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.

Lavender

Mar. 5th

At the same time, something changed in both of us.

She glided on one side of the Paseo Del Río, I stood shoegazing on the other, the turbulent green water between us. It rained like an angel's tantrum, heavy and cold, but not bleak, not melancholy.
Her hair flew back, parachuting in the gale and I could almost feel it stretching across the creek and stabbing into my senses. I could feel the perfume, lavender in scent, invading my olfactory, breaking down barricades and drawing my autonomy to its knees.
I was enslaved to her, the change between us occurring in different locations internally. My insides churned inside-out, mushed into one another. I had become a septic tank, withholding my own sludge. She glowed with intensity, her face reflecting the few rain-flecked dabs of sunlight like a golden idol.
The more my heart beat excitedly, the more it sunk into it's own cavity, shrinking in anguish. The more my eyes grew wide, the more they shrunk with hypothermic limpness.
Not once did her eyes turn to notice me.

Time is a flour mill, forever turning in the wind, crushing memories and history together. The more the gears twist, the more the result is unfamiliar, a strange flower growing until it overtakes entire gardens. What was once there is never replaced, never repeated, not once.

So that was then, and it doesn't matter. This is now and it still doesn't matter. The only experience worth noting is how my wristwatch continues to fade into the anonymous present. It ticks one way first, then flings back into the present, like an oar consistently propelling our craft forward.

She gave me one dinner. I sat back, barely attempting to act casual. This, after all, was just a business date at a seedy place off in some distant nowhere corner. She sat stiff and appeared ordinary, none of that floaty bullshit. No makeup, casual dress, her hands laid out face down, innocently on the table.
She noticed me staring into her crusted, chewed up fingernails. I followed them up to her withered, chipped knuckles, past criss-crossed scars dug across the wrists, to her chest, spotted with sunbleached freckles and adorned with a plastic necklace. Her feet, chipped and tattered, could follow the same pattern. Not once did I glance down.

The more my heart beat excitedly, the more it sunk into it's own cavity, shrinking in anguish. The more my eyes grew wide, the more they shrunk with hypothermic limpness.

It all came to this, a brief cup of coffee, yogurt sprinkled with granola and a hasty goodbye.

Walking.

FEB. 26 2010

When I was eight and she was six, my sister and I escaped from an after school program one day. We walked home about three miles, in the 110* heat of June, stopping outside of Baskin' Robbins. I drank from the water fountain inside and I will always remember how the water was so cold it would hurt my teeth. I liked that feeling alot, especially after eating a cone of ice cream. A brain freeze was a sweet, beautiful thing.
But we had no money for ice cream, so we were asked to leave.
Outside, a woman in a car asked us if we wanted a ride.
"Look, I know you aren't supposed to ask for a ride from strangers. But you're more likely to get hurt from someone else than me."
The woman had a daughter. And she had a point. We had another two miles to go and it wasn't going to be easy. So we hopped in the back.
I remember being kind of terrified, thinking of elaborate ways to protect myself, but it was mostly just if, if, if.
If I had a knife.
If I had a gun.
If I had a chance.
The woman dropped us off without incident. I stole a dime from her backseat, went inside and we watched Veggie Tales.
Hours of cartoon vegetables later, my dad burst into the room, shouting, "There you are! We've been looking everywhere!"
My sister immediately broke down crying, thinking we were in trouble. We didn't even know we were missed.

And then I stupidly pushed submit.

Dear New Yorker Magazine,

I'm going straight for the throat.
I have no experience in creative writing publication. Not a jot has seen professional ink. I oughta start somewhere. After all, this is a dream. A pathetic, clichéd, wonderful, innocent dream. So, I'll aim for the eyes, even if I'm doing this all wrong.
I'm being cocky. I don't mean to be, because pissing you off isn't my intention. My intention is to win, but how can I even hope?
I at least somewhat hope for a generic, soulless rejection letter. Better than being ignored, like when I was in third grade and I kept passing notes to the cute girl even when she rolled her eyes.
I'd learn my lesson. Don't be self-important next time, idiot! I'd learn something, too. All I know right now is there is a disproportionate amount of pink slips versus acceptance slips.
So fire away. I'm young, so I have nothing to lose. Maybe I'll keep dreaming. Lose a little cynicism. Does it help if I don't consider myself a poet?
Oh, speaking of which, I included a little poem from my heart and soul blah blah blah. . .

Have a nice day.

