Agnosia

go on, turn that other spurious cheek and
spurn the one that you let fall
you humble thief
you decadent shadow

stay your hand
steel your mind
you gotta be strong enough to
watch him die
let him go
ignore each desperate show
that patent vulnerability
let him go
watch him die
for the Moloch of your pride
and the virtue of sacrifice
let him die
he’s your sacrifice
let him die
he’s your sacrifice

between an arching tongue of tarmac
and a prostrate one below
he felt alive
for exactly three seconds
from an arching tongue of tarmac
the soft whip of sky through clothes
just a hiss and a trundle
abrupt smack and steady flow
of ichor, slithers slowly
slithers
forming figures, undecipherable
like languages, long dead
writ across the sky

so seek some sick mythology
in which to hide your guilty eyes
look away
call it murder, blame the lover
the filthy sodomite
but don’t let yourself, no
don’t you let yourself fucking cry
you need the sympathy
the spotlight
you fucking saprophyte
your only son
your sacrifice
you fucking saprophyte

so seek some sick mythology
in order to attain
some kind of alimentary dystrophy
which mitigates all pain
vomit your profusion
of careful platitudes
to explain away delusions
and make inimical the truth
’cause that’s what they do
that’s what they expect of you

they call it murder here

when a faggot leaps
from a bridge to the street
they pray themselves to sleep
they pray the lord his soul to keep
if he isn’t human he doesn’t need it

they call it murder here...

Windward Warps mah Wensleydale

He thrusts his stares against their boasts
And still insists he loves the coast.
This post-immortal derby-roast-
How fat, How fair, how Crisp as Toast-

He found a crabhole beckoning close,
And thrust inside to poke its host-
A sandy bit of wild-sown oats-
How quick, yon prick!
(He is fortunate the crab was not at home.)

And now the deckhands hoot and holler,
As sits he in a tux, by goller,
And whispers faint soft lovely words into the sand.
He's daft, gone Mad, HE AIN'T A MAN!

With daylight ending, night and night,
For months here, in his lover's plight:
He thrusts his stares against their boasts
And still insists he loves the coast.

Typewriters

Win.
I am trying a posterboard multicolor outline with all sorts of 'emotional growth' and 'secondary peak of chapter' nonsense inherent. It might help get me out of wordgame wandering tho. The point is to build an entire story arc rather than the three scenes you love in your head and how fecking sweet they're going to be, just you wait.
I hate rules.

Ben Higginbotham Takes LSD

Vision burst like batter on him.
Bits of spectrum, grayscale, people's hats. The road was banked for motorcycles, and yet he had no motorcycle. He was crouched atop a callbox in his sister's underwear, hard salami pasted betwen his teeth. He burst into tears.
Along the road back down he found his clothing, bit by bit. One pocket of his jeans was full of mashed insects, a frog, some pondslime. The backs of his legs were scratched and weeping, battered. He removed his sister's underwear over these abrasions.
How do I know they were his sister's underwear?
Written in Sharpie inside the left buttock: Margie Higginbotham.
He found his shirt, his backpack, somewhat filled with gravel, one shoe, no socks.
He was wearing his socks. They were so much the same color as his legs, he thought, he hadn't noticed. He recalled howling, crying.
Saying over and over 'I feel nothing.'
He recalled an erection made of gummibears, and shuddered. Was it his, or someone else's?
He hobbled toward the city, and left himself above.
Bits of people's hats, he was exhausted.

A city full of pain pills and tattoos defend me

The way he reached into her pocket for the key made her think of trying on swimsuits in junior high. Saturday and the backs of her thighs sticking to the Marlboro-soaked naugahyde as her grandfather cursed at old women in Camrys clutching a cigarette between his teeth and the steering wheel in his mottled brown hands. Foghat mumbling out of the speaker between the glovebox and the "Fuck it right off there, Grandma!"s and the smoggy exhalations of passing busses. The trip to the mall when she smoked some of his stolen cigarettes with her friend Stormy and wore the lipgloss her mother asked her not to wear. Shimmying into swimsuits in a cold dressing room lit by flickering green flourescent lights, she and Stormy had admonished their own bodies while cattily complimenting one another on how no, really, no, no I am th fat one. Just look at this cottage cheese! Buying swimsuits that were never meant to be swam in. Swimsuits intended for languishg about in and sipping sun-warmed Diet Cokes while licking nuclear-orange powder from their thirteen-year-old fingertips with each time their hands emerged from the family-sized bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos. Swimming suits meant to sell their wares to the boys who pierced their ears in March and walked around the pool in June wearing cologne and hats and sporting hoop earrings and their best attempt at swagger while leaving their shirts in the car.
The way he reached into her pocket for the key reminded her of making out between popsicle bites and finding third base to be more fun than Stormy had described. It made her grateful that the groceries were in her arms and not his.

New Novel

So eight pages on the typewriter- here's a runthrough-

Everything YOU have ever written joins a club. My new novel joins the club, then facefucks everything YOU have ever written, and what's more, it likes it. YOUR ouevre takes the facefucking, then hangs around instead of running to the thesaurus to report abuse; mistreatment; Cher. It starts telling other people's ouevres what an artist my new novel is, and how it wasn't like that at all, that it was kind of Asking to get facefucked.

My new novel has a cellothief who runs a clan of lostboys with temporal shifting abilities, a little girl who is separated from her father by an earthquakebred canyon at age four- she is eight when the canyon ends and they touch again, a love story with a tacostand, a lack of chloroform, and a new way to masturbate involving castanets.

Also, a 30 pack of Tecate costs $38 in Sedona, AZ. Sandsucking cogtards.

Birds are Dinos too

Ravens have a Hollywood-style Dracula-coif behind their sharp little eyes. Also, their pinions are off- when taking crows as the comparative- but that hair-hump is the main difference that makes them Not A Crow.

Ravens can live to be over a hundred and fifty, and are the only bird to be found in every temperate zone on this fuzzy planet. They are the big black knives that hover at angles over the red rock South in Utah. They group together in Alaska and run grizzlies off their salmon. No shit. A full-grown female raven, given a clean strike, can take a sphere of meat out of you (or a 1 ton bear) the size of a silver dollar. Like a melon baller with feathers.

Ravens are murderous, cowardly, fascinating.

Birds, on the whole, are the MEANEST creatures I've ever come across. I'd rather be in a small space with a Rottweiler than a Cockatiel. They are where the dinosaurs went, you know. 

