Sun, 19 Nov 2006

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

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

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

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

“I got a good idea today!” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wed, 27 Sep 2006

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

Thu, 31 Aug 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rejected lyrics from new album
Satan Snowman

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

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

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

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

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

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

oneironautics
“You, you are a Key.”

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

Sat, 18 Mar 2006

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

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

Fri, 14 Oct 2005

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

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

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

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

“Sure. Or else maybe a dime sometimes.”

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

“That’s ridiculous.”

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

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

every day is evidence
“Hello?”

“Hello, is this Sarah?”

“Lucas? Is that you?”

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

“Okay.”

“Okay, huh?”

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

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

“You don’t say.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“Yeah, ha, something.”

“Right. So how did jail go?”

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

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

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

“I guess.”

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

“So how are they with all this?”

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

“Meetings?”

“You know. Meetings.”

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

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

“Wait, wait.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One day at a time, bitch!”

“I’m gonna hang up now.”

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

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

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

debaser
True story.

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

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

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

Mon, 25 Jul 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sat, 23 Jul 2005

consequences
2005.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sun, 22 May 2005

final event precautions

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


(09:45.05.22.2005) [/scrytch] #

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thu, 19 May 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

until we see each other again
The song she sent me didn’t do its work all at once; I listened to it a few times in single shots and tried not to be critical about recording quality, as I’m getting to be kinda a snob with things like that, caught the harmonies she was so good with and the sound of the piano which was just the tiniest bit sharp, but then I listened to it here at the house instead of in the car in between errands, sat down and played the cd with the player left on loop from earlier, and I realized she had to have someone help her burn the cd because she hated taking anything off tape, even off the crappy four-track her brother handed down to her, so to take the song onto hard drive and clean it up, which was a mistake, so whoever helped her (probably some new boyfriend I’ll hear about in a week) basically messed it up a little, and she was always so weird about not wanting anybody to hear something she had recorded, so this must have been an ordeal, and there’s a couple places where her timing on the piano is a bit off and he probably wanted to sync that up but she must have said no, that’s how it is, and I felt kinda proud of her, and I wanted to tell her before the feeling faded and I forgot to do it but she would have been asleep for hours, so I listened to her song over and over and in my mind I talked to her like I do all the time and I said I am so proud of you, and I’m sorry I’m so far away, and I miss you so much, and then I couldn’t stop crying.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

unpopular mechanics
He was old enough to know that certain words weren’t meant to be taken literally, they were figures of speech, but there was still a connection which always warranted investigation. He had heard, somewhere on the television, that the heart is a knot of muscle, and this had stuck with him, as he was fascinated by knots, so that at night he dreamt that when one dies, the doctor cuts through the heart-knot with a scalpel, and all the skin and sinew and fat falls off the body like so much Christmas ribbon, until the immortal spirit which hid in each of us fell up to heaven. Other figures of speech hinted at the truth of this theory: shake off this mortal coil being a phrase he heard on ER once, coil as in rope, like the ropey biceps of a basketball player he had seen at the park once, sitting on the grass, waiting for his mom to pick him up. This meant each person had a single point of weakness, a blow to which would unspool them, unprepared immortal spirits caught in the trees like kites. It had to be a serious blow, he considered, as people (even people shot in the chest, like on television) rarely unspooled in public, which is too noisy and distracting a place for ascension, so that the surgeon is both a butcher and a priest, in the same way that the astronaut is also an angel. He pondered this notion over and over, until he felt satisfied, having finally understood how death worked.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

unlearn
“Hey man,” the businessman said when he saw the jilted ex-boyfriend with explosives taped to his chest in a final act of faith in last-minute reprieves from people who lie when they say they don’t love you anymore and just can’t see things the right way which sometimes a desperate and valiant act can put into a certain focus only he didn’t know where it was he should go as there’s no empty land in the city anymore (that’s why it’s a city) and noplace where there wasn’t bound to be some nature of structural damage and he felt the same vertigo he once felt considering the cleaning lady who would have to clean up his brains only he knows they have special people for that hired by the city with amazing disinfectants which erase the very memory of atrocity from some once and now once again anonymous room but even then someone just takes on one more little bit of damage under the skin and eventually there’s only so much pain anyone can take on and he has to know that as well as anyone and what if he was the one to send that person into a spiral of self-destructive behavior i mean this guy just wants the impossible feat of returning a situation to the way it once was only fixed forever so as never to discover there was always some barely-covered emptiness festering in her heart and waiting for some strange boy to come walking by and give her a reason, right, he didn’t want to be come sort of enabler for massive widespread agony enabler you see being a word he picked up on in group and sorta stuck with him as now he had terminology for the sense he long had that his personal blame was a web that extends beyond the things he understands, i mean, everybody’s responsible then, because how do you know what’s going to set someone off and he knows in the back of his mind that he doesn’t really have it right but it sounds right ot him in a desperate sense but as we’ve already seen this is a person not above desperate logic and equally questionable ideas such as the solution for his notiong of distributed culpability which is the paranoid’s crutch of randomness or perhaps even if he were one to get mystical the unconscious urge toward a specific area manifest in directions he doesn’t undertstand as he thinks through the first past that comes to him to this three-story cement storage block eternally half-full with the castoff jetsam of a couple hundred transitory lives and an office building where the businessman was to sit and ponder the day’s events for a couple hours before the rest of the staff comes in since they’re all essentially college kids adverse to the idea of early to rise and there’s no peace and quiet at home what with the kids hollering and shooting aliens hiding in the closets and watching some sort of semi-pornographic mexican cartoon about a sentient donkey and his two breastacular assistants who maybe solve crimes or something certainly not the sort of environment which lends itself to contemplation of anything and certainly not now with his wife’s endless cold calculated slights and punishments for things he can no longer remember so the best time for him is an hour or so here in the office with a cup of hot coffee and maybe the morning paper maybe not it depends on what kind of day it feels like but no, not today, today some clown is standing behidn his desk with a rock in his hand he used to break the window over the door and climb inside with what even the businessman can see is explosives wrapped to his chest so that all he can say is “Hey man, please don’t blow yourself up here, this is the best place I have.”
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

tundra
The brightness of the diner gave the illusion of a continuance of civilization, that other houses and buisnesses would continue past the far end of the asphalt parking lot, but now that he was out of the twenty-foot tall streetlights around the pumps Jason could only see a blackness before him, the tiniest trace of hidden moonlight like a band behind the trees giving him any sense of distance. He parked out here while the sun was just starting to dip, assuming the light would reach this far, now somewhat offended there were still places left in the world which could remain so dark as to hide a car, leaving him to half-step forward, a vague vertigo caught in the knees. He clicked his remote ignition in a slow arc in front of him until the headlights and engine came alive, a small puddle of sight thirty feet to his right. He opened the door, comforted by the slight ping of the alarm, and started to fall into the driver’s seat when he saw something in the darkness, a light, blue but startlingly bright, a light he had never seen before. He stood and stepped from behind the door, trying to guess how far it was, if it was part of some automated pump station or some new hybrid tractor, and he listened to see if it made a noise, trying not to breathe, trying to be as still as possible.

“It’s the guy,” Marshall said, quiet but not whispering, cold as the stones beneath the river. Marshall’s brother Carl regripped the spotlight, his right thumb on the switch, waiting for the guy to get closer. From the field Carl could only see him as the absence of the light from the truckstop, a walking shadow, but thorugh the scope Marsh could count the buttons on his shirt. Carl saw the car start and for a second thought he was too late, that he had screwed up, but then he could see the guy again, and knew it was time, standing and holding the light over his head as the blue light shot across the field. Carl watched the man walk in front of his car, staring, and listened to Marsh to make any adjustments, but he was set, and most likely didn’t even need Carl to bait, but this had to be done just so. Through the scope, Marshall saw the man’s face like a bloated blueberry, like some diseased pumpkin stuck on a pole out behind the farm, and took the shot, and like that the man’s head became a cloud of black fluid, caught in the spotlight for just a second before Carl cut the power and the brothers doubletimed back to the pickup.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

trembler
I am walking down the sidewalk toward the apartments, but at the same time I am deep in the mud under the river, thick and cold but not crushed by its weight. My fingers can move, just a little, but I don’t feel the need to breathe, content to pull in the silence and dark where I cannot be found, revisit memories, consider potential acts, and yet I am now at the complex, walking around to the stairs, and I am running out of time. In johnboats up on the river’s surface, they hunt for my body with long metal rods they shove into the riverbed, the calloused fingers and palms attuned to the frequencies of my bones, but I know nothing of this, and yet I know all about it, and know it is not real, that I am at the door, that I am knocking on the door, that I can hear someone inside turning the locks.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

too close to see
july 04.

I woke up around midnight, still in my clothes and boots, and walked out to check the mail when I saw some large stuffed animal all in pieces down the street, pulled apart by the storm. Part of the head was on the lawn, and I kicked it over to see it had chrome-plated eyes, clean enough to catch the light, to see my blurred face as I picked it up and looked at it. The stictching was all hand-sewn and crazy, jagged lines around the ears and neck, and I realized the storm hadn’t done this, somebody ripped this bear apart and the storm simply scattered the remains. I was terrified of this bear, but I was done being afraid of the artifacts of other people’s insanity, and walked up and down the street with a huge garbage bag I stole from work, dropped in thirty pounds of stones and threw the bag into the Cedar off the Gilbertville bridge.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

today is the day i stop getting high (one)

  1. satellite telemetry readings
  2. shortwave pirate radio broadcasts of bootleg polka performances
  3. suicide notes (five different ones)
  4. electromagnetic pulse distortion
  5. digital compression artifacts
  6. audioleaflets from the divine arrow of the retribution of the christ that is to come
  7. the 60 watt hum of the grid
  8. vinyl 45s recorded for WWII army soldiers by girls they had never met
  9. cia numbers stations
  10. very low frequency recordings of solar events
  11. black box recordings
  12. death threats
  13. 8-track trucker pornography from 1972-1975
  14. microcassette notes by crime scene detectives, 1987
  15. am ministry “prayerathons” for the death of various hollywood celebrities
  16. heartbeats (normal, irregular) of various breeds of dogs
  17. recordings of blank tape
  18. flexidisc promotional material for a mentally challenged punkrock band
  19. prank letters to santa claus as read by children
  20. eight-hour collection of phone messages left from a recovery house in Ann Arbor


(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

timesheet, 01.29
09.00pm: check in, check to see if i’m digging tonight. i’m not.

09.03pm: tank up on coffee.

09.06pm: get shovel and flashlight.

09.08pm: walk around yard, check for damaged stones.

09.30pm: pretend to be a zombie pirate. scream “I GOT THE SCURVY!” at top of lungs, work on my stagger-walk.

09.41pm: use shovel as imaginary microphone stand, pretend to be Juan, latin singing playboy.

09.47pm: practice hypnosis on creepy lookin’ dog.

09.48pm: run from creepy lookin’ dog.

10.02pm: return to office, drink more coffee.

10.06pm: go to bathroom just to hang out.

10.16pm: walk around yard.

10.25pm: try to scare drivers out on the highway by staring directly into their souls.

10.33pm: take antacid for to battle all the coffee.

10.48pm: work on stories in my head.

10.58pm: decide that fifteen below is too cold to pretend to work, go back to the office for the night.

11pm-1:15am: take nap in office chair. note, for the record, that this is the first time i’ve napped on the job.

1.20am: check yard again.

1.32am: decide i need to buy a giant gong, and invite people over and walk out in my fu manchu outfit and bang gong and make spooky yet incomprehensible proclamations and then send people off into the world to do my secret bidding. might have to build gong out of stolen sheet metal.

1.38am: again, run from creepy lookin’ dog.

1.46am: drop flashlight in the snow, consider something about how a flashlight makes unilluminated areas darker than they are with the flashlight off, realize i need to go to bed.

1.55am: return flashlight and shovel to closet.

1.59am:check out.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

throw yourself to the hogs
To sit in the throne was to crawl and climb in equal measure, to contort and belittle yourself, to feel the crown fall off your head and the scepter dig into your side, as it is only right that someone willing to bear the greatest of public shames, only those willing to eat the greatest plate of stool and offal, should be allowed to serve as king. His body doubled-over allowed only the shallowest of breaths, so that a horn was inserted into his mouth, distorting and amplifying his voice into tones like scratched glass and belly-slit kittens, and the king tried to apologise for the sound of his voice, but the effort of even the simplest syllable sent him into minutes of breathcatching, during which his senators would stare uncomfortably at each other and whisper of regicide. The king, malnourished and half-mad, faded into dreams of sleeping in a bed, of walking upright, of seeing strangers smile, dreams which only lasted half a minute before his guards jabbed at his distended stomach with spears. This is the taste of power, like a bit between your teeth, bile always at the back of your throat. This is what it means.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

this is not the time
When Ana was thirteen, her mother told her that the one thing she regretted no longer being able to do was visit her friends, and Ana, who wanted nothign so much as to help her mother in that last year, told her mother that she’d gladly visit her mother’s friends and announce her intentions and condolences that she could not attend in person. They agreed this was a good idea, and so Ana got gussied up in her impress teh adults clothes and took the car around town, stopping often at convenience stores to ask directions, until she visited all of her mother’s friends and announced how she was dreadfully sorry that she couldn’t attend herself but certainly wanted best wishes (and in one case a speedy recovery). This is where Ana learned to put on her professional face, friendly but formal, her voice a bit flat, her movements a bit slower than usual. This is how she started talkig to me after I told her the thing I promised myself I would never tell her, the thing about why I’ll never have children and she hung up the phone and called back five minutes later and announced that she was dreadfully sorry she had been so rude before, and has the deepest sympathy for my situation.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

the things i’ve caused (three)
I read the letter, searching for weaknesses, looking for ways to make my words more effective. This was to be the last thing I ever said to her, my final statement, and I wanted the words to hurt her so much, to cripple and blind her, to lead to months of unconsolable crying on her bed and binge drinking and wrist slashing. I wanted her to know and understand all the horrible things she had done to me and never given a second thought to, expectant that the world would once again change to suit her whim, heal its wounds once her back was turned. I still thought I was a writer, and I thought that if I have learned anything, if I have any ability with the word, then let this letter be the sum of my powers. Let this letter kill her.

I saw her two weeks later at a bookstore, and she greeted me as though we were still the best of friends, and laughed about how great the letter was, how she read it over the phone to people she knew in fits of laughter. You were always so funny like that, she said, smiling, oblivious.

That’s when I stopped writing.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

the things i’ve caused (two)
One Sunday afternoon, watching football on the couch, his father turned to him and said “I want you to listen, and whatever happens you need to remember this. A man who hits a woman is a punk. He’s a fucking punk.” His father never swore, even when he caught his hand in the car door, so he knew this wasn’t a casual comment. He didn’t know what to say, so he pulled himself together a bit, put a little more depth into his voice, and said “I know”. Years later, he’d been in circumstances with women which were, to put things kindly, ambiguous, where the use of violence, or at least the threat of violence, seemed to be a desired result. She would turn, and she would dig, for a reaction, and he would give her nothing, held inside, unwilling to push against the few things he took as truths. In time he found someone with whom this was not an issue, and he took her as his bride, and she told him the story, the story every woman he’s known eventually tells him, who he was, when it happened, how she’s not really afraid anymore. The next year his father died, and after the funeral he sat on the back porch with his wife, and his sister and her boyfriend, and he mentioned the thing his father told him, and they all became quiet, and his sister told him what had happened to her, and how her father found out, and what he wanted to do, but she said no, no, it’s over. After everyone went to bed, he sat on the back porch by himself, staring at the scattered lights of distant farmtowns, and he found the address in the phone book.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

the things i’ve caused (one)
The clouds cast shadows so deep they seemed to stain the ground, casting the grass in a darker hue until winter reset the scene. She took a step from the doorway to the playground and felt the life drain from her, the dread pool in her chest. It’s just a series of steps, she thought. I’ve taken millions of steps in my life. This is no different. She felt like she would fall forward, and so she leaned back, and almost fell over, catching herself with a sudden backstep, and just like that it hit her, now she had to start over. She’d never get off school grounds at this rate. She saw traffic slow as it reached the block, the amber light of the warning signs on each corner just barely visible with the sun covered over, with the wind coming up from the south. She was the last to leave, the same as every day, but she was sure there were still some children left, standing at the windows, watching her, waiting for something to happen. She took a breath, took a step. As she moved from the building the playground came around from behind the corner, and there were kids there, three atop the jungle gym, the highest point of the playground, pockets filled with rocks, but she was not afraid of these kids, who only wanted a modest perimeter to call their own, to define themselves against, the most meager of reputations to hex away the terror. She tried to take another step and hesitated, uncertain of where to step, and now the jungle gym kids were watching her. “Are you okay?” the littlest one said, his voice like air escaping a balloon. She wanted to turn and say she was fine, maybe she could become one of the jungle gym kids, maybe she could be protected by whatever totemic power the space held, but she was so tired, and there was so much more walking she had to do, and she knew she didn’t belong to a place, she was without a center, and it was all she could do to fight the current, to walk a straight line.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

the stomach of the ostrich
Jason and I hadn’t seen each other since high school, and he must have heard from someone that I was in a bad way, as he showed up completely out of the blue to see how I was. At first he pretended that he was just passing through town, and halfassed a story to that effect, but it became obvious that this wasn’t a casual visit. Jason was on point for a group of people that all hung out when I was younger, and apparently still did, moving into houses next door and carpooling to PTA and all that, and for a year or so I ran in that circle in order to get to this girl that I can’t even remember what she looks like any more. We had our ten year graduation aniversary a while back, and obviously I didn’t go, because I don’t go anywhere, but this gang of adults apparently got to talking about me, and that had led to this quasi-intervention in my living room, Jason asking me if I was paying my bills, how long it had been since I’d slept with someone. I was surprised enough to answer, for a little while, until I wised up enough to be insulted and showed him the door.

The next day I go to work and see a sign in my front yard reading WE LOVE YOU! with balloons on it. Luckily this was still about five in the morning, so I don’t think anybody saw it before I could kick it over and throw it under the deck, but I had a suspicion this was just the start, and when I found a giant bouquet with a sash reading FRIENDS FOREVER! sitting next to my locker at work I knew I would have to take action. I didn’t know where Jason was, but it wasn’t long until I saw him again. Apparently he called this gang of his and told them I was in desperate shape and they all found babysitters and formed a SUV convoy to my trailer. I pulled up and tried to pull out but Suzanne (that’s what she said her name is) knocked on the window, grinning and gesturing to roll down the window. The driver’s side window in my car doesn’t go down, so I pulled into my driveway and got out and then it was all hugs and statements of support and whatnot and I tried to usher everyone inside before my neighbors called the cops. Most of these people looked vaguely familiar, morphed faces from high school recollections, but one of these people was much older and unfamiliar. You ever notice on commercials for weird medicines that you have no idea what they do, how whenever there’s a group of people gathered together looking confident and in control of their mystery affliction that there’s always one gray-haired smiling yet stern older woman at the center of a gaggle of younger traditionally pretty women? That’s what this woman looked like, and I knew this was her idea, but I had no idea why she would take such an interest in a person she had never met.

“Why did you all come here? What exactly do you want?” I said, trying to weave between them to reach the fridge vodka.

“Listen, you are obviously too damaged to appreciate the outpouring of love we have for you, but I assure you, we have nothing but the best in mind for you”, the older eagle-looking woman said. “We are not here to judge.”

“I should damn well fucking hope not!” I said, drinking from the bottle.

“You should come with us to Charles City. You can stay with Jason and Suzanne until we find you an apartment. I’m sure there’s plenty of businesses which will overlook your academic failings.”

“Academic failings? God damn it, I’m almost graduated!”

“Of course you are! And you can pursue your higher learning at our local community college. You might even meet a special someone there who appreciates you for you!”

I had heard this phrase before, and suddenly I felt a wave of dread and nausea. “You’re not just bored suburbanites! You’re CANNIBALS!”

“Oh that’s ridiculous,” the eagle-woman said, but I saw the others twitch at the word.

“I heard a thing about this on Morning Edition! You’re those suburb cannibals that keep eating failed ambitionless drifters! I’ll have you know I’m writing a book!”

“Book schmook!” the eagle-woman said, dropping the facade. “We’ll take good care of you! You’ll learn about equity and get a cellphone! Maybe we’ll just eat the skin from the bottom of your feet, and you don’t even need that skin!”

It’s a good thing that I wired explosives to the bottom of the trailer just in case such a thing happened (which would get written off as just another meth lab explosion), but as I tried to dive through the kitchen window I forgot about the storm windows and the insulation wrap and did little more than give myself a nasty concussion just before the suburb cannibals got to me.

Now I live in Charles City, with a nice blonde actuarian who is into yoga and skin-eating, and our new house has two and a half baths and three hundred square feet of crawlspace. I work from home, writing ad copy for a local winery and the occasional letter to Salon. Sometimes I think that I should leave, go back to my old life as a shifty layabout and mooch, but it’s hard to walk away when you have bloody stumps for feet.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

the stage is everywhere
My dad was always buying electronics we didn’t really need, and so we were the first family on the block with a satellite dish, with quaddrophonic sound, with a vcr. I never understood why he bought these things, as he was home a few weekends a year and never really had a chance to use this stuff, but I later learned that all this stuff was pre-release and experimental models that hadn’t hit the street, stuff he wheeled and dealed out of low-level research and design people he met on the job. My mom basically ignored all this electronic junk, except for a small voice-activated tape recorder which she claimed for purposes we didn’t know about, or think to question, until much later. It turned out that my mother, to avoid phone charges and possibly direct conversation, was making tapes for my father after the kids were asleep, concerns and dreams and little bits of quiet singing, which she mailed to whatever hotel he would be staying at the next week. My father got these tapes, and must have enjoyed them, as he played them for his business friends, who liked them enough to ask for copies, and so my dad made a lucrative side-business of copying and selling the tapes his wife mailed to him with the raunchy parts cut to the beginning of the tape. Years of this went by before my mom found out, and was understandably furious, and that was just one more thing which led to them breaking up. My dad must have made a bunch of these tapes as every once in a while I’ll hear a sample of my mother’s voice in a song, tucked in some spliced-up plunderphonic barrage of samples or fading along the edges of some drone number, and if there’s anyone else around and the voice isn’t moaning and panting into the little solid-state microphone I’ll listen and try to understand who she was in that other world, the world that wasn’t her children.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

the remaining words
It’s not that she’s forgiven me. It’s that I’m becoming irrelevant to her, fading out of her life, so that it no longer seems worth the effort to hold a grudge. She calls out of habit, when no one else is around and her boy is gone, and she no longer asks what I’ve been up to, as she knows I am up to nothing, my life having hit a point where every day is like white noise, hiding from the world, pretending to do the work. She loves me now in an abstract sense, as I have shared enough of her life that I become a kind of living conduit to a severely edited highlight reel of her past, content to be her audience as she was once content to be my everything.

