Brash Fiction

Cinematheque - 10/9/2004

2004-10-09T23:41:00.000-07:00

Langlois' living room stood darkly amidst the cacophonous noises and flashing glares of Paris streets around ten at night. There were no exterior features in this place, or rather out of this place. A dull, featureless and ultimately supermodern structure, placed near enough haphazardly to be called haphazard, like punk rock Feng Shui.

It was all part of the plan. Observe without being observed. Eliminate interest in the construct in order to preserve its only viable resource - its sanctity. Totally usable, a commodity like any other. The second it was learned that Langlois was operating there the hipster covenant would descend; boorish, demonic critics of landscaped architecture and personal availability. Langlois wanted none of that. He'd seen it, lived it; often enough to understand the emptiness therein. Real things, true things, required no exterior construction.

The inside may have had features or things, but Langlois had forgotten them. It was night inside, separate, an entity unto itself. It was Langlois' private locale, his Teatro de Vive, as Dali had once referred to it. Not the aneurysm-inducing spectacle that Salvador was looking for but absurd enough in its own way to provoke moderate interest.

It was entirely possible that the only thing inside was Langlois himself, seated, maybe not - he could no longer receive signals from parts of his body - and staring at the single portion of light inside the room. His screen, his eternal fire, staring back at him. Langlois looked into the screen, bulky nineteen-seventies headphones studding his temples. Empty eyes, empty skull.

Originally this was the Great Movie, the film that really captured the intense levity of life, Verite in its most extreme. It was only looking outward, always, reproducing the daily scenes for Langlois.

His final thought, the narrator put down in text form, was of the failure to capture reality. Subjective consciousness, he realized, could never be fully rendered. Even to the self, in the self, everything is parts, slowly understood dynamic facets of a persona. Like writing something down. Its a full measure from any for of concrete. Langlois' final moment was utterly embracing the inanity of standing two steps away from reality in order to discover what reality was.

Christ that's postmodern of me.

Maybe I'll open up a fucking club.

I Also Heart Huckabees - 10/9/2004

2004-10-09T23:24:00.000-07:00

I awoke to the sight of my girlfriend ovulating DuPont polymers into a Pyrex container in order to bake a airtight food-preserving Tupperware style bowl. There were rusted-out utensils creeping underneath the door again and parasitic embryos clinging to the sharper edges. I'd already phoned the Terminex people to send a Raid cloud but hadn't seen any noxious self-aware fogs yet.

The heroin unloaded into my medulla receptor, shorting out the waking protocols and allowing me to continue through the workday unhindered by lack of sleep or food. The disembodies boss-head, Mr. Arikawa-Jones, whose image of a half-Jap skull leaking entrails in a six-foot radius always failed to disturb me, cited my tardiness but waved it off when I told him I'd rape his cat if he fired me.

A Black courier arrived. He spoke to me in Ebonic, which I didn't understand, and I referred him to the receiving department where a friend of mine, a ghoul who moonlights (daylights?) as a Funk-o-Tronic Hipster, was stationed and fluent in the language of Hip-Hop culture that I'm told was once mere slang epithet but evolved into its own Post-African primarily-Black-person manner of speaking. It no longer had any easily identifiable roots in the common tongue of American standard English. Then again, nyaro set hurlmen.

The ACLU wired our corporation a protest message that resulted in the hyper-firing of several Wakazashi salarymen, their laptops literally exploding, taking pieces of hand and face and torso with them. Supposedly those people were being held liable for discrimination after stating that a co-worker's dog's terrible poodle-like haircut was unlikable in an extreme manner and most likely the fault of an owner whose intelligence level was sub-par.

It was often best not to mention anything to anyone about anything unless they made more money than you.

My first flashmob riot in a week happened during lunch, when I walked to the fruit stand next door for a Hanta-granate, the finest fruit/deadly disease available. Kids dressed in tattered Canadian flags and apparently suffering from intense gastro-intestinal difficulties flooded the street and fired glowing excrement at cars and bystanders, engulfing them in what appeared to be highly radioactive ass-goo. SWAT police and Haz-Mat crews arrived within the minute and napalmed the kids and the cars and everything in their vicinity. Luckily, the fruit stand was overlooked by all parties.

By the time I got back to work I'd been laid off. The company was bought out by a Pakistani interest and my job now belonged to Peng, the Chinese reconstructionist who was asking via text message for training. I told him it would cost a blowjob and that apparently didn't translate because Peng began asking about the Shanghai Fish Market down the street.

I got home and walked up the driveway, through my junkyard, skirting the piles of refuse and dodging a falling brick of decomposed animal matter. "Bad day," I sighed when I got inside. I kissed my girlfriend and went to the table. She'd grown a lamb's leg shrub since morning. I broke off a young sprout and bit into it, tasting flakes of calcified something in my meat. Probably cancerous.

"I don't know, honey," I said. "I think I might hire those Huckabee people, see if they can't find some kind of meaning in all this. That or buy a sports car and run down small mammals like I did when I was a teenager."

2004-10-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

The other day I picked up a comic called Western Tales of Terror. In the back there was an open call for stories and artists, so sat down and wrote me some stories. Here they are.

The Empty Man - 10/1/2004

2004-10-01T13:23:00.000-07:00

"There's something you should know about your jewelry, Miss. It's haunted."

The redskin moved close to my lady, his dirt-stained fingers reaching for the silver pendant that hung from her ivory neck and shoulders. She quickly pulled back, clasping the pendant and stepping backwards, taking a momentary stumble as I stepped in front of her and swatted away the Indian's fingers.

"What in the hell do you think yer grabbin' at there?!" I held his wrist tight, knuckles losing color. He was motionless, a statue-man, looking me in the eyes and humming under his breath, the guttural noises emitting quietly up from his diaphragm, from his whole body. I loosened my grip but he made no move to take my hand away. He simply continued chanting, gaining volume, until his mouth dropped open wide and a high-frequency squeal leapt at me, knocking me down.

"You're sorry for what was done, I'm sure. Sorry, but still guilty. The man who owns those trinkets will come back for them. He speaks through the sky and the earth and has made me his herald. I tell you now so that you have a chance to repent. I'll leave you be now," he said. Then walked away. I remained on my back, in the dusty shadow of a wagon. Molly, my New England girl, stood gaping over my form for a moment before she dropped and put her hand against my head, pulling my face to meet hers.

"Charles! What- what was that about? Are you okay?" she asked. I looked up at her wavy hair, dripping over her shoulders, rolling down to me like ephemeral waves.

"S-sure, Molly, yeah, yeah... I'm fine. But I don't know anything about- about whatever that red man were talkin' about." It was a lie. I couldn't tell her where those things had come from, but I knew. At least, I thought I knew. There wasn't a man alive on the trail who hadn't heard the tale that only I knew for sure to be truth. The story of Luke Ironside, which of course wasn't his given name, who'd made a deal with the devil.

Molly helped me to my feet and took my hand, smiling at me. "Well, let's unpack our things, Charles. We have something to take care of, don't we..." And I couldn't have agreed more. There were wedding vows to be made before sundown, before someone back east could figure out what had happened and track Molly down in order to drag her back to the life she didn't want to live. I was her Romeo, only our story turned out a lot better than the old one.

We went to a preacher and had a hitchin', invited the local Sheriff and a few degenerates for a drink apiece to be our witnesses. They witnessed, gave affirmation and even shook my hand as we walked back to the hotel room we'd rented for the evening. Our plan was to keep moving, toward the coast, where we'd be able to settle down. I was pretty good with numbers. I'd be accounting for some back in no time. Or working my old position, 'fore I headed east to face trial; rustling cattle. Either way I'd be able to support Molly and myself with ease. All she had to do was give me a couple of kids and help out around the house. Which, it seemed, Molly was more than willing to do for me.

That night Molly and I consecrated our marriage. She slept, her arms bent over my body, warm, beautiful, breathing against my flesh. I couldn't bring myself to sleep that night. Nor could I bring the wide, scathing smile to come down from it's elation. Even knowing what I knew, about the pendant and the bracelet and the two rings and that Indian who'd made such a fuss over my arrival, there was nothing to block my joy from rising to boil and cascading over the edges of it's container.

A few weeks passed, Molly and I went down the trail, off west to our new life. We were stopped one evening in Nevada, a day or so from the border of California and another couple days from the ocean that Molly had never seen. There was a sunset, which Molly watched, almost weeping when the purple rays spread over the skyline and I held her, whispering into her ear the future I'd planned out for us. The sun dropped away from our existences and I went to light a fire, starting up a small dot of warmth on the desert's breezy, desolate face. We were there, insignificant specks in this mass of nature, together, hoping and dreaming. It was poetry, really, when I think back about it now. I always see it from above, from the clouds, when I consider us then. I pretend to look down and see the tiny, tiny point of fire, the flame of man's own aspiration against the world itself, the ant that makes it's mark irrevocably in the universe. I relish that memory. It's the only thing I like to think of anymore. Our last night.

Sometime before morning came, before the flowering dawn stripped the moon of it's relevance, I woke up. This, in itself, was not unusual in the least. I woke up often, worries or scared, relieved to be out of some nightmare or sad to leave the pillow-soft dreamworld I'd been inhabiting. What made this unusual was the high-pitched noise filling my head. And Molly was gone. I got to my knees, crawling to the opening in the wagon. Molly was standing ahead of me, facing east, nude, her back to me.

"Molly!" I said, yelling over the noise and the wind. "Come back here!"

Molly was still, staring off to nowhere. I leapt from the wagon, my heart palpitations loud and strong, and ran to her. Something was wrong, seriously wrong, and I could see my plans slowly fragmenting. What I wanted to build for us would disappear forever in this terrible noise if I didn't do something to stop it.

I reached Molly and spun her around. She was expressionless, wasted, empty visage covering his face in funeral pall fashion. No blinking, no twisting of the lips. Suddenly I realized, 'No breathing.' I pulled Molly back to the wagon. She was still wearing the pendant and rings. I dragged her body, it's weight like coal-black iron, heavy and remorseless, into the opening and laid her down. She was cold, but that wasn't surprising. It was freezing outside and our fire had long been ashes.

I looked back to the eastern horizon and saw the sun slowly rising up. I pulled the pendant off of her, the rings. I jumped out of the wagon and kneeled to the upcoming dawn, chanting the things I'd found in Ironside's book. I screamed out to the approaching cosmic body to slow it's progression until I'd finished the incantation.

There was a hand on my shoulder. I turned and saw the Indian from before.

"She's too far from you to reach now," he said. Stripping off his vest and accoutrements, I saw there were symbols covering his body. One of them was the engraving on the back of the pendant, an upside-down Y with Cs at every point. The Indian pointed to the symbol. "This is where she is."

I stood up, pushing back the Indian. He caught my arms and held me, stared me down, immobilizing me. "Why did it happen?! Who- what's going on?"

"You read the book. You should know. You asked for the opportunity to escape your prison sentence. And he gave it to you. Now you're paying for it," he told me. I sobbed against his words, shaking my head.

"No, no! This, I didn't agree to THIS!"

"You agreed. You said anything was his if he'd let you live through the ordeal. And so you met her, the girl who could help you escape. The Governor's daughter could pardon almost as easily as he could. Just had to walk in, tell a story, and walk out with you. He'd arranged the whole thing."

It was true. The thing I'd done was to raise up something, maybe the devil, maybe not. It called itself Azsrthng, some inhuman thing that lived in Hell. The book, Ironside's great secret, the treasure that was buried with him, had held the incantation. I'd found it because it called to me. I don't know why, perhaps because I was a murderer or destined for this fate or because it was pure, demonic retribution for a life lived in opposition to what preachers called Holy Word. I found the gravesite, unmarked, and dug up the devil's servant in order to make my fortune. All I found was that book, done up in leather with flaking pages and print almost worn away. Almost.

And then there was my arrest. Even out west they'd been after me. Wanted, Alive. Reward for any Sheriff or bounty hunter who'd get me. And then, up in Wyoming, cornered and captured and hauled back east to face the charge of seven murders, one of them being a child. So I called to Azsrthng in the night and offered him anything he wanted for my freedom. Give her these gifts and tell her you love her, I was told. And there were gifts, the pendant and the bracelet and the rings. I hadn't counted on actually being in love.

And here was his herald, come to take things away from me. I'd never dreamed it would be her. I always thought I'd lose my soul, what I already believed lost. Maybe that was it. I couldn't have lost my soul because it didn't even belong to me then. So it done took everything else I had.

~~~

"Jesus, that's some damn story," the boy said. His blue eyes were wide and he'd nearly lost hold of the whisky in his hand. A moment passed and he shook his head, tipped back the remainder of the whisky and swallowed hard, grimacing. He was nervous, looking left and right, searching the room for something.

"Well, I gotta go, uh, Mister. Th-thanks, I guess, for the story. Maybe you ought'a get inna' the bisness of tellin' tales ta' kids," he said, standing up and knocking the chair over. The bar was dark, nobody in the place but myself, the kid, and a bartender looking to close up. The kid stumbled back, nearly tripping and headed out the door. The bartender stood, polishing a glass with a dirty rag, behind the bar, eyeing me and giving me a look that asked me to leave. I tipped my hat to him and smiled, exiting the bar and following the kid back toward his resting spot for the evening.

He moved into an alley, looking back at me, making sure I wasn't giving him any trouble. I followed closely, deliberately, giving him no room to breathe, chasing after him. He started running shortly, and I followed him through the night air in this tiny western town, with it's mud streets and plank sidewalks, trigger-happy Sheriff and well-armed bank manager.

The kid stopped. He turned and drew his gun, a long, silver barreled six-shooter. "I'll shoot! I've shot men, I've never missed! I don't wanna kill you, but I will if I have to, Mister!" Without warning a shot flew out and slammed into the empty space he'd seen me in a moment before. I put a hand on his shoulder, standing tall from right behind him, and opened up my jacket to show him my bare torso.

There was an engraving on the grip of his gun, I knew, with a circle split in two by a wide line. That was one of the symbols already affixed to my flesh. I looked him in the eye as he stood before me, explaining to him the dilemma. "See, with no soul myself I have an option or two, but not one of them is a regular life, like you or me'd figure it. Walk the Earth ad infitum, go into the mystery beyond or maybe, just maybe, get into the business of repossessing what's been traded."

The kid was terrified. It was clear on his face. I continued, "I know what the Indian was wearing on his skin, now. See, a body starts out filled with spirit, animus or whatever you want to call it. And, slowly, it dwindles away, especially in the evil people. It's like a desert, the body. Wide, expansive. And if it's not full already, it can hold a good number of desiccated spirits. Like the kind you might have if you'd made a deal to have the best shot this side of the Mississippi. You get me?"

Even Cowboys Have Bigger Intentions - 10/1/2004

2004-10-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

"Name's L. Roy James. 'An I already know your name. Saw the big damn hat from a mile off," I told the man as he swung a leg over his horse and dropped to the ground, handling the reins.

"Ellroy?" he asked, tying off to a post outside the store.

"L period space Roy. James."

"And the L stands fer Lady, right?" His joke wasn't funny so I smiled. The gun was out and ready for shooting before he'd ridden up. I didn't walk into a gunfight with a weapon holstered. That was just plain dumb.

Before he had a chance to say anything else I'd killed him, put the bullet from my army issue Colt .44 in his chest. Wasn't really from any army I'd fought in, but it was originally issued during the war so's I always called it that, givin' it some historical reference. The body were dropped against the ground and I walked over, nuzzled the toe of my boot into his ribcage, hard, makin' sure he wasn't gonna move again. Made that mistake once, early on, and paid for it with a scar across my ankle from some Cherokee's boot knife.

Having determined the likelihood of death I lifted the arms of the dead man and, with a couple of people not already used to this sort of thing watching from windows or porches, dragged the body over to the morgue, which of course was an empty barn where the coffins were built. Hauled the body up on top of the slab, a few long boards stacked onto wooden horses, held down with old, iron nails. Checked the pulse, lifting the hand into the air and gently searching for the feeling of a heartbeat.

Nothing.

"Roy!" the voice started into me. He never called me by my first name, which my deceased mother gave me. I could hear it often. Often enough to know that it would probably always be there to taunt me like it did. Remind me of what I was doing and the big plan that my father would never see to know that it wasn't just worthless, doing those artistic things. "Roy, there's nothin' in drawing yer damn pictures. No future, boy. No respect! Here," he'd say, holding out his hand. "Here's where your vitality is, in your own two damn hands. Gotta make something of yourself by working hard, using your damn hands like they's meant ta be used."

He would take away the slate, the chalk, take away the books. Remove the earnest efforts of an eight-year-old in order to get him out there, working hard to pry the gold out of dead outlaws' teeth or scavenge the workable metal from their horses' hooves. Son of the corpse-handler, set about putting things in the ground at an early age.

"Damn, Roy, you've got some practicin' ta do if yer gonna be the next in line to handle this business of mine." Truth be told, I didn't want to. I was scared ta death of the dead folks, their vapid gaze, double zero eyes. Worse 'an that, they were mostly the criminal types in our town, people laid to rest in violent struggle. There were stories about the animated spirits of those people travellin' into the real world and not stayin' dead.

When I was twelve my father went off to join up with the Texan's militia, fighting in the great battle of the Alamo and losing his life there to Santa Ana's ruthless charge. He got to see Crockett and Bowie though, who by then had quite the following of young boys, legends of the frontier lifestyle. I wanted to be them. I wanted to know them, at least, and that would never happen now. There was pride in my father's demise, out there with the heroes, a hero in his own way.

"Yer daddy hid in the basement while the Mex'cans killed 'v'ryone!"

"There is no basement in the Alamo," I replied. That was the first real fight I'd gotten into, ten years old and self-employed, building wooden houses for the folk done murdered in my town. Some of the kids I knew, my age, were 'fraid of me somethin' fierce. Called me Morbid James. Boy by the name of Rick, I believe... Yeah, Rick somethin' or other, got into it with me and came out almost dead. Parents of the boy weren't very accepting, none of the townspeople either. Thought it was strange, a ten-year-old who worked on the dead. Didn't particularly want me around.

So I left. Took an old army issue Colt .44 and a horse that I had the money for, my father's busted out saddle and some silver spurs that I would later sell way below cost in order to pick up some food. I rode out to the next town and offered my services in whatever way I could, using my hands to fulfill my aspirations. I worked hard, harder than anyone could have believed from someone my age. At fourteen I took over Deputy duties for a local man ran the prostitution and kept the law in the meanwhile. I shot a man that almost shot him. As reward there was a deputation. And booze. And women.

For awhile I didn't do nothin' but hang around town and take lives. I didn't have anythin' else to do, really, and it paid well and kept me fulfilled. And there I was learnin' the ropes of running a business besides gunslinging. I kept the books for the whorehouse sometimes and other times worked as a bartender. Mostly earned a name for myself as a killer, though.

Eventually it came down to me 'an the benevolent lawman, where's I'd have ta' shoot him if I wanted to continue the business I was runnin', taking just a little off the top of every transaction. He found out, or would soon, after I made a slip-up somewhere along the line and gave myself away. The books weren't what they should have been and he'd know when he saw. So I decided instead to head on out during the night.

Twenty-five years old, now, living in a lonely place just southeast of Tucson, a couple days ride through the desert. I found it by accident, as if the horse just sort of knew where to go. Slept on through the ride, holding on in a drunken haze as we galloped into the middle of nowhere and found something there, a place I'd never been where I wouldn't be followed by my former employer. And after a few years here I'd managed to pile up quite a body count and a local reputation as a fair and just law-type, even though what I mostly did was take from the no-longer-living.

I came back to what I'd always wanted to be, in the end. I started up with the books and the thinkin' and drawin', settling on a method by which to live forever in the annals of artistry. I was working on a monument to self-respect.

