I have to give it to Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Joe the Plumber asked one of the only relevant questions during the entire McCampain. And Sarah Palin did indeed point out an important relevancy regarding intellectuals. Yes, some of us are elitists. Snobs if you will. I have ever been so eager and in practice to write off the country folk of this nation as bigoted, ignorant and unsophisticated, inbred, mouth breathing imbeciles, and to a certain aspect this is entirely true, but that conclusion is no lesser a sin than that Sasquatch strength crutch often wielded upon the aluminum siding of a trailer as the accusation of racism.

One of the things I will credit towards the so called rednecks of these hills, beyond their disdain of three syllable words, is that they people will never turn down an extended hand. I admire it, and in the wee hours of the morning I welcome that camaraderie into my friendly stupor. So I enjoy speaking to different people. People of all cultures, races and social branches. Part of it, I admit is my tendency to disprove my own bigotry, and part a sick curiosity and still another part is the charity betrothed upon the mentally retarded. Hey what, you say! You cynical imp! Your mixed messages are mixed and frothy of mixation. I challenge you, sir, to a dual of apathy! Well chew on this. While introspection is ever much the equalizer as an aging British operative with a .45 and a launching knife, audacity is the God of Comedy.

I have lost the point of this discussion. It lies somewhere in drunkenness, a beautiful place where logic and that second thing you make up to complete a cliche sentence are irrelevant in the face of a punchy laughability.

If you want the point, and I'm not sure there is one at this .... juncture, is that I have met country folk who appear backwards and retarded but who still refrain from the 'N' word and I have met the same who I have found myself in humor, entertaining out of aspect of camaraderie, who by their misfortune, have slipped between the cracks of a recognizable mental retardation full of smiles and softened signature and that of the genuine ignorant, who sadly are labeled as the latter because of their lack of childish mirth and wonder. As anyone can see when talking to them, they are not merely, or offhandedly suggested as retarded, but genuinely incompetent of reasoning. And yes, I now believe this is actually the result of inbreeding. All you mutts out there, you Heinze 57s. Be thankful of your promiscuous genes. Thank Lord Christ, Allah and that cross eyed dude that bags your groceries. Or not, because I can achieve in three hours what four generations of undiscriminating fuckage can inflict upon the world.

I started watching TV again. This was not a significant decision in any way but there was one in the hotel room so I watched it nightly. It made me rethink why I stopped watching it in the first place. Of course I was not naive enough to expect a cease of elimination challenges and one on none closet confessions of "say it to my face"land. One grievance (well two if you count that neverending bowflex commercial) I had forgotten about was the nearly constant repetition of Pharmaceutical ads. I guess there was a time when drugs were given a scientific name and passed on to the public despite their pronunciation. As their advertisement potential grew, companies began to recruit sharp shooting Ad specialists with half pregnant cocktail napkins. If you want to explore this metaphor any further, consider the offspring, these little hybrid words like Singulair, Celebrex and Naselcrom, which aren't clever at all if you try to figure out what the fuck a "Crom" is. (the God from Conan?)

There's one Ad that particularly bothers me. Some guy that looks like a tennis racquet salesman from 1981 strolls out of the everwhite. Whenever he drops the product name he taps his nose (ding). It bothers me in the way that Dr. Phil speaks and forces me to imagine how bad his breath smells. Aside from that, I'm surprised there are still houseshopping programs on TLC. Coming up next: A Suicide Story

On the plus side, I now have a crush on the Progressive Insurance girl.

In the past week I've seen three, what are sometimes referred to as varmints, stumbling around in the broad daylight. They closely resemble the animal from Groundhog Day. So I'm throwing out a groundhog watch or nationwide "ALERGENCY" for those of you who may be concerned with these events and that's all of you, because I've never seen a groundhog before in my life and now, well, it could be nothing.