All my friends are older now, and in love with other people. I can’t really hurt them anymore, not in the ways I once could, when we were younger and so close we seemed to share organs, so close we took the same breaths. All the new ideas that felt so weird in the mouth when I tried to explain them in late-night phone rants are unwrapped, components exposed, so that now I work toward subtraction, removing what is not me. I don’t devour libraries anymore; I read the same few books over and over, and the same with music, and the same with almost everything else. I couldn’t surprise her if I tried, and I have, and have failed. I was so alien to her, once, so full of dark places and stray threads, and now she has a simplified surrogate of me in the bottom of her brain. “That’s like something he’d say.”

I have nothing left to tell her but I love you, and I love you is never the answer to a meaningful question.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

the other disco
Years ago I was vaguely seeing a girl who was full of opinions and advice and homespun wisdom, only it was all fairly questionable and generally didn’t hold up under scrutiny, but everyone paid it lip service because she had an air of bone-deep insight. Here’s an example: we were at a party (we were always at parties, more parties than I’ve been to before or since) and she said “A kitchen should be minimal; a meal made from every foodstuff on hand should still taste good, because all of its ingredients taste good seperately”, and everyone nodded as though this was a logical thing to say, but I had been with her for a month or so, and was wise to her little ruse. This would mean that during my dire college days, when the only things in my kitchen were hot sauce and vodka, I was a better person than I am now, with a healthy collection of items which simply can’t be blended into some sort of tasty culinary variant on jungle juice. Eggplant, for instance, does not go with everything. Wasabi does no go with everything. This topic was the first of my arguments with her, which I had attempted to hold off for as long as possible, as this was during one of my short-lived “I have to be a proper adult and go to dinner parties and drink wine and wear suits” phases, all of which required I have a clever and well-networked girlfriend, but for fuck’s sake, there’s only so much one can take.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

the other bethlehem
1991.

Pamela and I were loitering around a diner/truck stop out in Elk Run, taking unfair advantage of the 99 cent bottomless cup of coffee and splitting a blueberry muffin with the last of our shared funds. Pamela was on this thing about ideal objects, and how there should be a harmony between each of the five senses in any given object in order for it to be considered ideal. “Take for instance,” she pronounced with coffee-mad grandiloquence, “the lowly blueberry. In its color is the perfect compliment to its flavor, which again is perfectly complimented by its texture.”

“And yet the blueberry is without sound,” I said, “and in its silence it fails to be ideal.”

“This is not true! The blueberry, to those with proper ears, emits what we in the business know to be the blueberry hum.”

Such conversations often degenerated into the ridiculous, particularly those undertaken at four am on a school night, but I was wililng to follow this line of reasoning a bit longer. “The blueberry hum, you say. Of course you know that each concord you place between discrete sense-data only seems ideal because this is your primary context: you know what is ideal from the blueberry, not because the blueberry is ideal, but because it is the first and possibly only blue food you know.”

“LIES!” Pamela said, her ringed fingers flailing over the table. “The first blue food I knew was the blue popsicle, which is not an ideal food! It is a referent to a flavor which never existed! It is only through endless rejection of inferior blue foods that I have come to know and understand the aesthetic correctness of the blueberry!”

Mock-disgusted, I pushed the last bite of muffin away from me, proclaiming “You, obviously, are ignorant. What do you have, really, when you sum your experience but the application of your latent preferences and prejudices? The blueberry is ideal because it fits your schema, and that’s all there is to it. Feel free to finish the muffin; it’s all you have left.”

Pamela popped the last piece of muffin in her mouth and lit another cigarette, starting to crack a smile. “You’re god-damned right I’ll finish the muffin. I may not be able to prove beyond a doubt that the blueberry is ideal, not to biased simpletons like yourself, but I know it’s delicious, and I know I want it, and I know it’s mine. Also I know we need more coffee.”

I giggled a bit, but regained composure and said “Yes, yes, we’ll never get to the bottom of this without more coffee. The fate of the universe depends on the outcome of this conversation.”

And I was kidding, but at the same time I wasn’t.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

the one place i can never go
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be haunted by something, damaged by the world in a way that would fill me with a sense of world-weary wisdom, a rehab gravitas, scars on my palms. To get to that point I did a lot of stupid things. There’s only a couple of these things I actually regret, mostly because I was too chickenshit to really follow through on any of them, and in that sense I’m pretty much the same today as I was when I was eighteen. Everybody else I know took all the blows that I was owed, and all I have now is the stories of how they fell, and how even now I am jealous of that loss, that damage, their names only spoken with an over-the-shoulder glance around the room and then a breathless hush. People who vanished forever, swallowed up by the legal system or the grave or the wilderness. People who left scribbled spirals in per-week hotel rooms with shattered acoustic guitars and little pieces of tin foil. People who joined convents, or ashrams up in Oregon, or militia groups in Latin America. All of my old friends have become what I always wanted, and I have become nothing.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

the old atlantis
It was the fashion of the time for artists to paint scenes of heroic battle, landscapes filled with the dead and dying, of cavalries descending from the hills, and as there were only so many actual battles to depict, the artists took to inventing new battles. At first this upset no one, as production boomed and the historians thought that popular culture had no effect on scholarly pursuits, but soon the people demanded the histories of these battles, and those scholars who denied the existence of these wars were shunned and starved and buried alive, so it was decided that an imaginary country would be created, cast toward the beginning of time, where any and all imaginary histories could be staged, and while the historians were uncertain of the admission of fantasy as fact, they thought at least it would always be obvious and apparent how honest a historical anecdote was by a quick check of longitude and latitude.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

the days set before us
What would it take to change my life completely? I would have to change the shape of my body, as that’s where I store all my habits, and the core of how I see myself, less purpose than promise, filled with a well-nursed sloth like a middle-finger in the face of the cult of health and safety, my nemeses. But then I will have to give them up as well, won’t I, if I’m to change entirely; I’ll have to embrace the endless yammering idiocy of fad diets and a life without sugar and caffeine and fat, and I can wear that self-satisfied smile and convince stupid women to fuck me. Yes. This will be the new me, different in every attribute. I will give up reading, which has never given me anything but heartache, lacking the rigor of the scholar and the sweetness of the lightly-worn entertainment, and I will leave the internet, nothing but endless nights of empty conversations and unfinished crushes on women I’ll never once touch. I will leave this country like so much empty skin and walk through villages where the camera eye can’t reach me. I will know only what I can hold, and I will cradle this lie, as I have cradled every lie I have set before you over all these years for the hours until I finally sleep, and then I will sleep, and when I wake I will remember nothing, and do all the things I always do, forever.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

tendencies
1995, 2004.

If I fudged the details a bit, straightened the narrative line of a few anecdotes, that in no way means i wasn’t honest. The fundamental structure of everything I ever told you remains whether or not you accept the tinsel and glitter and slapstick and goof. It’s not fair to say I lied to you, or was silent when I should have spoke, because even if I never say another word you know everything there is to know about me. Everything that matters.

Except, as Jer noted, that one thing. There’s always something left to know.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

takebacks
She never spoke, and so forgot her name. She remembered the last few years the way you might remember a movie you watched some December Sunday afternoon, sick with the flu, fading in and out of sleep, so that when you saw it again years later you had the strange feeling you’ve seen it before, but you don’t remember any of the details. People call her, sometimes, and she has nothing to say, as nothing has happened, as teh only changes within her are deep and dark and hidden to her. She knows putting words to the truth would make any listener sick with sadness and impotence, but she knows all this silence is starving the people who love her, and she does now know what to say, what to do.

I told her that I was going to spend the rest of my life alone. This is something everyone says from time to time, on ugly and empty days, but I hoped that my condition lent those words a little extra heft. She agreed, in a distant way, then said that it was beside the point, as the want and longing would haunt me for every day left of my life, so that not even the promise of crippled peace would satisfy; being alone would gain me nothing. I knew this, but did not want to admit to it, the way I still tell myself stories of how I could still be a genius or a scholar, despite early sleepless whispers all around my bed which make clear the lie inside those dreams. I told her maybe I was misguided, then, and could find someone to pay witness, to giggle and scheme, but she told me it was beside the point; having a body next to you does not make you any less alone. Your heart is a nest for ghosts, she said, and I don’t see any evidence that anything will every be otherwise.

I told her I was going to stop writing, and she told me I had finally come to the logical conclusion that my own mysteries and fables were mine, and by peddling every half-idea I was buying into the great lie. “It makes you paperthin, makes your character follow the straightest of roads, this sharing of everything. Every dream on the website, every idea via email, every piece of yourself given away before it can take root, grow into you. Keep yourself secret. Share only with the people you love. Like me.” “You think so?” “You have to decide if you are going to spend the rest of your life playing puppets with an anonymous mob, or if you are going to grant the things you build the value they deserve.” “But I’ll still be alone, like you said.” “You’re wanting for what you will never have, this idea of the ideal companion, and as long as you want for that you will be alone, yes. But you’ll learn, finally, that there are things more nourishing than that, and you will sleep soundly, and you will feel good in your skin, and you will no longer beg the world to remember you.” “Is that what you’ve done?” I listened to her be quiet for a long time, until she said “I don’t know what I’ve done. I probably shouldn’t say anything. No. I’m not gonna say anything.” “Okay, so.” “I should go, I should go”, and she went, and I didn’t hear from her again for a year. Which didn’t matter, as that was another year where nothing changed. She was still keeping herself hidden, and I was still giving myself away.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

swallowed up inside
What of a life is necessary? What are the parts which cannot be removed? What can be pulled off and discarded as habit, as ever-failed potential, as custom and contrivance? This depends on intent and purpose, obviously; any object is the minimal amount of material needed to complete a set task. What is the task before me, then? What can be removed, and what can be expanded, in order to reach that task?

What makes this so difficult is that each attribute is so tightly wound with the others that distinct boundaries are hard to find. So much of what one needs is grafted upon what one does not need. Yet there is so little time, and so much waste in a life, so much running at a thousand things and never reaching any of them. Give up the words, and you give up everything connected to the words, like some knotted nest of roots beneath the skin. It becomes difficult, when following this line of thought to certain ends, not to think we are fundamentally flawed, that the goals set before us are impossible, content to ape out humiliating parodies of the things we aspire to, narrowing the scope of our aspirations to the trivial. I am liked by people I do not care for, and that should mean absolutely nothing to me, certainly in comparison to the people I love, but instead it feeds my pride, suggests second guesses and bad faith, because what am I if I am not well-liked. Then the lies come in, the backtracking, the preening and posturing. I become encrusted with it, growing slower and heavier and more tired until I cannot get out of bed, cannot type out the words, cannot cleanse myself of the stink of shit. But what good is writing, the voice whispers, if no one is there to read it?

I once had an answer to this, when I wrote sheerly for the physical joy of it, for the quickness of the ideas pulled together under my fingers, the lack of forethought from years of practice now leading to a kind of quicksilver simplicity, an economy of motion, which made the very idea of what would come after almost an afterthought. The audience I had then was of one, or two, and I wrote to them in stories as much as in letters. It was all I needed, and it made me happier than I have ever been since, and I cannot compare it to love because it was not fundamentally different. Writing was a self-sufficient machine that ran on the simplest of premises: I love you, let me tell you a story.

There was no fucking internet then. There was no ache in my wrists, and in my stomach, and in the base of my neck. There was no having to imagine some ideal reader that I could write to, no need to think about whether or not this or that idea would be productive, no desperation to do the work, and no endless nights of terror when the work stopped. I cannot stop doing this, because even when I stop it does not go away, and because I have absolutely nothing to replace it with. If this was my goal, then I have mutated over time into a form which hinders pursuit of the goal, creates difficulties as distractions. I am convinced that I can get back to a place by walking away from it, no matter the logical flaws in such an argument.

Who am I talking to?
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

stolen stories
You told me you loved him, and I went to another window to hunt up his webpage and steal his stories. Sorry about that. Sorry about when I got that suspiciously similar haircut, and when I started pretending I like The Clash. Sorry for that fake accent. I’m really sorry I bought that motorcycle, but I’m glad you went to see me in the hospital. But that’s not why I crashed, it wasn’t part of some plan. I was never at that point. Sorry I came over to watch Dark Shadows with you when I was just getting off work and you were just getting up, mostly because I read your diary while you were in the shower. Sorry I tried to sneak a peak as you changed clothes. Sorry I made you all those mixtapes. Sorry I went to the library and checked out the 1990 high school yearbook to see what you used to look like, and sorry I photocopied your picture. Particularly sorry about that night I called your mom. Sorry for coming to your wedding and making that scene at the dance, and for spending too much on the gift, and sorry for throwing up on your nephew Matty. Sorry I cribbed those love letters from James Joyce, and for sending them at all. Sorry for the collect calls, and for that night I sat in my car in front of your house for an hour. Sorry I said hi to your son as he was walking home from school. Sorry the only reason I’m leaving this message is the hope that you might call me back. You know the number. So okay then. And I’m sorry for everything else. Sorry your husband is gonna get this message and erase it before you get home. Sorry, Dave. Okay, that’s enough, that’s enough.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

steping
It is good, sometimes, to be busy, to leave yourslef only enough time to do what needs to be done, to have to constantly consider what is three steps ahead, five steps ahead, twenty steps ahead, and take action accordingly. It is good in the days when you have bad dreams, when you attempt to step from old habits, when you wish upon stars for something to change. I thought about this as I watched the four of them, buzzing around the attic, crunch-time before some deadline none of them would speak of. Every time I come here, my ideas of what it means to be elderly are changed, stripped of the anodyne images the young feed on, the endearingly helpless, the terrifying death’s-headed bogeyman at the end of the antiseptic hospital hall. These people are smarter than I will ever be, than any of my self-styled genius friends will ever be, and the tasks to which they now apply that intellect are important in ways I can only pretend to understand.

Lester, having hit some sort of intellectual wall, decided he could decompress for a few minutes and return to surface level, which is to say he could take to me while we went out for coffee, so long as I didn’t ask him about the work.

“So she gave me the book,” I said, half to myself, so that if he didn’t want to talk about that he didn’t have to. Which was stupid; Lester by definition never had to talk about anything, content to stare you down while you tried to think of excuses to leave.

“You knew it was coming, man. You said yes.” Not a question, a statement of fact.

“Yep.

“You start reading it yet?”

“Nope.”

“That why you’re hanging around the attic being a pest?”

“Yep.”

“Listen, man, they’re just words. They only have the power you give to them. That’s what the people don’t recognize.”

“It’s not that, it’s more that if I do this, it’s like I draw a line in the sand with Ana, with everybody. It’s like I’m a pariah for doing the thing people want me to do.”

“Well now, it’s not like it’s just some incidental document. He went up to write it. He wrote it. And that’s all she wrote of that dumb bastard.”

“Lester, did you know him? Through the group?”

“Did I or did I not make a specific mandate as to us not discussing the group as you call it? For that you’re gonna buy the coffee.”

“I’m just fishing for something, something I should know but I don’t know it.”

Lester didn’t say anything after that, but he did nod once, more to himself than to me, after my last sentence. I spent the rest of the day keeping my mouth shut and paying attention, and what I saw was amazing.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

spit sin from the mouth
“If I did it then, like I planned, everyone would have forgotten it by now.”

There’s a farm three miles past the county line where they’ve been building animals, beowulf clusters humming through gene sequences in the basement, machine sheds where faceless buyers for the underground zoos up in Chicago handle and weigh half-chickens, snakefish, deviled children. I was up there with Ana, who knows everybody, asking about the revitalization technicians. A boy with burn marks across the palms of his hands told me that was just a myth spread by Mexican kids selling stolen vaccines. I stared at him, looked for a tell, but it was like his body was only alive when he spoke, the muscles in his face shutting down to conserve energy and hide away the subliminal secrets of his posture. The windows are boarded shut, the room ghosted with flourescent light; they worship the moon. I though I saw an empty dissection table in an unlit back room, but Ana told me that was probably just the kitchen. Ana has recently taken to telling me lies without so much as a blush. She got something from a side-room where I could not follow and walked out of the farmhouse, and I followed her, because that’s all I ever do.

The bar crept like taproots through the maze of abandoned storefronts, storage cubicles, plague-gutted apartments; I swear we walked half a mile before Ana found the table she wanted. The walls were covered with a red moss that devoured cigarette smoke, dark swirls above the booths like permanent shadows. Speakers crookedly nailed into the ceiling oozed some bass-heavy cabaret music. It seemed like my eyesight and my hearing were no longer in sync.

“You should read the book,” she said. As though it was the simplest thing in the world.

“Fuck that. You should read the book.”

“I can’t read the book. I read a little. It cuts too close, I don’t want to know all the details. All the last days. But somebody should read it, and that somebody should be you.”

She said this as though there was some silver thread between the book and my skin, predestined to recieve this pyrrhic gift, but I knew she had asked almost everyone else she knew. She asked Seth and Mark and both Daves, she asked Carolyn and Rissa and even Owen, who was still working on his human catapult act, which shows you his level of maturity. I was last on the list, and we both knew it, and had I any sense of self-worth I would have said no, no, a thousand times no.

“Do you have it here?”

Ana reached into her bag and pulled out a wooden box which rattled as it moved. The top was covered in silver rings, which were bound with red string to weights within the box. Ana showed me the order in which they had to be pulled, until she looked like a puppetmaster with rings on all eight fingers, when the box clicked open.

The first page had flecks of brown blood on it.

“That’s not from then,” she said. “That’s from something else.”

I stared at her, through the thick black air of the bar, and said absolutely nothing, until finally, distracted with bad dreams, she said “Or at least I don’t think it’s from then.”

There was nothing else in my life then, nothing at all, and I have never refused Ana any of her requests. I would read the unreadable book. I would graft myself onto its skeleton, map my thoughts to the narrative arc, set its errata and facts over my eyesight until everything took its shape. Like coral grown atop jettisoned cargo, the stray thoughts would find a form, congeal into clusters by which I could grow a personality, an identity.I realized this was the same logical line which led to fandom, to endless reams of slash fiction and neurotic collections of the smallest scraps of stardom, and I knew that I was currently of a mind prone to such extremes, unmoored from family and friends and employment and the small guides of my prior life, but I was sick for alternatives to the hollow sound of my future, growing increasingly quiet as I unwound into tedium and torpor, the sort of peace so many claim to desire like a collective death wish. I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t just give myself up, I needed a direction, an irritant, a dream-locus. I would read the unreadable book, and claim its nature as my own.

“Okay. I’ll read it.”

Ana smiled, and passed the last work written by head dead ex-boyfriend across the table to me, slipping out of the rings as she got up and walked to bar.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

sour days
He rose from the bed, but never really awoke throughout the whole of the day. As if he was sick with some obscure flu variant, as if he had spent days watching the perimeter for muzzle fire, he made it through the day on autopilot, praying for the slight lizard comforts of a warm air vent to stand near at work, or a corner away from the flourescent glare in the supermarket. He was forced to repeat almost all of the day’s minor trials; three minutes after brushing his teeth that morning, he realized he had not brushed behind his lower front teeth, just as he forgot to use shampoo during his first shower. He barely registered seeing a woman he went to high school with sitting in the cafeteria, and could not bring himself to care about her repeated attempts to catch his eye. Driving home, he took the third off-ramp instead of the fourth and ended up in a neighborhood he only recognized after pulling onto a street where a buddy of his lived, until he left town and moved back in with his parents. He fell asleep on the weather channel after a half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt at masturbating to his favorite meterologist, and slept for twelve minutes, until midnight, when as was the case every night for as long as he could remember the devil began reading the endless litany of his crimes against himself, against humanity, and against God. He would occasionally seek council with the devil, or else argue the crime in question as not being relevant, but the list of crimes had long passed the valid and even the trivial and had now become gibberish, trespasses at specific points in celestial space-time, false slander against characters from novels he semi-read in college, harboring diseases. He would try to sleep, but the voice scraped along his nerves, admonishing him for failure to appreciate the severity of the charges against him, the hot stink of apple-rot and shit fililng the air as the devil spoke. On this night, however, the devil read the last of the charges (breath-smuggling) and informed him that now notified of his charges, he could either plead guilty, in which case he would be punished upon death, or he coudl plead erasure, in which case the specific events of his transgressions would be erased from history entirely, as would his memories of said events, and any memories held by the living or the dead. He pleaded erasure, and immediately fell asleep for three full days, and when he awoke, he could remember absolutely nothing.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

what i remember of the song she wrote for me, one
At first it made me happy, all the standing up for me she did, how she championed me in any company, and then I saw it start to wear on her, how before she could say anything to certain people, people who were otherwise her friends, she had to rego through the seemingly endless debate about whether or not I was using her, holding her down, pulling the heat from her body in exchange for some poential future interest on my “talent”. I haven’t had to make these sorts of arguments since I moved out of my parents house, and had assumed they had ended, but it became obvious they had just changed venues and participants. I thought it would help if I could return the favor, make a public statement of support against the general concensus of doubt, and so, over time, I convinced her to start performing her songs at parties, at open mics, anywhere she could lug her guitar.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

something terrible is going to happen
He stopped sleeping sometime in his early teens. It didn’t happen suddenly; he would get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom and just never go back to sleep, until he was getting a couple hours a night, until he was catching quick naps in study hall, until he simply didn’t sleep any more. He always assumed it was a temporary phase, like his short-lived interest in german fighter planes. He was still going to bed at night, as his body was tired, and he liked being able to listen to Pink Floyd albums with his headphones on until the sun rose. It wasn’t until college, and his first roomate, that he became self-conscious about not sleeping, and took to spending the early hours at the library, staring at art books, telling people he was staying at the house of some imaginary girlfriend. He met a girl in his rhetoric class, and after quite a bit of talking around the subject, he learned that she didn’t sleep, and in fact lived off-campus in a small basement apartment in order to avoid the sort of problems he had with his roomate. They began spending the time when everyone else was asleep talking to each other on the telephone for hours, every night, so that the process of introduction and courtship was greatly accelerated. Two months later he moved into her basement apartment, and gradually drifted out of being a student and into data entry. A year later they married, and moved into a slightly bigger apartment, and bought a cat. From the moment they began sharing a bed, he noticed she would nod off for a few minutes, from time to time, until by the time they returned from the honeymoon she slept solidly for a few hours a night.

