Chapter 162: You've Got to Hide

I remember the very, very first time that I listened to Pondering Pootan with Ajishio Taro & Hachimitsu Boy. It was sort of a benchmark, you might say, and I remember that this friend of mine that always got there first visited me with this little glass phone and this podcast with a cover that looked like a weird comic. And since I was a graduate of Dr. Kamiyama's, I figured there were no surprises. So the only question I asked is, "How long does it last?" And he said, "About thirty minutes, there's a timer." So I did it, and… There was a something, like a fruit, like a banana in brown and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the banana into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully noise cancelled audio, and the crawling host's introduction along the soft intro music, what was happening was that there were a lot of, ah… beings in there, what I call self-transforming Mechazawas. Sort of like beautiful tin cans all mecharattaing their way toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces, just lightbulb eyes. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be confused; not to give way to bewilderment. And so I listened to them, even though I wondered if maybe I hadn't really done it this time, and what they were doing was they were making bits come into existence by speaking them into existence. Bits which sounded like serious takes about forgotten media morphing themselves with intricate comedic structures. They sounded like the concrescence of linguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyper-dimensional transform into three-dimensional audio. And these little Mechazawa Betas offered themselves to me. And I realized when I looked at them that if I could bring just one of these little bits back, nothing would ever be quite the same again. And I wondered, Where Am I? And What Is Going On? It occurred to me that these must be holographic aural projections from an autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting my own, and then I thought a more elegant explanation would be to take it at face value and realize that I had broken into an ecology of souls. And that somehow I was getting a peek over the other side. Somehow I was finding out that thing that you cheerfully assume you can't find out. But it felt like I was finding out. And it felt … and then I can't remember what it felt like because the little self-transforming robots interrupted me and said, "Don't think about it, mecharatta! Don't think about who we are, mecharatta … Think about doing what we're doing, mecharatta. Do it! Do it! Do it now, mecharatta!" And what they meant was, use your voice to make a podcast. And as I understood, I felt a bubble kind of grow inside of me. And I listened to these little robot tykes jumping in and out of my ears; they like to do that to reassure you. And they said, "Do it." And I felt language rise up in me that was unhooked from English, and I began to speak…

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OP: “Ningen nante” by Yoshida Takuro
ED: “You've Got to Hide Your Love Away” by the Beatles

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