Blue Jeans and No Rosary

New Story (intro)- Is it too obvious that I'm trying to be William Faulkner with this one?

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:00:34 -0400

His relationship with life was one of terrific midnight compromising and unnecessary illumination. His parents were exceptionally (and incidentally addictively) literate and when he was six years old he was amidst almost six hundred poets, writers, and other exceptional literates, seated between an elderly woman who consistently seemed to moan with some sense of exhaustive self-satisfaction every few minutes and an undergraduate student of the arts who nodded so hypnotically that it would appear to any non-literate that he suffered from nemaline myopathy; as a collective they stared intently yet vaguely, diffusing an overabundance of activation into their hearing, at a poet laureate who was speaking more politically than literally on the topic of his twenty-seventh book which described the value of literature in today’s government and foreign policy. Watching the reactions in the closely-studied facial expression of his progenitors, Steven began to gather semblance of the respect and awe this man demanded. The humility that he was only barely old enough to recognize in the faces of those around him and the attention that he had fought for unsuccessfully from his parents were being delivered to the stage en masse stirred his envy. The speaker paused distinctly between all imagined periods and commas, not for breath, but rather with a silent and intended breadth that was manufactured to accelerate the audience’s attention and because Steven had trouble comprehending the majority of this man’s speech, he attributed this man stature to those pauses. The sudden affected intervals of silence in Steven’s speech patterns alarmed his teachers who recommended an appointment with the school’s psychiatrist, who then recommended an appointment with not only a neurologist but another child psychiatrist and a specialist in such adolescent disorders of attention deficit disorder, autism, and other non-specific learning disorders. At the conclusion of several expert and fundamentally trained and educated hours backed by coverage that extended financially far behind their health insurance Steven was found to have a non-specific learning disorder not caused by physical trauma. And because of the attention that Steven knew was borne from his rhythmic speech/non-speech he extended those pauses temporally further and further leading to his eventual enrollment in a resource school for children with moderate to severe learning impairments.

I think I almost asphyxiated the first time I heard this.

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 03:05:00 -0400

I think I almost asphyxiated the first time I heard this.

hahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 02:58:00 -0400

hahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

“This has degenerated to the extent that it doesn’t...

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:43:00 -0400

“This has degenerated to the extent that it doesn’t even make sense to do a show.”

conversations with God part 4

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:35:28 -0400

I try to stay well removed from any retarded political business, argument, or even constructive discussion, but this is a little beyond politics:

Taken from an article “Obama and Clinton in talks to unify party”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/us/politics/26unity.html?em&ex=1214625600&en=cb36965f18f1c44c&ei=5087%0A

“Mr. Obama asked his big-dollar fund-raisers this week to step in to help Mrs. Clinton pay off her debt… [In addition to the $12 million that Mrs. Clinton owes to outside suppliers, she pumped more than $10 million of her own money into her campaign.]”

The only thing I have to say is: FUCK YOU Obama and Mrs Clinton. We’re in a growing financial crisis, people are losing their jobs, social security is losing its reliability, and there are people all over the country who are making less money than is possible to survive on but let’s get some fundraisers to help some cunt who was unable to buy her way into office. Fucking sickening.

Video

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:08:00 -0400

Filibuster: Delaying tactic used in the US Senate by the...

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:23:00 -0400

Filibuster: Delaying tactic used in the US Senate by the minority in an effort to prevent the passage of a bill or amendment. The Senate’s rules allow for unlimited debate in some situations, unless a 2/3 vote to end debate passes. A filibuster results when one or more Senators continue “debating” for as long as possible (sometimes for days).

??????

Video

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:11:37 -0400

Video

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:09:31 -0400

The man with the Straw Hat

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:41:45 -0400

[Note: I found this in my old writing folder. I wrote it at some point in college and I have no idea what the title refers to, but I dig it. I think it’s from a song?]

Consider this: ten years of love, ten years of tears, orgasms, laughter, longing, fucking, daring, keeping, hugging, losing, fighting, loving. What if the entirety of these ten years were spent alone, without the person in question? What would you call it? A dream? Sure you feel it every day, but some dreams can ruin your whole day. I dream of my wife fucking my neighbor and when he grins at me while I’m getting my mail I knock his two front teeth out, ripping the skin on my knuckles. A law suit, a loss of friendship, all because of a fucking dream. It happens, I shit you not. So fine, we’re making some progress: the only way to experience those things without another person there is to dream it. I admit, I think we’re talking about something a little more engaging than a fantasy.

What does your wife say when you piss and moan about something she said to you in a dream? Get over it; it was only a fucking dream, Christ, what’s your fucking problem? And on and on and on, until you begin to piss and moan about what she’s now said to you after you’ve woken up. There’s definitely something missing in one’s human manifestation of pity when they can’t find it in themselves to pity someone for what happened to them in a dream.

Hopefully, you’re starting to understand, maybe linking this to something in your own life, maybe from high school. These “dreams” as I suppose we’ve defined them are about a girl in your life, one that you are in love with, and, to make things easier, she’s in love with you. Perfect, right? But, why the dreams, when you can so easily turn those dreams into reality. This girl fucks you like you’ve never been fucked, and massages your temples with the hands of God while you orgasm through your veins. She smiles and laughs, and runs you through town, showing you what life should be like, and what it means to exist in a world void of pain. She tells you that yes, that hobo vomiting all over your old shoes is really a happy person deep down inside, and convinces you that he’s smiling at you, sharing your view of a perfect world while clutching his dick and drooling on himself. She shows you God’s gift of rain, snow, clouds, sunshine, a fucking dead bird rotting on the side of the street is a gift straight to you from the big man above and all he wants to do is make you and your girl fall off the fucking planet in ecstasy. An angel created for you, with the charisma of the jolliest man on Earth, only loving you. And you are special. Fuck everyone else, fuck your friends, fuck your parents, what the fuck are they there for anyway? The whole point of all that other shit is to make you happy. But, you’ve already got your angel; you need nothing else to ever make you happy as long as she never leaves you, and you know she never will.