When you stop sleeping, you fold your dreaming into your day, slight adjustments to memories and half-attended notions, so that the first conversations the two of them had were shot through with a giddy sense of sharing these daydreams, and the more they shared this material the more it became similar, sharing details and form and recurring incidents. For her to sleep now, he felt, was like hiding her life from him, so that she would pretend to continue the constant daydreaming, would recycle old stories and sift through online dream journals, but it was obvious to the both of them that it wasn’t enough, it would never be enough, and so he took to spending his nights at work, sitting in a spare office, staring at the wall. He’s convinced they’ll work through it, that she might come back to insomnia if they have a child, that maybe with the right combination of drugs he can induce sleep on a regular basis. Sure, I tell him. Of course.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

sleep until
1997. Ana was in the middle of the Summer of No Impulse Control, which is mostly funny when I think back on it but at the time it really was kinda hard to put up with, I mean it could have been worse, as Ana’s generally pretty nonbothered by small annoyances but if something got under her skin, okay, so you already know the story of her and I at the Food King where we got into a very bad scene with a mom who was hitting her kid, but what you might not know was THAT SAME DAY Ana called Carolyn, who had just broken up with Seth, and after about eight seconds of civil conversation started screaming into the telephone as to how “You have to be FUCKED UP to leave him after all of your shit he put up with, for a long time, and we all heard about it, and after he gave you that fucking money to go back to school and then you just fucking leave him, you stupid fucking whore? What the FUCK is wrong with you that the best thing that ever happened to a stupid spoiled self-important cunt like you just gets tossed aside when you get bored and have pumped all the money you can out of him? Huh? HUH? FUCK YOU!”.

A week later we found out (from a positively mortified Seth) that Carolyn left him because she miscarried their baby, which we knew nothing about, and that was pretty much the end of the Summer of No Impulse Control, althought I would be lying if I said there weren’t nights like this when I wish Ana would give the current girl a call.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

skin for everyone
there is a heat source they hold in the mouth and exchange, back and forth, under the disguise of conversation and they are nurtured and educated by this process and i cannot understand its nature and my possession of the source is a corruption and the understanding of the intent of all those who have held the source in the mouth is unintelligable to me and makes me literally sick in the muscle of my neck and chest and also in my stomach and now my mouth is ruined for food or speech and still i do not understand you are all blank to me and my every attempt is just mimicry and politeness only now the mouth has been disfigured and cannot make certain shapes barring me from certain sounds and through the diminished glottals in the sound of my voice everyone knows what i am.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

skin allergy
[02.92]

I was standing in the tunnel beneath the train tracks on the path from EPB to the . The snow had stopped, but it was still cold, and I was high enough to relish the temporary comfort of being out of the wind. I had lived in Iowa City for half a year and had already read all the graffitti in the tunnel, but the ceiling lighting was out and in the half-light certain symmetrical images were kaleidoscoping, and I told myself no, don’t get stuck on anything, keep moving, you’re halfway back to Quadrangle, but I must have got stuck on something, because after some unknown period of time I felt someone touch my shoulder and ask if I was lost.

“I’m not lost,” I said. “I’m just busy.”

I looked over my shoulder and watched her nod, as though she were taking me seriously.

“Are you busy-busy or just busy?”

“I’m not too busy. I mean, if there was a busy which required immediate attention, and. And also a busy. Like a different busy. Then I’m to be the other, which is to say the second of the two busy kinds.”

“Are you hungry at all?”

I wasn’t hungry, was absolutely detached from the idea of putting food in my body, but I knew that food was often warm, and it was a good thing to be warm, so I said yes, yes I am hungry.

“Do you feel like you’re up to lifting half a couch?”

I tried to remember gym class and thought I can do eight pull-ups, and I weight a shitload more than half a couch, so I said yes, yes I can lift half a couch.

“Awesome. I have uses for you!”

This should have worried me, but I suspected I might be involved in an adventure if I followed this woman, so I shook my head and followed. Helping someone move a couch out of her ex-boyfriend’s apartment isnt’ even an adventure while high, but I did get some half-decent Chinese food out of it (I was less high and more hungry by the time we finished), and she did drive me back to my dorm by about four am, so it worked out pretty well. I never saw that girl again, and I don’t remember what her name is, but she shouldn’t take that personally, as I don’t remember much of anything anymore.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

siftlike
Pamela said she was lower now, closer to the earth, rooted down into the loam, and I nodded. These calms between storms, these lulls when her life is like everyone else’s, these are the days I cannot take, not knowing what to do when damage control isn’t called for. I know what to do for freakouts, for month-long panic attacks, for jails and juries and graves, but being an adult is a black box I can’t seem to open. Pamela kept talking about insurance difficulties, and I kept nodding, as that’s about all I was good for until the next catastrophe.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

sick in the mouth
The only way I can remember anything is by writing about it, and whenever I write about something I polish it a bit, switch things around, and tell preposterous lies. Now, when I go back and read such things, everything I want to pretend actually happened is true and everything I want to pretend never happened isn’t. Nobody ever has to cop to anything because there’s a certain ambiguity about everything, particularly as the only people who would ever call me on it either would never know the strict literal truth or else will no longer speak to me.

I suspect you have to live most of your life in your head for this plan to work.

1992.

“That’s exactly the sort of thing I mean, you call someone a whore and obviously that’s not, it’s not a nice thing or not nice I mean that’s derogatory, right, but you call someone a pimp and it’s like some kinda compliment. But that’s all backwards and even opposite of how that should go, because a pimp, that’s totally worse, and that’s the kind of thing I mean when I say you’re a pimp.” “What?” “I read that zine you do, I’m probably the only person who reads that thing but I read it and I read what you wrote about me. What the fuck?” “You? That’s not about you. That’s a totally different thing.” “The fuck it is! You think just because you changed the name from Heather to whatever it was that somehow I wouldn’t see through your elaborate ruse, I mean, that’s totally about me and you didn’t even tell me about it and that’s pretty fucked up. I mean you’re a pimp in, like, you take all these personal things and you go peddle your apples to fucking whoever and that’s supposed to be okay because you’re a *writer*, oooooh.” “Okay, wait, wait. First, I state again for the record that none of that is about you, and if there’s a couple little details that are kinda similar it’s only so I can give the rest of it a kind of um bit of reality of what really happened, like details you make people believe it because it happened.” “Little details? That whole story about when I was eight with that guy, that whole thing, you even used like the way I talked about it and just put it in your stupid story that didn’t even make sense, with your fucking dramatic turning around like that even makes sense.” “Second, I can’t just draw a line in the sand and say okay, all these things are things I can’t write about because they happened with other people and god fucking forbid I should ever mention anything even remotely similar to things that actually took place and not only that but I *know* you read Angel of Mercy because we talked about it before and you said you read it and if I remember right you said you read it before you even met me over at John’s that one time.” “You dick! I met you in Rhetoric before I met you at John’s and I bet if you wrote that in some fucking story you’d remember that. I’m so sick of your bullshit.” “But what you don’t even appreciate or understand is whether you believe it or not I actually change *everything* in those stories and even when I include things they’re so changed that it’s like, like I think of it like on top of my memories? Like an imprint? And so thinking I’d remember something because I wrote it in a story is ridiculous because I’d remember the story and then I would remember everything wrong.” “You mean like us.” “FUCK! FUCK! I said I was sorry about the fucking story and I’m fucking sorry and fuck.” “Story? You and I went out twice, the one time after that art class when we got lunch and the one time when you stayed over at my dorm room and we were supposed to study for that test but we went to that stupid party and you didn’t even try to kiss me so I went to sleep and then that next week you called me up all fucked up on LSD and were creepy and I gave the phone to someone else and then you never called me again.” “What?” “That’s what actually happened, and all this invented history about us and how we went out that semester that you wrote as a story and then wrote as another story and then you made yourself think it was mostly true, not totally true because you wouldn’t believe that but more true than the truth because with you the truth is always bullshit.” “Okay, stop. Stop talking for a second.” “And it wasn’t just that one thing, it’s everything, you tricked yourself into thinking all that shit with Jenna was different and so you felt bad about pimping memories that weren’t even real and you’d talk to her and there’s the dissonance because it’s like you’re reading off a different script. And just everything. You fucking spectator.” “I’m not talking about this any more. I’m done listening.” “And we’re actual real people. I mean you’ll never see me again but I’m a real person and I don’t need this shit. And the real people who are actually still in your life? Did you ever think about how uncomfortable and just awful that must be, to have someone take the things you said to them and did with them and then not only change everything around but then pretend like that’s how it really happened? “I’m walking out the door. I’m out in the hallway. I’m almost at the stairs.” “This is why you’re so scared all the time! This is why you can’t sleep! This is why you feel so alone all the time! Everything’s a do-over until there’s nothing left to do over! You’re thirtyone years old and you can’t do this anymore!” “Then Heather said ‘But you’re just being clever. Like in that book.’” “But you’re just — stop it!” “And then Heather said ‘Because you can say anything you want. A writer can say anything they want and it’s okay because it’s not real.’” “Because you can say no you can’t say anything, I mean you can but it’s not like it doesn’t, there’s meanings and the audience and people know what you say and it’s okay because it’s not real.” “And then Darren made a smartassed comment about too much writer’s workshop and that’s as close to a real ending as he ever gets.” “Something like that.” “Mostly. Kinda. It’s ambiguous like that.”
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

shabu-gomi 01 04
I told myself I wouldn’t do it. Not for the guilt of it, not for the fear that I would not be able to stop, not for the nervous dread of the things I might do once I did it, but because I was just relearning how to write, to put word after word, and if the past were any indicator, doing this would push too hard, a blur of fingers and keys, endless pages of unreadable speed text. I would have to start again at nothing, and it could be another half-year of staring at the screen, dead inside, waiting to start. What you don’t know, what you cannot possibly understand unless you have been the same, is that it isn’t the quality of the words, it’s the feeling that got me started, the effortless rush of it, page after page, an open channel. It has been so hard, these pathetic therapy-paragraphs, these fumblings, working out the mechanics, and maybe if I could just feel it again, just once, it would come back to me forever, and I would stop feeling so bad all the time. Maybe. I told myself I wouldn’t do it, but I did it anyway.

The sons stood by the bedside and watched their mother struggle for breath, the scraps left of her heart pushing at her paper-thin skin. She hadn’t spoken in six years, and the family waited for change, searched for extreme cures, some miracle breakthrough to open the door to her, hidden behind the white wall of her coma. They listened for the slightest clue in her breath as they talked to her in habitual comforts, more confessional than they had ever been when she spoke and walked and lived. There was nothing of her but silence, silence and emptied hope and this shell which waited to end. Today was the day, the DNR day, the day the machines shut down. They stood by the bedside and expected, they didn’t know what, some movement signifying her transfer, nothing painful, just a shudder. They would never have known the moment, were it not for the cardiac beep losing its cadence, extended into drone. She had always been small, even when the brothers were just boys, but this was the smallest of her, looking back as the doctor escorted them from the room, so small they knew she couldn’t hear them as they said goodbye.

The three doctors waited to be sure the sons had left the floor, going to tell the family and make arrangements, the body to be delivered to the mortuary in three hours. The tallest of the doctors felt the hum of his pager on his hip and knew it was clear. The doors were locked and the second surgeon, the one who smelled of lilac, turned the machine from play to monitor, and the beat of the mother’s heart returned to the screen, the beep returned to the room. The third surgeon, who was without any identifying characteristics whatsoever, brought the knives and the recording device beside the bed. It was not possible for any of the surgeons to intone the calls, and so a recording was used, tested years back for gramatical and tonal accuracy. This process was difficult enough without potentially flawed calls. The mother was injected with more painkiller than was necessary, enough that it would kill her, in time, but she would not live that long. The surgeons had been given pardon by certain agents of the transfer to revitalize the dead, to put the breath and light back into the body, to perform miracles of tissue and blood. To do this, the revitalization technicians had informed the surgeons, others must take the place of the rerisen, as there are balances beyond simple comprehension, and specific methods for such exchanges. This is what the knives are for, the calls, the sacrifice of those who should be dead so that others may live. The surgeon who smells of lilac picks up the first blace, and feels it vibrate in her hand as it centers over what remains of the mother’s heart. The calls, a high-pitched squeal of a voice spoken through inhalation, creates a heat in the body, a light coming from the skin, and the tall surgeon lifts his blade above the heart, and the call becomes a drone, harmonics hung in the air, and the surgeon who cannot be identified lifts its blade and holds it over the mother’s heart. The mother is, and a moment later is not. Something pulls the light from the room, and the flourescent light returns, but the rest of it is gone, taken to the transfer. The surgeon who cannot be identified removes the knives and takes them to be cleaned and stored, and the surgeon who smells of lilac cleans and closes the wounds, and the tall surgeon replaced the tape recorder and other equipment. He has done this the fewest times, and perhaps is still nervous, still uncomfortable, and perhaps it is that discomfort which causes him to realize someone else is in the room, and he turns, and sees the glint of a camera lens through a hole bored in the wall, a glint replaced by darkness as the camera is swallowed into the wall. Something has gone horribly wrong, and the tall surgeon pulls air deep into his lungs and makes the call, the other call, the call all the butcher-surgeons can make, the call of distress.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

seventh devil dub
I woke up in the back of the van, which we had left running all night so as not to freeze. I tried to look outside but the windows were frosted over, so I opened the door and peeked out at a parking lot tucked in the center of a block of downtown businesses, everything in snow, Sunday-empty. I quickly shut the door and turned to look at Sarah, up in the driver’s seat, blowing smoke at the windshield. There is no place where Sarah is as happy as behind the wheel of her van, going anywhere, doesn’t matter. We’d been sitting here for two days and she was getting nervous, sleeping less, and she never really slept much. During the night I’d decided we couldn’t wait around any longer; we’d hang out until eight, go to the truck plaza, get some breakfast and showers and head north up 28. If it were just about me, I’d wait forever for Pamela, but I’m trying to think more about other people this year, and there’s too much left to do.

“How long you been up?” I asked Sarah.

“Not long. Half an hour. I’m gonna run around the corner and get coffee.”

“Actually let’s just go. We’ll hit Cedargreen on the way out.”

“Yeaaaaaah, now that’s what I’m talking about. Pancakes and sausage and the open road.”

“Fucking a. I’m gonna piss real quick, first.”

“Take your time. I gotta scrape the windows.”

Back a year ago, when I moved into Sarah’s van, I would have offered to do that, at least to help, but now I know better. The van is hers, and I’m not to fuck with anything, as I am ignorant to its inner wisdom. Which was okay by me. I ran over to the dumpsters by the print shop and was just starting to take care of the morning business when I saw headlights pull in the far alley. I crouched down, causing myself an awful pain, but I didn’t care, as I knew the plates, knew who it was.

It had been two years since I had seen Pamela Bambelam and just to see part of her face in profile from a good fifty yards away was enough to stop me dead. I’ve never told her I still love her, but she has to know, every time she picks up the phone she has to hear it in my voice, even now that I’ve fallen off the earth. Now more than ever.

I almost forgot to zip up my pants before I walk to her, watching as she got out of the car, looking at the van, looking at me, running toward me.

Eventually I will have to tell her everything, and she will never speak to me again, but I wasn’t thinking about that as she threw her arms around me. I wasn’t thinking about anything, which is another way of saying I was happy.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

the self-cleaning gallows
The children stink, Martha, I don’t care what it is you say of how they’re just active, they’re not active they sit there like toads and shovel that shit into their mouths and do you I caught them playing with the thermostat? For fuck’s sake, I don’t let the wife touch the thermostat, you think I’m gonna let your little schweinkindern mess with the and not only that but they spit, I tell you, they literally and deliberately spit on the floor, like some sort of oh I mean you’re a friend of mine but I will feed those children insecticide if they don’t learn how to behave. I mean this is my job, and I know you don’t think much of it, but if I have models over to shoot well it’s not like I can just have your little filthy children spitting ketchup at the wall, it destroys the whole ambience, and you need a little ambience to do this, it’s glamour is what it is and I don’t care what you call it, but if they spill pop on the dildoes well now obviously that’s going to be a problem and I’ve had three cancel already and who even knows what I’ll have to do to bring them back, endless hours of handholding and bolstering to get them in front of the camera and I’ll have you know I don’t feed them drugs I just convince them, you’re new in town you can start all over, you can be anyone, but no that’s not right when there’s those beastily fucking children asking the girls if thee’ve been naughty and they’re going to hell and that gag makes them look fat and I know you told them to say that. This is a studio, for god’s sake, not some sort of kindergarten and I know you can’t leave them alone and you’re at the restaurant all night but no don’t say that there are other people and A CAMERA IS NOT A TOY and that’s it, I’m sorry, you’re gonna have to go.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

seedling
“And everybody went a little mad.”

Every story I hear from family and friends seems to have a point in which there is some sort of breakdown of common civility and decency and logic, bound on both sides by desperate attempts to avoid it and desperate attempts to rebuild from it. It’s as if tornadoes were a daily occurence, the sort of thing one gets used to, as one gets used to anything, given time. Yet I’ve spent my whole life mostly in my head, walking small circles in my room while the rest of the world grew older and loved and responsible, and in that distance certain things seemed clear, the way the hills outside town take the form of a giant’s skull from the air, and I know now that the madness we all attract is not within us, but an exterior madness, drifting and waiting for us to let it in.

Her soul fell from her body and stained the floor before her like a shadow; she had gone mad, as in all the stories, but would not settle, would not work it from her muscle and skin, and so he took a gun to her. They tell this story to each other, and nod, quietly, ajust as they did when her sister climbed into the thresher. They play at reson with copper-bitter homilies, which is all they need to send off his guilt, what could he do, she’d gone mad. He stands on the porch now and surveys the schoolgirls while her bones spin like turbines deep in the earth, and I see her and him and the whole of the town, and softer, dimmer, I see the fluid of the mad spill out between them, as real as water and air and soil, and it poisons us, and cripples us, until there is not one of us left. I adapt its traits, and hide inside the light, and it gives up all its secrets, and I tell myself this knowledge provides me an advantage, so that like some gordian knot one decisive act could free this town, but as I try to explain this to the police before me, on the other side of his opened body, I realize I don’t have the words at all, except to say what we all know, which is that I’ve gone a little mad.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

second and third promises
The first time I saw a girl naked I was in the fourth grade and Carolyn was showing me her rash, a rash in the shape of Mickey Mouse. In hindsight, I should have been suspicious, and when she later accidentally admitted that it was only due to creative use of peanut oil (to which she was allergic) and a Disney cookie-cutter that such a rash existed, there in the center of her chest, but I was too busy to be suspicious trying to come to terms with what was, in a literal sense, too much information, so that it was only later, sitting in detention after being caught (due to snitchery on the part of one Jenny Hoyt which I swore to never forgive, but did, years later, drunk on lime vodka, up in a tree, in the middle of winter, trying to figure out how to take off my pants without breaking my fool neck) and awaiting a talking-to from my parents (who had no contingency plan for such an event, other than some sort of advice about allergies) that I realized the importance of such an event: some girl made herself sick as a pretext for taking off her clothes in front of me. I must be the greatest man of all time! I thought, and beamed a smile so obvious it got me another half-hour of detention.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

sarah
1997.

It was about three months since I moved into the trailer and I was working for Servicemaster, doing janitorial, but not the kinda janitorial I like, where you’re basically the only one working and you buff floors for a few hours. This is where you’re on a five-man crew and the boss drives you around in the van to a bunch of different places and you’re always go go go and have to wear the company shirt like a dick. I was gonna quit, but I was thinking about running off to California so I figured I’d put in a couple more weeks. We started working a new place which wasn’t very big, so it was an extra hour a night, kinda out by the big Bosnian trailer court. It turns out this place was an Operation Rescue-type deal, full of antiabortion literature, at which point I thought fuck it, I’m not coming back to work again, and not only that but I’m gonna steal some shit while I’m here. I set a small trash bag inside the big plastic trashcan, up along the side, and while I do all the office trash I drop a few things in the little bag, some cds I figure I can sample, some office supplies, nothing heavy. Then in one of the storage rooms I see these seven pickle jars with little fetuses in ‘em, and my brain says just leave it alone, this is the last thing you need, don’t fuck around, but the next thing I know I have one of the jars in the trash bag. I close up the little bag, finish trash, then go out to the dumpster and dump the trash, setting the little bag right up along the inside of the dumpster. We’re back at Servicemaster at four am and I drive out and hit the dumpster and drive down a few blocks to a closed gas station, where I check the bag in the parking lot, and there it is, this little almost-baby, fingers and all.

The next day I didn’t show up to work. I guess I was fired. I did get my last check, but I didn’t go to California. Instead I did a lot of writing in my room while everyone else was out and decided to name the fetus Sarah, and I started talking to her the way you talk to a plant. I started having daydreams about where the antiabortion people would get hold of a bunch of fetuses. Eventually I decided I couldn’t keep Sarah, I had to bury her, and not just out in some field but a proper burial. There’s a small little graveyard out in the sticks off a dirt road where I’ve never seen anybody go, and I felt kinda bad that Sarah wouldn’t have anybody to visit her, but then I thought okay, she didn’t have a birthday so we’ll pretend today is her birthday, and I’ll come out on her birthday and hang out with her. That night I snuck into the little graveyard and I buried Sarah away from the other graves, on the far side of an oak tree so I would always know where she was.

I visited her every year except for the year I lived in Austin, when I had to wait until Christmas, but that seemed okay. I thought I did a good thing, and I felt good about it, and it didn’t seem as weird as it seems now that I’m actually writing about it.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

rejected twilight zone episodes (one)
“Wow! This is easily the most delicious gum I’ve ever had! Where did you get it?”

“Get it? I don’t have any gum. What are you talking about?”

“This wonderful gum you gave me! You said it was called King James Super Gum.”

“There’s no such thing as King James Super Gum!”

