Monday, December 27, 2004

Orally Yours

I would have to say it was the Spanish who invented oral sex, and for many reasons. The conjugation of a verb or the oral processing of a cluster of R’s pours off the tip of the tongue with a vibration only akin to energy designed to stir a lover’s blood.

Such cunnilingus of speech leaves one no doubt when drawing parallels between a softly bent Spanish T, to the careful angles of luring the clitoris out of its fleshy hiding spots. The O’s are gentle twitches of the lips that brush away troublesome hairs. J’s are muted conveniently to emit a rumble of pleasing echoes; all directed upward the lips, all ferocity of its formation funneled upward to waiting nerves; albeit pert nipples of philosophy or the ecstatic labia of current events. Perhaps the Perineum of politics…

And to the elation residing in the rest of the long vowels… Even the accented Ń; it sends its hungering lips to ridges and senses indescribable by my uptight English tongue. Those sultry diphthongs that light up the Mexican night, driving us all to shudder when it’s finally all through. A thousand young mouths throbbing to the beat of the livid and languid tongue, all wrestling their bodies to give enough force for one more ménage with tonight’s spoken volumes.

What Provocateurs,
What Oral Artisans…

Thursday, December 23, 2004

letters from america - part 1

I’m not convinced that I would make a very good american. For instance; I don’t enjoy the smell of dryer sheets, or Robert Frost. Yes, I am implying an inherent stench in each. How far can I get with this dual barreled burden? A beloved poet raised by our fertile country; and too, the little paper sheets that coat our clothes with anti-static stink and lipid like texture, all put down in one opening paragraph.

Speaking american is like speaking vanilla. Neutral northern accents all but entirely bled of inflection, soaking the earth with white folk stereotypes. Dead tongues twitching to roll an ‘r’ that only comes out with a lisp. Vice Presidents that grin like vultures and that would swoop down to prey if the tight navy suit didn’t keep his flaps in check. Presidents that grin like a dachshund pondering a staircase, brow furrowed, lips pursed as to give clearance to the many very tiny government spy jets waiting in orbit to land upon them.

I have no particular quarrels with apple pie, though a rudimentary staple; or with majestic purple mountains for that matter. So I guess all is well, only a fifty percent loss in ratings, and the band plays on…

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Whispering Little Nothings

Sometimes, saying nothing at all says a lot. It says I’m angry and it’s only going to get worse by looking at you. It says that problems might just be bad enough that I don’t even want to think about solutions. It says I’m tired of accusing, pretending and having expectations of you. It says I’m at the moment where I need you the most.

These moments go on seemingly without end, only as perforations between us feeling content and alive. They are the abstractions of you fear of being alone, my fear of being happy, and our mutual inability to get the message across.

Those moments spent not speaking; were they hate, or caricatures in you minds eye reminding you not to talk to strangers.

Were you focused on my actions?
… Or my inactions?

Are there stories right now being made in your head, or merely rearranged and held firm with the glue of assumption, all lined up in sequence to make you feel ok with never talking to me again.

I feel trained to believe that this stage is the end of a companionship. Like the body without connection to the brain, such is the people without access to the precious spoken word.

I’ve begun to think this is the probable end to relationships. All quirks harvested and habits revealed, no more curiosity sustaining crop; so it all yields to slash and burn economics.

Six billion hungry mouths packed so tightly, no wonder we get sick of ourselves. Even the recorded voice drawling on while we sleep, television left speaking painfully into lonely space. Gospel shouts to panel walls and paintings of lush French battlefields. War and celebration on the big screens, left open to anyone left on the streets who is unoccupied enough to peep in.

Stereos lined up across countries; tuned in to hear the same radio relayed mix album that we haven’t heard since yesterday. Its barely mixed up with the new birthday announcements and one live segment that comes on just long enough to tell us how many shopping days until X-mass.

Perhaps saying nothing at all will inevitably say so much more than repeating the same empty expressionless phrases that a lover gets all too often. But perhaps too, there is a world inside us that grows smaller and smaller at every day spent at depriving each other of those precious words.

It’s December, again, and the world has some very unflattering ideas still built up about me. The foremost was its instinct for reminding me how bad I was at falling in love. It would trespass all too frequently and speak its mind unto me. “Hey… You got problems babe…”

… And maybe it was still pretty dead on; that damn gravelly voice. But, if I were to ask what it’s really talking about when the subject of love comes up? It would probably have little on its mind but some arrows through hearts and a quote from Plato out of context. The way I see it, the world is out of sorts with what it loves today. Love to you is just another false prophet of hedonism, strung out to dry with garlic necklaces and other fairytale STD remedies.

So we find ourselves another mess of manmade ideas, groping for something organic, and all we find is love? Perhaps. Love is something you can do when no one is looking, when the world is all but a closed eye for the night and you can’t keep it all to yourself.

Love is not in the kitchen making brownies, she is crouching in the bushes, making fun of your lifestyle and cursing the day you chose to repaint your fence.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

New Proletariats…

Congratulations, I have been briefed on the new and natural state of political affairs surrounding the consumerist derivation of sexuality we have come to know. I should perhaps share this manifest with your readers in hopes that recognition of this faltering economic development will somehow spare us all from over consumption demise.

Ejaculate is the brand new proletariat. Anything less than a union for our multitude of young underprivileged workers will not do. Is it not for them that we prosper? Is it not their interests met on the silver screens and the musty bed linens of all in love?

Are we still not simply the bourgeois who go mostly unaware of the needs of our sex, instead consuming it so blind and rapidly that the sweaty hands and uncovered bellies can barely keep pace. It is we who are at mercy to the needs of our engineered masses, those ceaselessly generated and gracelessly unappreciated by our own dedication in a race to arm ourselves with progeny.

Labors of love… Sounds like sweaty innuendo. Greeting cards and skin flicks dance titles in the brain, on the periphery of dreaming, falling asleep to neon signs. It is for this tryst of palpate sensations that the new blue collar marches.

Heavy crosses these burdens, those impermanent satisfactions. Those thirty second trailers of what is to come. The trial membership of lust and date rape and boozy hallway pinches. It is an alienation from the fruits of our labor; right my dead heroes? Such that we cannot bear to look at the faces of our children made in such splendor less states. Such that we cannot tolerate the sense of attraction without foreboding; the inevitable response to a sociological impotence that transcends breeding, and climbs the fruitless limbs of altruism.

Our new minister of propaganda appears on our sets and strips himself of armament, i.e. his pantaloons. The closest secretariat gladly bends over, inspecting the hedonism from inside out. Are we evil!? Exclaim a million marching soldiers in compression shorts or red red lingerie. “God gave me this” shout the old men on rooftops, fingers splayed, it’s supposed to mean peace without your tongue in it.

All hail we say, dangling in the suspense of rejection or satisfaction. I take it back; the world has not changed in one thousand one thousand years. Its currency merely takes the faces of its new hero’s. That is why “fuck you” is the strongest phrase in the English language; and it sells, goddamn baby it sells…



Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Diggin’ for Dead Men

Once, while mining for mineral ore deposits somewhere in the subterranean depths of south western Pennsylvania, Benjamin had the desire to posit a daring question to his digging buddy and long time comrade Jake.

All dirty and capped with a yellow protective helmet, it was a provocatively human moment when he turned his head and pronounced…

“Why are all my hero’s dead?”

And sure it was true that in the good old days he watched great characters from MASH keel over from well simulated bullet hits. He continued his investigation into the curious nature of mortality with his obsession for crime dramas and cops shows. It was a combination of his love of logic and the law, yes, with the fertile subtext of a lonely bachelor home life. But they all seemed to pass away too suddenly, much to the heavy burden of our narrator.

“Can we recognize hero’s when they are alive? Or are they better dead, when they are people without problems?”

True that a certain amount of overlooking can make a better role model, as I’m sure that our questioner is insinuating. Even though, I must question the truest motive behind his inquiry, his quest to be enlightened. Didn’t your daddy love you and fill you with respect, led you a childhood without superfluous violence. Didn’t every hero of your comic book genre grant you some lesser amount of helplessness and convey a lesson, a moral, and a commandment. Did not the coaxing of your peers give you the esteem to wander away from ephemeral and angst-ful questions?

Maybe it was not that at all.

Law school was quite the venture. Everybody knew you could do it, everyone lauded your capacity to succeed. You would be an enterprising youth, emerging like a busted chrysalis into the new world of surging opportunities. You drank and fucked, and made me proud. You harvested youth and promoted your own. You were careful enough; you didn’t steal any lives or make any new ones. For this accomplishment we bowed until our foreheads touched our feet.

One day you ran into a girl, perhaps an easy one. She though she had cancer, she cried, she thought nobody loved her enough, she knew you might mean those things about marrying her sad ass. Your penis spoke eloquently to her, addressing her innate fears of dying alone, and this is how you made her yours for only one night. You filled all the empty parts of her that night, and how could we hate you for that, your just a feeding, fucking, sleeping organismo.

Maybe I’m no better by wanting permanence, which could just be stealing a young girl’s life away. Don’t die with regrets… Hump away youthful vixens. How can I be angry that you didn’t die for me, that you didn’t turn off your sex for me, that you didn’t stop your lusting forever when I entered the picture. How gracious I now become knowing that I asked you to deprive yourself for me, how humble now that I recognize that I alone cannot suffice for you. That is of course total shit. I blame furiously.

I apologize for fecklessly losing my objectivity. It is of course this that you ask abjectly from one who narrates this type of experience.

So hero’s go back to whence they came, despite their forthcomings, is that the lesson we learn from this collection of verbiage in the tumult of a below earthen gap? Do you mean not for us to glean a hopeful detail from these cogitations?

