Thu, 19 May 2005

The Light Beneath Your Skin
Of all the things in your life, given the chance to begin again, I’m one of the things you wouldn’t keep. I’ve known this for years now. Instead of leaving, I turned the knife, turned the screws. Like I was some record club you couldn’t get out of. You once told me, then, that you liked me too much to fuck me. My goal, then, was to see if I could get you to like me less. And the pathetic part of it is it worked, for a while. Back when becoming a ghoul seemed a perfectly justified lifestyle choice, another part of growing up. And we preyed on each other, our bigotries, our weaknesses, our petty evils. Because we just needed a little more time. Only at some point in the ending, the strangest thing happened, and we forgot entirely about our attritions.

The nubs across your shoulderblades where you were growing wings always hurt and needed balms we had to drive out into the country to find, honeycomb and pomegranate and cattail. You had taken to sleeping on your chest, which used to terrify me when I slept beside you, convinced you had suffocated. I could feel the cartilage pressing against the yellow-red skin, feeling you wince and pull away under my fingertips, neither of us ever content to leave such things alone. I kept the windows closed for fear you’d pull away the skin, shake off the blue blood from your wings and take to the sky at the of an open window. The merest suggestion was an invitation, then.

We were spending so much time at the hospital the doctors began scheduling in time each day for our visits, all panicky and filled with asinine questions. “This is a small thing,” they told us, “and after the novelty is gone it won’t really change anything, won’t fix any of your problems.” But there was no talking to us, our ears only tuned to screams and whispers. Everything was going to change forever, we knew. It had to.

One morning I woke to find the sheets covered in blood and you gone. I saw a light in the bathroom, and found you there, sitting in the bathtub, your feet up over your chest. Clumps of feather and bone streaked the floor. The nubs were gone, replaced by broad wartish sores. I cleaned the floor, filled the tub, and we cleaned the blood from your back, draining the water each time it grew red. After an hour or two or ten ( I cannot remember) of this we went back into the bedroom and slept. We never discussed it again.

Nothing changed. The silences grew more noticeable, the time away grew longer, and we took separate shifts at the kitchen table, sobbing. Eventually being apart became easier than being together, once you realized I had no place in your future, once I grew tired of watching the light beneath your skin fade and go out.

Perhaps there is a necessity for mystery in a person’s heart, a side-door into some strange life running parallel to yours all this time. Perhaps we get this mystery confused with novelty, with the shock of the new, and take this week’s distraction as a substitute for the things we really need, which we fear to think of, much less touch. So much simpler to settle, to swallow any notion of something else, to feign at contentment and make the best of petty revenge and the satisfaction of feeling your heart grow cold. Perhaps all we ever really wanted was an excuse. I’m not entirely sure these aren’t just differences of definition, swapping words as fit our vanity. All I know is it was never any miracle to grow wings from your body: the miracle was the ability, the attempt to cross that space between you and I, for a while, our only stupidity lying in thinking we needed a reason, a pretext, a condition for making connection feasible.

But that’s done and over, now. Give me an hour and I’ll be gone.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Not The Thing You’d Keep
I have a photograph a friend of mine took of me while I was sleeping. I was staying with Seth and Rissa, sleeping in their basement, and i often awoke to find one of their cats burrowing in my clothes, or battling my shoes. In this picture, the smaller of their cats, Inquisitor, had climbed up onto my chest and fallen asleep there, his head just below my chin. You can see the start of the wave in my hair, see where I’m starting to bald. There’s a small cluster of acne along my jawline. There were red lines just over my ears where my glasses normally were. I had been gnawing at my fingernails. It had been a few days since I shaved last. There’s a sweater you gave me balled up under my head. When I wonder what happened to me, what’s become broken, I look at this picture and think: is this me? Is this the place I’m trying to get back to? Or was I just as lost then as I am now? If I met this person, this fixed me, would I even know them, or would the difference be so great that I couldn’t make the connection?

I have tapes my siblings and I made as children. talking and singing and little skit-story things. the tapes are really fucked up, quality-wise, and a lot of stuff was (obviously) recorded stupidly, so there’s gaps and missing feed. Is *that* me?

I have a scar on my inner left leg from where I jumped into a bush while on vacation in Idaho. I have a very faint burn mark on my right arm from when I was a baker. I have three small bruises on my left wrist from moving my dresser, after cleaning out the book-rot stuck behind it. I have some kind of itch on the back of my scalp, beneath my lobotomy-patient haircut. I get occasional arthritis in my right knee from an old skateboarding accident. Is *that* me?

I’ve got a book I’ve been writing for a while. A lot of it I haven’t shown anybody, mostly because it’s stuff I’ve cut, some of it because i can’t get it to work, whatever that means. You all know all about this. Is *that* me?

There’s an envelope with the results of various tests I had been given throughout my childhood. IQ tests, morality tests, “creative problem-solving” tests. Tests involving parcels of land, injured animals, various trains on various tracks. There’s a composite of these tests which was used to track my academic potentials, my future plans. Is *that* me?

I own clothing and books. Bedsheets. Pictures I pulled out of library books. A crateful of cd’s, a crateful of records. An old typewriter I use more often than the computer I’m using right now. Stacks of spirals and typing paper. A dresser and a desk. Stones, necklaces, letters, postcards and tapes people have given me over the years. Is *that* me?

When the sun is out, I leave a shadow. I leave messages on answering machines and email in people’s accounts. I try to send letters and give gifts, at times. On snowy days, you can see where I’ve walked. Obviously, then, I’m somewhere. But where am I?

——

Last night, around five, I called my mother. My mother gets up around four, for no better reason than because she likes the morning, but was still a bit surprised to get a call, particularly from me, the most delinquent of sons. “Mom?” “Josef? Uh, Josef, is something wrong?” “No, everything’s okay, I just got a question. Did I ever have a dog?” “What?” “When I was little. Like maybe eight? Did I have a dog?” “No, no, Josef, you never had a dog. You did have that fish that died, and then you had those bugs that I made you throw out, but you never had any…” “‘kay, mom. Thanks.”

This is only distressing because three hours ago, before Ana fell asleep, I told her all about my dog. I had a dog named Pookah, and it was so big. It’s like I can almost remember it, but I can’t. I guess that stands to reason.

Dry blood, the body’s so cold.

My mother tried to get me to learn the piano. She knew how to play, as did my grandparents, and their grandparents. We couldn’t actually afford a piano, but my mother used to go shopping on weekdays and wheel her cart up to the electronics section, staring over the electric keyboards. She’d look around, wait for an open time, and start playing, songs half-remembered, improvisations from school-age exercises, light pop songs played from ear. I used to watch her from a distance on Saturdays when I was supposed to be trying on shoes or pants. She sat me down in the church basement, where an older friend of her mother’s tried to teach me fundamentals. I was a tempremental child, and after long minutes i’d smash my fists into the keys and scream and kick at the wood. After about five such aborted sessions, my mom let me quit and paid off my damage costs. i’ve cultivated patience and stillness since then, but there’s times when i sit at a piano, and i try to play, and the notes come out wrong, and i have to hold back my hands.

——

It’s a myth we have that we are only as deep in our feelings as we have words to express them, only as emotive as we are eloquent. The most meager and miserable of orators is a genius of heart and mind, should his words please us in form, thinking we thusly know their content, while the greatest of us and in us becomes so much stupiditiy as soon and as sure as it stammers and spits. Words are only as true as they cater to and flatter our sensibilities, our love of the rush of rhetoric and argument, and they are only as honest as the fall in with the cadences of our habit and prejudice. As I was writing only for myself, the avowed touchstone of proper fiction (or so I had been taught), the only bigotries I had to concede to were my own.

During the floods, Seth and I once spent the night at the West High gymnasium, which had been converted into a Red Cross shelter for those left homeless. We were looking for another of the April Eight people. It didn’t occur to us what we were going to ask this person, should we find him. “Hello. Have you recently been brought back from the dead?” We walked around, saw people we had seen before but didn’t really know, neighbors and cashiers and passerby, and exchanged smiles, slight waves, nods. Their belongings spread out in a pile near their cots, the children playing tag between each family’s handful of scavenged property. We didn’t have the nerve to ask anyone of anything. We couldn’t even look these people in the eye. That was the night I began to doubt what it was I was trying to do, the entire project, though I hadn’t yet realized the most basic truth of it: it does not matter whether or not I am supposed to be here. I am here. I threw away all the hours left to me, obscessed with the slightest feigned half-imagined traumas. me, mine, my, me, i, mine, i, mine, me, i, my, me, mine.

It was always too late. Even when time remained, we convinced ourselves that we were running out of time, that there would be no extensions, that the only decisions left to be made were the decorative and meaningless choices that were good only for consolation and distraction. And we did love our distractions, then, in the good old days.

I will go no farther. You can push and push and push but I will go no farther. I have spent as long as I will waiting by the window, the phone, seeking news of some faraway place where all my decisions are being made for me. I gave away my books, my records, my clothes. Incidents to feign control, direction. I wanted the world to end, to watch the houses burn and topple, to be a witness to immortal acts. Time would not bow to my command, and the scope of my life was, as ever, lost to history, the never-remembered small days bookended between greater dates. So I set to the things I had built and made plans for their destruction, as the world around me continued to slow its spin, a top gone too long. Hollow, the pathetic lonely plots, the door closed and the typewriter clicking, drifting away. A boy pulling the wings off butterflies, kicking strays, picking through roadside carrion with a stick and a scalpel.

She had never actually told me. I had stopped by to visit, after she had moved back in with her parents, after she had quit her job, and went to her door, where inside I heard her singing to herself, just above a whisper:

“there’s a little black spot on my lung today…
it’s the same old thing as yesterday…”

And I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. I’m still not sure if she knew I was there or not. Either way we didn’t discuss it then, as I left the house and walked away, that being what I do. From that day on it was an unspoken referent. But she never actually told me, and I always hoped.

I spent this time, the last days, sitting in my room, writing, plotting. Setting them up to watch them fall. Plagues, earthquakes. Rivers of blood. Locusts nesting in the skulls of abandoned infants. Clusters of feverish refugees, beaten at night by the kids of the neighborhood. Still plotting how it was that I did not die. And all the while, Ana sat in her bedroom, the pictures of her high-school days still up on the walls, getting smaller, hollowing out from inside. My hands knot into fists and my jaw cramps to think of it now.

After it was all over and she had finally finished fighting, her mother told me she walked around the house, holding herself up by moving from wall to wall, saying good-bye to everything in the house, finishing with her room. Good-bye, books. Good-bye, desk, chair. Good-bye pictures, blankets, bed. She stayed on a while longer, but those were the last things she said. Ana once told me she believed that when you die, your soul goes to the moon, where you meet with everyone else who has died, and you get a seat above the earth, where you can watch the lives of those still here, like a movie, and nobody shushes you for talking or tells you not to put your feet up on the seat in front of you, because there’s no reason to be that uptight when you’re dead.

I was standing outside, watching the house from the street, as though I could watch her rise to the moon from the street. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Yoin
She had an endless collection of quilts on her bed, which we’d crawl under and find each other back when we did such things, but on the night in question we were atop the quilts, as she was showing me the constellations of moles on her body. She was quiet, telling me a secret, the feeling of being let in on something that was present in my every interaction with her. I followed her fingers with mine across the goosebumps, trying to remember the names, the shapes. Months later, when we were dancing, I followed the constellations with my fingertips and she held on to me as though afraid of falling off the earth.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

YM
Your momma’s so unpleasant that she makes people uncomfortable when she’s around.

Your momma’s so average that sometimes it makes her cry, when she’s alone, that resigned sound in the voice of her parents the last time she saw them alive, the ache in them, the quiet space in them she had always wanted to fill with pride.

Your momma’s so filled with shame as to her lack of steady income that she uses coupons, but can’t look the cashier in the eye, and just sets them in a pile next to the cash register while she stares at the skin where her wedding ring used to be.

Your momma’s so fat that when she takes you and your sister to the pool, she waits in the car, and you feel sad but you don’t know why.

Your momma’s so old she doesn’t remember you when you visit her in the home. So you never visit her in the home.

Your momma’s so old she dropped her change in the parking lot and tried to pick it up, and couldn’t, and waited for someone to help her, but nobody would look at her, they just pretended she wasn’t there.

Your momma’s so tired of being alive that she spends days staring at the ceiling, at her hands, at the patch in the lawn where grass won’t grow, and you’ve learned she won’t make you dinner then, won’t unclog the toilet, so you keep your mouth shut and eat potato chips in your room.

Your momma’s so sad she’ll come into your room at five in the morning on a school day to tell you how sorry she is she’s such a bad mother, she had some bad days there and it’s been hard but she’s gonna make it all up to you now, she’s met this new guy and he’s really nice and a really good lay, and she’s sure he’ll be good to you and your sister, and everything’s gonna change, and then she can’t stop crying and aches to breathe and you have to sit up and hold her until she falls asleep at the end of your bed.

Your momma’s so crazy every time you hear the phone ring you’re certain it’s her, or someone calling to tell you to pick her up from some bar or jail, and you feel this dread you can’t shake, but what can you do.

She’s your momma.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

What Is Wrong With You?
There was this party. I was in high school, maybe a freshman but definitely in high school because my friend Escho had a car and could get us to parties, and since my folks had me working at the Slurp ‘N Suck on weekends in order to teach me responsibility I could get us beer so long as we were careful. So Escho and me are at this party out in that neighborhood if you take Ansborough south out past the graveyard, where a friend who knew this guy in the debate club was throwing an anti-prom shindig. And but so I’m hanging out in the backyard, which is where I last saw Escho looking for a surrepeticious place to puke, and there in the grass I see this necklace. And not even like some plastic thing, or like ten dollars at the mall kinda thing, but like a serious grownup necklace. So I put in in my pocket and go inside and start asking around if anybody lost a necklace, and this girl who smelled like fruit juice and stomach acid and some kinda plasticky strawberry perfume came up and threw her arms around me and started thanking me over and over and over, so I take her over by the stairs out front where it’s quieter and tell her it’s no big deal, but she talks all on like it’s her mom’s, she’d get killed if she lost it, she made such a big deal of letting her wear it tonight, because it’s like prom night and she didn’t want her parents to know she didn’t have a date so she told them she was meeting her boy there because he’s shy and this whole trip with this made-up boy and she’s crying and shivering even though it’s not cold out at all. but then this fucking stussy-kid comes in and starts hollering that my friend is out on the street telling drivers that the end is near and i better fucking do something about it, so i look at this girl and i look out and i tell her to wait, that i’m coming right back, and i run out and fucking Escho is laying in the street giggling and i pick him up and drag him back to the car where he passes out in the back seat finally, and i go back to the party, but the imaginary boyfriend girl was gone.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Everything Is Wrong With Me
First, you won’t believe me, but who even cares, because that’s not the point; the point here is, well, I better start at the beginning if I have any hope of ever getting to that.

Like all beginnings, this one starts in a roller rink.

“Okay, this one’s for the couples only, no singles out on the rink at this time,” said The Man At The Top Of The Booth, who had been torturing us all night with Air Supply and Foreigner songs despite our pleas for Slayer.

“DUUUUUUUDE! ANGEL OF DEATH!”

“Sorry, gents, this one’s meant for the young lovers out there,” which obviously didn’t include us. Most likely it was Seth’s idea to get tanked on cornhusker vodka and go roller skating — real roller skating, mind you, none of that pansy rollerblading action, we’re talking strictly ‘78 roller boogie time. And that’s what we thought we were in for; we stayed up all last night popping unmarked pills and watching across 115th street, car wash and the Mack in preparation for what we thought was gonna be a disco inferno, but we forgot that the ’70s had a whole ‘nother musical dark side to it.

“NOOOOOO! NOT REO SPEEDWAGON!” screamed Ana, which was enough to get her sent to the penalty box beneath the Tower Of Suffering for five minutes. Something had to be done, and fast. We had already blown what little cover we had when jimmy cheerios slammed into a wall after trying to speed-jump to the snack bar, so all eyes were on us. We went to the mini-arcade and played centipede and the journey video game whilst we whipped up a plan.

The DJ had to pee sometime. It was just inevitable. And we knew he didn’t just have a piss-bottle stashed away or the board of health woulda closed this place down long ago (it eventually did, by the way, but that’s after the fact). we stood on the bench to the left, pouring water from glass to glass and making gurgling noises. This eventually paid off, but we hadn’t decided who was going to be the intrepid soul willing to climb up and take control of the floor. Unfortunately, before we could say no, our old friend fast eddie satan scurried up the ladder, at which point all we could do was look confused.

Ed began to spin the record (“escape”, better known as “the pina coloda song”) faster and faster, sending the skating couples around the rink faster and faster. People began to look afraid, and a few were obviously out of control. “SKATEN ODER TOT, SCHWEINHUNDERN!” screamed Ed in his best pig-German as the young lovers enacted meth-soaked brownian movement, and finally the din broke into the raunchy version of “love to love you, baby”, which had those skaters still up and ambulatory gyrating and swooning like a pheromone experimentation lab.

Ed jumped out of the booth and flew the fifteen feet down to the floor, where he quietly said “my work here is done” and left, as did Seth, carrying the passed-out jimmy over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Ana, Julia and I stayed to watch the young suburban teens learn to master the pre-rut dance, and eventually the heat got to me and I passed out.

The DJ was fired the next day.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

The Ballad of Maria Einseideln
(Undergrad Writer’s Workshop, UofIowa Spring 1996)

It was cold like this, the snow hanging in the air, the last night I was here with her, the last time I could look at the blankets and quilts and know that she was under there, asleep. I would sit here, on this rug my wife made for her last Christmas, and watch her sleep, nothing but moonlight between us. I would think about the stories I just told her, sometimes; usually I would just sit, fill myself with the stillness, the silence.

The story I told her that night was horrible.

“…and that’s why the world is flat. Now go to bed, please.”

“Shyeah, I don’t THINK so. One more time.”

“Nope, won’t happen, you have lessons tomorrow. You need the rest. You and I both know how loopy you get when you don’t get enough sleep, and Mr. Broadrick won’t care much for one of your impromptu naps tomorrow, will he? And you’re just coming back into his graces after The Swingset Incident…”

“Ah, no problem. It’s okay. See, I got a plan for that, but that’s tomorrow, anyway. ON WITH THE STORY!”

“Last one. Final. The omega point of tonight’s readings. Agreed?”

“Shyeah, I don’t-“

“AGREED?”

“Yeah, agreed, okay.”

“Okay, this is a story about Stick, the boomerang who never came back when you threw him. The hunters used to throw Stick at kangaroos and dinosaurs and missionaries but Stick just fell to the ground, still as a stone. So one day the hunters turne d him into a fire, and that’s the end of the story. Good night!”

“GYP! That’s no story, I mean, there’s just a stick and then things, and it’s…it’s just nothing! DO-OVER!”

“Shyeah, I don’t THINK so, sweet. My part of our agreement is full. Sleep!”

And she gave me The Pissed Look, but it was late, and I had so much to do the next day.

——

Story: There was a mole who lived in Big Forest all by himself because he had no friends. Mole thought people should like him no matter how he treated them, and when they didn’t, he treated them worse and worse until there wasn’t a single animal in the forest who wanted to be Mole’s friend. Life is rough.

One night Mole was walking around out by the creek and saw Wildebeest, who only had a few friends, but that was more than Mole had. Mole came up behind Wildebeest and tried to scare him, which was a very Mole thing to do, but Wildebeest didn’t get scared because he was dead. Mole started thinking and decided that since Wildebeest didn’t need it any more, Mole would dress up in Wildebeest’s skin to help make friends. But when Mole wore his skin to the clearing where the other animals were playing they liked him even less, which made Mole even more confused than he normally was.

The next day, Mole saw Frog asleep on a rock sunning himself, which was about all Frog ever did. Mole decided that since Frog never did anything good, and because Frog had even more friends than Wildebeest did, that Mole should take Frog’s skin. Well, Frog was using his skin at the time, my Mole already had the taste of blood in his mouth, so he ripped up Frog with his claws and took his skin. The other animals didn’t like Mole one bit now, but Mole kept at his plan, up the friend chain, until the only animal left in Big Forest was Peacock, the most beautiful and beloved of all the animals. Peacock saw Mole coming and flew away just in time, never to return to Big Forest again. Mole felt bad and tired and there was a pain in his back from carrying all those skins around all the time, so he went to the creek to wash off, where he saw his reflection in the water. When Mole saw his reflection, he knew that he had become Death. Mole was so afraid that he just stopped living. After that, there were no more animals in Big Forest ever again.

—-

When our daughter was born, my wife wanted to name her something exotic, something to set her apart from the everyday. I wanted to name her something simple, something special to me. My daughter’s name is Maria Conquest Of The Celestial Song Einseideln. She started calling herself Conquest around the time she could first talk (well, she called herself Con-Con, which was close enough…the way a parent’s mind will jump to conclusions…). We called her Conquest from that point on, though I couldn’t help but wonder what that would translate to by the time she reached junior high. It was around that time that I began tucking her in at night and telling her stories I had written when I was younger, when I thought I’d only be teaching until we got on our feet. I dug them out from a box filled with notes, family pictures, small pieces of cloth, a picture Conquest drew of a big purple sun. Amazing, the junk we collect and hoard — old envelopes with lost letters, broken crayons, small cold stones — everything had as a special meaning, a connection to nostalgia which falls on us like rain when we try to sleep.

—-

Story: Out behind the barns at Grandpa’s farm, past the grove of trees growing from a bed of abandoned cars and trash, past the electric fence and the place where the hunters set their deer stands, way way way out past the farthest thing you can see is where The Snow Queen lived. She floated above the lake just after the sun had set; she pressed with the tip of her finger into the ice and cracks ran from her across the surface, she floats again, she presses again, a latticework of bright white lines ran through the darker white of the lake, the same dark white as the sky when the sun would finally return.

People would occasionally go out through the fields and get lost, stumbling past this site, the movements of the Snow Queen lost to the blowing snow, their failing eyes only almost seeing what took place across the lake. Sometimes, by odd chance, a break in the wind, or simple determination, someone would see the Snow Queen and know her face. They would wander out to the shore and crawl across ice so smooth you needed to take off your gloves and claw your fingernails into the surface in order to move, all the while going snow-blind and frostbitten and half-mad beneath an invisible moon. The sound of wolves who gather, dance and pray to the Snow Queen out in the trees remains unheard to those on the ice — if heard, they would know to fear the place they are going. Finding themselves finally at the center of the lake, prostrate and dying at the feet of the Snow Queen, they breathed suppositions through lips gone blue of how they always believed, that they were convinced, that they always had faith in her.

The Snow Queen would smile, sigh, and reach down with one finger which touched them upon their foreheads. They shattered, scattered into the wind, into the cracks in the ice, down, drown, a perfect stillness.

Nothing remains of the Snow Queen now but forgotten ghosts who continue to fade and vanish.

—-

We used to take my daughter to my father’s farm on the occasional Sunday. One time she fell into the sty, where pigs five times her size nuzzled her and squealed. I remember getting up before dawn, going out to slop the pigs, screaming and crying when I fell in, afraid I’d be eaten. She just smiled. “Hi, Pigs!”. My father laughed and picked her up with his right arm, the same one that got caught in the auger when I was twelve. He shouldn’t be able to move it, much less lift with it, but my father’s a strong man.

Later that day, my father told Conquest that each snowflake is individual, that it has a design all its own. After hearing this, Conquest ran outside and began examining snowflakes. Once she saw this was true, she came to the conclusion that snowf lakes have to be alive-the reason they go to the trouble of being all different is so when they talked to each other they know who they were talking to. She ran back to the house, grabbed me by the hand, and pulled me out into the night.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Listen,” she whispered. “The snowflakes are talking to each other.”

—-

Story: My father taught my brother and I a game a long, long time ago. The game was called BLOOP!. When my father said “BLOOP! Yer a fish!”, we became fish. When my father said “BLOOP! Yer a book!”, we became books. When he was feeling vindictive, my father would BLOOP! us into things which had no form, like truth or the Seven Year’s War. Because my brother and I were very hyperactive when we lived at the farm, the phrase we most often heard was “BLOOP! Yer a stone.” And we were stones.

It did not take long before my brother and I realized that our father was a witch. And he was not a good witch, no, no, sometimes he had two right hands. And I knew long before he told us to in so many words, that if we went against his wishes we were doomed.

Yesterday, when I couldn’t pick you up from school, I went to visit my brother in the hospital. My father told me not to, but I couldn’t help it, I had to. My brother has been catatonic for two months. I just found about it yesterday. I asked the nurse if I could have a few minutes alone with my brother. Then I went over to him and whispered in his ear “bloop”. It has been a long time since I was a child. And now I am not only an adult but a witch as well. My brother’s eyes roll backward, forward, focus.

“Kevin. Can you hear me?”

“Yeah. I can.”

“Can you walk?”

“Yeah. I can.”

“You know what we have to do.”

“I know. I know.”

And we went to look for my father.

—-

So much snow had fallen one morning that school was canceled and Conquest literally sprang out of bed when she heard the news. Half an hour bundling her up, snow suit and mittens and scarves and sweaters and caps until I could barely tell it was her underneath all the fabric. “It’s meeee, dad! but I don’t think I can breathe, yeah, no my face is here, yeah,” watching out the window as her and my wife played in the snow. I sat down at my desk and lost myself in work.

Even now, as I sit here and wait, I am not sure just what happened after that point.

—-

Story: Once there was a girl who got a bad disease. Every time she closed her eyes something disappeared. Sometimes it was things of hers. Sometimes it was things which had nothing to do with her. Sometimes she didn’t even notice it was gone until much later, but eventually she would go looking for something, something she had forgotten about, and it was gone.

She decided that the only thing that she could do was to keep her eyes closed all the time, but when she tried, she couldn’t tell if things were continuing to disappear or not. She was finally so frightened that she had to open her eyes, at which point she discovered that a lot of things were gone. She couldn’t think of a way to make it stop, and she started to cry, but this made her close her eyes many times and she forced herself to stop. She then noticed that people she knew were disappearing. Her friend Ana came over and asked her why she was crying, blink, Ana was gone.

The way I wanted to tell the story, being part of the story was a fate unto itself and she disappeared as soon as I hit the period key, but no, no.

That’s not what really happened at all.

—-

Our neighbor Mark owns a gorgeous black lab he named Pookah. Conquest loved that dog; she’d run up and down, along the fence, Pookah chasing after her on the other side, until Conquest had exhausted herself and flopped down on the grass, catching giggles between breaths. On this day, Conquest was running with the dog while my wife came inside to put on cocoa, watching Conquest from the window. The snow had piled high along the front fencing, and as Conquest dashed for that side, Pookah climbed a dune and managed to climb over the fence. I could hear her cheering and laughing (but I didn’t know why) as she petted the dog, then following as the dog darted off across the street, into the fields. This was the last anyone saw of her, until we found the body, Pookah licking snowflakes from her cheeks and eyes.

By the time the ambulance had arrived my mind was in another place, where everything was bright and slow and foreign. I was talking but I didn’t know what I was saying. Someone grabbed me by the back of my shirt, threw me into the back of the ambulance and we were off. They rushed Conquest, perfectly still, into the hospital and brought us to the lobby where I began drinking reheated coffee and shaking. I went into the bathroom and prayed, I mean I actually got on my knees in front of the urinals and prayed. I couldn’t remember the last time. It had been a while. A doctor came in and looked at me for just a second, then pretended not to notice, but I felt it and I couldn’t think right and I don’t even remember what I was saying, it couldn’t have been very loud and I don’t think he heard anything, God, just give me this one thing, please, anything you want, just please, don’t let her die.

Three hours later she was dead.

—-

Story: I wake up and remember dreaming about talking with Conquest. She tells me about the need for a decision. There is no more time. I don’t understand what she is talking about. She will not explain anymore. I look around the bedroom for an obj ect which I can use as a kind of emotional locus. Conquest tells me that all ends begin to fray. I do not see my daughter because she is not there. I begin to ask Conquest something but forget what it was, this happens to me all the time now. Thoughts collect like stray balloons across the ceiling. Conquest tells me that this will not be the end of the world, I think, maybe she said the end of my world, maybe she says the end of her world, I am having trouble understanding her. I look for my daughter but remember she is a dream I had last night. Conquest tells me something, forgetfulness, blaming it on others, given up the ghost, I don’t know, I can’t hear her anymore. I laugh but I don’t feel happy. Conquest tries and tries and tries but there is no way to get me to understand.

—-

At night, after my wife went to sleep, I would come in here and read her stories. We hadn’t touched anything in the room since the funeral, hadn’t even made the bed, and with only the light from the window I could convince myself that she was still here, asleep beneath the dinosaurs on her quilts, while I sat and read so quietly that I could barely hear myself, remembering how much more important this was compared to the mornings I’d arrive at work dead to the world.

I left the old stories in the brown folder in the basement; I didn’t need them anymore. My head was filled with stories now, night after night, over and always. When my wife found out she began screaming at me, which had become converted by the next day to pity, the next week to long talks, trying to come to a kind of terms. I told her I loved her, that it was time to move on, that I cannot live in the past, whatever would end the conversation, whatever I had to do to stop thinking about it. And at night I would come in here and tell my daughter stories.

Last night, my wife left to live with our friends Aria and Matthew. She told me that I had to do this by myself, that she couldn’t do anything, that she thought I was a liar, that she didn’t matter, she said so many things. I went out with her — Matthew and I went and had a failed man-to-man over bad scotch, Aria told me that people at the school were wondering what I was up to and if I was all right, my wife told me she loved me. I drove back to the house and fell asleep in the car.

I forgot to tell Conquest her story.

It’s been so long since I’ve left the room. I have closed the door. I do nothing but tell stories. I look at the sheets and know there is no child beneath them. I tell stories I half-remember from when I was a boy, stories my father told me, things I did, things kids I knew did. I tell her stories about funny things that happened when I was first working at the school, about how her mother and I met, about my cousin who can eat broken glass. I tell her stories I remember from books, from television, that I overheard on buses. I tell her lies. I tell her things which do not make sense. I am the only one in the room. My daughter, Maria Con-Con Conquest of the Celestial Song Einseideln, is dead.

At night I can hear Pookah howl. Nothing can keep him quiet. The last time I talked to Mark, he told me he was looking for someone to take Pookah; there was just no way that dog could stay in this neighborhood. I heard something on the porch, and thinking it was my wife, got up to unlock the door and let her in. Pookah was standing there, perfectly still, as though he was waiting for me.

I stared at him. And I waited.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Just Before The Winds Come
All my neighbors are in the Vietnam Conflict Recreation Society. I kept refusing to join. I’d noticed a general lack of lawn respect from their children and an unmistakable snub at this summer’s block party: our car-part-built gamelan booth was placed on the railroad tracks. They are a force to behold, I will admit; mighty and high as kites, out on the high school football field, running flanks and scattering from imagined treeline fire. That the area is completely devoid of any jungle never deterred them; nor does the fact that most people find the entire ensemble’ in questionable taste. They were never bright boys, the Central Heights Squadron, all desperately in need of some kinda hobby that doesn’t involve Paul’s son Mandrax making flashpots and pipe bombs. Mandrax used to be content planting fake alien artifacts out in he fields with my boy Barry and the other kids, but now it’s barns peppered with shrapnel, tracers up over the house at night. Enough of this; I’d begun fortifying the house, putting up steel reinforcements, cleaning the weapons, and finally, at night, I began watching from the trees for enemy encampment in the garden, the fields, my son soliciting soldiers from his school, forming a center of resistence dead in the middle of Euclid Street.

We were in the trees, looking down, searching for soldiers in the wheatfields. Our men had split into two factions, warring over the accuracy of our uniforms, our neighborhood politics. Barry’s Consumer Responsibility instructor Jack and I had taken to the trees, lining both sides of the railroad tracks, facing the fields. Should we be spotted, they’d make quick work of us, but we had the advantage of sight and positioning. Clausewitz said “in war, there is a connection between everything which belongs to a whole”, which as true as all his truths, something we understood and our traitorous neighbors did not. The wind came down hard, from the west, and brought the stalks of wheat to the ground, leaving three of their men exposed. We quietly removed them from play and worked our way from branch to branch so as to reposition in case of any sighting. Jack and I were both getting older, and hadn’t the eyesight of our youth, and so with the setting of the sun we knew the advantage was shifting to the younger men, who still had children in diapers and lust for their wives. We could wither wait it out and hide for the night or we could force their hand now. Jack and I communicated through clicks and whistles. I feel a love for Jack, a manly and respectful love, which the younger seem not to understand. We had shared venture capital backing sources, Herodotus, cask-aged aberlour. I realized, up there in the trees, how inevitable this schism within the neighborhood had been, and how I had waited for it, for now. Jack suggested a rush on the fields, flushing the remaining two down to the river, just like Frederick the Great, then regroup with the remaining members of our squad, if any. We were agreed, and began to descend the trees when we heard something from behind. a collection of children had formed a line along the railroad tracks, headed by that foul mandrax, waste of seed and skin. I felt relived I didn’t see my girl with them; it’d be like her to be wasting her time among this neighborhood rabble…but there she was, in the back. Something left her hand then, following the arc of her arm, up into the trees, and the last thing I remember was staring at that item, spinning end over end, a capped piece of metal pipe, stuck towards the top with what looked like a fuse. Jack made clicks and whistles, and it seems so obvious, then, where the schism had truly come from. And then it was over, to the best of my knowledge. We were pressed from our bodily remains, from the pieces and fragments of our forms, our spirits collected like fireflies in some sticky summer night, pulled upwards, into a tunnel of lights. I watched out for Jack, and I saw him head toward a thick red sphere, and I pulled myself to follow. Whatever god manifest in that light was akin to ours, for we returned to the earth as rocky mountain spotted fever, built in labs for resilience and virility, and after the rush of our missile ride we got to nest in the mucous and vomit of our victims, clotting and clogging the mouth and nose, clawed out but never removed. And it was not long before we forgot our children and our sieges, and learned to content yourself on the idiot joy of replication, casting out into the air just before the winds come. Perhaps not so different after all.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Via
When I was in the fourth grade, Kraft General Foods (maker of the fine line of Kool-Aid brand unsweetened soft drink mix products) began a contest open only to elementary school children. The school which sent in the most empty Kool-Aid packets would not only get a visit from the Kool-Aid Man, they’d also get to invent a new Kool-Aid flavor. We were industrious students at Washburn Elementary and through a citywide drive (from which our history lessons on mob control of organized crime came in super-handy, as we put pressure on grocery stores to “throw out” thousands of packets of perfectly good Kool-Aid, as well as undercutting other local elementary schools with threats of playground hits, and most importantly we ran the milk concession right out of town, forcing cafeterias citywide to switch over to “the powder”, as we called it, constantly mumbling “powder is power” in a oversugared haze) we sent in over two hundred eighty-seven thousand Kool-Aid packets. We won by a landslide.

After meeting the Kool-Aid Man (who basically ran up and down the hallways of our school screaming “Oh Yeaaaaaaaaaaaah!”) we gave the president of Kraft General Foods our suggestion for the new Kool-Aid flavor, which was “pee”. The reason we found this so insufferably humorous was that somebody at Kraft General Foods was going to have to approximate the flavor of urine, which they could only do after sampling urine, and when you’re in elementary school getting grown-ups to drink pee is about as a coup as our brains could imagine.

The guy from Kraft told us to fuck off, gathered up the Kool-Aid Man (who was standing in the back, sipping fruit punch vodka from his hip flask and making time with the reading teacher, or at least trying to: “But I’m the Kool-Aid Man, bay-bee! I-yah Aym! Kool-Aid Mayn!”) and split straight outta Washburn, giving the prize so some pansy runner-up school full of defective trust-fund kids. And that’s how Purplesaurus Rex Kool-Aid was invented.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Various Kisses
The past is exactly like the future, only in the other direction.

The members of my family seem to all possess defining moments, single decisions which speak as much of who they are as years worth of more incidental moments. My uncle John once saved the lives of two cabdrivers and their fares, midwinter, steam rising from their mouths and wounds, pulling them from flaming wreckage. John hadn’t saved anything before in his life, and wasn’t particularly good at this particular rescue: not only did he cut his hands to ruby-red ribbons shattering a side window with his fists, he broke one of the cabbie’s arms trying to pull him free of the seat belt without unbuckling it first. Nevertheless, this city sought fit to claim him as hero, and the cab company publicly offered him free rides for life. John now spends his days riding around in various cabs, attempting to sell hand-bound books of his own poetry to paying customers. This is problematic for the cabbies, as fares often find readings of The Mellonberry Cantos: A Cycle in Twenty-seven Parts Based on the Practice of Shelling Mountainsides to Cause Avalanches as Attack Tactic in World War One both oppressively dull and overly derivative of early William Carlos Williams, a criticism John tends to respond to with screams and threats. John is now assigned to a rotating list of cabs each night, so as to evenly distribute the potential for attack (and bad press) amongst all on-call cabbies. This isn’t family knowledge, John having fallen out with his brothers prior to his becoming a heroic figure; I only know because Yusef’s cousin, to whom I had to deliver an incredibly suspicious package to on my return to the states, works for the same cab company John haunts. It was only halfway through his telling of the story I realized I was related to The Ghost of Carter Cabs…but this is not a story about my uncle John, or about cabdrivers, but about an entirely different poet, who had wares of her own to sell.

The German architect Albert Speer developed a system by which the buildings he created would decay and fall in specific ways, so as to create magnificent ruins. Speer was a National Socialist, however, and the majority of his buildings were Nazi offices and camps, which were destroyed at the end of the Second World War. The effectiveness of Speer’s plans, thus, remain unproved. The time I spent with the poet in question was brief and long past; my memory fills with new holes each time I think back to those days. No matter what is lost, however, what remains is undeniable, something I cannot…lose. I nearly said escape. Something I cannot escape. Perhaps this is how a defining moment is defined.

My uncle John sold all of three books of his cantos in the first year of his new job as in-cab salesman. The first two were to drunk couples who most likely didn’t understand it was his work he was selling and not the work of a — I’ll say it, with all due love in my heart for my uncle — a real poet. The third was to his father, my grandfather, who made his living as a failed escape artist. This would be the last time the two of them saw each other, as later the next year my grandfather performed his final escape act late at night, in his workshop, with a twelve-gauge shotgun. My grandfather lost three of his fingers and eight of his friends in the Alps, at Mellonberry Pass, a fact I did not learn until after the funeral. My grandfather bought his coffin twelve years before he was laid in it, and each spring he filled it with cuttings from his lilac bushes so as to prepare the interior. The lilac bushes were planted by my grandmother just prior to her death by ovarian cancer. When he died, he left nothing to his sons but his debts; he is not spoken well of in the family now.

John did manage to barter off a fourth collection of his poems to a woman who seemed to wear circles of small stones around her eyes, sapphire, royal blue apatite. I believe this now to be snow melted into the kohl she lined her eyes with, refrozen in the distance from her doorway to the cab. John, however, is adamant. The night we discussed this I began to understand the problems my family had with him. John traded one of his cardboard-bound books, twine-tied and inked with borrowed and stolen and found pens, for a kiss. This was not a woman of this earth, John told me, this was someone celestial, and her each motion was by divine appointment. Ever the poet, John.

“In the pathway, a drift of leaves;
one searches but does not find source, no tree nor wind.
I feared, then,
and did not even hear the crack.”

I was to meet this woman myself, not much later, and though I saw no stones circling her eyes I knew her instantly. I knew her from voice, from the things she had written and read aloud, from the roof of her building, each Sunday night for as long as I could remember. I knew her because she was reading from John’s work, which I had slugged through one weekend sick with some deranged recombinant flu. A blue-violet opium dream, this woman, whose kiss (I imagined, then, watching her from the edge of the room) seemingly dusted with narcotic sugars, the muscles in your chest falling downward, your skin misting with juices from where her fingertips met and held your body, now aching to lose its rigid boundaries. I couldn’t understand how my uncle John could press his lips to the mouth of this woman and still retain the ability to speak, to breathe. What I did not know, at the time, was that his lips had never met his. The poetess has kissed his hands.

From finger to palm, the muscles in John’s hands were torn into a red pulp like the insides of overripe peaches. He had regained some muscle control after he saved the cab-people, but the actual tendons had not grown back correctly. John can only hold a pen with a special rubber support slipped along its sides, and even that becomes intensely painful after more than a few minutes. It’s because of this that John receives disability payments each month, leaving him ample time to pursue his new profession. I asked John how he could bear to write and copy his poem, all 298 lines, over and over. John didn’t answer me, instead offering me more lemon-tea and asking me about my sister Angela. I asked him this question again, later, under entirely different circumstances, and he told me “This is what I do.” There was to be no further discussion.

I had decided, in a conviction I never told even my closes of friends, that I was going to pursue a life of celibacy. This was not for moral reasons, necessarily, and certainly not for religious reasons. I had made this choice after watching what relationships had done to others, how they had pulled themselves off from the world, filled with what D. H. Lawrence called “egoisme a deux”. I watched them have the same discussions, over and over, endlessly delighted with the same tired clichés, the same humorless jokes. I watched them fight each other, break each other down, becoming the flat average of two perfectly interesting people. And I said no. I most certainly did this out of fear, and with rather flimsy reasoning, but the times are rare I regret my decision. Because I want for nothing I can be trusted; I serve no master. Each word I speak is mine, each decision mine, and I stand or fall on my own terms. And yet I ached for this woman, for the proper steps by which to cross the room to her, the proper words to say. I wanted her to know my thoughts, where all lines were clear, the geometry simple and elegant.

I left, terrified, and once I was home I attempted to write a poem. I had never actually put words on paper outside of utility; I had no idea how exactly one went about writing a poem. I thought the same thoughts over in my head, lost scenarios, if only I were more brave. A heat I can feel against her cheek and neck, the coming apart of her clothing, the smell of fresh-formed juices. The skin of the body is so different in so many places it’s hard to believe we can call it all by a single name. The more I thought about her, the farther I was from a poem. I sat there for hours. I began to develop a nausea which I keep with me to this day. There is a trembling in my right arm, at times, which I first felt that night.

It’s quite possible there’s something essentially wrong about lusting after someone you don’t know. Perhaps that’s what finally convinced me to stand on the sidewalk one Sunday night and ask the poetess if maybe she’s like to come down and eat a bunch of pixie-stix and work off a mad sugar binge by teaching me how to write poems. This was winter, and the air didn’t particularly smell of anything, and the sky pretty much just looked like the sky, only with it being so cold it seemed like there were more stars than usual. I remember none of the surrounding details. What I do remember is her coming downstairs and out to the street , walking up to me, and saying “You don’t know me.” “Exactly. That’s the whole point.” We substituted fresh strawberries for pixie-stix, but essentially the evening went according to plan.

I’d like to tell you there’s a conclusion to this story, that the end closes the remainder of what I’ve said like the lid of a well-made box, but I don’t think there is. I was originally hoping to finish with a poem, my first poem, but even with all the years gone by, all the things which have happened, I still haven’t finished the poem. Sometimes, at night, I can feel things shift inside of me, maybe memories, maybe words, maybe something entirely different, and I feel like I’m getting closer, but when I awake in the morning I remember nothing. I’m no closer than when I began. Perhaps someone else is writing my poems for me.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Toppling Tyrants, Or
Would it kill me to try? maybe, and Pascal informs me that any wager with death as a potential makes the bet unworthwhile. But I’ll try.

David drove us to work, it was his week, it had been his week for two weeks but he had air conditioning and no one seemed to mind. Out where 30 becomes 197 David hit a small dog. He pulled over and got out of the car and the dog was flapping, like a fish, David picked it up and set it in the grass, the dog kicking at his forearms, as we watched from inside the car. The dog relaxed, stopped thrashing, but remained alive. David laid down in the grass, facing the dog, staring into its eyes. We couldn’t get him to get up. Eventually I got into the drivers seat and the rest of us drove to work, half an hour late.

David came in around lunch; no one thought to mention what had happened, no one particularly cared. David was like that. I went up and offered him his keys when he said “don’t, I’m not here.” He refused to answer any more of my questions. David drove home and in midweek it became my week.

David showed up, at times, but more often than not called in sick. Sometimes, when I was out of my cubicle, people would say “Hey, look, he’s doing his David impression again”. For a while, this loss bothered us, but we found it bothered us less as the days went on. And on.

I met David’s wife at a party a few weeks later; I did not know it was her at the time. She was talking to someone nearly as beautiful as she herself was, and I was smitten, confused, afraid. The music was too fast, but that entailed her jumping up and down a lot. On the way to the bathroom, a man in a booth offered me the chance to shoot at targets with a small pellet gun. On closer inspection these targets turned out to be small pictures of Elvis presley. I declined.

She didn’t recognize me until we were getting into my car. “Ah! hey, do I, do you know David?” “yeah. We work together. You know David?” “yeah. I’m his wife.” And we laughed, a little.

What happened next is connect-the-dots. I would tell you about their marriage trouble, about his denial of existence, about his stillness, but this would be rationalization, and not completely true. “Ow, uh, sweetie, you’re on my hair…” but I didn’t hear her, because I saw David standing in the closet. She turned and saw him, following my eyes, and we stopped for a moment, then she held me by the hips and rolled me onto my back. She began to move, and I began to move, and David began to move, and soon he stood beside us, and she would slow, and speed up, and slow, and speed up, and look at me as though I was to tell her something. And then I felt strange, and cold, and she began to speed up and not slow down, and I forgot to look for David, and then I was lost, and I felt colder, and I remember being a little kid lying on the grass and the other children stood over me, and they pointed at me, and they listened but heard nothing and they told me, oh, oh he looks ill, oh he’s sick, he’s dying, he’s dying, he’s dead.

We have decided to pretend there was never a David. We share the apartment now, and my car as well, and I’m thinking of inviting the guys from the office over to see my new place. David is gone, and people don’t remember; when his name was once mentioned we all became confused, and felt like there was something just past us we couldn’t hold anymore. I remember, because David still watches, not when her and I are together, but when I am alone, in the kitchen, staring at nothing. And I wonder about him, but when I turn to look, something shimmers, for a moment, and is gone.

I could be wrong.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

He Was Having Difficulty Swallowing
He called me and asked if I had a shovel he could borrow. I remember him having a shovel, a much nicer shovel than mine, so I asked him why he needed a shovel. He told me he was digging a hole in his backyard. I asked him why he was digging a hole in his backyard. He told me that digging a hole was something he knew he could do, and that he had to do something, and he didn’t know what else to do. I told him I’d be over with my shovel in half an hour.

When I pulled up in his driveway I saw he had erected two small worklights at angles to the hole, which was maybe four feet deep and a couple feet wide, in order to keep digging through the just-fallen dusk into the night. He was sitting at his picnic table, where two months back we ate overcooked hamburgers while he entertained friends from work and the new husbands of old girlfriends. The broken handle of the first shovel was set across the table, but the scoop was nowhere to be seen. I handed him my shovel, which I permanenetly borrowed from my parents when I first moved into the hose where I lived with Sarah all those years ago, which he took out of my hand while walking back to the hole, heavy in his legs and chest. He set about digging, throwing the dirt up and to the side, onto one of two piles, shifting his stance from time to time. I watched him for about twenty minutes, then went in to get a beer. I sat on the picnic table, drinking, listening to his telephone constantly ring, caught at every fourth ring by the machine, completely ignored by him as he kept digging. When I went in to get a second beer, I was about to answer the phone when I heard him start swearing and kicking at the walls of the hole.

Having hit a layer of clay which he could not get through, he was at a loss as to how to continue the hole. He looked at me, asked what I thought, and I told him I had no idea, except maybe that he could make the hole wider, if he just wanted to keep digging. No, he said, the hole has to keep going down, and if he could just get past this fucking clay he’d be set for a while. This, of course, was just plain wrong, and I told him he’d need to get a backhoe if he was going to keep digging. No, no, he said, he had to keep digging, keep digging down. He pulled himself out of the hole, walked to the shed, and came back with a hand trowel, which he used to pick at the clay, throwing small pieces of it onto the pile of dirt. I picked up my shovel, strangely protective now that he had no use for it, and asked him if he was okay.

“Does it look like I’m okay?”

I didn’t have an answer to this, so I went out to my car, put the shovel across the back seat, and started driving home, only I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t was to go anywhere, so I drove around out on the highway for a few hours, until I ended up at a diner in one of those small outlying towns, where I asked the waitress for ten dollars worth of quarters so I could make a call out to the coast, so that I could call Sarah, though I had no idea what I would say.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Seth
First I gotta explain that was the same summer my uncle Jeb took a header off the nature trail bridge and sealed his fate. Jeb used to take me and Jay-Jay and Josef and Seth, back before he became the monk of everclear, but I’m gettin’ to that, anyway he used to take us all out fishin’ on the cedar, which is a shitty place to fish cause all you’re bound to catch is bullheads and carp and maybe a catfish. All the fish in the cedar are ugly. The upside to this is you rarely get a bite, so if you’ve got a mind to do some drinkin’, just drop a line and by the time you got one on you’ve worked up a sweet buzz, unless you were my uncle Jeb who was always an i’m-sober-i’m-sober-i’m-fuckin’-ripped kinda drinker but this shit is all incidental. Jeb used to pour a little in the water, watch it was down towards Gilbertville, tell us he’s getting the river drunk so we can catch more fish. Actually when I say it like that he kinda sounds like a dirtbag, I’m doing this all wrong but he was a good guy, even with his problems, and we all had problems, specially that fucked-up worthless summer. He was out by himself nightfishin and talking to the cedar (which if you’re from around here is shits and giggles; what do you say to a wall of black sludge?) and the river tells him it’s not really the river talkin’ it’s Rick Hannah, that little eight-year old from cedar terrace who drowned a year or so ago, only Rick’s about to get out of the river and go to heaven (he had to work off some bad karma, I remember, he was a creepy kid, and ants-and-magnifying-glass kinda kid, which is a bad thing to say about the dead when they died little but anyway) which meant someone was gonna take his place. Jeb chewed on that a while and got scared, thinking it was him, but Rick told him it wasn’t gonna be him, some drunk high-school kids were gonna eat it in a few days. So Jeb got all paranoid and wouldn’t leave the river ‘cept for more booze and microwave burritos from the evansdale Guns-N-Likker, and a few days of this and he was in a bad way by Friday, when me and the hoolies went out to drink cheep beer (“Pig’s eye ICE? what the fuck?”) and commiserate about our third collective month of girlfriendlessness. Jeb, though, he was squirrely and staggering and had tears in his eyes, so we checked if he was okay — Jeb kinda had a rough stretch back in ‘87, spent a couple months at the MHI in independence, but that’s another story — and then we went rock-n-bowling. While we were being bludgeoned by 120 db of Ozzy and getting rejected by girls with feathered hair Jeb went to a pay phone, called my dad and told him what all was going on and that he was sorry, then went back out on the bridge and jumped. It’s not a tall bridge, but the cedar’s pretty shallow. Later that night, some kids form cedar falls nearly went off the main St. bridge, but the guardrail held.

Now there’s two ways to take that: the way most people do is Jeb’s kinda a hero for what he did, but my dad and I (and the hoolies) see it different, Jeb got suckered, or maybe he just wanted to die anyway. We hung out a lot, but I don’t know enough to speculate like that. My dad told me a story about Jeb, after the funeral. When Jebbie (what my dad called him) was in kindergarten, he thought the weatherman makes the weather, and decided he was going to learn how to be a weather wizard and know enough nobody would have to go to school ever again. He made himself a magic wand out of a twig, put on my grandad’s sports coat and tie, and wearing nothing but that and a pair of moon boots climbed up on top of the car and started yelling ‘SNOW! SNOW! SNOOOOOOW!’, and before long, it actually started snowing. This wasn’t any mean fear in February, but my dad and his sisters and their folks used to laugh about that, blaming Jeb every time it snowed, even when they were older. That was the first time I saw my dad cry.

Anyway, the point of all that is it became a thing with the hoolies to go out to the nature trail bridge and drink and look for Jeb’s ghost. It was kinda solemn for a few weeks, but it got back into the swing of things once summer started in full, and once jay-jay got a girlfriend who had girlfriends, it was looking like it was gonna be a good summer, but that all got shot to hell when Seth had his brush with the dharma.

We were elevating our taste in hooch from bad beer to bad liquor, and being kids, we developed a taste for everclear. Seth had a thing for it, though, the rest of us were all lightweight but he was workin’ on it, wanted to learn how to drink for college. Seth was a year younger than me, and I told him he’d have plenty of time for all that after he flunked out like me, but you just can’t talk to that boy sometimes.

For example, it must have been the end of June, and the hoolies had decided it was time to learn the fine art of mixing drinks and were working on new recipes at jay-jay’s girlfriend’s apartment when Seth, halfway through that night’s bottle, took a spill on the stairs and fell five flights (not all at once, mind, he went from six to four, then got up and went down to three, then nearly made it up to the fourth landing when he rolled all the way down to two, giving up on fighting gravity) and laid there in a puddle of sick until we found him, probably an hour later. Booze chemistry nite was called off and we drove Seth home, dumping him off on his parent’s front steps and heading for the hills.

Next morning I got a call from Seth’s mom, who I used to think had a thing for me but now chalk that up to the foolish hubris of youth, who sounded panicky, which (and this shows what a dork I was) gave me the chance to play Mr. level-headed hero. sheeesh.

Soon as I came in Seth gave me a massive bear hug, which isn’t a Seth thing to do, and just starts in on this new kick he’s on.

“‘Ay! How you been, man? I’ve been weird, it’s like, it’s kinda hard to explain, uh, coulda shut the door…okay, it’s like this. I know this is gonna sound psycho, but that’s how it is, like, I think something happened to me. Like I don’t think I’m all me, it’s like there’s a little bit of someone else in me now, and I’ve been seeing things all different. I think things are changing, I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, I don’t really, I haven’t thought it all the way out yet. Y’know?”

“Uh, no, no Seth. You okay?”

“Yeah, I mean, I’m good, I’m…I’m really good. I’ve just been thinking about a lot of things, laying in bed all day, and maybe, I don’t know, maybe it’s time I started doing things a bit different.”

“You know your mom called me up and told me you were actin’ like a nut.”

“Yeah, earlier I hadn’t really thought before I opened my mouth and was kinda thinking out loud and tat was stupid, I admit that, but I’m kinda past that, I’m getting used to it, whatever that is.”

And none of this seemed all that weird, I mean god knows I had weirder talk after Jeb died and Jay-Jay once told us some crazy stuff about, well naw, I better not talk about that.

Anyway, I left there after consoling Seth’s mom (heh) and things seemed back to normal until that next Friday, when Seth began making his proclamations.

“Okay, first off, I’m not gonna lie anymore. I’ve been thinking about trust and how you can’t trust people if you lie to them and so all the people I love, for starters, I’m not gonna lie to, and after I get the hang of it then no more lies at all, period.”

Now I best explain that none of the hoolies talked about love like that, like maybe if you with your girlfriend and the situation fit you’d say that, but even in our drunkest moments we never said we, like, loved each other. It just wasn’t like that, and it wasn’t like a gay thing either, so this was weird, and the lie thing topped it. Seth lies like it’s a mental condition and it’s just something you get used to, like if he says he’s coming over you don’t expect it, if he shows cool, if not no big surprise. And he always makes shit up, but that’s not really a lie, that’s embellishment, and we all do our share of that. However, he was pretty deep into his bottle, and one is given to proclamations at that point.

“Yeah!” said Jay-Jay. “I vow never to mix wine and whiskey ever again!”

“I vow, uh, shit,” stammered Josef. “Get back to me in a sec.”

I leaped in with “all those books on my shelf I keep on there just to impress people? I’m gonna read all of em, every last one.”

Josef had a weird look in his eye for a minute, he was really trying to answer this, and finally he sighed and said “I don’t know. When I think of something, I’ll let you know.”

Seth laughed along with us, and we dropped the subject for the evening. That was the last time we were able to do so.

Next time I saw Seth he had developed his vague epiphany into a system. “Okay, it’s two parts. One, I can’t tell any more lies, because I need people to be able to trust me. Two, until I figure out what to do with myself, and I need to do something soon, this dicking around is getting old, I’ll do the things that will make the people who love me proud, because maybe through that I’ll be able to figure out what I want, and until I do that I don’t think I’m gonna be okay.”

I almost asked him what he meant by okay, but I kinda understood. We were all floating, then, in some drift we didn’t understand, waiting for something to happen to us. Out here it’s always been like that, you drift or do army or go straight to work, which is what you’re gonna do eventually anyway, it’s just how long you can put it off. Seth was probably gonna go straight off after college, if he got through, which he might. He was smart enough, but he was a fuckup, just like the rest of us. Well, Josef, only partway a fuckup, Jay-Jay’s a complete fuckup, and well, I guess I’m one too, really. I pretend I’m not sometimes, but really, yeah. So Seth’s epiphany was kinda harder for us to take than we’d care to admit, because Seth was basically trying to say he wasn’t going to be a fuckup anymore, and that just wasn’t an option. Here, let me show you.

For the next month or so Seth drank with us but he was getting to be a quiet drunk, staring into the water. While we all cracked wise and pretended things hadn’t changed. Jay-Jay had to explain to his girlfriend and her friends why Seth was so quiet, but I don’t think they understood. It was hard to explain, it still is. So we were wandering around the mall, playing t-mek and waiting for the nine o’clock showing of pink flamingoes, and Seth looked over at bouncy little kid in a parka and pj’s and she looked at him and said “hiiiiiii!” and Seth just lost it. He couldn’t stop crying, I mean, it was like a scene, I had to take him outside and ask him what was wrong, and he couldn’t explain, he didn’t understand. All kinds of things like that started happening, things that were just like nothing started to depress the hell out of him. And he was having a hell of a time figuring out what the people he cared about wanted from him, what would make them proud. Everybody he asked, pretty much, they just told him they wanted him to be happy, but he didn’t know how to be happy. And it kept getting worse.

Soon Seth stopped hanging out, just bummed around his room, listening to old jazz records and staring at his hands and sleeping. I stopped over a few times, tried to get him out of the house, but there was no way he was gonna leave his room.

“I think maybe when I fell, that maybe my soul left my body and got mixed up with some other souls, and part of them is still with me, but I lost parts of me in the swap, and maybe those parts I still needed.”

“Maybe, Seth. I don’t know.”

“I’m never gonna be okay, am I?”

And I think about it now, and I realize I should have told him yes, things are going to get better Seth, you just have to give things time, but I didn’t know that then. All I knew then was don’t worry about it, and that’s what I told him.

A month or so later his parents sent him off to Richter-Goldberg, and I didn’t see him for a long time, and when I did things were different and we don’t talk much anymore. And it seems like there’s something in there, and maybe if I could figure it out everything would be okay, but I don’t know. I don’t understand it at all, and I think shit just happens and there’s no way really to make sense of it, we try and make up excuses but at the end of the day who knows. It’s like trying to figure out all that stuff about Jeb don’t lead to anything and you just go insane trying to make sense of it ‘cause you’re never gonna do it, or it’s like those books on my shelf I never read, I tried to read some of ‘em but it was all shit about other people and other things and I can’t make that jump from here to there. This probably sounds really stupid.

Anyway, that’s what happened to Seth.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Sarah The Giantess
The children, where I come from, are convinced that all greater and lesser demons can only see motion, not form. When they go out into the woods, where paths have been stamped through the grasses and underbrush (as their parents did, as their parents did, as their parents did: history is that which cycles), where fortresses have been built up in the treetops which bounce the wind around until it whistles and moans, the children hear and know to be afraid, to be perfectly still, until the evil which flies on claw-lined wings passes them over. The children have never actually seen these demons, not face to face, of course: no child has seen the demons and lived. Everybody knows that. There’s a dread the children hold in their hands and words whenever they walk through the forest, and that dread has no place to go. It’s little wonder that so many of the children open their small stained hearts and let their terror loose on the first target outside of the trees.
      Sarah was a giantess. It’s quite possible that she was the tallest woman in history: the people who took her away have yet to tell any of us their final findings. Her parents were not giants; they were not even tall. They were algae-farmers, running the rafts over the forest-ponds and gathering the luminous plants which grew on the surface. The children tell rumors of this family, have for years, for no better reason than because nobody actually knew them. Once Sarah the giantess was born, however, there was a focus for all our misplaced fears. Sarah’s father had to build his daughter a separate house, the roof extended from oak branches, the walls built up from shore-stones. Sarah could not do much moving because her heart was too small for her body and ached to get blood through her, but when she had the strength she climbed gracefully, easily, through the trees. If one follows the logic of children, this made her a demon, and curses and snow-cold silences held to her all through those days.

One afternoon, on the morning train, a man from across the ocean came to see the giantess. We all fell so fast to flutter over the famous, the semi-famous, the possibly famous — anyone from someplace far away who might be able to take us back with them, somehow. We were more than happy to show him the way down the road, past the churchouse and graveyard, past the place where the factory used to be, out to the woods, to the house. The man from across the sea knocked first on the door of the house, talked to Sarah’s father, then walked out to Sarah’s building and asked her outside. The man from across the sea took all method of measurement, which Sarah responded to quite gallantly, if somewhat bemusedly, and was quite polite in dealing with his gawking and ogling. The man from across the sea told both Sarah and her father how wonderful it would be if Sarah was to leave her body to him in the event of her death. Both Sarah and her father dismissed the notion; not only would she certainly outlive the man, she was also to be buried as we were all buried, in the pond, with our relatives and friends. The man looked at Sarah, told her she’d never see twenty, and left on the evening train.

Sarah’s heart finally burst not long before her seventeenth birthday.

The man from across the sea returned, bringing with him two gnarled apish men, and as Sarah lay in her bed-casket, quilted only in the hair of her parents (all her classmates stayed home and spent the day staring at the walls of their bedrooms), the man from across the sea stole her body and left the next day. We have not heard from the man since, although we all are now ashamed at having the only thing that ever made us different taken from us.

The children now tell no stories of demons in the trees, but of the ghoul who comes out at night and steals the bodies of boys and girls when they sleep. The rest of us have all forgotten about being famous. Sarah’s father was made sick with the disease of outliving one’s child and will die soon, if he hasn’t already died, out in the woods. Sometimes, in the silence of our small hours, we all wish the whole town would die and blow away, but it has yet to happen.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Revisitation Seven: Everything Burned Away
(original version by allida. not complete.)

1. in which the limits of severity relationships are tested and disproven

The last time I saw her before I left for Minnesota she was in the corner of the living room she had made into a sort of open-ended bedroom, sitting on a large throw-pillow in front of my old typewriter I had given her after I got the first computer, propped up on a slab of pine she had pulled out of some neighbor’s garbage and painted black-purple with small calligraphic symbols in silver paint, up on cinderblocks over her collection of books on VLF analysis, piano-tuning, abstract taxidermy. For months now we had some sort of unspoken connection above and beyond the strange late-night conversation level we’d been at all year, so a final conversation was obviously fraught with promise, and a delicate thing. Unfortunately, while taking a deep breath to steel my nerves, I inhaled too deeply and now had a booger caught in my throat.

“I have some things of yours still. I, if you want ‘em back, I put ‘em in that bag over there.”

“That’s okay, you can haaaaaaaaach. Haaaaaaaaaaaach.”

“What are you doing?”

“I have a haaaaaaaaach. In my throat. Haaaaaaaach.”

“Uh. You want a glass of water or something?”

“No, I’m fine, it’s no big haaaaaaaaaach.”

Certainly there were graceful ways out of this situation, but something in my brain flipped on and all the long-standing tense energies of this mess between us reverted me to age seven.

“It’s a booger, is the thing. Throat-boogers are the worst. Haaaaaaaaach.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“It could be worse!”

“You know, I have some wine Sarah left over here, maybe we should—”

“Like a dingleberry, but in your throat, is what it’s like. Poop-booger in my throat! I could fish for it with some dental floss and gum! Help, help, I’m trapped in the thoat and only you can save me!”

“What?”

“You must rescue the poop-booger from the icy depth of my throat! Diver down! Diver down!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Lo, the fool to go looking for mouth-treasure! You never should have left the safety of the sinus, where your snot-bride waits for you and pines and turns her engagement band around her ringfinger! The old booger seamen told you to never go over the horn, but you were brash, and now you must be saved or else haaaaaaaaaaaaaaach!”

“You should probably go now. And take your shit with you.”

“Can I borrow a pipe cleaner, or some string, or just anything?”

“Out! Out the door now!”

I didn’t see her again for two years, by which time she was married.

2. in which a feast of the green milk takes place in the root cellar

Upon the walls, where the twin mathematicians had used twigs and coal to devise this gallery of missteps, brought up on skeletal wings, clustered like emptied ships on a nodal tide, wherein graven images of Rv. Emersohn depicted scenes of his rerisen wife, led back to her love via a series of olafactory hints, yet there is no means of escape from the forrest, maps tattooed in his wrinkled palms, endless paths circling upon themselves, and the snow thickens outside the kitchen window, where the darkness swallows up the moon and hides all transgressions against the fallen god in the colliseums where rebuilt men fight against horses and dogs with briars caught in their coats while the villagers listen outside the gates, drunk on apple wine and rancid pudding, waiting for the light.

Surgery was an invention by an alien race whose genitals were formed inside their bodies, like any other internal organ, requiring a steady and swift learning of surgical strategy in order to, if nothing else, hold off blood loss for long enough to mate and spawn. They later taught this skill to a race of aliens whose children were too large to leave the body vaginally, and thus had to split the belly of the mother like an egg in order to escape the womb. They were all very pleased with the new technology, but not nearly as pleased as they were when they started letting the humans have their babies for them. That was a glorious day across the galaxy, indeed.

He took his breath from out of his body and put it into his child.

I am the creator, and the creator is to put breath into the bodes of the dead, put form to the lost and missing.

3. in which a number of diabolical schemes are related to the reader

Seth sat at tne far end of the drafting table on the raised platform, possibly once a stage, just in front of the entryway to Kara-Bakos, when a new girl walked in, pushing back the pneumatic door with both hands, a small bag hanging off her left shoulder.

“Is Ben-Jakob here?” she said, staring up into the rafters, where the third floor was cantilevered off the back wall, rope ladders hanging from its black underbelly, lights flickering somewhere inside. “I thought this was the place.”

“This is the place, but he’s gone. I don’t know when he’ll be back. You looking for something?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure what yet, though.”

“You can look around. You need any help, just ask. If you don’t know how something works, don’t pick it up.”

“Like that thing hanging off your neck? What is that?” she said, reaching across the table to take the strands of aerogel fiber wound around Seth’s neck between her fingers, suprised at how soft soft and how heavy it was.

“This is prototype for mutable jewelry, is my guess. It uses precise body temperature as a random number generator seed, which gets sent as expansion distance for each cluster. So it gets bigger or smaller depending on body heat. They’re quite fashionable around here. I don’t know what they’re originally for, these buggers, and they are damned heavy, but hey…it looks rockin’, don’t it?”

(Jesus God, Seth thought to himself, I can’t beleve I just said “rockin’”.)

The new one looked across at him, her eyes aglow with amusement. “Not really, but hey…convention is as it will be, eh? Hey, what is that one there, kinda ‘L’ shaped one on your right hip?”

“Don’t know. I like the way it fits in my hand though, must have once been some whosibob to massage your hands with, maybe for astronauts or something. See this little buttony thing here? If you push it, it vibrates and blows…”

“Vibrates and blows?” she quered skeptically. “Let me see it, it could be useful, if you get my drift?”

The aerogel necklace around Seth’s neck pulsed madly.

“I don’t mean like that, I mean, well.” He paused and debated internally, as if it were a huge decision. This was the first time Ben-Jakob left him in charge of the store, and while he took a small thrill in playing his records over the PA and taking calls from weird cryptic booksellers, he was still nervous as hell something would get broken. “Fuck it, here you go, maybe you can get it to work.”

She took it in her hand and looked at it. As the button depressed the pointy metal part rotated with its castelations whirring around. The part in her hand vibrated, and the part behind with the bars on it pushed some air out at her. She looked more closely and a strand of her hair landed square against the screen and broke off. It was suctioning in not out. She turned it over again and looked at the pointy part. There were holes in it a half-inch above the castellations, with three nubs along the top. Looking at the bottom again she noticed a round bulge mirroring the castellations on the top, which she pulled at with her other hand. A hidden door opened, revealing several long twisted rods and a foursided angular doohicky, all of which fell out of the compartment and onto the floor.

“Awwwwww, fuck, just give it back to me,” Seth moaned.

“No, wait, I think I figured something out…”

She took the castellated thing and put the tip of it into the hole at the pointy end of the larger object and turned it left. The three nubs moved outward. She turned it right and they moved inward. She picked up the long rods from the floor and put one into the pointy tip of the ‘L’ object. She tightened the nubs using the castellated object and pushed the button under her hand. The rod spun, emitting a low tone they could feel in their muscles.

She purred in counterpoint to the hum and announed “This is perfect, this is just the sort of weird fetishy object I was looking for, you could really do some amazing work with this thing. How much you want for it?”

Seth unconsciously touched his necklace, feeling it swell beneath his fingers. “Tell you what. You take it, and when you feel like you have something that would be a fair trade, bring it in and we’ll call it even.”

“I’ve gotta give you something now, though, I don’t want to just walk out with it.”

“You can give me fifteen cents, to be returned to you on payment.”

The new one smiled, and Seth barely noticed when one of the back bookshelves collapsed.

In the back of the train, where unemployable superheroes perform mutant tricks for spare change, she sat turning the item over in her hands, the beginnings of ideas gathering in her head as to potential uses, unthinkable options. Across the aisle a touseled girl with white skin that almost glows either with joy or pain keeps looking at the new girl, her eyes unwavering, sparkling with reflected light from the glass of the window as the night pours out past them, streetlights and neon like bioluminescent gills atop some giant deep-ocean manta. Someone she should know. Some courer from some other life, sent to give a signal, a notice. Maybe. The girl looks away, out the window, at some vague point in space, just like everyone else does. The new girl removes and inserts the rods into the end of the device, without looking, learning it in the muscles of her hands.

“Password?” the door asked the new girl, in a soft ring-modulated hum.

“White ghost white ghost white ghost”, she whispered, just loud enough so the clicking noises she made in the back of her throat, the real password, were audible for the security system. The door opened with a click, and hummed slightly, the sound she had replaced all the door system’s vocabulary with. Talking houses made her lonely. She made tea and sat in the bay window, watching the self-cleaning glass chase smudges across the surface, until the sun went down.

While holding the object in her hands, she had a dream of large ships out on the ocean, where long stone pillars came up out of the water at disjointed angles and reached up into the cloud-cover. The pillars were covered in small hooks, upon which prior sailors had tossed rope-nets which held things she couldn’t quite identify. She saw the ships were without crew, drifting between the pillars. She tried to bring herself in closer, close enough to identify the ships, or the nets, but she was caught in something, held midway between the clouds and the ocean.

When she woke it was almost eleven, and the device was warm in her hands, emitting a chordal tone, and a light, white to yellow warm on her face, reflected light making the room golden, the floor coppery wood glistening, and she became mesmerized, just for a moment, as she realized the device was shining a light directly upon her eyelids.

She thought of something he told her, before he decided he really wasn’t as into her as he originally thought, before she stepped into an endless recursion of stupid stupid stupid stupid like an endless loop that tastes of copper and vomit in her memory, before something got lost in her and she forgot what it meant when he said this is as far as this is going to go, she thought of something else, something he said, he said, he said the things that you touch are the things you become.

She closed her eyes again, and saw the light come shining, come shining all around.

4. in which hollowed eggs are used as models for improbable fruits

“One of the levitation machines got stuck in the tree, and so, so it tried to release itself, only its depth-sense must have been damaged, because it pulled off its own antennae, and then the back-servos kicked in and now there’s fucking levitation debris all over the backyard, and I really don’t need this today, I just, why can’t I have a day where I don’t always have to keep dealing with things all the time, where I can just get—”

“It’s just hard, because there’s always this, you know how it—-“

“It’s not hard for you! Everything is so easy for you all the time!”

“You’re still there, you get to, like, schedule and do what on your time but I’m in the car all day, okay? I mean all day I’m in the car driving to Carmel and back because they can’t get the prints to take, three times today and it’s just not even…it’s…what time is it?”

“I don’t know what—”

“Whatever time it is! And I need to keep doing it! Every single day!”

“Okay, so, nobody is any better than anybody, I’m not even saying it’s you, I’m just I just want to not always do this. You know?”

“I know. Oh God, I could write a book on how I know.”

“Yeah. It’s just so.”

“So, it’s all over the backyard?”

“Well, mostly just by the corner which is where it hit and then some around there, where the garden was.”

“Is it on fire, or just?”

“No, no, there’s like this foam it’s filled with that expands when, but the foam, it’s blue, right? And now that it’s getting to be noon it’s getting warm and, so parts of it are flaking off, so there’s all these blue flakes all over the place.”

“Like snow?”

“(laughs) Yeah! Exactly like snow! Only it smells like bleach!”

“Don’t eat it!”

“Are you mental? Like I’m going to eat blue crud that came out of some camera thing that crashed in the tree.”

“Is there somebody to call?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I called you.”

“Yeaaaaaah, of course it was.”

“It was! There was—”

“Oh, you know? I bet Seth would come over and clean all that up if you let him haul the debris off, he’s always scrounging for that kind of thing.”

“Is that legal?”

“Well, that’s not really our problem, I mean, I doubt they want to even say anything about their super-secret levitation machines.”

“Not very secret.”

“Fuck no, they’re not.”

“Heh.”

“So. So I’m pulling up to the building.”

“So I should let you go, and also what’s Seth’s number?”

“It’s on the thing. The fridge thing.”

“Okay. So. So I’ll see you on Thursday?”

“Yeah, Thursday night. Maybe we can do something, or something.”

“Maybe.”

“Okay, I’m gonna go now.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #

Revisitaion Six: The Highway Of Mirrors
(original list of ten statements by k. johansen)

One: A woman opens a frozen dinner and finds inside the perfectly preserved hand of a six month old baby.

Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was considered by many to be the greatest anatomist of his time. Developing a personal method for the preparation and preservation of anatomical specimens, he was often used as a mortician for Dutch heads of state. The multitalented and just plain weird Peter the Great, who had been a fetishistic collector of strange items since childhood, was assembling the first museum in Russia, the Kunstkammer at St. Petersburg, wherein the European cabinets of wonders (Wunderkammern) collections of strange artifacts of nature were displayed side-by-side with current and classic artworks. These museums, with their bizarre anatomical displays, became the model for the “secret museums” of the next century, the precursors of current pornography collections. Peter invited Ruysch to assemble a collection for the museum’s Round Hall, consisting of his now-famous glass jar prepared infants, decorated in lace and beads, preserved according to his private specifications. Also on display were Ruysch’s tableaux made from the skeletons of deformed infants upon a bed of coral, shells and preserved organs, often posed as moral fables, playing bone-sculpted instruments. None of these still exist, having been destroyed in the siege on St. Petersburg, though drawings of the collections by Adrian Backer and Jan van Neck do still remain. After his death at the incredibly advanced age of 94, Ruysch’s daughter took over his profession, having learned his methods and aesthetics, completing a series of preparations for the King of Poland. Later her work would be passed from museum to museum, wunderkammern to wunderkammern, a piece eventually ending up in the Microsoft of oddity-displays, PT Barnum’s circus. History loses track of the Ruysch lineage at this point, but research I’ve been doing in the third floor at Kara-Bakos leads me to believe the tradition of anatomists in this bloodline continued, doing less publicized work, spending time collecting specimens in the Siberian city of Inkutsk, considered by many historians the most crime and violence-prone city of the past five hundred years. With the advent of recording media, the Ruysch bloodline was able to make temporary displays preserved via modified ferrotype images with a positive image cast on tar-blackened iron sheets. While others in this century would utilize the Ruysch material as inspiration such as Joel-Peter Witkin, Anderes Serrano, and Max Aguilera-Hellweg (as well as false imitators who make infant models from plastics, whose names do not deserve to be mentioned), I believe there has been a secret monitoring of what are now called “dead areas”, places which are no longer inhabitable, with documentation of those who live on the outskirts of such areas collected and shown to private collectors, the ghost-memory of Bhopal, the socketless skulls of those who still live near the “elephant’s foot” of radioactive material at Chernobyl. The outcry of safety and decency which caught up with Damien Hirst’s leaking bisected cow display obviously cancel out legality of work such as this, and so the team of assembler-anatomists must pass materials surrepeticiously, hidden inside packaging. Josef, whose skeletons of unreal animals seems a wan shadow of this work, had been hunting for proof of this thesis for years, up to the day of his death. Alas, he was not the one who recieved the mislabeled hand-part, sent to Susan Hinds, now convinced the fetus she aborted years ago is coming back to her, one piece at a time.

Two: Anna May Coulter, age 19, believes that God has been speaking to her on her cellular telephone. He is telling her that he has great plans for her, and she must listen carefully.

“Resurgat: it will rise again. Nested wheels above the horizon, yurei no zu, an apparition, stray fate, einfall. VISION FINAL death’s head moth [acherontia atropus] elohim [diamond] 24:00:00 corpus incorruptible complete union — love is an engine of unfulfilled desires by which all things continue in motion as opposed to stasis of completion. The state of everlasting frission, conduits, cells, balances.

  1. It is difficult for us to gauge the health and mental state of the Final Goddess, as her steps precede ours, wind-quickened, beyond us;
  2. and we did set out across the city, the electric cable ley-lines, the terror of the little animals in the trees whose frozen postures mark her wake;
  3. and there was the left glimmering of her beauty in the shimmer of shopwindows, and the forgottenfulnessing of the Unknowing, the crack in their thoughts where the missing time gaps;
  4. and we utilized the God Tracking System scanning out into the aether, a tracing of her area, from whence the Spirit manifests its Will through the Final Goddess.

“Cell-digita geistesblitzen. To visit your earth as ten carrier-angels in ten forms of carrier-moths, disguised in plain sight. Sic I tur ad astra: vision first luna moth [actais maenas] zilm [talc] 22:14:03 [a gift of dust-pollen on the front window, pupil follow flightpath wherein transfer-shape imprinting closes inside hinterbrain] within the amass of clouds. Spiralcirclestairway, a tunnel in time. A warning, a kunstwollen, a shrieking of sightless cave-birds.”

  1. Step forward, against the automotive tide, against the mass of the mob and the pox of their Voices, and with a cleansing of one’s sight the traces of her messages will linger, a traceable trail;
  2. and so it will pass that the strata of blood on which this daemonic false earth is fed will open out, and the Light will reach into you;
  3. as you are not a Holy or proper thing for simply possessing skin and breath;
  4. you are a bowl, a scrim, a dish for sifting transmissions;
  5. you are a vessel for the signal.

“Mansur al-Hallaj, “Kitab al-Tawasin”: moth to lamp to retell to others (visions, star-bound incidents/true faith within flame. Caught between sky and earth, vision second new Mexico owl-eyed moth [antheraea polyphemus olivacea] arelim [zinc] 22:21:02 purification of base materials: the pearl, the ambergris, the heart.”

  1. And so it is now that we obtained confirmed Vision of the Final Goddess, at the place where the Fourty-Fifth and the Vojtech streets meet,and did approach with much caution;
  2. as she continued to listen to the Voice, and was informed;
  3. and she saw us, and reached out with her free hand, as to touch,
  4. and through a hole in the firmament there came a storm of roses, and snow, and the circular wing-strategies of a million million moths.

Three: An old man has been waiting patiently to die for three years now, eating nothing, drinking nothing. He does not know that he has died every morning, to be resurrected after dinnertime through the prayers of a Navajo woman he does not know.

There is, in this world, a series of invisible knotted connections between all things, and should one follow any strand long enough, they will come across everything which has ever lived, has ever been formed, has ever held together against decay and time. The character of any single thing is echoed in others, distant in space and intention, connected only by the most hidden of shared traits. The failing of the alchemists comes from a generalization of Platonic forms, of recurring attributes sharing certain celestial energies, and it is only as time staggers forward that we see the reverberations not in standard forms such as the foot, or the datura plant, or the black and yellow humors, but in specific elements which cannot be generalized. This sort of web is so expansive that the encyclopedic notion of the Renaissance is thwarted by a Pataphysical schema of the unrepeatable experiment, of the singularity present in all things, blurring into other forms before our small water-damaged brains have time to hold down the image, the memory. Thus it is only through an appeal to a crystalline intelligence beyond our abilities to do the sort of processing necessary to discover these connections, the scaffold of support around each of us we only sense through what masks as chance. The flat expanses of desert in the American Southwest, a means of accessing information through physical location, the consciousness altered by the shape and sound of the earth, provides a sort of echo-chamber, a method of shifting outwards in order to view processes, spot connections in a paranoiac-critical manner, and attempt to use certain technologies in order to affect secondary objects and therefore affect sympathetically, along these arteries of light-thought, the primary object. In this case, there have been, since the beginning of our presence here, a series of beings who (knowing or not) are designated as barometers of the continuation of life on this planet. There has been rumor of this collective before: the council of the birds and Farid al-Din Attar’s Simurgh mentioned in Lives of the Poets, Balzac’s “Thirteen” mentioned (and then, strangely, dropped) in Histoire des treize, through the increasingly paranoid theories of the masters of the world. This, of course, is all foolishness. There is no direct control, there is only the unknown echo, and the hung corpses of all those who attempted to seize direct control should be cleaned and displayed so the practitioner does not forget. In this desert, amid the white sand and the geologic attention-traps, Parsons’ gates, Oppenheimer’s spiralpsychosis, the skeletons of lost bankrobbers and scrubbed traces of disappeared civilizations and skylights, a woman keeps bringing a small wizened man back from the dead, making him one of the re-rises, the eroded memory, the trap of the spirit between worlds. Each of us is presented, at some point in our lives, with a decision, a choice of actions, and it is this solitary moment which decides our fate, the fate of those we share the connection with, a circuit of sorts. This man’s defining moment has not yet come, three years too late, and with his connection to the earth as a whole comes a necessity for proper action on his part. Years the desert woman has spent attempting to guide him toward the right choice, speeding up the process, but time has moved too slow and his body had been moved to a place where the passage station of heaven has not been able to find him, the infernal doktors who drain the skulls of nursing-home patients hiding their depraved laboratories beneath displacement rooms and secondary curse-prayer generators. It took the Navajo woman so long to find him again, held at the end of his life, bringing him back and trying to whisper consolation into his ears, that the cost will be worth the gift, that soon the bardos will welcome him, and his work will be completed. He hears these words like fractured transmissions, and believes them, but sometimes he forgets, as the brain comes undone, and he is afraid.

Four: She puts her hand into the bathtub, and fourteen thousand tiny black eels burrow into her skin. She smiles, my babies, I love you all.

So get this. Those goth kids who had taken to imitating gargoyles up on the corners of the building, the ones everybody thought were an omen of mass-goth suicide cultism but were actually content to stare at passerby and make goof-scary faces for hours on end, anyway one of the littler ones fell off and landed on my fire escape, breaking his fool leg, so I’m trying to carry him out only he’s wearing this weird fake-leather thing all slick from the rain so I keep dropping him on his arm, which leads to terrible screaming attracting my landlady who starts pounding on the door while I’m trying to drag this stupid kid inside leaving a trail of white base back to the window, and by the time the ambulance showed up it was all I could do not to get arrested, though the crazy landlady is still all like how I fucked up and she should kick me out and how I owe her, now. So she tells me she needs a ride out to the docks by the old prison, and, y’know, whatever, fine. So she’s in the car, and she’s rubbing this salve into her arms, her hands, she says it’s moisturizer, it opens up her pores, and I try to listen to the Homeless Gladiator matches, only there’s some kinda low-end nature broadcast about moths that keeps cutting in, so I fiddle with the knob until she starts screaming “Stop! This is it! My babies want the water!” and runs out of the car, up to the edge of the dock, and starts moaning and carrying on. So I go up to see if she’s throwing up, or whatever, and there’s, okay, there’s eels coming out of her skin, falling down into the river. “Run free, my babies! I will be back for you tomorrow to take you home! I love you forever!” she screams, and I just got back in the car and drove away fast as I could.

I get a call from her again, the next night, and I tell her I don’t want any part of it, but she threatens me with being out on my ass, and being between careers I realize I’m not far off from fighting genetically fortified floam-eating sewer rats and disfigured children with canine teeth, so I go up and visit her in her tiny rooftop room. She asked me to watch the bath drain, making sure things are okay while she goes out to check the stupid goth kid out of the hospital. So I hang around and drink her coffee and talk to a couple of the remaining gargoyle kids, who mostly want to know if I can score them some ibogaine, when the roof-room begins shaking and I run back to see thousands and thousands of eels begin to flood up through the bath drain, up through the toilet, up through the sink. I start bringing in water and pouring it on them so they don’t suffocate, but there’s so many that I yell for the gargoyle kids to help, only they’ve been posing for so long they fall down screaming about pins and needles, while I’m getting out bowls and glasses to put eels in, until they stop, settle, and I dump them all in the bathtub, closing the drain and filling it up near the top, just as she comes storming in, screaming, putting her arms in the water, and the eels crawl back inside her skin, nesting in her organs, and the gargoyle kid she brought back from the hospital and the others from the roof and I just stand there, amazed, while she coos to her babies that it’ll be okay, the bad man is gone, they’re safe now.

I still live in that building, and I still talk to the gargoyle kids who hang out on my porch and buy my drugs, and I’m even starting to get less weirded out with helping my landlady and her eel-babies, now that she’s agreed to pay for my help in bottled water.

Five: While he is moving, he knocks over the urn bearing the ashes of his uncle Ray. When he bends over to clean it up he discovers it is actually full of cocaine and a note with a scribbled telephone number.

(Aspen Colorado, August, 1975)

“You need to get over here, I think I just made us rich, my man.”

“Rich like how rich? Like big score rich or like we can party this weekend rich?”

“Rich like we’ll never have to pay for coke again.”

“I’m hearing you, man. Keep going.”

“So my bitch of a girlfriend threw up all over the back seat of Juliette again, and I’m telling her I’m done taking her home, she can walk for all I care, and I spend half the day scrubbing at the leather, trying to get that fruity-drink bile smell out, but nothing doing, is what I’m saying.”

“Sure man. Puke in the car. I’m with you.”

“So I’m like the motherfuckin’ master chemist though, mixing shit in the garage, some Borax and some turpentine and stuff because all this might really fuck up the leather I thought about later but at the time I’m just super mad, so it’s like anything, right.”

“Sure.”

“And so I spill some of this shit onto my sleeve and when it hits it just eats through, and I move my arm quick, and there on the ground where the goop fell off is this flaky shit. So I’m cleaning it up, and I must have gotten some of it on my fingers or something and wiped off my face, because soon enough I’m good, I’m feeling no pain. If you see what I’m getting at.”

“No. You’re losing me, man.,”

“This shit I made, it’s like some Midas shit, everything it touches turns to primo untouched coke. Snow white, I’m telling you, I’ve got a mound sitting right here.”

“You sample this shit? This fuckin’ homemade synthetic coke?”

“All day, motherfucker! Help your fucking self!”

“So everything it touches, huh. How come the bucket you got it in ain’t turned to coke? Or the floor?”

“Not totally everything, just like organic shit. Like it ate through the cotton shirt I got in Vancouver but those stupid polyester that bitch of a girlfriend got me stopped it cold. So you gotta be, like, superfucking careful with it.”