I get a lot of weird ideas lately. A cigarette brand with the slogan - Burns slow when you're freezing your butt off

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A bad ass TV biker named CORE. Tristan Corey Gallager, the street romping hero with a murdered family and a chip on his shoulder that could kick your dad's ass. He rides through Texas towns looking for trouble to clean up. He's got a straight laced on the sidekick ex-cop known in those parts as Chocolate Thunder. He comes in handy at least once an episode when our protagonist needs a little tough love advice or a license plate pulled. This is the last time I'm doing this, Core. I must be a daaamnn fool.

Core has the grace and the good looks, where MoonDog has the big greasy muscle, a kind of Randall Tex Cobb lookin fella with a hog dirtier than his underdrawrs.

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I'm kind of guessing Randall Tex Cobb's headshot incorporates a dirt & grime theme. He might hand them to his agent with a coating of blood stains and grease. A kind of subtle, HIRE ME OR ELSE.

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Somewhere in Arizona there's probably a hot shot sheriff who denys any television or entertainment to his inmates. Instead he gives them bubble wrap. Walking through the cells with your eyes closed is akin to touring a Rice Krispies factory.

I haven't been much for words lately. I pass them out on resumes. One man laughed in my face. A woman said, "bless your heart". I'm not sure which response I liked better. People wave to one another here. From the winshields of their cars, from utop their horses and over their canes. The horses blink at you with obsidian lashes. The other day I waved at a dancing chicken. I may soon be that dancing chicken.

Apart from the accommodations, Asheville is every bit as beautiful as I imagined it.

My WiFi is threaded through dial-up. From my window, the drizzle meets the intersection as a steady hiss under the rumble of traffic. I'm lied out in a motel room that should have undergone renovations 30 years ago. Cedar paneling, faulty plumbing and a Zenith that likely witnessed the Kennedy assassination. The cobalt lens stares back, daring me twist its chapped polystyrene knob. I've promised myself not to do this until my expectations reach the promising agreement of an instantaneous explosion accompanied by the static screams of Lucile Ball. "We are locusts - I am Legion!"

The outside is done up in a hokey old west meets worlds largest ball of twine kind of feel. The balusters are dressed like tree trunks, and on closer inspection appear to be authentic. The parking lot is a looped driveway with a giant neon cowboy who is puffing on a cigarette and giving commuters the stink eye. The cowboy is barefoot. The nucleus of the parking lot is a swimming pool encircled by a flimsy reed fence. I half expect to see the corpse of Roy Rogers floating there with his pecker jammed in one of the jets.

When this milk expires, I'll be in North Carolina

It is very revealing to me that this post is difficult for me to write. Not in the way of sentimental obstacles that the phrase 'difficult for me to write' usually invokes and has been accepted to indicate. It may have something to do with all this freedom or that I can only grasp the ideal in summary. Or simply because there is so much I want to tell. It is also difficult to write because I have spilled cider on my keyboard and the dry air has jammed the keys together. Besides the annoying disfunction of the keys and the habit the cursor has of running away from me like a dog when the shift key gets cozy,  what also bothers me is the sound of snails masturbating when I type.

I cut the strings one Friday afternoon and all the apprehension dissolved like rain on the desert, like snot in the shower, like hamsters in a wood chipper. My lifeline is disconnected. I haven't any longer burdens of indecision. I quit my job when jobs are the next sliced fucking bread, but I feel like the first one off a sinking ship. For one reason, it will prove to be a commute problem as I move farther and farther away from the state of Georgia. There are four cities on the inexpensive side of Appalachia. Asheville, Charleston, Pittsburgh and Roanoke. I have my eye on all of them and the day after Thanksgiving, I may see them.

Online, I have found a site with a thousand films in the Russian language. It reminds me of when I was a child, young and  bereft of understanding about the world, how a scene would seem so unfamiliar to me and I would constantly be pressed to nag my mother again and again something to the effect of 'why the fuck did he just do that?'. As of now I am watching a movie about a young village girl who tried to  hang herself in the woods but was instead hit in the head by duck. She ran away with the duck and now some newly wed is waving his brides undergarments in the night and seems to be lamenting the consummation.

