to bed, you walk the dog, you have breakfast, you ride your bike, you just do nothing--you get the point? 102805 #eel I thought I was alone in the bathroom, and when I turned around I was quite startled to see a shadowy figure holding out a towel for me. I didn't really need a towel--I had only been standing in the shower, not actually taking a shower. But it was still nice to see you. 000096 #human I felt a little selfconscious, but not in a bad way. It was like a conscious decision to give in to an urge despite fearing the urge was there because i thought it should be. It wasn't. I am a child of the Ironic Age, and these are the oddities with which I must contend. 102304 #eel played/fought the first row of three or so guards. mostly ignored hits they gave me except as necessary to remain convincing enough. knocked them all out with cool martial arts moves. one of them had a stick. he hit my arm with it; it didn't hurt but i pretended it did. 090813 #worm Why do two people living in the same house look at each other like that? Is it a necessary summation of nature, like a fleeting waterfall when January grows too hot to hold its ice inside a limestone bluff? Is it calculation? Desperation? No. it is... looking. 081313 #copperhead I think that's what I need to do. Every time my friend breathes wrong or throws his shit all over the bottom of the canoe or not only fails to notice an orange root but also refuses to understand why I'm pointing it out or that it's a big deal, why it's a big deal— 051111 #martian 1. mr. Tatum used to play with ko-thi. 2. He slammed his fingers in an industrial-strength door, and it hurts to play, but he heard me & played with me & said, "just wait until after the summer!" 3. I said, "There was no deception." Miss Reed touched my arm. 081013 #dog *There is a knock at the door.* ME: Who could that be at this hour? HIM: Who could it be at any hour? Or is it the same person or people at this hour as it would be if he or she or they were to show up, say, tomorrow at six? ME: Shut the fuck up and answer the door. 110512 #copperhead be having a beer in my goddamn *pants,* not sitting here like a pansy in a nervous boat, looking down at my own legs sticking out of cotton shorts like a little boy would wear, wondering why my legs look suddenly effeminate. No, seriously. What's wrong with me? 081413 #worm Oh, I guess that girl works here, too. She goes behind the counter. She has something to say to the older lady. They have their conversation, which is more than a lot of people have at this time of the morning. The girl is wearing orange pants. I am too. Coincidence, merely. 081413 #worm I let you lay me back, and take me. I feel what it's like to get wet. I understand my mother. My grandmother. Her sewing machine; her clam chowder. I talk with my true voice. I let my hips go, for good this time. I meet my summer boy, and take him to my cabin in the south. 082813 #bunny #elephant 2005 Fuck me, fuck me. Oh, won't somebody please just fuck me utterly senseless, fifty guys fuck me fifty times in a row, and fifty girls with strap-ons too, and their cruel faces spitting on me, utterly senseless so I don't have to listen to me any more. 010614 #bushmill That doesn't make any sense, says Mel. Shut up! I say for the what, fifth time? I wish we had some popcorn. She puts her foot on top of my foot, and I almost keep my eyes closed in kittenlike rapture, but instead I decide to watch outside the window some more. 000000 #human somehow her staring at me with her red lipstick and her curled hair and her strange breath and her constant, fibrillating, vibrating shakiness, all just made me feel very, very pedestrian. she talks about work. i answer briefly. it all feels so normal, like toothpaste. 022605 #human Instead of merely saying to the Moondance guy, "I'd like another scone," I said in my best, Southeast-Missouri-but-nonetheless-intelligent drawl, "I gotta get another one of your scones, man. That's good stuff." His face lit up, and that made me feel pretty good. 081313 #copperhead I have an idea to go down there and see. Throw together an elaborate scaffold of excuses, get in the car, spend all day and all night in the zero zone of the highway. Just go and see. Then the idea disappears like an imaginary minnow. Ha ha ha, I follow it down. 000000 #eel I was way outclassed, but I let the capoeira flow take over and I thwarted his every attack. I literally pulled his energy right out of his limbs, swam with it, and turned it around. Afterward, he was impressed and asked me how it worked, and I tried to explain it. 000009 #human I want to go back to that bricked and stacked place where its okay to make weird little experiments with words that dont always quite make sense. I miss that. And then go get a drink from the bubbler, find another quiet, hidden spot away from the elevator, and try again. 080913 #stargazer #squirrel That juicy voice recognizes your scent; it knows I'm addressing all this to you, and it will not be silenced, and it is sometimes circumspect but its big "secret" is, it wants to talk about how much it loves you. That's all it ever wants to talk about. 030696 #squirrel I went to an Irish bar with Jackie & Glenn (another co-worker) and it was open stage night and they cajoled me into singing Brown Eyed Girl on stage with two guitar players. I feigned reluctance and then had an absolute blast. Little things like this matter the most. 032612 #human #meerkat Time to start saying yes more. I've been (had to be, I guess, according to some voices) the strength of no. And yet, daffodils in a metallic blue water bottle. A lego camper. Sticking sticks in the fire. Mud. Dipped cones. I'm scaming becase I need a vaciton. 083013 #gull 2010 "Information wants to be free" has not so much really to do with money changing hands, but more with: the greatest ideas want not to be confined by the minds that spawned them. The greatest possible invention is an organism. 031203 #eel Coming out of a restaurant, in a low, thrumming town shot thru with inlets and canals. The presence of deep water everywhere, all connected to the sea. Stopped to look over a railing. Mom was there. Dolphins! I shouted. Dolphins! 102302 #human So I asked the teh-dsa again today for some insight into my ritual gang- bang roda, which is coming up in a couple of hours (I'm nervous). The teh-dsa said, "Thanks for making raisin pie." Sometimes I want to slap the teh-dsa. 010314 #jonquil Next she picked out of the basket a pair belonging to the rich girl--her finger traced the sailing-ship curves of the monogrammed "M," feeling the contrast of the raised letter against the frictionless satin of the panties. 090913 #bunny the blank page in a new light. And how about with men? I should like to try that now, in my smoother skin, in my svelte carapice with turtle-turned grin. We shall see. 030004 #human Shut. Up. Oh my god. Shut. The fuck. UP! 100112 #human A person can only stay in panic mode for so long. Eventually, your philosophical swagger has to kick in. Wanting to smoke at the shop is so the old me. And the new me. But not the now me. And the now me is the one who matters. 090913 #trout I looked over my shoulder. Lightning struck again, and you were silhouetted against the black glass of the patio door. We stared at each other in the reeling dark, while the answering machine said something vapid in your voice. 092312 #gull #crow #fox Download app that's supposed to help you achieve your drama/dreams. Fidddle. Ask "what *is* my dream?" Decide "get paid to do what I love." Ask "what are the steps?" Decide "meditate" and then—what??????? 051111 #martian 1. I flung open the door of the boys' restroom and said, "Hey, what's going on in here!?" 2. It was the snoke. We all recognized it at once. 3. Demetrius Stokes took off his jacket and said, "Box me, Mr. Schulte." 000097 #human So why didn't i say anything. Why didn't I pick up the cup and follow him into the cafe and say, Here I think you dropped this? When I can do that, then I will be strong. Then I will have come out of my hiding place in the bushes. 000002 #human my midriff's turning into a lazy rabbit, and no skyscraper cares anywhere still waiting for an attractive man, the street hovers inches above itself try a few kicks to loosen up, she says, and her black tights pinken reflexively 010614 #eel When I had first caught the balloon and prepared to tumble and be chased and what-all (I wasn't even sure but I was ready), nothing had happened. Everybody froze. What are you doing? Riana demanded, nicely but with a definite edge. 112413 #longwalk #centralsea We're for real populating a real empty dark quiet part of the ship tonight. It's nice. I'm not scared. It's not totally dark. It's really quite alive, lit softly, pulsing, glowing within, ready for anything. 081413 #worm There. It's out. He can't deny it. Him heard him. The blond boy heard him. The sandpipers and the curlews heard him. The great heron heard him, and carried the message to faraway chimneys and bramble-bushes everywhere. Right on. 032513 #gull Sometimes when you can't quite be with those real moments, you find yourself tinkering with the scaffolding, the mechanical business of this drawing and putting, this poking and peeking. That's okay. Just remember to go back. 120599 #human WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WORDS WORDS WORDS URGENCY URGENCY THEN THROW THEM ALL AWAY AND START AGAIN WRITE WRITE AIRPLANES SEX CANDY CHOCOLATE STEAK BUBBLES CANDLES OIL FUCK ME FUCK ME I'M A DRAGON DRAGON at the mud show. 081313 #copperhead Well, the world is mine, now, by god. I step over the left gunwale, and my ankles kick in remarkably well after so long sitting idle. The river rocks grind beneath my rubber soles as I cross the gravel bar to the northwest. 111503 #squirrel My cousin's house burnt down last week and she was lifeflighted to the hospital.  Good news though that she survived the fire by jumping out of a 2nd story window and broke 2 vertebrae in her back.  It's been a rough week. 000096 #squirrel how did you know or rather when did you know you were "really in love" and what was the difference well when 6the words came out of my nmouth and stung my klips and hung in the air scared and frozen then i guess i knew. 081413 #worm Him and Me walk on. Go behind the waterfall. The little blond boy survived childhood. He's a dusty, army-jacketed teenager now, with too much sailboat in him for his own good. He says, remember when I helped you make the snoke? 100313 #ghost There are a few gusts in the teh-dsa, there are a few ghosts. Yes ghosts exist but the funny part, all you superstitious morons, is that they are just mistakes, typos, miskeys. Somehow that's more sad than disembodied spirits. 040804 #squirrel Kissing the back of your neck and up to the base of your skull and gripping your flesh with my teeth.. growlring a little.. possessive at this single moment of communion and lining my front to your back and my heart thudding just behind yours. 120913 #trout Only class he passed one year in high school was AP American literature. Loved Edgar Allen Poe, couldn't give fuck-all about anything else. His teacher said, I am disappointed in you right now, because I know you're not trying. 103012 #eel she said, call me if you need anything, leave a message. I said here? Cuz i thought she meant her phone would ring over here on the sidewalk at this old theater/auditorium. Ha ha, she said, no, the phone rings in my office. Okay. 102913 #snail #elephant ...her belittling spit, and I know above and below all else that I will eventually pour myself out to her, for her, and she, uncaring, superior innately and permanently, will always own me, never need me, always win. 000002 #human #meerkat I always felt an affinity for ladybugs. Or lady bugs. And mayflies (because May flies) Ladybug, mayfly, sycamore, sassafrass, sumac. Tapestry, incense, beaded curtain, filmy skirt. Small, firm, pale breast with just a hint of freckle. 102913 #snail Running through the hot soup and smell of the afternoon, beads of sweat cascading off like so many stars being born and spectacularly dying beneath our notice--the yellow cheer of that sidewalk becomes sinister as I look back. 112413 #fox #crow You don't get to just be a hero. You have to live and live and live as a failure, broken down into little failure pieces. You don't get to just experience being a hero the whole time. There's no parade while you're alive. 010314 #jonquil She always baked bread at the rich girls house, but never at home. Why did her own house not seem like a place where she could do that? But then again she never ate smoked almonds and tangerines at home, either, but here— 042813 #human Play castle tents in the backyard breeze, neighbor kids connected by shouts across the commons. One by one they succumb to supper time but they'll be back, back to hide and seek and argue and escape again into the nascent summer sundown moment-- 081613 #worm I'm thinking of alcohol's greatest hits. How you think the song was written for you, even though you know it wasn't. As soon as you're like, 15 or 13 or 27 or whatever it was for you, you know. And then you drink to forget. 