James LaFond

Moving to Substack

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 08:27:00 -0700

Hello friends,

I created this blog back in February of 2017 to organize James LaFonds multitude of published books. Since then, I have used it to publish our podcast and many exclusive pieces of writing not found on other LaFond websites.

From now on, the posts that usually appear hear will appear as public posts on substack. If you sign up for free emails, these pieces will be sent to you automatically. There will be more stuff behind the paywall, including audio. Visit us there: SUBSTACK

The most important part of this blogspot are the bookstores I created. I spent a lot of time tracking down all LaFond's titles in print, emailing and calling him up to figure out which titles were related to one another, organizing them into genres, and saving the book cover images and purchase links. This will stay up indefinitely and I hope to duplicate it on other platforms for the sake of posterity. Please visit the front page of the BOOKSTORE and click through to find the genres of your interest.

Best,
Lynn

By Gaslight Chapter 7 Gunshots

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 7 Jun 2021 15:40:00 -0700

Thursday, November 5, 2020, 7:10 pm,
Holgate and Foster

slow rain failed to keep the fog at bay, a mist which seeped to the lungs and the hands, the soggy shoes too. They stood in the grassy, muddy alley behind the Northwest IPA Bottle Shop, where those hipster faggots drank their fancy beer. They had run the trash to the dumpster in the rain for the Cherokee owner. So he gave them a Pabst tall boy to split. Tones was feeling kind of bad drinking near all of it. But Dox would not stop digging, just shoveling like a maniac. He was digging a deep hole behind the abandoned furniture in the ally, six feet long, two feet wide and about four feet deep at this point, even getting down in the hole and digging. This was uncharacteristic of him. He was such a clean freak most of his effort as a homeless guy was spent keeping clean, which in and of itself was no mean feat. He was doing this in a driven frenzy, not getting tired despite his age.

Tones finished the beer and tossed it on the couch as Dox stopped digging, got up out of the slot ditch against the concrete foundation of the brick building, and leaned on the shovel they had stolen out of a backyard a block to the west.

“What is it Dox?” Tones asked, for he could see the empty, receiving light in those small grey eyes.

“Tri-colored lights, crossroad, the crackle of highway musketry—two heads are better than one, the Grey Norn on Her remorseless Loom has so spun.”

The beating of wings overhead and the crackle of crow feet landing on grating shingles seeped down to them in the fog-choked alley.

A block away, on Foster, sounded like at the intersection, they heard five rounds from a handgun, in two controlled bursts. Then came the dull report of three, three-round bursts from another handgun, followed by squealing tires and a continuous stream of semi-auto handgun fire that came to about ten rounds. There was more tire squealing, sounding like from a different car, and then two more shots and the gunning of engines.

There was a crash, a dull crash, like a car hitting a curb and pole at low speed. This was followed by the sound of another car tearing off northward and two car doors slamming shut near the mouth of the alley.

“Here they come, Dox.”

What the hell—this is all wrong.

Dox ducked down behind the couch and chair and Tones simply laid on the couch, holding his hammer close.

Within seconds two thin black guys in hooded sweat shirts, one with a spent Glock in his hand, came running down the alley.

As they passed Tones he grabbed the rear one around the waist, and did a roll-off-the-couch tackle and Dox, rising from his wolfish crouch, damn near cut the other guy’s head off with the shovel. Tones crawled into a back mount and pinned the guy below him, not having the heart to hammer him. These guys had done nothing to him.

Then the little skinny under him snarled, “Nigga, you dead—I’ll come back with—”

And just like that he was silent and dead, a hole knocked in the back of his head.

Dox was cutting off the head of the other gangbanger as the neck spurted warm steamy blood everywhere, then, in an amount of time that seemed too brief to dispose of a human life, the old guy neatly rolled the body into the trench. He placed the head in his backpack—Tones now understanding why the fellow had left his spare clothes behind the makeshift plywood shelter they had slept in last night.

People were yelling worriedly out on the street.

Tones stood up and turned around and then he heard a sickening slice and saw that Dox had chopped off the dude’s head and was rolling the corpse into the trench. As the little guy placed the second head in his rucksack and picked up the shovel and began to shovel the muddy topsoil into that grave, Tones had an idea.

“Dox, throw in half the dirt, just level. Don’t mound it up. Scatter the rest over the blood and marks. I’ll move the couch over the grave.”

Dox nodded his head “Yes,” and that sentiment was ostentatiously echoed within Tones’ bewildered mind, “Yaas!”

Get out of my head, asshole.

They were soon marching down Foster in the driving rain, sirens sounding in the distance behind them.

When they got to the train platform, Dox went up.

This is weird, where I came into town.

In the mist and rain above the singing splash of the highway they stood before the fence that kept fools from getting run over on the rails and Dox looked up at the top, where the wigged-out baby doll head Tones had taken from C-Three the Guru the other night was hanging just out of reach.

Dox shucked his pack, and took out both heads and held them up towards the baby doll head and stood like a maniac, like some Aztec priest who had just ripped out a heart.

Oh, this does not look good.

Tones turned and faced down at Foster. If a train came by they would be made. But at least his big frame would blot out sight of Dox having gone insane and holding up those heads.

I killed a man.

…He threatened you.

Yeah, because I tackled him!

…He was a scumbag out there gang-banging, just like those savages that did you wrong up in Seattle.

“Yaas,” came the echo in is head. And before he could think a negative about the creeping ego edging into his mind, four crows swooped down out of the misty night and he heard them fluttering and cawing and pecking and ripping behind him.

“Yaas… a thinker next, a revel maker, an ethereal baker,” echoed in his head.

The crows flew off in a wicked fury of wet wings, eyes dangling from their beaks, circling out over Foster and then back northeast in the direction of Mount Tabor.

He turned around and saw Dox placing the heads reverentially, one in each of his old T-shirts, swaddling them and sliding them one at a time down into the bottom of his rucksack.

Dox also shouldered the shovel, which they should have thrown on the roof of the buildings over the alley, looked up at Tones with a weary, ashen cast to his pinched face and asked, “What’s a revel?”

“It’s a party, like a drinking party, I guess in olden times.”

Dox blinked, “What would that have to do with an ethereal baker?”

“My guess is brewing, beer-making, the brewer uses yeast to make the booze.”

“What is Domingo?”

“Fuck, you’re a radar dish. You got more than me. Domingo is Sunday, the Lord’s day, if you believe in that shit.”

“The Master believes.”

I feel bad for this guy. He’s worse off than me by a long shot.

“I’m tired, Tones, so tired.”

“Come on, pal, let’s find someplace dry. There is a dry doorway near the 7-Eleven. We need to get a tent. Tent living is the way to go.”

Off into the misty night they walked, the black hole in Tones’ chest not aching for the first time since he came to Portland.

By Gaslight Chapter 6 Tent of Shadows

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 31 May 2021 19:56:00 -0700

Monday, November 2, 2020, 3:48 am
57^th and Powell

he night was clear, the moon was down below the distant trees and Tones was fearfully proud that he somehow had a pal three times his age, a loyal buddy that had saved his life, was the first to wake, the last to go to sleep, didn’t jerk-off in the middle of the night like Erik, was as wary of tweakers, hobo camps and cops as he was.

They sat sipping coffee behind the brewery, drinking out of cups that the old guy had made using aluminum foil. The coffee itself they had gotten from the Cherokee at the 7-Eleven on Foster in return for cleaning the windows on the exterior. It was the left over shit at 3 am.

He mused as the old fellow, his head forever on a swivel, looked into the clear night sky of predawn.

I mean, the only possible downside to this situation is the fact that my little buddy is insane, believes that he is possessed by the soul of an ancient sorcerer, and is actively hunting another ancient sorcerer—that must have been a good acid trip.

Yeah, but at least the creepy-ass crow has not come back since my cuffs came off—that was just too much. Yeah, and no more LSD—imagine how much LSD this fucker has eaten!

With that thought, he heard a crackle above and saw the wings of the crow outlined under the ambient night sky land on the edge of the brewery, the eyeball still dangling from its beak—are you fucking kidding me? Erik, why did you sell me that Nepalese paper!

Dox stood, drank the rest of his coffee, carefully folded the cup for reuse, slid it into his jacket pocket, shucked on his rucksack, saluted the crow, and as the thing flew off, Tones’ belly of blackness burned like ice and he rose eerily to his feet, “He’s back in your head, Dox?”

The little fellow looked up at him with steely grey eyes over his pinched face, now almost bearded and nodded to the right, across Foster, “Alongside Powell, five wolves and seven sheep, a big blue tent.”

“Fifty-seventh and Powell,” he answered. Then he asked, as he finished his coffee and dropped the aluminum foil cup, which caused the little fellow to wince, like someone had stepped on a beautiful flower, “What do we need to collect, Dox?”

The fellow seemed to register verbal addresses much better when his name was spoken. Otherwise he often would not answer absent eye contact.

“A head, the Shaman’s head.”

“What?”

“Yaas” sounded the stentorian voice dripping with assurance within his subconscious.

“Well, I’m not killing anybody. But you saved my ass. So I’ll play lookout on your caper.”

The little man walked off—no, marched like going to war—and Tones ambled on after him, keeping up easily, checking to make sure that ball peen hammer was still in his back pocket.

Within a few short minutes, they found themselves at the homeless camp where five tweakers stood around the bicycle tent where they chopped up stolen bikes and collected an inventory of scrap-built bicycles. Eventually a panel truck would show up and load the bikes. He supposed it was the racket that kept these guys in their meth. Shit, the Chinese meth was so cheap.

He then realized that Dox was seriously fucked up. This dude just stood there, looking up at these guys, around the fire, sniffing and listening, saying nothing. Tones walked up behind him and said, “What do we want?”

“The wise one in the big blue tent.”

“Okay, Dox.”

With that Tones stepped up to the tall long-haired hippy leaning on his dragon cane under his cowboy hat, “Look, Pal, we’re lookin’ for a fortune-teller, in a big blue tent.”

“Oh, sure friend,” the man answered glassy-eyed and languid, “C-Three the Guru is up a block, on the next side lot, on the other side of the apple tree. Tell him that Hip-Man sent you.”

They followed the directions and came to a large blue tarp tent and could hear chanting within, in a throaty nasal rasp, that hollow drug-addict glitch of a voice. Dox looked up at him and said, “Ask him for his head, the Master says.”

Tones ducked into the tent while Dox stood guard and, in the dull candle light saw this light-skinned, maybe 20% African fellow with dreads and a denim braided bandana and all these affected esoteric bullshit trinkets, sitting cross legged in the center of his tent while some fat red-headed bitch sucked his dick.

He was in some weird Buddhist posture and she was methed out of her mind sucking away, while this guy seemed to be focusing on this baby-doll head wearing a cancer-kid hair wig and eye shadow.

This is some sick shit.

Tones snatched the baby doll head from its string and the weird lame guru looked up at him and yawned, “That ain’ right, man,” and Tones used his sneaker to heel-stomped his nose into mush and walked out with the wigged-up baby doll head on a string.

He showed the thing to Dox, who seemed kind of lethargic all of a sudden, and the crow with the eye ball in its beak lighted on Dox’s backpack, finally swallowed the eye ball and retinas after carrying it for two days. The crow plucked the string from Tones’ hand and flew off into the dying night.

This is far, far beyond disturbing.

“Dox, are you alright, little buddy?”

“I’m real tired, Tones.”

“Let’s go down to the park. We can sleep behind the pool house, okay.”

“Okay, Tones.” And the little man waited for Tones to walk off and then followed him like a puppy dog down towards the homeless guys and Hip-Man, who kind of seemed as much as a pervert as C-Three was. He just knew there was some child abuse somewhere along the line and all those bikes being kids bikes pissed him off. It wasn’t so long ago that he had been a kid on a bike getting knocked off in the street by adults he was trying to escape.

Dox stopped behind him and Tones said to Hip-Man, “My friend is tired and you guys suck, and you are a bitch, so I’ll take your best bike for my buddy here.”

Hip-Man said, “Wait a minute, friend.”

“I’m not your fuckin’ friend, bitch!”

What are you gonna do?” he asked one big tweaker, who backed off into the shadows for answer.

“And you, what are you gonna do?” he demanded of another shadowy figure, who also backed off.

“Nothin’, that’s what you bitches are gonna do.”

Dox then patted him on the shoulder and hissed, “The Master doesn’t want me killing this one with the creased forehead,” nodding to a big leather-faced tweaker with his hand in his pocket as Dox placed his hand on his own sheathe knife.

“You sure, pal?”

“I’m sure. I can walk. But my hand is thirsty so we have to go. If he keeps looking at me like that my hand will have to drink. The Master will be mad with the wasted effort. His wants only quality heads. The creased forehead would ruin the curation of the totem.”

A chill issued from the black hole in his heart and in his mind echoed, “Yaas!” like the whisper of the Devil himself.

