Sat, 12 Apr 2008

interim
So it’s been a while since this has been updated, and the dates on most of these entries are wrong, and one of these days I’ll get all this stuff straightened out but probably not soon.
(01:48.04.12.2008) [/else] #

Sun, 19 Nov 2006

another name
I was in line at the burrito place today, and the family ahead of me had a daughter who was shy, and didn’t want to say what she wanted, so the guy who made the burritos came around the counter and kneeled down and the girl whispered her order in his ear.
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #

well aren’t you the clever one
I was walking back from Walgreen’s when I passed by a burrow in the ground, the entrance of which was large enough to climb inside, and deep enough to keep clear of the wind, and lined with leaves and dried grass, and after looking left and right as though I should be guilty I bent over and looked in the burrow, which was empty of everything except a small circle of water-worn stones in the center. A nearby electrical transformer gave off a thin whine, and the wind cut through the trees, but beyond that the neighborhood was quiet, so after looking around a second time I set my cold medicine and whiskey by a nearby tree and crawled inside the burrow, my knees up against my chest, snug but not uncomfortable, warmer than I would have guessed. The sound of the transformer became deeper under the ground, richer, and it lulled me into a fuzzyheaded trance. I picked up the stones, three in each hand, and they were warm to the touch, and comforting, and for a while I thought maybe I could just live in the burrow, maybe I could just sleep for a while, but some kids walking home from Hoover came by and poked at my head with a stick, so I crawled out of the burrow and got my bag from beneath the tree and walked home.
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #

a face which i did not know
I mow the lawn, and sort the shelves, and wash the sheets, and polish my boots, and clean the toilets, and fix the doors, and replace the outlets, and vacuum the carpets, and clean my fingernails, and shave my beard, and say my prayers, but eventually there is nothing left to do, and it is still there, waiting.

She told me she couldn’t talk to me any more, maybe she couldn’t talk to me ever again, and she put the phone down and I waited, having been through this before, but before she had decided that I had lingered in phone limbo for long enough her daughter walked by and picked up the phone.

“I got a good idea today!” she said.

I was relieved that I could at least have a reasonable conversation with a three year old, and shook off all my unspoken threats as I said “What was your good idea?”

“I’m gonna make a glass that has the Kool-Aid in the glass? And not the water? So you put the water in the glass and woop! It’s Kool-Aid!”

“That’s a pretty good idea. Does it only work with water?”

“No! You put milk in it and the milk turns into Kool-Aid! You could even put peas in there!”

“So you get Kool-Aid flavored peas? That kinda sounds gross.”

She exhaled sharply, obviously disappointed in me, and said “All I said is you *could* do it. I didn’t say it was a good idea.”
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #

revision
He was fiftyone, and until this point had made every decision perfectly, every step in place, exactly as planned, but the days had grown long, and details fell out of his grasp, and on the eighteen thousandth six hundred eighty sixth day he stepped aside, fell out of line, and made the mistake, and prepared himself to spend whatever time was left to him this time to consider the error, to rehearse proper action, so that when he came back for his next life he could eliminate one more mistake from a seemingly endless series of mistakes, until finally there would be no mistakes, whatever millions of years this process would take was nothing to him but opportunity.
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #

stone
My friend Brian, whose father owned a company that manufactured headstones, told me he had inherited the business after three years of legal shuffling, a bout which had essentially drained the company dry, a business for which he never had any interest, so that he wanted to know if I knew of any brokerage house which would buy the remaining stock and sell it at some estate sale, as he wanted to be rid of it as soon as possible, but I told him I had a better idea, and for three months Brian and I drove around the country secretly installing headstones in the recesses of public parks, in the hidden corners of playgrounds, in unmarked alleys, at the ends of unmaintained highways, in swamps and wheatfields, in sewers and behind gas stations, at the foot of overpass columns and electrical stations, any place where they would for a time remain unnoticed, each of which carried the name of one of our friends. Our enemies, we decided, would be best forgotten.
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #

something in the waves
She expected it to be different, braced herself for the endless little changes, but when she walked through the front door and saw the same rugs, the same furniture, the same paintings in the same places on the same walls she stopped all at once, still as a stone, waiting for an explanation.
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #

illicit
1999. Pamela used to tell me she wanted to become a prostitute, which I thought she talked about the same way I occasionally talk about becoming a convict: in the abstract, it seems a simplifying move, a means of forcibly casting off the complications of everyday life, but not a strategy that really made sense. We were walking down by the river, taking occasional sips of whiskey from the flask she always had in her purse, when she started in on the topic of prostitution again, when I told her I’d give her fifty bucks for a blowjob. It had been years since we’d slept together, and had grown into a weird kind of flirty friendship, so I didn’t think she would take this proposition very seriously, but in the back of my mind I was trying to figure out if I had fifty bucks on me. In the end, I guess, if you want to get technical about it, I did give her the fifty bucks, and she did give me the blowjob in the boathouse on the North Cedar side of the river, but I always thought of it as a weird kinda joke between friends, and the couple times I talked about it with Pamela after the fact seemed to solidify my opinion, but as my peer group is slowly learning, things you do as a joke are still things for which you are responsible, as I told Sarah this story a couple weeks ago, thinking she would, at worst, consider it yet another example of how I used to be a creep before she straightened me out. The actual response was quite different.
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #

inner
2004. A friend of mine from college asked if I wanted some part-time work writing short online study guides for short stories, and while I wasn’t really that interested, I figured I could try a few and see how it went, so I agreed. Once a week I would be assigned a story, a pdf copy emailed to me, and by the end of the week I would email back a two thousand word summary of the characters, settings and plot developments of the story, along with notes on symbolism and contemporary relevence. I discovered that such summaries intentionally have a small flaw, a character added who was not in the original work, or an event which did not take place, so that students who felt they could cut and paste these summaries in place of actual work would be given failing grades by instructors who were professionally aware of this “tell”. I enjoyed adding this detail, trying not to make it too garish but at the same time hoping to add some sort of amusement to readers who had actually read the work and saw the inclusion as a kind of knowing wink which the student who did not read the work would never notice. Months passed, and soon I was given other kinds of documents to summarize, from novels to legal statements to financial reports, and each of these was also given a tell, so that the function of the summary changed if you had access to the original work. Some documents had multiple tells, some which went in entirely different directions than the actual work, and some which even stood in direct opposition to legitimate statements. In time, I not only wrote these summaries, but replacement works, similar in general nature but different in telling detail, such as institutional copies of popular novels with potentially offensive material removed, or copies for children’s libraries with difficult material changed to simpler terms. I discovered that copies of novels available at public libraries were slightly different from copies available at bookstores, which were both different from copies directly available from the publisher, or the author. I discovered that the law studied and practiced by students was different in slight ways from law publically practiced, and each court was likewise off in miniscule ways, which were rarely noticed, and if noticed not disclosed, as such knowledge was only an advantage so long as it remained secret. Finally I discovered that there is no exact copy of any text anywhere, that each seeming copy is different from all others, each of which is similar only in this shared difference, and it is a collective apathy and embarassment that prevents people from recognizing that when they seem to talk about one thing, they are in fact talking about two different things, and this unseen but everpresent disconnect is the reason why we are the way we are today.
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #

fortune
1992. For about two months, during the spring, I was an unofficial fortune teller at the Ped Mall in Iowa City. This started in March, I think, late March, when I was sitting by myself in that little square by Ragstock and this older woman told me I looked like I knew something. This was a Saturday afternoon, and the Friday before (as was my habit at the time) I had Taken Something, so I was in that weird open clearheaded day after state of mind and said it is possible that I know something but I don’t know which something she meant. She told me I looked like an old soul, which I still don’t know what that means, and gave me her hand and asked me to tell her what was going to happen. I think in hindsight that she was probably On Something at the time, but I tried to tell her as honestly as possible, and she seemed pleased, and asked me to do the same for her boyfriend, who was having none of this, so for him I gave this whole weird story that he seemed to like, and people sitting around became interested and soon people knew me as that guy who told fortunes. I figured this was good writing practice, as I had to come up with stories quickly, and I had to suit the stories to the audience, so that freshmen trying on a newfound cynicism they wanted to show off to friends got stories of despair and agony and loss while older NPR ladies got stories of how small deeds connected to greater histories and whatnot. Sometimes people would give me a few bucks but I never asked for money, and a couple times I had return customers who told me I was right about this or that part of my story, which was weird but I tried not to think too much about it, but mostly I kept doing it for the same reason I do anything, to meet girls. This is how I met Heather, actually, well I met her in a class we shared but we only really talked after she smirked as I ran my fingers along the inside of her palm. At the end of May classes were over and I went back to Waterloo for the summer, and when I returned to Iowa City in the fall I sat on my old bench and waited for someone to ask me their fortune, but nobody asked, and I couldn’t really solicit people for something like that, so after half a hour I went back to Burge and gave up my fortunetelling business for good.
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #

genius
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a genius. I wasn’t sure what being a genius actually required, or how I would know once I became a genius, but I knew that people thought I had potential (whatever that means) and maybe if I do the right things I can become a genius. I knew I was not yet a genius because I sucked at chess and couldn’t do math problems in my head, which was okay, as I didn’t want to be that kind of genius. The closest I could come to understanding what this position of genius meant was that people would have a problem, and they would have to come to me, as I was the only person equipped to deal with it. I figured reading a lot was important, so I started doing that, but I didn’t really consider that what I was reading might actually be important, so I mostly trawled through bad fiction and pop science. I also knew having a lot of books was important for geniusing, nobody respects the genius who just has a library card, so I started hanging out at thrift stores and library sales. As I got a little older, I decided I didn’t want to be the sort of nerdy geniuses I knew from my TAG classes, I wanted to be an at-risk genius, a genius damaged by the very genius which led to being a genius (or something) so that nobody would expect me to have to do anything as tacky as get a job or do busywork or get good grades, no, I was the genius of last resort, and everyone would secretly fear me and my crazy eyes! I later decided that being a genius meant being able to explain difficult things in simple terms without compromise, but by that time I was done with wanting to be a genius and instead was training to become a matador.
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #

yellowtail
Last week I got an email from a woman who went to school at UNI who told me she read the stories I had posted online, and at the scrytch archive, and she wanted to meet me because she had something she wanted to tell me, and wanted to tell me in person. I was skeptical — this has happened to me half a dozen times, and never with good results, but I’m at an odd place in my life and decided that if nothing else this meeting would be an exception to my ordinary days, so we met for coffee in downtown Cedar Falls, where she told me she had recently become engaged, and was soon to marry, and she wanted to know if I would attend her wedding as it was due to something I had written that her relationship had been possible. She explained that she came to school here from a small town in western Iowa, to which I must explain that the difference between western and eastern Iowa, which is probably beneath the notice of most people, is vast to locals, and with not only the geographical distance but the cultural difference — Cedar Falls was such a big city to her, coming from her town of four hundred people, smaller than my high school graduating class — she felt isolated from her peers, and closed herself off from the standard ways college freshmen get to know one another. She continued living like this, in her little apartment on 19th street, for the first two years, spending time studying, or looking at websites. I went through a phase of self-promotion when I returned from Austin, and put up sad little page-sized posters with short stories and the url for my site, then on neuron, around town, and she was struck by something in one of these little stories, and began reading my website. One of the Ana Skyfish stories reminded her of herself, and led to a reevaluation of her solitude, and how she could never be loved if she was not open to love, or words along these lines, as I was growing increasingly uncomfortable and not following her exactly, until in the middle of her shyly smiling discussion of her fiance’ Bradley I stopped her in mid-gush and told her I could not under any circumstances be held responsible for anything she chose to do or not do with her life and that anything she may have read into anything I had written was entirely of her own choosing and she looked at me, confused, and tried to explain no, it’s a good thing, I’m trying to say thank you, and I stared at her, livid, and said so if I wrote some story about some girl who killed herself then I guess that means you would have done that too and she said no, no, you didn’t make me do anything, that’s not what I mean, and I stood up and screamed at her you can’t tell me this, this isn’t fair, I’m not just some witness to the joys and tragedies of the world, and stormed off, and attempted to drive home but found that my hands were shaking so badly that I needed to sit for a few minutes and breathe before I could even start the ignition.
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #

Wed, 27 Sep 2006

definition of scrytch, 2006
To look down at what is beneath our current feet there must be a looking forward and a looking backward and also a looking from side to side in a shifty manner. Consider the hundred-year plan of Scrytch as being half completed, a plan designed by the primary Heath at end-of-time then manifested in the Utah desert of 1956, where his passage through the salt flats was determined by spitting mouthfuls of blood into the sand and determining direction from the patterns thus made. There must be a document! he cried, squinting into the sun, There must be a document which does not end at death and in fact has no end, no summary, which changes and devours and multiplies at rates unimaginable! And so the primary Heath set fire to his tent and his horse and determined this earth must birth a memetic virus, a word-plague later scholars would come to term Scrytch. Given this to be the case, is it even possible to make a statement as to what the state of this great visitation can be called, this becoming-beyond-knowledge? To be a map is to compress the whole of a set space into only the information necessary for travel, to remove what is extemporaneus, yet Scrytch contains no such data, as what is necessary is in eternal flux, not simply “against interpretation” but impervious to the very concept. At once a phantasm built of kites and balloons and the laughter of ignorant children and at the same time the black sap of the secret organs within the human heart — no, not simply at the same time, but *the same thing*, this highway of mirrors, this recombinant serpent, this sing-song of sickness, what tracks does it leave in the snow of our souls? Is it simply only visible at end-of-time, so that in fact the primary Authors all of us will eventually become can only give hints and echoes buried in the corrupted sense-data we call the present? Is it (as the primary Flink once told me, or believed he told me, as we hunted the Pig-What-Walks-Upright through the sewers of Portland) that all these words are actually The Great Sifting, a removal of impurities until nothing but what is foundational alchemical truth shines free? Borges once told us of the labyrinth that is a straight line; what he (nor Zeno) did not mention is that it leads only to the grave, and it is there that I believe the state of Scrytch can best be explained (if incoherent stammering can be called an explanation): that Scrytch, which once was the creation of a great and terrifying maze, is now the process by which each wall becomes a doorway.
(15:49.09.27.2006) [/scrytch] #

Thu, 31 Aug 2006

adversary
It had been seven years and I thought I had changed so fundamentally that she would never recognize me. I had put on and lost and put on weight, lost and put on and lost muscle, lost hair, lost beard, lost glasses, lost alternarock tshirts and combat boots and put on a semi-quaker austerity, sold books and bought books, sold cds and records, developed a shaking in the right arm and a clouding of the eyes, I was a different person, I could not be seen by those who once knew me, I had changed, but she knew me the second she saw me, as these were not the traits she knew me by. None shall ever escape.

She called me and I did not beg her forgiveness, and I suppose that is a victory. She spoke of play, how adults think of play as a casting off of responsibilities, a brief respite from deadlines and debts when all things could be equal, while a child thinks of play as a taking on of responsibilities, of rules and boundaries and goals, burrowing into private obscessions and bone-deep satisfactions, and I told her she was not so much a teacher as a spy from the international adult conspiracy, expecting her to laugh, or at least notice the pete and pete reference, but instead she sighed, and was quiet, and finally said maybe I was right. My impulse was to tell her I was sorry, but I cannot tell her that anymore, and as always I was glad I did not follow my first thought. Instead I told her that back when I was writing that’s exactly what I did, I gave myself completely critical yet entirely false restrictions and demands. She then told me I was a spy for the International Child Conspiracy, and I said if only, if only.
(03:49.08.31.2006) [/scrytch] #

a walking tour
Megan took me for a walk behind her new house, down into the woods by a deer-trail which went all the way to the river, and she stopped by a bush with large green berries, and she picked a few and told me to open my mouth. I said, what are they? and she said they’re Meganberries. I took a few into my mouth, and they were tasty, sour, and juicy. That’s amazing, I said, that they’re called Meganberries, as they’re just like you, and she gave me a lopsided smile, trying to figure out if I was kidding. I will never understand even the simplest of things.

