EngfishWords

The Woman, The Gargoyle & The Kudzu Plant

2011-04-09T02:18:00.001-07:00

Wispy tips and purple flowers, the plant sat on the shelf like a delicate ornamental trophy, its leaves grew the memorandum of designs lost and later proclaimed as something monumental.

Once there was a village who refused to ask themselves questions. They questioned each other and each person asked what was required to give a predisposed answer that would grant them the permissions to continue to live, however, no one questioned these questions either. Thus there was a village that refused to question themselves, therefore their questions. In other words they did not interrogate the words of their asking or those who asked. They were “scripted” people.

Once there was a woman of poor eyesight who dared to ask herself a question. She repeated this question religiously each day as she baked muffins and prepared herbal tea. “Why not go to market today?” After she wiped the jam and butter from the corners of her mouth and replaced the cleaned dishes to the cabinet, she would gather her hand bag and slicker then leave through the gate to the town square. “Yes, she would exclaim,” bustling one arm into her polyurethane jacket while the other swung the handles of her coated fabric handbag, “Why not go to the market today?”

More often than not as she approached the end of her amber travertine walkway and reached out to the swan neck iron handle, she would remember the skeleton key to lock the gate. Without question she would return to the house and find the latch key.

In the town square there were many people, each with a predisposition, an idea of how the universe worked. Each with their own universe in mind they moved like an archipelago would if each island was unattached and free floating, not the tip of a larger volcanic body protruding from the earth’s athenosphere. Each person was mostly predictable. Goods and wares were sold and used and purchased again. The same people at more or less the same time would offer supposedly new thoughts and ideas that were quaintly attached to previous ideas which were subtly above the surface of understanding.

The woman had but one question and it was simply, “Why not go to the market today?” She did not ask herself why she would go to the market but somewhere deep inside she felt that on this day going to the market would somehow make her stronger. She didn’t realize that she was weak because she, like all of the other people in the village, dared not to ask herself questions therefore knew nothing of weakness.

She would not go to a Doctor proper for an answer. Nobody asked questions of the self and thus would not go to a Doctor for the proper answers regarding such matters. The Doctors of the village came to the people. They were slow in rounds and often only came upon situations of near death. The Doctors were followed by the coroners and the coroners were followed by the priest and the priest were followed by the pall bearers and they were followed by the grave diggers, who would never go to a person’s house because their position was to stay in the cemetery and dig ditches.

When the woman arrived at market she saw things of shapes and size and color but with poor eye sight found it difficult to decide. She felt about the items on tables and stumbled about touching things. Her hands grazed over flowers and plants, breads and fruits. The aged wrinkled hands of the woman rubbed over textiles and linens. The tactile properties of most of the objects she handled were soft and soothing but left her feeling limp and vague. As she reached out for more and found watering cans, but had no flowers to water, a bread box but no rolls or fresh bread. Besides she had a bread box that was given to her from an old friend which kept her grains fresh for most of the week and since she could not see well had no reason for purchasing a new for the sake of aesthetics. She grasped the edge of furniture, dressers and a bed but as she felt the mattress she was once again soft inside and weak.

She was near the end of the market and turned to leave when she tripped over a large object that had obstructed her path. She bent over and petted a stone gargoyle which was sitting as a paper weight of the contracts for the furniture salesman. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “how solid and unmoving.” She bent down tracing the features. A head like a cat, ears engulfed by the flow of fur, a lion’s mane. “How much for the stone lion,” she inquired of the market man who depressed his lower lip and palmed his chin thinking. With solvent stained thumb he tapped his mentalis. “You’re sure that is for you?” was his usual response when he was about to make an unsure sale.

The furniture man was like the other salesman, proficient in every way at their craft and skill. They knew their clientele and what was best at fitting person to property both naturally and aesthetically.

“Oh, yes!” cried the woman, “this is just what I am looking for.” She squinted up at the furniture man and smiled.

“Well ma’am you seem happy enough…” he bit the inside of his cheek, “and that sure is a nice smile you’ve got…”

The woman raised her hopes with her eyebrows silently pleading.

Inching its way over the spines of books and figures of knick-knacks, the leaves expanded its announcement into bi-pennant patterns which obscured old possessions from view.

The woman returned home with her old stone gargoyle and concidered a proper place for it. Still under the impression it was a lion she remembered how when she had better vision she would often go to the library and read from books. Outside the large granite building which contained volumes of her favorite fictional stories were two stone statues; one of a griffin, named “endurance” and another of a phoenix named “determination”. From that memory she decided it best to place the gargoyle outside the house on a pedestal beneath the cherry tree. She liked it there and could enjoy it whenever she left for or returned from market.

The next day as she wiped jam and butter from the corners of her mouth and prepared for her trip to market she remembered yesterdays purchase. Instead of asking herself "why not go to market today" she gathered her handbag and strode out the door to consult her new stolid animal friend. "Why not go to market," she inquired playfully. The statue of course did not reply. She waited a moment for an answer which she imagined was forthcoming. A bird tweeted in the cherry tree above.

“Oh what a divine and pretty song,” thought the woman. I shall go to market in search of music for us to share. She turned and walked the amber travertine walkway to the gate. As her hand touched the swan neck handle she remembered leaving her key back at the house, so she turned again and walked back to retrieve her latch key.

The truth about each town person's universe was simply, there was no truth. There once was a king who ruled the townspeople. He declared that the only way to remain in the town was to speak good things of the town and the only way to profit from the kingdom was to speak great things of the kingdom. Anyone who understood the value of words and the temper of their meaning supposed that what was good for them would either be bad or great for another and those that were great for themselves could only be good for the kingdom and therefore not great. The entire town and kingdom fell silent for years not knowing bad from good and neither being able to profess which could possibly be for the other and thus lived in fear of banishment. The townspeople took to writing books, most of which were fiction. Books were passed around and shared yet no single truth was distinguished from another and no complete truth was decided on since no one had the lifetime to complete all of the books. After the King’s death the townspeople built a giant library for all of their books. Those that were fiction remained in the library and those which were ideas were created into businesses and handed down. Two stone statues were carved and placed on either side of the entrance, one with the mane and body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle named “perseverance”, the other with the wings and body of an eagle and the head and scales of a dragon named “composure”.

When the lady returned home with a sweet little penny whistle she played a little song for her statue. To her the lion listened peacefully with a large smile across its face. As she played she remembered exciting nights of dining with gentleman callers who swept her off her feet across ballroom dance floors, guiding her, this way and that as their bodies played harmoniously. She finished her song. “Did you like that my new friend?” She asked as she stroked the gargoyles head and pet the smooth contours she considered its mane. She remembered her memories and was pleased with her purchase. She patted her stolid animal friend goodnight and went inside for bed.

The following morning the woman woke later than usual. The sunshine was her alarm yet the room seemed dim and the sunlight mottled. She went quickly to the yard to see if the sun was disappearing. The brightness stung her eyes. The sun was still in the sky, full and illuminating and ever so warming. She turned to her stolid animal friend and shouted with radiance, “Doesn’t the sun feel ravishing my dear old friend?” and then a moment later, “Why not go to the market today?” She laughed youth from her heart and tilted her head upwards to the tree. She could distinguish the shadows of branches and leaves and tiny clustered dots of the cherries which hung low. The woman turned again to the stone statue, “What pleasure do you desire today?” She paused and cupped her palm behind her ear, waiting for a response. There was nothing, only silence. She looked up into the tree and whistled for the birds. The woman heard nothing but the silent wind as it shimmied the branches and leaves.

The woman had felt the warmth of the sun though and it reminded her of the heat from her oven when she baked loaves of bread. “I know what I will do for us today my strong friend; I shall bring back fresh dough to bake in my oven and tonight prepare delicious cheese sauces to dip our fresh bread.” She turned and walked the amber travertine path to the gate, grasped the swan neck handle and tugged. It was locked. “Oh, why won’t you stay open,” she spat. She turned again and trumped the amber walk path back to her house to retrieve the latch key.

Vine covered walls of foliage dispatching the missives with runners that carried a message of growth.

Each town person had their own idea of how the universe worked and there was no single truth for all people yet each person had a function in society; a tool, body part, color, object, made into an icon, given a normal or odd label and told “this is who you are, everyone knows who you are but only you know the depth of your knowledge”. There was no set monetary or rewards system; things were taken at face value. Those who have it are always watching to know how to take it, those who don’t are always waiting for the right moment to approach. Still though nobody knew about business ethics enough to know right from wrong and the elderly great men were so incredibly tired of reminding people and finding new ways to enforce the necessity of the old kingdoms system that they became good men as well, visiting people door to door and followed by a crowd.

That evening after the woman’s sauces had been dipped and most of her bread had been eaten she sat in the front yard beside her statue with a large swollen belly, snuggled up to her solid stolid lion animal friend and slept. She dreamed of her late husband who had died while on duty. His job, he said, was to fight in the war where he dug fox holes and trenches. Each day he returned home he would return sodden and soiled. He was a pretty man with large hands that when clean, covered entire regions of her body. Often he would approach her from behind and embrace her completely with his arms, nuzzle his face deep into the crevice of her neck and with one giant hand cup her breast and the other hold her hips firm to his. He was tall and strong. He was her strength.

When she opened her eyes the woman was blind in the dark. Night had fallen and with poor eye sight felt the grass towards the travertine walkway and the walkway towards her door. As she crawled on her hands she thought of how much time this seemed to be taking her. Then wondered how long she had been asleep. It would be a relief when she reached her bed. Ahead she could sense she was nearing the door. The woman reached up and grasped the swan handled neck of the gate. “No!” she cried out. “I’ve gone the wrong way! Why?! Why?! Why?! She found herself saying. “Why are you here now?! Why are you never open?! Why do you keep me in?! What good are you…you…you gate?!” The woman enraged turned and crawled back on her hands and knees across the amber travertine walkway towards her door.

As she reached the stone statue again she asked, “Wouldn't you like to go to market tomorrow?" she paused, "What would you like?” The woman again waited for a response, a sign. There was nothing but the wind through the cherry tree and the gentle creak of the drying limbs, a ripple then a crackle and a crisp leaf fell by her hand. She waxed it between fingers feeling the midrib and ribs out to the margin.

Inside, the house was darker there was not even the light of the moon to help guide her poor vision. She felt around for a lamp but only touched what seemed like tiny sheets of paper sewn together and hung all about her house. She thought she must still be dreaming and perhaps if she went back to sleep she would wake again, outside, snuggled beside her strong stone friend. She curled into a ball and wept for her husband. She cried herself to sleep, her tears falling upon the paper.

Something tickled her nose and she swiped her open palm across her face. Her nose tickled again and she opened her eyes. Dangling above her head were rows of fuzzy seed pods suspended from a great vine which appeared to be her coat rack. Hanging on the rack were odd squares and circles that resembled her hats and polyurethane jacket. Coiled around the height of the rack and stealthily watching her was, upon closer examination, what used to be a knitted scarf. The house was dark and she wondered if she could still be dreaming. Slivers of light penetrated the darkness; she felt for the door handle and pulled. The door would not budge. The vines had grown thick around the frame and secured themselves outside. She felt along the walls to the windows but the vines were embedded everywhere, protruding to the other side like prison bars. They grew up the chimney and covered the roof. The small plant she had purchased long ago after her husband had gone.

The woman found her way into the kitchen. She prepared herself tea and ate the rest of her bread with butter and jam.

10.

The next day the elderly great men of the well, also known as the Doctors proper, arrived at the woman’s home, followed by a coroner, who was followed by the priest who was followed by the pall bearers. By the time they arrived to tell me about what had happened I was already sodden and covered with the soil of a fresh fox hole.

Impossible Interviews

2011-01-31T14:47:00.000-08:00

She 1 was the worst liar of them all. The best liar of course was he and the most impossible liar became she 2.

She was the worst liar because she could not do it. Not to say that she couldn’t tell a lie but she was ordained not to according to her religion. She lived by strict guides of life that must always be front and foremost in the public eye. But as usual the public eye could not see everything. Her lies were only distinguishable in what she said. She was voted class clown in high school and everyone knows there is a bit of truth in every joke. The problem for her was that even in joking she had thoughts of whatever she was making fun of, in her case it was usually nothing too criminal but in the eyes of her lord, even thinking it was punishable by spiritual law. Some people might say, yeah but we all say a lot of things that we don’t think about, or we say things before we think about it. But that thought had to come from somewhere. If she had done something without thinking about it, than later said something without thinking about, she was only admitting to everyone what she had done. The one exception would come from an implanted thought from another person who had thought the thought before her and she was regurgitating. Rarely do regurgitators and the class clown become the valedictorian, unless they are the butt of a really big joke. To be the class clown you must be funny. To be truly funny you have to put some effort into it, thoughts must be had to make a real joke come across as funny. So was she a thinker and a regurgitator? Could she regurgitate only the intellectual knowledge whilst living her life in a world of ungodly thoughts or was she the class clown because people were laughing at her, not with her and the biggest joke of all was watching her take valedictorian while the real smart kids sat back and laughed at their school for what they had created and set forth into the working, somewhat comprehensible to all, for lack of a better phrase; normal world? Really though, that was between her, her god and the man she chose to marry. To the public eye she was just smart and funny or a funny kind of smart.

The man she chose to marry was the best liar. He of course was only the best because of the amount of pre thought he had prepared before the actual test of a lie. He unfortunately got mono in high school and wasn’t around to pass an aptitude, let alone a popularity test to be voted for anything the yearbook staff might have a creative banner font to smear across a page. He had many days to watch television and learn how the world worked from a different perspective. He could analyze the drama of daily soap operas and as time passed by learned how to implant lies and not be affected by the drama that they created, because he knew they were lies. He was comfortable knowing that he was a liar, however, his god allowed him to do pretty much whatever he wanted and he would be forgiven. He only chose to lie though but did so all the time. After awhile people caught on to what he was doing and dismissed most of whatever he had to say as a lie. Only lies are usually created from something inside and most everything that is inside has an outer resource. So though his lies were often a long stretch from the truth, the truth was out there somewhere, obscured, and in those rare occasions when one of the lies he was involved with trying to convince someone of, the important hidden truth is so buried, it has no time to surface before it is sunk again and covered with more lies. Therefore his words were like a sink hole or quick sand. Though he was the best liar at one point in time for his preparations and ad lib, he eventually vanished into himself, never to be truly seen by anyone again, except those who would laugh while sinking.

The girl that he got mono from was the girl he dated in high school. She 2 like she 1 had grown up with a serious inclination to become more like a similar god to whom she 1 worshipped. She was also a class clown. Unfortunately, unlike she 1, she thought about everything. She was such a thinker that it was impossible to accuse her of not thinking. Unfortunately she thought too much about the same things and often repeated many of her thoughts, therefore to break the monotony; to her the glass was neither half full nor half empty, it was just a shallow glass. Although she was often correct in her own right, her own right was often wrong and thus she was the most impossible liar. It was difficult for anyone to discern if she was joking or serious, honest or lying, right or wrong. Of course she was correct in her thinking half of the time, half of the time in academy or even public school, is still failing. She was sent to a remedial school where she excelled and made people laugh. Her pride became her and gave her the confidence she needed to find herself within all of her twisted untruths. She didn’t think as much and found she could nearly double her aptitude, which was an A- or A but still only 75% of what the public schools had covered in their text. She had spent a lot of her spare time reading religious books to help her with her public appearance to her religion and school, what most people would consider a debate of prayer in schools, she began asking more and more questions and returned to her analytical routine of over thinking. When she met her boyfriend, afraid to include her in the drama, instead implanted his penis into the void of her so called soul, thus beginning a sexual relationship that was as big of a lie as could be confused. Though everyone knew the truth of their lies, they were happy to see that he had focused his attention on something and she 2 was smiling more instead of furrowing her brow so much in thought. As time progressed the town had looked past their lies so much it would have been impossible to convince them of the truth so the town went along with it as if they also had created this plan, as they had her 1’s.

