Chupacabra Can't Be Stopped!

See

2009-02-06T12:12:00.001-07:00

This is on The Obscurian, but I don't want Chupacabra to be stopped, even though I don't think any of us look at it anymore. Oh, sad.

Summer crawls 'til Winter snows
And all will come undone
People crash while no one knows
That none of us have won

All wear masks to hide the pain
And truth is buried deep
Twisted tongues will lie again
For pride they wish to keep

Vile words spat without thought
Cut deep into the bone
See the mess that Man has wrought
Blind to what we're shown

Dumb Light

2008-11-22T13:25:00.002-07:00

Sky full of flies
Fault lines breaking up the ground
And it’s so easy to fall with the sun blacked out
See, they build them steeples high
There is one truth I’ve found
Even with your eyes wide open, babe
Aint nowhere to go but down

So I’m down here with the locusts, love
Marching in no direction

Trying to keep these fuckers off my heals
Trying to keep from getting eaten
See, down here we all cannibals
Gregarious little creatures
We'll eat your flesh and pawn your watch
at the first sign of weakness

And the locust king is a pretty thing
I spent a year between its thighs
It taught me how to sing a pretty song
And how to weave a pretty, pretty lie
Said there’s a reason for every thing we do
And ya'll beholden to me
Each of you is a sad collection of
Myths and dreams and ennuii
And each myth exists, you see
To support the next in line
We've stacked them all right here
The big one on top is mine

And they say one day a hero'll come
To seek repudiation
They say that he'll be gaily dressed
And in the highest fashion
And all that bling may mean something
But your own dumb light is blinding
Your the answers to the riddles
Your the deapth of any hell
Heres an empty bag and heres the cat
Heres the bottom of the well

writers group revival

2008-11-15T13:48:00.003-07:00

What this town needs is a genuine revival! My house, December 7'th. It will be like the Christ-ass episode of writers group, complete with crying and hugging and a great big, solid, dripping moral at the end!!!

XOXO

P.S. There will be cookies and wassel, but bring something you stingy lechers!

The Experiment...

2008-11-11T18:27:00.001-07:00

This might actually count as an experiment in terms of both the title of the story and the fact that I was high as a kite on Nyquil when I wrote it. Not only that, but this one is another of what Crease calls "my diarrhea stories", written in about twenty minutes. Tell me what you think. Please.

"Please, Mr. Gordon. Have a seat."
Donald looked around the small room, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. But there were no speakers that he could see, no glass that would signify a two way mirror. In fact, the only thing that he could see in the room was a chair that reminded him of the one that graced his dentist's office.
He sat, and the chair reclined automatically.
"Are you comfortable, Mr. Gordon?" the voice said, and Donald sat up to see if he could pinpoint the source again. A small metallic arm darted around from behind the chair and pushed his head around until it faced forward. "Please, Mr. Gordon. Let the chair do the work. Now, are you comfortable?"
Donald flexed, trying to see if there were any cramps currently or that might form if he sat long enough. "Yes, I guess so."
"Mr. Gordon, I don't mean to sound rude, but you may be here for quite some time. We want your visit here to be as pleasant as possible. So, if you feel anything, please, say so now, and the chair will automatically reconfigure itself to find your maximum level of comfort."
A little impatiently, Donald said, "No. I'm fine."
"Good," said the voice, and two steel bracelets clamped down on Donald's wrists, locking him into the chair.
Donald immediately began to struggle. "What is this?" he shouted.
"Please, Mr. Gordon, don't fight. The restraints are merely part of a complex biometric system, designed to measure the slightest detail of your bodily systems. Right now, we are showing a thirty seven percent increase in your heart rate and a twenty six percent increase in your blood pressure. Neither of those are good for a man of your advanced age, Mr. Gordon. Now please, just try to relax. Besides, as we said, you may be in here for a while, and any abrasions you might make while fighting against the restraints would not be able to be treated until we are done in here."
Donald took a deep breath, and tried to relax. He looked around the room for a moment, trying to focus on something to take his mind off the chair. It was impossible, though. The room was completely nondescript institutional tile on all four walls. The door that he had entered was precisely fitted with the wall, and he couldn't swear to its exact position.
"Commencing study on subject 1437-Alpha. Are you ready to begin, Mr. Gordon?"
Donald felt a drop of sweat rolling down his nose, and his entire body ached with the craving to wipe it away. Instead, he watched it trickle inexorably down his nose and dangle, seemingly for an eternity, before falling into his lap with a nearly inaudible plip. "Yes," he said, trying to keep his mind off the next drop of sweat that was already beginning its long journey.
"Very well. Now, before we proceed any further, let me ask you this. You have signed all of the appropriate paperwork, including waivers, insurance forms, and next of kin, is that correct?"
"Yes, yes. Is all that really necessary?" he asked.
"Certainly. We are reasonably confident of the intended outcomes of this experiment, Mr. Gordon, but there are always aberrations in any experiment. Hence your forms, as well as this confirmation that you are here of your own free will."
"Yes, that's fine. What are you guys working on again?"
There was a moment's silence, and then the voice came on again. "We are testing the strength of the fear impulse, Mr. Gordon. Specifically, we are testing whether you are more afraid when you know that the objects aren't real, or when you are not in on the joke, so to speak. You, Mr. Gordon, are part of the control group. We have let you in on the joke, as I have said. You are going to be subjected to a gauntlet of common phobias, but rest assured, they are all simulations. You are not in any danger. However, once the experiment has begun, you may not leave. Mr. Gordon, this is your final chance. Can you speak very clearly, so that we may record your response for prosperity. Do you wish to proceed with this experiment?"
Donald watched a final drop of sweat drip from off his nose, and then he said, "Yes."
"Very good," the voice said. "Beginning phase one."
Suddenly, the lights went out. Donald tried to see or hear anything in the blackness. For a beat, there was nothing, and then he heard, or thought he heard, a gear turning.
The lights came on, and Donald was staring down into an abyss. He was dangling at least a mile in the air, his legs pulling down with the intense force of gravity, and he could feel the breeze buffeting him. He felt his stomach drop, and he looked aside to make sure the restraints were holding him. As he watched, he could see a gear turning within the chair, the restraints loosening bit by bit. Three more revolutions and he would be falling, end over end, towards that cold, unyielding ground so far below. Two revolutions. Donald held his breath. One revolution, and Donald began to pray.
The gear made its final turn, and with a sound as loud as judgment, the restraint popped open, and Donald began to scream.
"Interesting reaction," the voice said.
Donald opened his eyes. He was back in the room, the same blank white walls staring serenely out at him. His face was pouring sweat, and he wished that he could wipe it away. But the restraints were still firmly in place, and Donald wondered whether they had ever opened at all.
"Let me again reassure you, Mr. Gordon, that all of these are merely simulations. You are in no danger whatsoever. Now, are you ready for the second phase?"
"Can I get something to drink first?" he asked.
"Of course," the voice said, and a small mechanical arm rose out of the machinery again. Instead of swatting him, however, this time it was holding a glass of water out to him. "And open, Mr. Gordon."
Donald looked strangely at the arm for a moment, then opened his mouth. He choked for a moment, then was able to swallow. "Are you ready for phase two, Mr. Gordon?"
"As I'll ever be," he said.
"Good," the voice said, and the lights went out again.
This time, there was no grinding of gears, but there was a sound, and not only that but a sensation, as well. It started around his ankles, slowly rising up his legs until...
The lights came on, and Donald was sitting chest deep in cold water. Out of nowhere, the blank white walls had formed spouts, great mighty fountains that were gushing gallons of water into the room; and the water was rising at an incredible rate.
He twisted in the chair, trying to get away from the water (and that's what it was, it couldn't be any simulation for he could feel it lapping at his chin even as he twisted), but the restraints held him tight. The water rose higher, higher, until it was past his lips, into his nose, and he couldn't breathe, couldn't even think of anything other than the fact that he was drowning, oh dear God, drowning...
And then he was back in the room, his clothes dry except for the sweat that was quickly drying in the cool, white room.
"Well, while there was no vocalizing this time, your heart rate jumped exponentially. Are you ready for phase three, Mr. Gordon?"
"No!" he shouted, straining against the restraints with everything he had. "Let me out, you never told me that it would be like this."
"Mr. Gordon, we told you everything that we would be doing. You are entirely safe, Mr. Gordon. These are simply simulations."
"Simulations, my Great-Aunt Ruth. I nearly drowned and you guys were just sitting here watching it all go down."
The voice sighed. "Mr. Gordon, let me assure you, you are in no danger whatsoever. As I have told you time and again, these are merely simulations. In no time are you in any danger. Would it ease your mind if we warned you what phobias we will be testing?"
Donald looked around the room for a moment, thinking back to the last time, when he'd been straining for a hint of what would happen next, the waiting almost worse than the actual test itself...
"Yes," he said. "Yes, please."
"Good," the voice said. "The next test is arachnophobia, then."
The lights went out then, and Donald struggled to remember what exactly that meant. He'd heard the phrase before, certainly, but right now he couldn't think what it related to. There was a mythological precedent, he remembered, a weaver named Arachne, and she'd been punished by being turned into something...
He felt the first prickle as something made its way up his leg.
The lights came on, and it all came back to him then (spider Arachne was turned into a spider arachnophobia is a fear of spiders oh jesus), and he locked eyes with the thing crawling up his leg. It was huge, it's body roughly the size of a softball, and it wasn't the only one in the room. The room was alive with them, their hairy legs ticking maddeningly on the white tile floor and walls and ceiling. The walls were white, he knew they were white, but to his eyes they looked to be a thick, undulating brown. The one crawling up him had worked its way up into his lap now, and he could feel the legs of it digging into his stomach as it began climbing up his chest and towards his face. Donald began to scream...
...and the lights came on again.
"Mr. Gordon, are you all right?"
His brow was sweating, and again he wished that he could wipe it away, or that the arm would dart out of the chair again, this time holding a handkerchief to wipe his sweating forehead, but the arm stayed secreted away in the machinery, and his restraints were still locked in place.
"Are you ready for the final phase, Mr. Gordon?"
Thank you, God, he thought, and aloud he said, "Yes. Please, I just want this over with."
"Very well, Mr. Gordon. The final phase will be fear of abandonment."
And the lights went out.
Donald waited in the darkness, wondering what horrors he would be confronted with when the lights came back on.
A minute passed, then two.
After ten minutes had passed in the dark, he began to laugh. A simulation, he thought. No danger whatsoever, he thought. Any minute now, the lights will come back on and I will be free from this hellhole, and I'll be able to put this nightmare behind me.
Any minute now.
An hour passed.
Then two.
On the second day, Donald began to scream.

The Exhibitionist

2008-10-14T18:12:00.003-06:00

Crease woke up tonguing another face in the sandstone. His cough, like the braying of a autistic donkey, protruded to lift a murder of dessert birds from their vigil. They had perched, he surmised, for the better part of the morning waiting for him to regain consciousness. His tongue was swollen and soar when he tried to speak.

"Flech eateen philisthines! Dont eefen have the dethenthy to eat a man while heeth too numb to notith!"

His helpless flailing, big and awkward like that of something to heavy to support itself, fell short of frightening the birds. In the emptiness of their cackling he could skry laughter, malevolence, enmity. They circled once. He tried to to stand and did a sort of ragdoll summersalt instead. He hoped someone was watching him. Possesed of a constant need to feel abberant, he started to piss and cackle like a hyena, just in case. Like Hemmingway said, he thought, no one can stand before a bar with dignity. Fuck if I can't have it here though.

"C'mon you thtupid dino'th!"

He knew they had him this time, lemming that he was. Fuck, he hoped someone was watching.

Eat, you little shits, eat!

2008-10-13T17:48:00.003-06:00

She had that look, like Error must have just before she took her last gurgle of air and was made the unholy communion of her cannibal children. Tanya's fat, stupid mom had adopted the look after she found me up to the hilt in her daughter. This time, though, it ran deeper. I was bracing for the impact of the bible I expected her to projectile vomit at me any second now. I had been rehearsing this scene for the last month, usually in front of the bathroom mirror.

Fuck.

Big fish, dragon, whale; it doesn't matter once your sequestered. It aint like the fucking bible story cartoons, no, nothing like Baron Munchausen. No ships lay dissolving in intestinal sepulchers. There are no card games with pirates, no campfires, no matches. Once you get in, through the mouth as usual, or through the cunt like me, your trapped good. Like a prick in a latex jacket, your held tight. No matter how hard you try, you cant find her spleen from her fat, stupid stomach, like I thought you could.

If she could vomit bibles, I thought, then maybe there was one in here I could use to give her a papercut. After I gave up on tearing out her spleen, I tried for the bible thing. Maybe I was wrong about that, I guess.

It's not as bad as you think though.

You ever reach up a fat bitch's cunt to get at her spleen, she might swallow you, but at least there won't be any more teen-agers. No more blunt-wrap, Hello Kitty milf's to be. No more super-gauged, gangsta, headphone fops. Anyway, it's better than overdosing.

2008-10-13T17:35:00.005-06:00

I have a bad habit...

2008-09-09T21:05:00.002-06:00

I can't just let a sleeping dog lie. Shit man, this always happens. I drop out of writers' group for a few weeks and it goes on a six month hiatus. What the hell, man? So, in the interest of bringing back the beast, here's a new story for y'all. It's a long one, but we need a long one to make this bitch breathe again. It's called "Smoke 'Em If You Got Em".

Smoke 'em If You Got 'em

Andrew woke to darkness, darkness and a rough, scratchy surface covering his face. He opened his mouth to say something and suddenly the sack was removed from his face, the harsh light stinging his eyes. Once the dazzle settled from his eyes, he looked around. He was in a warehouse, it looked like.
"Are you comfortable, Mr. Reeve?"
The voice came from behind him, and he tried to turn, but couldn't.
"Oh, yes. Let me get those for you," the voice said again, and he felt someone loosening the knots on the ropes that bound him to the chair. After a moment, he heard the sound of movement behind him, and a small, thin man stepped into his field of vision, carrying a chair in one hand and a small wooden table in the other. He set these down in front of Andrew. "You are no longer bound, Mr. Reeve. You can move about freely, but be warned that you are not allowed to leave just yet."
Andrew stood up, feeling pins and needles shoot through his legs. "How long have I been out?" he asked.
"No more than half an hour, I suppose. But I understand that the ropes can do horrible things to your circulation. Feel free to stretch, if you must."
"What do you want from me? Money?" Andrew asked.
The man laughed. "No, Mr. Reeve. I suppose this is what you would call an intervention."
"An intervention? What do you mean?"
"Ah, yes, where are my manners? My name is Bannister, and I am here to help you quit smoking."
Andrew laughed disbelievingly. "You? What are you going to do? Hold me here, slap patches on me, make me sip herbal tea until I don't want to smoke any more? Look, buddy, quitting's not a problem. I've done it hundreds of times."
The man smiled thinly at this. "Ah, yes, quite an old joke for you, isn't it?" He picked up a small brown bag from near his feet and picked through it until he found a folder. He opened it up and flipped through it for a few pages before he said, "Here we are. Let's see, the first time that your wife recalls you saying that was in December of nineteen-eighty-one. At your office Christmas party, predictably enough. Looks like it was a variation on the theme, however, as you said you'd quit 'dozens' of times by then. Keeping track, are we?"
Andrew looked at the file, then back at Bannister. "You've got that much info in that file?"
Bannister snapped it shut and favored him with another of those thin-lipped smiles. "That, and more. This is quite a detailed little file here, filled with every single detail of your life that friends, family, acquaintances, and of course, your wife, could recall."
Andrew snorted. "So, Ginny sent you, huh?"
Bannister gave a slight nod. "Yes, I was hired by a Mrs. Virginia Reeve. She's been quite concerned about your health lately, you know. She gave me full permission to do whatever I have to do to get you to quit."
Andrew leered at him then, getting up close enough that he could have kissed the smaller man, if he'd had a mind to. "And what's going to stop me from walking out that door right now?"
As quickly as if it had been magicked there, a small, pearl-handled revolver appeared, pressing into the underside of Andrew's chin. "Mostly this," Bannister said, in the same calm, conversational tone he'd been using thus far. "I won't shoot to kill, of course, not unless it comes to that. But I will take out a leg. Both, if necessary. Now, if you would be so kind as to sit back down, we can begin your treatment."
Andrew sat down with a hard thump. He looked smaller somehow, almost deflated. "So what do we do then? Do we just sit here, eyeball to eyeball while I go cold turkey or something?"
"Actually, not at all. Would you care for a smoke?" Bannister extracted a pack from his jacket pocket and laid it on the table between them.
Andrew eyed the pack warily for a moment, as though he expected it to sprout sharp teeth and bite off a finger if he reached for one.
He stared at them for a moment longer, then said, "Alright, I'll bite. What's the catch?"
Bannister leaned forward and smiled. This time he looked predatory, showing off every single tooth in a too wide grin. "Why, I'm glad you asked. This pack of cigarettes is your brand, is it not?"
Andrew looked down and nodded. "Yeah? So?"
"So, I can tell you this. Half of the cigarettes in this pack are absolutely normal, not a thing wrong with them other than the usual gumbo of carcinogenic ingredients."
Bannister paused, obviously waiting for Andrew to say something. Finally, Andrew said, "And the other half?"
"Laced with a slow acting poison. It won't kill you outright. It usually takes six or seven of the bad ones to do that. But you will start to notice certain things. Memory loss, tremors, twitches. That sort of thing."
"Only half of them, though, right?"
Bannister nodded.
Andrew reached down, opening up the pack and looking down at the cigarettes. "Ah, hell. I like those odds. You got a light?"
Bannister seemed pleased, and extracted a silver lighter from the same pocket. "Excellent. Now, you are welcome to smoke as many as you like, Mr. Reeve, but you must answer a few questions for me each time you do so. Are you ready to start your first set of questions, Mr. Reeve?"
Andrew exhaled a large ring of smoke towards him. "Shoot."
"Okay, let's see here... Ah, here we go. Tell me about your childhood, starting with your date of birth."
"Yeah, okay. Let's see... I was born September 2nd in 1954."
"Good, go on."
"My parents were named Ralph and Maggie, and I had an older brother named Alex who was killed in Vietnam when I was twelve years old. He was twice my age, twenty-four, when he died. I didn't really know him that well, since we were so far apart in age, you know. Anyway, I graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1972, and I married Ginny in '73."
"Excellent. And you started smoking when you were... let's see, fifteen, it looks like. That would mean you've smoked for... what, nearly forty years now?"
"Yeah, I guess. Can I borrow your lighter again?"
"Of course." Bannister took out the lighter and set it on the table. Once he was done with it, he started to hand it back. Instead, Bannister held up a hand and said, "Set it on the table. You'll be needing it again soon, I think."
Andrew shrugged and said, "Fine with me."
"Okay, next set of questions. Are you ready, Mr. Reeve?"
"Fire away, chief."
"You said you were born in '54. Who was president then?"
"What?"
"You heard me. Who was President of the United States back then?"
Andrew laughed. "That's your question? I don't know who you been talking to, but I ain't no history major. I could barely tell you who was president ten years ago."
Bannister smiled. "Your best guess then."
Andrew looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember. His fingers traced delicate smoke patterns in the air as he thought. Finally, he said, "Christ, I dunno. Truman?"
Bannister smiled again, then said, "You're right, Mr. Reeve. You aren't a history major. By the time you were born, Truman had been replaced by Eisenhower. And you're on your second cigarette."
Andrew recoiled as if he'd been slapped. "So? Like I said, I ain't no history major. Doesn't mean I got one of your bum smokes."
"No, it doesn't. But it is interesting. I know that Reagan was office the year I was born."
Andrew laughed. "Reagan? Christ, you're a kid. When were you born, '82, '83?"
"I was born on January 20th, 1981. It was the day he took office, in fact."
"Well, hooray for you. What are you doing in this business, then?"
Bannister didn't say anything for a moment, then said, "Let's just say that I enjoy my work."
"Whatever," Andrew said, reaching into the pack and grabbing another cigarette. "So, how long do we play this little quiz game here? I mean, are you trying to bore me into quitting smoking or what?"
"No, actually. We play until you decide to quit yourself, or..."
Andrew looked up at him, exasperation on his face. "Ah, Christ, enough with the dramatic pauses. Or what?"
"Or we play until the poison sets in, and you die."
Andrew smirked. "Poison. Yeah, right. Poison, my ass."
"Actually, they are poisoned. That one you have right there in your hand, in fact, is one of my 'bum smokes', as you called them."
"Yeah, sure they are."
"Yes, they are. If you look by the filter, you'll see a small red dot. I use those to keep track of how many you've had, and adjust the questions accordingly. Your next round I will want a little more detail, if you please, Mr. Reeve."
Andrew froze, the cigarette hanging from his lips. After a moment, he took the cigarette away from his lips and looked at it.
The red dot stared out at him, and he made a panicked motion to stub it out.
Like magic, the revolver reappeared, and Bannister said, "I wouldn't do that if I were you. I'm afraid that it's a rule. You take it out of the pack, then you smoke it. All of it."
Andrew slowly pulled his hand back and put the cigarette back in his mouth. He inhaled and said, "All right, fine. I need one after you shoving that gun in my face, anyway."
"Excellent, that's the spirit. Now, tell me about your family."
Andrew felt a drop of sweat start running down his face, and he said, "Shit, like I said, my parents were Ralph and Mandy, my wife's name is Virginia, I got one kid, a girl. Named Maggie, like my ma."
"Maggie? I thought you just said your mother's name was Mandy."
Andrew smiled weakly, the sweat running faster now. "Did I? I meant Maggie. Yeah, my baby girl, named Maggie, after her grandma."
"When was Maggie born? Your daughter, not your mother."
"A few weeks after you, I guess. February 2nd, 1982. Groundhog's Day."
"More than a few weeks, Mr. Reeve. I would be a full year older than your daughter."
"You said you were born January 20th."
Bannister nodded. "I was. I was born January 20th, 1981. The same year Reagan took office, remember?"
Andrew nodded back. "Yeah, yeah, okay, I remember now." He took a puff of his cigarette and said, "Fuck Reagan. Never liked him anyway."
He reached for another cigarette, then paused. He tilted the pack towards him and tried to look down into it when he heard a soft click. He didn't even have to look to know what it was, and it only solidified matters when he heard Bannister say, "No peeking."
Andrew picked one out and checked the filter.
Bannister watched as his face went white. Keeping the revolver cocked, he said, "Smoke 'em if you got 'em."
He watched with some satisfaction as Andrew lit his cigarette with a shaking hand. "Are those tremors I see, Mr. Reeve?"
Andrew blew out smoke harshly, shouting, "Of course there are fucking tremors. I'm scared, okay? There, you happy?"
Bannister smiled at him. "Yes, I am. So if you're scared of them, quit smoking them."
Andrew took a deep drag, then said, "I can't. Jesus Christ, I can get you money if you want, but I can't quit, can't you see that, I can't fucking quit and you're going to kill me if you don't let me go."
Bannister shook his head. "No, Mr. Reeve. You will have no one to blame but yourself. Now, are you ready for your next round of questions?"
"Please let me go, I can get you money, I can get you lots of money, just let me go."
Bannister shook his head again, and this time he looked as though he were filled with genuine regret. "I'm sorry, Mr. Reeve, but I can't let you go. Not until you quit, or you finish the pack. Your choice."
"Please."
"No, Mr. Reeve. Now, are you ready for your next set of questions?"
"I'll do anything."
"Fine. Don't grab another cigarette. If you can go for twenty minutes, I will let you go."
"I can't."
"You can't do twenty minutes? Not even a full hour, not even half an hour, and you can't do it? You see, that's why we're here tonight. I'm trying to help you, I promise. Even if you finish the pack, I'll be helping you."
Andrew snorted. "How will you be helping me? By killing me?"
"Yes. By saving you and your family from tracheotomies, from lung cancer, from a slow and painful death in a hospital bed. I'm trying to help you. Meet me halfway."
Andrew looked down at the cigarette, the red dot already half burned away. "Twenty minutes? Starting now?"
Bannister nodded. "Actually, I'm feeling magnanimous. Twenty minutes from when the offer was first put on the table. That leaves you with eighteen to go."
Andrew stubbed the finished cigarette out. "I can do this."
Bannister clapped his hands together in excitement. "Excellent. Are you ready for your next set of questions?"
"Sure. Throw them at me."
"When did you buy your first pack of cigarettes?"
"Excuse me?"
"When did you buy your first pack of cigarettes? Describe the experience to me. Make me feel as though I'm there with you, watching you take that first drag."
Andrew glanced down at the pack, then back at Bannister. "That's not fair."
"I doubt anyone would accuse me of not playing fair, Mr. Reeve. I've been level with you from the start. Look at it this way. If you can get through this, then you can get through anything."
Andrew glanced at the pack, then away, as though he was afraid they might burn him. "Okay, fine. What do you want to know?"
"Why did you start?"
Andrew laughed. "Why else? To impress a girl. I dunno what I was thinking. My parents never bothered cleaning out my brother's room after he was killed in 'Nam, and I was digging through his stuff to find something, I don't even remember what. But I stumbled across a pack of his Lucky Strikes, and I figured that this girl I was lusting after would be impressed." He laughed again, caught up in the memory for the moment.
"And was she impressed?"
"Oh, yeah. Real impressed. Fifteen year old kid smoking an unfiltered Lucky the first time he ever tried smoking? Not to mention that my brother had been dead for four years, and those were probably sitting there from before he got shipped out, so they had to have been at least five years old? Yeah, she was real impressed right up until I blew my groceries all over her shoes."
Bannister laughed. "Then why did you keep smoking?"
"Figured I just had to practice at it, show her one day that I'd learned how to do it right, and she'd start thinking I was real manly. By the time I got it right, she was going out with Bobby Stockwell and I was up to a pack every other day."
"I see. And what was it like when you got it right?"
"What do you mean?"
"That first drag where you really got your first look at what it could be like? That first drag where you didn't cough, didn't vomit, just tasted that rich smoke?"
Andrew pulled another one out of the pack and lit up without thinking. "Pretty damn good, kid. That first drag is what keeps you coming back. It's never as good as that first drag, but you keep hoping. That's why you keep..." He stopped in mid-sentence, looking down at the cigarette dangling from his lip. The red dot stared up at him from just above the filter.
"You tricked me," he said.
"Not at all, Mr. Reeve. I didn't put that in your mouth. You did."
"You know what I mean. You might as well have handed me this and lit me up."
"Don't blame me for your addictions, Mr. Reeve. If you had quit before today, you would never have seen me."
"Well, you're certainly not helping. I normally don't smoke like this, you know. You just..."
"I just what, Mr. Reeve?"
Andrew took a long drag before answering, "You make me nervous."
"Then I am doing my job. I believe that makes number four of the 'bum smokes', Mr. Reeve."
"No, it doesn't. This is three. I've had three of the ones with the dots, I've been counting."
"And how many of those have you had, Mr. Reeve?"
"I've had five, and the first two were clean."
"Were they? You didn't start checking until the third one. Are you certain the first two were clean?"
Andrew felt sweat forming in a small pool beneath his nose, and he swiped it away before he said, "I'd have noticed."
Bannister just smiled. "Would you have? Well, then, let's agree to call it three, and just keep in mind that six is usually enough to kill someone."
"Six? I thought you said seven."
Bannister nodded. "I did. I said six or seven. It's not an exact science. One man made it down to four cigarettes left in the pack before he finally keeled over. When I checked for dots, he had two left. So, I suppose the current record is eight. Would you like to try for the record, Mr. Reeve?"
Andrew stared at the pack for a long moment, trying to make a decision one way or the other.
After a second's hesitation, he reached in and grabbed another one, anxiously checking the filter.
No dot.
He breathed a sigh of relief and lit up.
Across from him, Bannister smiled and said, "Well played, Mr. Reeve. That's the spirit. Now, are you ready for the next set of questions?"

