Anorexics Love To Eat

Life is not the only thing worth living for

2011-08-12T00:10:00.005-04:00

I think the most important thing in life is to party, but not to have fun because those are two different things. Lana and I were standing on a deck.

“My dad’s girlfriend wants our band to fail,” I said. “Now we have to succeed just to spite her.”

“No we don’t. Your dad’s girlfriend is actually really nice once you get to know her.”

“You know her?”

“I did. Five years ago. I don’t think anyone has since then. She started a band and wrote really eclectic music that drove her insane. I have picture of her playing a drum.”

When you’re standing on a deck near a street look inside the cars. You’ll see people. Immediately stop looking; it was just a mirage or one of those half-asleep thoughts. You stopped just in time. Keep playing these games until your band takes off, then accept the mantle of rock stardom and write important music. But your band won’t take off because

For me playing Magic: The Gathering is about exploring new worlds, like doing drugs and getting addicted and exploring alleys.

“I once gave Magic cards to a kid and he was like ‘I don’t play Magic anymore!’ and his voice was really bitter and that was when I first realized I project an outer self that others judge, so I hit him with a jug.”

“It’s okay, I accepted in 5th grade that people are products of their circumstances and don’t do cruel things on purpose. I don’t accept it now though; I just blame myself, but since the self cant be isolated to a single entity I'm on shaky philosophical ground so I generally just let it go.”

I never have fun at parties, but I understand their importance in getting people to stand on decks and notice how nice decks are and buy one for their own home even if they don’t need them.

“When you’re playing guitar do you ever pretend God is watching you?”

“I see someone human, not eternal. I don’t like being watched by someone who can see my corpse. Looking at corpses is almost pornographic, but not quite so I let it go since I’m a moral absolutist.”

I was depressed so I sat down. It was the kind of lawn chair you could sit on and pretend you were running from the police or being the police or being a rogue detective who isn’t on the side of the police or the criminals: the kind that is the size and shape of an alley from a police film.,

“Someday I’ll get better at being confident in myself playing guitar,” I said. “And things will be like they were before.”

“I don’t know, at some point we have to move on. We can’t keep watching that dog run on the treadmill forever. At some point the dogs legs will fall off or he’ll get tired or bored.”

“I don’t mean watching the dog. I mean being happy.”:

The Swimmer

2011-06-16T20:39:00.003-04:00

“This is what you wrote on my swimming instructor evaluation form,” Lana said. “’I’m alone and afraid, please help.’ I know I’m your only friend and you idealize me, but knowing something and seeing it on a swimming instructor evaluation form are two different things.”

“Sorry. It was the drugs letting me talk.”

“I hope by ‘drugs’ you mean steroids.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You guess what, that you mean steroids or that I hope you mean steroids or that hope even exists?”

We parked a couple blocks from the YMCA in a lot hemmed in by white buildings and chain-link fence. All day parking was whatever you could afford – for a poor man, $5; for a rich man, a machine that shrinks camels and spits them through the eye of a needle. As we neared the pool I felt anxious. Maybe it was the acid. Or maybe it was the place itself. We passed faded wood signs, bright pink banners, battered sandwich boards, glowing neon lights. Girls in bikinis, guys in shorts and bikinis. Slick tans. Gray faces. No sign of life.

“There should be a separate hell for boring people.” Lana said. “It’d be a room with my swimming instructor bar exam in it. They’d have to work on it all day, even though they’d rather be eating or watching a movie or breathing because the air would be sawdust. Honestly though, the torture isn’t important; I just want to keep boring people out of regular-people hell.”

“You mean the realization that the world will end in 50 years, and unless you adopt a healthy lifestyle you’ll miss it?” I said.

The first glimpse of a pool is terrifying. The longer you’ve been away, the more it grows. The more it grows, the more you shrink. The lens of chlorine, tracing earth’s finitude, makes you feel puny, like a bug on the toe of a dinosaur. I couldn’t see the pool yet, but it saw me and was smiling. The air was heavy and weightless, bodacious and without any mass.

“I don’t hate Eskimos because I’m racist,” Lana said. “I hate them because I’m evil. There’s a difference. A lot of good people are racist, like Archie Bunker or Mel Gibson.”

Why go to the pool? Everything is supposed to be better there - sex, drugs, even books. Also, they say, it’s serene, an enema for the mind. Stare at the diving board, that glassy plane of nowhere, and your thoughts disperse. And while you’re there, the party line goes, get molested. You haven’t relaxed unless you can prove it physically with a piece of paper explaining a lawsuit.

