Snow fell from the general's eyes
as the city dreamt of itself.

The Albums That Made 2007 Bearable

20. Liars - s/t
19. Dinosaur, Jr. - Beyond
18. Dirty Projectors - Rise Above
17. The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
16. Dan Deacon - Spiderman of the Rings
15. Pandabear - Person Pitch
14. Nina Nastasia & Jim White - You Follow Me
13. Justice - †
12. Les Savy Fav - Let's Stay Friends
11. Ponytail - Kamehameha
10. Thurston - Trees Outside the Academy
09. Electrelane - No Shouts, No Calls
08. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, are you the Destroyer?
07. Radicalfashion - Odori
06. Radiohead - In Rainbows
05. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
04. Spoon - Worst Album Title Ever
03. Battles - Mirrored
02. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
01. Deerhunter - Cryptograms

Biggest Disappointment: Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity

Favorite reissues: Leonard Cohen - Songs of Leonard Cohen, Betty Davis - s/t, Jean-Claude Vannier - L'Enfant Assassin des Mouches

Best Compilations: Eccentric Soul: TwiNight's Lunar Rotation, Jonny Greenwood is the Controller

write the story of a reincarnated soul as it migrates through history and cultures in (very) short vignettes. have ambiguous threads connect these lives: repeated images, names, vague memories, concepts. maybe do it in chronological order as the soul migrates, or maybe it might be more interesting to do it out of order. include their deaths.

maybe include:
the hunter-gatherer (maybe an indian? or is that too cliche?)
the empress
the soldier
the buddhist monk
the young victorian girl
the explorer (ship captain? or more marco polo? maybe an arctic explorer?)
the housewife
the revolutionary (english civil war? paris commune? russian revolution?)
the missionary (maybe muslim for a change of pace? maybe christians in japan)
the wino

any others you can think of

is this too long for a short story? is this a novel? is this a multi-volume series of epic novels?

notes from 12/12/07

Women pouring out of the sun, filling the sky like sperm dancing on the outer edges of a great burning egg.

A town filled with white squirrels with nothing to fear. The residents deferential to the will of the rodents.

A white policeman's hat floating over an empty collar with no head to fill it.

A city of interiors; a collection of dirty rooms, cramped basements and crowded tunnels that connect one walled space to another.

unicorns are rooting for you.
they all know you can do it.

Being Average in America

Like 55% of people, you watch the news while cooking dinner. You whiten your teeth while you sleep.

Your household has more televisions than children.

You are one of 90% of Americans that own a Bible, only half of which can name a single Gospel.

You will still consume 20 tablespoons of added sugar today.

You are one of the 16% of people who have never been forgiven.

Tonight, you will spend 7 hours sleeping and 20 minutes wondering why you can't sleep.

Like 33% of people, you haven't really felt alive since the summer of 1997

If you're one of the 10% of people who think Joan of Arc was Noah's wife, you're also one of the 95% of people who think they're right.

You will live 13 years longer than the average celebrity and will have pictures of your accidentally exposed crotch in 100% fewer tabloids.

You are one of the 26% of people who will burn their children alive.

You will be married three times but still believe in one true love.

You are one of the 71% of Americans who dream with their eyes open, kiss with their mouths closed and make love in the dark.

You will not save any money today.

One-third of American workers see tiny skulls in the mirror.

You will spend 137.8 hours this year commuting to work and 135.2 hours getting back home.

You will only spend 17 minutes a day reading.

You are one of 98% of people who wish they could remember how it felt to be born.

At some point today you will say a prayer. You will not floss. You will take a shower for 11 minutes and not sing in it, drive an eight-year old car to work and spend 95% of the day indoors, in front of a computer, pretending to look busy.

You are one of the 30% of Americans who can not afford to be sick.

At some point today you will wish you could write a beautiful song about love. Like 62% of people, the feeling will pass.

At the age of 71 you will be retired, you will live off Social Security, take three kinds of pills, will no longer speak to your children and will, most mornings, meet your last remaining friend, Bill Stevenson, at McDonalds to drink bad coffee, eat greasy egg biscuits, stare wistfully out the windows at an ugly, tin-foiled sky and talk about things that happened 20 to 40 years ago in softly forgotten tones.

self-portrait

write a love story from the point of view of two merging companies.

A Proposal on Taking Your Newsmagazine to "The Next Level"

So the ridiculous/idiot company I work for asked me to reinterview for my job and present a proposal on taking Afrique Newsmagazine "to the next level." Below is the proposal I wrote, although I was let go before I was even allowed to deliver it--because Afrique is the worst magazine on earth. You've seen from my last post that there are no editorial standards whatsoever. They currently have someone from sales, someone with no editorial or art skills whatsoever, acting as the editor-in-chief and doing layout.

---

Above all, Afrique suffers from three things: lack of communication, poor management and disinterest.

Lack of communication – No one at Afrique seems to know what they’re supposed to be doing at any one time. Chomba asked me several times if I could do the layout and I said I would try to give my best shot. I had my stories but didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing or how I was supposed to be putting the magazine together with just that. I was waiting for some direction as to when we were going to press or even what would be in the magazine. Then Shomari announces that he’s doing the layout.

Why? Not to put down Shomari but he has no writing skills, he has no design skills, and he knows how to use Illustrator even less than I do.

It was the same when it came to the media kit. Everyone kept talking about putting together the media kit but no one actually wound up doing it because everyone thought it was some else’s job.

Even worse, I had no idea when and for what reasons Jeremiah and Kate left. No one told me for over a week. The only way I found out was by finally asking Margie what had happened. Jeremiah had set out a plan for the issue and the one after and when he disappeared there was no direction from the top to replace that. This resulted in the rather ridiculous situation of having no idea when or if the publication was going to come out. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing or who was in charge of keeping the publication running. It’s difficult to reach above and beyond my responsibilities when I’m not even sure what those responsibilities are in the first place. Which leads me to…

Poor management – When I started working at Afrique, the company had 8 employees and was preparing to launch a second publication. We now have 3 employees, including myself, and we are barely able to produce one magazine. This is the fault of poor management.

Cat quit because the direction of Ethnic Family was arbitrarily changed at the last minute over her protests, after the stories had been written, after a media kit was made up, and after the magazine had already been conceptualized and approved for weeks. As you can see by the last month here, she was the person keeping this magazine running smoothly. When I asked her why she was quitting she came right out and said it: “the management.” Indeed, the single most egregious example of poor management is that Ethnic Family was never launched. At this rate probably never will be.

Another example of poor management, and maybe the most ludicrous thing that’s happened since I’ve been here was Chomba’s repeated demands that I be here at 9 o’clock. This would not have been a problem, except no one else was ever here, the door was locked, I did not have a key, and no one showed up until almost 10. Asking an employee to be here at a certain time and then making them wait an hour before they can even get through the door is disrespectful and, frankly, ridiculous. So I stopped coming at 9, at which point Chomba got angry and told me to be here at 9 again, even though I still didn’t have a key. So I was locked out again and despite my repeated requests for a key, I was only given one about two weeks ago. I have never before worked at a company where I was locked out at the time I was supposed to be there.

Management has offered no clear direction in the wake of Cat, Kate and Jeremiah’s dismissal and, in fact, seemed unconcerned about finding new writers and coming up with new stories to put together a September issue. Who is the editor now? Is Shomari? Am I? Who is writing for this publication? Heather B. Duke?

As near as I can tell, the managerial direction at Afrique consists only of time-wasting, recriminatory and condescending meetings that drag on and on with no apparent point. I have never left a meeting at Afrique with a clear understanding of what my responsibilities were or my timetable for completing them . This is especially true of meetings where the publisher was present, as he would arbitrarily change plans and deadlines and dismiss all criticism.

Disinterest – The biggest problem with Afrique, the problem that inspires the communication and management problems, is a lack of interest. The management seems distracted by other things. Indeed, Afrique seems like an afterthought. A publisher who cared about the future of his magazine would have taken charge to offer some direction after the loss of his editor-in-chief. He would have at least chosen a replacement. Jeremiah seemed to be taking on this role but within a week he was gone too and the November issue was left to drift.

In my short time here, employees have been asked repeatedly for proposals or plans to save the company. No one can do that but you. Usually when these plans are presented to management they are dismissed. At the next rambling, recriminatory meeting, the employees are then told they are not working hard enough. The problem as I see it is that the management does not inspire hard work in its employees. When you ask employees to be here by 9 but don’t show up yourself until 11 o’clock, what kind of message does that send? If you ask others to offer proposals to save the company and then reject their ideas and suggestions, why do you expect them to want to work harder?