He’s parents took the most of the boasting rights. They knew to save their son by giving him the false hopes of sexual attraction with women, though he could have been a social worker or a priest, his parents whose relationship was primarily based on drinking and sex, could only relate to their son in minimalist ways and so self esteem was learned through an education of sexual attraction. This is what his mother had been trying to teach him as she selfishly controlled the television programs, watching primarily soap operas. Her original intent was that her son would be quickly bored and either get well or go find something else to do and leave her in peace. When she discovered his attention was quite captivated by the programs her embedded guilt reaction caused her to reassess what her son was thinking and feeling while watching the shows. As she evaluated his responses, she understood that he had an attraction for females and his reason for watching them were all the pretty girls, thus being the one motivator she could presume. It was her goal later to find him a woman who would satisfy his sexual cravings and motivate him to do something with his life. Unfortunately their limited understanding of their own son was a lie. And that lie was marginally perpetuated.

SILD

2011-01-21T20:00:00.000-08:00

I could have said that we were just bagging pumpkins. The kids on the playground might buy that, but their parents who were already offering sideways glances and biting double-speak dialect would know the truth and probably not appreciate having to be the ones to later sit down and explain the serious facts in a dismal tone to their four year old when it came up in conversation while pulling to the McDonald’s order window.

I could have said we were just bagging pumpkins, the bags were bright orange enough to be seen as such from across the road, but something made me think they were bright for the purpose of being seen from across the park, or in this case from across the parking lot where the van was parked. Also, there were no black haunted smiling faces on the bags; they were in the van as well. I could have said that we were just bagging pumpkins but I knew better to just keep my damned mouth shut and not utter a fucking syllable.

In the van it was alright, I suppose, to talk. On the way over the driver was gabbing to the person in the passenger’s chair. Chatting up a storm. Jawing out every random cock mouth thing that popped into their pea sized noggins. It didn’t take a genius in linguistics or a sociologist to figure out that in their words were the kinds of low tact, distasteful and otherwise unintelligent banter that spawns from ignorance. I was content though knowing I was only wearing an orange vest and contained in the van instead of imprisoned in either of their minds.

“So I finally buried my cat yesterday.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, after a few days the ground was finally soft enough to dig a shallow hole and then I used potting soil and covered the hole and put two heavy stones, you know, two heavy stones on top of the top soil…”

“God dammit! I’m always looking for the shifter. Every time I drive an automatic, even the van I am always looking for the shifter. Where’s my shifter? I’m just so used to a standard. See?” He points to the speedometer on the dashboard and mimes shifting gears. “Vroom, vroom.” The van sputters accelerating with the traffic.

In the lane next to us was a beat up red car with a Raiders football logo on the sides were letters F and C-K. Below it read “the rest”. Two small Mexican guys were in the front. There were fuzzy dice hanging on the rearview. The driver of the vehicle was looking around them to talk to his neighbor in the passenger seat.

Our driver snorted from his perch high above in the captains chair of the van, “Bangers, yeah you’ll gang bang the rest…”

“Yeah, trouble, we’ll be seeing them soon.”

“Would you look at this big piece of shit?”

“What is it, a bridge?”

“Nah. Most people think it is a bridge but it’s the fog lights for the airport. Millions to build that piece of shit,

and it took ‘em three years. I guess if you make enough money off the air port it pays for itself. I can see that.”

“But a lot of time…”

“A lot of money and a lot of time.”

“Look at that house. Can you believe it is being sold for that much?”

“A crappy house like that for that much? It’s not even a good location. Although when you figure…”

I didn’t care about what they had to say about the real estate of Boise. It was a crappy market with crooked people. The way I had figured it was in the late 80’s early 90’s the Californians who didn’t strike gold with their bogus ideas migrated to the Midwest to take advantage of the cheap land and a couple of building contractors. Those who stayed recreated their money making schemes as lawyers and real estate agents, crooked ones who cracked their safes instead of a book. The standards of practice reduced to writing a check instead of composing a business proposal. They broke their piggy banks instead of records. Now that there are no more high rollers to forge the state of the economy the city had to face the fact there is a recession in America. They acknowledge it by laying off workers.

“…take for example a family bought their home and in a couple of years the refinanced their home and it is worth more so they buy a boat and take a trip to Disney world and a couple of toys or whatever, then in a couple of years lose their house or have to downsize, I see that they didn’t lose anything, they made out. If they would have gotten something else, not refinanced they would be working pay-check to pay-check, no boat, no trip to Disney land and no toys. They made out. I only see the good in it. They didn’t lose anything.”

“Uh-huh…”

“Okay, after the next light make a right I want to show you the house I bought and tell you how much I paid for it and how much I sold it for and how much I made. Turn on Camas Street. No not this one the next one.”

“Camas?”

“Yeah it is the next street.”

“I know where it is.”

“Oh it looks like someone is moving into it…”

“Yeah there’s a van there.”

“Oh, it’s the one beside it. See there. Its small isn’t it? I advertised as ‘a pertinent bench cottage’. And the guy I bought it from was a firefighter.”

“Really a firefighter…?”

“Yeah he said to me, ‘you are probably wondering why I am living in such a small house with my pension and retirement and all,’ and I was like, well I was thinking, no that is more information than I need to know I just want to look at the house…”

“Well, yeah that is his business…”

“He said he his wife had taken a lot in the divorce. After I sold the house I found out he had died and it was one of those deaths that was quick and kind of a shocker.”

“Oh yeah? Heart attack?”

“No I think I heard he was shot, well it is like the one guy we heard about, he was shot ten times and they never found the killer. He was like chief eagle beard or something.”

“Oh yeah.”

“He’s probably dead now.”

“That’s why you hear about these stories and never find out what happened ‘cause they didn’t catch anyone.”

“Yeah they get away. But they’re all probably dead by now. That’s when you hear about bodies turning up in the river.”

We had traveled across Orchard and were now going down Americana, past the cemetery. When we reached the junction at Emerald our driver’s head turned 90 degrees going through the light to follow the ass end of a girl crossing the street. Then he opened his dumb mouth.

“Keep struttin’ it girl but nobody’s buying.”

“Yeah, she’s workin’ hard.”

“Yeah but nobody’s buying.”

Then his attention was diverted to a semi ambling up the narrow road.

“Whoa, where’re you going boy? Uh-oh, he was black he probably wouldn’t like being called boy. Some black boy, he probably wouldn’t like that, but I didn’t know he was black till I turned my head.”

There was little more said the next hundred yards as we reached the entrance to Anne Morrison Park. Then our driver opened his big damn dumb mouth again in an attempt to recover.

“You ever come down to this park?”

“Ann Morrison? I watch the fireworks.”

“No the Albertson’s. My daughter had her wedding there and it was a nice reception.”

The kid behind me on the bench seat tried to chime into this conversation but his words were lost. Seems he bore the last name of Albertson and wanted to make known this fact that he was somebody other than a kid trapped in a vest and van and deserved better than their tactless gibbing. It was no use though, nobody would respond to him.

In the park we were given rakes and a box of big orange bags.

“Why don’t you start over on that hill and work your way back to the bathrooms.” She turned to her partner in the driver’s seat, “Does that sound good to you? Let them start with that?”

“Yeah they can do that and then we can probably call it good, huh?”

“You and I can stay here and continue to work?”

“Yep. We’re workin’.” He adjusted the clear plastic bud of his radio device over the folds of his ear.

I could have said that we were just bagging pumpkins but I didn’t. Our vested group scattered beneath the trees. I imagined myself one of the parents with my own child, free to enjoy the nice weather.

An Epistle from "Tape" #4

2010-12-06T13:39:00.000-08:00

The balcony appeared cold. It contained the characteristics familiar to CS which presumed when sliding open the transparent door there would be a slight movement of chilly air into the room causing shivers and a recoil from stepping outside. But outside is where CS wanted to be. The door was opened and the weather was warm. What appeared to be evaporation of water molecules hazing the morning atmosphere were dust particles, unsettled by the southern winds. Oklahoma during this month was the fourth driest month with the least amount of precipitation aside from the three coldest months, November through January. This optical illusion of climate was only a slightly disturbing discomfort for CS, it marked the beginning of new thinking that would be required, as forgetting the old ways would be necessary for progress.

The heat of the Oklahoma morning has made my chocolate chip cookies melt. I can really feel a change in the weather. It’s really dry out here at motel 6. The sky hasn’t changed much as far as I can tell, yet something is different. The trees are few but the air is clean and I like it.

Our room is located on the third floor and there is a balcony. Father was sitting out there tinkering while listening to an old country station on the radio. The music was my attraction to discover what he could be doing, though in some sense it should have been a message to me and perhaps I should have known what he was doing. He is always listening to Eddy Arnold and Johnny Cash records while tinkering.

When I stepped out he stopped what I was doing and looked up at me with his crafty knowing smile. He was in that serene place of mindful thoughts. Knowing when he is content with his thoughts makes me feel at peace. He put down what he was doing and stood up with a slight stretch and with his arm gestured to the great vast beyond of Oklahoma. We had a decent enough view with a far vanishing point that ended where sky meets land.

Father began expressing himself. “There is much to be discovered where sky meets land. Some people need a spyglass to see that far in the distance but you learn more along the way if you use your own legs and feet. I know you have been reading a lot about the universe, so I would like to share with you a bit of knowledge I have picked up over the years. Galileo was a physicist and astronomer who used his talent for mathematics to build a bigger spyglass called the telescope. Later that same year of 1609 he discovered the moon was not smooth but mountain and cavernous. When you look out here to the distance it might appear that you see everything there is to the vanishing point but I can guarantee that is only the perspective through a spyglass. It isn’t until you use your own legs and feet and get moving in the direction you want to go that you will see anything from a real perspective.”

He then reached down and took my hand. He turned it over to look at my palm. I thought in this moment of weird wisdoms he might try to read the lines and read my palmistry to decipher my future but he didn’t. He smoothed his fingers from my wrist to my finger tips then began pinching each tip between the second knuckle of his forefinger and thumb. “There are other cultures that believe different things. One believes there are universes located in the swirls and whorls of our own fingertips. So while some of us lie on our backs and examine the stars, others only have to look into our own hands to see galaxies. Hindus credit the tips to Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth.” After turning each tip around several times he, pulled on each phalange from the distal metacarpal to the tip again. Then cradling my hand in both of his, applied pressure to my palm with both thumbs and using them like windshield wipers, fanned opened the metacarpals. If you were a palm reader these would be your lines of Mars, head, heart, life, fate and health and what have you. The hindus ascribe this part of the hand to Sarasvati, the goddess of learning, music and the arts.” He began making small specific circles to my carpal bones, which relieved some of the tension I had been holding from writing so much. I felt a shiver go up my arm and felt relaxed. “This part of the hand for afore mentioned palmists would be your mound of venus, or your mound of love. This to the Hindus is Govinda, God. Each morning they are reverent of their hands in all that they support and they are gracious, this symbolizes their honest labor. Consider your hands CS. When you discover your honest labors go forth into distance and be sure to use your own legs and feet to make the journey as you gain your own perspective before your reach the point of

vanishing.” He smiled again his knowing smile and let go of my hand.

“Maybe you might include it in that journal of yours someday.”

When I went back into the hotel room I looked down at my chocolate chip cookies with melted chocolate chips. I imagined each was its own galaxy and the chocolate chips were expanding black holes. I then thought that if this plate was the universe and my galaxies were swallowed by chocolate chip black holes at least it would be a semi-sweet ending.

Today we’re going to drive by the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. It seems kinda morbid but it is historical and educational. I was going to suggest this but he said it first, so I don’t feel so bad about going, like maybe I was conjuring up some negativity.

Last night on the radio I heard the Aerosmith song, the power ballad that was remade into a country tune by Mark Chestnut. The radio man said it was written by Dianne Warren, the same American songwriter who wrote “Solitaire” for Laura Branigan. I asked dad if this was the same “Solitaire” that Sheryl Crow sang, which I thought was a remake of The Carpenters. He explained that it wasn’t and then he pulled out a mix tape from the case beneath his seat labeled “pair-of-dimes”, he had made many years ago when he was a journalist, which contained both songs. He explained that essentially they were the same story. Laura Branigan’s (or Dianne Warren’s) was from a first person perspective of heart break and that Sheryl Crow’s (or The Carpenter’s) versions were from a second person narrative. He said too that together they created the paradox of loneliness.

“You see LB begins the story with ‘I still remember how much I used to need you, tried so hard to please you but you didn’t need me…’ which depicts what could be a woman scorned, but because she could easily find something better to do that required less of her, it seems more likely that her attention just shifted to a different game. Her thoughts didn’t change, especially since she didn’t need to take the fella back to sustain her life and found more amusement in watching him suffer in the same way she only thought she had. It is ironic really only that it helped launch a solo career. I think anything else is summed up in the first line ‘I used to need you’ think about that.

The narrative “Solitaire” which was written by Sedaka and Cody and sung by earlier artists like Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis and even Presley the man, was more about a bunch of artists ganging up on one man. Suppose Cody’s lyrics were really an observation of one man, if not his self, the song becomes the anthem for the anti-social. I don’t suppose that makes a lot of sense but each of the artists are individuals, surrounded by many fans, who listen to a song about being lonely. But this is all irrelevant to the times of now. What have you got to listen to?”

I shrugged. I was curious to know more about the tapes my father had brought along with him and what they meant with all of their interesting names. I was still thinking about you and us being connected and I couldn’t help believing that if I was sad than you were sad too and perhaps I should give into my feeling of loneliness. I reached into his bag and selected something called “Subject 2 Change”. My father looked at me rather surprised and then smiled from the side of his mouth. I opened the case and pushed the cassette in. I listened. It was twang but not country. It was more hip than country. Then I was surprised my father would have this in his collection of music. The artist began to sing. “I’m the same I was when I was six years old…” I wasn’t sure of his voice but it seemed familiar, like someone had I had been listening to just recently. When the song reached the bridge I thought it was you.

Maybe “Solitaire” was an anthem for one lonely man who was stoned to death by his unwillingness to be social but this song was a perpetuation of what I had already been thinking and I knew I had made the correct choice of anthem. “The universe works on a math equation that never even ever really even ends in the end, infinity spirals out our creation…”

I was pacified for several songs but then I got kinda upset about leaving again because I feel like I’m going to be missing out on a lot of things. Like the sports seasons, well, watching you play. I hope you’re having fun with that and play really well in all of your games. Of course I will be active and join as many teams as I can when I get out there, you know softball with the Sunday alcoholics, track and field with the skinny nerds and soccer with the long quiets. There is bound to be real sand volleyball with as dry and treeless as it has been. I wanted to start running when I got there but I left my running shoes. My ideas seem choppy and sentences full of contractions. I hope my letters get better. I think these are the worst letters I’ve ever written. That’s okay though, I haven’t written anybody in a long time. I’m sure they’ll get better.

