Doldrum Days

Having dinner with friends, today I feel like saying no words. I consume my plate, quickly. I get up, dispose of plate. I walk back, put on my coat,

"I'm outta here guys."

"So soon?" They all inquire, words and glances.

"Yea. See you all later."

My back collects inquisitive glances. This is perfect. I selfishly get what I want. I get the feeling of human contact with expending next to no effort, besides the energy it takes to utter sentences like:

"I have a lot of work to do."

"Test tomorrow."

And

"Crazy weekend." (including eyebrow pump)

That's all.

I want that to be "my thing" I think. Let me illustrate a perfect scene:

Pencil Lebowitz is languidly traversing the path that eventually empties into the mouth of Collegetown; Hollister Hall on the left, and the ancient, imposing Myron Taylor Law School on the right. From behind shuffles a passerby.

"Hi Pencil!"

"Hi Sarah. No offense, but I would prefer to walk this path alone. I know that common courtesy dictates that we walk the next 3 minutes or so in a kind of simulated conversation, each of us racking our brains about things to come up with, things to ask each other. However, today I choose not to. I will stop in 2 seconds and allow you to walk ahead of me and we will both continue at our own chosen speeds, mine will be selected first and foremost with the intention of not surpassing you. Good day."

I stop, that is if the effort it takes and the social degradation that I experience is less than the effort it would take to conjure up an artificial conversation.

This has the potential to ruin relationships, but I'll let you know what I discover.

Author's note:
I apologize to any and all parties injured by the preceding prose. I AM AN ARTIST. I AM FULLY INCAPABLE OF CONSIDERING THE OPINIONS AND FEELINGS OF OTHERS. MOST OF THE TIME. NO, OK SOME OF THE TIME.

Why I hate this blog (Bob!)

Today, I am sitting in a room, with forty computers and eighty college students. The main character is not here, I am a supporting character, and when he isn't here, I of course stop existing . I am listening to The Kills, I am typing and realizing.

There is the man bob. I am quite excited to have the man bob in existence today, because he flushed my toilet 11 times…to no avail. The man bob haggled with my landlord, hoping to get some poetry out of our little arrangement… to no avail. The man, that is, the man bob, has shrunken two and a half inches in the last forty years. We believe it to be a result of massive beer consumption.

Once, Bob read a blog. He sifted through its pages and posts only to realize he needed to flush my toilet again. Then he stopped reading the blog. Later, he gave it another go, shortly after killing half of a cockroach. Finding the Scarsdalekings he shrugged, winked at the computer screen, and screamed. The commas were out of place, the style was sophomoric at best, the ideas were feebly conveyed, and most importantly, the words were not words. He read the words and realized the words were not words. No, not words, but replacements for words. On the site Word meant Party, Bob meant homophobe, or student, and on and on and on. The words, letters, phrases were so deceitful and evil and plaguing, the man Bob shrugged, winked, and screamed. And then he ate it. He ate the blog, or as it is in reality, sandwich, and he never spoke to me again.

Damnit.

Why I hate Poland

There are many reasons to hate Poland. I have chosen to dwell on merely two. The bountiful constraints of my life have left me in a position in which I am unable to express my opinions and feelings completely--it's a time constraint, not a constraint of expression. Folks, I assure you I have no problems with inability of expression.

1. Vaclav Havel.

According to Wikipedia and the vast body of general knowledge (increasing at at least a constant rate, sometimes increasing rate) that I possess, this man, who was commander-in-chief of this sad excuse for an encapsulation of borders from 1990-1995, helped Poland achieve a state of post-communism. Normally, I would say "'Nuff said", but this time I will be a little less brief. Get rid of communism? Why? Doesn't that mean Vaclav's an asshole? Doesn't care about the rights of workers and shit? Fuck that guy.

2. Biskupin.

This open-air museum is home to Poland's "most famous archeological find". Woop-de-doo! Who cares? It's a model of some little civilization that existed in that region from the Iron Age. If I ever wanted to get an extremely good bicep muscle workout, you know what I'd do? I'd purchase a plane ticket to Poland, pay for entry into the Biskupin, then let my hand do what it inevitably will do: suppress yawns. Thousands and thousands of yawns.

