Bentbrook, KS

2010-04-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

Bonn, Germany

The only two public bathrooms in Bonn I have visited in this first month have special lights installed to prevent mainline injections. One’s in the university palace, the other under the train station, both flooded totally with the same radioactive glow of blue light that leaks through the doorway gaps. The whole idea is that this blue ligh reflects off the skin and blinds the addict’s eyes from tracing the oxygen rich veins down his or her arm. Looking at the mirror in these bathrooms will hollow your skin to a dull milk color and make you look for only a second that you’re the one who’s been foiled again by German anti-drug techniques.

I go back after this pause to the room where a 100+ group of Program students from the far east and the far west were received to learn how to navigate a webpage for course registration for international classes, all of us now with one-month’s experience in Bonn. One month ago, we all were in this same room watching another bilingual presentation in German and English with the windows open to the evergreen, manicured, and trash-free lawn, after just being received in the central court of the palace in which Kaisers of the disintegrated German history were also once received. There’s no ceremony like the one in my head with the horns and complexly dressed ladies overlooking from open windows. We’re clustered and fragmented, all remotely similar in clothes, but already blindly picking who we’re going to be best friends with for the next month of the introduction course, which is now over. I picked a girl, Sam, with eccentric antique class and a 6’6’’ man who picked up a nickname, Buffalo Dan, immediately on arrival. This is because he is from Buffalo, where the people, according to Buffalo Dan wear sweat pants and eat chicken wings all day. He’s told me twice about a story he’s been trying to finish about a cat that gets stuck on the moon but finds it better and wants to stay. The other in the circle was a girl who many have not seen in weeks. It’s rumored that she wants to be a German teacher but hates Germany and lays in bed for days only skyping her boyfriend in America, waiting for our departure day. The German past tense of skyped is geskyped.

In the long presentation hall of today, the view to the Rhein is again just out of reach, and the international staff draws the billowing peach curtains which run the 6-meter-high windows, leaving the windows open for a good chill. It’s dark so that we clearly see for the second time this month the mood graph. And I prove to myself that my mood meter is haywire. The Mood Curve is a rollercoaster of a chart in the PowerPoint presentation. Spanning the whole experience of a semester, it presents the whole group with their emotions: how they’ll probably feel for the next five months, so as to tell us don’t worry when you feel bad, feel like you don’t belong, feel like you’ve made a mistake, feel set back years, feel misunderstood for walking, feel like there was never any reason for you to leave, feel like you're stepping on flowers when you’re in a group with eight other Americans you have to take the bus with to class, feel bad when you finally get used to it and then have to go back home, how you feel when your memories of home grow stark, linear, and infinitely nowhere, how you feel when the present makes you tired and forgetful, how you feel when a foreign eye becomes a monster that is out for your soul, how you feel when you’d rather be deaf then here a word you don’t understand, how you feel when the ground beneath you sways and dances you like an exotic dream, how you feel when you hear a voice you’ve never heard, how feel when you finally get to see how it ought to be. It rises and sinks past days specified by our excursions, the highest being the day we tasted six glasses of wine in a basement. The next slide on the first day was the one where they talked about beer. Today is the lowest point on the curve. I know that the most of the students from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan don’t know English or German well at all. The Chinese do, though.

The class breakfast this morning with Frau Paust, whose resemblance to my mother is something I sometimes brag about, also marks the end of the first month. Last night I was told by the friends I’ve made how easy I am to embarrass, how often I just need to let go, because after all, I’m in some place I’ve never been. This morning she asked why I was always so afraid. I explained away my fear of surface relationships, something she noted was nearly impossible to pass in five month’s time. This is an especially difficult task, and I explain to her the American ideal of Study Abroad, the experience of endless befriending, endless minutes of sheer shock from the fun that comes with leaving America for change. But now I’m excited. Tomorrow I am going by bus (German trains are too expensive) to Berlin to see Sarah, whose year-long absence from home breaks hearts in Kansas, whose earned respect is expressed through long sighs of friends at home who need to see her now, but who I get to see.

On the plane here I watched the night as I was hurled into the future to find myself reverted to a child-like status. Being abroad is turning back a clock but drinking more. A balance made nearly impossible by not being able to communicate to anyone but people of the same status.

I crept to the kitchen late one night to open the door with the same involuntary embarrassment I with which I take every step on this land. I opened to the door to a dark room with a dark sofa and the dull outline of a figure in the chair. This pause would have lasted ages and likely been forgotten had the man in the chair in the dark not gently told me to come in. I gestured to the light switch and with minimal German requested that I flip it on. He was there on the phone making small Cameroonian French noises into the microphone. I avoided contact and swigged from a cardboard juice container. I still question whether this looks barbaric as it does when anyone else but you notices it. This could or could not be a sign of American upbringing. This question becomes a clout of worry that seems at a constant glandular drip on in the frontal lobe. This then makes it very hard to not be anonymous where ever you decide to place yourself.

Naoya is a Japanese student with loud camouflage and thick denim pants. His face looks rendered. His hair is buzzed and mowed with asymmetrical patterns across his temples, where his smile can reach when he laughs. But with a blink and a look back, his mouth is closed and stern. One day in class, after he spent the last night with his razor, he stood up to present to the class over Japanese religions in 15 minutes. Frau Paust sprang up and waddled over to grip his head and gaze at the two and half or so lighting bolts cut out of his thin whiskery head. She explained the dangers this symbol and the SS, which would possibly make him the wrong friends. Always in fun she has to explain, but being a German, she had to tell him to change it. After class he went home and made a few more cuts in with the same erratic gestures and it came out looking like bows, his head wrapped like a present. Naoya is now gone, having only stayed in Germany for one month. After visiting Berlin, all he could say about it was that is was very, very sad. I will remember the day I walked by the giant lawn in front of the palace, explaining to him in broken German the feelings of smoking pot, aided by the wobbling of my head, which he repeated and smiled to his temples.

The Cameroonians, Dany and Erik, may or may or may not live together in the same room. This has been a common question among the American girl across the hall and me. They walk in and out of the door at different times, are often together, and are often in the same room. These rooms are very small and built for one. If they do live together, an amazing sense of personal space these men must have. One is taller, smiley, and sings deeply throughout the halls. He sings Lady Gaga very deeply. I cannot escape a discussion over her, but my opinions are forever concealed and irrelevant to this man. The other never shows his teeth and speaks English with demand. They question why Americans learn another language. He does have a point. It is mostly in jest, why we are here. Sam from Michigan is having one big adventure just across the hall. I later learned that Erik studies mechanical engineering and left to go to Frankfurt to study. They were indeed living together. I danced at an small African club with him and other sturdy Cameroonians and Tunisians on the other side of the Rhein. Inside was a humble portal to world under think sand colored arches and mirror in which everyone saw themselves. Ben from Wisconsin was told, “You must show America your dancing.”

We arrived later that night a Turkish all-night restaurant, one of thousands across Germany that sells very cheap lamb or chicken sandwiches. When Americans pronounce this word is sounds like doner. After ordering we sat and watched Lady Gaga on the television screen. This lasted a time that does not matter to anyone any more. Behind me were two track jacket college students with their faces in the steaming lamb meet and onions. He yelled at me to see who we were, European exchange students or Americans.I told him who, and my friends walked out as I lingered around to see what he had to say. He seem to refuse to accept the Americans girls' hilarious surprise that when he studied in Albany, shit-town U.S.A, as he called it, he would tell girls to this hilarious surprise that he spoke more than one language. I told him it was a big country. His friend told me they were drunk. I told them I was here to study the German translation of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I asked his friend if he'd heard, and he said, "Yes! The new Dostoevsky!" I was missing my bus and quickly hurried out to the sight of the sloppier one, the one who studied in America, pumping his fist forward in the air and chanting "America!"

Before I left for Germany I pulled up a satellite’s eye view of Bonn and the surrounding area. At the same altitude, I then looked at Lawrence. Kansas City is in the Netherlands. This is also to where a students from Chicago, a neurosciences major who loves to write stuff, escaped during our first excursion, which was two busloads full of students. Soon the program will be over and the Americans will be let off a leash to wander this dense country with almost no room to spare. No room in the people’s head for curiosity, at least to anyone but the pretty American girl glasses across the hall. I have not been lost yet.

