One of the things my childhood taught me is that inbreeding is a funny joke until you meet the results. This itself is not a joke. You’ll think it is because your distance from it will make it seem absurd but I’ve seen this absurd throw a chair at a teacher in year 5. He looked like the banjo kid from Deliverance but didn’t need the makeup. On our school camping trip to Moreton Island, this absurd stood behind a camp organizer who was fixing our tent and mimed aggressively raping him on a pillow effigy. This absurd then peed in that corner of the tent. I don’t mean like he peed in his sleep or had some kind of bladder distress, he was looking over his shoulder at us and laughing while he actively peed in his rape corner. There was a 3 minute scuffle between the rest of us, 10 to a large tent, to fight for sleeping positions farthest away from him. That was the trip where he told us he fingered his cat one time.

There’s a kind of sub-class of feral human being that most of the other classes don’t see outside of news reports on either a guy holding a knife to his de-facto wife’s neck or the RSPCA rescuing a small horde of animals from a home plastered in newspaper and shit. I’m from this class, both of these things happened on my street, it’s just dumb luck granted me the mobility to mingle with my betters undetected. There’s a bleakness to the Brisbane suburban slurry. There’s not the population density, drugs, or weapons that would make anything these beings do severe enough to get noticed, let alone be romanticised in movies or rap lyrics. There’s just a crushing malaise that, like the summer sun, is enough to stifle every attempt at action but not enough to just kill you. The resulting madness is appropriately analogous to a melanoma: small, quintessentially Australian, and typically only noticeable when you really look.

I was grumbling about this place in high school when my English teacher piped up. Typically, when you are badmouthing a place and its people, a teacher will interrupt to chide or offer an alternative view. Mine could only add an anecdote that went like this: She was organizing a drama day for kindergarteners, between 4-5 year olds, and one of the little ones didn’t have a permission slip. My teacher called the child’s home to get verbal consent. When the parent was told it was for a drama day, it replied, “I’m sick of all this fucking kike shit” and hung up.

Australia’s Jewish population is about 112,000 people, 95% of which live in Sydney or Melbourne. Brisbane’s population of Jews is about a few hundred and I’ve met most of them which is a side-effect of being friends with one. This person has never met a Jew and is probably more than 3 degrees of separation from any interaction with one, and yet they are sick of kike shit. While it’s not always antisemitism, this is indicative of a kind of thought process you see in these places. One so divorced from reality it becomes a cryptid for the normals to repeat as an anecdote to incredulous friends, like an inbred cat fingerer. And so we come to Logan. More specifically, we come to a demented tweet’s live theatre cousin hanging over the M1 there.

 

Don’t try to take this all in at once. There’s a lot of moving parts here and I don’t want you to hurt yourself.

If you’re anything like me, the first thing you noticed was the lack of a web address. I’m used to seeing shit like this as I live in Brisbane and have the kind of face that makes strangers hand me small cards about white supremacy. They all have a web address on them somewhere because they all want you to go to their website. You can’t explain a far-reaching conspiracy to make white babies retarded with fluoride in just a couple of sentences. I mean, that doesn’t even leave room for sources. That this doesn’t have directions to any further information is the easily missed linchpin of the whole thing. This isn’t a thread, you can’t write “1/10” on that thing and hang more from subsequent overpasses, everything they want to communicate and how they want to communicate it is all there. Through this, we can explore the mind of the scorched Brisbane imbecile.

Getting the obvious out of the way first, the drawings. This is just bad design. Why have two penises and two vaginas touching only to have an isolated red X to symbolise a negative? Passersby are going to be drawn to the images and all they’re going to see is a homeschooled 8 year old’s understanding of homosexual activity next to a red cross over nothing. Do you hate homosexuals or asexuals? You’re expecting your audience to read the rest of the text and then use that to understand that a picture of two moustached birds kissing actually means you don’t like lesbians? A billboard has to explain everything at a glance, you should have drawn a red crossed circle around the disembodied vulvae and medieval family crest made of dicks. I absolutely know that this wasn’t done for fear of making the already sub-webcomic quality art less legible. This means that someone stood musing, either to a sympathetic party or a baffled universe, whether or not to get another bedsheet and try drawing them again or to just give up and stick a red cross over white oblivion and hope that it makes sense.

To their credit, at least they remembered lesbians. This does suggest an operant principle beyond being grossed out by dude-on-dude which is a commendable level of coherence from the homophobe community and a fucking miracle coming from this creature. The thing about remembering lesbians, though is that you’re stuck drawing vulvae and that shit’s hard. It’s not like drawing a dick. Dicks are so obvious they impose themselves. You have to work just to make the innocent things you’re drawing not look like dicks. Conversely, you have to interpret a vulva. You have to tilt your head and have someone point it out to you, so avoid drawing them whenever you can because unless you’re an actual artist who can frame them with hints of thigh and leg you’re left with something that looks like a pair of dusty doritos. Now people are driving under this thing and thinking the author has a bone to pick with homosexuals and a hairy hourglass.

