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+Slice life like bread gets stale faster -- music gets rid of voice -- guitar retires --  faster newer smaller stuff -- emotional plague hits west coast -- thousands lost -- Mayan caper inferred -- ancient city found -- new reality tunnel finished -- down the driveway -- next to the old rabbit hole -- heads on tails -- significantly more anxious -- needed every day -- sweeter than this -- 
+
+Jimmy is sweeping the porch as I stroll up, his thin frame lost in a dusty cloud. He stops and coughs a minute or two. The haze settles a bit. He takes off his glasses and wipes them on the inside of his shirt. He is covered in dust with eyes ringed lemur white. Jimmy is a carpenter. A post -- graduate carpenter because sawdust is more complex than the simple stuff of library shelves. Sawdust is soft tallow, a malleable tonic, and open to further disintegration, wood chips from rough planing, smaller particles expelled from whirling blades, the sugary whisper of dust expelled from sandpaper. Libraries have only one flavor of dust. Human debris. Tiny flecks of shedding skin accumulating around the glacial increase of perfect -- bound knowledge, the decay of people, slowly falling apart in alphabetic lives. Sawdust is the evolution of form. Termites eat sawdust. Destruction and digested rebirth. Jimmy builds things with his hands. Sometimes pocked, slapshod things, framing and roofing to restore dilapidated houses. Once he spent two weeks digging in the crawlspace of a cinderblock shotgun house, thinking the whole time it was going to fall and squash him with the cockroaches and rats that scurried over his legs. His more exciting projects are the highly skilled woodworking ones -- the gorgeous black walnut wine cellar he built last fall. He took me over to see it when it was done, sanded down to 220 grit, satin and specular, obsidian. It lives in the basement of a restaurant owner. It harbors vintage grapes from around the world behind its temperature -- controlled, walnut -- framed, glass doorway. There is a vacuum fan to suck out the dust and a once -- a -- week maid to free those particles too stubborn for wind.
+
+In the process of building things, Jimmy goes in and out of many people's houses, under them, on top of them, and once, accidentally, through one of them. He sees an endless variety of lives revealed in collectibles, faded magazines, dolls, signs of defunct companies, pictures of children, vacations, friends, works by artists known and unknown, technological gadgets galore, and once, accidentally, his own contribution to an otherwise ornate living room -- a ceiling, a fan, and a Jimmy deposited by gravity on a nice wooden coffee table covered with miniaturized food which had been set up for a dinner party. Jimmy invades people's lives. But they invite him in. And pay him for the invasion. Sometimes they pay him in things rather than money. Today he came home with a truck full of castoff furniture he has accumulated over the last several months. He has been storing it in his parents' garage, but now he is taking the plunge toward permanence, toward admitting residence. His truck is piled high with heavy objects, a sofa, a table, several chairs, a pinball machine recovered from his parents garage, and boxes of records that are too scratched to play.
+
+"The only one I know for sure works is this Dylan album." He pulls out Blonde on Blonde.
+
+"Never heard it."
+
+"Really? Shit man. This is perhaps the greatest album ever made. I mean I might say that if I were the sort of person who said such things. Of course it's not true, but it is. Possibly. You have got to listen to it."
+
+"No record player."
+
+"Oh I have it on CD. Remind me."
+
+As we unload the furniture Jimmy talks about Bob Dylan. When Jimmy is on a roll, it's best to just settle in and listen. He doesn't talk, he orates. There is no space in the conversation, no silence into which you might interject your own thoughts. Nor is there any discussion until he finishes the initial thought, and by the time you've let that one sink in, he's off on another. Eventually they pile up on each other, an enormous anthill, and you can only stand back and admire the scurrying echoes of his verbal architecture.
+
+He has the history of Dylan seemingly wired to his tongue. He knows things about Dylan that Dylan doesn't know. He can do the same thing with jazz musicians that were dead before either of us were born.
+
+"That album man, you have got to get that one...." He gives me this intense look as if my very life depends on it. "Whew. Man. It's the most amazing thing you have ever heard...again, if I were prone to making definitive statements like that, which I'm not. But, still it's incredible, a man at his most honed, unselfconsciously sharpened point, pure honesty, just telling it the way it is, and you know it is because you've been through the same things in your own life, or you can see them coming down the road. Ya know? It's Dylan just laying it all out on the table and you know that he's been there because you've been there too. That's what I'm trying to say. We've all been there and that is the underlying thing on the whole album, I mean fuck the music -- well no, because it's great too -- but you know what I mean? Sad -- eyed lady of the lowlands... you have got to hear that man, you have got to hear that song." We put down an enormous toolbox in the middle of the living room. "And the images, man the fucking images, you can't fake images with that kind of power. They aren't just words cleverly strung together, it isn't some bullshit cleverness strung out on a hook, lying in wait for some beret to bite or anything of that sort. To sing what he does, whew, man," he blows a long slow exhale of admiration. "You have to feel it. You have to fucking feel it. Otherwise..."