Don't even get me started about United Arab Emirates.

Agamben man (A Message to the nonexistent)

I am sitting in a room going stale. Two chairs, one table, a lamp, those are the items that comprise the totality of the room and my existence. My fist supports my fluid filled skull, and I sit hunched over looking into the thing, the thing being everything. I have moved only once since I became aware of my existence, and for a very brief interval. Since that time I have sat, hunched, seeing the thing that is everything that could have been, every word that would have been, the sights that weren’t seen. My days are spent like this. Wide eyes open, staring, until I pass out and then awake, only to find myself in the same position. I cannot move.

In my eye, the one outside of the fluid and skull, the one connected to my optic nerve, as I have said, I go over each thing, every nonsensical word, abrupt gesture, and random occurrence. I hop onto the table, I poke the wall, fall into the floor and emerge standing on the ceiling while the room melts, and then say the word “Jar!” Then my eyes, you know the one I told you about, do it again, now ending with a different inflection, then a slightly different word. Imagine each possible event that could have transpired as you sat reading this, dear imaginary muse. Imagine the many thoughts you could have thought, the spasms that didn’t happen, the orgasm unexpected. I have done it. I have. Of course I am only millennia away from finishing my task, but that OBVIOUSLY isn’t the goal. No. The goal is not to do.

I did once. Once, when I sat hunched over after coming into consciousness, I reached over to the lamp and felt its warmth, without touching it. It passed beautiful heat into my index and middle fingers, and I passed out and awoke in my position. My position. I have made it mine, it is mine, and if no other action, thought or pose is rightfully mine, I claim this can belong to no other. Don’t position yourself in my position. Please.

Now I have to cease casting brainwaves out into the abyss that is outside, because I know I haven’t written, spoken, or done anything, but I have merely thought these thoughts to some being which will never see them. I have to stop now, because I know there is no magic fairy to receive my thoughts and write them, and hold them, and cherish them, but there is just me, in my room, with my hand in a fist on the base of my jar, supporting the fluid and matter in my skull. Maybe I have been alive for a day, but maybe forever. Regardless, you have never been at all. Goodbye now imaginary men, I must continue my task, and you must continue to not be.

Who Will Meet Me in Alaska?

I just realized something. When I meet a person, I must find out where they're from before I can shake his/her hand. The reason, you ask?

Well, let me give you a scenario:

I find out that Adam is from California. I have just met him. I am from New York. I shake his hand and our hands become Nebraska in my mind's eye. My hands feel dry, yet meaty. Well-fed and plump. Although, on the exterior they are the same amalgamation of chicken bones.

Do you see what happened there?

I met Parisian Pierre. My hands were clammy, moist. I met Jaime, from Mexico. My hands were ten gallons and again well-fed. On winter days I hold hands with my South African princess chicle. In the summer, who will meet me in Alaska?

Our anarchist

The anarchist’s arms dangled spastically in the air with a stick pointing out and to the right, like a supply and demand curve, as he preached the good word. The word coming out in jumps, flutters, piles, outside a looming white castle-church—Ignacio, the church. The stick in his hand darted back and forth in between commodity words, while his body shook under his gesticulations. His energy formed raw and pure and unabashedly directed itself toward the passersby walking through the empty night, on their way home from 200,000 dollar educations and 100,000 dollar jobs. A jump, a hop, a giggle.

Jump and hop back two days, and I swear I’ll make you giggle, because jumping makes you fall off balance, and you start moving slowly, but then you accelerate like aggregate supply after the equilibrium point. Two days previous the anarchist and I stood in a library while he struggled to whisper, something he never quite got down. Through struggling words he spoke to me of a day when the buildings would still stand and the money would fly into fires. “SHHHHHh!” We were in a library. We left the library. And then he told me why. “Why will the people give up money?” “Love.” “Ha!” I was another schmuck laughing in the face of this poor withered loving soul. Counter points flew out like daggers, or swords thrown by giants, and his eyes moved like lizards, the animal his shaman said he embodied. So am I surprised that after the insults flew he packed his bags and his manifesto to spread the good word? No, but I never thought he’d proclaim himself leader of legion, legion of suburban Newton, on a night when I had to pick up a package and couldn’t help.

