This is a 24,000 word horror novella about a morbid fascination: self-help.

It’s one of the 21st century’s phenomenons. It’s corruptible linguistically. One letter away from “sell-help”. Another letter away from “self-hell”. It’s corruptible in other ways, too. Scientology. James Arthur Ray. Jonestown. History is full of charismatic sociopaths with the solution to all your problems, so long as those problems are a heavy wallet, your sanity, and your life.

This book takes that idea, turns the dial to 11, and tears it off. Review copies are available. Hit me up at mail @ this website URL, with “Gateless Gate, Skyless Sky” as the subject line.

—

“…Welcome to the program, Mr Zhang.”

What would you do to change your life?

What if you said ‘anything’…and meant it?

Jiro Zhang is a small-time criminal, steadily circling the drain. Then he meets Makassar, psychologist and founder of the Gateless Gate, Skyless Sky method.

This method is like nothing that has ever existed before. Its techniques are terrifying, illegal, and perhaps deadly. It can cure you of anything, even your humanity. It’s Zen Buddhism on steroids, crack cocaine, and Zyklon B. Jiro just has to sign the dotted line.

Under the guidance of the sinister Makassar, Jiro will walk a path to the edge of sanity, and then far, far beyond. He’s on the ultimate self-help journey…but he might look inside and find there’s no “self” left at the end.

Gateless Gate is a horror novella that mixes Buddhism, transhumanism, and ultra-violence. It’s the tale of a man who tears out the darkness in his soul and replaces it with something a thousand shades blacker.

[The Gate Opens Wide.]

If Metallica’s career was a movie narrated by Morgan Freeman, here’s the part where he says “…and that’s when it all started to go wrong.”

“It’s slow” is a common complaint lodged against Metallica’s 1991 self-titled release, but that’s not the true problem: a slow Metallica album might be actually interesting. Instead, what they did was take any possible extremity and…make it less extreme.

A few long songs became lots of short ones. Furious speed became a uptempo bounce. Droning slowness became a downtempo plod. Everything was smoothed out, graded even – this is an album so flat you can iron your clothes on it.

Pick out something you liked about 80s Metallica. Odds are, that element is now either gone or greatly reduced. It could have been career suicide, but unknown to everyone, they were positioned ride one of the biggest waves in popular music.

Nirvana’s Nevermind was sliding out of Seattle’s bomb bay doors, and rock music would be destroyed and rebuilt in a new, “alternative” image. Rock concerts became the new place to get bored out of your skull, and Metallica became the heavier version of the grunge rock craze. People seemed to dig their new lack of pretension. Playing too fast or too slow is trying, man. And trying isn’t cool.

Sometimes, The Black Album hits home. Other time, it’s my finger that hits home, on the skip button.

“Sad but True” is pedestrian and lacks energy. Hetfield’s riffs are weak and Ulrich’s drumming has a mechanical, overproduced quality. It almost seems to flop out of your speakers.

“Enter Sandman”…chronic overplay is an interesting phenomenon. Some songs survive it, other songs don’t. No further comment except that I neither want nor don’t want to hear “Sandman”: it inspires no reaction from me at all.

“Nothing Else Matters” is either the most commercial Metallica song ever or an fascinating fusion of genres. Apparently Hetfield wrote the first few bars while on the phone with his girlfriend, which is why the opening arpeggios can be played with one hand.

“Holier than Thou”, “Through the Never”, and “The Struggle Within” rock fairly hard and pull the album back a bit to a thrash metal sound. “Never” is the album standout, featuring one of Hetfield’s better vocal performances and an energized set of riffs.

The rest of the album is a crapshoot of commercial-sounding metal carefully calculated to not scare anyone wearing flannel and stonewashed jeans. Tracks like “Don’t Tread on Me”, “Of Wolf and Man, and “My Friend in Misery” are now heavily dated, especially if you believe metal should push against a boundary somewhere. None of it is offensive, but you want something more – more speed, more heaviness, more hooks, better developed ideas. Instead, these songs just show up, punch a clock, do their job, then leave. They’re the Teamsters of the metal world.