Megan’s father spent three years in prison when she was a little girl. I am not exactly sure what the charge was, I know she told me but I wasn’t paying attention, which seems incredible as this is a topic of great interest, her parents, as she says and does certain things once in a while that make me think pieces of the collected background my friends all share never got to her, not even like she comes from another country but from another time, and I wonder sometimes if this is in fact not a random chance but something she does deliberately, an affectation, which helps the people she meets to excuse other of her eccentricities, and I think that if I were to meet her parents that this would become clear, if it is a real thing or a falsified thing (which has perhaps become real over time, the way that I tell people I used to have a dog), but still I wan’t paying attention, perhaps I thought she was going to leave me, but I do believe her father was a nonviolent offender, perhaps an embezzeler, but for three years once a week Megan and her father would write to each other, continuing the stories they had begun when she was even younger, just before she fell asleep at night, but while she would write a letter and forget about it her father would continue to write the stories in journals he kept for himself, sending her specific passages he thought she would find funny or charming, and Megan had read this unexpurgated collection of spiral notebooks years later, after she returned from her third year of college, and she told me about these stories as well, this endless collection of plots and subplots and conflicts and strange landscapes and creatures described in immaculate detail and travels through time, but of this I can barely remember anything at all, except that her father had written both Megan and himself into the story, wherein Megan was called Jenny Pearl Sherbet and he was called The Hero Of Last Resort.

Megan was worried about her daughter Jasmine, who was eight, and had taken on a defeatist attitude about practically everything. Megan first noticed this after picking Jasmine up from school and asking how her day had been, only to hear her speak about how she was going to be nine soon, so much wasted time, so many things still undone, the best years of her life behind her. Megan considered this a mood, or perhaps something Jasmine had heard on television, and didn’t think too much of it, and while Jasmine was not unhappy, and in most ways acted as she always had, she would occasionally sigh and consider all that was now lost to her. I thought this was hilarous, and Megan told me that my laughing at something like this is just another perfect example of why I hadn’t yet met her. The first time I did meet her, that first weekend at the new house, Megan introduced us and I asked Jasmine how she was doing, and she told me things were as well as could be expected, and I said yeah, there’s only so much we can do with all these worries and failed hopes filling what little light remains before the inevitable call of the grave. Megan shook her head, and Jasmine stared at me for a second, sizing me up, and said worries? I got worries. Dealing with children is a lot easier than I thought when I was younger.

Megan told me that every Saturday night, her daughter Jasmine and two other kids from the neighborhood staged mystery plays in the small clearing behind the house. They waited until the sun had completely vanished from the sky, which made performances closest to new moon somewhat difficult to see, but this was intentional, as much of the mystery play was a kind of tone-poetry that took on strange echoes from the trees and the cliffside, so that assigning direction became almost impossible. I didn’t intend to still be staying with Megan. I had planned to go home a week ago, but things came up and I’m generally lazy, so I extended my visit, but by this time I was a bit punchy, too long with people I barely knew. I had missed the first two performances for various flimsy reasons, but Megan demanded I attend at least one before I went back to the city. I told her I would, because I was tired of arguing with her, and as I sat at the kitchen table overlooking the forrest I told myself it was just one more day, it wasn’t a big deal, I’d leave tomorrow.
(03:45.08.31.2006) [/scrytch] #

nacht
It is not right to call it daylight, as this is not yet a time for activity, for plans and schemes and duties, this is a middle-time left empty for preparation, for mirror-staring and deep breaths in the shower, and this is why I like to stay awake until the dawn, taking in all the preparation of all the people in all the houses while I creep back to my hole, racing the daybreak to rooms without windows and piles of quilts where I spend the better hours in sleep, where I am happy, and when I open my eyes again it is dusk, the settling time, the point between the hours you sell for profit and the hours you keep for yourself. This schedule of mine was endearing when I was twenty and spent the better part of the small hours crawling out of my skin wooing difficult post-feminist scholars impressed with zine publication and orange blotter, but I am thirtythree now and by all accounts not aging well. This doesn’t matter; I am a night person deep in my rotted organs and there is no changing this trait as my habits are not suited to sunny hours. I am not a person who appreciates hard work and prudent planning so much as gory details and drunk-dialed confessions and insomnia-sick rants and blurry-eyed promises. I like playing Galaga for twenty bucks a game with shiver-sweating truckers out in Elk Run, I like sitting beneath the big elm at Mount Olivet Cemetery with the tape recorder picking up spirit-sounds, I like breaking and entering foreclosed slaughterhouses with flashlights and sandwiches, I like staying up past my bedtime and telling secrets and I am okay with not being at peace. If I have betrayed my promise it was only to sidestep obligations that never had anything to offer and I refuse to be sorry for breaking promises I never made. There’s still some dark left outside and there’s a million places to go even here in the middle of nowhere and if you can’t sleep you can always give me a call.
(03:30.08.31.2006) [/scrytch] #

cairn
Pick up a stone, and then pick up another stone, and pick up another stone, never dropping a stone, and then pick up another stone, until your hands are filled with stones, and then pick up another stone, and then pick up another stone, piles of stones in your hands, and then pick up another stone, the muscles in your arms aching and slick with sweat, and then pick up another stone, and then pick up another stone, the flesh pulls away from the snapping of bone, and then pick up another stone, and another stone, and another stone, forever.
(03:26.08.31.2006) [/scrytch] #

rejected lyrics from new album
Satan Snowman

(guitar solo>/SATAN SNOWMAN MELT IN HELL OH NOOOOOOOOOO/SATAN SNOWMAN SPEND HIS SUMMERS WITH ST. NICK/SATAN SNOWMAN LIVE IN THE FREEZER WHEN ON BUSINESS/THE FREEZER IN HELL/IT’S BIG AS NEBRASKA/(guitar solo)/GOT A HUMAN FEMUR FOR HIS NOOOOOOOOOOOOOSE/HAIL! HAIL! SATAN SNOWMAN NOT MADE OF HAIL!/HAIL! HAIL! SATAN SNOWMAN RIDE MOTORCYCLE OF DEATH!/MOTORCYCLE RUN ON BLOOD/100 OCTANE BLOOD/(guitar solo)/(another guitar solo)

tabs available upon request
(03:25.08.31.2006) [/scrytch] #

waiting for the concussion
1992. The things I turned down when I was young are things I would beg for now.

Gashes in my palms from the barbed-wire fence wrapped in dew-soaked t-shirt which I push with my fingertips over and over, off and on, trying to find a pressure which kills the pain. My glasses lost somewhere in the cornfield, squint to focus, my head falling back and catching with a jerk every few minutes, looking for an exit, ready to run. Some apartment I’ve never been in, or at least cannot remember, a conference in the kitchen as to what to do with me. Someone has to have a car, someone has to be able to take me home. I love everyone and everything but I am made graceless with this love and stand and stumble into a bookcase, steadying myself with my left hand while my right checks for my wallet in my jeans, some clown screaming how I’m getting blood all over his first editions. Now I love everyone but him, he is an impediment to my love, and I pull down the bookshelf and it felt good so I pulled down another one and it felt even better and I tried to pull down his desk when I feel hands on my arms pulling me outside and I think okay, here it comes, here it is.
(03:22.08.31.2006) [/scrytch] #

the great occlusionist
I didn’t intend to visit my fifteen year class reunion. Pamela and I were attempting to buy illegal drugs from a night auditor at the Holiday Inn when one of the walking corpses of the Class of 91 identified me in the lobby and shook my shivering hand and pointed me toward Ballroom B and the next thing I know I’m telling a gaggle of my fucking peers that you can make Bird Flu serum from apples, but don’t buy too many apples all at once or else there will be rioting in the street. Pamela totally bought into this whole reunion fiasco as she’s never met any of the people I went to high school with except for Josef and Huey Kablooie The Living Bomb, so after she finally tracks down the auditor and gets suitably high in the bathroom she’s making medicated smalltalk with an endless sprawl of stayathome moms while I flip the imaginary bird at the cash bar only it wasn’t imaginary and now all these pipefitters and data entry failures are giving me three feet of space on all sides. State education is the final slavery!
(03:19.08.31.2006) [/scrytch] #

lights like broken like
it is not like riding a bike. whatever natural and effortless quality this act once held has now vanished, replaced with a brick by brick exhausted commitment, a head down trudge through every word and sentence. one and then the next and it seems so small, so much nothing, barely even a ping. i am still transmitting. i am still here. the interpersonal silt all washed away, the skeletons of old stories rubbed smooth and shiny, everything thin and brittle and familiar. left and then right and then. my friend seth told me during basic training he learned to sleep while marching, which seemed unbelievable, but i understand it now, you train the muscles to do something and then you go away. that is how it was. i would sit down and when i looked at the screen there it was, as if i didn’t do it at all. i was just a witness, it was not i who did those things. now nothing is instant, everything is an attempt, an effort, and i have never been good with effort.
(03:18.08.31.2006) [/scrytch] #

oneironautics
“You, you are a Key.”