~~~

The cleaver came down, slicing through epidermis and calcified skeleton at the wrist, severing the hand from it's former owner. L. Roy James tied off the stump and held up the hand, peering at it, turning it from front to back and making sure everything was in right formation. He smiled, brining the hand back down to the table and pulled a thin, wide iron from the fire he started before he confronted the man, applied it to the open end of the hand and sealed it shut.

He picked up a long, curved needle that dangled a line of metal thread and walked to his wall, it's ninety-eight right hands sewn together and forming a lattice that climbed the side of the barn. It was his epic plan, the thing he'd been seeing in his mind for years now. He sighed and found a spot where he could attach his newest piece and began sewing, linking flesh to rotting flesh and whistling.

Swamp Gas - 10/1/2004

2004-10-01T13:19:00.000-07:00

Fiddle music sprang from behind the stumps and betwixt the swamp mist that blanketed the entire area where the ragged remnants of the Swamp Fox's unit caroused and cowered, vaguely awaiting the end of a war that they'd nearly given up on, had it not been for the words of a now-dead compatriot, Bill the Bugler, and his rousing version of 'Ol Thompson's musical medley of Southern pride. William Banes in particular had grown weary of the war, having seen the murder of many a man he might once have referred to flippantly as his northern brethren. And yet, where he found in himself a thin void, there was the sentiment of national pride, of Jefferson Davis's country, of economic freedom and the continued tradition, of conservatism and the Southern way.

Moreso, even, there was the flicker of gloryhounding. "Let it rip, boys!" Thompson would say to them as they exploded from the swamps of southern Missouri, dodging trees and firing Enfields into the brains and stomachs of enemy troops. Just a brief flash of blue and William could snap his trigger back and let hurl the sleeping dog of his war, a furious leaden ball that could easily blow away the rear aspect of a man's head if it were placed just right.

And William always placed his bullets just right.

Then, of course, the Swamp Fox was caught, caged by Union officials in 1863 after the Grand Raid and imprisoned, his freedoms snatched in an effort by the North to purvey to the South what would happen if they lost the war. This singular moment, at least for Missourians of that epoch, would diminish the fervor with which they could fight. And for some it would be the breaking straw, the grounding element that surfaced and sent them back into the few remaining fields to await the loss of the war with silent hope and external hopelessness.

And the ragtag scraps of the First Military District of Missouri, (the originals, that is; the unit at this point still lived on in another form), retreated into their specific habitat and planned the future in either apathy or vigorous bloodlust.

William Banes polished his rifle slowly, moving the tattered rag up and down the silver parts, very aware of the encroaching gases of the southern Missouri swamp. In New Orleans they said that the mists could cause birth defects and some of the blacks could bend them to their will. Banes never gave stock to that superstition. He'd graduated from college and jumped into the war but was nonetheless an intelligent, educated gentleman of the aristocratic south who cherished the ideals set forth in the Confederate States' proclamation of secession.

"Cut the fiddlin' or bite the end of my pistol," someone said. William didn't have to look up to know it was Boyle. Boyle never gave into festivities. He was spoiled, poor, uncouth and generally imbecilic. But William didn't bear down on these points because Boyle was a good soldier and served his country well.

"Go to hell," the fiddler Damen said. He was only first generation citizen, not well-liked in the Americas in the first place, from where he only mentioned once and everyone had forgotten. It didn't matter, frankly. There was a war happening involving the Americans and Americans were dying and fighting and that was the end of it. Foreigners needn't have business with them if they weren't going to do anything but fiddle and sing.

Boyle stood up and walked over to Damen. "You're not blasted Billy and you never will be. Stop fiddling or I'll stop you," he said. Damen looked up, holding his bow still over the strings. His eyes were fiery. There was blackness behind those green irises that belied his genial demeanor. He could scalp a man if he wanted to, take him in the night while his comrades slept nearby. It would be easy for him. He was their scout slash spy, after all.

William Banes offered his own take. "Let the lad play, Boyle. There's no harm in allowing a bit 'o the Thompson merriment during which to parlay in the downtime," he said.

Boyle looked back at him. Banes stared, polishing away absentmindedly. "Sure," Boyle said eventually. "Play, Damen, you damn devil, play something for Willy Banes, our educated-type man."

Damen dropped the fiddle and walked away, mumbling. "What?" Boyle called after him, sneering. "What was that, you bastard?"

Banes began to stand, but stopped and went back to polishing as Damen disappeared into the mists. Around him the men were mostly getting to sleep, dusk having broken hours ago. They were planning on waking early and rendezvousing with another unit eighteen miles north for a push east along a Union supply line that was supposedly moving foodstuffs to units stranded behind enemy lines through Southern citizens. The push back would be no problem with numbers and guile, both of which the combined units would maintain once the Swamp Fox remnants had joined.

The fog thickened up as the men began sleeping, becoming nearly opaque, rendering vision to a rough five-foot radius in any direction not already blocked off by natural encroachments, of which there were many in the swamp. Trees wrapped in vines surrounded by muddy water and hanging down over everything else.

Banes took first watch, as usual, setting himself inside a circular formation of tree stumps and watching, listening for anything outside of ordinary. His ears were attuned to the marshes after so long living within their borders, as were everybody's; used to the bubbling sounds of ventilation and the buzzing of insects, mosquitoes and flies mostly, the odd animal noise near enough to penetrate the din of swarming bugs. It was hot in Missouri, even in September, especially hot in the swamps and the unit had borne it out to the fullest, taking everything that nature could give them in a season and still functioning at maximum capacity. Lately, though, they'd been more and more aware of the extra-small rations set out for them, lower than standard Confederate soldier fare, and the hunger they'd been feeling was gnawing at them worse than the bite that any insect could possibly muster.

The slow, deliberate plodding of boots across mud entered the area, Banes's eyes flashing back and forth to discern any visual confirmation possible, his ears zeroing in on an approaching individual, footfalls too heavy to be anything that generally lived in the swamplands of Southern Missouri. A creaking sound carried over the swamp, horsehair bow against raised nickel strings, a fiddle in the middle of the night. It's music was solemn, eerie, sevenths and ninths in a staccato rhythm.

"Damen?" Banes stage-whispered into the veil. "Damen! Answer me!"

The fiddling didn't stop and no vocal intonation was forthcoming. He raised his rifle's butt to his shoulder, clicking back the hammer on his Enfield and aiming in the direction of the noise. "Damen!" he yelled, giving all his lungs could grant in terms of volume. "You answer me or I swear by God I'll blow your brains out!" He stared down the length of his rifle, swiveling the sight back and forth, waiting for a flash of blue uniform to come into view.

The fiddle switched to something jaunty, hitting major notes in succession, almost a ragtime tune but banged out in such time as to offer no easily followable melody. Banes fired a shot up and left, splitting leaves and bark. "Damen! Boyle's right, you're a bastard and you've got one damn chance to not get shot!" A voice rattled forth, chattering out a song known by the few persons close to Thompson before his capture and imprisonment.

"Down in the swamp east, low lands low
Come follow wherever Jeff Thompson goes"

Banes knew it was Damen's voice but there was something odd to it, a garbling of the words, as if he were unable to properly close his mouth and make out certain sounds.

"Come on boys, don't lose your grip"

More sounds, footfalls, in the direction that Damen's bizarre fiddling had come from. Several men, moving slowly, arms at hand and the familiar tearing and clicking of the standard loading action.

"When I give the word boys, let it rip!"

Damen stumbled into view. His face was knotted, black, the veins and arteries contrasted hard against his flesh. His shirt was torn open and there were massive gashes in his side where a large animal had likely ripped into him. He was bleeding profusely and moving his bow left to right against the upraised fiddle, chin resting against it. Banes took aim and snapped back the trigger and, as promised, blew the rear of Damen's skull away from his head. His body crumpled into the thin layer of liquid he'd been standing in and Banes began the ten-step process of reloading. He wasn't the quickest in his unit, only able to load two balls per minute, but rarely missed, even at distance. He was capable of calculating near-perfect trajectories for his misshapen musket balls, a skill lost on the general populace.

Thirty seconds later Banes aimed his rifle again as another one of his own men walked into view, desiccated and monstrous like Damen had been, his neck ripped apart and spurting rust-colored blood up the side of his face. Banes took the shot and dropped him. A musket ball struck the stump beside his head, cursing into his right ear, smoking and sending wooden shrapnel into his cheek.

"Damn!" he yelled at the approaching men, all his own, he imagined, as the first two were. "Stop! Stop firing! It's William Banes!" Another shot screeched nearby, missing him by several yards. It was lucky that they weren't very good shots, at least not in this mist. Unable, perhaps, to hear anything to find him. Another man came up from the left and raised his rifle, prepared to take Banes at point-blank range. The disintegrating man's face jerked outward and burst, bullet taking him through the skull. A sweeping gesture from the shadow in the mist and the head came off, silver hatchet from nowhere removing it swiftly.

Boyle stepped over the carcass. "Son of a bitch! They're everywhere! Something's happened. I don't know what, but our own damn men are standing up and trying to kill us. Started with that rat Damen, chewing on Red's arm while he slept. After that Red got up and bit someone else. I watched it happen but didn't believe it."

A shot.

Boyle dropped, his side wide open. Banes rolled him over, placing his palms against the wound and pushing down hard, feeling exposed ribcage against his bare hands. He breathed heavily, strangulated by the thick, noxious fog. He looked around wildly, waiting for a bullet to come at him. He looked down. Boyle was pale, pasty white. The blood was gushing from his side and there was no stopping it. Banes lifted his hands, apologizing to the dying, maybe dead, man. He grabbed his rifle and finished loading, turning back to see if Boyle had any extra ammunition on him.

The fog was suffusing itself to Boyle's wound. It was red, velvet red mist swirling around the massive opening. What looked like fingers poked into Boyle's side, slid up into him, pumping his heart and making his lungs work, flexing his muscles. Several hands went inside Boyle's body. A fog face looked up at Banes, grimacing, and followed the hands into the body. Boyle's face melted slightly, turning the color of used-up carbon, wrinkled flesh over frail bones. And then he sat up.

Banes pointed the weapon at Boyle and fired, taking off most of his arm where it met the shoulder.

Rifle fire. Loading and firing. The spread of warfare, the cacophony of pervasive enemy footholds. Banes prostrated, laying down and screaming at the top of his lungs to someone, something in the beyond to help him.

There was no answer.

Then he felt the first cold fingers rend his clothing and seep into his back.

Excursion - 10/1/2004

2004-10-01T13:16:00.000-07:00

Dim gray like ash fallen from nowhere echoes back and forth in wide strokes over flesh-and-bone stalks seemingly planted into the black ground. It's very dark, and they stare up at something that I can't see.

"What do you think they're looking at?" I ask aloud. Someone is looking over my shoulder and tells me they watch anything that's up there. I'm fairly sure it's alien lifeform. That's why the background was chosen and why it's so dark. Confusion. Warped nothing poured down canvas from the reality of outside-the-box.

I turned around. The entire place was filled with people, mostly dressed in black, apparently unaware that color was the season's newest high-fashion exterior remark and perfectly suitable for a gallery opening. They were all staring, slightly upwards, near identical to the people in the painting I'd been watching. I wondered if this was the keystone to the show, the intended response from myself in the wake of the viewing.

Motionless. Most everyone stood, blank-faced, altering the images in front of them with collective experience and bending critical notions against the breakers of their knowledge. It was strange. Stranger than any of the surreal offerings or the blinding, over-exposed photography that Steve Mason had to offer us. Perhaps that was the point.

I walked through the people that couldn't move, the statues of beings locked into the process of exposing the world's background through sense-filters. I didn't believe any of them could do it.

Then I left the gallery.

The Scavenger's of Ideas - 9/19/2004

2004-09-19T11:28:00.000-07:00

Minister Van Illen covered the television viewing space, sparking like fireworks at the prospect of the upcoming Apocalypse. It was his delivery, though, which formally executed the reality-based plan for full-throttle headers into the great beyond. As the encore to his sweat-filled, hard-lit speech about the fall of man's Grand Moral Standard into nihilistic fervor he had himself executed, staring up into the rafters of some Midwestern choir's cavern as he took the bullet from his son, Peter Acolyte Van Illen, whose duty it was to perform the miracle of re-creation with the hands of Jesus moving through him.

There was an arrest, of course, but the boy was acquitted as having been part of a fantastic cult of suicidals bent on investing the world with seeds of autonomous disparagement. Oddly, the rituals continued unabated without arrest after another year or so, soon taking to television performances live via Pay-Par-View and later syndicated across the (666) World Wide Web.

Joshua Mal Carne, the prophet of the Heaven Spring's Eternally Within Church of Reformed Sadists joined the ministry late in the third year after the elder Van Illen's death, linking hands with Peter Acolyte Van Illen in Africa and subjecting the village of dark-skinned natives to sixty-seven hours of preaching before BetaCams with satellite links and expansive broadcasting range, a record at that time for live television. This, of course, followed by the irreversible discourse whereby Peter and Joshua coerced God-Fearing villagers to suicide in order to portray to us, American at-home viewers, just how far we'd fallen from the Grace of the Almighty in reference to these heathen savages who'd only just experienced the sublime love of God.

The American Theocratic Nation, so named for it's recent jump from attempted ideologically-based society to pre-Renaissance fear-based cowering-in-the-shadow-of-our-own-iniquity nation state, took to the new phenomenon with reckless abandon, decisively swathing through foreign worlds with Crusader fury, bringing the Word and the knife in equal measure.

And then there was nobody left but themselves. The inevitable schism generated enough vehemence in the religious orders to begin civil war, world-shaking as it was after co-opting most all lands on Earth, and burned out the sinning portion of the opposition clan with nuclear fire.

And then they were gone. And all that was left was us, the scavengers of ideas. And we all lived happily ever after until there were enough of us to start over again. Then we just killed each other and raped the bodies.

Drunken Editorial - 9/13/2004

2004-09-13T02:26:00.000-07:00

It must be hard to work for George Bush, Jr.

Watching the television, the interviews with cabinet members and various Secretaries, the impression is left that they are often flustered, anxious people these days. The look on their faces is virtually identical. They wave their hands and proffer harsh tones in their explanations of what, exactly, the plan for the future is. Brows are frequently furrowed and eyes narrow to virtual solitary-confinement slats, as if the only way we're allowed to see in, or them to see out, perhaps, is through this smallest of possible thoroughfares. I can practically see the frazzled dementia settling into Condoleeza Rice's frontal cortex as she explains to the nation, those few that manage to tune in to politically pertinet television shows over the allure of reality t.v. and reruns of CSI: Miami, the various policies which will certainly be enacted by the president should he manage to be elected to a second term.