“NOOOOOOOOOOO!”
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

prowl
I was walking to the office. I was going to get the mail, and to make a phone call I didn’t want to make from my phone. I saw a white cop SUV prowl up the block, the spotlight honed in on a trailer with all lights out, and the SUV slowed to a stop, blocking the driveway, and that’s when i heard the first shot. I’ve heard about three or four gunfights since I moved in, in the dark, early in the morning, but this was the first time I had ever seen one, and so I ran up toward the SUV to get a better look. I don’t understand why I did this, except that I was writing a book then, and one of the scenes was like this, and I knew if I could see it all, could sift out the hidden telling details, the scene would work. Between the trailer and the garage was a narrow alley, not an alley, there’s a word for it. It sounds like throughfaire, but that’s not it. That’s where the guy was, hidden behind a bush, and I saw the muzzle flash as his shot hit the SUV, which was reinforced so that the paint chipped off in a lopsided circle, and some sort of pink plastic had shattered but not given up the gunmetal steel beneath. The driving cop slumped down low in his seat, so that I thought he had been hit, but he took two shots into the not-alley, one hitting the garage and splintering the wood, the other catching the gunman somewhere, I couldn’t see, as the spotlight had yanked up toward the sky as the driver dropped down. The cop riding shotgun jumped out and hid behind the front tires, taking a shot around the grill, which put down the gunman, and then turned around to face me, and screamed something like “get on the ground”, or maybe just “on the ground”, and I asked him what was happening, and was going to walk closer to see him, to find out if there was something in his features I would need to know, but my body gave itself up and I fell toward the pavement.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

your preserved ovaries

#
Hits
Search String

1
390
28.18%
the light which failed to revive her

[she lost her breath of the first day of winter, fresh-frozen sidewalks
which shone in the sun, still not the cold that hurts in your lungs but
the cold where snow packed in your palms gets a little wet and packs well
for snowballs, she had her laundry in neatly folded squares stacked in her
basket then spilling as her hands rushed to her mouth as though they
could push the breath back into her as all of it caught up to her the last
piece of some new history now fitted away in her head so that even the
light seemed manipulative now, just another witness to despise her weakest
moments, the light which failed to revive her as light let slip the
blackness hid behind it]


2
310
21.18%
drowned in green breast-milk

[i was then a member of an operation rescue splinter group which attempted
to complete through marketing and merchandising what advertisments and
rifle fire had so far let slide, I was building fetus dolls with
Keene-wide eyes and little articulated hands which could fight off suction
tubes and scrapers, the details rubbed away with cartoon-like
indeterminacy of features so that each of them could be anyone, saved from
imagined she-devil monsters who would leave them in dumpsters at the rest
stop, drowned in green breast-milk and half-digested burger king she
couldn't keep down when she had seen what she had done, i was an artist
then, i made a difference then]

3
18
1.09%
that six am telephone call when i first heard

[missing]

(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

practice
There are some morening where, after waking, I cannot find my glasses. I usually leave them on my bedside table, next to the lamp, where I set them after finishing reading and turning out the light, and so my hand instinctively reaches there when I wake, but on some mornings, like this morning, there is nothing there. Sometimes they are on the computer desk, from when I fell asleep watching IRC scroll by. Other times they are on the bookshelf at the foot of my bed, whcih is a somewhat illogical place to put them, but it’s hardly beyond me to do illogical things. Other times I’ll find them under my bed, or on the bathroom sink, or atop the dryer, or in the mailbox, or stuck in a tree. My eyesight is very poor, so looking for my glasses generally takes on a very Mr. Magoo quality; squeezing my face into corners and squinting hard, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and stumbling around in the zombified and useless state where I always spend the first couple hours after waking. This used to bother and scare me a little when I was younger. Now I consider it practice for when I grow old.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

photographs of bodies
There was no depth of field, and no sense of distance. It could have been a small bedroom or an emptied office. The minor telling details, placement of outlets, lighting, number of switches, all this was removed, all the trim and carpet, nothing but the minimum which still constitutes a room. The door must have been behind the camera, or else perhaps there was no door at all. The light some bright flash, nothing ambient, the room in total black before and after the shot. They looked like trapped animals, the reflection in the eyes like raccoons at the side of the highway. Too quick to turn, to see the light, they appear from the side, hands hidden in something that I can’t identify, something dark and of two parts. I didn’t get a good look. I was too busy focusing on the faces, the skulls imploded, the faces like the bottom of a bowl. It must have been a trick of the light, a bit of digital editing, it couldn’t really be like that.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

over forever
Q: Where were you when you realized no one would ever be in love with you?

MR, 25, programmer: A year ago. I was at home watching TV, I don’t remember what, some ambient late-night cable movie, and I tried to think about movies I really liked, and I couldn’t really think of any. I mean, there were some movies that I knew were classics and that I would mention to impress people, and there were some movies that were somehow interesting in a way that I would structurally consider them from time to time, and there were movies that I knew were childhood touchstones for most of my friends, but I didn’t really like any of these movies, they were just interchangable pieces of my social environment. And as I thought about it, music was like that too, and the rugby team I was on, and just everything in my life, none of it stuck to me, it was all just pretexts for conversations. And I went through that thing, that “Who am I?” thing, and what I came up with is there’s just not much to me at all. I’m entirely on the surface, and even that lacks texture. So if that’s the case, how can anybody ever really be in love with me?

JO, 42, package delivery: I was thirty-eight at the time, and was happy to see the accumulation of wear and damage that so many of the people I used to know were trying so hard to hide. Face-lines, old scars, a slight palsied tremble in my hands from time to time collectively gave my words a specific heft that I attribute to my uncles, giants among men, meth merchants and tired farmers feared by the world as men without doubt, no end to the strength of their resolve. All that shit-work, all that rehab, all that solitary December meditation had scrubbed me clean of the weakness of indecision and appeal for change and desire for the things I could not put my hands upon. People who spoke to me took on an increased seriousness, held in the nervous habit of small talk. I was thirty-eight, and changed entirely in my essence, which was all I ever wanted.

It was February then, and the heater had killed in the night; the floor was so cold it stung like needles against my bare feet. The thermal couple had burned out, as it did a couple times a year ever since I moved in, so I went down to the basement where the pre-dawn light couldn’t get past the snow piled up over the ground-level windows and walked down the stairs by memory, walking to the switch on the far wall (a feat of prior-owner stupidity that I kept reminding myself to fix) when I heard something move. I figured boxes had shifted, or maybe fallen a little, but as I took another step I heard a specific sound, the sound of something moving away, against the wall. Something or someone. It was too early and cold to think of being afraid, this was just another small problem to be dealt with, so I kept walking toward the switch while keeping my upper body turned toward the sound, reaching out with my left hand to find and flip the hundred-watt bulbs on, but the lights didn’t come on. I turned the switch off and on again, once, and still there was no light, and I thought to myself “Well, that’s it, this is how it’s going to happen.”

I heard her voice then, and I knew it bone-deep but couldn’t immediately place the sound of her to her name as she said “I didn’t think you’d mind if I slept down here. I promise not to be weird.” I hadn’t seen her since we split up, and that had been three years ago when she disappeared with some other guy while I was at Windward House, after which I never thought I’d see her again. Her name was Cheryl, and for a couple years I thought she was in love with me, and now she was living in my basement, eating out of my fridge while I slept, learning all about my new life, the life I thought was so far away from everything that happened before. I instantly felt very tired, and wanted to go back to sleep, and I told Cheryl that she could come upstairs and sleep on the couch, which she did, and after a while she just kinda officially moved back in. We had sex once, just because it seemed inevitable, and since then she sleeps in my bed, staring at me in the dark.

I don’t feel strong anymore, or serious. I feel like someone’s always laughing at me, like I’m a joke to everyone who knows how my life is now. People stop by, sometimes, and they see this woman who lives her own small life inside my house, almost entirely seperate from mine, and they wonder, they speculate, they gossip. I guess that’s just one more thing I won’t have to worry about anymore.

LS, 61, retired: Oh, but I always knew. When you’re like this, you just know, you don’t expect too much. You can be different and it’s okay, but then on the other hand sometimes it’s too different, and when that’s the case you…it doesn’t work. Oh, not that I didn’t try or nothing, but you know. You know how it is.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

other face
It is one of our collective shortcomings that we equate simple eloquence with sincerity, that to speak of a subject in such a way that its nature is instantly clear to the listener, through the simplest and most direct means possible, that such a person truly knows a subject, while those who stammer and spit at a subject feign knowledge, playing dress-up in someone else’s ideas. This is one of the most diabolical weapons of the corpse, as it is at one’s worst, when one is desperate to make anyone understand what is happening, why it is so difficult to complete even the most minor of tasks, that exhaustion and frustration and confusion get at the throat, choking off the words, leaving the listener with nothing but the vaguest outline of impotent rage. The words will fail you when you need them, every concept falling apart in your hands, so much dead telephone hum and deleted email, until everyone decides there is nothing left to do with you, no means of translating all these false starts into something even close to meaning, and if they do not leave they will remain simply as a mute witness, watching for some short glimpse of that other face you once wore.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

on haggling
I’ve never been able to get too hopped up on Columbus day pro or con, as all it’s ever menat to me was half-off sales at Carlo’s Insanity Furniture, and I can’t even remember the last time I bought furniture for myself except for all the Pirateland surplus I bought up when they went out of business, so that now everything in my apartment is set up for swashbuckling and walking the plank, though my landlord frowns on my use of the plank, as those who walk it end up in his compost heap. My mom, however, was like member number one of the Carlo’s Insanity Furniture discount buyer’s club, so every Columbus day her and I were down there (my dad had the good sense to start drinking heavily just after the beginning of October) sifting through the Remainders room, apparenlty off-limits to “regular customers”, while my mom did math in her head and tried to figure if it would be possible to get a sofa for less than ten dollars. Carlo, who did all his math via an abacus-armed autistic mute he met “while inside”, he’d whisper to my mom, who loved all this gray-market nonsense, and while he’d love to give my mom a deal (among other things), Malthus the Memory Magician brought the hammer down and fifty bucks was the best he could do, at which point Malthus would cross his arms across his chest sternly and glare at my mother as though his children would now go hungry to satisfy her endless lust for discount furniture. My mom loved this, but I cared not for sofa haggling, and Carlo’s Insanity Furniture was so far down in the haggling district that even buying a dime’s worth of gum was an hour-long process, so I’d stand by the chain-link fence and throw rocks at a nasty shovel-headed dog chained behind Vaccuum Repair Paradise for no better rason than a child’s natural tendency to goad certain death until my mother grabbed me by my collar and pulled me to the car, where Carlo and Malthus fought physics and common sense by trying to load my mom’s new thirty-dollar sofa (my mother, obviously, was no spring chicken when it came to negotiating, and a promise of highballs with Carlo later in the week probably didn’t hurt) into her ‘58 Fairlane. So yeah, nuts to Columbus day, that’s what I say.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

ola
My friend Michelle has a magic dress she wears on memorable occasions, not because it’s particularly stunning, but because it holds odors particularly well, which is important as she never washes it. Michelle always thought it was a cruel biological trick that humans shed skin, as skin is the closest thing she has to memory. “Everything I ever touched should be immediately apparent across my fingertips,” she says, “but it always fades and disappears, and that’s why I have a magic dress.”

I told her that the magic dress seemed less than ideal, as powerful odors would block out subtler scents, the delicate overpowered by the oppressive, and she gave me a sideways glance. “That’s how everything is with memory. Isn’t it?”

I thought about how trivial and incidental all my memories are, like misshot photographs of empty sky and blurred treelines, and I thought maybe the magic dress truly is a better form of memory, and nodded approval as I wired up the new preamp.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

notice of events
I was living in the Black Hawk that summer, constantly on the pay phone in the lobby with my stack of stolen phone cards so that the waitresses in the cafe across the lobby thought I was a drug dealer, until the younger one asked, and I stared at her until she went back to work. My phone time was spent trying to convince this girl that she was in love with me, her affection obvious to everyone but her, and that in time she would learn not to want the things she knew I could not give her. I felt like I was approaching a breakthrough in September when I ran out of phone cards and money on the same day. I ended up stealing ten bucks worth of change from a drunk Santa a few days later, but by that I was living in the men’s shelter, and you gotta have stones the size of Utah to convince a girl she’s secretly in love with you when you sleep on a cot in what once was a gymnasium back when girls couldn’t wear slacks to school. I could still afford to send letters, or at least postcards, but this was one of those postliterate girls who appreciated the time and effort of a letter, in theory, but at the end of the day letters are kinda a cornball tactic. However, there was a fire sale at the Hallmark store, and for three dollars I bought a hundred of those greeting cards with little two-bit samplers in ‘em, so you could record yourself saying “Happy Birthday, Grandma!” or whatever, and so I recorded everything I had to say to this girl, my whole gameplan, on three hundred talking cards. At the time I considered this an incredibly bold and romantic gesture, but in hindsight I realize I could have sent an audio tape for half the shipping cost. Long story short, to this day in the thrift store in the town where this girl lived (I don’t want to say the name, you might know her) there’s a huge stack of talking gift cards, each with my voice enunciating one of three hundred reasons why you already love me, whether you admit it or not.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

no one enters
She said there was an unused computer in the back room, and that maybe it would be fun if people went in and wrote a little, if they felt like it, and later we’d try to figure out who typed in each phrase, each story. Through the night, some unknown number of guests went to the keyboard and added their words, sometimes attempting to lift and gather the thread of what had come before, sometimes pouring out things which seemingly needed to be said, sometimes blankly wandering, trying to find some point of recapitulation. I read it later, printed it out, spent afternoon hours in empty rooms trying to pull apart who said what, which words she said, which words may have been meant for me. I was selfish that way. There is only meaning insofar as the words set forth a potential, a promise of some long-postponed connection. I took my pills and traced the words, and came up with nothing. That party was the last of us, the morning finding us aware of how little we had left between us, and our attempts to hide from the sun with blankets over the windows and chemicals to kill the king of sleep may have kept them safe, gathered in the kitchen making grilled cheese sandwiches, but I was happy to have the light hit me on the front porch as I closed the door behind me, happy to be finished, happy to have nothing left to say.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

noiseless (good works III)
a variation on a theme by allida

Breath is all I hear, now that the drone of the bedroom television becomes white noise, the end of the broadcast day, bundled up In blankets and quilts, the moonlight refracted by window frost, and like the radiator purring in the corner, I watch you breathe Out, your dreams floating and pooling across the ceiling, the stoplight newly turned on in fall giving them a diabolical glow, that light comes In and changes everything it touches, so that even the sweetest dream becomes catalyst for my fear, and my insomnia. Someday you will go Out and leave forever, tired of the lies, endless talk of how my cures for insomnia and depression will remake me as the man once reflected In your eyes, and kept in your heart, a love as tangible and true as the heat of your arm upon me, or the heat of your breath upon my skin, Out from lips I still remember, aching with the memory of your lips across my belly just just whispering, just waiting, just holding In every fear and doubt left dormant to grow and fester within you, touching the tip of half-dreams of all those other men, better men, Out in the world of lust and nobility and good works, a dream which distracts worse than my endless settling, my weakness, my greed to be Inside you on my own terms exclusively, never once content to take your gentle snoring as a hint, an excuse, a means of quietly staying Out of the trap I’ve set for you, as I gracelessly rest your mouth next to my ear or your thighs beneath my fingertips, and fall back In to the same stupid shit we keep saying we need to change, the night sweat melting into my hair as I stare at the celiling, wanting to walk Out out of this, out of us, out of everything, and so I kiss your neck, melding scents with the dry winter air, and I take it all In for the last time, working up the words, maybe I won’t be so sad on my own.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

never (two)
After a close-fought campaign filled with exchanged favors and broken promises my uncle Grant was made Commissioner of Sorrows and pulled down six bills a year gauging the loss and agony of all those who came before his car-wide desk, seeking medals and rememberance portraits to display to family members and other strangers to excuse all the poor manners, all the listless frustration and empty days too sick to get up from the couch. “Look upon my wrist-wounds and jars of tears and despair!” they would say, throats raw from wailing, desperate for a dispensation, a pittance of funds granted by the state to those whose condition precludes gainful employment and compassion for others. It is a profession like any other, with due-paying unions and magazines only available by subscription, techniques for working the crowd, making every witness feel personally responsible for tragedies beyond comprehension. My uncle was born without a heart and had no patience for theatrics, sorrow was a quantifiable sum of distinct elements, there was no fudging the numbers in his court. After thirty years of sifting the suffering from the simply sad Grant took an early retirement and invested his pension in a twentytwo year old trophy wife, only survivor of a family reunion gas explosion, and last I heard the two of them are on some beach in Cancun, bumming out tourists.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

more dread, terror
Every time someone prays for you, a satellite records it onto half-inch tape. When you get to heaven, that tape is unspooled, and it is measured against a tree. If your tape is long enough, you are allowed to enter heaven. You then have your stomach pumped, as it is not permissable to carry material from the earth-world into heaven, and all the hair on your body is removed by swarms of unbaptized children. The gland in your neck which controls the fear impulse is also removed, which you can keep if you like. A series of statues demonstrates the internal process by which your gastric system seals itself up and is dissolved into the bloodstream. A walking person shows you photographs of yourself with all your different outfits, and you are asked to choose which looked the best, and that is what you wear for the remainder of eternity. A crawling person will open your fontanelle and pull what looks like a cord of clotted meat from your skull: this is your memories, and as the material leaves, you may have flashes of things which happened back on the earth-world, but soon they will be gone, and you will feel something akin to ephedrine and air conditioning. You will be given a heaven-name, which is simply a formality, and then the kingdom will open unto you, and you will step inside.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

mister racecar
Seth and Dave(1) though it would be a good way to meet new ladyfriends if they opened up a dance club and advertised by hosting a DANCE PARTY show on cable access every Friday morning. Dave(1) finally worked his way through a messy divorce and somehow ended up with about nine square feet of warehouse space in the deal, and Seth stole thirty pounds of silver glitter from the dumpster behind the costume shop, which basically meant they already had about sixty percent of the job done. Seth asked if he could borrow my mixer and some speakers and I asked if I could dj and he said no, but I still owe Seth some money so I wasn’t really in a position to be all persnickety. The local cable access channel lets you rent equipment the police confiscated from god only knows what kinda horrible scene and they’ll bring the hammer down if you try to pawn it, which was fine by Seth and Dave(1), who spent the day rigging a glitter fan and practicing their best Club MTV upskirt zooms on a mannequin they found behind the warehouse dressed in a garbage bag. Somehow between the nausea-inducing cable access show and the difficult (at best) musical tastes of Seth and Dave(1) it was assumed this was actually some kinda artnik hipster scene and soon enough every weekend the place reached capacity (five scenesters, six if they’re bulimic) and turned enough profit to let Seth and Dave(1) quit their teaching jobs, which means it’s time for those suckers to give me back my mixer.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

millstones
2004.

On the last night I worked at the graveyard I took the last of my LSD. I don’t know why I did this; I was saving it for a special occasion, but it seemed like I wouldn’t have any special occasions this year, so I thought I should make the most of my opportunity. By this time I worked three nights a week by myself, and this was one of those nights. I had one grave to dig, and after that I was night watchman until four am. I didn’t really want to run the backhoe while tripping, so I didn’t actually drop until the hole was dug, when all I had to do was clean up the sides a bit with my shovel, and after that I sat down and rested for a little while. When I climbed out of the hole I scared the holy hell out of a gaggle of drunk mall goths who ran as fast as their clunky platform boots would carry them. In reality, that’s where that confrontation ended, but in my head I thought about what I’d say if they actually stayed and talked, and so I walked around and kept an eye on things and went over the conversation in my head, and I realized I wasn’t actually talking to a gang of faceless teenagers, I was talking to you, and so I started embellishing things, adding in state department necromancers and giant speakers in the trees droning ghul-repelling harmonics, and I thought about heading across the street to call you from the payphone at the gas station, but it was two am and I knew you’d be long asleep and the charm of my late-night calls wore off nearly a decade ago, so instead I walked around for a couple more hours, stuck in my memory.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

millions of miles
august 04.

I fell asleep at the library, after a couple days unable to get more than a hazy hour of sleep a night, and that was fine, people slept at the library all the time, but when I woke up I was no longer on the chair, but curled up beneath the desk where nobody could see me. As I tried to stand up, having to crawl out from under the desk, pushing the chair back to the wall, I realized this was no simple process; I could not have fallen under the desk into this position, I had to have been lucid enough to pull and twist my legs, pull in my shoulders, tuck my hands under my head like a little kid after recess. I rubbed my face, gathered my books and walked to the elevator, checking to make sure no one was watching me.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

medroxy progesterone acetate
I must have got mixed up. I must have got on the wrong bus, went home with the wrong girl, put on someone else’s clothes. I didn’t sleep for too long, I couldn’t sleep, was afraid of sleep, and saw all these icons on my desktop and each time I clicked on one I saw these paragraphs someone else had written, pretending to be me, mocking my style, or else it would be a picture of me with my eyes digitally scratched out and word bubbles reading I’M A FUCK coming out of my mouth. Many of these icons were for programs or documents I regularly used, so that I became afraid to click on anything, because I didn’t want to see these mock-files anymore. Worse yet, I went to read old email and found they had been edited and rearranged by someone else, this false-self. I started writing letters to people but the words that I typed were not the words that showed up on the screen. I swallowed a rock, and could feel it in my stomach, and heard it hit other things in my stomach, a piece of a beer can, a half of a pencil, a marble. I pulled up my fingernails, peeled back the skin of my arms, in search of this other person hidden in my body, but I couldn’t find anything. The sunlight is too bright now, I’ve been awake for too long, and I nail a quilt over the window and tape the edges so as to keep out all light, maintaining my crackhouse decor. Two cousins looking to milk what little money is left in the Iowa education budget put me in the back of a pickup and drive me around to elementary schools as a cautionary lesson as to the evils of inattention, poor hygiene and moral turpitude. I open my mouth to show them my black tongue and the children gasp, look away. I must have done some horrible thing when I was asleep, strangled some photogenic children or upscale young blonde girls, the sort of thing that makes CNN, loops of home video footage of Christmas parties and talent shows where the anchor makes sure to say my first, middle and last name each time he refers to me. I’m autographing last known photos by the side of a blacktop highway while the scabs on my scalp spontaneously open and my hair becomes matted, sticking to my head. No one was there to pick me up when they let me out and I had to move to the only three-block area that was more than two hundred yards from a school, where the man in the next room drives a screwdriver through the wall between his room and mine at night, hoping I’ll be on the other side and he can claim it was an accident. When I sleep dead people enter into my body and tell me about all the things they’ll never get to do — I’ll never get to spend the insurance money, they say, or I’ll never get to see the season finale of ER, or I’ll never get revenge on all the people who didn’t go to my funeral. I have new friends who have never looked another person in the eye and keep their hands over their genitals at all times, just in case. There is no door on the bathroom, so I have taken to taping up the same quilt I cover over the window to cover over the door, only sometimes when I get out of the shower the quilt is gone, and I have to go door to door, and that can be dangerous, so now I don’t take showers. There are protesters on the sidewalk outside the building most weekends and sometimes during the week, depending on what’s happening on the news. The man on the other side of the wall cut off a little piece of his finger, which he put on a bent paperclip he’s using as a hook, and having made a line from unwound yarn he fishes for stray cats and squirrels. Every morning I wake up with bruises, the sheets too tight around me, instantly alert and on my feet. Fat satan girls mock-worship me and tell me they’re trying to get pregnant so that they can sacrifice their babies to me, only nobody will fuck them. One morning I woke up and there were bugs crawling on my skin, actual real physical bugs, but I didn’t do anything because I was sure as soon as I went to scratch them away they would disappear and I would be the world’s worst stereotype. I must have made a mistake somewhere. I must have got on the wrong bus.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

lucifucked (one)
1993.

