A Dream: The Ambassadors

It took months for us to work out all the details – the visas, the airfare, the program stipulations, the itinerary and all the other boring crap and this was just so we could PAY to fly to an impoverished country and volunteer. This wasn’t missionary work – we were just done with college and had nothing better to do. The program we chose had more to do with tourism than charity, but it didn’t matter much. Business is charity and charity is business.

            Kyle and I chose Mexico because, why not? It wasn’t far and it seemed like a logical choice. We were sent emails from what seemed like a responsible, reputable organization and everything fell into place.

            As soon as we stepped off the plane, I realized that Mexico was far different from the Latino country I had remembered. All the buildings were bombed out, nothing more than shells and skeletal structures. Few people walked the streets and the only traffic was from carriages led by half-dead ponies.

            Our guide, a short man named L____ met us near a crushed taxi stand and shook out hands with his sweaty palms. He wore an Acapulco shirt and a baseball cap, assuring us that we’d enjoy our time here.

            I looked to Kyle. He looked back at me and shrugged. Either we’d been ripped off or there was gonna be a lot more work than we realized. Didn’t matter because we couldn’t go back now.

            The tourism center we were staying at was merely a compound of warehouses with the walls blown out. The floors were filled with green, white and black garbage bags. Flies crowded the air and underneath was a carpet of maggots.

            “What happened to your country?” I asked our guide.

            He laughed. “This isn’t my country.” He had a weird accent that wasn’t Hispanic.

            “Well, OK, fine. What happened?”

            “You Americans.” The guide shook our hand and walked away.

            “Was that an insult or an answer?” Kyle asked.

            We set our luggage against a busted wall near some crates and started digging through the trash. I’m not sure what we were looking for, but we started to find a lot of old VHS tapes, cartridge video games, trading cards and pre-teen horror books.

            I became excited. “I remember this and this and this from when I was a kid! It’s like I’m digging through my past!” I shouted.

            Kyle shrugged, his arms full of his own childhood. We shared a lot of the same memories and I kind of felt weird that they were so mass-produced. Like anyone could have shared them. Like they weren’t unique.

            And then we noticed some homeless kids rifling through our luggage. We chased them off and cursed at them until we were out of breath. Then, in the distance, we watched an American plane dropping bombs onto the city.

------

            The next day, all the garbage was cleared out of the warehouse and thrown into the street, replaced with thousands of shelves of American brands of food.

            “We’re going to make this a booming tourism industry!” Our guide was ecstatic. “Built especially for people like you two. Built on your own garbage and the graves of a third world country.”

            I nodded and muttered, “I guess I preferred the garbage to this.”

Lucid Fluids vol. 1

I present, LUCID FLUIDS vol. 1, the first in a series of surrealistic, experimental flash fiction based on the fantastic and disturbing pillow visions of Mene Tekel. These 14 tales (including three poems) spelunk into the deep, incoherent abstractions of the mind -- memory, dreams and fear. Written with an admiration for Franz Kafka, Stanley Donwood, the cartoons of David Firth, with a little bit of Neil Gaiman and David Lynch for good measure, Lucid Fluids will fill you with a restlessness and dread that's all too familiar.

You can buy it HERE.

Ending With Dreams

Starting with dreams, well, that describes how I felt. I mean, the whole thing, the whole "go to sleep, hallucinate and wake up" thing isn't so Freudian for me. I always know what my dreams mean, not some symbolic, New Age bookstore crap either. I know what they mean. 

When I dream of being locked in prison, having to tunnel my way out with a spoon, having to duck down a corridor just before the guard, demonic in appearance, turns around and sees me, well, I'm just dreaming of ways to escape from society. I guess it's some teenage angst thing, some rebellion against The Man thing I should have outgrown, but fuck that noise, I never sold out and just cuz I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me. Some Woody Allen quote.

But when I dream of floating downriver, in out-of-control boats and deflated balloons, I can't steer and the current is just taking me away, well, that's just me swept up in all of my life and that's nothing new. Who isn't overwhelmed by everyday circumstances, by the pressure of routine and deadlines and just having to be honest with yourself when you jostle around in sleep, wake up and comb your hair back into place, like nothing ever happened.

And then there's all the fist fights I used to get into during my restless, midnight escapades. I'd always lose. I'd always take the first punch, then my retaliation was like my arms were rubber, like I was trying to kick underwater and nothing ever connected the way I wanted it to. I'd be stabbed and beaten or I'd run, sprint down dark alleys and under yellow street lights and I'd always lose. 