And it pains me, (as surprising a sentiment as that may be coming from your truly), to see these bright people, these masters of sentient relationships and stewards of philisophical interaction, force themselves to spout off in directions that they seemingly have no real connection to outside of their desire to remain employed. Perhaps it's the fact that there are no jobs to be had that makes them cling to their current positions. Or, conversely, maybe it's the fear of the jobs that await them that provokes such a stranglehold on ideology that would otherwise be rejected in the name of constitutional (American, as I like to call it), sentiment.

I've heard that Colin Powell is a rather sharp individual, someone who, (and this is something held close to my heart as well), will take the opposition side to any, ANY argument simply to evoke discussion and clear understanding of every angle he can possibly think of in the minds of his peers. He wants people to think, to see and to understand the choices they face whenever they take a particular stance. And I wonder if he acts that way with the President. I wonder beyond wonder whether or not he's willing to stand face to face with the men he serves and render their arguments nil with opposition logic in an attempt to betray an inner knowledge that portends understand on levels that George Bush, Jr. may never fully realize in his bull-headed attempt to eradicate the American China Shop.

What's the point to a democratic society if there are no powerful minds at the top? Realistically shouldn't the Prez surround himself with dissent in order to discover what the options are? I can't possibly believe in a man who asserts his cowboy nature and fears horses. Which is really something that we've seen throughout his career, isn't it? He joins the military but won't go to war. He gets a DUI but won't face the charges. He declares war on Osama Bin Laden but stops looking for him after a while.

However, that's a digression that only ends in unreasonable accusation.

Back to the original point, what's going in Washington, DC? Why, if it makes them appear so uncomfortable, are the officials at the right and left hands of our Optimus Prime so discordant in their public appearances? Why do the questions being asked about the President's plans force them to squint and rave and stutter and curse, (Okay, I made that one up), when they purportedly support the initiatives?

In a word, power. They, those people we expect to provide the President with legitimate information and make decisions at low levels as to what should become a high level question, are swayed as easily as any other member of the public-at-large when it comes to the maintenance of the status quo, namely themselves. These are people who may have once worked as managers whose goal was the firing of employees they didn't like simply because they could. These are the assholes you've worked for once before; the kids who took hall monitor too seriously; the total bastards whose sense of ineptitude, once they were given any credibility whatsoever, gave way to puerile teasing.

That's not to say that there aren't people out there whose corruption extends to the extreme boundary where they give up ideology for a cool sash and a stack of demerits. I don't particularly get that feeling from any of the other candidates I've seen this election year. Not Kerry, (whose voting record actually implies an honest humility, what with his bending to will of the constituency and all, something Bush has yet to do even though it's his job), not Nader, not anyone.

Speaking of which, has anyone else noticed how GB, Jr. praises the nations who refuse to submit to the masses? We hate the French because they obeyed the will of the people but love the Brits because Tony Blair told his nation to sod off. Makes total sense, given that demo is basically Greek for "people" and cracy is basically Greek for "governance."

Another digression. I apologize.

It can't be determined what will happen to the current members of the cabinet if a new President is elected. Certainly, many of them will go. It's unlikely that the Democrats, reasonable people as they appear to be, would go so far as to pull the politically abrasive but partisan-supportive move of throwing out literally everything put in place by the previous administration, (including, say, the Clinton plan to disarm North Korea that was ON THE VERGE OF BEING ENACTED), but who am I to make that kind of brash statement when I have basically no active method of discerning these sorts of matters?

Well, besides history books, the internet, common sense, well-known facts and interviews with people tossed out in 2000. But those aren't really sources, are they? I mean, it's not like I got this information from a press conference that was nearly held in secret because the press secretary was too afraid to make White House information public knowledge.

Yeah, thought so.

Delusion - 9/12/2004

2004-09-12T23:22:00.000-07:00

Half of life is somnolent desperation, like the film set to show at off-shutter speed.

Crawling through the morass of emotional deprecation, introverted meanings coerced beyond the realm of the self with blatant drunkenness and otherwise asinine behavior, he manages to seduce himself into believing that there's something going on between himself and the other.

"She's clutching me again," he thinks, modeling himself after her shadowy grasp, imagining that this has something magical to it. "Is she interested?"

Her arms cradle his; thin, wiry fingers straddling his biceps and her head laying across his shoulder while they consume alcohol and pizza. "Touching me," he hears himself think, suddenly conscious of his desire to entertain her apparent wants. "She must be interested."

There's an abyss between them, though. He doesn't know it until he reaches out and attempts to cross, to see if he can hurdle the bottomless gap of endlessly frustrating signals which may or may not be tangible. "Fuck," he says to himself, solemnly acknowledging the insult of possible failure. "What do I do?"

Old sayings propose to take varying degrees of differing measures. Carpe diem. Milk for free. More flies with honey. "What the hell am I thinking about? This doesn't make any fucking sense!" There are clearly set rules to this sort of interaction and the trick is knowing what they are.

"Dating, dating, like on a date. A date. Where people 'go out' and stuff."

Simplistic sensibilities reach no comprehension and he lunges expectantly over the cliff-face, seeking to splash into deep, deep waters and find certain truths exposed as affection. And yet, when he hits, he finds nothing but hard concrete greeting his faceplant-bellyflop dive. A snapped ego and enough psychological trauma to agonize over for the next three to four days.

"Why do I even fucking bother?" he asks. And she answers back with a short smile and the flicker of un-enthused giving, letting go of his hand that she held so tightly only a moment before.

Ember Children - 9/11/2004

2004-09-11T11:48:00.000-07:00

Before the animation all twelve kids were superdense lumps of carbon atoms prepared in such a way as to trap light, layers of semi-reflective grids meant to slow down the rays that got through and send the rest back into the body. They were marionettes at first, three foot tall clumps shaped generally into bodies by scientists-turned-amateur-sculptors. We'd managed to make them fully articulated, two-hundred twenty-three points of movement of one kind or another, more than would be there if they'd been born human beings instead of realised concepts.

Once we'd animated them with the SunSpark they literally hopped up, each and every one of them, and began running around, bumping into walls and into each other and glowing, diffusing their light outwardly and created their own sort of burn. They left imprints of charred paint when they touched the walls and the floor was covered in ashy refuse.

Laurenn and Bobby Hughes, the specialists in training animal training, worked to teach the ember children about the world around them and the world outside. There was no reason to believe that they would have any sort of capacity for understanding. After all, there was no brain inside them. The theory began with that, though. It was the whole reason for bringing back pieces of the sun. We wanted to study those tiny flames to discover how and when the star was formed and, if possible, trace back the universe to it's earliest possible notion. And here, in one of the experiments, we'd cultivated enough SunSpark to give these dolls their own existence. It worked completely. And the ember children learned because we were of the universe and the star stuff and they were the basis of life aroused with plasma.

They watched us, more than we watched them. Every time they took a step or looked in any one direction they learned something new. They began to look more and more like people. One day we came in and discovered that number three was wearing clothes he'd chiseled from his own flesh. They talked. They were animate, fully rendered beings and we were the creator that Genesis II had been searching for when it swept past the center of our solar system and gathered data and star parts.

After a short while they childrens' glow wore away. They had no new sources of real light and the only way to give it to them would be to let them outside, into the world where they would certainly be dangerous and, quite rightly, feared. Everyone on staff, of course, having grown massively attached to them, wanted to allow for a midday jaunt into a playground or soccer field where we could control the number of people coming and going. It would be worthwhile to study their interaction in the outdoors. The solid NO came down each time from the top floor, denying us the privilege of study and ensuring the eventual demise of our beings.

And then they evolved. Overnight, number three was better than the rest. He glowed brighter, stronger. Number eight, the smallest of the group of twelve, no longer gave off any luminescence. Eight was keeled over and blacker than black, a void in the room where none of the other children walked with four feet of. Except three. Three would go past and kick at the body of eight. It was extraordinary. In order to preserve his own life, he'd absorbed the life of the other. And because of his newfound knowledge we'd postulated that he may have managed to absorb whatever information was being stored in the carbon body. In taking the SunSpark he'd removed everything the SunSpark knew. Which also meant that these children probably understood the origin of the universe in an instinctual way that surpassed our own link to the beginning.

Soon the other children began dropping away. Three, whose name we'd changed to Prometheus, swallowed the entire clan of twelve. The ember children were all gone an Prometheus wanted outside. For weeks he'd been attempting to explain his case to us. He'd been holding secrets over our head and trying to bargain. And always the answer came down from above: "Destroy it. End the project. This has gotten out of control and we need to exert human power over whatever it is that you've got in that room."

We never ended the project. Prometheus ended it for us when he disappeared one day. The door was open. There was a melted hold in the door and scorch marks on the walls and floor around it. Probably he'd always been able to get out. He just wanted it to be our decision. He wanted to know how we worked. He'd been able to study us long enough to come to some kind of conclusion about our behavioral patterns and needed no more information. Or maybe his glow was just too dim to stay any longer. We didn't know. What's more, we didn't know anything about Prometheus. In our zeal to study the children we'd begotten we managed to arrive at no conclusion about them. We didn't know what they were or how or why. I don't think anybody was excluded from the attachment that blocked out our reasoning. That's what we get for referring to our project as the progeny of man and his universe.

The Monstrosity of Being in LoveorConfessions of a Sickening Fuck - 9/10/2004

2004-09-10T02:07:00.000-07:00

Weeping from his mouth, drooling like my broken fucking septic tank, staring off into the vacuum screen and watching the porno ladies dance their asses between the aperture plate on their home-cam.

"Jesus fuck, Carl! You're going to watch that all fucking day?!"

The son of a bitch barely answers, mouth dropped like an anvil in a Warner Bros. cartoon. He's cornered by a pair of tits every time, the smooth flesh flirting with his backwards brain until he's literally drooling his puerile ecstasy over himself. Go fucking boink yourself in the bathroom, Carl! Just fucking do it!

I really do hate him, really. It's not that he exists in such a state that I despise. I simply hate him for being the self that I understand to be in me, somewhere, repressed or defunct, I'm not sure. Shouldn't I be watching those nipples like a fucking dog with a hard-on? Isn't that the person that I was born to be?

It's there, in the demeanor of the bar-hopping chauvinist; the antithesis of every man who ever got a girl; the asshole with a brain in it's anus; the bleach-blonde fuck whose every action breathes penetration. "Can't take your money, your drinks are paid for."

The words of a bartender, spoken in the half-life of the drunken jackass, his money, hard-earned or barely-strived-for frivolously spent on the attempt at gaining access to pussy, pure simple pussy, the warm, innocuous event that drives the self to date rape and more as if easily purchased late at night during an infomercial. Well.... Fuck that.

Truly and seriously.

There are greater things than the pursuit of the all-encompassing need to create progeny, disgusting, monstrous versions of ourselves. No, that's not true.

More to the point, there are greater endeavors to break for. The creation of the autonomous progeny of the text, for instance. The bastard of the brain, it's horribly mutated offspring. And what about art? Isn't art always the pursuant version of the self, mimicked in a hundred different ways upon myriad canvases and displayed proudly as the offspring nonexistent?

Jesus, there's more to life than that, isn't there? Something beyond this sickening need to burden one's self with the horrible nature of the being. I believe in the will to power, the personified God-Man, scarcely, though the rapist I despise to his torturous end.

There are people so consumed by themselves that they can't understand the fundamentals of living as a person. They are oblivious to the Marquis deSade and yet wish to accommodate his one-time needs, fulfilling the pleasurable acts of unadulterated domination. It's those people that I strive to overcome, it seems. Those fucking cunt bastards, to paraphrase many a United Kingdom, (yeah, sure), resident, are the simplistic focus of too many ranting parables to count.

I can't stand that I hate them. Hatred implies envy, and this is, I believe, fully untrue. There is no raison d'être for the hatred outside of my inclusion of myself in the social order that I also tend to look down upon, as these members of the same organism constantly battle against the tide of the status quo in ways gruesomely depicted in stories of the thriller or horror genre. A nearly admirable quality, if it weren't such an asinine venture on their part.

Fuck. More than that I hate them for trying to become me, to take my place in the life I've created. The next fucker who hits on my girlfriend I want to murder, slowly and deftly, taking devices of medieval design to their anatomy. Is it wrong to savor those fantasies? Certainly not, but then it wouldn't be wrong for them to hit on my girlfriend. And therein is the conundrum that must be faced. Watching from the sidelines as every attempt is made to wrangle the relationships I have farther from me and, most importantly, closer to another being. Simply allowing trust and honorable notions to become the anchor by which your life as you know it is suspended.

Christ I hate trust.

Autobiographical - 9/8/2004

2004-09-08T23:53:00.000-07:00

The first girl I could, without sarcasm or using semantic logic, call a girlfriend was Mindy. Her father was a police officer, possibly a sheriff, though it should be stated that this fact has not connection to my present feelings toward the enforcement arm of the judicial branch. Her mother, as far as I can remember, was a homemaker but in my memory she's rarely home. Generally speaking I would visit Mindy's house and we would reside downstairs in a basement with (possibly imagined) light brown paneling covering the walls and watch MTV for hours on end and listen to Kriss Kross and play ping-pong. Mindy played viola (violin?) once or twice, Canon in D, but what else would one expect from thirteen year-olds?

We went out, to apply a term general enough to mean virtually anything on a relationship scale but is officially understood to imply "dating," for the entire schoolyear. I'd met her, probably, earlier than I began dating her but the first time I remember having any sort of interaction was during a school dance where we determined to display our rug-cutting prowess inside the hot, dark gymnasium at Jefferson Junior High School, a place rumored to have originally been constructed with the intention of turning it into a local penitentiary but was, at the last second, turned by voters into a school. I'd always believed the story and still do, mostly because it was there that I felt most imprisoned, of all places that I was required to go to, and it was there that I first happened upon the idea that it was my personal decision which put me there nearly every day. I spent a lot of time in in-school suspension that year.

During the dance, sometime, probably towards the end of the night, Mindy sent her friend Kim, her best friend whose innate hatred of me, which in retrospect likely stemmed from a feeling of having been cleaved away from the one person she most enjoyed being with due to my presence, would later cause some dilemmas, to ask me if I'd go out with Mindy. I thought about it and said yes I would and presumably we exchanged phone numbers. My parent's drove an Isuzu Trooper, greenish hued, that I climbed into shortly thereafter, smiling and immediately spilling my newfound validation to them in the form of the story of my (typical) boy-girl combination.

And then we were in the basement of her house, watching MTV and she would fall asleep on me and I'd lean to the side and begin to doze off myself until I realized I had to go pee and there was a sleeping girl on my lap who, frankly, I didn't want to move. I don't remember what kind of feelings I really had for Mindy, but our physical connection, something I tried not to give much thought to, as we'd been trained to avoid thinking about girls that way when I was a youth because of the sexist connotations inherent therein, was very clear from the beginning. The first real touching, kissing, holding each other and all the various emotional and psychological aspects which pervade the youth's first-time relationship. I would invariably be at a loss as to why I felt the way I did, and I'm sure I never gave it any consideration at the age before introspective questioning, but now I can look back and wonder what exactly we had and know, certainly, I didn't love her but I was her friend and we spent countless hours together, near-daily, and there was a drive to see her over and over again.

During winter, which is the part of the year I most fondly remember, we could dress in layers because winters in southern Idaho are cold, desert winters with blizzards and below-freezing temperatures that eventually unfold into sunlit, gray days like I imagine Alaska sees fairly often, and go outside and build snow-structures and play ping-pong and listen to Kriss Kross and throw snowballs and then come inside and huddle together while drinking warm things and cover up in a blanket, (still a favorite pastime for me), until one of us was required to go home. (Falls in southern Idaho are equally as beautiful, however, and normally the autumnal months are the ones I most enjoy, though that year there was a sense of something different involved, which was the influence of Mindy.)

We certainly had fun together. I played my tiny guitar poorly and talked about being in Aerosmith and she wanted to be a Fly Girl, which, given her seemingly instinctual ability for maneuvering in dance-method, didn't seem out of the question and both of us presumed that by the time we were twenty we'd probably have fulfilled our dreams (nominal wishes?). But, at some point, I stopped enjoying our time together. I still had fun, but part of what was once there, or what, from today's perspective, I imagined was there and because of the nature of memory can't realistically deny or endorse the existence of something peculiar that drove my desire to be together, no longer seemed to. There was no tangible, visceral reason for seeing her, or maybe it was the impending sense of my relocation out-of-state that fueled a subconscious feeling that I should diminish the effects of our separation by blocking her out, but whatever the purpose, be it natural inclination or cosmic will or random, chaotic apathy, I no longer needed to be her boyfriend.

I was sorry, all the time sorry for feeling that way and tried to stay with her as long as I possibly could. Eventually the sorrow became cynical bitterness, a sort of redirected self-hate. I didn't hate her, couldn't possibly hate her in the least. That's the wrong word. More like a redirected self-disparagement. I became less enthralled with her person and began looking elsewhere for possible mates, having lost the sense of togetherness in exchange for a gained temptation to be experiencing the same scenarios with someone else.