“Wait, fucking, what if there’s still some of that fucking shit in the coke! It’ll eat at my, oh shit! Shit, man, I can feel it getting, fucking sinuses, Jesus man!”

“I’m sorry, dude. Really for real. But I’m all out of cotton shirts, man.”

Six: A sentient but invisible lifeform, desperate to breed, finds its mate in a 92 year old woman who lives only because her family cannot bring themselves to disconnect her life support.

What do you love, when you love someone from a distance? Is it the way you feel wrong and misfooted and dizzy in your genitals, the sweat on your neck and dripping down your chest, the way all your dreams change course to swirl around your new center, the reefs of beliefs you branch out, convinced they’re like you, they know, they’d love you if only. The sort of structure you first feel when you start a new job, only jittery, unsure, balloons dancing with streetlights. Feeling completed, feeling emptied, feeling the phantom tongue centering spirals across your thighs. Perhaps too effete to spackle semantics atop the want to fuck.

The Immortal, who had been here for three years, stared out the window-frost, off in a place farther than measurements permit, completely outside her comascope, the dim halos of energy spinning in slow-time, and as the memory of her body fades she enters into new forms. In the dreaming place where she lives she had taken on the lupus sickness, running along the hallways, sniffing out the half-forms of the other ward-patients, the tribe-forms of her early dreams, when Ernst called her a paroxysm of beauty, where Aragon wrote feigned-fictional accounts of his obsession over her cunt, where she filled phonographs with the automatic writing of the “spirits” which she acted out, the silly Surrealists only willing to listen to voices clad in subconscious magick. So many years later she’d smile over a pirate-broadcast girl called Strawberry Shortwave, playing her fractured prose-poems, dreams of the return of angels in the form of  a shower of moths, the chain of held hands of women walking out into their strangeness sent forward. She took to teaching, so much wanting to help these self-conscious priggish conservative children, trying so hard, walks across the quad telling them of Dorothea Tanning, of Leonora Carrington, the slight smile of water-flavors apparent to all. Even then, in the cloistered academy, she knew she was a lycanthrope, flows beneath the skin. She ran from nothing in life, and embraced being a wolf-girl as anything else, keeping her secrets into her retirement, into her coma, where she felt the half-life stripped from her, the shock of her senses unbound, the notice of something always unseen but always watching, waiting, observing from a distance, seeing she’s a wolf, a wolverine, a hunter of missing things, following the warmth.

The Immortal hears her sighs, her pants, down the hall. She begs release. He envies her, to be able to step out of this world with just the pull of an iv, the flicking of switches. He walks the hallway, quiet and alone, sidestepping pools of disinfectant and flaking pea-green paint. He knows he hasn’t much time between hall-checks. Her face lit with monitor-light, the metronome and hiss of her extended immune system, the cloud-speech of her guttural growl, so close to something she’s been wanting so long, and he turns back once, looks behind him, almost sees something in the corner, noticing the absence of sound, the complete removal of ambient noise within which it is hidden, and stares, waiting for it to reveal itself.

Seven: Every night, a screenwriter dreams a new movie which, if produced, will be the largest-grossing movie of all time, winning 12 academy awards. Every time he wakes up, the dream slips from his memory.

Like a vision in neon: TITTY NINJAS, the greatest film of all time, haunts his speed-shrunken dreams, elaborate footage of full-frontal kung-fu like a smutified ballet dancing around his cerebellum —

JACQUELINE: No time to ask how robotic assasins got into the showers, girls: it’s time for action! Beware their vibrating finger-attachments!

— an army of sculpted extras writhing in The Grand Inquisitor’s sadistic scented oil trap! Recursion upon recursion as our heroes are embedded in the infinite Porn Shop of Babel! Serious foot action of the likes not seen since Nezami’s Le sette principesse (The seven princesses)!

CHRYSTALLINE: It appears I’ve spilled all of the antidote all over my lap! Thank God that in addition to being a demolitions expert, a supermodel, and an expert in tensor calculus, I’m also a gymnast, and incredibly flexible!

The critically-applauded Zero Gravity Showdown scene! The heart(etc.)touching training sequences, in which the Russian master parallels the development of barkovscina and the spinning-fire school of stick-fighting! The Drunken Fuck Monkeys!

ANGHELLHYNE: How could I forget a four-foot prehensile cock?

Devious CGI-enhanced vagina dentata duels! The whirling pleasure touch of ten thousand fingers! Dr. Hanherholden’s alternate genitalia! The simps at the Vatican will beg for a copy for the Index Expurgatorius, the prissy prudes at the Bibliotheque Nationale’s Collection de l’Enfer will plead for first-run footage, the private case of the British Library will whine and cry for stills, but only the Academy will be gifted with original reels in thanks for their complete sweep of every Oscar category! Just imagine the “Best Musical Number” production! It would…it…

No, he thinks, sitting up from the couch and looking for his pills. That can’t be the way it was in the dream. There’s no way that’d sell. I’d get arrested. I should get back to work on that hospital fire miniseries; I got meds to buy.

Eight: A child is lost in a crowd, carrying a stuffed bear loaded with plastic explosives.

CIA operatives training Afghani rebels to fight Soviet troops in the eighties discovered quickly that the common tactic of car-bombing simply wasn’t effective as there weren’t enough cars to go around. There were, however, a great number of camels, and thus it was that CIA director William Casey can put “inventor of camel-bombing” on his resume. Unfortunately, camels are not indigenous to all areas, although one cannot step out into any corner of this world without tripping over a malnourished whelp looking for a life-purpose. These children would once be utilized by the comprachicos as models for monsters, mutilated and displayed in subbasement freakshows, but that was a barbarous age; we now have global media networks and the skeletal platform of political atrocity from which to display the return of all the sins of the father. She tells the guard she’s visiting her mommy. The guard doesn’t check the list. When she was at The Colony, all her favorite cartoons were about exploding girls. The movies all seamed different than she saw in the city. You’ll come back having owned the city, to stand on your own terms. Say what you want, you stupid idiots, but I own this place and if you want to deny it we’ll see how mart you sound when they’re scraping your scalp out of the rubble. There are colored lines on the floor you’re supposed to follow, green for maternity and blue for rehab and white for ICU, but the lines are hard to read when the power goes out. If you ever think you don’t matter, you should spend the way with plastic explosives in your hands, wondering at the blast radius. She has never known fear, she will weep no more tears. Childhood is not a given. She has to put the bear down to push through the door to the stairwell. The space is as much yours as anyone. Step into it. She talks to her bear in her head, because when she talks to her bear with her voice people look at her, people want to take back her space. No one can do the work for you. She counts down in her head as the room numbers recede. She remembers the people at The Colony taking about The Company, which made her laugh, she had puppets named Colony and Company and she’d do puppet shows for her bear in the closet, Company telling Colony secrets, Colony telling the babies they’d soon have to leave, as things were about to end, but they were not afraid. Why be afraid? She was unsure, when his bed was empty, but she turned to see him enter the room, turned and handed him the bear, the relief in his eyes, skipping out and down the hallway, her mission completed and the whole vast world spread out before her, saying goodbye to the bear, proud of it finishing its time here, the note reading PULL MY STRING pinned to its chest.

Nine: A psychic runs over a man in an intersection with her Cadillac because she sees that he will someday rape and murder her sister.

There was once two sisters, one with the second sight and one with an empty place in her mind where the other children developed the small skirmishes and mimicking of adults in their formative years. Simple, the teachers would parrot to each other, just as the nuns would call her blessed, for the meek and the damaged and the retarded will always have a place in God’s kingdom. Her sister, however, was at war against this world, against the flood of sin and perversion which clawed at her night-dreams, telling her of her insanity, of her sinfulness, of her willful turning away. Years spilled away and the sighted sister ran as far from the cattle and carrion of her tiny snowglobe city as the bus line would take her, while her simple sister made windows in paper with fingerpaint, the vanishing spires of Tir-na-nog lost to her ever since the aide who smelled like rancid aftershave and night-sweats began stealing her underwear. The sighted sister made her living blocking and moving the flow of commerce, routing money by conduits clear to her as the midday sun, watching over her sister back in the ward, the joy of fresh strawberries with meals on Mondays, the annoyances of being forbidden the paints for a week after an incident with the day room walls, the tightening fear of the aide. The sighted sister saw the future, saw what was to be, and abandoned her life of profits and powers for a sleepless drive back east, white-blurred signs counting down the miles, resolving herself to what she must do. On the corner, just after dawn, she split him in three pieces under the wheels of the Cadillac, his severed fingers caught in the axle, the breath emptying from him as the police pulled her from the wheel. From the window of her room, the simple sister can see her sighted sister, whom she loves, having saved her from the Tamlin with her magic powers, keeping her maidenhood safe beneath her white cotton institute gown, and is now trapped by the faeries (having offended the queen) in the dark of the castle across the river, and she knows the only person left to save the sighted sister, which means an escape off the ward floor. What adventure! Sad to tell, however, the guards and nuns were on the strictest of watches, even in the evenings, and the ward door was kept all locked. Who would have thought all this would be thrown into disarray as the sound of something exploding tore through the walls, sending everyone scurrying, up from their beds and demanded the doors open, and the simple sister snuck quick-like into the main hall, down the laundry chute, across the sub-basement (where the whispers of all the dead people clung to her hair, changing their shapes in the corners of her eyes, finally squeezing out the window, across the street, out to the river, and how surprising! to see her sister, eyes rolling in her skull and blood all across her hands, and just barely visible in the spinning light of fire engines and emergency lighting, the sisters returned to the Marrows, Melusine, mer-girls, in the holes of the river, a story as true as its closing is sweet, and I wish nothing but as kind an end for you.

Ten: He has just dropped the last vial of true love in the world on the floor of the men’s room in Grand Central Station.

The vial has shattered and liquid has begun to trickle toward the drain. Many people on this earth are convinced there is one other person who completes them, makes them part of a larger whole, cures them of the dreaded loneliness disease. It’s quite fortunate that for most people, this one other person lives so close to them, or shares the same employer, or the same circle of friends. Some are still left unconvinced, however, certain the other still waits for them. It is for them the vial of true love exists. This is not a love potion in the strictest of senses, as it does not induce love in another; there is no damiana, no mandrake, no witch hazel in its makeup. Nor is this a pheromone derivative, an umwelt stimulant, none of the base powder methylenedioxy-n-methylamphetamine. The vial of true love is a means of focusing on an end-goal to the removal of all other aspects from one’s life, to strip one’s consciousness to a streamlined essence of intent. I was to learn this lesson myself, due to my vanity, my ignorance, and the magicians Abel and Baker.

Amanda had been gone for about a month by this time, time I mostly spent staring blankly at the wall, eating take-out and masturbating. In fact, I was reaching my seventh ejaculation of the day when I heard a knock on the door. Thinking it was her, I rushed to wipe myself off and make myself somewhat presentable, having gone to shit hygienically since she left. Hurdling mounds of trash in the hallway and scattered books across the living room floor, I was out of breath by the time I got to the door, where two men in suits were waiting for me.

“If this is about the water bill, I’ve got the check here, just give me a second to—”

“No. This is something entirely different. May we come in?”

“What do you want?”

“We’re here to help you get Amanda back.”

I was stunned at this, paying little notice as the taller of the two pushed beside me, taking a seat on the couch, while the other stood near the door. The taller one introduced himself as Abel, and his associate as Baker, and they offered me a foolproof method of regaining my girlfriend’s affections, or so he said.

“I assure you, this is no scam. We offer only what we claim, and no more. We simply have material you may find of use.”

“How do you know me?”

“We don’t know you. Your situation, however, is not uncommon.”

“Are you detectives? Or something?”

“Perhaps. Of a sort. Mostly we learn things and try to put that knowledge to use, for a nominal fee and all necessary expenses. This is the proposition we offer you: our fee, our expenses, in exchange for the discovery of your lifelong love, always and forever. We only require that once this contract is agreed upon that you follow our instructions to the letter, without hesitation. If you do not do this, our contract is immediately broken, with the prearranged fee remaining with us. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“Perfect. We’ll start from there.”

I had met Amanda in college, where a friend of hers knew a friend of mine, and eventually the genital-called square dance of intersocial coupling brought her and I together. I was pretending to be an artist at this point, taking Kline’s monochromatic brushwork as my start. I only found the slightest bit of acclaim within the university due to a kind-hearted and overly indulgent professor who spoke well of my thesis project, removing the paint from the earlier canvases with a battery of solvents and exhibiting the scarred, blank canvases; she claimed transformation possessed power exemplified by a return to original form, which was nice, but Amanda though the pieces were shit. She did approve of the process, however, seeing a need for updating what was basically a onanistic version of Rauschenberg’s subtraction piece. Amanda suggested exhibiting not the canvases but the paint, the solvent, in a base of oil and collected in glass vases she was making. The idea left me with questions, unconvinced the new version was significantly different, but the opportunity for long night of discussing the structural balance of the fluid, back and forth, I think you’re right, it’s getting late, maybe you should just stay here tonight…the process seemed more than worthwhile. It’s not like I had any better ideas; I had basically blown my high art load on my first public showing.

The solvent show, as we jokingly called it, never happened, and we both eventually graduated and got grown-up jobs, y’know, just until we could get enough money together to get our gallery plan up and running. Three years later we were married, reveling in every kitchy bourgeois cliché we could remember, giggling together at the head table after eating mescaline in the limo. At some point we had to move into a bigger place out in the upscale suburbs, still close enough to downtown to have coffee shops and hippie grocers, meeting neighbors with noserings and elaborate investment portfolios, our old projects tucked in attic-corners of our secondhand two-story out by the hospital. I laugh about it a little now, how easy it all seemed, but it was wonderful. For the first time in years there was no more feeling scared of the future, no more wondering where I’d be in a year. Everything was set. It was all revealing itself in the slow ebb of time.

I can’t tell you honestly why she left me. I doubt it was that one defining moment like you see in the movies, but maybe it was, I just don’t know. I knew she hadn’t been happy, and I knew I wasn’t as okay as I kept wanting to be, pretending I was, knowing how absurdly lucky I’d been to get to this place and holding on as tightly as I possibly could before it could fall away. I came home on a Wednesday night to find all her stuff was gone. My first thought was a desperate fleeing from this life, from the place, from a solid and certain world where I knew I did not belong. That’s the definition which comes the easiest, that it was all a question of reevaluating priorities and seeing hers lacking, very clever, very guilt-free, equations in a personal calculus. This was the logic I tossed out over margaritas with my coworkers, handed to my family when they’d call, asking over and over if I was okay. An old school friend suggested self-inventorying, a sort of inspection of one’s faults, but after staring at myself in the mirror she and I got from her mother I felt stupid and self-conscious and finally did the sensible thing and started drinking. Part of me still says it’s a senseless tragedy, nothing to be done about it, the sort of strategy I was fond of when I was fucking chunky Linda from Accounting in the back of her Volvo, wondering how many more times I’d have to wipe my cock with her all-cotton panties before my heart would stop being broken. I even started painting again, thinking I could somehow telepathically summon her back through the sophomoric ball-and-cup routine I’d used the first time, only to remember why it was I gave up this idiocy in the first place. I tried driving around all night, hoping highway zen would clear my head. Eventually I stopped trying pretty much everything. That was my state when Abel and Baker came to my door.

I know, poor me, no one understands me. And you’re right. I should have stared at the wall for a few days, taken a shower, and started over again, but that would have been the obvious thing, and there’s no point in telling stories about doing the obvious thing.

By morning they had gone through the house, removing the trash and the broken plates, wiping the windows and mirrors, mopping the stains off the floor. They made me shave and shower and start in again on the habit of being human. Three days of this and I was beginning to feel at home in my skin, the ends of my nerves covered over.

“Perfect,” Abel said. “Now we can begin.”

Baker reached into a duffel bag and pulled out two videotapes, putting the first into the vcr before going to the kitchen to make popcorn.

“The first tape is probably what you expect. You’ve been waiting for this ever since we showed up, so we might as well have at it. This is your ex-wife—”

“Separated. We’re not divorced.”

“Your separated wife? My, isn’t that telling. This is your split wife fucking James. You remember James? You met him at the neighborhood block party once.”

It was a grainy shot, but unmistakable: Amanda and James, Amanda on top doing that weird dog-pant thing she always thought was sexy. Baker came in and took the seat next to me while Abel looked for the remote to turn up the volume.

“You must have thought it would be different. Some sort of outrageous paradigm-shattering sex. All ball gags whip handles, wrists and ankles, needles and enemas. I imagine this is something of a letdown. I mean, even you could do this. Not anything like what you played over and over in your mind while staining your sheets every half-hour.”

“Fuck you.”

“She had plans for girl-girl, like back in college. Changing your life and truly understands and whatever people think when they’re alone. She even wrote an ad, but she just didn’t have it in her to meet someone new, to do the whole introduction process. Fortunately she had her supportive male friend James there to pick up the slack, in a plain-jane vanilla sort of way. And it pretty much goes on like this for another four minutes. Let’s switch over to tape two, where we see…hey, check it out. It’s Amanda and James shopping for furniture. What’s with you people and all that fake Tudor shit? You ever have to move that stuff?”

“How did you get this?”

“And see here? See how she’s watching him? She’s over you. She’s not in love with you, and never will be again. She’s better off. So the question you have to ask yourself is if you’re willing to find the thing you love.”

“The extent of your resolve,” Baker said, the first thing I heard him say.

“How far are you willing to follow, to fall, to fail, to swing out of your orbit to make this discovery?”

As soon as he finished the sentence, Abel pulled out a vial of some strange fluid.

“Yours is a love with a skeleton of comfort. You ended up with Amanda from inertia. It was what was expected, what was easy, what you knew you could handle and control. Only you couldn’t, of course. Your skin splits at the weakest of hungers. I don’t even know why we’re bothering with you."

“There is nothing I would not do.”

“Say that again.”

“There is nothing I would not do.”

“Well then. That’s quite the drastic statement.”

“The boy’s practically a martyr for the cause, Abel.”

“It warms the heart, it truly does.”

Abel and Baker removed the tape from the VCR and left. When they returned with two large bags I was relieved. I thought maybe they could actually help me. I didn’t know any better.

“People find true love in the weirdest of places. We’ve been doing this ever since we left the lab and hit the road, and you’d be amazed.”

“This one poor inhuman fuck fell in love with an old woman. Shit you not.”

“This other woman was in love with the Earth, so she kept this other poor fuck alive against his will, torturing him with consciousness. You know something about that, though, don’t you?”

“This girl was in love with god, so we set her phone to pick up broadcasts, which we figured would solve that, but now there’s this gaggle of people in love with the girl in love with god. They even started a cult called the Colony. But they’re all dead now.”

“That girl’s not dead. She did a good job for us, actually. We’ll have to keep an eye on her in the future.”

“And those sisters! the ones who loved each other and couldn’t love themselves. They’re staring face-down in the river-sludge now.”

“The eel-woman nesting her babies in their skulls.”

“Lots of people love things. That guy who loved coke. He was a fucking liability.”

“Ended up converting his legs, his arms. We eventually dumped his ass in a tub of the solvent. Though chances are whoever goes sniffing at his remains will want to do the same. We left a voice-mail number, just in case.”

“So you think deep on that before you open your mouth and close your eyes, kid. You think about what it is you really want.”

I was fed up with this two-bit sideshow. I wanted it, I wanted to know, and so I picked up the vial, touched it to my tongue. That was three months ago.

[Litany of detestable acts removed for brevity — db]

I hear from Dave, the only person left who will talk to me after the hideous degrading things I’ve done, and apparently Amanda and James are over with; she’s thinking of moving upcoast, changing jobs. I had to sell the house for bail money, and because of my current mental state she had no problem getting an annulment cleared. My friends and family don’t talk about me anymore, not even the tense jokes shared at reunions. My old life is over. I am now horribly in love with the second urinal from the left in men’s bathroom #8 at Grand Central Station. I run my tongue along the inner rim, the cool wet porcelain, the sweet sloping curve of the bowl. Having found the one thing left in this veil of tears which makes me happy, I dropped the rest of the vial on the floor, near the drain. The cops chase me out twice a day, and sometimes kids come in and kick me around, so if you should happen to find the place empty, just lick around the drainpipe and you will find the one thing which your soul truly desires.

I guarantee it.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #

Revisitation Five: River City Sutras
Not so much a hiding-place as a surrogate light, containing from all directions, the breath frozen in you as luminous things hunt out your time-pulse. Gratitude springs up and forth once the lights stop. Story had planted his journals out in the fields, not staying long enough to see what sprouted up, struggling for sunlight, new words meshed from the old. airbourne harvesters sifted the grain, the pages, the clouds, utilizing these components as one of the engineers would. The automated pilots would wave to Story, and he would wave back, and smile. The earth was filled with portals, in those days.

the pulse was moving into different time-signatures, capitulating and recapitulating with the train-sounds, the oxidized cardiovascular system of the grain-plains. There was no wind at this time, and thus no pathway. So difficult to gauge action, all teh mapmakers died and their children have no interest in carrying on the lineage, poisoned with the inner critic, never good enough, content to hang from bridgebottoms and suck on river-mist.

There are times when Story is in the bright place, where the Aliens speak to him, ask him his Path. “Which is your door?” they question. This is not a place from whence one can find the King, although the Aliens seem to know where to set him, hidden assignments he fufils despite intent. The Aliens have left him here, on the edge of town; this is not a place they can enter. The scents are stripped from his dreams, as he sleeps in an emptied gas station, feeding on leftover candy bars from a machine no one ever thought to reclaim.

The train-paths, Story thinks. They were not laid out by capital or by travel-want. They serve the same King as I, and are forever and immortal until such a time as their service is completed. He stalks the streets for tracks, for trains, for a sign, but in the houses the families were casting out dreams of displacement and ensnarment; the signal was lost. There were no lights to be seen in the sky.

There was a small luminous boy in the garb of a preacher. He told Story a parable of revenge and loss. He told Story a parable of ache and love and how all these hungers will be satisfied. He told Story a parable of DNA sequences, of the star-maps along the zodiac, of the misguiding direction of gravity. “Do you believe there is a secret road?” the luminous boy asked Story. “The road is not secret; I can hear it even when I am asleep.” The luminous boy smiled. “I grant you safe passage into River City, as an envoy of the King. You will need to find a second passage out.” Story nodded, and faded.

Lines of travel (roads, tracks, the cropduster-airport on the edge of town). Lines of utility (sewers, steam tunnels, water manes, electrical cables, refineries, generators, sewage plants). Lines of commerce (store-clusters, banking-clusters, light industrial clusters, heavy industrial clusters, warehouses, and failed versions of the above). The city is a nest of grids. It is a difficult place to find the pulse, should one not be able to find the center, the magic, the heart-line of a city, at which point all becomes clear. Story has not found River City’s heart-line yet, and fears for his likelihood of ever finding it. Seeker-logic.

Dampeners in the tiles of the ceiling along the hallways of the city council absorb faith and radiate blistered fear. Story is protected, but knows to pay attention to such foul omens. Children smile at him, and he whistles short themes they will remember and whistle themselves, in quiet times, for the rest of their lives. Orange voices. Hope can manifest anywhere.

At a certain length, tone-sequences begain to fold on themselves, algorhythms coded in the first few sequences in order to map the unfolding of the entire piece, frequency limiters and repetition hues, cerulean in this light, a milk-white hum as the interoffice spiral tightens and Story closes in on this place’s heart, tucked away, stored in a jar of bleach and gooseberries to repel stray dreams. “You, you are a key,” Story whispers, and tucks the jar beneath his colored coat.

From Kornley and Voss Story can hear the train-whistle. His time here is ending. The out-gate is outside his sight. Desperate and lost. All fives and sevens.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #

Revisitation Three: The Exploding Girl
(original version by my esteemed colleague kyra)

“Okay, you need to just settle down, you’re overexcited. Start at the beginning.”

“She FUCKING EXPLODED! Jesus Creeping Christ, Rissa!”

“So, so wait, so you mean to tell me you’re just out there doing your Sensitive Macho routine and she just blew up!”

“That’s *exactly* what I mean to tell you. What the *fuck*, man? What the *fuck*?”

“So she exploded like a baby in the microwave, you’re trying to tell me? Like you’re slathered in innards?”

“First off this is no time to be flippant. I called you for help. If help is not forthcoming I will pursue other avenues of helpdom.”

“Fine fine fine. But it does beg the question.”

“And second, no, she didn’t go all Troma on us or anything. It was like there was this massive bright white light and she was gone.”

“So more Akira, then.”

“Precisely.”

“So explain to me what brought you to this point.”

“So I’m just minding my own business.”

“Owen, never in your life have you ever just been minding your own business. You’re a goddamn walking liability.”

“See, that’s what was so weird about it, because I actually was minding my own business, so I shoulda known something really serious was about to happen, because I got all jittery for not acting a fool all day, so the bus pulls up and allofasudden, just wham, I heard this voice in my head.”

“We have a rule about listening to the voices in our heads, don’t we?”

“Yes. But this voice was really only one word.”

“It wasn’t ‘kill’, was it?”

“Good lord no!”

“What was it, then?”

“Sup-a-flyyyyyy.”

“Superfly. That’s what the voice in your head said.”

“No no no. Sup-a-fly. Like Curtis would say it.”

“The voice in your head is Curtis Mayfield.”

“Yeah! And like I’m not gonna listen to Curtis Mayfield!”

“So what did you do?”

“I turned around to the woman behind me, did a little dance, and said ‘Ladies first, because I am a feminist gentleman, baby!’”

“Oh you did not.”

“So she laughs and gets on and I give her a little ‘Ow!’ as she climbs up the steps. Like a James Brown thing.”

“Just stop it.”

“And suddenly I realize what I just did and I get to feeling *really* conspicuous and I can’t get on the bus now because everybody’s looking at me so I head down to the bus station down by the river and play pinball until my ears stop burning.”

“Can you snap this story up a bit? I haven’t done any saving the universe yet today, and you’ve obviously gotten nothing productive done.”

“So I see the bus woman later, and we get to talking, and it turns out she used to know Ana from a long time ago, and we go get all freaked out on pixie-stix and we end up walking out on the tracks back by the small forest and so I think to myself ‘What would Curtis do?’, so we started smooching and — ”

“Okay, you’re going to have to stop now, because I so don’t want to hear about it.”

“No, but then, okay she fainted.”

“Well well well, let’s hear it for Tom Jones.”

“So I’m kinda freaking out a little, right? Because it’s like she started to, I dunno, almost *glow*…”

“You really do think a lot of yourself, y’know.”

“No! I’m not even being like that! I’m just saying!”

“Fine, whatever, so how is it she exploded?”

“So I’m talking to her, pulling the leaves from her hair, and we talk some, and then she put my hand on her chest and then it was like being in another place but also there still. Maybe. I’m still pretty confused.”

“And that was it?”

“That’s the story, true as anything.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“Do?”

“Well, consider this. You, brother Owen, you’re a mess, and here you’ve got this excellent girl you actually totally hit it off with and then she disappears into the light. That’s gotta, y’know, *mean* something.”

“No! It’s just a freak accident resulting from all that jumping out of the car I did last summer!”

“Foolishness! You, for reasons completely beyond me, you’ve been Visited.”

“Like a blessing?”

“I’d say. And those aren’t the sort of things which last.”

“So she’s gone.”

“I dunno. Maybe. Maybe not. She’s certainly not here, and that’s the key-point. I think you should consider yourself lucky, keep your eyes peeled, and lay off the sugar.”

“Well of course I’m lucky! I’m Owen! My lifestyle would kill an army of vat-bred supermen!”

“No, I’m meaning — ”

“Saved only by my inability to recognize oncoming catastrophe and lightning!”

“You need to pay — ”

“Fueled on an endless supply of cornball situations and misunderstood metaphysical dilemmas! So what are you saying?”

“Nothing, Owen. Nevermind. Let’s go see what’s happening at the temple.”
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #

Revisitaion Two: All That Is Is Less
original version by c. flink

I was hanging out at the coffee shop downtown, decked out in my “I’m an independent filmmaker — show me your tits” T-shirt, sitting at the piano, trying to remember how to do Schwartz’s second etude when this guy came along and hit a key at the low end, one note, like a misplaced thought. I stopped paying and stared out after him as he walked away, followed by a second guy (more a boy, really) scribbling something down in his notebook, and it suddenly struck me like a rope passed through my body and pulled taut that I had to get the fuck out of Lawrence.

Oh mothers, where have your dumb boys gone?

I awoke this morning from a dream of fleeing. Alone, this is nothing new to me, but the man who pursued me in this dream was armed to his fingertips in cutting tools twisted and bent like they’d spent years at the bottom of a blast furnace. These blades leapt from his fingers, cutting through the shrubbery and fallen branches, tearing through treetrunks and swinging back to his hand, invisible guidewires tied around his wrists. The animals of the forest dropped stones to stop him, slow his progress, landing in my hands so as to carry me down through the river-water, sunk down to the floor where the two rivers become one. The river takes me to be one of the drowned dead and I am allowed to walk to the opposite bank through the shimmering green light lamentations, the splintered remains of bed-caskets all twined in algae and baby dolls. Here there was the skull of Susan Christmas, who I knew from playground tragedies, who lent me a lock of her hair on Saint Valentine’s Day, so young as to not know what it meant. Over yonder the still-whole body of Ehm Whaelk, who taught me the way of the second skin, his arms now mirroring the current. I knew a song for to sing to bring them surface-side, but the water filled my mouth and the air all rushed out and the hunter’s knives had found me too soon.

I awoke knowing just what it meant to dream of walking underwater, and drew the day’s first breath.

The body of Ben I saw there as well, but he hadn’t stopped twitching, and I knew he was hiding, as was I, looking for components to build a method of escape. In the real world Ben kept calling the cops on himself, his contraptions to mutilate and kill oiled and primed, a secret door out of this world. The first time he had built what looked like a large metal pig from the body of a holding tank, a vulvic slit along its belly lined with sharpened gear leading to a crank like a tail out of its far end. The problem with this creation was the inability to work it without at least two people — one to work the crank and one to crawl up inside the tank. Ben had duct-taped himself into its maw, leaving himself a mouth-hole to ask the police to please assist him in his last exit. They confiscated the metal pig and gave him a stern lecture as to bothering the poor people at the junkyard.

One time, not long after, he waited for the storm which brought the flood-rains down on us for so long, then stripped himself to his skin and attached a long metal rod to his penis, apparently inspired by a copy of Crad Kilodney’s underground classic “Lightening Struck My Dick”. He then jumped from rooftop to rooftop around town, like some deranged roof-goblin, searching for the ideal spot to lay down anchor and lift his antenna aloft. Alas, he went through a skylight and landed ass-over-ankles in the middle of a Rerisers Anonymous meeting, skewering the bunt-cake, destroying about six bucks worth of rehab art and prompting several relapses and one conversion to Satanism.

Yet another attempt involved his reading that the fungus which grows in bowling shoes could be fatal if inhaled over extended periods of time. Ben spent the next week at Der Bowlingplatz, stealing dozens of heavily-worn bowling shoes (at a loss of his two dollar shoe deposit each time) in order to build the Black Chamber, which he lined with the innards of the shoes, keeping it perfectly airtight until he finally entered on the fifteenth day, prepared to leave this earth. Alas, Georg Beschmutzer had come to the house to retrieve his missing shoes, deposit or no, as there were currently only three remaining pairs of size tens left in stock. He kicked open the Black Chamber, drug Ben out, and ripped the shoe-remains out in order to try a restitching job. It was at that point Ben decided to try more grandiose methods.

“Every day of his life, Ben has played one note on the piano in the coffee shop downtown. He walks by, and he strikes a single key without pause or break of stride.”

“And you’re writing down the notation, huh.”

“Yeah. I can see the notes he’s played, a glow above the keyboard.”

“Maybe it’s not a song. Maybe it’s a code.”

“Y’think? Like for what?”

“Well, show me whatcha got, up to this point.”

“Okay, fuck, it’s….okay, here.”

“See here? if we loop twenty-six letters three times we get three number-sets, for a total of seventy-eight, with ten keys left over. If we letter the keys we get…here…”

“stoptryingtostealmyshitbenny”

“Well. That’s just curious.”

“Or maybe just an unhappy accident.”

“Maybe.”

My friend gave me the laptop he bought when he went to college. I tried to thank him once for giving me the computer.

“I don’t want it, I don’t want to own it, I don’t want to think about it ever again.”

“Then why did you keep it?”

“In case I needed it again. Which I won’t. But I might.”

I took a look on the hard drive and found dozens of encrypted files without any sort of key. I thought about trying to hunt something up, but I’m beginning to suspect I’d rather not know.

Oh mother, what have your dumb boys done?

I lived, then, in a small apartment block behind a refinery whose owner had decided the profits coming in wouldn’t be sufficient to make continuing business worthwhile. Indeed, the only means of extracting profit from the refinery would be to torch it. The employees, knowing full well what shallow prospects for work Lawrence held for them, actively prevented the owner’s brothers and cousins, who had been promised a cut of the insurance settlement, from burning down the refinery. At night, the employees would take shifts watching the streets for suspicious vans, whose passengers would be pulled out into the street, beaten, and tossed off the North Second Street bridge. For months this went on, and I didn’t get one solid night’s sleep the whole time. I ask you to keep this in mind as I relate who I was, then.

“But if you break the eighty-eight keys down going the other way, you get findnohiddenmessage. How’s about them apples?”

The use of knives and blades, a weak attempt at a joke (it’s ‘violence with a point’, geddit) blurred into horrid puke scenes weaved into halfassed prattling as to “really deep thoughts”. Then again, we’ve always taken a backhanded pride in our violence, our depravity. It’s hard-core, being from here, we tell ourselves, suddenly made important by the increasing transitoriness of life in the here and now. All your years nothing but a smear of black fluid at the bottom of a porcelain bowl. He used to pretend at an awkwardness in order to meet women. It was ideal. A cry for a kind of lifting-up into the light that comes from her body as she sleeps, rumpled and fuzzy, curled beside you. To look down at your body and know the places it has been, the points of contact, to know it is a part of the continuum of physical forms which meet and mate and fall away. A vision of crossed thresholds and calls from somewhere far away from someone who wants more than anything to pull you as close as the skin allows.

Oh mother, what will your dumb boys become?

Nothing: they are this, and nothing more.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #

Revisitation One: My Take On My Take On All This
(this is based on deb’s “my take on all this”, available at www.neuron.net/~snow/mytake.html. thanks to kyra, who gave me the idea in a sideways kinda way.)

No one could be certain whether or not the ship was sinking. There was no reason to think it was. No water was coming up over the side. No abrupt shift in the balance of the deck, no lurching, no portholes in view of nothing but breaking waves. Yet the animals were pacing in their cages, crying out for something no one seemed able to identify, and the captain was nowhere to be seen, spending yet another night in his cabin, with her, soon to be forced to put rigor and structure to his notions of love.

Constantinople did not like parties, but tonight he was restless and didnot want to be alone. He ended up along with the rushing tide of hisfriends at an unknown compartment. The music was blaring from unseen speakers hidden in the edges of the room, practically unseeable, and it irritated him not to have a face with which to connect the music. Constantinople played his music only for himself, and a few friends, of whom none of the throng who had led him here could truly be counted. He cursed himself for having so little discipline and in the same instant cursed his cursing; he knew he didn’t like parties and yet had come anyway. He started making his way toward the exit: an excruciatingly slow process through a sea of unfamiliar jackets, earrings, beer bottles and outlined lips. He then saw her, and he stopped, and did not know what to do.

If you, the reader, are with me, imagine if you will she is sitting in a corner, hands clasped together, legs crossed, eyes staring far off. Perhaps across the water, to a sea-port town — do not look too closely, for if she senses our attention she may discontinue her fantasies. “To begin: all writing is an act of love. But this is saying nothing, so I must continue.”

She had no need to look at him as he said this, for they had been telepathic for two months before they spoke to each other. They quickly discovered that they each had a different native tongue:

-mis palabras no puerden espressar lo mucho ce te amo.

-what does that mean?

-words cannot express how much i love you in spanish.

-oh. shalom, ya hachoo omlette de frommage.

-what does that mean?

-hello, i’d like a cheese omlette in hebrew, russian and french.

-french, bah. je conchie la langue francaise.

-what does that mean?

-i shit on the french language. in french.

-ah. no se sabe lo que quiere decir.

-we don’t know what that means. in spanish.

-in any language, even.

This seemed not to be a problem, until those fateful words:

-so you only love me in spanish, then?

-no, you misunderstand. the sentence was in spanish.

-so what language is your love in, then?

-um…i, i don’t…

At which point their still-budding affair was in desperate need of a translator.

—-

Constantinople was ok. He had good friends, a good ship, and a place to hang his circus for a time. He had chosen these. There is no need to look too far, he thought, to make myself happy. At times, impatience would creep its way into his otherwise slow and purposeful movements, particularly when he thought of her, as paradoxical as your favorite paradox or woman, which may well be one and the same. He would then go to the main deck, which looked out not upon the ocean (which would have certianly been a safer and more reasonable use of the room) but upon a model he had made by one of his crew, a perfect model of the view from Constantinople’s left rear balcony, the one which juts out from his bedroom over the city, both his love and his nemesis. He thrived and died alone, in the city, each model scaled to show the change and cycle of time in his town by the crewman who recieved news of Constantinople’s town by sealed and coded messages sent from townsfolk in his employ — at least until the town was overrun by devils who emptied them of their organs and salted the earth where the town once stood. The crewmember, whose name is best not said (according to the impotent author), modifies the vast model of the town as though this never happened, imagining wht changes would have taken place, should the lives of townspeople have never been stopped, or had they been made to stand and breathe again.

Such acts are not unheard of in the town where Constantinople is from.

—-

What happens is, she says we’re going to run away, off to the ocean, and you say no, you don’t want to anymore, those were in our younger days, now you stay, and you think of how she hasn’t really laughed since you called her crazy, not crazy like you thought was so romantic when you were spending your schoolnights with your panties around your ankles dreaming of getting out of whatever town your story contains and so ready to fling yourself screaming into the gaping maw of lunacy where all passions snarl and claw and fuck out of the unadulterated knowledge of what it means to be alive, no, you called her crazy like the women who count spilled beans on the dirty tile of the grocer’s floor, the crazy that makes you sad and sick and more than anything embarassed to watch, pissing in your pants and sucking on sores crazy, the playtime romance as dead as the light in your one good eye. You want her to stay and you want her to leave and you can’t tell where you’re going. You want her to stay and keep an eye out so you can get away with the {secret} when all the time she’s trying to whisper{it} in your ear:

want you to get down on your belly
want you to get down on your knees
want you to put your tongue inside of me
before we speak any more of your loyalties

but you won’t fuck her anymore, you say, and she gets very cranky.

Of course, we all knew who would give in the end, now, didn’t we.

—-

It seems so silly, now, to look back on the first wave of private practice geneticists and their creations, so sure they had solved all disease and malformation by rooting it out at the source code. So many supposedly perfect superbabies designed by questionaire and sequence splicing unable to stave off even the most meager of diseases, so many collapsed skulls, so many eyes gone sightless but such a movie-star quality of blue. It was soon a disreputale thing to be a geneticist, at least one who left academics for the big bucks of baby farming, and soon all the strip-mall labs went up for grabs again, the once-proud doctors sifting downward into the lower bardos of Aryan Nation backroom “repurifications”, third-world gender modifications, and the once-again prolific freakshow, of which no circus is complete without one.

A young old man resembling a lion brings all of his cubs out of the closet and sets them on the ground throughout the room. Their legs, which have never been used, have no strength, and need time to get used to the sway of the ship which the majority of the passengers scarecely even notice now. He watches them struggle to get from one unbouded section of carpet and sees that it is good. he begins to purr, one long deep purr rumbling contentedly, as if from the depths of an extinct volcano. He returned the cubs to his closet; he was to meet the captain tonight for reasons still unknown. This seems only fair to the geneticist, who is well-versed in the flux and shift of the merketplace; he has been many things before he was a geneticist, and will most likely be many things after.

The man talks to the cubs in their language, telling them he loves them, and they understand.

—-

Follow the waiters once they’ve left the table down to the bowels of the ship’s stern side. Follow them down and past to the kitchen where the staff runs from the butcher and hides. Watch him dance pas de deux, pulling cleavers from his boots as he hacks at the men and the walls. The chefs get him unarmed without a hint of alarm and lock him in the back bathroom stall. Through a crack in the door you can listen to him roar and bellow at whoever goes past. Were you to ask why he’d just sputter and sigh and swear that this time was the last. “I don’t know what I’ve done ‘til lucidity comes and wipes all this blood from my sight. I just want my knives, and to dance side to side, and to slash all your eyes by tonight.” Now the meat’s gone bad in the store. And the chefs are all tired and sore. And the butcher who dances in violent trances is cutting a hole in the floor.

—-

so, beardslee, you’re in love again. how beardslee of you.

you don’t understand. this is different. i have to think this out.

think this out?

she’s demanding proof of my love being a portable expression.

extricable from the terms you’ve fallen back on.

precisely.

are you at all familiar with the rules of logic?

—-

She liked good conversation. She only got a chance to have it when she was taking a break from her job, which was to be locked up with tiny scraps of paper and put on display down in the hold, performances every hour on the hour. Actually, this was only one of her jobs as a Certified Metaprogrammer (BM, Portstown MetaTechnical Institute and Grill, class of Kali Yuga). Nobody seemed to know what exactly a Metaprogrammer was, least of all an actual Metaprogrammer, who was either whacked to the gills on whatever chemical Consumer Responsibility magazine said the kids were doing that week or laying around in a stupor, but they were being sought for council by crisis-striken Post-Metaprogrammers, who used to be Metaprogrammers until the bills got to be too much of a hassle and really, let’s face it, laying around convinced you know the secrets of the universe won’t get you any closer to getting laid.

One of the ways Metaprogrammers occupy themselves, according to her instructor Gibreel Macadamia (who had a doctorate in Metaism, which is accomplished by suggesting the concept of Metaism without any of the core elements of Metaism through use of all concepts learned in Cheap Irony 205 and Pointless Cleverness 380), is to take all of the energy which would normally be used in torturing others and use it to torture themselves instead. This, which was always a sure crowd-pleaser, is known as the Small Knot, or Loop in the technical jargon. But nevermind that. Remember, what may seem obvious to the reader may not be as obvious to the author.

She spent lots of time below decks when not working, terrified of the sky,which seemed to suggest that the porthole view from her display case was not entirely accurate. To silence such fears she spent her time in the eddies and whorls of the seemingly endless party which passed from compartment to compartment, oblivious of time or lack of necessary mission equipment. Through this process she became shacked up with another Metaprogrammer, who explained his job as “enlightenment through captaining”, a tried and true Metaprogrammer’s trick. She had her doubts of his affections, despite his pleas, and all was nearly lost until a Translator showed up. She invited the translator in. His presence was a gift, of sorts — she had good reason to believe that they did need him, though perhaps not in the way he expected. This good reason is called Intuition, in the technical jargon.

When Constantinople, which was her partner’s name, got back from whatever he did atop the ship, he was pleased as Kool-Aid to see the translator because they were old friends and everything was simply complicatedly marvelous. He informed both of them that their difficulty in expressing their love was bound with their use of multiple languages, and would have to be stripped clean with the burning blade of symbolic logic.

“you see,” the translator said, “all writing *is* an act of love, if we are to equate some essential quality as being present both in writing and in love. discuss amongt yourselves and present me with a validation of that statement by 2200 hours. in the interim, i must check on my closet.”

—-

Maggie was a doll, primarily, except when she was bad, during which times she was a menace to society. Maggie was not the sort to do evil herself, no. She would suggest evil to others, evil which would occasionally take root and find a willing participant in the heart of whoever heard her voice. Being a doll, and a circus-doll at that, she came across many who would follow her hinted orders, which has made the cargo hold where the circus is staged a place sticky with salt and blood. Her hair was red, and she made songs with her hands, like any puppetmaster.

In college Maggie had studied theatre until somebody of consequence told her she was a bad actress. At that point being a bad actress was generally a synonym for someone who wouldn’t put out, so Maggie put out like nobody’s business and was still called a bad actress, so she burned down the theater and hitched a ride to the coast. Many people do not know this about her. They do know, however, that Maggie like to get into situations, primarily out of boredom, like someone trying to run from their shadow.

She once wrote research articles for a polygamous Hindu-Italian slumlord who wanted to marry her. She once crashed a wedding party and sang Ted “The Nuge” Nugent’s “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” in front of three hundred hokey-pokeying relatives of an unknown couple. She once took a fourteen year old suicidal genius hom with her to make sculpey-beads and, well, you get the picture.

Today she took out a slice of paper and began a letter to our woman, who lived on the other side of the ship:

“been having too much fun. sick to stomach. making friends
with an upstanding young man with strong hands and a solid
understanding of musculature. he’ll be crazy soon enough,
and we’ll be home soon enough. drugs and kisses.”

—-

It should be of no suprise that the translator/geneticist/gadabout, whosename is none other than Theodore J. Krabdovik, was once a Metaprogrammer too, until he was disbarred for certain unseemly incidents involving hope and patience. During that time he had written “The Translator’s Theories”, a seminal work in the Ted Krabdovik canon, portions of which survive against enormous odds.

“There are some metaprogrammers who think that torture is wrong. I have a hunch that there might be interesting results were our normal ‘Iadic’ loops opened up to a slightly larger controlled loop called, for my purposes, a ‘Diad’. Following this might be ‘Triad’ and ‘Quatrad’. For a more complicated understanding please see Figure 31-B [ed: these notes have been lost], which demonstrate how this theory holds to the Metaprogrammer’s Credo that if it feels wrong, do more of it, you wuss. Since developing this theory I have found some willing parties, who have been willing to experiment, and I have published my findings below, demonstrating the Metaprogrammer’s Credo that all problems can be solved via a quick fix, which generally consists of putting something in your mouth. [ed: this fragment is here cut off.]”

Ted looked at this fragment and wondered if there was something here he should remember, while he brought the cubs back out and watched them take their first steps.

—-

One of the chefs went to check on the butcher, hearing nothing from inside the stall, afraid to hold his ear to the door. The chef noticed water coming from the crack in the door and nearly realized what was happening by the time the hinges burst and the door slammed him into the far wall, shattering his bones, flooding the hall.

—-

There were once two people in the story and we have, you and I, experienced our first near-miss together. It’ll be nothing but from this point on. The party is over, the band has disbanded, and someone has started screaming. By day she dances alone, as if the steps could bring back what once was, and ancient battle in which she is the victor. Her jaw is clenched almost by habit. She is visible and vulnerable and has left a trail of clues, followed by you and I, after the fact, so sure of our notions.

—-

In the tide a weathered piece of looseleaf paper finds itself before us. It hopes we set it loose when we’re done.

Professor Hinkle, my love:

I have set upon the task as has been laid out and have run into some unexpected difficulties. I am as sure of ever of my convictions but have not been as able to solidify these notions structurally. I have no doubt that I am closing in on the solution in due time. This note is simply to keep you updated on oour progress:

x = writing, which is operantly defined as “a grammatically-ruled means of communicating information”. You may disagree with me on the grammar aspect, as you’ve explained your displeasure at the notion of still-living languages being encumbered with artificial rules of conduct; however, it is my argument that it is only due to a grammatical and syntactical skeleton that exceptions and variants on its rules can be said to exist at all. As such, the intent of communicating information belies the use of language, and thus if one is serious as to this definition one will take great pains to clarify the communicative process as much as possible. Is that not why we are doing this in the first place?

y = love. There is no proof of love, just as there is no definition of love. If it is not expressly manifest in the situation it is not there. The mention of an unprovable statement invalidates the compound statement ~x -> y. Since we cannot prove that y -> anything at all, we cannot even set up a transitive proof of the equivalence of x and y to a third statement z, not even if z = futility, operantly defined as the inherent inability to achieve set goals — we don’t know what the goals of love are, or why it makes people do the stupid things they do.

I can’t prove anything. It’s there or it isn’t.

yrs,

Constantinople Beardslee

—-

For nearly a century sailors have reported seeing strange animals off the coast of a small country which will change names and presidents and graves in the next few weeks, one more time. The animals are the size of large dolphins, but built differently, and despite swimming at high speed they seem to be furry mammals, but no one has ever seen one close enough to verify this. At night, while the crew sleeps, it is alleged these animals use their claws to climb aboard and feed off the storage lockers below deck, able somehow to bypass locks and doors. In the morning all that remains are paw-shaped prints on the deck, leading back to the ocean.

—-

She has been on a ship in the middle of the ocean without wind, and she is a crybaby but she laughs instead because it looks better on her resume, but when she is not laughing she thinks about exploding and how the stars don’t care at all whether we return, and how this thing has all been done before but she still reads it. I still read it. And you are to me everything I can’t have, I reach out, I want. That’s what I do I reach out

my hand

[which is very very very small]

the day the dream is turned off is the day she dies. it is not real. it is a dream. we are far. far. far.

in the morning our skin is sensitive and it feels good to touch you.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #

Re-Rise, an Introduction
I don’t remember much from that time, and what I do remember is probably wrong, but I remember walking, which I did constantly then, and I remember the flood. There were streets which were impassable by foot and sometimes by car; you could stare out from windows and watch the rainwater and the melted snow runoff flow down the streets and sidewalks, the drains flooded and releasing branches and lost toys, and not have to try hard to imagine the street had no solidity, that it was all water. As the town sloped down toward campus, toward the river, you could see trees jutting up from flooded fields, see washed-out parks and abandoned cars, trying to remember where the riverbank once was. I walked set paths throughout my section of the city, cutting across parking lots, stopping off for milk at the grocer, following pathways I never intentionally designed but discovered through months of repetition. One night, blocks north of the clump of yellow pre-fabs where the foreign grad students live, I ran into a girl I was certain I knew from somewhere. She asked me what had happened, where I had been, and I couldn’t understand her question. Class, she said. I hadn’t showed up in two months. Had I dropped out? I was confused, told her I’d been sick, that I was probably not going back to class this semester. I had forgotten, replacing the memory with a low humming dread which found me when I wasn’t walking, when I laid in my bed and readied for sleep. Sometimes I would panic, thrash, wonder what had happened to me, but I couldn’t find anything wrong, any reason. It was like I got on the wrong bus one morning and forgotten I had a home and an academic career and goals and future plans. Having to remember, remember anything, made me feel tired and sick and confused. I tried not to think about such things, to walk, to spend hours in the library staring at books, not reading anything, just feeling as though I had intent and direction and purpose, until the fear was gone. If I can keep on like this, I remember thinking once, just keep going and not thinking and not remembering, then maybe everything will be okay.

The only way to stop remembering is to have all the people in your life leave. Seth, who for years had been my best friend, had left town, presumably forever, in order to join the circus. I had no reason to think I would ever see him again. He had an epiphany of sorts after an accident, a moment of clarity, and he knew enough to know he couldn’t follow it here. My other friends from that time were lost in their own lives now, having either grown up and become responsible and uninterested in their past, or they had reached a point of stillness, the days looped and spiraling in on themselves, content to find a center in the familiar. I never heard from any of them, mostly; whatever we were doing with our youths was now over, and there was no reason to revisit. I had nothing to force memory back on me, and could let it fade or change as its nature dictated, unbound by truth and concensus.

Then I got a call from Ana.

This friend of mine, this girl I used to know, her name is Ana. I havent seen her for a couple years, she went to school and I tried to follow her but I kinda didnt do school so well, things happen, and after I fucked around long enough they threw me out, so I came back home and got a job and stopped fucking around, somewhat. We were close, we were friends, we spend a few miserable parties huddled in corners discussing and flirting and being friendly in the way that two people who know they’re never going to come together sometimes do, clenched in my mind when she (two years my senior) decided o go right into grad school. Around that time I was asked to leave the school, and we tried to stay in touch, and strange nights were spent getting calls from out of the blue about recent traumas or drunken apologies, and for a while that was wonderful.

Through this time, however, my life became strange, and my connection to Ana became important in an unspoken way. Ana did not know, really, what was becoming of me, and because of that our conversations always felt normal, like things normal people did, and that was so important then, to talk to someone who didnt watch each word for suggestions and accusations. Its very hard to explain.

One night she called me, told me about graduation, told me about her most recent fucked-up relationship, and how she had to leave, to get away. I wasnt really thinking when I told her she could stay with me, but she accepted, and later that night I watched her as she slept on my couch, her bags piled in the hall, and I walked clear until morning, sitting at North Playground, watching the Saturday Morning children at play.

There was a time in my life, during the floods, after Seth came back from the hospital but before he joined the circus, and this time was dead space, endless. I spent my days asleep and my nights working out at the burial ponds on the edge of town. I did not sleep, and I tried not to think. I found myself staring at people when I walked around outside, watching their bones shift and fracture beneath their skin. There was a voice pasted to the back of my skull and it droned out anything interesting in me and filled my days with a hum that scares to the bone, even now. This time is lost to me; I cannot remember my thoughts or the contents of those days. I reach for them but they are beyond me. I quit the burial ponds and went to work out at the rest stop, which was a marginal improvement but was my first step in moving my career arc away from the dead, of of weeks worth of forgotten days and dreams. All I do rememb er is Seth being around and then gone, and that there was something wrong with me, and that in those days I remember the trees being filled with children.

There was a young girl at this playground where I sat and tried to think through, to remember, and she had self-drawn upside-down clouds on her dress. She would spin around and around until her legs gave and she fell, in a heap, on the ground. She instantly got back up and began spinning again. I remember this, the secret purpose of spinning; the girl is trying to rise up off the ground and ascend into the sky. She will spin and spin until her body cannot stand the motion, until her brain blocks her from the attempt, until she spends unquiet nights awake so many years later wondering what terrible things must haunt her dreams to keep her awake at night. She is waiting for the aliens, the angels, waiting for the lights, as all children do, the hidden intentions behind their games, the words they use, the making real of reams. The pushing of bones through the tips of the fingers and set in a pile and mixed as the children close their eyes, pick up bones, and push them back into their skin. This was how we made friends as children. The bones in my hands are still, to this day, not my own. There is something calming about this, something which tells me I am not alone, though that feeling was something I had lost for a time. When I was seven I got married to a girl I kindasorta knew from the neighborhood, we had a ceremony towards the far end of the playground, flowers and everything, it was forever. The last I heard this girl was going to school somewhere in Wisconsin. She still has the ring I gave her, and I still have the ring she gave me. Sometimes, like now, I find myself wearing it and people occasionally look at me strange, the purple plastic band attracting some attention, but I dont explain. Someday Ill bump into her, and well both be wearing my rings, and well be together forever. Near-asleep, I will feed her on opiated milk-sugar and she will feed me on scotch and black honey, and we will make a home in the caves beneath the surface of the burial pond. Asleep, our teacher taught us in whispers how to form symbols and shapes from snow. At night, the wind was so fierce it would pull you from the ground if you didnt put rocks in your shoes. Wee slept on dishtowels and were hung by the laces of those shoes on hooks behind the blackboard, set there by our teacher. There was a boy named Jimmy whose mother made him wear galoshes and a raincoat no matter the weather, just in case, and he was elected to be the class historian, and we sealed up his mouth and eyes and buried him a couple feet from the flagpole so 25 years later the schoolchildren could dig him up and he would tell them what life was like for us. I remember throwing up a lot that year. There was a graveyard across the street from our school and at night we went there and tried to speak to the dead, lying spread-eagled across the mounds. You could see the devil if you stared long enough into mirrors. We all got free combs on picture day. For a long time I remember being afraid of certain furniture in my house, that the plumbing was trying to suck me inside and down, that the chairs wanted to eat me alive. The birds must have been diseased that summer because the world was filled with feathers; we ran from yard to yard collecting them, comparing them at recess. Later in the fall we began to wear them, tucked behind our ears, sewn to our jackets by our mothers. Out on the lake, where no less than a year earlier we were building boats of balsa wood and paper and sinking them with rocks, we now floated naked under the moon, letting the psychosis of the cranes seep into our small heads. We were just beginning to see shapes in clouds. I remember being afraid of the cranes, because the cranes were crazy. I remember all these things, down to the details, how the angels never heard us, how the aliens never called on us, and eventually our bodies failed us and we had not choice but to grow up.

The spinning girl spun and spun and finally gave up, staring up into the sky, gasping. I walked back to the apartment and watched Ana sleep a bit longer and finally went to my room and stared up into the ceiling, wondering if it is normal enough now, if maybe the past was past, if she wouldnt notice that there was still something wrong with me. Finally I contented myself with my abilities, and if I still had my difficulties, I was certainly normal, and could handle any strangeness to arise from this situation.

It is probably for the best that it was only the next day that I learned Seth was returning to town.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Pushwise
Over the years, people had fit coins into the cracks in the walls. Supposedly this was offerings to whatever god watched over those twelve people who walked out of the rubble when the roof collapsed, the whole far side given way under the water-weight without one casualty. The bottom of the wall is lined with chalk drawings, names of child artists and those in need of divinity. Each prior owner’s coat of paint scraped back over neglect and age to show palimpsests of ads and signs. It’s local tradition that nobody pulls the change out because the change is the only thing holding the wall up. There’s always talk some store will move into the remaining half of the building, the part still standing, but it never happens. There’s rain-washed fragments of hopscotch and four-square fields out among the yellow parking slots, the abandoned cars pushed to the far end and waiting to get towed. kamikaze’d kites up in the power lines, lost superballs in the gravel of the roof. Patron of children, and of children’s games, any god who watches this place. They entered through the garbage chute, which once had been wedged shut with a broomhandle but that had broken on repeated shoves. The lighting was out, but the moon through the holes in the ceiling shone of the linoleum and the chrome of the shelves. They spread out over the remains, through the rubble, careful not to disturb anything without worth. There were a rack of untouched gumball machines, which were pulled up from the tubing rack and hustled out back through the chute. One of them found a meat cleaver stuck in a cutting board, back in the meat department. Unlabeled cans were taken to be used as objects for window-breaking later, and two mop handles were taken to be used as weapons, should the recon mission be discovered. One of the girls was scouting for parts to build a drum from, or at least she had explained it as a drum; she called it a gamelan. Others found a satisfaction from arranging into patterns and systematically combing the store. One boy spent the entire time dismantling a coffee-grinder. At the ten minute sign, one of the children whistled and the lot of them flew back to the chute, which they climbed into and through, hauling the taking out in carts and wagons. As they were leaving, the drum-girl walked to the wall and reached up, tip-toe, and pulled a coin out of the wall. An X had been carved over the president’s image on the front. She listened, waited, then shoved the coin back in its crack, running off with the others, off and away.

The first ever Food King was build in 1935ish (my father told me, a man who felt no need for statistical accuracy as long as the basic timeline held), just down the street from my folk’s house. At the time, the local grocery stores all had local butchers, and all the meat was brought in from local farms, which meant your selection of meats was dependent on local conditions. Refrigerated railroad cars were not a new invention, but had yet to be brought en masse to the area, and with them came a selection of downright exotic meats, which is where the logo “We Are The Meat People” supposedly sprung from. It was just in front of this very Meat Department, in the world’s first Food King, where my father taught my mother how to waltz. These are the same floors where Jimmy Cheerios’s father developed his mop technique, the same floors where Ana Skyfish was born. It’s where I was working up until two months ago, employment which was terminated after I found with my boss over bounced pay checks and broken equipment, nothing interesting. But at nights, when I was locked inside, I used to sit on the back desk, in the Customer Service nook, and fixate on what a center of personal history this place was, is. All the fiction has roots in real geography, and if you wanted, I could drive you around one night and show you where everything would be, were it real. Regional Writer, indeed. All week I’ve been having what I call “glacier days”: the feeling that huge events towering over me are taking shape in the dark spaces between stars, shifting and grinding, too large to even see, much less comprehend. This always happens when I reenter social circles, and to an extent I saw it coming. As well, getting closer to finishing up the book, large pieces of my life are falling into place. But there is something else, something I can neither see nor touch, and it has me worried, worried enough that I’m shoving change in the cracks of buildings to feel like I’ve left something in this world.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

You Hav Never Been Pretty
After I get done puking on your lawn and having your mom come out and I take off running but fall down and your mom helps me up and wipes the puke off my mouth and asks me what I’m doing and I think maybe I’ll break down and start crying and tell her the entire story but refuse and say it’s okay and I was just looking for you and wanted to say hey though I know it’s like super-late and everything and I’m gonna walk home and just leave the car here for the night and I promise to pick it up tomorrow if it’s okay with her and she says “oh heck yeah, you’re in no condition to drive anyplace anyway” and I thank her and she tells me to keep the towel and I puke up a little more clumpy potato puke on my t-shirt and it hits me that I done really fucked up this time, the last fucking thing I’ll do is howl, howl like an animal because I want you to know I’m here and it’s not like I got any dignity left to lose anyway so why not, I guess.

Dave’s talking about how this is the first drugs he’s done since college, he went through this weird faux-adult straightedge phase for a while which I guess makes sense because with Seth begin all weirded out and all, and me being not as weirded out as Seth but still kinda weird I guess, I can see how that’d make a person do some pharmaceutical reconsideration, but so he just got back from his four-year bit in the service (where apparently he did enough drugs to kill a small village, but I guess what the fuck else you gonna do on a fucking boat for six months at a time) and so we got out the fresh needles and went to town. So later we went and sat at the Amphouse and watched people for a while and Dave talked about old times, but I kept thinking about something you told me — “It’s not your job to make me happy.” — and I kept turning that sentence over in my head like I was looking for the place to put the batteries in, like I was looking for the switch to open it. I was half-tempted to try to explain this to Dave, but maybe it was better at this point to just shut up about it. Somewhere in there we started thinking we looked awful conspicuous sitting there and not drinking so we split a pitcher and tried to get the folky couple playing acoustic guitars on the “stage” area of the floor to play holiday in Cambodia. Three pitchers later Dave got lost in the bathroom and puked on the floor and decided it was time for us to leave, which we eventually did, keeping ourselves vertical by balancing ourselves on the bar and the people standing by the bar and making a mad dash from the end of the bar the entire five feet to the doorway, which was quite an accomplishment. Cocky from out success with traversing the bar floor, we stumbled to my car and made it all the way along the river back to Waterloo before I realized what a screwy idea my driving was and I looked for a place to park, curiously enough right in front of your house.

Someday you’re gonna look back on this and laugh.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

The Pres
To this day I’ve never heard of any country called Morgal, found no mention in any atlas, but The Pres. assures me this is due to the laughably inadequate mental capabilities of my culture. "No place to fit it into your people’s maps, you mean! God help there should be a country not designed by your Central Infamy Agency!" he spits, a zone of empty seats around him as businessmen and vacationers sift to a farther orbit. His suits may once have been regal, but the fraying at the edges tells of how long he’s been here, at least as long as anyone I’ve talked to can remember, washing his body in the lower showers and his clothes in the sink, keeping a slipping grip on the status of the world via papers stolen from the cafe. The President of the State of Morgal in exile has been a lunch partner of mine every Sunday, ever since I first heard his story during the week I worked out here at the airport (fired for betting on pinball during my lunch break).

“The destruction of nostalgia by a false architecture, based around symbolic form-cages, Dresden china eggs, Mondrian squares. Infinity as desired aesthetic effect, warp replacing flat plane. Architecture is the only art form from which we cannot e scape. Desire as sympathetic magic, the concept of separating the interiors of our living environments by symbolic mindstates instead of around our technology-the t.v. room, the washing room, the terminal room are now replaced by lust, post-consumer plast ibliss, oblivion. We now find ourselves in a world in which emotion can no longer be separated from the gestalt of anywhere.”

“The delicate thud of gunfire heard from the secure side of a plexiglass bubble rushed past me, crying at my desk, perfectly lit and framed for post-positional PR. Flakes of paint fall from the public side of the bubble, creating eye-sized peepholes in the wall of graffiti surrounding the House of Government. Video camera lenses attach themselves to the holes in the blind tourist hope of catching high dollar raw feed. I. tried to think my way through a phenobarbituate haze until the thought of martyrdom hits like a sniper bullet, cleanly penetrating his hindbrain. A look overcomes him, the same look anyone who has found a way of understanding a basically nonunderstandable situation eventually discovers.”

“We had graffiti artists paid by communiprop lackeys to translate the only remaining means of communication in the southern ghettoes into an Orwellian nursery. Along walls and ceilings my face, distorted as though the skull was perfectly round, perfectly endless, float like bodies lost to the tide through a field of constantly mutating text — THERE ARE THOUGHTS NO PATRIOT SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF CONSTANT SELF-MONITORING IS THE MEANS BY WHICH WE KEEP OUR NEIGHBORHOODS PURE. Said artists became threatened by both sides of the political spectrum, a disgrace to their once-friends and families and a potential threat to the forces they serve. Suicide rate amongst such artists was up to sixty percent, murder rate nearly fifteen during pre-election months. Such a challenge, inspiring the young people.”

The left-right polarization of American politics becomes a loop, positions scattered around the circumference of The Pres., who has established a kind of ersatz dictatorship through the decisive use of Masters-Johnson reports to exploit sublimated erotic impulses toward submission to a greater power throughout the previous campaign. Said devices only work once, after which they travel the routes of all technology, down through state and local elections, then throughout the third and, finally, the second world countries, where Americans watch in horror as direct feed CNN International shows how there poor people are exploited by psychological devices.

Marxian hive theory has taken on new meaning for The Pres. while watching a broadcast of George Bush (whom, The Pres. informs me, is one of three genetic surrogates designed for public speaking and other dangerous tasks, altered somewhat in face and skull structure, diminished rhetorical capabilities and, perhaps most importantly, each marked with a bar code in the small of the back in the unlikely event of a coup by imitation) wander through the hallways of City 619, a low-income housing project consisting of a massive complex of apartments, fast-food restaurants and Welfare stores — Welfare works, as all state projects do, on a failed credit system instituted by Citibank in 1998, scrapped and sold cheap to HUD, thus no longer allowing, in theory at least, for use of money given to Welfare recipients for non-necessary means. The truth of this is quite the opposite: credit dealers readily buy up Welfare credit accounts in exchange for black market merchandise, the accounts then being spent en masse buying wholesale amounts of technological equipment, sold to people in cities like 619 for a price slightly under exorbiant State prices. With the continuing cuts in Welfare payments, more and more people turn to this alternate system in order to keep somewhat fed. Bush organized a series of committees to investigate command structure in insect communities, which sums to playing earsplitting loops of insect clicks and drones around the clock throughout City 619. In the broadcast Bush walked along the hallways of one of the transient hubs, hands over his ears except for hand-shaking of the thousands of previously unemployed inhabitants now busy installing and maintaining the drone-speaker system. "Your Mister Bush has some of the Quixotic nature. You’ll be seeing him in the waiting room of a hospital or a hotel lobby soon.”

“And then I was informed by the cabinet that profanity is the way to reach the average street person — an auto wreck of street thug ‘organization’ slang, gutter humor and feral grunts, but the stupid pig-people don’t want that from their godhead. I went all wild with the new vernacular during the next State of the Union address to a stunned populace. One week later I’m on the air (once again cancelling top-rated program “Fuck Junkies form Planet Yoni”, never a shrewd move for a political figure hanging so tenuously to his approval rating) “with my homies M.C. Information Paradigm and D.J. Skullfuck at my motherfuckin’ back, you slimy nothin’-ass sellout commie traitors!”. For the first time in fifteen years the polls had me at 49%. The reincarnated Zombie-Duvalier refused to have lunch with me anymore. It was all, how you say, downhill.”

“The Pres. begins to have dreams about his life after politics. He awakens from a dream consisting of an endless string of orphanage girls crawling through broken glass and used syringes in order to give him gifts of their mouths to find himself in an airport. He has no ticket, has no luggage, and has no destination. He walks to the bathroom and relieves himself, happy that no one notices him yet terrified that his Secret Service agents are nowhere to be seen. The thought that their utter professionalism allows them to blend so completely into the scenery reassures him-the critical aspect for employment in the Shining Fist is anonymity-and releases into the bowl the usual stream of blood, semen and urine. He walks to a lunch counter and eats. He wanders around, never seeing the same terminals twice. The sense of endlessness gives him a sense of inner peace. He sits and reads three-month old magazines, blankly running his fingers autistically across the scar at the base of his skull, twitching and uncomprehending whenever he reads his own name in print. He falls asleep in the chair, awaking exactly eight hours later to do the same. Repetition is the highest form of meditation for The Pres. He awakens every morning to find two hundred dollars in his left coat pocket, but the thought of catching a flight or a cab never crosses his mind. Soon his memories dry up and blow away until he cannot even remember himself as being The Pres. The increasing effects of a time-lapse Alzheimer’s DNA prion, perhaps , weaves his life into perfection until he wanders naked through the terminal singing “Hail to the Chief”, his only remaining verbal cluster, and drops dead.”

He awakens to find himself covered in blood, semen and urine. The Pres. obtains a dramatic fear of dreaming and begins a barrage of CNS depressants just before sleep in order to avoid conscious dreaming. After six hours he is injected with dextroamphetamine resin complex. This cycle of medication affords him a sense of order but wreaks havoc on his nervous system. The results in his mental stability become obvious.

The Pres. was once asked in a press conference given from his hospital bed what his definition of morality entails. The Pres. told me he had a curious sensation of intangibility, which correlates to thinking about walking — once each step becomes a conscious thought, the entire system breaks down. The closer he came to putting this network into words the less substantial it becomes. The Pres. remembers that dissection is not possible without the death of the subject. A severe tremor rips through the entire room and The Pres. instigates a complete House of Government media blackout for three days while he and the cabinet go into special session. The Pres. developed an irrational fear od the word “morality”, the very mention of which sends him into a fugue state. Needless to say, the PR damage of the past few months increased exponentially.

The Pres. holds the press legions hostage within The Presidential Compound, each member finding little solace in the shallow corners and angles of the room. The Pres. stands above them on a semicircular table, arms stretched back schitzophrenically behindhis head, one leg inches from the faux oak surface. The cameras find him through the wall, his infrared image so well known by this point as to identify him by the populance on first sight. The remaining members of the cabinet — those who have not either resigned to live off gov. stipends in the Carribean or those who have been liquidated by either SF guards or privately hired police forces — young white trash thugs given badges and guns and paychecks on the first and fifteenth in order to search and destroy any subversives who are not with the game plan (from advertisement, New World Securities, as seen in The New York Times), are on bended knees, praying outside the door. One can only speculate just what they are praying for. The Pres. tells them half-remembered childhood stories, hide-and-seek, throwing rocks at foriegners, his first kiss. The words slow and stop.It is completed, he sighs, knowing he has not nor will ever be forsaken. The room fills with white light.

“Now I am here. Everything is so much simpler now.”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Plasmate
In 1992 I was in the snacketeria of Quadrangle dorm in Iowa City, where I was talking to this girl I knew from my Intro to Philosophy class, and she had seen me do this improv thing (I did a lot of that sort of thing, for a while), and we were walking over to one of the study rooms, where rows of wooden desks from the teaching college that burned down in ‘38 soak up florescent light, which were strangely off, and I felt weird, that this girl I only kinda knew and I were walking into this dark room, and the pressure of the pneumatic door-hinge was set really low, and so this big heavy door fell shut behind me, and somehow her hand was caught in the door. At the time, I was working on a kind of strategy where every day I was convinced there was a “critical moment”, in which my actions would become an integral part of my life, would set forth a path, and I had to be prepared all the time for that day’s moment. This idea, pretty obviously, completely ruined me for any “real” writing and played into my technical apathy and my laziness into making me the little three-paragraph writer I am today. So instantly I knew that this girl’s hand getting caught in the door was that day’s critical moment (which I knew was coming, as getting my desk drawer stuck wasn’t much of a critical moment though I tried to come to it with complete mindfulness and not getting frustrated and made sure to completely fix the drawer so it wouldn’t happen again. Here, however, I didn’t have the time to think through what needed to be done. If you assembled a panel of women who have played an ongoing role in my life (which would be hilarious, and would probably end in drunken prank phone calls) hands-down there would be agreement that I’m notoriously bad in the clutch, generally out of touch with what’s actually going on, and while I think my spaceboy days are over (thank god), I’m still a bit thick, and generally have to explain and apologize for things half an hour after the fact, when I finally realize that, yes, I fucked up. That said, I do think there’s an out to any circumstance, at least one thing one can do which would be perfect, would completely counterbalance and capture everyone involved. I used to call this “narrative disease”, this notion that things should work in the world the way they do in a story, and if I make fun of that in some things I’m mostly laughing at myself. So she’s on the other side of the door, and I can hear her yell “Fuck!” really loudly, but it sounded a bit muddied through the door. I reached for the doorhandle, and I also tried to reach for the light switch, because for some reason it seemed important now for the lights to be on, I’m not sure why. So I pull the door open, and was trying not to physically look for the switch, but just grope for it with my right hand, and she was standing there, holding her left hand with her right hand, and she laughed a little, but she was definitely pissed off, and I was convinced that if I was just present, and didn’t overthink it, I would just naturally do the right thing.

My natural unthought Zen response was “You wanna go to my room and get some ice?”

The lesson, for that day, was my inner voice is retarded, which is just as true today as it was nine years ago.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

How My Parents Met
So anyway right after my dad got out of the navy and right before he totaled his convertible (long story, another time) he was hanging out in Jim’s, local waterloo down-by-the-Cedar bar some Saturday night playing a drunken game of what probably started out as darts but by this time had become Stick Larry In The Ass, a local Jim’s tradition ever since Larry Heinous made it “his place”. So in walks this guy who has that used to be a biker but sobered up and now is doing AA and making god’s eyes and bad hippie art but tonight he’s gonna drink every last motherfucker in the place beneath the floorboards look to him, and so no big deal ‘cept there’s a flock of waitresses from over at the local Bishops giggling and passing around some piece of paper, and Big Biker Motherfucker goes over and looks at the paper and starts laughing like there’s nothing funny at all and so my dad (who’s nothing if not a gentleman, see) who’s been drinking like everclear/cuervo/jaegermeister/purple kool-aid mixers since about eleven that morning staggers up and tells BBMF to go peddle his apples on some other street and BBMF looks him dead in the eye (that’s the exact phrase my dad uses when he tells this story, “dead in the eye”) and says, no, belches “man, don’t you know who I am, sailor-boy?” — see, pops still had his crew cut and his big ol’ heavy shoremans jacket which he gave to my cousin Brian who promptly lost it ensuring it would never reach my father’s progeny and first-born heir, me, but so anyway my uncle Kenny comes up behind him and spits out “‘makes you think we give two red shits who the fuck you are?” and BBMF bellows out “man, I’m Satan, you fucks! the king of all evil hisself!” and there isn’t a person in Jim’s who thinks this guy is kidding, I mean everyone there knows that this is Satan who had nothing better to do on a slow night than pick up waitresses in some midwest straight-from-boilermakers “you want an umbrella in your drink? man, you keep that shit up and you’re gonna have your balls floating in that fucking drink” hayseed bar, maybe he’s a local, who even knows. So my dad, right, he looks the prince of darkness right in the eye and says “Listen, Satan, how about you and me step outside.” Now my dad isn’t always the brightest guy but common logic would pretty much hold that you gotta be dumber than me to go fight Satan, I mean he’s got unholy powers and he’s got legions of demons and arch-demons and all kindsa ghastly dante’ shit to back him up and plus he cheats. But when it comes down to a mono e mono bare-knuckle streetfight, Satan ain’t really no jackie chan; hell, he ain’t even no chow yun fat. Satan hasn’t had to kick any serious ass in a while and is really out of practice, and he’d had a few shots before hassling the waitresses, and unlike my dad, whose reflexes and raw tooth-and-claw fighting skills only improved w/alcohol, Satan got kinda sloppy and left himself open for a few really wicked kidney punches. So they’re out there in the back parking lot mixing it up and the cops show up w/a priest in tow because apparently Satan has been pulling this bit quite a bit lately and so father martin hops out of the car and goes into his bad exorcist spiel and Satan does the full b-movie jack chick bit and points at my dad, saying “i’llget you, man, I’ll get you But bad, mister sailor hotrod boy!” and disappears in a cloud of sulfur and toads. So one of the waitresses comes out and starts talking to my dad, and they hit it off, and they got hitched, and you don’t need to be Paul Harvey to know the rest of the story.

The point here is that this Saturday, when I took a header down a flight of stairs and fucked up my knee, I swear I could hear Satan laughing. Now you may think I’m paranoid, and you’d be right; I am. But you’d be paranoid too if your dad was on Lucifer’s bad side.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Parables
I once knew a woman who fucked up her legs mountain climbing (well, more precisely, a woman who got drunk at a grad party and said “hey! let’s go climb the rocks!”) and has since learned to walk again and can cover short spaces fairly easily but cannot dance. One weekend, all wigged out, she installed a series of ring-ended ropes into the ceiling of her apartment (to her landlord’s displeasure, but fuck, what’s he gonna say?) and has learned how to dance, hanging and swinging from ring to ring like a little kid. It’s actually quite nice, once you get used to the notion of your partner’s arms being straight up instead of around you, the muscles in her arms growing more defined each time you dance.

I once knew a kid who gave me money for milk on a day I had lost mine, a kid I had never really known outside of hallway-nods and shared laughs at class-jokes, no reason to be kind at all. The next day he had moved away. Where did you go?

I once knew a man who could fake his own death. He moved into an apartment across the street from the hospital and instead of calling a cab home he’d just call a 911 on himself. He’s a millionaire now.

I once knew a baby who smelled like amethyst and blackberries. This was no dietary fluke, no scneted diapers, it was just a natural smell, just as I once knew a boy who smelled of chocolate and feces, just as I once knew a girl whose cunt smelled of chicken soup. As the baby grew out of babydom, the scent faded but remained, like a polio scar or an infantile shame, and the children tried to find nicknames for the scented kid, but nothing ever came to mind, all aukward and apologetic, and the kid grew older, until the scent was just barely detectable, the nose against damp skin, the tongue in all the sour places, and no one would ever truly believe, confused, so certain it was a soap, so afraid to believe in small things.

I once knew a woman who spent a year in a containment camp. This camp aspired to all the trappings of culture and thus needed a symphony. Members of the camp who had musical training were auditioned and assigned instruments, the finest instruments available in wartime conditions. The symphony was allowed to stay in special barracks and eat better food to insure their health: dignitaries and high-ranking military brass regularly visited the camp and half the symphony out with dysentery simply wouldn’t be acceptable. Over time, the members of the symphony were allowed to play pieces they had written themselves, so as to further show off the abilities inherent in the lesser peoples once exposed to a true culture. These pieces were lullabies, and were honed over time to a narcotic efficiency. The members of the camp fell asleep midway through the performances, sleeping longer and longer as the band’s talents improved, until whole days passed in a stupor. Other prisoners began using these lulls as escape potentials, and by the time the camp was “liberated” at war’s end, half the population of the camp had vanished into the surrounding area, coming out and laughing with the freed prisoners as a shared joke the liberating army couldn’t understand.

I once knew a man who went out into the woods and dug himself a grave in the soft earth by the lake. On days when the notion of dying came to him, gathered at his door, he’d get in his car and drive out along the abandoned highway, walk through the fields and lay for a while in his grave, staring at the light-patterns in the trees.

I once knew two theives who did not know they were theives. I didn’t have a place to stay after everything had gone wrong up north, so for a while i slept in my friend Yusef’s van while he was at work, during the day, eating quarter-loaves of bread and rice i’d make in the Quik Trip microwave (I think the girl who was working there had a thing for me, or (more likely) just didn’t care). While I was sleeping in Yusef’s van the van was broken into. Two young men started removing the stereo. I kept thinking I shouldn’t move, but I was scooting on my back down closer to them, legs first. I kicked one in the back of the head, which fractured the windshield, while grabbing the other, who began screaming, dropping tools. “The fuck is wrong with you, man?” said the first, dabbing blood from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. “You’re stealing the radio! Fucking theives!” “Stealing? No, no, we’re recall technicians. You know how when you go in tunnels or under bridges the reciever goes out? That’s our fault. And the company won’t spring for replacements, so we’ve been going around ourselves and fixing it. Doesn’t take more than five minutes.” “So why you breaking in, then? Crook! Claimer of false integrity!” “Because we don’t want anyone to know, right?” said the other, after I let go of his throat. “Like maybe it was a fluke or something like that. We take pride in our work. I mean, if you’re dead-set on not getting it done, we’ll just go.” Figuring Yusef would want such a thing done, I let them finish up, watching them closely, until after a couple minutes they were done and left. I told Yusef, but he didn’t believe me. Nobody ever believes me.

I once knew the scavengers who lived at the far end of the field of abandoned carriages, who often died suddenly, before old age could claim them. Those closest to the corpse at the moment of death were obligated to strip and clean the corpse, getting first claim on pieces of the body, which they would cut and pull from their own bodies, replacing the corpse’s parts with root-grafts and mud, until the scars were barely visible. Thus, the loved ones of the corpse could see pieces of them continue on, see the hands on other arms, hear the heart beat beneath someone else’s skin, stare into swirling and confused eyes shoved in someone else’s skull.

I once knew the weaving-machines which had been liberated from the automated assembly station out by the radio towers, up in the trees, binding strands of plastic-wrap and newspaper to the leafless branches. Sometimes two of the weaving-machines would come across each other, grasping at each other with servo-arms, falling from the trees, stripping parts from each other to weave packaging out of ribbon-wire and insulation.

I once knew a woman who served as an assistant baker in a bakery where I used to work. I am certain that she has a story, but I have yet to figure out what it is.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

The Ballad Of Pamela Bambelam
Pamela Bambelam thinks she may have inadvertently sold her soul at some point in the past year. She’s generally not the sort of person to do something so foolish, but she’s been in a haze, a kind of stupor for the past couple years, since the bottom fell out of the life she had planned and she entered freefall. She draws small lines in the winter-dry skin on her arm and stares out the window. Maybe she’s looking for her soul. Only I get the feeling that even if she saw her soul, it’d look different, the way a cow that’s been cut and dressed and cleaned doesn’t really look much like a cow anymore. But everyone tells me I’m a cynic. Maybe it’ll come floating to her in the breeze, a severed kite, a balloon with little chocolate fingerprints all over the bottom of the string. Maybe. I do still pray, at night, when I can’t sleep, and this is one of those things I pray for, my suppositions, quiet petitions. It’s questionable.

Pamela comes from a place where you can see the rusted skeletons of old Chevys out in the river, out where ex-bikers with missing fingers spend the money they got for their Harleys and the rest of the mortgage on meth labs and shotguns, where rope-swings hang over the ice and the shore and the ice-fishing shacks. It’s probably a lot like where you come from. Camaros with putty in the DUI-dents all along the front end, chest-bruises that ache when you breathe, that dry-stuffed skull feeling when you’re still getting used to the tricyclics. I’d been kindasorta pretending I was a writer for a while, staying up and working out my little windup revenges for imagined faults and betrayals I couldn’t even pick out of a lineup today, and I was convinced that this process gave me some small modicum of what other people refer to as wisdom. Now the last thing Pamela needed from me was any of this claptrap, but I was alternating between bad crystal and Cornhusker vodka and skipping all my classes at UNI around this time and just fucking rambled off at the mouth every single time I had an opportunity. I won’t bug you with what I actually said, mostly because I’m embarrassed to admit it and partially because I don’t completely remember what it was I said. What I wish I had said, what I’d say if she were still around to go driving all night out by the factories and train depots and tell me all her dreams, what I’d tell her is that all the problems and shitty parts and bad days and days when you’re a mess and can’t talk to anyone and keep thinking you’re a complete fucking loon, that’s your soul. It’d be nice if it wasn’t, if you could take these pieces and put them in a box and keep them in the backyard and only have the good parts available for public display and private reassurance. When I was younger I thought maybe this was about being proud of things like that, and so I spent a lot of time doing really stupid things so I’d have lots of stupid ugly things to be proud of, but after a while I started thinking that my ugly parts are really not interesting. They’re not bad, or good, and spending all this time dealing with them in any fashion was time lost forever. So now I drive around and get in adventures, and Pamela stares out the window, getting ready to leave my life again.

I’d been in town for about half a year before I bumped into Pamela Bambelam, who’d married this guy who designed parts for an injection molding system, which is apparently a pretty solid gig, according to Pamela, who was still giddy with the new familial structure her nuptials had afforded her. “We had to get one of these suburban utility assault vans just to get the stuff moved into the new house, and for the baby” she said, and smiled.

She asked me what I was up to, and normally in these situations I tell an extended string of elaborate lies, mostly for the entertainment value, but strange things had been happening to me lately and I opted to be honest. We unspokenly agreed that no good would come of any further discussion of the empty spaces in my life and instead shifted back to her giddy-nervous bliss, the meta quality she used to talk about domestics shopping, the “I can’t believe how corny this is but it’s really wonderful” thing that smears newlyweds around my age who are still unsure if getting married means they can’t go dancing to bad local bands anymore. When I bump into her in a couple months she’ll want to go out drinking, wanna get high in the back of the Suburban Assault Vehicle, wanna wear something tight enough to bounce in, certain that being a wife doesn’t mean she’s, y’know, a wife. Maybe after the first baby we can smoke crack in the garage and fuck viciously against the toolbench, but most likely she’ll be done with the nostalgia I afford, all the shine rubbed off college hijinx, no purpose left in the non-threatening flirting we’d been using as a filler for the uncomfortable silences for so many years now.

There’s a word for it, an Italian word, for the leftover echo of feelings for someone you once loved. Razbliuto. I tried to remember how to spell that word as I watched her walk away.

Pamela has never known this much darkness. Not in her childhood bedroom, fearful of other world inside the closet. Not when her friends and her drove around on Wednesday night, out in some small outlying town, when the electric cables froze and cracked, all the lights gone out, the empty spaces behind all the windows swallowed up and gone. Not when she turned from the screen, the heels of her hands holding the hollows of her eyes, thinking up horrors infinitely worse and endlessly more personal than the wash of corn syrup and latex up on the screen. Not when the doctor put her under, trying so hard to hold onto consciousness, to see what they were going to do to her, wanting to be there when her body changed, as curious as when she was in high school, keeping a log of her fecal and menstrual characteristics. These were all darknesses smeared with a muddied light, peeking in from cracks and corners, coming out of her skin. This is something else entirely.

In college, Pamela was somewhat smitten with a girl named Rissa, who had set up the International Blindfold Chess Championship Pro-Team, consisting primarily of games played by herself in a sub-level hinter-access wing of the Union, back where obsolete dumb terminals and splintered desks fill the tunnels and troublesome student radicals chained to broken boiler-parts ask if Jimi’s new album is out yet. Figuring this was, at heart, a ploy to meet new and experimentation-friendly others, Pamela decided to check it out after Chem, finding the G bank of elevators, getting a pass key from an off-looking janitor with facial scars and the scent of beeswax, taking a side-hallway where someone had drawn cross-sections of insects and genitalia on the blackboards, down a metal spiral staircase to what must once have been an indoor training room for the track team, barely ducking into a janitor’s closet in to to avoid being run down by a pack of dogs (or, at least, what looked like dogs), before finally reaching a freshly-scrubbed room containing a table, two chairs, a chessboard with handmade pieces, and a girl who said, before so much as hello, “Everything you think you know about chess: forget it! All that weak-ass strategy and tactics your little woodpushin’ friends were impressed with is all shit! You must first climb out of the hole of knowledge before you can ascend the escalator of wisdom!” “I don’t really know anything about—”

“Then you must forget what you don’t know!”

“What?”