I had flunked out of school and moved back in with my family for a few months, unwilling to talk to anyone, not leaving my room, until Jezebel Decibel called and told me I should move into her house. I could stay in the basement and pay fifty bucks a month for rent and help her make her film. In the first book, there was a character named Seth, and that was basically me, so I moved in with Jezebel and her friend Loyola and Loyola’s boyfriend-dealer Frank Sinatra, who was actually hardly ever there (I don’ think he ever really knew I moved in, but he was pretty busy at that time) in the house out by Hickory Hill in Iowa City. This is when I started making puppets and learning what I called Attack Guitar and renting tons of weirdeyo videos from Tofu Hut and doing lots and lots and lots of LSD. Our goal while high was to weird each other out as much as possible, which was actually a lot of fun and made me feel better (and also helps explain my later aversion to “let’s sit in a circle and listen to hippie jam bands” experiences I’d have in Chicago a couple years later). We’d devise elaborate and malicious headtrips to play on unsuspecting high school kids who drove down from Waterloo looking to score, from playing horrible Japanese noise and heroin-damaged stoner dirges from speakers hidden behind the furniture to instant “What the fuck did you do?” interrogations to mock demonic possessions, and these poor protohippie “are you kind?” kids just broke, in which case we drove them to the bus station and shipped them back home, or else they got the joke and rolled with it and usually ended up hanging around, learning the tantra of fake blood and strobe lights.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

like showing a coin trick to a retarded child
I was on the lawn, and screaming at her that I would never bother her again if she would just come down and talk to me for five minutes, so I could tell her the secret phrase which would open her heart to me forever, and her two younger brothers were stepping outside, just barely in their teens and unsure of what to do but obviously not going to allow this creepy pervert to stand outside and yell at their sister, and rationally I knew that fighting with her little brothers wouldn’t help my case at all, so I said stop, okay, just stop for a minute and let me explain it to you guys, as though I could appeal to these two young gents on the higher level of logical reasoning and thus not only gain entry but also demonstrate that I could also be rational and reasonable apart from being a pederast and sodomite and whore, only they were too young to be swayed by my deductions and so what the fuck was I supposed to do, ma’am. Okay. Okay I see where you’re going with this and that, okay. Well but I didn’t know they were. They don’t look sick, they. Well shouldn’t they be in a hospital and maybe you shouldn’t get all like that with me, when, when you’re just letting them go out and really this is your fault anyway. I mean you never liked me just because I was older and well now I KNOW that eleven years is a big difference! You say that like I’m not aware that there was a difference but and I don’t mean to be rude here but you didn’t raise her very good. I mean you can say that guys like me prey on girls who have bad relationships with their dads, and well okay that’s partly true but none of that would happen if you and your husband had. Well. Well she never told me that. I mean she never talked about it at all. She’s a fucking drama queen, though, it’s not like you don’t know that, so I just thought that she was being, no I’m not saying that. Well and so he passed on and you still have your boys here at the house? Oh boo-hoo, you’re poor, give me a break already I saw that car and don’t give me any of well all right fine, then, I guess you just got an answer for everything, I’m just a fucking jerk because of. But. Yeah, but. Fucking christ, lady, you know good and fucking well that none of this is my fault.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

like chains
He was still, after the years, the tiniest bit sweet on her. Not enough to proposition, or even truly want to, but just enough to daydream while wandering around the grocery store, forgetting all the things he needed to buy, dreaming of some other life where everything was slightly different. This is a dream he cannot think too deeply on, as all the things which kept them apart in the real (children, location, money) were waiting behind the memories, so that every time he had this dream it was in the same house, empty the only time he was ever actually inside, but filled in the dream with endless small decorations and objects, the sun coming in through the front bay windows, as it was always late afternoon, and the windows were open and there was just a bit of a chill in the air. He was sitting at the kitchen table, at her right-hand side, and sometimes they would talk about any number of things, but sometimes they would just sit. Maybe their hands would brush against each other, or she would touch his left shoulder, and sometimes back in the real, standing in front of the soup, he would stop for a minute and let this illusory touch linger for a moment, let it sink into him, but that awareness would pull him back out and into his body, the small basket in his right hand, and he wouldn’t try to hold on the way he sometimes did when people who were no longer alive met him in his sleep, he would just let it go. He could tell you it wasn’t sadness, the feeling that remained once the daydream had ended, but beyond that he couldn’t describe it, couldn’t tell you what it meant, and it shook from him as soon as he reached for the can of chicken and wild rice. That’s the extent to which he was sweet on her.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

lightning
I used to have a t-shirt with Barney Rubble flipping the bird which I bought as a kid at the campground just above Flintstone Village, where I also played the best game of mini-golf of my entire life just after buying the shirt, and have since considered it lucky, or at least it was until this stupid girl that I didn’t even fuck walked out of a party wearing it, and I chased her down into the street and said hey, that’s my shirt, and she said well but I spilled wine on my shirt and I just wanted to wear it home and I promise I’ll bring it back tomorrow and I said no, but see the thing is that’s my lucky shirt and you can wear the shirt I got from my aunt on my last birthday with the racecar on it and she said but I’m already out in the street and why get all bent out of shape man it’s just a shirt and I said listen bitch, give me my fucking shirt and some clown-dick boy she was with does his whole peacemaker tough guy routine and the short story is she ran off with my shirt and I got kicked in the ribs. Most people, that would be the end of the story, but not me, I hold a grudge forever and also I’m crafty. I don’t want to give away the plan, as I might have to use it again, but it involved dressing up as a Wal-Mart employee, video cameras, a grapelling hook and dog poop, and the moral of the story is when you steal someone’s lucky shirt, that’s unlucky, as luck isn’t something you can steal.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

life in the well
The night Josef tried to get a hooker he said “If I stole all the change out of every take-a-penny leave-a-penny bowl in the city, I bet I’d have a hundred dollars”. He was up to about sixty-five cents when a clerk at a Guns N’ Likker out by the Evansdale county line pulled a gun on him and told him to put the eight cents back, as the bowl is for paying customers only. Terrified, Josef bought three Blow-Pops, which ate up the evening’s earnings, and didn’t even use the change in the bowl, and by the time we got back to the trailer Josef had forgotten all about the hooker.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

lambshead
I’m not going to a party, I told her. If you want to come over, I will make you some tea and we can sit in the bedroom and I’ll play you that new Devendra Banhart album I like and not talk very much and wrap up in quilts like we were coming down, well we can do that, but I’m not going to any party. We can hide a flask in your coat and get drunk and ride the bus around and buy some fireworks and shoot ‘em at each other out by the little airport, but I’m not going to any party. We can wait until the sun goes down and go out to the woods and climb up in the trees and scare the animals, but I’m not going to any party. If we hurry, we can go to the thrift store and buy a slide projector and some fire-damaged children’s toys from which to make puppets, but I’m not going to any party. I don’t do that any more.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

kyrgyz wisdom
Out on old 42 there’s this chicken plade, King Judah’s Chicken, nothing but chicken, you can’t even get a Pepsi there. Nobody mind because maybe Judah feed his chickens on the cocaine but I say you cannot stop eating until you’re too sick to chew. I mean I seen men die at the counter, fall right off the stool and somebody jump up and take his spot, ravenous for it. I can’t go so often now that I’m old and have to crawl out to the car and sleep it off, can’t run for three days, but still it’s times you can’t leave it alone, you know how it is. So I’m in there yesterday just on that cliff edge of wantin’ to throw up and in comes this guy, I mean teeth like a wolf, kinky white hair slicked back, shirt open and bouncin’ round in his chest hair he got a silver cross and a shrunken head. This guy steps up to the counter and asks for a three-piece, puts his money down, takes one bite and just cold as the grave says “I thought this was supposed to be good chicken?” and we all just mute up and stare and this guy drops the drumstick with one bite and some ratty lookin’ kid grabs it before it hits the floor and runs off to a corner, but this guy don’t even blink. Now here comes Judah, who I ain’t seen but once and he’s just a little fella but like they say he’ll crawl ya. Judah jumps up to the counter and then up again and grabs this guy by the hair and starts gnawin’ at his face, most disgusting thing I seen since the war, and I just hurl all over the place and stagger out the back and fall asleep in the weeds. Wake up and my wallet’s gone, keys gone, but I had a twenty I keep in my boot for drugs, and I walk right back into King Judah’s and standing on the bloodstained tile order half a bird. Can’t leave it alone.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

known
I have four brothers, and of the five of us, I was the only one who was never in a band. Perhaps it’s because I was second-youngest, and because my three older brothers were all so well-defined as musicians, that I felt following behind them would be the surest way to lose what little identity I had. I would tag along with them on school nights, pretend to help wire amps or sell t-shirts, and watch them build a noise which caught everyone unaware, every time, of how much music could change your life, even if only for a few minutes. I knew I couldn’t do that; I could pick up the guitar and play well enough to fool people at parties, but there was a sort of switch inside people which the right frequencies, the right words, the right volume could turn on, and open them to some greater thing, and while I knew what that felt like, I had no idea how to reach that point. I knew I never would.

If I did not join a band, I did not know what else to do. I probably could play football, technically, but it didn’t much grab me, and I wasn’t going to become a drama geek, and I could never get my head around the idea of a car as being anything more than a way of getting from place to place. I tried being a genius, but of the two types of genius I was aware of (the endlessly-working genius, and the gifted from birth genius), I knew I was neither. The closest I ever came was a short-lived fad of wearing a lab coat to school and cackling like a sleep-deped muppet. I started to see the rest of my life as being fundamentally similar to all that had come before. I would be a face in the crowd, that kid at the party no one knew well enough to dislike. Besides, everyone knew I could get them into shows, and I could always get booze, and that’s all it takes to be quasi-popular in high school.

I decided, then, to become a snakecharmer. I would initially perform at parties, and open for local bands, playing primarily for name rocognition and beer. Mostly beer. Since I had no competition, I knew that the only hard part was getting people into it, so before I even had my first escape planned I started working on my banter. I knew I didn’t want to do some kinda retro trip, and I knew I didn’t have a lot of money for a proper cobra, so I initially tried to build a fake snake out of springs and socks, but this resulted in a very poor performance concluding with a whiskey bottle to the right temple. There was no question that I would need a real snake, and that snake had to really be deadly in order to the performance to work. Luckily, I knew a guy who knew a guy who worked for animal control.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

kill every living thing on this earth
[04.02]

Pamela showed up on my doorstep around three that afternoon, and seeing her there in the sunlight I had a half-second joy that she had driven all the way down here just to see me, just to keep me company and talk about old times, but it was obvious as soon as I looked for it that I was just a hiding place, a place to rest while running away from whoever she was with. I took her in and made coffee and set myself to hear the story one more time, minor incidents altered to give the illusion of change, and I thought maybe I could sneak into the bedroom and take some darvon, but she’d know. I had not seen her in three years, and had changed in insignifigant ways during that time, put on the slightest muscle that I was overproud of, lost more hair, started a new job where I had to wear a pager at all times. I thought I had changed, I thought it was enough. She had only told me half the story, up to where everything fell apart again, when I heard someone pull up in the driveway, and heard someone begin shouting, and she stared at me for a second before running into the bathroom and locking the door. The man came up to the door, and I was a little suprised to see him; he was small and thin and obviously spent a lot of time thinking about his accessories. I opened the door and he tried to push past me, and I shoved him hard in the chest, pushing him back off the steps onto the sidewalk. He pulled out a gun, which I guess was supposed to scare me, but I had been through this part as well, the jilted abusive boyfriend thinking everyone was as afraid of him as his girl was, and I knew he wouldn’t shoot me, or maybe he would, I didn’t really care. I used to hate these guys, used to nurse vengeful fantasies of axehandles and pondbottoms, but in time I began to realize these men were simply manifestations of the death of history, of memory, as each one was conviced they were bound within forces beyond control and entirely singular in application: it is always the first and only time for them.

“Go home”, I said. “Be glad it’s over.”

He stared at me, the dream of a final showdown draining away, until he was content to talk some shit while walking back to his car. I watched him until he left, and I stared out at the street for a while, the sky, the stars, remembering all the things I’d have to say over the next few weeks, all the apologies, all the mock-harsh “truth”, until she’d leave again, and I’d spend another year staring at the wall and sorting albums I no longer listen to and talking about how I need to start wrting again, and everything continues again, until finally I just can’t do it anymore, and then there will be no shame, no exhaustion, no staring blankly at people pretending to care, no insomnia and stomach pain, no shit jobs, no owing people money, no sitting in front of the keyboard for hours unable to think of a single thing to say, no broken promises, no empty posturing, no imagining women i don’t know are in love with me, no headaches and no heat, no light, no sound, no time, nothing, nothing at all.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

jubilation
When she was twentyfive and the first house went up in the empty lot where all her critical childhood events took place she angsted a little, and felt impotent toward the endless creep of progress, but essentially considered it a done deal, sealing it up inside herself. It’s thirteen years later and the lot has returned, property value fluctuations and the collapse of the new mall out by the interstate and finally the tornado that gutted Twin Oaks from Jackson to Kennedy tearing the development out by the roots, uncovered basements filled with topsoil hosting indian grass and cattails and drain fixtures. She drove up one Fourth of July weekend, parked the car by the concrete barrier and walked what she could remember of old paths now twice-buried, the occasional suburban artifact overturned down beneath the weeds: a fork, a torso and head of a Skeletor action figure, a keyring to vanished doors. It was the same, but not the same, and the hope she had that something had been returned to her slowly fell away as she watched the wind whip Wal-Mart bags caught in the year-old trees.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

john, afterwards
She sits in the kitchen and rehearses the tragedy. She refuses to be taken by suprise when the phone call comes, when the word that John is no longer alive reaches her from some shaky-voices relative of his she should remember by name, but wouldn’t, were it not for the fact that she has rehearsed this event, memorized the names of all the people who watch over him at the hospital, waiting. She has already developed rationalizations for her not being there, work is so crazy right now and you have to keep living your live for as long as you can, you know, John would understand, he was always so good at that. She will attend the funeral, which she originally thought she wouldn’t be able to handle without the sort of histrionics everyone expects of her, but it’s been two months of practice and she keeps getting better. She will not drink; this she knows for certain, as whatever control she has will be lost to her then, and once she makes that first mistake she knows it will all fall out from under her, and she will never stop falling. She knows she will not speak at the funeral, but has practiced small talk with the family, with all the friends who came out of the woodwork to gnaw at the collective sympathy, and they will talk of how hard it was for them, as this is the only way they can come to know anything. She will cry, of course, and her hands will shake like an old woman’s, but that is all. There will be no wailing, no falling at her feet, and she practices mourning in her new heels to be certain of this. She will watch the crowd, and find the most sactimonious, false friend and will tear him down in private conversations, and this is how she will bond with John’s sisters, as the temporary amnesia of suffereing will allow her a chance to change history, to make someone else the judas goat. She will take up smoking again, and will stand outside on the porch in the rain with them, and it will be as though she is one of them, staring through the window into the kitchen where the goat takes another beer from the fridge. No one will ever ask her what she is thinking about ever again, and the relief that brings is extraordinary. She remembers that her silence is no longer an implication of guilt, but a wall behind which those who do not know cannot follow, and which those who do know have no need to see behind. She will get back the ring she gave him, which was too small, which he wore on a chain, and she will place it back on the finger from which it came, and one full cycle will be completed. She takes off the ring which John gave her, all those years ago, and rolls it back and forth between her index finger and thumb, staring at the light caught inside the band, hiding the inscription, and is so startled to hear the phone ring that she drops the ring, and it bounces away, and she holds the phone to her ear, flustered, and hears the words, and falls to the floor, and begins to scream.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

jerkury
Somehow my uncle got hold of hundreds of weather balloons, and spent weekends launching them in clusters from the farthest end of his farm, then racing back to the silo in his pickup, climbing to the top, and shooting down any he could get a bead on, culling the weak from the herd. He stuck elaborate letters inside small capsules where the weather-detecting circuitry was to go, but never expected a reply; after all, the majority of these letters ended up wrapped around dead trees out by the railroad tracks, and the rest were written in his crablike scrawl, barely ledgible to himself and his wife, much less any poor sap wondering what this big white thing was doing in the backyard. Sometimes, while drunk, he would tell me that one day he was going to fill the rest of the balloons with explosives and let them all fly, flocks of them dealing death all over eastern Iowa. I didn’t think much of this until I saw helicopter footage of the barn torn open and burning on the midday news.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

i want to do the thing i should not do
I could smell her before I saw her, a sour sick that bloomed every time she began to sweat. When she smiled she pulled her cracked lips tight enough that I saw the intimate pink of her gums. The neighbor kids who threw stones at her door and called her a witch now stood outside, trying to guess at shadows behind the curtains. I scared them off when I pulled up, but they could tell I wasn’t an adult and ran back as soon as I stepped into the house. She watched the screen and tried to explain the plot to me and I pretended to understand. She shook with each word. I am here to tell the others, later, that I was there for the last days, that I was able to do what they could not, so that they will remember me as close to her, a secret friend made public in wake conversations and hushed gossip. I am placing myself at a strategic moment so that I might be able to pretend I meant more to her, anything to her. All I have to do is keep showing up, I thought to myself while she ran the list of characters and their sins. I just need to put in a little more time.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

it is completed when there is no one left to witness
I spent my workdays dreaming of incidents in her history she had never spoken of, blank canvas for my inevitable and ultimately corrosive projections, a December morning as a little girl dancing with her mother across the kitchen linoleum with little ladybugs drawn in blue ink on the backs of her hands and rhubarb pies just starting to brown in the oven, a June evening where her eighteen-year old hands push a piano down the dirt path to a clearing of blankets and underwear and an axe with which she will enact her final revenge for ten years of forced lessons, until finally I have abstracted her entirely from the flesh and tedium of what she truly is, back in my head, cotton in my ears.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

interlace workprint one
“Lobjan was invented by gay Nazis who want to eat all the placentas and foreskin!” -C. Flink

Casual readers may not know that the incoherent and narratively retarded pile of woodge known as Interlace is actually the edited version, with hundreds of sub-stories, faked IRC transcripts and halfwritten freakouts passed between authors and ultimately deemed inappropriate for the story at large. Not long after the whole thing fell apart, I burned all that material to cd and promised myself never to look at it agian, but the past week has been particularly boring and I’ve been jacked up on cold medicine, so in order to once again spit in the faces of the scrytch audience at large (and also as a way to kill time during another round of bookwriting impotency) I present the interlace workprint, unedited and without cohesive stability.

Shelly Harmful, safe within a womb of quilts, attempted to wish the ringing telephone into the cornfield to no avail. Taped to the bottom of the bed was a foot and a half long meat cleaver which would solve the telephone situation permanently, but the telephone was all the way across the room, and while Shelly was certain she could kill the telephone with one well-placed throw it would leave her defenseless against attacks by The Devil, so she crawled out of her bed and kicked the phone to death with the heel of her bare right foot. The outside world may want to cast Shelly as the next postglam antihero, but she would have none of it.

“I’m a monster”, it said, standing on the gas and throwing bricks out the window. Like some motion-sick jump-cut, we were on some cross-country burn, the Heroin 900, truck stop gunfights and blowing toll booth guards to get back on the interstate. I’ve got a teddy bear full of coding beads and the remains of a dozen nazi bikers in the grill of my Chevelle. Gangs of hippychick cannibals wander the parking lots of all-night diners, slashing tires and luring stranded truckers into VW vans with blood sluices in the floor. Speed-jagged drivers with IR goggles and cut brakelights race down blacktop access roads until state troopers hit them with high-powered strobes. An army of reanimated roadkill. Prayers to failed new gods smeared in blood on empty billboards.

Teams were assembled to provide a series of scenarios in which the participants fully believed closure had been achieved. Hidden loops, abrupt service termination, false history and time-delayed neural unprogramming all proved to be useful tools in the struggle to close certain doorways, put the period at the end of specific stories. Research funds well spent, obviously.