What a perfect girl. It’s just too bad no one else sees all the good in her that you do. It’s too bad she comes from a poor family and your parents look down on that. It’s too bad that she’s black and you’re from a strict Italian household. It’s too bad that she likes the rush of breaking the law. It’s too bad she’s a suicidal nutcase sometimes. So, everyone tells you to stay away from her. She doesn’t care about your school, your health, your happiness. She’s just using you for her own pleasure. She’ll leave someday, and you’ll be left with nothing. She’s going to destroy you. That’s what they say; that you’re a fucking idiot for falling for some psychotic cunt like her. So, you stay away, with this shit too drilled in your head of the horrors of what a life with her would be like. Fuck em, for ten fucking years you dream. Finally, you say fuck em all, and she fucks the living shit out of you.

Christ, what a way to justify the use of heroin.

Ignorance (Part 1 of 4)

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:54:05 -0400

The pill was green. It was double-stacked and closer to a sphere in shape than a disc. On both sides three eyes were etched in a triangular orientation. It had cost Luke thirty dollars but he was told that it was well worth the extra money. They said it was the best stuff Portsmouth had seen in a long time.

Initially, Luke thought he’d snort it. He carried a razor-blade wrapped in duct tape in his jacket specifically for that purpose. But Jason said that snorting it wouldn’t last as long and Luke wanted to be someone else for as long as chemically possible. At 10:30, Luke placed the pill gently onto his outstretched tongue and slowly reeled it into his anxious mouth. Jason and Megan ate theirs at the same time.

Megan was Jason’s girlfriend. She worked at Pizza Hut. She spit on pizzas that were ordered by cops and Asians. Jason was a fairly good boyfriend, as far as boyfriends went in the 90’s. He chain-smoked Newport Menthols and drank Heineken on a daily basis. When he and Megan fucked, he liked to keep a tight grip on her neck with his left hand. The muscles in his left forearm were slightly more robust than his right. Megan always used her tongue sparingly and with a teenage caution. Jason could always tell when she was getting really into it because she would peck its head against his tongue and then back away as if she were testing the temperature before jumping head first into a swimming pool.

Luke’s friend Robert was there as well. He never did anything besides marijuana and he patiently watched television, stoned, while the other three consumed their own drugs. It was five days before Christmas and Robert was watching the live coverage of a local parade. Due to the fact that Santa’s facial hair somehow resembled Jesus Christ, they had replaced the final float with a singing Christmas tree. This was to avoid the same tension that they had received last year from concerned parents. When he was twelve, Robert had once marched in a parade with his Boy Scout troop. They had constructed a float that was a giant stocking made out of wire, wood, and lots and lots of paper mache. Because he was a younger scout at the time, Robert wasn’t permitted to help in the actual construction but was given a major role in painting the float green. After a month, the group attached it to the back of a truck so that it could be towed in the parade and ten scouts scaled the side of it into the opening of the stocking fifteen feet from the ground. It had railings so that they could keep their balance with one hand while waving with the other. Again, because he was a younger scout, Robert was not allowed onto the float, and was one of the fifteen who walked behind it, handing out candy. Throwing candy had been barred several years previously due to the fact that some thought it promoted violence. There was a boy named Trevor who walked in front of Robert during the procession. Trevor had stolen five dollars from Robert during one of the meetings. About thirty minutes into the parade, Robert stepped on Trevor’s heel and kicked the back of his knee at the same time, causing Trevor to fall onto his face in front of a crowd of gasps. He left the hospital with five stitches and a broken front tooth. Everyone believed Robert when he told them it was an accident. He had always been such a good scout. He accumulated merit badges so quickly. The two had always been such good friends Robert could never have intentionally hurt Trevor like that. But Robert hated Trevor and Robert’s father signed off the merit badge requirements without Robert’s participation and Trevor was a devious fuck who poured white-out into the scoutmaster’s coffee when he wasn’t paying attention, scoffing at the man’s inability to recognize the obvious change in hue that followed.

The green pill tasted dry and bitter as Luke closed his mouth over it. He moved it to one side and opted to chew it, accomplishing only two grinds before he had to swallow it else the unadulterated taste of chemistry make him gag. A half-full glass of Pepsi absolved his tongue. Forty-five minutes and counting.

Greg arrived with a six-pack of Budweiser. Jason refused to drink any of it. He was on his forth Heineken. Forty minutes and counting.

The five piled into Greg’s Toyota Camri. It was white. Greg couldn’t remember the car’s year. His parents believed he was spending the night at Tony’s house. That’s where they had popped the ecstacy. It’s where Robert was reminded of boyscouts and Tony’s mother had let them into the house because Tony wasn’t home but they could wait for him anyway and she was in the basement playing pool with some older friends, which actually involved less of a pool table than a tin-foil poked with holes, a lighter, and a sticky wad of opium.

Tony never arrived so they left the house at 10:55. His mother was still downstairs and the distinct sound of pool balls striking one another had completely ceased. Greg snapped open his first beer and steadily swallowed it as he pulled onto Old Dover Road. He passed his own house, which was right down the road from Tony’s on his way to Dover. They were all headed to Jason’s house. Twenty minutes and counting.