101413 #human The kid in me mistrusts adults' self conscious niceness, probably because it doesn't seem as though it's genuinely directed at me or for me. It's a show for someone else, possibly primarily for the adult who's exhibiting it. 081413 #worm The old dog on the porch stands up, ticks over to his bowl, and drinks. Sunset swirls around him like a lazy dragonfly. The long shadows smell of cut grass and limestone. Summer lasts forever. Someone's coming. It is almost time. 032413 #maelstrom the beast knows i'm coming-- scratch that. the beast knows I may be inching closer to no longer running. Big difference, heh. But nevertheless, I must be inching close to *something* because it's throwing everything at me: 080913 #catacombs i miss pussy and i miss washing golf balls in the ball washers under heavy heat, walking across stubbly grass, on the way down to the river crashing in slow motion, and finding the dark enchanted places kids aren't supposed to go 081613 #worm The sun sets early on the bookstore. The not shoppers don't not go home. The door jingler throws on another imperceptible coat of rust, and gets ready not to go out, nor to stay in, but to half-exist on the threshold of either way. 081313 #copperhead Straight ahead, the river cantilevers right, and disappears to the southeast. There's more gravel over there, more crawdads, more nettles, maybe a frog, more flickering leaves, and always, always, always—more water. more water, more light 081413 #worm find him, no matter the height of the tower, the breadth of the moat, the contempt of the monsters, nor the invidious omnipresence of the popular conception of princesses as helpless, merely beautiful, and perpetually in need of 081413 #worm #roach The side of the map I can see now shows Krim and Ltiky seated at the bar in a brokedown old tavern around the corner and a few flights of stairs away from the Snoke, a few lightyears away from where Esriel's Cafe used to be. 040004 #human REMEMBER THIS: EVERYWHERE YOU GO IT'S LIKE WAKING LIFE. PEOPLE WILL JUST COME UP TO YOU AND SAY STUFF, AND SOMETIMES IF YOU LISTEN IT REALLY MEANS SOMETHING, OR IS IMPORTANT, OR MAKES YOU THINK, OR IS JUST WEIRD AND FASCINATING. 000096 #squirrel i dont know i think its a game that you know how to play really well it hthink its like riding a bike and you dont know how to stop hmmmmm riding for a long time and when you get off you feel like you're still on the bike 102913 #snail #elephant Yes it is often encrusted with sex, dripping with jewels, raw as the bared neck of some lithe girl you're grasping forcefully from behind, one hand on her neck, hard, and one hand roughly furrowing her naked pudendum. 010314 #jonquil Yes. Homework. People did that, didn't they? Why was it that this mundane transgression they were about to attempt seemed so much more titillating and impossible than the long-term deviance of the last few weeks of Gwen's life? 110412 #copperhead it's like one and seven eighths. I'm pretty sure. Great. So this thing definitely leaks, most likely. Pain in the ass, is what that is. The river is mostly shallow. I mean it's not like we're going down in shark-infested waters, but still. 081013 #dog *They're not going to wear underwear. It's just a couple of tingly, pleasantly raw cocks behind denim; nothing else but the fall air and life is good. They walk, hand in hand, sometimes stepping on the sidewalk cracks, sometimes not.* 082813 #bunny 2005 And oh yes--I want a man like Orsino. I don't want a twink or a poseur or a pretty builder. I want a scary bearded big fucked up man like Orsino to sacrifice me like the lamb I am. I too am in disguise; time too is fleeing. 000002 #human why one man in a thousand crowds perfect silhouette? queer GOD I LOVE SAYING THIS: One more smoke & then I go Wouldn't it be cool if it was always a surprise what kind of genitals you would find? They just dimmed the lights. 081413 #worm The bathroom is exquisite. Everything is real plastic. Him has seen nicer ones before, but never in places he had been specifically invited to. He plumbs his wretched pocket for some tobacco, finds it, rolls a grease-stained smoke. 081613 #worm Why things end is that you start to groove on them. And that makes them end. It's dumb, it's tragic; it's like the national soap opera or whatever, but it's what happens. Did anyone else notice? Probably not. But you'll never know. 000096 #human when we were talking about oddletters doing the RAA thing, howard talked kinda like he was joking, and he said, "How cool our lives are becoming! To think I left this city for fifteen years, and came back, exhausted, and now...." 081313 #copperhead But whatever it is, it makes me get up now. The canoe does that dumb rocking thing canoes do even when they're mostly on the ground, as if it wants to dance with my cracking knees. I inelegantly steady myself, elbows sticking 081613 #worm I remember some seniors saying I was a more for real person than my brother was, and how I was kinda swelled up about that and kinda pissed off at the same time, like protective, only to be honest I think I was mostly just swelled up. 011004 #eel There was a boy who lived in a bottle (a fairly well-appointed bottle, it may be said, with ochre carpets and a wet-bar), and he wouldn't be persuaded to come out unless we (the audience?) could find some people for him to play his guitar with. 050704 #eel I knew I was going to end up cheating on my wife. Didn't particularly "want to," you know, but I remember saying to myself, I just can't help it. Actually, I said that to the girl: I can't help it. Nobody ever makes me feel like this. 081413 #worm Hey! Jelse yells, as the pipe flashes through the air. The driver convulses sickeningly. He stops trying to climb out. The overalled man drops the pipe, staring as if he's just woken up. He lurches back three steps, then turns and runs. 081413 #worm Him's supposed to be working, but Esriel's not here and Esriel's pretty laid back anyway, and she doesn't pay him in cash or anything, so he decides he'll just sneak a sit-down on the old plank porch, and peer into the dusty summer trees. 080406 #human how monkeys' faces change: a part-time seminar on personal narrative meteorologywhy dragonslayers will always find work: level playing fields don't stay level for longi want a man so bad right now. like a sexy nigerian. or freddy. 082813 #gull I don't necessarily disbelieve in magic. I find certain rituals helpful and fascinating. However, I prefer magic that doesn't cost a lot of money, and that doesn't irresponsibly or capitalistically attempt to pass itself off as science. 090605 #eel Chris and I were in the middle of a project to restore a small but grand rowboat to seaworthiness. It was stormy and windy and moody outside, and the waves were getting more insistent. We lived by a secret sea. It was almost ready. 082013 #trout A hard-pointed spaceship nose-dives into the backyard. Those familiar old fight-or-flight hormones fire up inside me as I go over to investigate. This is the third time this has happened this year--and this has been a quiet year. 081413 #worm Are you sure? prods the blond boy. Aren't you supposed to be somewhere? Don't you have lives? Responsibilities? I mean, come on, no one wears clothes like that down the river unless they have an easy chair in an office someplace. 080013 #editor - If you do not need to do a function **right now,** then you most certainly must not fuck around with it. There is no such thing as getting the "environment" ready for every contingency. It already is ready. **What is not ready is you.** 091313 #elephant Munsy said I’m gonna let you decide. Give me anything! Anything! I'll take anything at all! I said and she licked the sweat off my chest and I watched her golden chest sweat glistening in the early afternoon lily pad monster heat 081413 #worm Everybody pretty much keeps to themselves unless some interaction is really important. It's up to you what kind of boundaries you want to have. Some people like a half-falling-down, rusty, barbed-wire fence. Some people like an electronic system -- 081613 #worm It's your turn. You realize this man probably is no student. More likely, he's a perv. A creepy, possibly sociopathic perv with a bad haircut. So why do you kinda want to fuck him? That's one of the minor mysteries. The great ones are too obvious. 081413 #worm When the darkness of overhanging sycamores steals over the stolen craft, she stands and smiles. One hand upon each hip. One smile, two generous lips. One foot forward, resting on the crosswise seat. Her glittery red shoe beckons to Me. 000002 #human Men are so pathetic. Especially the straight ones, with their pasty throats and hollow eyes. But also most of the gay ones, with their pants and attitudes. And I? I am pathetic but that is because I am an infant with a bulky camera. 120913 #human You're right. I don't care about your stupid shit anymore. I know perfectly well what's at stake, and I'm not slipping into this old vortex with you this time. Because it's sick, and sickness just really isn't particularly sexy. Anymore. 000008 #human Megan, naked, performed camp dances in the kitchen. Libby rocked out. Millie put on a hat and said, "Millie's going to work!" The last song, in Megan's sweetly piercing sopranino, was Make new friends, and keep the old.... I teared up a little. 102913 #snail When the floor changes to hard wood not artfully but by actual age and wear distressed, there is a wall of books to my right. 092504 #human Asked yesterday what she would like to be when she grows up, Megan replied, "A dog." 090813 #elephant You have pretty nipples. Your breath smells like strawberries. Your ass curve makes me howl. Candlelight washes over your pert belly, and when you arch your back and thrust your pouting pubes into my face, the universe (as we know it) smiles. 012014 #human #serpent Cutting lime wedges with a serrated knife; for a moment felt too tired and bored to bother being careful with the knife 081313 #copperhead The sullied rainwater that does make its way into my mouth tastes like iron. 081413 #worm Because, Geprorogo says. The cops--the new cops, you understand--long ago pegged Esriel's as a hotbed of political dissent. Oh yes. They needed someone on the inside, someone to keep them cool with what went down. And they paid him well. 081613 #worm Where's my one one dollar bills? Give me back my eleven swine. Poetry nite at the ol' jail cell. Come one, come awl, come in nuttin' but a yaller shawl. We gots plenty of jam. I got pain medication that would make you blush, kitten.... 122303 #squirrel Right now I'm afraid I look bleary- and sunken-eyed, shivering and pathetic, as I seem to have caught some horrible cold or (I hope not) the flu. But otherwise, I'm told I'm generally more anthropomorphic than ogre-ish. 102910 #human Why do we have to hide our idealism? Why should I be guilty for saying I love you? Man cuz nobody makes me whip out the notebookrgxdthhhhhhhhhhhnjjchhhhyhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhnhhhhhnnhhhhhnjjjhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhnhgggggg like you do. 081413 #worm They rave goodbye to the sweet barmaids. The barmaids call out sweetly, come back soon! Oh god, you know we will. They go outside. Mud the color of nightlights prevails. Old planks wrap around the tavern. It's almost going to rain. 010414 #mistress At 4:25, awakened suddenly by some Pavlovian response, I chafe against my collar and hoarsely ask, Now? And she says coldly, barely interested, No. In the casual hatred of her voice I find true love, and long to drown in her contemptuous spit. 000096 #squirrel so what about this warrior thing. what about it. you what about what do we need to turn that down can you hear me yes. can you hear me when you articulate i think we better turn it down i'll turn it down. 082904 #eel The bus driver offered to sell me some cash. "No thanks," I said. I don't have that kind of money. Who the hell does? Then he looked pretty hard at my card. "It's an old one," I said, which was most of the truth. He shrugged. 090813 #roach You have to go through my apartment to get to the underground cafe. You might think that would be horrible, like living right on top of the airport, or the dump, but I feel personally blessed. Someone could trash the place, but no one ever has. 081613 #worm This is a test, I said as soon as they was all seated around the enormous spool. Tell me everything you know about jail. You sit around and play with barbies all day! Cash in the trash can. It's funny what this place makes you become. 