Fluidic residue from Gary "engaging with the world", seen under a blacklight.

What in the world is that noise coming from your room, Gary?

"Hush, ma.  I'm passionately engaging with the world and experiencing creation."

There was a man, he was singing a song and they were all listening: it went, "I'm a whole damn town".  And he had non-federally taxed gambling kiosks and some other, some gummies of dubious origin.  Something that looked like the old bubble gum that came in packs of baseball cards.

And his essence.

If you put a florescent light in there, it would have been horrorshow, the handprints, assprints, and other odd shapes that appeared on everything in the gloom.

And it glowed.

Like his sin.

It was, his passion, his art, the sin-stain of a life, blemish like the pock-mark on the lunar surface, his name and whims scrawled across eternity, no amount of Ammonia or Multi-Surface standing a chance against it, a life lived well, you ask?  Or a kind of life lived profoundly unwell?  Under the spell of something one might find in a database somewhere, hidden in the million years of analytics generated by the system, terabytes-plenty of-databases and then the thing moving to still images, and only shortly, the mainstream to be introduced to A.I. generated video, generated from whatever terribly lazy prompt typed in by the user---but yet--make it more simple, Mark.  They won't even have to type.

A modern art mosaic dabbled, dribbled, smeared and daubed across the landscape of the life.

Dissipation, as I so often say, the profoundly not only unproductive, but quite the opposite: classical mortification.

As I said in a novel opening once, something to the effect of "now she had him enveloped, marked and on the path of ruin--just like the rest of them--Jefferson Road East--just like the Goddens family, so stupidly programmed in a death spiral that they willingly, laughing, smiling, jumped into the grave, and gleefully pulled great handfuls of dirt over them to hasten the end."

The little teetering log at the edge of the river, partly-in and partly-out of the current proper, teetering, twitching somewhat randomly, and at a slow clip to soon pick up speed towards an end.  The Bible spoke of an expected end, but that was for God, not for that family.  They didn't expect.  Instead, they happened, like random massive burps of the natural that destroyed entire ecosystems, entire solar systems even: not expected, but instead simply happening.