From b13fbe69e2a09e7915a619b3d9ea34bf42702621 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: luxagraf Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2018 15:20:44 -0500 Subject: added old writings --- .../_Tomorrow is the Desert backup 9_1.zip | Bin 0 -> 4194304 bytes .../existential ich/existential ichiness.txt | 691 ++++++++++++++++ .../gone book/D iam diff version.txt | 88 ++ veryold/very old writings/gone book/D iam.txt | 87 ++ veryold/very old writings/gone book/LA iam.txt | 67 ++ veryold/very old writings/gone book/LA3 iam.txt | 128 +++ veryold/very old writings/gone book/LV iam.txt | 167 ++++ veryold/very old writings/gone book/LVR iam.txt | 160 ++++ .../gone book/SF iam older version.txt | 73 ++ veryold/very old writings/gone book/SF iam.txt | 165 ++++ veryold/very old writings/gone book/Train iam.txt | 104 +++ veryold/very old writings/gone book/for lv iam.txt | 96 +++ veryold/very old writings/gone book/gone1-7.txt | 915 +++++++++++++++++++++ veryold/very old writings/gone book/river iam.txt | 73 ++ .../notes from a lounge trial.txt | 77 ++ .../orbit submitted to prism 1_28.txt | 37 + veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/3.txt | 47 ++ veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/4.txt | 39 + .../sil chronicles/Sil Waiben Kell Tucker.txt | 144 ++++ .../very old writings/sil chronicles/THE BOOK.odt | Bin 0 -> 131066 bytes .../very old writings/sil chronicles/THE BOOK.txt | 781 ++++++++++++++++++ .../sil chronicles/Y of R CHAPTER ONE.odt | Bin 0 -> 42852 bytes .../sil chronicles/Y of R CHAPTER ONE.txt | 134 +++ .../sil chronicles/book one sez i.txt | 419 ++++++++++ .../sil chronicles/book two sez i.txt | 351 ++++++++ .../sil chronicles/chapter one.txt | 419 ++++++++++ .../sil chronicles/open your eyes.txt | 115 +++ .../sil chronicles/smiling house.txt | 179 ++++ .../sil chronicles/the house that smiled.odt | Bin 0 -> 46768 bytes .../sil chronicles/the house that smiled.txt | 176 ++++ 30 files changed, 5732 insertions(+) create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/_Tomorrow is the Desert backup 9_1.zip create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/existential ich/existential ichiness.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/gone book/D iam diff version.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/gone book/D iam.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/gone book/LA iam.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/gone book/LA3 iam.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/gone book/LV iam.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/gone book/LVR iam.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/gone book/SF iam older version.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/gone book/SF iam.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/gone book/Train iam.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/gone book/for lv iam.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/gone book/gone1-7.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/gone book/river iam.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/notes from a lounge trial.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/orbit submitted to prism 1_28.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/3.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/4.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/Sil Waiben Kell Tucker.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/THE BOOK.odt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/THE BOOK.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/Y of R CHAPTER ONE.odt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/Y of R CHAPTER ONE.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/book one sez i.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/book two sez i.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/chapter one.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/open your eyes.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/smiling house.txt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/the house that smiled.odt create mode 100644 veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/the house that smiled.txt (limited to 'veryold/very old writings') diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/_Tomorrow is the Desert backup 9_1.zip b/veryold/very old writings/_Tomorrow is the Desert backup 9_1.zip new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7fb5ee0 Binary files /dev/null and b/veryold/very old writings/_Tomorrow is the Desert backup 9_1.zip differ diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/existential ich/existential ichiness.txt b/veryold/very old writings/existential ich/existential ichiness.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2031436 --- /dev/null +++ b/veryold/very old writings/existential ich/existential ichiness.txt @@ -0,0 +1,691 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + +Prologue + +(Ordering food at the drive thru) + + + + +Write what you know... What if you don’t know anything? Don’t write. An entirely unacceptable solution. Learn something. Far too great an output of emotional energy. Do some drugs? Esoteric solutions always being the best. I need what every writer needs -some giant epochal adventure by which to define a generation while I myself, like those before me, mumble about being misunderstood and quietly drift into a life of oblivion, all the while snickering at those who bought the bullshit and made my life easy. + “Chicken sandwich with cheese and grilled onions” + “Honey mustard of that?” + “Sure and an order of fries” + Its amazing even in this day and age that one can obtain food by talking into a metal box. + Side note for the book on tape version: Reader please lean a little closer to the microphone in the million dollar studio and repeat the following... “I (insert celebrity name who recently starred in the movie version) love to grease my ass with Vaseline and insert a string of sausages with the other end in my mouth; I then eat until I reach my belly button at which point I come and enjoy a slice of watermelon and bask in the warm after glow of sex.” + Everyone these days is completely obsessed with The Bizarre. So much so that nothing really is The Bizarre anymore. Yuppies ride Harleys and frequent bondage parlors on the weekends while pulling in double incomes of 150K during the week scurrying from house to latte to work to the onceaweekmatrimonialassfucking. This is not bizarre this is vaudevillian comedy gone real life. + “$6.35 next window please.” + “I only got five bucks better hold the fries.” + “4.95 second window.” + “Thanks.” + You need bizarre, truly bizarre. You need circus freaks castrating themselves on the street corners and pimps shooting heroin in there balls while screaming whores accost their long dead mothers in hotel rooms cockroach won’t set foot in while lawyers sit on the roof television antenna protruding from there limbs as policemen ritualistically torture themselves gouging out there own eyeballs to avoid the scene below them. + “I think we need to get out of town.” + “Why? So we can live that tired old Kerouac/Thompson road trip in our quintessential american kind of way?” + “No. Because rent is two months overdue and I heard from our neighbors that the landlady’s gonna have the sheriff at our place in the morning.” + “What?! Fuck! Gimme my sandwich I’m fucking starved.” + “Fuck is not a adjective for every situation you know. I thought You were a writer.” + “For your information Fuck is a multi-purpose word to be used whenever other modifiers are deemed inappropriate or lacking or -in this case- when one does not feel the situation merits the construction of a complex descriptive metaphor. So what you’re saying is that we need to leave or all our shit will get seized in the morning?” + “Ya.” + “Alright lets pack.” + + + +Teridactal winged birds flew overhead and the ground was squirming the way heat waves shimmer the horizon. The Fort at San Juan rose distinctly to my left as if my subconscious were unabashed stealing its imagery from salvador dali. I licked my fingers and and found them to be an interesting Teriyaki-lemon flavor quite unlike anything I had ever tasted before. I looked at my shoes and realized I was standing on a giant skeleton key which I somehow knew was to the old Fort at San Juan. I tried to pick it up and carry it to the door but it was much to heavy for one man. In the distance I could see a bus approaching and felt as though I had been waiting for it the whole time. It pulled up next to me and all my college friends were gesturing for me to come aboard. The door opened. + + We left the following morning with me disparaging about the existential ichiness I felt toward driving a Japanese Sedan on what should be a quintessential american journey. That’s the problem these days, everything is ever so slightly perverted so as real insanity goes almost totally unnoticed. He was real quiet. A good neighbor. Kept to himself. I never imagined. It’s just terrible. Real insanity is left to drugs and those are hardly worth a writer’s time anymore (god rest your gonzo souls). We’re left with a watered-down silicon-infused Pop culture whose art is its adverts and whose only god is commodity. You snicker and suggest that television is to blame. The Media. Fuck you I am the media and I blame everyone but the media. As if the puppets on your TV screen were capable of destroying a culture. Proctor and Gamble destroyed your culture and we’ve all been put on the payroll. I’ll keep complaining so long as the checks keep rolling in. + Nice fucking sneakers from Indonesian slave labor camps propped up on your italian leather ottoman watching you stare at your state of the art hi-fidelity TV babbling about what's wrong. Headless chicken man is here to save the day. Rush Limbaugh isn’t right and probably doesn’t even believe the shit he spews out, its show biz folks your whole life has been pre-scripted so that you will know what to say and when. No stumbling over lines, the computer chip in you brain has precision craftsmanship unequalled in its uncompromising quality. No expense has been spared in the programming of your life. + “What's the scrapping noise?” + “My internal anger” + “Seriously, is that your brakes.” + “What brakes?” + “Are you stabbing at existentialism?” + “Its the brakes.” + You the insolent reader wishing you knew what was going on here. Who is having this conversation anyway? Wouldn’t you like to know? Too fucking bad you can’t have it all on a plate. Hallucinogens would help of course; you understand. I’m not talking about LSD here, no your medulla doesn’t need to slowed down anymore that it already has. I’m talking about the greatest drug of all the strongest hallucinogen known to man: the television. The great Tractor Beam of America sucking out your insides, and turning your guts to mush that I can spoon out and pour over ice cream. It’s oozing from your clawed out eye sockets, slowly at first and then in a fiery blast your projectile vomit squirts unrecognizable organs mashed into goo across the room to the smiling screen of the television. Ted Turner loves you. Turn the page and read the goddamn book. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +Chapter 1 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +Chapter 2 + +The Legalization of Marijuana +(three straw theory) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Somewhere in Texas I fell asleep. I awoke at the exit of a drive thru wide-eyed in Terror clutching three straws. + “Are you okay?” Ed asked. + “No.” + “Maybe we should let the dog drive.” + “We don’t have a dog.” + “Right. What’s with you?” + “They gave us three straws.” + “So?” + “We only needed two.” + “So?” + “The next time we go to a drive thru it’ll be late at night and in the middle of nowhere and we’ll be back on the road again before we realize that they gave us only one straw.” + “So...Why don’t we just save this one?” + “It’ll never last. Look at it. It knows what just happened. You can’t just go around bending the rules of fast food physics.” + “You are genuinely strange.” + + + I had a dream last night and Johnny Depp was not in it. I was twenty-three. Again. It was the twentieth century. Again. I hadn’t finished college. Again. I was scraping by on a Dean Moriarty salary parking cars nine hours a day. I got off at three and went home to find a sailor on my couch. There was a needle in his arm; he was watching soap operas. The woman on television was pregnant by her daughter’s husband. We laughed. I sat down and the sailor put a needle in my vein. William Burroughs walked in from the kitchen and stood over us. He smiled sadistically, knowingly. + “I wanted to be a writer,” I said to him. + He laughed obnoxiously. + “Shoot up kid its the easiest thing to do. I’d love to stay but they're expecting me in Tangiers.” He left and I awoke feverish and uncertain of where I began and ended. + I had another dream that night. The world’s end was at my doorstep. A white hot light had flashed civilization out. Cities ran as great metalglassconcrete rivers of deathdisfiguremanglement. Citizen’s charred limbs protruded like rocks that were floating with the stream. The searing smell of burning flesh darted through the hazy yellow air. A great clock tower was dripping time from its hands and my one true love stood beneath, arms severed and lying by her side. Her face had been burned off and eyes dissolved. Her head was upturned and its jaw hung down swinging stupidly in the yellow flesh burning air. Time was pooling in her mouth and dribbling done her chin like come. I awoke deeply offended by my subconscious mind. + I got out of bed convinced that we must find my Georgia friend Todd before it was too late. We were in Louisiana still and dangerously low on hallucinogens. + “I’d hate to have to go home early because we ran out of drugs.” + “I’d hate to run out of drugs.” + I ate the last of the mushrooms and relaxed staring at the dresser on the opposite wall. Presently it began to change. It dissolved into millions of tiny ants that crawled up on to the wall and began to flash messages like those signs at the side of the road that warn of up coming delays. + “Hello. We are ants.” +THIS IS WHAT WE KNOW: + Our purpose is singular. To inform you as to your mission. + “Hey are you seeing this Ed?” + “Probably not.” +SHUT UP AND READ, HOW OFTEN DO ANTS IMPART ADVISE? + <<<<<. Orders from above. You understand. Nothing personal. Actually we like you. Proceed from above dialog to TODD’S HOUSE. There you will be seduced by the enemy. Do not believe them. LIE is in the middle of believe. Talk to The Pigeon Man. He will be perched on the rain gutter out back above the patio. He will tell you how to proceed. You are our greatest hope. Avoid the cock-eating sirens as you may need your cock in the future. If locating TODD’S HOUSE proves difficult go to Ed’s Pets in Watsonville and buy Stevie Wonder. He is the chocolate lab just before the back door. He knows the way. <<<<<<<<>>>>>> + They slowly moved off the wall and structurally reformed the dresser. I got up and opened the drawer suspiciously. You just never know who to trust these days. + “Ah ha! just as I suspected. We must leave at once. The Gideons have been here.” + + + Nothing makes me as uncomfortable as organized religion. Especially one that sounds like some boxy Ford from the seventies. We checked out five minutes later after confirming that the effects of the mushrooms had indeed vacated my brain. For the most part anyway. Actually truth be told I was pretty out of it still and I just kind of threw the key at a bewildered looking Pakistani man. Or was that fear? + “Drive,” I said jumping in the already running car “I think he was on to us.” + The tires spit Gravel and we were off. (I love a good cliche.) + “We need to get to Watsonville.” + “Where the fuck is that?” + “Its just outside of Athens.” + “How the hell are we going to get to Athens?” + “Not Athens Greece you idiot, Athens Georgia.” I said impatiently. + “I know that you idiot, but we don’t have the gas money to get to Georgia.” + “Okay. Lets rob a gas station.” + “You know you would be dead by now if I wasn’t here, right?” + “How do you mean?” + “Look around you, we are in THE SOUTH. People here have guns, big guns, and they use them. Alot. What do we have?” + “Good point. But we have to go to Stevie Wonder’s Pet store and buy Al the chocolate lab. I need to have dog on this trip.” + “Buy a dog? Are you not hearing me? Money?” + “Well shit I don’t know what did Kerouac do?” + “His PUBLISHER IN NEW YORK wired him money.” + “Right. Find a phone.” + “You don’t have a PINY.” + “I know I don’t.” + We pulled over at a Exxon station and I strode in saying I was Capt. XXXXX XXXXXXXXX and I needed to use the phone to report an accident. The attendant look straight out of a Flannery O’Conner novel but he handed me the phone. + “Hello Penguin Books? Yes this is Edward Abbey. I’m in a spot of trouble and I need you to send some money.” + click. + Shit. I leaned out the door and yelled to Ed “whose America’s most noted literary figure that's alive?” He looked puzzled. + “Tom Clancy?” + “Good thinking. Hello Random House? This is Tom Clancy, I’m in a spot of trouble I need some money.” + + male voice. + “Ya the CIA’s harassing me down here in Louisiana and I need you to wire me some money. They took my wallet and all.” + + “Do you think anyone is stupid enough to try and mess with a publishing company?” “Now look,” I said raising my voice, “If you want to see anymore of my manuscripts tell Ralph here to give me whatever is in his safe and you’ll wire him a reimbursement alright?” + + I handed the phone to the attendant who listened for a moment, eyes widening and nodded the way some people do as if the person on the other end can see you nodding. He hung up and went in the back room without saying a word. He returned with a bag of money under one arm and The Hunt for Red October and Clear and Present Danger in the other. + “I just love your books here would you mind signing them?” + I snatched the money and scrawled quickly in Hunt for Red October, To Ralph. I love you, Thomas Clancy and flipping to the back of Clear and Present Danger I wrote Ralph you are a true American. Call me sometime 555-8216, love Tom. I ran out the door and jumped in the car. + “What took so long?” + “I had my first book signing, it couldn’t be rushed.” + We split the rest of Earls potion and I drifted into a semi-conscious day dream state. + Fragments of Ash falling. +White washed ceilings hanging so ominous +Hallucination of bubble headed figures +crawling like the Michelin Man +across an indescribable mountain of tires +Motels Motels Motels +Whiskey Bourbon. +Tow truck +non-ordinary state of reality +precludes a state of reality +that something is real Point at +the autistic man woman child +Autistic man pointing at you +laughing unable to fathom how you brain +functions and quite self righteously +you you cling to its definitions. +Must delineate between abnormality +and those of us who Understand +The Human Virus breeding +like rats unconsciously conscious and aware +of our disorganization. +Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams +of the Anarchist are breeding +in the minds of the oil men +who don’t want to +lose they're stranglehold of reality. +(where is Earl nice guy.) +Fragments of Ash falling +the continual settling of dust +weighing down humanity and the +French Maid masturbates discreetly in +the next room. you need her +to keep the dust off your mortal +coil spring. +Rebirth mythology. +Mythology of reality. We must +distinguish between what will be defined as +sane and what shall be referred to +as insanity. Kevlar definitions +constructed to make a better shampoo +seem like a logical item on which +to squander your paperbacked slavery bills. +After all these years Tide still +gets your socks whiter +Its a wonder +they aren’t transparent by now. +that your brain retarded +in its development +that evolution had not +anticipated the advent +of the opposable thumb the unopposable +domination of the thumb leading +to and insect superiority of mating +rituals stolen from a textbook +on damselflies darning needles +sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy. +Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority +Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash. +Shit from the sky. Tax man came +for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance. +You understand. Nothing Personal +Just doing our job. Same as the +next guy. From Auzwich on down the +line. Didn’t make the rules. Sorry. +We perfected them. +There are no innocents in a world of +free will. You don’t have to survive +at the expense of others. You could +die with puncture wounds in your hands +and other would create a new mythology +strange irony would find another with holes +in his hands unwilling to accept +cockroach mentalities. +You want to beLIEve Hitler +was a madman but he lives on +buried under restraint in everyone mind. +Only taking orders you understand. Didn’t have +a CHOICE. Got a family to feed. +radio crackle. pop. hiss. +silence. +<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>> + + + + Georgia is a beautiful state if you take the right drugs. The drugs obscure the frightening backward racist mentality that the New South’s propaganda claims is gone. A thing of the past. I’ve been through Macon and if that’s the New South I’m damn glad I wasn’t here for the old. Earl’s miracle potion wears off as we pass through Jasper. + + + + +I have a penchant for old cars. Actually I have a penchant for anything old, anything with heritage. Items found tucked in the back of junk shops layered in dust still settling from the days of Atlantis. Heritage is the human element that lingers long after the actual owner of an old ford "woody" station wagon has disappeared. There is a feeling one gets from holding up a slightly rusted coca-cola sign, hung for years of the wall of a small country store where an old man used to sit of the porch and smile at the customers as they walked in. An old man who used to show local children the holes in his wrists where they pounded through the nails. + Salvation lies in artifacts, coca-cola signs from old stores or advertisements for the old clipper-ship routes to Paris where a young woman once went to be alone, to write, to create. Slow spoken words sink in, unlike gibberish sloganeering of our day, sliding quickly off the deaf ears of time. I treasure artifacts left behind to carry on memories when there is no clipper ship route for her to take anymore. + Artifacts are not a part of "americana," they are a part of lives. Old cars talk. Drive one a thousand miles east into your own past, they will find you. Words can always find you even across the ages. "Americana" is the garbage hawked in front of tourist landmarks. The artifacts are gone, for when the voices leave to escape the throngs of unwisemen, the artifacts leave with them. Of course trinkets of "americana" remain, to sold for thirty pieces of silver. + Artifacts must be sought after, they are never found. Most began as the dream in some ancient person's head, a fanciful dream to which only they adhered. Their voices can be heard of course, even without the artifact, for dreams inhabit the earth. Anyone who has spent any time in the canyon country of southern Utah will tell you as the old man did, "there are voices in the hills." Voices yes, but precious few listeners. Falling trees need ears to hear their sound, lest they remain simply vibrations and sudden movements of air. + Science has taught modern man to understand the how, but it can not answer the more ancient "why?" The voices in the hills know why, and those who spend the time sinking roots into the land and into the artifacts of the land, they know why. Technological society has entrapped itself in an ever more complex web of "how's" at the cost of listening ears. Deafness is a disease. + It is a disease wrought upon those who have cut loose their roots and float expressionless dangling ten feet above the earth. I have observed such people and wanted to help them, but I am small and could not reach. I have watched as some people, giants rather, Abbey, Thoreau, or a young girl named Anna, pulled them down. All this I have observed, but observation is nothing --reflection and meditation is where creation lies. In meditation I find only loss and sorrow, pain and dread, an overwhelming sense of my unimportance. This is the trouble with writers, they know only pain for reflecting back on life is to see a series of goodbyes farewells, a never-ending and complex web of leaving ears. Until there's no left to listen to the stories you tell; death is the process of being absorbed into the land, into artifacts. + Old Ford "woodies" were artifacts --simple in-line six engines without air conditioning, tape decks or alarm systems. You rolled down the window and listened. Listened to the wind rushing through the car, carrying the voices to your ears. You stopped at gas stations where old men wore overalls and you bought coca-cola beneath a shiny new metal sign. You could drive for days and in the end you might well have picked up a woman headed for New York to catch a clipper ship to Paris, or an old man who had holes in his wrists. + + + + Every so often in the course of observation one finds the kind of simple beauty on the face of a simple person that gives us pause. Pause to smile and wonder how we could have done without such a smile, such a radiance, such a pair of eyes. God made beauty and radiance and chose to call them children. I saw a photograph recently of a captivating child whose moment of radiance and simple beauty had been frozen for eternity by a shutter-click. An image lighted with a spirit and essence of beauty about it. Children have the kind of light about them that you need in April. By the time I'm eighty I hope I will have that radiance again. + Promise. Promises are what people need in April when the Earth is just beginning to warm up. The light tends to be clearer and the ocean swell finally arrives from some distant Mexican shore bringing the scent of flowers from the sand dunes. Flowers and passion are so often breathed in the same sentence they tend to loose there connection, but it lingers. Passion and flowers both need spontaneity and freedom to bloom. Is that the connection they seek? + Passion and Promise. Sometimes you push down the shutter of a camera and look back in a year only to find that you hate half the faces you froze. The good times are when you look back at a single face and stare right through it into the soul --the light behind the eyes. + Her eyes are windows into a soul, a soul which we create in reeling pitches of beauty and strength. If I had my way I should make her queen of the world. Oh Queen of the World won't you rescue me? I need a savior, and behind some immeasurable depth of eyes there is a kind of salvation. In the midst of a generation spinning and hurling violently around the sun one girl smiled to save me. + Passion, Promise and Salvation. I wish I could thank her, give her my hand to hold as we spin across the face of the sun at 68,000 miles an hour. It's a fast-paced world. I hardly have time to breathe, but in the air I do find I find a kind of vision. A hallucination and vague dream of a street in New York many years ago when Diane Arbus froze in time "a girl and a watch cap." + April's fading fast. The world's spinning faster and faster falling slowly and inevitably out of its orbit. I hope it hangs in there long enough for me to find a copy of that photo to hang on my wall. I'll hang it next to Christ. Christ is holding hands with that smiling little girl. She's helping him to his feet. She holding her hand out to me. + + + + + Some people say that after a rain the earth is cleansed and everything washed anew, and then, claim they, we are also. Oddly most of them own umbrellas. And now I stand in the rain watching them run, cursing their luck at being caught naked in the middle of salvation. Water drips down her nose onto the already soaked grass. I picked up a pen and called you to say... + I only want to love people, and I do in my fashion, but I am angry that not everyone wants to love everyone. I'm not bitter at people, I'm just saddened that they don't want to love each other. Race, Culture, Religion, all these things divide us, and to what purpose? I only want to stop them in their tracks and dump buckets of water, wet, cold, and painfully truthful, on their heads. To bandage the shallow petty wounds and wipe the blood away. "In his blood you are saved" --as if I needed more blood. Your hands are punctured, sir, give me your shroud and I will bandage them, stop the bleeding. + Rain falls evenly on the surface of rock, but it runs off and pools in the places where the granite has dug into itself to create depth. Granite is salvation, it is firm. On a granite surface you can climb, I can pull myself up granite cliffs and stand atop their holiness. But it is the depressions, cracks, and holes in the rock where I place my hands and feel secure. + "I heard the rainfall on my tentfly" and promptly took it off. I sleep much better when the rain can pool in my mouth. I dreamed long dreams of gold and silver snakes. A young boy found them, brilliant, shining creatures, deep in the forest. He brought them back to his village to keep them as pets. They began to grow and soon the boy was forced to spend much of his time finding them food. Soon they became so large that the boy had to toil from dawn to dusk just to keep their bellies full. They were consuming him, devouring up all his time until the day they devoured him. Two massive snakes of silver and gold hissing and striking poison into the body of a once curious young boy. + I awoke to a world where people carried their religions and philosophies tidily on the bumpers of their cars. Buildings and jewelry, smiles and sunsets, rings and promises all sparkled --silver and gold. Somewhere an old man was standing, holes in his hands, rain washing down on him. Water filled his eyes. He wept. + A freeway snaked across the land, its blood coursing with little religions and philosophies. This is where we lived, this is what we lived for. + + + + Nothing is ever as it seems. It has been sunny and warm lately so I thought I ought to tell about the time a dark-haired girl told me about people who lie in the sun. To tan of course. But a cynic informed me that a tan was merely the preliminary stage of cancer. No more of death. I have to much of death in my life, too much altogether. The Phoenix is dead. No life comes out of death, only pain, and sad memories, stored carefully from the beginning, for everyone knows there will be a time when memories are all we have. + So I set out to dance the sun up past the morning, catching with it the approving eye of sleeping squirrels and a once called god, old man. Life would be this much simpler if only I could clear thought from my mind. Truth. So truth is what you seek? + Our truth is only what we have known the longest. Men are stronger than women. That is the truth. We have known it the longest, heavy-handed down from weak lying old men who crawled about from bath to bath, groveling after truth. I have heard that men have been to the moon, but I have also heard that it was all staged. No. Truth must be that they have been there, I have heard that lie the longest. + Truth. The oldest and rankest lie is what we call truth. + And so shall be truth, there is nothing you can do to avoid it. You know you can not fly, it is the truth, and you will never fly. It is truth that you will never know whether your failure is because you can't fly or because you think you can't fly. Birds have hollow bones. That is truth. That is how they fly. Humans have hollow heads. That is truth, that is why they can not fly. + Boxcars and trains haunt my truth, a vision of a girl; black hair and smoky eyes. Fire. Fire is the one truth I can never escape, heat is all that is need to live. Fire in her eyes. Fire in Laguna's hills. Fire burning through her cheeks, her smile, flames licking and consuming her body. If only for a moment. + Images of dark and light arise from the depths only to be slapped in the face, clawed, bit, pulled under by the hair, ripped, torn and ravaged entirely by cliche. That in the end is truth enough for anyone. Especially a writer. + "You can cut a chicken's head off and it will keep on running," how's that for truth? Truth that death isn't death and isn't life, it is monotonous continuing about life without a head. Truth that spirit is inseparable from body. Truth that the spirit is in the body and the body is in the spirit. Our roots tell us that truth can be found by denying the body. By detaching it. What has sex to do with love? Sharpen your knives and prepare to cut lose the next limb. The truth is you don't know how to use it anyway. + I can cut your head off and you will keep on running too. Running about from your government to your economy to your business to your bedroom, but the blood doesn't stop spewing and bubbling out of your stump-neck, waiting for a moment, trickling down your body as if hoping some god will be your savior. It clots and dries and the only thing left is fire. Fire to burn you up without ceremony, only a faint crackling and sizzling as you burn without your headless for truth. + She didn't lose her head she only smiled and the flames cooled her. Shadrach and a girl with black hair. She was lifted, she did not twitch, only floated, and was delivered on. That is truth. You have blood. She has herself. Go ahead break it drink it. She'll never know. + +To me that image produces such strong emotions of longing for the road that sometimes I just want to break down and cry. The simplicity of life, the sheer joy and love I felt on the road last fall confirmed what I'd always believed, that I was born to travel. I don't know exactly what it is that is so enticing and alluring to me. I guess maybe its the freedom; the freedom to not have a job, to not have anyplace to go, not have anything to do that I don't really want to do. The simplicity, the essentials of life food, cigarettes, beer and gas. Give me those and I could live a million years in total ecstasy and bliss. The wind in my hair, the open road in front of me -its utter poetry for my heart and soul. The warmth of loneliness and the peace that it brings is overwhelming. Its not a sad loneliness, but rather one of infinite gratitude and joy in simply being alive and I know that might sound kind of corny but its really how I feel. If I could step into that photograph and just smell the air and hear the beautiful sounds of cars wizzing by and the talk of local folk, I could disappear forever + + + + + +I had a dream last night and Johnny Depp was not in it. I was twenty-three. Again. It was the twentieth century. Again. I hadn’t finished college. Again. I was scraping by on a Dean Moriarty salary parking cars nine hours a day. I got off at three and went home to find a sailor on my couch. There was a needle in his arm; he was watching soap operas. The woman on television was pregnant by her daughter’s husband. We laughed. I sat down and the sailor put a needle in my vein. William Burroughs walked in from the kitchen and stood over us. He smiled sadistically, knowingly. + “I wanted to be a writer,” I said to him. + He laughed obnoxiously. + “Shoot up kid its the easiest thing to do. I’d love to stay but they're expecting me in Tangiers.” He left and I awoke feverish and uncertain of where I began and ended. + I had another dream that night. The world’s end was at my doorstep. A white hot light had flashed civilization out. Cities ran as great metalglassconcrete rivers of deathdisfiguremanglement. Citizen’s charred limbs protruded like rocks that were floating with the stream. The searing smell of burning flesh darted through the hazy yellow air. A great clock tower was dripping time from its hands and my one true love stood beneath, arms severed and lying by her side. Her face had been burned off and eyes dissolved. Her head was upturned and its jaw hung down swinging stupidly in the yellow flesh burning air. Time was pooling in her mouth and dribbling done her chin like come. I awoke deeply offended by my subconscious mind. + I got out of bed convinced that we must find my Georgia friend Todd before it was too late. We were in Louisiana still and dangerously low on hallucinogens. + “I’d hate to have to go home early because we ran out of drugs.” + “I’d hate to run out of drugs.” + I ate the last of the mushrooms and relaxed staring at the dresser on the opposite wall. Presently it began to change. It dissolved into millions of tiny ants that crawled up on to the wall and began to flash messages like those signs at the side of the road that warn of up coming delays. + “Hello. We are ants.” +THIS IS WHAT WE KNOW: + Our purpose is singular. To inform you as to your mission. + “Hey are you seeing this Bill?” + “Probably not.” +SHUT UP AND READ, HOW OFTEN DO ANTS IMPART ADVISE? + <<<<<. Orders from above. You understand. Nothing personal. Actually we like you. Proceed from above dialog to TODD’S HOUSE. There you will be seduced by the enemy. Do not believe them. LIE is in the middle of believe. Talk to The Pigeon Man. He will be perched on the rain gutter out back above the patio. He will tell you how to proceed. You are our greatest hope. Avoid the cock-eating sirens as you may need your cock in the future. If locating TODD’S HOUSE proves difficult go to Ed’s Pets in Watsonville and buy Stevie Wonder. He is the chocolate lab just before the back door. He knows the way. <<<<<<<<>>>>>> + They slowly moved off the wall and structurally reformed the dresser. I got up and opened the drawer suspiciously. You just never know who to trust these days. + “Ah ha! just as I suspected. We must leave at once. The Gideons have been here.” + + + Nothing makes me as uncomfortable as organized religion. Especially one that sounds like some boxy Ford from the seventies. We checked out five minutes later after confirming that the effects of the mushrooms had indeed vacated my brain. For the most part anyway. Actually truth be told I was pretty out of it still and I just kind of threw the key at a bewildered looking Pakistani man. Or was that fear? + “Drive,” I said jumping in the already running car “I think he was on to us.” + The tires spit Gravel and we were off. (I love a good cliche.) + “We need to get to Watsonville.” + “Where the fuck is that?” + “Its just outside of Athens.” + “How the hell are we going to get to Athens?” + “Not Athens Greece you idiot, Athens Georgia.” I said impatiently. + “I know that you idiot, but we don’t have the gas money to get to Georgia.” + “Okay. Lets rob a gas station.” + “You know you would be dead by now if I wasn’t here, right?” + “How do you mean?” + “Look around you, we are in THE SOUTH. People here have guns, big guns, and they use them. Alot. What do we have?” + “Good point. But we have to go to Stevie Wonder’s Pet store and buy Al the chocolate lab. I need to have dog on this trip.” + “Buy a dog? Are you not hearing me? Money?” + “Well shit I don’t know what did Kerouac do?” + “His PUBLISHER IN NEW YORK wired him money.” + “Right. Find a phone.” + “You don’t have a PINY.” + “I know I don’t.” + We pulled over at a Exxon station and I strode in saying I was Capt. XXXXX XXXXXXXXX and I needed to use the phone to report an accident. The attendant look straight out of a Flannery O’Conner novel but he handed me the phone. + “Hello Penguin Books? Yes this is Edward Abbey. I’m in a spot of trouble and I need you to send some money.” + click. + Shit. I leaned out the door and yelled to Ed “whose America’s most noted literary figure that's alive?” He looked puzzled. + “Tom Clancy?” + “Good thinking. Hello Random House? This is Tom Clancy, I’m in a spot of trouble I need some money.” + + male voice. + “Ya the CIA’s harassing me down here in Louisiana and I need you to wire me some money. They took my wallet and all.” + + “Do you think anyone is stupid enough to try and mess with a publishing company?” “Now look,” I said raising my voice, “If you want to see anymore of my manuscripts tell Ralph here to give me whatever is in his safe and you’ll wire him a reimbursement alright?” + + I handed the phone to the attendant who listened for a moment, eyes widening and nodded the way some people do as if the person on the other end can see you nodding. He hung up and went in the back room without saying a word. He returned with a bag of money under one arm and The Hunt for Red October and Clear and Present Danger in the other. + “I just love your books here would you mind signing them?” + I snatched the money and scrawled quickly in Hunt for Red October, To Ralph. I love you, Thomas Clancy and flipping to the back of Clear and Present Danger I wrote Ralph you are a true American. Call me sometime 555-8216, love Tom. I ran out the door and jumped in the car. + “What took so long?” + “I had my first book signing, it couldn’t be rushed.” + We split the rest of Earls potion and I drifted into a semi-conscious day dream state. + Fragments of Ash falling. +White washed ceilings hanging so ominous +Hallucination of bubble headed figures +crawling like the Michelin Man +across an indescribable mountain of tires +Motels Motels Motels +Whiskey Bourbon. +Tow truck +non-ordinary state of reality +precludes a state of reality +that something is real Point at +the autistic man woman child +Autistic man pointing at you +laughing unable to fathom how you brain +functions and quite self righteously +you you cling to its definitions. +Must delineate between abnormality +and those of us who Understand +The Human Virus breeding +like rats unconsciously conscious and aware +of our disorganization. +Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams +of the Anarchist are breeding +in the minds of the oil men +who don’t want to +lose they're stranglehold of reality. +(where is Earl nice guy.) +Fragments of Ash falling +the continual settling of dust +weighing down humanity and the +French Maid masturbates discreetly in +the next room. you need her +to keep the dust off your mortal +coil spring. +Rebirth mythology. +Mythology of reality. We must +distinguish between what will be defined as +sane and what shall be referred to +as insanity. Kevlar definitions +constructed to make a better shampoo +seem like a logical item on which +to squander your paperbacked slavery bills. +After all these years Tide still +gets your socks whiter +Its a wonder +they aren’t transparent by now. +that your brain retarded +in its development +that evolution had not +anticipated the advent +of the opposable thumb the unopposable +domination of the thumb leading +to and insect superiority of mating +rituals stolen from a textbook +on damselflies darning needles +sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy. +Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority +Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash. +Shit from the sky. Tax man came +for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance. +You understand. Nothing Personal +Just doing our job. Same as the +next guy. From Auzwich on down the +line. Didn’t make the rules. Sorry. +We perfected them. +There are no innocents in a world of +free will. You don’t have to survive +at the expense of others. You could +die with puncture wounds in your hands +and other would create a new mythology +strange irony would find another with holes +in his hands unwilling to accept +cockroach mentalities. +You want to beLIEve Hitler +was a madman but he lives on +buried under restraint in everyone mind. +Only taking orders you understand. Didn’t have +a CHOICE. Got a family to feed. +radio crackle. pop. hiss. +silence. +<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>> + + + + Georgia is a beautiful state -if you take the right drugs. The drugs obscure the frightening backward racist mentality that the New South’s propaganda claims is gone. A thing of the past. I’ve been through Macon and if that’s the New South I’m damn glad I wasn’t here for the old. Earl’s miracle potion wears off as we pass through Jasper. + + + + + We arrived in Watsonville this morning and went to Steve's Pets