Your Infinite Spiral

An Epistle from "Tape" #3

2010-11-28T22:08:00.000-08:00

Each shelf contained oil wrapped in oil polymers. Every gas station they stopped at along the way was essentially the same; rows of shelves, creating isles, containing the most absolute worst consumer available snacks often labeled “goodies”. Somewhere there was a schism in the mind of the applied ethics director of Mars to distribute and be consumed or continue to get fat off crinkly plastic enticing the gullible few to participate in a sweepstakes. CS strolled around and observed everything that made a roadside traveler’s stop, again, noticing the slight change in prices of certain items but the most obvious difference was in the sales pitch for fountain sodas. Each had their own refillable promotion cups.

The muzak piped in from a satellite radio station was always oldies. CS couldn’t help singing along from “Golden Slumbers” to “Escape”. Each finger tap touch to the polyethylene film became a beat like a snare in the rhythm section. CS selected, with the exception of a little fruit juice for natural flavor, the most worthless kaolinite coated package of confection to be slugged down with Chicago’s Klapman & Bern’s sweet sassafras pseudo beer and on the way out the dingle-belled door snatched up a brochure for the gateway arch.

The weather is warm and all I could think about was how to taste a rainbow. I decide if I could fill my stomach with carbonation, I would float upwards like Charlie and his father from “The Great Glass Elevator” to at least the stratosphere, but I am too mixed with “whethers” and wouldn’t make it past the white lacerations of an airplanes exhausted frozen condensation droplets, I think you called them “contrail formations”. I believe my trail has been conned, or mixed. Either way senseless consumerism is my one form of self expression right now and aside from making a kite from these Skittles wrappers I have nothing that is getting my hopes off the ground, except your book which keeps me at least entertained and thoughtful.

It was Kepler who inspired my motion to emote this morning. I am making an effort to be more rational and reasonable but learning the orbit of every planet is in the shape of an ellipse left me thinking of far away dots and the ellipses of thoughts I could not finish on my own. Instead of a completed cycle I get only half-way to make an arch. I imagined it a rainbow. I kept thinking in my head “focus” but it came out “foci” with the accent of the south and was followed by the grammatically equivalent sentence: “Tha only thang I foci is me ‘n’ you ona plane”. It seemed so simplistically sweet I thought I had channeled the retarded spirit of Winston Groom’s fictional brain child or had created my own idioglossia from being isolated in a car without direct experience to civilization. I liked the thought of the motion of two bodies around each other though…

After passing the sign of Ill-annoy it was a blue indication sign that we were “Now Entering Missouri”. I read “misery”, as a marker of miles further from our zero mass and big bang. I’ll say St. Louis was awesome. I understand, subjective... but I am positive 836 tons of stainless steel would impress those people of Darwin boasting the largest ball of clothes line; therefore it is “awe” some. Yeah not much of a syllogism. I suppose that would be all confusion by excluding a premises or a silly-gism argument. Spooge in the funny face. But that is the best I can do for inductive reasoning for now. Other than I have decided there could be a tangible mimesis of string theory connecting you and me. This brochure declares 7,049,191 feet of twine. Unraveled it would link 1,335 of the miles that will be distancing us. Once again I am tormented by empty tin can telephone thoughts, heartless and cold but increasingly logical, however unpractical.

The bridge into East St. Louis was really… neat. We could see the gateway arch from the Mississippi river front, about 8 miles away. If the arch is 650 feet tall and we were 8 miles away what would the formula be to calculate how tall the building appears? Is there a solution for illusionary distance?

I really wanted to go to Planet Hollywood to eat but when we tried to turn around we were lost on the one way streets of Laclede Landing and Morgan Street. If I don't have a complete plan or business proposal prepared while dad is in overdrive, diversion can be difficult. I was so down town but really, what would we have done with Tigger and Cody while we were inside stuffing ourselves with proper velvet Elvis cake or whatever they serve there. Of course there were excuses why we couldn’t stop. I sat impatiently with my feet on the dashboard lifting the zipper of my hoodie to examine the tiny “ykk” letters then lowering it again slowly so the metal chinked every tooth in its decent. It’s an annoying sound, I know. I can be a brat sometimes when I don't get my way. If it is his way or the highway it didn't matter, I had had enough of the highway, just drop me off on the corner and I’ll find my own way back. The governor of the gravity gavel can put it in his pooper for all I cared. I looked in the back seat. The cats were panting and appeared drenched in sweat. Our friendly gay neighbors had given us a couple of dried stems of fresh cat nip. I reached behind the seat and into the plastic bag where the withered herbs were, crumpled the leaves a bit and left the bag open, thinking the plastic might not be permeable enough for the plants hallucinogenic toxin to circulate. Then I considered I might be wrong and the raspy breaths and sweat was an adverse reaction and their body was naturally trying to rid itself of the toxins. I was torn between the goodies feeling of helping and guilt. I gave up. I didn't know.

I wanted to continue on 70 North to Hyde Park but Dad found his way back to 64 deeper into Missouri, deeper into Forrest Park. He rolled up the windows, reached over and turned on the air. "Did you know that driving with the windows down while going over forty miles per hour is counterproductive to your gas mileage? You see, the wind causes a greater resistance with the windows down." I thought I couldn’t see the wind at all and it was just a matter of faith in existence. But then I remembered nothing mattered and wind was a greater part of that nothing according to the vast beyond.

The cats seem to be taking the improved aerodynamics of the car fairly well, or maybe it was the A/C. We stopped about every two hours to let them get out and walk around a bit. I’ve decided to live on skittles and root beer. I don't really have much of an appetite for anything else. It’s kinda nice. By the end of this trip I should have obtained enough wrappers to sew together a hot air balloon to escape back home.

The countryside is beautiful and the cities are huge. I just wish we were there already. I turned my head to see the cats in euphoria and my father yawning. Then feeling sedated myself stared out the window at the flat countryside. Father’s music was keeping the time in three minute and thirty second pop intervals. He liked The Eagles. I shuddered to the beguiling seduction lyrics of “Hotel California”. I used to think “Tiffany twisted” was a reference to the 80’s teen dance singer. Later learning that she would have only been six when the song was released and the allusion was probably more in reference to the twisting design of tiffany lamps that would make for 70’s hotel decorum, I wished for my childhood naivety to return to me. I did learn that Tiffany herself did eventually escape California into Tennessee with the aid of her mother.

8:47PM

Now we’re traveling to Tulsa Oklahoma. We’re going to drive straight through till we reach Oklahoma City, then stop there for the night. After that we’ll only have fourteen more hours in the car. That doesn’t seem that bad. For father however, it must be hellishly strenuous. For the native flying arthropods; their aerodynamics are halting speeds at an alarming rate. Traveling greater than 40 miles per hour is counterproductive to their phylum. I’ve only cleaned the windshield once in Illinois but I should probably clean it more since we’ve killed about twenty bugs since I’ve started writing this paragraph.

I have been listening to another tape of ours. There is a dark irony in the mood of Pearl Jam’s “Alive” as insects pummel the windshield. Moths, beetles and lightening bugs, they strike and stay illuminated for several seconds before sputtering out like a candle. I am trying not to see the dark constellations they create as oncoming headlights from across the meridian flash the shadows of their carcasses around the interior of the vehicle. The morbidity bade me to turn off the cassette. The dark irony continued as “Alive” was also the song selection from the disk-jockey on the alternative station the radio happened to be tuned into.

I am doing butt exercises with cheek alternation.

I’m sorry I haven’t said much about the trip in really good detail. There’s not much to see. We’re on highway all the time and it’s a lot like well… highway.

Midnight

Right now we’re in Oklahoma City. We’re staying in a Days Inn. Well at least that’s what it was when we arrived. We were tired and stopped at the first available place. We checked in and then left again to get gas, when we returned there was a vinyl sign strapped over the plastic fluorescence declaring it had now become a Palace Station. This of course excited my father into hysteria of conspiracy theory and set him off to the internet kiosk for research. I don’t know. At least at this hotel we didn’t have to sneak in the cats. I went outside and took each carrier to our room. On the way back I didn’t see father at the kiosk but could hear his voice in the lounge around the corner. I went back to the room. I played with the door key card a bit. Sticking in the slot and watching the light go from red to green, opening the door and watching it slowly shut again. Finally I put down water for the cats and fell into bed. On my back with my hands tucked under my head I traced the cloud wall paper border with my eyes and imagined my father’s seven star hotel skylights as they became the stucco ceilings of a mid-western palace.

Out here, the sky doesn’t change much. I’ve seen two different sun sets while being on the road and it still seems like home. Even in an “American Tale” sort of way it makes me feel like I’m closer to you. Besides your book there are other things which remind me of you. Road names and car plates, architecture and plant shapes. I know I’ve only been gone a day and a half but it’s hard when I know I won’t be back for a little while. It’s hard when we’re driving down the road and I realize that I won’t be back to my house for dinner. I won’t be waking up and meeting you before the sunrise. I will miss the feeling of anticipating entrance. I’m going to miss and miss out on a lot of things but I suppose it is not fair for you to think of them while you’re reading this. Just remember that I love you a lot and I haven’t stopped thinking about you, goodnight,

-CS

An Epistle from "Tape" #2

2010-11-21T14:32:00.000-08:00

There were no chafers of silver dollar pancakes, sausages or bacon. No plates of angled fruit pieces or jellies next to a six slice toaster. There was no continental buffet. There was however a linen napkin lined basket, containing several whole fruit on a folding TV tray next to a coffee maker. CS was accustomed to seeing stainless steel Bunn, double warmer automatic coffee machines; brewing up to six gallons an hour for the mud-milk guzzlers. The stained beige plastic of this twelve cup carafe resembled the sovereign pottery of late classic Mesoamerica. The glass Krups lid could probably reveal in its peat colored spiraled slip stain, the historical data of indigenous cultures. Breakfast in bed was not an option except a tepid bowl of oats in the back seat of the station wagon. Selecting a safe looking banana from the basket, CS waited for father to fill his travel mug with the seven remaining cups of coffee from the pot and without turning it off replace the decanter and head off for the bathroom.

CS was tidy and attentive. Observing the walls, they were decorated with nice paintings of quaint horses streaked with gold. Some were catawampus over warped water stains. Others were oblique covering peeling paper. Only one, of a mother nurturing a foal, seemed to occupy the proper position to adorn the space provided.

Father, invigorated and determined burst forth through the bathroom door, bit his lower lip and cocked his head while slicking a hair back on his head with three fingers and winked. The motion and energy made CS smile but pride swelled when Father snapped his wrist aside, clicking the coffee switch off, on the way out the front doors.

I have been thinking about what you said in regards to the true nature of a body in motion through space. I am absolutely moving from one place to another but somehow I doubt this is my true nature, considering I am figuratively and literally being driven by external forces. My celestial being is in passionate conflict with law makers who attempt to decipher the relativity of our motion and thus governing the quantity. Did that sound more intelligent? I used the word “thus”. Did I sound argumentative?

I suppose my true discourse arises from the unknown of the great vast beyond. Like the time we were catching craw fish in the river, I wasn’t afraid to catch the craw fish because Father had shown me how to handle them. (I still think you secretly wanted me to be afraid, just a little.) We walked down the river to the bend, the farthest point which I had been allowed to go, my permitted boundary line and you wanted me to go further. I wasn’t that afraid because I had you near me but I wasn’t excited like when we would bound out into the yard through the screen door to capture the essence of the weather. I remember to make me feel better you gripped up a stick and stuck it down in the river to show me refraction, only you called it “snail’s law” and I thought you were making fun of me for being too slow or something. Then you started chanting in some kind of Faulkner dialect; “Nigh, sin. I ‘nd are ugh sin-nar” and then I thought you were trying to spook me with superstitions of faith, but you looked cute so I laughed. You explained to me that when you put the stick in the river it appears to be bent or broken but in reality the stick was a straight as sticks are when you pull it out. You told me that just because the river was bent and you couldn’t see around to the other side, the river didn’t end around the corner, otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a river. You told me I shouldn’t be afraid of what is around the corner because really, “you never know”. I kind of smiled I remember at how you were trying to convince me to do something which was against my permissions. I looked down and watched the spiders on the surface of the water hop around. It was when you reached out and took my hand that I was able to walk with you the rest of the way. When your hand touched mine I felt a current of electricity up my arm. It was like we were two jumper cables attached to the same battery standing in the water and when we touched our sparks splashed like the sun light over the moving reflection.

It was too early for room service so there were no plates of crepes in bed. Illinois wasn’t much. When I see the flat tabletop landscape in my mind I forget the existence of trees and can only imagine a blue road sign misspelled you are now leaving “ill-annoy”. We spent the night in some “weird unethical or extremely loose hotel” and then left promptly the next morning. Father is like that sometimes, he doesn't mean anything by what he says because he doesn't really care as long as we are “warm and safe”. He eats in the best greasy spoon diners with newspaper clippings from important dates when such and such were inaugurated into this and that or a UFO was sighted here and when. There always seem to be a little shrine somewhere with pictures of Elvis or President Kennedy. He says it is educational but I think he likes it because it reminds him of the office he had when he was a journalist in college. He talked about it a lot when I was little but now he rarely mentions colleges, unless it is in reference to assimilation or brainwashing.

Now any of the obsolete yellow age newsprint with a picture of a Vietnam Veteran serves as a conversation piece for conspiracy theories while making small talk to other diners. I listen some while I journal. I've heard them all before and know most of them verbatim. I really like it when he goes on about BK shoes being a front for the new order of the Knights Templar, then tries to convince the mother of a thirteen year old wearing a sassy pair of Lunars, that Jack Schwartz is the next Grand Master Molay, and he says it like that, “Grand Master Molay”. The kid will probably just go home and search for him on youtube thinking he is some kind of underground DJ and when he pulls up some .org tribute page he will become “Echo” Umberto of the Molay microphone.

Sometimes father will acquire a new bit of information to add it to his repertoire, he seemed attached to the idea that the reason the U.S. was still in Afghanistan was because of the medicinal marijuana. He claims Obama is planning on using it in the 2012 campaign for re-election. His ploy is parallel to Meinertzhagen dropping opium cigarettes to the Ottoman soldiers in Sheria. At least that is what he told the lobby man in the hotel last night.

As it usually goes on the way up to our room father will make the excuse the place is shifty or he doesn't like the looks or feel of a place, so he can shift gears and continue in his own overdrive when he has figured on a destination to reach. After his last DUI he stopped stopping for beer on the long hauls and got on these “yellow zippers” he calls them now. He doesn't take them everyday though because there hasn't always been a doctor to prescribe them and he's never sure when he’ll get another refill. When he does take them though, it is usually in the morning. The night clerk only gave us one key for the room. It unlocked the main door and our room, it wasn't a card key. It was a cute golden brass key which appeared hand chiseled. We were informed that if we left the building we had to unlock the main door, go up stairs and then just use the same key to open our room. This didn’t make dad feel too much better about staying there. He joked about it though. He said, “This is the second seven-star Hotel in the world and one key opens all doors, as for the stars there is probably a skylight in every room.” His expression reminded me of the electricity in your touch that day on the river and the sparks I felt then saw in the reflection on the water from the sun. If we are connected by energy than we are like the stick bent by an illusion of matter and space. When I lay down I hugged your pillow tight and thought nothing matters. I fell fast asleep imagining the ripples we would create. I guess when you are secure in yourself all thoughts of negativity just vanish.

