. I have the perfect long-sleeved dress for you,’ the maid reassured you with a warm smile. ‘It might be a little warm for the summer weather, but it will hide your scars from unwanted eyes.’

You thanked her for her kindness with a beaming smile and took the hair brush out of her hands so that she could fetch your outfit. Before Prince Chenle had bid his goodbye last night, he had promised to show you the town around the castle after breakfast and you didn’t want to waste a second. Especially because it had already felt like hours while you had been waiting for Yizhuo to knock on your door and prepare you for the day.

The dress the maid brought for you was simple but gorgeous. It consisted of a blue skirt that reached your ankles, a black corset, and a white shirt that hid your arms, but emphasized the lines of your neck and collarbones. Completed with the blue ribbon in your hair and the light make-up Yizhuo put on your face, the outcome was magnificent. It fitted those images you had in your head - that you had seen in human books - whenever you daydreamed about dating.

Feeling restless, the breakfast went by both quickly and painfully slowly, but your chair was right next to the prince’s, therefore you weren’t complaining. You ate your soup diligently and put some rice in the broth when you saw that Prince Chenle and his grandfather did the same. There were so many things you still didn’t know about their habits, you couldn’t wait to tell Kunhang and Yangyang about your own discoveries.

“As if they wanted to hear about them, you silly girl. You will never see them again. Never see them again. You will never see them again.”

The voice came from behind you, but when you snapped your head in that direction, you saw no one but the maids who stood by the door, waiting for your requests silently. You gulped and shook your head. You could have sworn that you had heard this scolding tone before, but you had no idea where.

‘Is everything alright, dear?’ The prince’s grandfather inquired; worry evident in the way he pronounced each syllable.

You reassured him with frantic nods and a beaming smile. Although, if you had wanted to be honest, you weren’t entirely sure whether things were indeed quite alright. But to explain the situation to them in detail, you needed more than your limited arsenal of gestures and mimics. Hence, you chose to not address your concerns. You were a big girl. You were determined to prove to everyone that you could fight your own battles.

Your father and Kun might have never believed in you, but neither of them was present in your life anymore to doubt you.

The books that sank to the bottom of the sea were too fragile to read after a certain point. But once you had realized that it was because the material they were made of changed form under water, you had gained the habit of opening them at your favorite pages as soon as you found them so that you could at least stare at them when you were bored.

The drawings you had seen in these books portrayed humans in beautiful ball dresses while they were laughing and dancing. They depicted lovers on romantic dates as they were kissing. And they also showed how human towns were always crowded and full of life.

The town around the royal castle wasn’t any different. It was loud, but well-coordinated. At first glance, it seemed that everyone had somewhere to be, even the youngest children who ran past you and the prince near the market. Their energy reminded you of your carefree childhood and the day when you had first met Yangyang.

The tropical yellow fish had gotten lost on his way to school, so you had helped him get home safe while you had been having fun getting to know each other and munching on seaweed cookies. You had been his first friend. And he had been yours.

“He could help you, if only you had told him about your plans. But you didn’t think about anyone or anything, did you? Do you really believe you can make him fall in love with you in six days? You can’t even tell him it’s too warm in your dress or that you’re thirsty. You’re pathetic, you silly girl. Pathetic. You’re pathetic.”

You flinched when someone grabbed your hand, but relaxed immediately when your eyes fell on Prince Chenle’s delicate fingers around your wrist. He pulled your hand away from your neck and squeezed it lightly the moment it swung back and forth by your side.

‘Do not be nervous. I will be here the whole time,’ he reassured you kindly; his thumb was caressing the back of your hand tenderly. You furrowed your eyebrows, confused, but then you noticed the softness of his fingertips against your skin and your mind went blank. With your sanity out of the way, you didn’t question why he would have thought you were nervous. What you focused on instead was the fact that he cared.

Therefore, you pressed your lips together with a newfound determination and looked around in the vicinity in search of a place where you could get some refreshments. There was a house on your left with breads of different shapes and sizes in its windows and another one on your right with stalls of apples in front of it. You saw a shop that changed one’s hairstyle and a building that had a dining hall in its garden.

You pointed at the latter.

‘Are you hungry?’ The prince asked and you shook your head. ‘Well, that is a restaurant. But we can have shaved ice at the shop two corners from here. Do you like shaved ice?’

