ANOTHER REPORT FROM THE INSTITUTE:

SNAKES, DRAGONS & LOTUS EATERS

 SOMEWHERE BETWEEN SEOUL AND THE ENTROPICS THERE LIES A low ROAD TRAVELLED ... by M.R. Bradie

*Another fine presentation by the EXPRESSWAYS TO YR SKULL INCORPORATA*

     I was sleeping with my shoes on, under the mosquito net of a groovy Siamese island bungalow,
when I had the most vivid, thorough and totally recallable death dream I've ever dreampt.

                                 ENTER DREAM STAGE CENTER:

I'm standing in a dark, nondescript place, in front of an unidentifiable man who's holding an Uzi

 ( an easily recognizeable Israeli sub-machinegun).  He says to me, " I'm going to kill you now,

  get on your knees.".   I say, "Okay.", and obey him without resistance, immediately

     getting down on my knees.  Without hesitation, he gets behind me and buries the

       barrel of the gun in the hair on the back of my head.  I feel him rooting around

         in my thick hair with the barrel for the perfect spot.  Then I hear a loud

           crack and feel a sharp pain in my head and everything goes com-

             pletely black.  Instantly I see, feel, become an inverted black

               triangle, like the top of an hourglass on a two dimensional

                 plane ... wiggling down down ... until I'm an upright

                   black triangle, like the bottom half of an hour-

                     glass on a two dimensional plane ... wiggling,

                         wiggling ...In the next instant,  I'm spit

                       forth from the black triangle world, my whole

                    body and person intact, and I'm flying freely ... and

                I can  look at my hands outstretched before me and see

           that I'm a translucent ghost version of M.R. Bradie. I'm flying

       through a spacious sort of yellow tiled shopping mall, complete with

  potted trees and spewing fountains ... there are hoardes of other flying indi-

viduals ... escalators, cash registers ... but nothing to buy ... emptiness running into

infinity where the walls should be. I make eye contact with the flying ghost of another

nondescript person and she let's loose a horrendous soul-scream and flies into me ... casting

us both into tailspins that result in a blurry shift from the surrounding ghost mall to an oblivious

void of nothing ...
 