But when they later spoke of his arms in the air, and his beautiful life changing words, and his eyes taking in every corner of the world, I had to praise him, kneel on one knee, kiss his imaginary cheek (because I was insane by then, of course). Then the cops came and he shouted at the “slaves of capitalism,” and the dissenter was arrested and shipped to a mental hospital, where they put the geniuses, the artists, and the beautiful. But that sermon on the rock will go down in history, if for nothing else than the fear it evoked and the dehumanization his friends and past followers invoked upon his imprisonment. Another was.

Was does something special. It makes that beautiful boy into a beautiful myth. He is no longer a person, he is more. He invokes sad awe in sad eyes as they struggle to figure out what it means to be on a different plane of sanity, which I suppose most call insanity. The fallen men are myths, that becomes their identity., They are our cherished mirage memories, and we sadly tell their stories. You can recognize a story-wielder if you look in the glazed eyeballs we point towards Orion’s belt, and the flaccid postures we mosey from place to place when thinking on the mythologized. In the end, the anarchist, the leader of nonexistent legions, is dead to these people, to me. I may shake his hand, or hug him during a visit, but he is real only in a memory of a dream of the night in a library when he told me why the world would change. His existence is diluted and transmuted in my mind. But that’s because he’s different. That is because he is different. He is human no more, and a blur forever. 

This is a movement. Just check the MVMT splitting the skull in two.

St. Valentine's Day Massacre (The Counterpart)

"Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people, right on "
--- Power to the People, John Lennon

"Nice," I said as I took my headphones off. I was sitting in my room at my desk, but I decided to get on the bus and go to Home Depot.

"Drills?"

"Aisle 3."

"Thanks."

I bought a drill. I think only I can understand this one. I was going after Omega Superior. And his mother. I had a dream about him and he made fun of me. Nobody insults me. Dead men tell no tales.

I went to Regal Cinema. That's where Omega Superior takes girls on dates. I saw his mother near the entrance. She was sitting by herself at a table. She saw me and ran.

"She acted rather quickly. Perhaps too quickly. Some might say she is too hasty in this endeavor and has no real reason to act in this way," I said to myself as I pulled a gun out my pocket.

I shot her. I felt happy. Not too happy though. Not the definition of happy. Definitely not.

People stared. She writhed. She died. I proceeded to the theaters. People tried to stop me, but I pulled out my drill and they backed away. I ran into "Black Swan" because I knew Omega Superior would be there.

He was. He was in the back row. He had a girl next to him. I stopped and stared.

The ease and finesse with which I leapt over his head, I cannot explain to you. I won't even try. I was in my element. Plain and simple. I was Aquafina amidst a tempest. All I can explain to you with any degree of finery and justice is the terror on his face. As I stood upon the back of the chair in front of him, and stared deeply into Omega Superior's face, this is what I saw:

His mouth was a hole. A knot, if you will, because he was a tree. He was petrified wood. Petrified in the sense that his face legitimately seemed to have been in this particular contortion for centuries, and would continue to do so for eons and eons. Until Paul Bunyan disembowels the forest in which he resides somewhere in eastern Tennessee. The lines. The lines that cracked his face into fragments momentarily frightened me. I hadn't seen so many lines since I was auditioning for "Les Miserables." All joking aside, they were plentiful. They barely allowed for the portals of his face to exist and perceive what was happening to him. The irrationality of fear. These were the ramifications (I can't take credit for that one):

In this position, perched atop a tottering Regal Cinema comfy chair, I remained for five seconds. Not a fraction longer. The exact moment I noticed his eyelids amplify and reveal a hint of gleam from the towering screen behind me, I plunged. I plunged my drill into his knee. That scream. Ah, that scream!

Hahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!

Ah.

I sit back now, like many a magnanimous artificer before me, in a cell. Recalling my tales. Unloading my burden. Gather round everyone, the festival has just begun. Omega Superior is still out there. He lurks in the corner of your subconscious and urges you to act. Do.

