collage and text   ©Jonathan Zap You You. I know you. I saw you survive red flames twisting glass and steel burning the dry night air. Saw the heat of greedy fingers on the smooth skin of your youth as you splintered into fragments of light glittering through the dark suction of tunnels spiraling upward to entrance threshold intensity. I saw you and I saw every particle of sand on your naked skin as you awakened in desert night, spirit drawing back into wounded flesh and rousing itself into mosaic perceptions of reptiles, cactus spines, red rock, stars. I saw you, you with the will to survive and to glow upon the open mesa, tendrils of light penetrating the minds of strangers, penetrating me. You. You that awakens me and walks through the alleys and streets of empty cities to stand beside roads as I drive by and ...

Nexus 2012 by Jonathan Zap May 31, 2009,  early hours of the morning I find myself standing on a murky surface looking toward the dark rift at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.  I am thinking about the galactic alignment of 2012, and more particularly about the conference I have just attended on 2012: 2012 Now---Empowering the Transformation. But now I think even more particularly about the fact that I have been recruited to write about this conference, and now I feel like I am tumbling down the wrong end of a telescope, and my ever more particularized thoughts narrow and splinter: What exactly should I write about?   Should I meticulously and laboriously thank and recognize and appreciate all the amazing people that were at the center of this conference? Should I…what? Recapitulate everything that happened? As I think these frantic thoughts I see ...

Consider this my pre-election special. You probably already know that after months of intensive lobbying by the McCain and Obama campaigns the coveted zaporacle.com endorsement has gone to Barak Obama.  For more on the present political situation and why Real People suck please read the following. Real People Suck: An Imaginary Person’s Manifesto © 2008, Jonathan Zap Elitist Imaginary Person and World Government Federation Chairman, Jonathan Zap “Real food for Real People.” ----Ad slogan for Nutrisystem, a company that sends pre-packaged diet foods to subscribers through the mail. (What Real Food looks like.) Teal People at Burning Man, 2008  photo © Jonathan Zap (I greatly prefer the company of Teal people to that of Real People.) We tend to take the sun for granted, as well as many of our greatest blessings.  I know that I have been guilty of taking for granted one of the greatest ...

March Forth! ---A March 4th Mutant Manifesto © 2006 Jonathan Zap March Forth! March Forth! Mutant Warriors! March Forth! and cast off the shackles of wage slave bondage, the mind parasite tentacles, the multi-heart attack drunken vice presidents with loaded shot guns, the mustachioed police troopers ready to pump 9 mm holes in alleged perpetrators of victimless crimes, the Abercrombie and Finch hottie torsos beckoning you into retail adventurism, the five dollar lattes and gallons of dinosaur juice, the social sqwuackers and vidiot slackers, March Forth! and assert your multiverse-given right to non-monotonous incarnation, your right to shatter Babylon McMatrix into other worlds than these, your right to phase and shape-shift at will, your right to shatter a world of florescent cubicles, burgeoning green house gases, reptilian Republicans and mind parasite-infected Islamic Fundamentalists, shatter it, shatter it, shatter it back into the misconceived zeros and ones ...

W's Victory is Actually Good News! Copyright 2004 by Jonathan Zap Yes, like most of you, like all of you who have any hope of remaining on my email mailing list, I felt upset about the election news.  I felt like someone looking forward to four years of chemotherapy with a prognosis of agonizing death, felt like a 100 year old coal miner with sever rheumatoid arthritis approaching a four year shift in the coals mines after a breaksfast of cold gruel, felt like I had been hit in the chest with a depleted uranium canon ball the size of a Death Star. But then, about sixty seconds ago, I realized what a blessing in disguise this really is.  All my life I have expected to witness apocalypse and especially after nothing much happened at the turn of the millenium I started to notice that something ...

Parallel Journeys  Part II   copyright Jonathan Zap > black and white photo of Parallel Journeys Collage----copyright Jonathan Zap IX Slowly, I spiraled downward in the quirky darkness of the duck’s mind, and as I descended the speed of my rotations accelerated, like water spinning down a drain. When I reached the epicenter of the duck’s mind I plummeted downward, like a snowball tossed into an elevator shaft. Instead of hitting the bottom of anything, I crossed the threshold of the new reality and found myself shooting upward like a rocket in the star dappled heavens of a new world. Unlike the skimpy universe I had tumbled in previously, this seemed to be a proper universe with a rich array of stars and nebulae. And I was not just tumbling either, I had a powerful upward trajectory and in the vacuum of outer space there was nothing to slow it ...

These three little stories, which were written in one sitting as notebook sketches, were composed around 1990 when I was teaching at public high school in Long Island New York. Three Stories Copyright 1990, Jonathan Zap Smoke “Life sucks.”  Marc said in a flat, quiet voice while passing a joint to his friend, Andrew.  It was late August and the two boys were reclining on the slopping walls of dusty grass and tangled weeds leading to the bottom of the sump where they frequently went to smoke. “You always say that.” said Andrew “Because it’s true.” replied Marc. There wasn’t much that could be added to this since they both felt it so strongly, and they lapsed into silence passing the dwindling joint back and forth, staring up at a sky that was darkly hazed by the smoke that nightly rose from the power station.  Delicate swirls of marijuana ...

This story, a fragmentary take on the life of a home boy, was written in the Eighties when I knew a lot about that subject as I was teaching in the South Bronx.  This place and time was ground zero for the hip-hop explosion.  Grand Master Flash came from my high school, and I was especially close to some of the more talented graffiti writers.  I knew Keith Haring and the Fun Gallery was right across the street from where I lived in the East Village so I was able to help some get their work shown.    This story was published in Long Shot (http://www.longshot.org/), a literary journal edited by my friend and fellow teacher in the South Bronx, Danny Shot.  Allen Ginsberg, who lived a block away in the East Village was a contributor, he has a poem, “On the Conduct of the World ...

I had to exchange media with my friend Mica of Mind Temple Productions who is working on a documentary with me, Logos Beheld, (about my theories about evolution and visual communication) and he was setting up to do the music and lighting for a film wrap party or something like that, and he invited me to stay, and out of politeness I did, not expecting to stay for long. But I found myself involved in interesting conversation with a young ethnobotanist named Evan, and while this conversation unfolded I noticed that Mica, who was spinning records, and John, a drummer, were in a egoless mind meld of flawless musical virtuosity. I already knew that Mica was a master at matching beats and flowing musically with the energy of rave or club, but John, who I had never met before, was obviously one of the best ...