At the end of the year was the final dance, the BIG ONE, call it, that she'd been waiting for and I'd been anxiously attempting to dissuade her from. There was a depression in my mind in those years, and still is, that had managed to turn me into a recluse. After a while there was little that I left the house for. A few choice people would come over sometimes and we'd watch movies, mostly Japanese animation, which in those days we still called Japanimation because nobody really knew anything about anime or manga, and sit around and be bored and generally express malaise with respect to our life-situations. When the dance came around Mindy was fully prepared to go and have a great time. She'd bought a new dress, something costly, and we were going to go there and dance and be a couple and be awesome and everything else that goes along with that. And then, in what I would term today a purely misogynistic thrust, I refused to go to the dance, stating my need to pack my things and the upcoming move as reasoning for not going. Mindy, (I told this to her over the telephone due to cowardice and hermitude), cried lightly at the other end of the line. I remember being pissed off, literally pissed, though without the sense of direction to understand why and where it was coming from.

Thereafter I'd adopted the air of an asshole for a little while, probably a few years too many. That was the first of it, though. There was the first thing I'd done to another person which really hurt them and, remorseless as I thought I was back then, it cause injury to my psyche, to my self. Misguided anger turned hateful and bitter leaves the imprint of regret. Which, finally, I understand.

I don't have anything left of that relationship except my memory, deluded and drained as it is, and I sometime want to try and find out where she is and offer her the apology she probably deserves. Maybe she's a reader and she'll find this post.

No time for delusional repose, however. There are things not related to indulgent nostalgia or self-effacing examination that need to be done. Time to return to the world of the now, whatever that is.

Brain Bubbles - 8/30/2004

2004-08-30T18:28:00.000-07:00

"Shit, man, he's got Brain Bubbles!"

Fucking paranoid cops put god-damned recording devices in our heads to make sure we weren't shooting up on weekends. You know, like, for our own good. Only side affect is brain bubbles. Sometimes the recorder fucks up and works like a bad capacitor, waiting for too long before releasing the built up electricity into the cortex. Usually results in seizures and an overwhelmed prefrontal lobe, which means you can only think inside of these information bubbles, as if everything around you becomes liquid, malleable and spherical. Kind of like your brain's assaulted from every angle by a hundred different information loops.

If the brain bubble is really bad you can burn out your lobe and get a state-authorized electro-shock lobotomy because some asshole doesn't properly understand the process of thought-screening and builds a bad processor.

In any case it was HIGH time we took E1467, (our prisoner numbers have become ironic nicknames), to the hospital for an overhaul of his neurological hardware. Unfortunately, despite the fact that his bubbles were caused by state-mandated wiring, the system in place won't cover it because we're criminals and anti-humans. And it's nearly impossible to work while jailed in the halfway house. The only places that will hire cons are factories that run all night and none of us are allowed to leave after dark. Nobody here in the halfway house has much dough around.

We we're on the way to the hospital, my fingers pressed hard into my roommates temples while his head throbbed visibly due to informational overloading. He mumbled things at me, circular things, whatever he'd been thinking of before the neurotrace shorted out. I can't believe what's happening to me, frankly. I used to be a junkie. Everyone in my house used to be a junkie, except one guy whose addiction was booze and ko-cah-ee-nay. And for our crime, hurting ourselves with occasional substance abuse and the possibility of injuring the sensibilities of their emotional standing because of our near-death experiences and lack of nice jobs or, in cases like my own, occasionally lacking homes.

There seems to be less of an interest in the people who run these programs in aiding people with perceived problems and more like a societally condoned aggressive hatred for any of us junkies and smokers and drinkers. And why? Why fucking tell me that I can't use my systems of experience to artificially raise my dopamine levels to staggeringly high and self-induce an elation I couldn't possibly achieve otherwise? From what I can tell it's basically the envy of the middle class pushing legislation on us. They have their responsibilities; their job, their kids, their wife. I have none. And they covet my lack of responsibility. They want more than anything to have my station in life, where I spend my days in blissful nothingness.

I mean, really, is it worth my buddy's frontal lobe to make sure that we can't take time out of our day to find something those people feel they can't have without horribly ruining their "grand plan?" What fucking son's of bitches they must be to desire my punishment for their own ineffectual seeking.

We're in the hospital. There are cops on us, immediately arresting myself and the other functioning person in our party. The frantically gyrating body of my roommate is strapped down roughly by police officers who believe they're literally holding together pieces of reality with their handcuffs and non-lethal means of stopping opposition forces. These are the mindsets of the men and women allowed to exert pressure and restore "order" to the world around us. They're neurotic in the extreme, maniacal killers waiting for the time to leap up and put things back together for the rest of us.

And that's how we were escorted back to our "home," where we are required to pay from our pockets for a place that we'd probably never otherwise attempt to live in, a place nearly condemned the year before that would have been a parking lot had the state not stepped in and purchased this cheapest lot available to stick social boils like ourselves. I'm expecting to receive a ticket sometime next week for leaving the house after dark, but I might be able to fight it in court if the judge isn't too much of an asshole. So, okay, I'll tell him. I'm willing to conform to your standards for a little while, until such time as I'm no longer shackled to the judicial system currently in place. And then, judge, then I'm going to hate you so much you'll be lucky if you don't find me in your house with a handgun. Because in an equal world, in an equal system, if you can take part of my life, I can take part of yours.

Or, maybe I'll just pay it. I don't know.

September Syndrome - 8/28/2004

2004-08-28T17:31:00.000-07:00

September Syndrome was born with Aphrodite's Disease, a condition occurring once in every billion people. September was born too beautiful to live. Aphrodite's Disease, the delivering doctor informed the parents of the girl, had a 100% mortality rate. No girl had ever survived beyond the age of 16 in the entire recorded history of the malady, going back to the time of Hippocrates. Everyone born with Aphrodite's Disease carried an apple-shaped birthmark that glowed gold when exposed to sunlight. September's was on her back near the right shoulder blade.

Faced with the facts of the near-certain death of their only child, the parents decided to hide September away until they could figure out a solution or a cure for the disease. They locked September in the basement, keeping her down there with all of her favorite toys and sewing special clothes that veiled her face from onlookers who would surely want to steal the girl for themselves. When September was two years old the parents had decided the only way to allow the girl a life near normalcy would be to have her surgically disfigured. They searched around the city, seeking a doctor whose skills could leave the girl's beauty damaged but still within the boundaries of generally expected human features.

They discovered a doctor named Sigwell and had him over to the house where he could try working on the girls, replacing parts of her face with new, lesser pieces. As he lifted the veil to begin structuring the new face he was stalled, black pencil in hand, no longer prepared to face the toddler. She shone up at him and Sigwell was forced to resign after the parents finally distracted him from their daughter by closing the veil and shaking him back to reality. This girl was too beautiful to allow him to disfigure her, no matter what the cost.

The parents widened the search, extending the offer to doctors statewide, then nationwide, then worldwide. They sold everything they owned; pawned away their valuables in order to pay for flights and operations. Every time a doctor saw the girl, though, the reaction was the same. Each one regarded the child as too fine a specimen of man to horribly scar over.

When September was five years old the parents gave up on the search for a surgeon, their money dwindling and the operation apparently impossible to perform. In lieu of offering September a normal face they instead gave her everything she wanted. Any object, any toy September liked they would provide. The only condition was that September never reveal her face and never leave the house. The girl primarily resided in the segregated basement that her father had turned into a virtual playground.

At the end of September's tenth year the family discovered a blind surgeon from Mexico who called himself Juan Carlos Bergman. He'd been discharged from hospital duties after losing his sight but continued to operate successfully south of the Rio Grande. As a last hope, the parents decided to hire him. He came to the house in Rockport, Connecticut, and was led into the basement where an operating room had stood for several years, since the earliest attempts at disfigurement. As he knelt over the girl, the veil raised up, and felt her soft face with his thin, nimble fingers he began to weep.

"I can't do this. Not to this girl. You mustn't allow it to happen," he told the parents. He turned to them and sobbed out an explanation. "I can see this girl. I can see her face so clearly, pure and unblemished. Any damage to this girl would be grievous beyond reproach." Juan Carlos Bergman returned to Mexico that evening.

September's father reached his breaking point and decided to do the work himself. He went down the stairs and violently attacked his daughter, throwing his brick fists into September's veiled face. He hit her again and again, trying to damage her and destroy the disease and eradicate the surety of her imminent demise. His wife pulled him away and up the stairs, the father's eyes jammed shut, his lungs filled with air that was released in brash, staccato rhythms of screaming and profuse crying.

After that there wasn't much that the parents attempted to do for their daughter. They'd crossed a line with September, who became distanced and unwilling to forgive. She'd spent her entire life in the house, in the basement or under cover night and dark clothing. After being beaten but not cured once she refused contact with her parents. Still, the parents attempted to attract a person who could administer relief from the disease. They found a German who would eat part of September's face if she signed a waiver. There was a Tanzanian witch doctor that could cure her with ritual scarring if afterwards the girl became his wife. An Antarctic mission offered to take the girl to the bottom of the Earth for confinement and scientific education, for a fee.

There were no options worth pursuing, no procedures that seemed worth the price paid.

And so September remained locked inextricably in the basement until her sixteenth birthday. The morning of her birthday September's parents went into the basement, expecting to find her awaiting their arrival. Things hadn't been the same for so long, but they held out hope that their daughter would not only forgive them for trying to have her face destroyed, but reach an understanding that they were trying to do what was best for her. They found, instead of a happy, youthful girl, the corpse of a teenaged suicide, their daughter crouched against the wall on her knees, arms pulled apart at the veins and arteries. Blood circled her body; dried, rust-colored blood.

The parents fell and wept, cradled the body of their once-beautiful daughter, pulled close her cold body and felt tears cover their face and pool on the blood-caked concrete. They began to understand what they'd done to their daughter. They could see, in the wake of her furied escape into the unknown, that their push to protect merely stagnated and infuriated their child. The golden-glowing apple impressed upon the flesh of her right shoulder blade had disappeared, leaving pink, raised flesh behind.

Echelon - 8/9/2004

2004-08-09T22:23:00.000-07:00

His name was Amillion and he had Bette Davis's eyes stuffed with pinkish goo and floating up and down between the glass walls of his aquarium. A blue and silver Beta would occasionally attack the bobbing spheres with the ferocity its ancestors may once have seen evinced by a samurai.

Amillion had a girlfriend whose real name was Ava but required all those around her to use the pseudonym she took when she first became a journalist for the Tallahassee High X-Treme Newspaper: Julie. Julie couldn't have children because she was born without a uterus, which filled her with sadness when she was young. As she matured, however, Julie began to consider the repercussions of childbearing and, though still sometimes grieved at her condition, developed a rationale that allowed her to adequately deal.

Had Julie been able to have children, she was once told by a magician who said he peered across a dimensional gap and see what could be, the child would be a boy and his name would by Sky. Sky would grow up to be a sociopath who was unable to retain relationships of any kind except with prostitutes and amputees - whom he found fascinating - leading him into a despair that took years of self-therapy to climb out of. His story would inspire others and his books-on-tape would make him a millionaire at age forty-three.

Later Julie watched the bobbing eyeballs and thought about the magician and fell into a deep trance, staring forward into a translucent reflection as someone else's soul-windows drifted over the vague notion of Julie. The magician stared back, elucidating a situation unraveling somewhere else and inside Julie the scenario became the natural course her mind should take her, a sense of knowing the self by (creating?) seeing the things imaginary realities had to offer.

Inside the other world was Lucille, Pagan mistress and worshipper of the Dark God Pan-Saturn, some version of an archetype inside Julie's mind that became the reality of another place. Lucille craved stimulation and earned it through her church, the Divine Throne of Being Humans, in the form of an unstoppable orgy already surmised by others in other places and times. Lucille tired of her cravings and eventually left her place at the right hand of the invention called her deity and decided to pursue lesser goals, specifically enlightenment.

Julie never saw whether or not Lucille achieved her goal because Amillion had returned from the grocery store with four cans of Spaghetti-Os and a carton of milk, which spilled after being set precariously near the edge of the slate-gray kitchen counter. Inside the milk thrived millions of microscopic organisms, each of which contained a reality unto itself, Julie staring down and watching from above.

Amillion wondered why his girlfriend was lapping at the milk draining onto the kitchen floor. Then he offered to clean up the mess and she said to him without turning to meet his stare that there were worlds she needed to drink in and ideas would flow from them like tree sap and envelope her body and turn her into someone who'd completely shed herself once or twice over. Amillion nodded and left her to the task while pulling together the midnight meal-in-a-can.

Resentment - 8/8/2004

2004-08-08T12:57:00.000-07:00

Schuman stared at the river, his pupils following the clear, rolling stream as it coursed over rocks and between shores, dragging nature's detritus away towards the ocean somewhere off in the distance over the horizon line. He'd come up to the river to drown himself but, standing over it and watching, listening to the bubbling rush of glacier water, he could enter into a state of introspection and wasn't sure if he would be capable of murdering his own consciousness. At least not through drowning.

He'd staked out the river earlier in the week, researching the temperatures at which the body began to react through hypothermia and sleep, hoping that the river would be cold enough to kill him without requiring his specific intervention. He knew there was no way he could drown himself unless he was dead tired from swimming or totally knocked out. This part of the river maintained a perfect temperature, 38 degrees Fahrenheit, the rough temp of the glacier buried inside the mountain from which the river swam. It would take ten to fifteen minutes and then he'd be gone, headfirst into the lull of sweet, numb sleep.

Killing someone had brought Schuman to his position. A random interaction with someone he didn't know that became a life-or-death scenario after Schuman brandished the .45 Desert Eagle he kept on his person at all times. He lifted his shirt to the man in the bar, staccato-beat hip-hop resounding between the walls and across the floor and ceiling, after the man referred to Schuman as a 'little bitch he'd rape later.' And the man lunged at him, taking a swing that missed Schuman's face but still send him staggering back two steps, unable to put up his hands fast enough to block the next punch. Glass broke and the entire bar turned into a fight, chairs rising over the screaming and anger and coming down, exploding and hurling shrapnel. Schuman felt himself get cut with a bottle and pulled out his gun, fired three shots, looked where he was shooting and fired another one, killing one man and wounding two more. He'd never fired the weapon before that.

Shortly thereafter he found himself the subject of a manhunt, police seeking a drawing of a man whom vaguely resembled Schuman, who escaped to the apartment of one of his friends and had decided to hide out until such time as the police stopped searching for him. His friend didn't think it would take very long. They were calling it a possible gang fight, and police didn't care whether or not they found poor gangsters and sent them to jail. They expected said poor gangsters to get shot or die of a drug overdose or AIDS or something. And it didn't bother the police or very many in the community at all.

The family of the dead man went on local television and pleaded for the criminal to turn himself in. Schuman saw them, watched them, felt sorry for them. In his mind he'd altered himself. He took another persons existence and refused to allow its continuance. In one sense he'd made himself immensely more powerful. His indoctrination wouldn't allow that, though. As much as he postured, forcing those around him to acknowledge his absolute baditude, he couldn't help but feel like he'd committed a wrong that required his punishment. Some aspect of his self was forcing him to hate what he'd done.

And he decided to go to the river where he'd been many times before; camping, hiking, hanging out and drinking with his buddies in high school, senior-skip-day when all the kids went up there and brought music and kegs and got totally plowed before driving back down the curving, windy roads to the town below. He'd been in the water before, knew how cold it was, knew a little bit about the effects of near-freezing temperatures.

Lifting up his shirtfront, Schuman pulled the Desert Eagle from his waistband, sliding the barrel up along his stomach and slowly raising it to the bottom of his chin. He pulled the trigger, listened to the click of the empty barrel and smiled. He started laughing and sobbing, tossed the gun into the water and dove in after it. He pushed himself to the bottom of the river, holding on to tree roots jutting out of the muddy banks, trying to hold his breath until he could hold it no longer. Schuman popped up through the maelstrom at the surface of the river and saw the red and blue flashing lights, sirens piercing the serenity of the river spot. There were policemen with guns drawn and pointed in his direction. They were yelling something at him.

Schuman didn't hear it. His ears were filled with icy water, the glacial flow streaming over his figure, leadening his clothes and weighing him down. He felt better now, though, about everything that had happened. And when he let go of the branch to give himself over to the river, police running up the bank in order to try and catch him, he felt himself begin drifting up, away from the body, into the aether.

My Face Through a Filthy Mirror - 8/6/2004

2004-08-06T22:56:00.000-07:00

When Michael pulled at his flesh it lifted away easily from the rusted alloy mesh criss-crossing over the muscle. He stared down at his forearm, where an incessant itch had turned to bleeding turned to scraping turned to severing and ripping, showing him what was there, growing inside his arms. His memory pulled a montage from nowhere, revealing the steps taken by Michael some years earlier to implant the chain-linked mesh. Originally it was intended to modify Michael into a cyberpunk near-human entity, the ultimate urban being, but instead the world began functioning differently, more fluidly, giving us iMac G4 processors and infinitely more and more complex cellular telephones.