+
+"Otherwise you wouldn't feel it."
+
+"Exactly." He smiles eyeing the toolbox, "I think I'll just use this as a coffee table. Is that too white trash gearhead? To have a toolbox as a coffee table? I broke up with what's her name you know. She's crazy. Or I am. There was something crazy about us. It didn't work. The point is if I have a toolbox as a coffee table I'm going to stay single, that much is clear. But is it going to hamper my getting laid? Is it a little too much? Do I need to soften the room a bit? Something that will make a woman more at ease?
+
+"Chloe won't be over."
+
+"She's not over now. She hangs out at your place. She only comes over here when she's out of weed."
+
+"I don't think having a toolbox in the middle of your living room will effect your getting laid at all. I mean, if you actually get a girl back here, I'd say she's already into you. Or she's too scared to run."
+
+"Hey now."
+
+"I just mean, you know, when you drive in here at night... hell I expect to get killed every time I come home. Its all dark and foresty back here. We all live in the serial killer's house. Think about it, Jason started in cabins in the woods. Every late night skinnemax movie has one of these places in it."
+
+"Hey maybe we could make some cash letting low -- budge films shoot around here."
+
+"Maybe. But the point is you're better off going to her house anyway."
+
+"Yeah." 
+
+We drink beer and unload furniture. Jimmy keeps going back to Dylan every time we're standing at the tailgate because the record is sitting on top of the box and he avoids the box in favor of much heavier, bulkier items. A glass table for the kitchen. A bookshelf in one corner. An antique pinball machine with the tilt alarm blinking stupidly as we half drag half carry it inside. He rediscovers the album every return trip. But Dylan is only the launch pad, there is only so much one can say, from there he slings out along the Saturn line shouting down echoes of the view. His eyebrows arch up when he tries to talk and lift something at the same time. When he's not carrying something, his arms dice up the air trying to drive his point home. His voice leads out the door down the steps and back to the album.
+
+"I'm telling you, you have got to hear that album. I can't believe you lived this long without hearing that album. But it's not just an album. It's a verb, an act in which the artist connects with the audience and transcends this kind of stale artificial reality that says we're all separate and individual and what not. We're hung up on this individuality kick you know, the freedom to do your own thing. You only go so far. Your mind maybe infinite but your body is not. That's the essential mystery maybe. And we need community to go further. And I don't mean some West Virginia hippy crap kind of community. I mean meaningful relationships with other people. And not just like -- minded people, because that's the clause that's often at the end of that line. You need to know people you hate. People that make you cringe. People that stir violence in you. You need them. You need them because you are them. Them is you. Ugly and sweet." 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It is one of those Octavio Paz nights where the sky speaks Spanish and looks surly, doubly purple its usual self, and the stars are a Navaho sand painting stretched across the ceiling of the world. Serpentine eels wiggling around in the electrical storm of the mind. Lightening strikes somewhere, a thought in an architect's head, suspension bridge wires, wink and smile.
+
+The Falcon roars. It is our fading youth, but not middle aged or mid -- twenties crisis sort of fading youth. Such things having come and gone with the uncomfortable realization that nothing ever happens. Tall buildings are raised. Then razed. You go on. You don't want to. You want it to be painful, you want it to be so fucking gloriously painful it makes you cry. But it doesn't. And even if it did, what then? Space changes. Time fluctuates. But it plods on, the purr and growl of cylinders roaring, then settling, then roaring. In the intermittent silence of shifting gears the questions loom, perhaps it is all a lie and you are alone, perhaps the questions are only slow, insidious dribbles of propagandacid trickling from your oil filter, leaving thick meaningless splotches on the asphalt, a slow drain needing only a new filter. Perhaps you are sitting in the machine, on the machine, perhaps the machine is you, the acceleration an extension of femur to tibia, to talus, to phalanges and fading slowly from flesh and bone to leather and rubber, and then metal rods, a cable snaking through the firewall, an exposed and surprisingly flimsy extension from mind to throttle in one unbroken line, room for silence only in the space between sole and accelerator.
+
+Downtown. The Manhattan. We are in the Manhattan. There are drinks on the table, drinks poured in the mismatched helter -- skelter collection of glasses used to transfer the goods into the service. Jimmy is talking, no longer his animated self, a brief pause, his second wind will kick in soon. He is saying things quietly. Excuses I believe. Excuses for the excuses that have grown weary of dragging around. He feels nothing is getting done and he knows why. It isn't going to get done. Lullabies. Turn the page. When you look in his eyes, his moving lips, they look just like yours, how you imagine yours to look, how yours must look when you spit out your own excuses for the excuses that are excusing things you perhaps ought not to have been trying to do in the first place and you wonder if people look at your teeth when you talk or do they look at your eyes with the arrogance of complacency and contentment, watching smugly as your teeth begin to fall out, and you chew them, bleeding gums, torn lips and chunks of tooth choking back the words.
