What part are you avoiding? she says, poking me in the ribs, and it is nice because it is a rib-poke, not a rib-poke qua overture to obligatory kiss or other such sentiment. It's not that she's not beautiful and attractive; she is. It's just that I want to talk to her, not fuck with her, and she is aware of this. More importantly, I am aware of this. It's not that I think men are pretty or even sexy-looking. It's not that I want to fawn over one or act weak or any of that stuff. It's just that I have this, this 010714 #human #mrgrenache What if we eminent soul-searchers, recognizers of the bright segments, are the ones totally deceiving ourselves? What if all this personal transformation, out-coming blinding flashes of deep authenticity, are just so many more complicated levels of the same kind of bullshit rationalization that we've been performing for years? Well, then I guess that would suck. A healthy skepticism is good. There's great grey woolly masses of clouds behind you, before you an oaken slab. The climate is changing. 081413 #worm Unfold your map. Settle on the mystical rune at the top of the page. Go there. Quietly sink in. Pick a card, any card. Ask a question. Turn the hypercube, see the side nearest you light up. Read what it says. Stare at the tapestry until flea-sized soldiers begin to move, almost imperceptibly, in the patterns of their imaginary lives. Inhabit the body of one of them. Make love with a tiny paramour. Flip to a random page. Shake up the eight ball. Fold back the curtain of the magic theatre. Fire up the spaceship. Dream. 081313 #copperhead Yee-haaaaaaaaahhh, that feels so good my teeth resonate. Holy shit, how long had I been sitting there? A shiver goes up from my lower back and out my shoulders. I'm enjoying the last of that full, relieving stream, and thinking of how cozy and satisfying it's going to feel to put my shirt on over my slightly sunburned shouldersthe fabric cool against my radiating skin, but warm against the breeze that's curling ever more insistently across the field between the hills behind me, when I finally, finally hear it. 102913 #snail ...Periwinkle and is and radish strawberry wild onion thyme spice cabinet the poor farmer's gift to his new bride the she she the know the eyebrow the assuming raised in desperation having poor been having not had wanted this but when but who she searches. 030004 #human You need to love yourself. You need to finish learning to love yourself unconditionally. With the voices of your past you have achieved a concord in a state of arms. Now is the time to take the negotiations further. You are the Captain, believe it. 102112 #human Tonight I'm roasting the seeds from the pumpkins the girls picked out at Godsell Farm. Heather did an amazing job of separating and cleaning them. I stirred in some salt and let them sit a while, then dried them using a combination of paper towels and hair dryer, then stirred them with melted butter, pretzel salt, garlic powder, oregano, and freshly ground red white and black pepper. Then I spread them out on a sprayed baking sheet. I've got the oven at about 300, and I'm checking and stirring every ten minutes. 022496 #human Dexter I just want you to know that sleeping in with you is one of the best joys of my life. On a saturday--preferably when i don't have to work at all, but okay if i have to work at two--just to be curled up there warm under the down, and you down by my feet, and when i turn over in my halfawake i hafta adjust my feet to curl around your warm little self down there and just to know that you're there and that i'm there and everything is warm and solid for just those few hours--that is one of my favorite times in life. 082313 #meerkat 090302 I'd like to see the emergence of a road thru the teh-dsa. I am not going to try to pave one immediately, not going to force the issue. But I want to let it roll around a while and see what happens. I have in mind the kind of changing scenery and micro-detail of the bike path by the river parkway. Endless zoom factors, weeds with individual personalities, sites, attractions, forgotten bifurcations, random destinations, non-dimensionality expressed through the distorting filter of a linear perspective. 081413 #copperhead Yes, I think about it. It seems plausible. How many days out are we? The town he's talking about is probably below that bridge. I sit up. Yes, that bridge. Its underside is dark as bats right now. So glad we'll not be passing under it tonight. Something about concrete at night that's colder than it should be. Some astronomical compact between the death of souls and the aggregation of all that slag and sand: even the most civil concrete sings an alien song at night. I'll take my gravel bar, thank you. 090605 #eel We did little things mostly, me and my (dog?) friend. We would disarm automatic doors here and there. We ran through the mall doing--i'm not sure what, something mildly illegal bordering on seriously illegal. We did stuff right next to security guards. We went in darkened wings we weren't supposed to go in. We stopped to play a big beautiful piano in the mall. The action was a little heavy but it sounded great. I hardly even had to hit the keys exactly right; as long as I stayed in rhythm the song was convincing. 000004 #human Every day I see something I haven't seen before. I'm blessed that way. I don't mean to brag, but I can't help it. Every day I wake up in a new national park. There's antelopes and snowmobiles and Republicans with great paws--watch out! Just give them the food and back away slowly. Don't climb a tree. That shit doesn't work except in the movies. 111201 #eel A guy in a ruddy-salmon coloured heavy cotton shirt, with wild-frizzed blond hair, touches my shoulder. Were you going to get that turtle? He asks. 011314 #centralsea Atmospheric events trigger memories, sensations to which it would be easy enough to attach cultural code libraries--high-level linguistic structures like, for instance, "Early January, the breeze that blows ajar the door to the Dairy Queen carries a hint of unseasonable warmth; images of summers past and little girls growing up fast flicker across my mind, telling me life is precious, what is success? life is precious after all." Why reinvent the wheel, especially when all you have at hand is a wheel? 021613 #eel And there I was at some party or gathering or just our house or someone's house, dancing with this young girl, someone's neice or cousin or daughter or something, and she was beautiful and had this huge young naive smile, and we were dancing all mock old fashioned like, you know like exaggeratedly formal, and laughing, and it was all so perfect because I just wasn't having to act any certain way. Exchanging wisdom, exchanging perspective, exchanging lives. And the energy of my man and our love permeated everything. 000002 #human Fear is rigid as ball bearings in the mud. People in cities going about cautioning each other; they are the faces of death and I hate them. Do I have to forgive them not to become one of them? This then is a most odious task and it lingers before me hugely, lapping like a pearl-grey sea, not peaceful though its quietness is vast. I must take off my shoes to feel the ribs of the beach. If I can touch this wetness even once, I can go home. It is night. Dogs and seaweed and bits of shells. No stars. We are lost. 101609 #treefrog Most of my 11th graders are "practicing" their scene adaptation of Ball Don't Lie. But what they're actually doing is playing. They're acting silly and having fun in a dorky, childlike way. This, I surmise, is why a lot of them want to keep coming back to school. The absurdity of the environment (yes, it is absurd, no matter how pedagogically serious we may be), through its arbitrary restrictions, enables freedom of creative play. School puts up enough of a guard to allow them to let some of theirs down. 043013 #human Here's the thing that pisses me off the most about this fucking fucked up world right at this exact moment (two or three seconds ago actually; but what after all is an eon besides a stack of seconds, and what in fact is a person besides a stack of bacteria and other cells?): Some things, no matter how often or hard you clean them, just never get any cleaner. The front door. The hood above the stove. The kitchen wall where that sick bitch glued a bunch of pictures up with some kind of insane gorilla adhesive. 081413 #worm #roach It's the sound of steam existing. It's the sound a frog's feet make leaving the mud, after the peep, before the splash into the pond. It's the sound of the collective inexperience of the little smoking klatch in Esriel's Cafe tonight. It's the sound the door you've never opened makes, when you finally open it, for no particular reason one night, never even having known you were afraid to, until you heard this sound. It's that little voice in your head that never told you what to do. What is that sound? 214104 012314 #feandra #stargazer He's working on his computer, of course; he's very into the numbers and the possibilities. He's achieved considerable notoriety among astronomical circles. His ability to focus is legendary. Why be burdened by the soap-opera gruntings of human gossip, the bacteria-laden silliness of monkey drama? But Feandra comes up behind him, insinuates her arms into his personal space. Her smile, her smell, her serene ridiculousness, the way she interrupts him. He tilts his head back, reveals his neck. 112413 #gull #fox #snail It's okay if species just exist and dominate for a while. Even if it doesn't make perfect sense. For instance, there's a shit load of foxes right now. It's less important that they indicate a particular purpose or theme, more important that they exist. This phase of my cuboidal planet's rotation or revolution is just mostly about foxes right now. For a while it was snails and then they stopped showing up so much. Maybe they'll start up again. Maybe not. That's life. As long as there's life, I'm happy. 082613 #trout Some polluted water breaks against the levy. You are thirteen feet above sea level—just high enough so you can't touch. But you can breathe—barely. Get naked down here. Concrete cool & rough against your ass. What are you looking at, bitch? It's raining sideways thru the slanty sun. Where's the party? These kids don't know or if they do they won't tell you. They're not going there. They're wasting away down here instead. Broken green glass waves. The imagined sunrise. Stuck on a narrow strand. The levy. 012902 #eel this short, black haired girl that was a sometime roommate of ours 081013 #dog What the hell are we learning from this, anyway? I mean, I sit here not exactly telling you how I feel, or what ideas I'm having, and you sit there not exactly telling me what your reaction is, or what you think about it all. I mean it's like all these little disconnected snippets of uninteresting code-language, stuck more or less at random like so many post-it notes on the desktop of our collective psyche. Why, I bet we— 000097 #worm Ever since then, I have always driven a car that used virtually no oil. I'm miles away in flat smelly old Milwaukee now, and things are different. I can't smoke pot any more, unless I want to feel sad and heavy. I need a massage so bad I ping when I walk. I lost the string of beads long ago, and I regret that. I have put gallons and gallons of gas in my car, and that's always been all there was to it. You pump the gas, you pay, sometimes with your TYME card in lieu of real money, and you go on and do something else. 000000 #eel So now that the outsider was gone, we went into the bathroom. Our blonde lady went into the old claw-foot bathtub. I was close to her. She chose me to demonstrate some things. I held out my arms and she cut them. I presented my chest and she cut me there, too. It was quietly erotic. I dipped the wounds in the bath water and watched the blood swirl. I was aware of all the people watching, aware of my own submissiveness but not ashamed. When she was done, I said reverently, "Thank you for paying attention to me." 071002 #eel Finally on a raised dais at the head of the room, one of them appeared. It was androgynous, slender, muscled, lean. I could only see clearly from a little above its knees on down, above that the being was hazy, and glowed softly with a gold light. Its feet became my sole focus and my craving. I slithered across the floor towards its feet--slightly calloused, slightly dirty--and i said oh god yes please as i took one, then the other, into my mouth and sucked and licked and bucked as the creature smiled dispassionately. 