For all its failings, The Black Album is not grunge rock. But it’s infected with the grunge rock disease, a pretentious lack of pretension.

Sound contradictory? Welcome to the 90s. Rockstars pretending to be tortured, introverted loners while making millions of dollars. Pantera and Ministry conducting Stalinesque purges of their back catalog, lest anybody suspect they were capable of laughing or having fun. The whole decade sucked. Phony, fake, wrist-slashing garbage. Lyrically, Hetfield bows to changing times only once, writing a sob story about his upbringing in “The God that Failed”. Musically, he bent so much he turned into a pretzel.

I wish there was more contrast. It seems like it was written so that every song could be a potential radio hit, and it comes off like a plate of mashed potato – some hills and some valleys, but it’s still pile of mashed spud.

In zoology, you’re not supposed to anthropomorphosize animal behavior. For example, a dog doesn’t “laugh”, it “vocalises”. The idea is that you keep a bit of daylight between human emotions and animal emotions, because they’re not the same thing.

But people are fine with anthropormophisizing other things. We talk about nations, states, churches, backyard mud wrestling federations, etc as if they’re people. Reagan described the USSR as an “evil empire”. Can an empire be evil? Any more than an empire can have a favourite basketball team?

(All adjectives are behavioral. “Evil empire” = “an empire that does evil things”)

Ayn Rand once said “don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.” But the things she thought were caused by her family, her childhood, her friends, and her feelings. There isn’t some “Ayn Rand” homunculus issuing orders from on high. It seems to me more likely that Rand’s feeling of free will emerged from lots of little incidents, both inside her mind and in the world outside, and they composited to form her personality. And if they created her personality, maybe they deserve the credit or blame for her actions.

Like Rand, The Soviet Union was a very large emergent froth coming from many subunits, which themselves were made up of many subunits, etc. What level of the apparatus bears the mark of Cain? Which level is “evil”? When talking about, say, a massive artificial famine like Holodomor, who do you blame?

The USSR itself? No, it only acted the way it did because of the smaller gears ticking inside. The NKVD, or the People’s Commissariat of Land Cultivation? No, same problem.

What about the minions who enacted the policies? Were they to blame? They would have claimed they were following orders.

So we can blame Stalin. He was the irreducible evil. Hopefully he won’t claim that he acted ideologically, otherwise blame for the Ukrainian famine gets passed back to Vladimir Lenin, then to Karl Marx, then to Adam Smith, then to John Ball, then to Jesus (and then to…). But hey, at least we’ve found the ultimate source of the Holodomor…

…No, we we haven’t. We’re still horsefucked. A nation is very complicated and elaborate, and if we’re withholding judgement on the USSR for this reason, we need to realise that  Joseph Stalin’s mind was even more  complicated and elaborate. There were 100 billion neurons in his brain. Each hemisphere had 400 to 500 distinct brain areas. His genome encompassed 20,000 genes, 84% of which were expressed in the brain. He was an incredibly sophisticated thinking machine.

Even if we understood a normal person’s brain, I don’t think we could have understood Stalin’s. Everyone who knew him or his works commented on how unusual he seemed, how cold and cruel. No more a human being than HAL9000. Adolf Hitler, although he owned a dog, strikes me as a stereotypical “cat person” – anxious, neurotic, sensitive, and artistically-minded. Benito Mussolini is more like a stereotypical “dog person” – a gregarious backslapping Il Duce, prone to self-aggrandisement and egotism. Stalin strikes me as a person who would have brooked no pets at all. Although maybe he considered Lavrentiy Beria a kind of pet.

So what in this confusing mare’s nest can we “blame”? Stalin’s neurons? They have to fire together in elaborate Hebbian patterns, and no one neuron is responsible for anything. His genes? All behavioural traits are heavily polygenic, there wasn’t any one “evil gene” in Stalin’s mind. And these genes were gifts from his parents, so we’re almost back to blaming cavemen again. “What caused the Holodomor?” It seems the answer might be…everything.

Homer Simpson’s method for getting out of trouble is to say “It was like that when I got here”, and so is mine.