Inevitably during the time a song spends banging around in my skull it engages a sort of curiosity. Wikipedia comes in handy for this.Todays crosseyed disgust is lowered upon John Mayer. It's not that I have any moral disagreement with waiting for the world to change other than it embodies the passion of a nursing home. But I just had to see what this guy looked like.

A few nights ago I was inflicted with a particular melody that followed me to sleep and through my dreams. Instead of being fully ingested into the myriad of egocentric and destructive enzymes my subconscious uses as a surrogate for personality, a climate so volatile barely I can stand its atmosphere, instead of snuffing out quietly or preferably violently under the influence of the worlds second most powerful drug, it had followed me from one end of the dark to the next unscathed and happily champing along side me like that donkey from Shrek. But I'm not going to write you a love song. What I'm coming to believe is that sometime in the early 90's, the fabric of modern musical talent being dangerously thin and susceptible as it was, was rewoven with a slurry of basement dwelling instrument molesters, ushering forward an era of jazz influenced folk music. A.k.a., the most pretentious form of singer/songwriter known to man.

This weekend I am going to Helen. Most my life has been plagued by Bavarian themed towns and I seem to like it just fine, but I'm most excited about getting to stick my face between the tits of Appalachia.

When I was in grade school, I listened intently as a friend spilled the details of a terrible wave some 200 feet in height with the capability to crush miles beneath it with a solid slap of deadly glass. Of course, the specifics were a tad exaggerated being relayed from the mouths of ten year olds and over the years my imagination has been steadily deflated by the reality of phenomenon such as tidal waves. I remember a time at Melbourne Beach, Florida, where I was swallowed whole into the noisy underush of the sea. With one salted punch in the face, one discerning scrape of the sea floor, my senses obliterated, my world knocked out from me like that styrofoam boogie board and seconds had stretched before me into a distorted mess loose enough to build me a coffin. To this day, I cannot watch footage of an encroaching wave without some consternation or the nagging impulse to look away from the television or greater still, the desire to physically strangle the cameraman for those gratuitous exposures.

When I greet the sea in person, I have only a fraction of the fear held to the visceral portrayals I receive from the television. I have swam with barracuda and waded with the traffic of stingrays. I watched in wonder a manta ray cruise near this clumsy tourist. I have experienced strong feelings of freedom beneath the water and if I did not possess such great fear at waging my health to the trade of mathematics I would long to scuba dive the shallow of that world and touch in amazement the things others cannot touch. It is only that deep blue, the dark muddy aether behind the fragile reflection that I cannot bring myself to peer into. It is an emptiness, a deprivation so obscene it would cease to exist if not scarcely punctuated by mouths who's only attribute more fearsome than their blackness is their resentful acclimation to such an existence.

Don't get me wrong. I do love the sea. It is because I fear it that it captivates me. A Florida boy like me is only destined to love such a thing, wouldn't you say? And you never quite get used to the size of it. It is a body of water so immense that it doses the very sky with a salt so thick you can smell it. The beach does not end where the water laps at the crabs, as it changes the very culture at its fringes. It reaches into the mainland with ramshackle fruit stands, out of state plates and gift shops. The bridges hum at their centers, or heave into the air to usher barges and boats piled with the oceans givings. The atmosphere is electric, partying with gulls and processions of great fowl prehistoric in nature, defiantly shunning the busyness of our last 500 years. Their eyes seem to look right through us.

Greater still, is the solemn night. Despite its chaos, the ocean has always been a predictable thing. With the falling light settles down a traffic to a reverence of last light walks, clinging hands and names in the sand, laughter somewhere in the dark. Cloaked in black, those soft churning slivers of white can still be heard behind thick curtains and the hum of the air conditioner where I would lay awake and ruminate on the things that crawled from the surf.

In the morning there would usually be coffee cake. No, there would always be coffee cake. And there would always be me pounding my heels past the concession machine to the orange rapids, because the sea is predictable and there would always be those early morning walks, clinging hands and children poking things with discarded straws. Things that stung you, things that scurried, things that you could not tell if they were alive or dead, or where its face from where its ass was, but I never found the things that swam through my dreams. So as the sea licked the sand from my feet I was too young to grasp the concept that the beating heart of the ocean lay in those ruminations. In the depths of that hell and below all that strange biology was the pulse of the unknown and a driving force of my existence to seek out that which has not yet the chance to be imagined.

Places I'm tired of looking at

Title Pawns
Highway 78 has a title pawn every 30 feet. I'm not sure what other services are given there, but it doesn't take commercial unit to rape somebody with a rolled up tube of expired magazines. Boring shit like this should be conducted at a bank.

'Hi, I'm a dumbass who wants to pawn my ride to work.'
'Well step right over here. Here's four bucks, now get the fuck out of here. You're taking up all this empty space.'

Dollar Stores
All strip malls are flanked by dollar stores. It's practically a law of fucking nature. It's the Island of Misfit Toys without the exotic location. I walked in one of those things a couple years ago. Shit was thrown all over the floor, kids running unchaperoned through the isles, and the shelves were overflowing with inferior versions of things I never wanted in the first place. And plastic snakes. I seriously don't know what's up with the plastic snakes but Taiwan's entire GNP has been liquidated to the dollar store and it rests in the form of plastic fucking snakes. The Dollar Store is cleaned with straight bleach. It stings your nostrils and then they try to sell the half empty bottle to you. Sorry, I'm not murdering anyone tonight.

Storage Units
All storage should be maintained underground. Dogs, squirrels, Vikings all store their possessions underground. We even keep our dead underground. It only makes sense that we keep our dismantled waterbeds underground as well. Get your big stupid cubes off the highway. If I want you to hold some of my junk, I'll call you. This isn't exactly an impulse item afterall. Oh look honey, there's a storage unit. Do we got anything we need to be stored? Yes, of course. The children. Why didn't I think of that? The children.