I guess that's why, when my fist connected with the bastard's face, some prick starting shit with me over nothing, I couldn't hear myself screaming obscenities, didn't know I was yelling, "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, man," till I noticed he was on the ground, his buddy trying to both help him up and keep him from attacking me again, trying to stop something that shouldn't have started, that's why I felt so good. It wasn't just the adrenaline electrifying my swollen eye, blazing through my veins, wasn't just my bruised fist that felt so fucking good. And I felt on fire. It was the realization that I had overcome a nightmare.

The Hive

Once you clear the fence, hit the ground running. If you're quiet, it will take about ten seconds for the dogs to notice you and give chase and it's only a 30 second sprint to the house. Think you can outrun a pack of dogs? The dogs, rottweilers and pit bulls mostly, are there to guard the estate from trespassers, assholes like you.
            The brick wall is ten feet high, so you jump from a tree, right into the barbed wire circling the top. The barbs claw up your arms and legs like a shredder to cheese, the whole spiral bending with your weight and when you land awkwardly on your bad ankle, it takes some flesh with it. Once you clear the fence, hit the ground limping, bleeding, terrified.
            Edging toward the house, you're quiet, like the breeze that teases the weed-saturated lawn, kicking up pollen from wild flowers. If you duck low enough under the grass, maybe the dogs won't see you, but it won't be long before they pick up your scent, the stench of your fresh blood.
            Barking. The sound of little paws racing invisible through the overgrowth. Your ankle's complaints are drowned out by one word: RUN.
            The beasts close behind, the ancient three-story mansion just within view, you notice all the windows, the doors, everything, boarded up, nailed shut, sealed like entrances to tombs. This is a dead end; there is nowhere to hide. Not far behind, you can already feel the spittle of the dogs behind you. Then, your foot catches in the anaconda coils of a garden hose and you trip, tumbling headfirst into the hatch trap door to the basement, which snaps in two. Down you pitch, making sure to hit every stair on the way down.
            Too dazed to move or even assess broken bones, the dogs snarl and growl at the top of the stair. Then they whimper and turn away.
            You pick yourself up, not sure what made the dogs leave. Not scared, are they? You can hear a slight humming sound, constant and steady like an air conditioner. Go up the stairs, turn the doorknob and pause. The hum is louder.             Suddenly, there's a strong burning sensation in your leg and you look down to see a single bee with its ass stuck in your calf. A swift swat and it's nothing but goo, mixing in with the blood.
            You grab the doorknob again, noticing two more bees fluttering near your head. Shoo them away and then pull the door open. You're in the kitchen, but it's dark, so you hit your keychain flashlight. The walls seem to be moving, swaying ever so slightly, like a bead curtain. The air is thick with flies or something. Then your eyes adjust and you realize the flies are actually more bees, lots more bees and the walls are thick with beehive. You wave your hand at bees getting too close, the stale air making it hard to breathe, and push through the swinging door into the living room.
            The den is no better, every wall coated in honeycomb like a bad mold. And then the truth dawns on you -- the entire mansion is one giant beehive. You’ve got to get out of here.
            Back up. Before you run out the door to face the dogs again, remind yourself why you're here.
            OK, so it began back with your father on his deathbed, but it was barely him anymore. The ex-military captain, amateur hiker and former jog freak was now as shriveled and emasculated as a castrated bull's ballsack. He was tangled in an assortment of cords, a steady pulse going through his heart rate monitor, his skin saggy like fried chicken flesh. Barely there, the indent in the mattress the only evidence he weighed anything, seeming more like emptiness.
            He asked quietly for death, asked you to ask the doctors to kick out whatever crutches he was standing on. But he was leaving you with his debts, the ruins of a mortgage company crushed in the latest economic scandal. Your frequent visits to the hospital were only to watch him suffer. You got some sick pleasure out of it.

