by shaun lawton
This periodical aims to measure the worth of success through the eyes of those who dare pursue their passion for the amateur. It's a brand new modern cousin of the magazine, only perfect bound and reduced to the size of a six by nine. Roughly the size of Plasma Tales or Impressions, thin glossy chapbooks which contain a wide variety of original writings one might loosely file under human interest, because the one thing they have in common might be the direct electrical current they tap into, the fluid shocking grasp of the moment itself, reverberating with its own hypnotic rhythm and series of interpenetrating counterrhythms producing a subliminal harmonic that could awaken cells heretofore unbegun.
If you would recall for a moment, in silent meditation, that long bygone era of ethical journalism was it called, back when people were men and they really reported the news with integrity by corroborating sources and making sure the everyman could sit and catch up with so called world events.
Forget about that for one damn moment and find yourself refreshed by the invigorating articles in the Journal of the Mind. Because honestly we could care less for whatever happened in Butt-town, and we are not interested in facts, and the only integrity we have left remains with integers, as when a couple of them make two, and how 1+1=3, because that's what life's all about.
Rest assured you will not be bothered by any such nonsense as would be accounted for in the most prestigious newspapers of history. Rubbish of the most baneful sort, even the fact they grew to charge a nickel per day (that's a dollar a month) belied the despicable garden of monstrous lies that would grow to mutate into a pogrom of genocidal proportions which are still rocking the human population to this day with increasingly exorbitant numbers, digits, reaching out to finger the truth, that coveted myth we the vampires of imagination crave so much.
These articles will be written by some of the finest minds to have flourished online and in print for quite some time. Each slim and trim issue will be chock full of micro fictions and flash faction and dubious essays concerning an array of of approaches designed to provoke the reader and automatically guide them toward learning how to think for themselves.
A sort of ink stained literary lubricant, if you will; but I prefer the more evocative description of likening these truncated reports as being synonymous with popping IQ booster pills. That's because the contributors to Journal of the Mind each have an exceptional intelligence and uncanny ability to pierce between the atoms of the veil, and seize the heart of the moment, that pulsating and vibrant essence running through the cosmos we think of as the current moment in time because we're in the process of being electrocuted which may be likened with possession.
To be possessed by the spirit of life itself is what it means to be human, among a wide variety of other living things coexisting apart from one another mostly yet feeding on the left over remnants of each other's dried up dreams and carcasses.
This is a collection of writings to provoke readers to follow their imaginations wherever their minds can be taken. It's not necessary to know what happened downtown last Saturday night. Pay attention to the sound passing through the finest hairs in your ear canals. Notice the syncopation with the wind. The rustling of thousands of leaves in the darkness of night under a pale moon light. How the silent stars slowly slide en masse to the left.
Our columnists and correspondents only wish for you the reader to be able and willing then to relish each successive feature, review or editorial which we are able to assemble from the various wizards at our disposal.
The editors are thinking of eliminating known bylines and replacing them with pseudonyms, in order to remove any potential association or connection to any given persona, so that the reader may then focus on the words themselves without having a yardstick by which to measure or even calibrate their opinion of what they've read.
Journal of the Mind will pave a new integrity of word and phrasing and language and metaphor. The editors have just decided that well known names deserve to be heard by an even wider readership. All will be allowed.
Since it will necessarily be made available in print by means of POD tech and self publishing, the cost will be as minimal as possible with enough for the contributors of each issue to split their share of the chump change with the dot com platform providing their service. Since a book this size may cost around 5 dollars wholesale, the cover price will be determined as one dollar times the amount of contributors, so for example if the editor and two contributors produce an issue, that edition will sell for $8 + the usual four dollar shipping fee which brings total cost to $12.
Journal of the Mind is not about the money as much as it's about a fun exercise for all involved including the reader. The editors believe it's important that every contributing writer to Journal of the Mind receive one dollar per issue sold, and if this publication comes out as a monthly (and it will) then just do the math by factoring in five different levels of potential success. If ten copies sell, each contributor makes ten dollars. The idea being, if each successive issue manages to hold the reader's interest, within the expansive community of creative writers alone it could go viral enough to become a new meme.
Stay tuned for the first issue of Journal of the Mind.
Coming soon from Plasma Press.
Journal of the Mind will be as if issuing from a cut-out hole in a newspaper containing only the human interest section, and blowing it up into its own world. Journal of the Mind's code of ethics will dictate that the application of fantastical prose be done so with enough sagacity and ethos which qualify its articles in a manner akin to the outmoded ethic of the best journalists of old. Journal of the Mind will be not unlike wandering through a mine field of explosive speculative fiction which unlock areas of the reader's psyche few even stop to consider on a daily basis. Journal of the Mind seeks to keep above a certain waterline while not limiting contributor's scope of creativity, but rather enhancing it.
Journal of the Mind is only now beginning to take shape in the mind of just one of its inceptors. Journal of the Mind will never veritably reach that threshold we could mutually agree upon were the shared domain of consciousness because assembled aggregates of data recombining into predictable patterns will never suffice to re-enact consciousness much less be possessed by it, which brings to mind a curious possibility. Just because we've established there's no such thing as monsters doesn't mean that will stop us from making it so.
Journal of the Mind will keep it's multitentacled appendages wielding writing instruments to the spare and parched territories dancing in between the digital pixels of cyberspace. A continuum of subdirectories stored within directories with no end or beginning in sight. We will do our best to keep up with the rest of the fantasists most cutting edge material that could be provided in order to keep our mission statement going.
Journal of the Mind has no mission statement. We are dedicated to finding a more interesting hobby to keep us occupied, while hoping to stumble upon a sudden wild excursion into an unexpected reading territory which led to previously unanticipated passages of lurid and even thought provoking description. These were articles on the surging new practicalities of the burgeoning new dimensional capabilities of our technological singularity.
Journal of the Mind will keep tracking this rapidly advancing singularity right on down to the -mode, the so-called quantum of action, a property of the electromagnetic wave itself. Dedicated to the ongoing current developments of our timeline, our journal will set out on a search looking to find new perspectives and ideas for processing our mutual experience here during this brief interval in the nearly expired refractory period following the pandemic.
The reset experienced globally in the year of Perfect Vision only four annular cycles behind us already remains as the ground zero-point from which the initial clap of prominent impact must be measured before lightning strikes and distant, rolling thunder responds. This "reset," "recycle," "repent" and resume our process of mindlessly strip mining our lungs in order to breathe, repeating the manufactured mistakes, helplessly allowing the machinery to grind on and on as if it were somehow already become alive, nevermind the advent of AI, our industrious tools have come to a life of their own granted solely by our mutual refusal to respond hence granting sovereignty to the process by default, it's now just a conditioned response we've all agreed to continue feeding into so long as we each get to keep our own job.
Welcome, my son. Welcome to the machinery of the mob. So I hope you don't mind we bring about a journal. Welcome to a Journal of the Mind.