“Ahhhh, you know perfectly well what I’m talking about. You’re a hustler! You silly freshman tart, you think you can hustle me?”

“Maybe. In a different way.”

Which is how Pamela met Rissa. Pamela still doesn’t know anything about chess, including blindfold chess, and isn’t entirely convinced Rissa’s “circular strategy” style is actually legitimate, though she’d never dare tell her to her face. Rissa can be a bit intimidating, at times. Which is why Pamela is down here, in the blackness.

I was at Pamela’s house visiting her father, who was stopping through town on some nature of business. Such an ideal father-daughter relationship! How absolutely miraculous it must be to spend time with a beautiful woman who loves you very much without the inevitable ensnarements and sunken terrors of sexual attraction! Having a daughter must be a wonderful thing! All these years of celibacy and naysaying; what was I thinking?

“We’re gonna get some ice cream at that new place. You coming or you gonna pilfer more books out of the basement?”

“I’m not pilfering, I’m borrowing. I’m nothing if not thoughtful of the proper home of belongings. Your dad seems cool with it.”

“Help yourself. Shit, bring a truck. I’ll never read any of that crap again.”

“What do you want with old advertising magazines from the sixties anyway? Are you up to something?”

“Pamela. You have to stop thinking I’m always up to something. I’m done with all that now. I’m a model citizen.”

“Look at him, Dad. Look at the way his eyes dart around when he lies.”

“Weren’t we getting ice cream?”

“Yes! Come on, boys, there’s yummy milkfat to be had!”

How utterly charming it must be! How overly and ludicrously sentimental I’ve become over a seemingly simple thing! I need to have me a child immediately!

Pamela had a few months when she didn’t sleep much. She wasn’t paranoid, or busy, or out of her mind on dope and speed more than usual; it was just something she half-decided not to do anymore, the way you sometimes drive home on different streets than usual. She wasn’t really talking to people at the time, but the few conversations she did have seemed willfully obscure and difficult. She wrote a number of letters to people she hadn’t spoken to in years, some of whom were dead. After a while she wasn’t really awake, and she wasn’t really asleep, and it was all she could do to not do anything, to sit, to maintain flight speed. Pamela had a nervous tic of tapping her pen point-down on the top of her desk, leaving a circle of dots whose density could be used to gauge that day’s nervousness, at least until she was in the midst of a furious phone call to the money-people in Toronto (of all places) when she jabbed the pen into her right calf, absolutely terrifying the money people who were convinced another disgruntled American nut was shooting up the office, so while Pamela waited for the ambulance (everybody biked or walked or bussed to work, it was that kind of office) the private-sector security force sweeped the office and nearly ended the short life of one of the new phone support kids who was walking briskly with scissors, forbidden by contract and resulting in a zero-tolerance dismissal policy. One of the production people called one of the security guards a “fascist” and soon enough the two of them were slap-fighting out in the hallway, knocking over plastic plants and faux-outsider assemblages. During this time no actual work was being accomplished, as the money people could tell from their elaborate real-time productivity metering software, and thus they came to the logical conclusion that the entire staff had been killed by the lone gunman, thus taking the entire office offline, rerouting phones and mail to feeder offices and checking to make sure the automated employee funeral FTD script was still running. Since the power was still on (the money people had offices throughout the entire building, and could not shut down specific areas exclusively), the employees (including a bandaged Pamela, what a trooper) came back to work to find a delightfully slow day at the office.

This went of for years, the employees growing tired of waiting for work and forming an interoffice encounter group to talk of their lingering traumas over “the incident”, even bringing in the security guard in question to facilitate a renegotiation on personal accountability issues, ending in a tearful group hug, interrupted when the money people pulled their last office out of the building and had it nuked from orbit.

So I got into this party by convincing the kid at the door that I was Einstein’s great-grandson, which no one in their right mind should have believed but it was already one and everybody had been drinking since noon, and besides my good friend Pamela Bambelam was with me, and it’s not like any clown is gonna not invite in Pamela no matter how suspect her entourage (that’s me) may be. Now I had been all depressed because I had been convinced I made everybody else depressed both in the shit I write and in my general presence and this had convinced me that I was evil, which sounds kinda over-the-top, but that’s how I felt, and so Pamela convinced me we should sneak into some shitty suburb party as that would make me feel better, and what the fuck, I’d go to a rhubarb convention so long as it got me out of the house. Pamela is an attention magnet, which has its downsides, but it’s always been interesting for me, as the attention people pay Pamela is attention they don’t pay me, which allows me to watch from a distance, to observe people in the presence of someone who intoxicates and confuses them, which is always good for laughs. At this party, however, the storehouse of attention had been wiped clean by too many days spent holding onto the last bit of spring break, which had ended days before, but would not officially be over until these people slept, and it was clear no one was going to sleep until the bodies collapsed. I realized instantly that these people, lost weight and hair and hope, needed a leader who could promise the abolishment of tomorrow for an everpresent today, an immortality formed from a barricading against the sunlight, against the slouching of the rough beast known as the waking world, and heartsick as I was of the endless compromise and apology my life had become there was no other option but to make my last stand and my paradise on earth in the basement of some collegiate group-home just off campus among those who had seen the big lie of the fast-falling future. Pamela, who knows me better than any god or government, immediately knew her plan had gone awry, and had already slammed her third drink by the time I started my speech.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Putting Your Life In Someone Else’s Hands
The thing we most remember, obviously, was the plane crash just up the road. We were out playing, watching, listening to the long tear in the sky reach a zero up in Feldman’s fields, the crack of the trees and steel. We were on our bikes and heading down county road V5G within seconds, all eager to witness, to be of some help. A wake in the corn starting back on the road spread as the fuselage came apart, the left wing split, the grove around the small empty pond bent left, the path of a small piloted tornado. There were police there before we had a chance to properly enter the cornfield, and contented ourselves with watching trucks rush along the culverts, twilight fading, eventually riding home after the roadway grew too crowded for comfortable observation of other people’s tragedies.

Later, after the work had been done, we went out to the field, stooping under the tape and beng careful nto to knock over the wooden stakes, looking for clues, for a reason such a crash would occur here, where nothing ever happened. We thought of stealing something, but nothing left seemed to carry the center of what had happened, so we kept coming back each weekend until all the pieces had been stolen away from us, all the traces of recall and strategy pulled away, nothing left but the scars in the earth. We started pulling pieces from the abandoned pile of Studebakers down by the burial pond and dragging them out to the crash-site, trying to redefine what we had seen with the limited means available to us. There was a scrapyard over in Washburn, and with the help of an older friend with a car and no friends his own age we snuck over the sheet-metal fencing, pulling whatever looked under the moonlight like controls, like flaps and spoilers, like shreds of fuselage stuck in the earth.

A year later survivors of the original crash came out to the site to remember, or to put it behind them, or maybe just to match up their memories to the place. Feldman was so spooked he had abandoned this whole square from the road to the grove, a second lighter crop poking up from leftover seed, grass and foxtail between the rows catching at their feet as they wandered onto the site, all the kids laying out and soaking up sun on a timeless pointless early-summer day stuck somewhere between missions and sugar-laden intrigues. Trains out on the Great Western, just barely within range, filled the quiet around the passengers, staring at us, speechless. Eventually we realized we were being watched, and looked up.

Later they turned the empty field into a bar, the only bar within walking distance when I was twenty-nine and decided to take my hermiting to its logical conclusion, retreating to the woods. When one retreats to the woods, one should not hang around in crash victim bars (or any bars, for that matter), as it makes the whole notion of retreat kinda laughable, but there I was, sucking down small bottles of off-market vodka with my new peer group, photographs of our mock site next to newspaper clippings and a polariod of Duane Berryberry, who once accidentally played there when his Amphouse gig was cancelled due to arson and curses. People had forgotten me, unsuprisingly, and I looked in vain for a small me staring back out of the pictures. I knew these people would never come into contact with my friends, my family, the people who were looking for me. Only it’s Iowa, and Iowa is a small world.

Most of my friends were gone. Josef had gone up to Minnesota and killed himself. Seth was gone, gone away, nobody knew where. Ana was sick and not seeing anyone, her hair gone, the promise of the benign faded. the circus had disbanded, Harold and Lawrence reunited and no longer in fear of the Cult of the Yellow Sign. Everybody else was grown up or in jail or dead. Almost everybody. There were still two associates still unaccounted for, as of my last day in the world. I should have known.

“YOU! How utterly fitting that you’ve cocooned in the nest of other people’s pain, so like you, swiping their stories in their sleep and imagining the maudlin applause fo those who wonder where you are. Shaaaaaame!”

“Tell him, Rissa! Shaaaaaaaaaame!”

“You’re not even drinking real booze! What kind of alcoholic nose-dive is this? William Holden wouldn’t drink sippy-cup size vodka bottles! Dylan Thomas could get drunk faster on his own piss than this swill-ale the infirm and forgotten have made their house brand!”

I barely mumbled something about crash survivors and respect then Rissa, who I always had a crush on (and yeah, you can get plenty of miles of psychoanalysis out of that), rapped me across the forehead with her cane (she had started carrying a cane as the best possible legal weapon, though the nails she had pounded through the base weren’t quite cricket) and screamed “That was twenty years ago! Enough is enough, you sad sodden sorry sacs of sympathy-sick…”

“Scallywags, Rissa?”

“Owen, please. I’m building to a secondary crescendo here. I can’t very well use that Bluebeard action at this point; something more striking is called for.”

“Violence ahoy! I got the gas!”

“No no no! I still have another ten minutes of material!”

Long before there was any cance to properly build, however, Owen had poured gas and kicked over candles and screamed [Owen would like me to inform the audience that he did not really pour any gas or kick over any candles and is only said to do such a thing in order to wrap up what is obviously a poorly thought out conclusion; he has better and more noble things to do with his time than set bars on fire without a decent reason] while we ran out, attempting to destroy history-roots, to free people to the present.

Only that moment, that present, fades. There is no holding on.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Rissa: Vomit
The body is confused, it doesn’t understand food. the acid taste sticks in my throat. dry heaves, the bucket and towels, arms wrapped around, getting it out, hidden poisons. i’ll never drink seven up again. i am so tired. cleaning up, fighting the want to fall down, the cool of the tile beneath my knees. i know this. this is how my body has acted for years and years. it’s strange, how comfortable this feels, how much sending cereal into a brown streak into the water feels like home.

She’s driving circles out on the highway, business routes in orbits around the outskirts, she’s making calls to people she barely remembers asking for bits of shared memory. she’s not looking for anything. she’s just scared, now that she has nothing to do, no way to fill up her time.

Rissa was trying to teach me how to play gigantic on the bass, which is an easy thing to learn, but i couldn’t pay any attention, and after a while she told me that’s it, that’s enough, you need something to get all this crap out of your head, all these bad ideas, all these fears, and soon enough i was throwing up again, and it felt all right to me.

“Now you’re gonna start all over again.”

“but that’s all i ever do is start all over again! i never get anywhere!”

“aw, don’t get snippity with me. here, have a ham sammich.”

“rissa, fuck off! nobody pukes and eats ham sammiches!”

“you’ll be the first! that was always such a big deal for you.”

“nooo! i’m having a popsicle. you eat whatever you want.”

“how is eating a popsicle doing something new?”

“it’s not. i’m done doing the new thing. i’m done starting over.”

“you don’t say.”

“i do say!”

“what are you doing, then?”

“i’m being careful. this is a time for being careful.”

“i don’t know anything about being careful, tho.”

“i know. that’s why you’re my friend.”

“get your popsicle and get in the car. there’s something you should see.”

We went out on the interstate to the edge of town, where orange barriers had been erected over the road, giant signs reading NO EXIT taller than we were.

“huh.”

“yeah, so there’s no going away.”

“that’s fine. as you may have heard, i have shit to do here.”

“yeah, that’s what god said. you should be less rude.”

“i was all in a snit. i’ll have to write an apology note.”

“so what are you gonna do, then?”

“getting together a new army out of insects and wind.”

“you’re still on that?”

“mostly it’s just backup. i’ll be needing backup.”

“whyfor, fair prince?”

“i have a big project coming up. and i need to finish old projects.”

“so you’re back on the job.”

“yeah. not writing made me feel creepy and evil.”

“really?”

“yeah. it was no good. i had to spend too much time with myself.”

“wasn’t that the plan?”

“yeah. but it was stupid. i need to stick with the work.”

“obviously, i’m glad to hear that.”

“obviously.”

“so i’ve been reading richter-goldberg and i don’t get it.”

“yeah. i been really slack.”

“can you maybe give me a plotline or something?”

“um…maaaaaaybe. but you can’t tell anybody.”

“like anybody cares. sheeesh.”

“a’ight, here’s year zero:

Josef Ephraim, born in 1972, lived a fairly uninteresting life through his high-school years. Spent time with friends from his neighborhood: Seth, Jackson, Jay-Jay. Had a short-lived senior year relationship with Loyola Jehovah. Spent two years at university, where he met and became non-romantically entangled with Ana Skyfish, we think, though it’s hard to tell. Flunked out of school, spent next few years working at the burial pond, at the rest stop, doing some industrial work out of town. Came back into contact with Seth, who had connections to a company called Shock Zero via his involvment with the World’s Most Depressing Circus; Seth used their equipment as part of his Retro-Futuro Fortune Telling Booth. Seth had a new device, a sort of strange machine, which he and Josef experimented with, altering local weather patterns, instigating a flood. Josef later believed this device brought people back from the dead, including Josef, who attempted to take his own life during this time. Seth went into hiding while Josef investigated the cause of his apparent resurrection. Ana Skyfish, suffering from domestic troubles and chemotherapy treatments at Bethany Medical, moved in with Josef, during which time their relationship was ambiguous. Josef believed certain displaced or homeless persons were actually re-rises, who could not return to their prior identities and thus became hidden people. We do know that the Sewage Priest, whose actual name was Marshall Einseideln, backs up this story, claiming he is a part of an “underground railroad” for the re-rises. Josef also speaks to people at Methusela’s Empire nursing home, who verify this story as well, though they report there are others attemting to contact these re-risen people, a group which is called The Cult of the Yellow Sign. Josef identifies two of these agents as Abel and Baker and from them recieves information about chemical testing on him and his associates through an agent named “Frank Sinatra”, who sold them certain chemicals durig their college years, primarily Eidetamine. They also reveal these chemicals come from the same source as the Shock Zero technology, and that the connection is not accidental, Shock Zero intentionally sending Seth the machine for zero-liability testing purposes. It shoudl be noted here that Abel and Baker are not entirely to be believed. Fearing for his life, Josef abandons his life to flee to a small town called Tamrack Minnesota. He is visited there by Seth, who has obtained information about the technologies through an ex-employee named Paul Apostrophes. Seth has stolen additional technology from a warehouse operated by persons calling themselves the Endless Mechanics. Through their experiments with this technology, Josef learns how much he has thrown away for a fool’s errand, betrayed by his own inability to see what is in front of him. Seth disappears again, and Josef is left scrawing a strange text explaining what he has learned, a text left incomplete by his death.

“that’s a bit bleak, isn’t it, boss?”

“yeah, but josef was a dick anyway.”

“this is true. so where’s seth?”

“back with the circus, last i heard.”

“and ana?”

“ana becomes the big cheese from this point on.”

“excellent. i always liked her.”

“yeah, me too. here’s the scoop for year one:

Ana’s sickness becomes operatable and is removed. She spends recovery-time trying to make sense of what has been going on in her life; having come back to town looking for a bit of calm and ending up with the events of year zero has left her none too pleased. Throuch this process she comes into closer orbit with her old friend and bandmate Rissa —

“hey, that’s me!”

“yes indeed.”

“well now i don’t wanna get written into this. some horrible thing will happen to me, i just know it.”

“no no, i promise, nothing horrible will happen.”

“you know, if ana starts hanging around, though, she’ll have to bump into owen.”

“yeah, i was just getting to that.”

— and Ana’s long-time ex-boyfriend Owen, whom she asks to return all her old letters to assist in life-inventorying, but Owen being Owen decides he needs to annotate all letters before returning them. Ana attempts to track down Seth by following the circus, enlisting her younger brother Merle and his questionable friend Ed Satan to attempt to infiltrate the circus via soundtracking by their band, Fuck The Beatles. Before this can happen, however, Owen and Rissa have to rescue Ed from summerlong detention at Our Lady of the Clotting Stigmata, which goes questionably. Merle and Ed then hunt down the circus under the pretext of a statewide tour, with disasterous results. Ana discovers additional information about Seth’s involvement with the Endless Mechanics and a place called Richter-Goldberg, seemingly a pharmaceutical testing facility or asylum (depending on who you ask) right across from the university hospital. Recovered and working at Rent N Putt and part-timing at Midwest Death Cult Studios, Ana attempts to piece together this information with what she’s learned of Josef’s end, provided mostly by old drug-buddy Jackson Demerol and two particularly strange individuals known as Jimmy Cheerios and Seven Dogeater, who were incarcerated within Richter-Goldberg witin a simulated satellite and fed on accelerated doses of the same sorts of chemicals Frank Sinatra sold. Ana thus learns of the strange experiments at R-G, who also experimented on Seth during his psychiatric stay after his bout with alcoholism and his girlfriends Jezebel Decibel’s miscarriage. Also a member of that original test group was one of the Endless Mechanics named Qu’ael, or Qua’el, or Qu’al. Jimmy escapes the building though the same underground tunnel hive where the Sewage Priest hunted the Wurm, where reports of the Lost and Found Girls have become legendary, while Seven is still on board the fake satellite, utilizing a system entitled Squareone to correlate information. Seven and Jimmy bring Ana into the fold of a collective of researchers called the Tracer-Guild, through which infomation is exchanged as to the history of Richter-Goldberg as well as its biomorphic abstraction, the Kilvan’s Block. Seven makes contact with others inside the building, including K. Carrington, the “false historian” whom Seven know from their Alchemical Warfare days. During this time, his Squareone database is infected with something called the Infernal Salt Codex, which rearranges information into new patterns, as well as re-meeting a young person named V. Serin, who originally (accidentally) let Dogeater and Cheerios know the satellite was a fake, and Serin reports of other things deeper in the tunnel-nest, strange surgeons working in an underground theatre code-named the Abandoed Hospital Ship haunt the R-G members, while outside Ana and Jimmy keep hidden from the Yellow Sign killers Abel and Baker. The Tracer-Guild reports that the software Seven has been using mirrors a strange AI nicknamed Bluebucket which was similarly corrupted by the Infernal Salt Codex after the introduction of an online data dump called Scrytch. Owen and Rissa introduce Ana to their other employer Ben-Jakob, a dealer in hidden texts, whose secret bookshop is tucked away next to R-G, a corner-shop atop the flood-evacuee hotel where V. Serin once worked, before going underground. Ben-Jakob provides information as to the Kilvan’s Block, an area where he claims to have been made one from two, and where refugees have been hidden, wherein he once met a man named Azrael, who claimed to represent the forces of death. Ben-Jakob also seems to know V. Serin, but cannot find his current location.

“good lord. that’s a lot of shit.”

“there’s also the story of meth-addled hunting flood-crazed animals which leads to the discovery of a field of seemingly abandoned trailers out in the middle of the floodplains, the legend of the lost and found girls, the final visions of the sewage priest, the abduction of qu’ael from a kansas holding facility by a team outfitted in jumpsuits, the discovery that the the re-rise machine is one in a network with others in the basement of r-g, on some uncharted desert aisle, and at the top level of the shiniest building on london, the disappearance of cowby james, the ballad of sarah mossiman, dr. arthur brisbane and rachel aven’s discovery of the cascading moeboid tarot and hidden worlds within the AI system, the hidden raids by infinitek agents, the grue identities of frank sinatra and gerald huyssens, what actually took place on comsat ahimsa, the great satan transmissions, the connection between the infernal salt codex and someone within a vat of goo as discovered by late tracer-guild agent luxo maglite, visions of stange futures in denver colorado, serin’s discovery that the abandoned hospital ship and the cult of the yellow sign are the same, and various other visions that i can’t quite remember right now.”

“and that’s year one.”

“yep.”

“and you haven’t even really gotten it written yet, right?”

“no ma’am.”

“good lord. needless to say, you can’t leave.”

“hell no. too much to do.”

“is this it?”

“fuck no. there’s a beeday present coming up that i need to finish, and plans for a second book that i can’t talk about yet.”

“it’s good you have a hobby.”

“my name is darren. sometimes i come out of my room.”

“(giggles)”

“you wanna get some lunch?”

“sure, but we gotta pick up owen from KB first.”

“can do. on and on and on.”

“admit it, you’re jazzed.”

“i am, i totally am. this whole set-up rocks.”

“can i turn the tape off?”

“sure, just hit the-”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen: Saints
On Sundays, after confession, Owen would receive a Saint Card, which was something like a baseball card with a portrait of a given saint on the front and information on the saint’s life (including a list of relevant Biblical verses) on the back. While this was generally seen as a smart way to use a child’s compulsion to collecting as a means of both assuaging fears about confession and strengthening Sunday School lessons, Owen and his friends generally collected these cards in order to play extensive games of Saint Fight, where two children would put their cards head-to-head and determine (with a third child as moderator) which Saint would persevere in combat. On some weekends there was a theme, during which time a particular situation (such as if it was that saint’s feast day, or if the battle was set in town, where masters of disguise like Hildegund could pull a sneak attack, or in a forrest, where a goofball like Simeon the Stylite could sit atop a tall oak and wait out any opponents) would affect the outcome of the fight. Owen had a secret weapon in the form of a stash of older-edition saint cards handed down from his sister Rissa, including a Saint Christopher card from 1965, four years prior to his removal from the Roman Catholic hagiography. While considered both rare and impressive by his friends, Brent declared the card void and unusable in play. This pissed Owen off to no end, as Christopher was not only his secret weapon and the core of his deck, he was also a general badass as saints go, bested only by hired killers like John of God and little crippled builder of hiding places Nicholas Owen (a card which our Owen always regretted not finding), whose powers could easily wipe out lesser saints with ease. Brent and Darin refused to play so long as Saint Christopher was allowed, which they felt was both blasphemous and corrosive to the inner logic of the game; were any schmoe allowed within the arena the saints wouldn’t stand a chance, and as such, the designation of sainthood as overseen by the papacy was critical. Owen picked up his cards and walked away. Years later, over Christmas at their parent’s house, Owen and Rissa sat up drinking a sugary holiday sherry and playing Saint Fight, all cards legal, which pleased Owen until Rissa brought out a pack of Tibetan devata cards, including Kali as Lha-mo, who ran rampant over Boniface of Mainz and Shenouda the Archimandrite, Philomena and, yes, Saint Christopher. A rematch is currently pending.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Rissa’s Old Job
Rissa used to have the punk-rock problem. This was back after she graduated from college, not long after her band, Buddy Holly’s Drummer, went the way of so many collegiate bands and parted ways, with Ana wanting to concentrate more on school and sleeping with Rissa’s little brother Owen and Trenchcoat Larry itchin’ to join underground luminaries Biomorphic Feedback Performance. Thus it was that Rissa moved across town, got really into sedatives and found work as a busdriver, the worst part of which was the monotony. There was no getting off the bus whenever you felt like it, like all the guests could; you were stuck on the bus until the end of your shift, with occasional breaks at the main station, nothing more than blank gaps. After months of this Rissa knew more than she ever wanted to know about the migratory patterns of construction crews, drifting along the highways like nomads who had forgotten they ever had a homeland. The ebb and flow of traffic throughout the day, pulsing past increasinly-tempting traffic accidents. The regular guests, running to and from work, the confused and lost, the sleeping, the daytripping students, the buisnessmenchen with eyes scrubbed so bright the predatory glimmer used to baffle their fiscal prey shines through, a crazy poet guy who would give out copies of his chapbook called The Mellonberry Cantos during the cab strike, the secret performers waiting for drama and constantly switching seats in order to find a perfect alignment like some lysergically-damaged story problem, the blind and their dogs, the children with notes pinned to their sweaters and money growing clammy in their tight fists, endless numbers of people who took the seat right behind hers, right up next to the yellow line, and asked Rissa about her increasingly-elaborate mohawk. It could, and did, drive a person to drink, the promise of nightly reward of a few fingers of the cheapest scotch Layne the grocer could obtain legally, each day the drinking hour moving a few minutes closer to dawn, roaming within the veins of the city, looking for an edge to fall upon. Rissa hadn’t been sick for months, but kept taking the medication, which helped to blur the faces of the passengers and swallow up the hours, blotted out of her memory, the days a haze of browns and greys. Tival must have noticed the filling up with emptiness, the rings around the eyes, as he moved her to a route without bridges. The last thing she wanted was attention, was someone watching, wondering. Alas, it wasn’t one day on the new route before she met Mrs. Patricia Martin and her grandchildren.

“Excuse me, ma’am? The children, they have a little song, if you don’t mind them singing it or anything.”

“Honestly, I’d really prefer if they —”

“OOOH, we all love to ride the bus

There’s no seatbelts to harness us

The people smell like piss and rust

And soon they’ll go to join the dust

The bus takes us all over town

From libraries to the playground

Over the lake where kids are drowned

And sink beneath without a sound.”

“That’s, that’s super, kids, that’s just—”

“Do you want to see my doll? My mom says it’s okay that if you find most of an aborted fetus and you love it enough it will come back to life because God loves fetuses. I put mine in a jar!”

“What?”

“Jamie’s messing with you, dear. She’s like that. Jamie, tell the bus lady you’re sorry.”

“I’m not sorry! Death to tyrants!”

“Jamie, you want the ice cream?”

“I cannot be bought! Nobody understand me but my half-baby and zombie Jesus!”

“Jesus was not a zombie! Just because you come back from the dead does not make you a zombie!”

“Sure it does! He even left a ghost to do his dirty work after he went back to heaven! I had to explain this three times to the half-baby, because most of its brain is missing. It needs extra love!”

“Is this your stop?”

“Oh…um, no, we’re still a ways off.”

Only Patricia Martin and her creepy charges never got off the bus until my shift ended, and soon as I took over for Rick on Monday morning, there they were again, waiting for me.”

“Hooray, buswoman! We have a new song for you!”

“Your little brother doesn’t seem to sing. He’s a nice boy.”

“His organs are deformed. He can only sing through his eyes.”

“Sing through his eyes.”

“Yeah, listen. Joey, sing that one song.”



“I don’t hear anything.”

“When you remember today, the singing will be in your memory. Joey is a remembersinger.”

“Stay behind the yellow line. And no talking to the driver.”

“Listen, ma’am, I’m sorry about the kids. They’ve been through a lot lately.”

“I’ve got polaroids I took of my dad after he killed himself. You wanna see?”

“She’s making that up. Her dad is in Evansdale.”

“A fate worse than death.”

A guy in a Meet This Year’s Evil t-shirt spit in “Hey, I’m from Evansdale, and people talk a lot of shit, y’know, but it’s not bad like people say. And besides the CDC says it’s nearly 90% habitable now.”

“Motherfucker, get behind the contanment barrier NOW!”

“But I still have some hair and teeth! Look at my teeth!” “NOW! NOW! GET BACK NOW! NOW! NOW!”

“Fuck you anyway,” he muttered, staring down at his lesions and fading back from the conversation.

“Now I’m going to have to ask you creepy evil chldren to be quiet or I’ll drive us right into that wall.”

“Do it! Do it! Joey, tell her to do it!”



“Quit it!”

“Kids be quiet for a while and I’ll give you honey-pollen. You want the honey-pollen, right?”

“YAAAAAAAAAAY!”

This went on for nearly two weeks, during which Patricia told Rissa about her plan for a sitcom called Nostalgia-Man, with a superhero who moves in and out of cancelled sitcoms tying up loose ends and messing with the plotlines, bringing together the casts from shows which haven’t been on for ages and setting them up in lookalike sets, which creepy Jamie said would lead to plots of sitcom limbos where washed-up has-been characters sat around Beckettlike playing the laugh-track tapes over and over and over, at which point Patricia thwacked Jamie on the back of the head. Joey stared blankly at the other passengers until they’d get up and move to the back seat, eventually creating a ten-foot vibe zone around the front of the bus, adding to the confidential nature of Patricia’s endless family revelations.

“And Pammy, well, Pammy’s jealous because her sister Shiela had cervical cancer. I mean, is that just the stupidest thing or what? It’s like she’d get the cancer herself just to have the attention and feel like she’s been through something, like she’s proven herself by being in pain or something and not even have to have any scars because you know how vain she is, but she’d just look like a copycat if she did that, which she is, you know, I mean it kills me to say it but it’s true.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do! And what with Shiela, I mean, she’s still taking the medication they gave her even though it’s been a year since she was done with the surgery, but who’s going to say anything, right? She just sits there, and then when the family gets together, I mean I love those girls but they just can’t leave each other alone, they just pick and pick and pick at each other, I mean it’s Pammy’s this, Shiela’s that, Shiela’s a junkie, Pammy’s a lesbo, I mean — I didn’t mean to, If you’re one of…”

“I’m not offended, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I mean, people can do what they want, that’s what I’ve always said, but it’s just that people are so *touchy* these days!”

“You should probably tell Jamie not to eat things off the floor.”

“Jamie! Spit, spit it out, here in this kleenex, just, that’s right, here, have a mint, sweetie…”

After two weeks of this the phone calls began. Calls asking for advice with what cd’s young people like, what the lastest dish on Jerry’s new maybe-Jewish girlfriend is, maybe she’d like some of the banana bread left over from the holidays, did she happen to see any of Joey’s buttons because when they got off yesterday there weren’t any on the sweater and maybe if they’re not on the bus they got swallowed so maybe they should call the hospital. Meanwhile, Jamie had taken to cutting out pictures from 18th century autopsy manuals and making collages to get sent as postcards, the organ block removed, the cavity filled with unborn birds curled beneath each other, their eyes like well-bottom silver. The phone unplugged, the mail refused, and all her remaining sick days used up in one eight-day stretch, Rissa hoped the Martins would forget her, go off to bother some other poor sap, but thermoses of soup and homemade cookies left at her doorstep with instructions for battling flu, cold, hypothermia, diphtheria, malaria and nerves made it clear that no quick-change escape act was going to sway away Patricia et al. A high-noon showdown was inevitable, and the morning commuters heading to the office-banks along Kienholz Blvd. were treated to every last comment, wondering if the windows would open wide enough to squeeze through, wondering how long they had before CNN reporters were reading their names over live feed from overhead helicopters.

“Patricia. Jamie. Joey. I expected to see you here.”

“Are you over your sick, dear? Did the mandrake root help?”

“Listen; I know you’re a witch. I know these children are not really children at all, they’re your flask-formed homunculi, your dirty-faced Golems, abominations Eleazar of Worms never dreamed in his most demon-driven hours. And yet you can be so foolish to enter my lair!”

“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Rissa, but you’re scaring the children…”

“HA! Double-HA! Scare your irreal undead necrotech servants, I think not! But you, sorceress-hag, you know the fear you feel in your hollowed uterus is the fear of your destruction, for I am Rissa, Engineer of Hidden Mirrors and the Universes Carried Therein, which includes the Endless Hallway of Two Facing Mirrors! Step into my circle, devil-enchantress! Stay you behind the yellow line!”

“Enchantress? How do you figure I’m an enchantress? I just capture people’s irritations and uncomfortableness and nervous energy for my…aw, shit.”

“AHA! And now that you have revealed your evil plan to me you are powerless! Right? Isn’t that how it works?”

“It…we haven’t gotten that far…Jamie, what’s the verdict on that?”

“If you have to ask, Grammie, the gig’s up.”

“You’re not a black-boned witch at all, are you?”

“Sure I am, hon! Watch as I call up powers beyond your comprehension!”



“Grammie, Joey says the triple goddess duesn’t really have time for this kinda nonsense.”

“This is perfect, this just figures, I’m gonna flunk the class and get kicked out and the kids, I mean Susan has to be wondering, I think maybe I should sit down.”

“So what, then, am I like your semester project? Aren’t you a bit old for schooling?”

“It’s at the home. At Methusela’s Empire Retirement Home. I’ve been taking this Grey Witchery class, oh, I’ll be all the talk around the circle when this gets out.”

“Your coven is all octogenarian Wiccans? Isn’t fucking with public transportation employees kinda heavy for that scene?”

“That’s what I kept telling myself, but I saw you, and you just had all this negative energy, and it seemed such a shame to just let it hang in the bus, I thought maybe if I could, oh, I don’t even know anymore…”

“Listen, it’s okay, don’t cry, Jamie, get your grandmother some kleenex out of her handbag—”

“—mind the satchets, sweetie—”

“—there, now just relax, I won’t tell anybody anything—”

“—only I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I thought maybe if I brought the kids along, because you look like one of those girls who gets nervous around kids, I mean, no offense or anything, you were just so mad at everything all the time, expecialy when you were drunk, so, I’m sorry, I’m terribly…”

And so, while the bus was parked underneath the I-218 overpass, Rissa and Patricia and her grandchildren (who were initially thrilled to get that much time off school but after so long on the bus they were pretty fed up with the whole gig, even with getting to be weird to people in public) worked out a backup project involving some of Rissa’s abnormal Islamic optics, Angelica mash and faux-foetal tissue (which, in all truth, was really a carved and dyed potato in a jar of mouthwash and mosses), which apparently got high marks and a key spot in the macrame’ knotwork project which gave aid to coven member Kingsuk Nevi, who was battling hyperthyroidism at the time. Rissa, obviously, was fired, and moved back in with her brother Owen, who by this time had been dumped by Ana (who dropped out of school and moved away to ‘get herself together’, or something, Owen said, but he’s not really a trustworthy source on this subject), leaving the two plenty of spare time to think about saving the world.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa Save Their Pennies
It was a gradual but unmistakable process, the cartooning of the park, in which trees which had held their ground since before electric light now were potted in striped pots with handles smooth and well-formed as refrozen ice, which meant you could lift the trees and move them to aid in shading, or all to one corner for epic weekend-long games of wiggley-poo (of which more will be elaborated on later). Beneath the trees one often found eggs as large as your head which never seemed to hatch, but would hum when you held your ear to them, and should you be wise enough to be in the lying-down position while listening to such egg-humming, a drowsy sort of stupor would find you like a puppy in the snow, and you’d pull up the grass as a blanket and the leaves would move in such a way as to make puppet-shows from phosphenes across your eyelids. It was little suprise the park became a frequent place for lounging and pontificating, which is why Owen and Rissa were there, as their plans to save the world had not yet made it out of research and development. The notion of whether or not the world even needed saving came up and was quickly dismissed as irrelevant; a quest, being a quest, needs no such validation. Equally dismissable were notions that they weren’t cut out for such efforts, for although they had no superpowers per se, they had an admirable collection of non-super powers, summed up by Rissa’s quoting Drunken Master II: “A little drinking to help in crime-fighting is okay.” Plus, the gradual cartooning had assisted them with a super-idea, on which nearly all of cartoon physics is based: the notion of compressed space, or c-space. It’s with c-space that you can fit all of a tree’s roots into a teakettle without difficulty.

Here’s an example: here comes Paul Apostrophes, his head in a jar, which seems awfully improbable, until you consider that the jar is chock-a-block fulla c-space, where all his innards are stuffed. It’s c-space where your car keys went that one time, where the rabbit fits when the hat’s smashed, where all those bullets fired in late-night steroid-action movies go instead of hitting the leading mensch. It’s another discovery that would have made the front pages, had it not been for the control of all media from global networks to apartment complex newsletters by Sarah and Karen, secret rulers of the universe and owners of Rent ‘N Putt Video and Mini-Golf, whose courses have become world-renouned in mini-golf circles due to their use of c-space (which is why you can never make that fucking eighteenth hole waterfall shot). But how, you ponder, will the deus ex codex of c-space help our young heroes fufil their superheroic destinies? By use of what may possibly be the quintisential c-space embodiment: the portable hole, which are literally a dime a dozen across the swings and past the jungle gym at claude’s improbable mechanical delights, of which we take a slight digression to speak at some length of subjects pertaining to. Claude sells balloons to chilren ready to run from home, for which they give him stones they’ve held in their shoes all these years, stretched out in kid-time like a sweater you’ve outgrown. the kids take the balloons and go up, into the sky, out and away, until you can’t even see them by squinting. I’d tell you where they go, but that comes later in this story, and there’s no need to blow my whole proverbial verbial wad here.

Anyhows, so Owen and Rissa have this portable hole, which they’ve gotten no end of yucks out of by tossing it in front of passerby on the street, who fall all the way to China before being slingshotted back to where they were, the hole yanked away on yarn, leaving them a bit jetlagged but no worse for wear, mostly. Owen, giddy with power, tried to wear the hole on his stomach as a way of passing the middleman of his mouth in the eating process, but decided it felt “creepy”, at which point the two decided to get serious as to the potentials of the hole, which mostly brings us to now.

“Well, there’s no point in overshooting our abilities, so mayhaps we should start with saving something smaller than the world. Like oatmeal, say. Or Tenessee Ernie Ford! He could use some saving!”

“No no and no. Better we save somebody who really *needs* saving. And somebody close by, because we’ve got an eight dollar expense budget until that Macarthur grant comes through. Think locally.”

“Oakeley-dokeley.”

“You’re this close from being off the universe-saving team, Owen.”

The logical solution, certainly, was right across town, where no less a county-wide superstar than Fast Eddie Satan was serving an extended summer-school sentence for skipping 87 days last year while on tour. His partner, Merle Skyfish, got his mom to write him a note, explaining how he had “the nerves”, which was plenty suitable for his school, the Cedar Valley Learning Collective, a freedom-intensive program for autonomous self-generative processing teams. Ed, however, was doing an extended stint at Our Lady of the Clotting Stigmata, which is essentially a holding-pen for pre-teen visionaries and other problem cases. The missed days being problematic enough, Ed then compounded his woes via a run-in with his Consumer Responsibility instructor and a baseball bat, leading to his all-weekend “study sessions” with Mater Tenebrarum, the most vicious of the sisters. The school was positively impregnable from the street; the only way in at all was through the head office, which was only open to outside entrance during special events, such as dances. Saint Jude’s day was fast approaching, and so it was that Owen and Rissa spent the remainder of the day in the park, misdirecting children into hile Rissa backed him up on a bass Merle had lent her for the occasion, with percussion supplied by a bus fed on sugar and cooking oil trying to backfire the poison out of its fuel line. Aware there wasn’t much time before the unholy terror this spectacle induced wore off, she led the dazed sisters (and their first echelon of toadies, the Bown-Shorts) on a conga line directly inot the Enclosed Infinite Space, kicking the door closed behind thed running back to the gym in order to find Ed and ditch this creepy-ass school. Ed, unsuprisingly, had set out the dance by claiming religious practices forbade him to come within thirty feet of girls, opting instead to hide out in his room and play endless games of Devil Pig. Springing Ed, thus, was as simple as opening the door and leading him out through the pandemonium, despite Ed’s pleas to let him finish the End of Assyrians.

There is no end to the tests and demands on modern superheroes.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen: School
There are people who come in and out of our lives who aren’t friends, who we may not even really know, but who do or say something at a time when nothing could be more perfect and fitting and right and then leave us better than before. It could be something as simple as someone letting you into traffic, or giving you change for the phone, or giving up a seat on the bus. They may not even remember it ever happened, once it’s over. For reasons we may not understand, however, it becomes a model for the way we look at ourselves, at each other, an example of how strangers can care about each other in the most fleeting and permanent ways.

Owen was always terrified of the lunchroom. Ever since beginning middle school, seing his friends fall away into castes and cliques he knew no entry for, he constantly felt out of place without anywhere to go. Because his family lived out in the sticks, there was never the aukwardness of having to share a seat on the bus, of being turned away, as there were more than enough seats to keep him safe from the spitters, at least until he had to get off the bus and walk past the windows. During breaks between classes, he found he could walk the hallways, looking determined, drifting from drinking fountain to drinking fountain without being a still target or entering his next class too early. He spent his recess breaks in the library, where no one thought to look for him. For a time, he spent his lunch breaks in there as well, until the librarians informed him they would not let him miss lunch no matter how much studying he said he had to do. Owen thoguh maybe he could just get milk and drink it in one of the empty hallways, or out on the bleachers, but until the bell rang no one was allowed out of the cafeteria. Maybe he could hide in the bathroom down on the annex floor where nobody goes. Maybe he could just go home. But now he was in line, and monitors were watching, and it was too late to do anything but hope for a flu epidemic which would leave large blocks of valuable cafeteria real estate open. Owen remembers there was a casserole in the menu. They were out of chocolate milk. There was no place open to sit at all, unless someone was saving you a seat. Owen wandered up and down the tables, looking for the most inncouous place to hide himself, starting to sweat under his arms and down his back, turnign red in the face, feeling everyone stare, when he heard a voice say “Why don’t you sit here?”.

That was how Owen met Sarah Mossiman. He thought about inviting her to his birthday party, which was still two months away, but felt all shy and knotted up inside and thought it best to wait. He was certain there was plenty of time. Owen tries hard not to think about it now, but sometimes there’s no getting away.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen Covers His Books
When Owen was in middle school, it was mandatory that in the first week of classes all the students put bookcovers on all their textbooks. Some kids went to the store and bought bookcovers with pictures of horses or stock cars or Jack Calamity on the front. These were the kids who were generally involved in the quiet escalation of school supplies, incresingly ornate trapper keepers and pens which wrote in thirty different colors. Owen was always struck with the school supply fetish, which would come back to haunt him during his brief visits to the offices where Rissa would temp, but storebought bookcovers were generally weak, and had to be constantly replaced. Instead, Owen made his bookcovers from grocery bags, the Food King logo with “We Are The Meat People” turned inside, facing the cover, leaving a brown canvas with the name of the book on the cover and spine. This left Owen plenty of room for drawing little crucified stick-figures, or figuring out nested BASIC goto loops. When Ana was in the hospital, and Owen couldn’t get any sleep, he made bookcovers for every book he owned, and they’re all still on to this day.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen Gets A Cold
So not only did Owen get fired from Carpet Market, he also owed them two hundred for the missing carpet which was now cut all to shit and moved to his ex-girlfriend’s floor. Knowing full well Lou (this is the guy you see in the Carpet Market ads, with the crown and the creepy VHS special-effects) wasn’t above dragging this thing to court, so Owen set out to find a way of coming up with two hundred dollars as quickly as possible. The solution was obvious. Medical Testing Services down by campus wa hiring people with the flu to try an experimental vaccine; two days at a hundred dollars a day including meals and board. The only problem with this plan was that Owen wasn’t currently sick, but that was only a minor setback; this was March, after all, a season of cold and frost and disease. Owen got dressed after his shower without toweling off his head, heading out without coat or hat or scarf or mittens. The best way to do this, Owen thought, would be to find a sick girl and get some serious disease-ridden love action goin’ on. Marching through the snowdrifts in his Chuck Taylors, no longer able to feel his toes, Owen felt for the first time in a long time that his life, at least for now, made some kind of sense.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa
Owen’s mom has been really weird lately because she thinks maybe she’s getting into bondage, but Owen thinks really she just wants to become an escape artist. He was telling her about Houdini and how there’s no way what Houdini did was a sin against God, no way. This settled her quite a bit and the two of them worked on the harnessing designs until I came in and tried to explain to Owen my idea that the cross was really a means of preventing the bodily ascension of Christ, only the Roman guards who placed him on the cross really were Christians at heart and this is why he was crucified through the palms and feet instead of the wrists and ankles, as was standard operating procedure, and thus all the religious iconography and tales of bleeding stigmata are perfectly accurate, and then Owen’s mom got all freaked out again.

Speaking of Jesus, this was November First, which three years ago became Angel Day, where the spawn of Cedar Valley Conglomerated Church dressed their children in tinfoil haloes and old worn linens and marched them door to door to sing hymns and hand out toothbrushes. Vermin. Three of these mewling rugrats were at the door, singing a self-scripted hymn entitled "Proper Dental Attitude" when Owen invited them in and hacked them to little bits.

Owen wants me to tell you that’s not really true; he didn’t really hack any children up. We did slip them some Pixie-Stix and Mexican Skull Candy, though, and I’d like to think they’re currently bouncing around their minivans, tweaking on their belated sugar rush.

Owen was double-fisting cans of Original Scent today; there were special guests on their way, and the entire building had to be antiseptic’d for fear of the “musical entertainment and guests” coming down with some foul sickness. Kids in short-pants were standing around the entryway, sucking on lollipops handed out by a orange-vested and befez’d Shriner, and the employees were meddling just outside, smoking and debating over the day’s entertainments. An off-duty checked closets and supply rooms for threat and suspicious activity; finding none, he blew a wolf-whistle and the roadies entered, pushing flat black amps like monoliths. The preparations went on until just past lunch, at which point a large hairy man wearing as much gold as clothing (I’ll leave it to you to decide which way that scale sways) sweeps the area with a beeping box. The large hairy man decides, after listening to the beeping for ten minutes that the room doesn’t have “proper geometry” and that the sheer sonic force of a Cthulhu’s Fishermen show would destroy the building and everyone in it. The roadies, apparently used to this, begin to haul the equipment back out to the parking lot, the Shriner sighs and gives the remaining box of lollipops to a little boy in lederhosen, and we’re all subjected to the “backup entertainment” — Kathy from Rent N Putt (across the street, in Dowager Park) belting out Karen Carpenter emo-faves, all broken on her need to scream the high notes. Owen started thinking about maybe finding room in his schedule for that heroin habit he’s been planning for a year and shooed the kids away, back to the park, the entertainment over.

It’s Saturday, which means Owen has to baby-sit his cousin Shelly’s new baby. Well, *has to* isn’t necessarily accurate: it’s more his being less opposed to child-cleaning than the other potential applicants and the Gordon situation (that’s his nephew’s name, well, not Gordon Situation, which is a bit too nuevo-wavo for a three month old) neatly absolves him of looking for Saturday night entertainment. Getting to kick back in the deviously comfortable recliner, whip up formula and watch hours of satellite-delivered schlock films, unfortunately, eventually leads to self-introspection of the sort that wakes owen up at three am later that night, all itchy to fix his life and right all his wrongs. Gordon provides a solid and trustworthy oracle for future-plotting questions, a talcum powder and spit-up smelling magic eight ball.

“So Gordo, Beastmaster or Prom Night II?”

“agaph.”

“Beastmaster it is. The babies…I can see through their eyes…Okay, real question. This thing with me and school. So I’m trying to figure out what I’m gonna do after I grow up, which I was thinking I was gonna try to Section Eight out of in my basement but I’m kinda bored with that and it’s not getting me any chicks. And I don’t wanna clean up people’s shit forever. And I don’t think anybody’s gonna pay me to hang out and be cool, so I have to do this stupid school thing again. And It’s gonna eat up more of my life, and I’m gonna be here that much longer, and it means I have to go out and be a human. Which I’m kinda so-so at. I think that’s what’s bugging me. So you’ve been human for a few months now; is it cool or overrated?”

“apf. aaaaaaaaaa ah phft.”

“Yeah, maybe. But you still get to shit in your pants, so I’m gonna take that with…man, Mark Singer rules.”

“aialpff.”

Owen can skip rocks off the surface of the lake back behind his farm like a motherfucker. He hasn’t done it for a couple years, since the night he came back here, drunk, looking to find the place where his child-years fort was. There’s been no wind all day; earlier in the week there were terrible thunderstorms which pulled up trees down the road, but that front’s blown itself out, and now the lake is broken only by algae clusters and lillypads. Owen can hit the far shore, given the right-shaped rock, but all he’s found today is pebbles. Three skips is the best you can get with pebbles like this. Owen wishes he had a reason for feeling like he does. Some great catastrophe, some infinite loss. It’s essentially just another day, nothing particularly wrong, actually fairly good, as these things go. Most of the life things are taken care of, the papers signed, the i’s dotted, the t’s crossed. Everybody seems pretty well taken care of. Even the biologicals seem well, no vomiting all week, no illness, good food. Maybe these things don’t have reasons, answers. Maybe there’s no explaining b by means of a. Back during the drought, Miller put up barbed-wire across the diameter of the lake to keep his cows out of the access. Miller doesn’t bring his cows down this way anymore, not with the lake, not now that he can set them to graze out by the highway, but that fence is still there, sinking down about twenty feet out, coming back up about twenty feet from the far shore. Owen can hit the posts on the far fence with the small stones, three skips, every time. Every single time.

Owen’s family was so poor when they were young that his mother used to bind her children’s feet with duct tape so as to squeeze a couple more months of use from their shoes. That’s why he walks like that. Never would have guessed, huh?

There’s freighters leaving every two hours from the harbor, down the Mississippi, you can stow for ten bucks or a bottle of cheap bourbon, get down to St. Louis, where Owen has a couple friends farming pot and salvaging scrap from foreclosed farms. From there it’d be a two-day all-night burn straight across, over the mountains, to the ocean. Easiest thing in the world.

There were a gaggle of children in angel’s costumes today, tinfoil haloes and gossamer wings. Like it was supposed to mean something, or something.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

owen and rissa start an alternative rock ensemble
“Guess what it’s called? Go on, guess!”

“They don’t deserve to guess, Rissa. Fuck them squares.”

“No really, guess!”

“Give up, sqares? GIVE UP, because we’re called—”

“MY BUTT ITCHES!”

“Which is easily the greatest band name since the Pee-Pees.”

“Also because it’s true, which gives us a kinda Bruce Springsteen earnest quality to our alternative rock ensemble.”

“And ensemble is right, as we were originally going to be called Chas Feston’s Hot Jazz Trio, only Chas quit the band moments after answering our ad for an and I quote tormentedly handsome Chet Baker-like jazzbo with plenty of reefer.”

“We didn’t actually put the reefer part in the ad.”

“It was implied! Charley Beatnik has to blow his mind on the reefer for our Behind The Music expose to work.”

“See, we’re planning the whole thing out in advance. Owen’s gonna be the midwest kid with stars in his eyes and no real talent to speak of, I was going to be the aging punkrocker with dreams of one last shot at the big time, and fucking Chas Feston was going to be the hipster who gets lost along the way in the itchy sweater-like underworld of reefer addiction, but he ended up being just nowhere, man, just a big zero.”

“Chas Fenton! Rebel without a dick!”

“But don’t you worry your pretty little heads about it, because now we’re a duo. Duo of power!”

“Set your receivers for rock! Pants optional!”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa Do Some Quick Surgery, Six
“Rissa, I accidentally snorted a worm and it’s in my brain!”

“Is it a superintelligent worm that will boost your mental powers to that of a god?”

“I don’t think so! I think it’s just a worm!”

“Hold on, I’m gonna go unbend a coat hanger. Just sit still.”

“It’s biting my parietal lobe! I’m gonna end up like Chekov when Khan put that thing in his ear! I MUST KILL KIRK!”

“Okay, settle down, tilt your head back, and whatever you do, don’t sneeze.”

“Hey hey hey! Are you not gonna sterilize that?”

“You’ve got a worm in your brain. I think we’ve already gone past the point of proper hygene. Stop squirming!”

“I can’t help it! You’re triggering motor responses!”

“I’m gonna trigger a moron response if you don’t…hey! I think I got it! Now to just yank really hard and…blamo! Iiiiiiis *this* your worm?”

“YES! Thank you thank you thank you!”

“This means you don’t get to take that sick day now, tho.”

“Oh, yeah, about that, I got fired and before you even say anything it wasn’t my fault.”

“Oh good lord.”

“Well, okay, so I’m supposed to read to children, right? And so, I mean, who wants to hear about some little goofy-ass talking dinosaur, so I go off about this kid who takes a dump so big he can ride it like a raft, which he does, down into the magic sewer.”

“You know this means you now have to go crawling back to Isaac Hauer.”

“Yeaaaaaaah, I know. Which is fine. Hey, can I borrow ten bucks?”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa Clock Motherfuckers In The Head, Five
“So you ingrates probably don’t know it, and will probably never know it, but we saved the world.”

“And you weren’t even paying attention! Can you even fathom the ammount of hair-raising calamities we faced and conquered like a playground game of dodgeball!”

“Yes suh, while you were fixing a microwave burrito or talking to your mom on the phone we were insuring the safety of you and everyone you know for the remainder of the century, at least!”

“And how did we do it, Rissa?”

“Oh, you know how we do it.”

“We do it —”

“—by clocking motherfuckers in the head is how we do it!”

“That’s right, Earth, go on with your little lives and melodramas, we *allow* you to snuggle in the dryer-toasty comfort of nonchalance and self-importance, luxuries you can revel in because we made it so!”

“All of human history owes its continued existence to us!”

“And what do we ask these clowns for in return?”

“Not a god-damn thing. Their gratitude would sully our victory.”

“Besides which, we’ve still got work to do here. Every good saving of the world deserves a party to match, and you *know* we’re gonna fufil that end of the bargain, just as soon as somebody can come spring us from the pokey.”

“As my man Fidel said, history will absolve us. The US Government, on the other hand, has no vision or appreciation. The screws.”

“I regret nothing! I am not resisting arrest!”

“Eh, forget this. You make a bomb out of the toilet and some chalk and I’ll rig us a hanglider from the sheets. Punk as Houdini.”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa Have A Bake Sale, Four
“Yeah!”

“Yeah!”

“Double-yeah, motherfuckers!”

“We cannot be stopped, for there is no stopping us! Public apathy and lack of funds may have spelled curtains for Nicolae Ceaucescu—”

“Well, that and the firing squad—”

“—it will not stay our path! We’re going hearts and minds on this one with the one thing which brings all people together!”

“And what would that be, Rissa?”

“Sugary treats! With handy history lessons on each napkin!”

“My, but this is a delicious brownie! And I didn’t know Warren Beatty was a Pinochet speechwriter!”

“It’s all true, and none of it is at all good for you, so you *know* it’s good! And at the Marinas-low cost of fifty dollars American for each hand-made treat, how can you afford not to stock up immediately?”

“Quantities limited! Order today!”

“Makes for great gifts! All funds go directly to the Owen And Rissa Travel and Defense Fund!”

“Do it today! We have places to be and soon!”

“Silence! Don’t tell them the plan! You’ll doom us before we even begin!”

“But they are weak and stupid, Rissa! They are only good for buying our tasty treats! They can do nothing to foil our plan!”

“Remember the ‘Dueling Breakdance Electro-Moles’ plan? Do you? Money in the bank until you squealed to those people from Mattel! Use your forebrain!”

“TASTY TREATS!”

“People of Earth! Do not fear the concoctions we have prepared for your entertainment and stimulation! Buy your salvation at cut-rate prices! Indulgences with each dozen!”

“Yeah!”

“Yeah!”

“Yeaaaaaaaaah!”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa Lollygag Around And Really Don’t Say Much Of Anything, Three
“Good evening; Rissa here. I…am a genius.”

“And I’m Owen. I’m a boy.”

“And now that we’ve got our nod to our imporbable histories out of the way, we have a few points to make as to our not yet saving the world.”

“I mean, I don’t see *you* going out and doing it. So just settle down, already, with your ‘step up with the action!’ malarkey.”

“Hey, screw you, we’ve been busy, and not any of your candy-ass ‘I had to go to the library AND the post office today’ busy, I mean seriously busy, like we had to hire Paul Apostrophes to be our schedule-taskmaster and designer financier.”

“Which is super-easy to do, since he’s a head in a jar and thus not to be lured by the ways of the world, though he can be tortured with fish and ice cubes and little kids with loogies, but so can we, so.”

“All of which is simply to say that we’re on the go and living large and not just fiddlefucking around. Most people don’t realize how much preparation saving the world entails. The world is big!”

“And full of shit, too!”

“Here’s just one example. We know this girl who likes to climb up into trees and shine mirrors into the eyes of pilots in order to make them crash their planes. If we’re gonna save the world, like, the *whole world*, we’ll have to do something about her. Right?”

“It’s a god-damn shiteating moral quagmire, the world is.”

“So not only are we doing all this studying, we’re also getting into shape, because we’re gonna have to kick some ass, probably.”

“My shape’s an oval. I’m almost there.”

“We also need to start having better conversations. My speech is flabby lately, and Owen’s practically retarded.”

“It’s true! I’m just barely sure of what we’re talking about!”

“So don’t you pay no nevermind to all this hype about how we’re off the case, because we’re still here, getting our kung-fu correct. Not to mention my thirty hours a week at Rent N Putt, and Owen’s freelance modelling career. Next week we’ll save the world. Promise.”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa Save The Universe, Two
“The weekend, according to the tyrrany of Objective Codified Time, extends from friday evening to monday morning, roughly. We defy Objective Codified Time!”

“Preach on, Rissa!”

“So with our Subjective Weekend, we did some looking at a few things when we weren’t up to no good and we came to a couple conclusions. First off, we learned that the problem with saying things and having people read them later is that if you keep whining like a crybaby anbout stupid shit you don’t actually care that much about, people eventually get upset with you, because they care about you, and unless you’re looking for attention or something it’s just a mess. So we’ve decided enough with that ‘first thought best thought’ prattle. From here on out, we actualy *say* things.”

“Yeah!”

“And that cuts both ways, as lately we’ve been really namby-pamby about saying things and believing in them, backing them up. Like we’re afraid to be wrong, or worse, afraid to not be wrong in the same way as the people we care about. But being that kinda noncommittal inoffensive friend is just lame and a big suck, so we’re done with that, too.”

“Yeah!”

“So none of this is of any great consequence. It’s just some shit we gotta get straight before we save the universe. We’d speak on, but we gotta get down to the mall to pick up our super universe-saving duds., and man, these things are so cool, it’s like some Al Green shit.”

“Personally, I think it’s more an early Isley Bros-via-Sly look, but you’ll see what I’m saying in a bit. Mall is go!”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

owen and rissa save the universe (one)
“Deny all you want, but deep in your colon you know perfectly well that there’s something unsightly, unhygenic, and pitiful about writing. Antisocial to the point that roadkill scavengers look like therapists, bitter enough to make south american nazis in hiding seem cordial, and generally as depressing as a visitation by leperous angels, writing essentially is the province of those who never did in life, thouse who think they can fool history and memory by stacking words the way rehab patients string beads. Say what you want about the intrinsic joy of creation, but you know perfectly well, looking back, that it’s about as satisfying as painting with spit.”

“Yeah!”

“Thus, Owen and I have taken matters into our own hands and declared this weekend the first annual Weekend Without Writing on the World Wide Web, or WWWWWW for short—”

“That’s pronounced ‘wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh’, by the by.”

“Good point, O. Get in touch with your legs! Skip out on a few hours of sitting in your room and scribbling like a dumbass!”

“Yeah!”

“We’ll be back to actually saving the universe next week. In the meanwhile, there’s a baggie fulla pills and three boxes fo shells with my name on it, and Owen’s got a double-shift at Food Jesus that’ll keep him busy all Saturday.”

“Yeah, but what the bossman don’t know is I’ll actually be spending those sixteen hours watching the complete works of Gary Busey back in the break-debriefing room, thanks to the new autoscrubber robot me and Josef rigged up. Fight the power!”

“So it’s up to you, kid, to get something equally depraved by Monday. Or we’ll bust some ass.”

“And don’t think we won’t do it. We’ve been eating this box of free ‘Steak In A Cup’ samples I stole from work and we’re all unsure just what kinda ‘flavour chemicals’ make up the ‘meat flavour’.”

“And get a job, you putz!”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

An Introduction From Rissa
Hi, my name is Rissa and I’m a friend of Darren’s, and he and I talked a while back about writing and he told me about scrytch and though I don’t have an account or anything h’es been printing me out some. so anyway I’ve been reading some of the stuff of his he sent me and I wanted to write something so here it goes.

Here in Iowa there are these people called “weather spotters” who call into the tv center and report when the weather is bad. Iowa is big so it works out that people can keep an eye on these things. Only people would get bored or maybe just be sad and so they’d call in and report weather that was worse than it really was even if there was no bad weather at all, sometimes. sometimes they were just crazy and called in like grapefruit-sized hail but sometimes it was just enough to get interest up but not exactly be the truth, just a little exaggeration. So now all the tv centers have “official weather spotters” who apparently have to take this test or something or maybe be related to people who work there (I don’t know) so the weather people don’t pass along bad weather. But they still let the other “weather spotters” call and they just say it’s an unofficial report.

That’s what those stories made me think of.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen: Golf
Owen was sitting on the axe-modified couch, drinking cough syrup and wondering at his life’s smaller failings, when The Channel Channel informed him of a show he’d never heard of was soon starting on The Conglomerate Channel called, cryptically, Senior Golf [sic]. The Conglomerate Channel was the same channel Sebastian Hex was on, which led Owen to assume this mysterious Senior Golf aforementioned in the title was some sort of undercover detective, perhaps a spin-off character from an episode he hadn’t seen — or maybe seen and just not noticed, so undercover was this character! This Hispanic crimefighter who could disguise himself as anyone, anyone at all, infiltrating any organization or event in order to bring the villains to justice. “No one is above the law of Senior Golf!” Owen mumbled, grinning, waiting impatiently for the District Seven Sub-annex Extreme Horseshoe Quarter-finals to wrap up (Clete Tango, as always, had the whole thing in his back pocket; the long and sordid history of graft and corruption the District Seven Extreme Horseshoe division had become notorious for made the televised broadcast more a collective last known photo gallery than any sort of sporting event), wondering if he’d have time to call Jackson, resident expert on all things Hex-related, in order to get the scoop on this Golf character. Fortunately horseshoes was called on account of a bomb threat, cutting right into the first act of Senior Golf, which meant Owen had to guess at the missed introductory material — apparently the Senior was on the third green at St. Charles, disguised as one of the forty-eight golfers — or was he a caddy? Or was he a spectator? There was no way to tell at this point, the ingeniousness of the Senior’s disguise being undetectable. Owen instead looked for the ne’er-do-well who would be slowly pulled into the binding web of justice. With all the special guest stars, adding immensely to the feeling of realism which made the show so riveting (how could you not truly in your heart believe this man was out balancing the scale of justice?) the potential suspect could be anyone…but what is the crime? Will one of the pros end up face-down in a water hazard on the back nine? So far the only crimes committed have been those of good taste (one of the golfers has been kneeling and praying to one of the new gods before each drive) and diplomacy (one of the announcers has refereed to Latvian phenom B. Iarkho as being Estonian), neither of which need the Senior’s help. But are these clues, Owen wondered? Is there a subtle message being sent to the attentive viewer? Prayer…Latvia…Owen searched the crowd for Catholic dignitaries, and sure enough found a very casual-looking Cardinal Beseniata, flanked by equally casual-looking bodyguards, standing just behind the top at the seventh hole. One of the golf pros was going to kill the Cardinal! The leader had just played through the fifth hole, leaving precious little time for the Senior to act before the terminus had been reached. But who, and how?
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen and Rissa and Dwayne the Necromancer
The next time humanity has a need for absolute evil, Dwayne thought, they’ll have to come to me, as I have the one and only Brain of Hitler in a jar down in the root cellar, and with some Popular Mechanics-style fripjiggery I can make that thing talk and give orders and generally be loathsome and evil. Only it was much later after Jim hit that deer and ended up in the hospital that Dwayne actually found out that the pickled brain he swapped for a half-broken table saw is actually not the brain of Hitler at all, which (as we all know) was burned up in the Reich Chancellery after being splattered via application of gun to mouth, which left Dwayne feeling somewhat less important in a cosmic sense but prodded his interest as to whose brain he was caretaking, which (as you can’t very well go around asking in polite company) led him to the unarguable conclusion (unarguable from someone who hasn’t yet learned the horrible downsides to necromancy)that he would have to resurect the brain and find a way to ask its identity, because what other use does a brain in a jar actually have besides freaking out the grandkids?

Lou and Carla down at Supply Depot set Dwayne up with a line of credit and free use of the forklift, realizing that being able to add their byline to Dwayne’s possible cracking of the metaphysical wall would make them the one-stop source for every do-it-yourselfer. Dwayne was trying ot explain to Julie’s kids how a brain could a) get itself out of a sealed jar and b) eat off the fingers of children without a mouth when Carla called to tell him the Feds were asking her why they needed to order two metric tons of lawn fertilizer. Fortunately Dwayne had a plan and told Carla to hold them off long enough for him to get his shotgun loaded and the truck running. The kids, who thought this was all terribly exciting, started running around the house screaming and waving their hands, which freaked out the Feds, which led to a lengthy standoff while Dwayne drove out to the barn to get the Revitalizing Tonic, which tastes an awful lot like lime vodka and sweetarts. With the brain under one arm and the tonic under the other, Dwayne only had two people he could call for the kind of help he’d need.

“Yeah!”

“Triple-yeah, motherfucker! This is Rissa the benificent!”

“And this is Owen the hydroephalytic!”

“What you need, Dwayne?”

At which pont Dwayne unloaded the scoop on our heroes, hipping them to the potential miraculous breakthroughs science had in store if only he could find a safe house for a couple hours where the fuzz wouldn’t find him.

“It should go without saying that coming here is out of the question. However, for a small cut of the profits arranged through your resurrection trick, we can arrange for you to stay with an associate for up to three days.”

“Perfect. Perrrrrfect. Where to go?”

“We’re going to put you in Dave(1)’s basement. He will object. Do not worry.

But Dwayne did worry, worry and take hits off the bottle of Revitalizing Tonic.

There is a house in a row of houses which all look the same. It makes buying furniture easier, as the move from one house to the next requires the most marginal of rearrangements. This is the appeal of these houses; what they lack in personality and warmth they gain in simplicity and an instant-home feeling of great comfort to people who move often. More hotels than homes, the cheapness of the contracting and supplies are nowhere reflected in the rental price, bolstered by the nearness of schools and churches and grocers with the same interchangable demeanor and layout. While we can argue all night over the sort of psychic effects such a non-place can have on its inhabitants, there is no question of it being an ideal place to hide mad scientists, as our old friends at The Museum for Questionable History will attest. Dwayne, neither being that mad nor that scientify, didn’t need flight out to Columbia or Brazil; anonymous suburbs were much closer at hand for Owen and Rissa.

Dave(1) was on very thin ice with his wife, at this time; not long hence they would be divorced after his genetic failure to keep the children’s wear buisness out at the mall open. He would then move back in with Dave(2) and Seth in the trailer in the hills. But this is all in the future, and of marginal interest to the narrative; it is mentioned only insofar as to explain the dialogue between husband and wife upcoming.

“No. This man is not staying here. Not even in the basement.”

Listen, it’s just a day or two, it’s not even.”

“You don’t even know him!”

“Oh, that’s not true, Dwayne and I met that one time at Sheyllah’s party back in ‘89 when Eco-Safe Lobotomy played, only they weren’t called that then, they were, like, Tissue Damage Monthly, or something, because that’s when.”

“Shut up about you and your fucking high school friends. It’s been nearly a decade and you’re still talking the same stupid shit about you and your old sories and expecting me to care. And even more than care, to say it’s okay for people you don’t know to come in here and do God only knows what and pray he doesn’t leave any stains. What the fuck, Dave?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t about Dwayne at all, is it? This is about me fucking up being assistant manager, that’s just, that’s fucking great, I can’t do anything.”

This went on for the better part of an hour, when Dave finally realized the simple way out, and told dwayne he could stay in the minivan for a couple days, which placated his wife and gave dwayne enough space to bring the brain back to life. So score one for yuppie compromise. There was no way for the brain to communicate without a mouth, or at least an appendage of some sort, so the hunt was now on around campus to see if anybody had a skull they could borrow. This took all of two hours, including an extended break at the bookstore for necessary medical texts and ephedrine on Rissa’s u-bill. Dr. Sela, who at the best of times can be said to have rather shaky ground from which to practice medicine, not only had a skull for use, but an entire debrained head available from the Scott Moore Cloning Project (‘97), which was pretty creepy but certainly perfect for the evening’s needs. I have been advised not to speak overmuch of the actual rebraining and reanimating process which took place in the back of Dave(1)’s minivan, due to the dicey legal attributes and due to the just general ickines of the process and also due to the fact that no reader worth their eyes could suspend the kind of disbelief this process instils in even the most angelbelieving alien-worshipping audience. So we’ll just say it happened, and go on to the big reveal, wherein -

“IT LIVES!”

“No, that’s just me, I’ve got my fingers in there.”

“Put it down! You’ll infect it with your fecal fingers!”

“Illness is the last thing this poor bastard has to worry about. Turn the pump on.”

“Is this an aquarium pump? Did you get this from my house?”

“What I steal of yours is none of your business! Give me the hose!”

“Is it supposed to bubble likethat?”

“Stop touching it! Leave it alone!”

At which point, the head says “Could you please stop touching me, please?”, and that’s how Owen, Rissa and Dwayne the Necromancer first met Paul Apostrophes.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen: Comix
When Owen was in middle school he had a foolproof system for stealing Conan comics from The Iowa Distribution Center, which was a generic dispensary of generic drugs, generic foodstuffs and bulk grains, which wasn’t yet a hip thing to do, store-wise, stuck somewhere between the advent and the proliferation of the local yupified whole-grain all-natural neighborhood grocer. IDC was just across from Ben-Jakob’s junk dealership, where next to a rack of ten-cent paperbacks where Owen picked up the bulk of his education Ben-Jakob wrote a monthly newsletters to his notions of current fiction; always unreadable and crammed with minute schematics for “fictive strategies” by which nearly any book would reveal a hidden meaning — generally the impossibility of mediated communication, which struck Owen as gypish in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. That didn’t keep him from picking up a copy each month, as when folded in half it provided an optimal carrier for stolen comics. Owen always picked up Sophisticated Gadabout Comix, which later corroded into an abysmal corporate shill after Infernal Press was bought out and bulk-replaced with graphic design BAs guaranteed to draw Jephed Manyana in that month’s ad-heavy fashions and write Mashed Potatoes as “really super into” the twenty-hour work week the House tried to slip into the ass-end of…I’m rambling. The point is Owen grabbed Sophisticated Gadabout and the Conan comix, when they had either particularly weird-looking demons or scantily-clad warrioresses, which was generally the case. Owen snuck out the back door, never well-guarded; who’s gonna steal wheat? Owen would walk slow and steady over to the playground at Our Lady of the Clotting Stigmata, always empty on the weekends, pleased as punch to sit on the merry-go-round (well, it wasn’t a merry-go-round according to the nuns, who called it the Wheel of Fortune and tried to make certain questionable moral lessons stick through visual and visceral example) and try to make his brain a more interesting place to live.

One of the odder things about buying books at Ben-Jakob’s is that Ben-Jakob not only read all the books before selling them, but made extensive notes in the margins and end-pages as to the validity and quality of the statements made; many people didn’t care for this at all but Owen was fascinated, as the notes added a second palimpsetic level of interpretation, which invariably made absolutely no sense. This was ignoble with interesting books and made uninteresting books suggest a level of interestingness so insidious it could not be stated directly, or even indirectly. This was all fine and good until Owen had to write book reports, in which Billy and Susie were actually personifications of Clara and Pascuel Rosas, once-married human cannonballs who dueled over the heads of rapt and terrified audiences, slashing at each other with each pass with rapiers, until a miscalculation by Pascuel the two collided mid-air, the bodies and swords falling into the scattering crowd below, leading to an outlawing of shooting people out of cannons (but not, Owen gleefully noted, shooting people *with* cannons), which made both strict cannon-based and variant catapult and rocket-strapped projections quite the rage with the young people for the next few seasons, which is how it was that the only Rosas offspring, Manuel, came to the states and took up the familial occupation with the World’s Most Depressing Circus, utilizing his profession in order to tell the story of his parents’ deaths, bringing him into tightening romantic spirals with his assistant Kristin, who played the role of Manuel’s mother in their re-enactment. This essay, like most of Owen’s others, got solid failing marks until Owen stopped telling the secret histories of the Scholastic Book Club series and just copied information off the back.

Owen kept the real reports for himself. He still has them in a series of spiral notebooks in a box in his closet. Sometimes he cribs details from them when he tells stories today.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

There Is No Way Out Of The Woods
I know that you have told me a number of times the words I have chosen to use will confuse me as I cannot hold them I cannot make sense of them I can only recite them as though buried inside me hidden there by someone else when I wasn’t looking while I slept or while I fed myself on some other person’s hopes and dreams as though running past the words with my eyes would put that man’s life into mine as though reciting and considering and weighing each syllable might somehow lead me closer to something called wisdom but you laugh and laugh as this is the crooked path of people stapling tinfoil to the ceiling to keep the transmissions out of their heads pulling out teeth with pliers and bottling their feces and yet, I sputter, I stand and point to gather up your attention, I scream for fear you’ll never listen to me again if I cannot keep hold of your eyesight this last time and you’ll fall away forever, yet you still seem to believe these words are not mine, that worn spaces had been filled in with mediated poisons which had corroded away my personality and left me with nothing but catch-phrases I stole from eight-grade movies and YET you still seem to believe that I am nothing but my influences that there is only a negative potential sum to anything which comes into me that doesn’t come out of your mouth mumbled mantras in the flightless closet of your heart and you TELL ME the gall the arrogance for you to stand there trembling in your rage you TELL ME that I should be making my own decisions your decisions the clotted cord of your logic slips in my hands I see you turning away I watch you I can see your right eye eclipsed you lead with your left shoulder you turn away you won’t listen to anymore of this idiocy you tell my you spit and fluster it’s not going like you thought in your head in the car on the way back from work when you decided forcing a confrontation was your best possible option you turn away your hair swings out a pendulum you picture yourself whipping through the room the apartment the city like the wrath of some displaced god returned to find the earth spoiled in your absence and your send your demiurge sidekick to wipe the world clean again wood splinters glass shatters and you almost smile but you can’t smile because you’re shaking so hard you turn away your pupils holding back waiting wishing and I stand there trying not to scream you TELL ME? who are you to tell me anythingriding my every failure the terror the fucking shame and I keep thinking I can turn this around I can bring up some shift some turn of phrase but you turn away you turn away twitch you’re a fucking psycho I’m so sick of your bullshit you turn away the light shines in your eyes and I know you’re not going to start crying until you get in the car some stoplight half a mile away and you slam your open palms on the steering wheel the dashboard you’ll remember it wrong you tell me you remember everything wrong what gives you the right to change history to flatter your sympathies your shore-shallow symphonies your abstracted passions collected like change an exchange of your words for my time rented out you’ll laugh it off you’ll never remember you turn away you turn away you’re gone.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Candy Opiate Jesus Dream
I was at the rest stop, but I was not working there, although I did have a key. It was late, or early, the sun had not yet come up. The two Hispanic hookers, who are real people, were there, only they were Chilean and feverishly luscious. It was unbelievably hot for nighttime, even for midsummer. I was having a conversation with one of the women, and in the dream I was speaking what seemed to be fluent Spanish, of which I only know “no mas” from my prison days. She was telling me that she had been visited by angels formed of vibrant water, which took on all sorts of shapes. The angel had explained certain things to the woman, which she was attempting to explain to me. She wore a crucifix made of blue-purple wax, which contained narcotic pollens released into the air as the heat of her body caused the wax to melt. She told me to lean in between her breasts, where the crucifix was running into a slow trickle down the center of her ribcage. The scents held within her cleavage made me dizzy, and I nearly fell as she cupped the back of my head with her left hand, pulling me closer, whispering the angel-secrets to me as the colors began to blur and pulse. I began licking the wax from her skin as she laughed, softly, beginning to float away herself, her eyes rolling as I crossed her flesh with my lips, my mouth. The tips of her fingers crawled into my hair, drawing signs and hexes across my scalp, at the point where skull met spine. I staggered forward, into her, and she met the wall with the base of her spine, moaning. The water-angels nest in spinal fluid, she told me. All reasons for everything. World-tree, neural highway, chakra-bowls of bone and nerve. I did not have the muscular control to pull up her dress. I was certain I was going to die, and I did not mind. Stairway to heaven. Sweat spilled across each place our bodies met. The liquefied wax was smeared across her chest, across my face, soaked into my tongue. I could not stop breathing the pollen. Containers for celestial fluids, she said to me. Pulse and throb. I had lost all control over my body, and I could feel myself falling, and I could not stop. I dunno. I guess it’s a spring thing.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

One Thousand One-Liners (one)
If you won’t fuck me for my beauty, then at least fuck me for my genius.

For a magician you’re not very mysterious.

Refer all inquiries to the solar transmissions department.

I’d hoped you’d sleep through the gunfire.

To unsubscribe from the poor-you automated sympathy list (poor-you-list@smallestviolin.net) please send a free-verse poem of at least two thousand lines on the topics of a) why your job sucks, b) why your fuck-partner/lack-of-fuck-partner sucks, c) why you suck, and we’ll remove you from the list just as soon as we can round up four nails.

Every word you say is killing me.

The sort of opulence that looks ordered from catalogues.

I’ll sink the midwest to prove my powers.

People disappear all the time.

Nobody plans on becoming addicted to placenta.

If you went back into the past, and you told somebody from twenty years ago that the proliferation of technology in the workplace would lead to longer hours, weekend and holiday mandatory time, unpaid overtime, benefit-free positions, instant firings w/o warning or backpay, and a sense of disposability only slightly less corrosive than the panicky terror of waking up at four am and realizing your life has passed the point where options were open and directions could be changed, they’d laugh, and say “But what about the Jetsons?”.

I need the precise date and time when you stopped loving me.

That’s how she became the pre-teen queen of the hygene scene.

Meaningless bit of self-indulgent fluff.

No, i gave up writing novels to concentrate on my telepathy service.

I can see poop, but that doesn’t mean i’ll eat it.

And her love for me is undying, so long as i’m at least six states away.

As uncomfortable as your doctor giving you a hug.

He walked but did not stumble as he leapt up into the air, thinking he would be pulled skyward on an updraft into the trees, his hands weaving the willow branches into shields and nets to keep him safe, lost in a cloud of leaves, continuing still farther up along the trunk until the wind pulled him on his new wings from any tether, his fingers spread out to help pilot his path, the shoes falling from his feet and spinning slowly back to the ground, proof of the story, as though there were places to hide in the clouds, but that isn’t true at all, and his leap made no connection with anything but gravity, and the steady gait of his steps on his abbreviated return belie his inability to really believe in such a notion as unassisted flight, just a decoy and a distaction on the way to the grocery store.

And that’s why i shat in your pants.

I stood there for hours, poking the bird with a stick, as though if i found the right spot the bird would get up and fly away.

We like your funny stuff better.

And you ran, and you ran, and you ran, and i just couldn’t follow you anymore.

So my minister actually used the phrase "branding strategy" in a sermon today.

The problem with being in a coma is you can’t take lunch breaks with friends in order to find out what they’ve been up to; it’s an all or nothing sort of lifestyle.

Constantly in search of a captive audience, she made a terrible place to hide.

Can you really see my veins through this top?

He kept telling me the sky was a place where you could put things, where they would stay until you needed them again.

Something something chest explodes something crystal nerve lattice something something butcher-surgeons something suction mouths something something something.

James has a notion as to why the voice of the God could not be recorded by modern digital devices, but I so totally didn’t wanna hear it, I was just so fucking sick of this endless stream of prattle and halfassed pseudo-thought and listening to that stuff in my head all the time, every single day, it just made me wish I was dead.

I was in the closet on too many drugs, crying, and i begged god to remove my memory, i didn’t want to be wise, i didn’t want to know, and that’s why i am the way i am today.

He bought his personality in installments; he had a few left to make.

Shelly used to say you can’t oversharpen an axe, but she learned that was all bullshit when the zombies came.

My whole life has been the smile you give to a dying child.

Like most parents, we had decided Shelalah should go to a cannibalism-intensive school, where the gifted feed on the special.

You’re always watching yourself from the other side of the room.

Just because I’m a genius doesn’t mean I’m smart, necessarily.

How long did you watch yourself when you had my eyes?

Her dreams filled with a violence without restraint or consequence, the organs unfolded in the sun, the smell of blood thick in the air.

The exit is hidden in the exit.

Somehow, he had convinced himself that, with a serious enough wound, she wouldn’t have the heart to leave him, and in the heightened emotional state she’d be in he would be able to bring himself to a heroic bravery as to his condition, which would frame his newfound honesty and declarations of a love he had always felt but was always afraid to admit to, and all of that would be well worth this time now, sitting here, on her porch, holding his hand over the wound in his kidney.

When was the last time you touched an old person?

What’s the point of even being a writer if you’re not essentially interested in fucking with people?

The beat was working on multiple time-axes, she said, which was why it made everybody feel so weird.

Gravity is a myth.

Sarah couldn’t stop thinking about the night of her child’s conception, the mess inside her, the drip and stain of it, and she couldn’t shake the notion that the adorable infant on her lap stank of semen.

Where’s the fucking race war you’ve been promising?

Rethinking the viral community.

Your spine is an antenna.

They had one of those boxed “Future Parties”, where everybody takes turns acting out what they’ll be doing in a thousand years, though my inability to act out rot and decay got me a big fat zero for a score.

He came like a hummingbird, and she couldn’t stop giggling.

To hell with you squares; 4-H girls is where it’s at.

Jub-jub children sniffing candy like synthetic seed caught in the jaws slathered in superheated saliva breaking down the sucrose stuck in the gut and rooting the kids corkscrewed to the floor with overfed topheavy stupors staring scared as sitters with filed teeth and cleavers close in on their prey.

Consider also the smaller and yet still critical sub-harnesses used to keep the massive girth of obesity model Fairok Productivity from dragging across the glass-strewn runway, an obvious no-no as blood-trails have been a bad joke in the fashion world ever since Damien Morrander’s "Calligraphy of Agony" coup, back when no well-dressed organ dealer would leave the vat without a hurdy-gurdy and a camel-headed cane, as unlike today’s wiz-kid designers who download chunks of prior designer’s credit histories looking for inspirational purchasing patterns, David David tends to extract his epiphanies with a three-foot length of steel pipe and silver hooks, which is part of what makes him such a crowd favorite on the Darwinian Combative Fashions circuit.

I prayed for you, and I love you, but you’ll never know.

Fuck you all.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

I Hate How Obvious I Have Been (version)
The only thing I remember from being in school was having to blow my nose, sitting in class, without any tissue, and I’d have to get up, but I couldn’t get up, I was mortified of getting up for some reason, maybe the teacher was talking, and I’m trying to think of a way to wipe my nose on my hand, or my sleeve, without anybody looking, but there’s always somebody looking at me, because that’s what school is all about. I told her this once and she told me that someone who was always watching me in school was her. I didn’t know what to say to that.

She said she was going to go looking for her brother, who she last heard from up in Vancouver, working for the city, unless he was lying, stirring her coffee with her left ring finger. She kept saying she missed him, missed him so much, but mostly I think she just wanted an excuse to drop out of school. She told me I had to take care of myself, because nobody else would take care of me, and she laughed when she said it, and then retracted it, and started to apologize, and then turned, and tried to lose herself in some other conversation. The police walked from table to table while the other patrons pulled back their scalps, having replaced their brains with a nest of high-tension wires, so that their actions and stations could be decided by the tones broadcast over the speakers in the marketplace, all the bad days and sadness gone instantly through a hum of some peppy tune, all arguments sifted out and away by harmonic sympathies of skull-chambers brought close enough together. I still had pieces of my brain at this time, and thus did not have to display the inside of my head, making sure no one had cats-cradled themselves into antisocial genius. She always kept her brain. She was like that.

I’d been keeping a log all year of all the things people told me, or else said about me when I wasn’t around, heard secondhand, totally misconstrued, and I wrote down everything she said, everything I could remember, as soon as I finished talking to her, but even in the minutes it took me to get off the phone or out into the hallway it’d slip away from me, so that to look back is a crooked line of throwaway lines ghosting the things I wanted to remember, all the talk of the boy she was in love with who I used to imagine was me. Everything she said. Nothing I could hold against her. Every edge blurred. Safety of specifics, certain environments, unbound over time, coming apart in my hands. Give-lines, the hairline cracks in each argument, each statement, incomprehensible an soon as she left my sight. What did she mean? What did I say? She must have gone through millions of words with me, but the only one I remember, the only one I can still hear when I listen for it, was “don’t”.

I feel a little bad.

Last I heard she’d been showing everyone her coffin when they stop by the cape, asking cousins and the half-famous to rest in it, see what the world looks like through the small blue window she had carved in the lid. I heard her brother had another seizure at the grocer while she screamed at him, told him to get up, told him to just keep walking, but he never really listened to her even when she was beautiful, and that’s been such a long time ago. I heard she was still claiming other people’s miseries as her own, selecting angles from them the way she once ransacked other people’s beliefs to provide shimmering accessories for her new personality, so as to raise her secondhand agonies up from the everyday to the mythic, but nobody can even hear her anymore, washed away in a constant white hum of mumbling pity. I heard she was promising blessings and indulgences to anyone who could produce gold from her bones. I heard she was counting down the days until her buffer of spoiled privilege wore thin, her wrist-scars all on display.

As the police arrived, as the ambulance was called, we watched for the miracle we were promised, but that miracle never came.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Nobote
“the last thing I wanted to do today was have a conversation with some entity of perpetual identity crisis.” -dls

In 1997 I was associated into the Fraternal Order of the Butcher-Surgeons in the steam tunnels beneath Hawkeye Community College, which is how I first came into contact with one Dr. Hern of Leipsic, one-time associate to Ambrose Bierce. The good doctor informed me that this world is filled with “dark pits” into which people may fall and never be seen again. At the time I thought little of it, but as of late those words have come back to me, often in the walking dream, which I have had every night since the new year.

In the walking dream I am walking with a real person, who I will herein call The First Principle, and we walk for days and days and say nothing. It is not an uncomfortable silence. There was much talking before, and will be much talking again, and now there is nothing to say. Then she turns a little, turns back to look at me over her shoulder, and follows a different line out away from me, into the fields. Days pass, and sometimes I think I see The First Principle out on the horizon, beside the grain silos and radio towers, but it is too far, and I cannot be certain. I see a man in an oxcart called the Observations Upon The Prophecies Of Daniel, and he offers me a ride, but to get into the oxcart would mean to travel faster than The First Principle, and possibly lose her forever, if I have not lost her already. I refuse the ride. Years pass, and you life grows more complicated; I begin to carry a shell of filth and sticks upon my back, am repeatedly warned that the moon creeps from the sky at night to feast on those without proper homes, I am followed by three children who claim to possess a grinder-box which destroys mystery. I continue walking. Intricately-wrapped gifts line the sides of the road, but I pay no attention. I am certain The First Principle will return to me. When I wake, I am in the middle of an argument.

Eighteen minutes she’d been yelling at me, and all I could do was stare, through her conclusion to the silence which followed, hung there between us, waiting for a reply, but I didn’t have anything so say, I’d said everything I had to say, and eventually she turned and left. I couldn’t care less, I was happy to have her gone, but her toes had recently been offering me secretive advice both relationshipial and otherwise, and I was in dire need of guidance as to the walking dream, which offered me no rest and no peace.

The last thing I remember The First Principle telling me was “There is no around. There is only through.”
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Neptune Machinery
Me and Escho and Mark figured between the three of us we had a buck’s worth of gas, which would get us within walking distance of Sarah’s house, and the whole drive is, like, three turns, so we figure we can make it, only on the first turn the last five beers Mark left on the roof go flying off and explode on the street, which kinda stabbed us all in our hearts, as it was after two and we couldn’t get any more beer and we all had a sinking suspicion that without proper fortification our diabolical plan would fall through. We then had to stop at a QuelCo so Escho could throw up in the parking lot, during which he lost his glasses, and it took us fifteen minutes to figure out they fell off into the car and not in the puddle of vomit. I then realized we were lost, and Mark kept resting his head on the dashboard and then sitting up again really fast and pretending he didn’t just fall asleep, so we told him to stay and watch the car and Escho and I would set out on foot. We were somewhere in fratland, and from the second story porch some guy threw us a couple beers, and by some miracle we caught them and didn’t get killed. We hid behind some bushes when a cop went by, and at some point we were wading in a creek behind some houses, and by some fucking miracle we found Sarah’s house. Escho broke down, then, and wouldn’t sit up and go up to the house, so we sat in her backyard and he mooned about her for a while until we fell asleep.