Happy Valentine's Day!!!!

Finger Mountains (Valentine's Day)

Dear You, without You, Artist

I’m sitting on a coach in forbidden lands, a little outside Scarsdale, with The Artist on me, looking into me. We’re about to leave and we don’t know it. The moment has its own color, something like blue-green or chasmic (which isn’t a real color, but it should be). The Artist and I will fall now, into the moment’s color and each other. Maybe it’s the heat. It must be the heat that makes us melt together, because this recreation has a warm soothing feeling to it. Or maybe it was what The Artist said, “Don’t analyze, just feel.”

The world is about to change, and it’s right as The Artist lay still next to me, and as I gravitate toward the window seal. But then I know. The world is about to change. And my hands grip her and pull her in, and my legs fumble about, sweat drips, breathing labors, but it’s all in my head. Did The Artist feel that embrace, did she feel my hands running down her side, hoping to chase my mind down, around, over those valleys and mountains? Probably not, but I felt, I didn’t think. I felt in the dark, and the moment was red-pink, but perhaps her moment was just black.

And now here I am, after an event that may or may not have happened. She is miles away from me, I am miles away from me. So here we are, feeling! Not thinking. Is feeling enough though? Would thorny flowers with golden stems and giant pedals express or substitute the feeling? But that’s just thinking. Well, The Artist is miles away, sick, and I’m confused, and the feeling confuses the thinking, so please excuse this.


Thanks,
Him, or a part of Him, New Guy

And Now I’m sitting, and the world has changed. She’s gone. Not just miles away this time, but gone gone. Gone with a text not much better than “It’s not you, it’s me.” The finger mountains are gone, the color is gone, gray is here, feeling is here. But I’m screaming to myself “DISSOCIATE!” But the dissociation properties suck, and the gray makes me think I suck. Finger mountains are all I have now that that world is gone, on Valentine’s Day. But the colors melt with me now still, and gray just doesn’t rub off. Maybe it just won’t rub off. Whatever. Cliché, you and I are one.

Feb. Guest Posts

Tree (Guest Post by an asshole)

tree this is not cool. just leave it at that thats good. dont change i-stop dont change any ig man yer good sip im gonna lol till you stolp. maybe rofl on the floor til roggin'. damnit kevin. oh well. i suppose this is an alright post. lets pub it and see what it looks like.

Selvin(Buest post by Rathore)

Dude nice email.

Below you can find my application for a blog for KINGS:



Nae: Remanu Phillips

Still: photo not picture

Namesake: Panther

Desires: Dragon, natural strength (aka inner strength), control, and support

Has: Skill, knowledge.

Poem:

Selvin was his name.
He wore a large letter N on his chest.
Some say it stands for nut
Some say selvin was his name.

Croatia was his callling
He was Croatian by nature
And croatian by birth
He fashioned, and fashionably made fashionable the necktie.

Selvin was his name,
Croatia was his calling
We recognize his name
Yet not his calling.

And if you look close.
All you have to do
Is look inside me,
and see you.

For the Croatian boy
What was his name? OH, Selvin.
lives in all times
sees all ties.

3 AM departure (Internal Reels and Dream Sequences)

Qualifications: yeah I possess ‘em

Intentions: yeah I got some

Disclosures: not seeking kingship, but simply guest privileges

3 AM departure (Internal Reels and Dream Sequences)

yes. you proud of me. Yeah’m proud uh ya.

What yur white and yur male? uhhh

Yeah’m proud uh ya. What? Yeah’m nah.

Ya are or yur not? Maybe….not. I’m…I. no.

Hands playing in yur blood.

Improbable supreme sequences. I’ll give ya that.

Trade off: loose lips

Spew, spew, prattle .

Screaming for agony in their bodies.

I’ll just follow the stank of the under realms unwashed.

Smells like fish ta me.

I’m always one step behind

Melding their bodies to the screen.

I’ll just follow the trail of shrunken eyeballs and limbs.

I’m always one step behind.