The man with the creased head stepped further back and showed his hands, apparently creeped out by Dox’s languid and matter-of-fact appraisal of his head. He had to come away with something, so he grabbed Hip-Man’s cane and said, “I’m Big Tones, you’re my bitch and this is my cane! Got a problem with that?”

“No, Big Tones. Thank you for letting me hold your cane’” submitted the big old hippy.

And so they stalked off, Dox pirouetting like a merry-go-round to keep eyes on the camp until it was out of sight.

“Simple beast,” hissed the distant voice in his head.

Maybe I am, asshole boring into my soul. But I’m not letting you take over my mind, and you better let my pal off the hook or I’ll find a way to wreck your game.

By Gaslight Chapter 5 Moon Crow

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 24 May 2021 14:55:00 -0700

Foster-Powell Community, Halloween

Saturday, October 31, 2020, 4:00 pm

ig Tones was shitting his guts out on the toilet—at least he had a toilet. And the process seemed to interrupt his hallucination about Harry fucking Houdini inhabiting his abdomen.

Shit, no toilet paper.

You are two feet from the shower.

He heard the front door open.

You have to be kidding me!

Who shows a house on Halloween, on a Saturday?

For a moment he wondered if perhaps he was losing his mind. His hearing is usually great for cars and car doors. That audio imprints very strongly the first time the cops come to beat your ass for sleeping in the bushes.

He tip-toed, as easily as a 270-pound dude can, out of the bathroom, holding his clothes, and slid into the closet and curled up.

The realtor was about to open the closet for this lisping hipster faggot and his prissy-sounding bitch when the woman said, “What is that smell? Is there a sewer line broken here?”

“Oh, oh, let me check said the realtor,” as her hand pulled away from the slide knob and Tones heard her walking into the bathroom with the couple and then the man started gushing, “Oh My God! Oh—I have to leave—Linda, we’ are goiiiing!” and this faggot starts running out of the bedroom and down the stairs and his girl is saying to the realtor, “Eduardo has a fecal phobia—we have to go…”

The woman realtor was on the phone with some other realtor as she left, so he figured his spot had been made and he’d pack up and leave the mess for them as well—fuck them, these rich people. In the meantime he laughed his ass off. He must have laughed for a half hour.

But first he needed a good shower, not in the bathroom he had blown up, but in the main bathroom with that nice custom stainless steel nozzle with all of the settings that housewives use for masturbation.

Hell yeah that felt good. Shit, these fools had the water tank stoked too. He was running this bitch dry! Damn this felt good. They even had soap in the form of the bullshit flower-shaped scented decorations in this porcelain cornucopia. He hated hipsters and all their bullshit. But they did serve the purpose giving him food, and a place to sleep and shit and shower, before he continued down his own personalized stairway to hell.

He got out of that steaming stall, dried off with the towel, got dressed, brushed his teeth and then had to pee. One good thing about being over six foot tall, is that you can piss in the sink. There he stood, everything but his jacket and backpack on, pissing in the sink, holding his dick in his hand, when two rednecks, muscular, bearded, MAGA-fucking Trumptards busted through the bathroom door and screamed, “Freeze motherfucker!”

One was holding an aluminum bat and the other a big fucking nickel-plated revolver. Everything but his pisser froze and he was embarrassed to hear the sink, where some rich bitch would one day be brushing her teeth, gurgling with his piss.

“Oh, you dirty motherfucker,” snarled the big one with the gun—shit, these dudes were both bigger than him and looked like they banged steroids.

To that the even bigger one rumbled, “Oh, I see, we got us a Goldilocks wannabe shittin’ up this house that we scarped and saved and busted our asses to build and—you know what…we gonna take you out in the woods and make you dig your own grave!”

He had finally gotten his dick back in his pants and said, kind of deadpan he thought for a dude who always tried so hard not to get killed, “Please don’t kill me.”

Wow, does that dude even want to live? Life must have screwed him good.

Tones spent about two hours scrubbing the bathrooms while those goddamned rednecks took turns bitching him out and kicking him in the ass with their steel toe boots. By the time he was done he didn’t even like them anymore. Then, just as he was thinking he was free and clear, the asshole with the gun slapped a pair of handcuffs on him, “To the woods, Goldilocks. We got the shovel in the truck.”

It would figure that of all the houses in Portland to crash at this one would be owned by two lumberjack-steroid-bangers and one of them a cop.

Oh, God does hate you, Tones.

Off to his doom he went with head down and hopes gone, shoved into the black pickup truck in the front passenger seat with a muzzle of a 357 pressed behind his ear.

As he sat in the truck and the sun dipped down below the tree tops, streaking the world with bright diffused light, a big crow cawed at him from across the street, where it was perched on the hood of an Audi, which he thought was pretty damned strange, especially since that was his totem, his tattoo fetish anyhow. Tones had seven different raven tattoos on his body. The raven and the crow were just always a kind of bird he admired and he did not know why, but he’d had an affinity for them since boyhood. This thing was looking right at him like it had something to say and his chest tingled like he had just snorted a huge line of coke through his navel and was drawing the powder up through his guts to his nose.

Portland, Oregon, Halloween,

October 31, 2020, 7:57 pm, 72^nd and Holgate

“This homeless piece-of-shit is going to pay. The cops are all getting their asses kicked downtown—nobody to save his worthless ass!”

So snarled the big boy with the gun as the bigger boy with the bat drove the big black 4x4 Dodge ram down Powell and agreed, “Shoot, shovel and shut-up, I say, Brother!”

Fuck, I’m really dead. We’re headed out towards Gresham. These hicks are going to murder me out in the sticks. They will chuck me in a hole that they are going to make me dig.

“Fuck that, you sell-out bitches, working your ass off to provide housing for cross-dressing hipsters who would never buy it if they saw your bearded pie-holes. I can’t keep you fucking inbred assholes from killing me, but the hell if I’m going to dig my own grave.”

“You’ll be singing a different song—what the hell?!” exclaimed the Bigger Boy behind the wheel as a crow, Tones had to think it was the same crow that was looking at him before, came down on the windshield, grabbed the wiper in front of the driver and started flapping its wings and obstructing his vision. These guys may have wanted to be killers but they were still knee jerk rules followers and the big monstrosity stopped the pickup right at 72^nd where the 7-Eleven was on the left. He grabbed his bat and got out of the truck to shoo the crow off of the windshield.

This could be my—

“Don’t even think about it, motherfucker,” snarled the big boy behind him as he pressed the muzzle behind his ear.

Then, as the bigger redneck tried getting rid of the crow, they all heard something, a human war cry, like out of Last of the Mohicans and this little dude, an old dude with a pinched face and a 5 o’clock shadow, looking on the clean side of homeless, came running down the side walk on 72^nd and leaped out into Powell with both hands on an aluminum baseball bat that smacked the side of the big, bearded head with a ringing ping and that giant redneck’s bloody face smashed into the window frame and—horror to behold—the crow started poking its beak into the big man’s eye, ripping that thing out!

“Billy!” yelled the big boy as he jerked open the back right passenger seat and stood on the seat and tried to aim his pistol down over the roof at the twerpish tweaker who was now running back down 72^nd—but not for long.

Tones had pulled his ass and cuffed hands up, opened the door with one big thumb and slid out instinctively. Tones managed to land on his feet, and rammed his left shoulder into the open rear door and pinched that uninjured brother, spilling him hip over doorframe back on his shoulders on the street, where he could hear an audible crack, like bones breaking in a chain and the pistol discharge, ripping through his pants leg, burning his shin and blowing a hole in the front tire with a gout of flame. Tones was off down Powell, running after his little savage savior, the crow, its beak occupied by a dangling eye, flying above him framed in the dull light of the just risen moon.

He could hear the two big monsters moaning and groaning at one another and asking after each other as he chased the little man down 72^nd towards Mount Tabor, his hands cuffed behind his back.

“Hey, wait man, I can’t keep up. My hands are cuffed.”

The little man stopped next to a car, reached behind it, and shucked on a ruck sack, placing the bat in the top with his left hand and standing there looking up at him as if dumb. Tones could tell that the little guy was scared. And as he got close he could see he wasn’t a tweaker, actually looked recently homeless.

“Hey man, let’s cut north down the side street and cross Powell a ways up. I got a place we can regroup.”

The little, older man, like sixty it looked, nodded “Yes,” and they walked along side-by-side, the crow with the eye in its beak keeping pace with them flying out in the street, waiting on a car roof, and then hopping alongside them as they slid like shadows through shade.

Three blocks back, before they turned to re-cross Powell, he stopped and looked down at the little man, “Hey man, thanks. My name is Tones and you saved my ass. We might get pinched crossing the road. I gotta know. Why’d you save me?”

The little man nodded at the crow, the eye dangling from its beak, standing imperiously on the roof of an old Bronco, “The man in my head said so, said the crow would help.”

“The man in your head?”

“A voice—I thought I was losing it. But the man was right and he seems to know me somehow in a way I don’t know myself. Anyways, I can’t stand him. He is so bossy. So I just do as he says so he’ll go away.”

Is that like the man in the mirror in my belly?

They darted across the street, no traffic in sight, and over the grassy median and across the other side, and Tones was feeling creepy about the little guy when they got to the service road where the homeless camp was. So, among the blue tarp-covered tents and the eerie fires, one in a hubcap, one on the asphalt and another in a legless dish grill, he stepped in front of the man and said, “What’s your name?”

“Dox.”

“Why are you hurrying ahead? I know the way, not you.”

“The bathroom light is on, a side light, second story, behind a frosted window over a rose bush next to a house with three black-spotted, white dog statues on the lawn. The crow will be on the porch eave.”

A chill emanated from the black mirror to hell in his chest.

“Yes, that’s the house.”

The little man continued, “There is a little red shed in the yard with tools. I can cut off your cuffs,” and on past him he walked, as if obedient to some other will than his own, but not in a daze. This guy was keen beyond cagey, like a coyote trotting down the street, moving better than a guy his age with that size pack should be able to.

Tones followed him as the crow beat wing softly above them, framed in the dull street light and something, a keenly observed thought, echoed ominously and with supreme confidence in his head, “Yaas!”

Oh, this is fucking bad.

“Yaas!”

By Gaslight Chapter 4 Tones

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 17 May 2021 18:21:00 -0700

Portland, Oregon, Southeast 52^nd Street,
Friday, October 30, 2020 7:01 pm

ifteen years a brat and ever since his mother kicked him out, he’d been nine years a knave.

Knave, who the hell says knave?

It must have been those 120 hours of community service he did at the library shelving books. The other dummies got yelled at doing road work while he was reading. He’d been homeless, mostly in Seattle, since age fifteen, minus the two years he did in the King County Jail. There had also been a couple of years hopping freight trains and scamming bus rides. He supposed Seattle had only had to endure his presence for five years all told.

But that bullshit in downtown Seattle since the “Rising” was actually making shit too hot for him there. It’s one thing dealing with the cops when you are a non-violent criminal scamming for a meal to eat and a place to sleep. The cops generally had worse assholes than him to deal with. But having to live on the streets now that the cops were literally not allowed to deal with violent criminals, meant that those fuckers had free rein to tax bums and they would be bored with nothing to do—at least some not being completely lazy—and be free to roust a guy down on his luck and out on his ass—just like Jack London and Jack Black wrote about a hundred years ago.

Here he was, on the train platform above I-5 and Foster, looking out over the highway towards distant Mount Hood. He had spent most of his life in the shadow of Rainier and the Olympias. Now, he thought he’d reboot his road show in the shadow of another unlucky white mountain, volcanoes all of them, one day to blow their tops like that insane nun Helens.

Ouch. His chest hurt, like a piece of rebar had run clean through him under his sternum. It felt kind of raised there, warm to the touch under his hoodie.

Shit, I need a place to stay and I haven’t been in Portland in years.

He looked down the stairs from the platform and saw a couple lowlife tweakers there and just decided that he’d avoid the camps as much as possible. He could see their tents all along the overpass.

Fucking tweakers.

Shit that hurts. I know I’m big. But could this really be a heart attack? I’m only 24, should be graduating from college! My heart is racing and my—fuck it.

He had been born Frank Radicke, a boy without a dad. Through his involvement in stealing music equipment he had wrangled some work as a roadie for a few local bands and had gotten the nickname Tones and just felt like it was more true to who he was then Frank. Poor fucked-over Frank, the kid whom the principal kicked out of his chair and informed that he was going straight from school to prison—and the bastard was right. Who wanted to be Frank?

Down beneath the platform his chest still hurt and he wasn’t dead yet so he set out looking for houses that were for sale. Some of these hipster faggots had to be selling houses, what with all the arson and anarchist violence. The cops were getting their asses kicked downtown, so he’d graze along the way. Tones was a big man with one change of clothes and some beef jerky he had stolen from the 7-Eleven in his small backpack along with a bottle of water.