Jason lived by himself. He used to live with his parents but they were both killed by a drunk driver while crossing the road, hand-in-hand, from an Italian restaurant to their BMW on their fifteenth anniversary. Jason was vaguely reminded of this as he watched Greg snap his second Budweiser. They had been driving for ten minutes and were near Chili’s Restaurant. Megan wanted to stop and get some food but didn’t want to be in there with people when the x kicked in. She also wanted to get back to Jason’s house as fast as possible so that they could fuck. But she kept that to herself. The amphetamine cut was making her unusually horny. Ten minutes and counting.

Greg brought the three remaining beers into Jason’s house and Jason brought his small vial of cocaine. He had done only three lines at Tony’s house and still held a pretty good buzz. Megan didn’t do cocaine but she wasn’t adverse to a week-long sleepless binge of crystal methamphetamine. Five minutes and counting.

Jason and Megan went into his parents’ old bedroom to fuck and Luke turned on the Playstation in Jason’s bedroom. It had a sticker of a red alien on the front and it was given to Jason as a gift from Megan. An imported fighting game was in the system and Luke complained that it wasn’t written in English. No one else seemed to care. One minute and counting.

The three could hear Megan moaning and coughing. Robert and Greg played the first round. Greg got the first hit in, following it with a combo. The game’s theme was different members of a school (teachers, principal, students) fighting against each other for an ultimate diploma. Forty seconds and counting.

Luke sat against the wall on Jason’s bed. His eyelids were half closed. He scanned his body, analyzing his somatic sensations, and wondered why it all felt so normal. Luke wondered if he had inadvertantly purchased bunk pills. Twenty seconds and counting.

Luke wondered if Robert and Megan would want their money back. Ten seconds.

No, he thought, it’s definitely fake. Motherfucker… Five seconds,

Ripped, four…

Me, three…

Off, two…

One.

Luke blacked out for exactly one second. He woke up and everything had turned dark red. He felt a little nervous. But on a literal second though, he felt terrified. He could hear Greg and Robert playing the video game but it sounded so far away. Hell, it looked like it was occurring miles away. Everything was so dark, so…

Luke blacked out again, for five seconds this time. He thought he was going to die. Was there such a thing as lethal ecstasy? Was Jason going to die too? He couldn’t hear anything coming from the other room Wait a second; he couldn’t hear what Greg and Robert were saying either. In fact, the only thing that he could hear was static. It was as if the gain had been turned up too high on the amplifier within his ears.

Without warning, Luke felt the chemicals actually being physically pushed, all at once, into his brain. It felt like warm saline being injected into the very center of his head. The vacuoles of serotonin were being squeezed so tightly that they shot from their pre-synaptic cells with the velocity of a bullet fired from a gun. The receiving neurons, bombarded by cannon balls did their best to man the defenses and send couriers to the rest of the body but some lines failed and the cells they protected were killed in the mayhem. Rather than being released from their receptors, many of the neurotransmitters were actually sucked into the cell as the torrent grew in ferocity. There was simply no physical place for them to go. It was nothing less than a cataclysmic meteor shower occurring within the confines of the human brain and Luke was feeling every bit of it.

The room was filled with laughter and Robert and Greg stopped playing their game as Luke leapt from the bed. He ran out of the room, giggling, and Greg began to laugh along with him. He put down his controller and followed Luke.

Luke began pounding his fists against the bedroom door that hid the intense, practically lethal intercourse, screaming,

“Are you feeling this?!? Are you fucking feeling this?!?” This went on for half a minute before Luke gave up and darted into the kitchen, compelled by singular motivation of thirst. Greg greeted Jason, half-clothed when the door finally opened. Over Jason’s shoulder, he could see the room. The blankets were half off the bed since they had gotten tangled in Jason’s legs when he jumped towards the door to answer the maniacal pounding. Megan was lying on the bed in only her panties and she was massaging her crotch. There was some blood on the sheets.

“Heyyyyyy, what’s up Greg…” Jason mumbled, embracing his friend. Greg pushed him back and said,

“Fuck this, I need a drink. You fags are having way too much fun.” Robert was watching this all from Jason’s bedroom and he reached into the paper bag that held Greg’s beer and handed one to Greg as he entered the room. Greg sat down in front of the television and picked up a bottle opener off the floor in front of him. It was bent but it still worked. He used it to open his Budweiser and took a long sip from the bottle. He offered it to Robert and Robert took a considerably smaller one and handed it back. They resumed their video game that no one could understand because it was in Japanese.

Luke’s entire spinal cord was tingling. He kept experiencing uncontrollable shivers that felt better than any orgasm he had ever had. He couldn’t stop thinking about flowers. He could smell roses and buttercups and pine trees. The refrigerator’s door seemed almost too strongly attached to its unit; either that or Luke was simply too weak because he couldn’t seem to get the damned thing open. But it turned out to be the funniest thing that Luke had ever experienced and he fell onto the floor in epileptic laughter.

“Need some help?” Jason asked between laughs. He reached over Luke’s body and grabbed the refrigerator’s handle and pulled as hard as he could. Luke remained in the fetal position, watching as the lines became curves and colors formed infinite circles across Jason’s pant legs. There were no longer any definable objects that Luke could perceive. Instead, he just saw shapes, colors, and infinite lines going in infinitely many directions. Luke couldn’t recall what it was like to actually perceive something with real structure. His body was floating two feet above the floor and he was being spun around like a game at some circus. He could hear the song “New Sensation” by INXS coming from somewhere in the distance. Luke couldn’t recall anyone actually turning on a radio but he didn’t care where the music was coming from. The only thing that could possibly hold any relevance to Luke at that moment was the fact that he had to, at all costs, lay perfectly still. He had discovered the most comfortable position that the human body could ever manufacture, sprawled on the floor with his left leg straight and his right bent at an astonishingly precise 45 degree angle. His arms formed the shape of a circle above his head and to Jason he resembled a figure skater.