Mene Tekel

The Sewer (non-fiktion)

The Sewer

Our feet sucking through the mud, we stomped through the swampy muck, this raw sewage drained from all the nearby farms, a trench and a tunnel, a big pipe, going through it and the dirt road going over it.
We were hunting frogs, me, my brother Junior and the neighbor kid, Mike. Mike had a small, lime fishnet for extracting goldfish. When we spotted the bulbous yellow eyes floating out of the syrupy grime, we called Mike and he scooped up our writhing, squirming prize.
The further down the sewer we went, the darker the drool became. Oily swirls and floating chunks of I-dare-not-think-what twisted in the ripples we caused. You had to duck your head or risk scraping your scalp against spools of cobwebs. Looking down at your shoes, filled with this goop up to your ankles, terrified of snakes or worse, sometimes we’d jump. What was that, what was that? Then, we realized it was our own splashing. Our own ripples.
We kept the frogs in a Tupperware container we took from grandma. We were careful as surgeons not to let them out when adding to the collection. Junior had the net now, and Mike had trekked to the other side of the tunnel alone. I scanned the brown murky mud and parted the reeds near the entrance, looking for any creatures trying to escape in the opposite direction.
Mike leaned his head into the tunnel and called that he thought he saw something. Something big. Bring the net, quick!
Junior wouldn’t let me take the net and soon it became a fight. I was small and gangly and Junior was 200 pounds, at least, and he was gonna kick my ass. Again.
I was tired of it. Junior was so big and stupid and always trying to push me around.
Rage surged through me and I did the most stupid thing possible. In my tiny mind, I became like Riki Tiki Tavi, the mongoose, a rodent that kills king cobras in India by biting deep into the neck and never letting go.
So I bit Junior on the nipple. Sunk my teeth in through his oversized Phoenix Suns shirt and chomped down. Did. Not. Let. Go. Junior pounded on my back with his fists, the whole time Mike watching from the side, rolling his eyes and telling us to cut it out. I wouldn’t let go and Junior wouldn’t stop hammering me.
But everyone has to breathe sometime and I let out a big exhale, enough room for Junior to shove me back and run off down the dirt road. It was a mile to my grandmother’s house and he ran the entire way, shouting, “I’m telling, I’m telling.”
The Tupperware of frogs knocked over, the net in the bushes. Nothing mattered. I ran off down the street after my brother. As I got to the door, my mother was there, asking what happened and I told her she should punish me so, so, so bad. I was crying. Guilt, or fear, but probably both.
Junior’s nipple was swollen and plum purple. My mother tried to stifle her laughter. Everyone was confused about the nature of the fight, but they figured we had it worked out. It was over and I wasn’t punished.
I went back to Mike, still baffled, but more bored and he said all the frogs got away. I looked down at my ankle, sticking out of my mud caked shoes and browned socks. A leech was suckling on my Achilles’ tendon.

Transfiguration

Transfiguration

The day was on the fringe of timelessness, frigid with glaring white sanctity. A brightness more radiant than any bleach, almost fusing my eyes shut. I had to walk through endless, tangled trenches of snow, higher than my head.
Through every corridor, the light headed straight for my eyes and flooded my corneas. Through squinting glints, I could make out the shapes of buildings just enough to navigate through the troughs.
And so quiet. Not a sound but sharp, soulless wind. The howling follows you, burrows into your head and reminds you, there is no life here. This is the edge of oblivion.
At a dead end, I feel my way around a trench wall and climb up. At the top, there is a building, the roof caved in, bombed out almost. No people around, so I crawl through the window and under a broken support beam. Inside, it’s warm like a shrimp bisque. Knocked over shelves, busted walls and insulation freely littered down every aisle.
I travel through the ruins, careful not to disturb any artifacts. I feel hunger, but something holds me back. I have no survival instinct other than to pass through ruins to the other side. Stepping over baskets and tilted doorways and spoiled fruit.
Once I uncover where these fragments of history end, I will step back into the searing, raw light, able to transfigure into a new form. Leave this infertile wilderness.
First, I must give up earthly needs. I must not eat.
But like an animal, I throw myself on all fours and devour the moldy, worm-infested fruit. I chew it down, juicily, like a broth. A different spirit has consumed me, taking over.
When I am disgustingly full, I can only start to gag. I will vomit soon, leaving another mark that I have failed in my goal.