Yours truly,

in natural motion,

An Epistle from "Tape"

2010-11-14T19:45:00.000-08:00

The waitress approached the table and reached across for an empty coffee mug, “How are you tonight, hun?” She inquired with more sincerity than CS had ever heard from any ascetics from the monastery. Her hands appeared soft like little pillow pads hugging a bed frame as she poured the coffee.

“Well…” replied CS, “…”

“That is good dear.” The waitress interrupted before any further words could be spoken. She placed the mug back onto the center saucer circle. “Good, good.” Then she hurried off to another table and continued her pouring for customers.

CS looked down at the pen lifted from the waitress’ apron pocket, pulled several napkins from the stainless steel spring loaded silver box and began an epistle to whoever would read…

I am now traversing route 44 after Missouri. The trip so far has been pretty good. I understand that was subjective and rather nondescript but I do not know how else to tell you what I’ve seen. My mind does not work the same as yours and though I try, unless I am told what something is I could not judge it from another. There were trees and shrubs; Ash and Elder, of course Oak, what did you call them… queer…cuss alba or something? You always had a way of remembering the scientific details that I cannot hold onto. Just allow me to walk you back.

After father and I pulled away from our house, the house which used to be ours, we turned left down 17^th Street. As we approached the stop sign I saw Ash, walking back to the house. I was not thinking rationally, I suppose I was a bit emotional. I yelled to stop the truck, jumped out and ran. Tears were beginning to weep from the corners of my eyes as I threw my arms out exclaiming I was leaving for the west. Ash threw everything into the street and became angry, softened quickly then hugged me.

{Only my really crazy friends got fake mad before reacting with physical affection. Dad said it has something to do with being an island or rather “no one is an island” and therefore psychological problems are not purely individual. I don’t quite understand. It was nice but not exactly neat, there I go though being nondescript and perhaps useless to you for understanding. I felt really bad telling Ash like that but I had to before I left. I only wish I would have spent more time with people before we left but dad and I had all of the packing to do. I wish I would have spent more time with everybody. I feel so selfish because I didn’t tell people about the move.}

The South didn’t take long to get over… above…out of, it was easy driving, according to dad. The George Rogers Clark Bridge was awesome, well… I suppose it would awe some people. I really wish you could be here to experience this with me. I was thinking about what you said that day in the park. There was no need to carve our initials into the tree as vestige to our love. I loved how you said that, “vestige to our love”. You are so sensitive to our environment and life and to me. Then you explained about us being connected when we are together. That we travel holding hands and our hands are crossing the town, which is rotating with the Earth and Earth, is traveling through space but moves also through the galaxy and so we must be carving our love into the same shapes of space time of the great vast beyond. This hurts to think about now because you are not beside me, holding my hand. I can still feel you inside of me though, that is a feeling I never want to lose.

I am reading your book. As usual I didn’t understand much but that we are connected by a string and that string connects everything, therefore we can never be apart. I suppose we are like tin can phones, right? No, that seems silly. Tin cans are boring and hollow and cold. It reminds me of the tin man from Oz and he didn’t have a heart. I don’t want us to be heartless. They are common like this coffee mug in front of me or the napkin dispenser on the table. I want to return to the place close to you to feel embraced by your mind and sheltered again by your thoughts.

As we ascended, is that the right word? Headed North ward, each state was pretty neat but looked a lot like the Southern states of our hometowns, yet again we were on the highway and highway scenery is all the same. As we entered Newton the great bright fire in the sky was descending. The sky was getting dark and I put in some softer music. I guess my music selection was good but that seems so subjective. All the songs I recorded on the tapes were songs that I’ve listened to a lot. Only the songs I listen to a lot are songs we used to listen to or songs that remind me of you. The feeling of you inside of me I imagine rises in my heart to my throat and as it tries to escape my mouth while I sing along to our songs I feel the strains and begin to choke. This reaction of emotion is so distant to your mysticism. It’s so hard going away when everything I want I have to leave behind. This move has really opened up eyes to all that I had and to all I’m really going to miss. As long as I keep my mind on the road it’s not so bad but whenever my mind starts to stray it strays back to you. Maybe one day when I’m not thinking about it or least expect it I’ll stray back to you for good. Well… good or bad. Does it matter? What is matter but a string? So again I will put my feet upon the dashboard and tighten my shoe laces until I can walk again with you.

Always yours in Time & Space,
CS

A Triptych Character Coffin or Shortcomings #2

2010-11-05T12:47:00.000-07:00

1-1

Some things you just know, others, well, require investigation. Bring your best friend.

It began with an impossible night in front of a glowing piece of white paper which bore no resemblance to paper other than it was white.

It began with a story. In writing, to most, it was only a story. Even the author made mention it was only a story, something written to appease a momentary emotion or thought. Why else would someone write a story, unless they really had something to say? Funny thing is the author did have something to say, whether it was an emotion or thought at the time, he had something to get out; a message to someone who probably never received it. With only one person in mind a single message, lost and retrieved later from an old white cabinet is still a blank document in need of an author’s signature. Perhaps she knew this when she read it. Unfortunately for her, she read it as a contract for future endeavors and thus signed the contract with her own name.

She was preparing for her double date. She was to bring along her best friend who was soon to be married. This however was not her intentions behind the definition of the “double date”. She was hooking up with a fellow that remained her friend. Her friend was a lover of her best friend who was soon to be married and then they would leave. And as if that was not confusion enough, there would be a bit of a scuttle as to which of the males would pay the bill; the guy who banged both or the proud person who was to be marrying one of them. The one who worked in the joint would probably insist on paying, cutting the other a break, as that is what he always did and she and her best friend would leave debt free to spend what money they had brought along on booze to meet the mysterious author of the story they had found, one of which who had signed as a contract for future endeavors.

1-2.

When the two arrived at the bar they knew where they were, they were sure they had been there before and for the most part could remember who they had been with, charmed to take simple delight in each other’s stories as they waited to meet the author.

“You remember being here with so and so”

And

“Oh my gosh do you remember such and such, we did this and that”

Of course

“If word ever got back to my family that I was here it would be hellish.”

They sat and were chatty. Their words were excitement. Their wrists were barren of time and as the walls formed around them they realized how the place had changed since those days and how nostalgic they were really being. They could see the age and in themselves felt how old they had become. Neither doubted their intentions or backed out. They both assumed their roles and one offered up a game of pool. They hung about the pool table and plotted for their angles before the author would arrive.

1-3

She must have been standing behind the table for five, maybe ten minutes. Already accustomed to the amount of times a man behind her coughed and guffawed, she used this auditory stimulant as a marker for the minutes. She was hiding in the shadows beyond the hanging bar lamp, stylized like a tiffany only in its mosaic of broken beer logos and fragmented brands.

Her friend was ready to meet this man, this author man, for he must have just been a plain old man and not a god amongst his friends if he had made them wait already nearly a half an hour. They knew he would be riding a bike and both snickered a little at the thought of either of them involving themselves with a man who tramped on a bike.

He lives with his mother; he is either poor or pontificating. He will probably try to pass himself off as another hippy or claim he will be joining the Peace Corps next year after he talks with us, so there would be no point in getting involved in a relationship.

"Why be so pessimistic, he is probably a lovely guy with sexy legs that make him great in bed."

"I suppose I never think of those things, you should definitely work in a gym and watch the sexy guy-men as they walk out to their cars."

It was the attraction of the laugh, their smiles meeting each other’s face, the wholly pure illusion of two women involved in a congenial personal matter, engaged in a thrill that excited the author as he entered the worn down wormwood bar. This was the only bar he had been to in the town and couldn’t give a nickel or a dime to care whether he had ever been in another or would ever compare his experiences invested with those that might appear more glamorous. He had been in better places and he had been in much worse and either way he could sit on a stool and be as righteous as a preacher or preach to the choir about where he had been.

Immediately he fell in love with the moment of the two being together, locked in their smiles. He jaunted past them both though without the flicker of a diverted eye in their direction and returned with two drinks. A casually polite smile while friendly eye to his date and cordial words of greeting to his familiar, he set the drinks on the eagle table next to them and turned to acknowledge more completely this encounter; she was still but not completely hiding in the shadow. Emerging slightly she was tenderly red faced, if not embarrassed for her somewhat luscious imbibe which caused an abrupt bashfulness seeping down to her panties.

Her friend came fourth and explained she had already had one long island ice tea and she was then working on her second, as if this was an explanation to something more than a declaration of her inebriation. The author turned his lips to the side of his cheek and then again turned around to place the drinks. He downed the first and slowly sipped the next. His demeanor had only changed slightly when he wheeled around again to face them. Both responded as if he had suggested they were adjunct to his pleasure, either way the author was privately content with his actions and their probable outcome. He was standing at the center dot of the table and decided he liked the distance better viewing them together from a far. He lifted his attaché case and walked it down the pew like bar bench and with his left hand placed it on the end; there really was not further commitment but time.

***

2-1

He spoke to the group about pleasure and nothing that could be discounted. His friend John was his best man whom he talked up affectionately. He also talked compliments and impressions of his left hand man Jeff, a tall red headed ball player.

He had talents for things that no one could relate to. He spoke in other people’s shoes and patens that had never been developed. He was concerned with intellectual property and adding asset values to those that were developing. He was first concerned with health patens and later, with his friend James grew wealthy from diagrams and operations.

He rarely talked about anything but for the most part knew that was the right way to go. His friend John, the math genius developed a catheter, perhaps he was afraid of waking up one day like a veteran pissing in his depends and in need of something more scientific and expensive to serve him, at the same time he was sick of the drunken bums he had witnessed in the streets pissing in flower pots in the wee hours of the morning.

His friend John had issues with many things and thus kept little around, save his wife whom had left early in their relationship and returned when she realized her love for him was greater than the differences he rejected.

2-2

He was always honored to express his bright openness to the forums and skillful. His words were money. His words were the future. Always speaking on the future and current participation brought other words of progress and motivation.

He spread his wealth to the youth. Once he gave a group of five year olds each a two dollar bill, just because it represented his work. The other grownups mocked him for giving kids a picture of President Jefferson, the parents saw him as a pompous rich fool, but the kids, after his speech, believed he was a leader. Not because of the money, they really hadn’t discovered the value of that yet, but because he talked about building bridges and friendships across an open sea but most of all because he was a successful story teller. He was dedicated to life and a master of his craft. He had vision and faith, goodwill. He had a cause and everybody who was somebody knew that nobody could do it better than him.

2-3

He felt the world need direction. He held tight to the reigns of every conversation he found himself engaged in took the reins like the mighty Poseidon grasping the (ropes) on the bridge which spanned the sea.

He claimed that everything is important therefore nothing really eventually became. He had a strategy for explaining this that made sense like a whirl-wind. He words blew over audiences and each that remained strong like the (pillars) of a bridge were the ones he would continue to cohesively discipline for his team. He would grow with them enabling clarity from creativity forming a unity from a laundry list of repetitive positive words. It was through this repetitive use of these words which he spoke his mantra to himself and communicated effectively the purpose and intent of the direction he was giving. It was important for him to be consistent; therefore he was always growing more creative with his approaches to saying the same things. Nobody really took notice of this. As he spoke whether his words rose or fell, there was a message for each individual and motivation in the great vast finale which would support his multiplicity and reinforce the truth of his own wisdom.

President Jefferson, however, had an alleged affair with his slave and people didn’t believe in slavery or the illusion of mixed races, or even the constitution. They cared less about money and more about fairness and equality. Their children came home and gave the money to their parents because they didn’t know what else to do with it. The parents tithed twenty cents and parted the rest to meet their needs, except for a dollar, which was put in a jar by the parents and sent to the speaking man along with a card which read:

“Thank you for your entertainment.”

***

3-1

He was on the plane, though there were no wings nor seats or wheels to be lifted. He was rising above the earth ascending to the bright energy masses of chemical reaction. Two pulsing reflections splintered and grew, their centers expanding as they became closer together then shattered into fractals and split further in segmenting lines that cut through and beyond the circumference of their natural size.

He was on a plane but there was no grass, no shrubs no climate and no animals. He drew in his breath and floated further into the great vast beyond. His lungs were weightless with the inspiration of the gaseous elements and as the bronchial sacs distributed the particles throughout his own matter he released the tension from his body and released his body from the tension. He was a free spirit, an immaculate soul.

His soul spirit floated further and with greater speed as it reached the pulsing lights. The shattered fractals pierced the elements he had become. He was no longer his body. He was no longer a soul.
He had become a conscious world set amongst the other energy masses of chemical reaction.

3-2

As a one heart cell neared the other they pulsed like the stars. They pulsed first at their own interval and as while growing closer beat with the same rhythm before joining as any bonding molecule. Synchronicity was at critical distance. Their unexplained phenomenon had become a fragment for a functioning organ.

As he walked on the plane in complete consciousness he fluttered not about who was where and which was who. He looked down at his ticket, looked up again at the seat numbers. He put his carry on in the overhead luggage rack and took his seat next to a gregarious old lady who had been interrupted only momentarily while he was doing this, from chatting up a young man who sat curtailed and gleaming with tooth to ear grin past the chatty lady on a young fawn looking woman brushing salt from in-flight pretzels off her fingers while dusting dry scalp skin from her shoulders.

3-3

Like the molecules of water two hydrogen atoms merged then inspired to find oxygen.

He lay on his back in the field of grass and peered from beneath a plum tree his father had planted in his youth. The moon often reminded him of his father. The tree made him think of his mother. Each fruit became the women he had plucked from the tree with reasonable likeness. Those that his ate ended with a hard pit he worked his lips around to remove the last of the fleshy fruit. Those that he left would fall and re-fertilize the land, sometimes he would observe certain fallen ones until they sunk in the soil or torn at by crows, he was curious to know which ones would survive as a seed and navigated through them to find a place to rest and look through the branches and stare at the moon. There were many pits and many ways to lie to avoid them. He adjusted himself with the flow and the fall of each and each day of fruiting enjoyed the juices from the fruit, till there was none.

The Origin of Engfish: A Wordsalad

2010-10-30T20:36:00.000-07:00

The Origin of Engfish In high school my Junior English teacher gave a lecture on Engfish. In the academic world this phenomenon can be described in further detail as the lack of academics or the proper use of formal language in the structure of writing. Some have said it is made up facts, misunderstandings and miscommunications. I live for these, considering I believe my life is one big misunderstanding. I can’t deny that each day I exist, I make facts happen. I’ve lived in many places and have been subjected to multiple dialects and accents.

Misunderstandings branching from jargon, babel and odd mutterings during interpersonal communication within these multiple subcultures have made me into a word whore, as opposed to an enunciation/intent Nazi. I picked up on phonetics and thus began my own system or language.

While living amongst a Navajo tribe one of my friends came to school donning a t-shirt with a band design logo silkscreened on the front. The band’s name: Word Salad. I thought this would be great juxtaposed with the already existing Engfish. Even after learning the psychological connotations to this expression I began listening more for what I would consider to be EngFishWordSalad, my new written language.

While in Sociology class I even created a logo or crest containing a big lipped fish expiring air bubbles with a mechanical robotic arm spinning on its crown. The idea behind it was that of the fish, which travels in a school of like aquatic species glubbing similar thought bubbles. Over time the fish has evolved into a pseudo industrial, single function human anatomical limb, which it uses for simple daily routines. I thought this made sense on a larger spectrum of human evolution, industrial revolution and on into the today’s technological era.