There is little that compares to the crisp light of the LED. When I was young, engaged in the business of untangling Christmas lights, I would usually be struck by the concentration of the lamps as they were bunched together, smelling of the attic and ceremoniously plugged into the outlet to test their integrity. It was a glowing heart. A handheld ember. This droplet I shaped from the twigs of a persistently nasty batch of Privet that grows in the back. The branches are green and easily woven through one another. You are looking at nothing more than branches and a string of lights. I am proud of it.




I have been collecting these as I run across them. As far as I am concerned, the stranger the fruit, the more Halloween. I will be carving them.

I've never been one to bite my nails. There was a moment long ago where I placed my thumbnail into my mouth and attempted that very exercise. I immediately discovered how vast my ignorance was regarding the baffling talent. It has always been the clippers for me. The polished chrome utensils engraved with Revlon or Avon or some other unmanly brand name that ended in 'on'. I have several times employed the service of scissors for this task and thought myself a Mountain Man for the achievement. I had once by accident nearly trimmed a nail with a 60 pound roll of barbwire though it was the wrong end of the nail and altogether a rather haphazardly executed direction. This latter experience had proven to me that I was indeed NOT a Mountain Man.

I don't have a schedule or any token words penned next to the full moons. How it happens is almost immediate as if suddenly by observation there is a pressure, an uneasiness about my fingernails. A lack of wind on my fingertips. I incessantly curl my fingers over the cuticles of my thumbs and pry the nails apart from the imaginary gum pressing beneath them. Each tap of the nail is amplified like a jackhammer, every scrape a distortion of their integrity and I feel the nails sweat until I get my hands on the tiny chrome alligators and hastily snip away at my fingers, sending the crescents down the sink.

When I grew up I had this friend who's house I rarely entered. It was dark and full of sharp corners and more importantly, it was forbidden. His folks were not a mentally deranged pair of recluses. But they were Christian and they were conservative and they did express a disdain for me when I wasn't around. I was a weird kid. This is where my prejudice against conservatives and religion began, but we all know that Republicans have always had a lousy PR department.

I've never been a fan of manners. Maybe I lacked them or maybe I took too much offense to having my hand slapped and I never felt an urge to appease those newly imposed expectations out of anything but fear and so I have a large grievance about the dictation of morals and a fucking hatred for those who dictate them.

This is obviously a big political year and it is without a doubt, in a climate such as this, inevitable to find oneself asking questions about their own politics. Having a tremendous resource at your fingertips such as the internet, a place where in mere minutes a person can learn every aspect about the reproductive cycle of a Gypsy Moth, should in all sincerity be enabling to the search of unbiased facts on a candidate. Sadly this is not so. And so the information I seek is deeply mired in bibles of rhetoric, misinformation, diversion, biased negation of facts, psychotic raving ad hominems and death threats. As if having two hundred years wasn't enough time to sort our shit out we seem eternally undecided as to which is the better party. This leads me to believe that the science of politics is not measured in facts but emotions. They are only argued as facts. And in this I see two main sentiments, the factions we know of today as democrat and republican.

General Observations of Democrat VS Republican

Most minorities are democrats
Most city people are democrats
Cat people are democrats
Hunters are republicans
Truck drivers are republicans
Vegetarians are democrats
Environmentalists are democrats
Artists are democrats
Military are republicans
Cops are republicans
NASCAR fans are republicans
Goths are democrats
Christians are republicans
Whiskey drinkers are republicans
Comedians are democrats
Celebrities are democrats


I guess the point of this list is, Is there a Wiccan gun-toting M.A.D.D. Mother out there? And equally important, Why not?


It appears to myself that I hold personal freedoms in higher regard than financial freedoms. I am more insulted by a woman who wants to outlaw abortion than a man who wants to put his fingers on my paycheck. My interest is in personal liberties, though both parties seek to remove some of these.