where we bought a chocolate lab we named Al The Wonder Dog or ATW for short. A couple dozen milk bones later we arrived at Todd's house. Todd was looking worried and not at all glad to see us. + "I figured you freaks were on your way out here, this came in the mail yesterday," he said handing me a letter. + "It's good to see you too" I shot back. They always seem to know when I'm coming like I am the anti-stealth bomber. + "I'm sorry man, its just that Carol lee's parents are coming up from Macom' and I don't know what to do with you guy's." + "Well, we already got somewhere to stay so don't sweat it we weren't expecting anything but a cold beer." + "Of course, of course come inside." + I went out back on the porch and opened the letter and sat relaxing in the sticky humid southern evening. It went like this. + + Dear Wayfarer, + Thanks for your piece on Mardi Gras. It was definitely a first, and perhaps only, of its kind for the magazine. You should see the stack of letters sitting on my desk, people love you or hate you. Actually seven people loved you and over two hundred found you and your story to be the most offensive thing they had ever read -which I figured you would be delighted to know. + Anyway I was hoping you could do something on this piece I clipped from -------- magazine (our major competition in the LA and New York markets). I called them and got permission to rerun it in "an editorial form" (which I have on tape) so I think our butts are covered. + + Do the math. Many hosts are unsure how much liquor to buy for cocktail parties. When in doubt turn to arithmetic. Most drink recipes call for two ounces of liquor. + A 750mL bottle contains 25 ounces allowing for spillage. You can expect 12 serving per bottle. Figure most quests will have two drinks in an evening so you get one bottle per six people. + + + + + + Richard says to tell your to keep going up to D.C. Next week he wants you to cover some event that the Rev Farrakkan is having. Gimme a call, 'cause I think I actually got him to book a hotel room for you. + + + good luck, + + Dean + + + + I reread the letter several times trying to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do with the clipping. I mean shouldn't we be writing our own shit not just making fun of other people's shit? It occurs to me however, that magazines seldom blantantly make fun of each other, so who better to do it than me? I get another beer from Todd's fridge while he's playing with ATW, and I roll a cigarette on the porch. What sort of people need to have a formal theory for mixing drinks anyway? No one I've ever known has ever had a cocktail party, we usually all just show up at some often unsuspecting friend's house after the bars are all closed and proceed to raid there supplies of liquor and pharmaceuticals. Two ounces per drink. Who the hell knows how much two ounces is by sight? Besides that's the reason you drink at home -because you can make a God's honest beverage sure to alter your normal brainwaves after a few sips, instead of paying five dollars for a drink that wouldn't faze a second grader. I like to have two drinks in a evening too. Preferably poured in leftover 32 oz 7 eleven plastic cups. About three quarters full of alcohol (preferably clear and of Russian origin) and one quarter something else for taste. I like to drink in large quantities. + But it'll make you sick (sound of church ladies agast). Well your pointless life of boorish toiling from dawn to dusk with an hours worth of watered down pissass drinks at the pub on the way home to the overpriced, style-challenged suburban dwelling with your weekend cocktail parties where you gag on your bosses short dick angling for a promotion makes me sick. So fuck you and your organized society with stoplights and clockwise circles and social security cards and adverts drooling over the latest piece-of-shit-got-to-have-it plastic automobile so big you can't even drive it. Get the fuck out my way. Come out here sit on this porch in languid evening sun, relishing the sweet sticky smell of the southern air fanning across your bare chest as the Godless afternoon heat relents into a warm evening breeze. Then you'll understand what I'm talking about. + On second thought don't. You've got that big mortgage payment to worry about, and well, quite frankly, I just wouldn't be as relaxed if anyone else was here. Be content with your life and enjoy your smug possessions and play armchair enthusiast. I am your omnipotent guide and everything is under control. Actually if you must know I'm lost and everything about this god awful society is totally fucked-up. But nevermind, we'll get to that. + I set down the pen and my seventh beer and gaze cross-eyed at my response written in column form to impress THE EDITORS. + + Forget the math, you'll be too drunk to figure it out anyway. Buy one 750mL bottle per person bare minimum. When in doubt buy two. most drinks should be made with 12-15 ounces of alcohol and spillage will only earn the ridicule of your friends. Buy some pouring nipples or steal them from a bar you don't go to very often. + Figure that most guests will be belligerently drunk by ten so to save funds bust out the cheap stuff (re: Ralph's charcoal filtered vodka). Another excellent way to cut costs is to have a readily available supply of marijuana amphetamines and opiates. Avoid hallucinogens at you own party, better to bring them to someone else's house. That way should the neighbors find you huddled naked beneath a tree barking like a dog and foaming at the mouth, at least they won't be your neighbors. + + I have the strangest drunken feeling that that will never be printed in a magazine and that if it were I would be forever hounded by every law enforcement agency from coast to coast. I hurriedly scrawl a note that, if printed, not to put my name on it. Cops are like rattlesnakes there's no sense throwing rocks at 'em you know what they'll do. In fact I think in all likelihood the name on the jacket of this book will not by mine. People stopped believing in fiction along time ago, twentieth century imagination-atrophy syndrome. + I wander inside and find Bill and Todd staring mindlessly at the television. Creature of a human resemblance are cavorting on screen to a ten cent laugh track background designed to cover up the fact that sitcoms are basically not even remotely funny. They have to be stoned I realize and after a moments search I pick up the rest of the joint laying next to the ashtray. I light it and ease onto the couch. + "We should go down and see what's happening at the Knight." + No response. I take another drag hoping to catch up. I glance at Todd's glazed over eyes and realize that more than pot might be involved in this situation. I’m not talking about LSD here, no ours medulla don’t need to slowed down anymore than they already have. I’m talking about the greatest drug of all, the strongest hallucinogen known to man: the television. The great Tractor Beam of America sucking out your insides, and turning your guts to mush that I can spoon out and pour over ice cream. It’s oozing from your clawed out eye sockets, slowly at first and then in a fiery blast your projectile vomit squirts unrecognizable organs mashed into goo across the room to the smiling screen of the television. Ted Turner loves us. He's given us our own alter state of reality that we can all share together. + I wave my hand in front of Bill's face. + "Hey man shut up I'm trying to watch this thing." + I turn off the television and ask "have you ever considered that maybe it is watching you?" + "Yes," answers Todd, "but I don't publisize my paranoia" + They seem to have snapped out of their primordial trance state so I again suggest the Little Knight and this time they agree, but Todd the dutiful husband can only go for an hour. Uh hu. I'm going to need more than an hour I love Georgia girls and the most beautiful and intelligent ones (no thats not a oximoron) hang out at the Little Knight + Besides which, I'm full from all that beer, and am feeling the need to lighten up my head with something clear. Something Russian. We sit in the customary back booth where Todd and I first shared a beer. And I do mean shared, we were both so broke at the time that between the two of us we had only enough for one pint of Guiness. But that was many moons ago. I gave Todd some ecxtasy the New Orleans club girls had given me, and despite his protests of coming in-laws (whats worse in-laws on extasy or a wife stood up because you're on exctasy? Tough call.) Now he and Bill have become thoroughly enchanted with the red velvet texture that cover the walls. I'm not big on X its too tactile of a drug. I start thinking of the how long its been since I've been here. I miss this one little outpost nestled in the middle of anotherwise boring and featureless state. Perhaps boring is the wrong word, sufficeto say that Georgia's beauty is in its subtlies. the little pockets of beauty that you can't find anywhere except Georgia. And of the eccentricies of the folk the land has given birth to. + I think, for instance, of Leo the crazy cook back in Athens Georgia, black like the greasy skillets and pots he is forever clanging around and the glum ceilings of the kitchen, greasy smoke crawling up the wall to rest at the top, muddy brown, delicious looking. Automatic. Your food is thrust at you by a wide-eyed black woman who appears to be Leo’s wife but never says anything except "Greens, potatoes or Yams?" "Greens please." The first time we were there she added "sweet tea is on the left regular right." After that when we would come back she seem satisfied the we could figure the tea situation ourselves. "Greens, potatoes or yams?" Yams please. And cigarettes, always cigarettes, after a meal the soothing feel of smoke blowing out you nose, relaxing your greasy full belly. I would like to sing an ode to cigarettes at the top of my lungs, at the top of my hills at the bottom of my valleys. Cigarettes are always there. Food and Women come and go and can be enjoyed properly when you have them, but cigarettes you must always have cigarettes. + And MY My my the southern girls (why always girls? Why not?). The true peaches of Georgia. Lips honey sweet and dripping with southern accents. The hot sticky air that seems to cling to you like unwanted jackets your mother used to put on you when you went out to play in the snow. It makes you want to throw off whatever garments propriety dictated onto your unwitting frame and dive naked in the cool river, swim naked with the girls, women, water moccasins, and the lucky alligator or two if any are around. + But tonight the Knight is empty save for the token Frat boys playing pool. And of course Anthony Luigie Bruno. Or Tony as we call him. Bartender extrodiniarar. I don't know anything about Tony. Or at least I don't know anything for sure about Tony. I could probably fill twenty pages with the bullshit stories I've heard him tell unsuspecting "freshies" as he calls them. He really is Italian and he really pours stiff drink and he rarely makes me pay for them. That's the extent of the truth about Tony and beyond that in all honesty I'm really not mush interested. + + + +Brian a quiet shy nice good, weed suppling friend. We’ve been in the back rooms of Frat houses just passing time. Hendrix, Zepplin, tie-dyed Jerry Garcia staring down from the stark plaster-patched walls. Michael and I flat on our backs listening to Adam Sandler sing "I’m fucking wasted/its the best shit I’ve ever tasted." It’s all down hill from here, such beautiful silence between songs, minds scouring for thoughts like a thousand skinny starved rats devouring a single crumb. Giant looping conversations chasing bumblebee ideas through great open fields of thoughtless silence. + Hey what day is it? Lets go downtown, by the fountain, cool jazz music drifting out the open windows of the too crowded to enter bar. I try. Can I get a beer? In a minute. Didn’t have a minute, life was flying by, Amtrak coast to coast flyer, stopping causes derailment. Back out into the dizzying flow of human traffic. We’re trying hard not to get trampled like those poor soccer fans at the stadium riots in Italy that I always am reading about. Its Brian, It’s his fault where are the girls? "Lets go to Tangz!" he says. So we warder through throngs of drunken kids --college towns 20,000 people with nothing to do but drink Tangz! is too crowded full of Hootie and the Blowfish listeners for Michael’s tastes, so we leave. Brian stays. + Wandering together like we always end up. Drunk now, the tea worn off. Streets swirl and in my daze I hear horns and skidding tires, get out of the street you moron. A cop cruises by this city is fucking chocked full of cops, we duck down an alley. Half way down a drunken bum accosts us. + "This is my alley college boys." + "We are not college boys," Michael babbles with little coherency, but a lot of conviction, "we are upon a sojourn." Big words usually piss bums off and I am fully prepared to run from a spraying onslaught of cheap red wine, but it never comes. + "Where are you sojourning to?" mumbles the bum. + "Tonight we decided to share your alley, I say, trying to keep the world upright, but it refuses. "I think I better sit down." I lean against the wall next to the bum and slowly slide down, the bricks bumping my back, until I arrive on the ground with the bum. A small journey downward amongst some larger incoherent vision. Sitting relieves the mind of its burdens if only for a second while the brain floats downward and lodges back in your drugged skull. + "Chinese?" + The bum offers me food. + "Shouldn’t I be offering you food?" I laugh. + "Food is food right now I’ve got some and you don’t so I’m offering it to you, someday you’ll have some and maybe you’ll offer it to me." + I acquiesce and eat a bite. Pass it to Michael. He jabs his finger in to scoop up some noodles. + "Shit boy wheres your manners?" the bum croaks in disgust. + "I don’t know how to use chopsticks." + "Shit you’re out here on your own ‘sojourning’ around and you can’t even use chopsticks. Come here I’ll teach you." + I’m laughing at the comic nature of the bum trying to show Michael how to eat with chopsticks, ready to slouch down and say goodbye to the world for a while. No, not yet. I raise my heavy head banging it into the bricks. OW! The bricks are laughing at me manic side splitting laughter. I try desperately to focus on the wall on the opposite side of the alley. I notice lights and I become aware for the first time of music, not just music, but Prince. It occurs to me that its probably Tangz! right down the street. Drunks usually don’t wander very far. + The faint lights down toward the end of the alley fade out of focus I squint and suddenly all I can see is some coastal port for France. My brain gives in to the illusion and start to see it clearer the faraway sparkle as one might see from an ocean liner steaming across the channel, glittering insane promises of wine whore and Henry miller. Miller and I are in some dim lit alley, scrounging for scraps of bread in the flickering shadows of gas lamps. We come to a door, a pastry shop! Straining my head I can see glass shelves behind a counter displaying torts, cheesecakes, eclairs, raspberry torts, blueberry, lemon. lime, blackberry, and chocolate cake dripping fudge, carrot cake, pineapple upside down cake, buns muffins all seductively delicious in rows and piles, food to feed armies, countries, continents. But the counter is made of barbed wire, we can’t get to them. All the food to feed the world and I can’t reach it. I am trying but the razor barbs cut me, I am bleeding, Miller is gone, I’m no longer in the store, my neck aches and throbs. + I open my eyes and am suddenly blinded by the midday Colorado sun. I am desperately craving a raspberry tort. I can’t figure out why, then I remember the dream. Walls come into focus and that rushing of blood to my head that signals the onslaught of a terrific headache. Michael’s head is resting on my shoulder and his arm is strewn across my legs. I heave him off and stand up. We arm in the alley still I notice just a few doors down from the back entrance to Tangz! A horrid thought strikes me and I reach for my back pocket, but no my wallet and all its money ($23) is still there. Maybe bums are the last honest people left. + Michael is up and rubbing his eyes. + "Take those contacts out one or these days or your going to go blind," I warn. + "I am blind. Where are we?" + "In that alley still." + "oh yeah, hey you passed out, I kept trying to wake you up man that bum was one wacky cat." Michael unconsciously imitating the slang of the cool old ponytailed Jazz musician who runs and open mike night at this little coffee shop in LA. Michael and I used to go there me with guitar and him singing, we’d slaughter Bruce Springsteen song and the guy would just say "you cats are pretty cool -I can dig you." I loved that guy. + + + + +I talk to bums. I smile at there stories and listen in reverence to the quiet theories of conspiracy. Why not who else to talk to in these most disheartening of times. The manic glow of thought that echoes hollowly from our collective lips is little more than the endless glow of faceless faces radiating a cheap phosphorescent light streaming stupidly by on the streets. What have you to say to me what have I to say to you? Bums are crazy not one has ever made any attempt to shed any sort of sanity into my life. I talk to bums. I give them money for food for cigarettes for alcohol to numb the stupidity of their lives. If I were rich I would by everyone a bottle of wild turkey and hand them out on the corner of 6th and Broadway. Here take off your mask admit the insanity of our lives. Face it square on, look into its eyes, grab it by the throat and choke the life right out of it until you are numb and your hands relax from your own throat. I hate my generation. sickened swine what have you to say to me? Same as I to you not a goddamned thing. + I tried to do that, to choke the marrow out of life or some other ridiculous sophomoric whine that passes for art. Now I talk to bums. The more I rant in aimless circles the more they listen. They have nowhere to go no one to believe in. Who would you believe in if no one believed in you? Bums don’t lie. They tell stories that never happened they bow their heads to priest whose god disowned them, but they don;t lie. We lie. The ones with the warm houses ,the comfortable chairs, the endless sewer of easy loves and voluptuous non existence, that I wouldn’t trade for one instant of truth or enlightenment. We lie. To ourselves to the empty communitiless society we have created. What we wouldn’t give for true vulgarity in our lives. Not the false hopeless vulgarities we have dreamed up -pornography, narcotics, state supported war. But real vulgarity live stripped back to the essential to the marrow of existence. To have to forage for our own food for one mere night, to find shelter for ourselves and our families, to love life as the precious dirty scuffed diamond in the rough. To sink your hands into the dry desert sand clawing for a God who doesn’t hear with the sun beating endlessly on your naked back ,your fetal heart. + I talk to bums because they seem not amazed at the contradictions of life. They know the hideous lie of monogamy and the false happiness in sorrow. They are not loyal to state to man not even to each other I have no doubt they would rob me blind if they could and I respect them for it. Better bitter honesty than the stinking filth of the man who marries one woman and disowns four others in the process. We bought this lie this one mate, one country, one planet in the face of a 250 billion other galaxies. we are the ones the only ones. We are at least probably the only ones who have the audacity to believe we are the only ones. Would the mule deer grazing in land locked Colorado deny the existence of whales in an ocean it has never seen? I have asked many, but in there silence I can only assume they do. After all if we found life outside out planet would we remain calm and un moved and go about our business as we always had. Would our beliefs hold up in the face of such a test? would our religions crumble, our faith in the “order of the universe” be irrevocably shaken? Ask the mothers whose sons and daughter have been struck down on our streets about the “order of the universe” God may not play dice with the universe, but physics don’t control it either + + + + + + + + + +Sitting at a table in upstate New York- + And the Galaxy girl walks down the street, boyfriend in tow, brown stomach seductively bare, midriff shirt. They're meeting friends later at the gate hanging ten feet high down town. She and her shirt with GALAXY GIRL written in glittering silver, would like to get drunk, high on little golden yellow pills, and float in the ecstasy of swirling music. Who wouldn't? + Three marines drive smiling and pointed in squirish red truck (marines de reguir) desperately hoping for some sweet young girl to cross the street coming back from the beach. Stoplights are a woman’s worst nightmare. Catcalls. Warbles, like sex crazed crows float up the street. Victim. Hoping for a smile of a acknowledgement to insincere flattery. Them squirming in their truck. Hey baby... Marines cruising for cunt. Any cunt will do + And the aging club girl with bright cherry lips painted extra red by the contrast in her black leather jacket eyeing me. She sits slouched in a chair as if resigned that she will never make it back to New York. CEBE JEBES THE ALIGATOR LOUNGE. Those were the good days. Now its just slouched days in slouched chairs cigarette aimed skyward dreaming of darkness and the wild seductive wails of guitar (what was that blonde guys name?) the rhythmic pounding of the beat forcing its way into your chest, the throb, the guttural appeal of all thing taboo and enticing. + The surfer and his girl stroll by, her breasts spilling out of the too small top, losing its Herculean battle to save the world from nudity. They wander into the cafe’ for snacks, drinks, to gorge the thirst induced by the haughtless sun now carving the end of its tyrannical arc. They order designer water and leave. + The tired shopkeeper is out smoking her obscenely thin cigarettes again (excuse me is there any tobacco in those?). She smokes constantly pausing only to give a tired answer to the same tourists she has to stare at day after day. An endless reminder that they not her are the ones enjoying life. Too many of them day after day year after year look look looking never buying. THE LEATHER CONNECTION doesn’t do a lot of business on hot spring days. Nor is it the kinky sort of fetish shop you might hope for. Not even any leather in the windows. She moves her lips mumbling incoherences intelligible only to herself. She’s probably thinking like I am that she shouldn’t have married that conceited machoistic slob, that cigar smoking house tyrant who will be demanding dinner the moment she walks in the door. She lights another cigarette. Get some thicker smokes, they’ll last longer I want to say. But I can tell she’s not the type to take unsolicited advise. + The sharp eyed Asian hawk sitting behind me closes her purse, pen safely secured inside. She licks stamps and affixes them to postcards. Notes for those at home. “Jenny: New York is great -warm sunny. I’m having a great time. Remind me to tell you about this guy Bill I met the other day. Take care of yourself. Say hi to Tom for me. Love....” + Families wander by looking for a nice place to eat. The neon signs offer Mexican Italian Greek food, “but we need a children's menu.” “Tommy’s only nine, he can’t eat a whole meal himself.” “Do you think they could split a dinner, I’m not very hungry myself?” “You brought the credit card right?” “No, but I’ve still got some cash left over from breakfast this morning. “Wasn’t that a charming little place?” “What was it called?” “Lets go there again before we leave.” + And the girls the beautiful girls yes they keep going by, but I ignore them all I can ever think of them is what color lace covers there sweet impressionable pussies... + The locals, the non-travelers, the doomed-forever-to-live-in-one-placers stream by in shinny cars coming home from work in THE BIG CITY. Their flimsy soda can Japanese cars that look as if a good size bird could with good aim crush the plastic colored roofs. Remember when Kerouac and his crazy friends roamed the highways remember when cars were made of steel? Me either. The locals drive with windows up and frowns turned down. “Did I remember to e-mail that memo to Tony at the office in Chicago? I wonder what sort of crap Diane cooked for dinner tonight? She is the worst cook. What happened to that tri-tip on Friday? I wouldn’t have known what is was if I hadn’t bought it myself. Dave and Linda smiled and said it was delicious the lying bastards. don’t encourage her she might actually believe she can cook. Dave probably just wants to sleep with her. That whore. I wonder if she’s fooling around behind my back? She never wants to have sex anymore. Its always the same routine. Me still dripping from a shower her reading some book I crawl onto of her . ‘Not tonight honey I’m to tired.’ I wait till she’s fast a sleep and sneak down to the kitchen reach behind the fridge and pull out the nudie magazines off quietly to the bathroom. I wonder what Diane would look like in tight leather probably fat. She still hasn’t lost all the wait from the pregnancy. God its been what like eighteen months Justin’s starting to walk for christsakes. The light is green, fucking traffic.” The typical suburbian woes. + Fog is settling in from the hills meeting up with banks rolling in from the sea, threatening the star’s view, tiny windows of the gods peeping in watching our silly games in continued amusement. (“they keep doing it every night”) Reminding me of San Francisco, the golden gate after sundown glowing like it were Apollos chariot itself. Proudly beckoning the traveler with tale of endless wanderlust -out here the final frontier come swim discover secrets hidden from mankind...Come the sharks are hungry. The mashing of teeth and bone the tearing of flesh. Being ripped to sheds in the jaws of nature that is a glorious death. + A bitter couple take a seat behind me. “out here in the great outdoors the largest smoking section in America.” Amen brother. Places out of reach of the spreading TYRANTS OF HEALTH. Would you like extra grease on that steak? Why, yes please. Breakfast in Memphis, eggs pancakes toast slices of orange parsley, juice and a happy go lucky waiter offering free Sprite? Why, yes please and keep it coming. Michael could I borrow you lighter? Certainly sir. Cigarettes coffee and more open road that's what I need. Bad coffee, bad roads full of chuckholes and entire lanes wiped out in flood, and of course really good cigarettes, that's what I really need -enough of this damn city. + But it the girls the girls the girls. Sweet tight little asses hidden under Levis soft pillowly breasts rounding out tight white black blue silver t-shirts, arms cut short and stomachs exposed by some ingenious designer who truly understands life. Belly buttons sunken gently with the hint of what sweet candy lies below wrapped in red green white black lace, curly auburn hairs, not brown, never true blond, but in between --auburn. In between indeed. + And the men at the bench across the way cackle and pop with laughter pointing and gesticulating as if begging for some passerby to take interest and join in their conversation. The dizzying roar of a departing bus temporarily drowns them out. That was seven moons ago and any return is several moons hence. I am here, California. The Queen Bitch. No more humid smiles. + The milk of human kindness. The smiles of a five year old with grandmother eyes. Don’t look at me it is to late for me, save yourself. + Brave is the soul who dare to parallel park in the clanging honking impatient drone of six o'clock traffic. They have other destinations, other places they want to be unlucky soul giving in and going away. Only to return moments later and steal stealthily into that same spot! The triumph of the human spirit is reduced to finding good parking. And she exits to the roar of cheers, friends waiting on the balcony above me. Greek. Ladies night out at the Aegean Cafe’. Park the husbands on the couch, insert beer, and leave. Ladies night out. + The eastern couple hesitates on the steps below he Indian she Asian. Such a wonderfully raceless baby they could have. We need a worldwide orgy to end racial differences. End racism, fuck a foreigner! And of course end culture, diversity and everything interesting about people. + I would not fuck you in Thailand/ I would not fuck you in a plane over Japan. One of Dr. Suess’ lesser known couplets. Brain candy. Soul fodder. + Three big beefcake men approach in white t-shirts, dripping fake tans. Score! Find a cunt jack off in. Find us all one. Dewy eyed art school girls who want nothing to do with the beefcakes’ piercing horny lecherous stares, they want coffee cigarettes and conversation. And maybe, just maybe some weird vampire sex with blood sucking and candle wax dripping, burning nipples. But you wouldn’t know any better than I. Such eroticisms sparkle and fade. Sparkle and fade. + A limo. Movie stars? Sparkle and fade. A beautiful Spanish style villa to return to after a night on the town, bring the press along we’ll write it all up for the morning papers. We’ll waltz under the comet’s tail, our bare feet shuffling in the sand falling between naked toes making the sound of a a rainstick, its seeds forever trapped in a cactus skull, only too quiet to hear. + Four sweet college girls pause and seeming ask no one “‘didn’t this use to be called Fahrenheit 451?’ Sure I reply. They study me uncertain. It cooled off I guess. Poor smiles for a poor attempt at humor. ‘What are you writing?’ (The blond too.) A bunckofworthlesscrap no one will ever read. ‘Can I try?’ (Shit.) My writings pretty bad. + +. + + + + + + I woke up this morning in a sleeping bag with no where left to run. We are in Wyhoming. Again. It's still the twentieth century and not much else appears to have changed. Al is licking my face and appears to want food. That dog is eating me out of House and home. House being a battered sixty-nine Ford Pickup and home having disappeared several months ago. + + + + + +As it turned out it was a good day to ask. I was going through one of my increasingly frequent fazes of moping. What Dr. Fredrick called depression, but he didn’t understand people very well, on account of his being a psychiatrist and all. I cut him slack though because he did provide for the occasionally insightful discussions. I think it was boredom that held me in its jaws, not chemical depression. I was going through a cliche period, I was pondering the meaning of life. + I have nothing that could be termed a skill so as my friends and neighbors began to get more and more involved in jobs and families, I spent more and more time in my room staring at ominously blank sheets of paper sticking out of my antique, but fully functional Underwood typewriter. Lacking anything better to say, all I ever typed was I am bored. Forty of fifty sheets of paper were neatly pinned on the wall above my desk reading just that. I was just arriving at the conclusion that perhaps it was the city and its claustrophobic patches of grey sky wedged angularly between skyscrapers that was getting me down. I was contemplating moving to France when a friend pointed out that the sun rarely shone in Paris either. I have lived in this city for five years and have yet to run across anyone who can explain why this place never sees the sun. A half an hours drive in any direction will generally produce sunshine, but the city itself seems to have been built in the world’s only perpetual fog bank. + In lieu of any logical explanation I have conceived my own; the weather is out to bore me into depression. Dr. Fredrick’s eyes lit up when I mentioned this theory to him, and he immediately asked if I ever heard voices. I told him yes, but generally only on the cordless phone. I told him that the company had said that if wanted to up grade to digital the noises would go a way. Dr. Fredrick’s smile widened for a moment and vanish along with his grandiose idea that perhaps I was a paranoid schizophrenic. Dr. Fredrick’s mission, and hence my reason for visiting him, was to study the psyche of the artist and try to prove that artistry was perhaps a chemical imbalance in the brain which led to increased creative urges. He a big grant from some fancy university back east and paid me to be one of his test subjects. Unable to hold down a job, lack of motivation or sheer laziness its your call, I needed easy money so I had answered his ad and apparently did a good job of convincing him that I was a writer. The fact that I had never really sat down and written anything of substance didn’t seem to bother him. “Its not so much the act of writing, but the heartfelt need to write that interests me,” he used to say. I usually just nodded and let him inject me with some chemical that let his scanners see what parts of my brain were active and which weren’t. The five hundred dollars I received every Friday cinched the idea for me. + I never mentioned it to him, but I had already exorcized my right to self diagnosis and in my educated opinion I was chronically afflict with the disorder of humanity, that is to say that I was human and subject to the usual symptoms of emotional turmoil and occasional serious ups and downs of life. A condition which I concluded was both terminal and incurable. + + This morning started like any other, I struggled to get out of bed before noon and after I finished typing my usual rendition of I am Bored and pinned it next to the others, I headed out for some fresh if foggy air and a cup of coffee. That's what you do if your an artist I learned you frequent coffee shops with a pen and sketch pad order a cup of coffee, sit preferably in a dark corner table and put on airs of deep thought and cosmic contemplation. So it was with a sense of heavy obligation that a swung open the door at Jittery Joe's and strolled over to my table in the dark corner opposite the front door. I deposited my pen and sketch pad and strolled to the coffee bar trying my best to appear distracted and preoccupied with my very own “big idea.” + Supposedly I was researching a book which was to be my masterpiece, I wanted to storm on to the scene as the triumphant and brilliant new writer who would issue in a new area in modern fiction. The mundane reality was a little bit different. I was facinateed at the time, with aboriginal world views and the native minds connection with the earth. I had gotten so far as the ominous one hundred page mark when my puplisher told me in an exited voice that this was exactly the book the were looking for to break into the burgening new age genre. I set the phone down and ran into the other roon scooped up my manuscript and flushed the entire contents down the toilet. My masterpiece work of genius was beginning to look like a lucrative career ghost writing for Penthouse Letters. + But, as I settle back into the plush highbacked chair that I am forever dragging from one end of joes to the other, whatwas mainly on my mind was hwo to get to Utah. My publisher had kindly arranged some time ago for me to sit in with some members of the hopi tribe on a dream quest or something of that nature. Not wanting to miss such an opportunity I had yet to tell my publisher about the toilet flushing insident, so I was left without a ride to Utah. He was supposed to give me his car, but since that would involve my giving up what I had written I was at present, screwed. + + + + + Wake up and walk down never having satopped. Beginnings are always violent; the universe sxploded from a single point, achild is pushed out of a whole that is normally tight around my cock. Violence is the natural state of beginnings. Without violence there is sterilty a barren wasteland. Test tube babies sickening smell of death waiting like a vulture, to ooze out of the scientists lab. The good Dr. B having a bowl of weavils for breakfast sucking them up out of a 1920's huca smoke seeping out the floorboards of the room + + + + + + + + diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/gone book/D iam diff version.txt b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/D iam diff version.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9c3d7de --- /dev/null +++ b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/D iam diff version.txt @@ -0,0 +1,88 @@ + Denver is a clicking noise, a perfect symphany of flying fingers, words and shoes. The collision of bodies results in equal and opposite repultion into free form voids of their own peruvian designs, fre form abstracts of temples and vines, jungle book black cats. The mayan caper recast north of the equator. But as is started to say it was a clicking noise… It came in with wheels slowing west of the main station and it continued in the cab ride to mikes house as I sat mexmerized by the meter, and it finally collided when I opened the door to his house and I saw Dean typing on a laptop on the couch. I said Mike, I should have said Mike and Halley which is whole different sort of beast. +Mike and Halley had come about because of me, at least that was how it looked when you poked around the edges of their relationship. The official story was that Halley’s job had led them Denver, but I wasn’t buying. Mike and I went back a long time ago to a galaxy far far away. Actually it was closer to Spaceballs that Star Wars… right down to the trailer. Mike and I had both dropped out of college and being broke as hell working coffeeshops we could only afford a one-room trailer. There was never any money or food other than noodles. The one thing we had tons of though were friends, friends from high school, friends from college, friends from work, friends friends friends and they were there every fucking night like band of chimpanzees throwing there own feces about and giggling and whooping with laughter. We were all just finding drugs. We were late bloomers. I got out of that trailer atrocity by sheer force of will; well that and the luck that my parents hadn’t done anything with my own room. Mike’s parents already had a home office and they weren’t keen on getting him back. They had vaccinated themselves with furniture, a cruel reality that I only point out because it helps explain Mike. Mike was forced by circumstance to escape via Halley, love was only one side of the coin, the side that Halley saw, but in Denver I saw something colder, something more reptile-olike creeping behind his eyes —necessity. Love and necessity colliding with all the fanfare of a plane wreck. + Denver was a crash landing, a bust in grandest old western sense of the word. I remember three things rising up out of the rollicking sautéed cacophony; they float in my recollection like enormous turds. There was the windowless tomb of stone blocks that constituted a house inhabited by five people in two bedrooms in which Dean developed a Heroin habit, Betty drowned in despair and Mike and Halley fought great crusades for the dominance of their sexes. The cinderblock walls sustained all their momentum for seven months. Mike and Halley fell out of love, Dean fell in, Betty climbed over love, and I watched totally unable to act; I was paralyzed and could do nothing for myself or them. It was bliss while it lasted. I watched Dean until he faded into love and heroin becoming too thin to see, then I watched Mike and Halley dissolve into Mike, and Halley, and then finally out of self-pity Dean inadvertently propelled Betty and I out with him on an arcing trajectory that landed me in New Orleans, Betty back in Las Vegas, and Dean in Washington D.C. Throughout it all the television reigned. Betty and I were stationed like zombis before the master god of all creation and its blue aura. Dean was one with the place; he existed by the skin of his teeth, I have little or no recognition of him while we were there, he was either shooting up or talking to Amanda on the internet or both. Otherwise he did not really exist. Dean did that from time to time, became invisible and disappeared only to resurface again at the oddest moment possible. Most of all what sticks out was the sound of it all. The mad clicking that brought me into Denver was always in background like the sound of time itself walking about in the rooms, banging pots, cooking rice in the kitchen, arguing with itself in the bathroom, throwing shoes at Mike as he runs out of the bedroom. +Dean is typing, it’s a furious noise, he is pounding the keys nodding his head to the sounds from his headphones. He has drowned out his own fingers, doesn’t realize the force with which he is pounding the keys, mad telegraphs spitting out like lizard tongues firing themselves out into electrostatic love notes wired and flung off to Maryland where another pair of fingers responds…. the thing itself it flying back and forth maddening! + And the outside world is no better, what filters in on the TV is reflected back all around us, cold insensitive innocuous suburban delight… detachment. We lived in a decidedly residential area of Denver, a cityvoid that occurs in every big American city where an arbitrary line is drawn around some houses, a couple of suburban strip-mall shopping-centers, and gas stations and it is given a purposefully pedestrian name like Irvine or Turtle Rock… the streets of Douglas Copeland's nightmares. The perpetual warm blue glow of television sets emanated from the windows of vinyl sided endura-homes —guaranteed to last a lifetime or your money back! The television a great luminous third eye watching the affair with the indifference of god. Walking around in the evenings I felt the pride of it’s inventor. Every house was glowing quiet blue light the streets bathed in its iridescence, cobalt streets, sapphire lawns, purple skies, everything lit from within blue, blue noise humming softly… in the background blue people wandered, silhouettes dancing in front of kitchen windows and shadows lurking in open garages. The blue is grating irritating, gets under your skin like the flesh eating virus boils spring up and burst revealing slick blue oil and puss. They slide under the arm; you can see them moving just below the skin. But in background faint at first but growing in decibels is the maddening chant of the newsman and the Maytag man and all the talking heads disembodied and floating in the sky singing choruses. It’s all in timing! The process must be subtle and slow, but steady until the critical mass is reached then summon them like zombies to their own deaths in the gamma ovens… the mad scientist paces about suburban streets in a kind of furious strut. Every thing is planned; everything reflects precision. + Around the cave we lived in even the trees were well manicured as if the force the random act of god even into simplistic conformity, but not with menacing intent… only so that it will match the lawn and the wife’s nails all neatly polished like jewels. I used to work in a town like this, for a couple of days anyway, just long enough to collect such gems as the story of the woman who abandoned her dog on the beach one day because its spots clashed with her new interior design ideas. Or the man who smothered his baby because his wife was paying more attention to the child then his dick. Precious people we all aspire to be and yet you and I somehow we will be different isn’t that right? Somehow it will not get to us, all these trapping we can see through it now and we will see through it then; it never occurred to the monsters either that you don’t have eyes in the back if your head. +You and I though, we can’t afford to do that we must work real hard and get where the rich people are. Funny logic. Fuzzy math. Keep it I’m outta here me the old man said sitting on his rocker, a Kansas porch, hot summer day, cats, an orgone box, a southerner, and glass of clear liquid refilled constantly. Keep it, I’m outta here me. So long. And there is a witch stirring her cauldron; stir in a few European brains, some Irish brawns, a twinkle of pigs’ feet to sniff out the hidden truffles and simmer for two hundred years until the whole cesspool turns into a soufflé. +Outside is America. The sound is deafening. It comes in waves of music, horns, engines, electricity, spinning warbles of neon light echoing asphalt dreams of sanity. Vibrations given off by the turn of espresso handles, the pull of yogurt machines, the spinning of laundry mats, the chopping of the Chinese cook’s knife atop the trash can, chunks of chicken fat and bone accumulating on the floor; all of it whirls in a hurricane melee reverberating about through the dry air of the plains. Crisp air that offers no resistance to the pealing clamor, it just carries it about silent as a tomb offering no comment on the meaning of it all. Standing air listens like a woman in orgasm to the totality of nothingness like wood hewn by sandpaper until smooth contrasted against the sanding sound of ocean waves, rivers feed by rain, driftwood and manicured wood lying side by side. And running your hand over each to notice the artificial feel of the polished hard wood and the prickling organic sensuality of the rough hewn driftwood tossed like a cork, a bottle, a note, all of them riding over seas of imagination and somehow in the landlocked spirit of place Denver sounds like cancer. The insidious beat of death. Tribal drums still heralding the rising moon, wood blocks clanging about in alleys, homeless people rattling shopping carts up one street and down another the mad mad mad sound of science. +Sound I am told by Dean is nothing more than pressure waves being interpreted by my ears. “Horseshit” I mutter and then there is Mike ducking and the sound of Halley yelling, her voice wailing in anguish over something he had done, but we don’t know what it is we don’t know if it is that bad or if she is insane. Betty and I serve the madness in silence, in the background Chandler is broken up over Joey moving out and that mousy guy that’s always ‘the other guy’ in movies is moving in, homoerotic jokes are sticking to vellum walls like flies. + The shoe hits the wall above the couch and tumbles down between Betty and I, she looks at it, I look at it, we look at each other, we look at Mike (he is crying), and we look at the television it is moving on trying to sell me deodorant. On the table is a bong. Betty rouses herself and packs a bowl. Halley is crying and Mike is holding her, but she is pulling away from him. I can’t help finding her sexy, her legs are vulnerable, succulent, but I think of last night when I accidentally walked in on them having sex. The only bathroom has a doorway through the closet that opens into their bedroom, and as I was digging around for a condom I looked in the mirror and saw Mike’s bare ass bouncing enthusiastically off the bed, presumably pounding his cock into her. It made me laugh. Laughter followed by waves of nausea born on seas of alcohol and girl named Jen and then Mike’s ass bouncing furiously… wham!, right into the toilet, into the floor, into walls, the roof the place reeked of laughter, mine, Deans, Betty’s, the studio audience, the children of war celebrating peace. And now I can’t laugh anymore, but Halley is still looking good, her ass is stretched tight in the mirror behind her, it murmurs sex in spite of the shrill of her voice and the sobs that wrack her body; they feel like they are sucking all the air right out of the room. I look at Betty to make sure she has not imploded, but it is too late she is hacking and coughing smoke, a bit of spit flies out of her mouth and she tries to stop it, to regain some composure it all makes me laugh which earns me the finger. I take a big lazy hit. + Halley’s sobs quiet to weeping; she is one with the floor now, her head grazing stupidly against Mike’s knees, he is standing indifferently, they look like the cover of European vacation, a horrible twisted picture of Chevy Chase as a superhero with his family at his feet and Mike looks every bit as ridiculous as Chevy Chase. He has a defiance to his posture that looks wholly artificial and it occurs to me that he ought to be the one on the ground, he ought to be begging, not to Halley, but begging god to give him his humility back. +Peace talks continued in Kosovo today with both parties saying that progress was made, but meanwhile fighting continues in the country side where sporadic violence and sharp shooting snipers continue to take there toll on the moral and hope of the people who live here…. +And then there is silence, an editing fuck up at the news station, the television is silent, and Halley is not weeping and I hear the air rushing out of my lungs with a asthmatic hiss as I exhale the bonghit. Mike is breathing hard, Betty is holding her breath and suddenly from the other room the tapping stops and a drunken, stoned Dean comes walking through the kitchen. He stops in the frame of the doorway slightly hunched, holding a beer and squinting his eyes…. “What?” +Little phantoms of the house, strange shadows that lurk in the corners without regard for the science of light… they moved in dreary circles, little red blocks all stacked in the living room and the angels sing… how many would die for you?