+
+And all the while the shuffling of indie rock feet scuffing from door to bar, the awkward brush of corduroy pants, the stealthy screaming fibers of too tight t -- shirts stretching to meekly collect drinks and shuffle off to a corner table. But we are in the corner table. We have your corner table. You are in the open now. You are exposed. All of you. We're staring at you. Do you feel on stage? Isn't it what you've always wanted? The thing too dangerous to be dreamed, the thing you have denied yourselves for so long. Slouching, weepy -- eyed, meekly waiting to inherit? This is what you want. We are giving you the opportunity. You are seizing it, I can see it in your hunched shoulders, the semi -- permanent curvature of the spine developed from too many years spent bending over thrift store racks, record bins, eyes squinted from reading the imprints of limited edition vinyl. You will come here soon. Soon the filters will spring leaks. Thick warm liquid will begin to ooze out, cigarette breath grow hotter, hearts sputter, and you will want to feel, you will want so fucking bad to feel. But it doesn't come. It is leaking out from under you, crumbling from the inside. Violent smugness is leaking from drinks, hazardous waste collecting and pooling, seeping across the floor.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Maya has a picture of me. A picture of me which she routinely photoshops with various outfits stolen from other pictures. She dresses me as a cowboy, as a superhero with a mahogany colored cape, as a handyman with a tool belt after I fixed the leak in her sink last summer, as a prizefighter in the ring with Ali after I got thrown out of the Incandescent for beating up the bouncer, as a eurotrash tourist to remind her of my obsessive habit of taking pictures of garbage, in buckskin fringed pants for the time I dragged her off to the mountains to club her and have my way with her, as she requested, the fire crackling with the sizzle of dripping fat from steaks, as a marine for my protective move when the potato exploded and the white hot chunks covered my body instead of hers. She had been using a picture she took of me lying in bed. We were running late to one of our rich daddy dinners with her possibly rich daddy who lives in a mysterious state of fabulously wealthy poverty. Other people's money tastes better. 
+
+She was doing her impish young artist act and I was playing along, but trying to reverse things. I have a very peculiar look on my face, one I have never seen before. I have lecherous eyes and my body is a clumsy anticipation of movement. She took the picture the instant before I leapt out of bed and wrestled the camera from her
+
+"My turn."
+
+"Who said anything about turns?"
+
+"Take off your clothes"
+
+"You're unbearable." But. Licorice lips part, half -- moon, and she begins to disrobe --  trickles of silk and lace sliding down smooth shale arms, rivulets of rye whiskey piling on the floor -- nipples like soft serve.
+
+"What -- no panties? The pile is incomplete."
+
+"You haven't even kissed me. Shouldn't you be making some kind of move?"
+
+"Move?"
+
+"Yeah. You know seduction, game, something...?"
+
+"We're too old. Just take off your panties."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Cause your pussy's tired of being caged in panty prison. Its been locked up for too long, it's like Nelson Mandela -- end apartheid. End Apartheid!"
+
+"Nelson Mandela? My pussy is Nelson Mandela?"
+
+"Yes Nelson Mandela. Now take off your panties and let that pussy make a speech."
+
+And she did. 
+
+Of course I don't have the photographs. 
+
+But tonight. After more purring and roaring and a little more drunken careening on the down trip, we are up here. Home again. And there is new email. A photograph of me taken across a table, a checked cloth and jar of syrup apart, I can see her smiling, though it could be any table, any syrup, I can see her smiling, a detached mouth hanging from the lens, a little nymph hanging off her teeth as the shutter whispers. 
+
+And here I am all pixilated and dressed in black with a Jesuit wide brim hat. Give me a new religion. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Chloe disrupts the indie rock calm of the Manhattan. She sashays Saturday night with glittering toenails wrapped in heels with more strap than is necessary -- excess is best -- and the nearly unheard of skirt. Heads turn as heads do whenever the door slams shut behind someone, but then heads snap back to whatever they were doing lest the girlfriend across the table in the paint stained overalls detect a pique of interest -- the girlfriends' glitterless scornful glares -- you bitch you tramp you whore you porn -- enjoying feminism -- destroying carnivore...
+
+"Damn girl." Jimmy shits bolt upright when Chloe comes over, "you be looking fine tonight."
+
+Chloe turns red. "I hate this town sometimes. In New York I'd be getting stared at for looking like a librarian."
+
+"No trust me Chloe, New York couldn't miss you tonight. Or maybe New York is missing you tonight."
+
+Our friend Jason the bartender, pulls up a chair and looks Chloe up and down. "You are aware of course that you're upsetting some carefully constructed mopishness here." 