My political stance: Hypocrisies not excluded

I am pro gun
Pro abortion
Secular
Anti affirmative action
Pro death penalty

I believe when you take away a person's right to burn the American Flag that it burns anyway

That Christmas celebrations should not be removed from schools but the Commandments should be removed from the courthouse

A store owner should be able to sell alcohol past 2 AM.

A person should be able to ingest any drug they choose.

Corporations should be regulated

Anybody who questions your right to disagree with our government by calling you a traitor should have a living bald eagle inserted into their asshole

That people who use the argument "if you're not doing anything wrong, then you don't have anything to worry about" should choke on a turd that insults their masculinity

Politicians who pass religious and unconstitutional laws should be immediately fired... out of a cannon... that's attached to a submarine.
After it has been filled with acid and tossed into a volcano on fire.

They call it a gas shortage, or they call it panic and maybe they call it politics, but I would wager on all three. The gas stations have surrendered, thrown down their numbers and bore their blank white slates. And so we all go about our business but our business has gotten strange as if it might grind to a halt during two miscalculated glimpses. The buzz in the air is akin to before a thunderstorm. How it smells of water and electricity, sirens and a faint excuse for throwing television sets through glass. Not that I've ever sought the compulsion, but it's nice to have options.

I used to dream of a world without cars and broken concrete, the atrophy of cities and the clop clop clopping of horses, shitting on those white tar arrows and trimming at the grasses that grow where they shouldn't. I have a stupid mind.

More broadly the term Great Depression is being thrown around the wind and I guess these things don't bother me as much as they should, because I've been planning on packing and getting the fuck out of dodge. So I'm down to one excuse and maybe I need that final shove in the ass to get it all going and if you're not with me, what the fuck do I care. I'll be going north, maybe to Pittsburgh, maybe to Michigan or maybe halfway, and maybe they'll have different names when I get there, but I've always fancied the life of a drifter and my feet are getting oh so itchy.

I can tell things are getting dark outside. Each glance at the time is a new curseword out my mouth as with every recalculation of my energy. God, I hate to lose time. A hard kick to the trashcan and the room absorbs a cloud of dust and another half hour of my life disappears in the form of that shower I wasn't going to take. I throw a boxcutter to the wall which I immediately need, driving me to the humiliation of picking it up from a tiny wreckage. This is what defeats me. The Aesop like insults. Those well chosen and innocuous targets propelled into the Rube Goldberg of fuck-yous driving a callous and mocking escalation of consequences. The words from my mouth have lost coherence. They awkwardly shit on all the violence. "Fuck your shithead" And here all I wanted was a something loud and inconsequential. A rightful smack to the world around me, where I cannot drive a word taboo enough to flinch its damned eyes. A graceful glove to the face of fate for miring me in this overtime. That's all I ask. So it is Aesop himself, that Goddamned lecturer preaching from the safety of his perch, Aesop I am flogging with these worldly commodities, who won't give a second of satisfaction with not three of condescension.

Times like these I grasp an imaginary pipe in my hand. I see some imaginary assailant, one who tries to steal my life shrewdly in the loophole of some legal belittlement. Some sorry son of a bitch who puts a face to all these fables. All the misfortune in the world wiggling its dick through a hole the shape of this man and every angry word withheld for the sake of kindness comes raining down in a rod of lead. I scare myself sometimes. It's true. Because I know that lead pipes are real and men like the ones I've bludgeoned in my mind the same. And I sincerely hope that we never meet. You see, there's this place behind my eyeballs that when I play this scenario, it will momentarily jerk and squeeze sending my pupils slightly skyward. It's all about instant reversal. The film rereels and that rod comes rushing down in black and white, audacity knocked away from whomever is unlucky enough to play asshole with me, and in an instant of black blood that rivals the creation of the universe a mountain of understanding is pushed through the size of a dime. With the years spent building our lives it is unfair how easily it can tumble down like a cheap curtain. A bottlecap off the gameboard. And God help me, how would I stop? How would I stop when I realize that my life has disappeared in a cloud of dust and the cause of it lay right in front of me? How could you come back from being that fucking animal?