I saw a Raven still as stained glass- leaded fat obsidian- stretched against the beating wind at an arch in the Canyonlands last year. The wind nearly blew me off a long sharp precipice, and I was clutching one foot of the arch like an invalid when this fifteen pound bird snapped up like a kite beside me, turning its long wings at an angle so the 70 mph gale just held it there- ruffling, but stuck in space.

It seemed too big. It seemed as if I was having one of those Young Adult Fiction moments- that bit where the precocious child discovers there is more to the world than the grownups say. This bird was surely torn through some other plane, some other aniverse, and visiting to forecast dire things.

I was terrified. I dont terrify easy, but surreal floating raptors in hurricane gales will do it.

Oh Jersey Christ- the raven turned it head and noticed me.

This bird was no more than twenty feet above, framed by god's erosive masterwork, the Rainbow Arch, and it cocked its head that way that birds have and looked to see if there were any brains in my head. Its cheeks and neck had gone silver. I was possessed by an almost sexual attraction- it was DANGEROUS, you see. It rode between worlds. Here was a hunter in true sociopathic glory- no room for me, and nothing but a game offered by the bursts of air from badland furnace. I began to laugh- mad, horrible cackling at this beautiful atavism. I tried to stand, to totter over through the wind and let it tear the sinews from my arms, and skidded sideways in the gale instead. I tore a fingernail on rock.

The switchblade, black as black, shook its humped head at me, I swear it laughed- it knew me there, along the precipice of dry red dust, and saw that I was clever, if not as sharp as she. It folded, and snapped away- kites or burst vacuum- and flashed the sun off the planes of its back. The other tourists were staring at me. I was some other thing, they saw.

I later read that a raven gone gray was almost always over a century old.

The Reach

A piece I've had on the back burner for a while. As soon as I get canvas, I'm gonna paint it. I want to do it kind of big.

Foist

There was a way to fold his arms so that their silvered undersides glowed against his neck and whiskers. There was a way to fold his thoughts so that their barbs wouldn't catch the SoftStuff of his (bless them) sensibilities.
There was a way to drink water whilst standing on his head. Like so:
1. Pour a glass of water
2. Have him lie down
3. Stand on his head
4. Drink the glass of water
At these times there was a way he would sigh, as if chipmunks were shredding his dreams in the pit of one lung. There was a way to get better.
It is the same way one gets worse.

Again to the wallet for inspiration:

There are no notes here, scrawled or otherwise to tantalize. A deluge of receipts kept for the feelings of fastidiousness I must have hoped they would elicit, not-quite-a-deck of plastic cards and three unusual items are all I find.

1. A fortune cookie missive that reads " :) Maybe you can live on the moon in next century. :)"


2. A note with a phone number and a kiss drawn on it from a girl named Linden who I don't remember.


3. A bank note for 5000 Dong. Strange, I don't recall visiting Viet Nam recently.

Watermark

These dreams a-blighted as old xylem hollows

But all western edges abrade

Termite coryphée: she shucks and she pivots

Anointing our knots lūbricāre

Oh, slink past tallow signals intimately

And, night-side, stretch out like a plague

Think back to the boy

All alive in the summer

Prick prodding cambium stoutly

Grey grannies wag fingers

Shaking, veined in the sunlight

Sense of honor, might you subdue mine

Come Nymphalidae! Sesidae! Come Dance!

Glissade! Pop and step! Come to life!

Bare a throttle, wearing nothing

Being landscape and lover

Mother-fucker, you best be my wife

Wearing murder like hairspray

All of this, but no walls!

You’re the king of the desert, kid

Be that liberty licking thy scrotum? Thy ashtray?

In limbo, black snow is your bible

See, it falls on the phloem, on the rind of the thing

And seething, you rub it in

Shakespurrrr

Philomel, with murder stay;

Come not near our Lady nigh-

Lulla-, Lulla-, Lulla-, lay.

Lulla-, Lulla-, Lullaby...

Sometimes lurk I in a Gossip's bowl,

In very likeness of a withered crab;

And when She drinks against her lips I bob-

and on her Withered Dewlap pour the ale-     The Wisest Aunt,

Telling the Saddest Tale...

Though speakest aright!

SHIT howdy Bukowski and Mailer are wrong about one thing. Shakespeare. Anyone who can't digest his deft, broad plagiarism for what it is- the swiftest bit of Human Surveillance ever penned- ought not leave the Outhouse after breakfast. Buk again fails at the Beatles- he was too dedicated to enjoy any species of fluffery.

God love the bastard- how many of us are Ourselves?

And shill his style, my writing friends: He only Capitalized his sentences when it served a narrative purpose. Bukowski was the softspoken mindfuck the psychologists all dread like cankersore. He scorned all style and grammar for pure thrust, and unlike the other wasted prophets of our age- our Kerouacs and Ginsburgs and all of them worth my cornshit but for Neal Cassady who refused to write- Buk pierced your bubble till you danced beneath it, your hand on your cock hidden from the world and GRINNING like some new breed of bastard.

Too bad he couldn't Dig da Bard.

I wonder if Bukowski Dug Kurosawa. 

Zomboetry

Before we begin, you must check your skin. Be it crawling, itching, bubbling, or falling. Try to keep hold of it herein.

Would it be foreknown that from the gravestone would arise corpses of rot flesh and bone, it would have been said that most should have fled, although we all ended up dead.

It started with a chill that made many ill. Their skin would turn red and most were dumbfound, how fast it did spread and filled up the ground. All would groan and all would moan and all filled with dread, as more were dying and not staying dead.

We tried to hide but soon were found and those corpses needed a meal. We yelled and we cried when they'd surround to nibble at our heels. 

Some scrawled notes from my wallet

1. 'Our heads are round so our thoughts can fly in any direction.'  -Frances Picabia

2. Better than sex, the advertisement says, and it is a picture of you punching your father in the throat.

3. Toggling between nothing being new under the sun, and everything having very recently changes absolutely is perhaps the central driving tension of my work. -Bill Gibson

4. Creatures in the rivers and soil and caves that eat the emeralds, and their teeth are broken, and they dream of lush green grass.

5. Clocks destroy rhythm, faces betray, and every girl was a knockout at 19.

What I did on my Spring vacation.

There are people who aren't white in San Francisco. 