+
+"No shit. Sil and I were just about to water down our drinks with a tear or two and suddenly it's a fucking party in here. I mean good lord Chloe I think I might want to sleep with you." Jimmy murmurs the end of his sentence, the top of his half raised bottle and then quickly puts it to his lips before anything less leaks out. But his head tilts to side, eyebrows shoot up and it's plain to see that it's only a joke if Chloe wants it to be.
+
+Her head sinks down a touch and she sighs like someone suddenly exhausted.
+
+"Or play with your breasts or something." He adds after swallowing.
+
+"Jimmy if you are a good boy maybe someday you can play with these babies." She juts her chest out and then bounces her breasts for effect. 
+
+Jason the bartender is a mixture of aghast and unbridled lust. "What about me?"
+
+"Actually you have a far better chance than Jimmy, who I was actually lying to just then. And now that I think about it Jason, I'm lying to you too in hopes that maybe you'll bring me another drink." She sucks her straw playfully.
+
+He sighs. "Anybody else need anything?" He leaves to retrieve another round.
+
+"So why were you about to cry in your beer boys?"
+
+"Same reason you dressed up like that." 
+
+"But come on its satanic anagram night... you have to dress up for anagrams..."
+
+"Right. I had forgotten about that little adventure..." 
+
+Jason returns with three more drinks. "What little adventure?" 
+
+This is the part where Chloe is supposed to explain it very innocently, and Jason is supposed to giggle or at least smile, but Chloe hesitates and Jimmy jumps in with a cover story -- our anagrams are of dubious legality you see, not to mention ethics or taste or any number of other things. 
+
+"Oh we were just talking about going up to some of the party bars and turning it up a notch... there was some discussion of dancing." Jimmy manages to get this all out without a smile and then glues the beer to his lips and takes a long, probably too long, pull. Jason looks unconvinced, but he buys in.
+
+"There's a good DJ tonight at whatever Mean Mike's is now." Most people in Athens refer to establishments by what they used to be before the scene took a dive -- with bars coming and going with the semesters, it's hard to keep track of what things are called. The Manhattan on the other hand soldiers on. "You know next week we're having Moroccan night... Ya'll should come. I was skeptical at first but it seems like it might actually be fun. Gonna clear out the tables... get a bunch of pillows and some hucas and maybe even a belly dancer."
+
+Jimmy hunches over in concern, "ya'll aren't going bankrupt are you?"
+
+"No. Not yet. But it's definitively geared toward avoiding that."
+
+"You know what you really need to do is implement the plan." Jimmy tilts his bottle as if toasting some abstraction.
+
+"You love your plan don't you James." Jason weaves slightly in his chair he has a habit of doing what Chloe endearingly calls the body laugh. He wears a blank smile and almost imperceptibly rotates his torso without moving anything below his hips. It's a subtle but brilliant laugh, it makes entire rooms spin with him. Fake candle lights that have been fake flickering above our head suddenly leap out of the wall at me and start a conga line with their arms on each others' backs, kicking their legs out to alternating sides, clogging to the beat of Lola. And then he stops.
+
+"Hey man, I'm telling you, bikini bartenders will draw in a hell of lot more people than Moroccan night or whatever."
+
+"Not if I'm the one in a bikini."
+
+"Hey Jason don't under -- estimate yourself. I'd be in here more if you wore a thong." Chloe crosses her legs and grins at him. "But you know this is one of the few towns in the world where sex doesn't seem to sell."
+
+"Girl you be talking crazy." Jimmy screws up his forehead into the self -- conscious knot he favors when he attempts to propel himself out of his skin color and into the rainbow world of rants. His arms come up from his sides, called into the service of emphasis, and he launches into a diatribe, volume escalating as he takes off. "Just cause ya'll aren't trying to sell sex does not, emphatically does not, mean that it wouldn't work if somebody in this town had the balls to do it. Look here, all you gotta do is have one night a week with Kelly and Brittany in bikinis -- or better yet -- no offense to them -- you know I love them -- they're my girls -- but recruit a couple of girls from the club and get them to serve wearing bikinis and this place will be fucking packed," He stands up and sweeps his arm across the room, "I mean look at these guys," he lowers his voice, waves to friend, "these guys are desperate for half -- naked female flesh. They can't go down to the club because they'd loose face, but damnit they want to see naked women, and they'll settle for half, everybody wants to see half naked women, half naked women want to see half naked women... I'm for real Jason. And I know what you're gonna say it'll draw in the wrong crowd and that will alienate the cool people and whatever, but shit you only do it one night a week and that pays for the rest of the nights so it can just be a good bar and not end up bankrupt. Or you know what you could do..." he pauses for a minute and studies the conspicuous bamboo thrones chairs -- king square backed, queen triangle -- as if suddenly mulling over their significance. "What you could do is start a backroom game... Cards man. Get a couple of poker tables, maybe a blackjack table for the amateurs, girls in bikinis serving drinks and making the rounds with the cigarette trays... man that would be so fucking cool and of course you just charge twenty bucks for entrance and keep it real low -- key. People would pay twenty dollars to sit in on a nice backroom game. Shit ask Sil people are fighting to get into our game -- am I right Sil? -- I mean that's what's wrong around here there isn't enough corruption -- everything has been sanitized and made PG and damnit the people want R. Fuck it man the people want X, but they can't come out and say it. I mean ferchristsakes you can't even serve on Sunday -- what the fuck is that about -- it is the twenty first century isn't it? Sometimes I'm walking around downtown on a Sunday night and I have to pull out my checkbook and double -- check the year... This town, this whole fucking country is begging for sex, corruption and debauchery. Of course I have to add the caveat that we don't need the racism and sexism and all that shit, but really have we gotten rid of that? Shit man try working construction for a few days, those mutherfuckers are every bit as racist as their daddys' were, they just whisper the jokes to each other now... and the sexism well I guess you could argue that my bikini bartenders idea is a touch sexist, but shit I mean the line between exploitation and enjoyment is a dicey one and frankly I think it would be a good idea to have you in a bikini as well, Jason. Maybe you should just hand them out at the door, everybody could be in bikinis and we could all just sit back and admire each other as the over -- sexed, lecherous, debaucherous, and damn good lookin monkeys that we are." Jimmy sinks back down to the cushion -- finis.
