Frank, Gunk & Goo
The incense burned. The bright tip consuming the stick as smoke dances in wild graceful gestures. Gunk & Goo are cupids. They dwell and work in the atmospheric levels of the soul where it lightly touches the base realms of meta. Here is the zone of scent. An invisible, silent, textureless world where one can almost taste. Almost. A world of instinct and intuition, where clairvoyants feel their blind way around with goosebumps and raised hairs. This is the place of wine and spirits, of perfumes and aromas, of formaldehyde and chlorine. The manifestation of smell is the first ritual of evocation. The only one necessary actually. Scent is where libido dwells, and libido comprises spirits and entities, the enveloping bubble directing cause and effect on simulation earth.
Sorry to break it to you guys, but yes you live in a simulation. Your whole world is pixels, every cell in your body, every atom you breathe. Only your consciousness is real, whatever real is; but your consciousness is generally asleep. Those who wake up want to go back to slumber, and the only thing you can learn is to control your dreams. So the matrix got it right. But we’re not mining energy. We’re mining love. Love is energy. Quantifiable. Qualifiable.
You’ve heard the expression that love makes the world go around. It makes the meta too. It is the basis and foundation of everything, it makes lust meaningful and worthy, makes it last. Last forever. Lust forever. Otherwise sex is boring, shallow and cheap. And the reason you exist, the reason God made you was so that IT could squeeze every last drop of love outta your soul.
So here is a day in the life of Gunk & Goo, cupids for the best feeling in the universe. They were resting under a banana tree. They’d just successfully paired two buffaloes together. Now there will be continuity, the next buffalo generation will plough and feed upon grass. Gunk & Goo aren’t top brass; their domain is insects and animals. They hated it when they heard the other cupids brag about how they got humans to copulate. Humans were harder as compared to beasts, their myriad emotions complicated things. For aeons Gunk & Goo had waited for a promotion to ship humans.
Starry eyed, the duo will observe and obsess over the sphere of man, fantasizing so and so with so and so. In their free time they will come up with stories and fan-fiction for these somatic characters, imagining their lives should they be in an (engineered) relationship. Ahh, the beauty of metaphysics where you can actually plot alternate decisions made by men and women and see them in 3-dimensional fruition. Gunk & Goo often sat at where the infinite branches divided, sobbing or rejoicing over the challenges and joys of their beloved humans in the multiverse.
Yah they bitched. They bitched when they didn’t agree on the choices made by other cupids. Like Gunk & Goo were rooting for Adam and Lilith, but Yahweh paired Adam with Eve instead. But what could they do? Two low menial blue collar workers could have no say against a high corporate flyer whose gilded office was in the glass clouds just glimpsing the ascents of meta.
Gunk & Goo, their big break finally came in 2022, at the eve of the end of days. A lone woman sits in meditative pose burning frankincense. She was a lonely woman of thirty years. Whatever love affairs she’d had in the past, if they can be categorized as love, had ended up with harassment and violence; she being at the receiving end of the stick. Rachel, her name, had been sexually abused as a kid, a two-year trauma in preteen that she’d wilfully forgotten. Obviously she had not dealt with it, resulting in repeats with her previous boyfriends and in her inability to find happiness in general.
Strange, no one was answering her call, Gunk & Goo thought. Perhaps she was not doing something right, or maybe it was cheap imitation incense that repelled instead of attracted. But whatever it was, it got their attention, and no one else.
“Hello, hello, anyone there?” Gunk said, uncertain what to do when it came to humans. Sure, they’d seen it on replay countless times, how the experienced cupids seduced, but practical and on the job was a whole different ball game. Animals were easy. You didn’t require tact. You just shot your arrow and watched them fuck. But humans...damn...humans.
“What do we do?” Goo asked Gunk. “Do we manifest? What do we manifest as?”
Rachel blinked behind her eyelids. She was concentrating, trying to at least, focussing on her breathing, banishing all thoughts. Impossible! She’s almost giving up, opening her eyes, diffusing the scent. Then...
“Hi.” She heard a voice. “Hi,” she replied. She didn’t know what to make of the timbre of the tone. Not what she expected. Was that her nephew’s SpongeBob SquarePants playing in her head?
“I’m Gunk,” the presence stated. “And I’m Goo.” Ooo...two of them. Not bad for a first time novice. She had followed the online instructions, the YouTube videos on channelling. Actually she had been confused, there were loads of contradictory opinions and arguments. Heck, she thought, she was just going to buy some incense sticks and try it out.
“What...what...can we do for you?” Gunk continued, unsure how to proceed with humans. Insects and animals never talked back. At least not in such a manner. Rachel was exploding with emotions, fireworks of feelings. She’d managed to contact higher beings from the otherside. She composed her flailing gut. “I want love,” she stated, calmly, clearly.
“Anyone in particular?” asked Goo. Rachel was self-conscious. She’d read that it was best to be as specific as possible when summoning, but in truth...no, she had no one in particular. She just wanted love. Well, there is that guy in the coffee shop. But he never noticed her. Was he the one? Should she petition his attention? Nah, she decided on an open dice. See what comes up.
“No I don’t,” Rachel said, “I don’t have anyone in particular. I was hoping if you guys could throw someone in the mix?” Silence on the other end. Gunk & Goo truly had no clue what to do. And so they left, leaving Rachel in limbo, thinking if she was mad and had officially started talking to herself. Or that she was delusional and certified crazy.
“Why did you drop the line?” Goo frantically vibrated.
“I don’t have an answer for her. Do you? Let’s think this through. Consult someone if possible. We’ll get back to her. Somehow.”
Goo was still agitated. The vibrations were causing energy dislocations. A picture frame fell from the bookcase. Rachel was shocked by the thud. Can’t be coincidence. It assured her she was not insane.
Rachel got up to pick it up. Turned it, and there it was, a photo of her and Jacky, her dead Labrador. Zany with a shiny coat of black Jacky was, her lovable lolling retard. Rachel’s tears dripped from her chin to the glass of the frame as she stroked the wet ears of her dog, her mind teleporting her hands to fur. Ran over. In front of her. Guilt could never repay her regret. It was too hard to think about it, and yet she could never forget the scene on auto-replay in her head.
“That’s it!” exclaimed Gunk. “True love, Jacky and Rachel. And now if only we can convince the canine to come back to life.”
The duo got to work. After some deliberation and discussion they decided the best way to go about was to build a golem out of clay and coax Jacky to possess. After all, luring animals was their specialty. Unfortunately, design wasn’t. The sculpture standing in front of the pair was a gargantuan beast with askew horns and a ridiculous grin framed by floppy ears. Once Jacky got in it would be terrifyingly happy with smoking red eyes and a sonorous snout.
On the other side of the line, Rachel had been suffumigating frankincense to zero effect. Nightly, she’d lighted a stick for about an hour for a whole month. Nothing. She never gave up. Once you have a sliver of the otherside, you want it again. You chase it, you concentrate, you clear your mind, hoping...hoping for clairvoyance, for clarion. On the thirtieth night, not a full moon, it came.
There was silence, but she could feel the presence of the two. Then came a knock on the door. Alarmed out of her focus, she answered. Only an Amazon parcel greeted her. In it was a deformed figurine of a werewolf. She recognized immediately it was Jacky.
Far off, Gunk & Goo prepared their arrows. One pricked Rachel in the butt. The other, enchanted with the word TRUTH in a foreign tongue penetrated Jacky’s forehead. The beast howled a baby howl alive. “Well done! Great job!” The pair clasped hands and congratulated each other on their first hybrid pairing. For the other couple, it was indeed (true) love at second sight.