A New Moon Rises

No one is aware of the changes occurring in my life to the point that I wonder if they are really happening.
Oh, yeah, it's a new year.
The sixth day of it, in fact.
I've hardly noticed.
Internal changes are present but I barely recognize any adjustments outside myself.
Like that Dandy song. . .
"Hear me out, I must have changed."
The title, "Everyone Is Totally Insane" is fitting.

If you think of the term "worldview" in literal terms, I've traded in my glasses for a different prescription.
And I feel like speaking in purposely vague terms, so I'm gonna.

2009 was the worst year of my life.
If I could represent it in some kind of effigy, I would use napalm.
Never mind. That's a tough thing to say.
2009 had its moments.
Nothing happened, but in tiny bouts, I felt something breathing. Most of those times involved travel to little scraps of desert realty. California, Arizona, Nevada.

A friend died.
Remorse aside, that set off one weird chain of events.
I had to reexamine every one of my beliefs to make sure I was ready for that kind of thing. Turns out I'm not.

I got my foot in the door of some journalism career thing I suppose I want.
Wait. No, I want it. I know what I want. Most of the time.

Oh, we all do some things we regret, but not as much as the things we don't do.
I was sorta supposed to finish a novel a hundred times over.
And what else? Don't know, don't care.
I need chains to be free.

I guess my stumbling thoughts can be summed up in how I am coming full circle. Yeah. So where I started has led me to be where I already was.


It's interesting how the book of Ecclesiastes maps my recent thoughts perfectly. Everything is meaningless, even the good things, especially the good things.

The only question it leaves is: what to do now?

I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet.

I like resolving to be a better person, even if it's just masturbation. So I have one resolution for 2010.

(1.) Don't suck.

A new moon rises.
We press on.

Stealing the Communist Manifesto

When searching for the top ten list of the most stolen books, I got many differing accounts. Some say Bukowski, Thompson, Palahniuk. Some say Kafka, J.K. Rowling, the Bible. Some sources don't even list titles, just authors. Then there's some book called Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, which doesn't surprise me. I think the decade has a lot to do with it, which explains the variation, but a statistic like this is hard to prove in the first place.

Somehow I thought the Communist Manifesto made that list. I thought, if there's any book you have to steal, it's got to be this one. It has a typical red cover and two yellow price tags. The book costs $2.

Thousands of revolutionaries built empires on the spine of this trashy paperback. Some of them had to steal it. They were rebels, right?

I took the copy into the dressing room, buried under a pair of jeans and stuffed the book into my pocket. It fit perfect.

I took it out and took off the stickers. If an employee suspected anything, I was afraid they'd find the stickers, so I peeled the yellow tabs back. Wondered where to stick them and thought, leaving them in the room would be suspicious as well.

So I bent down and slapped it under the dressing room bench. Beneath it were hundreds of stickers.

sunday school.

Nov. 8 2009

I thought I was "floating in a dream and all my dreams are musicals, so the dead fetuses hanging from the trees were singing". I sung that of course, like that douche from Singing in the Rain.
I kept passing out and writing one line of poetry at a time. This is what I got.

Gliding through fog like misguided lace flies.
The shriveled trees are but fingers groping from the snow.
We approach the exterior of a cave and look at the twisted jaws of a deeper eternity.

Delving between shelves of every level of history, a librarian craft floats us to the floors of time.
The sweet lower symphonies of our minds are scraped from the torn scalp.
The crisp ground of our skulls are the seeds for a meadow of miraculous flowers.

The plants grow three leaves and one eye, to gaze into the sacred realm of geometry.
Every octahedron spins in anatomical beauty until they make up every one of our atoms.
Our lace eyes blink solemnly and by this way we can bat our way over the foggy glade.

The fog is our breath, our very soul.

Like the howling of wolves.