/I’m not talkin’ ‘bout those that get high with you… Over and over scenes of confusion, jumbled words, jumbled phrases, Deans finger flying and the little green men in the shadows that have no regard for the science of light and they sing…. Did you lock into a pattern you couldn't see through? You can no longer trust the metaphor because you saw it coming in focus and you realized it's something from your childhood —endless tapes loping across eons. And you see the game for what it was —something cold-blooded, reptile, slinking across the room. You know the menu is not the meal and you have your metaphors and language bounded in all its unique epochal glory and you see through the epochs, but you can't shake the fear. You know that change is inevitable; you know what you want, you say what you want, and you build the metaphor until it casts its shadow into time. You think you know the end of it and still your sitting on the curb, hungry, apathetic, waiting for the sewer water to splash and wake from the nightmare of history. You're thinking this isn't me, this can't be me. +There is peace in between the news of Kosovo and Halley’s mournful sobs and Betty sucking down another hit of pot and Dean returning from the bathroom pausing again like a half cocked gun squinting, observing and leaving again. The sound of finger tapping reaches us before he is seated, but now the cartoon man wants me to buy his paper towels and you are wondering… what is it that we are wondering? +Everyone walks with unshakable self confidence, but not slow enough to remember that they are walking and when they laugh they pretend to be unafraid. This isn't you. This isn’t me. + + + Its two nights later, the war is over, peace reigns, rich people’s financial interests are secured, Friends’ reruns have come and gone with dinner and Halley is cuddled up on Mike’s lap. She is serene and beautiful tonight because she fucked Dean in bathroom at her work this afternoon. For once there is no typing, the television is on still… commercials. The sound of typing is still hanging in the air translated by the TV as if the noise itself was a force that could pick and choose its manifestation. Mike is happy because he thinks that he is the one making Halley happy and he goes right back for more like one of those rats pulling the lever to get its dosage of nicotine in the studies that Philip Morris wakes up sweating to in the middle of the night. And Halley is making out with Mike now; Mike is not wearing any pants. Halley seems intent on fucking Mike right there in the chair in front of us. I think what would happen if I lobbed the hand grenade into the silence… so Halley how was Dean this afternoon? I hear you fucked him on the sink counter of women’s restroom… that didn’t even work for Tom Cruise in Top Gun at that club… what did Dean do to get you to do that…? I just ask so I can get some pointers you know…? + But I don’t. Obviously. If I had a gun I might have. Dean would have forgiven me in a few weeks, Halley I could do without and Mike already lived with the fantasized notion that Halley fucked everyone when his back was turned. Hell he probably thought I was fucking her, and I probably would have if I thought Halley would have if any of it. If we had any sense at all we would have probably all just fucked each other like blow up toys, like the lecherous little weasels we were, but we didn’t Dean, Betty and I just watched while they dry fucked in the chair, but when Mikes little half-chubbed alcohol-soaked wiener rose up like a miniaturized Cobra from under Halley's mini skirt I had had enough. Dean and I started laughing and Mike reached down and tried to tuck it back under but the thing had a mind of its own and before I knew what I was doing I turned the video camera one and aimed it at them. Dean, Betty and I sneaked out while they went out of it. I left the camera running. + In the bar the talking head from CNN is telling us how the people are safe and the world is somehow better and nothing has changed here because the fingers are the thing that hold it all together and they keep at it every night. And I think of the governors and tyrants of the world celebrating just like they did when the war started I imagine and the man behind the counter wants to know what I want and the girl in the booth wants to know why I haven’t noticed her yet and everything is just wonderful. Being around Mike has us all spinning loops and watching our backs until we find ourselves at the end of night all twisted up and tangled in the ephemeral confusion of nothingness trying to stand on the legs of somethingness. It all swirls together with the past, with Mexico City with San Francisco and Ed’s loft and the bathroom floor, the cabby squealing about fried chicken, the woman on the arch is mixing with Voodoo, gringos and the Quantum Uncertainty principle. Oh you mean this can really happen? Or am I just thinking that it’s happening? Or is it happening because I think its happening? Or am I thinking that it is really happening and I'm just dreaming? Am I going to wake up one day and not remember this dream? Fuzzy logic dogs chasing each other around on a 1987 street in a Mexico City neighborhood. And the Spanish soldier selling chiclettes say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words. Wouldn't give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret. Gotta keep that in house must remain forever sealed in baby pissshitguts. No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying. Same old stinking shit. No Good. No Bueno. Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass? Lead me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors. Can’t close them all —we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in —even offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good. Can’t use those, too strong. No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean. + The girl in booth has her arm over my shoulder she is stroking my hair but the little street urchin with the chiclettes is at the table; he can’t be shut up, hawking wares for death, little powders potions and peppers hanging from his arms, but the CNNhead says all is well, justice is served. The television is close curcuit captioned for the hearing impaired, the little boy is adament no captions only pictures for the blind. Rustling of paper behind boardroom walls sends him into fits…. I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed. So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit…. The CNNhead is protesting this outburst… get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn!!! But the boy will not be silenced there are thousands of them now a chorus of little brown boys singing, chanting like Benetine Monks…All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch. Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like? But the girl in the booth has a name, a face we will not hurt her, she will be the last innocent and my tongue slides in her mouth, hand up her skirt she is wet the last innocent. Her breath is short it comes in rasps I hear it against my ear. The boys are chanting to the beat of drums… I got pictures for you gringo… pictures you hear? Her breath. The commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe is fucking small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cries for his mother the general is laughing, your mother’s down the hall boy, she’s busy with the president of France right now. But maybe later you’d like to lick his come off her dead face… Ban those words tear them right out snip snip. Can’t say that, its disgusting. War is a snuff film for the rich. The CNNhead is confering, the girl is breathing the boys are chanting. “We gotta step up the bombing chief the public’s losing innarest in us” screams the chief of staff running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple and with all seriousness General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect: I remember a time when life was good no one got in our way, why in Europe under Patton i musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handful of nuns too. He smiles lost in memory...but God hath given us these trying times.... Yes it is bit hard to get cunt these days isn’t it, mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife’s cock....Yes dear start a war, get me some cute refugee boys, i so love snapping their necks when I'm coming, she growls affectionately. That's it gentlemen were going to war! The president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world KOSOVO it is he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia. + You like? You like, no? Too bad. You can’t have those words, too strong. I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, to expensive to buy it. I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure rectal itch? Eh? Eh? Eh? She comes and lights a cigarette. The man behind the counter turns off the TV and we leave. Her name was Maya. + +By the time we got back the camera was on its side, the tripod was broken and they were screaming at each other + “Fucking slut….” + “You’re an asshole…!” + “Fuck you! I love you!” + “You don’t know what love is! You’re a little child!” + “You’re cold bitch! Don’t you have any feeling in that dried hard little cuntheart of yours!?” + “Do not call me a cunt! + “I didn’t call you a cunt! I said you have a fucking hard little fucking CUNTHEART!!!! + “Fuck you! You wouldn’t know what to do with cunt anyway!” +At that point a little air shot out of my chest involuntarily, I knew what was coming. There was the sound of skin, a sickly slapping, stinging horribly thin kind of sound, the unmistakable sound of hatred and self doubt bring itself into realtime like an airborne virus. Then silence. Dean and I sit passing joint on Betty’s bed, listening through the wall. + “I’m sorry……… I didn’t mean to hit you!” + “Then how the fuck did you HIT ME! How can you not mean to hit someone? There is no such thing as ACCIDENTALLY hitting someone, that doesn’t happen… nooneaccidentally hits anyone…youmeant to hitme…(sobs)… you FUCKING PRICK! (Sounds of crashing, light bulbs pop and the light streaming under the door disappears)” + “Oh that’s FUCKING great! You stupid bitch!” (Now there is a dull thud followed by a low moan and Dean and I look at each other. We are too fucked up for this….) + By the time we turn on the kitchen light they are wrestling at the door and before we can get across the room Mike throws Halley out the front door wearing only a thin nightgown. Its February in Denver, Colorado and they are in hysterics. Tears are streaming down Mike’s face and whether they are from the marijuana, the alcohol, the pain and anguish of heartbreak or the red welt atop his forehead it is still February in Denver and he is still in hysterics and he stands there trying to manage a thin strained smile as he collapses against the door. Dean and I are frozen. + “She fuck some guy.” + I try not to move or show any signs. + “The BITCH FUCKED SOME OTHER GUY!” he yells at the door but there is no answer. “You hear me you dumb bitch! I hope you fucking freeze to death. I hope his cock keeps you warm out there! I hope you know where he lives! I hope you get there before you lose any fingers or toes… you FUCKING CUNT! Jesus Christ….” He is weeping on the floor with his hands over his face I try to move him and he punches wildly but accurately hitting me in the jaw. Out of anger I kick him and he makes no protest. I shove him aside and go out to look for Halley. She didn’t go far. She is sitting on the neighbor’s couch the neighbors are up wearing bathrobes, rubbing her back and rocking her on the couch. She is shaking like a leaf. + “What’s wrong with him Sil? Why is he doing this? I am good to him aren’t I? I shouldn’t be putting up with this, this is bullshit, I can’t keep doing this…. (head in her hands) What the fuck is wrong with him? What wrong with you, with all of you? (Tears are running down her face) There is this thing in you that can’t let go, can’t admit that you’re wrong… all of you, your so damn sure that your little feelings and your little emotions have to be so goddamn right that you think you can just pull them down like shades over the whole fucking world! (yelling up at me, wild eyes) Every emotion, every thought, every fucking little thing can be broken down and analyzed and dismissed with some cynical diatribe that you think is so witty and fucking funny… goddamn all of you. (lunging towards me and hitting my chest, near screaming hysterics) You make me sick… I make me sick for letting myself be involved with him…. (collapsing onto me) I outta fucking be able to do better than this if this is love… this… this… fucking little hyper universe that you guys live in.... (pulling her self up and off of me) This is not love… I don’t always know what I am doing… I don’t always know what I am feeling OKAY! FUCK! (arms raised in exasperation) Don’t you ever, doesn’t he ever, just have moment of absolute confusion where he wants to do something completely irrational not out of love even just because its there and it can be done and.... and fuck… I don’t know why I fucked him…….(staring at the ground, pacing) It had just been so long since there was any passion you know, Mike and I are an old couple this shit happens, it doesn’t mean anything, right? …and I know Mike has fucked around, I know he fucked around in Europe, but he won’t admit it that’s the thing that makes me so fucking mad is he won’t admit it… and why? Why? Because if he admitted that then he’d have to face up to the fact that I am as weak as he is… whereas now he can call me a slut and make himself out to be better, that’s all I am to him this thing against which he can measure himself, this thing… this superwoman which I am supposed to be to him… this …fuck! (arms up exasperated) Do you know what this is doing to me? I am losing my mind… I’m not going to go nuts over him… I knew I should have run away right after we made love for the first time… I should have just run, because now I’m here and he’s throwing me out the door in my fucking night gown… in my FUCKING NIGHTGOWN!!!” +And then she collapsed or rather doubled over in sobs. I turned around and went back to see if Mike had calmed down. He and Dean were smoking a cigarette on the couch. Betty was in the chair dispensing wisdom that sounded like it would have solved all his problems, but Mike is a man and men can’t hear a word that women are saying, just like women can’t hear a word that men are saying and whole so-called battle of the sexes could be stopped just like Capt. Cook didn’t have to die on that island if only we had a goddamn interpreter that could translate the two languages and solve the riddle. Translate the emotion and feeling into the logic and predictable precision and then back out into the chaotic no-man’s-land of feeling again. Some guru, some pygmy, some monk, some alien that can add it all up and give us some kind of answer, that’s all we really want. +And the newscaster is talking about chemical warfare and he says that chemicals are weapons of mass destruction, but they are not, they are very selective and Mike turns the channel and there is a leopard or an ocelot tearing away the flesh of wildebeest and then the image changes to an ad for a moisturizing soap that will make us all look ten years younger and there is girl who looks ten years younger and her head is moving her lips are moving, but her voice is hollow and detached she comes out the side of the television and echoes falsely about the room and then I turn off the TV. And Mike starts in. + “Fuck man what am doing? (tugs at his hair with one hand and rolls the phone absently in the other hand, the whole movement seems false.) What did you do? Did you do this? I mean with Leah, she was you first love… and now look at you… you’re fine, you haven’t talked to her in years… what did you do? How did you fill this hole that I feel growing in me…. (looking at me pleading for some answer) Do you just harden yourself?… she thinks I’m hardened because I pushed her out the door, but that wasn’t the hard part of me that was the raw nerve endings of pain that was me trying to find love….or fight love… (looking for the answer as if it might be on the ceiling) that was my love that pushed her out the door… the cold hard part of me is the part that will go over there in a couple of hours and talk to her… (reflective self-analyzed pose of mock security) the hard part of me is the part that will make love to her while the love in me fades, gets up and leaves the room…. The horrible thing about losing love isn’t that it makes you hard it’s that you realize or you start to realize that love can be lost…. (serene face of philosopher dispensing wisdom) That’s what is tearing me up right now, the reality I am beginning to see is that there is no sacredness to love like they want you to believe… whoever they are…. (momentarily side tracked by a novel thought) But that’s not the point… the point is that once you realize that love can be lost, once you know that this can happen… its doomed to happen again…. You will never again be able to look at someone and to see a relationship that doesn’t end… I know now that for every beginning there is an ending already written…. (with disgust) Like that goddamn book you think you’re writing… the end’s already there isn’t it? I bet that was the first thing that you thought of… (sobbing, despair again) Oh god! How the fuck do you get out of this… how do you find hope again… and even if you do what do you do when it is dashed? How many times can you do this? Is there a limitation to the number of times you can have your heart broken…? (serene face of philosopher dispensing wisdom) Is it like one of those Lithium batteries where it never recharges all the way again and its starts looping back until there is nothing and then right when you think you have it… oh I underst…WHAM! And then it’s gone, you’re gone, the thing is gone… (silence in which feeling flashes across his face like a forgotten memory) Jesus what is she doing over there does she really hate me? She really hates me now doesn’t she? Fuck and the horrible thing is that somewhere deep down I wanted her to fuck that guy whoever he is… it doesn’t matter… god I want a whole gang of giant cocked black guys to gang fuck her through eternity if that’s what it takes, but I want to feel something… I’m not feeling anything anymore, the only time I feel anything is when I hurt her… then I feel hate. I mean I feel her hating me, but when she’s not hating me I don’t feel anything… I don’t feel loved…” +And he broke down into pure honest crying. Dean and I looked at each other and then at the VCR clock, it was ten till two and we both had the same thought. Run. + + + + + +Months rolled by and I have dim images of fall colors and an unsettling chill to the air. The mountains colored like firestorms and then the snow, lots of it, too cold to go outside. I took a job at a paper writing the horoscopes and occasionally I broke down and delivered pizza with Dean. Halley and Mike were at each other all the time. The television no longer mentioned Kosovo and there was a new game show sweeping the nation where you answered a series of stupid questions and got a million bucks. It was in the same vein as the Idiots Guide series… the steady decline of intelligence perfectly laid out like military campaign. Can’t figure out how to tie your shoes? Get the Idiot’s Guide to tying you shoes. I was waiting for the only useful title… the Idiots Guide to suicide… I wrote a letter to the publisher, but got no reply. And there was Regis Philman presiding over the burning hills and the freezing snow gleefully like a weatherman issuing a hurricane warning he smiled over it all. Great floating teeth that hung in the nightmares of f. Scott Fitzgerald’s. Signs of the apocalypse. This is hardly the first collective suicide. It's all part of history, the endless tumults, hills and glades and all the while we look at the crimson leaves and think that fall is in the air. But the spacemen never showed and the Nikes and the black suits with spaghetti ties were all in vain because the CD is skipping and we’re all stuck on endless repeat. +The fingers kept flying and the months fell away with them. I hear them from a distance now like the sound of an approaching marching band or a clock that hasn’t chimed yet. Sometimes I would wake up at dawn and hear the fingers. Marching marching marching. Dean as a tireless soldier of seduction…. Mike on the other hand remained a tireless soldier of reductionist emotional rationalism, which is what we named his peculiar nit-picked version of life. His idea of a worldview was crumbs, the confetti after the parade has passed. Christ all the way. Quick get us a tree, somebody make two boards… hurry before he loses the courage and does it himself. Christ was on a suicide trip, that much we know now he’d have gone with or without the Romans… how else do you end a story like that? +By March it was getting so bad that Dean and I used to just sit and smoke and listen to them for entertainment —familiarity breeds contempt.... We tuned them in and out of our own conversation the way television comes and goes. Betty would pass out on the bed and we would sit with out backs to the wall and just listen for hours. We had running bets on who would go insane first Mike or Halley? As time when on we both switched our bets to lie on ourselves. One morning we had to leave at nine because they were throwing things and we just wanted to sleep, but it’s hard to sleep in the midst of reckless friendly fire. I remember that morning because I was awoken from a nap by a lamp hitting my head. The couch was no longer safe. I kicked Dean and we darted out. We tried sleeping in his car but it was a no go so we wound up getting coffee and after that we went for a drive to get a feel for Denver. We wound up downtown since we just kind of aimed for tallest buildings or at least that’s how it seemed but Dean might have know what he was doing… I wouldn’t put it past him to have been buying down there for sometime, but I ignored his heroin use. If you ignore something long enough eventually it just goes away. +It is finally warm enough to take off the jackets. We sit on the steps of an old warehouse loading bay and listen to drone of afternoon. Listen for the returning Spring, which creeps in like a virgin newlywed glimpsing her first erect penis. And the thing is jerking with anticipation and the virgin is meek, but something is stirring some hunger that can never be satisfied starts to gnaw at the hidden parts of her mind, of her stomach, of her cunt. Spring is coming amid the fantastical ruins of downtown Denver, anywhere. It’s a disquieting sight, a testament to the durability if not of buildings than the certainty of mankind that he out always to have more of them. The macabre feeling of mobile decay struck me as we drove out of the sparkling sterile business hub of the new downtown where cars run with silent hums, exhausts hits the air clean without additives, fat free business men and women scurry, rat feet scrapping the ceiling at night and the cars are bigger, they sound like squirrels scampering up trees. Push cart coffee salesmen in sharp uniforms chat with professional desk sitters over bagels and reduced fat cream cheese and the heart attack penthouse office fat men in suits collect like windblown lead trash in front of the roach coach. We can see them, hear them, smell them from down here, two blocks south where all is not well. Brick steps pad silent under our feet and crumbled bits of mortar from the buildings settles with the rustling of the air, little whirlpools, miniature tornadoes that circle the vast open parking lot that once was a truck loading zone. Everything is in various states of disarray, here and there a tree sprouting out a window. A chiming laughter of the gods whose frail leaves still quake like the virgin. You may build with your precious creations of pressed gravel, but we, we are here always perpetuating a grand cycle of which you are only an upstart movement an attempt to catalogue, and what did you get for it? You get fantastic ruins, testaments to your own malleability, silly creatures struggling to leave a mark in competition against the eons of geology and botany. Water stained brick has a romance that the Nouevvo downtown can not match it has a weathered face to it that is gained only with the infinite passing of time like an old man with wrinkled wizened face sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of roadside store in Louisiana. Even material so simple as brick will outlast you and I, our own permanence is in the stories we create, whether living them out, dreaming them aloud, or writing them down, we beat nature on one account, we can record the past and bring it into the future even if it never actually happened. Sheet metal roofing that collapsed inward to the lofts that it sheltered is now stick out at awkward angles through broken industrial windows and a giant piece hangs precariously over a second story doorway, threatening to give up and fall clanging down the stairs to the ground where Dean and I are sitting. We walked about in the industrial ruin taking a few pictures and sipping on now cold coffee. I was wandering about in the ruins the way tourists of room head out to Pompeii with a sense that here is a monument to times past. Times I never knew, times that remain locked in my own phantasmal imagination where errand boys skipped about street delivering messages from the factory to the office uptown. Merchants pushing carts sold pomegranates, oranges, and onions to welfare mothers in the great depression. The launch pad for a thousand tragedies —it could be Denver or anywhere. + Ed lives in a part of LA that looks remarkably similar to this, an unholy contract between artist renovated lofts and slowly dying industrial shipping companies, metal recycling facilities, and giant distribution warehouses. All things move in circles and so after the first settlements leave in come the companies bulldozing blocks of shabby tenement buildings to put up cement factories, iron workings, and canning plants. The residents retreat in the face of endless employment the deep consciousness of the working man knows to keep ahead of drudgery, but then the factories run out and the economy shifts to some new fresh means of creation. The buildings are abandoned in favor of new warehouses outside of town; the industrial complex collapses and leaves a twenty-year void with its passing. Twenty years give or take of rotting fermenting nature slowly eking its way back onto the scene until the streets relinquish themselves to the ceaseless torrents of rain and snow in the winter and the broiling summer heat until they are broken like spirited horses that once walked over them, they begin to crack and then patches of grass come up out of the soil beneath, followed by weeds and shrubs. Nature is heliotropic, always moving up toward the sun, whereas man is constantly being knocked back to the substrata of his origins the crumbling of the old to give rise to the new. The new screams, the new anguish the new drama the newborn slapped on the ass by the god of it all. + + “What do you want from me? I fucking try so hard to love you… even when you throw me out the door, and you throw me out the door, but then you want me back and then you tell me to go again.... WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT? + “I want you… I want… I don’t fucking know what I want why are you always harping on what I want why can’t we just live and exist and be… like Sil and Dean and Betty and every other fucking person on this planet… why can’t we just be happy? Why do we have to have these issues… why do we have to have these things to work on? What are these things what the fuck is going on around here? When did this start?” + “What do you mean? What are you talk” + WHAT DO MEAN ‘WHAT DO I MEAN? You know what I mean, this all of this… look at us…” + “Why are you bringing Dean and Sill into this? Why do you have to live up to some manly ideal that you think they embody? (Dean cracked an eyebrow at me) I got new for you they don’t embody shit! The two of them would be living in goddamn dumpster if we weren’t putting them up!” + “Why does this have to be about my friends? Why is it a problem I asked you if it was alright for them to crash here and now you say its not?” + “It has nothing to do with them…. Its you that I’m talking about. You say we used to be happy we used to not be like this… we used to ‘just live’ as you put it. Well do the fucking math Michael when did this start? When they showed up! And I’m not blaming anything on them, I like them both and Betty too, fuck I like them more than I like you sometimes, but its you. Its what showed up in you that wasn’t here before, this fucking over analyzation shit that you didn’t use to have…” + Police said the suspect was dressed in business suit and may be armed do you have time to cook a meal every night in the midst of balancing… So this guy comes up to me… guaranteed to last a lifetime… + “What the fuck are you talking about?” + “This indecision this fucking shit” + “My indecision? (Derisive laughter) My fucking indecision? And who pray tell FUCKED SOMEBODY else! Who is indecisive? It’s not me I know exactly what I want… I want to be with you, but you won’t let me just be… you question my every fucking move, want to know my every thought, every feeling, don’t you ever not have a feeling? Isn’t it ever just a blank page of white with little blue lines… little fucking blue lines and not word not a fucking thought in sight… do you ever get that… or is it just constant fucking emotional fucking input from the far reaches of the earth and heavens all pouring though your precision little hear that occasionally seems to feel that it need some other guys DICK!” +“Yes Michael we all fucking go a bit nuts every now and then I am as clueless as you are and someone in the midst of this insanity I think that I see and feel and what I see and feel is you, but you won’t let me in you won’t let yourself be hurt and I can’t figure out if its because your scared or because you just don’t fucking care about me like I’m just some sort of ornamental drama that you have been pursuing over the last two fucking years because it happened to interest you and now, now that some bigger fucking part of the drama that you think you are… now that its here I just get shoved to the side cast off like so much luggage…. Fuck me! Fuck you! I don’t know if I was some whim, some thing you wanted to try on in the dressing room and then when you thought it was out of style you can just hang it back up on the rack. No id don’t know anything about anything and neither do you but that doesn’t mean anything, none of it means anything….” + “No that not what you mean, everything means something, it may not make any difference, but goddamn it all means something, who you fuck who you eat dinner with what time you get up, what kind of fucking bombs they drop on everyone, the jails, the murders, it all fucking means something, all of this, everything that is happening it all means something. Maybe none of it matters but it all means something goddamn it! (There is silence in which we here Mike heaving for air and then) “I just don’t know what it is, I just need some time to figure out what the hell I am what I am doing, what this life is, were all fucking try to figure it out… I don’t fucking know what I want okay, I can’t give you some fucking pat little answer that’s going to explain exactly how I feel. Some days I want to be with you and some days you drive me up the fucking walls….” + Researchers have concluded that including a glass of wine with your regular meal may actually increase your life span… but Jim we can’t just leave them here… We’re tiny were toony we’re all a little loony… the initial results indicate HIV… we will be appealing your case… Mr. president the girl from Arkansas is on line to… did you or did you not engage...?… the white house denies… tide gets your colors looking bright… guaranteed to last a life time… I like to buy a vowel… what is the Serengeti?… that is my final answer… +“Oh great! Fucking great now I drive you up the walls!” + “Why the fuck do focus in on the negative, see that’s what I’m talking about I say that some days I want to be with you and some days I don’t and what do we have to get into the days I don’t this must be explained, there is a reason for this, this is what needs to be fixed…. Has it ever occurred to you that I must just want to be alone some days, has it ever occurred to you that I can love you without liking you every now and then? + “You are sick fucking man Michael, I am going to Ally’s to spent the night. I can’t sleep next to you, ugh I can’t be near you…” + And the door slammed. +Betty sleeps, Social Distortion plays in the background and Mike is a flood of meaningless gibberish goes internal and bounces endlessly about in the echo chamber…. Michael was cold calculated psychology distilled out of textbooks through all the vital organs of his body until it fills up his soul with formaldehyde and preserves him eternally, preventing any growth; everything is preserved like jams for the future. He collapsed on to the couch with shrug and I see him standing in on the bridge from now to forever and trying to figure out why he can’t get to tomorrow. He needs to have the bridge blown out from under him, otherwise there will be no growth, just canned life, evaporated stale milk. He is a root bound tree in desperate need of transplanting. He is a leech, it seems so unreal to me that I might have once lived with him, liked him even as a friend. Michael’s insidiousness extends far deeper now than it did back then or at least back then it was never played out in front of me so I didn’t notice it as much, but now I see it overflowing like a boiling kettle. He has lost all traces of humor and runs about madly chasing after this invisible spirit that he thinks will somehow enlighten him, give his life the meaning, the purpose, the joy that it lacks. I remember once years ago an incident that now seems more revealing then it did at the time. I got up and went to take a leak around noon. There was a woman I didn’t know sitting on the toilet chewing on her fingernails, her head bent down and emitting peculiar sniffling sounds; I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying. I should have turned around and gone right back to bed but I didn’t because instead of jealousy I am afflicted with pity —incurable. I do it not for them but for me because I can’t bring myself not to, I have no intention of helping I just don’t have reason to do otherwise. So I asked her if she was all right. Yes fine, she said between what I now took to be sobs. “Fine, is there anything I can get you?” A coat hanger…. She smiled weakly and I just started laughing. Laughter that swallowed her up and digested her image sitting there on the toilet hunched over her twat, sniffling like a wounded cornered animal —the perfect specimen of humanity. “You must be a friend of Michael’s?” Yes she was what did Michael do with the creature? He keeps her around because she has constant drama that she dumps on his fragile little middle class heartstrings and it gives him something to do. Something that can be solved that’s all he wants from life, a problem that can be solved something to which he can point and say see it is all better now…. He has no use for whole people, just the ragged torn edges of the pages… preferably dripping fresh blood, new wounds to cauterize and in the process open old ones… poke at the soft scar tissue… induce hemorrhages… leech the life out…. +Michael is an only child like myself, but he is of a different breed rather than independent of self-serving like most (myself included), Michael is like frail wounded animal huddled into corner cowering before the world. What he is cowering from or about I can only assume to be his own personal, self-created demons and to get relief from them, to stand up straight, facing the world and lock arms with it to struggle out life… or some other Hemingwayesque metaphor… he assumes the burdens of others. In great leaders who have already faced up their own demons such a facility would be revered, but in one who can only act on the behalf of others and never for himself it is repulsive, even comical in its stupidity. +He wants to go out and have a drink, but really he doesn’t he wants to keep fighting he should keep fighting, but he should fight with himself beat his own face to a pulp. This is America we beat each other; like the Marquis he stands bleeding and asking if wasn’t good for us…? +(clutching a glass) “She’s fucking nuts you know that only reason I can’t leave her is her body, sex is this thing… this… force that swarms over me and I’m hating her but its pulling at me and no matter how much we scream and even when I hit her that night I am still seeing her tits heave and the way her ass looks when she’s crouched over and the other night she was crying leaning against the door jam and I was standing over her blind with hate… I looked down and she wasn’t wearing any underwear and there is the cunt staring at me, this furry little thing that is the source of all the problems in my life and just stared at it, it enveloped me swallowed me up. What is that warm stick squishy thing that I want? Or maybe (trying to enlist support of dementia through body language, leans in conspiratorially) may be the trouble is everything around the cunt… that’s the real mystery what I need is lust, just pure cunt with no feeling warm and sticky.” +“Yes Michael I think you would be better off with a blow up doll.” Dean is rakish tonight, he is already gone, his body remains to propel the dream further. Mike is menacing tonight too. I can here the masticating of hatred being chewed… mulled over… teeth grinding in his sleep… +“You think so? Ya fuck you! You guys don’t understand with Halley its all about the sex, beyond the sex we don’t get along at all. I can stand over and kick her teeth in if I thought that her cunt would stay warm. Damn that hairy fucking little cunt. She’s too sexy. I get swallowed up.” +Mike was running on and on and I was getting swallowed up and I saw Halley's cunt between her legs I see an aborted fetus hanging out of it bloody and covered in afterbirth with umbilical cord still attached, and cord is there just dangling out of the cunt and I see Mike with scissors trying to cut it and Halley is screaming trying to stop him. The doctor takes the fetus and throws it in the incinerator; the furnace flares and is silent as a slaughterhouse. Halley lies on the table spread eagle, naked and Mike circles her holding blunt object tubular and made out of the words that describe it. It is black and plugged into the wall. Dean and Mike are yelling through me, words pass like water though a screen and there is mike in room with the cattle prod standing over Halley and a symphony strikes up. Marching bands.. fingers tapping… tapping… violins… rhythm of kettle drums… and his arm rises. . He is floating, watching as choked up gasoline-napalm sores sear off his tongue and lick up his body in flames. The air is hot and thick like the worst humidity and the scorching of the flesh sizzles in my nostrils and I just watch. Hell is for voyeurs, the control addicts that like to watch. You just have to ride it out and hope that the cynicism doesn't burn you up right up with them or you find yourself in the liquid fire ripping out your own eyes and sawing off your tongue to run away. Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.... A little red light comes on signaling that the cattle prod is fully charged. In front of him is Halley, beautiful with short black hair like ravens. She is lying naked with her legs were splayed wide and restrained with leather straps and buckles, her arms are restrained above her head. He smiles weakly at her. Hand the symphony reaches fever pitch, the clash of horns and strings and drums and Mike is looking into her eyes watching the pupils dilate. And it fell, his arm fell, the cattle prod fell; and her body went rigid and she shot up off the table as if suddenly turned into a stiff board. He keeps his eyes locked on her as she collapse back onto the table. He sees something flash through them and he feels a tremor in his guts, his muscles spasm involuntarily. Big uncontrollable sobs wracked his whole body and he falls on his knees and proceeds to curl up in little ball on the floor. He lies like that for a while until the sobs work themselves out the violence fall silent and only a lone lunatic flute floats over the scene. Halley gets up and begins to undress him, starting by unbuttoning his shirt. When she undoes his belt she reaches down and rather gently holds his rigid cock as she eases the pants down over it. She stands embracing him strongly with her arms around his neck pulling herself up until her cunt lips part and she slides down on his cock. Mike is fucking her but she can’t feel it. She can’t feel anything and then the strings return crescendo builds…. She spreads his legs and restrains them along with his arms. She strokes his cock hard again and teases him by biting his nipples. All at once her eyes go black and she thrusts the cattle prod into his balls… Mike is blown up off the table by some kind of wind. He doesn't even feel his come splash of his face as the electricity causes an involuntary muscle spasm that makes it arc out of his cock in unnaturally thick spurts. He lands back on the table his voice is a violin, an inhuman screeching kind of wail. + “What the fuck you know…. What the fuck do you have that lets you glide through this existence like some strange cloud a vapor that is there and you can see it but it doesn’t hurt you? How do you have to turn things over and around and rearrange them so that you can see it in a bright light? Don’t you ver get tired of laughing that smug glib little smirk?” Things are not well at this table, the glasses have accumulated and the pent aggressions are knocking them over. +“Hey watch it Michael, you can insult Sil all you want but don’t bring me into your quaint little semantic psychoanalyzed universe where you little puny mind thinks it understands me….” Dean leans in toward me and around at Mike. I turn my back and while trying not to laugh I harangue the little fucker in hopes that maybe he will listen, but the trouble with me is that I didn’t care, I wanted to make a point, but I knew it was already lost, I could just as easily have stood by while Dean beat him to a pulp. I talked to shut out the symphony the close off the images of torture playing on an endless film loop flickering through the eons. I talked to put an end to Denver, to bury the ugly future in the overflowing sewer of the past, not to thwart violence. So when Dean forced the issue I didn’t do anything to stop it…. +“You know what you stupid little fuck, I don’t need your hospitality I don’t need your food, and certainly don’t need your advise seeing that while financially I may be fucked I am at least fucked and can fuck while you are nothing but a confused mediocre little spoiled piece of shit that can’t do much beyond leave his girlfriend in a half fucked state of longing. That why she called me one day and invited me to lunch one day.” +And then there was an absolute motionless silence for a full five or six seconds. And Mike leaped over me and things went the way things go. +Dean beat the crap out of him. We went home gathered up our bags and hit the road in Dean’s car. In Kansas Dean turned right on my assurances that Mark Pledger would welcome us with open arms. + diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/gone book/D iam.txt b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/D iam.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a110e5e --- /dev/null +++ b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/D iam.txt @@ -0,0 +1,87 @@ + It turned out that Dean and Betty were in Denver too. We all crashed with Mike and Halley. Mike and Halley had come about because of me at least that was how it looked when you poked around the edges of their relationship. The official story was that Halley’s job had led them Denver, but I wasn’t buying. Mike and I were ancient friends (though not as ancient as Clay Mike did know him) we went back a long time ago to a galaxy far far away. Actually it was closer to Spaceballs that Star Wars… right down to the trailer. Mike and I had both dropped out of college and being broke as hell working coffeeshops we could only afford a one-room trailer. There was never any money or food other than noodles. The one thing we had tons of though were friends, friends from high school, friends from college, friends from work, friends friends friends and they were there every fucking night like band of chimpanzees throwing there own feces about and giggling and whooping with laughter. We were all just finding drugs. We were late bloomers. I got out of that trailer atrocity by sheer force of will; well that and the luck that my parents hadn’t done anything with my own room. Mike’s parents already had a home office and they weren’t keen on getting him back. They had vaccinated themselves with furniture, a cruel reality that I only point out because it helps explain Mike. Mike was forced by circumstance to escape via Halley, love was only one side of the coin, the side that Halley saw, but in Denver I saw something colder, something more reptile like creeping behind his eyes —necessity. Love and necessity colliding with all the fanfare of a plane wreck. + Denver was a crash landing for all of us, a bust in grandest old western sense of the word. I remember three things rising up out of the rollicking sautéed cacophony; they float in my recollection like enormous turds. There was the windowless tomb of stone blocks that constituted a house inhabited by five people in two bedrooms in which Dean developed a Heroin habit, Betty drowned in despair and Mike and Halley fought great crusades for the dominance of their sexes. The cinderblock walls sustained all their momentum for seven months. Mike and Halley fell out of love, Dean fell in, Betty climbed over love, and I watched totally unable to act; I was paralyzed and could do nothing for myself or them. It was bliss while it lasted. I watched Dean until he faded into love and heroin becoming too thin to see, then I watched Mike and Halley dissolve into Mike, and Halley, and then finally out of self-pity Dean inadvertently propelled Betty and I out with him on an arcing trajectory that landed me in New Orleans, Betty back in Las Vegas, and Dean in Washington D.C. Throughout it all the television reigned. Betty and I were stationed like zombis before the master god of all creation and its blue aura. Dean was one with the place; he existed by the skin of his teeth, I have little or no recognition of him while we were there, he was either shooting up or talking to Amanda on the internet or both. Otherwise he did not really exist. Dean did that from time to time, became invisible and disappeared only to resurface again at the oddest moment possible. Most of all what sticks out was the sound of it all. A mad kind of humming that was always in background like the sound of time itself walking about in the rooms, banging pots, cooking rice in the kitchen, arguing with itself in the bathroom, throwing shoes at Mike as he runs out of the bedroom. +Dean is typing, it’s a furious noise, he is pounding the keys nodding his head to the sounds from his headphones. He has drowned out his own fingers, doesn’t realize the force with which he is pounding the keys, mad telegraphs spitting out like lizard tongues firing themselves out into electrostatic love notes wired and flung off to Maryland where another pair of fingers responds…. the thing itself it flying back and forth maddening! + And the outside world is no better, what filters in on the TV is reflected back all around us, cold insensitive innocuous suburban delight… detachment. We lived in a decidedly residential area of Denver, a cityvoid that occurs in every big American city where an arbitrary line is drawn around some houses, a couple of suburban strip-mall shopping-centers, and gas stations and it is given a purposefully pedestrian name like Irvine or Turtle Rock… the streets of Douglas Copeland's nightmares. The perpetual warm blue glow of television sets emanated from the windows of vinyl sided endura-homes —guaranteed to last a lifetime or your money back! The television a great luminous third eye watching the affair with the indifference of god. Walking around in the evenings I felt the pride of it’s inventor. Every house was glowing quiet blue light the streets bathed in its iridescence, cobalt streets, sapphire lawns, purple skies, everything lit from within blue, blue noise humming softly… in the background blue people wandered, silhouettes dancing in front of kitchen windows and shadows lurking in open garages. The blue is grating irritating, gets under your skin like the flesh eating virus boils spring up and burst revealing slick blue oil and puss. They slide under the arm; you can see them moving just below the skin. But in background faint at first but growing in decibels is the maddening chant of the newsman and the Maytag man and all the talking heads disembodied and floating in the sky singing choruses. It’s all in timing! The process must be subtle and slow, but steady until the critical mass is reached then summon them like zombies to their own deaths in the gamma ovens… the mad scientist paces about suburban streets in a kind of furious strut. Every thing is planned; everything reflects precision. + Around the cave we lived in even the trees were well manicured as if the force the random act of god even into simplistic conformity, but not with menacing intent… only so that it will match the lawn and the wife’s nails all neatly polished like jewels. I used to work in a town like this, for a couple of days anyway, just long enough to collect such gems as the story of the woman who abandoned her dog on the beach one day because its spots clashed with her new interior design ideas. Or the man who smothered his baby because his wife was paying more attention to the child then his dick. Precious people we all aspire to be and yet you and I somehow we will be different isn’t that right? Somehow it will not get to us, all these trapping we can see through it now and we will see through it then; it never occurred to the monsters either that you don’t have eyes in the back if your head. +You and I though, we can’t afford to do that we must work real hard and get where the rich people are. Funny logic. Fuzzy math. Keep it I’m outta here me the old man said sitting on his rocker, a Kansas porch, hot summer day, cats, an orgone box, a southerner, and glass of clear liquid refilled constantly. Keep it, I’m outta here me. So long. And there is a witch stirring her cauldron; stir in a few European brains, some Irish brawns, a twinkle of pigs’ feet to sniff out the hidden truffles and simmer for two hundred years until the whole cesspool turns into a soufflé. +Outside is America. The sound is deafening. It comes in waves of music, horns, engines, electricity, spinning warbles of neon light echoing asphalt dreams of sanity. Vibrations given off by the turn of espresso handles, the pull of yogurt machines, the spinning of laundry mats, the chopping of the Chinese cook’s knife atop the trash can, chunks of chicken fat and bone accumulating on the floor; all of it whirls in a hurricane melee reverberating about through the dry air of the plains. Crisp air that offers no resistance to the pealing clamor, it just carries it about silent as a tomb offering no comment on the meaning of it all. Standing air listens like a woman in orgasm to the totality of nothingness like wood hewn by sandpaper until smooth contrasted against the sanding sound of ocean waves, rivers feed by rain, driftwood and manicured wood lying side by side. And running your hand over each to notice the artificial feel of the polished hard wood and the prickling organic sensuality of the rough hewn driftwood tossed like a cork, a bottle, a note, all of them riding over seas of imagination and somehow in the landlocked spirit of place Denver sounds like cancer. The insidious beat of death. Tribal drums still heralding the rising moon, wood blocks clanging about in alleys, homeless people rattling shopping carts up one street and down another the mad mad mad sound of science. +Sound I am told by Dean is nothing more than pressure waves being interpreted by my ears. “Horseshit” I mutter and then there is Mike ducking and the sound of Halley yelling, her voice wailing in anguish over something he had done, but we don’t know what it is we don’t know if it is that bad or if she is insane. Betty and I serve the madness in silence, in the background Chandler is broken up over Joey moving out and that mousy guy that’s always ‘the other guy’ in movies is moving in, homoerotic jokes are sticking to vellum walls like flies. + The shoe hits the wall above the couch and tumbles down between Betty and I, she looks at it, I look at it, we look at each other, we look at Mike (he is crying), and we look at the television it is moving on trying to sell me deodorant. On the table is a bong. Betty rouses herself and packs a bowl. Halley is crying and Mike is holding her, but she is pulling away from him. I can’t help finding her sexy, her legs are vulnerable, succulent, but I think of last night when I accidentally walked in on them having sex. The only bathroom has a doorway through the closet that opens into their bedroom, and as I was digging around for a condom I looked in the mirror and saw Mike’s bare ass bouncing enthusiastically off the bed, presumably pounding his cock into her. It made me laugh. Laughter followed by waves of nausea born on seas of alcohol and girl named Jen and then Mike’s ass bouncing furiously… wham!, right into the toilet, into the floor, into walls, the roof the place reeked of laughter, mine, Deans, Betty’s, the studio audience, the children of war celebrating peace. And now I can’t laugh anymore, but Halley is still looking good, her ass is stretched tight in the mirror behind her, it murmurs sex in spite of the shrill of her voice and the sobs that wrack her body; they feel like they are sucking all the air right out of the room. I look at Betty to make sure she has not imploded, but it is too late she is hacking and coughing smoke, a bit of spit flies out of her mouth and she tries to stop it, to regain some composure it makes me laugh which earns me the finger, and the bong. I take a big lazy hit. + Halley’s sobs quiet to weeping; she is one with the floor now, her head grazing stupidly against Mike’s knees, he is standing indifferently, they look like the cover of European vacation, a horrible twisted picture of Chevy Chase as a superhero with his family at his feet and Mike looks every bit as ridiculous as Chevy Chase. He has a defiance to his posture that looks wholly artificial and it occurs to me that he ought to be the one on the ground, he ought to be begging, not to Halley, but begging god to give him his humility back. +Peace talks continued in Kosovo today with both parties saying that progress was made, but meanwhile fighting continues in the country side where sporadic violence and sharp shooting snipers continue to take there toll on the moral and hope of the people who live here…. +And then there is silence, an editing fuck up at the news station, the television is silent, and Halley is not weeping and I hear the air rushing out of my lungs with a asthmatic hiss as I exhale the bonghit. Mike is breathing hard, Betty is holding her breath and suddenly from the other room the tapping stops and a drunken, stoned Dean comes walking through the kitchen. He stops in the frame of the doorway slightly hunched, holding a beer and squinting his eyes…. “What?” +Little phantoms of the house, strange shadows that lurk in the corners without regard for the science of light… they moved in dreary circles, little red blocks all stacked in the living room and the angels sing… how many would die for you?/I’m not talkin’ ‘bout those that get high with you… Over and over scenes of confusion, jumbled words, jumbled phrases, Deans finger flying and the little green men in the shadows that have no regard for the science of light and they sing…. Did you lock into a pattern you couldn't see through? You can no longer trust the metaphor because you saw it coming in focus and you realized it's something from your childhood —endless tapes loping across eons. And you see the game for what it was —something cold-blooded, reptile, slinking across the room. You know the menu is not the meal and you have your metaphors and language bounded in all its unique epochal glory and you see through the epochs, but you can't shake the fear. You know that change is inevitable; you know what you want, you say what you want, and you build the metaphor until it casts its shadow into time. You think you know the end of it and still your sitting on the curb, hungry, apathetic, waiting for the sewer water to splash and wake from the nightmare of history. You're thinking this isn't me, this can't be me. +There is peace in between the news of Kosovo and Halley’s mournful sobs and Betty sucking down another hit of pot and Dean returning from the bathroom pausing again like a half cocked gun squinting, observing and leaving again. The sound of finger tapping reaches us before he is seated, but now the cartoon man wants me to buy his paper towels and you are wondering… what is it that we are wondering? +Everyone walks with unshakable self confidence, but not slow enough to remember that they are walking and when they laugh they pretend to be unafraid. This isn't you. This isn’t me. + + + Its two nights later, the war is over, peace reigns, rich people’s financial interests are secured, Friends’ reruns have come and gone with dinner and Halley is cuddled up on Mike’s lap. She is serene and beautiful tonight because she fucked Dean in bathroom at her work this afternoon. For once there is no typing, the television is on still… commercials. The sound of typing is still hanging in the air translated by the TV as if the noise itself was a force that could pick and choose its manifestation. Mike is happy because he thinks that he is the one making Halley happy and he goes right back for more like one of those rats pulling the lever to get its dosage of nicotine in the studies that Philip Morris wakes up sweating to in the middle of the night. And Halley is making out with Mike now; Mike is not wearing any pants. Halley seems intent on fucking Mike right there in the chair in front of us. I think what would happen if I lobbed the hand grenade into the silence… so Halley how was Dean this afternoon? I hear you fucked him on the sink counter of women’s restroom… that didn’t even work for Tom Cruise in Top Gun at that club… what did Dean do to get you to do that…? I just ask so I can get some pointers you know…? + But I don’t. Obviously. If I had a gun I might have. Dean would have forgiven me in a few weeks, Halley I could do without and Mike already lived with the fantasized notion that Halley fucked everyone when his back was turned. Hell he probably thought I was fucking her, and I probably would have if I thought Halley would have if any of it. If we had any sense at all we would have probably all just fucked each other like blow up toys, like the lecherous little weasels we were, but we didn’t Dean, Betty and I just watched while they dry fucked in the chair, but when Mikes little half-chubbed alcohol-soaked wiener rose up like a miniaturized Cobra from under Halley's mini skirt I had had enough. Dean and I started laughing and Mike reached down and tried to tuck it back under but the thing had a mind of its own and before I knew what I was doing I turned the video camera one and aimed it at them. Dean, Betty and I sneaked out while they went out of it. I left the camera running. + In the bar the talking head from CNN is telling us how the people are safe and the world is somehow better and nothing has changed here because the fingers are the thing that hold it all together and they keep at it every night. And I think of the governors and tyrants of the world celebrating just like they did when the war started I imagine and the man behind the counter wants to know what I want and the girl in the booth wants to know why I haven’t noticed her yet and everything is just wonderful. Being around Mike has us all spinning loops and watching our backs until we find ourselves at the end of night all twisted up and tangled in the ephemeral confusion of nothingness trying to stand on the legs of somethingness. It all swirls together with the past, with Mexico City with San Francisco and Ed’s loft and the bathroom floor, the cabby squealing about fried chicken, the woman on the arch is mixing with Voodoo, gringos and the Quantum Uncertainty principle. Oh you mean this can really happen? Or am I just thinking that it’s happening? Or is it happening because I think its happening? Or am I thinking that it is really happening and I'm just dreaming? Am I going to wake up one day and not remember this dream? Fuzzy logic dogs chasing each other around on a 1987 street in a Mexico City neighborhood. And the Spanish soldier selling chiclettes say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words. Wouldn't give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret. Gotta keep that in house must remain forever sealed in baby pissshitguts. No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying. Same old stinking shit. No Good. No Bueno. Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass? Lead me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors. Can’t close them all —we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in —even offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good. Can’t use those, too strong. No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean. + The girl in booth has her arm over my shoulder she is stroking my hair but the little street urchin with the chiclettes is at the table; he can’t be shut up, hawking wares for death, little powders potions and peppers hanging from his arms, but the CNNhead says all is well, justice is served. The television is close curcuit captioned for the hearing impaired, the little boy is adament no captions only pictures for the blind. Rustling of paper behind boardroom walls sends him into fits…. I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed. So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit…. The CNNhead is protesting this outburst… get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn!!! But the boy will not be silenced there are thousands of them now a chorus of little brown boys singing, chanting like Benetine Monks…All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch. Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like? But the girl in the booth has a name, a face we will not hurt her, she will be the last innocent and my tongue slides in her mouth, hand up her skirt she is wet the last innocent. Her breath is short it comes in rasps I hear it against my ear. The boys are chanting to the beat of drums… I got pictures for you gringo… pictures you hear? Her breath. The commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe is fucking small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cries for his mother the general is laughing, your mother’s down the hall boy, she’s busy with the president of France right now. But maybe later you’d like to lick his come off her dead face… Ban those words tear them right out snip snip. Can’t say that, its disgusting. War is a snuff film for the rich. The CNNhead is confering, the girl is breathing the boys are chanting. “We gotta step up the bombing chief the public’s losing innarest in us” screams the chief of staff running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple and with all seriousness General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect: I remember a time when life was good no one got in our way, why in Europe under Patton i musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handful of nuns too. He smiles lost in memory...but God hath given us these trying times.... Yes it is bit hard to get cunt these days isn’t it, mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife’s cock....Yes dear start a war, get me some cute refugee boys, i so love snapping their necks when I'm coming, she growls affectionately. That's it gentlemen were going to war! The president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world KOSOVO it is he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia. + You like? You like, no? Too bad. You can’t have those words, too strong. I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, to expensive to buy it. I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure rectal itch? Eh? Eh? Eh? She comes and lights a cigarette. The man behind the counter turns off the TV and we leave. Her name was Maya. + +By the time we got back the camera was on its side, the tripod was broken and they were screaming at each other + “Fucking slut….” + “You’re an asshole…!” + “Fuck you! I love you!” + “You don’t know what love is! You’re a little child!” + “You’re cold bitch! Don’t you have any feeling in that dried hard little cuntheart of yours!?” + “Do not call me a cunt! + “I didn’t call you a cunt! I said you have a fucking hard little fucking CUNTHEART!!!! + “Fuck you! You wouldn’t know what to do with cunt anyway!” +At that point a little air shot out of my chest involuntarily, I knew what was coming. There was the sound of skin, a sickly slapping, stinging horribly thin kind of sound, the unmistakable sound of hatred and self doubt bring itself into realtime like an airborne virus. Then silence. Dean and I sit passing joint on Betty’s bed, listening through the wall. + “I’m sorry……… I didn’t mean to hit you!” + “Then how the fuck did you HIT ME! How can you not mean to hit someone? There is no such thing as ACCIDENTALLY hitting someone, that doesn’t happen… nooneaccidentally hits anyone…youmeant to hitme…(sobs)… you FUCKING PRICK! (Sounds of crashing, light bulbs pop and the light streaming under the door disappears)” + “Oh that’s FUCKING great! You stupid bitch!” (Now there is a dull thud followed by a low moan and Dean and I look at each other. We are too fucked up for this….) + By the time we turn on the kitchen light they are wrestling at the door and before we can get across the room Mike throws Halley out the front door wearing only a thin nightgown. Its February in Denver, Colorado and they are in hysterics. Tears are streaming down Mike’s face and whether they are from the marijuana, the alcohol, the pain and anguish of heartbreak or the red welt atop his forehead it is still February in Denver and he is still in hysterics and he stands there trying to manage a thin strained smile as he collapses against the door. Dean and I are frozen. + “She fuck some guy.” + I try not to move or show any signs. + “The BITCH FUCKED SOME OTHER GUY!” he yells at the door but there is no answer. “You hear me you dumb bitch! I hope you fucking freeze to death. I hope his cock keeps you warm out there! I hope you know where he lives! I hope you get there before you lose any fingers or toes… you FUCKING CUNT! Jesus Christ….” He is weeping on the floor with his hands over his face I try to move him and he punches wildly but accurately hitting me in the jaw. Out of anger I kick him and he makes no protest. I shove him aside and go out to look for Halley. She didn’t go far. She is sitting on the neighbor’s couch the neighbors are up wearing bathrobes, rubbing her back and rocking her on the couch. She is shaking like a leaf. + “What’s wrong with him Sil? Why is he doing this? I am good to him aren’t I? I shouldn’t be putting up with this, this is bullshit, I can’t keep doing this…. (head in her hands) What the fuck is wrong with him? What wrong with you, with all of you? (Tears are running down her face) There is this thing in you that can’t let go, can’t admit that you’re wrong… all of you, your so damn sure that your little feelings and your little emotions have to be so goddamn right that you think you can just pull them down like shades over the whole fucking world! (yelling up at me, wild eyes) Every emotion, every thought, every fucking little thing can be broken down and analyzed and dismissed with some cynical diatribe that you think is so witty and fucking funny… goddamn all of you. (lunging towards me and hitting my chest, near screaming hysterics) You make me sick… I make me sick for letting myself be involved with him…. (collapsing onto me) I outta fucking be able to do better than this if this is love… this… this… fucking little hyper universe that you guys live in.... (pulling her self up and off of me) This is not love… I don’t always know what I am doing… I don’t always know what I am feeling OKAY! FUCK! (arms raised in exasperation) Don’t you ever, doesn’t he ever, just have moment of absolute confusion where he wants to do something completely irrational not out of love even just because its there and it can be done and.... and fuck… I don’t know why I fucked him…….(staring at the ground, pacing) It had just been so long since there was any passion you know, Mike and I are an old couple this shit happens, it doesn’t mean anything, right? …and I know Mike has fucked around, I know he fucked around in Europe, but he won’t admit it that’s the thing that makes me so fucking mad is he won’t admit it… and why? Why? Because if he admitted that then he’d have to face up to the fact that I am as weak as he is… whereas now he can call me a slut and make himself out to be better, that’s all I am to him this thing against which he can measure himself, this thing… this superwoman which I am supposed to be to him… this …fuck! (arms up exasperated) Do you know what this is doing to me? I am losing my mind… I’m not going to go nuts over him… I knew I should have run away right after we made love for the first time… I should have just run, because now I’m here and he’s throwing me out the door in my fucking night gown… in my FUCKING NIGHTGOWN!!!” +And then she collapsed or rather doubled over in sobs. I turned around and went back to see if Mike had calmed down. He and Dean were smoking a cigarette on the couch. Betty was in the chair dispensing wisdom that sounded like it would have solved all his problems, but Mike is a man and men can’t hear a word that women are saying, just like women can’t hear a word that men are saying and whole so-called battle of the sexes could be stopped just like Capt. Cook didn’t have to die on that island if only we had a goddamn interpreter that could translate the two languages and solve the riddle. Translate the emotion and feeling into the logic and predictable precision and then back out into the chaotic no-man’s-land of feeling again. Some guru, some pygmy, some monk, some alien that can add it all up and give us some kind of answer, that’s all we really want. +And the newscaster is talking about chemical warfare and he says that chemicals are weapons of mass destruction, but they are not, they are very selective and Mike turns the channel and there is a leopard or an ocelot tearing away the flesh of wildebeest and then the image changes to an ad for a moisturizing soap that will make us all look ten years younger and there is girl who looks ten years younger and her head is moving her lips are moving, but her voice is hollow and detached she comes out the side of the television and echoes falsely about the room and then I turn off the TV. And Mike starts in. + “Fuck man what am doing? (tugs at his hair with one hand and rolls the phone absently in the other hand, the whole movement seems false.) What did you do? Did you do this? I mean with Leah, she was you first love… and now look at you… you’re fine, you haven’t talked to her in years… what did you do? How did you fill this hole that I feel growing in me…. (looking at me pleading for some answer) Do you just harden yourself?… she thinks I’m hardened because I pushed her out the door, but that wasn’t the hard part of me that was the raw nerve endings of pain that was me trying to find love….or fight love… (looking for the answer as if it might be on the ceiling) that was my love that pushed her out the door… the cold hard part of me is the part that will go over there in a couple of hours and talk to her… (reflective self-analyzed pose of mock security) the hard part of me is the part that will make love to her while the love in me fades, gets up and leaves the room…. The horrible thing about losing love isn’t that it makes you hard it’s that you realize or you start to realize that love can be lost…. (serene face of philosopher dispensing wisdom) That’s what is tearing me up right now, the reality I am beginning to see is that there is no sacredness to love like they want you to believe… whoever they are…. (momentarily side tracked by a novel thought) But that’s not the point… the point is that once you realize that love can be lost, once you know that this can happen… its doomed to happen again…. You will never again be able to look at someone and to see a relationship that doesn’t end… I know now that for every beginning there is an ending already written…. (with disgust) Like that goddamn book you think you’re writing… the end’s already there isn’t it? I bet that was the first thing that you thought of… (sobbing, despair again) Oh god! How the fuck do you get out of this… how do you find hope again… and even if you do what do you do when it is dashed? How many times can you do this? Is there a limitation to the number of times you can have your heart broken…? (serene face of philosopher dispensing wisdom) Is it like one of those Lithium batteries where it never recharges all the way again and its starts looping back until there is nothing and then right when you think you have it… oh I underst…WHAM! And then it’s gone, you’re gone, the thing is gone… (silence in which feeling flashes across his face like a forgotten memory) Jesus what is she doing over there does she really hate me? She really hates me now doesn’t she? Fuck and the horrible thing is that somewhere deep down I wanted her to fuck that guy whoever he is… it doesn’t matter… god I want a whole gang of giant cocked black guys to gang fuck her through eternity if that’s what it takes, but I want to feel something… I’m not feeling anything anymore, the only time I feel anything is when I hurt her… then I feel hate. I mean I feel her hating me, but when she’s not hating me I don’t feel anything… I don’t feel loved…” +And he broke down into pure honest crying. Dean and I looked at each other and then at the VCR clock, it was ten till two and we both had the same thought. Run. + + + + + +Months rolled by and I have dim images of fall colors and an unsettling chill to the air. The mountains colored like firestorms and then the snow, lots of it, too cold to go outside. I took a job at a paper writing the horoscopes and occasionally I broke down and delivered pizza with Dean. Halley and Mike were at each other all the time. The television no longer mentioned Kosovo and there was a new game show sweeping the nation where you answered a series of stupid questions and got a million bucks. It was in the same vein as the Idiots Guide series… the steady decline of intelligence perfectly laid out like military campaign. Can’t figure out how to tie your shoes? Get the Idiot’s Guide to tying you shoes. I was waiting for the only useful title… the Idiots Guide to suicide… I wrote a letter to the publisher, but got no reply. And there was Regis Philman presiding over the burning hills and the freezing snow gleefully like a weatherman issuing a hurricane warning he smiled over it all. Great floating teeth that hung in the nightmares of f. Scott Fitzgerald’s. Signs of the apocalypse. This is hardly the first collective suicide. It's all part of history, the endless tumults, hills and glades and all the while we look at the crimson leaves and think that fall is in the air. But the spacemen never showed and the Nikes and the black suits with spaghetti ties were all in vain because the CD is skipping and we’re all stuck on endless repeat. +The fingers kept flying and the months fell away with them. I hear them from a distance now like the sound of an approaching marching band or a clock that hasn’t chimed yet. Sometimes I would wake up at dawn and hear the fingers. Marching marching marching. Dean as a tireless soldier of seduction…. Mike on the other hand remained a tireless soldier of reductionist emotional rationalism, which is what we named his peculiar nit-picked version of life. His idea of a worldview was crumbs, the confetti after the parade has passed. Christ all the way. Quick get us a tree, somebody make two boards… hurry before he loses the courage and does it himself. Christ was on a suicide trip, that much we know now he’d have gone with or without the Romans… how else do you end a story like that? +By March it was getting so bad that Dean and I used to just sit and smoke and listen to them for entertainment —familiarity breeds contempt.... We tuned them in and out of our own conversation the way television comes and goes. Betty would pass out on the bed and we would sit with out backs to the wall and just listen for hours. We had running bets on who would go insane first Mike or Halley? As time when on we both switched our bets to lie on ourselves. One morning we had to leave at nine because they were throwing things and we just wanted to sleep, but it’s hard to sleep in the midst of reckless friendly fire. I remember that morning because I was awoken from a nap by a lamp hitting my head. The couch was no longer safe. I kicked Dean and we darted out. We tried sleeping in his car but it was a no go so we wound up getting coffee and after that we went for a drive to get a feel for Denver. We wound up downtown since we just kind of aimed for tallest buildings or at least that’s how it seemed but Dean might have know what he was doing… I wouldn’t put it past him to have been buying down there for sometime, but I ignored his heroin use. If you ignore something long enough eventually it just goes away. +It is finally warm enough to take off the jackets. We sit on the steps of an old warehouse loading bay and listen to drone of afternoon. Listen for the returning Spring, which creeps in like a virgin newlywed glimpsing her first erect penis. And the thing is jerking with anticipation and the virgin is meek, but something is stirring some hunger that can never be satisfied starts to gnaw at the hidden parts of her mind, of her stomach, of her cunt. Spring is coming amid the fantastical ruins of downtown Denver, anywhere. It’s a disquieting sight, a testament to the durability if not of buildings than the certainty of mankind that he out always to have more of them. The macabre feeling of mobile decay struck me as we drove out of the sparkling sterile business hub of the new downtown where cars run with silent hums, exhausts hits the air clean without additives, fat free business men and women scurry, rat feet scrapping the ceiling at night and the cars are bigger, they sound like squirrels scampering up trees. Push cart coffee salesmen in sharp uniforms chat with professional desk sitters over bagels and reduced fat cream cheese and the heart attack penthouse office fat men in suits collect like windblown lead trash in front of the roach coach. We can see them, hear them, smell them from down here, two blocks south where all is not well. Brick steps pad silent under our feet and crumbled bits of mortar from the buildings settles with the rustling of the air, little whirlpools, miniature tornadoes that circle the vast open parking lot that once was a truck loading zone. Everything is in various states of disarray, here and there a tree sprouting out a window. A chiming laughter of the gods whose frail leaves still quake like the virgin. You may build with your precious creations of pressed gravel, but we, we are here always perpetuating a grand cycle of which you are only an upstart movement an attempt to catalogue, and what did you get for it? You get fantastic ruins, testaments to your own malleability, silly creatures struggling to leave a mark in competition against the eons of geology and botany. Water stained brick has a romance that the Nouevvo downtown can not match it has a weathered face to it that is gained only with the infinite passing of time like an old man with wrinkled wizened face sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of roadside store in Louisiana. Even material so simple as brick will outlast you and I, our own permanence is in the stories we create, whether living them out, dreaming them aloud, or writing them down, we beat nature on one account, we can record the past and bring it into the future even if it never actually happened. Sheet metal roofing that collapsed inward to the lofts that it sheltered is now stick out at awkward angles through broken industrial windows and a giant piece hangs precariously over a second story doorway, threatening to give up and fall clanging down the stairs to the ground where Dean and I are sitting. We walked about in the industrial ruin taking a few pictures and sipping on now cold coffee. I was wandering about in the ruins the way tourists of room head out to Pompeii with a sense that here is a monument to times past. Times I never knew, times that remain locked in my own phantasmal imagination where errand boys skipped about street delivering messages from the factory to the office uptown. Merchants pushing carts sold pomegranates, oranges, and onions to welfare mothers in the great depression. The launch pad for a thousand tragedies —it could be Denver or anywhere. + Ed lives in a part of LA that looks remarkably similar to this, an unholy contract between artist renovated lofts and slowly dying industrial shipping companies, metal recycling facilities, and giant distribution warehouses. All things move in circles and so after the first settlements leave in come the companies bulldozing blocks of shabby tenement buildings to put up cement factories, iron workings, and canning plants. The residents retreat in the face of endless employment the deep consciousness of the working man knows to keep ahead of drudgery, but then the factories run out and the economy shifts to some new fresh means of creation. The buildings are abandoned in favor of new warehouses outside of town; the industrial complex collapses and leaves a twenty-year void with its passing. Twenty years give or take of rotting fermenting nature slowly eking its way back onto the scene until the streets relinquish themselves to the ceaseless torrents of rain and snow in the winter and the broiling summer heat until they are broken like spirited horses that once walked over them, they begin to crack and then patches of grass come up out of the soil beneath, followed by weeds and shrubs. Nature is heliotropic, always moving up toward the sun, whereas man is constantly being knocked back to the substrata of his origins the crumbling of the old to give rise to the new. The new screams, the new anguish the new drama the newborn slapped on the ass by the god of it all. + + “What do you want from me? I fucking try so hard to love you… even when you throw me out the door, and you throw me out the door, but then you want me back and then you tell me to go again.... WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT? + “I want you… I want… I don’t fucking know what I want why are you always harping on what I want why can’t we just live and exist and be… like Sil and Dean and Betty and every other fucking person on this planet… why can’t we just be happy? Why do we have to have these issues… why do we have to have these things to work on? What are these things what the fuck is going on around here? When did this start?” + “What do you mean? What are you talk” + WHAT DO MEAN ‘WHAT DO I MEAN? You know what I mean, this all of this… look at us…” + “Why are you bringing Dean and Sill into this? Why do you have to live up to some manly ideal that you think they embody? (Dean cracked an eyebrow at me) I got new for you they don’t embody shit! The two of them would be living in goddamn dumpster if we weren’t putting them up!” + “Why does this have to be about my friends? Why is it a problem I asked you if it was alright for them to crash here and now you say its not?” + “It has nothing to do with them…. Its you that I’m talking about. You say we used to be happy we used to not be like this… we used to ‘just live’ as you put it. Well do the fucking math Michael when did this start? When they showed up! And I’m not blaming anything on them, I like them both and Betty too, fuck I like them more than I like you sometimes, but its you. Its what showed up in you that wasn’t here before, this fucking over analyzation shit that you didn’t use to have…” + Police said the suspect was dressed in business suit and may be armed do you have time to cook a meal every night in the midst of balancing… So this guy comes up to me… guaranteed to last a lifetime… + “What the fuck are you talking about?” + “This indecision this fucking shit” + “My indecision? (Derisive laughter) My fucking indecision? And who pray tell FUCKED SOMEBODY else! Who is indecisive? It’s not me I know exactly what I want… I want to be with you, but you won’t let me just be… you question my every fucking move, want to know my every thought, every feeling, don’t you ever not have a feeling? Isn’t it ever just a blank page of white with little blue lines… little fucking blue lines and not word not a fucking thought in sight… do you ever get that… or is it just constant fucking emotional fucking input from the far reaches of the earth and heavens all pouring though your precision little hear that occasionally seems to feel that it need some other guys DICK!” +“Yes Michael we all fucking go a bit nuts every now and then I am as clueless as you are and someone in the midst of this insanity I think that I see and feel and what I see and feel is you, but you won’t let me in you won’t let yourself be hurt and I can’t figure out if its because your scared or because you just don’t fucking care about me like I’m just some sort of ornamental drama that you have been pursuing over the last two fucking years because it happened to interest you and now, now that some bigger fucking part of the drama that you think you are… now that its here I just get shoved to the side cast off like so much luggage…. Fuck me! Fuck you! I don’t know if I was some whim, some thing you wanted to try on in the dressing room and then when you thought it was out of style you can just hang it back up on the rack. No id don’t know anything about anything and neither do you but that doesn’t mean anything, none of it means anything….” + “No that not what you mean, everything means something, it may not make any difference, but goddamn it all means something, who you fuck who you eat dinner with what time you get up, what kind of fucking bombs they drop on everyone, the jails, the murders, it all fucking means something, all of this, everything that is happening it all means something. Maybe none of it matters but it all means something goddamn it! (There is silence in which we here Mike heaving for air and then) “I just don’t know what it is, I just need some time to figure out what the hell I am what I am doing, what this life is, were all fucking try to figure it out… I don’t fucking know what I want okay, I can’t give you some fucking pat little answer that’s going to explain exactly how I feel. Some days I want to be with you and some days you drive me up the fucking walls….” + Researchers have concluded that including a glass of wine with your regular meal may actually increase your life span… but Jim we can’t just leave them here… We’re tiny were toony we’re all a little loony… the initial results indicate HIV… we will be appealing your case… Mr. president the girl from Arkansas is on line to… did you or did you not engage...?