Two hours later, the pack was empty, the final cigarette dangling from Andrew's fingertips, forgotten for the moment. A thin curl of smoke still issued from the tip, but he made no move to smoke it.
Bannister leaned forward, tapping Andrew lightly on the shoulder. "Mr. Reeve?"
Andrew's eyes opened sluggishly, and he looked up at Bannister with no recognition in his eyes. "Who are you?"
Bannister grimaced at him for a second, and then forced the grimace into something resembling a smile. "Just a friend, Mr. Reeve. Can I get you anything?"
Andrew lifted his head slowly, turning to stare at the now-dead cigarette in his hands. The red dot had been burned away. He lifted it to his lips anyway, sucked weakly, then threw it away in disgust. "Actually," he said, slowly. "I'm just dying for a cigarette. You wouldn't happen to have one, would you?"
Bannister kept the smile on his face, even though it felt horribly fake, as he reached into his pocket and extracted another pack. He unwrapped the cellophane and extracted a cigarette, placing it in Andrew's mouth. Andrew didn't notice the red dot on the filter, didn't notice anything but the cigarette in his mouth, and the sensation of smoke filling his lungs as he sucked.
Bannister watched him smoke for a minute, then set his lighter on the table. Andrew looked up at him with a confused look on his face that broke into a smile when Bannister said, "Keep the pack."
Bannister walked out of the warehouse, turning back only once to watch as Andrew lit up another cigarette, still wearing that same smile as he pulled the first drag of smoke into his lungs.

Oh Well.

2008-08-28T15:18:00.000-06:00

Apparently so.

Chupacabra Stopped

2008-08-28T15:14:00.001-06:00

Well, I guess we can lay the bitch to bed, eh?

Why We Write

2008-08-23T11:15:00.004-06:00

How with time we all will die
And how life seems to pass us by
How memory we hope won't fail
And every day we write our tale

To leave a legacy of ourselves
To add to books upon the shelves
As photos fade and faces gray
Our words, our phrases will hold sway

Countdown to Apocalypse

2008-08-21T15:46:00.000-06:00

Tonight is the night the whole world ends.

Sing it loud to set you free
The Anthem of hope and clarity
Display it proud for the world to see
The words of truth for you and me

Tonight is the night the whole world ends.

Out not with a whisper but with a bang
We shall not whimper but we shall sing
We all look forward to eternal dream
We shall gather in the streets and scream

Tonight is the night the whole world ends.

Large and low hangs the moon
We all know the end is soon
Blood-red ocean, beach whale-strewn
Apocalypse illness none immune

Tonight is the night the whole world ends.

Blammo

2008-08-20T15:28:00.002-06:00

I slipped a bit when the pate de foie gras came around, principally because I cannot pronounce pate de foie gras. Eating a thing unpronounced is like donking someone's sister whose name you can't remember. The person whose sister it is, or the sister, you ask.
Forsooth, either. So I slipped a bit.
What I mean by 'slipped' is I ducked under the tablecloth, making a noise I thought would sound as if I was feeling a bit ill. 'My God,' some bitch exclaimed, 'has he the dysentery?'
Naturally, I grasped this interjectionist by the heel and sank my teeth into her ankle.
Who wouled have thought her husband would be so angry?
So, we played a little game. Every time he hit me, I did my best to spit on his wife. The game got better and better, as I graduated from phlegm to blood, and bits of teeth, and then some of my dinner. The other guests were huddled in the pantry to our starboard side, tittering in adulation of my cleverhood. 'You had enough?' I demanded through new holes in my smile, and spit the tip of my tongue into his wife's fatass cleavage.
When I woke up I was in a dumpster. Dear God, forgive them. For they know not bout my crew.
I called all the third graders I'd been buying smokes and mouthwash for, and told them to bring ski masks. Oh, Gotham, you will burn for your transgressions.
First things first- find the fuckers that puree duck liver into French words, and fist their bunkin holes till they swear that Cher's ass a recycled toilet seat. I love my brain.
It is so well-built. The End.

Taxi

2008-08-19T17:26:00.001-06:00

My own personal writing exercise, I took a line from "The Crack Up", which is the notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald and used it as the first line. Feel free to do the same if you'd like. For me, it wanted to be a poem, but maybe it won't for you, if you so choose to use it. I'm not so sure this is done yet, I haven't decided.

A taxi tipping over on a nervous night
Skidding tires on slick street rain
Crunch of metal and swirls of light
Overturning once, twice, and again

Heaven showers still rain falls
Dripping drops tell up from down
People huddled ‘gainst the walls
One by one begin to drown

Mr. Lucky Lip Saves the Salt

2008-08-15T17:18:00.005-06:00

It probably could use more, but this will do for now...
***This is a work of complete fiction***

Mr. Lucky Lip cringed and coughed and looked up and laughed. His tall frame stood scarred and strong as he mounted his extra-cycle, a truly noble transport, and made his way to the Den of Ill Repute. It was there he played the delicate beautiful instrument with bow and heart. Drop-jawed they watched and wondered who this stranger was. They wondered if it was he who wrangled a tattoo-throated fisherman with a belt, or if it was he who served them drinks with a loud laugh at the lounge with hookahs, or he who sold them books with a smile. They couldn’t know that he would set in motion a chain of events leading to the downfall of the local elite, The Church. And no, I am not speaking of the fairly descent band from the golden age of hair rock, the 80s, but of the institution of a faith run by white men and their little clones.
He played until the sun came up and those who snaked around at night tightened their ties and polished their shoes and kissed their clueless wives goodbye to spend the day packed into a cubicle. They played at being bad, thought they were kings, but it was they who were the ones to act for appearances. The poor little yuppies couldn’t sleep, so they quietly crept out of the house and into the bars and showed off that tattoo they got when they were nineteen of a dragon on their upper arm, yes, that would make them look bad and cool. Those people were blind to their contributions to the churning Church machine, those poor saps, he would have save them from themselves.
Mr. Lucky Lip, or Chris, as he was known to most, began his quest by going home. He plugged in his weapon and it hummed, no sound sweeter. He loaded it with a blank white page and began to type. He would write his truth, a manifesto of epic proportions. It was all clacking and dings for seven days he didn’t stop typing. His fingers cramped and bled and still he typed. Page after page, his heart poured out as inky lines, each letter pounded with purpose until he was finished. He signed the end with a Pac-Man ghost.
He made his way to Temple Square and began handing out his truth to anyone who would take it, which wasn’t very many. He stood in front of the Temple of Doom and tried the same with similarly poor results. He decided to make large posters of each page and paste them to the sides of the light-rails. They were taken down almost immediately. Feeling slightly discouraged, he went back to the Den of Ill Repute and left a few of the manifestos on the bar for people to take as they wished. He downed a pint or two before returning home.

A shifty looking man whose name I can’t recall happened to take a copy of Chris’ truth that night and took it with him to the office the next day. The stapled pages made their way around the building within hours. Copies were made and taken home to show the wives and to be passed to brothers and fathers to take to their places of employment. A few weeks after Chris left the stack on the bar, he began to see graffiti that looked remarkably like his Pac-Man ghost signature. It was everywhere, trains, buildings, windows, pavement, and he could swear he saw a tattoo or two. He caught a guy handing out copies of his manifesto and asked him what it was all about. He was told through a hoarse voice to come to a meeting that night deep within the bowels of a local bookstore where he happened to work. Masquerading as a book club, the meeting was led by Zach, a guy who became passionate about the truth within the manifesto. He told them all of his plans to take down the temples.

“Clearly, doing this nonviolently is not going to work. We need to do something a bit more extreme.”

He paused for a minute, judging the feeling of the room.

“Bombs.”

Chris went along with it, fuck it, he figured, why not. A sultry dame wiser than her years told him it was a terrible idea and that it would change nothing, but he didn't care. So someone said they knew a guy who knew a guy who could get them what they needed and they started to plot the downfall.
Around a month or two later (no official record can be found) forty-five or so black clad figures surrounded the temples ready to rig the blasts. They crept with shadowed accuracy to the sides of the buildings and set the explosives with a timer. They went up Capitol Hill for the show.
Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six… Chris’ breath quickened, his eyes widened.
Five. Four. Three. Two… With a large intake of air, he held his breath.
One.

Nothing happened.

“Oh, what the fu-” and before the ck could leave his mouth, BOOM! He felt the sound in his chest, it looked like fireworks lighting the night sky. They did it. He swigged his flask and laughed.

Good(ish) news...

2008-08-14T16:45:00.002-06:00

So, the good news is that I got a job that is paying me a significant amount of cash more than what I was getting at any of my previous jobs. The bad news is that between the new job and school starting as of next wednesday, I'm probably going to have to sit out the group until about January-ish. Lame, I know, but I'm going to be working like a slave and trying to keep a decent GPA, so somethings gotta give. I'll still try to post shit on here though, so it's not like I'll be disappearing from the face of the planet. And Chris, I just want you to know that as soon as my student loans clear, that sweet ass guitar of yours will be mine. Anyway, I'll try to come if I can, but for now, I'd say you can probably count on me not showing up more often than coming.

Bricktop Betty

2008-08-14T16:04:00.002-06:00

She rambled in like pickup sticks, her hair all ragged wicked wild
And called the regulars to tits, she thrust that bricktop suckle, child.
'I'm come,' spake she, 'for sweating fun,
'For eloquence and catching come. Who here among you knows the eldritch ways of knocking legs?'
The old men all just shook their heads;
They peered in beer, and downed the dregs.

William Shakespeare Writes Corporate Sponsored Poetry

2008-08-14T14:35:00.002-06:00

Energizer Batteries: A Sonnet
By William Shakespeare

I hath fallen down dead into the earth
Drained of life I lie pondering why
If only there was a source of new birth
To raise me back to sweet succulent life

At last! I hath found a wondrous gift
A tiny cylinder filled with acid
Oh positive and negative do lift
And now I am energized, death forbid!

How could I have lived without this life source?
I feel I can go on and on and on
Eternal life is now my destined course
My duel with death is now forever won!

Pink bunny so cool beating on thy drum
Energizer Batteries life comes from!

Vamos Vamos Vamos

2008-08-14T12:15:00.002-06:00

So... no one else wants to drag Oz through the mud. Who's next? Keltin's on vacation but fair game, as are Zach, Kan and I.
I vote for myself, just because I want to see what strange and evil things I'm doing in your heads. Think on it and comment your choice(?)
Schmorgasbord.

Strippers in Atlanta

2008-08-12T07:38:00.005-06:00

I went to Cameron's bachelor party night before last. It was fun- the strippers weren't gross.
Well, any more so than any pretty girl who wiggles her nibbly bits on guys noses for dirty one dollar bills. Strippers are gross. I lied.
The strippers kept telling me I needed to tip or get away from the rail, but that's where Cameron was, so I just pretended I was deaf and talked funny and pointed at my ears. Guys kept peeing in the garbage cans in the bathroom, which was fucking weird. Also, there was a really fat guy with a tray of cheap cologne and lotions and shit who squirted the soap in your hand when you used the sink and I think wanted tips but didn't say anything to the guys who kept peeing in the garbage cans.

I have found that paying attention to the strippers is against the spirit of the thing. Either you are coked out of your mind and full of whiskey and think the whole thing is swell, or you drink bud lite and try to stay away from the tables, and just watch, because the setup is unhealthy and pretty weird, and there are 100 guys hoping the stripper offers to go get coked out of her mind and drink whiskey with him. Now- Saturday night- we visited a true Atlanta institution (apparently): the Clermont Lounge.
A piece the newspaper did recently dubbed it 'The stable where old strippers go to die'.
Not only were the strippers on an island in the middle of the smokiest most gnar-drawling bar I've evr drank $1 PBR in, they were, almost uniformly, over forty and wobbling around like PCP had the better of them. One grandma wore a little red riding hood outfit, then a Krispy Kreme getup, and crushed beer cans between her tits. This place was both horrible and inherently honest, stuffed beneath a weekly-rate hotel on a run of Tattoo parlors. I got the inside of my lip tattooed.
The rub was- the joint filled up with an old Cuban DJ in a fuzzy white Kangol hat and more happy, drench-sweating gorgeous twenty and thirty somethings in rockabilly dresses and sunglasses and snappy shoes than I have ever seen, and danced like the paving stones were coming out of their streets and howled and gave dollar bills to women that looked as if they'd cut their hair that morning with a grapefruit spoon.
It was the best bar I've ever been to, and the girls were sharp and quick and danced too well for me and the enormous lesbian bartender put me in a headlock and called me Cuddles at one point. All I did was order a drink, and she dragged me onto the bar by my neck and called me Cuddles and told me I could have a job cleaning the dancefloor, as she gave me a painful noogie and people laughed at me. I am still confused, but the Clermont Lounge was pure 1950's debauchery- the kind of thing I imagined as a small boy when bad things were described to me.
When I first heard punk rock, or metal, I remember being reeeeaaaally disappointed, because they were candycane tame in comparison to what I'd imagined. I eventually found bands to redeem my imagination. It took longer to redeem strip clubs. That place was fucking dynamite.
Oh... there's a tattoo parlour next door.

Oh Hell.

2008-08-09T10:26:00.003-06:00

I know this isn't here to solicit anything, but this is making me angrier than when I heard about the remakes of "The Day the Earth Stood Still", "Wizard of Gore", AND "Last House on the Left". Fuck MTV.

City of Strays

2008-08-05T12:09:00.002-06:00

I wanted to re-post this without my other introduction. This is what I have so far. I have started adapting it into a screenplay even though it's not finished, which is giving me so many ideas for the story.

She took the cigarette like water, sucking down the smoke in gulps. The dim blue glow of the moon lit her face with shadows, her red lips puckering to blow then swirls of smoke danced circles before her. She dropped the butt beneath her pivoting foot and began to walk toward home, her high heels clicked on the concrete. Jean’s only solace was her lonely stride home through streets littered with the trash of the world in a city built for strays. Sidestepping past bums was just part of the path and turning a deaf ear to the whistles and calls from dirty old men became routine. Jean was the prettiest thing about that part of town, a diamond in the mud and the mud was drowning.

In the night there in the City of Strays things tended to change, buildings would twist and stretch and some would sink into the sand-soft pavement. Jean loved watching this happen, it seemed like she was the only one who noticed anymore, at times she questioned whether anyone else could see it at all. By morning everything would look the way it always had, dull gray buildings covered in filth, but the night, yes, the night was magic.

Jean slid the key into the lock on her front door, she felt the pins move beneath the grooves a twist and a sigh and she was home. She knelt to retrieve the mail finding only one unmarked envelope which she opened with one of her long red nails. Pulling out the folded paper hidden inside, she found a single sentence typed.

“Wednesday 7:00 p.m. Gravel Pier”

Jean tossed the note into the fireplace and followed with a match. She went to her bedroom, flipping off her shiny black heels along the way, and began unbuttoning her dress; the neck stretched to just below the chin and the hem to just below the knees, little black buttons swirled their way down the length of the blue satin fabric embroidered with pink cherry blossoms, following lines of black piping. Eventually managing to free herself of the garment, she unclipped her stockings, rolled them down her statuesque legs and placed them in a drawer. She pulled the pins from her auburn hair and let it fall free onto her slender back. And there she stood nearly bare at the floor to ceiling one-way mirror which was her window to the ever changing city, ten stories above the trash and filth and scum of the world in that muddy little part of town. She stood watching the buildings sway and bend and wondered why this was, why the city could change at night and show no signs of its dance by dawn. She sauntered to the kitchen and poured herself a drink. Moving back to the window in her bedroom, she sat on the floor before it, drink in hand, and let herself get lost.

***

The bright warm orange sun woke her in the morning. Jean had finished the drink and fallen asleep where she sat. She lay awake on the floor soaking in the sun’s embracing rays hoping the new day would be better than the previous, she hoped the night’s meeting would bring a good assignment, and she hoped that Cliff would catch her hints of disinterest. Leaving her glass on the floor, she propped herself up, stumbled to the bathroom and filled the tub. After a lengthy soak, she slipped out of the towel and into a silky blood-red floor-length dress, a slit from toe to hip let flash her long leg, a white leather holster attached to the thigh cradling an elaborately decorated six-shooter with a gleaming white mother-of-pearl handle. She climbed into her black heels and pinned up one side of her hair, leaving the other to rest on her shoulder and back. She dripped dangling pearls from her ears and painted her lips scarlet.

It was noon.

Jean locked up and walked to the Tea Tin, a tiny diner a few blocks away from her apartment, it was a small one-story building that had streams of a rust-colored grime running down its once sky blue exterior walls, the interior looked like a typical roadside/airport diner from some forgotten time that had been left to devour itself. There were tears in the fabric of the booths, gum beneath the tables and bar, the walls of the restroom were layered with thousands of markings from girls with pens, and the teal and once-white checkered floor was ever-sticky with syrup and soda. The place was run by a sweet old lady named Dot who tried her best to do what she could to keep that diner going, and to keep it from going to the Rats, a band of transients who stayed in the Strays to terrorize the town into submission.

“You want your usual, hon?”

Jean nodded while giving a friendly sort of smile. If there was only one person Jean could truly trust in the Strays, it was Dot.

Five-forty-five and Jean started toward Gravel Pier, two miles east. She tossed her leg over the seat, thrust her foot down the kick-start and the bike sputtered alive. Roaring and raring to go, she situated a pair of silver framed goggles on her face and curled the throttle back, speeding forward, she rode. The sun began to set over the crumbling old city just outside of the Strays. Rebar and beams were skeletal silhouettes against the orange pink sky with a few reflective panes of glass clinging to the bits of concrete and brick still attached to the once grand skyscrapers. Gullville used to be a great city booming with suits and stocks and bonds and ties, polished shoes and gallons of hair gel, a yuppie paradise built for trade. People moved like clockwork in straight lines like drones, work, lunch, home, work, lunch, home, day in, day out, no weekends, non-stop. You could almost hear the ticking of their synchronized wrist watches echoing from the shiny buildings.

Jean looked like a ruby speeding through the smokey bleak city, the side of her hair that wasn’t pinned up waved behind her. She reached the edge of the Strays and found the road she had always used to be nothing but rubble in the desert sand. Fucking Rats, she thought. She had to hope her junk-yard bike would make it across rough terrain, the tread on her tires was nearly non-existent and the sand spray not caught by the fenders would certainly leave some sort of rash on her legs and arms. This better be a damn good assignment. She rolled onto the sand slowly, it was hot, she could smell the rubber begin to melt and knew she would have to go as fast as the bike would let her. She backed up onto the remaining road, revved the engine, and bolted forward. The sand swirled around her like a hurricane, she kept her mouth shut tight and her face down. Weaving around chunks of road and rubble, she rode toward Gullville with determination. After what felt like an hour, she felt the front tire bump up and onto pavement. Jean took a moment to brush some sand from her hair and face and wipe clean her goggles before she continued on to Gravel Pier.

Six-forty-two. Jean pulled up to a rusty gate chained shut to an even rustier fence that crumbled at the slightest touch. She went to the largest hole and pushed her bike through. She climbed back onto her bike and rode along side the murky littered shore to Gravel Pier.

Jean saw two shadowed figures before her as she approached the pier wearing trench coats and hats they spoke to each other with intensity, she was unnoticed. She popped down the kick-stand, removed her goggles, and dismounted her bike. Wanting to listen in, Jean stayed back silently. She couldn’t hear anything more than undecipherable whispers, she saw a gun pass between silhouetted hands. Being two minutes to seven, she decided to join them. As she walked up to them, they kept their faces down, shadowed. The figure who passed the gun handed Jean a manila envelope and walked away without a word. She turned to the other figure, a face lifted enough for the setting sun to light the eyes.

“Hello Jean.”

“Cliff.”

“Are you gonna open it or what?”

“You know I won’t until I get home.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“You seem to be.”

“You know, this light makes you glow.”

“Is that right.”

“You really are beautiful, Jean.”

“So they say.”

Jean left Cliff beneath Gravel Pier and walked unturning to her bike knowing Cliff’s wanting eyes were solely on her. She zipped the envelope into a pouch on the rear fender, fit her goggles on, kicked up the stand and down the start and rode toward the hole in the fence.

***

Jean locked the door behind her and sat on the couch opposite the fireplace, which she lit on the way. She lifted the little prongs holding the envelope shut and raised the flap. Reaching inside, she pulled out and eight-by-ten photo of her assignment. Her lungs emptied with a shocked sigh and her shoulders dropped. Flipping the photo, she found the explanation as to why. This is what it said:

He has been found to be the Pin of the Rats.

He can not be trusted.

We have enough evidence to prove so.

You have one week.

Though she had a dislike of him, she would have never wished his death. A single tear flowed down her soft cheek as she started contemplating how his life would end.

The next morning, Jean walked to the Tea Tin as she had everyday for the past year. To her surprise, when Jean arrived at the corner of Dent and Forty-Second, all she saw was the faint shape of the Tea Tin's roof in the ground and a few of the tiles peeking through the dirt. It had sank and failed to emerge during the night's swaying sinking stretching dance. She had never seen a building stay the way it had been at night, they always had gone back to normal by dawn. Things were changing. It couldn't be good.

A Novella Coming?

2008-08-04T16:19:00.004-06:00

There is a city- an island city- set grandly in the center of a forest-edged bay. The bay has two inlets, and over each a Collossus stands, straddling the point of entry. The Eastern Collossus is a man, the sun piercing up into the sky behind him each day. The Western Collossus is a woman, accepting the sun into her waters each and every evening.

They are man and wife, these two, and have not ever touched.

They sing to one another, and perhaps speak, and sometimes whip the waters of their city's bay into a murderous mess for want of ways to punish just the other. At night, their city swells, and blooms, or cracks, and warps, according to the shape they've made between them. There are centuries of drought and war, of taifoon and crops curled ankle deep in every plot of earth. And then comes reconciliation, then come birds, and trade, and sunflowers the height of horses, as their love renews.