“Perhaps we are each a hero to someone out there…“muttered Jake, the elder member of our two man drilling committee. And so it was established. Two corners of thought fighting for supremacy in this narrow crevasse. It was tools dangling and each twitching with the anticipation of some side winning word to wrap up the need for this figurative race to the core of the earth.

“How can I help you, she says to me. On the back of her shirt...” Benjamin gets back to an earlier tangent. It was something about the super market and how it was stealing his life.

“She couldn’t help me, right!? All I wanted was an answer to why I threw my life away.”

And that’s true again! Just like we all throw it away my friend; for lack of better excuses, for lack of any better creativity to draw us away from natural demise. Yet don’t look to me to find the exactitudes of this mess. I’m on the same front, doling out angry bayoneted thrusts to my own attackers of ego and psyche. I’m busy tossing my life away, just like you my friend, except were both doing it alone now, thanks to cicumstance.

Girls go back to school to find themselves anew; to dump or get dumped by prior lovers and to establish a routine of self pity and aggregation of new romance. We do the same too, maybe a job or some summer classes, try to work hard and define this soul of ours. Why would it stick with us, things we failed at, things we now detest every moment of? How could we just go back to law school and sit back in law school, and think of law school, when there was something so burdening inside the three of us.

Why can’t we just fight and get it over with, get our purity back from ourselves. Why these violations can’t be washed away with water, to break those salty stains that we leave on other peoples bodies in the churning heat of the most reckless of moments. Just let it be all of us in a big soapy tub to apologize for hurting each others feelings and discarding the hate of the other floating bodies; slowly but surely.

More of those countless hours float by in the unknowing pitch of dark underground. Sandstones open up lubricious maws to squeeze lamplight through, mostly just taunting an under stimulated mind to wander with preoccupation of the surface. Who knows what horrific deeds were cancelled out by the miles of black rock and dust, though it was no deed of theirs that was being kept from escaping at one time or another into the open gasping air. These thinks of theirs just like middle earth canaries, let out of cages to bolt to the sunny brilliance of the world above their heads, bursting into daylight and watched carefully to see if the survive this foreign world.

Its just sex you would say, perhaps in unison with the girl you though you loved, as she mouthed it to familiar ears. It’s just a physical action, like walking or running, or humping your pillow somnambulistly in the dead night. Screwing you defined as a desperate filling.

Maybe not even that. Maybe you were just hurting and needed more. Maybe it had nothing to do with me at all. Damn. All this time spent thinking I had a purpose; to fight this defilement. Suddenly it becomes painfully clear that I’m less in control than I ever thought. But at least I live up top here!

Hammer…

Pickaxe…

Diamond bit drill…

Your hands work quick unfastening what sedimentary formations thought they had firmly put into place. Your sharp commands bring your implements effortlessly into your hands. Sweat hardly discernable under the bellowing breath of the caverns, its humid and esophageal atmosphere. Then it’s the constant clamor of cathartic brain noise, like the hint of religion on someone’s tongue; your thoughts of heroism burning a hole in your psyche.

“Perhaps each one of us has that special someone, somewhere, waiting for us…” Jake incited, causing Benjamin to exhale briskly and emit conical funnels of dust from each nostril. His tools whirred to a stop and his eyes fell to the abyss below his dangling feet.

“How can you say that…?” Came cautiously from pursed lips and closed eyes, a head focusing on an impossible focal length.

How can you say that Jake? Waiting for us like some fucking miracle of creation beget us each a perfect love, to be found and conquered like a fairy tale tragedy. Jake, you have been immersed in this tunnel too long, hidden from UV and perhaps lacking of vitamin D synthesized by your skins contact with natural light. If not, if you are less than maniac and trod nearer the truth, then I humbly bow out of this contest. I knew love in my own heart and could not even begin to permeate the fastidious little seed that our deep earth mariner had planted inside that questioning heart.

I live on the goddamn top, and that’s not enough. I can’t play king of the mountain. I just live on ground a bit closer to the sky.

Thanks for that one last chance my friends. They are aspirating gently on dimly chilled guttural winds. In the belly of the beast, each mind yet a muscle to the end means of this oblivious organismo. We, just wheat in its colon; corn in its undulating stomachs. Can’t you hear the winds a blowing, but it’s the beating of a heart, and were all under the fist of idealism, waiting for our daylight when we are finally digested and make the wet plunge to clod or sidewalk alike.

Detonation caps sing songs of finality that we can never know; searing the rock and blaring its last horn for all the world to hear. Sometimes it is as those little rock holes fall in on themselves, just like our escapes to the outside world, leaving us alone with ourselves in velvet oblivion.

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Reel in Realty

“This is a late model ranch home, refurnished with period replication pieces. It was previously a one family dwelling, now trisected into these identical units.”

What she means is that it’s an old broken down home with its original broken down furniture, sold to an old sod with investments on the brain. He reworks some essential plumbing and adds some outlets, shoots up some rough dry wall and makes me a potential home.

“The kitchen is furnished…” as she shows me that all four burners work on the stove and that the fridge light comes on.

“We would just need a deposit and you can being moving in next week. Of course it will be the unit next door, but they are reasonably identical, just that one faces the street.”

Libby walks around the room, making sure she has enough closet space for her ample wardrobe and kitsch shoe collection. They are all great shoes though; I helped her throw away the crappy or redundant ones, now they all fit within select categories and color combinations to give her maximum and practical flexibility.

Don’t know why she cared about closets. Most of her clothing was a large bin of underwear; a throwback from college days when she bragged an entire two months without doing laundry. She had stripes and dots, thongs and boy shorts, solids and diaphanous. Sporty bras, three pronged latch bras, front clasping bras; none that could escape the ruse of my nimble fingers. I looked at her eyes; I think we were thinking that same thing. We laughed together as the realtor was in the middle of telling us how to get to the laundry room and what key to use when the basement is flooding and we have to swim out the skylights. Damn, I had no idea what she was talking about. Then we were out the door..

“You really want to do this?”

The best thing to do is to sit on a question like that; you know she needs a little reassurance but if you give it too quick… Either way; we’re in my car, driving away from another cute brick apartment, wondering in unison about the true identity of the person next to us.

It difficult making that decision to discard your lives apart and trade them into one big mess of getting in each others way. To be immersed in the stage of required symbiosis, am I ready…

“And if we break up, you can have your girlfriends over.” She inserts without a pause of sense, as though that was my main concern. As if I were intrinsically drawn to that subject whenever I spoke of our plausible life together… This was her way of reasoning out of the complicated fluctuation called our relationship; and she was broadening the gap at every word.
“Lots of couples go through this.” She piped in; somewhere between a song and a crosswalk. Was she talking about her cheating problem or about the hesitance to move all of our shit into one pile called home? I was cued and ready for the sweet part that happened routinely in our near weekly cycle of despondence.

The first part of the cycle was a relatively smooth transition, loving words and gentle touches; it was all designed as a compliment to our affection to one another. It was the good part that made all the other things more bearable.

The secondary portion kicked in at random intervals, brought about by tiny things, habits and comments seeping out of their hiding places. It was a stage of precautionary measures and relative defensiveness that generally occurred when something triggered and tripped the jealousy instinct. Some days it was good sex that made us angry. Sometimes it was even sitting leg to leg in her little tub and trying to talk things out, why it would never happen again

The tertiary stage was brief, yet burned gratuitously. It was when I told her that I don’t think I have what it takes to be in this relationship. For me it was that one damn thing, I never could put it down. It was that bitter day in January when I sat at home to start a Camus novel and calm the fuck down; the same day she walked around Pittsburg with an old High School flame and got her confused little brains banged out.

The last, it was wonderful state of reconciliation. We flooded all of this into an hour or less of apathetic detritus. We argued and blamed and screamed with our hearts. We lashed tongues; we hid our wet faces in pillows and blankets. I can see it replay like some gaudy pantomime. We would get through it all again, we would finally tell each other what we needed to hear, the stuff that maybe we even meant when we said them, and that’s the scary part. We were just so damn honest and open, even after all the shit; that very moment of glory and indulgence.

Perpetuate Cycle… Now…

I L*VE you Johny. I L*VE you too Libby.

“You really want to do this!?” Her head rocking in my periphery, fighting my concentration and attention to the surrounding lanes for a bit of eye contact and some assurance that she isn’t just handing her check over to some half ass.

“Maybe we need this…” It just came out of me live relieved gas. It just felt right to say, felt forgiving and rewarding. I wanted it to be real; just the way I intended it, I wanted to stop this cycle some day.

“There are lots of places to do it in the cabin!” She said with a manic excitement. She was being playful now, coaxing me out of my shell and into a sensual mood. This might have been her defense route against pending emotional danger, disarming me with powerful sexuality; this I realized late in the relationship.

It was true anyhow. When we were given a friendly little tour of the cabin we researched those details whenever we were out of earshot or at eyeball range.

The air had a hint of hippy too it, some nice mountain folk renting from a lady botany Professor in Ca. We even went online to read a couple of her dissertations, to see if she was groovy enough to add to our new list of acquaintances.

The stairs were wide enough to fit us when entangled. We giggle. The washing machine was low enough. The bathroom sink was bolted on nice and tight. This tour was an experience of innuendo. We said thanks and dreamed for nights about holding each other forever in that little back yard.

“Ya, lots of places…” I said; nothing else on my mind but images and fleeting emotional gasps as I put together more reasons for and against the move.

“You should come with me this summer…” She said it quickly then went back to staring out the side window uninterestedly. Very coy. She even went far enough to clip some good jobs out of the local paper for me; and then we both entertained the though of driving that thousand miles together to spend a summer amidst the Steelers and the Amish.

