120913 #ostlergundegoot #human And I could have used the beautiful ghost of that man, again, to soften the blow of that voluntary fall, like I did so many times and I don't even regret it. It was the only thing there was to do, for so long after he was gone, I have compassion for myself, those years, sitting there across from where he was supposed to be. Talking. Drinking. 000096 #squirrel shes formula in a sense like high school boy is formula theres the kissing then theres the french kissing then theres the feeling up of the breasts then theres the sucking of the breast and it just kinda moves on from ther you knoww i have to say though honestly its kind of a strange thing the whole phallus cncept i think it really gives her this incredible sense of power 110913 #snail ...Sometimes you stood and stared at the rocks, stooping to pick one up, turning it this way and that, feeling its heft and its coarsenesses and smoothnesses against your gloved hand, plopping it down in the dirt again. ... Sometimes you experienced something in between—you found the next rock; there was some doubt as to whether another one might be more perfect 081813 #treefrog Um. Here's one thing you could do: Vocalize. When someone says, "Can I go to the bathroom?" answer them. Don't just nod, and do that half-grunt in the back of your throat that you've been doing for years. Same for when you're in the hallway. Either say hello to someone, or don't. Cut out this stupid, sheepish, "h--" thing. It's disgusting, really. Talk, or don't talk. 080004 #human Instead of my whole life flashing before my eyes, I'm getting certain charged particles of my life waving through my fingers, falling like crispy leaves onto the yellow linoleum of my consciousness. There's the one about the pussy. There's the one about the pizza. On and on they go, towards the end of the world. Ah, the end of the world. Vacation destination extraordinaire! 010114 #farmer #human #godilovepeople God I love people. Do not strive to be so un-fucked-up. Our fucked-up-ness makes us so deliciously, adorably, fiercely fucking lovable. Be naive. Be defenseless. Fall for it. Give in. Taste and be eaten whole. "The first part of the ad read 'Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair.'" 000096 #squirrel yeah. i dont know matt. i dont eaither i think i shoud just throttle you why i dont know you drive me nuts yeah well. you drive me nuts i just guess it all boils down to the fact that i cant help but subscribe to the belife that with you adn i literally i think if we put our heads together we could really move mountains you think. i know 000097 #human SOMEONE ELSE. THE OUTSIDE WORLD. THE WORLD. MY FELLOW ANIMALS. THE DIRT, THE SUN, THE MEMORIES, THE LIBRARY, THE BOOKS, THE PAGES, THE FACES, THE STORIES, THE CAMPFIRES, THE YOUNG PEOPLE LOOKING UP AT NIGHT, THEIR FACES FULL OF STARS, LONGING, THOUGH THEY MAY NOT EVEN REALIZE IT YET, FOR SOMEONE TO TELL THEM SOMETHING HELPFUL, SOMETHING POWERFUL, SOMETHING MOTHERFUCKING REAL. 010714 #gull #robot If you need to do a function, you can find a service or a program or a way to make your own script or workflow for it. 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.** 112012 #copperhead I kind of want it to be about sex, and I kind of don't want it to. There is a definite low-level thrum, as we slither anonymousy along our thin slice of biosphere between the baking sun and the glistening water. It's not even a slice: it's a thin thread, between the left bank and the right bank. Right now they're the north and south banks, but that could change. 051311 #martian 1. I think there's a ghost in my house. 2. I no longer have my bike, Kingdom Hearts 2, King Kong, $20, pet fish, or Great-Grandfather. 3. Kingdom Hearts 3, Prototype 2, Resident Evil 6, to go fishing, Sonic Generations, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, Infamous 2, Dead Space 3, Left 4 Dead 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. (Thanks Dominique #students) 081413 #worm Shouldn't he do something? But if she didn't like it, she would say something. Wouldn't she? The bearish one reaches around Krim's waist, and undoes the top button of her jeans. The lean one helps him wriggle them down, past her hips suddenly luminous in the sultry firelight, past her knees. The men support her elbows and hands as she steps out into pure, delicious nakedness. 081413 #worm They arrive--splash! (the dog), splash! (the pig), ka-swoosh! (the dolphin, a few hundred yards offshore). The Aviary welcomes them as a pillow welcomes the repeated advances of a frustrated fist. The Aviary welcomes the silly, the befuddled, the ill-prepared, and the angelic with equal ease. The Aviary mixes all into its own screeching, howling, utterly silent stone soup. 120613 #controlroom #mudmask What is power based on if not the individual organism's visceral, often sexualized fear response, mixd with a strong dose of inertia? Might a constructive use of abstraction and "higher order" thinking be hacking ones own viscera to become less susceptible to the perceived threat of the privileged group within the semi-invisible power structure? 121813 #skeleton # example ## Scene 1 ### Character 1 I don't know what I'm saying anymore. ### Character 2 I don't really know what you're saying either, to be honest. *"This"* is just another way of not going to sleep. ### Character 1 You don't want to go to sleep then? > It goes on like this for so long, nobody remembers why we were even here in the first place. 041204 #squirrel *growlrs ferociously and digs my nails down into your lower back and ass and pulls you tightly to me.. lifting your shirt and burrying my face into your skin and the center of your chest and nips and nuzzles over your skin.. pressing my cheek against your warmth and listening to your heart beat as the shirt blocks my eyes and my sigh of contentment is deep.. * 000002 #human What fills it up for you? How full is filled up? Are you a gusher or a trickle? A seeper or a geyser? Do you even know? Do you even know what water tastes like? The water of you? The water you are? Do you even feel yourself against plump wet leaves and autumn-stiffened grass? Do you even hear the deer? the laughing sound of their drinking? Smell the musk of their fear? 081013 #dog *Did you ever notice how sometimes at night you can be walking along the sidewalk in a sleepy-mooned midwestern town, maybe freshly off the platform, just outside the depot, and see some people ahead, but not be sure, at least at first, sometimes for quite longer than you might have expected, whether they are coming towards you, or walking in the same direction as you?* 000000 #human The world is a blessed place. My home is a pocket of warmth. I know I shouldn't forget that the world is also a cold place, that there are pockets of curses that blow up and down the streets like dirty plastic grocery bags--but don't worry. I can't forget that so let me live in here in the bacon-smelling warmth for at least an hour or so; please let that be all right. 081013 #dog HIM: [outside in the corridor] There are bound to be other rooms. *And there are. All the rooms are connected by tubes, pipes, ducts and contrivances. There are scraps of carpet in many of them. Some have notes scrawled into the plank walls. Some have food. Some even have other people, real people it seems, in them. And every table has a salt and pepper shaker set.* 091313 #worm Papers can rip, books can mold, libraries can fall to the clenches of fanatics and rich people. Computers can crash, electricity can stop flowing, a physical shell surrounding a quasi-infinite world of wondrous e-legos can crack, be forgotten, become obsolete, explode. A man's fingers can wither. His eyes can grow sleepy. He himself may implode, at will. Rave on! 091313 #elephant Seventeen weeks of probing and prying, asserting and insisting, silences and crying. Over four months of yammering like a jackass before this willow-throated hippie goddess of whiskey-coloured hair and careworn eyes. An entire season spent returning to this chamber of indelicacy, all the while pulsing, throbbing with inarticulate want, and now--finally--we were naked, on the floor, behind the blinds, with a full session to go and nobody booked for the rest of the day. 000000 #human walking fast. glenn's old leather jacket, even with the freaky pumpkin on the back that i know people are looking at funny. yelling. ranting and fucking raving. slamming things around, throwing things away. storming in and out of doors. slamming things down. throwing things away. yelling until my voice gets hoary and mellow. walking fast. it's cold. milwaukee. night. train tracks. even the god damn dogs that make me yell and storm in and out. even the god damn dogs. 030004 #human You have everything you need to go to the next level. I can tell you, have told you, and will again tell you, you are beautiful. Now you have to decide to be beautiful. Allow yourself that summertime luxury. When you relinquish your attachment to bad luck, you will cease to be dominated by it. You need to believe the things you've taught me. You need to love yourself. You need to love yourself. You need to love yourself. Whatever that means to you. Learn what that means to you. 110113 #fox #eel #trout what's next? (after a series of cartoon=panel images depicting various stages of his life, none of them showing the one thing he has (almost) always not let himself not be missing--the final panel is blank) well, have a closer look. (zoom in on the final panel. there's a little something there after all) it's grain...! no. no wait, it's just chaff. Well then--feed your animals! 082613 #finch Newspapers turning piss-gold; smoky afternoon. 081413 #copperhead Transfixed. Here comes my redemption. I push out a little laugh at that. His footfalls crunch percussively into the quiet symphony of my star, my memory, and my motionless earth massage. Coalescing out of an aural plane between sleep and wakefulness, his voice sounds like a kitchen when you're dozing on the couch and there's nowhere in particular you need to go and someone else is doing the cooking and you live there so there's no question: you're staying. 000094 #human I said, Thanks a lot, fuckhead! to a guy driving a car and he said Fuck you, Bitch! back as he turned the corner behind me. Civilisation. i'm a little lost but then again not because lost is only a rune, or a card, or a bone, or a compass, or a hunger, or a nervous clenching grabbing unclenching sweating because you're wondering what you have in the fridge that might spoil when three weeks ago you didn't have a fridge or a house at all and you weren't lost just sick of beans. 081413 #copperhead Each irregularly rounded or slightly piercing stone presses into your back, your buttocks, the back of your thighs, the coolness under your knees, your ankles, your heels. There's one that hurts there, and you move your left foot one scraping inch. Better. Your spine, each vertebra pulsed by its own individual rock. How long have these rocks been in this river bed? And you? Another star is born. Another imperceptible loss. We will never be just starting out again. 081413 #worm Let's jump out, brave the margin of screaming cold between the water and the fire, and go right into another smoke break. Tonight is just one big smoke break. No matter where you sit, the smoke follows you, probing for your eyes, insisting on your tears. Perch on that pigeon-painted boulder: smoke wafts toward you. Lean against that hunk of washed-up, used-to-be tree: the smoke will find you. The smoke will find you wherever you go, because it has something to tell you. 103012 #human #bunny It's not cops & robbers. It's a whole nuther country, my friend. Attraction feels different and comes on differently. Imagination is different, emotions are different. Astonishment and joyous "helplessness" are different. Acceptance is different. It's a whole different instrument to learn to play. You're still you, but you're just getting to know you. Be good to yourself. Knowing more means deceiving less. Challenge your assumptions that your attraction would be an affront. 081413 #worm Ltiky kneels beside Ella on their blanket. The fire is double-fucking hot now. Where is the willow-haired girl? Ltiky wants to fuck her, hard. Even Ella can not reign in his passion this time. Ltiky wants her adolescent lipstick ring around his cock. He wants to lick and suck Bnabe's come out of her cotton-candy snatch. Ltiky feels the fire draw him, despite Ella's fingernails lightly in his hair. He steps forward. One after another, two by two or more, they go into the fire. 102913 #snail The bartender chatted cheerfully and told me a story about bloody marys after I'd ordered one at four in the afternoon: I only make them extra stupid ridiculous spicy if people annoy me.... After arranging the coaster, the tall glass, my jacket on the back of the chair, myself, having looked out the window at the growling rain and slush, I finally sit back with a sigh and take a sip. 000002 #human I want to not think about every laugh, every smoke, every syllable! 122503 #eel There were other messages. He had been trying to get ahold of us. Now here's the funny part. I had had this image of him as this wild, wily, street-smart guy who was so much braver and less domesticated than us. He didn't need us! He was the cool one! And to discover that, having been unearthed so to speak by us, he actually wanted to talk to us, bad enough that he wasn't too proud to leave multiple messages, well that was just a big reversal of my perception of the way things were. 121512 #human #crow I'm looking back across acres and acres of wet dewy letters and emails, and holy shit, I do put words together. That's what I do, and that's a thing that is made of the zip-zapping energy between and among people and other chumps and chimps. And dogs. And yes, dammit, even motherfucking cats. And dead guinea pigs, god if there was one rest their homely little souls, be they buried in the backyard or still stuffed in some grocery bags in the goddamn freezer. 000096 #squirrel wow what [quiet] strange why i just sense rite at this moment just a really heavey feeling of sadness and grief and i dont know if its me or you or us or where its coming from i dont quite but just now i felt like getting up and putting my arms around you you can do that just to connect or disconnect some of that energy im not quite feeling it. i dont and maybe its me maybe what you just stold me about the circle casting scares me why? 121513 #gull Wondering if there's like an upper limit on how long a cuboid locus should be. Like should I go back to using DAYS as a destination when it's longer than a ¶ or so. But then that adds cognitive overhead because I have to decide first. Maybe just let it go long if it feels like it, whenever the natural pause comes let it come. Like "send to teh-dsa" is the new command-S. Wondering if wondering about this is some kind of ADHD thought-ordering response, or just some kind of weir 081313 #copperhead But he has the message, so now he can finally put it in the right folder on the right desk. His supervisor picks it up, but his supervisor is some kind of artist, so he spends a long moment just holding it, between thumb and four fingers, admiring the sturdy feel of the stock, luxuriating in the way it holds itself upright under the yellow light of the incandescent bulb he brought from home to obviate the chilled fluorescence of industry's preoccupation with reliable mediocrity. 082713 #crow No, okay, not all of them. You still have your jackdaws, your shrews, your wailing wandas. Your ex-army hopefuls with their dusty voices, peeping praise. Your respectful majority, your radio listeners, your traffic-light stoppers-at. Your people in your grocery store, your eaters of steak, your carrion birds. But the people, let me tell you, people, people, people who are everywhere, who exist like punctuation in an overly legible document, your people have abdicated. 081413 #worm Immediately, another member of the circle steps in to intercept Ltiky. This one is tall, toned, dreadlocked, and grinning as demonically as the rest of them. Her breasts are high and firm, her nipples dark and tight. Ltiky stares. Her grin widens, if that's possible, and she sways alluringly. Ltiky starts to get hard despite the public--that's when she drops into a crouch, swings one leg around whip-fast, and sweeps Ltiky's feet. He plunges ignominiously into the pungent mud. 081613 #worm #roach Times like this, I could really use a cup of tea. Times like this, the crushing loneliness of this place really sings. I mean, I can find tea bags, a mug, even ways to get hot water. But that's not what tea is. If you've ever sat in a cafe, or tete-a-tete in someone's bamboo antechamber, or even at the plain old kitchen table with your mom, you know what I'm talking about. And I'm not going to talk about it any more, because I'm obviously too hard-bitten to cry. 081413 #worm A mob of humans is disappearing, assimilating itself into the surrounding alleyways and streets. A few people can't run; they moan and crawl instead. The keen of emergency sirens is growing steadily louder. The bloody head of the trash-truck driver lolls on the hood, jutting out through the smashed windshield. On the other side of the truck, a lone figure stands motionless, silhoutted by the garish firelight. A hand reaches out and tugs at Me's ankle, scaring him shitless. 081413 #worm Omsatigo is only too happy to comply. The night is young. Omsatigo's not--let's not get all rose-coloured--but he doesn't care! What better way than this, to procrastinate his suicide? They gather a basket full of hot dogs, bakery items that have never seen the light of an actual bakery, beverages that make you smarter even as they rot your teeth, magazines, salty snacks, and a tube of lip stuff with sparkles in it. Omsatigo makes a kissy face; the whore applies the gloss. 091602 #eel A scene when they are moving out of their old house: everybody files out laden with boxes and luggage: father, brother, youngest sister, mother--then older daughter looks out the front door at them, slams door and disappears inside house. Mother stops about halfway down the walkway, looks back, worried, then walks on after the others. In a moment, the door reopens, and out comes the older daughter with a mountain of boxes and luggage: she is carrying all her own stuff by herself. 