I’ve constantly heard talk of how much better the magazine was run, how much more money it made, when you and Chomba did it alone. And yet, you leave the business to be run entirely by amateurs and students rather than taking control yourself. No one is going to care about Afrique as much as you will. How are your employees supposed to be inspired to reach above and beyond to make this magazine succeed when they don’t see any leadership? Why not train them to do a better job? Why not take them under your wing for a few days and show them exactly what to do and how to succeed instead of laying out endless meetings that go nowhere and offer no real direction?

You asked me for a proposal on how to take Afrique to "the next level." The only way to do that is with strong leadership and direction from the management. Only you can save this company. No one else can: not me, not Shomari. Just you. Otherwise Afrique will go exactly where Ethnic Family did: nowhere.

We have nursed one another, romanced one another, and wept for one another--ever since science taught us how.

"A Protest against Heavens."

this was once the future.

"A Dinner Party for Seven Inflatable People."

human history is not the history of flesh and blood and bone. it is a chronicle of costumes.

The state of education between the Black Man and Woman

I work at a newsmagazine targeting the African diaspora community in Chicago. It is ridiculous. Everyone in editorial has been fired except for me and no one told me for over a week. This is a very real example of a freelance story we got from someone the publisher recruited himself. This should give you a good idea of how fucking ludicrous and amateurish this place is. I present to you in totally unedited form, the godawful writings of Heather B. Duke. All spelling, grammar and logic mistakes left intact for you, the reader. The horror starts with the title.

---

The state of education between the Black Man and Woman

The education of Black men and women are in a Sad State so many black men have many environmental factors that are key as to why they do not pursue and succeed in receiving higher education it starts at a young age. A black boy feels the school system isn’t for him, it can’t provide for his current living conditions dysfunctional home life, dangerous neighborhood plagued by gangs, crime, and drugs. In most cases the dysfunctional home life involves a single black mother, who is tired of trying to put food on the table and pay bills.

The young black boys feel they have to survive and provide for their family. At a tender age he has to be “Daddy and the man of the household”. Lost between two identities he struggles to find his place with the alarming statistics surrounding him such as school dropout, unemployment, and prison. “Black male achievement begins to decline as early as the fourth grade and by high school studies show black males are more likely to drop out of school. In 2001 only 42.8% graduated from high school. The Homicide rate among black young males and men are higher than any other race.”(According to Ervin Dyer title Series will explore the perils successes of young black men April 19, 2007).

Black women are highly educated (Bachelor’s etc). One might ask why: well after we complete high school we have no other options but to attend college because the lack of jobs available, working in retail or McDonalds), aren’t very appealing, black women feel it’s easier to go to college than work. What happens to Black Men? They don’t realize or recognize that education can increase economic stability and accepting a minimum wage job just so they can survive will not motivate them to want to make changes. Another factor that plagues men from going to college is the tuition black males cannot get financial assistance if a person has any drug or federal convictions.

How can we change the state of education among young black males? We first must understand that the psychological, environmental, and emotional factors must be resolved. Young black boys need to understand school is a place for them; it’s not their sole responsibility to provide for their family. Teachers, guidance counselors, grammar schools through high schools need to encourage and support them regardless of their academic status. If young black males are made to feel school is not for them but the streets are drugs, gangs, dropout rates will continue to rise: educators, politicians, and parents lets Rise and Roll up our sleeves and take a stand.

Thank you Heather B. Duke

---

No Heather, thank you.

New look.

Lemme know if you like. Lemme know if you vehemently hate. Don't tell me if you're indifferent, you goddamn fence-sitter.

Free the dark data from all your failed experiments.

write a story that runs in two parallel columns from two different perspectives. two people meet for the first time and their individual running thoughts are each contained in one of the columns. The only words that cross between columns are dialogue unless there are mispronunciations or misunderstandings.

does this make sense?

Write a one-line story that includes 7 pages of foot notes.

Meltwater

The summer had been good. That much had been clear. The summer been almost idyllic, almost like when they first met, when they were first learning each other’s charms, each other’s surfaces, when everything was still new and exiting, when flaws were accepted as ornaments, as tiny gems that revealed deeper character, before they grew, before they overtook everything, spreading like cracks in a dying wall. That was what the summer was like.

They were in love again, maybe. Maybe. So Don proposed. He hadn’t thought much about it, in fact he had been dreaded her mother's repeated questions on the subject as recently as that spring. He hadn't thought much about it, he just did it. He didn’t even have a ring, just a pen which he used to draw a crude but beautiful little ballpoint ring on Shell's finger until the next day when they chose a real one that gleamed like snow and meltwater, that gleamed like her flaws.

Don proposed and Shell said what the hell? She actually said it, What the hell? Not Yes or Yeah or Okay or even Sure but What the hell? As in What else am I doing with my life? What do I have to lose? She said what the hell and in the spirit of the spontaneous proposal, the nonchalant acceptance, and the silly ring of ink they had planned a quick wedding, a whirlwind engagement of only a few months before the passion ran thin, before the summer became the winter again. They had planned a quick wedding but they had not planned the postponement. Or the next one. Or the next. Or the extra weight, the bruised expectations and the bruising sky.

And now the snow was lying in thick ropes outside, covering everything like cracked makeup, like dry cake and grease, like whispered words that turned to steam.

And now the snow was painting the world into unfamiliar shades and unfamiliar shapes.

And now it was cold.

And now it was winter again.

And now Shell--her voice catching in her throat, her eyes cracking like breathing glass, her body swelling like ripened telegrams dangling from the clouds at night--now Shell was an unfamiliar shape too.

Set the trees on fire
we'll seek our answers in the air.

Jessica, Pt. Forever

So I finally (finally!) finished a complete draft of the Jessica story. Its way too long to post here, and still rough towards the end but if anyone wants to read it for me and give me their opinion (especially the ending, on which I am very ambivalent) I would be much appreciative. It's about 19 pages long in Word. I'm also thinking of changing their names.

Possible titles?
"The Second Jessica"
"The Animals have Human Names"
"River Horse"
"Death Rides a Hippopotamus"
"Uncaged: The Shocking True Story of one Family's Nightmare Pet!"
"Pets with People Names"
"Meanwhile, in South Africa"
"A Detailed Library of the Bestiality of Others"
"2 Fast 2 Furious: Tokyo Drift"

None of these are blowing my mind except the last one.

leave a comment with an email address if you're interested. i'm not sure if anyone reads this.

PICK UP CHICKS ON THE BUS.

Found this in a text file on my computer at work. It's good advice.
________________

PICK UP CHICKS ON THE BUS.

The best way, is to pretend you are from a place not local! You can say you are checking out the city for the day, and wanted to know a cool club. Normally, you’d try to hit up with a girl on a Friday, because if she’s game, she’s probably going out on that day! If you are hitting up a chick on a weekday, what you want to do is talk about museums. You can say you are here to check out the arts.

How do you know when you meet the one..

he lived like a pendulum that was too fat to swing one way or the other.

she wears her past like a pervert.

starving for space, aching for time, a mask watches all things.

small cellos for small people: an autobiography.

I hope to live my life as a series of escalating pipe dreams, like a boy mesmerized by the wind.

There was a red moon hanging in a blue-black sky.

A golden coin rolling on the velvet sheets.

She sang her songs on the missionary's roof.

In soft, supple tones, shining sweetly like the sea.

Bathing naked in the red lunar light.

Arms tied, hair pulled, legs spread.

On the missionary's roof.


The walls weep milk from tiny roving eyes.

he delivers bad news in the whitest of white lab coats.

write a story about a four-course meal from the point of view of a fork.

i sit in offices all day thinking about how we sit in offices all day thinking about liberation.

Computer

So I'm having some computer trouble at the moment as well as being in the middle of a move to a new neighborhood in Chicago. Unfortunately, the second half of Jessica is currently inaccessible, as are the notes for the collab novel. Even if I could work on them, I haven't actually had the time. hopefully I can recover these next week when things calm down.

This collab thing is taking longer than i expected. To everyone who was interested, its still happening if you're still interested.

green copper teeth

her mouth was full of all sorts of things
of wings and sins and setting suns
speaking of broke-back bitter men
who lend their mended, quaking hearts

to anyone, anyone at all.

literature is dead.
painting is dead.
poetry is dead.
rock and roll is dying, if its not dead already.
sculpture is dead.
jazz is dead.
god is dead.
hip-hop is looking pretty frail.
idealism is dead.
realism is dead.
television is dead.
the internet is brain-dead.

what's left?