I put my ear to the hollow above her left clavicle and listened to something rattle around her ribcage. “That’s where I put it so I wouldn’t lose it or anything. Which I would think would be an okay sort of thing considering I don’t know what good a key is without a lock but now only how would I get it out?” I assumed when I gave her the key that she would lose it, as she loses everything, and it would be a little trick I played on myself so as to avoid blame for throwing it away, but there must have been something in the transaction that made this possession important, as the only things she kept within her body were to be broken down into components and absorbed so as not simply to never be lost but as to never be removed. Perhaps that is what she had expected to be the fate of the key. Perhaps all these things I thought she lost were never lost at all, and all this attraction I had for her was actually attraction for all the things I once held and thought lost. In which the key was more special than I had initially realized. “Maybe it’s a different kind of key,” she said, and stared at her hands.
(03:15.08.31.2006) [/scrytch] #

Sat, 18 Mar 2006

sucklesick
2005. I was spending a lot of time hanging out at Covenant Medical after work, just walking down endless white hallways, thinking about all the times I had been there before. Sometimes I would walk past maternity and try to project myself into the body of a newborn infant, thinking that maybe if I could start over that I could do things right, but then I realized I would be overwriting the life of this baby who hadn’t yet had the chance to do anything wrong and I felt like just hanging around was evil so I would go out to the picnic tables by the housing projects and wait to feel better.
(00:55.03.18.2006) [/scrytch] #

runaway
Nobody gives a shit about you gnawing on the skulls of the virgin dead or those cops you shot or that time you died because the new shit is getting fucked with by nebbishes! Get snapped on by that kid at the Burger Murder drive-thru if you wanna be down! Let your boss spit a little right in your mouth! Put your hand in a puddle of your own blood and realize that you are now one of the chosen few! I saw a slight organ spill backseat stuck and pulled up to reveal gaping entrance of devil tunnel. I saw and do not question. Palaces of bone rubbed away by endless sand until a seeming maw points skyward to devour approaching intelligences. Cannot question, wonder. Bound and removed. Honey-glue spread across split wings blood trails into warehouses. Tremors in the hand just to consider. You were once beautiful, a loved thing kept safe in skirts and teflon, now just so much stain and stink. Consider, remember. Once so much promise now an empty vessel for endless appetites in empty rooms. Bow and I will pay witness! Handfulls of smashed blackberries and beeswax and ash smear sigils on the face and along the spine. Consider and repent. This is what I cannot touch. Not simply a memory-vision but representative of various others, faces beneath, one to stand for many. Impotent piss witness. Pills, pills. She presents her body before the dog, before the elk, and I witness and choke. Sinew abuse. The maker sets a mouth upon creation and exhales, spits, vomits, puts everything into the made, a carrier of terrors. Slips out beneath definition, sticky and dizzying, everything to someone and now nothing, nothing at all. Pleas beneath speech. Unknowable intentions. Show the bones! Make a public display of the areas of intersection! Become my everything and I will follow and weep at your long slide down! I will give you money and stories and praise your wisdom and curse your father! My child bride reverses time and crawls upward into the final light!
(00:55.03.18.2006) [/scrytch] #

Fri, 14 Oct 2005

unvisible
Pamela Bambelam’s eyes used to be in someone else’s skull. When she was younger she suffered from severe retinal detachment so that finally her eyes did not function and so due to fickle fortune (or perhaps a doctor made sweet on a certain teenage girl is how I always read it, but you know how I am) she was given someone else’s eyes, some person who no longer had a need to see, some person most likely in the grave, she was never given any details (as per hospital procedure) but this did not stop her (nothing ever stopped her from anything, ever) from postulating as to the identity of this mystery donor, this person who once housed her eyes, and she wondered as to the things she had seen, this whole other life passed through her pupils, all these strangers staring into her greenish blueish irises, all the witness paid when this part of her was a part of someone else. I never knew her when she had her birthgiven blind eyes, and I can never be certain this whole story is not some elaborate ruse, as her parents would never tell me and she’s a bit untrustworthy, but maybe that’s why I’ve hung around for so long.
(00:24.10.14.2005) [/scrytch] #

more powerful than a wino’s drinking hand
They put this salve on me so that schoolchildren could not see me. This was enough to get me out of my public service, my lawyer said. But was I still allowed to disco-dance? No! No, unless I did said disco-dancing in my living room with all the shades pulled, but what kinda disco dancing is forbidden from the joy and simple heartfelt perfection of my adoring audience? I am not some sort of silly artist who feels that disco-dancing is a self-perfect act, taken place in secret, hidden from the world! I do these things for the comfort and stimulation of the many who witness and applaud! Fuck your stupid laws! I am a genius of dancing, and this genius will not be silenced! This girl I met at the discotheque was covered in glitter, and from my years as a custodian I knew that glitter was my enemy, there’s no using the Bissel on glitter, there’s no wiping glitter off the coke mirror. But I was bedazzled by undulations and bouncing and forgot my cleaning training and told her, you know, I’m a genius of disco. She did not at first believe me (which is understandable, as I’m kinda lumpy) but moves were busted like so many planes of glass and soon she swooned for my moves and next thing you know there’s glitter all over the back seat of my Nova. This was a problem later, as coffee-jittery detectives pushed on me as to how said dancing queen was missing presumed dead and I said no dice, Beretta, she’s staying at my domicile until she gets up the nerve to tell her cornfed parents she’s in love with the genius of disco, but those cops, man, there’s no talking to them. Also I was staying at an SRO over by the Y and so my story seemed shaky. “You mean to tell me this woman, this Miss Cattle Congress ‘05, she ran away from home and a promising career as a spokesperson for Tiny Giant Pork Industries just so she could live in some seedy hovel with an admittedly lumpy failed writer?” to which I said “That’s exactly what I mean to say, dig, but what you don’t know is that I’m a genius of disco” but like I said, the fuzz don’t want to hear about young love, so I put my trick wrists to work and get out the cuffs and jump out the window four stories to a dumptruck full of feathers driven by my true love Miss Cattle Congress ‘05 and she puts the pedal to the metal as I tarzan into the passenger seat and we hightail it all night to Omaha where they know about true love.
(00:24.10.14.2005) [/scrytch] #

ghost man on first
“What’s being a grownup like?” she asked me.

“You ever have someone ask you for a quarter?”

“Sure. Or else maybe a dime sometimes.”

“Okay, imagine someone asks you for a dime, and you give them a dime, and they ask for another dime, and you give them another dime, and they keep asking you for dimes every hour of every day until you’re dead.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“And all the time, instead of thinking it’s a sunny day, or I don’t like gooseberries, you think how am I gonna get more dimes? All the time, I gotta get more dimes.”

She thought about this for a second, her face all scrunched up like she just ate something sour, and said “Look, if you want a dime, all you have to do is ask.”
(00:24.10.14.2005) [/scrytch] #

every day is evidence
“Hello?”

“Hello, is this Sarah?”

“Lucas? Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me, look I know you don’t want to get into a whole big thing but I just wanted to tell you I’m out of jail but I’m not coming back to town, I’m gonna stay with my folks for a while, I mean I cleaned up and it’s like if you can realize and find some peace when you’re in prison then maybe that’s something you can take out and put things back and so really I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, huh?”

“I’m not really ready to have this conversation. It’s not even six am here.”

“Yeah, I know, but it’s been three years, I’m ready to get started.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“Yeah, ha, something.”

“Right. So how did jail go?”

“It was bad. I mean, I can’t complain.”

“You can’t complain? What do you mean, you can’t complain?”

“It was jail or, whatever, I don’t know, something bad definitely, and it’s like you’re a toy that gets picked up and put back in the box and that gives you some time. That’s not a very good, the putting it isn’t right but you know.”

“I guess.”

“I don’t know what the deal with this bullshit weather is, tho. I nearly froze waiting for my folks to come get me.”

“So how are they with all this?”

“I think it’s okay, they seem okay, I got a plan and I think I can get work and I’m going to meetings and so long as I stay on track it’s okay.”

“Meetings?”

“You know. Meetings.”

“So you’re a different person now, huh.”

“I can see all this stuff I couldn’t see when I was with you. Not that it’s totally your fault.”

“Wait, wait.”

“What I mean is I know that I didn’t do right, and I want to do right now.”

“You know what you could do if you were serious about making things right.”

“You’re not still hung up on that money thing, are you?”

“You owe me two thousand dollars! That would be a big fucking step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned.”

“Look, you said it yourself, I’m a different person now.”