After about a half hour walk he hit the bar strip along Foster, all of the hipsters outside eating at tables. He turned right on Holgate and started zigzagging through the side streets. Two houses were for sale but occupied. On the sixth block he finally found one that was unoccupied, walked around back between the garage and the house, located the laundry room door, and looked around to make sure no neighbors had a clear line of sight on his position. Night was falling and the mist was coming in from the sea. He did not want to be out in this shit tonight without a tent. He took his jimmy out of his backpack. Old Erik had fucked their tent up trying to make a fire inside in the rain. Erik was a good dude but just did some weird shit. He guessed he was better off that his pal had not decided to come south with him.

One of the realtors must have forgotten the deadbolt—no way was he defeating the deadbolt without cracking the frame and making his egress obvious at a glance. The door knob was a cinch, as the wet Portland weather had warped the frame enough that this lock barely locked and he was in within five seconds.

What a nice house, he thought as his chest expanded to breathe in the unfamiliar sent of forced dry air, as the furnace was pumping just then.

Shit, that hurts.

He located a bathroom, found the mirror, took off his jacket, his hoodie and his shirt—awe fuck!

Right under his breast bone, over the diaphragm was either burned, or tattooed or grown a black sphere, a glassy globe of night. He turned this way and that to see if it was a growth.

Fuck, could this be from smoking too much meth, pot, or from the LSD I got off of Erik last week—Erik?

Erik!

Erik, what the fuck?

It was not raised like a tumor or something—what the fuck do I know, I never finished high school!

He did notice that the lights around the mirror—some woman obviously lived here—radiated a brightness that grew duller as it neared his malformed diaphragm, like there was no sure way to really illuminate his chest or belly fully, with the shiny mark seemingly absorbing some of the light.

He heard two car doors slam shut out front—shit, three!

He grabbed his clothes and backpack and headed upstairs, found the master bedroom and found a walk-in closet and secreted himself there. He did not even dare put his clothes on as the realtor and the potential buyers wandered about the house chattering.

They came into the bedroom, examined the large empty space, passed by the closet without a mention and spent a couple minutes critiquing the bathroom.

This is perfect—he thought as they flushed the toilet to demonstrate the water pressure—two dykes and a straight female realtor. I can shit and shower and sleep all up here in this little corner. I didn’t see any furniture. If the fridge is plugged in that will be great!

The mark on his chest tingled more and ached less, not even a pain anymore but more of an informative sensation—like fucking aliens are about to burst forth from your guts, Hoss!

The front door shut and the cars pulled off. It was dark now, so he broke out his little flashlight, got dressed, tried not to think about the creepy black hole in his body and explored the house. The fridge was plugged in. He needed to heist some beer. There was a decorative towel in the bathroom off the master bedroom—he was going to be drying his big ass with that!

It was getting late, almost 9 o’clock and he was hungry. He walked up to Foster, across the park, past the government building, made a left and just saw loads of rubes, feasting on all kinds of great bar food, nothing but little fat teddy bears, skinny jean hipsters and their women. Guilt was rife, not a black person in sight and Black Lives Matter signage all over the place.

An inspiration hit him and big Tones was among the feasting hipsters—probably the blackest man in Portland despite his pale skin—raising his fist in the air and chanting, “Black Lives Matter! What matters? Black Lives Matter!—come on y’all, get up and march, Black Lives Matter!”

That’s all it took for these rubes. The guys, he could tell, did not want to get up and march around the four little pavilions, with their gas lights heating the silly faggots and turd-brained princesses afraid of this phony fucking disease. But the women, who all apparently dreamed of being gang raped by the savages he played dominos and spades with in the King County Jail, those stupid bitches could not resist and were soon running the thing: syncopating, dancing, leading chants, dressing lines.

And, to the tune of “Black Lives Matter!” Tones slipped off down the side street behind the trashcans with a plate of nachos, a slice of pizza and three vegan enchiladas!

Well, the nachos were good! He ate the rest on principle as he sat on the toilet behind the master bedroom that had a frosted window and the decorative towel as a makeshift curtain to hide his presence.

Big Boy Tones sept like a baby, high and dry—well, unfortunately not high.

In the morning—well, in the early afternoon—he woke up with that ache in his chest and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, hoping he was not going to see some alien shit ripping out through his stomach and then attaching itself to his face.

What he saw, in a way, was worse. A stern human face looked out at him from within that globe of night as if this son-of-a-bitch were tunneling out through his guts. The face had piercing dark eyes, a forked mustache, a scar on the cheek and a pointed beard. This face held all of the vicious arrogance of a cop, the caper-making wits of a crook, and the high and mighty disdain of a judge.

“What a perfect prick this bastard must be. Shit, I’m talking out loud. That must have been some bad LSD, Erik.”

“No,” spoke the face from the well of night, “you litigious scoundrel, you, my reviled mutineer, have partaken of the potion of the shaman upon the Hitching Post of the Sun. I could not rightly kill a white man—no matter how low—without soiling my honor, unless I somehow made use of the fellow in furtherance of illumination. You, brute though you are, have been honored to be cast into the distant future in search of he who fled my wrath some years ago and laid upon me a curse. More importantly, Eternity yawns with the possibilities.”

“What, Oh shit—sorry man, my stomach is not right. You probably want to leave my hallucination—Oh God, those fucking vegan enchiladas!”

The scandalized face of the mesmerist in his fist-sized upper navel of night, scrunched with disgust and Tones barely had time to take a seat before he rocked out the song of the vegans on the porcelain kettle drum.

“Fucking hipsters!”

By Gaslight Chapter 3 The Bridge

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 10 May 2021 16:43:00 -0700

Over the Columbia River,
Portland, Oregon, 7:50 pm

he air was cold now and he shivered, more so from what lurked within than what chill vapors crept down from those distant, unseen mountains to remind men why they clung to the coasts and valleys.

Twilight was here, darkness descending, and his dumbass had failed to find the quickest route up across the river to the other side. The ugly hospital grinned on the mountainside behind him—a kind of place he deeply feared, ever since his wife had him committed to Shepherd Pratt back in Maryland. He would never go to a hospital again.

The people with the Nazi masks and shields, hunting Nazis had scared him slightly. But for some reason, the modern style opera house right on the river galled something deep inside—as if a higher self who gave a shit about such things cared deeply for the aesthetics of this soulless place—and impelled him to walk as fast as possible across that mighty bridge. He could still see the dim outlines of the hills above and ahead he saw the house lights blinking on, drawing him upward and out of this rat’s maze of a city—he so hated city centers with their cops, other homeless and the empty ways that made him feel all the more alone. He wanted to find a residential area where he could camp behind some bushes near a park and not be drawn into the camp scene or worse. He wanted to at least live where families existed even if all alone.

Shoot, look at this coming.

Two young men, late teens to early twenties, with surgical masks on their faces and clown masks worn as hats were coming down the sidewalk on skateboards towards him.

Hope they pass. They’re tall.

They pulled up in front of him, both kicked their skateboards up into their hands, and the tall one with the pink hair accused from behind his mask, “You gonna breath on us? Social distance out in the road, or mask up, bitch!”

He just kept marching past, hoping they would let him go. He moved nearer to the railing and scooted sideways a little and the pink-haired guy, who kind of had an afro, swung on him inwardly with his skate board. If not for the handle of his aluminum bat sticking up out of his rucksack, he would have had his head knocked in. But the ringing bat handle saved him and he stepped right towards the blond kid, ducking his head as the taller, pink-haired guy swatted down with his skateboard wheels and they became stuck in the torn top of his torn-up rucksack.

Then, as the blond kid seemed to try and block his way with his board, as if he had no stomach for hurting bums, Dox pulled his five-inch knife out from the sheath on his front right hip and thrust upward. The blade sank up to his fist and he cut inward, across the kid’s belly as the kid wheezed and he dragged the kid leftward as a shield to hide behind from the pink-haired freak swinging the board again. That board came down on the head of the blond kid and Dox shoved with hand, shoulder, and elbow as his knife ripped clear out of the belly, sending the gutted and head-banged kid over the railing and into the darkness.

The pink-haired kid opened his eyes wide. Dox drew his bat out and sheathed the knife, not wanting any motorist to see it. As he did this, facing the now-terrified youth, the blue eyes under the pink afro seemed drawn to his right hand and a panic swept the mouthless face and he laid down his skateboard and pushed for all he was worth down the way Dox had come.

Dox beat feet for the high end of the bridge and those welcoming houselights twinkling in the fresh night. He ran with remarkable dexterity and lack of fatigue, possessed as he was with a deep fear for the police and the hospital they would surely take him to.

“Yaas,” echoed the voce in his head as he returned his bat to his rucksack and wiped the blood from his hand off in the pockets of his black hoody under his denim jacket, running again like a young fellow without a fifty-pound load on his back, running for freedom into the gathering night from the freaks and fools that infested this sick city.

My hand tingles like it is alive.

The unblinking stars above seem so near and the twinkling houses on the hill so far.

Am I really losing it?

Was Becky right—that wicked bitch—for shutting me away, having me comitted?

How did I get discharged? I don’t remember.

Then I am losing it. The memory of my freedom from those mind-fuckers, that should be etched in my mind. Where is my mind?

…Your consciousness spreads like a sail before the breeze of Infinity, Drood. You sail forth within the Boat of a Million Years.

Drood? I am not Drood. I am—I was Ted—now I’m Dox.

…Yaas Drood, yaas…

Get out of my head! Stop talking to me.

…Onward, Drood, into the night, beyond peril and below the reach of the petty officials who would foil our purpose.

The hand began to ache again instead of tingling and Dox jogged along at a sharp pace in a mania to achieve distance from his just-lived past.

I killed a man? I’ve never killed a man.

I should be sick, throwing up, crying, turning myself in—that’s what they always said.

He began to sweat and grow angry at the kids back there, could feel his heart pounding in his chest, probably headed for his first and last heart attack on account of those rotten kids who had turned him into a killer.

He ran, surprised at the resilience of his bad back.

I feel good. I feel strong.

Dox’s hand ached but his chest heaved high, his wrecked back did not spasm and his duct-taped boots trod the concrete with confidence he had never known, not in any of his failed lives: bullied kid, spurned husband, order picker, mental patient, bum.

He felt somehow different, taller, wider, deeper, yaas, deeper.

To hell with these people! Let the cops come. That is my ticket to punch, to checkout time…pull out the knife and they’ll light me up and this miserable fucking life is finally over forever.

Dox left the bridge and headed uphill, wanting the highest ground for a spot he could get in this rainy climate. The stars smiled down in this young night. But by morning they could be raining their wrath and freezing his ass. Not for little Teddy, not for loser Ted, and not for the bum named Dox either, life had never had a luster to lose, but freezing to death was not the way he wanted to end his sentence in Hell.

By Gaslight Chapter 2 Dox

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 3 May 2021 15:30:00 -0700

Union Station, Portland Oregon, Thursday, 5:00 P.M., October 17, 2020

hirty hours on the Coastal Starlight train and he hadn’t seen the coast once. It was a fine ride, much better than, than what—what is that ache?

Dox was out of sorts. He had adopted a new identity, even legally got his name changed to Dox Smith two years ago, after he lost his job for posting his political views on social media. Before he even bought a backpack or a train ticket he got his name changed, a man with no history in a nation that hated him could do little worse than a change of name.

Ever since the train hit Oakland he’d had this terrible ache in his right hand. His paranoia about the virus had kept him out of the bathroom except for right after the steward cleaned them. He went nowhere on the train without his rubber gloves on, even washed the rubber gloves when he was done in the bathroom.

Is that why his right hand ached so much, because he was wearing these gloves? Then why not the left hand? Maybe because it was smaller—he was right-handed after all.

He would have to make his way through another train-side homeless camp as a lone hobo, just a little guy and he was highly reliant on his right hand for working his knife. Big tweakers had their own canes and bats—and he had his aluminum bat sticking out of the top of his rucksack. But it was the knife that kept them off a man and preserved a little fella from a homeless woman’s raped fate.

The train was winding along the Columbia River Gorge in its gloomy, rust-tinged majesty. The hand was driving him crazy. He had to take a look and headed down to the bathroom. As it happened, one of the aluminum doors in the 2-foot wide metal hallway was rattling open and he ducked in, found paper towels, pulled the door shut and locked it with a paper towel, disposed of it and then gingerly peeled off that black plastic glove.

A black shadow streaked by his right eye and another by his left. Each time he tried to follow their progress he got a sick queasy feeling in his shrunken gut. Almost 60, after a life of work, and here he was, alone on the rails like an A.D. 1900 hobo, but minus all of the prospects…noting but lame old age looming grey before him…

No! No!! What the hell?