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            You were there for his last moments when he finally gave in, when his breathing was mere gasps and he told you to remember the mansion on Cedar Grove, the one the bank snatched back, the one with the dogs roaming the grounds in case your father tried sneaking in to steal back any of his valuables. He said, in the Red Room, the one painted as sanguine as a Ferrari, under the floorboards he buried one of those priceless Islamic vases he used to collect. One of those is worth a couple million at least, enough to get you out all that impending debt.
            He told you to go to the house and you'd be fine, you’d be able to save yourself. Once you clear the fence, hit the ground running.
            When you asked him why he didn't sell the fucking vase in the first place to save everyone from all this trouble, he merely shrugged, half a grin on his face. "I didn't want to give it away." Then his eyes closed and he breathed in less and less and then finally stopped. He died with that stupid smile on his face.
            Now you're in this godforsaken mansion, worming through the corridors and high ceilings filled with millions upon millions of bees. You've heard the stories about how swarms take nest inside houses. They can grow comfortably in number in a way nature can't provide and given enough time, a hive could potentially take over the whole building. Or perhaps it's not just one hive, but several hundred, all coexisting. Either way, this house is alive with the numbing hum of countless flying, stinging insects.
            Standing in the living room, tracing your flashlight beam across the walls, marveling at the complexity of the place, the sheer numbers, the perfect tessellations of hexagon honeycombs covering everything in sight, you can feel dozens of little insects landing all over you, investigating the sweet smell of your oozing cuts. You tremble as bees tickle your neck, attempting to remain calm so as not to startle the things. You remember your mother was deathly allergic to these creatures and the venom in their stingers and that's how she passed -- the squatters built a makeshift kingdom in her bathroom and stung her repeatedly during the night. On some heavy-duty painkillers for whiplash from a near fatal car accident earlier in the week, she didn't wake up, she didn't feel a thing.
            You don't know if you're personally allergic to bees -- you've never been tested. You inspect the sting you got earlier, still smarting, but it looks fine. What do allergies look like anyway? But still you hate the bastard that did this to you.
            Some people say honey bees are disappearing and you could care less, but still, because of your mother, you know far too much about bees. You know that out of the 16,000 species of these insects, only eight produce honey. You know on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, the piercings from these bees ranks at a 2.0, just above a yellowjacket (which feels like a cigar being extinguished on your skin) and just below a red harvester ant (which feels like someone drilling into your ingrown toenail.) Bee stings, including the one on your leg, feels like someone flicked the cherry off a cigarette and let it smolder into your skin.
            The faster you get out of this hellhole, and what better term for this place, the better. When a bee stings, the barb gets stuck in the skin and the result is an eviscerated insect, it's tiny bee guts pulled out like a popper on the Fourth of July. You know that when honeybees sting, they release pheromones, a battle cry for other bees to come and join in the fray. Better hurry before they notice and begin some Kamikaze attack on you.
            As you climb the stairs, flashlight pointed down so you don't step on any honeycomb nurseries, you hear the sound of a tractor outside firing up. You hear men yelling orders and the steady pulse of some large machinery backing up. Checking your cell phone, the battery almost dead, you realize it's the 15th already, the day the bank threatened to tear down this mansion. Some zealous developer wants to buy the land and turn it into a themepark or a parking garage or a duplex complex or whatever, so as soon as your dad died, before his body was even cold, the mansion went up for auction. Like most other mansions in this housing market, it was sold cheap and quick from what you remember reading in the Sun and today, it's going to be torn down.
            At the top of the landing, you peak through a crack in the boards, getting your face up close and personal with the hive. Bees crawl on your face in circles, doing little bee dances, their antennae twitching back and forth like anxious metronomes. Outside, you can see the men with a gigantic crane and attached is a pear-shaped wrecking ball.
            Now you've really got to hurry. If you get caught, assuming the dogs don't come back and maul you, you'll be charged with trespassing, not to mention theft.
You pass into the first room on the landing. You can't remember which room is the Red one. It could be any of these, all of which are so caked in thriving hives you can't make out the color of the walls. The bees are living in everything in this room, which was probably a billiards room given the massive form in the center, a miniature city growing around the billiards and cues, hundreds of commuters flying out of the pockets.
            So you dig. You reach your hand into the hive wall and slowly pull back. The honeycomb bristles and crumbles like a weak plaster and bees swarm your hands so fast it looks like you dipped them into sunflower seeds. The wall is an eggshell white except for the dirt left behind. And then the stings come, hundreds upon hundreds, all over your hands.
            You shake them off frantically, but more just land and more sting. You hands become gloves of angry punctures.
            The next room is a bathroom and you thrust your bleeding, swollen fists into the dark, goopy tank of the toilet. Bees are evacuating the medicine cabinet, flying like some Great War-era fighter pilots, dog fighting, zeroing in on you.
            The air is thick with bees and sometimes you breath one in. At first you frantically try to spit them out, but that just results in stung and swollen lips, so now you crush them with your teeth before they have a chance to jab at your tongue. You soon have a paste of bees you're half drooling out your bulging mouth and the taste is like a waxy, furry glue.
            There's a crash downstairs and the whole house shakes. You look down over the banister and see a fog of bees angrily swarming around some giant light. Then you realize the light is coming from a gigantic hole in the living room. This time you see the wrecking ball crash through the wall, taking out a larger chunk, throwing honeycomb and dust everywhere and angering the bees even more. The house shudders and starts to lean, collapsing into the hole.