Cell Phone Stores
Cell phones are a big business. I never quite grasped the concept until I gazed into the depths of one these castrated shells the government mandates to employ failed car salesmen. Cell phones are small. I mean, you could sell this shit at a lemonade stand. Or better yet some schemers trenchcoat, where they ought to be sold. You should have to pose the risk of being knifed in the gut whenever you buy one of these things. Then you can call 911.

Playgrounds
I'm going to carry a little on here, seeming it's a passionate issue of mine. One almost deserving of an entire post. You know the type I'm talking about. The kind with curdled cheese and special sauce oozing down the edges of the slide. Greasy little fingerprints, breadcrumbs and discarded diapers. But not just those kind. All playgrounds have become overly stressed kickbacks for the polymer industry and the manufacturers of Yellow Dye #1. This has seriously gotten out of hand. It's like that kid from the twilight zone with all the special powers has been secretly pushing around our government funds, erecting bright stupid cubes with plexiglass bubbles and fucking pinwheels. Except the company that makes these sectional monstrosities only hires colorblind employees so the playground contractors receive different sections in different colors and have to assemble the misshapen parts under the intense gaze of the Twilight Zone Kid, which they would probably like had they not been payed in Tootsie Pops.

You never see any kids playing on these things. They're abandoned ghost towns with idle swings that squeak their cumbersome plastic seats in the wind. The children are out in the woods catching poisonous snakes like six year olds are supposed to. I played at the creek, herding tadpoles and sinking GI Joe guys in quicksand. We threw sandbombs at each other and searched for used condoms in the woods, dug biketrails and built forts. We built our own playgrounds! Do you know why? Because we had imaginations that were not taken from us by the stagnating and annoying colors often appointed by Miss Middybiddy of the HOA.

Miss MiddyBiddy, if that is your REAL name. The kids will do fine with out the bright red, yellow and blue plastic. I didn't have color when I was growing up. I had light gray creosote and dark gray creosote. How do you expect a kid to pretend he's in a rocket ship blasting alien Klingon scum when you paint his assassin squadron in blue yellow and red. How do you expect little girls to voyage their Barbie and Ken Mediterranean Wedding, er.. Cruise or whatever the hell little girls fantasize about in the ever present colors of clown pants? Nobody ever flew around in a yellow, blue and red rocket ship. And,.er, nor.. will they for that matter. Those colors should never be put together unless you're planning to induce seizures or disperse an armed doomsday cult with psychological warfare, and at that only by trained professionals. Miss Middybiddy you are not a trained professional. Step away from the homeowner dues.

I don't understand why we have playgrounds in the first place. Obviously, somebody doesn't know their seniority roles. We can take apart the situation simply. They're for kids, right? Somewhere, some kid had to have asked for one. Here's the solution.

Kid- I want a playground on Fourth and Haverton

Adult with money and the perpetual mental struggle of overcoming the temptation to murder folks on the highway, AND for that matter, would probably benefit from a nice quiet park- Get fucked, kid.

Ray Dixon shifts into third gear, shunning the clutch. He throttles the accelerator. The gracious purr of the eight cylinder monster roars to the mountains and back a perplexed riddle unanswered, to a place Ray no longer exists. His window is cocked slightly, compromised like a busted eardrum. The vacuum of cold air licks the wound from his cigarette. In the nothing before him, Ray is burning a hole with those blue eyes, where white lasers rush into his belly an intoxicating nausea. At the command of his finger he controls the grinding blues gone sour to swagger and the poetries of rape, faintly mocking the panic behind him. Faintly mocking at dust-devils broken, at the lurching biology who had decided, there at the roadside, to trade a moment of flesh, for a moment of peace. Ray's left blinker is on. It has been on for 3 miles.

The aliens come as spores. Invisible. Their presence is always announced by an intuitive or foreboding knowledge. Or as this time by the credits of a movie. They are a running slime, sickly hues of opened shellfish,  growing pains whipped against corners of the living quarters they have attached themselves. Along this stage they are the hardest to eradicate and are better just run away from. It is not a good idea to fall asleep in their presence. Though blind and paniced, they develop quickly into orgasms of meat, and if given enough time, a fully developed lifeform with a physiology for killing. 

One of the ways of locating John Merrick's body is to toss a coin in the direction of the nearest tree. Or was it a marble? Whatever it was, it sprang from the nearest dogwood, landed and spiraled the run of a groove coming to rest in a  bowl that was inset at the center of a large circular slab of granite. By intuitive and foreboding knowledge we were satisfied this was the grave we were looking for. We asked him to call off the meat, and we asked him how to stop it. What he said to us and exactly how the Elephant man became our father of flesh, I do not remember, but I give props to the sleepless wits that spin my dreams. It is a swell pairing. 

What makes these alien dreams, which are loosely inspired by the creations of H.R. Giger, disturbing, are the undefined nature of them. They usually possess a resurgent cycle that cannot be broken but only temporarily crippled in a perpetual repetition of safety protocol. Added to that is the way they corrupt the flesh. Their abandon disloyalty towards a uniform identity. It reminds me of the stock we place on our human faces. How an accident can transfigure it from a glimpse of a beauty to a disfigured nightmare and yet leave the soul unscathed while at the same time burying it from exposure. 

I'm looking at a beautiful woman.  I want to give the world to her. Simply by existing she has earned my loyalty, my sins, the currency of my crimes.  Who has not realized the cruelness of this illusion? I'm not a fan of models or exhibitionists. Aside from the human desire to feel needed, what is a person posing to others besides arrogance? Knowing how arbitrary the merit of beauty is,  what is the accomplishment of the model?

I sometimes have dreams of enormous spiders, resting somewhere in an attic or a guest room that I must clean out before I lay to bed. 