And, despite the salt-frosted wind coming off the Presidio, the new style for young Asian and Latin girls is to wear soft cotton hotpants in garish colors with huge fuzzy boots and put their hair in pigtails. I walked into a man on the BART, grinning like a cheese-stuffed retard at a trio of girls- indeterminate soft cacao race- their legs as bare as my squishy thoughts.

Chewing on legs- is frowned upon?

So two and a half hours after debarking at SFO I made it cross and through to San Rafael, gateway to the wake. Cochran picked me up and Honda-whisked my backpack and I to the dugout, where guys in hats with the stickers still on them stood around and glared at one another. I was attacked by Keoni the Hawaiian surfbear and Warner for a minute, in which time a small group of guys in hats with the stickers still on them gathered around me and murmbled threateningly.

I suppose I was slamming Keoni into the wall of the log cabin in glee, and they had never seen me before. I picked up the pieces of my pink cellphone (thanks Cindy) and put them back together. Anywho, after a few hours of carbombs and listening to Dirty say everything at the top of his lungs, I was acclimated, and I stood around and glared at people. I was home.

They all had their hair cut under those hats, and this made my brain itch. I got a SF hat from someone and proceeded to draw a sticker on a bar napkin. I put my brilliant drawing on the bill of the hat and then poured beer over the whole contraption- to make the napkin stick, you see.

Whoever it was took their hat back. Philistine.

Lucy, God love her, had two new tattoos, one on top of the other, that completely belie her beauty. Some bugfuck jailturd with a gun had layed down two rubber duckies with cigars and middle fingers up, in lines that had me remembering Steve-O being tattooed in a Hummer.

Umm....Black Flag lives.

I told her how hideous they were, and she explained that her father had invited this guy over on her birthday and gotten her tanked as Exxon before unleashing the 'artist' on her. Thanks a fuckbag, pops. You've ruined the finest ribcage this side of the Mississip.

As we were leaving, some indeterminate hour before dawn, Cochran got flustered (as he will), and ran over Dirty and some ParkadeRat with his car. No, seriously- I was in the car, and Mike hadn't been drinking for three or four hours. People seemed to be crowding his car, he said, and this made him nervous.

So nervous he clutched in and floored the gas, folding Dirty into the redwood bark and gravel like a marionette. Hot cocksmoke, he leans out the window, yells: WHAT WERE YOU DOING ALL UP ON MY CAR? and drives off, his face twitching in a panic attack.

Unable to believe this had just happened, I leaned out the passenger window and yelled his name and phone number and some choice things about his character, pushing his panic attack into apoplexia. I settled back and listened to him boil over, my work was done.

As a note, Matt Borello once convinced Cochran he had hit a homeless man and kept driving (in the Tenderloin) after he had smoked enough pot that he broke down crying and sweating and shaking and praying instead of pulling over and checking his bumper for mouthwash and beard. He can be a tad unstable, you see. Love the guy, but he's unstable.

After some three hours of sleep and spilling beer on Mat Hockett's bed, we rose and had breakfast. Fuck. Marin County- my plate of two pancakes, an overeasy egg, sausage links and sourdough toast cost $16. No shit. $16. 

Ty explained to me that the climate and elevation are some of why the sourdough is so lovely in San Francisco, but that the sourdough molecules actually build up in the air and paint and spiderwebs in a bakery that bakes it, and the sourdough improves year by year, its ancestral fug oppressing it from the air, pushing it to new levels of yummy. Far out...

Hockett sez Hey Chris, you wanna try my rope swing?

Do I!

We climb up through banana slugs and Hockett's treecreatures he builds from bones and twine and hangs around to scare Christians and other gentle creatures. I insist on going first. . Foot in loop, hefty leap out over the slope-

I open my eyes twentyfive feet downhill, one leg beneath me, wrapped in webbing and logs. My arms are scraped up, my ankle is twisted. The sunlight is really very pretty through the branches overhead. It is utterly silent. I look up and Mat and Ty are holding their mouths beneath enormous eyes, and I know that Hockett must have come out in the night and sabotaged the swing so that he could kill me and keep my oversized genetalia for one of his sick projects. Once I start cursing at him they snap out of it. 

The webbing didn't break. His knot didn't come untied. The two pieces of the knot stayed in form and left eachother. The ropeswing just didn't like me, that was all. 

KITEBOARDING! Without the board!

Hockett bought these two enormous kites, anchored to you by an arm cuff and a bar you yank at to steer, and the wind tries to pick you up and impact your vertebrae some thirty or forty feet away. It is more fun than Tetris, although I was kind of slow from smoking Trainwreck and kept crashing my kite. Jerm and Warner were pros right away, it seemed, inured to the cognitive-wrecking effects of hydroponic fluffydangdangDrool. We ate cheese and bread and avocados, and then we went a half mile down the beach and built an honest-to-Mohammed HOUSE out of driftwood. This was no shelter. Mat dug the support poles down a few feet and I found fresh wet ocean plants washed up and tethered the treelimbs together at every joint. The sun baked them and the rubbery cords contracted as they dried. Warner made a dragonhead mastpiece and leaned LONG whole trees against the roof like drunken masts. Jerm lay around and drank my wine.

The roof sat eight feet up, and when she was all lashed together, I climbed the thing and jumped on it and swung around and it didn't collapse on Warner, who was studiously fitting sticks into the walls to break the wind. We drank a bunch of beer and built a fire in there and all got smokesick from being forced too close to it, and then we left.

I love that house. Love.

Once Hockett was safely in bed we hit Peri's for some girl's birthday party who kept propositioning me in a voice like a hobo brakeman's. She had everyone spank her, and danced some. Chloe was there, and wondered where her boyfriend was. Mat looked pretty sick when he left us, and she was mad that he went to bed. Then we danced a lot and I overtipped the bartender, who sold Ryan Scott and I some sixpacks at last call. Well, actually, Ryan came and said:

She's going to sell us some beer.

Me: I like beer.

Ryan: So you want some beer.

Me: Indubitably.      We go up to the bar, and she produces sixteen Budweisers, and Ryan says:

Pay the lady!

Me: What?

Ryan: You said you wanted beer!

So I paid the lady, and the beer was put into a fancylooking bucket in some kid's trunk. As Ryan argued with a girl with funnylooking ears (We are going to your house, Sue! That is where we are going!) I grabbed the funnylooking bucket and ran the two miles to Hockett's house with the beer.

Haha! HA! I am mean. 