The next morning Sarah woke us and gave us coffee, and Escho was so embarrassed he never talked to her again.

That wasn’t actually true: Escho did talk to Sarah again, and they even ended up going out for a while, and probably would have gotten married, only she went off to school again and he was too much a flake to keep up with his phone calls. Later both of them got married to different people, and they ended up pretty happy, and even call each other from time to time. So fuck you for thinking I can’t write a love story.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Necromancy For Dummies
From time to time, certain of my associates get the bad idea to bring people back from the dead, either for fictional creep-out reasons or just to have an army of the damned to come over and do lawn work. But lo! it is necessary for me to inform and enlighten as to the evils and dark prices paid for such foolishness, in the hope that you will not end up in the lowly position I found myself in, attempting to bring the dead to life.

It was me and Ana and Ana’s new boy Clyde Apostrophes and Huey Kablooey, who had escaped from some kinda crazy high-rise/helicopter fracas under conditions still unclear, out at Metro Grave Distribution #8, by the old highway. The plan was we were going to bring Clem Fichus back from the briny underworld in order to have him answer some questions. Our reasoning for this endeavor was varied and suspect: Ana and Clyde were asked to participate by shady academic forces I’d rather not know about, I was there basically because Ana was there and wanted to scope out the new boy, and Huey was there because, apparently, “chicks dig necromancy”. So Huey and I get out our rocket-boosted pole vaulting equipment while Ana and Clyde push the car gate open and drive over by the big oak. Huey’s liquid-based propellant sloshed around in the coffee-can tank, thus giving an incredibly uneven propellant distribution, and to cut to the chase I ended up in the oak tree, prompting Huey to take the gateway and basically making me look really dumb in front of Ana’s new boy, which I have to admit was causing me all kinds of inner torment and hand-wringing and whatnot. By the time I got out of the tree Huey had his autographed copy of the Necronomicon out and was setting up his turntable and Judas Priest record collection (Huey, Fast Eddie Satan, Merle and I earlier had an incredibly lengthy discussion as to the best music for summoning the devil to do your bidding; my in-depth argument re: Barry Manilow I’ll spare you, for now: eventually we went upstairs and asked the two Satanist members of Loyal Evansdale Satanists And Librarians #281 for hints and suggestions, which led to all kinds of arcane vinyl that noway nohow could we get our hands on so eventually we just defaulted to the fucking Priest) while Ana got out a small stack of notecards and Clyde busted out a tape recorder so that we’d only need to do this once, which seemed like a super-bad idea but there’s apparently no talking to that boy. Huey, a master (in a savant kinda way) in the black arts, explained to me that the best way to raise the dead is to trick them into thinking they’re headlining the Sands and by the time they realize they’re not anchor for “Whipped Cream”-era Herb Alpert and Tiny Tim it’s too late, you got ‘em. So while “(You Got) Another Thing Comin’” spun backwards on the turntable, Huey belted out via Mr. Microphone “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Tangerine Lounge here in beautiful downtown Elk Run Heights is honored to present a performer who needs no introduction, a man whose songs have touched the hearts and privates of millions worldwide, the Blue Schmaltz Daemon, the one, the only, the never ever lonely…Clem Fichus!” Everybody made that Elvis-On-Stage music that sounds like the theme from Family Feud and we felt the earth shake, and we scattered and jumped back just before Clem burst out of the ground, hollerin’ “Yeaaaaaah! Party people in the place to be, lemme see some love out there tonight!” Not actually expecting this plan to work, we all started screaming, which Clem took as a show of love, and he started doing his best Mr. Showtime hustle, accidentally falling back into his grave, which startled him enough to realize he wasn’t on stage at all.

“A’ight, what the fuck is all this commotion about? Do you people need something or something?”

Huey had long since split with his turntable and records and I was pretty much eyeballing Clyde, who was cool like Brando, so it was up to Ana to answer (or ask) any questions.

“Hi, Mr. Fichus. My name is Ana Skyfish, and these are my associates. We’d like to ask you a few questions about your involvement in the scat riots of 1957…”

“You a cop?”

“Nosir. I’m doing an essay for school.”

It dawned on me and Clem right about the same time what was happening —

“Waitaminute. I was all cool and shit and now you brought me back here because you wanna work out some stupid answers for some stupid paper?”

“Well, um.”

“Oh, oh you people, you people just gotta leave it alone.”

Clem then climbed back into his grave and pretended to be sleeping, and we all felt kinda creepy, so we took off and got overcaffeinated at Eat (where Huey was nursing his scratched-vinyl traumas over the Unholy Frijole Platter) and discussed how crappy all this new music is while Clyde and Ana got all googly-eyed and moony, which was exactly how I expected the whole miserable night to end.

(dramatic orchestral music)

So let this be a lesson to you! Do not tempt the demonic fates rashly, or you — yes, even YOU — could fall into the same fate! Take caution as your guiding light, and…well, you get the point.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Na Na Na Na Na Na
Simple introduction. something to catch interest. Something quietly funny which puts the reader at ease. Building sentence which evokes mystery to be recalled later. Reference to something the reader knows. Hook for first line of second paragraph.

Incredibly revealing personal fact. An undercutting of personal fact through offhand comedic throwaway line. Elaboration of personal fact. Justification of personal fact, generally using the phrase “the point of which is”. Something in Greek to look smart.

Goofy childish thing said to present a feeling of intimacy. Comedic statement set up for the enjoyment of one member of audience who probably won’t be reading. Pseudo-deconstruction of previous statements for reasons unclear, perhaps for no better reason to evoke uncertainty. Statement which fulfills on the mysterious aspects of third sentence in first paragraph. Irritating disavowal of everything said up to this point. Empty threat of giving up writing forever, maudlin idealization of silence, exile and cunning. More backpedaling. Second goofy childish thing said in order to regather a lost audience. Statement as to the intent and failure of previous sentence.

Paranoid muttering. Paranoid muttering. Paranoid muttering. Paranoid muttering. Paranoid muttering. Paranoid muttering. Paranoid muttering. Paranoid muttering. Paranoid muttering. Veiled threat of suicide. Paranoid muttering. Paranoid muttering. The”nobody really understands” speech. Paranoid muttering.

Apologies for paranoid muttering. Apology for paranoid muttering *as* paranoid muttering. Apology for apologizing. Statement as to the author’s stupidity.

Empty statement.

Attempt to reroute and control damage. Clever use of memory. a fixation on prior focal points. Repeating of prior points, comparison to popular culture reference. Statement of violence in a comical sense. Rant against something meaningless and morally indifferent as a catalyst for directionless energies. Quote from established writer.

Zippy closing statement.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

the ballad of my corpse
One day, a long time ago, I did a terrible thing. A thing I regret to ths day. After I did that thing, I felt a weight upon me, and a touch across my skin, and though I could never turn my head fast enough to see him, I knew that I was no longer simply carrying my own weight, but the weight of my corpse, tied to me with sinew and wire. Someone had been standing in my shadow, speaking to me, tracing my steps, as long as I could remember, but that distance had now been crossed, and I knew who it was that had been watching me, waiting.

My corpse had once been happy to occasionally gloat over my failures, to watch me as i stumbled and fell, and I knew then that my corpse was weak and not to be feared. Once I felt the weight, however, I knew that balance had shifted, and the sound my corpse made was now constant. There was a slow dry breath, so light as to almost be dismissable. The voice has the rattle of husks and insect hum, of faroff electric lines and water deep beneath the ground. The voice does not stop, ever, and it does not change tone. It speaks to me not as though it wants something from me, but as though it is telling me a truth. The sky is blue with low-flying clouds. There are crows in the trees. You have to die.

Over the years I have developed a means of diminishing the corpse. I have argued, in my mind, over the course of actions set out for me by the corpse. I have reminded myself of patience, and of connection. I have made a daily prayer of the people I love, and of the people who love me. There are times when the drone of my corpse is thus faded to the back of my head, into the rest of the chatter that swims through my skull. The voice returns, eventually, and has learned new methods of reply. I could explain the core of these arguments, but they do not hold up in teh light of day, and you would think me a fool to believe I could be swayed by such things. I should know better, and I do. In order to keep that balance, however, I have had to come to the realization that my corpse will never leave me, that to my last day this voice wil remain, teh mouth pressed against the base of my skull, the atrophied arms crossed at my shoulderblades.

I believe the voice knows that I will not bring myself to death. I have seen, in people I know, the process by which they approach their dying to this world. the lights inside them go out, until there is nothing left behind their eyes, until the door is closed. My corpse knows this, and has taken after the small lights inside me. My corpse attempts to convince me of my failing before I make any attempt, in order to stop me from trying. My corpse sticks its fingers into my brain, pulling at chunks of tissue, filling my ears with blood, until I cannot remember the things I need to know, and I find myself with the person I was talking to staring at me, waiting for a reply, and I go off to hide, to be away until I am okay again. My corpse whispers of psychosis, of loss. Whatever connection I have, it cannot hold. I fear for the words which leave my mouth, and I hold them insde me. My corpse denies it exists, tells mow I’m always looking for an excuse, a scapegoat, a reason to pull down. It never laughs, and it never yells. I am lost, it says, and there is no way I will find my way back again; I have run out of time. Whatever it was that I was supposed to do on this earth I have not done, and the things I have broken I cannot fix. Every conversation is a series of doubts, ficticious accusations, the stink of my own lies. My corpse convinces me of my weakness, that I should have such trouble over nothing while those around me suffer so greatly and so well. I do not deny that I am a coward, that I have hidden when I shoudl have stood, that I have been a silent witness to the evil of the world. I cannot deny that in their times of need, of true and honest suffering, I have abandoned the people I love to cultivate my insipid and endless litany of faults and forgettings.

I am, from this point on, at war with my corpse. I will feed myself from the meat of his throat, his hands. I will fear no evil.

You and I will never discuss this again.

….

It was five years ago. I don’t remember if we had slept together yet. I don’t remember if I was yet homeless. I do remember that I hadn’t yet been hit by the car, because I wouldn’t have done this afterward. You were talking. We were not sure of what we were, what we were going to be. We didn’t want to talk about it. You had decided to tell me about him, which you had done before, which was not a strange thing. We got coffee at Great Mid and you tried to figure out if it was okay to smoke up on the second floor. I bought a cd earlier and I remember thinking how much i wanted to leave and go listen to the cd and then see ou later tonight, after this thing had passed. I think you were waiting for me to encourage you to go after him, to move back to Davenport with him, live with him, but I didn’t. I started bashing my face into the table. You sat there, still, until I started screaming, at which point you got up and left. Startled, I stopped, wiped the blood from my mouth, and left. I did not go back into Great Mid for years, by which point the turnover had cleaned the building’s memory.

I went looking for you, once i had moved back, but your landlord told me you had moved to Davenport. I wanted to tell you that I didn’t want to touch you, that i didn’t want to lie in your dinosaur and rocketship sheets, that I was content to be your friend, but at times I would need some space, somewhere to run off to, because I don’t know what i’m doing, and I want to be careful. It is probably for the best that I didn’t see you then, because you would have known me for a liar, as always, as ever.

Last week I was in Great Mid and I missed you, but I always missed you, even when you were in my arms.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

micha superstar
[This is an old book for children I started years ago and never got around to finishing. I’ve fixed the names because the original names made everybody think it was something else.]

Micha Superstar’s backyard is huge. If you stood at the beginning and threw a rock as hard as you could that rock would still be at the beginning, it’s that big. Micha spends most of the time in the backyard, peering over the treeline from any of the dozens of tree-forts, and working on incredibly cryptic plans which nobody but Micha seemed to be able to find any kind of logic in. once, Micha’s daily strategy required climbing into a tree-fort left abandoned for months, and inside Micha found a big hive of bees. Micha began to back away, noting from the diagonal stripes across the thoraxes of the bees that these were Decimation Bees, which according to the Young Person’s Guide to Bee-Culture were not friendly bees at all. One of the bees approached Micha, cautiously, and explained to Micha (in simple terms: Micha knew basic Bee Language but did not know the specifics of the Decimation Bee dialect, so communication was necessarily rudimentary) that Decimation Bees weren’t intentionally harmful, they couldn’t help themselves, they just got that way.

“Well now that’s just preposterous” said Micha, who had no patience for this kind of victim-stancing, as Micha’s mother would call it. “You can do anything you want to do!”

The bees were flabbergasted at this notion. “You dork! all we want to do is decimate things! it’s the only time we don’t have to act like bees!”

“So you’re telling me you never watched the aeroplanes, then?”

“No. Why watch something fly when you can fly? That’s such a human thing to say!”

“Mo, come with me and we’ll watch the aeroplanes. Maybe then you won’t feel so much like decimating things.”

So Micha and the hive of decimation bees got into Micha’s bus (which had no engine, and could only go downhill, but fortunately the aeroport was downhill from Micha’s backyard) and went to the aeroport, which was in between the shifts of day travelers and night travelers and thus Micha and the bees got a good look at the areoplanes. The decimation bees seemed to love the aeroplanes, and sat perfectly still, fixated. Micha was tickled and began the long walk to the backyard just before the night travelers came into the aeroport. Unfortunately, it was not the sight of the aeroplanes but the roar of their mighty engines which made the bees so still, upsetting their delicate sense of balance and making flying impossible. Either way, there were no more decimations due to the decimation bees, which means this part of the story is over.

…

Pretty much everybody loves Micha, even in a way her enemies and nemeses, who if you asked them they would get a thoughtful look on their faces and scratch their chins and nod “Yes, Micha is a worthy adversary, there’s no question about it”. In fact the only people who wouldn’t say that are the pilots who live in the wrecked aeroplanes, who are grouchy and don’t like anybody, and her friends Ernest Erp Erplington and Zeke Diblitz. Now it’s going to take a bit of explaining to explain this, as Erp and Zeke are convinced that if you’re somebody’s friend you can’t tell them. Nobody’s exactly sure why this is, and if you ask Erp he’d say that’s just part of being inscrutable. If you ask Zeke he’ll just run into the hills, which is what he usually does when somebody asks him a question and he doesn’t know the answer, which is awfully frustrating to his teachers.

So what Erp and Zeke mostly do is get buckets of water and pour it on the dirt and make mud, because they are mud farmers, and there’s a good market for mud among people without access to water, or dirt, or both, which isn’t very many people but the cost of production is nothing, so it’s a break-even sort of business. Erp and Zeke were two of the only kids who got boots out of Micha’s whole boot fandango, which was very good for the business as there’s no good to come from wearing your good shoes while you make mud, and that’s how Erp and Zeke and Micha became friends, because they all had boots, and sometimes that’s all it takes.

So anyway Erp and Zeke weren’t big on talking about things like being friends but they were big on contraptions. Now some kids are into contraptions like putting a board on a log and jumping on it, but Erp and Zeke would have none of that, as a contraption is only as good as it takes a long time to make, and requires intricate plans and lots of supplies which getting are an adventure in and of themselves. So you know that it’s a super-big project if Erp and Zeke feel like they have to bring another person in on it, and when they went to get Micha to get her to help there was a lot of hemming and hawing and shaking their hands together and such before they actually got started. What they needed was a boat, see, and they didn’t have the time to build their own boat, which normally they’d be ready to do in a flash and had in fact once even done before with barrels and two by fours and paneling they found out by the Different Tree and they even made a flag only that boat, which they called the Super Death Prow Eight, fell apart before they even got out of the drainage ditch and they spent the afternoon chucking rocks at it until it all sank. So now for some reason they thought Micha had a boat, or had access to a boat, which she did not have, but she did have a way to make a bridge of fish so she could walk across the water. After heated debate Erp and Zeke decided this would do, though a boat would be better, so they should keep an eye out for a boat while they walked out to the fish-bridge just in case.

…

Everybody in The Big Empty Space likes nearly all of the monkeys except for the Crazy Monkeys, who live underground and dig up under you when you’re just standing around minding your own business and they go AAAAAAAADJF! and you jump up in the air and the monkeys steal your shoes, which you were so scared you just jumped right out of them, and then you have to walk all the way home really slow so you didn’t step on anything that would cut your feet.

Possibly the worst thing about the Crazy Monkeys is that nobody who hasn’t seen them believes in them. This includes Micha’s parents, who are none too pleased to have to buy Micha a new pair of shoes, Crazy Monkeys or no.

“But but but! They nearly took my feet off! They were gonna wear my feet like shoes and walk around town!”

“I thought the Crazy Monkeys lived under the dirt, like moles.”

“But first of all the moles are nice, and second the Crazy Monkeys only do that because they think they don’t have enough shoes. They sit in their holes way deep in the ground and go ‘Oh bother, I just don’t have enough shoes, and what would go really smashingly would be a pair of feet-shoes! I could go out on the town if I had a pair of feet-shoes!’ So you see the direness of the predicament!”

“I’m thinking maybe we just shouldn’t buy you any more shoes, is what I’m thinking.”

“But my feets will be defenseless to the world! You don’t want that, and I don’t want that! The only people who want that are the Crazy Monkeys!”

“I think what we need is a pair of shoes you won’t jump out of. I think it’s time for you to get a pair of boots.”

Now Micha wasn’t all that pleased about this at first, as the boots looked laughably laughable on her feet and the kids at school thought they were even more laughable, but Micha realized that with boots like these she could go walking in anything which she promptly set about doing. All the kids were much impressed with this, where most kids might splash through a mud puddle Micha would jump in like a commando and then go stomp in the mud and kick pieces of mud at people, and the kids thought that was a worthwhile thing to do with feets, so they all requested boots from their parents. Most parents knew something was amiss, and refused the request, but some didn’t, and those kids who got boots didn’t have any trouble with Crazy Monkeys until the Crazy Monkeys stopped being shoe fetishists and got really into backpacks.

…

You may wonder why it is that there is such a preponderance of poison apples in some of Micha’s stories, and there is a simple answer for that. If you leave Micha’s house house and go across the road and then the field and then the traintracks and across the place where the aeroplanes have crashed into the ground you will come across a shack stuck up in the trees, and that’s where a witch named Iara lives, and Iara the witch makes her living when not doing witchy things by selling poison apples. Only the market has recently fallen out in the poison apple market, with all the ne’er-do-wells and evil princes and whatnot having gone over to the new poison puppets, which you put on your hand and then go up to somebody and pretend to tell them a puppet-story and when they get into the story and get up close you reach out and the puppet bites them with fangs in its mouth full of whatever kind of poison you may want for the job at hand, whether it be a princess-to-hideous monster potion or just a simple herbicide. So Iara the apple-surplused witch started having deals and two-for-one offers and even gave away free apples with the purchase of an evil witchy contract hit but nothing worked.

Micha heard about Iara’s problems and how the First National Bank of The Big Empty Space was going to foreclose on her shack stuck up in the trees, and this was just no good, so Micha decided that from that point on all her stories would have at least one poison apple and sometimes even more, if they could be worked in reasonably, though Micha isn’t big on the more high-end poisons so mostly the poison apples in her adventures are more like Pretty Miserable Week Poison and Vague Insecurity Poison and sometimes even Poison You Think Is Bad But Isn’t. So people eventually started coming back around to the tried and true method of poison delivery that is the apple and the poison puppet fad passed into oblivion just like that Poison Mattress fad did back before Micha was even born, except for a couple people who were really into the puppets but they were happy everybody else had stopped doing their thing and they could be known as the Poison Puppet Gang again.

And everybody was pretty much happy for the rest of the month.

…

Micha has been hiding under the table for three days. Perhaps not hiding. Maybe we’ll say she’s built herself a fort. A super-fortress! The Fortress of Ineptitude! she proclaims, looking out over the battlements and the tiles and the particles of foodstuffs. All a castle truly is, however, is a center from which to plot adventures. Micha knows this because she reads Heroic Adventure comics, which make this sort of moral lesson apparent to even the youngest reader. Micha’s friend Erno reads Sophisticated Gadabout comics, and generally scoffs at this talk of quest and glory, but Erno isn’t here; he’s throwing rocks at beehives and will be dead soon.

“Is this the path of glory?” Micha asks herself from beneath the table. “Is this route of jewel-encrusted brilliance? And what foul daemon stalks the way between hither and yon? Would that I had my trusty stick!” Earlier in the year, as she does every hear, Micha scavenged through the Big Forest to find the proper walking and whacking things with stick, one which felt good in the hand and looked cool at her side. Alas, she tossed her walking stick bolt-like at a stray train which had creeped off the tracks and was nesting in the bushes.

“Forsooth! My cape and my staff and I shall ready myself for my queen’s quest! I will—”

Then Micha had to be quiet, because her dad came in and yelled for a while, and she had to postpone the quest until he took his afternoon nap.

…

It was right around the middle of summer when Micha became fascinated with balancing things. Certainly she had balanced things in the past, but in a productive way, as a means to an end. At this time, however, just the idea that you could put something on top of something in such a way that it would stay there even though by all rational logic it really should fall over. Micha’s father told her this was due to science, but she’s incredibly skeptical there’s a force in the universe whose job it is consists of being able to put things on top of other things in such a way that it would stay there. Of course, there are a lot of forces, and Science is obviously important as it has its own magazine. Of course, Science is also other things, like where plants live and different kinds of rocks. “Nevertheless,” Micha would say, a look of sheer consternation on her face, “skeptical.”

But how else could it be explained? She put her entire penny collection all on their sides across the floor of the magic basement and they all stayed that way until, terrified, Micha kicked them all over and then put them back in the dragon-china vase where none of them would stand on their sides at all. Micha discovered there were Natural Forces and Unnatural Forces, and while she went back and forth on what she thought of Science (outside of being skeptical, obviously), she was convinced that Balance was an Unnatural Force. Which meant she couldn’t stop messing around with it.

Eventually, if you stack enough chairs on top of each other, the stack will become so high you can’t stack any more chairs on top, until Micha came to the startling realization that you could build two stacks of chairs, side by side, and thus keep adding chairs to one stack while scaling and descending the other. “I,” said Micha, “am a genius!”. Thus she gathered chairs from her kitchen table, from the machine shed, from a pile in The Big Empty Space, from Erp and Zeke’s house, from a fisherman out walking around in the lake on a pair of stilts, and from one of the abandoned carriages, taking special care not to be too rough with those chairs in case the drivers ever returned. Erp and Zeke even came along to help hand up chairs, and to wisecrack from beneath the apfel tree.

“Hey, Micha! Can you see our house?”

“No! It’s all trees up here!”

“Can you see the clocktower?”

“Well, yeah, I can see the clocktower.”

“What time is it?”

“Would you gentlemen please refrain from your shenanigans and hand me another chair, please?”

Eventually Micha ran out of chairs, but that wasn’t the point; if she wanted to just get up high she would have taken the afternoon tour of the clocktower, or else climbed up in the tree queen. The point was all the chairs she knew about were now stacked on top of each other, and she was stacked on top of the top of the chairs. Which shouldn’t be, and yet was. Micha pondered this at length, so deeply she didn’t even notice at first she was falling.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Marches Grotesque, three
there was a sluice-drain in the floor. my shirt was caught in it, and i was thus held from the tube leading downward. this was a dream based in part on my memories of playing in storm drains as a child. when you come to visit, i’ll show you. hold your hand in front of you and make a circle, your index finger pressing into the space between it and your thumb, tucked over that fold of skin. that’s how big the light from the ends was from the center. i didn’t have any sensation in my body. the sluice had caught some of the hair on my arms and i was being too wimpy to pull it from my arm. there were gate-ends pressing into my stomach, just beneath my ribcage, red marks turning to purple. my mom had promised she’d make shakes to go with out lunch that afternoon and i was late. i couldn’t turn my head far enough to see if there was any light up above me. my mouth tasted like brown water. i was excited because earlier that week we had bought school supplies for the coming year and i had a supply fetish; i spent that night organizing the placement of pens and pencils in the plastic case which went inside my folder, writing my name and grade in all my spirals. i couldn’t get my shirt free. the drain-sluice, i realized, was a stairway without any backing material. i had always feared that. i would slip and fall and i would be killed, or worse. my shoes were untied and i felt them at the ends of my toes, come loose from my ankles, pointing my feet as far upwards as possible. a year before, playing tag, i had run into a barbed-wire fence in a cornfield, but that felt like nothing. this stairway was chewing on my body, eating me alive. i can’t hold on. there’s sweat and brown water on my hands and i am weak and i am slow. i can’t hold on.

i must have been eight. i wanted to be in this band the other guys told me i had to audition. sure, i said. can you sing? they asked. i s’pose. so i sang some and they laughed at me, and i realized they would do that so it wasn’t too bad. can you play drums? sure, and i sat down and played some stupid drum thing, and they said okay, but that’s just part of it. the first boy’s mother had just tilled the garden, in the back, and rains had brought up worms all morning, crawling across concrete, lost and terrified. i was told to put my hands into the mud, which i did without complaint or hesitation, and told to keep pushing, to climb down into the soil. i was up to my shoulders, spitting clumps of dirt and mulched plants out of my mouth, and i tried to think of how this connected to being in the band. i would have asked, during a pause for breath, but the second boy, looking over his shoulder, screamed “jesus, hurry up! we’re running out of time!”, and so i continued to dig, my legs dangling, my feet jutting upwards, until i was completely surrounded by earth and fresh-planted seeds. through the soil i could see decades worth of housecats, gerbils and mice, their remains sealed inside water-decayed shoeboxes. closer to the surface, there were army men lost to the rain, guns and arms bent backwards, heads gnawed on by squirrels. further down there were pipes and cables, and further down still there was a tunnel, a burrow, massive and solid. i tried to keep climbing downward but i could barely move, inching along, until a few weeks worth of arid heat pushed me farther down as the water-steam left the earth. i was frozen, at that point, and without help i couldn’t make my way to the tunnel. i could hear the vibrations of the first boy’s mother above me, watching her garden grow. years went on like this, and to the best of my knowledge, no one thought to look for me. about a week ago (i believe it was a week ago; my sense of time has been greatly altered due to my time underground) i was shaken from sleep by massive vibrations, soon afterward feeling something loosen around my feet. i could hear yells, and feel hands pull the earth from around my legs, pulling me upwards. i couldn’t tell what was happening because my pupils were large as saucers, though i could feel myself move at tremendous speeds, the shock of which caused me to black out. i had been taken to my parent’s house and placed on my old bed after being washed off and shaved — i had undergone my puberty while beneath the garden, to my suprise. my mother explained to me that my muscles had deteriorated from lack of use and that i would have to spend some time resting before i could go back to school. i would ask her why it was that her and my father never thought to look for me, to ask about me, but since i was brought back my mother hasn’t been back to my room. in all the years, absolutely nothing’s changed.

visitations by spirits both eldrich and celestial in this part of the woods finds problems; the wind blows a wet thick cold through the trees thick with yellowgreen molds and mosses, hangs the shreds of red capes and ribbons of those log lost high up in the branches. nests for eyeless birds sewn from twigs and hair. higher up, higher even than the birds fly, there are pre-fab suburban homes left here by errant and flighty tornadoes, eggshell-blue sinks spilling down into the trees. children fly kites from the rooftops, closer to heaven than earth, and from here they are reached by spirits. alas, the lack of oxygen and the knife-edged cold breed disease in both animal and praeternatural beings, which leads to most visitations between such beings little more than sneezes and sniffles and coughs. i once believed the sneeze of angelic beings would contain special properties, alchemical and narcotic, that visions would open to me once soaked through my skin, but my experience with angel-fluids (of all sorts, but these things are not open to discussion in such a forum as this) leaves me with only a slight twitch and tingle in the spine, my hands gripping onto the unused tv antennas (the only broadcasts available at such heights are Mir transmissions and the surround-sound music of the spheres, listening to which tends to lead to catatonia and drooling) so as not to fall from the roof.

They had placed hands upon me, to keep me down, out of the line of sight, my staff falling into well-trained defense posturing so as to keep me shielded from any angle of attack, checking the contents of my mouth for potential tranquilizers or nerve agents or constrictive bolus caught in my throat and in finding nothing examine exposed areas of my skin for rashes or tracks and in finding nothing checked my blood and pulserate where it was discovered, indeed, that I had been implanted with something they did not know what but it had changed me in some way and as I had made the mistake to connect the allegiance of my staff to my genetic fingerprint so as to prevent potential surrogates from claiming my identity only the material I had taken into my body had damaged my chromosomes and in the examination of my blood it became clear to my staff that I was no longer, in a technical sense, the subject of their service, and as they stood and walked away while I tried to pull the needles from my veins and stared in panic at the nests of shadows surrounding my small circle of streetlit sidewalk I heard them leave drop their identification and keys on the ground as they were now without a subject and thus of no value to the economy; the rent on their identities would no longer be paid, and the artifacts of those identities were now void.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Marches Grotesque, two
Job was rewarded for his trials, the battle between god and the satan, by having all which was taken from him returned to him. he was filled with joy, in the first days, and felt the solidity of his faith reward him for his agonies. but as he watched the motions of his family, he could not put aside the thought of their deaths. when he looked at his children, all he could see was their skulls; when he went to touch his wife, all he could feel was the cold moisture collected on her dead skin. he spent his nights asleep in a shallow grave behind his home, thinking his family’s rising was possible only by his fooling the god into believing he had died, until such a time that his family actually did die. job spent the days of the rest of his life wishing for the courage to kill himself and his family, and he spent his nights drunk, in the fields, where he called on god: “i know you’re killing me, my Lord, and i do not mind, but must you take so long.”

years after jacob had his vision of the ladder, he would return to canaan, where he met a stranger whom he wrestled with through the night. at daybreak, the stranger demanded he leave, but jacob held firm; he would not leave until he knew the stranger’s name. we all know the power inherent in a name. the stranger finally revelaed himself as el, or god. i may have wrestled, but i have never been able to hold onto this stranger, for i was born with withered hands. it is thus that at night, driving on the interstate, i call up to the heavens in an attempt to guess the name of god, hoping that god will thus present itself to me. i know now this will never happen. it takes me so long to learn even the simplest of things; i will never understand these patterns, this process; in the edges of my eyes something flickers and is gone. there were times, later, that i had certain visions, armies gathering on the horizon, the net being pulled taught. i could not understand this world if i was not of paramount importance, and i could not be that important if they were not coming for me, coming to end me. i had to be paranoid, because if i was not paranoid i was, literally, nothing. it is only the end days that are ever remembered, that ever find their dates memorized by schoolchildren, and i, like all people, wanted to be a part of something larger than myself, wanted to step out into the heroic, the dramatic, the truly great. this was the bribe which i was given, my payment for all the terrible things i had done. i was so stupid. what does it mean, then, to come to an understanding with the evil of this world? how are we different? or have we just sucked off the outer layer of novelty, beyond shock, and numb to the hystrionics of guilt and blame? how is it that anything ever changes?

on the television, i saw live images, the walking wounded, the exposed organs. a woman kept screaming she didn’t know which blood was hers. i could still taste vomit in my mouth. i wanted so much that day to be the exterminating angel, to wipe the face of the earth clean of humans and their miseries, to sweep the earth free of violence. i spent the days of my youth, my middle school days, fixated on this wish, a lust for harvesting bones. these are sins i will never finish paying for. the last thing my grandfather said, strapped to the gurney so as not to rip tubes from his hose and throat and arms, was “look there, there i go.” the end of all flesh.

dreaming how it’s gonna be when everything’s better, she secret-sung prayers for peace, or at least for sleep, or at least for her cd player to stop skipping. you’d know to hear it even before the sound reached you just from the shimmers in the walls, just from the way the light through the leaves kept shifting, the sky the same washed-out blue as the pills. one of these days all this terror will lift from us, will wash itself from our thoughts, and there will be no more walking and waiting to be tested, to face trials muscles and dreams locked and prepared for impact. my little neighbor-friend jayce explained to me there were certain ways to walk down the sidewalk, patterns from block to block, and i would ask him what was different about walking out of the pattern, and he said “nothing. you just wouldn’t be in the pattern.” i was so set for a showdown, to stick it to my boss, with whom i had been feuding for weeks, ready to get my money by any means necessary. but he kept being nice, apologizing for that which had gone wrong, and i got all confused, didn’t know what to do. he cut me a check with a little extra cash because he wasn’t sure about my hours. and it dawned on me that i’ve been walking around waiting for a fight, waiting for something bad to happen, ready to totally fucking attack. and i’m not sure why. let this go, and this go, and this go, because it’s time for absolute velocity in order to fight gravity.

we were fishing, no, not fishing, claimed to be fishing as a pretext for spending the afternoon sitting around, drinking and staring at clouds. the lines were out but there was neither hook nor bait at their ends. we could see glowing translucent animals, not fish, gathered in clusters out about twenty feet. we attempted to steer the boat thorugh the cluster but it kept away from us at approximately the same distance. we then left it alone, and for an hour nothing happened, until this fish split the water and landed inside the boat. it flapped back and forth until i picked it up and went to the side to release it, where i was hit in the chest by another fish. and another, and another. soon the boat was bottom-covered in fish, and i realized these fish were working together, were attempting to capsize the boat and kill us. this was the point at which we agreed to take action against the fish. and by action we weren’t talking afternoon fishing excursions, we were talking massive PCB infestation of heavy-breeding backwaters, we were talking oxygen depletion, we were talking stocking the lake with bio-engineered predators. what we soon discovered, after word of this crept out of town, was there was a market for such sport. once the lake had become a warzone between schools of militant fish and human aquaforming, high-dollar fishermen came from far and wide to pull one out of “the lake of fire”, as our local hole became known. yuppies tried to trade stories with the locals over zimas (ack) until we literally had to start beating ‘em off with sticks (and oars and branches and ice augers). one night we made a deal with the fish, breathing treaties through hollow reeds down to the riverbottom, coming to concensus that something had to be done, again. me and the boys all drive sweet high-end sport-utility vehicles with thousands of dollars worth of tackle and rods in the back, selling the pansy-ass booze to the local high-school kids cheap and chucking the cell phones in knutsun’s well. the fish live free of phosphorescent patches in the lake, the lake being uncontaminated through filtering, and even the genetically altered barracuda have settled down enough not to bug anybody. and the yuppies are nowhere to be found, though there’s a spot mid-lake where a diver could make a pretty penny salvaging rolexes.

one day you will realize something, something so perfect, something which moves the pieces of your life into a whole, something through which all things fit. you will tell yourself to remember this. you will insist on it. you will hold it before you, in your mind, but you will watch it fall away from you. this is a reminder of what that thing was.

I was living in the co-op, working afternoons/nights at the labs, buffing floors and cleaning offices. people who have done this work know there are three grades to such work: janitor, custodian, and maintenance. these terms are used interchangeably by pretty much everyone who doesn’t work these jobs. the janitor does the (literally) shitwork: cleaning bathrooms, taking out trash, so on. the custodian cleans things, mainly floors, occasionally furniture, but not windows; that’s a janitorial job. maintenance fixes and replaces things; they’re the ones who use the tools. at the time, i was a custodian, a low-level custodian (i took out recycling but not garbage; i cleaned offices but not bathrooms), but not a janitor. ed was a janitor. ed used to be a farmer, about thirty years worth, until his farm got sold at some point in the eighties. this was not an uncommon situation then (and still isn’t too uncommon now; many previously privately-owned farms are bought out by larger corporations, and since prices for grains and livestock are low at best, most settle for payment and relocation), and ed thought, at the time, that his position working at the labs would be temporary. nine years later he was old, slow, and beneath me on the employment hierarchy. i did not realize it (at least not consciously) at the time, but ed was also mentally deficient. doug (yet another in a long line of employers i have feuded with) stuck me with helping ed on mondays and tuesdays, effectively bumping me down to a janitor as payback for my constant tardiness. ed was (and possibly still is, i don’t know) a nice guy, if kinda hard to take at times. he would hit on various women we came across in the building by singing to them, singing horribly out of tune. you might remember i was in love with the dish girl at the time, and i spent those mondays and tuesdays positively dreading coming across her with ed in tow, belting out this roadkill-flat rendition of “anything goes” which never failed to make everybody in the area uncomfortable. on break, i would hang out with kwan and gina, who i only discovered in my last week there were lovers, and complain about freaky ed. kwan, who got hit on by ed more than anyone there with the possible exception of dorothy, would laugh and tell me to thank my lucky stars (her exact expression, she used it constantly) i wasn’t female. after three weeks of this, ed and i kinda worked out a routine, and though i still wasn’t happy about the job, i could at least breeze fairly easily through the night. one tuesday ed and i were doing one of the offices, which were always empty by this time, and he was talking about dorothy, and how he thought she had a thing for him. she didn’t, but i chuckled and muttered, which is how i’ve so far made my way through life. ed then suggested taking a short break, off the clock, and god knows i’m always up for that, so we sat down and looked at the screen savers and talked more about that, when i noticed ed was doing something odd. i got up from my chair to see if he was okay and i saw that he was masturbating himself, in the chair, talking about dorothy. i immediately left and didn’t go back that night. by next monday doug told me that ed wanted to work with somebody else and that i walked out on the job. he asked why and i said i didn’t know, i couldn’t explain. this is how i got assigned to clean up the animal experimentation labs.

we were probably drunk. we were certainly on something, something slow. there was a hole in the back of my head that my facial muscles were crawling toward, and the pain was blinding. i was so fucking sick of you. i was so tired of your mouth, of your smell, of your attempts to battle against me. i had bong water and urine all over my pants. my skin had the telltale diffused psychedelic glow. i couldn’t get up. you walked over to me and multicolored images fell into your shadow. i still couldn’t get up. you asked me if i was okay. you searched my eyes for evidence of brain trauma. i wanted a reason to beg for forgiveness. i wanted one thing in my life i could control. i wanted something to change, to end. you stared down at me, stupidly, waiting for something. i could smell your breath, the sweat from your body. you opened your mouth to a slack idiot smile. that’s when i hit you.

a separate planet for dogs, small children, and the easily tired was the crux of his platform. none of us expected to win. after we swept the competition away like so much confetti, we realized the predicament of our situation, and that our competition had done us the cold favor of giving us enough rope. little did they know we had our own space program, and our own collective of animal translators. after something like that, the rest of the time in office would be forgotten by history and we’d be off the proverbial hook. unfortunately in the inaugural address, our candidate claimed that his entire election was only possible thanks to booze. there’s a rarely used 1917 clause in the city charter that states that any politician who actively endorses “lewd behavior” (such as drinking, or skirts above the knee, or flappers) could be removed from office by a majority vote from the city council. we’re now using the election headquarters as a secret hideout, where we plot out revenge and make forts of the desks and chairs. politics is not a pursuit for the sophisticated.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time at the library. I rotate among the three libraries i frequently haunt (uni, waterloo public, CF public) in a weird triangle which fills up the afternoon nicely, even though i generally don’t find what i’m looking for at any of them, but that’s okay. today i ended my cycle at waterloo public, which is a weird library: i’ve been feuding with the librarians there for years over various stupid things. at this point we’ve kinda called a truce, i do my interlibrary loaning from CF and i don’t use the computer lab (heh) there anymore so generally there’s not much to fight over. anyway, i was in line, one of the chatty moms i always get stuck behind at waterloo public, talking to the librarian about their children while the mom checks out three hundred ten-page picture books for the little one in her yuppie baby-backpack. this mom and the librarian were talking about the mom’s plans for remodeling the house, which centered around a wrought iron staircase leading up to the bedroom with a waterfall falling down the middle. while i was puzzling how such a thing would work, the librarian said “i’d really like to move out to a space out kinda by hudson and build up an old mansion.” i was floored. i asked her, totally lost by this point, “how do you build an old mansion?” the librarian and the mom turned around and looked at me, and i stood my ground, it seemed like a reasonably logical question. the librarian then said “well, you build a mansion, only you build it with old things.” there was this kid behind me, middle-school ageish, and he started giggling, and then i started giggling, and then he started giggling again, and we couldn’t stop. i’m kinda suprised the librarian let me check out my books.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Marches Grotesque, one
Skull-reference: we spent the majority of this time working on architecture and tracking secondary body memory, on which I should explain: the storing of memory cues on the body, both as evident in the remains left post-disease infestation and intentional body-play, fingers run unconsciously over the childhood scars, the cramping I still get in my right knee. There is no such thing as a simple device for torture because such machines are fetishes in and of themselves as much as the act: history as the pebble in your shoe. Thus, the obvious thing to do at that point was build low, hold to the ground, stacked slats to force wind out and away. Unable to awake. a sightless vista god exhales across the flats the smell of rot and burning leaves and cold and water motion across the screen surface tension and shadows from a collection of rags and newspaper and equipment stolen from an abandoned drive-in, wasps nesting in car speakers. Such models left potentials open.

up and away, it said, up and away. i could never find the way through the rooms, so i had it tell stories while i was gone, to the bathroom, to the kitchen, and by the sound, the wound of the voice i could find my way back. i couldn’t remember how long it had been since i had stopped going to class, to work. “light-bringer. no survivors, no signal.” we kept the sinks filled with water and ice cubes in order to ward off contaminated spirits’ which one of us had to restock every two hours with fresh ice. our fingers all peanutbuttery, strobing christmas lights all over the walls of the hallways.

gopi: “cow-girl”. first manifestation of the god-in-earth was deformed, misfigured, and there was thus a second god, sent to slay the first, and through the course of this first battle the humans, godless so long, learned the meaning of law. we’d go driving and she’d climb out the window and scream at passing cars “KILL ME! BLOW ME THE FUCK AWAY!”, until i’d pull the car over, like a parent, and wait for her to start crying. NHI: no human involvement. as a child, she had a series of dolls she had built herself from the cannibalized parts of other dolls from her elder siblings. later, she began taking small objects and gluing them to the dolls, in order to make them more closely approximate the beings she had seen during fevers. later, when i had to look through her things, i saw a boxful of these creatures, Hopi dolls built from golf balls, pipe cleaners and severed barbie heads. she also left me a letter, which she wrote just before it happened. in the business and general confusion of that time i never managed to open it, and left it beneath a pile of ads and flyers. later, sorting and cleaning to keep myself busy and distracted, i came across the letter, which i did not open. which i have yet to open. as long as i leave it be, leave it closed, she still has one last thing to say to me, the conversation has yet to close. shabu-shabu, all the days were.

particle to field theory to cloud-cluster theory. i’d get my letters back with grammatical corrections. examining and electrically charting the energies of the subtle body (prana): pornography taken with Kirlean cameras. we became fixated on certain facial poses, mouth-shapes, the folds just below the ears which indicated breathing gills abandoned post-birth. days we spend, dusting the rooms, to see if any of her fingerprints remained.

About two years ago i was sent a package in the mail, no return address, sent to the people who lived in my house before I moved in, a year before. These people had left no forwarding address, and i usually just redirected the mail, dumping it in a public mailbox once a month, but this package obviously contained a videotape, and my patience with remailing was gone, and i was bored: this was the same summer i shaved off all the hair on my body just to have something to do. The tape was of a group of boys playing basketball over at Westwood School, a few blocks away. A voiceover informed the listener the boy had been abducted and would be killed unless a ransom was sent to a certain address. The camera followed one boy, mismatched socks, a part in his hair so severe it could only be put there by a mom. “I’m open!” the boy kept chanting, over and over, but (probably wisely, looking at the child) the other boys on his team refused to give him the ball. I must have watched the tape twenty times before i called the police and sent them to my house to pick up the tape and packaging. I never heard anything more on the subject, but since then i’ve spend my empty-time driving around, going nowhere, looking for this boy. I have seen three boys who almost look like him, but i cannot be sure, and I would not know how to check, other than watching him play basketball. I’m open, I’m open.

when santa claus returns from the dead, resurrected by the same benign cancers which the astronauts had been exposed to so many years ago, he’ll build small gifts of bone and half-gnawed muscle, searching for a means to escape the ground, and will die his second death after pulling pieces of his brain from his skull with small strands of wire in order to make children’s toys, confused, tired, searching for a grave in the snow. that christmas, all the children will find little slivers of bone in their stockings, small pieces of tissue tucked inside the head of dolls and animals. many parents will then have to explain to their children there is no such thing as santa claus, the truth of the matter being far too unsettling for the children to comprehend. saint nikalus, forever in the shadow of his Lord Jesus Christ, could not carry his weight, found himself lost in the lessons and the cold, unable to fight off the psychosis of flat windswept tundra, never learning that after his second coming, his children will begin the practice of cutting their thumbs off with gardening shears and leaving them on the doorsteps of those they love.

”### ## ######: a means of divining the future by judging the patterns formed by drops of blood placed into a bowl of clear water. the size and shape of the bowl, as well as the temperature, directly affect the accuracy of the readings, although different texts call for different variations in order to judge different life situations. it is as such that the entire field of fluid dynamics is essentially a means of fortune-telling technology, which is the unspoken (ad generally unconscious) distaste physicists have for the occult: sublimation and displacement of self-worth anxiety.”

we’d chase tree frogs through the water, ripples left like tracks in snow, until finally we’d catch one and hold it’s small green body up to our ears, listening, waiting for it to tell us something. all kinds of code words for the depression: “going to the circus” possibly being the most often used expression. “my mouth and throat all filled with the dry wing-husks of locusts.” in the evenings, all the people who lived around the lake would stand on the decks and balconies of their homes and pound slowly on huge plastic bottle-drums. this sound would confuse the bats, which would swoop and dive over the lake, hunting for unreal prey. the tree-frogs would cover the area with polyrhythmic chants and history-songs: there was a time when there were few mosquitoes, there was a time when cranes nested in the pond and all the animals were infected with their psychosis, all the same stories of sex and death every animal tells. i was always afraid then, searching the skies for thunderclouds. i knew the frogs knew the approach of such weather but they would not tell us. i tried to tell the homeowners this but they would not listen, content to drink their california wines and tell their summer-lodging stories and beat on their huge plastic bottle-drums. my attempts to find allegiance with the bats resulted in nothing. i knew there was a storm coming, and there was no one i could turn to for help. fed entirely on grubs and tufts of cotton soaked in lime-juice, my breath gained all the qualities of sour death, and when the adults would talk to me, tell me not to play in the street, keep me away from the dead animals at the side of the road, it wasn’t long before a look overtook them, a confused dullness, and they fled to their homes, their skulls closing in on them.

There was this guy I graduated with, I sat behind him in Physics, I Forget his name now. After graduating he spent a year like most of us, Doing college, soaking up questionable chemicals, selling plasma for food, living out of his van with his girlfriend Melissa and their big golden retriever in the parking lot of the seven-eleven where they worked. I remember Melissa’s name because i used to flirt with her in the small hours of the morning before I’d drive off at five to work at the rest stop, nothing more than friendliness, she’d let me swipe atomic fireballs and I’d buy the dog some food. This went on all summer, until one day I saw a big day-glo purple FOR SALE sign on the front of the van: the guy was going to head off to India to get his head together and Melissa and the dog were going to move into the apartment complex where I was living at the time. That day, at work, three people asked me what I was grinning about. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) I moved out of those apartments and stopped drinking my evenings away at the hotel bar across the street, moving out of Coralville entirely and into the house I shared with Kara and Jean/Heather, in the course of which, with my stupid trials and tribulations, I lost track of Melissa and her dog entirely. I look for her when I visit Iowa City, on weekends, but I have yet to see her, and probably never will, for i did run into my main man Frank Sinatra (the other Frank Sinatra) a couple weeks ago. Melissa apparently followed this guy to India, where he had been living with fakirs and learning body-manipulation in order to settle his mind and spirit. they talked, and fought, and she left India a week later, moving to Portland with a couple friends. This guy, however, spent another two years over there, learning to slow his heart rate and breathing until it appeared as though he were dead. He now uses this ability to con Vegas hookers into thinking he’s dead, in order to skip out on the bill. This trick worked a total of five times but failed him one night in north Vegas, where he had picked up a girl who looked exactly like Melissa (i didn’t ask frank how he knew this; frank’s one of those people who just knows things, he wouldn’t bring it up otherwise). She went to the bathroom to clean herself off, and when she came back, the guy was apparently dead. she checked his pulse and his breath with a compact mirror and sure enough he was. While moving his body out of the bed, her left hand brushed against his penis and she felt him come a second time, obviously not dead. she then called her manager, who came up to the room and beat the guy with two feet of steel pipe. Alone in the room afterwards, the guy tried to climb out of bed and to the door, falling forwards and hitting his head and right shoulder on the nightstand, his upper body falling to the floor, where fourteen minutes later he choked to death on his blood and vomit. frank and i later smoked some cheap hash and he alluded that the guy possibly wasn’t dead, and that the hooker possibly actually was Melissa, and that the guy had possibly killed himself, and that the guy would never have been with a hooker anyway because he’d been on heroin for years, leaving him impotent, the true reason he and Melissa split up, and India was his failed plan for detox. And all i could think about was “i wonder if she’s seeing anybody right now”.

I was driving back from CF, taking the interstate, in the dark section where the lights hang too high and everything is swept in shadow even during cloudy days. On the rotted stretch of road between the yellow line and the cement guardrail I saw interstate debris, half-seen in the motion and white trails and the darkness; tire pieces, bags of unidentifiable refuse, animal parts. I thought I saw someone sorting through this trash with a long metal pole, searching for something of value or use, but that couldn’t be, anymore than I saw those children on the overpass dropping pets onto the road. Do the dead carry their wounds to heaven? When the children of airplane crashes stand before god, are they small nebulae of blood and bone? Do lovers, upon rediscovering each other after years of being alone, find themselves terrified by the touch of hands burst and bloated with black-blue blood, the broken ribs pushing through the chest? Do they dare never kiss lips gnawed at by mosquitoes and disease? or do they come back as they once were, younger, their infirmities fixed? do the dead get back their fingers, their sight, their dignity? Are they now idealized, the person they always wanted to be? Or are they all the same, one platonic ideal of the perfect human? When you step through those gates, are you still you? Does it matter? You ever hold a secret over someone else? Some small piece of truth they want left hidden, a bond only you and them (and the parties their secrecy directly made implicit) share? Did you dangle that threat or did you keep your mouth shut? Did you snitch, squeal, rat? When you learned that your employer pays a janitor every other week to let him lick the rancid fluids from the floor of a peepshow booth, did you swell with the power held in those few words? When you later learned that a friend of yours audiotaped all the conversations they had with their ex, did you spill the beans? If God was talking to you, right now, who would you tell?
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

little girls
This was a number of years ago; I was in high school, wasting a Thursday night with a couple friends driving around pretending enough roaming would unearth adolescent treasure. It was winter, and the streets were frozen, sheets of ice from drift to drift, and up ahead of us we saw headlights arc left and right across the road and spin out to blackness. We slowed, searched for tracks off the road. This was out by North Cedar Elementary (I think it’s elementary), where there’s a road that cuts out toward the highway, out by the airport, so that if you keep going you come up behind the crash embankments at the end of the runway, set on this flat plain where flood runoff from the Cedar comes right up to the dirt road in the spring, curbless, so that in the frozen-over winter one could drive right out onto the river and not even know it. This is what had happened to the other car, slammed through a truck-mounted plowed bank (the city trucks never came out this far into the sticks) and slid out onto the Cedar. It occured to us that the car could go through the ice, and we were too far from a phone (we’d have to go back to the gas station back on old 218, maybe even across the river to old downtown; I don’t remember if any of the convenience stores in North Cedar were 24-hour at the time, and it must have been at least one in the morning), so we stopped, got out, and called out to the other car. There was no reply. The headlights went out over the river, but the engine had killed in the spin. It was very quiet. We talked about whether it would be better to stay on the road or to go out, to add to the weight, but isn’t the shore further out, and not this far at this time of year, and even so isn’t it not all that deep for quite a ways out, being a floodplain and all, and though we couldn’t see any trees to server as bank and depth markers we weren’t sure of any of this, this wasn’t our neighborhood (which was the reason we were out here, promised some sort of backwoods promise, of the place off the edge of the map), and there was no way to know. We called out again, got out the flashlight and knocked it against my thigh to get the batteries to connect, let the thin light dribble out, short of the car. We were young, and not very smart, so we went out, one by one, to the car.

Inside we found two young children, both girls, who were working together in order to drive the car, one steering while the other worked the pedals. There were suitcases in the back seat, which had opened in the crash; a half-dozen shirts and personal effects and nothing else. The girls were conscious, breathing, but refused to acknowledge us, to reply to our arguments, sprawled out in overly dramatic poses, one on the seats and the other on the floor, tongues sticking out of their mouths. We knocked on the windows. The children ignored us. The heat of the car seeped away, and the chill caused the to shiver, but still they would not get up, would not unlock the door, would not pay any heed to our crazy talk of rivers and ice and death.

We decided the best thing to do was to go back across the river and make a call from Happy Chef, or ask one of the everpresent overnight cops hanging out there to go out and bring the children in. There were no police there, but there was a large man with a truck and tow chains, caught up in the drama, and after we called the police we had him follow us back out there, only to find nothing. The car had been brought back onto the road and driven back to where it came from, assumedly. The truck-man pointed out the second tracks out off the road, another truck which had pulled in the car. I noticed the cloud of footprints out in the snow near the site where the car was. There was a chase. That’s all we could tell. The truck-man shrugged, asked us if we wanted a beer, and that’s how we met Trenchcoat Larry.

I never heard of the two little girls again.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

lilypads
My dad used to take his boat out into the far end of Durnal Lake, drifting into the lillypads, and fish would jump up into the boat and they’d have a short conversation, until my dad would then put them back in the water and they’d swim away.

“What you been up to?” my dad would ask.

“Swimming around. Eating.”

My dad, who only managed to get a couple free weekends a year to go talk to fish, would nod and say “Yeah, that sounds pretty nice.”
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Lawsuit!
“What the FUCK?”

Earlier today I was contacted by a band of unruly lawyers in the legal stables of Warner Brothers Studios, who presented me (via a one hundred and seventeen page letter) a cease-and-desist order on the use of Huey Kablooey, demolitions expert, bon vivant and gadabout. Apparently the WBS television program “Animaniacs” features a character entitled “Katie Kaboom” (actually, apparently nothing, this is how I spend most of my free time when I’m not out back working on the war cannon or selling passes on the highly-classified and officially-unacknowledged “black schoolbusses” to impressionable and dimwitted schoolchildren) who bears absolutely no resemblance to our good friend Huey, other than the name thing. Alas, I am but a poor man, and do not have the kind of legal weight to mess with the big boys, and as such I regretfully inform scrytch that from this point on, there will be no more Huey Kablooie.

“That’s just swell, Hoss, but you know perfectly well I’m not gonna take a dive before I cause a major ruckus. You do understand this, right?”

Absolutely. It’s your nature.

“Okay, first off, I got a few words I gotta say before I take my bow. First off, I wanna give a shout-out to all my homiez in the DB Child And Small Animal Army, s’pecially my man Harry The Dairyman…”

Oh, about that. I’ve actually been informed by Johnson Dairies that the name “Harry the Dairyman” is a copyrighted character of theirs, and he’ll be stepping out here just after you to take his final exit.

“Harry!”

“Can’t be a dancer when The Man owns your feet, I always say. Don’t you fear, little pumpkinhead, we’re not the only ones. There’s Bomberman, who obviously got his axe via the re-release of the actual game. And apparently Jimmy Cheerios has broken certain sub-clauses in his contract, so he’s out, i mean, it’s gonna be downright desolate.”

“But this…this cannot be! RIOT IN THE STREETS!”

“No, for this is the way of all things, and there is a logic inherent in this process, though…nah, fuck it, you’re right. Education via terror! Go go go!”

The kids sent a letter of petition against their respective companies which read “You can play your fucking song all you want — we ain’t dancin’!”

Retribution was swift and brutal.

“They reposessed my fucking legs! I went to sleep and when I woke up there was a reciept of forfeiture and a blood trail! How the fuck am I supposed to run around acting a fool with no legs, huh?”

Others were even less fortunate than Huey Kablooey: Harry the Dairyman was completely confiscated and is now in some beaurocratic limbo from which it is unlikely he’ll ever escape. In the interim, in the interests of our loyal readers, the role of Harry the Dairyman (who will hereafter be known as Harold Dryrot) will be played by Greatest American Hero star William Katt.

Hijinx are a lot harder when you no longer have the financial safety cushion of the Baulercorp. per diem to fall back on. Huey decided that since they already had his legs, that he’d be better off to let the firm take all of him (which, it should go without saying, led to his singing “all of me” while pushing himself around in a shopping cart with a broom outside the lawfirm of Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe, which was the last we’ve seen of him) and, with the exception of the members of fuck the beatles, who were touring the illustrious Gilbertville-Elk Run-Jessup circuit at the time, I’m the only one not in custody or in hiding. Something must be done.

The switchboard at ABWH, Attourneys At Law has 48 seperate phone sex lines, which is where all callers on hold are forwarded to. That’s the kind of money these people have. They’ve also discovered that nothing frustrates a potential irate caller than the instant shift from checking to see if the office door’s locked to being on the business end of a five-way conference with the fiscal assualt response team, which has brought the most delinquient of late-payment cases to fits of fear-induced urination in under two minutes. We learned all this by hanging around the lobby for half an hour, over lunch, last Monday. We also learned that Steve, the receptionist, in the 97th steve in his family, which for centuries was a family of farmers (though that kinda petered out into more menial labor once they reached America) — in fact, it was one of the earliest Steves whose swine were filled with the demons which had once possessed his neighbors Erp and Zeke, two other names which have passed through the years. Jesus happened to be in the area, and cast out the demons into Steve’s swine, which ran madly through the streets and into the sea. Jesus then whisked off with his enterouge in their boat to another land, leaving Steve’s family to eat dirt sandwiches that season. At least, this is how Steve the receptionist tells it. Some people just can’t let go of a grudge.

We can appreciate that. After all, all this lunchtime super-secret spy business isn’t just for chuckles; during this time calls have been made, arrangements are set. It’s been a while since we’ve had an old-fashioned jailbreak.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

I kings 13:24-28
once, just barely no longer a child
i was asked to lie in a field of wheat grown on charnel-blood.
my body’s shape marked by bent and broken stalks,
i was to look between specific stars
until a message was spelt for me in the heavens.
there were half-birthed animals, out there in the fields,
dogs with cracked cartiledge for paws,
calves without eye sockets.
they were made sick by the pull of the stars,
searching the ground for a hole to die in.
i could hear the slow slack breathing of other people,
searching the same skies,
the light broken by the tears turned to hoar’s frost in their eyes.
years passed, and we collected moisture in our lungs,
decayed memories of ligotti, ruysbroeck,
the index left of our shared carnal sin,
you asking me to identify the stains which remained —
cloud-bodies, ink losing form in water.
when they had left me, when i had emptied,
i beheld a vision of the horned moses.
betrayed by jerome and cursed by the eternal memory of the church,
a mumbled exegesis as to my misunderstanding
of elijah as the first of the weather-prophets,
of which i may be the last
(should these truly prove to be the end days).
were i a prophet, i was told,
i would be sent to fufil deed and premonition,
not to make speeches and frayed book-parts.
what, then, i spoke through cracked lips and dried throat,
of ezekiel, of jeremiah? what, then, of you?
my tendons severed and my limbs grown as roots,
i ached to turn myself to face him,
but my eyes would only lie, my sight mislead.
you know nothing of which you speak, he told me,
and i knew to the bottom of me that he was right.
in the distance, i heard the approach of the beast.

these is but one moment,
and all things contained within.
my name has been stripped from me,
betrayed by kings and cursed by the eternal memory of the church,
and now i am but the blood from which the wheat feeds,
and though my imprint remains in the grain
we know, all, it is over.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Joyful
It was my job, in the end days, to check the harnesses of all the angels, which I was all about as it put me within touching distance of the beautiful sepharim, who were very lovely and yet very cold; there was no juice or throb to them. All things considered, however, it was a perk, in the way that hanging with meth-addled post-Russian chanteuse-ballerinas can be good for one’s self-esteem. The actual closing shop on the real didn’t seem to trouble them much; just another gig, no different from orbiting Mary in Fantima or appearing over Kansas cornfields roundabout Christmastime. The seraphim bobbed their heads to avoid hair-mussing drafts and smoked constantly, sharing bored gossip as to who will sit where at the time of revelation. The employment package for grunt-work such as this guarantees one a spot with the 14,400 ascended but beyond that it’s a crapshoot, most likely ending up in an antiseptic white duplex out in the great hosannah’d suburbs of the farthest sphere, where Beatrice is still waiting for Dante in a horrible form in the back seat of a ‘57 Chevy. Bobby Kennedy once said we live in times of danger and uncertainty, which not feeling the point was driven home by his brother, led him to make this apparent through his own actions, and the actions of those to follow his blood-line. The seraphim are constantly discussing the Kennedys. Their bones are black and hollow, polished internally to a sheen one can see through their alabaster skin, and I fear they will shatter as I lace up the corset-harnesses, whalebone and opal and lilac. JFK is in heaven, quoting from Luke, waiting for his throng of admiring angels to gather around and behind him, out on the periphery so as to fully view the earthbound spectacle ahead. I had ribbons tied around my wrists and pins in my mouth, trying to get the fitting right. The seraphim drank mochas and watched the sky.
(12:08.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

A Joke For The Edificaion Of Travellers And Lost Souls
On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, jeffff (!) wrote: “A pirate, a priest and a monkey with a jack-o-lantern walk into a bar.”

The town where this bar was housed was in a country which had just gone over to a thoughtless variant of misunderstood and impoverished communism, which (in the heady rush of the government-in-transition) led many to tear down temples and churches of all faiths — massive corruption and opulence on the part of high-ranking clergy had led many to view the church as the primary cause of poverty and strife in this country. Thus, church officials were treated as traitors to the new state, whom all good patriots were to bring in before the junta to be tried and executed for their crimes against the people. As is often the case during the dangerous days after such a violent coup, many smaller towns found themselves unprotected by an organized governmental army or police force, and thus were laid open to plunder by bands of roving pirates. Many of the small towns in the hillsides to the south have been completely abandoned after repeated sackings had left the villagers still living nothing left to have stolen, leading to beatings and slaughter by the banditos. In order to secure public faith in the revolutionary forces just now getting the fit of the vestments of power, deputized villagers have been armed from the state arsenal and let loose on the land, ordered to shoot to kill any persons suspected of piracy. Certain of these militia bands, getting a taste for such a life, become pirates themselves, stealing from the original thieves, instituting a hierarchy of kickback and payoff as per the express design of the infant government.

The people of the town in which our bar resides have been fighting the “mola t’kh”, the monkey-army, for the past three thousand years, since back before the mountains were closed off by rock and ruin, back in the days when the lost legion of vayu entered this place and forgot their meaning, entering into bloody conflict with the people who had made homes near the rivers, crops of the vegetation, and “nature” of what once was everything. In the late summer nights, of which this night is one, the townspeople set aside talk of the old revolution and the new government and sing ballads of children carried off and eaten by the mola t’kh, of the victories their ancestors must have had (for was it not they, and not the monkeys, who had brought civility and order to the darkness?), and, drunk off the extracts of the tree-roots, fire pistols into the brush, taunting any foolish monkey to try to take their children.

These three should know better than to show face in the village, much less in the bar, where all those not sleeping are spending away the small hours, but they know nothing, having been made dumb by a vision they had shared while crossing the bridge.

Upon entering, the priest says “I have seen a most terrifying thing in the stars, a vision which has wrapped around and gnawed at my soul, and I cannot believe in any god who would allow such a thing. I defy the church, I defy god, and I need a drink, immediately.”

Following immediately after, the pirates says “I too have seen a most terrible thing, the form of which has brought me to a level of baseness which deserves not even the most menial of sustenance. I abandon the wealth and power I have stolen from the people and ask only that you provide me with drink enough to steady my nerves, so that I may go back out into the night and take my own life.”

On the heels of the pirate, the monkey enters the bar and says “As has the others, I have seen a most dreadful image in the stars, and I know now that I deserve not to wear the fur of my birth. My life has been a disgrace to my true masters, and vayu looks upon me as you people do, with disgust and loathing. I will walk back out into the night wearing only my skin, carrying this totem of my shame, and will never speak a word again, but I am afraid, and need a drink before I begin my vow of disgrace.”

The people in the bar sat in silence. Hours of drinking have left them emotional, months of conflict and warfare have left them drained, and talk of star-visions wells up as a thick black fear in their bellies. The bartender, who has spent too many nights in the arms of a vodka-stupor and knows that “permanent revolution” is nothing more than the abstract name of ghouls feeding on ghouls, is certain that letting these three into his bar will result in his execution come morning. The bartender no longer cares. Let it all come down, he sighs under his breath, and pours three shots of his finest for three who had entered the furnace and shat themselves in fear.

“I will give of you all the drink you can swallow, but you must tell me, what is the vision you saw? What could bring you to such states?”

The priest says “We were on the bridge, comparing our trials, speaking of all the terrible things we had seen as pariahs in your world, attempting to best the others with our depravity and suffering. As we were reaching a nadir, there was a light in the sky, and we fell onto our bellies in dear, covering our eyes, terrified.”

As the priest stopped to drink, the pirate continues the story —

“I’d seen things so terrible I’d rather remember nothing than have to see them again, but this, this was a thing much worse than any of that. I…I cannot speak of it, cannot, cannot find the words…”

The monkey comes to the aid of the pirate, saying “There is no understanding it! There is no way to speak of it! It is the absence of all hope, of all love! Better you never know of such a fate, so as to perhaps protect yourself, so as not to spend your handful of remaining days as we must!”

The bartender, pouring a second round of shots into the empty glasses, says “but we all know of the vision in the stars, for we have all seen it. It is the thing which turns the heart of the righteous into the tool of the tyrant, the seed of decay in that which lives. It is that which keeps us clinging to the ground, rolling all the same stones, consoling yourself with the litanies of stupidity woven into history. We all stare at that idol, and we all bow. We all cave and cower at the vision in the stars. The only solace left us is to align ourselves with the vision, to prey on those freshly-blinded, to tell ourselves ours is but a small evil in a world of great and gross wrongs. That we meant well.”

While the barkeep gave his speech, the patrons gathered around the three pariahs, pulling long knives from beneath their clothes, wiping the spit from their mouths with their sleeves.

As the three travelers lay in pieces on the floor of the bar, sawdust stained with blood, the three look at each other, knowing they have walking into the star-vision, and as their life pumps out of their bodies, the pirate laughs.

“What? what is it?” asks the priest.

“The thing of it is we weren’t even the first. Not even the first tonight.”

“Why do you say that?” asks the monkey.

“Well, that’s not *my* wooden leg!”
(12:08.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Me And Janice And My Xmas Vacation
Janice, I knew I wouldn’t get a chance to talk to you before you arrived at my parent’s house for the holidays. I’m certain you’ll be fine, and I think I’ve covered most of the major areas, but I thought I’d leave you this note just to cover some last-minute sorts of things and because I love you. Awwww. So anyways the big thing I didn’t say before is that you have to be super-careful not to tell Dave that his skull looks weird because he spent a lot of money on that skull and yeah so maybe it’s a little crooked, but crooked is a million times better then when you would be eating dinner and then just whoof his whole forehead would just collapse, so just say it looks good (he really likes “distinguished”) but don’t touch it unless he asks you to. If you find yourself trapped in the lower rec room, do not panic: there is a doorway, and you will find it as soon as you stop looking for it. If one of the kids throws you a flashlight, immediately throw it to someone else: Tuxedo the dog has been trained to attack sources of light, and if you don’t get rid of it quickly he’ll clamp onto your hand, and even though it doesn’t hurt much because of the paralyzing toxins in his saliva you’ll end up laid out on the floor for an hour, and take it from me, no one will help you up, that’s part of the game. Oh! there’s a hiding room behind the fridge where you can go if you need to cry or do any drugs; I built it when I was in high school. Sheelee will borrow things from you in order to cast curses, but they’re good curses (unless you get on her bad side, which you really can only do if you fuck up her car), and the glow around you from her spells will get you special seating at the adult’s table, while those lacking the halo end up at the kids and midgets and dogs table. She might also try to sell you used diapers from her latest baby but that baby is not the messiah any more than her other six children were, their spirits all broken, their careers as potential children of god over before they could even get into Menudo. You might think about bringing up the election fiasco as well, but you probably shouldn’t, because Grampy used to challenge George Bush Sr. to a pistol duel every single day for over two years outside the White House due to some sort of obscure CIA paycheck Grampy didn’t get back in 1961 for his role in what he cryptically calls “the Skytop event” until finally one day George agreed to the duel in the Cerulean Room during which Grampy claims there were at least three additional sharpshooters hidden in the room at the time and thus there was no way for him to win the duel, so he’s still got an axe to grind, and he’s not very pleased with George’s son either, so. When the family talks about “the surface world”, they’re just talking about the surrounding suburb. The computer screens in the unused kitchen shows immediate real-time results in Vocal Copyrighting markets, the buying and selling of spoken phonemes by various children whose parents have sold their vocal patterns to advertising and design houses, who use them in different markets depending on the effects their voices have on potential clients and audiences; this is how Askhaf can afford those narcotic eggnog he’ll bust out Christmas Eve. The government did not really pay Lutis to burn his crops. Yes I won the Black Hawk County Rodeo Queen award in ‘86; no there is no Rodeo King award, and when I said Drunk Oly got his final revenge on God with his Satellite Gun, I didn’t realize your folks would get all upset about that, so don’t go all off the handle now. I mean, even if you are getting older, you still got the prettiest tits in nine counties, and that’s no lie. Supper’s ready, so I should sign off. See you soon.
(12:08.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

The Ballad of Cowboy James
We hadn’t been there more than three months before we got our walking papers. Cowboy and I had just come into work, strapping on the kevlar and zipping up our orange JPWA jumpers when King told us we weren’t working today. Three months is a really long time to do professional witness work; most people were out after a week, but Cowboy was there when I started and probably a month before that, even, so he and I were the two biggest kids on the block by then. We’d come in a little late, leave a little early, wouldn’t get uptight about talking to the citizens when we were on rounds. I’d managed to get by with nothing more than a couple shots taken at me, but Cowboy still had bruises from where some fucking kid winged him with a deer slug. You don’t know what, oh, okay. Professional witness is somebody who gets paid to stand around somewhere where there’s a lot of street crime, so that if an incident happens the witness can testify. The cops make a donation to Jourgenson Witness Protection Agency and some measly amount of that trickles down to the actual witness. The money part is if the victim or the victim’s family wants to press charges they can make a direct payment to the witness, which I guess is kinda like tips. The only bad part about the whole setup is if somebody decides they’re gonna plug some guy on the street they start looking around for the witness, you know, so as to make it a clean hit, but we’re so fucking padded that unless you can drop a fridge on ‘em or something the cops’ll be there before you even get through the first layer, so why bother.

So King comes in and tells us to take the day off because he’s closing up shop. JWPA has been dodging lawsuits from all over the place over “the illegality of coercive witnesses” but these tend to disappear after certain people move certain influence over certain other people. Turns out what’s really the case is the supercooled gel they use in the second layer to slow projectiles has been springing leaks and supercooling some of the witnesses, which lead to the kinda of lawsuits that influence I was talking about earlier doesn’t have any influence over. I heard this later, from Ali, king of the Bosnian homeboys. “Always with the fucking with me and us, that King, man he such a, how do you say it, a motherfucker punk, man.” Ali spent two years at Srpski Brod; kids with .45’s couldn’t scare him less. Dammit, I’m drifting again.

So anyway me and Cowboy head over to Tzherhyd’s, just down the street, where Ali and Smiljan have been drinking Early Times all morning and can barely tell Cowboy and me what really happened, which I already told you about. Somewhere in there I get to telling Cowboy about what I’m gonna do with my last paycheck, which King had ready for us as a parting gift, along with our MEDALERT: NO BLOODBOURNE PATHOGENS badges, and apparently somewhere in there I made a crack about starting my band back up. There’s very few things I know about Cowboy: he used to be a trucker but multiple DWIs brought that job to a close, he used to be married, and he really really wants to play in a band, only he can’t play and he can’t sing. I mean, he can sing, but he can’t sing well, it’s like if you took Merle Haggard and you kept punching him in the throat while feeding him whiskey he’d maybe sound like Cowboy James. So he’s been drinking and I’ve been drinking and we’re both really pissed off about having to find new work and Ali and Smiljan keep goading us on, laughing their asses off, and finally I say “Look, man. You can’t sing. I mean, that’s nothing against you, but that’s just all there is to it.” And the next thing I know Cowboy James has a fucking gun in my face.

“I highly recommend you take back that comment immediately, son.”

Everybody else in the place gets quiet, except for Ali, who keeps giggling and mumbling “Bitches is very crazy, man, very crazy…”

“James, you put that fucking gun down right now.”

“No, no. you take it back. I ain’t killed nobody all day, don’t make me start now.”

“You put that gun down, we’ll step outside, we can have a talk like civilized people.”

“We’ll go outside. And we’ll duel.”

Cowboy James reaches into his bag and pushes an identical Glock 18 across the table. I can barely even stand up, but fortunately Johnny-on-the-spot Ali helps me to my feet and puts the gun in my hand and the three of us stagger outside while Smiljan calls the cops.

We must have been in the bar for hours because it was cold and snowing and just a totally miserable February night. I’m walking through slush and shit on the way to the back alley and I can’t even tell which direction I’m going and even with Ali helping me I have to keep one hand on the wall to keep from falling over. I’m pretty sure I pissed myself at some point. I yelled to Cowboy, who had already fallen in a heap about three paces shy of ten that there was no way we were gonna fucking duel tonight, we’re too drunk and it’s too cold and we’ll have out our differences tomorrow, midnight sharp. Cowboy lets out a grunt of approval just before passing out, and by means I don’t really understand, somehow I made it home.

For the next two weeks, Cowboy James and I would get together around three in the afternoon at Tzherhyd’s, drinking up the remainder of our paychecks only to discover each night we were too intoxicated to duel. I realized this would only go on for so long, but I didn’t see any other alternatives, though I admit I didn’t try very hard. Booze was cheap, particularly if you exclusively drank Cornhusker Vodka Brown Label, which was factory defective runoff stolen from the back dumpster behind the refinery down in Traer. Moia ran the vodka through cheesecloth to siphon out the flecks of paint, and at ten cents a shot, you’d never notice the difference after about six of ‘em. So this continues on until it becomes a treat for the locals to watch the two drunk Americans make asses of themselves in the alley every night, taking odds, cheering us on. Finally, right about the time I was starting to seriously think about spending my last fifty on a bus outta town, Cowboy comes in, stone cold sober, and asks me to take a ride with him. Cowboy isn’t supposed to be driving, but chances are he wasn’t supposed to be carrying around handguns under his coat either; he wasn’t the sort of person to take the law into consideration. We spend about twenty minutes driving south, past the meat-packing plants and the tractor factories and the abandoned refineries and trailer parks, until we get just north of the interstate. He pulls over and tells me to get out, he’s got something to show me.

It had been snowing all day and had only gotten worse since the sun went down, but with the clouded over and nothing around for miles but radio towers and power lines, I knew exactly what he wanted me to look at. There was a billboard with this little girl, maybe eight, and she was sitting in front of this huge hamburger with everything on it, and fries and a shake and the whole deal. She was grinning from ear to ear, and you could see this airbrushed glowing crown on her head, like it was a halo or something, and beneath it read “Make ‘em feel special tonight”. I remember that like I was looking at it right now. Cowboy James didn’t say a word for about five minutes, we just stood there.

“I got a couple kids, I dunno if I ever told you about that. I ain’t seen ‘em in forever, the wife has this restraint order on me and since I’m telling the truth anyway I kinda haven’t really wanted to see them all too much for a while. I kept hoping maybe I’d get it together or something and then I could go back, but since I lost my rig and she found out I was chasin’ pussy on the side anyway, I mean, shit man. She ain’t gonna take me back, kiss that shit goodbye, you know? I mean, those girls just walk right up to the door and start flashin’ their tits right at ya, I mean, these Mexican girls, I could get two of ‘em bangin’ each other while they suck me off for like ten bucks each, I mean, shit, man…”

“You don’t have to explain none of that to me, James. That’s a million years ago.”

“You’re right, man, you’re exactly right. Shit, it don’t take much brains to see you’re the one who’s had the college, huh? I mean…fuck man, it’s just fucking fucked, is all. I spent ten years saving up to buy that rig and then I got it just the way I wanted it, I got it all painted nice and put a real nice stereo in there and everything and I fucked it up. I used to go out and sit up there and look out at the lawn, and the kids’d be playing there, and I’d just sit there, I wouldn’t even drink, I’d just be thinking about everything. You might not believe that, but it’s the God’s honest truth.”

“I believe you. I got no reason not to believe you.”

“So I can’t work, right, and I have to sell the rig to keep food on the table, and I tried to work at this restaurant, y’know, washing dishes and shit, and this kid, this like fifteen year old punk kid starts yelling at me because I’m not getting the milk out of the bottom of the glasses. And I’m just thinking about how much I’d like to just shove that glass right in his face, you know? So I just walked right out, and I was so mad I just walked all the way home and when I got there and told Sandy about it she just started crying. I slept out on the porch that night, with the dog, with that damn flea-eating dog, and when I got up Sandy had all my stuff all packed. And that was pretty much it. We signed papers and shit later, but that was the last, the last time I really saw her. Or my kids. Those kids, Jayne for sure, she’s just getting to that age where they stop saying shit you say and they start saying their own shit that they made up themselves, and it’s like ‘what the fuck’, you know? It’s so cool. Kids,man, kids are just fucking cool. I had no idea, man. I mean…I mean I had no idea.”

“Yeah.”

“All that stuff I got so mad at ‘em for, it’s just, I don’t even remember why I even got like that. I can’t even remember.”

We sat there and didn’t say anything for a good while longer.

“So fuck this duel business, because I got something I gotta do first. Get in the car.”

And Cowboy James and I drove back north, back into town.

—-

We pulled up in front of this trailer, bikes in the front lawn, and I told him we shouldn’t be there. “James,” I was saying to him just the whole time, I was saying “James, listen man, let’s just go back and do some more drinking and we’ll talk about it, you don’t need to be fucking with them now, it’s one in the morning, c’mon.”

“They’re up. Jayne, she has trouble getting to sleep because she’s trying not to pee the bed but she can’t do it, so I know she’s up. And Josh, well, yeah, Josh sleeps like a log, but I know he’ll get up for food, that kid don’t never miss a meal.”

“Listen, man, how about we do ths tomorrow, during the day, it’ll be better then and you and me can work this whole thing out, okay?”

“No, I think instead we’ll do it now. And you’re coming with me, or I swear I’ll shoot you right where you sit.”

We got out and walked around to the door, which had one of those cheap-ass locks they put on every trailer that you can just push open, but apparently Sandy had installed a deadbolt since James left because that door would not budge. He tried pushing it, then shoving it, and then getting a running start and jumping up the steps to slam into it, which woke up everybody in the trailer. I heard a voice inside shushing the kids, then speaking, quietly, “James? James, you can’t be here anymore. You gotta go.”

“Sandy, listen, I know that it’s real late and I’m sorry, I mean, I’m sorry for everything, and I know that I can’t make anything okay but please, all I wanna do is take my kids out to dinner with their old man, okay? That’s all I want and then I promise I’ll leave you alone, okay? Okay?”

“There is no way you’re leaving here with my kids, there is just no way, I know you’ll do something and there’s no way so just don’t even think about it, just sleep it off.”

“Noooooo! No I don’t need to sleep it off because I ain’t drinking and I know I wouldn’t take the kids out if I’d been drinking and all I wanna do is this one thing, so just open the door, baby, just please let me do this one thing and I’ll never come around again. I’ll never come around again.”

I didn’t hear anything for a minute, then I saw a pair of eyes peek out from a crack in the door. “You promise? You promise this is the last time?”

“I promise. And you know I always keep my word, you know that,Sandy.”

The door opened. I could tell Cowboy James had been by here before, that she had seen him stagger in here before, that she had had that gun in her face before. It was like she wasn’t really there. She went in and told the kids to get dressed and went back into the living room, where she sat on the couch and got out a cigarette and stared at the ground. I tried to look at her, like maybe I could tell her that it would be okay, but she wouldn’t look up. I was sick, and the heat inside the trailer was up so high that I started sweating under my thermals. I tried to think of something to do.

After forever, the kids were dressed and wandered out to stand next to Sandy, who I think was crying but I couldn’t tell because I couldn’t see her face. James said “Hey there, pardners, I stopped by to take you out for hamburgers, how’s that sound?” and the kids stared at him, like they were waiting for the first blow. I think I et go of something in my mind then, and I felt like I had fallen backwards into myself, like I was looking out from layer after layer after layer until I could barely even see what was happening. James told me it was time to go, and we all filed out into the cold, and I think Sandy may have looked up then but I couldn’t tell.

James had all these jokes he knew that he cleaned up so he could tell his kids, only when you took the cuss words and stuff out they didn’t make any sense, but they kids pretended to laugh. I looked at the mirror and I watched the lights go by until we got to the restaurant. Nobody was there; it was two am on a Wednesday morning, the post-bar rush not coming anywhere near this place. James says he’ll pay for me and slugs me in the arm and laughs and I look at him. The waitress gives us water and James asks the kids what they want but they don’t know. “I think you’ll really like the hamburgers,” he says. The kids get the hamburgers. James gets a hamburger. I drink my water.

James asks the girl, Jayme, how school is. Fine. You learn anything new lately? No. You seen anything good on tv? No. I was looking for one of those little dollies you like so much but I couldn’t find any. They don’t make those anymore, dad. Oh. And I don’t really like that stuff very much now, really. Well, well yeah, I mean, you’re bigger than the last time I saw you so that makes sense. Yeah.

“Kids, wait until you see the hamburgers here. They’re so big you gotta hold ‘em with two hands, and they put on all the good stuff you like. And there’s fries and a shake too, though you have to clean your plates because we don’t go out all the time anymore like we used to.”

“We never went out.”

“No, we did, I think it’s just that you don’t remember because you were little then. It was a long time ago, I guess.”

I could barely hear any of this, because at the time I was floating. I was up, out of my head. I was looking at myself and I thought, hey, look, there I am. And I went up into a place where I hadn’t been in a long time. First time I was probably seven, maybe eight, spending a few days with my brother and my neighbor Tony at his dad’s cabin, out on the Mississippi river. Out walking around on the ice, watching fishermen in their shacks, kicking a hockey puck around with our feet until it slid into an ice fishing hole and went under. Then we were kinda bored so we hung out by the boathouses and I got this idea to go walking by where the ice was kinda thin, I don’t know why, I mean I knew it was stupid but I did it anyway. So I did. And I heard the ice start to crack and headed back and then the next thing I knew I was under the water. I clawed up and my hands touched the ice. And I knew I couldn’t breathe but I tried and the water poured in my lungs, cold and black and heavy and and I moved over where I thought the hole was and I was wrong and I kinda was sure I was dead then and a hand grabbed me and pulled me up on the ice. My dad looked at me and said “Boy, sometimes you are just bone stupid.”

The second time, well first I was in the navy for a few years and was gonna go off to college and I actually did for a year and a half, and I probably could have done better but sometimes things you know, they happen, and I had to come back to town, did me some fucking around and getting in trouble and told a couple high school girls I had to leave school to help my dad with the bills and got one of ‘em pregnant. So we got married and I settled down a little and we got half a duplex out by the school, which I thought was funny but I don’t think she did. So me and Lynn-Anne (that’s her name) tried to get new jobs because we were gonna start having adult bills soon but that didn’t work out so well but I didn’t worry too much about it because we were gonna have a baby which (and I’ll be straight-up here) kinda scared me some for a while but I kinda liked it after I got used to it. My cousin john and my old neighbor Tony both had kids and it didn’t slow them down any and they seemed pretty happy most of the time, really. So I was gonna be a dad, and I was pretty happy.

So one night Lynn-Anne got to screaming and we got in the car and headed to St. Joseph and they took her in and strapped her down and asked me if I wanted to watch and I wasn’t sure but I thought, well, I didn’t think anything at all but it was like something in my head made a choice for me and I said sure. So for a loooooooong time I’m standing there trying to think of something helpful to do and telling her to breathe or something and getting coffee when the doc told me it would be a while yet. But soon they told her to push and push and push and she did and soon the baby was out.

I’m not proud of what I thought when I saw the baby, but it’s what I thought anyway. I thought it looked like it was made out of wood. It was tiny and small and dried and didn’t have any of the chucky stuff you see in the movies and it didn’t move. My wife just had a little wood statue is what I thought. And the docs looked at each other, and my wife was listening to hear the kid, and I felt something cold and black and heavy in my lungs again. I backed out into the hall and I looked down and there were little drops of blood on the things they covered my shoes with. And I think for a little while there I stopped breathing.

The third time wasn’t much later after that, when she was out of the hospital and wouldn’t go to work and just sat around drinking vodka and watching TV all day, and we were both drinking by ourselves, I’d sit in the kitchen and watch the wall for a while and try not to listen to the sounds she made. We did a lot of yelling then too. It was kinda bad. It was probably about two one morning when I heard her in the other room, and I got up and turned on the light and she was packing all the things we bought for the baby in a couple grocery bags and I asked her what she was doing. She told me she was gonna take ‘em back to the store and get our money back because it’s not fair that they can do that to us. Well she said her but you know what I mean. And I tell her to settle down some and come back to bed but she just keeps doing it and I take her by the wrists and she pushes me back and I kinda fell and hit the wall and I don’t wanna say this either but it’s true I wanted to hit her. I didn’t but I wanted to a lot. And she just walks out and gets in the car and drives off and I think good, fine, and I go back to bed. About an hour later I get a call. Don’t ever answer a call at three in the morning, it’s never anything you want to hear. She was driving down the interstate kinda by where my old house was and she swerved off into the ditch and drove along down in the ditch until she hit a concrete pylon.

After they said their final words her family gathered around the coffin and they held hands and I noticed they didn’t ask me to join them so I went home. And that night I drank and drank until we were out of vodka and then I drank whiskey until we were out of that and then I drank some old peppermint schnapps until we were out of that and then I went to bed, and I had a dream she was standing there at the foot of the bed and she was saying things, but I couldn’t hear her. So I got up and I went over and looked at her and I don’t think I was asleep now and I still couldn’t hear her so I got up close enough to remember what Lynn-Anne smelled like and she said “Don’t let go. Don’t let go.”

I still have my ring. It’s not a big deal, it’s just a gold band, but I still wear it, and sometimes I think to myself “Am I still married?”, and I don’t know. When I think about it, I can almost feel what I felt that night, feel something cold and black and heavy in my lungs, feel something that feels like dying, only I can’t quite get to it, just like I can’t quite remember what Lynn-Anne looks like now. But I was there, back in that place, and I watched everything happen like I couldn’t reach out and make it stop.

James kept smiling, hard, like he was trying to hold something down, until finally the waitress brought us the hamburgers. They weren’t big, or covered with stuff, they were just hamburgers. The kids looked at them, took a couple small bites, put them back. I couldn’t tell what happened to James, not from way up in my cloud, but it was something bad, because he made these small muffled screaming noises. He forced himself to stop, got up, and went to the bathroom. I stared down from my cloud to look at the kids, who stared at their shoes. I remember something told me not to move, not to do anything, but I moved forward, and suddenly I was back in my body again.

