12.27.2013

Picaresque

Cousin Chazz ducked out of there. He dashed across the backyard, hurdling a Batman Big Wheel, juking a netted off trampoline. By the time he baseball slid under the pine trees, the truck had rumbled into the yard. Chazz commando crawled out to the pole line, needles all over his new underwear.

Hiram

the man stepped out of the dark. the lamplight shone over his overly thick brow, made of it a craggy promontory, and gave him the look of an iniquitous golem.

the man was called Hiram. he was younger than his face, and older than his soft small fingers reaching out, both hands from under his coat. hands slithering out, clasped the wrist of his guest in a quick precise manner; his movements were surgical, and his tiny eyes were so cold.

12.12.2013

Ms Garfield III

These exhibits
A through E
the detective says
are Ms Garfield's things

Ms Garfield II

The janitor was known 
To take pictures with his phone
During the lunches 
Ms Garfield attended

Ms Garfield

we ate beef tartare
in her green Mopar

11.29.2013

FLASH: The Beefy Gigolo

One of the many nicknames I've given this dog over his year and a half of life is the Beefy Gigolo. Look at that picture: he's a 1950's contract player for MGM, he'd look good as a cowboy or a gangster, but in real life he spends most of his time by the pool at some Hollywood hotel, where he sucks his gut in while hitting on starlets.


11.25.2013

PICS: November


REVIEW: Xbrick One

I'm writing most of this blog on my phone these days, so let's just do this 500 words at a time: 

XBOX One: Up until six months ago Microsoft had no problem bragging to advertisers that the Kinect camera was the next step in advertising; the machine was designed to feed ads to you, and then report your reactions to those ads. It's like how Facebook or Google advertise to you based on the data they have on you, that is if Google or Facebook had sold you a five hundred dollar machine, and also put your tv services, (those you already pay for, like Netflix and DirectTV), behind a new paywall of fifty dollars a year. The Kinect is the reason the machine is five hundred dollars; it is also the reason the Xbox One is underpowered compared to the competition's machine when it comes to running games. None of Microsoft's big games utilize the Kinect. So why would Microsoft force the Kinect onto every Xbox purchaser, (sort of like how Windows 8 has been forced on laptop purchasers)? To watch you watch ads. It might be understandable were Microsoft giving you the machine for free. They're not. I may be a rube, but I'm not a mark. The machine is an unfinished, underpowered dog. Don't do it.

11.16.2013

FLASH: Google Maps

When the Google Maps car, with all those cameras fixed to the roof, passed by, I waved. Google me. I'm there in my Levi's jacket, standing in the yard at 30 Mulberry Fields. Every day now I google 30 Mulberry. Every day I attend my image.
I like to imagine the elderly me tapping the chip in my head, and returning to this picture, that jacket. I feel satisfied with this daydream, of old Mulberry, and young me.
But I know my idle there on the lawn won't be forever; some year Google will pull another drive by, and erase me from their virtual world, this grandiose art installation they've made the earth.
And that fact has so obsessed me that I have taken to stalking the Google cars. I pick my spots. 
McDonalds isn't going away; I'm there by the dumpster in a grey hoodie. 
I'm there at the Chemlsford Walmart in snow pants. 
I'm at the crosswalk out front of a Route Nine liquor store, Worcester - columns of Heineken kegs unloaded behind me.
I am the ghost. I have a spread sheet of my haunts. One of these doppelgängers must survive me.

11.13.2013

PIC: Agamenticus


LIMTUCKY: Depot Despot

He had parked across from the Home Depot. Sitting in his truck, a bag of Taco Bell snug against his thigh. Diced tomatoes falling in his lap. 

Had he been serious about getting the job he would have held off the burritos until after he did the minimal inquiry of a job app, busting out of the depot for the congratulatory meal. But that charade -- no.

Hank was in truth today,

Wasn't it always a job? Looking for one, looking to keep one, sometimes to lose one. 


In all directions from his truck he saw store fronts: the Taco Bell, the KFC, Bed Bath and Beyond, a comic book shop; out his driver's side window he could make out a Radio Shack and a Pet Quarters just under the Burger King sign. This used to be a lake town. There were no stores here when he was a kid, just fishing holes.

These stores were for pond tourists. The pond isn't enough for them.

These dumb thoughts played the time while he ate his lunch. And after the foods, while daydreaming fishing trips, some he'd fished, some he'd invented wholly from the pictures of these others, was when he saw the daughter with her friends.

These were all boys that tagged along, all shorter than her, younger than her, keying cars, lighting her cigarettes, while she strolled from strip mall to strip mall, watching her phone for a sign.

Hank watched a long time. He hadn't meant to interrupt her, but they were coming the way of his truck, and it had been a long time since he had seen her; when they were close, he honked.

Once she recognized him she shooed her boys away. She went to his truck alone, pulling up out of the slouch she had been using to her full height taller than him.

"What are you doing?" She said to him.

"Spying on you."

"Funny."

"Yup."

"Seriously though."

"I had errands."

"Errands. Uh huh."

"What about you?, He said, "Why don't you go in the Home Depot. There always looking for pretty girls in there."

"I don't want a job."

She smiled. 

You coming over for Christmas?" Hank said. 

The girl, the young woman, looked off at her friends.

She said, "You know Jesus wasn't born on Christmas. Guess when he was born. September the eleventh."

-- This girl, this tall girl with the colors in her hair that made him think of the Stones, was his daughter. His girly, this thing that started nineteen years earlier when Hank had been nineteen, when he had married the daughter of the man who had first hired him to a job, (but not before impregnating her). 

"Are you hungry? You want some Taco Bell?"

"Okay."

He handed her the bag.

"You know you need a job." He said.

"Okay." She said again but different than the last, softening to him.

"What kind of --"

"Dad --", she interrupted him, "I gotta go."

"Christmas." He said.

"We'll see."


As he drove away he saw his daughter hand out burritos to her friends.

10.31.2013

LIMTUCKY: Valero

The Valero is full of crust. Old men in rancher jackets and green dungarees, wanting to smoke. No smoking inside the gas station. The gas station smells like cigarettes.
Truman says, "Oh here's a sight. Hammerin Hank. Where's yer hammer, Hank?"
"If it were up your ass, you'd know."
"Never heard that before."
-- Truman had a beard like a Quaker, red and some grey now, completely off-putting with no mustache to go with it.
"Hank, you know what my problem is with you? You think yer better than me. Admit it, you think yer better than me."
"I don't think I'm better'n you," Hank says. "My thoughts on me, what I am, wouldn't come into play were I to consider my dislike of you."
-- The old timers taking note now.
"You think yer smart?"
"This minute, talking with you, no, I don't think I'm smart."
-- Truman is looking around at a lot of old timers. Grasping for an out line, but cleverness was never his thing.

-- Hank turns around to leave. He doesn't hear the man again until he's in the parking lot.
 "Hank."
-- Now Truman is with him, gently, ever so gently, invading his space, his hand on Hank's arm.
"I could use an extra guy over at the pit, at least until the snow, and after, maybe."
"You keeping the pit open through the winter?"
"If there's business."
"Is there?"
"Probably not."
-- Hank thought about the man walking the cat. He considered telling Truman that he didn't have any other prospects. He thought how brave it would be to just admit it, especially to this guy. But living in truth had a limit. That limit was Truman. Some people weren't safe with honesty.
 "Too be honest, Truman, I got this other thing."

10.28.2013

HOTEL: Trade Winds

Been awhile, Rockland. A long while, October Rockland. Halloween? Maybe I'll go out as the ghost of my early twenties.

10.24.2013

LIMTUCKY: Double Wide

A fat man walking his cat on a leash.
"Look for yourself."
-- Hank looks through the screen.
Hank looks back at Mert, "Maybe he's walking through his truth."
-- Mert didn't follow. "Walking through truth?" 
He imagined man and cat walking through a wall of snot - ectoplasm was truth.
-- Mert had many cousins. Hank was one his own age. They could have been brothers, (there were those rumors about daddies). They were sometimes a team: Mert (thought he) drew bitches, Hank (thought he) was a tough guy, (Ironically they shared a distaste of former San Francisco 49rs free safety Merton Hanks; it wasn't that they disliked the 49rs per se, and neither thought himself a racist, but both regarded long necked black folk as mystical and uncanny. This is no non sequitur, it is a matter of their bond).

They had always been friends, now they were roomies as well, ever since Juanita sent Hank packing to the other side of the park, to Mert's double wide, (bequeathed to him by one of his alleged Pa's).
"When you say, walking with his truth, what does that mean?"
"Well, (and here, Hank thought over his answer), it just means being awake. Being awake to what you are in some fashion; to what you are in some way that allows you to do things such as leash your cat. There's a fine line between a free man and a slaving fucking poseur. You read me?"

Powdered vanilla creamer for the coffee. Blueberry bismarks. Sulfurous water. Chew. Menthol cigarettes.

"I think if the cat walker comes back by I'll go down and introduce myself."
"You do that," Hank says to him, "But I got to go."
"You working?"
"No. I'm looking. Maybe go to Home Depot, see what's what."
"If you worked at the Home Depot, what aisle would you choose?"
"The aisle would be mine alone?"
"You its master."
"Good question. I'd say tools. I wouldn't want some girl to get her dad the wrong lithium ion batteries. And I'd up-sell the Black and Deckers just for laughs."
"What's the worst aisle?"
"Lumber. All those warped boards."
"That's quite a metaphor, Hank."
"Yeah it is. I'm a regular Juice Newton."
"Hank?"
"Yuh?"
"I don't know if you're being sarcastic about Juice Newton."
"Neither do I. Perhaps living in my truth means admitting I don't know what I mean; maybe I feel nostalgic for the target of the joke I'm making even as I make it, and maybe, after saying the joke, I regret it, despite I don't know the target -- because, if it is meaningless, to speak lightly of another person's work, a stranger, well then, maybe we all are just a bunch of soulless turds."
"Hank."
"Yes?"
"You serious about getting this job?"
-- Hank lights another cig.
"Last night I was thinking about that kid got drunk and fell off the roof of the church."
"This again?"
"But Mert, who hasn't been drunk on the roof of the church?"
"I was last February."
"But this kid died. Why? A good kid! The reason can't be, no reason. No reason? God just folding his arms like a woman, shrugs, and says, No reason."
Booze.
Yes.
Yes.
Fine.
I'll see you later.

After Hank leaves, Mert calls over to Hank's trailer, and tells Hank's wife, Juanita, he can't see her today.

NOTES: On Football Stats and Narrative

Sports are fun. Sometimes they even fill up neat narratives as smoothly as if they were booked by wrestling promoters. But often times not. In these times, when say, your team is rostered with dirt bags, or (worse), chokers, one needs find a way to explain away the trolls. It's all a fascinating bit of cognitive dissonance. The question is: why do people need an excuse for supporting dirt bags. Throwing a football is beauty, just as Van Gogh's sunflowers and stars are; that one is art doesn't disqualify the shallower beauty as transcendent. Beauty is a universal country, all of us blind patriots.

When I was a boy my football heroes were just that, heroes. It was biblical, and Emmitt Smith was Jesus -- I can tell you I had the whole gimmick worked out as to why Emmitt Smith was better than Barry Sanders at running the football. I was no football atheist. I was a kid true believer. I admired this athlete. I attributed to this athlete qualities such as work ethic, perseverance, and heart; these attributes became far more important than the attributes that may have been lacking in him, and greater in others, in this case: elite athleticism. Cognitive dissonance, like me working the blue collar angle with Emmitt, is easy and uncomplicated, so long as the object of your affection does not fail the narrative you construct; in the case of Emmitt Smith, he never failed me other than to get old; the worst personality defect ever attributed to Emmitt Smith was that he had the mind of a businessman -- hardly transcendent, but not exactly Michael Jackson in a house full of kids. When fandom gets icky as in the Michael Jackson case, or when Jim Brown throws a woman out a window, or Lance Armstrong dopes, or the New England Patriots get into Spygate -- here is where the conspiracy theories come out, the "everyone was doing it",  or "people were out to get them", stories -- (perhaps you have a few friends who run this gimmick in defending their favored politician?) -- it is icky here because the person is now desperately defending indefensible behavior, or failure, and for what? It isn't necessary to defend joy you have already felt, so what is it you are defending? The answer is injured tribalism. Had Emmitt Smith pissed positive for steroids, it would have done a number to my blue collar romanticism over his work ethic, and my identification as a fan of everything Dallas Cowboys. If you made Barack Obama your savior, and it turns out he is merely mortal, you might have a time reconciling it, or you could just say: "Election night in that field was a great night.".

Tom Brady is clutch, except he is and he isn't, which is to say, he is a an elite quarterback at not making mistakes, just not as magical as he seemed ten years ago, when he won three super bowls, and his first eleven playoff games -- Brady is like a poker player that went on a ridiculous run of cards, and given how hot the cards were running, he did everything right; and since then, however those cards are running, he manages those cards beautifully, just not magically. But grown men will argue with me that he is magical, a gridiron Gandalf, full of wonders. Because the cognitive dissonance of fandom tells these fans that the three championships Tom Brady won by three points were won via "the Patriot Way", whereas when the super bowl he lost by four points comes up, they remember every single call that didn't go their way.  Eli Manning's transcendance was fluky and against the rules. 
I won't disagree with Pats fans about the helmet catch, just that it is no more unfair or fluky than the tuck rule. The truth of Tom Brady is that he is great, and also his career, in regards to the magic of how it started, regressed to the median -- it was a market correction, even as the player himself became better than the player he was when he won his titles.

Ahh the wonders of sabermetrics. Sabermetrics are the new stats. Stats devised by MIT eggheads and the like to more accurately, more scientifically, assess, and predict excellence in sports. Nouveau stat lines for the degenerate gambler and sports atheist, wherein the athletic achievement is no longer sappy narrative, but some kind of obsessive modern autistic math game. Simplest explanation: better stats for calculating individual greatness inside a team sport; take all the grit, and clutch, and heart away; who performs the best in the theoretical vacuum introduced by these shiny better stats? This is the world all the Madden kids, (like me), have grown up into with our childish sports fantasies.

10.01.2013

FLASH: Cold Open

Right is right. All day he'd been thinking this until the words had lost meaning but gained power, become a chant, grown a melody. Right is right. Right is right. Right is right, he thought as he stopped in the middle of the dirt road and tried to remember how he had been wronged.

9.30.2013

POEM: Vague Vin

he knew the girl we asked about
and answered with queer platitudes:

She were a freight train in the night
She were a sight
she were a curse
comfort werent her thing
dressed up like a nurse

he talked to himself:

a devil a dragon
a tiger back a'wagon
a chickadee with one bad wing
shes a waitress 
a bee sting
a tiger in the jungle
smells of apple crumble.

He says she always proclaiming herself:

ima queen ima pixie queen
ima wear a hat sunday afternoon
ima daddys girl im everything mean
im my own little world my daddy the moon

(1oct13)

he knew this girl
We asked about her
all he had were platitudes:

She were a freight train in the night
She were a sight
she were a curse
comfort werent her thing
when she dressed up like a nurse

What she were
he talked himself into:
a devil a dragon
a tiger back a'wagon
a chickadee with one bad wing 
a bee sting
a tiger in the jungle
a waitress smells of apple crumble.

He says she one whats always telling you what she is:
ima queen ima pixie queen
ima girl wearing a hat sunday afternoon
ima my daddys girl
ima everything mean
ima my own little world
my daddy the moon

(30sep13 #2)


Says he knew this girl
We asked for details
all he had were platitudes:

She were a freight train in the night
She were a sight, she were a curse;
comfort werent her thing
when she dressed up as a nurse

What she were
he talked himself into:
a devil a dragon
a tiger back a'wagon
a chickadee with one bad wing
a jungle a bee a sting
a waitress smells of apple crumble.

He says she one of these whats always telling you what she is:
ima queen ima pixie queen
ima girl wearing a hat sunday afternoon
ima my daddys girl
ima everything mean
ima my own little world
my daddy the moon
                                         
30sep13 (phone)



9.29.2013

OLDPROSE: Henny Newton

In those days Henny Newton traveled with a lot of heels, all kinds of phoney intellectuals, drug dealers, poets, porno actresses -- feasters.  There was this Count Olof who would brag to me about one million acres in Romania, then borrow five dollars to buy a Cola Roba.  It was a big tour; all after-party, no show.  But see, with Henny, I'll give the kid credit for vision: he was biding his time, he knew something was coming.  Because here was this other count, or duke, or something, but importantly he was Russian, not Romanian, and with him Russian money cloudied Henny's way.  They wanted Afghan pictures.  A trilogy, with the first to take place on the Silk Road, the second to resume the story with the Russians fighting the Taliban, and of this second movie Henny should really do it Gunga Din style, because the third movie would be a tragedy on Marines stomping towels, not nearly as fun-loving as the Spetsnaz.  These Russians were looking to get PMC contracts for Afganistan -- Maggie, these oil barons wanted to be poppy barons -- they wanted the USA to sell them back the right to waste ordinance in Toar, Boar, and Loar, and Henny would be their sonneteer and heavyweight annunciator.  They wanted to burn bullets, and pick poppies.

9.23.2013

RATHISTORY: Presidential Historian


Professional hobbyist and amateur historian Al Muskrat Jr. thinks the 'Merica would have been better had G. Washington become king.  Below are his highly negative opinions on some of our greatest presidents.

PICS: Isle of Crete


9.12.2013

FLASH: Steak House Waitress Cuckold

1 one of those ideas. not a story alone. an event. I imagine this while eating my supper. the note i take to remind myself is:
'roider rages over guy making eyes at his waitress in a chain steak house. saugus.'

I imagine this bulky dude. a juiced up dude who looks to effort getting steroids more so than lifting weights. he's in a steak house with fake animals on the wall. he's with his gym rat friends. all order the same thing: well done sirloin, double broccoli. 
the waitress is cute. friendly. cute. great smile. but something is up with her. bulky dude notices every time she comes by -- to refill diet soda, to up-sell sides -- she's looking over his shoulder rather than in his eyes. Bulk looks behind him, spots a frowzy little dude wearing a scarf. and Bulky realizes his waitress has not given him his just due as a customer, nor as a man. he's been cuckolded by a scarf.

when she brings him the wrong soda he f-bombs his friends. they are confused.

8.19.2013

GYPSY: 58 Atomic Boogie Hour 80

Tennessee.  Mississippi. Doing the once-over twice.  Back in '52 an engineer named Sam fancies himself a record producer.  In '46 a boy named Danny moves from Tupelo to Memphis.  In '67 a star wants to be born, and her name is Leigh Bullington.

8.15.2013

MERCANTILE: Tapo Meru/Sind

tapo meru

after days of nothing but hills of sand, the black trees appear on the horizon. 
they will always be the horizon. they are the highway of Tapo Meru.  
an orchard of gargantua speared deep into the sand.
the Arboretum Infelix.

8.13.2013

BIT: Shitheel Dialogue

brring
-- What up
-- Dude, the 57 year old you is guarding the water fountain at Target.
-- What are you doing at Target?
-- Getting Timothy a present for his Guncles.
-- What's this now?
-- Susan's gay uncles just got married in Vermont. She's bringing the kids up there for the weekend. But I got out of going. Told her we're doing Chuck's intervention.

8.02.2013

ON: Watching Wrestling

If you didn't love wrestling when you were nine years old, you probably won't get it after. When I was nine years old Vince McMahon's WWF ruled the wrestling business, and had done so by selling saturday morning wrestling, with Hulksters, and Ultimate Warriors, and crazy barbers, and dudes with pet snakes, and all the other cartoons, to nine year olds like I was in 1987.  By the time I was twelve I was over it. Other interests, other delivery systems for stories came along -- wrestling just didn't seem cool anymore.

7.27.2013

REPOST: Something Wicked This Way Comers

The story goes Tolkien read Macbeth as a boy, (as an English boy, at the turn of the century, they all did I would guess), and he was taken with it: his imagination sparked by the Weyard Sisters' prediction that until Birnam Wood comes up high Dunsinane Hill, Macbeth is safe.  Tolkien was sorely disappointed at it's fruition: ten thousand camouflaged men moving through the forest and up the hill to the castle appeared, to Macbeth's servants, as a moving forest.  It's a killer visual, a showman's move; I'm not sure Brian DePalma meant consciously to use it in Scarface, but there they are, on Tony Montana's security feeds, the boys come to finally do in a thug climbed too high, (Macbeth could have been subtitled, The World Is Yours).  The greatest swipe version is Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, a perfect film climax, (and I mean one of possibly five perfect film climaxes I have ever seen); only the man who made Rashomon could have swayed the forest this way, (and Mifune's Macbeth, the best).  It is, again, so beautiful a set-up, one can get sick fantasizing about Shakespeare as a filmmaker.  
So why would Tolkien carry a lifelong bitterness over Macbeth?  Because he wanted the trees to walk on the castle, to come to life.  Weren't those witches after all?  Even a floundering appearance by Hecate the dark goddess!  There were ghosts, (and not the first time!), in the play.  So why not pay off, and bring a great and angry forest alive, at the witching hour, to revenge a villain for his crimes?  
-- Of course Tolkien did his rewrite some forty years later, when Treebeard and the Ents march on Orthanc to capture and punish Saruman.  Saruman gets away where Macbeth does not, and suffers his punishment later.  This is not the only part of Macbeth Tolkien weaves into The Lord of the Rings; Galadriel's mirror predicts the future much like those Weyard Sisters, it is tricksy, it gives partial story: Macbeth is told no man of woman born can slay him, MacDuff was untimely ripped from his mother's womb; whereas in the case of the Lord of of Nazgul, who is himself considered unkillable by man, a woman and a hobbit cashier him.
-- Tolkien in letters seems snobbish about William Shakespeare.  His own creative work betrays the truth.  Tolkien was not just a professor of ancient languages, but considered at the time an elite linguist; he knew better than we what Shakespeare was, and maybe it depressed him; it clearly pissed him off.  I read somewhere, a theory by a younger professor who knew Tolkien, that Tolkien's bitterness over Shakespeare came out of that childhood disappointment of Birnam Wood not being Ents; in his honest moments Tolkien would speak of the stories and histories, those that later in life would become his great fantasy books, that were born in trenches, France 1914, World War I,  and made there for the purpose of righting a wrong: meant as a mythology for his own country, a true British mythology, rather than the emigrated French stories of King Arthur.  He never meant these stories to be The Lord of the Rings.  He meant only to fulfill his own emptiness.  And to get through some bad nights. 
-- So then. Shakespeare. Tolkien considered Shakespeare running off to London, writing plays, putting asses in seats, a waste of such talent.  Tolkien wished William Shakespeare to have stayed in the shire of Stratford.  Had Shakespeare even known what a novel was, (before likely coming across Don Quixote, already into his own career by then), and had he attempted just such a thing as staying in the country among the shirefolk,, writing, building, deepening a thousand page epic; had Shakespeare created one great universe, a Middle Earth peopled with Hamlets, Falstaffs, Rosalinds, Iagos, and Macbeths; had A Midsummer Nights Dream existed in the same world as Macbeth the way the Shire exists alongside Mordor, what kind of literature would we have now?  Tolkien took it upon himself to do what he felt Shakespeare should have.  But, alas, Tolkien was not Shakespeare.  Still, Lord of the Rings: not bad.


(originally posted july 2011)

7.05.2013

WORK: Lines With No Home

1. the double-wide trailer of my heart
2. an emulsifier of spirit
3. free spirited chicks trading with them some proper man

LIST: Dog Day Pod Set

Been awhile.  Trying to finish some writing.  Here's the playlist to finish it:
Tossin and Turnin -- Bobby Lewis
Wildwood Flower -- The Carter Family
Doin the Best I Can -- Elvis
Why Baby Why -- George Jones
Cocaine Blues -- Johnny Cash
Partyman -- Prince
Release Me -- Ray Price
Be My Baby -- The Ronettes
Carmelita -- Warren Zevon
When the Levee Breaks -- Led Zepelin
Keep a Knockin -- Little Richard
Sympathy for the Devil -- Stones

ON: The Book I Wrote 2.0 Wrasslin Book


(A version of this was posted in May of 2011)

6.29.2013

ROAD JOURNAL: Dick Cheney Trolls You

DICK
I forget now which year was the sweet springtime from Arabia to Biafra, but it was one of these last few that has slipped by.  All because of Twitter.
2.  Anyway, I was thinking: were I Dick Cheney, were I sitting around in 2003 figuring out how to maintain my power over the world even up to and despite my ousting via election in my home country, it would be a two-fold strategy:
a -- ARAB SPRINGS via TWITTER.  That's right, as any old pro wrestling booker will tell you, the people want to believe; for instance they would love to believe change comes from uprisings by the people, not by the incremental downdrafts of the powerful.  And, were I a Dick Cheney, (or fill in any dictatorial right-winger you like), I'd want the people to think that a decade of chaos caused by the military and intelligence agencies was actually due to a year or so of Twitter... because then, well, people get wit that.  But only if if we enact B.
b -- Give them there guy.  That's right, feed them, (in pro wrestling parlance), a babyface, a good guy -- because as I, (as Dick Cheney), knows, when this babyface gets into office, when this babyface gets the intelligence reports we gave the last hero, well, he'll do exactly what we need him to do, and, as Americans are stubborn folk, if they stand in a field for the guy, they'll excuse the guy for any decision he makes.. but this really only works so long as we mark these people out on the fact that their Twitter and their Facebook makes a difference..  These poor bastards will be so busy posting placards that make them feel good about their beliefs, that, before they know it, we'll have revolutions wherever we need them, and they'll be congratulating themselves for them, as if they had something to do with it besides for remarking on it.  Sweet victory.  And if they question for a minute, we'll throw them some cultural bone, something we all knew has been coming for twenty five years anyway, because when it comes to the people, nothing softens up their revolutionary belly like allowing them to clap each other on the back for evolution.
3. Okay, I was just trolling you up there.  The truth is, Facebook is a tool to keep you from revolution.  That itch you used to feel of changing things, well, hey, there's always a new placard to share from your favorite website.  Look, I'm not like you, I quite unashamedly love my world of Playstations, and NFL football, and so long as Apple will always allow me access to Blue Christmas by E Presley, I'm fat and happy.. but you, YOU! -- you, the would-be revolutionary -- what the fuck are you doing watching Jon Stewart?

6.12.2013

MLH: 1 Dead Cow Bounce At Little Indian 10

Perhaps this is the draft to an opening chapter.  Perhaps you've read about RR Beth's car crash before.

6.02.2013

BOOKS: Hamlet is The Son of Anarchy and Lion King

I watched the pilot episode of Sons of Anarchy from 2008; I don't know where the show goes beyond this episode, but one can guess.  As a pilot, a mission statement of what a show will be if it survives beyond it, this show intended to be Motorbike Hamlet.  I watched it to see just how Hamlet it is.  And it is.
+ Libraries are filled with writings about Hamlet; of language, parallel storylines, and the deeper meanings -- it is a holy text, (one would think the Writer carved it on stones at the top of a mountain).  So much of the text over all these years has masked the plot that SOA copies: a dude's dead dad started a motorcycle gang; presently the gang is at a moment of truth where it will either rise or fall down the food chain of tough guys, as the gang's new leader, (who had been second in command when the kid's dad was alive), knows well.
What I would guess comes next on this show is further muddied waters for this young protagonist as questions of his father's death arise, and he becomes suspicious that the new leader of the gang had something to do with it, (and, by the way, the new gang leader is dating the kid's mother); in stark relief the kid begins to see the leader no longer as a caring uncle reminding the kid he'll be king one day, but as a jealous second banana covetous of the juice, the crown, and the wife.

5.18.2013

FLASH: Drunken Poet of the Riverlands

This is Aram Steeds, who claims to be the Poet Laureate of Limtucky.  Below is an interview I conducted with him at his tent home behind the sandpit.

5.16.2013

HOTEL REVIEW: Cheektowaga Comfort Inn

This hotel is full of middle aged couples here to see Niagara Falls.  Caged chimps on the television behind me, ganging up, screeching little humans they seem.  I might have had too much water today, bottle after bottle of generic aqua vitae.  The water of life, yes; Niagara was the waters for which at least two generations of easterners chose as the starting point of their lives.  Honeymoon central now seems to be a take-two destination for mid-life crisis second, (or third), attempts at love, by the looks of the crowd.  Not so many nineteen-year old virgin brides here to bungalow for a day or two and watch the awesomeness of nature in those falls even as they make their first honeymoon entry into that other frightfully awesome natural game within the game of life, that being first sex with the new hubbs, and, (if lucky), rushing together within the act, losing all identity, and figuring out just what IT is all about.

Too much bottled water, and so it is an accidental and unfortunate detox, the waters rushing through me, diligently sloshing me.
Another lost day to come while people bigger than me decide whether to pay for work.  Another day of niagara bettys and berts, of going to the best supermarket in the world, Wegmans, for zuccini and eggs and kraut; another night of plugging in to laptop, and audiobook, and digital book, and blog, and screenplay program, and drawing tablet; and maybe one of these days some engineer will explain to the money how his computer program couldn't explain to him the obvious signs of the water table, and how ultimately to dig down seven feet now costs double; maybe after the mobilization of heavy equipment, rebar, and labor, maybe we can get a day of work done out here.  But I doubt it.  It's never that easy.  Not with water.

Is life a circle?  I hope it is a river.  But I fear it is a plastic bottle of wa.

5.05.2013

CHAZZ: Rumford Is For Lovers

+ Rumford, Maine was settled in 1782 by a gaggle of dopes out of Shrewsbury, Mass who ran up north as conscientious objectors of the Revolutionary War.  While Rumford has moved on from the fact that these cowardly coats loved their king, there are other bad Shrewsbury habits that have been passed on even up to today's generation of Rumfordians -- for instance: Rumford is the birthplace of the horrific Maine accent, an accent I can only describe as, "Mark Wahlberg ate a jar of paste".

4.22.2013

STORY: I Live On A Spaceship


*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
Lines of pale people snaking around the concourse.  Beyond the rampart they amble in the bulky suits they have purchased.  Fog, fog, fog.
You are watching Episode 8: 
"The Day They Put Us On The Spaceship"

JOURNAL: Fuck Star Wars

In conversation a week ago this kid bemoaned the fact that Disney is planning about seventeen new Star Wars movies.  This kid was upset that Disney appears to be maximizing the possible profit on their massive investment, because, as this kid believed, this would result in watered down product.
I said something like, "Who cares?  Star Wars isn't good."
"Phantom Menace, exactly."
"Not Phantom Menace.  Star Wars.  It's not good.  It never has been good.  And it has always been about selling merch."
"But Star Wars is the most influential film of our lifetimes."
"That's like when a Bin Laden is named Person of the Year.  It's not celebratory, it's proof of our demise.  Star Wars made three generations think vapid robot movies are deep mythology; it's like when some kid starts watching porn at age 13, and blows out his still developing brain to where he is incapable of appreciating true beauty or eroticism: he can't get hot over a little stocking because his brain only registers fake boobs and bumholes."
+ And that is what Star Wars is: fake boobs and bumholes.
+ It feels like a culture where others' juvenilia have been made monolithic: where Justin Timberlake is a genius, and Drive is a great movie; where Walking Dead warrants Shroud of Turin levels of anthropologic study.  I wonder if this all started with Star Wars having been hoisted on us as a great movie.  As if Star Wars had depth.  
+ Star Wars Nerd quote: Chicken nuggets drowned in barbecue sauce is the greatest food of the century.  
+ Stop mythologizing porn, and read some poetry.

4.07.2013

CHAZZ: Hiram Is A Den of Iniquity

So gone to seed are the lascivious residents of Hiram that Father Rusty Steeds has proclaimed their souls lost to Satan -- from the Castine Columbian Gazette 1808

4.04.2013

RAT: Vote Muskrat in 2013!!!

Al Muskrat Jr. has thrown his mullet in the ring as a candidate for mayor in East Dinksborough.  Below are the leaked bullet points from his campaign pamphlet.

4.01.2013

SMILOS: No Be Friends With Hipsters

This is Chazz's great-uncle Smilos who came over here from the island of Mypos in the 50's.  Having recently retired from driving the bus down to Foxwoods, he's a new addition to our pantheon of bloggers.  Today he uses his life's experience to warn against befriending hipsters.

3.27.2013

FLASH: Diesel Can Love

Town full of monsters.  Murder eyes, chewin on a hot dog.
I tried to save a girl.  I did all.  She gave it back.  
At the Valero her man takes a poke at me, I pour a diesel can on his head; more a symbolic gesture lighting the matches.
I had a way out for her, with or without me she could go.  Pick whatever she wanted off the floor of that trailer to take with her.  I had a new town, an apartment, and a job for her way up where she could eat her cheese and crackers by the ocean.  She stayed put.  She never spoke to me again.  Her man showed my love letters to everyone at the Valero.  This hurts the worst as diesel at the Citgo is eight cents high.  Always.  

3.20.2013

FRAG: Open to Horror Movie 11-281


The rolling pine hills of northern Maine.  Aroostook.  Trees and trees and trees and a lake.  A little village around the lake, and then some trees, and one high mountain lording over it.  THE MOUNTAIN: is that a stone tower?  CLOSER.  Yes, like something out of Skyrim, or Castle Crag; but more intriguing: built around this ancient stone tower is an ultra-modern mansion, all glass and steel..
CUT TO: Standing on one of the high porches of this construct is a doofus white character with thick prescription glasses.  He's drinking a can of beer, and puffing a joint.
The sun is setting just for him.  But he isn't all that happy about it.  All goes dark and shadowy around him.
+ As the sun sets we descend to the village and the lake.  Villagers, who look like lumberjacks, get panicky.  It's the opening to The Wizard of Oz.  But no tornado.  You've never seen weather so peaceful.  Christ, it's nearly summer, and these hicks are running for their lives.
+ As things get dark, one little boy peeks through the window of his house..
+ The mountain is a silhouette.  The castle atop it is lit up for a holiday.  Then.. THEN.. the shadows come running down the mountain when she comes.
Shadows like dogs, or as Shakey said, Let slip the dogs of war! --
+ Shadow dogs howling, baying, in the lack of moonlight... Like smudges of black out of a Rembrandt they ski down the brown of the mountain, these Fenris-shapes.

3.14.2013

FLASH: Freaks and Leeks

He's sore at you.  Tilma says.
She sniffs the beets.
I said what I said.
Oh, you're honest.  She says.
Put the beets in a bag.  He says.
What did you say to him?
I said he deserves to be alone.
God.  Come on.  Be honest when you have something to gain.  Lie when there's something to gain.  When there's shit to lose, keep your mouth shut.  Who doesn't know this?
She scratches the skin of a leek with the nail of her pinky.
Can't you help yourself?  Are you a child?  Tilma asks. 
He puts space between them.  He turns and counts shallots. She fake laughs, too loud.
Her name is Tilma.  She loves vegetables, and making a scene.
The discomfort you feel with my volume, that's some straight-up narcissism.  He hears Tilma say.

3.10.2013

CHAZZ: Shapleigh's Tribunal of Nanas

Last month Cousin Chazz posted his first dispatch from his travels across the state of Maine while hiding out from various authorities.  It was called KEZAR FALLS IS MAGIC, and can be read HERE.
He's back this month with a story on the unique traditions of marriage and governance still followed in Shapleigh.  

2.22.2013

JOURNAL: Gay Sam @ Taco Bell -- A Great American Novel

What a dinge town.
there.  that's the opening line of the book I've decided to write just now.
I don't mean now-now, but that this is the moment I decided I would.