081613 #worm Yes, yes, Protein!, sing it out, say your little incantation before our humble repast. Hamburgers again. Sound familiar? I wonder what poor piece of shit animal these ones are made out of. Chew, chew, think and chew but mostly chew. 102913 #snail #featherwoman When I told you I don't relax because I'm afraid I'll miss something, you said you can miss some things, and it's okay. 090813 #trout You know what I think it is? he asked at last. What? I asked. She lets me be myself. 082613 #trout Now I can just look at girls & smoke if I want to. Like that girl: tall, fair, one shade of grace this side of awkward. Flat hair twenties style. Or guys, like the card player at the next table. Breezy open shirt and girlish grin with muscles. 081613 #worm Hey, you. Yes, you. You want a smoke? No, I'm not talking to anyone "in here." I'm talking to you, out there. If you exist, can hear me, and are jonzin, come get a fucking fag offa me and light it with this lighter. Please. Let me know I exist. 081413 #worm Drinking, smoking, music, cinder block walls to keep the neighbors out, more music, more drinking (as long as there's more of the stuff, you can always have faith that there will be more of the stuff, so drink up), and of course, whores. 102903 #human Holly and I really didn't get talking until we got drinking. YNOT YNOT. Tony's Tony's. She showed me a folded-up, undelivered love letter she carries around. It started, "OK, so..." just like something her sister might have written. 081613 #worm I thought, Tomorrow at least I'll get to smoke again. And then I thought, well, I kind of have to piss, so I just let go, and piss got all over my thighs, and then I got up, took off my flowery girl-shorts, and had a smoke right now, just in case. 000001 #human Sugar and spice, revisited . . . Women are sexy like teddy bears, sachets, a riot of clean goodsmelling, revolting savage musk and sometimes wicked; men are sexy rough like trees, the terrible call of the sea, easy, perfect death. 012005 #eel But finally, the light comes. I didn't do it! They're going to do their investigation, and it's going to come out okay, because I didn't do it. I wake up, realize it's true, it's okay, I didn't do it; I would never do that. It's okay. 082813 #robot 012105 Ya know, amidst all the specious analyses, petulant grievances, and affectations of jadedness, it's nice sometimes to remember that the Internet is totally fucking cool and amazing. We'd better love it and use it while it's still (relatively) free. 070914 #copperhead It's amazing how long of a drive this is. When did I become so afraid of dogs? I'm in the car eating cheezits and drinking a beer and careening down a hill and all I can think of is that there was a time when the pack of semi-wild dogs on the shoulder would have been a thing I would have walked through, low and slow, using my instincts, but now I'm embarrassingly grateful to be racing by in a car spewing dust. Jesus, did I even have a car at that time? How did I get down to the river that first day? Yeah, I walked, that's right. The realization hits me like a slap across the face from a rival pool-player in a dive bar who's just realized he can do whatever he wants with me. Jesus, what the fuck have I become? I throw the bottle in the back seat, because regardless of whatever else has happened to me, the fat gut, the flabby arms, the paling constitution, I still don't believe in littering. Ah, these feeble myths on which we warp our tapestries of identity. It's funny, really, but I don't feel like laughing about it. Maybe a little farther down the road—shouldn't I have come to the turnoff by now?—I'll stop the car and it'll be dark and I'll get out by the soft shoulder and some weedy grass gone to seed and 081013 #dog *
You danced. And frankly, you looked ridiculous. You didn't win any awards. You didn't set any records. Oh, people noticed you, all right. What was that, the getting-riddled-with-bullets dance? You looked like you were having some kind of convulsion! Or a fake orgasm. You were wearing a toga. You went crazy and whipped the fabric around as you gyrated. You slicked back your sweaty hair with your hands as you flailed. You spun around and around. I fell in love with you that night, though you didn't know I existed. I was right there in your ear but you couldn't hear me. The music was too loud. Songs from your parents' exciting times. What was that one song, the four-hearted, full-throated harmony song that sounded like it sprang right out of the spring? Aaaaaaaaaahhh... the notes piled on top of each other like lovers in the hay. Lovers. You had never had a lover, toga boy. Spin! Jump! Swirl! Dance! It wasn't until tomorrow that you began to feel remorse. Shame? Did you look back and see them laughing at you? Did you figure out how dumb you must have looked? Could you not believe that fool was you? Could you scarcely picture yourself ever being that foolish again? Did something at the base of your spine, deeper in than a backrub could touch, tighten up? It wasn't until tomorrow that you began to think about what you did—and then my lifelong vigil began.* 081013 #dog *At the abandoned parking lot between the abandoned drive-in movie and the abandoned volcano. HIM and ME's bikes sit idly by; one wheel of ME's still spins lazily under a gathering bruise of thunderclouds.* HIM: [with a gesture of imminence] She's so.... She's so.... *Enter HER.* HER: So what? HIM: [taken aback; it was she he has been trying to describe to ME; he was not expecting to see her here.] Oh. Ah. Hello! HER: Hello yourself, you big dweeb. *HER embraces HIM warmly, and HIM gathers himself enough to reciprocate gratefully.* HIM: This is ME. ME: We've met. *HER smiles wickedly at ME. The smile lasts a spare moment too long for HIM's jealousy threshold and HIM begins to squirm.* HIM: It looks as though it's going to rain. ME: [pointedly not glowering at HIM] Yes. Rain is imminent. HIM: We were. We were ah. We've been having Martian conversations. Would you care to join? HER: [all but clapping her hands like a little girl] I'd love to! ME: [to HER, before HIM can even think to make the offer] You start. HER: Hmmm.... *To the east, the drive-in movie screen is vast, blank, teeming with invisible potential. To the west, the volcano is thinking about something. Under their feet, cracks in the asphalt answer an unanswerable question in code. HER's bike, having recently joined the other resting bikes, rebels in mauve insouciance against the unbearable machismo of gender reversal.* 082213 #human #treefrog Okay, it's happening. It's happening RIGHT NOW. I have sat here in the dark lit by the glowing screen and I have been just quiet enough for the creature to approach. The being of avoidance is sitting in my back yard, watching, waiting, and it was awakened and drawn here by my day at the school I worked at today. Someone on the Internet said, "Most schools have at LEAST a few teachers who teach critical thinking, even in the worst inner-city high schools. Critical thinking is a choice," and I said right on, brother, we do manage to sneak in there, and then I thought, wait, *we*? Who the fuck am I? I already quit! And I'm thinking back to my day of discomfort shot through with moments of nobility, and I'm having a drink and eating some chips, and even though I'm also lifting some weights, I have to ask myself, what am I avoiding. What am I feeling like I'm having to soothe myself and recover from. And I have to know at least part of the answer. And the next question is, how do I NOT quit? And do I care or do I not care? Do I care about only my own problems, are they so vast that I can't see around them? Do I expect heartrending sympathy for my struggles, but for everyone else's do I just want to get my check and go home? And if I'm not going to quit (our questions imply their answers), then I think it's getting to be really important *HOW* I'm not going to quit. It has to be challenging yet sustainable, 000096 #squirrel hahah no way no way no way 000010 #eel He was speaking with animation. I wasn't really catching everything he was saying, because I was thinking about the fact that here i was watching a guy who would be dead soon, by suicide. I was thinking about how i would be able to look back and remember this moment, this image of him, after he was dead, and so i should probably really try to soak it in. And then the image froze. He was standing there talking, and it suddenly just froze. As if some TV editor had heard my thoughts, and was trying to make it more dramatic for me. Only it wasn't a very good still shot. It was kind of an awkward side view, with him just about to open his mouth, or maybe just having closed it. It was kind of like when you pause the movie you're watching, and whoever is on screen at the moment looks funny. Later, we were talking about his albums. He had produced a few albums, and two of them were really good. I was going to go down to the music store at the college later to buy them, kinda because i felt as if i should, but mostly because i liked them. He could actually sing. He was kinda like a crooner. 102912 #human It is better than it sounds; to me it means: the space bar chisels softly thru the snow of this Until it hits a rock and then it sings, serrated, mad, ali ve! I' ve said it before and I'll say it again: I'm more alive now than I've ever been. 030913 #martian - Slow, compassionate repetition - Megan started out *HUGELY* resistant to nightly saying three good things about the day - But tonight, I started to say goodnight and leave, but *she* initiated it, saying the girl scout event was one big good thing. 011914 #robot #gull #deletethis I don't know, it didn't do it that time, but maybe that's cuz I landed on an existing page. Let's try one more time. 101503 #trout What's that word for a point that's nowhere on the line between points A and B? That word's me. 081413 #worm Some dreams take you back to high school with your pants off. They put you on the stage without your script. They leave you to improvise; stoke you with the certainty of failure. Do what you can to survive in these dreams. That's all you can do. This dream dumps Ltiky on the couch, married. The mettle of any marriage can be measured by the indentations it leaves in the couch. Ltiky's just learning how that couch feels. How it sucks in around his thighs, how it comforts even as it sings a flatulent song of death. It's the same couch he would long for, were he outside looking in, as he used to fancy himself in his romantic, self-deceptive bachelor life. Then married life taught him how pedestrian he had really always been. At least now he had an excuse--domesticity! And so he sits there on the couch, dying lizard in his lap. The curtains are drawn against the insinuating orange of the city night. His wife--his wife--is gone somewhere, on some familial visitation. She will come home much, much later, and admit she hadn't wanted to see the lizard die. Her lizard. She had unloaded its death on Ltiky. So Ltiky sits now, in a strange slurry of contentment and resentment, waiting for the end. 081413 #worm Something drowns in me when you open your mouth and I see you are not yet alive. You catch my other wrist. Your fingers are cold. Lifting my arms, and raising my hips with the forward pressure of your hips, you slam me onto a long, low mound of dirt and ash. 042505 #human That old saw about listening to everyone as if they were more enlightened than you is useful, but if you can simultaneously listen to them as if they were less, you'll get the whole shebang. Or at least more of it. There's probably another step beyond.... 081413 #worm Back in the butt-warmed comfort of his own booth, Barp studies the paper he has retrieved. It looks like a crude map. There's a square with an "X" inside, marked "You are Here." Barp isn't so sure about the accuracy of that feature, but he wonders what it would be like to zoom in on the "X" and see if any hidden elements revealed themselves. He slides his empty mug right up to the edge of the table, just in case, and trundles once more to the neighboring booth to pick up a pencil. On his way back to his seat, his lumpy troglodytic ass nudges the coffee mug and sends it hurtling to the floor. The mug shatters. Krim screams. The moment is forever frozen in Ltiky's lust-frosted mind as the moment he fell completely in love. The spotlights yank their blazing gaze from center stage, probing blindly for the cause of the commotion. Barp stands still, stunned, staring at the shards. "You are Here," they seem to say, and they really seem to mean it. They spell out the pattern of an unplanned city, an organically evolving metropolis of eternal potential. The fates of citizens, denizens, hangers-on and bums are written in the jagged cuneiform of those ceramic wedges. Barp kneels, knees creaking, and dumbly, reverently, starts to rearrange Npydyuan. 