Dox, who had until a couple years previous been a discredited man living under a given name rather than his defiantly taken name, looked down at the previously aged, spotted and thin-skinned back of his hand, swollen from years of order picking in refrigerated warehouses and saw a terrible black spot. This was not cancer or some outrageous liver spot, but something artificial, something that looked like the “black spot” handed to that pirate of old who had violated an oath and fallen out of favor with his cutthroat brotherhood. From the back of his hand just behind the swollen knuckles, to the base of his thumb and upon the wrist proper, was a clean, clear, hairless, black sphere—not an exact circle—that appeared tattooed but shone, and the skin that shimmered with that glassy black radiance sprouted no fine little hairs but had been given over wholly to this radiant sink hole of lightlessness. There was something unsettlingly concave about the spherical mark.

To check his faltering sanity, Dox turned to the mirror, held up his hand and could see therein the shining blackness tattooed—no, branded—no implanted—there. He shivered and shook when he noted that the bright white light of that tiny, unsanitary cubicle seemed to bend towards that tiny sphere of night where his hand ached so. Standing with a shiver a bit more rigid he looked himself in the eyes in the mirror, afraid now to look at the apparition upon—or rather within—his hand and wrist.

As the train rocked and the steel wheels squealed below his tin-trapped feet, homeless reprobate Dox Smith, formerly concerned citizen and wage laborer Theodore Roy looked at his small weathered face, pinched nose and bald head and saw there something wicked, thirsty and unfed.

A larger head, as if floating or rooted on a taller set of shoulders—yes, a hazy outline of higher wider shoulders played dully behind him in the mirror—shimmered hazily above his own head. Or did this shadow of light emanate from his head? There, about his ears and eyes expanded a larger, more artistically formed head, possessed of a higher forehead, black and still substantial hair, though closely cut, over domineering eyes, sporting a forked mustache beneath scarred cheek and above a wickedly pointed beard of short cut.

This hallucination would not dissipate and the base of his brain burned, icy claws gripped within his head as he seemed to grow a bit stronger than his scrawny norm and a shiver coursed through him as if something old and forgotten had within him been reborn.

The image framing him faded in the mirror. But this granted no comfort, no reprieve, for then, within him, within his very head, in his mind, echoed words, “Yaas, Drood, find the Hindoo priest.”

He vomited in the sink, and, embarrassed at himself, began running the water, trying to clear that fine, L. A. soup kitchen slop from the bowl, forever fouling the gloves, which he then discarded in horror.

“Take me damned virus! It will be better than going insane.”

With another shiver and an unmanly shake, he drew his green bandana up over his nose, and feeling the train begin to brake, stepped out into the hallway to heft on his rucksack over his denim jacket and jeans and await the welcome opening of the door, when he would once again be able to breathe straight air without sucking life’s breath through a face diaper.

The train shook and the old Mexican woman leaning on her cane looked to him as he instinctively placed his right hand to her shoulder to keep her from falling into the electrical panel casement.

Her eyes crinkled in an easy smile as he withdrew his hand and then, as he smiled back, she caught sight of the unnatural sphere of night on the back of his hand and her smile went out like a harshly blown candle.

The ache in his hand and the sickness in his belly returned and continued during the long, slow braking process.

Then, finally, the conductor opened the door and Dox motioned for the old woman to step off first and she shrank back into the press of the others, mostly men. A bit wounded in his vestigial honor gland, he shrugged his shoulders and stepped off onto the metal stepper and then to the concrete platform.

The station was crowded with masked normals and he could not wait to get free of their fearful taint, to get out to the round-about cab stand and walk, walk, walk, hike, march and leave the toxifying hallucinations of that train bathroom behind. These dreads were only amplified by proximity to the fearful zombie mob at the station.

The sun was dipping down as he walked to the bus stop past the tents on the sidewalk and the moist air closed in around him between the tall empty buildings.

Oh, one could not get aboard a bus with cash, and he had no credit card…

A hike it would be.

By Gaslight Chapter 1 Mesmerist

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 14:05:00 -0700

Machu Picchu, Peru, January, 1869

rood stood, bent from his burdens, in the shadow of his larger accomplice, Timothy the Irish Blackguard. Drood was just a deserter, who had been bullied into this expedition by Her Majesty’s Own Pompous Braggart Agent, out of fear of being turned in to receive the D brand under his arm to match the BC brand for bad character on his chest—and a flogging to boot. Drood placed more confidence in his criminal accomplice than he ever did himself, not alone because the hulking fellow was twice his size, but for his quick wit in a bad spot—and this would be it.

Something unnatural was about to transpire and Drood felt it shiver his bent and crooked bones under his weathered skin.

They stood, above the godforsaken jungles they had trudged through hauling this man’s scientific equipment, among the hideous ruins of some long lost city, overgrown and tangled as if choked to death by the creepers and weeds and trees of the mountains—and still higher towered those other mountains behind which the sun would fall in another half of the day. And as the sky soared above the distant western mountains and those mountains soared above these, and these mountains looked down giant-like below them…it was not geography that made him feel so impotently wee.

Towering above him, looking eye-to-eye with Big Timothy and continuing his litany of demands, was Captain Burton, the Queen’s own goddamned secret agent. Burton stood before them in his black frock coat and held his spy glass to one eye as he declared, as the sun rose above them and he checked for shadows on the various mountain sides, “Yaas, my men, we stand before the very Hitching Post of the Sun. Thanks in no small part to your stupendous labors and gallant conduct on the pampas, the Royal Geographic Society has found the Lost City of Zed!”

Burton then turned to him and commanded, “Drood, begin setting out my table and book and take particular care with the Hindoo charm, arrange it just so, between the pages of the open book, those pages being 362 and 363.”

“Aye, Captain,” he grumbled as he broke open the goddamned heavy teakwood chest he had lugged all the way from Argentina for this unbearable brain on legs, who stood there devil-may-care with his two savage witchdoctors, chattering with them in their jabber-jaw squawk.

There was no stopping this man. When Drood had complained, about his book wrangling assignment—and what a book, all ten stone of it—that he could not read or follow the numbers, the man had taught him like a school master. His brain still hurt from the burden. He could not wait to find a cantina, a jug and a señorita and erase this misery.

Could not he simply enjoy the day? Must there always be something over the horizon, some secret yet to be found, something, anything to bore to tears this poor fool who just ached for a roll with a wee whore?

The Captain droned on, “Big Timothy, clear all of this brushy vinery away with your machete from this wondrous altar to the sun! Snap to it, now with an Irish jaunt, as if you had ever toiled honestly in all of your grifting days. We have a mere two hours and fifteen minutes before the sun is directly overhead!”

Then came the voice of Ehrin! Rumbling in his nasal brogue, Big Timothy Kern, an M for malefactor tattooed on both of his big rugged hands snarled, “I don’ thin’ so, Cap’n. I’m done bein’ ye boy. Just ova dose high mountains pass the sunset—ye said it yeself—is the road down ta the sea. I’m done wi’ dis circus a’ ye hocus pocus!”

The Captain glowered in a rage, “You refuse your duty, you fulminating rascal! We have a compact—my word at the embassy and you are off to America and on your way. Now to your task, or I shall thrash you, boy.”

“I’m don fer ye boy!”

With that outburst Big Timothy Kern drew out that machete. He did not take it to the vinery, but instead menaced their high and mighty leader.

“Ye wi’ me, Drood!” demanded the big man and Drood, with a sinking feeling in his guts, drew out his fish knife what he had gutted the Gaucho with down on the pampas over that fireside disagreement the Captain had had with their cattle-ranging clan. He did feel somewhat terrible, turning on a man he had served in battle—but he was such a high and mighty bastard and Big Tim was the only friend he had ever had.

He felt even worse when the Captain threw back his coat and drew that American Confederate saber he had gotten God knows where but always carried it bold since he emptied his pistol into those gauchos down on the pampas.

The saber rasped harshly and the two little copper colored men stepped back and cringed and the Captain roared, “You litigious, low Irish negro! No man has crossed blades with Richard Burton and boasted of victory! And you, you lick-spittle, slow-English beast of a man. I give you a three count to surrender your weapons and do your duty.”

“Arr!” snarled Big Tim as he stepped in with a mighty swing of the machete and Drood slid up beside them and—Oh God, I’m done!

Drood sat on his ass looking at his ruined right hand dangling from the remaining bone and tendon, squirting good clean blood and looked over at big Tim, holding his barrel chest right under the breast bone where the Captain’s sword had passed through and run out his back.

“’orry, Lille Droo,” slurred the big man, and Drood wanted to cry.

The Captain was in a rage about them staining his perfect record of never killing a white man on safari and was commanding the witchdoctors to attend them. As Drood was losing consciousness he was having his hand wrapped and pressed and could hear the Captain declare, “There is hope yet, for your ghastly souls at least, if not for your misbegotten bodies. I am a world-renowned mesmerist, a sufi, a dervish… a Hindoo priest of sorts . You may be of service to me yet, you poor, beggared fools!”

Big Timothy looked at him with far away and glassy eyes.

* * *

Drood came to his senses sitting on a stone altar with a pillar in the middle, the clear-shining sun beaming directly down. Across from him sat Timothy in a daze, his belly bloody red and caulked like a busted ship’s plank.

The Captain stood before them to Drood’s right holding his black disc of Hindoo mesmerist stone on its brazen chain, chanting in some unknown language that only madmen must speak.

As Drood wondered about all of this, the witchdoctor attending him placed his left hand kindly on Drood’s back, even as he saw the witchdoctor attending Big Tim do the same, and they each, in a cadence, mumbled their own incantations, and with their free, steady brown hands tilted a hollow wooden drinking tub into the mouths of Drood and Tim. The Captain drank of a similar frothy red potion, drank deep as did they all, then looked at both of them at the same time—one eye dedicated to each as his head seemed to expand into a giant face and his mouth, under that devilish, mustached and scarred face, split ever wider as he drawled in his characteristic affirmative, “Yaaas!”

In This Hat, He Believes:

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 08:54:00 -0700

The Crackpot Hobo Historian Living Out of a Backpack Declares Social Justice Mommydarity—At Last!

It is this Crackpot's belief that he has been rendered homeless for failure to kneel and pray forgiveness from the gods of Guiltopia. For, as he limps across this ill-gotten land, an impiously guiltless man, no longer spry enough to step over the prostrate poor, shuffling around his fallen, fellow man, signs sprout ever upward from manicured lawns and church marquees in black, white, red, yellow, green, purple and baby blue declaring...

I am sorry, but I don't have a house, just a hat and a backpack. So as I haul my vast store of privilege around the nation with me, somehow the words become refracted upon passing through the ireful nimbus aglow about this lowering brow:

Hate is Homeless

Fat Lives Matter

Bitch Lives Matter

This Human is Illegal

Science is Not Real

Disabilities are Rejected

Kindness is Misleading

I hope I didn't lose anything in the hobo translation.

Molly Hatchet

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 18:12:00 -0700

July 4^th, 2041, 4:48 P.M.

Rick reclined in his hard wooden chair, Molly chirped on his shoulder. He poured three shots of Bacardi Coconut Rum into the amber coffee cup as he held the downward-reaching neck of the gay giraffe before him.

“Yeah, girl, I wish that motherfucker was here too. Asshole spent fifty years practicing for combat and then curls up and dies on a couch in the middle of nowhere. What the hell.”

Rick looked at the old picture form a half century ago of that skinny, long-haired fucker he had befriended in middle school when they were alone and hated by one and all, misunderstood and filled with hate for the world against which they both stood, tiny and quiet in its all-devouring shadow.

“You liked your rum, didn’t you, Jim—fuck you wherever you are. I’m joining you soon. You’d like that wouldn’t you? Meeting on some black diamond bridge over Hel’s abyss—sick fuck.”

Molly screeched and alighted on the picture frame and pooed down the back of it as she looked at him, quizzically concerning his getup.

Rick had changed his wife beater and flared jeans for an old Halloween costume of the New York Mets, complete with cleats and tights. To this he added a blank white hockey mask, the aesthetics of which had always pleased him. Of course he had that old practice bat, that unbreakable chunk of heavy wood in his left hand, his Mets cap on his head. His brown face was looking good and his old Spalding backpack was loaded. He had also his $1,200 skateboard from 1998, which he could still ride. However, the cleats would have to be exchanged for his climbing boots with the rock guards if he was going to keep the board under control.

Off came the cleats, tossed in the corner of the impeccably neat room.

He now understood—never having been much of a drinker—why a man who hated the world drank—it eased the contours and contrasts in the mind and helped plan its demise. He lit up a blunt after changing shoes and had a drag with Molly before that picture of his long-dead deserter friend. Molly took a hit and then fluttered over to the 5-gallon bucket of fun and landed, skittering and off balance on the haft of his old camp axe.

“Molly Hatchet, huh? Molly want me to have some fun?”

Molly screeched and Rick stood up, put out his blunt and placed it in the mesh side slot of the backpack.