011614 #gull #placeoftheway Ok, I get it. Build things. But what if the "thing" I think I want to build is an "art"? What if I'm in the habit of thinking that? What, then, do I think I'm going to get out of the process and product of building that? Why did I get into that habit in the first place? Is there anything that might actually be more interesting or rewarding for me to put energy into building? I don't remember having all these questions come up when playing with Legos. 120213 #human I just ate *ALL THE REST OF MY CANDY.* While watching TV. Yeah, still a little off balance here. 102903 #human Those people are all around me, all the time, and I can talk to them any time I want, and I do, even if I'm not aware, and I love them. And sometimes they love me. They don't live in the computer. They live with me. We live with each other. Period. (ps: All the little bottles were still up above the bar, but they didn't look as bright as that one other time.) 081613 #worm The closest we've come so far was underneath a crumbling overpass in some gravelly weeds. The salt and pepper shakers were there, but cracked, empty, and long ago flood water had rusted the napkin holder into modern art. We waited. We waited a long time, and no-one came. We actually got up and left before getting any service. Everyone was really quiet that night. The truck seemed to drive itself by moonlight, and even Milt looked as if he was starting to wonder. 081613 #worm They go home. I have several nightmares about killing everybody, and then I'm just so dry, so dry. I wake up. Try to get a bath in the piss-ass sink. Wish I had a comb so I didn't look like a dried-jiz-covered dick head, which is obviously what I am. My friend, the idiot with the saucy girlfriend, brought me a new video game. He said it's going to take me wherever I need to go. Even offered to hang around after everyone else was gone, to play it some with me. I said okay. 081013 #dog *They go outside and smoke. The afternoon's work doesn't get done. The cupboards don't get painted. The washbasins don't get ajaxed. The toilet paper sits on the back of the toilet, tho it would only take a couple of seconds to remove and throw out the old cardboard tube, and install the fresh roll. You could do it while sitting on the pot, no time wasted. Even so, lights are coming on outside. Cars zip up and down, the way they always do. Go with them. This can wait.* 100912 #human #bunny Hideous but beautiful. So so flawed. Shambly, ever so slightly, ramshackle, a little faded, a little settled, a little extra, a few free radicals. A bit spent, a bit used, a lot leathern, rough, hard but yes, okay, obviously, also soft in just the right, just the right places, and those are the places where HE will let ME in and I will do the same for HIM, and it is a secret, a secret thing, I want to be among people who know secret things, or else alone. 102913 #snail #elephant ...Then looked at tonight, it would be 46 if I started tonight, which is really a continuation already, and I want to go masturbate but her minionette face appeared on my screen and called me bitch, and I slipped back into the slippery throat 080004 #human What matters, or so I was going to explain to the plankton, is claiming a space. Space is the only thing left you can own, and the only space is inside your skin. Got it? Love it, rub it, good. 010714 #warmglowbox What are you putting into the box? Cameras! Quite possibly, the most perfect camera yet produced. Will make you see the world in deeper, richer color! Will make you a hero among your family and friends! Will make you see things that aren't there! Will make your days exciting, not fucking boring as they are now! Buy it! Buy it! You can afford it if you put off paying the rent a couple of weeks! You're going to be working til you're 90 anyway, what's the difference? 110512 #copperhead fucking watch. How long have I been sitting here? A crawdad swims backwards in a sandy little puddle just a few scattered stones away from the main stream. If I reached out my right arm, I could probably just almost get him, if I was fast enough. Somewhere away off to my left, a woodpecker smashes his face into a tree over and over and over again. Somewhere even farther away than that, the sound of a chainsaw—I realize I've been hearing it rise and fall for some time. 091113 #human #writing The guileless hyperbole. The oblivious failure to empathize. The assumption that other people are fine. The overplaying of the solo in the first break. The scattered ore of lucidity. Joyce Carol Oates nails adolescence in *Big Mouth & Ugly Girl*. The epiphanies are authentic because they are incomplete and flawed, subject to revision though spoken in hard words. The meta is as invisible as excellent typography. You awaken with the characters, not ahead of them. 000001 #human there is a warning voice, friendly, warm, black, that says, "This is the most dangerous level known to man," and you say, yes. Let me in. Let me sleep here. Let me sit here. Let me break my fast here. Let me study this rock face, this backbone, this delectable muscle of manhood and let me ripple my tongue over its sharpsmooth facets, and let me purr in milky delight and let me go weak and give in and i can see the street from here. I can see in other people's houses. 010314 #jonquil There was really no one here she wanted to see, she thought, as she avoided eye contact in the main hall. Well, except— her cheeks reddened and she actually smiled to herself as she made her way to her locker. She set the thermal coffee cup on the top shelf—she would get it later; different teachers had different pointless rules, and first hour was a bear—and grabbed a couple of books and ratty spiral notebooks out of the pile of junk in the bottom. 081613 #worm Anyhow, Milton Brockham Jameson France has a hairy paunch, a pagan beard, a thespian manner, and waaaaaaay too much time on his hands. He's one of those guys who will never be in a beer commercial, unless it be one of those post-hip, celebrate-the-sub-par, grainy, black-and-white ones, but who nonetheless posess, to certain beings, of which I proffer myself as a practically apopleptic epitomatic specimen, a distinct and peculiar sexual problem. More on that later. 102913 #snail ...I got stuff from all over the place, I mean some of it's broken, some of it works, it's all kinda beige and yellowed and some of it's cracked, and the fans they spin up and they sound real loud like the bearings is worn, but shit it still spins.... Take all these pieces of shit and scraps and shit I got laying around, and make a person even if it's only for a little while.... I mean, because I'd know they were going to die real soon, and they--I mean, I don't think I'd want them to know, you know? 081413 #worm After a while, you have to take a piss, so you heave yourself out of the water, nakedly grateful for the teases and catcalls of the girls, and for Omsatigo's ever-ready laughter, and go back into the hut. The can is in the back, behind a clattery bamboo door. There's no light in here. That's okay. You've been doing this a long time; you can manage in the dark. You listen to your own stream gurgling into the bowl, full force--pissing wet & naked, now that's a fine feeling. 031513 #copperhead I HAVEN'T SEEN HIM for a long time now. I know he lived in a trailer for a while, in an actual trailer park. The white-T-shirted, corn-chip-eating pathos of that breaks my heart right now, as I think back, but of course in real life, as anything in real life is when it's compared to your anxiety-ridden, deep-night dreams of what life was supposed to be like, you child, you grown-up child of lost dreams and broken promises, it probably wasn't really all that devastating. 081413 #worm After he grunted, let go, and slumped back against the couch, he shuffled into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He didn't look the same either. He was unmistakeably autumnal. Not unattractive, but his leaves were falling. He looked at himself with good humor. He wouldn't look so good in a leather skirt anymore, either. When did his legs get so knobby? Oh well. Oh well, oh well, oh well. Back out in his quiet kitchen, he smoked a contemplative cigarette. 120012 #human Plus, the kid was cute. Sheepish. Looked adopted. The mom was creepy. "We're praying people" creepy. I didn't like her hat. I didn't like the way she said, "Could you get that beer can out of there, if you don't mind?" Fucking religious people afraid of a fucking beer can. I'm so over it. Yeah and then you're going to stand there and quibble with me over ten dollars. 750. "Seven...forty?" Okay, fine, whatever you stupid hypocrite. I hate fucking religious people. There. I said it. 081613 #worm So but I don't know how to prepare for my class. They borrowed me some books but I can't read. I was thinking maybe I would just play the trumpet in front of everyone, but brass instruments make me look fat. So I guess I'm going to wing it. That's the last thing you want to do, they tell me. You always want to be prepared. If you aren't prepared, if you don't know what your students are going to look like, then you might as well be a piece of cheese going into the butcher shop. 081613 #worm I remember her leaning over me to kiss me goodnight. Her hair was a dark halo of angelic shimmering softness. Her nightgown--nothing else in the universe was made of fabric so sheer, soft, and slight--softly fell down as she leaned in, and showed her breasts. They were perfect, inquisitive, aromatic, strange, and comforting. I was showered by her love; I was in the center of a gentle storm of shooting stars. Celestial music. There was just the faintest smell of smoke. 081813 #treefrog 101006 Manuel Fajardo (Joanna's brother!) knuckle-punches me when he sees me now. He really got into the Benjamin Banneker letter. I like the way you interpreted that! he said, about BB and TJ both getting their freedom from the same place. That. Felt. Good. And goofy Joe was into it, too. They even seemed, for a moment, to appreciate the idea of the power of language--the way you can be all civilized, rational and formal, and still be totally STICKING it to someone.... 010714 #gracetone I was dreaming of a place where it was raining outside, and I was warm and safe inside. There was no way to know the overall size of the place, because you could only see little bits of it at any one time, from any one part of it. The part I was in at the moment had an extremely long table, a massive slab of oak with like sixteen or more chairs along either side. I was sitting near one end, and someone, a dark somewhat female figure, was sitting across from me. 112813 #gull #fox #farmer The real work. It's funny. Is done in spite of what you think of as the real work, and yet it wouldn't happen without the seemingly empty exercise. You burn off a byproduct that must masquerade, willing suspension, as a product. This could as easily be a farmer as a gull or fox, or then again it could be anything else. That's the point. If I'm pretending I don't know, then everything depends, or possibly nothing, on the verisimilitude of that performance. 051706 #squirrel and I'll sit here as long as it may take, delaying walking up the stairs and back into the folds of what's become my life; I'll sit here as long as it may take for me to stop avoiding saying what I really mean, which is, namely, I'm glad I met you, glad to know you, gratified, amazed to feel that knuckle punching knuckle saying brother, dear friend, live friend, thank you thank you thank you. one shot. good night 081413 #worm A few feet in, they stop and look back out. One last flap of moon-sky remains, negotiating peace between the vastness of the night outside and the tiny heart of secrets inside here. They are standing in a thin trickle of water. It's not so cold in here. Krim takes off her shirt. Ltiky breathes in the vision of her. Yes, the crows have marked her smile, yes time has eased the tautness of her breasts. She's softer and harder at once. It makes her so much more beautiful now. 000094 #human See, here it is Independence Day. I remember thinking, "Oh, it'll seem like no time at all till that day arrives." And so on. --that is why I don't want to wait around to start really working. Because it all happens so fast. If I wait, I might miss it. Really. And I don't want to be one of those people who is really intelligent, but for some reason or another--some minor reason, probably--never really got around to doing anything. Think how many people like that there are. 081013 #dog *In the hot-springs-fueled sauna. The hot stream flows across the floor, about half a foot deep. Everything is redwood, massive, pungent. Night takes its wakeful refuge from day, in here. Outside, the sun is just another star. eguntleg, TasleeV, rogesrann, LEanIssy, vezarpel, dekaldilugya, chuhauryn, greletil, racimyly, bfnuflypk, Rodendie, pakfag form a circle, facing in, dicks out. Astral pines embrace the sauna.* ME: God yes, thank you, thank you, my god.... *God yes.* 010314 #jonquil There was a lot of underwear in this load. His were wide, drab—boxers, exclusively. She tried on the idea of picturing them next to his crotch, his penis, his ass, but it didn't fit. There was something missing from it, a sweetness, the image was too coarse, too meaty, and it neither repulsed nor stirred up any hunger in her. She folded the tent-like cotton rectangle of it, and laid it on the pile. 063013 #human just saw a whole family of baby raccoons, at least 3 babies, come out from under the back stoop. people always talk so tough about raccoons, but they make an adorable chittering sound. and they're just trying to do what all of us are doing. get stuff with their grubby little paws and stick it in their grubby masked little faces, all without getting killed or dying off. namaste, you little grubby bastards. 112013 #fish A letter from the fish: Dear Fuckface, Let your characters do something, anything. They don't want to just sit there, frozen in the last perfect moment you got afraid to let them move beyond. So go fuck up their lives, fuck up your perfect tableau. You selfish bastard, they just want to live. They do not exist just to entertain you. Love, the only one who gives a shit 111412 #human God that sounds so gay. Ha ha. Today Millie said I love the others more than her. Megan said she does everything wrong (again). Libby cried at bedtime because when she asked if she would have to have money out of her jar for not being quiet, I said be quiet. Cecilia actually had a pretty good night but she cusses like a damn sailor. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Is there nowhere I can go in this desperate alley of a house that doesn't have some visual or aural or psychic ticking? Hey wait--today I read you're supposed to count your blessings, so, let's just remember how horrible this house USED to be in the noise department, and maybe the stupid bird clock isn't so bad after all. I could take it down. Hmm. Wonder if the girls would care. Is that really the issue, though? Would I care? Actually, yeah, I think I'm ready to be rid of the damn thing. I think. I think. I think. Tick. Tick. Not sure, though. Maybe it has something to do with my guilt. Maybe it has something to with her soul. Maybe it has something to do with the way I feel more like her mother than her husband, if only in the way I can't forget that she was a child once, too. That she had innocence and hope and laughter and sweetness, and it was crushed by forces, powers beyond her control. Who is she? Is she the criminal, or was she a victim long before I met her? And the crucial part: *is the child still in there, horrified, scared, alone?* Because I don't know how I can handle that. 081913 #copperhead She picked desultorily at some primary colors in a bowl. Tangerine, banana, what's the difference? her chipped nail polish seemed to be saying. I was glad I didn't live here. But he did. This was before we even had the idea for the trip. This was when the idea of the two of us being in a canoe together, without her or anyone else, would have seemed like a corny shtick, a huck-finn parody, a fantasy. 060104 #gull There's that place with the tawny wood floors and space to pace and breathe, I think it was on Well Street, where I spoke with my dream folks about all this, about how it was like a map but not in the strictest sense, how intersections could be expressed fractally, and if you need to visit someplace or see something, you just add it to the map and it becomes a part of the whole organism.... 021113 #treefrog just remembered this: how the Christian textbooks threw all these 'classics' at the students with no context, preparation, or connection; how when I made them try to picture the specific action as we read _the pit and the pendulum_, we were just like the narrator himself, feeling his way along blindly, making egregious mistakes, not even aware of the magnitude or significance of them as he made them. 081613 #worm What do you think most people actually think about all day? Milt asks. Something sacred, Margie replies at once. Me, I'm not so sure. I'm starting to suspect most people don't think about anything much at all. But then again, maybe that's what other people assume about me. Maybe they're right. An oak tree hollers Goodbye as we streak invisibly past in the ancient orange truck in the antique night. Goodbye. 010614 #bushmill And so we go. Away from that little town. The headlights slash across a sad-looking little park with a sagging merry-go-round under a cumulonimbus willow tree. It's weird because it's right across from the gas station. I mean RIGHT across. It's like light-years away, but only separated by one greasy little street. It's dark but light over there, like a firefly, nothing like the McDonalds version of light they got at the Texaco. Watching it diminish in my vision as we head back up the frontage road and get back on the ramp, I get this really sad feeling, I don't know why. Like somebody must have gone there all the time when they were a little kid, when just trees were good enough, and they didn't know how much everything sucked, and they were little and safe and had parents, and they laughed and went around and around on that merry-go-round, and that was enough. And everything didn't smell like diesel and have crude shit written on it in the fake light, and they weren't grown up and didn't have to know everything and do everything, and somebody still cared. But that was a long time ago, and now car after car after car swept on past, through the night, and we were just another car, with some sweaty stranger squashed up against me, into the next day, full of radio signals and more gas stations, and potato chips and smoke-breathing factories on the horizon, gliding by with all their orange flashing lights and their own system of roads, and it makes you wonder who goes in there, and what are they doing, and can people actually go up on those walkways, and then that's gone too and there's something else weird and foreign and pointless and industrial to look at, a billboard, a stricken tree, a muddy creek. Where are we going anyway? 