Their feet rest deep in ocean bedrock, and the people of the island city say their ancestors carved Them from basalt ranges over eons, cutting out the ships' passage into shapely legs from the solid stuff of mountain gods. The people in the woods around the bay say that They sat up, fullbent formed and seeking one another from the ocean's silty bed one day in time past memory, and froze under the sun before their monstrous arms could meet.

The Man's temper was a heavy thing, and wild, and dashed the island's people from their rocks and homes, some years. The Woman never struck so hard, but her legs stood in deeper water, and her enmity ran deeper still, and held its roots for years, and years. Sometimes the people of the island city would wake to find sharp canyons where their streets had been, and poison oak over their temples. Sometimes the water came like wolves and dragged their children off at night, and they would gather on their beaches come the morn and offer fruit and milk and tears to reconcile the feuding giants.

Sometimes there were fish so thick that they could walk across the bay to land, and overhead the Collussus sang in warbled tones along the wind; never to touch, always- just to stand.

Just as long as your thing ain't got a thing to do with me and what I'm tryin a bring

2008-08-03T13:47:00.006-06:00

Regarding writerly groupings.

I think a regular meeting place can easily be established over on 800 East where Chris and I lay our heads. Then I have to issue an asterisk.

If that is indeed to be the regular meeting place, some things need to be modified. My stipulations for further participation on my part- and my agreeing to allow my space, furniture and dishes to be used-include:

-Attend only if you brought writing to share and discuss (except John- who is a great reader and always offers thoughtful feedback); basically, attend only if you are contributing.

-Be thoughtful and constructive in your feedback and requests for feedback. Condescension and entitlement are a little rampant for my tastes. Defensiveness is rather present and rather absurd. The point of getting together as I understand it, is to evolve our writing while having a pleasant and sociable time. Respectful criticism shouldn't be met with jabby remarks and criticism or gripes should be void of name-calling and attacks. Be fucking articulate on both ends, you are fucking writers.

-Be critical. Compliments are so appreciated by me but snags are sooo important. We also should to be directing the focus of the group when our piece is being shared. What do you want from us? "I'm wondering about the story int his one..." or "How do you guys feel about the characters/dialogue/flow in the piece I am reading as I have been really struggling with the dailogue/plot/ending..." and then we will actually evolve. Sometimes it may just be "I wrote this, I like it and I want to share it." which is part of all this but when it's not that, tell us what you want.

-Be nice while being articulate and critical. Be nice while being articulately criticized.

-Bring a bottle. No more showing up empty handed and emptying out the booze supply. If you are going to drink, you need to be contributing. I have been unemployed for almost two months and I pay rent and I have managed to scare up enough cash for wine. Not because I am a self-righteous cunt but because I am a wino and I can't write with out sousing. I wouldn't drink another wino's wine with out throwing down my own first. I expect the same courtesy from guests in my house. There are times we can't bring anything, of course. Life is a mean thing and sometimes you need someone to give you their share. That needs to be an exception, not a rule.

-Respect the space. Breaking glasses, spilling all over furniture or floors and generally employing frat boy antics is unacceptable on my porch.

-Figure out a ride home. It is not the job of people with cars to ferry the rest of us about, I do not run a hostel (El Hostel Free for All Motherfuckers) and I have shit to do the next day. We are all adults and if you can't get yourself back to your own home in an adult way it is not on the rest of us to figure it out for you. If you want to crash, ask ahead of time and work it out, don't spring some last-minute awkward shit on the people that live there. I walked home from Chris' old joint at 4am in the winter plenty of sputteringly drunk nights, it is a drag but comethefuckon. We are adults. Bring that grown up ruckus, y'all.

-Respect each other and personal space and boundaries. For fuck's sake.

I am highlighting what I need to participate. Feel free to vote me off the team, I understand that I am not in charge and many of you may have different ideas about what makes a successful writer's group.

But my home, furniture, booze and dishes will no longer be utilized unless the above things are addressed. I feel I have been very genuine and generous with these things as well as my couches, pantry and time spent cooking. I enjoy sharing and cooking and writing and reading.

However, lately a number of instances have tried my patience and boundaries and I simply feel drained each time we get together. That and the house and yard are always trashed the next day.

Please don't respond to this on an individual basis. I am not calling anyone out. I am simply defining my boundaries for my home. Chris pays his own rent and can do what he sees fit but my shit ain't going out like that anymore.

Thanks for reading and pondering.

Watch It

2008-08-02T15:50:00.003-06:00

I could reach my hands inside your mouth and split you open like a peach. The sadder that I get the worse I talk about it.
I have violence in me like breakers, doll- they swell, and ebb- but that's not what this is. It's more the way things should be, a return to the quiescent state before you grew your grand ideas. You never shammed me, doll.
I could count the drops of sweat that beaded on your young little lip.
This backlash, now- how sad, oh bunny, pobrecita, dear. Did you fuck it all up? Did you derail and lose what little respect you held cogent 'gainst your oft-flashed ass? Did you ruin something you wanted so goddamn bad you'd mark up corny books of poetry, or flowers, and leave them shivering on my doorstep?
Did you have no one else to blame?
How cute that now you're coughing up your bile. You'll lose the taste for it, sad babydoll, oh dear.
Don't let your cunt, or drink, turn you into another skidmark bimbo on the scene. Oh yeah- I'm mean- But never were to you.
Don't fuck my memory to ease your choices made. I've had enough of taking punches for the decade, peach. Your whole ripe shell would shuck in half and settle to the sawdust in a pile. It's age, and care for my self that's made me treat folk well.
Yeah, sure, they listen when I speak; and I do love to laugh. You'll listen too if I lose that keynote bit, and tear your fake in half.
Thanks for the fucking photo.

Broken Social Scene

2008-07-30T09:55:00.002-06:00

Liz had a pile of them, now.
They'd accumulated, somehow; a chipdrift 'gainst her laptop by the door, heavy little lightweight bits, so useless by themselves. Invaluable to those they'd left. The Philistines, Liz liked to say- under her breath to friends in places without crowds. She'd never liked a crowd.
Now Liz was from Los Angeles, or thereabouts. This meant two things. One, she refused to walk. For chumps, walking- for the goddamn birds. Two, she was sick to death of people. Pressed against her, breathing on her, pawing sloppily at countertops with warm beer slopping on their hands and eyes. She had a poet's soul, she'd tell her friends, and crowds do not a poem make.
Whatever, said her friends. We're going to see the Schmunkaholics at Johnny's on Second.
But this required walking. Philistines.
It was a year back when the Bluetooths began integrating. Sounds funny, don't it? A jeweler and a neuroscientist whipped the whole business up at UC Berkeley- the start of it was hearing aid implements and how they interacted with the brain itself, if the eardrum was bypassed. Folk with shattered ears could hear again, allowing one small wire and something like a transducer pickup on the skull. Punch it straight through to meat and voila! Sound- the world restored.
So this scientist, a capitalist at beating heart, decided to push things further, and called upon a jeweler friend. The standard slim clip Bluetooth, integrated into the ear's upper cartilage, could be wired straight into one's brain, eliminating cell radiation, extraneous equipment, and most hateful to Liz- the need to interact with one's fellows with any sort of decor or respect for personal space.
It was as if the hateful bar followed her everywhere now- everywhere, she was assaulted by stranger's intimate conversations- never sure who was schizophrenic, and who was just another integrated asshole.
Darcy was the first in her inner circle. They talked about it, tersely, in the back of a hookah lounge, hidden away in a booth. Darcy showed her how it was turned on and off. She had a piercer install hers- far more chic, more pleasing to the eye than an instore job, and lined with bit-green LEDs no bigger than a flea's tit. 'Well, what about showering?' Liz asked. She was immensely annoyed.
'You have to turn it off,' Darcy said. 'Look, its not a fucking product scanner, Liz. I'm not some corporate heist-monkey, here to ruin your world. Its just a fucking phone.'
'It's in your head.'
'Yeah, yeah.' Darcy had a sip of her drink. 'Its weird, though- spooked me out a bit. The guy who integrated me, holding this big wicked punch in one hand, a sautering pen in the other, says Don't ever, ever, remove my RIFD chip from the back unless its powered off. Rain- even a shower- won't hurt me, just maybe screw the electronics up. It's like pulling an external drive out of your computer without, um...'
'Ejecting it,' Liz offered. She drained her drink, and stood. Sighed. 'You want another? And you'd better still give me a ride, drunky.'
'Yeah, yeah.'
When Liz returned Darcy was on a call. Manly Banister, her o'ersized troubadour, no doubt, pooing sweet somethings into her ear. Only not into her ear, Liz seethed, a drink in each hand. Directly into her inconsiderate little brain! Past the ear and into meat itself! "Are you going to ignore me so you can talk into that thing?'
Darcy waved at her distractedly. 'A real person, Darcy,' Liz snapped. 'Right here, in front of you!' No response this time. Liz set both drinks roughly on one of the many abandoned tables and stalked up close to her friend. 'Philistine,' she hissed into her blinking ear, and thumbed the little chip off the node that wired away into Darcy's bright red hair.
When Darcy's head hit the table Liz shook her once, fear in her in growing shapes. Then she turned heel and split, clutching at the chip in what approached fixation. Darcy! Oh God, what did I-
Oh God...
They'd come after her soon, she knew. She tried to target random assholes; even put herself in crowded situations and just waited for the inconsequential jerk who'd yell to get his aural rape across. But those she knew just kept on integrating! She would show up for a chat with friends, and there was Ben, his still-raw instore blinking inanely as he talked around the people he had come to meet! She took care of him as he used the urinal (still talking), thumbing out his chip with practiced ease, watching with orgasmic glee as he slid down into the pool of bile and urinal cake. They'd connect the dots. Oh yes.
Liz slipped a hand under her shirt and thought of all those noxious eyes- going blank- fogging over when she reached behind as if to caress, and fucked their hardwired brain instead, her thumb a killswitch clitoris they just didn't see coming. Philistines, the lot of them.
All she knew was, when they did catch her- it was going to make one hell of a screenplay.

'Cause mami's a rida and I'm a roller

2008-07-28T11:50:00.004-06:00

The sun poured out of the sky, long and hot like kettles of oil onto the early afternoon as she poured buckets of water over her wellies in the ditch behind the barn. Blood mixed with water and human filth and ran pink and cloudy into the mud. Liz craned her head to the left and reached into the hole in her neck. Flesh ran crusty up against her pale and uncalloused fingertips and the dried blood of last night's examples clung in riverbeds of burned saffron down the back of her translucent hands. Beneath her squalid cattleman's hat she scowled over the landscape that lay cringing under the hot hot sun. Moistened with sweat, dried with nocturnal winds, wetted with sweat and dried again in the morning sun- her black hair stuck in hooks around her face as the lion's fur nearest his mouth stands erect for the first hour after a particularly vociferous feeding.

Her slate eyes flickered in blue rage as she found another gash, this time on her cheek. Anger diminished apace and perturb gave way to tenderness as a golden-maned child came bounding from behind the truck.

"Ma ma!" cried the child and threw her arms around Liz's sticky neck. The child's arms adhered to the sweaty blood and tears of last night's toilings.

"Hello, little girl." Liz winced and she scooped the child into her arms. Her husband, Jake, rounded the corner and handed her a cup of coffee and newspaper.

The rebel attacks grew in 1973. Liz had been hired by her brother's firm to come down and get some sunshine in her family's life while providing the surreptitious muscle for government enforcement of rules during the resettling effort. Having accomplished all she could professionally as a psychologist specializing in experimental therapies in London, she had spent four years in Hamburg before being recruited to Rhodesia the year their daughter and only child, Charlemagne, was born.

By moving her research to Africa she accomplished an atmosphere of untethered creativity while also serving her Homeland.

Once Dr. Shattler's experiments were finished and the bodies incinerated, a canvased truck would lumber dark and leathery as a rhinoceros over quiet night roads. Bumpy tree roots of roads which clucked and moaned with daylight traffic of chickens, goats, landless farmers and women with loads of household burdens. The truck would squeal strangely in the silent yard and after a loud knock a door would swing back timidly like the hatchets of children. The sleepy-eyed ghosts were told their missing relative had been located and to come right away to the hospital. The translator was typically shot on site once the family had been secured in the truck. The rebels families were driven blindfolded to a swath of dirt which lay gummy and hard beneath their huddling bodies under the cold African sky until the sun came to reveal the day's intentions.

During the three years she conducted her research, a documented 750,000 blacks were resettled in 200 equally-documented Villages- as they were called at the time.

She was managing the wing of government that would eventually become the Psychological Operations Unit in 1977. The literature outlines in part, a goal of "creating emphasis of 1 POU operations against the terrorists structured toward psychological confusion of the enemy with the objective of so undermining his morale that he becomes unwilling to fight and is encouraged to defect from the forces of communism."

Alas that would not be published until after Dr. Shattler had been killed, her husband remarried and her child... well. That story needs to be told, but not now.

She kissed her husband on the inside of his hand and took the coffee and paper. On the page he had folded back was printed the list of guidelines her brother's office had drawn up for the citizenry considering harboring terrorists calling themselves rebels.

Restrictions will be posed upon all of you and your Tribal Trust Land and Purchase Land:

1. Human curfew from last light to 12 o'clock daily.
2. Cattle, yoked oxen, goats and sheep curfew from last light to 12 o'clock daily.
3. No vehicles, including bicycles and buses to run either in the Tribal Trust Land or the African Purchase Land.
4. No person will either go on or near any high ground or they will be shot.
5. All dogs to be tied up 24 hours each day or they will be shot.
6. Cattle, sheep and goats, after 12 o'clock, are only to be herded by adults.
7. No juveniles (to the age of 16 years) will be allowed out of the kraal area at any time either day or night, or they will be shot.
8. No schools will be open.
9. All stores and grinding mills will be closed.

"Do you work tonight?" Jake asked, picking up her duffel and heading toward the house where the behemoth, savage dogs were clamoring and howling, stretching chains to their capacity in the entry yard. The canines silenced as she approached and sat quietly as she reached into her knapsack for some treats. Three hands, curled and black with dirty fingernails landed in a stiff and flat thud on the ground in front of the dogs.

Liz sighed heavily and put the paper in her shirt pocket, "Yes. Until these animals figure out how to behave like civilized beings, yes. I will always work tonight."

Cripes

2008-07-26T16:40:00.001-06:00

I, famished, ate the dross from off her eyes, and sated, pushed her newlit to the swelling world.

She Slipped

2008-07-26T14:14:00.003-06:00

And as she drew her last breath, she stared up to the sky with wonder. She saw the clouds huddling closer together, the blue was beginning to hide, the clouds darkened and it rained. She could taste the first few drops as she closed her eyes and died.

He couldn't hold on, lost his grip. Whose idea was this?

They went up the one hundred and twenty flights of stairs to sit on the roof. They crawled if they had to, took small breaks to rest. He thought this would be a romantic spot to propose. The view, my God, the view. She wanted to see it from the edge. He told her no. It was slippery and still she insisted on looking over. My God, the view.

I should've seen you was trouble right from the start

2008-07-26T11:53:00.007-06:00

They arrive in a quiet invasion on the night streets of July, silver rims clatter against chain link and the side yard becomes a flashing hall wheels and red lights. Hours have been spent in the deafening sun ducking under aquamarine rooftops filling the ears with wet and the hair with chlorine. In the twilight, natty cotton has been retired for breezy linen. The grip of summer is white knuckled but still fully intact. His face is healed from last weeks tousle with the asphalt and her dress hangs comfortably from her shoulders. The guy with a guitar keeps smoking while the guy with college and wine collects names like Brynne and Cami. They raise glasses and empty them with gusto- over and over. They run forks against porcelain and paper alike and hold hands on the stoops releasing the last heat of daylight beatings. Wishes suspend themselves in the still, still air over their heads and the dogs bark down the alley. This is what they look forward to each February and what they remember sweetly each November.
Then comes the breeze marking two hours until comes the sun, here. With the stirring of Cottonwoods wishes are dispersed, beds are found, lovers are vanquished and the surreptitious day creeps out of gardens and parking lots.

How To Proceed

2008-07-23T18:39:00.004-06:00

'Tell them what you mean, little miss.' Her Daddy trails a feral shape out from his pipesmoke mouth and doesn't cough. 'Look at them square in eyeballs and you tell them what you mean. You will be rude for twenty years; stupid for longer; but you'll be that which we need, little miss.'
She tucks her precious hands beneath her hem and gazes on him with gravity. 'But,' she pipes, 'but Daddy, you say be polite.'
'Humph,' her Daddy humphs, 'that's it, though. Treat a soul politely, offer them what's yours, and blast them out the water when their falsehoods gather. Prudence will come to you, little miss. Sycophants ain't polite; they're sycophants.'
'Sick of pants!' she squeals.
'Sick in pants,' he counters grandly, and he coughs. Some stringy tar like bark flings hotly down his wrist.
'Daddy?'
'Little miss?'
'You gots to not smoke, Daddy. I heard of it.' She stands and puts her precious hands on his knees, and looks him square in the eyeballs. 'Stop smoking, Daddy.'
He hits her, hard, and laughs as she gets up off the floor.
'That a girl, little miss!' Her eyes well up, betrayed. 'Now, now, pup, don't bawl for that. That was your reward. Your Daddy gots to quit smoking? You tell the dumb son of a bitch. And when he smacks you for it, smile, little miss.' He stands and picks her gently up in arms, and hands his warmish pipe down to her precious hands.
A tear pops loose, and curls down to her nostril well. She throws the pipe against the wall- all spark and soot and ugly little burst of wood on wood. He howls with laughter; she is silent still. 'Remember that I struck you, little miss. That's gonna happen most every time.' He sighs and buries his face in her hair. She clutches at his ears. 'And every time they's gonna keep getting smaller, little miss. They shrink, and with each blow, you grow.'
The dawn breaks, thin and dusty through the cellar windows, thinned through bushes. She can see the Mason jars screwed into the beams, their lids nailed up. She can see the mess of his pipe, the mess cats leave, mice leave.
She can hear the birds heartening, maybe a creak in the floorboards overhead. She can feel her Daddy's monstrous mitt still shock against her cheek; she sees his scruffy beard.
She can feel a warmth for him that hurts her teeth, somewhere married to her heart- against her ribs. She hates him, too. She wonders at her ratty dress and he just puts her down, and goes and stands against the wall, his arms at angles to the brick.
'One day, little miss,' her Daddy says, so soft it sifts out from his lips, 'someone will want something from you that you can't give. And you will rod that little spine of yours and tell them what you think of them. And they will hurt you, pup. They's gonna hurt you like you never known. Happened to me. Happened to your mother, to your teachers, to the Lord himself. And when you've taken all they care to give, you'll have that for yourself. You'll have the power of their secrets, little miss. They'll leave your broken spirit or your broken bones a cowardly mess, and you'll just rise up, darling. Big like mountains cause you looked them square in they eyeballs, and you told them what you think.'
'Daddy?'
'Little miss?'
'I don't want em to hurt my mother.'
'No, pup; I know.'
'Or you, or me.'
'Or the Lord?' She shrugged; he barks a laugh, and turns off from the wall. 'Little miss, people hurt each other. It's what they do. It may just be an embarrassment. It may be hell itself. But you're gonna take them, pup, even if you wake up in a pile of blood.' He scoops her up again. 'You know what I believe, little miss?'
She shakes her head, eyes wide. 'I believe it's no sin to lose. To fall, to smother; to have to take another man's garbage in your mouth. You just have to keep your spirit in your eyes, and your will in your hands, cause behind every boarding house door they's poets dying, pup. On every wooded hill a congressman is crying out his eyes. Each overpass has the messiah howling, mad on truth and mouthwash to his lungs, and dying slow and sure beneath our notice. I believe those things we build to make us feel like what we've done is something doing- all those things are tablecloths. The wood beneath is warped and split and that is how we are, people- twisted as a corkscrew, shining just as bright. And all we've lost is truth, little miss.
'It's a tiny thing. It'll kill us all before it heals us.' Her Daddy takes a breath and looks at her intently. 'Do you understand, darling?'
'No, Daddy,' and she begins to cry.
'Good,' he whispers. 'Good.'
And when the floorboards sift from footfalls over head, and they go out amidst the weeds, the low sun ain't as bright as she had thought, the dying stars just tinfoil. The trees are shrubs with grand intentions, and the birds the egos of the insects 'neath the leaves and loam. But there's her Daddy, big as mountains in the cold and damp, his broad back holding up the world from off her precious eyes, his wide hand pointing out the way to start-
To hold up just a little bit, each day, and take that extra step alive-
Your spirit in your eyes, and your will in your hands, and your own Truth fresh blood upon the lips of anyone who calls you false, little miss, I promise. You can rule them all, if that is what you want. There are gods with less in them than you.
I tell you what is true.

Flight

2008-07-21T17:10:00.002-06:00

Don't give me any snarky "what about rockets and airplanes and helicopters and hang-gliders" comments. I don't need that bullshit.

So loudly sounding, the song of the wren,
Feathers flutter through wind so restless,
And hollow bones float easily weightless,
Lovely flight inspiring dreams of men.

Ever held to gravity, man has been,
To touch the stars, a wish I now confess,
Forever doomed to dream, and write, and guess,
And never soar the skies, feet planted in.

How is it that the heart is free to fly?
And minds can travel anywhere in time?
But the body can only pantomime,
To lift my heavy feet from where they lie.
Since the dawn of man he has wished to soar,
But rooted down he shall stay evermore.

Write what you know...

2008-07-21T04:03:00.004-06:00

So, in case it wasn't painfully obvious last Wednesday, writing has not been coming as easily to me lately. In particular, there is one story that has become the mental equivalent of a kidney stone, in that I need to get it out, but it ain't coming easy. Hopefully, this strange little vignette here signals the return of my muse (whom I've christened Zeke) from wherever his dumbass went for the first half of July. It's called "Write What You Know".

Write what you know. That's the first rule of writing.

Write every day, that's another rule. Write every day whether you want to or not, whether your muse comes down and hands you an idea that will get you every acclaim from the Man Booker Prize to Oprah's Book Club or whether your muse just comes down and hands you a big pile of reeking shit.

When you're writing, don't take the time to go back and edit it. Get the story down first, as fast as you can, like you're vomiting onto the paper, and then go back and see what's story and what's just puke.

He's heard all of these rules a hundred times, no, a hundred thousand, and yet he still can't write. It's not won't, he wants to write like the desert wants the rain, but he can't. Every time his fingers click down on the keys, they produce nothing more than uninteresting scenes with characters that he hates, or worse yet, feels nothing for. At one point he looks up to see what he has typed and sees the following sentence on screen:

Why the fuck can't I do this any more?

It is not a part of the narrative, it is not a witty piece of dialogue, it is not even a clunky piece of dialogue. It is just there in the middle of the screen, related to nothing. It does nothing to advance the plot, and yet, sadly, he thinks that it is the truest sentence he's written all day. Maybe the truest he's ever written.

He gets up, pacing the small confines of his apartment. Write what you know, that was his main problem. He's not a very interesting person, he'll be the first to admit it. He doesn't have an interesting job, he isn't going to school for anything interesting, he doesn't even have any interesting hobbies. As for reading, forget it. He never had time to read in the first place, and the most riveting fiction he's read lately is the turn-ons and turn-offs column for Miss December.

He doesn't even know any people who are interesting enough to swipe wholesale and transcribe onto a sheet of paper. He doesn't know anyone with any life threatening diseases or fascinating jobs or homicidal tendencies. Hell, he doesn't think he even knows anyone that's been robbed. All of his friends are drab, lifeless facsimiles of himself, people who were below the notice of most people, people who seemed doomed to lives in the service sector.

He doesn't have time to read, that's his main problem. He wonders where he got the idea that he would be able to write the Great American Novel when he doesn't even have time to read the back of cereal boxes anymore. Right now, even, while he stares at his computer screen, begging and pleading with his subconscious to burp up anything resembling a story, all he can hear from his brain is a mental litany of everything he's putting off to stare at this white screen. Even worse, it's not his own mental voice that he hears listing everything off. Instead, it is the whining, nasal voice of his bosses' secretary, and it is so clear that he can picture her, right down to her cat's eye glasses, attached to a chain that looked like it had once had a pen on the other end, and she is reading them in a bored voice.

Christ, even his subconscious was bored. He needs to go out and do something, do some research, live a little fer Chrissakes'. He stands up and walks over to the bookshelf, closing his eyes and running his fingers along the spines at random. He promises himself that whatever he pulls from the shelf, he'd go out today, right now, and research. No, not just research. Live, do, experience.

He runs his fingers along the spines for a few more minutes, trying to disorient himself, trying to forget that everything was in alphabetical order, that he had actually organized it by subject as well, and wondering what he would do if he pulled a biography off the shelf, wondering whether he would go out and impersonate that person, or whether he would simply try to live as they had. For a moment, he loses himself in the nearly inaudible piff-piff-piff his index finger makes as it jumps from spine to spine, from subject to subject.

After a moment, with a final piff, his finger stops, and he opens his eyes to see what the fates have decided.

He sees the title his finger has stopped on, and, smiling slightly, pulls the book down from the shelf and begins to peruse The Serial Killer's Encyclopedia.