“Lots of places…” That’s all that could come out of my stupid grinning lips. The mile rolled on and we rolled even father apart. I never could get over the affair; and she probably got fed up with my shit in the meantime.

How much can you expect two people to overcome anyhow? No goddamn Romeo’s over here baby. Just two people with time to kill and some nice apartments that need some credit secured lovebird to fill it up with their kitsch shoe collections and drums of groovy underpants.

Lots of places indeed, except that we gave up a long time ago on finding them together. Cast your heavy line in the chilly Atlantic, mine ill put with vigor into the frisky Gulf of Mexico. Reel in your catch kiddo, and let it be reality this time. Let it be the bright shining lips of just a bit truer of a world on your gilded hook. A world where I loved you for as long as you let me, and even just a bit longer…

Monday, December 06, 2004

It was the best of times…

It was the best of times…

Ok, who am I kidding? It’s the same old story of starting your life over that I’m certain that people getting this letter are sick of hearing about. People come and people go, often quicker than they came, and life assumes this surreal sequence of instability. Surges of association and experience; touching, talking, sharing food, all an explosion to the impermanence of nerve stimulation…

Sometimes, merely having your health is more of a bane than anything else. When Jessica had her brush with quick crawling skin cancer she seemed crazy and alive, unlike the middle aged angst we all stumble into. It drove her out of the house kicking and screaming, but I can’t say that was the wrong choice either. When Amanda sat in that chair to get her first pump of chemo; I wish I knew what she thought. Day by day, hour by hour... I’m sure we both tried to get the message, but it came through convoluted. When you said ouch, I’m sure it was a pain that was beyond your skin and bones; I knew that then too.

It’s not as though I envy chronic or incurable illness, or even the last minutes of life. It’s perhaps that as I watch the crowd around me fall to their ends, there deserves analysis of the freedom attained by instant recognition of the inevitable.

I look at my own life now; as a curious person must do; and add up the parts that I think need my remembering. Everything is a hiss and blur, like I never had time to clean up; to organize. Perhaps that’s why I like starting over; and over; and over… Maybe that’s the time cancer gave you, the moments to slim down your collection of half eaten and misplaced brain wrinkles.

Try writing seriously about chronic illness as “Shrek Two” gets funneled into the background in a surprisingly comical Spanish translation. Half of it is some footage of a little kid’s birthday party and lots of snippets of the energetic music tracks and enticing action animation. Gotta love the half breed called special occasion and event coverage; because these are the times I will cherish forever; funding my survival by helping the kind folks re-remember their lives in clear colors and perfect focus.

I’ve been awake too long, and everything on me stinks; even if I smell dryer sheets it’s all gotten old as my day draws on. I’m sleeping on couches and eating out of boxes. I’m reminded of a promise I made myself when I was younger and more naïve; I was going to find something to call home and stay there.

I pride myself of the fact that all of my earthly belongings fit in my car. Maybe that was shooting too big. Maybe feeding that is way too much responsibility and I should have only taken what fit on my back. Take a bus down, see the country…

Several explosive romances and a beautiful child later, I’m breaking my own promises by the day; and who’s not to say forever. People find me charming and mysterious enough to smile in front of and then curiously avoid. Love becomes a game of catch instead of hide and seek; and then love becomes freeze tag on a July morning when you run, run, run until all you can taste is the fog and your own snot. Nobody wins… but nobody cares. So physically deceptive…

Maybe my back is too much. Maybe I should have taken what fit in my pockets. Better get my best suit ready to make the journey, because I need to make a good impression when I get there. Tuck toothpaste in my lapel and call it good enough to go. Adventure, it’s like an instant grab bag of satisfaction, and there could be any amount of dollar store wonders waiting for you inside.

Still sleeping on couches, eating dry noodles like a candy bar and wondering why you feel so alive after all. That’s why I don’t believe that god is made for people like me. God is made for spiritual exhibitionists. God is made for the well off. God is made for people who don’t think about where bouillon comes from, just where it goes when the wife puts it in the water. God is made for those with enough extravagance to afford the weighty job of not needing to know a damn about what’s going on out there, on the battle front of reality.

So people come and people go, usually too late to save your thoughts on them. They pass like pinpricks in the lamp shade of night; just as you swing the whole thing around your head to drive the loneliness out of the room. “Get out” you scream, but even “it” doesn’t respond to you…


Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Handing Out Dimes at Said Corner Store

The world had several ideas about me lately that weren’t too flattering. Initially it was a preoccupation with reminding me how bad I was at falling in love. It would rub it right in my face, “You got problems babe”.

And maybe life was right. Perhaps if it read in bold letters on my lapel “how’s my living”, I would get what you really think of it all on some tidy 1-800 voice mail. A good antiseptic tiding from across the phone might just kick it all into shape; let me know really what I was doing wrong.

Really, how many times can you fool yourself into thinking how different a relationship will be next time? Every time a great dance ends, you remind yourself of the things you learned, things you won’t yell again, or ways to keep a partner smiling, it all meant something… I’m sure everyone gets tired of starting over, but we can’t seem to set the brakes.

Today, none of that spoke even a whisper above the clamor of the plaza. Its open spaces were rife with the usual antiquated ideas of open air commerce. Hot dog vendors fit neatly between cell phone merchants and littered again by the occasional bible thumper. For your convenience, you could pick up god and a new pair of ray bans today, and you didn’t even know who to thank.

That was my stroll down 10th street, teetering at the few spots that still pandered to foot traffic. I watched life going on at an exaggerated speed. Hundreds of people lying in some estivated state of consumer activity, seeking bargains with their heat pits and striking with closed eye when the time is right to save.

Bells clinked and feet patted down sticky sidewalks. Holiday employees vied for attention, leering from behind red velvet or musty beards, driving us all out of our minds with those bells.

Somewhere among the whole dance of over stimulation; someone, somehow, knew that it was all getting too out of control. To many arms slinging money, and stooping for change, and grabbing the last doll or dump truck effigy. Too many eyes darting like protective mothers, but with their eggs at home!

His bell landed with a thud on the sanded pavement. I turned to pan upward on lavish figure. Sandals and a Santa suit, with a worn canvas shirt under cheap rouge velour, this was the anti-Clause. We were collectively awed.

With no interruption in the procession of events, he stooped with eyes upon the crowd. He inspected with a half turn the bent dome of brass, and then with a slowly building beat began the chiming again, though different. Now instead of a humble grin and an urge to put your change in his melancholy bucket roja, he balked the attempts with his body language. His free hand passed in slow motion before our astonished eyes and plunged to the wrist in dimes, nickels and such; the occasional folded bill and numerous glued together pennies.

“Help the Needy!?” he screamed out with a questioning anger.

“You are the Needy!”

Nobody prepared for this; they all began to fall from ranks, mothers grabbing children, any children, running for their lives.

The bell soared over the crowd and skittered across asphalt, under cars and out of our minds. Hands reaped the bucket, our new Santa wild with glory, grinning maniacally and tossing handfuls of dirty discarded change into the air to land on the terrified and amazed alike.

I must admit, I laughed like a delighted child in the rain; even if it was a rain of snotty pocket metal. Our new Santa preached against this breed of moral ambiguity that we believe with all our little heart in. He said take your fucking bread crumbs and come back when your strong enough to help anyone at all.

I backed up a step to avoid another rush of the infuriated and could not help brush shoulders with a dark haired girl.

“You like the show?” She quipped, taking the bump in stride and using the opportunity.

“It is a delightfully right way to start the evening.”

She smiled and in taking my hand we walked past all the disgusted folks who raised their hands in anger; who swear at he who dares interrupt them with only 20 shopping days ‘till Christmas.

She told me first about the Navaho Indian tribe, right out of the blue. Not with an eye of reverence, but just alluded to their customs and intricacies in a way that made me wonder how our culture would be described in a thousand years by some prudish history novel. We laughed and compared, deconstructing societies heavy blocks one by one.

It was strange how all her stories seemed to say to me “we are not just the byproducts of society.” How right she was, because watching the growing craziness from the truck stop window was enough to prove what happens when a single mask is let down.

“They worshiped the sun… But not as a god you see, more of a…”

“Respect? Acknowledgement?” I would fire back.

“Maybe that’s important…”

“What’s left to respect...? Ourselves?” I quipped with a furrowed grin, letting out my laughter.

All she could do was laugh, and carry me on with her, until we had every other restaurant goer gawking in our direction. We seemed to say “Of course not”, and that was enough of a philosophy for us.

Strangely we all met later at the truck stop. Our sad red clown staggered in, tired from performing, and we invited him down with a knowing nod. We talked about love, wealth and the scrambled eggs. He left that night as we sat in refracted street lighting and we tried to make him out through the window glare. My companion though she heard hoof beats as he sped away from the store, but I swear it was an old brown Vespa scooter. Either way, the meaning is what we make of it as growing brooding individuals. I for one will be leaving out chili and hash browns for my new Santa hero this year; albeit he might just be on the road instead, his haver sack full of clean underwear and no shiny toys for Mr. Johny.

At least he has my goddamn respect, as we both pull at the same strings and padlocks, trying to let ourselves out of that big cold box called complacency.

And as for the Navaho…

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Jesus Killed the Kennedy's

When Jesus Christ killed the Kennedy’s,
He sat both on rooftops and window ledges to get the shot just right,
And the world turned just a bit slower,
As a shot rang out to bounce across decades,
To fell a plane and scatter grey matter in trace amounts across an old parade car,
The cross now on heads as they jolt pass at less than holy speeds,
Waiting for the thunder to consume a life,
To put them in the ground.