+
+"It is a plan." Jason deadpans.
+
+"See I like the end where the men are in bikinis... I'm an equal opportunity lecher." Chloe giggles at her own wit. 
+
+"Yeah, but," I do a quick survey of the room and then look down at my stomach, "are you sure you want to see a bunch of fat skinny guys in bikinis?"
+
+"Fat skinny guys?" Jason looks at me quizzically.
+
+"People like you and I, who do not, as our lean mean Jimmy over there, work construction or otherwise exercise and have the dreaded slightly pot -- bellied body of the fast skinny guy. Scratch being the one who actually caused me to notice the phenomenon."
+
+"Sil you are not fat. Have some respect. How do you think it makes people who really are fat feel when you say you're fat?" Chloe looks at me crossly. Her sister is over -- weight. Everyone we actually know is over -- weight, only strangers are fat.
+
+"You're missing the point. I'm not saying I'm fat. I'm saying I'm fat for a skinny guy. It's a very important distinction."
+
+Jason heads back to work,, pausing briefly to look at his profile in the mirror hanging between the throne chairs. He looks back at me and smiles and pats his stomach.
+
+"Besides a little stomach is sexy. I wouldn't worry about it until you have handles." Chloe folds her legs up under her, sitting Indian style and lights a cigarette.  
+
+Jimmy, who has been silent for a few minutes, suddenly seems to snap back from where ever his mind has been. "Man I was just thinking about something or other... temporarily lost track of where I was and then I noticed Chloe and for a split second between synaptic firings I thought goddamn who is that?"
+
+"Jimmy lay off. I let you get away with it for the novelty, but you're bordering on annoying now."
+
+"Chloe you're lookin' so good I'm thinking maybe we should go for a ride..."
+
+"Alright." She downs the rest of her drink in one long suck. "Yeah let's go for a ride."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It's heaven. No other way to say it. Complete with feathers, though here they are carefully stuffed. Only he -- whose -- name -- may -- not -- be -- uttered knows what divine substance they put on top of this mattress which, in other ways, resembles the one I have, although it's unlikely this one was left behind by a man moving to Australia. This one was purchased in all its consumer glory at some star -- spangled mattress dealer -- probably in Atlanta -- probably by parental units desperate for some way to dispense love to the daughter who is not following the plan.
+
+Whatever the case, the soft billowing pillow -- top is the perfect thing to lie on, with your head hanging off the edge, after tying a few on as Jimmy puts it. We three are fallen dominos lying head to toe such that Chloe and I are separated by Jimmy's feet. Chloe has shed the skirt and strappy shoes in favor of sweatpants and converse. We are waiting. Waiting for the witching hour when all satanic things stir and muck about rearranging letters and such. Which is why we have all recently taken an internet quiz to determine which Norwegian Death Metal Band we are. On the stereo...may the good lord... shine a light on you...make every song... your favorite tune...
+
+Darkthrone: Without religion there would be no kinky sex.
+
+Enslaved: Without that strange Norwegian phrase which you didn't understand anyway you wouldn't be Darkthrone. 
+
+Darkthrone: Like you know one way or the other. The point to this whole thing --  considering tonight's adventure -- is that, in spite of mocking religion and yes being somewhat condescending toward it, without it half of the kink in this world would not exist. And like you said at the bar, there are those that think a totally healthy approach to sex would be a good thing, but personally I think it's a little boring. And I think religion deserves some credit here and there. The soft brush of the whip... [a descent into laughter]
+
+Enslaved: Maybe. And Chloe, I have to say if anyone is having kinky sex it's Sil and Maya. You know they're freaks...