I have this fear that a confession will lead to manifestation. Call it a feeling. A prerequisite justification. Like how those Columbine kids tore a hole in the chain link fence and all these other bullied miscreants saw a way off the chessboard. So no sympathies for me here. I don't want honey in that hole.

You may have seen these.



This man.


This poor son of a bitch. This is a man battling Aesop. Those who cannot understand a frustration this violent will stand at a distance, leaving their masks at their desks, their faces drooping at the sides. I take particular notice of the hens and how they cluster together at the fringes of the spectacle. Noticeably distressed yet not fleeing. And why would they? This is good entertainment. Watch how the men search for sticks and as the scene escalates from courtesy to calamity, the order dissipates into tribe of primitives surrounding the fearsome dance of a Shaman.

He diverts his aggression for others in favor of destroying the inanimate. The supervisor is promptly struck with a keyboard but he is spared any additional harm by the office supplies. A man speaking right to God, the offender himself. Such a task cannot be done in grace I say, but at least this man possessed a large middle finger.





Exhibit B


If I were judging these men in a court of law, I would think the footage to favor the defense. This man is a lucky son of a bitch to have a human opponent. I would like to see this man set free and the victim incarcerated for underestimating the passive aggressive.

There's a storm raging inside my chest cavity. A Turkish traffic jam. Let's say a second serving of kebab has jackknifed the causeway spilling my insides with rice, pasta and large amounts of stupidity. I lay awake till 4 am like a python with one less pig in the vicinity summoning burps from my windpipe. There's little more pathetic than a contrived belch, people. String them together in the dark like a chorus of ineffectual little toads and you'd have something very funny if an observer could only keep their bloodlust in check.

TruSleep Uses Cadavers in Photos

Allegations of TruSleep, Inc., North America's largest mattress manufacturer, were blown wide open this week on follow up to claims of the mattress company's use of cadavers in their product photography. Attorney General Lance Whollen, made public statements announcing an investigation into TruSleep's practice, saying "We know that TruSleep has been using cadavers, what our investigation team is unwilling to release is exactly how many and for how long this has been occurring." Witnesses say the cadavers could number in the hundreds. Elliot Long, a former employee to TruSleep's marketing division, states that the practice has been ongoing for at least two years. The time when Elliot was first promoted to marketing and image department. Elliot was hired to make deliveries of mattress products to funeral homes with which TruSleep, Inc. had established accounts with.

from police statement taken on 8/6:

"The funeral parlors were said to use our twin foam insulating cushions to line their coffins. The first time I made a 'delivery' I was instructed to reverse into a garage and wait. A burly man in a pinstriped suit came up to my side of the van and instructed me to look forward. He told me they would be done unloading the vehicle shortly and then he called me a 'Fucking Sissy'. A 'fluff boy'. A fluff boy was an insider industry term. It meant somebody who was familiar with upholstery but had little experience with the viler nature of the business. At the time I thought nothing of it, because I was listening to Sheryl Crow."

"It's not as crazy idea as you'd think", says Larry Whitmeyer, CEO of SpanishPly, a well known competitor of TruSleep Mattress. "You want people to visualize your product and associate it with 'cozy'. Nothing portrays these essential qualities like a dead woman. Or a dead man. It's hard to fake, which is why a good sleep model has an elevated bottom line. The models are all union affiliated and don't come by cheap." If TruSleep had circumnavigated these obstacles they have done so slyly. Evidence of false contracts have recently come to light, the donation of a body would construed as voluntary given the fine print and easily hidden among the mysticism of US mattress law. Sources say that there were selective purchase contracts. Employees were instructed to supply these contracts to persons who had appeared to have a 'comfortable' feel to them. "Somebody you would want to snuggle with but looks like they might soon overdose on heavy barbiturates." , was what one employee Mike Lanther attested. "It was written on the back of the counter." These contracts accumulated in the thousands, giving TruSleep a selective queue from around the nation to choose from come an untimely death. This Thursday, authorities seized the contracts from the vault of NarcoFile, LLC, a subcontractor with a long relationship rumored with TruSleep, yet who's services remain questionable and broadly cloaked under the term 'finders service'.