Rick laughed, “Molly, you have to stay here. My Live Identity just got home from work. So I have to go to work, Girl. See you soon.”

He then pulled down his hockey mask and Molly screeched and fluttered frantically away, like a tiny emerald chicken fleeing a towering fox.

Rick emerged from behind the blue tarp energized and driven stoically to his task as he walked nimbly among the pallet stacks, eventually wending his way to the riverside ramp, mounting his skateboard in obscurity and rolling down into the Strip District, where his Live Identity ran his bitches and Pakistani traffickers bought and sold anything that could be humped.

He soon rolled by a gang of Pakis dressing up this little unmasked, redheaded girl like a boy and making her swish back and forth between them. The crazy thing was the girl kept praying with her hands together, which made the scene doubly obscene.

The two largest waved him over, thinking he was what he seemed to be, and he nimbly veered in their direction, skipped off the board, kicked it up into his left hand and brought his bat to rest on his right shoulder.

“Yo,” he said, unconvincingly from behind his hockey mask as they arranged their sharia hijabs under their fitted caps and the leader said, “Wan’ to fuck, huh—fuck dis bitch?”

The man then held the little girl cruelly with both hands by the base of her skull below her ears and Rick could see that she was perhaps ten years old, not even in puberty yet and he said, “Sho’, I like to fuck,” and as he stepped forward slammed the point of his sixty-pound skateboard into the mouth of the man so that blood and teeth spilled down through his hands into the girls’ pretty red hair. As that skinny-fat Paki crumbled, Rick brought the practice bat down on the one nearest to his right and crushed that pin-headed skull like a watermelon. Then he stepped left and backhanded the short fat one across the nose with the back of the skateboard and sent him reeling into the gutter with blood squirting from the shattered bridge of his nose.

One yelled in Arabic and a small one ran for a storefront, where a gun would obviously be. So Rick took a wide reaching leap at the remaining Pakis, and as they stepped back he dropped the skateboard, snatched up the girl, stepped on, and pushed off, no footsteps sounding behind him.

The girl was shivering in fear in her little boy clothes and clinging to his belt and baseball suspenders as he balanced with his left hand and rested the bat on his shoulder, awaiting the sound of the gunshot, a shot that never came.

A siren sounded in the distance as he turned the corner and he realized, that his violation of grooming gang activity had gotten the PIGs called on him. So it was a race down the street to his Live Identity’s apartment, where he would certainly not be expected to have fled.

“Hold on Little Girl. I’m Rick. I don’t hurt kids.”

“I know,” the girl chirped. “God told me so.”

A chill played down his spine and Rick pushed harder than he should and somehow saved it in the turn, and before the siren got to the location he had run from, he was at McCloud’s place, an hour behind the PIG’s usual arrival home, according to Mike that is, Mike who seemed to know absolutely everything except how to get the hell out of bed.

The skateboard was now an identifier, so he stopped, stepped into the alley, and tossed it on the roof of the bar across from the apartment building where McCloud lived. He glanced around and saw no camera angles, then turned to the girl who looked up at him and pulled off his hat and mask, and said, “I’m a good guy, see.”

The girl looked up at him and said, “I know. But why are you so old, and how come you are painted up like a black man?”

He looked down at her and could not help but smile, “What is your name?”

“Rebecca, I’m Rebecca Dorn, daughter of Joshua and Ellen.”

“Okay, Rebecca, I’m so old because I break the rules about diet and activity so I can help a little girl.”

“God told me that, too.”

Rick was about to be sick with all of the brainwashing and his head spun. He didn’t come from God. He was just stubborn and this girl had gotten momentarily lucky back there.

“Okay, Rebecca, we are going into a policeman’s apartment and you will be safe.”

She began to cry, “How can you be a good guy if you are taking me to the police? The police raid our church services and sell us kids to the Muslims—the guys you took me from.”

“Check that, Rebecca. I came here to punish the policeman and ran into you. So you have to stay in the hallway with my teddy bear—his name is Care Bear—until I’m done in the policeman’s apartment. Then I will find you a place to hide—then I go.”

Rebecca jumped tiny jumps in place while she clapped her hands, “God sent you. I know it, Rick!”

He snarled under his breath, tossed his cap and mask up on the roof, took the little holy roller by the hand, walked up to the UPC reader, opened his palm to scan the UPC for Officer McCloud, and the glass panel door to the lobby of the small apartment building with its back facing the strip district docks opened. In he went with little Rebecca Dorn held by his devil-marked hand.

Stepping off into the staircase, Rick shucked his backpack, put it on her little back where it hung down past her butt, took out the bear and handed it to her, slid out the camp axe and hurried back to the lobby door and used it to jam the slide. Returning to the doorway he extended that hand again so the little girl would feel safe, and, hand-in-hand they went, up the stairs he went, to apartment 3-C for a reckoning with his Live Identity.

Travis Drexel McCloud

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 5 Apr 2021 16:40:00 -0700

A PIG with a Glorious Fate

orn 3/20/2015, Joliet Illinois

Gender: Masculine, Permanent Intent

Medical Status: Testosterone enhanced, law enforcement exemption, PDA Order L-16, 2038

Psychiatric Status: Psychopathy-3, law enforcement waiver of treatment, PSP Umbrella Order 2039

Race: African American

Age: 36

Height: 5’ 10”

Weight: 175

Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice, with Advanced LEO Certifications in Medical Justice and Social Justice, Penn State University, Class of 2036

Pennsylvania State Police

Sergeant: Special Weapons and Tactics

Assignment: Special Victims Extraction

Addictions: Cocaine [powder], Ambien, alcohol

Rackets:

-Protection, Three Rivers Somalia

-Prostitution, Strip District, Asian bitches and Caucasian trannies

-Medical trafficking, supplier, Children’s Hospital Harvesting Team, customer, Brill and Brillinda Yates Foundation, Human Resources Department

Impending Return of the Hobo Historian

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Fri, 2 Apr 2021 10:36:00 -0700

Visual Inspiration and Audience Questions

Some guy on the East Coast has kidnapped my old podcast cohost and will be putting him in front of the camera for audio-visual exploitation. I asked my twitter friends to suggest topics and here they are:

Andrew Edwards (author of King of Dogs) asks for comments on push daggers. Image is an antique for sale here $$$$.

A fellow known as King of the Blind writes, "I would be interested in his take on bayonets. Before ww1/2 militaries seemed to treat it as primary and shooting as secondary."

Brown Bess Bayonet:

1968, student protest against military government in Brazil:

WWI photo of French troops in a bayonet charge:

The following are photos I've run across of beautiful weapons and armor. I would like James to talk about how the ancients acquired and maintained such belongings, what is the significance of ornamentation or style development, and comment on his favorite historical examples.

From Gareth Harney on twitter:

Ancient bronze Samnite helmet and neck-guard dating to 450 BC. The Samnite people of central Italy were staunch enemies of the ascendant Roman Republic but after three wars were forced to recognise the supremacy of Rome.

The Worthing helmet, a 3rd century Roman cavalry parade helmet made of gilded copper alloy, decorated with sea dragons and a very grumpy eagle's head. Dredged from the River Wensum near Norwich in 1947.

A stunning Corinthian bronze helmet with engraved decoration, a grotesque Gorgon on the forehead, serpent eyebrows and mirrored prancing lions on the cheek guards. Similar surviving helmets suggest these decorations were once gilded in gold-leaf. Iberia, 6th-5th Century BC

From Jim Craig on twitter:

On the neck guard of this remarkable 1stC AD Roman helmet found near the Rhine are the engraved names of its ancient previous owners. Titus and Statorius from Antonius Fronto's century had both owned this helmet suggesting it saw years of service and quite possibly a few battles.

Beautiful Italian knives showing regional styles:

Hernan Cortes on twitter gives us this:

King Henry V was able to survive a six inch deep arrow wound to the face due to English surgeons having real healing skill. A mass grave from the battle of Towton in 1461 had a veteran with a large healed wound, likely from a sword. He probably died from a poleaxe to the face.

Hope that gives you something to get started on!

A Broken Heart in Hell

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 16:36:00 -0700

The Death and Rebirth of Rick Pensky

he Wicked Witch of the West manually kicked them out of the Rainbow Bridge Please Fund Me site, and Rick found himself standing next to Mike in his bed, with his gravity vacuum diaper sucking away, and the good person that was Mike under that mountain of socially prescribed sloth shone through in word, “Rick, Bro, I’m so sorry.”

Rick intoned hollowly, “Can you get me in there before they kill her?”

“It will take me a couple hours. I’ve been in and out of this site. Any friction that might conflict with upload, once a patient has agreed—”

“Motherfucker, she’s a child! Agree to what!” roared Rick.

Mike began to cry and started whining, “I knew it was bullshit, Bro. I just want to be gone—it was nice to believe I’d be on a generation ship with Brill Yates. Besides, I can’t use my body anymore and they tell you about how many African kids you can save with your organs being harvested to be reparations for the slavery—it made me feel like a little more than whale shit.”

“Motherfucker, how long!” snarled Rick, as his iron fingers squeezed into and through Mike’s massive arm and found bone, which began to bend and give and hurt.

Mike blubbered, “She is already sedated. They are pressurizing the room, drawing down the temp and sending in the harvesting team. They will not pull the plug until she is denuded of all internal organs, and her eyes—her skin will be used for sickle cell research… Rick, buddy, she’s gone in ten minutes. If you had a jet pack you couldn’t get there in time.”

Rick was streaming tears, red with rage and racked with silent sobs.

After a time, he looked coolly at Mike, and Mike knew fear, fear born of seeing a brokenhearted man, a super sweet guy—remaster his shattered self with a snarl, and a roll of his shoulders and wrists. Mike thought to himself, Did I just see my only friend die inside and come back as a demon?

“What can I do, Rick?”

Rick stood, ominous in his brown shoe polish and intoned, “Who facilitates this?”

“The medical corporations, owned by the banks and the oil sheiks, the billionaires, the infotech moguls.”

Rick hissed, “How do they keep us inside, force our loved ones into hospitals, send lonely little girls across imaginary bullshit bridges—how do they do that?”

Mike thought out loud, running through the enemies list of humanity, or what was left of it as it teetered into oblivion, “Cops, safety officers, medical warrants—that means doctors—courts, the National Guard, all the intelligence agencies—its millions of willing executioners, Bro.”

Rick steeled, and his skin was less disturbed by the raised veins under his shoe polish tan. His voice was like ice, “I don’t want your credit. I’ve got today, maybe tomorrow. Make me a cop, Mike. Find me a fucking PIG my height and weight—if they aren’t all piles of blubber now, and get me his address. A black cop. The shoe polish might as well stay on.”

Mike whined, “Okay, Rick. I need about an hour. I’ve got some fried chicken on the way in ten minutes. You can get into your role while I pick you out a live identity. Bro, you kill this dude and you’re him, alright. If you don’t mind, I’ll patch in through his body cam. Fuck Rainbow Bridge! We’re going to burn this bitch down.”

Rick looked straight into the screen as the roll call of potential live identities scrolled by and he pointed at a SWAT leader, about half his age, “Fuck yeah, Carl Weathers from the Predator movie. That’s me, get me his file.”

Rick then absently handled Care Bear, picking him up, as his eyes and sinuses drained their last drops and the bear spoke in Dandelion’s voice, “Hello, I know who!”

“What,” asked Rick, “am I going insane?”

Mike blubbered, “Bro, you been nuts since 2021 as far as I can tell. That teddy bear is part of the Cuddle Huddle series. He recorded both of you, an interactive media companion.”

Rick looked amazed at the pink teddy bear he had so lovingly decked out after Mike had bought him for Dandelion and muttered, “Her voice, her words, at least some of them, some of her…”

Mike felt a fire light deep inside of his gelatinous chest as he watched in wonder at his elderly friend—the guy that once bathed him in return for online anonymity in his endless quest to stay free of medicine and government—now turned on those two vast monstrosities like some ancient hero shaking his fist at the gods and sharpening his sword.

Well, Mike mused to himself, a hero who fights gods and monsters should have a terrible, swift sword.

“Rick, fuck Rainbow Bridge and fuck this world—I’m in until they send a drone through that window—I’m your eye in the sky!”

And Mike’s fingers twitched as fast as his fat-fueled mind could send the impulses. The logistics of the Medical Social Safe Space streamed by on the screen, mesmerizing the savage bodybuilder standing with the teddy bear as the full array of military and law enforcement and medical hardware scrolled ominously down and across the screen on Mike’s furious tour of the soul-eating Machine that had once been a thing called America, a supposed home of the free and land of the brave—now a thing that ate children like a fiend in its echoing cave.

