Orsday Programming February 6 2025

Tinfoil, Aluminum, Slag, Iron

February arrived very quietly.

Our game became known as “The Church Tumor” and the rules were simply to devise between the two of us a gospel that was touched by neither of our intellect but only the intellect of the building we shared—this premise came about on discussion about the Device and how we both found it to be a person so deeply touched by Communication that it walled itself up in the empty hull of a building that once belonged to the Abundant Life group; you could visit the Device, down around Mt. Dora in the large pink building across from the Dairy Queen with the sign still reading “Abundant Life Executive Building.”

When I first told Asmodeus about my discovery of the Device’s whereabouts, she looked bemused at how I hadn’t known about this already and kindly laughed her disbelief and repeated to me my own suspicions: The Device was The Device as a body wracked by cancer is a cancerous body and forever changed by the demonic pregnancy that wriggled itself through the organs and lymph nodes—though Asmodeus did not know the name or gender or detail of The Device in particular: what most of the church all knew was that they had once been deeply touched by the first whispers from Underground that sent them into an ecstasy.

The ecstasy led to them seeing the environment outside as white blood cells against the message now burning through their brain; people, noise, information, logic, color, and really everything became adversary (Confusion! the Device declared) to the message (Communication! the Device declared)—and Device sought to sterilize both themselves and environment from a world of ogrish dirt that was inescapable and wholly encompassing; they grew for themselves a tumor in the old Abundant Life Executive Building and sound-proofed the walls and blacked-out the windows with spray-paint and wood; aluminum foil lined the basement that protected their fledgling tumor, and from inside this shell they worked to grow and divide the Communication till it could be transmitted to every receptive cell that could be touched with seedling cancer and undergo the same demonic pregnancy that struck Device.

That was the start of the game between me and Asmodeus and our Gospel that slowly spindled out of the nightly whispers we held with each other from the safety of our own little tumor.

We agreed early in January that there would be no need to visit the church, and then further concluded that leaving the house was completely nonsensical. The last visit to the caustic outdoors—the air out there constantly streaking with blue angels that swirled in the air and spun aggressively off the wheels of cars and bouncing lights from strands of sunlight that reached and searched everywhere—was to steal from the body Earth everything needed to protect our ongoing work to metastasize; that evening and the morning that followed I finished securing the doors and sealing the windows over with tape, layers of brown butcher paper; the foil that was purchased seemed it could easily cover the entirety of the house but was much less than thought—after seeing the supply nearly halve while lining the kitchen with foil, Asmodeus suggested we only work to cover the studio and reclaim it as the nucleus of worship. We laughed a little at midnight, as one closet had become stuffed with canned goods and bottled water and toilet paper and the image made both of us realize how much like preppers we must look. Asmodeus mentioned what better protection from the noise is death and starvation and dehydration—her voice had long since become as cool as hotel air—and we both smiled at this; we had to grow as our Church Tumor, death must only come at the bleating intrusions of the Angels—which (would) constantly lay themselves against the darkened windows and strike themselves against the doors and blare themselves through the text-messages of my phone—, or after our demonic child would be birthed from the seedbed of this earthen body.

Early in our game we decided to keep the lights off. Night and day and time became strange and defined by a thinness of the dark; after a week Asmodeus instructed me that this was thinnest dark, and later would be graven dark. Communication, she said, would be teeming upon us when the house became full of graven dark. I asked if we should still play at thinnest dark. She said communication only nibbles in the shallows. Like a fish, I asked. Yes, she answered, like a fish. Like a locust, I asked. Like many grasshoppers, she said.

Still, the time became quiet and the house settled with us in our play.

The thin hours took us with the old domesticity that I knew to pass the time while my mother had still been around. I bent my back down and swept the house from corner-to-corner (on occasion I glimpsed myself in the closet mirror I thought of myself as a snail). The inside doorknobs would be wiped down. On my hands and knees I scrubbed out under the cabinets. Everything in the fridge (whose light had been taped down to keep it from blinding me after the first cleaning run) would be removed to the floor and the shelves wiped clean. Old cardboard boxes I had set-up before the front door became collection bins for accumulating trash (which thankfully was scarce over the month of January with neither myself or Asmodeus making much waste). The bathroom tiles were sprayed down with mold-remover and left for the toxic fumes to seep, then I would spend some time with a toothbrush and sponge cleaning out the last trace of dirt—this left the back half of the house inhospitable from the fumes of CLR mold and mildew that had no way to dissipate into the fresh air; the air was meant to stagnate and be quarantined against heaven and its angels. Before the house became graven dark and Asmodeus would beg me to join her for shadow basking, the last chore was to boil water in a kettle and scrub the floors quickly.