061303 #eel I caught a bus back from the airport in some widespread, sunny, halfempty city. The bus when it came turned out to be a big old Oldsmobile, the driver a kindly black gentleman who discussed with me for several minutes the pros and cons of sitting in the front versus the back seat. If I sat in the back seat it would help traction by putting weight over the drive wheels. Finally, I elected to sit in the front. I had the diaper bag with me, and put it in the back, next to a bunch of boxes and bags of the driver's junk. 060098 #eel And later I was outside, at some kind of practice session with baseball and bat, and it was just this one other guy, a coach, and me, and oddly enough the coach was acting civilized and offering suggestions about form and technique, and it was going to be my turn soon, and I was a little apprehensive but getting excited about the idea that maybe, after all these years, I might have a chance to really learn how to swing a bat, and instead of being ridiculed for not knowing how, to be respected for wanting to learn. 121703 #eel I was admiring the computer while the guy was in another room getting a bath ready. I was starting to wonder if we were going to take a bath together, and starting to imagine if I would like it if he touched me intimately. The notion seemed strange, a little off-putting, and weirdly appealing. Throughout, there was the feeling of being almost all the way in on a secret, in the presence of intelligence and quiet subversiveness. The sunlight filtering in was wan but wistfully cheerful. Even the dust had eyes. 092511 #human It's about so much more than sex. God, yes, it is about sex, oh my god. But it is also about nothing less than my very existence being recognized and accepted. It is about "me" being okay. Consequently, it's about parenting, teaching, everything. Maybe I can let go of some of this anger. Maybe some of the hidden grief can melt. Maybe I can forgive my dad. I haven't felt this young in years. I can stop being a lousy actor. Nobody really believes my shtick, anyway. Least of all, me. But I was the easiest to fool. 111209 #treefrog Remember when it was a big epiphane that "playing cards is just a framework (excuse) for the real games you play while playing cards"? Well, it's like that now, but on a whole new level. Because "teaching English" is just a framework for being with these kids. God bless them. A mask. He wore a mask; he was ashamed of his eye; she asked him out because he was afraid. Bullets fly into his house, and yet he is afraid of a little girl. 072613 #jan "If they really dreamed it," said Jan, "they'd be living it." 091413 #martian 1. I don't even remember what book it was, I just remember the black TA, large with a little bit of power and a captivated audience, who said are you scared? You *should* be scared! 2. And when he said Little Jim Klise, I didn't say I believe his name is actually just Jim, because I was too young, indoctrinated, soft, and opportunistic at the time. 3. But you know, I did actually learn some stuff from Little Jim Klise, for instance, "This time, they're going to revere me as a god!" but then of course they don't. 081413 #worm He and his friend the whore are in the convenience store down the street from his stinky apartment. This is the only place open at this pissant hour of the morning. All the little corner markets, corner bars and drug-trade-concealing candy shops are shut-eyed, barred and blankfaced til tomorrow. But this place, this fluorescently blazing, corporately stoked den of sulfites and nicotine, is wide, wide open, open wider than Omsatigo's ass a little while ago when the whore fucked him handsomely with a hairbrush handle! 040513 #gull #fox Somebody thinks they know what someone else is thinking, and begins to react accordingly, only to realize that the other person was thinking something dramatically different all along, such as in *The Man in the High Castle*, when Childan was thinking he was in trouble because Paul knew the jewelry was an attempt to seduce his wife, when in fact Paul was concerned with a much larger issue: the *wu* of the piece of jewelry and what it indicated about the significance of true American art beyond mere historicity. 081313 #copperhead That reminded me of something he used to do. Sometimes when we were playing cards, or also when he was working on something in his garage, he would pour himself a drink—usually Canadian whiskey for some reason—but then he would just let it sit there. The ice cubes would slowly melt into little fuzzy bumps, and then disappear. I don't know why I never said anything or asked him about it. It just seemed like the un-drunk drink was a part of the picture, like a gun-black wrench hanging up on the pegboard, or a 081413 #worm Damn it, she says, trying to drive and reach between her legs at the same time. She feels all over on the floor for the lighter. Suddenly a much sharper curve appears in the little world of the headlights ahead. She looks up just in time. Ltiky grabs the dashboard. The car lurches like a jon boat in a power yacht's wake, and just manages to stay on the road with a horrendous slow-motion screech. The procession of white lines veers crazily off center and back again, never ceasing its disappearing flight. 040004 #human The month of the werewolf. The werewolf shows us around the castle, which is actually a house, a big fucking house, the whole ground floor of which has been semi-converted into some kind of art gallery. We follow the werewolf by smell. The werewolf smells like the best perfume you've ever smelled; all innocence and wickedness, freshness and lust! How you want the werewolf never to leave, never to have left in the first place (although she always does; although he always will have...). 081413 #worm She says. Ltiky wakes up in a matchbox hotel room. It's been seventy-two hours since he left his wife; why doesn't he feel good? The air is green. The luminescent hands of the clock rise up in total surrender. The air-conditioner kicks on. It's freezing in here. He wraps the sheet around him--the one remaining unkicked sheet--and worms out of bed. He has a feeling he's been here before. With declension in his gut, he draws back the heavy curtain, revealing the parking lot, a giant hot dog, and some weeds. 010414 #warmglowbox #human I can't believe how wretched I feel. Obsessive ticks keep resurfacing, like why didn't the metadata on the jonquils order itself corredctly? The modification times are all backwards. And I'm coughing in the back of my throat, bleary, drained, having jerked off in some kind of monosexual gluttony to a bunch of trashy youtube videos. For a while I thought the box was my plaything. Where is all my rebirth and confidence now? I feel like shit. Self doubt is rampaging like a gory bear. 000097 #worm But just lately, my car has taken the next little step on its way to becoming an honorary junker. A car that's Been There. A real Piece of Shit, if you know what I mean. And it has--Been There, that is. It's been out West--to another hot springs, in fact--back, out again, back, down South, up North, and finally all around and around and around this honking screeching town in search of a little something--and it's really starting to show the wear. And now, today, I realized, yes--she's using oil. 081413 #worm Right now the map of Npydyuan ain't much. Maybe someday we'll all strike it rich and get a bunch of cartographers migrating to the area. But for now, you've got to picture a white rectangle, maybe with faint blue transverse lines all down it, and one candy pink line over towards the left side, running perpendicular to the blue ones, and beyond that three round holes, bam, bam, bam. Now take a pointy, painted, wood-coated stick of semi-soft graphite and scribble on the rectangle thus: 030604 #eel Thinking about what I did next, imagining it, made it work: I pulled a knife out of seemingly nowhere, brandished it, but while he was concerning himself with that I pulled a smaller one, a pocketknife really, with my other hand, and threw it, with inexplicable expertise, right into his right eye. He died on the spot, I think. It didn't seem like a terribly big deal, not highly dramatic nor particularly criminal. Just part of the whole scene. I was glad I had won, but not flabbergasted about it. 122106 #treefrog Chris Petty's Christmas story.... "What am I? 16, [going] on 17? So this was about 6 years ago, I was 10 years old, and it was Christmas, and my mama couldn't afford to get me nothing, she didn't have no money, and, I didn't get shit. "And I didn't really cry, but some tears came up in my eyes, and the room started getting a little dusty--there was people smoking in there, and my eyes was burning. [pause...] "Bang bang! Shoot 'em up!" [several students listening crack up] 011114 #human #shitboy #warmglowbox Wouldn't it be easier to fuck around with keyboard shortcuts, or maybe agonize deliciously over whether VoodooPad or the Finder is better for the cuboid? What about web export? Don't you want to share with the world? Or at least your mom? Wait, you don't want your mom to see what goes on in the cuboid! For gods sake, man, there's cocksucking and shiteating and god knows what else in these rubbish-strewn compartments! Hasn't she had to sit through enough of that already? 081313 #copperhead Paddling is watching his shoulder muscles, rolling steady in the sun. Matching his perfect rhythm, watching his perfect back. The tributary stream is narrow; trees abound on either side. The cool blue-green of tributary shaded by the hazy green of overhanging vegetation—we're thrusting up a sluice we'd have to stand up in to turn around. Every time the paddles pause, suspended, drips leave trails of circles, tiny waves of history, expanding, colliding, interfering, disappearing. 081413 #worm It's that easy. It's only later--months later? years later?--that he knows what he really meant. He really meant, this particular moment is very good. Let's press this moment in the leaves of a big book, and let's wield the book like a cudgel to keep each other's ghosts at bay. But the ghosts keep coming back. They always do. They've read your book, even the pages you always skip over. They've started at the end and read the whole thing backwards, and they alone know how it all begins. 052513 #eel I was staying aloof and with the anger and distance primary but as the time went on she seemed nicer and softer and smoother and fragrant and I felt my resolve slipping and it felt so good to just give in and offer myself to her again, to just give up and submit, it's where I belong, I am longing toward the gravitational pull of that, it was so thrilling and such a relief to just sink into it, into her, the flesh of her and she smiled and I ate a piece of my own shit to prove my devotion and sincerity. 061303 #eel I was going to make a little book of things to tell myself to help me out, and give it to my mom and say, here, save this and give it to me when i'm old enough to read it. It was covered in green construction paper. So far, the main points I was trying to get across had to do with seizing the day and pursuing your dreams vigorously, not waiting around for stuff to happen to you. Pick something and work your ass off and get good at something. Start early, for it will soon be too late. Have fun. 081413 #worm Elevators don't work in this building. Rusty corpses of ivy cling to windows they've given up trying to enter. To get to the stairs, bump your bike over three crumbling steps, and go in the front door. Your tires are new enough to squeak on the old, cold tiles. Go in the accidental light down the hallway to your right. Now turn left. The nautilus chamber of the stairwell echos dizzily above you. You might want to hitch your bike up by the crossbar, and hold it on your shoulder. It's a long way up. 081413 #worm Next, Krim and the rest of her troupe of madmen and pirates burst onto the scene from behind a fallen redwood. They are all out in their colorful silks, brazen chests, and come-on-fuck-with-me grins. They catch up with Ella and Ltiky, and rib the latter mercilessly. Ltiky gets hard yet again. He's feeling young. For the longest time, he hadn't recognized her, what with the passing of time, and the dreadlocks and all. But it was Ella. It was definitely Ella. And every day, she kicks his ass all over again. 000097 #worm Anyway, the four of us decided to drive across the mountains to a hot springs they knew about. The witches, Helena, and me. We went up and up and up, over for a couple of seconds, then down and down and down gradually until we were on a smouldering wide plain, with rusty fences, bent trees, a yellow-grey look to the sky, curlicue winds, space space space, level and low and flat and stretched out for miles. It was really a totally different place from where we had been that very morning. 