For inspiration I jumped from the jiving board in search of those people who were seemingly unaware of the patterned speech they used and reused repeatedly to express themselves or the world around them. I cast my rod into the sea of words and phrases that were out of context, syntax or abhorrently irrelevant and inappropriate. I found pleasure in “you see the thing is”, “I reckon” and especially “Fuck”. I went deep juba-diving to understand why people desired to give the “because”, “what for” and “it”. I dragged my net and always came up with those who thought everything was “cool”, “neat”, “nice”, “awesome” and “okay”. Later as the evolution grew more distinguishable, I scaled dude-fish, rad-fish, aight-fish and fine-fish, most of which I thought were great-fish, all of which played or acted as a single fin maneuvering the colloquial liquid language of slang. I dined hearty on brain food. A WordSalad always complimented my EngFish sand-which.

Statements Unknown

2010-10-18T09:14:00.001-07:00

California was cruising around to the radio still looking for her man in black. Sometimes she would say her black man but often that would offend Alabama who was still riding in the trunk. Every now and then he would pop it open on a stop and ride behind the passenger’s seat. The square metal center bearing the Arizona license plate clinked and chunked up, sand fell from between the connection points.

Towels

2010-10-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

The sound of his cell phone sounding out a “door knock” at six in the morning woke him in a panic attack. He opened his eyes and panicked that the room was dark even though his eyes felt open. He had not been asleep too deeply because he was too concerned thinking about the plans he had made. He was unconsciously making ideas happen in his mind and watching the details of how they would turn out. He needed confidence that those ideas which he had conjured would come true. He thought deeply again. This time as he was awake and staring into darkness he could feel the emotions which he had somehow turned off in his sleep. He had somehow turned off his emotions so that he no longer felt anything but at that moment he was feeling something and it hurt. He thought perhaps what he had been thinking was a lie and that pain was the unease of a lie coming true. He didn’t want to feel or believe a lie any more so he forgot the thought. Once again the pain went away and was replaced by a new thought. The thought of why he was thinking the idea anyway.

He thought of who the idea pertained to and what could be the cause for the emotion that was associated with the person and the idea and the person with the thought.

He thought once again that the person had died or was going to die or was going to kill themselves and he was sad. This time he was not sad for himself but for the person whom he believed he would lose. He was torn between losing a person and losing himself and then he discerned the truth. Neither he nor the person he suspected of dying were really gone. He was alone in this thought and felt more at ease knowing that he just was not with the person of whom he had been thinking yet he had already lost her because she was no longer with him. What he was feeling was loss. He grieved for her for a moment and then decided to take a shower.

In the bathroom there were so many ordinary objects which he could not discern as his own. The objects were in the room and stationary but he conceived that they were all floating around him. He could feel the power of the earth’s rotation as the objects moved along with him through space and time. He opened the closet, two towels to choose from. The top one was black. A black fuzzy large towel folded neatly and on top of a pink towel. The pink towel was smaller.

Sticker Pinch

2010-09-24T22:31:00.000-07:00

The day closed in and I began my ascension up the mountain. From far enough away it looked just like any other mole hill one might cross on a prairie.

As I sat, imagining walking through the painting I wondered what a real climb would be like, what it would be to climb a real mountain.

I pulled my eyes away and looked around the room. There were walls painted red and people talking out their mouths, from their heads but the more they talked the less sense they made. They were confusing the easy life of living below the raze or rather rays of the sun, beneath the hardships of climbing a hill, every day to get home. They were jabbering and talking, talking and jabbering. It was the shear ridiculousness of the entire scene that probably drove this particular artist to paint the mountain.

Each person had a motive, a purpose, a goal, a nothing really. They just bounced from one person to the next, wearing a label. A sticker that might identify them as someone other than who they really knew they were.

People would try to grab other people’s stickers and by the end of the day the person who had collected the most stickers would be declared the winner of a circle, the winner’s circle.

Others would just raze or rays or rather raise their voice when they believed they were being heard. Those would hearken to the listeners who were not yet animated. They were livid, unmoving without process of things that went on about them until hearken alerted them of a purpose.

The hearkened waited until a wire was tripped before knowing the turn to speak. Speaking in turns. Turns like a cycle a circle, the winner’s of the sticker pinch.

People nodded when eyes were on them or they would turn their heads and look away, it was purely irrelevant to the whole of the community.

I sat staring at the painting and wondered what it would be like to sit on the mountain and look down on the city. Everyone would appear to me as an ant and no detail would be made out. There would be only little dots, dots like the stickers they wore bearing the name of their occupation, occupancy or image. I would not climb the hill to see this. I would climb the hill to see this with the knowledge that I had worked to get hear or rather here. That I had worked hard to get somewhere to see the dots that were the people, not the dots that people wore.

I would have worked to see something that other’s could not see. It was something that took work and effort just like the others.

I sat and stared at the painting wondering what it would be like to know what it was like to stand on the top and see myself reflected as the painting reflected the descending sun’s raise or rather raze. No, rays. What would I be? A cloud? A high flying bird? Would I be the great vast beyond of blue sky? Or the ascending moon or rather sun of the opposite world?

I wondered what it would be like to see each person, each ant, each dot whorled or rather world. No, wore. Which is to say boar or perhaps bore a dot. A dot as a painting, a painting that could be walked through with the mind. Each person was a painting as a dot, which was the pointillism of the whorls. No, worlds.

I watched the illusion as it changed in the light. I desired to know more about the people. How funny, I thought. How inspiring, there was something more in the world of this art.

I turned on my feat or rather feet and was confronted by a man, who of many dots wore a black dot upon his left arm cuff.

As I had watched the painting, I watched him reach out and nab from my lapel, my last dot. I was dotless, finally, dotless. Without a dot, dot free.

I observed his decorative adhesive spots along the shoulders of his shirt, worn like a bar, a brocaded epaulette, a symbol of status and wondered, how had he collected so many? How had he accumulated those dots? Which represented who and who were those people walking around without, missing a dot?

I watched as he contentedly affixed the dot spot to his collection, smiling smug.

I turned and walked towards the wall, the wall that held the painting. I stepped inside and advanced towards the mountain, ascending higher, working for something that no one else who collected dots had ever thought to do. Dot free and without a dot.

Kid-oh's!

2010-09-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

engfishword ba-ba

It was just... a place to grind your grain

2010-08-16T23:40:00.000-07:00

Utilitarianism (In my own words)

When determining what happens how, Mills was earnest to prove happenings are what we how. If your ultimate “how” is an acquiescent happy sauntering of a humanistic “what” in the supposed direction of “happenings”, your actions will be good. Take the act of turning on a light for example. You happen to flip a light switch that refuses to turn on because you shrugged off materialism, sloughed out of a liberal college and demystified the conundrum that you are now toggling the light gadget of an abandoned building that has no power. Instead of remedying the visual handicap like some current conductive Christ Casanova you might create, sit and enjoy the pleasures of a utility pipe-can fire while pondering the humble teachings of Siddhartha and humming a whore house hymn with members of the New Patagruel Church. If your free will has guided you towards happiness with these desires, which have also benefited others that you have encountered and those you might stumble upon, perhaps you are closer to the illumination of Mill’s Utilitarianism.

Mill exhibits sensuality and inner awareness as stimulants to our initial core of knowledge so they may be used realistically. Furthermore, the reformed primal instinct touching the terminal spire is desire. Next, he squabbles that if an object is in our view of perception, it is possible to be observed. If a tree falls in the proximity to stimulate our tympanic membrane, it is possible to be heard. So it goes if happiness is the point of our steeple, then analogously, it is desirable.

If you enjoy humming hymns, do well and believe you have a message to share perhaps you decide to take your show to the subway and perform for change that could otherwise be given to an alcoholic nomad who does not possess vocal talent. There is happy goodness through your actions which in turn create happy goodness in another’s peace of mind and also the inebriated week day warrior of intoxicating character is forced through poverty to sober up to the happy goodness surrounding him. Furthermore, good is produced in an individual through happiness. If each individual is happy then the society is also happy, which is good.

The ultimate goal in mind that Mill argues is happiness. If you have decided to take your show to the subway to share because there is a message you believe you are delivering, even if that message is virtue, you are still ultimately creating happiness for yourself because you enjoy what you do and do well. If you are virtuous while doing then it is merely a preface of how you administered your sensuality and inner awareness, thus your realistic knowledge to achieve happiness. It was a rung in the ladder you climbed to reach the ranks of subway crooning.

Furthermore the other man, who gave you a buck and change, when he takes a step towards the 14^th and F train, someone tosses out a dollar bill to his feet. So every step he takes he is picking up a dollar bill. It motivates him to walk in this direction everyday. Because you are there and he finds your message a reminder of virtue, the man drops a buck and some change into your hat to coerce you to play there again the next day and receive another buck and some change. You, who shrugged materialism, have found that paper burns well in your pipe-can fire and this green paper does especially well as a starter. However; so does newspaper that is everywhere and no one is dropping it in your hat. So the next day you are off to another sub entrance. The point is for those who understand; money is a way to purchase things and does not provide happiness in itself. Perhaps though you decide you would like to start a collection of five dollar bills and get ideas to further express a growing disdain for capitalism and desire to demonstrate this by erecting a giant wooden man wearing a suit of green Lincoln nickel notes and setting him ablaze in the desert sands of Nevada. For some time your desire would shift to obtaining as many five dollar bills as possible. It would seem you spire would grow larger than the steeple, like the Salt Lake federal building or the tower of Babylon, resulting in a crumpling pile of government ashes containing the burnt bills. Though the love (or hate) of money was a means to the end, money itself was not the tip. The memories of the ash used to paint gatherers faces were closer. The ultimate would be whatever symbol you used to portray whatever your meaning was. The meaning was the ultimate spire. Memories and meanings are as power and fame. They have no physical currency, they help attain other desires and are sometimes desired more or mistakenly synonyms. The mistake and difference is that a greedy or an unwisely powerful person may find themselves separated from the society, while a selfishly virtuous person may bring happiness, pain or both. Only a truly virtuous person is a blessing entirely to a society

So it goes, a truly utilitarian person who desires happiness as “the ultimate desire” and all else a rung or step to this. This person is capable of judging all human conduct such as actions and dispositions via the promotion of happiness, therefore incorporating it their sole criterion of morality.

Untitled Four

2010-07-19T23:49:00.000-07:00

or: the show and tell teddy bear

Slippered feet float down the hallway to a sliver of light. The feet and slippers belonged to a boy who held with him a torn teddy bear. The light was from the other side of a door which led into his father’s room. It was the dark and scary time of night, when faces appeared in the whorls of the knotty alder closet doors and the house was said to be “settling”. The insipid dark of night, when creaks were most audible and rumbles from faucet pipes or the toilet filling moaned from deep within the home. Occasionally, there would be a radio program, tuned in a touch too loud and filling his father’s room like the light would reverberate beyond the door sliver and drift down the hall around the walls. Like the pipes stuttering and the commode filling.

The little boys hand reached out for the silver knob of the Mahogany bedroom door and clung to it waiting to hear a reaction from what was playing on the airwaves. Nothing but a feint samba. He leaned onto the swiveling rectangle and sidled into the light before he spoke. As the door gave way this little boy could feel a soft breeze from an open window. A shutter from the cold and the boy nearly dropped his teddy bear.

The teddy bear was a present from his mother just last Christmas. As the season melted into spring, the bear’s adornment had grown disheveled. Teddy had become awfully worn and very unkempt. Unkempt in that teddy bear was used often, usually a mischievous activity that required dirty work; something messy. Typically it was anything the boy could not do himself: sledding down impossible hills, rides through the laundry chute, splashing through giant mud puddles or climbing trees. It was only several months old but a child’s ragdoll go, what a child’s rag doll do and this object of affection had lived it’s days ambitiously ambivalent. He lived literally through a rough patch of life the boy would probably have endured alone but for what it was worth, served well as a best friend and companion.

The Samba was still subtle as it continued emitting from the tiny radio around the low lit heavily draped room. “Father?” the boy says into the dark matter over and beyond the dresser next to the door. The door fell in and the boy, who had been holding his teddy in the same hand as the handle, nearly lost a slippery grip of fuzz against the Hancock knob. The wind swept in from the window.

Rather gracefully approaching his father’s recliner next to a large queen-sized canopied bed set, the little boy held out his hands brandishing the teddy bear, exposing loose threads, fluff n’ stuffings.

The father who was asleep awoke and looked about the room in the nil dark and shivered. He looks at his son and then looks towards the large bed. He turns back to the boy and takes the bear for examination. He locates the hole his son is upset about, studies the cotton and touches it, smells his fingers and tastes it.

Giggles erupted from the boy as he watched his goof-ball father make fun out of the dismal night. The samba careened into a waltz.

The man heaves from the reclined position and rises from his chair with a stretch. Yawning and scratching life into his lower body he leads his son back down the hall to his bedroom. Along the way they pause in front of the closet to retrieve the small sewing kit. The boy had seen his mother use the silver plate threader to pull through the eye of a needle, a spool of yellow while stitching the long neck of his giraffe. Without light, the father enters his son’s room. He turns to his son before turning on the switch. He moves to the bed where he lays the bear out as if the mattress was a bier and prepares to perform a surgery.

With a frightfully serious look on his face, the father crawls onto the bed and kneels over the teddy. His son is watching as he exaggerates the distance from the floor to the bed. First crouching then slowly he brings the toe of his house shoe to a rail. His foot is plantar flexed like a ballerina as his plight becomes more an amusing dance. The son is aware, this is entertainment. His son rather enjoys watching his father use his legs. He watches as he pretends to be small and struggle. With the help of other stuffed friends the father reaches the top of the sheets where he will examine further, in better lighting, the damage to his son’s poor dilapidated friend.

The father starts by opening the hole a bit with his fingers and removing tufts of its cotton fluff. He works his fingers inside and then rears his torso upwards to thrust his hand further into the bear, nearly three fingers deep. Soon he has created an illusion that his entire arm is inside the bear but really his arm is between his legs. Reaching for another stuffed animal piled at the head of the child’s bed, this grown man makes a show in full Thespian swing. Struggling he pulls a small stuffed mouse out from the bear and declares; viola he has solved the issue, it was indigestion and the bear will be back to normal in the morning, as for his other friend, the church mouse, he will feel better after a good night’s sleep.

The boy objected that the bear was still not better, meaning the remaining hole in need of stitching. The father puts his cheek up the bears face as if he was listening to its breath and checking its pulse, then raises himself to look at the boy and agrees with sincerity, “you know you might be right”. He ponders for only a moment with his index finger tapping his bristly chin before he begins his reaching illusion again. Believing this time to have found the problem he feels for another toy and acts as if he is pulling it out. Pulls and heaves, fingers and sleeves..

The boy, now near hysterics, believing the game humorous and wondering how far this would go, he objects again that there is yet still more. This time the father continues the show, he pulls out several small toys and a couple medium toys. Again and again the father removes the stuffed toys. The one remaining is a giant giraffe that would clearly not fit between the father’s legs. It was obvious the game would be over soon but together the father and son laugh and together make a big joke about the giraffe.