091313 #trout I kept getting ready to say how much I hated the man. But that's not it, really, is it? What it really is, most of the time, is that I just resent the necessity of his existence--because if not for him, I definitely wouldn't have been dejected enough to be looking down far enough to see the hole in the wall near the men's-room door. And if I hadn't seen the hole, I wouldn't have seen what was building and rushing up on the other side of it. So I wouldn't have had the forewarning to brace myself behind the milkshake machine, even though waitresses in tight skirts and sexy-utilitarian black aprons just about kicked me in the balls because obviously nobody's supposed to go back there. But when the tsunami hit, they were all washed away, along with all the other customers. As I was underwater, about to explode, desperate for a breath, I saw my girlfriend's necklace float by in the salty murk. That used to touch her breast! I swore to myself, and I clutched at it, like an infant clutches after absolutely nothing and anything at all. 042202 #eel We were having an intimate conversation and I was listening to her but also idly thinking that I probably should have married her. 062913 #martian 1. Dad said I dug the postholes really fast, and that was nice. 2. Took Celi into town in the old truck to buy concrete, and that felt extremely, I mean almost unreasonably fantastically nice. Physicality--I held the door at the hardware store for some girls, and the one said, "*Thank* you," and in my mind I was like, "Thank *you*," and I just realized again, a couple of days after staring around the shop at Leo's auto body and recognizing something from Alvin and those days, that I really am a physical being and that's one big reason why I am not an English teacher, and there's more to it than that (isn't there always) like the popcorn that Celi and I had that the hardware store guy gave us, and the half price on the open bags of concrete, and me winking at her and her winking at me, and the old truck and the open windows and the no radio and the clouds and the pines and the dust and the vague residue of last night's dreams 3. Lots of hardcore erotic dreams, some featuring Ann and the powerful cuckold dynamic. I am giving up on trying to cure that. I don't think it needs to be or should be my ONLY source of physical pleasure, but it is a part of who I am and I'm okay with that. I'm bi, poly, cuck, whatever. Pirate. 110008 #human This is me. I'm stepping in to save this wretched project, but not for the reasons you might think. I'm so horny for human flesh, I'm like to bust a nut. But horniness only really works out good if I have to leave my little world to go get to where the goats are rutting in the tall grass. If my little world becomes indistinguishable from the outside world, which it can do if I don't take precautions to, you know, actually have and cultivate a little world in the first place, then there's no catch and release. There's no give and take. My life is a novel. Fuck the novel. The novel is as dead as the theatre. And that ain't saying much. No, the point is not the story, the plot, the MC, the FMC, the OC, any of that bullshit the pansies prattle on about. The point is the world that exists only on index cards. The point is the freight train made of only text. You can't see the point until you zoom in. And you can't zoom in until you sit here, alone with your own dumb bullshit inside your own dumb, sad zoo of a head, for hours and hours and hours, whenever you get a chance. And you have more chances than you might like to admit. Don't you? I thought so. 081413 #worm Him is home with his girlfriend Dekna. Me had a girlfriend once--her name was Warra. It didn't last. Me felt her breast, once, on a long bus trip back from somewhere, but he was too slow to follow up. Warra got--bored? Disappointed? Offended, even? and hiked up her skirt to faster pastures. When Me cried in the bathroom about it, it wasn't so much because he'd lost her, as because he'd lost an opportunity to be in the game. There's no problem like that with Dekna. Me gets to bask in her warm aura any time he hangs around with Him and her. Me gets to feel vicarious tingles when his friend and Dekna touch and tease. And then Me gets to go home. Later he'll hear all the stuff about Dekna that Him would never tell Dekna herself. They'll be lying face down on Me's trampoline, in his boxy backyard under a tree so ancient it looks out of place in this comfortable neighborhood. Does she have hair between her legs? Me will ask; just razor stubble, Him will answer. She's really good at making out, Him will add, and to tell the truth, Me's not exactly sure what Him means by that. It could be a little, or it could be a lot. Either way, the electricity of Dekna, stored and amplified in Him's brashly questioning body and in Me's infinitely spying mind, flows between them. 081313 #copperhead They're fucking tippy, okay? There! Happy now, fucker? I hate canoes because they fucking wibble wobble back and forth, every time you so much as twitch your dick muscles! Okay? I mean, whose the fuck idea was it to make a goddamn boat that's like twenty times longer than it is wide? What the fuck? I'm supposed to go down the river in a fucking hollowed-out *stick?* Fuck this! I'd like to be able to have the concept of *sideways* in my kinetic vocabulary, if that's all right with you, but no. Noooooo! He wanted to take the canoe. He, actually he *insisted* we take the canoe. So here I am, practically immobilized with vague discomfort in this one-dimensional torture craft, waiting for his heinous ass to get his ass down here out of the grocery store, past the parking lot, across the interstate, over the weedlot, through the tires and plastic bags and shrubs, past the condominiums' backyard, over the gate to the park, into the thick of the oaks and the maples, down from the cliff with the caves and the bats, across the granite flats, down along the winding stream to the place where the smaller streams meet and make the bigger stream, then turning upstream, past the fallen sycamore at the swimming hole where he lost his copper bracelet, veering left at the neverending hump of the water from the great freezing spring, to here, this gravel bar, this predetermined place where we were supposed to be, I don't have a watch, at least an hour ago. The fuck. 081413 #copperhead The eyes I look at him with are light, cervine, wondering. The eyes looking back are dark, igneous, implacable. The sun drapes this scene in heat. I: shirt. He: no shirt. I feel pale next to his dark olive; scrawny and soft to his compact buff. 081413 #worm Their ship, the Moth's Wing, has a lot of elevators. It's practically nothing but elevators. Some of them still work properly. On the world where the Moth's Wing was built, some seven and a half eons ago, elevators had quite a lot of significance. If you dream you're in an elevator, especially one that goes sideways or in some odd direction rather than simply up or down, you can be pretty sure that some creature from that world is trying to contact you, or trying to lead you somewhere. Go with it. Ride the elevator, and don't be afraid. Fear kills interstellar travel like nothing else. And interstellar travel is essential to good communication. And good communication is, as we all know, essential to bloody everything, including a prudent schedule of elevator repair, which the Moth's Wing has lacked for several generations. Therefore when the Captain, the Science Officer, and the Medical Officer step through the irising portal of Elevator 301B, they find, instead of a nice floor, or even some walls with the usual array of buttons on them, a vacuous space that proves more than willing to whisk them, in cahoots with gravity, toward the planet they are (fortunately, probably due to the lack of a qualified pilot or navigator) orbiting rather more closely than standard protocol would dictate. 112413 #eel At Scott's house after school. Came back into the kitchen/living room. Another friend less close was with me. I said to Scott, "let's compare sidearms. " I had just recently gotten mine, and I'm pretty sure he had not had his very long either. he said okay not quite as excited as I was. His was a 45 revolver and I fiddled with the revolving part of it, not as familiar with it. Mine was a 38 ::automatic::. "ladylike by comparison," I said. My/our other friend was just standing to my right not exactly pleased. then Scott's dad Melvin came in. He said something about how we needed to put those away. He started to explain himself, but I said no need to explain, if you say put it away, I'll put it away. But he explained himself anyway. It had something to do with not having the tool out if you weren't doing the work. He had some example, some story to tell about Scott doing some boneheaded thing relating to acrobatics. It was kind of funny but the whole thing was rather serious. The whole time Scott was just sitting there sitting back reading a magazine or something. Thing is, I was just so excited to have a sidearm. So excited that I had finally graduated into the caliber of person that they would let have a sidearm. I was so excited to finally be legitimate. To finally belong. I didn't think our other friend really got that concept. 122813 #spanishnotes #eel It'll all be over in a little more than a month. They have been here for several months. The boy in the backseat is pouty because he thought they didn't really like him enough. The boy in the passenger seat (that's me) and the boy in the other backseat are trying to reassure him. "Everything was different when we said all that stuff" backseat 2 says. "We were just kids then." "I still am," quietly interjects passenger. "Come on," urges backseat 2. "What about long walks. Millions of stars. Dirt. The river. The Matador." (Everybody chuckles, remembering.) "What about Madrid?" Passenger feels for backseat boy and shares backseat 2's desire to bring him around, but his attention and all his butterflies are all about the insanely beautiful elegant worldly tall scary girl in the drivers seat. Finally, finally, finally her persistence has paid off and she's outlasted his fear and she has picked him up early from school. He's missing his after lunch classes. He will be in trouble. But he has been slowly slowly inexorably intoxicatingly falling in love with her ever since she first picked him out and pulled him aside from the tour group, and laughed at how he tried to pronounce her language. 083013 #bunny 2008 Okay, look. You can't go back and be the twink. You can look back, and be absolutely astonished that the twink was you. But you can't just be him again. It doesn't work that way. Or so they say. But anyway. You can be who the twink grows up to be. 051111 #martian 1. They smashed the robin's eggs to make her abandon the nest, because she was bothering them. waking them up early? or what? [ask]. But now she's insane. Beats her wings and smashes up against all their windows all day long. It's out of control. Are we supposed to feel sorry for them? 2. He doused the whole wooden play set in gasoline, threw a match on it, and watched it burn, burn, burn to the ground. It had attracted all the kids from the suburban ghetto. It had been so hard on his wife, who stayed at home. She wasn't the yelling type, but she was obsessive. She had to have everything clean and in its place. The neighborhood kids never cleaned up after themselves, were always loud and disorderly. It was torture for her. He had begun to regret the kid magnet play set almost as soon as it was in the ground. 3. The creationist science teacher got canned. At least that's what the seniors said. He had always been the one to tell the kids fantastic stories. He was wired to the FBI, knew the President, that kind of stuff. He said half the female staff and most of the outspoken male students were trying to get dates with him. That's why they acted the way they did. Well, now he's gone, after spending a whole weekend constantly calling and texting and harassing one of the seniors. "He's a faggot! He's a pervert! He harasses students and comes on to them!" That's what the seniors said. 112296 #human well, it was like a roller coaster. a swift, gut-sickening, intoxicating acceleration that, once something triggered it--in this case, learning that michelle was a pot smoker and almost certainly had some available--started creeping forward slowly, with a little jolt at the beginning of the ride that reminded me queasily that i was strapped into my seat and there was no way to back out now, and ratcheted up a hill that took forever to climb,me getting more and more nervous as my remaining seconds till the inevitable plummet dwindled, and then it happened, the hump came and i started going down--at which point, i said to myself, okay, i will just enjoy these two women in their house. no problem--a euphoric feeling that lasted about ten seconds, and then i started worrying about everything, and specifically about what terri was thinking about me, and even more specifically about what terri was thinking about my smoking pot because i think it made her sad and then i felt like shit i blew it, and i tried real hard to act normal so she wouldn't think i had checked out and then i tried to not try so hard so she wouldn't think i was a fucking pervert staring at her or something and then i tried not to try any of this shit, but by then i was so stoned i didn't trust myself at all. 010314 #jonquil They were sitting on the bed again. Mary had grabbed half a freezer's worth of food from her house, after securing her mother's somewhat baffled but pleased blessing for the sleepover. Supper had been microwaved, bad for you, and intensely satisfying. 