081313 #copperhead A ticking noise. Something ticks against the metal hull. An iridescent beetle, blue, or green, or both, metallic, suddenly clumsy, following a random drunkard's walk along the gunwale. *You're not supposed to sit on those.* Did you know that? I know all kinds of dope shit about this shit. I know how and where to sit, and what the colors of the water mean, and how to steer, and when to not steer. I'm in the prime of my youth, mother fucker, and I'm here to tell you, *I am not wearing a shirt.* 133904 012614 #cafe #celeste The girl sits casually bent-legs-to-the-side [what do you call that?], you know, the girly perch that boys aren't supposed to do, on a plush burgundy couch in the living room of the restaurant. With chopsticks she holds a piece of sushi. The light is warm, subdued. The wood is dark, the walls are white. It is calm here, there are people but not too many. A restaurant made out of a regular house--it is its own kind of magic. Magic is the musical intersection of incongruous worlds. 121513 #human #tinker kind of mourning the loss of the camera I just bought and then cancelled. but kind of celebrating the freedom that emptiness brings Now I can, guilt-free, write about absolutely nothing of significance, just to feel and hear the gentle music of the keys. Now I can, without the addict's fierce-kept distance, design a better lego-holder ($0) to hold the phone up at a nice angle in front of this grubby little keyboard not buying something is truly the best purchase you can make 010314 #jonquil The long weekend was finally over. Gwen took a shower. Once the rusty part of the water got out of the way, the rest was fine. She let the hot water sandblast her skin for twenty minutes. She could never get enough of a shower. It felt so good to be warm, naked but safe. The image of Mary's ambiguous smile when she caught her with the panties kept flashing back to Gwen's mind, as rivulets of water teased her neck and back and inner thighs as she bent forward to shave her legs. 112204 #human I was lying in bed with my whore last night, after fucking her hard and whispering Sweet Baby in her ear. I told her she was the best whore cuz she stays the whole night. She said, Yeah and I'm pretty much free, too. I said Nothing's free. She said, Well, you pay me the best anyway. I said Yeah? She said Yeah. Everything I could possibly want is right here in this room. The room was quiet except for the hush of her breathing, my breathing, and the breathing of our beautiful two daughters. I slept well. 082813 #bunny Look. I know. You're supposed to be doing something. But. Let me prevail on your senses. Sit with me for about five minutes, and then we're going to run. Cedar flaks your jacket. Sassafrass bites your lungs. Eat the creek. Fry the sun. Come on into my cave. Sit with me then wrestle with me then get naked with me. Pitch and soil and mica sticks to our shining ribs. Come, come, come with me! And smile. Then we'll smell like spunk and dirt together. Is this you? Do you remember this? Unhesitating, I do. 031213 #human The sun just came out behind me and to the left, where the Lake curves away towards busier and more congested climes. I am sitting in the special balcony of Alterra, for the first time ever--or if not, then the first time I can remember. I always wanted to sit here. Every wool-capped, shoulder-bagged, fuzzy-faced, introverted douche-bag that walks into this place with Macbook under arm pokes his head in here to see if it's available. It isn't, you vomitous ciphers. I'm in here. Get the fuck out. 083013 #squirrel #treefrog I have to just sit here and be real? Yay! 081613 #worm And so it began; a trickle, turning into an outpouring, turning into a rocket blast, then turning back into a kitten again. Just like my friend's girlfriend, I sez to myself very silently, because any time I hear, even in my head, wordz like kitten, I get a very funny tingling under my eye, and I think about the in-between-the-TV-stations kind of aura the female past has all about it, like fireflies at the bogus Rennaissance. 000004 #squirrel Our friend and comrade Corey Cambel, was killed last week due to an unnecessary attack which I have little information on. His wake was last Sat. and his brother found my # this past week which in turned called me to let me know. We are looking to have a Memorial for him at the studio this Saturday at 11:30am. All classes before and after will still be held but we would like to honor him during the 11:30 class. I would hope everyone would attend this Saturday in remembrance of Corey. 082713 #gull #roach And what isn't it? I think it's important to remember, it's not a collection of metaphors or allegories. It is what it is. The junkyard is the junkyard. The Cafe, with its myriad salt-and-pepper shakers, reaching beyond the ken of any mortal blessed enough to eat breakfast and fall in love, is simply the Cafe, nothing more, and nothing less. Welcome to it. Enjoy your stay. Love one another-- beyond these simple imperatives, "it" is also definitely not a set of commandments. 081613 #worm I am looking at the time. It as almost time. I am always saying that. What the fuck. What else is there to do, except this? I am looking at my hands. How old they have grown, how old. I am looking at anything resembling a sliver of light; a way out. 000097 #eel the puss who looks like a cocksucking 14 year old and i would love to shoot jizz all over her little yellow face appeared in my dream and gave a very moving dissertation only more like a conversation about why she did not drink. 030004 #human There's a guy in here reading. Sitting at a table on the mezzanine in the wan winter light. He just rolled a smoke from my tobacco. He said thank you. He seems like a nice guy. I don't have a point to make in this paragraph. I just thought I'd provide it in case you wanted to download it, use it as an exercise in color adjustment. Make the winter sky a summer one. Turn blue ducks red, red roses violet. See what you can do. If color adjustment doesn't provide the results you want, undo. 081613 #worm I was thinking about writing a bunch of slogans on the walls. We could have a whole, write a bunch of shit on the wall and deface the place party. I was thinking of getting things going by writing, Jail: See where it takes you, like a recruitment ad or some shit, in big, wet lipstick up on the mirror under the naked lite bulb up over here, and then I could give everybody some naked pens and paint and crayons and whatever the fuck, and we could all say fuck until we didn't want to say it any more. 081413 #worm What they had always assumed to be a room is clearly now a corridor. The trickle of water bends relaxedly around their shoes; they are going downhill slowly, toward the underbelly of the city. The objective remainder of Ltiky's mind flails, harkening back to noisier times. The legendary underground neighborhoods.... The cops never went there--until, of course, they did go there, and the tunnels were demolished, the great subterranean subversion reduced to rubble. Could this be--But how-- 081413 #worm In the other bathroom, the one behind the wall, sits a demigod. His butterscotch skin is sculpted in fame. His forehead is a bowsprit. His cock-ring is a kranch. He is in some kind of love with himself. Rose petals adorn his bath--but it is not water on which they float so aromatically. This demigod bathes in shit. He sits in a shit-filled barrel, and roars to himself as he flings great fistfuls above his head. He rubs brown circles into his chest. He yells the ochre tiles off the mouldering walls. 010314 #jonquil Leaves made papery noises and the toes of her shoes got wet as Mary walked southwest through backyards, weedlots, and alleys toward the town's paltry little high school. Out front over the grubby parking lot was a sign ::with an insulting mascot that had so far flown under the radar of recent attempts around the country to change such traditions.:: Gwen glanced with mild distaste at the comically warpainted Indian. The letters *HOME OF THE BRAVES* looked as homely as a roadside ice-cream drive-in. 102412 #human I'm really ready to start feeling not like crap physically, and because I'm not a wispy twink anymore, it looks as if I'm going to have to work at it, actually put some time in. But hey, what am I putting that time into now? Sitting around half listening to the kids watch Futurama while reading bullshit on the Internet? Drinking? Eating? Yeah, mostly. There's some other stuff, but for the most part, yeah. Time to start swilling that good juice (again). This might be a little tricky. It's been a long time. 090813 #bunny Yes, I say in a small voice, much too small. His laugh turns throaty, he advances. My heart begins to race, almost like the old days, one more time, one more dawn light sad pathetic holy time. 000000 #human Anyway, Maybe I was kidding myself. Maybe it's either a) just me, or else b) I just haven't found where to take off in my own stellar cloud of nebulous passion. Maybe someday I, too, will get to see the Seven Sisters. Maybe not. Who knows except the hedgehog, and he ain't saying. 081413 #copperhead The weird thing is, I don't miss it. I did at first, for I guess I'd say about the first four or five days. I even kind of had some jitters. There was a raspy paper-bag hum or echo in my ears in the evening, a dry mouth in the morning, and a general feeling of missing something. But along with that unpleasantness came a strange sense of power. Like a raw edge—something had been cut away from me, or I had been pushed out of an airplane and for a while at least, I was flying. 102513 #trout The bell above the clinic door jangles as she leaves. 000096 #squirrel well its its not that your a good liar i dont think i think its that i'm willing to just believe because i love you whats loving about\ because i want to what did you say ' i said, whats loving about that?. from me? yeah? I mean, i'm not just being belligerent i really wonder why it is loving to believe someones bullshit i trust you maybe that;s why it is scary/.. and maybe thats why it is loving 000004 #human the beautiful thing is how we're all on stage. little stages. the horrendous thing is how incredibly subtle it all is. low-key. minimalist, even. it's disgusting. too much almost. i mean, too much "almost." too much of that tired old nonarrival. or failing that, too much abandon, too much oblivion, but all of it so subdued, earth-toned, kept-in-check. it's like a library without the electricity. no, that actually sounds really cool. it's like... it's like... it's like a goddamned coffee house in here. 081613 #worm This game was where we turned into bunnies. We go hopping through the sinister fields, avoiding laser beams and doing ninja moves, and basically bringing down the elephants. It was fun but dumb. Like a movie, only where you get to do everything. God I'm stupid, I thought to myself, as we drifted off to sleep on the floor while the video game was still flashing bleep, bleep, bleep, and flickering all its inane wisdom onto the pisscolored ceiling. We were so drunk on pain pills it didn't matter. 081813 #treefrog No matter how screwed up it seems--even this moment right now (Sam laughed) is still your real, actual life. Don't it always seem to go.... How when you wake up from a dream and think, maybe I'd like to go back there. How one day we're going to wake up from this dream, and wish we could go back, so, enjoy it. That felt real, saying that stuff. And--here's the important bit I'm trying to get at here--it was unplanned, but it came around because of the foundation of the stuff that was planned. See? 223436 011914 # Get real quiet. Hush. Listen. The vertical blinds over the patio door go *tick tick tick* in the warm breeze from the heat vent in the floor. Outside, beyond, there's the commons: a fingernail of freedom, the teeming seething side of this suburban encampment. An experiment left over from the seventies. "Not much good comes out of there," said Officer Fathead. A grown up little boy with a gun. You know where he works? A middle school. You know who he flirts with? prepubescent girls. Yeah, he's a big man. 081413 #worm When the dear old waitress brings my change, she drops a piece of paper on the table, too. It looks like some kind of a map. I try to get her attention to tell her she dropped something, but she's already gone, gone, gone. Dorbifyr and Hanad perch on pigeon-polished boulders by the lake. He takes her hand. Her silhouette is bonnetted. She breathes deeply. Shorebirds screel, and wheel around. The moon is smoky. They are the first ones here. Of all those expected to arrive, they have been in love the longest. 