Chapter II: The Castle Crullith
“I say what I know to be true, even if I don’t believe it.”
On a somewhat regular basis, either through the use of psychedelics or lucid visualizations in the sleep state, I eliminate from my memory all things that no longer serve me. The choice of technique comes down to how I’m feeling at the time. In both cases, I accomplish the task by constructing an imaginary mansion and entering into it.
Every hall, room, space, or place within this mansion is assigned a general category of experience. From there I subdivide each category and assign specific memories to the objects inside of that hall, room, space, or place. For example, I may construct a simple reading room with a comfortable chair, a lamp, and perhaps a record player stationed on an end table by the window. I will then enter that room.
The chair will be the maroon barcalounger I had in my first apartment, complete with stains, smells, and faulty cushions that spark my silent knowings. I will remember the conversation I had with my roommate about the use of children’s songs in horror movies. That memory serves me. I will keep the chair.
The lamp beside the chair will be the post-modern cheap piece of junk I stared at during my first acid trip. It will have a stained glass bulb in it. That same bulb illuminated the wall when I saw a sweeping ghoul drop bad dreams on me. I will keep the lamp. I will keep the bulb.
The record player will be the same brand and model owned by my friend Juke when we lived in the foster home on 33rd. On that record player will be a Nirvana album I don’t like, but when I hear it I will remember smoking a joint behind the skatepark and the future vision I had of myself in the hours after. I will keep the record, and the player.
The end table will be the one I kept in my living room when I lived in Texas as a young man. I will remember staring at it aimlessly, depressed, drifting into sleep while listening to music. It is a fond memory, but not very useful. I will get a new end table.
Don’t even get me started on the window. That illusory, magickal, violet window. I will most certainly, and absolutely, be keeping that.
Over the years I’ve continually added to my mental mansion a library of books with their true titles on the covers. I keep Doctor Zhivago with my memories of reading it in Reno written inside. Next to that you’ll find Nietzsche’s The Antichrist with a depiction of my churchgoing years. Also, The Hobbit with a recollection of every summer I ever read it. And thus…
So forth and so on it goes.
Seek out Silverton McCord if you’re interested in hearing more. Modern Mysticism is his bag, not mine.
So, where was I when we left off? The sorority party in Syracuse? Marley the girl with the talking eyes and the limp? Juke running out on me after raving about disembodied aliens that want to eat me? That sounds about right.
Well, I didn’t go to college in Syracuse, or at all actually. Juke never resurfaced in my life, although the effects of his friendship have reverberated to this day. After a few years on my own I somehow slid into the position of being an adviser of sorts to various creative heavyweights. I was always hired off the books, and I was paid in cryptocurrency. It all started with a friend I made shortly out of high school while working at a record store.
His name was Aspreet, and his parents migrated to the united states from India. I’d always had a mild fascination with the Sitar, so naturally when he decided to check out the land of his extended family, I decided to go with him.
We were only there for a couple of months, but it changed the timeline of my life for the better. Turns out he had three cousins there who did two things: develop video games, and mine cryptocurrency. As far as I can tell, they were one of the first groups to discover that currencies could be fashioned out of Thin. Fucking. Air.
Together they had created an arcade style game that used ambiguous units of data called aEthos, mined from web based servers. aEthos were used much like the stock market uses shares; as tradable currency within the game. These exchanges gave players the ability to purchase real world products or services from each other, and competition between the players drove the value.
Once they began charging subscription fees to play the game, serious money could be earned if you were a successful competitive player, which, in turn, brought more players with dreams of free money and therefore increased the value. Self appreciation.
They had a company called Indromeda through which all of this transpired, but it was so far ahead of the curve it had fallen into obscurity. The style of their game didn’t help much either. It was two-dimensional, purely reward driven, and visually underwhelming. Zero entertainment factor. The only people playing it were the ones who knew how to utilize the system to generate funds. That eliminated the majority, and thereby caused profitability to plateau.
Aspreet and I were inspired to plot, scheme, and plot some more. Neither of us were tech savvy, but we knew needed to stick close to crypto. We had advance notice, and that needed to count for something. We decided that the easiest way to infiltrate a market that didn’t yet exist was to assist the people who were inventing it.