The magnet holding the refrigerator’s door finally lacked the proper force and Jason fell backwards, barely keeping hold of the handle to stay upwards. He was laughing so hard he couldn’t concentrate on anything but the three inches of cold handle beneath his fingers. His chest felt as though it were bulging out in the middle and his heart felt five times its natural size.

Megan slowly got up off the bed. When she sat up, she felt a rush of blood leaving her head, as though she had been hanging upside down for a year. She was smiling, singing to herself as she pulled on her jeans. The two of them hadn’t even had a chance to get past the foreplay before the drugs hit them both like a truck passing through their heads, burning an everlasting hole. The possibility of brain damage didn’t matter to her anymore. Nothing did. The only thing she knew was that she couldn’t remember the last time she had ever felt this good. Megan was a religious girl. She attended church when she had a chance; when she wasn’t busy cutting up her arms and stomach, or bingeing and purging. But this was the first time in her life that she could truly feel God’s presence. He had enveloped her in a light of warmth and beauty that she hadn’t even had the imagination to pray for. Everything was darker yet her sensory perception had heightened. She could smell the leftovers in the open refrigerator that was in another room. She could hear every tiny beep that made up the sounds coming from the video game in Jason’s bedroom. She was in absolute love. He was the only one for her. He was everything she ever needed. Thank you God.

At that moment a trinity was formed, much like the three pairs of eyes that formed a twin triangle on both sides of the pill. There was a temporary perfection that existed in the house on Sixth Street in Dover, New Hampshire. The three drug induced individuals were all feeling the exact same thing at exactly the same moment. Their emotions were paralleled, and in that sense, linked into a circular chain that gyrated continually, sending pulses of light in a spherical direction. But the three sides of the triangle were different sides of the same triangle and they interpreted and acted upon these feelings differently. For without three different sides, neither a triangle nor a trinity can exist. Robert and Greg would never realize that they were witnessing something sacred, something that was far beyond the expectations or comprehension of any human being. Only a true God could have planned this perfection and it was felt by people within a five mile radius. They blamed it on the full moon.

There comes a time in every drug user’s life that they realize that they’ve actually been alive for a reason. Ecstasy was what did it for these three on that night at Jason’s house. Every pain, every worry, every anxiety, every single neuron firing in their nervous system that was meant to tell their body that something was wrong were suddenly clouded by the overwhelming force that is joy; that is ecstasy. There are endless lists of words to describe what happens to the human spirit when it find itself in the presence of a power of love much greater than themselves and they are every bit useless. If these three had to go back to their normal lives, taking a step down from this religious height, they knew that they would absolutely die in a single breath. Nothing, not a single thing on the planet Earth could ever compare to this green, double-stacked God. The existence of God was unquestionable in this space, as only a being with the unconditional love attributed to God would create a human body that has the biological capacity to react to a combination of chemicals in such a profound way. Evolution was proven to be false on that night.

conversations with God part 3

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:51:00 -0400

What would Jesus do?

I dunno, probably perform a miracle like raising the dead or curing the blind and then he’d have a dialogue with God about how awesome heaven is. I’m not really sure how that applies to me.

But I wonder, if Jesus was an alcoholic, or if an alcoholic had the ability to turn water into wine, would he be able to stay sober for very long? I know I wouldn’t. What would Jesus do if he were an alcoholic? Well, I’m guessing the Dead Sea would no longer be named for its high salt content.

It’s trendy to hate catholicism, which is somewhat strange when you think about it. Well there’s the people that hate catholicism because it’s the cool, independence-proving thing to do, that’s fine that’s the majority of the population whatever, but the people who actually hate catholicism, it’s not the religion they hate but the people.

“I hate catholicism because it condones priests using their position as one of power to molest children.” No, if you read the tenets of catholicism you’d see that it clearly does not condone it. Some of those high up, however, do, and those people you hate. What is it about religion that confuses people so much when it comes to a distinction between the person and the dogma? There’s an aweful lot of people that hate George Bush, but most of them don’t hate democracy.

Video

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:36:53 -0400

The Power of Love

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:51:16 -0400

When I was in middle school I used to fall asleep with the radio on. Every Sunday they did a top eight-at-eight countdown which usually ended around midnight with a random sound byte taken from a popular television show. I used to stay up to carefully record all of these sound bytes onto a cassette. The only one I can recall, however, is “Weeell, if it isn’t the leader of the wiener patrol” from the Simpsons, which at that time I hadn’t the privilege to watch due to a content misinformation that my parents had somehow developed.

Before this, there was a brief period of my life in which I was haunted by regular night terrors. It got to the point that I attributed the quiet darkness of pre-dawn with unimaginable horror and loneliness. By the time I was in middle school, however, these night terrors were hardly memories and only a vague association remained.

The last time I fell asleep to the radio was sometime during May of my seventh school grade, when the school year was closing and the pre-teen mind could finally begin to focus on that thin edge of self that was only in its infant stages. It was the time of the year when the blinding neon glow of middle school had dulled enough to allow other aspects of life to become visible.