Ryan's voice trailed me for the first two hundred feet, up to the baseball diamond: 'OC! Oooooh Ceeeeee, cooooome baaaaack! That's his buuuuuuucket!' Haha! Ryan Scott is the best trumpet player ever. HE is a maniac of trumpeteering. I am still mean.

Bucket! As an aside, it really was some kind of Scifi Bauhaus bucket, all pleasing lines, possibly made for Paris Hilton to shit in when she must go camping.

The next day I found my friend Matt Borello quite by accident at a bus stop and got to catch up. I miss him. We once spent six whole months playing SKATE on a bald deck on his trampoline in the redwoods, the blue herons mating overhead and making tremendous noise as they littered the loam with their beautiful feathers. Wild turkey up there too, and mountain lions. We would drive out to the Inkwells once we were out of Budweiser and I would proceed to dump ALL of the fresh beer into the deepest well, 20 ft. down amid a mess of old trees, before Matt could stop me.

That fucker is cold, and we'd have to dive and search for each beer. Matt hated this game, which made it even more fun for me. And no one ever drank our beers, because we'd point down into the waterfall-fed hole from the rocks far above and inform them they had to dive for it. No jumping. Jump and I'll club the beer back out of your hands into the icebox below. Dive. I miss Matt.

Anyhole, I had to switch to a later ticket because of traffic on the bus, and now I am home. That is what I did on my spring vacation.

Lamb To The Slaughter

Take me
Leave her untouched
Innocent
Let her never know
Betrayal

Baby of mine
No, not mine - still
Born in my bed
Shared the same womb
A decade apart

Take me
A willing sacrifice
If she will be safe
From your attentions
Betrayer

Take me
Does this make me
A complicit participant
In my own
Destruction?

Sometimes
The lamb knows
Where it is led.

Margareet

Margareet, when you rolled into town

All us peasants came out to greet the day

Cause it follows you, babe

Every misguided step you take

It follows you babe

Like the lamb follows little Mary:

Through the fields of flowers

And the April-showers, which fall

All around this town

Why must all mothers tether

Their dreams to their daughters

To float and follow

Like useless bouquets of balloons

Follow children

Bright and buoyant

Empty tombs

And Margareet, when you moved out of town

And stole the dawn, we all just went insane

Trying to find some other place

Where we could all go to get laid

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

Yeah, we degrade our own

Delineations

The Sun and The Moon

If ever there was a morning,

When the sun forgot to rise,

The moon would stay,

Keep wake away,

And never open eyes.

If ever there was an evening,

When the sun forgot to set,

The moon would cry,

And wonder why,

The sun sometimes forgets.

Harvey Metz

Okay, so I'm accepting Chris's challenge to post our delightful little assignments on here, but I don't know that I'm so fond of my back-alley abortionist tale. This is the assignment we had the week previous, the prompt being the first line I use in the story, i.e. "I always wanted to know Harvey Metz." This one came a lot easier than the abortionists tale, and as a result seems a lot more organic to me. Of course, this could all just be me blowing hot air out of any number of orifices (take your pick), but I do like this one. Let me know what you think.

I always wanted to know Harvey Metz.

I guess I did know Harvey, at least a little; but it was in that superficial way that we know any prominent figure or celebrity. I read about his latest exploits in the morning paper over orange juice and eggs over easy, knowing as well as anyone that Harvey was responsible for at least ninety percent of the organized crime in our city, if not the whole enchilada; and yet being equally sure that Harvey would never go down for it. It wasn't as though Harvey tried to hide his shadier dealings all that well. Thanks to Harvey Metz's deep pockets, there was no such thing as an honest cop left in the city limits anymore. We all knew this, everyone in the city, and we all lived with it, because there really wasn't much choice.

Harvey Metz seemed to be a mythical figure, almost. Seen as rarely as Bigfoot, and each time he was spotted it was with an entourage in tow worthy of King Arthur himself. I saw him once, walking down the street, smoking a cigar that probably cost more than I make in a week, his ridiculous waxed mustache sitting proud on his face. He didn't acknowledge me, and I didn't acknowledge him. Even though anyone would laugh if you said it outright, even though whenever Harvey did make his rare appearances in town, he would be decked out in an expensive ensemble that allowed him to blend in about as readily as a peacock in mating season, Harvey Metz valued his privacy. If he didn't want to talk to you, you would know right away, and if for some reason you were dense enough that you didn't get it immediately, Harvey would make sure you got the message right around the time you sunk to the bottom of the bay.

One time a local reporter decided to test the limits of Harvey's desire for privacy, telling anyone that would listen that he was going to dig up enough dirt on Harvey that the police would be forced to press charges. The next day, that reporter didn't show up for work. A week later, each of the newspapers in town received a finger in the mail. The Post, the newspaper that the unfortunate soul had worked for, received two ring fingers. The left wore the reporter's wedding band, while the right finger was adorned with the reporters class ring. Any talk of bringing down Harvey Metz died a quick death on the spot, and no one has been fool enough to bring it up again.

You may be wondering why I would want to associate with such a lowlife, rotten piece of work like Harvey Metz, and I would be hard pressed to come up with an answer for that. He's a liar, and a cheat, and a murderer, and he'd sell his mother's soul for a dime, but...

But.

I got my chance to know him the day Harvey Metz died.

He needed a mechanic, he said, and he'd heard from a friend of a friend that I did good work, and that I could be trusted. I told him that I guessed that was a fair enough assessment, and asked what he needed done.

Harvey had something big in the works, it seemed, because he wanted me to convert one of his cars into a drug mule, making whatever adjustments I could to panels, seats, any square inch of the car that could be hollowed out and filled with whatever Harvey's hard little heart desired. Granted, he didn't spell it out in quite those terms, but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to read behind the lines with Harvey.

He asked me what I charged for such work, and when I told him, he handed me four times that amount. In cash. No paper trails, I assume. That was fine with me. I'd rather not let it get around that I was working for the most notorious gangster in our illustrious little city.

It didn't take long to do what I had to do, and I felt bad, strangely, as though I was cheating the biggest cheat I'd ever heard of by doing it quickly. Harvey didn't seem to mind, and was pleased when I came out an hour later, grease-stained and covered in sweat. He'd told me up front that he preferred to wait, and had sat out on the grass, just outside my shop, smoking two or three more of those cigars; and every now and then, when he thought no one was looking, Harvey would reach up and stroke his mustache lovingly, as though reassuring himself it was still there.