We called the unit  Spanish Disgrace.  A kind of mockery of the apartment name. It was a stucco labrinth full of architectural affectations, arches and cantilevers. The place was a maze, but I'm not sure if I've ever navigated it sober. Rick was in one of his drunk moods, singing the bananafana song as we stumbled into the warmth of Tiffany's apartment. Tiffany Biffany Boe Fiffany banana fana Foe Fiffany. Oh god, I can't imagine a youth without alcohol. The taste of the moment was cheap cans of Seagrams Bourbon/gin cooler.  They sold it across the road unitl 2:00 am, not to mention the offering a very affordable pizza by the slice. Through the years, several aquaintances of mine would call me to the complex of Spanish Disgrace.

Russ Russ Bo Buss, BananaFana Foe Fuss. Fee Fie Fo Fuss. RUUU USS.

Russ was asleep on the sofa. It's what your money gets you went you rent a room from a one bedroom apartment. Russ had a bum leg, a samuri sword and an assload of stories. Me and Rick, we don't hang around fucks. Russ was an allright guy. I don't know where he came from. To the wee hours in the smoky incandescence we listened to The Crow soundtrack. We played card games like Circle of Death, Drunk Driver and Asshole. My favorite was a handmade boardgame called Detrimental Drinking. My friends were once in this thrash band called Detriment. They had the usual shananagins afoot, ego, fisticuffs and backslapping, but the shining creation of this comraderie was the game. It worked a lot like monopoly. On the outer edges of the posterboard ran a series of squares, where you would move your beercap or car keys. They had neat little messages in them like all women must address the men as 'Sir' for two rounds or 'Proclamation of Urination. My favorite was Sign the board.

Rick had the best signatures. 'Rick is cool and sensitive and wanted for MURDER!'

We called the car BoneCinder. Slobatious Whore aka: The Grinch was once a guitarist from Detriment. I don't remember his real name, but I remember how they kicked him out one day by removing all his equipment from the storage unit and stacking it together in his room. They placed his lighting equipment over his failures, panning it down on them like a spotlight. We ran into him at the FBI one day while he was leading a Death Metal band called Bonecinder. It was an impressive band. So his bumper sticker was slapped on the back of Rick's eight cylinder monstrosity and it kind of fit. It was a large brown beast with a smooth ride that will lull you to sleep through armageddon.

One crisp night BoneCinder rolled us up a narrow stretch of asphalt deep in the Florida countryside. It was I, Rick, Tiffany, Russ and a friend whom would not be coming back with us. Suthumin J. Comfort. Suthumin J. Comfort never comes back with us. Seagrams coolers may be great but Southern Comfort trumps all for special occasions, particularly when fire is involved. "I know the guy who owns this land", says Russ. He tells us a story about a confrontation of sort and how a little namedropping saved his ass. Would it surprise you if the Italian Mafia was involved? It could be the Gotti's law of storytelling, but I didn't really care. I think Russ could talk us out of any situation were it called upon. These were orange groves set to the wilds after the freeze of '85 kicked their ass one too many times. The land leftover was little but an orchard of skeletons overgrown and poorly grazed by stray cattle.

The road kind of ended and Russ led us through this rotten break in the barb wire. BoneCinder rolled smoothly over the Bahaia and we found ourselves near a copse of trees where the land sunk away from the horizon. The fire lit up and the bottle opened so we told more stories tossing articles into our borrowed furnace. As it turns out Gino Paluchi owns a lot of land out in this area. He's the Pizza Roll guy in case you care. Tonight I glimpsed the sky and that night came back to me with the cold crisp air. The stars burning down were the same drawn against obsidian orbs of owls, watching four others commandeering a parcel of wilderness, and on they go leaving a burnt bottle behind them.

It took maybe a month, but finally I saw him.

We've both tried to guess exactly who he is. If he is homeless or crazy. Maybe he is on his way to a hospital to inspire sick children. I no longer care, nor even want to know the answer.

"Look, here he is!" , says Joe.

Superman paces down North Avenue, his head bowed in a reverence preserved for the uneasy of mind. He bothers no brethren nor breaks a glance from the pavement before his feet it seems in preference to an attention he reserves for a world in jeopardy.

At an initial glance you may miss him entirely. You might write him off as another unfortunate soul of manpower. The unremarkable height and hairless head. He has a solid build, yet nothing bred from the likes of a gym.  Only a ruggedness to match his pockmarked skin. You'll then notice the glaring red boots beneath him, somehow modern almost HotTopic, adorned with yellow laces knee to toe. And underneath that long white butcher's coat, (A butcher's coat!) is a translucent hint of  the red and blue. That's what truly does it for me. The working class sleight of hand. That ambiguity is parted barely enough to hide the famous emblem upon his chest as if he will at anytime explode from his mortal disguise and unleash some miracle.

Last week we saw him again. He wore a new article of clothing. It was a fleece jacket, unglamorous as his calloused hands, yet an un-ignorable fluorescent orange. On the back, as if he had crafted it himself, was the shield of our caped crusader, and underneath it drawn in a black marker was the word, 'FREEDOM'. I have never been so inspired by that word in my life.

Monster Under the Bed

Last night there was a scratching at the floor beneath my bed. A scurrying or a clammoring. I knew it was the rat.

Two weeks past, I drove homeward with spuds box full of scratching noises against the passenger seat. The rodents inside were being simultaneously indoctorinated to the concepts of inertia and heavy metal. It would have been humorous if there was a flaked potato product named Poor Man's Pal.

These rats lasted longer than the ones I had last year, which I suspect were poisoned by the Czech next door. He was the opposition of savant. Husband of my landlord. Rebel without a brain. Man without a job. The man who's wifemother left alone for two weeks, to come home and find the same pot of coffee she fixed on her departure waiting for her. The man who drops pills and forces me to listen to guitar solos from Toto, but who has never bothered to learn the guitar. The man who shown at my door half naked and drugged to give me a smoke detector. The man with a key to my house! I'd call him strange if he wasn't so entirely predictable. I'd call him strange if I didn't consider him a parody of normal. Poor Man's Pal.