… the white house denies… tide gets your colors looking bright… guaranteed to last a life time… I like to buy a vowel… what is the Serengeti?… that is my final answer… +“Oh great! Fucking great now I drive you up the walls!” + “Why the fuck do focus in on the negative, see that’s what I’m talking about I say that some days I want to be with you and some days I don’t and what do we have to get into the days I don’t this must be explained, there is a reason for this, this is what needs to be fixed…. Has it ever occurred to you that I must just want to be alone some days, has it ever occurred to you that I can love you without liking you every now and then? + “You are sick fucking man Michael, I am going to Ally’s to spent the night. I can’t sleep next to you, ugh I can’t be near you…” + And the door slammed. +Betty sleeps, Social Distortion plays in the background and Mike is a flood of meaningless gibberish goes internal and bounces endlessly about in the echo chamber…. Michael was cold calculated psychology distilled out of textbooks through all the vital organs of his body until it fills up his soul with formaldehyde and preserves him eternally, preventing any growth; everything is preserved like jams for the future. He collapsed on to the couch with shrug and I see him standing in on the bridge from now to forever and trying to figure out why he can’t get to tomorrow. He needs to have the bridge blown out from under him, otherwise there will be no growth, just canned life, evaporated stale milk. He is a root bound tree in desperate need of transplanting. He is a leech, it seems so unreal to me that I might have once lived with him, liked him even as a friend. Michael’s insidiousness extends far deeper now than it did back then or at least back then it was never played out in front of me so I didn’t notice it as much, but now I see it overflowing like a boiling kettle. He has lost all traces of humor and runs about madly chasing after this invisible spirit that he thinks will somehow enlighten him, give his life the meaning, the purpose, the joy that it lacks. I remember once years ago an incident that now seems more revealing then it did at the time. I got up and went to take a leak around noon. There was a woman I didn’t know sitting on the toilet chewing on her fingernails, her head bent down and emitting peculiar sniffling sounds; I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying. I should have turned around and gone right back to bed but I didn’t because instead of jealousy I am afflicted with pity —incurable. I do it not for them but for me because I can’t bring myself not to, I have no intention of helping I just don’t have reason to do otherwise. So I asked her if she was all right. Yes fine, she said between what I now took to be sobs. “Fine, is there anything I can get you?” A coat hanger…. She smiled weakly and I just started laughing. Laughter that swallowed her up and digested her image sitting there on the toilet hunched over her twat, sniffling like a wounded cornered animal —the perfect specimen of humanity. “You must be a friend of Michael’s?” Yes she was what did Michael do with the creature? He keeps her around because she has constant drama that she dumps on his fragile little middle class heartstrings and it gives him something to do. Something that can be solved that’s all he wants from life, a problem that can be solved something to which he can point and say see it is all better now…. He has no use for whole people, just the ragged torn edges of the pages… preferably dripping fresh blood, new wounds to cauterize and in the process open old ones… poke at the soft scar tissue… induce hemorrhages… leech the life out…. +Michael is an only child like myself, but he is of a different breed rather than independent of self-serving like most (myself included), Michael is like frail wounded animal huddled into corner cowering before the world. What he is cowering from or about I can only assume to be his own personal, self-created demons and to get relief from them, to stand up straight, facing the world and lock arms with it to struggle out life… or some other Hemingwayesque metaphor… he assumes the burdens of others. In great leaders who have already faced up their own demons such a facility would be revered, but in one who can only act on the behalf of others and never for himself it is repulsive, even comical in its stupidity. +He wants to go out and have a drink, but really he doesn’t he wants to keep fighting he should keep fighting, but he should fight with himself beat his own face to a pulp. This is America we beat each other; like the Marquis he stands bleeding and asking if wasn’t good for us…? +(clutching a glass) “She’s fucking nuts you know that only reason I can’t leave her is her body, sex is this thing… this… force that swarms over me and I’m hating her but its pulling at me and no matter how much we scream and even when I hit her that night I am still seeing her tits heave and the way her ass looks when she’s crouched over and the other night she was crying leaning against the door jam and I was standing over her blind with hate… I looked down and she wasn’t wearing any underwear and there is the cunt staring at me, this furry little thing that is the source of all the problems in my life and just stared at it, it enveloped me swallowed me up. What is that warm stick squishy thing that I want? Or maybe (trying to enlist support of dementia through body language, leans in conspiratorially) may be the trouble is everything around the cunt… that’s the real mystery what I need is lust, just pure cunt with no feeling warm and sticky.” +“Yes Michael I think you would be better off with a blow up doll.” Dean is rakish tonight, he is already gone, his body remains to propel the dream further. Mike is menacing tonight too. I can here the masticating of hatred being chewed… mulled over… teeth grinding in his sleep… +“You think so? Ya fuck you! You guys don’t understand with Halley its all about the sex, beyond the sex we don’t get along at all. I can stand over and kick her teeth in if I thought that her cunt would stay warm. Damn that hairy fucking little cunt. She’s too sexy. I get swallowed up.” +Mike was running on and on and I was getting swallowed up and I saw Halley's cunt between her legs I see an aborted fetus hanging out of it bloody and covered in afterbirth with umbilical cord still attached, and cord is there just dangling out of the cunt and I see Mike with scissors trying to cut it and Halley is screaming trying to stop him. The doctor takes the fetus and throws it in the incinerator; the furnace flares and is silent as a slaughterhouse. Halley lies on the table spread eagle, naked and Mike circles her holding blunt object tubular and made out of the words that describe it. It is black and plugged into the wall. Dean and Mike are yelling through me, words pass like water though a screen and there is mike in room with the cattle prod standing over Halley and a symphony strikes up. Marching bands.. fingers tapping… tapping… violins… rhythm of kettle drums… and his arm rises. . He is floating, watching as choked up gasoline-napalm sores sear off his tongue and lick up his body in flames. The air is hot and thick like the worst humidity and the scorching of the flesh sizzles in my nostrils and I just watch. Hell is for voyeurs, the control addicts that like to watch. You just have to ride it out and hope that the cynicism doesn't burn you up right up with them or you find yourself in the liquid fire ripping out your own eyes and sawing off your tongue to run away. Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.... A little red light comes on signaling that the cattle prod is fully charged. In front of him is Halley, beautiful with short black hair like ravens. She is lying naked with her legs were splayed wide and restrained with leather straps and buckles, her arms are restrained above her head. He smiles weakly at her. Hand the symphony reaches fever pitch, the clash of horns and strings and drums and Mike is looking into her eyes watching the pupils dilate. And it fell, his arm fell, the cattle prod fell; and her body went rigid and she shot up off the table as if suddenly turned into a stiff board. He keeps his eyes locked on her as she collapse back onto the table. He sees something flash through them and he feels a tremor in his guts, his muscles spasm involuntarily. Big uncontrollable sobs wracked his whole body and he falls on his knees and proceeds to curl up in little ball on the floor. He lies like that for a while until the sobs work themselves out the violence fall silent and only a lone lunatic flute floats over the scene. Halley gets up and begins to undress him, starting by unbuttoning his shirt. When she undoes his belt she reaches down and rather gently holds his rigid cock as she eases the pants down over it. She stands embracing him strongly with her arms around his neck pulling herself up until her cunt lips part and she slides down on his cock. Mike is fucking her but she can’t feel it. She can’t feel anything and then the strings return crescendo builds…. She spreads his legs and restrains them along with his arms. She strokes his cock hard again and teases him by biting his nipples. All at once her eyes go black and she thrusts the cattle prod into his balls… Mike is blown up off the table by some kind of wind. He doesn't even feel his come splash of his face as the electricity causes an involuntary muscle spasm that makes it arc out of his cock in unnaturally thick spurts. He lands back on the table his voice is a violin, an inhuman screeching kind of wail. + “What the fuck you know…. What the fuck do you have that lets you glide through this existence like some strange cloud a vapor that is there and you can see it but it doesn’t hurt you? How do you have to turn things over and around and rearrange them so that you can see it in a bright light? Don’t you ver get tired of laughing that smug glib little smirk?” Things are not well at this table, the glasses have accumulated and the pent aggressions are knocking them over. +“Hey watch it Michael, you can insult Sil all you want but don’t bring me into your quaint little semantic psychoanalyzed universe where you little puny mind thinks it understands me….” Dean leans in toward me and around at Mike. I turn my back and while trying not to laugh I harangue the little fucker in hopes that maybe he will listen, but the trouble with me is that I didn’t care, I wanted to make a point, but I knew it was already lost, I could just as easily have stood by while Dean beat him to a pulp. I talked to shut out the symphony the close off the images of torture playing on an endless film loop flickering through the eons. I talked to put an end to Denver, to bury the ugly future in the overflowing sewer of the past, not to thwart violence. So when Dean forced the issue I didn’t do anything to stop it…. +“You know what you stupid little fuck, I don’t need your hospitality I don’t need your food, and certainly don’t need your advise seeing that while financially I may be fucked I am at least fucked and can fuck while you are nothing but a confused mediocre little spoiled piece of shit that can’t do much beyond leave his girlfriend in a half fucked state of longing. That why she called me one day and invited me to lunch one day.” +And then there was an absolute motionless silence for a full five or six seconds. And Mike leaped over me and things went the way things go. +Dean beat the crap out of him. We went home gathered up our bags and hit the road in Dean’s car. In Kansas Dean turned right on my assurances that Mark Pledger would welcome us with open arms. + diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/gone book/LA iam.txt b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/LA iam.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8321427 --- /dev/null +++ b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/LA iam.txt @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +Things are looking up for me here in LA I have migrated from Andy’s closet to Dean’s dining room; he never uses it as he never really dines, if I renamed it the drinking room he would kick me out on the street and be in it every night. Dean has a place about an hour south of Los Angeles proper and then my good friend Ed has a place smack dab in the middle of LA so if I want the city I can have it and I can escape it again when it gets old. The real strangeness started about a week ago when Betty, Dean’s sister, showed up. Her husband has just shipped off to Japan for a year and she is morbidly depressed about it moping about the house all day like a slug, oozing existence but absent of all life. Betty is especially monstrous in the morning and I try to slip out before she gets up, luckily she sleeps a lot so I can usually make it out around noon without having to face her and then when I come back in the evening she is awake and more or less harmless, but I fear her before ten AM. +As I say she brought the strangeness, or maybe she just drew it out and reflected the strangeness back so I could see it again, whatever the case it is here like an epidemic of the plague. Not long after she arrived we dragged her up to Ed’s we felt it was our duty to entertain her and get her mind off the missing husband. I tend to drink far to much when I am at Ed’s, drinks role down my throat like wild horses rampaging through my hands with a life and will of their own, and so it came to be that I broke Ed’s cutting board, door, chair and took to lighting his floor on fire one night. It was round Christmas that much is certain because I woke up under a toppled Christmas Tree; I blame the whole affair on Ed. He should have known better than to give me a whole bottle of scotch all to myself. Of all the people in my life who’s homes I have wrought destruction and chaos upon Ed was he least deserving. +Ed is perhaps the gentlest of all the maniacs that I associate with, he had an almost feminine kind of glow about him that comes across like light through a stained glass window —in odd chaotic fragments of color. There are for instance the little things like the way he is sure to have fresh towels and clean blankets for us when we arrive. He cooks little pizzas and sometimes pastas, the mornings after he is libel to be up brewing coffee and frying eggs, Ed had always been the perfect host. +Other shimmies of light come through in his art, his paintings (the best of which he insists on hanging sideways), his photographs and mostly his endless curiosity. He stalks through the conversations like a man eager to learn something eager to be shown something new. Ed craves novelty and doesn’t yet know how to find it; he finds it in Dean and I. He cultivates our company like one takes care of pets with the utmost love and concern asking only to be entertained in return. Ed knows that his lot in life is not to burn cities with ideas, scorch the earth with paint and revolutionize the modern aesthetic or whatever painters are up to these days. Ed is destined to paint quietly with the patience and understanding of a true saint. Ed of Ark I call him in letters. +But back to the destruction…. +It must have been a Thursday, because Dean and Betty left for LA on a Friday, that much I know for sure. I got up early, around six, and went to serve my time for being a citizen of the United States —jury duty. It was my first time in a courthouse and I was certainly not to used to that hour of the morning; much like I assumed it was horrid —a half day of exposure to the radiation dangers of white middle class suburban values. I was bored. My inner child was beginning to putrefy in the stale smokeless air of the waiting rooms, I felt like sheets of burnt skin must be slowly slipping off my face I felt grotesque and obvious, like I stuck out as the most-likely-to be back of the other side of the room. +I had hoped perhaps to have a fellow juror to slide off with into a broom closet, but there were no attractive jurors, nor did I catch any broom closets. The nuts and bolts of democracy were frigid and even asexual. The halls of justice sported the sophisticated airs of wood veneer and fake marble floors whose undistinguished patterns inhabited a no-man’s-land between linoleum and whatever is just a bit nicer than linoleum. The architecture was studiously formal in a painful way that only psychiatrists, number theorists, and judges find appealing. Courts are strange places; they have a sense of doom about them. You’re accused from the moment you walk in the door regardless of why you might be there; the tribunals of architecture condemn your very presence. Walking in those doors I got the sense of dread that the great cathedrals of medieval Europe must have inspired in the serf peasants. The state is the new dominant religion and the court is a place of worship; you don’t just go to jury duty, you serve jury duty; you serve the state and the state has some things they want you to know. +They bring juries into the court room to remind even the law abiding citizens of what will happen should they decide to stray out of the neat little square boxes that hold the officially accepted rules about what is permitted and what is not. It reeks of textbook Freudian repression. They even put you in a “jury box” either with a straight-faced synchronicity that tapers over into irony or to make sure that the burden of life sinks into your wee little cellular glob. I’m still unsure if everyone there really believed the crap they feed you in those jury notices about your civic duty or if they were like me, offended at the very concept, but intimidated by the bottom sentence which used the words… failure to comply will result in criminal penalties… The government talks like an abusive spouse —it needs you so that it will have someone around to walk all over and beat the crap out of. You wouldn’t want the government to get its feelings hurt when no one turns up for the public spankings now would you? Without you whom the hell would they spank? The whole show was ludicrous; no one wanted to be there, it was only under the threat of jail that most of us had shoed up there. Mostly people talked amongst themselves waited irritably, hoping to avoid an OJ trial, bitching about time lost at work or conversely reading and enjoying a break from work. A few of us, smokers all, congregated outside and swapped stories about our lives, a couple of them looked like me —guilty, as if this was only an observational run through. +I could have been doing a thousand things all of them infinitely more interesting than sitting on the patio of a jury call room smoking and listening to stories from a trucker about life on the road. I kept hoping for that one sexy young juror to come strolling outside but she didn’t. I’m from LA true, but I just can’t surrender my optimism…. It was a morning steeped in boredom. I read a book and listened here and there to catch snippets of someone’s life randomly dropping out of the sky like seagull shit in the desert. +Make the courtroom fun? That had seemingly never occurred to anyone. Why not turn it into a burlesque show with a little skin, some singers, and few dirty jokes between trials? It would be huge. You could even charge a few bucks at the door and the average citizen would finally have reason to participate in government. Instead of jails a dominatrix judge could administer spankings and trade her gavel for a paddle. And of course the stenographer would have to turn into a photographer, which would open up the whole print aspect of the courts —the monthly newsletter for patrons. From there as word spread it would become a full fledged magazine with centerfolds, feature interviews and reviews of crimes…. But the stunted pedophilic minds in power will hear of no such thing…entirely unacceptable….why it makes a mockery of the justice system… I will not hear of it!!! +Libel to give one a coronary the way it is now. The whole morning left me feeling strangely violated; some faceless uncontrollable monster had sequestered four hours of my life away from me. I wanted to sue the judge for making me get up at six in the morning a trauma which doubtless took years off my life in stress and mental anguish, but I let it go… no paddles, no burlesque, no photographer, no show… what’s the point? +They released me at noon. I spent the remainder of the day wandering around the beach looking a tide pools and picking up little snails and trying to organize them into juries and try a starfish for sloth, but nothing cooperated the way humans do so I gave up and read a book on the steps to the beach. I stayed almost until sunset when I caught the last bus into Laguna Beach and had dinner a restaurant where my friend Matt works. +When I got home I was full and content, wanting only to stretch myself with a short walk and then go to bed, but Dean was at manic pace, it is imperative that we go to Ed’s tonight he must wake up in the city tomorrow he can not take the suburbs anymore…. +“If I see one more rich cunt in a BMW sitting at a green light talking on her cell phone to Erik the Viking workout coach that she is meeting to fuck before going home to her idiotic husband who has spent the day licking his boss’s ass for pocket change, I am going to kill. This entire fucking town ought to be a toxic waste dump; I was thinking Sil, about that plan I had to take over the world and make Kansas a prison colony… I am relocating the colony here just like that terrible movie that was out a few years ago what was it called?” +Dean is in a frenzy of blind hatred, the kind of frenzy which all the dead must surrender to occasionally and what’s more he is beginning to get me in a frenzy as well, he feeds off that… “The worst thing is that there is no fucking reason whatsoever for me to be here I hate my job I hate the people rent is too damn expensive and there’s never anything to do but get drunk or high. The monotony of it is numbing it tears away my flesh….” He looked around exasperated as if we were going to somehow come to his aide but then he just started pacing in silence for bit. All the sudden he said he was going to Ed’s house right then if we cared to join him. I went for it and so we drove up there and on the way Dean told a curious story about a Muslim. +“I was sitting on a bench smoking and reading as usual, and this guy sat next to me. He works in the mailroom, always says hello, real happy chap, friendly as fuck, in a genuine way. I suspected he was Muslim, but I had never talked to him. So he sits down and asks me what I’m reading...I hate that question. Last week someone stopped me in the hall and asked what Naked Lunch was about..."um.... a guy living in tangier...." week before that I was reading Junky....not sure if anyone is paying attention or doing any math over there could be only a matter of time… Anyway... I try to get across that Western Lands is Burroughs going through death and meditating on the afterlife myths et cetera while he was nearing the Great Divide himself. This guy starts laying down some thick rap about Islam, and I was mesmerized. Their stories are fucking INTENSE. He laid down this Angel of Death gig that was a definite keeper. I closed my book and was genuinely enthralled. Not by what he was saying but by him. He’s one of those people who, regardless of what they are spouting, give off this haze of education, and inner peace, and wisdom. Maybe I’m working with numbers too much and my brain is melting. I keep "waking up" at work. Wondering where I am and how I got there. Not unlike realizing that you're dancing on a table because you've had to much Bombay, and politely excusing yourself to the boy's room. I get stuck in trance like internalization periods that last for hours, sometimes days, and then I snap back into this reality. +The freeway roared in the vacuum of silence that Dean left hanging there, as if it were a painting and he were steeping back to admire it for bit, check to make sure it hung straight and true. +“I had a fucked dream the other night. Sis and mom and I were living in Texas again, where I grew up and I was walking barefoot outside. I walked through a stagnant pool of water to avoid a vicious barking dog. When I got to the house, I lit a cigarette and tied up for a shot. I saw my skin move. REALLY move. I thought I was hallucinating, and it started moving all over. The stagnant water had some sort of microscopic parasite in it—like a tapeworm with a leech body. It had seeped through my pours and reproduced and grown. I ran around the house freaking out, my skin moving in little bumpy wave-like black ripples. I could feel them crawling under the epidermis. I stopped suddenly and had an epiphany. I began kneading my flesh, corralling the parasites to my extremities and forcing them out through the skin. My skin was shredding like latex paper mache`, and blood burst from the ribbons of flesh, covering my arms and face. When I had finally gotten the last one out, and crushed it in my hand, I lay back knowing I was in agonizing pain, but only feeling the smooth balance of shock soothing my nervous system, fooling it into feeling okay. I felt tired, and realized I was bleeding to death. I didn’t fight, I just slipped away.” +Ed apparently had been expecting us as the door was unlocked and there was a note explained that he had run to the store to get beer. On top of the fridge we found a bottle of scotch bearing my name and bottle of Gin bearing Dean’s, we were well on our way through them before Ed got back. By the time he showed up with the beer it was nearly midnight and things were getting fuzzy. +I can hear Ed and Dean talking about the implications of time travel. I keep slipping into near coma in which I start to turn their dialogue into the inner workings of my own mind. I am living in a terrible Dostoevskyian land of cross-examination and self-doubt. Although I know they are not talking about me or even too me I can hear the across the room and I keep thinking that they are. Th world feels heavy and I sit down in front of the sideways painting and contemplate the endless thick erotic paint that loops and curls its way about the canvas propelling the eye with it inertia, allowing itself to be converted by the viewer into latent energy. You walk away from it feeling refreshed rejuvenated except that I can’t walk away from it anymore I am too drunk with scotch and the very intoxication of the paint itself; I lie down complete staring up at it floating about in the oily oceans of pigment, vermilion waves crest with whitecaps on a sea of lavender. The waves grow larger as I move, rippling away from me and then I start to sink as if in quicksand. I begin to shuffle my arms and feet but that only sinks me deeper and I remember that in quicksand one must remain perfectly still. I lie perfectly still and feel myself slowly slip down into the oil depths, out to the tattered edges of consciousness the ragged glories of existence and individuality bow before the divine circumstances of the universe and all is lost amid a swirling see of alcohol, pigment, dream, hallucination and reality muddled in the roaring deep baritones of Beethoven, Ed’s painting, Van Gogh’s ear, Burrough’s pinky all gathering up in the comic dust to form a cherubic symphony wailing incessantly across the crepuscule of darkness. + When I woke up I was still wearing my pants and had somehow or other been dropped face down on the couch. My head hurt before I moved not good sign. As I sit up I am gradually aware that I don’t have a hang over. In fact I am still drunk which cheers me slightly and give me the courage to look around. Ed is already brewing coffee, he is standing if front of the sink absently scratching his ass, staring into space and looking for all the world like roman gladiator after the battle. Its then that he notices me and shakes his head. +It turned out that I had not passed out I had blacked out, a first for me. It was unsettling to realize that someone other than the me that is usually me had been me. Who was this other me? Where did he come from and what did he want? Why did he break things and set them on fire? Was it even a he? Perhaps it was a she? The true disappointment is that I didn’t get to meet him. From what Dean and Ed piece together for me I probably wouldn’t have liked the guy, but it would nevertheless have been nice to meet him since he was hijacking my body. +It took me two days to fully regain myself, in the interim the weirdness grew, I lounged about all day watching television with Betty; we could both hear it the rumbling of a distant and future overture. Friday rolled around and they went back up to Ed’s but I stayed behind; I was still feeling sheepish about my behavior and I thought it would be good to do a little recording, to take some time off of life. I had decide that I would not change a word of what I wrote, I would record the life as it unfolded with entirely too much honesty —record things exactly as they were. I was trying to write what all my mentors had left out of their books; I was going to fill in the gaps in the cannon of literature. It is all going to be laid bare for the world, the ideas will become real through seeing and doing, not through the telling… the word would be flesh as was recommended by another writer. I sat down Friday night after they had left for LA and I wrote furiously through the night and all the next day, I was Jack Kerouac on a bender, drunk with words they flowed out in rhythm with the river that is life, they cascaded over the boulders of my fingers and tumble underground into keyboard and finally flooding the deltas of white space that the computer had decreed would now serve as my ocean. I had been writing for almost twenty-four hours solid when the phone rang and the whole perilous structure collapsed in on itself and I looked at the clock. +. It was quarter of twelve and I was pretty sure that nothing good would come from answering the phone at that hour. I stared at it until the machine picked it up. +“Hello? Sil are you there?” There was a silence on the other end for a moment and then came a more thoughtful, lonely drawn-out sounding voice, “well if you get this message call me tonight, my roommates are gone and I feel king of unsafe…(there was a pause) I was wondering if you would come over and stay with me… if not at least call. Okay? Goodbye.” +I sat for moment staring at the pattern of plaster on the wall wondering what my will would do with me. The voice was Amy, my ex-wife whom I had waked out on six months prior. I stared at the wall and tried to figure out how she could possibly have known that I was here, I smelled the evil artistry of Dean who in moments weakness might have squealed my whereabouts to Hillarie his own little nightmare who would have been sent by Amy to find me. Women are insidious little creatures and I could see Dean sitting on the edge of his bed with Hillarie on her knees, his cock in her hand… Dean tell me where he is or I’m leaving. Oh well I’d have done the same. +Besides all that was irrelevant. Why not give the ex a good poke? One last poke and then I’m gone, through with whole sordid affair. And what a clever little girl, wanting protection, so Amy she would never have had the courage to admit that she wanted a good fuck and nothing more, with Amy there was always something more, more more more. I knew that she wasn’t lying, the apartment above her had been burglarized the last I was there. The poor woman had ended up in the ghetto after I split. I would be little more than psychological comfort. She wanted me there for reasons well above and beyond her safety —she wanted sex. She wanted sex because a) she was horny or b) it was the only substitute she could thing of for the emotional hole I had torn in her heart. +I was a bit of a loss, but not entirely surprised. I was feeling free and floating in the effervescent vapors of my new freedom and now here was the old, the familiar, like sliding a foot into the comfort of a well worn boot… But was it a good idea? I called her back and in her voice I caught it the indeterminable mystery that had always gotten me and always could from the beginning to the end. The alpha and the omega—the only thing that ever drew me to anyone —the mystical enigma of the unknown. The familiarity of anything makes it pedestrian and undesirable to me whether it is a place, a person or an emotion. It was on this point that I realized that Dean too bore the mark, bore a mark; I never told him how profound his words were to me when I read them but it was he who put it best: familiarity breeds contempt. +It was the contempt for the familiar that had driven me from Amy; it was never anything to do with her, but try as I might I could never sell her on that point. Whatever it is I can change… those words of desperation that we use when we are in danger of losing our tenuous grasp on the world are the very ones that seal our fate and guarantee that we lose hold. When things are mysterious they remain perpetual wellsprings from which I draw all my hopes dreams and fantasies, but the closer in to actual thing I get, the longer I stay in one place, the more familiar I am with a friend the more intimate I am with a lover the less mysterious they become. Without the mystery I have nothing from which to draw, my existence is not unlike that of the vampire, but unlike the vampire my victims do not die. I shatter their worlds and they come crawling right back again for more. I felt sickened by myself, by the fact that I could recognize such a thing, but feel powerless to stop it; worse still was the dawning realization that I didn’t care to stop it, I had no reason to stop it. My brain squirmed looking for a way out constantly and when Amy gave me one the wheels were already turning. Like a man trying to fly I felt the words in my head, but what if it doesn’t work and I fell like a rock. Doubt kills. +I ended up at Amy’s house twenty minutes later; I tried briefly to resist to see how serious she was and when she offered to come over and pick me so I wouldn’t have to walk I knew there was only one way to go about this. I walked over so as to not be stuck there and also to give myself time to get right down into the sands and dig a little hole, take a closer look at the fragments of my passing even as they were going by. What propelled me was something other than what I think of as me, something I no longer considered myself; I was merely along for the ride. I began to see this temporal me with increasing clarity it seemed to have crawled up from inside and it hung on to edges of reality leaving me to wander in dream and observe form a distance all the beauty that surrounds the dreamer. + Amy was in a shiny satin dress that clung to her lithe frame; it was green and made her eyes glow the deep luster of emerald stones. Her hair was a little bit longer and she had it pulled up behind her head to give unrequited views of the curve of her shoulder as it snaked its way up to her neck. Her nipples poked out of the thin green material and her lips curled playfully as I walked in the door. +I accepted a beer and we talked for a while, she told me of a few dates she had been on, how worthless men were in general, asked how I was how was I enjoying myself, did I have any plans? It was preliminary nonsense to an inevitability of habit, probably mutual fear as much as need, it was to be a construction fuck, the best sex of your life even as the walls are being built up again. For me the walls would never go up, they never do, I could walk into her house ten years from now and feel as familiar with her as I did at the height of our relationship, but for her they went back up. She needed to know that she was the only one before she let the guard down and I had hurt her so up they went, slowly at first day by day, week by passing week she moved farther and farther away from me. I know longer try to fight that emotion, let her go don’t question her is my new mantra. Amy thought I was cold and callous for being able to break her heart, but she didn’t understand that I did suffer, I suffered far more, I had nowhere to place the blame, I broke my own heart as well. I had done it before and I was destined to do it again. She had moved through all the stages of depression that you find in the first chapters of grief psychology. +First there was anger; my nose took the brunt of that off her closed fist. Then silence, my favorite stage —denial. And her we were in surrender where the inevitable is accepted but not yet acted out, and of course there was one yet to come —acceptance. In surrender you give up on the ghost and live on autopilot, from the rear window of the plane you can see the tragedy and the comedy, and the tragedy in the comedy and occasionally even the comedy in the tragedy. The rear door opens and from that artificial altitude you can see the surface of convoluted emotion smoothed flat with distance. We were, for that night, up there together standing on the back of the plane just looking down and admiring the view. How we got there and where we were going was irrelevant, it was all about the view. I knew she would call again tomorrow and that would not be good, but for now… +What a view! She stopped talking and leaned into gently kiss my lips; she started to pull away, but could not the tantalizing attraction of the unknown came over us both, would it be the same? That was the mystery which created the inclination keep our lips pressed together, softly at first until the craving appetite of carnality parted them with hunger and by the time our tongues met we were sealed in our fate. She straddled me on the couch and my hands explored her sphinx-like body as though it were a newfound treasure. My fingers tugged gently at her nipples and pulled the back of her head, pushing my tongue farther around her mouth. The tugging became pinching and her hands fumbled at my belt in a frenzy until she had firm hold of my hard cock and she stroked it gently at first and then just held it in a vise grip as my own trailed down her legs and hiked up her dress. Her legs parted and I twisted my arm to get a finger in her cunt. She was gushing; I rubbed her smooth hairless cunt, probing my fingers in to the knuckles; it wrapped them up like a closing sea anemone. +I pulled the dress off over her head and pushed her up onto the couch as I slid onto the floor. She squatted and moaned as I went to work on her cunt. The taste was familiar and called up memories as only taste and smell can. Infinite desires that spanned far beyond this lifetime into some timeless place where the expression of desire is infinite and perfectly tied to everybody all at once in an ecclesiastic orgasm. Her cum was dripping of my chin and she pulled me up under her again by tugging my hair. She licked her cum from my chin as I fingered her some more, she began to gasp into me ear and I felt her cunt contract on my fingers. She had never come just from my hand before; it empowered me and made my cock rigid as a cement light post. In one move I impaled her on it, she pushed me back against the couch and began to —what better word than ride? I lay there with a sense of relaxed enjoyment born out of the certainty that I would not cum until I was ready. +I wanted to feel every thrust, to feel those warm stretching walls of cunt gripping like a vise, I knew I never would again and I savored it. I kissed her breasts as they bounced delectably in front of my lips. I trailed her juices down to her asshole and reached my hand around her to her ass and slid into her puckered hole. She lifted herself slightly and leaned her head down dragging her lips breathily across my cheek until she bit at my lips and her tongue snaked into my mouth. I held my hand still and kissed her letting her grind as she raised and lowered herself up and down slowly building momentum. +She rode me through two orgasms after which I lifted her up and threw her over the arm of the couch. I slipped it into her with ease and began to fuck her with that intensity where you momentarily forget whether you are trying to please or destroy the cunt. Her cunt milked at my cock until in was near bursting. I watched the swing of her ample breasts as her body thrust back to meet me. +“Don't cum...!