For some important but unknown reason I awoke sometime around two a.m that night. It’s funny how little we know about our own lives. We were given so much information and learned so much from outside of ourselves during the entirety of our early growth that there was little time to learn from within. How many of our memories occurred while we were in a classroom during a class? Not many. It’s quite possible for an adult to tell someone how they felt a week ago, identifying some of the causes behind those emotions, sorting out the aspects that don’t fit with reality, and reflecting on an aspect of themselves that those emotions swam over like the white bits of a colored marble. But the same can’t be asked of someone in the seventh grade. Whatever associations and reflections that our minds perform at that age are almost entirely subconscious and completely out of our control. And much of our adult lives are spent trying to learn our own history. We’re constantly looking for the reasoning and logic that went into these associations and the impact they have on us today. But, as it would be, a person’s own past is the most difficult thing that he or she can attempt to learn or be taught. Physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, art history, economics, literary history, civilization, and on can all be analyzed and tested from this day forth with new tools, ideas, and physical evidence. A person’s history, however, is almost completely inaccessible. There is no electronic microscope to view the days they spent learning the alphabet. There will never be a particle accelerator that will allow us to hold our first cat, its body being almost half as big as our own. And yet, with all of these obvious limitations and road-blocks, the quest of self-discovery is put at the forefront of any reasonably curious person’s life. Something important woke me up at two a.m. sometime in May during my seventh grade of school and there is no way I will ever know what it was.

The darkness and quiet of the night instantly brought a sense of terror to the base of my heart. That childhood fear of the dark that can only exist within someone who still has the innocence to believe that monsters have a factual impact on this world was running rampant throughout my nervous system. Such a unique sense of fear and loneliness must be akin to surviving a nuclear holocaust. When you stumble from a shelter, you’re shaking your limbs as you slowly realize that you still alive. But moments later, you find yourself in that place that only children go to in the middle of the night; you are still alive but the rest of the world is dead.

Fortunately, I never regained full consciousness that night. Maybe it was that lack of consciousness that allowed me to think so clearly and embed such a clear and distinct memory in my mind. But the radio was playing “The Power of Love” by Celine Dion and I had a single thought: this is important, this matters. Even though I was far too young to know and understand the word, I had for the first time in my life been able to identify a moment of synchronicity as it was occurring.

Over a decade later, the effect of that event hasn’t faded. I find it incredibly difficult to listen to that song and when I hear even a portion of it I am reminded of what it feels like to be the only one left alive. A deep and feral fear that has no name stirs just enough to let me know it’s not dead, but asleep.

The power of love scares me pale and perhaps it’s one of the only things I’ll ever truly know about myself.

For Buster

Sat, 31 May 2008 23:38:34 -0400

I saw Buster tonight. He was much thinner than I remembered, his head was smaller, and his hair wasn’t orange and white but a slight tan that looked almost dead white when my headlights hit him directly, but I could tell it was him because he looked me in the face and sat calmly as my car approached. He waited for me to get out, just sitting in the grass, watching. I bent over the passenger seat, grabbing a grocery bag, searching for the box of raspberries. When I found i and looked for him, Buster was gone.

I met Bust in the attic of my wonder year’s house. He was skinny then, but not like tonight, and he let me pat him gently. But when I bent my eight-year-old face close to kiss the top of his head he slashed my forehead and disappeared into the shadows. My mother rushed me to the hospital, fearing the worst, but my rabies vaccination was still legitimate.

We adopted Buster some months later. He wasn’t easy to train, spending the majority of his life unattended in the freedom of the outdoors. I’ll never forget the time I trapped him in my parent’s bedroom as I lay on their bed, watching a movie. He wanted to get out so desperately, repeating the same useless actions over and over. Once in a while he’d look at me with the face of an infant but it did less than his paws on the doorknob. I forgot about him when he disappeared under the bed, becoming too engaged in The Point. But moments later, as I heard him scratching through bits of paper, I could smell it. I jumped off the bed, catching him trying to cover the pile with ragged bits of my father’s files and opened the door quickly. He was gone and I left the door open and went to dinner with the rest of my family. It didn’t really surprise my parents that Buster had taken a shit under their bed. He was having a hard time adjusting to a litter box. I never told them the truth. Buster hadn’t failed to behave, in fact his conditioning was strong enough to push against his natural instincts until it was physically no longer possible. I do still wonder how long he held out for.

Buster bonded with my mother on that level that only exists between a human being and a pet. It’s that rare sort of kindredness that exists between the spirit of an animal and the ancestral spirit of a human being, the spirit that spends most of its lifetime asleep. Buster was never meant to be an indoor cat. He was, however, an outdoor cat whose kindred spirit existed inside of a civilized human being. Because of this strange duality, he led somewhat of a double life, spending much of his time outdoors when she was gone and settling into the role of a housecat when she was home. He quickly learned to recognize her van; maybe he learned its scent, or her scent, or maybe it was something deeper that science tells us doesn’t exist. Regardless of the how, it always brought Buster to the front door whenever my mother entered the driveway.

I wasn’t home when it happened but I was when it mattered. Buster had been doing whatever it is he does across the street. My mother returned from grocery shopping and it could’ve been the frequency at which her van vibrated the earth and he knew and his compulsion propelled him towards her brake-lights. He tore into the street, his head bouncing with an invisible smile and an innocent excitement that only comes from being in the place you’re meant to be in when you’re meant to be there and he was hit by a truck. His skull cracked and his arm was flattened. When my mother carried him inside blood was pouring from his right eye, his tiny nose, and his invisible comfortable smile.

I was on the phone with Justin when the operator came onto the line, asking if I would accept an emergency phone call from my mother. It was difficult to make out exactly what she was saying but gradually I realized what had happened.