081613 #worm I'm not even trying very hard on this, I tell the girlfriend. The way her smile demurred by proximate boyfriend falls on joy head of me. I like the way I know she likes me but she has to wait because her boyfriend is like, supposedly my best friend. 142648 081413 #worm #roach You have to go a little ways behind the counter to get to the one bathroom at Esriel's Cafe. Don't let peristaltic urgency overwhelm your manners--get out of the way of the waitress holding aloft a wide tray full of loaded coffee cups. In some other skewed universe, maybe you don't get out of the way in time; maybe she looks just a pinch too long back over her shoulder to sing out a farewell to the lanky, babyfaced guy on his way out. Clang! go the bells on the front door. Ka-chung! goes the cash register in an unrelated transaction--some smoky mafioso is buying a green pack of gum. Oof! goes your chest against the svelte breast of the waitress--o, delectable collision!--and ka-smash! go the coffee cups, spraying chinks of cheap china and hot, wasted coffee all over everything and everyone. You mutter an apology but she doesn't even look at you. She grabs a rag. Even as you're backing meekly away, you look with longing enhanced by embarrassment (you haven't forgotten your need to get to the toilet, of course, but that particular intestinal resonance may actually also play a subtle part in the heightening of your arousal) at the perfect, cruel curve of her skirted ass. 081013 #dog HIM: Mine says I have to go back to high school. ME: No . . . ! HIM: Y—yes. But— [relief pours off him as sweat] I get to keep all the knowledge I have now. And it's only for a little while. ME: Small blessings and all that. HIM: Yeah. I guess so. 091313 #trout Where'd you get those? my girlfriend asks. Her gaze, when she finally tears it away from the man, looks as ripped as a medieval bodice. I can practically see his meaty nipple prints all over her naked eyeballs. Her panties are sopping, I just know it. 081413 #worm What sets the old days apart from the new days? Essay question. Is it the foreign (in terms, if not geographical, then at least cultural) military presence? Is the main difference one of sociopolitical innocence? Does it all hinge on the price of cash? On the fact that before, all you had to worry about was getting hassled by a bored sherriff telling you to slow the hell down because we've had fourteen traffic fatalities already this year, and all of them were speed related? Yes sir. I understand. And he gives you a ticket--and you feel like a toady later, but you actually say thank you. At least the regular old cops were human. Now, with the soldiers in the streets, you have to worry about whether your identity is in order. You could be saying or thinking the wrong thing at any time. It sounds ridiculous, but it's true. There are strange side-effects. The subversion implicit in a simple plate of bacon and eggs is almost palpable. Carve it all up, shovel it all down, but the whole time, your conversation is subject to surveillance. Surveillance. Say it. We're all under surveillance now. It's not supposed to be a problem, if you're not doing anything wrong. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. But we all know, everyone has something to -- 215716 121396 #human #beach mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmcastlesmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmms andmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmclownsmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmountai nsmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmadeofsandmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmandmudmmmmmmmmmmmmandoaktr eesmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmandgentlevillagersmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmwhotakethe mselvesseriouslymmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmenough 081313 #copperhead The sound of ice clunking out of the ice maker. The sound of ice clinking into the glass. The sound of a shot being measured. The sound of the shot being poured. The sound of the drink being swirled. But it was just a commercial, so I kept driving. 081813 #treefrog The problem is, there's a dissonance between two branches of the same perspective here, I think. Here you are, an actual grown-up, certified by undeniable, inevitable, self-evident facts resulting from having survived, reproduced, etcetera. Now here you are, a grown-up in high school, and of course it doesn't take any special kind of grown-up to see that high school kids are still, most of them, as most but not all of them were the first time around, assholes. Here's the problem: part of you wants to win the battle from which in youth you shied away, when you were overwhelmed by the omnipresence of socially sanctioned boorism. Part of you demands it of yourself; you're a grown-up; you're powerful now (aren't you?); shouldn't you be doing something to avenge your juvenile humiliation? Don't you owe it to yourself, to all the quiet ones, to anyone who knows better, who is not, in short, nor never wanted to be, an asshole; to prove, definitively and sure-footedly, that the assholes aren't the superior beings their continual, facile braying insists that they are? But the other part of you pretty much accepts that there's nothing you can, or even should, really, do; assholes will be with us always, and if you really care what they think or say, then you really haven't changed at all, have you; you're really not--dare not whisper it--a grown-up at all! 081613 #worm There's something disingenuous about being in or out of jail—even as you're trying to act all transgressive, you find yourself not much more extraordinary than a cup of fucking tea. What is, after all, passion, except the bituminous response curve of an alien grove? I give you a command, thus: walk with me, and you expect a certain oh nevermind. What the hell. We're all going to die in prison anyway, right? 091313 #trout I joined the coast guard, and then I woke up and thought I had better kill myself, and so instead of doing that I decided to join the coast guard. I could get a decent job in there, because I had an education. I was going to be some kind of cultural expert or something. Whatever the dream said, I don't remember exactly. Some kind of regional cultural authority on some region or culture I didn't know anything about. But they had training. They would train me, and I could have that job and be a solid citizen, a real powerful man at last, and have a real woman and a real car, maybe even a truck or a four wheel drive or one of those things that's not exactly a car and not exactly a truck and not exactly a four wheel drive, but that's all cool and tight and efficient and powerful and that basically just says, yes, I have a good job and a big dick and I don't even have to compensate for it because I'm still young, and strong, and fast, and actually pretty smart, and I got all my meals taken care of and I got the full power of every god damned battleship in the world to back me up because, well, needless to say it didn't work out that way. 081313 #copperhead And hungry. And could really go for a coffee. Oh, there's nothing quite like a coffee at the right moment. At the not-quite-right moment, it's just another of those things that exist to fill up extra space in what we think of as the world. An unintentional, non-mindful coffee is basically another cigarette filter not decomposing on some sad, faded asphalt next to a cracked curb stop with rusty rebar poking out. Just the stuff of the world, you know, the stuff without which everything would look like a primitive wire-framed hastily blocked-in computer rendering of an idea of what scenery is—a rendering in which the artist added in a couple of pieces of trash or flotsam, for realism, but only succeeded in reducing verisimilitude, because the pieces were so transparently added, so mechanically placed, too perfectly accidental to look accidental. The only thing more perfect than nature is our idea of geometry. That's why we never quite get it, never quite really understand where we fit in. We mistake our inability to draw a perfect circle for imperfection; our true failing is our inability to draw an honestly, properly imperfect circle. We can't recognize true randomness, because we always expect it to look perfectly random. 121512 #human #crow Oh and PS: I don't have to trim my beard like some kind of fake poser-gangster teenage blowjob band bullshit little lines and fine trim. I can fucking grow whatever the fuck I want out of my fucking face and if you don't like it, fuck you. :-) 111513 #martian #treefrog - Bijan had this weird little chant/song that sounded something like poop-a-potato-potato when you wander-over-yonder that he kept saying - when he said it, he turned sideways to look at Will, with whom he was playing Minecraft and with whom, in a few moments, he was about to get in a major altercation over who killed who and who destroyed what, resulting in Will's being removed to a "break room", and a tendon on his neck stood out and it reminded me of years & years ago when JR said mine did that and it was one of the things that made me look masculine - Now I'm home and listening to music and the kids are playing Wii and Megan's sick but she'll be okay, and there's music and heat and food and no particular major trauma at the moment and I'm thinking about career possibilities and the idea of trading my camera for branding work from some guy with a portfolio who seems to think I want to be a copywriter, which I don't, not even ironically, I tried going into the wrong job on purpose before thinking it would make me clever and poetic and tough but it didn't, it just tore me down and broke my heart, and 000097 #worm Other things happened--like when the witches and I were in the old apartment, going through some things--I think this was right along when the bead turned up--and one of Helena's other neighbors came along. Sun, she called herself. She was either a stripper or a prostitute or both, I honestly don't remember which. She had a threadbare white dress and a voluptuous if slightly tired body. She had blond hair that looked like it remembered being brown. She was making conversation, and the tall witch chided her, or perhaps just teased her, for trying to make conversation. She offered to show us her tattoo, and the tall witch made fun of her a little bit for that somehow, too. I said, yeah, show us the tattoo. So she lifted up her little old dress, and showed us her inner thigh. There was a tattoo on it, all right. I don't even remember what it looked like. But I do remember that inner thigh, looking so--so--tough yet vulnerable, so delectably soft yet weathered that I wanted to stare at it, drink it in with my eyes all day. But I couldn't, of course; she put her dress back over it, and the conversation went on, under the humming thrumming slanting sunrays of Denver. Helena and the witches gently made fun of her more, later, when she was gone, but I have another secret--I really liked her, in fact some part of me loved her and still does and always will. 081413 #worm The Snoke offers to buy the Aviary a drink. They trudge up the mountain to the tavern behind the mansion. Where's the dog? The tiny barrista twins are here. Are they sisters? Blond and lithe, they flit about unhurriedly, bar rags swirling, smiles at the ready, young bosoms flushed with simply being there. Sometimes the older one, barely a teenager herself, lifts off her hempen blouse and serves bare-breasted. 082813 #bunny I had in mind this leaping elf, this musical unicorn of a young savage, lithely whipping thru the sassafrass grove. Recorder-playing, magic-spilling, laughter-releasing, he tracks lightly thru this world on an invisible train of mythical dimensions. He is the picture, of course, of health. He doesn't crab over a stinking ashtray, groaning and sighing about how crappy everyday existence can become. About the only thing he lacks is an experience-based sense of humor. Irony, like smoke, can overcome one, though they begin their charms with innocence. Anyway, I'd kinda like to reconnect with the brat, taking along everything I've learned. I am maybe a little bit wiser in some respects now, and I think the two of us would be a good partnership. He will be skeptical at first -- he'll find me crotchety and pessimistic, a burden. I'll doubt his ability to embrace the practical necessities of earthly adulthood. But we'll stick together, at least, you know, for now, because almost grudgingly we have to admit there's some sense of something, some connection? some appropriateness? some intangible viaduct between us across which flows in both directions Information -- that most melodic and elusive form of Energy, also known (and widely celebrated by our astral tribe) as Pershidium. 