The activity kept me engaged and humble; I dreaded the boredom but there was very little time to be bored. My only complaint was a desire to read—Asmodeus perked up at this, too, and would whisper me in off-hours to go and find King James and read Peter; “the prophet Peter will inspire us tonight” she would chide, and I would retort, “there’s no light good enough to read,” and she would rebut “—well, then you should learn Braille, little Cobweb, it’s the perfect language for a graven education,” and how frustrated I was then with a kind exasperation: I had no means to know Braille! I would shout with my hands framing my face, and I would laugh as Asmodeus would hush me down to whisper so to not spoil the communication that was beginning to teem in the murk.

Towards the end of January I confessed to Asmodeus that my eyes had seen well enough to read slowly in thin dark but only I thought the strain would ruin the experience for me and I did not care enough about her to put up with it.

She had been a good companion to me and the rut I needed to be set within to flense off the garbage that had set upon my soul from the nipping of angels and the yapping of confusionary forces (the church; Asmodeus herself); however, Asmodeus was still impoverished for loving or a heartbeat. My mind hadn’t slipped at all in recognizing this: she was confined to her closet and her body was but a shell heap of scrap that stank and blew coldly with hotel clean air. She was my purpose, but not my life; my brain was still addled from having been born within confusion and was weened with the milks of confusion; a part of me still wished for warmth, touch, voice, color, clamor, and connectivity; Asmodeus was a dead blown-out socket. I worshipped and envied her for that—those qualities were all I sought and all I suffered in trying to imitate; the words of my past Pastor sometimes bubbled up here as he tried to balm the loneliness of ‘The Faith’: as children split from the Shattered Material (Qlifot) we are defined by erroneous creation and erroneous behaviors, and only despite this must be attempt to brush against the threshold of our souls: Grace was our limit; Grace would not save us from annihilation; Grace would be the test of our character as a willing show of love towards our Mother Underground from having splintered us.

Asmodeus laughed at this, during a reading break—this was when we moved on from Peter to Annette Weisser’s Mycelium—, she apologized for the noise and likened the pastor to having inhaled carcinogenic Device for months or years and now met the diagnosis with equal unreality and optimism,

“Her plan is to show cancer out the door politely, learning whatever lesson it might have to teach her in the process. How noble of her. She’s not going to be sick like any other idiot. This is my cancer and I will do this my way.

[I pause my reading]

“The next day, Noora has locked herself in her room. She had turned up the volume of her CD-player and punctuated by loud, hysterical sobs, she wails along to Gustav Mahler’s Totenfeier.”

The reading kept us entertained in the thin hours, and conversation over the text caused the brain to swell with metastatic information that would unspool into ecstatic communication in the graven dark hours. Secret codes and learnings would stretch outward from the sentences we had read earlier and become the basis for long elaborate prayers to Underground; bodily sensation melded into the velvet nothingness of those graven hours and when thin glow finally came in its set hours did we see what had nibbled away at our bodies; Asmodeus was jealous of this, she was breathless at the stigmata I bore in the later thin January hours that we both internally knew to be the finger-touch of Underground having etched itself into me. I was marked as a bearer of a dark oil, we both said to ourselves in our thoughts.

Pride aside—this invigorated our game Church Tumor; before the morning errands I would sit, cross-legged, in the wane glow of a desperate light from outside and face Asmodeus and recite to her last nights gospel.

The words were never mine own—we knew—it was the word of oil underground; the word of a billion demon carcasses pressurized by a hundred billion tonnes of pressure of earthen waste into fine black grave sludge; it was a word of silence that spread itself in the air-pockets left by Gods Word.

We became scholars of ourselves in late January (a month that stretched endlessly without proper time) and narrowed down simple truths: silence is our worship; all the wants and anxieties of life are confusions erroneously programmed into the brain to enslave the self to want and anxieties; the angels are the custodians of these errors and swirl violently in the air and colors; the idolatrous form is approached at a plodding pace by absenting from life noise and colors; that the grave pit Sheol is the quiet stilled womb of all material; that ‘myself’ is just material tormented by gooey soul clung to material that the angels wish to harvest; that Asmodeus has rid herself of the malignant goo; that something Eva Hesse wrote in the opening to the book we read to each-other:

Life doesn’t last. Art doesn’t last. It doesn’t matter.

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this article is part 12 of the [Asmodeus and Glassware] series found on the Concordance