000096 #squirrel what does that mean. i stnad in circles of lite that nothing may pass. it means, its kind of like a defensive parimeter. i mean, you haftoa be careful not to interpret it as, EVERYBODY KEEP OUT ALL YOU FUCKERS GO TO HELL, its not that, its' rather, this is my safe spave, this is my grove this is my little slivce of time and space in the universe and noone can just tread all over it without regard for my what i dont know my something. its casting a protective circle\ exactly. 000003 #human There were plenty of times I climbed on top and fucked her hard. You can't just self-consciously assume the role of sissy for it to work. You have to be enough of a "real man" to have that reality undermined. You have to be at least a somewhat tall tree to enjoy the ripping sensation of being felled. She has to build you up in order to cut you down. And she did. And she always did. Oh shit. If someday I could succinctly express this one phenomenon, I should be satisfied as a writer. 010314 #jonquil Dude, check it out. Mary came up close, closer than personal space usually allows, and she smelled good, shampoo mixed with cooled sweat, intermingling with the decomposition of the autumnal patch of woods outside. She rolled up the black sleeve of her ::sweatshirt::. Underneath was a gauzy, lacy black sleeve, obscuring a pattern of dark red. She pushed up that sleeve too, and Gwen felt foolish for almost letting out a gasp when she saw that the pattern was dried blood, lacerations scabbing over. 000096 #squirrel so your looking to be enteratained then well yes arent you yeah but i dont know that i wanna expose every corner of my psyche for your entertainment i dont know that i can do that you know i guess entertainment as a a word is alittle weak, i dont' mean amusement like you get form watching tv i mean enetertainment in the sense of fucking with the universe in the sense of things that really fascinate you really think this conversation is fascinating yes all right then we can have it 081313 #copperhead I sure could use two cheeseburgers with extra mustard. And a pepsi, with rectangular ice cubes with little divots in one side, in a textured plastic cup with a corporate logo embossed on the outside. Maybe a napkin with quilted edges, some factory-practical flatware, rolled up and tucked in by a slip of paper and a dot of glue, served on a linoleum table top by a frabjous waitress in her early twenties or late thirties or who knows how old she is—seems like maybe you've seen her somewhere before? 051111 #martian 1. For Jesus to be McConnis would be almost too obvious. I rather think he would be someone deceptive, yes, but in a more layered way. Someone devilishly charismatic. Someone whose appeal would test you not through pathos but through psychopathology. Someone who would elicit not your obvious sympathy but your deepest doubts. Someone like Devonte. 2. I told DC my theory of obviating adjectives. 3. Or maybe Devonte's brother, who is going home after school today to make an oatmeal sandwich. 051111 #martian #treefrog 1. Teacher's trying to explain abstraction. He says, "You can't touch beauty. You can't touch happiness." Squirrelly girl and squirrelly boy, sitting in the one carpeted corner as always (except for the brief interlude when he sat by the new old girl, and squirrelly girl was very intentionally not sullen about it)--he says, "I can touch beauty." And touches her face. She says, though the perfection of hers is messed up a little by her small, silvery laugh, "I can touch happiness." And touches his. 2. If you're not making any tracks, it's hard to get stopped in them. 3. Malcolm touched my neck lightly with his index finger as he walked by. What was that about? 112413 #human I told Megan, "Let Cecilia fuck up." I wanted her to use the strategy of not telling everyone what to do. But you know sometimes it's hard for her to embrace that. She stood there, leaning towards me in that ready-to-fight pose she has, arms stiffly out from her sides a little bit. The skin below her left eye quivered a little. She kept repeating it. "Okay. I'll let her *fuck up.* I'll let her *fuck up.*" I felt like she was trying to scare me or teach me a lesson. And it almost worked. But I "gave up," and kept calm, and just explained again why I didn't want her to have the burden of telling Cecilia what to do. Maybe at some level she was experimenting with the energy of saying fuck and being angry. 000098 #human and so eventually i left because glenn said WE GOT TO GO a long time ago and of course he was gone by the time i got out there and of course he called and read me some poetry and he don't know that means i love him on my answering machine and i called back and i said hey fuckface because that's how you gotta address a straight guy that you love kinda how come you was reading poetry on my answering machine and he said what poetry and it was okay because we talked and we called each other and i'm still hungry. 081413 #worm Falyw keeps reciting his excuses: I can't go in; I just got my nails done. My arm's broke. My fish died. I can't get it up. I forgot how. I'm too stupid. Whatever. Finally, Fickyn kicks his ass, and in the both of them plunge. Falyw falters like a dying asshole. He sticks his arms in this direction and that. He looks like a fucking cocksucker out there. But you know what? He starts to enjoy it, a little bit. One tenth of one percent of one tiny fiber of one muscle in his ass lets loose. Today's excuse gets scratched off the list. 000096 #squirrel if right now you had to try and relate the story thats going on between us to someone how on earth would you tell them. i would start by going to the computer at night all by myself, and start spewing. thats the only way i could even begin to approach it tihtnk unless perhaps i was in a therapists office then after i did that, i would have a clearerer idead of where i actually stand in my thoughts, or a clearer idead of what the story even is. cuz right now, i'm a character in the story and its hard to tell the story that way. 081413 #worm Jelse kills the engine. He used to have a good life. He slumps in the sudden silence of the cab of his pickup, absently wondering if the son of a bitch will start up again. Maybe it's really getting old after all. Jelse sure as hell is. He'd rather accept that, than the inevitable demise of his most trusted, four-wheeled friend. His dirty-gloved hands still rest on the old, boat-wide steering wheel. Tiny flakes flail silently against the windshield, melting into street-light refraction. Whores! he shouts with something like cheer. Whores! 000096 #squirrel you think somethings gonna cmoe down and strike you like a lightning bolt your gonna say eureka no. but the big but] i think it is too it is possible that something in between nothing and lightning bolts can happen well gee thats kind of a sweeping generalization nevertheless, one necessary to state when shut up 081013 #dog HIM: [as if seeing ME for the first time in a long time] This is getting boring. ME: So let's do something else. HIM: Fine. *They do. For a little while, at least.* 000096 #squirrel in this learning how to live my lkife thing it seems sometimes like im barreling full speed ahead and then sometimes i feel like sitting dfown at the typewriter and typing over and over your fool ing im fooling myself im fooling myself etcetera. only you know wyour own truth so why i thought i thought i did but i was mistaken its not up to me to know your truth its uip to you and i guess all i can do is cut myself some slack and give myself the time and path i need to find it. yeah pretty much and you will 040513 #lovers He will be skeptical at first -- he'll find me crotchety and pessimistic, a burden. I'll doubt his ability to embrace the practical necessities of earthly adulthood. But we'll stick together, at least, you know, for now, because almost grudgingly we have to admit there's some sense of something, some connection? some appropriateness? some intangible viaduct between us across which flows in both directions Information -- that most melodic and elusive form of Energy, also known (and widely celebrated by our astral tribe) as Pershidium. 090207 #eel Later, or earlier, I'm walking alone in Milwaukee at windy night. Some black girls are walking behind me--it's Center Street, by that one bar and the little park, going west, approaching Locust. The wind picks up, nudges me forward, lifts me off the ground a few inches. I spread my arms. Hey! the black girls shout. He's flying! And I am. I go higher and higher, til I get scared, squunch my eyes shut, and go higher still. I know if I wake up I will regain control. When I wake up though, I'm not really awake. I just think I am. 081413 #worm The Aviary gives the Snoke a purse-lipped look. The Aviary assumes the position of infinite distance. The Snoke is aroused. Arousing a Snoke is like shooting fish in a steam room. It's time to have some fun. The Aviary sashays around in the street like a girl. The Snoke curls in low, sniffing for her sweet spot. But wherever it is, is where it was just a moment ago. She leads him around in a dog-treat dance until his goofy grin gets easy. Then she wraps herself around him, takes him down without a sound. She lets him hit the mud. 000208 #human I also miss the orchard, Diebold's and the other one, the one where we got stick candy in so many flavors, really any flavor you could possibly want, all swirled up in a spiral, and you sucked it til it got sharp, so pointy it could pierce your cheek if you weren't careful. I miss the apples and the apple and cement smell of the place, and the long ride home, and the basement, and the roller skates and the iron smell of the support beams of the basement, riding around and around and around and around on roller skates in the basement. 070813 #copperhead On the way down there, there were two dogs fucking, and it reminded me of a dumb old joke. Pretty soon I had to go to the bathroom, so I pulled into a dilapidated but seemingly viable gas station with a convenience store. There was a lot of yellow light, and it made the grey parking lot gravel look gold. This was at the intersection where the road you have to take turns to gravel, turns from a big black and white letter to a little yellow and blue number. I wasn't sure if I remembered that store being there before. 011114 #human #mrgrenache #warmglowbox Wouldn't it be easier to just look online at different cameras? Or read a really well-written, thoughtful piece at somebody's tastefully designed blog about how it doesn't matter what camera you have, because photography's about storytelling? And feel vindicated, because oh yeah, storytelling. I know about that. While your scattered characters bounce around and around inside the ever-tumbling cuboid, not knowing which way is up, not knowing each other, not knowing salvation and a kiss may lie a single cell away. 000001 #human I told her you have to learn to accept what people do give you, instead of always crying over what they can't. She said yeah, and then tomorrow they leave. I said I don't think people have been dying just to be mean to you. I said if you concentrate on the fact that they might leave tomorrow, you'll miss the part where they're here today. I wondered to myself, am I kidding myself and her? Am I making the world out to be a nicer place than it really is? But these are the things I tell myself, and they still seem true to me. 081613 #worm And no sooner is the sweat stuck to my tattoo like a Nipponese fairy merchant, than it happens. A-gain. Table. Chairs. Bad, bad, bad rusty pipe music. Old bashful computers; they don't make them like that any more. God I think I miss those old, harmless computers, with their wan screens, their steady fans, and their utter, absolute, unthinkably sublime dumbness—most of all. Clickity-click, snippity-snap, whirrdley-pop. But we'll get back to those little boxes of inert imagsperation in a lil' while. Right now I've got customers. 081513 #human Wake up. Confused, off, suffused in vague regret, as if you didn't know you'd done it again: the small avoidance, the minute concession, the sucking and chewing, the little death by devouring, Peter don't you know what you have done? Angry at bedtime, you pushed them away again--the kids, your dreams, your lightness--your fear of the ordinary once more has closed you down, sealed you off, surgically attacked the possibility of transcendence. You gave in to saying no. Mornings are made of honesty. You cannot pretend you do not know this. 081613 #worm I'm hungry for some cock. One cornfield looks a lot like another. I want to masturbate. The orange beast is silent under a cemetary tree. The other travellers are occupied, some asleep. I wander off. One corn row looks a lot like another. I find a place to press my buttocks into soft silt. Summer smells and the buzz of bugs accelerate as I slow down. My ears, my head, my heart. We all make compromises with the fatality of the sun, I think as I begin to stroke myself. I smell wet. Rainclouds, my eyelids; I settle into a rhythm. 