Lana and I had been friends for eight years. She knew me better than anyone. She also knew swimming. She’d been doing it on and off since high school. Once she swam less than five minutes after eating. She said all the evil in her body turned to water, so she tried to shake it off. “On the DANCE FLOOR?” I texted back. She didn’t answer.

"One time while cyberswimming my deck exploded," Lana said. "My head crumpled like a napkin. It took me ten years to learn how to learn again."

People! People everywhere. A mass exodus of people, scrabbling for the pool like chumtoads. It looked like a hidden cutscene you can only access by unlocking everything in a video game about swimming. My hobbies when not swimming are looking at things that aren't girls' eyes and Extreme Anything (that isn't looking at girls' eyes).

“I wasn’t born with an ounce of swimming talent,” A swimming professional said. “I just swam my ass off every day. But that didn’t work either, so I took these steroids.” He held up some steroids. “They have side effects.”

“Unquestionably unconstitutional,” the cashier said. “You’re banned from my poolside snack bar forever.” He turned out the lights, walked around the counter, past the register, through the prep area, and into the kitchen. On the floor, next to the grill, was a hose, black, with an l_shaped chrome nozzle, attached to a metal block with a red switch. He bent down and hit the switch. The pump juddered to life with an electric roar.

… And maybe tonight. Maybe tonight you’ll be gone.

There was a hollow slurp as the last oil was sucked from the grease trap. He stared down at the nozzle, thinking about the swimmer and his story.

If it bleeds we can kill it

2011-05-24T02:18:00.005-04:00

Puns are the lowest form of humor which is why Shakespeare was the Carrot Top of his day. I'm sitting in a car waiting for someone to come back with drugs and reading the Shakespeare play that Carrot Top's name and stage persona and prop comedy is based on - Chairman of the Bard - and going through drug withdrawals.

Reading helps my anxiety. Anxiety is rooted in real-world fears so it's good to read about things with no real-world referent like love and compassion. Anxiety is also caused by insomnia. I wish I were a vampire since they don't have sleep problems. Last night I was up all night thinking about a story about VHS tapes. Vampires never have this problem because they don't write: they've been around long enough know words are futile. I don't write either - the writer being dead because of Roland Barthes - but I want to and desire is my weakness.

I put down the play in disgust. Shakespeare is at worst Satan. Everything decays; thinking one can make a lasting document of the humor of Carrot Top is pure egotism.

To buy I drugs I took out two mortgages - one on my blood and one on my future. If I default, a repo truck arrives at my 29th birthday party. A repo person climbs out and grabs the cake with a pair of ice tongs, revealing a sinkhole that the things that will replace my existence shoot out of: trees, air and sections of walls.

"You're a whore." I tell her.

"Why?"

"I want to tell my friend he's a whore but he's not here so I'm telling him by proxy. Anyone with an IT job, a girlfriend, enough money to live comfortably - who still feels some non-specific malaise - that's their conscience telling them they're a whore. I have a soul sometimes, just not my own."

The repo person cries. Lana turns to Ari.

"What's that person doing?"

"Her or his job."

If I don't default, the birthday goes fine. I open my presents and blow out the candles. I want to wish for a magic amulet, one that will grant me infinite powers, even though due to karma it will cause my soul pain and suffering in a later life. But then I realize I already made that wish in a previous life. So I wish for a horse. Not a pony because ponies are for girls or homosexuals.

Some addicts I know hate looking at clocks. They're idiots. Clocks are the most important instruments in the world; they verify that time is working properly. People who hate clocks probably hate stepometers and gauges on planes. They probably hate the display on Coke machines that says "Vending." Probably hate their own pulse ... No wonder carrot top is unpopular; no wonder we have culmination theory, like Red Box and think peeves are our pets and not vice-versa.

There is not a crate big enough to throw at all the people who need a crate thrown at them tonight. (Turn to page 56)

Friendship is still there when you turn out the lights, like a skull that glows in the dark. (Turn to page 82)

Heroin. (Stare at page for 6 hours, then read again)

Click here for less information

2011-05-10T01:01:00.005-04:00

I associate all people with a person named O. O is the essence of everything I hate about her or him. She or he really badly hurt myself (reflexive pronoun intentional since I realized on acid that I’m God and therefore the agent of all actions). The beekeeper at the podium spoke:

“Ever since a man in a bathrobe described Mos Eisley as ‘a wretched hive of scum and villainy’ ‘hive’ has been a pejorative. The loss of revenue to beekeepers has cancelled our proposed beehive prison where paraphiliacs are detained by forcefields made of honey.”

“This is so much better than last year,” Lana said. “I’m so … what’s the opposite of sadness?”