“He had run across the street to see me because I had just gotten home… he doesn’t… he’s alive but he doesn’t recognize me… I don’t think he recognizes me because he just keeps staring and I don’t think he knows what’s happened… they say that it’s over but I can’t do it Greg I can’t tell them to end it I can’t do this I just don’t know what to do he ran across the road because I got home, he was coming because I got home, I don’t know what to do”

I don’t remember exactly what I said and I’ll never know what effect those words had on my mother, but she lost her kindred spirit that night. Maybe she let her eight-year-old son make the decision because it was the type of thing that only a child could understand. Maybe she felt like I understood what that kind of bond felt like even though I didn’t. Or maybe I was the only one she could get in touch with. But I think it was because I was her oldest son. I think that she knew that one day she’d be claiming me as her power of attorney and I’d need some experience before making the most important decision of my life. I didn’t understand the bond they shared, not even slightly, but I was still young enough to be willing to accept that it existed. I didn’t need to see or feel because I could still simply believe. As an adult, I still don’t quite understand it or know what it might feel like, but thanks to that phone call I can still believe that it exists.

And it stoned me to my soul

Fri, 30 May 2008 16:43:47 -0400

I was surfing craig’s-list at 3 a.m. after accidentally spilling cocaine into my starbucks frappacino and my eyes had become blood-shot-blue when I clicked on his cry and it really struck my fancy.

It said: want age 25-70 guy to come over and jo in my model train room. Mutual touching and stuff but nothing more than that… I’m not gay. It’s all HO scale. Then after you finish you can stomp around and kick the trains and buildings like a monster (don’t break they are my son’s). We can do this until 4 a.m. or until we get tired. Also I have lots of imitation crab meat in my freezer that I need to get rid of so you can have a bunch when you leave; it’s all perfectly good we just got too much!!!”

I thought I might be having a heart attack because I felt like my heart was going to puke but I ignored it because there was something about this man that caught my eye. I didn’t know what he meant by “jo” but I had a pretty good idea that it might be fun to play Godzilla with a 48 year old man. And he seemed like an intelligent person so I figured that jo might have something to do with economics or political philosophy.

I threw my coat on and I dialed the first number that popped into my head. As serendipity would have it, he answered the phone, obviously tired, but with a dull spark in the back of his throat that reminded me of lego’s and toy blocks and matchbox cars and sandboxes. Suddenly I felt a warm sensation in my shoulders, as though some invisible ghost was giving me a massage and I decided that I could tell this man anything. I told him I wasn’t gay either and that I liked the photograph of his train room. I told him that we had many things in common and that I usually stay up far past 4 a.m. so that it might be fun to spend the evening together. I asked him what jo meant and when he told me that it stood for “Jack Off” I asked him why that kind of thing wasn’t done after the role playing and he said because that’s the way it’s been done for millions of years and I believed him.

It was eight pm when I departed my driveway and I pulled beside a blue minivan parked in front of a closed garage attached to a modest house that could’ve passed for a trailer if it had some wheels just as the day officially ended. My car beeped and then his beeped for some reason when I locked it and he was already outside before I could get to his door. We shook hands. There was hair coming from the skin just below his fingernails and the fat seemed to sag further than the skin of an old person. His eyes were sunken a bit but he looked confident and he had a child-like smile that made me comfortable. He wore a flannel button-up shirt, with the upper two buttons loose, exposing curly white chest-hair and a pair of brown slacks. His feet were bare and I wondered if he didn’t need to wear shoes on account of how hairy they were.

The man told me his name was Steven and offered me a coffee. He was whispering because his son was asleep upstairs and I wanted to ask if there was any exchange of information about the train-room between him and his son but I didn’t want to be nosey. He gave me a massage and his cool fingers eased the warmth that had taken residency in my shoulders. My upper spine tingled from the cocaine. His fingers must have popped a deposit somewhere in the base of my thalamus because I felt a surge of aggression.

He led me down the stairs to his basement, which was fully furnished with a carpet and old sofa facing a television and a punctured dart board on the opposite wall. Beside the dart board a door was ajar and the light was already on. I could see the edge of what turned out to be an incredibly expansive mini town that was built entirely around a complicated railroad system that made so many unnecessary redundant paths that I felt like petitioning the mini-mayor.

I masturbated quickly and he stood in the doorway. I tightly closed my eyes, trying to imagine that I was having sex with a miniature plastic woman inside the caboose. I kept trying to get under her skirt but the plastic fused it to her legs. When I was finished I handed him the caboose, apologizing for hitting it with my DNA. For the first time he looked angry and I thought I heard him hiss. But when he finished wiping the side of the car with the bottom of his shirt the child-like smile returned and he said

“Let’s go get em!”

“So you want me to be like Godzilla right?” I was buttoning my pants.

“No, I’m fucking Godzilla. Don’t be a wise-ass. You’re Mothra.”

“Does that mean we fight?”

“No we don’t fight but do like me.” With that he let out a guttural roar that was somewhat dampened on account of his son and began lightly kicking the train from its track. I put my arms out as though they were wings and I began to imitate a gliding monster as I kicked over houses, careful not to break his son’s toys.

The room was expanding at an incredible pace and I could see green leathery skin on the man’s face and for a second I felt myself floating above the bustling city with its mini-screams. I let out a ferocious roar at the ceiling, expelling every hormone in my body, rattling the pipes lining the ceiling so that they clanged against each other, creating a resonant frequency with my voice that made me dizzy. And uncontrollably I kicked the city hall as hard as I could, smashing it into uncountable pieces and I stomped hard down on one of the engines, crushing it into almost as many.

My head hurt when it bounced off the wall and I fell into the center of town, crushing the majority of its major industry and driving wedges of plastic into my back. Steve had pushed me from behind and he was standing over me, furious, clenching his hands and baring his teeth like a feral dog. Drool came from the corners of his mouth and spit rained onto my face as he screamed,

“I said not to fucking break anything! These toys belong to my son! What the fuck have you done?”