Care the Bear

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 16:05:00 -0700

July 4, 4:20 P.M. EST
Children’s Hospital Pittsburgh

andelion Machi had lain alone in this bed all day since the nice little man brought her medicine and lime Jello. Before long the not-so-nice lady, the big one, would be along with her soup. It was always like that, Jello and soup. It was so much nicer back before her parents went over Rainbow Bridge.

Mom and Dad used to argue with the hospital ladies all the time until one of them could be suited up safely and be let in to see her. Since Dandelion had ARDS—the kid’s version she called it—she couldn’t get hugs or kisses or even her hand held, except by a gloved hand. It had been hard for Dandelion to understand that she was so dangerous to adults, and at the same time, that they could make her sick somehow when she was already sick.

“Grownups,” as Uncle Rick had often told her, simply “sucked,” and were impossible to figure out. This was an interesting thing to hear from the most grownup of grownups, for nobody Dandelion had ever met was older than Uncle Rick.

She well remembered Uncle Rick sneaking out of grownup hide-and-go-seek with the police and ARDS-chasers from the government to come take her for secret walks by night, on his big shoulders, where no one could see, not the ARDS-chasers, not nobody! He would tell her about raccoons, possums, rabbits, squirrels, foxes and owls. They would even play soccer in the yard by night, once even made a snowman.

Then she had got the ARDS, which the mean lady said, over, and over again, was short for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. Since Mom and Dad had gone over Rainbow Bridge without her she was so sad. The nice little man with the food was not allowed to talk to her and smiled a lot to make up for it. He was a little tan man in a blue uniform. He had tried to speak with her but his English was really hard to understand and then the mean nurse lady, almost the same color as her white uniform, had chased him off. That lady, from behind her hawk-like nose, down which she peered like a monster, kept telling her that the other lady, the one in the suit who looked like a boy, would be back to sign the Rainbow Bridge release and then she could leave and be with Mom and Dad.

With the ARDS she was not allowed to leave except by Rainbow Bridge. This confused her, because the little kids with the nice skin and the dark eyes, who weren’t all pale and freckled and pasty like her—with her sick eyes like a winter sky—they would sneak in for visits and play with her and tell her about the new parents they were getting from the hospital. They had somehow recovered from the ARDS. It seemed that she was especially sick. The little girls felt so bad for her, that they even lied and told her how pretty she was even though she was almost the color of the bed sheets and felt ugly amongst them as they smiled and giggled and brought her their extra chocolate milk. They seemed genuinely sad about Dandelion not being allowed to leave or have new parents.

“I wonder when you guys will sneak out again and come see me? Or did you get your new parents already?”

As if the TV was listening to her—not that she had any idea why it was called a TV, though it seemed to have a lot of ideas about her—it turned on and the great Rainbow Bridge opened before her on the screen, the kind mommy voice of the unseen speaker announcing, “Dandelion, you have a visitor.”

The screen spiraled into a rainbow swirl and opened up like a flower and there was… a teddy bear. This was no ordinary teddy bear. It wore overalls, like the overalls that Uncle Rick had made for her from one of his warm shirts. It had little black buckle shoes like the shoes that Uncle Rick had brought her from grownup hide-and-go-seek ARDS-chasers. The bear was, of course, pink and had a fancy hat like Uncle Rick wore as a disguise one time, with a green Molly feather in it—Molly the hero parakeet who tricked ARDS-chasers! And, to identify the messenger for sure—because you had to sneak to be near the ones who loved you in hospitals and among grownups in general—the bear had a dream catcher made by Uncle Rick’s own caring hand. For Uncle Rick brought a dream catcher for Dandelion every time he had come to visit, for all of her eight years of life. This made her smile and brought back the memory of Uncle Rick making her a dream catcher out of dandelions, despite the fact that it was against the law to go on the grass at the park without a mask—but Uncle Rick didn’t care about laws. He just cared about Dandelion!

The teddy bear then spoke, spoke in that voice equal to three dads, like the voice of a police that was not a mean ARDS-chaser, that was not a lock-you-up-until-you-are-better safe spacer, a voice that was like an unstoppable machine, the voice that always came back for her—the voice of Uncle Rick:

“Hello, Dandelion!”

“Hello, I know who!” answered the little girl, suddenly alive with color.

Uncle Rick’s voice came from the moving mouth of the bear, “That’s right, Dandelion, I’m the Bear that Cares. Call me Care Bear!”

“Oh, Care Bear, thanks for visiting me. It would be so nice to have a hug.”

“One day, Dandelion, we will have a hug!”

“Oh, Uncle Rick I miss you!”

The bear then shook and spoke, “Care Bear, I am Care Bear! I love you, Dandelion! I will be there.”

“Really?” she said, amazed. “They told me that Mom and Dad are waiting at Rainbow Bridge. But they didn’t say anything about you, Uncle Rick—I mean Care Bear.”

“Uncle Rick?” came the voice of the mean nurse lady with the eagle nose as Dandelion felt a gloved hand pinch her thigh through the bed sheet and saw the face shield of the mean lady fog in anger and then her non-pinching gloved hand reached for the remote stem. Dandelion snatched her TV controller back and let it drop off the right side of her bed as the mean nurse lady glared into the TV screen and began touching the screen itself, bringing up various images of Rainbow Bridge officials, doctors, police and barked in her shrill voice, “The Rainbow Bridge account of Dandelion Machi has been hacked by an ARDS-denier named Rick. Alert Safety Officer on duty.”

The Rainbow Bridge screen was now replaced with the heads of these terrible grownups as the mean lady responded to the boy-looking lady in the suit who worked for Rainbow Bridge, “Yes, Facilitator Landry, I am initiating sedation while downloading authorization.”

The lady then pressed the screen and it was filled with the face of a triple-masked man who spoke clearly, “The harvesting team will be bed-side in twelve minutes. Initiate pressure-lock and reduce temperature.”

Dandelion did not understand these words. But the adults who ganged-up to chase Care Bear and Uncle Rick’s voice from the TV were mean and that made being little, ARDSed-up and alone all the more unbearable…

The pressure in the back of her left hand brought Rainbow Bridge leaping into view all around as the rushing of cozy sleep waters came to her on her lily pad as she floated up and over Rainbow Bridge—and there, across the way stood Mom and Dad, their arms wide open, both dressed up in the wedding dress and tuxedo they had been married in long before Dandelion came along…

Rainbow Bridge

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 15:29:00 -0700

What the Fuck Is It?

“Rick,” blubbered Mike, “please, come ‘ere and sit down in your chair and look at the monitor. This is what I’ve been looking for to release me from this earthly prison. I’m sure it’s not for you. But with my social justice score and my credit rating, and my weight and health handicaps, I’m a prime candidate. And—check this shit out, Brother—since I have a 157 IQ, 27 points over the minimum requirement to gain a berth in the Counsel of Angels alongside Brill Yates himself—who has already achieved pre-mortem upload, there is no need for me to stay on this dying planet.”

Rick could hardly believe his ears even as his eyes took in the graphic presentation of the sick and dying, the depressed and the brilliant, the environmentalists and the idealists, reaching out from their medical beds, intubators, incubators, playpens, lonely safe spaces, and even professional athletes running and biking and swimming and diving and jumping into a spherical and welcoming spinning database which was then cast into orbit, where the minds would be curated as a base collective, serving the earthbound living, advising and guiding people still damned within their wretched and disease-ridden bodies… and, and, with sublime and Godly fanfare, each hundred morally-inferior high-IQ data-based minds, along with the morally-superior souls of low-IQ minds are gathered each in a folding chrysalis of cosmic hope, wrapped in the solar sails and launched towards the distant planets and even the stars!

Rick wanted to vomit. This had “scam” stamped all over it. He’s sure that his long dead friend Jim would have been able to articulate why this was bullshit. But that asshole died in hobo infamy long ago and had left Rick alone, well, he did have Mike, to deal with this messed up world.

He wanted to object. He turned to Mike and saw an unusually vibrant glow on his face, a wonder in his eyes, aching hope in his bedridden soul, and knew that the most he could do was ruin this moment for his last remaining friend.

The screen before them expanded inward, rosy clouds of stardust gathered to embrace the teeming and suffering billions confined to safe spaces and ghetto places and wastelands across the world, as the face of Brill Yates smiled serenely as a tiny sphere at the bottom right of the screen. Expanding bubbles of smiling children rose from the cities of the world, Africans delivered from starvation and beamed up into orbit from the locust-plagued Sahara, Amazonian children floated into orbit from the charred and smoking ruins of their great forest, home to one last, final tree, Russian women embraced the orbital light as their husbands stopping beating them with empty vodka bottles, Chinese soldiers laid down their weapons to grasp bubbles of hope that bore them into orbit, dull-faced Christians closed their bibles for good and embraced the light as it beamed them up into welcoming, pink-hued Eternity…

Mike was sold.

Rick had a need for diplomacy. Mike was done, cooked, duped, ripped off, ruined and damned to remote euthanasia.

“Mike, what can I do for you, buddy?”

Mike looked at him with happiness in his eyes for the first time since he had known him, when their drug dealer, who supplied Rick with weed and Mike with coke, opiates, pharmaceuticals, and psychedelics as well as weed, had hooked them up as a mutual favor. Back then Mike was getting too fat to get up out of bed and needed a rehab coach and helper and Rick needed an underground connection to the economy and the internet. On that occasion Mike had smiled once, but not like this.

“Rick, that is so cool. I almost want to cry. I was so afraid that you were going to judge me and yell at me and tell me what a fat piece of shit I was. I was just going to have an uplink drone sent over, which would have basically cleaned me out, nothing left for you. So, if you could dose me with the syntech and insert the uplink feed into my neuro-net and make sure it halos evenly, I’d really appreciate it. After dinner though! I have some fried chicken being delivered—stay for an early dinner, buddy?”

“Sure, Mike, sure.”

Mike smiled and began keying in his dinner order by twitching his fingers and activating the leads over an imaginary keyboard and asked, “Rick, what can I do for you? I set up a crypto-credit debit account for you—you’re already in. It should be enough to feed you and get you transit for the next two years.”

Rick was smitten with gratitude, “So you remembered why I’m staying alive, why I treat this old body like a prize machine?”

Mike answered, “The last we checked, Dandelion had two years left on her prognosis, and her parents are both passed from the Vid now—at least that’s how its recorded, though I think the numbers have been manipulated all out of proportion.”

“She was in a diabetic coma and he overdosed,” Rick said. “But they had both had the cold, or at least a positive test… basically murdered by the medical system.”

Rick took out the bear with the overalls and fedora and said, “I tried to deliver this today to Children’s Hospital and they tried to arrest me. Could I get it to her, at least on video? Could you patch me in some way to talk to her? That little girl is all alone, Mike. I have to do something!”

Mike

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 8 Mar 2021 14:36:00 -0800

July 4, 2041, 1:41 P.M. EST

ick had maintained his health, his drive and his privacy—a thing that was now virtually against the law—through Mike, his interface. In the 1980s and 90s, when he was a young man banging steroids and strippers with a hard-on you could cut diamonds with, bulked out to 250 pounds and doing flies with 150-pound dumbbells, he had had to break the law then to get his juice. Then, after getting involved in natural medicine and longevity fitness, getting raided by the fucking feds and then having to interact economically with a world that wanted you to be like Mike—well, that meant you needed Mike…

The towering office building and apartment complex had a pleasing view of the mighty Ohio River. Only two other pedestrians in safewear [known in a previous age as a hazmat suit] were out and about.

What day of the week was it? He could not remember.

Days didn’t mean much anymore—it was all dates and times, every day bleeding into the other as life droned on one isolated soul at a time under the grey, electric-spangled sky.

A cop, a University Hospital cop, hummed by in his electric car down the deserted street. PIGs had always pissed him off, hassling him since he was thirteen years old in Washington, PA, arresting him in Las Vegas, messing with him his entire life, citing him for starting his truck in his driveway twenty years ago now, and grilling him every time they saw his pasty face on any street in any town in America he had been to, constantly up his ass about not wearing a mask when he was alone in public.

PIGs pissed him off so much!

But, as usual, when he was in brownface, disguised as an African American, and dressed like a Modern Reform Muslim in fitted hat and masculine hijab, the PIGs just glanced at him and kept going, looking for the next Native American paleface they could hassle.

So, on impulse, old Rick stopped and leveled the middle finger at the PIG, pale and fat in his rolling social distance observation post, and shouted in the most socially acceptable dialect, “Yo numba one muvafucka!”

Not only did the cop not stop, but he sped up, ramping that gay golf cart up to its maximum speed of 30 miles per hour.

Rick remembered with a pang the gas rationing, and then the government limitation on internal combustion engines to military, law enforcement and trucking that began with the Sino-African Crisis in 2030. It had been over a decade since a regular American could drive a petrol-based car.

Up he walked to the lobby entrance and hit the buzzer with the back of his hand, cagey and careful not to apply his fingertips and the betraying fingerprints to any visual reader, and keyed in Mike’s address, 723, with a knuckle.