000004 #human Acting like a grasshopper typing like a madman. Give her a big smooch for me. I watch football. People yell because they can't have their guns. They got a special on that chain link fence you use to put your neighbor's yard over there and yours over here. We can all see each other's yards because there are no trees here. A few tall streetlight poles and some haze, that's it. The scene is dark-lit. Do you know what I mean by that? More glow! Turn up the glow! I work as a prostitute in the Fantasia district. The benefits are good. I get two months off every three months. I don't have any sexually transmitted diseases. The microchips see to that. It's a good job, but somebody's got to do it. Tee hee. Welcome to my fish. Why is the fish always implicated? That's how it's done here. How did things get this way? Do you remember the days of automobiles and sausages? I do. My kids barely do. They were born right before the strange haze descended. Right before it was unmistakable. Right before the war. The war has been going on a lot longer than most people realize. Most people don't realize it's going on at all. The perfect mouth of the bar never opens. You can't slide in there. It's an illusion. Give it up, slick boy. Open your teeth and your heart to me instead. I cost more up front but in the long run, you're better off. How do I know? I just know. I was there. I am here. Love me. You might as well. The foghorn sounds but we're not going inside. Not tonight. Not tonight. 121694 #squirrel Anyway, you'd be a lovely birthday present, even if a few days late. (But, hey! By the way--did you ever find that swinging girl necklace?) Oh, and thanks again for the food processor. I've been using it quite a bit lately. 081313 #copperhead The chainsaw guy is probably having a beer. I'm pretty sure I would have a beer after destroying a dead tree. What the fuck. I'd deserve it. I would 081413 #worm She telephoned him from another continent, pretending not to sound as though she was pretending not to be lonely. She had heard a song spilling out of the anonymous speakers in the ceiling of a too-ritzy clothing store whose prices she could never afford anyway, so why was she in there? Probably because a woman who wanted to marry her had dragged her in there, intent on changing Krim's wardrobe, and thence her approach to life and especially relationships. It wouldn't work. It never does, one hopes. But the song moved her to wrap herself in the red and glass embrace of a telephone booth outside on the plaza, and dial a dreamed-up number from a dreamed-up life an ocean away. Ltiky answered: once he had decoded the strange familiar voice, his blood moved a little faster, his breathing became more urgent. Electric whirlybirds took flight in his gut. She said she was coming back across the water when the summer was over. She said she'd done some soul-searching. Pretending to sound as though he was merely pretending he would be able to think, until he saw her again, about anything but the sound of her clunky black shoes clunking up his front porch steps, Ltiky said she should give him a call when she got back. Fifteen, even ten years before, he really would have been able to think, in the interim, if not literally of nothing else, certainly of little else without visions intruding of her mischeivous smile, her scornful arms akimbo. The days and the hours, as he counted them, would have been laced with the narcotic of jealousy--who is she with? Will she keep our appointment? Will she be disappointed in me? Now, however, after the negotiations of time and the brute fact of life's having gone on, the tortuous, old longing needed to be invited, cultivated even, in order to consume him. He didn't have to go to work that day, and he had, as usual, no pressing social engagements, so after they hung up, he invited it. 221451 012514 #trout #moonwalker And so the unwinking smoke detector begins its nightlong vigil. He snores. I stare at the paisley darkness. Too exhausted to not think. The smell of alcohol is still in the room, also a faint smell of cigarettes and anonymity. His leather jacket is bunched up on the dresser, looking like a fucked up pumpkin. It's not yet November. Tomorrow is the last day of the convention. 224137 081613 #worm I'm sort of supposed to be this jaunty, carefree, whistling, heel-kicking, goofy-cap-wearing, wise-cracking, insightful-yet-outside-of-it-all Fool type of guy who really just appreciates, commentates, and basically has a rip-roaring time without getting too bogged down in the petty discourtesies of man. But. Here's the thing. This wall they're building? I gotta admit, it is starting to really creep me out. 081413 #worm To the river, of course. They could hardly avoid it. The little abandoned boathouse, where they used to hide from ghosts, with other ghosts, draws them magnetically. Three blocks in that direction, drawing closer for warmth, then stepping over the cable that keeps out the cars, he holds out his arm for her; she accepts his assistance. It's muddy. A splat of mud sucks itself onto her ankle as they follow the path downhill. Yes, yes. Maple and ash, hawthorn and sumac enfold them. The orange of streetlights gives way to glowing moon-black. Their laughter comes freely at last as they slip down the slope, into nettles, wild mustard, the last of the season's trout lilies. And there it is: the river. Ltiky leans against the rough, bulbous muscle of a tree long ago hacked by lightning. He breathes. He really breathes. He looks, and Krim is looking back at him. The smile she wears belies her earlier efforts to force the game. Ltiky feels an upwelling of tenderness towards her. He has at times, as the years have passed, hated her. He has clung to that hatred as to a trophy. She has owed him retribution for a thousand crimes of selfishness and non-spontaneity. But now all debts are forgiven. Look at her: she's just a really sweet girl, after all. Yes, and not so far in the back of his mind, he knows that's what she's always made him think, always just before she knifed his heart again. But that was not her fault. He loves her for that intractible behavior too, now. He loves her. Holy shit, he loves her. 000003 #crow I like who I come from. My grandfather was smart and made little puzzles out of nails. He could also drive a nail in with one swing of a hammer. My grandmother was sturdy and generous and humble. My other grandfather was an ornery son of a bitch who found pens on the street instead of buying them. He was in WWII. He was a machinist and later a civil servant. I have a bunch of his clothes that he never wore. My other grandmother is sweet, sarcastic, outgoing, kind. She says she'll go when God tells her it's time. She won't make that decision herself, she says. I don't know why I'm talking about this, she says. Shame on me. There's no shame, I tell her. We're drinking coffee. All three of her daughters are here, plus one of their husbands, and me and my wife and my almost-one-year-old daughter. My grandmother's great-granddaughter. Who screams just then, and then laughs, pumps her legs and claps her hands and everybody loves it. I love it. And I'm always so afraid of people whose best loved ones have just died. I'm always so afraid they'll be aliens now, by pain transformed into something I don't know and that doesn't know me, so that if I try to say something it'll come out wrong, be something hurtful to them because we're aliens to each other now. But you know what? We're not. We're anything but. It's easy. You bring your wife and daughter. Or whoever you've got. You come. You have some coffee. Maybe a brownie or a cookie. Your daughter can make a mess of crumbs on the floor. You can take some of your grandfather's old clothes. They fit. I'll use these, you can say, and you can mean it. Thank god. It's still okay. You're not an alien after all. 110000 #human i can't stand staring into this thing any longer and it doesn't help and it tastes like a chalky, bitter prescription from a short-haired evil doctor who doesn't know me and only wants to touch my mama but she's oblivious and sticks me back in the hot-leather-smelling Lincoln and we drive away with the windows sealed up til I can feel them squeezing my neck like the turtleneck she made me wear and i can hardly breathe and the air conditioner's on and it makes the air syruppy and the streets outside hiss silently and i give up and plop back into the leather seat and it slowly slowly sucks me down in in in in in in in into another world and i wake up in that world not quite knowing what's wrong with me, just knowing something's wrong and i wake up in pajamas in the brilliant outdoors, surrounded by trees and bright green leaves reflecting marbled sunlight and there are birds twittering about and moss and rocks and i get out of my straw pile, stretch, dust off my pajamas, and think, what about a quest? somebody said there was something about a quest, but all i have is my pajamas, not even a knife or a wallet or a pair of shoes, and little nemo flashes through my head but i immediately let that thought go because who wants to be so helpless. who? who wants to be helpless? and the quest ends there because i haven't the strength to conjure any animals, friends, or enemies, and so i just stand there, blinking, in the sun until the sun starts to fade and right before it goes completely dark i have a flash of pain in my heart like, i could have done something here in this world, if i had only wanted to, or been awake enough, or had some energy, or not fallen into the leather car seat trap, i could have maybe done something, gone somewhere, and now it is too too late and i will never ever get another chance and here comes oblivion thank god but it is oblivion unearned and so i will not feel like celebrating the nothingness, the resting will be stickysweet and make my stomach hurt and i will not be solid nor thumped on the back by other warriors, no one will know who i was or what i did, and that, friends, is hell. i feel i could go thru reams and reams and reams and never really get what it is that is bugging me, that's all. and this isn't helping. what will? do i hafta let go of something? because i'm not very good at letting go of things. 081413 #worm A few years later, they're on their way back from another road trip, this time in the north woods.They've replaced the clunky old wagon with a newer car, one with conservatively supple lines and an air-conditioner. This is her car. She's driving. A white line whirs by followed by another and another and another and another until they blur into meaninglessness and Ltiky quits watching. He looks over at his wife instead. She has what may or may not be half a smile on her face. The numbers on the digital clock bob in a long minute. It is nearly midnight. A bright wash of light fills the car, illuminates the set angle of her chin, makes her squint, silhouettes the murdered bugs on the windshield, peaks with a white rushing noise to the left and immediately dies, replaced by a faint red glow which disappears into back there somewhere. Still no one speaks. Ltiky wants to but he doesn't know what to say. So he looks out his window. He sees a dark line of pines floating by, ancient and secretive. He imagines himself among them, feeling the cold wet air brush through them, seeing every detail of bark, dirt, and needle up close with animal eyes. He knows that beyond the pines the earth grows soft and lush, and a beach begins, and where the beach drops off from consciousness a sea begins, and where the sea begins are waves, and waves, and waves--relentless, gentle, powerful. From inside the speeding warm capsule he longs for those waves. Would he feel the same if he were actually alone out there, after midnight, with a laden breeze telling stories of faraway shores, under a sky full of staring stars -- 091513 #human #fish Dear fish, today Lib & I sat next to this horrible man who kept yelling at his daughter because she wasn't playing soccer perfectly enough & she wasn't ripping scalps off the opposing team & she wasn't unscrewing anybody's head and sticking it on a spike as an example to all the other losers & occasionally she made a pass a few degrees away from where it optimally should have gone & every now and then she didn't manage to get the ball away from Sheila & her team didn't win & I've heard of this kind of thing on TV shows and stuff but this is the first time I've witnessed it firsthand & what a godawful nightmare to go to an 11-year-old's soccer game on a beautiful Fall day and be half out of your seat in pain and anxiety the whole time & I mean seriously what the fuck is wrong with people? Do people like that ever see themselves satirized on TV shows & do they recognize themselves & do they feel bad because they're such hundred per cent class A pricks? Or do they just totally not get it? Tonight after his house is quiet will he feel bad and not know why? Will she? Or does she already know why all too well? And the guy's son was chubby-faced and all decked out in camo from head to toe and he looked ridiculous and I'll bet you anything he thinks he's trying to please the old man. 042013 #eel We ducked into the doorway of a dark side room at the end of a downhill slope of the path. Everyone else just disappeared. We held each other close. God she felt so so good. She had a tiny pimple on the end of her nose. I said something about some guy that had been in the story, a tan, strong, charismatic lifeguard type that we both knew, and i said something to the effect of how much it would excite me if she wanted to have sex with him, and she said, "what if I already did?" And I pressed up against her harder with a little moan, and she said "would you like me to?" And I said yes, and I was just about ready to come and she said "you may." 000096 #squirrel so why do i feel so guilty about glenn missing us tonite as long as your answering questions hmmm. becuz i think you care for glenn you know i care for glenn you know he cares for you and you feel a soul connexion and i'm afraid that if everytining doesnt go right thate the connexion will be eroded and we will go spinning off into space right yes. so willit? no not if its real 022613 #worm You have to be sharp, sharper dressed than they, you have to have subtly immaculate fingernails, just enough scalp showing at the temple, just the right amount of frown, that shows you're in control. They are, as soon as they abdicate the upper hand by walking in here dressed in anything even remotely slack and sitting down, essentially your slaves. Their only choices now are to capitulate or to run away. 062513 #eel living at grandma and grandpas old house and the neighbor insisted I mow the lawn and had automatronic wooden animals and it turned out a whole cotillion of scary but intriguing and sexy demons lived there like the guy with numbers in his eyes and haylee the catlike animal woman that was bare throated laid back animalistic purring smiling dangerous 050004 #human Is it possible to escape the tyranny of heirarchy? Is it desirable? Why am I so god-damned stuck? Why isn't the Internet working? Why isn't the United States of America working? Why haven't I had a really good system since the index cards? Except for the original incarnation of teh-dsa, I mean. And that one remains questionable. Do I just need to leave the god-damned computer at home? What the fuck am I going to do with myself then? Why did that frumpy art-bartender ladygirl give me such a large glass of whiskey? What is Capoeira? Do I really suck as bad as I feel I do right now? Where is Walt Whitman? What happened to all the trains? What's going to happen to all us pudgy peasants? Is there such a thing as a moral compass, and can it be trusted? Does anyone really know how to read it? And most importantly, why did I dream this last night: 000003 #gull OH MY GOD, THESE are MAGIC CARDS!!! If my wife knew I had these, she'd throw a shit fit. Ever since she found my old ones and rendered them... useless, I've been sort of striking out, cruising for a new deck and never finding one. I found one in the last place I had expected to look. My old filing cabinet. The ugly tan one, bottom drawer, wedged in downhill. A very thick book with many small pages. Outmoded, too-specific, semi-portable, vaguely embarassing, fuel-efficient, kind of glowing, kind of weird wood-and-pulp computer of some kind. There's no on/off switch. Parts are easily lost, found. You can peek and poke at will. Some of the moments make no sense, some make so much sense you wonder what you're doing. 081413 #worm The blond boy takes flight. Him takes flight. All the leaves on all the trees take flight, and seeing them fled, so follow all the leaves all over the ground. The breasts of the woodlands lie bare. The boats in the boat graveyards fly away. The moon and all her craters fly. The salt and pepper shakers fly, leaving comets' tails of glittering white and grey-black. Me wakes up sitting at an oaken roll-top desk. Me wakes up in front of a larger-than-life-sized painting. Me wakes up covered in blood. Me wakes up trying to band-aid a mortal flesh wound. It's not going to work, little bunny. Me darts left, dashes right, searches thtough the faltering manicures of eternal urban backyards for the hole in the hedge, the secret gate to the pinhole garden, the laundry chute, the curvy slide, the fire escape, the garret in the arching manor house. Not so fast, little bunny. Me wakes up in the hospital. An orderly in pink garden clogs insists the clock is working fine. Me can plainly see, the clock is stopped. Me fails the tests. Me feels the restraints. Him vouches for Me, and they let Me go. Me has nowhere to go, so he bounds around the universal landscape, arm in arm with Him. But Him takes flight. The little blond-haired boy steals out into the garden late at night. The dog has killed the bunny; ripped its throat into a million strands of unmusical gore. That's what dogs do. Isn't it? Me doesn't know. Me wakes up in front of a bus. The bus, the bus: barometer of Me's deepest passions. when in the winter of a graying city's hovering despair a bus jams by, its jam-packed denizens seem destined for a grisly fate. Filled to capacity with emptiness, the bus keens on in a diesel tune that torments the emptiness shrouding Me's carcass. The window across the street glows, chestnut-warm. Blind snowflakes slice the air in front of that forbidden golden section. The bus, barometer: remember in the city's lanky, downhill summer, when the bus banked around a sunny schoolday afternoon? Remember how its raucous creaks and strains sounded in your ears exactly like the music you told yourself you'd never forget? Didn't you follow that cacophonous, polyamorous music out onto the semi-sea-worthy planks of your old, battered, green front porch--the park bench grows more chipped-green every year--and didn't you sit down in the swing your grandma's grandma's second cousin's ever-lovin officer brought back for her from the battlefields of original wonder? 