…I want to feel it in my ass” +This was a new idea, not one I was all the keen on, but she looked back at me with a expression of lust so primeval and inhuman that I could see her no longer as the wounded animal that lashed out two weeks ago and more like the whole person that knew what she wanted and was going to get it however she pleased. I pulled out and tongued her asshole teasing her to moans and making her beg. Amy loved that cheesy sex talk in the ears…Fuck me harder! had evolved over the years until I was breathing stories of group orgies and gang fucks with stadium crowds full of dicks and cunts swarming over the flesh like inflamed fire ant hills, searing every raw nerve with sex burn. Amy would cum a kind of intensity that startled and scared me almost as much as it turned me on. I told her about watching her with other men, other women, forcing her to watch, rapes scenes where I passed her like meat on a platter to a group of friends, slavery where she led me on a leash. Everything I could ever dream up just made her cum harder and harder the more far-fetched it got. Sometimes I felt like I was an abstract fantasy that was given bodily form to enhance what could otherwise have been a masturbation session. As my cock choked its way slowly into her tight ass I asked her who she had been fucking in my absence and she recounted (maybe she made it up, who knows?) the night previous when she had sucked off a girl in the toilet stall of nightclub restroom and then let her boyfriend jerk off and cum on her tits. In the heat of sex stuff like that usually does the trick and I filled her ass with the biggest squirt I had ever felt leave the tip of my prick. I kept pounding into her fascinated by the intimate squishing sounds of my cum oozing and dribbling out of her ass. +I collapsed into a chair panting, but my mind was reeled about the room. I was exhausted but had never felt so alive, my only thought was to escape her and get out into the streets into the pulse of life, to go and go and go and never look back, but Amy rolled over and begged me to make her come again. I rolled her over and dove into her cunt trying to morph my tongue into an electric eel. + Later we lay for a while in silence and smoked a cigarette. She kissed me and fell asleep with her head on my chest. Around four I gently slipped out from under her and left. I smoked a cigarette walking home and stopped a lot to luxuriate in the good fortune that seems to follow me around. I was living in a kaleidoscope of realities that swirled with all the vibrancy and color of my youth, but it was alive now, here, in this moment, fairly bursting out of my chest. At home I devoured left over Thai food and fell into a deep coma like sleep. I dreamed a radio broadcast of unknown origins pilling down the universes own information superhighway at a genetic tilt, coming across the galaxy without static pure unadulterated reception of signal and through it all the fragment of ash kept falling, fragments of history written on burnt paper and cast about in a hurricane of now. Fragments of falling ash. Fragments of ash falling. White washed ceilings hanging so ominous.... Hallucination of bubble-headed figures crawling like the Michelin Man across an indescribable mountain of tires. Motels Motels Motels Whiskey Bourbon. Tow truck non-ordinary state of reality precludes a state of reality that something is real. Point at the autistic manwomanchild Autistic man pointing at you laughing unable to fathom how your brain functions and quite self-righteously you cling to its definitions. Must delineate between abnormality and those of us who UNDERSTAND.... The Human Virus breeding like rats unconsciously conscious and aware of our disorganization. Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams of the Anarchist are breeding in the minds of the oilmen who don’t want to loose their stranglehold of reality. Fragments of Ash falling, the continual settling of dust weighing down humanity and the French Maid masturbates discreetly in the next room. You need her to keep the dust off your mortal coil spring. Rebirth mythology. Mythology of reality. We must distinguish between what will be defined as sane and what shall be referred to as insanity. Kevlar definitions constructed to make a better shampoo seem like a logical item on which to squander your paperbacked slavery bills. After all these years Tide still gets your socks whiter Its a wonder that they aren’t transparent by now...that your brain retarded in its development that evolution had not anticipated the advent of the opposable thumb the unopposable domination of the thumb leading to and insect superiority of mating rituals stolen from a textbook on damselflies darning needles sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy. Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash. Shit from the sky. Tax man came for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance. You understand. Nothing Personal Just doing our job. Same as the next guy. From Auzwich on down the line. Didn’t make the rules. Sorry. We perfected them. There are no innocents in a world of free will. You don’t have to survive at the expense of others. You could die with puncture wounds in your hands and others would create a new mythology strange irony would find another with holes in his hands unwilling to accept cockroach mentalities. You want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman but he lives on in quiet cafes centralsouthamerica not so free not all the communists have been shot yet Your mistook misunderstood missed the lesson in the situation that unfolded Dr. of dialectic excuses you want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman Hitler killed everybody's body only taking orders you understand just doing my job from Independence on down the line. It was a sad money grubbing hunter gather up his children and thank his gods they are his and he their god behold I have come to tell you that everything you know is wrong stop doing your job it is not yours see Hitler in your mind you want him dead but he's not he lives on buried under restraint in everyone's mind. Only taking orders you understand. Didn’t have a CHOICE. Got a family to feed. Radio crackle. Pop. Hiss. Silence. End transmission. + + + +Somewhere in the background of all these goings on there was Betty. I did not know her save that she was Dean’s sister, had married a Marine who was overseas, and seemed for all practical purposes to be settled into what most of the country would call a normal healthy existence. Her only problem so far as I could tell was that she had exposed herself to Dean and I. When they came back from Ed’s Sunday evening I was feeling muted, as if I did not exist at all, but was merely a spectral figure watching over the chaos and insanity of this tiny little rock spinning about a nearly equally tiny burning rock. I had attained the kind of Zen State that I had always wanted. I observed everything just as it was without subjecting it to my own opinions, beliefs and feeble desires. +I watched Dean and Betty come home. I watched them smoke a joint and drink some beers. I watched swirling patterns of conversation float about the room as radiant butterflies. I chased them in silence. And then somewhere in midst of conversation about the sheer futility and meaninglessness of everything I snapped out of it and floated back down to my body, my life and my animal desires. It was the same sort of detachment that had led me out of LA up to San Francisco and then back only now instead of happening in dreams with strange men leading the way, it was happening while I was awake. Indeed for the first time I was awake, aware. Despite the fact that I had not slept all weekend (or perhaps because of it) I felt more refreshed and alive than ever. +I talked Dean and Betty into going with me for a nightcap. We drove down to a local tavern that Dean and I were known at in, the golden days of youth we had passed many a night there. Bruno, our favorite bartender who greeted you like Odysseus returning every time you walked through the door, was working. Bruno had the most awe inspiring memory I have ever witnessed, which he combined with a fantastic power to ‘exaggerate’ as he called it (lie as the rest of us called it), to create an atmosphere an Italian family reunion. Everyone always felt welcome and loved when Bruno was working, no matter how pathetic their lives might have been during the day they were all on the same level even playing field when Bruno was around. He should have been a cult leader or spiritual adviser, but this is the twenty-first century and there are no spiritual advisers there are bartenders. +Tonight he is in rare form: +“Dean! Sil!” He fairly jumped over the bar. “How have you been?” +“Since last weekend?” Dean has the same arrogant self-mocking sense of humor that I do. “You know… ‘nother week, ‘nother check and we come here to spend it!” +“That’s why I love you guys; did I ever tell you that? I love you guys!” He grabbed us by the shoulders and shook us with all his Italian might. He leaned back over the bar and took off his shirt. “Watch this…” +The bar had this pole in the middle of it, but the ceiling was too low to actually stand on the bar so Bruno jumped up and kind of crouched his back down so that his already enormous gut looked even bigger. “Hey ladies!” He hovered over two girls sitting at the bar and began to pole dance to the music from the jukebox. Catcalls from the locals drown out whatever the girls were trying to say and several patrons ran up to stuff money in Bruno’s pants. He hammed it up flipping his hair and shimmying his enormous Santa belly around the pole. His pants were falling down to plumber level and I knew we weren’t getting beer any time soon. Dean and I joined Betty in the corner booth by the door. Cached safely with my back to the wall I settled into watch the familiar show. +Bruno was now running up and down the bar flexing his muscles; he had stuffed enormous wrenches, screw drivers, and other tools of the plumbers’ trade into his belt loop and down his pants. He squatted in front of a forty-year-old businesswoman and shoved his three exposed inches of ass crack in her face and circle-swooshed it around like a Vegas showgirl. She roared with laughter and tucked a five spot into his crack. He took off down the bar to clean up on the drunken thirty-something’s that had never seen such “hilarious antics.” Bruno was a one of kind; he was the only person I know that could dance so badly, stick pretzels into his gums like fangs, pull his pants down like a plumber and make money while he was at it. +I deeply admired him for that. It wasn’t something you see everyday, but eventually the act got old (drunks have a short attention span) and Bruno came over to the table to see what we wanted. + “Gentlemen,” He screwed up his expression to a face of mock seriousness, “what flavor will you be having this evening?” +“Guinness,” came out of Dean and I in unison. An Irishman would have wept, but Bruno, being Italian only smiled. He went off to pour and I tried in vain to explain what had happened to me while Dean and Betty were at Ed’s house. But there were no words, that was the overwhelming thing that pulled me around and around as a wrestled with the feelings and emotions. Somewhere near the edges of what is here and now and what is always and forever there comes in the grips of eternity a feeling so exhilarating and blinding that it transcends all language all communication. In trying to explain myself I only felt more and more that what I knew was mine alone and could never be shared. In celebrating myself I had lost myself something I never would have expected I kept remembering odd phrases of mystics and cryptic jokes that no one understood except the jokesters themselves. I thought a lot about Andy Kaufman and for the first time felt that I had some sense of what he was doing; or Beckett or Joyce or countless others that had hitherto seemed only deranged lunatics babbling in rhythm and rhyme. +Dean and Betty listened intently but I felt sure that I was inarticulate and confused when inside I was bursting with clarity. In my reverie of several hours previous I had experience extreme chest pains; I felt as if life itself whatever it might be god… dog… you name it… was pouring right through me like Shaterack Meshak and abandego I stood and in the fire and was untouched and yet there was nothing that could be said to describe it. Just when I felt on the brink of madness and isolation Dean interrupted me with a story of William Burrough’s the last old man of the mountain. +“That sounds a lot like the western lands… the sort of middle ground between life and death to which mystics and all character of that sort are always propelled…. The western lands where everything is unwritten, unwritable even, quite a treacherous place I would imagine. You ought to read the Tibetan Book of Dead, see if that rings your bell a bit….” +“Ya? See the supremely frustrating thing is that I feel like I saw a cure for all that ails us… all the worlds problems were solved from where I was… beyond good and evil, but not philosophically; vitally… damn I’m at a loss for words again…. But I will tell you one thing I can’t stay here anymore… I appreciate you putting me up and all, but I have to keep moving what is going through my head is taking over my life, it is the supreme and indeed the only important thing that has ever happened to me. It keeps saying move move move; sitting still is going to drive me mad. Even writing it out on paper, writing a book is futile for this is something entirely separate this art that had to be lived to understand it….” And once again I grew drunk with out liquor swirling the clouds of inception circling with Hesse’s eagle and the swooping brown pelicans of literature, pouches heavy with something new, something fresh which must be shat from on high to land with a dull splatter that covers the earth with a new freshness a new fecundity from which new life could spring, new wells could be draw, new myths created, new words invented new dreams, new ideas, new art forms that would blend seamlessly with old, taking there place in the long infinite line of creation +I had worked myself into a bit of a frenzy by now and I could see that it was catching, little gears and wheels of machinery were turning in Dean’s eyes. Betty too seemed infected by the virus of sanity; the diseased atrophied limbs of lives were beginning to amputate themselves, to fall off useless as the leper’s tongue. We were on the verge of a virtual appendectomy. I gave up and lapsed into silence surrendering all dreams and fate to wind, to the room, to Dean, to anyone who might have taught me anything, I grew sponge-like with anticipation. At this point Bruno delivered another round and now with a little rich Irish nectar to coat my throat I really laid into it. It all came spilling out in an avalanche that swept down and plowed me over until I was beside myself. +“What we ought to do my friend is to light out for the territories. We ought to do those things that living people —I mean people that are alive and eager to go about the business of living — do. They sure as fuck don’t hang around here I spent all weekend watching the scurrying rats running from hole to hole and I just about can’t take it anymore. I am bursting I am alive, am that one little thistle that turns green after the rain on an abandoned lot. And you, look at you, what the fuck is wrong with you? You know better than to go showing up at some job every day like it matters in the grand scheme of things. We are monkeys and yet all we do is mimic the rat on the wheel or the ceaseless activity of the worker ant to serve a queen what? What we ought to be, what we ought to be concerned with is something real something of value that extends beyond this barren womb this business capital of humanity. Even the landscape is mostly boring and drab except by the coast. What is the rest of this place mediocre rolling hills that are brown from lack of rain three quarters of the year. The whole place is so sterile there aren’t even any animals running amuck. This place these people all of them are beyond hope and even if they weren’t you and I are hardly the savior types we look our for ourselves and those that come to us… we don’t go looking for help it comes to us don’t you see? Its coming to us it’s drawing us away from here away away away! We will be embarking on a radical change and no matter if we should end up destitute selling children in the back alleys of Rumanian because no matter what might possible happen it will at least not be this. This is nothing this is a static oasis on the edge of desolate gasoline holocaust.” +I was not surprised that Dean was up for such an alteration, but I must confess I was surprised at Betty’s willingness to but herself in league with such rapscallions as Dean and I. Betty reasoned that she had nothing to lose, but that was only half of it she wanted to do something different as much or maybe more than us. I was exuding enough enthusiasm to power a small city and the Guinness was the only thing keeping me in line I watched it spread around the table first to Dean who began to launch a thousand thoughts much as I had done silently in the pool. We talked of Europe and South America with such enthusiasm that listeners would have been shocked to hear that neither of us had ever been there. We walked the dusty camel choked streets of Morocco and took the Marrakech express across the desert and then ported ourselves to the coast and caught freighters back to Brazil to sail up the Amazon. We had splendid adventures and our table was bursting with a bubbling exuberance that lit up the bar like a rocket ship. Soon the place was packed and we were hemmed in to the table by a wall of drinkers willing to stand for the privilege. I sat up on the back of the booth and had a look around. Dean used the break in conversation to leap up on the table and yell for more beer. As heads turned to see the face of the roaring noise that took the bartender away from their own precious little drinks Dean found himself with an audience. +“Come on Bruno! You know tomorrow is meaningless to now! We’re here, right now and we have to live here right fucking now! I’m not going to work tomorrow because it’s never going to be tomorrow and I don’t want the things I have to pay for today. Every moment of everyday is only one thing —now. What the fuck are you people looking at? If I could be anywhere doing anything why would I be here? Do you realize the odds stacked against me? Against you? The sheer probability of any of this ever occurring, let alone occurring like this, in this exact fashion, at this exact time, in this exact bar? But here we are… what can you say beyond that? You’re going to pass out tonight and happily assume in the seething cesspool of your unconscious that you will wake up again tomorrow, but the odds are equally against you…” +At this point in his ranting Dean wandered off into Quantum physics, Astrology and Chaos math. Most of the drunks were lost before that and the ones that weren’t raised their glasses and got lost rather quickly, but Dean had tapped into something and soon we had new friends. +Cristof, who turned out to be from Rumania, and Charles who could have been from anywhere outside the general atmosphere of earth, bought us round after round of expensive whiskey. Cristof said Dean’s speech was, as he put it, “the only intelligent thing I’ve ever heard an American say.” +Soon there were girls and the world took on a kaleidoscope quality. Time passed as a jerky black and white slideshow, moments were projected onto a screen and just as I was scrutinizing them they were gone replaced by another that seemed out of order. The world got jumbled rather quickly as if my proverbial house of cards was sort of collapsing rather harmlessly about me. I was kissing and pawing roughly at a girl from Arizona. She fairly dragged me with her hand on my collar into the women’s restroom where I threw her against the floral print walls, lifted her skirt and slipped it in roughly and drunkenly. She moaned heavy in my ear but I was beyond caring about her, she was merely a vessel through which I was vainly trying to propel myself into the full stream of life, the raging river…. I came hard seeing stars and then left it slide out, tore off the condom threw it in the toilet and ducked out the back door with lipstick still smeared on my face. Betty drove home. + diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/gone book/LA3 iam.txt b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/LA3 iam.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1670a76 --- /dev/null +++ b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/LA3 iam.txt @@ -0,0 +1,128 @@ +The first week I did nothing but work. Dean’s job was peculiar in that he wrote things before they happened. That is for every concert he reviewed we each wrote a review ahead of time, one good and the other bad with all sorts of adjective cut out and scattered through text. Then we would go to the show or the movie or whatever it happened to be that he was reviewing and about halfway through, when we felt like we had the gist of it we left. Getting the gist of it actually consisted of deciding what more people wanted to hear, it frightened me somewhat to notice that reviewers generally put no thought into the actual art or music or whatever. Everything is in terms of numbers. Are this bands numbers going up or down? Is this exhibit fresh and new with the brightest most of the moment people or is it that washed up nobodies that were huge stars in the past? If the numbers are rising good review, unless of course you're working for an alternative magazine in which case the rising numbers mean bad review —sell out talk. If the numbers are falling it can go to ways one the artist or art is washed up and past tense or it is the artist staying true to his roots and allowing the culture to pass him by. These were the things Dean and I dealt with on a daily basis. In the end none of it really mattered and if you were a performer, an actor, a musician, or a writer or a director there was always one camp set up to support you and another to ridicule you. In some way the two functioned to keep the whole thing and perhaps even the person or art being reviewed in a weird violent balance like a tight rope walker at the circus. Occasionally if one of us were irritated we would shoot the tightrope walker for fun without even bothering to find out what they were doing. We spent an entire afternoon slaughtering Infinite Jest though neither of us had read more than twenty pages. Too much tennis. No one care about tennis. But we praised the Thin Red Line because it was written and directed by Terence Malik and we like his name. Such are whims which journalists bounce around in. Then they asked us to go to a concert for the latest boy band. I quit outright and Dean caught a cold. With a couple of days off we decide to head up the Ed’s place in LA +I tend to drink far to much when I am at Ed’s, drinks role down my throat like wild horses rampaging through my hands with a life and will of their own, and so it came to be that I broke Ed’s cutting board, door, chair and took to lighting his floor on fire one night. It was round Christmas that much is certain because I woke up under a toppled Christmas Tree; I blame the whole affair on Ed. He should have known better than to give me a whole bottle of scotch all to myself. Of all the people in my life who’s homes I have wrought destruction and chaos upon Ed was the least deserving. +Ed is perhaps the gentlest of all the maniacs that I associate with, he had an almost feminine kind of glow about him that comes across like light through a stained glass window —in odd chaotic fragments of color. There are for instance the little things like the way he is sure to have fresh towels and clean blankets for us when we arrive. He cooks little pizzas and sometimes pastas, the mornings after he is libel to be up brewing coffee and frying eggs, Ed had always been the perfect host. +Other shimmies of light come through in his art, his paintings (the best of which he insists on hanging sideways), his photographs and mostly his endless curiosity. He stalks through the conversations like a man eager to learn something eager to be shown something new. Ed craves novelty and doesn’t yet know how to find it; he finds it in Dean and I. He cultivates our company like one takes care of pets with the utmost love and concern asking only to be entertained in return. Ed knows that his lot in life is not to burn cities with ideas, scorch the earth with paint and revolutionize the modern aesthetic or whatever painters are up to these days. Ed is destined to paint quietly with the patience and understanding of a true saint. Ed of Ark I call him in letters. +But back to the destruction…. +It must have been a Thursday, because we left for LA on a Friday, that much I know for sure. I got up early, around six, and went to serve my time for being a citizen of the United States —jury duty. It was my first time in a courthouse and I was certainly not to used to that hour of the morning; much like I assumed it was horrid —a half day of exposure to the radiation dangers of white middle class suburban values. I was bored. My inner child was beginning to putrefy in the stale smokeless air of the waiting rooms, I felt like sheets of burnt skin must be slowly slipping off my face I felt grotesque and obvious, like I stuck out as the most-likely-to be back of the other side of the room. +I had hoped perhaps to have a fellow juror to slide off with into a broom closet, but there were no attractive jurors, nor did I catch any broom closets. The nuts and bolts of democracy were frigid and even asexual. The halls of justice sported the sophisticated airs of wood veneer and fake marble floors whose undistinguished patterns inhabited a no-man’s-land between linoleum and whatever is just a bit nicer than linoleum. The architecture was studiously formal in a painful way that only psychiatrists, number theorists, and judges find appealing. Courts are strange places; they have a sense of doom about them. You’re accused from the moment you walk in the door regardless of why you might be there; the tribunals of architecture condemn your very presence. Walking in those doors I got the sense of dread that the great cathedrals of medieval Europe must have inspired in the serf peasants. The state is the new dominant religion and the court is a place of worship; you don’t just go to jury duty, you serve jury duty; you serve the state and the state has some things they want you to know. +They bring juries into the court room to remind even the law abiding citizens of what will happen should they decide to stray out of the neat little square boxes that hold the officially accepted rules about what is permitted and what is not. It reeks of textbook Freudian repression. They even put you in a “jury box” either with a straight-faced synchronicity that tapers over into irony or to make sure that the burden of life sinks into your wee little cellular glob. I’m still unsure if everyone there really believed the crap they feed you in those jury notices about your civic duty or if they were like me, offended at the very concept, but intimidated by the bottom sentence which used the words… failure to comply will result in criminal penalties… The government talks like an abusive spouse —it needs you so that it will have someone around to walk all over and beat the crap out of. You wouldn’t want the government to get its feelings hurt when no one turns up for the public spankings now would you? Without you whom the hell would they spank? The whole show was ludicrous; no one wanted to be there, it was only under the threat of jail that most of us had shoed up there. Mostly people talked amongst themselves waited irritably, hoping to avoid an OJ trial, bitching about time lost at work or conversely reading and enjoying a break from work. A few of us, smokers all, congregated outside and swapped stories about our lives, a couple of them looked like me —guilty, as if this was only an observational run through. +I could have been doing a thousand things all of them infinitely more interesting than sitting on the patio of a jury call room smoking and listening to stories from a trucker about life on the road. I kept hoping for that one sexy young juror to come strolling outside but she didn’t. I’m from LA true, but I just can’t surrender my optimism…. It was a morning steeped in boredom. I read a book and listened here and there to catch snippets of someone’s life randomly dropping out of the sky like seagull shit in the desert. +Make the courtroom fun? That had seemingly never occurred to anyone. Why not turn it into a burlesque show with a little skin, some singers, and few dirty jokes between trials? It would be huge. You could even charge a few bucks at the door and the average citizen would finally have reason to participate in government. Instead of jails a dominatrix judge could administer spankings and trade her gavel for a paddle. And of course the stenographer would have to turn into a photographer, which would open up the whole print aspect of the courts —the monthly newsletter for patrons. From there as word spread it would become a full-fledged magazine with centerfolds, feature interviews and reviews of crimes…. But the stunted pedophilic minds in power will hear of no such thing…entirely unacceptable….why it makes a mockery of the justice system… I will not hear of it!!! +Libel to give one a coronary the way it is now. The whole morning left me feeling strangely violated; some faceless uncontrollable monster had sequestered four hours of my life away from me. I wanted to sue the judge for making me get up at six in the morning a trauma which doubtless took years off my life in stress and mental anguish, but I let it go… no paddles, no burlesque, no photographer, no show… what’s the point? +They released me at noon. I spent the remainder of the day wandering around the beach looking a tide pools and picking up little snails and trying to organize them into juries and try a starfish for sloth, but nothing cooperated the way humans do so I gave up and read a book on the steps to the beach. I stayed almost until sunset when I caught the last bus into Laguna Beach and had dinner a restaurant where my friend Matt works. +When I got home I was full and content, wanting only to stretch myself with a short walk and then go to bed, but Dean was at manic pace, it is imperative that we go to Ed’s tonight he must wake up in the city tomorrow he can not take the suburbs anymore…. +“If I see one more rich cunt in a BMW sitting at a green light talking on her cell phone to Erik the Viking workout coach that she is meeting to fuck before going home to her idiotic husband who has spent the day licking his boss’s ass for pocket change, I am going to kill. This entire fucking town ought to be a toxic waste dump; I was thinking Sil, about that plan I had to take over the world and make Kansas a prison colony… I am relocating the colony here just like that terrible movie that was out a few years ago what was it called?” +Dean is in a frenzy of blind hatred, the kind of frenzy which all the dead must surrender to occasionally and what’s more he is beginning to get me in a frenzy as well, he feeds off that… “The worst thing is that there is no fucking reason whatsoever for me to be here I hate my job I hate the people rent is too damn expensive and there’s never anything to do but get drunk or high. The monotony of it is numbing it tears away my flesh….” He looked around exasperated as if we were going to somehow come to his aide but then he just started pacing in silence for bit. All the sudden he said he was going to Ed’s house right then if I cared to join him. I went for it and so we drove up there and on the way Dean told a curious story about a Muslim. +“I was sitting on a bench smoking and reading as usual, and this guy sat next to me. He works in the mailroom, always says hello, real happy chap, friendly as fuck, in a genuine way. I suspected he was Muslim, but I had never talked to him. So he sits down and asks me what I’m reading...I hate that question. Last week someone stopped me in the hall and asked what Naked Lunch was about..."um.... a guy living in tangier...." week before that I was reading Junky....not sure if anyone is paying attention or doing any math over there could be only a matter of time… Anyway... I try to get across that Western Lands is Burroughs going through death and meditating on the afterlife myths et cetera while he was nearing the Great Divide himself. This guy starts laying down some thick rap about Islam, and I was mesmerized. Their stories are fucking INTENSE. He laid down this Angel of Death gig that was a definite keeper. I closed my book and was genuinely enthralled. Not by what he was saying but by him. He’s one of those people who, regardless of what they are spouting, give off this haze of education, and inner peace, and wisdom. Maybe I’m working with numbers too much and my brain is melting. I keep "waking up" at work. Wondering where I am and how I got there. Not unlike realizing that you're dancing on a table because you've had to much Bombay, and politely excusing yourself to the boy's room. I get stuck in trance like internalization periods that last for hours, sometimes days, and then I snap back into this reality.” +The freeway roared in the vacuum of silence that Dean left hanging there, as if it were a painting and he was stepping back to admire it for bit, check to make sure it hung straight and true. +“I had a fucked dream the other night. Sis and mom and I were living in Texas again, where I grew up and I was walking barefoot outside. I walked through a stagnant pool of water to avoid a vicious barking dog. When I got to the house, I lit a cigarette and tied up for a shot. I saw my skin move. REALLY move. I thought I was hallucinating, and it started moving all over. The stagnant water had some sort of microscopic parasite in it—like a tapeworm with a leech body. It had seeped through my pours and reproduced and grown. I ran around the house freaking out, my skin moving in little bumpy wave-like black ripples. I could feel them crawling under the epidermis. I stopped suddenly and had an epiphany. I began kneading my flesh, corralling the parasites to my extremities and forcing them out through the skin. My skin was shredding like latex paper mache`, and blood burst from the ribbons of flesh, covering my arms and face. When I had finally gotten the last one out, and crushed it in my hand, I lay back knowing I was in agonizing pain, but only feeling the smooth balance of shock soothing my nervous system, fooling it into feeling okay. I felt tired, and realized I was bleeding to death. I didn’t fight, I just slipped away.” + + +Ed apparently had been expecting us as the door was unlocked and there was a note explained that he had run to the store to get beer. On top of the fridge we found a bottle of scotch bearing my name and bottle of Gin bearing Dean’s, we were well on our way through them before Ed got back. By the time he showed up with the beer it was nearly midnight and things were getting fuzzy. +I can hear Ed and Dean talking about the implications of time travel. I keep slipping into near coma in which I start to turn their dialogue into the inner workings of my own mind. I am living in a terrible Dostoevskyian land of cross-examination and self-doubt. Although I know they are not talking about me or even too me I can hear the across the room and I keep thinking that they are. Th world feels heavy and I sit down in front of the sideways painting and contemplate the endless thick erotic paint that loops and curls its way about the canvas propelling the eye with it inertia, allowing itself to be converted by the viewer into latent energy. You walk away from it feeling refreshed rejuvenated except that I can’t walk away from it anymore I am too drunk with scotch and the very intoxication of the paint itself; I lie down complete staring up at it floating about in the oily oceans of pigment, vermilion waves crest with whitecaps on a sea of lavender. The waves grow larger as I move, rippling away from me and then I start to sink as if in quicksand. I begin to shuffle my arms and feet but that only sank me deeper and I remember that in quicksand one must remain perfectly still. I lie perfectly still and feel myself slowly slip down into the oil depths, out to the tattered edges of consciousness the ragged glories of existence and individuality bow before the divine circumstances of the universe and all is lost amid a swirling see of alcohol, pigment, dream, hallucination and reality muddled in the roaring deep baritones of Beethoven, Ed’s painting, Van Gogh’s ear, Burroughs' pinky all gathering up in the comic dust to form a cherubic symphony wailing incessantly across the crepuscule of darkness. + When I woke up I was still wearing my pants and had somehow or other been dropped face down on the couch. My head hurt before I moved not good sign. As I sit up I am gradually aware that I don’t have a hang over. In fact I am still drunk which cheers me slightly and give me the courage to look around. Ed is already brewing coffee, he is standing if front of the sink absently scratching his ass, staring into space and looking for all the world like roman gladiator after the battle. Its then that he notices me and shakes his head. +It turned out that I had not passed out I had blacked out, a first for me. It was unsettling to realize that someone other than the me that is usually me had been me. Who was this other me? Where did he come from and what did he want? Why did he break things and set them on fire? Was it even a he? Perhaps it was a she? The true disappointment is that I didn’t get to meet him. From what Dean and Ed piece together for me I probably wouldn’t have liked the guy, but it would nevertheless have been nice to meet him since he was hijacking my body. +It took me two days to fully regain myself, in the interim the weirdness grew, I lounged about all day watching television with Betty; we could both hear it the rumbling of a distant and future overture. Friday rolled around and they went back up to Ed’s but I stayed behind; I was still feeling sheepish about my behavior and I thought it would be good to do a little recording, to take some time off of life. I had decide that I would not change a word of what I wrote, I would record the life as it unfolded with entirely too much honesty —record things exactly as they were. I was trying to write what all my mentors had left out of their books; I was going to fill in the gaps in the cannon of literature. It is all going to be laid bare for the world, the ideas will become real through seeing and doing, not through the telling… the word would be flesh as was recommended by another writer. I sat down Friday night after they had left for LA and I wrote furiously through the night and all the next day, I was Jack Kerouac on a bender, drunk with words they flowed out in rhythm with the river that is life, they cascaded over the boulders of my fingers and tumble underground into keyboard and finally flooding the deltas of white space that the computer had decreed would now serve as my ocean. I had been writing for almost twenty-four hours solid when the phone rang and the whole perilous structure collapsed in on itself and I looked at the clock. +. It was quarter of twelve and I was pretty sure that nothing good would come from answering the phone at that hour. I stared at it until the machine picked it up. +“Hello? Sil are you there?” There was a silence on the other end for a moment and then came a more thoughtful, lonely drawn-out sounding voice, “well if you get this message call me tonight, my roommates are gone and I feel king of unsafe…(there was a pause) I was wondering if you would come over and stay with me… if not at least call. Okay? Goodbye.” +I sat for moment staring at the pattern of plaster on the wall wondering what my will would do with me. The voice was Amy, my ex-wife whom I had waked out on six months prior. I stared at the wall and tried to figure out how she could possibly have known that I was here, I smelled the evil artistry of Dean who in moments weakness might have squealed my whereabouts to Hillarie his own little nightmare who would have been sent by Amy to find me. Women are insidious little creatures and I could see Dean sitting on the edge of his bed with Hillarie on her knees, his cock in her hand… Dean tell me where he is or I’m leaving. Oh well I’d have done the same. +Besides all that was irrelevant. Why not give the ex a good poke? One last poke and then I’m gone, through with whole sordid affair. And what a clever little girl, wanting protection, so Amy… she would never have had the courage to admit that she wanted a good fuck and nothing more, with Amy there was always something more, more more more. Not that she was outright lying; the apartment above her had been burglarized the last I was there. The poor woman had ended up in the barrio after I split. I would be little more than psychological comfort, both she and I knew that I would be out the window before the door was half open. She wanted me there for reasons well above and beyond her safety —she wanted sex. She wanted sex because a) she was horny or b) it was the only substitute she could thing of for the emotional hole I had torn in her heart. +I was at a bit of a loss, but not entirely surprised. I was feeling free and floating in the effervescent vapors of my new freedom and now here was the old, the familiar, like sliding a foot into the comfort of a well worn boot… But was it a good idea? I called her back and in her voice I caught it the indeterminable mystery that had always gotten me and always could from the beginning to the end. The alpha and the omega—the only thing that ever drew me to anyone —the mystical enigma of the unknown. The familiarity of anything makes it pedestrian and undesirable to me whether it is a place, a person or an emotion. It was on this point that I realized that Dean too bore the mark, bore a mark; I never told him how profound his words were to me when I read them but it was he who put it best: familiarity breeds contempt. +It was the contempt for the familiar that had driven me from Amy; it was never anything to do with her, but try as I might I could never sell her on that point. Whatever it is I can change… those words of desperation that we use when we are in danger of losing our tenuous grasp on the world are the very ones that seal our fate and guarantee that we lose hold. When things are mysterious they remain perpetual wellsprings from which to draw all hope, dream and fantasy, but the closer in to actual thing I get, the longer I stay in one place, the more familiar I am with a friend the more intimate I am with a lover the less mysterious they become. Without the mystery I have nothing from which to draw, my existence is not unlike that of the vampire, but unlike the vampire my victims do not die. I shatter their worlds and they come crawling right back again for more. I felt sickened by myself, by the fact that I could recognize such a thing, but feel powerless to stop it; worse still was the dawning realization that I didn’t care to stop it, I had no reason to stop it. My brain squirmed looking for a way out constantly and when Amy gave me one the wheels were already turning. Like a man trying to fly I felt the words in my head, but what if it doesn’t work and I fell like a rock. Doubt kills. +I ended up at Amy’s house twenty minutes later; I tried briefly to resist to see how serious she was and when she offered to come over and pick me so I wouldn’t have to walk I knew there was only one way to go about this. I walked over so as to not be stuck there and also to give myself time to get right down into the sands and dig a little hole, take a closer look at the fragments of my passing even as they were going by. What propelled me was something other than what I think of as me, something I no longer considered myself; I was merely along for the ride. I began to see this temporal me with increasing clarity it seemed to have crawled up from inside and it hung on to edges of reality leaving me to wander in dream and observe form a distance all the beauty that surrounds the dreamer. + Amy was in a shiny satin dress that clung to her lithe frame; it was green and made her eyes glow the deep luster of emerald stones. Her hair was a little bit longer and she had it pulled up behind her head to give unrequited views of the curve of her shoulder as it snaked its way up to her neck. Her nipples poked out of the thin green material and her lips curled playfully as I walked in the door. +I accepted a glass of wine and took a seat on the couch. It was a Chilean wine, a pinot, light and sweet. We talked for a while, she told me of a few dates she had been on, how worthless men were in general, asked how I was how was I enjoying myself, did I have any plans? It was preliminary nonsense to an inevitability of habit, probably mutual fear as much as need, it was to be a construction fuck, the best sex of your life even as the walls are being built up again. For me the walls would never go up, they never do, I could walk into her house ten years from now and feel as familiar with her as I did at the height of our relationship, but for her they went back up. She needed to know that she was the only one before she let the guard down and I had hurt her so up they went, slowly at first day by day, week by passing week she moved farther and farther away from me. I know longer try to fight that emotion, let her go don’t question her is my new mantra. Amy thought I was cold and callous for being able to break her heart, but she didn’t understand that I did suffer, I suffered far more, I had nowhere to place the blame, I broke my own heart as well. I had done it before and I was destined to do it again. She had moved through all the stages of depression that you find in the first chapters of grief psychology. +First there was anger; my nose took the brunt of that off her closed fist. Then silence, my favorite stage —denial. And her we were in surrender where the inevitable is accepted but not yet acted out, and of course there was one yet to come —acceptance. In surrender you give up on the ghost and live on autopilot, from the rear window of the plane you can see the tragedy and the comedy, and the tragedy in the comedy and occasionally even the comedy in the tragedy. The rear door opens and from that artificial altitude you can see the surface of convoluted emotion smoothed flat with distance. We were, for that night, up there together standing on the back of the plane just looking down and admiring the view. How we got there and where we were going was irrelevant, it was all about the view. I knew she would call again tomorrow and that would not be good, but for now… +What a view! She stopped talking and leaned into gently kiss my lips; she started to pull away, but could not the tantalizing attraction of the unknown came over us both, would it be the same? That was the mystery which created the inclination keep our lips pressed together, softly at first until the craving appetite of carnality parted them with hunger and by the time our tongues met we were sealed in our fate. She straddled me on the couch and my hands explored her sphinx-like body as though it were a newfound treasure. My fingers tugged gently at her nipples and pulled the back of her head, pushing my tongue farther around her mouth. The tugging became pinching and her hands fumbled at my belt in a frenzy until she had firm hold of my hard cock and she stroked it gently at first and then just held it in a vise grip as my own trailed down her legs and hiked up her dress. Her legs parted and I twisted my arm to get a finger in her cunt. She was gushing; I rubbed her smooth hairless cunt, probing my fingers in to the knuckles; it wrapped them up like a closing sea anemone. +I pulled the dress off over her head and pushed her up onto the couch as I slid onto the floor. She squatted and moaned as I went to work on her cunt. The taste was familiar and called up memories as only taste and smell can. Infinite desires that spanned far beyond this lifetime into some timeless place where the expression of desire is infinite and perfectly tied to everybody all at once in an ecclesiastic orgasm. Her cum was dripping of my chin and she pulled me up under her again by tugging my hair. She licked her cum from my chin as I fingered her some more, she began to gasp into me ear and I felt her cunt contract on my fingers. She had never come just from my hand before; it empowered me and made my cock rigid as a cement light post. In one move I impaled her on it, she pushed me back against the couch and began to —what better word than ride? I lay there with a sense of relaxed enjoyment born out of the certainty that I would not cum until I was ready. +I wanted to feel every thrust, to feel those warm stretching walls of cunt gripping like a vise, I knew I never would again and I savored it. I kissed her breasts as they bounced delectably in front of my lips. I trailed her juices down to her asshole and reached my hand around her to her ass and slid into her puckered hole. She lifted herself slightly and leaned her head down dragging her lips breathily across my cheek until she bit at my lips and her tongue snaked into my mouth. I held my hand still and kissed her letting her grind as she raised and lowered herself up and down slowly building momentum. +She rode me through two orgasms after which I lifted her up and threw her over the arm of the couch. I slipped it into her with ease and began to fuck her with that intensity where you momentarily forget whether you are trying to please or destroy the cunt. Her cunt milked at my cock until in was near bursting. I watched the swing of her ample breasts as her body thrust back to meet me. +“Don't cum...!