I am only a stray who only wishes to not cause a nuisance. I’ve spent time wanting to fit in but never sticking. My tactile nature has been reduced to stomach pains in the morning and mud on the paths around the lawns in front of the palace that is now the University’s main building. A Japanese girl whom I've not talked to besides a few greeting with is someone who I know I can identify with. Talking with Sam, the word she came up with was scared. She searched some more, but yes it was indeed scared.

I’ve seen four very old churches, two central shopping districts with the same cobble stone streets. The people cling in groups and remember silently, talking mostly of food.

Sarah, with her first blog post, put "settling-in" in those quotes.

I can't wait to see her.

2009-09-15T22:31:00.000-07:00

A Safe Watershed

An old graveyard overlooked the highway that led across the river to the new airport. When it rained, the earth on the hill loosened and bodies rose gradually. So a team of three young men on the graveyard were there for doing the maintenance, keeping the buried down after summer rain.

A plane filled with young women flew over and the sound in the air was scorched for some very long seconds while Freedy let the new boy know what he signed up for: Recently, a filmy waste from bodies in the town’s watershed contaminated the river that divided the city and the airport.

“First things first. I haven’t had sex in three days on account of all this Spirtual Waste in the water,” Freedy said. “The science teachers at the school said it must be coming from this graveyard. It’s the oldest one in town.” As the new boy listened, he unearthed a body that had begun to rise. His hands slipped down his shovel and his head followed down to the body whose head had begun to expose a bit of brain.

“Smell that? That’s what happens when the brains get out,” Freedy said.

The film reeked of spirituality.

“Spirtual Waste?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t believe in it. It’s been trickling down to the watershed area.”

Freedy and the other worker named Bo came and patched the head using gauze and stitches as the new boy watched, trying not to believe what he saw.
Another plane filled with women took their voices, and they continued the maintenance.

Freedy called the science teachers, and he said that they had found another brain exposed. They still didn’t have a good answer about where it came from. So he hung up quickly.

“It was difficult for them to be accurate on whether it the waste they were finding in the river was the body odor from river bathers, vomit from a post-fasting period feast, or unused semen. But they were sure the brains of the bodies seemed to dam it.”

The three men continued to steadily place old limbs back into the half-rotted coffins. They did not find another loose brain, but Bo called Freedy over to the edge of the hill to witness the damage that had already been done. They sat to watch the girls on the highway to airport.

“Watch them, boy,” Bo said. “Mostly women, flying from the new airport as fast as they could, searching for a cure by starting careers.”

Freedy said the worst was that the waste had given the girls false hopes, that their brains were going to be gouged from their heads when their new lives out their ended. He looked at the new boy.

“What are you going to do with your body when you die?”

“Donate it to science.”

“That’s what I’m talking about, Bo, you see all these kids think its smart to donate their bodies to science, not even thinking how that makes the girls do the same thing. You know what that means, boy? All these planes?”

“That means the whole country would be infected.” Bo said.

“I don’t believe it.” The new boy said.

“I just need one of them.” Freedy said.

“For what?” The boy said.

“I’m looking for a girl to offload my complete history in, so I can free myself.”

“Memories.” Freedy’s memories were those of paralysis and vanity.

He said the memories weren’t really real in the first place. But now, Freedy’s fragmented history was now serialized in the ears of the many women he had brought up the hill. The last girl he brought up to the graveyard could not be objective about his history and ended up ejecting Freedy’s memories all over the graves.

“Last girl of yours, she must not have been white,” said Bo.

Freedy said that when he revealed his history as fact, her skin color turned from the glow of ocean froth into an inky red tide, and then she began squeeze and roll Freedy’s life in pictures out of the ear on the other side of her face. Next thing, she was on a flight to California to fulfill her duty as a woman and become a neurosurgeon. Only one explanation for that kind of hope: something spiritual had gotten to her.

He had not even begun to tell her about his method of keeping a whole world of Spiritual Waste from rising out of his mountain. As she ran, he yelled at her that they’d never get his brain from his head, and that he’d have to make his body suffer a very physical lethal blow, so it was obvious how he died. No science needed.

After she left, sprinkled over the loose ground were pieces of pictures, one of which showed a foreign airport and a deplaning girl with a stack of books crushing her head into the ground. But they buried that one.

“Tonight I’m gonna take my new girl up here. And she’s not contaminated. Heads screwed on straight. If she’s says she wants to be an engineer, she’ll be with me till I die. Girls who are engineers know how to lock their minds in their heads. Girls who are engineers don’t like California, anyway.”

He paused.

“Have you been burying those pictures, Bo?”

“Yes sir.”

“Where have your girls been?” Said the new boy.

Bo only pulled a framed picture of his mother out of his coat pocket.
Bo had had a girlfriend and had sex with her. Afterward, he said he loved her, and that he had finally figured out what good sex was. He said:

“It’s the phenomenal meeting of mental, physical, and rhythmic awareness. You have to do that all at the same time. And you can’t even think about it.”

After that, the girl screamed as a framed picture of his mother slid out of the ear on the other side of her face. Bo’s mother had died of the Spritual Waste when Bo was born, but in the picture, she looked like she did in the 60s, pregnant and dancing. She was tall and atmospheric with no signs of damages.

“But that can’t be it. It can’t only be the loose brains that are letting the girls go, can it?” The new boy said.

After he said that, a picture of the three men, each sailing their own Spanish galleon, rolled out of the new boy’s ear and glided into the river at the bottom of the hill. He screamed until he saw what the picture had done.

The three men on the hill watched the cars stop on the highway. Carloads of girls ran down to the bank. Each was very pretty and made each man love the world they watched from the hill. More women from the airport came to the foot and looked at the river. They gazed at the river and talked about memories, throwing water up in the air, and even acting out scenes of their lives: sneaking out of windows past curfew, going to college. A woman with the infant cried and dipped him in the water. Yes, the waste was surely stifled.

More reports of a decrease in Spiritual Waste in surrounding areas filled in on the radio as the men who had very forgiving jobs watched and thought about the many children they would bring into this world with the help of the woman, waiting until the day wives can mutilate their bodies so the cause of death is simple.

The sun was setting and the bodies were all tucked in. It was time to leave work.

“Where are you going now, new boy?” asked Bo.

“I’m going to go masturbate into your mom,” the new boy laughed with the relief of getting off work and then paused, remembering about Bo.

“His mom’s dead,” said Freedy.

“It’s okay,” said Bo. “I’m not emo about it.”

There is now a website you can visit on how to keep your watershed safe from anything that may turn up in the water of some middle america.

Fart Jokes

2009-04-18T14:14:00.000-07:00

It's true; the internet can be suffocating sometimes.

But I think that's understandable, for it's as if popular internet culture is a small glass room with the spatial potential of a clown car, and the clowns inside swathe themselves in priceless works, resurrected after suffering the spiritual death of a commodity.

Then they fart, and the farts are incessant.

You might choose to laugh at the sounds, might smell it long enough to where the smell of other's farts discomforts you, or you might start to judge what they've eaten or how they ate it, and you might then choose not to breathe. Or you might exit the clown car and complete the joke, and go on farting over the hills.