Michael had planned on becoming a 1980's hipster-bot, molding his exterior form into something spawned from Neuromancer and glam-rock, equal parts Japanese technology and Sunset Strip badass mentality. This, of course, was ten years after most of that had sunk below the horizon and been replaced with AOL and CompuServe and NWA. Despite the obvious course-change in cultural focus, at least sub-cultural focus, Michael went ahead and stripped back a portion of his skin and laid in a subdermal structure that offered nothing in the way of pragmatic excuse. It was simply there, totally functionless, except in Michael's wildest dream where it slowly altered the genetic structure of the body and literally made him trans-human.

Now, Michael sat cross-legged inside a dark basement, the smells of mildew and cobwebs suffusing the scent of stale air with their own particular odor, peeling himself away like an onion. The transplant was successfully pulled off without medical assistance the first time around, and Michael assumed it would be the same now, though he kept a first-aid kit nearby just in case. His fingertips brushed over the intertwined wire, feeling the coolness of the basement's natural temperature breezily waft over the exposed parts of his arm. And then he gripped and pulled, yanking the mesh away, finding that muscular tissue had enveloped it in places, and screamed out in agony.

Upstairs I stopped typing briefly to listen to Michael's groans. He continued to sob down there, clearly audible, the sounds passing through unused heating ducts and traveling up, reverberating against my inner ear and alerting my brain to the cacophony of noises emitted by humans when they hurt. I smiled, however, thinking about the creation in the basement, My Michael, the child of reminiscing and Pabst Blue Ribbon, finally achieving his personal goal, a goal I gave him, of fusing with something inexplicably real; unrelentingly vibrant.

Then I continued writing, spawning something else, something besides Michael and left him to his own moods, shifting perspective inward and seeking to pull something newer out, something intentionally different and less reactionary. I left him off to pursue the strands of subconscious desire rotating like velvet strands of semen somewhere off in Ideaspace.

War Story - 8/1/2004

2004-08-01T21:32:00.000-07:00

"Stick a concussion grenade down his throat and carpet-bomb those Jap fuckers!" It was my Captain's voice, crackling across the sky in radio frequency, offering his advice on how to handle the situation unfolding behind the cockpit. Somewhere back there was a lunatic who'd stowed away on the plane expecting that we'd be close enough to sea level that he could make a jump for it with half of a parachute made out of Navy ordinance bedspreads. Apparently he'd been wanting to visit Japan for a long time and this was the right time to do so.

The lunatic jumped into the cabin from wherever he'd been hiding and crowed at the Land of the Rising Sun. My co-pilot pulled his .38 and ducked behind the cabin to find out what was going on. The last thing that happened was the retort from a pistol and the reverberating squeal of the bullet as it ripped left and right across the fuselage, banging against steel and changing it's course. I think it probably found a thin part of the plane and flew out.

Then came the scream that we had a stowaway and my Captain on the horn and now I'm diving lower over the land and watching the wooden city come into my viewfinder. Another few minutes and I'll be in range to drop the payload of fire bombs down the throat of Edo and pull up, up and away to the safety of clouds and the point in the atmosphere at which flak guns stop being effective.

A series of dogfights are taking place around me, a couple of Zeroes pulling up and out as a squadron of American planes zooms up on my tailwind. Another shot goes off behind me and my co-pilot comes into the cockpit, his hand pulled tight over a gaping, slashed wound in his stomach.

"He had a knife," he tells me. "But I have gun."

He smiles weakly and lifts his .38 up, showing me the still-smoking barrel and pointing it across the nose of our bomber, making a child-like shooting noise nowhere near the actual sound of a discharged personal firearm. I shake my head and he leans back, groaning and holding his stomach in. I notice the blood is dripping from his jacket and pooling underneath his chair. He probably won't live through this.

I come onto the drop and smash the button, listening to my Captain order a status report on the stowaway. I don't hear the grinding of the metal doors as they open up because I'm too busy focusing my attention on the knife blade stuck between the bones in my wrist. It's gone all the way through. I'm screaming, I think, and pulling back on the level to drop the bombs. The lunatic runs back into the fuselage and I can see the makeshift parachute in his arms, folded in a bundle like dirty laundry. He leaps down and lets go of the parachute, following the pathway of my fire bombs into the black smoke where they've exploded, igniting the wooden city.

I wipe a thick strand of salty tears from the right side of my face and attempt to wake up my copilot, who's been injured far worse, before realizing he'd gone into shock and probably deep, deep sleep. I turned the plane around and headed back for base.

Another Day Another Dolly - 7/31/2004

2004-07-31T00:35:00.000-07:00

Her name was Susan and I'd had enough of her shit. Days and nights would go by, Susan's fucking voice richocheting around the inside of my skull, orbiting my prefrontal cortex and begging, fucking begging my amygdala to attach violent, angry emotional impulses to it. Every instant together was another reason for her to scream about something she'd percieved in our relationship that required fixing, preferably through my humility and bending to her will. I cracked a PBR and swallowed half of it and tossed the remainder at the wall behind her before verbalizing the internal frustration she'd had me feeling.

Alexis was hot. Model hot. Bend over with a g-string and a short, tight mini and automatically receive a few hundred dollars hot. That, however, was the problem. A million other guys wanted to fuck her and she wasn't very happy having just me. I remember coming home to an open door and the sounds of stranger-sex, a favored past-time of my blonde/blue-eyed ex. I didn't react that time. Just closed the door with a note attached that laid out my plans to obtain my belongings the next morning.

And, of course, Cassandra, or Sandy, or Cass or Cassi or Marilyn or any other new name she'd decided to go by that week. Cassandra was a Queen, the very definition of regal. She had a sharp nose and high cheekbones and always asked me about my feelings after we'd had sex. She was a cocaine addict and that didn't work for me, as I'd spent several years already hooked and wasn't particularly interested in reinvigorating my faith in self-abuse. We would probably have been together for alot longer but, as she articulated, we were in different places in our lives. I had to agree. I kind of miss her, though.

Mary was too much like my mother to really enjoy time with her. We'd encountered each other on an internet dating service. She was literate, extremely so, and used words like paphair instead of erotic and pulchritude instead of beauty. Our breviloquent relationship ended after she evinced incessant maternal resonance, emulating a person that I'd moved away from for a god damn reason.

The girl I'd fucked with the most unfortunate name must have been Pearl. I know I'd hate to carry the burden of a moniker that was simultaneously a near-worthless precious gem, if a pearl even falls into the gem category. I met her one night through a mutual friend and we seemed to hit it off. I drove her home and she came in and both of us ate eggs and toast with marmalade jam in the morning. I don't know why, but Pearl had several Denny's-style packages of marmalade jelly in her purse. I was too blitzed to remember much else about the night.

I vomited on Pam, Benni and Erica, but not all at the same time. Houston I banged as a birthday present from some friends when we visited Vegas and took a side trip out to the Bunny Ranch or whatever it was called, and Nikki was the girl that most seemed elated when I whipped out my cock in front of her for the first time.

I'm currently dating an Ashley who spells her name with an -eigh instead of the way I imagine it, which kind of bothers me. I'm fairly sure I can get past that, though. It's the tendency to kick my dog when he tries to sniff her ass that I'm not sure's gonna fly.

Anybody Actually Out There...?

2004-07-26T14:18:00.000-07:00

I'm doing an experiement to see who actually looks at this page. Leave a comment or send an e-mail. No, really, c'mon. Just leave one. It doesn't have to be witty, but feel free to try.

Also, ignore any place where the word "it's" is used to convey possession instead of "its," which is what William Strunk and EB White say to use but which is contradictory to what I was taught in school. So it could go either way.

My New Creation Myth - 7/26/2004

2004-07-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

Gestalt looked to his left, scanning the ground where Pythagoras was sketching images and symbols in the dirt absentmindedly, his eyes glossed and directed towards the horizon. He would enter into trance states fairly often, much more often than he used to, Gestalt thought to himself. Gestalt wondered out loud what it was Pythagoras was experiencing.

The thinned hair on the old man's head shifted slightly in the wind, the hunched figure raising to look up at his compatriot. "I see numbers and shapes," Pythagoras said.

"Oh," Gestalt replied. "What kinds of numbers and shapes?"

"The kind you're created from."

"Oh," he said again. He looked around, mentally surveying the world around him. There were vague differences in the world, differences that he'd begun noticing more often. There was the day he learned of the horizon, and the time he noticed that water was at the edge of the land and sometimes cutting through it. Today, he'd seen something else but not bothered to ask Pythagoras about it.

"What's wrong, Gestalt?" Pythagoras asked him, smiling. "Oh, I know. You're probably seeing something new again, right? Yes, of course you are."

Gestalt nodded. "The land comprises multitudes of shapes. There are different things coming up from the land."

"Those are trees and shrubs, both of which fall into the macro-category of plants. From those things come other things, as well. Fruits and vegetables, leaves, flowers. The plant itself is mostly just root and stem or branch," Pythagoras told him, standing up and brushing the dirt form himself. His sandals crunched sand as he turned to the shoreline and swept his arm outward. "You remember this, don't you?"

"The sea."

"Correct," he said.

"What are the symbols and shapes from which I'm created?" Gestalt asked. Pythagoras glanced down to where he'd been drawing in the ground. Much of it was covered up with other drawings, the stacked images having no delineation.

"You'll have to discover that by yourself," he informed his friend. "But you will. I created you knowing you'd find out eventually."

Years passed, Gestalt learning to live with the world, discerning it's features and allowing them to become separate parts of a greater whole, uncovering everything from mountains and clouds to particles of carbon and strange quarks. Most of his knowledge came from sitting in the trance Pythagoras had taught him. This was the method by which he could go inside himself and reshape what his external experience had shown him. Inside he could see the horizon, close in on it, and feel the reality of his knowledge spin the metaworld in time with his chasing, bringing him new things but never leaving the gap between Gestalt and the horizon to close.

Civilization swung in different ways, Gestalt watching it turn from Greek to Roman to Catholic to Italian to European to Clydean and further, eventually surpassing him completely, leaving his body behind when it left for good. He found himself virtually indestructible, the fiery winds at the end of the planet having no effect on him. Between Olympus and Hades he wandered, occasionally drifting even into those zones once declared sacred, searching for life and not finding it.

He started to see himself in new ways, though. He understood his biological parts, could see them easily in his mind, but this was new. The body he'd always depended on could break down into other parts, not just biological parts, symbols and numbers, twelve compartments in which It was stored. During his meditations he looked at himself, peered inside and saw his fleshless form writhing sensuously, stripped of it's physical incarnation and barely concealing It; the Creator.

Gestalt uncovered the stars living in his Self one day, and decided to let them go. He opened his eyes and stood up, letting the heat burn out his senses from the inside, removing his experiential being and leaving the body. The twelve stars that arose began sketching out symbols over the twelve points in the geodesic sphere, stacking the pieces of It and disintegrating. The symbols pulsed effulgent, glimmering questions at Gestalt, who was so attached to the world that he could feel the questions and manage to choke answers out, give the numbers to the dome stars and collapse when he was finished.

From his body emerged life, five women from one hand and five men from the other, the two arms becoming the parent units. His legs and feet performed similar functions, raising new into another part of the world. His body puffed up and exploded, splayed parts scattering over the sky and skimming across the horizon, cleansing and renewing. From his hermaphroditic genitalia sprung clean waters and silt, flowing like the Nile and spreading vegetation. The earth opened and swallowed his head, situating it at the center, where he continues to speak with the new people, his knowledge drifting upwards and laying like silent mysteries for intrepid discoverers to find and unravel.

The Lorax - 7/21/2004

2004-07-21T14:12:00.000-07:00

We'd placed every member of our smart sensor network. The grid ran from the undergrowth to the treetops, a sensor every fifteen feet in every direction for a quarter mile square. The habitat was now being monitored some nineteen thousand eight hundred nickel-sized computers that could sit static, asleep, until something happened in it's part of the habitat and the computer could infra-red the information across the synthetic neuronal gap and, eventually, transmit the status of the entire habitat to MOS, the central system governing the web of monitors that rested in a hard-shell case bolted to the ground with twelve-foot long plastic alloy cylinders, at which time MOS could bounce it's signal off a satellite to the Oxford Environmental Study Coalition, the group of students and scientists controlling the entire system.

I started working with the Oxford students in 2000, when I was working on the study of Redwoods. There was an environmental scientist who taught at the school whose studies had originally inspired me to start working with the redwoods in the first place. He was already working closely with some of the top people in the field and invited me to come work with him. I called a buddy of mine from college whose work in electronics had provided the possibility of the sensor network. I brought him with me to the Oxford group and we worked to set up a habitat study with a minimal amount of interference form human and human creations. Four years later, we'd had the funding and the study was underway.

For weeks little happened out of the ordinary. The environmental conditions were regular, the interaction between flora and fauna compulsory. Then we hit the full moon. At first the signals were blasting new messages every few seconds. The trees themselves were leaking fluids, perspiring in the moonlight, and the ground shook slightly, each of the soil monitors reporting different levels of action. Within every fifteen feet the forest was changing, altering itself somehow. We'd rigged several visual monitors that we were trying to avoid utilizing due to cost of power to our system, but we switched them on to get visual versions of the metamorphosing forest.

The images stunned us. Color sprung from trees, beams of fluorescent lights wrapped in fog, something streaming from cracks in the bark, liquid creeping around the trunks. The next series we got was five minutes later. The monitors on the trees had stopped working. The ground monitors stopped sending earthquake messages, but they seemed to be working correctly. The pictures showed us a grouping of humanoids covered in leaves collected around the MOS. We only got two more pictures, but it was clear that the forest had destroyed the MOS and possibly the other monitors.

The Oxford group turned its information into the Intelligence Service, both MI and American agencies. Most of us were sworn to secrecy under penalty of imprisonment. Others, myself included, are now on the payroll at the FBI's Forest Consciousness Task Force. With any luck they'll be friendly. Doesn't look like it so far.

Academy Shmademy - 7/15/2004

2004-07-15T16:18:00.000-07:00

"Watch the Academy Awards in Style!"

There was a sign begging for my attention, announcing proudly those same words in ostentatious pink and yellow electrified gas, a train of intermittently flashing light bulbs rolling clockwise, then reversing, around the admittedly ugly display. I wouldn't have imagined that the pull of celebrity gatherings had a magnificent amount of attraction for the homeless population but reality itself was working to prove that theory wrong.

A shambling line of tattered Value Village clothing mounds, presumably cradling human beings in semi-warmth, moved slowly to the sign-up table in order to acquire prominent placing at the Pistis Mission Banquet Center's annual Academy Awards Gala and free-soup convention, at which point the Hollywood auto-appreciation machine would present a variety of awards televised for, among millions of others, an assembly of panhandlers, hungry down-on-their-lucks, sign-wielding vagrants and an assortment of other societal accidents or unwanteds.

I could only presume that the mindset was either self-preservation, i.e. going to a warm place for a few hours to eat gourmet soups, (commonly understood to mean Wolfgang Puck brand), or total boredom with the generally-speaking low-key day-to-day living of your common houseless individual. I've never been satisfied with assumption, however, and decided to ask a few questions.

The first few people I talked to sounded remarkably similar, both expressing clearly that the Academy Awards were the only place where they could walk into the lives of the ascended Americans, those idols of the Silver Screen, whose H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D existences so defied their own that they obtained some measure of suspension regarding their own miserable experiences. Much the same way that audiences in theaters reacted to the stars while portraying someone on the celluloid side of things.

They, of course, expressed this view with something akin to, "Well, I love Ben Affleck... And my favorite director of all time is Steven Spielberg, damn ET was good, and, well, I just like to see them get what they deserve."

This astonished me, being a generally empathetic individual with nothing close to sympathy for the people honored with congratulatory statues for turning a profit of sixty million dollars on one film, a profit that will probably be kept offshore to avoid paying taxes and the used at will to refurbish a home that already overcompensates for deep personality and other psychological distress issues. And here were the homeless, waiting in the cold for a chance to glimpse the celebrity at his or her finest, accepting a golden trophy and sobbing, trudging through the list of people who helped them to achieve this moment, tossing away all regard for the cinematic experience and burdening themselves with the responsibility of carrying some part of the film-world on their wide, Atlas's shoulders.

I wasn't particularly fond of the Awards or those involved. And this experience didn't exactly bring me closer to them. It just makes me wonder at the manner in which we attempt to experience life, or perhaps livelihood, and this culturally understood notion that our own lives are droll, uninteresting slabs of drab concrete to be used primarily for stepping up to a small hole in the celebrity fence for a quick view of someone else's intensity.

Anyway, nevermind. It's my own neurosis, I guess. ET was a pretty good movie.

A Simple Explanation

2004-07-12T14:24:00.000-07:00

Been on vacation for a couple of weeks without access to a computer. To make up for it, here's today's edition and two make-up shorts. There's a fairy tale, a sci-fi (sort of) downer and another one that, I guess, might be called politically invigorated. Savor and enjoy.

Interference - 7/12/2004

2004-07-12T14:22:00.000-07:00

Fuck this shit!