“You being a different person doesn’t mean you don’t still owe me two thousand dollars. You don’t just get to erase that because you got some new clothes and go to church.”

“This isn’t some kinda what the fuck thing like when I bought those turntables and told everybody I was a DJ. This is different. I’m all different now!”

“Didn’t your sponsor say you had to make right your prior mistakes? Isn’t owing me money a prior mistake?”

“One day at a time, bitch!”

“I’m gonna hang up now.”

“No, wait, look, the thing is, I was hoping you could help me with this thing.”

“Thing? You’re not seriously asking me for money, are you?”

“Sarah, look, okay, this will be the last time, it’s just. Hello?”
(00:24.10.14.2005) [/scrytch] #

debaser
True story.

I had gone out with June three times when I asked her if she wanted to see the Pixies in Davenport. At the time, Davenport was the only place in Iowa to see bands of a certain level of popularity; while your average indie jerkoffs could play Iowa City and maybe Ames, you had to be of a certain caliber to play Davenport. I mean, Nirvana played Davenport. So anyway she said yes and I decided I would mark this occasion by making a bootleg. So there I was jumping around like a dufus with June, trying to get the microphone I had hidden in my sleeve aimed toward the stage, and it was actually a pretty good show but I wasn’t really paying attention as I had a plan to tell June y’know. it’s pretty late, maybe we should just get a room here in Davenport. This plan actually worked, and for a couple months I didn’t feel weirdly selfconscious calling June my girlfriend.

I forgot about the bootleg for a while, until I traded Brian a copy for some mushrooms, which was as far as my bootlegging scheme ever got. Just now I saw a copy of a live Pixies show from ‘94, from Davenport, and because I’m a sap I downloaded it, and sure enough, you can hear when I tell June that she’s totally hotter than Kim Deal. Smoooooth.

Fucking Brian, man.
(00:24.10.14.2005) [/scrytch] #

Mon, 25 Jul 2005

all of this is real
1995. When I lived in the apartment complex in Coralville, each building looked exactly the same, so that one night after working at the rest stop I pulled up to Building C instead of Building D and walked up to someone else’s door and prepared to put the key in the lock when I realized I was not at my apartment, the hibachi the prior tenant left wasn’t by the side of the door, there were small pictures I had never seen tucked into the corners of the windows, and I stopped for a minute. Perhaps, I thought, this happened to everyone here, the buildings were alike for a reason, so that if you ever became sick of your life you could walk into someone else’s apartment and begin again with new belongings, new clothes, a new girlfriend or boyfriend, and I thought if that is the case then I should not leave this to chance, I should find the ideal new apartment within which I will be reborn. I walked around the complex, examining the clues left on the porches, peeking into windows, listening to what little sound escaped through the door, until I found what I believed would be my ideal incarnation, a decision based less on actual facts as on a general premonition, a feeling of calm and comfort, and so I opened the door and stepped inside before something from the back of my mind screamed this is not real, this is someone’s apartment, you can’t just walk in here, none of this is real, and I froze, and looked around for a minute, telling myself to remember all this, every small detail, the keys on the counter and the magnets on the fridge, as this could have been my new life if only I believed, and I stepped back outside, closed the door, and went back to my room.

When I was in high school I knew a girl who never read books, or perhaps I should say she read by keeping books beneath her pillow while she slept, so that in the morning the entire book had found a way into her memory. This turned out to be not only an efficent use of time, but also led to a deeper understanding and recall of the text. I tried this strategy a few times but only pulled disjointed bits of the text out of my dreams, bits which were cobbled together with other half-forgotten information so that my actual reading was more difficult. I tried to convince her to try other objects to see if perhaps there were hidden stories not available to strictly textual readers, but she didn’t want to mess with a good thing.

I always thought plants didn’t talk to me because they lack mouths or lungs or vocal cords but maybe they’re just stuck up.

Sarah had worked at the grocery store for about a month when she learned the store had a basement set up exactly like the ground floor only the shelves were stocked with less popular specialty items. Shoppers could only access this second store if they knew the entry code at the back stairwell. There was a seperate staff who worked in the basement store, and the word among Sarah’s fellow cashiers was that they hated her. Sometimes, when Sarah was feeling too lazy to help with restock and killed time smoking by the delivery doors, she ruminated upon a sub-basement store with even less popular items, and a store beneath that store, and so on and so on all the way to hell.

Owen called last weekend and told me he was selling his telephone. I told him I had no need for another telephone and he said “Not yet! But soon the great telephone famine will arrive and you current telephone will wither and die! Entire cities of telephones will be wiped out within a week! Only old-fashioned rotary phones will survive! Can you afford *not* to be prepared?” I asked him what he intended to do after the mass telephone extinction event and he said he had trained himself to give up use of the telephone. “I have seen the signs in the stars and evolved beyond the telephone! Behold the superman!” I considered asking how this regimen led to his calling me on a, y’know, telephone, but instead I told him I only had three dollars and hadn’t even bought candy yet and immediately he hung up on me. The young people of today have no manners.

My grandfather told me the clouds used to look different when he was young. Now the clouds want to look like those famous clouds you see in the movies, and so dump moisture whenever possible, so that in a day you can see eight or nine clouds that look almost exactly alike. All clouds aspire to a perfect state of cloud-nature, but this is a mistake, as all clouds by definition are of the cloud-nature, and all this conformity is in fact a betrayal of the cloud-nature, which once expanded and deepened with every new form of every individual cloud, but those days are all over now. That’s why my grandfather bought his cannon, according to police records, in order to force the clouds to become themselves. He had a similar belief about how all houses aspired to be ruins, but I can’t remember the logic he used for that.
(17:25.07.25.2005) [/scrytch] #

Sat, 23 Jul 2005

consequences
2005.

“I am trying so hard to do the right thing, to say the right thing, to be the right person, because this dread in my chest every time you get close to me is a compass, and I know I will be improved, and anchored, and slower, and maybe you could even love me, if I go into the fear.”

She sat silently, on the far end of the phone line, and said nothing, until she said:

“That you have to try at all means it’ll never happen.”

Then it was my turn to be silent.
(02:17.07.23.2005) [/scrytch] #

everything burned away (final)
If you were a friend, I would tell you she is happy now, off in some other city, new books on her shelves and new photos on her fridge, her body just different enough to facilitate greater changes in the color of her clothes and the length of her hair. If you were an enemy, I would tell you she is dead, most of her smeared along the bottom of a pine box in some unnamed field where nothing grows. If you were a secret admirer, I would tell you she is thinking of you, resigned to the impossibility of any sort of coupling but still pining in the back of her heart just to hear the sound of your voice. If you were a sibling I would tell you she is soon to call just as soon as she gets her head together, a little more breath back in her lungs, the shivering settled a bit in her hands. But you are none of these things, and so I will tell you nothing.
(02:17.07.23.2005) [/scrytch] #

mouth full of feathers
This is they spot they claimed, and announced to the heavens they would never be moved, so that state-sponsored wizards in suits and ties of indigo velvet poured circles of salt around the park and giant bells tuned to specific frequencies were struck by hammer-swinging butchers still covered in the blood of the wild pig. Obviously such a spectacle brought out all the summerlong lollygaggers, folding chairs and coolers at the ready, taking good seats atop the stores along Main Street facing the claimed park and taunting the cops stationed along the sidewalk. “Crack a fuckin’ cultist head! Do as we command! Throw the swallow-box in the coven’s center and let the witches fall into hell!” Some local Jesus Rock band with cross-stitched bellbottoms stacked amps on the back of a flatbed and stole power from the streetlights and kicked into some kinda fuzzed up dope-raga about the fundamental nature of the human condition and the grandpa brigade kept hoping some girl would take her top off. I was there, drinking dollar beers with Susannah and her wheezing little brother with the shakes and the braces sneaking sips off his big (but not too big for me ‘cause I’m a revelator and a rumpshaker just as sure as your name’s Sucker) sister’s hip flask full of go-juice and sickleberry Kool-Aid, and the three of us were looking for something to throw at the lead singer when all of a sudden a thousand blackbirds came up from a hole in the park and attacked the park-claiming cultists and man was it ever a scene, Susannah’s brother poked out his eyes so as to never see the sight again and Susannah herself won’t go back downtown (which is okay by me, now that she moved into my trailer and I don’t have to pick her up at her house and talk to her parents, you know, the ones with pieces missing from their faces) and even I cross the street every time I think I see a blackbird. Mayor Victorious and his automatic cop army shoulda just left those warlocks alone.
(02:17.07.23.2005) [/scrytch] #

Sun, 22 May 2005

final event precautions

  1. The body will be disguised upon initial viewing so that participants cannot identify The Maker. The Maker will be played by a prior member. Absolute silence is required of all participants during the transformation from hidden member to public member when the body becomes The Maker, and likewise when The Maker becomes the body.
  2. Particles remaining in the body will be collected by The Collector. All attempts to leave the area with unclaimed particles will result in instant death.
  3. Orange lines mark lines of televised surveillance space, purple lines mark urine and blood trails.
  4. Irradiated eggs and semen will be exchanged for clean eggs and semen at the end of the final event. If you feel your eggs or semen has been mishandled, contact The Collector, placing the mouth against the touchscreen.
  5. If the pulse is not followed, a chance for great danger appears.
  6. The larger place cannot be exchanged for the smaller place, unless the smaller place has been Changed by The Great Leveller. All exchanges will be balanced against prior debts.
  7. Any body marked with the milk is a Beacon. At least one Beacon must remain within one marker-like from each participant at all times, unless the participant is in the Hidden Place.
  8. Exposure of intentions is mandatory.