Fish Lines

2009-04-12T18:50:00.000-07:00

Dee felt sick inside the city crowds, binding her and declining her to her knees.The mayor mentioned, “high-fives for the fish inclined to wear fair doctor frocks!”Her eyes widened, and her knees sprung from the paved ground.Dee shined out of the leagues of men in the legal rooms to the seas. She was inclined to be a doctor, and lest she veered, the high-fives would be then inclined to her. When she came, the sea flowed in a forward religion. So she declined onto her knees and fished in order to be a doctor. Dee needed bait. To better he yet, she lacked and needed a net. She was resigned, but then again inclined to her religion, so she used her sock as a fish netter. Dee flaunted the sock, soaking it in the see and trying to make the fish inclined to it. The sock only became a soaking vault never to be broken. From her brow, Dee’s tears fell, hit, and splashed a mossed-over rock, lying.But again being inclined to be a doctor, she forever carried floss in her blue frock. The floss let the fish faster become her fowl. Dee hooked and lined five fish. She was now finally inclined to disguise herself and get those high fives from the mayor, being the doctor. She stuck her hand through the gutted fish like a mitt, giving new layers to her skin. When she was fully disguised inside the fish skin, she finned back to the amphitheater to be outfitted with the fair doctor fish frock, thus inclined to be the doctor and get those high-fives from the mayor. But when she arrived, she saw the city crowds in waves. Ousted from the buildings and theaters and legal rooms, there was no more order. The men and mares were finning out and in of their religions just like how soccer is ordered. Upon seeing the fifty layers all finning in and out of the field and sea in leagues and schools. She looked high into the sky. Someone called a foul. Everyone declined to their knees. But she stood as her fin on point, and proceeded to fish for the gutted, religion inclined, blue frock wearing city people, one by one, inclining them back to their socks, healing all with her fishing.

2009-03-18T22:36:00.000-07:00

There are links if you can't already see them below. I can't tell. Visit them if you can.

The set used to be in Florida, where I'm at again. I hope its still there. Alfred Hitchcock and the Art of Making Movies has been gone for some time, too.
The Back to the Future ride has been replaced by the Simpsons Ride.

When I was young I was scared of Kong frontation.
The fire hurt my face. I wanted never to have inched my way through the miniature New York and meet that great half-ape machine, swaying in whining cringes as it screamed.

Cadence

2009-02-24T07:38:00.000-08:00

Don't say a word
Don't say anything
Don't say a word
I'm not even listening
I read in the paper about their escape
They're just two bit of kids from a bunch of sour grapes
You better watch your step

Watch who's knocking on your front door
Now you know that they're watching
What are you waiting for?
Think you're young and original
Get out before...
They get to watch your step

Ev'ry day is full of fun
And family spies
They're making heroes out of fall guys
They say it's good for business
From Singapore to Widnes
You better watch your step

Broken noses hung up on the wall
Back slapping drinkers cheer the heavy weight brawl
So punch drunk they don't understand at all
You better watch your step

Ev'ry night
Go out full of carnival desires
End up in the closing time choirs

When you're kicking in the courtroom
And you're drinking down the Eau de Cologne
And you're spitting out the Kodachrome
You better watch your step

Bye
I send you all my regards
You're so tough
You're so hard
Listen to the hammers falling in the breaker's yard
You better watch your step
You better watch your step
Ooh, watch your step

Real Time

2009-02-23T07:13:00.000-08:00

Centuries should go by before I crawl out of bed, and to witness the passing from glowing pages is a scrutinized wave of the fingers, weakly lifting sharp moods thought once on a rock by the river, now curved about the folds beneath by forehead, and they seep tightly and fasten in the flexible words that have yet to be said.

"The gown fell gauntly from her shoulders, across her fallen breasts, then tightened upon her paunch and fell again, ballooning a little above the nether garments which she would remove layer by layer as the spring accomplished and the warm days, in color regal and moribund. She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage and fortitude which the days or years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child's astonished dissappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed the door."
.
- First description of Disley from The Sound and the Fury - April Eight, 1928.

This is Not An Audience

2009-02-19T07:30:00.000-08:00

The University of Bentbrook opened its doors, which recently earned inscriptions, advertisements as a haven, safe from recession.

The teacher's head totters when we discuss anything that's worth talking about, at least for an hour an fifteen minutes two days out of a calendar week for several months until summer comes and we can go about the business of mobility - arrivals, departures, ways to escape, displace oneself preferably away from a safety net that was so kindly knitted by people deemed worthy for whom to sacrifice your narcissistic self as a clock tells you that things are actually measurable, mobile, from place to place inside of one place.

"There's the talking head syndrome," she posits.

So we read from Umberto Boccioni's Genius and Culture. It goes a little something like this:

THE WOMAN (without looking) Oh well, he's an artist...he wants to renew himself, and he hasn't a cent!

THE CRITIC (bewildered): Strange! An artist! Impossible! For twenty years I have profoundly studied this marvelous phenomenon, but I can't recognize it. (Obviously with archeological curiosity.) That one is crazy! Or a protester! He wants to change! But creation is a serene thing. A work of art is something done naturally, in silence, and in recollection, as a nightingale sings... Spirit, in the sense that Hegel means spirit...

THE WOMAN (intrigued): And if you know how it is done, why don't you tell him? Poor thing! He is distressed...

THE CRITIC (strutting): For centuries, the critic has told the artists how to make a work of art ... Since ethics and aesthetics are functions of the spirit...

THE WOMAN : But you've never made any?

THE CRITIC (Nonplussed): Me? ... Not me!

THE WOMAN (laughing with malice): Well, then, you know how to do it, but you don't do it. You are neutral. How boring you must be in bed! (She continues putting on her rouge)

THE ARTIST (always walking back and forth sorrowfully, wiring his hands): Glory! Ah Glory! (tightening his fists) I am strong! I am young! I can face anything! Oh Divine elextric lights ... sun ... To electrify the crowds ... Burn them! Dominate them!

So we continue to talk and understand, and then we moved on to the Dadaists, where one Tristan Tzara put, "Philosophy is the question: From which side shall we look at life, God, the idea or other phenomena? Everything one looks at is false. I do not consider the relative result more important thatn the choice between cake and cherries after dinner."

He became Surrealists when the WWI ended.

The Surrealists were less egotistical, because after all, they relied on the partition of the mind, as desinged by Freud. To create the marevlous, more than on one is needed. His terms are one side of the equation.

Creval notes: "The narcissistic individual, the one has remained in the expressive stage, has eaten up the universe and because he has devoured it, suppressed the objects, becomes himself the object, and thereby not only becomes insuffiecient unto himself but destroys himself. In the island whose outline is that of his littleperson this isolated being succumbs before the mirror he has questioned - he was questioned the most mediocre, the most vain, the most superficial of waters."

Surrealism can partly be summerized as a combination of art, philosophy, and psychology.

"How would Breton respond to Tzara's decree in Dada Manifesto of 1918, "Logic is always wrong," the teacher asked.

Logic is always wrong when one considers logic the only path to rightness.

Sick of it!

I did some automatic writing in class, but I (concisouly) wasn't a part of it, which is a Surrealist tradition, which isn't really tradition at all; in fact, it's against it. Though I remember promising to myself once never to speak truthfully here, so who knows?

A frowning achievment across the light source of minds couteracts with a contempt for life. A human, can only react against contempt, but a static moment encompasses an amplifies from the inside out in a infinite cloudless definition of items found at o0nce on the underside of our eyes, which, in rotation, grow into a garden of mirrors.

The castles built on hills lack the experience to give life to a child, and thefore give experience away in birds, plastic, metal made of now depleted raw materials of an earth that is not ours to know, but to forget as a senseless explanation of impluse.

I've been reduced to a delusion. The characters are inhuman. Shall I define myself as anything less than a fish in the net of a fisher alone and eating, selling, farting, and itching each piece of flesh once jostled by a mother who held nothing but a placid fear, like that of a white breeze?

One Month's Payed Vacation from Bentbrook

2009-01-14T08:15:00.000-08:00

Have the once in a life time chance to feel like a criminal!

As advertised, you'll be alone, traveling, and on the exhilarating escape from the law. First, you'll be kidnapped and stuffed into an overcrowded car where your face will be masked and flattened against a back seat pane. Blind and alone, you'll feel industry tower high over, and you'll have the quickest route to getting that escapist robber feeling because your going to straight downtown to the mayor's own home! Tread lightly, and watch out, folks; the authorities will be breathing down your neck wherever you may rest your head. But this will feel friendly and out of your good judgment, because you'll feel it for the love of chase from here to the plains, to the backwoods, and if necessary on a desperate journey across the Pacific by ferry, pining for magical Tiki women and their infinite primitive mystery. Whether or not you're caught is up to you.