When Christ first selected a weapon that day,
It was without dread or lackluster to duty,
Perhaps he felt for Cuba or was far too similar to junior,
He waited for the moment to strike,
To take them from their thrones.

When Jesus killed the Kennedy’s,
It’s confirmed that he was not out of town enjoying the seasons,
But that he harbored and meditated with malign contempt,
To reduce to none a competitive trinity,
One that allied with free market instead of free will,
Not that their parity was adverse,
But there is no reasoning with religion some days.

The day that Jesus killed the Kennedy’s,
The Pope said somebody needs to take that boy out,
He meant Jesus,
I’m assuming he went too far my lord,
This question was answered with a nod,
Nobody moved because they all knew,
There is no reasoning with religion some days.

The day Jesus stalked the streets for his hiding spot,
The day the Vatican sat on their hands,
The day the Kennedy’s groomed and bathed and practiced their wave,
The day America waited for a moment they could all share together
The day we waited for something big to change our lives
The day the son of a myth discharged a weapon in public and then ran-ran-ran.

The plane went down and everyone said awwwwww,
All this metal and shattered family dreams,
And Jacqueline wept for the attonment of the inevitable,
And Jesus forgave himself…

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

My kind of people

I think there are two types of people that sit alone in coffee shops. The depressed; and the depressed and waiting for someone. They sit in lounges and on poolsides too, and maybe those are just the two types of people to begin with.

You can stroll into that new city brimming with hope but the essence and draw of life will eventually let you know that these little things you do are just a distraction from what eats you inside.

Or maybe im just less hopeful than the people that frow in nobodys direction as I speed past their car windows and groping headlights. Maybe I take shit too seriously and convert their passive stares into angst and a wholly deprived mode of mind, I succumb to the projection of state and boil about what bad news they just got or how within that situation I would be unable to survive.

Truth is that we are all equally unable to survive it all, and maybe thats why we wait in coffee shops and hope for someone to come wake us up. The caffeine cant do a good enough job of keeping us awake, and I can understand that, because we are purposely slipping away, slinking under our chairs for the pity of humanity, avaoiding glares and shedding small talk just to devote full attention to those heavy doors that any moment could swing open and deliver our next new reason to live.

Hulk in Pants

Its Halloween, and I am celebrating the one year aniversary of having lost myself to the girl i should have grown old with. Isnt it funny to hear other people say cathartic shit like that, pretending they know what love and hurt and jealousy are. Things are different this year, in fact everything is different. She sits on my mind as an old mistake, my home is a brick fortress with the hounds of god at the doors, my job is a delight of chemicals and creativity, my sex life as dry as the Sahara, my local language profficency nill, and the rest of the world just wrapped up in those preoccupations. The only consistent field is of course the bills and radical debt that it took to catapult me half way across the united states and into this derivation land concieved of a wandering bastard of Mexico and some lost band of Aztec mystics.

---

The funny part about horror movies is that when a man turns into a monster, or some elisive transformation renders an akward 130 pound lout into a sneering beast, the clothing rips off of him with such ferocity. You see close ups of buttons popping and shirt sleeves being wrent by the horrible transmuting flesh and muscle.

Strangly though, the byproduct is always some rippling green monstrosity in Capris.

Was this fashoon trend inspired by the hulk himself, or countless wolfman concepts? Or instead, has the practical intergrity and inherent indestructability of Capris leggings been shamelessly advertised since even before the ilk of Mary Shelly.

Some would argue with me that depending on the era, transformation garb has also included various sub-species of Shorts and Jams. Let us not forget though that they are still well within the fatherly genus of incomplete leg coverings, so rests my point.

This does nothing but force me into wondering why for once cannot Frankensteins abbomination be complete with a a frankensteinian cock, and cater not the the censors who would have you believe that the mystical world of the supernatural is too uptight to show some werewolf vaginas or cursed mummy tits.

Dont tell me it would be another million or so in special effects just to give the Hulk some big green jello balls. Its fot the love of believability anyhow. Who can go to a film and be drawn into the storyline when they see a perfectly good fast motion steroid engorgement go sour with the tacky irony of granny bloomers being the cape of their new super hero.

Now for the record, I dont want to see King Kong bat planes out of the sky with his ding-dong, or for that matter see another bare actors ass on my screen (Ill leave that love for my mother and Patrick Swazey), but please people, I for one know that with balls like the Hulks, he is bound to skip the Capris and instead battle for the fate of the earth in some nice loose fitting sweat pants...

Monday, October 04, 2004

a footnote

i have no idea what the hell that was all about. Just follow my advice though...

Hand me that gas mask, you bastard.

In a large arena, people crammed and horribly packed, stuffed together in one space like... well, people. Tight formations of swarming mouths and tongues oscilating like peterbed flagella. We want a social hero, we want a social hero; they chant. Much to their chagrin there is a figure pulling in from the murky recess of the stage. Chant, chant!

His dark suit makes his pasty skin appear ever the bit more pallid, and a doctor trained in early 1900 diseases might just remember this presentation and walk into a benjamin moore in some distant and not so 3rd world area and pick out a half gallon can of a pre mixed shade of tuberculosis dry wall paint, laugh his damn hardest at the shimmering paleness of his memory and whoosh off to paint his house.

Speak oh wonder of the free world. In a slight of law rendition of liberty, deliver my trangressions to the world of fretfully illegal and grant me the morality I would otherwise lack. Tell me that masturbation is murder, just like dashing fresh babies on the rocks. Tell me the hole is unholy and speak so effectively about the donning of the rubber cap. Tell me disease is punishment for living in sin, and that florida has hurricanes because its foggies were up to something immoral.

Ok, maybe you wont exactly say all of that. But when I ask you, you might say "makes you wonder though".

Fire up the revolution baby. Its a good day to sleep in; and to touch yourself...

Saturday, September 25, 2004

Just smuggling fruit

Ive begun work on my first spanish movie. Am I that moved by the place and the culture and the language that I want to tackle it head on and toss my creative juice into speaking such tongue in a feature length amateur film? You are damned right!

Perhaps shooting will begin tommorow, in the summery haze of morning, trooping through cacti plastered fields with tripods and sweaty equipment bags holding smiles just long enough to get that shot just right. Im excited.

So look for it folks, "El Arbol de Regalos, A film about young love, selfless giving, and Mexican fruit smuggling"...

After that, just maybe Mexico City, and if we make it out alive and with our gear we will have a story to tell the world.

!Viva Mexico!

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Carry on, Carry on dancing…

Let the music begin; and to my surprise it is the Mariachi. A strange new set of rules when you cross the border and into something a bit more substantial than a crappy country garage band filled to their brim with the BUD ON TAP ordered for the very special occasion/wedding. The Mariachi are so damn unique to themselves, hence my intrigue.

Having worked for a certain company that involves itself with social occasions, I have been exposed to a gamut of entertainment experiences. I can tell you when the thought out toss of hair by a neurotic Quinceaneras mother can mean; the cake will be cut in five minutes, get your cameras ready.

Then I hunch in the corner, secretly zooming in on your face to see what you might be eating. I might experiment a bit with night shot to get a glimpse of a bra line through a diaphanous black dress, scarcely a nipple but the art is imperfect anyhow. Light plays tricks indeed, but nothing that godlike. Sometimes invited to eat; never the cake though. Ill fill up on dinner rolls and inscribed valentine mints. Ill try the chicken entrée and endless iced teas, gets warm lugging this equipment around.

Those are all bland facts compared to the capacity for voyeurism. Image you pay said company to send me on a paid trip with a bag full of electrical voyeurisms; to your precious wedding/birthday/someday I want to film a divorce. I show up and am immediately an extended member of the family. Hence, I dine with you, meet all the family, see the girls baby pictures that stretch all the way back to bloody. I hear the jokes, delight when you dance and lip sync, and laugh on the inside when you have five too many margaritas, do a conga line, lose you shoe and fall on your head. Why laugh on the outside, right? Because video is forever, and that’s laughter enough.

So enough of my poor Spanish to get through and its midnight, time to pack it up and ship it out. By then the Padrino’s are a bit brandied up and need not babysitting for they are practically pickles. Give the thanks, and say goodbye to your instant family forever, or until some other fine young Hija ripens to age or gets a rock on her finger. See you all again someday, different time, different popular restaurant, and certainly a new and unique variation of “El Mariachi Loco”.

Saturday, September 11, 2004

The Stoop

For all I know, we are in unison on the corner of some dusty street, miles and miles apart, sun setting and groping its last rays over our booze afflicted bodies. For everything I don't know, there is a sign somewhere pointing to the inevitable.

Without being able to see you, I can only imagine that we are together trapped in such a foreboding isolation. I can only dream that we participate in a breed of longing that only timeless lovers can summon.

I can only sit here, and with baited breath and intoxicated influence, hope to affect somehow the weave of fabric that brings back what im lastly kept from.

Its difficult to separate every emotion and every body. Its a complication to now attempt to draw from each experience as is own, as though untainted by experience and the million hormone saturated smootches. Its difficult to remember names and faces as much as just the feeling of being cared for. It comes to this eventually, when I can no longer struggle for the idealism of love and instead merge the senseless concepts thereof to make out of the clay of harsh lust a golem of satisfaction.

As though your hair spilled blonde or black on a pillow or against a wall. Whether your hands just barely fit in mine, or were pinned by the weight of my hips to yours. Like your eyes reflected so much as an ocean, or beamed like polished tiger eye, or even cut frantically out of emerald brilliance.

All experience as one lusty experiment, one haughty last revisit to sexy land. Each plummet into rapture as ravishing as the first, each beat and rhyme drummed out by crotches in perfect rhythm structure.

I can barely recall the details of a single body as I remember the sum of all.