It was John's motto, his ever-lasting tribute to the entire Earth, the phrase-repititious contumeliously pockmarking his speech pattern, regardless of what John was talking about. And, not surprisingly, the phrase uttered at the point where he discovered himself forced into the custody of National Security Forces as an enemy combatant.

He should have realized something was wrong when Republican states stopped carrying Doonesbury, the comic strip which, one Memorial Sunday, obliquely criticised the needless injury and death suffered by soldiers in Iraq. It was, of course, completely in step with memorial, honoring the fallen by evincing pictorially the point-of-view that a soldier might take in a scenario where injury rather than death occurs. Then, soon, other things began falling away; anything having anything to do with the war. People were soon declared enemy combatants, (at least those whose disappearance wouldn't arouse major suspicion), and jailed under the pretense that declaring yourself opposed to the administration's will was tantamount to declaring yourself an enemy of the President.

John was a sometime writer for a local zine called X Patriot, a milita mag shipped over the US to various encampments and widely hailed as fantastic propaganda. He wrote an article entitled "The War in Iraq and It's Far-Reaching Consequences" wherein he supplied random information about older, similar wars, comparing it to Vietnam and giving various freedom-oriented skirmishes in American history and the resulting "clusterfucks," as John put it, as reasons why the current war was harmful to the continued security of the nation.

Several day later John was arrested. There was media coverage, of course, but he was painted a lunatic militia-member on par with Tim McVeigh, whom he probably had conact with anyway, right? And John, finding no recourse in his vocabularly to describe what was being done to him, declared, loudly, to the assembled onlookers and the media with it's fence of satellite-empowered vans: "Fuck this shit!"

TSS - 7/12/2004

2004-07-12T14:20:00.000-07:00

I used to spend nights sleeping next to my wife, concern warping my face, wondering what the magic required to cause impregnation was and how to use it. We'd spent eight months in the process of attempting pregnancy, our six-year marriage hinging now on my ability to properly cause my semen to penetrate one of her eggs and begin the process of cellular mitosis. Clearly, what we were doing was somehow flawed; our execution somehow wrong.

We went to a fertility clinic. Dr. Yuri Cosmogrov, the specialist assigned to us, spoke at length about our relationship and our method. In the end, it wasn't what we were doing that was wrong and Cosmogrov required a sample of my sperm, which, after a short, (well, not short short), stint in the on-site masturbatorium, a place brimming with pornographic material ranging from "Tight Twat" to "Maxed Out Midget Mamas," I was able to provide him with one. Cosmogrov informed us that analysis would take at least two weeks.

In the meantime, we went back to our usual performance, the twice daily routine of variously positioned coitus, each time, in my imagination at least, a failed attempt at reaching the goal of propagating my genetic code for the generation to follow. After three days of that, my wife became ill. She woke up vomiting all over our bed and ran for the bathroom, where two hours of intensive gastric problems erupted from her body. I listened from outside the door and offered advice that was adamantly shot down. She finally came out, sobbing and hysterical, blood running from her nose and mouth.

We went to the hospital, where she was, after the obligatory waiting and filling out of extensive forms, admitted to the emergency room and given a series of tests. The bleeding had stopped while we were sitting and watching cartoons, trying not to stare at the child with a grievous headwound across the room crying. During this time the doctor couldn't discover anything specific but had determined that, from the blood test, my wife had become pregnant. Several weeks, actually. I remembered the money shelled out at the fertility clinic and wondered why we hadn't bothered to have my wife tested.

After visiting her personal physician the next day and taking a trip to the ob-gyn, everything was determined to be normal. Within the next three days, though, the condition returned, with the bleeding and this time with fainting, and the paramedics were called on a final occasion for resuscitation. One of them remarked that it appeared as if a possible case of cancer. We were stunned. We were saddened, and stunned, and closed out the night trying to think of something else but eventually flipping through the channels to Love Story and sobbing ourselves into sleep on the futon.

Shortly thereafter, the results from the fertility clinic came back. My semen was toxic. Very, very toxic. The doctor recommended that I come in for a series of tests and that my wife and I stop having sex. There were extreme levels of known cancer-causing agents in my come. I told him about my wife and our baby. Cosmogrov gave us his condolences and asked that we should abort it, as there's cancer built into the genetic code of my semen and that the baby would surely be born with the disease. We'd made that decision, however, when it was determined that the cancer was cervical, already spread up through to her stomach, and she wouldn't be taking any chemotherapy so as to avoid injuring the growth that we tried so hard for so long to create. Cosmogrov sighed and bid us farewell and good luck and best wishes and "I'm sorry." I mimicked his response somewhat and hung up the telephone.

Six months later: We've got results, finally, regarding the status of our child based on testing amniotic fluid, various full-body radioactive scans, blood tests and sonograms. There was evidence that the child was a mutant of some kind, a nuclear-age fear given substance. As for myself, I had some mystic immunity to the whole thing. Apparently my bloodline had partaken so deeply of the carcinogenic, radioactive, processed fast-food world that we'd become carriers, as would be my child, assuming that my child was born resembling living human beings. The doctors weren't quite sure about that, either. Sonograms showed regularity of form. Expected tumors numbered from fifteen to several hundred.

My wife hadn't taken any of this well. Neither of us had. We opted for an end-all option that would stop my line from ever reproducing and give both of us relief from this dilemma that we'd perceived existed. We decided to lighten our burden of choice with bullets, and that's where we are now. Sitting, facing each other, having called the police to report a dual suicide ten minutes ago. They should have been here by now. With any luck this memoir will quickly elucidate my situation and our bodies will be donated to science for testing. Maybe there's a cure in me somewhere.

Anyway, here goes somethin'...

Prince Charming's Fairy Bail - 7/12/2004

2004-07-12T14:18:00.000-07:00

The marriage was ending. It had to, as far as I was concerned. My relationship with Miss White, though incredible from the beginning, had become part and parcel with my relationship to her step-mother, a woman clearly bent on psychotic pathways; the neurotic woman presiding over the affairs of the kingdom from the background, sliding her cold, dead fingers into whichever crevices she could locate.

Don't get me wrong, I'm truly in love with my wife, the new Princess, the woman whose lips touched mine and became the initial crack in her somnambulist outer shell and opened the route to the divine interaction of intense emotional attachment. Call it True Love. And then, as expected, we'd gotten married immediately and gone on our honeymoon with the expected knowledge that her father would exile the old witch called mother-in-law to some God-forsaken locale. And what a honeymoon. I wouldn't have imagined that someone under the sleeping-spell of a poisoned apple for three years could have remained so limber. And then Dopey swung by with a pocket-full of rocks...

That, however, is unimportant and possibly grounds for Princely impeachment.

The step-mother, the goal of this rambling measure, is gnawing at the nerve endings at the base of my skull and spreading throughout my cranium to encompass my thinking centers with a throbbing, all-too-sensual pain. The pain of incessant attacks on my person; the pain of that awkward meeting after an assassination attempt that both of us know was orchestrated by her; the pain of seeing the second part of the curse, a creeping morphism that would turn my wife, ultimately, into the image of her evil Step-Mother. And it's got to end. I'm thinking that tonight, in fact, something terrible will befall my wife, or possibly her maternal replacement, or both.

Beside that, there's another girl calling for me. I can hear her, being the first Prince to take on a quest for glorified intercourse and tuned particularly to the telepathic distress signals of damsels the world over, clearly calling out to me, or anyone, really, to come climb her hair and save her from exile atop her tower. And, since it's no longer a viable option to get a divorce in my kingdom, (the Church outlawed it twenty-six years ago when the Grand Bishop learned that the King had been re-married eight times, each time to a younger woman), it's time my wife met the sword. Well, not my sword. Someone else's. Maybe I'll blame it on those dwarves. Nobody really likes them anyway.

Therapeutic Frustration - 6/21/2004

2004-06-21T16:21:00.000-07:00

It seems that everybody except me is fucking monkeys these days.

I had the opportunity the night before last and almost took it, but the baboon someone had paid for ended up busting out a plate-glass window and taking off down the street where it shot up some cocaine with a French-Canadian guy named LeFou. I was so drunk I could barely stand up so it wouldn't have worked out anyway. Also, I hate the color orange.

A friend of mine recently told me that he'd pulled off a fairly general theft, that of an automobile without any sort of tracking device installed, which contained in it's trunk a blow-up likeness of a person with no head and six arms. There were a variety of heads that could be attached to the blow-up doll; insect, goat, girl or boy, even a volcanic lava-flow that would drip red-orange crap all over the thing while, apparently, the owner of the stolen vehicle would have sex with it.

People involved in commodified sexual escapades scare me. Not in a way where I think they're nuts or anything like that, but in the sense that they've surpassed the traditionally bizarre or taboo and moved on beyond that to something I hadn't even thought of. It's the fact that I can't imagine the actions before they happen that scares me. There are people out there who's driving force, psychologically speaking anyway, is to discover new ways to turn themselves on and then attempt to surpass those. Every year thirty-six new ways to have sex are invented by pioneers of the bizarre in the porno industry. In some countries it's not even sex anymore, and there's no nudity, it's just brazen fetish, the arousal as the payoff instead of the orgasm. It's the blatant desire to maintain the physically entertaining experience while post-poning the gasping end-all of what I'd come to think of as the spiritual part of fucking.

Needless to say, the monkey-fucking thing has bothered me for awhile. But what can I say? Everyone's into it right now, and I'm told that if I miss out on the opportunity to bang a simian while it tries to pick bugs out of my hair or throw poop at the walls I'll be missing the opportunity of a lifetime. They've said that PETA will probably push the necessary legislation through pretty soon, so I'd better jump on the bandwagon before that happens, even though most Senators and Representatives and various other public officials have brought a slave-ape to bed to keep things interesting at home.

So, there's the dilemma, I guess. Follow the accordance of my own fear, or conform to the sentiments of my social circle and try like hell to avoid strange venereal diseases. I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but whatever happens, I always know I can come back to staring through thick plastic windows as men and women alike are spanked with vegetables and spit fake blood on the floor behind the fifty-cent fetish fence.

That reminds me, Theda Thigh-Highs has come back to town. Maybe I'll have to check that out.

Brand New World - 6/14/2004

2004-06-13T23:24:00.000-07:00

Nokia reclined in her cell, staring past the bars and across the cement floor into the cell of one of her jailhouse mates, a woman named Carla. Carla was in prison because she cut apart another person. Nokia had been jailed, and her lineage fined, for breaking brand laws by having been named Nokia, a name reserved by the cell phone technology company. Her parents had been old, too old for jail, but a jury found them guilty of infringing on a brand name in giving it to their daughter and fined them heavily. Nokia was issued a permit that allowed her to use the name for thirty days following the finding of her parents' guilt and told to pay for an alteration. Having not complied with the notice she was arrested, tried, and jailed. Her trial made national headlines.

Nokia often watched Carla. Carla was the largest woman on the cell block, and by far the most menacing in appearance, but tended towards the maternal, provided you were of similar skin color. Nokia was olive-skinned, with Mediterranean ancestry, similar to Carla, who's Italian roots were made evident by the red, white and green stripes that were inked permanently into the flesh on her stomach. Above the colors was the word "PRIDE," in all caps, Olde English lettering. Carla bore the latent scars of child-birth and knifings in nearly the same location on her inner thighs. One of the scars was the result of inter-racial violence that occurred with relative frequency within the confines of the Marlon County prison.

Before Nokia realized it, the nighttime siren had erupted, sliding between bars and through her inner ear, loud and almost painful. It didn't last very long, though. About thirty seconds later the lights went out and, as usual, voices began coming from down the block and around her cell, the sounds of frustration loosed into darkness and echoing throughout the complex, stopping once it reached the sound-proof doors that led into or out of the cell block. The whooping generally kept up the first hour or so before people settled back into the solitude of thoughtful introspection. Or, more often, Nokia thought, the internal missives of a subconscious slowly being driven to lunacy.

Nokia had only been in prison for a month. She'd been beaten up twice, the first two days she was there, by a group of Black women. Carla eventually made Nokia aware of the racial tensions inside the prison and made a deal to bring her into the gang if she wanted to, though this would require getting tattooed and Nokia would have to show up for the first big fight the two major factions inside the prison were planning on having. Nokia almost always wanted to laugh when she considered it, the cliche method by which the prison operated. It made sense, though, that stories of gang violence and race riots became commonplace because it was commonplace.

Trying to sleep usually didn't work. Nokia's body had stored more energy than she could have expended working out in the prison yard, which led to laying in bed and considering the methods by which she'd been brought there, searching through the legal knowledge she'd obtained to fight the charges she'd been guilty of; not for some surprise of automatic freedom one day soon - she knew this wasn't going to happen - but to become an educated person who worked against that system on the outside, routing, or attempting to rout, civilian brand law transgression prosecution whenever or wherever she could. She often thought of stabbing corporate lawyers to death in boardrooms and pissing on their remains.

The days in prison were a scheduled routine that was always followed, rarely resulted in severe bouts of violent interaction, and allowed for some personal freedom while outdoors. The only other way to gain time outside the scheduled daily events was to involve yourself in religion, which couldn't be subjugated by the prison system due to immense pressure from religious groups outside the prison who believed in reformation through divine intervention. There was a San Diego church sponsoring the online presence of a serial killer who lived in the prison because of her reported conversion to Christianity. Nokia didn't believe in religion. She tried to join the prayer service once for the possibility of spending even more time outside her cell but couldn't stand the attitudes of those involved; kneeling and praying and crying to the Heavens that they'd renounced their personal beliefs in order to fall in with the flock and begin conducting themselves according to prison rule, social rule, government rule; abandon rebellion in order to survive without crossing the paths of others. Nokia had made it her life goal to live in rebellion the second she entered prison.

There were several other cases like Nokia's being prosecuted during her first month in prison. Within days of discovering that branding kids was illegal, most corporations leapt at the opportunity, a couple even citing that it was the role of the Better Business Bureau to contest such naming practices as unfair advertising. That was at the extreme end of the spectrum, however, and few people clung to those ideas. It was mainly the producers of product with little to no following who made such declarations, and as they didn't have the logical, legal, or financial authority to back the claims up, they were generally ignored. A slew of brands had become popular names in the years during Nokia's birth, and it was twenty-five years later that it had been banned and those carrying the names asked politely to face a sentence or alter the word that had, to that point, encompassed all that they were or considered themselves to be.

Time in prison didn't work correctly. Nokia couldn't remember a specific moment since she'd entered prison, save the moments when she'd been punched out and the moment that she'd stabbed another woman in what the prison guards and warden opted to believe was self-defense. She was, after all, a perfect prisoner; reading available law books and following schedules, fighting only when forced into it - which hadn't happened often - and generally exuding "good behavior."

Nokia believed that the good behavior would have to end, soon. She could feel herself slowly going nuts inside the prison, beginning to explain to herself the reasons behind her ability to rise above and destroy other people, the way that she believed society had done to her when they placed her in judicial hands. She could rationalize murder in a way that she never would have believed she could before she went in. She wasn't even going to be able to keep her name, they'd told her. She would retain the prisoner number given her upon entrance when she left, as Nokia had been taken from her and allowed for use only when leased through very specific corporate channels.

Nokia stopped counting the days she was to remain in the prison. There were only eight months in her sentence, and over-crowding in the local jail had sent her, by default, to the harshest place in the state. The strikes against the community that forced Nokia to become 77149 were recounted every night by her subconscious, tallying the reasons for rebellion and revolution. She seethed controlled hatred and tried rallying those that would talk with her to the side that fights back. Nokia had developed a plan that she'd be able to enact once outside. Until then, though, there was only waiting.

Constellation Remark - 6/7/04

2004-06-06T23:52:00.000-07:00

When I was a child my elementary school was on a track. It would begin at the top of the mountain crest on which our town was constructed and, during the schooldays, slide to the bottom. This required every child to walk to school uphill, both ways. And, as added punishment, during the winter there was simulated heavy snow. We lived in an arid climate on the moon and all weather was simulated. This was a ploy by colonists to, as the Governor had put it, "Raise a new generation with the resilience and demeanor of our forefathers." Apparently in earlier generations people were forced to walk to uphill both ways to school, everyday except Sunday, the day of rest, every year for the twelve years following their first two years of life.

In third grade I had a teacher, Mrs. Coleman, who consistently admonished the student body, particularly the children in my class, for the slightest nuances in daily apparel. She singled me out once for combing my hair with the part on the left instead of the right and forced me to sit in the gravitron cage for the entire class period. For two days afterward I couldn't stomach our SYSCO brand moon-meals without wondering if my inside's weren't being torn to pieces.

It was during Mrs. Coleman's class that I first met Dave and Jack, the two men who would eventually become partners in the Frost Furrow settlement some sixty-seven hundred kilometers north of our colony, and a girl named Jemina, who would soon die outside the atmospheric dome.

Dave and Jack were the two most important friends I'd had, as the friends from prior grades and classes had either moved on and away from our hard-hearted colony or never stayed in contact, despite the fact that only a few walls may have separated us at school. It was Dave and Jack who convinced me to go with them on an "outing," the very same outing that would kill Jemina, to find out if the rumors about an underground group of anarchists surviving outside the dome colonies was true. We'd expected, with our naïve perception of the moon's size and the immediacy of unsubstantiated reports, that our locale was prime for anarchy. We figured they were hosted right on our doorstep, waiting to cause Red Level Chaos and turn off our oxygen or something like that.