He thanked me for my speed, and gave a pat on the back and a hearty handshake that made another wad of cash appear in my hand like magic.

The next morning I opened my paper to find Harvey's death on page one, in headlines so big I felt tempted to make another set of eggs over easy for them.

NOTORIOUS MOBSTER KILLED IN GANGLAND HIT, they screamed. Seems Harvey had been at home, relaxing with another cigar when his house exploded with enough force that they found one of Harvey's hats, still smoking, at a playground six miles away.

Funny. Can't imagine how that could've happened.

I always said I wanted to know Harvey Metz, but the Harvey I met was much different from the legendary figure I'd read so much about. The reality was a slow, stupid, pompous old prick who was growing complacent in his old age.

The Harvey Metz I wanted to meet would have done some checking around before he took just any old Joe's recommendation for a mechanic.

The Harvey Metz I wanted to meet would have at least done enough checking to find a mechanic who hadn't lost a wife and child to him.

The Harvey Metz I wanted to meet was dead. The Harvey Metz I wanted to meet had been dead long before I killed him.

Daily writing tips

I don't know if it ever went through- here is the email for David Farland's daily writing tips, which are very practical and specific, or broad and unpractical. He has kept me writing, for sure.  Email dwolvert@xmission.com and say 'kick me!' 

Churchgoing Man

The Sum of my experience is Terran-bound. Thus far.

I've got no love for this jacketed cock- this doublethrust VanadiumChrome poorman's transport. Its fear what brings my form inside her. Not a sense of adventure.

Some fuck is jabbering beside me (a true judge of character, it seems), and occasionally he pokes me to enhance a point. Soon I'll grasp his stringy thumb and twist it till it bubblewraps:

Pop!Pop!Pop!

But I just close my eyes and forget who I am, and let the tourist poke me, and wonder if they'll trace my accounts, my bonds to Quintus VI; wonder if my subterfuge will stay subterranean even as Terra dwindles back from windowsight. 

'You some kinda preacher?' spits my lucky loveseat-mate. The com is listing doubts and reassurances- the lurid details of our cathe-tubes and vomit-vacuums. I miss the aeroplanes of youth, and finger at my new white collar.

'Newman rector,' I tell my jabbing friend.

He nods. 'A preacher.'

'Sure, friend. Sure.'

'Uh-huh. Where you headed?'

'To a galaxy,' I sigh, 'far, far away.'

'I know that one! A classic! Classic!'

'Indeed.'

He leans and tunes a vertebreak, lumbar by the reach he takes down his spine, and rolls his neck- appreciative- when what-ever hits his bloodstream. I sneer a little bit, but he don't notice. 'Adrenabarbitol,' he coos, 'Endorphin too.'

'Expensive,' I reply through teeth.

'Yeah, well Momma left account in trust. I get an allowance- at my age! Haha! At my age!' The asstip jabs me with his thumb once... twice.

Thrice. 'Look,' I snap-- 

'What's your cocktail, preacher?'

I try to smile. 'I am bereft,' I say through teeth.

He gasps. 'Oh no... Oh... no? No... An accident?' He leans in, whispers: 'Naps?'

'Listen, I'm tired.' I shut my eyes.

'Did they abduct you? You could still implant a thoracic, even at your age. Cost a bit.'

'I'm fine.' They are shut.

'But... But,' and he gasps deep- for air- his eyes showing white all around. Sanpaku. 'A... borted,' strains it out, 'you were aborted?' And I laugh. Despite my fear, my precarious future- despite the suits on my ass and the Naps that died in flames as I slithered down and out through sewage, I am laughing. Doc loves the talk about town, and his eyes are open. 'Aborted,' I manage. 'Yes, the tragedy! That!'

I wonder how many excisions my blunt fingertips have made, the vertebreaks' little plastene hooks twisting from the bone with lightbulb pops and viscera- the flagellates of spinal fluid. So many come willingly. So many... enough, though? We have quotas- the Naps have theirs- the Docs have quotas too. What a word for freedom: Aborted. 'How could they?' my friend cries, too loud, in fright. 'How could they deny you this?' He claws lower at his back, and then relaxes, breathing, breathing. 'Oxyfenadrine,' he sighs apologetically. 'And Xanadex...'

After a moment he croons: 'Xanaduuuuuu... Xanadooooooooon't...'

Soon I'll grasp his cheekbones and jelly out his swimming, pupilled eyes. Soon I'll snap and guards will come and take me from this loveseat and they'll scan my fingertips and see their jackpot hit. 

So, no. I finger my new collar and I force a Terran smile. I forget who I am as the thrusters hum up beneath us.

'Xanaduuuuuuuu...'

This backalley abortionist is a churchgoing man.

                         This was written as an exercise for the Writer's Group. I spat it out and didn't see it for two weeks. If anyone else wants to post theirs- the prompt was (of course) 'The backalley abortionist was a churchgoing man,' and I drew SciFi as my genre. I thumb my nose still at Oz and Darcy, who insisted that Pugilist Crime Fiction isnt a genre.

Where the hell did you two grow up, anyways?

No, No, No!

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Alpha Male

It had been such a long time since Lewis had seen another person that he wasn't sure he was really seeing her. He'd spent weeks wandering the vast, silent city, unable to think of anything other than the smell of decay, heavy and cloying in the August heat.

Lewis had gone insane for a while, spending the beginning of June in a feverish state where he would be just as likely to run down Main Street naked as he would to leave his house fully dressed. It didn't matter any more. There was no one left to complain about decency no matter how many times Lewis went outside with his balls flapping in the breeze.

Except today. Today he'd remembered to put on pants, and they were even clean for a change. Clearly, he'd dressed for success.

As for the rest of his outfit, he was neither sloppy nor overdressed. He wore a white shirt underneath an open button-down, and a baseball cap.

The woman was sitting in the middle of a park at a picnic table, her eyes glazed over. For a moment, Lewis thought he may have just stumbled across another corpse; but then she yawned. He jumped a little, feeling as skittish as a colt. He hadn't seen any other forms of life for nearly four months now, and wasn't sure how to act around her.

He decided to bite the bullet.

"Hello?" he said when he was about ten feet away.

The woman let out a startled gasp and stood to run.

"Whoa, slow down lady, I'm not going to hurt you."

She stopped, hesitating for a moment before she sat back down at the table. "Did I startle you? I'm sorry. I'm Lewis, by the way."

The woman chewed her lip for a moment before answering, "I'm Anne."