It has to be admitted that he did not always directly vomit blood onto his canvasses, that sometimes he could not get out of bed fast enough, and in those cases he simply sold his stained bedsheets.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

infant hands
My brother drove over earlier tonight, telling me Pamela Bambelam called him up in tears and demanded to speak to me. I used to leech off my brother’s cellphone, and currently have no phone, as my brother moved out a couple months back, and I told Pamela I would be out of touch for a while, and probably said some bullshit about how I had to get my head together or how this bird will never change or whatever stupid shit I was saying back then in my old life. Pamela, of course, was having none of it, and because my brother is a saint of infinite patience I got to talk to her for a while. The first couple minutes of conversation was moslty an incoherent sniffling cloud, but eventually the topic showed itself as the transitory nature of happiness, or even the smallest sort of satisfaction, which is a common topic for her and I, and I had no real answer, so I told her one of my kinda madeup stories about how happiness is always having schemes to work on, such as right now at work there’s a rubber cross-section of a pregnant sow, maybe the size of a large cat, sitting in one of the classrooms where I’m currently working as a paid thug. I told her that I have named this plastic pig Courtney Love, and every night I steal one of Courtney Love’s plastic organs, and eventually the whole of the sow will be mine. “I took it one piece at a time, and it didn’t cost me a dime,” Pamela vaguely sang, no longer crying, just on the outside of laughing. I told her she used to be my scheme enabler, so it’s hard to come up with such notions on my own, but I simply fall back on what I knew she would tell me, like muscle memory, and everyting else was cake. She told me she’d imagine a tiny invisible me, skulking in the corner and not looking directly at anybody, suggesting half-mad plans, and I told her I’d keep some notecards on me and if I came up with anything I’d write it down and send it to her. Then we talked about some other stuff. Finally I got off the phone, and gave the phone back to my brother, and we watched the game until I had to go to work.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

identification removal services
Initially it was Sarah and Dvhyn and myself, we were going to start this band, all processed audio to be submitted by the internet rabble, only when you ask people straight on for this kind of stuff you get the dullest most godawful stuff, so we built this fake “online erotica community” where people swap mp3s of each other faking orgasms and telling elaborate stories about greatly exaggerated true-life encounters, but even this wasn’t weird enough. We wanted it to look like it had been going on for a while, so that the people who found it wouldn’t feel like they were the first ones in the pool, so we spent a weekend making a slew of audio files using this terminology we had invented in place of regular slang, which is where things like “the secondary anatomy” with erogenous zones hidden between organs which can only be reached through psychic penetration techniques, and this whole method of predicting the future from bumps along the areola, all this shit, and I don’t know if it was peer pressure or we tapped into some sorta pre-existing underground but we got all these audio files where people just picked up this stuff and ran with it. So we let this roll for two months, occasionally goading the subscribers on with some bit of late-night alternate genital ranting, and we ended up with about nine gigs of audio, more than we would probably ever need, so we shut the site down. Some of the subscribers moved on to some wiki out of Austria, but I haven’t checked up on it in a year or so.

At first we thought we’d just plunderphonic our way through it, slice and dice with maybe some bloopy-beep background music, but Dvhyn was on the statistic natural language processing kick again, so we built a grammar which divided every file into a series of words, collected each instance of a similar word (we had to comb this by hand a bit) and FFT an average of all files for each word. This meant that words used often (like “the”) took on a kind of feminine yet homogenized quality which sounded like a breathy and kinda nervous automated operator voice, while words used only once (like “inchoate”) retained entirely the voice of the original lonely kook who whispered it into a desktop microphone, naked in front of the keyboard.

The grammar was also (mostly) a handy-dandy transition matrix, so we fucked around with Markov chaining some text, which (no suprise) didn’t sound very natural, so we fucked around with filters and a bit of granular synthesis goofery until everything sounded like a whisper, which made the lack of continuity between words less of a problem. Then we layered on the reverb and echo and left it running all the time, until we forgot about it. Only we left it running, just barely loud enough to hear, until the thunderstorm hit.

That is where the phrase “Hum Goddess” comes from.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

i am now okay with being stupid
Mark came over, without Escho, and it hasn’t just been Mark and I hanging out in forever, so it was a bit weird, and maybe that’s why we went right to the pipe and the bottle, old habits in a decaying tape loop now fuzzy and distorted, and that’s all we ever wanted. We sat up watching black and white movies with the sound off, giggling at improvised dialogue until even that seemed too much, then giggling just at the image, the poses and postures and costumes. “I should start dressing like that,” Mark said, and I agreed, and so at four in the morning we went out to find suits. We had maybe twelve bucks between us, and we were cognizant that the transaction would be difficult, but we were certain we could convince the local tailor that our plan was of such certain necessity that he would gladly lend his name and wares to our arc toward fame and fortune. Struck dumb by inspiration, I froze in my tracks, long enough that the snow snuck into my boots, and told Mark that I knew a guy who had lots of suits and was Mark’s size. This guy, I did not tell him, was the husband of my onetime girlfriend, the both of them content to draw close in a shared hatred of what I now was, and that he would throw us from the roof and into a pile of broken glass he’d break himself just for the occasion as give Mark use of his suits. I knew I could work this, and in the process I’d convince Michelle that I was not the person she thought I was, not that I wanted her back (may shrews nest in my rectum before I go through that hell again) but because I cherished the idea of zinging her one last time, making her doubt a bit, oh my heavens that would be sweet. It was a twenty minute walk to Michelle and Steve’s place, cutting across the abandoned K-Mart and a park with all the playground equipment pulled out, and plus another ten minutes of getting high again in someone’s backyard with the dog silently staring at us from behind the fence, so that the sun was just starting to rise when we knocked on the front door. No one answered, so we went around the back and knocked on that door, and Mark said okay wait, this is the right house? These people actually have suits? Because even if it is not the people that we believe are in possession of the suits, correct, they may have other suits of which we might make a use out of, and he had some other thing to say but we never got around to it because suddently Steve opened the door and hit me right in the mouth. Mark is not a big guy, and he probably sees less physical activity than I do, but he’ll surprise you, and he sure surprised Steve, as by the time I got back up to my feet Mark was kicking the shit out of Steve, prone and fetal on his kitchen floor. I screamed “Now! Get the suits!” and the two of us darted in and ran upstairs, looking for the bedroom, and that’s when I saw Michelle standing in the bathroom, the door open, the toothbrush sticking out of her mouth. “Not a muscle!” I screamed, my voice cracking from all the excitement and the exhaustion of running up a full flight of stairs. Mark and I ran into the bathroom and rushed through the closet, finding two suit jackets and what looked like a nice pair of slacks, and we headed back to the stairs, tripping over Steve, still spread out on the floor, on our way back through the kitchen. As we ran out the back door and into the street, I stopped again, looked back and saw Michelle staring out the bathroom window. I tried to strike one of those classy poses like we saw in the movies earlier, but I don’t think it came out exactly right, and I yelled “I zinged you good on that one! Choke on it!” and caught up with Mark, who was taking off his clothes in the middle of the street to see if the suit fit.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

how to kill your children
It is a trick of evil men to believe that history cannot be corrected. As people continue to extranalize memory, the ability to modify that memory expands, so that the reality of an event is more in doubt now than ever before. What is yours belongs to you, not to the hallucination of history, covered over in the failed tinsel of fact, and you should leave this world through a complete vanishing, taking all that is yours with you.

In order to live in this world, one must cultivate a small garden of compassion, but when it is your turn to go, that compassion must be the first thing swallowed by the hole. This will be the most difficult of the things you must do, as the habitual nature of compassion holds roots in the most unexpected of places. You are now responsible to one thing only, and that is your absence, and you cannot leave it incomplete. No one will remember. You have spent your life in the spaces between sight, you have pulled up the wake of data behind you, and now it is down to the last things, the product of your body. The endless drone fo trivia and trend will hide most things, but not this, not the people who are bound to you. They have paid witness, and know what you have done, and will tell the world. They stink of you, and of your memory. They must go with you, when you leave.

Go to a quiet place, far from prying eyes, as seen on the map of disposal sites you have been provided. A thick forrest is best, as it keeps you from the prying eyes of satellite recon. Make sure you are free of materials by which you can be tracked, which should all be gone by this time, negated and erased. The angels will assist in this, placed in critical areas within the mesh of information, devouring mortgages and legal records and surveillance video. The electronic camouflage will be temporarily shut down, so finding the disposal site should be fairly simple. From this point, you have options, depending on your situation. The children can be dropped directly into the disposal site, through the entry-gate, or else you may puncture the fontanelle with the needles, as per your training. activating the overwrite device before proper disposal. This may be of use if you are uncertain what the children actually know, and want to clarify any ambiguities. The disposal process should take no longer then thirteen seconds. You should then enter the entry-gate yourself, closing the gate behind you, which will reactivate mimic and blur devices as well as sealing the gate. When you are ready, let go of the handle, and gravity will do the rest.

We thank you for your efforts, and while you will be forgotten, know that the goals which you have worked so hard to bring to fruition will live forever.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

how the two devils were made to live without mouths
First they began by pleasing him with letters written from seers of a prior age who forecast his coming as a sign of the great completion, a golden aeon of wisdom and punishment, and then they poured oils from the sepulchres and forecast the meaning of the shapes the oil took upon entering the standing pools of water, and then they brought forth nine sheep who had been taught to kneel before him, and then they brought forth eight infants so that he might name them and bestow certain boons upon them, and then they reenacted mighty battles upon the sea in the same standing pools where the oils began to deform in shape with thousands of miniature boats made of clockwork and fat, and then they brought forth six apples whose insides were as pleasure gardens, with microscopic vines and pagodas and statues, and then they brought forth figs soaked in brandy served in a portion of the head of the great beast, and then they brought nineteen dancing women whose skins had been dyed in various pleasing colors and patterns, and then they pulled him, one by the left hand and one by the right hand, into his grave.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

heart murmur
I hadn’t really looked at my feet in a while, and so I was surprised to see a series of bruises and sores along the instep and around the ankles, particularly as there was no pain in them, nothing more than a vague itch that I feel all over my body in the dry winter. I didn’t have any money to see a doctor, and figured I could fix my feet by poking at them with a pen, which ended up opening some sores, and this, I’ll spare you the details, but obviously it wasn’t a promising development. I decided the best thing to do would be to get some athletic tape and wrap it around my feet and ankles, but we had no athletic tape, so I used some electrical tape, the same tape I had used a couple weeks ago to tape up my boots, and it was then, looking down at my feet, that I knew a door had closed, that my girlfriend wouldn’t come out here to find me and my boss wouldn’t rehire me and I wouldn’t just walk back into my old life.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

something somewhere has to break
She keep vomiting. She spits up pennies, rings, notes she was passed in trig. She spits up the plastic rings from milk jugs, strands of string, twist-ties. She spits up plastic army men and undigested lumps of gum. She spits up candle wax, shoelaces and cigarette butts. She spits up bolts and wire and oil. She spits up eggs, and from the eggs hatch chickens and lizards and falcons. She spits up clumps of dirt, and that dirt forms into islands in the sea of brown-stained detritus that has come up from her. She spits up villagers and pre-fab huts. She spits up stereos and automobiles and shopping malls. She spits up countries and continents and planets and galaxies. She contains universes, is what everyone told her, and those universes want no part of her anymore; they only want to be out and away, because she is disgusting, and vile, and evil.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

hasbeen
My friend Sawyer used to run track in high school, and he was good, like four-minute mile good. He set school records for the full and the quarter, got a full-ride scholarship to Northwestern, and while there started training for the olympics when he got hit by a car one morning. He came out okay, though he shattered his right knee rolling over the hood, and that pretty much was the end of his competitive running days. Some people have this sort of thing happen and do years of rehab and start a new regimen and talk of how they’re gonna come back, better than ever. Michelle, who also went to Northwestern before she dropped out and moved back here and is now on her third kid, she told me that was how Sawyer was, that first year, and everybody did all this shit for him, all these donations and stuff and people he didn’t know would come by the house and tell him what an inspiration he was and all that, only Sawyer could see it, could see he’d never really run like he did before, and so one morning he cleared out his savings account and all the leftover donation money and vanished. Nobody saw him for about five years, by which time everybody forgot about him, except the people who weirdly felt that he owed it to them to keep doing endless laps out there on the junior high track by his house. One night he called Michelle, and I don’t know all the details of that, but she drove up to Madison for a couple days and came back like nothing happened, maybe a year ago. I went over to her place last Friday, while Bruce was off fixing airplanes in Chicago and the kids were all in bed, and after enough rum she gave me Sawyer’s address, and said he’d like to see me, which probably wasn’t true, but there was a tone in her voice that made me not want to press the point. Saturday I drove up to Madison and pulled into a small apartment building that looked to be full of college kids, and there in Apartment 3A I saw Sawyer, in a short-sleeve dress shirt and navy blue slacks, just off work. Michelle must have called and told him I was coming, as he seemed to be expecting me, though he stared at me for a second or two as I stood in the doorway, until he asked “What are you doing here?”. I stepped in, into the half-kitchen just inside the doorway, and said “I wanna talk to somebody who used to be good at something they can’t do anymore.” “Well that’s me, I guess,” he said, and passed me on the way to the refrigerator, where he poured himself a glass of iced tea without offering me any. “Is it better? Is it better that you used to be able to do something, or woudl it be better if you could never have done it, never known?” I said. He walked into the living room, sat down in a leather recliner facing away from me, and said “It doesn’t matter. It’s not any different. You want something, you don’t have it, it’s no different for anybody.” I don’t know what I expected him to tell me, but that wasn’t it, and suddenly I felt tired, and self-conscious, and halfheartedly asked him if he wanted to go out and get a beer or something. He said no, and nothing else, and I mumbled some excuse to leave, and how he looked good, and how we should keep in touch, and I drove home in the dark, listening to evangelists on the radio.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

habitual
The closest bar to her apartment was in a bowling alley, but the lanes close at ten except on the weekend and the bar itself is open until two, and she always went out with friends on the weekend, so the actual bowling aspect of the bar never really came up, except for an occasional league in a back booth buying pitcher after pitcher. After a couple months she knew everyone there and they all left her alone, mostly. After the lanes close down you can’t even tell the bar is open from the street, so it isn’t the place that gets a lot of new customers, and that’s how everyone likes it. On weekends, with her friends, she didn’t mind the meeting people, as pointless as it is, as they were the sort of women where one of them would meet a guy and bring him back to the table and talk around him, about things he had nothing to say, and maybe he waited it out and went home with the woman who pulled him over but mostly they left, vaguely humiliated, and they would discuss his latent faults. Here, however, such an intrusion would require some thinking, some making conversation and not being uncomfortable and weird and keeping everything on a certain level, and after work that’s the last thing she wanted to do.

At night she had dreams of an office complex built like a hive, each cubicle a shrine to a different god, the leftovers of rituals in the breakrooms, pitch and feather and blood on the tables and floors. She had developed this dream, creating new rooms, tunnels into the earth and rooms of primitive computers which spat out dot-matrix reports of exterminated employees. During work, she transposed this dream-office upon her actual office, so that the minor dramas of the workplace were scrambled and rebuilt in her ears as realtime histories of secret rites. The first month of her job people would occasionally speak to her, and she would give them a terse reply, as little as necessary, as having to actually participate in the scene shattered the illusion. Soon she had the entire eight-hour shift entirely free of interaction, and so her job became palatable, dredging up material for her dreams, which would in turn allow her to work in peace, and so on. This process proved to be quite an effort, so her time at the bar was used in the way most people actually use sleep, as a time to shut down and process the day’s events, here aided by alcohol, the only drug she still had a use for.

Three years of this went by without a hitch, until the bowling alley decided to institute Wednesday Rock ‘N Bowl, blacklights and Ozzy and double the usual lane rate from ten until two. The inhabitants of the bar were understandably thrown into fits, some vowing to leave, some filing complaints with the manager, but she didn’t really pay any attention the first week, which was a bit of a flop. Week two started to see more people, mostly junior high kids with missing parents and disgusting ideas as to public displays of affection, but even this wasn’t too much of a problem. The fourth week saw the introduction of postironic college students, prepared to relish and mock and drink, and it was here that the problems came up. Now the Rock ‘N Bowlers were infiltrating the actual bar, and started coming during the remainder of the week, ordering goofy drinks and complaining/delighting in every trivial detail. Now college boys with elaborate facial hair and internet-bought trucker caps tried to buy her drinks and ask her about her secret dreams, and she had to stare them down until they broke inside and went home to stage suicide attempts. This left her little time to decompress, and soon the effects began to show at work, where she referred to the executive vice president in charge of sales as “the second and final skineater”. At night, her hive-dreams were unravelled by visions of faux-jewel faux-fur faux-soul holocausts, and she kept waking from these unsatisfying visions, her eyes opening to the shadows of trees before the streetlight wave back and forth across the ceiling. Initially she tried to imagine the shadows as shapes, then she let her eyes unfocus and tried to hypnotize herself with the flicker of light, and finally she grew to hate the sight of her ceiling and nailed quilts over her windows, but it was no use, the sleep and the work and the bar were all now little more than vaguely different locations which housed the same dread and exhaustion.

Eventually she had to burn the whole city to the ground.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

good works
As the sort of changes which marked the earlier years grow smaller, the scope of the things she took as critical, talismans of each year past, grew smaller as well, which was ultimately a boon. The scars she put on when she first left the house begged for public display, so that they were never really hers, overwritten with the projections and false hope of everyone who paid witness, until the stories which once caught in the throat from raw human emotion caught a whiff of the maudlin and decorated. These small years held no stories, nothing she could build from at dinner parties or drunk smalltalk in the back of cabs. The lessons learned in those years were too hard to put words to, lopsided and irregular and lacking in anything approaching easy entertainment. The years of living for the amazement of others slipped away, glitter and gilding chipped away to good works and quiet spaces, and while she is never sure if it is better or worse, the now or the then, she is certain she now holds secrets, she now has things only she will know after spending so long overexposed.

The audience walked away from her story years ago, but I still see her sometimes, and I want to know all those secrets, because it kills me to have anything escape my sight, because I am a jackal, and a ghul.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

goodnight, agents of satan
Dave(2) no longer works at that store in the mall. He left his wife a few years ago and sees his kids on Christmas and the Fourth of July. He moved into the apartments by where Jezebel used to live and is a sysadmin for a bail bondsman service across the street from the jail, right next door to that Bosnian bar we went to last time you were in town. I didn’t even realize they’d even need a sysadmin and apaprently Dave(2) says they don’t, really, but they haven’t realized that yet, so he’s sitting pretty good all things considered. His brother Steven is a cop, and that’s how he got the job. Steven was always more responsible, but not like in a bad way, like he used to buy us beer in high school, he’s a good guy, he can just keep things together better. Steven’s on his second wife and I think she’s about to go, if what Dave(2) says holds any water, but maybe he just wants a divorce buddy. That’s kinda how he is. Sometimes we end up talking about it but I mean I haven’t even smooched a girl in ten years, so what do I know about marriage? That said, it’s one of my lesser hobbies to talk about shit I do not even remotely understand, so I’m always giving Dave(2) advice. You could say (if you were of a disposition to be cynical) that I’m using Dave(2) as my divorce guinea pig, betraying our friendship (and more specifically, his lack of other friends and his romanticised notion of “the old days”) by tricking him into nonideal strategies. There’s a bit of truth to that. But it’s not like I have a gun to his head or anything.

So Dave(2) calls me up last weekend and tells me he’s been talking a lot with his ex, maybe they can work something out, all this crap. I know for fact he’s not thinking clear on this, she’s about as through with him as is humanly possible, but I’m interested to see how such a plan shakes out, so I tell him that his main problem back when he was married is that he couldn’t be a provider, he was a man of reaction, a pillar of jello, and what this situation requires is decisive action and a ten-year plan. We got drinks at the Bosnian bar (I don’t think it actually has a name) and by last call his ten-year plan ended in the White House. “We must strike while the iron is hot!” I yelled, too loud, and pulled his coat to a taxi and sent him off to his wife’s new house out in Hudson.

Dave(2) called me the next morning from jail. There’s a lesson here, I bet.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

for all practical purposes
I can never become a great writer because I do not know the names for things. A woman walks into a room and I cannot tell you what she is wearing, beyond the vague description of the colors, and even then not specific, red kinda, maybe brown. The room she walks into has a specific look to it, an architectural form I should be able to identify but can’t, and there are sound from outside, traffic sounds, but the phrase “traffic sounds” barely means anything, it’s a shorthand for ambient noise, each imagined individual automobile blurred into a rumble. All of this provides context, ideally, and a proper writer would be able to cast eachof these details so as to set up the reader for what is to come: is this woman one of those eternally bruised midwest minimalism women who will probably go to the bar later and get knocked around by some guy and eventually move back in with her mom? Did she come to this room to build a bomb, to crack this earth like an egg? Will she float thre einches from the ground, pulling dust from the air so as to cover the windows and the undefined walls, blocking out the sound of the nondescript traffic, until the room becomes a kind of cave where she, suspended equidistant from every plane, will hide herself for years, the minds of those who would approach the outer door becoming befuddled, so that they forget why they came, walk away from the door, drive away to the places where they stage their lives before the captive audience of their families, only now they cannot help but think there was something they were supposed to do, some missing sense which deforms daydreams and conversations into guesses at the contents of the locked room, and one night they will awaken, unable to sleep, and drive for hours, trying to find the building, but the building hides from them now, and will hide from them for years, until the woman decides it is time to return to the public, ready to once again be seen, and all the people who waited for thismoment would stand outside the door, all the details of their lives written over with want and confusion, clean of the world and ready to do whatever was necessary to see the woman and wait for an answer, wait for a sign?
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

floor
I have spent most of my life too stupid to be afraid. I have worked with corpses, Bosnians with tattoos on their faces, masturbating janitors, pig killers, crack dealers and whores without a moment’s concern. But today I am afraid. I am wearing a snappy shirt and slacks and my duty is to sell office furniture. This means I have to talk to people, be friendly, shake hands. Three times today I have seriously considered suicide. I have to lie to people, tell them this desk is the last one in stock, that chair retails for twice the asking price. I pretend to like the Green Bay Packers, and I hate the Green Bay Packers. It’s like sucking cock for twenties, only sucking cock is a geniune service. I keep looking at the clock, which is in the storage room, and every time I go in there the floor boss shoots me a weird look. I keep thinking maybe I can fake an accident, pull a couple hundred pounds of oak shelving down on my head, stab myself with a pen. I’ve only been here for an hour. Nice-looking families who need a desk for the new computer that they already paid a thousand dollars too much for ask if they can cut me some kinda deal, it doesn’t have to look perfect, maybe there’s a scratch on it, and they stare at me, you know, maybe there’s a *scratch* on it. I go to the bathroom to throw up and the floor boss shoots me a weird look. Maybe over lunch I can get drunk, I tell myself, only three more hours until I can drive to Hy-Vee and buy six bucks worth of bad bourbon. I walk in circles under the air conditioning vents pretending not to see the customers. Maybe they’ll fire me if I punch one of the cashiers in the face. My shoes are too tight and I can’t stop clenching my teeth. Three more hours, I think. I can just leave for lunch and never come back.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

FIVE STAGE PLAN TO DESTROY UNIVERSE
stage one giant sea cannon ultrasonic power for to hunt the sea-pig where it lives and tear its ovaries from the fat of its underbelly and render this flesh for unto make eidetic stimulant power necessary for

stage two with aid of massive monetary and necessary mission equipmet grant from various corporations who wish to utilize end-of-time technologies as weapons platforms i and my team of specifically chosen suprageniuses undertake intensive and harrowing brainstorming session at very limits of human tolerance so as to compress time and greatly speed up learning process so to devour whole of human knowledge within three weeks necessary for

stage three millions of networked hypnosis generators all slightly out of tune played at nightmarish speed humans to burrow into the earth to escape the sound massive undermantle cities over thousands of years loss of pigmentation and development of eyestalks finally through overdigging the giant undermantle cities collapse and the earth falls off its axis

stage four is classified

STAGE FIVE CREEPY MONKEY HEAD
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

fishbellied
I never learned any of the big lessons that everybody told me drugs would teach me, but I did learn that no matter what I’d be less crazy after eight full hours of sleep. I’ve been working too many hours, trying yet again my kamikaze schooling strategy, catching ten minute naps with my head in my hands at the library, or in my car. Gradually, things which I knew were sociall unacceptable didn’t seem so bad, the lagtime between intention and action razor-thin, the words out before I knew what I meant to say. For a while this was fine, as I didn’t see anyone who would mind, and the occasional nasty glances I got from strangers was just another reason to be angry about everything. I didn’t worry much about how I looked, or how clean my clothes were. I started falling down more often, including a nasty spill down eighteen metal-edged stairs that gave me a nasty gash across my forehead. I was constantly staring at nipples every time I left the house. I hated the sun, and wanted a place to hide, but there was no such place, even after I covered all the windows at the trailer. That’s how it happens. That’s how you end up like that.

