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.