The small creatures learned to warm up to me, learned to groom themselves upon my shoulder. They have little habits, like multiple sneezing, lots of twitching and midnight rassling. A WWF cage match sort of thing. Then they grew slow, and I would come home to find one downed with mucus about its eyes, limp and cool and it would expire and I would take the luke warm creature delicately in my palm and escort its corpse to a hole in my planter. Then I would fix some dinner and eyeball my food extra carefully.

My landlord and her Czech live far away now. The smaller of the two rats is showing symptoms of a disorder to its nervous system. Acting lethargic, antisocial, giving great effort when forced to use the latter half of its body. It was displaying the rodent's equivilant to not cleaning the coffee pot. I placed him inside the door to the crawlspace, the one beneath the bedroom, Die free, little buddy and I placed the elder sister, spry and inquisitive, along side him to keep him warm and spare her life. And now I offer handfulls of seed inside that underworld every once in a while and check to see if it has been split and scattered.

Santa

I don't have the words to describe the hypnosis that eminates from the glow of a christmas tree, but I've never been skilled in the art of illustrating the positive. I believe when people speak of the 'magic of christmas' they are at least indirectly referencing electrical illumination. Leave it to me to deconstruct this holiday a bit farther than anyone has asked for, but that is not my intention. If you ask me, there is nothing as visually stimulating as the sporadic glow concealed of a conifer's needles. I have a Charlie Brown. It's a gangly thing with the bottom half stripped and empty, though its tip nodds defiantly against the ceiling. Come January I will pry apart its pot and descend the roots inside the ground, someplace near last years tree, which has now shed its former Charlie Brown status. Tomorrow I may buy some lights and an extension cord, ignite the (Cuppressus arizonica var. glabra 'Carolina Sapphire'). once again. This time from the frame of my window.

I once asked my mother, If we don't have a chimney, how does Santa get inside?
She told me Santa has a key to the city.

Plausable enough, he just comes in through the door. I don't know about you, but as a child it sometimes creeped me out that this man Santa Claus was going to break into my home one December night and hopefully leave gifts. I mean, do we really know this guy? What if he didn't like our cookies, or god forbid, our politics?

Most Saturday Mornings I hit IHOP for breakfast. I particularly love breakfast houses. They remind me of being far away and ready to embark on some journey to someplace wonderful. On the way to this essential pancake bliss is Soccer Valley. Early morning, you get a decent fog that lingers down there in layers and patches. Some nights the fog forms a tight hazy blanket thirty or forty feet up. You collide with it up the hill and the ethereal congestion rolls up the contours of your vehicle. This morning is Saturday. This is the soccer hub of the county, which means that scores of biomechanoids interwoven with lounge chairs and strollers shamble their way across the road like migrating buffalo.

Due to the high density of soccer folk in the area, there is a steady flow of soccerdads, soccermoms, kids and coaches alike trickling into the IHOP. They all know each other and sometimes bind their parties together. The kids all have the same haircut, the Bad News Bears mop style. Even sitting down they cannot stop kicking, preoccupied and cross-eyed with straws dangling into their drink. The Pakistani doesn't mesh well at the soccer party. Not like back at home where it is called fut-ball. I'll bet there the men didn't talk about lawnmowers so much. I kept trying to pick out his kid.

One of the waitresses is rather good looking. She looks older than me, which means she's probably younger than me. I tell myself I'm going to ask her out when I have the chance.

Outside by the car I see a bluebird and one of my signs in the distance. I've got signs all over this town. Gas stations, strip malls, schools, churches and some are moving around attached to cars. Sometimes one of my signs will drive right by me on the highway. I miss my old job greatly.

The oil change place is down the road some. Usually there's a cute and plump Pakistani girl working there and her fat brother. Their old man has the couter today. Some stop motion animated christmas show is on the tube I've never seen before. It features a donkey with gigantic drooping ears. There's a Bible Story on the table. It's a softened down version of genesis though it gives me a pouncing lust for the illustrations of Eve. Apparently, it never rained in Eden. The water just kind of oozed up from the springs and watered everything. I think that's probably where the big guy fucked up. At the counter is a Budda statue with a dish for your nickels and dimes. It resembles the old man who owns the joint. Aside from being a dick, that is.

I always prefer Lowe's over Home Depot. I just thought I'd point that out. I've got a little PT Cruiser I like to wedge between the larger parked vehicles. I pull in deep so others will think the spot is empty. I'll be writing a book called 'The Karmic Obscenities of Ineffectual Mischief'. Either that or 'Karmic Misadventures in Decedent Camping'. I already have a cover outlined in my head for the latter. It's going to have a kid cooking sausages in the forest while surrounded by all these modern ameneties. He'll have an Ipod wired into his ear and behind him will be a large slathering bear bent on dispensing kill-force to the person who's portable treadmill has ensnared its cub.


Lowe's has got a department called Tool World. I laugh to myself. I can think of so many better places to put that sign. There's another girl in this place that I want to ask out, but I dare not until I have worked out my cold approach on women of less importance.

My Brother is coming today. I suppose we will go out and get wasted or the like. Me and my Brother have a strange relationship. I think our brains are set to completely different frequencies. He likes to talk. He goes into extravagant detail about things you could care less about. It's not so much that, I think. Maybe he's just a shitty storyteller. No matter, he aint heavy, he's my brother. I love the guy.

I hear the trains pass fifteen minutes from another, three in a row, and sometimes I notice long absences laid flat like pennies waiting for their wishes to be crushed out from them. I think it may be the air conditioner, the refrigerator, the wind.