000007 #human Here I wanted to be so wise and hurt. Here I wanted to be steeped in grief like every other two bit celebrity out there that can't do a god damned thing about the war. Here I thought I was so careful not to act like I was wise, and you know what? I'm still a god damned fool for all that. I was mad about the kids, trying to get them buckled into the van, and it was hot, and I'm a fucking idiot, and my mom said gently, gently because that's what she is, that's what she's always been with me, even when I couldn't hardly stand it, she said, "Someday they're going to be thirty." And I acted like I understood, I smiled like I understood but you have to realize it's hot out here and I'm sweating and we have a long fucking way to drive, and I get what you're saying, and I know, I know, I appreciate them, as soon as we get home I'll stop and we'll play a game or something, but what she was really saying was, as soon as you get home it'll be too late. They'll already be too old to play Hi Ho Cherry-O. They'll be teenagers and they won't give a damn about the totally meaningless random rolls of the dice and they won't give a damn how many cherries are in their basket, or worse, they will give a damn and they'll be upset because they don't have enough, and you will have said later, I'll play that stupid, pointless game with you later, and you'll hear yourself saying it, and you'll know it sounds like a dumb story about some dumbass that always says later, but that's not you, you're just saying it this once, and by the time you actually do get around to sitting down and playing it with them it really will be pointless. That's what she was saying, you god damned stupid son of a bitch. Now go fill out the forms and give them a drop of your blood and get a job. And quit acting like it's such a big deal, because it isn't. It's only, as some other jackass who also thought he had to be so fucking wise figured out, life after all. 081913 #human I miss people. No--I miss adults. I miss House with People in It. See, like, Anne's coming for a visit in about a month, and I'm a little apprehensive because I don't know exactly what she wants or expects, and earlier I was going to say that I don't know what I want or expect either, but that's not really true. I do know what I want, and it is not a new (old) wife. I just want to talk, and smile, perhaps even touch, I don't know, we'll see, but I want that to be one piece of a bigger House. I want a man. That doesn't mean I don't want women, but see? I want women as friends, as the spice in the pot, the chagrin of the other men, the laughing, the pointed awareness, the sarcasm, the sublime curviness of dizzying interaction. The mix. The melange. And then I want to go home to my man. 052894 #human "Well I had one of those moments today that will just have to eep out whenever however it wants. Walking with Anne holding onto my arm. Down Ninth Street. A guy with a nice voice singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot, and then it went right into Everything's Gonna Be All Right. And I was singing and I was on the sunny sidewalk and I was with the woman I love. She's my friend. We had a few beers. Tomato and artichoke pizza. She gave me a kiss goodbye. She told me she was my friend and I told her I was hers." 081913 #human And now here it is 606,873,600 seconds later, and she's coming to see me, and we've both been married and had that blow up in various ways, and... 081413 #worm He is in a barn. Not just any barn. This is the barn where the barn-dancers played. This is the lightning-bolt, faraway-dog-barking, amaranth-hidden, long-abandoned barn of not-so-secret ritual. This is the first place the river travelers slept, before they were created. Surely this barn housed someone's hard-nosed livelihood, some half-forgotten sepia time ago, but now it is impractical, and very much alive and free. This barn is off the map. This barn leaks moonlight, but the roof keeps out the rain. Come on in, come on in. There's plenty of room in the loft. There's a narrow staircase. The dogs are going upstairs too, reluctantly because it's dark, but you know the way. You will encourage them, and they will follow you. There are ghosts, but none to be afraid of tonight. You can stay all night; there's plenty of straw. The willow-haired girl is a big girl now, red-haired and slight. Her smile is naughty. She smokes. She hands Me the cigarette. He inhales slowly, sucking as much air as smoke. The tip glows. The stars glow. He exhales as much breath as smoke; the two clouds go their separate ways. The willow-haired girl claps her hands, as if Me has just performed a virtuoso caprice on violin. Me hands back the fag. Me and the girl go upstairs, brushing past spiders' webs and mud daubers' nests. Everyone else has gone now. Me and the girl have mischief on their minds. They kiss. The kiss is a variation on a theme of light. They've been up all night. They know the deluge is coming. It's only a matter of time now. Me has to go downstairs to take a piss. Wait here, he admonishes playfully. You're free to go, she says. But he doesn't take the stairs; he opts to balance on the grain chute that angles hypotenuse-wise, outside toward the ground. As his weight passes below a surprise fulcrum, the top of the chute flies up and the bottom flies down; Me free-falls several feet, and hollers. The invisible dog barks. Me explores the lower level briefly, finds an empty stall doored in by ancient grey wood. He unzips, lets go. His piss turns fine dust to mush in the dark. 000000 #elephant you WISH you were hopelessly aroused. you wish you were in agony over your wife but you're not. Frankly, you don't really care whom she fucks. you remember what it's like to feel that jealousy creep up over you, arising out of your crazy-airplane-sick gut, licking at your loins, tingling up your torso like poison termites. To feel your sense of identity waver, then shudder, then implode with a pathetic little pop when she says those three perfect words every lover wants to hear: "I fucked him." And it was great. She had the most amazing fucking orgasm of her life. And it wasn't from you. So you hated her. And you hated yourself. And you really really really still wanted to crawl back to her on your pasty little hands and knees and beg her to still let you fuck her. That's what you wanted more than anything else. To do whatever it would take to make this gorgeous, cruel, smiling creature continue to bother to use you for cheap laughs. You will always come back to her any time she calls you back. She has shown what she is capable of, and from now on, she is just a little bit ahead of you. She will always have the upper hand, because you didn't walk away that night she said, "I think I want to have sex with other people," because you didn't laugh in her face, or yell in her face, or tell her to go to hell and storm out, because you meekly laughed that little laugh you have, and talked with her about it, and it doesn't even matter what you said because her mind was already made up. In fact, her eye was probably already roving over the bar, while you were still prattling away about how change is probably a good thing usually, but you're not sure, but then again, what the hell and so on and so forth with your sick little gut and stiff stupid little dick. She was perfect and you know it, and she finally got tired of you. She finally turned her laughing iron gaze away from you, because you couldn't keep up. You broke the rules. You got married--to someone else! And to punish you, your princess is withholding her torments. She has called your ridiculous bluff and left you to be happy in your own little life. And you try to pretend--you even strap on silly plastic toys--that your wife is your one true mistress. You got kicked out of hell, and you miss it. 071013 #copperhead I'll think some obvious thoughts about perspective and the billions of stars and how anything could be happening out there, I mean, truly just anything at all, and a truck will roar past and I'll wonder if that guy driving the truck has any idea about what-all is going on on the fourth planet out from the the 33 and a half billionth star from the left of that arm of the Milky Way I can see from here, or if he cares, or if I care, or if we're just stuck down here thinking about our own stupid troubles--him with his load of milk in the ------ truck with its baffles to keep from sloshing around too much and sending him careening out of control on one of these sharp turns--what the fuck is a semi truck doing on this gravel road anyway?--and me with my stupid pseudo-mythological narcissistic exercise in half-denied soul-searching gone sour on one and a half beers and a late night full of fluorescent tubes and windshield-killed bugs--and maybe at some time I'll be ready to think about that and maybe I'll be alone and lonely enough for that to really turn into something despite itself, or maybe there will be someone there, and as a result words will turn into other words that I didn't even mean or think, and maybe there will be some advantage in that, but for now, I don't know, I just don't have the energy for any of it, and so instead I hit seek and hope for a station that's something other than pop pop pop pop fake country or commercial, but no such luck, so I crack open another idiotic beer and sing along. I'm usually not like this. I guess I really don't know exactly what's wrong with me. 081013 #dog *Outside the garage, it's raining, but there's no way HIM and ME, hunkered inside their powder-blue Cadillac with the doors and windows shut, and the garage door shut (and there are no garage windows), could possibly know that. Smoke, smoke, smoke fills what little air remains.* ME: Hey look, someone's coming. [reaches across HIM, who is sitting in the driver's seat, and turns on the windshield wipers for some reason] HIM: [masturbating jaggedly, trousers crumpled down around the pedals] What the hell are you talking about? ME: Nothing. Nevermind. [But it is true, ME has seen something. Figures emerge out of the transparent ether of the windshield world! One of them seems to be a cop, judging from the pointy hat and blustery demeanor, and the other seems to be a guy. Just some guy with a goatee.] COP: Can I see your ID please? GUY: I don't have it. It was confiscated at a random checkpoint yesterday. COP: Step out of the car please. *As the GUY opens the car door, slowly because you don't want to alarm a cop, ME hallucinates that it is he who is getting out of the cadillac. Meanwhile, HIM keeps pumping away on his naked dick, oblivious to all this.* Do you mind if I look through your car? GUY: Well, I guess not. Do you mind my asking what the problem is? COP: For my safety, I cannot divulge that information. Just get down on your knees, please. Right over here. GUY: Well- okay- [gets down in front of the COP] COP: Do you know how to suck a cock, boy? [unzippping trousers] GUY: Uh. I don't- I mean- Well, I- COP: Well, you're going to learn. [takes firm hold of GUY's head] Open up and suck it, fag. *GUY does as he is told. What else is he supposed to do? The COP has a better body, superior training, the support of the entire legal system, and not to mention a gun. GUY's chin runs over with slick spit. His cheeks bulge as the cop slides it out and in, out and in. A pebble digs into GUY's knee. His jaw begins to stiffen, but the COP is relentless and just keeps slamming his loins into GUY's face, deeper and harder. The COP's meat tastes like sweat and funk. It gets harder and bigger. GUY is aware of headlights going by, people slowing down to stare. He feels like he has to take an enormous shit.* Oh, that's good, keep it up, cocksucker. Suck it good, shitlicker! *The COP grunts and his knees almost buckle as finally, mercifully, he hollers and lets go. The spunk fills GUY's cheeks suddenly, and the feeling is alarming and astonishing. GUY almost gags, and tries to pull his head away but the COP holds on, and holds on, and wanting to retch with a burning shame, GUY swallows the COP's load.* All right, you're free to go. I'm just going to give you a warning this time. *GUY's lips are sticky and his stomach is all twisted up and he can hardly stand the macho, musky smell that is all over him.* HIM: What the fuck? [coming out of his masturbatory self-absorption] *ME comes out of his little trance, and finds himself twisted sideways on the car seat, his mouth around HIM's rapidly diminishing dick. In startlement, he swallows HIM's cum, and sits back up, not knowing where to look.* What the fuck is wrong with you? ME: With me? With me? [but he cannot answer the question] 092712 #martian 1. The other day in the Butler computer Lab--that almost scrawny kid with the nape of his neck buzzed and thin, black plastic framed glasses, but not nerdy really, not in the exaggerated movie way you might expect, looked like a Paul, a *souris*, quiet kid but dignified enough--he was typing. Courier font on plain Word document, double-spaced like a proper manuscript, just typing away, word after word, scarcely pausing, until I think he felt me over his shoulder and minimized it. I said sorry, I wasn't spying on you, just curious, and he said okay, didn't seem bitter or anything. Then later I watched him alternate effortlessly between the march of words and the browser, looking up map of Switzerland, google-Earthing London--it's all right there. Research on the fly. It's not a big deal, it's just right there. That kid is doing what I need to do. It was so quietly electrifying and illuminating to watch the words just appear, the way they used to do for me. Not this wishy-washy journal stuff, but made-up shit! Where stuff happens to strange people! And you get to know them because you're there every moment as the stuff keeps happening! I remember being on that bright field! And I want to go home! What I'm trying to say is, he made it look so easy. I used to be the one making it look so easy. 2. How many times have I had to tell you, life is not a bed of pansies! 3. Hm. Substituting and typing. I might be a little pathetic. And that might be okay. 000009 #human We got a late start. We took forever to go shopping, get packed, eat lunch, get gas, drive through construction, etc. It was hot and crowded. People were thick, everywhere. I was scowling, inching the stroller through the masses. We were bitchy with the kids for every petty infraction of behavior. We hemmed and hawed about the logistics of going on the Hometown Fun Machinewhos going to hold the baby? Can Libby go on? I could have just said come on, and taken them on it, but I was nervous. We ended up not going on it at all. We kept plodding through the crowd instead. Maybe the line will be shorter later, we said lamely. We didnt even get them on a ride at all for probably an hour at least, and that line was way longer than the Fun Machines. The water park was full. More waiting. They went on the little kid rides at the Wiggles area. The big red cars were closed. We did get into the water park later. Megan and Libby had time for one slide each. Millie got a little scared, so no slides. We splashed around with Libby though, and she laughed, and the lazy river was nice. I waited in the cotton candy line for freaking ever. Millie was mad because she didnt get the carousel horse she wanted. We got mad at her for getting mad. Megan saw a big light-up, spin around in the air ride, and Mommys going to take us on that!but it was closed for the night. By anything approaching an objective standard, it was a pretty mediocre trip. Not disastrous, not epic in any way, just okay. At least we didnt pay for the tickets. But you know what the kids had to say? They said I was the best Dad ever, and Ann was the best Mom ever, and thank you for bringing us here! God bless them. I just feel a little bit dirty with guilt. But, just like I told Megan when she didnt get a part in Alice in Wonderland, theres always next time. 081413 #worm He waited at the bar through two whiskeys. She was late; thank god some things never change. He sat and smoked. Once invited, the daydreams of her had kept coming back, more adamantly than he could have predicted. It was gratifying, really, to feel so relatively helpless, after all. Could something be waking up in him? Or was he merely horny and tipsy? Surely by now he should be able to tell the difference. 164733 012514 #trout #moonwalker This guacamole tastes like weed, he says, sniffing some on a chip and putting it back down on his plate. The napkin sits there, greasy. He pushes back his chair and it makes a horrid squawk on the terra cotta floor. When we get back up to the room, our plastic cups are still on the dresser and the desk. Mine has a worn-out piece of lime floating bubblelessly. His still has the remains of some ice--a small berg huddled in the middle of cold water, disappearing in slow motion. That was the problem, he says, and he's drunk now of course, with our whole relationship. He shuffles over to the trench between the beds. Our whole relationship was like hotel ice. 'S'not like normal ice cubes. 