+
+Darkthrone: Freaks? What do you mean freaks?
+
+Enslaved:  I mean you know they into some freaky shit. I mean come on. Look at the guy.
+
+Cradle of Filth (aside): Jimmy laughs what I take to be a knowing laugh though I haven't the faintest idea why he proposes to be knowing. Mark Twain pointed out that, not only are humans the only animal capable of blushing, we're the only animal with the need to.
+
+[M: Why do you want to fuck me in the ass so badly?
+
+ S: Because it won't go in. If it went in easy, all pornstar style, I'd be bored with it. Maybe. After twenty or thirty times
+
+ M: You want to go to a forbidden place...
+
+ S: Yeah I guess. Do we have to analyze it? I guess your ass is like Kubla Khan and shit.
+
+ M: (laughs)
+
+ S: I want to dine on honeydew and drink the milk of paradise.]
+
+Darkthrone (evaluating): Is it true Sil? Wait, actually, I don't want to know.
+
+Cradle of Filth: I have no idea what he is talking about. I own no whips.
+
+Enslaved: Yeah but does your girlfriend?
+
+Cradle of Filth: Of course. I mean why would I have them? She never comes down here and that whole thing can be embarrassing at random luggage search.
+
+Darkthrone: Why is it that she doesn't come down here.
+
+Cradle of Filth (after too much silence): I'm not sure actually. To tell you the truth, at first I didn't care because I love going up to Manhattan, but lately I have been thinking about that. 
+
+"Sorry. I wasn't trying to make you feel bad... I just assumed there was some good reason." Chloe sits up and turns to leans against the pillowed wrought iron of her headboard, she rests her legs on Jimmy's and lights a cigarette.
+
+"Sometimes you can see the proverbial writing and just stare at it until it's meaningless letters and never read what it says." No one responds to this thought and I sit up and study Chloe's bedroom. Somewhere in here Noah turned the helm to its final unknown destination and abandoned ship. My own bedroom suddenly feels cold, hard and inadequate. Chloe's bedroom is colorful and soft, full of pillows and comforters and enormous mattresses buttressed against the mythology of the pea. The enormous candles and antique perfume sprayers feel loved, if they were in my bedroom they would look deliberate, items for sale in a junk store. Here they are transformed in the waves of candle light that break across the mottled crimson walls. Above the dresser pinned and peeling back from the wall is a portrait of William Blake. The conjunction of ceiling and wall is interrupted by a string of tiny blue lights causing the wall to fade from crimson to purple to the blue ocean of ceiling. Even Maya's bedroom lacks this kind of continuity, her antique hat rack draped with boas and chemises and nightgowns has always seemed slightly out of place -- posing for a photograph. The only thing in my bedroom that means anything to me is a bag of rocks, a leather pouch I got at a tourist stand in New Mexico filled with the small stones they pulled out of what used to be my eyebrow. After that I started periodically adding rocks, pebbles really, to the pouch, pebbles that had never been a part of me. When I die I want the mortician to put them all back in my skin.
+
+"Shall we?" Chloe stubs out her cigarette.
+
+Suburbia three A.M. We have left the relative cool of Chloe's bedroom for the sticky streets of Athens.  
+
+"You think god wants to hang around heaven with a bunch of christians? How much fun is blind acquiescence? I mean look at celebrities, that's the closest thing we have to godheads right? So? Look who the smart interesting ones are always hanging around with... need I call to attention RS? I mean when you see him around town who is he with? People that don't give a fuck who he is... People that have know him long enough to know he's just another guy with personal problems. God wants to sit around with atheists and have a decent discussion. He wants dialogue. If he actually exists that is."
+
+"Uh, hold up a minute, you lost me." Chloe shakes her head side to side as if it's going to clear up the bottle of wine her brain is swimming through. "Who is RS?"
+
+"Resident Rock Star, slightly shortened..." Jimmy's voice has the faked patience of one explaining geometry to a sixth grader.
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+"Oh right. Sorry. Wasn't down with the lingo." She starts walking again. "But wouldn't it be pretty stupid to be an atheist and sitting in the same room with god?"
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+"Maybe. But what does it take to be god? I mean is god all -- powerful because he just is? Or does his power come from people believing in him? In other words wouldn't god be most threatened by, and therefore interested in, those who would or do deny him the power to exist? I guess my idea of an atheist isn't someone who doesn't believe in god, but someone who isn't willing to accord him the power he demands. So in that sense, no I don't think it would be stupid... the world is a self -- created phenomenon. And so is god's power."
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+"That's actually quite beautiful Jimmy." Chloe lets us pass her and then comes running up behind Jimmy and jumps on his back. "You make me want to be an anarchist." She kicks her heels against him and they take off down a long sloping hill that leads toward the graveyard. I walk alone through the darkness.