082913 #finch Protein, plain and simple rain drops jumping out rain filled the history of her reduced instruction set rocket rollercoaster bucket sex sex sex she bursts in She said do you think she's getting impatient Shooting at fish shrouded by two glasses squirrel rasping gently The floor is cold the proprietor just brought the railroad track the world is going to end then Watching people sex we did it it was fun What do you want world You pushed into me What else can I say? 101900 #human i wrap my silky hand around his veined, bulging penis. it is like a shaft of wood, the shaft of a great pipe to be smoked in honor of the people still living. in this world, i was the one who died but glenn staid alive. he has (finally) permitted me to come back to life--provided i be a girl and be in love with him. "Silly," I say, delighting in the freedom to say such curvy, teddy-bear things to his grizzled face, "I was already both!" and we come here, and he comes here, and he comes in my arms and my cheek in his neck and i taste him 013113 #human A tiny compression wave of sublimity just thrust thru me with infinite warmth. No-one has to be anywhere tonight for a change. Supper's planned & easy & a popular choice. Millie's reading, Megan's crafting in the basement, littles are playing upstairs. It's cold outside. It's warm enough in here. Nanci's on the ancient speakers via modern airplay. I just took one cold sip of a perfectly-timed old fashioned. Just sweet enough, just bitter enough. One sip, and my whole world was suffused with amber dragonfly perfection. 081413 #worm For an interminable time, Him and Me simply stink, and follow. When their leader stops, Him and Me almost slam into each other and his wide back. His hand reaches out in the dark--to touch a button, perhaps? An electric hum, and--a door slides open. They all crowd into the little, square room behind it. The door trundles shut. The pinging of ballast, a pinkish flickering--a fluorescent light comes on. The gnarly figure of the one they've followed this far fingers a button on the brushed aluminum wall, then turns to face Him and Me. 081513 #worm Meanwhile, ancient Greece is getting paved over, brick by gray brick. Me yearns for it the way you yearn for a dream too early stolen by the noise of day. The bricks of history don't let in the sun. One of the bricks has Me's blood on it. Does that make him complicitous? In what crime? Has he helped protect the ancients, or deprive the moderns of their real wisdom? The last bit of Greece he spies, before the last brick ka-thunks into place, is an orange dog, with sparks flying off its back, lifting a leg on one of the columns. 000002 #eel There is a lizard-fish that will, if you get in the water with him, and if you have taken a certain preparation which discolors and scents your molars, swim into your mouth and right down to the base of your digestive tract, whereupon he will cause you, forthwith, to shit yourself. The shit-lizard-fish is put to a number of kinky uses among the more daring--are there side effects? dangers? how does he get back out?--of the s&m and b&d set of these various worlds at the fringe. You and I found one. We had even used it once. 081413 #worm Hi. It's good to see you. Long hug. Feel the explosive impossible heat of her breasts pressed soft and warm into me. Stay there. Long time. Much longer than Hello. Breathe softly and slowly next to each other. Rock ever so slightly back and forth. Feel the plumpness of her back cupped in my hand. Press. Stay there. Little longer. Feel the need to let go. Time is coming; even though we have crossed the first line, there is another one coming that we will not cross. Not yet. Maybe not ever. We're not such children any more. We know better-- 102600 #human W#ine, wine, bring me more and more wine. Mermaids to bring me wine. Sawdust creations to take the shape of women and pour the wine right into my mouth. The sweet foul smell of barnyard and planks and violins, wine and firelight, tromping the boards dancing with all our feet but bring me more wine. One, two, three, let me count them out, the people I travel with, the souls I need to find my way, the ones without whom I am nothing. Play what roles you will, all you souls, but please, wait until we are all dead to leave me this time. 121113 #spaceacademy Employee #104041 greets the newcomer in a corridor outside one of the main offices. You look like an art teacher to me, he says. Haha, says employee #1212924. It's his first day, so he's not sure what else to say, nevertheless he tries: Fake it till you make it, I guess. Haha. Employee #104041, a custodian whose name is Gus, jingles and squeaks as he leads the new art teacher around corners, ddddddddddd, along slidewalks, and through fire doors toward the art department of this branch of this wing of this deck. 030403 #eel Actually, the game hadn't started yet and they were having some kind of pre-game shenanigans. This guy named Corporate Pinkington, or maybe his last name was Pricington, was out on the court, stomping around, and he shot at the basket and made it. The announcer said He made it! And that's a free supply of diapers for Corporate...! He was wearing nothing but thigh high black stockings, and he was really white and really fat, and I was thinking God this is stupid, but at the same time, well, what the hell, if it works for you.... 081413 #worm #roach Cinder blocks are everywhere. This is Him's home, his office space. If you crouch down in the dark and peer through the half-closed blinds at night, you can watch the whole fool city drift by below. You can see the river, with its occasional, inquisitive lights. You can see the Cafe. How many fallen leaves can you see from here? That's how many Ltikys are in Cafes. The hands of how many clocks you can see rise up just now to ask for the check. How many toilets have you ever taken a shit in? That's how many Omsatigos are in Cafes. 000000 #human my whole demeanor (reading Delany makes me want to use fancier words; "life" just didn't seem adequate right there) seems to be expressible in lower case. i'm neurotic; not Psychotic. I'm bright, not a Genius. I write journals, not Novels. I have these oily, slimy suspicions about how i'm deluding myself, but no Revelations. Still, it makes me feel a tiny bit (and that's a lot, sometimes) better to type sometimes. (but does it Save my Ass?) (Does my Ass even need Saving, or in that, too, am I lower-case: it soothes my butt.) 000096 #squirrel its fun it reminds me of being litlew dancing around in my bedoroom with my pink plastic hi heels in my paste diamonds paste? yeah when i was still queen of all i surveryed dont you think thats sort of the catch 22? what you mean i mean, when your little its kinda hard to survey a whole lot at least in the outside world and then when your old enough to survey it it seems like your not queen of it any more at least often it seems that way well its still good i know i was just being argumentative 031513 #human I'm getting drunk and there's a small wooden chair in front of me, in front of the speaker, the speaker from the 60's, from when my stepfather wasn't my stepfather, when he wasn't anything but a hungry young man, attorney barely, veteran, redneck, product of his times, sexy, he probably had hair then, I don't know why it matters so much but it does. I didn't solder the wires. I just crimped them on with pliers. God forgive me. Forgive me please. Just keep playing the music and make it sound good, or at least good enough. 000008 #human I secretly know something. (No, not that. I'm talking about something else now.) I secretly know that I can be wildly successful. I know who I am. I know that Aslan, that Simba's dad, that drummer, that play-directing farmer inside who says, "You are more." I know it's there, I know it's real, I know it's me. Pretty much the only real question right now is, do I have the energy to be huge? Am I awake? Am I up for it? Come on, man. Are you coming or not? We're at Bearfield, waiting for you. We have booze and chicken. Come on. 091013 #human I GET TO BE WHOEVER THE FUCK I WANT TO BE! I GET TO BE WHOEVER THE FUCK I WANT TO BE! I GET TO BE WHOEVER THE FUCK I WANT TO BE! I GET TO BE WHOEVER THE FUCK I WANT TO BE! I GET TO BE WHOEVER THE FUCK I WANT TO BE! 090913 #roach go, because it has something to tell you. go with it. go up to the stars. go, if anywhere, go to the cafe go home and drink, go out and flirt go skidding dizzily out into the street, go clunk, clunk, clunk go into what used to be called the woods go play tenpins go? go in the special smoking room. 101713 #human #meerkat The (A) in the Spiral calendar is a somewhat but not completely arbitrary chunk-tweak, a deliberate cutting up and moving around of a subroutine, that may well produce interesting results in itself, but, perhaps more importantly, serves as practice--a building up of the awareness muscle that peels back the hypnotized outer layers of my consciousness and reveals the games I play with myself all the time. It is simply another wild hack at the strangely-grown-closed-source API's of my mind. Plus, it's sexy as hell. Enjoy!! 081613 #worm While we're here, we might as well smoke. I love the sound of the train we're on. It goes, chuk!-ka-Chuck!, h-uk, h-ChuCK!, a, over and over again. It never gets tired of going that. And what's more, it throws in imperfections. Just when you subdermally start to flinch away from the repetition, it's suddenly non-Euclidean; it violates a principal; it's, as are all events and patterns perceptible and therefore musical to humans, more perfect than perfect; it flies in the face of the compass, the ledger, and the laborious pursuit. Relax. 081413 #worm Bimium, Snapo, Glit, and Peppar take a feast of sweet potatoes in with them. They feed each other's bodies, never prejudiced toward the mouth, with pulpy, soft, warm sweetness. Dorbifyr and Hanad, watching still from up atop the boulder pile, hug each other's hips a little closer. Each remembers exactly when they learned what a question mark was. When did you learn how to eat? asks Hanad, and their impossible conversation slingshots on into the stellar system. Love need never fear the sensual feast, no matter how late the season. 000097 #worm One of the witches--the tall, stringy one--gave me a bead. A little black one, fat in the middle and small on the ends, with little white markings around its equator. He told me where it came from, someplace special, some old crone or something, but I don't remember. I wore it on a piece of leather around my neck. Over the next couple of years I would add other significant beads one or two at a time, but I always liked best the one from the tall witch, and I always loved telling people, "This came from the first witch I ever met." 102913 #snail #featherwoman The last time the girls and I went to that place was almost exactly two years ago, and the woman that was telling us what to do then had hijacked my fantasies, had become swollen beyond the boundaries of her own fantasies and assaulted my daughter, and was picking apples and telling us what to do as I sat there not quite there, marking time until I would have a chance to leave the house without arousing suspicion and go break down in front of the sliding window in the front room of the Muskego police department. 110812 012514 #fish #gull That is one gull that got his fish! Or vice-versa. Once again a desultory dipping into kiddo-Christian morality donates the strong spell. If you're looking at teh-dsa trying to remember what the work is, how it works, remember the fish. It's all about the patience of fishing. You can't just dip your sick sick wick for one sec and say nothing happened, it's cashed, this is boring, etc etc. You gave this thing a life so now repay the curse by "loving the necessary work." Be still. Have a cheese cracker. Sun. Wait. 221451 090813 #worm She walks bravely, proudly, the beginnings of a smile just pressing against her juicy cheeks. Her breasts are full and glorious under her shirt; they roll there and play there and laugh there and are beautiful and full of life and plumpness; there is no stopping them. They must feel good to have on you, I mean on her, she must enjoy having them be a part of her body because they are so boisterous and lively and calm all at once. So thrumming with bumblebee energy they make me want to make honey and keep bees on honey street. 