EXIT DREAM STAGE FLIPSIDE: I wake, stand up, and head for the local kitchen for fruit pancakes and a pineapple milkshake. THOUGHT VS. ACTION      Bangkok's Khao-San Road is anything anybody ever claims it to be.  Any picture ever painted is by nature, complete andprecise.  I arrived there three separate times during my month long vacation in the land of King Rama  the IXth.       The first was blasting sun and smog, Black Sabbath's 'Children of the Grave' throbbing from a perfect sound system,throngs of wild dogs living in the streets.      The second arrival on that road was in the company of a 20 year old fire engine-red dyed hair sporting Americancollege kid I'd started running with along the way.  It was book store shopping, Me-Kong whiskey drinking and fake I.D.buying, international spectrum girl lusting and transexual sexual proposition avoiding.      The third and final touch'n'go was money rationing, pack hauling and a sort of on-street fashion show runway conpletewith the tatooed youth of tomorrow and futuristic looking Israeli hippies who'd been on the bus to Bangkok from Surat Thania week and a half earlier, one of which managed to fuck his girlfriend in the laid-back seat while it was dark and hethought we were sleeping.  The damndest thing was that after watching a cross section of the fabled street for a period oftime spanning from the early afternoon to the 2am shutdown, I realized that so many of the people promenadeing up and downthe street were the same ones who'd been doing it all day.   (flash back to Korea) DETAILED DESCRIPTIONS OF THE POPULAR 'RE-VIRGINIZATION and PENILE ENLARGEMENT  OPERATIONS' AS TOLDTO G.LENNY MUNNY BY THE KOREAN DOCTOR TREATING HIM AFTER A MOTORCYCLE CRASH:      I was sitting on the couch in the rumpus room of G.Lenny's apartment, OUTPOST ALPHA-ALLAK, when he told me aboutDoctor Kim's story.  It went something like this:      "I was in his office, getting the fluid drained from my hip.  We were chatting, and I mentioned that I was heading forFukoka in two days to get a new visa hooked up.  He started telling me about the strip shows and hooker clubs that Fukokahas to offer, but warned me that wide eyed gai-jin's such as myself were often not admitted.      But, having reached a new rapport of openess on socially tabooed topics concerning matters of human sexuality, Iventured to ask him about the strange 're-virginization operation' I'd heard of along the vague bar-room conversationalwire.  He smiled and seemed obliged to explain as he deftly manipulated the suction device under the scarified skin shunton my hip.     He began by explaining that for many of the more conservative and supposedly chaste couples who marry, it's fullyexpected that the female  show proof positive on her wedding night consumation bed that she is in fact a vaginal virgin, byexpressing pain upon the initial penetration and by releasing blood that is assumed to have originated from a freshlybusted hymen.    Having set the stage, he went on to explain that he was frequently approached nervous brides-to-be, who inconfidentiality, expressed to him that they had lost their virginity and hymen at an earlier date.  Some, he said, claim tohave rendered the epidermal overgrowth to a crudely inserted tampon or aerobics class, while others confessed to having hadsex before marriage. All women expressed the fear of nuptual anuhlment, becoming an unmarriable social pariah or evenphysical abuse upon the discovery of their previously penetrated vaginal passage upon their wedding bed.  The women askedhim if there was anyway to regain their virginity through modern surgical means.     For a handsome price, he said, this is how he solves their problem: The simple procedure  has to be performed  withintwo or three days before their wedding night, because the  juryrigged hymen won't last much longer.  All he does is take asingle hair folicle of suitable length off the woman's head.  Then he goes up into her vagina and does a shallow suture,drawing the walls together with the hair, in effect, creating an easily broken barrier with a material that is incapeableof causing suspicion if spotted.  And that's it.  The woman get's down on her wedding night.  The new hubby inserts hispenis and breaks the hair-sown suture, which induces a reasonable amount of pain and bleeding.  Viva illusion!      Well, I was jazzed by our freewheeling talk and this crazy information, so I asked him about the penis enlargmentsurgery I'd heard talked about in more places than just Korea. He chuckled and replied that it was much more difficult andstatistically less successful than the Re-virginization, and that he'd never performed one,  but that it worked like this:When a man wants to have his penis enlarged, the first step is to remove the fatty tissue that covered the base of thepenis ... a simple enough procedure that offers the appearance of increased length. Then,  in an attempt to increase thegirth of the penis, or in layman's terms, the thickness, they take the fatty material, or a silicone substitue which offersgreater firmness and greater risk, and inject it throughout the penile shaft.  The biggest difficulty, he said, and risk,is that the hotdog will burst from all the added pressure, or come out all lopsided and deformed.  Those aren't his exactwords of course, but you get the gist. "      It should be noted that G. Lenny cashed his Korean Won out yesterday and headed back to the States to share hisvaluable newfound knowlege with the western world, and that this surly and rather unattractive brick of a man will besorely missed by the minions of Pusan's Academic Underground.  