Michael Hanson
writing, drawing and painting
RacerTrash: The Blazing World (The Whole Illustrated Draft)
Pg. 1: The pandemic made it impossible to leave this tiny, city apartment. I was losing it. I started to experiment with teleportation. All efforts were complete failures—until today. I started by playing a K-Tell disco album looped at half speed on my laptop. I turned on ITunes looping Get It Up (The Feeling) by Ultra Naté at lower volume than the disco album. Next, I threw on desperate moaning porn at 1/10th volume for depravities' sake. I’m convinced I came closer to teleporting when I started playing EXPTV on their website AND their second stream on Twitch, both at half volume grating and smashing on each other with LSD trip-induced talking hot dogs, Liberace’s recipe tips, French synth punk, primal scream therapy seminars, Israeli sci-fi, teenage girls’ homemade art films, and Belgian hard techno dance. (1) Each sound stream was at times enhanced by the others and totally garbled. There was no way to concentrate on anything. No silent pauses.
The final element needed to successfully teleport came from introducing a weekly Twitch stream from RacerTrash into my robust mixture of ephemera. RacerTrash editors take popular cinema and cut it up into unintelligible layered waves of hypercyberdelic information (2)—deluging the viewer’s senses, unlocking time and place. Once RacerTrash began to stream in my room my mind exited my body from my chair entering into a new digital space. My mind freed from my body continued to operate without me. I was inside the stream. I was the result of the data. My conscious mind melded into many personalities from many walks of life. I shared some unspeakable essence with each person. At some point, briefly, I became animal—I vaguely recall clucking and crowing. Memory is of zero interest when travelling in this manner. Only feeling and the next sensation matter. My mind moved beyond inhabiting living, solid forms. I became energy travelling through people as they interact with one another: stretching, pulsing, vibrating. I was superheated sound waves of hot, wet breath shot from the mouth to another’s interior ear, internalized and shot back again. As RacerTrash played on I spun through a blazing world, sampling one existence after another impossible under the yolk of the corporeal self.
Pg. 2: I became radiation. Shooting through the cosmos. Why was there was an insistence of purpose? Was my human mind struggling with the fact I was no longer—just a nucleus stripped of its electron approaching the speed of light? Ahead of my speed, I recognized a solar system from the gravitational collapse of a fragment of a giant molecular cloud. How did I know that? Why did it seem familiar? The earlier magnetic conquest of my brethren radiation cast the sky bright green. Fully ionized, I crashed into a forming planet. From my velocity and highly charged energy I exploded in a million directions. After the explosion part of me formed giant magnetic clouds that pulsed on a horizon. I bonded with oxygen to form walls of surging, boiling water exploding as thousand foot geysers. As my energy waned I sank deep into the planetary sediment. My welling horror from being buried in rock made everything around me glow molten. I emerged to the light of the surface a molten rock geyser, ten thousand feet tall. Finally, I became a rapidly cooling mountain. Around me was the beauty of pure violent instability that confused everything I thought I recognized. Water became rock, rock melted into water—all at the same instant. When I blinked a lush neural network of forest bonded to my rock body, suckling the hidden water I held inside. I felt. I existed.
Pg. 3: I was light traveling at a speed predetermined by whatever forces agreed to the Big Bang. I felt pure in my purpose. Then it all came apart. I was controlled by a complex algorithm. It directed me to bend. I bent. My vibrations meshed with other particles. I slowly became a bipedal human-like organism on a mysterious planet, summoned and assembled by a transporter. The horror of turning from light to flesh was unbearable. Yet as I became alive the horror of forming dissipated into the rush of the conscious body, completely immersed in immediate sensations. A new started video played on RacerTrash. Once again, I evaporated. I woke up as a vampire thirsting for blood in an era undefined. As an apex parasite I pursued a body. As RacerTrash dictated—I dissolved into sex without shame. I was all that is uncomfortable about lust exposed to daylight, on the dirty bed holding hands with the cuckold.
Pg. 4: I was surrounded by my consciousness, but I was not myself…or more than myself? Emerging suddenly into a body way past technological singularity— uncontrollable, irreversible. Some powerful bureaucracy, for a substantial fee, deemed my consciousness acceptable for downloading and digitization through methods I cannot possibly understand. My inhabited body was grown in a lab, it was one of many bodies I’d known as “mine.” I was machine strong. I was immortal. My skin’s greenish pallor was the clearest sign my body was grown in a lab. Blood was obsolete. In a reflective surface I saw in my eyes a metallic glint. My face was frozen, locked in abject horror. Once I was relieved of my weak original body, my consciousness was supercharged with hyper-empathy, hyper-awareness, hyper-feels. My original neurological wiring was not made for these hyper-sensations. The smallest emotion pounded like giant tidal waves upon my nervous system. It was unbearable in a mind teleported from my chair due to a RacerTrash induced hallucination. Hyper-love was unprecedented IRL. I cried, I laughed, I screamed myself into unconsciousness.
Pg. 5: I was asleep in the Hypersleep Chamber on an intergalactic light assault carrier. It was a sleep I longed for during my waking hours. The dreams of an insomniac who can control their sleep are more magnificent than anything waking life can offer. My beautiful stasis was interrupted as we picked up an alien lifeform we thought we could contain. We couldn’t. I don’t know how long it was there or how it got inside me. My terror was beyond my ability to endure. The parasite was changing me from the inside. I was its Prometheus, it baked and gestated. Soon it was keeping me alive, keeping me still. You know you are not your own. There was a calm, a well-being I felt in knowing exactly what was soon to kill me. Suddenly, pointedly my RacerTrash dream was broken. I was back in the place I was trying to escape, my tiny apartment. EXPTV blasted away the smooth vapors of RacerWave into a distant narco-dream. There on my screen is a thin woman dressed in brown form long ago. She’s singing so fast I can’t make out what language it might be. To my ear it’s frantic gibberish. Then I identify what broke my RacerTrash trance. She screams over and over, “Banana!!!” cradling and swinging a six foot prop banana. EXPTV plays this song regularly, it’s impossible to not get caught up in the hook. My RacerTrash teleportation nearly destroyed me but I’ll be back. How can I not go back?
Works Cited
Pg. 1: she found peace.avi https://racertrash.com/work/#video=she+found+peace.avi
2. https://www.tedmarsden.com/recent-work/racertrash
Pg. 2: drinks before the show.mp4 https://racertrash.com/work/#video=drinks+before+the+show.mp4
Pg. 3: carfox.3gp https://racertrash.com/work/#video=carfox.3gp
Pg. 4: stares.mov https://racertrash.com/work/#video=stares.mov
Pg. 5: unhuman fears.mp4 https://racertrash.com/work/#video=unhuman+fears.mp4
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