Jessica, Pt 1

I know I haven't been blogging much, but that doesn't mean I haven't been writing. Here's a taste of what I'm working on. This is just the first part. There should be one or two other pieces of it. Its taking a bit longer than I expected, but after this I'm going to try to pound out the first part of the collaborative novel if anyone is still interested in working on it with me.

No one's going to read this, its too long for the internet.

---

There was a knock, a thump, a loud quaking that echoed through the house, echoed through my bones and out of my mouth and now—charging through the living room, charging through my life, bounding into the table and knocking the television to the floor with a crash—now there was a hippo in our kitchen.

Normal people didn’t live like this. I knew normal people, I was friends with normal people, grew up with them, visited their homes and they did not live like this. They had dogs and cats, maybe a gold fish or a turtle that would die after a few weeks, but they didn’t live like this. They didn’t have hippos in their goddamn kitchens.

It was standing there looking at me with its waxy marble eyes, rolling and waving like cellophane. It opened its mouth like a shovel. I was eating an apple, a big red one, and the hippo wanted it, wanted it now. Feed me, it wanted to say. It wanted to say feed me but it was a hippo and hippos can’t speak so it just sat there with its bulging eyes rolling and its big open mouth waiting for me to feed it already. Feed me. Feed me, already!

I reached in the fridge and threw Jessica—that was its name, the hippo, it was Jessica the Hippo—a whole raw onion. The mouth closed and without a twitch, without a swallow or any movement of its throat at all, it opened its mouth again. It was empty. Feed me. Feed me! It was staring at my apple again.

It’s not like we didn’t have dogs and cats or goldfish or terminal turtles in dirty tanks. We’d had all those animals, hell we’d even had some snakes and a horse and a wounded baby elephant that had wandered onto the grounds from off the savannah. But we also had this hippo, this fucking hippo Jessica. It knocked over the goldfish bowl, stepped on the snake, ate one of the cats. The turtle had died on its own, that one was my fault. Its name was Paul Newman. I guess I shoulda cleaned Paul Newman’s cage or fed Paul Newman more often. I sort of forgot we had Paul Newman for a few weeks until Paul Newman started to smell up the place. I was paying too much attention to Virginia Woolf, the elephant, which eventually healed enough to wander back out and try to find her family again. But man, oh man, riding around on Virginia Woolf had been a lot of fun. It made Jessica jealous, made her steam and roll and eat a cat, anything to get our attention, but Jessica also never let us ride her anymore. No, no Jessica made Mom massage her before she would go to bed. Virginia Woolf was fun and self-sufficient, and also a stream-of-conscious writer of some repute. Jessica was needy because Jessica was a fucking hippo that was standing right in front of me with her big mouth hanging and waiting.

I took a bite out of my apple and threw her a bunch of just-purchased bananas. Her mouth closed and automatically reopened empty. Now we had no bananas.

“Oh come on.”

Jessica nudged into the kitchen table with her shoulder, sending a plate to the floor. Feed me.

“Fuck!”

“Watch the language!” Mom yelled from her bedroom.

“Fuck!” I whispered.

Jessica bumped the table again, this time with her ass, and a knife went clattering among the shards of china on the floor. Sure, mom heard the curse word, she always did, but didn’t seem to care that her kitchen was being ground down, chewed up and trod upon by a thousand-pound beast with a horribly empty, thundering belly.

Jessica dug her face against me, dug her lower teeth into my stomach. It was sharp but the pressure was what hurt. Jessica knew what she was doing though, she had never really wounded any of us, not me or mom or Dad, just the cat. But she knew how to scare us to get what she wanted. Or at least she knew how to scare me. Her eyes rolled and she kept pushing her head into my chest, forcing my back into the cabinets, forcing my spine against the handles and just pushing pushing, feed me! Give me your apple, give me your fucking apple, give me your life come on, come on. Feed ME!

“Fine,” I said. She pushed harder. “Fine!” I took a last bite from the apple and threw it into that open wheelbarrow of a mouth. She closed it on those huge wet hinges and backed off. She tumbled off through the door, into the living room and back outside. “God,” I said. “I only got to eat half that apple.”

Now I wanted a banana.

You might think it would be fun but having a pet hippo is just about the worst thing that can happen to a teenager. Having a pet hippo is just about the worst thing that can happen to anybody. Its worse than getting pregnant at the age of 13. Its worse than starting up a healthy and expensive meth addiction. Its worse then shooting out your eye with a BB gun. Its worse than getting kicked in the head during a soccer match and its worse than showing up at school naked. Its not fun at all. Hippos are not fun.

But I didn’t always think so. At first I thought Jessica was the greatest thing ever to exist in the entire world. Dad found her washed up as a baby on the side of the river. The previous week had brought heavy thunderstorms that bloomed with electricity and lashed heartache down on us. The river flooded and the floodwaters stole Jessica from her pod, from her hippo family, and brought her to us when she was just a day old. As Dad came in from the rain that day, his coat wet and slick with what he told me were the tears of heaven, we saw a little slug that quivered in his hands, a slimey little monster that he nestled like a child.

The glow on Dad’s face was eternal, I wish I had a camera that day because the picture in my memory of his glowing mouth, his burning brows and his cracking eyes has faded badly with age. Its edges are smudged, blurred, the frame is yellowing and its been covered by years of greasy, oily fingerprints but its still the only image of Dad that I cherish, that I crave, that I try hard to remember. How exciting it was! A strange new animal to play with, to live with, to hug and hold and love!

Dad’s happiness was inspiring, it made me happy, it made me excited, it even made Mom happy. She said she hadn’t seen him smile so big for so long since the day I was born. She said she thought his face was going to crack open, spilling the inside into plain view on the outside, teeth outside lips, tongue rolling over chin, brains spilling out all over the places, and he would be too hideous and horribly deformed to love. She would have to kick him out into the cold, cruel world and he would wander the Earth, trod upon the dirt of every continent, an endless stranger always riding on the back of his faithful hippo.

Mom was a little skeptical of Jessica at first. She was right to be. What a stupid idea it was to have a hippo live in our house with us. Of course it would eat everything, of course it would smash everything, of course it would be a huge financial burden but she eventually gave in. Dad made all kinds of arguments, even laying out the biblical metaphors at work, how Jessica was just Baby Moses washed up on the banks of the Nile by God himself. Either way, how could we turn away Baby Moses when he, or she, might still lead the Jews out of bondage?

Well, we couldn’t really. But mom wanted to know what that would that make Dad in his own metaphor. Wasn’t Moses found by Pharaoh's daughter? Did that make him Pharaoh’s daughter?

“No, of course not … I’m, um, you know. I’m the head of this family so I’m Pharaoh I guess.”

“So you’re evil, Jonah? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, I—”

“You’re going to get a plague of boils and toads for enslaving the Jews, my dear. And just who are these Jews she’s going to be freeing from your tyranny? Other hippos?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Miriam.”

The man posits Moses as a baby hippo and he asks mom not to be ridiculous. This is my family. This is why we have Jessica as a pet. Because these people are insane. Dad finally decided that he was actually Noah, our house was an ark and we had saved Jessica from the flood of God’s fury. He kept the part about her being Baby Moses too but it didn’t make any sense, it never did, none of it and he didn’t care.

Ultimately, it wasn’t Dad’s poorly-thought metaphor that brought Jessica into our house, it was the little worm herself. She was too small, was too cute and silly to hate, to kick out into the cold. Mom felt sympathy for such a tiny, defenseless animal. Mom was infected by Dad’s enthusiasm like a sweaty, ravaging virus. At the time, I was thrilled to have a new plaything, it was like having a new little sister to dress up and have tea parties and adventures with, a new playmate to abuse and reuse. They agreed that they would tend to Jessica till she got old enough that she could live in the wild again. Just like we did later with Virginia Woolf, only Jessica never left. Mom and Dad got attached, way way way too attached.

Mom walked into the kitchen. Her eyes were small but always kind, the crow’s feet getting deeper and more defined with each year, little canyons carved out of her flesh by a river of misplaced smiles and programmed hospitality. She had on a floral-print sleeveless shirt and the faux-denim pants with the elastic waistband again. I had tried to explain to her the horror of elastic waistbands—“Mom, Hitler wore elastic pants.”—but she just wouldn’t listen. In fact, she got a little angry. She still had the blonde, unkempt bob that she’d had for the last four years because she said she it looked good without her even having to think about it or fuss with it. Mostly it just looked very plain, like she didn’t spend very much time thinking about it or fussing with it, like she didn’t spend very much time trying to look nice. Mom walked into the kitchen and she looked upset.