081013 #dog Gentle Vigour: So how do you like it so far? Rain Song: What? Gentle Vigour: Don't play dumb with me. Being a woman. Rain Song: Well, I like it. I'm excited; it's beginning to tingle ever so faintly in my loins, my voice is more natural, and I love the way this dress fits on me now. Gentle Vigour: But—? Rain Song: Well, but. But. But what. No but's, really, just . . . . Gentle Vigour: Well, what? Rain Song: I'm kind of scared. Gentle Vigour: Scared that it's irrevocable? Rain Song: Scared that it's not. 022613 #worm Bipeds with fine strings sproinging out of their heads constantly exchanging power tokens with gestural interface. The pitch has been pitched (it still is being, as the roller coaster car continues to roll long after the initial downhill charge). Some will catch it, some will successfully deploy the shield of doubt. This bitch is obviously crazy, but I was young once too, and misled about the source and direction of my desperation. The things I can see and the things the victims at the next table can see overlap, but nowhere near entirely. 081613 #worm Mortal embarrassment is the only purity. I have good friends. They get my terry cloth bath robe, set me down on the love seat. The barrista tinkles; laughter of pure, heavenly condescension. She goes to get more tea. The warden is a server. Alone jh sits in the decency of jhs own room; forty-two and forty forty-thirds floors above the rest of the heirarchy. Don't be a technophobe! common sense cautions; jh is not a computer. In the post-techno-dichotomous domain, a server is simply a server. A server is not a subcategory of machine. 081013 #dog *Early, in the still prismatic hours.* HIM: It's all about creating a space. ME: Good morning. HIM: Oh yeah. Good morning. I made some coffee. ME: You got a cigarette? HIM: Sure. Here. ME: Thanks. My back hurts. HIM: [deciding he can take a break from creating a space] Here. I'll rub it for you. Then we can sit outside all day on the porch and watch the acorns dive-bomb the weathered planks. ME: Hey, sometimes you're not all that bad, you know? HIM: And you. *That's it. That's really it. That's what today is like.* 090813 #worm A knight in full armor strolls past, talking casually with a harp-carrying bard in purple tights. 081313 #copperhead But from here, the tetchy whine's no louder than a pair of fucking dragonflies. And I've got my own problems. A soda can is half-submerged in gravel. Sun and rain have faded the label. It looks a hundred years old. It looks like something you might have drunk at your grandparents' family reunion. Is it old enough to have the old style pop-top ring? The top is turned the other way; can't tell; just as well. 120913 #human Clueless, brainless, witless, just plain stupid. That's what you is. You can't even be fat right, you stupid fuck. As soon as you declare something to be your salvation, it fails. Because there is no salvation, obviously. You thought you were having some great insight about your precious "temperament" when you were so exhausted after teaching a couple of classes, you poor thing. Turns out you were just getting sick. Ha ha. No wonder you were tired. You spent the rest of the night sweating into your sheets and having fever dreams. 081413 #worm The dolphin reconnects with the collective unconscious of her kin, and dreaming with her skin, releases the wrinkles and kinks of command. She takes many cetacean lovers; she wriggles laughingly alongside the prows of many vessels, to the delight and enlightenment of the crews and passengers thereon. Eventually, her new freedom transforms her into an organism of pure imagination, manifested as a pattern of chips and cracks in the porcelain of a funky, old, claw-footed bathtub. The willow-haired girl, prepubescent, genius nascent, takes a bath. Look at the dolphin! she squeals, transfixed, as the water flows. Her parents have no idea what she is talking about. 080004 #human Passion's not dead; it's sitting very, very still. Screaming at the silent phone. I don't mean the silent phone, I mean the "Silent Phone." The phone that operates on silent waveforms. The phone I lust toward, to pick up and call Bnabe. Bnabe's not dead, but passion is. Until the next long season 000096 #squirrel you know what i fe like more often than anything what i feel ike i feel ike your my best little friend you know little? i feel ike were this matched set of monkeys playing in the trees/ it feels really comfortable i mean it feels like it felt for me when i was little. and i think thats part of what i love the most about this 081413 #worm Wiggling back on the bed, she asks: Do you still want to fuck me? What? After you've not ten minutes ago just explained to me that you fucked so-and-so, that day I tried to call you and couldn't get through, and you had an amazing fucking orgasm, and you cried afterwards because you had wanted to know if it was just with me that you had this little problem--and it was--you have the nerve to shimmy back on your mattress on the floor, your ample tits laying back with you, your face painted with that evilly delicious smile, to say, Do you still want to fuck me? You fucking cunt! Yes, Krim, you fucking cunt, I still really, really, really want to fuck you so bad -- 082613 #finch 24 September 2003 I am so ridiculous. a big tank of lime vodka water dogshit french cigarettes pictures of beautiful nude women smiling in various ways i want that one to be my mama that one to fuck me up the ass that one to shit in my mouth, make me suck it like a cock that one to torment me, make me kneel and beg but never let me.... that one to cuckold me, leave me home to sweat and pout and in my impotence rage sweet the drive has just spun down computer quiet at last 081413 #worm A couple comes in. The female wears a baby in a sling. The male wears, and now this is getting a little odd, orange pants. No shirt. That's right, stay in shape. I allow myself a self-directed chuckle. Stub out a cigarette. The couple nestles into a booth near the front. A cop comes in, too. One of the old ones in blue, not one of the new military ones. The old ones aren't so bad. They're merely corrupt, not malicious as the new ones are. The cop sits at the counter, leaving an empty stool between him and the grizzly guy. I guess it's morning for real, now. The bells on the door have stated their case. Coffee gurgles in a faster rhythm. I love this time of day. 081413 #worm #roach At last, Him gets the cigarette from Me. It is all Him can do not to grab the rattly matchbox and light his smoke himself, but he is feeling rather polite tonight, and he knows how Me can be about these things, so he waits while Me strikes once, twice, three times, and the match goes out. Me slides the box open, picks out another match, slides closed the box, and tries again. Flame! Him leans forward squintingly, suckingly, and smoke, finally, ensues. Him sits back in eternal satisfaction. Outside the cafe it is still winter. Everything is beautiful. Oh yes! says Him. Thank you! Thank you very much, that's very kind of you. 082013 #treefrog what we see going on in your poem, this is what we hear, this is what we don't hear, here's some ideas, what about this, and the whole thing is we would be a roomful of people, not a judge and a bunch of underlings, and this is not just because i am young now, i would always want it to be like this. i would want my students to know when they come into my class that we are going to have a good time and play some games. and practice, practice, practice. the main goal isn't even to learn to write; it is to build up our muscles and our laughter guns for the battle against the indifference that leeches across the country twenty four hours a day. 081513 #worm He hears Krim cry out. He can see nothing but the sweaty backs of the bronzed, delirious strangers. Was it a cry of pain? alarm? ecstasy? He forces himself to approach the circle again. It opens for him this time. He is propelled into the center. The mud is chopped up and sloppy from the dancers' antics. It weighs down his shoes. On the opposite side of the circle, facing him, Krim stands, fully, shockingly, savagely naked. Mud smears her thighs, her dove-white belly, her breasts. Her eyes flash with the firelight. The slender man and the husky man hold her arms tightly. Others, shadowy, crouching down behind her, grasp her legs. Ltiky steps toward her. 121513 #human stuck inside the emptiness of your own head you know nobody can hear you you write it down (actually you type it; there is no "down" in space) because it's the only way to order your thoughts, and without order they're just a dull, numb, faintly queasy chaos you had another mini-crisis; some kind of possibly self-inflicted emptiness or panic caused you to make a rash, ridiculous, selfish purchase, which an hour or so later you recanted, thank god, you did in this case do the right thing, but the whole fleshy business has left you raw, teeming, hungry, generally weird but at least, thank god, you didn't spent that money 000097 #worm So in addition to not sliding off the road we had to worry about the car acting up, which evidently it sometimes did when conditions were inconvenient enough. We had to stop every fifty feet or so to put more oil into its smoking hole. And you know, I admired the wry humour with which these witches poured oil into their car. They called her she, they called her bitch, they laughed and cursed her, but they bought the oil, and they popped open the hood and poured it in there and we drove on another little treacherous ways. That was how it worked. When we got back, we lay in bed in boxers and T-shirts, and the short witch gave me a massage. 110913 #human #fox It's really just a re-learning of what I new a long-ass time ago. You don't need to stress and plan ahead too much. Go ahead and exist, do your day, play with your legos & your kids & do the laundry & look at trees & listen to people's conversations. Whatever. No need for the self-conscious self-improvement of it all. Just invigorate yourself with the liquor of mundane fascination. And then, *the words will come out as they want to* when it's actually time and space to sit down and type. Then & only then, and that's the only thing that time & space is for. It's elegant, it's good for your muscles, it'll keep you sane & clear. 051111 #martian 1. Malcolm said, you should look in someplace you haven't looked—in the closet that's never been opened. I said I haven't found that closet yet. He said, all you have to do is look behind you, and there it is. The invisible closet. I said but how do you open it? He said, that's the thing. Nobody knows how to open it, because it's never been opened. I said maybe it has to be opened from the inside out. He said, but it can also be opened from the inside in. All you have to do is draw a door, and a handle, and open it. 2. Isaiah came in and said, that orange juice really did a number on me. 3. Demetrius said, did you find my story yet? 081413 #worm They get on it. They fall into a rhythm. Me mans the sprayer hose, sluicing the slop off the saucers, bowls, plates, glasses, etcetera. He slams the dishes into the racks, slides them sideways. Him runs the dishwasher. While it churns away on one load, he's putting the previous load away. It's all steam and music. A tinny radio blares out perfect love in the middle of the night. Him and Me's hands grow baby soft from the hot water. Dampness from spray and steam battle it out with dampness from sweat, to besog their shirts. Off go their shirts. Up fogs the one small, high window. The night gets blacker, the kitchen glows brighter. 000096 #squirrel #treefrog and nobody will do it for you or make you do it for yourself, its jhust always waiting there right outside of your field of vision and you can feel it, at certain times in the day, and you know its there but still, it is not mandatory, it is entirely voluntary, and thats why, i admire so much teachers like richard klepack, my acting teacher who said, if you want it bad enough you'll jump up and do it, and then it will be your turn, i mean he edidnt hacve this okay you go now you go now , this kind of grade shcoole thing, it was just if you were there and ready you got to work on your scene and i loved that it was hard 112613 #tonahutu A thing my dad said, aged 73, living in the woods and in possession of several guns, on the same day when we were teaching my daughter to shoot: "I don't want to shoot a deer." Some guy just parked on main st in Waukesha, across from where I'm sitting with a steaming cup, with a coupla deer carcasses strapped atop his car. He's wearing a flannel and stubble, is slightly hunched, and frankly looks kind of dumb. The way he walks down the sidewalk, two little girls in tow, sort of a smug swagger barely concealed--it's like he's saying to everyone in sight of this socially acceptable spectacle, yeah, I shot that. Yeah. Me. Shot that. Killed it. I can kill stuff. 