“C’mon, kids. We’re going home,” I said. I took Jayme’s hand and picked up Josh, who was two winks from falling asleep, like a bag of groceries and I set a twenty on the table and we walked to the door. And I kept waiting for the bullet to hit me, right in the back of the head, but it never happened. Nothing happened.

On the way home, both the kids fell asleep without saying a word. I carried both of them back to the trailer, the door still unlocked, Sandy still watching the floor. I tried to tell her everything was okay but I don’t think she heard me. I tucked the kids in their beds and I watched them for a minute, sleeping, and it was like there was something there I was supposed to understand but I couldn’t quite get hold of it before it went away. I locked the door on my way out and heard the deadbolt click before I was off the steps.

I almost drove by the restaurant but I didn’t because I already knew what happened. Instead I drove out, south, until I got to the interstate. I got on the westbound ramp and I kept going until there was no more road.

I guess that’s everything.
(12:08.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

one hundred answers to one hundred questions
(or at least the first fifty)

one:

One afternoon, coming home from school, young Rosalyn Enoch brought home her two new friends, Abel and Baker. Her parents though it odd that a nine-year old girl had befriended two such intimidating men, but any dispute they may have had with the duo’s presence was qualmed (or, perhaps, silenced) by Abel’s finger-over-lips shhhhing as Baker showed them to their seats around the dinner table.

“We need to discuss a few things with you kind people. Let us begin by saying we thank you for making us feel at home in your home, even though you know little of our intentions. Being good parents, seemingly, you may have questions as to why we are here. Let me lay those doubts to rest. My name is Abel. My associate’s name is Baker. We are here in the service of your daughter, who is a most bright and intuitive child, though not entirely well-gifted in certain…combative aspects of interpersonal communication. Feeling a need to better cover her interests in this area, she has hired us as bodyguards. The nature of our agreement does not concern you, as we keep a strict confidentiality as to our fiscal arrangements, as I’m sure you can understand. Let us just say that it is now our constant imperative to see that no harm of any sort comes to Rosalyn. Earlier in the day, we discovered that a young boy named Stephen Robbins…are you familiar with this boy? Stephen Robbins?”

Rosalyn’s father, already confused by the breakup of well-worn routine in his day, stammered “Yes, yes. Stephen. Ryan and Julie’s.”

“Stephen found it amusing to make certain unwarranted advances toward certain of the schoolgirls, including Rosalyn. We’ve seen to it that the only advances Stephen makes for the next few months with be with the assistance of a wheelchair.”

“You’re joking. Can’t even be.”

“Oh, I assure you, we make no light of our profession. Baker, show the man your hands.”

This demonstration produced the sort of sounds one generally hears from squeak-toys caught underfoot from both of Rosalyn’s parents. It’s possible this came not so much from an empathy for young Stephen as a realization of what might possibly be coming next. If so, they were right on target.

two:

I had never thought of my father as a religious man. We had attended services when I was younger, but we as a family got rather lax about it — I had discovered they hadn’t attended church regularly for years before I was born, wanting to make a fresh start of things by the time I came around. Any sense of an organized religious quality only came out in fits and starts — we were wedding and funeral Catholics, occasionally ducking into a Ash Wednesday service when the odd mood struck. I found the story he told me last weekend, while visiting in the airport bar during a layover between St. Louis and Boise, not only suprising, but contextless. Perhaps that’s why he waited all this time to tell me.

I remember him not being around when I was nine, which would have made him thirty-six at the time. I thought, at the time, that he was just busy with work, which he was, but it turns out he was avoiding the house because God was talking to him. “You ever try to remember something, a song or name or something, and then you just, it’s just there, you can hear it? That’s what it sounded like. That’s exactly it.”

The most suprising change in his life post-voice was the amount of anti-government rhetoric which sprang to his lips, of which (as the two scotch-and-waters became four, and six) I got quite an earful. “It’s exactly like those bastards, it’s just shameless, it is, it’s the fact that at least when somebody comes up on the street and robs you they know they’re doing wrong but they’re doing it anyway, and but these fatcat pukes don’t even understand, they’re too ignorant to realize what they do is a sin, and that there, that’s the worst sin of ‘em all.” It’s hard to know how to reply to statements like this, particularly coming from my father, who I realized as I was taking old Highway 20 back from the airport had probably always felt this way and only now, as we were all out of the house and he was coming into the end of his career, had no reason left to mind his tongue.

That has to be a good feeling.

three:

[removed]

four:

Davis was smaller then, and had no trouble climbing under fence and over hedge, up into treetops where he’d leap from branch to branch without any hesitation, stepping lightly across rooftops and leaping down into the snow-covered lawns, rolling and sprinting out and into the street. There was a cornfield unpassable in the spring, with the rain, but in the underbelly of February the field was a flat white slate, and Davis made extraordinary time crossing the places where, years earlier, he had helped to cause hundreds of dollars of property damace by knocking down cornstalks to make a fort deep in the middle of the crops. By dipping down into the access ditch, he found his way to the now-dry creekbed, a kind of eco-filter for field runoff, up to where Mr. Humphreys had put the stone, sheltered drainage pipe in, which went out and under the street, into the sewers, another place Davis liked to play, but not today, as he had an appointment to keep. From this point it wasn’t much farther, but Davis had to step carefully, as on a moonless night it was a trouble to see the barbed wire and cattle-fencing, and even with his many visits here he still occasionally got a prick or a shockfrom an inattentive choice. fortunately, there was no one this far out to awaken, excepting the cows, who were monolithically indifferent to any of Davis’s statements, no matter how often he tried to engage them in conversation. He was almost there, just up that hill, and he could hear it coming, he was just in time. There was a point where it stopped being noise and became tangible, something which held you and shook you, rattled the bones and the brain, made it hard to see, but Davis watched, standing there on the top of the hill, close enough to the tracks that he could feel the wind pull him in, and in the dark of the night, while the rest of the world was asleep, Davis understood, again, what it meant to be powerful, to be graceful, to have a strength so great that no man could stay your course. Davis walked home, but it was always longer, always slower, on the way back.

five:

Everything kept changing.

He’d fish for birds, using small balloons as bobbers and pieces of beef as bait, sitting on his rooftop hoping to catch something. This plan didn’t work for the simple and understandable reason that birds tend not to eat pieces of meat hung from beneath brightly-colored balloons, not even the crows. Hen then added a series of hanging hooks and went after the neighborkid’s kites, which made him quite the local scourge and target for eggs, soap, toilet paper. If you asked, he’d tell you his grandfather was a pirate, off the coast of Brazil, salvaging storm-shattered ships for a pittance of plunder and an excuse for mutiny, that month’s captain tied to the cannons. He’d make an analogy to his life from that story, but I’ll spare you such vanity.

He once had a wife. It’s unbelievable.

He is a Christian only insofar as he believes in a Prime Mover, a “first cause”, but buys not into any notions of purpose or divinity as conscious force, just as he has no belief in any permeation of this “first cause” in all creatd things except in the most fleeting sense. in fact, he thinks there’s somethign downright pernicious in this notion of collective sameness insofar as it appeals to a means of of similarity which, if given, allows for communication on a core level which he believes does not exist, and allows for a type of deluded solphism based on the assumption that we share certain traits. He’d make an analogy to the kites from that theory, but I’ll spare you such idiocy.

six:

He had taken to leaving her voice-messages when he knew she was on the phone, wanting to talk but not wanting to talk, and the nervousness of wanting to say something interesting and engaging and welcome would undercut his resolve and cause him to say terrifying things, telling her that reality had recently shown itself as a disguise for an increasingly malignant evil which had reached into every area of his life and was inescapable, that the armies of Satan were gathering on the horizon and the horizon exponentially tightened like a noose. He had to stay away from the phone, as demons nested there, entering through his right ear, breaking his speech into shards. But what then? If he fell out of touch, disappeared as he had so often pondered and promised, he would be lost, and would never come out from under it. The answer came as a vision. It was so simple! He’d join the army!

That was three years ago, and he’s not all that much worried about Satan’s armies or whatever it was that stuch him as being so terrible all that time ago, and even though it didn’t so much solve any of his problems as made him too tired and preoccupied to ever consider them, and even though sitting here at the airport he know all the things which sucked then still sucked, and even though he’d lost track of all the people who cared about him, at least nobody could say he never got out of town.

Maybe, he thought, waiting for his bus, maybe he should get married.

seven:

Now official, now completed, it was my job to help her remove all traces of him from the apartment, bagging clothing and books and leftover food for a short walk to the incinerator. I backpacked the Gaddis novels, not having them in hardcover, which may have been frowned upon but wasn’t wrong to do, exactly, as she didn’t make mention of it as we looked for the shears I had brought over.

“Okay, I got the sketchbook, and I got those shitty reggae cd’s.”

“I hate reggae. I really do. It took me a long time to admit it, because I felt like the whitest person in the world admitting that, but fuck it, reggae sucks.”

“So he played this a lot, is what you’re saying.”

“No, not even, but he’d play it and get into that goofy way people get when they listen to reggae, that kinda dumbed-down pseudo-stoner nod. It’s a lot like the way old biker people get when they hear the Zep.”

“This is true. So that’ll about do it, whcih I guess means it’s time for the second act. You have any styling ideas?”

“Short. Really really fucking short. I wanna have to wear a hat for a week so I don’t burn my scalp, I want it that short.” “Sure thing, cheif. Like last time.”

She didn’t have any reply to that.

eight:

“It’s November, and the snow has fallen, and that can only mean one thing—”

“And that’s vandalism!” “Shit yeah. You got the axe?”

“No, no, no, you’re not bringing that fucking axe. First off, if we bring it you’re gonna wanna use it and you’ll cut your foot off and you’ll be screaming and hobbling around and leaving an incriminating blood trail and probably leave the foot-chunk behind and get blood all over my dad’s car and what are you even gonna do with an axe anyway?”

“But you never know! Be prepared, I say, but if I can’t bring the axe I’m willing to concede on taking the bolt cutters instead.”

“See, now there you go, that’s a piece of equipment we can actually get some use out of. So we got the bolt cutters, we got egg-money, we got a stack of Misfits bootlegs—”

“Heeeeeey, these post-digger has quite a bvit of potential. We could steal a couple scarecrows! We could…shit, your folks don’t fuck around when it comes to lawn care, do they. There’s all sorts of, hey, paint!”

“Would you please stop fucking around and help me push the car out? Or better I’ll steer and you push. Get up front. And, no, no, put it back. Scarecrows. I don’t even know why we take you along.”

nine:

I had always assumed that the listing of “corpse defiler” on Arturo Oliver’s business card was a nod to his short-lived stay as curator emiritus at The Museum of Questionable History (it was during his stay that the “Hindoo and Chinee action village and playground for youngsters” exhibit went up, and boy was that ever a bad idea), but no, he actually really *was* a professional defiler of corpses, whcih must have led him to take the protections he did against such an ignoble fate. Art’s wife’s parents, understand, had not necessarily crooked but certainly askew connections to the Mayor’s office, and believing Arturo had lined his coffin with his life’s savings, unwilling to believe that he had left this world with only the three dollars and twelve cents in his bank acount to his name. It turns out that Arturo did have his coffin lined, not with his name. It turns out that Arturo did have his coffin lined, not with loot, but with claymore mines wired to tremor gauges in the coffin-handles, which went off just around the time the backhoe was a foot shy of the lid, which ripped all kinds of hell outta the backhoe and covered a twenty-foot radius in dirt. This would have defiled his corpse somethin’ fierce, only Arturo had been cremated, and three months later Paul Apostrophes, prior to losing his head, was to come across his urn stuck up in that lumpy-looking tree by the mobile-memmorial to all those killed in pursuit of mad science.

ten:

All the local kids had different entries in the Insect Pit Fight contest out at Carter Park each Friday at five, all summer long, hypothetically. We had a number of disputes as to what constituted an insect and came to the comclusion that anything that would make a good monster if a thousand times its own size counted: thus crawdads out of the mercury creek counted but Randy’s pet hampster was unquestionably out. As absolutely none of these pit fights actually led to any fighting, matches were primarily judged on how creepy your contestant was, which may have been somewhat subjective but each week’s results stayed pretty consistent throughout the year. As June began to fall down into July, crazy half-understood notions of eugenics and breeding led us to attempt cross-breeding between different creepy insects to maximixe their creepiness. Getting insects to mate proved to be even more difficult than getting them to fight, and we were just about ready to wind down our little insect show-and-tell society when Lou attempted to define himself as an insect. “I ate a bug. And so that bug is part of me and that makes me a human-bug hybrid” was his line of thought, and were it not for the fact that he could kill us all as soon as look at us we woulda thrown that contestant on the same heap we threw Adam’s “so dig this, I think a whole colony of ants should count as one insect, because they have like, this hive mind, and when you, like, think about that for a while that’s ever creepier than a sheddable exoskeleton, i mean, that’s like *society*, man” claptrap. Not only that, but Lou proceeded to eat all our other contestants, which pretty effectively brought an end to the insect pit fighting series for years and years.

Later, after we all got real jobs and sporty cars that impressed clients and suits we couldn’t clean ourselves, we started the insect pit fighting series up again, over extended lunches at Adam’s new place out on the peninsula, only we can afford to have designer insects flown in from labs down south, which tends to make things a bit more cutthroat. We still can’t get ‘em to fight, though.

eleven:

I got a message on my machine today, and all it said was “Is Gloria Swanson dead? No, fuck it, don’t tell me, but give me a call though.” I knew by the sound of her voice (she has a slight problem, even at thirty, with her r’s) that it was Natalie, who used to date Seth for nearly three years, during which time I became better friends with her than I was with Seth who, last I heard, joined the circus. The three of us used to sit up and watch old silent films on AMC with the sound off, supplying our own soundtrack — Neubaten was a big fave, I remember. It was in the middle of an Erich Van Stroheim triple feature, and smack dab in the middle was Queen Kelly, and Natalie kinda quietly flipped out.

“Fucking a, that’s my mom, that’s my mom right there.”

Seth, who knew these films backwards and forwards thanks to an extended stay at Bethany, said “Gloria Swanson. Y’know, Sunset Blvd., Gloria Swanson, oh God you guys. There’s no way.”

Later that night we watched Swanson playing herself playing Nora Desmond and Nat was just silent, just staring at her. It was eerie. Nat’s never met her birth-mother. She has memories, in a vague way, and some pictures, which I saw for the first time not much later, and she was right; Nat’s mother could have been an understudy from back in the twenties. I think she knew then that Gloria Swanson had to have died by now. It’s been nearly a century since she was born. It’s be the easiest thing in the world to get on the net and look it up, just to know. I haven’t done it, and I guess Natalie hasn’t done it either. Sometimes it’s okay not to know, even when you know.

twelve:

Will has a collection of used diaries and journals he’s bought in estate sales and flea markets. Not famous people, or people he ever knew, but just ordinary people who wrote down whatever they thought was important, or worth remembering. He has about fifty now. He once told me he feels different when he walks around now, among other people, as though he can hear the rhythmic pulse of the songs in their heads, hear how they all intertwine together, even if none of them know it but him. He keeps asking me if I want to borrow a couple; like any collector he has particular favorites, the woman who hid dolls in the walls of all the houses she ever lived in for some perceptive child to find, the man who talks of how the corpse of his miscarried son comes in at night, takes his body apart, and puts it back together wrong, the skin inside out and the fingers down at the wrist. I’m terrified to read these journals, even the kindest or most incidental of them, because the idea of feeling as though I know people that I do not and will never truly know makes me feel ill, makes me feel weak. There are certain curtains I think you shouldn’t walk behind. Will, on the other hand, says one should run from nothing in nature, but study it to better learn who we are as a whole. The question I’m left with, and that i think about each time I leave Will’s apartment but never think to ask him, is what can one put together from such scraps and blurtings, scribbled phone numbers and endless repetitive doodlings? Can you really put a life together from such things?

thirteen:

I had locked my keys in my car again. Only this wasn’t my car, or else I would have known how to get access to the spares. Instead, I was left to stare blankly at the keys, sitting on the dashboard, an unwitting accomplice to my addlemindedness. When I was working at the lot, we had this plastic wedge/metal hooked wire contraption which made breaking into cars easy-peasy, but out here at one in the morning I was to find no such ewuipment without calling a locksmith, which simply would not do, as I hadn’t the money for such luxuries. Thus, it was either chicanery or breaking the window with a rock, which wasn’t even an option, this not being my car. The window was open a crack, just enough to fit something inside, like a coathanger or a branch. This, of course, would be too simple, and lacked panache. After wandering down a couple blocks and ducking into a couple bars, I found a guy with a couple fishing poles, which he offered to let me use for a round of shots for him and his compatriots, on their way to Storm Lake that night to hook up with some “serious people”, whatever that means. He then lent me a pole, but at the suggestion that i stick the end of teh pole in through the crack and descend the hook like one of those toy-car-and-crane games you still see in airports and riverside bars, he scoffed openly and informed me that the only way this plan would work is to stand back a good twenty feet, cast teh hook in through the crack, and snag the keys that way. This seemed like a roundabout way to get my keys, but fuck it, it’s his pole, and I had nothing better to do. So this guy takes a dozen-odd casts and gets nothing but glass, at which point one of his buddies takes about six casts and ends up getting the hook stuck up in the trees, at which point he is shamefully removed from the pole. It’s about two, at this point, and the bar rush is pouring out into the parking lot, and people keep asking for a shot, so we decide to do the American thing and charge a dollar a cast, with the winner getting half of the pot, the other half split between me and the pole-owner. We had about sixty bucks when the police arrived and unlocked my car with the wedge-and-hook thing. Pole-owner and I very quietly split the loot and I got into my car, moved the box of cd’s back down on teh floor, looked over the pile of clothes and shit in the back seat, and left town for the last time, up thirty bucks in gas money.

fourteen:

So it was that Ana And Merle’s dad decided he was running for mayor. Now if there’s two children you don’t want as your posterkindern for photo-op perfection it’s those weirdy-o skyfish kids, but Merle was out on teh road with Ed (after Ed was sprung from a summer sesh. of Extended Detention with Extra Discipline at Our Lady of the Clotting Stigmata Church For Incorrigable Delinquients thanks to some high-grade cup-and-balling by Owen and Rissa, but that’s an entirely different story) and Ana was being led around the outskirts of town with Josef and Seth, who were convinced of some sort of half-baked plan about re-rises again, so as long as things stayed out of sight, so to speak, for the next six months, all would be fine with the Vote Skyfish campaign. That, of course, did not happen, but I’m running out of time here. I’ll tell you about it later.

fifteen:

XXXXX

sixteen:

Jean and Todd had been living together for nearly a year before the cannibalism fantasies began. At first it was something more subtle, more like a displacement complex manifested in wearing the other’s skin. Being thouroughly modern, they discussed this, and decided that there was no use in holding in their emotions, and so while lying in bed at night before they went to sleep they told each other, in technicolor detail, that days daydreams of skinning and stretching and tanning, that first trip to the grocery store disguised in someone else’s flesh, the stomach-flutters of being found out and the delight in getting away with it, slipping back out of the carcass while driving back to the apartment, giggling. They developed recurring storylines: picking up runaways at the bus depot, seducing them, and pulling the facial skin back off the skull just before orgasm, staring into their terrified eyes; or taking in blind housekeepers and convincing them the skin was a high-dollar item in Europe, talking them into putting it on, modeling it across the living room floor, taking them by force. After a time, as all such things do, the glimmer of these tales began to dull, and being throughly modern and well-read as to such ideas, came to the conclusion the removal of the skin was really a means of devouring the other in an indirect way, and wouldn’t it be marvy if instead we go right to the heart of the matter? So Jean and Todd skipped over the already-curdling retro-necro of vampyrism and started in on elaborate cannibalism fantasies, assured by all the major experts that such thinking was perfectly healthy and indeed essential to a fully-functional relationship. Jean was particularly into notions of keeping Todd alive for as long as possible, removing his arms and legs and keeping him alive by feeding him off a gruel of finger and ear meat. Todd, being Todd, was much more obscessed with the idea of surrepititiously feeding pieces of Jean to people he know, friends at work, potential love interests he was sizing up for the knife before he’d even cracked open Jean’s ribcage. They were both so happy to finally have shared interests and were delighted to hear the news of Jean’s pregnancy, which opened up an entirely new aspect to their nightly post-morteming. Placenta may be deathless meat, but at least it’s a start. Alas, at eight weeks in Jean lost the baby. WEll, no, she didn’t so much lose it as it left her body before it was completely finished gestating. By the time Todd got home she was still there, laying in bed, trying not to roll over. After the showering and the disposal and the phone calls, Jean and Todd had a terrible idea. The enitre time they told each other they weren’t there, they were somewhere else. “We’re not doing this.” “We’re both at work, making spreadsheets.” “We’re driving home from the library.” “We’re naked on a beach in Cancun.” “We’re at your mother’s house, puting up the new awning.” Both Jean and Todd began joking about it, talking about it, both at work and among friends. Jean’s work friends, hardened to the far edge of irony, thought Jean was showing impressive reserve to be able to joke her way through such a tough time. Jean’s non-work friends, who saw her endless stream of comments as representative of a re=integration of her child’s spirit with hers, were moved beyond words at the extent to which she had incorporated her child’s death into her life, embracing her loss. Todd’s work friends, all sensitive to the hardship he must be going through, played along with his play-acting as part of the greiving process, careful not to cause any conflict while he was in such a fragile place, making sure to up their unexpected hug quota for the next few weeks. Todd’s non-work friends, crotch-thick in the new masculinity, ignored all his comments as being potentially inciteful to expression of feelings, which was just not macho. All of their friends, however, loved the casserole.

seventeen:

listen, i know she’s not going to like me, so let’s not even dick with each other. just keep walking. i don’t care enough about anyone or anything to pretend something we both know isn’t there exists, or could exist, or might one day exist if only i would change. i should be happy to still be breathing oxygen. all my friends are playing an endless game of post-sexual tag, taking turns being It. i’m sitting on the sidelines and thinking about how cool i am not to demean myself by playing. twenty-five years and absolutely not one fucking thing has changed. it’s not the sadness. i get that way. there’s nothing new or novel in that. but there is absolutely nothing in my future to suggest that this is temporary, that i’m going to surface from this and find myself in a productive state. the only think i have to look forward to at all is getting away, running away, as fast as my little legs will carry me, until i have to run from there and find some other place to hold all my dreams. embarassing. maybe if i got in a car accident. at least i’d have a reason to call.

eighteen:

I was nine years old, if memory serves correctly. I had heard from a bus-associate that this girl a grade ahead of me would let you look up her skirt for five dollars, which was the equivalent of four days worth of lunch money. All that week I sat in the library, ducking out on lunch, too racked with the thought of where my savings would soon be going to actualy do any reading. By Friday I had the money, and after the final bell rang, I went out front to look for the girl, who walked home from school instead of taking the bus. I knew I would be missing the bus, and I was too ashamed to call my mother to have her pick me up, so I walked behind the girl for a couple blocks, trying to get the nerve up. She stopped at a crosswalk and waited for me to catch up, my cover blown. “Is there something you want?” “I heard. From on the bus. Y’know.” “No, I don’t know.” “I’ve got the, it’s right here. So.” “What are you talking about?”, the emphasis on the word talking, the withering tone young girls get once they decide you’re wasting their time. “Like they said. So I can look.” “Get away from me. God.” That was the first time I met Pamela Bambelam. I wouldn’t have the nerve to look her in the eye for another three years.

nineteen:

Dave(1) has been working at the mall. He’s the manager of a store which sells children’s clothing. No one at the store has a child of their own, except the owner, whom none of the employees has ever seen. Dave(1) supervises the unloading of the trucks that come up from downtown. He checks for damaged merchandise and sorts the clothing into stacks designated for areas in the store. Area Seven is infantwear, and the piles which are laid on the Area Seven designated space in the back of the store are all very small. New employees tend to make these piles too high, and they topple onto the floor, which should be scrubbed down every other night were it not for the fact that Dave(1) had to fire the janitor, who was stealing clothing for his daughter. Most of the new employees come from the local high school. Some of them get a certain look in their eyes when they look at children’s clothing, a blurred haze between lust and fear. Dave(1) arranges storefront displays with plastic infants supplied by a warehouse out in Chicago. The infants all have numbers in black marker scrawled across their back, like the victims of a coven of ritual mathematicians. Plans for the displays come from the head office, indicating the placement of each plastic infant in the display with a number. Sometimes the high school employees rearrange the placement of the plastic infants in the front window display and have to be fired. In the past two months, Dave(1) has locked the keys in the back office four times. Upon discovering he has done this, he walks around the store, holding the temples of his skull with his fingertips and muttering. Dave(1) took out a second martgage for his fifth aniversary, earlier in the year, at the insistence of his wife. He is now terrified that he will lose his position of manager and be, at best, reduced to his earlier position of clerk, with a reduction in pay and benefits which will make prompt monthly payments much more difficult. Dave(1) and his wife have a beautiful home up in the hills, which they’ve been pouring a steady stream of cash into in the hope that it will stay beautiful through the years. It’s the little details, Dave(1)’s wife tells him. The district supervisor has been hinting that sales in the corner of the mall where Dave(1)’s store is have been low across the board, he shouldn’t take it personally, it’s the season, just gotta get through the next couple months, when the Dillards will be moving in two stores down, revitalizing the north end. Dave(1) cannot sleep, each night’s dreams have him putting his arm into a hole and unable pull it back out, something wet and stuffed with teeth brushing against his fingertips. Dave(1)’s wife has been stopping by the store at night, before he gets done doing up the next day’s inventory, thumbing idly through Area Seven. The high school employees make jokes at Dave(1)s expense, agreeing that they won’t have to deal with any of that shit just as soon as the band gets to LA. Dave(1) has sold his cellular phone and beeper, and only through force of will can bring himself to pick up his home phone, his hand shaking over the reciever. When he drives to buy groceries on Thursday night he keeps thinking he sees the car he sold when talk came up of a down payment on the house. While setting up the front window display one of the arms came off plastic infant number four, and before he could stop himself Dave(1) began to bash the head of the plastic infant against the window, unable to stop before he had gathered a small crowd, staring. The last I heard, they’re putting an Orange Julius there.

twenty:

You could live your entire life and never get off the interstate. It’s an insight which had dulled to cliche and washed up as a mute truism you can do nothing but shrug at, waiting for a possible “but…”. Truckers with piss-bottles and tin-foil filled with powder know this as well as vagabond kids praying the engine doesn’t die before they hit town know this as well as state troopers flashing the lights on, then off, so as not to have to get out in the cold, scribbling tickets. What once seemed to be the apex of the dehumanized consumer, the self-sealed commuter, now holds a hint of escape and velocity unknown to the workaday world. This was the flow of logic he put forth, refusing to leave the car for any reason, refusing to stop except for gas and watch-timed urine breaks. We had no reason to hurry, but I couldn’t get him to slow down, to stop off and visit friends, to just chill out. I had seen this behaviour before. I had a girlfriend once who was a CNN junkie. Actually CNN wasn’t even enough, she ended up spending so much time online we had to get a second connection. Nobody called it a war, not even the troops, who all had that processed overlit glow to them, a very slurpee run at four am while coming down at Quick Trip look about them. She had a cousin who knew a guy whose brother was there; he was sending e-mail which had been forwarded four times by the time my girlfriend got to it. “You don’t know what it’s like over there,” she’d tell me repeatedly. During the bombing runs on the capitol city she took time off work, sitting in the chair I bought for my first dorm room, drinking coffee and watching the screen. She had favorite reporters, ones who could be trusted and ones who were jockeying for anchor spots. It dawned on me after about a month that I wasn’t going to get properly laid again until after the hostilities ceased. I was this close to a massive letter campaign when the truce went into effect. It wasn’t a full week later before those kids barricaded themselves in that school, however, and I had moved into my car by the time they started taking out bodies.

twentyone:

He’d designed trees which go through their entire growth cycle in a week, Suck the soil dry of nutrients. Drop a seed along the foundation or beneath the floorboards and next week the house was destroyed. Twelve times he did this. He went over to see his ex-wife, just to drop by, maybe take a look at the house. By the time the cops arrived he had branches reaching up from his mouth. have nowhere to | i ever wanted was | yes, just like you fucking | because i | inferior and don’t even | witchhunts for the | reboned and strung through with | rash all splotched like demerol | other hands | because if I had a probelm with it I’d go straight to | stopped loving me when? When the passenger trains used to cut through their backyard, they’d go out sometimes and put on shows for the travellers. dancing, just enough leg to make you turn back in your seat. or else they’d just wave. hi, i never knew you, you never knew me, it’s a shame this life’s so short.

twentytwo:

There’s a certain kind of logic, a vernacular of seeming-like-truth, what we think of when we think of talking honestly, the talk we want from others, that we respect even though we’re a little afraid of it, all knuckles and specialized terms and brutality despite itself. We’re certain this is some sort of primal core honesty because it hurts, and the truth is supposed to hurt, isn’t it? This pain in my chest I get when you tell me such things, that’s because it’s more real than that joking around we did at lunch. Isn’t that right? Doesn’t the echo of that ache outline the boundaries of your passion, your feelings for me, and isn’t it true that the stronger that emotion the more solidly we’re connected, weathering the storm, coming through all the hard times we always knew would find us? It’s supposed to mean so much more, now that we’re yelling and throwing things, because it feels so much more immediate, so listen, there’s no need to cry, no need to explain, because I know in my heart that you only hit me because you love me.

twentythree:

To think of him now, not him in the casket but him standing there, in the backyard, just a bit too cockeyed to make a sunsetting silhouette, is to slowly realize how much the dying part had smoothed out all the memories, softenened them in the night-terrors and idiopathic risings up out of the brain in the bathroom or on the sidewalk and the shuddering push of the tears back below the surface, now drawn out and blown clean, all the edges sanded away without the overly soft bloating of the bad dreams he hoped he was past now, all the old hatreds too long unfed to do more than gum at his ankles when some silly misunderstood spat left him looking for something to kick. The clench of the jaw just to think of what she’d said, how he hadn’t been clear enough, too muddled in his words to get the point across, focusing hard on the grammatics to push back the idea that it wasn’t form but content that was lacking, that what he was trying so hard to say just wasn’t worth it. The old man never had these sorts of problems, he’d tell himself; he’d just speak his peace and let it go, maybe at best toss a rope with a joke he’d heard on the tee-vee. Towards the end he had to re-learn how to breathe, with that thing in his neck, and maybe it’s just looking back but he did grab at his chest a lot, settled in his chair, staring out the window. No slack-ass meds for the old man, who’d lump anything he had no need for or response to in an impressive category he’d call shit and kick to the curb. No blathery babbling, no backtracking excuses, no thrashing around to fill every silence. That’s how he remembers it, and it’s too late in the day to start looking at the undersides of the rocks he calls his parents. Close as you’d ever come. Hints and emulations and boxfuls of knicknacky crap with no place to fit in his house, ends he can’t remember fighting so hard for, actually calling Jack’s wife a cheap freeze-dried cunt right in front of the kids. The sort of thing the old man would say, he thought, and settled into the chair, watching the skyline for the slightest hint of a storm.

twentyfour:

One night, back in Iowa City, we were all wandering around on mushrooms and hash, and Tilda made some comment comparing a car running a red light to the brown hornet, and we laughed, and Brendan started to compulsively blurt out the names of cartoons, terror-laughing “Right, remember that?” after each one, and Tilda got this stressed look in her face, and this was around the time I was trying to get into Tilda’s tights, so after about thirty of these increasingly meta-regressive looping exclaimations I hit him, hard, in the back of the skull, and I hit him again, and again, five times in all, while he stared at me, confused, unsure if I was actually hitting him or not. I didn’t see anybody from that crew for about a month (except for Tilda, who had decided to let me into her tights after learning we had the same English class, taking that as a weary kismet), and even after I started hanging out at the apartment way over by the Vine again Brendan and I didn’t much talk, but he wasn’t much talking to anyone then. It was around my birthday that Brendan’s girlfriend called us, told us she was looking for him, that he was going to jump off the roof of Currier or something, and that if we see him we should call her and that the police were looking for him so we should probably call them too. Jackson, whose apartment this was, put down the phone and told the rest of us. According to the clock on the wall, we had dropped about half an hour prior, and we turned out all the lights and sat in the dark, on the floor, praying Brendan wouldn’t come here. About twenty minutes later there was a knock on the door, and we all got quiet, and he knocked again and again and again and it was inevitable that one of us was going to crack, so Matt got up and opened the door, and Jackson told Brendan that his girlfriend was looking for him and that he just couldn’t let him in the apartment and Brendan started wailing about his girlfriend and sat down by the door, out in the alley, and then the police showed up. The police came into the apartment and asked a number of questions, none of which I remember anymore, and then they took Brendan off in handcuffs. I never saw Brendan again.

twentyfive:

She’s got a sonambulent quality to her. Think Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion tweaked on too much mocha, so even in her existential hollowness she can’t quite sit still, can’t help to reach up to play with a bang she cut after her last boy had their last fight last Friday night, her fingers skittering across the side of her hairline like roaches in a flouride-dusted death scene. She’s a closet exhibitionist, a tanning-booth addict who spends the weekend on a giddy high from full-body UV radiation. She has fingernails that look like Easter eggs and a tatoo of the Sacred Heart between her vulva and her belly button. She has wooden shoes she only used for grain silo waltzing with the smell of vodka, vomit and Lorzban tucked deep in the back of her closet. She was a passion play Mary three years straight. She’s reaching for her hair again. Her brothers are all cops, all still on their first wives, the oldest with a kill to his name. She put that dress on today to show off the tan, the strapless slope of her shoulders. Three drnks in she’ll wander in conversation, wonder how many years she has left, and get this stunned look, all the emotion she’ll show tonight.

twentysix:

Three am and I’m knocking at her window, crying that she’s gotta teach me how to play piano. I gotta know, I can’t wait, it’s the only thing left that’ll save me, I don’t care that it’s Thursday and she’s gotta work tomorrow. I’ll give her all my money and what’s left of the Stoli to come down here and teach me how to play piano. What? Fuck that shit, I’ll buy a piano! We’ll break into a piano store and ride it down Cherry street! Come oooooooooooon, piano! PI-AN-O! PI-AN-O! Howsabout them piano lessons? I’m a quick study and my fingers aren’t fucked up anymore! I cut the cast off this afternoon after my medical council down at the Amphouse convinced me that so long as I got feeling in my digits I’m out of the schwartzwelt of muscle regrowth! I could chop down a house with this hand! PIANO! Don’t make me climb up there! I need an employable skill and seediness is not resume quality! And nobody who’d have use for my amazing prodigious lego assembly skills is hiring! But that kinda skill should make it clear that I’m at least four times as serious about this piano thing as I ever was about the lego thing! I’ll fix the trellace! So what that I broke it, I’m saying I’m willing to square all my, and even, okay, even more on top of that I’ll haul that piss-smelling couch out of the basement for equal trade of lessons as to the high art that is the piano! PIANO! Come oooooooooon! What cops? What the fuck do the cops know about playing the piano?

twentyseven:

[this men and women kick is bad, i don’t like it. it’s like i’m writing everybody else’s stories. who needs to hear another story about how frustrating and scary and joyful it is to be a thing with someone else? well no fucking duh, matlock, why don’t you go peddle your apples on the other side of the street? it’s insidious, this line of narrative, as it infiltrates all other stories, until you can’t write anything without sticking in two crazy lovestruck kids who find each other across time and space, spoiling and tainting anything interesting which surrounds it, like a wisecracking animal in a Disney movie — which reminds me, I’m working up a spec script for a Disney adaptation of the sinking of the Indianapolis, with a freshly-sobered Corey Haim as the voice of Louie the Happy Shark, give me a call if you got a bid — and the next thing you know you’ll pimp out any human tragedy that might have room for a wet coupling in it. who gives a cheap back-alley fuck about how men and women are different? are we still on this shit? next thing you know we’ll be writing Being Clever With Guns stories with lots of highbrow smut from people who can’t masturbate in private like decent folk, all aflutter talking about the latest rumor around town that there’s a new kind of irony just discovered out on the coast that’ll be big this summer…oh, that’s right, i forgot. sorry. This is the only thing I’ve ever been good at. This is the only thing I have. I have lived my entire life in a small room, the windows closed, the phone disconnected, the typewriter clicking out the next list of grievances and impotent desires. I collected everything I had ever written, found printer cables so as to get a copy of the science-fiction novel I wrote in the seventh grade, photocopies of the psychic theater stuff I gave to Jenna in high school, stories tucked in with my report cards up at my parent’s house. Pieces of the stupid book, unused interlace material, stories I wrote for rhetoric, for workshop, for publication. A sixty-page chunk from 1993 I had forgotten writing. Things I wrote instead of studying, instead of sleeping, instead of leaving the room. I listened to the shanti project collection (which you should buy) and looked through it all, trying to find pieces for reading. This is the sum of my life. This is what I have to show for the past twenty-five years. There is no indication that my life will ever change. I will move to a new town, at some point, and I will shut myself up in my room and write, turning the sunlight out, working out scenarios for my imaginary friends like a schoolboy with army figures, until I burn all the bridges there are to burn in that town and I move somewhere else, convinced that happiness is simply an exercise in applied geography. I do this in the hope that eventually this thing that I do will reveal itself as something that can supply the parts of a life I’ve been missing for so long, or until such a time that I realize how unlikely that is to happen, and feel something in my head fit into place, and change my life. I don’t need any massive epiphany. I just want to feel like I’m not lost, that I haven’t made some terrible mistake I cannot find my way out of. I just want to sleep.]

twentyeight:

It’s summer, and you know what that means: the unstoppable juggernaut that is the Journal of Speculative Disease Softball Team of Lower Washburn, with proud new sponsors Kilvan Excavation Team Twelve and Cornhusker Vodka (“You won’t remember how good it is!”), has returned to wreak nightmarish havoc amongst the Gilbertville League, with or without the “no spiked bats” rule. All the medical atrocity from a while back has left the team incredibly limber, though the inability to dampen gravity (as ruled by the league two years back, after the floods of ‘97 washed out the park, leaving JSDSToLW at a distinct advantage) has pretty much resigned Qu’ael to the bench for the remainder of the season. In fine form are power-hitters Abel and Baker, who still get a laugh by replying to the common question “I thought you guys were dead?” with a delighted “We were!”. Also looking to cause some deep-field damage is Jimmy Cheerios, whose “game face” led to a number of dropped balls and screaming basemen last year. Yet the team holds its own defensively with the pitching powerhouse of Ana Skyfish, so long as the team can keep her off the booze until the Seventh Inning Binge. It’s looking to be a fantastic year for the team, particulary since the immediate expulsion of all members utilising demonic technology is no longer an official rule, though any victory parties which end up within fifty feet of Immaculate Conception lead to a hundred dollar fine, so expect to see more midnight raft-burnings out on the Cedar should this underdog team come back from last year’s dissapointing 0-16 season. Opening day is the Fifth, and don’t forget, it’s Fruity Drink Day at the Gilbertville Softball Complex so bring you pitchers and get ready for softball the way it was meant to be played: drunk, bloody and beligerant!

twentynine:

He was hoping the new jacket made him look like a Chinatown hitman, but it was too new, too shiny, and God knows he’d give his kid to the Gypsies before he let anything happen to his two hundred dollar coat. The sort of guy who buys a truck and then spends his weekends hand-buffing it with imported chamois and special waxes. Maybe if he bought a gun, he kept thinking, he’d been thinking all year. He decided long ago that were he ever in a position to pull a gun, he’d forget he had it, and thus from a self-defense standpoint it was just silly, but he was trying desperately to build an attitude, be more of a fuck-you guy, even if just on the weekends, certain he only had a couple more years to learn how to be a fuck-you guy before the kid was old enough to notice and the wife was old enough to care that he was just being silly, buying all those magazines he’s convinced young guys read in order to keep up on how to be young guys, planning to increase their young guy qualities, completely oblivious to the stone-writ fact that young guys are, to the last, fuckups who do not plan *anything*, much less how to be cool. He was, in fact, driving home from the hip (according to the magazine) uptown boutique when he was broadsided by a Taurus full of kids jetting off to post-band practice dinner. Nobody was really hurt, except one of the kids cut the inside of his mouth on his braces, and while exchanging information he realized he actually had something of a social context to talk to a gaggle of young guys as to what essentiates the young guy in this strange age, if only he could make a decent bridge between the two topics. It then hit him, like divinity, how he could speak a language the young guys would understand. “You guys want some beer?” “Fuck yeah!” They pushed the cars into a nearby Denny’s parking lot (more because there was something about pushing a car that seemed to feebly imply a context for meeting chicks than any actual structural damage) and crossed behind the back fence, where there was a hill that was renouned amongst the little kids as a phenominal sledding hill, in the winter, five months from now. This was the first time he had the experience of being the cool older guy and he wasn’t sure how much talking he should do, or what questions would diminish his cool older guy status, so he stuck to vague questions about school and laughs he hoped seemed knowing when the subject came to girls. One thing he learned is that young guys polish off the beer at a pretty quick clip, and rather than trying to draw the evening out he said he had to get back to the wife, actually saying “the wife”, and they laughed as he took off. Driving home, he made a mental tally of the things he had learned about being a young guy, which wasn’t much: young guys really look forward to getting out of school because they think being a college guy will let them date next year’s high school senior girls, who he guesses are a year or two out of the range of their male peers, or maybe the young guys just weren’t very sure of themselves and thought the mystique of moving fifty miles away would make them well-nigh irrestiable to doe-eyed schoolgirls, or something. He learned that young guys don’t give a squat about all the music labels he was certain young guys took as their generational call to arms; they didn’t even know what Budapest narco-dub was supposed to sound like. Young guys are convinced that drinking only takes place when joined with adventure and cunning, which is the priveledge of being underage and fades swiftly once you hit 21. His wife laughed when she saw the side-panel dent in the shiny red truck, which was gonna depreciate the resale value, he told himself, which meant he should unload it as quickly as possible. It’s not really him, anyway.

thirty:

as though talking about it somehow made it magically go away. she’s sitting atop the vent. she’s shrouded in quilts. she doesn’t yet know for sure that he loves her. she has notions, but no confirmations, floating inside the hiss of the air. when she touches the window there’s ovals where her skin melted the frost. she’s not entirely sure that he knows what he wants, not sure he knows he wants her. she knows precisely how many steps from here to the refrigerator, where the bottle of vodka was tucked up in the icebox, an equilibrium of internal and external, the same song on loop for hours now, staring blankly at the floor, the dead center of december night. he’s not even sure he wants to be sure, he said, and she wanted to smack him. she had hoped to have outgrown this, to have thought long and hard enough on all these things, endlessly resurfacing, but apparently not. balance of polarities. it’s the only way. it has to be.

thirtyone:

Backwards. Sleepless. There were infants who had removed themselves from the womb with clar and fang, sinew strung between teeth, feeding on the insects whoe clustered around their mouths and eyes as they lay, perfectly still, awaiting prey. In the marketplace such infants were bought and sold to be kept in front foyers to keep out theives, or used in soups. There was a basement room where post-soldiers had been gathering after the war to rant and spit at the cowardice of peace, plotting how to make the most of the groundswell of anti-governmental opposition which had been rising since the currency became worthless. a scar-line across the knuckles to identify party members. Lamps fueled on a thick white fat filled the room with dim light and a smoke that stuck to the skin, residue you could lick from your fingers. Trucks packed with speakers drive slow circles around the city, playing People’s Music and calls to appease the bloodshed. A woman with missing fingers has been speaking on topics roughly related to “Genetic Destiny” while distractedly folding a sheet of green paper into a house, a swan, a spider. The air is filled with wind-up toy birds tethered by thrice-used string to the wrists of children, who stand numbly in the park and wait until they are allowed to go home. Some of the children are missing, with nails driven into the ground to hold down the false birds. The throat collapses with certain word-combinations, and the bodies remain where they have fallen, dated only by the soot which covers them. Everything we touch we taint forever, which only haunts as we have fallen in love with a mythic space which continues falling away with each glance. At times, in the wire-hung tunnels benneath the cobblestones, there is no way of knowing if one has been deafened, the silence is so absolute. Streetcleaners push false tracks into the mouths of empty mines which pop up from the street like sewer-worms, attempting to lure the street rabble to their heart-bled ends, keeping the population down. The townspeople talk often and at length about how great their new technology is, how much easier the world is thanks to the miracle of assisted walking. He asked her to take off her clothes and put her head inside the skull of an elephant. Last night, when I could not sleep, I did something I have not done in nearly five years. I told myself, then, I would never do it again. I guess I was wrong.

thirtytwo:

I don’t understand how I feel. When I was ten, I was in the playground at school, up on the wooden fort, when two kids who didn’t like me grabbed my legs and threw me over the side. I flipped and landed on my back, the wind knocked out of me. I didn’t know such a thing could happen. I tried to breathe and couldn’t, couldn’t even pull as though I was gagged; my body couldn’t do the thing it needed to do. One of the teachers ran over to me and told me to settle down, to relax, to stop trying so hard to breathe, and I would have hit her in the mouth, had I the ability. When I was underwater, a year before, I at least had breath left to me, and felt like I had time. I was surrounded with something and I wanted to get it inside me, but I couldn’t do it. How I feel now is like that, only reversed. I have something inside me, but I don’t know where it is. I’m carrying something, by which I don’t mean any kind of maudlin “heavy weight” metaphor; I simply mean that I feel this presence on me, and the overwhelming desire to let it go, but I don’t know how. It feels exactly like not knowing how to breathe. I am not afraid. The things I was once afraid of losing are gone now, and the only things I have left are the things I have an absolute trust in. What am I, now that my future is gone? When my notions of who I was supposed to be no longer exist, what is left? I have been noticing what parts of me are actually other people; what parts once lived in someone else’s body. Other people might take this as a reason for panic, an ill-defined sense of question as to one’s primal nature. I believe that the people you love are a part of you, and not in some mush-sense: you can see those people in you, and so can others; you carry them inside you, just as they probably carry some of you with them. This is part of why being a hermit is not as hard as it could be, because these people are, in a literal sense, with me. It is a diminished sense, when compared to the more visceral qualities of interpersonal connection, but it affirms a permanence that the heady rush of this week’s fixation may not necessarily hold. When I die, I take a comfort in knowing that I have not fully left this earth, that there are people in which I still carry some effect. I do not want to die, however, because those people have an effect in me, and I have to respect that, even in my emptier places. This is the afterlife as I understand it. I don’t think of this as cynical.

thirtythree:

The girl who lives two blocks over, Jason and Mag’s kid, practices the piano every afternoon from four to five. She’s been doing this since before I moved into the neighborhood, two years ago. She’s recently become smitten with some boy from school, and now spends her afternoons on the phone with this boy, attempting to fool her parents by playing audio tapes of old practices on her high-end stereo. I can tell these are tapes because of a slight hiss and flatness of tone. beneath this sound I can hear the sound of her on the telephone, talking to the boy, setting herself up to be teased, to laugh. I can hear the brush of her feet across the carpet, dangling over the edge of her bed, toes pointed at the floor. It’s absolutely startling all the things I can hear once I stopped talking.

thirtyfour:

am thinking of lines of flight. I am thinking of a way out. I am thinking of crossing in front of the bus, at my stop, despite the insistent reminder by the bus driver against crossing in front of the bus, for if I wait, and let the bus pass me by before crossing the street, the other kids will spit on me. Sometimes they spit gum. Sometimes the gum gets stuck in my hair. I am terrified of going home with gum in my hair and having someone in my family see what I have become. I am thinking that maybe I wouldn’t mind getting hit by the bus, as the bus couldn’t be going very fast in that short a distance from a complete stop. I am thinking maybe I could take off in a sprint up the street, hopefully reaching the corner before the bus does, before the other kids catch me. I am thinking of walking up to someone’s house here, pretending I have business there, pretending I need to borrow something from Mrs. Riva while praying she’s not home. Perhaps it would not be the bus that would hit me, but another car, and with this being a poorly-enforced 25 miles per hour zone I could be seriously hurt. This would not necessarily be a bad thing. Perhaps my leg or my ribs would be broken and I could do my assignments from the hospital, or from home. I am beginning to suspect that if I try to escape from running this gauntlet that retribution will be inflicted on me later. I am thinking of the time Brandon called me a pussy-eating faggot, and I told him that didn’t make any sense, and he hit me in the mouth with his fist wrapped in his leather belt, the buckle cutting my lower lip. Perhaps I could just not get off at this stop, go three blocks down, where I could duck under the bridge. This is my stop. I have to get off the bus. I have to go now. The bus driver is waiting for me. Everyone is looking at me. I have to go. I stand by the curb and Brandon’s friend David, whose girlfriend sometimes talks to me in study hall, spits gum in my hair. I cannot pull it out. I walk two blocks home and try to think of how I can sneak in the back door before my mom sees me. I go around back, and my parents are both out there, weeding the baseline of the house, and they see the gum in my hair, and I do not know what to do.

thirtyfive:

All this time come and gone and I’m still the surrogate boy. What a crisis means is that all ongoing projects are shelved in order to take care of the given crisis. A crisis is a means by which to step outside of time, into a ficticious now where the importance or relevance of events pertains only to the crisis in question. It is a way to hold back the tide of one’s personal history by engaging in a greater potential tragedy, through which all ramifications can be postponed, all emotional debts remain unpaid. What one ideally hopes to feel is the displacement of entering a completely different social sphere, that feeling of “craziness” or “detachment” that pulls us from the long-term frustrations and petty beatings each “normal” day consists of. That crisis, particularly intentionally generated crisis, almost always fails to sustain that sense of shifted strata for any signifigant length of time only demonstrates the absolute nature of one’s personal assignments and histories, how one cannot step outside of one’s life in order to go play in the sun for one more day. The questions inside you require answers and will not wait. Of course, were any of this true, I wouldn’t be here now, waiting for a call.

thirtysix:

There was once two brothers who could remove the bones from their bodies and exchange them, so as to increase or decrease in heigth as necessary. Sometimes they would take the bones from their arms out and chase girls around the schoolyard, flapping their unskeletoned arms in circles while holding the bones in their mouths. As punishment for such acts, their father would remove all the bones from their bodies and leave them in their shared room, two puddles of skin and tissue atop their quilts. As children almost always do, these children occasionally lost their bones in play, through forgetfulness, or by hurling them at something and being unable to retrieve them. Their father cobbled false bones from pieces of wood and scavenged steel pipe, and as the children grew older, they became quite odd-looking indeed.

thirtyseven:

She runs from nothing in life. Everything is, at worst, an incredibly challenging learning experience. She has a sideways hardwired grace which carries her feet across or around the strangest of places, to emerge later with another batch of stories and something close to peace. I can’t stub my toe without being laid up for two weeks, calling my friends and telling them how I’m going to kill myself because I can’t go on. Everything’s an excuse to play Beckett for me. Novelty is a repetition of forms. Were I not fixated on my idea of hermiting I may have learned a few of the things she has taken in and made a part of herself. I know better, and remember each time, but the simplest step never gets taken. There is an excess of repetition. I give her an extended explaination as to how I am going to cease talking because there is too much information, or perhaps too little hidden in what I’m trying to do, an inaccurate attempt. She smacks me on the back of the head. “Dumbass,” she says, “what do you WANT?”

thirtyeight:

I used to own an oracle. I was pulling out of Eat one afternoon and this kid in a Scoupe dinged my passenger-side door on his way in. Instead of doing the whole insurance gig he offered me an oracle, which he apparently was gonna try to pawn down at Hemsetter’s. We called it even and I went home, where I tried out the oracle, to discover that it was broken. It wasn’t entirely broken, it still spit out fortunes, but they weren’t at all clear, even for the accepted vagueness of the business. breath you remember, rejection, body-gates I called up my hoolie-friends, because what the fuck else am I gonna do, I’m worthless as vaccuum attachments alone. “Dude, first off, this is home-wired, none of this is professional work. Or they were smokin’ Drano at the plant. Either way, this is just no good.” “So it’s broken-broken?” “No, it’s not exactly broken, but whoever did this either had some kinda superfucking plan going on or…what the creeping fuck is *this*?” “Dude, that’s a cockroach, that’s not part of anything. People need to learn to appreciate their machines, I say.” “No, no, look. First off that ain’t a roach and second off it’s soldered onto the board. That’s some kind of seed.” “You were right. People who use seeds as resistors have no common sense. Get your fingers in there and pull that thing out.” “Yeah and you can suck your dying breath out of my ass, man. I ain’t pulling anything out of there. Or better it’s his shit, mn, so if bravery is entailed it figures that he’s our boy.” “Fuck you both. If you’re not touching it, I’m not touching it.” “I say you should haul this thing off and bury it under somebody else’s lawn. Somebody you want cursed, or at least wanna stick with a dead lawn.” “God damn it, that’s just what I need, some fucker hits my car and curses me with his evil oracle. Su-perb.” “So whatcha want me to do, Haas? Seal this beacon of evil up? See if I can pawn it to the Librarian and Satanist contingent?” “Nah. I gotta take care of this. You guys wanna go with me to the quarry?” deviant tangibles of mouth, tongue, skin Quarry’s about five miles out of Wasburn, just shy of Eagle Center, only I hadn’t been in there in a few years and hadn’t been updated as to the closing and filling of the quarry, which leaves abandoning the oracle there pretty iffy. I went back towards town, over by the dump, but the NO BIOTOXIC, CONTAMINATED OR EVIL OBJECTS sign suggested they wouldn’t let my deposit fly. I tried giving it to my landlord as a sign of good faith toward my back rent, but found it no less than an hour later on my doorstep with an eviction notice. I made a few quick calls while backing up my two boxes worth of shit (see, I’m supposed to be moving) and discovered that my previous circuit-bending hoolie-friends would not allow the oracle in or around their homes, even in Martha’s kids’ treehouse. Everybody was out, or doing the young-adult-trying-to-get-laid-and-don’t- jinx-it-with-your-needing-a-place-to-stay-bullshit thing, or wouldn’t talk to me anyway. I got all my shit in my car, cancelled all my utilities, and drove out to the rest stop to sleep and ponder. In the morning, I consulted the oracle. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxx x xxx x I guess I don’t much have a choice. Which is good, because when I have a choice I hold onto it as long as possible. I just have to do it, now.

thirtynine:

I was in Iowa City a couple weeks ago. They cut down the tree where the birds who knew my name lived. I listened, to see if they had nested elsewhere, but they were gone. Something was wrong, she thought. She wasn’t supposed to feel like this. She was supposed to feel entirely different, crazy and wild and free, let go of her old life and stepped into a completely different world, but she felt the same as she did before she made the call. Perhaps tired, perhaps sore, but no different. She wanted to look down at her body and see if maybe the change she had been so certain of had manifest there, only he was looking over at her, trying to nudge her into saying the first word, and she didn’t want to look stupid. She wanted to go but didn’t want to move. She didn’t know where she wanted to go. She couldn’t go home. She looked out the window, away from him, and waited for him to leave. Something was wrong, he thought. Everything was supposed to be easy now. Everything was supposed to fall into place. He thought of things to say. He had gotten what he had wanted all this time, all these years, hints and suggestions finally come to fruition, only this couldn’t have been what he wanted because he still felt the same thing he had always thought was the feeling of him wanting her. He told her he had to go to the bathroom, started to mention something about cleaning up and left it half-finished, hanging in the air. He locked the bathroom door behind him and avoided the mirror. She didn’t look any different. Maybe it’s all these fucking flourescent lights he has, maybe tomorrow, out in the sunlight, she’ll see it, she’ll feel it. She used to feel that free, before. She’s almost certain. It seems like it when she thinks about it. It was all so different then. We were all so.

forty:

Ed Satan’s youngest brother Doug had been playing his favoritest game in the whole world, which is called Bomb, and I’ll hip you to the rules. Go to the nearest drinking fountain or sink or water cooler. load up on water, holding as much as you can in your mouth without spitting it all over yourself. Go to whatever designated area you have been asked to trade the next X hours of your life for money or education or the approval of the elected government, and wait for somebody to say something annoying. When they do, spit water in an arcing spray (or up in the air, should you have multiple targets), yell BOMB! and run out of the room. Educators frown on this kind of behaviour, as do spit-targets, and if you don’t find a target fairly quickly you’ll spend the rest of the day rubbing your aching jaw. Doug, however, is obscessed, and has developed the mouth strength (and the cloak of silence) necessary for hours of water-holding, waiting for the optimal moment.

fortyone:

“Two catholic girls were sitting on my front steps trying to figure out at what point penetration actually becomes penetration, and thus a mortal sin. They asked to borrow a ruler, and i told them to get the fuck off my porch.” “That’s exactly the kind of attention you don’t need.” “I had always remembered catholic girls as being more orally fixated. I guess the church is trying to keep up with the needs of the young people.” “Or something. More Chivas, please.” “I got the taxi driver to run to the store and bring this back here. I didn’t even need to leave the airport. What kind of two-horse operation doesn’t even have a bar?” “I’m learning it’s all part of the distribution of satisfaction in Des Moines. The whole logic of this town is that if you want something, you have to travel to get it, no matter where you are.” “You have to expand your notion of where you are to include the entire town. Unless you have cabbies to do your bidding.” “Right. See, I’m used to thinking of here are room-size. You do that here, you’ll never get anything done.” “We need glasses. Drinking this from the bottle looks really horribly conspicuous.” “No bar means no glasses. For God’s sake, does this even count as civilization?” “Plane leaves in two hours, huh?” “Unless we get delayed again. Which wouldn’t suprise me.” “Let’s go play pinball. No one’ll be around to watch us get tanked there.” “No arcade here. If you can imagine.” “Savages. Fucking savages.”

fortytwo:

you should always go out with a bang, but it’s late in the day, and the shadows are hung, and there’s nothing left to say. at least not to you.

fortythree:

today i was at the mall. my head hurt, again, as always. i reached down to pick up my keys and felt a cooling quality to the tiles. i thought perhaps if i could rest my head against these tiles the pain would subside, at least for a while. i touched my head for a moment, a moment where the pain went to some other place and the absolute cellular knowledge of peace defined as lack of fear plus lack of suffering reached into me and shook my body, as though i had collected memories like phlegm in the lung which had split and come loose, all at once, i could not follow. a security guard came up behind me and asked me if i was alright. i couldn’t move. i thought if i stayed perfectly still he would leave me be. he lifted me up by the shoulders and asked me if i needed a doctor. my legs gave out in an attempt to return my skull to the dirty tiles, but he would not let me go, and called an ambulance, and i hadn’t the strength or the control to do anything but wait, and hope he’d drop me, let me go. by the time i got to the hospital, the sense of peace, and all the remembering that followed, had gone away, and the darkness came in on me.

fortyfour:

mai q’aellah neiah delleasa ve auim wallia devenes, est. (the you-and-i is simple until we get scared, but without being scared there is no you-and-i.) Jimmy came over and convinced me there was nothing wrong with cooling off by sitting in the fish pond. “We’ll just be careful not to sit on any of ‘em and we’re good. Besides, it’s too fucking hot to just be hanging around and sweating like a couple of simpletons.” “You need to take your poorly-thought out ideas and you need to hit the road. You being here is giving me an ulcer and you haven’t even had time to really think evil thoughts yet.” “I ain’t staying, and if you don’t wanna soak in the pond that’s fine with me, kid. I just wanted to see if you knew the score on Josef. Like if we should be doing something, or something.” “I ain’t doing shit. Fuck him anyway.” “Well fine then. We know where you stand.” “Listen, I’m not gonna get all weepy-eyed over somebody who’s basically been dead for the past six years just because the body finally died. I have real people to care about. If you guys wanna have some pretentious-ass pity-party for poor Josef, knock yourselves out.” “Jesus Christ, man, I’m just asking what the things are. You don’t wanna do anything, fine. Su-perb. I think I’ll be taking off.” “Good idea. And don’t take any of that candy with you on your way out.” “Fuck you.” “Fuck you.” “No, man, fuck *you*.”

fortyfive:

“It’s not so much that I miss you, as I think we’re past the missing each other part, but I would like to to think about a proposition I’d like to make. Just think about it, and if you don’t wanna do it I’ll let it go, no problem. I’d like to buy our bed off you. Now I know it was your bed from long before you ever even knew me, but ever since I’ve left I haven’t gotten a solid night’s sleep on my old bed that I got out of my parent’s house after I moved out, and I’ve tried out a couple other beds while staying with friends, but nothing’s doing the trick. So if you’re interested call me back. I’ll pay super-well: I got that job with the meat people that I had told you about from before. So just —” “Hello?” “Oh, um, hey. It’s me. I thought you were at work?” “No work today. Bomb threat. Did you call hoping to get the machine?” “No. Well, actually, yeah. But it’s good to hear you, though. I mean.” “No, that’s. So you wanna buy the bed?” “If possible. If not, you know, it’s no big, um, thing.” “You know Dave and I have been in that bed.” “I’m not asking for the sheets or anything. I just really like the bed, and remember when you told me that when you felt all not right that your advice was to get a good night’s sleep? Well that’s what I’m trying to do. And you can help!” “I’m gonna charge you through the nose, you know.” “I pretty much expected that.” “Well. I think I’ll talk to Dave who’s thinking about moving some of his things over here anyway, but yeah. Anything else you want?” “No, I got…Darren wanted me to ask if you have any soiled panties you’d like to sell, but I’m not gonna ask that.” “I appreciate that. Always a gentleman.” “So you’re good?” “Yeah. I really am. Sometimes I’m not sure I should be good? You know? Like I should still be all fucked up or something? But it seems good, so I’m kinda just trusting in that.” “Excellent. That’s good to hear.” “You?” “I’m working all the time. Which is okay. Something I need to do or something. It’ll pass.” “You doing anything for Josef?” “Nah. It doesn’t sound like anything’s going on here, and I’m not driving up there for that. And when I talked earlier abotu it I get the impression like things are maybe not good. So whatever.” “You gonna be home tomorrow?” “Yeah, after about six.” “Cool. I’ll stop by and tell you what’s up with the bed.” “Perfect.” “I gotta go. You take care.” “Will do, cheif.” “No, really.” “I’ll see you tomorrow.” “Yeah.”

fortysix:

We were about halfway through the dishes when my grandmother looked at me, paused, and said “You know, what you need is a woman to straighten you out.” We’d had this conversation before, so I defaulted to “Well, yeah, but you know that the sort of person to attract a woman is already pretty straightened out.” She paused for a good long while, seemingly whipping up some sort of enderly great secret that, once hipped to, might actually prove to be the thing it seemed like everybody else already understood, some kinda pre-uterine memo I musta slept through. “That’s true,” she said. “Ain’t that a bitch.”

fortyseven:

“If only we had a means of aeronautically propelling ourselves from the confines of the garden,” the great mole said. “we could be free fo this place! we could live by the river and feast on the finest of roots!” “but alas! such knowledge is lost to us, as we have paent our years belowground, where the light found us only in times of accident or catastrophe. what do we know of the laws and bylaws of space travel?” “but we have in our possession associates who do know of such things! wiht the knowledge they possess we will build us a craft to lift us up into the sky and out and away! destiny become history! (ed. note: this is the war-cry of all moles, which is also (like most war-cries) a root-sap drinking song — either way, should you ever hear it, we would most certainly suggest immediate taking of shelter, for things will soon go amok.) to the treeline, gentlemen!” “the treeline? but sir, who lives out by teh treeline? the rabbits?” “yes, but they are just as stuck here as we are. we go on further!” “the squirrels? they know of limb-to-limb locomotion.” “but still not sufficient, for where we wish to travel there are long gaps without trees. further still!” “but then who, sir?” “our friend moi! she will be in the trees!” “moi? you mean conquest?” “no sir! i mean moi! onwards!” [intermission. we suggest spending this time getting yourself a refreshing beverage from your local kitchen, or going horsies, or calling someone and telling them something you never thought you’d ever tell them.] “i have spoken with moi, and she has agreed to use her intricate knowledge of aeronautical engineering to build us a worthy vessel! indeed, she is quick as tragedy, for here she is!” “what nature of craft is this? it looks like a box!” “silence! i will have no dispiriting the manifest destiny of my people! all aboard!” “if you’re sure, sir, than i’m sure, so…all aboard. how do we work this contraption?” “we just OH FUCKING HELL!” (collective screaming) “it’s just moving! just like it just…aaaagh!” “oh, when will it ever end! will this be the end of our exodus?” “did we just stop?” “we did, we…” “moi’s lifting us out! saved by providence! mine are a blessed people!” “all praise the almight moi, who saved us from the metal beasts and poisons of the garden! hooray!” “hooray!” “there is the river! we have found the homeland!” and this is how zeke’s dad (with some help) solved his mole problem.

fortyeight:

the speckle-shelled birds are diving down on each other, through the branches and brambles, where the bells tied there by the tree-children crack open the morning and lead to much yawning and rubbing of eyes. yesterday, while i was out walking the dog, i came upon a gaggle of children who asked if they could pet her. i, of course, said certainly, and they did, informing me of the day’s events. “we hit the dog jackpot today. we petted three dogs and we have one inside to pet. and we saw a weinerdog but they wouldn’t let us pet him.” i know this weinerdog; his name is spencer, and he’s as high-strung as the people who walkhim, enough so that when i see them i have to cross the street to avoid the little hyper weinerdog’s yelping and carrying on. “that dog sucks anyway,” i said. “yeah. this dog’s a peach, though.” this is the first time in a while i had heard someone other than myself refer to something as being a peach, so i was a bit taken aback. they looked at me and said goodbye to the dog, heading off to the creek to throw rocks. last night, coming in from doing bad things, i saw those children leaping from tree to tree, silhouetted by the thunder, moving faster than i could follow. i assume the bells in the trees are theirs. because of this, i know that i need to shave my head again. i cannot explain how these things work, and i’m too old to try.

fortynine:

[forty-nine is a secret story. ask me, and i will tell you.]

fifty:

the center of all fiction is the stories children tell themselves, at night, trying to sleep. all of literature is annotations and extended examinations of this core. all the work is done; all we do is fit and frame the stories we already know, the ones other people have woven into their speech, their dreams. it is not the suffering, the torments, which caused job to suffer. it is the knowledge that his god was fundamentally unknowable, that none of the structure he had attributed to his god existed. “there’s no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going” i wonder what i missed today. i wonder what i did not notice. all the things which have escaped me forever because i did not know where to look, or how to ask, or when to stop and notice. i want to know how things work. being a janitor was a means of better understanding architecture in an applied sense. in the buildings where i worked i knew how to get from any point a to any point b. i knew what lurked behind all the secretive closets, what was hidden on the elevator floors one needed a key for. i knew how the lights in the chandeliers were changed. i have made music to understand how songs work. i understand how certain houses work, how certain neighborhoods work, how certain communities work. it’s all in the looking, the bone beneath the skin. in my dream i saw ana and josef. i asked them why they had come to visit me. i asked them what they wanted. i asked them why things had happened as they had. i asked them why i felt so terrified despite my seeming autonomy as narrator. i asked them why i was still in iowa. i asked them if i will ever get out of this place. i asked them if i shoudl keep writing. i asked them if i will spend the rest of my life as alone as i had to that point. i asked them to bless the people i love and bring me to them by any means available. i asked them for curses, for songs, for cautionary tales. i asked them for people with pieces of their face missing and for little girls who live in the trees. i asked them for underage punk-rock bands and storytellers whose audience had floated to the bottom of a pond on the edge of town. i asked them for guidance. i asked them for solace. i asked them to cast my step in grace. ana and josef stood at the end of the bed and stared. everything near becomes distant. i don’t know what i’m doing anymore.
(12:08.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Horse Collision
I HAD FINALLY COME TO THE ONLY POSSIBLE LOGICAL CONCLUSION TO THE FINAL QUESTION AND THAT IS THE ONLY EXPLANATION FOR THIS LIFE THAT I HAVE CONTINUED FALLING FOWARD INTO IS THAT IN THIS VAST WAKE OF DECAY AND FILTH AND THAT IS MY ROLE IN THIS EMPTY BROWN VALLEY IS THAT THROUGH MY LOSS AND SUFFERING I AM FILLING THE CRACKS OF THIS WORLD WITH VIRII AND MOSSES LIVING OFF THE PARTS OF MY BODY WHICH FALL FROM ME AND WILL IN MILLIONS OF YEARS BECOME A NEW LIFE WHICH WILL WALK THE RERISEN EARTH ITS TRUE INTENDED HOSTS AND LIKE A GANG OF IDIOT GODS IGNORANT OF THE LENGTHS OF THEIR POWER THEY WILL CONSIDER THEMSELVES MASTERS OF PROVIDENCE AND GRACE, BOILING AWAY THE SIN OF THE OCEANS, ENDLESS MILES OF GREEN OIL TRAPPING BIRDS AND BROKEN PIECES OF OFFICES LONG SUBMERGED AND STARING OUT INTO THE BURNING OCEANS MY PROGENY WILL EXPLODE IN PAROXYMS OF PURE INTENTION AND THEN THEY WILL KNOW THE LIE OF THE LEGENDS THAT THEY HAD TOLD THEMSELVES THAT THEY WERE NOT BLESSED BY SOME FAST-RETREATING STRONG AND JOYFUL CREATOR BUT WERE THE EXCREMENT AND DEAD PIECES OF MY FAILING TO MAINTAIN MY BODY INTEGRITY AND WHEN I LOOK DOWN AT THE STAINS FOLLOWING ME LIKE A GIANT PATH OF EVIDENCE I SEARCH IT FOR CLUES FOR INSTANCES OF DEVELOPING A CULTURE A CANON OF LITERATURE A HISTORY OF ITS PRIOR FECAL HISTORY OF WHICH IT IS COGNIZANT IN THE HOPE IT CAN AVOID THE MISTAKES OF ITS PAST AS IT PULLS ITSELF UP THE BELL CURVE INTO DEVELOPING A MARKETPLACE AND A CONSUMER CULTURE VEHICLES AND FARMS AND ITS OWN TELEVISION SHOWS IN WHICH THE FOIBLES OF ITS SHIT-LIFE WERE GENTLY PRODDED BY REENACTMENTS OF HOME LIFE DEVELOPING ORGANS AND HAIR LIKE A HALF-DEVELOPED TWIN AND IN THE VISION OF BURNING OIL THEY WILL SEE THEIR SOURCE AND THE WILL WORSHIP ME AND WALK THE REBIRTHED WORLD STAINING EACH THING THEY TOUCH AND EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH WILL BE MINE.
(12:08.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Hidden Places
Sometimes you hear a song whose lyrics make you feel a certain way you didn’t think you’d ever feel again, or answer a question you didn’t have to words for, and you try to tell someone else, sing them the song, but without the music and the tone and the feeling you had sitting on your bed with your headphones on playing the same song over and over it just doesn’t come across, and you feel like there’s something you knew, just for a second, that you’ll never remember again.

Memories unravel in small details, things you’d never notice, the way certain things used to smell, the direction of the wind, light in the windows in the building behind you as you looked back to see if I was still there. The image remains, the picture of it in my mind, but there’s nothign to it now, thin as muslin, as though it belonged to someone else, i’ve grown new skin since then and the places where your fingers touched me are no longer dyed in, my eyes are a little worse, my teeth a little better. I’m not on the medication anymore, and that copper taste that was always at the back of my throat isn’t there anymore, I can’t bring it back. I still have the words, but I’ve lost the inflections, the sound of small breaths between sentences, so that to remember what you said is essentially to narrate, in my mind, in some half-real mimicry of your voice. Your hair was longer then, longer than it was the last time I saw you, but I couldn’t describe the color, couldn’t tell you where the henna ended. I think I’ve rearranged the things I said that day, stripped out the coughs and the silences.

I don’t really remember you at all.

He had taken to sitting in the middle of the plaza, downtown where no one goes anymore, just after midnight on Wednesday nights, where he would mumble to himself, telling stories, in an attempt to see if, over time, anyone would learn to come to this place and listen. His mother would wait up for him to come home, knowing he only had about twenty minutes worth of material each week, and with the nights growing cold and his skin so weak and brittle it was growing increasingly unlikely he’d make it even that long. She would make him sweaters, in which she knitted the words of his stories, which he thought one day he would give to someone watching from the edge of the plaza, coming out from some better-lit area on Wednesdays in disbelief at this person, this storyteller, keeping the story-sewn sweater as proof to show to friends who thought the story was fictitious. In his room, there are piles of sweaters, holding up the ceiling, into which he climbs and sleeps, when he can sleep, listening to the scuffling of feet in the plaza below, wondering if any of those footsteps belong to someone just a bit too late, confusing Wednesday with Thursday, or Friday, or Saturday.

I couldn’t get out of bed for days. when i was a kid, in my old room, there were flourescent lights over my bed, and as i turned them off and fell backwards, my head on the pillow, the lights would fliciker and flash like distant lightning, until finally it went out entirely, and i so looked forward to that everyday, everytime i went to sleep. i kept thinking about that, the week i spent in my room by myself, as part of me was convinced that if i didn’t get up, i was still, in a way, back in that room, and could stay there forever, and never have to get up again, and i would look for the lights across the ceiling, but there was nothing there, nothing at all.

The easiest thing for him to do in this situation is to blame himself. There are many things for which this blame is deserved, the odds of his blame in the situation being a solid bet, and so he had taken in times of confusion and discomfort to hold himself responsible, to have the reassurance of a target, a sense of order, so much better than the notion of things happening at random, a dispersion of tragedy into lives like rain, which erodes the sense that even in the cold hollow formality and habit of his relationships there is at least structure, pattern, an ability to predict in some small sense what will happen next. He thought of his mother, of how bad it had gotten toward the end, even in her pain when she stopped taking the medication there was a connection, and though they had never told each other in so many words or necessarily had much of a physical connection or did any of the things which are taken as psychological signs of connection that there had at least been, in the short conversations they repeated rote in the front lobby, the reuse of old anecdotes of his embarassed childhood hand-polished like the wooden handle of a heirloomed tool, the way he would shake her hand, that he was not completely unable to connect, that the small comforts he had learned were not without value. He had answers then, watching his mother go away, and he had answers now, the resolution of guilt and shame, a comfort when contrasted to the idea that she had left him just because, it was just time, things were different, all the things she had said. She was too kind, he thought. She could do better.

All the bands should have broken up years ago. The relationships running on routine and inertia. The stories they tell each other all just reiterations on the same handfuls of swiped anecdotes. The children are all tired of the arrested development. The abstractions infected with psychological bearings despite all good intention. The hijinx with all the appeal of a forced smile. Overexamined relationship deterius and maudlin set pieces. Attempts to convince of a small wisdom, something learned to balance out the years, all dead echo. In a word, clever. Though I guess there’s still time to fix everything.

Demons prove to be much less of a problem shenanigan-wise after they’ve been neutered, which I guess shouldn’t be a suprise when you think about it. I, being me, hadn’t thought about it, and thus was adamantly against Edna bringing home her new bladefighting instructor for two weeks of intensive constant training in the taela-shaen school of machette-dueling, as perfected by the crew of the Haitian space program before they had that terrible accident, most likely caused by the same aspect of Edna’s instructor which troubled me so greatly, ie: his demonness. Edna, who knows my disposition like she knows what goes in a Wormwood Gibson, not only brought home papers verifying Delatz’s neuteredization but also provided a series of before-after pictures which made me certain that this giant snarling pus-clothed piss funnel was actually just a gracious if rough around the edges house-guest, which was just one more shiny angle to Edna’s going back to school. Maybe I can get Delatz to eat her dog.

Certain people have a sort of blindness which won’t allow them to see directly ahead; they can only see from the corners of their eyes. Her and I are like that, which is why it’s a good thing that we have each other, which is why we’ve walked such a crooked road. I wouldn’t change a thing.

The superhero was doing his laundry down in the creek, which most people wouldn’t let slide if you weren’t a superhero, but they chipped in tax dollars to bring him here and keep them safe from whatever big thing everybody was afraid of that year, so small things like public washing of spandex superhero costumes was allowed just so long as these costumes weren’t unduly soiled, that is to say in the natural way, which never came up until the Uguhystku arose from the briny deep and ate the library, which would make anybody feel a little queasy, so now atop the shame of being bested by the first and so far only superhero-quality villain the superhero has to face the same of Mrs. Fedrick calling the police to have the superhero removed from the creek, as his costume was stained in an indecent way, and for the first time since Cincinatti the superhero thought about returning to his job in market evaluations.

The funny part is Owen called me up to ask me about it. Why he called me I have no idea. Maybe he didn’t want word getting back to Ana through some sort of gossip-channel, and knowing that I was a dead end for all communications he figured the trust factor was reduced considerably. Or maybe he thought I knew something about how to approach such a project. Either way, he was sorely mistaken.

I was not dreaming, as I have not had dreams (at least that I remember) since I stopped taking my medication, and there was no shift from dream-logic into wake-mirror-logic, so immediate I could hear a snap, a shift, and as I opened my eyes, and she was there, her lips on my throat, just above my thyroid, humming. I have told this story before, but it was vague, and I had no understanding of the event taking place. I could hear certain harmonics resonate inside my ribcage, inside my skull, and subvocally asked her why. When she stopped humming, when she raised her face over mine, the ambient light of the moon and the clock became vibrant, swum around the edges of my vision, so that I could pay attention to nothing but what was right in front of me. She said in order to achieve syncopation, certain resonant frequencies were required. The muscles in my neck began to spasm, and I turned away, and she was gone. In case that is of any comparable interest.

I had hooked ropes to my steering wheel and weighted chains to the accelerator and brake of my aunt Cleo’s Continental so as to stand on the roof and drive around town, road warrior style, when the police asked me if i had a rope-and-chain-weight permit. “Abraham Lincoln didn’t need no fucking rope-and-chain-weight permit!” I screamed, to no avail, as the copman took my rope and my weighted chains and left me to drive around town like a regular schnook, which was doubly embarassing as my wardrobe consisted of nothing but studded black belts placed Judas Priest-style across my privvies and delicate areas, which was just all wrong for the Elderly Maroon (I swear, it’s a real color) Continental, and it was in this get-up I ran into, and then over, Mister Dobalina (Louis, nothing like the song) and his dog Rochester. Louis Dobalina, as everybody in the neighborhood knows, is a state-certified necromancer, so when I saw Rochester licking secret seals on the forehead and palms of Louis’s corpse I knew I didn’t have much time before Zombie Dobalina would be looking for my insurance information and prompt arrest by the same police who already thought of me as a hooligan from last week’s portable cyclone stunt. I had blown out bothe the front whitewalls when I hopped the curb but was lucky enough to see an abandoned tricycle over in the Goulitz’s front yard, which i wedged under the front bumper of the Continental, which allowed me to progress just so long as I didn’t have to turn. Thus it was I took off down De Rais Boulevard at a smooth single nickel, listening to the cheap metal of the tricycle buckle and bend as I made the slowest getaway of my entire life.

There’s a feeling you get when you step away from the circle of friends you’ve accumulated and surround yourself with near-strangers, the feeling that you can redefine yourself, wise to the failings of your previous selves, all set to be the person you were always supposed to be. The problem with this is that nobody actually defines themselves at all, any more than you make your own face. You modify and shift what already exists. You learn to speak through your skin and stances, each shifting to fit around the other, corrupt only insofar as we believe in a thought unsullied by communication, ghost-thought, a dream by which we are polluted and believe in sin and shame.

Manny was explaining his life-schema to the woman at the unemployment office, explaining how his prior job as door-to-door boogeyman insurance salesman was nixed by underground b-man connections in the department of energy who basically own every solicitation office from sea to squealing sea, which was fine with Manny as it gave him more time to work on his enemies list. Manny’s enemies list isn’t just personal slights and high school bullies doomed to get theirs, no; manny keeps a near-complete list of all active supervillians. this is not the sort of thing you should tell your unemployment officer. Manny was in a hurry to go see the Superhero, having discovered that a criminal-in-hiding since the Thirties calling himself the Butterscotch Bandit (who apparently stole candies from children of priveledge and gave them to poor children, whose parents promptly put the sweets in the trashbin, knowing better than to let their urchins suck on sugary confections not only stolen, but stolen by a man in a purple full-silk bodysuit) who has never been brought to justice, and thus kinda blew off his mandatory unemployment visit, which is how it is that his welfare got yanked and Manny had to get a job.

This woman and her grandchildren had actually tracked me to my apartment in order to make me listen to and perhaps write about the story of the prune. Not prunes in general, mind you, but the story of one single prune as it goes about its pruny day, a snapshot of the life (so to speak) of a prune, which they assured me the reading public would find classic, an understated brilliance found in the single story of a solitary prune. I had to remember to get new locks.

And that’s when you realize this person isn’t all smitten with you, that she’s not secretly pining for you, that she doesn’t spend the empty spots in her day imagining some near future where you are together and buying groceries and looking at strange objects in the sky, that she doesn’t shift her body in her bed to cradle your absence, that she has been watering that little buried seed of love deep in her heart, not for you, but for someone else, someone you don’t know, someone more fortunate and more ignorant than you will ever be, and you can only think of how glad you are you never told her, that you never said the words.

Not having a home, the oompah band took up residence in the front yard of one Mr. and Mrs. Hanherholden, whose great-great-great-(etc)-grandson would have made them proud by becoming a doctor but the would have made them confused by his rather pointless and ignoble end, but that is neither here nor there. What is both here and there is that the small agrarian horses and antiques sort of neighborhoood the Hanherholdens live in has no recourse for oompah band removal or extermination, and Mrs. Hanherholden’s attempts to reason with the band was thwarted by cross-language communicative failure. Something, however, had to be done, as the likelihood that property values would shrink and atrophy once word of this oompah infestation spread was great enough to demand drastic measure. Mrs. Hanherholden went to the phone and dialed the one number she hoped she’d never have to dial, being forced to lift a lifetime ban in order to solve the problem with the only person who could solve it, persona non grata in extremis Fast Eddie Satan.

After she had moved out, he had taken to painting his toenails in the sky-blue robins-egg color she had always used, thinking through the work-days which had solidified and made him feel sick and scraped out inside about the color on his toes which helped him feel a little less alone. Until the polish ran out, and he scoured stores looking for an exact match, the empty bottle in his pocket, clerks curious about his obscessiveness, expanding the search radius out to bordering towns, to late calls to friends of hers who might know, to leftover receipts on the floor of the living room, to experiments with combining off-brands which never came out quite right, to written requests to the company which made the polish for an order form, a sample pack, anything, learning the company had gone out of business, bought up and sold for parts to other cosmetics firms, and he knew then that she wasn’t coming back.

She sat there, draped in rope and plaster, a dull pain in the base of her spine, blinking, as though her survival was a trick of the light she could wipe out of her eyes, turning back to look and see if anyone had seen her fail, the windows across the street all empty or curtained, and the phone began to ring, in the middle of the night, which hadn’t happened since her brother called to tell her about her parents, years gone by, the phone ringing long past the acceptable number and into the desperate, unable to get up and afraid to put her hands on the floor to push herself up for fear of pushing her hands into the broken glass from the lighting fixture the rope had been attached to, feeling stupid and wondering how accidental this stupidity was, the phone ringing to the point that she was afraid her neighbors would come over to find out if anything was wrong, some throbbing feeling at the bottom of her brain, and she knew she had to get up.

The names change, near-instantly, and the character of the place slowly adopts the necessary attributes, like water pulling the dyes from a piece of cloth. It was, and mostly still is, a hospice, which explains its presence out here beyond the city limits: none of your sick in our neighborhood, we care but it’s the property values, so on. During that time there was a man who lived in the attics, feeding himself off cafeteria leftovers and washing himself in the public bathrooms. This man would walk into the rooms of the dying, at night, when no one else would see him, and tell them he was immortal, that his blood carried benign and possibly sentient lifeforms which had cleaned him of his pathogens, and could do the same for them, given the chance. It is unsure how many took the man up on his offer — at the time of his capture he had been living in the building for nearly a year. The fact that no one quite knows what became of the man, or of the patients, lends the story nearly-assured fictional status, the sort of story those with endless time on their hands spin and pass on. This man was one of three people who lived in the building who was given the title “The Immortal”. The second, and most recent, was Sarah Mossiman, the first child in space. Of the third I cannot yet speak.

Josef is on the highway, trying to catch the thing he runs from. Ana’s breath has collected across the ceiling of her bedroom and escapes through cracks, beginning to glow as it gets farther away from this place. The corpse digs into the mud until it stills and is silent, the water filling the mouth to keep the soul sated. Seth adjusts the readings of precognative machines in the attempt to know which way to walk. We all had so much promise, once, if only we could reach the place where the light would find us. If things were different.

Right now, in the basement of an hourly motel just off 28th street, four elderly men are practicing their christmas ballads, as they do every year, on piano and standup bass and violin and modified guitar. During the holidays they play a variety of songs from a number of different traditions, including a few self-written songs whose patterns and tempos are based on the falling snow and the patterns left therein by passerby, in front of Ben-Jakob’s Curiosity Emporium. Their chances of all living out the year are slight, and the empty place left with the dead will not be filled with another member, but they continue practicing, because this is what they do.

Ali and Smiljan were in a band. Actually, they were the band — Zombie Monkey Corpse — which is how I met them, originally, even before I worked with them. Waterloo has a pretty strong Bosnian speed-metal underground right now, refugee families working at the plants, but ZMC were one of the first, back when they were a five-piece playing midnight jams on stolen power behind the abandoned Hy-Vee over by Gates. BFP used to play those shows, as did Buddy Holly’s Drummer, so this must have been when I was in high school, the end of the eighties. Ali disappeared into Minnesota around ‘95, and Smiljan now does sound-work at Midwest Death Cult Studios, where I’ve been working construction these past few weeks. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is the whole of Zombie Monkey Corpse’s ouerve were what they called “grafts” — two songs smashed together and played at teeth-clenching speed, the more inappropriate the connection the better. I’d bump into them, later, at the vinyl room at St. Vincent de Paul, sifting through stacks of old records, looking for new cover material. “You can’t, it’s like not to just go blamblamblam!, right? the songs you have to be able to hear and go, like, ‘Don Ho but he’s rocking!’ and it’s all ‘aaaaagh!’, you know? ‘Rocking Paul Anka, oh no, aaaaaagh!’, hahahahah!”

There was a terrible storm but I will not write about that, as I almost believe if I do not write about it the storm will not happen, only what sense does that make because the storm already did happen, and even if there was a way to make it not happen, not writing about it won’t cut the mustard, as everybody’s not writing about the storm all the time, and yet you can still see where the storm split the trees, and half-flattened the barn, and I still get tremors in my hands when I hear a loud noise. And yet I will not write about the storm. I might write about a frog that lives in the garden, or the way certain things taste after you brush your teeth, or the shrine I’m building to Sarah, the goddess of practical advice. Those are all perfectly suitable topics. The world is absolutely filled with suitable topics. Turtles are good, too.