If I could finish it, if I could put down the words, everything would be different. There’s this other self that I can almost see, when I am very tired or when I get this chill in my chest, like a reflection in the glass at one’s side, walking beside myself, only that me has finished it, done the work, and has entered this other life. I am not fully changed in this other life, not stripped of my habits or faults, but I am settled in a way that I cannot understand from where I currently am. I do the things I am intended to do, instead of all this scurrying and scavenging, all this biding time. I saw it the longest while I was in Austin, taking the number seven bus downtown, the sunlight caught in the trees, and I closed my eyelids and felt the pulses of light and. I know this is weird. I know that I am not helping myself by saying these things. I saw myself sitting in front of me, and I reached out to touch the back of my head, only I could not reach that far. I was not thinner, and not perfectly loved, and not fixed in the way I cast myself in dreams. When I was a child I realized that much of what I thought constituted cool was based on a kind of exhaustion, all the nervous twitch and jitter spent, everything burned away but that which cannot be destroyed. I saw that on the bus, in my other body, and I tried to ask myself what to do, how to solve this neural trick that marks the here and the there, but I could not make myself speak, and I realized that it was because this other self would not hear me. This sort of thing would not happen to him.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

finisher
I think all three of us realized it at the same time, standing in front of the amps while kicking randomly at our homemade pedals, no drummer necessary, endless miles of feedback like a wound in the universe from which the only true light we had ever known poured into our skin and crystalized in our spinal cords, which became antennas vibrating at specific frequencies so as to see the larger place which is our only home, Mark and Escho and I realized that pretending to play rockandroll for elderly hipsters who stood by the walls and nodded occasional approval was a failed path. We did not, as our enemies would later spit from mouths deformed by jealousy and shame, give up on what we had learned. We still believed in an excess of volume and chemicals and complete opposition to every empty gift the human disaster had to offer. We simply had to stop doing this monkey dance for a paying audience. We had to remove ourselves entirely from the production of content, go to the places where we were not meant to go, learn to live strictly from the twin disciplines of seduction and intimidation. We would never again sell a minute of our lives for someone else’s entertainment.

“We’re off to kill the wizard,” Escho said into the lone microphone to a dozen-odd record collectors and other dicks. Five minutes later we were on the road.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

face down
The dance, properly done, will hobble the dancer, shatter the ankles and warp the knees, good for nothing but to sit at the cafe and tell stories of former glories for the price of the bar’s cheapest beer. Just to say the name in certain circles will lead to a flurry of crosses and curses and spitting at the feet. Every dancer the town has bred gets sick in the head for this dance, to perfect the step and find the escape, or else never bother with an exit plan, content to throw it all away for a moment’s perfection. The streetcorners will hum for days ahead of time in anticipation of the next to try, each night a contest where the tables are pulled to the walls and the schoolkids twitch through new variations on classics so worn the floor is grooved with the steps, which only the drunks and grandparents show to watch, but on nights when the last dance is attempted the whole town closes in on the cafe, fresh-hung electric lights in the trees and women covered in children selling iced alcohols in the hollowed rinds of fruit. The lesser talents go first, as it is everywhere on this earth, until just before midnight, and the two find each other from across the street in a serpentine slither practiced into habit. It is slow at the start, and the crowd starts to guess that tonight is in fact not the night, that last-minute changes had been made to the plan, but then coy hints at the final dance appear, a twist of the arm here, an instep there, and quick enough that no one ever sees the exact moment of inception the final dance begins, time slows, all the pushing and yawning and drinking stops, everyone in the exact right spot to see what is taking place, and the beauty of it lasts just long enough to taste in the air before the scene is split with muscle tearing from bone. The dancers struggle not to scream as they fall to the floor, the crowd keeping a distance, the fall being as important as the dance. It is all one motion, a completion of a cycle, and the dancers do all they can to keep composure until the stage is struck and the last of the song vanishes from the air, now grown cold across the sweat of the skin, the light all bright from the pain, face down.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

exurgent morturi et ad me veniunt
There is a first matter, which existed before man and beast and earth, and it is the material from which they are born, from which all things are born. The alchemist cannot transmute anything back to this first matter, but only to the particular sperm of the species of which the matter belongs, and then only through the use of philosphic mercury. The first matter can be extinguished, however, resulting in the rebis, or last matter, from which all potential is removed. It is the remainder of the final death, from which nothing can return. The rebis can only be reached through an elaborate process, undertaken by the most skilled of alchemists. It is the process by which the Revitalization Technicians remove the corpses of their enemies from the book of life.

Josef and I were in Oklahoma, driving rural roads in as close to a random pattern as we could manage. The trunk of his car, lined with black garbage bags, contained most of a man named Berthelot, who was Josef’s instructor in the spagyric science, until he was reached by the agents of the Final Wisdom. I had met him once, in a bar with Josef and a woman I do not know, and he looked at me and said “You know, I can sell you an infant which will never grow old.” I asked him why I would want such a thing, and he smiled, and said “You’d be surprised what people want.” Josef believed there was enough left of him to make an orcale of him, to soak his body in sessame oil for forty days, until the head could be removed from the body at the first vertebra and speak its wisdom. Josef claimed to love this man as a son loves a father, and yet he wanted to fix him in a death-in-life in order to recieve oracular wisdom. “If the Final Wisdom reaches him before we can get to the midhouse, he’ll be given much worse,” Josef said. “They will remove him from history, from memory, as though he never existed. I can’t let that happen, not now. I’m too close.” I stared out the window at the winter-bright stars, the moon in hiding, the snowless winter plains empty of even radio towers and farmtown clusters of streetlights. Soon Josef will sleep, I thought, and I will kick him out of the car, and bury Berthelot somewhere down the road, where no one will ever find him but God, and I will turn myself in at the next police station. This has to stop. I can’t go on like this.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

everyone vanished
As he walked toward the cube-building, the faces of the people he passed gradually changed, losing definition, as though the muscles beneath the skin had atrophied or grown numb; the myriad details of each person’s expression grew flat and empty. The mouths of the street people were slightly open, and from them came a hum like the rustling of dry cornstalks occasionally interrupted by sticky cottomnouthed swallows. He has seen this before, on days of harvest, and knew not to interrupt the street people; each depended on the others for direction and task definition, and to confuse any of them with questions would send ripples through the neighborhood, drones stepping in front of traffic, botched copulations, organ trading, things which were frowned upon in the cube building.

The keys to the front enterance were a series of thin metal rods which he kept hidden in the now-useless veins of his arms. He pressed against the wrist with his sharpened fingernail and unsheathed the keys, inserting them into the line of holes, until the door vanished, dropping the rods onto the ground. He picked up the keys and returned them to his arms while stepping into the sniffing room, where his skin and clothing was examined for contaminants. This was not necessary, as there was no longer anything inside the building which could be further contaminated (in a fit of drunken rage he had smashed each of the third-level windows, killing off every hothouse strain unable to acclimate to the outside world), but he kept the system in place in order to know exactly what he had on and in him, now that he was the only person in the building.

Maria only stayed with him for two years before she couldn’t listen to him anymore, couldn’t find any meaning or logic behind his rants and weepy bouts of self-pity, but two years was all he needed. He captured every image, every sound. Microphones in the phones, the intercom, the air vents. Cameras behind the mirror, behind the television screen. Keyboard sniffers on the USB port, rootkit backups of her email to his account. To live with her, constantly in the moment, was to waste away all the details of her, to gorge on her presence. With her gone, living with her mother in a duplex somewhere on the west coast, he had time to savor each word, each image, zooming in until the pixels pulled apart. He diagrammed her sentences, made maps of her movement from room to room, built elaborate databases of her eating habits. He chemically sifted the components of the hair she left in the drain trap. Each detail seemed to open a new world, infinite strategms for study and contemplation. He became an alchemist of her detritus, the aura of her binding to his skin, his skeleton. He became a king of infinite space, an infinite space named Maria.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

drug pussy
Mark and Escho and I heard about this party, and having completely run out of good ideas, we decided we’d get caught up in someone else’s life for a while, so we drove maybe an hour out to some town we can’t remember the name of, and there’s this, well not like a party, because a party is where people have fun. This was more like some kinda experiment, everybody had their shoes off and were talking to each other about what they called “blocks” between each other, and if they could remove all these blocks then they’d achieve complete lossless communication. We were fixin’ to get when this girl offered us some mushrooms, and you would think that being creepy old fuckers we would know better but no, we decide to stay and take off our fucking shoes and everything. The person we knew who was supposed to show up, Matty, he ended up working a double shift at Hy-Vee and so all we had to talk about with these people was where’s Matty, and you know we’ve done all that before but then the idea got around that because we were strangers we had no “blocks” yet in place and this would be an ideal time to practice perfect honesty. So there was this one girl who I guess was their leader, but you know she’d never say she was the leader, it’s rididulous, but she had a sister and apparently Escho had figured he could maybe get with the sister if he played this right and kept kicking me and Mark in the ribs as we smarted off answers to the leader’s questions about how we were being unnecessarily possessive and defensive. Escho, his mom was a hippy, and these people weren’t hippies, because I can kinda understand being a hippy in a lizard-brain kinda way, but these people were, like okay they had a logbook with doses and times and such, and all I know from doses is I want to take all the drugs. But no okay Escho’s mom is a hippy and so he picked up from her all these phrases that apparently went over like gangbusters with the group and particular the sister, who got all to makin’ googly-eyes at Escho as he played off sensitive and fauxpen. The dick. So by this point we’re on, and Mark and I are getting all into how we get sometimes, burying people alive and end-of-time and the group starts *touching* us, like we’re freaking out, but all this is actually really freaking me out, and Escho’s actually making out with this sister and Mark kinda stops talking to me and everybody’s telling me it’s okay and I jump up and scream “YOU’RE ALL A BUNCH OF DRUG PUSSIES!” and run out the door, right past the car, but fortunately by the time I walked back to the highway (after a close shave where I tried to hitch a ride off a cop) I was actually feeling pretty good, and I met these devil girls who drove a van and it ended up being a pretty good night.

Escho’s still a dick, tho.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

dried hives
Up on the waves, I saw the trunks of dead trees pierce the icy black water, unwound ropes lashed as a net between them where two old women built a home of ships torn open on the reefs, lines trailing into the current, mirror-shards used to fool and catch birds now set to blind anyone stupid enough to approach. I was that stupid, then, on my raft of dead sailors, bloated and sealed in brine, the mouths sewn shut and the eyes staring toward the ocean floor, where they knew they rightly belonged, so as optics and logistics allowed me to approach I granted them what they wished, and severed the ropes and stabbed holes in their distended stomachs to that they filled with water, and sank, as I climbed up the tree to seek the council of the fish-women. “Leave us be!” they shouted, throwing broken crockery and buckets of spoiled stew at me, though I was too quick for them, and lept from branch to branch until I reached the net-house. “We will open the cabinet of your chest and feast for days on the organs within!” they shrieked, shaking strange metal blade-machines in the air, which rang like finger cymbals, and made me dizzy to hear, as when I had eaten hashish candy and spent days in some faceless woman’s bed. I used the power of my eternal will to close off the sound in my ears, and tied my feet to the planks beneath me so as not to fall back to the ocean, and roared “I have travelled for months through every hell offered by soil or water, forsaken cross and crown, hid within another man’s skin and left children to starve in the snow so that I could seek your council! I will not be turned away now! You will tell me what I must know!” The two old women spoke to each other, quietly, in a series of coded tones, and then replied in a single voice that they would answer a single question, and then be done with me.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

delta
Michelle was so poor she didn’t have money for a 4-track, so she recorded songs on her answering machine, which was okay as no one ever called her. Instead of slipping tapes to her friends, she gave her machine code to people, and they’d call up and check her messages, which were actually songs. Once in a while people would call back and leave encouraging notes or nasty criticism on her machine, until her machine was full, by which time she usually started over with a new song. A few months back her phone was disconnected, and no one has heard from Michelle since.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

dead in the eyes
After ninety thousand dollars in plastic surgery, Katrina no longer resembled her mother in any way. The graft and tuck and cut left her carriage at different weights, so as to change her gait and measurements, freeing her to rethink her choice of clothing, after post-operational imprinting as to splints leading her towards tight-fitting dresses, later leading to a fetish for corsets, a wasp-goddess variant on each seeming definition of her genetic makeup. Katrina sold her home, her cars, and the last of the land, rebuilding herself away from the open spaces of her Savannah childhood into a cloistered hermitude similar in nature (but not in detail, or in intent) to Saint Jerome. She set about filling the vast gaps in her cultural memory, lining the walls of her dark apartment (blackout curtains, 60 watt lamps) with the Western canon and various detours (Imagist poets, Laotian pornographic manuals, Spinoza), whcih she studied late into the morning, free of the chattering distractions of telephone and television and visitors. She would leave, for short stints in the world, and they would stare at her, awed and humbled, while she bought milk and tea and carrots. No one would ever guess at what she once was, Katrina thought, and smiled as she stepped out into the day.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

daylight
She decided it was critical that she stop slouching, that her posture become perfect, and so she replaced her chairs for the straight-backed discipline of homebuilt furniture carved to exacting angles. I am a lazy turd, and this new shift toward spinal discipline struck a fear in me, that as a slovenly enabler I would be judged toxic to her chiropractic future and escorted from her life, and this could not happen, as she was the last of my friends, and so I tried to stand straight and tall, but I only looked a fool, and hastened my exit.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

complete breakdown of narrative faculties
capture kept remembered in various surrogate hosts. bits and pieces, not even enough to grow a dream, apparations of undefinable dread in side-corners of the day. shake and shiver. the archive ate itself, disappeared within the black of the maw. i cut my right palm with a knife so i would never forget it but the skin will not hold the memory, the taste and the pain are not sufficient. i designed an intelligence to tell stories in my absence but there were complications and now she listens at the speaker to find glimpses of me in the garbled speech. a blink and the day was gone, her body left with reminders of things she had not done. she called and i did not know her voice and i hung up the phone and left so as not to hear it ring again. bells in the trees, coathanger mobiles with bits of aluminum and copper so we could find a way to return, until the day the wind stopped. i can’t breathe.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

circling over rowboats (good works IV)
“This bed is cursed!” she proclaimed, filled with finality, obviously the start of a course of action which would end in some blessed bed where nothing but sweet dreams and orgasms would find her, and it would be my mission, as her stooge, to provide menial labor and comic relief over the course of this plan’s execution, and at fruition I would wisecrack and fawn and see myself out as the came to claim his just desserts. “Yes!” I agreed, “most certainly cursed! Else why so much gone wrong here, so little sleep and satisfaction and nothing but aches and tears and insomnia?”

She stared at me, and smiled a little, which she does when she suspects I’m cracking wise at her expense, like when I told her that the Mayans invented the first automobile. “You laugh now, monkey-boy! After I get this new bed, everything will change forever! Believe it, hot rod!”

The binding-lines of our friendship primarily consist of ridiculous notions that we can fundamentally change the course of our lives through last-minute drastic actions, often supersaturated with drama, and so while I was vaguely skeptical I was, at heart, a True Believer, and that belief is the thing outside parties mistake for crushery. Certainly there’s a bit of that, indulged during stints of housesitting when I will sleep in this new blessed bed and trick myself into believing I could change enough to become someone else entirely, someone authentic in all the affectations she swoons for, someone smart and ignorant in the proper balance, and more than anything, someone entirely new to her, someone whose heart was still a black box she hadn’t yet cracked open, because (as she would tell me sometimes, trying to convince herself through repetition and giddy inflection) history cancels the possibility for perfection, leaving only the settling and pretending and disappointments that all the relationships all our friends were caught within were based on. I would nod at this, mock-sagely, and spout off some tenent of True Belief, like perfection was possible within our lifetimes.

Mockery is the soul’s way of acclimating itself to what it will one day become, learning the muscle memory through the positive reinforcement of laughter and disbelief, until you start to suspect you’re adapting yourself to the things that were once so funny, until you stop suspecting it at all, until it is what you are. This is easy to see among the people I know, once practically built from laughing at the sad cliches of the world that came before us, and so it was with her and I and True Belief, still falling into exaggerated preacher voices, fake-pompous and stretching the vowels, as we said things we wanted to be true, that we learned to believe might be true, that we were still young, and could still change, having drawn over our memories of how hollow and predetermined everything felt when we were actually young, how easily we fell for every stupid lie, how enamored we were of suffering and loss. In that sense, we have not changed at all.

“I believe! I believe everything!” I laughed, and kicked the old bed in defiance of its curse. “We will go downtown and will not leave until we find the perfect bed, and we will have it blessed by professionals with glass eyes and velvet robes that smell of cabbage and rum!”

“And cutie-pie witches from the community college who will toast this new bed with offerings of cheap wine and panties!”, she said.

And we laughed, and believed, at least for a little while.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

cease
My uncle was always cowardly. My dad used to tell a story about the two of them, back when they lived on the farm, and they went camping out by the train tracks, and my dad told my uncle this story about the ghost train, and how at night it takes souls to hell, and sometimes if someone is standing by the tracks a soul can pull that person on the train in exchange and so go free, and my uncle ran back to the house screaming his fool head off. I thought that was pretty funny.

It had been about a year, maybe just short of a year now that I think about it, since Jeb died, and he was okay about it, I mean you could tell he was still shook but he was back at work and taking care of things. But then I guess he had to be, because his wife Paula, she was a wreck, she slept in his room some night and like that, and she wasn’t going out hardly at all, and she kept going over his things all the time. So my uncle — his name is Jeff, I guess I should call him that, I’m not being real clear. Right. So Jeff called me and said that he and Paula were going to Toronto for a week and I said well that sounds nice. And he said maybe I could watch the house, and I said that’s fine. And then he hemmed and hawed for a while and eventually I found out what he wanted was maybe my brother and I could remove all of Jeb’s things from the house while they were gone because maybe that would help Paula out.

Now I should say at this point that Jeb was right around the same age as my brother and I. My brother Chris, he’s four years younger than me, and Jeb was two years younger than me, and since he didn’t have any brothers or sisters we sometimes would bring him along when we did things, especially during the summer, I mean, he was a good kid, we liked him a lot. It was pretty weird when we heard. I mean it’s still weird. So I was at first all like oh I don’t know if I can do that or if that’s even a good idea. Jeff said okay he understood, don’t worry about it, and he kinda just faded off the phone, and it was quiet like I should hang up, but I waited because I didn’t know what to do but eventually I just hung up. You know? I mean so anyways I went over that Friday and talked to Jeff about taking care of the house and what I should do, and so he walked me around even though I knew all about the house and basically there wasn’t anything to do. He said to, you know, to take in the mail and check the messages and basically hang out a little so that nobody would rob the place, which is ridiculous because I don’t think any of the houses up there have been robbed in like twenty years and there’s no way I’d do anything, I mean, right, somebody comes in with a gun and I’d be all “Here’s the keys, sir!”. So we were upstairs, and he asked again, and we were right next to Jeb’s room and again I was like I don’t know if I can do that. And Jeff said okay, well, I can’t make you do it but if you want to there’s boxes in the garage. So I said well what are you gonna tell her because you can’t say that Chris and I took the stuff, that would be messed up, and he said no no he’d think of something. I said well what something, because I need to know that you have a plan before I even consider this. So he said I’ll tell her that I got rid of it, I’ll just put my foot down, I mean I can put my foot down when I want. And he smiled, and gave me a twenty, and I said well I’ll think about it.

The weekend I was busy and just ducked in and out but then Monday night I was feeling all lazy and didn’t want to do dishes so I figured I’d have dinner over at Jeff and Paula’s house. So I got a steak and cooked it out on their grill and sat on the back porch eating my steak and drinking beer. And I thought about it and thought about it. And I thought okay, I’ll just go up to the room and look around and go from there. Jeb was a junior in high school last year, and all his stuff was still there just like it was, but there was a box on his desk, this good-sized cardboard box, and I opened it up and there were all these cards people had sent and that kids he went to school with had sent and the track team had this picture of where they put up this banner with his name on it in the gym. I saw the card I sent, which my girlfriend at the time reminded me to get and even picked out; I wouldn’t have remembered it except that it was still in the envelope and it was her handwriting (both our names, I think in a weird way she was, not excited, but like it was an official thing, and she came with me to the funeral and it was like we were a couple, only not much really because we were done two months later). Maybe I was a little buzzed because I remember thinking I didn’t even really send a card, who am I, that was fucked up. And then the next thing you know I’m calling Chris and telling him to come over, we’re gonna pack up Jeb’s stuff.

We had filled five boxes when Chris asked where were we gonna put this stuff. I mean it’s not like we can just leave it in the garage, and what if they want it back? So I figured I’d rent one of those garage-things out by the airport and then he can pay for it or move it or whatever. Chris has a pickup, and really there wasn’t that much stuff, so we managed to fit it all in the back and make it in one trip, so that when we came back the room was, it was just the bed and the dresser with nothing in it. I’m not gonna move that bed, forget that, I’m not even sure we could get it out of the room. Good enough, Chris said, and I agreed, and so by eleven we were finished. I didn’t spend much time there the rest of the week.