“What was the big ruckus in here?” She saw the smashed plates and silverware on the floor, the table shoved into a corner and the chairs splayed about in unknowable patterns. “What did you do in here Jessica? It looks like you threw a temper tantrum.”

“No,” I said. Did she really think that I did this? We had a hippo in the house and she really thought I was the one breaking dishes? “No, Mom. No. it wasn’t me. It was Jessica,” I said. But that was my name too. I was Jessica, Jessica the Girl.

“Jessica, I heard you from the other room. I heard you scream the f-word and start throwing the dishes around. I heard you. Don’t act like I’m stupid, Jessica. Don’t act like I can’t put two and two together. Why did you do this?”

Dad used to be a game warden, this was the reason we had all the animals and how he knew how to tend wounded beasts like Virginia Woolf when they turned up. Dad had a strict policy, a strict philosophy that all his animals have real people’s names, real people’s lives, real people’s personalities. He would never rob them of their primal dignity with dopey names like Bobo, Pokey, Rover or Mr. Cat.

Mom was watching me. Her bob had a big clump of blonde hair sitting strangely on the back of her head, unnoticed, uncombed. “Mom… I didn’t! Jessica came slamming through here looking for food again. Again, mom! I fed her only a half-hour ago. She ate all those new bananas you bought. She ate the apple I was in the middle of eating.” Mom gave me a skeptical look. Arched eyebrow, arms folded, hip angled forward, elastic pants. “I swear! Look she knocked over the TV in the living room again too. Again, mom!”

She held that position for a minute just looking at me. “I can never tell if you’re lying to me anymore, Jess. When you were little I could always tell. There was always a guilt in your eye. You were always sad when you lied, like you didn’t want to lie, like you didn’t want to do it but you did anyways. Like you were forced too. But I can never tell anymore. You’re so … you’re so blank to me.”

Virginia Woolf was an elephant. Paul Newman was a turtle. Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy were our dogs, collectively known as The Ramones. Tony Blair was a snake. Copernicus was a fish. George Bush was a chimp we had for a year before a neighbor took him in. And Jessica was a hippo. But Jessica was me too. We were both their children. We were both Jessica. None of them, none of us had any primal dignity.

“Mom! I’m not lying. I wanted to watch that movie I rented tonight. Right? Why would I smash the TV? I can’t even lift that thing.”

She kept looking at me.

“Look, where did the bananas go?” I showed her the empty fruit bowl. “You honestly think that in a wild fit of, I don’t know, teen angst or something I just ate up all the bananas in one sitting?” She looked like she was trying not to smile. “Jessica, it’s Jessica. Come on, Mom, how many times has she smashed the TV before?”

The logic was this: Dad was reading a Virginia Woolf book when he found the elephant. He always liked the Ramones. When he found Jessica he was beaming, burning, blazing with joy and tenderness in a way that Mom said she hadn’t seen since they first brought me home from the hospital. It was the same expression, the same mood painted all over his rain-soaked face. So they gave her a real person’s name like all the other animals. So they gave her my name. So they called her Jessica because she was just like me. She was Jessica the Hippo. I was Jessica the Girl.

Mom unfolded her arms. “Ok, ok. Fine.”

“You believe me?”

“I believe you.”

For the first year Jessica was only about the size of a dog, cute and sweet and kind of slimey. I loved her, I loved so much it hurt my head, made my eyes swim, and my heart shrink and my teeth vibrate just think about it. I didn’t know the difference between hippos and hippies so I would dig out Dad’s old Jimi Hendrix and Doors albums and play them for her. She didn’t like them at all. Not even a little bit. I kept asking Dad why she didn’t have any tie-dye shirts or smoke drugs and make peace symbols. He explained that she wasn’t a hippie, she was a hippo, a hippopotamus, that she was a river-horse, but she looked more like Jabba the Hutt than a horse to me. That’s the reason she hated the Grateful Dead. Turns out that Jessica only likes hardcore gangsta rap. So I would open the windows in my bedroom and blast Biggie Smalls and she would shimmy and shake in the front yard, rolling in the dirt and tearing up the grass and just having a great old time. Not exactly dancing, totally off-beat but just having fun and loving the rhyming tales of ludicrous violence and silly drug-dealing. So that was fun for a while.

Because she was so small Mom and Dad let her in the house all the time, they let her in their bedrooms and even put her in a little washbasin on their bed to sleep for the night. It was soggy but they stuck with it because they loved her. That was until they found out that hippos mark their territory by spinning their tails while defecating to distribute their excrement over the greatest possible area.

The first time their bedroom was covered in hippo shit they were mad but confused. The second time, she was banned from that side of the house. Mom felt bad about kicking her out of what had become her home, so she started tucking her in at night on the front porch, she started massaging her before bedtime. After she sprayed the front of the house, Dad built her a little shed in the back yard that she could spew poo over all she wanted. And she did. The kids from the ranch down the street started calling our place ‘the hippo outhouse.’ Needless to say I had few friends. And she still came in the house whenever she wanted.

Mom was picking up the pieces of the dishes that Jessica had smashed.

“Oh dear, this was a good set too. Your Aunt Jean gave us these three Christmases ago.”

I got a trash bag and held it out while she dropped in jagged shards of porcelain, once something, now nothing.

“Sorry Mom.”

“Oh it’s not your fault.” She picked up a large piece, half a plate, like she was holding a broken and battered moon. “Hold the bag open a little more, dear?”

It dropped with a clatter onto the other broken fragments, chipping into two or three smaller pieces.

“Now what will we do when Aunt Jean comes to visit? She always looks to make sure her gifts are in use.”

“Mom, Aunt Jean hasn’t been here since she gave you those plates.”

“Yes, Jess, but what if she comes this year.”

“She won’t. Remember what happened last time?”

Mom sighed. “I always hope she’ll forgive us for that, forgive Jessica.”

“Well, it was Uncle Johnny’s own fault. You don’t taunt a hippo with food unless you want to get a broken arm or worse.”

Uncle Johnny was an idiot. I was glad he and Aunt Jean has stopped visiting. Mom was always urging them to have kids, even though Aunt Jean was nearing menopause. I was also glad they had never had kids. I wouldn’t wish that misery on any child.

“Jessica. Don’t talk about your family that way.”

“Mom, he’s not even related to us. He’s not even Aunt Jean’s first husband.”

“It was kind of his own fault, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. She smiled and threw another broken dish in the bag.

the past is poetic.

heaven is a greenhouse.

Lourdes

Lourdes was large, a heavyset woman you might say.

She was a collection of rolling hills, sagging fruit, anxieties, insecurities and aching joints that called out into the wilderness—but she hadn’t always been that way. No, no. Years ago she had been a beauty, in fact, had been one of the most desired women in the entire city, and believe me, she took advantage of it. She had her choice of lovers, a chorus of suitors, and she was very rather indiscreet about the whole thing: she had tasted everything from fur-clad rebels who spit sorcery at the sky to rich and refined platinum-nosed moguls, the kind that felt no qualms, none at all, about eating endangered species from fine white iron plates set with semiprecious stones.

Susanna remembered when she was child, everyone in her class, everyone in her school, already knew about Lourdes’ reputation. But Lourdes just laughed and skipped on, enjoying love and enjoying lovers, enjoying fresh flesh and life and everything simple and silver under the sun.

Even now, beneath the excess fat and the crow’s feet, you could still see that beauty, still see who Lourdes had been, still see her struggling like a ghost screaming to break free from her age and anger and do it all again, enjoy her youth and beauty for a second time.

start a band called The Typographical tErrors. all song titles and lyrics are to be mispelled and have exceptionally poor grammar. our debut 7" single will be "Eats, Shoots n Leves." it will be in 7/8 time and feature a dulcimer, a glockenspiel, and a kazoo. it will also have a three-minute guitar solo full of mistakes. the singer should sing out the letters of the notes in the guitar solo as they are played. the guitar solo should be completely inept and full of mistakes.

thank you houston, we're The Typographical tErrors!

there was thunder on her lips
there were oceans in her eyes
there were churches underwater
as she watched the ship sink.

she turned her head and laughed
the sadness was an inspiration.

Collaborative Novel 2

So I think a theme is coming together for this collaboration. It's going to be about a televangelist over a couple of decades who experiences a Jim Bakker-type financial disgrace or a Ted Haggard-style sex scandal. No one in this collaboration will write as him. Everyone will develop separate, wildly different characters who all happen to have some connection to this televangelist. They should all have perceptions and opinions about this preacher throughout different periods of his life, both during his rise, after his fall and possibly during some type of redemptive legacy.