I staggered to one elbow, driving a lamppost into my hand and began to get up. Steve left the room cursing and I groaned. My back felt wet. Less than five minutes later he returned with his son, whose curious eyes were glazed from a recent REM and he held a teddy bear and his pajamas were too long because the feet dragged far behind him.

“Look what this man did! Look at your train-set! He’s destroyed it!” Steve pinched his son’s shoulder causing his eyes to flicker and for the first time he comprehended the wreckage before him. He began to sob and I stood hunched with my hands on my knees ready to vomit and trying to give him the most apologetic look that I could come up with but was really just an ear-to-ear grin.

Steve shot his son from behind. His tiny skull was almost completely removed by the bullet and I felt a bit of brain go between my lips. It had no taste. I swallowed it instinctively.

“You’ve ruined everything… you’ve ruined everything…” He pointed the gun towards me and I looked at it helplessly, noticing that it was half-painted with his son’s blood and saw a tuft of hair sticking from the muzzle and for the first time in my life I felt completely sober and completely calm and at peace.

“Steve… what does HO stand for?” But he shot me in the face and I couldn’t hear anything, just felt an inexplicable sense of dizziness and tried to inhale but it tasted like I was being held underwater in the ocean. The floor was the ceiling and the ceiling was the floor and I fell into the residential neighborhood and wished that I had brought my cocaine.

Note: this story was inspired by this photograph sent to me by Colin. http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2223/2459422677_09f05a0bab.jpg

I didn’t bother to reread it or fix any errors because Steve would’ve wanted it that way.

conversations with God part 2

Thu, 29 May 2008 12:18:00 -0400

I read this in a ridiculous article on the accuracy of Sex and The City and how many sexual partners a woman in New York City has. Someone wrote a book on it…. cause the world is fucking retarded.

Anyway, I couldn’t figure out why I was reading the article until the very end, when I read:

“”The women on ‘Sex and the City’ went through so many guys they devalued sex,” says Crystal, 22, an exotic dancer at Rick’s Cabaret in midtown. “I’ve seduced thousands of men…”

Which is, to my knowledge, the best sentence ever written by a human being.

referenced article: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/2008/05/29/2008-05-29_in_sex_and_the_city_number_of_sex_partne-2.html

conversations with God

Fri, 23 May 2008 11:16:38 -0400

its about beating the odds, beating the comittion and its about beating yo meat nigga.

128 (Jessica, I love you, more than you know..)

Fri, 23 May 2008 01:03:36 -0400

Jessica had a moderate mental handicap. Not quite full blown downs syndrome but you could readily tell that she was in every way a bit stunted. To all of us, however, she was a complete retard. A complete retard without feelings like ours, just automatic reactions to things. I mean, she couldn’t feel anything really; she was a retard; retards don’t feel. Her feelings were just fucked up neurospazes worth a laugh or two.

It was the Friday before my fifth April vacation and, like the previous four pre-vacation Fridays, it was a day I actually looked forward to going to school. First and second graders might just draw and color all day, but we were in the fifth grade. We were old enough to party. After four hours of meaningless school garbage, the entire class gathered in the social studies classroom. The desks had been moved to the side of the room and the chairs were arranged into sloppy rows facing a television that rested on a giant black metal stand with wheels, wires, two shelves, and a VCR.

The Big Friendly Giant began its opening theme song but no one seemed to care. We were lost in our own attention seeking jokes and conversations. We were already on vacation. No matter what the school tried to give us this week was going to be absolutely ignored. Some students read, others drew shitty pencil-sketches of horses and trees, while most of the classroom tried to talk over each other, eating cupcakes and laughing at each other. It was grade school education at its best.

There was, however, one student patiently and quietly staring at the video screen, its animated colors dancing around her retina. Jessica sat with her arms folded, motionless, her eyes dancing in a quiet joy that is only seen in the stoned and the retarded. She hinted a smile so subtle that it created a supernova black hole sucking the smiles of every student in the room into a condensed lump of confused pre-pubescent self-loathing. It must have ripped at Jeremy’s smile in particular because he felt an inexplicable need to fulfill his angst-driven bullying of the day. It was like a gland in his head was dedicated to Jessica, and it was releasing an incredible volume of hormones.

Jeremy’s mind scanned the scene for a start-point. If there was none, he would simply default to a smack to the back of her head. But, noticing how engaged she had become with a movie designed for kids half her age, he grinned, exhaled, and pounced. He flipped the TV off, failing to evoke a reaction from anyone, including her. She just looked with a forlorn gaze at the blank television screen.

“Awww, did I turn off your baby show? Does retard need her baby show back on?” She stood up in silent defiance and walked to the television. Jeremy patiently watched her pass in front of him to switch the television’s power button back on. What she was hoping to accomplish I’m not sure. Perhaps it was just an automatic reaction like touching a hot-stove. Or maybe she was so beyond our understanding of social psychology that she was the only one who knew that acknowledgement was precisely what he was looking for, and without it he was defeated. But it was a trap. Jeremy was overjoyed when the television came on, fueled by the fact that the rest of the room had become silent, watching the event unfold. He unplugged the set and gave Jessica a decent shove. I turned, wondering why we hadn’t seen any adult intervention, and realized that the teacher wasn’t among us.

Whether Jessica had any advanced notion of social psychology or was as dumb as she looked, she had amount of sense to know that she was fucked. She scraped her chair across the floor to a desk that sat in the corner of the room. Sitting behind the desk, she buried her face in her arms, sobbing. It must have been like the scent of blood to a shark because Jeremy immediately went in for the kill. Even if a twinge of guilt had managed to bubble its way into the frontal lobe of Jeremy’s miscoiled brain, which I doubt, the peer pressure’s internal chanting to utterly disassemble this poor girl, to flex his power amongst his peers, would have popped that bubble instantly.