'S'smaller. The pieces are like, like chips. He pauses dramatically. I'ss like these goddamn round bumpy chips of ice that normal people don't. I mean, you don't just. You have a whole machine that it does nothing except make these fucking ice chips. Who has that kind of luxury? He gestures as much at the mirror as at me. That I'm in the mirror is extra. BIZness people? Don't make me fucking laugh. They don't want ice chips. They want to go HOME and FUCK their WIVES and have drinks with regular, normal. Fucking ice cubes in them. The people who want these kind of stupid cheap, fake luxuries are exactly the people who can't, AFFORD them. Yeah. It's always about AFFORDING things. How can we AFFORD this? She always had to stay in hotels. He picks up the remote and throws it across the room without much fury. This is normal. Fuck it. He'll be asleep soon. 222824 081413 #worm It's true. They've walked for hours. They have no way to know which way the lake lies. Seen from above, they seem to circle like autumn flies. Passing a jug of wine back and forth, they tread and retread the same acre and a half of woolly wood until the dawn's last constellations, muttering about the trash pickup, it's late again, go slinking into anonymity. But what else are they going to do? They walk on. 100006 #human Thinking about whatever I want, or nothing, without feeling guilty or rushed. 000006 #treefrog How to deal with the people who simply do not see the appropriateness of being self-restrained as a social expectation? And it's not simply black culture versus white, because Ms. Christy is totally on the side of people being quiet. Honestly, I think the problem is mostly Erica. She's the meanest and bitchiest on the subject. The other ones act out, but she really seems personally resentful, where they're more just normal school bullshit ha-ha resentful. Faced with people like that, I just get so easily flabbergasted. It's like people you see out on the street, driving cars and whatnot, and you just ask yourself, Why? Why are you SUCH an ASSHOLE? Then the weird thing is, she came over to me later to ask me for something, and she was perfectly nice and polite to me. I didn't even consciously notice it was her until she was walking away. 090207 #eel my gay self is stalking me. he's pale, scrawny, nerddy, half-retarded, and sullen. He has shit-stained tighty whiteys. He's tenacious; he followed me all the way to Barbados where I was trying to vacation with my wife and my rational self. My rational self watched helplessly as my gay self climbed into the white enamel, claw-foot bathtub in the middle of the apartment where we were staying (I don't know where my wife was; off having fun in the sun I think)--but hey! I said before he got in there. Wash your damned underwear. Wash your ass. There's no way I'm even going to think about touching you unless you get cleaned up. Okay, my gay self said. The tub was so full it almost spilled over when he lay back in it. Yourself and I are going to do it now, he said to my rational self, who didn't quite believe it, didn't want to believe it, didn't want to believe I would betray him just like that, after all this time. 081313 #copperhead But right now we're walking. The canoe is stashed under some grapevines and a scrawny little clump of silver maple that probably won't even be here after the next big flood. As we hove the hull, his hand curled around the bow deck plate, mine around the stern seat, in one satisfyingly muscular swoosh over the whisperings and scrapings of weeds, a fluttering of samaras ticked and tapped into the bottom of the boat. Most of them didn't have far enough to fall to even begin helicoptering. Somehow their presence in the boat, all tan with feathery striations, some still with a pulse of green at the seed end, made the boat and all our gear look already half gone back to prehistory; like maybe if we wait a moment too long to come back here, there will be nothing but a faint mound, maybe the dull shine of some long-buried aluminum poking through, less noticeable than an ancient soda can. 081413 #worm #roach Downstairs, the whispering stops, too completely. There are sirens outside. Jelse leaves a bloody handprint on the glass door. He's back on the street. The blood from the truck driver's open mouth drips off the crumpled hood of the garbage truck, onto Jelse's shoe. The firemen and the cops are arriving in droves. Jelse stands, a phoenix, arms outstretched, thermos dangling from one gloved hand. It's a dream. It's a dream. It's a dream. Flash, skip, flip, slip or waddle through the mud to a time, any time, make it twenty years removed from Krim and Ltiky's initial flushed flirtations. Need directions? Fold the map. The piece of paper I picked up in the cafe at dawn has at least sixty-four distinct sides. I don't know how to access all of them, but as I puzzle through the permutations, I see a plenitude of pathways through dimensions more numerous and fractal than your commonplace convenience store's three-dollar compendium of roads, highways, counties and campsites. 060212 #human #crow Remember what it was like to be in school. You wanted a nurturing environment, even though you didn't realize that's what you wanted. You wanted some people and an environment that cared enough to build a large, well-lit, semipermeable structure for you to live in each day until the summer. Yeah, you wanted to complain about it; you wanted to resent being babied. But all along, underneath it all, you were grateful for the privelege of having something safe to complain about. They've built that here. But you don't do that for your students. It's partly your fault, and it's partly a failing on the part of the school's society and culture. You need to decide if you are going to do it from now on or not, and if not, you need to do something else of value. It's that simple. Your current happiness is impaired by the dissonance of your hypocritical situation. You can't hide from it anymore. 051111 #martian 1. On the way to work, I was drowning in an anxious circle of expired plates, no license, might be pregnant, what if the kids needs need braces, what about college, can't even pay student loans, spend all my time working for nowhere near enough money, why isn't it enough, and so on. Then first hour, Malcolm said, "You all right, Mister Schulte? You look like you been in a bad movie. Like you were the guy drowning, and the slow-motion life-guard came running down the beach, and you were screaming, and he was running even slower.... What's up with the slow-motion thing, anyway?" 2. Devonte thinks he'll always be charismatic. He said school is a fun place for him to be happy, to get away from his real life, where he has to always be looking around, serious, ready to fight. 3. Is there a pattern to who my favorite students are? Part of it is "misfits," but that's not all there is to it. 081413 #worm #roach It's Esriel's Cafe's Post-Blow-up Pajama Party, and your friends are all sad, walking around in the rubble in their pajamas. Everything is just--broken. You walk around. Broken. One wall still stands, a natural attractor, turning into an amphitheatre of some sort. Closest to the makeshift stage squat Esriel's regulars, as if their beloved counter were still there. Behind them, in clusters: the legions of booth- and table-sitters; the families, the divorcees, the cousins, the gangs, the crushee and the crushed on, the lost soul, the rambling gentleman, the arbitrary and the vanishing, the familiar and the dog-faced. They perform a fractal chorus, wandering in and out of zoom, all night; some of them have flashlights. Behind them? The city streets, which never have stopped hissing since this whole affair began. The gray and shaggy streets and roads remember what it was like to be canals. None of this shit is new to them. 081413 #worm Eventually, the mall became the entire town. Him's little empty-office loft got chewed up like a guppy in the watery maw of a great, gap-toothed predator fish, bigger than any aquarium could bear. Sometimes Him sleeps in Me's closet. They can always make something up to tell Me's parents. Me's parents' house is a women's shoe store now. At night, Him and Me unfold the trampoline and bounce, lullingly, amid the dun glow of the backup night-lights and the smell of all that potentially female-caressed leather. O, hopeful leather! to be filled by the superlative, fleshly pads of the feminine foundation! It was simply too much to bear, at times. Some of the sleeker black, strappy heels bear the traces of Me's dried-up spooge, although of course this is an utmost secret to be kept concealed from Him. Him, likewise, is certain his friend will never know about his own lost sperm, hiding and flaking away in the veal-soft interiors of certain size fourteen triple-A men's cross-training shoes. 000097 #worm I have to admit I get a secret joy out of having a car that burns oil. Weirdly enough, I had always wanted one but never had the pleasure. I remember the first neo-pagan witches I ever met. They had an old silver bomb of a car, with Alaska plates cuz they'd driven it straight down all the way from Ketchikan to Denver, and that's where I met them, in my college friend's apartment, smoking pot and playing the flute. Helena and I were playing flutes, that is; the two neo-pagans were either singing or laughing or moving their stuff into her apartment because they were all going to live together, cheifly so that she would be able to afford the rent and stop writing hot checks all over town. That was stressful, the always being broke and trying to slip a postdated check past a clerk at the grocery store. So while they moved boxes and burned sage, we smoked pot and slowly but surely got worse and worse at flute-playing until our lips stuck to the mouthpieces and we laughed and gave it up. 000094 #human "I'm not ready," she protests. But you gotta do it anyhow. When you're poised on the gravel bar in front of the swimming hole and you know it's going to be colder'n hell, and you say okay i'm just about ready i'll jump when i'm ready it's gonna be cold and i'm so dry and warm right now in the sun and okay how about just in a second here, i'll get ready and then i'll go just one more second, okay my feet are planted i'm in the position to jump and it's just a matter of swing the arms up and over we'll go right thru the air and into the pool and it'll make a big splash, right in a second here okay here goes, right, okay--but you will never be ready. no matter how much preparing you do, it is never going to change the fact that the water's cold and it's going to be a shock. So one of those times you just jump anyway even though you're not ready. And you come up screaming and whoopin, and you feel awake, and wet. 081413 #worm Him, bless him, senses Me's deteriorating psychic equilibrium, and offers in mediation a chunk of his own heart: instead of getting testy in return, he takes a deep breath. Have you ever tried that? Ever been in a rapidly decomposing conversation with someone you both love and hate (ha! to specify that dichotomy is probably redundant!), and decided to swallow the rock that comes up in your maw when you know they're in the wrong; you're the persecuted one; why do you always have to put up with all this shit; and for an instant all you want in the whole world is to say, loud and pointedly, Fuck. This. But instead, you just take that dramatic but genuine deep breath, lean back, relax your tired bones (lord knows, we're all tired), and say, Hey. Okay. Let's just take a little break. Let's just sit here and maybe have a smoke, if we smoke, or maybe I'll rub your shoulders a little bit, or we could have some tea, or a margarita if the wind tickles us that way, and let's just sit here and relax a minute. 081613 #worm How about when Pam and I danced our fucking brains out at the pagan fest. Lightning. Thunder. Drums. Us naked in the mud, pelted by that rain. A slim woman watching. A bunch of fat people watching. And everybody else, watching. Some of them might have realized it, and I bet a bunch of them didn't: we were it. We were what they were praying to. We were the gods and goddesses. Next morning in the butterfly sun, they'd walk around, do their little rituals, put the glass over their eyes, cast their eyes downward and say the phrases they're supposed to say, only instead of god you say goddess. Instead of he you say she. Instead of bare ass fucking naked, you say skyclad. Whatever. It's all the same fucking thing. Only instead of being quiet in church, you fist fuck each other's mouths with food out in the woods. You can see why I was interested. I'm not bitter. Not anymore. Now that I'm not so afraid. I just think it's funny that hardly anybody knows, we're god. We're the goddess. Fuck us. Fuck us good in the rain, baby, with drums! 081413 #human funny how calling something into the light repeatedly can have such an effect on how you see it, how you feel it. I think I glimpsed a little something of the avoidance of alcohol tonight. For a moment, I saw a facet of it heretofore hidden. Whereas it had been a highly pleasurable *thing*, I saw it in old-hag-dropped-illusion form, and it looked like a mechanical masturbation machine made of pus-filled roaches. I mean, not exactly, but you get what I'm saying? For a moment there, the "high" appeared spurious. Why? I think it's because I'm getting a better vision of the alternative. The thing I've been avoiding, my own personal godbody, really is better and harder to see from day to day when you've studied the spell of invisibility and seeled the scales on your eyes for so long. And here's the thing: here's why the alcohol (and its equivalents) can be so seductive. The other thing, because it's *real,* comes with no guarantee. Alcohol does. Alcohol therefore represents total power. And only the weak lust after total power. 000004 #human This room would be an easy room in which to fly. If I were going to learn flying, I would start here. Look at the great peaked roof. Look at the spidery beams. Look at the punchy duct. Look at all that beautiful, calm, big space. It's clear. It's clear in here, more clear than anywhere I've been for a long time. I wonder why that is? Coincidence? Juxtaposition of nodal lines? History schmistory? This was some kind of a place, you know, before it turned into what it is sort of supposed to be right now. It wears the costume of what it is supposed to be now with a good grace and a sense of humor. You know. Kind of like the way I don't. 081313 Then I played a #meerkat with the cuboid involving a tarot spread with text files instead of cards, and when I asked about what's behind me, where I'm coming from, an #eel reminded me obliquely (eels are always oblique) about a time when I used to play congas in a band and wear gauzy skirts in public and flirt with my male drum teacher. 081313 #copperhead I sure could use a drink of something, though. I do have some water in a bottle in my bag under the seat my aching ass is pressing down. But still. Sure could go for a nice, tall, steamy, dark-roast, fresh, black, styrofoam-surrounded co-mother-fuckin-*fee.* Yeah that's like a fucking dream, as the sun ticks another nanosecond down towards the bridge, the reeds, the bats, the cattails, and the world outside this narrow little channel of invisibility. And another. And another. He's never going to show. I've disappeared, haven't I? Why am I down here? It's so quiet all of a sudden. Where'd the guy with the chainsaw go? The water licks the rocks with lewd suggestions. The water, I realize, has dismantled everything it touches. The softest thing in the world destroys the world. Until it gets destroyed. Dude, I don't even know what the fuck I'm talking about any more. I'm like some kind of lame low-budget animé cartoon in my own head. I'm almost certain now this was a bad idea. 081413 #worm There he was, in the pool at the top, as good as already dead. Half naked, he floated supine in the pool. A silly grin taunted his desperate face. He would have stayed in there forever, circling troutlike in the square, blue pool. Lazily he would have spun about, in the realm of pure potential, never needing to close his mouth, nor open it to scream. Would he have died? or lived? Would it have made any difference, ultimately, if you and the willow-haired girl--guided him? If you directed his flow, the way one might nudge a soggy stick, stuck in a bend in the river, out of its beaver trap, just so you could watch it flow into a new, wide arc, past the fast part of the stream, orient itself effortlessly, and sail away? She held on to you; you pushed him with your foot. He plunged. The coiling water whisked him straight down, then whipped him around a curve to the right, and--just like that--you never saw him again. 081413 #worm Three curls of smoke while away their short lives in the broad leaves above. The breeze carries a hint of death. It says in a sigh, if you do not go home soon, you may never be able to find your way back. You prick up your ears, but you don't run away. The river itself speaks. It tells tinkling tales. It shows you how to make a perfect bowl, if you look. It demonstrates the proper use of tobacco. It sends a signal always home. It wends its way around your feet without offense. Occasionally, it bites you. It can kill. Remember that, Greh said; and disappeared. Take only what you need. Extra baubles will sink to the bottom like indiginous trout. The river says there is no deadline except the line between death and life. The other lines are spurious, too perfect--encompassed by geometry, they fail to conjure vital imperfection. Still, Him and Me and the blond boy sit and smoke. A crow flies up. A crow flies away. In that sequence alone lie fifty thousand words. 081413 #worm #roach The space Krim tells the space Me stories that melt his astral heart. He plies her with replicated milkshakes. She lifts herself in his esteem beyond the planet-bound. Her spirit transcends the killingly sexy waitress skirt, the brutally compelling black boots. Her essence blossoms beyond the cafe, beyond the bus stop, beyond womanly form altogether, til she becomes, simultaneously, the tenth floor of a ten-story building; a mossy hollow where Me is king of the lions; a sensual organism made of pure star; and the tallest, scariest, wisest, most popular girl in school, as Me remains a grade behind, too young when it's better to be older, or too old when he wishes he were younger, afraid to read her neat triangle of a note because it surely, if it says she likes him, must be some kind of trick or trap. He turns it over and over with his thumb and two fingers, nervous, as the stars and nebulae whiz by the spaceship's picture windows. 