So be weary of authority that come in shapes, figures, and presences. Their welcome feels warm, but their absent minds only wish to strip you of your mask and send you out in the cold, and then your trip will be over. (And for those under the appropriate age of maturity: This feeling is temporary, your parents will welcome you upon your return.)

The glamorous life of the obsequious Al Capone is what you seek, and to make it straight to the top, you assume the role of impostor. You'll assume the thrilling odd job in which you're protecting the mayor in the big heated black car, day and night, for the whole month, watching the upper crust come and go while you scorn their frailty, or you'll assume the role of a heroin addict turned snitch in some dead end train stop town, wearing a wire when the deal goes down in the warehouse loft. The authorities chime in your ear while you try desperately to keep your fiancee out of the big house. What's worse, and yet more fun, the friends you've left behind have no chance to comfort you, so you have no choice but to assume the worst. In this case your parents are also out to get you, so hide each and every bit of drug you've so desperately conned your friends in scrounging. (Beware of when the therapist of the Sameritan company asks you if you believe in God. Look her straight in the eye and give a flim flammy answer.)

In a last scenario, you've found yourself in a quiet tourist ghost down deep at the bottom of countless land folds and ridges, stale slimey after-freezes of winter. The man who owns a gallery will attempt to rob you of your last cents because his antiques look so charming, and he hobbles and shakes his curly grey pile of hair about the dusty room, and you feel sorry for not buying anything. And the girls you find in the chocolate shop, one of them will fall in love with someone who seems like a friend. Remember your chance to escape dwindles with each connection!

Please join us on this all expenses payed trip and skirt your way across the midwest, shirk your responsibilties, stay alive from addiciton, and try and make it home without being caught.

(We are not responsible for lost personal items on your trip. At certain moments the authorities will feel it necessary to strip you of all of your homely resources. This includes mobile phones, watches, shoes, underwear, earrings, paraphanalia, and your book that we equip you with from the beginning of the trip: Learning to Live Again: A Guide to Recovery from Chemical Dependence. This is your ticket home!)

From the archives: "Satellite's Broke"

2008-12-27T12:12:00.001-08:00

It could come down to this: Deek Reeling never figured that the coin rolls he always gets from the bank took a good pinch on the bottom end to work right. Sitting and skimming over the old print-out the wife said would be a sure help for saving some more coins, so they didn’t have to steal satellite anymore and could have love without that, Deek couldn’t find anything in Mr. Ruff’s Fundamentals of the Washeteria that told him about the something like the good pinch so the coins could be easily stacked into neat, heavy sticks. Mr. Ruff ought to know that rolling up the coins for the coin revenues cannot be gotten a hang of so easily. Besides that, Deek had already bought the front loader machines with the Energy Star rating that Mr. Ruff advised, so the print-out was just another wife thing to crumple. In spite of what his wife said, they would keep watching the movies he won from stealing satellites. Any kind of movie you want all for free.

Deek hook-shot Mr. Ruff’s fundamental crap in the waste and looked out his office pane to see if any of the customers had any of their damn huge and baggy clothes to wash today. No one came in, but he remembered that he never had to look twice anyway. Some kind of loud language was always spitting through their heads from broken ear-phones without the cushions, so he got the sense of them real quick even before they started using the machines and making that rumbling sound of an overstuffed machine. He sure as shit didn’t expect anyone besides that group today anyway, because he, thank Christ for his sake, was getting the hang of accepting how the types with tighter clothes got their own machines and all them just moving farther from King Johnny’s Coin Laundry. Saving themselves, he thought, but he never liked think about leaving and saving himself. Ain’t his place or his business. Deek knew that.

If it could only be the usual rumbles of the washing machines beating the sides of each other that made his ears hear for the first time that morning instead of it having to be another customer on the headphones, bobbing and spitting with his head, pounded with sound and full of a language he refused to give up. That’s something Deek Reeling didn’t tolerate for no one but Deek Reeling and only Deek Reeling.

Good thing then that the only thing making noise from the other side of his office window was his young nephew who was just ripping and banging the joysticks of the table top arcade game. The other nephew, the older one, was just sitting around and staring down at the corner folding table, tearing apart the mag subscriptions from LA that Mr. Ruff also advised he should provide for literature, and that’s wise because Deek liked that soft gloss they gave off. But the older nephew just tore and tore. Tearing or reading some dry, dark looking book was all he could do, but you know, they got to spend the month at Deek’s King Johnny’ Coin Laundry. It should of been nice for them just taking sometime away, just an hour on Highway 50, from Deek’s brother who was bed ridden, because he said that the office was making him sink into his bed, though he also said every other day that it was the kids doing the making the sinking, or better yet, choking him too, he said.

Deek looked back down to get the hang of the coin roll, but he never got that good pinch, the hang of the brown coin rolls.

Through the office window pane, if you got the luck to be the first customer on coin rolling days, you might get to catch him not getting hang: struggling and ending up sticking both his finger tips into the ends of the roll and then jabbing each through until they almost kissed - his ash grey knuckles exposed at end-holes, as if he was caught in some Chinese trap. And that but making his body bubble water upward and out his face’s dark holes toward the desk, forming itchy salt pools, which he would soak with another crumple of the stiff roll paper and then throw it to the mountain of folded and jagged rolls on the far side of his desk, while still whole chest of loose coins in the register tray, set to boil over just in time for the first spic or whatever customer to walk in. He couldn’t even freaking tell what hot southerly place they were coming from anymore.
On coin revenue days, when he would finally get a hang of the roll and was able to proceed with each coin from Lincoln to Kennedy, he would flip-flop the stacks and bowl the finally filled rolls toward the mountain of jagged paper balls that he formed across his desk and hook-shoot the other crumples in the waste, balling around. But when he didn’t get a hang, you can see him fist shoot a half-filled coin roll without the bottom pinched toward the glass in front of the desk and make bursting money showers with the clinks like sharp thunder, making the sound that his prized Plasma screen made when the satellites would be cut off and disappear into the sun, leaving everything silent except for that spic crap spitting through the headphones of that lucky first customer.

Those days with coin outbursts started to come oftener because the street was getting all melty liquid and rain was much less routine. And on these days, more July-sweaty, dark people of all kinds came in Deek’s laundromat and sat all over Reeling’s new front-loaders, licking their fingers and stuffing the scented softeners everywhere inside their lustery trash-bag-looking shirts and twinkling clown jeans. When Deek Reeling was bore witness of all this, fuming and anguished over the mountain of bank rolls and little bits of the aftermath from the coin explosions, he left his office and went to through the rows as if he was going to just be pin-balling for a bit. But only the young nephew did that.

These days when sweat forms a flower pedal on the back of his 4X violet shirt were the dark ones that meant a lot of coin shower explosion, and bright days only being when his machine’s rumbles turned King Johnny’s Coin Laundry into tuneful place and the people wearing their ball caps could come in and have swell days over the soothing white noise, reading the LA literature, never sitting on top of the of machines, and then driving home to thawing meat on the kitchen counter to have dinner with people in soft fitted clothes with and good house-holds and respect for Deek. But this rainless dark day was pretty much like the other day when he got up from a coin shower, came out his office, and started slapping all over with a rolled up LA literature, trying to make a rumbling noise on the hollow machines that would maybe scare the baggy-clothes customers off the machines. But they always stayed on the machines, not noticing the sign, championing the rumbling front-loaders with their jeans, tossing a rubber snake around and even black cigarettes sometimes, one head phone always loud and slipping off. They never even read the available LA Literature and just listened to old black headphones lacking the ear cushions.

Same kind of day just had to happen today, that spic or whatever sitting on the machine with his damn language buzzing while Deek sat in his office, his fingers stuck in the Chinese trap. He intended to say something once he got the hang of the roll. He never really said anything that and never really had to until the smaller-clothes types got their own machines, and left the other group of all these dark people just sitting over every washing machine, scraping the white finish and leaving little scar of silver.