The Indromeda guys were not exactly social geniuses, or artistic prodigies, which made it very easy for Aspreet and I to grab hold of the reigns. That’s right, I’m implying that I’m a social genius. I am not, however, very talented artistically. We decided to do two things.
First, use The Snakeoil Salesmen Technique:
Track down as many starving artists as we could and convince them to work on concept art for free in exchange for ownership in a brand new development company we created along with Indromeda called Rainbow Serpent Studios.
Secondly, The Obvious:
We sought out unemployed programmers and late night gamers of all shapes and sizes. Specifically ones who knew the back roads of the internet.
Keep in mind that Bitcoin hit the mainstream circa 2008, and this was around 2004. The dark web knows everything before it happens. Black market products and services were being sold on this hidden internet with etheric forms of currency far earlier than they say.
They also say it’s difficult to find eclectic computer wizards who presumably live in basements, but if you go to enough college campuses and you aren’t shy about asking weird questions, you will find them in the computer lab doing the dark lord’s work.
That said, our main selling point with this crowd was their own knowledge. Cryptocurrency was a complete secret to most people, but it was inevitably on the rise, and they were not most people. As soon as they heard we were attempting to build an open-world adventure game from the ground up using cryptocurrency as an in-game currency, they were on board.
The game was set to be called Black Opal, and the concept behind it was relatively simple. In fact, those who are familiar with DragonCatcher, our current blockbuster produced in-house by Ashley Maddix, will recognize many similarities between the two games, but that’s beside the point.
First, you’d create an avatar based on your personal preferences and subsequently enter a medieval desert fantasy world chalked full of other online players. Your goal would then be to comb the countryside for ancient ruins in search of valuable artifacts of various types. You would bring these artifacts to the village or city of your choice, and sell them to other players in the marketplace. Typical treasure hunter stuff.
There would be other, more grandiose quests scattered throughout the game for players who need a vague storyline to keep them sane, but the main point would be to sell your gathered goods indefinitely. The prices paid in the game would correspond to crypto, and if you were clever enough you could trade your way to riches.
We were attempting to take the idea of “mining” cryptocurrency, a concept I still don’t totally understand, and make it literal within the game. We assigned a team at Rainbow Serpent to the task of mining crypto for real continuously. As they generated the stuff they would assign values to different objects and hide them in the game for players to find. The finders would be the keepers, and they’d run off and sell it to someone else. That someone else might use those objects, along with various other objects they’ve collected, to fabricate a novel object worth more than the sum of its parts. In other words, find some jewels, get some gold, make a crown. Capische?
If all went well, which it did, a single unit of our in-game currency would one day be worth thousands of real-world dollars. Thus, any player of this game could hypothetically make a living simply by massaging the virtual economy, and you wouldn’t need to be a computer nerd to do it. All we had to do was get the ball rolling and the law of attraction would work its magic.
Predictably, Black Opal was released to select users on the dark web through Rainbow Serpent Studios, and never saw the light of day after that. It has since taken on a life of its own in the underground, but that was well after my involvement with it ended. Aspreet took the lead shortly after I was swept away in middle of this endeavor by a separate, but not entirely unrelated, spirit quest.
During our second trip to India, while the beta tests were talking place, I smoked DMT with a group of complete strangers. Of course I’m being sensational, they weren’t complete strangers, but I did keep my psychedelic explorations a secret from Aspreet. I’d been venturing out on my own under the guise of clearing my head creatively. I started with the clubs, but the crowd wasn’t for me. The music, however...
During the day I would take a cab to nowhere simply for the sake of the experience. They drove like they were trying to die. No stop lights. Stereos blasting. I’d roll down the window and watch the breaded rays crashing in the wind. After arriving at my randomly selected destination I would roam the palmy streets in search of corner store enlightenment.
One fine and dandy day I inevitably walked past a temple. A moment later, when I realized what I’d missed, I decided to step inside. Immediately I felt like a character in the game I was curating.