There will be a few rules:
1. All narratives should be in the first person.

2. All characters need some kind of connection to this preacher, even if its just someone who has seen him on TV once or twice.

3. Anything your character says/does/believes in regards to this preacher can be completely repudiated by another character/author with a different set of opinions/facts.

4. Other than that almost everything is up for grabs. If you wish to write multiple chapters with multiple characters, I encourage you. If you wish to write multiple chapters with the same character in different decades, I applaud you.

I think I may start it off as a reporter writing a story on the preacher and his family before the fall. Jessica has claimed the character of his mother. If you need ideas for characters or perspectives, you could write as his wife, as one of his kids, as all of his kids, as one of his ministers, as a federal investigator, as someone going on talk shows claiming to be his gay lover, etc.

I'm especially interested in people far from him--people in the audience at his sermons or people who see him on TV or his critics in the media--lives and stories that are only tangentially related to his. Hell, you character can just have a silly pop-culture conversation about him with a friend, with the rest of your character's story/life having nothing to do with him. The fun part will be having all these wildly different opinions and 'facts' about the man, like say if one person kills him off then another can always say it was just a Weekly World News tabloid story or something. You may think he's a saint, you may think he's a crook. There is no truth to this man, only what we can imagine for him.

I'll try to get the first chapter worked out by the end of the month, hopefully. If you have any ideas or would like to contribute, I would love to hear from you.

Collaborative Novel

Actually that last post made me want to do exactly what the geniuses behind Terror, Terror, Terror aren't doing. Would anyone like to contribute to a collaborative novel like the kind imagined in the first paragraph? We will truly harness the 'power' of 'the internuts' this way. I guess we can figure out kind of the shape of the story before we get started but leave a lot of it chance and chemistry.

Anyone interested?

Terror Terror Terror

These guys are looking to harness the 'power' of the 'internet' to publish a collaborative book. No less than 60 authors have contributed. What a novel idea, right? What a wild chance to experiment with varying styles, voices, characters! Hell you could write a book about a single event witnessed by 60 different characters each with their own voice, their own interpretation, their own life. You could write a multigenerational tail of the vast and varied experiences of human existence. This is new! This is novel! This is exciting, and suprising, and furiously original!

This is not what they are doing.

No, the men behind this book have wisely decided to make it an antiterror novel. The premise? Well, its an action novel, thank god. An action novel about "a moderate Muslim [that] takes a stand against the radical terrorists. He hires operatives from the West to terrorize the terrorists." Utter and total brilliance. Move over Jason Bourne, stand aside Jack Bauer, get out of the way whoever that guy in XXX was. This actually kind of sounds like the plot of Munich, but you know, shitty.

Here's the best part: the title of this book is Terror, Terror, Terror. One just wasn't enough, apparently. The subtitle? The Solution to Muslim Terror. I think that maybe they think pretty highly of their premise. I wonder about their political orientation, what their agenda is with this book. Gee...

Back to it being a collaborative novel. The whole thing is available for download in Microsoft Word. All 187 manuscript pages. You can add whatever you want. This is your chance to be an author. You can change the course of the plot, you can change the course of history by adding your two cents to the greatest novel ever written. Ever. By anyone. Ever.

Need ideas? Here are some:

exadore: you should just start adding ridiculous shit

phil: that's basically my plan but i want to get a feel for how ridiculous it already is, although the idea sounds hilarious

exadore: you should end it by having everyone die. and then they wake up and it was all a dream and its really 1985 and america is great and reagan is wonderful and 9/11 never existed. hallalujah! shalom!

phil: hahahahahaaha

exadore: that would be sweet if you did that. i would laugh forever

phil: do they just accept whatever anybody adds in?

exadore: i don't know, but they said you have to tell them where you added stuff so they don't have to hunt through the whole manuscript for it. i guess they never heard of 'track changes' in word. so you could probably just add whatever wacky shit you want wherever you want and not tell them

phil: hahaha. i love the internets!

exadore: like have the president eat a fucking baby or something for lunch but just have it be totally normal. or replace every instance of the word 'freedom' with 'cervical cancer'.

phil: well with the magic find/replace feature of MS Word, that's quite simple!

exadore: indubitably!

But don't expect to get paid for your genius efforts. "All author royalties will be donated to charity earmarked for use after the next terrorist attack." What charity is that one? And does it need to wait for a horrible hypothetical attack on America to do any good? Couldn't you just like, donate the author royalties (if there are any at all cause who the fuck is going to buy this thing, especially since its already free on the internet) to like, the Red Cross or something? Habitat for Humanity? The Tsunami Fund? No? Ok.

If anyone actually does this, I will give you money. Please comment or email me and let me know. exadore@gmail. I will pass out crisp single dollar bills like you were a stripper or something.

Have fun kids!

Terror! Terror! Terror!

the raging sea of idiots.

those old diamonds don't bleed for me anymore.

My story "Anna Was an Acorn" has been accepted for publication by Eyeshot. Kindly read it and tell me how much you love it and me and those little muffins I baked for you that time when it wasn't even your birthday. You never did thank me for those. So you owe me.

Thank you and goodnight.

The Empire of Distraction

Jonathon woke up hungry. His eyes were tied shut, his mouth was blank, and his head was like a box of wool floating on a sea of silence. Jonathon woke up and decided that today he was going to try to spend 14-hours on the internet. He had nowhere to be and nothing to do and no one to speak to today so he was going to spend 14-hours on the internet. But first he was hungry.

He grabbed a milk-n-cereal bar from the dresser next to him. The kind that has the milk as this thin waste-paste on the underside of a bar of fused oats. Whoever invented them was a criminal, a torturer, a real-life villain that should be tried by the UN as a human rights violator. Still, Jonathon ate them, he ate them every day and he was pissed when they ran out. He loved cereal and milk-n-cereal bars were easier than getting out a bowl, getting out a spoon and the box of cereal and mixing them together and then washing them in the sink. The thought was torturous, the effort was too much. This way all he had to do was unwrap it and eat the poisoned thing. It wasn't as good as a bowl of cereal but it was three times as fast. That meant more of his 14 hours could be spent exploring the secrets that could be found on the internet.

Also, this way he wouldn't have to face the roommate. He wouldn’t have to wander out to the kitchen to find a bowl and a spoon, wouldn’t have endure the grilling stares and guarded, insinuating greetings. Tension had been building these last few weeks, escalating. Each tense sentence and subtle putdown countered by some pile of dishes, some rotting applecores left on the table, an unflushed toilet. Feint and counter. The kid, Rich, the kid couldn't flush the toilet. It was physically impossible for him. Pain shot up and down his arm whenever he touched the handle. He had cluster headaches as soon as the water started spiraling into the S-trap. Every time Jonathon walked in to brush his teeth or comb his hair or pop a zit, there was a big yellow pot of piss staring him in the face. It started to stain the bowl, even when there was no piss in it, it still looked yellow and cracked. Three or four time he found Rich's shit floating in there. Jonathon finally stopped flushing it when he found it, hoping Rich would get the point. He didn't. So Jonathon just learned to use the bathroom as little as possible. Besides, that meant there was always more time to spend on the internet.

Rich had now taken to eating Jonathon's food without asking him and then denying it. Jonathon would say, "So hey, Rich. How were my toaster pastries?" and Rich would give him a blank stare and say that he didn't know what Jonathon was talking about. But everyday there was one more missing, one more hiding in Rich’s stomach and laughing. So Jonathon moved all the food into his room, made space in his dresser and on his cabinet for it all and now the milk-n-cereal bars were right next to his bed for when he woke up in the morning hungry. And no bowl to wash meant he didn't even have to leave the room. He could keep the door closed for all 14-hours he planned to be on the internet today. He wondered what Rich was eating for breakfast now that the toaster pastries--and the toaster--were on Jonathon's dresser.

Jonathon sat down at his computer, punched in his screen-saver password and within seconds he was back on the internet, right where he had been last night before he decided it was past time to sleep. He had been gone for about 7 and a half hours and he needed to see if anything had changed in his absence. Was everything the same? Or had there been movement, had there been vision and color and quests? First he checked his email. Apparently there were “hot girls from your state” just waiting to meet him. He assumed from the email that they wanted to fuck. June had written back about the youtube video he had sent her of a monkey hang-gliding. There was an important message about the size of his penis and/or increasing it. A very important message.