"Nice to meet you, Anne."

"I'm sorry I started to run away from you," she said. "It's just that I've forgotten what other people are like. I thought I was the only one left."

Lewis nodded. "I know. I thought the same thing until about five minutes ago."

Anne went quite for a moment before saying, "And then when I saw you, the first thing I thought about was how everyone started acting when things got really bad, near the end of May." She trailed off, letting her gaze travel to a nearby storefront. The store was a wreck, a tangled jumble of broken glass and bent metal, all streaked with soot from the fire started by rioters. The rate for murders, rapes, and suicides, all jumped to match the levels from the previous year in a single month. The whole process sped up the gradual extinction of the human race immensely, and estimates from any of the news sources still operating at the time said that on one night alone, over six million violent crimes were committed.

Lewis was silent for a moment, reliving that night in his own mind. He'd been at home when a man with a large bloodstain trailing down his shirt burst into his home, ransacking it. He lunged for the knife drawer first, withdrawing a large meat cleaver and promising to plant it in Lewis' head if he tried to stop him. Lewis let the man do what he wanted, terrified the whole time, both by the man's refusal to put the cleaver down and by the incoherent mumbling that he kept up for the whole time he was in Lewis' home. Roughly every five minutes or so, he would heave a loud, watery sounding cough that would add to the bloodstain on the front of his shirt, and leave a spattering of blood on the surface of Lewis' kitchen counter.

Finally, after what felt like hours, the man left.

Lewis found him the next day, curled up under a bush no more than sixty feet from Lewis' front step, still clutching the meat cleaver in one cold, stiff hand.

"How did you survive?" Anne asked, jarring him out of his thoughts.

"What do you mean? You mean that night?"

"No, just in general. I thought everyone else caught the bug but me."

"I don't know. I guess I have some sort of immunity to it."

"Lucky you," Anne said, a faint smile playing across her lips. "I'm surprised at you," she said after a moment.

He looked confused for a moment, then said, "Why?"

"Most guys I know would have already tried to get me into bed by now, using the whole 'repopulate the earth' thing."

He smiled. "The thought did cross my mind. I was trying to think how best to approach the subject without seeming like an asshole."

"Don't worry. I don't think the old rules apply any more."

"Well, in that case, your place or mine?"

The faint smile returned, and she said, "I live a block away. Unless you're closer, mine is fine."

She walked up to him, smiling as she took his hand. "It's not far." They began to walk.

They had walked no more than twenty feet when when Anne began to cough.

Lewis froze, staring at her wide-eyed. No, that's not true. He didn't look at her so much as at the fine misting of red that still hung in the air between them. He looks at the blood that landed on her shirt, and on his, the red as delicate as the speckles on a robin's egg, and yet as damning as a fingerprint.

"I..." Lewis began, and then faltered.

Anne stared at the red spots, trembling, and then she laughed. "So much for repopulating the earth."

The rest of their walk was silent, although Lewis thought he heard her sobbing every now and then. The empty city stared out at them.

When they got to Anne's place, they made no attempt to do what they had set out to do. Instead, Anne crawled into bed fully dressed, patting a place on the bed next to her.

She said two words, and to Lewis they were the most pitiful words he had ever heard come out of anyone's mouth.

"Hold me," she said.

Lewis did.

In the morning, Lewis was unsurprised to find that her arms were cold around him, feeling less like arms and more like old seaweed, clinging to the side of a ship. He untangled himself from her arms gently, as though he didn't want to wake her.

He walked back to his apartment in the pouring rain, feeling a grim satisfaction when he felt the first cough rising in his throat.

Beach

The hissing sound of the spray of the sea against the rocks is strangely soothing, the warm salty stench of fish wafting through my window is too. I hate this place. If it weren't for the sounds and the smells, I would have left years ago. At least I think I would have. Now I can't leave this place. I feel some kind of tether keeping me tied down, anchored. The sea sways back, forth, back, forth, back, forth, the rhythm is hypnotic. The swelling tide does not swell enough to make this terrible house disappear into the water. I wish it would. I hate this place. The floor is never clean of sand, I gave up sweeping it years ago, it was pointless. Now the floor looks like the beach outside. The salt has dried out the wood and it is drafty at night. Why can't the sea take this place away from me? I have always loved the sea, I suppose that must have been why I moved into this terrible place. I can't remember now. My memory is shot, I lost it too, years ago. So many years ago. I haven't seen anyone come to this beach in so long, I wonder if anyone is left. After the sky flashed bright all those years ago, I have seen no one. Not even me.

marriedtothesea.com

Breaking...

I lay in the bath, too chickenshit to sink my ears beneath the water, and listen to her. She makes hideous braying sounds, loud GOOONKs with each breath, and shakes on the sink.
I have to listen to it.
She curdles back snot, like fabric ripping, and GOOONKs and tries to make a word. The noises are painful, my ears whine. The bathroom is a reflective place. A solitary place.
Goddamnit, she's not really talking. She's spraying saliva.
My chest twists up some and its like watching a child vomit while eating- that effusive rush of puke they dont try to stop- and you throw up a little bit in sympathy. Like watching some bastard yawn.
Its sweat coming down my face. The bathwater is hot.
My feet are wrinkled.
I wish.