You knew what an ice cube was and you didn’t particularly like the stinging numbness you felt when you touched one. However, shaved ice was most probably different because you had never seen anyone eating plain ice cubes before, thus your brain decided that not even humans would have enjoyed chewing on them willingly.

Seeing your contemplation, Prince Chenle patted the top of your head with an affectionate smile and pulled you towards the aforementioned direction. By the time you reached the shaved ice shop, you completely forgot about the reappearing voices in your head because your mind was filled with all the stimuli you had encountered on the road. You had seen old people reminiscing about the good, old days; children scolded by their parents; and animals like Daegal running after a round toy.

Humans were fascinating; and so were their animal friends. Smiling at the vendor behind the wooden counter, you wished you could have shown your father that they weren’t as malicious as he made them to be.

“They are monsters, you silly girl. They are monsters. All of them.”

‘… a different flavor every time, but their red bean shaved ice is really good,’ the prince said, pulling your attention to your options while quieting the scolding voice. Your lips parted in wonder. Ah! So this was shaved ice. ‘They have fruit flavored ones, too. You seemed to like the peach slices last night,’ he nudged your shoulder with his arm that encouraged you to take a closer look at the variety of desserts.

Prince Chenle was right. Although they weren’t as good as seaweed cookies, you had enjoyed the fruit slices during dinner, even more when they had been coated in warm chocolate. Thus, you pointed at the displayed topping that resembled yesterday’s dessert the most, then put one of your palms on the counter to support your legs. When feeling excited, you had gained the habit of bouncing up and down a little; it messed up your weak balance.

‘Easy,’ the prince scolded you with a chuckle, before he asked for two portions of peach and two portions of mango shaved ice, one of each in your separate cups.

It tasted amazing. And not just that. One spoonful of the delicious, cold dessert managed to make the hot weather less suffocating. It lifted your spirit and gave you an energy boost that urged you to see more, taste more, feel more. Hence, when Prince Chenle suggested looking for an empty bench in the shade, preferably in the royal garden, you disagreed with him for the first time since you had exchanged your voice for a chance to be with him.

The prince’s steps came to an abrupt halt, and your eyes opened wide when you snapped your head in his way and your gaze fell on his figure. His face and posture looked a little different, but you couldn’t pinpoint why looking at him gave you this impression.

Especially because a couple of heartbeats later, he shot you an amused smile.

‘So you have a better idea? Now, I am intrigued,’ he raised his left eyebrow, and you giggled soundlessly, because his sudden playfulness took you by surprise in the best way possible. It must have been a sign that the two of you had grown closer.

You nodded with a beaming smile and walked up to him with your loose steps so that you could take his big hand in yours again. You craved for the damp feeling of his palm against your own and the warmth that this gesture ignited in your chest.

During your morning adventures, you visited a huge shop where people could eat mooncakes, drink bitter and sweet beverages, and borrow books that were placed on huge shelves in the back of the building. You also met children who invited you to draw on the road with them - they had these short, wooden sticks they could write in the hard sand with - and bumped into two adorable animals that looked exactly like Daegal, just with brown fur.

‘Should we check out the lighthouse, too, before we call it a day?’ Prince Chenle asked after you bid your goodbyes to the two puppies and their owner.

Honesty, a part of you felt that it would have been too early to head back to the castle even if you had visited the shore, but you were a royalty just like the prince. In the back of your mind, you knew that he couldn’t spend his entire day with you: that he must have had his own duties and responsibilities. So you squeezed his hand and nodded. Since he had offered, you saw nothing wrong with prolonging the time that you two had a little more.

The more steps you took towards the shore, the more exhausting it became to move your legs, but you did your best to shut out the numbness. You didn’t want to cut your program short with unnecessary complaints, especially because you couldn’t have been sure whether it was normal to feel so drained after a couple of hours of walking. There was a fat chance that you were overreacting and you were determined to not let your lack of knowledge sabotage your happily-ever-after.

Still, you barely reached the borders of the town, when your limbs gave out and you lost your balance. A silent scream stuck in your throat as you held onto the prince’s hand, desperate in a way you had only ever experienced when Yangyang and you had been attacked by a shark during one of your impromptu adventures. You closed your eyes, unsure what else you could have done to prevent the fall.

‘I have got you,’ Prince Chenle whispered against your cheek; his arms keeping you close to his chest in an awkward hug. Perplexed, you opened your eyes and turned your head to the right slowly.