010514 #max Eyes closed, pulse pounding slowly slowing. Every knurl of bark on every tree; every shoe-scuffed root protruding through the dust; every mottled speck of asphalt in the road; every pane of every darkened window in the closed-up, sleeping houses up and down the block. Every glimmer of each headlamp of each car that streaks away tangentially, caught up in the highway universe; every hiss of every tire. Every paltry note of every country song that briefly flares out of the open window of a beat-up truck, pulling out of the parking lot across the way. Every disappearing thing. Every forgotten autumn, every cookout, every hot dog, every half-uneaten bun. Every tick of every clock. Every penny in the drawer. Every hue of every rainbow on the oil-slick fetid water in the ditch between the park and road; every pebble; every blade of grass, even the dead ones, even the partial, even the half-lopped off, half-rotten ones that will never grow again. The rider on the merry-go-round, he loves them all. He sees them, feels them, he alone knows them, and he loves them all. The spinning slowly stops. He opens his eyes. 081613 #worm Nonsense! It's a kind of prayer when she says it. Much as I have come to depend on the ingenuousness of Margie's dumb comments, I'm glad she's not here right now, so I can focus my full ears on this new, this other, this rocklike polished girl with no name. 082513 #bunny ZoE and Clare are leaving now, laughing easily in the dragonfly heat. ZoE left his knife and I touch it with my fingertips, lightly, a sissy touch against the lightning heft of it. My lips are slippery and my jaw is sore. I belch a mushroom cloud of spunk. 193514 100309 #treefrog God I want a smoke. And then some fuck me pumps and a long tall hit of the finest weed. And then a dog, a fine old girl, a path by the river, and all the time in the world. Where did it all go? The long age of ignorance is upon us, and I, for one, am relieved. The next Shakespeare may now appear. Drink! Which is kinda all interesting and stuff, given that I just now read in an [essay](http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html) that "as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They're just mistaken." Okay. I guess in a sense what Im saying is, Ive really got it now. I still suck (think Capoeira), but Im in the game. Ive got the proverbial bug. Lets just admit it. Im a teacher now, and Im thinking about it. All the pent-up, pulled-back rubber band power of the gun-shaped hand is driving me now toward the climaxxx of the next chapter. I care. God damn it, I care. And Im going to do something about it. God I want a smoke. Shes my baby! Dont mean maybe! 193524 081413 #worm #roach One more smoke and then I go. I mean it this time. A few more young girls come in--young in the sense of not being able to tell how young or old they really are. Thank god, they have brought their tits and their tights with them! You can't have too many tits in a cafe like this where the matronly waitress gets around to the couple with the baby, and recognizes them. The couple are immensely pleased. They will leave as big a tip as they can. No-one has too much cash these days. Anyone who comes here, and anyone who works here, has to know that. It's okay. It's no-one's fault. Is it? The bus driver tried to sell me some cash this morning. I said, ha, who has that kind of money. Then he looked at my card pretty hard. It's an old one, I said, which was most of the truth. He shrugged. As I made my way to my seat, I reflected a little absently on how you pretty much just have to trust people. The bus wheeled around in the sunrise. Across the intersection, the military police were cleaning up a mess in an alleyway. There was an overturned truck, all smashed. Looked like a lot of buildings had burned. Then we left that scene behind, too. 121802 #human Jim Linneman is going on with his chums about his favorite topic, local music. A bumper sticker from the third year I lived in this town, "Live to Ride 95th Anniversary," is yellowed and peeling off the wall. There is one pretty lady here, showing a small crescent moon of her back. I swear I recognize the bartender from somewhere. Riverwest White sucks but they were out of Eastside Dark. Yes, it is Wednesday but instead of going to the Roda I came here because when I stepped out of Rochambo onto Brady, the rain and the christmassy lights hit me softly and I had to go have a beer with Glenn. I thought about Up & Under, thought about the Tasting Room, but eventually I had to come here, to see if he would show up. Here by the open stage. Here by the dark wood. Here by Jim Linneman who never remembered me. Here by the pool table in the back room where Sara used to be, where sloppy scruffy Chris used to be, where Julia the raven girl was and where Kathy with a K was, where any number of perfectly lovely, funky, sad, shapely, perfectly glowing people used to be. And the huge old tree trunk chair that's such a great idea but really isn't very comfortable to sit in. 081413 #worm #roach Me imagines, regardless. At some point, his imagination decides that an awkward exchange of digits in a doomed cafe is not really romantic enough, and, drawing its pershidium from the thump thump thump of Me's humble shoes against the corridor's floor, where Me walks a few paces behind the smouldering Him, it makes Me the owner of a dashing, low-mileage, tricked out, sub-Ethereally equipped spaceship, and of a more substantial sense of theatre. His imagination, not finished yet, randy creature that it still sometimes becomes, also grants Me the know-how to pilot the ship, and the privelege of swooping down on an astonished and immediately horny Krim--whereupon the two of them go blasting off into the moonrise on a real, old-fashioned, rocket-fueled date. So Me spanks her a lot, making the little control room get all hot and booty-smelling, and he learns some really interesting things from her about the wines of Dotlong, and he twirls his unlit cigarette while they lean against a navigational computer console. They gesticulate through all the gone, gone flirtations of the definitely-going-to-fuck-tonight while Him, sitting by the next computer console over--is it the weapons station? communications? auto-chef? who knows--listens as intently as a rabbit, or an eagle, or a sub-Ethereal intelligence satellite falling slowly out of orbit, out of synchronicity. 000002 #dumanstupid is kind of like the tarot fool, and i guess spomon steller must be the magician. one hand on the future & one hand up my ass, i lead my house of fractional dimensional electro-souls across a page that doesn't exist woohoo 000001 #human shower warm water remembering sacred irreverent bath outdoors at festival>guitar spirit laughing rusty tones down upon our heads>two dogs run amok children trolls alike>spirit tangible effervescence between two mouths talking walking down rutted road past bacon coffee tangerine. hiking stick walking stick preying mantis thorn foot watch out liquid noon slide unhesitating by, on down down down into the water hole the fishy wormy bramble hole with trees and stumps of trees left over from before yes before this was the way it was. music loud unceasing do you copy do you read me yes i hear you come inside the sweat the pit the too-intimate cleft of angled logs and fire. what goes on is bigger in than out. space betweening jangle jingle eyes the black lies quiet lies the cool slow patch of interstellar knowitall the one note wonder sings out whip poor will/ whip poor will/ whip poor will 112313 #eel #touchtunnel #cave There was a secret school. To get there, you had to go into this old abandoned house. Planks falling apart, dusty, moldy, cluttered, twilight. Hidden. In a certain room a few steps below ground level, towards the front and to the right, was a place you had to squeeze through. If you were feeling very claustrophobic, forget it. It was a tight squeeze, and it would sort of close up around your ankles as you pushed your way through. Once in, however, it was a lot like any other middle school. There were hallways, different wings for different grades, you had to know your schedule, there was a vague sense of disapproval in the air. I was in there for a while, sort of half knowing what I was doing, and then I came out, Somehow it was a different time on the inside than it was on the out- side. Like a whole different scale of time. I kind of wanted to, or felt like I should, go back inside, but then I turned around and looked at that narrow squeezeway again, and it was getting winter-dark out, and I just couldn't quite bring myself to do it. 010514 #gull #moonwalker Nothing is ever forgotten, as long as we have any say in the matter. The cuboid is the interstellar space into which pale history's utterances forever travel, unfathomable, rife with the hope, despair, and imaginings of grunting, grasping humanity. 082713 #bunny #elephant a howl of triviality. a whole barn of nothing but straw and hay and bugs and dirt and slivers and pebbles and pellets and musk and air and grass and prickers and stickers and beggarlice and moonlight and slats and treble cheering and laughing, licking toward you over the amaranthine field. lightning somewhere, faraway and big. heat lightning, they'll call it, the barn dancers, and they won't stop, they won't stop for lightning, even when it resolves into crackling forks, even when it grows demonic, inhumane, even when it brings its boulder-headed friend the thunder, when the whips of water come, the sheets, the hail, the torrents, and even when the mud grows bigger than the sky, they just keep dancing, even when the solid pulse of the drums is drowned, even when it's insane to be out here in weather like this. because that's what they do. it's not work, it's not art, they didn't plan it this way, but they open their legs and their coats and their gauzy, sweaty, rainstreaked and mudsmeared souls to it. fuck them. i mean that in a good way. fuck them. please. one more time. for me. 081413 #worm Me has to agree, and finally they both have to laugh. They recline together in their bower of fruit rinds, coffee grinds, empty pickle buckets, crumpled soft-drink cups, cigarette butts, envelopes with wrong addresses, trashy novels with the covers torn off, missing-fingered rubber gloves, chip bags, soda cans (geez, people should really recycle more of this stuff! Me giggles), spent pens, obsolete computers, jerked-off condoms, threadbare tee-shirts sporting messages from lost political causes or the names of uncool bands, air fresheners that didn't stand a chance, foil balls, greasy napkins, wads of toilet paper surreptitiously thrown into the trashbin when a weighty dump made the dumper judge the toilet too full already, toothless gears, plastic forks, carpet scraps, moldy bread, the innumerable shards of a broken coffee cup, and at least one horribly inanimate rodent. 081413 #copperhead As we plod up this tributary, the question arises again: Why are you afraid of tributaries? Why are you afraid of going down the main stream? Wait, now I've lost what the question started out as. Which one was I afraid of? Was he the one who was afraid? 081413 #worm Of course, sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes you suck it up, make the supreme sacrifice and volunteer not to press your case; you throw the argument for the sake of domestic peace, and still--still, your complement in the matter decides to snipe at you. 112202 #human #trout While I was in the bathroom, Sruky tried to steal my computer! I said "hey what's up" to him when I came upstairs. He's seen me here and other places enough to know I always have the computer in my backpack. I set it down on a chair by a table, and went in the bathroom, just to wash my hands and face. When i came back out, the backpack and Sruky were gone. I heard fast clomping on the stairs! I scrambled downstairs after him and just saw him flying out the front door. I almost knocked over the sommelier on my way through the bar. I caught Sruky at the corner and tackled him on the pavement. "Sruky! What the fuck were you thinking!" I said and I actually started laughing. The wind in my lungs and the buzz in my feet felt good. Sruky said, "Oho, itv aya den soh blem!" and as usual I couldn't understand a word of it. I pulled the backpack out of his gravelly hands and helped him up, and we walked back up the street together. What a day. What a way to end a day. Or begin a night, which is hopefully what I'm doing.... I haven't had a night in such a long time. 081413 #worm Ltiky gets a roller-coaster feeling in his gut. He and Krim stop short of the cavern's singing mouth. She looks back at him, and the roller-coaster races over a huge dip. Ltiky's biggest phobia is roller-coasters, and it's only gotten worse as he's gotten older. 