We really didn't notice anything different about
him while it was happening. . .
Looking back on it now,-- jesus, how could we have been so blind!... I mean, the nervous ticking,constant drooling, subconscious hour-long bouts of blank staring, the flaking of the skin, the chronic itching of the eyes, hands, nose, toes,ears, throat, and scalp... I mean, really, just the basic stuff happening to us all come mid-terms in the graduate computer art department…
--but… just a shade deeper, a degree further.
None of us happened to notice the epistimological quakes, the epilectic seizures of ethics, the twilights of the idols, the sheer genius blossoming in our midst.
And now, we're just left with conjecture.
Now, occasional news crews come by scraping for stories from any and all of us, after some angle or take that no one else has spun on it-- but we've been through them all-- the whole gamut, and still virtually nothing. We oblige them willingly; grateful, actually, to be able to relive those tales again and again, like an amputee feeling a nagging tickle in his phantom foot...
What we know is still filtering in from a variety of sources. The constantly increasing database of personal episodes and testimonials of visitors to that ski lodge in Aspen during his supposed three day stint there. Stories of myth and recapitulations of grandeous legend from the shop owners there at the time, several (most, in fact)of whom have become devout religious believers in his mystical aura and (some say) spiritual omniprescence; all the stories somewhat discongruous, yet maintaining a faint suggestion of some sparrow of truth at the core.
We know for a fact that he was in the Adirondacks in late spring: hotel registry records a signature (Sheik Yoboudi; a lark, false, of course) in his rough distinctive slant, and a 3 hour long phone call to Beloit, Illinois, to his mother. She was questioned, thoroughly, by professionals, with guns, and chemicals, and pastry. Without avail. We even went to visit her, desperate like everyone else to glean SOME insight into his motivation, his Word, but when we questioned her, she just sat there, rocking back and forth in her rocking chair, back and forth,
back and forth, mechanically petting a cat perched in her lap, staring out at the wall across the room before her, with this passive, fulfilling smile faint across her features, an essence of pure ease, rocking, rocking --always rocking.
The myths filtering in from the loose familial communities and jungle villages of SouthEast Asia are improbable at best, but do supply plausible ground for his supposed appearance in both India and Nepal near last winter...
What we know is circumstantial for the most part, but we DO know this:
that on October 23rd, he had formally abandoned computer art forever, and had signed on to the ranks of the Yonah Schimmel BigTop Anthropomorphic Circus under the guise of Aypo the Chimp-Boy, the name that would catapoult
him to international stardom, universal splendor,launch a unique signature line of Kay-Be facial spreads and accompanying chiffon bathing products, and spawn endless televised recapitulations of his greatness, all in just 3
short months.