Ken Recalls a Rehab Romance

I. The first time Ken saw her, they were both engrossed in a pop culture exercise designed to help them free their minds. By tearing the pages of the magazines without a prescribed plan, without envisioning a preconceived product, they were supposed to be able to reveal their true desires and hidden fears. Indeed, Ken felt as though his frontal lobe had exploded, unleashing an ebony flood of primal longing, tossing him into an emotionally charged, flat spin from which he was unable to recover no matter how much he trusted in the laws of arithmetic.

II. Sensory perception was both skewed and heightened, and for the first time in months, he instinctively preferred the seemingly psychedelic colors and textures of the natural world to the harsh necessity of timepieces and shoe leather.

III. This was the first of many visits to rehab where the almost toneless voices offered reassurance. … if you’ve suffered, if you’ve experienced loss, you’re probably more open to understanding it and more comfortable talking about it and experiencing it…

IV. Above the droning persistence of the well-intentioned re-programmers, the chirping urgency of his desperate blood drew him toward the delectable creature. He dreamt of her day and night, imagining her as dormant, doll-like, and waiting to be animated by the certainty of his need.

V. But Barbie was not content to wait for him to make the first move. Her heart sought ease. Her body burned with curiosity.

VI. In life, as in literature, such longing to connect is often the first step along the sacred, creative journey. Rules? Margins? They are merely made to be broken.

VII. The clearer his mind became, the more he felt the energy surrounding him pointing him in her direction.

VIII. She pretended to be aloof, but she had never truly developed the ability to blend into her surroundings. She was in fact a simple mechanism, ready to fall, ready to be unlocked, ready to shun the predictable plaids and stripes of her strict self-regulation.

IX. Together they were learning to see the world as plastic, as a many-layered palimpsest anticipating the inevitability of transformation. They began to see themselves as unlimited by the boundaries they had been born into, hoping the complicated tune they played would become harmonious and that they would be able, at least for a while, to set aside the rough edged corruptions and the predetermining addictions that had miraculously brought them together.

NOTE:  This intermedia piece was created by tearing consecutive pages of Interview magazine and allowing them to remain intact along the spine.  I then scanned the images and Photoshopped them.  The text was inspired by bits of text that were visible on the magazine pages.  I posted it on Facebook a few months ago, and someone recently asked me to put it here on my blog so it could be viewed and read more easily as a whole.  So, here it is in all its snarkiness...  I think you can click on the individual images to get more detail.