081413 #worm #roach Him and Me's forgotten papers lay dormant in the bottom of the recycling bin behind the counter--except the one Barp had picked up. Hanad, when she came to work to relieve Krim for the graveyard shift, found that one, mistook it for a tip--which she really shouldn't have taken anyway because Krim worked in that section all night before Hanad got there--and folded it up and put it in her apron pocket. Then she forgot about it. She was pushing fifty, and had more important things to worry about. Krim went home. Hanad sat in the cafe alone, and cried. What's the matter? roars Omsatigo. Ain't you never seen a couple of drunk people before? 022604 #eel Knowing she'd sensed it, dreamed it, knew it. Telling myself she could be wrong, but knowing she's usually right about these things. Thinking, cancer, yes, that's why her stomach's been hurting her in so many places. The dead weight of the unavoidable truth. Numbness. Walking by myself, riding a bike maybe, by our old neighborhood, only in this world the street is made of dirt and is only as wide as an alley, and the houses are low and dumpy and small, and the lots are separated by cheap chain link fence, and each one only has about 500 square feet or so at the most. I am aware of how different things are here. How did it get this way? 081413 #worm Hanad walks along the spook-planked highway. He hovers on it, over the marsh, between the whickering weeds. The clouds part their lips, close their eyes. The old boardwalk, settling into a state of disrepair--no one comes here anymore. It curves in and among the shady glades. A fawn watches Hanad pass. The boardwalk ends at the edge of a tiny lake. There are clouds of tiny green leaves that need no dirt. There is a spunky lake smell. Narrow fish circulate darkly in their tangential world. The moon shows through ragged fissures in the clouds. The boardwalk turns into a little, square dock. Hanad kneels at the edge; curtsies to the goddess of the lake. 081413 #worm Barp leads the way, stopping at a bookshelf to pick up the wine bottle and two more glasses. Thank god! Me thinks. The special smoking room has some futons and other sitting devices at odd angles, stone walls and floors with rugs, and a window through which can be seen a blank wall of grey bricks. For some reason, maybe because smoking forms a bond among strangers, in here the discomfort is lessened. Him and Me make themselves at home on one of the futons. Barp serves wine and cigarettes to Him and Me, tops off Geprorogo's glass and his own, and lowers his mass into a woven papasan. Geprorogo perches stiffly atop a stationary exercise bicycle. 090813 #worm I would do anything for her. I would get crazy for her. I would polish her feet for her. I would put on her socks on her terribly cute and short high tan feet for her. I would make a paper hat for her. I would fuck another man up the ass for her. I would strap myself to the post and let her lash me for her. I would wear her leather cockring for her. I would grovel in public for her and wear a leash out to the bar and let her lead me around for her. I would watch her flirt with other guys and take them home and then watch them fuck her and her smiling all the time for her. I would get crazy for her. I would do anything but go up to her and try to talk to her. 030002 #eel #roach Then from a doorway leading to a hall behind the apartment came this man, this gray man with keen eyes who was our favorite candidate for the senate. His passing through inflamed in me the passion of the revolution, and I went outside to join the straggling but slowly growing gaggle of people chanting, The Passion is Now, Turn Around, Turn Around! I was chanting louder than anyone, plus I was spinning around and doing cartwheels and clapping, going up to people at the sidewalk cafe and clapping in their face to get them riled, going up to the window of the indoor restaurant and chanting at the people through the smoky glass. 081313 #human I think I've realized one thing that is troubling me; the rusty nail of why I didn't leave as ebullient as usual, all self-fulfillment aside: It's as if we've set up a dichotomy between "creative" and "concrete," and the teh-dsa part of me is afraid of being un-hypnotized, drawn out of the place where it is safe, told it can't live anymore because it's not practical and doesn't do any work and is basically useless. It's like a kid who can't understand why the adults can't understand why all their calming words about compromise and how it will all be okay if he just doesn't get to do things his way are actually scary and creepy and just zombie-dead wrong! 081613 #worm There's plenty to say about that face: it's not perfect, is beautiful, has caused several traffic ensnarlments, is plastered across the dreams of many a bawd and a lewd still languishing in the jails of the nation. Almost suffice it for now to say, it's a face you can almost taste. Something so ephemeral yet humble, wise yet pristine, white yet deep there is about her face. I love it and you do too. It goes with black leather, which goes with anything. Versatile! To call it "sexy" is to call the notes of an old familiar, gut-wrenching pop-love-perfection-confection "catchy"—it means something, but it doesn't mean anything. Shut up. 081413 #worm Hey, maybe this is a dream. Maybe this orange crescendo of restive voices rounding the corner in the rear-view mirror is the product of a cold, caffeine-farting, bad-mouth-tasting, nodding-off-without-even-realizing-it, thank-god-I'm-not-driving dream. Some fraction of this dream is the recurring kind; I've seen these people before. Oh, not these exact people, but at least their collective face in other mobs. You don't forget that kind of anger. You see it more and more often these days--that is, if you've allowed yourself to see it at all. Anyone who hasn't, at least they're starting to sense something, or else they're totally not paying attention. 120813 #human #lovers You know what would be nice? 1) A house with another adult or adults in it; 2) said adult or adults being connected with me but not hideously entangled with me. Picture it: I could come into the kitchen at some hour of the evening, and someone else would be awake reading a magazine. As I cross to the fridge, they say, "I thought you were asleep hours ago," but it doesn't sound like an accusation. It sounds like conversation. And the faded amber of the paint on the radiator complements the faded black of the starry sky outside the sweating window. And the lights in the kitchen capture it all like a perfect, breathtaking photograph. 081413 #worm Ltiky doesn't know about summer boy. Ltiky remains blissfully deluded; he thinks he is the generous one. He thinks she is grateful for him beyond all real necessity of reassurance. He thinks she makes up stories about a strange man she met in the shit can of a gas station, on their way back from up north. He thinks it's sweet she stretches her imagination to provide him with the details of their neon, nude encounter, up against the squiggly white vinyl of the buzzing wall. She concocts encounters for him so immediate, he can practically smell the mingling of disinfectant, old piss, diesel, chewed gum, and Bnabe's hot cock sliding in and out of her spitty mouth. 121413 #skeleton # fire ### artist FIRE! Fire! That's how I feel today, and all day I will not rest until I bring it to you. It's the feeling of the day, town, and I will band the town with it, top to bottom and side to side. Each day I will have one feeling for the day, and my work will be to manifest that feeling however I can, thoroughly, for that one day. ### townspeople Well, okay. But Mrs Olafsen could really use a ride to church. ### artist Oh. Um. Okay. Sure. > Sometimes you think you know what your real work is, but your *real* work may actually be found in the margins, incidentally, in the moments between the pulses of your grand ambition. 083013 #bunny 2010 The angel of second chances met up with me in a late night donut shop, and said, "how would you like to just go ahead and be a girl now. You know," the angel reminded me with a serious eyebrow, "you used to fantasize about that." the angel paused. "in your twenties." as if i didn't know. But no, i said no. "why?" asked the angel of incredulity. "because i don't want to give up the fine aroma of being a guy, sitting around with other guys, where you can just say horrible stuff you don't really mean. I mean, it sounds dumb, but i just would never want to give that up." I don't know if i could ever explain it to an angel. 010514 #stranger The car turns a corner, and another, following the outside edge of town in a japanese tea-garden demon-dispelling bridge pattern. The image of the man, nevertheless, does not dissipate, but follows the car, across the tracks to the county road, past the winter wheat and the fallow fields, between high corn on the gravel road that leads to the splattering of parking lots behind the one restaurant across from the gas station by the highway, the highway that purports, implicitly through its green signs with frank official information and its unofficial billboards full of smiling immortality, to connect this autumnal place with reality. 080004 #human Let me see if I can clarify a little bit for you, fish. When I say claim a space, what I really mean is reclaim a space. Cuz you had it, you've had it since before you can remember. Remember? The smell of ribbons and oil? Yeah, I thought so. Particle board in the slanting sun. Wrinkly windows. The mark of a question. I could go on. Anything "good" I ever "wrote" has been an accident. But an accident on purpose! Those kinds of accidents only happen in a certain space. Which you own. Already. No matter who you are, where you go, what you have to do to pay the bills and protect the family, etcetera etcetera. Got it? Lick it, suck it, spit it, good. 121512 #human I guess I was kind of brilliant in my twenties & thirties. I may never be that exactly again, but what the hell. Like I said, I'm not dead yet. I'm not nonhuman yet, so I guess there's still some time to get consumed by bacteria and viruses, and we LIKED it, by god! You goddamn kids with your damn remote access and airplay and shit. We used to have to put plastic stuff into metal stuff to play songs. And they didn't just stop and start and randomly come on and off and shit. They by god played until they got eaten up and spat out as a mile and a half of weird tapeworm-shaped brown spaghetti, and then you had to buy or fucking physically copy a new one! 081413 #worm Let's see. Him remembers they started out south, because there's supposedly a river or something like that down that way. But the city was bigger than either Him or Me had thought, and it just wouldn't let them go. Around every corner was another corner. The orange haze of streetlights seemed to delineate the curve of the fuckable universe. And it was cold, so cold. Look--let's climb in there. I've just got to warm up. Okay, I'll put the thermos down here, so I can get the door open. Oh. That's what happened to it. He decides to tell Me that they should really go back and get that, but all he can say is: Hafava da hava ba lava dee dee dee deet! 081413 #worm Him and Me walk on; up around by the old schoolhouse, on down to the whorehouse. From outside it looks abandoned, but inside they see a neverending grotto-scape of couches, beds, and ruby lights turned low. On the mezzanine, a satyr and a faun recline together in a hyper-sized, wide-brimmed, bubbling champagne glass. They are feeding each other fresh, warm chocolate-chip cookies. On the landing, a fresh-faced cartoon cowboy twirls a lasso suggestively. At the foot of the stairs, a black-hooded man stands perfectly still in his own shadow; a scarlet candle in a sconce above him drips slowly down to sculpt his shoulder blade in wax. 120712 #copperhead Steady, percussive, the rain persists. Countless tiny explosions on the surface of what we've come to think of as our river; myriad idiophonic thumps on the bow and stern decks sing with such incomprehensible complexity as to seem like white noise to the unattuned. But we, we who have lived in this cut of water for days now, weeks, we hear a different song. We hear the soundtrack to the fog. We hear the naptime of the crawfish. We hear the surrender of the sky to the wet femininity of the land. Raspberry bushes glare out of the gray with audacious bursts of saturated color. We stop to select and eat. We leave some. It's just what you do. You leave some. 090813 #worm Or maybe I wouldn't. Maybe I would just keep paddling south, bailing with my cut-off milk jug every few miles, down past the highway, between the steeples and over the silent cars of the town, offering a ride, perhaps, to someone trapped on the deserted island of their roof, then out the other side, crossing the state line that snakes along somewhere under the middle of the great, old river, the river that, eventually, passes under, or over, all bridges, wears away all the walls, carries debris, despair, and hope to all the gritty downtowns and cobblestones along the way, and, eventually, maybe, comes back to where it started. I'm secretly, for one instant only, glad this social worker is a man. He has long, disarrayed hair, and jubilant but somehow still guarded eyes. He has certain veins that stand out. His leather jacket creaks a little when he moves in this quiet room. This is a man of passion, I find myself thinking. I find myself magnetized a little bit by this man, perhaps in spite of the fact that he's a social worker. He looks older than you're supposed to be in this society, but just about the right age for smoking and going to the grocery store, maybe even fishing. I hate fishing, but some giddy little guppy in my gut tells me it would be fun to fish with this cat. Dumb, I guess. 