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.