Can’t even hold her head up off the bowl can’t even keep herself from putting her hands down into the water and the yellow rope-vomit, can’t do much of anything but kick at the door and wait for logic to come down like an angel and inhabit the brain of the corpses spread face-down on the bed, the opal tears collected at the corners of the eyes binding the faces to the pillows, hairless animals trapped in the garbage cans, mon petit disease, the door has been nailed shut from both the inside and outside, the rain kicking and screaming, signs informing parents to keep their children away from the pool area as pollutant-damaged geese have nested in the deep-end puddle, snapping at phantoms, kicking legless, digestion problems, pustules and parables, she’s reaching for the towel rack which comes off in her hand, slashes the arm, the rug bunched up at her feet, she can hear the stereo playing bad nostalgia music out in the bedroom, falling bottles, some kid keeps laughing all scared and pretending not to hear her, she’s trying to scream through the vomit, his new anorexic maggot fuck-doll in the hallway reading modern bride with a highlighter, new diets and positions, she’s trying to pull a chunk of something out of her throat, the color soaks and spins, abortion sacrifices left to rot the brains still scattered on the rocks and his stupid ass won’t get off the phone to call 911 as the conversation is in ‘a real fragile place’, he may never fuck her again, said things and could not follow, something was off making a strange noise in the lot, like metal falling atop itself, but that was the sound of the rain, the birds couldn’t sleep and started to go insane, like the bolts were falling off the underside of heaven, the radio told them not to drink from the well until certain disturbing colors could be identified, i saw her on her back, on the floor, the sheets up to her belly and the black smudges of her soul escaping her body across the wall behind the sink, she couldn’t have been that old, the truth of it is only so strange when laid against and beside the memories, something in the window-light, in the smell of rain and pine way up here in the mountains, sometimes waking up on the porch, where they sucked up the warmth like flowers, the skies were meaningless and afforded no sense of place, at least the vodka wasn’t contaminated, she said it was a ceremonial weapon and thus not really very sharp, she kept talking about how it was okay that she was saving herself because she sucked a lot of cock, she was just starting to wonder if she was overstaying her welcome when the quarantine was lifted, her boy there at the ready feigning sympathy, and the last time anyone saw her she was playing in a band consisting strictly of guitarists; when the music ended she got up and turned and was gone before the ear-ringing faded.

She had asked Owen for all her letters back. Owen had spent the week working on annotations to these letters, in order to let her know what had happened in the time since, as a means of bridging distances. He wanted to show me, to ask my opinion, but I didn’t want to see it. I was certain the dead echo would enter through my eyes. I remember Josef telling me all his counseling was supported on the notion that the beginning of any sort of psychiatric healing was to let go, but to let go was to let death into your heart. He did not know what to do, I did not know what to do, so after a bit of silence he got up and left.

I used to live in a dorm which had a hallway connecting our building to the building across the street, and this hallway was incredibly ornate, with pattern-woven tapestries and elaborate mirrors across the walls, patterns in the tile on the floor, and I would see people I knew from the street or from passing between classes frozen and fixated, terrified by the immense space of the hall, or caught in the patterns, following lines which never ended, their pupils filling their skulls and their fingertips worn and cracked from tracing messages across the surface, like pulling algae from the surface of a pond. I was on drugs constantly for those two years, and had some buildup of the fantastic to fall back on, feeling a panic when walking the hall which never reached the fugue, and I would pick the people up, walk them to the door, where the opulence stopped, reverting to the browns and grays of the unintended brutalist annexes, and send them on their way, dizzy and dazed. Later I would see them, out on the street, a lost look to them, people who now wear ghosts the way you would wear an overcoat. I am beginning to wonder if my efforts to assist these people was simply the way in which the nested psychosis of the hallway affected me, and if perhaps I am the only one who was lost, and if perhaps all that lucidity I thought I possessed was just the narrative I clung to as I fell away from the world, as I was at that dorm today, and I could not find the hall.

The courage she’d taken so long to get up, the breaths limbering her lungs, the keys pushed until she could do it sightless and upside-down, and the sharp thrill of the click as the phone was lifted, years all gone in attempts at getting her shit together, Sundays walking around the lake and thinking about where the first misstep had fallen, the search for a safe distance, suddenly filled with the rash decision to call and reciprocate all the tendriled feelings sent out to her by obvious and unobvious means, the sound of the voice like a light emitting from every pore on her skin, her voice all ready to say any necessary thing, and the confusion broke up the signal, and she didn’t know what to say, and suddenly she thought back to all the conversations, all the calls, and she realized, the courage all going away, she said “I always thought you were talking about me.”

Ed’s brother Doug explained to me how to do the resurrection trick. The key is finding something that isn’t actually dead, or something which is ready to not be dead anymore. It’s just a matter of helping the process along. The tiles on the floor may have contained a message, but they were thrown out and buried when the floor was redone. Pieces of the possible message have since gone on to form the walls of a group of families who dug up the materials to insulate their homes, to fill the spaces where the walls do not meet. Parents now teach their children how to sound out their vowels by running their fingers beneath the message on the wall, watching the small pupils follow the motion and associate the sound with the image, until the process becomes immediate, which affirms their inability to send their children to school. Later they will hear the message and think back to a memory they can’t quite reach, mouthing the words as the sound sinks into them, a feeling of remembering something that hasn’t happened yet. The spires of the great satanic factory hidden off in the distance will spin with sulfurous lights as the children, no longer children, stand at the gates and listen, trying to remember.

Her prior boy tapes people on the bus, telling each other their stories, and puts them into car commercials — he won an award from the story she told him her abuse story, the general ritual of people-being-a-couple defining their connection to each other, the crackling faraway sound of her voice on the tape as the car drove off into the distance, some sort of ham-fisted symbolic notion of highway Zen as a therapeutic tool, the vehicle as a personal sanctuary where such stories can find a structure and, perhaps, even a solution, and she was so disgusted, she couldn’t move, the commercial had played three times before she could bring herself to get up off the couch and begin packing.

The color scheme, the lighting, the furniture was all supposed to create a feeling of deterritorialized space in which all that was past is passed and behind, too far away to hurt us, but Josef couldn’t stop thinking all these off-green and off-brown rooms, all these hallways in a rainbow of grays, they were all the same building, the same hall, that there is no hiding place. The answer he would give to anyone who asked what he was looking at, why he was staring down the hallway, was there is but one judgment, which would be decided as a problem of perspective. This is why they kept upping his meds.

12. I don’t think it’s fair that you said this of me. I don’t think you appreciate what was happening. You never told me, and yet expected me to take all this information I didn’t have into consideration whenever I talked to you. Not to mention running off to fuck other guys in the middle of dinner. You think I don’t remember.

Certain he wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t even think to wonder, they had the machinery checking the length of his lifeline to the internet, watching the beat of his heart in real-time, the flow of anticoagulants and synthesized venoms into his blood, the notes his doctors make in the patient database, webcams stashed in the ceiling, waiting to see, their pdas set to hum at first warning of trauma or collapse. A basement-written search engine came across the site, and now their stupid misguided agony feeds the world’s hunger for novel entertainment.

Every day she waited at the window, across the street from the new prison, taking aim with her air rifle, filled with hypodermic ampules which she’d shoot into the neck of her client twice a day, walking laps out in the yard, managing to keep his addiction fed throughout his three-year stretch without having to resort to using community needles. Over the years, she became one of the best shooters in the area, finding a number of offers for liquidation contracts once her narcotics distribution arrangement was completed. Instead, she went back to school, and last I heard was some kid’s mom.

When I lived in Iowa City, and for the short time in Waterloo when I stayed with my aunt, I used to wander around the nearby hospital on nights when I could not sleep, which were often. One night, which must have been in 1992, I walked from Quadrangle, my dorm, over to the hospital, through the lobby, up and down the halls, looking at paintings and trying to place the layout, when I walked into a family with a shocked look on their faces, people who had obviously been through an agony whose first half had just come to an end. Because I am the creator, I can tell any story for them I want. I could find them what they had lost, breathe a new life into the husk beneath the sheet, but none of them will ring true, and the best thing I could have done would be to leave them alone entirely. Instead, I switched corpses with them. I told them they could mourn for the person I had lost, and I would mourn for the person they had lost, and in that way we would develop distance from our suffering while spreading the half-life of the remembered a bit farther. They looked at me for a long time before they began beating me.

I talked to her last weekend, for the first time in years, and the point at which general smalltalk opened up into something different was when she told me she sometimes felt like there was something growing in her chest, like a pearl, or a crystal, and it would be decades until all the time and effort she had put toward its growth would bear fruit, only she didn’t know anybody willing to wait that long. I told her I didn’t really know what to say to that, and instantly regretted it, and then neither of us said anything for a while.

My man Cyrano, who’s been to the moon (which is like the Earth’s attic, where the god keeps props from olden times and sets for those old miracle gags he used to pull and lots of tinsel), says that Elijah tried to fly by making containers full of the smoke of human sacrifices which he used as balloons. Cyrano tried that same gig using evaporating morning dew. My associate Bomberman, who has no need for any of that stuff (though there’s pictures of both Cyrano and Elijah on his van mural, alongside Lindberg, Earheart, Saint-Exupery, Beuys, Ride, Komarov and Eatherly, all staring upwards, preparing to understand time through a disaster in space.

Blessed to follow. The pulse beneath makes the sound all splintered, flanged. Crosses on their palms, fresh-filled holes beneath the porch. Trace hand over hand and into places with hoses for company, bloodshot memories, making its way to the fence, calling out the seven-beast, seals and mastery of redesigned farm equipment. The trains kept on all day and the smell won’t get out of my clothes. Home sadism films down the obscure trail into the maw of children’s teeth, where the wicked are ground into thick paste until the day of arising. Supreme happiness aria as scored by the missing finger ensemble. Thick with trees who swallowed bird-eggs and kites, spitting them back out through the roots as beaked worms with cottontails all ribboned and smeared with mud and the prayers of worshipful young women in rusty wallace t-shirts who are convinced the bird-insects will one day gain control of their wings and fly the pen-scrawled prayers bound to their tails, stories of prison-held boyfriends and mothers with unpronounceable diseases, all the way up to heaven.

There’s someone whose job it is to manipulate a whole series of mirrors hoisted on pulleys and wires in order to make sure the sunlight always falls on her shoulders. That person will show you smudged photos of their children (seven, three, and 18 months) and explains they don’t really look like that anymore, it’s been a few years and they grow up so fast. There’s rope-burns across the palms, the lines of the hands and the corners of the fingernails dyed a thick black, a constant glance back over the shoulders to make sure she hasn’t walked across the park, or gone back to her car to cry. This person can’t stop moving, can’t stop checking angles and looking for water stains. Conversations are always partial, because they’re never completely there; the job is a bigger responsibility than any single idea, any fleeting need. It’s a life’s work. She’s looking at the trees, at the patterns between the leaves, and they’re triggering a burst of sunshine refracted off the morning dew, and smiling. There’s a certain satisfaction in a job well done.

I was hiding out at the farm, trying to work as hard as I could, bailing hay and walking the soybean rows. They had a room for me, but I slept in the root cellar. Lawrence Curst was released and sent off to find his brother, who was somewhere around Topeka, working on a human catapult gag. When they saw each other, Harold panicked and fled, running into the wheat fields and jumping a train. Lawrence took over the ringleader job, and in a matter of weeks nobody much minded the difference, particularly seeing as how Larry the Dairyman upped wages across the board.

21. It’s a mistake to believe the sensual is always obvious, a blatant gut-knotting hunger. There are forms of the sensual which are subtle without being delicate; they nest in your spine and feed from your attentiveness. There are certain wants that feed but do not nourish, light but do not warm. These are the things I have written. The heart-meat is sewn sideways, sneaking sidereal and grinning. No one ever thinks to look for the obvious.

For the whole of the winter she would draw pictures in the frost on the window as she sat at he desk, fingernail-doodling, listening to the sun crack the ice on the roof. Down the hall, someone had made constellations with the pushpins. Two floors down I was hiding out in the janitor’s closet, having come into work drunk and snarling and terrified that there were humans here on a Sunday. I took the hidden escape and got up to the roof, where I planned to sleep it off. That’s how I first met Owen’s sister Rissa, who was doing the same, asking me what my deal was. I looked to the sky for a sign, but the sky was empty.

There once was a saint who kept himself strictly within the confines of the laws handed down by his god. No potential for holiness was turned away, no notion of benevolence was shelved for a later date; the saint ran headlong into the beatific. Upon the deathbed, the saint had a vision of his god, who informed the saint he could not share forever in the god’s most holy light, as the saint had committed the sin of vanity. The saint, realizing there was no way to avoid sin when even avoiding sin was a sin, turned away from the god, stood up from the deathbed, and walked away.

The protocol of the situation called for my punching him in the face. There was no walking away. Being addicted to the notion of the defining moment, through which entire life-currents were given direction and meaning, it was critical that some sort of conflict be set into motion here. In order to stick to this rule of conduct we had been drinking heavily, a tainted yellow vodka I’d had tucked in my trunk for god only knows how long. This was partially to get him to tell me, partially to bolster the will to fulfill on my obligation, to close up the past through violent action. The point of concession was long past. We’d come out to the playground, sitting on the chipped-paint picnic tables, finishing off the bottle while staring at the mist on the river, and now we had to see this thing through. We’d like to think this was a pact shared between men, but that only held up so long as we didn’t think about it, so long as we didn’t hold it up to the light. He told me he could swear he heard the sound of shotguns off in the fields. I also had a bat in the trunk but that didn’t much seem sporting. Our precious quilt of abuses and transgressions, being in the wrong hole at the wrong time. You could see the watertower from here. Sometimes, when I’m nervous, I like to throw in a lot of high-grade words to distance myself from what I’m doing. A way to stop paying so much attention. I wanted to be sure he didn’t have the bottle in his hand when I swung. I want him to see it coming. That’s the center of it.

I had this story that he was doing a lot of writing. he was writing all the time. he didn’t see many people, but people knew he was writing a lot, and they were happy, and occasionally called late at night for long talks, or else met for lunches which were strangely mock-formal. Sometimes people asked him if he was lonely, and he was, but in a comfortable way, as he was not alone, and besides, he was writing, and wouldn’t have the time any sort of constant connection would require, or deserve. He ended up writing about everything, as he had plenty of time, and his everything was very small as all he had done was write, but he wrote about his little everything very well, and was happy. Idon’t think I’ll actually bother to write that story, as I’ve got too much shit to do, but I thought I’d mention it.

Yeah, we used to have some consciousness-mapped AIs, but once they figured out they weren’t going to get laid anymore their productivity dropped to nil, so we wiped the drive and sold the parts. Now we play weekends at the Holiday Inn. The pay’s better.

I was making money that summer by writing and delivering curses to people, usually when they were at work, hired out by jilted lovers and high-school grudges to say absolutely horrible things to them, break them emotionally, and you could see the tears well up in their eyes, and sometimes they would try to attack me, but I was carrying a taser, and would have to back out of the cubicle farm with the other insects staring painfully at their monitors, pretending none of this was happening, while I reached behind me for the doorhandle and mumbled how the meat in their chests would blossom with tumors. The way you think about the people around you changes when you spend most of your waking hours thinking of terrible, horrible things to say to people you don’t know. I’m too lazy to finish this story, but I imagine there’s some nature of falling in love at some point.

I became a faith healer, as every faith healer I’ve ever met has admitted after a couple dozen screwdrivers, primarily to bag the sort of woman who sees a causal connection between my laying hands all across her greater aspects and any falling of potentially prophetic prattle that falls out of my tongue-lulled mouth. This is hardly a straight-line sort of plan; I’d been out on the road for nearly three years, addicted to Pastuur Hyacinth’s Sleep Ray (bet you didn’t know the Pentagon perfected long-distance narcolepsy technology back in the Sixties) and adrift in a puddle of brain-dried responsibilities resulting from said pursuit of jigglin’ lust. It was then that the floor of my life gave in and crumbled, as all signs pointed to a herd of lawsuits holding me personally responsible for “negative mental suggestion resulting from improper and unlicensed prophesy”, which would essentially break the spine of my livelihood and result in the getting of a real job, a fate worse than death. I thought long and hard on how others had dodged this bullet, coming to the conclusion that the arts, long a shield for disreputable behavior, would be my ticket. Soon, I would do my readings accompanied by an acoustic guitar, thus protecting myself as an Artist, content to sing folk songs about death and cleavage.

I was living with a group of people that i did not know. my room wa sin the basement; i shared a large feather bed with two women who were lovers, which got to be very annoying, but i was instructed by god to bring in certain specifically marked people to stay temporarily in the house until certain things could be removed from their bodies; often i had them sleep in my bed while i slept in the crawlspace. one of these people was gary coleman, and while we were driving back to the big house we drove down a tight spiraling road whose weirdly involutional motion continued after the car had stopped, we talked to a prostitute who had gene-alterant work done to grow beds of small cilia and longer thin tentacles in her mouth in order to facilitate fellatio. “i have memorized over three hundred sacred geometrical patterns achievable with the components of my mouth.” i told her that sounded like getting sucked off by a macrame plantholder, and gary told her she would have been better off investing that money in some therapy. she then cursed us, telling us this road would not end, and folded in on herself until she was gone. after that, something else happened.

if it is true, as i was told as a child, that heaven is the place where nothing happens, and hell is the place where nothing changes, it is my suspicion (as it has been since my days of ccd) that these are the same places, and those who have been broken and buried face-down at their life’s end are finally admitted a rest from the endless burden of the body, while all of us who have sought and suckled distraction and addiction will be corroded by appetites we can no longer satisfy, gaki, preta, our throats like pinholes.

the wind had eaten through the trees, corrosives leaving tombstones like so many outcroppings of coral in an emptied sea, and i knew the chevelle wasn’t gonna get up to speed enough to get through the guardrail when i felt something come apart in my right shoulder, which sent me turning back, which sent the steering wheel into a spin, which jerked the car hard left across the median through a grove of tiny white crosses and at a 45 degree angle (nearly, close enough for our purposes) to an oncoming FedEx truck, which sent the engine block back into the driver’s seat, which would have crushed me had not the angels lifted me up through a torn hole in the roof, perching me atop a pet store right across from the interstate, telling me i need to start being more careful, but all i’m doing is looking for my hip flask, which is now three-ways dented around a mac truck grill.

First thing she did after she fell out of bed was check her online guru Paul Apostrophes for her guide-lesson for the day, which was “whenever possible, walk on your tiptoes”, which she pondered in a sort of clumsy way while showering and drying and brushing and dressing until she finally figured out how to apply today’s lesson right around the time she got on the sidewalk, walking to the bus stop, and for the first time in years pretended she was a danseuse, hidden grace trapped in the muscles of her calves released in a sort of buzzing all around her body, infatuating enough that she completely missed the bus while doing pirouettes out in front of my house.

and it was really very scary the way he just snuck up but i think maybe that was what he wanted and but it was also funny as then we watched him sneak up on mommy and do the thing like he did to us and johnson was with us and almost started to laugh so we poked him one and then he held his hands over his mouth and now it was like we all caught it and bit our tongues as he snuck up and then looked over his shoulder at us grinning with the icesicle in his hand and he had it up at the top of mommy’s dress and just waited a bit but she was making soup and you know when she makes soup it’s all like out of the kitchen you little hoboes! because she used to call us that you know and then just as she started to turn to get some onions from next to the table he let it go and she let out this scream! like aaaaaaaagh! and she turned and whacked him one with the ladle and he tried to run away and ran into the door and that was *really* funny and we were all on the porch all bent and laughing and johnson wet himself.

I think this was the only person i’ve ever gone out with where, like, we actually really went out, like on dates, like I’d have to call and have a schedule of events or whatever, it was pretty weird, I don’t reccommend it, but anyway there were tennis balls all over the place and so I thought she played a lot of tennis, but I could care less about tennis, so I didn’t mention it, until there was a lull in one of my well-planned event nights because Rent ‘N Putt was closed “due to unspeakable video-rack catastrophe” from when they had that burrower demon infestation so we’re walking back to the car and I was trying to think of something to say and so I ask about tennis and she kinda stares at me and then laughs and says “no, my psychiatrist has me throw tennis balls around in order to deal with my rage”, and it occured to me that there’s literally hundreds of tennis balls on the floor of her house, and you would figure I would have clued into her maybe not dealing with a breakup well, but I was never what you would call perceptive in that way.

Work continues unabated on the film adaptation of “masturbation and cookies: the jimmy cheerios story”, currently held up due to a series of disputes on how to film the weekend where he was a jewish satanist — now note first of all that he was never actually jewish or a satanist and mostly just wanted to get it on with this hillel dropout named rebecca something and while most of these clowns decked out in their backwards robes looked like a rabbinical kriss-kross nobody could fill out such an outfit as rebecca-lilith, bride of satan. plus note second that he was just completely confused, and thought they were metal chicks, and you know how he gets around metal chicks. the point being that our associates in casting were unwilling to meet stringent demands as to the, how to say, mental value of the help, as we really can’t have anymore day-temps running out of the “studio” (we were squatting in an abandoned meat-packing plant, which was great for atmosphere, but awful for catering) all on fire and shit because some goofball didn’t know that lubricant needs to be non-flammable. there’s no professionalism in the arts anymore.

We would go to the park and he’d stare at the dogs, crouch down and stare them in the eyes and say “you are not a dog. you are a human being. get up and walk, my friend.” He did this for years, every time we saw a dog. I never saw a dog get up and walk, but we were process not product kinda kids, back then.

she wore necklaces of small masks which had cracked and were secreting some sort of thick fluid which collected in lines carved into the faces, she saw certain patterns, she said these things are always hard to spot accurately, she was standing in the hallway, she refused to move, she was afraid of something which could only get at her in large open spaces, she was trying to push her fingers through the drywall to the insulation beneath, she was panic-stitching a shroud from pink fiberglass, she kept screaming pushing air out with her stomach trying to tell us to be aware, to pay attention, there were invisible things swirling all around us which wanted to get into our skulls in through our ears, she said she could see certain hues we were not trained to see, she was certain she would be safe if only shoe could sew a shield from what was around here, she was screaming, she wouldn’t stop.

a couple days ago i stopped into this place by the highway to get a sub, and not long after i sat down a man woman and child came in. the man was on a cellphone, and broke from his monologue just long enough to order. the family sat down at the table next to mine, where the woman talked a little to the child and the man continued to talk to this other party, which turned out to be a business partner, only they weren’t talking about business, they were talking about the man’s mother (whom i believe was actually the woman’s biological mother, but i’m not certain of this), who was being insufferably ingrateful out at the nursing home. i was there for twenty-odd minutes, during which this man’s stream of stunned offense at this bitch of a woman who must have been trying her hardest to make herself sick was the only conclusion he could come up with, you know ninety percent of it’s mental, she’s just bound and determined to be miserable you know and she won’t be happy unless everyone else is too and you have to cut yourself off from people like that, they’re vampires, they’ll drag you down if you let them, and after all the effort he had gone through to get her a room with a view of a tree. not only was this man not going to talk to his family, who sat and looked very intently at their shrunken meals, he wasn’t even going to waste time not talking to his family, he had better things to do, and thank god jake’s back from south carolina as the fucking bill’s gonna give him a stroke, and maybe that bitch can take care of his medical bills for a while, haha. on the way to my car i kicked in his taillights, as it seemed absolutely necessary to ruin this man’s day.

You reach an age where when you get into a fistfight on a Saturday night you don’t completely heal, you can see broken vessels in the nose, bruises lingering through the week. This started to worry Jon, who was just getting to the age where he was a little less handsome each season, a little slower, a little stiffer. When you assemble auger heads on the line every day for a decade, that’ll happen, and Jon had no complaint with that most of the time, but it used to be he could shake that off for the weekend, go out with his friends and get into some shit and wake up in a cornfield out by Jessup and laugh. Only now that soreness in the bones of his hands didn’t fade beneath the vodka and darvon; it pulsed from him, like a light he tried to hide in his fists. Sometimes he would find himself staring into the mirror, lost in time, not sure how long he’d been there. He started sleeping in his clothes, on the couch, not always remembering to change in the morning. Sometimes at night, he thinks he sees himself in his dreams, but he’s not sure, as he doesn’t look like himself in his dreams, only he’s not sure what he looks like now. The last time I saw him, right before I moved to Texas, he was sitting on the kitchen floor where the table used to be, plaster-dust all over his shirt and his hands and the floor from the holes in the walls, and he was trying to tell me something, somebody was waiting outside for him, only I turned to look through the blinds, past curtains an ex-girlfriend put on the back door, and I couldn’t see anybody, just snow and ice and night out into the fields. I told him I was going out to get more jagermeister at the holiday station and I didn’t go back.

if i stare directly upwards the snow seems to hang in the air, haloing the streetlights, but i’m a perfectionist and walk out into the street to get the lines right and she’s screaming at me, grabbing at my coat, pulling me to the curb. poetic-neurotic all her histrionics, fucked from birth, unaware of the stares of the children waiting for the walk light. she’s glad i moved. we complicate each other, i need complication, she needs a peace she’ll never find with me. i’m watching myself from across the street. i’m fighting the urge to dance. the rings on her fingers intwined with my fingers, hand-in-hand, are cold and root me to the present. breath-ghosts warm to invisibility when i face her, lean close, ask senseless questions. i am not dead. i am here. the children are singing something, making up words when memory fails. peeled skulls stare out from passing cars, rate of travel starts and stops in unnatural ways. your soul is larger than your body. her shoulder brushes mine. i am trying very hard to be normal.

I was working in this super-secret underground planetarium as their resident moog soloist, and i would make little shooting comet envelopes that i could trigger with foot-pedals while i got all phantom-of-the-opera-as-played-by-wendy-carlos on the keys. There were these two shrunken kids who narrated the show, and all the seats had restraints though i never figured out why. I do remember being happy.

She told me she couldn’t really sing, really belt out the song, with her hands on the wheel, which at the time seemed a perfectly reasonable notion. She lifted her hands off the wheel, and we flew down the highway, and I closed my eyes and listened.

There was a child who worshipped a small metal junction box in his neighbor’s front yard, a mint-green metal box which emitted a low hum you could only hear from up close, and an occasional loud click. This child was once a friend of ours, for a short time, new to the neighborhood and seemingly normal with a good yard for football. We filled him in on the mythology of the neighborhood, the witch-house where the crazy lesbians lived, the storm drains where we used to play and later take girls because the darkness made them pretend to be afraid and huddle close, the junction box where Billy lived. We had this whole story about this kid named Billy who was trapped in the junction box, had been for years, and that loud knocking sound is Billy banging on the box, asking for help. On late-night prowling around the neighborhood, feeling self-important and vaguely dangerous, we used to always say hi to Billy when we walked by the box, the sort of habit one first does as a joke which grows out of its humor. The child would stray a bit slower, staring at the box, not scared so much as fixated, looking for something. Later we would see him less and less, as his mother decided he was too sick for violent games, with asthma or hemophilia or something. Sometimes when I was walking to the park I would see him in the Wharton’s yard, in front of the junction box, staring at it, talking in a voice too quiet to hear. I’d try to talk to him, but he was too busy with the box, and I took all these small slights intensely personally and decided I hated the boy.

One night we were staying over at Kent’s house, whose parents didn’t much care what we did so long as we were quiet and stayed away from his sister, so we went to the garage and loaded up with tools and went out to destroy the junction box, somewhat because we were all fed up with the new stuck-up neighbor boy but mostly because we constantly wanted to break things. Being children, however, we were weak, and managed only to dent and scrape the surface, so we settled for spraypaint, the box too small for any extended writing, which is fine as most of the words we were interested in only had four letters.

The next day the box was completely painted over, small stones glued to its surface in intricate designs, pictures of angels and aeroplanes across its front doors. At the base there were flowers stolen from neighbors’ yards and little toys, race cars and army men, set on the top of the box. We had elaborate plans for a new revenge, but we never actually had a chance, as the telephone company came out a week later and removed the box. It was just gone. I remember sitting at the bus stop down the block, shakingly furious that these people had come into my neighborhood from wherever and just taken something, even something I was just going to break, maybe especially as it was something I was just going to break. The child we saw a few more times, late at night, wandering around the neighborhood very slowly, scanning the yards. Then he was gone, and we never learned what happened to him, it was like he was never there, which was fine with us as we were going to middle school at the end of that summer and had bigger things to worry about.

I went out that day and looked at the sidewalk, at the place where her tracks in the snow stopped. He came back the next day, but it had snowed, and the tracks were gone.
(12:08.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Heroes
Esther had her second heart attack at one in the morning, asleep in her bed, and she thought maybe she should wake up somewhere in her dream, but she didn’t and she died. Two hours later she woke up. Esther’s very good at sleeping all through the night and knew something odd must be happening. She looked around and everything was normal, only it was dark, but that makes sense because it was three in the morning. There was no point in her trying to go back to sleep because once she’s up, she’s up, so she got dressed and brushed her hair and brushed her teeth. She went and looked out her window at the street and had the feeling like she wasn’t supposed to be seeing this, like when she was in school and would watch plays from the other side of the stage. This was interesting and kind of weird so she went down to the street and decided to walk, which she never does anymore. She couldn’t hear the robins and cardinals singing because they were all asleep. In fact, everybody was asleep, everybody on her block, as far as Esther could tell. It’s natural to be sleeping but she still though it was odd and kind of funny, so she started to laugh. “I must have gotten a blessing!” she said, quietly to herself. Before long her legs started to get achy, and she went back to her house, and put up the shades again, and she took off her dress clothes and got into her nightgown and put her hair down, and she went back to sleep. And then she died and didn’t come back.
(12:08.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Why Don’t You Go Fuck Yourself
You could tell I had been taking sleeping pills and drinking because it took me such a long time to tell you how this time I really truly was gonna kill myself and there was nothing you could do about it. You had just fallen in love with a young minister, and you felt your love for him to connect you to a god you could believe in by proxy, and thus the thin paper-sack thud of your heartbeat tried to swell with sympathy and joy for the self-righteous hours of contemplation as to how to protect yourself you had to keep yourself away from me, I had forced your hand, you tried and tried but there’s only so far one can go, and you started in on this line early, maybe too tired for the crying jag you usually nestled down into after accepting the charges. I was into the standard bit, the the only pride you can have is that the universe had to work to crush you, that the prime mover had to turn off the assembly line to find your broken body on the ground and smash it with its own hands instead of the regulation hammer, you know, some shit like that, when you started in on this how you couldn’t bear to listen to my last words and hung up the phone.

Then your preacherman answered, so as to give me a stern talking to, I thought of something I said back when I lived in Iowa City, and I’ll never forget it: “Let me tell you how it is I’m gonna go about fucking your wife.” The reason I’ll never forget that is almost immediately after I became the endpoint for a series of head and body blows, all of which I had coming, was why I fell back and let it happen. I thought about saying it to the rev, but it didn’t make any sense, and in the five minutes it took me to figure this out he had managed to say all sorts of unsaintly things as to my character and hung up again, and there’s only so many times in a day a person can take being hung up on, so I went to the Goodwill and bought a couple steak knives and sat on the curb trying to look unbalanced but nobody would look at me, like I wasn’t even there.

So now that I’ve fucked up your life forever, now that none of your friends can look you in the eye again, now that you had to buy new sheets and new carpeting and new drapes and new silverware just to stay in your own home, now that you’ve finish the last round of injections and checkups, now that you have to drive twelve miles across town because the local grocer won’t sell to you anymore, now that the cops have reduced their prowls down your street to twice a night, now that your fingernails are growing back in, now that you’ve found at least three of your rings in the display cases of local pawn shops, now that you’re starting to think maybe you can get off the cigarettes and amphetamines and actually get a night’s sleep in peace, now that you can walk across the bathroom floor without having to watch each step, now that you’re no longer afraid to check your answering machine, now that the children at the bus stop no longer scream witch and throw pinecones and are content to run away and hide in Eltzlen’s garage, now that you’ve nearly paid off all the bad checks and missed bills, now that you can hold something in your hand and not fear for letting it go, now we should talk about when I’m gonna get my fucking records back.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Froggie Went A-Drinkin’
The funny thing is, just a few nights ago I had a dream with peeple I knew in it as well. It’s not a rare thing to have individual peeple pop up w/o reason in dreams of mine (at least, the few that I can remember after I wake up); you’ve been in a couple, but this one was mostly (for some inexplicable reason) Hank and David Moses. David, looking for all the world like a young John Barth, was searching in the other room for something, possibly a book, while Hank was trying out acrobatic neo-bennihanna cooking techniques involving peppers and strange purple fruit. I, meanwhile, am sitting on the couch, thinking that the surroundings kinda look like Heath and Amy’s old place, except different, like it’s up in the trees, but I’m not sure about any of that because it was night, and it couldn’t have been too far off the ground because here comes a frog riding on the back of a sleek black cat with brambles and briars in its hair, who begins communicating to the frog in low purrs, furthering my long-held suspicion that cats are a form of alien intelligence. The frog gets off and starts walking around on his two hind legs, which I believe is anatomically impossible and so I ask him how it is he can walk around like that, being utterly oblivious of the strangeness of asking a walking frog anything.

“The power of likker, boy!” says Frog, who proceeds to pull out a thimble filled with some kind of green-blue hooch and takes a big ol’ swallow, nearly knocking him back on his warty ass.

“Well now, hey, frog, how’s about you pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable?” says Hank, always the perfect southern gentleman.

“Well now and I guess I don’t mind taking a load off, mister Hank, what kinda action you got going on in the frying pan?”

“Aw, this? This ain’t nothing, just some things I picked up at the market and I got the idea to mix ‘em together rather than go to the store for a real meal, you’re more than welcome to help yourself.”

At which point David comes out from the back room, no book (or anything else, for that matter) in hand, and, positively delighted to see the frog, busts out a fat-ass grin and pulls up the chair next to him, asking him how’s his kids been, and for some reason beyond me I suddenly get some kinda psychic backstory that David had a thing for one of frog’s daughters, which either means frog has some human in his lineage somewhere or I’ve severely underappreciated David’s penchant for cross-speciesism.

“They’re good as ever, the kids are just right as rain and all but the little woman, she’s, well, she’s got this idea in her head that she needs to get the girls married off before too long so she’s been putting out ads, putting up flyers, I mean to tell you you get that woman started on something and it’s wild horses stopping it, but the girls, I mean, they ain’t but maybe 26 at the oldest, with Cathy, and Julie ain’t even through with her schoolin’ at the college yet, I mean, they got all kinds of time.”

Now David gets this look in his eye like maybe an entry window just popped open, and Hank apparently sees this coming and, playing it awfully smooth, starts pouring Frog another thimbleful of the booze and asking “Well, now, maybe you don’t wanna be too hasty on that, how’s about if Cathy met herself a nice, upstanding man, I mean Julie needs herself some more time but Cathy, she’s about ready to meet someone nice, someone with a future in the arts.”

“You reckon?”

“Absadamnlutely. Look at it like this, you get her married to a nice upstanding gentleman, and not no dingus from the want ads but someone decent and smart, and then you get the wife off your back and get Cathy taken care of and get to throw a big-ass party with all kindsa booze, I mean, that’s a win-win situation, if you hear what I’m sayin’.”

David’s practically bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet by this time, and is about ready to blurt out his marital intentions right there, but Frog says “Y’know, mister Hank, you talk right sensible for a cobble-chef, in fact, I’m fixin’ to get ready to go out and find that girl a right proper man, just as soon as I have me one more sip of my medicine, if you don’t mind pouring me another one, up to the rim, I’m a big boy, oh that’s the stuff…”

So while Frog contented himself with the healing powers of alcohol, Hank and Dave came into the other room, where I had been watching this exchange kinda blankly, and the three of us conferred and agreed that David was a suitable spouse for Cathy, who I still didn’t know if she was frog, human, or other, but I got the impression she was practically an angel descended from heaven to grace god’s green earth, this girl apparently was as groovy as a Victoria 78, she was the shit.

“Mister Frog, I got a proposition for you, and I think you’re gonna like the sound of this…” beamed Hank, in a triumphant voice, and though the rest of the dream is a blur. I’m fairly sure David ended up with Cathy the possibly-frog princess, Hank got loaded and made a downright touching speech at the reception, and I got arrested for drunk and disorderly.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Fed On
Your boyfriend’s watching the news, watching lives find their endings, and he turns off the screen because he can’t deal with it. Later he’ll call his other girlfriend and they’ll talk and cry as she says she can’t bring herself to do this anymore, this being-together, she just can’t deal with it. After she called a friend, a friend she hadn’t talked to in years, since the time of meds and visitations, but this friend will be fearful of the end of her job, her livelihood always impending, and she’ll tell her old friend that she loves her but she just can’t deal with it. That night her apartment will be broken into by an ex-boyfriend who who feels that the emotional costs she took out of him entitles him to things she owns, things which represent the two of them, which will find a home tonight out in the river, where the train bridges creak and ring, and the couple who live across the street will watch this entrance through the window, this breaking and crying, and they’ll hover over the phone like a lost cloud, wondering if they should call, but the paranoia which comes with illegal deeds the two partake in occasionally has convinced them they just can’t deal with it. The two, both women, have been shunned from their families because their families just can’t deal with it. The heads of these families, all those dying of polysyllabic diseases which get caught in the throat even by the professionals who counsel over costs and incisions, they lay in beds in empty rooms and sleep in their rare and clotted blood, alone, because nobody can deal with it. All the words you hold in your mouth because to say them will bring potentials, and you don’t want to deal with it. All the dreams you push to the back of your head, because to think of the now is to know how little you’ve tried, how far you’ve fallen, and you just can’t deal with it. There’s a place floating just over your head where you go, sometimes, when you lose the ability or the will to care. And the last time I saw you, the last time you looked into my eyes, I saw you there, floating, somewhere far away.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Extual
I can’t remember the year. It was the year in which every film that was released was compared by critics to Pulp Fiction, a trait some of my slower friends have since taken as the whole of their critical process. I was working for STS, on the suggestion of an advisor of mine looking to place me in a friend’s post-grad mill. Sheridan Testing Systems designed those psychological evaluation tests that most of us had to take at some point in our educational careers, whether for placement in certain classes or because teachers were concerned about that new “sullen” trend you’d developed that fall. Miserable shag-carpeted rectangle on the edge of town, where like-minded businesses clotted and throttled the hills lining the riverside. All said, however, I was fond of this job for the simple fact that being a question-writer was not only a cush job, it allowed me certain perverse joys for child-brain fuckery:

127. It is four am on Christmas morning. You hear a crash and discover that Santa Claus has been involved in a horrible sleigh accident, in the course of which his neck has been broken and his reindeer let loose to roam the countryside, seeking out Salvation Army Santas to become their surrogate keepers, which results in massive donations to the SA that year. You see, amidst the twisted wreckage, a bag filled with all the world’s worth of toys, practically bottomless, all yours — if you are willing to dispose of the body and the evidence? What do you do? (50 words or less)

The point of education, many would say, is to acclimate children to the mores of the society in which they live, training them not only for vocational aptitude but for proper psychological and moral health. This was certainly the outlook at STS. Our tests, therefore, were designed in order to teach children how to lie and sublimate, two traits most definitely necessary for future success. Setting up hypothetical situations in which it becomes both increasingly important and increasingly difficult to effectively sidestep the truth most likely affected us in certain ways. It most definitely didn’t make for a healthy relationship environment.

Consider, for example, the following:

1. Jimmy Cheerios has been taking The Test for three hours now. Jimmy has a weak bladder — it’s not his fault, it’s in his genes — and is soon to be all over his jeans if he doesn’t relieve himself post haste. Jimmy has three story problems to solve before he finishes the test, the time limit being 45 minutes away, farther away than Guam due to jimmy’s power-chugging a pitcher of oj this morning for the mythic “vitamin c rush”. jimmy, early developing a diet of things which give him ‘pep’, jackhammers his way through his days on steady staples of coffee, ephedrine, oj and raw sugar, and is well past due for a full-body crash soon, which means any te spent non-testing lessens the time between now and a jittery snooze atop his desk, awash in his waste should he play this wrong. Thus, is
a) the amount of time long enough that Jim should stick it out (so to speak) and finish the test, make a mad dash for the door and hope he can finish tinkling before sleep hits;
b) should he run out now, do his business, and hope the envelope of bodily endurance he’s pushing doesn’t collapse his preteen body; or
c) go number one right there on the classroom floor and hope to frighten his instructor enough to give him a perfect for fear of his life?

2. Jimmy Cheerios is playing scrabble with Phillip Funk, heir to the Funk and Wagnalls, well, empire is a strong word, but the dictionary/encyclopedia marketplace is solid as slate and, being in second only to the Webster conglomerate, it’s safe to say P. Funk is well-off, perhaps tutored from a young age so as to be a scrabble prodigy — top-ranked scrabble players, after all, make a very healthy living, not to mention the kind of rolling-stones-circa-cocksucker-blues debauchery forbidden on the pro-chess circuit. Why Jimmy got into a match with a ringer like P. is beyond us. Maybe it’s a setup. After six turns, P. attempts to use the word ‘butterly’ off Jim’s previously-placed ‘butter’, extending onto a triple-word score. Jim cries foul, at which point P., smugly, calls up his grandfather, president of Funk and Wagnalls, and insists that the world ‘butterly’ be included in all funk and Wagnalls dictionaries from this point on, effective ex post facto. Phillip defines ‘butterly’ as any item which shares properties with butter, i.e. ‘that oleo sandwich was positively butterly!’. Should Jimmy
a) immediately quit, realizing p. doesn’t understand that making up words in the midst of a heated scrabble came is, well, not quite cricket;
b) immediately get in touch with the top brass at milton-bradley and get their ruling;
c) let it go and eat the loss, knowing full well irking the young funk could result in a dictionary entry for jimmy Cheerios (jym-e cheer-i-ohz, v., one acting in an unsportsmanlike or irrational way, i.e. ‘he went totally jimmy Cheerios on me when I told him there’s no such thing as dry ice hockey’); or
d) just go all-out king-hell batshit and throw the board at the wall and sulk out in the hope that scrabble-beat weekly will wonder and fawn over ‘this brash, temperamental young upstart, whose first victory was stolen by an unfair move by veteran and trust-fund baby p. funk, leading thousands of scrabble-groupies to mob jimmy’s house, professing offers of love and revenge…’?

3. Can a living human get frostbite on the brain?
a) no. are you mental?
b) yes! trepanation is a procedure dating back to ancient times which consists of a small hole being drilled in the skull, exposing the brain to outside elements. practitioners claim this results in ‘a constant high-state’ or ‘one endless orgasm’, a pyrrhic victory at best. All frostbite requires is exposed tissue, so it is possible, but not at all fun;
c) yes! liquid oxygen is medicinally used in order to freeze and then remove parasites burrowed beneath the skin. The same practice, accompanied by delicate neurosurgery, could result in a frostbitten brain, though the resulting neural trauma could well result in death; or
d) absolutely, if one is willing to somewhat redefine the term “brain”. a small amount of brain tissue could be pulled through the nose and frozen by nothing more than daily exposure with only minimal damage to the brain or to sinus cavities. Leonard Niemoy says the Egyptians used to do it, though I think he’s kinda fucked on that one, cause I don’t know how you’d freeze anything in Egypt.

4. If you had to choose half the population of the earth to be destroyed, which half would you choose?
a) the first half;
b) the second half;
c) flip a quarter; or
d) kill ‘em all, let the jackals sort ‘em out.

5. Jimmy Cheerios is looking for a means to enter the high-risk kick-happy world of geopolitical control. For example. The Baulerland Tactical Near-Space Program has begun fundraising and grassroots campaigning and plan to be the first privately-funded space program by 2010. a personal fave has been the Satellite Skeet Shoot, where for the low cost of $1000 American (which we quickly have transferred into gold, having been clued into the World Bank’s attempt at returning the American tender system to the gold standard and thus collapsing our credit system, yes we’ve got our sights on them) old-money hunters are given one shot with the Baulerland Projectile System, aiming and firing on the satellite of their choice. We provide detailed maps and up-to-the-minute targeting information to assist such heads of industry take aim at competitors (who are then invited to do the same to the original shooter’s satellites), while bringing the global information system to havoc and making a sweet sum in the process. You gotta problem with that?
a) yes, destroying property is wrong, and besides, the gold standard is aces with me;
b) no, but c’mon, any tactical weapons dealer NEEDS satellites in order to do business, and besides, with this new push to pass Reagan’s old warhorse SDI as a defense against asteroids God knows the kind of wicked- cool money is to be made in the near-space racket, why shoot yourself in the foot?;
c) hell no! hit the fuckers where it hurts! and should I pass this test and be allowed to continue my education, the first thing I’ll do with my first three paychecks is shoot me down one of them planet-killing lie-spreading angels of misery!; or
d) if the Gaia-mind is making use of advanced technology as a means to leave this planet, that would make Sat-Net the visual system, which means, as anyone who knows that Cataracte is Greek for floodgate (of Heaven) understands that by blinding the global consciousness we stunt both the modern capital system and…uh, alternate consciousness would, um, shit.

Can I have a do-over?

Extra Credit: in keeping with our plans to uplift the populace, Jimmy Cheerios has been throwing a series of marches. Earlier today, for example, he began his March on 7-11, where he marched the distance from my house to 7-11 and back in a symbolic gesture of the ongoing struggle the people have made in their ongoing fight for freedom and the distance we all have come. Other planned events include the March on The Mall, the March to Jimmy’s Car, and the March on The Kitchen. This may seem like an inordinate amount of marching, but he will spare no expense, not even his own comfort, in supporting common peasant causes. Being a young peasant-type, and seeking proper guidance in both your life and in your politics, between what two geographic points (no more than five miles from each other) would a march best represent your hopes and dreams?
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

extranarrative two: bones
bones

(image by RJ Moore, girl wrestler)

Scurvy? Shyeah. Siren sickness, songs scattered seductively, silt-sullied seas swallowing spilled screaming sailors. Sentience stopped, sail-shawled skeletal sentries stand silent, stalking sounds since stilled somewhere skyward. Sirenic starvation sated, surface-swimming schoolchildren serenade shell-seated sweethearts sharing sorry ship’s story, stripped, skin-shimmering, speechless.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/extrnarr] #

cuckoopad
cuckoopad

(image by RJ Moore, world’s laziest ninja)

The universal abolishment of distant spaces may have made trips to the bathroom much more expedient, but without question brought on strange neighbors. Telescopes in such settings demonstrate one’s willingness to indulge the decadent or the disbelief in the powers of the state to make all things instantly convenient, which is both sinful and rude. What sport was there, after all, when by merely thinking of the Venusian Saltsucker it would be little more than a glance out the window in its proximity? Everything distant becomes near, inverting Goethe’s maxim, presenting the splendors of ease on a platter of disease, our immune systems not at all prepared for the extent of our appetites. How’s that rash doing?
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/extrnarr] #

extranarrative two: charliebrown
charliebrown

(image by RJ Moore, bon vivant)

Three days into my stint as substance abuse counselor and already I had driven pop sensation Melissa Dubious into a spiral of exobiologic tranquilizers, stone of spiritual understanding abuse, parole violations and at least one missed final. Missing somewhere in the endless trade district of west gilbertville, I sent malign spirits in search of his trail, who so terribly terrified the junk-addled clientele that in the panic outside a boy-thing in a gelatin cloak threw a drink in my face, the fumes and absorption alone sufficient to trigger my long-checked thirst for my old friend John Barleycorn, leading to a three-week bender in the company of sat-pop nymphet Dubious, and that’s why I haven’t been home in so long, sweetie, honest.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/extrnarr] #

extranarrative four: veneer
veneer

(image by RJ Moore, raconteur)

Leave it to the Monotonous Monotony Troupe to perfect their goal of slow-motion chase sequences in their new opus, “Playground Buzzbomb”. Designed primarily for those who find the hurly-burly of the modern world, its automobiles and synthetic butlers, simply too hectic to provide a lasting aesthetic experience, this six-hour piece consists of a race between a sand-stuck skateboard and a swingset. A visceral peak is reached toward the end of hour four, at which point the actor on the skateboard falls down from exhaustion, leading to the now-famous “sing-leaping sequence”, slowed to twelve frames a minute, requiring special water-cooled cameras so as not to melt the film.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/extrnarr] #

Experiments
It has long been my belief that the definition of one’s erogenous areas need not be located specifically on the body. For instance, while I consider myself as sensitive physically as most people, my most sensitive area is in the corner of a bathroom in a two-story house on 108th Street, Indianapolis Indiana. For years I would, without any specific physical stimulus, have incredibly powerful orgasmic experiences, which occasionally led for fairly embarrassing situations (I have a confessional story that would make you cringe). At first I thought of this as some sort of neural misfiring, so I went to Student Health, who gave me an aspirin and sent me home. In the waiting room I started talking to this girl I knew from my freshman Consumer Responsibility class, who told me she had a cousin who had the same condition I had, who discovered he had a pleasure-locus (her words, not mine) located along a section of telephone cable leading to an elderly woman’s house; this cousin befriended this old woman, and would call her for hours, completely naked, with bottles of water and towels at his side. The question, ultimately, is if the entire universe can be considered a vast lattice of potential orgasmic nerve-endings, which one connects to you, a silver strand tied straight to your crotch. A year passed, during which these events slowed and then stopped entirely, when in the back of this xerox zine I had sent some goofy story about magic poop or something, I read an ad from this group called Aethereal Joy Foundation, which not only nailed the same thing this girl was telling me about earlier, but offered help in finding my “pleasure-locus” so long as I later assisted others in the same manner. I was taking a lot of drugs at this time, and would become totally obsessed with random things I had read being coded messages directed specifically to me in order to assist my discovering the Final Wisdom, so I took it for granted that this group was part of the Secret Imams or the Swarm Angels or whatever, and that I should drop them a note. Two months later, with help from AJF, I took a bus ride to Indianapolis, where I met an AJF member and realtor by the name of Holdus III, and Holdus drove me to 108th street, an emptied house he was attempting to sell, and through techniques I don’t exactly understand he led me to the area he had locked in as being directly connected to me. He left me alone in the bathroom, where I felt around for a while, until I found the corner, which I fondled in a rather disgusting way for hours on end. I had hoped to be able to buy the house, but since I had all of eight dollars to my name, Holdus told me not to worry, he’d see what he could do for me. A month later, I began having the orgasms-at-a-distance again, much more powerfully and regularly than before. I got a postcard from Holdus with this spotless, gleaming 50s-style ultramodern bathroom on the front. On the back, he had written “Two obsessive compulsive cleaning fetishists! You’re welcome! -Holdus III agent of infinite delight”.

Should any of you be AJF members still seeking your center, let me know; I’ll see what I can do.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Every Stitch
I told myself if we stayed here in the city for another year I’d kill myself. Sarah would laugh at calling this a city; it’s too green for that, she’d say, too open, but the crowdedness and the tension and the relentless sound of a jibbering idiot future everybody told me was inevitable was suffocating me, making me act terribly. Sarah had many friends here, had her job at the clinic, had akido and video editing classes; she had made a home here. After hinting that leaving the city might be my entryway into starting a family, after a pair of nights of listening to me locked in the bathroom going unhinged, after wearing her down and breaking her resolve, Sarah was willing to leave her life here and move with me, farther north.

Summerland was something of a fluke; I once had a professor who lived there, suggested it to the class once in a drunken rant half-passing for a lecture, and the name always stuck as the sort of place one could write a novel, the novel that’s been haunting me for ten years now. We did a bit of house-hunting before we moved and found an old two-story farmhouse by the river, the sort of zone between the outlying neighborhood and the farms, plenty of space without being entirely isolated. Convinced the place was flood-safe (Sarah had a thing about floods) and filled with ideas for use of the emptied barn, her acceptance of the idea grew into slow elation. We felt like conspirators, like infiltrators, children playing at spies, playing at being adults. The rent was so cheap we didn’t even bother finding a subletter for the last three months on our apartment’s old lease; we packed our stuff in a day and never looked back.

The property owner was an older legacy farmer named Asa who had two missing fingers on his left hand and a wife who could have thrown me into the trees. They showed us around, warned us of the big dryrotted oak on the bank, told us about the neighbors, told us something was living under the front porch but it’d never get in the house. We were smitten. A week’s worth of unpacking and we were set.

Rent being so cheap we could afford to wait a while before seeking out work, but Sarah’s not the type to drift. The best we could do was a dialup connection, but as I had no interest in the outside world and Sarah had lined up enough technical writing jobs to last out the year that was fine. One thing we were always good at was giving each other space, mostly as our sleep schedules didn’t sync up; she’d usually get to sleep around eleven, when I’d nap with her for a couple hours, get up and start writing, actually getting to sleep around the time she was getting up. I’d spend the night sitting upstairs, making coffee in the second half-kitchen, listening to my headphones and watching out over the street, to the houses out in the hills and the fields and the blinking radio towers, then turning to the other window and watching the river through the black trees. We’d go into town on weekends and make elaborate Sunday dinners. We cleaned out the barn and decided it was time we learned how to paint. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

One night I heard something out by the road and saw a neighbordog, an old black lab, letting out a low howl as it staggered into the yard, falling in a heap by the mailbox. I got dressed, got a flashlight, and went out to look, but by the time I got out there it was gone. The first time I thought nothing of it. Every couple weeks, however, some sort of animal had crawled to our yard, seemingly to die, only to be gone by the time I got to the yard. One night, having had no luck at writing and having had far too much coffee, I heard a barn cat’s call and climbed out onto the roof, watching. The cat fell, breathed out, and was silent. Two large rabbits then bounded out from beneath the porch, where they grabbed the cat gently in their jaws and pulled it back beneath the porch. This should have seemed a bit odd, but ultimately untroublesome, but I was terrified.

At the age of six I was the youngest non-baby child in my neighborhood, all the other kids older, bigger, knowing. I would tag along behind them, attempt to find a place among them, but I was at best a gadfly, a niusance. One day they told me I could be a part of their group if I passed the test. I agreed without thinking and they took me to the back end of the park, near the drainage ditch, and sat me down in front of a small hole in the ground. They told me a baseball had fallen into the hole; were I to pull it out I was one of them. I knew something was wrong, but I did not care. I reached out, slowly, staring for the slightest motion from inside the hole. I could not stop shaking. I stopped reaching and had to lean forward to make progress. I could not see my hand, my arm, twitching each time my hand brushed along the inside of the hole. I felt something then, something soft, something not a baseball, and I was relieved for a second. The half-rabbit then turned and bit into my hand, hooked into my skin as I pulled it out of the hole, its face and paws mangled from a lawnmower or something worse, flailing around as I kept falling backwards, trying to get away, my hand covered in blood and thick ropey saliva. I ran home and hid my wound from my mother, going back that night and pouring gasoline into the hole. For years afterward I was visited in my sleep by the half-rabbit, giant in its death, standing at the foot of my bed, patches of singed fur around exposed muscle, its jaws silently jerking open and shut, waiting for me to move and then kill me.

This was decades ago, and I barely remember anymore. A girlfriend I had in college had a rabbit which, in time, I’d learned to feed and pet. All that was in the past. I barely remembered.

I became terrified of the porch.

I told all this to Sarah, who told me not to worry, this was the country, you have to get used to animals being around. Which, of course, is the truth, and I was being a child. I couldn’t leave it alone, though, spending the nights sitting on the roof, staring down at the porch, waiting for a sign. Eventually Sarah, who believes greatly that any fear should be run toward head-on and thus erased, told me I had to go down under the porch and see for myself that a couple rabbits are nothing to worry about. A week of procrastinating later, I was shamed and sleepless enough to follow through.

Too afraid to go at night, I got my flashlight and stick (like a kid, I had to have some sort of club in hand) and pryed back the panel next to the stairs, by the front hose spigot. I looked inside but could see nothing from that angle and had to actually crawl inside, closer to the house. I knocked something over and saw it was a skull, a dog-skull I guessed. I pointed the flashlight at it and saw a number of other animal skulls, piles of them, dozens and dozens, spilling up from holes in the dirt. I heard something scurry behind them, saw the movement of fur, and panicked, scrambling back out, slamming the panel shut. Over dinner a couple hours later we laughed about it, about how little we actually knew of the country, but it was obvious to both of us that I was ashamed, that I wasn’t finished. Laying in bed with her I heard a raccoon howl in the yard. She rolled away from me. I picked up the flashlight and stick, sitting at the foot of the bed, and went to the yard.

I pulled back the panel and immediately crawled inside. I could see the two rabbits pulling the body of the raccoon into a small hole, where they used their teeth and paws to strip it of its skin. There was a light which escaped from the skull of the animal, short and dim but visible, while the rabbits polished and cleaned the skull with their saliva and fur. They then kicked dirt over the remains in the hole and lept farther along the porch. I followed, my flashlight off, trying to be silent. There was a large mound at the far end of the porch, which the rabbits stopped in front of. From within the mound I heard a low squealing sound, the sound of a speaker dying. The rabbits listened to this sound, then chattered back and forth to each other excitedly. The thing in the mound then let out a short barking sound, and the rabbits turned, facing me. I did not move. The two rabbits approached me, sniffed at my face and hands. I breathed in and out, hoping they would not thing I was dead, but I did not move. The rabbits bit into my shoulders and slowly pulled me toward the mound, the flashlight and stick falling out of my hands. I realized I could not move, even if I wanted to. The thing within the mound shifted, at which point I realized the mound was not a mound at all. There was a hugely obese man, as large as a small sow, whose arms and legs had atrophied and wilted, whose teeth were gnarled as roots, piercing his cheeks and lips. I am not certain this was a man at all, but it spoke in the voice of a man, as I remember:

“Have you died? Do you remember?”

“No. I live here.”

“You do not live in the portal. You are not a dead man and do not belong here.”

“I wanted to know.”

“And what do you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“You are a dead man. You are late in arrival; your brain has decayed. There is still time.”

“No. I am leaving.”

“Can you leave?”

I tried to turn, but could only twitch; the rabbits let go of my shoulders and lept back, staring at me.

“You are a dead man. You need to let go before we can open your skull.”

“I do not want to die,” I cried, and began sobbing.

“The black lights are falling away. You are cursing your release by your fear. You need to die.”

I could not speak. I could barely breathe. The pig-man called in a low hum to the rabbits, who pulled him forward, biting into the rings of sores across its chest. The pig-man arched up as the rabbits pulled him toward me, then descended on top of me. It was going to smother me. I heard it hum, heard the rabbits hum, heard the animals in the woods and barns hum, and I stopped trying to move, and felt myself falling upwards, and I saw a spinning cluster of lights, far away, and I knew I could only reach the most outerlying of them if I fell into its gravity.

Something pulled me back into my body, out from beneath the pig-man, out from beneath the porch. Sarah was brushing mud out of my eyes, shaking me, and I felt a snap and began convulsing. At the hospital she told me I kept screaming about the lights, so she kept turning them off and on, trying to figure out what I was talking about.

Neighbors with shotguns came in and investigated beneath the porch, finding nothing but holes and skulls. They suspect we had a wolf, or some sort of wild boar, although there shouldn’t be any boar this far east. I had stopped writing even after I got off the medication, spending my nights driving around the back roads, looking. One night I saw the rabbits, pulling somethign toward a storm-lamed barn out by the tracks. I began searching for recent roadkill, carrying the carcasses to the barn where the portal was hidden, hoping I could erase the memory by delivering the souls of other animals.

Years have come and gone. Someday I will wake up and forget all of this, wake up with my wife and my new child and my life as I always wanted it, and I will be okay again, with nothing staring at me from the foot of the bed, waiting for me to move.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Essential
It had allofasudden gotten all summery, the night getting shorter, the stars blurred by the humidity in the air, drifting up off the tarpaper and the asphalt. We were sitting around the kitchen table at her apartment, drinking some local beer and staring at everything but each other through sixty watts of yellow electric light. It must have been around two, because I could hear the train creeping along beside the river, here to Saint Louis, coming in through the windscreen above the television. I was making Rorschach shapes from the stains on the floor and she was watching the flightpath of a moth, tracing a jangled fluttery line across the perimeter of the room. The refrigerator hummed and the Kamikaze Brothers, one floor down and to the left, were shooting cockroaches into clumped brown paste along the baseboards of the living room with pellet guns they stole the night that truck overturned down the street, by the empty Hy-vee. The fan had broken at some point and had its head taped back onto its body, quietly buzzing and feebly pushing air around. She kept putting the ends of her hair into her mouth. I was wondering how much longer it would be before Star Trek was on. Finally, she said “I guess you know what time it is.” I had no idea what time it was, and looked up at her broken cat-clock out of habit, and guessed at two-fifteen. “No,” she said, “it’s time you and I switched skins.”

She went over to the drawers just beneath the toaster oven and got out a foot-long carving knife, which she set on the table before getting herself another beer from the case on the floor. “I guess I should start, then, if you don’t know how to do it. You wanna get a couple towels out of the laundry basket?” I was getting nervous, but for some reason I can’t remember now I wanted to wait this out, see where it went before I did anything. I got the towels, took a leak, and came back to the kitchen table to find her out of her clothes, all heaped on the couch, trying to figure out where on her body to start cutting.

“It’s best to do it in one cut, otherwise you get separate pieces and something gets lost and its just a mess.”

“Well now, wait a minute. How is it I’m gonna be able to, like, fit in your skin? I mean, I’m a big fat load and you could probably squeeze yourself in the icebox if you wanted. I mean, there’s this size thing. Y’know?”

“Well yeah but skin’s super-flexible, I could so easily fit over you but you, hmm. No, I think it’ll work out fine. I mean, it’s not forever or anything. Bring the towels over here.”

“Isn’t it time for Star Trek, though?”

“We can do this and watch Star Trek at the same time.”

“You’re sure?”

“Hell yes I’m sure. Now hop to, get me another beer and put those towels down there on the floor.”

Which is exactly what I did.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Emile Chucklehurst
(cowritten with W. Schwein)

“Self-portrait with Guest” 1919-1922 oil, ink, charcoal and wire on canvas and wood — It is perhaps telling that it is impossible to tell which figure is Emile and which is the guest.

“Circus Attacked By Lightning”, 1922, oil on metal and canvas — A knot of human, primate and reptilian hands, each set of fingers clasping the wrist of another hand; surrounded radially by a faces, some recognizable as contemporary Viennese politicians, clergy, professionals and civil servants. Included also are an infamous sodomist, two anarchists killed by the Ringstrasse riot in 1918, several prostitutes and a skinned dog. In the lower left are three portrayals of the artist himself, in varying degrees of fanciful scarification. Note the single band of steel stretching the canvas concave, & the fringe of electrical wire soldered to each end of the band. That Chucklehurst for several months kept a steady current moving through the painting may account for the minute singes and striations in the surface.

“Bratislava Sunset”, 1923 oil on canvas — During the summer of 1923, Chucklehurst entered a period of hiding, spending three months living in the basement labyrinth of what is now known as the Slovak National Theater, located at the eastern end of Hviezdoslavovo Namestie (Hviezdoslav Square). It is here that Chucklehurst may have spoken with Rabbi Michael Weissmandl, best known as a member of the Working Group, a cell of resistance fighters during the second world war; we do know that Weissmandl’s study of equidistant letter sequences in the Torah parallels much of Chucklehurst’s paintings throughout the twenties, including this piece.

“Sewage Labyrinth Ascent”, 1924, assemblage — Swinging freely, a bladed pendulum massaged the contours of a squat stone and plaster cylinder. Overlaid with several dozen prints of leaping men —acrobats and tumblers believed to have been employed by the Vergeltungszirkus, costumed in the absurd admixture of military, paramilitary and religious garments favored by the artist throughout his Karthago-Zweilicht period— the sunken surface leaked a viscous fluid when lacerated by the blades. Only photographs remain of this work, destroyed by Yugoslav authorities in 1939 —the base incinerated & the pendulum reduced to scrap metal.

“Twilight Dinner”, 1924 oil, ink on wood — Now in the possession of one Arthur Brisbane, this piece is unviewable and no photographs have been taken. Reports state a piece of massive size, which requires distance of nearly half a mile in order to view in full. It is suspected by at least one viewer, a Rachel Aven, that this piece was intended to be suspended from hot-air balloons over a large area, such as a city.

“Three Billion Years of Inane Chatter”, 1926, environment with sound — 16 branching and gently curving steel poles, 3.4 meters in height, clothed in vines and limning an imaginal blossom. A rotating brass and zinc ‘stamen’ produces a variety of tones when breezes from any direction are caught and amplified by the fluted surface: low moaning chords, short dopplering bursts and intermittent whines producing continuous texture later much praised by experimental composers such as Ingemar Liljefors of the Fylkingen Society. Sixteen guests were hospitalized with inner ear injuries following a freak windstorm at the installation’s opening. One of the earliest products of collaboration with expatriate Baronet James St. James Vachwood, “Years” prefigures the later investigation of plant life, sound, and architectonics that was to provoke arrest and imprisonment under Hungary’s Reform regime.

“Balaam’s Ass”, 1931 watercolor, ink on paper — Between the word of the ass and the ears of the curse-maker (balu - ‘am: destroyer of the people), the mind sullied by years of Midianite hookers and booze, Balaam stared up from his murder by the forces of Israel and searched the skies for the Star of Bethelehem. Servant of the son of the father, the child of incestuous union, this piece is most likely indicative of the increasing popularity of Chucklehurst’s work, a disturbing omen of the war to come for a man whose ass never saw any damn angel.

“Langa”, 1931, oil/fur/blood on canvas — Two men of equal height face one another, mouths open in speech, smiling. One holds a full wineglass, into which his companion knocks the ash of a cigarette. Two crushed tips are already to be seen in the glass. In the foreground three children play with a doll dressed as a Cardinal; behind the men and painted in the blurred brown shades of a daguerreotype stand four women and an elderly man, tense and evidently vexed. These five hold out a variety of objects belonging to farm and household —recognizeable are a gelding knife, a pocketwatch with a cracked face, a meat tenderizer and a handmirror reflecting the wineglass. A premier example of the artist’s facility with texture: note the variety of fabrics clothing this ‘pericosmic’ family.

“Guest of Melchezidek’s Family, 1930”, 1931 oil, steel dust on canvas — The guest mentioned here is most certainly Abram (Abraham), and the appearance of his feast on dust most certainly indicates a turning-away of Hebraic subservience of forces cloaked in Christian garb who actually serve false gods (Melchezidek blesses Abram in the name of God Most High), the first of his overtly political pieces directed against the burgeoning forces of National Socialism.

“bone, valley, light”, 1932-1933, stone earthwork — 36 sandstone columns, equilateral triangles in cross-section, rising out of a deep still pool. Landscaped into a garden of the Vachwood estate, the last and greatest of Chucklehurst’s sculpted environments was long a venue for raft-borne midnight fetes. Rising 4 meters above the water, the stones’ vertical faces are riddled through with climbing plants, a living paradigm of the fantastic vegetal overgrowth and cutaways inhabiting works as varied as “Bromius Iacchus, M.P.” and the Antiphrastic series. Within a year of its construction, “bone, valley, light” was colonized by albino kingfishers, adopted by the Vachwoods as the “Gens Ponti Gaeaque” but all killed for food late in the war.

“Apology to Midian”, 1932 oil on canvas — The blind prophet Shu’ayb, known Biblically as Jethro, was sent to Midian, a city of bandits and heathens, in order to convince them to desist their wicked ways. Shu’ayb was shunned and rejected, and thus God destroyed them. Chucklehurst is to have spent the year of 1932 in southern Syria, east of the Gulf of Aqaba, wandering an empty tract of land and working on this piece, swirls of paint applied almost calligraphically across scraped canvas. When asked, he would speak of the transmission of certain forces via the pupil, which (according to his only contact in Syria, one Bilal bin Rabah, named for the Muathin freed by Abu Bakr) nested in saline.

“There Is No Hiding Place”, 1939, oil/silk/metal on wood — Believed to be based on photographs from the Finno-Soviet war. A lakeside meadow blooming with the first spring flowers and crossed by four rows of concertina wire barriers. The rising sun illuminates condensation on the wire and traces the edges of three soldiers’ bodies lying off center in the middle distance. The technique by which Chucklehurst invokes rippling water out of a continuous sheet of satin fabric (an effect used frequently throughout the Magdalene period) has not been recorded but may have involved many successive stretchings followed by immersion in a nitrate solution.

“Eight: Mirrored Revitalization Casket”, 1939, oil/sand/glass on silver — From the last series of sculptures. Folding up into a dodecahedron more than a meter in diameter, the piece’s layered silver panels are each hinged to two others and have customarily been displayed in an open configuration. Including such elements as minute hand-hammered spirals and arabesques painted with a single-hair brush, “Casket” ends the artist’s explorations of “maximal textury in minimal variation”. That Chucklehurst requested post-mortem interment in the work has been ruled out following the research of M.E.B. Tillinghast (“Saltpork and the Green Man: Soteriological Dimensions of an Apeirophobe,” 1972, Clarendon Press).

“Untitled #9”, 1936 housepaint on wood — Suggestions of deep space align centrally in a gridwork where coded words (utilizing a combination of a cipher devised by Abu Bakr Ahmad ben `Ali ben Wahshiyya an-Nabati and the aforementioned equidistant letter sequence) are scraped into the upper layer of the black paint. At the time of this writing, the painting had yet to be decrypted.

“In The Fields, The Killer Rises To Heaven”, 1941, ink on plaster — Part of a defacement of the Chapel of St. Hugh in Bermondsey (subsequently deconsecrated; purchased 1951 by the Ordo Juliansis and reopened as a salon). A radical departure: one continuous line describing a nude male figure suspended without support over crowded city street. The central figure, disproportionately large, floats head-down in a fetal crouch, his face twisted to the left to face the viewer and his hands bound with loops of his own intestine. The eyes are closed, the lips curling into a subtle smile. Long considered a self-portrait (the only such image in the post-imprisonment corpus), recently discovered letters identity the subject as an amalgam of several Presbyters Apostolick [sic], an East End apocalyptic sect with whom the artist maintained extensive correspondence.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Rv. Emersohn, Brought Low Like A Dog
You count half a dozen mile markers on the way to the farm, but you’re sure you missed a few, hidden in the cattails. There’s a witch who lives in a shack just up from the emptied graveyard, where the Williams kid used to drink away his undertaker’s pay until that second coronary, only she’s not really a witch, and you don’t even know where you got the idea. There’s a station from Ithaca you can get in when you’re not under the trees, where an elderly man has spent the past fifty years warning his listeners of the imminent apocalypse. There are thin gossamer tethers coming down out of the clouds, the ends of which bind lures which trap the ignorant and the wicked, pulling them upwards, never to be seen again. People constantly disappear in the world, and there is no time to notice, you think, and no one will notice when you leave this world forever. You pretend to count the rocks in the road, or the leaves on the trees, or the dust in the sky, so maybe people will think your inability to pay attention is undercut by hidden skills. There is a dead crow at the side of the road, but it doesn’t mean anything.

All night we heard nothing but the creaking of the ceiling and the bend of the branches out in the orchard. Not one sound of a carriage passing by, not one sound of aeromachines caught in the nets strung between the windmills, no ghost nor speaking owl disturbed our wake, gathered in candlelight until sunrise to keep watch o’er the body of the good Reverend Emersohn, whose eyes, replaced now with cold black opal, devoured what little light we had to share. Jakob had nailed shut the doors and windows, both to keep us in and to keep the dark night out, so that while the widows and boys danced at the promenade, we made certain that none of the good Reverend’s proclamations as to a return from the land of the dead were realized. In our village, we have had only one revisiting spirit, yet even in the days before the body decomposed enough to allow us to rebury it, the rerisen Captain Nonpareil poisoned the livestock and chopped holes in the foundation of the alderman’s house, which collapsed half a year later. It’s been a frigid winter, and this is our sixth funeral in as many weeks, and the grain we’ve buried in the root cellar hsd been contaminated with the yellow spores. We cannot afford a walking corpse during such conditions.

Upon his first stir, Daniel began shaking the bell he held in his left hand, the hand not holding the butcher’s blade. “He is risen,” Daniel whispered, as the ringing stopped, and we all turned from our whisky and pipes to face the rerisen Reverend Emersohn, his head slowly turning away, his hands nailed to the floor.

“I am struck blind! Glorious heaven! The light of my Father exceeds the wavelengths of grace and providence!” he mumbled, through his sewn lips.

“Emersohn,” I said, “you are not meant to return to this world.”

“I…this is not heaven?”

“No. Your body is bound to a table in Ez’s workshed.”

“I’ve come back. You’ve taken out my eyes.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to come back. I don’t want to be here.”

“You have to leave this place, Emersohn.”

“I never meant those things I said. I never meant to return. That was just a threat, just foul words I cast at the sisters.”

“We can’t let you come back. You can’t be here.”

For half an hour the good Reverend Emersohn pretended to be dead, trying not to move, until finally we had to pour the kerosene onto his body, and he began screaming.

Outside, beneath the trees where the alchemists were hung for attempting to incite revolution by undermining the gold standard, a hole was dug, into which the second-spend form of Rv. Emersohn was set face-down, so that if his spirit should return again he would think to dig down and not up.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Oh, To Be Elvis’ Houseboy
Y’know what I really, totally, cannot at all fucking stand? people who walk up and tell me stories and then don’t even bother to explain what the fuck they’re talking about, like I’m supposed to give a shit or something. For example. I was drinking in the greyhound station over in c.f. where, before the Dekalb move, the Blackhawk Lounge all-night swingers used to play every Wednesday, led by fast Eddie Satan’s dad. So this guy I know from my Iowa city days named Jackson Demerol asks me if I wanna head out to janesville, where in the back of a tool shied out on some farm a guy named raven set up a workbench with coke and JD and some kinda strange yellow powder you sprinkled under your tongue before doing your shot. I was bored, and thus agreed.

So we’re out there and this guy with half a left arm starts setting up shots like Jackson’s a local and he takes us up into the combine, whose windows were covered over with decade-old newspapers, all about Reagan’s four more years, and gives us the powder, which we take under the tongue and take our shots and then my body locked up, muscle paralysis, and raven starts telling us about how he used to be Elvis Presley’s houseboy. One of three, actually; it was him and Clem and Jimmy something, and all three of them lived on Graceland and watched over the king in his final fe years, picked him up when he passed out and fixed the bulletholes in the walls and make him peanut-butter and banana sandwiches, regular housework stuff. So the three of them start swiping pills when E’s not looking, which is pretty often, and soon they all got training-wheel addictions of their own, so in between handfuls of Demerol and Percodan they start turning on each other. Jimmy Something was the smallest, so they started in on him; they’d hold him down and pill off his work scabs, which led to Jimmy Something stealing a caddie and heading south to Miami, where he apparently came to a grisly end while sleeping in his car. Raven and Clem were about to set in on each other but admitted to mutually assured destruction and tried to find a way to up their pay to keep their habits in line.

It was Raven, ultimately, who came up with the plan, or at least that’s the way he tells it. It got kinda lonely in the mansion, whose size and decor was known to do strange things to a person’s mind, and the houseboys occasionally waited until the king was well into a blackout and then, well, doing the sorts of things that houseboys are prone to do when left to their own devices. (I should interject here and say that it was at this point I was convinced raven was not only a liar but possibly mentally deficient: I would have left were it not for the fact that my body was no longer obeying my orders and the incessant flanging quality of the world around me would make climbing out of the combine rather difficult.) Raven realized that if they could sneak people into the mansion for a round with Elvis they could make serious cash. Their price was a thousand a pop and even the fat dying Elvis could command that kinda price. Over one hundred and fifty customers, raven estimates, snuck over the outer fences of Graceland that last summer.

“Yeah?” I asked, forcing my mouth to move, waiting for the punchline. “Then?”

“Then nothing, dingleberry. That’s the end of the story.”

Raven took Jackson and I down out of the combine and sat us along the back of the barn so as not to disturb the patrons while we stared out at empty cornfields and low-flying clouds. Jackson regained muscular control before I, dragging me back to the car and dumping me in the back seat just before I passed out.

Even now, now that my brain and my body kinda work again, I’m still wondering what the fuck happened, and why you’d even bother telling someone a lie if no one’s gonna believe you anyway. Some people.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Eggwhite
The things we gain a sentimental attachment to are small, but they hold us within the world, they give us a place and a purpose and allow us the comfort of habit and trust, things which many people think of as moral failings, but things I have always had an affinity for, things I believe in. At a place where I used to work, there were a series of communal mugs to be used for coffee, to be washed and set on the drying rack at the end of one’s shift. There was a woman (whose real name was not Shelley) who drank coffee religiously, and as such had developed an affinity for a particular mug, not so much because of the picture on its outside (a picture of Bill the Cat with his own cup of coffee) but because the other employees knew it was her cup, and would leave it for her, as she was one of the last people to come in at night. When I first started, all this prior history was invisible to me, and so (among other transgressions) I began using Shelley’s cup. The first couple days went by without notice, as Shelley used a secondary cup, but on the third day another employee informed me this was Shelley’s cup, and not to be a pill, but maybe I could use a different cup? I said sure, definitely, and didn’t think any more of it. Then there was the weekend, and that Sunday night, when I went back in, I had forgotten all about Shelley’s cup being Shelley’s cup, and poured myself some coffee into the Bill the Cat cup, and the rest of the night a certain percentage of the employees glared at me, then turned away as I tried to make eye contact.

I am a very petty person. I never let go of a grudge, and the only things I don’t forget are moments of shame. Rather than realizing that I have fucked up, and doing the adult thing of admitting my wrongs, I tend to burrow in, consider the entire circumstance a joke at my expense, and lash out when nobody’s looking. I mean, it’s not her cup. She didn’t buy it. I have as much right to it as anyone. So I made it an issue to take the cup every day, as I always came in before she did, even on the days when I barely sipped at my coffee. Shelley began coming in earlier and earlier, so I did the same, staying a good fifteen minutes up on her, until I was coming in while first shift was still working, when I’d sit in the breakroom, sipping my coffee from Shelley’s mug.

On the birthdays of employees, everyone would go to the breakroom and have cake and/or ice cream and receive some nature of small gift. On my birthday, everyone had chipped in and bought me a mug of my own, with DARREN’S MUG across the front in black bold letters. People mostly laughed, but I noticed Shelley didn’t laugh. She just watched me from behind her bowl of ice cream, waiting. I smiled and laughed and dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands beneath the table.

A couple days later, I set the mug among the other cups, picked up Shelley’s cup, filled it with coffee, and went to my desk.

A week went by, and just before I punched out for the night Shelley walked up to my desk and asked me what my problem was. I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about. She said I knew damn well what she was talking about, only she slipped on the word what, and began to stutter. I had never heard her stutter before, and she seemed to be surprised, and flustered, that she had done it, and the more angry she got the more she stuttered, stammering through variations on why I wouldn’t just let her use her cup, until she turned on her left heel and walked away, trying not to run. I felt like everyone was staring at me, so I swiveled around in my chair, but nobody would look at me.

About a month later the majority of us were laid off, and my first impulse was to loot the supply room, but they had locked off the rest of the building from the room where we worked. I did, however, manage to get to the breakroom, where I shoved a whole shitload of cokes into my backpack, along with Shelley’s cup. I then walked out the door, didn’t say goodbye, and have not seen Shelley or any of my other coworkers since.

For about a month, I had Shelley’s cup on my desk, which I used to hold pens. One night, while blindingly drunk, I smashed the cup into pieces, which I then buried in the garden, hoping it would make me feel a little less disgusted with myself, but nothing changed.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

The Magnifying Suit
DO NOT WEAR MAGNIFYING SUIT DURING ECLIPSES OR DURING PEAK DAYLIGHT HOURS AS YOU WILL COMBUST said the tag on the outside of the big-ass box sitting on the front porch, and like any such temptation to danger, Fast Eddie Satan couldn’t help but to sneak down out of his expartiate home in the Skyfish Treehouse and peek into the box’s contents. After being dropped a few times down the steps Ed discovered a tear in the box’s bottom, and not wanting the contents to get wet or infested with fire ants he decided it best to open it and keep it safe from harm. Having kept a low profile ever since being sprung from Catholic school and concluding the County Tour with the unfortunate show at Mark Clarise’s funeral, Ed had been itching to do something morally questionable, and with the contents of the box being like a giant permission slip to wronghood, it was as though he didn’t have a choice; this was something he had to do. He kicked his clothes up from the porch and through the window of the treehouse, climbing into the Magnifying Suit and limbering up to flee from authority figures when the parental Skyfishes arrived home from their jobs somewhere out in teh Industrial Grid to find filthy grubby Ed Satan wearing nothing but a giant pair of magnifying glasses like poster-signs. This officially closed any potential for his remainign at the Skyfish home, sending him out to the streets, and all streets lead to me (give me a map and I’ll prove it), which means Ed’s now living in my trunk. Which is why I can’t help you move your piano tonight.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/edsatan] #

Hope
Fast Eddie Satan’s dad used to be a bandleader; well, he used to lead two bartenders who kinda knew sax and a shoeshine boy who played harmonica at the Velvet Room of Jim Hagen’s Bar and Greyhound Station, Dekalb, Illinois. Sometimes Slim the Butcher would come in, and people in the audience (some winos, a couple conned by the doorman into thinking there were strippers involved in the show) would whisper “so what, is he a hitman or something?” and Slim would turn to ‘em, say “no, I’m the butcher” and sit in on drums for the band’s rendition of ‘house of the rising sun’ which went on, at times, all night. People hated that.

Fast Eddie Satan’s dad was one of the first people to buy a theremin and was convinced that it would be his means to success, the way bach thought the glass harmonica was going to take the orchestral world by storm. . thus, every song he ever wrote (as well as every cover the band performed) featured an extended theremin solo smack dab in the middle. This “exploration of new directions in music”, as he called it, resulted in hour after hour of…theremin soloing. You ever listen to a theremin for hours after hours? add to that the fact that after three or so hours of this, you realize it’s been a “reworking” of various Laurie Anderson songs when Slim and his junk butcher friends would murmur “this is the hand…the hand that takes…” and come kinda close, but not close enough, to a rhythm. And back to the theremin.

Fast Eddie Satan’s dad came THIS close to getting an NEA grant when Philip Glass, traveling through the bus station, heard the band and recommended them for the screening process. The band realized, at this point, the band didn’t have an official name, and this bugged the hell out of ‘em. After seven hours of heated debate, they dubbed themselves “The Velvet Room Necromancers with Slim The Butcher as A Side-Dish Of O.G. Funk”. NEA ate that shit up with a shovel. Alas, one of the waiters had his gun (always unloaded, like his hero barney fife) on him and set off an alarm on the way to an interview, and was so embarrassed he refused to go back, and Fast Eddie Satan’s dad, with the kind of quick thinking and lack of decorum his son would later be famous for, said “fuck ‘em, money would just corrupt our sound anyway” and threw the application away. They were back in the Velvet Room that night with a new sign behind ‘em-“The Crystal Blue Sounds of the Velvet Room Necromancers”-and did their Sun Ra medley. “interplanetray…interplanetary…interplanetary music…” murmured the band as Fast Eddie Satan said a silent prayer to Richard Moog and whoever looks over him and his trials.

As you may know if you were keeping an ear to the news around ‘82, it all went downhill from there — Fast Eddie Satan’s dad going into debt building “the Therechamber — the ultimate in perfect sound…”, Slim the Butcher getting blacklisted throughout Dekalb for comments about “the good old days in El Salvador”, the waiters getting better paying jobs at a Burger King across the street. But that night they were ON, if only once, and even now they still call each other, drunk, and talk about “getting the band back together”.

Fast Eddie Satan was three at the time. He tells me he’s sure he remembers that night. It’s pathetic, the way I can’t help but go digging through someone’s life looking for explanations and reasons, but maybe this time, maybe this time, I’m right, and that one night explains everything.

Maybe.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/edsatan] #

Day Ten
“The tour is over!” screamed Fast Eddie Satan, throwing his guitar at the amp (which sounded super-cool) and stomping off-stage. Merle hung out and looked out at the crowd of six, who were impatiently waiting for headliners Mark Clarise Is A Creep (apparently, from talking to these two orange-haired kids in green jumpsuits who looked like the Lucky Charms factory racing team, Mark Clarise really is a jerk, he likes to pee in peoples cars if they leave their windows down and give taffy to babies and stage seances in order to get chicks because apparently chicks dig seances but anyway) and eventually wandered offstage himself, leaving the drum machine belting out the same 5/7 beat for the next ten minutes, until one of the kids kicked a hole in the amp, which pretty much meant that the tour really was over, and having not found anything even kinda looking like the World’s Most Depressing Circus the boys wired home for cash and waited for good fortune to find them. Which, of course, it did.

“Local youth Mark Clarise was found dead earlier this evening after attempting to flee an irate mob and running into [sound lost to cheering and hollering by the audience and the six-piece MCIAC, who ended up playing for like five hours that night and probably even longer but Ana had showed up to get the boys and drive the twelve miles back home]”, said the television. “Dude, I think it’s time to start up a new band.” “Nuts to that, Ed. We’ve been broken up for not even half an hour yet, and besides, I think that lead singer dick peed on the drum machine.” “No drum machine, my man, we’re gonna have to get us a real drummer. And a new name.” MCIAC stumbled into a sing-a-long cover of “I Am The Walrus”, at which point Ed and Merle looked at each other, and the answer was obvious. All they needed now was a drummer.

“Hey! It’s the Megadeth Dude!”

The Megadeth Dude’s real name is Mitch, but not even his friends (well, his friend) calls him that anymore. Apparently, so the urban legend goes, Dave Mustaine had a coke-fueled vision that if he could get twelve people in twelve diffferent towns to constantly wear Megadeth shirts that the band’s street cred would just shoot through the roof. This was back in the “Killing Is My Business…” days, just after Dave was kicked out of Metallica, and so there wasn’t much money to go around, so the twelve lucky winners of Rip Magazine’s “Clean Dave Mustaine’s Kitchen” contest also got hooked up with free shirts and white promos of new Megadeth albums for life if they agreed to wear Megadeth t-shirts every day for the next ten years. They all agreed. Unfortunately, Mitch’s dad lost his job in Cincinatti and the family moved here, which is a considerably diminished population base in comparison. Metal not being quite the subculture here, the Megadeth Dude kinda stood out in a crowd, increasingly so as the years went on and he graduated high school and became something of an adult. The Megadeth Dude has a wife now, and they have a baby on the way, the worn and ratty “Peace Sells” shirt she wears to the market warping around the mound of her belly. Everybody knows the Megadeth Dude. But practically nobody, including Ed and Merle, knew he was a drummer.

“So let me see if I got this straight. Your kit consists of a tom, a cowbell, and a gong. And that’s it.”

“Well, it’s like I used to have a couple snares? But I figure why sound like everybody else when I can strip my setup down to the bare skeleton? And do something unique?”

“Um, okay. So you do realize that we tour, and so how do you expect to get that big-ass gong around?”

“Dude, that’s not even a concern because I built this frame for the top of my van that holds the bottom part and the actual gong I can fit in the back, right? I mean, I totally take responsibility, I’m the keeper of the gong, man.”

“Okay, but do you know anything besides “Highway Star”? I mean, you’re the Megadeth Dude, don’t you know “Wake Up Dead” or something?”

“Hey listen, man, fuck Megadeth anyway six ways from Sunday. You know how hard it is to get a job in a shirt like this?”

“Hey, sorry, dude. We’re gonna go talk it over and we’ll be right back.”

While the Megadeth Dude practiced his drumstick twirls, Ed and Merle went into the Rumpus Room and talked over their options.

“It’s either him, or Josef, or your mailman.”

“Hey, my mailman rocks, and you know it. You’re just against him because he likes the Beatles, which I think is taking the name thing just way too far.”

“It’s not just that, it’s also his whole hippie demeanor. We let him in the band, we’re gonna start having 20-minute “drums/space” sections where everybody noodles. You can forget that, man.”

“So we’re going with the Megadeth Dude? Are we gonna have to heavy everything up?”