            You run into the next room, quickly tearing at the walls. They’re peach. You run back to the bathroom, dip your hands into the toilet and lather, rinse, repeat. The next room has beige walls. The stinging is so constant you’re getting numb to it, your hands, your neck, your face ballooning like elephantitis mixed with chicken pox.

            You’re on the third story. Another crash from downstairs and the wall next to you rips off, revealing the hot air outside. The light is blinding, the bees flying out like bats at sunset, vainly trying to save their home.

            In the last room, your fingertips so fat and numb you can barely pry, you peel back the honeycomb and find that the walls are blood red. The wall behind you disappears, the wrecking ball retreating, and the ceiling starts to sag, the floor warping like a Dali painting. The bed, nothing more than a bee metropolis, slides past you and tumbles out the gap into the world.  Bees are crawling through your hair like headlice, stinging you repeatedly. The floor splits in the middle, giving you the leverage you need to pry the boards back.

            Just like good old daddy promised, there’s a box there. With mushroom hands, you lift the lid and remove the vase. You cradle it for a while, marveling at it’s intricacy, the hours of horned passion pressed into every groove centuries ago. It’s creator anonymous but more precise than any artist alive today. There’s a kinship man has with craft of this magnitude – no wonder it’s so invaluable.

            Another wall collapses, leaving you naked to the open air. The bees, perhaps giving up on their sinking Titanic, varnish themselves on you like those coats of bees you see performance artists wear. You can feel your breathing swell up and you’re still staring at the vase when the foundation of the house gives way, the floor beneath you folds like a house of cards and you disappear.

The Joke

Everyone was talking about it like it was the greatest thing to hit the art world since, I dunno, acrylic paint or something. Every magazine, paper, blog reel, zine, video podcast and Twitter feed shamelessly linked to the same photograph, taken on an iPhone the night of the bombing. It was a burning building, limp corpses hung in the windows and viscera littered in the streets, the contrast so warped by the low-resolution that you could almost feel the heat and smell the burning flesh.

            The memorable part was a woman, her head greasy with blood and sulfur, her face frozen with a half-horrified shriek, half-hysterical giggle. There was some debate as if she was laughing or not, but no one could ask her. She was never seen again, like her existence was limited to the snapshot.

            Everyone called it the most iconic image of the 21^st century, after the World Trade Center collapse and Bush’s Mission Accomplished speech. Alongside every reproduction of the bombing was a similar story, starting with a room full of taxidermic animals and a man named Damien Ringle. But I probably know the story best, because Damien was my brother.

            Damien and I attended the same small university in Flagstaff, Arizona. He majored in Art, something our father called a “fart of a degree” and I focused on business, intending to inherit Dad’s mortgage company. Sometimes the university had a tiny show for students, encouraging the wannabe-Warhols to drag whatever hidden masterpieces they had stuffed in their dorm closets.

            Even at a young age, Damien stole the show. His sculptures were stolen taxidermic animals that were painted over to look like cartoon characters. Damien’s all-star cast featured Donald Duck, Felix the Cat and Scooby Doo and managed to get the whole exhibit protested by the student animal rights population. The student paper tried to defend the little art prodigy, but once a couple windows were smashed, the animals stolen again, the Art Department shut down the gallery for the semester.

            The paper quoted Damien as saying, “It couldn’t have gone better if I planned it.”

            From the beginning, this is exactly what little Damien wanted. It’s what he’s always wanted, controversy, conflict, chaos.

            Growing up, Damien was the middle child, between me and our sister. You know how on road trips siblings will poke at each other until a fight breaks out? Damien never outgrew that provocative mentality. And our Dad was barely in our lives enough to whip around and vaguely threaten the brat, “If you don’t cut that out, I’m going to turn this car around…”

            At a young age, Damien wanted to be a stand-up comic. He marveled at the way George Carlin and Lenny Bruce could say the most provocative, fucked up shit and get away with it and still leave their audiences in stitches. Damien soon abandoned those dreams when he realized he had incredible stage fright. He couldn’t divide himself from his audience.

            The general teenage delinquency, the feigned interest in graffiti, the drugs and the broken curfews, it was all just part of Damien’s act. When he decided to step up and become the next Hirst or Fairey, my father steamed with anger and disappointment, but tried not to let it show.

            Damien just saw art as another way to piss everyone off.