There was also a message about ‘the formless vagabond tubers and the anarchy club.” Jonathon at first thought this was a postmodernist, freewheeling, free-associative story that Chris, his friend from high school, said he was working on since the sender was named Chris. So he read half of it and it was wild and insane and degrading and everything postmodernist stories are supposed to be. There were talking chairs, and talking vaginas, and burritos that bled, and cannibal animals and men with horns and all that kind of shit.

“This is pretty good,” Jonathon said to himself. “This is pretty funny.” Then he realized it was just a spam email that had combined strings of random words with a link at the bottom. He didn’t know what it was for. Chris was not Chris. This story was not a story at all. He junked it.

His email box was empty. He checked his myspace. Sammy left a comment about a party that weekend that Jonathon would not be attending no matter what, ever. There was no fucking way. He checked the auctions he was following on ebay, none of which he planned to buy. He just liked to follow them, see who won and for how much. High drama. Today he was following a vintage Elvis Costello t-shirt, a house on the beach in Hawaii, and GI Joe action figures. He checked craigslist for hot girls from his state who wanted to fuck. They were all fat. There were always all fat.

He looked at his watch. He had just somehow spent an hour on the internet in the course of only four paragraphs. There were only 13 hours left. This was going good. This would be easy. Thirteen hours on the internet. What could he do next? He could do so many things on the internet. He could read his webcomics, download some music, download some porno, play some card games against people, play some war games against people, he could frag some n00bz, he could find some more videos with monkeys, or hang-gliders or both and send them to June.

Sammy IMed him. “Hey brooo! U comin to my party?!?! OR WHAT?!”

“No,” typed Jonathon. “Please stop typing like a 10-year old.”

“Dood! WTF! U better show @ da party! Biggest party on da west coast, broooo!!!”

“No,” typed Jonathon. “I have a doctor’s appointment.”

“@ 11pm on Saturday?” typed Sammy.

“House call,” said Jonathon as he typed it.

“Whatevs, dick.”

Jonathon spent some time on a stranger’s blog. This stranger liked kung-fu movies and William Burroughs. Jonathon could respect that, that seemed perfectly reasonable and he thought to himself that this stranger seemed like a good person, someone he could get along with. Uh oh, he also liked the Grateful Dead. Jonathon decided to leave a nasty comment but then didn’t when he saw that anonymous comments were disabled. Oh well. What a dickhead.

10 hours to go. He opened a bag of pretzels and had a juicebox. He checked Rich’s blog to see if there was any mention of him in it. There wasn’t. Rich never wrote about anything that could be considered ‘real-life.’ He mostly wrote about sexual misadventures with imaginary whores that he claimed to be sleeping with, and imaginary situations where he wound up buttfucking them in the back of Volkswagens or in elevators or cemeteries. Then they’d be caught be gravediggers or something and instead of calling the cops, the gravediggers would just join in the fun. Rich’s blog was like the Penthouse letters page crossed with an unending series of Freudian slips. It was high entertain, psychologically revealing and sleazy as fuck. Jonathon hoped he made it onto the blog someday.

Jonathon checked youtube for more monkey videos. He found an otter one but decided that the otter craze was totally last month. A month on the internet was a lifetime, you see, whole fads rose and fell, whole civilizations thrived and decayed, whole flames wars fought and won. A month was a lifetime, but the 8 hours he had left on the internet—that was nothing. Ever since a video had turned up of a monkey in a Brazilian Kentucky Fried Chicken, monkeys had been in, way in. See, the monkey had somehow gotten into the kitchen of this place and started eating all the chicken, just tearing into it, and when the employees tried to stop it, the little monster bit them. Then it started throwing the streaming goop that was supposed to be mash potatoes at everything, at the walls, at the ceiling, at the employees and customers and even the guy with the videophone who would upload the video in a few hours. Finally, the monkey fell asleep in the open drawer of cash register and everyone agreed that it was the cutest thing they had ever seen anywhere ever. Monkeys were in.

Jonathon checked Cindy’s myspace profile. Her status was still single. She had taken down all the pictures of them together. Deleted all of his comments, stretching back two years even. Some new guy was leaving her comments, three of them actually, three dudes he had never seen or heard of ever before. He looked at their profiles, Chuck and Dave and ‘Thumpster tha #1 Stunna’. What a bunch of total fucking douchebags. These were the kind of guys Cindy was hanging around these days? He looked at the pictures of her for a long time. Tried to remember what she looked like when she sat on her bed, wrapped in a blanket and smiling at him. He suddenly had a vision of her fucking Chuck and Dave and ‘Thumpster tha #1 Stunna’ all at once, all tangled up in bed with them, like an 8-legged human spider, tied in knots and eating itself. ‘Thumpster’ planted firmly in her mouth.

Fuck. He closed the window. Fuckfuck.

He IMed Sara.

“Hey Sara.”

“Hey Jonny. What’s up?”

“What’s up with all those dudes on Cindy’s profile?”

“I told you to stop looking at her profile, Jon! What the fuck, Jon, you gotta get over her.”

“I know. But I looked. I feel really bad now. Like … really bad. I feel like my lungs are melting, Sara. Is she fucking them?”

“I don’t think so. Anyways it's none of your business.”

“It’s all my business.”

“Don’t be creepy Jon. You know she has a watcher on her page right? She can see every time you look at her profile, she knows it.”

“I know.”

“So why do you still look?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you doing today, Jon?”

“I am spending 14-hours on the internet today.”

“Nice. You should get outside, see some sunshine and birds.”

The sun was streaming in through his blinds leaving these ugly, bright bars across the monitor. They hurt his eyes. He turned the blinds the opposite way, keeping out as much light as possible.

“Hey Sara,” he typed.

“What’s up?”

“Sammy invited me to his party again,” typed Jonathon. Sammy and Sara used to date until he got wasted and fucked one of the drunk girls at one of his parties.

“Sammy’s a dick.” The girl at Sammy’s party was into it at first but was crying by the end, as she sobered up. His friend Robbie videotaped it all and they put the tape on the internet, with commentary about what a stupid, silly, emotional bitch she was, recorded afterwards.

“Yeah I know. He types like a 10-year old,” Jonathon typed.

“His party is going to suck.” They sent the video to all of her friends, sent it to her sister.

“I know. Do you want to play me in a game of Scrabble?”

“Sure.” The girl was humiliated.

They logged onto the Scrabble game site. It was Jonathon’s dream to one day get ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ in Scrabble, his lifelong goal, the one thing that would let him die happy. He was beginning to think his dream was hopeless. Sara won. She got a double word score on ‘existential’.

“Nice one,” typed Jonathon.

“Thanks,” said Sara.

“Do you want to walk in parks?”

“Sure.”

They logged onto Second Life for a bit and walked in parks. They both had free trials that they kept uninstalling and reinstalling so their free trial was infinity. Second Life was stupid, but they kept registering for it for free. They kept going and walking in parks.

“I think I’m going to log off now,” typed Sara.

“Why?”

“Because I spend too much time on the internet.”

“No you don’t. I hardly ever see you these days.”

“That’s because I’m cutting back, Jon. I’m trying to walk in more parks in the city, the real city, you know … the one we live in. I’m trying to walk in less parks in Second Life.”

“Don’t be depressing. You don’t spend enough time on the internet. Look I’ve got about 6 hours left, don’t leave me yet.”

“Sorry Jon, I’m trying to quit. I spend too much time on the internet.”

“Everyone does. Its the 21st century. You have to.”

“Not everyone.”

“If you don't then you're out of touch.”

“My mom doesn't.”

”Your mom is out of touch. She probably still thinks otter videos are hilarious”

“Probably,” typed Sara. “She has a cell phone though, so she can't be that out of touch. I just talked with her a sec ago. It was her birf-day yesterday.”

“Does she have an iPhone though, Sara?”

“Nope, but there was a big discussion of the iPhone at the picnic I went to Saturday. In the real park. Everyone wants one except me. I don’t care. I'm not going to spend my life chasing the next gadget.”

“Maybe you're just out of touch. You need to spend more time on the internet, then you will want one for sure.”

“But I already spend all this time on the internet.”

“Not enough. Not enough to want an iPhone.”

“We can’t all be internet pioneers like you and spend 14-hours exploring the corners and nooks of the web.”

“You know what would be cool, Sara?”

“What?”

“If we were having this conversation over text messages on our brand-new iPhones.”

“If we had iPhones we could just call each other.”

“Don’t ruin my fantasy.”