Of course I'd agreed, provided we could let Jemina go along.

Jemina was another friend of mine, the only girl I had really known then, and the first girl who ever let me kiss her. We'd been watching Kid-Friendly-MonoVision, the short-distance frequency emanating from our Community Resource/Control Center, when something happened to the pre-recorded programming and it switched over to teen-aged kids making out on a couch. Both of us, wide-eyed, stared at the spherical MeeVee Set and simultaneously turned and kissed. It wasn't a watershed moment in my life or hers. I'd forgotten about it shortly thereafter, (within fifteen minutes), and our relationship, as it were, reverted to the neutral status of playmates. Still, we maintained some connection and I attempted to include her in Dave, Jack and my oddball games when I could.

The day we set out we had each managed to smuggle a survivor suit from our homes, except Dave, who had to borrow one of Jack's older brother's suits and could barely walk correctly in regulated gravity due to the bagginess of his pants. Everyone popped a series of pills meant to help stabilize the system and maintain neural functions in case of mania, and we ventured off into the aerospace halls, where Dave's father worked and Dave had been convinced we'd be able to leave through.

Sometime during the trip to the anonymous airlock somewhere inside the aerospace center, we were spotted, (of course), and ran away, (of course). Each one of us was caught by a guard eventually, myself holding out the longest hidden underneath the removable seat in the back part of a lunar rover's cockpit. They wouldn't have found me if I hadn't poked my head up to see what was happening after the engines fired up. Fortunately for me, probably, they snatched me up before sending me out on a mission to the next colony over, the Cadigan agrarian commune, in order to establish trade routes.

Jemina almost got caught, but didn't. She'd managed to find her way to the outer hangar, the next-to-last-stop for anything leaving the colony's aerospace hall. This is, in fact, where the lunar rover that I'd been hiding in would have left from, though whether it was that specific mission or another one that resulted in the outer doors springing open while Jemina was standing right there I still don't know and never thought to ask. I think I'd prefer not to know, just in case my hiding in there might have somehow set things up perfectly for Jemina's death.

Jemina had been standing right next to the outer portal, and her suit had somehow been caught on the massive garage door. It swung out hard and flung Jemina across the landscape, landing her too far out to signal back for help and too far to walk the distance in her survivor suit. She was missing for eight days before a rover found her twenty-two kilometers down the side of the mountain we were on, towards the center of the crater. She'd frozen after a couple hours of nighttime on the moon. I'm not even sure our colony emits enough light to see it from that distance in the darkest hours faced away from the sun.

Everyone spent several days in mourning and a number of propositions were imposed on the children to protect us from ever attempting to venture out like that again.

Anyway, I was thinking back to that because I just read something about Dave and Jack erecting a monolith to Jemina, whom I'd forgotten. It made me sad to know I'd blocked her from my memory when I was a kid. I felt I needed to do something for her, to establish some link between myself and the first girl I ever really knew. And at the end of it I find out that it's not really her I'm trying to talk to. It's me, alone, cold, typing and trying to picture her face and wishing I'd done something sooner. It's me I'm communicating with all along. I suppose that we don't get to know anyone else; not really. Least of all their ghosts.

Jitters - 5/31/2004

2004-05-30T23:19:00.000-07:00

"Oh my God, oh my God! You NEED to read this book!"

Angie was speaking to me frantically, her voice capitulated through telephone wire to heightened states, frequency ranging from middle to peaked. The obvious urgency made me wary. She generally didn't think the same things as me or read the same types of books. Her life-altering experience was likely a full-on bore.

"I'm going to bring it by. I have to. I don't think it can wait."

She hung up the phone. It clicked in my ear and I lowered the handset to it's cradle, shifting it to hooked. I looked around my kitchen, where I'd been standing when the phone rang, seeking my previous mode of engagement. I couldn't remember what I'd been intent on creating but I knew I was hungry. A partially peeled orange, next to the toaster. Probably my doing.

After the orange was finished I dozed off, trying to watch a television program about kids having multiple sex partners and parents who were implanting chips into their heads to keep them from thinking sexual thoughts. Apparently the kids had worked out a schoolyard code to delineate between those who were 'active' and the 'prudish' students, and had developed methods by which to discern what one child would do or wouldn't do and where. The parents were concerned. Concerned enough to take drastic measure, seeking to use currently-illegal operations to maintain their offspring's' innocence.

I thought it would have been fabulous had I had that when I was in school. Later on I discovered the program was the seven o'clock news.

I woke up some time later. The clock on the wall had stopped, but the tele was running perfectly fine. A fuse might have been thrown, I thought, but took no steps to reintegrate the system's malfunctioning properties. I noticed that a Cronenberg film was on, one of his early ones. I couldn't remember the name, but it involved a creature that climbed from one body to the next through kissing, spreading it's infection and turning it's hosts/victims into liberated lunatics.

A noise, smashing, it sounded like, came from without. I went to the door and opened it, pulling aside the five locks and springing the metal shutter from it's post. In front of my door was a book. Probably Angie's text. The ab fab manuscript for the criminally uninteresting. No sign of Angie, however. I imagined she'd come and gone while I slept. It was dark out. I guesstimated the time at half past ten, though whether or not this was accurate I had no idea. Most of the lights were off outside. There was crashing in the distance. A band, maybe, or a parade. I couldn't tell, but I hadn't been outside for a long time. Something could be happening and I'd never discover it unless the internet held a direct conduit. The tele was never any help for real current events. Even the news was overtly hydrogenated crap, filling the South Beach neighborhood with unnecessary fears and weaknesses. It was bad enough that there were government agents and police and terrorists and rapists and murderers. I didn't need to know about local loonies spreading their hate-memes. I kept my door locked and stayed inside.

I tossed Angie's book on the table and reset the locks, pulled down the security shutter and went back to my seated position, looking into a full-length mirror as I did so. Striding past I could see myself; naked, filthy. I'd hated myself for a long time now, and had come to terms with my personal loathing rather than accept myself for what I seemed to be. Dieting didn't help, and exercise required stamina I just didn't have. It was fated. My body would be a structure of glistening white fat cells accumulated in meteoric number and wrapped time and again around my frame. Hair grew from points - all. My face was a fat version of a child's, soft skin dripping with grease and sweat, the occasional pimple and eyes too close together. Some nights I spent thinking about slashing my sick pieces away and sewing myself up. I didn't think it seemed unfathomable.

No email. No new movies. Television a static mess.

Angie's book was wrapped in brown butcher paper, no dust jacket or title, no description of any kind. I opened it up:

"Angie fled the scene, sliding a finger down her pants while she ran back to her Jetta. The
book was left behind on the doorstep where Angie knew it would be okay. She knew
this man better than anyone, even himself, and knew it was something he needed,
wanted, craved more than any other concept. She fingered her clit and pulled the
seatbelt over her body, clasping it down and leaning back. A man watched from
outside. In his hand was a copy of THE BOOK. Angie smiled and opened the car door."

"What the fuck…?" I asked myself. It went on, a few more pages of Angie's exploits. It didn't look like she'd written it. It was bound professionally, pages affixed with precision to the cardboard cover. No title page or printer information, however. I thought Angie had been playing a high-priced joke, but didn't know why she'd leave me something erotically inclined. Describing to me her paphair adventures seemed like a particularly bad joke. She knew, the only person who did, that I hadn't been intimately involved with anyone. It was too terrifying for me.

The joke, once clear, made me cry. I tried not to. I forced myself back into my senses and reminded my brain that it's job was to examine, objectively, and report. I had tougher skin than this. The tears stopped. I stopped and began reading it, flipping through the pages. I saw my name a few times. Then the pages went blank.

I went back and took a look at a page I'd seen my name on.

"He toyed with himself, reading Angie's horny stories. She must have written these to him
for some reason, he thought. But why? Meanwhile he was getting harder. His fingers
were wrapped tight around his member. His knuckles were white. He lathered his
cock in sweat and lotion and read on, thinking of Angie's creamy skin and warm mouth."

I looked down. My heart was pounding. I was scared of the book. I realized it was telling me something about what I was thinking of doing. It predated my own thoughts about jerking off to one of Angie's earlier entries. It's obvious, really, I suppose, that I would do that. She knows me, right? She knows how I work, how I think. This is probably what I do when I'm alone and confronted with explicit, pornographic words. She could probably have predicted this and written it down.

I closed the book. The spine was leaking red fluid. I flipped open the novel and found the location, page 354, dead center, where viscous, blood-colored stuff was oozing from a hole in the spine. The edges of the page looked fleshy, the center of the book a pinkish hole. The white pages became long lumps that touched together and bled, soaking the surrounding pages. I recognized what it was. There was a vagina in the middle of the book.

The phone rang. It was Angie.

"Oh, fuck… Hi, I'm getting… Ooohh… Right now I'm doing some guys I met…"

"Angie, what is this!? What the hell is happening?"

"It's the book, Frank. Read it… Ooooohhhh… Yeah…."

"It's covered in, something, I don't know. Some red shit."

"The book is menstruating, Frank. Fuck it. Fuck the book Frank! You'll love it! Come be… Oooohhh, yes, yes! Be with us, Frank!"

I hung up. The book was open, still bleeding. I turned on the television. Still static. I went to the internet, scanned the first news pages I could find. There were thousands of sites up, already, dedicated to the book. Porno images of people having sex. The book was in every picture. CNN told me about the epidemic, the raging masses of hedonists roving through the cities. In two days, since THE BOOK's release, hundreds of thousands of people had been converted. It carried some kind of parasite. An STD that infected the brain and altered you, made you part of the sex mob.

I logged off and went to the window. There was screaming and noise downtown. I wondered if that was part of it. I figured it was. The television station still didn't work. I sniffed, looked back at the menstruating pages, and dropped my pants. I didn't need to read any of Angie's text, or whoever's text. I was already hard. Something was already driving me. Maybe something in the book was already inside my head. I stood over it and stared down. Was it moaning at me? Sounds were filling the room, or possibly my head, as I committed myself to literary coitus.

Substance Obtuse - 5/29/2004

2004-05-29T23:36:00.000-07:00

She's a recursive number being, a cyclical person set to seventeen years between growths. Every so often I see her, expanding up from the ether vats and forming into HER. That's when it happens that we can join in a process that requires her to fill my organs with her "self." Shortly thereafter she disappears back into the nothing and I'm back to my research and diagnosis, until conception time comes. That's when I'm handed a note, telling me that it's okay, I'm just on drugs. I have to remember that, remember that I'm just on drugs. There are things in the back of my neck. Broken, mechanical devices from ages ago. I can see into her cosm, every seventeen years. I can't remember the last time I saw her. It's a recursive number being, a cyclical person. I know it was years ago, but I can't recall the circumstances. I can't remember… I can't remember what she looks like, but I know there are pictures. I'll check the backlog. I'm flipping through the comics, trying to find the cover with her on it. She's in one of these damn things, I know it. The longbox is filled with remnants of her face. I'm still on drugs. The cover says so. Apparently seventeen more years have passed, because I feel like I'm pissing myself and there are voices in my head, the same thing that always happens before she shows up.

"It's okay! It's just the drugs! You're just on drugs!"

Flipping through the pages, looking for the research we've compiled on her. I know there's a lifepod in here somewhere. Something extracted during the construction phase. She's behind me already. I can feel myself melting with her. She's inside me, all the way inside me. Why is there a metal tube strapped to my penis? Oh, it's actually my penis.

There are monsters here. Did I say monsters? I meant martians. Classically framed martian people asking for my autograph. I'm the hippest thing to come from Earth in the last hundred and seventy years. That's ten times she and I have copulated. They know my face and my name and remember that last thing I did with Carey Grant 37 and Android Audrey Hepburn. They stole the show, I thought, but the martian's love me for it.

Damn it! My comics are scattered across the floor. Out of order, out of order, out of order, out of order, out of…

I can crawl in the longbox. I can be the comics. I can find the cover with her face on it. Then I'll be able to remember who she is. Wait, who the fuck am I?

Cosmos, cosm, cosmic, cosmonaut, caustic, causeway, causality, casualty, casual, cashmere, cash, case, cased, careful, etc. Just remember to concentrate. That's another C-word, concentrate. "It's just the drugs, Brian! It's just the drugs!"
I remember her face, I think. It's like the martian faces. Ovoid, with tiny eyes. She's fucking Chinese martian or some shit, I don't know. I do remember where my comic is. I put it in the mylar and closed it up. It's taped up somewhere. I think it's on the wall, maybe, or in the lab. There's something in the ether vat again, probably a rat. Fucking rats. We haven't changed anything for the last hundred and seventy years. Everything is rotted, rusted, rotated, ratty, rancid, rainbow.

Hoooo-lee shite. That's my nipple, doctor! You're grabbing… Well, okay.

I think that she's back. I can feel her inside me. Goo, spilled against my ribcage, coagulating. I think she's in there. Warm and sticky and nice inside my abdomen. I think I can tell that it's her, the way she moves, the way she emulates outward. My skin is moving. It's her, I know it. It's her.

Back in the lab:

Ben Affleck…?! I didn't think so. We've been working for years to perfect this film. It's based on my comic book, the "Dull Boy" series. It's all about a stupid cunt-ree hick named Dull Boy who gains the trust of and fills the sit-ee folk with warmth and forgiveness. Then he was in another book, a crossover series where Dull Boy used his charismatic country slang to stave off a horde of martian invaders. I seriously doubt that she can appreciate it. After all, she's just a figment of my imagination, right? I can't really be in the lab.

Doctor's playing hard to get. I fucking hate the doctor.

What the hell is that? Is that my drugs? Do you really think I'm paying you sixty bucks for that?! Here, here's fucking twenty. Yeah, fucking give it to me. Fuck you, that's fucking shit, right there. It's fucking nothing. Twenty bucks is more than that's fucking worth. Yeah, fuck you too, punk bitch.

Yeah, whatever. Just, just, just fucking give me that bag, okay? Okay? Okay?

I got ripped off. The doctor probably knows that. He's got a PhD, after all. There she is. She's standing next to the doctor. It's his assistant, again. She's got her face on my comics. She was in the movie, too, but not as a drawing. I can't believe we had sex. Her face is disgusting. Like some melted retarded persons features planted onto a martian head. Then again, it was really, really good that one time that we did that one thing.

2004-05-29T23:34:00.000-07:00

That (Below) was then. This (Above) is now.

On Silent Bondage

2004-05-29T23:32:00.000-07:00

I'd been writing my book about Thomas Edison on and off for five years. Originally it started out as my thesis back at UCLA but I hadn't had the time or energy to really delve into it back then. What I ended up doing was writing a piece called "Origins of American Culture in Relation to Neighboring Influences." I don't remember what kind of grade I received, but I graduated with a BA in History and a Certificate to teach, which became my primary function shortly thereafter. The original research for the Edison thesis was shuffled underneath a million other things and became a vague notion of interest.

Two years later the interest grew once more when a student did a short project for the class I was teaching. The project was a multimedia presentation revolving around Edison's earliest forays into the movie-making business. He never actually marketed his features, but American cinema basically began with Edison toying around with Lumiere equipment. I rifled through my papers and found the old research, winding through reams of notes now indecipherable until I found what I really wanted; my search for Edison's long lost erotic films.

Originally I'd thought it was a joke. While studying fiendishly in the school library one night a janitor strode to my table and offered his take on Edison. The janitor, Jorge, said he thought Edison was the first pornographer. Certainly, he told me, there was the imagery of naked people copulating on film as soon as the capability existed, even if it was during the tail-end of the repressive Victorian era. Even more the reason for it, in fact. Jorge left me to examine my book, but the thought was implanted now despite my outward laughter.

I wondered, then, kneeling between mountains of papers, analyzing handwriting smeared and crumpled and almost completely obscured, if maybe Jorge was right about Edison. I decided to continue my thesis, using the original documents I already had as a base to redirect; to discover the secrets Edison might have hidden somewhere.

Another year went by, with little luck, my mind not focused on the specifics of writing and studying. I was teaching constantly, spreading myself completely over my students and spending my energy there. All I'd really done was post some things to various internet sites and scratch the surface of what I was sure would require in-depth research. I was surprised, then, when a contact emailed me, informing of her intention to find exactly what I was looking for. She wanted to combine efforts.

It wasn't long before Megan and I stumbled onto something interesting. We learned that Edison's laboratory, where he created his earliest films, had been equipped with a cellar the size of the entire floor. There was no indication of a cellar in the current renditions of the floorplan, however. The cellar must have been either hidden or totally covered up by concrete. We didn't know why, but perhaps being the first moving-image pornographer America would know might be enough to send him into the shadows, dissolving any traces of that history so as to maintain his reputation.

And now I'm here, another year gone by, sitting in a cold, dank space below the house that once belonged to America's most famed inventor, handling the preserved reels of celluloid Edison ever made. I can barely touch them without having to worry about collapse, but holding up my flashlight I can make out images. The images of a woman, her clothes sliding from her shoulders and dropping at her waist, revealing breasts, and a man, his head covered in a sack with two holes cut out for eyes carrying a stick.