Deek thought the Chinese trap technique was the best way to get the hang going, so he started again until his office pane was rattling because the younger nephew was tapping on the class with a head of a toy robot and the little nose of his die-cast four-engine bomber, wanting some of those coins for pinball.

No, he said, louder and longer drawn each time, until the boy took the die-cast mini-bomber hammered the nose all over the lid of Deek’s only top loader machine, and Deek noticed that his only top loader, clear reading, Don’t Use, was being used. If Deek just couldn’t kick him out, he at least let them know who’s boss, saying all that to himself like that behind the window before he got up, to simply warn that spic or whatever, because he just purely wanted to be the coin laundry man, the happy one with silver coins that glided out from the lip of the filled roll to the cupped hands of these people always trying to get more coins out of you. But as bleeping from the games and the bad language from the broken earphones spread across the rows of machines, Deek, out of his office and roving on down the rows, got damn near nose to nose with that spic or whatever and said to him to read the damn sign. There is a sign, he said, that says don’t use this one, and another one that says don’t sit on the machines, which you’ve been doing since you got here.

I don’t see no sign, dude, the man said mocking with some real pride. Deek was in his office by the time the customer finished talking. He shut the door and you could see him slump down, and start to not get the hang again, the sweat pooling and Deek getting closer making more coin showers. So the customer turned those headphones with the bad language up. He looked at Deak and saw him cupping his ears and pressing his head in, trying to cancel all that freaking noise. The dark day was far from being over, so he hurled the half-filled roller and caused another coin shower, this one more earth shattering. He flung the office door open, fisting handful of heavy Kennedys, smiling some half-assed scary smile, and acting all happy for the visiting kids and pinball. He swiped the head-phone off the man’s shaved head, and he yelled over the games’ exploding bleeps that he asked him nicely the first time and that he had to just leave now and never come back around to wash clothes if he don’t want to listen or read, or just can’t read, the sign that said no sitting on the machines. Thank Christ the spic or whatever felt fine taking those huge clothes elsewhere. That’s the right way to deal with this shit.
So the day was bright for a while and the afternoon in the Johnny King’s Coin Laundry would be filled with nice bleeps from the arcade. The young nephew played the pinball well, and making every high score, he continued to make the nice bleeping sounds, his faces gleaming and drooling over the table top screen, and jerking that joystick over the rattling plastic. When the nephew put down the die-cast bomber and showed him that it just took a bit of folding on the underside and the coins would just stack right on top of the other, the coin showers were over for another day and Deek could make home in time for the thawing meat dinner on the kitchen counter; that thing better be clean, clean as the new purple uniforms with the screen print of King Johnny’s Coin Laundy he got for his new employees. His newly hired employee, a nice but stocky little Guatemalan woman who carried her baby in a sack over her back, took over the shift until the evening when Deek would always return to close this life-blood investment place of his.

Deek finished packing each variety of coins and even intended to give one roll of dimes equaling five dollars to each of the nephews. The older one refused again, while the younger grabbed it so quick that he tore it and spilt open the vein of dimes all over split-up parking lot. So he got the older’s roll, but only after the older was done pulling some the hair of the younger and shoving him in the back seat, slapping his head a few times, just to make him not want to talk, so that wasn’t all that much of a deal. But the older pulled the shot-gun call that these kids do a lot, and sat in the front, so that’s in the order of certain kind of good deals that Deek really got a kick out of, until the older boy took out biggest book he could find written by what looked like some another spic or whatever, and he cracked it to seriously read, for the whole ride back to Uncle Deek’s house. And he got some good reading in because he didn’t even have silence or shush the young one, even when held his little die-cast bomber against pane of backseat window and through it saw a miniature battlefield that he would give the soundtrack to with the noises his mouth made. With wet swishes from his lips for the flying and firing or explosion noises, his plane soared over the malls and that one willow tree that meant they were close to the chained restaurants, so he breathed some more swish bombs. It was a kind of white noise that Deek mistook for washing machines, so the car just a good silent all the way home to Grandma and the wife waiting for the meat to thaw. Good thing the younger got the plane last Easter from Grandma’s house. That was really a great day to see him tear open the plastic and fly the four engine miniature die-cast around the room smiling and swishing, but man it should be hard for the grandma to even take a look at those planes because she went through the whole thing, but it still should be a good thing because that’s why they live in place they do now, away from a Europe fight still actually going probably.

Jesus Christ do I have get a goddamn sign in Spic that says you can’t sit on my machines? Deek spat over the white noise swishes. The older nephew, with a split headache or a certain kind of vomity sick look in face that he always got in Deek’s rocking Buick, said yes that he should have the fucking sign in Spanish.

So Deek says no, and goddamn it I knew that head phone was screaming something in that freaking Spanish. Hey punk, he said, my parents learned English after the war just like every other culture or ethnicity or culture whatever that came to this place.

But they didn’t even teach you Polish, Deek, the older nephew said.

I don’t need to know it. I speak English here and no one else that comes into the damn store any more does, does that make sense? Deek’s asking then.

So yeah, let’s just rename Los Angeles and say it’s always meant to be called The Angels. The older nephew said, spouting that real smart crap and then throwing the book across the dashboard, Deek then just picking it up off the dash nailing the boy’s head when he tossed back, telling him too keep quiet in the car and read again.

Swishing around in the backseat, the younger screamed something about the air and obi one.
That says Nairobi, the older said, and he wants to go there to eat tonight.

Things were already thawing on the counter so that’s out of whole big question of what the visiting nephews were eating tonight. Plus, the place was way too much money. Who did they think their uncle was?

God if they’d only listen, but they never got it, the older one suggested they go to the trusty Outback instead.

Oh yeah! Well I’ll take you out back and beat the livin’ crap outta you! Deek laughed because that was really a good joke compared to his other ones that were too political for the younger in back, who was now tapping the nose on the pane and play-firing, cheek-swishing bullets toward the Nairobi Bar and Grill. Plus the wife said earlier that they’d be watching a movie, an award-winning picture about warring Africans, over dinner anyway. Deek clutched the steering wheel and laughed again because that’s what was funny about Africa.

It’s his damn birthday though, the older Nephew said, and he obviously wants to go there. It’s bad enough that your brother left us here. Didn’t he leave you his card anyway?
We already got steaks thawing, said Deek.

The little boy’s plane suddenly took dive into the in the bench and he tumbled as if he was a belly turret gunner with the force of Deek’s Buick rolling over the curb and across the asphalt lot toward the flat horizon of the town mall. The older nephew knew what Deek was doing again. It was the thing that got to the older Reeling boy the most about his father’s brother, because was the trashiest thing that people do. He felt it just as tacky as the way Deek Reeling’s wife gave the play by play and the blown-up limb count of that World War movie, and he just wished Deek’s wife would shut her mouth during movies that they stole from satellite somewhere.
Deek made a run through the slide doors under the great white sign of House Holder’s as the sun setting over the mall began to pull the satellite with it. Deek’s wife called to tell him that the satellite was busted again, meaning he has to stop by the video store too, but he could get that House Holders because they also had a adult entertainment section in the House Holder’s Family Video. He got a box of Christ Lights and stepped out to suck hard in a hurry the cigarette in front of the sliding doors of House Holders.

The funny part to the older-nephew and the trashiest thing about his uncle were the icicle lights that hung all for the summer and ever after, except when the neighborhood hoodlums would tear them all down for no damn good or reason.

I hope he’s buying more Christ Lights, so more of those the neighborhood kids will rip them down, the older nephew said to the younger who was still keeping on the swishing.
Deek went back in and found the cramped adult section, which seemed to shrink in the presence of Deek and his purple shirt with petal sweat stain and short shorts. The whole world was shrinking and folding for Deek when he noticed the tall clerk flapping the wax pages of some LA literature on the glass counter, and recognized him from back in another dark day. The boy at the counter, pierced all over his face with rings and chains, made Deek reckon about his own son for the first time since the he left the house bruised all over his chest from Deek’s powerful fistfuls of Kennedy’s.