It could still be you I see in distant whirls of the plains dust. It could be your car or your face or your voice, all found in some inconspicuously public location.

It still will all disappear under the weight of the earth, yet only to me bears a force of meaning. Only to me will your voice hold that polished ring, so don't let the romancers fool you. Do you think you will be as beautiful to anyone else, after having wasted so much on me?

So much decided as we sat on that stoop together, in my imagination anyhow, some two thousand miles apart. So much I lost to time, that I still let slip away to the laziness of being sad.

Yet there is a sadness to knowing that I cant be complete, or that happiness is only found in myself, because I fear that I have given that gift away at some somber gathering, at a party you organized so long ago. You got all my beloved people together, made my favorite party snacks and then spiked the punch with...

I have still forgotten how to take that one step forward, and that's the moral of our love.

Sunday, September 05, 2004

War looms unpredictable,

War looms unpredictable,
Balmy clouds forcing me into despicable liaison,
With abandoned and unkempt shelter,
With roofs like pinhole cameras,
Catching all the broken light,
That sputters over milk white structures,
Perhaps vermillion when the sun is downing,
When the cameras need external brilliance,
To shutter their imaginary glass eyes,
To forever preserve,
To assist cranial perspectives,
To adapt my timid frame to the surroundings.

A day of waking from tiredness,
Restless concepts built from a frantic January,
That follow me through more months and mornings than that,
And you can rub your eyes to give greeting,
Or get meaning through voyeuring,
Old slatted walls leave holes where plaster is bled out by rain,
Watch them walk and dance and pray,
See them dress.

Then we are getting married…

There is not a cake, imagine that,
But what’s under that veil?
That… shroud?

I might be losing clarity.

It’s HIM under that cloth,
I nonchalantly toss aside the fabric,
It looks like a blue bed sheet,
And it’s HIM beneath it.

I think, boy, why are you at my wedding,
Why are you at my most sacred day of union?
But neither my hands nor face respond to such logic,
Because I’m cutting him up with silverware,
I’m putting cake-like slices of him on platters for guests.

I feed a piece to my beloved bride,
And she eats a morsel with a grin,
What is this grin she is wearing?
Its reminiscence, I recognize it,
She has eaten this Goddamn cake before.

Furious at something and I’m whirling around with cake-ware,
Collapsing tables and slapping even the feeble guests,
I’m humiliated,
He has crawled inside,
He is ruining my finest moment.

Yet war looms, paltry and irresponsible,
It settles on dusty side roads,
It smokes harsh cigars,
It carries a heavy bag that jingles like loose pocket change,
It slings its dirty sack over one shoulder,
To let the other rest a while.

I’m in a tattered tuxedo,
Still running from the ruins,
That special day was built of wax impressions,
Meant only to melt with the passion of the moment.

I remember cutting your little eyes from the cake,
And every few miles a finger will find them in my breast pocket,
I’ll make sure they remain,
Two bead-like brown eyes,
Fixed pupils like eminent train wrecks,
Can’t help but stare at them,
Maybe that was her problem too,
To fall forever into their meaning,
I just have to see what she wanted with them…

I’m surprised you could keep up all those years,
It’s amazing the time you spent traveling,
From state to state,
In all of our little apartments,
Maybe you just found some niche in my brain,
And stuck there steadfast,
Waiting for the moment to strike.

I’m broken as I wander the black highway,
Sputtering recitations and problematic vows,
Screaming to hot deaf air what I knew was once love.

Because war looms in the unopened lids of my shaded eyes,
And my stares are now just as blank and unpredictable,
They are the last visual stabs of a shattered wanderer.

Saturday, August 28, 2004

A reassurance to Josh

It is such a pleasure to meet the archetype that began this precipitous tumbling away from modern considerations. It seems that you have made a comeback into the life of our former mistress, a step I never once considered since you tossed her out of you life in several instances of infidelity and the finding of shallow Pamela. May it also be played upon under current circumstance that you might have been the baggage that ruined our chances at happiness instead of my having hand in her current demise?

Ill let that alone for the time being, seeing that I am just reeling at your brash use of physical language. I shudder at the intonations that you should have come and spoken to me, to teach me a lesson, to keep me from sodomizing the innocents with my insecurities when we all lie in the puddle of your personal failings.

I’m truly blessed to receive your cake of verbosity and crassness, but my observations were without crass because they were with direct regard to people’s feelings and how it would affect them, and are you certain that I write verbosely when my focus is a subjective capture of a rather ephemeral emotional subject?

In correction I prefer “Existential Literary Engineer”, as your version replaces Literary with Technical and that just is cute because I have not the foggiest what Existential Technology is.

So to address your next racy ad hominem attack, I am just as happy as you are that I am again out in the world, and perhaps I will grow up a bit too as you suggested. I will begin by approaching relationships maturely and responsibly and not to believe it is my mission to correct all wrongs in my partner’s life through angry intervention. You surely make yourself look like quite the hero though when you tell me harsh words like fuck off and get all huffy puffy about troubled artists.

So maybe I will live in a boxcar, like Kerouac perhaps? You can keep your American play though, because as I see it you are much more fitted towards the American dream. A young hurried romance with confused responsibilities and a pharmacopeias supply of life and mood enhancing opiates in the medicine cabinet (though some in tragic succession have the tendency to make out peckers flaccid, is that not true?).

Let me instead script the next five years of your life out on tasseled vellum and with dreamy India inks.

Or better yet, let me write to you and speak with authority in that jealous little ear of yours. Though we have both wrestled with the same woman, and spilled kisses upon the same breasts, maybe whispered the same words in her half sleeping ear, that is not the point. Nor is it the point that you have someone to rescue or even have the remotest need to disregard the callings of another soul merely out of insecure jealousy.

I am not your enemy, and though you might see me as a hateful disillusioned man, these are my presentations of the facts although perverted by a wistful mind. I too have read your poems of hurt and have mused at your depictions of angels in fluorescent lighting, we share this thread.

So young antithesis, the challenge remains. I write to my blog with personal reflections, anyone on my mailing list that doesn’t want to receive them merely removes themselves at my web site or asks me to do so. I do not monitor my list, so anyone can join or leave at free will but some do so without my knowing. Your bride seems to unfortunately be fastened on by her own will to receive this, as I make no attempts to contact her, nor have I done so for over three months.

I repeat; this is a personal work that I have posted on my public forum for anyone who wants to see. So I have no one to leave alone or fuck off too you see, I keep to myself.

So surely this is why you avoided speaking to me, because you knew the truth combined with the life you are trying to lead with your mistress is too hard of a battle, I have tried this too. So join the side of the light instead, I urge you to open your eyes and grope for truth with your own findings.

Put down your anger for me for it is made of only testosterone and protectiveness. I am adequately prepared for you to respond with more angry words and jabs at my character, most addressing me as pompous or arrogant, but there is also a little faith in me that you can break the vicious circle and speak like a peer. Just remember, glory days are over baby, and don’t pretend this is only as good as it gets…

A radical defense by Josh

Really...I avoided speaking to you for a long time, even when I was there and should have, but this is really too pathetic for words. I've seen a lot of people take out their insecurities and failings on the people who try to prop them up anyways, but you really take the cake for verbosity and crassness. An existential technical engineer...cute. I'm glad to hear you finally got out of your parent's house, maybe you'll get to grow up a little, find yourself in a boxcar, write a really great American play...but as for your ex, you can leave her out of it, I think you've already done quite enough, and someone your age should have gotten over name calling a while ago. You're such a fucking troubled artist, so misunderstood, so abused. Leave her alone and fuck off.

Cordially,Josh

Posted by ShunyataX to la Philosophica at 8/28/2004 04:16:48 PM

As good as you get

…and what if this is as good as it gets?

Well my dear, those crucial last words were some of the final utterances to seal my conviction towards leaving that city. It became a city built of remorse and regret, and of you stalking me. It became a metropolis of broken promises all gathered up on glittered street corners. I could block your phone number, and take enough doses of sleep deprivation to nearly forget about you, about your sticky kisses and your handprints on my back. Somehow though, you still left messages, little telltale notes as though you were screaming through the veil of the underworld, as though you somehow breached the realm of the dead to put a cold necrotic hand on my underbelly. This analogy had you all but still and buried.

You made silly little reasons to call and stop by. Crap we had collected before your fateful little trip home, stuff we were going to own collectively when we lived together, you needed that motley bag of yard sale items immediately. Just could handle the possibility of me slipping town with Salvation Army quality novelty mugs, a vintage Saltine’s tin and your vibrator.

I hope you liked everything I left you, because it indeed was everything physical that connected you to me. That little wooden man that greeted me to Pennsylvania so long ago, he became a visage of our struggle when I bored his tiny heart out. It surely was not a heart that kept us together anyhow my dear. Every picture, even a sticky note that I had wrote your phone number on when I solicited it from my called ID after our first phone call. Your hair ties that you left on my sheets, a bracelet slightly bent from fast paced undressing, a sweater that was left squatting for land rights in my closet so long ago. It all came together how much of you I had inhaled in our brisk months together and how little capacity there was for me to breathe. So I expunged the acrid aroma.

So little sleep… I look at the mirror, I’m disheveled. I have hair shaped like my sleep patterns and a beard that needs trimming and sideburns that need weeding. I cut it all off, and it was nice. I forgot about the mirror for damn near a month, and everyday was a great hair day.

So with a fell swoop I dropped you and vanity in the same receptacle to compete for food and/or attention. It all felt free. I was in charge of my genitals, and only my genitals; and soon I did not worry about your precocious vulva and its frequent flyer miles.

In the timeline this is about where you intercede, cutting nice peaceful violin solo’s in half with your prepubescent banshees wail, all sitting neatly in my voice mail box.