010714 #human #tonahutu That's what was so funny, speaking of inversions. It almost seemed like *he* was bidding for inclusion in *my* esteem when he said he recognized the feeling of staring at the stones, willing one of them to be the one that would best fit next. 081313 #copperhead We've got more clothes on than we've had in weeks, and I still feel half naked, and it actually feels pretty good. I feel nut-brown and elastic after all these days of paddling and portaging and splashing around. I feel tight, alert, cohesive. As a matter of fact I don't think I've ever felt this physically whole. I feel young but capable—it's a golden moment, and I'm realizing it right now, and that makes it a platinum moment. Cause let's face it, most golden moments sneak past incognito and it's not until a year or a few or a decade has passed that you look back wistfully and say, yeah, I really had it going on back then, that was really where it was at. How often do you get to be aware of gold while living in it? It's like waking up in a dream, lucid dreaming, isn't that what they call it? And you know you can do whatever you want, *because it's your dream!* 081413 #copperhead The surface of the water steams with a popcorn hiss. An undulating mirror under fairer skies, now it looks like a curving flat bar of sandblasted aluminum. The willows are dripping like washed hair, while saturated sycamore boughs droop like well-used mothers' breasts, robed in patchy white. The whole air moves with a breathlike hotness, as we sit in the television-blue glow of the tarp above our heads. 081413 #worm #roach Make a small, tidy square at an eye-pleasing location about a third of the way down and two thirds of the way over from the left--but not exactly one third and two thirds, you know, just off enough to be inconspicuously, accidentally artistic. Mark the square with a gentle but firm "X." You don't want to labour over the "X;" you don't want it to appear to have been the source or the result of any psychic unrest or intellectual indecisiveness. You want it to look dashed-off--not sloppy, but done with a certain charming impulsiveness, bordering on overconfidence. Consider the "X" a vote for spontaneity and vitality! Is it laborious to point out that "X" marks the spot? You may proceed to the next step if you like to be mysterious, or else you may feel free to label the "X"ed box, in the dialect, pidgin or creole of your choice; call it something like "Esriel's Cafe." 111812 #human I just don't want to be a perennially impractical, useless piece of bloated head. What if my therapist's just saying shit to make me feel validated? What if I'm really just as full of shit as I think I probably am? What if I'm reinventing the lack of wheels? 081613 #worm I went and got some another time, same brand, same varietal. Is that a dumb word or not. What the fuck is wrong with variety. Why they gotta say varietal. I think jargon is about my least favorite thing in the world. It's kind of a genius suit for idiots. 081413 #worm Have you seen Votym? Deteb asks. You don't really want to tell her; he's right over there by that pile of planks, talking with some people. You know he'd probably rather she didn't go over there and talk to him. You know he'd probably just rather not get into it with her. But of course, you do tell her, either because you're mischeivous, or else because you're merely a little slow, and of course she does go over by him. Even the way she walks suggests recalcitrance wearing a feather boa. She's an odd duck, Votym concludes, watching her approach. He takes her cold fingers in his leonine hand, and leads her graciously back across the little slice of glaciation between the wood pile and the fire. Together they step in, and they become a perfectly matched set of lighter-than-crystal champagne glasses. They overflow with bubbly bathing goodness. Butterflies take their waters and grow into other bonfires, in other locales, where people need them the most. Maybe there's a butterfly in the last, licking flames around the downtown curb where Jelse lies. Maybe. 081413 #worm Pick a stall. They're all empty. One guy in a black beret splashes into a urinal. You go in the stall farthest from the door, back in the corner. Slide the steel latch home. Depants yourself, make yourself comfortable. You wouldn't have believed it possible a few minutes ago, but you don't let go right away. Half-involuntarily, you wait for the sound of the other guy's hand-washing, the ratchet-ratchet-r-r-r-rip of his paper toweling, the squeak-clunk of the cylindrical waste can's chrome hatch, and finally the swoosh of the door as he leaves and here it comes--one silent grunt--the penultimate push--the plashing projectile of relief! Faintly light-headed, you sit there for a moment, as a token gesture to the habit of waiting to see if you're really done, but with a good solid one like that, there's really no question. There's hardly even anything to wipe. Now that's satisfying. open mic 051111 #martian 1. I used to write everything down. Now I hardly write anything down, which is odd, because now there's so much more that should be commemorated. 2. Ze can do stuff with his mind. 3. Do you see why I don't write stuff down any more? 051111 #martian 1. I played the pitch deck at the Soggy Pigeon. I lost, but I got good and drunk. 2. Emergency punched a hole in the corridor wall today, after Grandiosity poked him in the chest. 3. Ain't nothing going to probably happen to him about it, though. 081413 #worm But the simple pleasures of a cup of joe don't last forever. If you haven't eaten, coffee can easily make you queasy. If your truck doesn't have a men's room, the prospect of having to take a piss can prove quite distracting. Sooner or later, you might find yourself becoming less than serene. Maybe the caffeine, traitorous as any drug, will even have cut through your well-established, torporific contentment. Maybe you will suddenly admit it: today pretty much just flat out sucked. I'm sorry but there's really no other way to describe it. It just sorta hung there.... Definitely not good. Not really bad. Just there, and terrible. Maybe, hey maybe while we're at it, maybe all the days are like that. Yeah. And the nights? I don't even want to talk about the nights. When was the last time you had a real dream? Yeah, my life is real fun. If by fun you mean Asshole.... 193007 000001 #eel Well, I guess she meant tonight. Right now. She's here. She actually started driving up here without even waiting to see if I wanted her to. I guess I can't blame her for that; must have been all those times before when I said, "Why don't you drive on up here?" 101313 #dolphin Weak. They are also the sleazy and horrible and lecherous degenerates among us. So sick of this holy-as-thou pathetic game of perversion denial. If you're going to suck the queer out of it, it just shows that your o'er-protested self-acceptance is a sham. 081813 #treefrog Also, and perhaps on the other hand, a just-as-fucked-up Andrew Ward showed up today too. After Emily started asking me to kick him out because he was being rude and vulgar again, I sat calmly next to him and tried to reason with him to appeal to his better nature. He sulkily contradicted me at every turn, but at least we were actually having a two-way conversation. He seemed a little less act-out-ish after that. (Although at one point I heard him deny that he had been crying, and declare, "The only thing I feel is anger.") After class, as everyone was filing out, I turned around from erasing the board to feel/see him standing there, just kinda half staring at me. Are you all right? I asked. Yeah. Kinda. I guess so... [pause]... Why? Because... I was just wondering... you were just standing there. And he walked away. I feel like I missed something there, maybe something important. 080613 #dragon Sometimes illusion is a double agent. Now you realize an obstacle DOES exist; you can work with it. The illusion was thinking that the obstacle was an illusion--get it? I'll take a finite wheelbarrow of real bricks over an invincible phantom fortress any day. 053104 #eel "I can fly," I said to myself. I saw some bits of wood twirling slowly through the air away from me, ahead of me, and I realized it was the debris that had been stuck to me earlier. "This is the first day of--" and I thought, what is this the first day of? My existence? No, not exactly. But it is the first day. "Happy First-Day," I said into the friendly ear of a man walking on the sidewalk, as I floated past. 000096 #human Oh, my god. She just wrapped herself around me, just poured into me, and oh my god she was so soft and warm and glowing and loving and amazing and beautiful and i just wanted to flow into her and out into a warm, warm sea. and i don't care if that sounds stupid. 000096 #squirrel well, im picturing wyoming right now, and its really really really really late so late you dont remember what time is, and you're not quite asleep but getting there, or maybe just hovering at the edge like a bumblebee, and i'm driving have been for some time but oddly enough am not getting tired as i usually do, and theres no one on the road excpet an occasional bevy of trucks witht hose little orange lights down their sides, and theres a storm way far off in the north but we might never run into it, its so far away and you cant see anything on either side of the road but you can snese something way out ther, like maybe mountains or animals or something, you just cant quite tell and the whole effect is a little sppooky but kind of soothing and comforting in a way. and the radio is playing a deacon blue song but it is not skipping like this one is. and the thrunming of the car blends with the slow rhythm of the song and the whole thing has that unspoilable quiet movemenbt of a movie when the music is playing the highway is drifting past and theres no other noise. 081413 #worm It's a dream. It's a dream. In the dream, Jelse is in the upstairs of a coffee shop, a few cents away from being asked to leave. It's the smoking section, but he doesn't smoke. There's a railing around a large open space through which you can see downstairs. They're whispering too loud down there; Jelse can hear them. He's not the type to ramble out loud, but he speaks up now: What if you slip up one of these days? Then it's not going to be so funny. Then you're not going to be so holier-than-thou. People don't look at him. A lady moves out of his way as he's heading down the stairs. What? Are you afraid of me or something? No, she says. She's plump. She smiles. Her coiffure remains undisturbed. You're on your way down, she says. I was just getting out of the way. Jelse knows it's not her fault she's trying to be nice. And you're on your way up, he says. It's obvious. 081413 #worm Of course, she says. The door doesn't budge. She just blinks at him and he melts into the kind of sentient, obedient puddle that can ooze into a motel room, between the acute angle of an almost-closed door and the french curve of his new wife's masterful thigh. 110412 #copperhead I didn't want to take the canoe. It doesn't even have air conditioning. It's not an automatic. I'm pretty sure it's a stick. And *I don't know how to drive stick.* I never learned because I never had to. How fucked up is that? I never learned because I never had to. Welcome to the Internet age. 081313 #copperhead What is it about sitting in the ass end of a canoe, that's sitting three quarters of the way on a gravel bar and one quarter of the way into a slowly swirling current of a vulture-guarded, frog-dotted, gnarly-rooted, probably snake-infested, long-forgotten elbow of an unimportant little ditch of a so-called river somewhere in between the most anonymous acres of crops and weeds and prickers and clods of turned-up earth with roots of fallen trees for homes for rabbits your uncle and your grandpa shot at long ago, that makes you want to stay completely still and listen/not listen as a dragonfly glides by atop another dragonfly, and the sound their tandem wings make fits the color of the sun so perfectly you almost go into an actual, honest-to-goodness trance? 