Forgiveness

Am I a failure? Chaos wonders as he considers the sheer chasm that he is staring at, three hundred feet straight down to the angry, foaming sea below. It's raining now, the harsh wind driving rain into his face that feels like a thousand slaps, a thousand disapproving words from everyone he's ever known; and the soft hissing of the rain sounds like the heavens are answering him with a single, sibilant Yessss.
He looks down, actually begins to step out, and then pulls his foot back sharply. In doing so, Chaos nearly overbalances, ending his own indecision with a single cosmic accident. Or maybe it's not an accident, if the rain is to be believed. He's sure he's crying, although it's hard to tell where the tears stop and the rain begins. His face is soaking wet.
He weighs his life, the disappointments that he's caused, the friends that have become enemies.
His name wasn't always Chaos. He had a name once, a proper name that was given him at birth by two loving parents who'd had nothing but high hopes for their newborn son. But that name has receded, his new name gaining more and more relevance as he's caused more and more damage to the ones he loves until even Chaos himself cannot remember his given name. Christ, what a mess.
He closes his eyes, feeling the way the wind whips and tugs at him, beckoning him towards that release, that long fall towards...
No one really knows what happens at the bottom. That's why religion has been invented: to give people an answer to that question, that question and many others that are unanswerable without applying the magic wand of a benevolent god, or God, if you believe in a god mighty enough to merit capitalization. Chaos holds no such beliefs, although at times he wishes he did.
At times like this, for example.
He sits down, unable to make a decision one way or another.
His car is parked a few feet away, close enough that he can still go back. But to what? he wonders aloud, and there is no good answer. There is no one left back there, no one that cares about him enough to accept him after all that he's done. And, by some cruel twist of irony, the only people that he cares enough to return to are the same people that he believes will be better off if he were simply gone.
He could disappear, resurface somewhere else, give himself a proper name or at least rediscover the one that he has since forgotten through misuse and dishonesty. He is a worthless human being. No one will miss him. Except for...
No. Best not to think about that. Even if he'd wanted to, that bridge is burned. What he did is still too recent, the scars too fresh.
Still, the idea of a new start, away from people who stare at him with disapproval or outright hatred, neither of which he denies them, is extremely appealing. He could go to Europe , start out right in France, maybe. He doesn't speak French, but that actually might be an advantage. It seems that speaking to people is when his problems begin.
Chaos cradles his head in his hands, suddenly all too aware of the boundaries between rain and tears, as the tears come hot and fast now. They are scalding him, punishing him for his wrongs. He doesn't care. He's earned the pain, earned it and a lot more. He stands, pacing back and forth between safety and the lip of the cliff, each time telling himself that this is it, this time he's just going to end it all, and not only that, he's going to do it at a run, by God. For once in his miserable life, he's not going to do anything half assed. He's going to do it right. But he doesn't do it, not the first time, and not the fourth time.
The car beckons him.
He believes in forgiveness. Of course he believes in forgiveness. Without a God to pray to, forgiveness is the closest thing to a religion that Chaos will allow himself. Unfortunately, he's most often preaching forgiveness to those around him, rather than practicing it.
He stumbles, and for a brief, giddy moment, he thinks that he is going over, but he manages to catch himself. As soon as he catches himself, he wonders why he bothered. That's what he came up here for, isn't it? Chaos stands there, assaulted by the rain, the wind, the chasm with its siren song promising peace, promising closure, and above all, promising forgiveness.
Chaos looks at the chasm, then back at the car, then back at the chasm, back and forth, until he resembles a potential suicide risk less than he does an avid spectator at a tennis match.
Finally, with a deep breath, Chaos makes his decision.

Anti-Messiah Project - Chapter One: The Mylar Jungle

The caustic churning of film projectors had evolved into the din of a hammering monsoon in the crepuscular, insomniac, M.D.M.A residue. A screeching telephone brought me gasping back to something like reality. I had been hanging by both hands from an incongruous pipe, which clung, somewhat unreliably, to the ceiling of an ill-lit room. I was not, as I had presumed, in the jungle. Realizing this, I released my grip on the thing that was not a vine and dropped to the floor.

More screeching. I began to look for the source. Skirting a pitiful desk and outdated computer whose chords seemed to vein not only the desk itself, but the wall and floor around it like a saprophyte feeding on the building, I found it: a little, eggshell-brown telephone. Laughing, I lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

Things were beginning to seem unpleasantly familiar. I knew I had answered this phone countless times.

A sympathetic voice replied. “Uhm, there’s someone here to speak with you”

Finally, through the filter of the previous nights ecstasy binge, I came the sharp realizations of identity, location and responsibility. I was young (seventeen, eighteen?), I was at work (a lame ‘teenager’ kind of job managing a local, corporately owned movie theater) and, perhaps most disturbingly, I was supposed to be running the place.

“Oh?” I said “and who might that be?”

The voice on the other end belonged to my close friend and co-worker Jon, who was currently pausing for dramatic effect. When at last he did speak he said something to the effect of ‘Officer something-or-other’, which was not exactly the kind of name that would belong to anyone I was interested in speaking with.

Laughing, I returned the telephone to its shaky perch and darted straight to the little, one-way window, which looked down on the lobby from the projection booth. There, breaking the faint orange light from the lobby windows, hands on his hips, Sunglasses glimmering; stood officer what’s-his-name. He surveyed the lobby floor arrogantly as I watched. He was plump and proud. I on the other hand was a scrawny, disheveled teenager who hadn’t slept in at least forty-eight hours, and had not been sober in something like the same.

Fear drove me to the narrow mirror where I examined and attempted to repress the inordinate tangle of hair that wreathed my head. It set my heart to beating rapidly as I made a mental catalogue of the more vulgar flaws in my appearance. The hearts efforts had supplied the energy necessary for my hands to button a wrinkled dress shirt, covering over the blood stained wife-beater I wore. My body was ready to collapse and, with that in mind, I found myself descending the claustrophobic staircase, which led to the lobby. I walked across the unsettling, checkered floor towards officer whoever-he-was. He offered his fat, calloused hand and I gave him my thin, clammy one. He grasped it firmly and jerked my arm up and down like that of a marionette.

“You’re the manager,” He stated. I replied with a nod. I remember thinking he looked like he had come out of some generic cop mold somewhere. I wondered if there was a serial number associated with him. How many officer dunderheads were produced each year? Where there perhaps more sophisticated models, reserved for less meaningless duties? And for that matter, what was his duty? What the hell was he doing in a dilapidated movie theater talking to a vulgar kid like me?

“Well, what can we help you with exactly?” came the result of my curiosity.

Officer portly-pants was about as fatuous and pragmatic as they come (probably the result of having been manufactured rather than born), and took his time explaining the situation. It would not suffice, however, to simply give me the information necessary to understand his question and then ask it. No, he had to bate me first; asking questions he knew I could not answer; operating under the false assumption that I was fully aware of his reasons for being there; making slightly out of context remarks to steer me away from the subject at hand. He was playing the elaborate game that was his job, and I was nothing more than a piece on his board.

After a great deal of time had passed he relented, realizing I still had not shown any signs of knowing what he wasn’t talking about. At last he explained himself. Someone had lost their wallet in one of our theaters and called to see if we had found it while cleaning. Someone else apparently had found it, or said they had, so the owner came by to pick it up. When he arrived it was not there. Naturally, he called the police.

Having moved from preface to subject, the time had come for the question.

“Do you know the location of the man’s wallet?”

“Nope”

“Very well then, thank you for your time”

Officer shit-for-brains opened the door and walked outside.

