20090518

Caleb Puckett


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Hazard Communication

All employees should have plastic disposable gowns and conspicuous scissors.
All employees should have examination gloves and conspicuous bandages.
All employees should have face masks and conspicuous inhalants.

A designated party should compress the cloth, pull the pin, aim the discharge and smother the waste with a heavy coat. Accumulate. Exhaust. Evacuate.


Bound to the Legacy System

The lyricist finds focus in his corporate office setting, adopting breezy, machine-readable unicorns into his images and supplying his juvenile audience with generic postcards from the Snowbird Institute of Technology. His digital music manuscripts, data migration techniques and access points follow the de facto standards set forth by the cataloging task force, which means his submissions are well-calculated and well-supported. No negotiations are needed and none are delivered. Past his door, however, a weathered hawk challenges the authority controls, trafficking striking notations and endorsing state-of-the-art record dislocation meant to deliver new licensing scenarios to society as it is represented by the usage statistics bound to the legacy system. On an intellectual level, the lyricist supports this widespread upheaval of the people’s sense of permission and their basic technical services, but on a fiscal level he knows that Euclid pulled no punches regarding the processing of unicorns and postcards in a successful long-term economic model. He thinks, “Discovery requires constraints; a restricted door, an out-of-print book, a dead battery.” Observing the weathered hawk a last time, he deftly changes its bibliographic data and subject heading, greatly rerouting its point of reference. Satisfied, the lyricist finds focus in his corporate office setting, appearing certain that there is as much truth in tradition as in evolution.


User Authentication

The managers said, “Eve freely produced a treaty with the public. It only permitted conventional, direct attacks involving collisions and trapdoors on her birthdays.”

Eve replied, “Official documents imply needs, vulnerability, blind trust, and coercion. Investigate the encryption. Check the sensor. Enforce the political configuration.”

The spies said, “Eve’s signature was sparse but seismic. Her spaces implied seditious schemes, secret modifications, forgeries, cheats, and a malicious interception of identity.”

Eve replied, “Knapsacks imply choice, control, hijacking, and security requirements. Investigate the hierarchy. Check the fence. Enforce the existential configuration.”


Discarded Atlas, Discarded Praxis

We are plaster replicas of humanists wrapped in plastic corsets with leather lacings. We are bolted into uniform metal tracks where complicated computations overlap until they cause irritations or even inadequacies among participants. It is here that we create a literature of undesirable disarticulation, a picture of oscillating friction. It is here that we review the scars of our terminology in white mirrors and institutionalize our myths. Our wishes are weight-bearing, like an amputee’s hip joint hinges, but less permissive, less enabling, less superior. Yet our caregivers create stability through the pressures of gravity and the impossibility of privacy. They provide lucid biases, blame and vacuum chambers to keep us on the straight line. We should not be removed from their direct vision and constant rotation because we know that popular forms of self-awareness impinge on the police’s sense of justice and the historian’s sense of guardianship. Thus, in this apparatus, we know that acceleration is our only form of convalescence. Reception, then, may have significant drawbacks or even trigger malignance. Reflect on the traction and reconstruct the knee cap. File under “Adjustments” and cross-reference “Rehab”.



Caleb Puckett lives in Kansas. He has pieces in Counterexample Poetics, Great Works, Greenbeard Magazine, and Radiant Turnstile. His prose collection, Tales from the Hinterland, is available from The Otoliths Storefront.

 
 
 
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