When it comes it will resonate in your belly, smother your heartbeat. You may arch your head to distinguish such chamealeon orgins. You may pause to imagine a great weight being dragged across the earth. Both the slow aching rumble of stones and a thousand scrapes of quarreling metal rolled through the milage that stands between the house and the tracks, summoned from silence, a cage of thunder, stopping not for luck nor lunatic. And after a short period of time, maybe a minute, a horn gasps over the hills and over the houses and threatens to seize you in a trance. You have to love a device that can get away with so much racket.

I have a love affair with large lumbering creatures and their great bellows of distance. Those cries to me are the songs of the unknown. The howls of mammoths sign defiance and freedom and so as that the deafening bugle that resists all decorum.


I have a little, so call it, fantasy.

It's dark and I'm waiting alone by the tracks. The train arrives slow. Not one light gracing its surface or as far as I can tell its interior. Near rolls the shadow waiting until it's upon my nerves before releasing that vicious warning. Behind the inky squares are not faces of people, but faces of things. Hallow damned eyes all attention on their witness, mouths moving not a sound, or maybe they are tapping on the glass with those pale fingers.

So tell me about these 'Darkies'.

What?

Colonel Eiser pulls out a pack of smokes from his shirt. "I'm just being facetious. Do you know how long we've been looking to get our hands on a reluctant racist?"

"I would think that's rather easy."

"I suppose, but you're the first guy we picked up, so I guess it doesn't matter. Here." A cigarette slides across the cold metal table.

"So you haven't been looking that long, I take it."

"We can learn a lot from you. Our side," he says, as he lights his cigarette, we need to understand the mechanics of prejudice."

"You're asking me to be a.. A race traitor."

"Don't hose me. You hate that word." The colonel lights his smoke and leaves his seat. "Prejudice is a funny thing. From the very fact that somebody can possess a prejudice against prejudice, well.., I find that a funny thing, don't you. It's so often associated with ignorance. Intolorance. Other catchy words. Words with power, like the word 'nigger'. They can quickly lose their meaning as they bond themselves with a popular perspective. Nobody's gonna call you ignorant for dehumanizing a hillbilly."

"Of course not. Country fucks are usually deemed as racists. And well.. ignorant."

"Exactly. But racial prejudice is not particularly in fashion right now."

"Of course not."

"But you feel it, don't you?"

I take my first drag. "Menthol."

The Colonel is now gazing out the orange glow of a tiny window, the only illumination in the room. "I thought it would stick a pin in your ass."

"This supposed to get me all heated up or something?" I take deep flouride drag of poison. "I hate this whole race relations thing. The same way we always talk about ethics. I think it's a bunch of bullshit."

"How so?"

"Like you were talking about. It's a fashion. I can't pigeonhole this black guy, but I can badmouth hicks all I want, and everybody will loudly agree with me, that hicks, yes indeed, suck. And I believe that, too. I feel fine about slandering some cocksucker in a pickup with bumper stickers that solicite his reluctance to cry when he shoots animals. Vegetarians are pretentious assholes. Realtors are ex-cheerleaders. College pukes are talentless assholes who worship beer. But it's that same illogical thinking that goes into debasing somebody on the color of their skin."

"But it aint about skin. You would be fine with making a black friend. And it isn't because he's acting white. It's because he's acting like you." He plops down on his chair which immediately crashes over, imbalanced and capsized right onto the cold dirt. "Shit! Where'd my cigarette go?"

"It rolled under that crate. The B3-C3s, how do you know all this?"

The battlescarred Colonel is not immune to the grunts of aging and as I may detect an ounce of arthritis. "Oh, fuck it." He makes a labor of wiping the dust off his pants.

"There's no such thing as B3-C3s, are there?"

"Well, how would you know that, civilian?"

"Cause I can't picture a bunch of soldiers yelling for BC-C3s on the front line. It's kind of a tongue twister. And besides, it sounds kinda stupid."

"Those are my porno mags." He tosses me a flapping comet of smut. "1982 Rachael Klonkid".

"She's a skank."

"Well, it was on top."

"Her name sucks, too. She should be named BC-C3. I think she'd be better off."

"She's Swedish, smartass. And stop ragging on my girls." He relids the old wooden crate. "My wife hates guns. I'd figure she wouldn't find them here."

"When's she gonna be down with that soup."

"Soon. But first you tell me about some more of this racism."

"It's an internal fight. No matter how I act, it always feels like I'm losing. I don't like to say the word, nigger. I don't like to say anything I wouldn't say on MARTA. It feels cowardly, but it goes through my mind. You see some guy crossing in front of your car, a thug, fake limp, gangster clothes, taking his own sweet fucking time all the while he's daring you to hit him with your car. And he makes sure to give you some shitty look on top of all that. You just want to point at him and say, 'There. Right there. That's a fucking nigger. Nihhgg-uhr. Hey nigger. How does it feel to be a nig..

"Okay. I get the point."

"I mean, my dad never taught me this shit. I never heard my father say that word. I respect him for that, too."

"You've just name four reasons to hate this guy. Why do you need to use his race?"

"Who, my father?"

"No asshole. The ni... The guy who was crossing the street!"

"Oh... Well, that's the funny thing. Like you said. Words have power. What do you want me to call him? BAD BOY? See, Piece of shit. Cocksucker. Those just don't work for me. The human mind wants to compartmentalize. It's a human fucking instinct. I don't want this asshole to be an individual." I take another menthol. Reignite the ritual. "I want him to be a fucking stereotype. The lowest fucking kind of human being imaginable. A cookie cutter soul. Completely predictable. One not deserved to be weighed as an individual but who fits perfectly into a predictable box with a polystyrene strip from one of those cheap label makers that says 'college puke, whore, guido, nigger, etc.. "

"You're selling short all of those who share his race. Those good ones who might be your friends. Have been your friends."

