PROLOGUE:

I've been dreaming awake for too long, walking circles, and the soles of my eyes are jet black.
The last shithouse rat I consulted suggested that I might need a change of scenery, and recommended that I move to a grottier city. Someplace where your face gets dirtier when you rub it on the street. This is the essence of culture, he tells me: to experience the degradation of travel.
"What the hell do you know about it?" I shouted at him, just as somebody knocked on the door.
"What?" said the voice outside.
"Occupied," I said, reflexively, in the contractual third-person melody. The hour was up, so I threw my last hundred bucks down the toilet-hole and fastened my pants. When I opened the door, there was nobody out there. I looked at the sky. It was full of corkscrews. The trees were muttering, but I couldn't tell if it was wind. I read the light: three sources (red setting sun, two early-blooming sodium-vapor lights down the gravel road, still warming up, raydiosity low.) I powered up the binocs. Nothing funny on IR.
I stepped into my own screaming tinnitus and walked to the car, keeping an eye on the chrome, the reflections in the windshield, the distorted silhouette Dr. Seuss trees.
The doorhandle sounded like a gunshot in the whining silence, and the major-thirds song of my conscientious keys mocked me as I got in.
Coins are keys you give away. Put 'em in a coke machine, they unlock a coke. Put 'em in a parking meter, they unlock time. Put 'em in the meth machine, and they unlock the failsafe. Then you can push all the buttons. And with your numb fingers, you might be able to type out a vibrating version of what happened on the keys you have left.
If it weren't for the past, things would be different.
Ha-ha!
The horizon is a flat oscilloscope at this altitude. I can hear the ocean in my shell.
Waveforms laugh green like trees when you try to un-collapse them. They elbow the scrambled eggs, and everybody chuckles. That's all we've got going for us at the moment. Tonight I heard a story, and I laughed so hard I cried. For a moment, the water in my eyes corrected my vision, like dyamic neural contact lenses. Looking through waves, I saw clearly.
I have to work the reaction backwards. It's going to happen anyway. I'm going to laugh the split world back together. And I've got a sky full of coiling cameras to record the whole thing.
I've got nowhere to go. The payphone took my keys.

Lawrence Underwood, San Diego, January 2002.

----------------------------

[concepts i'm integrating]
Discovery wings channel.
supercollider physics (bubble chamber, spiral paths, high speed, antimatter)
memory: white gloves
crick's astonishing hypothesis
bonehead quantum physics
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: Koans and Mu-mon's comments followed by Stuccomeyer's comments, Stuccomeyer being analogous to Allagash in Cloud Factory and Zeke in EM, also to DG)
format like Trout Fishing in America, but macropatterned/fractal chapter structure
schroedinger's cat: "be right back"
cribbing from simpsons
transcribing tv backwards, no sound
compulsion the root of all action
the clumsy carpenter
stealth technology/fly-by-wire, aircraft held aloft by computer power, tesselation
meta-tags review
el chuga/mojo/juice
the theory of fractal composition
three mammals: the hole-in-the-head coda
spooky action at a distance
rods
conspiracy
facial-ridge versus weird-haircut theory of otherworlders
major thirds: crosswalks, cuckoo clocks, doorbells, foghorns, elevator chimes, car alarms, nyaa-nyaa, Beethoven's 8th
reading the light/3D modeling, antishadows, design color theory
Dr. Seuss
gui design/eye tracking/memes/heuristics
catWave, the failed project, completed anyway as punctuation to narrative
flip-books in margins: mouthing final chapter.
occasional interruptions by 'the narrator,' the only reliable omniscient character
emergency hammer: break glass to use
ansi/boing standards: snooze limit
the thoughtful kamikaze
test pilot of consciousness: scott crossfield
hubble space telescope
printed waveform-frames at page bottom, decipherable by scanning them in and playing in suitable software. Somebody'll do it, and it will end up on the web. Content? Maybe something like: I LOVE YOU! I HATE YOU! looped. Must be spooky. Speech synthesizer voice: "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
mad skillz
home-slice bread

-------------------------------------------
Notes:

Oh, and I'm going to re-incorporate the concept of the Kamikaze (project comes full-circle... supercollision!)

I'm playing with the idea of the title having a rider or subtitle. Something like: "a methamphetamine rocket-ride through a mind unsafe at any speed."

Here's the basic idea:

It's a story told by a guy who's hallucinating the whole time he tells it,
but somehow he has retained a subset of the craft required for storytelling. This will allow seemingly random (not random: nested-fractal, but lots of people won't know the difference) perspective and narrative-subject shifts that will make a kind of sub-intuitive sense.
I am considering encapsulating it thusly: The outer, or timing narrative, is the story of a Kamikaze who leaves on a mission, reconsiders his motivations, and changes course to find someplace to have lunch. Inside that, we'll have the first-person narrative of the supposed author describing the failure of the catWave project, starting with Elevator Music and your Cat-cam 'what if' suggestion and carrying through to a climax of paranoid hallucination brought on by the methamphetamine component of the research for the book. [You, by the way, get to be incorporated into Stuccomeyer, the sidekick-element in this: a kind of devil-may-care garage-style philosopher who, when presented with the opportunity, will always try to get the narrator into more trouble.] Inside the failure-of-catwave structure, we'll have the poor, battered artifact itself: fragments of catWave, well-crafted but with no basis in science or reality, entirely shot down by research, meticulously deconstructed. Potentially very funny!