081613 #worm Words like cern, sition, ly, pital, kets, doned, gan, and oirs kept standing around in the forum of my connivance engine. So I thunk to myself, I'm just wasting time anyway. I might as well go to jail. They throw me against the opposite wall. They say it's someone else's turn. They don't need this kind of shit. Nobody does. Nobody indeed. I was about to get to the good part. I was about to get to the part where I say I never did any of this, could never even dream of acting like that, but then I was going to reveal the unholy, ironic truth—of why I actually did get thrown in jail. And believe me, it was a shocker, it was a stinger, it would've made you think. 010804 #eel then he said let's go to caterpillar hill - on the way there, he walked on ahead. someone said he said we'd never be able to get there in the winter - serpentine road up the green dome of the hill - halfway up, a little cozy block and a half off to our left - two rows of houses, different colours but understated, dark not pastel or glib - offices and classes on the bottom floors of some, residences and flats in the rest. the street angled gently up hill. at the entrance to the block, a great outcropping of granite, with a built-in windmill so huge the blades almost touched the ground. wouldn't it be cool to go to school and live there, someone said. 081413 #worm Woof. Npydyuan: the veil is thin. Outdated, antiquated, overweight demidemons come out to play in the fog. Coffee and danish are hot-links to another world, the one you used to live in--to live in! Could it be that memory is imprecise? In the afternoon of technology, your old friends do not exist. No Bnirke, no Bnabe, no Farmer, no Barn even. It's been bought and sold; labelled, parcelled and posted for the baleful eye of night. Mornings only, when the veil is thin and the angle of the sun permits mist, can you go into what used to be called the woods again. The woods, which will never be the same again. I have absolutely no idea where to begin, says Me. 081013 #dog *HIM strikes a wooden match on his zipper. It flares into life. He lights his smoke. ME watches with appreciative hunger. The whole scene takes less than a century, would probably fit within the warm hollow downhill of an old barn on a chilly spring night. You can go down in the hollow to feel a bit warmer. Talk to the creek. But slowly, and thank god for the luxury, slowly.* ME: Do you mind if I...? *Several rabbits, a coyote with a song in her throat, a family of raccoons on vacation, a litter of bugs and a star, all do not mind at all.* 081013 whatever else happens, I know this: I remain faithful to the word #trout #fish #crow #noshit 081613 #worm Maybe it's because you like this place. Maybe it's because you've only just emerged, chick-wet and frazzled, out of jail yourself. Or maybe you're losing it—no! don't be silly—but in any case there's one thing you don't see as you go about this old familiar process, one thing you would have seen if you had been a little hungrier, a little older or younger, or just a little little. You don't see the interview man casually not watching the whole thing from his resolute stance behind the felf section. You close the door to your nest, upstairs. Downstairs, the interview man closes his book and a galaxy of dust is born, swirls around, dies. 081013 #dog *The relentless pace of the life you've already lived a million times is nauseating as it scrolls past your portal once more* BRURO: Here's the part where you take the drug of never being satisfied. BURYMO: Here's the part where you realize you're a pussy. POTUB: Here's my favorite part: where you start to like being a pussy. TYDDAF: Here's where it all falls apart. BRURO: Here's where you lick up all his slickery cum and start over. BURYMO: [eyes rolling] Here's a commercial. OMSATIGO: Here's where I come in and distract you. *Exit BRURO, BURYMO, POTUB, TYDDAF.* Here's where you come with me. 081613 #worm Hey. Hey bro. Anyone who calls me "bro" is probably stupid. But I'm magnanimous in my incarceration. Wouldn't you? Be? Hey. 'Sup. 'Mon in. Have a seat (laughable). Serve tea but the tea fish don't seem to be biting today. Oh well. What's tea after it's grown cold, after all, but another reflection of where your life has gone.... Anyway, it's not your problem. 110712 #copperhead above the short sharp bank that's growing from, a rutty path, some wispy weeds, and corn. An actual corn field. Just the tip of one, actually. Because ridgelines come in almost perpendicular to the riverbank both upstream and downstream from the field, hemming it in. It's this slice of agriculture wedged in between chaotic tumults of trees and scrub. 010614 #bushmill The big man was definitely big, there's no question about that. I mean, not just bigger by comparison with his—foe? partner?—but he would have looked big in a Texas steakhouse. I like the sound of that, so I say it to Mel. You're such a retard, she says. Shut up! I tell her, and I give her leg a jostle with mine. Oh god that feels good. 081413 #worm Eventually you are going to have to ask for help. You really can't get out. Isn't that a trip? Ha ha, yes, keep it light, right? Okay. But you're still going to have to ask for help. She's still gone. You're still in the middle of the stage. Help comes in the form of a story you stole from someone. No-one knows about this theft but you--no one alive, that is. 000002 #human Here we are in the north shore area where women go around with pinched faces not looking at you. Their hundred dollar hair cuts don't make them very beautiful. Their hair cuts make them look like knives. Knives with dead green eyes. Expensive shoes cloak passionless feet. Get out while you still can, kids. This place may have spawned you but it's sterile now. 090513 #human #treefrog #martian Megan's highly charming, disarming, and frankly adorable 6th-grade homeroom teacher writes: 'Perhaps you could identify your own personal beacons if you took the time to reflect and prioritize those things that "guide" and "inspire" your own spirit.' So.... 1. the girls 2. the rest of my family 3. this is my personal heaven 010614 #lifeboat When there's sickness in a house, everything seems dirty. Passageways are open for feelings of guilt, desperation, and grotesque, overwhelming pity. You can't help imagining what it would be like if *you never got better.* What if it was always going to be like this? This was just normal from now on? Fortunately, for most of us, most of the time, it isn't. 022703 #eel The parking lot was gravel, covered with snow, a clearing surrounded by trees. I parked and started walking around the lake toward the snoke. It was slippery, rather steep, and I slipped, my left foot punched through the snow and I knew the ice would be thin. As my foot sunk in, I thought, well this sucks, and I kept sinking in deeper, slowly, deeper. 022813 #human while the people actually acting--do you realize how actually dusty and rough those boards actually are?--are acting out the fake real story a thousand times more real than the real fake one going on in the lofty balcony heights beyond their vision's horizon, beyond the cruel glare of the lights; don't even know the fake is real; what we pretend to be we become 081613 #worm I'm going to walk all day. Why? Because I can. Tin can, soda can, coffee can, oil can. We got everything in the junkyard. Every. Little. Thing. And some big things too. I got a whole machine shop, although most of the shit doesn't work, of course. But hey, most shit out there doesn't work, either, really. Statistically, it's about the same--junk or not junk. 102913 #snail #featherwoman When we were talking in the backyard, I said I had a carapace around me, and that's why I hadn't been dating or having sex with anybody. You told me about your nice guy who treats you really nicely, and how you're trying to kick your addiction to guys who are a puzzle but are damaged or else aren't really there once you really start to dig in. 010314 #jonquil Back in the kitchen, a stainless-steel salad bowl still sat propped halfway into the left-hand sink. The tomatoes had been sitting there for days, and they were starting to wrinkle. There was an equilibrium in the silence, a sense of absence that filled up every cranny of the odd-shaped house, all its ::gables:: and ::A-frame sub-constructions::. 222824 012514 #human #barndancers This is where I would be drinking if I were drinking. Instead, it is only raining. The barnboard is wet. It lets in some drops. The green is subdued yet brilliant in the diffuse gray light. That little girl's raincoat is gemlike, yellow, a dripping wet sun in a quiet solar system. Bring me a drink of this, any time I am thirsty. 112613 #gull #maelstrom He used whatever he had. He threw all his ingredients, some new, some used, some garbage, some puzzling to him, into the environment, and sat back to watch. The results were interesting, but it wasn't until lightning struck--outside influences cracked the purity of the hermetic capsule--that the thing began to display characteristics of an organism. 011914 #robot #gull #deletethis Interesting: Date stamps that are also timestamps will eventually be lit up as links. Or you could, ah, speed things up a bit. We shall, ah, speed things up a bit! 111112 #copperhead out, cotton shorts still dorky, ass suddenly cool as the evening breeze comes across the trembling stern and swirls against what had been out of reach 091313 #squirrel So my grandfather who is this little kid tells his dad & mom and everybody and they didn't believe him! They're going to burn down our store! he said and they assumed he was being a fanciful little kid. And so guess what, the building burned down, the store burned down, everything burned down and that's when my grandfather's family lit out for Lowell. 000096 #squirrel oh one thing about wyoming i failed to mention hm the trains nothing but trucks storms trains and darkness and silence the trains come up beside you, this unearthly steady light, out of nowhere, and pace you for a while, before you part ways again, and you can faintly hear them as from a long way away, justbreathing their bullsbreath train noise 000002 #human Frank and maybe Harrison said that one day Capoeira just hits you, and you're playing instead of going through the motions. If it's anything like writing it's not really one day but a whole bunch of days, sometimes clustered together, sometimes wanly scattered. But it does hit you. It hits you slow and hard, fast and gentle, over the course of years. Faith. 052113 #bunny --we interrupt this journal entry to report that the gentle bear that brought me my sandwich was, i'm pretty goddamn sure, and you know how hypercautious I am about these things, flirting all to hell with me, I shit you not. It was really nonthreatening but titillating, just plain nice and secret and intriguing. Holy-- Reminds me of the frog's leap merlot. 111912 #human #water I feel like I'm going out on a limb that's thinner than the thinnest part of the river when the river is a barely visible trickle. And all I have to sustain my faith is the word of an old dead curmudgeonly coot who said all water's connected to the hem of the high priestess's gown. I mean, that is some made-up shit, right there. If anything is. 000004 #human And no, Past Me, for your information, if in the course of your petulant research you've found this record, it's not because I'm awesome and kick-ass at it (I'm not (although I can do a back-handspring, ha-ha)), not because I've attained the mystical Next Level (there still isn't one). It's just because I try, and I don't give up, and I let my hips go. 030696