I am a party, strangely enough, and I'm drinking, but not too heavily. It seems like everyone I know or used to know, even for a little scrap of time, they're all here. All drinking heavily. All of the people my eyes ever graced.
I start to feel it coming on, the vomit and I head to bathroom. It's not the alcohol, it's the pills I had hours before. Waiting outside and then, a guy in a red shirt walks out, passes me. He turns and looks me dead in the eyes. I know him, perhaps better than anyone else here, even my flesh-and-blood sister. He looks at me and we both know. He's coming for me, later. He's coming to get me.
I dash in the toilet, quickly vomit and leap up. Splash water on my face and look in the mirror. I can do this, my eyelids flinch. I have to escape. Out the back. Now.
I duck into the back bedroom, kick out the screen and this apartment is on the second story. I have to leap hard, land hard and roll. My twisted ankle, I don't think it's broken. So I run. I run down alleys cloaked in nightfall, past wooden fences with chainlinked pitbulls on the other side.
A howling, screeching terror follows me. Like the howling of wolves, I flee with pumping legs and throbbing lungs.
I dart across traffic, right in front of a police cruiser. The beast floods me with his violet lights and slowly crawls from the cradle of his car. He towers over me, checks that my ID is of age and breathalyzes me. I don't even blow a .07. So weak.
The cop decides to let me go, but I realize it would be better to be imprisoned in the cage of leviathan than the foul hunter on my scent. For I know, he comes for me.
So I sock the officer in the face. Hard. To give him a reason to handcuff me, to sacrifice my freedom for my breath.
But the officer goes down. He's unconscious in one slug.
The only viable option is to steal the cop cruiser. What else is alternative? By barely slipping into gear, I'm screeching off at speeds unknown to physics. The lights are still beaming in all directions as I tear down the wrecked neighborhoods of junkies, immigrants and thugs. A fool's paradise.
A mere second later the hood crumples up into the windshield and the airbag explodes onto my face. Glass and dust bond with my skin, until I am streaked with the blood of the stigmata.
I crawl from the wreckage and inspect my victim. A red sports car, the driver completely flattened by my tires. The angle his neck and limbs hang suggest he was killed instantly. On the other side, I twist the deceased face. It is truly, by the coincidence of saints, my enemy. His life essence leaks and mingles onto my own red covered hand. How could I?
I was guilty all along. He never meant to bat a cardinal eyelash at me. I killed my nemesis with little more than hallucination.
And sirens rise on the peaks and the heavy air, hunting me, like the howling of wolves.

Spacelab (Hundreds of Places)

The car dipped and dodged in potholes, dust speedbumps and avoided jackrabbits, mice and occasional deer. The gas on “E” the whole way down. 40mph.
That isn’t fast enough, Sloan thinks and pulls to the side of the vacant dirt road. It’s 2:13 a.m.
Blackheart skips out the passenger side and Sloan follows, hovered over the door, and staring in awe at the thunderstorm currently attacking the mountains. Lightning tears electric wrinkles across the sky and illuminates the forest of surrendering cacti. There’s supposed to be a meteor shower tonight.
On the horizon, Sloan envisions a horde of angry townspeople, all carrying blazing torches, come to kill them. Blackheart screeches and lightning cuts vertical down the horizon. In rhythm, at every screech of Blackheart, a lightning bolt erupts.
Soon, Sloan hears the baying of coyotes and thinks this must be Blackheart's doing. He's inviting the terrible cannibal dogs!
‘Stop it! Fool! Swine!’ Sloan hisses. ‘You’ll attract the monsters!’
He whips out a butterfly knife and flings it around, cutting out chunks of his knuckles. Blackheart is still screaming at the dogs.
In the moment, Sloan does what he thinks best! He strips naked and wields his belt, still trying to silence Blackheart’s howling. Blackheart ducks back to the car and closes the door as the clouds above burst. Hot, wet saliva-like rain spits on the desert.
Now Sloan is rubbing his terrible cock across the windshield and the rain is rushing across the glass and Blackheart gets out and runs. He picks up a large stick, probably a cactus skeleton, and lunges at a passing minivan. It swerves off the road and is never seen again.
Soon Sloan, still slobbering on the windshield comes to his senses and dives in the car. He races a mile down the road, the wipers squeaking and finds Blackheart cowering in the soaking-wet bushes.
‘Get in the car,' he says. 'We have hundreds of places to be.’

Alone

Sunday, May 31

I am alone in a dark, red room.
Watching a movie and it's horror and I've never been so terrified in my life, never so unselfishly considerate for another's well-being.
Too much fear even to remove myself and turn off the TV.

I watch a skeleton remove his hands and arms and shoulders and he didn't shrug and said, "I give up."

Suddenly, high-pitched screaming, non-stop echoing, so loud, my skin quivers and starts to pus over.
Then, silence.
A billion miles of static and I am strangled by a single note.

If only my life were condensed to a single, silent 8mm home film.

A woman dies of a fatal wound to the head, which slowly pours blood into a little pile for her. Her blood platelets slowly clot the gash, knowing full well this will be the very last time they will ever do it.
On a small street corner, she bleeds out her lungs and a homeless dyke tells her life story. Drugs, sex and rock 'n roll. Depressingly, she sighs, knowing this will be the last thing she ever hears.