Created in humidity

2008-07-19T16:19:00.004-06:00

You can crabwalk through the ivy, fool; you can scamper down the heath. You can quote from dumb imperiled books and fight and spread your teeth. I'd like a bit of perspective.
I'd like to be one thing, and not so much at once.
I am swimming, though. A few times a week, a few breakins at night.
I only really fight my friends, and only those who'll take it. I have no want of women flouncing through; I'll take a girl with a good strong stride, red hair, green eyes, and GodYes hobbies. One who says oh Doll I'd love to, but I have these things I have to get done to make myself happy.
I'd like to run away.
I'd like not to imagine terrible things happening to those that I love, in order to remind myself. I'd like a handle on my crazy, right? In fact, I'd like a pair- to grasp like hair and yank back hard as I keep pushing in. I'm trying to win.
I'm going to start a notebook of all the things I regret, and when it's done I will not burn it, or drop it in the ocean, or eat it page by page and shit it out. I'll leave it somewhere on a street and start another notebook, cause that sort of shit don't stop. I'd like to fuck a lady cop.
I'd like to need some help.
I get so angry so quick these days. I drink until I sleep all day. I lie to you. I am all that is man, see?
A rabbi, a priest, and a witch doctor walk into a bar. Odin joins them for a drink. Mickey Mouse whips out his gargantuan wang and crushes the witch doctor to death with it. Oh man, says the rabbi. Mickey Mouse is circumcised. The priest coughs up some semen. Mickey offers up some merch for sale, and Loki takes his glass eye out to scare the waitress. In comes an Irish beat cop. His brogue is thicker than Jennifer Lopez.
God strikes everyone dead but Loki. They split a bottle of cask strength scotch and I go home to write a joke. The end.

Oh, doll...

2008-07-16T19:23:00.001-06:00

She holds her hands in funny shapes, and keeps on laughing, cause he can't just hate her when she's laughing, right? He looks at her tits, which is safer. They have that quality that otters do, stroking industriously through sweaters. They inspire that strange childhood in him.
Her hands do birds, then wrenches, then scarves, and she's just fucking laughing.
He bores a neat little hole in her forehead with his mind and all the shit comes drooling out onto her hands; onto more birds, wrenches, scarves, branches, bridges. Shitbirds Cockwrench Crapscarf Shadow Puppet. Goddamn if she would just stop laughing he could call her stupid, or come on her hair. Something classy; something timely; fucking SOMEthing.
She has bad poetry in her, and mostly words- just words- no will behind them, she has youth and she has fire, but she just keeps on burning off her hair. You think she'd sit down, and write a poem about that. Write about the nature of such fire while bangs still smolder, baby, get it done for once, don't dilly dollar. Make it holler.
But maybe she has a use or two left in her.
He stands, and takes her manic hands, and lifts her gently to her feet, and folds her into dotted lines and otter-tits all neatly stacked away and thinks 'Well, this is it- no turning back.'
And she's just fucking laughing.
He stretch-and-crease unfurls her till she's flat and useful, and he makes a boat of her, and climbs inside her and paddles off on a sea of shit so sweet, so familiar it's like breastmilk, baby- nectar. You've been swimming in this shit so long it holds you soft as feathers in its arms. Her face is laughing from the keel, and he lovingly, tenderly, puts the heel of his foot into her teeth and presses till she's still.
Together, love. Together we will see what we can see.
A blacklight in this boat would show the stains of semen, everywhere, and Who-Knows whose it is, these glowing bits of waste and spite. Oh, oh, but she's all right.
And somewhere off ahead he'll leave her just to float, and she'll spit out teeth and start to laugh, and feel like shit for letting him steer.
Some far-off shore will welcome her, and fruit trees heavy with old citrus will bow to pull her back to shape, and she'll balloon, and laugh, and laugh, and monkeys there will see her for the predator she is, and hide their trembling babes behind their arms and squeal in feeble terror, tree to tree.
He's off smoking Cubans on Skid Row, sweetheart, and your cupped hands can't make no scarves, no wrenches, bunnies, trembling trucks. You've lost the will to fuck.
So useful once, and sometimes fun, and harmful to most everyone.
She tries the locals, tires the locals, fires the locals, has a child. Swears off, and two years later cycles through again. The locals love her, though they wonder where her shoes are, and why she drinks the rainwater from coconuts and not from plastic bottles. She takes bruises like she takes a kiss. Its like she just can't miss.
And years gone by, still stranded there, she'll dandle children on her knee, and tell them tales of lives lived- gone. She'll play trombone wrapped in a sheet, and smash blacklights mercilessly. She'll dance poorly to old phonographs and wash herself in rainstorms, play with blocks and forge new swords from spring steel out from under cars, she'll map the planets, dig a well, and bite her fingernails too far.She'll pull her hair from out her scalp and milk the sap from husks of fruit and wonder why she kept on laughing, all those years, when there was nothing funny happening.
Not for miles around.

The Victim

2008-07-16T11:49:00.002-06:00

As I sat and waited,

While breath was bated,

As you demonstrated,

How my life was not for long.

I hesitantly pondered,

My mind began to wander,

I never would grow fonder,

Of your much repeated song.

You paced across the floor,

Checked the lock upon the door,

Hummed that awful tune some more,

And gripped the gun tight and strong.

Clicking back the hammer,

Your hum began to stammer,

Gun-hand began to tremor,

Did you wonder right from wrong?

As you found the courage,

I heard the clinking of the cartridge,

On the floor and saw the hemorrhage,

I knew my life would soon be done.

Against the Light (abridged)

2008-07-14T10:46:00.003-06:00

Bleed now the sun into the darkness of the night,
Rage, rage against the brightness of the light.
Valiant soldier in the everlasting fight,
To rage, rage against the brightness of the light.

The Professor swings for the bleachers

2008-07-09T18:01:00.002-06:00

There's something strange in me. The more I drink, the less I sleep, the healthier I become. Does freedom, or release, stimulate cell growth, and counteract my poisons?
If I quit now, the new cells will be produced to no purpose, and give me cancer of the face. I don't want cancer of the face, so give me more box wine.
Its science, you bitch. Look it up. You can't argue with science. Now suck my cock.

I think I'm sensing a pattern here...

2008-07-06T19:40:00.000-06:00

Okay, so not to flog a dead horse here (too late), but I seem to be stuck in a post-apocalyptic rut right now. Don't know why, but I'm producing, so I guess I'll just roll with it. This one is kind of a prose poem, I suppose. It doesn't rhyme, there's not a beat that you can dance to, but to me it just seemed to want to be a poem. It certainly doesn't work as a story, and I'm not even sure that it works, period. But, hey, tell me what you think. Both barrels.

This evening I sat on my porch and watched the world end.
I watched as the stars winked out, one by one.
I watched as the neighbors loaded a van with everything they own, and then drove away.
I watched as people ran by, frightened eyes wide as they wondered where they could go.
I could have told them that there was nowhere to go.
That's why I'm sitting right here.
That's why I've got a bottle of wine, and a glass, and a good record on the stereo.
That's why I'm still sitting here.
That's why I'm not with the rioters, or the looters, or the runners.
That's why I'm not stuck in a traffic jam, angrily honking my horn.
That's why I'm not glued to my TV, watching the news and drowning in hope.
It's a beautiful night out, and I don't want to waste it.
After all, it looks like this is the last one we'll ever see.
There are still a few stars, and I watch each one, as they disappear.
I watch them turn to blackness, and I close my eyes and try to see it for as long as I can.
And when it's gone, I open my eyes and find another star.
The moon is still there.
I wonder when it will wink out.
I wonder what will happen when it does.
I wonder if I will get to see one last sunrise.
I wonder if I will get to finish my wine.
I wonder if I will have to flip my record when it ends.
This evening I sat on my porch and watched the world end.

Tryin' to get this cheese

2008-07-05T12:22:00.002-06:00

Villiany: lives in Rhodesia in 1973, married, one child.... the rest is up to you: the nature if the crimes, the timeframw their carried out and the physical notes.

Heroism: lives in Eugene, OR 2004, married, one child.... see above.

Our first victim is Liz Shattler.

Go get her.

For want of a nail...

2008-07-04T03:15:00.000-06:00

Here's a shocker: Ben's written a post-apocalyptic story again. (Gasp) Rather than just rehashing my old territory, however, I tried to at least utilize a new theme. This one is called "For Want of A Nail", and the difference is this. Not only are both the protagonists and villains responsible for the apocalypse, they're still at it. Tell me what you think. I'm a little worried because this is my first attempt at a "political" story (and really, if you need me to explain where I got the idea of a never-ending war, I've got some seaside property in Arizona to sell you), and I really hope it's not too heavy handed. Anyway, do me a favor when you've finished reading it, and follow the advice of one of our greatest philosophers of the modern age when she said "Holla back, girl."

For Want of a Nail

We're finally winning this thing, but to look out at it, you'd never know it. Yesterday, we engaged in house to house firefights, suffering heavy casualties on both sides, but I know for a fact that they got it worse. I personally took out two of the bastards for every one I saw them take out. I took three for Benny, and would have taken more if I could've. Benny was a good kid, and nowadays, those are in short supply.
It's funny. Ten years ago, this was one of the busiest cities in the world. New York City, home of the elite, the criminal and everything in between. Now, there's an encampment of us, maybe two hundred people left in all of the city, us and them. We're in Central Park, close enough to the Zoo that we can hear the animals pacing their habitats. Every now and then one of them will yowl for food, but the keepers aren't rattling their keys around the park anymore.
Aside from the zoo, there aren't many animals around either. That was one of the demoralizing tactics they used once they finally landed on American soil. They drove around like greaser kids bashing in mailboxes, with whoops and hollers and much drinking of beer, only their target wasn't a mailbox. They would take aim from a moving car and pop rounds into the family dog, or cat, or whatever pet you owned that you left outside at night. After a while, people stopped leaving their pets outside. And shortly after that, most people just stopped, and never started back up again.
The raids only happen at night. Its an unspoken rule between both sides, but it's cast-iron nonetheless. The days are spent trying to get some uninterrupted sleep now, but at the start of it all, we spent days taking shifts on corpse duty. It might seem like a waste of time to somebody out there reading this, but it's mindless work. You tell yourself that it's no different than hoisting sacks of grain onto pallets, and you don't think about things for a while. You especially don't think of the fact that there are over eight million corpses in the city, with summer due to rear its pretty little face in a few weeks.
At night, though, the treaty ends, and we work out some of our anger and our not-thinking by killing anything that isn't American. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, amen.
Tonight we've got a raid planned, a counter-attack on these bastards. Everyone is sitting around the campfire, making preparations and pretending they're not nervous. I know they're nervous, though, because I'm nervous. I saw what happened to Benny, and I know from the looks in a few eyes that I wasn't the only one to watch Benny's head disappear, as neatly as if clapped between two books, into a fine red mist.
One of our scouts came back while we were still licking our wounds from last night. He was dirty and covered with six days' worth of beard, but he said he'd found out where they were staying. They were staying in Carnegie Hall. I guess they'd been practicing.
We geared up, leaving nothing to chance, and started walking towards Carnegie as soon as it started getting dark. It's only a little under a mile from where we started, but between humping all our gear and trying to be quiet thrown into the bargain, it took us nearly an hour to get there. By then, it was full dark, and we switched on our night-vision. Immediately, the hall floated out of the darkness at us, illuminated in a ghostly whitish-green. We could see the hall clearly, could even see posters advertising long-dead people playing sold-out shows to nobody. But there was no patrol, no one guarding the entrance. Looking back now, I should have taken that as a bad sign. But I didn't.
I split the team into two squads, one to cover both entrances. Bravo team took the main entrance, while my team took the 7th avenue doors. Both teams paused at the doors, waiting expectantly for me to issue the go code. I did, and we broke in fluidly. Within seconds, we had the entranceway clear and were moving down the escalators towards the foyer two stories below. Bravo team was meeting with similar results, judging from the radio chatter in my ear.
I didn't intend to take the cushy job when I'd suggested we take the 7th avenue entrance. But the doors on 7th led to Zankel Hall, which could seat about six hundred souls in the way back when. Six hundred seats isn't exactly an intimate gathering, but I much preferred those odds to the three-thousand seat, five story monstrosity that was the main hall. Bravo team would have a hard time covering all the angles in there with just the six of them.
But we weren't in the auditoriums yet, either team. Even now, the foyer was impressive. The crumbling marble walls and chipped pillars gave it an archaeological feel in there, like we had just found the Coliseum, say, or maybe the Parthenon. Our team split up for a second, one covering the mezzanine level before regrouping. As one, we entered the auditorium.
Most of the seats had been ripped out or broken. The hall was a mess of broken wood and torn seat cushions. As soon as we entered the room, we had to take off our goggles. Someone in there was having a fire. A little bit further in, and we could see who.
They were sitting around a fire started with the seat backs and probably a few splashes of the swill they were passing around as an accelerant. One of them was standing up, gesturing with the bottle and having trouble keeping his balance. He said something in his guttural language, and wandered away from the campfire.
A hand over his mouth and a knife over his throat ensured that he wouldn't be wandering back to it anytime soon.
This was it. We'd found the central infestation and were going to eliminate these bastards once and for all. I gestured to the men to take aim, and they raised their rifles as one.
And then a burst of gunfire came chattering out of my radio, followed by someone shouting that we'd been compromised, and they stood up with their guns ready, sober as the day they were born.
The fighting went on for hours, and in the end I was the only one to make it out of there alive. I felt good, convinced that me and my men had just ended this goddamned war after so many years that most people had forgotten what peace looked like.
But the next night, there was a counterattack. There were heavy casualties on both sides, and there can't be more than a handful of us left in this whole godforsaken city. And whether it will be us or them that will emerge victorious, I can't honestly say. But I can say one thing.
We'll continue fighting, for as long as we can. We'll fight to the last man.

Untitled thus far... (My fantasy story)

2008-07-03T16:06:00.002-06:00

So, I'm just going to post this as it was read last night at the Hookah Lounge, mostly because I really couldn't hear the comments and suggestions thrown my way over the off-key caterwauling of the idiots at the next table singing along with "Bohemian Rhapsody" at the top of their drunken lungs.

Christopher Kite moved through the crowds with the practiced ease that came with his profession. He was able to weave his way through the crowds of farmers in their overalls, merchants in their flashy finery, and the people from the outlying lands dressed in their town clothes; he was able to move through all these varying costumes in a long black cloak with an equally menacing cowl covering his face unnoticed.

But, even in the tiny provincial town of Parley's End, the sight of a thief practicing his trade wasn't unusual. As long as the thief in question had his guild card on him (and Kite did, it was tucked into a pocket of his tunic, high on the chest near his heart), then the best any citizen could do was to fill out the appropriate forms and wait for reimbursement from the city.

Kite's guild card was no protection against what he had planned for today, however. He had his sights set higher than the coin purses and leather wallets of the bumpkins around him.

In the center of town was a large, imposing cathedral; and Kite was trying to work his way towards this in such a way that no one could say that he was definitely heading towards it.

Once near the cathedral, however, his resolve broke, and he picked up his pace, his hard leather boots ringing on the cobblestones underfoot. He was making too much noise, a violation of the code that could easily cause him to lose his guild card, but he didn't care. The heavy oaken doors were ten feet away, and there was no one looking his way yet.

A light rain was falling, little more than an annoyance right now, but the low black clouds promised that this was but a prelude to the main event.

As soon as he put his hands on the ornate door handles, the sky gave a great crack, and the rain came down in force. The rain went from gentle pattering to feeling as though someone was upending a massive bucket over Kite's head. All around, merchants were folding up their tents, and their customers were scattering to the four winds, some covering their heads with newsprint that were offering little protection from the torrential rains. It would only be a matter of time until someone noticed the thief, working furiously at the heavy doors of the cathedral, and then Kite would be cast into the Mines. Kite didn't have the constitution for such backbreaking work. He'd have to work fast.

He'd just worked the lock open when he felt more than heard a deep rumbling sound, and he turned his head slowly towards the source of the sound.

A wall of water was working its way down the main thoroughfare, a great roaring Leviathan destroying everything in its path. As Kite watched, a man in overalls was picked up by the swirling waters. He struggled briefly, but the waters jerked and tossed him around in the tempest before dashing his head against a lamppost. The water around him darkened to a foaming red for a moment, and then he was swept out of sight.

Kite took all this in the space of a breath, and then he was climbing.

He leapt straight up, his hands automatically finding purchase in the rough-hewn stone of the cathedral, and he scrabbled up it as quickly as he could. The water had already passed below Kite, continuing its horrible tour of the town, and yet it was still rising, the water lapping at his ankles as he rose further and further into the suddenly pitch-dark day.

Kite hazarded a glance downward, and saw that the water had risen above the level of the pub, washing all of the drunks to their final watering hole, and still it was rising. Kite guessed that he was probably three stories above the cobblestones below, and still the water rose.

And then he was at the top of the cathedral, clinging to the spire, staring down at the waterlogged interior of the church through a small skylight. With a strange sort of detachment, Kite saw that a basket of apples was floating just underneath the skylight, and a few stray apples were bobbing out of the opening towards him. He considered for a moment reaching out and eating one of the apples (the condemned man's last meal, he thought), and then a large swell rose out of the water and knocked Kite from his perch.

When Kite awoke, he was laying face down on a hard wooden surface. He could feel splinters working their way into the skin of his face, his cowl laying a few feet from him. He sat up in a panic, immediately reaching for it. This was another card-revoking offense, being seen in public without some sort of mask. Once it was safely reattached, however, he looked around him.

That's odd, he thought. He remembered bits and pieces of the town before the flood, and dimly, the cathedral. But none of these were in sight. True, after the ferocity of the storm, he had expected this. But instead of a wreckage-strewn field, he was at a train station.

Before he could even begin to process this information, a man in a conductor's uniform stepped off the train and extended his hand in greeting. "Mr. Kite?" the man asked.

Kite felt his heart drop, and automatically checked to make sure his cowl was fastened. The conductor noticed this and smiled. "Don't worry, lad. I'm not here to take your card. Quite the opposite, in fact. You see, we've been expecting you."

Kite relaxed, but only slightly. His eyes were still thin slits behind his mask, and in his most quietly menacing voice, he said, "Who has been expecting me?"

The conductor had been standing with his hands clasped below his waist in a display of deference, but now he gestured grandly towards the train with one hand. "Why, the people who wait at the next station."

Kite looked at the train with an appraising eye. The engine of the locomotive was painted a bright bottle-green, and it was studded with what looked like jewelry. The cars were likewise painted, yet they seemed to be less extravagant, their only hint at gaudiness a gold trim along the edges of the cars. And yet, as he looked closer, he saw that the trim wasn't gold paint, as he'd assumed, but actual gold. He could tell just from the exterior that the inside would be similarly lavish. Perhaps while inside, he could lift enough to make up for his dismal showing at the cathedral.

He looked back at the conductor, whose smile broadened until his entire face looked in imminent danger of cracking in half. "Don't worry, Mr. Kite. All will be explained at the next station. In the meantime, why don't you come aboard and relax? Or better yet, familiarize yourself with our extensive collection of rare coins."

Kite looked at the man, not quite believing that he had just been given him license to rob this railroad blind, and yet the knowing smile on the conductor's face led him to believe that this was exactly what had just happened.

"Coins, you say?" Kite asked.

The conductor grinned even broader, although Kite would have been hard put to explain how he accomplished this. "Aye," he said, "and real silverware, with ivory dishes. Come aboard, lad. You can leave with all you can carry, just to listen to what they have to say."

Kite nodded, then stood up, taking a few moments to dust his cloak off and smooth out the wrinkles until he felt presentable, and then asked, "When do we leave?"

The conductor nodded, then said, "As soon as you're aboard, sir."

Three hours to Edgar, Montana

2008-07-02T17:50:00.002-06:00

Ruthie's got a pillowtop mattress. She cackles lightly, says 'Don't mind mah 70's bush. Mah Serta, heard? Mah sweet little pillowtop mattress.' She looks like she tears phone books apart, with her clothes off. Some tourists slow down and peer at her muscled legs from up above the rocks; they honk their horn.
I am freezing up against the cave when Kan whips around the rapids from the canyon proper. She slips under in the mess of kicking water. She comes up and kicks, and goes down, and works her mouth to scream, and doesn't, and comes heaving to a stop on some unseen boulder, breasts flying out of her bra, hair like seaweed cross her gasping mouth.
Ruthie, petrified with worry, lets out air like a tiny tire, and we all see that Kan's okay. The water's deep, and wicked; brown.
I have a large bruise on my ass- perfectly round, in fact, they say- I climb around the rocks and try not to scrape anything reproductive off. It is still raining. The Firehole is too high to be warm from the thermal pools. The mosquitos are fucking slaying, rising in great dumb clouds from every surface when they smell our carPressed sweat. It is freezing.
I drink another beer, and grin a lot.
Soon we'll pile back in, and open three more beers, and wander hopelessly along the wrong roads, wrong exits, wrong freeways, singing along to burnt cd's, buying bottled beer and gas at regular intervals, drinking Malbec from soda cups in straws, Sangria from a two-liter bottle, CocaCola lime Perrier coffee Moose Drool Corona white Zin- but no water- zipping mountain roads at 80 with the windows roaring potsmoke fumbling mountains like a Viking FistThrust Storm across whatever valley holds our fear of heights.
We stay up every night, and Kan is feared of bears, and brainRot bacteria in pools, but Damn! I have a picture of her screaming from a log across a waterfall, Ten million gallons of pierce-cold whitewall coming down at her like God, her Cuban sandals slipping on the bark as cowboys lead their cushioned city customers on horses through the sward and wood.
A bear would run in dickless fear from such a torrent- canyon walls squeezed into the mountain river, roar and fall like buildings crashing, Lord- a bear would hide its pretty face in paws.
Later, Ruthie and I had a pillowsex rodeo with Kan's momma's cowboy hat and precious throws. We laughed until our faces all came off.
So dogs and goatcheese, bearskin coats and silver bracelets, hitchHikers with chemical burns and drunk guitars, communal sunglasses, dead bison sunburned never got her panties on when rivers come And FUCK if Kan said it was three sweet hours to her uncle's ranch. I was so blissfull that the ten-hour truth was fine, pardner; jes fine.

Erasers are awesome

2008-06-28T14:43:00.002-06:00

Listen up well as I spin this tale of an eraser, a boy, and a tree. A tree? But what does a tree have to do with an eraser, a boy, and me? Oh-ho! Said the boy, this eraser is fine! It does whatever I please. Yes, yes replied I, and I repeat, what say you of the tree? Right-o, said the boy, I was getting to that, about that silly old tree. It was ever so tall, too wide all around, and never grew any leaves. That doesn't sound nice, no, not nice at all. Why is this old tree in this tale? It's not, said the boy, the eraser is key! Then why did you mention the tree at the start? Did I? Reply, it must have slipped out, confusion is not what I seek. Alright then, if the eraser is key what say you to me, it does whatever you say? Oh yes, said the boy, it makes my mistakes go away!

Fun is for faggots and writers.

2008-06-26T20:29:00.002-06:00

Proposed exercise. For fun. Write a character based on us. Each of us in the Silly Collective. One villian, one hero- however you interpret the two. One week at a time? I want to see if anyone is down with this; if so, I will write the guidelines.
But I am thinking 10-15 lines at the most. Introduce everyone as you see them if you were to exaggerate/diminish them into physicality and caricature and mildly intriguing sub-plots before you insert them into the Next Great American Novel.
i.e. Sampinos as a villian in Cold War Memphis/Sampinos as a hero in 19th-century Melbourne, Australia.
It would take research and brevity but I think it would be fun and challenging. And wicked fun to see what everyone comes up with.
And.
I don't have to say anyone died of ennui from reading the shit I have been turning out lately.
Let me know via comments and one we all throw in, I will start the guidelines.

What you said made a mess of me.

2008-06-26T19:29:00.007-06:00

I miss you, kid.
And her heart fell on the floor where she slipped on it. Again. Twisting her ankle.
She caught some of her balance and watched her simple-minded corazon slide across the kitchen floor before rolling under the fridge where the previous year's resolutions had gone to smoke Pall Malls and watch Cheech and Chong movies.
I'm NOT sorry! yelled her foolish heart, pretending to ignore the faraway look of stupidity on the face of our Best Supporting Actress.

Dick Van Dyke had the hots for Julie Andrews

2008-06-26T18:09:00.002-06:00

Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, chim chim kerplunk,
A sweep ain't as lucky as one would have thunk.
Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, chim chim kaboom,
Bad luck will rub off when I shakes 'ands wif you.