            It wasn’t hard for my brother to get funding for his next installation piece. The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art opened up a basement and allowed Mr. Ringle to fill ten rooms with different artifacts, each representing a different Plague of Egypt. Most people found the Plague of Blood amusing, albeit disturbing, but entering a room fluttering with locusts and lice was too much. The Plague of Frogs once again attracted the attention of radical animal right’s groups, who broke into the museum, staging a “liberation” and releasing the plagues – the frogs, the flies, the fleas and the crickets – onto the city of Los Angeles.

            The irony was not lost on the media, who praised my brother’s installation as the funniest art stunt since Phillippe Petit’s tightrope dance between the Twin Towers. The best thing some L.A. art critic said about the Plagues was, “Damien’s art is about suffering and he makes sure everyone suffers with him, intentional or not.”

            For at least one week that February, Damien Ringle was the number one-trended topic on three different social media websites, overshadowing the death of a hip hop star, a pregnant model/junkie and an earthquake in Thailand. The only quote the papers could wrangle from the guerrilla artist was “Hallelujah, baby.”

            More and more people were talking about art again. The general complaints of “I don’t get it” and “What’s the point?” were replaced with “Did you hear what he did at the Academy Awards? He dumped a bucket of pink paint on Jessica Alba and called her his masterpiece.”

            Everyone ditched those Kanye West glasses and started wearing Damien Ringle’s bulbous headlamps. All over the country, kids everywhere were getting thrown out of art class for trying to outdo one another with daring, violent art pranks. One kid was quoted in the Chicago Tribune saying, “You know why you don’t nail dead birds to a board and coat them in that polyvinyl chloride shit they put on Christmas trees? At first, it looks cool as fuck, but then little bubbles start to form and when they pop, they smell like, well, rotting birds. And oh yeah, the mandatory counseling appointments kind of suck, too.”

            If ol’ Dad had any feelings about this, he didn’t express them. Around the same time, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for stealing from his investors, just another victim of The Great Recession. I took over the company and although it was barely salvageable, I was still making a pretty penny. I guess that’s why I didn’t really mind when Damien approached me, asking for $5,000 in cash.

            “This is for your next installation?”

            “Uh huh.”

            “Why can’t you ask someone else, someone from a museum or something? You’ve seen the economy, why come here?”

            “The galleries are afraid to touch me now. Too many arsons, lawsuits, whatever.” Then my brother looked at me with those sad, sorry, “Please forgive me” eyes that he used when were kids, begging me not to tattle on him. And the trick always worked.

            Leaving the bank, handing my brother the cash, I said, “I want this back before Christmas.”

            “You’ll get it before Labor Day.” He smiled, like all that sibling rivalry bullshit didn’t matter any more. But I knew that wasn’t exactly true.

            Come Halloween, I still hadn’t heard from my brother. I didn’t really have to anymore, I just had to pick up a newspaper or look on Google trends. Unfortunately, it wasn’t good news.

            The Huffington Post ran a headline that read “Ringle’s new installation busts -- literally.” Every other magazine, newspaper, Livejournal entry and the mandatory Boing Boing feature echoed the same sentiment – Damien had blown it.

            Damien’s big failure was stringing 4,429 balloons, one for each casualty in the Iraq Invasion, in a warehouse, filling each one with a different, random liquid. He gave each guest a rusty steak knife and an empty champagne class, instructing everyone that whoever found the balloon filled with crude oil would get a free, signed Ringle print, valued at $1.4 million.

            Mostly on accident, the gallery soon became one giant knife fight. People were slipping like Bambi on the ice all over dish soap, goat’s milk, bleach, dolphin semen, Smirnoff Ice, no-pulp orange juice and liquefied butter, to name a few. But mostly everyone was slipping from all the blood from all the accidental and on purpose stabbings. Someone should have said “No smoking” because when the balloon filled with gasoline popped next to a guy with a cigarillo in hand – well, it wasn’t a pretty sight.

            Because the violence stood out the most from the show, that’s what all the papers, the magazines, the blogs decided to focus on, bent over with sardonic laughter. Videos of the event made their rounds on YouTube, complete with the idiotic comments and auto-tuned remixes. Some blog, something like SomeLikeItHot.com, started a rumor that Damien was addicted to heroin. People stopped wanting to work with him so much. It didn’t matter if it was true if enough people linked to it.

            I was almost furious when Damien approached me a second time, his hand extended for ten grand this time. But he always had this over-convincing way of getting anything out of anyone.

            “Cash, this time, again?” I asked.

            My brother nodded. “Don’t worry. The last show was a bust, but this next one will get you twice of what I’m asking, plus whatever I owe you.”

            Even strapped for cash myself, I gave him the money, more to throw it in Dad’s face than to help out a sibling. I guess that rebellious streak wasn’t isolated in my brother’s genes. I hadn’t visited the old man once in prison, he even spent Christmas without a visit, but I knew he’d heard about this latest disaster. Damien’s celebrity reached even into San Quentin.

            For his next act, aptly named Slaughterhouse Six Six Six, Damien bought an old slaughterhouse and built a playground inside. He didn’t remove any of the various decapitating, disemboweling machinery, but he did spread a thick layer of offal and guts all over the floor. The playground was filled with dead, decaying animals, broken glass and the ball pit was overflowing with dirty needles.

            The worst part was going into the freezer, where Damien had hung towels from the ceiling, all of them dripping blood. The guests were herded to the end, which they did like sheep, assuming this was another way to get inside the mind of my brother.

            I remember walking through the cold, the blood even colder, hitting my head like rain. It stained dozens of elegant, posh evening gowns of brainless trophy wives and ruined the Armani suits of their art collector husbands. I smirked the whole time, finding the stunt enormously funny, especially that anyone would willingly participate in this. Then, reaching the end, my grin faded.

            At the end of the freezer a handwritten note was taped, saying the blood was HIV positive. Love, Damien.

            Thirteen people sued, even though later it would be revealed no one had contracted AIDS. Damien was lucky this time, but the heat was really starting to rise.

            The backlash, exaggerated as it was, made it seem like Damien was Richard Nixon. The media came up with a typical title, “Slaughtergate” and almost overnight, everyone seemed to abandon their obsession with the “pop-art infidel,” as 7minuteitch.com called him.

            I didn’t hear from Damien after that, but I read about his next big thing as soon as Google Alerts updated. It was called The Joke and the buzz was like Britney Spears’ comeback – completely baseless media manufactured optimism. The papers, the magazines, the blogs, they all asked questions like “Will Damien be resurrected?” because they wanted to see him raised from the dead. But it seemed like it was just so they could nail him to the cross again.

            The actual theme of The Joke was kept secret, the gallery windows blocked out. For the artist’s reception and opening night, it was invitation-only. Everyone who was anyone in the art world was given a ticket and I wasn’t invited. Feeling bitter and brushed off, I decide to show up anyway.

            It’s a three-hour drive from my office and I’m worried I’ll be late, but I arrive just in time. From the parking lot, I can hear music and a long line of people entering the building. I stand behind a couple, trying to see inside. This art gallery slut, someone who dates guys with names like Florence from Barcelona because he’s “so deep”, she makes me want to puke. But she has a ticket sticking out her purse. Making sure no one sees, I take it and push my way to the front of the line. The bouncer barely glances at my invitation.

            My first impression is that what I heard outside wasn’t music. It’s the sounds of animals being slaughtered, rabbits screaming and lobsters squealing and pigs crying. The whole aura is giving me a terrible chill.

            The Joke, the actual exhibit, is relatively mild for Damien, just a bunch of silk-screen prints of various historical tragedies. A Warhol take on the World Trade Center Collapse, the Mai Lai massacre, the Hindenburg explosion, the Titanic sinking. In each corner, there are fake, homemade bombs, complete with wires and synchronized countdown timers. Painted on the wall in what looks like blood is the words “IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU.”

            I walk over to the refreshments table, trying to think of something to say to my brother. I nibble on a brownie and scoop myself some punch. The air feels cold and fresh and I notice that everyone going around from painting to painting is laughing their ass off.

            It almost feels like being in a sitcom, the laughter endless and inappropriate and canned. Everyone is giggling and guffawing till tears are trailing down their eyes.

            I see my brother, talking to a couple of scrawny models and I tap him on the shoulder. He’s the only one not smiling and his face goes from shock to anger. He hisses at me, so not to offend the girls, but they walk off anyway.

            “What the fuck are you doing here? I made sure, double sure, you weren’t fucking invited.”

            “Wow, what a way to welcome your flesh and blood. I don’t know, I think I have a right to be here.”

            “A right? What right?”

            “I paid for your last two shithead installations, your stupid little stunts, I wanted to see how bad this was going to be. By the way, how did you afford this?”

            “I maxed out four credit cards, but that doesn’t matter. You really don’t want to see how bad this one is going to get.”

            “Looks like I’m gonna.”

            My brother leans into me and whispers, “Why don’t we step out back for a bit?”

            A bouncer’s gorilla hands suddenly clamp on my shoulder and I’m led through the back and into an alley.

            “OK, so here’s how this works,” Damien says. “You’re going to go home. I don’t want to see you here again tonight. If you do, I’ll have Marvin here crush your face, got it?”