Jeff and Paula came back that Friday, and apparently they had an okay time, but it’s hard to tell with them because Jeff never wants to complain and Paula anymore is she just doesn’t really want to spend any more time talking then she has to. Only all that just went right out the window when she saw the room, oh man she hit the roof, and so she just tears into him and all that stuff about putting his foot down, I mean I never really thought he’d do that but not only that, right, he makes up this crazy story about how it must have been robbers. Like robbers are just gonna steal one room and the room with nothing even of any value in it. I mean not without value to them but like to sell. And she believes it, because she’s still convinced that when Jeb died it was like some kinda plot because how else could it make sense, right, so it makes sense that just to twist the knife somebody broke in and stole everything. So she calls the cops. And then the cops call me, because I mean I was watching the house, right? So I say can I speak to Jeff please and the cop says well what do you have to tell Jeff and I say listen, I just need to ask him something and the cop says well if you have something to say then you should tell me, and I said Oh okay fine and I tell the cop I moved the stuff out and oh Christ, so then the cops show up, and I say Jeff, okay Jeff, would you please explain to the cops what happened, you asked me to move the stuff, here’s the key to the rental thing, just fucking stop it already.

So eventually he explains to the cops and Paula freaked out again, and eventually she left him. Jeff moved to Indiana and I don’t know what he’s doing now. Yesteday I was cleaning out my car and I found the key to the rental space, which I had forgotten about and hadn’t paid for, and I drove out to the rental place, but the rental space was empty.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

called out
1990.

Pamela bought a wedding dress at a garage sale and didn’t ask the woman who sold it to her what had happened, but the whole drive back she speculated on possible trajectories the garage sale woman, the woman with little stars on her fingernails and bruises on her wrists must have followed to need money bad enough to sell a wedding dress. Sometimes you sell things just to get rid of them, and if you’re gonna throw ‘em out you might as well get a few bucks for ‘em, I said, but Pamela was already on about what kinda wedding it would be if everything was bought secondhand. She was already wriggling into the dress, her flimsy fauxhippie number balled up on the floor and flashes of her raggedy cotton panties caught in the corner of my right eye as I swerved to miss a kid on a bike. You best hope that’s been dry cleaned, I said, and she asked why and I told her to think about it and she looked at me like I was cancelling Christmas. I don’t give a fuck what you say, she said. If I have to go to the fucking mall with you I’m gonna wear my wedding dress.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

calamity, revisited
I sat at the bus stop, too drunk to drive home, and two kids stood next to me looking at the bulldozer across the street, across the lot, leveling land for a new school. The two kids pulled their arms down in the universal “blow your horn!” sign that works best on truckers but occasionally gets a rise out of construction workers, but this cat was all business and didn’t let out even the slightest peep. This offended me, as I’m pretty easy to upset when I’m all drunk, so I marched across the street, across the lot, and demanded that this clown blow his horn for the sake of America’s young people, and he tried to explain to me that the horn didn’t work, that all the equipment scattered across the lot was mostly-broken secondhand junk bought on the cheap from other states, but I coudn’t hear anything and was honestly too fucked up to decipher voice from diesel roar so I marched back to the bus stop and I said don’t you worry, kids, I’ll find something with a functional horn.

And that’s why I stole that dumptruck, officer.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

bulletproof
Two weeks ago the girl I’ve kinda been seeing asked me if I would go with her to her brother’s intervention, and I said fine, because basically I’ll do anything a woman asks me to do, plus her brother’s just a little fella and so I wasn’t worried about what he’d do if he freaked out. I met Mike (that’s the brother’s name) a few times and he seemed like kinda a prick but not somebody who needed serious help but then what do I know about it. Right? So Melissa (that’s the girl I’ve kinda been seeing) says no, you don’t know, he borrowed all this money from my mom and me and it’s all gone and so I should have kept my mouth shut but I say well what’s a lot of money and Melissa says a couple hundred dollars with this serious tone in her voice like that’s a statement that speaks for itself and I say a couple hundred dollars? and she says you say that like that’s not a lot of money and I say well I mean it’s a lot of money and she says didn’t you just get fired from your stupid little job at the mall? and I say listen I’m not saying it’s not a lot of money but okay so how long has it been and she says two weeks and I’m like, in my head, I’m like oh god here we go, I knew there was something. But even past all that I still go to the intervention and even break into this guy’s apartment just so we can surprise him when he gets home from work and not only does he have the money (which it turns out was a total of eighty bucks) but he borrowed the money to get his mom this really fancy looking china cabinet and he even drives us all, like all nine of us waiting for him, down to the storage place out by the airport so we can see it. Happy birthday, mom! I mean, that’s pretty much when I knew. But the good thing of it is that I met Melissa’s sister at the intervention. Don’t give me that look.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

braeth
His father’s cabin was not really a cabin at all, it was a shack built from scrapwood and furniture he pulled off curbsides at five am. The spaces between the two by fours were filled with crumpled copies of Look Magazine and garbage sacks, no windows, a door pulled off a grocery store someone torched for insurance money. His father would drive up there twice a year, when the attacks got bad, and wait out his jitters on weeks of campfire popcorn and five o’clock vodka. One winter he quit his job, cancelled all his utilities, told his neighbors he was moving to the shack, they had never seen it, they figured it was some kinda fishing bungalow off the Mississippi. By the time Jack, the youngest son, the one the old man still talked to, by the time he got word it had been a month, and so Jack and the rest of the boys went up expecting to find his emaciated corpse frozen to the ground. Instead they found that the old man had taken a bride of some ratty looking checkout clerk and moved into her parents basement after burning the shack to the ground. Last he heard his father was still there, spending what he always assumed would be his inheritance paying rent to his parents, three and five years younger, just happy their daughter finally settled down with a good man.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

bone rattle
The devil appeared to me with your face wrapped across his skull. His voice was calm, and quiet, and told me not to worry. His hands were warm to the touch, but not burning, and as the burning of his body heated the room I felt myself slow, thinking less, everything fuzzy and bright and just a bit out of focus. The devil told me he had paid me this visit in order to clarify certain issues which he felt I did not understand, and I told him I did not want to listen to him, he is the king of lies and cannot be trusted, but I wavered in my objection, and the devil took this gap as an open door. He spoke of distance as illusion, of an infinite series of points between any two points, of the true meaning of consubstantiality. I listened, and was not rude, but in my secret heart I felt a rage begin to rise, that these words would poison me, and so after listening to his speech I told the devil that I had considered what he had to say, but could not abide his intentions, and then ripped your face from his skull, at which point the devil began to scream like a thousand broken cats, and if just to still his voice I tore the devil into twenty pieces, and swallowed each in its turn, and thought myself done with the devil, but I was, as I always am, mistaken.

In time I digested and forgot all about the devil, and while my mind remained unclouded by his speech, the pitch and tone of my voice began to mimic his, the way too many days in Texas will give you a drawl. First it was the peripheral people, those who intersect with me only in an official capability, who took offense, as my nearest and dearest thought I was taken with yet another affectation and tried to wait it out, as when I was given to tremble, or refused to use the telephone. In time even those I loved could not endure the whine and scrape of my every syllable, and found reason to keep from me, until I found myself alone without even the companionship of phone sex operators, whose technology forced disconnect at the modemesque whirrs of my vowels. In this new silence I vowed not to speak, and to find company among those who sought a similar relief, but now my skin began to burn, and my nethers to emit the most foul of odor, a rotten egg fight in a sulfur mine. I could not even bear my own company! My attempts to apologise to neighbors who thought I was cooking methamphetamine led only to hands over ears and a visit from the county sheriff, who could not arrest me but only threaten at a distance. I could not stay, and drove into the desert, where no living thing would approach. There in the desert I vomited up the devil, who stared at me from the pool of my sick with a countenance which could not be endured. I draped your face (all I have left of you) over the puddle and the devil pulled himself into its form and began to speak in your voice, and asked if I would hear his statements again. I agreed; oh anything to be rid of the sound and the smell of this new person I was fast to become! The devil spoke again, languidly, taking great pleasure in his every point, and by the time he finished I would have believed anything he had to say, but his words all seemed true to me, or almost, or enough. I agreed that he was in the right on the issues of the day, and the underlying axioms by which this world is spun, and he thanked me for my kindness and candor and I awoke in my room.

I have been newly blessed with secret wisdom so that young women rabid for the stink of power and money drive for days just to sleep on my doorstep, so that the hidden masters of this world step from the corners and offer me council, and it is now the case that I cannot do wrong in the eyes of the people around me. Born into kingship, I have perfected the grace by which things can be done without notice, so as to seem blessed with the second sight. Yet I know the crooked road by which I have crawled to this place, and I have left more than blood behind me, for at night the stink and screech of my former self approaches in dream, and as foul as the sense of these things may be, they at least resolve in my mind, at least have a nature, unlike the person I now am, a ghost only visible to other ghosts, a trick of the light, a thing which one cannot remember.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

bell sounds off the shoreline
He expected the room to become immediately cold at the moment the presence entered the room. All the expectations, so deep in kiddom he couldn’t identify the point of origin, had filled him with a notion of a dramatic rending of space, milisecond-precise, when contact and confirmation took place. In this, as with so many things, he was disappointed. Perhaps it had always been there, or perhaps what he thought he heard was just an auditory hallucination, a trick he played on himself to alleviate the boredom of the endless waiting. Even the clearest message the prophet-room gave him was like a fight two houses down, caught on the wind and broken in the branches. Disgusted, embarassed, he called her on the cellphone, overcruel in his mockery of her faith in the corrective nature of the supernatural. “If I can’t hear it, how can I understand it?” he asked, cutting her mawkish fencesitting off at the knees. “I don’t care if it’s the devil, or ancestor-ghosts, or the final visitation of Christ — if it doesn’t have the power to enunciate, how on earth can it have the power to see into the future?” She went on with tired notions as to how it would become clear in time, with contemplation, but that sounded to him like he’d end up doing all the work, which defeated the whole purpose of this two hour drive out to Omaha to break into a house in the closest thing Omaha has to a ghetto and stand around for hours waiting for some otherworldly visitor to tell him what became of their daughter. Eventually he threw the cellphone as hard as he could, penetrating and falling behind the drywall, and as he pulled cheap plasterboard and fiberglass insulation off the studs he thought he heard a voice, and stopped, unwilling to so much as breathe, and tried to hear it again, tried to understand what the voice wanted to tell him, but he couldn’t hear anything but the ring of his cellphone, down beneath the floorboards, like bell sounds off the shoreline.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

before the sunlight
He first saw her as a series of glimmerings, the electric light reflected from her sunglasses and teeth and fingernails, breaking and catching in her endless twitching movement, a torrent of offhand opinion and facial tics, and he thought oh God, please don’t let her see me, please don’t let her speak to me. A year later he was sitting with her family, her father a railworker who managed to reach the day’s end through an absolute economy of motion, all nonessential functions disabled, waiting for the next family catastrophe. The others were all as she was, vibrating in their bones, eyes darting back and forth, dropped conversations and missed cues, and he realized the true secret of the father, who had become not simply another man to charm in order to make use of his daughter, but a kind of savant genius — if you do not move, and do not speak, they will not notice you. Just before the main course (some sort of casserole accident which might have contained green beans) he watched this girl who accidentally became his girlfriend, and her mother, and her two stringy brothers, and then finally her father, still as a stone, content to explore the line between the plate and his mouth. This is brilliant, he thought. This is the answer. He turned in on himself, shut down any reflective surface on his body, focused on the dinner before him, as if they had begun cooking one dish and changed plans at the midpoint, and his stomach attempted to boycott the entire process, but eating was no longer about taste and hunger and satiety, it was a place he went where response and conflict was expected of him, a little village made of burned cheese and unidentifiable pieces of meat.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

a vision
We stood in the center of the pond and washed our hands and knives, her and I, faded pink stains like some tremens-damaged script along the neckline of her white linen dress, child-made charms sewn into her hair and devils passing through her, caught on the wind, the sun doubling my vision until the stones beneath my feet seemed some second world, quieter than the chirp and rustle of the dried weeds and browning trees around us, the promise of a first fall frost in the sight of our breath as we wade deeper, my arms ache to keep my hands above water, tempted to put my ear to the water and listen to the quiet and try to find the voice, the hint of a cry, but I stand still before her, terrified to touch her, a mutual mumbling between us emptied of all meaning, just noise to hide our actions from god, do not see us, do not see the terrible thing we have to do.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

attention defecit
He wanted me to listen to his confession, to his running down the list of his faults, but I was so tired, and it was so late, and he never just wanted a silent witness, he wanted interjections and second guesses and blind stabs as to what his actual underlying problems actually were. Never a friend in the official sense, just another person I had bounced around in the same superdramated tide, I should have never witnessed this opening of the chest more than once in some drunken stupor we later pretend to forget, but I had done this nineteen times, and should have had it woven into the habits of my speech, but I had to fumble for every word and soon lost hold of even the most cursory courtesy, and he stared at me from the other side of the table, as if this was my last chance, my final second hail mary to keep what was left of our friendship together, and suddenly I was angry at being put in this position, of having to hold the rope he hung from all this time, and I decided that if it were finished, it would not end on his terms.

“Jason,” I said, “tonight’s the night I fuck your wife.”

And that’s exactly what I did.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

a public display of recreational disfigurements
When I sleep, I pretend she is beside me, in my bed. Sometimes, mostly asleep, I reach out to touch her. Put the words in my mouth, push them until they form spastic motions at my fingertips, until I can see the words before me and know that it is not just another wasted day of not writing, weeks and weeks of staring blankly at the screen and bashing my fists into the keyboard. The words will come, she said to me, but she isn’t real, and my entire life is based upon impressing unreal women, not a life at all. Clumps of stillborn stories in my head, bits from alchemical texts and victorian pornography now cast in a selfsimilar brown sludge that stains my skin, apparent to anyone who would bother to look. Headaches and nausea. Missed opportunities. Underwater bass drones, detuned chords which never fully fade sent from some wandering radiotower out in the snowfields, hiding at the center of a grove of trees where farmgirls go to get high and fuck each other, every mouthmoist promise broadcast into my swollen brain. The crows are made sick with the smell and scream at the stars. Something crawls within the walls, calliing out to me to come closer, to set my ear against the drywall. I am too far away from the small details of everyday life, caught in some empty hole hidden beneath the stations of daily life, of telling details by which we are made identifiable and comforted. It is a trick, the shape of my face, the fat which hangs from my bones, a trick disguised as distinction. It is a sickness of my education to believe I contain organs, memories, crushes. All the books I read when I was the other person have flown from me, so that the best I can do is rattle off titles like rote prayers emptied of meaning, and it is the same for the names of my friends, and it is the same for the list of my accomplishments and failings and characteristics. Stoned farmgirls stare through me, as there is no mental comparison by which to trigger attention. That I can hear their thoughts means nothing but that I do not matter, that what I learn of them has no use. At night I am filled with dreams that these broadcasts speak to me, if subconsciously, a sidechannel display of elaborate possibilities. It is difficult, and takes all of my now-limited abilities to follow the causal chain, and it is always so close, the notion that it is not for my eyes to see, not for my hands to touch. When I was younger, everything was pregnant with secondary meanings, omens buried beneath the surface, but now all that is gone, and even the primary purpose is scratched out of the earth, so that nothing remains but running from pain and embarasment. There is, however, something else hidden, as I am hidden from what I want, and at night it broadcasts marco, and in my sleep I whisper polo.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

and i thought it was the end
Was she distant? Of course she was distant. When have you ever known her not to be distant? For her to do what she does, to be a commentator, a scientist studying group interaction, she had to be distant. I would to see her every Monday, from five until six, sitting in the lysol-sticky visitor’s room, and she would methodically go over the amusing foibles of the institutionalized. Well for instance she told me about the demons. Apparently. It was a common thing for the girls to smear menstrual blood on the door or window, as that would attract Mechiah, who would enter through the cracks and have sex with them. No, a whole taxonomy. There were fuck demons, and give demons who brought stuff from the outside world, and snitch demons who would provide council. She would say this in her increasingly distant tricyclic drone, staring at her legs at the edge of the table, and set forth hypotheses as to the truth of the myth. No, the word demon was misleading, she said, and would be better replaced by agent. She’d say that, and I’d give her my mirror-practiced nod, like I understood, like she would complete her investigation and she’d come home with me, and then I would go to the heavy loced door and have myself let out, and go home. I don’t think so. Well, I think you know who I blame.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

amends
Certain she was a manifestation of the divine spirit, everything was born again in her sight, the way no child that comes from your body can ever be anything but beautiful. She kept getting thinner, so that she seemed like a bird, there in the kitchen in her half-robe, her skin sweatsticky in the early morning light, every sip of her coffee visible as it descended her throat. “The process of time forward into the future is like a mill, grinding away imperfections and flaws, until all things become what they truly are in intention,” she said, her teeth chattering, her rings tapping on the coffee cup. She would stop in midsentence, not remember what she was talking about, but when questioned she would hold up her palm, waiting for the impending revelation. “Everything is waiting for us,” she said, turning toward the window, making a note to herself she will soon forget that today is Wednesday, she has to eat today, great things are about to happen and she must always be ready.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

always afraid
Saturday. At the grocery store. Kid crying, walking alone. Asks me where his mom is. Say I don’t know, look around, don’t see her, Walk to look for her. Kid holds up his hand, I don’t take it. Kid starts crying again. Take kid’s hand. Walk down aisle, see frantic looking woman. Woman screaming don’t touch my son. Get your hands off my son. Pull back my hand, but kid holds on until mom grabs him, pulls him away, screaming at me. Everyone looking at me. I don’t remember what I said. Something something looking for you. Trying to help. Kid still screaming. I don’t care, I don’t care.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

a half-dozen seconds
I have almost perfected the letter. I am close enough to feel a relief, the conclusion now visible after so many years of guessing and hoping, the line of letters reaching a quintessence of pitch-perfect pleas, the irrefutable logic of my arguments all standing in a line, holding hands, one after the next, so as to come to the only possible conclusion, which is for her to gather the kids and get in the car and get on the plane and come back to the house, come back to me, and we will be a family again, as though none of the past decade ever happened. I am almost there. I am a half-dozen seconds from being there.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

advice for my aborted son
The phrase “what you pick up, you cannot always put down” comes from Pamela Bambelam, who first said that to me a couple days before I graduated from high school, and I understood what she meant, but it’s the sort of thing that takes time to fully open to you. Be patient with what you know, as most things are not immediately obvious. Most people do not know their faults, and this is an advantage you have over them, but be careful with this, as it can come back to haunt you. When in a crowd, pick the one person you want to talk to and speak exclusively to that person. Whenever you feel like you’re losing your grasp on your personality and your ability to funtion in society, make sure to get some sleep. This applies likewise for drugs. Spend a couple years listening to everything you can get your hands on, as all of it will prove useful eventually. Do not overthink women, as they are simple, like most things. Make sure to visit the people who love you often, because if you don’t they will question your resolve and you will spend your time wishing to die. Be prepared, like the Boy Scouts say, and that’s the only worthwhile thing the Boy Scouts can teach you. Don’t forget, when you take advice, to consider the source.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

addictions
Time passed, and she grew smaller in her wants, the things she felt she needed, the things she relied on as a constant comfort, having downgraded from illegal painkillers to sleeping pills and cheap lite beer in order to help her sleep and not dream, as dreams are where the dead confront her. The comfort in telling people no, in watching the look in the face when they realize they’ve made a mistake. The comfort in mistreating service industry temps, a little more forceful in the argument than when she was younger, a stage whisper “idiot” as she walks away. Throwing newsprint and bottles in with the rest of the garbage, no longer wiling to sort and sift as though it made a difference. Hanging up on people. Listening to bad pop music and agressively pretending to love it, mentioning it in every conversation she had with her sad trendsucking friends who kept swapping bad haircuts and dismal rainy-day lovers in some brute-force attempt at an antiseptic fat-free smoke-free vaguely leftist adulthood. Nothing so sad as a hipster mom, she told me last Friday, as we sat on the roof of the trailer and watched the combine in the field across the street strip corn from stalks. I was telling her about what I’d been up to, modifying Teddy Ruxpin dolls and making songs of modified baby cries and writing a hypertext novel about strange reel-to-reel recordings found one day in a thrift store, and she said “You really are dead-set on wasting your life, aren’t you?” I tried to clever up an answer, but fumbled it somehow, and then we didn’t say anything for a while.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

twentyone sad thoughts
(but then again, every thought is sad if you look at it right)

  1. Everyone you love is going to die, and you’re not going to be ready when it happens, because you cannot be ready, there is no ready.
  2. Somewhere out there someone is in love with you and could make you happy for the rest of your life and you will never know who that person is.
  3. The times when you were being most honest were the times your friends thought you were being polite, saying what they wanted to hear, saying nothing at all.
  4. Your enemies will outlive you, and tarnish your name.
  5. With the slightest effort at the right time you could have been such a better person.
  6. The thing you said and thought nothing about cut someone who once loved you so deep that they never really recovered.
  7. They only slept with you because they were sad for you, and afraid of what you might do if you spent another year alone, but the taste of that kindness turned to ash in the mouth while you were on top of them, sour and shivering as you tried to come.
  8. All of the things which went unsaid should never have gone unsaid.
  9. Someone you love is ashamed of what you’ve become.
  10. Someone you love grows tired and dead inside when they hear your voice.
  11. Everyone knows your secrets.
  12. You will never know the sacrifices other people made for your happiness.
  13. The way you sometimes think you can still see bruises around her eye and jaw.
  14. A little bit of a tiny little body you thought you saw just before you left for the hospital.
  15. The most disgusting thing you ever thought about while masturbating. Not the thing you would tell friends some late night after too many drinks, the thing which was vaguely nasty, but the real thing, the horrible thing.
  16. The night you saw a missing child and didn’t even notice.
  17. The night he tried to call you and you didn’t answer, and all the things you could have told him.
  18. It isn’t you who takes care of your kids, its your kids who take care of you, stroking your hair as you cry.
  19. The percentage of your love which is actually habit, or novelty, or exhaustion.
  20. Everyone knows your weakness.
  21. You might just as well vanish.


(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #

2002
Some of you may remember my prediction for the year 2002. I am disgusted to announce that this prediction was one hundred percent correct. The only real complaint is that it was far too long, so I offer a summary: the year 2002 was like watching security camera footage of a puppy getting kicked to death over and over and over and over and over. As such, I have trepidation as to making a prediction for the year to come. Should anyone have specific information which they feel may change my understanding of the year to come, please send it my way before this evil and haunted year’s end. Thank you.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #