Jazz Is A Disease:

A Brief Treatise Of Jazz Music On The Human Mind, Body & Spirit

Rangold Spirtu

Hello again,

I hope this letter find you well, despite the large uptake of the winter condition. The following is a cultural artifact, and deserves to be preserved for at least 194 Millennia. I hope that your tense equine publication will do just that. Hugs, love, and gonorrhea.

Cheers,

Lt. Gen Hardsworth Glendale Matan, Sr. Esq IV.

A Forward by Parson White:

This manuscript was found buried in a junkyard adjacent to a modern movie cinema, which was made out of bricks. Not much is known about Rangold Spirtu. All he left to this world was a shotgun, two short stories about old people hiring a hit man to make love in a canoe or a cannon, a list of words he could not pronounce correctly, an overcooked ham, and fourteen pairs of pants, all with a variety of stains. We do know this...he would occasionally carve various anagrams and aphorisms into anything made of white oak. His words will live on (barring a white oak parasite that destroys fragile support system white oak needs to survive) through time as he could not.

It is said that the day he died, four children refused to play with wooden dolls ever again. It is also stated that his corpse was found in a building, approximately 49 days after death. It was covered with maggots and roaches and various dismembered penises stolen from 5th Street Hospital in New Clairborne City. It was found by a dog first, who subsequently tried to eat the corpse, and managed to rip off a good 2/3s of his face, as well as most of his left leg. The dog was never to be found. The police said that he died, and turned the body over to the city morgue. They also adhered all the penises to his body before burial. His funeral was held on March 9th, with 109 people signing the guestbook (though it is commonly believed his half-brother was at least 62 of them). He was buried with all the things that the coroner believed to be useful in the afterlife, including four spears, a fog machine, a shovel, and a copy of the broadways hit musical ‘There Is Always A Baguette For Maggie’. His strange mutilated corpse still lays at a subway station, as the town council didn’t care for a cemetery to be that close to a shop where one would buy nails.

When this document was unearthed, at least 59 fortnights ago, it was thought to be a joke, a prank being pulled on a local forensic scientist. But Mr. Spirtu’s bile, blood, and ovary juice were found to be all over it. Local historians could not believe Rangold had left yet a fourth document unto the world. They attempted to get it published in the 108 volume of ‘Crumb Times’, a periodical that would occasionally house several well-known and underground artists work, after they had perished, amidst their sea of extreme Japanese pornography and photos of napalm victims. Alas, the company said, they believe this man was still alive and sent several Cossacks to beat up the elderly man who always sits in the middle of Vespucci Circle on Saturday mornings. Eventually, it was passed to yours truly, from a person who could only hold blue cups if they were filled with water or sugar. As soon as I read it, I knew the world at large had to know about this man’s great final work.

For me, this is the most human thing I can possible associate Mr. Spirtu with. It’s as if you can see his hands physically moving the pen or pencil over the paper. As if you can hear the primordial scratching of tip to ancient paper. As if you can smell the blood, spit, and bowel movement as they cascade unseen or unfelt as the only drive he had was to write this paper. Some say it was demonic possession that spurred the majority of it. »Can this be human made?» one notable Ivy-League professor quipped. »The writings here are almost too unbelievable, to scrupulously scribed to be of non-divine origin.» Nevertheless, the humanity seethes over the edges of paper, and almost intoxicates its reader, much as it must have Rangold Spirtu. Anyone who is familiar with the beasts of the artists mind can relate to this work.

It is unknown whether this would have been expanded if Rangold was still alive. But, even as is, it provides tremendous insight to the man, and humanity alike. I would like to thank this publication for allow such words to be spewed here and I sincerely hope that after the next three biological holocausts this document could survive and be passed on to the next stage of humanity, for they don’t deserve to have missed this outpouring of the human spirit just because they weren’t born yet when it was written. With that, and without further ado, I present to you the last work of Rangold Spirtu…Jazz is a disease.

Jazz Is A Disease

Jazz is a disease.

It is large and horrific and overpowering. It festers and eats away at healthy tissue, devouring all that crosses its path. Jazz is a plague that spreads without care, remorse, or boundary. It infects and refuses to subside. There is no medicine, there is no cure. It lives off of strife, it breaths off of attempts to bury, it thrives in attempts to cure it, it prospers off attempts to kill it. It will grow bigger and stronger until all organisms are suffocated and are converted or die out. Armies falter, brainmatter congeals, and empires succumb. Jazz is an infection. It inflames and contorts. It can lie dormant for years and strike with vicious anger or vast subtlety. No one is safe from its all-encompassing arms, fists, and thighs.

Jazz is incendiary, a violent reactionary. The type of intangible item all mothers fear, and all brave men chase. A type of force that trembles tsunamis, and halts earthquakes. A type of power that can be unmatched in this dimension. Jazz is an antagonist, a volatile debater. A mongrel, with iron jaws and superfluous maw. There is no escape from its grasp range. No rock to hide under, no planet forbidden. Jazz is dangerous. It corrupts and assimilates like a cannon or wild boar. Ambushing the young, innocent, and unassuming. It rips apart and assumes command. It’s spirit, a mighty spear.

Jazz is a drug. It is an aural cocaine. It creates a space in the brain and mind where it will live and suffocate anything else that tries to occupy that space. If it starts to fade, the space itself remains and will only be filled with the sweet jazz nectar that produced it. Jazz is an addiction. It is more powerful than methamphetamines. The full control it manifests is immeasurable. Days, even weeks, may pass between its gratifying release of auditory chemical delights, but when it occurs, the magic will be like nothing before it. And the craving will grow. Soon, nothing will satiate it. But the struggle will continue, and you will endure joyfully. Jazz is mind control. It changes the way you breath, the way to see, the way you eat, the way you juggle, the way you arrange undergarments, the way you participate in illicit games after 2:11AM on a Thursday night, and the way you fall down a flight of stairs, all before you realize anything is different. You think everything is normal, you go about your normal routines, and then all of a sudden, something activates in your brain, and jazz is in full control. Someday you may recognize it, perhaps its control will be too tight to allow you be take account of how the world is revolving. But it’ll be there. A small splinter of reality. Ready to strike, ready to act, ready to be.

Jazz is a terrorist. It is destructive and angry and levels anything in its way. It will fight without mercy. Corrupted, fanatical, completely single minded. It will drive into buildings and level anything it deems unwarranted in real life. Jazz is a daydream. The distant reverie of lost thoughts, actions, and motives. The truest suffocation of freedom. Carrying away its prey to realms unfathomable. Distracting from any other focus. The spotlight, the limelight…the heart of jazz. Jazz is the beacon of hope and despair. Raising up, casting aside, shoving down. The end of everything, the beginning of everything. A horrid, turbulent force that provides the necessities of life in its sweet aural nectar.

And I love it. I must have the joys only jazz can provide. I want to wrap it around me like a straightjacket or long shag carpeting and rub it against my flesh and spirit. I try to play mind games with it. I try to not listen, or to distract myself with thumbtacks or ancient Egyptian weaving patterns. I try to dance with the rebellious moons or sleep through weeks as if they were days. But I cannot escape its pull. It has enchanted me like a sorcerous, pulling me deeper with every minute. At times I try to escape. At times I try to love other things. At times I succeed, but am always pulled back towards the black deity of the burnt hand of the overpowering colossus. It makes me lie in a field and causes me violent convulsions until I worship it again. Praying that it will never leave me, for the chasm it will create will tear my brain from my skull, and suffocate my heart. It will empty my bowels without pause and summon contractions so ungeometric that Lovecraft himself would cease to believe the possibilities. It will bathe me in dystrophies beyond comprehension and force me to eat my own flesh until the dawn flattens the earth. My truest love, my deepest happiness. Jazz, the master of my mind, my body, and my soul.