            “Fine. You want to threaten me, treat me like shit, fine. But if I don’t have the cash I loaned you by tomorrow, I’ll see you in court.”

            “Is this about money?” Damien reached into his pocket and gave me a business card. “Here. Call this number tomorrow and you’ll get your fucking money.”

            “This is a life insurance company.”

            “Exactly. And if you don’t get out of here, I’m going to kill you.”

            I start to feel a little bit sick and suddenly puke. “What the fuck was in that punch?”

            “Sunshine acid. There was some kush weed in the brownies, too. The nitrogen being pumped in the room wasn’t cheap either.”

            Bent down in the alley, hovering over my own puke, I say, “What?”

            And Damien leans down, with a smile on his face, saying, “The Joke. Do ya get it? Do ya get it?” And he laughs. “That’s not even the punch line.”

            I get up and start to walk off, when Damien calls after me, “Hey, bro, tell Dad I love him, OK?” Then he stops and says, “Actually, scratch that. Tell him to go fuck himself.”

            Walking back around to my car, the acid still starting to kick in, I fumble with the keys when an explosion comes from the art gallery. It’s so loud I nearly piss myself, I’m thrown to the ground and spend several minutes trying to figure out just what the fuck happened to me.

            If they’re big enough, explosions aren’t like the movies, you can’t just walk away, at least in my experience. I’m barely even realize I’ve been hit in the head with a flying brick, my ears have shut off and I slump against the tire, bleeding from my forehead, trying to rationalize the irrational. I just wanted to sit and not think.

            I mean, you read about post traumatic stress, but seeing a building full of people collapse on fire, killing dozens of folks that you saw breathing and laughing and alive just minutes before – well, it’s way harder to ignore. Something like that really doesn’t ever leave you.

            I knew my brother was inside when the timers hit zero. The biggest surprise was that the bombs in the gallery were real the whole time. Everyone was so caught up in the artist’s illusion, they didn’t question it.

            I guess Damien got his revenge, or finally made whatever statement he’d been trying to get across his whole life. In the end, I appreciated him throwing me out. Saving my life, sort of.

            In the following weeks, everyone was talking about my brother’s suicide bombing like it was the greatest thing to hit the art world since, I dunno, the Mona Lisa or something. No one missed those art gallery junkies Damien murdered. Far as most art world aficionados were concerned, he did the world a favor. Things were changing already – no one was interested in stunts anymore. People wanted sincerity, truth, documentary, whatever. Most people stopped paying attention after that and art became another “thing” for weirdos and freaks and misfits.

            Still, constantly watching and rewatching and hearing about the news of my brother’s death depressed the hell out of me, but later I found parts of the whole thing funny. Or at least, ironic. The Joke had become another example of the screen prints Damien had made.

            I was legally able to collect my brother’s life insurance, getting my loans paid back in full, but none of that really comforted me. My doctor called me saying my blood test results tested positive for HIV. Sure, they said they wanted me to come in for some follow-up tests, but I didn’t bother. All I could think of was Slaughterhouse Six Six Six.

            I went to San Quentin. My head in my hands, I sulked in the waiting room of the prison. A guard came in saying my father would see me now. I summoned the courage to stand and was led down the dim hallways and then I started to laugh.

Donations

a little treat from JULY 5 07

     Last night, I stopped by my work to get some cheap drinks. I walked in, and this giant, fat woman was dumped on the floor, like a deflated blimp. My coworker, Duc took me aside, chuckled and said, "She slipped and fell. She'll probably sue the company." The paramedics arrived soon after I left. The end.
     Today, I go into work and my manager explains the new ALS promotion. Basically, I ask every single customer who comes in if they would like to donate to the ALS, which is a group of people working to find a cure for Lou Gehrig's disease. It costs a dollar, and they put their name on a perfect, little circle, which I then tape to the wall. Somehow or another, this cures Lou Gehrig's disease.
     There are about sixty little circles already on the wall. My manager says, "Each and every one of those are from Arielle. She's been working hard. The district manager is gonna buy her a soda, and she could win the district contest, which I think is a trip to the Bahamas." I decided at that moment, I was going to sell more of these donations that Arielle. I don't know why, I don't care about the Bahamas, it's probably just instinctual selfish ambition.
     I noticed my friend Tyler Doty was on one of them already. That was a trip.
     I sold four in the first ten minutes. A woman came in, paid for one and let me put her name on it for her. I put my own name instead. This happened twice more, so I started putting some of my aliases. I sold about ten in the first hour. It was so much fun.
     The entire day became a game. A competition. I was smirking the whole time, holding my breath as people signed their names. If people said no, I would sigh, and say whatever. To kinda guilt them into it. It worked about three times.
     A cute girl came in. She had a slight burn scar on the left side of her face, so she had her red hair tucked to the side to hide the blemish. To me, it was beautiful. She wasn't emo, just soft and still not self indulged. She must have been fourteen. I asked her about ALS and she kindly said no. Her friend had some kind of case with him, and I asked about it. He said he found it by the side of the road.
     I said, "That's cool, I do stuff like that too."
     He didn't look like he believed me, so I said, "I found a Jack in the Box T-shirt in the street once. It says manager on it, and I took it home and washed it. One day, I'll wear it into Jack in the Box, slam my hand on the counter and demand free burgers."
     The cute girl laughed, and said to her friend as she left, "He's cool."
     Too bad she's too young.
     A lot of different types of people donated. A cute Muslim girl buying makeup named Hina. A drunk Mexican. Boring white people. A disorientated Jamaican. And also, two blimp women, similiar to the one who slipped the day before, they both write checks. I must examine their ID's but not for anything special. I learn that they were born in 1938. Their were grumpy and impatient with me but I was calm because they could inadvertently send me to the beach.
    