…I want to feel it in my ass” +This was a new idea, not one I was all the keen on, but she looked back at me with a expression of lust so primeval and inhuman that I could see her no longer as the wounded animal that lashed out two weeks ago and more like the whole person that knew what she wanted and was going to get it however she pleased. I pulled out and tongued her asshole teasing her to moans and making her beg. She got up and ran to the bathroom, returning with jar of Vaseline. She lay down on her stomach and smeared Vaseline on her ass, working it in with her fingers. +“Ughuuuuuhhuhuhhhhh… you know you want my ass…. I was masturbating the other day and I started fucking myself in the ass with that dildo you gave me [I couldn’t just leave her you understand] and I’ve been wanting to feel your cock ever since.” She smiled slyly at me. +The veins in my cock were bulging like I had never seen them before. I climbed on top of her and slowly, gently as I could ease myself into her ass while she spread her cheeks. I watched her face wince at first and then relax. Soon I had a good rhythm going and Amy came again twitching violently and screaming. I exploded in her ass and collapsed onto her back. After a while I propped myself up and pushed at her asshole; I was fascinated by the squishing sounds of my cum oozing and dribbling out of her ass and the way it refused to mix with Vaseline. +I collapsed into a chair panting, but my mind was reeled about the room. I was exhausted but had never felt so alive, my only thought was to escape her and get out into the streets into the pulse of life, to go and go and go and never look back, but Amy rolled over and begged me to make her come again. I rolled her over and dove into her cunt trying to morph my tongue into an electric eel. + Later we lay for a while in silence and smoked a cigarette. I was fucked out, but I couldn’t help commenting on the candles. The place was lit up like a Catholic Church, a voodoo ceremony; candles on the coffee table, the end table, the wall, even some hanging from the ceiling suspended in gnarled balls of wire that Amy had bent and twisted for the purpose. +“Why is it that in movies when ever white people start to have sex candles appear and everything gets soft lighting and feels like a hallmark greeting card?” +She laughed. “Was I trying to hard?” +“Absolutely.” +“Well thanks for humoring me….” She got up and more cum slipped out her ass and landed on the floor. “Oh my god! Elsa will kill me if we stain this carpet,” and she ran off to get a towel and clean herself up. I heard running water and her yelling form the bathroom, “Jesus you haven’t gotten laid in a while…. There's a ton of cum up my ass.” +“Fuck You!” But it was true. After a minute I walked in, “let me know what it feels like next time you take a shit.” She was sitting on the toilet wiping the Vaseline off, cum was dribbling slowing into the toilet. I went into the kitchen to clean myself. I had the water running and I was studying my cock intently noticing that it was darker in tone after sex than before sex, but it didn’t wash off so I knew it wasn’t shit. I chalked it up to blood circulation. As I was turning it around and twisting it in knots Elsa, Amy’s roommate walked in the kitchen behind me. Apparently she had been here the whole time in her room. I naturally assumed that she had been gone otherwise Amy wouldn’t have fucked me in the living room, but as I turned off the sink and went to grab the dishtowel I saw her. Her face had a wide-eyed look of wonder and I froze like a deer. We stood there staring at each other in absolute silence for a full minute and then Amy came charging around the corner with a wineglass in each hand and nearly sent Elsa flying. They both yelped and screamed and then Amy started laughing uncontrollably rolling on the floor still holding the glasses up off the ground. It was so ridiculous that I had to laugh in spite of myself. The last time I had been over, Amy had tried to get me to seduce Elsa with her. I forget why we never went through with it that night, but I do know that this was not exactly how we had planned it. The absurdity of it made me burst out laughing; Amy and I were rolling on the floor and Elsa just stood there in shock for a while. And then non-plused as a kitten she strode over grabbed the wine and a glass and poured it and walked off to her bedroom. Amy and I looked at each other thinking perhaps she was genuinely offended. +“Great, now you freaked her out…” Amy knocked on her bedroom door softly and then slipped inside. I hunted through their refrigerator looking for something to eat. I found an apple and hunk of Gouda cheese, which I took out to the patio, along with the bottle of wine and a glass. The patio was small and choked full of plants. Most of them were mine or had been mine before I split for San Francisco; it seemed like ages ago that Amy and I had split up and we weren’t even divorced yet. The ivy was wilting she had it in direct sunlight; I fondled the brittle leaves. The flowering plants were doing much better, the snapdragons were getting so tall they could be seen from the other side of the fence. They were slender explosions of red and purple jutting out of the moss lined baskets I had built. I sat on the couch and lit a cigarette. I had to admit that this patio was better than our other one and for some reason that irked me. There were more plants more candles; it was more…. I gave up. I thought I heard the sound of running water and I figured that someone was in the shower. It seemed fairly obvious to me that we were all going to have sex at some point; it hung in the air like stale smoke. It was inevitable. I propped my feet up on the table and sat back to enjoy. I left the details of the scenario to Amy; it was after all her house. I was a guest, little more than a friendly cock at this point. I heard a murmuring sound and looked up, there was Amy dripping wet standing in the frame of the sliding door, “would you like to join us in the shower?” +“Sure.” This is where the trouble starts I thought to myself, but I went anyway and there was Elsa standing under the warm water. She was shorter than Amy and thinner, her breasts were bigger though and she had shiny black hair that clung to her neck in strands. I got in and Amy followed, Amy and I kissed for a while and then she pulled away and pushed me toward Elsa who kissed me hesitantly at first and then as if giving in to something unseen she reached both arms around my neck and tried to chew my lips off. Then the girls kissed and fondled each other softly while I stood under the water. +“Stop hogging the water come here…” Amy pulled me over to them and the three of us kissed at the same time as best we could, but by then the water was running cold and we got out to dry off. I wrapped a towel around my waist and went back to the kitchen to see about more food. Once I start eating late at night its hard to stop, this time I set about to make a fruit shake out of frozen packaged peaches and blueberries. Elsa came in to see what I was up to, she was wearing only a silk bathrobe and looked at my coyly. +“Would you like to dance?” She walked over casually and took the towel off my waits. I was already hard and she just stood there for a moment fondling my prick. +Elsa turned up the stereo and went outside onto the patio dragging me by the cock. The fenced enclosure was small but we didn’t really dance we just kind of turned to the soft tones of a mysterious violin. It warped out the screen and wrapped our arms lazily about as we explored each other’s bodies. She pulled me into her smashing her breasts against my chest, grinding her pubic hair into mine and nibbling at my neck. I circled around sliding a finger down the crack of her ass and stroking her cunt from behind. Amy came outside and sat on the couch and lit a cigarette. She exhaled and smiled at me. She twisted her mouth up into a sly grin and spread her legs and began stroking her cunt and watching us. Every time my back was to her Elsa would fondle my ass, then she went to my cock. She seemed to be testing Amy to see how far she could go. My cock was ridged again by now and stabbing her in the stomach. She reached down and pointed it under her, rubbing it across her cunt and mashing at her clitoris. Without a word she dropped on her knees and popped it in her mouth. I was standing sideways to Amy and I saw that she was fucking her pussy with two fingers and gently patting her clit with her other hand while staring intently at Elsa’s head bobbing up and down on my cock. I reached down and stroked Elsa’s head, gently pushing my cock further into her mouth. +“Ya, fuck her in the mouth,” Amy purred and Elsa’s murmurs tickled at the hair on my balls. I was feeling a bit too good and eased out of her mouth. +“Why don’t you two dance for a minute? I need a cigarette.” I sat down on the couch and lit one. They never even really danced. Amy walked up and Elsa fairly seized her head and started tearing at her lips. Amy pulled herself away. +“You want me bad don’t you?” +“Yessss….” +She pushed her down to her knees and lifted one leg over her shoulder bearing her cunt down on her face. I had sat on that same couch a million times when we were married and never had a cigarette tasted so good. An incongruous thought came to me as I leaned forward for the ashtray, why hadn’t we done this more often? In fact why didn’t everyone do this more often? Surely this was better than watching television? It was definitely better than talking. It occurred to me that this felt natural, that in fact every thing I had ever done that was looked down upon or judged to be morally reprehensible felt natural. I was a natural sinner; I was even good at it I realized. This was my calling. I would be a professional sinner; I would apply to the pope for a position in his majesty’s satanic army. I would stand up and be the ting toward which all catholic hatred could be directed and then I would go the presidents of all the countries of the earth and I would give them the very image of debauchery and self-slaughter until all hatred was focused on me. Then I figured I would fuck it out. Fuck until it was all dispersed and there was finally peace on earth. Debauchery will cure everything I thought. It was a novel approach. +I leaned back and glanced around; the place was a jungle. Plants in pots on the walls on the table, and even in metal stands on either side of the couch. I stared laughing because it was just like the candles. Amy came over leading Elsa by the hand. When I laughed she bent over and reached between her legs spreading her swollen red cunt lips and wiggling her ass at me. I pulled her down on me and entered her as she wiggled about on my cock. +Elsa stood next to us on the couch and I stroked her fur with one hand while pinching Amy’s nipple with the other. Elsa was moaning low and she started to move around until she was in front of us half straddling the coffee table. I leaned Amy to the side and pressed my tongue into Elsa’s cunt. Pulled back savoring the taste of her cunt. It was bittersweet, more like wine to Amy’s nectarine fruit flavor. Amy’s was better, but Elsa’s was foreign. There was something about Amy’s cunt and the way it tasted that made the back of my throat salivate. She was wiggling on my fingers and now I felt Amy’s hand furrowing through her bush. I moved my away to allow her to continue and I began to slowly lift Amy up and down on my cock. Amy leaned back onto of me so that I was pressed up against the couch. Everywhere I put my hand there were tits and nipples and hungry mouths laughing and biting playfully at my finger. Then Amy began to rub at her clit and occasionally my balls kissing Elsa frantically and then she came. She went off like a bomb tensing and jerking as if invisible forces kicked her. She used to scare me when she came jerking and thrashing about like that. She hung on the Elsa’s lip and never stopped fingering her. +“I need to be fucked,” she moaned to Amy. Amy nodded and stood up. +Elsa straddled me facing me and Amy fed my cock into her cunt, coated her fingers in juice and then stepped back and licked them clean. Elsa wasted no time and fucked me like a hellion, digging her nails in and snarling at me. I pounded upwards to meet her frantic rhythm. He cunt was long and hotter than Amy’s; I could feel my balls slapping up and down out of control. +“You like that don’t you? You like getting fucked hard don’t you.” Amy pulled Elsa’s hair and snarled at her ear. Elsa grabbed widely at Amy and came with little muffled cries; I could feel her cunt tightening in silken spasms. By now Amy was worked up and again and I still hadn’t cum so we moved back into the living room and they spread out a bedspread and some pillows. +“Let’s do something together,” I suggested and they went about arranging themselves in a sixty-nine position. After some debate with myself I decided I wanted to cum in Elsa. I maneuvered myself behind her on my knees straddling Amy’s head. Amy licked at Elsa’s clit and my balls and I rammed her in deep slow strokes while she leaned over and ate Amy out. After a minute Elsa announced that she was cumming and I actually felt the juice pouring out of her cunt down my balls and onto Amy’s face. Amy must have seen my balls tighten because she grabbed me buy the base of the cock and pushed Elsa forward off of me. She sat up and urged me to lean back. I did and the two of them went to work on me. Amy kissed me for while; her face was covered in Elsa’s cream and was more of a cunt than a mouth. Elsa was licking my balls, which by now were on the verge of pain, if I didn’t cum soon I was worried that I might never be able to cum again. Amy leaned into my ear and whispered, “I want you to cum on her face, on both our face’s.” And she went down with Elsa and began sucking on me. The licked and sucked and nibbled and kissed each other with my cock between there lips. Finally I came. I came so hard I got tunnel vision and arched my back off the ground. I stayed like that forever it seemed. It felt natural, I wasn’t even aware I had arched off the ground until my leg threatened to cramp and I collapsed down. I lifted my head in time to see them licking my cum off each other’s face’s giggling like schoolgirls. +We all lay around completely fucked out. We had some more wine, and some cigarettes. I laid them both out on the couch and inspected the differences between their cunts. Amy’s cunt had thick lips that sealed it up like a sea anemone while Elsa’s was wider with little lips that stuck out like flaps. They were same little flaps of skin that stuck apart with her cum and gave a slutty well-fucked honest look to her cunt. I told her it was beautiful. Amy leaned over to look at her with me and it wasn’t long before we were both eating her out and she came again and then she watched exhausted, as Amy bounced up and down on my cock until she came. +Around four we all climbed into Amy’s bed and I lay between them feigning sleep. Jut after I heard the familiar breathing of Amy in deep sleep, Elsa grabbed at my cock and whispered that she wanted me to fuck her again nice and slowly from behind. I tried to protest. I was tired, but my cock was hard in no time and she feed it into her cunt. It was still wet from earlier. We swayed gently fucking for a long time and then I heard her gasping she came again and rolled her head around to face me. +“Oh cum in me, please cum in me I wanna feel it squirting…” +I pulled out of her cunt and nudged at her ass. +“Oh yes fuck my ass… oh my god…ouch…uuugh....yes… god…” And somewhere in the middle I came. +We lay in silence for a while and then out of nowhere Else blurted out in whispers and gasps, “oh god that was amazing! I saw stars and right then you came and I felt stars shooting into my ass…I want you to fuck me again sometime… just you… “ She stopped and stroked my face, “you will won’t you? How about tomorrow? Amy will be gone, “god I must fuck you again…” +“Yes yes, okay we will fuck again.” I started giggling she was so adamant about it. She rolled over and I lay on my back staring at the ceiling. Elsa kissed me and fell asleep with her head on my chest. The clock read 6:23 and I still wasn’t asleep. They were both purring softly and had been for some time. I was bursting with energy and honesty; I felt expansive, like I was floating, orbiting the moon. I had been lying there for a while just staring at the rough plaster ceiling, it’s texture seemed to resemble the surface of the moon. I lay there a minute more orbiting the lunar surface and then gently without waking her, I eased myself out from under Elsa and climbed over Amy. I went in the living room and got dressed. The house smelled warm and organic. The windows were fogged over and condensation was forming on them. The sun was not yet up but the sky was already glowing a soft pale blue color. I went in and kissed both of them. I slipped out and locked the door behind me +I smoked a cigarette walking towards Dean’s house, but a donut shop seduced me and I sat in the silent morning air outside eating a blueberry filled donut covered in powdered sugar and dripping filling. It stands out as a pregnant moment stopped a lot to luxuriate in the good fortune that seems to follow me around. I was living in a kaleidoscope of realities that swirled with all the vibrancy and color of my youth, but it was alive now, here, in this moment, fairly bursting out of my chest. I collapsed on the couch that doubled as my bed and fell into a deep coma like sleep. +I dreamed a radio broadcast of unknown origins pilling down the universes own information superhighway at a genetic tilt, coming across the galaxy without static pure unadulterated reception of signal and through it all the fragment of ash kept falling, fragments of history written on burnt paper and cast about in a hurricane of now. Fragments of falling ash. Fragments of ash falling. White washed ceilings hanging so ominous.... Hallucination of bubble-headed figures crawling like the Michelin Man across an indescribable mountain of tires. Motels Motels Motels Whiskey Bourbon. Tow truck non-ordinary state of reality precludes a state of reality that something is real. Point at the autistic manwomanchild Autistic man pointing at you laughing unable to fathom how your brain functions and quite self-righteously you cling to its definitions. Must delineate between abnormality and those of us who UNDERSTAND.... The Human Virus breeding like rats unconsciously conscious and aware of our disorganization. Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams of the Anarchist are breeding in the minds of the oilmen who don’t want to loose their stranglehold of reality. Fragments of Ash falling, the continual settling of dust weighing down humanity and the French Maid masturbates discreetly in the next room. You need her to keep the dust off your mortal coil spring. Rebirth mythology. Mythology of reality. We must distinguish between what will be defined as sane and what shall be referred to as insanity. Kevlar definitions constructed to make a better shampoo seem like a logical item on which to squander your paperbacked slavery bills. After all these years Tide still gets your socks whiter Its a wonder that they aren’t transparent by now...that your brain retarded in its development that evolution had not anticipated the advent of the opposable thumb the unopposable domination of the thumb leading to and insect superiority of mating rituals stolen from a textbook on damselflies darning needles sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy. Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash. Shit from the sky. Tax man came for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance. You understand. Nothing Personal Just doing our job. Same as the next guy. From Auzwich on down the line. Didn’t make the rules. Sorry. We perfected them. There are no innocents in a world of free will. You don’t have to survive at the expense of others. You could die with puncture wounds in your hands and others would create a new mythology strange irony would find another with holes in his hands unwilling to accept cockroach mentalities. You want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman but he lives on in quiet cafes centralsouthamerica not so free not all the communists have been shot yet Your mistook misunderstood missed the lesson in the situation that unfolded Dr. of dialectic excuses you want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman Hitler killed everybody's body only taking orders you understand just doing my job from Independence on down the line. It was a sad money grubbing hunter gather up his children and thank his gods they are his and he their god behold I have come to tell you that everything you know is wrong stop doing your job it is not yours see Hitler in your mind you want him dead but he's not he lives on buried under restraint in everyone's mind. Only taking orders you understand. Didn’t have a CHOICE. Got a family to feed. Radio crackle. Pop. Hiss. Silence. End transmission. + + + +I didn’t wake up until five in the evening. I was just sitting up and lighting a cigarette when Dean burst through the door laughing. +“Jesus, what happened to you,” Dean let his bag fall to the floor and stared at me with a questioning look. +“I don’t really know… I think I went over to Amy’s and fucked her and her roommate for a really long time, but I might have dreamed it. Dean walked over threw my bedding off the couch and sat down. Then he sniffed and then he leaned in and sniffed at my face. +“No my friend I think that whatever you think you remember most definitely happened.” He laughed and lit a cigarette. “Go take a shower man we’re going to the Knight to have a drink, I got some news for you and I want to hear all about your weekend….” In the shower I tried to snap the trance state I had awoken in but even the water failed to cut through. I felt like a was stoned, but I hadn’t smoked anything. +I was feeling muted, as if I did not exist at all, but was merely a spectral figure watching over the chaos and insanity of this tiny little rock spinning about a nearly equally tiny burning rock. I observed everything just as it was without subjecting it to my own opinions, beliefs and feeble desires. It followed me to the car and all the way to the Little Knight. In the parking lot I got out and saw two lithe girls stumbling drunkenly toward their car; something about them captured me and I stared at them intently. The one that seemed to be more sober looked over and smiled, “Hi, don’t worry I’m sober…” +“I’m not!” Gurgled her friend who hiccuped and laughed stumbling and lurching forward. They booth giggled insanely and tried to unlock there car. I went inside with Dean and we ducked into the restroom. I stood over the bathroom sink examining myself in the mirror splashing a little water on my face. +It came like lightning bolt that you never see you only hear the rippling crash of thunder; I was alive. It was that simple. There was no other thing that mattered at all. . I snapped out of it and floated back down to my body, my life and my animal desires. I sighed and Dean came out of the stall and scrutinized my reflection in the mirror +“Are you okay man? You’re not on anything are you?” +“No no, I feel fine now; come on I’ll tell you all about it.” +Bruno, our favorite bartender was working. Bruno had the most awe inspiring memory I have ever witnessed. He greeted you like Odysseus returning every time you walked through the door. He also had a remarkable power to ‘exaggerate’ as he called it (lie as the rest of us called it); he exaggerated everything, the very air that surrounded him. He looked more than anything, like Homer Simpson, but her claimed to be Italian, which was at least substantiated by his full name Anthony Luigi Bruno. The Little Knight was a hole in the wall, tucked between a dry cleaners and a driveway, but it had heart, it had an enormous carnivore heart that spun around like lions and roared with lights, alcohol soaked floors and cigarette smoke. Bruno brought out the atmosphere an Italian family reunion. Everyone always felt welcome and loved when Bruno was working, no matter how pathetic their lives might have been during the day they were all on the same level playing field when Bruno was around. He should have been a cult leader or spiritual adviser, but this is the twenty-first century and there are no spiritual advisers there are bartenders. +“Dean! Sil!” He fairly jumped over the bar. “How have you been?” +“Since last weekend?” Dean has the same arrogant self-mocking sense of humor that I do. “You know… ‘nother week, ‘nother check and we come here to spend it!” +“That’s why I love you guys; did I ever tell you that? I love you guys!” He grabbed us by the shoulders and shook us with all his Italian might. He leaned back over the bar and took off his shirt exposing his most telling homer Simpson trait —his enormous belly. “Watch this…” +The Knight had this pole in the middle of it, but the ceiling was too low to actually stand on the bar so Bruno jumped up and kind of crouched his back down so that his already enormous gut looked even bigger. “Hey ladies!” He hovered over two girls sitting at the bar and began to pole dance to the music from the jukebox. Catcalls from the locals drown out whatever the girls were trying to say and several patrons ran up to stuff money in Bruno’s pants. He hammed it up flipping his hair and shimmying his enormous Santa belly around the pole. His pants were falling down to plumber level and I knew we weren’t getting beer any time soon. Dean and I joined Betty in the corner booth by the door. Cached safely with my back to the wall I settled into watch the familiar show. +Bruno was now running up and down the bar flexing his muscles; he had stuffed enormous wrenches, screw drivers, and other tools of the plumbers’ trade into his belt loop and down his pants. He squatted in front of a forty-year-old businesswoman and shoved his three exposed inches of ass crack in her face and circle-swooshed it around like a Vegas showgirl. She roared with laughter and tucked a five spot into his crack. He took off down the bar to clean up on the drunken thirty-something’s that had never seen such “hilarious antics.” Bruno was a one of kind; he was the only person I know that could dance so badly, stick pretzels into his gums like fangs, pull his pants down like a plumber and make money while he was at it. +I deeply admired him for that. It wasn’t something you see everyday, but eventually the act got old (drunks have a short attention span) and Bruno came over to the table to see what we wanted. + “Gentlemen,” He screwed up his expression to a face of mock seriousness, “what flavor will you be having this evening?” He stood there waiting, stripped to the waste pants slung low halfway down his ass with two bread stick fangs hanging out of his mouth. +“Guinness,” came out of Dean and I in unison. An Irishman would have wept, but Bruno, being Italian only smiled and the bread sticks fell to the floor. He frowned and Dean and I burst out laughing. He went off to pour and I tried in vain to explain what had happened to me while Dean was gone. But there were no words, that was the overwhelming thing that pulled me around and around as I wrestled with it; there was of course the story the physical account you might say but there was no way to wrap up the emotional/mental account, the underlying thing that I was trying to reach out and give to them remained mysteriously buried under the heavy noise of concrete silence. Somewhere near the edges of what is here and now and what is always and forever there comes in the grips of eternity a feeling so exhilarating and blinding that it transcends all language all communication. +Dean listened intently but I felt sure that I was inarticulate and confused when inside I was bursting with clarity. In my reverie I experience extreme chest pains; I felt as if life itself whatever it might be god… dog… you name it… was pouring right through me like Shaterack Meshak and abandego. I stood in the fire and was untouched and yet there was nothing that could be said to describe it. Just when I felt on the brink of madness and isolation Dean interrupted me with a story of William Burroughs, the last ‘old man of the mountain.’ +“That sounds a lot like The Western Lands… the sort of middle ground between life and death to which mystics and all character of that sort are always propelled…. The western lands where everything is unwritten, unwritable even, quite a treacherous place I would imagine. You ought to read the Tibetan Book of Dead, see if that rings your bell a bit….” +“Ya? See the supremely frustrating thing is that I feel like I saw a cure for all that ails us… all the worlds problems were solved from where I was… beyond good and evil, but not philosophically; vitally… damn I’m at a loss for words again…. But I will tell you one thing; I can’t stay here anymore… I appreciate you putting me up and all, but I have to keep moving… what is going through my head is taking over my life, it is the supreme and indeed the only important thing that has ever happened to me. It keeps saying move move move; sitting still is going to drive me mad. Even writing it out on paper, writing a book is futile… this is something entirely separate… this is art that has to be lived to understand it….” And once again I grew drunk without liquor, swirling the clouds of inception circling with Hesse’s eagle and the swooping brown pelicans of literature, pouches heavy with something new, something fresh which must be shat from on high to land with a dull splatter that covers the earth with a new freshness a new fecundity from which new life could spring, new wells could be draw, new myths created, new words invented new dreams, new ideas, new art forms that would blend seamlessly with old, taking there place in the long infinite line of creation +Dean smiled at me. “Its funny you should mention that…” +But I ignored him, I had worked myself into a frenzy and I got drunk on the words, on the bear, on the ideas. “What we ought to do my friend is to light out for the territories. We ought to do those things that living people —I mean people that are alive and eager to go about the business of living — do. They sure as fuck don’t hang around here I spent all weekend watching the scurrying rats running from hole to hole and I just about can’t take it anymore. I am bursting I am alive, I am that one little thistle that turns green after the rain on an abandoned lot. And you, look at you, what the fuck is wrong with you? You know better than to go showing up at some job every day —like it matters in the grand scheme of things! We are monkeys and yet all we do is mimic the rat on the wheel or the ceaseless activity of the worker ant… to serve a queen? What we ought to be; what we ought to be concerned with is something real… something of value that extends beyond this barren womb… this business capital of humanity. Even the landscape is mostly boring and drab —except by the coast. What is the rest of this place? Mediocre rolling hills that are brown from lack of rain three quarters of the year…. The whole place is so sterile there aren’t even any animals running amuck…. This place —these people—all of them— are beyond hope and even if they weren’t you and I are hardly the savior type…. we look out for ourselves and those that come to us… we don’t go looking for help it comes to us don’t you see? Its coming to us it’s drawing us away from here away away away! We will be embarking on a radical change and no matter if we should end up destitute selling children in the back alleys of Rumanian because no matter what might possible happen it will at least not be this. This is nothing this is a static oasis on the edge of desolate gasoline holocaust.” +I was exuding enough enthusiasm to power a small city and the Guinness was the only thing keeping me in line. I watched it spread around the table first to Dean who began to launch a thousand thoughts much as I had done silently in the pool. We talked of Europe and South America with such enthusiasm that listeners would have been shocked to hear that neither of us had ever been there. We walked the dusty camel choked streets of Morocco and took the Marrakech express across the desert and then ported ourselves to the coast and caught freighters back to Brazil to sail up the Amazon. We had splendid adventures and our table was bursting with a bubbling exuberance that lit up the bar like a rocket ship. Soon the place was packed and we were hemmed in to the table by a wall of drinkers willing to stand for the privilege. I sat up on the back of the booth and had a look around. Dean used the break in conversation to leap up on the table and yell for more beer. As heads turned to see the face of the roaring noise that took the bartender away from their own precious little drinks Dean found himself with an audience. +“Come on Bruno! You know tomorrow is meaningless to now! We’re here, right now and we have to live here right fucking now! I’m not going to work tomorrow because it’s never going to be tomorrow and I don’t want the things I have to pay for today. Every moment of everyday is only one thing —now. What the fuck are you people looking at? If I could be anywhere doing anything why would I be here? Do you realize the odds stacked against me? Against you? The sheer probability of any of this ever occurring, let alone occurring like this, in this exact fashion, at this exact time, in this exact bar? But here we are… what can you say beyond that? You’re going to pass out tonight and happily assume in the seething cesspool of your unconscious that you will wake up again tomorrow, but the odds are equally against you…” +At this point in his ranting Dean wandered off into Quantum physics, Astrology and Chaos math. Most of the drunks were lost before that and the ones that weren’t raised their glasses and got lost rather quickly, but Dean had tapped into something and soon we had new friends. +Cristof, who turned out to be from Rumania, and Charles who could have been from anywhere outside the general atmosphere of earth, bought us round after round of expensive whiskey. Cristof said Dean’s speech was, as he put it, “the only intelligent thing I’ve ever heard an American say.” +Soon there were girls and the world took on a kaleidoscope quality. Time passed as a jerky black and white slideshow, moments were projected onto a screen and just as I was scrutinizing them they were gone replaced by another that seemed out of order. The world got jumbled rather quickly as if my proverbial house of cards was sort of collapsing rather harmlessly about me. I was kissing and pawing roughly at a girl from Arizona. She fairly dragged me with her hand on my collar into the women’s restroom where I threw her against the floral print walls, lifted her skirt and slipped it in roughly and drunkenly. She moaned heavy in my ear but I was beyond caring about her, she was merely a vessel through which I was vainly trying to propel myself into the full stream of life, the raging river…. I came hard seeing stars and then left it slide out, tore off the condom threw it in the toilet and ducked out the back door with lipstick still smeared on my face. +Dean drove home and it was in the car that he turned around said, “by the way, I forgot to mention this back at the bar… we kept getting sidetracked… hey did you fuck that girl back there?” +“Yes,” I slurred, “but what ere you going to tell me?” +“Oh, I’m moving to Vegas day after tomorrow… you want to come? We can stay with my mom for a while, 'til something cheap comes up….” +I was too drunk to fully comprehend what he had said. All I heard was Vegas and mom, I fell asleep convinced that we were going to Vegas to visit there mom sometimes soon. + +The next day I woke up and Dean was packing up his room. He had the entire thing down to a box of books, a suitcase of clothes and trash bag of miscellania. +“So what’s the story again? We’re moving to Vegas I take it?” +“Ya,” Dean set his things by the door and lit a cigarette. “You still up for it?” +“The question is more ‘is your mom up for me?’” +“You know Rachel; she loves rounding up the strays and setting them on the path to righteousness…” We laughed. And I figured what the hell. +“You already packed up? That couldn’t have taken more than five minutes what the hell’d you do if for at eleven in the morning on your day off?” +“I have less than twenty four hours to seduce Kim, finally give into Kala, and then fuck the shit out of Monique and finish it off with Corey because she doesn’t care if I’m fucked out… she’d fuck my lifeless corpse I think.” +“Yes she probably would.” I felt bad for Corey though because while she wasn’t in love with him she did care about him in that strange concerned abstract way that only women can care. It may not bother her that he fucked everything he could get his hands on, but I think it did bother her that to think that he thought of her more as a fuck than a friend. “They got any friends you can set me up with?” +“There is this one girl… Jen… friend of Monique's… she’s been wanting to get in with me…maybe Monique too… anyway she’d go for you. You can have her…she’s got great tits, but I can’t talk to her long enough to get her naked.” +“Give her a call…” +Dean went off to try and seduce Kim over lunch, but he called and told Monique that he and I were coming over and that Jen should join us all. With a few hours to myself I figured to go see a movie and get some breakfast. I wandered down to the coffeehouse where all the hipster art kids hang out. The place was a refurbished storage cellar with yellow-gray walls and a scattering of benches and tables. It was windowless and stale like most of the people it held captive. I tried to get a plant to grow down here a few years ago before