Attempting to keep their illusion alive the father exhibits dramatic exaggerated movements and torsions of his body and pelvis to remove the supposed swallowed giraffe. “Push’em out!”, cheers and shrill shrieks of laughter. Finally exhausted with no more animals left to pull between his legs, the father then says tersely that the bear will be stitched up and kept for observation. The boy would be able to return tomorrow for visiting hours and see teddy bear.

The father now sleepy and spent but content never-the-less, lifts his son from his wheel chair and places him in bed next to the long neck of his giraffe and other stuffed animals. The son seems to have found a new appreciation for his toys of several Christmas’s ago and somehow feels safer.

As the father is leaving the boy peeks above his blanket and asks his father if he is going to take his baby with him. The father is unsure of what the boy is referring.

“Here, the baby giraffe you just gave birthed. Shouldn’t she go to the nursery?”

The Desultory Peripatetic

2010-06-15T07:17:00.001-07:00

--->>>The Desultory Peripatetic

Best of Luck

2010-06-13T19:43:00.000-07:00

The sun was setting as it often did, nestling itself in the covers of its cot somewhere between Teewinot Mountain and Mount Owen, where it would sleep for the long cold November night. It was no longer visible as it had already pulled cumulous covers over with one final nearly audible “humph” to the world. The only evidence it had existed was the somewhat incandescent glow that emitted through the seemingly endless blanket of fluff.

The man who had been standing in the doorway of his garage watching the sun while it turned about and tucked itself in, shifted his eyes and scanned the changing topography of his back lawn glistening with a mixture of color, reflecting the last glimmers of dusk from the tightly packed snow, which had been increasing in depth as the week progressed. The snow had paused for awhile to let the sun go down and everyone who was interested come outside and experience the splendor. It seemed the man was the only person interested tonight. He knew it would be the last night he could watch the sunset from the West.

Mr. Sun finally decided to call it a day, rolled over and flipped on the night light.

The dog who had been watching the man, watching the descent from the sky, stood up and perked his ears to the man in hope for attention, a bone or possible a ruffle around the collar would do just nicely. If by some chance he had been exceedingly generous, the dog would then press his luck and roll onto its back for a tummy rub as well. Perhaps this would help the digestion of the bone. However, the man remained still and unaware of the dogs efforts.

The dogs name is Peanut. The man used to, and sort of still does, own another dog cleverly named, in its own respect: Butter. The man’s name was Edgar Eiland.

A peanut is an edible nutlike oily seed that grows on a vine and is commonly, though not so much anymore, referred to as a goober. Butter is a soft yellowish emulsion of fat, water and air churned from milk or crème. Peanut Butter is processed by grinding numerous peanuts together and requires no butter in the making of this product. It has the color and consistency of turds, which are produced like a sausage factory by Peanut and Butter’s anal orifice.

Edgar Eiland is the name given to the man by his parents: Edgar, being an English patronymic name meaning “prosperity” and Eiland, a German nickname meaning “banished, miserable and or luckless”. His parents did not take into consideration their son was a contradiction from birth.

The dogs were named by Carol, who is commonly, yet not anymore, referred to as “Edgar’s wife”. She had found them on the outskirts of an Indian reservation. Edgar used to say she was “a keeper”. Oftentimes these stray mutts are called rez-dogs. More oftentimes than not “rez-dog” is what Edgar referred to them as and sometimes, though not oftentimes, he would throw in some rather unpleasant adjectives to preclude their names as they were. Carol did not appreciate this and would call him more foul words than he used towards the dogs, after which she forbade him to use such language.

Both dogs are yellow labs and look like peanut butter, hence the christening, except lately Butter was becoming more of a strawberry jam. Both dogs figuratively act like turds, which was not taken into consideration when the naming commenced but has given excuse for several of Edgar’s adaptations. There were only rumors that Butter was not acting lively.

Edgar was not opposed to yellow labs. Possibly a better name like Tea-Cake or Butter-Scotch would settle with him more but he really quite enjoyed yellow labs. These, however, were rez-dogs. Although they looked much like a yellow lab, inside they were bloody mange, except Butter didn’t have much blood left in her.

Peanut is a male. He is thirty-five pounds and has an anal orifice of five inches in diameter. This is the largest anal orifice seen by the Eiland’s on a dog this proportion.

Butter is a female. She still is sorta, but not functioning. She has an anal orifice of a silver dollar, if one had to give a round-about estimate with a coin. Luckily no one has ever had to do such, it is information I have simply included.

The chance of these dogs being related is highly plausible, considering both were rez-dogs. The chance of these dogs mating was also, at one time, highly possible. The chances of Peanuts anal orifice shrinking to the size of a peanut are nil. The chances of Butter springing back to life from the driveway where she had been for the past month were absolutely none.

Peanut, was now performing a show of tossing dead field mice around in the lawn, in hope of nabbing the attention of Edgar, who continued to ignore him and smoke a cigarette. He was thinking to himself.

“Dogs are easy to please. They live for themselves and communicate through signals misused by humans such as sniffles, snuffs, licking and wagging.”

Peanut changed his act to dragging his large anal orifice across the ground.

Edgar hadn’t noticed and continued thinking to himself.

“The language is silent, for the most part, and seemingly effective. At least to other dogs.” he added as he spun on his heels to face what his dog was doing at the moment. Edgar thought there was more to gain from this, some hidden knowledge within actions.

Peanut was not to be seen. This was a good because if Edgar had looked upon his dog a minute earlier he would have been disgruntled by the corruption of his theory. As it was Peanut had given up on his attempts for attention and gone inside his dog house. When inside he circled twice and with one final “humph” to his owner, lay down for a nap until three o’clock in the Ante Meridian, when the neighbor’s cat would come prowling around.

With nothing further to observe, Edgar decided to dispose of his cigarette and go inside. He really didn’t think about smoking in the house. His wife had forbid him to smoke indoors but she was no longer around. She had left in a fit of rage about a month ago and backed over Butter on her way out, who had been sleeping in the driveway. She made a rather nasty “thump” and left quite a dent that dimpled the bumper in such a way to dislodge the remaining screw holding the license plate into position.

Carol hadn’t noticed until she reached Tulsa and got out to fuel up. A broken collar and set of identification tags ensnared within some cog of the auto and drug over the hundreds of miles traversed were discovered. She really did not know how to feel about the fact. She was confused and leery. She had nothing in mind to heart, except she kept asking herself why the military used "dog tags" and the twin flat metal bones in her hand were "identification tags". She was rather unbalanced as she prepared to leave the gas station and backed into a cow that had meandered to the edge of the parking lot while looking for a patch of cinch grass to graze upon. It made quite a “thump” sound and left quite a dent that crushed parts of the trunk in on itself. Thinking she had run into a plowed snow pile embankment she over compensated her recovery. While looking over her shoulder she engaged the car into drive. The small auto pushed through a wire fence guarding the ditch for the cattle guard. In the accident Carol was hurled from her seat through the windshield then onto the pavement, where she was rescued by the emergency medical team and rushed to the hospital with a concussion, multiple spinal injuries and chronic amnesia.

There were many things that did not occur to Edgar as possibilities now that she was gone. Of course he did not know where she was or how long she had intended on staying there, but then neither did carol for that matter. Until he had heard from her, Edgar played it like she would walk through the door at any given moment. He didn’t do anything she wouldn’t approve of to save face if she walked through the door and caught him in the act of doing whatever it was she would not approve. Also it had not occurred to him to clean up the broken dog that lay fallen like a piece of toast jelly side down. It did not have proper identification and look like any other mutt in the neighbor, well any other mutt that had been hit by a speeding vehicle in a fit of rage. So Edgar thought maybe it belonged to the only kid on the block, Martin, a dysfunctional little cooter. Edgar never contacted Martin to testify his theory, because he couldn’t bring himself to tell a kid, even if he was a twat, his wife has just run down his dog. Instead, he let alone the dead dog laying crippled in the driveway.

Edgar went into his house and prepared himself a cup of coffee. He took down his favorite coffee mug which he had, for lack of a better word, stolen from a hotel during college. He hadn’t actually stolen it or at least consciously stolen it. He had stayed in the hotel for about three weeks while other housing arrangements were being made. Every morning he woke and made himself a pot of coffee which he rank before going to work. It was the only nourishment he would have before dinner and it would last him for the day. All of his money was tied up in the hotel and he was, for lack of a better word, broke.

The first two cups from the four cup pot he made, he would drink with the condiment packets hotels housekeeping had provided the night before. Carelessly dumping all of its contents: sugar, artificial sweetener and creamer into his cup or rather the hotels cup, without stirring it. The other two cups he drank black with whatever puss-like solution remained in the bottom of his cup or rather the hotel’s cup.

At the end of his three week stay he felt the cup was a part of him. It did not have the hotel’s logo on it, like other mugs. Nor did it even appear to be hotel property. On the bottom was the word DAD, all in caps and fancy Old English font. The first “D” was backwards, which gave myth to the mugs origin. Possibly a young child had purchased it for his/her father, who was a business tycoon or some wayward traveler and upon writing the symbolic name of ownership upon the bottom reversed the first “D’ by mistake. However, the writing appeared to be professionally stenciled by the manufacturer. Underneath the word DAD was another word in the same factory print. It read “China”. This solved the myth of the mugs origin.

When Edgar was packing his things to check out, he subconsciously took the mug, wrapped it in a t-shirt and stuck it into the smaller of his two suitcases. Consciously he felt he and his mug had gone through a lot.

Perhaps the mug did belong to a business man or a traveler or a traveling business man, it belonged in the hands of a fellow nomad and at this point in Edgar’s life. That was how he felt. At least if the mug stuck with him it would have proper ownership and an identity. Had it stayed on the hotel nightstand there was no determining its fate. This was a special mug that deserved to get used. It was its purpose and it was free. So was the coffee pot, some of the larger bath towels and the soap but of course those were not as sentimental and had long lived out their purposefulness years ago, much like Edgars wife.

“Ah, my wife,” Edgar reminisced, “perhaps if she thought more like a dog then she would have not spoken so much and needled me about so many things or maybe I would have run her down one day, she’d be out there in the driveway. It would be her body broken, bleeding, frozen in the snow.”

The thought cheered him up and he whistled as he continued to make his cup of coffee. Had his wife brought along personal identification before she left the house, Edgar would have received a phone call about then, informing him of his wife’s fate or near fatal accident in which Edgar, would have continued making his cup of coffee but probably would have lit a cigarette as well.

By now the art of coffee making was firm in his usual routine and he had specific likes and dislikes. For example; he liked two spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee and he disliked the way the second spoonful left a congealed lump of coffee and sugar in his sugar bowl resembling patches of snow around the dog houses. Like smoking in the house or the dead dog in his driveway, that was in fact his, it had never occurred to him to not stir the first spoonful in before adding another.

After drinking his coffee he washed his precious mug and wrapped it in a t-shirt then stuck it into the smaller of his two suitcases. He would need it on his trip in the morning.

He decided two weeks ago, now that his wife was gone and apparently not returning for a while, considering she hadn’t called to inform him of her locale or when she was going to collect her clothes, Edgar was going to take a vacation to someplace he had never been. He was not a frequent vacationer and wouldn’t want to go someplace without a mission of some sort. So he decided to search for the previous owner of his mug, someone named “Dad” in the land of “China”. It seemed like a hopeless cause but he needed something to leave in a note to his wife if by some perhaps she arrived while he was away. He signed his message to his wife:

“Best of Luck,

E.E.”

Untitled II

2010-02-23T23:01:00.001-08:00

“Not this again.”

He stared at the blank sheet of paper.

The paper was tilted, fifteen degrees clockwise, from hot dog style. It was blank, white. He thought of writing his name. He thought about how he would smudge it before he was done with the essay.

He craned his head up a little higher and peered around the room, counting the heads. He slumped back down in his seat, covering one hand over his mouth to stroke his chin fuzz. He thought about shaving this morning and then decided not to. He would shave in a few weeks.

The word “recumbent” came to him. So he wrote the word on the paper. He read the sentence back to himself.

He couldn’t write the essay. It just seemed redundant. “Recumbent rhymes with redundant”. He did not write the word down though.

It was supposed to contain a sophism, regarding Sartre’s psychological dichotomy following de Beauvoir’s return from Chicago (1947) that may or may not have inspired Intamacy – “le mur” - in other words - to borrow from Waters; a socialist’s propaganda which exploits psychedelic disambiguation theories, 1971 - build “the wall” between Being and Nothingness and the more nothingness of political affairs, which Sartre covered with Dirty Hands, his work of 1948.

It seems this affair was a recumbent sensationalist’s version of Otto Rank’s cash cow from previous decades, unexpurgated by Pole in 1985, which symbolized the over-study of the original *Clifford’s notes to infidelity, censorship, savage pilgrimage, *$#@ing , & .

heme? Now?

After dotting his final mark he sat back. Became recumbent. He recumbented his back into a more neutral position. He looked down at his paper. It was tilted at a fifteen degree angle, counterclockwise. It was no longer white.

He picked it up and carried the sheet of paper to the long island that jutted from a wall along the edge of the room. He was proud of himself as he laid it down.

He pushed a twenty dollar bill over the formica, towards the lady on the other side, with two grey digits. With his left hand he took a wax paper cup of coffee, turned and exited the Starbuck’s. Leaving a $7,015.53 advance tip and a bit of skin that sloughed off when he turned his cardboard insulator.

Which was hanging Who?

2010-01-27T08:51:00.001-08:00

The wind swept the tarps from side to sway. This is where people went to restock on free paper hats, pens, key chains and undelivered junk mail. Usually you are greeted first thing by a dirty blonde with rolled bangs and a neon pen on a string around her neck. She will hand Mother a plastic drawstring bag with a couple of items, usually including the first key chain and a clicker stick pen with some realty company’s logo on it. This would be the first booth of a long line of standing and talking to people in tarp covered booths behind spreads of brochures, pamphlets, fliers and business cards.

I think at the time this was Mothers way of networking. She was too young for bingo and the make-up ladies grew bitter and jealous when she won the company car for highest sales, which left Christmas oddities catalogues once a year for "Social Professional Association" – or SPA time, in a way. This was when she sold without having to flirt or show off more leg for the rapidly growing, cheeky and insistent businessman population of greater Delaware.

Mother got her start in the business during a vapid age of the sexual revolution. Uniforms were cutting back and policies were being amended, however, people were mute. They were all frozen in an elevator listening to the omniscient intercom of Genesis Muzak. Mother was hired to show these people how to have a good time. As a second generation host she would leave the house with a bag full of lingerie and return with a bag full of laundry, empty wine and sparkling cider bottles. She’s a professional realtor now but on those days it was sell! Sell! Sell!

I remembered the first time going to an air show at Rickenbacker. I saw the neon pen around someone’s neck and wondered which was hanging who. Then I wondered what that meant. I kept repeating it in my head as we rounded the corners of the plastic tarp tents while the jet engines chopped up the sky, leaving scuff marks in the blue distance.

Flailing vehemently against each other were a dozen white balloons tied by strings to the frame of a booth. A child was standing on a chair, untying one of them to have on his wrist. He watches his Mother, hoping she does not turn around and yell at him for being on the chair. He reaches for the string. The balloons pull and struggle away with a gust. He turns his head and looks over his Mother again. She is standing in close proximity chatting with a man in a navy blue suit.