+
+About a year ago Chloe decided that the propoganacid of Southern churches had eaten enough useless holes in her brain and she was going to fight back. She enlisted Jimmy and I in her efforts and now every Saturday night -- after consuming copious amounts of alcohol -- we go out and rearrange the letters on the signs. Last Christmas was my favorite. It was the same church we're going to do tonight, we changed JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON, to SEASON THE FETISH, USE FOR REASON. We had a left over H several R's from another church on the other side of town, which Jimmy thinks is cheating, but he's outnumbered. Season the fetish was up for three days before anyone at the church noticed or bothered to change it back. It feels good to see your words in a marquee, luminous and two feet high. It feels even better to rid the world of banality, however small and insignificant a gesture it might be. Tonight's objective is PRAYER WORKS, which is going to be altered to GET YER HORSES, which is exactly the counter -- intuitive kind of dissidence that Chloe loves. I thought, as long as we're adding letters, why not go with FUCK YER HORSE, but we agreed to no obscenities.
+
+To get to this particular sign we have to pass directly through the church's cemetery, Cemeteries are best at dusk when the ghosts are just getting up, still sleep -- eyed and prone to making noises, whispers of wind when there is no wind, rustles of grass where no animal is running, fingers scraping headstone marble, covered in lichens and half obscured by leaves, readable now in the moonlight ...died 1910...died 1947...died 1892...died....
+
+Chloe and Jimmy are crouched silently behind a crypt, monstrous and out of place, a monument to the arrogance of a bloodline hiding behind the name Fortson, streets, parks, probably a non -- profit agency for the advancement of southern quilting.... But it does make for good cover in our situation -- dead Fortsons stacked on the other side of the concrete wall we lean against, unwittingly aiding and abetting the bored anarchism of fast retreating summer nights. Bodies, perhaps nothing but bone now, the last remnants of human debris having been sluffed off, skin and fingernail bits dusting the bottom of the worm eaten fabric liners, only bones, worn out and no longer needed, encased in wood or fiberglass or some polymer designed to spare the living the thought of what mess must be left after eighty years of decay. Synthetics, each the highest technology of its day desperately trying to hide the one inevitability we know, the failure of the organic in the field of permanence and yet even in death unwilling to return to organic origin, separate even in our rotting, still useless and detached. In myths we hide in the sky, Orion, the Pleiades, the Horsehead Nebula, clusters bloated with grandparents, great aunts, uncles from the revolution, tragic children in ribbons blowing pinwheel constellations, rotating galaxies, black holes of bitter pious old men, neutron stars for lonely celluloid fatales, dressed in silver and longing, but knowing all the while that the scaffolding is wood and fiberglass and workmanship. Constructs of carpenters and architects, city planners and funeral directors, sawdust and sweat from the living.
+
+A quick game of rock/paper/scissors sends me scrambling up the terribly exposed grassy hill toward the sign, sweaty palms gripping the extra letters. 
+
+Prayer may work but you better get yer horses just in case. 
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+At home I put in Jimmy's cd and stare at the phone. Maya. The phone. Bellsouth a bastard son of Bell labs. Maya all tangled in wires and switches and routers and gates and filters and then there she is. Maybe. No way to really know for sure. A voice. Flattened and dribbling out, amplified by more circuits and switches and more zeros turned to one and back again, but always one or the other. This to a background of mumbles and rasps. Mr. Dylan doing his naivist. The reverberations of something ancient and universal, perhaps a touch overwrought, but warm nonetheless. More zeros and ones and lasers and laboratory genius to span time and space. Not tonight. Only flesh will do tonight or the imitation of flesh through some archaic means. I want to hear you on an old crystal quartz, tinny speakers and Roosevelt having just signed off, a commercial for Burma Shave and Murray's Cream and then Maya, warm soft lips pressed to the silver screen of the condenser, to be able to see her, headphone clasped to one ear, just from the tone of her voice, the background rustle of sateen skirts and flower embroidered cashmere... To drive home a Model A, fedora cocked back, suspenders loosened, flowers wrapped in yesterday's newspapers... smile my way home to some Indiana farmhouse and find her waiting at the end of the dirt road, jumping on the running board and kissing the length of the driveway, holding her widebrimmed hat with one arm, the other wrapped around the rearview, lips suckled to mine and just keep driving and driving make wide open circles through rows of corn and elms and maybe a straight unbroken line as far as the eye can see, we stay like that clear through to the badlands of Wyoming...