Didn’t you take my son to prom? Deek said looking down over the boy’s dangling chain piercings. He set the case on the glass, trying to block the menacing toys from his eyes. The clerk boy swiped Deek’s card and tapped it, waiting for it to go through.

He gave some queer look and asked for Deek’s ID. The signature on the back is faded, the clerk said.

Oh, well, this is not really my card. It’s my brother’s. Deek responded with a groan. Doesn’t that count?

The clerk tapped on the glass, shaking his head no, and Deek spun his eyes around the dim pink room and cocked his neck to the humming white tubes on the ceiling. Deek said that he had some coins in his car, and that he’d be back.

Deek coming through sensor doors blew out some yellow gas that the little nephew sitting in the car was immediately ready to identify, tapping the pane and pointing with the jagged nose of his die-cast bomber. He made the swishes like it was now that poison gas that he learned about in the movies Deek’s wife would always give the play by play. Oh, she would say, the poison gas makes him turn blew, or there goes his arm, oh man, he’s lookin’ all over the beach for the end of his arm, oh, yeah he’s dead now, and man think about the mother just crying back at the farm.
Deek came and ripped the front seat open, asking for the younger nephew’s coin rolls. He caught the boy in the back seat sucking on a brown paper tube with a coin sticking out and reached to snatch the roll of dimes from his mouth, and his swishing turned into crying siren. Deek slammed the car door and hurried through the lot and went back to the corner room of the video store. He barely recognized that fag punk whatever, but he was sure it was that one from high school, so he took the coins and hurled the five dollars worth at the fag punk whatever tortoise shell glasses. It was loud with all those chains and shattering glass, so then he just took the video and power-walked through the dividing doors, swinging a plastic bag full of Christ Lights to put back up after dinner.

Thing was though, the older nephew kept sneaking out back during the night to plug in the lights so they’d be the only lights in the neighborhood. The chained sit-down restaurant of or the white light of the giant House Holders sign didn’t even flicker, so the Reeling’s house would be a beacon of tacky people who just didn’t care to take down their Christ Lights in the summer, and that’s why they kept coming down.

The meat was now soft on the counter and one by one they were being thrown to the grill by the wife, who was doing the play by play about the problems in Africa this time to Deek’s mother, Basia. She said that those people just kept on fighting for some reason and it was just violent, and yep, she said, their gonna kill them because their from one family, and it’s just a shame that these people can’t be civilized. Basia was also making a very certain kind of warnings herself over the flaming steaks. She especially ought to know about opression, having to serve schmorgesborg after schmorgesborg to Aryans and Russians in a Warsaw ghetto back in Europe.

It’s because they’re black, she kept saying.

After several loud staple gun-shots out on the gutter above the ever-green hedge, Deek came through the screen door and sat down at the table.

During a silent meal without the satellite, the older nephew arose and said that he should be excused because he had to use bathroom to wash off the blood of each of the dinner party members who all sat complacently, stuffing themselves with countless cutlets of red meat. But they kept on eating.

Another break in the silence occurred when Basia peeped up toward Deek in mid chew. She began, asking if the boy had been advised by their father, as she told him, to not let the older to vote for that black man to be president. Deek remained silent, and his wife, too began to choke at the break in silence. For this was not something to discuss over steak dinner, but the satellite was blocked, and no movies were on, so as far as Basia was concerned, her orders were immanent to the now eligible voter in the older nephew. If they are not baptized before I die either! What’s happening? She swooned as best she could.

Well I’ll have to tell him myself, she said and waited for her grandson to return to the table from wherever he was. But he had already overheard her from the bathroom. And he turned back, rushed to the head of the table, and stood yelling.

I can’t wait until that man is anointed president, he began to sneer, so that when he is assassinated by something like sipping poisoned Starbucks coffee while soaring high over this damn country on Air Force One, you people will run around screaming that your prophesies were good and dead-on! Of course, the whole table was aghast and silent with the exception of the soft swishing of the younger nephew flying his die-cast bomber over his untouched food with his soft hand.

Deek said upward at older nephew, I can’t wait till you mature. I don’t really have a problem with him, but where does he get off calling himself black, anyway? He’s only half.
And why the hell does it matter to you what he calls himself if he’s a good candidate? The older nephew pushed his chair in and shook the table. I’m going to the bathroom, he said wishing to be excused. He went through his brother’s stuff to get the lucky black face mask, which the younger kept for times when his father didn’t want to see him. He put the mask on, locked the bathroom door, and opened the window to excuse himself from his boiling, which he figured now should turn to vengeance as he studied the mess of wires and unlit Christ lights.
Deek, scraping his plate, excused himself from the table and said that he was going back to the laundromat to collect the day’s coins and kick out every late customer, bright or not.

Basia and Deek’s wife slept with stomachs full and brains tired in front of the TV, leaving the younger nephew wandering the house. He found the multi-colored and inserted in the machine that closely resembled the videogame system which his father bought him last Christmas. It flashed pink and flesh colors projected on family room walls while the boy’s bomber and toy robot lay neglected on kitchen counter. And the boy, after several minutes in front of the silent flashing, keeled and rocked on to his back and shut his eyes.
Deek’s Buick, on its way home, hopped and cut the corner toward his house. Deek realized, as he approached the driveway, that the car’s headlights caught some dark spic fag punk whatever rushing around the yard, tugging the blinking Christ Lights and ripping out the staples. Deek pressed down the gas, flicked his cigarette out the open window, and sped straight over the curb through his rotting fence and then flipped the spot-lit black-masked figure onto windshield like a big old doll. He paused and listened to the car crushing the picket fence. Deek charged out of the car with it still running, drug the man off the hood and began to kick the every bit of wind out of the man’s stomach.

Uncle Deek! The man bellowed breathlessly, reddened drooling streaming out of the corner of the mouth-hole of the black mask and over the illuminated turf.
My father will know! He moaned.

Deek cradled the boy, pretty much ugly and unrecognizable, and brought him in through the house where he flopped him on the carpet in front of the plasma-screen in the family room next to the younger nephew whose hands were cupped over the front of his waist.

Deek’s wife called Deek’s brother and explained how: while your son was running around in the yard after dark and Deek accidentally hit him with the car. It was just awful and like a bad movie, she explained.

The boy’s were loaded into the back seat of the Buick and driven straight home across the plains through the night back to the boys’ home since only his father could afford the co-pay at the hospital. The rumbling of the engine could soothe him properly, so Deek Reeling calmly dropped off the boys, thinking that his brother should have known better than to leave the boys in the care of a man who couldn’t even manage to keep his own son straight.

On one of his days home from the office, John and his sons watched that black man being anointed as president.

The thing that bugs me, John Reeling said, rather two things: I don’t like it when he says things like spreading the wealth, and where does he get off calming himself black? The younger swished while the just older smiled, and didn’t say shit. Oh well, he sighed, you guys are going to help me with the lights tomorrow, aren’t you?

Not until you take the pumpkins off the porch, the older boy responded, and give me some cash for it too.

Basia died the next summer, and had a funeral nice quiet with everyone dressed in black, and when Deek returned to the laundromat after the funeral and full and half asleep from a steak dinner his brother paid for at the Nairobi Bar and Grill, he found the glass windows shattered and every coin taken from the machines. He listened for rumbles, and hearing nothing, he pinched himself under the twinkling lights of King Johnny’s Coin Laundry, trying to wake himself up. His wife called, and announced the good news of the satellite working again, so he didn’t have to stop at Householder’s to pick up one of those videos.

The First Wish of Winshel

2008-12-23T09:03:00.000-08:00

Beckon, Christ. There’s an anchor in my stomach. You were a sailor, I know, and you walked on the water; I know this too, and you have a way of diving down the throat of all those whom you’ve pleased since your birth. Oh come, Elijah, the one you were most like. Come and clutch the hands of privileged and the plain and the clamped, the clasped, the naked, the forced, the obsessed and most of all, eject the anchor from my stomach, and send it out of my mouth across the ocean to the ice on the other side of the world. And can you be like Apple? Can you inscribe a note on the anchor that you’ll swing from your camel hair belt on the stern the Galleon of Grace you champion like a pirate? Specifically, I would enjoy a Chirstmas list to be written on the anchor. Give it to the first new born you see on the Pacific. Read the anchor to him very slowly and make sure the parents of the new born tattoo this inscription Christmas list onto his left clavicle. They’ll listen. They always have, right? This list will state clearly the steps I will take to fame, each step a new way up instead of down, and each step becomes the means to the end.