“Denial,” I said – I was sad because my entry in the Beekeeping convention flier cover art contest – a tuxedoed bird standing next to an old mattress spitting springs at some bees and the bird – was rejected because I misspelled my name on the raum-nuff [intranslatable: closest is “Snowman”]. Earlier that day I had written “I felt like a van covered with bumper stickers no one could read” as a lead-in to my review of the HoneyMaster 30 beehive. There was a time when the buzz of bees set to music made pictures dance in my head, but standing in the bank line, beehivereviews.com check in hand, I realized I was an O, turning phrases about beehives like a hooker turns tricks.

A school bus filled with people in lab coats pulled into the parking lot. “Judges,” the person next to us said. “We’re trapped in dreamspace pending a perfect 10 on our performance as convention-goers.”

“What do they evaluate you on?”

“You is a sexist pronoun because it refers to me as a separate entity from the hive and therefore a male because the hive is a matriarchy.”

“The queen is just a figurehead. The real decisions are made by the springs in her mattress. Their tensions control the alignment of her spine, determining the cerebrospinal fluid level in her brain: too little and she dies; too much and she gets executive functioning disorder and declares war on beings of inexistent colors whose atoms spin counterclockwise.”

Everyone goes outside; the person stays seated.

“Aren’t you going to see how you scored?”

“No point. Even if we got a ten, there are two other halls down the road that have to score a ten simultaneous. We’re no more winners than an scientist can measure the thickness brown adds to a TV screen.”

Lana points a gun at the person. “Go! It’s all you have!”

[1] <---------------------------> [2]

Until Honey on Demand goes live, honey is only available in packets at the McDonalds drive-thru. The unmediated space between the two windows is the closest thing drive-thru customers have to freedom I feel myself drifting farther and farther from reality; a few more feet and I’ll be somewhere in the wall between the manager’s office and the crew room, the one the lockers are on.

“I’m getting adopted by a refrigerator mother for my egodystonic neurotypicality.”

“Aren’t you a little old?”

“According to physicist Bill Cosby, parenthood is nonlinear.”

The lab was abandoned after the test. McDonalds’ scientists thought they could eliminate inter-window space by mashing the windows together like lesbian cunts. It worked, but the cashier and presenter discovered they had magic rings that when touched grant eternal happiness to every person ever, a process that takes longer than the test allowed.

Date Gun

2011-04-26T09:03:00.001-04:00

It’s a brick tenement, three stories, with a lighted archway over the entrance. A cloud of moths circles the bulb like drunken atom trying to hold itself together. I find the button and press it. It takes most of my thumb strength. It’s the grimiest one on the panel and feels like it hasn’t been pressed in a long time.

I wait.

Drug week was a huge success. Real(I)ty flattened out like a movie through 2D glasses ... Ernest Hemingway is the Ernest Hemingway of torture porn in this reality. He was molested as a child and writes torture porn because the body is a perfectly good dying machine ruined by eating and drinking but mainly as a form of self-therapy. Fatherhood. "How do you know it's for me?" I said to the cashier, at which point she continued laughing.

But I didn't care. But the important thing to remember is shadows shuffling, whispering.

Scientists in charge of studying the ocean and coming up with scientific names for those studies have discovered the nineties are hiding in a trench in the Atlantic, and while they aren’t sure how the nineties got there or what to name the committee they plan on putting in charge of not being sure, they are finding mounting evidence that the ocean is sick of the nineties, like everyone else, and in 50 years or so will vomit them onto the east coast in a disaster to end all disasters or at least the ones that have names.

"Pop quiz: How did France win World War II?"

"Airplanes?"

"Actually it was economic sanctions and a gun that makes people become overburdened with dates."

"Okay, so metaphorical airplanes made of sanctions and technology."

I know its face is in there somewhere, along with the explosion and the Sega Genesis game and the year book. Inside the physical warehouse of memory, wind-torn and salvaged in the postcard gleam of port cities and unmoved receivers, desolate of kindness and wanting the finite touch of wisdom to set it aloft. Lana got a tattoo. We can't dream of anything that we can't hold in our four hands until inhuman voices sedate us. The return address on the postcard read:

Six-Legged Deer
P.O. Box 11
Rome, GA, 30161

and corporate logos and infomercials ... blue lines killing the jagged red ones, which I sometimes pretended were high school bullies or people on the internet who attacked my posts about Kevin Smith movies with specious logic or strawmen. Someday I’d defeat those people and their falsified argumentations – just as soon as I got back in college and quit my fast food job, which was going to be any day now.

Road trip. we saw a nuclear power plant that I thought looked like a giant boob. I told this to Lana, who said I’d never seen a boob, which was true; my concept of boobs was mostly extrapolated from a drawing of one I solicited from a caricature artist at the last state fair I was allowed to attend.

