Chris Carroll's website

Children end up having creepy journeys into adulthood. They slowly reach towards senescence with clawing-like movements. Upon reaching maturation, they end up behaving in myriad ways that signal a breach, a betrayal of their childlike inanity. Reason, deep-anger, and otherworldly repressive forces all constitute the spiritual template of a man. Our protagonist, Cryss, rejects this paradigm and forcibly attempts a wrathful implantation of typically kiddish styles. “I’m wearing pink pants like a kid,” he cries out while whipping back and forth on a swing, eventually circling over the top bar of the swingset. “I can fall off and not get hurt. Children have smaller terminal velocities. It’s hard for a child to die without the introduction of immense tragedy (which is usually avoidable anyway),” Cryss says in a calm, high-pitched voice, seemingly unaffected by his gyrating movements and grown up body. “I like to pretend my body is small like a tot!” Cryss calls out finally before jumping off, sticking the landing in sand, foamily and unhurt. Reason and logic end up restricting people into behaviors they don’t enjoy. Even reasonably spawning chaos or splendor through roleplay or mental age regression wasn’t enough for our protagonist, or protagonists, Cryss. That’s right, we as writers can multiply her, alter her gender, shrink her and kill her, only to revive and enlarge her into a foamy, expanded form. “I want to be normal now. I want to grow up and act like the other adults found at institutes,” she begs. Eschewing uncertainty, I immediately facilitate her desire, not intending to teach her some kind of Buddhist lesson about the thing you wish for being the thing that unravels and destroys you. I am not a dogmatic narrator. I am quite leftist, though. Walking into the Adult Institute, Cryss looks around at all the trophies lining the walls, trophies given to adults who made significant contributions to the canonic legacy of Men and Women. Award to Michael Grace Spuart for The Invention of Consensual Sex Award to Linda Berry for The Development of Calm and Collected Behavior Award to Nils Klein for The Maturation of Childlike Folly and Fit into Adult Comedy and Abuse “Strange. These trophies are strange,” Cryss remarks. I reach out my God hand from above and pat her little hair. “Most trophies are. They are based on cups. Which are normal. Basing something intense off something normal is going to make it weird.” “Yeah. Awards should just be original objects that aren’t like, a golden version of a normal object.” “What is an original object, though?” ‘I don’t know. A gem. Or like a crystal or plant. Those are natural. Natural is original,” Cryss says, seeming smart. “Wow, smart,” I say, genuinely impressed. Cryss continues down the hallowed halls of post pubescence. She passes by the birth to death rooms, watching scientists subject subjects to condensed lives. It’s emotional because all the twists and turns that typically happen to people are on full display in prismatic, time-lapsed boxes. The cries of the birthing mother transition into the cries of the newborn, like in movies, but that the crying newborn creepily morphs into an emotionless adult who can’t even hug his male friend without feeling extremely uncomfortable or like he’s doing something wrong, and then morphs into a lonely old man, writing in his journal. “I am full of regret. I never truly loved. Only my wife. But that was so easy. I was socially conditioned to love her and create children with her. I never made love to my best friend Ryan. We drifted apart. I should have grabbed his penis and took him inside me and taped the whole experience, and then gone home to my beige suburban home and showed the tape to my entire family, rupturing my programming, destroying the deadening chamber I have never truly escaped, only seen flashes of it, brief ecstasies, when I raised the pitch of my voice, when I wore my wife’s clothing secretly, when I-” and then he morphs into a corpse, disintegrating in at the cremation center, the ashes spread over the lake. “Oh. God. This is horrible,” Cryss said. The scientists jot down “ADULTHOOD VERSION 119220 TEST 784b MALE, RICHARD, 1935-1996. SUCCESS.” “Take my hand instantly and we will leave,” something romantic grabs Cryss and I can’t see her anymore. They have left the facility. As a neutral observer (with some Marxist tendencies), I don’t follow. We didn’t really communicate about this so it seems like I should just let it happen until Cryss tries to get back into contact with me, if that ever happens. I’m just going to spend some time in my narrator hangout space with other narrators. It’s an interesting space because there’s a lot of diversity with narrators, some are meant to be like a real person. Like with autobiographies you basically have a simulated version of Paula Abdul or Michael Jackson, but it’s not really them, it’s like their ghost writer or them just trying to be like, The narrator of their life, as if that’s truly possible. I like the poet narrators because they can be very abstract and beautiful. Without a protagonist I feel very lost. Protagonists are the muse of the narrator. I become very attached to them, honestly, and lose my neutral objectivity. I begin intervening and making them go through journeys that teach them or the reader something about life. Speaking of the reader, I think I’m going to hand it over to the reader and stop narrating. I am exhausted and simply lonely and I need time to drift in between sentences. Maybe I’ll come back and link up with Cryss again and get back to juxtaposing shit and being all slap-dash experimental with scenes and perspective. You are the reader. You wonder how you are not the narrator, since there seems to still be words being written. The narrator left in the last passage. You wonder if you are the narrator now, or if the switch to second person is just a cheap simulatory trick. But you really are the reader, you insist, for the sake of this section. You try not to implicate yourself in any political ideology that could expose the narrative workings of this entire writing, thus revealing you as the narrator, and then as the author, Chris Carroll. You don’t have any specific attributes