I’m sure you’ve heard this two thousand and eight times. Or since you walked and suffered and died for the reason, a reason to stand up and live and make Mary run away shrieking at the sight of your ghost.

Help me. I’m just some Joseph looking for a manger.

-Become a half-Jew
-Love a half-Jew
-Stand in the face of persecution
-Wave a covenant
-Cast it off into the a sea
-Make it a gentle stream
-Remember
-Over Speculate
-Buy a new Car
-Sign off
-Teach my son to use a computer

Make sure the infant gets back to me with an answer to this question:

Which way through what snow to which star on what morning?

Thanks, Jesus
I’m blowing out the candle.

P.S.

I’ve crushed the glass with my hand, and it’s bleeding over light socket burn on my hand. This is a tradition. I was never good with lighting candles. Wax was expensive, I heard.

The Racoon Family Problem

2008-12-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

On the golf course, even when dad tries to cure or cut it, the chalk tree covered in sores or black spots, always grows up and keeps cursing his view of the green and fairway behind the house. Because the chalk tree looked dead ever since we moved to that house with the view of a country golf course, I swear it pulled the burn everything to black to purify the land on itself every morning only when two headlights from the groundskeepers drove the rock paths in their go-karts. Then the sun rose and it was chalky and cocky again, having seven horns and a large wingspan.

The coons were more, probably the family doing the purity burning to the tree, dad said. Maybe the keepers’ go-karts could have sped over the noisy raccoon packs and stopped the raccoon family problem, which would be a much better way to drive them out of the playing fields because with all the tries to use poison things or mad clubbing irons, they always just came back and gathered at the tree. That or I could shoot my brother’s bee-bee gun in their masks. I shot the bee-bee rifle to a wood pecker from mom’s window because she couldn’t be still on Monday mornings. She needed sleep and asked me to shoot the gun at the bird because she took dad to the airport before day every week so he could work in the tall office in another city a million miles away. The woodpecker would stir me too, but I slept, dreaming of it as the lawyer neighbor riding a John Deer through his grass. I sniped like a World War American and beaned the woody, and it fell and barely jumped away with wings flapping on the grass, so then I felt bad for the way it wouldn’t fly anymore, but then my mom started sleeping until 1:00 in the afternoon, and I was a dead eye.

Year after year as summer breaks threw me into another grade at my good money school and my dad got a lot more stressed or frustrated, when the sun should have turned that one shriveled tree into dust, the tree clawed back reaching out and up to the sky, not dying and not being bound. Sunday afternoon on his newly stained deck, dad scowled his big brows at all trees that swayed just beyond our staked, but fenceless yard in our subdivision called Wilderness, and they were reaching again, not yet to his property, but maybe extending closer at the green of the course. Off the deck and down the hill he trotted slowly and looked like a giraffe from lawn to fairway to green to rough. He was going to cut that kind of dead looking tree one last time, and the raccoons would go with their black spotted tree uprooted.

Through the kitchen windows I saw dad fighting through tall grass, and I held frozen waffles, and then the garage door roared again, and my twiggy sickly brother, high or desperate and older looking again, sprang through the door and looked my mother always sitting at the crumby table.

“Hey! Happy Birthday! Are you just stopping by?” Mom got up slowly and gave him a hug. He kissed her with his eyes spinning around the yellow room.

“Is the mail here?” I didn’t know. I hoped he wasn’t asking me.

He spied the low leaning pile of mail. Most were bills. Should he have found one with his name on it, that would surely take his mind off asking me for just twenty dollars.

“I think there’s one from Grandma,” my mother said.

He found it because of the old scribbles of ink. He ripped it open not remembering for the right way mother said to open letters because he was ravenous. We watched him open the card, but his white face skin brushing against his bones got really heavy and red in spots when he opened it.

“What?” He panted at my mother.

“When your cousins got older, we stopped sending money.”

“But it’s Grandma. I’m freaking broke.”

I wouldn’t give away twenty dollars for my brother again because it didn’t come back just like my mother and dad said, so I went outside to try to play with dad.

“What are you doing, stupid? Can you do that? It’s not even on your property,” I said.

“I can see it, can’t I? It blocks the view. It needs to be cut back.”

“Has our neighborhood or the ones in charge of golf ever caught you doing this?”

“Probably not.” I watched him clenching the jaws of his trimmers. He said that he wanted to tell me something funny. But he first waited for confused golfers putting to drive away.

“Idiots! Oh yeah… You know how blacks…uh… make up words sometimes?” “What?” I paused and smiled a little.

“You know what I’m talking about, right?”

“Sometimes my friends make up words.”

The branches were not ever brittle on this tree that now looked like it was sweating with dad. And his trimmers were dull. The limbs dangled when he tried snipping at them.

“Well, you know what I mean. I was watching The Judge today and there was this huge black woman trying to defend herself. I mean, she and this other woman were trying to settle a case about…” A branch finally fell to the ground after I scurried a step back so my school clothes wouldn’t get dirty.

“There we go!” His face now focused at the point on the very tip of the highest, longest branch that looked like a spiraling briar, thorny and everything.

“Anyway, but you know how black people make up words?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

My eyes were directly into his and I looked really concerned for what he was saying and didn’t really want to hear his story anymore.

“Oh come on. You know me. How dare you accuse me? Show respect.” He grew menacing and started to yell over me. “That’s just offensive. I’m just trying to tell you something funny.”

But I heeled. His face grinned at the charred branch with no leaf as he reached up and tangled his arms around the tar, leaving his collared shirt a long stripe of charcoal. He cut it. This one fell on his face, leaving rings and smeared cuts of dark dirt on his eye bags. He dropped his teethed trimmers and used his short arms in an L shape rub his face.

“Might as well just chop it down. I’m going to do that when I come home next weekend. Anyways. On The Judge, the plaintiff and defendant were going on about this fight that the black woman had started because her window had been shattered by the TV Control, and then the car. And guess what? Of course they would get the car involved and of course it ended up through the victim’s legs or knees and turned one into a gimp.”

He dug his Adam’s apple into a husk down his throat, and he was getting ready to mock as I watched him making a gas laughing breath because his chest was getting bigger.

“Ya know when I drink I lose my emissions.” He said like a black woman or something, making up a word, and smiling.

“Emissions?” He made his voice deeper or something smarter or manly because he was the judge now.

“Do you mean inhibitions?” Dad broke into laughter after stopping the role-playing. That was the story dad told me about making up words.

“Yup.” I smiled, and turned from his pile of freshly dead tree arms. I broke across the tall grass and then off into his house. I pictured my dad black so I could laugh, but he was playing. I felt like sleeping so I went up to bed. After not dreaming, I got up naked and jumped into my mother’s bedroom across the hall, and I found the bee-bee gun by the window to take, so I pumped it hard and scampered through the house with it in my teeth, and then under the roaring garage door. I crouched in the tall grass with good view, and sniped to shoot dad’s temple because we had the raccoon family problem and that would get rid of it for at least just a while. He fell slowly and crawled on his short arms to the house.

The raccoons came back to then gnaw the dead looking tree down I heard. The groundskeepers probably hauled it off in a stretcher by now, but now I don’t have to deal with giving my high or desperate, hungry or sick brother money anymore.

Carolin'Shorts

2008-12-08T21:47:00.000-08:00

When you think you're desperate, the drinks you drink to find the mule's fight boil down to tasting like a tinge of bull's urine on a leaf, and while you piss it out, you flip the dial to chamber music and sit and read the rainy LA to NY literature and you feel the downpour of droppings outside, slapping off the intellect that six maidens roofed on your rotted slat shanty for the coming flushing winter as a sweat sticky down comforter, and finally it is so that comforting her is safer.