Mike’s massively obese visage, pale and blotchy, appeared on the monitor, asking, “Can I help you?”

Rick gave the password, “Food delivery from Hip Hop Hillel.”

Mike’s fat face, recognizing Rick’s voice and always a fan of Rick’s many artful disguises, split into a gelatinous grin and the door opened and his gurgle of a voice drawled, “Allahu Akbar, bring me a Butterfinger bar!”

Rick never took the elevator, conscious that these were used for netting thought crooks, social distance violators and disease deniers.

Up the stairs he climbed to the seventh floor and out the metal door and down the hall to room 724.

His presence before the door triggered the mirror-image of on the video monitor above the door to come to life and he held up his middle-finger, the visual code that gained access to his friend and interface, Mike Alban, the ether-genius and fat piece-of-shit through whom he bartered or bought all of the groceries and clothes that could not be had from the Nigerian Bazaar among the tents down on the Ohio or from the Somali cart peddlers across the river or the Pakistani fences up in Bellevue.

Rick did not technically exist, so he committed manual crimes like physical theft for ether crooks like Mike, moved his stuff around the apartment since Mike was bed-bound, and, before Mike got that gravity aqua diaper, even wiped Mike’s ass. Rick was still strong enough to roll Mike’s 500-pound mass over and address his bed sores, change the sheets a corner at a time and provide the lonely man with company.

Company was mostly in the form of playing chess, with Rick moving both sets of pieces, as Mike was only fit enough to breathe, eat, evacuate and interface with his computer array verbally, through finger leads and most frighteningly through his neuro-net, the web of leads pasted to Mike’s head. Rick also took care of that mess, removing the leads, bathing the massive fat head with alcohol swabs, and taking care of everything for Mike other than evacuation, feeding and sex, which was handled by a small Chinese girl that was sometimes seen leaving right before Rick arrived.

Mike had a few blonde hairs left on his 40-year-old head and was nearing critical system failure if he didn’t lose a couple hundred pounds.

Rick was bursting with urgency over the plight of Dandelion and could barely contain himself. But he had an arrangement with Mike that Mike’s needs came first. Besides, after Mike basically saved him from medical reassignment and psychiatric confinement he had to try at least one more time to get him on the road to health.

“Mike, your complexion looks terrible. Let me help you get out in the hallway at least and we can start exercising. I’ve been modifying my diet so that it will be doable for a person with your tastes. How about it?”

Mike looked at him, tapped his left pinky finger for a dose of cocaine—which Rick purchased from the Mexicans for Mike—and smiled slightly, then drooled with some wan enthusiasm, “Rick, buddy, I really appreciate everything you’ve been doing for me. As old and as crazy as you are, you’re my only friend in the whole world. These people online mean nothing to me. But, I’m headed across Rainbow Bridge. It’s beautiful. I can’ wait. I’m uploading tonight.”

Rick could not believe his ears even as they began to ring with stress.

“What the fuck? What are you talking about? What the fuck is Rainbow Bridge?”

Pittsburgh Safety Patrol

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 1 Mar 2021 11:21:00 -0800

Captain’s Desk
Shelia Dryfus Attending
July 1, 2041, 9:45 A.M.

ichard Wayne Pensky

Reporting Missing and Unrecovered: Orlando, Florida in January 2032

Suspect in the murder of Shah Ali Khan of Basra, Iraq, in Philadelphia, PA, June, 17 2041

Felony Warrants: Impersonating an Immigrant, Failure to await Safety Certification, Vacating the Scene of a Medical Crime

Medical Warrants: Pandemic Denialism, Failure to Register Psychiatric Symptoms, Evading Contact Tracing [no statute of limitations applicable], Attempt to Violate Safe Space, Willful Child Endangerment, Failure to Comply with Face Covering Ordinance

Warning: Richard Wayne Pensky was a member of the militant underground bodybuilding cult known as Fit Grit, and is thought to have escaped an FBI raid on the gym he attended in Orlando in 2028 in Violation of Federal and State Wellness decrees. He is thought to be the last of the seven Fit Grits who survived the raid to evade reeducation and medication. The subject is therefore regarded as extremely dangerous, unnaturally fit, and likely to be a carrier of various pathogens to which his training regimen has given him unnatural tolerance, and should be assumed to be carrying influenza, cold, and other viruses likely to cause Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. Though the subject is assumed to be unarmed, he is regarded as extremely dangerous, as he is suspected to be engaged extensively in such illegal disciplines as lifting free weights, occidental plyometrics, cage combat and boxing.

Approach with extreme caution, only after notifying Overwatch and requesting Tactical Relief.

Lynn takes Pics

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 10:18:00 -0800

A few years ago, I bought a kit camera at Costco, basically the cheapest DSLR you can buy. I use a cheap android phone and the camera cost less than an iPhone. It came with two lenses and the elephants you see here were taken with the long lens.

The beach had four or five elephant seals on it and this one was the most active and appeared the most dominant. He flopped into the water and began swimming down towards a couple of other males who were sunbathing.

He made a sound like a low drumming honk. The other males ran in opposite directions. One was flopping towards us so we also moved away!

Off to a different stretch of coast, I looked around at the tidal life. Snails munching some rotting seaweed.

A hermit crab hides inside a snail shell.

A snake, possible a Western Yellow-bellied racer was stuck at the bottom of the cliff and on the wrong side of a coastal creek. I moved him into some vegetation.

A kitesurfer, there were around ten of them that came and went. It was very windy. The kitesurfers seemed to be all middle aged palefaces with different manners compared to surfers. Their rigs use inflatable tubes to remain open, rather than rigid structures. Below are a couple of tidal scenes. The cliffs here are hard sandstones. The wind knocked chunks of rock out of the face which made clinking noises as they fell.

THE END

The Attendant

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 18:43:00 -0800

July 4, 2041, 8:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, Pittsburgh, PA, Children’s Hospital

he man appearing on the Clarity View at the visitor’s gate, on the unwatched screen in the security round, had a kind, elderly and yet incongruently muscular face, framed above by a shaven skull of a pale hue, ancient freckles and fresh age spots mixing into a complexion that might seem motley. Below his close-cropped silver beard, attached by a corded neck, his kind, somewhat worried visage was offset by the hardened body of a 20-year-old athlete under sleek, form-fitting yoga leotard of blue—the same color as his wistful eyes.

The man was holding a pink teddy bear, a stuffed companion bedecked in a white fedora decorated with an emerald green feather, a hand-stitched dreamcatcher suspended from its fluffy neck, above plaid overalls and black leather, silver-buckled shoes.

The automated attendant announced, “Welcome to Children’s Hospital, your name please?”

The man shuffled nervously, “Rick, ah, Richard Wayne Pensky.”

The attendant droned, in a gender neutral voice: “Greetings, Richard. Please state the nature of your visit.”

The man shuffled again, “I’m here to see Dandelion Machi.”

The attendant suggested, “Richard, please extend your hand for safe check.”

The large, thin-skinned but unwrinkled left hand extended as the other held the teddy bear. An electric eye moved near on its rubber stalk through the galvanized steel bars of the gate and illuminated the Universal Person Code on the back of the man’s pale, spotted hand. The eye retracted and the man’s face was oddly cast in a state of wanting wonder, a face curiously un-indented by a mask, a face that, should the man be viewed by any sociologist, would suggest a lifetime of non-compliant criminality.

The attendant droned, in a now feminine voice, “Please Richard, await the safety officer for a manual reading of your safe code.”

The man looked around nervously, and asked, “Can I just drop the bear off for Dandelion Machi?”

The tinny female voice of the attendant droned for compliance, “Shah Ali Khan, await the safety officer. You have been cited for use of an assumed name. Failure to accept citation may result in the issuance of a medical warrant by the attending physician.”

“I just want to see my little niece! She’s sick. She should not be all alone. I’m not sick—look at me. I’m healthy!”

The attendant soothed, “Visitor, please understand that safe code certification is a condition of visitation and that Children’s Hospital is dedicated to the safety and wellness of staff, patients and visitors. The safety officer will be with you momentarily.”

The man claiming to be an unregistered person named Richard Wayne Pensky, as indicated by the red flashing words “NOT FOUND IN DATABASE” on the unobserved monitor in the vast security room, occupied by one obese officer asleep in one of the 24 swivel chairs, before the 240 screens, became red in the face and blurted, “Just let me leave the bear, please. A little girl should have a teddy bear at least!”

The attendant, unseen, as the attending screen and speakers were below the monitor lens, switched to a mid-octave feminine tone, a voice with a motherly quality patterned after long-dead but immortal singer, “Visitor, in these trying times the need for counseling and treatment of anxiety and depression remains profound. We, at Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital, are dedicated to the wellness and safety of all and offer treatment. Our Cradle-to-Rainbow Bridge Initiative links MedFar Health facilities suitable for all ages and genders. If you would be kind enough to await safety certification by one of our sensitivity-trained officers, then the attending physician may redact your medical warrant and issue a prescription for psychiatric treatment in one of the following assisted living facilities: Monroeville Geriatric Center, McKeesport Senior Hospital…”

The anonymous man, now known to possess the Universal Person Code—as indicated by the red flashing notice on the Clarity View monitor—of Shah Ali Khan and claiming to be a missing and unrecovered person by the name of Rick Wayne Pensky, last contact traced in Orlando, Florida in January 2032—as indicated in the still, blue notification of investigation lettering at the top left of the monitor—became agitated. The irrational man then stuffed the bear under his arm and jogged nimbly down the walkway and out of view of the Visitor’s Induction Clarity View.

As the single safety officer in the 24-seat security room, before the 240-screen Clarity View round, snored softly in her blue uniform, her many service decorations slinking softly against her sagging breast, various views of the muscular old man in the blue yoga suit alternately shuffling, jogging, walking and looking about suspiciously under the grey overcast sky, played across the cluster of monitors dedicated to the exterior of the east wing of the hospital.

‘Ogres of that Coast’

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 11:26:00 -0800

Black-Walled Khemi: Chapter 16 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon

Reading from pages 202-206 of the DelRey edition

Impressions by James LaFond

Conan leads his savage corsairs to the evil coast of Stygia, which would have been like Tolkien having Aragorn recruiting Haradrim troops to infiltrate Mordor and was entirely at odds with Jim Crow convention, for those half-witted critics who type Howard as part of the slave master elite, when he repeatedly has his white hero allying with black henchmen to slaughter enemies, and, just to make certain that he insulted blacks as well as whites, Howard treats the reader to this:

“The blacks sensed his eagerness, and toiled as they never toiled under the lash, though ignorant of his goal. They anticipated a red career of pillage and plunder and were content. …and the Kushites of the crew joined whole-heartedly in the prospect of looting their own people, with the callousness of their race. Blood-ties meant little; a victorious chieftain and personal gain everything.”

It sounds like Howard had taken a trip forward in time to one Baltimore, Philly, Saint Louis, Chicago or New Orleans to glimpse the sad spectacle of blacks butchering one another in service to The Man.

Howard then continues with modern American commentary, indicating that the Stygians, his lifelong enemies and those of his tribal black allies, were a slave race whose common men were not permitted to wear swords, which is of course the fantasy replacement for the gun of Howard’s day. The reader certainly reads a hint of Howard’s Uncle’s tales of riding with Nathan Bedford Forest in Tennessee who employed black soldiers against Jefferson Davis’s orders.

Gianni closes out the chapter with an illustration of Conan returned to his lone element rowing a boat into the heart of his enemy’s city, with the Stygians essentially representing Howard’s version of the pre-Hellenistic Egyptian race.

Diction of Note

Zikkurats, for ziggurats

‘A Hell Unfathomable’

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 14:20:00 -0800

The Return of the Corsair: Chapter 15 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon

Reading from pages 197-201 of the DelRey edition

Impressions by James LaFond

To begin this reader’s favorite chapter in any Conan story, the illustrator sketches six dark figures, enchained and rowing as slaves in what Howard would call in the text “a hell unfathomable.”

Conan awakens on the deck of an Agrossian ship and roars in his kingly manner, “What lousy tub is this?”

To this, one of Howard’s more short-lived incidental characters answers:

“The Venturer, out of Messentia [Howard’s Naples, Italy], with a cargo of mirrors, scarlet silk cloaks, shields, gilded helmets and swords to trade to the Shemites [Howard’s Hebrews] for copper and gold ore. I am Demetrio, captain of this vessel and your master henceforward.”

It doesn’t take a plot genius to realize how short and bloody this chapter is going to be as Conan, the White Lion of the Black pirates finds himself between caught between a galley full of black slaves that used to be his warriors and a crew of stocky Italians that don’t know they just brought their worst nightmare onboard…

The deserved carnage of slave masters butchered alive by rising slaves is so palpably enjoyable to the author that the reader must wonder if he admired Nat Turner, who surely would have blushed at Howard’s vision of what a slave revolt should be like.