“Don’t forget the pictures you took of me, I want them!”

Yes its true dear, I took nearly three hundred pictures of you in various poses, non poses, and states of undress. I assumed you wanted our memories together, as these were tickets into times when things might just have been as good as they get. Maybe you did want them for the powers of good, yet something oscillated within me that grew contemptuous at you showing a new person our intimate memories, perhaps you and this new person engaged in some coital activity. Either way, I didn’t have long to decide whether to make the effort for you.

I started writing this goddamn wonderful play called Law Boy Forever. Don’t ask me what possessed my spirit or my fingers for that matter to begin me on scripting a play, but the first page was rife with symbolism and accuracy of emotion. I smiled a huge smile at how well it wrapped up my emotional longings to quit from your constrictions.

… and then, as it so happens in the land of opportunity, the platters of my hard drive ceased to spin and locked up the screen with a final glimpse of Law Boys exploits, well the fictional one anyhow, as he has already planted his flag on your dimpled ass.

Can it end that easily? Thousands of images, videos, writings, digitized memories, damn near a human life, gone to star stuff when a little speck of dust lodges between two dervishes of magnetic plates and jams them to a stop? You bet it’s that easy.

Another job well done of emptying you from my memory; lets thank my slow old friend called entropy. What timing really; I took your cheating screw and immortalized him as a massive testiculed and super hero outfitted lawyer, contrasted his ideology with a sharply underwritten wit towards the subtlety of human passions and then ripped it all magnetically and irretrievably asunder.

So what was left between us now? …you’re stalking abilities?

You did surprise me when you first stopped by, didn’t know you had the sack for it really. Thought you might have enough respect to leave dead things buried to decompose naturally. You came in a little skirt and a slinky tank top, and the notion that you meant something to me. You’re an arrogant little girl. “My stuff!” you shriek with your body. I can’t help but shut the door, it’s a protective action.

The second and last time I saw you were much the same. I hadn’t slept right for weeks; you came and feigned some pity for obviously I looked pitiful. We sat in the summer morning sun, me having slept for nearly two hours and still reeling in the daylight, wrinkled clothes, reeking of fast food. It was a solid rock wall in front of the apartment and you put your little butt daintily down and wiggled it into a crevasse or depression in the stone.

We could have talked about anything, solved anything, my walls were down, I was a fresh person. Instead you ask me how long it will take to here get from upstate New York. I reply with arbitrary figures and you retort with how you were wondering that with the company you would be receiving if “They” would be getting into town soon.

Your old habits are so intentional and they spill through the cracks in your character.

There are two genders, male and female. In most languages one conjugates either a masculine or feminine denotation into the word they are using. He or She would be proper examples of referring to a singular piece of gendered company. It was once in the habit of poor grammarists to attempt political correctness by saying “they” instead of “he” or “she”, particularly when it was assuming the presence of a non participant character.

“So what is HIS name?” I say.

With a shock and a startled laugh you begin the whole game again, but you play yo-yo with my heart no more, because the string that should tether it to your finger was long ago severed by the penis of your lover.

As a play writer would insist, this is my exit, and Ill pat you on the head as I pass and remind you that you have taken the last moment we will ever again have together and turned it into a forgettable sour memory.

Really, that’s all we will have for an exit. Shortly after that I started driving. Not just because of you, but because you are a piece of the city and the city itself lies to me. So Ill pack everything I own into the backseat, prioritize and compromise, discard memories that I wont want to drag 2,200 miles with me.

Ill make promises to myself that I can keep. Ill keep Elizabeth’s advice at hand “Don’t take any shit!”

“I want my fucking pictures!”

You make it fun to check the phone, though you probably don’t understand the word “no” or “don’t ever” for that matter. You had to bother me just as I was delighting in seeing palm trees for the very first time. You don’t understand that these photographic bits of data have spilled out of existence forever; and I promised you that our last meeting was the final straw so I can’t bear to tell you either.

So will you just sit and wait, discovering all the little time bombs I have left for you in our fragile city? Will you just go back to grad-school with you clique-ish friends like you always have in the past, talk about more boys and their endearments and spend the next few years of your cancer remission passing your tits around the lobby? Will you dig your little hand into your tight cotton under things and dream about movie stars and glossy lipstick, law degrees and dancing your little heart out to change the world?

Well my dear, you can pirouette tight formations and toe off on a high kick for justice, but that balance of needed things can only be found when I stopped dancing and instead put you down.

See, now I’m far away, immune to your visits and letters and phone calls. I’ve found a life that I couldn’t have with you and your lubricious ways.

The best part; is I know now that I never needed you around for me to be in love. I know that when worms were crawling out of your body or when josh was your secret second life or when all you could eat was a cheap fruity breakfast cereal; that you were indeed just limited to being crazy.

So take that. Enjoy your cramped narcissistic classrooms and narrow narcissistic company, enjoy boys from the big apple, and smile that homecoming queen smile, wave like Jacqueline fucking Kennedy before she had to tuck that boy’s brains back into his head.

I found so many awful things in you where I never expected to find them. Just the same, I have found love where I had once neglected to look. That will teach me, but I am willing to learn, because for me at least things are only getting better…


Wednesday, May 26, 2004

I’d rather count turtles

I’m driving down a dark boulevard. It’s scarred by wet rain stains. It’s pitted with pitch puddles, a yellow line scratched dimly through it all. Then for some reason, I don’t see the road anymore…

We’re in the forest, hands on saplings, supporting our weight. We swing out towards the waters edge, to catch a glimpse of little heads receding into shells. I see your hair bob; you’re at the end of your arm, you turn and smile… Suddenly I don’t see your lips anymore…

I’m at your house, or on the phone, telling you how my past hurts me and I can’t be hurt again. Oh, but your crying, and I’m crying too, and I know your perfect if only I can make you know that. But I see the microphone dot of my cell phone, and hold on to angry thinking, its tearing us apart. But I can’t hold the image straight, it loosens, slips from grasp…

I’m in your arms or you’re in mine, who can tell in that tangle? Can it be like this forever, I can eat with a straw? You talk to me and tell me everything that rotates your life; like I were just a microphone bud in your soul, picking up resounding bits. I’m at the curtain when you shower, the smell of scrubbed skin and clean hair.

I’m driving; crying… Am I lost; my windshield is wet and blurry, like a contact lens out of place. When it rains, it pours, and I can see only a mirage of happy forest play, and red Frisbee in the park where you never dared to kiss me. I remember kissing you first, I had to, and those eyes made me do it.

I’m on the phone again, telling you I’m confused, starting the shit all over again; the stuff five months was supposed to heal. I cry because I think I can’t stop it, but the truth of the matter is that I can.

It’s not hurt anymore, its counting turtles, its cold nights in your apartment bickering about toilet seats or me getting jealous of your cell phone log. Its sweet words, and some bitter stuff too, and the few days it takes to heal from saying them. It’s the smell of cooking and of eating, and the citrus soap that cleans the plates that I can smell on our hands when we make love afterwards. It’s about seeing those goddamn turtles, and the smile it brings to us, and rotating with a wide grin that catches us both by surprise.

It’s about our little apartment, and our cat that’s probably named after some dead French guy. It’s the need I have to be special to you, and the fear that I get when I think I have lost you to expectations and jealousy. That’s my biggest fear in the world; not sitting on the tub edge and hearing about your corner of the world.

It’s about hugging you goodbye and then hello again, a perfect month apart. It’s about me reaching out to you, and knowing with all my heart you are reaching back too. I know its just black letters in a white screen, but it’s also about young love growing up; together…

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Associate Survival Guide

Us

We are your every day working man, Semi-Confident, Semi-Charmed. We attempt our separatism from capitalism so we must harvest from the “other’s” obvious obsessions and vapid decadence. We differ from the shopper because we possess a human humility and perhaps a morality that is indicative of our retail past. We are the damned salt of the earth.

We sell you pants, shoes and laces to tie them with. We deliver you fish and game with our tools of harvest, and give you licenses to murder them. We spoon feed you babies MRE’s and clothe you with fatigues for traversing the dense urban jungle. We give light in the dark night, we give you the batteries to suck dry. We put the hats on your pretty wife’s head, ones that wont keep her warm but instead build her flock of fake friends by merely being ornamented. We give you socks to keep your fat feet dry in the cold wet of your basement. Slippers to walk your merely luke warm carpet with.

When all that is not enough, we sweep the kernels of sweet corn that somehow missed your maw. We clean our glass and windows of your sweaty palm prints, and wipe your fake food breathed smiles from our heads each night. Then we clean and prepare for the next day with some reckless drive, a force that keeps us moving through it all.

We please the upper class enough to keep them complacent.

We are the new bohemians and nearly the third millennium coal miners. We are the intellectuals but the culturally downtrodden. We are the recluse and refused. We are our mothers fear and concerns. We are the ticking gears of corporate consumerism, we are the cogs in the machine of a humming and bustling global economy.

We are the ASSOCIATES.

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Them

They are the “shopper”. They are the bourgeois and the imp of a money market. They are the impractical yuppie, and the semi-educated slob. They are sometimes the working man too, but they hide that under egoism and a horrible demeanor.

They are a consumer that lives to consume and extracts the monetary equivalent of their output. They are thrifty and cut coupons, they are wise and accept no substitute to the product that they typically find on infomercials at 4:30 in the morning. The shopper is wizened to your way of selling and will correct you harshly and bluntly when your face fades from a fake grin or when you back is turned to them. They walk with an eye open to scrutinize any passing giggle or trace of sincerity.

