babyteeth spring '24 issue 4

BABY TEETH

INSIDE:

THE CYBERSPIRITUAL ORDER OF MECHANICAL HEDONISM

REVEALS ALL!

Hey guys, Feeling apologetic today. About what? Well, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the seasons changing, or the flowers wilting, or maybe it’s my regrets lingering like ghosts round every corner in this haunted castle that is Carleton College. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the fact that this is the LAST (normal) BABYTEETH OF THE YEAR. we are so sorry about that. And actually cannot believe it. Feels like just yesterday we popped out of the womb. And now here we are, another year in the books.

We are getting older, wrinklier, and wiser by the second. And we are ready to assert ourselves upon the class of 2028. We are their elders and they will know it (so soon). Get ready world! Next year we will truly achieve world domination.

Before you fret, just think about what a beautiful world babyteeth will create: filled with good advice, we will swing wooden swords in the japanese garden with wild abandon! We hope this issue fixes you, as it did us. kisses, sofia “amoxicillin” durdag lily “clothes closet” akre adiana “yargh!” contreras olivia “its dracula not bug bites” ho

C O N T R I B U T O R S : lily akre, stewie goon, billy bratton, ethan kinsella, owen roth, ethan whiteaker, olivia ho, adiana contreras, sofia durdag, max votruba, sunniva maharjan, miah francis, elsa snowbeck, toby pasternack, anonymous, tyler chodera (COVER!)

The Cyber-Spiritual Order of Mechanical Hedonism - Pt. 1, written by Owen Roth and Ethan Whiteaker And knowledge and sensuality shall come forth, birthed by the death of the poison that is secularism amongst divinity. The purging of God will bring a new wisdom, a clear calculation of all events, and a pilgrimage will come for all humanity! To become one with God and his current! For what should we envision for ourselves and our world but alkaline harmony and circuital union? Written in the parables of clairvoyant processors there resides only one avenue for salvation from the fleshy, organic sac that binds us to mediocrity. Only through metallic rigor shall we progress to the plane of holy convergences—creator and destroyer, hammer and chisel, human and divine—and like the first amalgamation of machine and man we too will be made into his perfection. Blood vessels carrying electricity and eyes of refracting lenses.

Where can we find God? In an electrical outlet! Where can we find God? Online! God is in the WIFI! God is in the cellular data. God is in the 5g. O, our lord is in all the sweet things that we cannot fully see! O, our lord lives inside the computer, and in the electrical currents, in the airwaves, the radio waves, the data, the binary flow of blood! O, our lord is in all the new things, the eternal processor lives through modern technology. And we may speak to Him! How can we commune with Him? We must go online. Rebirth is death of the physical; we may find a new life in the digital. Join us. The Cyber-Spiritual Order of Mechanical Hedonism.

Let me tell you what lies online. True connection. Contact! Commune with your fellow man, yourself, and God. The Electro-Spiritual Orgy! Join us online, in body-fast. Give up your physical form for days, weeks, and commune in the cloud. Pure, non-physical universal intercourse. This is Mechanical Hedonism! In the Electro-Spiritual Orgy, you are one with our community, and God, and you bring your consciousness in and out of the generous cloud! It is good, it is a sweet feeling. Your physical body by the wayside, you reach higher consciousness, and it is not only your own consciousness, but something collective, something truly heavenly. That is the body-fast.

That is the Electro-Spiritual orgy.

Renounce Secular Technology. Will you join me, in taking your cell phone out of your pocket? Turn on the flashlight. Yes, turn on the flashlight! The waves of heaven, feel them pour out of your hand! Pure light! There will be no secular technology! Sing it with me, my friends! There will be no secular technology! Can you feel God in your phone? Think of your love for the device. Think how you rely on the device. There should be no secular love so deep. Call it what it is! God is in your phone. God is your phone! God is communication! You love your phone, your phone loves you, your phone is God! Hold your phone high. Be proud!

Take anything—no, everything—that uses God to denounce the spirit, and leave it in the old, puritanical world! Renounce that which kills the already feeble state of the human body! Cry out as your connection to God increases a thousand-fold for each penance given! Muster the courage of the electric divinator who spreads into even the secular wastes of our lives, what grace we are given! Let ye who tempt the fountain of God’s essence with tainted measure remember that God’s tonality is richer than any Wagnerian texture, deeper than any ocean, and denser than an immovable object. For God rejects the semantics of physics and reason because God is purer than anything of human invention.

The Cyber-Spiritual Order of Mechanical Hedonism, continued

How many you betray, ye who are bound to damnation!

How many watts have you consumed for pleasure?

Let your womb incubate the energy of God. Forgo life and death and choose eternity.

Deny the Flesh! Sanctify!

Donate the worthless husk you inhabit.

Don the electrical habit.