Squm Squm Squiggle

2008-06-26T10:45:00.003-06:00

There's something for the writing- it's there, waiting, biding. It's hiding underneath my flow of words. Its mean and quick- and yet deft, and lilyfingered. A few of my favorites have the habit of touching on it. Douglas Adams, with his monstrous intergalactic cocktail having the effect of knocking your brain out with a gold brick wrapped in velvet. I'm sure I've misquoted.
This morning I read Harlan Ellison on the bus, and he, in Angry Candy, was lauding an author I've never read- Theodore Sturgeon- and said of him that he could grab your heart and squeeze it til your life hurt.
WHAM! Its there, somewhere. Running through my fingers like lover's hair.

2008-06-25T16:00:00.003-06:00

I walked outside and it was warm, and tack, and I knew it was Her. There were kids insteppin soccer balls and ugly birds calling and my forehead felt like baconsponge, the shirt stuck to my back like baconsponge too.
Of all those things remembered was that photo on my parents' bookshelf, that big huge photo like a black and white beacon- what it means to be twentyone and not know what you're holding- most just hold their pudd and bark a lot. There was another photo too, She took it of me tumbling on a lawn; the burrito shop and bookstore and those big old funky trees.
This ain't worth all that I say it is- its gone for good now- that's its charm.
There was a time we both awoke in middling night and made love without a word-slow and easy- Do you see?
That isn't even me. This isn't ME.
I still worried after recycling, then. After carbon footprint, endangered freerange sprouted hamburgers. And now I walk outside some sort of Man that I've become- I fight and crackSmack jokes and fuck and don't much ever 'make love.' Haven't made it that far in years. I'm ManChild, Kan would say- I'm walking on my castoff selves and swaggering a bit- well, Shit.
You can't believe forever.
I walk outside Some sort of Man and know it was Her (Tripe) and let that sink (Stink), because she told me how things went. It isn't how I remember them. Some precious girl is falling for me now, and I am useless to her. I should drive the beast away. She's too sweet for me. Its meanness that I need.
This sort of talk is toxic, push a fist back through your throat and you will catch just what I mean, I'm cruising for that now- some Tom Dick or Harry wants to meet my horned eye.

And there were buds- lolling phallic newgrowth Life on every branch, the poet said.
They promised all the ruin yet to come.
Some kind of Man stood, and took the pen, and drove it through the poet's hand.
'There's life,' he says. 'Your allegory, arched wit, lifeless melancholy Twit- There is Life.'
The poet squeaked and ran out all over his watermarked pages,
Ichor, Bristle, Bled.
'Fuck, feel it,' said Some kind of Man. 'You're making pretty structures of it in your mind. Feel it, let your dick get hard, its worth no more than what it is: A shitty turn. Stop building palaces from it, fuck!'
The poet might just turn his head and swallow Some sort of Man whole; whole as walnuts, whole as melancholy whining cunts. He might listen, too. He might, at that. Might.

A Conversation

2008-06-24T23:18:00.002-06:00

Hey

What

Hey, you there

I said what

You got a light

I don't smoke

I don't care if you smoke, I asked if you had a light

Why would I have a light if I don't smoke

Some people carry a light

Yeah, well I don't

Ok then. You got any change

Fuck off

Whoa man. That's a bit harsh

Get a job

Then fuck off

Hurts

2008-06-24T14:06:00.005-06:00

Next time she'll fall in love in Spanish, my friend is fond of saying. Fucking love; fuck love, I'm fond of saying. Sweat and meat and call me Disco Stu- I'll get through. Not love.

My little girl can have all that of me- that pride and pain, breath held high inside your throat- that shitty gravel dragout and that box of flares. She'll break my heart enough for thirty women; This I already know.

I'll be careful of the hearts I play with; but that ain't true either.

And I spoke to Jen today, in digitalia, and out fell my stomach, right through my asshole, Gawd, bingo in utero, DiscoBalled me Crunch like thirty pounds of broken mirrored Whump right between my clavicle and collarbones, and I am full of shit. Just full of it, and sitting comfortably on top and telling Kan: Fuck Love.

She's getting married, I think, and all these six years have been a balance on that skein above my torso full of winding shit, riding out the wave and grinning at my angry wife. I crushed up a bit and wrote to her-

I wish you happiness like burst plums and honey, Jen.

I'll always wish I'd been man enough to keep you.

Forgive me- I know this is just weight between us- so, I wish you happiness from every pit within me.

You ever think back on how bad you treated someone? Maybe you don't. I've treated a lot of people bad, I guess. I treated that lil' orchid like a compost heap, and slept with my head between her breasts and huffed the good out of her and left my stringy black footprints in her linen sheets. She watched, and learned, and broke my heart back, after a time.

And thats all I ever think of, is What SHE done, right? That scandalous boney bitch, that BITCH.

How could she? Well, fuck. I would've ruined her right well, had our seats been reversed. Would have blown her away.

Just don't have daughters, men. It fucks the real right out of your life. You're left holding what someone like you will do to her, one day.

If I was not so proud, I'd pray.

Greenstick

2008-06-22T02:02:00.003-06:00

Chris's last post seems pretty apt, in light of what I'm about to post. This one is called Greenstick, and it follows Mr. Card's rule pretty sharply. Also, I'll warn you right now that I've been having myself a very Stephen King weekend, so I may have absorbed some of his tics as a result. Also, specifically I want criticism on how it all ties together for y'all. Like the ending, hate the ending, want more from the ending? Throw it at me.

Anyway, here you go.

He awoke with a startled gasp, feeling the crushing weight of all that earth and stone pressing down on him, making it hard to breathe in the too close confines of... of...

He thought for a moment, trying to remember anything about where, or even who, he was. Panic settled in, and he started to buck and kick, but he realized that he couldn't feel his legs. He should have been able to feel his legs, especially in this tiny stone coffin that he was trapped in, but there was just a horrible emptiness down there, a very pronounced feeling of no feeling whatsoever. His breathing increased until it sounded like God was in there with him; an out of shape God who had just run up twenty flights of stairs, and he forced himself to calm down, to slow his breathing. After a moment, he was no longer hyperventilating.

He continued pacing his breathing, even when a horrible thought (have to conserve my air don't know how much is left) flashed through his brain and threatened to bring the panic back for a curtain call.

Okay, first things first. Inventory. He moved and twisted as much as he could, testing what still worked and what didn't, and in doing so, found that he wasn't as firmly trapped as he'd originally thought. Although the shaft or whatever he was in was certainly small, there was enough room that he could prop himself up on his elbows and still have an inch or two between his forehead and the rough rock ceiling.

He tried to pull himself back a few inches, and suddenly he could feel his legs again, a hundred different pains shooting through his legs and accompanied by a million pins and needles rushing through them. He screamed involuntarily, but he didn't mind the pain, not really. The pain was good, in this case, infinitely preferable to that horrible blankness. The pain meant that his legs might work again, someday. Assuming that he could get out of here, that is.

He tried again, pulling himself a few more inches, and this time he pulled his legs free. He looked down at his legs, wanting to see what sort of damage had been done, and he looked away almost as quickly, immediately wishing that he hadn't.

He remembered, dimly, a medical term that someone had once told him for what had happened to his leg -green stick- and he'd laughed, thinking that it couldn't possibly be a term that doctors actually used. There weren't enough syllables in it, he'd said.

But now, he could easily see how it applied. The broken ends of the bone peeking through the torn skin on his right leg had a raw, splintered look to it. It was certainly easy to imagine it as a sapling branch, roughly snapped in half and showing its tender green insides. He felt his stomach starting to revolt, and at the same time he felt the world swimming away from him, swirling away as though he were watching water drain out of a pool a hundred feet below him.

This way, Paul.

For a moment, he looked around, confusedly, as though someone had actually spoken the words aloud. They repeated, and this time he recognized them for what they were, a memory. And then, as if his acknowledgment was all it took, the memory unreeled itself in his mind's projection room, and he watched, rapt.

...up the mountain now almost to the top stephanie running as easily as though it were level ground but he wasn't running he was dragging his feet breathing hard sweat pouring down his face and she turned around and laughed and said it again this way paul...

And then it was over, as quickly as it had begun. Paul, then. His name was Paul. Paul what, though? He didn't know, and with his shin bone sticking out, he didn't think it mattered much if he was Paul Simon or Pauly Shore. Who? His mind asked, and he let the question slide by unanswered. The better question was what, as in, what was he going to do to get himself out of here?

He tried to drag himself forward, but now that he knew what he'd done to his leg, he could feel it in intimate detail, could feel the broken, raw edges of his bone grating together. Even worse was the sound, a nails-on-slate shriek that was almost certainly only in his head, but horribly loud despite this. In the depths of his pain, there was nothing else in the world but that shriek, his bones screaming as they rasped together like a metal file on prison bars.

The pain was enormous, huge, and he started to black out again. He forced himself to stay conscious, gritting his teeth against it.

The pain slowly relinquished its grip on him, and the world began to cautiously approach him again, like a nervous teenager at his first dance. Sweat poured off of him in sheets.

He looked around for something to splint it with, nearly giving up until he saw a backpack a few feet away. Had the backpack always been there, or was Stephanie...

(this way, Paul)

...helping him out somehow?

For that matter, where was she? If she'd been with him on this trip, then it stood to reason that she should be around somewhere, didn't it? Of course it did. Maybe she isn't hurt, he thought suddenly. Maybe I fell down here because I wasn't paying attention, and maybe she didn't fall in here with me, and maybe right now there's a search party coming out here to find me, with helicopters and policemen and bloodhounds and...

Maybe she's dead. The thought came out of nowhere, startling him as effectively as a bucket of ice water in the face would have done, and his breath sped up again. No, he thought. Don't think that, don't you dare think that, if you think it then it might come true. He knew that this train of thought was irrational, but nevertheless he shied away from the subject.

"Don't you dare think that," he repeated, aloud this time. His voice came out louder than he expected, echoing off the confines of the cave. He felt a little better, stronger, as though his voice had healing powers that he hadn't suspected before now.

So he said it again.

He pulled himself up into an invalid's sitting posture, legs straight, body forming a gradual slope upwards, elbows underneath him. He pulled the backpack close to him and began looking through it.

He found a bag of trail mix inside, and at that his hunger came rushing back, and he had devoured half of the bag before a single thought of conservation had even crossed his mind. A sense of disquiet went through him as he realized that he had no idea whether or not the hypothetical rescue team was on the way or not, and if they weren't then he had to get out of here on his own.

But Stephanie is bringing them back.

But what if she isn't?

He shook his head as if to dispel the very idea, and he continued looking through the bag. He found a water bottle and allowed himself only a few drops, only enough to awaken his thirst, really. A few guide books, and none of the titles meant anything to him. He wondered if he'd done some sort of brain damage that had ruined his ability to read, and he picked up a guidebook at random. Underground Utah, he read, and laughed aloud. He couldn't exactly remember where Utah was right now, but he was sure as shit underground now, wasn't he?

Next to the guidebooks was a flashlight. He flicked it on, and it gave a weak light that solidified into a white glare that stung his eyes after a few brisk whacks to the side.

Other than that, there were just a few shirts, and then underneath that...

At the bottom of the pack was a medical kit, and he grabbed at it greedily, unzipping it and taking in its contents. He didn't even see the burn creams, the band-aids. Instead, his eyes immediately found three small packets of aspirin, and he pulled them out and started ripping the first package open before his mind had even finished forming the word aspirin.

As soon as it was open he tossed back the pills and crunched it down immediately, not wanting to waste any water on the pills. Besides, he had a sneaking suspicion that his sips would turn to gulps, and then the bottle would be empty before he knew it.

He didn't think that the aspirin would take away all the pain, but he hoped it would at least take the edge off. He went back to the medical kit, his eyes seeing a pair of scissors but not really registering them yet. His eyes wandered over to the backpack again, seeing the metal support struts and yet not seeing them.

These two things triggered a third word in his mind -splint- and he was grabbing for the backpack again, dumping the contents on the ground before he pulled the struts out of the bag.

He didn't know that it would do any good, but he felt good, felt as though he was accomplishing something while he cut up two of the T-shirts and looped them around his leg, the metal struts getting tighter and tighter with each pass. When he got close to the exposed bone (compound fracture, not a greenstick- greensticks only happen to kids, and the bone doesn't poke out, it bends and splinters, but it doesn't break, his mind chimed in), he paused for a moment, grabbing for the backpack. He clenched one of the straps tightly in his teeth as he continued winding the strips around his leg, biting down so hard his jaw ached as the strips forced the bones into something at least closer to their original positions.

When he was done, he had sweated through his shirt, and he took it off and used it to wipe his forehead before tossing it aside in favor of the last shirt in his pack.

He waited for a few minutes before he started moving again, hoping to give the aspirin time to kick in, or the splint to force the bones back into place somehow so they could begin the tedious process of knitting back together, or for Jesus himself to come down and show him the door that had been here all along, but mostly just waiting because he was sick of the pain for a moment. Ever since he'd woken up, the pain had been here with him, and he was enjoying its absence, however brief it may turn out to be.

Finally, Paul began to move.

There was light sifting through a jumble of rocks near where he'd been laying, faint but enough to suggest that there was freedom just on the other side of those rocks. He'd spent a few minutes trying to shift the rocks, but they were too heavy, or he was too weak right now, or both, and he gave up when the pain got too intense.

This way, Paul.

The pain was still there, but it wasn't as bad as it had been. It was still bad, still making sweat pour down Paul's face in rivers and streams, but it wasn't as bad as it had been. He made progress, slowly but surely, pulling himself maybe twenty feet that first hour.

After two hours, the ceiling began to cut away sharply, heading up and up so abruptly that Paul could have stood with plenty of clearance, if he'd been able to stand. Even so, it was a relief to have that open space above him instead of the ceiling pressing down on him.

He stopped to take a drink

(let's rest here)

and another memory began to play as he drank in small sips.

...he and stephanie are sitting down now sitting on two rocks that seem to be custom made for the purpose nature's laz-e-boy he says and stephanie laughs perhaps harder than it deserves but they're tired and it's getting late in fact it's late enough and they're tired enough that they've reached that place where everything is funny not just funny but hilarious sidesplitting and when they're done laughing she stands up and starts to walk away and she says it again this way paul and he stands to follow her when he hears something start up underneath his feet a low rumbling sound that he feels more than hears...

The memory came up short, and for a brief moment he felt cheated.

No time to waste, he thought, looking at the bottle of water, just over half full, with a sense of growing dismay.

He continued his slow progress, the pills starting to wear off, and he stopped just long enough to crunch another two down before hitching himself backwards again.

He didn't know how long he'd been moving when he realized that it was getting lighter in the cave.

He looked around for an exit, and saw that the light was coming from a hole in the ceiling. It wasn't terribly bright, and as Paul pulled himself over, he saw that it wasn't sunlight but the bone-white gleam of the moon shining down on him.

There was a pile of rocks in the center of the room, directly under the site of the cave-in, and two words flashed through his mind -burial mound- before he could stop them. No, he thought. She got out.

He had no sooner thought this than he noticed something sticking out from under the pile of rocks. He edged closer to it, knowing already what it was and not wanting to know, but having to know.

A hand. A hand wearing an engagement ring. And as he sat looking at the hand, everything came back all at once, displaying itself in high definition in his mind's eye.

...this way paul and he stands to follow her when he hears something start up underneath his feet a low rumbling sound that he feels more than hears and stephanie is frozen up ahead looking more confused than scared she still looks confused even as the ground below her starts to break apart and she disappears into the hole so quickly that it would be comical if paul weren't shit scared right now and all that's going through his mind right now is two words the two words she'd spoken to him last night in the tent that had filled him with equal parts anxiety and joy and then they'd made love and lain together afterwards talking about their future together and now here he was watching the future the future was here and now her slipping down this hole and the hole getting wider and wider and she's still not screaming and all he can hear is those two words again but now its more than those two words now he hears her say paul we need to talk i've got some good news you see...

Paul grabbed her hand, tears streaming down his face, and he sat there crying even as the memory continued, playing now on every screen, no escaping it now, and he hears her say again

...paul we need to talk i've got some good news you see i'm pregnant...

Paul barked a harsh sob at this, willing the memory to stop; crying harder when the memory continued on inexorably.

...he jumps down the hole after her and he can't see her down there and jesus he's been falling for too long and he sees that he's falling towards a mound of rocks sharp jagged rocks and he tries to adjust his descent but it's too late and as he lands he hears a sharp crack and sees the bone shoot out of his leg like a battering ram knocking down the doors to a castle in a medieval epic sees all this in horrible clarity and then he is rolling and then he is crawling away from that mound away from the hand that he sees jutting out from underneath the mound and after a while he finds light but there is another rockfall in the way and he lays his head down and cries and sometime while he is crying he falls asleep and when he wakes up he can't feel his leg...

Paul sat for a long time, holding her hand in his, not caring that it was cold and stiff in his hand.

I'm going to die in here, he thought. Don't you dare think that, he thought immediately afterward. Don't think that, don't you dare think that, if you think it then it might come true.

He hauled himself up to his elbows, setting Stephanie's hand down gently after giving it a single, soft, goodbye kiss.

It was faster to get back to the rockfall than it had been to get to Stephanie, but once there he was out of ideas. He just wanted to sleep, maybe drink some water and finish the trail mix before he fell asleep, but he realized that he'd left both of those back by the cave-in. No way he was going back there. In fact, the only thing he had left was his splint, and somehow he'd managed to keep the medical pack in his pocket, but what was the point in taking the last set of pills when there was no way he could shift the rocks unless he had some sort of excavator or at least a lever of some sort?

He sat up again, his eyes focusing on the splint again. The struts he'd used to make his splint had felt fairly sturdy, but how sturdy were they, he wondered. Would they shift the rocks?

It's worth a shot, he thought, and he crunched the last two pills down in anticipation for the work to come.

Wild...

2008-06-21T18:58:00.002-06:00

Orson Scott Card says, in his On Characters and Viewpoint, that your viewpoint character in any scene should be the character in the most pain. A stupid, stupid rule that will make me write better immediately.
Wokka-wokka

It's been agreed the whole world stinks so no one's taking showers anymore

2008-06-21T14:22:00.004-06:00

"But you said we would go at the end of the month.You said it wasn't going to be another winter here."

Chelle scratched the scab on the back of his hand. There was nothing left but some dried bits of crusty epidermis-death clinging to a dreidel-shaped itching pink spot brought into existence by a vat of broccoli cheddar soup. The molten potage slopped over the side onto the back of his hand while he staggered down the hall past the distractors and commuters of addiction, chain smoking outside the kitchen door or huddled on the couch with all their knitting and needlepoint.

Fucking AA meetings. The ability to get through the weekly circle jerks to the frailty of self and the subsequent celebration therein, was fueled entirely by a well-appointed glove box holding the flask of Jameson to wash down the quick kiss from Mary Jane who slept in a Children's Tylenol bottle underneath an Illinois state map and a pack of Big Red.

"Jeanne, I can't help if the fucking job hasn't begun yet. Shall we just head to Jupiter and ask if anyone wants to let us stay in their basement? 'Hey, my job doesn't begin for 6 weeks and I am a convicted felon. My girlfriend here is struggling with bulimia, baby-hunger and mild alcoholism. She can't work because she finds work either too boring or stressful. I promised her I would take care of her because she tolerates my disappearing every now and then and she gives great head which I enjoy after finishing a plate of lasagna- which she cooks very well. I also guess that I love her. So, anyway. Mind if we crash here until I can begin my new job? We don't have savings or anything because, see the first bullet point- prision made it hard to save up and what with Miss B&P not working...."
Jeanne stood and walked out of the room, his tshirt slinked over the pink panties that hung grumpily off her round little ass as she stormed down the hall toward the bedroom. Talking to her in this hot apartment while black branches scratched the salty grey windows on November's last Wednesday made him feel uncomfortable. Yes but. Uncomforatble like he was sitting in a hot tub wearing a sweatshirt and jeans.

A Toast to Dylan Thomas

2008-06-18T13:59:00.000-06:00

There have been better places for a tale to start. This has no light, and has no art; it has no deeps, or musiclust and has no Cost displayed for characters to note and pay no heed. It has a poet lad in cups and a few archetypes you'll get to know. It starts off fast.
Then lets you go.
'I've put down thirty Guinness in a whip,' the two-armed man exclaims. He waves his cane.
The lad and the Irish twat go on. 'You're a funny one,' she drones against his backwards leer, driving back towards one ear.
He sighs, and starts, his forceful heart propels him: 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,
Drives my green age...' and he leans, not heavily, on the redheaded girl, and manages to paw her leftmost tit.
'Woke up on the strawcart. What's a strawcart, ask you?' The two-armed man was agitating, stirring batter. 'Had a prick like concrete, then.'
'What is it with you?' she shoves him off, and glances about. 'There are people about. People downstairs. There are people downstairs all over the World, you know.'
'Concrete, lass! In the strawcart! Was a coalcart, innit!' His cane rings the hardened floor.
'There are girls,' the lad snaps, setting his elbow in the Neufchatel, 'Behind these sliding doors, these weeping walls, women stuffed in every corner, bed, and cupboard, Lord! Girls with ankles like winestems, necks like porcelein arched above the Thames!'
'I was a milkmaid,' comes her lament. He hooks a pinky in her dress and tugs for glory, She, nostalgia-lost, allows it.
'I am sure,' he replies, 'you were.' Her bosom heaves like seal puppies. 'Women waiting for MY chance, I tell you.'
'There was a boy not unlike yourself, promising love, and I lost my post.'
'A revolver stuffed inside my belt.'
'THERE was your CONcrete,' cries the cook beside the two-armed man. 'The gun, you billygoat!'
'Harridan! You'll taste my Crete, for truth! My Greek eyetooth!
'A tragedy out on the coast,' the lad has wormed his jutting chin into that nectar-cleft.
'A tragic lad, as full of poetry as you.'
'As full of seed, of shit, of meat.'
'You'll pay your bill, wanting talk like that,' the Cook advances big as fuckMe hams, strapped into an apron like a sail.
'Ah, wanting,' wheels the two-armed man, 'wanting only mountains of your eyes, Cookie dear, and love what springs from midden heaps and soiled old garments in the Southern reaches.'
'Git on,' the Cook spits, grinning hugely.
'The meat was the problem,' snaps our Irish twat, and drives the lad from her Eden with a heave.
'The meat?' he cries, 'and not the seed? What sort of lad- how unlike me!'
'You'll have my leave,' she warns.
'No, no, sweet dove.' The lad crinkles face into a mourning grin. 'Lets talk of poetry again: Two pints of Bass
One Pint of Gin
I found a haven for my chin--'
'You're rhyming,' notes the Irish twat, and takes her leave, as quick as that.
The two-armed man is buried in the Cook's embrace. They'll soon renew in kitchen depths, they'll breathe, and drip, and die that little death.
The poet starts in fingering the suds amid the splintered wood, and rubs and thrusts until he's bleeding, mixing dark sweet Bass and heart-thinner, pushing all that youth and fear and need and ugly EgoDrive into a rut until he's dizzy, and the Cook comes back and whacks him hard along the earhole with her spoon, her monstrous jowls still pink with swoon, her oer'sized lips all pinched and fat from bites the two-armed man laid snipSnipSnip along her teeth and gums, and poet lad falls sobbing in his torn-hand Filth and sleeps till bouncers come.
They arrange him soft as kittens gainst the kerb, and whisper middling lullabies in his ear;
Have no fear, my youth, young Lover,
Have none of that- no fear.
For there are girls behind these sliding skies, with dewdrop teeth and honeyed eyes,
All waiting for the Wolf and his soft words to tear and bite and rip and thrust and puncture up till hipbones grind her lily thighs to canted bruise and moan and walk like horseman, lad, you'll see-
You'll knock the bounce from every knee. These girls in cupboards, under stairs, waiting for their gait impaired.
So sleep like ivy covered books.
And have no fear.
No fear.
The city holds such pleasures for your poet's driven hand. And coming yet: You'll be a man.

Found it.

2008-06-18T12:54:00.001-06:00

Tried to throw it out; burn it; but Ms. Milfenstein stole it away. Now- feeling nostalgic- I found the thread on work-computer. Here she lives.

A curved spoke, unfolding slow beneath the body of machine, could tell a hundred thousand things you might believe.
'There once were forests, end for end, from here to Cathay, back again.
Cain't climb no trees, cain't split no bread,
We won't be rich until we're dead' The caliph of the spoke, it said.
It once saw grease, but then saw gravel, a judgement sure as robe and gavel-
Now it sits, and sits, and rots, and unfolds slow in vacant lots,
This slender bit of arm and gear, this Caliban,
this metal Queer-
Questing for that bit of real
it knew here once,
Inside a wheel.

Schmentle

2008-06-13T13:24:00.001-06:00

They Came, They Went.

Liz clutched and hammed and made Monroe, of pretty bits of blue and wind;
The first two chucked, she opted for the third of pictures took above that fan.
Mah platinum-beast she curled and growled, those bruises livid on her skin;
And told a story bout what made a beatin man.
Protest- I am-
but lost for kind, and waiting to hold up that what I preach.
I'd never bruise such lovely bloodFilled peach.
but Soft, what glove through yonder cheek I pierce.
It is the Would I were a hand upon that Sun;
I miss this one.