Now, I’m not religious, but I’d heard a thing or two about Vishnu. Up next were Brahman and Maya. It’s complicated, the relationship between them, but the more I learned, the more I became transfixed with their function. Or, more accurately, the idea of existence itself being a dream within a dream dreamt by some elusive and all pervading dreamer that is somehow simultaneously me, but not me, and that this particular life I have is being fabricated by a different facet of that same someone as an illusory sensory experience that feels subjectively real even though it isn’t. In short, a big played out drama. A living film. Or a game. I found that suspicious.
This wasn’t necessarily new to me, I’d done a great deal of existential brooding in my life, especially after the party in Syracuse. During the trip of that night I’d seen a man who was not me walk out of a black cube covered in neon green dots and say, Wicked Be Where, Sunshine? That was unexplainable under my then held view of existence. I didn’t believe in the invisible world, must less that it had a structured reality in and of itself. My friend Juke clearly did. He also believed it had a villainous nature, but no matter which way I spun it, that just didn’t seem right.
In order to keep my head in the western clouds while my feet were in the east, I picked up some tapes by a man called Terrance McKenna. He was an academic turned Head who spoke almost exclusively about the metaphysical implications brought about by mushrooms and DMT. His lectures would occasionally dip into theoretical discussions of time-space, dreams, the evolution of humanity, and most importantly, the world wide web. One of his wonkier theories was that the internet would act as a literal net for catching an alien intelligence. Although, when he said alien, he didn’t mean three-dimensional extra-terrestrials, he meant an intelligence alien to us.
The theory goes that throughout the course of human history, this intelligence could only communicate through altered states of consciousness, but with the internet, and the technology that makes the internet possible, we could communicate with it via concrete, albeit digital, means.
For various reasons, which I will now list…
-The man from the cube who spoke to me.
-My involvement with Black Opal
-The Sitar
-A vague understanding of Hinduism
-The mysterious reappearance of a Bible one time.
-My conversations with Juke
-My history of lucid dreaming
-Continuous bouts of Sleep Paralysis
-The phrase, “two lost souls in a fish bowl”
-An experience I will describe in the next paragraph
…caused me to recklessly seek the truth.
So there in Bengaluru one day, I found myself in the back room of a dingy hooka lounge with four random humans and a glass pipe of brain chemicals. I counted to three, and went for it.
/
/ /
/ / /
*BOOM*
The world melted in a flash. I saw a dark tunnel. Blooming out of it were shapes and patterns. No sound. It grew brighter and brighter. A new tunnel of light interlaced with itself and elongated. I went through it for some time. Not a single thought of what was happening could cross my mind. I soon found myself in a pure white room, strapped to a chair. Everywhere there were—I mean all over the place—liquid lightning murmurations.
Each word they spoke became a thing. I remember them pronouncing:
Lambda Lux.
Kissin Kissin.
Reb Rum Rooah
An especially excitable ball of lightning took the front. It gave a speech saying:
The bully mop has a new rock
and the orange creek is swaying.
Beneath the tully wide serene
Crystal Loca wears a glorious nightshade.
*they swoon*
*they swoon*
The dare be laire under castle crullith.
I saw the suckle sipping brightly
behind the hell worth shining.
And what to know but two betroth,
I saw you there a-trod the road.
Writing the poem of Gilgamesh,
The hundredth monkey stood up and said,
Look, I’m a fish.
Next the surface of everything flipped like a diamond matrix. All was pitch dark, but the sounds were normal. My cognitive functions were restored. I saw an opening door. It was golden and magnetic.
A man I recognized waltzed in as if upon a stage. I saw tiny white words written on a black rainbow pinned to his painted suit. None of it I could read. His hand was raised, floating an orb. I summoned all my strength of mind to say, who really are you? He said to me he said:
A way is not a way until it has been travelled twice. So pummel your feet where will they meet and turn the ash to ice. The trees you burn in every fire will float into a hole. Buried there with all they wear they’ll weave the roots of Om.
*BOOM*
He disappeared, no, melted in a flash. I was immediately dropped back off in the dingy hooka lounge with four shape-shifting reptilians sitting around me and a glass pipe of brain chemicals on a cushion by my side.
A few minutes passed.
I couldn’t think.
A few more minutes.
Everyone became human again.
I
well
Myself
on the other hand
felt like a planetary guest.
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