(09:45.05.22.2005) [/scrytch] #

my heroes have always been nutjobs
Originally, in the initial transcript of this story which is still stuck somewhere in a dream I could not fully remember, this story was to be completely different, with a bit involving people who talk like real people (whoever they are, these ‘real people’ I keep hearing about) and not like devices for setting up punchlines. Also there was a bit about the names of certain plants, which I do not actually know, and a bit about girls I used to know but I can no longer talk about that for various reasons which may or may not include chest-beating boyfriends/husbands who never had much use for me anyway. But all that is neither here nor there (it’s nowhere, man, it’s just a big zero) because this story is not that story, not in this translation, not in this world.

Sometimes in the past few months I have tried to channel various characters that I used to write about, regulars I could always count on for entertaining if not exactly profound material, only none of those characters will speak to me anymore. I’m not sure how else to put it. I try to write an Owen and Rissa story for AvFest and there’s just this endless white hum like water down a stormdrain, and nothing I have done so far has brought them any closer. I try to dream about what those characters do now that they’re done with me. Maybe someone else is writing stories about them, which would be okay, I mean I’m jealous but it would make sense and eventually I would come to accept it and this new author would maybe invite me over for dinner with my ex-characters and the piles of stories they had birthed together and would expect me to bring a bottle of wine like some kinda Frenchman. Also I would have to make conversation, which I would do, telling myself that all these minor humiliations will be repaid in Heaven, but out of spite I would go into a long and horrible story about death after dinner which would make both this new author and my ex-characters feel uncomfortable and at a loss for words, and how do you like it, you fuckers.

“Here’s what you do,” Pamela told me. “When you get all drunk and depressed and think you should call her and tell her how much you love her and how you fucked up, call me instead. When you think maybe it’d be a good idea to park your car outside her house and make sure the boy she’s seeing is a good egg and maybe get a peek at her through the windows, drive over here and do the same thing. Just stalk me instead of her. I ain’t got shit to do, and you’re about one bad decision away from jail time.”

Perhaps my ex-characters haven’t shacked up with some Johnny-come-lately prodigy at all, but in fact are in a sort of Limbo, a kind of suspended animation while I work out whatever personal issues I’m supposed to be working out. Or maybe the stories I wrote were like views into this other universe which continues after I have stopped peeking in on it, like some pervert in the bushes with a keyboard and a trenchcoat, and they are none the wiser that I am banished from that world. That’s my favorite, as it means that even if I am not a witness to current actions, current actions continue to take place, and I do not need to feel guilty that my team isn’t seeing any action, as it were.

While I tried to trick my way back into this other world I thought about what my heroes would do, faced with such a situation, and while I cannot list my heroes by name (for fear that you would think less of them, as they are all to a fault poor role models, a sadder collection of schitzophrenics and drunks and general malcontents one would be hard pressed to find), they are my heroes all the same and worth consulting from time to time.

Sometimes, at the grocery store that I go to late at night, after work, because there are fewer people then and also because I like to pretend when I am at the grocery store that it is after the apocalypse and I am the only person left on the planet and the heady rush of this solitary state has passed, the nights of cheap vandalism and theivery faded, and now I obey all the laws of my old life and will leave my handful of useless money at the front register even though no one is there to take it, but sometimes at the grocery store I find myself buying things for no reason. These are usually cheap things, some sort of crazy-looking soda I have never tried, some kind of generic candy whose packaging makes me feel like crying, a bunch of bananas so that the bananas won’t be alone even though I know there is no way I will never eat that many bananas and I’m just setting myself up for the inevitable discovery of brown bananas above my fridge and will think to myself oh god, I’ve killed another bunch of bananas. Sometimes I’ll buy something that I’ll plan to give as a gift, to include in a package I’m going to send to some faraway friend I haven’t written to in too long, or maybe someone I don’t know, just walk up and give them a gift the way I used to walk up to people in Iowa City and give them books I no longer wanted, an attempt at reading minds and intentions in my choices, here, I think you’ll like this, I think you maybe can use this. Sometimes I’ll buy something I used to own, maybe when I was a kid and had the time and focus to actually appreciate distinct objects which would be worn smooth with attention and care as they could not be replaced, nursing minor tears and blemishes, duct tape on the shoes, marker over stains in the fabric. Sometimes I will buy things as an attempt at some other life, a set of new ideas and potentials, my will so weak that simple cheap objects exert enough pull to move me into entirely new orbits. Sometimes I won’t buy anything at all, will simply pick things up, read the label, feel the texture, put it into the other ghost universe where the characters that will not speak to me will find it one morning while I am asleep, some gift found behind the couch or tucked into the mailbox, and I will try to hold onto the memory as a beacon into this other world, but I will be asleep and not paying attention and it will slip right away to become part of a bounty of goods given to some other writer who never considers that all his or her “inspiration” comes from someone else, someone doing the object-research, the collection of sad little grocery store realizations they will never have to witness firsthand as handfuls of stolen riches spill from the page.

Like Dean Martin, I do my drinking in the evening time, which works out well as it makes me harder to see so my getaways (which have become part and parcel of these evenings) are much simpler. The one time I tried to outrun a cop during the day did not end so well, as you might remember, but in the night I am the shadow of the panther! Also helpful is how the fortification of booze leads to derring-do which is beyond the means of mortals, such as jumping off rooftops or out of moving cars. Also an empty bottle makes a good weapon.

Pamela told me she was going to give me one last chance, which I thought was ridiculous as first of all who was she to give me any sort of ultimatum, I mean, I was doing fucked-up and incredibly stupid things long before she ever met me and that this practice had not changed during the time she was legally my wife should have suprised no one, and it’s not like she had any limit of shortcomings, but one of the rules I made for myself after the relapse is that it is important to agree with people and basically do what they ask of you as a sign of your strength, and so I nodded, and smiled, and said something about how I was happy or something. Pamela attempted to scowl at me, but this quickly fell into some sort of weepy fit like she was always having, and I continued to smile, thinking that eventually this would placate her. “Things will be different now,” I said for absolutely no reason, which I told myself that the present is necessarily different from the past because if the present was indistinguishable from the past (and presumably the future) than the whole of life would be continuous, which I knew about what that was like and trust me it isn’t good when you think like that, and now wasn’t like that at all, now was a distinct now, unclouded by mirror and echo events, and saying this seemed to calm her a bit. Pamela is much smarter than I am, and I love her very much, but she has weird ideas about how things change, and so she became convinced this was the case. I just wanted to move back into her basement and eat her food while she slept and proceed to collect and assemble The Great Work and maybe if I obeyed all the rules I kept in my head I might get my cock sucked, and to these ends I was willing to say any fool thing anyone wanted to hear. After that I said some other stuff, which I am removing from the record.

If I could not hold the things I created, how could I hold the people I love.
(08:15.05.22.2005) [/scrytch] #

always obnoxious
“so okay, if a werewolf bites a pig, you mean to say it turns into a werepig?”

“well what if you dressed it up like some backpacker college student? so that the werewolf didn’t know it was a pig until it was too late?”

“sure, but you could get around the smell aspect by bathing the incognito pig in aftershave and rumplemintz.”

“well maybe it’s just a stupid werewolf. let’s not pretend werewolves are suprageniuses.”