Jessica had a grape juice box at the corner of her desk. A thin white straw poked out of the top and she had a very loose grip on it with her right hand. I started to laugh and Jeremy grinned as he silently dripped that warm sticky juice over her bushy brown hair. I think that for a couple seconds Jessica actually tried to ignore the liquid that was now streaming onto the nape of her neck and underneath her white cotton dress.

Besides the now missing juice box, the only other item Jessica had carried to the desk was a treasured box of 128 crayons constituting an incredible range of colors. Just as we all began to comment on her incredible ability to ignore her surroundings, Jessica’s head came up and she screamed a shrill arrow of painful humility into the corner of the room, sending it reverberating into a resonance that lasted for a second after she stopped screaming. Jeremy froze and someone dropped a pencil. Someone else chuckled and Jessica seized the box of crayons with adrenaline-strength and launched it over her shoulder at Jeremy. But, she was retarded, and she missed furiously. The old cardboard crumbled apart on impact with the floor and crayons were spewed in every direction, some whole, some broken.

I might have been the only one to see it, but just then I caught a glimpse of her eyes and felt as if I was looking into the mirror at my own. I saw someone whom I had never seen before. But feeling uninvited, it didn’t stay and Jessica’s eyes deadened as she allowed her face to drop back into her crossed arms. The entire room was silent and I think that at that point Jeremy could have impaled her spine with a crayon, severing any signal to her lower extremities, and Jessica wouldn’t have noticed. The person inside of her had given her a last ditch effort to save some face and it had cost her her treasured crayons. That was the last time she was going to let her take control again.

And like a dog following its owner’s dinner-plate, the entire attention of the room rested on the colorful explosion that had just occurred in the center of the room. Before even Jeremy could move, the entire mass of children was scattering, shouting with glee, laughing, and grabbing at the crayons. In some sort unspoken agreement, everyone started throwing the crayons at each other, dancing in the rain of hardened colors.

As the room blurred around me, I picked up a long red crayon that had lost most of its wrapping. Its tip had been broken off in the fury. I leaned my arm far behind my head and launched the red torpedo with all the weight in my body into the center of that blur. For a moment, the blur paused, the children took their proper forms and I watched my soaring red crayon slam head-first into her eye-socket, missing her eyeball by an immeasurable distance. Immediately thereafter, Erica was swept into the storm.

Some seconds later, cries of pain caused the chaos to cease, revealing Erica; she stood among the ruins of a semi-retard’s nightmare and worried sweaty faces, cupping her injured eye and sobbing intensely with pain and fear.

—-

For some reason, not a single person was penalized for that crayon fight or any of the events leading up to it. Jessica never made any attempt to implicate Jeremy and I don’t think the teacher even noticed the juice staining the back of her dress. Most likely, the teacher did not want to be seen at any fault for leaving the room. There were no protests from us.

Erica ended up going to the nurse with a black eye. She was under extreme duress and spent much of her vacation upset. I never came forward with my part in it. In all honesty, I was glad that she had been wounded. Erica was your regular pre-cunt-pre-slut fifth grade girl who treated most people like shit. Someone must have witnessed it, however, because her alpha-male guardians were informed of my guilt. During afterschool recess, while we waited for the buses to arrive, they surrounded me. Four boys, all physically my superior, hungered for revenge-induced testosterone release. I didn’t move a muscle. I just stared, trying to imagine where Jessica had taken herself earlier. Greg informed me of the situation, that they had been told that I was the one who gave their fragile pre-slut a black-eye. Before I could answer, John kicked at my legs from behind, sweeping me onto the dirt. I kept my expression blank as I bounced back up and John said,

“Did you see how I tripped him? Did you see how he went down? Ha ha.” I calmly told Greg that I had no idea how Erica got a black-eye and that I hadn’t ever thrown a crayon, certainly not the crayon that ruined her vacation. Some threats later, I stood alone. I thought to myself, if anyone does finally get a severe retaliation for what happened to Erica, it would be Jessica. I looked to my feet, kicked a rock, and chuckled at my fellow human race.

Why I go to Narcotics Anonymous to pick up girls:

Wed, 21 May 2008 21:12:11 -0400

Jesse removed a twinkling syringe from a chewed pen-cap holding bleach and flicked its tip against his palm. The summer air held its breath as he took a bundle of small blue papers held taught by an elastic band out of the front pocket of his one-piece gas-station uniform. He delicately removed a slip from the packet, his wrist trembling from an acidic anticipation with such ferocity that his knuckles rapped against the dumpster he sat against. His back was to the sidewalk and he could hear a man talking about the Red Sox as he passed. Jesse wondered how much it would take to become such an empty shell of a sports fan. Who becomes one of those people whose single source of emotional stimulus comes from baseball games and football games? The city of Boston wasn’t lack for those chubby men and Jesse thought maybe something was in the water supply. Jesse shrugged, it did a fine job of dissolving heroin.

Jesse saw his mother in the spoon and he raced through the crowds of the deceased and betrayed. As a nurse sucked their pre-daughter’s fetus out of his wife’s womb into a jiggling black tube whose shadow danced over a boss whose liver had buckled under thirty years of alcoholism and a brother who had hung himself, he fixated on the gleaming silver that floated above. He pulled his belt around his upper arm and held it tight with his teeth, causing streams of drool to run the length of his arm and the past blurred into the gas station he worked daily, its green dumpster beside him, a drop of preemptive rain on his wrist and Jesse smiled as he caught another brief head-start on his dried up, brittle soul. He had resolved to cross the finish line hugging the last of himself like a football.