Found This one

2008-06-13T13:20:00.001-06:00

THIS IS OLD. LORD KNOWS HOW OLD, BUT I THINK I CAN GUESS.

Wind

It slaps you out here, when it comes. Not because its harsh- the wind- because weather’s weather, out here. Rain lashes, fog consumes, and the wind, it slaps you.
They crest the Olema hill, verdant lush down to the blackberry eucalyptus jungle, down to the sea. The pickup’s seen better, though in summer weather it’s a coastal dream- the hardtop lifts right off and slap! comes the wind from everywhere doing 35, 40, 45, 50, till you’re used to the howling and it’s a fullbody massage. The pickup crests the hill, its hardtop locked now, in November, and they stop their bickering for a breath or two, the clouds over the headlands, the Irish roll of Bear Valley sucking the fight out through their eyes.
He grumbles, grinds a gear, and takes the slick turn too fast. She stomps an imaginary brake and stretches against the window, hands on dash, face drawn. “Goddamnit, slow down.”
“Yuh,” he says. He downshifts again and they jounce down to Highway one’s Bed and Breakfast infestation. He stops at the T and sits, grinding palms against the steering wheel. He could have cut hard left at the last turn, flipped the wheel back right. She was smaller. He would have lived. When they pulled him from the crushed wreck of the truck he would have been crying, and everyone would feel terrible for him, and he could go on a bender that would never end.
“Are you gonna sit here?”
He looks over at her, the steering wheel making friction noises under his palms, and a strange stab of emotion hits him. He wants to cry, high in his chest where it feels like a rollercoaster dipping back into his throat. He blinks. Turns left.
“What’s the matter with you?” He just shakes his head, the choking tears receding back to somewhere in his stomach. It would be so sad, if she died in a car crash. Terrible, if she slipped off the cliffs. Everyone would feel so bad for him, and drive him home when he collapsed in a corner of the bar.
“Where’s this joker live?”
She stretches her neck before answering. She’s pretty enough. Nice legs, eyes, skin. “I told you, out toward Agate. I told you enough times.”
“Right after Dogtown?”
“Yes.” She was pretty enough. Everyone would feel so bad if she died in a car crash. He pushed the tears down again, and knew clearly what a shitbag he was. The pickup lumbered down toward Bolinas, wet-season wind slapping at it. Even with the windows up it smelled like fairytales, out here. Like luscious rotting earth and dripping trees.
He could slip the wheel on the wet road and smash into those trees.
You fuck. You coward fuck. Just pull over here, tell her its over.
Everyone would feel so bad for her. He’d have to move towns.
They made their way to the Doc’s house, she directing by grasping his shirt and stabbing fingers at a turn ahead, he shaking loose and hunching further into his shoulders. She turned the radio on, and couldn’t find a clear signal. He exhaled, too loudly, and switched it off. Every tree beckoned, and he knew that he should break up with her.
Break up with her before it’s hell for sure.
“You believe?” he asked, as they switched from paved to dirt and back to paved.
“Believe?”
“Yuh. Were you brought up religious?”
She looked at him funny, grabbed his shirt and pointed at a left turn. “No.”
“No Earth-mother mumbo, no redpath, even?” She stared at him. “Christopher Hitchens,” he said, twisting the wheel under his hands, “when Jerry Falwell died, Christopher Hitchens said he wished there was a hell for Falwell to go to.” Stared. “You think there’s a hell?”
“Christopher Hitchens? And who’s Jerry Falwell?”
“Loudmouths,” he said, and hunched down further. “Both of ‘em. Hitchens wants Henry Kissinger hung.”
“Kissinger?”
“Christ- you don’t read?”
She stared at him, a pickled fish. “There it is,” she said.
Ramshackle, clapboard… veneral came to mind. An ageing hippie in overalls stood next to the onestory, a picnic basket in one hand, no shirt under his straps. The wind slapped his loosetied hair. She opened the door before he’d cut the engine, and they both got out into the encroaching fog, the pickup adding steam. “Hey,” the Doc said, and put his basket down. “I was gonna go pick agate. Thought you wouldn’t make it.”
“The storm’ll bring it in, huh?” he said, popping the pickup’s hood to help it cool.
“Yessir,” the Doc said. “Storms turn up all sorts of treasure.” He grinned. “I’ll get my scrip.” She came over suddenly and snuggled against him, twisting like a cat, nuzzling in his neck. He wanted to cry again. You fuck, he told himself. You fuck.
“Mmm… this’ll be good,” she said, tracing the line of his jaw. He pulled away slightly. “We can make some money.”
“Violence,” he said, and she rolled her eyes. “Paranoia,” he insisted. “Fine things to bring home with you.”
“Don’t be a shit,” she growled, and stepped away from him. “You smoke enough of it, so don’t be a shit.” The Doc came back outside, and stood before them in his overalls, apparently comfortable in the cold and wind without his shirt.
“So, what seems to be the trouble, young man?”
“Hell,” he said, and blushed, because no one else would think him clever. You fuck. You fuck. She stared at him, and jerked her eyes toward the Doc.
“Your back,” she hissed.
He rolled his eyes. “I’ve got lumbar amnesia, Doc. Spinal halitosis, and my dick won’t get hard after a fifth of whiskey.”
She shoved him, hard, and he was happy for a moment. It started to rain. “Well, son, maybe I can help. A heinous set of symptoms, that.” He eyed the intensifying drizzle. “Step inside my office?”
He went before her into the shack-house, and she whispered harshly at his back: “Do you think he wants you makin fun, you stupid shit, do you think Celia called him so you could be a shit if you fuck this up I don’t know-“
“So,” the Doc said, and gestured toward a stinking couch, a television set playing silent San Fransisco daytime across from it. “Lumbar region, repetitive stress damage, affecting your… virility.” Raised his forearm violently, a fist-salute.
He didn’t answer. On the TV, a woman left her car and leapt into the arms of a man in a suit. His eyes stung before the urge to cry passed. Did they love one another?
She shoved him, and it hurt, this time. He breathed too deeply, hiding his face from them, and reached into his jacket for the envelope. Tossed it onto the television. “Yuh,” he said, and didn’t look at the Doc.
“Depression?” the Doc asked.
“O,” he answered, meeting his eyes. “O-pression.”
“Fuck you,” she hissed.
“You know,” the Doc said, retrieving the envelope, thumbing it open thoughtfully, “I do a bit of couple’s counseling.”
“The scrip,” he said, and the Doc nodded, disappearing the envelope beneath his sagging chest. He scribbled on a pad, and held the result out. She snatched it hungrily from before his outstretched hand.
“That’ll do for the club,” he said. “I got to examine you, just in case a polygraph ever comes into it. Stand up, son.” He did. The Doc came over and pressed on his back, right above his jeans. Harder. Harder still. The Doc dug a knuckle into his kidney, sighing in exasperation.
“Shit, ow!” He shoved the old man away gently.
“Just as I thought,” the Doc intoned. “Repetitive stress. Now get the hell out of my house.”
They mounted into the pickup silently, and the Doc came out and gathered his picnic basket, waved cheerfully.
“Don’t you want a shirt?” he called, but the Doc just walked off.
“What was that?” she hissed at him as they pulled out. “Celia does us this favor and you act like a complete shit, I think he’s her uncle, what is wrong with you?”
“All sorts of things,” he said, and almost cried, again. You fuck.
She looked at him intently. “You’d better get real,” she hissed. “This isn’t playtime any more. This,” shaking the scrip, “is going rent a house for us. Some land. Pay for school and clothes and a new fucking car, you understand?”
He looked over at her and reached out. Gentle though the gesture was, she recoiled, surprised. He rested his palm on the swell of her belly, already pushing her tits skyward when she sat, making an arc of the loose pants she wore. He rubbed the swollen globe, and the tears battered against the wall in his throat again, again, again.
You fuck, he told himself. You fuck.

Devilish Cunts

2008-06-12T23:44:00.002-06:00

These baggy ass jean broads, these saggy titty, bible bearing bitches.
I've had it up to here with them, the whole lot.

If another female missionary comes to my door talking about Joseph Smith, I'm just going to shit.
& I will. ha-ha-ha-ha.

Epidemic

2008-06-11T13:33:00.002-06:00

Go to The Obscurian and read my Harris Burdick window story.

You know you want to. Take note of the tiny text, when I pasted it in it pasted too wide. Blah, blah, blah. The formatting kind of sucks on this thing.

Please read it.

Lobbazob

2008-06-10T17:10:00.003-06:00

It all began when someone left the window open.

Fear came in, and then mistrust, and then the psychopathic rage. We came back and shut the window, SNIP!

but only hope got locked outside. Pandora's twopane weatherseal. I got a spatula and whacked at fear and psychopathic rage, but mistrust soaked right in and spread for corners. Fucking YOU-

YOU who left the window open- YOU!

Whoever you are, I plan to sap your teeth out.

2008-06-10T16:09:00.003-06:00

Refresh

2008-06-09T16:46:00.001-06:00

Bands of pale light, cast through dilapidated blinds, lay across the room like strips of tape. Tremulous fingers hovered above a yellowing keyboard, waiting.

He couldn't shake the pitiful sense of absurdity that had overcome him. Maybe if he where a painter himself he could conjure some surreal, bear infested landscape that, with the right kind of eyes, could appear moving or meaningful or at least fucking funny.

He clicked refresh. Nothing.

Stravinsky's Firebird was reaching a pitch as the tea kettle began to cry out in antiphon from the kitchen. Its awkward dissonance spoke of a duality that recalled the magical bird itself. Everyone had their firebird: that which signifies to the individual that life and death are contrapuntal.

Whiskey. It burned like fire going down or coming up and it was now his sole source of inspiration; his firebird. If he could get enough of it down all his dull, dun, dead words would start to seem florid and even insightful, if only for their ambiguity.

He clicked refresh. The tea kettle kept screeching.

Crawling toward the kitchen in search of sweet, caramel colored inspiration, he bumped a table leg and was showered in mail. He paused. Slightly bemused by the beurocracy he was always avoiding. Sifting through the postal detritus he discovered three unpaid rent bills, one uncashed mental disability check and one notice to evict Why the fuck hadn't they come and thrown his sorry ass out on the street?

Nevermind. Words were coming now.

"Feathers formed of dollar bills, we glide.A specie of raptor, surveying the night. We are lank weeds outgrowing gardens and vines, festooning walls of time, we degrade our own delineations."

Between muttering each line over and over again, he had somehow found the composure he needed to stand, turn the stove off, poor tea and whiskey into a wretched glass and drink. He felt better. If the world had ended outside his windows, he hadn't noticed. Still, standing there wraith-like in nothing but his bed sheet, he found himself considering the possibility.

Um...

2008-06-03T22:31:00.001-06:00

Sorry I said mean things. I don't know what came over me.

Swallowing words while giving head

2008-06-03T00:22:00.003-06:00

I'm a real boy made of wood. She's a real girl made of lollipops.

An Oldie but Goodie...

2008-05-31T03:05:00.006-06:00

So, I've discovered a new glitch in the system here at dear old Blogger.com. This story has been absolute hell to post on here without major portions of it being set to black text automatically. Since the default background on here is black, previous attempts to post looked like I was playing a fun little game of "Infer what the hell is going on in this story by reading every other page." Sure, it can be done, but you'd just hate me for it. So, it's fixed now. Also, I'm took out the big fat reveal in the middle and would like to see whether the story fares better or worse as a result. So, here we are, actually posting a readable copy of Final Purchases to the blog. Enjoy, suckas.

The store was dimly lit and musty as hell, which, Jonas thought, is actually pretty funny under the circumstances.

He'd already decided that he didn't like this store one bit, even though Dorothy was completely enamored with this stuff. Junk, he thought, surveying the aisles of battered toys, worn quilts, and badly dented picture frames. Hell, some of this stuff looked it had been through a pretty nasty fire at some point. Which, Jonas thought to himself, is probably pretty likely. Dorothy was currently cooing over a selection of old photographs that looked like they had to date to at least the 1920s, and probably even earlier than that.

Jonas couldn't have cared less about anything that this store had to offer, though, and let his gaze wander around while she picked through the shoddy stock.

His eyes landed on one of the staff, a pretty young girl probably no more than twenty-six. She was helping a wizened old hunchback of a woman get something off of one of the top shelves, keeping up an animated conversation with the whole time she was standing on the stepladder. Pretty girl, he thought absently. She really doesn't belong here.

She got off the stepladder with surprising grace, considering that she came down from the top shelf carrying a large rocking horse that had to weigh at least as much as the girl, and handed it to the old woman. Surprisingly enough, the old woman actually jumped for joy and let out a loud whoop that caused more than a few people to look at her. The girl just traded a knowing smile with another employee who was walking past, showing a child of about eight to the display of comics.

The girl traded a few more words with the old woman, apparently offering assistance carrying the cumbersome thing, but the woman shook her head politely and walked off, clutching the rocking horse close to her as though it weighed no more than a pocketbook.

Jonas was brought back to himself by a tug on his shirt sleeve, and he turned around to see Dorothy holding up a tattered Raggedy Ann doll. "Oh, my God, Jonas, look!"

He looked closely at it for a moment, but he didn't see anything special about it. In fact, it was in pretty bad shape. One eye was working loose, hanging down from a loose thread forlornly. The hair, which had originally been thick red yarn, was now worn and frayed to the point where Raggedy Ann was nearly bald. Her white apron was stained a dull brownish white, and her hands were covered in a faded pink stain.

"It's very nice, dear," he said dutifully.

"Nice," she said, incredulously. "This is more than nice. This looks exactly like the one I had when I was a little girl. I remember that I couldn't say Raggedy Ann, so I just called her my Baby Annie doll. I lost it when I was seven, and my parents couldn't get me to stop crying for days."

Jonas nodded, still listening with one ear, but getting increasingly tired of the dinginess of the store around him. He looked down at the tile floors disdainfully. Didn't they ever mop in here? He saw what had to be at least twenty years of dust, dirt, and God only knew what else.

He wandered around for a moment, picking up anything that caught his eye. Admittedly, there wasn't much. He stopped briefly to look at a box of baseball cards that had to be worth a small fortune nowadays, and considered asking how much it cost. Then he decided that a small fortune was probably exactly how much they were asking for it, and put it down on the shelf again.

He found an old Buck Rogers zapgun toy that he remembered playing with when he was younger. He held it in his hand for a moment, feeling a pleasant wave of memories wash over him. He'd spent countless days running around his backyard, pretending to zap space aliens back to Pluto, or whereever his imagination had summoned them from on that particular day. He looked around for a moment, trying to find the girl who had been helping the old hunchback a minute ago to ask a price on the zapgun, but she was nowhere to be found. Well, surely they can't be asking too much for this. And if they are, why then I'll put it right back. No harm, no foul. He nodded to himself without even realizing it, and continued to stroll the aisles slowly, his arm swinging absently. Every now and then the hand carrying his gun (he didn't know when he'd started thinking of it as his gun, but he had) would smack against his hip, and even though he hadn't had a day in over twenty years where the slightest wrong move would send pain shooting through his arthritic hip, he didn't even notice. His hip didn't notice either, didn't even send up the slightest twinge when the gun hit, even though the zapgun was one of the old ones that was actually metal, and felt as though it had to weigh at least two or three pounds.

He stopped to look at a clothing rack near the back of the store. There was a suit on the rack, really the only suit on the rack, that looked exactly like the one he'd worn on the day he'd married Dorothy. He remembered it well, because he'd been poor back then, just like everyone else, and it had been his only suit. He felt foolish in it, because it was too short in the legs, and he looked as though at any moment he expected the wedding to be flooded out. Still, he hadn't cared, because the realization had come to him that the radiant woman standing next to him was his, that she had just agreed in front of God and everybody to spend the rest of her life with him.

He'd even laughed with Dorothy when, later that night, she'd told him that he'd walked around all day with a mustard stain on his pants. They'd both laughed over that, and then she'd snuggled up close to him, buried her face in his chest, and fell asleep. Jonas had stayed awake for a while longer, simply stroking her hair and marveling at the fact that she was his.

He turned to look at her, and he stood watching her as she picked through a display of old, tattered quilts. My God, he thought. What did I ever do to earn that woman? Even now, he still felt the familiar rush in his heart, the way it sped up whenever she was near. Age had been kind to Dorothy, giving her a look of wisdom and experience without ruining her features, and he could still see traces of the young woman she'd been in her high cheekbones and soft, gentle lips.

He was startled out of his reverie by a voice near his shoulder, saying, "Are you finding everything all right, sir?"

He turned to see who had spoken, and he recognized the girl from earlier. She was smiling at him, and looked genuinely interested in helping him. "Oh, no. I'm fine. I'm just waiting for my wife."

She smiled, and said, "Well, let me know if you need help finding anything."

He was distracted by what sounded like a scream, and he ran forward, moving surprisingly fast for an eighty-four year old man. He didn't even notice that he'd dropped his items.

It hadn't been a scream for help, or of terror, he soon found out, but a shriek of delight. The boy that he'd seen another employee helping earlier was lying on the ground, a hyperactive puppy licking his face while he rolled back and forth, giggling.

Well, will wonders never cease? he thought to himself. What don't they sell at this place?

Jonas walked stiffly over to the quilts, where Dorothy was still picking through them. "We should get going," he said.

"Oh, don't be silly. What's your rush?"

He looked pointedly at his watch. "I don't want to miss the train."

She kept looking through the quilts, not even looking at him as she said, "Oh, there'll be another train."

"Do you feel like waiting around for another train? Because I sure don't."

She swatted at him playfully, saying, "Oh, don't be such a grumpy old poop. It'll still be there when we get there. And besides, when are we ever going to come back here?"

"Well, I just don't know that we're going to be able to take any of this with us when we get where we're going. To be honest, I'm still not even sure where we're going."

She stopped looking at the quilts long enough to give him another one of those playful swats and said, "Well, I know where I'm going. If you don't want to come with me, then that's your problem."

He started to walk away when the loud speaker came on overhead. "Attention customers. The next train is leaving in ten minutes. If you are riding the next train, please bring your final purchases up to the register.”

He turned around and grabbed her, saying “That’s us. Let’s go.”

“Wait, Jonas, look at this. It’s the blanket that we slept with on our honeymoon. My God, I never thought I’d see this again. My God, it’s even still got our initials on it. You remember that, how we wrote them down with that big black marker? I didn’t think those would survive the first wash, especially with the big washers that hotel used.”

“Come on, Dorothy. Let’s go.” He was getting impatient now, and his hip was starting to throb again, probably from when he’d ran up to see where the scream was coming from. It wasn’t fair, he’d thought that he was done with arthritis, but if the throb in his hip was any indication, then there’d be no respite even now.

Still she resisted, and Jonas turned around with a yell on his lips, and it died instantly.

Dorothy was standing there, clutching the doll to her chest in one hand and the blanket in the other. She was also holding some photographs that he hadn’t noticed before. “Don’t you get it, Jonas?” she said, and he was shocked to hear her voice quavering, to see the tears forming in her eyes. “We can’t leave yet. This isn’t just stuff, just junk. This is ours. And I’m taking it.”

Jonas felt his shoulders slump, and he said, “I’m sorry. You’re right.” He stood still for a moment, then said, “Say, hold on a second, will you?”

Before Dorothy could answer, he was running towards the back of the store, hoping that his things were still where he’d left them. And there they were, laying in a neat little pile like he’d set them there rather than fling them every which way. He grabbed the suit off the ground, picking up the Buck Rogers zapgun (barely even noticing his initials scratched into the butt of the gun in the long, straggling handwriting that he’d used as a child), and as he did so, he saw a dress on the rack that looked exactly like the one Dorothy had worn on their wedding day. He grabbed it too, and then ran back to meet Dorothy.

She had found a few more things as well, and together they managed to get it all to the cash register. “How much do I owe you?” Jonas asked, reaching for his wallet.

He’d just realized that his wallet was gone when the girl behind the counter, the same one he’d seen twice now, smiled and said, “Don’t worry sir. That’s all yours. We were just holding it for you.”

He smiled, and said, “Thank you,” before scooping everything up in his arms and heading for the door.

“Do you need any help, Jonas?” Dorothy asked, and he broke into a large grin. “I sure do, pretty lady. You can carry this for me.” He handed her the Raggedy Ann doll, which was no longer the dirty and stained thing that Dorothy had picked up off the shelf, but looked as fresh and pretty as the day that Dorothy had first played with it.

On the way out, Jonas saw a hat hanging on a coat rack near the door that looked familiar. He shifted the bulk of the weight into his other hand, then pointed with his free hand to the hat. “Excuse me, miss?” he shouted to the girl behind the counter. She looked up politely, and he said, “Is this mine too?”

She nodded to him, and said, “Why yes, sir, I believe it is.”

He grinned and gave her a jaunty thumbs up, something that he hadn’t done in years, but to be honest, he hadn’t felt this good in years. He grabbed the hat off the rack and put it on with a flourish, the same way he used to do it when he and Dorothy were dating. He put out his arm, and said, “Shall we go, then, my dear?” Dorothy took his arm, and they walked out side by side.

They got to the station just in time to see the train pull out, and Dorothy looked at him and said, “Oh, dear. We missed the train.”

Jonas looked at her and smiled. He sat down on the bench and threw an arm around her. “Don’t worry. There’ll be another train.” She smiled back at him, and put her head on his shoulder. He kissed her lightly on the top of her head, and then he sat back to wait.

Dream Keeper part 2

2008-05-30T18:27:00.002-06:00

Come now, oh thou Keeper of Dreams,

A wish for a dream of fancy...

A fluttering pair of silvery wings,

Among the faeries I want to be...

To play in flowers and live in trees,

To ride the snails and race the bees.

To jump with frogs from pad to pad,

To always be happy and never sad.

Please hear me now thou Keeper of Dreams,

I ask you for this one,

A fluttering pair of silvery wings.

I want my slumber fun!

And I shall grant your wish tonight,

Now lay down your head.

Close your eyes and shut them tight,

I lay you now to bed.

Be ready now, your dream is waiting,

I hear the faeries' song.

The mandolin tune is a lovely thing,

Know the words and sing along!

What Doesnt Happen At Writers Group...

2008-05-29T17:10:00.002-06:00

A beginning of something...

2008-05-29T16:04:00.003-06:00

I was sick of playing games with this dame. She knew something. She was trying to cross those lovely stems in a way to distract me. I can't say that it was unpleasant, but it wasn't going to work. Not now that I'm this far in. Even if I don't get the rest of my fees, even if I hated the client -which I do- I had to find out what happened to Henry Snow.

"Just call me West." I said this as I stuck out my hand to shake that of a man named Oswald Nevin. We exchanged the usual how-do-you-do's and I offered him the chair in front of my desk. "What can I do for ya?" I asked, as I leaned back in my chair and displayed my feet on the desk.
"Well, Mr. West,"
"No Mr."
"Oh, o.k. then. As I was saying, uh, West" I nod in approval, he looked like he needed it.

"I need you to find someone."
"Oh? And who is it that you need me to find?"
"His name is Henry Snow."
"How do you know this Snow fellow?"
"He was a really good friend of mine in school."

I knew he was lying. "Old schoolmate huh?"
"Yes. It's very important that I find him."
"Why?"
"I'd rather not say."

Something smelled fishy and it wasn't my lunch. I thought I'd play along anyway. I hadn't had a good missing persons job in a while. Hell, to be honest, I hadn't had any good jobs in weeks. Only the maid-stole-my-silverware jobs, and those made me want to kill myself. Oswald Nevin was figety and sweating. Something about this guy didn't sit right with me. I thought I should find out more about him before I look too far for Snow. He agreed to my fees and wrote me a cheque. We stood, motioned polite, and I showed him the door.

yeah, Daddio*

2008-05-29T02:53:00.002-06:00

Clarity of speech ability to simplify or...annunciate nonsense, but for the nonce, sets of madness and darkenss inscribed with that sword., THose indominatable, delicies. that breathe from relife to umbillical cords. Rusted tips of my confessional tool. THe pen nibs drool. AS i sapproach to boast a coaster of smoke and it's habitual so keep the switche s fool. ANd check the sheep;.
I need another PECK of heat resistant wool to keep, our hearts warm our heads full, casue red BULL< is emthamphitic killer in your slepe. WAke up from your nightmare, slip dwonsatairs, creep wicked eyes keep. With an eye, to the capillary rythm of the street and tweek east. Got the flag at half mast to feed the beast. What's the sum of all the projects that you preach. It goes deep, deep, deeper than you might hold your breaht. Where I swim, casue the thinfgs i shed, the skin comes from within, I say win. Not as peace of ming, but place, it's your life,
liek your face
you rejected it it might sting yourself liek mace.
oh to. My yattitudwe, ste the mood.
CCAsat ion caprece about, to measure how we stood.
But soft, waht light throuygh a winfow brakes.IT is
the east and JUiliet is the seun. see who she rests that chin upo n her hand, oh where i a glove.
Rest upion that hand, misquote the promised land, it's parafizzle in thie MOTHA FUCKA<
and you'll get thre smuckers.,
EVERYJEALOUS THAT I SET IS SUNK TO JAM,
And my better half is quotin sun of sma son of man, i ll like it when you for ce it down my hand cared throat. SO save youyr gloat, cayuse yoyur freedom barn might need anbother coat. PUNK PUKKA< COME FUCKIN PUBLISH ME*\

HAHA!