We managed to get the film into a projector without destroying it and viewed Edison's creation. Not only was it pornography, it was fetish. Here Edison had a superb example of bondage, playing out in front of his massive camera box, the light bathing the people and over exposing some parts, but otherwise a crisp, clean picture well-preserved in the freezing cold cellar.

And then the shock. After the scene had ended, the man, having chained and spanked and fucked the woman, pulled away his hood, showing us the face of early American porno. It was Thomas Edison himself, smiling self-satisfactorily at the camera as the lens closed and left us in darkness and wonderment.

Megan and I re-wrote the thesis into a finished product based on our find. It became number one in no time.

The Underground

2004-05-29T23:29:00.000-07:00

In 2005 the Bush administration made material located in most libraries around the country classified, effectively ending the public resource centers by restricting entrance into any library under any circumstance. The idea was that only terrorists would want to read books, and after the Big Scare of early 2005 it was the opinion of most cabinet-members that altering the ability of the American public's access to information would definitely curb the uprisings from "unspecified enemy combatants."

I was working in a library that year, only an assistant to a librarian but only a few months away from full induction into the free-reading system as a true librarian. And at twenty-one years old that was moving along the fasttrack. Of course, the fasttrack didn't go much further than becoming a librarian, except perhaps moving up the branch line and becoming head librarian at the central branch, but still, I was happy with my accomplishment. And then the CENTRAL Mandate came down; Congressional Entropic Necessities to Reverse Antithetical Leanings closed down my library and ninety-five percent of the libraries in the nation.

It was only two years later that I'd discovered the revolutionary forces living within the defunct library system. While browsing the (illegal) online MIT open-course ware system and reading notes from a student on the interaction of early hominids with their environment I'd received an instant message, the loud *ding* of the pop-up window jolting me away from information gorging and forcing me to interpret the new media. "They're on to you. Leave now. We're waiting down the block in a green SUV."

I didn't know what to make of it at first. This was supposed to be a joke, I'd imagined, but certainly if they were coming I'd need to escape immediately. I grabbed my bookbag and closed the connection, snapping shut my laptop and rushed out the back door of the condemned library I once operated from legally. Sirens erupted down the street. I rushed around the block, glancing both ways and missing the green SUV. The sirens came closer, just down the block now. There was no green car in sight.

That was the day of my first arrest for suspected links to terrorism.

My trial was huge. Bigger than Scopes. Every single person I'd ever known was put on the stand and attested to my love of free knowledge, regardless of what that knowledge might have been. Each one dimming my hopes of an innocent finding, the jury prescribing a guilty verdict before ever stepping over the threshold of the courtroom anyway. The inevitable verdict dropped like nuclear fission, gavel striking granite-reinforced oak and pounding away at me until I was in a Cuban cell, without light, without food, crying myself to sleep and listening to the slow howl of drooling, half-brained inmates above me screaming and retching and shitting themselves after imbibing the psychotropic control substance generally used in terror prisons. I could never stop shaking when I was in there.

Outside my room guards laughed. They laughed in English, not Spanish, and regarded the prisoners as personalized playthings, poking them with sticks and watching as the totally deranged ones leaped at the bars when a bit of food or a dead rat was dangled in front of them. Of course this was expected. We were terrorist scum. If they could burn us alive and piss on our remains and use our scalps to wipe their asses they would and most of the frightened country to my north wouldn't care; would likely applaud them for committing such acts.

There were some, though, in the library underground, who were out there trying to help. Already they'd begun causing turmoil on the floor of the House, submitting bill after bill after bill in an attempt to turn over the CENTRAL Mandate and the PATRIOT Act and the numerous other now-classified documents usurping citizen's liberty in exchange for peace through greater control. And then there was the Library Underground. The LU had plots, real "terrorist" plots to blow up buildings and cars and open the gates to Guantanamo Prison and let out the snarling monsters inside. This was the movement that, eventually, managed to free me and others who weren't already permanently damaged. From my hole in the dirt I could hear vague popping sounds and roars and cheers and an explosion. Minutes later light stabbed at my withered body. I screamed, having missed the light in such amounts for the last four years, having not quite gone mad, having no hope and now hopes fulfilled.

I couldn't take it.

My waking mind waltzed away into unconscious fervor, remembering binding books, day after day, binding binding binding books. I don't know if the LU dragged me or if my limbic system responded to hidden wishes and forced my legs to work at running away from the Hell in the Red Zone, but at the end of the day I was safe aboard the boat in the Caribbean, floating to the dark side of Cuba, where the lights had been cut by the US some years back as part of the ongoing war to deliver democracy to the tiny island.

And now I'm one of them. The LU. I've been writing, as well, turning my feats and the LU's war on restriction into a comic book, because there's still one place for information to be dispersed. The comic book has passed under the radar. Presumably Presidents Bush through Kaplan, the current dictator-state regime leader, have assumed that pictures are for kids. We hope they are. I hope they are. I hope to whatever deity might be staring down at us that my comics are for kids, for the next generation of revolutionaries. Maybe they won't even have to fight our fight.

Maybe.

Slink Fetish

2004-05-29T23:27:00.000-07:00

The burn is excruciating. What's worse, the thin stream of black goo that constantly seeps from my cock is permanently staining everything it touches. I've tried to wear the same three pairs of underwear in a constant rotation of washing and using but a buildup of crusty dark stuff has begun to make them unbearable. I knew fucking a transsapien would have certain risks attached, but what can I say - I'd already smoked a handful of 190 proof hashish and plugged my few remaining serotonin smokes into the tracheotomy gap underneath my chin.

I remember seeing her, really, for the first time when I woke up and felt the warmth of her exhaust hatch slowly gurgling out a night's worth of serious substance abuse and hard, grinding sex. Her face was mostly plain, a small stubby nose centered on a tomato face, lips parted showing remnants of teeth used for gripping one end of a crank intake shaft. I could hear the artificial organs scraping together insider her stomach, connected to a womb shaped by plastic molds and aluminum rivulets connecting everything like mesentery. She was mostly human on the surface, but her snatch was a reconfiguration of a reptile pussy and the ignition of a 1965 Chevy Bel-Air. For all I knew her anus retained similar qualities, but I hadn't bothered going back there. At least, not that I could remember.

I crawled out of our motel bed stinking of motor sex, sliding from the slick polymer sheets which were equipped with self-eradicating cleaners set to start sometime around noon whether someone was under them or not, and put on my clothes, careful to avoid touching my prick as I slid my pants up. It had been rubbed raw, small cuts lining my shaft, scorch marks forming a nice circle in my pubic hair. I left a twenty on the dresser and headed out, back onto the road and on schedule.

Two weeks later - today. My venereal specialist finally agreed to take a look at me. I'm standing in his office, pants anchored to my calves, holding my barely-healed member while Dr. Sendo probes my stinging urethra with a cotton swab. He pulls the swab back, watching as the lump crawls under the skin like some foreign LSD bug, a long string of sticky black stuff bowing like viscous spit, weird bubbles held in clumps along the
string.

"I don't know what's wrong," Sendo tells me. Transsapiens have managed to bring diseases belonging in the machine and animal realms into our own. My personal misfortune, I suppose, that I find automobile girls attractive. Then again, my fetish has yielded too many exciting nights to start bemoaning the whole sub-race or my predilection thereof. This is a side-effect I just have to deal with.

Another week and nothing from Sendo. He'd told me they were doing tests but had only discovered that the base substance was motor oil carrying some strain of chlamydia. There were other things in there that couldn't be readily identified. Sendo's main concern was how my body was managing to produce motor oil in amounts high enough to provide a constant drip. Another trucker told me about a case of VD he'd gotten while running freight from Bangkok to LA from a girl modified for fungus sex that did something similar. Eventually he'd needed a new rod and his bladder now excreted spores into his streams of urine. I told him the chick was reptilian or something around her pussy. He told me I was fucked up for hitting something with scales.

After six weeks of leaking and two more visits to Sendo I'd discovered that the substance was spreading, appearing to stop after reaching into my lower intestine, coating it and causing severe cramping and bloating. A new organ had grown inside my appendix, which is how the oil was being generated, running down my bowels and out my urethra, burning the whole way. A breakthrough had come in diagnosis, though. I was infected with male menstruation. Among certain species of reptiles or amphibians, Sendo hadn't been clear and that chick probably had both anyway, there was an innate ability to spontaneously change sex. I'd been given a shot of that gene and a bonding agent. I was growing a uterus in my stomach. The real kicker was that I wouldn't get a vagina, making the birthing of the eggs I'd been passed improbable without surgery once they had matured. On the rag and still impregnated.

I asked Sendo what I could do. "Ask for maternity leave," is all he could give me.

A Thing That Happens...

2004-05-29T23:25:00.000-07:00

Walking out of doors, it was impossible to not notice the intensity of the sky. It wasn't the normal shade of blue. Something had happened to change the color, filling the horizon from end to end with a swirling, intense light that shone as the spectrum of blue, light to dark, streaming around the atmosphere and covering our planet.

Reports had come into the newsrooms across the globe of the light being everywhere at once, eliminating the darkness of night. Our sun's light had been reflected to both sides of the Earth simultaneously, bathing it in the harsh tones of pure, unadulterated passion. It was enough to send endorphins speeding through my nervous system, down my spine and outward, elation the side affect of living underneath the new light.

We couldn't find the reason for the reflection. When everything was lapped up by rays of sunlight it obscured our space cameras and altered the communication networks between ground and satellite. The Hubble could still transmit messages and pictures but they were always an iridescent version of some Heaven, the Milky Way wrapped in the Northern Lights beaming from the center of the universe in all directions at once. Religious types shouted God's name and rejoiced in the streets, while scientists searched for rational explanations in string theory and Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle.

I didn't bother thinking about it, though. I didn't believe it was the work of God or physics. I didn't care either way. What mattered was the affect. The awful purity the sky had forced onto every human being, sending them seemingly into the psychological direction they most desired. Some wallowed in the most dramatic depression possible, most killing themselves within a few hours of stumbling into the light for the first time. Others, like myself, became constantly happy. Regardless of what happened, the happiness was always there; always drowning my brain stem in Seratonin; always shooting across my flesh like Tesla arcs; always showing me the fractals, the Mandlebrot Sets.

There was a catch, however, in that the affect would drain away if you didn't get into the sunlight at least once every hour or so. But darkness never came and it was almost impossible to avoid catching a beam between the eyes a few times a day. Those that did hide suffered anyway, filled with either fear or dread or both. The doomsayers who stuffed themselves into basements and hung thick black palls over their windows. We never saw them. At least, not for many years.

In those days I would lay on a specific hillside and watch the clouds shirk between light rails and float past, sometimes drizzling blue rain, sometimes nothing at all. The grass was changing color, too, becoming more vibrant and always green, even in climes with little moisture. Everything was new again, as if in the formative years of our planet. And it had occurred to me that I was in love with the planet. More than anything else in the universe, I sincerely loved the planet. Not like a member of Greenpeace, but like a person loves another person. I could feel the way the planet shifted and moved and understood the tormented innards as they rolled and burned and fought to escape the crust and become part of humanity. The planet talked to me and said loving things, and I said them back. Other people told me they loved the planet as well. Nobody said anything about talking to it, though.

My terrestrial communiqué was how my happiness was eventually revoked. Despite my feelings for the Earth and the things living and dead residing upon and within it, I couldn't help become infinitely somber when I first learned the reason for the changing sunlight and my people's new moods; when I discovered that the universe was collapsing in on itself rapidly enough to auto-eliminate utterly within a thousand years. That's when I stopped being happy.

"There's nothing you can do," the Earth told me. "You're going to become nothingness once again."

My gut lurched and vomit spilled from the recesses of my stomach, sliding upwards and filling my mouth and throat with fiery pain. I lost my soul to the news of festering demise. Soon I was boarded up in my own basement, refusing the sunlight, scared and lonely and depressed, eating from cartons of processed food and drinking tap water with a hint of mercury. I was tired. I was living in the sunlight for so long. I couldn't sleep like that. Nobody could. Even those living in terror of what was happening couldn't sleep; even with their windowless homes and thick, black goggles to simulate nighttime. Years went by with no sleep. There was no relief. The daytime that once let me bask in joy now maddened me as I tossed and turned beneath the makeshift blanket roof I lived under. I could do nothing but sit in my sanctum and think about the destruction that only I knew was heading our direction. Most times I acted martyr, tears screaming from the reservoir behind my eyelids as if I were crying for the entire world. For days at a time this would happen.

The planet saw me crying one night and opened up to me, showing me the patterns in it's existence, letting the math become apparent for my eyes alone. It consoled my sobbing consciousness. I learned that I would be nothing. That everything would be nothing.

Finally. After all that time.

We could rest.

The Teething Undead

2004-05-29T23:18:00.000-07:00

It's been six days since I started the affair. Which means it's only taken six days for my wife to discover the subtle kink that's turned into a massive fetish over the past half decade of living with the Hybol.

She caught on when I left last night with my flashlight and shovel, the obituaries section of the paper left on the nightstand, torn from it's parent unit and baking underneath the dull blue waves of luminescence generated by my lamp. I thought I'd put enough of the sleeping pills into her drink to keep her out, dead cold unconscious, for at least six or seven hours. Apparently she'd thrown up only a few moments after guzzling it; part of her little bulimia secret hidden away since long before our marriage. This reduced the effects and allowed her to wake into semi-consciousness and see me dress in dirty clothes and hear the rustling in the garage followed by the dull roar of our Saturn's engine.

She said she followed me out there immediately, but I know that's not true because she didn't actually catch me in the act. Only after it had been done did she notice me laying on the darkly colored grass in Overhills Cemetery, resting my naked body in the cool breeze, arms slowly caressing the rotting flesh of my new mistress. She was beautiful in life and was now, in death, the very thing that made my prick swell and twitch. She was Annabel Thornton, daughter of a neighbor down the street and buried just that morning. The paper didn't say what she died from, so I couldn't be sure she'd wake, but I've grown to uncover certain telling facts given publicly that imply someone has been directed to death and re-animation by a member of the Hybol.

I'd watched living Annabel from my window several times, her young body speeding past my home and down the street in a car filled with teenagers. Her father was a client of mine, a golfing buddy on occasion, and proprietor of the top-grossing sirloin steak specialty restaurant in the state. She was much more attractive than my wife, whom I married from leisure at the age of thirty, hoping her slightly venerable years would provide amplitudes of income for which I wouldn't have to work. This was not to be the case, though.

Marion, my wife, wasn't going to be rich. After marrying me her company took a massive loss during an SEC investigation at the top levels revealed terrible financial lies and embezzling. The employee's were mostly laid off. Marion was one of them.

So it was me who had to work. I was the sole bringer of income. Every ounce of everything we had was mine. I bought the house, the furniture, the bread on the table. And Marion continued to demand that I satisfy her perverted needs, begging for thorough oral sex while she pissed. I was willing to give it to her as long as she'd give into my corpse-fucking fantasies. She didn't know, or at least hadn't articulated as such, that she knew I was into corpses, not to mention the animate dead. I suppose that having her take the cold bath and lie perfectly still during coitus could have tipped her off, but nothing was ever spoken.

So it wasn't a surprise to her, she'd said after we'd returned home and lay, humiliated both, next to each other in the warm sheets and blankets of our bed, that I was out digging graves that night. She wanted to know how long it had been going on. Six days, I told her. Six days I'd had three different girls. This was Annabel. You remember Annabel, right? She had. She asked that I stay the night in a hotel. I rolled out of the bed, sliding my apparel over my body and packed an overnight bag and suitcase. Marion recommended packing more than a day's worth of clothes, but I told her I'd return for more tomorrow.

I'd been out with the zombies now. The Hybol were living in the cemeteries all over the northern half of the US, and, I hear, many populations springing up across the cemeteries in the southern. There were nibbled marks of decayed teeth on my skin, up my neck and shoulders where desiccated lips had pressed closely into my warm body and their zero temperature kisses splayed over my tasty flesh. I didn't know if Marion would want me back. I didn't know if I could stay with her. We certainly weren't in love. But that night, the hotel sucking me into it's stale-smoke room and twenty-four hour pornography television stations, I felt that maybe I'd made a mistake. Maybe Marion was right when she said I was a pervert and a fucked up sicko.

Then again, those nibbled indents in my flesh were starting to spread; gangrenous boils and pustules razing small sections of the skin on my back and chest and neck. Annabel said she liked to bite me two years ago, the first time I'd fucked her. I'd asked her not to. I should have known that if she didn't listen then, she wouldn't have listened now.

A Statement of Intent...

2004-05-29T22:38:00.000-07:00

This is Brash Fiction.

I'm going to print something here at least once per week. Mostly flash fiction, things I sit down and write in a few minutes, left out to be read by you, the sick bastard sitting on the other side of the mirror.

Anyway, the first few posts are things from an old blog of mine on the same system, (Blogger.com), and something I wrote tonight. Anyway, enjoy the reading. My plan is to update every Monday, though that may change.

Also, please comment. I love comments. Especially pissed off, hateful rhetoric. That's the best.