Bodies. Baw? Deez?? Bodies piled high.

I just follow with my gaze to the top of the pile.

Guess I’m still one step behind.

Yeah I believe in stuff. I’m drinking up your fluids, your liquids. Yeah there’s a taste. I’ll believe in that.

A face. And two eyes for excoriating. A face. And two eyes for wagering. A face. And two eyes for contending. A face. And two eyes for amusing. A face. And two legs for evading. Two eyes devouring.

Painting a picture 400 feet tall.

Aha! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA. Screeeeeeeeeaaaaaaams, but mostly eheh heh heh. And a little bit of hmmmm. A lot a bit of hmmmmmmmm. And I’ll stand by any one of ya! And maybe you won’t notice me. And probably you will

notice me. Yes.

And what! (Guest Post by Rathore)

"And what!"

That's what those little kids say to each other as they each try to score on the looming, tall, daunting thing. It's a thick black sinuous pole and when you're seven, the tendency is to be daunted by it. Doing my daily whisk around the world, I tripped and fell on something invisible. I tumbled speedily to the ground ("fuck!"). Fuck. I landed feet first as we always do, my feet instantly burning on the unfamiliar blacktop. The kids were there, each trying to score. "And what!" "AND WHAT!" I frowned. The scene brought me way back to my childhood. A dark door, an absent father, and murky cliffs. Everywhere I turned, a cliff but a bridge. I couldn't tell what the fuck it was. In those days I did it all for the girls, I got them napkins, I made them love, we made cookies, we made sandwiches. No euphemism. I made them cry. Those kids had no idea what they were doing. No one does. I stared at my cat all day, not relenting until he looked away. I stared at women, looking deep and scraping hard behind their hearts, revealing all the murky areas. Behind which their were cliffs. Those cliffs had bridges, but ones so tiny I couldn't see them without aid. Those kids these girls...those kids...The kids loved the cliffs, the ones they could see. They could see them in their teachers vividly, in their parents and their friends so easily. They knew what made them tick. And as they saw those cliffs, similarly I saw mine in peers. And as I saw murky girls, they saw murky strangers. The unknown to them both a cliff and a bridge, both exciting and super scary. I reflected and I reflect. I sat down there and I sit down there. I thought and I think, was I ever up in the sky, zooming at twice the speed of the mind? Am I or was I always here with these fucking kids, screaming, convulsing, fermenting in this insane asylum that is the world..those kids.

Basic Printer (Guest Post)

The concept of abstraction...ignoring the interworking parts of an item and simply taking its function for granted. Is this really how the engineers work?

Of course it makes sense from a manufacturing, circuiting standpoint, but are we really that insensitive to our own work? Do electrical engineers see everything this way?

That's a bit sad to me. Everyone looks on the surface. Now it's okay to ignore the warm, gooey parts of things, things with a good deal of worth and work to them. Machines are so cold, they have no problem with slapping you in the fucking face every time you're wrong, incessantly.

And yet computers and machines are absolutely wonderful: have you ever heard a jazz trio cut and fucked up into musique concrete? The absolute soothing brutality of it? The tail ends of upright basses tripping over light ride cymbals? A concrete COLLAGE?

And what about the warm buzz of a synth: knowing every knob you turn will shape a sine wave at your fucking bidding, turning it into a pink laser stream of full sound, gliding the notes together.

Such is what I face daily. Emotionless machines speaking to me, gaining a personality. I am the responsible for the fusion of sincerity and bullshit. Logic and emotion. I look into machines and into people, swimming in their warm goo, connecting inverters and XOR gates.