INSERT CRAZY RANT AGAINST THIS WHOLE TIRADE HERE.
    I was called away from the register to take out the trash. There were about five crates full of spoiled orange juice, and none of the girls wanted to throw them out, cause they smelt so awful. I could have just tossed them in the dumpster, but I decided to slam them, spraying fermented orange piss all over the dumpster. It dribbled into puddles of pulp and coagulated with the intense summer heat and the other trash. It was awesome, and the refuse has coated the dumpster ever since.
    I came back in to find my manager mopping up near the coolers. He had ordered too much ice and it didn't all fit in the freezer. So he stacked in the fridge. Of course, it melted and cost the store about 50 dollars worth of ice. My manager was a moron, and I took the dripping bags to the back.
    Later, these two women came running into the store, and tell my coworker Anna to call the police. "There is a belligerent man outside walking in traffic and disturbing people!" I had a line of ten people, so I just took note while Anna dialed and the women tried to calm themselves down.
     The first woman had a money card she wanted to buy. Basically, it's like a gift card for anything and she wanted five hundred dollars on it. She handed it to me in cash. Then the "belligerent man" walked inside the store. He was old and dirty, tall, bald, and red faced. Obviously homeless, obviously stark raving mad.
     He stood right in front of everyone and yelled, "Would anyone like to donate money to the pens and pencils and paper?"
     Everyone was freaked out, scared stiff, deer in headlights.
     "Anyone? If you don't do it, we're all gonna die."
     I smiled. My heart was throttling like I was scared, but I didn't feel it. The woman with the five hundred dollars asked me to "quick, hide it." She was totally afraid. I didn't. I continued her transaction, and told the man, "I can let you borrow my notebook if you want."
     He said, "Nevermind. Satan told me to draw the smiley faces or he was going to fight you. But never mind. I'm just losing my mind." And he walked out.
     Everyone tensed up even more. The woman with the 500 dollars started to shout at me, to rush me. "My kid is in the car, hurry up!" She was so afraid. I just laughed, finished her transaction and watched her run out. Anna hung up the phone, said, "They're coming." The women who reported this guy walked outside and rushed back in. "He's back in the road again."
     I don't understand what was wrong with everyone today. This man comes in needing help, and the whole store just freaks out in fear and cowardice. I mean, he was a poor hurting guy, and was no threat to anyone, yet. . .
     Well, the cops showed up and arrested him.
     Jeez, anything that scares someone should be arrested.
     Anyway, at the end of the competition, I sold about 90 little circles. Arielle got way more than I, but she didn't win either. I guess that's what really matters.

high there captain (fire is the divider)

burning! burn burn burn!'
fire is the divider
between the absurd!

Jumping jump jump jump

Like elephantiasis, I expand with balloon accuracy. I'm a cancer, forming in the skin of society.
My anarchist skin is leathered with every human sin.
We can find a solution to politics by admitting there is none.
Admitting that the sickness of humanity is a cavity in the soul.
If we look in a mirror, we can remove the dirt. Only then flowers shall bloom from our chest.

I peel the edges of my fingers with unsympathetic rage.
My teeth are ripe, yellow and spotted. The rotted food falls out.
My hamster wheel, my repetitiousness, is devouring me.
I should be growing and infecting others with the doctrine of chaos and love.
My own hero, breaking down barriers of filth.



written in may or something.