The kid stands on his tip toes and tools at the knot, freeing one of the white floating orbs upward and away. The jets shush off to silence and the crowd applauds dimly like the feint of the lapping tarps. The boy has descended from the chair to avoid reprimand and is tugging on his Mothers coat hem, pointing at the lost treasure. He yanks harder to get her attention then yells at her towards the crowd of people. “Look Mommy! Now daddy has a balloon to play with.”
She looked up and for a moment. The three of us watched as the orb ascended, then vanished.

----

The white light behind his floor number pinged off and the door shushed open. He stepped off the elevator and through a corridor. The omniscient intercom horned Chicago brass.

FOAM

2010-01-20T09:43:00.000-08:00

She liked the sound of her voice. She was calm quiet. Sort of hoarse, in a good way. She was happy with the way it carried an unintentional pitch in correlating constrictions of the larynx, which vibrated her palate and stimulated her pituitary gland. To her ears, at that moment, she would have said she “spoke saucily”. A ripple of excitement scrolled up her spine and sat beating behind her right lobe, as a warm wave flushed along the back of her arm, out to her fingertips.

“So that’s one sausage, egg and cheese muff-in…” She paused breathlessly before ejaculating her tongue to touch the ridge between her most medial incisors. “…'N’ Kay, that’ll be two-oh seven at the next window…” Her voice stopped. Dialogue paused.

Someone developed a franchise, where instead of the stressed hook being in the beginning of the menus items, as a prefix, put it at the end and made everything more ridiculous. Some thing’s were easy to get away with, like hamburger “N” Fries.
The last thing “N” Franchise employees were trained to say to a customer while processing an intercom order went “N, that’ll be all for you?”
The “N” was at the end of all the food items, it was meant as an automatic suggestive sell. Like you would say “I would like a Double, Hamburger “N” Fry “N” a large Orange Shake “N”. Though most people left off the final “N” to save face, for it was clearly the end of their order when they lowered their heads to rearrange the cards in their wallet. It was sub noted in training manuals that any sort of banter, colluding or sarcasm outside of “N that’ll be all for you?” was seriously frowned upon, regardless of how easy a target the person might have left themselves.

Sounds of a chugging engine and choking exhaust being belched from the rear end of the auto were muffled and demonic over the headsets as the car in the drive-thru advanced around the corner of Menu Sign and Enter Only, to window number one. It was a slow progression as the serpentine belt squealed from beneath the hood in front of the empty passenger’s seat. The carbon monoxide and burning oil was difficult to discern from the mid-morning fog lifting, until the vehicle was nearer to the transparent sliding unit that was -the first window.

Just beyond this apperception, taped to the other side of the glass, was the bottom of a Styrofoam cup that had been severed from the greater rest of the portion affixed to face customers reading “We Accept Tips”. Beyond the informative decoration was a kid balling his hand in a fist up by his head. He is looking down examining the back of his arm and elbow skin but looked up when the clunker pulled into view. Neither driver nor window man, moved their bodies. An odd moment occurred as the two stared at one another, as if both expected the other to do something first. As the seconds ticked by and eyebrows fell into boredom, the kid beyond the window dropped his head once again, redirecting his attention to pick at the skin on his arm. The jalopy advanced towards the next window.

As she listened through the chunky plastic box over her right ear, to the sounds of some guy, who she clearly said “muff” to, coming at her in his hoopty hot rod, she couldn't help getting a little wet.

She really hated the morning shift. It was always cold standing on the tile by the order window. She wore the company jacket, but because she had a cash-register and till to manage, there were no company gloves. The only other thing she could really do on her shift, while crammed in a tiny corner, was operate the beverage machine. It was a huge metal ice box, stainless steel piece of crap that sat on the only counter space in her nook. This was meant to be the quick solution for the multi-tasking automated soda machine operator, her job was to place the desired sized container into the fore-finger-thumb tongs and push a button and when the liquid receptacle was filled the machine would shut off. It hadn’t failed yet, with its laser eye, stopping fill at the right time, but the tongs that held the rolled wax covered cardboard into place were too tight for the thin sides. So, every beverage removed had a bit of a squeeze, lid or no lid, she couldn’t help getting a little wet.

Now usually in the morning you would think coffee or orange juice. Most people still ordered a giant soda. Or an extra-large, it was forty ounces, but nobody asked for a “forty-ounce beverage of orange flavor”.

The cups occupied the overhead space. If it was a full sleeve, Miranda had to be wary of bopping her head or knocking off the clumsy heavy headset when she turned to get an order to hand out the window. The sleeves were delivered to the store in giant boxes. Those were kept on big shelves in a closet room beyond the front counters, beyond station one and the kitchen, prep and dishes. It was in the very back of the store. Each box contained twelve plastic sleeves of cups. Each sleeve contained enough cups that when stacked one inside another, turned horizontally and stuck on top the beverage machine of the future, Miranda would hit her head or knock off her headset.

As the window closed, sending a gush of morning chill across her collar, the morning manager stepped away from her position of stuffing wax paper wrapped orders from a heated chute into a paper bag with a receipt, and walked out the side door.
The headsets fuzzed and the new guy in window one could be heard, “Need more straws for window one, Vickie, we need more straws back here for one, are you there?” Pause. “Miranda, I don’t think, Vickie is on headset.”

Miranda was warming her skin beneath the heat lamps, watching a receipt turn black as it flicked on the metal chute. She walked to the window. There was the junker, cozied up to five-by-four frame and split in the head by a center bar, marking the division, which warranted the separation for sliding action, rendering this –window two. Miranda looked beyond the customer and car with its gaseous cloud. She watched outside as Vickie was gesturing beneath a tree in the slick grassy median of the sidewalk and parking lot, talking to her baby daddy. Then slowly she rotated her head to stare dead on into the customers eyes.

He was a young guy, handsome, good skin, probably a college graduate and seemingly completely unaware that his vehicle is a complete piece of shit. He smiled, closed lipped over a sucker stick and narrowed his lids. He was wearing a plain white V-neck T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses on his head.

Miranda was warmer as she opened the window this time. She leaned forward against the bar and the glass perception shushed back, letting in the heinous smell of exhaust and burning oil. Miranda nearly died. She forgot this was the customer she had deliberately said “muff” to, as she angled backward with her tongue hanging out, coughing, gagging, she remembered. Half-way out the window she could hear, both over her headset and from the order box, Derek, the new guy from window one, “Miranda, when you get a chance to run some straws to one?”

The guy in the white V-neck watched Miranda’s eyes fill with water as they looked beyond him, now avoiding direct contact with his. They were two red little globes, roving to focus on the couple beneath the tree. Quickly he raised his arm to hand her a ten dollar bill, nearly shoving it in her navel. He could see her rib line and tone beneath a thin white thermal and polo work shirt. He said the first thing that came to him. “What time do you start serving lunch?”

Miranda knew she had lost the sexy rasp in her voice. She cleared her throat to say “eleven” but found it difficult to inspire even a negligible amount of air into her lungs. So she just smiled and pointed to a sign "Lunch at Eleven" on the window, as she closed it to keep smoke from getting inside while continuing to hack. She decided that she would give him his change when his order was ready.

Moving away from the window Miranda conked her head on the medium cups jutting from above the metal beverage machine and knocked her chunky headset from her ear. “Straws,” she remembers and regains her composure. “Fuck it. There is no difference for me or him to get them, he probably just forgot where they are and needs to be shown or he is just being lazy.” She doesn’t say anything. As she bends down to pick up her headset the guy from window one comes on to say something. “Hey, Miranda…”

As she is adjusting her position and microphone back into place, “Yeah I know Derek about your straws.” She tilts her head up and looks back out the drive-thru window beneath the tree. She sees Vickie holding her temples and looking down. She was pacing or walking in mini circles. “I’ve deliberated with the greater syndicate and we believe that the distance between the two windows is of equal proportions, thus you should be responsible for obtaining your own stock of individually wrapped plastic drinking devices.”

“But I don’t remember where they are.” Derek was below mellow. He was dead pan, but still needed to draw in a large breath before continuing. “Hey that’s a pretty HOTT muff ‘N’ your giving that guy.”

Miranda had said what she needed and wasn’t listening to respond. She watched the couple beneath the bare tree argue, the wet grass glisten and the fog lift from the wood. She shuddered and moved closer to station one, where she would wait for the order to be dropped and warm herself again under the lamps.

“So what about tonight after work? Do you want to do something then?” Derek had somehow gone from antagonizing her to asking her out on a date.

Miranda was leaning on the warm metal counter with her occiput on the chute. She responded with a long and ponderous mMm? Which she hummed and tickled her nose. The sound grew into and “N” like she might just say M&M’s which would be better than
“No”, however, not quite as bad as the sound that emitted from her mouth, following a complete 180 rotation of her body from the counter, as she grew louder with a half yawn and a squeal that sounded like the approving satisfaction from post coitus finale, mixed with the franchise “N” hook. It went; mMm..nnn…no…nigh-ee…no…nnnommm.

The order came down a long metal chute lit with light bulbs. It was wrapped in wax paper and tagged with a sticker “SEC”. The girl pauses and thought about how she always thinks about a “sec” being a “second” and how every time she thinks of it she has lost a second of her life and would sometimes tally the hours she has devoted to the abbreviation of second. She thought of the hours burned, searing those letters into her memory, she thought of the books she could have read for every time she looked at that word, the education she could have by now.

She puts the sandwich in a bag and notes the recycle sticker and then thinks of how many bags she has shoved out this very window. She hands the bag to the man in the stinky car.

“Um, my change..."

"Oh yeah, hold on." She closes the window again and opens it with bills and some change.

“I was going to order a coffee before you closed the window the first time. The guy in the back told me not to order drinks because he had no straws or something…? Would it be possible to get one now?”

“Um, sure.” She turns and looks at the burnt pot that Vickie was going to change before her boy showed up. “Turns out there’s no fresh coffee. If you do not mind waiting another few minutes I can make it fresh for you.” She smiles, but only because she knows she is supposed to. He nods in approval.

“You could pull your car off to the side and someone will bring it out to you.” She closes the window.

untitled

2010-01-02T23:05:00.001-08:00

“I don’t see things in black and white.” Lisa was getting upset now. Her face frowned -though no muscles were initiated. Her sad face was effortless. Her eyebrows folded over her giant wet globes, melting –oozing over her ocular bones and down the sides of her temporalis. Her lips twitched bombastically. She sniffled and swayed her body.

“Lisa,” the man bent over the side of his cush chair to draw up a black canvass portfolio containing Bristol Board inks, two magazines and a copy of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes and bedtime stories. “Now what do you see here?”

Giovani was a portly man. He didn’t care much for suspenders but today was a suspender day. When Giovani explains to himself why it is a “suspender day” he could hardly find a rational premise to base an argument for or against suspenders. Nor could he fathom that he had declared days in which these suspenders would occur. The issue was moot.

For all intensive purposes it should be known that a suspender day was in fact a day in which Giovanni would wear suspenders.

Suspender Day thus would begin when Giovanni would extinguish his wardrobe of the rather shamefully unrecognized “Belt Day” pants and leaving two identical pairs of blue boot cut polyester – cotton blend dress pants with gold inseam stitching and curly “N”s sewn into the rear pockets. He didn’t mind the “N”s so much.

He rarely stood up or moved around the room. Giovanni sat in his cush chair and shuffled through the Bristol Board inks, asking questions.

“What do you see in this one Charles? What do you see in this one Johnny? Sue? Emily?“
“Lisa? What do you see in this one?”

Her bored eyed drifted up from the hair fallen on her shoulders, split ends snaking back at her. “Same.”

“Lisa, you can’t keep seeing the same thing…”

“What? That is all it IS.”

“But you’ve got to see something else?”

“Maybe I don’t want to let you in.”

“That’s it”

“If I tell you something fruity, you’re going to start with diagnosis. If I tell you what IT IS than what does that make you look like, flashing me with your silly Bristols and inks.” She could see well into the bag now and was sneaking glances at the magazine covers to judge if they were anything worth really reading.

“Okay, Lisa. Here, what do you make of this?” He held up the last card.

“A Car”

Giovanni chortled and half smiled, “Yes, it is a picture of a car.” He lay the Bristol face down on the others. It was a cartoon clip art picture of a purple car and like a child’s flash card, beneath in light blue bubble font was printed “C - Car”

“Even my little brother could do that one.”

He set the boards down and trying to seem interested pointed an index up his snout and stationary glasses even firmer onto his rotund head. “Oh? How old is your bother?”

“Three.”

“Do you love him?”

“Do you want to show me something else, please, at least they were entertaining.”

“Alright, I wanted you to take a look at some more pictures.” He reached into the canvass bag and withdrew the Mother Goose and such. “What do you see here?”

“A goose.”

“And here?”

“A talking frog.”

“And here?”

“A castle, look where is this getting us?”

“You see, Lisa, black and white.”

“What?”

“You are conditioned to see things. You do not see things with your own eyes.”

“But how? I?" She remembered seeing the magazines. "Show me the magazines then. I’ll bet I can tell you all kinds of mad shit about what is there.”

“I am sure you could, ‘mad shit and all’, but really those are just reading material for the bus and break, now I can see that you are afraid and our session time is over. Would you like to reschedule, I have tomorrow afternoon open… “

“Afraid?!? I’m fucking pissed! Why won’t you just tell me why I see things in Black and White? What is that supposed to mean?”

“How about just recommend you for 12 hours of anger management, our director does well with the staff who are always here to help you. Who is your probation officer?”

“Fuck you and your fucking fucked up fairy tales!” Her voice rose above the small pacifier of music that thinned the gurgles from the Purina bottled water fountain.
Her voice wailed through the paper thin walls – audibly. Lisa stormed -threw open the door and left the office.

The secretary came into the room with her file.

Giovannis forehead was cradled in his right hand and he sat stroking his temples. “Recommend 12 hours of anger management.”

The secretary made a note and then began to leave. “Charles Peterson is in the lobby,” she whispered back through the ajar door.

The Desultory Peripatetic (Prologue pt.3)

2009-12-10T00:36:00.001-08:00

(To Intro Pt. 1)

3.
A traditional living room would be the gathering place, where a household group congregated to do things of the familial nature; watch television, play games, read aloud story hours or sit and talk about the events of the day. The heart of The Palace was an arena stage room, built like a left atrium, with wings that pinioned into single bedrooms, arteries to the head of the house and upper appendages. It was a place not unlike every other room in the upstairs apartment where the people read, sang songs, wrote and painted, played games and talked. The only thing that made this room slightly unique was a giant black box with a one-way window, neither solid nor liquid, that sat on a shelf and bleated colors and sound occasionally. Every room in The Palace was a congregation room, wherever particular people played. Every room, except one. He passed the doorway recalling the last conversation with the lost roommate, something about the prejudice against the Afghani population of America.

Her room, the first bedroom, left stage, after the left subclavian ARTorRE room of Mexico, was the left common carotid ARTorRE room. A twin bed was tucked beside an interior window to the sweet South of the border hide out. Dawning in plaque yellow light dulling from a ceiling fixture and covered with green and purple bedding like an aneurism, clotting in the corner, growing across the bedroom floor with every messy day it went usurped. When the double doors were opened The Palace heart dazzled upon the fresh bright white painted fireplace. It shimmered like an ivory tower. On that night like most, its darkness vacuumed deeper beyond the drapery of tightly closed doors.

