_ | \ | \ | | \ __ | |\ \ __ _____________ _/_/ | | \ \ _/_/ _____________ | ___________ _/_/ | | \ \ _/_/ ___________ | | | _/_/_____ | | > > _/_/_____ | | | | /________/ | | / / /________/ | | | | | | / / | | | | | |/ / | | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | |_/ | | | | | | | | c o m m u n i c a t i o n s | | | |________________________________________________________________| | |____________________________________________________________________| ...presents... The Bird by Obscure Images >>> a cDc publication.......1993 <<< -cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc- ____ _ ____ _ ____ _ ____ _ ____ |____digital_media____digital_culture____digital_media____digital_culture____| The cigarette dropped onto the heaping pile of used-up butts. A hand reached out to the pack on the table and got ready to add another. His name was Sydney Allen, a tall young man with short black hair and an incongruous penchant for both the absurd and the most sober of events. The room was small and completely full. There wasn't a single inch of the room that was bare. The walls were covered with Xeroxed photographs, ripped- apart newspapers, and all sorts of inane items. The floors and the table space were overflowing with piles of books, compact discs, computer printouts and ashtrays; all of which were full. Sydney was sitting in front of a computer terminal: working and not working at the same time. In-between drags on an unending flow of cigarettes, he muttered and swore at the computer or at something that happened to flutter across his mind, distracting him from his work. Strangely enough the only thing that didn't seem to be annoying him was the torrent of obscenely loud music that was always on. He turned off the computer and abandoned the work for the night. Sydney got out of the chair and turned the music off. He stubbed out the last smoke of the night and threw off some of the accumulated rubble on his futon, before heading out of the room to go to the bathroom. On his way out of the bathroom, he paused long enough to take a pill, a tranquilizer, to keep the fear away. The futon was hard and uncomfortable, and Sydney glanced at the clock by his bed. It told him that it was six in the morning. He stared at the ceiling and spent a few moments doing calculations before he closed his eyes and fell asleep. Despite the time, the room was pitch black. Sydney had taped opaque black plastic bags over the only window in the room. Daylight was painful to Sydney's eyes so he tried to avoid it as much as he could. When he got out of bed later in the day, he threw on some dirty clothes from off of the floor and wandered out into the living room where his roommates were watching television. They exchanged greetings, and Sydney went into the kitchen where he grabbed some food and a can of soda from the refrigerator. He joined his roommates in the living room and set his food down on the table in front of the couch, then picked up a half-empty pack of cigarettes and lit one up. They were watching cartoons. This one was a classic Tom and Jerry episode. It was one that they had all seen many times before, nonetheless laughing intermittently. After an hour of watching television and talking to his roommates which soon left to go to their jobs, Sydney was left to watch the news for a while before deciding what to do that day. As he absorbed the news, his mind wandered to concerns about his health. His breathing was becoming raspy from all the cigarettes, and his body ached all over from sleeping on the lousy bed. If he looked out the sliding door to the porch, he could see the small forest behind the house. That and the small floating particles that swirled around his eyes. As soon as the tiny spots became prominent, he averted his eyes to temporarily clear up the translucent miasma. Sydney was bored with the television, bored with all of the magazines and the books, and decided to get some work done. He picked up the phone and dialed up the voice mail service that he used to keep in touch with his employers. The messages that were there were dismal. All the projects he had been working on had either been finished, nearly finished, or canceled altogether, said the recorded voice of his boss. The computers and other equipment that Sydney had been using were to be returned to the company as soon as possible, and they would call him when they needed his services again, the voice continued. Sydney hung up the phone, and stared at the wall for a while, pondering his enrollment in the ranks of the unemployed. Another cigarette appeared in his hand, but was short-lived due to the increased frequency of drags. When the smoke was finished, he tossed the butt into an ashtray and went back to his room to think. The loss of the job wasn't terribly frightening to Sydney, it was the implications of not being able to survive that made