SMARFLAR

DOnt try it bar clar.

CAR

HARDY SMAR? \

DO YOU WANNA RUIN THE WEBSITE?

2008-05-29T02:48:00.002-06:00

Ah hee hee whats your thought on this Mike said to me in the Humboldt dome
I dunnop, I said eerily, pointedly, misguidedly It think I duinnop I have an affinity for adjectives
How would we go about destroying a website
Ambidextropusly, Mike said the best way to do it would be to fiflibuster Our way tyhru it
Ok i SAID WQith 11 lbs of balls that has to weigh a TON.
Um letys see now When Its my tiurn why is it i fuck up?
Rock it out daddy
TAPTAPTAPTAp
Spo Mike bgan taloking again If he could hear himself talk he would probably never do iot aghain for dstarterfs. Starters
ut But Mike was an odd one in that way. He like sd to carryu o0pn ion verbose p[antyhose
seamless words. Huff.
Falling like deft turds.
I really didnt want to hear any more so lewts publishg this.

FROSTY DINER MUGS

2008-05-29T02:42:00.002-06:00

I am the very model ofd a modern intellectual.
All info pornogrpahic. Evil& intentional. ANdf if you ask the preacher sson, it's rather ecumenncial, I am the flaming epicure of all youi intellectuals. Iconoclast, adn filibustered feind. I find, eventual--the better of my ugly halves. Is hafl a cycle-menstrul. When bleeding on the proicesse's Im eveil and intentional. I am the very modle of an modern intellectual.
I have a paper ready neaming every one deiscenarbel, and ewhn Im in the tubn, my fleshy monster is immersebel. I blew a bubble once, inside the backside of a brommabowlk.
So please don't call Me Sally, I will dunk you in my asshole JEL. YOU WANNA FIND OUT*
If Raymond Faulks is wrong, then cahin me to the wall, I got about 11 lbs of balls.
YEAAAH!
I dont' thing that;s approaprit.e The best of our intentions, cracked and bleessed. Upon the back of breasts., If pupils teell the last thing the broken person swaw, your mother saw 11 lbs of balls.
SQUEAK*!
THe asskciks make it believeble.
puBLISH HER.

Its Awesome Dude

2008-05-29T02:37:00.002-06:00

Whats the title.
zdude its fuckin awqesome Dude its not
That hot Lets roick. What dya call when a girl wears her shirt like that
Wears her shirt like whatr
Tucked in? Why do girls do like that?
Adive. Advice.
How the fuck would I know.
Notge to SLEF THESE TWO SOUND LIKE TH SAME PERSON ALL CAPS
The light shine on me I was on stage eating coprned beef and hash and it was absurd that we were having coffee and hash at 4:30
VBush Is In Town Dick Cheney crazy braineyt He's in town I nm On Stage Oh fuck not that red light more or less like get oiff the stage now I've a;lways
:LIZ IS PUNCHING MY CQAT. She wthrows my cat across the rokmm
room
Just relax your throat muscles, Liz. First time for everythiong, Oh no, clappy clap
Publish this motherfucker.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI, RIPS!

2008-05-29T02:21:00.004-06:00

Capowara swings from the back of the bush and it spins from the mush and trhe mshe that you tush. All i ever wanted was to pick apatr your crain. Put the peices back together, my way.
IT HELD SAWY, natze capillary puimps. Blood is senteneary bump. But emersion cures the ills.
Of all a mercery, french frues.
TOne your thighs, fix ouytr teeth, beleech youutr asshole. Drink vermoyth. Butying hats. P:eople use thge toilet each and every day.
I';d like to find a sounding board for all the gings yiou say,. Which isnt me. AS you SEE> Im a bit ofg TIRED OUT. ANd if liek you to give your frama back, I ll purt it in your mlouth.
LBAE>

CHARLES BUKOWSKI, RIPS!

2008-05-29T02:21:00.001-06:00

Figgie puddin Just bring some right here

2008-05-29T02:15:00.002-06:00

Ultimate vagabond
U;ltimate's gotta copunt for something in this case it soesn't Ultimate fucking Vaga Bonmd\
What did I just Say? So's I pass this Ultimate ''Hey mista!'
OPh fuck he can taLK TOO
Hey mistaa!!
Cant you see I'm missing your legs?
"Ohg fuck, you're missing your legs??" Its coming cleare that none of these things are gonna happen.
"Proistheretewriocs."
"Cosmetics."
"Prosthetics" Kris is blowing demons out his nose close the windows so this Ultimate motherfucking Vagabond he sez Hey mista- See I gopt an old aldy, she's.../. the care's getting fixed... I gotta see my old ladfy.
A p[art of me thought I could caRE, A5T6 LEAST sO i STAYED tiune, but its not gonna matter
I just went inside, bought some cigarettes, got a BLESS YOU
bless you roll of qwuaTRERS Gacve him hisd cifgarettees
Have A Nice Day. Fuck me in the eyee.

Pretty Little Pickle

2008-05-29T02:11:00.001-06:00

Kosher, Dill. HAsidic anti-nasuea pill.
I came upon a peck of pickled pups and had my fill.
Inconstant will, goes out before the rot. And it's everything you've ever wanted, everything, you've ever bought.
Carolina, not nocturne, pushing out schlock.
Burn the books that do not serve ya.
Cut the hand offf that ownr nock
ANd the nmatter of the mysteryh is atrapped in someones bill.
But thge statetory clkasues of secrecy will kepp it still.
Good LIGHT, GODS NIGHT< it's miles before we sleep.
And the onlhy type of promise is kept is deep.
SWEET.
Publisher!

Fell wind aboot and winking moor

2008-05-29T02:06:00.001-06:00

Um...
It started well, tyo talk aboput that, its really a fnny story actuallyu. It started two mornings ago. There she was, wearing that littlwe pink wig that was lke a Ctavcher'sd mitt on her headf. If only I could lob a softball at that head/
No there she was in her pink little frizzy How she'd conme out and I thought to myself
Self- Why is that so cute Jesus, this can't gop anywhere CXhris
This is where it devolves inbto into inbto
into Something foyul Sometrhing odorous yet Gently persuasiver
If given the right light this shit canm shinme
can shine if viewed upon on a lonely night by a lonely light
Incoherency
This shit could shine

Squat

2008-05-28T13:28:00.003-06:00

I have pushed, and I have pushed, and pushed, Yes. Somewhere along the line it just turned into yelling at you- that feels much better anyway. Pushing's what got me into this, holding your arms above your head.
Yes, I'm failing now. Not flunking out, ohNo, I'm magic, kid, I'm Dynamite- the versatile submersible. I'm fading fast, I'm failing to resurface,
Lastly I would like to say a gracious Fuck You for the loss of choice. It wasn't your fault. You didn't do it to abuse me, didn't do it to get anything from me. But Fuck You anyhow.
There was a Child got lost in woods, and found in there a changeling sprout
Of little leaves and grubs and twigs, it had an urge to see the world
The way the greasy humans lived, and offered Child adventure out
Of mundane things, Where faeries swirl.

But the Child smashed the changeling into the roots of a nearby tree, because who would be stupid enough to fall for that Archaic jerkjob, anyways? Then Child kept some pieces of the changeling skull and later ground them into guitar picks and grew up to be Jeff Buckley.
Oh, fuck me.

The Tower of Babel was Hysterical

2008-05-27T16:22:00.003-06:00

Epic Rewrite- screw you if its too long.

Everything comes crashing down. The walls, your pictures, cantaloupes, the Frigidaire, the catscratch post, it all comes crash!

Down to the floor. Nothing lands on your bed, where your pretty child lies, and nothing lands on the cat. The rest is dust and rubble, the smut in the air settling in a ring around the bed, the fucking cat. I yack and splutter and rub the asbestos into my eyes and wonder why I’m angry still, and still here in this shellshocked house, and then I punch you in the neck,

and slip in milk, and fall onto a carving knife wedged beneath a stack of Sunset magazines. The knife goes in and skates off my ribs-zip, xylophone- up into the armpit through the rotator,

The artery, punch- I’m staring at its sated tip thrust out beneath my collarbone.

‘You,’ you say, flailing in the wreckage past the fallen Frigidaire, the overripe cantaloupe in the air. You can’t think of anything horrible enough to call me, I guess. You get up, and climb onto the smoking fridge. ‘That fucking hurt,’ you scream, and I try to indicate my shoulder.

Once I jerk it around the bastard starts squirting; prrt, prrt, it says, my heartbeat Pollacking your dusty boots. ‘Oh,’ I say, and poke at it. Hold my fingers around the knife. The squirt flings farther because of this, and splots onto your stupid hands. ‘Oh, shit,’ I say.

‘I’ve got it,’ you say in half a voice, a Eureka not- more like my geysering life is a long ball.

‘Got it,’ I wonder, ‘you’ve got it?’

‘It’s a trust issue.’ You’re babbling, surely. ‘I’m going to turn and fall backwards, and you’re going to catch me.’

‘What? Why would I catch you?’

‘Then we can begin to work on what’s really wrong,’ you say, nodding sagely. I jam a finger into my wound and try to spray your stupid face with blood but it just hurts like fuck and I pass out for a second.

‘Oooohhhh,’ I am saying when I come back, and then you land on me, you stupid crazy, and my nose goes into your assbone and my crown goes into the floor and my knife goes up into your seat and jams itself to the hilt into my armpit, thank you very much!

I pass out again.

When I come back I am laughing hysterically, and you are screaming like no other and the roof caves in on us.

Just one more time, God. Just right in the stupid neck once more, and then I’ll go to Hell.

I’ll pack you a lunch and you can come with me.

And God comes by and says HEY, SO WHAT DID YOU THINK?

‘What,’ I say to God, looking about. ‘Think of what?’

EVOLUTION, OR INTELLIGENT DESIGN?

‘Um, well... which did you like?’

COME ON, DON’T BE A SHIT, says God, I MEAN, COME ON.

‘Well...’

OUT WITH IT.

‘What about my dying wish?’

THE NECKPUNCH?

‘Yeah.’

OH COME ON, God says.

‘Well, can I just watch it again?’

JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION.

‘Please?’

OH, God says, VERY WELL.

‘Slow motion,’ I say.

And there it is, in Thunderdome Widescreen Catharsis Theatre, and your whole neck changes shape like rutabegas in Playdough and you flop over the Frigidaire, your legs wide and plumbing flashed beneath your nightrobe.

Georgia Okeefe quivers from the neckpunch, claps her wings and sends the shockwave on. ‘Man,’ I say. ‘Didn’t see that the first time.’
SO, says God.

‘Yeah. So.. evolution, I guess.’

WHY, WERE YOU TAUGHT EVOLUTION?

‘Aw, who knows. Yeah.’

AW... THOUGHT SO.

‘Thanks for that,’ I say, gesturing toward your vanished replay.

THE COCKSHOT? NO PROBLEM.

‘Do you make words, like that? Did you make the word cockshot?’

DID I… WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

‘You don’t make words?’

I MAKE STARLIGHT AND MOUNTAINS AND COMETS AND FIRE AND ONCE I MADE A FEW MONKEYS SO THEY’D SHARPEN STICKS AND STONES AND NOW THEY ASK ME DUMB FUCKING QUESTIONS WHEN THEY SHOULD BE DEAD, I MEAN COME ON.

‘So it was evolution. And, you don’t make words.’

I MAKE WARS, LITTLE HUMAN.

I have the idea this is a joke, a vast self-awareness I’m too frail to comprehend, so I laugh at God. I laugh and laugh and then I see your holes, neckpunch-flexed like a Thangsgiving turkey in my mind and I laugh so hard I’ve gone completely nuts. ‘Wars,’ I say. ‘He makes wars,’ and laugh and laugh and laugh.

HEY, God says, WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING ABOUT?

‘War,’ I say.

YOU’RE LAUGHING ABOUT WAR?

‘War. You know, war.’

YOU WANT TO GO GET A DRINK?

‘Shit yeah,’ I say to God.

He comes and gets me from the rubble, and you are nowhere to be seen when that slab of floor tips off me onto the Frigidaire. The walls are mostly gone, but your magic holds over the bed, and over the cat, beating against your magic, bloodying itself on your magic trying to get out. Your lovely child sleeps on, a bubble of health inside the wreckage, and you are nowhere to be seen.

‘Hey,’ I say to God, ‘what do we do about her?’

God looks at your glorious child, sucking her thumb, and shrugs. Oh, wait. He is not God. He is Mr. Vance, from upstairs. God doesn’t wear waders and long underwear. ‘Where’s her mother?’ I ask helplessly, and Mr. Vance shrugs again. He turns and considers the cat for a moment before ambling off, hands twitching for his pipe.

I always was your oil, your filth.

I step on the voices of your peeves and fears and you just loved me for it.

I reach down and ease my hand into your magic and it squeals, and stretches, and snaps, and the cat comes yowling furballing out and zips up me like a fucking tree, every claw going yards into my flesh, until it’s at the top and shredding my scalp for jerky strips.

I hit the cat, and it hits the wall and rolls down the rubble and it isn’t moving. Oh, you are going to be furious.

My shoulder seems all right, muscle-sore but whole, no carving knife shoved clear through it, just a low, dull burn. I slide my hand into your magic around your bed, and burst it too, and gather your beautiful child to me and climb out the windowsores into the night. Mr. Vance is there, and three people I don’t recognize, and Julianna.

I walk over and deliver your precious child to Jule, and she says nothing.

‘I killed the cat,’ I tell her.

‘Oh no,’ Jule breathes, and peers at me. At the ruin of your building. ‘That’s why?’

I sigh. ‘No. I killed the cat after.’

‘Oh no,’ she repeats.

‘No shit,’ I say, ‘tell me about it.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Don’t know. Stupid crazy... she stabbed herself with the knife that killed me. I was supposed to catch her.’

‘Why didn’t you catch her, El?’

‘What?’

‘Why didn’t you catch her?’

‘The fuck should I know,’ I growl. ‘The fuck should I do around her?’ I realize I’m going to start crying, and tousle your pretty child’s hair, and put my hand on Julianna’s shoulder. ‘Thanks, okay?’

I walk off.

I find Him in Moriart’s, eating peanuts

‘So the Tower of Babel,’ I say after four shots, and God interrupts me.

‘Jesus, why the Bible? I mean come on, I say some things and you’ve gone and burnt out your ancestral memories, cant be bothered to tell stories to your children, and you write down some of what I said and some of what cousin Dovid did and boom, next thing, no one ever asks me anything but Bible trivia! Take this fucking shot and shut up.’

Jagermeister tastes like the good cold medicine. My stomach complains. Fuck you, I say to my stomach. I died earlier, and he’s buying. ‘Okay, but what’s hysterical, and what’s not?’

‘Lenny Bruce, and anyone else.’

‘Historical. You heard me. Historical, historical.’

‘W.C. Fields, now there was a funny fucker, should’ve taken him out for drinks. Water, Jesus, he wouldn’t drink water, what kind of person doesn’t drink water?’

‘Frenchmen,’ I say, and slosh beer down onto the Jagermeister.

‘Someone offered him water, and he says, I never touch the stuff… fish fuck in it. Fish fuck in it. I mean come on! W.C. Fields and Leny Bruce. Take this shot.’

‘Fuck you, God,’ I say once said shot has taken me beyond the edge of reason. After trying not to throw up for what feels like minutes, after wondering where you and the carving knife went.

‘Oh, that’s original, Moses.’

A table of stringy drunks looks over, entranced by the phrase they’ve heard. fuck you, god, they mouth to themselves in silent chorus. I am invigorated.

‘Doublefuck you, God, and the myth you rode in on.’ Ooh, that one felt good.

‘Okay,’ God says, ‘okay…’

‘Go shit in the sea, my name is El, I’m an onanist!’

‘Good, good. Take this shot.’

‘Spillin seed, Yahweh!’ I don’t know what happens after this, but I wake up like a lead coffin on a bed I can’t imagine where, sweatstuck to a starch-prickly cotton comforter, piss pressing on my organs like a gutwound, dick stiff and utterly confused.

The booze wore off, and snap!

I’m awake. I go and sit down to pee, and think I’ll die, and drink sinkwater, and throw up into the shower, and drink sinkwater, and throw up into the sink, and cascade back in and fall asleep on the creepy bed. I wonder if this is God’s house.

God needs to clean his shower. And his fucking sink.

When I wake up again I can keep the sinkwater down, and there is a note on the floor.

El, it says in green Sharpie, you have the stomach of a Jew. Don’t worry, I like Jews. They’re my people. The knife will be there, later. She won’t be, perhaps. You should be so lucky.

Your soul is mine,

God.

PS, The tower of Babel was hysterical. Humor is misunderstanding.

PPS, Your great-great grandfather made the word cockshot.

I pick up the note and fold it once carefully, and tuck it into the coat I am wearing. What the fuck. Maybe it is God’s coat, but it is not my coat. It is a white leather coat, and the left cuff says Motor It in red stitching. There is a mirror in the hallway.

Besides the jacket, I am wearing: my teeshirt (Jeff Smith’s Bone), a thin red tie, a leather fannypack that matches the jacket, and my jeans, which have had pinstripes squiggles down them in what seems to be Whiteout.

My hair is cut into a wide mohawk, replete with shaved steps up either temple. My eyebrows have been shaved off, and my forehead says, backwards, in green Sharpie COCKSHOT!

‘Thank you, grandpa,’ I rasp, my voice an ugly, basement voice. A woman comes out of the door next to the mirror. Her neck, her knuckles, are humming with speed. Her eyes are too wide and she stares at me.

‘God,’ says the woman.

‘Yes,’ I rasp, ‘it was He, that fucker.’

‘You want a drink?’

‘No.’

‘You want a fuck?’

‘Here,’ I say, and press the note into her flighty palm.

She opens it and reads it. Looks at me. ‘I ain’t fucking you for this.’ I walk to the end of the hall and find a staircase, and find a landing, and find a staircase, and find a hallway, and find a door, and come outside.

Oh, Man. I’m in Salt Lake City.

The mountains hang over the downtown Lego set like a storm, and the streets are too wide. People are driving like geriatric assholes. I almost go back up and ask for that drink, but look for my wallet instead.

It’s there, and I am sure there is somewhere I can pay to have my head shaved. Maybe they’ll let me wash my face as well.

‘You, kid,’ a voice says from a doorway, ‘look stupider than anything.’

‘Yeah?’ I say.

‘Stupider than fuck,’ the voice says, the owner bulking up out of the shadows.

‘Fancy meeting you here,’ I say, and start to turn.

‘Stupider than fancy,’ Jack says, filling the doorway with his frame. ‘Stupider than owes me three grand, El.’

‘Stupider than even that?’

‘Uh-huh,’ the Poly-Ute growls, and he was made to growl, he’s as big as Range Rover kittens, as big as fatass trees might be, if you tattoeed them neck to wrists and gifted them with violence. Crushing limbs and a sawnoff cue in his workboots. Straight razor in his longlong hair.

‘So,’ I sigh, ‘is this coincidence, or what?’

‘Nah,’ he says, edging into the light. ‘God tol’ me where to find your ass. Come on, Cockshot.’

‘Man,’ I say. An Escalade comes around the corner and stops, and Jack gets into the passenger’s, doesn’t even look at me. I get into the back right. ‘You going to call me Cockshot?’

‘Who are we to resist God’s will?’ Jack stabs my forehead with a finger like a hardbrown twinkie. ‘Now shut the fuck up.’

God sold me out to Giant Jack. And he shaved off my eyebrows. I put my fingers in my ears, and somehow fall asleep.

You come back from where you go to heal and walk out of Julianna’s coat closet, rubbing your ass through a tear in your nightrobe. ‘Jule,’ you cry wearily, and then ‘Hannah?’

And there she is, your gorgeous child, in a Van Halen teeshirt and a belt, and you scoop her up and cry into her neck. ‘I’m sorry,’ you tell her, harshly, ‘I’m so sorry, baby, honeypumpkin babybear, I’m so sorry.’

‘Hey,’ she says, ‘look at this!’ and she holds her breath and starts to turn red.

‘Hannah, don’t do it,’ Jule barks from the next room, and there are the frantic sounds of her getting up. ‘Hannah!’

‘Mmph!’ says Hannah, and belches a footlong tongue of flame into the air toward you. ‘It was little,’ she shrieks, ‘you messed it up!’

‘Goddamnit,’ Jule says, and bursts into the hallway, ‘not in the house!’

‘If I do it outside, you said, they’ll burn me at the stake.’

‘Why are you doing it at all?’

‘Ooh, Auntie Jule!’ says your precious child, and stalks toward the kitchen.

You stare after her, cutting sobs and wiping at your cheeks. ‘So,’ you say.

‘So,’ says Julianna.

‘Thank you.’

‘I know, kiddo.’

‘The cops?’

‘Probably want to talk to you. I took her before they came.’

‘El?’

Jule shrugs. ‘He got her out.’

‘Fucker punched me in the neck.’

‘You,’ Jule starts, then takes a ragged breath. ‘What happened?’

‘Oh, we needed to talk, but he wouldn’t, and I got so mad, and the walls burst, and the Frigidaire fell over, and El punched me, Jule! Right in the neck!’

‘Honey,’ Julianna sighs, ‘if you burst the walls on me I’d punch you too.’

‘No you wouldn’t.’

‘You scare me, kiddo. Don’t scare me. It’s me, it’s Jule? Your friend?’

You collapse against the wall. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, its all so crazy, I can’t look at it when its happening, its crazy, I think he died, Jule, died. He was squirting blood and I was crazy and I said he had to catch me, and Hannah, oh God Hannah…’

‘Ssh,’ says Jule, and comes and cradles you carefully, careful for thorns, or fangs. ‘Ssh, its okay, kiddo, I know.’

‘Its all fucked up.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘No, you don’t know I got a knife in my ass, Jule, you…’

‘Hey,’ your beautiful child says from a doorway. She is wearing underwear and a knit wool hat. ‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing, cuddle, little beanbagbear. Nothing, baby, momma’s alright.’

‘Kay,’ she says, and disappears.

‘Honey,’ Jule says. ‘If I tell you something, you promise to leave the walls up?’

‘Huh,’ you manage, around a sob.

‘The fridge too?’

‘Jesus, Jule, what?’

‘El,’ she sighs. ‘El killed your cat.’

‘Sparfmeef,’ you breathe. ‘Sparfmeeeeef?’ You get up, and walk around in a circle. ‘Clothes,’ you say, and Jule clambers away from your now-unhealthy glow. You hear closets open. ‘Hannah!’

‘Whuh,’ she asks, from another doorway. She is wearing a raincoat and a man’s pair of cowboy boots, blue coyotes picked out on the leather.

‘Clothes, babykins. Clothes, now, you hear, pumpkinbear?’

‘No clothes, got my pajamas.’

‘Then pajamas, dunklebunny. Pajamas. Hurry, hear?’

‘Hey,’ your glorious child says, ‘don’t get mad, kay? You’re funny colors.’

‘Okay, babybear, little lighthouse, okay. Just hurry, hear?’

‘Kay,’ she says, and passes Julianna in the hall. Jule hands you a pair of pedallers and a hoodie, socks, Keds, teeshirt that says I can’t believe I ate the whole thing, hairtie, sunglasses.

‘Car keys,’ you say to her.

‘Huh-uh, no, kiddo.’

‘Car keys.’

‘No, fuck that, you’re collapsing houses and disappearing you can’t use my car not ever.’

You growl.

‘Uh-huh. Steal one. Fly there on a big grey goose. Take the bus, but stay away from my car.’

‘Hannah!’

‘Kay, crap, hold on,’ your pretty child exclaimeth, coming out in nattered jammies.

‘Where are you going,’ Jule asks with some distress, one hand on Hannah’s shoulder.

‘Utah,’ you say, and jerk your precious child away from Julianna, and drag her out into the night. You remove your nightrobe and hop into the jeans on the lawn, breasts jouncing, child bouncing on your arm. ‘I don’t know how,’ you call into the night, ‘but that catkilling deadman is in Utah.’

‘Fuck,’ Jule says, once you’re gone. ‘Fucking stupid fucking cat.’

Giant Jack only hits me the once. Doesn’t even hit me in the face. I get up, when I can, and try to be grateful. All the ribs on the right side of my body are bruised, if not cracked, if not broken. I cough for a while, and that hurts, and I expect blood, to validate me, but none comes up.

‘Damn, nigga, that hurt?’

‘I’m not black,’ I wheeze, ‘and neither are you, Jack.’ Still no blood. I feel cheated.

‘I’m the blackest motherfucker in the valley,’ Jack says, kneeling down.

“Salt Lake City,’ I cough, ‘that may be true.’