I met a man today of much girth and excitement. His full-tilt pinball eyes explained to yours truly, that aside from ethanol, electricity, vegetable oil and cocaine, it was entirely possible to run your car on Hydrogen. Yes, like the Hindenburg. What he explained to me emphatically, was also that essentially, a person could dramatically increase their gas mileage exponentially (50%) by adding hydrogen into their fuel mixture. If he were dressed nicer, I would be convinced I was speaking to Billy Mayes.

In the parking lot, unseasonably cool weather moved about us. I have seen some funny things in this parking lot. Damaged cars, search and seizures, auto theft, internal bleeding, but none of these things would hint what mechanical snake-oil was holding me from my lunch. The man reached into the mess that pressed outward from his cab and yanked from the rummage, yanked, possibly the coolest thing I have seen in a years.

Before I could properly react, he thrust in my arms like a darling infant this eye-peeling contraption. What teetered in my hands seemed to be a small nuclear fission reactor sealed inside of a Mason Jar. Two hoses dangling from its rim. Bolts penetrated the sealant, thrusting downward inside a scaffolding of electrodes and wire. A core of lattice so carefully woven by this ramshackle man. It was architecture inside of a diamond, mesmerizing and spotless. Many times his meaty finger would forcefully bow down to the crystal Mecca, this Peeler of Eyes, Magnet of Fingernails. Then he whirled quickly fro and engaged the mighty steel springs of his hood, ushering forth rusty salutations of the levitating panel, and his finger directs me to a device like I hold in my hands, resting full with preserves and amber weal, bolted to his engine compartment, a cherished molar crowned with gold.

He tells me about baking soda, electrolyte and the splitting of the atom! The wondrous, astonishing, UNPHANTOMABLE miracle of machinery! The stupendous, exciting, clean burning marvel of the next millennium, Hydro Fuel! And God, am I sold. He cranks the ignition and I unshield my eyes to a concoction of bubbling alchemy and jerking hoses. His finger again grants me a tour of this Hindenburg. And about right then I couldn't give a shit about vehicle emissions and affordable mileage, cause though I might not of known it, I was gifted a glimpse straight into the silver lining.

The mad science tells me this. There may be delicate joys laced into tough times. If a petroleum crisis gobbles our confidence, we will at least be spared another suburban coach and afforded another dose of that old fashioned American ingenuity and hopefully some fucking purpose.

This post is not related to my story of the Beagle, which is true. This is maybe my third attempt at writing a long standing work of fiction. A short story over 30 pages. Maybe even something larger. I would like for once to write something large, even if it sucks.


Outside the city limits of Eugene is a diamond sign with a serpent like signature, one slick swatch of black forecasting a road with a tendency to squirm. There is an intersection here, rarely busied, quiet and waiting for something to happen. I have rarely seen the hour here which a person can misdirect his time, counting fireflies by the dusk where the lost dog posters twist against their crucifixions.

What a peculiar business this finding of dogs. It is a quiet whistle soaring over hills and hounds and manifesting on our utility poles in stark alphabets, as if those rigid spikes which nailed our own conversations to the earth were a showcase for loneliness. A two cent tablet stapled to the speed of electricity and under that a dog pissing beneath its own name. There is a universal joke here but until I figure out the punch line, I‘ll never be sure what I‘m laughing at.
So we publicly decry our longing with a lazy picture and a telephone number, what’s to stop us from pinning our desires to them? How many wedding dresses would be dancing in the moonlight, next to hammered pictures of our younger selves? Our dreams?

An average lost pet poster endures about a month of rain, sleet, snow and hail before finally disappearing into the breeze. One moon to the other. They are rarely torn down by the sign of relief.
Mutts in particular are the most easy to recognize and if you ask me, the most likely to be found. But the most significant dog I can recall was not a mutt. It was a Welsh Corgi with moving eyes. I saw those eyes from the road.