here, but not because you aren’t a person, they just don’t matter here. Outside of this world you do have specific attributes, like hair. You have hair outside of this story, you are certainly not bald. The narrator and Chris Carroll do not condone bald people reading their story. Not because the narrator and Chris Carroll dislike bald people (they do,) but because for some reason bald people don’t seem to be interested in experimental writing. I’m not joking. There are like no bald people who like experimental writing, and anyone you think of who does (Foucault) is secretly unbald. Foucault was wearing a baldcap. You don’t find this funny. You liked reading the beginning of this story when the writer was more caffeinated and you noticed their ability to glide across pools of meaning was much more seamless. You begin to grow tired of all of this. You. Reading. This. Maybe you stop reading it for several months. Stop here. Stop reading for at least three months. In the interim, you lived life, read other things, and in general didn’t think much about experimental writing. You worked on your own project of being depressed or very happy and falling in love or breaking up. Your break up was so sad and you just couldn’t get over the nagging feeling that it left you with. Until you did, and that’s when you got back into reading and started reading this again. You looked around the authorial space, the hallowed halls, the weird world of word. White spaces. Black inscriptions. Nothing changed that much. Until you looked in the corner and saw a weird little glowing symbol. & What’s that? A yellow ampersand? Okay that’s good enough. You followed it. It got scared until you picked it up from its shivering corner. It seemed insane. It practically melted in your hands once you started stroking it, and purring. “This is weird, I guess. I’ve read weird stuff before though,” you said in your mind outside of the story. & “Hello.” “Hi.” “I was very nervous earlier.” “I know. I didn’t mean to startle you.” “I was shaking in the corner really fast. I was so scared haha.” “I’m sorry!” “It’s okay. I have a disorder or something. I’m not like meant to exist or something. I’m a yellow and sign.” “Ampersand.” “Okay. Yeah. Anyway. I can show you the way.” “Like how to live or something spiritual?” “No I mean back to Cryss. The weird child/adult character from earlier.” “Okay. How?” “Follow me magically. We will glow away.” “Okay. Pretty girl!” “What?” “I called you a pretty girl.” “I am a little colored symbol.” “Same thing to me.” I squelch back into the story. The reader and the sign went away with each other, hand in and, and like a psychedelic love story, morphed over time into Cryss and that romantic being, in a different setting, at a later time. “I’m naming my life romance,” Cryss said, while holding Youly, her lover. “After me?” asked Youly, whose eyes were closed in a rather peacefully shut manner. “Yes. After our fling,” Cryss confirms. “You took me away from that horrible institution. That trophy palace. Institutions seem to generate awful trophies for their members.” “I hate members of institutions,” Youly says, opening their eyes and looking around their environment. They’re in a very nice French apartment and the sun is yellow from the sky, making the objects around them visually yellower. From the sun. It feels good to be back describing the physical events surrounding the characters who use dialogue to communicate. Dialogue. Dialanguage. Wow. I am good at inventing things on the fly. Well actually, I’m heavily edited by the editor, so it seems like it’s on the fly but it was actually labored over for like six months. The editor is very important and I am thankful for them because they choose to keep me in. They must think I am vital! “Is our romance boring?” asked Cryss, insecure that she isn’t good enough for Youly. “Maybe. We need to spice it up or break up and suck on Other.” “I hate the image of you sucking Other,” Cryss said, and then awkwardly glanced at Other, who looked sad. Earlier on, they had made a pact not to suck on him, a symbolic pact that created their romance and somehow made it real. Like marriage. Blowjobs were like marriages, real, and created by agreements that involved blowjobs. “So what should we do?” “The only thing people can do to broaden their horizons.” “Go to community college or a trade school?” “No. We should avoid obvious institutional pathways to success, which are more like carceral tubes that suck people in and force them to play with wires for sixty thousand dollars a year. We should also avoid having a child. Having a child is an institution. Look at how many institutions are related to children. Hospitals, school, hell, everything requires children because children are born by fools who create institution fodder. The mother, father, and baby all smiling at each other is just a fortunate side effect of the grotesque, conveyor belt-like process of child rearing. In the past they had children to create warriors, now we create workers. It’s a radical act to abstain from human creation, despite what the growing number of “trad” young people insist upon. A child is a prison, darkly enough.” “So what should we do to renew our vows? To spice up our sex life? Should we try new positions?” “Haha I like that. A couple focusing on how to contort their bodies in such specific ways that it unlocks new types of pleasure, pleasure that infects their whole thang, and saves their decaying marriage.” “Should we do that?” “It’s still not enough. As novel as yogic sex and tantric orgasms are, what with these older white folks screaming their dicks off in their Indian themed bedrooms, these things are ultimately fads. I would posit that our mutual creativity and sustained interest in sustaining interest is enough to keep our thang alive.” “Honestly I agree. That’s really beautiful.” God this is so beautiful. This is what was happening while I was dormant? What a nice surprise. This is all over now. They go off into the sunset, being creative little guys together. The end. “Actually I disagree. I’m going to break up with you and write and publish a book of tweets I wrote while high on myriad substances. I consider divorce trauma a substance, also. Bye,” Cryss says.