him shake. He closed his eyes and let himself drift into the music that was oozing out of the speakers in the corners of his room. Behind his eyes, images of losing his possessions materialized. Not for a month or two yet, I've got enough cash stashed away to last a while, he thought. After that time there would be nothing. He sighed, got dressed, and walked down to the convenience store to get some cigarettes and a newspaper. He scanned through the classified section of the newspaper and circled all of the jobs that he felt qualified for. Then he prepared a resume and set out to the post office to mail them. When he got back to the house, he called up his mother and told her about the job. She said that she felt bad about it, and if he needed to find a place to stay he could come back home for a while. He told her that he'd let her know if he needed to take her up on the offer. He hung up the phone and began to pack up all the equipment that he had received from the company. When it was all in the shipping boxes, he loaded them into his car and took them down to the closest UPS depot. He gave the lady at the counter the company's UPS account number, and watched sadly as some men came out from the back and carried the boxes away. He said "Thanks" to the woman behind the desk and left the office and went home. A week passed, and he began to get replies from the places he'd sent resumes to so he called them and made appointments for interviews. He then began sorting through his portfolio, picking out his best work for the interviews. One by one he went to the interviews, showed them his work, and explained that he was still going to school to get his degree. For the most part they liked his work, but then they'd explain that they had at least twenty other applicants with work as good as his, but with more experience and a degree. They all said that they'd keep him on file in case they needed someone else, but Sydney knew that with the way the economy was going, it would be lucky if the guy they hired lasted a year with any of them. To keep some money coming in, he got a job at a fast food place working forty hours a week. One night, after working for a couple of weeks his girlfriend came over with all of the stuff he had given her. She'd come over to give it back and tell Sydney that she was seeing someone else. Sydney, who was on edge from work at the time, picked her up and threw her through the screen door. He turned back inside, and his roommates hastily made their ways to their rooms. Sydney went back to his room and cried. The tears turned into rage, then turned back into an aching despair. After a few hours he couldn't take it anymore, so he called his now former girlfriend, who told him that if he ever called her again she would call the police and then hung up on him. The pain that was shredding his mind was getting unbearable, so he took the cigarette that he was smoking and pressed it onto the smooth skin on his forearm. The tobacco smell in the room quickly was replaced by the smell of burning flesh. He stared at his arm as the red cherry at the tip blistered the skin, and then began to part it as he ground the cigarette in. He was blinded with the pain, his eyes were watering and he screamed. The cigarette ran out of air and stopped burning, so he let it drop onto the floor. All that was left was the white hot pain in his forearm. In the back of his mind the despair hid, but Sydney was allowed the luxury of unthinking pain if only for a little while. A week later the physical pain was faded to a minor discomfort, but the despair of the past month was as strong as it had been. He'd been reduced to a machine. Get up, go to work, come home, go to bed. No more reading, talking, listening to music. Nothing. On his day off Sydney sat in his room moping around, staring at the black plastic on the windows. He decided to rip it all off. The light in the room temporarily blinded him, but as his eyes adjusted he began to see the object in the tree that was just slightly below his window. It was a bird's nest. Inside the nest there was a baby bird laying on its side with its beak contorted into a grotesque last squawk. Sydney looked at the bird for a few seconds and began to laugh. _______ __________________________________________________________________ / _ _ \|Demon Roach Undrgrnd.806/794-4362|Kingdom of Shit.....806/794-1842| ((___)) |Cool Beans!..........510/THE-COOL|Polka AE {PW:KILL}..806/794-4362| [ x x ] |The Alcazar..........401/782-6721|Moody Loners w/Guns.415/221-8608| \ / |The Works............617/861-8976|Finitopia...........916/673-8412| (' ') |ftp - zero.cypher.com in pub/cdc |ftp - ftp.eff.org in pub/cud/cdc| (U) |==================================================================| .ooM |Copr. 1993 cDc communications by Obscure Images 04/01/93-#224| \_______/|All Rights Drooled Away. SIX GLORIOUS YEARS of cDc|