"Don't think I don't tell myself this. All the arguments show up to the hearing. The logic is reasoned. I come to a conclusion that my thought is unfair, and I still hate the fucker. Still hate others like him. Compartmentalization."

"Is that even a word?"

"I honestly don't know. It hides my smut, okay."

"So you don't want to be racist. Why not just be that? Not racist."

"That's the answer you're looking for, isn't it?"

"It shouldn't be so hard. You're a rational man."

"The fuck I am! You show me a rational man and I'll show you waste of life. Passion yeilded to mathematics. It's just fucking wrong. You feel someway and that's the way you feel. Everytime I tell myself I'm a tolerent fair minded person, I feel like a fraud. Prejudice is part of the illusion that keeps us alive. We're fucking nuts, okay! We pick our noses and talk to our dogs. We collect pictures of our naked species and keep them in boxes labeled BC-C3s, because we cover ourselves with an excess of clothing that cost an extra twenty bucks if they advertise for TOMMY FUCKING HILFEGGER! I wouldn't have it any other way. I mean, maybe if I saw the real ugliness of racism. I remember once. Some John dude on our bus. He was one of these big fuckers. Supposed to be a skinhead. He ran around with a gang that nobody fucked with. White power. I was a racist too, but these guys were hardcore. I'm riding the bus home and he starts spitting in the hair of this little Spanish girl. A harmless little girl. A goody tushoo, or however you spell that.."

"What?"

"Nevermind. Anyways. Those black fuckers that blocked up the hallways, giving you shitty looks, I could hate them, that was no problem, but for this john dude to sit there and hawk loogies on this girl while she pretended that nothing was happening to her. You have to be a special kind of asshole to do that. Maybe if I would have followed her home. Had seen her tears. Maybe, if I had other friends and seen some really ugly shit happen to them it would be easier."

"Maybe you looked the other way."

"Well of course I did, but some shit you can't look away from. If I had seen some of that, well maybe I'd be different."

"Let's see." The Colonel pulls out a file. Flips a page like a doctor reading my stats. "You've never had a prejudice against Jews. You've shown insensitivity towards gays, but not any real hatred. Mexicans you find okay for some reason."

"They make me feel tall."

"What about when other people talk racist."

"Honestly, it makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes it's downright creepy. You never know exactly who you are dealing with. Maybe the guy is just blowing off steam, or maybe the guy's idea of blowing off steam is dragging a man behind his truck."

"Oh, so he's a man, now?"

"Nobody deserves to be dragged behind a truck and called a nigger."

"Insult to injury, I guess."

"Don't be cute. That's just some sick shit, okay. You were talking about fashion. Sentiments without understanding. People who advertise their tolerance, I just don't fucking trust them. It's called doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Where will these people be when fashion takes a turn. Thoughts can be embraced or returned to submission. When I fight my thoughts, that's what I feel like. Like I forfeit them to submission. Like looking the other way."

The rapping hand of Mrs. Eiser steals my attention toward the door. The iron latch jerks upward and the aroma of split pea soup prys it's way through the heavy moving oak.

Soups ready.

Things have quieted down. We're slurping at our spoons the Colonel hands me some bread. "You've told me enough, for now."

"Can I borrow that jack, then?"

"Sure. The wife's already brought it out to your car. There's a station not but two miles up the road."

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it. Take some soup home with you. She makes good soup, but I can't eat it all."

"It's excellent soup. I will. Oh, and Colonel."

"Yes?"

"Your porn is on fire."

'I'll tell you what. If that ever happened to me, you bite it off. That's what I'd do. You just clamp down and you got the fucker.'

I've never had a piece of broken glass pressed to my throat. The hypothetical argument which has bothered me since childhood, when I was first introduced to the mythos of prison, is the situation where a sharp object is placed against your throat by grip of a poorly manicured hulk, and you are proposed the ultimatum of massaging a cock into your mouth or an incision of that utensil exploring the heat of your windpipe. I'm sure the reality of this gesture goes somewhere beyond what words can describe. Whoever you are, whatever ass you've kicked in high school, it can't prepare you for such a test. And only then can you measure more than an inkling of your integrity. But, poet or not, whomever you ask, everybody will claim a favor for that knife. I have searched the internet, typing keywords into the google search engine such as penis, bit, correctional, assault, and have not come across one example of such an act of defiance, though some quite amusing stuff nonetheless. I am an arrogant man. I have a chip on my shoulder that can kick your dad's ass, but I am also a superstitious person. I am afraid to make such a claim.

The true atrocity of rape is not the violation of our tissues, but could you say the liberties forfeited in the name of our self preservation? One universal mechanism of shame which all share paramount is what we give to fear. The measurement of our true grit is the blood between our teeth.

An Old World interrogator, a good one that is, one who might have been employed by a Catholic Inquisition and not bound by the terms of the Geneva Convention, perform both the role of the good cop and the bad cop. The interrogator talks softly and carries a big stick, frequently striking you in the face with it. Flanking the psyche from opposite sides of the skull. Submit to fear, or submit to charity. The objective of torture being to extract the truth from the subject at a confident level of understanding between both accuser and victim. The line he strives to reach is somewhere between abuse and obscenity. The subject will reach a point where he has learned enough of his own boundaries, that is to say the nearly endless labyrinth of pain and fear of which his resolve cannot surely match, and he is then given an alternate reason, one other than he views as cowardice, which he can expell the truths asked of him.

Possibilities are a bitch. If you could somehow place your ego inside a test tube, (and this should be a pleasant thought because a test tube cannot be forced to suck a dick) hold that tube up to the light, (not without a good laugh, that is), and every control known to man lay outside that window, never heeding to perch upon your scale no matter how you sweettalk it, you are left only to speculate. The great city outside your window hold plagues of headlights heaving one lane to another. How many cocksuckers are among us, woman and man, smoking fags and driving on 93 octane complacency, lamping the dark night and filling it with music? It is not all this dicksucking which makes us ugly. But when you dance that vial in the light, studying between all that is transparent and all that exists in a beautiful spectrum, there is that dark sliver of arrogance.