By the looks, we'll have to carol in shorts.

2008-12-07T11:01:00.000-08:00

Ulysses’ clear Homeric parallels begin to wane after the arrival of Chapter 12. In his abandonment of his own scheme, he purposefully shatters with it any preconceptions of authorial control of literature and its interpretation, and therefore necessitates his pivotal shift in Ulysses’ versatile and increasingly abstracted form. Joyce’s seemingly obsessive engagement with the phallus in Chapter 12 is not only farcical self-persecution of his authorship, but an earnest critical deconstruction of monolithic tendencies of a masculine obsession with dynastic fatherhood. The arrival of characters who sequentially suggest failure of dynasty, specifically the nameless narrator, Bloom, and J.J. O’ Molloy, all work to provide a glaring autobiographical ambiguity, and thus a distrustful masculine authority, from which he then intentionally divorces in order freely to embody his text and simultaneously empower the reader with interpretive independence.

Across Old Clods

2008-11-29T10:52:00.000-08:00

-This place ain't gonna become Kansas City, you know, 'cause we're gonna get something on them, something meaning business: a complex stretching wholly a mile along Old Clod Road. We're commencing just in time, before a wintry mix spreads that Christmas spirit seed and sticks snow scrap over our new addition to our church, which gleams straight across Old Clod Road and over the land we're using for the new and safe part of King Householder's. Also just in time for the new gold-plated cross to be erected on the front of the new church addition. Christ can then overlook across the road and protect the ground breaking ceremony of the new King's Householders with fire.

Honey, did you move the furniture off the lawn? I hear that mix is gonna be spittin' winter down tonight. Get that goin' before you go slingin' hash at the Melodrama. Also make sure you bring some of that Pig-In Pig-Out home for dinner.

-Dad, I'm tellin' you they already got a King Householder's in KC.

Did I say King? This one's gonna be the emperor of the plains.

Now, let me conitune.

Sirs, with the new addition, your boys won't suffer a stampede like up there on that long island. For one, thank the decent Lord that they don't shoot themselves up with backstreet trash uppers and have those backyard wrestling tournaments. God, have their parents keep them off the video games.

But thanks to the new complex design, when you are buying for your son Tom Clancy's Siege of Mumbai for next Christmas, the sheer size of the new double wide auto sliding doors, ten in number, stretching at fixed intervals from wall to wall, will allow for hordes of hungry deal scavengers! And the tragedy of that human stampede that happened in those Buddhist hills last year will be saved from the comparison of Householder's shoppers, killing one of our poor employees on Black Friday.

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-That new hot-shot kid's the son of the head pastor who just nailed the sermon you just heard, his boots on the leather chair at the head of the board room table. Damned son looks like he's got cancer on account of that baldness and those goggles he dangles over his nose's bridge. He has to, like, fan his lustry blue tie number, swinging it with plumes from his bull nostrils when they get to where Kennedys can clog them, no bones about him, and I just can't stand on my heels when he's busting through the door, making the whole meeting go dizzy when the power point flashes possessed flickers, and saying hey you idiots I got a cure for all your holiday stress, and it doesn't have anything to do with your balls or, or even hookers, or shrink.
He shot a specific glare to my eyes through those dense goggles and I wanted then and there to get up and shove him through the glass screen like a cue ball.

He tossed down schematics on the table for double-wide, double electric sliding doors for the ten entrances of the new mile-long King Householder's, pride of the plains. Now they're saying they'll stick a monument in front of the complex for the Indians, native and all. So now, they'll find that those plains Indians misjudged the depth of the dirt, but just went for it and buried elders and infants only a couple a' feet deep in the hard, hardly arable, flint shit soil.

I can't wait to see they're faces when they break the burial ground, staking their spades and uprooting rigteously American human fossils among trickling off crowd claps.

Yard Tramp Stunts

2008-11-25T10:24:00.000-08:00

Eli, man, he's beginning a Bean Sprout trick-out over the iron gate.
Don't pop your nodes! I warn and shout over the bending cringing springs.
That's a sure hurt thing that we would have to call a doctor for man. Eli, man, stop that trampin'; ya can't clear the fence. Eli let beams from is his sickly eyes over through the trees and iron fence, always noticing whenever that the family with that little girl did not take down holiday lights from their gutter. He thought there were gun shots when they put them up years ago, and he only came to find that they were staple-gunned hanging christmas lights that now needed to come down sooner or later. But he shouldn't have been jumping with his nodes the size of cashews, pumping up to like jumbo-jelly bean range now.

Can't impress a girl with those, Eli, man, anyway, they're bulging outta your groin on the edge of your bush! So what good is the tramp jump just over the staked iron gate gonna get for you. The damn man, that girl's dad, who clawed the staple thing looks goddamn mean too. Fuck! There's that daughter over there who goes around and lets her sexy strap hang over her shoulders. She's twirling around in the grass just over the fence.

I can see her hair Eli says.
He just owns a washeteria, laundromat, thing. He can't do nothing to me. I can run! Fast on the track, coach told me, after I puked the other day.

It's those nodes, man, don't do it.

Man he looked cool under the sun. Like bullet-time.

Tramp jump over to the fluff turf was a real success. Eli dusted his stained jean knees and posed to the girl if her father was home, and she immediately shook her quick neck, her black hair lifting like an old good pirates dress. You don't like those hanging lights do you? Well let's take them down. They were going to have their first kiss under snapping off staples and swinging christmas light wires until the laundro-man came from behind a bush, burning or something it sounded like, shattering the bulbs of the lights in the grass. He must have been waiting for their little stunt shit to be commencing, when he started hitting the head of Eli with a shoe and spanking his daughters ass with it, and that's the point when the nodes explode and Eli really got the rest of his legs discolored, and the girl didn't play outside anymore. No coming over to Eli's for the tramp stunts.

I'm telling my mom all this. Eli, man, you got the shingles! Can't be doing tramp jumps all over the damn place. Not for a some girl.

Just Giving

2008-11-21T09:11:00.000-08:00

A half-Jew named after David still speaks the law. After gobbling stuffing and a wild turkey, he’s describing the bird's hunt with a racist brother, outspoken, who owns a long cut of land for an airstrip in Missouri, and he explains to you, after graduating proper and well-early from that Blue Devil school with a degree in economics, that a liberal arts education is only for you to impress people at a cocktail party over all the crab sauce and lunch meat. My parents often put me in his position, and how I should be excellent. Law schooled, I’m sure he’s early over with now. My eyes just still burn at the cream cheese that’s on the coffee table. And you can only extend your boyish reach toward his tight jaw but swerve to the crackers and the butter knife. His sister had died a year ago. She was young and was into dogs and drugs and my brother. My brother cried big tears over it. Or just listened to it.

I feel whole hog guilty about all this.

I almost felt sacred and not guilty later.

Later, your feet standing before the printer at liberal arts school, sweat salt through your socks and fester in on the rubber soul of your canvas shoes, and make you think you’re in fact not God’s dust floating in what scientists surmise can’t just be nothingness. The neo-gothic library laser printer starts to spew pulp. The tear that you cry from your egghead has the yellow refractions. It blind-sides the caverns of your coffee stained teeth, falls into a printer in the neo-gothic library When you’re trying to print off the words of a man who wrote ceaselessly for twenty-two years, as an addendum to a book that serves as his second penis, jams it hard. You’ve downloaded it from a public URL and compiled it in a word document. You read, “Poems Penyeach” by James Joyce.

The yellow tear, refusing to heed to joystick yoke, creeps. Saltwater falls in the seem of white plastic shells, and pauses the ink roller. Jams again. Twelve coeds of all colors and languages pumped up on study drugs beleaguer you with their soft hands, reaching out for the pulp jammed laser busted ink you’re blocking up too. But it’s all suspended. And at least one of the kids, probably a white one, fails a test and a paper, which for him, means no more money from daddy. I went later to judge the pomes. I salvaged that.