Maybe the traffic was bad that day. Maybe the cars weren’t really moving that fast and the drivers had a moment to look beyond your crossed weens. This is the big time for conspiracy theorists so deranged they can’t even work the computers at the local library, and here too our tragic author has fallen short. The selection of different colours for your text is a time-tested way to draw your audience’s attention to the important elements of your presentation. Typically, one would leave the function words the standard black and highlight the content words in red but this only works if your red isn’t washed out by back lighting and if your sentence is more classically structured, not a stream of consciousness ending in a sheep laughing at me. The result is now a distinctly visible sentence amongst red mess that reads, “Only the and want marriage!! Wake up, research baaaaahahaha” which sounds just enough like real instructions to veer into deliberately ironic surrealism. And you know the writer thought about this too because the WAKE UP in black has clearly been painted over an original WAKE UP in red. This poor organism has been thinking exactly this, that their emphatic font colour has been so used that it’s become the default and their sentence now features weirdly emphasised function words, so they’ve launched into an hilarious half measure to fix it.

Now, to the sentence itself. What it actually says is remarkably incoherent for something like this and why I was really surprised there wasn’t a website on it somewhere. When I say, “incoherent” a lot of you may be saying, “but Gabriel, it clearly says NEW WORLD ORDER, ILLUMINATI, and JEWS. Also, you’re looking good today”. Thank you but what makes it incoherent is that it tells me to research a new world order without specifying the one I should be looking for. The first new world order that shows up in my google searches is the dark mirror of Hulkamania and I’m already a member of that 4 life so further research is just unnecessary. The thing is, there are a lot of Illuminatis, NWOs, Sell-out governments, and homosexuals. The potential combinations of these outnumber the possible moves in chess. How am I supposed to find the right one amidst the false flags, wrestling stables, and unresearched maniacs who litter the internet? What if a reader went home, researched Bash at the Beach ’96, and came away with the idea that Scott Hall and Kevin Nash were conspiring to sell homosexuals to the Liberal Party?

The conspiracy itself is remarkably unremarkable. There’s no hint of the kinds of personal creativity you usually get with local maniacs. It’s such a haphazard collection of other people’s conspiracies that it can only be a poser lunatic’s first attempt at impressing the other children with entry-level villains. Jews, really? In Australia? Suggesting that Jews run the local media is so incredibly offensive to Rupert Murdoch that it’s downright un-Australian. This was your time to shine, Loganite, and you’ve given me something that reads like madlib filled in by an algorithm and a comment section. Now all that time spent in a garage huffing paint fumes was for fun instead of liberating the minds of your fellow countrymen. Though that would explain the baa that degenerates into laughter. This is actually my personal favourite bit of it, an artistic achievement given it shares an installation with attempted lady genitals. Under any other circumstances I’d assume the writer meant it as some addition to the insult but here I can’t be sure it’s not because they started laughing while they were writing it.

Speaking of huffing paint, it’s the only explanation for the use of “sheeple” twice. Sheeple is the kind of word you use when you are 13 and have just tried opinions for the first time. A lot of this does suggest that a 13 year old is responsible but you can tell it isn’t because a teen would never forget to send you to their website. This whole thing screams both “thirteen years old” and “irony” so loudly it can’t be either. If it’s irony then it’s like me marching in a Nazi gathering is irony. I’m not a Nazi but I wouldn’t look out of place among a group of them. The irony is hinged so heavily on knowing that I’m personally super-not a Nazi that the joke becomes esoteric to the point of invisibility. If this is a joke, it’s so perfectly structured that it only appeals to dipshits like myself who can appreciate homophobic bedsheet manifestos as outsider art, and there’s less of us than there are people who think Jews control suburban Brisbane kindergartens so it’s gotta be legit.

What the hell is this person’s life? What Escherian labyrinth of madness is it stuck in that this combination of paranoid free association, grade-school genitals, and the word “sheeple” amounted to a thought so profound it required this? Don’t bother thinking about it, you’ve a better chance of understanding the inner monologue of a sea cucumber. A cryptid is often defined by the thing that makes it an exception in the first place, the Mexican Goat Sucker isn’t called the Mexican Tends Its Young Until the Age of Two, and I’ve no doubt this worldview defines its holder. There must be real a real lure in the excitement of it all. I wake up and try to remember if I have any yoghurt left or if I ate it all at 3am ’cause I couldn’t sleep. Waking up and knowing that I have to finish making a banner to fight the good fight against The Illumifaggy seems much more exciting. As attention grabbing as glimpses can be, the cryptids aren’t capable of affecting change any more than bigfoot numbers can rise to pest levels. One can only marvel at them when they emerge from the underplace.

By Gabe.