I once built furniture. I was clumsy with words, but skilled with a chisel. I miss my woodworking tools.

Seems that ash colored stretch of scratch and sniff dirt was there forever. The street that navigated our world was tearing loose from its surface many tiny jagged stones. I never remembered a time when the shallow gutters weren't damned with drifts of pulverized silt and the old street's teeth. When it rained we would damn up puddles with those powdered bones. Puddles large enough to impede traffic. I escorted leaves that were shaped like tiny canoes, chaparone them all the way around the corner until they safely reached hell. What exclamations the tiny invisible frontiersmen must have made at me as they suddenly succombed to the black gurgling mouth.

I must have been in fourth grade when the asphalt trucks came and went. Our roads were suddenly smooth and black and everybody was an overnight skateboard enthusiast. Some of us had slick blades of birch, varnished skeletors and fat fluorescent wheels that hummed on the blacktop. I had a plastic piece of shit called the Coyote III. The GT Coyote III was about the lowest tangible excuse for unmotorized recreation that could be vaguely defined as a skateboard. I'm somewhat convinced until this day that some engineers purposly develop these humiliating wrecks so they can kick off their shoes and fall asleep to the white noise tinkle of shattered dreams. The Coyote III probably had an In-House nickname like THE CHRISTMAS MORNING TEARJERKER or... or.. HAPPY BIRTHDAY ASSHOLE. I kicked the hulking plastic tank into the edge of the asphalt and watched it pantomine calamities that extended the human fucking imagination. And I remember the day when I finally broke that thing, finally graduating to the kid who didn't own a Coyote III.

We were dorks to many, but David Nimble was our dork. The resident fat kid. He wasn't that fat, but fat enough. A little chewy in the face, he told ridiculous stories and was spoiled with toys. It was walking home from school on our new road that me and Rick ran across David Nimble. He passed us up on his bike, backpack humping his rear, his usually nieve chow cheeked face winded and puffy. "Hey, guys", he say's and he lurched ahead of us. And then he ate shit. He just jostled the handlebars and went down and no sooner than he hit the ground did a stream of laughter sail from our lungs. Tangled under that scaffolding and wrestling with a backpack that persistently threw him off balance like a horny golden retriever, David Nimble uttered two fantastic words. It's hot!.

He was referring to the blacktop. The damn kid was trapped under the bike and couldn't get off the hot pavement! It's hot!

As you can imagine this initiated more laughter from us. Two pairs of Converse swaggered up to this wreck in no decided hurry, It's hot!, drunk on the sights of another's misfortune, Rick lifts up on a handlegrip with an expected ease that makes the situation all the more hilarious. Oh, Thankyou!, he exclaims, a melodramatic exasperation worthy of an afterschool special only David Nimble could create. Oh, Thankyou! Grateful eyes, blind to our amusement. Oh, Thankyou!.. So Hot...

He turned out allright, I guess. I can't say the same for me or Rick.

My backyard this morning.

My groceries weave about the conveyor-belt, around the wet spots like regretful lovers, placed like betting chips. Better yet, I'm Napoleon planning an invasion. Orchestrating the warboard with cans of tuna to an audience of magazine faces. The beautiful people are on my right, the ugly people on the left.

Thee baked beans veehl cross the svamp vherre, and flank thee enemy from behhynd. Vee vill squash their ranks, trampling their barricades vith lahge cahns of cream corn, then..

"Excuse me, sir?"

Oh, wait.

I start on the left.

New York Times bestsellers, seasonal items, carbonated soda stacked like Fifth Avenue. There is something provocatively comic about pushing an empty shopping cart in public, yet I have for the life of me failed to ascertain why I am the brunt of this joke. In an area of the store that smells faintly of peppers I find myself surrounded by a multitude of severed lifeforms and swollen pods, all aligned, stacked, hibernating against the walls. I'm a curious person, so I start to prod the produce. With a stick. So soon I am prying the textures like a blind man's brail, navigating the surfaces of a cantaloupes and squash until I finally slip a disinfected fruit into the mouth of a bag and inaugurate my cart with the rolling head.

Why there exists a second story to a supermarket, no less the existence of an elevator is beyond me, but upstairs there is a glass gangway that extends the front of the store from one end to the other. Allthough this hallway is usually empty, I am certain men with hardhats and clipboards make themselves present and write down data when I'm not looking. There could be a malicious science to the displays among us bottom dwellers where clandestine organizations, the same ones responsible for the bar-code, observe our patterns as we meander what equates to a deftly constructed maze. Beneath the razor-thin mustache of a portrait who bears striking similarities ..Look, Cheese!

It's not something expected of a clutz like me, but I maneuver like agraceful fish in the grocery store. The cart becomes and extension of my body, my partner in intricate dance with whom I ooze between transforming windows of opportunity. Those who don't adapt, succomb to abruptness and the loss of momentum. They make tight faces of irritation. It's nice to see other people irritated for a change.

I feel so good with myself, I oblige to help an old man in an automated cart reach anything he wishes from the top shelf. He has a cool hat. He also declines.

"Well, old man. That's a lot of pride you got in your little cart. Hope it doesn't cause you to..TIP....OVER!"

I don't really do that, but I think of it because it's goddamn funny. A shiteating grin has crawled onto my face. You can't swallow a smile like this. You have to wear it like you know what you're doing. If not the other is bound to know it exists solely at his expense. I pretend I'm having a nice day.