It was at this precise moment, swaying irregularly on the sprawling, vacillating chessboard of the lobby floor, that I had my first vision. That is to say I experienced something that was not a dream, hallucination or random flight of imagination, though one could argue it was all of those things. A dream, however, is a kind of vision one has while sleeping, which I was not, and a flight of imagination, in this instance at least, refers to something one perceives only in the minds eye, so it was neither. The argument that it was not a hallucination is much more difficult to defend but I will try. The term hallucination refers commonly to any apparent perception, which has no counterpoint in physical reality, no corresponding external stimulation. So, my perception of the floor heaving and shifting beneath my feat, for example, was most certainly a hallucination; the floor was not really moving. What I experienced that morning was too complete, too rich and much too terrible to be anything so trifling as all that.

I stood, naked, at the center of a broad and hollow tree trunk. Thin columns of light protracted from the numerous bullet holes, which adorned its aged carapace to create a pale and ethereal spider web along one edge. I dredged a grimy toe through the loose dirt at its base and watched the light play across my foot. Then I noticed the many footprints, none of which were mine, which carpeted the soil all around the trunk. There was One place where a huge, teardrop shaped piece of wood had been broken a way from the cylinder of the trunk to create a kind of door. I walked many times around the carcass of that gargantuan tree which must have once been quite beautiful, inside and out, to try and determine what creatures had made the prints. Some were small and pawed or roughly fingered (Fox? Weasel? Raccoon?) Others where quite large (Wolf? Dog? Cougar?) even huge (Bear? Human? Gorilla?)

Okay, I'll stop after this

Veritudinous in-vitriol, Orgasmic and reciprocal, I left a mess between her breasts, she swabbed my grill with fishygel-

I have a thing to ask, she said, and ran her tits across my head.

Clean that up, and don't be tardy. -checked her watch- Its time for party.

Now watch her gorgeous dewdrop rump, as percolates across the rug.

She runs the sink and starts the whiskey;

Holy Jesus, may he fist me, never had encounters so damn full of grace.

I wipe the blessed angel from my face.

   Come on, Swellers writers. I dare thee to outdo my DirtyDitty.

Here is a song to sing to your child.

This little baby has a heart of gold,

So I tore out her heart and I took it to the pa-awnshop;

Bought myself some sneakers with the proceeds.

This little baby has a silver soul,

So I stripped it from her spine and I took it to the smelter's;

She'll be fine and I've got brand new shoooooooes.

CHORUS:

I'm gonna take your skull and put mah wee-eed innit!

I'm gonna take your skull and put mah wee-eed innit.

     Repeat, while tickling said child. Also threatening to sell her to the gypsies is funny.

file:///Users/Chris/Desktop/of=50,590,442.jpeg

Freeline

She took my daughter from me this weekend.

I am a juggernaut of Fiction; know me or don't- this is my conceit. I have more stories in me than white blood cells. 

Or healthy liver bits, at the least. Regardless- she took her. For three days.

And so I'm real-life, no need for story. Let me show you who I've been.

Anyone else been on a proper bender? Let me amend: BENDER. Ben loves the cartoon. I sure as shit don't love the diarrhea.

     So I hopped a train at around 9:00 pm on Sunday. I didn't intend to. I made some 300 dollars at the bar this Saturday, and drank a bill or so of it starting Sunday morning. Call me old-fashioned. 

So the snow had started, and I ran off from Orest by the Paladium because that train was moving faster than me. And I'd be fucked if I was going to let it win. 

Please- as an aside- don't believe my bluster. I'm embarrassed to be such an asshole. Its just not in me to ingest it. And no-one but my friends have subscribed thus far, so who but they will judge me? As fine a form as you, my contemporaries have seen me in, I was Force Factor Five on Sunday.

I may have killed the German Shephard that bit me on Capitol Hill. I didn't stay to see.

Anywhich- the train.

I caught the cocky bastard, waving all the while to flabbergasted Orest, who was yelling something about St. George. I ran the tops of the cars as we picked up speed, and found a shell full of steel cable bundles, and thought about how sweet California was gonna be.

Cue blizzard.

I wedged under the cables for a while, and then turned my hoodie backwards and breathed Jack Daniels into my nose for a while, then I ran from car to car and howled and shadowboxed, and cried some. The train stopped somewhere out past the flats, and I saw lights that were sure to be Wendover. 

Fuck California. Wendover has fresh whiskey and strippers.

The guards saw me disembark, I suppose. Or someone cellphoned to say that a 6'5" asshole in just a sweatshirt was jumping cars at 80 mph through the desert. They bowled me over and brought out a pair of cuffs before I'd gotten off the gravel.

Now I'm a violinist. I have fragile hands.

I fought these two shitkickers like they were set to sodomize me. Good God give me the sweet hard rush of adrenaline, that sure joy of getting my face knocked about and standing against them, of feeling like- at nearly thirty- I was drunk and dumb enough to be swell against those Straightedgers in Cincinnati at fourteen, too stupid to lie down as they dulled their boots on my bones.

I am ashamed at my animal stupidity.

And I am twenty feet tall today. Ever need your ass kicked?

I can claim that felicity more often than most- no, no, don't protest- you've all met me. 

But when I'm pissing into a bag at eighty years old, I'll have whipped two Railjacks and run off into the Nevada desert in a no-contest blizzard, and discovered a shivering hour later that I'm 20 miles west of Tooele, in fact, and my ribs are cracked on my left side.

There are no strippers in assfuck Tooele.

Again- I tell my tale less now in triumph than in pain- Have you ever tried to book a room with soaked cash in an LDS desert town? The blood thawed on my face and made me say interesting things to the sweet-tittied young girls who clutched their phones against my dog-wet stink. 

I am proud of one thing other than my sheer capacity to survive. Having been turned down- creditcardless- at the third motel in town, I hiccuped and vomited all over the floor as the blonde fawn before me squealed in disbelief. I was already carrying a twelvepack of Budweiser around at this point, and using British words to express my disbelief that cash was not good enough to get a place to sleep.

Dear Lord preserve me, I suppose I looked as if I'd tried to fuck a moose on the moors.

So... don't ask why my nose is jacked up. Or why I'll roil and curl if I laugh. My left arm don't lift too far. Just remember me when your chips cash in, acolytes and heroes. An asshole born, but too large to lose.

I'll be fisted if I'll let some dimestore guard arrest me- never live it down.

But I'll regret that dog till Ragnarok.