“Goodbye, Jonathon I really have to go now. I can’t sit here any more. I am getting restless leg syndrome or something. AND! Stay away from Cindy’s page, you lurker.”

Sara signed off and Jonathon was alone. He sat there in the dark and looked up suddenly. The room was empty. There was no one there. It was like being underground, under a blanket, in a box. It was the kind of quiet, anxious emptiness that caved in and gave way to a creeping, sneaking, ugly dread. He expected a man in a mask of human leather to tear into his room with a chainsaw. His intention would be to carve off Jonathon’s face so he could wear it. Maybe his old mask was getting moldy or something? Jonathon didn’t know. But he was alone. The door stayed shut. No chainsaw-wielding maniac tore him apart. He was just alone.

He ate a ho-ho and a coke. He felt like the only person left in the entire world, hiding in a basement from the bombs. He felt like the only person in the world, standing in the sand before the light rose and swam over the face of the World, before the animals and the plants had even been dreamt up by some late, great slumbering God. He got up to take a piss. The lights in the other room were on and it took a minute for his eyes to adjust, leaving trails and streaks behind his eyelids. Rich was watching porn on the big-screen. Jonathon was still in his underwear. Rich looked at him, then looked back at a huge penis entering a huge vagina. Now Jonathon wished he was the last human left alive, hiding in a basement.

In the bathroom Jonathon saw a huge turd floating in the toilet.

“God fucking damn it,” Jonathon said. He pulled Rich’s toothbrush out of the medicine cabinet, put it in the sink and pissed in the sink. He picked the toothbrush up with some toilet-paper, shook it off and put it back in the cabinet.

Rich looked at him again as he came out of the bathroom.

“I didn’t hear the toilet flush,” he said.

“Neither did I,” Jonathon said and went back in his room. He closed the door. It was dark and he almost tripped over his shoes lying in the middle of the floor. He wished he had a pet monkey that could hang-glide. That would be awesome. That would be fucking amazing. He was starting to wish he had kept the surrealist story from fake Chris. He probably could have changed a few things and gotten it published somewhere as his own story. He could start a whole career on it, a whole industry of surrealist books and stories based almost entirely on the nonsense spam that no one reads. “Ingenious Forks Favor Mao’s Blanket Bank” would be an international bestseller, on par with the DaVinci Code but only half as bad.

Jonathon checked Cindy’s page again, nothing new. He checked "Thumpster tha #1 Stunna's" page again. What an asshole.

He checked his email again. More penis pill emails.

He crawled back in bed and pulled the blanket over his head and buried his face in the mattress. He hugged his chest, he breathed his own breath. He realized he hadn’t brushed his teeth or showered today. He didn’t care. He didn’t care because the internet was a place you didn’t need to shower, the internet was a place you didn’t need to brush your teeth or trim your nose hair, or shave your pubes, or even make small-talk. The internet was a place that was hidden behind bricks and wires and tubes and motors, hidden behind whole continents and tiny pebbles. The internet stretched across fields, across visible spectrums, it lived in towers where the wind howled like an animal, where the wind climbed inside you, climbed inside your lungs and stole your breath right out from the inside of you. The internet was place that lived in blank white rooms filled with echoes and alarms and angry resentment. It was a place that hid in the back of your mind and crawled out every few days like a crab clawing its way painfully to the top, through the sand and debris of thought, right up to the front of your mind to scream its disgust and desire and dreams at you, to scream your own ideas lost to the uncounted, unwanted years, to scream forgotten memories back at you, to scream your life’s ambition into your face before it retreated silently back to its hole with all your thoughts in a tightly-clutched little bag. The internet was a place, the internet was a place filled with holes and hiding places like Afghanistan, the internet was a place where it was always freezing cold and you were always stunningly alone, sweepingly adrift like the nomads of Inner Mongolia, the internet was a place that was frightening and terrifying and primal, filled with red skulls and sullen murder like the blackened jungles of deep Cambodia.

The internet was a place that was in this very room with him. Jonathon didn’t need a chainsaw murderer to come chomping into his room in a haze of gasoline smoke and adenoidal rage because the internet was already doing that job and doing it very well. The internet was sitting in the chair he had just been in and it was whispering effigies, whispering elegies, and it was watching him under his blanket, watching Jonathon as he hugged his chest and buried his face and mourned every wasted moment, it was watching his twitches and his sorrows and regrets, it was watching everything, every facial expression, every tick and muscle movement, it was watching it all.

It was watching with its single, enormous, roving eye and it smiled with teeth that weren't there.

write a story about a man who puts cialis in his coffee every morning, "just in case."

write a story about avoiding people.

you have succeeded at the unexceedable.

Wendy or Gertie or Edith

We're on the bus again. We're on the bus and the wheels are breathing and the engine is burning and children are staring at the bone-white vagaries that dangle from adult ears. The sky has this distant kind of yellow, the kind of yellow you see in sun-curled pages of aging books, the kind of yellow that spills with its own dust, that cracks with its own weight, that spins with its own sins. There are towers and spines and suns and spirals that stand like knife points against the fleshy yellow belly of the noontime sun and we watch them pass outside the windows.

Because we're on the bus again and there's this woman. She's sitting across from me see, and she's not quite aware that we’re there but she's just sitting there, waiting for her destination and spooning this ice cream from a cup into mouth. It is the most disgusting ice cream I've ever seen. Baskin Robbins or Dairy Queen or something and it is the biggest, ugliest, most grotesque way to eat ice cream that I think has ever been invented.

The city outside the windows of the bus was flaming, screaming and burning with the smoke ready to choke and feel and drown. Things hadn't been good that August and now things were on fire. That's sort of the way it goes sometimes.

And all the way this woman is spooning this melting pile into her mouth. She's got these slithered kind of eyes, sparkling like a silverfish and used for scanning newspapers as they blow down the street; these homeless sort of eyes that sleep under sidewalks and soda fountains. She was a sucker for celebrity gossip. I could just tell. And she bathed her kids in bathwater she had just finished using herself. She had 17 children, or maybe 32 children in all, some with the same names, some with the same faces, and by the time she got to bathing the last kid the water was black like the smoke piling up outside. Her name was something like Wendy or Gertie or something like Edith. A middle-aged woman withered with an old woman’s name.

The city outside the windows of the bus was abuzz with vultures. They were like a crowd of disturbed flies. Mentally disturbed. The kind of flies you have to lock up in institutions so they don’t hurt you, hurt me, hurt themselves, hurt each other, so they don’t hurt the President of the United States of America or his designated successors. Except they weren’t flies, they were vultures and so they were free from the hospitals, free from treatment and feasting on the dead bodies in the streets. They sat on those streets, climbing over the bodies and buildings and block parties. They took off from flaming roofs. They took off from smoking streets and dive-bombed the bus. The vultures lived in the smoke. They loved the smoke and they fed on the August fires.

And all the way this woman is spooning this melting pile into her mouth. Her lips, her lips look the way that those disembodied lips in commercials look. The way the Rolling Stones logo looks. Ugly, swollen, distended, obscene, like your mother in lingerie. Those lips look like all the seas, and the sun and seven different kinds of animal fat have been pumped into them until they're less like lips and more like apples rippling under flesh, less like lips then a whole collection of lips squeezed together and fucking each other. And yet her teeth are so tiny, little gravestones behind the monsoon of her spreading stain of a mouth.

The city outside of the windows was destitute and broken and abandoned. No one on the streets, no one brave enough to face those flaming buildings and humming vultures. Any one who’s any one is on this bus, most of them children. Some of them adults. Then there’s me and you and this woman here.

I nudge you with my elbow. "Are you seeing this?"

"Seeing what?"

I jerk my chin in her direction. Subtle-like. "Watch her."

A big gooey dollop of ice cream dribbles off the spoon and into the cavern bored through her face. She licks her lips with Jabba the Hut's tongue.

"Oh my god," you say. "That's fucking disturbing." And when you say that I know exactly what you mean. Between the movies and the internet and video games, we've seen all kind of horrible things together. We've seen dead babies, real dead babies, amputation videos, the Saw franchise of movies, government torture, mutilated soldiers, horse porn, pregnancy porn, the Faces of Death gore-video series. And here’s this woman, this woman with the ice cream, and she’s disturbing our delicate sensibilities.

She lets another dollop dribble into her mouth. My god, my god I can't look away. Neither can you. She's spooning this dripping chinawhite cream between them, collected from the branches of trees, collected from the mountaintops and bedsheets of firemen and prostitutes. She’s licking her lips, smacking them. She lets it roll over her lips and tongue, lets it play over the back of her throat, like a lover’s limbs. My god.