“how many werewolves ever won a nobel? that’s right, three. and that ain’t many.”

“look, you started this whole thing with the werecabbage. which, as we have agreed, is simply a ridiculous idea.”

“well what if you paid a werewolf to bite a pig? for science?”

“if a werewolf is smart enough to know the difference between a college student and a pig, it’s smart enough to know the value of a hard-earned dollar.”
(08:15.05.22.2005) [/scrytch] #

waiting for the conclusion
Today, reading old email and irc logs, I realized I really, really fucked something up in a way I didn’t even realize until now, years later, the damage too deep to fix, explaining the distance I feel between myself and someone I love, and I realize I fucked up and can’t make things right and at the end of the day I have one less friend than I thought I did, that bond actually being the sort of uncomfortable friendship you have with college friends you see once every few years, and not the endless knot of muscle and blood I thought it was, and I realize I have fucked things up far far greater than I believed, and I feel so ashamed at my own ignorance, my inability to see what was obvious to everyone else, and I can say that because I know the person in question will never read this, but I love you so much, you mean everything to me, you are the only person who I thought still cared about me, and I cannot let you go even if you have closed the door in my inattentive face years ago, I have fucked things up in ways I cannot even understand.
(08:15.05.22.2005) [/scrytch] #

a lesson (one)
It is commonplace to hear that regret makes a home in the things we avoid, the things we postpone, the things we tell ourselves we do not want, more so than in our actions and statements, but I don’t think this is true. The things we say, stammered by insecurity and made ugly by frustration, mark us in ways that become deeper in time, limit the trust and kindness others will give us, cut letters into our skin that no midnight move or change of clothes will hide. We take these failures as necessary components of our makeup, stones in the stomach, cheap fatalism to explain away that it was simply a mistake, a misunderstanding, something I should have kept inside.

Tell the man who hit his wife that action is better than caution. Tell the woman waiting out the next seven years in a cell it is better to have done than not done. If you have ever listened to me, ever paid what I say with even the slightest credence, I beg you listen to me now: everything you do not understand that waits in your heart must be hidden from the world, as all it wants is to hurt you.
(08:15.05.22.2005) [/scrytch] #

kook (starting)
She stood above me, nipples smeared with green milk and canine fangs buried in her smile. The left hand reached up and held the moon like a peach while the right hand held the knife that dug into and pulled up small jewels from the skin of my chest. I remember this. This is a thing which actually happened. I no longer have an audience, a single person who will hear a single word, I want so much to not be alone. Openings in the mouths of blackbirds which fill all nature of alien chatter. Every intersection of any two lines is a cross. Choice of options against choice of absolute freedom means that there are problems with her heart and I must wait in the lobby again. I am not famous and you will never be in love with me. You’ll never know dear how much I love you. There is a skin you do not know and cannot see beneath the false skin you show to strangers, and this is the skin that I know, and you do not care. There will be a time of jubilee, and certain gifts will be hidden in places that cannot be visited, which is cruel, but there is a joy in knowing these things exist even if they cannot be found. This is the way, it leads to certain points. I cannot stop getting high. We drove around in a seriously modified Chevelle and molested angels. You tell me you don’t love me, well I don’t love you. This is not pleasure, and I am not happy.
(08:15.05.22.2005) [/scrytch] #

obnoxious
i’ve got a short film of chuck norris taking a dump in a child’s toybox you can borrow. the best part is when the child cries. originally it was gonna be a full-length feature. shitty christmas, starring chuck norris. only bobby beausoleil, who also did a goofy syntho soundtrack, refused to share writing credits with chuck, and that’s why the manson family killed bruce lee. not many people know that jane birkin, french pop chanteuse and wife of serge gainsbourg, had her actual teeth removed and replace with the teeth of two wolves at the direction of lee disciple wilt chamberlain, and that she was to be the final opponent in lee’s “psycherotik” collaboration with renouned “New Satanist” and lsd addict Jackie Gleason entitled “Jesus Fucker ‘78”, a film about a gang of thirteen bikers on a mission to kill the president. chuck norris was not asked to participate. in a vodka-rage, norris and then-lover jan michael vincent snuck into the home of bruce and linda lee and took a dump in brandon lee’s crib. his attempt to have timothy leary kill manson at vacaville prison was less successful. at the very end of the rolling stones documentary “cocksucker blues”, there is a second-long flash of an “attack and cripple” sigil, hand-drawn by dennis wilson prior to his “accidental” death. it is my conviction that chuck norris, who suffers from dyslexia, saw this sigil in its inverted state and became an agent of the hidden christ. syd and marty krofft built automated fellatio devices with the faces of history’s great villians which were shared and soiled at lee’s “retreats” in the hidden city beneath oakland. it was here that norris learned “the death-touch”, a combination of jeet kune do and remote viewing. “Every home holds a weapon, a gun pointed at the faces of every viewer,” an obviously intoxicated norris told tv guide in 1988. the ghosts of all the people chuck norris has killed via television gather at his bedside as he tries to sleep, fighting coke-jitters and heart palpitations and crying jags, no one left to call at three am and beg for mercy, no stareyed groupies to give a medicated nod to his every memory, desperate searches for instructions from his god blurred and broken. tonight, black peter stalks chuck norris, santa pants around his ankles, faded polaroids stuck to his bare chest.
(08:15.05.22.2005) [/scrytch] #

Thu, 19 May 2005

you should put me in a hole somwhere
ALL TIME FOREVER OVULAR STAIN DAMP TO TOUCH FOUR BODIES THREE BODIES CONSTANTLY CRADLING BATTERED MATTRESS IN THE FLOOR DIFFERENT TIMES COULD NOT SEE FROM STREET WAIT NO WAIT STILL POSITIONED CLEAR MASKS HANDS TAPED TO PIECES OF BENT METAL ALL TIME ALL TIME PORTRAITS OF ORGANS TATTOOED ONTO THE BELLY THE CHEST NEVER FOREVER ALL TIME PLASTIC BAG RINGS WATCHES IDENTIFICATION BOWLS OF WATER AND JASMINE VOICES WHEN CLOSE QUIET LIKE FAR AWAY “KEPT WARM VENT DRANK WATER WAITED HE IS COMING” “INVISIBLE TO GOD” NEVER FOREVER ALL TIME YOU WITNESS WATCH WORK OUT FROM SKIN AND URINE BOWL COLLECTED HEAVEN SIGNAL INVISIBLE WAIT WAIT ALIVE BURY IN HOLE VANISH IN PLAIN SIGHT WAIT ALL TIME IS COMING NEVER FOREVER BUT SOON UNCOMING FINAL
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

you’re the stink on my cake
Marjorie kept saying that I should come up, that I could move in with her and her husband and her two boys and be the family manservant. “You wouldn’t have to actually do very much other than crack wise and buy groceries, and that’s about all you do in Iowa, other than sulk,” she said, which was true in a technical sense, but that didn’t mean I was about to be some fucking manservant. First, I did not like her children, and sure we all know that I don’t like children, but I particularly don’t like her children, because they’re so much like her husband, and probably the less I say about that the better. How can I work on my diabolical experiments with little people running around sticking their fingers in sockets and screaming about whatever stupid crap televison children are into this season? I’m the dark prince of American fiction! I can’t move to the suburbs!

