Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

Me making that transcript, I'd step off the train at every stop. Walk around in places like Reno and Cincinnati and Missoula. I'd rewitness the whole trip through a dog, a perfect old-school trick for heightening the olfactory track. Really make the smells pop. For the taste track, I'd borrow from the best gourmet boosts, then strain that track through somebody on a starvation diet to really beef up each flavor. That's called "sharpening."

Half of the industry is freaks who rewitness shit to amp the tracks. You hire blind folks to build up the audio track. It's so beyond illegal, but you rewitness the tactile track of anything through a year-old baby, and velvet feels like velvet. Granite like granite. No sloppy guesswork about the texture of anything. No calluses to fudge the feel of real skin or hair. No baby needs a boost port stuck in the back of its neck, but you see them around. This industry is full of assholes ready to let you remix your porno peaks through their kid. It's beyond tasteless, but you can tell porn peaks reboosted through a kid's soft, sensitive skin. It's no wonder the real world can't hold a candle to a boosted experience.

Babies amp the touch track. Blind people ramp up the sound. Hunger, the taste track. Dogs, the smells. To ramp the visual track, some production techs swear by rewitnessing through birds. Hawks. You know, birds of prey. In school, kids I knew used to rewitness through deaf people, saying it gave the final visual track the best resolution. You take all these reboosted tracks, mix them, and you have a train ride worth taking. My point is, if you're going to sell a crap experience, at least the quality should be the best.

My point is, this seventy-two hours is coming out of someone's life. This boost will replace something real a person might do, so it should be decent. Hell, it ought to be beyond decent. If some asswipe's handing over his time, he should get the train trip sweetened by having the whole mess rewitnessed through a Playboy Bunny on heroin. Morphine at least. Watch those boring, bullshit mountains roll past while zonked on opiates and fondling your own set of love-a-luscious titties. You want to wish the old man a happy Father's Day, that would be my gift suggestion.

In school, after all the film schools switched over, after the entire film industry switched over to neural transcriptions, I did my best work by getting it reboosted through junkies. Hang around any transcription program and you'll meet needle freaks who'll sweeten student work for the extra cash. Or speed freaks who'll let you boost a boring peak through them to amp the pace. If you only need some soft-focus, hook up with a codeine fanatic, run your final mix through him for out-cording, and your edges will look a little relaxed. Very damped.

In transcription school, the programs have random piss-testing. That's why you rewitness through some outsider. If you're financing a hundred thousand to get your M.F.A. in neural transcription, you don't want to piss hot and get booted out of school. Before you can boost anything for the industry, you need to learn how to identify a marketable peak. Then how to choose the right primary participant as your witness. How to structure that experience. If it's a sixteen-course meal or a hot-air balloon ride over Holland, you need to deliver the payoffs at regular intervals. Plus, you need to keep your focus; if this is a boosted peak about swimming the English Channel, you don't want to get distracted by muscle cramps or a headache. Nobody is going to buy a bullshit feature-length headache. Even boosted through an OxyContin high, it's beyond impossible to remove a headache from your tactile track. Trust me.

About going professional, a solid method is to boost for the consumer-product market—you know, those boosted peaks where you're always drinking a Coca-Cola and wearing Nike clothing, always looking straight at the logos and brand names of the products. Eating stuff that tastes so incredible, so drool-inducing, that you know the taste track had to be rewitnessed through some starving tribesman in some famine-ravaged nowhere.

How weird is this? But for fifty bucks' worth of rice and canned milk, somebody's reboosted the entire taste track through so many human skeletons that you can hardly get through the peak without interrupting, you're so hot to buy a soda. A doughnut. A hamburger. Old Spice cologne.

In transcription school, you learn all about effective pacing, so you don't overwhelm your user. You learn all the legal criteria for the production codes and rating system. What distinguishes a G-rated peak from a PG-13. Classifications based on the physical reactions, the electrolyte balance and hormone levels, pulse and respiration of a test audience. A good way to flatten a peak—say, lower it from an R rating to a PG, is you rewitness through a dope-smoking stoner. An easy fix.