Seeing as nobody was behind me and more importantly, that I didn’t care, I stepped outside my truck and made my way to the telephone pole. Mildly relieved that I was not hallucinating, though not thoroughly creeped out, I would swear the temperature outside had dropped a few degrees as I stood investigating this poster. Hampers the Corgi had eyes swimming with ants. They marched up the creosote in a tight line, along the pulpy tear in the paper and stealthily matched the dark seams of some neglected toy, over the dark patch on his ears and congregated onto the pooch’s eyes, giving them a bulging liquid dimension. There are sometimes a fellow can lay down a few bucks on a particular certainty. What I would have wagered would be more than a few bucks that this dog was dead. In fact, I was momentarily overcome by the urge to pin a twenty to that telephone pole and blow away the ants. I did neither.

Apart from Hampers, there is the old man. Sometimes this man sits near this road on our more pleasant days. His bike is something of a cross between a Schwinn and a piñata. He rests it against the rusty guardrail, an adornment so ineffectual its only purpose seems to be supporting the tawdry bicycles of old men crazy enough to stop here. The bike man looks at you with the eyes of an imbecile. Not a smile or a lift of the hand will he spare in your direction. I gave him a hello one afternoon. I was pumping gas up the road and he was plopped on there on the concrete. He was peeling from his drink a label gone soft and I watched him carefully paste it onto the rim of his bike. A little bit of crazy a day, I assume.

“Hello“, I say.

He told me to shut the fuck up.

Since then I never liked him. Not so much for the remark, though it didn’t give him any credit, but for the way he looked at me, which along with catching me off guard, was a bald attempt at reading things that were none of his business. Things that are none of his business or understanding he expects you to hand over to his empty brain. I’ll tell you what it is. He’s like a peeping Tom, and he makes you feel like a pair of little girl’s panties. It’s solicitous! But he doesn’t head off into the bushes when you point at him and scream, he keeps watching.

I see him up at the mart every once in a while, him and that damn bike and I wonder how he got as crazy as he is. I make sure whenever I see him, that I’m at least vaguely thinking about kicking his teeth in. There would not be much to stop his head from caving in. It is that thought that woke me up the other night in a sweat. That while I am looking at him giving him the boot to the mouth vibes, his head will start contracting. Just like a bladder. It would inflate again and breath at me through the hollow eye sockets of a cheap rubber mask.


Asshole.

The day I discovered that garbage could be stacked into mountains was the day I stopped worrying about our country's waste disposal dilemma. Maybe a couple summers back, during one of my jaunts into the countryside, I came to the county landfill. Despite this bulge on our horizon, this beacon of piled up refuse, it is not easy to find the landfill. You might first circle the imposing dome several times, gauge with each narrowing route the adjoining roads that look most inviting to change a tire. You have to look for the roads that no other municipality would want. These roads are usually banked by discarded dishwashers and weeds that are encased in film of dust. The roads may take sudden right angles, as if the gods are playing a game of scrabble with your car, only the god's are illiterate and prone to using Cheeze-its in lieu of more traditional parcels. I find places like this strangely beautiful. I would guess it is the lawless feel of the wastelands, the sense that the very rules of physics can be discarded, cheated on like a scrabble game at the mental ward.

On this road that was half dirt, half god knows what, I came upon a beagle, probably a runt, not more than a pup. The dog's eye was diseased and bulging from the socket. The young dog looked at me, with its other eye, curiously and with a longing I may never forget. I drove on, probably leaving a thin film of dust clinging against its coat, and went home.

Sometimes I think about that dog. I wonder what would be if I had pulled over and invited the dog into my passenger seat. Would it be here with me tonight, my one eyed dog? I admit, even at this late hour, I have a faint urge to drive back to the landfill and see if that dog is not still waiting for me to turn around.

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.