Just to make certain that modern African-Americans would be as disgusted with the outcome of this chapter today, as “white” Americans must have been when this story was published, Gianni, the illustrator, with rare balls accurately portrays the freed black savages as hailing Conan “in an ecstasy of hero worship” as he stands above them like a naked, prehistoric Abe Lincoln. Never has something been written or illustrated to insult both racial fraternities of the retarded American Body impolitic.

Flood: Interlude

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 8 Feb 2021 07:30:00 -0800

The Conclusion of Flood

am too much of a literary whore to let an entire book go up as free content.

So, for those interested, there are only two chapters I am not serializing of Flood’s story:

Large and In Charge, Our conversation after the Y2K water and battery buying panic, sparked by a shared vision of our lovely overnight cashier, in which we ended up talking about our mutual rivals Big Boy and Ralph, our sleazy employers and our mutual enemies, the thugs of Baltimore.

The final chapter is an event that occurred a few years earlier, which resulted in his massive loss of teeth, as he did not have bad oral hygiene and I was moved to ask how he lost so many teeth. This account, the final chapter, titled The Rent comprises one of the most heroic stands against the odds that I have documented in my weird hobby of interviewing violence survivors over these last 25 years.

Other than that, and whatever became of my coworker after 2002, you have all of Flood’s story I can recall and reshape.

-James LaFond, 1:03 A.M., Sunday, November 15, 2020, Portland, Oregon

‘A Dingy, Ill-Famed Den’

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Sat, 6 Feb 2021 12:10:00 -0800

The Black Hand of Set: Chapter 14 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon

Reading from pages 190-196 of the DelRey edition

Impressions by James LaFond

The opening illustration presents a horror started man with a black hand imprinted on his bare chest as he lays still in death on a shadow-cast floor.

“Conan woke from a sound sleep as quickly and instantly as a cat. And like a cat he was on his feet with his sword out before the man who touched him could so much as draw back.”

That’s Robert E. Howard on PTSD before it had a diagnosis.

Finding that his quarry is hiding in a place called the House of Servio, Conan is off on a brief, brutal and unsuccessful venture which finds him stretched senseless among the bodies of a reasonably competent band of murders as a pressgang happens by to force him into the slavery of the sailor.

But Conan is not so much the story of this chapter, but rather the tale of his grim pursuers who bring sedate death in his angry wake.

Death is illustrated by the artist as four predatory black birds on wing, searching the world below for their quarry, relentlessly seeking the hero via at once arcane and beastly methods.

Flood No. 14: Big Boy

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Mon, 1 Feb 2021 07:00:00 -0800

July 1999, Fort Avenue

our figures sat in the tiny lunch room:

Smart Stuff was a skinny little long-haired white man who didn’t even drive and had somehow written a book that was getting published by a “How to Make Bombs in Your Basement” publishing house. This fellow and Israel had been on the same crew since 1995 and had never said a word to one another, him being the frozen foods man until recently and lowdown white besides.

Then there was Flood, who no one in this company had ever called Israel. They just all liked that Flood—liked the biblical significance he supposed, of his family name. Other than Curtis Green, the Little League baseball umpire who cleaned their floors at night, Flood had been the only black man at this store, ever and he had been the night captain until very recently, when he had opted to go to part time due to his advancing age.

Then there was Ralph, a small, skinny, red-headed bitch-made redneck who had been promoted to night captain when Flood stepped down. Unlike Flood, Ralph’s idea of being in charge was all about having everybody else do all the work and him do nothing. Ralph, knowing that he was in charge and yet not the smartest white man on the crew, had a deep hatred for Smart Stuff, for the very sensible reason, that a scrawny little white man in charge only has one thing going for him—smarts—and Smart Stuff owned that. Where Big Negro concerns applied, Ralph made himself scarce, afraid, apparently, of being trampled in the throes of the dominance display.

But on this occasion, Ralph had no choice but to stay pinned in the ringside seat of peril, for he sat in the back corner, with Flood next and Smart Stuff, his cold paranoid self always sitting close to the door and carrying a screwdriver he didn’t need for opening boxes in his back right pocket…

The fourth man entered, Big Boy, who called himself “The Mac Daddy,” like he was a clown wrestler on TV. He was a former minor league linebacker who only stood 5’ 11” but scaled 350 to Flood’s 6’ 1” and 280 pounds. More importantly, this reprobate, who forever thirsted for white women in an unseemly and open way, and threatened all the white men except for the diabolically evil Smart Stuff [1], who he seemed to consult like some Spartan Ephor approaching the Delphic Oracle of old, was only 36 years of age to Flood’s 60.

Time has its way of elevating the low and levelling the high.

Big Boy was likable after his fashion. Heck, he got kicked out of the football league for excessive contact against teams composed of police—who couldn’t get behind that?

But his arrogance, talking about his fists calling them “chump hammers” and throwing his weight around wore thin when a man was old and had long ago been told not to let some fool bring you down.

Big Boy came into the breakroom, only six feet wide and 12 feet deep and leaned right into Flood’s face and menaced, “Flood, who’s the HNC! You know what I’m talkin’ ‘bout! There can only be one! Who’s the Head Nigger in Charge on this crew!?”

Flood tried not to get angry and parried, “Keep on jawin’ Chomp [2]. Keep pluckin’ a nerve ‘till a real man give you dat woopin’ dat yo Daddy should ‘ave!”

Ralph looked frightened, like he might get squished.

Smart Stuff leaned back in his chair and grinned his wicked grin.

Big Boy pressed his five-gallon bucket of a head against Israel’s head—it were Israel now, old time Israel being bullied for the first time in his heart—and he stood up and faced that hulk of a chump.

Ralph cringed in the corner like a rat in the dog pound cage.

Flood stood and looked down into the needle-green eyes of that light-skinned chump and snarled, “You about ta cross da line, Slick!”

The “ghetto-bragging man,” always talking about how tough Washington D.C. was, disparaging Baltimore folks as soft—it made Israel’s blood boil that this fool didn’t know he was messing with a Country Boy from Downhome!

Big Boy pressed his forehead against Flood’s chin and growled, “What is it Flood, Baltimore or D.C.? Who’s the Head Nigger in Charge at Store Forty-Five! [3]”

That was about all of this crowding he could take and Flood slapped that pumpkin headed clown so that it echoed through the store and out the front door and Smart Stuff darted like the serpent he was out onto the sales floor, back to work 15-minutes early, unpaid and off of the clock.

Now, there is an old saying in Baltimore town, that when the smartest man in the room up and in a hurry leaves, that some stupid shit is about to go down.

That lazy faggot Ralph was trapped.

Big Boy then body-locked Flood, hauled his big ass off of his size-14 feet, slammed him into the soda machine, which rocked and cracked the dry-wall behind it, then snarled and turned again and slammed Flood’s back into the time clock, and was about to slam Flood into the water fountain which had a real ceramic encasement…

This was not the only fight between night crew employees witnessed in this tiny lunchroom…

…

A minute later Big Boy stalked out onto the sales floor, one would think victorious, his massive arms flexing out of his green wife-beater as he stalked down the aisle to Smart Stuff, who was facing up the pickles on his own time as he stood on a milk crate. He then fumed, his massive chest heaving below the skinny man unnaturally elevated upon his milk crate prop and said, “Jimmy, you see what dat nigga Flood done ta me!?!”

The forensic anthropologist of the night crew at Store 45 then peered down at Big Boy’s massive trapezius muscle, between his corded neck and the strap on his wife beater and reported, “I see three blood-filled holes, two low, one high. The upper wound I would suggest is Flood’s final front top tooth and the two lower wounds their dental companions.”

“Bleeding?”

“Yep.”

“That dirty mutherfucker—and he was pulling out his case cutter goin’ ta cut my throat!”

“Can we call it a draw?”

“You call it. I ain’t goin’ nowhere near his old ass. Imagine if you had a hundred a them rising up on a plantation in the middle of the night—fuck that!”

…

Big Boy and Israel never got into it again, although Israel forever called Big Boy, to his face “Boy,” “Chump,” “Chomp,” “Slick” and even “Slack,” if it could passably be made to rhyme with “you ain’t comin’ back!”

But when Big Boy was out of ear shot, Flood later confided in the author, “I ‘bout shit maself when he picked me up—it was on then! Dats a big boy!”

Somehow, this event ended up bringing Flood and Smart Stuff (the author) into our few conversations in our last two years working together. I would also later referee a fight between Big Boy and a huge security guard [6’ 5” 450-lbs] of his same ethnicity over the HNC title for Store #45, a bare knuckle affair conducted in the dairy box, so the timeclock didn’t get ripped off the break room wall…

Notes

-1. Smart Stuff was Flood’s pet nickname for me.

-2. When Flood was having fun baiting a younger crew member, he would often pronounce Chump “Chomp.”

-3. I found out a few years later when I coached his son and friends and neighbor men [the fathers of two of his son’s friends] that Big Boy was a huge pro wrestling fan and was just playing the heel script not realizing he was triggering some Park Heights PTSD.

‘Like All His Race’

lynnlockhart@blogger.com (Lynn Lockhart) — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 19:52:00 -0800

A Ghost Out Of The Past: Chapter 13 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon

Reading from pages 181-190 of the DelRey edition

Impressions by James LaFond

“Argo was at peace; laden ox-wains rumbled along the road, and men with bare, brown, brawny arms toiled in orchards and fields that smiled away under the branches of the roadside trees. Old men on settles before inns under spreading oak branches called greetings to the wayfarer.”

Howard has taken his hero back down the road of his own storied past, to the place where he fled once from false judicial justice as a young mercenary to begin the life of a bloodthirsty pirate with his own pirate queen. From here on out the author walks Conan beneath the horizon of his former exploits that earned him fame and infamy in equal measure by illuminating characters which were once but shadows merely inferred. For instance, the fat fence Publio is now rich off of the trade he did with Conan, who strides out of is shadowy past with blackmail on his lips and menace in his grin.

And, as Conan guzzles, feasts, schemes, chafes and threatens his former partner in crime, four sinister shadows ride along his path, like psychic bloodhounds with the scent of his savage ambition in their nose, which the artist symbolically presents as a relentless footnote of four shadows under a sun setting on the ruins of a lion gate—Conan’ totemic symbol.

Diction of Note

Dromunds, a type of boat

James LaFond

Moving to Substack

By Gaslight Chapter 7 Gunshots

Thursday, November 5, 2020, 7:10 pm, Holgate and Foster

By Gaslight Chapter 6 Tent of Shadows

Monday, November 2, 2020, 3:48 am 57th and Powell

By Gaslight Chapter 5 Moon Crow

Foster-Powell Community, Halloween

Saturday, October 31, 2020, 4:00 pm

Portland, Oregon, Halloween,

By Gaslight Chapter 4 Tones

Portland, Oregon, Southeast 52nd Street, Friday, October 30, 2020 7:01 pm

By Gaslight Chapter 3 The Bridge

Over the Columbia River, Portland, Oregon, 7:50 pm

By Gaslight Chapter 2 Dox

Union Station, Portland Oregon, Thursday, 5:00 P.M., October 17, 2020

By Gaslight Chapter 1 Mesmerist

Machu Picchu, Peru, January, 1869

In This Hat, He Believes:

The Crackpot Hobo Historian Living Out of a Backpack Declares Social Justice Mommydarity—At Last!

Molly Hatchet

July 4th, 2041, 4:48 P.M.

Travis Drexel McCloud

A PIG with a Glorious Fate

Impending Return of the Hobo Historian

Visual Inspiration and Audience Questions

A Broken Heart in Hell

The Death and Rebirth of Rick Pensky

Care the Bear

July 4, 4:20 P.M. EST Children’s Hospital Pittsburgh

Rainbow Bridge

What the Fuck Is It?

Mike

July 4, 2041, 1:41 P.M. EST

Pittsburgh Safety Patrol

Captain’s Desk Shelia Dryfus Attending July 1, 2041, 9:45 A.M.

Lynn takes Pics

The Attendant

July 4, 2041, 8:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, Pittsburgh, PA, Children’s Hospital

‘Ogres of that Coast’

‘A Hell Unfathomable’

Flood: Interlude

‘A Dingy, Ill-Famed Den’

Flood No. 14: Big Boy

‘Like All His Race’

Thursday, November 5, 2020, 7:10 pm,
Holgate and Foster

Monday, November 2, 2020, 3:48 am
57^th and Powell

Portland, Oregon, Southeast 52^nd Street,
Friday, October 30, 2020 7:01 pm

Over the Columbia River,
Portland, Oregon, 7:50 pm

July 4^th, 2041, 4:48 P.M.

July 4, 4:20 P.M. EST
Children’s Hospital Pittsburgh

Captain’s Desk
Shelia Dryfus Attending
July 1, 2041, 9:45 A.M.