Prince Chenle’s hair smelled like salt and peaches; it blended your world into his and pushed your already mushy brain into overdrive. You didn’t even notice that your nails were digging tiny crescents into his bladebone or that he turned his head in your direction in the meantime. You were lost in your fantasies: all you could think about was your future together and how much you yearned for his kiss.

You choked on air when the prince’s nose brushed against yours. His inviting lips were mere inches from your mouth like in those books about romance. This was it. This was the moment you had been waiting for. Therefore, you pursed your lips and leaned forwards. Three inches. Two inches. One in…

The prince pulled away and sat on his knees in front of you with his back to you.

‘Hop on!’ He encouraged you, shooting a warm smile at you from above his shoulder when he realized that your feet were rooted to the ground. ‘Come on! I will carry you.’

Brushing aside your confusion mixed with disappointment, you climbed on the prince’s back and linked your arms in front of his neck. His muscles tensed and relaxed repeatedly under your body while he stood up and started to walk towards the lighthouse.

‘You know, next time you should tell me when you are not feeling well. We can always finish these tours another day,’ he scolded you worriedly, his words awakening dozens of butterfly fish in your tummy.

You buried your face in the crook of his neck and nodded. Your lips grazed along his soft skin when you smiled.

Your days as a human girl were filled with delicious meals, town tours, and lazy strolls on the beach. Despite his busy schedule, Prince Chenle made sure to take a few hours out of each one of his days to spend some time with you, showing you new places and free time activities that made you bounce up and down in excitement like when he had showed you the oldest books you had even seen in your life: books that told tales about gods and goddesses who blessed the world with as many wars as miracles.

Your nights, however, got more tiring, the closer you got to your seventh day on the land. The voices haunted you in your sleep and poisoned your happiest memories with your loved ones. By the fifth afternoon, whenever you saw something that reminded you of your life in the sea, your chest felt heavy and the urge to scrawl your way out of your own body clouded your mind. Your skin was dressed in crimson and rose-colored scars, some deeper than others, all of them painful nevertheless. You were a mess.

A hopeful mess desperate for her happy ending.

You couldn’t have picked a favorite; you thought of the beautiful colors of the sunrise just as fondly as you thought of those sunsets you had spent on the shore with Prince Chenle by your side. Then and there, it didn’t matter that you couldn’t speak or that you had the trident of Poseidon hanging over your head. You were happy listening to his stories while he played with your hair, lying on the sand.

It was one of those days when the prince asked you to accompany him for a walk after dinner. The Sun was still shining down on the world, painting the scenery in an orange-gold hue and you couldn’t contain your smile while you were listening to the prince’s stories about pirates and monsters nearly as dangerous as the kraken. His love for the sea was evident; you could see it in his big hand gestures, the way he kept stealing glances at the tides, and the smile that adorned his face while he was reminiscing. You wished you could have shown him Atlantica. You couldn’t picture a single scenario in which he wouldn’t have fallen in love with your old home within a heartbeat.

‘That night, I thought that this was it. I was going to die,’ he said animatedly, pulling you in with the intensity he told you about the happenings. You swore, you saw the hopelessness in his eyes when he talked about his inevitable death. ‘But then this girl saved me. She showed up out of nowhere and pulled me to the shore.’

You almost fell over your own legs when your brain processed what he was talking about. It was you; you were the girl who had saved him.

‘Grandpa says it was just a hallucination, but I know she is out there somewhere,’ Prince Chenle kept insisting, his gaze stuck on the waves. You gulped. ‘One day, I will find her and ask her to be my wife. I will make her my queen.’

He wanted to make you his queen. The revelation kicked the air out of your lungs, making it even harder to think straight, collect your thoughts, and communicate. However, you had to find a way, because this was the perfect moment to confess your feelings for him. He yearned for his savior, he would have forgiven you for exchanging your voice for your legs, making it harder for him to find you.

With time, you could have learned how to tell him the truth.

So you pulled on the prince’s arm and demanded his full attention. Your steps didn’t come to a halt, but they didn’t need to, because the moment your gazes met, everything else became secondary. You pointed at yourself, then pointed at the sea.

‘What? Would you like to swim?’ Prince Chenle inquired, frustration rising in your chest. It was more difficult than it should have been, but you couldn’t afford losing.

“You have to kill him, you silly girl. Kill him. You don’t have much time.”

You shook your head. You pointed at yourself again, then at the sea. You slotted your palms together and imitated the unique movements of your tails when you were swimming. Yet, he didn’t seem to get it.