ON THE NATURE OF ANALOGUE TRANS-SONIC TRANSLATION: A RETREAT FROM REALITY      It was no heavenly revelation or crystal and incense induced epiphany; it was a featurless green man, composed soleyof ocilliating rings of pure sonic vibration ... and he was sitting on my couch in the heat of a drug free afternoon,generating himself forthright from the water-warped copy of 'Beggar's Banquet' or maybe it was 'Trompe Le Monde', playingon my mono tape deck with dying batteries.  He didn't have eyes to see me, a mouth with which to address me, or ears tohear my moans of fear, but he was giving me advice.  He was in my head; he was absolutely analogue, and by definition,irreduceable; his ... or rather, it's name ... no, he must've been a man, because the perpetually shifting green rings werebulging out a little bit where his unit would've been ... his name was Analogus.  I'm not sure if his name was soleyderived from the word 'analogue', or if there was some intended double meaning concerning his sexual proclivities, and Ididn't bother to ask or find out in any other way. This is what he said to me:       ' Dude, you're living in an age gilded with illusion.  You have to seek freedom from the tyranny of information anyway you can.'        Then, through his telesonic vocoded voice that was vibrating it's way through my skull, he advised me to quit my joband take a vacation.  I began to question him.     " But, Analogus,", I asked, "If I do that, what'll I do when I run out of money and have nowhere to go?".      "Mike, ", he vibrated to me, " That's when you know it's time to come back to Korea, couch surf and borrow money,  andteach some more English ... at least until you raise enough dough to quit your job again and take another vacation!".      It made sense at the time.  So I did.  I jumped that shitty hagwon contract so fast that it made my poor abandonedstudent's heads spin!      I don't know who recorded that guy's album, but whoever it was had damn fine production values!      Next thing I knew, I was hangin' out in the jungle, tokin' C and puffin' O from tribal pipes and a bamboo bong witha machete tied to the bottom, holding it firm in the dirt.       As per my credentials as a Certified Ologist, an advanced degree bestowed upon me by the ever lovin' InternationalInstitute for the Advancement of Hand-Eye Coordination & the Surrealio-Satirification of Consensus Reality, I also took theopportunity to study indepth a wide range of free range wildlife, including but not limited to ... the crab that lived in ahole in front of my beach house ... an alligator I saw lowridin' in a ditch on the side of dirt road ... some funny littlepigs ... some big dick Oxen with rings in the nose ... an elephant upon whose head while sitting I managed to roll andsmoke a joint ... coconuts ... the girls of Padpong who've perfected the live sex show to a degree that obliterates anynotions of sensuality ... generating an erection was the bodily function I was farthest from as I watched the talentedladies of Club Super Pussy shoot darts from vaginal blowguns,  down liter bottles of water into the same orifice ... andthe most vomit inspiring feat of absolute anti-sexual inverted-perversion ... the string of razor blades pulled out of dapussy! Let me tell you my close personal friends ... I haven't seen anything like it since I caught Gwar's life affirmingshow at the Rose Land in down town Portland, Oregon, two summers ago.  May the Gods help us all.      Jungle on Opiates      While on the super-secret Island of Koh Phanagn, which was a virtual hidden paradise, hosting no more than 10,000North American and European tourists at any given time, I was also able to confer with one of my longtime trans-dimensionaltelepathic colleagues, a Buddhist monk I like to refer to as 'the dude who looked like a mutant snake-man', which was afterall, an exquisite honor and an exemplified privelidge.  Our chance meeting occured thusly:        I'd gotten the first bathroomless bungalow I'd stumbled upon the night my ship wrecked and stranded me on the desertedbeaches of Koh Phanagn.  While I was sleeping peacefully that night, two beautiful drunken Thai hookers (of age!) burstinto my tiny room and raped me.  One of them was so drunk that she puked and in effect, bungled my bungalow.  Upon wakingamidst the filth on the following morning, I realized that I had to make my escape to another bungalow sight.  I managed tofashion a motor scooter out of motor scooter parts that had been previously assembled and gassed up outside my room.  Ibegan driving all around the island with all my shit in my backpack on my back and pouring out of the basket on the frontof my scooter. I drove around all day in the merciless sun, smoking joints to keep my head clear.  Every Bungalow I went toacessed from my appearance that I was an idiot and refused to rent me a room.  Eventually, I got so sunbrained from drivingaround in a stoned tizzy like someone listenin' to too much Thin Lizzy, that I crashed my scooter.  I wiped out on a patchof sand.  Then I just stood there, staring at the bashed gear shifter and watching the oil leak from the engine. I was solow.  A couple whitey cats passed me and gave me those 'extreme' sort of looks from beneath their tribal tatoos. Then aThai fellow riding a street bike with mud on the tires rolled up and asked me, " Did you fall down?".   (...to be continued soon in some form or fashion)