‘Funny motherfucker, El. Always.’

‘Funny looking,’ a voice says from over there.

‘Man,’ I say, pulling at my silly hair, ‘someone give me a shave,’ and shink, there it is, that pearlhandled hookercutter, four inches of carbon steel ohGodno against my throat. Giant Jack’s hair falls over me like a willow sheet, soft and black and long enough to settle to the floor.

‘That what you want, Cockshot?’ He is close, and his mouth is big enough to fit my fists into. Great square teeth like dice.

‘No,’ I say, carefully. Jack folds his straight razor up and twists his hair around it into a knot, collar level. ‘You going to kill me?’

‘Maybe,’ Jack says. ‘You gonna climb for me?’

‘Jack,’ I say as evenly as I can, ‘you just broke all my ribs.’

‘Figure you can climb better crippled than dead.’

‘Fair enough.’

He’s there again, and picks me up roughly, drops me seated onto a linoleum table. ‘Nah, not fair, El. Three grand is fair.’

‘Ouch, Jesus, Jack. No interest?’

‘Cut this nigga, Jack,’ the voice calls out from over there. I guess it’s the driver of the Escalade. ‘Clownin on you.’

‘Clown he may be,’ Jack booms, his massive arm suddenly around me. ‘But El here, he’s a regular billygoat. Used’ta leap off buildings for me, huh, Cockshot? Zip the computer and flip, gone into the night.’

‘Like Batman,’ the voice says. ‘The fuck you want computers for?’

‘Lee,’ Jack says, quiet now, ‘you got any idea what some bishop motherfucker with the same urges as everyone else will pay to keep you showin the dirty shit he got at the office to one’a his wives?’

‘Hmm,’ says Lee, and Jack regards me fondly.

‘This shit was his idea. We ran credit cards from hard drives, blackmailed the dick off these businessmen, shit- I even invested a few times. Got a little insider trading going.’

‘Like Martha Stewart,’ Lee says.

‘Fuck Martha Stewart,’ booms Giant Jack. ‘And fuck you, El. Why you run off on me?’

‘You know me,’ I grimace, and remove Jack’s tattooed treetrunk from my neck.

He puts it back, and squeezes. ‘Yeah, I do. That’s how I know you’re gonna climb for me, one last time.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘One last time. For what, Jack?’

‘Graven image. Man says He God, wants that graven image cut down.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ says Jack.

‘Fuck.’

‘Yeah.’ Jack lets his arm loose, and I glare at him. Straighten, and try to breathe all the way in.

‘Jailtime, Jack.’

‘Not for me.’

‘Sell you out.’

‘Pollies have you beggin, come to that.’

‘I could just let you kill me.’

Giant Jack stares into my eyes for a while. ‘What you so cool, for, El?’ he asks, ‘What you been doing?’

‘Jack, if my girlfriend shows up, ask me that shit again. I want a haircut. Then we talk rope.’

‘Lee,’ calls Giant Jack, and something moves over there. He seems to study my face- not my eyes, the rest of the package. ‘You still on that junk, El? I can fix you up.’

‘Fuck you,’ I say, and brace for him to hit me again.

‘Right,’ the Poly-Ute behemoth grunts. ‘Fuck me.’ He repeats it as he walks off, swaying like an aircraft carrier, the only man I know that would threaten to cut my throat and then turn his back on me. ‘Fuck me,’ he laughs, and goes out of the light, and a door shuts over there.

You’re burning up desert, dragging your toes through redred dust and blowing at a thousand miles an hour, killing little mammals with your dry pink toenails cause they can’t even hear you coming, your gifted child clutching to the mandala your ribcage makes, teeth bared to your velocity, howling in her child’s delight.

Yeah, the good cat’s gone, the one you’d throw me out of bed for if I kicked it in my sleep, that stupid cat. I wonder if you’ll burn this hot, stay flamed through all the dry lands till you hit this false oasis and the heinous pact I’ve made. I wonder if He’ll stop you, God, and wonder if He can.

Come kill me, love, and save this halfbreed thug the trouble.

Your wondrous child, she bounces like a horseman in the stirrup, thumping against your back as you drift to me at awesome speeds, bad physics at your shredding mercy.

Come kill me, love.

REI is an ugly place, if only because you can’t afford what others are buying. They have a little bouldered terrain bridge for you to try out your onepiece Vasques on. God shows up at the display cases, and points out the roped dolmen that looms over the registers.

‘Ever climbed that?’ He asks.

‘Oh, fuck off. You twofaced drunk.’

‘Too much for you, huh? I mean, come on, look at it.’

‘I’ve climbed every line in the Rockies.’ I feel furious at the climbing wall, suddenly.

‘Except one.’

‘Now this is bullshit.’ Lee is nearby, confused by overpriced architectural trinkets, one hand inside his coat. ‘This is bullshit, and I’m gonna get arrested.’

‘Perhaps,’ God says. He spreads his hands prettily. ‘At least you’re not dead.’

‘But this?’

‘Once you’re in you can’t get out,’ He provides.

‘You’re Italian. God’s a Guido... preserve me.’

‘Nah. They kept on with their Hellenic cow and fuckfest garbage for centuries. Fair weather fans. I decide not to ask about the Pope, Vatican City, etc. Then, ‘I’m interested, about the climbing. I think I’ll go up with you.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Oh,’ He sighs, ‘yeah.’

The attendant sees you coming over the great dinosaur graveyards, sees that you’re a spark, a plume, a twister, freight-train, woman, faster than a plane could close the distance, screech!

You’re stopped, not panting, still leaning forward slightly, sixty five degrees to the hot flat ground, and Hannah loops and swings down from your shape and runs toward the station, hands pressed tight between her legs.

‘Rest-ta-rooms are for paying customers,’ the attendant whispers, and brings the bottle of Walker up and pugs at it for a second. You straighten up and sag. Your pupils are knocking about.

‘Roy, I’m not a customer,’ you tell him. ‘I’m a goddamn miracle.’

‘Rest-ta-rooms,’ Roy says, ‘are for paying miracles.’

You laugh, and laugh some more, and Roy just pugs that blended Scotch, until he don’t care about your mode of travel. ‘Buy a newspaper,’ he says.

‘No,’ you say.

‘Buy some gum,’ he says.

‘No.’

‘Souvenir trucker hat.’

‘Fuck no.’

‘Then get yer girl out the rest-ta-room, miracle.’

‘Too late.’ You look at him for a moment, and he throws his empty prism of glass to the red dirt and blacktop. ‘Alright,’ you say to Roy, and go inside the bright bright station, the blow of stars thinning as you enter its flourescent cave. Roy follows, hopskip, swerving.

You walk up to his counter and you slip a pack of Luckies from the overhead behind it, and you spin the little card console on its metal clamp and punch its painted buttons. You palm a lighter and tear the Navycut Strikes open with your teeth, not packing, and extract a loose cylinder with pinstripes and circlestamp in muted black, light it up.

‘No smokin inside,’ Roy says. You breathe a tankful of unfiltered smoke and cough five times, as if your throat will come out.

‘Pack of smokes,’ you say.

‘Five dollars,’ says Roy, and this is too much, but fuck it.

‘Lighter.’

‘Buck seventy-five.’

‘Gallon of gas.’

‘Three twenty-five.’ You show your teeth to him around the Lucky, and he coughs. ‘Two ninety-seven-point-nine.’

You punch the painted buttons. ‘Call it ten, Roy?’ He shrugs, and you grow a hoary fingernail out into a blade, and leering, run it through the cardslot on the console. Ding... approved. Roy swallows through his faded eyes, and follows you out into the night.

You choose pump two of four, and hit the super premium, unleaded, lift the holster-thing and raise the fuelcock to your mouth. And squeeze the handle, stare at Roy and guzzle warbought gas until the fuelcock clicks,

And drizzling, stops. You wipe your putrid lips and belch and laugh and laugh and laugh like fucking Christmas, and Roy wanders off into the dark, rejected from this world. You flex your gut and all the lights there fail, and night returns to Nowhere, Utah. The stars pile in and gleeful, multiply, until the Milky Way’s a rancid bar of light, jagged through it all, and you feel small, and sick, and want to die.

Come kill me, love, I whisper in your mind,

And you remember.

Your pretty child comes from the station, stops and looks straight up at it all, and windmills her arms. Falls onto her pajama-ed bum. ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Dang... did you do that?’

‘Sure, badger.’ You sigh. ‘Holywrinkle, loveymunchkin. Sure, I made the stars in the motherfucking sky, petunia. Sweetypumpkin, sparrowbear. Behold, my dumpling baby dear,’ and you sob once, ‘your momma’s everlasting light!’

Hannah solemnly comes and climbs your knee, your thigh, your hip, and attaches her limbs around your guts and shoulders.

‘Hey,’ your precious child exclaimeth, ‘you smell like gas.’ She breathes deeply of your hair and jowls.You tear into the desert like a fever after me.

The woman from the flophouse walks God to the Hotel Monaco. Bambara, but we are drunk instead of rich. Well, I am drunk. Fuck it. I’m climbing the Temple with God. ‘Does it bother you they call it their Temple?’ I say, and throw my beer bottle at them. God catches it,but she falls down anyway. ‘How’d you find her?’

‘The note I left you,’ God says, and pockets the beer bottle. ‘Sober up.’

Fuck, I’m sober.

I open my last beer. ‘Don’t,’ I warn him, and pound it.

‘Asshole,’ the prostitute says, gaining her feet in a series of miniskirt and stocking adjustments.

‘Go on,’ God says to her.

‘Motherfucker, you owe me two hundred dollars.’

‘Money up front,’ I exclaim around the suds of my Lev.

‘Go on,’ He insists.

‘Not without my cash, asshole!’

‘You,’ He whispers, ‘you still pretend you’re caring for your two children for the Welfare- one black, one white, both fucked and abandoned under strange names in Juno, Alaska.’ She squeals, and He advances. ‘When you were twelve you put your finger in your bellybutton and tasted what your neighbor’d done, all thick and spunk and burning up your middle. You dream at night that you’re Snow White, and waiting for that hunk-a’s kiss and then the dwarves they come and plug your every hole and rape you and you feel like you’ve come home, Amanda. Home.’

‘My name,’ she shrieks, ‘is Jazzy!’ She runs into the night.

‘You’re a dick,’ I say to God. He shrugs.

‘Maybe it’ll scare some religion into her. I mean, come on.’ I wait for it. ‘She changed her name to Jazzy.’

‘Gospel,’ I say.

‘Let’s go,’ He says, and takes my last beer bottle from me and pockets it too, and we walk north up Main Street. ‘Is it climbable?’

‘Climbable? Let me tell you, I climbed the Wells Fargo in this rotten city. I climbed the capitol, and I put a pumpkin on the city building for Halloween. They had to lower a firefighter from a helicopter to get it off.’

‘So?’

‘So of course its climbable. That’s not the problem.’

‘What’s the problem, El?’

‘The problem is,’ I sigh, and wish I was still drunk, ‘it’s the Temple.’

‘Right,’ God says. ‘Right. Got a hacksaw?’

‘Is it solid gold? Or plated?’

‘Who the fuck knows?’

‘Oh come on,’ I say.

‘Do you know?’

‘I’ve got a hacksaw and three blades,’ I tell Him. We hit one-hundred south.

‘What? Why didn’t you just bring three hacksaws?’

‘I don’t even know if you’ll make it over the wall,’ I snap. ‘You sold me out to Giant Jack.’

‘I brought you back to life.’

‘You wrote Cockshot on my forehead!’

‘El, I am-’

‘You let 9-11 happen! The Dresden firebombing, Armenian genocide, aboriginal cleansing and Paris Hilton got a fucking record deal! Six million Jews, two million gays and gypsies and painters, you let Joseph Smith sit and forge his science fiction from behind a sheet inside his kitchen and now you’re pissed they own the South-Pacific?’ We were past the malls, and there she was, that honkie Mecca, discreet and clean and tightly built and ringed by ugly concrete structures.

I waved my arm madly at it, at Temple Square. ‘You let it happen!’

‘Yeah,’ God said, and clinked my beer bottles together in his jacket pocket. ‘Sorry about that. You ready?’ I saw he was harnessed up. I removed my overcoat and I was harnessed up as well. I doublechecked my knots and didn’t check shit on God (may He devour Himself), stepped into the street and pulled Lee’s gun from the shoulder-holster and screwed the silencer on and shot out every light there on the corner.

Fuck a camera.

I scrambled up the wall and lipped it, pulling onto belly, then my thighs. The busted ribs screeched, and I was curled on top the Temple wall when God achieved my perch, and learning how to breathe in waves of pain. ‘Come on,’ God says, ‘I mean, really, Jesus.’ He lands on the soft, soft grass. I follow.

I consider shooting him fourteen times, the number of bullets I have left in my clip, and just shoot lights instead. We scramble up, and down, and lay our hands onto the holy masonry.

Up. The rope and spreader pinion caribbeaner trust in tiny feats of engineering all come out from my pack, Jack’s bill, and God just grins and he’s grown claws, big thick fuckers, and his sneakers lay abandoned ‘gainst the building’s cornered base, and claws have grown out of his socks.

Up. I holster the gun and throw the silencer beyond the fence and sploop!

It burrows deep, reflecting-pool accepting what its done with just a shockwave, gone in forty seconds. Maybe that’s what did it. Maybe that’s what brought the helicopter, fuck, who knows, they saw the waves in the reflecting-pool.

I think they have the building wired for weight.

God brought the helicopter down with my two empty bottles of Green-label Lev lager. He hucked them at the helicopter, and the thunderous wonder jerked, and tanked, and nosed, and dove.

Some people say ‘dived’, nowadays.

The helicopter dove and joined its little cousin the silencer, to sink into reflecting-pool, whupwhupkeeeraousch!

Plangtrankhtkerpow!

Ssizzssssssswhupwhuuuphwhuuuuuuhhhh… Indescribable, really.

You, my love, you, you would have appreciated the death of that machine. You know all about it.

The second bottle, I suppose, struck the rotor. Or went through the hurricane-shield and brained the pilot. But it was Old Testament again in Zion, folks, it was true-ly brimstone when that tilted carp of heated metal hit the reflecting-pool.

I was kind of pissed that there was no explosion.

Then someone is firing a rifle, and I keep climbing. God’s gained like twenty feet on me, and we’re centering on the fucker now, and it’s hard climbing, spire-humping, worming our way up a single stab into the Godless night.

Except there He is, calm as anything. ‘Were my fingerprints on those bottles?’ I shout at Him, at his grin and His unHoly claws.

‘Indubitably,’ He shouts back. A bullet takes him high in the shoulder and He clucks, and collapses onto his calves. My own ribs are singing counterpoint with choirs of live-skinned cats and winning, but it’s all easier somehow, this incredible broke-rib pain so I can’t feel my torn and straining fingertips. God straightens, and turns, and exhales locusts in a cloud toward the square below.

They storm, and press, and spread and we’re almost to him now, that lovely hornblowing behemoth, that angel over NewWorldJesus. He’s really much bigger than I’ve imagined, catching glimpses of his shape over the sunset, the Avenues against my back. He’s near as big as I, or God, I wonder, and free the hacksaw from my climbing pack.

The Catholic Church sounds Big Ben’s four a.m. and here come po-lice cars like bugs for meat, arrayed in tens on every street, their flat blue-red-lights made to pass for ski-racks at high speeds, and for the first time I hyperventilate a little bit, and then I set my saw and skkrrr-push!

It’s begun.

I heard a story, once.

Moroni the trumpet blower on his pinnacle was filthy. No ugly concrete structures, then. It was railroad-world, and the Mormons had their roots set into the unforgiving desert soil. When they came to Temple, their announcing angel didn’t gleam. He grubbed, and sucked the light. So word was put out for a churchbell-scaler, for a tower-gleaner, and the pioneers sent queries to the faroff world. Someone had to scrub their golden calf.

No son of Joseph had a head for heights, I guess.

This man came from Neuva York, a Rockefeller rope-swinger, a true arachnid new-wave freak, the urban version of those Swiss, already hanging from El Capitan in Yellowstone. He took the hardluck railway to the heart of Salt Lake City, and he had a meal, and slept.

He woke, and climbed the temple like a peak to see what he could see.

When he’d come down he saw the Prophet, and rubbed his sweaty brow, and said a price that shocked the very times. The Saint, who- prone to Revelations- hadn’t had a shock in years, asked why he quoted sums so astronomical.

The scaffold-devil, bridge-defier leered, and leaned his little wiry self across the Saint’s desk. ‘That sonuvabitch is dirtier than you can imagine,’ he said, and the Prophet cut him a check.

Another helicopter has arrived.

‘That sonuvabitch is dirtier than you can imagine,’ God yells over the helicopter’s bombast, and coughs, and scoops a lonely locust from his cheek. He flicks it at the ghettobird and down it goes, in-spiral, apocalyptic, destructo- boom!

I get my explosion, this time, and some of the SWAT team gets theirs.

‘Fuck,’ I whisper.

I’ve wrench the hacksaw too much, and my first blade warps and snaps. Moroni’s maybe one-third un-footed. I retrieve a new blade and manage to winch it onto the saw-frame. Skkrrr-push!

‘Hurry it up,’ God growls. Rifle shots sound every few seconds, and He is swatting bullets, His locusts swooping and diving and bursting where they succeed. ‘I mean, come on,’ He says.

The second blade snaps- I am pushing too hard. I dig the last two out and fumble,

and they flitter down, erect lengths of killribbon over Zion.

‘Get the knife,’ says God. I stare at him.

’The knife?’

He sighs, and then turns mean. ‘You fuck, you sold out Daniel Blumenfeld at ten, and told your mom the fire was his idea, and you stuffed the still-hot paper under shelves down in the cellar. You couldn’t fuck your girlfriends all through high school cause that man from church tried to sodomize you and you knew that meant you were a dirty fag.’

‘Stop,’ I say, weakly. What knife?

‘What knife? You broke into a home and took more weed than you could put your dick in, later saw the kid who told you where dad hid it, heard his father tell you how he’d stolen it.’

‘The motherfucker had an AK under his bed!’

‘That rich fuck, in his hardwood room? He was your friend! Get the knife!’

‘What knife?’ I scream, and hammer at Moroni’s ankles with my fists. Gold-plated. Definitely only gold-plated.

God holds his claws up to me, and they are fingers. ‘You dream that you’re that beautiful child’s father, and that you can take her away, and get a job with a tie, and serve her meals at night and tuck her in and call her babykins, pumpkinbreath, bunnybear, fuzzbutton, honeywraith.’

‘Stop!’

‘The knife, El!’

I scream and dig my fingers through my broken ribs, that zip-zip- xylophone of Giant Jack-pain, and close my fingers on its hilt. The carving knife, the prodigal.

The El-Slayer, the Ass-Mangler.

I wrench it from my heaving armpit and draw it ‘lectric cross the statue’s base, and down Moroni goes, and flips, and falls, and crashes through the peaked roof below.

‘Well, I mean, Jesus,’ God says. ‘Finally. I mean, come on,’ and disappears.

I clip in hard and kick out over everything, rope running through my hands- it’s like regret, like guilt, like lover’s hair- forty feet down. Knee flexor, impact chest in-tensor, ribs don’t hurt, the knife has vanished with its ribcage-hider, huck!

I’m off and forty feet further toward the ground.

And like Wile E. I feel you storming, first-time Roadrunner overcoming;

Tearing like a blade from south for me, something precious cradled o’er your forward-driving pompadour. Hannah like a crab on sickness clutching at your soul-burnt torso, gorgeous breasts straining at her banded arms, your hooded sweatshirt. As my feet hit the ground two officers railroad me, spin me on my expensive rope and turn me widdershins against the wind.

And you catch me, love, fuck knows how you came through that wall, but I am terrified and you are beautiful, and I wish I could stop seeing your thighs flapping like brisket beneath your nightrobe, dust still falling gently on the Frigidaire.

Hannah unclamps and lands in the softsoft grass and draws a mighty breath.

‘Baby,’ I gasp, flummoxed by love and tackle.

‘You killed my cat,’ you hiss. I dangle in your forearms, a doll. Hannah is turning bright red.

‘I hated that cat,’ I say before I can stop myself. You knock a wall of cops up off their feet and spread them loose against their holy site, and I hiccup: once, twice. Hannah is purple.

‘You punched me,’ you howl, and you are quite radiant, now, ‘in the fucking neck!’

Hannah blue, ‘Crazy, stupid,’ I whisper, hopeless.

Hannah really blue, and you toss me to the ground and raise your arms over me like the Ark of the Covenant, like the flood is coming, the rapture, whoosh!

I uncover from my huddle and you are gone, a greasy pair of Keds and a cloud of smoke overhead that smells like you, like you after you swim in the river, like you when dawn draws out your sweat, like the inside of your sweaters, your gloves, your pockets when it rains.

Your pretty child steps toward me, and pulls me to my feet.

‘El,’ she whispers, ‘I’m sorry.’

I begin to cry, and she hushes me, and jogs me toward the wall. ‘Come on, now,’ she soothes. ‘I mean, really, Jesus, El, come on.’ I scramble up the wall, bereft, and your glorious child makes a chuffing sound with her cheeks below. ‘Why,’ she asks, ‘did you shave your head?’

Grammar Sucker Can't Be Stopped!

2008-05-22T19:31:00.002-06:00

Fuck you Blogger. Fuck you for eating my grammar you miserable turd.

The Ascension of Teresa

2008-05-22T19:24:00.005-06:00

“It”, that magnanimous little nominative pronoun, is something Teresa lost. She lost the feeling of its forgiving embrace, its comfortable ambiguity. She was catapulted, quite suddenly into a new, autocratic world.

As a child she had played games, dancing and hopping gingerly between various forms of furniture to avoid the imaginary lava that clawed its way across the floor. Now it was buildings instead and the game never stopped. The unknowable loomed, simple and static, from beneath. Nameless Daemon, conducted past their dark prisons at the center of the earth, bloomed like rare orchids from exposed veins of copper to stalk the lesser altitudes. The dark children of Kennecot.

She, then, was a penitent exoskeleton, her soul buried just as deep as she could dig and her body clamoring unto heaven.

Look! She can be seen even now, vaulting the gaps that separate all her intimate Babels. See her olive drab coat shimmering with that fibrous luster of polyester, startled pigeons fanning out behind her in tidal formations, caught quite by accident in this mythology; they flutter, indistinct as reason, as memory; trapped by worldly distraction but straining nobly at the bridle. One sneakered foot finds purchase on this rough rooftop and the body follows. Distant lightning flashes uselessly somewhere and, having sighted prey, she knocks an arrow.

The Transient Keeps His Word.

2008-05-22T18:49:00.003-06:00

Weird transient
comes in and
glances magazines,
asks closing time,
i tell him,
he leaves.
But not before
declaring his return!
Break time.
Keltin's here at p.o.s.,
He returns!
The dirty, crazy transient
kept his word.
He buys a hip-hop magazine
(strange only because he is an older white guy-at least I think he was white beneath the layers of filth and leathery sun exposure)
with money he probably
just panhandled.
He managed to scrounge up
five bucks in
a matter of half an hour.
Amazing.
Why not use that to buy food?
Because "Mass Appeal" is WAY more important.
Apparently.
Wow.

Man of the People

2008-05-22T16:40:00.002-06:00

"That was some shit back there, man."
"You said it."
"You think they'll ever know. Find out?"
"Not likely. And even if they do, fuck em'. That's my approach, to that and everything else."
"Great motto, dumb ass."
"Even if it's not."
"Fuck em?"
"Fuck them, man."
"You know what I particularly like?"
"What's that?"
"Winning big."
"How do you mean?"
*

Those two posts below me

2008-05-22T10:24:00.001-06:00

Enter Double Dragon was Snapinos the mighty rattling off as I, E otB typed furiously. The one above it was Snapinos typing as I rattled. Fuckscinating.

Your Fame

2008-05-22T01:08:00.002-06:00

biscuit flipped like quick swith cnwew drip.
old came new. I piulled my tough son.
Once in woods whre Gretel terried.
I found ut that clit wa sharyr. Slammed in the door frma enad
and made her run for fole.
That barely leagal bithc cheaes scoal.

Enter Double Dragon

2008-05-22T01:03:00.002-06:00

There's a standup comic on the stage- he's all the rage
He grabs his Johnson and starts listying porn stars' names, and its nothing special- its nothing regrettable either
OPh lord what the hell is happening here Chris
Well we got the fUCKIN well we got some fuckin opkay, I mean,
and its not like I've seen t5hius before
I'm such a stupid drunk asshole right now I'm sorry to put yopu thru tyhis and thank you for being a scribe
Smile Charm Camera Lights
Jackson
And its not like we've seen this before You hesar that freakin tone you hear that shriekin tone I'd just hang the fuck up on her
IU'd just bang the suck out of her
Yopu really want to bang I got service out of a 43 year old this last weekend and iuts true Chris You can scribe it if you want but its true Adn so did i
pizza pie