We thus decided (well, I decided and she got used to it) that I would stay right where I am, but I would build a ROBOTIC MANSERVANT in my own likeness. This required a bit more introspection than I am normally comfortable with (which is none), so that I sent the ROBOTIC MANSERVANT to work one day to see if it would fool my boss. I haven’t said more than “hey” to my boss in a month, so it wasn’t much of a test, but it was a smashing success nevertheless, at least until some creep who has been hanging around the graveyard a lot tried to chat up the ROBOTIC MANSERVANT as to whether or not his wife was actually buried in the plot she had registered, he seemed to remember it being closer to a tree, it’s been three months since the funeral and no one will give him a straight answer. I happen to know for a fact that she’s buried in the right place as I dug the hole, but as I figured the ROBOTIC MANSERVANT wouldn’t have to get a job (besides the manservanting) I didn’t bother to include any information as to my many prior careers, and so the ROBOTIC MANSERVANT chased the grieving husband down the street, out to that prefab housing clump across the highway, which probably means I’m gonna get fired. It’s been that kinda month.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

they say when you talk like that you’re talking hate
There was a time when I thought I could be an animator. I had attempted to draw in the most minor of senses, but I was certain it was a skill I could instantly pick up, given a bit of effort, and soon enough I would be drawing my own cartoons, only better than the cartoons I saw on television. I went to the library to check out books on animation, which is my usual course of action when I decide I am to extend my genius into a new field, and there I found a collection of flipbooks, which brought the project into focus: with this little bit of eye-trickery, I could develop my skills on my own, and demonstrate said skills to my classmates. Being library books, each of the flipbooks was missing about half its pages, but I considered this an upside; the constant jolt of characters leaping forward in “time” was hypnotizing, and I knew I could incorporate sceharios and characters which directly addressed this non-traditional approach. I went into the teacher’s lounge the next day and photocopied all the flipbooks multiple times, and sorted the pages to form slow-motion and loop effects along with immediate jumps to different characters. By juxtaposing a Halloween story with a Mickey Mouse bit of claptrap, the viewer would half-see flashes of the Mouse as a skeleton, or as a devil. Indeed, at the age of seven I had become the Oliver Stone of flipbooks. Then, for no reason whatsoever, I completely lost interest, and forgot all about it, until just now, watching his image flicker in and out of sight as teh camera cut in and out and distorted to horozontal lines, his voice lost to the camera in the helicopter, screaming to get back, get back.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

you’ll never know dear how much i love you
She subscribed to one of those services where every morning a newspaper from a different city appears on your doorstep. There is a limited version of this service, strictly US/Canada, but she splurged for the full package, and on the mornings the paper arrived written in a language she could not understand she was content to look at the pictures, small smudged clouds which must once have signified discrete objects. Some newspapers had no pictures at all, just rows and rows of angular text, and here she contented herself to see images in the negative space within what was to her white noise, certain that the true meaning would manifest in a form she could understand. This was the single axiom of her belief system: an answer will come in time. Today it was a German paper, and she tried to remember what little high-school Deutsch she had left in her, so that short phrases — “around the corner”, “one hundred automobiles”, “the Berlin laundromat-road” — fell upwards to her, rising from the rest of the text, from the same smudgy images that could be from anywhere, of anything, except one, on the back page, larger than the rest, which she thought looked like her, when she was younger, maybe just after college. But different, obviously not her. Right? How could it be her?
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

wordsick
This was ‘98. The first time I met someone I didn’t know who had read something I’d written on the internet was at a bar in Iowa City, the one by where I used to live, the one right across the street from John’s Grocery. I bumped into a girl I knew from undergrad workshop who was now in proper grad workshop and got caught up in her wake for a few hours, not wanting to drive back to Waterloo. At the bar we met some friends of hers, and one of them was a classmate from one of the dozen classes I stopped attending during one of my fits. She told me she had read something I’d written after doing a websearch for undergrad writer’s workshop and pulled up my submission piece. She told me I should be less gimmicky. This is the same thing Dan Foss told me the last time I saw him, so I knew she was right, but I kinda blew it off because I didn’t really want to talk about it; I was very self-conscious around these people who saw themselves as the next wave of American fiction while I still basically thought of what I did as a goof. She woulsn’t let this point go, she stared right at me and told me if I could drop all this self-referential post-Oulipo flash and filigree and got to the very bones of the human condition that I had it in me to say something meaningful, something satifsying. That was the word — satisfying. I was trying not to drink very much, but that attempt was starting to fail, and I told myself to keep my mouth closed and not run off at the mouth, so I didn’t really address her point, and eventually she stopped talking to me.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

will never leave
There’s this diner out in Evansdale that’s open all night, and the entire staff is also a band; I’ve seen them play on Thursday night at the Amphouse (under new management) and they’re not bad, more roots-country than I’m normally into but it works if you’ve been doing a lot of drinking. Sometimes one of the waitresses will start to sing while cleaning a table, and the others join in with elaborate harmonies that make me want to learn some music theory. Normally I am made absolutely uncomfortable by such public displays, but there is a quiet to their voices, and a heartsick lonesome nature they have mastered which most singers don’t even know exists, and so it is that after work at the graveyard I drive across to Evansdale and eat bacon cheeseburgers at two in the morning while women I will never really know sing of a sorrow so deep it steals the breath from your lungs.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

what i’m gonna do
In my head I always associate staying home from school with taking care of my mother, after spending hours trying to get her out of bed because the phone has been ringing ever since she was supposed to be at the hospital and I knew if I wanted to I could just let her sleep and run across the field and down the street and catch the bus, but I never did, not because I knew she would yell at me (though she would) and not because I thought I could get her up and in the car and off to work (which never happened, so that I knew when the phone stopped ringing that she was never going to go back to that job, and there wouldn’t be any more money for a while, and I might have to stay with grandma again for a month or two), but because I was certain if my mom didn’t get up, and I left her there to sleep through another day, that when I got home she would be dead. And that’s why, later, after she was gone, I never skipped a day of school.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

we shall be changed
It seems inevitable that, given the directionand momentum of my life, I will eventually become a bum. Years ago, I used to talk to a homeless man who, like a troll, lived in the steam tunnels beneath the bridge connecting the art building to the union, and he told me that becoming homeless was never a decision made n an instant, but a stage in a long-term process, a process he was convinced wasn’t yet finished with him. This is where the Homeless Writer’s Coalition in the old book comes from. The homelessness isn’t particularly interesting, except in the sense that it would allow me to become the thing I have always wanted to be, which is a street preacher. My twenties, I see now, were a time of building my mythology, of doing the foundational work and burning it into my consciousness, so that it springs to hand even when drunk or high or sick unto death. My major impediment is my nervousness as to performing in public, and so as an experiment I got in my new car and drove to a place where I didn’t know anybody (Davenport), parked the car, walked around in the cold for a little while, drinking fortified wine, until I ended up outside a bar on Locust Street and started in on how not everyone had to die, and how they kept that information from us, but only because the medical condition of life after death was a fundamentally flawed concept, and how the ongoing conflict in the Middle East was orchestrated by UN athiests in an attempt to destroy holy relics imbued with cellular wisdom which, like the sexual exploitation of angels during the fourth and fifth centuries, has been sullied by the black magic of money and second history which stains the eyes of newborn babies except for those it cannot stain who are sacrificed in surgical theatres beneath every hospital with the severed organs flung to ladies-in-waiting in the balcony who then throw handfuls of rose pedals (in an re-enactment of Teresa’s vision of the visitation of Mary) upon the doctors, at which point people stopped walking past me and pretending not to notice and ended up chasing me off the block, at which point I went back to my car and drove home. It’s a start.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

walrus jar
There was a doorway beneath the staircase in the first house I moved into after the accident, and behind that doorway was hallway which led to End-Of-Time, and while I never went that far down the hallway the people I met spoke well of it, claimed it as a religious experience, a geographic epiphany by which the sorrows of the world fell into a larger lattice of intent invisible to us who walked the world. I didn’t need to see that; I had seen too much by then, and only wanted a place to sleep and keep company, and the hallway was ideal for that. The hallway was, in a literal sense, a waiting room, and so took on the attributes of any institutional no-room. The couches were incredibly comfortable, the coffee was better than average, and no one wanted to harm me. I often considered spending the whole of my life there, but after a while I would get antsy, and want to right my wrongs, and leave the hallway for a while. This story has no ending.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

untranslations
This is a short notice to myself about all of the things I have written and then lost or destroyed over the years. I hope the next time I go into one of my sinking rages that I will read this, and wait, but I know that won’t actually happen, and I’ll have to write this notice over agian.

And any number of little pieces, notes, letter-stories, narrated audiotapes and other crap. It’s amazing I have anything to show for what I’ve done.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

until we see each other again
The song she sent me didn’t do its work all at once; I listened to it a few times in single shots and tried not to be critical about recording quality, as I’m getting to be kinda a snob with things like that, caught the harmonies she was so good with and the sound of the piano which was just the tiniest bit sharp, but then I listened to it here at the house instead of in the car in between errands, sat down and played the cd with the player left on loop from earlier, and I realized she had to have someone help her burn the cd because she hated taking anything off tape, even off the crappy four-track her brother handed down to her, so to take the song onto hard drive and clean it up, which was a mistake, so whoever helped her (probably some new boyfriend I’ll hear about in a week) basically messed it up a little, and she was always so weird about not wanting anybody to hear something she had recorded, so this must have been an ordeal, and there’s a couple places where her timing on the piano is a bit off and he probably wanted to sync that up but she must have said n