Somewhere around the canned preserves, a lady strolls up the aisle pushing a shopping cart. Not just any shopping cart. This one is of a smooth exterior and the hulking plastic associated with children. It takes up half the fucking aisle. About the scaffolding of this colossal child unit scramble toddlers and juice like petrol harriers. Complete with a collapsable baby changing station and cowcatcher, the wheeling decadence possesses every convenience short of a knife-wielding midget strapped to the hood. Of course, leatherclad midgets are not on sale this week. Maybe next week. While the tightface people have long since retreated, I cut through this pulsating aura of sour piss with an icy blade of smug fucking optimism. Completely immune to Preschool Mountain, I buzz by that bitch like nothing. Drawn shutters and abandoned coupons quiver grimly.

Tumbledeals.

I love a good mystery. The Deli awaits me with crumpled and cold little balls of insect. Flies.

Flies on the packaged meats, flies on the packaged cheese, the packaged.. whatever that is. How did all these flies get here? Are the men upstairs responsible for these flies? They're watching me now aren't they? Quick, act casual. Pick up the genoa. That's right, nothing's wrong. Now throw it down with a tired indifference. Pick up a fly and eat it. Wait!

The solution falls like rain. Utop a package of Boar's Head Turkey Breast drops the small body of a fly. Motionless. From the higher reaches of the refrigerated frame are more flies perched precariously for me to part them with a blow. They are roosting near the condensation and succumbing to a temperature induced hibernation, falling asleep and dropping into the goddamn Deli.

Some flies.

My senses are usually cued for the predictable closure. It's not hard to anticipate the subtle changes of score, the inevitable fade to black that releases the completist from their nine dollar obligation of back pain, pent up piss. Sometimes I think the theater should be paying me.

The credits hit the screen like a starting gun. The room rustles with an exodus of murmuring spectres to the nearest convenient exits. I'm the first one of them. Sure, I could sit there with my feet propped up on the seats pretending to be content with the credits. If John Wayne were alive the credits might still be 15 seconds long. More dots than words, with drop-shadow. But times have changed and my patience had run out with 40th fucking Coca-Cola quiz before the whole damn thing even began. The truth is I'm embarrassed to even be here and I want to be the first one out that door. Leave these people in the dark where they belong. I don't want to shuffle among the gossiping nebula of groundlings checking their purses and counting heads. Let them see the back of my heels, the back of my shirt as I disappear out the door. Who the fuck was that guy?

He aint one of us. Nope. Aint one of us.

The old man is standing behind me. I know he's there. He knows I know he's there. Fresh earth slides from my shovel. The spade again strikes down through the humus. A scoop richer, darker than the last.

"They told me I'd find you here."

A smooth slicing sound of microcosms exploding under the blade, expanding this dark universe amassed with a new oxygen.

"We need you back, Jay."

I haven't decided what flora will occupy this particular cavity, but it will be the envy of the garden. Even the bees are exited. They're all about buzz, anyway. They haven't stopped fucking my mallow since this whole thing started. They fall asleep in the flowers like gentleman.

"The other guys. They aint going anywhere. It was always just you."

I spare the earthworms what yield I can afford. They have seconds between the rhythm of cuts and upheavals.

"C'mon, Jay. You aren't a gardener. You're a killer! The sooner you face up to that, the sooner you'll walk away from this miserable shit you call a life."

A red wiggler fits its mutilated body. The blade rests between new midsections geared to an ineffectual panic. I turn to face the voice. "What's the score?"

I haven't seen him in years, but every wrinkle in that grimace is how I imagined it. Stuff like that you don't forget.
"More money.... Asheville? It's up to you."

You could say he knows me more than I know myself. It's why I always trusted him. He stands rigid against time like a father. The patience of a million souls. But no, he hasn't always been there. My bags have. There's a space in the corner where they wait, dusty and full of dreams, awakened by the passage of a long aluminum fly. The contents are immaculately packed. He says nothing.

"I was never any good at this."

"That's what makes you so good at it.", the silhouette speaks. I turn back towards the doorway. I could never argue with his logic. How many people can argue with uncertainty?

It's a full time job. Pays nuts. Plenty of overtime, sweating in the dark. I had become a creature of stability in an unstable world. But I always kept my bags. It's been eighteen days. Eighteen days of loneliness, pinching my guilt for a hamburger, a pack of smokes.

"Remember when we first came to this place?" He grips the wheel with sweat not his own. "You had what, maybe a hundred bucks and a car." Another pothole jolts the cruiser. "You tried to sell the thing up on 78. You didn't even have the title. Two days later you went back home."

"I was a dumb kid."

"Yeah, but here you are. You were always drawn to this place. One day you're gonna figure out why."
"But you still got a lot of catching up to do."

My resume shifts by my side.

"Yep. You've been to some beautiful places."

This shit was inspired by Rambo III

You ever owned a wolf shirt?"

"A wolf shirt?"

Zach gestures with his knife. The exacto blade cuts the air, his hands rise and decend in a succinct movement any extraterrestrial culture would instantly recognize as a wolf shirt. "Yeah, you know", he punctuates the staccato of an engineer,"it's a shirt with wolves on it. Like, one is howling up at the moon and another is kinda,.. lookin away in the distance. A wolf shirt!"

I get it finally. "Oh, yeah! They're black. And they got the blue mist n' shit."

"Yeah"

"And there's one standing up on top of a rock."

"Yeah"

He's got this far away look in his eyes. Like the contemplative wolf that's usually lookin off in the distance, and hell we both do. I've never given a wolf shirt much thought before. It was just one of those things that are automatically presorted by your psyche. I mean, they have wolves on plates and on keychains. A friend of mine once had a wolf tapestry. I've even see them on camper vans.

It's usually three wolves and they're usually engaging in some arcane ritual of pack bonding. The protector. The watcher. The philosopher. Some higher aspect of communion us dumb humans are not privileged to. You never see a shirt with a wolf taking a shit or biting its nuts.

"Sometimes I want to get one of those, but then it's like.." Zach finishes this sentence with his face.

Yeah, I know what you mean.

We howl with laughter.