Burden

non-fiction
When I was a little kid, I used to pick up cigarette butts and put them in a bucket and throw them away. I was a little groundskeeper.
My dad smoked on our porch made of astro-turf and he'd throw the butts right on the green and then there was little melted footprints all over, little UFO treadmarks. I'd pick the butts out of the cradles they made. I'd pick up these beer cans of extinguished butts where hives of cockroaches would crawl into and drown in their drunkenness. I'd fish through ashtrays.

I had a mentally retarded neighbor named Keith that did the same thing. Cleaning up everything.
Keith was a twin, but sometimes one of the twins don't come out entirely OK. Keith was one of those twins.
He was confused, and he thought his purpose in life was to clean up the earth.
He'd crawl the streets on the way to the bus stop, crouching down for plastic wrappers and pop tabs and receipts and cigarette butts.
He'd mutter to himself.
Keith kept the trash in a grocery bag at his side. I never knew what he did with the bag when he was done with it.

One day I got real sick from picking up those cigarette butts, those cans, those roach motels.
"They check in, but they don't check out."
I lay in bed, sick to death and vowed never to do that again.
The task to clean the planet was too large a burden for me to carry.
I figured, let the world be filthy.

Now when I get sick, I don't reflect like that any more, I don't think about it.
I keep going. No rest.
I wonder, if I'm still carrying any burdens.

My First Computer

non-fiction

I remember getting my first computer, the excitement I had, all of it. I loved it because it was all mine.
I got it from my mother's friend who had an autistic child who watched a lot of VHS tapes. It was used, but free and I loved it.
It was a Windows '95 or '98, not sure which, but it was heavy, a monitor that weighed more than me. I remember bringing it home and assembling it in my room and how I just loved putting the pieces together myself. I loved opening and closing the disc drive, the hum of the monitor, the special sounds it made on start up, the loading screens and the little words that said, "IT IS NOW SAFE TO TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER". I wanted to keep my computer on forever, but my mother wouldn't let me. I had to turn it off every night.

I wrote novels on my computer. I'd open up the Word knockoff I had and just type and type and type for hours and I didn't care what came out. I wrote a story that was a Paperboy knockoff and one called 20,000 Pennies Under the Duckpond that was about guinea pigs and hamsters that lived on a farm and had to find some money. They were terrible stories and I never finished them, but they felt so good to write.

I had Juno, which was like AOL only so simple and pathetic it only allowed you to check email. You couldn't even get on the internet with it for anther three years. I'd check my mail all the time, but I never got anything so I'd email myself. It took forever to get them.
I'd hack onto my mom's Juno account and email her friends long-winded stories I wrote, mostly re-tellings of faerie tales so they were funny. Or at least so I would laugh. I wanted my stories to be like the chain emails that my mom forwarded to me and I forwarded to myself.

Fuck solitaire! On my computer, I played hours of games (that came with it somehow) like WinBreakOut '95 and I'd install dollar-store floppy disc games. A few times, if they sucked, I'd erase them off the floppy disc and reuse it.

But what I remember most is it had awesome screensavers of pipes and a maze thing and I loved customizing those. I'd change them every hour and then wait for the computer to start them up. It came with these themes, like the Jungle Theme and the Space Theme and it would change all the colors and the cursors and the sounds when the computer started up, loaded up and fucked up.

Really, all I liked to do was mod the shit out of it. It was mine and that was a powerful feeling, knowing I had something so useful all to myself. I felt privelegded. My computer could do anything! I mean, it didn't have internet or any music on it or anything but it still felt amazing to me.

But the computer didn't have a lot of hard drive space. So what did I do? What any kid would. I went into the :C drive and deleted any files I thought I didn't need. Such as old games, themes I didn't use and . . . system files.

After that my computer didn't work anymore. I totally fucked it up and lost everything. But somehow, I didn't really care.

The other day, I bought a new computer for a C-note. Got it for a song, really. It's an eMac with a thousand features that my old '98 never had, even if the eMac is a couple years outdated. It doesn't have a very big hard drive but I'm not about to delete anything I shouldn't.

Anyway, I got kinda giddy again, buying it. I started to feel like I used to, like my computer was the best thing in the world.

But then it faded after a day.

Still, I'm gonna keep my computer on all the time, deep into the night.