“If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” –Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

                    One
Serving out time in the Zone shows you
the chaos of their peeves and assholery: what goes around may
be on a whole ‘nother song that never
comes back to the non-professionals who get
entrusted with self-policing violence to
subdue any Revolutionaries that threaten to touch
the artificial resource of the 
elite few, the Master, 
who can break and reassemble, but
can’t read the Nine of Swords you
lay to cross the Emperor, though he can 
feel the sodium amytal needles tickle
the thick, veiny necks of his 
favorite loathsome creatures. 

                    Two
Despite the evidence of any of the
ITs present, they proclaim innocence
for the day-light murdering of
all sentimental surrealists opposing the
System’s own vile creature
whose worst kind of stoogin for the plutes is 
worshiped up on its fins in 
a celebration of markets, its value inverse
to any factual portion
they can’t pervert to
justify their violation of the Cycle, the
divine nature of their quest for immortality
that perpetuates this fucking war of
hate, demanding the Return of the
dusky natives to the Colonies of the Master.  

                    Three
Planning a silent extinction, if
they push dissent beyond the Zero, they
believe in their empty little heads they can 
amplify the boundaries between our stories to get
 Δt under their control, but when you
ride the parabola, you stop asking
the knight of deliverance to be the
proof against their magic, or digging wrong
through their misinformation for your questions, 
and in the map of your red stars, they realize they
broke the vessels of Creation and don’t
know how to reassemble the Fragments they have
into IG’s benzene ring, their only tool to 
call passengers to reclaim their seats, not worry
that the maniac bent on suicide is about
to reduce the World to their final answers. 

                    Four
“Fickt nicht mit der Raketmaensch,” you
cry, but they criminalize identities you must hide, 
and when anyone tries to find the Center, They
extract life as payment for the order they seek. 

                    Five
Citizens, Schwarzkommandos, Lakotians, and paranoids
who see through the thin-woven veil are 
rounded up, detained, and not 
allowed to exercise the rights of paranoids
convinced of their humanity because
it lives among the second-class trivia they’re
burying with deified Technology as paranoid, 
which highlights forks where they might have turned, but
haven’t started the complicated business of losing faith because
they’ve been taught history as sequences of violence, and they
want to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles to keep
society bound to an aggregate of last moments, putting
us on the boulevards of regret they built themselves,
always in service to the holy fucking
market, a monument to Analysis created by idiots,
terrified we might organize deliberately
and drag our covalent bonds by their little tentacles into
public spaces, where we can draw our own paranoid
schematics to navigate their bullshit situations.

Disclaimer: The characters, Systems, and concepts referenced above, as well as the Proverbs for Paranoids, belong to Thomas Pynchon, and were created for the National Book Award-winning Gravity’s Rainbow, its companion novel, V., and the novels Against the Day, Inherent Vice, and The Crying of Lot 49.

But the progress we can initiate by learning from this moment could belong to all of us.

Editor: Erynn Crittenden