“So you’re ready to die. Because that’s what will happen. You will die, you silly girl. You will die.”

You gulped and lay down on your side on the sand. You rested your chin atop of your palm while you were staring at a random spot where your imaginary prince was lying. You opened your mouth to sing him a song, and while no sound came out of your throat, it did the trick.

Because the next thing you knew, Prince Chenle was lying next to you on the sand, his eyes dark albeit happy.

‘It is you,’ he breathed as he reached towards you with a trembling hand and the pads of his fingers grazed along your jawline. You fluttered your eyelashes and nodded.

The voices were still there, in the back of your mind, they still laughed at the inevitable, but you had even fewer reasons to believe them now that the prince was looking at you so fondly. He looked at you like you were irreplaceable, like you were the key to his happily-ever-after, too, and your heart was about to explode.

A silent yelp escaped your throat when Prince Chenle pushed you on your back and towered over you with his entire body. The situation was thrilling and terrifying at the same time, although you blamed the paralyzing dread you were feeling on the voices that didn’t stop chanting: “He’s a monster. A monster. He is a monster.”

For the first time, they sounded like Yangyang when he was panicky, but your best friend was living his life in the bottom of the sea, hence you deemed it a cheap trick. How could Prince Chenle have been a monster when he was about to make all your dreams come true?

You licked your lower lip when he adjusted his position and placed one knee on the sand on each side of your body. He sat on your hips and leaned forward for what you assumed was a kiss. So you pursed your lips the way lovers did in your beloved books and waited, flames of anticipation licking your being from the inside slowly.

Although your older sisters had already gushed over mermen in front of you and told you how kissing could make one’s lips feel as though they had been touched by a jellyfish - if you kissed someone for too long, that was -, the intensity of the prince’s kiss still took you by surprise. It was suffocating in the way your brain forgot to remind you that you should have breathed through your nose; messy with his tongue coating your pink flesh with saliva; and mind-shattering when you felt his fingers sneaking around your neck.

You furrowed your brows in confusion when he pulled away, but his hands remained on your throat. He was smiling down at you and you tried to reciprocate the gesture, but the grin he shot at you was unsettling.

“Kill him! You have to kill him! Kill him!”

Yangyang’s voice filled your senses, confusing you even more. Meanwhile, the prince’s hand squeezed your windpipes and one of his knees put a light pressure on your chest.

‘It’s okay. It won’t take too long,’ he taunted you, his chuckle making you sick.

A part of you tried to convince you that this was a sick joke, a nightmare, but the voices said otherwise and for the first time, they sounded less mocking and more desperate to make you see the monster behind the charming facade.

You dug your nails into Prince Chenle’s arms, but he didn’t budge, so you quickly moved on to his face until your body still had the energy to fight. You scratched his cheeks, pushed his head to the right, and went for his eyes. But the more determined you became to survive, the more amused his laughter sounded.

‘You signed your father’s death. How does it feel? To know that he will die because of you?’ He asked before he leaned down to press a kiss in the corner of your mouth.

You bit into his lip and kept pulling on it with your teeth so harshly, you could feel the iron taste of his blood in your mouth. He pressed his knee against your lungs harder.

“Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”

You didn’t understand what was happening. You didn’t understand his reasons and the sudden change in his behavior, but you knew you wanted your father to be safe. You tried to kick him with your legs, push him off yourself with your arms, but he was too strong. Your head started to hurt from suffocation while your vision was already a bit blurry. The voices were screaming at you, scolding you for being so weak, but you couldn’t kill him. Heartbroken, you wanted nothing more than to swim back to your father and beg for his forgiveness. You wanted to see Yangyang and Kun.

Although you were certain that you were still on the shore, it felt like your lungs were getting filled with water. You furrowed your brows, eyes wide in horror. Prince Chenle’s hands weren’t around your neck anymore. They were pointed at you, fingers curled.

You coughed up water. It was salty on the tip of your tongue.

‘I should thank you I guess. Without you, I might have never gotten my happy ending,’ he mocked you, reciting the words you had told the sea witch when she had asked you about your heart’s desire. ‘It’s all thanks to you, love.’

When he balled his fists, your coughs became more aggressive. The water burned your lungs and your tears ran down on your cheeks.

Your death tasted like home.

the end.

#chenle x you #nct x reader #nct dream x reader #chenle x reader #halloween stories #royalty au #greek gods au #the little mermaid #fluff #horror #ssbyme #nct scenarios #nct dream #chenle

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