000096 #squirrel i dont see your bullshit acts i dont think that your always acting but see my dear thats a nother part of it coming from you maybe you want to believe that your acting cuz its too cscary to be real you want to be able to pull back inside the shella nd that was just a trik a slite of hand nothing riskt nothing lost nothing gaind. maybe i know sometimes i'm acting but never really on purpose exactly i dont knwo why this is all so slippery like i forget it as soon as i understand it i mean the very same instant i mean i dont know for some reaosn this is a very sluppery place for me to be and that sounds like its prbably a very core issue it is its connected to the root of your of my what go on say it sthe root of your beee ing. oh. i thought you were aboyut to say the root of my problem which is what i would have said but you are much harder on yourself than i am. 081313 #copperhead I'm probably going to get a sunburn. There's a crashing in the foliage over my left shoulder, but it's not him. It's so dumb I'm even thinking that. Did you ever sit near a road, waiting for a certain person to come pick you up, and it's getting dark, and each new spray of headlight over the hump in the road is definitely them, and then each time it's not? How retarded, to be sitting here on the ass-curve of the aft bench of a stupid loomie, feeling like that when a fucking squirrel misses his branch and crashes into a mess of sumac leaves. Scamper, scamper, he hides his embarrassment with quickness. I hide mine with chucking something into the shallows. The pebble settles in among its billion brethren, a pebble again at last. Hey, if pebbles weren't meant to fly, it tells the river bottom, *then I wouldn't have.* And then it forgets. Water flows by overhead, and sunshine and starlight over that, and that's all that happens to it again for a billion years. 000001 #human You start with a point attractor, like stillness in the case of a pendulum slowing down, or flowing basically straight to the sea in the case of a slow river. The next level of attractor is the circular, or limit-cycle attractor, as in the case of a pendulum's cycle between zero speed/max displacement (ends), and max speed/zero displacement (middle), or a bathtub-style vortex in the river when it's moving faster. Then you get torus-shaped attractors, such as vortices within vortices, as the river goes crashing on downstream. Then, you get (I'm not sure how the shape is described) vortices within vortices within vortices. But then--the attractor after that stage is called strange. And it's not just another zoom-level after the pattern thus far described. Somehow, the level of complexity becomes infinite, the shape of the strange attractor is fractal. How this happens, I do not understand. 081609 #human Whether you want to call it love, affection, sex, or whateverIve got it for my wife. I love her vulnerability, the candle of her brain, and her wide white ass. I love how she said the weather forecast overnight said it was going to be moony. Get it? It didnt show a sun. It showed a picture of a moon. Actually, it was partly starry. Shes sideways under red satin now, flanked by two babies. Shes milky and sometimes she hurts. I love her. The website for the survey that measures how much grit you have isnt responding. Thats not important. Whats important is whether how much grit you have is a mutable commodity. Is it ever too late. And I have enough grit to say, no it isnt. I have what it takes. Even if I spent way too many years not thinking so. Im making up my own mind. Im keeping on. Not giving up. I dont need a website to tell me that. Im defining it for myself. Tell the whole world Ive gone insane. 081013 #dog [speaking as he writes] But there is so much more I want to tell you. I love the way you put nail polish on. I love the cruel winter blast of your smile. I love when you talk to other guys, flirt with other guys, get wowed by other guys, listen to other guys, go home with other guys, laugh at other guys' dumb jokes, drink other guys' drinks, watch other guys' eyes roving over your perfect perfect perfect breasts. I love that I was on the phone with you and got cut off and when I tried to call you back you were on the phone with someone else and I love how I knew with a shadow of doubt that you were thinking of how devastated I would be when I called you back and I love how that made you smile and take your time talking to whomever it was you were talking to, whichever guy it was, whichever suitor with a hard dick and a thing I don't have and I love how you will love pretending to be hesitant to tell me how you were on the phone with another guy . . . . Will you marry me? 101004 #eel I leaned over to my buddy and whispered, I have a gun! He said, I know. {Later} we planned how we could use it to escape. We knew we couldn't just blast our way out; that would be folly. Instead we decided to wait til the outdoor festival later that evening. Perhaps a way would become clear. The gun felt light? Was it even loaded? Perhaps it wouldn't matter; we could at least use it to bluff. I checked surreptitiously. Though the gun felt as insubstantial as a toy, about half its chambers did in fact have bullets in them. The revolving part (what's that called?) was large; I had about 10 - 12 rounds. I spun it, locked it back in, advanced with my thumb carefully on the hammer til I knew the next pull of the trigger would result in a real shot, and put the thing back in my pocket. On our way back to our room, we passed the stern lady again. My friend acted like a retard, I acted as though I were leading him somewhere for safety. She eyeballed us, but left us alone. 081613 #worm We'll keep going. But only because we're slugs, and we have no choice. We hurry along, about .12 miles per hour, feel that wind. I said, feel that wind. Your car is about a jillion years old and I always know it's you coming up the rut, not because I'm so attuned to the unique motor sound, but because you're the only fucking idiot that ever comes up here. Did you ever wonder why I think you're so fucking hot, and you're so much better than me, and I'm so unworthy and all that shit, but if that were the case why'd you keep fucking coming around here year after year, you horny camp-ass bitch-whore slut? Yeah, that's right. You're just as pathetic as I am. And for some reason, that cheers me up as I light a fire under a rusted-out spatter-ware kettle I found under some dead guy's floorboards about two months ago. Everything finds its way into the junkyard eventually. Trust me. Everything. Even you. Still pullin at that leash. 000097 #worm I chatted with the lady, felt very sunny, walked back outside and raised the hood, and poured that sombitch in there. It oozed out, murky/clear, slow/fast, slurping a little over the rim of the hole where I knew it would smoke and that was okay; sometimes you spill a little and it smokes. I replaced the cap, tried to find something to do with the beautiful little bit of grime on my fingers, and let the hood slam back down with a definitive THANG! And I drove away looking for this one love-you-forever song on the radio, this ultra-pop, little-too-sweet, superficial, utterly soul-wrenching song that I really love. I couldn't find it of course. It only comes on when I'm not expecting it, or have missed half of it. And as I pulled out of the gas station parking lot, I thought, you know, there is a secret joy in having a car that burns oil. And a little green light went on inside of me somewhere. 062213 #human Worked on the wall. Mental zone of some kind. Pizza Hut. Meg & mil fought as soon as alone. I pointed out that Megan had said something about Millie for no reason and she got all horrible and said she wished she could kill herself. Then I remembered I'm not supposed to get drawn into their triangular contest to be queen bitch. Whoops forgot. Must work harder on not fueling that fire in the future. Seven to one. Made celi cry about limiting number of stuffed animals in bed, because of impatient authoritarian way I handled it. Should probably work on that too. Sun set while we were watching futurama. Did not go out and take pix although it crossed my mind. Celi scared the elk away. Had love and sex dreams last night. Both genders. And a big ship. Littles back in room tonight though so less freedom. Hopefully still good dreams though. Must go see doctor as soon as home. Digestive stuff is a real problem. Why have I ignored it for 3 years? 100812 #human #bunny I love men. It's still so weird to be okay with that. There's so much shame under the umbrella of this truth, but then again not. It's always been there. Every single normal Tuesday, every banana bread, every walk up the stairs to find room 234, every elevator, every stoplight, every convenience store, every time I said something to my dad, every time I wasn't exactly who I was supposed to be, every other weekend, every pair of pants, every pair of roller skates, every blank page, it was always there. It's always been there. Every radio station has been singing and saying it since the snoopy radio days. Since drunk at 15. Every time I looked the other way. Every time I stole one more look back. Every time I carnivalized the macabre flesh of the conspicuous female. Nothing against her, but there's a quieter, a deeper lake. I live there. I dive in and breathe deep and suck it all in, deep in that lake, and I always have, and it's time to let that be real again now finally. I love men. I love men. 102913 #snail Although there's something-- not sure-- exactly-- Just as I'm getting lost in people-watching him, his eyes meet mine and mine do a seemingly involuntary half-flutter, looking not exactly away, trying to avoid having been caught. 090913 #worm peach fuzz considered his options. if the black kid had been older, say, old enough to be pockmarked, scarred, and grizzly, the white kid would have been scared but incensed. he would have filled up with adrenaline, like a glass being filled with white soda, and he would have trembled, and in trying not to show that he was trembling, his lip would have wanted for all the world to start quivering, and in trying to keep his lip from quivering, his face would have taken on a rictus half-smile half-sneer which may, in the best case, have been mistaken for ironic if uncharacteristic toughness, a sort of tender stoicism significant of a true learning experience in the big city, laughable yes, but undeniably, finally, redemptive. 081613 #worm That's what the one driving the truck said. And then he expired. Son of a bitch died, on my fucking tarp by the southwest rotten pumpkin field. How long those pumpkins have been rotting, I can not tell you, nor can any man. But how long that kid that was driving that orange truck has been dead? Oh--about five hours. Better go around there soon, if you want to see him. The crows and vultures aren't going to wait forever. Nevermind the worms and smaller ideas even more sizzling and potent still. Yawn. I can't believe he died. It makes me tired. I didn't know him at all. He seemed like he was on drugs. Ha! That's all I know about youth culture. "On drugs." I'm sure that's some kind of joke, you know, among the youth. You were considerably more upset about the kid than I was, and believe it or not, this time I didn't even have the energy to retroactively act like I really was, after all. Upset. 022613 #worm I know, right? However, I am going to say just one more thing. About that. *SMILE you know I always have more than one thing SMILE* Keep in mind that sometimes people who are stuck in the one world and can't really see this one, they can still kind of sense us when we're near each other, and some of them only know that they're sensing something they think they need. But they don't know what it is and they don't know what to do with it so if you let them--*if you let them*--they will grab onto you and hold you down and you won't be able to breathe, and they'll be sucking on all your other reality, trying to drag you back into the other world to stay. They don't, at least most of them, understand they're doing it; I mean it's not like most of them are trying to hurt you or try to kill your freedom, they just honestly don't know what they're doing. It's maybe going to hurt sometimes to not let them do that--but. Well, you already know what I'm going to say. 080613 #wheelbarrow but you can lay the rocks down, one at a time, starting with bare dirt, and even if sometimes you just stare at them, eventually, you build your wall 101004 #eel #roach The prison was run rather like a semi-strict dormitory. There were rules, but no visible atrocities. Most of the staff left us alone. Most of us were young, just older than kids. The prison was a long, rambling, low chateau. My dad came to visit. We went thru the cafeteria line together and he bought me some extra desserts for like a nickel apiece. I went to grab some extra bacon, and no-one would have noticed, except dad spoke up and asked how much it cost. I wondered why he had done that. Being held prisoner unjustly, I felt, was enough cause for me to take whatever I could get. They owed me. I sampled some chicken; when I remarked how delicious it was, the cafeteria lady, thickly German, smiling, said, "We treat you good here." I was like, well yeah, but.... 021913 #human 'i just don't know how much more of this I can take.' Celi came fussing down the stairs literally the moment I lay my head down. Didn't really mean to be short with her but it happened. Got her tucked in, settled down, calmed myself down and sweet talked her. Came back down here and tonight I'm just feeling like a damn fraud. Like all progress is a damned illusion and there's no future except going back to bring a dull empty slave after I get done with my little state-supported vacation from reality. People have to get jobs and work. Dumbass. Real jobs. Yeah go back to your therapist and act smart and then daydream and fantasize all the way home. You don't need drugs. You have your own goddamned self-whitewashing brain. Are you ever going to fix that hole in the wall bitch? Ok so you're bisexual. Good for fucking you. You're still a pissy nobody in a shabby townhouse with a bunch of kids who aren't getting any cheaper. 022613 #worm Did you forget about the sweet mahogany pain of loneliness? That's a part of this too, this time too, and to pretend to forget that is to invite the old way of oblivion into your budding alleyway, your bothy in the clouds, your hut on the real beach. Don't worry. It won't be like last time. You're not alone. It will be a little like last time, until you turn a different way. Then it will be exactly the same and entirely different. The thing you didn't notice before (it's okay, pretty much noone does) is that the two worlds are perfectly juxtaposed. The however many worlds. They're in the exact same space, but it's a different space. Um. Ha. You know? Yeah, it's hard to explain. At any given moment, at least until you can get some more practice in, you might have to periodically check yourself to see which one (or ones) you're in. Go ahead. Experiment. Once unlocked, they stay unlocked. You are free, free to go back and forth in the same place. 102812 #human trickortreating this afternoon with the mcdonalds. Nice. Harold poked me with a plastic fake-bloody knife and said, "Why are you so quiet?" The girls laughed and got tired. Celi had the crap scared out of her by some ghouls at the obligatory scary house on the block. But she did all right. They all did. They're tough. Probably tougher than i ever was. Cici's pizza buffet with holly & shane, after wondering if angie was uneasy having them in her house. I kind of hate shane's sympathy. The way he said call us if you ever need anything made me feel pretty low, in that hypercozy smothered-by-a-blanket weird way. I'm now more unfortunate than the token family deadbeats. But who knows if they even are that, anymore. I could just use a little success, that's all. Well? Go get some! [Insert list of excuses followed by rational rebuttals here. Get tired of that. Try to think of or do something else.] 121512 #human #crow You know what? I could make this big speech to the girls about why the tree isn't loaded, isn't groaning like a pregnant fish with presents this year. I could go into detail about the words, the highways, the irony, the drink, the wonder, and the CHOICES, but you know what? They wouldn't get it. It still sucks to be poor and not have a bunch of presents. That's the beauty of it. It's not bullshit. Being poor really is being poor. I said I didn't care when I was in my twenties, and I'm paying for it now. And if they don't get it right now, they might get it someday, and they might forgive me. We'll see. But the beauty of it is, it's real. I always wanted something real. So I guess I'm lucky. I'm not posing. The shitty hard difficult part really has come home. And here I am, ready to grapple with it, with chicken beak and wiry hands. I'M NOT FUCKING DEAD YET, YOU MOTHER FUCKERS. I'm going to go out kicking and motherfucking screaming. It's who I am. It's what I do. Think that's a pathetic cliché? You're probably right. AND FUCK YOU. 000002 #human Sruky just came up to me and said merry christmas. All because I took his picture. Why do we orient on the horizon? Why trucks dusty with cornfield? Why faded red? Why the diameter of a cigarette? Why can't you leave your club at home this once? Why did he menace him with a stick? Why fish? Why are some faces broad and white and soft? Why the stars o'clock? Why the basement light on? how to get down there Why accidents happy? Why so much space so infinitesimal? finity impossible to imagine, not the other How long can you sit in one space? How often do you save? the toaster doesn't look alone olive green the colour of dense despair the colour of impossible sunshine two colours in this society: despair, laugh Why sick? stomach or something else Why some eyebrows curve sharply down at the outside? Why shadow slivers? Why no change in the payphone? What is the percentage? Why would you want blonde hair with brown roots & brown eyebrows? 