081313 #copperhead I have, like, two hundred dollars. So, yeah. Strange how that can seem like a lot, or hardly anything, depending on the situation you're in. Like right now it seems like a lot, because I mean I never ordinarily carry cash around in the woods. Who would? That's just stupid. It's just of course that this time is different. But it wouldn't seem like a lot like, I don't know, like if you were just a normal person with a job, and all your neighbors had huge houses with six bathrooms and two sinks in each bathroom and IRA accounts and whatever the hell else people have. Then you'd look at your two hundred dollars and you'd be like, Yeah, right. I'm a joke. I basically don't even exist in this plane or dimension. I'm an incident. A weather quirk. A bit of fluff blown off the top of one of those wispy weeds over there. Maybe I'll land in a nice river somewhere, and at least get to see more of the world before I end up jammed in a mini-dam of twigs, foam, leaves, shredded plastic bags, and six-pack plastic. But like, so yeah, really for the situation I'm in right at this moment, I'm basically rich. 081413 #worm When the Snoke and the Aviary both smile on the same night, new creatures take flight. An underwater pigeon becomes a dream. The game devolves. The Snoke grins largely. His teeth are the sun! The Aviary is laughing music; the Snoke is a leather locomotive. Together they careen down the street past the railroad tracks, kicking pebbles off the cliff, and shouting the hawks out of the long green valley far below. 081613 #worm They push you out the door onto the dock. Fusty tears fill the canal beneath your hot feet. Why are you wearing black socks on a day like this? Time can only imagine. Alis, arie, tric, terp, ablew, entof— You smack your head again, but again, it does no good. 010614 #bushmill We stop at an exit ramp on the westbound side of some Interstate. There's a cluster of the usual gas stations and fast food. One thing I can think of that would really equalize this situation, and that's if I felt more like a lion and less like a bunny. So while they're in the store getting snacks and paying for the gas—Pete's loaded, it turns out—I go around back to the grubby restrooms, make sure the door's locked, and fiddle around with the plastic baggie in my breast pocket. I roll a smoke, ::brown and pungent on one end, green and prickly on the other::, and lean back on the toilet seat and inhale deeply. The fluorescent light above the greasy mirror starts to buzz louder. Graffiti starts to mean something, and it's trying to tell me. I start to get a really nice hard-on, thinking about Mel's teeth when she smiles, and Pete's rough neck when he turns his head to listen to her or to say something. That act, that pushing out and taking in of words, is erotic, and I can't wait to watch and listen to them do it some more. But first, another hit. 081013 #dog I moved in closer, to where I could feel the heat of her breath, the heat of her body. It was a different kind of heat than I was used to. I had become rather detached these last few months during the transition. And it was the most familiar heat I had ever felt. 081313 #copperhead It flies like liquid plumbing, with too many elbow joints, but only awkward for an instant on the ground. Once aloft, it bends like quiet water through the sky. It has poured itself into our world, leading with its goblet neck, redolent with long-forgotten time. It takes forever to disappear around the river bend; it only takes me seconds to start hearing myself recollect: Dude, I saw a heron. Or dude, you should have seen this heron. Or dude, this heron flew like *right past my head,* I swear to god I could almost have reached right out and touched it. The work of preparing to make something real by describing it to someone significant is somehow simultaneously noble and puerile. Why not build a scaffolding of two-by-fours to hold your perfect vision of a harvest moon? You know you'll fail, but your body has learned to inoculate itself against the terrifying emptiness of unadorned vision by automatically attempting something more opaque, more attainable than real. Because what good is real? The real is always disappearing. Around the bend. 081813 #treefrog Makayla's Christmas story... was all about how her mom left the trunk of the car (with all the presents in it) open, and her auntie came over and said, hey, where's all the presents, and they went down there and everything was gone. I asked her if it turned out like the Whos in Whoville, where it didn't matter and everyone started singing and holding hands, and she said, No. No singing. It was terrible. 081413 #worm Me kneels in the grime, turns his lanky ass toward Him. The fraction of a moment it takes Him to find him again, to resume full contact, leaves Me greedily breathless. Him grabs ahold of Me and sidles his cock between Me's buttocks. They rub and slide together. Me's hands mash into the rust and rubbish of the dumpster. His head bangs into the dumpster's wall. The sweatshirt rides up on his shoulders. Him takes one hand off Me long enough to spit on his cock. The truck's engine howls. Its forks engage with the dumpster with a thunderous calamity. Me gasps. Him's buttery cock head pushes at his asshole. Their tiny boxed-in world lurches; Me bangs into the wall again; Him half falls over Me as Me's asshole opens up and Him begins to fuck Me slowly, slowly, slowly. The dumpster rises. It stops. Him stops, grasps Me's cock with one hand. The dumpster heaves again. Him starts fucking Me again, and stroking with his hand. Oh God! Me screams. The truck makes one more mashing noise. The dumpster starts to tumble upside-down. In an avalanche of trash, Him and Me come together. 121513 #human stressing about christmas, fucking xmas god fuck it. you know you don't have to live up to the hype, but it's so so so so so hard not to don't even have a tree yet we won't go without, thanks to loving parents, but good god i'm remembering that funereal inter-sibling gift exchange last year. Do they remember that? Megan especially seemed so depressed by the whole thing. Sad little packages poorly wrapped exchanged listlessly in the absence of the glorious tree flooded by glitz and packages that is supposed to mean America supposed to represent the success you're supposed to have when you're my age and have as many kids as I have and don't have an excuse There's that horrible language I use on myself again, again I ask, where's that coming from? I think it's pretty simple. It's coming from I DON'T HAVE A REAL FUCKING SOURCE OF DECENT INCOME. Oh yeah, that. 191756 000003 #human Try a little tenderness. Take charge. Beg, whine, tear off all your clothes. Just do whatever it takes, because this little number is hot. You're not going to want to miss this! It's the up-cycle of the roller-coaster, hear those ratchets ratcheting, up, up, up, til you can't hardly stand it no more, you want to blink, you want to flinch, you want to crawl back down the pole to safety, slimey safety. But you can't. You can't close your eyes, you're held in thrall. The issuances from this squaroid cave mouth dryly blowing up your skirt have words for you, and only you, and you, and you, and you. But you gotta promise me one thing. What's that? Have fun. That's all? That's all. You can do anything else you want. Play the organ? Both keyboards, baby. All the stops? Bells and whistles. God I love my daughter so much it hurts. 040004 #human Shit i could stay here all damn nite, if it weren't for all the all the um the other um you know my little you know that one thing, that personal, all that stuff that you, you know, know about. You know what I'm saying? 081013 #dog *But ME is not really listening now, at least not to the words, because just then he knows he really loves HIM. ME listens to the bass, the shuddering boom of slippery elms, the disappearing of the tree line, the cedars which alone follow them the last few steps, and then finally the rocks and chips and particles of high, clear sun at the top of the mountain. It's cold. They're going to need jackets. ME smiles.* 091313 #worm My boss fucked me on my desk again. I got little red marks all on my back from the typewriter keys. Inconsiderate bastard just pushed me down, shoved my blouse up, yanked my leather skirt down, devoured my panties, rubbed my pussy hard with his callused hand, and when he found me sopping wet, just rammed his cock in hard. I gasped. My arms felt rubbery. It was all I could do to hang on to his broad, hot back as my body lurched again and again with his blind, grunting thrusts. It hurt. My pussy still aches. Cum is slowly leaking out of me. I feel like a used up paper bag. And I am utterly, completely relaxed. I laughed as I tried to fix my hair and my comically smeared lipstick. I laughed as the nice boy in receiving said hi and asked me a question. I farted and stuck one foot up on his desk. My pussy smell wafted up and surrounded our faces. I looked at the nice boy and he fidgeted. Well? my eyes said. He got up and walked away, like I knew he would. But he'll be back. They always come back, the little cur mutt bitches. As long as someone else does the dirty work for them. 000002 #human I feel it in my jaw, my knuckles, the back of my throat. It's almost like the onset of a shroom trip, only I'm not tripping, you know? Crazy! This must be one of the reasons people do this sort of thing! It's like drugs only a little less sensational. It's cheaper, legal, better for you in many ways, and more social. Hmm.... Also it requires a little more effort. You have to put a little more of your body and heart into it to get the results you want. And the results are a bit more unpredictable. Which is a plus, of course, it means it doesn't wear out so much. Also there is more at stake, particularly for the ego. I'm afraid of looking foolish. I never really worried about impressing the drugs I took. Although there were times, high, when I was acutely aware that I was hiding from people around me. I was being invisible. In this, on the other hand, you have to do a visibility spell. 000096 #human it was (i thought) time to leave, and then she thanks me for letting her in, and i bust out crying. saying "it wants visitors." she says, "make yourself the primary visitor." 010714 #robot #hellsmarker Whence the paralysis? Where does that come from? Who invented the idea of not having anything to say but feeling as if you were supposed to say something? What about aliens? Why is everything split into two: real, unreal; science, fiction? Haven't we had enough of dichotomies for one lifetime? Why does the NSA have a huge black cube of a building, looking scary, sinister, impenetrable, just like alarmist, precautionary fiction? Are they *trying* to be like 1984? Is that the big joke? The joke's on us? While we're sitting here writing all these books and essays about America, and how horrible it would be if it was as horrible as, *this,* for instance, wow, really makes you think, they're busy taking notes, gleefully clucking and gabbling, saying, Yes, yes, yes, keep the ideas coming! and building our own nightmares out of the stuff of self-expression. 081613 #worm About five feet tall. About four and a half feet wide, so not exactly a Mister Five by Five, but pretty close. Hair hangs straight down like hypodermic needles that sag. Eyes a little squinty back of all that cheek. Breathes a little harder than he should have to when he feels he may be under scrutiny. Suspicious of almost everything. Every five minutes he says something that makes you think he thinks he's about to catch you in some hypocrisy, and he's going to be good-humored about it, he just wants to purvey some common sense, I mean come on, this is this country. We speak this language here. How your kids do on test scores, that sort of thing. But as annoying as he really is, you don't quite bring yourself to say, You're annoying, you festering sac, because there's something gentle about him underneath all the whine and bitch and squelch, something that just says, Yes? Yes? 000010 #human I don't want your maudlin pavane; I want some stories! Nobody wants to hear the ongoing drone of your pedantic psyche. They want to hear back from themselves, from their great hunters, from their charismatic lovers. They want messages from where the fighting is, from where the survivors party through the night in incandescent tents, billowing with heavy steam, lust, music, and the mad laughter of new birth. Me's trying too hard, he's trying too hard and he knows she sees it. He shifts around uncertainly. She sees the timing of his waist; decides maybe it needs a good belt. She waits. She's Krim, some kind of superheroine--she can wait as long as she wants to. 081413 #worm 081613 #worm The junkyard is about 24 miles square. Only it's not really square. It's kinda oblate, like an inflated douche bag, I don't know. I don't really know what a douche bag looks like; all the girls I've ever known with pussies they cared to show me were always too retro-classy to douche anything. I mean, come on. Just wash yourself every now and then; there's no need to go sticking a bunch of flowers and shit up there. 053004 #eel I ducked back into the bathroom because I didn't want her to stop. I was so turned on I was almost queasy. The jealousy was greater than I would have expected. I was embarrassed that the others were seeing me treated this way, but that only added to the turn-on. 102913 #snail