+
+I turn out the lights and walk in the bedroom. Mr. Dylan continues to... well it's not 'sing' is it... he makes up for it somehow... with shear will. Gut and will. Turning on the fan by the window, movement in my peripherals makes me jump back. Trapped between the helterskelter outside screen and the window is the most enormous, grotesque cockroach I have ever laid eyes on. It's over two inches in length and possesses a magnificent pair of wings, which click against the window as it tries to free itself. Hideous mini -- arms extend from its head, enormous pincer -- like implements that dredge up classic sci -- fi monsters and celluloid nightmares of a thousand shapes and sizes, the auxiliary limbs are scraping at the liquid sand, a futile attempt to construct a glass pyramid or escape its condition or maybe one leads to the other. The screen which traps him against the window does not actually fit the window; it was too tall so I simply wedged it in place, knowing full well that this sort of entomological invasion would not be stopped by my makeshift buttress. Some instinct has driven him upward to the top of the window where the screen is closest to the glass. I watch him struggling to find an escape. You need to go down I tell him. I tap the glass and try to herd him on a downward path, but this only goades him to attempt flight, tearing his wings against the screen. They flake apart, crumbling piecrust wings sliding softly down the windowpane. And your saint -- like face and your ghostlike soul, Oh, who among them do you think could destroy you... Mexico City: the blind beggars gouge out their children's eyes upping the pity ante and reach into those pockets a little bit deeper. Irony the petty buttressing of a child's sandcastle against a cresting tsunami, the last ditch architecture of those unused to confronting the raw, the unpitted, the full size ear of corn, the olive pre -- canning, the reek of half fermented cheese, too far gone milk, rancid butter, the raw and its tendency toward, its preference for, the rot. Somewhere there are great piles of children's eyes, some horrifying physical monument, empty eye sockets through the sticky haze, the red and white tattered woven blankets on which the beggars sit, old women starving in the shadows, the gasoline sunrise in Guatemala, cresting over the decomposing bodies of mass graves...flying right out of gaping empty eye sockets. Something to stop the leaks. Something that feels like it will never die but is transient, malleable, and divinely human. Something holy to sift through our garbage and find the discarded gems languishing on piles of steaming filth. No one goes down anymore. Everything at once delicate and obscene and the phone unplugged.
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+Lying down on the bed, back against the wall, cigarette between the lips, ashtray cradled on the stomach... There is a pounding again. Indistinct, from far off, the beating of wings in the distance -- wind working the leaf -- chimes, water on the percussion and our very special guest this evening, please give him a warm welcome...all the way from Peking on the back of a butterfly... the same temperature as the sun...crowd goes wild... But it all serves as clutter to hide the silence, the darkness just outside the careful window, the translucent edges of Dylan's nasal protest, between the safer glimmering of distant windows, Jimmy's windows, vaguely Chloe's, voyeur glimmers, other safely walled eyes watching the darkness but unable to bear it on the skin, the dreadful doubts and opposition held at bay by the baptismal liquid, fire roasted sand to keep us from having to...But the beating of wings, the distant rumble of was -- it -- only thunder, or something more watching in the shadows our cartoon lives, zoo exhibits behind glass...There are rumors. And bones. Bones of the roman churches -- stronger than any prophet's stuttering murmurs -- bones that never turned to dust, preserved and immobile to make you wonder, did their owner only step out for the papers? Did a whole culture step out for the paper together? Do the ghosts of mass graves congregate together to huddle and hold to watch the fearful show carry on without, huddled all together, hoarse voices in the shadows decided to make it impossible to leave -- don't think that because you never pulled the trigger you're innocent -- as if culpability required action -- to get clear of this you see... cacophonous sine waves, disarrayed, and carrying in our wake the sewage of useless entrails falling from the butcher's block. Men in black robes and others in white coats all singing glory glory hallelujah around a glowing metallurgic altar. Ambulance sirens wailing as they round the corner... faces fade into the road, beaten, bruised and swollen. Others watch from distant buttes spattered in blood, endless blood; rivers of blood running down the chopping block as the butcher frantically dices ever smaller... roasts into steaks, into filets, into shish -- ka -- bobs, into hors d'oeuvres, into mashed paste, pate, and finally only watery blood, running off the block and out into the street gathering speed as it moves over hills, lifting up, pooling in the great valleys and lapping at the butte shores as they dance naked around bonfires.... Geysers of blood sprout from a ground that can no longer contain itself; blood bank employees hang hoses into the street and collect a year's worth before they drown in it. Towns and cities are swallowed whole, the blood oozes down from the north, from the land of the bleached -- skin cave dwellers, trickling over the Mediterranean drowning the Elysian Fields and then the Nile runs red. Africa is laid waste and the oceans swell and wash over Canada and America. Tidal waves of blood a thousand feet high and moving 200 miles an hour fueled by the energy of a comet that lands in the midst of the riparian blood -- world and blows it all back out into space, powders all life into a fine dust that settles over everything, over the mountains and valleys and oceans, and the remaining rivers of blood, until what is left is absorbed into the heart core of history leaving behind fresh cool water that pools and settles slowing to a gentle meander, out to the sea, shiny brown bodies glistening from the humidity, from the endless sweat that pours off...the sky was screaming a cerulean sound... I want to be baptized, to be held down under the muddy red water until I can no longer hold my breathe and inhale the murk in desperate gulps...the metallic taste enveloping me...and never go to sleep. 
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