Turns out Edith was raped in a garden at the age of 17, we decide. She spent several weeks wandering through the streets trying, trying, trying to remember what the fuck had just happened, what had stolen her breath and forced her hands. The man in the silver mask was an old friend she thought maybe. Maybe he was. But then again maybe not, maybe the man who had forced her open was a stranger she had never seen before and would never see again no matter how long she lived, no matter how hard she searched. But his hands seemed familiar, his tongue was a memory but still but still...

Her husband, who I decided was named Tom or Frank or Franklin Douglas, was awake when she finally came home. She never told him a thing. He only wanted to know where she had been not what she might have done, not what might have been done to her. He had spent time in the salt mines, his work took him under the world, under the clouds, to dig and plow and smash and break free huge chunks of salt. He didn't have enough time or energy left at the end of the work day to care about her actions, only her locations. When their seventh baby arrived and looked nothing like him, he didn’t think too much of it. Recessive traits and all. Plus, she had some pretty ugly cousins, maybe it was just those same genes resurfacing. Cousin Jene's gimpy nose. Uncle Pete's lazy eye. But it was weird the baby was wearing a silver mask as it escaped Edith's womb. That one was your idea.

Franklin Douglas asked her if she wanted some ice cream in the delivery room. He got her some. And now 25 years later she was eating it the same way. Oh Edith, oh Wendy, oh whatever the fuck your name is, I love you I love you I love you. Take me away with you, take me away from you and these Augustinian fires and these vultures and this dim yellow sky and the whales and the pomegranate tea and the smoke and the living, breathing sector of human experience. Take me away from the silver masks.

She gets up, gets off the bus, throws the remains of her ice cream cup at the vultures on the ground and they do battle most vicious and fierce for its creamy contents. She walks into a building spewing smoke from its third floor windows.

It’s time for Edith to bathe the kids.

Equator Hymn

he meant to chase away the sadness one day
to chase it away with anything, anything really
he meant to chase away the sadness with a torch
or a vacuum cleaner or aspirin or booze or electric
neon hologram jesus figurines that glowed in the dark

he meant to chase it away by hiding the words that he swore
and whispering the fashions that he wore
left over from the last three years
the fourth year having been not very fashionable
and more inclined to use polyester than was really necessary or wise.

he meant to chase away the sadness
and so he squirmed and shook and shimmied and stung
he broke and fell and wallowed and whined
he sipped and supped and wandered and won
and then finally, finally
he belched like a broken beast.

You as a Nest

there were treasures in the water
there were visions in the sand
there was weight and heft
and birds that screamed their jealousy

there were also animals,
there were animals and sounds
that breathed in the night
that lived in the smoke
and danced under skin

animals that lived inside you

and looked out through your eyes

watching me.

i wonder where you are amidst the newspaper stars

finding yourself in the atrium of escape.

let us tomato.

Deep in the moon, beneath the rocks and ancient animal bones and habitable craters, under the biblical verses, under the dusty seas and the tonnage of top-heavy myth, through the center, through the half-empty core: that's where it is, like an desert child, that's where it rests, where it lies so silent and free like a reclining cloud, like a silent storm.

There is a mirror on the moon.

fear

He knew there were times when the terror just trickled down her back. When she was young she was frightened of everything, every sound, every sight, every car and aeroplane and train and seagull bell call stabbed the fright into her stomach.

She was Susanna and he loved her. But she was frightened. She was always frightened. As a child she had been afraid of all the usual suspects: body mutilation, animals, supernatural beings, monsters, ghosts, unfamiliar routines, separation from trusted adults, abandonment, annihilation. As she got older, just like we all got older, she learned to be afraid of getting older. In fact, now that he thought about it, she was still frightened of body mutilation, but really who wasn't? He was. And most of all, she was still terrified of the thought of annihilation—a big blank hole in the world where she used to stand and sing in the evening air; a big blank hole where her heart used to be. But at least, and thank god for this, at least she wasn't still afraid of ghosts. The ghosts had been horrifying.

Almost as horrifying as a mortgage.

And that’s what he had liked about her at first, she had been beautiful but so fragile, she was terrified and terrifying. He had never felt like a particular strong man until he met her, but she gave him a sense of purpose, someone to protect, someone to care for, someone to feed soup and bread. She had even been afraid of him at first, of the potential he had to crush her, to eat her heart and tear her flesh and wound her psyche—how could she ever give anyone such power over her? That was why she had been such a heartbreaker when they met, she never grew close to any of the men who came courting with chocolate and gold and saltwater fingers laid across the bone. She simply used them for what they were worth and moved on. She hadn't been possessed of the power of her own beauty, she never sought her lovers out. They had come to her and she had enjoyed their company for a time but cancelled them from her life, erased their memory the moment, the exact pinpoint instant, before things got too serious, got too comfortable, the moment before she truly became attached.

But she had grown closer to him, finally. He was the exception. She had relented, she had grown to trust him, to seek out his protection and his arms and slowly she overcame her fears. Instead of being afraid of love and heartache, she now could not even imagine being away from him; she had, in fact, insisted upon a marriage. She had been scared of moving out of her parents, yet here they were in their own home. She had been terrified of pregnancy, but here was their baby cooing and gooing and shimmying like a small snail in a bed of flowers. She had been afraid of him, she had been afraid of her own capacity to love, but here they were—here she was handling her life rationally like an adult instead of the terrified child who had ocne fled in fright from the sun as it hung suspended like a platinum plate in the air.

Sometimes he wondered if he had made a mistake.

Power Out

We were riding the train again. We were always riding the train. You and me and the woman down the street with the ugly hair. Dressed in our pressed shirts, black shoes and relaxed slacks, we were standing too close and avoiding eye contact. It was the same ritual day after day, it had to be performed or the heavens would come crashing down upon our heads and the earth would belch forth streams of liquid fire.

We were compelled, and here we were again riding the train like a closet full of junk: the shaman in the corner performing his newspaper rites; the woman with the skin disease, whose role was simply too stand far to close; the older woman who engaged in a ritualized dance with other patrons, silently demanding their seat for herself; the revolving greek chorus of men who sneeze without covering their mouth or stink like they just soiled their pinstriped trousers--I'm not sure what their role is other than to weird me out.

But here we were again, all of us, and we knew each other by sight and role but not by name; we knew the contours of each strange face in the morning, the sloping eyebrows, the freshly combed hair, the red-rimmed eyes, and the lines that formed for a yawn as we swayed along.

We were upset when the ceremony was interrupted, as it was today. We were left without footing, without maps or guides or signpost in a strange unknown land. The train lurched. A woman let loose a noise of surprise. The gods were angry. They must be furious to interrupt us in our communion and praise. Another lurch and the strength of the train below and around us faded, its virility suddenly gone limp. The power cut out. The lights flickered death. We were left in an envelope of darkness, folding closed. Underground lamps from outside splashed through the windows in arcs of light, bars of sight. It quickly played over each face in turn , exposing it to the others and moving on quickly. It was like watching lightening dance across a cloudy sky at twilight.

People twitched uncomfortably. Their eyes moved. The shaman put down his newspaper. The old woman looked about in shock.

The train coasted for a few minutes along its rails without feeling, without desire. It suddenly lurched again, jolting us all. The light flickered back on and suddenly it was as if the curtain had come down again. The ritual resumed. The newspaper must be read or misfortune would fall from the clouds as it had in olden times. The man must sneeze uncovered or he will doom us all.

Sip your coffee sir, so that we may all be saved.

"You are my rose," he said in delight.

"But roses decay."

We Stand

We stand for rising tides.
We stand for meadow-eyed monks and easychairs full of sticky, sweet sugar.
We stand for marble and moons, sculptured poetry and the kind of architecture that just bursts with soul you can see.
Because we stand for uncovering the artistry of everyday life.

We stand for angels and anarchy and anthrax parents.
We stand for raised fists and baby-faced beards.
We stand for clouds of child brides and rivers of cicada semen.
We stand for lust!

We stand for the elimination of cages.
We stand for the destruction of limits, of focus, of practicality and compromise.
Because the fucking jig is up! You hear me?
Turn around, don't go to work today. Set your house on fire and breath the flames like the air of your first breath.
Because we stand for setting yourself free.

We could have saved the blood of the Summer sun in our hands.

We could have sailed the maps and seen the seas of another's dreams.

We could have drawn our names in the pool of smoke.

We could have had value.

We could have been heroes.