080913 So like, I'm feeling pretty good about having spent all this time on the magic cuboid (AKA new generation of teh-dsa). Because I'm not drinking or even eating much besides a Rolo that Millie gave me (although I am DYING to be soothed in that manner, but I'm still not--is it because I'm clearly picturing what will make me feel better than that? Or is just because tonight's not that bad--yet?), and I can actually see using this one, instead of just blowing wads and wads of expensive time and energy (is that redundant, and if so, which parts?) for the first time in a long time. Why it's so cool, for one thing, is that I can imagine (AND WOULD *REALLY REALLY* LIKE TO EVENTUALLY BE ABLE TO MAKE) a visualisation of the cuboid--and how cool would it look NOW, like a partially-completed new Death Star--just the addresses (got to decide what to actually "officially" call those--bits? units? rooms? loci?) that exist so far, hanging raggedly in space, rotatable, color-coded somehow by content--okay now THAT would be shit-in-the-pants COOl, brah. #gull 020408 #human #treefrog Jesus, why did I ever tell you about that? I ask in half-mock exasperation when she says she wants me to stuff her mailbox full of flowers, too. What, you want me to stuff my own mailbox with flowers? I mean it's not like-- Christ, I was seventeen when I did that! Be seventeen! she exhorts, pushing on my chest with one paw like a Labrador standing up, and I know she is right. It's time to be seventeen again, when I knew I was someone, when I knew I had such a lot of love to give. Only now I'm seventeen and thirty-seven all at once, and I have a really important job to do. I'm going to be the one who is there, and ready, at the right time when the genius comes through the door, the loner comes through, the loser, the clown, the just plain weird--I don't have to invent the Apple I, but I would damn sure be honored to be like the ones the Woz looks back at when he says, yeah, that teacher really supported me when I needed it. It's such a blessing, because I don't have to be the genius, I just have to be-- 112112 #human #bunny What if it were not about sex, but love? What if it were not about sex, but love? What if it were not about sex, but love? What if it were not about sex, but love? What if it were not about sex, but love? That's the part I always forgot. I get the gay freedom feeling, and I dance around with it for a little while feeling powerful and free and full of music and honesty. Then I notice that I still like looking at women and I still have some of my old weird fantasies. It morphs into fear that I'm not allowed to be gay; my gay card will be revoked. I try on bisexual but it just feels hollow and pointless. So then *I* start to feel hollow and pointless, and about this time is when I start to recall the hips-moving, free-dancing, blue-sky-with-towering-clouds, Duluth-Minnesota feeling that I had, back *ages* ago it seems by now, when I said "gay." And then I wad the whole thing up like a bad rough draft and stuff it in my colon for another 10 years or so. But not this time. 081613 #worm In first grade, there were numbers above the cubbies. The number one was red. The number one has always seemed red to me. Primary, urgent, cocksure. Number one. The other numbers have their own colors. Two is orange, three green, four a more grayish green. And so on. Another thing from grade school was those playground balls. It was years later that I learned they came in all different sizes. The only ones we had were the ones maybe just a hair smaller than a basketball. They made a very distinct PANG when they hit the asphalt, hard. We had asphalt for everything back then, remember. And then there was the time someone had swiped a broken red ball point across the faux-leather-grain of the rubbery back of the bus seat in front of the one I was in. Someone said it was blood. Argument ensued. It is blood! No it isn't! It would seep into those cracks if it was blood! Why did it matter so much? Why do I remember that? 010314 #jonquil Some of the lamps are burned out, so the fluorescent light is crepuscular. The radio is off, the phone's not ringing, the computers are sleeping. Occasionally the plumbing makes a noise from somewhere else in the building. Traffic hisses intermittently, softly. The turtle scrapes on its floating rock a few times, then settles back into silence. A sliver of light glows under the door like a one-dimensional sunset or a distant supernova glimpsed over the horizon of a giant, forlorn planet. Out in the corridor, the elevator door chunks open, then shut. Footfalls slowly crescendo, then pause, interrupting the line of light under the door. Not even breathing can be heard. Then the footfalls go away again, on down the corridor. The previous state of not-quite-quiet returns. Gwen and Mary finally exhale, red-faced, hearts pounding so hard their eardrums can feel the blood squishing rhythmically. 081013 #dog *HIM is looking across the small space, the small, created space, through mirthful wraiths of smoke, over the tops of brimming cups, and he sees them sitting at a table by the window: the man has a gently grinning monkey face. He wears a thermal-long-johns shirt, dun white. His hair is rumpled. His eyes look a little sleepy and wide-awake. That is what it looks like to be relaxed. The woman has a big nose, not too big for her smiling face. She has a small, cute mole on her chin. Her fine, angular fingers flirt with a cigarette. That is what it looks like to be in love--when ebullience turns down the corners of the mouth in the kind of grin that comes before the next thing is said, when the next thing that is said will be the thing that makes the mouth open, teeth showing, laughter bubbling up and out into the eternal Fall! HIM might miss his flight. The airport is all the way across town. Who fucking cares?* 111812 #human Old blind Joe, fooling people into liking him and listening to him because he's blind. Nice try, dickhole. All you do is wait until everybody else has spoken, then you pick one or two of the comments and slowly say it all over again with slightly different words, as if it were your own. It's the slowed speech of the pontificator. Getting a patent on someone else's invention. I mean shit, we're all just regurgitating lit-crit 101 already, right? The least you could do is have the decency to sound like you have your own opinion. Nice fucking job, you think no-one notices? You think we're all as fucking blind as you? Fuck that. Yeah, I got your "psychotic" right here, cheesefuck. Bite it. 081413 #worm Once you realize you're dreaming, you can of course do anything you want, without guilt or rationale. This is especially true if you have nothing better to do. Jelse doesn't. Do you? Then hop in the back of the truck, hop in and hop in and hop in until the back axle groans. Jelse will keep driving, in first gear with the angry mob, hunching toward downtown. Some of you will tumble overboard. Some of you will lend an arm to someone else. The rest will walk, holding themselves more erect than the crush of the everyday usually allows. The amber of our flames will join the dusky, rubine light of the crepuscular city in an unholy wash of ire. Let's find some windows to smash. Let's wake everybody the fuck up. The ones that don't come out and join us deserve the torch. Look at the wolves dancing in our firelit eyes! Hey, it's warm out here now, bitches! 040303 #eel The hero of our story is a somewhat mousy little man who works at the zoo. One day on his way home he stumbles across his girlfriend getting raped--someone whose plugs don't match hers is trying to force a connection anyway. He summons all his courage and chases the bastard away. "Oh Stu," the girl says, gasping her thanks. They fumble their appendages together and hook one plug pair together in hasty passion. "Oh, Owa," Stu says. He reaches for her, seeking, touching. He finds another of her plugs with one of his.... It matches.... "Let's just, let's just--" he says, pressing closer, closer, to plugging in. "Get married right now?" she says, scared, delighted. Their plugs slide closer, closer.... 050201 #human she's out on the porch talking to one of the old ladies. she laughs a little in sympathy. she inclines her head, nodding, says, "yeah..." in understanding of something. She asks a question. "Where were they yesterday?" The old lady's voice scratches on, like a low phonograph, just a little warped. The sun crowns their heads with dandelion. Dexter, on this side of the windows and the wall, gazes at me from his spot on the couch. The huskies pace, jingle, jingle, pace. Thursday follows Wednesday, Friday is after that, before you know it, the weekend again. Nothing ever changes, or does it. A flightless bird juts upward once more, careens back down to icy earth. I wish we had some beers left. 081313 #copperhead Did you ever stop to think about how someone's life is right up next to the distant sounds you hear? Someone's holding that screaming beast in his hand—his tricep is knotted, it's flecked with beads of sweat and bits of chewed-up wood. The little chips and curls hang suspended in his arm hair. He's blinking sweat out of his eyes, underneath his tattered, sweat-stained cap. The chain spins up and dies down, in its own peculiar tempo, like a violent form of breathing, and the disharmonious roar unsubtly commands his focus—it's a violent meditation, and it soothes and satisfies. The tree he's decimating falls like an army of goblins under the devastating swath of that mechanical magical sword of doom. 081413 #worm #roach They walk under where corn fields used to be. They walk under a mud puddle that used to be the swimming hole. They walk under the barn, and down into the hollow, where it's a little warmer. This time they don't have to talk much. Me fingers a packet of raw sugar in his pocket; his piece of the Cafe. Him watches the cobblestones march under his feet. The ghost of Jelse hovers above them, taking bullet after bullet in ectoplasmic defiance. Up there in the dark, the cops clomp off in one direction; down here, Him and Me softshoe it on down the underground hill in the other direction. The interchanging rhythm of their feet speaks of flat mountains, cairns in space, and brilliant snow in every direction. 081313 #copperhead The chorus of small round shadows cast from every piece of river rock elongates. The feathered shadow of the top of my head just touches the bow of the canoe now. Something about the way the sound of the stream remains constant in the fading solar intensity just lifts up that loneliness that was subtle before, and paints it in lurid colors, elevates it to almost obscene sublimity. There's something almost comforting about being bludgeoned by the loneliness of the spinning of a watery planet. When I shift my ankles and knees a little, versus the slight stiffness forming there, the gravelly grumble of the bottom of the lumie sounds as much too loud as the sumac leaves are red. 081013 #dog *Go sit by him when he pats the couch. Go, enjoy your drink. Nobody's going to stop you. The air-conditioner kicks in, adding assurance to the hush. Where is the city now? It's in every sidewalk block you walked to answer this man's ad. It's in the faraway airplane lights, nonstop from nostalgia. It's in the rhythmical totality of all the traffic lights on all the corners, blinking alien intelligence into the night's thin canopy. It's in the lurid curves of every ice cube melting in your glass. It's in each whorl of your finger, magnifed, beyond the glass. It's in the smoke, it's in the smoke, it's in your mouth, your lungs, between your ears, converting your resistance with its eery, sinful innocence. Look up. He's stretching back. The hairy mountain of his chest takes on a gentler slope. Invisible, miniature mountain-climbers of disbelief breathe musky sighs.* 052002 #eel there was an intense light from the left--a car coming?--which faded. the figure came close. there was another surge of light during which i saw through the gauze to a silhouette--almost feminine? maybe female. long, slender fingers. a sense of amusement, wickedness, and something else. always the something else we can't recognize. the figure said, You don't believe in me! I said I do believe in you because you are walking towards me out of the mist! i stood up quickly off the blanket, approached the figure because i felt a need to, before it could--do what? it beckoned and gestured, undulating its arms towards me. it wanted me to touch it, go to it, and i was scared, the wavering yell came out of my throat 081413 #worm They're back out in the street, arm in arm. How did they get here? You know how; you've done it yourself. You simply follow the obvious secret code. One touch means hello, another means I forgive you provisionally, another means we are bigger than all our petty crimes put together, and we both sense the nearness of our sun to its inevitable supernova state; let's exchange what little gifts we may, before it's way too late. It's raining, as it often does in this part of town. Sloppy yellow maple leaves go skidding dizzily in the street, brilliant against the black asphalt. Krim's shoes--alas! not black, but at least their soles are hard--go clunk, clunk, clunk over the sidewalk squares. Where are they going? 081413 #worm Him feels for Me in the dark. He finds Me's arms, cool and firm under the fabric of the sweatshirt, and grips them firmly. Me's arms grip back. Him and Me pull together, chest to rabbit-thumping chest. They can hear each other's cold breaths. Now they are belly to belly, hip to hip, thigh to thigh. Me stumbles a little, steps on Him's toe; Him holds on tighter and Me leans in more, letting go, shivering. Two epicenters of warmth harden against each other through fabric; Him and Me are cock to cock. This doesn't feel anything like the way Me has spent the last few days imagining Krim would feel. It's harder, brighter, somehow faster. And astonishingly better than he had ever imagined. 081613 #worm I brutally murder you and throw your carcass to the baboons! I drag your blood all over the flagstones! I lick it! I step on your lungs while your babies are watching! I rake your astonished face across a bed of glowing nails. You're not dead yet? I rip your cock right off what's left of your pathetically mangled stump, and slide it slowly, smilingly into your fattened mouth! I piss on you while I'm holding your warm, soft, white wife. She's so gooooooood. . . . Want to watch me fuck her salt and sweet while you unhurriedly expire? Want the last thing you see to be her, reluctantly, hating herself, starting to enjoy my humongous cock plumping her fat cunt and making her hum with wretched, horrible, sobbing pleasure? 103012 #eel She looked like a man with a hollow expression, severe, old fashioned clothes, a desperation reddening her eyes, I pointed directly, electrically across the space between us; the connection was formed, the direct conduit was live and real. I said I commend you for not giving up. Do you hear me? A little later, I didn't know for sure if I was talking to her or to me or to someone else altogether. She was by me, under my chest, half reclining. She turned tan, hollow, chitinous, a charred exoskeleton. I commend you for not giving up. But you have to listen to me. I can help you. She smiled a demon smile, her tongue flicked, I wanted to writhe and beg and hump and suck. Yes, I moaned, destroy my soul, as we kissed a desperate demonic kiss, and it turned literally to her shit in my mouth, my tongue was probing an insect anus of the demon that she was. 010314 #jonquil Coffee. The routine was simple, but right at the end, a noise from somewhere in the house threw her off and she tossed the whole filter basket into the trash can instead of just the filter and the grounds. Her heart thumped madly as she fished it out, rinsed it and her hands off in the sink. 081113 #human Kind of on a roll. No play on words intended but I just fixed Jayden's bike. Well, mostly. Couldn't get the crappy back brake centered quite all the way, but still. Put the chain back on and oiled it, pulled the wheel back, took the dumb plastic thingy off, got the brakes to at least stop pushing on the rim, put the pegs back on, inflated the tire. I'm feeling so neighborly tonight. 000097 #worm Today was sunny, almost Colorado sunny, and I pumped my gas, leaning back against the frame and looking at the inside of my head. Then I thought, what the hell, if I don't check the oil I'll just have to do it later, so I checked the oil--and it was about a quart low! So I replaced the nozzle, let the hood down lightly, and sauntered into the quick shop wearing boots and jeans and a flannel shirt. I went authoritatively over by the automotive supplies, passed knowingly over Heet and washer fluid and filters and such, and picked out a quart of oil. Pennzoil 10W-30 will do fine. Or whatever you got. Everybody's got Pennzoil. And I plunked it down on the counter and said, "This, and Pump #7." 081013 #dog HIM: Look, let's just go somewhere. Anywhere. Even walking off a cliff into a sea of rotary blades is better than standing here being dumb to death. ME: Where do you get your notions about what life is worth? HIM: Where do you get your fucking head? Come on, I'm leaving. You can stay here if you want but I've got to walk or I really will go crazy. ME: You're not capable of going— [but HIM is already walking down the dusty road. ME thinks for a while, then starts to trot after HIM, then stops, looks back at the fire still burning outside their apartment house, then turns again and trots after HIM.] Hey, hold up a minute! THE BLADE IN ME'S POCKET: Save me, save me. Somebody save me. 081413 #worm It's too cold to take their jackets off, let alone their shirts. It's too cold, and the greasy floor of the dumpster too uninviting, to think about taking their boots off. Jeans crumple around ankles. Hot in the cold, Him and Me rub desperately against each other. Their own spunky smells rival the smell of refuse. Him grabs Me's hair and pulls. Me abandons his face to the kiss. Stubble. Me's stomach swirls with raw need. He is an adolescent again; everything is illegal! Him's tongue rings signals down through Me's spine, through Me's ass. Shame disappears. Me rides Him's leg hard. They are growing slick with sweat to spite the winter. Me lets his breath, a small animal uncaged, go into Him's. 081413 #worm His crassness sets the ambiance for everything that happens next. You're taken aback at first, but somehow you sense not disrespect from him, but a profane kind of gratitude bordering on worship. In this, the Snoke, his native environ, he is a despicable yet loveable pornographer; a sleaze-monger with a heart of burnished pewter. What the hell, you decide. You go with him on his trip. You climb aboard his flatulent soul with conscious abandon. It's like climbing into a garishly painted import car tricked out with all the right after-market parts--the bass is going boom! boom! boom! in an unapologetic, puerile, melody-free paean to balls-out adolescence. Don't worry. The windows of the Snoke are always tinted. 012513 #human I love the girls so much. Tonight watching Red Dwarf, watching them laugh at the jokes, Meg & Mil getting most of them, Lib getting some of them, but they were smiling and they are so infinitely gorgeous. I can just sit and stare and it's like staring at the security monitor of my soul. Megan like a cute bemused elf in college. Millie like a sharp, big, bold brave scared woman in college. Libby like the last year she's going to be a snuggle bug, also sharp, also big, on the verge of interstellar travel. Celi bear already asleep upstairs, but her whispering voice also already picking out sibilants and percussives as elegant as any worldly lady. They're all so perfect. I am surrounded by musical perfection. 