“Just…just listen. He’s moldable. and once we convince him to get a real drum set like a human being he’ll be okay.”

“Ahhhh…fine. Fine. He can play this weekend, at Trent’s birthday party. We’ll see how he goes.”

“MEGADETH DUDE! YOU’RE IN THE BAND!” yelled Ed.

The Megadeth Dude replied “Kick Ass!” just before Merle’s dad came out to the garage to tell him to get his fucking gong off the lawn.

The birthday party:

“Creative differences.”

“Listen, I’m just sayin’…”

“You mean to stand there and look me in the eye and tell me we can’t do you the favor of playing your crappy backyard birthday party because you and Merle are having ‘creative differences’?”

“Listen, I’m trying to work around this, I really am, I think this is like something we can still make work and you know I want this to work, but…it’s my mom, man, you know how it is…”

“How what is, little man?”

“My mom is, she’ll be okay with maybe a couple cuss words, but, c’mon, ‘Coochie Hat’, that doesn’t even make sense!”

“I’ll have you know I wrote that song, motherfucker, and if you expect me to stand here and explain the inner meaning of each song before I ‘get’ to play it then you’re sorely mistaken, Trent.”

“Dude, okay, but then your crazy drummer guy does NOT have to take off his pants and run around the stage like a pervo during that guitar solo in ‘Invisible Sin Girls’ and you know that.”

“Okay, I’ll concede that point because you’re a friend and because your mom is supplying the beer and because it kinda is creepy. I’ll talk to him, we’ll work this out, okay? But don’t you EVER question my authority when I’m on stage, understood? I own that stage! I own every last damn inch of it!”

“Cool, man, we’re cool.”

“Solid. And if your sister bugs me even one more time I’m gonna sic the dogs on her ass. So you know.”

Everybody had to keep the noise down because it was the second Wednesday of the month, which meant Ed’s dad was hosting that week’s Meeting Of Loyal Evansdale Satanists And Librarians #281, which meant no rehearsal, techinically, only Ed had recently gotten the notion that Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays were ALWAYS rehearsal night even if the band couldn’t actually play that night, so it was Ed, Merle, the Megadeth Dude and Kali The Destroyer (whose real name was Kelly Moyahan, who was only over because her father was one of the MOLESAL’s upstairs trying to figure out the secret numerological meaning of the Dewey Decimal System), working on t-shirt designs.

“We can’t design the shirts until we know the name of the first album, dudes. That’s all there is to it. And that’s the reason why ‘Climbing The Rope Of Skinned Penises’ is such a killer name!”

“First, you and I and everybody here know that’s not gonna happen, Ed. Second, it does us no good to have t-shirts if nobody can wear ‘em because they’re too putrilicious. And C, that has nothing to do with our sound, and if we don’t give the people an idea of our sound, I mean, it’s just like we’re totally lost.”

“But the name has! to! rock!”

“ROOOOOOCK!”

“Dude, shut up, my dad’s gonna come down here.”

“I think you boys are all missing the essential element, in that none of you can actually draw anything, which seriously limits what you can even do graphically. Y’know?”

“Who votes Kelly The Consumer spends the rest of this rehearsal in the Closet of Silence?”

“Aye!”

“Aye!”

“C’mon, guys, stop being all like that. That’s a good point.”

“HA! That’s a draw, dingus, I’m staying!”

“I don’t know how anybody expects this band to last considering you don’t even, it’s like nobody even appreciates the, hell, I’ll say it, the vision I have, because—”

“Merle has a crush. I’m going to be ill.”

“Fuck you, man. That’s my amp you’re dicking with.”

“Kelly and Merley, sittin’ in a tree—”

“F! U! C! K! I—”

At which point what can best be described as a ‘ruckus’ erupted upstairs as MOLESAL discovered that 666 was the DDS code for ceramics, which led to an extensive argument/fight as to whether or not the Hobby Hutch could qualify as a “hidden temple of the horned beast”. At last report, the crucial album cover negotiations were still undecided, with Kali (who sits in ront of me in Chem) telling me there “might not even be an album jacket, even, becaus Merle is all like ‘Art compromises us at every fucking turn!’, right, so who even knows?”.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/edsatan] #

Day Eight
(written for Undergrad Writer’s Workshop, UofIowa spring 1996)

Wow, Fast Eddie Satan thought. I’m having a deja’ vu. When you have a deja’ vu, do you just go with it, or do you try to go against it? I mean, maybe it’s your subconscious trying to warn you of something bad that’s about to happen, some way the world is conspiring to see your downfall come forth right then, and man, you gotta know to listen when you get hints like that. Ed pondered, weighed issues, made use of game theory and set precedent, life experience and classic views, pro, con, pro, con, pro, all right, fuck it, I’ll fight it, he thought, waking up just in time to watch the first drop of rain hit him in the bridge of his nose. Obviously an omen. Shit. He heard the sound of a drill clawing through metal, looked up at his car, and saw his omen come to its fruition.

“MERLE!” he screamed, instantly jolted awake and running across the grass, barely able to see the parking lot in the pre-dawn bluepink haze, recognizing Merle Skyfish by the figure’s size and propensity for ignoble, self-defeating hijinx such as t his. “For God’s sake, man, what are you doing?”

Merle rammed the head of the drill through the hood of Ed’s possibly-stolen pea-green ‘73 Dart then brought the drill to a stop with a satisfied smile, wiping his brow and murmuring “Damn fine work, if I do say so myself. DAMN fine work. Morning, Mr. Satan, you catch some quality sleep?”

“The fuck, Merle?”

“‘Kay, now before you get all in a huff, let me explain, in layman’s terms, just what it is I’m doing on this beautiful if slightly damp morning. See, I’m about to give this car something it’s never dreamed it could possibly have…maximum performance…”, Merle intoning the last two words the same way Galahad would whisper of the Grail.

“YOU! You deliberately sabotaged our grand tour and search for the truth of the American Dream! JUDAS!”

“I won’t even dignify such an accusation with a replay. As I was saying, while you were catchin’ Z’s, I was hanging out over at Vendoland,” gesturing to a small wooden building just south of the larger rest-stop bathroom complex, where coffee and soda were available to the weary traveler of Highway 80 West, “talkin’ to a couple cholos over a few rounds of extra-strong coffees with everything, and they were tellin’ me I should trick this baby out some, y’know, do some engine mod., bore it out. So a bout an hour ago I snatched this drill from the back of that tow-truck at the end of the lot and got to work.”

“Right through the hood of the car, Mr. Badwrench?”

Merle sighs, shakes his head, says “See, an engine running at…maximum performance…dig, it’s gonna need additional ventilation. Just chill, Mr. Cynic, go wash yourself up and we’ll do breakfast, then take this baby out for a spin.”

Ed looked at what had been his pride and joy for the past week, his ride, the Satanmobile, and realized there was nothing left to be done; the only thing he could do was trust that even in this there was a divine reason and all would be made clear in the end. Amour fati. Ed walked back to his rapidly-dampening sleeping bag, which he grabbed and threw beneath the awning of the main building. Getting in out of the rain, Ed saw on the clock hung above the vast Iowa highway map that it was 5:17 AM and realized there was absolutely no way any good could come from a day like this.

Rest-stop bathrooms in the morning with all the windows closed smell like a combination of Lysol, crystal methedrine sweat and the cesspools of Jerusalem in high summer, which was a bit more than Ed could handle, already blinded by overflourescence and struck dumb by stall graffiti (I SHOT JFK, FREE NORTH AMERICA, KILL THE POOR, and Ed’s personal favorite, STRANGERS DIE EVERYDAY). Ed peeled off his grubbies, tried in vain to clean himself in the sink, and slipped into his freshly-pressed tux in a daze (“you got a suit this cool, you gotta wear it”); alas, he had left his frilly piratey Artist Formerly Known As Prince dress shirt at his parents house and had no choice but to crawl back into his “Sub Pop-It’s French for Fuck You” tee, which he had been wearing for nearly the entire road trip, going on eight days now, before he put on the jacket. Looking at his reflection in the stain-streeeaked mirror, Ed felt a need to say something, to crystalize the moment for whomever may be watching — Ed fully believed that spirit beings in other dimensions watched events on earth like television, switching from person to person the way we would channels, and it was wasting opportunity not to play it up. Ed liked to think he was doing fairly well in whatever ratings system these beings had. This piece of factual jetsam explains more about Ed than his school therapists ever could. “The rest stop. Christ. I can’t believe I’m still at the rest stop. I feel like Paul fucking Westerburg, and that’s no way to feel.”

“Could always be worse, y’know. You could be feeling like Robert Plant, and then you’d have to prance around and write songs about wizards and junk,” said a janitor who had crept in at some point during Ed’s soliloquy, spraying some kind of thick green liquid into the urinals. Ed was too wrapped up in said soliloquy to notice the janitor in question was Josef.

“That’s a point. My name’s Fast Eddie Satan. I’m in a band. Dickrattler and the Reverberators. We’re destined to a life of opening for bad local bands, and will probably die frustrated and bitter…hey, it’s you. Well what the fuck you know, Josef?”

“Jack, I know I used to be in a band, but our bassist found God and kept telling us we were evil and checking us for marks of the Devil when we weren’t looking. We were called Ska Hell, but we changed our name to The King Of Terrors right before we broke up. I’m mostly killing time until maybe I go back to school-”

“Go back to school? Why on earth would you want to do such a thing?”

“I had a good gig going there for a while — I made full-size skeletons of nonexistent animals, or I did, until I kinda stopped going to class. I was up for a couple grants, but the show I was gonna do got axed, so now I’d have to private-fund it, and fuck that, thus…doesn’t matter, I’ll probably be shot to death by a crack-addled trucker. Pleased to make your acquaintence. Now, If you’ll excuse me, I gotta swab down the sinks, and I’d hate to stain that sweet tux jacket.”

Ed heard another nightmarish sound come from the car, and decided morning primping time was over. The sun had come up enough by the time he reached the car to see thick black oil pouring across the cement, pooling in the gutter.

“Merle, Merle, Merle. When will you ever learn, boy-oh?”

Merle looked disgustedly at the car, muttered something about “poorly-designed cylinders, faulty o-rings and shoddy Detroit workmanship” and returned the drill to the back of the tow truck without waking the snoozing mechanic inside.

“Enough talking, Merle. Time for breakfast.”

The back seat of the Dart looked like a stockroom at Willy Wonka Inc. The boys had two pounds of Skittles, half a grocery sack of multicolored gumballs, various flavors of Pez, seventy-five Atomic fireballs, and a whole galaxy of Sprees, SweeTarts, and a couple rolls of those crappy Smartees that were always the last thing you ate from your Halloween candy stash (excepting apples and, if you lived in Merle’s neighborhood, potatoes a nasty punk couple gave every year). Also, there was Pixie Stix, Hot Tamales, Super Hot Tamales, Wasabi and Napalm Hot Tamales, various chocolate delights from across mid-Europe, and some kinda purple Japanese fizzy thing both Ed and Merle were afraid to try. Being an already stressful morning, it was best to stick with the classics, and besides, nothing brings old friends together like a solid morning of Pixie-Stix.

“Breakfast of champions,” nodded Merle.

“Best way to start the day,” concurred Ed.

Brothers-in-arms once more, Merle started in on damage control as far as the car experiment went. “We’re going to have to rely on High Science. Fortunately, I still have my lab coat, but I’m not gonna put it on unless you promise to respect my sci entific acumen. Deal?”

Ed, wanting how such utter irresponsibility could possibly be rationalized, agreeed.

“Okay, Merle. Hit me with the diagnosis.”

“See here, Ed, where this tube got cut? This should be connected over there, to the refibulator, which gets oil up here in the overcam.”

“You don’t say. The overcam.”

“Right-o. But due to the damage to the Liston pistons, and irreparable trauma sustained to the Bachman-Turner overdrive, I’m going to have to give a diagnosis of Code 23…”

“Which is your way of saying?”

“…the only cure for which, of course, is death. A valiant effort on my part was not sufficient to save the patient, and though I am saddened by its loss, I find myself totally unresponsible for the end result. Y’know, what this coat realy needs is some gold lame’.”

“So you drilled a hole straight into the pistons, which thus means they won’t hold any pressure, which means the car will not move. So we’re fucked. And you’re saying this isn’t your fault.”

“See, I didn’t take into considerating the fact that pistons on all ‘73 Dogde Darts are notoriously unstable and thus could not take the strain of the process, is the thing. Basically.”

This must be the fruition of my omen, Ed thought.

“Hey, Merle?”

“Yup?”

“When you’re having a deja’ vu, should you just ride it out and go with it or should you fight it?”

“You go with it, man. Fighting a deja’ vu, that’s fighting destiny, man, that’s crazy talk.”

How utterly typical. Ed looked up at the sky and watched as the rain stopped.

“Y’know, Iowa has some kick-ass clouds. Check it out.”

“Totally. That’s God’s apology for making people live here.”

While the boys sat on the picnic table and tried to break clouds with nothing more than their thoughts, a large garbage truck pulled into the stop, leaving a trail of dead insects in its wake. Josef and James, the other rest stop attendee (“Hey Bud, my name’s James, but the ladies like to call me Cowboy”), had begun yelling and throwing empties at the truck until it backed out (and, in the process, waking everyone still asleep in their cars with the Truck Backing Up Hell-Noise, which apparently triggers some kind of neural response making sleep impossible) and left the area.

“Wassup?” Ed yelled from across the grass. “Something goin’ down? Y’all need to bring in some muscle?”

“Nah,” said Josef. “That’s just Emerson. That truck’s fulla biohazardous waste, that’s what those big symbols on the side of the truck stood for. Used to work fro a freelance waste removal agency until EPA busted ‘em for breaking code, wired out to all the disposal sites not to accept dumping from ‘em anymore. The removal place basically turned everything over to the government and filed chapter 11, ‘cept Emerson, see, he sold the radio out of his truck a couple weeks before that, so he’s been driving around from site to site, wondering why no one will accept his load.”

“How long’s that been going on?”

“What, James, half a year?”

“Sheeeet, no,” James drawled. “Couple years, more likely. All them trucks are faulty, see, that waste’s been seeping into the cab, I bet. Emerson’s gone loco. When I was truckin’, guys’d get off the road and say they saw a truck comin’ down the road with some kinda fog coming off it, like death. Horse don’t get much paler than that, I tell ya.”

“F’real?” Ed asked.

The janitors looked at each other, looked at Ed, and started to laugh.

“Shit, no. Emerson’s a Tom, he likes watching guys piss. Highway Patrol says we can mace him if he steps in here. Man, James, sucker born every second these days. I weep for the future of America.”

“It’s them schools. They should pull those Civic Duty and Consumer Responsibility classes and start teaching How Not To Be A Clueless Dufus instead. Got the first student right over there.”

The janitors walked to the back office, giggling, at which point Ed decided he’d had about enough of hanging out at the rest stop.

“Let’s find us a gun and get the fuck out of here. It’s my prognosis we have to give the Dart a proper send-off by pumping hot lead right into the engine block before we can leave it to shrug off its mortal coil.”

“I think we’ve found a suitable send-off. You get all the shit out of the car in case it blows up, which could happen, and I’ll call my sis quick and get some solid travelling advise.”

“Tell her I said hi, and stuff. And that I’ve become, like, cooler since I’ve gone out on the road, like I’ve found my manhood, or something.”

Merle giggled and almost said “Ed, you couldn’t find your manhood with a flashlight, both hands and an anatomically correct doll”, but Ed gets this weird look in his eyes when he talks about Ana, and Merle, ever the diplomat, decided to leave it alone. Thus, while Ed unpacked the loot — a pile of dirty clothes, the candy stash, Ed’s Gibson and bag of effects pedals, Merle’s bass and Peavey amp, Larry The Drum Machine (Age five months, Aquarius, turn-ons: annoying hand-clap noises not seen since the days of Devo, which Larry takes great delight in irrythmically adding during shows ever since Ed stepped on him in the midst of wacky stage antics), a stack of band flyers with gig times and locations left blank, and a map showing the last-known locations of The World’s Most Depressing Circus, which Fast Eddie Satan added another red X to, Merle found a semi-clean phone and called Ana.

Ana used to be in a few bands, one of which — Buddy Holly’s Drummer — actually got some airplay and a write-up in minimumrock&roll, so when they boys need technical advice, they go to her, adn with Ed having a thing for her there’s that weird bargaining leverage thing going on, which Merle made use of fairly often. Merle punched 1-800-FUCK-ATT into the phone pad, punched in Ana’s number, listened to her machine pick up (to the sound of Masonna’s japanese noise masterpiece (and Donovan cover) “Wear Your Love Like Heaven”), began leaving a message and heard Ana, call-screening, pick up.

“Heya, Merley-Merle, wassup?”

“Jack. Jack fucking nothing. Ed and I are stranded at the I-80 Victor West rest stop, where we’re about to pop a cap in our ride. Other than that, just out looking for The Great American Dream, or something, I guess.”

“So life on the road kinda sucks, then.”

“Oh Lord, Ana. Totally. You don’t even know.”

“I saw you guys opened at the Resist Destroy Kill benefit, you still there for the riot?”

“Okay. So I knew there was something wrong with a benefit concert for Amish Separatists with a name like that, and finding out it was in The Boathouse didn’t settle my mind any, but Ed kept sayin’ how it was gonna be such great exposure, how this was gonna be the cornerstone of the entire tour, and how if we played we didn’t have to pay cover. So we went on, and it was cool, I mean, they had this insane amp set-up, it was like from Motorhead or something, so we were LOUD, and I’m thinking this was a good idea. Then Urine Therapy played, and they sucked, like always. Then Cthulhu’s Fishermen played, right? The Angriest Polka Band of All Time? And they start the set with a cover of John Zorn’s ‘Krystalnacht’, so it’s already ugly, and this skin starts Seig Heiling the band from one of the pits and the lead singer jumps into the crowd and starts bashing the guy with his accordion and the band just keeps playing, and then they did “Blood in the Streets Polka”, and people are screaming and throwing bottles and shit, so they get off after about 40 minutes and we’re thinking the worst is over…”

“Right, I heard right after that Thong Miao started playing…”

“And they were cool, Ana, I mean…there’s three of ‘em, three small Vietnamese women, not much older than us, but they were just INSANE, they started with ‘A Contract On America’ and the whole crowd goes nuts, the bouncer guys start making a wall between the band and the crowd but the band just kept building and building and screaming, man, could they scream, and then somebody jumps up and tries to mace a bouncer who’s been punching kids all night and he ducks and the lead singer gets maced instead, so she pulls a Sid Vicious and clubs the guy with her guitar and the whole place just lost it, people were throwing chairs, the cops came and because Miao was playing tapes of like warfare samples nobody noticed until they rushed the place, tear gas and shit, so I lose Ed in the hubbub and I look up and there’s the lead singer, the one who clubbed the guy, and she smiles and looks at me and says ‘Now the real show begins’ and I start freaking out, man, she pulls out a MACHETTE and dives into the audience and as I’m running for the door I hear some frat guy yell ‘My fingers! SOMEBODY HELP ME FIND MY FINGERS!’ and I got the fuck out of the Boathouse.”

“Shit, Merle. What happened to Ed?”

“Ah, he hooked up with some girls who figured since the show was in Cedar Falls that House was gonna play and apparently drove out to that graveyard by UNI and did bong hits all night. I found him the next day at Cup ‘o Joe looking like something had digested and passed him. Moron. He says hi, by the way, and told me specifically not to tell you he’s got a crush on you.”

Ana laughs, “Like that’s news or something…you know the Amish refused the money because it was ‘tainted by violence’ and it ended up going to some public service program to rehabilitate ex-Wehrmacht troops, ‘Deposed Nazis In Hiding For A Kindler And Gentler God’ or something, and I hear there’s a ban on shows at the Boathouse now.”

“Go fucking figure. I’m convinced Cedar Falls is one of the seven gateways to hell. How’s life in Analand?”

“Uh…classes good, work sucks, music’s okay. Blah blah blah, same old, you know this story, Merle.”

“Hey, here’s today’s hypothetical question, by the way: When you were touring and the van broke down, how’d you get around?”

“Depended on the kindness of strangers. We were driving to Minneapolis to open for Scratch Acid, believe it or not, and the van died out on I-35, fucking Nowheresville, on what we later found out was the coldest night of the year. So it’s going on an hour and we pretty much figure we’re not long for this earth when a big ol’ bus pulls over and we get in. Alas, they were Chicago Suburb Hippies.”

“Good Lord. And you rode with such people?”

“These were desperate times, Merle, and desperate measures were called for. We had to sit and discuss the inner meanings of Phish songs for a couple hours, but all things considered, we got out fairly untainted.”

“I don’t think we’re gonna find any hippies of any kind out here at the stop.”

“You’ll find somebody, I mean, the people are already stopped there and it’s a warm summer day and two cutey-pie lil’ kids like yourselves are bound to get rides quick. Besides, doesn’t Ed have a, like, preternatural knack for things like that?”

“Normally, but he’s all in a huff because he thinks I’m deliberately sabotaging the trip, and you know how he gets when he’s grumpy… Forsake the car, then?”

“Yep. leave it be. Wait, I got a fortune cookie here, just a sec…okay, it says ‘All your troubles are behind you. Trust instinct. Go with destiny.’ You’re set, bro.”

“Wonderful. I’ll give you a ring when we reach civilization.”

“Godspeed, Merley. Keep sane. And if you get the chance, I’d suggest Crotch Soup. Sounds like you boys could use it.”

Merle hung up, listened to the cicadas in the trees and ruminated on Ana’s suggestion until he saw Ed in heated conversation with James.

“Waddaya MEAN, the candy machine is broken?”

“I’m tellin’ ya, we can’t fix it, we can’t do squat. They’re run by the Iowa Department of the Blind, the machines at all the rest stops in the state are run by them, and any they can fix ‘em.”

“So why the fuck haven’t they come out here yet?”

James started giggling, again, and said “They’re trying, mi amigo, they’re trying…”

“You dipshit! Where’s the ‘warm, helpful service’ the sign on the map promises…Merle! C’mere and help me give Cowboy here some warm, helpful service!”

“Forget it. We’ve got enough candy here, all we need is some soda, and we’ll ponder the truth, Ana’s advice and the Great American Dream over drinks.”

“Que?”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures, my friend. It’s time for Crotch Soup.”

Ed grudgingly decided to table his beef with James and pulled out three bucks in change he found while cleaning out the back seat, investing in Dr. Pepper, the ideal base for Crotch Soup — open Dr. Pepper, add Skittles (gruesome, perhaps, but necessary), add Pixie Stix dust, use empty Pixie Stix as straws, shake well, garnish with Nutella and enjoy. This feat of sucrotic and highly-caffeinated alchemy utterly horrified and disgusted all passerby unfortunate to pay witness to the spectacle…all, that is, except James.

“Y’all mind if I take a hit off yer drink?”

“Fuck off and die! Then fuck off in the afterlife! And then, if it’s possible, die again!”

“Listen, Bud, I’m real sorry for laughin’ at ya all day, I’m just funnin’, ain’t nothin’ personal…I promise not to josh with ya no more. Truce?”

“Ah…I s’pose. Go for it, dude.”

Merle added, in an attempt to be helpful, “But you probably wanna sit down first.”

“Sheeet, boys, I done shit that’d make yer kid-size sacs shrivel up and fall off, man, when I was truckin’, I was smokin’ ice all day every day, fat chunks of ice 24-7, then when I was doin’ professional witness work-”

“Professional witness?”

“Yeah, back a few years ago there used to be these outfits, Jourgensen Witness Agency, and in like your bigger cities you could get work there, what’d you do is go in about ten PM, put on a big orange jumper with JWA on the back, get dropped off the bus and stand around high-crime areas waiting for shit to go down, then if you see it and testify in court the victim’s family or local cops pay high-price to JWA, I’d get six percent commission and min. wage, was a sweet gig until i got a couple real interesting holes put in my back one night, but anyway so’s i was working out in Japanima, we called it, girl I know come up, say ‘Ey, Cowboy, gweilo, wan’ shabu-shabu?’ and even on the job I was doin’ it, shit, me and Josef been up all morning on coffee and ephedrine, smokin’ king-hell Humboldt County bud, man, tell me to sit down, shit—”

“Okay, just shut the fuck up and take a drink already.”

James takes a pull, laughs, and goes hypoglycemic in about as much time as it takes for the boys to scatter from beneath his falling body. Merle tries to flip him over and feels something lumpy in James’ pants.

“Dig. Our friend James is packin’.”

Sure enough, Ed pulled up the mandatory white short-sleeve dress shirt and there, shoved into the back of his khakis, James had the god-damn biggest gun either of them had ever seen.

“Check it, Merle. Desert Eagle. In case you need to stop a herd of rabid rhinos, or somethin’.”

“This’ll do fine, just fine. You’ll be remembered in song and fable, James.”

Still rushing on the Soup buzz, the boys walk to the car, pour the remaining Dr. Pepper over the hood of the Dart and pay their last respects:

“In his book America, Jean Baudrillard wrote ‘Drive ten thousand miles across America and you will know more about the country than all the institutes of sociology and political science put together.’ Certainly, through the aid of this car before us, we have learned a great many things we would never have without going out on the road.”

“We learned that everyone in this fucking country was, at some point, in a band.”

“We learned that Larry The Drum Machine gets temperamental when you spill pop on him.”

“We learned that opening for the Who’s ‘Pete’s Not Dead’ tour was the biggest mistake of our lives, so far.”

“And, now, we learn the meaning of loss. Selah.”

“Selah.”

Ed pulls out the gun from beneath his shirt. The morning picknickers grow quiet and watch.

“Guess it’s time to do it.”

Along the dashboard of the Dart, right above the seatbelt light, was a light whose function was never quite clear to either Ed or Merle. The car’s previous owner called it the Swindle-Meter because it went on just before something really bad was about to happen. For the first time since Ed “acquired” the Dart, the Swindle-Meter blinked on, a bright HAL-like red.

Ed pulled the trigger. The recoil knocked him back onto the grass, sending the gun up and out of his hands, which had gone completely numb from the blast.

The Swindle-Meter faded, blinked, and went out forever.

The entire rest stop was silent.

“So,” said Fast Eddie Satan, looking upside-down at a lawn full of picknickers, “anyone think they could give us a ride into town?”
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/edsatan] #

day two
“GO! GOGOGOGOGOGO!”

Fast Eddie Satan proved his surname by bolting across the street, dodging traffic which blocked the view from the car of Raymond Oates, lying in a heap, absolutely dazed by the impact of something bulky and screaming descending from the sky like a dying angel. Mike Danielson varied between asking Ray if he was okay and screaming panicked obscenities at no one in particular, the remaining El Duce Burrito patrons milling about and looking for possible suspects, and Raymond lay on the ground, staring at clouds, and giggling uncontrollably, quietly.

Ed hopped into the open passenger door, leaping into the hands of Doug and Ana, pulling the door closed behind him as the car pulled a sickening left onto Griffin Street.

“The fuck was that about, boys?” asks Josef, the driver, eyeing for police and possible vehicular obstacles.

“We weren’t happy with our service, and the customer is always right,” answered Doug, curled defensively around the project to prevent breakage and insect release.

Ana, who has learned from her day job at Rent and Putt Video and Extreme Miniature Golf Multiplex that the customer is always wrong, repositions herself in order to let Merle climb up into the front seat, which with her being seated friendly- close to Ed, sends him into puppy-crush synapse-collapse and effectively removes him from the conversation. Also in absentia is Jackson, who looks around at the others and stares out the window, trying to come to terms with his surroundings. Josef, on the other hand, is pretty much in high-speed pursuit mode, requiring constant reminders fom the passengers to slow the fuck down. By the time they reach the interstate (the most effective means of cross-town travel), everybody’s settled enough to attempt civilized conversation, or at least everybody except Ed, whose swaggering bravado has imploded entirely.

“You’re quite the quiet one today, Mr. Satan,” Ana comments.

Ed’s something of a fixture at the Skyfish household, and though Merle’s filled with stories of his harebrained hijinx, Ana’s never seen him anything but out-and-out shy.

“Yeah. I s’pose.”

“You regularly drop off rooftops on people?”

“Not regularly, no.”

The car is filled with the sound of the defroster, the low hum of AM depression music, and Jackson’s bronchitis-like chest rattle. Merle rolls his eyes and sighs, Doug stares emptily out the window, and Josef sings under his breath along with a Steve Earle song playing in his head.

“So what’s your deal, anyway, Ed?”

“Huh?”

“For example, like, what’s with Fast Eddie Satan?”

“That’s not my fault. That’s my parent’s doing. My whole life up until now has been a prolonged attempt to live up to the reckless streetwise sensibilities such a name implies. I’d rather be getting into my adolescent creepy side right now, but no, I have to pay the price of my stupid dad’s lipping off.”

“Elaborate, please.”

“So anyway right after my dad got out of the navy and right before he totalled the GTO (long story, another time) he was hanging out in Jim’s, a local Waterloo down-by-the-Cedar bar, some Saturday night playing a drunken game of what probably started out as darts but by this time had degenerated into a game of Stick Larry In The Ass, which was a Jim’s tradition ever since Larry Heinus, yuppie and satanic chiropractor made it “his weekend place”. So in walks this guy who has that used to be a biker but sobered up and is doing AA and making god’s eyes and bad hippie art with his girlfriend to sell at Sunday morning flea markets but tonight he’s gonna drink every last motherfucker in the place beneath the floorboards look to him, and so that’s no big deal ‘cept there’s a flock of waitresses from over at the local Bishop’s giggling and passing around some piece of paper and Big Biker Motherfucker goes over and looks at the paper like there’s nothing funny at all and so my dad, who’s nothing if not a gentleman, he’s been drinking like everclear/cuervo/jaegermeister/purple kool-aid mixers since about eleven that morning and thus feeling a bit cocky, he staggers up to BBMF and tells him to go peddle his apples on the other side of the street and BBMF looks my dad straight in the eye, the exact phrase my dad uses when he tells this story, and he tells my dad “Man, don’t you know who I am, sailor- boy?” — see, pops still had his crew-cut and his big o1’ heavy longshoreman’s coat which he ended up giving to my cousin brian even though I had dibs on it since I was, like, six, I mean, it’s just—”

“Hey, Ed? Does this little story of yours have a point?”

“So anyway my uncle Kenny comes up beside my dad and he spits out ‘What makes you think we give two red shits who you are?’ and BBMF bellows out ‘Man, I’m Satan, you dumbfucks! The king of all evil hisself!’ and there isn’t a person there who thinks this guy is kidding, I mean everybody in the place is convinced this is Satan, no shit, who apparently has nothing better to do than try to pick up waitresses in some midwest straight-from-boilermakers ‘you want an umbrella in your drink? man, you’re gonna have your balls in your drink if you don’t shut your mouth’ hayseed bar, maybe he’s a local, who knows. So my dad, see, he looks the Prince of Darkness straight in the eye and says ‘Listen, Satan, how’s about you and me step outside.’”

“Yah-huh, sure thing, Ed, I’m buying this.”

“See now, I’ll admit my dad isn’t the brightest guy, even for a bandleader, but common logic which even he possesses would pretty much hold that you’d have to be dumber than Josef up there—”

“You wanna walk?”

“—to go fighting Satan, I mean he’s got unholy powers and he’s got legions of demons and arch-demons and all kindsa ghastly Dante’ shit to back him up and plus he cheats. But when it comes down to a mono e mono bare-knuckle streetfight, Satan ain’t really no Jackie Chan, hell, he ain’t even no Chow Yun Fat. Satan generally doesn’t have to fight for himself and thus is out of practice and he’d had a few shots before hassling the waitresses and unlike my dad, whose tooth-and-claw reflexes only grew sharper with alcohol, Satan got kinda sloppy while intoxicated and left himself open to a few really wicked kidney- punches. So they’re out there in the back parking lot mixing it up and the cops show up with a priest in tow; apparently they’ve had this happen quite a bit lately, and so Father Martin goes into his exorcism spiel and Satan, who’s a fucking ham apparently, still as vain as before the fall, he does the full b-grade Jack Chick bit and points at my dad, saying ‘I’ll get you but bad, mister sailor hot-rod boy!’ and disappears in a cloud of sulphur and toads. So one of the waitresses comes out and starts talking to my dad, and they hit it off, and they got hitched, and you don’t need to be Paul Harvey to know the rest of the story.”

“You still haven’t explained the name thing, though.”

“So they have a child, and tat child is me, and they go to put his name on the birth certificate, and already written is Fast Eddie Satan, and so they get a new certificate and it’s got the same thing, they try for days and days but no dice, and eventually they give up and accept the sacrifice of their first-born, I guess. For an eternal curse, though, it’s not bad, I kinda like it, it’s a hoot giving teachers shit for not believing that’s my name.”

Only the thing is no teacher is really that suprised by any weird name anymore, it’s become rather standard for young people to change their names in a fit of adolescent rebellion; it started with the Bosnian immigrant youth whose families encouraged them to change their names in order to better fit into society; however, most of them being hip-hop b-kids, they adopted names like “Dru Malik J”, “West Side Ren”, or like El Duce Burrito night shift manager, “King D”. Local suburb kids picked up on this and began naming themselves after speed- metal and neo-goth frontmen; at Waterloo West a few years back, there were over a dozen Marilyn Mansons. Thus, few teachers would be suprised by something as benign as Fast Eddie Satan, compared to classmates like Betsy Wetsy and The Almighty, and so Ed generally had to find more abrubt ways to disrupt class and live up to his birth-given rep.

“You’re a strange one, Mr. Satan.”

“Maybe, I dunno, I suppose I — hey, there’s Lou’s! STOP THE CAR THIS INSTANT!”

The car lurched to a stop right in front of Lou’s Anti-Social Noise Hut, sending equipment, insects, and bodies flying toward the front seat, which resulted in a forced evacuation of the car until all foreign elements had been shooed away.

“So, that other kid’s your brother, huh?” asked Jackson, awake from his stupor thanks to the high-velocity stop.

“Yeah,” said Ana, “that he is. Merley’s okay, he’s just got weird friends, I guess.”

“Unlike his older sister, of course,” half-mumbled Josef, looking over his shoulder to check for traffic.

“Indeed indeed, praise be.”
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/edsatan] #

Day One
“Ed, I think it’s time we had a talk.”

Fast Eddie Satan unplugged his Fender Mustang and walked into the kitchen, so distracted by the parental intrusion of his newly reformed band’s rehearsal he forgot to do the Eddie Swagger past the small throng of prepubescent girls drinking kool-aid and whispering just on the other side of the backyard fence. Ed’s father, getting dressed in gray sweats and store- fresh cross-trainers, was getting ready for the night’s La Lobo De la Luna run, a neighborhood gathering of mid-life crisis- clenched yupscale fathers who ran through the neighborhood at top speed from one Miata to another (each night’s loser was left to walk home in shame and sweat), cutting through backyards and howling. Ed’s father had been working out for the past few weeks, tired of constantly having to walk home beneath the stares of homeowners wondering what the god-awful racket was about, and was too busy to notice Ed’s enterance, still entertaining visions of watching coworker and general nuisance Lawrence Cankle fade to nothing in the taillight glare whilst he and his fellow thirtyesque wolf brothers howled joyously into the suburban night. Ed’s mother, on the other hand, had been preparing to talk to her oldest boy all afternoon and, after careful deliberation and calls to in-the-know friends, decided to cut right to the quick.

“Ed, you’re going to have to move into the garage. We can set you up a little room back behind the work bench where you can play with your little friends, and we’ll help you move, but there’s no other way, you obviously can’t share a room with your siblings, and we need your room for the baaaaaaaabeeeeeee…”, at which point her crisp tones softened into a gelatinous goo of motherly affection, staring down into the eyes of the little miracle in her lap.

“What?”

“Try to have your stuff out by Friday — we’re going to start decorating the baaaaaabeeeeeee’s room by tomorrow, oh yes we are, oh wes, oh wes oh wes ohwesweswes”, coming in low and hovering over the child, finally touching down to make fatty noises by blowing on the baby’s belly.

“What?”

Ed’s mother no longer had ears for him anymore, and his father, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet in anticipation, was too far away to be of any negotiational help.

Ed stared down at his shoes, trying to come up with a crushing retort, and realized he hadn’t changed out of his Loop t-shirt and dirt-stained jeans in days. He then looked at the baby (who he was convinced hadn’t yet been named; he had only heard it referred to as “the baaaaaaybeeeeee” since its arrival two months ago), which was cute in the way all babies born without massive skin anomalies are cute, soft, no rigid features, cooing. No contest.

Ed marched back to the makeshift stage (two picnic tables pushed together with a severe danger of the speakers falling off the back and into the garden) where his band, consisting of Merle Skyfish and Larry The Drum Machine, was talking to the neighborgirls about the deeper significance of songs like “Snitches Get Stitches”, “Hand Check” and “I Hate Math”. Merle barely had time to pick up his bass and plug Larry in before Ed hollered “One! Two! One Two FUCK YOU!” and tore into a truly vicious cover of “Super Trooper”, which was a mess, but Ed felt better, and it scared the girls away.

Later, after having the amp cord pulled in order to free up an outlet for the bug zapper, Merle tried to round up plans for the rest of the afternoon.

“Hey, Ed, you wanna come over to the hacienda? I made a tape of John Woo movies with all the boring talking and plot garbage taken out. Two solid hours of supreme gunfight action, mui amigo…”

Normally Ed would have followed Merle back to his house without asking, if only for the chance to be around his older sister Ana, who tends to make Ed retarded in the head with love whenever she’s around. On this day, however, Ed shifted into mythic loner mode and said “Naw, I gotta go find Doug and talk with him about this stupid room thing, see if he has any leverage with the folks.”

“I’ll tag along, then, North Playgrounds’s right on the way, I got nothing better to do.”

Ed’s younger brother Doug spent his post-school afternoons sitting in his special swing at North Playground, where he tossed stones into mud puddles and brought insects back from the dead. This was a trick his grandfather taught him involving breath currents and stroking horizontally along the thorax with a thumbnail, anyone could do it, but the children who frequented the playground were convinced Doug had special powers and would pay him perform insect resurrections one more time. Doug kept a shoebox with him whenever he went to the playground where he deposited the insects he could not revive. For his term project in Natural Sciences, Doug’s teacher had assigned each child a box lined with cotton, pins, tweezers, and a bottle which the students were to saturate with fingernail polish remover in order to enclose and exterminate at least five insects of various kinds, which were to be carded and identified. Doug had thrown away the cotton-lined box and built tiny crucifixes for each of the insects he could not bring back, placing them by stickpins into a small diorama he had built from model train equipment, a toy-model landscape of blood and sand where, on the top of the tallest dune, stood the killing jar. The project was laid out before Doug on the benches kids normally set up as launching ledges to facilitate higher swing trajectories, but the swingset regulars and Doug’s usual audience had been bad-vibed away by the playland Golgotha.

“Dougie,” Ed said, over Doug’s shoulder, “that praying mantis is upside down.”

“Right. That’s Saint Peter.

“So this is the big N.S. project, huh. Mendehlsonn will, man, he’ll love this. This is some heavy beaurocratic heat, chief.”

“It’s a witch-hunt. If they don’t get me for this, it’ll just be something else. I might as well make most of my potential now, and if anyone asks, I’ll just feed ‘em some line about representations of Marx’s hive theory.”

“The fuck you know about Marx?”

“Nothing. Which is sufficient for my defense.”

Merle, over the other shoulder, asked “Hey Doug, how is it you couldn’t bring any of these ones back? What’s the difference?”

“I’m going to bring them back. That’s the best part.”

Ed and Merle began to understand the vibe zone that had collected around the swingset, and dwelt on that in silence until Doug spoke up.

“Had a guy come up today, smelled like a cop, wore cop aftershave. Asked me what I was doing. Told him I was working on some school junk. He told me maybe I should take my project somewhere else. I told him how a few days ago this girl, I didn’t really know her, stepped up to me with a small white garbage bag and a handful of change. She told me her momma kitty just gave birth to a while litter of baby kitties, only they were all dead, but the momma kitty kept watch over them and wouldn’t let this girl’s dad get rid of them. The momma kitty would hiss and spit and make unnatural noises; the momma kitty was obviously really sick, and the humane society had to come out and take the momma kitty away. But so later this girl climbed out of her window and down to the street and got all the baby kitties out of the garbage, because she knew just like the momma kitty knew that they weren’t really dead, it just took some time, and this girl had heard that I could bring things back to life, and even though kitties are different than bugs she was sure these just needed a little shove and they’d be okay.

“The guy who was probably a cop stood there and looked just like you guys look now. And after a while, he went away.”

“Wow, Dougie.”

“So mom throw you out yet?”

“You know about that?”

“Yeah, she told us to be super-nice to you today because it was going to be hard on you to move out of your room. What you gonna do?”

“I’m thinking of moving into Merle’s treehouse, though I haven’t asked him yet.”

“Yeah,” Merle mumbled, “my folks, they would dig on that.”

“Anyway, we were heading out to get some dinner. Dad’s out wolfing again and Mom’s gonna make some kinda casserole surprise thing. You wanna come along?”

Dougie started putting away his project, climbed up out of his funk and smiled.

“Yeah. Let’s get some Mexican.”

“Hello, this is El Duce Bur— oh, for fuck’s sake, what do you guys want?”

Ed’s family had once made the unfortunate decision to grab a Sunday Family Meal at El Duce Burrito (to knowledge, the only Italian-Mex restaurant in the States, named after an obscure rarely-seen photograph of the recently deceased Benito Mussolini, fresh from hanging upside-down from a meathook, rolled up in a carpet for storage before burial), where they ordered a Family- Size Holy Frijole’ Special and all suffered stomach cramps so wretched the children laid in the grass in front of the restaurant and moaned until shooed away by teenage waiter Mike “Sweet Willy Sunshine” Danielson — master of the sour cream gun, Camaro owner, rock and roll warrior, and target of Ed and Doug’s undying vengeance. “What do we want? Hey Ed, what do we want?”

“I’ll tell you what we want, we want our GOD-DAMN MONEY BACK!”

“Listen, okay, first, I’ll call the cops on you guys if you don’t get going right now, and second, you can’t order from the drive-through line unless you have a car, okay?”

“YOUR FOOD GAVE US CRAMPS, MIKE!”

“AND THE RUNS! AND PROBABLY CANCER!”

“PTOMAINE, DYSENTERY AND PEPTIC ULCERS!”

“DOUGIE HERE IS GOING BLIND DUE TO YOUR GASTROINTESTINAL TERRORISM!”

“INTERNAL BLEEDING! AND POSSIBLY SYPHILIS! RIGHT, MERLE?”

While the brothers had been haranguing Mike, Merle had been walking from car to car in the slowly-increasing line behind them and telling them nauseating stories of what Employee-of- the-month Danielson did with his hands during his three fifteen- minute breaks. “YOU HEARD THE MAN,” Merle bellowed, “THE WRATH OF GOD IS A COOL BREEZE COMPARED TO THE WHIRLWIND YOU HAVE REAPED, SON!”

“NOT ONLY THAT, BUT—”

At which point El Duce Burrito owner and Nautilus abuser Raymond Oates Jr. charged out the side doors and scanned the parking lot, searching for the scourge of all chain-restaurant owners, Underage Belligerent Loiterers. Normally the boys would have no problem with a speedy getaway to the relative asylum of any of the restaurants in the area, who all look on these ongoing antics as clean-natured fun and market softening, but with Doug weighed down with the project and with Merle lugging around the bass and a backpack full of patch cords and effects pedals, it was up to Ed to provide escape clearance via distraction. The best way to do this, as always, was mass confusion.

“SOD-O-MY!” screamed Ed, scurrying via dumpster to relative safety on the roof of the building. “SODOMY! SODOMY! SODOMY!”

Raymond rushed to the side of the dumpster, effectively cutting Ed off from his only means of escape. This is a game the two of them had played before; in the past, Ed knew better than to place himself in a corner, and Raymond stood still, smiling, waiting for Ed to concede, which he might have been forced to do, had he not seen out of the corner of his eye Merle and Doug getting into a car out in front of Eat, a vast beast of a car, a car which contained Ana, and Ana’s creepy pseudo- boyfriend Josef, and some other guy. Ed looked at the car, and then at Raymond, then at the El Duce Burrito sign which stood just past him. Maybe, Ed thought, if I did this just right, if I timed it perfectly, I could make this work.

Ed didn’t even come close.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/edsatan] #

Echo
When I was eight, David(2)’s sister fell into a well, out in the section of North Playground set up with fairy-tale concrete structures, giant pumpkins and mushrooms and gingerbread houses. The well was not deep and the snowfall made the landing even softer than usual, but she couldn’t get out of the well alone. David(2) ran from house to house, gathering up all his friends, assembling a tactical strike team to solve the problem at hand. We ransacked garages for ropes and flashlights and tools (for some inexplicable purpose; I remember grabbing a pair of hammers in case we had to dismantle the well) and we returned to the park, an incredibly conspicuous mob of prepubescent handymen, where we circled the well and schemed. David(2)’s sister, whose name was (still is, actually) Rose, called up to us, not so much scared as delighted to be the focus of so much attention. We attempted to rig a pulley-system with ropes and branches we found on the other side of the park and a three-boy anchor team but ended up knotting the rope around the frame of the well-covering. This led to a series of arguments which, in turn, led to the breakdown of the rescue party over cries of sabotage and willful incompetence. After boy after boy stormed off in a melodramatic huff, we eventually paired down to Rose, David(2) and myself, who had been telling Rose a series of raunchy jokes (which I will not sully this story by repeating here) to keep her already fairly buoyant spirits up. David(2) ran off to tell his elder brother Stephen of their sister’s predicament while Rose and I talked at length, her voice filled with an echo from the concrete and the cold-clear winter air, and for the first time ever her and I talked in a different way than before, Rose no longer being David(2)’s sister to me but something stranger, The Girl In The Well.

I saw David(2) not long ago. I asked him about Rose and he smiled some, knowing (as everyone did, I discovered after the fact) of my half-baked hopes for what he’d refer to as “thingieness”. Rose still lives in town; she’s getting an interdisciplinary bachelors in folklore, she’s sharing a duplex with two girls I vaguely know across the street from the yellow ghetto. And sometimes, apparently, she goes to North Playground and climbs down into the well, now tall and experienced enough to extricate herself at her leisure, and there she stares up into the sky and sings to herself.

At least that’s how David(2) explains it.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Dreams (three different ones)
I had somehow convinced the small town of Shell Rock that I was really Stephen King. What was most curious was I had convinced many of my relatives of this as well, as the entire town (mostly) had come to the new library right off the Shell Rock River to hear me read from my new book. Unfortunately, the only Stephen King book they had in had pages missing, and I didn’t think to bring my own copy (I’m not sure if this was a deliberate scam on my part, or one of those mistaken identity things), so I went down to the general store on Cherry Street to see if they had a copy. Only on my way [something happened] and I was with my sister out in teh river, which was frozen over, and wolves were hopping across the ice flows, circling in on us, and my mom drove out across the water to pick us up. As we got in the truck, my mom closed the door on my sister, who was a small bean-doll, and I was very upset. It instantly became night and summer, and I stormed out of the car down an abandoned stretch of highway, rolling through a cornfield, and this car started following us (it was not my mom) and slowing down, turning its headlights off, and I had to be careful not to drop my sister as I started running.

i was looking for on old associate of mine at what appeared to be a whole-town celebration of christmas, only it wasn’t christmas, and this was the town’s last year, as the city council had decided there just wan’t enough going on and everybody was going to have to move before the bulldozers came in. jenna and eric were there, working the lights for some kinda high school gymnastics/debate performance, which is probably how it was i ended up looking for this associate, who was supposed to dj at some later point (i was quite suprised to see, when poking through his vinyl box, that this associatehas gotten into mira calix) and, last anybody had seen of him, went out to walk around in the snow. i left through the top doors over the bleachers, taking the sneaky access tunnel out to the field, where i found a set of large bootprints which i kept following until i thought to myself “the woozle is you, darren, go back inside”, which i did, after harvesting some icicles, and i got in just in time to see the third and fourth graders do an interpretive dance on the destruction of the city.

Had a box on the floor marked “my first skin: old life” that I was shoveling letters and cds and clothes into for a goodwill run, immediately piling up everything I hadn’t unpacked since moving in three months ago into the giveaway pile. I gave up my old jane’s addiction bootlegs, my inability to not spell the as teh, my copy of finnegan’s wake I knew I’d never really read, one single long red hair, three twelve-gauge shells, my dreams of higher education, a chipped homemade bong, coffee filters, a stack of typewritten poems, and a ring I used to wear on a chain, tossing them all in the box, telling myself for the third time that week that really, truly, I was making a big dramatic show of putting away childish things, which meant I had to be a grown-up now. For real. Seriously.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Dead Pieces
What you gotta do, he told me, is grind these things up and mix ‘em right into the pitcher, because these fucking things taste just wretched, just horrible. I’d do anything, I was still playing unidentified pill roulette then, still licking vodka off the floor for laughs and economy. He’s no good for you. I was stunned to find, after reading all your journals, how little we actually know about each other, how wrong you see me. I’m chucking empty bottles at the side of your house but you won’t look out to see. Nobody ever bothered to tell me that just because you love someone, no matter how much you may love them, you cannot make people love you, you have to just give up. We’re sitting on the hood of my car and talking shit about you, we’re half tempted to piss in your mailbox. Your hair that summer was the blue of prescription pills, the color of washed-out summer-ending skies. I talked to your mom and she still loves me and is willing to play along. You’ll be happier when I leave, but I’m not exactly ready to go yet. It’s obvious that nothing was said for real, everything was just bargaining for optimum position. There are joys we will never come close to. Your little sister keeps hitting on me, the high school standards, lollipops and low-cut shirts, using her laughing as a reason to touch me. Every last secret given away, I have come clean, but I solved no problems through this. We’re asleep in the car in your driveway waiting for morning and waking up. It’s too bad you’re not a real drinker or else maybe we actually could be friends. There’s darvon all over the dashboard and empties across the floor. You never needed to say those things, you knew that you and I were not a thing, that was your whole pitch. I don’t fuck my friends’ girlfriends just for a joke, just for the leverage. She’s dancing to something on television, I can kinda see her through the window, and when she dances her feet leave the ground, arcing across the room, but these things are beyond my understanding now. We’re soaping your windows, filling your trees with toilet paper, making runs to the supermarket for more eggs. You were always a big fan of that am depression music, and that’s where maybe we can start coming together again. We’re making speeches out on the road, doing stupid things just to get them out of the way, you could stay with me forever but that would require sticking around to see this whole thing through, and you will never come to the door, the closest you got was calling the cops. It was my first domestic incident and it felt like growing up, even though I knew better. You cut your hair thinking it’d change your life, you boarded up your windows so as to enforce your attempts at new paradigms, your half-assed fashion sense, you nouveau-queerism, your eyes filmed over with unnatural clouds. One day we’re going to wake up and not be targets anymore, and it’ll just be the past, but I’m not waiting on that, certainly. The fucking doctor cut all the tabs in half and I keep losing ‘em every time I open the bottle. I know you’ve got a life to live. I’m sorry for rooting through your medicine cabinet, I’m sorry I flipped off your mom, I’m sorry about joking about eating your dog, and I’m sorry that you couldn’t change me, that I am not a projects. It’s all in the positioning, all in the timing, and you fail each time on that. We’re up on your roof, pulling up shingles and throwing the at your neighbor’s windows. I used to think I loved you, I was certain, but I guess I don’t, even though I can’t stay away. Relationships never end, they just go into remission. Look at the fresh-fallen snow and think about how you got from a to b. we’re trying to fit down your chimney but the booze and sedatives have made that task much harder, in fact, I’m half-tempted to just let go and fall off, but those were my younger days, I’m an adult now. You’re on the phone. And there’s probably something I could say to you, some act that might bridge, but I am through telling people lies. You never listened anyway. We’re spinning donuts on your front lawn. One of these days we’ll discover magic and forgetfulness and we’ll be okay. It’s the time in between that’s killing me, that won’t let me sleep. I can’t explain my life to anyone. Whatever you needed, is what I said. I will wait, and convince myself that I do love you. Let me in, I’ve got high-caliber whiskey in the car, I’ve got a new haircut, I’ve got insomnia like you would never fucking believe. We’re peeing through the open window in your garage. You still talk, but I can’t hear you now. You can still teach me how to levitate in dance, and I can feed you on vodka and darvon, and we’ll almost be in love.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Dates
[may 12, 1992] she said she felt it going. she said things were so fucked up, so bad, it was soaking and bleeding into her other memories, into her dreams, so that everything was a reminder of what had gone wrong, and she asked me if i would store all of the memories i had with her, the time we had spent together, the stories she had whispered to me beneath sheets afraid of a thing she could not name. i would hold them in all the empty spaces in my heart and the weight i felt would keep her with me until i saw her again, and night upon night i could retell her all of the rememberings, though i must admit there was a part of me that wanted to reform those dreams, a removal of edges and toxins. this was an academic point, as i took her to the bus station three days later and never saw her again. i was not lying, or being facetious. i do have a second life within me, a life that is not mine.

[april 5, 1992] there was a girl named lynn who once wrote me an incredibly flattering letter. she lived in my dorm, and shared my intro to philosophy class, which led her to knock on my door one day and ask to borrow notes. i am lax with notes, so we chatted a bit and she left. she then sent me the letter. i did not reply. the semester was nearly over, and i was going through a situation with someone else, and i did mean to reply but there are times when i am a flake.. none of which is any excuse. lynn, i am sorry. i know now how that must have felt.

[november 12 1997] you may remember i said “it never goes away”. i was right.

[september 02 1986] “My assignment for Monday is to write an opinion paper at least two pages long, with an opinion and reasons why I believe in that opinion. Since my other opinion ideas were shot down, and since it is already ten at night on Sunday and I don’t have anything yet, I’m going to just go ahead and talk about something I’ve been thinking about some and maybe that’ll not be what you were looking for but that’s as close as I’m going to get so it will have to do. I think boys are different than girls. I’m not sure of this but I keep thinking about it all the time but I don’t know what it is. Well, I think I know a few of the things now. I maybe shouldn’t say anything, because the big truth of it is the only reason I even know is because I’ve been brought into the cabal where some of these things were told to me and I’m not even sure why but I’m glad to know, because boy was I ever feeling like a moron there for a while! But I know that some people don’t know all the secrets and so even My assignment for Monday is to write an opinion paper at least two pages long, with an opinion and reasons why I believe in that opinion. Since my other opinion ideas were shot down, and since it is already ten at night on Sunday and I don’t have anything yet, I’m going to just go ahead and talk about something I’ve been thinking about some and maybe that’ll not be what you were looking for but that’s as close as I’m going to get so it will have to do. I think boys are different than girls. I’m not sure of this but I keep thinking about it all the time but I don’t know what it is. Well, I think I know a few of the things now. I maybe shouldn’t say anything, because the big truth of it is the only reason I even know is because I’ve been brought into the cabal where some of these things were told to me and I’m not even sure why but I’m glad to know, because boy was I ever feeling like a moron there for a while! But I know that some people don’t know all the secrets and so even though it might be against the what the inner sanctumary of boyhood told me about I will tell. The first and most important thing is boys generally don’t know what’s going on. But they learn that if you can make people think you *do* know what’s going on, it’s almost as good as actually knowing what’s goign on. The best way to do this is to make other people (particularly girls) confused, so they’ll more likely follow your goofball fake understanding. There’s a lot of different ways to do this, and I’m sure if you thought about it some you could think of a few. This is also part of why boys act weird sometimes, it’s because they *really* don’t know what’s going on, so they have to try a lot harder to confuse people. It’s all very complicated. Sometimes I think the only reason boys and girls get together is so they have a reason to be all weird and yell and act dumb, because people will let you get away with stupid things like that when you’re dating somebody. When you’re not, you’re just being a dork. People feel all weird inside and they work up all this energy from feeling all weird and they need to do something with it, so they find somebody else who feels all weird and they swing their hands around and act like babies who have been out in the sun too long. Because if you can’t control anything that happens in school or just in your life or anywhere, and you have somebody you can control or argue with or whatever, you’ll do it. Me, I set fire to my Star Wars guys and I have to see a psychologist, but if I had a girlfriend to yell at, well, I guess that would be okay with everybody. I am reading on this paper you gave us that an opinion paper should only have one opinion and stick with it, but I have some other ones which I think also go with this one. I just am full of opinions today. I am an opinion pinata! (I’m sorry about that part but it is very late and it’s Sunday and I have to get this done. I mean, Dr. Demento just ended so it has to be one in the morning and KFMW is going off the air for the night, which always makes me feel weird, listening to that empty sound, like walking around late at night and thinking that maybe none of the people who live in those houses will ever get up again. And I’m definitely tired now, okay, so I’ll just get back to the opinions…) My mom once told me, I don’t remember when or why, but she told me that it’s better to know than not to know. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s better not to know, because then you can think that maybe things will still be like you wanted them to be, and sometimes that’s all it takes to make things okay. This is why when a girl tells a boy that she doesn’t like-like him, that she thinks of him like a brother, that even if he didn’t want to have anything like that with her and wouldn’t do that anyway that really it breaks his heart. I think feeling like a normal person is a lot about having somebody who maybe possibly in the remotest way at least might like you. Even if really in your brain you know they don’t, you always make there be this maybe, and sometimes that’s all it takes to make things okay. A big part of being a boy is letting hope trick you into doing stupid things. I think boys and girls would be fine if they would just settle down for a while. If maybe they got more naps and drank some juice and would just say “I don’t know what I’m doing and I think I’m screwing up, but I’m trying, and I don’t know what I want but I know that I like you, so let’s have some ice cream and watch old reruns of Sebastian Hex Supernatural Detective, because life is long and it’s okay if you make mistakes as long as you remember to be good to people”. I think it’s really werd that it’s all so complicated, but that’s the way it is, and I don’t think people want to change, because maybe they’re lazy or whatever. I think it’s because you have this way you think adults do things and that’s the way to do them. I think kids my age are learning how to be adults but it’s like asking a klansman to pretend to be black. It doesn’t come out right and it’s kinda mean and it will never really fit but that’s how you’re supposed to do it. I don’t think it’s an acident that learning all your boy-stuff when you’re all confused and angry and stupid and looking for anything which tells you that there’s a way to not be confused and angry and stupid anymore doesn’t work, and you’re still confused and angry and stupid, only by that point you’re already going one way and there’s no going back to change things. I also think anybody who tells you how things are is trying to sell you something, trying to trick you into thinking that you’re dumb when you’re not and they have an answer that isn’t even an answer at all. This is even more true when they tell you that things used to be good and then something happened and now it’s no good and if only we’d go back to the way it was everything would be okay. I have some friends who always talk about how much they just want to go back to before school and everything and I think it’s dumb. Because you can’t do that. Everybody tells you they have an answer. I don’t have an answer. I don’t even know what I’m talking about, now. I don’t think anybody knows what the truth is. And I think everybody wants something to tell them they do know what the truth is, no matter what. And I also think that everything is fucked, that it is all totally fucking fucked, and I don’t care what you say because you know I’m right.”

[october 18 1995] in the letter, the letter i had carried beneath my shirt, held against my skin, she had told me she loved me, only me, she wanted to share love with others but between us there was a bond and that bond could never be broken and we would be together throughout time. later, when i was to finally see her again, she asked if i would bring her some things. among those things was a collection of things i had written, and that made me happy, and while flipping through it i found another letter she had written, the same ink and paper, the same immediate rush of the words, words even more possessing, so much so that i did not notice, at first, that the letter was not addressed to me.

[september 19 2000] i was living with a group of people that i did not know. my room was in the basement; i shared a large feather bed with two women who were lovers, which got to be very annoying, but i was instructed by god to bring in certain specifically marked people to stay temporarily in the house until certain things could be removed from their bodies; often i had them sleep in my bed while i slept in the crawlspace. one of these people was gary coleman, and while we were driving back to the big house we drove down a tight spiraling road whose weirdly involutional motion continued after the car had stopped, we talked to a prostitute who had gene-alterant work done to grow beds of small cilia and longer thin tentacles in her mouth in order to facilitate fellatio. “i have memorized over three hundred sacred geometrical patterns achievable with the components of my mouth.” i told her that sounded like getting sucked off by a macrame plantholder, and gary told her she would have been better off investing that money in some therapy. she then cursed us, telling us this road would not end, and folded in on herself until she was gone. after that, something else happened. if it is true, as i was told as a child, that heaven is the place where nothing happens, and hell is the place where nothing changes, it is my suspicion (as it has been since my days of ccd) that these are the same places, and those who have been broken and buried face-down at their life’s end are finally admitted a rest from the endless burden of the body, while all of us who have sought and suckled distraction and addiction will be corroded by appetites we can no longer satisfy, gaki, preta, our throats like pinholes. nightmares about dead people trying to contact me through the radio, and how i got a radio show at fra through that, and attained a minor popularity through the agnoies of others. my father building a mock satan in a hole he dug beneath the garage out of old car parts and rebar, oil and smoke sputtering the dirt walls, my faith directly questioned. we need a new inquisition. people talk to each other on the bus, but i don’t listen anymore, as i’m no longer taking story-notes. pamela had a definite line to cross, and once you crossed it you were out of her heart forever. i had seen this happen to others, watching their phones, wondering what had gone wrong. pamela was married at the time, which meant my conection to her was, once again, the third member of a couple, the friend through which all greivances are strained of their vitriol, once again fucked by my questionable addiction to female companionship, my heart unwilling to let out anything trapped within it. the upside to this arrangement was i thought there was little chance i could cross that particular line, not being in a position to do anything particularly terrible, but pamela has always been fickle. i imagine she still is, but obviously, i don’t know.

[march 6 1992] you and i had a child. you were face-down on the bed, and you wouldn’t look at the child. you felt in two places. then you were on top of me, wrapped around me, taking me into you. the child looked at me from the corner of the room and said “don’t be ashamed. don’t be ashamed.” the child was not my child at all. the child may not have been your child. you stood, lifting yourself off me, and the child sopped whisky and sugar into your mouth, easing your bruised inner thighs with ropes of wet hair. the lower half of my body could not be moved by me. all i could do was roll with my shoulder, back and forth, across the small stained bed. when i was not inside you i was confused and afraid. the child returned to the corner of the room and you turned to face me and pivoted forward.

[december 14 1998] ten am. call sean up, ask for the keys to the gun cabinets, says he’s going back to sleep. i need new friends. get in argument with the mailman over some alleged slurs written on mail sent to me. i said “listen, if she wants to call me a ‘little homo’, that’s fine, i don’t care”, but he says it’s a slur to gays. i’m a slur to gays? what if i was gay? but no, it *means* something because i’m so obviously the straight american. i should move. make note to send exploding urine bomb from neighbor Tony’s box tomorrow. wonder if termites can be trained, if they’d make a suitable army. tell neighbor Judy that i’m going to cut the bones from her children’s feet if they get in my shed and do their little evil deeds in there anymore; fight ensues, which was fairly entertaining for us both, i bet. one of those lives. sold one hundred fifty dollars worth of cds and records to help fund the psychotic moving plan, have moronic discussion with scott the clot — every fucking time i go in there he wants me to do something for him: give him some order number for some axiom comp., sell him some suicide bootleg, whatever. taking his money makes me feel like a toothless whore but it’s getting me that much closer to escape velocity. fortunately i didn’t have to deal with either rollins-boy or his halfwit buddy with the (really, no shit) x’es on his hands, every fucking time i see him. sorry, that bus left fourteen years ago. you don’t know genetic anamolies until you’ve spent five minutes talking to cedar valley hardcore/sharp scenesters. buy tea and mangoes at hy-vee, interview for a job at a hotel, had serious thoughts about crawling in the incenerator about halfway through the interview. i now walk out of interviews when i hear the words “go-getter”, “aggressive” or any form of racist “we gotta stick together” kinda talk, which i used to stick around to argue/insult. my time’s too important for any of that, a concept i solidified by pretending to be a big rock and roll star while driving around cedar falls (which is one of my more irritating habits). i interviewed myself and pointed and waved at unreal admiring fans. went home and took a big long nap in tribute of all the tired children of the world. woke up and ate a mango, which is a good food to eat just after getting up because they don’t fuck with the stomick. took out the trash and looked at stars for too long; my neighbors all think i’m mildly retarded. went back out into the world to find a second santa to confirm that SA santas can’t have conversations with patrons on the job, which abby told me true, and it is! what kinda commie fucking racket is this? the SA gets people looking to score a little extra gift-cash for the holidays, then says “hey, just take the money, say thanks, and that’s it, no talking”? ho ho ho, up your ass, slavation army. try to price santa suits for a freelance thing but the costume shop is all out. went to the mall, felt like a creepy old man with candy back in the econoline, discovered there is no such thing as Opium Julius and fled. went home, still three gifts short of being set for christmas. get yelled at for doing a music-thing after nine pm, which made me feel like a little kid, at which point i realized that if i felt like a creepy-ass old pervo AND a snotty little kid in the same day there’s a balance struck. mildly pleased with that, i got on irc and promptly lost six hours of my life while “writing” (hehehe) in the other window, then went to sleep. another day.

[february 03 2000] Had a box on the floor marked “my first skin: old life” that I was shoveling letters and cds and clothes into for a goodwill run, immediately piling up everything I hadn’t unpacked since moving in three months ago into the giveaway pile. I gave up my old jane’s addiction bootlegs, my inability to not spell the as teh, my copy of finnegan’s wake I knew I’d never really read, one single long red hair, three twelve-gauge shells, my dreams of higher education, a chipped homemade bong, coffee filters, a stack of typewritten poems, and a ring I used to wear on a chain, tossing them all in the box, telling myself for the third time that week that really, truly, I was making a big dramatic show of putting away childish things, which meant I had to be a grown-up now. For real. Seriously.

[january 3 1993]: my associate [david], whose antidepressant medication i had been taking for three weeks, called me up to see if i wanted to go drinking. i did, as the medication made it hard to sleep, which alcohol helped combat. we met at a parking lot across the street from the hospital and sat in his car listening to alice in chains and drinking everclear. he asked me at one point if i would be interested in killing him, as he was thinking about killing himself but was afraid he’d chicken out, and with me being a writer it would be a good experience and all. i wasn’t sure. this quickly degenerated into an argument, “i just thought it’d be cool for you but if you don’t want to do it then fuck you then”, and all pissed off i walked three miles home in the rain.

[june 11 1994] I used to play pinball for money out at elk run truck plaza for a couple years, back when i was working janitorial. i didn’t play much, mostly because i wasn’t very good, but i was good enough to keep myself in drug money running truck drivers and delivery boys. even after i moved to iowa city i’d drive out there, on friday nights, after i was done at the rest stop, though at some point in there i stopped playing well and never went back. the two machines they had there that i could play well were cyclone and black knight 2000, two early platform machines, simple layout, clean angles. one night i was playing black knight with this bosnian kid, younger than me, and he’s just fucking miserable, i had him up by like fifty bucks, and so he says well, let’s play some tetris, pinball’s not his bag. i’m alright at tetris but nothing particularly solid. danilo, on the other hand, he ran my stupid ass into the ground, but that’s not what i remember. what i remember is him teling me that this is what he did. he made a living playing people tetris. mostly he made money playing layover businessmen at the cedar rapids airport, and those guys play so much fucking tetris that you need imprinted skills to hustle them out of anything, but danilo made himself twelve thousand dollars the weekend of the ‘94 blizzard, just by standing at that one machine and taking on all comers. he wouldn’t even play me tetris for cash; we played losers pay, like kids on a playground, and he told me about how he was saving up to go to u of i next fall. i kept looking for him the year i was there, but i ever saw him. sometimes that’s the exact same feeling i get when i post and read scrytch, only i’m playing with so many players that if i was to stop and think about it i’d freeze.

[july 19 1995] he called me from the grocery store. he couldn’t figure out where the exit was, and he couldn’t ask anybody, as if he did they would *know*, and the minions of the mountain king would take him away to toil forever in the furnace beneath the earth for the hideous crime of taking an illegal substance and going to the grocery store to buy juice. midway through this story he burst into tears and began apologising for calling me, telling me how he’ll make it all right if he can just get it together enough to get home and sleep, certain he can trick his body into shutting down against the will of the chemical if only he could get between his sheets. when i used the phrase ‘the will of the chemical’ he became convinced i was one of them, that i always hated him and was trying to get him to kill himself so i could take what was his, whatever that was. he then began screaming, calling me a fucker and a judas until he dropped the phone and ran off, after which i hung up the phone, rolled over, and went back to bed.

[may 12 1992] she said she felt it going. she said things were so fucked up, so bad, it was soaking and bleeding into her other memories, into her dreams, so that everything was a reminder of what had gone wrong, and she asked me if i would store all of the memories i had with her, the time we had spent together, the stories she had whispered to me beneath sheets afraid of a thing she could not name. i would hold them in all the empty spaces in my heart and the weight i felt would keep her with me until i saw her again, and night upon night i could retell her all of the rememberings, though i must admit there was a part of me that wanted to reform those dreams, a removal of edges and toxins. this was an academic point, as i took her to the bus station three days later and never saw her again. i was not lying, or being facetious. i do have a second life within me, a life that is not mine.

[august 26 1998] When I lived in Iowa City, and for the short time in Waterloo when I stayed with my aunt, I used to wander around the nearby hospital on nights when I could not sleep, which were often. One night, which must have been in 1992, I walked from Quadrangle, my dorm, over to the hospital, through the lobby, up and down the halls, looking at paintings and trying to place the layout, when I walked into a family with a shocked look on their faces, people who had obviously been through an agony whose first half had just come to an end. Because I am the creator, I can tell any story for them I want. I could find them what they had lost, breathe a new life into the husk beneath the sheet, but none of them will ring true, and the best thing I could have done would be to leave them alone entirely. Instead, I switched corpses with them. I told them they could mourn for the person I had lost, and I would mourn for the person they had lost, and in that way we would develop distance from our suffering while spreading the half-life of the remembered a bit farther. They looked at me for a long time before they began beating me.

[may 15 2000] i have this image of myself in my head as a punk rock old testament prophet, outside the herd-morality (and thus laws) of the city-state, overturning the tables of moneylenders, cops, and bearers of false witness. i have knives taped beneath the dashboard and prostitutes who will keep me in clean laundry and heroin. sources of important information seek me out in hidden vip bars tucked away in bombproof bunkers where i seek visions in refracted sunlight trapped in palm-mirrors. armies of creditors and husbands search the streets for me, but i am without fear even in such desolate palces, as my co-conspiritors are with me, driving at high speed and kicking in doors and performing incredible acts of derring-do while maintaining perfect composure. this is obviously not true. i am none of these things. if you’ve met me, you know i’m a goofball, a bit overweight, polite to a fault. everything offends me and i nurse wounds for days. while all of this can be endearing, it certainly isn’t very thrilling or bizzare or what have you. there are times when i feel i’ve let myself down in this regard, that i have used writing as a hiding place, too content to be the recording device, and the feeling of limitless potential is very far away. there are times when i am with you, however, when i know any of that is possible, that we could not be stopped, that adventure and depravity is as simple as a step forward.

[november 11 1993] What I do remember is that walking around the neighborhood with a shotgun seemed like a good idea. Or not even a good idea but a thing I could do. This was a critical step in my reasoning: “If I wanted to,” I kept thinking, “I could do it.” By itself this wasn’t that strange; there were fields across from our neighborhood, and this was October, so it wasn’t too odd to see pheasant hunters walking back to their homes with guns, but this was different, as it was two in the morning, and I was obviously not a hunter, but I was convinced by some weird moral logic that I no longer have access to that I was well within my rights as a citizen to walk around the neighborhood with a shotgun, and that’s a good enough reason to do anything.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Keep Crawling, Motherfucker
This was 1998. Loyola knew good and well I was working on the book and didn’t have time to get out and see the humans, but after knocking on the basement window for a few minutes I let her in, and while she looted my bookshelf for novels I had swiped from the house on the hill she shared with Jez back years gone she told me

“I’m getting out of fucking Iowa. You’ll never see me again.”

“You’re going? Where are you going?”

“West. Like everybody else does.”

“Huh. You want a copy of the book? It’s nearly finished.”

“Yeah, sure, why not.”

“You want some mushrooms?”

“Nah.”

“You wanna fuck?”

“Nah.”

“You’re going where again?”

“Portland. But you’ll never see me again.”

“Like tonight?”

“Like right now. I’m getting my shit back from you, and then I need to stop and see Lewis, and then I’m like Casper.”

“Huh.”

“Okay, so, have a good life, boy.”

“Yeah. Happy Portlanding.”

And that was the last time any of us saw Loyola, and when I said I threw out the book, that basically means I gave it to a friend, but basically it ends up being the same thing.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

conversations
“It’s fucked up . I kept thinking to myself, that whole time, that I needed to put everything else aside and not be fucked up anymore. And that was good for me, I think, but it just now hit me — I’m not fucked up anymore. I can actually deal with things. I keep scheduling my life on brain-damage time: stay up at night so as not to have to deal with people, keep your goals short-term and reasonable, trust simplicity, relish stability, cope. Good things, generally. But I don’t need that anymore, not now, I’m not brain-damaged or stupid or fucked up. I have to stop being such a fucking victim, start being honest, stop being safe.”

“Yeah. I mean, that’s good, it’s good, but. And don’t get me the wrong way, but I’ve heard this speech from you before. And you do okay, for a little bit, but you end up being you again. Which isn’t bad, but it’s not this, this thing you keep talking about. It’s all bursts and crashes with you.”

“So I think then, what I need to do, I create a situation where it’s impossible to be me anymore.”

“Yeah, but what does that actually entail?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a process. That’s the beauty part.”

….

“I don’t listen to music anymore. I just noticed that.”

“Like you don’t go hunt up obscure shit.”

“No, no. I mean like anything. Nothing at all. I tried to listen to Ligetti today and after about a minute i just had to turn it off. And you know, I love Ligetti. So I tried all sorts of things. I put on Can and Sarah Vaughan and Nurse With Wound and Fridge and Prince and Monolake and nothing, I mean nothing, sounded like something I wanted to listen to. I’m beginning to suspect I just don’t want to hear anything.”

“Well, that’s not good.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“Maybe it’s a cutting yourself off thing.”

“Well, that’s obvious. I mean, look at me. I’m a mess. I’m cheerleading my getting out of bed in the morning. But this, well.”

“Indeed. I think you should go into hiding.”

“You think?”

“Oh, fuck yes. Absolutely.”

“Of course, you’re a corpse.”

“That doesn’t invalidate a good idea.”

….

“So you’re saying they tried to impeach you?”

“Hell, they snagged me on a couple things.”

“And they’re still in office?”

“Yes sir. Nothing I can do about it.”

“Pigshit! Fire the fuckers, Bill! Punk those fuckers like I did Primakov and Stepashin! Kill ‘em all! Like Ubu!”

“Who? Who is Ubu?”

“Very sad, Bill, you do not know. I wrote essay all about in my new book ‘The Duma Can Suck My Red Cock: Boris’s List of People In History He Wishes He Could Have Fired By Boris Yeltsin’. You really should look into it. Plenty of time you’ll have, sitting in the hotel room waiting for the little woman to come back from the campaign, ha ha!”

“Screw you, Badanov, this is my ticket out.”

“Oh Bill. So sad, so sad you do not know how to flush your conscience down the toilet.”

“Just like the ruble, huh.”

“Very much fuck you.”

….

“In fact, in order to have your complete trust as your Docktor, I’ll agree to treat you likewise.”

“As a docktor, you mean.”

“Indeed.”

“But what good is this newfound professionalism if we don’t have a patient?”

“Oh, but we’re both patients as well. At the same time. That’s the beauty.”

“If you say so. Have you seen my vibra-saw?”

….

"Every time I open my mouth a turd falls out."

“You know what I really want? It’s like, like you and I have known each other since we were little kids. And you’ve been there for me every time something has happened, and you’ve always been the person I talk to. And that sucks, because it’s like I don’t even need to talk now, it’s like you alraedy know what I’m gonna say, and so what’s the point of me even, y’know, even being here? What I really want, really, is to be able to suprise you, to toally come from out of nowhere and just totally fucking blindside you. I want you to lay in bed at night and wonder just what the hell is going on with me, what I’m thinking, where I’m going. I want you to take absolutely nothing for granted with me. I want you to wonder about me. That’s what I want.”

“Yeah, okay, fine. I don’t know you. Who even knows what you’re gonna do, even, because you’re just so crazy. Batton down the hatches, boys.”

“You’re not listening to me!”

“That’s because I don’t have the slightest fucking idea what you’re talking about! I happen to like the fact that I know you, that I can trust you, that you’re someone I can count on. I’m sorry if I’m holding you back or something by being your friend. Maybe you’ve outgrown me, or something, I don’t know…”

“No! Why are you such a fucking martyr? Why is every simple thing just an excuse for you to fuck up?”

“What?”

“I didn’t…I’m not saying this right…”

“Yeah, well, it’s always nice to talk to you, take care, hope everything works out for you, don’t take any wooden nickels.”

“Dammit, no, just wait a second, don’t run away from me.”

….

“I am very worried about you. I think you are sad. Everything you write makes me sad. It makes everybody sad.”

“I won’t write anymore.”

“That would make me sad.”

“I don’t want to make people sad.”

“Then don’t be sad.”

“I’m not sad.”

“I think you’re lying. that makes me sad.”

“Okay. I am sad.”

“Your being sad makes me sad.”

“What should I do?”

“I wish you had your shit together. If you have to ask me what to do, you’re still fucked up. That makes me sad.”

“There is no right answer to this, is there?”

“There is no answer at all.”

….

“I don’t much see what good having a kid is if you’re not willing to train him to be a miner. He’s not going to be that small for much longer.”

“He a miner, he got no strength to do his chores. He’s useless to us then. I didn’t pass his little deformed body through my womanly flower just to have him wasting the best of his energies not even contributing to the upkeep of this household.”

“But wife, love of my life and my loins, that’s what the punishing rod is for. You can’t let the children of today off just because they were born into an age of vice and depravity; that’s how they end up in those street gangs.”

“But that’s how we did that first child, and by the time her spine broke there wasn’t enough of her left to feed the dogs. You remember that, boy?”

“Why do you guys always have to be so weird when I have friends over? And they don’t think you’re cool, you know, you’re just embarassing. God. Why don’t you go watch a documentary or something?”

“You see what I mean, husband? That’s the kind of talk they learn in the mines. A couple months digging sulfur and all they want to do is curse your name while they drink bourbon from the mouths of whores. Better we put him in the bag and throw him in the river.”

“Hush, wife, there’s witnesses about.”

“Would you PLEASE just get OUT of my ROOM, PLEASE?”

….

I saw her at goodwill today. I was browsing vinyl and she was looking for sweaters, it being near-fall. I asked her how the painting was going and she told me she didn’t do any of that crap anymore, decided it was time to leave all that college-wannabe-artist bullshit in the past.

“Yeah,” I nodded.

When she asked me what she was doing now, I told her I was a baker. Which I was, at one point. I told her she was stupid not to be painting anymore, and she shrugged.

“If you keep having imaginary conversations with people and emailing them off, people will think you’re a psycho,” she told me.

“I’m not a psycho. I’m a writer.”

“Whatever,” she said.

….

“It’s suggestive of an inner conflict.”

“Oh stop it, it is not.”

“No, really. You’ve been like this, throwing up, migranes, forever. I think it’s your body telling you about keeping things inside.”

“So you’ve been reading Cosmo again.”

“Seriously, i think maybe that’s part of it.”

“Where’s Pookah? Did you let her in?”

“Listen, we need to talk about this. It’s not getting any better, and-”

“Do we have any more water?”

“Don’t just-”

“What do you buy when you go to the grocer?”

“I’m-”

“Pookah? Pookah?”

….

“I’m sick of listening to you whine about this. Either you do it and get it over with or you shut up about it and go on with your life. It’s fucking absurd.”

“You just don’t think I’ll do it.”

“Listen, I don’t care. Either way. Just cut out all this ridiculous melodrama, you’re cheapening it. You should just wake up one morning, bathe yourself, look out at the sunrise, and do it. And if you don’t do it, then no one will know, and it’ll be over.”

….

“Well, proper and complete blueprint drawn up, you don’t even really need to erect the building. Always a compromise, son.”

“You’re kidding me. You’re pulling my leg.”

“Listen, you will remember later in life the majesty of this plan, this plan we designed. To make some ramshackle betrayal of that plan will be to tarnish your memory forever. I can’t have such a thing on my conscience.”

“I told everybody. ‘Kick-assingest treehouse ever’, I said. ‘We’ll have pizza and pop and everything’. Is what i said.”

“On my death bed, you in tears, all how we should never have built the treehouse. Imagine the moment. Focus on the details. The color of the eyeliner tainting your mother’s tears, wailing in the hallway. You want this?”

“Steve Divitz’s treehouse. With a slide and everything. We rode our bikes down it once and Kev nearly got brain damaged. We’ll have to keep doing it if I don’t get a safe place to play. And I’ll do it, too.”

“The locus for your first adolescent gropings, the center of your later shame. Stains and apologies. Treehouses since time began are nothing but parent-sanctioned fuck bunkers. I have to keep to a modicum of respectability.”

“Stop creeping me out, Dad. Steve and I will have to be gay lovers so as to grant me treehouse time. The affection I didn’t get at home I’ll just have to find out on the mean streets of Twin Pine Terrace. I’ve got Springer on the phone as we speak.”

“You and your little hump buddies do whatever experimenting you will, but not in the cedars I planted myself, mister. And I can’t in any decency permit these high-powered rock cannons. The least of my parental duties is not building the child weapons. I have the handbook in the den.”

“You get a den and I get to sit in the compost heap shoving eggshells into my mouth. That hardly seems conscionable.”

“How about I just buy you a new bike?”

“Deal.”

….

[Crappy Chef, CF IA, 1:38 am Monday October 11 1999 ce.]

“What is that?”

“That I’m reading?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a book of essays. It’s pretty good.”

“Are you a teacher? Or something?”

“No. I’m a lumberjack.”

“And you’re okay, right?”

“No, seriously, I’m a lumberjack.”

“Not a lot of deep woods around here for lumberjacking.”

“Not anymore there ain’t.”

“Oh, so what has a tree ever done to you, anyway?”

“You must not be familiar with the folklore of my people. Trees are infamous for reaching in the windows of homes and pulling babies from their sleep, smashing their skulls on their trunks and laughing to themselves knowing nobody would ever suspect a tree. Well, I suspected the trees. And I exacted a dire vengeance for their murderous arborial ways.”

“Yeah, okay. What-ever. Do you have any more cream?”

….

“So I started praying again.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. It’s kinda weird.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah, I’m praying to have less patience and compassion and understanding. I’m praying to become hard and small and tired.”

“You don’t say. Wait, but that’s crazy.”

“Why is that crazy?”

“Why would you want to be those things?”

“Because I’m tired of praying for things I’m never going to have.”

“Shit. We’re almost there.”

“Run this stopsign. Just go. Nobody’s coming.”

“Nobody’s coming?”

“Go. Run it.”

“She’s still there?”

“No, no. She’s sleeping. Fuckin’ go, already.”

“Is she breathing?”

“Of course she’s breathing. Stop being all, like, a bigger thing about it.”

“What?”

“Like ‘woo-hoo, what a big adventure’.”

“I’m just driving the car, okay.”

“Go! Go through that!”

“Shut up!”

“Did you get at that?”

“Which that?”

“There, you gotta, jesus, you gotta stop and go that way, this is all around the neighborhood just to get to the highway and then to the hospital.”

“I’m not going back, if that’s what you’re saying.”

“Go back! It’s like half a minute!”

“Forget it, we’re going, it’ll be quicker.”

“You should probably talk to her, keep her awake.”

“No, you should talk to her. I don’t even fucking know her.”

“Fuck that. Do that shit at my party. I’m amazed I’m even here.”

“Well I’m driving the car, and that’s all I can do. So you better do something.”

“Shut up. Just stop talking already.”

“Fine.”

“Fine, whatever.”

“Fine.”

“You can’t even get to the hospital from here.”

“Fuck you.”

….

“Well yeah of course you would think that.”

“Because you’re just like that.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know that’s not what I meant. You’re just trying to turn this into a.”

“No. That’s just.”

“Of course not. Look, all I’m saying is that sometimes it’s just a bit much, just all at once, and you never really explain or, like, so like yesterday, when you.”

“No! No, just listen, what I mean is that you came up and then.”

“Right.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, you obviously don’t want to talk to me, so maybe you should just.”
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Come Back To Us Now
He turned thirty-seven on a Thursday and nothing much was different. He stuck out one of the floating factory jobs long enough to get settled in, earn enough to cover the whole apartment himself, a few good staring walls and soft distant city lights out the front bay window. He wasn’t drinking, for now, and was pleased with himself overmuch, half-thinking about fitness regimens he’d never enact. He hadn’t thought about killing himself for years now, not outside of a cheap tinsel way he’d occasionally use to prop up a pointless story with a slight shock, the way other writers use child abuse or gang experience. He was still writing, obviously, as he was still the writer, and files sat on the drive of a computer so old and fucked-with it would have deeply shamed some of his older tech friends, had they still been around. Sometimes, in moments of clarity, he’d mail off manuscripts like messages in a bottle and never hear back, which was okay. In a way he was relieved. He still ate alone, and went to movies alone, and slept alone, as his seemingly foolproof plan of eventually magically ending up with someone hadn’t quite panned out yet. His friends had mostly gone off to switch cities every few years, becoming in the process actual professional adults, and it can be hard to find time for even the truly important things when you’re responsible for things beyond yourself, for your family and your community and your skin color and your way of life. He had said many times that he had put the best part of himself into the things he had written, and after a time his friends saw that was at least mostly true, which left going to visit him in his muttering ill-tempered self-pitying stupor something like eating the shells. He still drove around at night, into the city and out to the endless backroads, some abortive preparation for a final leaving he hadn’t bothered to get around to yet. He still took everything too personally, still imagined slights in every sentence. He still stuck out his tongue when it was snowing and talked to stray animals. He still thought there was time to fufil all the promise he once held. He was thirty-seven now and walked around wondering what the future held.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Cognition
(dedicated to Daniel Foss)

Stephen Kosslyn’s cognitive model of mental imagery only gained a certain amount of respectability (at least, here one the quad) after Martha Farah demonstrated that isolated damage to the brain could cause direct loss of the image-generation component of Kosslyn’s model. We have thus decided to follow suit, using isolated brain damage and the corresponding loss of mental abilities to prove everything from the true identity of The Wicklow Man to spackle (which, in hindsight, was a perfectly daft waste of taxpayer funds, but it’s not like any of us are going hungry so), but it wasn’t until we began the aforementioned studies as to the obscession-development of bra strap snipping by scissors planted in the aforementioned freezer. It was a shock to discover the bra-wearing subject in our study was none other than a Miss L. [name changed to protect my academic standing], a third-year student in my Gestalt Post-Kohler class, who I had often taken notice of specifically because of her braless and ample and quite well presented cleavage — would this thusly mean she was to be bound by silk and lace packaging and presented for strap-severing so some delinquent Drano-snorting undergrad? Never! I said and immediately made calls in order to assure myself the position of First Severer, brain damage be damned.