but it didn't work; I forgot about heliotropism-nothing grows in darkness. A botany student who watched me try in vain to keep the poor ivy plant alive explained it to me in graphic detail; he was condescending like a scientists. Everything needs sunlight in one way or another. The kids that hung out in the cellar were bleached souls, burned by magic. Burned by money, by law, by a culture designed to seductively lull them into a sleep state of pacified stupidity where they could be exploited as a labor source of the robber barons of Washington. I don't think most of them were aware of that though which gave me comfort because knowledge is paralyzing and without it maybe a few of them would stumble blindly out of the cave and into the sunlight. + I got a cup and sat in the corner for while smoking a cigarette and watching a genetic reproduction of Ginsberg scrutinize the art on the walls. I wished I had on three-piece suit or a football jersey so we could have played beat generation dress-up, but I didn’t and he would never have seen the humor in it anyway. I contented myself to a cup of rich dark coffee and apiece oil saturated and extra gooey coffeecake. It was wonderful but I needed more. I approached the Ginsberg guy cold and laid it on him about selling my art to support myself hoping to his a sympathetic nerve that led to mommy and daddy’s money. He made we tell him all about what it was that I did and I thrust some tattered napkins under his nose and pulled them away before he could get too much into the meaning of the scribbles I talked circles around him once I realized that all it would take would be for him to feel inferior. Charity is always an inferiority complex —here you take this you need it more than I do… if I thought he had earned the money I might have felt bad, but i still would have taken it, and I did. Leaving with his five spot I went to get a sandwich at the donut shop on Newport Boulevard. It was an enormous sandwich coated in sweet vinegar and oil, dripping mayonnaise the constancy of slightly thinned-paint off the long strands of lettuce and delicately coated wafer-thin turkey breast that curled up and seemed to leap down my throat. I washed the whole operation down with a glass of ice water. When you're hungry the whole world is edible. And the minute I had the stomach taken care of I lapsed back into reverie trying to piece together why it was that I was going to Vegas. The main thing seemed to be that Dean was going. I thought I ought to pay a visit to the folks since they still thought I was married and just working in San Fran for a while. They were suitably alarmed when I laid it out honestly but I did with the firm conviction of one who knows he is right, but not why. For now I said I was winging it and nothing more. They gave me a hundred when left said to eat with it. They were always worried that I lived by not eating, but the reality was closer to my grandfather who was fond of saying after a meal so we eat… we eat again… we may not do much, but boy can we eat…. + Dean was pacing by the time I walked up the steps. "Come on Sil I’m trying to do you a favor here pass one you’re way and you have the gall to be late?” I told him I didn’t give a shit one way or the other, that he should have gone without me, but he wouldn’t hear of it, he was one some Herculean mission and had to have a guide for this little part of the test. He wasn’t just fucking these girls he was lining out some Greek sized life for a day. He had succeeded with both of the ones that morning; Kim had been to drunk for much but when he finally gave it Kala she was wildcat. We got to Monique’s house in time for dinner, but there was no talk of food; in fact there was really no talk at all. We walked in on them sitting watching television and then snap off went the TV Monique jumped up and grabbed Dean by the hand dragging him to the bedroom. The door slammed behind them and was left still standing in the entryway front door open behind me, staring at Jen. Jen was medium height with dark hair and huge tits. She smiled at me and I closed the door. After a few line of talk she reached calmly into my pants and pulled out my cock. She sucked and licked and bit at it until I was hard and then she stood up tore off her shirt and pants and sat on my lap. I mauled at her nipples for while squeezing her breasts in my hand. They were giant and weighty, things that demanded proper handling they sloshed in my hands. + She pulled my shirt over my head and then pushed me back and pulled off my pants. I was expecting her to crawl up on top of me, most women go straight to the top when there’s no emotion around, but Jen didn’t she climbed on the couch doggie style and said, “hurry and fuck me… I have to go soon.” + It was an odd way to put it. I felt like I was mounting a dead horse in bad western porno, it was a job at that point, a duty that I had been asked to serve. But of course once I had it in I forgot all about her and she forgot about me and the situation was no longer there. We were just fucking. We went at it like animals and suddenly I understood why she wanted it that way. I could feel the heat of her cunt but I couldn’t see her face, it was less like we were fucking than we were masturbating together. My hands were on her hips pumping her back and forth; I could feel the leaden texture of her skin. My hips moved like pistons, cold mechanical. My own body was strange foreign as if it were, a shell containing something much messier, more out of control; she rolled around on my cock so that she was tits up with her legs over my shoulders and I rammed her like that for a good while before she exhibited unusual hand gestures and undulations that I took to be an orgasm. And then the automaton turned off and my prick came alive again. Her tits were rolling in great ellipses as I pounded into her with abandon, I reached down and teased her clit with my finger until she came again and pulled out and shot a load on her chest. She lay there for a bit and I got up to clean myself off. When I came back she was gone which relieved me somewhat. I went outside and lit a cigarette. It was a warm night. One of the rare humid times when LA feels tropical, the kind of night when I enjoyed going down to the ocean and walking along the shore trying to see Hawaii. The glow of the sun had not yet disappeared entirely, but already the eastern sky was twinkling with stars. When I took a drag I could smell Jen on my fingers. I licked them to see what she tasted like. Electric. It mixed well with cigarette smoke. + + diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/gone book/LV iam.txt b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/LV iam.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8d32e15 --- /dev/null +++ b/veryold/very old writings/gone book/LV iam.txt @@ -0,0 +1,167 @@ +I didn’t wake up until we were past Barstow. I woke outside of LA, outside of everything, outside of myself. I awoke in a sinister little car on a ride through the wild forlorn California Desert; the only reason I woke up at all was the heat. It turned the pleasantness of my dream into a nightmare which I had to escape by waking up. I dreamed I was an emperor in a foreign land, a mystical Tibetan type of land where I sat in a palace of unrivalled spender and riches; I dreamed you were there, Orisis. Luxurious tapestries covered the walls and gold trimmed divans were arranged about the room so that you might receive visitors. I was trying to raise an army of thinkers to combat the problems of mankind; I had sent out messengers and courtesans to attract like-minded rulers to the palace. Word came back by means of an old telegraph machine, which sat on a cherry wood table in the corner. Next to it was an old high back throne such as one would find in Versailles, you sat in it searching, just like you Orisis, always scouring the world to put me back together. I wanted to wander about the palace and explore but every time I walked out of the room I would hear the telegraph machine and rush back to it, only to find that it was more negative response. I knew that you would never bother with the machine, if news was to be received it would be through me, you had given up entirely. Inexplicably, as it often happens in dreams, I found myself sailing in a glider over the tree dotted hills of northern Mexico. I was admiring the peaceful silence of gliding to and fro on thermals when I suddenly became aware of the unbearable heat of the cockpit, better drop down a bit I thought to myself, but as I eased the stick forward I lost control of the plane entirely and dropped like a rock toward the waiting rocky hills. In my descent I saw and felt what John Denver must have seen and felt when he plunged to his death off the coast of Santa Cruz. Within the dream I was musing over his actual death in an abstract way and then bang!, I hit the ground. I don’t know if I died, I couldn’t remember but I might as well have; waking up in the cramped confines of a glib Japanese car is a small relief from death itself. I sat sweating profusely with my forehead bumping gently against the windowpane, trying to reconstruct the details of my imaginary palace and quixotic dream quest. In reality as it is called I was going somewhere else, Las Vegas to be precise. +Air conditioning is no match for the desert phoebus, it only brings the nightmare into sharper focus, a palpable tease to remind you that somewhere it is not hot at all; even now as I sat there some Llama herdsman in Andes was warming his frostbitten toes by a roaring fire. Oh to be cold… The scorching sun made it too hot to go back to sleep. Dean was driving and Betty was still passed out in the back seat. It must have been around ten in the morning; I didn’t move to look at the clock on the dashboard, it didn’t really matter, one thing about travel —time has no meaning. There is only in the car and out of the car a sort of two-dimensional life. I’m not accustomed to functioning at the ungodly hours referred to by most as ‘morning’ and I wasn’t about to start now, here in the middle of nowhere. I hadn’t gone to bed until about six this same morning; I rested my eyes for a while longer and recounted the events in blackness. +There was a dim recollection of breakfast at Tiffany’s (or was it Denny’s?), pancakes and eggs with a side of bacon all tasteless and uneventful; a goodbye to some lingering friends, Carey, Dean and Betty’s father Mr. Dean; then conk! I was gone off in a Tibetan dream palace. I escaped the boredom of driving east out of LA, thank god. The drive out through the ‘inland empire’ as it’s called is a grand tour of hell (actually I would take the straight up inferno of hell served in a flaming glass before I would go of my own free will to the Inland empire). I missed the wrenching smell of the stockyards in Upland and the bucktoothed gas station attendants of Barstow, a crying shame to be sure. The stockyards especially amaze me; that the smell of a cow’s ass can somehow penetrated the near perfect Freudian-sterile seal of the modern automobile seems likely to remain, along with the Kennedy assassination and the pyramids, one of the true mysteries of the earth. +Just east of Barstow there is a sign that boldly states “Greensboro NC 1297 m;” I opened my eyes again in the shadow of that unpleasant knowledge, cracked my view of the world just in time to learn that the reconstructive dentistry capital of the world was a mere 1297 miles away. I wanted to let out a Homer Simpson “Woohoo!” but it was too hot for any unnecessary activity. I sat up, opened my eyes, stretched as best I could and wiped the drool off my cheek. I looked over and saw the pain on Dean’s face that only a drive through the California desert in the middle of August with a hangover can give you. God it was hot. And I was right it was not even eleven, which meant that the temperature was bound to climb at least another ten degrees before we got to Vegas. +Dean had volunteered to drive the whole way to Vegas (he always was charitable when he was drunk) and naturally Betty and I had thought that a lovely idea. He looked like he was in the throws of deep regret and cursing his own self-cast fortune, which for Dean is standard operating procedure. There isn’t a whole lot to look at out here in the desert, at least not a whole lot that you can see from the window of a Toyota Corolla. Of course that doesn’t mean there is nothing to see, its just that racing along in as enlarged soda can at ninety miles an hour limits your view of the world. The cramping stylings of a cheap Japanese car was hindering our view, or maybe not so much the car but the speed of it. We humans can move what! I mean real speed, airplanes, space rockets, trains; we can run like no other animal and with no personal effort whatsoever. Speed doesn’t allow for minutiae, even a mere gloss of the passing scenery is too much for the human eye at ninety miles an hour. The creosote and hohoba plants that dot its hills and serpentine sand dunes are the only relief the eye gets from the endless endless nothing. You don’t get details with speed, but its still the best way to travel —like comet we could crash into Vegas in a couple of hours, burn down the town and then go rocketing off again. +The car contained only the barest of essentials; Dean and I had thrown a few pants and shirts in a suitcase each and then I had a small courier bag with notepads, pens and a handful of books. A garment bag held two suits each because a stranger in a strange land ought to look his best we reasoned. Betty, being a woman, had the largest suitcase that occupied the majority of the trunk, but otherwise the interior of the car was uncluttered with the trappings of humanity. Music had been carefully selected for its road worth qualities, a healthy mix of raucous punk rock to keep us awake and soothing melodic pieces designed to lull the mind and drown the endless droning of the wheels. I insisted on bring Beethoven’s Ninth for nighttime drives. The upshot of our circumstances was the we traveled light, secretly though we kept it to ourselves, Dean and I mutually figured on having to lug most of it by foot at some point when the already suspect nature of the Toyota gave out entirely and finally surrendered its fate to the junkyard. We had all left behind an enormous pile of furnishings and creature comforts which for my part I hoped to never lay eyes on again, but our friends had assured us they would see that it all got into storage should any of us return someday and want it. + Happenstance carried me again I surrendered my own fate to that of the car, of the road, of the random complexities of life pure life with no entrapments, encumbrances, or dovetailed catches to hang me up. We have thrown ourselves to the wind to let the scattering process begin; the first day out and I was feeling as expansively free as the landscape, floating on the thermals of fortuitous caesura. Sheer chance drew me here and left me staring out the car window into nothingness, the pedigreed nothingness of freedom. The desert was a void from my window; it had the deceptive appearance of emptiness not unlike the silent inky surface of the ocean, which is not empty but teeming with life. The desert was once a sea floor, but the life wouldn't have it, the water rolled back to greener pastures. The desert is the void left by water and filled up with castoff bric-a-brac from the mountain regions. To the north glittery jewel peaks, the southern most tip of the White Mountains —snow. Its making my mouth water, I point it out to Dean which seems to snap him out of some trance state and he agreed to pull over so we can stand on top of his car and look at them through the binoculars. I imagined the cool streams, the whole painted backdrop from the set of Bambi coated in snow. Our enthusiasm lasted about thirty seconds and then we started to realize that in fact the air conditioning is helping and that without it we are forced to suck hot dry air like clamping your lips to an exhaust pipe. + Besides I knew the White Mountains didn’t look like a snow covered Bambi set; I’ve been there and they’re just as hot as the desert this time of year. I jumped down and we headed back out on the road. I lit a cigarette. Life was going bang! The epi-endo-genetic bang that finally turns on the radio, like when the old crystal quarts set gets cranked next to the digital signal, cold and clear you can taste it, metallic vibrations of noise it slam into your gut. Sock you like a plutonium fuzz blast. +The sun burned through the open window and the dry hot air sucked itself greedily down into my lungs so that the heat had the peculiar effect of feeling like it radiated out from within rather than coming from that detached burning globe that was nearing it’s apex. I felt like I might spontaneously combust just like those “rare” cases you hear about on That’s Incredible. I thought of saying I had heard —give a man a match and he can build a fire to warm himself through the night, but set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life. True what! +I stirred finally and Dean looked over at me. “How ya doin’?” he asked. +“Wonderful, except for the heat or course.” +“Ya that’s why I was willing to drive… so I didn’t have to sit in the sun…” he smiled mischievously. I knew there had to be some hidden insidiousness behind his offer… +“Ah, so you knew?” +He glanced at me with superiority, “come on now, I’m a professional.” +With the air conditioner on high and the fortuitous curve of the freeway I found myself becoming more comfortable. Heat radiates out from within. I found that if you keep that in mind you can cope with it, you just have to fan it out —blow the vents so to speak—burn it off at the right pace— with the right amount of water, cigarettes, ice-cold beer, and snack food. Eventually I came to find my mind relaxed and floating on the surface of a glassy pond. Gentle ripples between drags of the cigarette tuned my ears to the desert frequency. +Like the teeming depths of the ocean that once covered it there is an infinite web of natural and supernatural life out there. My father is a desert rat, so I am no stranger to the bristling spike infested country of California. When I was younger we used to make trips out here in the blistering heat and roaring silence to go hiking and camping; the sort of thing that most fathers didn’t do I found out later, but I had a good time on those trips. My father dragged me from one end of the desert to the other, up the 395 to Hisperia and down the 316 all the way across the Mexican border at Tecate. I learned a million tiny nuggets of knowledge to tidy my mind over through life’s boring stretches like riding about in a car. I can assure you that there is an unknown universe of life thriving out there in the sand and heat, a harsh unforgiving universe as the cliché would have it, but it is also a delicately beautiful latticework teeming with life. Complex and fragile ecosystems evolved over millennia of cooperation and mutually assured survival instincts are woven through the barren rock and sand washes. In the afternoons during a summer thunderstorm if you sit in the shade of a palo verde tree and watch the edges of a dry riverbed you can catch a glimpse of that universe. Lizards and snakes frolic and birds seem to rejoice at the smell of rain. (Lest you actually do this it is worth stating that you ought not to dally too long as that peaceful scene can be turned into a fifty mile an hour river of mud and rock that will jump out of nowhere and kill you before you have time to realize that you are going to die— I personally hope one day to die with such peace, but in case you aren’t ready don’t say I didn’t warn you). There are enormous anthills that look not unlike flying over Manhattan at midday. The desert works on a smaller scale, it is only for those with infinite patience, if you live in the desert you don’t want to have a lot to do. That’s why there are ghost towns from here clear up to the base of the Sierra Nevada, towns where people didn’t have anything to do. There was no reason per se to go to such towns and without reason they died. I went out to the famous Calico ghost town once; a collection of blue-gray wood shacks, collapsing roofs, broken out windows and ceaseless wind blowing dust in every crevice. But there were loads of people milling about in the summer heat, trying to keep the dust out of their teeth and see what a ghost town is. There are no ghosts in the traditional sense at least not any that I could see, but there were ghosts of ideas, of lives, and hopes and dreams. What must the inhabitants of thought living here in the wind blown back alley of nowhere? Was this entire town little more than a broken wagon wheel that changed a life? Or did someone plan this one out; did some one think this was a good idea? My friend Mike and I drank icy Coca-Cola in the shade and debated those and other questions. We watched the pasty bloated souls called Tourist Americanus and tried to decide what they would be isolated here instead of thriving in their air-conditioned Lysoled suburbs. +Dean’s stereo is just audible above the roar of our cracked windows and when I strain I can hear Morphine playing. She had black hair like ravens crawling down her neck… I quoted that line once as an example of the band’s genius and the man to whom I was speaking said ‘actually that’s basic literary imagery metaphor 101…’ I felt bad for him, but I didn’t reply. Its in the way it floats off the tongue, its in the way one simple image can carry you all the way to a seedy bar in Paris France, it’s the way it slides out of the lung and fits so smoothly in between the base and the drums. It can take you anywhere you want, but only if you want to go. If you want to hear cliches then I assure you, you will hear them everywhere you go. Have fun. Stay clear of me. +Take the subtlest of frequency modulations and dig until you find the pulsar of life; blasting straight through the chest and then stroking on soft cushions to sooth you down. In and out. Draws you from one world to the next, an electro- static charge, like a song played off an old Castagraf recorder. + You move the body electric in pulsation, with receptors that crawl — feeling warmth of the spine they head the back of the brain. The surge is ecstatic... drives me right on over into the next dimension -model -metaphor -you get the picture. You might have even hung it on your wall when you where younger, and hungrier —hunger drives the hierarchy and it’s there, even when your stomach is full... it hit raw exposed nerve endings with the high voltage throb of life that’s hard wired into our brains...in there like a virus you might say. Lust for what? It’s all gone from now. Ebb and flow, the surges come in waves. +I gotta run to make diving in smooth... feels in slow motion... you hang in the air for a timeless moment and then hit the water like a torpedo, the waves slip out from around the impact and form a circular blueprint... The pond turns in the throws of a tempest, frothing with uninterrupted motion. The animal body is an alternating current, suspended in perfect fluidity like the ecstatic dances of the trance-shamans carried slip-slow up into the magic of the beyond. Echoes abound like a caged sun gone supernova... atomizes and reforms as the cool wave hits the skin. Smooth blue skin. + I remember three —maybe four— days ago smoking filterless cigarettes listening to the voices trailing in from the mezzanine, a masterpiece composition of harmonized waves, sound —the trigger behind the motion. Dancing eyes so ravenous, spiral with giddiness, threw out the tired old man mind. Bring it back down... bring it back down cause I never quite got it the first time. +Lost in images, swirling words, sounds, smells miraculous warmth on the crawling embers of flesh.... The black on the starry night... Van Gogh and his goddamn ear always creeping in at the edges. Diggin' fast and furious: tunnelers. Roots and the little blooms—the moment—the purity—the wavelength transitions in simplicity—burned like hydrochloric acid onto the memory film. Scar tissue that languishes eternally. + + + + +We are staying with Rachel, here in Vegas, things are amuck amuck as the man said. First there is Rachel. Rachel is a cool-mom. In every collection of friends I have ever wandered into there is inevitably one whose mother is the cool-mom. Cool-moms are the ones that harbor the strays, know what clit piercing is and don’t mind the excesses of youth because they never forgot their own. Johnson through and through the cool-mom is and Rachel was the one in our circle. She was the one who didn’t mind wayward children crashing on the floor, junkies trying to kick locked in the bedroom and only god knew how many poor lost girls Dean had dragged home and put up in her house for a month or two, sometimes more. Through it all she was understanding and usually supportive of all human creatures. The cool-mom never judges or casts out someone because a simple disagreement or difference in beliefs. Rachel was every bit the part, she was a matronly woman heavy set and swaggering full of spice and fire spitting gusto, she could out drink Betty. Right now her life has taken a turn though, the cool-mom has had the bedrock foundation of the desert blown out from under her and for the first time in my life I feel old, old and weary the whole lot of us are slowly decaying in the heat, but the ambrosial smell of decay is good for us, like a hot brand on your ass, it might scar, but it’ll wake you up. +Then there is Rachel’s boyfriend Bob. Bob on the other hand is a redneck; the backwoods stripe ran through and through. Bob was the sort of alright guy that you realize isn’t alright after talking to him for twenty minutes. These types tended to hang around the Little Knight during the early hours of the evening where it seemed they were wrapping up a hard day of hard drinking. Mysteriously they always seemed to be loaded with cash. Most of the ones I had talked to were in some sort of construction related business and they were always trying to get “youngsters” like myself to give them or sell them or just get them pot. Bob had actually taken this cliché one step further and asked Dean and I to go up to Alaska, where he supposedly had a cabin, and grow Maui-wowi for him. Almost anybody else and I would have jumped at the chance, but the thought of getting into a small plane with that man at the controls made my blood turn to ice. I thought about it every time I see him. I see his false eyes glittering like pyrite in the alaskan mountains and I see our carcasses lying half eaten by the fire and Bob just sitting there smiling that absurd smile…. +True to the cliche Bob worked in construction (although he never seemed to actually work), drank hard and probably beat the crap out of Rachel —if not physically then emotionally. I pretended to watch television while carefully watching the two of them. From what I had seen of the man his mind consisted solely of illegible notes, beer stains and racist jokes. He possessed the outdated practical knowledge of one that works with his hands and knows how to downshift the mind into neutral in order to get things accomplished. There is nothing wrong with that per se but Bob seemed to have left his mind in neutral a little too long, maybe flooded the engine or something; maybe he was just dumber than a bag of rocks right out of the womb. There was something intangible in the air about him and all the others I have met like him, something sinister and vague in its intent; he is a bad man my grandmother would have said and I have had my fill of bad men for this lifetime. I avoid him like the plague. +Lately I have been spending all my time in the Double Down with Dean. Day’s pass like strolls through airpot loungues, arival and departure times listed in gambling winnings and losses, interims of waiting, waiting for the cards to come around waiting for a friendly drunk to throw a chip our way, waiting for the call girls to give in to the only thing money can’t buy… tenderness. typically we roll out of bed as the sun is setting and duck out before Bob comes home from work or the bar or wherever he whiles his time away. The Double Down is all the way on the other side of town so we don’t get there until eight o’clock. The sun has just set when we walked through the door tonight. We weave through the human menagerie and get drinks at the bar. In the back is a separate room a quieter one where you can have drinks with a date or a whore and talk before heading down the street to the hotel that rent by the hour where you can knock back for a few rounds and still some back for a nightcap because its Las Vegas and you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want and know one seems to care. This is the apex of modern ideals, Las Vegas. It’s the glitter capital of the world, the sky, the buildings, the streets all glitter, refracting light through the hollow core. +Las Vegas, is what happened when the fleshy ooze of humanity confronted the barbed souls of the barrel cactus, the spiny leaves of the Palo Verde tree, and all the otherworldly creatures of the desert. The first step in renovating what must have appeared as hell to early settlers was air-conditioned. Before air conditioning, not even the thrill of gambling would have made people come to Las Vegas in the summertime. But cool it down a bit and you can decorate hell up nice; some casinos, some brothels, curtains in the windows, now things are looking up. +Th puritains preachers of the four headed beast abstinance are the only humans that don’t like Vegas. In order to dislike Vegas you have to really dislike yourself. Any rudimentary logic, at least male logic, would dictate that a state where prostitution and gambling are legal and free alcohol is constantly being served is closer to heaven than hell. But these are unfortunate and trying times that we live in, they have wrought the heavy hand of the moral majority and its cronies all the way across the nation to squelch any fun you thought you might be able to have. The contradiction of the matter is ridiculous, but the uptight religious right seem to miss the irony entirely. Indeed I think that the American west is humanities final hope for salvation from the hideous forces of repression and the sad truth of the matter is that we are losing. It’s later in the game than you think —possibly we already lost. Our country’s history reads like cartoon strip of a small innocent child running from an overbearing stepmother; first it was England then New England; the poor child is tired and sat down to rest here in Las Vegas. Las Vegas used to be the grand ball of the country, but then the overbearing bitch of ‘prurient interests” showed up. The old casinos are being torn down and whorehouses are driven out of business every passing day and the mob has been beaten back to the landfills and over safer money laundering operations. Now instead of quasi-burlesque shows there are silly men in tights parading wholesomely around with white tigers amid a pyrotechnics background of high wire acts. Who the fuck wants to see tigers? We came to buy some whores and drink until we can’t see straight. To live more or less the way god intended —happy. +This evening I am sitting on a bench in the mezzanenie of the Double Down which is a casino/bar/night club/breeding ground for nefariousness; I am waiting for Dean who is chatting up a beautiful girl at the back of the bar who may or may not be a whore. It is Dean’s quest to find out and if the answer be yes then how much? In the meantime I am watching the cheapskate old ladies with blue hair clutch at their plastic cups slowly emptying them of quarters, which they drop mechanically into the slots. What goes through you mind when you do that all day long? Do you still have a mind, is anything happening in there? Perhaps this was there form of meditation, different but maybe the same idea as driving. They assume a purely mechanical nature in order to let their minds wander about, to frolic through lost memories of youth and life when it still meant something. More likely there was nothing going on upstairs I decide. It is nearly nine now and the sun is but a slice of irridecent orange peel slinking behind the glittery casinos of the strip skyline, but the heat is still hanging on even in the shadows. Off in the distance I can just see the tips of the high rise casinos where the rich gamble in private rooms waited on by topless cocktail girls and through the walls they listen to the thriving sounds of tourists dropping coins and laying down bills to line the velvet pockets which hold their Cuban cigars. The wheels are turning twenty four hours a day seven days a week for eternity. The velvet gets nicer every year and the girls prettier and the tourists dumber and fatter always wanting more! New! Bigger! By god!, screams the frustrated real estate Tycoon in horror. What the hell is going on here?! He stands up from the table in alarm, zombie eyes are peering vacantly through one way windows, what do they want? Well sir, says the nervous pimple employee who was sent in with a message, they want more... He speaks in a whisper unsure of whether to be more afraid of the Boss or the Mob. We gave them a pirate ship, recreated the pyramids, and the canals of Venice, what more do you people want from us?! I just can’t take it anymore, first it was the galls stones then kidney stones, two bi-pass surgeries (the second one a triple!) are you trying to kill me?! And off in the distance the throngs gather about and begin to chant as if spellbound by the ancient techniques trance revivals: We want more! We want new! The volume increases as the numbers grow from all over the world masses gather beneath the alter and chant…We want shiny! We want clean! The very enslaved that the bosses has so sneered at and exploited were now subtly fighting back with incessant dreams, the perfect slave became the uncontrollable master…We want to be fitter! We want to be happier! The Boss scratches his head and thinks for while, eyeing the faces in the mirror staring at him though they can not see him… alright kid, here’s what were going to do, you go out and tell them that I am currently drawing up plans to build a half size replica of the Eiffel tower, the hotel next to it is going to be immense, the restaurant will be in the middle with a clear view up ninety stories to sky. Tell them that I have plans for a tower to extend up five stories and I plan to fill it with wine bottles with will be delivered to their tables by a girl on a mechanical trapeze swing that can be raise and lowered as need to fetch their wine. Tell them the expensive stuff is going to be at the top, those cheap bastards’ll be order screw top crap that the waiters can get, but as long as somebody buys the good stuff they all get to see the show. The Boss is positively beaming now, inspiration has hit he is on to something. He shoos the kid outside and through the waitress’s out after him. He locks the door and starts sketching…. +Bordem. I wander over seeing that Dean is seated now and obviously not headed anywhere for a while; I join them in booth. Dean introduces me to Chloe who just as I had feared is gorgeous and a whore, I can see it in her eyes. The way she watches Dean while he talks, she is thinking that yes he will pay, but even if he didn’t she would enjoy it just the same, he has a tenderness in the dies of eyes, little flickers that light the whore imagination. She’s right, but its only half the story —her half. The room has the stale smell of too many smokers and not enough air filters built up over decades of excess and dapravity. I imagine the are walls a sickly yellow color coterized with smoke and splattered with sloshed beer, but its too dark to tell for sure. The is a sensual symphony gurgling and lurching through each minute with the ceaseless effort of the little engine that could. Cartoon character faces fill up chairs and resemble like the creatures that pop out of the walls at the Tiki room in Disneyland. Repulsive faces that seemed devoid of all humanity —zombies with coins. The frail frame of an elderly woman at a slot machine never so much as murmured as she dropped quarters in the machine; her arm moved from the handle to her plastic bucket full of change as if it were part of the machine rather than a warm body. Double Down became a swirl of lights, sex and drugs, the human effort to fulfill needs. + + +I watched with fascinated detachment as Chloe sucked on Dean's cock like something in a B movie. She looked like she was pretty good and I said as much to Dean. I think he found it all little too weird to have someone watching him while he got a blowjob and he made no response, which might, I guess, be the ultimate testament to quality. She however seemed turned on by the idea of a spectator and she kept looking over at me with Dean's cock halfway down her throat. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +Chapter four falling in with the hippies and the trip across the mountains into colorado Character sketch of natasha and Zak plus Clay. + +Chapter five in neworleans using walks through the sity to tell the story of coming across the planes and lay the foundations of Dean and amanda thus giving th impetus for us to go to DC and then draw out Ashley who leads me to new york… we meet in a coffeeshop in DC where she is visiting Bill and then we go to bed and disappear to new york here through in the grand musings of life and lead up unit Dean shows up and we go to canada which allows for the critique of america to come to head and then ends with me back in new orleans and then to athens GA where the book clothes out into nothingness that is not an ending just as there is no beginning. + + + +Transcribed from tapes: the terminal disease clerk took orders by the turnstile, finding the story in the story and logging in the disease workers all night long. At five in the morning he got off and headed to a tavern as the sun was coming up. Direct confrontation with the terminal virus word is a bit confusing to those who are not properly prepared. poor fuckers never had a chance; the technical sergeant takes off his helmet and slams it on the table the near moronic mumbling of discontent. Waging war is semantically impossible without overtones of homosexuality. Heavy handed, the second wave fell in line with the technical sergeant at the lead. The thing you have to watch out for are the warblers —the distractions coming in at the sides, sound is their most effective weapon, primordial hangover he called it drunkenly raising a glass. And some of you may think this suspect, but take my advice sound's where it all started. In the beginning was the word and the word spoke. The sergeant stoops and cups his hands to light a cigarette. Then there is sex or not enough of it, both is equally dangerous —biology is not something to scoff at. sexuality is the best cover an agent can ever use. Rockets come searing in overhead ripping flesh and scoffing at the notion of eternity, out here you don't have time to talk, the thoughts are things, they are no longer words...keep your radios tuned boys its getting ugly. Another rocket sears in severed limbs fly out the explosion and olive drab body parts litter the scene. + Watch out for the bloody words, sharp words that hang in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker and if every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience? Me no way I'm outta here. Situation getting sticky, humid like vaporous blood hanging on in the air. Still acrid smell of urine and small children playing in a asphalt playground ringed on all sides by immense brick walls with basketball hoops hung half way up each of the sides. Realize that that which we are taught from childhood to distrust is in fact a pawn of something far more immense and much much more dangerous. The governments and nations of the world are incidental pawns of there own control systems and then beyond them there are even more and so on like looking two mirrors facing each other and going on to infinity. The monster of power is faceless there is no one person or group that controls everything they are all parts of a immense and multi-headed monster that is constantly biting itself and attacking it own heads until some day it will destroy itself. The end of time leaves space and word alone together + we're taking heavy fire! The sergeant calls for back up, the captain says love one another and cryptically hangs up the phone. The Spanish soldier selling chiclettes say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words. Wouldn't give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret. Gotta keep that in house, dis-credit all news agencies by routinely feeding them false information. News doesn’t happen events happen, and the department of television information broadcasting inc. a subdivision of indoctrination inc. decides what gets out and what remains forever sealed in baby pissshitguts. No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying. Same old stinking shit. No Good. No Bueno. + Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass? Lead me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors. Can’t close them all —we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in —even offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good. Can’t use those, too strong. No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean. + I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed. So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit. + The technician is retro actively of course —the papers said the man was mentally ill. ‘my cod!’ screamed a church lady in the front row, ‘satan has garbled the lords message, this isn’t what he meant for you to hear, no it was not all like that, there was to be understanding.’ she is parading her old cunt bones whining at the justices —tissue conducts signals, animals communicate through the use of visual, acoustic , chemical, tactile and electrical signals. Our laboratory is an abundant and well preserved feed back loop to understand and interpret Eusocial behavior. negative feedback inhibition to make you shiver Gringo. Make you shiver good. + Repetition unsuccessful. The radiologist was called in to examine the patient —blisters and burns indicate high probability of skin mutation, what would you say Dr. Waiben? Crested and on the nod? Diminutively, yes definitely. + Information potential exists —its an unsettling thought, dependency —and what happens when things start to think? How do you draw the lines then? + HOW THE PLAGUE BEGAN: + The wish to preserve -not worth saving what already is- in this scenario. The word, the loss of body situated at the origins of recorded sound -the temporal metaphysical and esthetic possibilities. + + Old man yelling. Get off of my laaawwwnnn! Sits down to oil his gun some more and then half turns in his chair to face the camera and says "i haven't left the porch since i got this CDRom PEOPLE version 3.0. Updated and expanded human potential at your fingertips. Its the only thing i need —got no use for the stinking gringos anymore— camera pans out and down revealing a yard strewn with shotgun-blasted bodies of young children. We see wife, face half torn off, crawling towards a pistol her head disappears entirely. Old man: "human potential, the new CDRom makes wives unnecessary." cue logo: on sale now at a sanatorium near you.... + I'm going to finally send you the orgy papers this time -been fixing to get 'round to that for some time" don't think he's the type to do it though but i been wrong once or twice a'fore. Don't want people showing up on my lawn though that's never good. get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn! Fucking Gringos! Go home in a thousand languages! + Experience as much of the human potential as possible, retain the container and forward the frog to the fun sun freaks of eastern Tibet —all is well with alkaline, and acidity is on the skids with death rooted out leaving only chicken shit shoveled scrapped and scraped like lemon lime Gatorade poured from a fuck buck of love. Stop talking to yourself —listen to the virus talk to you. All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch. Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like?????? + <<<<