The shopper like us to be the mommy, but doesn’t like to be reminded. Don’t clean up their messes when they are looking, they expect that to be a behind the scenes maneuver. Don’t smarten up to old men and surely don’t ask a woman her true size. They are “people” who live whimsical flights of fancy, who believe that their crass consumerist world is reality and that with the correct measurements they can modify their clothes instead of losing weight.

These are the slovenly ilk that count our money and reject our credit, audit our tax returns and seize our scared children when the ex calls the state office and says you don’t feed the kids. These are your divorce lawyers and O.J. attorneys.

These are the tricksters of our world that will blindly seek you out in order to suck your soul. They will tattle, lie and fake pricing discrepancies. Turn not a blind eye to the shopper, it is your destiny to appease his twisted spirit and send him upon his way to the ephemeral yet corporeal other world that is the parking lot.

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Weapons of the Trade

There are certain weapons that one must possess in order to take upon the grim duties entailed within our guide. There is of course no shortage of need for basic physical violence, but quite often we are simply outnumbered.

Tact / Wit

This skill involves a certain amount of premeditation and subtlety. When presented with tasks by the shopper, one can with practice, talk the consumer out of interest in the merchandise altogether or out of wanting a certain size. Most of this is a good deal of improvisation and can be combined with the following methods to be more effective.

A simple encounter would go as follows;

“Hi, can I special order this in a size 17?”
“Sure Ma’am, our special order policy is a full deposit and it could take up to 12 weeks for delivery, still want it?”


Sarcasm / Facetiousness

This is the simplest weapon to brandish against the pseudo-educated shopper. When applied tastefully this method can dissuade presence in your department, attention to a specific object, or altogether the expenditure of time in the store. Use wisely because the shopper does tend to snitch on any rude associate and will demand revocation of your job before they shop again. Just use this to stare un-adoringly, look indifferent when they tell stupid jokes, and appear unpleased with the actions of their snotty children.

Techno-babble

By far the most powerful tool for the associate is the ability to create impromptu techno babble. This gives you points in product knowledge and also allows you to flip the tables on the thrifty shopper. The psychological advantage is obviously gained by appearing to be the current expert of the given subject. Bare in mind things like blatant mispronunciations (Chipp-a-paw instead of Chippewa, Vikadin instead of Vibram, or even Carnheart instead of Carhartt) this will immediately cue you into their weak area. Most people cant tell you if Gore-Tex is for waterproofing or for warmth so it is simple to gain the upper hand.

Pawning

Pawning off the customer is a can of mixed blessings. This must be done in a way that includes the other associates and hitherto does not annoy them. Hell hath no fury like an associate that has been duped into dealing with a retarded soccer mom just because you wanted to skate off to the bathroom. Be considerate and remember what you do can return to you in the way of store Karma.

Coordinate with other associates and make a plan of customer volleying that will benefit you all. Stick to the story that you are not allowed out of your specific department lest you be flogged. This will force them to feel alone and in a sea of information which is an obvious segue into techno babble. Excrete a hatred for people that ask you for an ice skate in the shoe department and try to return underwear at the sporting good desk.

Once the premise has been established, this should be a wonderful means to extrude people from the store. They feel juggled and manhandled, virtually violated and personally demolished.

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Mission

Only with these tools can we service our obvious conviction to humanity and punish the sludge that ruin our world for profit and the joy of plunder. Only with these weapons can we serve justice and bring down the unholy and corrupted reign of the all mighty dollar!

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Pretty in Eyebrows

So in retrospect it could have been in any of those countless of deep summer days, spent in the tall park grasses, looking at the crazy people between sessions of engrossment into depthless pages of Foucault, Diderot, or even Vonnegut. I could have recalled any of them with vague and pointless detail, but instead I chose this one to dwell upon and further drive into the conscious bastions of thought. It was this piercing summer day in the park that held on like a regret shaped icicle.

This was the park with the pitted pavement, where I learned to ride my training wheeled bicycle. It was this crab grass knotted knoll where I sat with big sis and tried to read; to the tune of red fish, blue fish. It was the sandy paths and littered tree bottoms that my mother and I first walked when her dear husband passed away; and my father fragmented into a mantelpiece ornament, scattered photographs of faux human poses, and the toothbrush that took damn near a year to find its forgetful way out of our bathroom cup.

It was the same set of three swings. They sat next to the gate, mere feet from the lazy afternoon street, slick thick rubber seats, shined for little asses, and chains laminated to protect little fingers from biting rust. I sat here too when my legs were short enough to swing, when I would flail my little feet hard enough to get some momentum to see over the fence and into the world it protected me from.

But today, here on some warm rock in a city park, I feel like the glowing capitalist Buddha. Full lotus with soft drink names wrestling on my tongue, their citrus twists eloquated by a Proustian like nirvana. How can I come to enlightenment when my proudest memories are cut from associations like park swings and popular children’s literature of the era? Has the great Theodore Giselle hijacked my family recollections with his wacky doodles and witty pronouncements, leaving me with only catchy phrases and sitcom tunes to show for growing up?

I need to stop and somehow grope for something real, an anchor to my identity. I’ll write a bit about modern romance (there is none), and I might sketch out an adventurous story about how a man chases a wounded metaphor all over a dirty little city trying to save her from herself and in turn drawing the precocious entity into his own being.

This is like drinking… I need a subject…

Panning left I catch wind of a middle aged dog walker, rubber mitten on to catch a stray pitch that seems all too inevitable as the mutt throttles at its haunches nearest to the rhododendron side of the shrubbery. I could write a book about dog crapping, little bits of scat-poetry or fun euphemisms for puppy dumps. I could sell it to this woman for sure; maybe add the cost to her subscription to Dog Fancy or some other irrelevant niche advertising haven.

Turn to the cute girls in the water, in their new bathing suits and dryer sheet reeking towels laid out on the sand with their wet butt prints holding them down. They giggle and gossip, rub on some sun lotion, arch their legs gracefully when reclining and make kissy faces when the lip gloss is applied unevenly. I could write a book about their friendship and how it transpires five, twenty five, eighty years down the road. They would buy it, but it might just be too late for me to make enough of a cut to get my kidneys dialysized.

Everyone is just such an actor here. Maybe even me, sitting on the hill and scrutinizing everything below me, playing the role of a disheveled depressive writer who puts on a brave front like he knows what the hell is going on in the world. It a façade of control that the performer tries to exude as he stays the stage in the event of major catastrophe, or in this case a tragedy of perspective. Everyone here just an eyeshot away from being figured out and analyzed down to their very particular and predictable parts. Everyone just players in the grand scheme of… wait…

There she was; her hair, like some fluid cacti, aggressed by the hot breeze of some arid-temperate sandstorm. It held for a moment and was back to brown strands across neck, to the brim of a nape. It reacted like an inverted mug of coco, wild with non-dairy creamer, highlights of softer brown in unstirred drape.

From my hill, she was made of a top of a head, a right arm unsheathed to the elbow, fingers cradling the latest paperback thriller, or a witty coming of age novel, of the autobiography of Jesus.

No! It’s Dharma Bums instead, yet rightfully from this distance I can barely tell if she is merely smelling the Kerouac or reading the frayed edges of the flowers surrounding her. I’m imagining fragmented sonnets under the magnifying glass, chapter-ettes scribbled out in .5 pt Times New Roman font; it would shimmy down crocus cilia and wrap its way up the woody stems of tulips. Rosy red stamen, erect to casual sunshine; Camus printed lengthwise, in sonnet like explosions of flower sex glands and glorious French surrealisms.

Turning over each petal, each plump frond; sucking in the prose like nectar from her palms. It was split columns of Ellis spread out in a five mile line, replete with simplified punctuation, wrapped like a gooey decal around the trunk of the old Dogwood, spiraling literature to the warm heavens.

Her eyes flitted over my dog walker, my bathing girls, and even a stooped man that I had somehow missed, tucked in the lilied gazebo with Walt Whitman at his hip. His eyes were sharp and green, and even with his hands tucked between gnarled knees, his humble look did little to disguise that at any moment he could toss out a quip and wrestle you down with his great expanse of poetical notion.

That is when the rain starts, and in cuing that weather was a brooding haze of summer sky. It was rife with blown dogwood blossoms, sand gritted grins; born of a thundering humidity tipped to its side to begin seeping its mixture of ripe dewy rain.

The Dandelions tiptoed as their faces were pattered with that drenching summer stuff. Leaflets hopping like tight drawn leather drums to the falling drops whose pace now quickened to a meaty downpour.

All my people scattered with papers over their heads and purses and laptops under their arms; rain biting their tidy faces and manicured moments and picnics. It challenged their love of the outdoors, forcing them again into flight and alienation in slick mobile homes and furniture cramped saltbox houses.

We are finally alone; me on a damn hill in a stunted city park, cataloging a girl with her shoulders drawn, warming from the rain and keeping her dog-eared tome from the pressing weather.

Is she realistically this beautiful? Is it a crude variation of psychosoma that draws her character to me, like some transposed mirage of what I need in my life?

Can she sit in the cold pissing rain with a wet book under her thigh and wipe snot from her eyes and be so beautiful?

Rain blots entire words from my notebook, but I’m so taken, I want more than just breathy contemplations on my yellow paper. I want to watch as she ties those little brown shoes in the morning, or when she takes them of and curls her toes with a big yawn.

It’s an anticipation that broods for me, like a quiet room filled wall to wall with trepidation, something needing to vocalize out of midair to keep the world moving and to keep the walls from dissipating out of non belief.

-

Then, seeing her just weeks later, outside of a coffee shop window, walking contemplative steps; over a berm, across a sidewalk and out of my life. It was me knowing all too well that I have shared more with her than anyone in my life, in just that simple glimpse that seemed to say good bye/ do I know you.