010314 #jonquil Sunlight had really started forcing its way in through her bedroom windowpane now, and it was really illuminating the dust. Old curtains that looked like something hanging in an out-of-business shop window on the old main street of a piddly little town just like this one glowed from ceiling to bare floor. Her dresser looked strangely like an old woman's--a few little jars on the beige top, a silver-backed brush and comb set that had, in fact, been her grandmother's. She drifted over to it, yes work was calling, but still, she brushed her hair slowly, feeling the weight of the Victorian brush pulling itself smoothly through her long hair. Her hair, she decided, was pretty much the color of waffles too. 081613 #worm Let's have friends come over again. We can sit down in the little dank hole with blanket walls and pallet floors and a ceiling of imaginary planetary delights. Glow-in-the-same-old-dark thing. Shine a lite, shine a lite. Send, it out, to your brothers and your-- We all have to eat hot rat sometimes. 081613 #worm Let's just say there's an infinitude. Focus is not our main focus, these days. There are more "characters" than you can shake an IP address at. Any one of them can be pointed to in any way at any time, although the funny thing is, randomness is not really random. I guess if there's a moral to this story, that is not it. In the meantime, we still have regular old killing smoke. 120712 #human #bunny #elephant Bisexuals are sneaky or asexual, right? Or tragically fashionable. Or weak. And the hell of it is, NOBODY CARES. They're the most neglected minority out there! They don't even get the invigorating hatred that drives other minorities to invent new folk songs and be strong. They're just relegated to invisibility. Most people, honestly, don't even believe they exist. And if they did, who the fuck cares? They can always pass as whatever the strongest faction is at the moment. Oh, sorry, gosh, you're a bisexual? That must be so hard for you. Gosh, hang in there, be strong. Nobody gives a fuck, you immature, adolescent, neotenic, mildly perverted, socially awkward nonentity. Wow. Gosh. Yeah. 081813 #treefrog  See, here's the thing. I think I can really be good at this. I really do. Right now there are these traps and wells that suck up and constrain too much of my energy. I don't have boundless energy at this time. There are limits to what I can muster. Right now, too much energy goes into worrying about looking stupid. Too much goes into the print shop. Those are the main ones. There's also the job hunt, and fun things like the girls and all. The point is, I need more energy and time to go to teaching if I'm going to be a good teacher. Period. I need to insist on my own visibility, and I need to give it more loving, attentive time. There has to be a way to make that happen. This isn't an excuse; it's an equation. 090813 #worm I plan to make some chocolate milk. But a strange thing happens. I notice the signs many blocks away, before I cross the river even. They say, THIS WAY TO PARTY. And they have arrows and pointing pictures of fingers. The signs are posted on telephone poles, mailboxes, trees, every few blocks. And they all seem to be pointing the way I am driving. Great. Probably one of my damn neighbors having some weekend bash, and I will have to listen to the thump thump thump of the bass until I can force myself to sleep. As I turn onto my own block, the signs continue--pointing to my own house! What the-- 060908 #squirrel so much for life. I gotta go. A headstone has come to the garden and I have to finish some transplants, and then go get Alex from School. By the way , You should meet him too. he is a special kid.OK, I'm biased, but, a parent should be! 081413 #copperhead My friend leans back on his left hand and his right arm is balanced on his right knee. He's wearing his beaver hat of course, but no shirt, so I see his stomach muscles tighten up before he shifts forward to bring his left hand up to peel the orange in his right hand. His dirty fingernail releases a galaxy of aromatic brilliance into our humid little universe. His torso rocks slightly each time he chucks a scrap of orange peel towards the strip of nettles and brambles between our weedy little burrow and the river below. The pieces lie there, some orange, some pithy white, like so many isolated countries with uneven borders, settling infinitesimally into the surrounding green. 000002 #human Contrast with the boy who is talking now with these other people who just walked up. This one has a charcoal grey felt coat that in itself is a statement of disaffection. He leans forward, his shoulders lean forward, he is a collapsing flower, black and delicate. His eyebrows are sharp, his smile flashes like a pocketknife, his sideways eyes say "disappear." And he will. They all will, of course, as will I. As I already might have. He is gentler than he looks. And sturdier than he looks. I wish him luck, the luck of the stick thrown in the creek. Maybe he won't jam up in the barbed wire or the tree root mess. Maybe he won't circle around and stagnate. Maybe he'll rush between the contoured rocks that form the little waterfall, and plunge, plunge! taking our wholesome imagination with him on the journey. The journey. I wish him luck. I wish us all luck. 133904 012214 #human #bushmill *Really* wanted to drink for a while this evening. Because the line from the Paul Simon song went through my head: *My mother laughed the way some ladies do.* Wondered why that made me want to drink, and laugh the way some men do. Figured it's because after all, after fairly continuously quietly concluding that I'm okay & self-sufficient, at least on a personal if not a professional plane, I actually do want a chance to be an adult & keep adult company and say dumb adult jokes and laugh at unspoken adult themes. Yeah no you don't have to drink to do all that, but see that's what the drink-urge was telling me. It was saying, "You've been ignoring this part." 211400 081413 #worm Recessed bathtubs are everywhere. Each one is filled to the brim, so that the level of water is exactly at floor level. Some of them are dark and still. Some are bubbly and lit from below: purple, aquamarine, emerald, deep brooding red.... Wend your barefooted way among them. This place is huge! The endless tubscape is dotted here and there with elevated islands bearing tropical foliage and songbirds. Some of the larger islands feature cozy-looking little cabins, made of bamboo. The walls fall away as you explore further. The tubs begin to vary in size; some of them are as big as swimming pools. The farther you go, the more intricate their designs become. There are little lakes, grottos, pools with tinkling fountains, split-level bathing extravaganzi with waterfalls--all lit by the omnipresent pink candles, and all interlaced by curving walkways of cool tile. 081413 #worm But in this universe, you manage to move out of her way. In fact, you turn the maneuver into a veritable genuflection, indicating with a generous gesture of the elbow and forearm your desire to allow her to proceed ahead of you. She doesn't even look at you. Be right with you, she calls over her shoulder to the overcoated gentleman who is waiting, ruminating on the toothpick in his mouth, to buy a pack of gum. He can't get enough oral stimulation, it seems. In any case, you tuck your shit-eating grin right back where it came from, hoping no-one saw how much of a jackass you suspect you just looked like, as she and her incredibly sexy boots disappear into the crowded dining room. The way to the bathroom is now clear. 133039 012114 #znupikste We were really restless and didn't feel like taking the time to be all organized about it, and as I've mentioned we are people who like things to stay a little fucked up anyway, so we just shoved everything into a big old trunk, crammed that into the back seat, *slam-slam* went the doors, and she thrust the key aggressively into the ignition. Znupikste was standing there looking all stupid, and so I took the lead on this one. I surprise myself, sometimes I do, because I don't like to talk or do social stuff at all with hardly anybody, but I spoke up and said to Znupikste, Okay, just meet us at the streetcar station by Foxglove Avenue. In a couple of days. Have your shit ready. 134701 121413 #skeleton # Sylvia > A fake wrought-iron fence surrounds a concrete plot near a nondescript intersection. Mist wrinkles the colors of the traffic lights. > Sylvia has her purse over her shoulder, and that makes her movements a certain kind of stiff. She has just exited the building. Someone else is coming across the concrete with intent to enter the building. > They meet. Sylvia takes one step forward. The other person takes one step backward. Sylvia steps to the side but the other person thought that was the way to go too, so they are still blocking each other. > The thing to focus on is the sounds their shoes make, scuffling against the concrete. Everything is wet. Does nobody realize how ridiculous that is? 081413 #worm The Aviary begs for more. Fuck. Me. With every thrust, its denizens rearrange themselves. Pigeons tend to stay near the water. Crows fly away from each other, arrow straight, but congregate later in secret circles. The gulls get preachy. Nobody listens. Trout furrow deeper into the labia of streams and rivers. A musky taste is their reward. The finches screech and tear each other's hair and fix each other's make-up. Elephants remember how to outwit bunnies. Bunnies remember how to race to the left and to the right, under the starkness of city lights. Unhidden, they are easy targets. And yet, they survive. The rock core explodes into magma as the Snoke fucks the Aviary hard, harder, one last time, and fills the Aviary's ass with hot, buttery spunk. The Aviary thanks the dirt under its shoulders, thanks the stars for whirling away above its up-thrust ass in the dark. 081413 #worm #roach Its large, nameless, quiet friend, the pillar of smoke, says, Yes. Him and Me carry on under the ground. Where are they going? Who cares. Will they make it back in time for the Esriel's Cafe Post-Blow-up Pajama Party? Because if they're not going to be there, I'm not going either. I flew in all the way from the Aviary to see them, and I'll be damned if I let the chance go by. Who knows when I'll get to see them again? So wherever they go tonight, I'm going with them. You can come along, or not. It's up to you. 000096 #squirrel wow. i did not know that ha. interesting i would have thought to someone as perceptive as you it would have shown up like ketchup on a white shrt haha. well yeah but matthew you know i think i probably idealize you because i admire your mind so much and i admire your talent and so i think i maybe spiritualize you and think your like this zen master you know that like knows all these answers and is really at peace with himself you know yeah. i think that's my big scam this sensitive new age man scam 081413 #worm Ltiky itches to go into the fire after Krim, but the itch is scratched by Ella. Where is the willow-haired girl? The child is growing fast; overnight she changes. She is sharply beautiful. She is almost translucent with grace. She kills Ltiky every time she looks at him. The pride he cannot help feeling when he looks at her is the very shrapnel shard that pierces itself, because she is not his. He is reduced to a wrinkled sac--around which Ella inevitably tightens her fierce grip. Ltiky begins to tighten and tremulate. 013113 #human Millie has suddenly become freaking hilarious. I guess a steady diet of Futurama and whatever all those books are she's always reading plus a healthy dose of classical and egyptian mythology... I don't know. There was the African stew thing last night, and then tonight about the kid that got so fat (I don't even remember why). Her delivery is hysterical and impeccable at the same time. "I can't even move! I'm too fat! Mom: roll me to school!" So matter-of-fact, worldly and yet still elementary-school. It blows my mind. 082806 #eel What he meant by "bullet" was "key"--meaning, I had a place to stay, or more precisely, a place I could keep scavengers and marauders out of, and an extended group who looked out for each other. What he meant by "murder" was that he had been charged with murder, back in a hazy past the meaning or location or present relevance of which was unclear--except that, according to him anyway, it made his basic survival here, in this insular, anarchic, mysteriously dilapidated world at least a little bit more difficult. 032545 121513 #human Are they going to want to give each other gifts this year? Or will we be spared the pathos of that? Aren't real parents supposed to have gone out shopping and come back with packages? If I take them to Half Price Books, will that be good enough? Is the percussion of my fingers on the keys doing any good? Making me feel any better, a little rhythmic? But is it answering any of these questions? Holidays make you real fucking vulnerable, and if you're not ready for that, man, anything can happen. 010814 #crow Often, procrastinators attempt to avoid the anxiety or worry aroused by a tough task with activities aimed at repairing their mood, such as checking Facebook or taking a nap. But the pattern, which researchewrs call "giving in to feel good," makes procrastinators feel worse later, when they face the consequences of missing a deadline or making a hasty, last-minute effort, says Timothy Pychyl (rhymes with Mitchell), an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and a researcher on the topic. 081013 #dog HIM: [goes in H.S. bathroom, boys' bathroom, turns around, locks door] That's funny. I never noticed these things had locks on them before. [dances sinuously, then fatly, then warblingly, then meekly, then pumps up all his muscles with the full spasm of the morning fall air, breathes like a foundry, knows like a horse, runs like a baby star, and, pumping majestically, ridiculously, masturbates full force, full steam, full throttle until an O-shaped cry is wrenched from his lips, his wet, rich, full, rouged lips] 082513 #elephant Her scornful white neck and red lips: ZoE's sister Clare comes looking for him. He's supposed to go do something or get something. She stares at me; I am vermin. She spits on the dangerous floor. This is filthy. I twist and jerk helplessly. ZoE's prick pins me by the throat against the greasy chair. Clare's disdainful eyes have faint humor in them. I stare back at her aloofness, hating the begging I know my eyes are doing. I will eat her shit. I will lick up her spit. I will be a slave to her skinny tits. 000002 #human slava over there by the window this fall, 2nd floor rochambo. suddenly i need him to be here. suddenly he is the only source of moisture for this poor fish. he taps and pads gently on a little doumbec. he looks out the window. he sounds himself a little like the rain. if he were to disappear, never to have been, this whole picture would fall apart, but more than just the picture. none of us would have been or will be. his white socks, in between his loafers and the edge of his blue jeans, hop up and down. 091313 #trout #timemachine I ache for the past. I don't even mean my own past. I mean *the* past. The past of subway trains and album covers. The past of lawn darts, shag carpet, and real newspapers. I want no clunky reconstruction through self-consciously arranged antiques. I want the real thing. The hand rolled cigarettes, the dark, greased hair, the peculiar color of a wartime sunset. The gasoline powered obliviousness. I want it all. I don't even know how far back it will take me, but I am ready and willing to go there. 000096 #squirrel hmhm. i dunno. you scare me why? becuz you're just close enough to be outside of my comfort zone i think thats part of the magnetixm that holds us in orbit yeah. nnyeahh uh what i dont know i dont know.i keep my mouth shut a lot what do you mean well i mean theres a lot more i could say about this subject but i dont because it just seems hopel;essly futile and pitiful pathetic and unanswerable and so so go with it so go with it what go with it being futile and unaswnerbal 000097 #worm The other witch was gay. He was shorter and glossy lipped, sort of pretty in a short, slightly puzzled way. Helena found a whole stack of gay porn magazines in his ex-closet when she was helping to finish cleaning out their old apartment next door to hers, which was now theirs too. She called him a bad boy. She really didn't like the magazines. She felt there was something vaguely immoral about them, but she didn't know quite why, and I don't think she completely wanted to feel that way. Like maybe it was an old habit. 214312 090596 #human you see, what i keep forgetting is that we're both typing. You and me both, at the same time, see. What's so unfair about that? I mean, come on. When you were me, you know you would have seen it this way. And not because you were young, either. But because you promised me, at least i think you did unless i totally misinterpreted you which is possible, no fuck it you promised me you would never forget what its like not to be in control of who you are, but to be a good person anyway, as much as possible. 010314 #human #mrgrenache here it is 2014 and i'm still looking for the perfect fountain pen. Only this time it's a $1300 camera. In the past it's also been a keyboard, drums, pens, typewriters, flutes, mouthpieces, stereo equipment, computers, word processors, text editors, and probably innumerable other things I'm not thinking of right now. So for two hours I've sat here reading camera reviews and obsessing. Just like I did all last night until I couldn't sleep. And so far this month I don't even have the money to pay the rent. 000094 #human Wow. I actually saw a guy literally throw himself at a girl's feet (pretty feet--tevas!) on the sidewalk below my window! He kept walking away, gesticulating and looking at the sky, and then walking back. They were, like, tied together, and mad and confused and I hope they work it out. I hope they go home and fuck, if that's what'll help at all. I could feel what it was like to touch her in the middle of the tension--how much he needs her, right now! Her in her white shirt, small supple breasts, bored–scared face. 000002 #human