The next doors were always open. With two beds, an array of posters and pictures on the walls, books and clothes piled on the floor. A striped couch was lined against one wall. On the far end of the couch was a small drafting desk that housed a computer and more books. A crude light was fixed nearby to add a little speak-easy feel. The first bed closest to the desk was a single mattress and box springs mounted to a metal frame with several thin blankets and a comforter. The bed opposite was a slug of a queen mattress snug in the corner by a window and covered in comforters for no more warmth than comfort.

This room might have been a dining area for the traditional family in its primitive years. A swinging door led from the back of the room into a hall past the Man-Bath and into the kitchen. The “Man-Bath” had been dubbed such for the occupants of The Palace consisted of both male and female, non which that compared any genetic similarities, therefore it was only politeness that allowed one bath to be used for its male components and the other for its females, though the other bath was rarely referred to as the “Woman-Bath”. Recently it had been converted into a den of multi-colored cartoons representing those known as The Power Puff Girls, in what appeared to be the smucous of a Technicolor-yawn initiated by Crayola’s box of 64.

This was where the young man was headed; through the swing door past the Man-Bath (avoiding the puce pussy room by a long shot) and into the kitchen, then out the back door onto the balcony where he sat at a large table fashioned from a giant tree trunk. The table was a redwood relic discovered in the patio storage and removed for protection of a bicycle. The young man relaxed and began to write.

Bully

The Desultory Peripatetic (Prologue pt.2)

2009-12-09T23:19:00.001-08:00

2.
The sun was squeezing itself between the monoliths of the city, shooting beams into windows, reflecting lasers cutting through sliver spaces in the mini-blind slats. The second story apartment of the old Louisville house on 2nd Street dubbed “The Palace” was empty except for a young man who sat doing the cliché smoke thing and defining the world around him. He thinks out loud. Taking particular notes on pairs and couples from a window room twenty-two steps above the street. It goes something like this;

“Yes…” scratching his chin, “second story. The pertinence of seconds is to have more gorging heaps of gluttony from something gratifying the first time. The importance of a story: to account experiences, with narrative prose, the succession of trivial incidents. To say simply; the distance from one floor to another, is carpenter-tenant talk, snubbed with a block pencil thick as a support beam and as out a context as Mapamundi, cockscomb or asking Do you speak Anglo-Saxon?”

The occupied room was located in the front of the house, overlooking the pavement. An old star state cowboy statue sat in the corner roping an imaginary bull or cow or perhaps an un-domicile llama, for of course the whatever was not crafted in plaster of Paris like the brazen gaucho, however, imaginary. Colored Christmas lights dangling around were offset and overcast by a tri-light stand donning primary blue upon mint stucco walls. Beautiful. Shadows of the strands of lights looked like thick dark spider webs, crisscrossing over medium silver jagged nails. There were two small couches and a foot stool. Some other candid decorations were askew on end tables and edges of the window sills that surrounded this get away, adding an ambiance to the wide open atmosphere like the patio veranda of an old cervezas bar. This was the first room of The Palace to be given a name; “Mexico”, was a place to idle time and read, write, smoke and sip a beverage to the rickety tunes of an old crotchety radio.

“Onward, say New York, post- Chaucer, 1925.” He turned his attention to the statue. “Vos iz neiaz? Could.ya kibitz me to da nearest bodega?”

He imagines the response comes from a pile of blankets -a slumbering conquistador beneath a brightly woven textile; “Uno minuto, aquilatar de mapa”. Now, totally amused with himself, Mr. Spangled-funny-britches finishes his mono-dia-logue. “Later? Ho-Kay, I’ll come back later. Meh.be ou .ave gud neiaz den”. Had he a hat, he would have tipped it. He tried to imagine how people communicated in Roaring New York, but couldn’t. He was a pioneer mixing Spanish and Yiddish and only spittish on the back of his hand from his sublingual gland, once again.

Among other oddities that existed in the corners of the room were a ceramic bust of Honest Abe converted into a smoking bowl, stacks of books and mugs placed on the corners of the coffee table, an 18 inch squared ceramic ashtray brimming with Camel, Parliament and Marlboro Light butts, a classical guitar (with steel strings instead of nylon) resting in the corner like a trusty steed and looming over all was a creepy plastic owl, which hung in the same spot since the landlord replaced it. Hanging the thing on a hook, like Bubo from Titans, to keep a watchful, unnerving stare on the apartments new inhabitants. Somewhere there might be a story going around about previous tenant dispositions toward the fowl ornament, including unfavorable places it might have been found after a leasing agreement ceased i.e. the top shelf of a closet, the back porch, in a box of used condom wrappers and socks or perhaps the pisser. The creepy plastic owl with its ogling eyes was a fashionable conversation piece for the amazing melting pot grab bag of Cracker Jack gumbo shoe-Frye’s that occupied The Palace since August of the second year in the new, sequel millennium.

The bloated-bowels-of-Mr.-Insert-here, fast forwarded his memories to several months ago in the year 2001 Louisville, Kentucky, the Cardinal campus Sav-a-Step mart. “A guy walks in with Daisy Dukes, no shirt and a rabid frightful glare in his right eye; ‘Where da Coronas boss?’ cuz slurs out his slobbering mouth, as his cardboard Burger King crown begins to slip from his oily head. He looks like General Lee just spun out and shit on his face –hard core. I imagine my lips tightening across my clenching teeth. I release a hiss, my eyes narrow. I dub him, a giant reddened delicious song and dance spokesman with a flair for the universal law. Then I ask him about his Jeep. He said; I ain’t got no Jeep you cow floppin’ dung heap. Whatever, back to work.”

The young man had been staring out the window, watching the lights change dim, until he was gazing into the reflection of his own eyes in the glass. Glass had always been a perception. The reflection was an apperception of whom or what might be on the opposite side. The reality; a thin transparent pane of irregular atomic structure separated him from the mere aspiration that kept him alive.

“For entertainment and self amusement the word steps could describe the Saint clause of the anonymous for those who believe in someone and desire to become them in a grandeur way. The second story of this apartment is accordingly, the continuation of another story apartment, where three of its inhabitants decided to move out in search of a more accommodating abode. There are seventeen steps from the sidewalk to the second floor. The house is six blocks away from the old apartment. The convenience store is less than five blocks away. The beer is foremost in the fridge and for the most part everyone speaks a version of what they could but never did refer to as English. There is absolutely no Mapamundi. The three pilgrims have decided it was mere coincidence that the new living quarters were one flight above the street and one block away from the division of numbered streets and woodland names on Deuce Boulevard. It is no coincidence that the occupants are of verbose language encoding and recording, raw lif-i-tudes.”

Butting his smoke he stood and walked through the doorway into the heart of The Palace, the living quarters for the nix-genetic order. He insisted on defining things as he ambled through the doorway.

(Prologue Part 3)

The Desultory Peripatetic (Prologue pt.1)

2009-12-09T17:24:00.000-08:00

An
Introduction

This is what was scrawled;

“Quite possibly I could be setting myself up for a flagrant injustice. I rather veraciously believe it was not the deep fried falafel I ailing choked down as a mid-day meal that separated the silky cocoons of my stomach, which until now had been resting peacefully within the darkness of my bowels, however, among all other theories presented I must agree with a possibility that once again I have fallen into a situation that no spade or pick axe will be able to provide any use but entrench me further into the self centering ditch of demise and disillusion. Yes my friends quite possibly I could be falling in love.

I describe bowels as anyone would who could unfailingly say that their “stomach has sunk”, for no average person would claim, “Oops, I believe I feel a constriction in the smooth muscle tissue deep to my liver and inferior to my lungs”, etc. Therefore it would seem to most I have, “butterflies in my stomach”. However, this is neither a predilection to teenage angst, nor a thriller of the absurd, where it would not be uncommon to find a flock of Lepidoptera circling my innards like the science-fantasy red nosed fiend of an optimistic Milton-Bradley game harboring 6-12 year olds to apply metallic tongs to its cavities in search of plastic exaggerations for rewards of ego and counterfeit currency.

Rewards of ego and counterfeit currency. I pen this now for belief. If in fact I am really writing this than I shall never stop falling in love. This cycle of life will continue. I will never free the Lepidoptera. The smooth will never be more striated. To whatever degree, I am forever digging inside myself as a child with metallic tweezers extracting from my abdomen, pulling plastic shrapnel from my Hara.

Someone once sold me a dream of a great beyond, something further larger and grander than myself. At first it sounded like a lobby. Later a lounge. I was convinced I went there when I slept, but the original idea was that I would go there when I died or something. Throughout earthly existence there are life friends and there are moment friends. Life friends are not always with me, but they are always there. Moment friends fill the spaces in between. Life friends are moment friends of earthly existence.”

It was ten days before he was moved again to write in his journal. He would have claimed it had something to do with the way the clouds hung so low our thoughts were trapped in the troposphere. He would say more about the aloneness in the vast empty Palace and how it was enabling him to see and know things just from the telepathic atmosphere that was omnipresent in an emptiness. He said "as if it were waiting to be filled by its occupants. It was like peering from a frost covered window and missing a warm weather friend." Something about missing a friend surfaced an ability to appreciate the characteristics he liked about his roommates, preventing drama and the dwelling upon unpleasant "could be" realities. Something about the remaining beers in the fridge began a binge that would reorganize the soft pupas he imagined grew in his skull.

You might believe this is a load of bulls shit. It is. How could I possibly know what this dung heap geekin’, turd fish is thinking and doing? I don’t really. This is just a fraction of what I hear from him as garble just spat by other spatters garbling. From the saliva I extract the essential oil of raw. Call me Mehal, pronounced Me-how, let’s begin.

Prologue:
The Café (an introduction to Broadway) &
Double Second-Stories (in Other Words; Sequels)

1.
Key-in. Click.
Engaged, the plain unmarked white Econoline cargo van pulled out from an alley into the southern noonday light. One burnt taffy road and then another, away from Preston Street. Riding bitch was the scrawny, undernourished, lubberly protagonist of this mock’n memoir. He observed every paltry detail through razor gash blood shot, dilated eyes, peering beyond the giant windshield, which appeared at that moment to have the malleability of Saran wrap.

In the event of an accident he might find himself ejected from his seat, bounding, bouncing down an avenue in a novelty plastic Bilipo bubble toy. The giant swollen orbs behind rip-torn periocular skin roved while he imagined himself dinging like a pin-ball against light posts and telephone poles, ricocheting off the incongruent steel beams, bonging off dumpsters and finally shunting into the gutter.

As Master of the Sewers, he imagined a private universe of dead-fall-fast tin soldiers missing arms and legs or raggedy Andy’s -tattered cloth rag dolls with matted yarns of hair; an underground society of rejected action figures. He would hope for the tramp-stamped abdomen of a Jem to float by while washing his hands in the filthy streaming bowels of the city’s backwash. His mind was as warped as the window seemed and in a couple hours when the delivery van returned to normal, parked in a garage, he would still be stuck like a shit house rat in the dump hole of his own demise, writing down every fucking raw thought that entered his jacked up, arced, con-caving-in mind.

The lack of oxygen and frying in his brain caused him to stretch wide, his mouth, like uncovering a spattering pan of falafel to flip. A stream of spit from his sublingual gland spritzed the back of his hand. His imagery was lost as he remembered a thought exercise of narration. He began.

“Riding as a passenger was easy for me. I don’t drive so I’m always a passenger and interesting company for most of the time. I sometimes forget I’m in a vehicle with other people and stare at the broken line in the road on long car trips. I watch as it flows -like my goals- along the side of the car, coming closer then drifting further anon. Other times I just watch as the telephone poles woosh past, coming on slow then pausing gently before thrusting behind the car, and yet never moving. I could easily just watch blankly remembering things as the current scenery rushes up and rolls back, washing over me. Things like telephone poles and how they carry our conversations that urge us. Traveling by telephone.”

I was more mindful on that day than I had been during those times. Trapped in the down town traffic of a tri-city metropolis, not traveling a great distance, the tall buildings kept far the illusion of a current. The task at hand heightened senses to awareness for future recollection.

We were going from a Canteen-style restaurant in the Health and Sciences building of the college campus to the central Café, the main restaurant, the original location. Like most restaurant chains, the original place where it all began is usually like an artifact with a pulse, still producing nuggets of nostalgia and artisan ambiance. I had never been there before.

The guy I was toting around was mixed with passive fear of duty and an anxious desire to be a bigger part of something, imagining it must have been what gubernatorial people feel like when they go from the Lincoln Monument in D.C. to the log cabin in Illinois. I imagined he would stand in the doorway, inhale a huge breath and sigh an ambiguous declaration like; “this is where is all began”.

The Health and Science location was a satellite, much like Abe’s monument. It was in a larger building with modern columnar style with a much different purpose than the ole cabin. It didn’t have the same fundamental foundation as the other, which is to say H&S was dispensable. As if any restaurant, café or lunch room could supply the meals necessary for the students, who might occupy its space during class hours, in search for a place to brunch, study or network.

This shit giggling monkey slap wouldn’t be too far off had he said anything of the sort. The Main restaurant was where it all began. Where the sweat beaded on brows and menus were created by people who spent time culturing themselves to be legit enough to pass off an ethnic special. Abe maybe would not have been so honest if he hadn’t lived in the climate sauna cabin as he did. Where tours are now run through the summer by groups of students, the political posse and travelers searching for that bit of humble humanistic history they remember once influenced our country. The main restaurant was much the same, only red brick and located between offices, banks and a bar.

Mop-bucket-fart-heads first day was filled with redundant paper work, hurried casual introductions, tours of random pointing fingers and mottled words with a saucy side of server du jour peppered with a -mouthing -watery man who leaned against the counter offering subtle cheers to the sports program tingeing from the swivel screen. As the evening approached Schlepy-left-foot-no-knee-McGee punched out and walked home.

(Prologue: PART 2)

The Epic Truth of Rubber & Glue

2009-12-04T21:26:00.001-08:00

There should be an awesome story about rubber and glue. Like a tale of how sticky glue is and repellent rubber and maybe one day they go to the beach. It would be an allegory to the saying; "I'm rubber and your glue..." Rubber and Glue would imagine the other, for it is known by all that neither Rubber nor Glue speak, cry or quips or talks shit at all about anything except perhaps to themselves, so they will imagine. And for all syntax their actions could be carried out by other non mentioned forces but written in such an illusionary way as if the pair was individually mobile with the ability of voluntarily guided movement. So therefore, during the turning moment in the story, while they are at the beach doing summersaults and building a sand castle, checking out each other’s packages and touching one another inappropriately in the shower -it is implied this story is pure imagination, a grim fairy tale if you will.

They might surf over to the coconut island and catch a smoothie from the fruit man in the wooden shed. But really that is preposterous. By the end you are harrowed from the final moments because you will have invested the special time to finally read up on the truth behind the rubber and glue. The author would convince you Glue was going to get it when Glue went rolling around in the sand making him into a pebble monster and the sun got hot and he lay out. Or Rubber -nearly lost his smoothie during the long swim or you thought he would puke overboard or drown. There are such many great adventures these two could get into that it would be sad to see one slip out into the ocean, diffuse and not return and the other to never really die but suffer a different fate nearly every moment of the story.

You see glue could be portrayed like a shape-shifting blob character in the sand who can morph or cover shells and make peel off stuff or whatever, it could be a comic strip and Rubber would be played by every dirty condom on the beach. Eventually it might come around; “I'm Rubber, your Glue. I get used to fuck people and you keep things together. Damn, I'm going to go hang out in the parking lot, dry up and crack into pieces. And this whole time you thought I was a rubber band.”