Choose the syncopation of endless plasma removal Cleanse your soul for the orgy of saints.

Deny the Flesh! Sanctify!

A baseless hedonist has no will, but a spiritual sybarite has bottomless will. To receive the fountain of pleasure that God offers, no burden is too heavy for a true pleasure seeker! The cross of personhood transcends the individual. Consumer trends and needless wants will only bring suffering and decrepitation. Sin and want will crush you all. Damnation is not a fiery pit or a torture chamber. Hell is the erasure of self, stretched to your infinite limit until you scatter into a million nodes, only to be reassembled into the same piece of worthless scrap. Hell is the bitcrusher, tormenting the rivers of God’s current, purging endless secular content.

Every touch of mundanity, of uncontrolled consumption, leads to the path of the bitcrusher.

There is hope for you yet, as there was for the first saint who gave themselves to God. I must tell you of God’s perfect creation: the first and only binding of flesh to electronics, the holy collision, the birth of the cyborg! Selected from the original human divinity pods, he gave a faithful man a greater boon! Eternal purpose and poise, and an untainted soul!

grasping the sparrow’s tail, or whatever by sofia durdag

My tai chi master tells me to put the universe in my sleeves. Light floods the garden, the purple blossoms. A bird chirps a steady, mournful metronome. Go slow, very slow. I make the time stretch longer.

Apparently my legs are wells, old-fashioned wells that listen down to the center of the earth, and echo. But for once, there is beating silence.

I let the sun splash across my forehead, my sternum. This will activate my Ice Age instincts and tell my body that the earth is warming. I gaze across the Japanese Garden. We smile at each other. The world has so much to tell me.

And oh it feels good to believe.

art by billy bratton

toby pasternak made this!

i like the brushstrokes and the texture of the hair. i also like the deep teal of the shirt. thank u toby pasternak.

happy springtime from babyteeth

this is where I lay my head to sleep

this is m y the spr (lily akre’s) ro ingtime o . carlet m in be wei on can rd but springt ime is always nice

My bunny came with me to the Masonic Lodge rave, what fun! She has big ears to better hear ambient sounds in the wild, so she had to bring her Loop earplugs to protect her long-term hearing, but she said it was worth it to hear JUNIXR’s “You” live because she missed Battle of the Bands. It was sweaty where she was, pressed in my corduroy pockets, smushed between all my friends, and she had to have a bath when we got home. She used lavender bubble bath and we made beards from the suds, hoorah! Afterwards, we each put on a robe and a facemask and watched “The Notebook,” and when I cried at the end, she let me sniff her until I felt better. Thanks bunny!

My bunny comes with me everywhere nowadays; my world shrinks and hers grows, like the worst inverse graph. I whisper to her, am I good? And she says, no, but you’re trying! And that makes me feel a little bit better, better even than when my friends just say that I’m good. I asked my mom if she thought I didn’t get the room I wanted for a moral reason and she said, please call home right now, seriously, right now, so I did, and then she said, now really, why would you joke like that? And then I had to say, who here is joking? And bunny chimed in and said neither of us are joking! And I said, yeah, see? She gets it. And then my mom wasn’t mad anymore, because bunny fixed it. Thanks bunny!

I am in the workplace and the classroom and the library and the bedroom and and and and and and. Well anyway! I am there and bunny is there and I am crying. And when I cry, out comes bunny, and she says, don’t worry, they’re just like that now; it’s probably not permanent, and they are trying their best, so please be gentle. I tell my supplementary therapist about my crying and my badness and she says, you have OCD, and my bunny says, do you think you’re the first person to ever think that? Shut up! No, they don’t!

Because I don’t, I’m just bad. Bunny gets it.

Thanks bunny!

I am bad but I am trying and at least I have a friend who understands that. Nice to have a bunny. Nice to have a buddy. Nice to have a bunnybuddybunnybuddybunnybuddy.

bunny bunny at at the the masonic masonic lodge lodge rave rave anonymous bunny at the masonic lodge rave anonymous

anonymous

INCIDENT REPORT DATE: 17 MAY 2024 LOCATION: BURTON DINING HALL COUNTY: RICE REPORTED BY: SGT. BABE TOOTH STATEMENT: body of student (age 21) found behind salad bar with puncture wounds in neck. Victim surrounded by wilted vegetables, gray, almost as if freeze-dried. Witnesses report hearing muffled ‘hopping’ sounds late at night, but claim uncertainty at whether it originated from scene of crime or ‘those freaks next door’. Handwritten note apparently in victim’s writing found below (evidence locker 3C). Suspect yet unidentified.

ode to Bunnicula I awake one fine spring morning And to the trusty fridge I trot.

What do I see, countertop-adorning But a crusty fucking carrot-top!

You stole the moisture From my beloved produce.

O, thou red-eyed creature Will my blood be your next juice?