My attempts to sleep at night were severed by waking dreams of various undergarment scenarios: sequins, fishnet, baby-doll — would she be choosing the design, or would someone on-staff have a selection of strategically-designed bra experiments for her to use? Would there be wiring to measure heart rate, skin temperature, sweat production? The undergarments notwithstanding, what positions would her body take? I felt myself re-imagining the scene, as though I was designing some Ballardian crash-site, as though she was some Bellmer doll. I grew terrified, a terror which followed me the next day, right into the testing room.

“You remember why you are here, correct?” “Scissors in icebox. Cut the bra-straps.” “Good job! Now don’t move, ‘cause that’ll make this hurt more.” At which point my associate, Dr. J (no humor intended), delivered a blow with a ball peen hammer to my non-limbic temporal lobe.

[The author, at this point, gives a lengthy explanation as to a week of displaced obscession-development wandering around the hospital ward snipping the bandages off the other patients with a pair of children’s safety scissors. For the sake of brevity, this portion has been omitted.]

So it was that I was deemed fit to continue the experiment and brought back to the lab, where I was led to the mock-apartment wherein my sweet Miss L. was sitting in the kitchen, watching Penitentiary Week Jeopardy. She faced away from me, and I could not tell from where I was what the makeup of Miss L.’s bra-design was. I entered the kitchen just as late-80’s rap sensation Slick Rick asked “Who is Alfred North Whitehead?”. Miss L. stands, turns toward me, and in that motion her simple green sundress pulls back from the shoulder, revealing a strap. I knew there was something I was supposed to do. Alex Trebek asks Corey Feldman if his recent cocaine arrest was staged simply to get him on Jeopardy; everyone but the two armed guards flanking Feldman laugh. I think to reach into the freezer, opening the door with my left hand so as to use my right hand to hold the scissors, which proves to be an incredibly complicated series of moves to pull off in quick succession so as not to lose current emotional momentum, more important for me than for the experiment in progress. Miss L. smiles and offers to assist me in procuring whatever it is from the freezer I am currently in the midst of procuring, which she believes (in a comment made to me in route from the far side of the kitchen to heart-poundingly close to me before the refrigerator) to be grape, cherry, or “blue” popsicles. I grope behind sacs of frozen peas, empty ice-cube trays (demonstrating a certain endearing slovenliness which only adds to the now-dizzying atmosphere of the situation), and (unsurprisingly, but uprising to me at the time) popsicles, finally coming across something metal, and handled, which I take hold of and remove from the freezer. Miss L. is stunned, and takes a half-step backward, her shoulders in retreat, the onle partially-exposed white and shimmering strap resting atop its clavicled support. My flesh sticks to the metal, which I discover upon looking down, is not the imagined scissors but dress shears, which although more aptly suited for the job at hand, are made entirely of unfinished steel and stuck to my fingers and inner palm. Jim Baker asks “What is chronic migrainous neuralgia?”; Alex Trebek replies “No”; Slick Rick asks “What is episodic migrainous neuralgia?”. The blades are frozen together and I find it impossible to wedge the blades apart. Miss L. holds her pose for a moment, then returns to my side, offering to run warm water over the hand so as to safely remove the shears from it. Something in the room flickers and is gone. From her proximity, I can see down the front of her dress, see where strap meets cup, and judge the give factor of those straps. A voice in my head begins to repeat “now what’s wrong with a withered hand?” and I find myself suddenly hungry for popsicles.

The grad students now study and make notes on my behavior from behind a pane of one-way glass, watch the elements of my speech break up like a radio signal at the mention of scissors, iceboxes, or bra straps. But elsewhere in the ward, just across the arboretum from the Psych. Building, I know Miss L. is waiting in her kitchen, in bra, with popsicles. Angela Carter one said there are certain articles of clothing which make a person more and not less naked, but she never held dress shears while standing on kool-aid stained linoleum, plotting the resistance force of this article.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Coal For Your Stockings
Tonight’s probably the last night The Amphouse (the loudest bar on the Cedar) will be open; Moia the bartender has decided there’s no reason to respect the rights of the United States Government and has been stuffing every dollar she gets for drinks and tips into the incinerator, which is the only thing keeping teh family living upstairs from withering away in this cold, and Moia’s husband Henri is out chopping down telephone poles in a whiskey haze, and the band playing can’t feel their fingers and can only make music by bashing their fists into their instruments, and the cops are running patterns all over North Cedar looking for a pack of wild deer who have been raiding gardens and gleefully breaking lawn ornaments, and really exhausted stewardesses and equally as tired passengers are bombing the suburbs with suitcases and meal trays, and this girl I had a crush on when I was in teh second grade who was a girl scout and moved and I never saw her again is rigging up ramps of dirt and plywood all over her neighborhood so she can jump her ‘74 Charger over her neighbors at stop signs, and every last member of St. Jude Parish have decided to install pianos in front of each and every pew and become a high lonesome ballad-hymnal collective, and all this is just fine, it’s just fine by me, because I’ve decided that I’m never, ever, ever going to die.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Clusterfucked
Now we all know Ana wasn’t quite right in the head but hey, we’re willin’ to indulge in a little novelty so long as it don’t hurt nobody or tread to far beyond the boundaries of good taste (like when I became obsessed with Amy Tan’s third kidney or when Matt started thinkin’ he was The Lost Bee-Gee and it was time for “a familial convergence”), but Ana was wading deep, deep, out past where the weeds stopped by the time Christmas had rolled around.

It all started so normal, too: Ana had hung up a string of Christmas lights across the front of her house all tasteful and Rockwellian when the same night, some ring-tailed pigfucker comes up and steals her extension cord. Well, I gave her one of mine and she tapes that thing down so tight a crack-addled Charles Atlas couldn’t rip that sucker off. That night, the same dude comes back and cuts the lights.

Now Ana gets nutty in the winter anyway, it’s in her blood and in her brain and the sunlight that goes through the cold air changes and lessens before it falls through her windows. So she goes right over the side after the above happens and starts thinking it’s an in-house job, starts questioning the people who share her house about “intent and purpose”. She becomes convinced the half-mad dog-woman in apt. 2 has a grudge against Christmas and its varied splendors and decided to call her on it. The dog-woman moved out soon afterward late some night to someplace “where I’ll be better understood”: good luck, sister, good luck.

Now I’m thinking the whole ruckus is dead and buried away when I walk to get my daily bowl of soup down at Eat and come across Ana, cradling a string of lights like a child of wire and glass and her eyes with that fifty-yard stare she gets when she’s been up too long on cheap speed and unfocused paranoia.

“Afternoon, Miss Ana, what’s the good word?”

“No time, no time, got plans. Well, no…(cackles evilly, bwahahahaha)…I can put you to use…”

“My car’s got no gas, and I’m not up for one of your harebrained schemes just now. I’m off to get a new job, me. I shaved and everything.”

“It’ll wait. Besides, I got something you might wanna see.”

Now nothing gets me like intrigue, so I follow mule-to-carrot back to her house. She sets the bundle on the porch and orders me to watch it with my life, which is presently worth about thirty bucks to everyone ‘cept me and fans of my wacky hijinx, which is basically Ana and the Dbhlyr Child Army. Long story. Anyway, she comes back down with something else in her arms, the other brother of the lights, a shaded black efficiency just waiting to serve its purpose.

“Aw no, Ana, don’t tell me, that’s a gun.”

But see, this wasn’t no gun, this was a GUN, a cannon, no, I mean this thing was just huge, sweet god, I’d say Godzillaish but it was bigger even, just nasty looking, like a kid with shattered knees, like eyes sewn shut.

“It’s an eight-gauge. Modified. Been making the shells myself.”

“No shit, Ana, I didn’t even think they made eight-gauge shells in the States anymore. You plan on attacking some architecture or whales or something?”

“Check it. Got it parkerized, chopped the barrel to just over 18 inches, ten-shot tube, and a 11000 candlepower light right…there.”

“Ana, you’re no gunslinger. The recoil would knock you through a wall.”

“Nah. Synth stock. Besides, I’m just shooting rock salt, can’t harm nobody…much.”

Bwahahahaha.

“I’m convinced the crazy dog-woman is coming back, Darren. She gave me this…look when she moved out. Like she was gonna go after my cat or something. Besides, any righteous god would approve.”

So after we re-restrung her lights, she sat on the porch like some shine-sodded killbilly itchin’ to pull a Goetz on any vandal foolish enough to cross her path. Now I haven’t owned a gun since my ex put a couple interesting holes in my back, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do, I guess, and I ain’t dumb enough to argue with a woman who has a shotgun across her lap. Fast Eddie Satan comes walking by and I jet off to talk a while with him and forget all about the shotgun mess.

Later that night I get a call.

“Get over here. I got ‘em pinned down in front.”

Couple blocks is normally a short walk unless it’s all icy on the sidewalks, fall on yer ass and can’t get up icy, and by the time I got there a real uneasy peace had settled across her front yard, where the dog-woman looked like she’d rather be just about anywhere else but where she was now.

“AHA!” I pontificated, feeling like Dupin as played by Don Knotts. “J’accuse!”

“Naw, she ain’t the perp,” (and I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t a little bit suspicious of this COPS-ish lingo, which I later found out she got from some crazy episode of Star Trek where they travel back to the 20th century to save William Shatner’s career or something) “it’s him.”

And there, nursing a nasty leg shot and a fresh scar across his cheek, was Ana’s landlord and mine, “Slim” Tim the Welcher. Leave it to a man whose alternate rent program involves organ sales to pull something so gutless and reprehensible as cutting the lights.

Like some kinda meth-junked Scooby-Doo denouement, Ana gave me the lowdown: “See, Tim was trying to get us all out of the house so he could bring in a fresh stable of girls young enough to be fooled by his slick demeanor, so he’s been doing a little housework while we slept.”

“Tim, you turd! Ana, give me the gun, I’ll shoot him myself!”

Ana shooed me away like a fly, telling me to go help the dog-woman. “Yeah, she came back to tell me about Tim’s plan to get us all feuding. He gave her a whole long rant about how I was in the wrong and she should get even, and then she know something was rotten in Denmark.”

“Yeah, and that something is Tim! Just let me take one shot at him, I’ll even let him try to run! I can shoot the dust off a flea’s ass at a thousand paces! Bring it on, Tim!”

“But wait,” I think to myself, “how did Tim get those scars?” right about the same time that Fast Eddie Satan comes flying out of the trees in full battle regalia, screaming.

Well by the time things had come to a close, Ana had her lights up in time for her trip south, where she sold the gun for an ungodly amount of illegal chemicals and various delights which her and her man Justin split over the holidays, Tim dodged the whole racket by examining a sub-subclause in the lease, the dog-woman actually DID find a place where both her and her dog were understood…and me and Fast Eddie Satan, as usual, ended up in jail for reasons which are still pretty cloudy.

So, how’d you spend your holidays?
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Tethering Clouds
This was in the winter, when the sidewalks were all iced and a walk to the mailbox involved enough bruises and bone-cracks to make me stop half-bundled and content myself to watch the nature channel. Eventually, however, curiosity and boredom would win out and I’d inch along to the post, looking out for my mailman, the only mailman with FOOD NOT BOMBS stickers on his truck, making him easy to spot. There was a letter with handwritten addresses on the front and snow-smeared words along the back flap, which got my attention, and so I opened it at the box.

“I didn’t think I was ever going to tell you, but I can’t put this off any longer”, it began, in script I couldn’t identify and paper out of character with anyone I knew. I won’t continue the text here, for personal reasons, but in essence it was a love letter, a proclamation of affection and promise of touch. This was completely unexpected, and I found myself rushing across the pages to discover who would have written me such a thing. The handwriting grew longer and looser as the letter progressed, as intimacies were breached, and pieces of my heart began to open until I got to a word: “Stuart”. I went back and over, and over again. “Stuart”. This letter was not for me.

A closer examination of the letter showed the rightful owner as the previous inhabitant of the duplex, who had run off without paying back rent and (thus) without leaving a forwarding address. I sat there for a while, listening to the wind form and sculpt dunes from the plow-pushed streetside drifts, listening to icicles crack and shatter. There’s a quiet you only really know when it’s below freezing, when the chill’s run you through, frost dusting your nose and lungs. After a while, I went back inside, sat down, and watched some nature channel. I got more of these letters through the month, and I opened them to the last. This woman waited on a response, begged for a response, made accusations and threw insults. I thought of replying, but she’d then know I’d been reading the mail. I then thought of pretending to be this Stuart, but the ache of this made me so sad I almost started drinking again.

Eventually the letters grew shorter, drying up and shriveling. Finally, a month before the first thaw, the last one arrived. She’d reached a form of acceptance and forgiveness. She’d also met someone, an organ player at a local church who was a master griller and owned his own boat. I still have all those letters, in a box I keep in my closet, though I try not to take them out very often, because every time I do, I find myself pretending those letters had been written for me.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Circular Strategies
Owen’s sister wants to be a chess prodigy. As such, she’s convinced that learning anything about the methods of chess strategy will only hurt her, convinced as she is that the true prodigious players around the world have an intuitive understanding of the game that mesmerizing a series of famous endgames would only corrupt. The problem with this notion is that Owen’s sister isn’t a very good chess player.

“Listen, Rissa, I’m not saying you have to do like in-depth study or anything, but…see, look right here, you’re in the same spot as Browne, when he played Momic in ‘73, so if you just —”

“Shut up shut up shut UP!”

“And you could totally cut off my drive here with a more hypermodern possession of these squares here—”

“Moooooom! Make Owen shut up!”

“And so…heeeeey. What do we look like?”

“I dunno. Something. I’m obviously I’m a girl, but beyond that I’m drawing a blank. How weird is this?”

“Yeah! I can’t even remember the last time something actually got described in any detail. In fact, I’m super-suprised there’s even dialogue here.”

“It’s nutty, I’m telling you. What’s the deal? I mean stuff like this is, you know, important.”

“It’s important to me, that’s for damn sure.”

“We’re gonna have to do something about this. And how. But what?”

“I dunno. It’ll wait until tomorrow, though; I’m ready to be off the phone.”

“Phone?”

“Fuck, man, I don’t even know anymore. Downright disturbing.”
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Churchtown
Pulled into Churchtown, every house a kind of temple, the crosses up by the t.v. antennas, gothic spires and eastern minarets like the thorns of some alien fauna reaching up for the sky. Back in the twenties, when auto road trips were just becoming a regular thing, mothers used to tell their unruly kids that nobody ever talked in Churchtown and so they had to be quiet. The legend caught on until the people who lived in Churchtown finally stopped talking outside of their homes and churches, the whole area scary-silent, unstill. Used to be a porcelain factory out by the tracks on the way into town, made bathtubs and sinks and the like, until the business went under when the owner’s son inherited the biz and drove it straight into the ground. They’ve got a graveyard in the middle of town, where a town square should be, where people bury the leftover tubs longways up in place of headstones, a small statue of whatever appropriate saint tucked in the white shrine, blanketed in withered flowers and letters tucked in the hollows.

Town used to be dry until that silence thing caught on and people needed to get the stress of being quiet all the time out somehow. Some guy opened a place called The Alibi, old sheet-metal machine shed on the other side of the town, a beer-and-whiskey place. Nobody thinks to card us when we come in, get three boilermakers of JD and Schlitz, quiet ‘cept for the sound of an old jukebox playing fuzzed ’45s of Buddy Holly, Hank Williams, Skip James. Guy at the end of the bar with no hair, half his left arm gone, staring at the bar like he don’t know how to do anything else. Some gossipy barber Merle shot some 9-ball with told him the guy’s a farmer, was bringing in the crops, his kids were out there building forts in the corn, run right over one of ‘em that tripped and fell while running away. Guy jumps down and swears he sees the kid reach out for him, so he reaches in. In Churchtown you shave your head when you lose someone you care about; you mourn until it grows back. Whole town has the smell of something old and dying, something you don’t want to know about. Merle asks the barber about the circus, barber says nothing, nothing at all. Nobody will talk to any of us after that. We couldn’t get out of town fast enough.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Capote
Woke up and someone’s playing ballads to the dead on the piano, two keys missing, silences where the notes should be. Eyes open and the ceiling is covered in water stains, an inverted field of lily pads and algae clusters of white on white as the light climbs in, curses a little and shuffles off its brightness across the floor. Lysol and fresh sheets and the scent of a world on fire outside the window, I can’t smell it anymore but just looking at it brings the scent back. Won’t bother to move, to roll over, I’ll never get up again, just keep counting breaths until it seems natural. Something slams to the floor upstairs and to the west, maybe just the natural clod of footsteps off balance, legs like dogs left in the snow and shivering too hard to let a full bark out, struggling to keep left right left into the warmth of a place you’d never go if you didn’t need in so fucking bad. A cluster of old men sit a floor below and watch the television, whooping it up when the home team (whoever that is) score s, listen to them now and know it’s gotta be getting past noon. Think hard about no one knocking on the door so maybe you’ll reverse that jinx to your advantage, but you can’t trick your own jinx like that, you know what you are. Seasons and years and clouds come and pass, memories wander off into the corners of the room and get lost and die, just enough stuff in lying around to make your still-life complete. Should get the mail, at least. I really should.

Two hours later and I’m putting on my pants and my socks and my shoes and getting ready. Keep having dreams I’m getting the mail and I forgot my pants, don’t care but they throw me out because I’m a menace. One thing, next thing, just concentrate, you got time. Go hold the door and go in the bathroom, prop a hand on the wall behind the toilet, lean in slow and prop my head back there and unzip the pants and let the stream fall. Getting some strength back now, getting the cold out of my bones, the piano slows and stops, one last chord left drifting. Behind the door could be any number of things. Get in the hall, okay, now get in the stairwell and left, right, yep, go down there and through another door and here’s the front room and mail? yep, got some , pull it out and ad, bill, bill, something, bill, letter from…oh. Oh yeah, yeah, I remember him. That’s good. The sun’s setting and the whole city gets red and isn’t worth a second look but I can’t help but go out, have to need something, I’ll know it when I see it.

Big fat guy across the street with a book in his hand. Preacher. Stay away. A preacher loves someone slow. Here he comes now, that’s not a bible, that’s a gun, he’s walking right here. Let me touch something, let me get my fingers on a wall, there in a crack I can get to know so well that I won’t have to be here anymore. No, he walks past me, not a real gun, the big fat guy is a retard. He can’t hear any of the people on the street yelling at him, some of them think it’s a real gun, finally a small guy pulls out a gun and pops him right in the arm but he just keeps walking so he gets another and I turn the corner before he hits the ground. I’ve got something in my right hand. The mail. Right. Pay attention.

“John? Open up, it’s me.”

John. No wasted motion. Last of the hundred bucks and I thank him.

Come back to the hotel and the big fat retarded man is still there, people gone away, he’s sputtering something about all the people who used to love him before there were jets or computers. Get the gun and it’s heavy, that’s not a toy, can barely lift it. Can pawn this. He’s asking for water. I don’t have the mail? at John’s? in the street? where did I put the mail? and now I have the gun. Between his eyes, I can do it, there’s something here, he’s been dead for years and who hasn’t.

That was the night I shot Truman Capote.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

All That You Can Say
When we were young, it is alleged (I cannot confirm this, and know it is not always true) that our parents fixed the things that were broken, only they didn’t so much fix them as allow time to fix them while they distracted us from the pain through parlor tricks and chores. It could be that the parents did this in order to give us time to heal, but I suspect there is no healing, there is only an acclimation to pain, until you stop noticing it at all, until it becomes a part of you, and you scamper off to look for new distractions, a little slower, a little stupider.

You were smaller then, when you were younger, and less apt to be left to your own devices; the scope of your errors was proportional to your feet and hands. As all your days were everlong, there was nothing a night’s sleep couldn’t wash clean. You had no memory, and had no history, and had no idea that certain mistakes never leave you, never get out from beneath your skin. Everything was temporary, which could not last.

(For eight years I sold imaginary real-estate to investors hoping to inhabit private islands built by my company, Palsinor Living Systems. We paid half a million dollars to some ad firm for the first word and invented the second two ourselves: we were not selling tracts of terraformed land, but dreams of a new deregulated live hundreds of miles from the nearest policeman. New-money tech people bought up the dream as though it were condos in the sea of tranquility. We had ten years from our first investor to habitation. We thought this would be plenty of time. Unfortunately, two years from completion, we were forced into an armed conflict with my twelve-year old daughter Amelia, whose years of reading fantasy novels had been research and design for bioengineered attack mecha to form a personal army and enforce her law. Childhood is the last refuge of the tyrant. In that sense, we’ve always been children.)

When our parents would no longer distract us, we went out into the world and sought others to keep us confused, so as not to feel pain. As this confusion only lasts so long as there are bruises to heal, it stands to reason that those who distract us will bruise us so as not to become a memory, a history, a broken thing. This, of course, is silly and pointless; there is no shortage of things which will bruise us, in this world, and should we ever find an end to them we will bruise ourselves. There is a protocol at work here.

When I was young I used to dream of my life when I was old. Unlike many people I know, I was excited for this future: I would be raveling often, wearing tailored suits, staying in opulent hidden motels (like last year at marienbad directed by helmut newton), where the finest of narcotics would await me, along with the company of strange and stunning women who would insure I arrived at my daily destinations despite the failings of my brain. This ended up being partially true. In that sense, I am pleased to no longer be a child. In fact, had I not been distracted by the writing disease, I may well be where I imagined myself then, but that line of logic is shallow as salt.

None of this is true. We were never children. We’ve just run out of people to blame.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

The Candles Will Blow Themselves Out
We split up over the cereal. I’d been sent to the supermarket in order to buy food and drink for the evening’s party, both of us dead-set on continuing our entertaining the small nebula of friends we’d gathered, showing off the rug she’d bought for a song back home in Vancouver over the holidays. She’d left the brand of wine and type of cheese foolishly up to me, but made particular emphasis on my getting enough strawberries. She’d learned how to make this soft chocolate thing and was certain chocolate and strawberries would put our edgy friends at ease, sauce licked from fingertips and all. While at the market, wandering around in a blur as an excuse to spend as much time out of the house as possible, I saw a few bruised-looking boxes of Jack Catastrophe cereal on the clearance shelf, next to unlabeled cans of mystery vegetables and orphaned children’s toys for unobserved birthdays. Jack Catastrophe was a children’s show I used to watch as a youth religiously every Saturday and later, in syndication, after coming home from janitorial work at six in the morning, syndicated on the small Mason City channel, in which gunslinger Jack Catastrophe had his thumbs sliced by a gang of fugitives, which drove him well over the edge of acceptable society, resulting in institutionalization, phlebotomy, electropathy and the isolation box. While in the box, Jack begins to imagine a series of gallant adventures in which God assists his righteous cleansing of the wild west by providing an angel disguised as a doctor who can heal any wound. Jack becomes a one-man wrecking crew with the good doctor’s help, running through walls and leaping from trains and playing chicken with stagecoaches. As the episodes went on, it became unclear whether or not these delusions were entirely fictitious or if one of the doctors actually was bringing Jack out to do profoundly life-threatening crimefighting. I’m not sure how the series ended; apparently the actor who played Jack Catastrophe became convinced of the reality of his role and was killed jumping from one limo to another on the way to his thirtieth birthday party and the show was immediately pulled from most markets, including Mason City, while the marketing juggernaut chugged to a halt.

This would be the last time I would see a box of Catastrophe Flakes, I thought. He looked out over the supermarket, pistols in his fists and the unhinged grin of someone who would never ever die. I tired to remember how many years it’d been since I first watched this show, tried to remember the actor’s name. It was all slipping away from me. The cereal must have been tucked away in some hidden corner where the clerks never bother to go, fallen behind toilet paper or detergent.

When I told her I had spent all the party money buying twelve boxes of stale cereal she sighed, began calling people to inform them the party was off, and started packing.

That was when I started thinking about going back on my medication.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Cal-Neva 14:21-15:30
The only time I ever heard Seth talk about his dad was just before he disappeared the first time, one night when we were eating at that cafe by Jamesch Medical Supply, where Seth was convinced the hum of the air conditioning and the high thin whine of the espresso machines blurred into a third sound, a hum which he said unraveled memories for him, but only made me overcaffeinatedly cold. When Seth was seven, he developed a habit of stealing things of his fathers, as he was sure his father was going to go away and he felt a need to keep as much of him as possible. His father, in a slow quiet rage after searching half an hour for his car keys, told Seth that it was wrong to take the things which didn’t belong to him, and thus filled a large cardboard box with Seth’s toys, which he put in the back of the Cadillac and hid, at his office, for fourteen years. Seth’s dad left him, his mother, and his two sisters about a year later, and Seth didn’t see him again until his first year of college, when a girlfriend I can’t remember the name of convinced him to find his father. I don’t know what they talked about, but he gave Seth back the box of toys and told him they were even; he didn’t owe him anything now. When I went to clean out Seth’s apartment after he disappeared, the box was sitting in the back of his closet, unopened.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Do You Think You Might Come To California?
There was a time when I was really into the Teletubbies. I used to get off a ten-hour shift of stripping wax around six, go out and scrape the frost off my windshield and take the old highway back to the trailer, and couln’t get to sleep even then, so I’d drink and watch Teletubbies for an hour and fall asleep on the couch, sucking up cheap heater warmth. This was ideal, as I didn’t dream, and when I did dream, it was all blurred primary colors, which is fairly inoffensive as dreams go. I was tired, and I had just torn muscles in my right ankle, but I was jazzed, as this shit-ass job was my ticket to austin, and if I could just keep my head down, and my mouth shut, I’d be fine. The people I worked with considered me a theif, and the manager would check my backpack (which i stopped bringing) and my pockets each morning before I left, and would not let me bring in a walkman, as he was convinced I stole a pair of headphones, but none of that mattered, as it was just a matter of months at that time. I had sold off a good chunk of cds, and given away boxes of books (I’ve never made more than five dollars selling books, and have basically given up on the idea, as it feels wrong somehow), and had put most of my other stuff in storage. My family didn’t want me to go, and my friends didn’t want me to go, but it was fairly obvious by that time that this was something I had to do, even as it started to seem like an increasingly brittle and fragile plan. I had even cut up my library cards, to make sure I didn’t have any overdue library books before I left. This is all public knowledge. What you may not know, however, is that for a very short time I almost moved to California. There’s a very obvious reason I would move to California, but suprisingly enough (even though you won’t believe this, as I’m fairly certain that I’ve lost your trust forever by this point) she was not my main reason, as it was obvious to me that I had to have more there then being some other girl’s imaginary friend. The premise, ultimately, rested on years of promises to move out there, on cheap goads by a friend of mine that I’d “never make it out there”, and primarily on the notion that if I was gonna move, I should seriously move, I shouldn’t fuck around. I used to pad my pre-sleep teletubbied thoughts with this notion, just cutting myself from the whole sinking ship of my life and spinning out to some short-lived freak-out in Berkeley, after which I could have headed up the coast to Seattle, or Portland, or even backtracked to Austin, having come clean from all the annoying shit that was collecting around my hard-thought exodus plan. One morning, after being yelled at by the manager again for missing a napkin, I asked him what his fucking problem was, and was immediately fired. I drove up to Iowa City, refunded my correspondence courses (my only way of ever being accepted to U of I, and thus get my BA), and stopped thinking about California entirely.

Maybe it’s different for her now, but back when I was still living in Hudson she had these tremors in her hands, when she tried to hold things, like a fork or a pencil. Because of this, she had trouble signing her name, and thus did all these little things to avoid doing so that you’d only notice if you spent a lot of time with her, which I never did, or if you watched her very, very, closely, which I did as often as possible. She didn’t have a credit card, and typed her letters, and signed yearbooks when we graduated with her thumbprint. I used to see her on ads for a local restaurant, where she walked with practiced poise among tables and staged patrons, smiling. I saw her at Dick’s one night, hanging out with some older friends, and I walked up to her and talked to her for the first time in years, during which I asked her for her autograph, as a lark, without even thinking about it. She actually tried, until finally I told her I was only kidding, at which point her friends were pointedly not looking at me, and I left, and didn’t go back into Dick’s for months.

I’ve got a videotape of a My Waterloo Days parade my folks made, as my little sister was doing marching band that year, though we’ve scoured the tape a few times and none of us can see her, can even see her clarinet section, as they must have been talking to Annabeth Gish while her class passed the grandstand, but I saw her, Ana and I saw her, and as we were both really horribly drunk we cheered incredibly loudly, which she heard, but didn’t know it was us until later, when we were watching the tape, as you can see us, her and I, standing by where that one restaurant was until it burned down a couple years ago, though you can see the camera pan hard left really fast, as Ana flashed her tits at the cameraman, and we ran off to the riverbank, where we sat on the thin cement walkway that runs along the floodwall, and she laughed, and I laughed, but I was distracted.

I got a postcard from Seth about a week ago. Ana sent him all the ISC stuff that Josef mailed off before he killed himself, as she had no use for it, didn’t want anything to do with it, so Seth’s been sorting through it all, all emptied out now that he can’t get back into school and what with the circus disbanded after they found Lawrence, so he’s got a lot of time, and needs a rock to tie his string around, so to speak. He varies between thinking it’s some kinda story, and thinking it’s just garbage, one last dump. Next week he starts work at some hotel down by the river, where apparently it’s still all flooded down there, and I guess he’s getting evicted. It’s kinda blurred at the bottom, and I can’t quite make it out, and I’m done trying to guess at what other people mean.

In HEB, just now, I went up to the first checkout lane and stood behind this stunning punk-rock asian girl with blue streaks in her hair who was buying nothing but gummi-worms and beer, and I thought to myself, I could make that woman happy for the rest of my life.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

An Illuminated Bone-Sadness
She didn’t know how to drive but was good at pretending she knew where she was going, good enough to trick me though I wanted to be tricked; I thought if I got lost with her I could keep her with me long enough to finish my wooing song and would have every plan I ever cobbled come true like a Christmas sunrise. She wasn’t supposed to be drinking but she was drinking and I wasn’t drinking and that normally would have made me testy but here it was just a necessity. We would drive and drive and pull over and fuck in big empty harvested fields over a palimpsest-stained sheet my grandmother had given me just before she died, in the just-dewing grass beneath apple trees which she would pronounce apfel betraying deutsch old enough to crust over with nostalgia-sweetness, jumping up to grab at the fruit as though I needed an excuse to watch her movement in the starlight. We lived on that strange cappuccino you get from rest-stop machines which is more like the memory of cappuccino formulated by scientist-chefs locked underground trying to bring back the things which had surrounded them in their better days. The entire time we were on the road she didn’t cry once, and when we reached the road where she lived now (which was faraway from where I lived) I pretended like I couldn’t see it. Or maybe I really couldn’t see it. When she lifted her head away from mine after she had kissed me she left a hair on my coat, which I tied around my ringfinger and told myself I would never lose, but eventually I did.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Blisslessness
During the war, from first declaration, the church of the twelve apostles began ringing the bells, which rang constantly for three weeks and were to continue ringing until the war was over. You could hear them throughout downtown, from the campus all the way up to Jefferson Hill. The people of the neighborhood complained of being unable to sleep. The alley-dogs went mad and started attacking dumpsters. People threw rocks through the stained-glass windows; Wednesday and Sunday sermons had to be held at the Y in order for Father Anders to be heard. Finally, despite the inevitable PR disaster, two priests and three others were arrested for disturbing the peace, breaking the PM noise ordinance, but while they were being taken away, one of the parishioners snuck into the belltower and began ringing the bell. When Father Anders, who refused to post bail and demanded to go through the entire proceeding, was released he discovered the city had bought out the land on which the church was built and had it demolished. Anders spent the day salvaging as much from the site as he could, storing it on the lawn of his home for the remainder of his days, a reminder of a war that was to crawl on for what seemed like ever. Father Anders never lived to see that war end, but his children keep the remaining pieces of the church, of which the largest is the main bell, untouched since it was rung at Father Anders’ funeral.

Tonight it rings for an entirely different reason, and all the children will have the fitful sleep of fevers and their parents will stare into the heavens and hold each others hands until it stops.

…

“Come on over,” she said. “Tim’s having another funeral.”

Sheila’s brother Timothy was convinced there were any number of terrible illnesses which only affected stuffed animals. For days he would hold a vigil over his terminal patients, breaking only for school and naps, until finally they could fight no longer and passed away. At this point Tim would get his dress suit, slick his hair back, and invite the family and loved ones of the recently departed to the backyard for services, burial, and kool-aid. If asked, Tim could go on at length about the terrible suffering Mrs. Cephalus had undergone, the way Beene the Moo-Cow had been isolated from the family due to the terrible exploding tumors. Generally these funerals were a small affair, but I hadn’t seen Sheila since she went off to ISU (of all places) back in August, so I got the clothes I had worn to my last job interview out and thought about where I could get flowers at this time of day.

Sheila and I had been weird ever since we met at a drama thing back in the day; she was into me because I could buy her vodka and I was into her for less honorable reasons. I had never met her parents, and was worried about what kind of setup this’d be for first impressions — would formality be considerate or overcompensating or just dumb? I pulled up to the house and took the gate’s entrance into the backyard, where the family was already gathering around the hole. I laid a small fistful of stolen daisies at the foot of the grave as Tim nodded, ready to begin.

“Kafka speaks of the shaft of Babel. Each grave is one more brick in the inverted tower. One day, the last piece put in place, the floodgates of heaven will open and we shall all rise up from our graves. As above, so below, so you know it’s time to go. Kittymonster, rest in peace, hidden by soil from the sun’s judgment.”

Sheila, whose entire wardrobe consisted of mausoleum castoffs, all wound in material made for the touch, a velvet that swallowed light, took my hand and led me into the kitchen as her parents sung “Onward Christian Soldiers” over a slow tape of churchbells. She offered me a glass of water and told me she had some pot down in her bedroom, so I followed her down, listening to her convince me her parents would be out in the garden for at least half an hour; they took this very importantly, seeing it as a necessary part of Tim’s development, not wanting to stunt his notions of the afterlife, his notions of mourning.

Sheila’s bedroom was exactly like you’d expect it to look, with the nearly-required assortment of stuffed animals piled atop her pillows. Even death-fucking protogoth girls keep their child-friends. I sat on the bed and felt her red-chipped fingernails on my chest, pushing me back, and soon her mouth was around me, the pull of the tongue and the close of the throat. The sound of the backyard I could hear all the while, two sounds I knew: the recordings of Alessandro Morechi, castrato, and the bells of the church of the twelve apostles, which I suddenly think of in the terms of what David Tibet (Sheila’s influence) would call the bloodbells. My head was surrounded by stuffed animals, all worn and loose eyes, and I saw that they were all filthy, as if rolled in dirt. She had crawled atop me, rocking back and forth, watching her family through the basement window.

“Don’t come yet. Don’t come yet.”

“Nnnnngh.”

“Not yet, sweetie. Just a bit. There’s something I have to tell you.”

“Aaah. Ah ha ha ha.”

“I have cancer.”

And I came.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

The God, Whose Arms Are Bent In The Wind
The child has moved its fingers far from each other, to spread the hand out wide, to press against the glass, to watch the frost evaporate from the warmth of the skin, to form a hole to see through, to watch through the snow to the driveway, to see the arrival of the van, to feel the body stop being tense, to feel the knots in the stomach release, to see the doors of the van open, to see the lights in the kitchen turn on, to feel the body turning away, away from the window, as the waiting had finally ended.

There were these kids in the neighborhood and I guess they were mostly okay kids, they were all depressed like kids are, and they had all the stupid little ritual in-jokes kids do, and they hung out at the graveyard, and that’s all fine, I mean, these are kids. Only so somebody was going around the graveyard and breaking headstones. And so everybody thought, you know, these kids, and. Okay, so this is right after Diana. So I was you remember how I was just all the time I would just sit there. So I was sure they were gonna get at her grave, so. God. So I got this gun.

The weatherman had been at his job for thirty-nine years, same suits his wife bought him when he got the job, one of those anchors you don’t really notice, something that shouldn’t ever change. But sometimes they’d cut to him and he’d just stare into the camera, just for a second or so, so you’d never even notice until you thought back on it later, when the gaps grew longer, and weird little slips in his speech would pop up, he started comparing stormfronts to armies, armies gathering on the horizon, and he started ending his report with “so please, be careful today”, until the anchorpeople started breaking character, confused. The last day he predicted a shower of roses would blanket the earth, and the kingdom of heaven would be at hand. Then he took off his mic and walked off camera. That’s the last I ever heard of it.

Nobody ever called her Sheryl. Most people did not know her name was Sheryl until they saw it on the news. There was a picture of her standing in front of a roadside marker, the spot where the first settlement west of the Mississippi River once stood. She’s looking to her left, at something not visible in the picture, something the other two girls in the picture haven’t noticed. The expression on her face is hard to make out on the television screen. The flicker of the VCR pause as it inches the tape forward further blurs the image. If you get up close to the screen, your face against the glass, the feel of the static on your skin, you can almost see it, almost figure it out.

When I worked at the rest stop, this kid and his parents stopped to use the bathroom and dart off. The kid forgot his wallet in the bathroom. I picked it up when I went in to clean, and inside there were two crisp new five dollar bills and a business card he cut out of construction paper. I walked around for half an hour, looking for the family, but they were long gone. An hour later, the kid walks up to me and asked me, very timidly, if I had seen a wallet somewhere. I went to the office, got it, and gave it to him, and he said thank you, and ran off. That’s what I was doing when it happened.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

The Girl With Beautiful Hair
How I met the girl with beautiful hair is a weird story. Me and Jimmy Cheerios and Jimmy’s cousin Ray were out by Traer, Iowa, flashlight hunting out of the back of Ray’s old beater bronco, loaded to the eyeballs on meth and fresh out of beer, which meant a run back to waterloo (it was one a.m., only place open) where one of us was gonna have to face the certain doom of going in the food king and, y’know, having to DEAL with human beings, which we woulda skipped but we were hunting. See, back in ‘93 we had nasty-ass floods for a long time and some farms spent months isolated and empty and the livestock had Linda gone mad. So the state designated certain areas no-limit, and with the horses and most cows able to get shipped to holding pens, the big game was chickens and rabid pigs, who’d been known to attack when cornered. There were stories of a few hunters already dead but that was more likely just stupidity. Anyway we needed the meth to keep us up and the beer to cut the anxiety, which was riding high by the time we got into town. We were in no condition to deal with the humans, no condition to try to make cash transactions, but somebody had to buy the ammo and beer, so Trenchcoat Larry’s Brother and Sinatra and I did three out of five rock-paper-scissors and I was the big loser. So with my pupils big as saucers, I half-stumble into the Food King (whose slogan, “We Are The Meat People”, took on evil resonances between the late hour, the powders and liquids we’d soaked into our brainpans, and out mission of the evening: hunting deranged pigs out on Shield’s Farm, now a flat plane of moonlit water broken by clusters of trees and the occasional abandoned barn. The rains had gotten so bad by this point that it was not uncommon to see people around town decked in hip-waders; thus I attracted little attention decked out in my bright orange thermal-insulated boots. I remember thinking all the aisles were crooked and I couldn’t follow a straight line to their ends. I kept having to stop, turn around, and backtrack, my hand gently along one shelf trying not to knock anything over, wishing I could crawl, dazed into stupidity by the low-hung fluorescent lighting. a girl in a Pantera shirt asked me if she could help me but she only spoke in clicks and subvocal whistles so I had to keep her from entering my personal space with curses and secret mudras. I found the beer and ran my hands along the inside of the cooler, feeling the syntho-frost melt onto my hands, and like a hammer to the skull it hit me: it was after two, there would be no buying beer nor ammo. I sat down beside the cooler, confident that I was hidden from prying eyes, and I heard a voice from behind me say (in clear human-speak) “there’s tile patterns you have to follow to get out of this place. I learned ‘em when I was little, watched the way the babies and insects moved. Follow me out, I got year back.”

This was how I met The Girl With Beautiful Hair. It was only the next day that I realized I had left Trenchcoat Larry’s Brother and Sinatra in the truck, waiting on me, but to no surprise they forgot about me as well and returned to the farm, where Sinatra got a nasty dent put in the side of his truck by a truly massive sow who split the waters like Moses, abandoning all plans for flashlight-hunting, instead doing up the last of the necessary mission supplies out on Traer County Bridge and shooting at debris bobbing in the water. I awoke on the floor next to The Girl With Beautiful Hair’s bed (apparently my idea. Stupid, stupid), the legs of puppets hanging over my head, the trails of ghosts still laid over my eyes. And, for a while, it was on to better days for all of us.

Alright, well, fuck. This is gonna be a longer story than I thought, and I’m gonna skip the long part for now.

…and then I spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out and drinking bad coffee with The Girl With Beautiful Hair, who didn’t hesitate to tell me that this wasn’t her first story.

“Don’t mean to burst any bubbles, but you and I both know that authors tend to frown on kidnapping characters from their books and putting ‘em into your own little pseudopomometayaddayaddayadda stories. I’d hate to see the writer’s guild have to come all the way down here and throw a bat party, is all I’m saying…”

“Who? Who is this person who wrote of The Girl With Beautiful Hair? Huh? If you don’t know, then I say it’s open season.”

“Well, y’know, there was that book by Murakami-”

“Wrong. She was the Girl With Beautiful EARS. Whole different gig. I’m still in the clear. (Laughs) Next!”

“Okay, well, David Foster Wallace-“

“The Girl with CURIOUS Hair! Next!”

“Fuck, uh…Carol Ermschwiler?”

“(giggles) And again, wrong! Well…um…I don’t really remember anymore…shit. I think you might be right. Okay, so MAYBE somebody else came up with this basic premise before, but that don’t mean squat, ‘cause — what are you doing?”

“(sighs) This is my job, remember. Don’t play like you don’t know.”

And The Girl With Beautiful Hair, as she does here in the marketplace every noon, stands up and shakes her head while people who have gathered from across the land watch and take snapshots to remember this moment, the brightest their lives may ever know, and hold close the memory forever. I know The Girl With Beautiful Hair pretty well, have seen her beautiful hair many times, and sometimes it amazes even me. As you’ve probably figured out, I am hopelessly in love with The Girl With Beautiful Hair. She is in love, essentially, with Someone Who Isn’t Me. Do you know the term “saudade”? And she sits back down to her bad coffee and we try to begin conversation again, but it’s a lost moment now. Perhaps I should invest in a camera.

One afternoon The Girl With The Beautiful Hair asked me if I would shave her head.

“Why?”

“It’s not beautiful anymore. Nobody can see it. All they see anymore is The Beautiful Hair. And it’s starting to dread, actually, which makes it a bitch to comb.”

“You realize the gov. is gonna cut off your Hair Artist stipend.”

“Probably. Fuck ‘em.”

“And I can go to the bighouse for Defamation Of A Government Site.”

“Listen, man, you don’t have to do it if you don’t wanna. I just thought I’d ask, is all.”

Once upon a time The Girl With The Beautiful Hair and I slept together, by which I mean quite literally we shared a bed. I would spoon up behind her, the spaces on my body where I felt her still holding the memory across the skin, my face covered like a veil in The Beautiful Hair, not so much lost within it as found, so long, so long ago. I’m getting maudlin.

“Certainly I’ll cut your hair. I’d be less than a friend to decline.”

It’s amazing the way that when someone we love leaves our life, how desperately we collect and cling to the small deuterium left behind in their absence, photographs, small pieces of trash, forgotten jewelry, letters scrawled on the backs of handouts and flyers. the way we listen again and again to messages left on the machine, layers upon layers, like Schleimann discovering troy, inventing subtext beneath subtext to every word, every breath. The way that, wandering around the room trying halfheartedly to clean, finding a long black hair reduces me to tears, curled and cradled on the floor, the spaces reopening like wounds.

After serving my two years of house arrest, the marks from the ankle bracelet still visible today, the first place I went was to the museum, wander back where no one goes anymore, get lost in the bones and plunder, back to the Body Art exhibit. I must have been there for hours, getting found in the blacks shifting into blues into purples into reds.

When love is shown as impossible it doesn’t really die, it shifts, becomes something lesthanmorethan, confuses, asks more than it ever answers. It’s a feeling you have to learn. But you learn it, a language you only speak to yourself. There really isn’t much else to do.

Sometimes I wonder if there is another Beautiful Girl With Beautiful Hair down at the marketplace, but I’ll never go look. The museum, though…I’m sure I’ll end up back there again, no matter how many times I tell myself I will not go.

Once I asked an old woman what you do when your friends are all gone, and she said, and I’ll never forget this, “You do laundry.”

Maybe I’ll never understand.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Baby Born Without a Torso
That damn quack doctor actually had the gall to say “Oh, but he’s a little fella, ain’t he?”. Owing us a torso (attached or not; we weren’t going to be overly difficult about this), we refused to leave the operating room until we had the whole of our child. The baby, who we had agreed to name Otto, had apparently taken to taken to the prenatal communications classes we’d had given him by speakers placed around my wife’s belly, for he kept pointing at the doctor and looking bothered, knowing there was something missing.

Chorus: otto, otto, such a starfish
you obstetrician’s one bizarre wish
hidden deep within his sock
your body’s missing organ block

It’s as though the doctor’s hired the nurses strictly for the ferocity of their screams, though they come now not in terror but laughter at the imitation of said doctor done by my wife; we are all agreed that we are sick-sick-sick of medical atrocity. Peddle your apples on some other streetcorner whydontcha. otto is already starting his own band; the torsoless infant market is very big overseas. Consider charts of the cleanliness of the utensils, the glare of light off the fresh-waxed floor, the angle of legs and hands. There is no reason for us not to have the torso returned to us. There is still such a thing as manners, after all.

Chorus: we are sick sick sick (sick sick sick sick)
sick sick sick sick (we are sick sick sick)
and more to the point, it’s become an embarrassment
the audience wondering where all his talent went

They’re already selling torsoless dolls in the entryway. My boy Otto has become a person of great privilege in all of twelve minutes, all of which could have been averted had we only been given the torso. He won’t return my calls, jetting bicoastal, experimenting with the political attributes of stardom. My wife is still heavily medicated and acts out cruel parodies of everyone she’s ever known. She’s currently chopping the metaphorical legs out from her third grade class, in alphabetical order. Terrible, atrocious things. My wife’s mother, Julia, told me once that my wife hit puberty incredibly early and has always since been uncomfortable inside her body. This is borne out in the malicious sketches my wife performs on the operating table. The doctor had to leave. I attempted to follow him. To retrieve the torso, but my wife demanded we leave the torso be: “too late, too late”, she laughed.

I assure you, this will be the last child I ever have.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Austin
When you spend long enough driving you go to another country, another place overlaid atop the actual geographic area you’re driving across. Christian stations breed new forms of last year’s big musical faves: Christian jungle, Christian kid-pop, Christian synthcore. Little kids wave and you wave back. Roadside museums which keep entire towns afloat financially display the shrunken errata of anyone somewhat famous and somewhat local. You start to think you’ll ever really get off the highway, just hit the end and 180 back north, washing in five-dollar truck stop showers and living on a&w burgers. This, of course, cannot last. Part of being in the place called on the road is shaping an image of how you imagine your entrance once you reach your mythic destination. When you’ve been planning a trip as long as I have, you get grand and ludicrous notions of how the new homecoming will be. In hindsight, of course, these dreams seem as silly as most other roadbound visions (I once had an extended inner dialogue between cows and clouds off on the side of I-35, just as I once lost the state of Nebraska on a snowy night off I-80w), and putting them out of your mind as soon as you hit city limits is always a smart move. The weather here is ideal, which makes me wonder; if it’s this nice in February, how will it be in August? one of the things I realized in the hermiting years is that fretting over the weather is silly. Even if I am not a weather prophet (of which I am not yet convinced), I certainly have the ability to adapt. It’s easy to focus on trivial things such as this when larger issues loom ahead. Something hiding beneath the ice.

My brain is still out on the road, or perhaps even still in Iowa; it’s definitely somewhere far away, which worries me, as this does not seem the time for the zombi-space-astral boy to be here.

Drinking abandoned tea is a good thing. Sunlight is a good thing. The company I’m keeping is most definitely a good thing. I fear nothing on this earth so long as I am patient and attentive.

Because this is Scrytch, I should tell a story.

Nene’s mom said it was okay if she tagged along with me as far as Des Moines, as that’s where Nene’s great-grandmother lives, and with Nene’s mom going to the hospital soon and all of Nene’s sisters all pissed at her it seemed the most logical place to lay low for a while. Before contacting me, she tried to get the florescent werewolf to lend her the Chevy, but that’s another story; ask me and I’ll tell you. Nene brings along more shit for a week-long vacation than Hannibal crossing the Alps, which fortunately works out as I’m a minimalist, or perhaps a post-minimalist, depending on how things go. We were packed in with clothes and blankets and spectre-dolls and herbs that there was barely enough room to move; I had to get a cardboard box rigged from my skull to the windshield to use as a periscope while Nene’s mother had wrapped her in a quilt and stuck her somewhere in the back seat. I couldn’t turn my head to look but could hear her yapping out foolhardy directions (“Through the field! It’s half an hour as the crow flies, and that’s how the crow flies!”) and reading from a box of stories with a penlight I had on the floor behind the passenger seat.

“‘ay!”

“Yes, Nene?”

“Why aren’t you like this in real life?”

“Like what?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“Because this way it’s like I get to be two different people. Or more. It’s my superpower.”

“You don’t think that’s dishonest?”

“I went on a long jag a couple years back where I thought it was. But that was ridiculous.”

“Perhaps. Possibly. Drive in that barn! There’s a whiskey bar in there!”

Finally I got Nene to her grandmother’s, who lived out in west Des Moines by the airport, after lulling her into contemplative meditation through use of modified Harry Potter tapes (courtesy of Yara). She asked me if I was coming back and I said I didn’t know. She went in the house to eat lunch, and I got on I-35S, and that was that.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Repent Atlantis
It was a confusing time. An age of popes and anti-popes, of simony and indulgence, where power lay more in those who controlled the massive telecommunications network hosted at the holy see than in any “authenticated” papal decree, issues from bombproof clean rooms somewhere beneath Rome. Any reassurances we attempted to give as to the falsehood of any notions of the “end times” was lost both on the populace and on certain officials, who instituted an emergency drafting of young missionary students as deputized (for lack of a better word) priests, so as to better cover the earth with missionary zeal. It was during these times, already fraught with peril and terror, that the ruins of Atlantis were discovered by an Antarctic offshore drilling platform. In a panic, and understanding it would not be long before the collectors would disturb the bones, we were informed that in this time of emergency, it was possible to baptize the dead. This was not long after the official dissolution of limbo, and the question of the unbaptized was increasingly pertinent as crib deaths skyrocketed throughout the northern hemisphere, which led to the initial revision — as long as baptism was performed prior to last rites, it was considered, how do you say, fair cricket? The problem with this process was that none of us were properly equipped for deep sea work, and thus we decided (without consulting the church direct: even our secret dialup numbers were being flooded with pan-global tales of miracles and visions of the new god) that we would perform mass baptism via loudspeakers mounted onto our dragonfly helicopters, bought in bulk when the New Zealand government fell. The dopplering off the waves made us mostly ill, and as such we could barely run clear patterns over the assumed ruins (truth be told, we may well have been miles off; there was no way to tell without entering the ocean), but we completed the area just before we received the transmission: the first recognized alien landing had taken place just outside Milan, and the consensus was the aliens hadn’t yet found the god.

Members of the papacy had secretly believed the theories of Veliakovsky were potentially correct until, in 1931, stations in Hungary began receiving transmissions, our first from supposed “alien intelligence”; the following is an edited transcript of transmissions from that year.

(4.8.31) “Hailing all frequenciessss! Attenshion all kidssss! This is the high council of scientists from the planet Arcturussss! After lengthy deliberation we have come to the inescapable conclusion that your planet needs more fluoride! That is all!”

(5.14.31) “Warning! Calling all earth specimensssss! This is the high council of scientists from the planet Arcturusssss! Our most recent studies indicate that your debilitating polio epidemic can be squashed by use of radio waves, tin foil and pyramids! That is all!”

(7.1.31) “Here here, all employed citizens of earth! This is the high council os scientists from the planet Arcturussss! 9 out of 10 of us agree that the use of fedoras as breathing apparati is all that stands between you and your imminent doom! That and an increased intake of gum! That is all!”

It has been supposed that there were further transmissions of the like, but a Hungarian scientist inexplicably named Carl turned the radio to Juan the Jungle Scout’s Adventures in The Briny World Of The Pig-Dogs, blocking all further transmissions. It has been speculated that the church received news of these transmissions and has been in wait for the inevitable visitation ofg these aliens, preparing young people for exobiological missionary work through recent advances in pharmaceutical research and high-end technology, which can be traced to transmitters placed in children’s teeth in the early 70s as a tracking device which, through sugar damage, have become receivers for these transmissions. When we, the first wave of conversion experts, arrived at the landing site in order to speak to these creatures, we were informed they had only one request, bordering on demand: sugar. All the sugar their ships could hold. Our connections to refineries in South America once again paid off as we utilized our understanding of their culture as a means of explaing our faith while filing their ships with the white crystal, telling them of a piece of prime Terran real estate called Atlantis while explaining the ruler of this earth and of all things everywhere resided in a place called the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Attendence at Sunday services rose over three thousand percent.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

The Ballad Of The Dead Astronaut
Owen’s eleventh birthday party was less than a week after Sarah Mossiman finally died in a white bed on the third floor of Saint Luke’s, staring at the star maps the kids in her class had taped to the ceiling. Owen’s handful of friends felt too awkward not to show up, but neither the games Owen’s mom tried to organize nor the sharing of presents (Owen’s folks bought something for everyone who came, hoping they would at least look back on the night as being a better time than it felt like, then) seemed to do much of anything. Kyle, who Owen lost track of after middle school and apparently works at the auto parts place out on the highway, went to the bathroom and locked himself in, refusing to come out. Parents began showing up early. One of the few things Owen still remembers about that night is sitting on the couch, his unopened copy of bard’s tale on his lap, concentrating as hard as he could until he could see a white light even with his eyes closed, certain that wishing enough could make something happen.

There are people who come in and out of our lives who aren’t friends, who we may not even really know, but who do or say something at a time when nothing could be more perfect and fitting and right and then leave us better than before. It could be something as simple as someone letting you into traffic, or giving you change for the phone, or giving up a seat on the bus. They may not even remember it ever happened, once it’s over. For reasons we may not understand, however, it becomes a model for the way we look at ourselves, at each other, an example of how strangers can care about each other in the most fleeting and permanent ways.

Owen was always terrified of the lunchroom. Ever since beginning middle school, seeing his friends fall away into castes and cliques he knew no entry for, he constantly felt out of place without anywhere to go. Because his family lived out in the sticks, there was never the awkwardness of having to share a seat on the bus, of being turned away, as there were more than enough seats to keep him safe from the spitters, at least until he had to get off the bus and walk past the windows. During breaks between classes, he found he could walk the hallways, looking determined, drifting from drinking fountain to drinking fountain without being a still target or entering his next class too early. He spent his recess breaks in the library, where no one thought to look for him. For a time, he spent his lunch breaks in there as well, until the librarians informed him they would not let him miss lunch no matter how much studying he said he had to do. Owen thought maybe he could just get milk and drink it in one of the empty hallways, or out on the bleachers, but until the bell rang no one was allowed out of the cafeteria. Maybe he could hide in the bathroom down on the annex floor where nobody goes. Maybe he could just go home. But now he was in line, and monitors were watching, and it was too late to do anything but hope for a flu epidemic which would leave large blocks of valuable cafeteria real estate open. Owen remembers there was a casserole in the menu. They were out of chocolate milk. There was no place open to sit at all, unless someone was saving you a seat. Owen wandered up and down the tables, looking for the most innocuous place to hide himself, starting to sweat under his arms and down his back, turning red in the face, feeling everyone stare, when he heard a voice say “Why don’t you sit here?”.

That was how Owen met Sarah Mossiman. He thought about inviting her to his birthday party, which was still two months away, but felt all shy and knotted up inside and thought it best to wait.

Owen and Ana had a number of spectacular fights towards the end of their relationship, before he moved in with his sister and left her all his records, having no room in his fucked-up Conquista for anything but the essentials, of which the vinyl was nothing but a reminder of the him he was all too happy to leave behind. Owen, who we all can agree was never all that bright, was very pedantic in his arguments, sticking a point until there was no new ground to overturn, while Ana was more abstract, skewing hither and yon until a web of seemingly unconnected events formed a near-irrefutable definition of how Owen fucked up one more time. During one of these final arguments Owen called Ana Sarah.

“It wasn’t that long ago. It couldn’t have been. I remember it like it was forever, but I know better, really. That was the summer when the rain was falling slower, and when you ran from me you left paths, archways through the air-hung drops. The summer of strange gravity. It had to have just been. Up in the sky, the craft turned endoverend, searching for an escape window, and the space girl, the immortal, the girl who would not die, stared out the window, watching. at night I could swear I almost saw her, up on the roof. it couldn’t have been that long ago. the space girl’s real name was Sarah. when she was seven she named her cat Sarah, and decided that she’d have to start going by a different name, and began calling herself jool. not jewel. jool. emphasis on the low oh sounds. Her friends and her parents and, later, the doctors and nurses and interns brought in to see the case firsthand called her that, but i called her sarah, because i told her i’d always know the difference between her and her cat, and she’d smile.”

If you send five dollars a month to NASA, you can enroll in their Young Astronaut’s Club, which gets you four newsletter-packets a year including star charts, posters, and a whole lot of SpaceCamp ads. At night Owen would sit on his roof and try to figure out which constellations matched up with which actual stars, aided by weekend visits to the Grout Museum, where he’d sit in the back of the planetarium for three or four shows, following the laser-pointer from dot to dot. There was a time where Owen could name most of the major constellations in the northern hemisphere. Most of these have left him now, but when he’s out in the country on dark quiet nights he can still make out easier ones; ursae major and minor, orion, cassiopea. There are other shapes he halfknows but can’t remember the names. Sometimes he takes out a marker and draws the shapes on the palms of his hands, but when he wakes in the morning he can’t make out the shapes anymore.

“Owen! I Demand you quit this sappery this instant! We have lunching to do, and I’m not taking you anywhere in this condition!”

“I’m not being a sap! I’m just thinking about things.”

“That’s your first mistake! Thinking about things is a highway to sappery!”

“C’mon, Rissa. Leave me alone.”

“Everything in your life is good. For you to sit in here and not be out hijinking is shameful and squanderous.”

“Maybe.”

“C’moooooooooon! We only have fifteen more minutes to get to El Duce Burrito before they shut down the Express Cannon!”

“I’m coming. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Sarah’s request to be the first child in space was refused both by NASA and by the Gift Trust, a non-profit organization who use donated money and items from large corporations in order to fufil the dreams of terminally ill children. The people from the Gift Trust attempted three times to sell Sarah on a trip to DisneyWorld. A representative informed her parents that they would allow her ashes to be dispersed during a satellite repair operation a month from then. Sarah’s parents hung up, which was the last anyone heard of the Gift Trust. A year later the Challenger shuttle exploded on liftoff. The Young Astronaut’s Club sent all its members freeze-dried ice cream that month.

“On April 24th, 1967, Col. Vladimir Komarov was returning to earth in the Soyuz-1 spacecraft after his aborted 26-hour flight when complications arose on re-entry. The auto-navigation system had gone out, and Komarov attempted to manually steer the craft, but the landing parachute became entangled, and the craft crashed into Orenberg steppe.

This is all the information I have been able to find because the Soviet space program has kept the incident silent, though I think there is probably more to this story than what I’ve already talked about.”

Owen’s neighbors had a walled pool, maybe five feet deep, plenty deep enough for any child. At night, when everyone was asleep, he used to sneak into his neighbor’s yard and climb into the pool. It was summer then, but he’d be wearing his late-winter black-and-yellow snowmobile suit, padded thermal gloves, and moon boots. He’d float on top of the water, just like the leaves and water bugs, staring at the stars, identifying each constellation he came across. Eventually the ski-mask he wore beneath his football helmet would get soaked and he’d have to pull the eye-hole down around his mouth to breathe. The snowmobile suit would start to soak up water like a sponge and eventually he’d go under, down into the water, weighed down enough that he could barely move.

One night, while thrashing at the bottom of the pool, the neighbors heard him and went out armed for fear of a thief. This is why Owen had to start weekly therapy sessions after school.

“There was a charity foundation whose job it was to use donated funds in order to make the wishes of terminally ill children come true. The salaries of the employees was determined by the remaining funds at year’s end, and as such representatives often encouraged certain cost-effective wishes to the children. pony rides, or trips to Disneyland (which, after airplane and hotel costs were eaten by united and holiday inn for tax-break purposes, was possibly the cheapest of all the wish possibilities). There was a small news crew on hand for Julietta’s wish-giving, which was prepped three times while she was in a medicated cloud. I couldn’t be there because I had class, fifth period english, but we had the television rolled in and we all watched the man in the suit discuss the good his foundation had done over the years, backed by a promo clip of chemo kids meeting Michael Jordan, Ken Griffey Jr., Brad Pitt. The suit-man asked Sarah what she wanted to do, and waited for the reply everyone expected: a visit to Spacecamp. Sarah and I were fascinated with space travel. we used to spend night in her backyard and stare at the stars. when asked, Sarah said she wanted to be the first child in space. i’ll never forget this, because we all busted out screaming, applauding, as though we were told to hold our breath two years ago and could finally let it out. It was too cool. We laughed and looked at each other like we couldn’t believe it, only we could believe it, because that’s such a Julietta thing to do. The suit-man stammered, asked her if maybe she wouldn’t rather have that spacecamp trip. julietta said no. How about a visit from Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong? Sarah said no. Well, I’m not sure if I can, if I can do that. Sarah took a breath, and said that she was going into space. and that she was not going to die until that happened. We all grew quiet, and stayed that way long after the national press got word of the story.”

“We took another breath and held it in and waited. Waited for years.”

I’ve only met Owen outside of Owen-and-Ana coupledom once, while he was working at the Carpet Market. I needed to recover the spare bedroom thanks to an incident Huey Kablooie had shortly before his assault on the legal firm of Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe. I told him it wasn’t much, and I wasn’t fussy, and he found some case-off shag that would work perfectly. No charge. He didn’t really know me from Adam, but he cut me this ideal deal. I still don’t know why.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Apollo, Scrytch and Me
[originally published as “space ghost” in issue #1 of Pica (sept., 1995)]

Michael “Mitch” Collins was the Apollo XI astronaut who did not walk on the moon. This is his legacy. Sometimes his wife, who will be leaving him in four months, finds him curled fetally in a crawlspace between their bedroom and their bathroom, mumbling escape trajectories into nothing.

While Neil Armstrong (one syllable then two syllables, semantic symbol of strength and courage, to be echoed in his last name) was memorizing his “One small step for man…” line, the line chosen by NASA over his previous selections from the list (“One small step for man, one giant leap for Neil, bay-bee!”, “Wow! The moon is really…empty!”, “Enough with the idle chit-chat! let’s play some golf!”); and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin (following Armstrong’s one-two approach while adding a down-home [irony intended] approach with the nickname)was doing final navigation checks, Mitch (who only changed his name while on board, by which point is was too late, considering he has, in essence, been lost to history), mixed the Tang and waited for his chance, which was never to arrive due to the scrubbing of the Apollo program six missions from then. Later, after both Neil and Buzz were back on board, their shared experience led to Mitch being seen as an outsider and potential threat-the two officially created the “Moon Man Club” while en route to the planet, creating secret handshakes and code phrases (Michael was to forever be referred to the two as “Michael Michael Tricycle”) while Collins stewed. It was not long before the workaday Joes at Houston, rushing on the giddy excitement of being part of something greater than they would ever again know, followed suit. Immediately upon hearing of the scrubbing of the Apollo project Michael left NASA to pursue a career in children’s entertainment, which led to his becoming Astro-Man (one of the few “hero figures” in history to not have a sidekick: potential costar Butch “Eddie Munster” Patrick refused to work with Collins, citing his agoraphobia and neurotic Shatner-esque upstaging) in a Miami children’s show of the same name, which ran for two episodes.

Sometimes, when he sleeps, Michael reaches out for controls which are not there.

Both Armstrong and Aldrin have long since placed restraining orders upon Michael due to his screaming their names and trying to in some way touch them during book- signings and school visits (Armstrong refuses to discuss any of the events of the Apollo XI flight and grows silent at the mention of Collins; Aldrin simply states “Well, three of us went up, and only two of us came back..”). Michael blames these episodes on the various lysergics and doses of ketamine he was administered during training.

Nineteen months ago, Michael found himself psychically unable to walk through doors.

His sense of time is gone.

One wonders if, perhaps, the Michael “Mitch” Collins who stepped on board the Apollo XI spacecraft is the same one who stepped off it.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Anesth
I had come into a small amount of money (eight bucks) thanks to a refund on an overturned parking ticket given by someone who, according to the short letter accompanying the check, was not really a cop. Flush with my newfound solvency, I perhaps reacted overly quickly when someone on the magic computer conferencing system where I troll for women with severe medical bondage fetishes and incredibly low standards offered to sell me one of their children, who had been causing all sorts of trouble due to a newfound ability to spit through his front teeth, or (what we called in my days) “gleek” on other people. Initial bidding started at fifteen dollars, but as the only other people on this system invest their petty cash into ghb/pine-sol addictions, the bid shriveled like a louse in a hairpiece until it got to eight dollars, at which point, possessed by the demon whisky, I bid and won. Seeing as I plan to die naked and broke in a Vegas hotel room from “death by misadventure”, and seeing as the family name has now been shamed to the point that my parents have begged me not to have a child, I had no interest in or use for an heir: as soon as the kid arrived and I brushed the styrofoam peanuts out of his hair I laid down the law. The boy would be my pointman: his duties were to keep the press out of my hair, keep my floozies from finding out about each other, and keep absolutely anyone from getting at my internal organs during my rare bouts of sleep. The boy understood instantly, and for the first few months performed admirably, keeping himself fed on squirrels and turnips scavenged out of the empty lot across the street, cleaning himself with rainwater, and somehow managing to keep his kevlar-reinforced tux immaculate. Tragedy struck, however, when during a trip to Buffalo I ended up with eight pounds of synthetic opium there was a slight mishap when the secondary trap-stomach I had him installed with for courier work was eaten through due to a chemical reaction from the fauxpium coming into contact with a whole shitload of fizzies he ate while on the plane. These things happen. Thus, if you have any children (particularly any legal-esque girls interested in van waterbed repair) you don’t mind potentially being used as drug mules and secondary sources of income, or if you have eight bucks I could borrow, please give me a call; I’m in the book.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Dances for Variant Anatomies
Injury to the wrist and palm can be a serious thing. Not even taking into consideration the dangers of carpal tunnel and repetitive stress, anything in or by which the hand may be crushed, punctured or torn is a constant threat to anyone who uses their hands regularly. As such, they are prime targets for anyone who would want to do such a person malicious harm. Take, for instance, my previous girlfriend meghan, who had the odd habit of throwing items for purchase to me in the supermarket. “Heads up! It’s rutabaga!” she’d laugh, sending vegetables hurtling towards me at high speed. At the time, I thought of this as just another example of how Meghan was all fucked up in the head, but now I am certain she was deliberately attempting to cause me permanent nerve damage in my hands.

My friend William would listen to my explanations as to Meghan’s systematic attacks on my hands and tell me this was yet another example of how I had no appreciation for the women in my life and how fortunate I was to be in my position. William is a crybaby who spends the majority of his time alone in his room staring at a wall and wondering why he’s never met anyone, so his take on such issues is fundamentally flawed, having never been in my position. I knew this before I brought up the subject, but had hoped perhaps he’d have some side-door into the subject: having no actual personality gives William a strange perspective on issues, occasionally, but not this time. As such, I knew the only person I could actually talk to as Meghan, who took my concerns with that air of bemused indifference which left no doubt as to her implication in the crimes against my hands.

“Meghan, if I ask you a question, will you respond honestly?”

“Maybe. You’ll never know. No, I’m kidding, yeah, shoot.”

“Are you attempting to destroy me?”

“I don’t think so. There’s really nothing in destroying you for me, is the thing. Do you wanna be destroyed? I have this friend in Buffalo…”

“Good lord no, that’s the thing! If you destroyed me, I couldn’t work with my hands, couldn’t get the process in motion.”

“What? What do you mean, ‘work with your hands’? Do you a job of some sort now?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean, you verminous harlot! The Work! The Great Work!”

“Oooooh, okay, The Great Work. That explains everything.”

I suppose, for the sake of context, I should explain The Great Work. This may take some time.

On a fundamental level my life is predicated on the notion that all things can be used to provide insight into situations I do not understand. Anything can serve as a theoretical model, and once such a model is held in the mind’s eye, solutions to problems arise spontaneously. Some objects serve more aptly as models for theoretical problem-solving than others, obviously, and this is where The Great Work comes in.

The Great Work is a machine I have built from an old metal carousel, run by two double-a batteries, whose horses have been replaced by wire and plastic locusts, an image from a dream I had often as a child. The carousel is incomplete, however, as I have not yet been able to create the sound these locusts made, which is integral to the function of the piece as a thought-model. My attempts to make field recordings, while certainly of interest themselves, have not matched the ferocity and metallic nature of the clicks and hums from the dream: it was as thought the locusts were made of bits of copper and tin, rusted and worn. I spend my weekends sifting through thrift stores, yard sales, warehouses, looking for a means of recreating that specific sound.

Meghan, in her nature, thought this was preposterous.

“So why not just make it with a computer? Just whip up a file and mess with it until it sounds right?”

“Because. Because it needs to be generated from an actual physical object in order to work. Are you not paying attention?”

“But you’re never going to find anything that sounds right. Maybe you don’t remember it all that well and you can trick yourself into thinking, like, ‘Okay, this sounds like the dream’, but really it won’t, you know, because nobody’s built anything for that, or like that.”

“Exactly! There’s some thing, some child’s toy, and though they never knew when they were making it, they made it so it’d sound *exactly* like in my dream! That’s the magic of it!”

“Why does something always have to be something else? Why can’t anything ever just be what it is?”

At which point our conversations always broke down. It was ludicrous to even start, but we did it, again and again. Perhaps we were bored. Like William and I. It’s something of a wonder I talk to anyone at all.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Aminal
Nobody remembers that summer. If you ask, they will shrug, or laugh, or get a pinched look between the eyes and start talking about their favorite politician, or musician, or operating system. Nobody was married, or divorced, or was born or died, of if they did nobody seems to remember. It is possible that people who seem to disappear in and out of our lives were always there, only the time is lost to us, a blur of nondescript days with no crushes on the subway or brilliant books or really horrible oysters that lead to a weekend in bed with the smell of vomit and cooled air conditioner breezes up near the ceiling. Perhaps we spent that summer afraid, unwilling to go outside, running out of real food and sucking on plastic tubes of condiments. Perhaps we were always afraid, staring at our hands and all knotted in the stomach and afraid for things we didn’t understand. More likely there was just a period without novelty, without character, the days all pointless and small. It’s no one’s fault. These things happen, sometimes, and that we cannot remember them is of no great loss as the reason we can’t remember them is there was absolutely nothing memorable about them.

Jenny and David met during such a lull, a hazy apathy around their aniverseries, a vague discomfort their friends get when Jenny and David talk about when they first met. They never discussed it, but Jenny and David both wondered if maybe there was something wrong, something cold and empty in the center of their near-perfect relationship. Each assumed it was them and not the other. They have a preoccupation towards this topic when they have sex, cook dinner, lay on the far sides fo the bed, staring at the ceiling while pretending to sleep.

They know something is wrong, but they don’t know what it is. They try to think back to their first dates, the beginning of their coupling, but it’s so hard to remember, it’s like they never really grew into each other at all. They woke up one day like they’d been that way for years.

When they split up, all their friends were sorry to see them drift apart, wondering what went wrong, and maybe just a little happy not to have to think about it anymore.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Alternate Outfitting
I had decided that none of the options I had earlier examined were worthwhile. I would not go to the desert; I didn’t even know in which direction the desert was, much less what to do with myself once I got there, and considering that even my Cub Scout training would be worthless in a place where there were no trees (was there an Outward Bound program for the prophets? did Elijah know some sort of secret to living off roots and mosses, or is this one of those places where prophethood simply has certain divine privileges?), my refusal to go retreating to the dunes essentially fell under the aforementioned “not dying” clause. I thought, for a while, about becoming homeless, but I felt the ends of my life still clinging to me; if I was going to do this, I had to do this completely. I sold my belongings, gave away my clothes, got in my car and moved to Minneapolis, where I found gainful employment (via falsified resume) doing distribution for Rebus Medical Services, a company attempting to corner the medical accessory market for young adults via a two-pronged attack strategy of short and long term “extreme sports” injury recovery accessories and the recent “surgical fetish” boom expanding out of the sickly “post-goth” demographic into more mainstream areas. Through market saturation of 8-16 year old boys via RMS sponsorship of professional skateboarders, snowboarders and matadors, as well as getting primary national recognition via the appearance of our “C’est Monstrueuse” line of spinal braces (later knocked off by Donna Karan, at which point we knew we were on our way to big things) in two videos by Floria Sigismondi we had made a solid name for ourselves within the first fiscal year. The other members felt uncomfortable with their status as successful young businesspeople: they wore black fingernail polish, sketched pornographic mandalas on the soles of their Paciottis, did shots while HMO reps sipped bourbon or, increasingly, mineral water with lemon. Heady times, apparently, but I wanted no part of it, and was known around the office as, well, timid. The friends I had in my old life were hidden in the hills, waiting for the end of time, cleaning their shotguns and mumbling kill ratios like closet mantras; I was perfectly happy to be timid, to be an adult, and in time I forgot about that life entirely.

Until Ana’s mom showed up,pharmaceutically giddy, practically bouncing on the balls of her feet.

“Hi! I’m Ana’s Mom! I heard you were all living it up and thought maybe we could go have some drinks!”

I poured her a healthy glass of Arran scotch (RMS had recently gone in collectively on a barrel which Ghenn and Mikael had already put a serious dent in; I took my eight percent worth, bottled it, and left it around for such situations) and sat her down, though even sitting she still looked like she was moving. After half an hour I had deduced that the real reason she had driven up here to see me was to convince me to help her write her memoirs. Of all things.

“Have you talked to Ana lately?” I asked. “You do know that I’m…I’m not doing that anymore. I do distribution for medical supplies. On weekends I do display work for the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, over on Main St.; it’s a promotional thing. Occasionally I do some site-work with Vox Medusa, but not writing. That’s why I came here.”

“But you know all about this sort of thing and I don’t really. Besides, all you have to do is proofread. It’ll be fun!”

I agreed to proofread her book and she left for the evening. Two days later, Owen and Josef and Seth showed up, wanting me to show them around town. That Saturday I got a call from Jezebel Decibel, who was living in Kenwood and wanted to hook up, maybe go see Eco-Safe Lobotomy and (possibly, rumored) BFP play in some warehouse by the river?

Start my life over? You take your life with you wherever you go.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

Above
I hadn’t seen Ryan since high school, when we were in an afterschool drama class together. We didn’t spend much time together then, though we got along well; I remember he and I having a long conversation on the bus ride home from Carrol Iowa, where we had a drama competition, and seeing him at parties, where he would come by, say hi, say something funny and forgettable, and then go off to repeat this with others. I hadn’t thought about him since my first year of college, when I was thinking constantly about high school, in which every connection I had with anyone seemed profound and heartening in comparison to the veil of tears my college career was becoming. It took me a while to place his voice as I heard him call out my name in HEB a couple weeks ago, only recognizing him as he called me buddy and reached out for my hand, which reached for his without my thinking about it. We started talking, what he’s doing in Texas, what I’m doing in Texas, and he told me about this cross-media thing he was working on, which I was initially skeptical about but became more and more interested, realizing that Ryan had seriously pursued acting and playwriting while I went into ten years of uncontrolled drift. I’ve been here in Austin for about nine months, yet I still didn’t know where a bar was that wasn’t on Sixth Street, or in a bowling alley, so I asked Ryan if there was somewhere nearby we could discuss this further, and we walked a couple blocks toward the highway and into a small building, on the edge of a neighborhood, where low fuzzy funk music pulsed out in waves from speakers in the ceiling. We had more drinks than was probably good for us, by which time Ryan’s projects were sounding like the perfection of all my worldly desires, and we’re walking back to the HEB parking lot and he’s asking me what I’m doing for Thanksgiving, and suggests we get together that night and he’ll show me the studio. You already know how I spent Thanksgiving day. That night I followed Ryan’s directions across I-35 to this brick building out by the library with the big mural of Martin and Malcolm on the side, and after banging on the metal door a few times Ryan answered, and brought me in, introducing me to a couple friends of his, Matty and Christina, who are setting up this strange while backdrop stage with a grid marked off in black tape. Ryan explains they’ve been working on updating a kind of low-tech 3d rendering engine a friend of Matty had abandoned when he quit his job and went to Bali. My understanding of this sort of thing is slight at best, but I had been reading a lot about Bunraku puppetry, which the three of them had only recently learned about, and suddenly I actually had an audience which was interested in the stupid arcane crap I pick up like lint. They ordered really good Chinese food from a place I forgot the name of, which is lame as I’ve been trying to find a good Chinese place in Austin since I got here, and Christina puts on a CD of this band she knows and it’s really good, and we end up drinking this weird potato vodka and the whole night is going really well, and Ryan asks me about my other friends here, and in a joking kind of way asks me if I would set him up with someone. Laughing, I tell him sure, I got the hook-up, it’s no problem, and he asks me what they’re like, and I’m playing like don’t worry, you’re set up, and he’s asking if I know any girls with long brown hair, and I keep waving my hands like an old shopkeeper, whatever you need, I’ve got it taken care of, and he asks me if I know any girls who have cancer. I give him a look, and he’s laughing, and Matty is laughing, and Christina is smirking and rolling her eyes, and anybody who knows me knows I make jokes in poorer taste before breakfast, so I laugh, cancer, syphilis, tuberculosis, whatever you need, and he says no, no really. I’m really looking for a girl with cancer.

Now I’m wondering if maybe he’s just messing with me, or if maybe he has cancer, or if maybe he really is into girls with cancer, and I’m not sure how to proceed, so in a feat of tact and diplomacy I managed to switch the conversation over to, I don’t know, wounded soldiers in the second world war being sodomized by wolves or something. This went on a bit longer, and then Matty left, and after another half hour Christina left, and I was getting ready to go, and Ryan told me he didn’t mean to make me uncomfortable earlier, it’s just a thing he has and he didn’t realize it would be weird. I looked at him, and he laughed, and said okay, sure, it’s a little weird, but he had a girlfriend in college who developed a tumor in her brain, and it was benign though the surgery was worrisome, and in the weeks beforehand the two of them had a relationship more immediate and more intense than any either of them had before, or since, at least in his case, as she’d broken up with him a couple months after the surgery to move to Seattle. After he graduated he moved to Austin to follow a job offer at garden.com (which he fled from with a sweet severance package as one of the first of the firings, which is package-wise definitely the best way to go) and had tried to meet other women, but there was something missing. Besides, he said, slurring a little, what’s so different about being attracted to someone with a certain hair color, or a certain build, or a certain disease? And weren’t women with cancer often seen as unattractive both by those who once loved them and by the world at large? I told him I agreed, on all counts, and didn’t mean to make him feel awkward, and we apologized to each other, and laughed, and after a little more small talk I told him I had a thanksgiving party I had to go to, which was true, but I didn’t go. I drove around for a few hours, thinking, and finally went home to sleep. What made this encounter so odd for me was that I did have a friend with cancer, an ex-girlfriend named Heather who lived in Iowa City I’d not heard from since I moved and had been thinking a lot about lately. Heather’s the only person I can think of who actually really qualifies as an ex-girlfriend: everyone else I’ve ever had any sort of relationship with was either a fluke or a fling or a friendship that failed. Like most other women in my life, Heather would occasionally call me to tell me how fed up she was with her current boyfriend, but it had a different tone, as this subject wasn’t just an abstraction between us, we had a history along these lines, and because of that the whole thing always felt more comfortable, more adult. I went away from my conversations with her feeling like I had a history, that I wasn’t just mindlessly falling through my life. And I thought to myself, driving up North Loop on the way back to the house, that maybe Heather and Ryan might not make a bad couple. And then I felt wrong, in a way I couldn’t place, and tried to think of how I should be writing more and how I needed to prepare for New Year’s, how I was going to be back in Iowa over the holidays.

Yesterday morning I got up early, then everything was still quiet, and I called Heather, who I knew would just be getting in from jogging (how strange that I went out with a woman who jogged, who I, and this shows how much I was into her, I even jogged with once, down by the river, when I think I threw up in front of the Art Building), and we talked for hours, how I had to get in and see her while I was back, how she had been thinking about me, and I told her I’d be in town for week, and she said perfect, absolutely, she had no classes and she wasn’t going home, we could talk and talk, it’d be perfect.

That night I went to Ryan’s studio, and Christina was there talking to Ryan about something very emotional, and I told them I’d take off, but Christina said no, stay, I know I don’t know you very well but maybe you could be like an un-judgment-like ear about this thing, and Ryan told me either way, whatever I wanted, and when I was younger I tried really hard to keep out of things like this but my life had emptied out to the point where this sort of thing had a secondhand charge which was invigorating, and besides I wanted to get to know these people and why not jump in, so I stayed, and Christina explained to me the history of her and Matty, and how they used to be so close and everything was going great but now he’d been closing himself off and there was something cold in him and while they still had this whole life in common with the studio and all their shared friends and everything the whole relationship was just impossible and she didn’t know what to do. Having done this a few times in the past, I told her some sort of, not nonsense, but something about needing space and open communication and things which, while true, were so open and general that they could apply to anyone, but I have this way of doing this in a very direct eye-staring way, and she totally knew what I was talking about, it was totally the situation, and she was gonna go call him, which she did from Ryan’s bedroom, and while her and Matty talked and tried to patch things up, and Ryan just looked at me and laughed, and just like that I told him he should go home for the holidays as I knew this girl I thought he should meet.

Ryan’s folks live in Cedar Falls, so after I drove down from Minnesota with my sister I gave him a call and he laughed about how after spending the weekend with his comatose parents I best come through on my end, and we drove down to Iowa City to do some book shopping and hook up with Heather, who met us in the ped mall, and I made introductions, and she was surprised to see someone with me (I used to be a hermit) but we got coffee at the Hamburg and I got the scoop on how being a TA was going, and over an hour she started addressing Ryan as much as me, and even more than me, and I smiled, and we drifted to that bar across from Dirty John’s, and they started talking directly to each other, staring and looking away and smiling and doing a lot of gesturing with their hands and leaning toward each other, and I told them how sorry I was but I had to meet my friend Chris in Cedar Rapids and I had to go, I’d be back tomorrow, and Ryan said it was okay, he’d find a place to stay, and they both blushed a little and looked at the table, and Heater walked out with me to my car, all and she had that surprised delighted tone I only heard from her a couple times, and she still needed to talk to me like *really* talk to me before I left the state and I promised her I would, and as she walked back into the bar she turned around and looked at me, and smiled, and went in.

And God, who had been waiting for me to fix and foster and nurture the relationships of all my friends, looked down on me and cured me of my idiocy, and for the first time ever I understood, it all made sense, and there, in the middle of Market Street, in the middle of my epiphany, I was hit by a Cambus and killed.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #

11.24.00
All set I was for to spend the day writing, which I obviously haven’t done in a while. All was quiet on the homefront, my eyes had stopped hurting, and the slow slide into a drizzly overcast holiday was keeping me from out-of-doors distractions. I did have to snag some refreshing beverage, as what’s a writing binge without refreshing beverage, so i headed up to walgreen’s, got refreshing beverage and some motor oil, and noticed this girl out of the corner of my eye while putting the oil in my car. She had long black hair with purple streaks pulled up on both sides in low-slung (which is to say not perpendicular-jutting) pigtails, a ratty-looking leather jacket with some weird hand-drawn pattern i couldn’t focus on in white paint-pen on the back and sleeves, an equally ratty sweater, tights, and combat boots, and as she turned to watch a car pass I saw she had a sign: TRAVELLING BROKE HUNGRY PLEASE HELP. I walked across the parking lot to get a better look, then she saw me, and feeling conspicuous and full of thanksgiving cheer I walked up and said hi and gave her ten bucks, to which she replied “You know this is ten bucks” and I said “Yeah, take it, I think New World is open.” Behind her (I hadn’t even noticed) was another girl, dressed roughly the same, and she got up from sitting against the Walgreen’s wall and the two of them pondered their options. After pondering what might be open on Thanksgiving, I said “I bet Flightpath is open, I can give you a ride, it’s just right up this way,” and we drove the ten-odd blocks to Flightpath, during which time I found out the first girl was named Sarah, the other girl was named Karen, and all sorts of horrible ideas went spilling around my head.

In the nine months I’ve been in Austin I’ve never been to Flightpath, which is weird as it’s just up the street from where I live. As such, I had no idea if it was open or not, though I suspect in hindsight the nearness of my home to our destination wasn’t an accident. Flightpath was open, though practically empty, and we sat for maybe three hours drinking bottomless cups of coffee and eating pretty ho-hum pastries. Karen and Sarah were on their way to Oklahoma City, where they knew some people (that’s how Sarah said it, “we know some people there”, which sounded iffy at best, but I’m probably just reading things into things), having come up from San Antonio yesterday with a couple Palo Alto kids coming home for Thanksgiving. Endless chitchat about Austin, about music, about writing (Sarah had been keeping a journal/sketchbook ever since she left home, which I tried to talk her into letting me read, but no dice). Karen asked what I was doing for Thanksgiving, and I told them I was kinda ducking out on a party so I could hang out by myself and write, and I flinched because it sounded really stupid the way I said it and plus it sounded like I wanted to not hang out with them, and I tried to think of a way to cover, and Sarah laughed and rolled her eyes a little, and for the first time all day I was all smitten with some girl again.

You probably already know this, but if you took the average of everyone I’ve ever dated you’d see a blurry image of someone prone to serious caffeine abuse, with long dark altered (henna/dye) hair, well endowed (she’d probably say too endowed) in the breasts and hips, who smokes but is trying in a vague sort of way to quit, who talks to excess at first but then settles into a comfortable if slightly manic peace, who is attracted to goofball bookish shy guys (obviously) and believes in things she’d never admit to outside of hushed post-midnight telephone calls from somewhere very far away. Which is to say Sarah was so ridiculously suited to my notions of crushdom that I was certain something really weird and wrong was going on and I just wasn’t noticing it, I being out of range of a faith in the inherently benign nature of fate. Karen was no slouch in that department, but I wasn’t gonna push it. I was dewlling on this at length while I ran back to the house to make sure I hadn’t left anything particularly disgusting on the floor and to (get *this*) turn to irc quick-like for a confirmation of my rightness in my pursuits. As anybody who remembers 1995’s “girl with bells on her shoes” incident can attest, irc can be a genuinely helpful oracle, bringing up angles one may have missed in the rush of giddy strategizing. The moral question, or “Is it proper to proposition someone you just gave money to, somebody who’s just looking for a way out of town?”, was raised and rightly squashed by the irc greek chorus, who did raise a second point to consider, which, to quote cheap trick, “you never know what you’ll catch”. this of course being always the case, but with vaguely homeless faux-punk girls it’s been suggested to err on the side of judgment. All of which I considered and reconsidered and then threw entirely out the window as I practially skipped back up to Flightpath, where the table where we were sitting was being bussed, as Sarah and Karen had left, and I walked around pretending I wasn’t looking for them until it started to rain again and I walked home.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #