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.
12.27.2013
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.
12.21.2013
12.12.2013
Ms Garfield II
11.29.2013
FLASH: The Beefy Gigolo
11.25.2013
REVIEW: Xbrick One
11.16.2013
FLASH: Google Maps
11.13.2013
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
10.28.2013
10.24.2013
LIMTUCKY: Double Wide
NOTES: On Football Stats and Narrative
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.
10.09.2013
10.01.2013
FLASH: Cold Open
9.30.2013
POEM: Vague Vin
she were a curse
shes a waitress
a tiger in the jungle
(1oct13)
(30sep13 #2)
30sep13 (phone)
9.29.2013
OLDPROSE: Henny Newton
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.
9.19.2013
9.12.2013
FLASH: Steak House Waitress Cuckold
'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.
8.29.2013
8.19.2013
GYPSY: 58 Atomic Boogie Hour 80
8.16.2013
8.15.2013
MERCANTILE: Tapo Meru/Sind
the Arboretum Infelix.
8.13.2013
BIT: Shitheel Dialogue
8.02.2013
ON: Watching Wrestling
7.28.2013
7.27.2013
REPOST: Something Wicked This Way Comers
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)
7.22.2013
7.05.2013
WORK: Lines With No Home
2. an emulsifier of spirit
3. free spirited chicks trading with them some proper man
LIST: Dog Day Pod Set
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
6.29.2013
ROAD JOURNAL: Dick Cheney Trolls You
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?
6.26.2013
6.20.2013
6.16.2013
6.12.2013
MLH: 1 Dead Cow Bounce At Little Indian 10
6.02.2013
BOOKS: Hamlet is The Son of Anarchy and Lion King
+ 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.
5.22.2013
5.18.2013
FLASH: Drunken Poet of the Riverlands
5.16.2013
HOTEL REVIEW: Cheektowaga Comfort Inn
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.
5.12.2013
5.05.2013
CHAZZ: Rumford Is For Lovers
5.01.2013
4.22.2013
STORY: I Live On A Spaceship
JOURNAL: Fuck Star Wars
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.
4.19.2013
4.07.2013
CHAZZ: Hiram Is A Den of Iniquity
4.04.2013
RAT: Vote Muskrat in 2013!!!
4.01.2013
SMILOS: No Be Friends With Hipsters
3.27.2013
FLASH: Diesel Can Love
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.
3.17.2013
3.14.2013
FLASH: Freaks and Leeks
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.