Basic Printer.



http://basicprinter.bandcamp.com/album/poor-ian


Torn and Delivered: An Encomium for the Anarchist (Guest Post by Chris Criswell)

You cannot part the seas of our doubt,
my lord, though the stick waves and the arms
flout, bared and unburdened in the Boston cold.
Before the cops rift their useless, manacle
hands into you, pulling at you like a statue
of Stalin--you, maniacal and throwing miraculous
words before you like simple seeds of love--you
are enslaved by the slaves you name around you,
your nose chipping off and your arm still iconic and high.
What capitalist Covenant must a Messiah bow to?
What nails must he suffer before he packs his bags,
accepting his Fate in the stones tossed at the
thrones of their Newbury Street windows, in the tearing
of all collars by the procession to the cop car, whether blue
or bright or dirtied with big city smog?
Evangelical of the Everlasting Proletariat, what has gotten
into you, raising your walking stick above us all?
Cast away your dollars like the demons inside you,
so we scramble at your feet and call you mad,
offering us so little ever after. The youth everlasting
in ideals, I'm sure, is fading in the desert walls and
group therapy in hidden robes around you. Identification tags
pull down the neck and make you long. But the blood of your
slaughtered wallets and bank account, I'm also sure, will
forever remain on your hands, waving still for all of us
to hear your Good News, marking you out as the one
who dared to challenge the Pharaohs at every corner--
you, Little Prince Prophet of the world we're too absurd to believe in.

Sitting on the cliff

They tease me,
Wretched beasts of the abyss.
Holding out my hand,
They turn their heads in the sight of shit.

So they walk,
Shoes clattering rapidly,
Hurrying, past the stench.
Passing the sign that reads
"Gimme a buck, you'll get it back..."

A gasp rings out.
Dear fellows, old men are no better than young.
Their shoes carry a certain purified disdain, though.
Rotating, twirling, gyrating,
Citizens! Wrinkled and pretty, everywhere,
Moving their asses, in a world of change!

Readers, you want to see me gone,
the ambiguous “They” want to see me gone.
No more crazies,
No more radicals, sitting in puke.
O! I understand. No room here,
Not for the downwardly mobile nobles living in the bathroom.

Readers, Hello! You've read the wrong stuff,
And I admit it.
I'm a pseudo-Junk Merchant!
I’ve relinquished my tie from service and cast off my trousers!
Won't lie in filth with me?
Won't tolerate disrupted apathy?


Friends, I am leaving.
I am going to the cliff,
Going off to the isle of Manisfree.
Slowly, I stride there.
Please, release me from your 9-5 cyclical world.
And now, dears, I am off. Off and half. Today, I
have a calm ceremony to become mist.

No worries.

I’m floating today. And that’s not because of the medicine I crammed down my throat during a mad rush for the bathroom door. Whatever. But wait, I’m floating through something today . Through this encounter mostly. Yes, yes, my body’s particles have seemingly merged with and then separated from the ideas you expose me to, this morning. The blue rug, brown cat, broken Jameson bottle on my floor all see me floating, and yes they’re all wondering how they’ll get me down. The spectacular “No worries.” Oh baby, yes baby, those were the wonderful words you said to me, and then I was floating, ignoring your new words, honoring the old. And the spider web connecting the two walls clasped me tight, attention-wise babe. Yeah babe, I’m floating today with my eyes on the spiderweb, above the cat moaning at me, the flying specter, but yea, it won’t be moaning in a second. In a second, I’ll fall, just like you want me to. And then I’ll be sitting, with a blue rug, an unseen spiderweb, a broken Jameson bottle, and a fucking dead cat.

“No worries.”

Maybe if I'd made it, ya know this morning when I headed for the shitter, maybe I would have died before this melodic embrace. Me on the ground, you cradling my head. But no, the pills sank to my belly's bottom and you called me, made me laugh, and we spoke for 20 minutes. But that's when the dog was still with us. He ran out while I spoke. I thought I'd beat him to the exit. But then a horn beeped outside. Real loudness, reeling me into sanity. Then I was in, and he was out. Poor fucking dog.

You're still here, and I'm still on this fucking cat. But right now, I inwardly snicker, because you don't know the plan. GAHHHH. Hm. The plan is to sneak back to the bathroom. You won't follow me in. I know it. When I get in there though. When I get in there though. When I get in there though. Mind looping. It does that sometimes, give it some air, just two fucking seconds, please. When I get in there, we'll continue where we left off, with me hanging from the cliff, singing the song that never ends, cramming pills into my mouth in between moves in a Me V ME!game of tic-tac-toe.

What do you say as I inwardly snicker? "No worries." Go fuck yourself.

Rashhhhhhhherrrrrrrrr mama

Insults form in the back of my throat and gather like mucus. I scrape as I clench my esophagus tight and growl. My head gets hot and it's not because I am wearing a hat.

"FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I am on top of my desk next to a computer pointing my finger at an asian male.

"YOU MOTHER FUCKERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AJH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!JKAW;DBFVAJKWBVAJKL;FBVJKEFBV"

Fall Break----Takin' it back

Windy black, ferocity impales. The fat, menacing head challenges with a big brain inside.


3 hour naps, thank god, neck SOAR but alas. The small talk withers to a zero, thank god, thank god. The 5 hour ride, he talks of the 5 hour ride and the 2 stops, no, maybe a 4 hour, 45 minute ride. Here I am, here I am. Library clutches my energy drink and I slam keys. Productivity pocket disguise sequence. Analogous to a Manhattan project laboratory surprise. The books stack up like hours, cram, cram, cram here it is. Miles Davis toots in the ear. He screeches I wince for beauty what else can I do? I sway like that rickety stool, ivory hands on these ebony keys. Funny how things change.

The isle of Manisfree

The trees are alive. The men up there are swinging, and diving, colliding and ‘whooping.’ Yes, the sounds they make are ‘whoop.’ Their essence is their sound, and the trees rock and crack, making more sounds. The trees are alive. God, where is that congo drum beat coming from? Where is that slow deep thing pounding away at my cochlea? God, where is it? I am in the trees.

I am in the trees swaying and swinging with the beasts, like so many others who come to Macondo to “do.” An easy down payment of $900.00 gets you this cool tanned boar-like experience. The experience attacks the soul like an animal. The California man, I am, comes to the jungle, plays with the monkeys, flings the dung, and owns the forest with my throat. The California veins I own pump adrenaline and dopamine through my brain during hours of this ecstatic exclaim. My civilized soul is brutally murdered, and I feel.

The culture made me an infirm, but in the trees I convalesce. I follow the tribal warriors, and they hit me, and teach me, and I believe they love me. And although we don’t share the same language, we share money. I share money, and we swing. All day, all night. Vines slap our faces as the ground rushes by and the air takes us safely through the growth.

And I go home to Wifey, my dear, and she cannot understand why I throw the plates, and she cannot understand why I pop my kids’ birthday balloon. But she must understand my howl, my Whitman YAWP, the transcendent oral lunge. She must understand and I must feel.

And the papers are served and my lunch is not. And the lawyers sneer and the children pout. But I rejoice because I return. Yates, I’ll leave you now as I return to the isle of Manisfree. I'll leave you not as I board my white watercraft, not as I order another glass on the boat, not while the people smile and dance, but as the ship crashes onto shore and I revoke my citizenship, accepting my kingship.

And then I’m there, and the tribal leader just barks and stares. Then one blow follows another across my face and he is primal. The skin on his arm stretches and shines, while he reaches back to strike again my visage. The sight is beautiful just as the trees, but bloody, broken, I am unwelcome here, dying on my knees. But I’ll stay hunched until my final breath, because the city slays men more cruelly than these god-like monkey men.

Pay Your Rent

A fresh sheet of white paper graced my front door this afternoon.
"PAY YOUR RENT, FARRELL!"
I sighed and pulled my hat off my head. Sighing again, I twisted the knob of gold and the door opened.
"Hey dude."
"Yo."
"You see the sign out front? You gonna pay rent?"
"Yea, I see the sign." In my fist was a wad of money; crisp, crisp bills. Fresh from the ATM.
"Here's your fuckin' money."
I threw the papers in the air and they swayed and spun. Radiated that freshly minted tang of dollar that follows from the press.
They hadn't all come to rest yet at the bottom of the stairs before I was at the top. I gazed down the staircase from my right eye and saw my roommate on his knees picking up the dollars.
"And I won't do it again! This is the last time you get any money from me you bastard!"
He looked confused. He squinted in disbelief up at me.
I slammed MY door shut. And blew the roof off MY house.