Join My Cult - Original Falcon Press

around you? Why do you leap from stone to stone…and never look
down? Like the beginning of Beethoven’s 5th it knocks, pounds. It
berates. It screams. And still, you do not hear it!”
Johny looked down at his scrawny legs. “Who are you?”
The man continued undaunted. Johny assumed that his question had
been rhetorical. “For the height to which you aspire is also the depth to
which you sink; as the tendril branches of the Tree of Knowledge stretch
up to the clouds, the roots too sink deeper and deeper into earth and
sediment, sucking up hosts of answerless questions and filth from top to
bottom. The timbre of each melancholy note resonates with the ache of
your Hope, your tallest branches stretching further still to be above,
while the weight of your mass drags you further into the mud. And, as
your branches begin to reach those clouds, you are hurled into a
convulsive terror, a loneliness without end, a delirious fever named
Unattainable Hope, Infinite Possibility… In the innermost, most
subterranean recesses of your Self, I can hear you screaming ‘how is it
that no one can hear me, from up here? Why do they not understand?
And now…now I do not even understand myself… I am the day after
yesterday, and I refuse myself. I turn away from my unattainable future, I
cringe from the memories of my past—they will not let me go on. And I
grow more and more unbalanced as actuality pushes me on further
without a choice. My longing for a companion is so unbearable that I soil
it with the filth from my roots; my need for communion is so great that I
cannot dare open my mouth; my hate for my friends is so great…because
of my love…’
“Must you turn yourself away—from yourself—and cast Hope to your
opposite? Would you be any happier a ‘no’ rather than a ‘yes’? You still
long for freedom, my friend, and that longing is your cage. You do not
even realize what you are missing, or what it is that you are longing for,
but something in you calls out to be aware. You have become parched in
the desert of apathy, and thirst for the Bacchic springs forever out of your
reach. And while your highest aspects thirst for freedom, so too your
basest roots thrust outwards and strangle the hopes—”
At this point a red-headed girl built like a sparrow wandered into the
smoking area. She had that mild-mannered heroin-chic that was all the
rage, the paradoxical combination of unnaturally red cheeks—carefully
applied pigment to simulate the sex flush—contrasting skin that was
almost slate gray-blue. Her eyes were glazed over, and yet the way they
moved from side to side across the room, scanning every detail,
suggested that if she wasn’t intelligent, she was at least cunning. It was a
122