How would it have been if I had instead taken that wet wooden seat next to her, the one that sat barren in the park. I could have told her this stuff, given her my notebook, something, extolled my passionate speech about the shallowness of humanity and how I knew by the way she watched the flowers that she felt the same way, and that when I saw her I knew that she needed to be in that moment of my life to make me real and awake.

Would she have cuddled with me in that sonorous rain storm, sitting next to one another with our papers in one pile, her “On the Road” in a wet stack with my “Slaughterhouse Five”?

I couldn’t tell her then if we would travel Europe on motorbikes, living in abandoned castles, or holding hands in ivy trussed villas. Whether we would just meet again and again in the little knoll in the park and read poetry to one another, backs to the dogwood, and me getting up enough courage to ask her if it was cancer that took her eyebrows away from her.

I would say, that either way, it’s nice not having something distracting me from your eyes.

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Gods Elevator

God… I am sick of the elevator scenes. The ones where the door opens and everybody looks at the new guy getting in, and inside there thinking why is this bitch slowing down my ride to the tenth floor. The way a man and woman are supposed to look so attractive to one another when the doors close and they are alone in this free floating dangle of cables and sheet metal. Oh, and the way that you greet people you know in real lift (not just lift life) when you meet them on the elevator. They are so damn jovial, saying their hullo and bye in sync with wrist watch glances and rubs of the collar.

Ill count out loud the times these presuppositions have come true for me… you ready?

. . . . . . . . . . . .

I meet walking dead people in the elevator. I meet hallucinating, barbituating, anti-depressanting people on the elevator. I meet the lifeblood of the city in this little elevator that skims up and down between basement and twenty seven floors above ground. I meet god as he waits for a ride, and looks disheveled when you open a shiny door for HIM! He says “floor 28”. I get the joke and roll with a grin, all the while with my thumb on the big ol’ button that will bring us to the top floor, to the ladder and to the roof.

This is the shit that happens when you share some crappy cognac with a homeless man, trade hats and go home a funnier and deeper person. It’s the experiential scar from looking down twenty seven flights of brick and hot metal, betting nickels on who is going to jump first, and reveling in the fickle breeze and cheap buzz.

“How did we get here” we say in unison, and we mean it in a fitting existential kind of way, but with rummy in the tummy we can’t help but think about that godforsaken elevator, its bad tinny music and sticky buttons. So another laugh from the peanut gallery and were on our backs, counting stars, rearranging our ladder rungs and faking a strait face when we chant “we believe in society”.

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Fidelity; in Subtitle

She stepped into the room and the environment changed. It became an atmosphere charged with accusation and post committal doubt. The two tense bodies occupied an entire hallway, the entire adjoining apartment. They are filled with a restlessness that permeates the wall and dull simple furniture. Whatever drew them together in this house, as they both stand in stupor and over stimulated emotional groping, it was a force sublime enough to pull them here and to lock their eyes in a somber gaze. Aside from the drama that transfixed their anxious situations, this lone active magnetism spared them.

They studied things in one another face, as only long time friends could. Acquaintances that have bathed together and brushed tears from each others cheeks. It was a mixture of blood, assorted veins of empathy. Yet, this was a dance, and a composition.

It may not always be the path to healing to discard from your life the very person that hurt you.

She cheated on him… He is trying to keep hating her for it, and she is trying to keep alive. That is the inspiration for this genre, this chapter called trepidation. The details are strong in each others mind, and motives are slick and refined to the point as to where each party is sure to why there should be such a wall of animosity. Its an unspoken mutual decision that the relationship has faltered to a position that is akin to chaotic. And why do they look, do they give the gift of acknowledgement to one another, why open the air to a possible word or insult?

Is it within human nature to be drawn completely through the middle in a situation such as this, to be split upon the character of emotional affairs in regards to a loved one, that you can simultaneously classify a single person as the object and the catalyst for two very separate emotions? Can it be said that a human being can be a muse and a suicide, a nepenthe and a wretch, and thus drive us to untimely self destructive struggling?

Would it be fair to say that the convoluted state of human affairs leaves so much to interpretation, so many moods to be deciphered that it may be impossible to suppress the urge to love the most unfaithful lover, simply because of a delicate memory rescinded and touched upon by painful recollection into the better parts of your lives together. To make love even after they lie with another, out of the fragmented perceptions of another persons psyche and misplaced motivations. You can even cheat on her, plummet your sexuality upon another, empower your sensual nature, and with love you care only to cheat on her with herself.

You could be unfaithful to your relationship, to objectify her as a loving sexual object and to pour your contemptuous eroticism into her waiting lusting hands. To touch her breast with yourself in mind, her textures to arouse you, lose yourself in her. Every moist thought and damp touch, her body new and fresh with a lust aroused by paranoia and reorganizing love.

Can you love a person and still be driven by hormonal caveat, out of reasonable passion and into a hedonistic outlet into self serving emotional gluttony, this much is true, spelled out by the scented history of copulation. And why would the cunt operate any differently than a hungry mouth?

To her, her eyes and quivering lips tell a much different story about the world, about an affair and a love gone bitter. Foremost it is a confusion that has permeated her world, left her reeling and dropping into harrowing circumstances. For her it was a momentary lapse, and even an indulgence into a promising path. It was a momentary drop from faithfulness to peruse an emotional and sexual road, that promised and begged to fulfill her, even to nourish her being and elevate her esteem, revoking a self loathing she has begun to foster through stages of fighting with her partner.

In ways, she was convinced it had less to do with him than it did with her understanding her world and her freedoms, even her options as the present themselves in her life, those that beg for a solution more comprehensive that wondering forever if she has invented love in her mind or if it is just a complacence that keeps her at the heel of another. Perhaps it was an opening to allow her to be happy again, to see if that person, an intriguing friend might be the grand mover to open her eyes to a new and not so distance sunrise.

They spent the day in courting bliss, shopping and holding hands, kissing on the couch with a sad or funny movie in the background. They could talk about the most intimate of things, seeing that their relationship was not superficially bound up in trust issues and fears of driving a partner away. It was not convoluted in secondary meanings and cheap sweet voices designed to calm a persons feelings long enough to work out an issue that grates on a partners nerves. So they spoke the things that brave misunderstandings have kept her from uttering to him, afraid that he wouldn't hear, care or listen.

All of this opened her to him, to someone who she could believe loved her in a genuine way, or even without would nourish her with this feeling for a long and important moment. So, an evening spent lip to lip aggressed her drive, and his tongue to hers, his fingers on her nipple, this all together drove her to absolute the act, to push forth with her yearning to express and be heard, to fight out with this meaning that was to be born from he heart.

This desire, this unbearable force mingled with his yearning, his soft face and thin body, it all came together as she slipped out of her clothes and thrust to him her delicate shape, her naked chest to his and another slow touching kiss and they were together. Pushing strong for every quiver and gasp, two soft legs caressing the aft of his thighs as the night passed away uneventful for the rest of the world left in tow.

It was fair play sex, and for them it was beautiful. It was every right word and a coupling of bodies who’s magnetism was fixed in righteous polarity. Timing was the only distraction wrestling them away from fitting together in a gracious physical harmony, and as her eyes bled clean of this consummation she knew the world she would be putting them both in, the men she cared for, the men who she fastidiously prayed would give her the grace and understanding to take what she needed...

Monday, April 12, 2004

long day

"Hey Bruce" I say.
"How's things Bruce" I add.
"How 'bout the big vacation?"

The boardroom is silent and everyone is looking at me. I'm screaming these questions to Bruce, not anyone else. Oh, the nerve...

Bruce goes about his normal existance, much like I didn't exist. A dilly here, a dally here, so pop in the boardroom; cocky, confident. Whats his big secret... Talking with the ladies, all right, and fending off some boyfriends, what a slicko.

I once assembled a complete HO scale model railroad track, all 37 feet of it, as it sits in the attic. That has yet to get the same attention that Bruce has in the pre-meeting group.

Bruce says, "Screw you, Bernie!"

I shouldn't talk outloud, I know that... Boo Hoo...

Sunday, March 21, 2004

My American Dream

I’m only 18 hours away; from finding truth. I’m only 18-24 hours away from being enlightened and amused. I’m only several days to a week away from being the best person I can possibly be. It’s not just random chance, I’m waiting for it all to come full circle and for the world to open its sleepy eye and say we found a fucking winner.

I saw you bright and luminous, and you made sugary promises to me. You told me I could have abdominal muscles and true love, with one simple machine. And you yelled to me;

Bla bla black sheep,
Haven’t you any shame.
All these blokes on QVC,
Aren’t they getting to your brain?

What do you lack in kitchen cutlery,
That keeps you all alone,
Surely if you get that bargain treadmill,
You won’t always be stuck here at home.

There is hope for you my chubby friend,
And it’s not in a face machine,
Because when you go out, we will make sure you stay out,
Or go home with a just of age teen.

So tell me the price of your happiness,
Before I fade to blue screen,
Just one chance, if you call in the next half hour,
Your credit card condensed to dreams.


I switch to talk shows… I wish I could put Popsicle sticks up all of their butts, and keep them in line, talking cheap falsetto over their voices as I solve their problems. It’s taken years of skill building with the ol’ remote in hand, but I consider myself a cultural commentator and veritable warehouse of human relation skills.

I could do it alone, but you will see how much easier it comes after I have read “Who moved my cheese?” I’m only a small excited jump away from unpacking my new lives from Styrofoam and flimsy cardboard, and assembling them with poorly translated Chinese instructions that tell me “do no use, keep out of children…” or some nonsense.

Laugh all you want, but ill be a new man soon. Women and stock buying powers. Sipping the ice of good life, what a solid American dream.