I smiled a

but inside I was still kind of sad, and a little scared because I actually take radiation poisoning really seriously. Death might not be how we feel when we're alive. It’s probably like It’s a brick tenement, three stories, with a lighted archway over the entrance. A cloud of moths circles the bulb like drunken atom trying to hold itself together. I find the button and press it. It takes most of my thumb strength. It’s the grimiest one on the panel and feels like it hasn’t been pressed in a long time.

I wait.

Drug week was a huge success. Real(I)ty flattened out like a movie through 2D glasses ... Ernest Hemingway is the Ernest Hemingway of torture porn in this reality. He was molested as a child and writes torture porn because the body is a perfectly good dying machine ruined by eating and drinking but mainly as a form of self-therapy. Fatherhood. "How do you know it's for me?" I said to the cashier, at which point she continued laughing.

But I didn't care. But the important thing to remember is shadows shuffling, whispering.

Scientists in charge of studying the ocean and coming up with scientific names for those studies have discovered the nineties are hiding in a trench in the Atlantic, and while they aren’t sure how the nineties got there or what to name the committee they plan on putting in charge of not being sure, they are finding mounting evidence that the ocean is sick of the nineties, like everyone else, and in 50 years or so will vomit them onto the east coast in a disaster to end all disasters or at least the ones that have names.

"Pop quiz: How did France win World War II?"

"Airplanes?"

"Actually it was economic sanctions and a gun that makes people become overburdened with dates."

"Okay, so metaphorical airplanes made of sanctions and technology."

I know its face is in there somewhere, along with the explosion and the Sega Genesis game and the year book. Inside the physical warehouse of memory, wind-torn and salvaged in the postcard gleam of port cities and unmoved receivers, desolate of kindness and wanting the finite touch of wisdom to set it aloft. Lana got a tattoo. We can't dream of anything that we can't hold in our four hands until inhuman voices sedate us. The return address on the postcard read:

Six-Legged Deer
P.O. Box 11
Rome, GA, 30161

and corporate logos and infomercials ... blue lines killing the jagged red ones, which I sometimes pretended were high school bullies or people on the internet who attacked my posts about Kevin Smith movies with specious logic or strawmen. Someday I’d defeat those people and their falsified argumentations – just as soon as I got back in college and quit my fast food job, which was going to be any day now.

Road trip. we saw a nuclear power plant that I thought looked like a giant boob. I told this to Lana, who said I’d never seen a boob, which was true; my concept of boobs was mostly extrapolated from a drawing of one I solicited from a caricature artist at the last state fair I was allowed to attend.

I smiled a

but inside I was still kind of sad, and a little scared because I actually take radiation poisoning really seriously. Death might not be how we feel when we're alive. It's probably like delirium tremens or licking the vinyl off a couch or a really mediocre orgasm that takes forever. Until then, all I’m left with is the smell of this leather jacket and a book on how to beat a plethysmograph test.

Chairlift Repair

2011-04-25T00:28:00.002-04:00

A man was driving to a business meeting when he saw an abandoned ski area. He pulled over and walked up the hill. Halfway up the hill, he saw a gear and picked it up. When he got to the top of the hill, he pried the panel off the chairlift motor and inserted the gear. There were still several parts missing and the motor had no gas and was covered with rust. It was dark, so he walked into an abandoned shack and slept. The next morning he drove into town and sold all of his belongings except his car and clothing; using the money, he bought tools and parts and a year’s supply of food. He worked on the chairlift until sundown and then retired to the shack. This was how it went for several months. Then one day while replacing a gear in the motor, he cut himself badly, forcing him to return to town and check into the hospital. After a week of hospitalization, he returned to his work. A few more months passed. Slowly, he made progress on the chairlift; he fixed the motor and began refurbishing the chairs and restoring the pulley system. It was September and the nights were getting colder. He’d lie on the floor of the shack, swaddled in an old tarp. Shivering. One night, a bear entered the shack and began eating his food. He threw a wrench at the bear; it hit the bear’s leg. The bear grunted and kept eating. He banged a hammer against a pot. The noise scared the bear away. The next morning, he installed a deadbolt on the shack door. The bear never returned. He continued his work on the chairlift, attaching the restored seats to the cable and welding support struts to the towers. One day, his welding mask fell off and rolled down the hill. Too tired to retrieve it, he welded without it. The next day he had welder’s flash – his eyes itched and he saw white spots. He walked to a stream and splashed water in his eyes. This alleviated some of the itching, but he still couldn’t work for the rest of the day. That evening, he noticed that mice had eaten a substantial amount of his food. He had no money, so in order to buy more food he would have to get a job. He went into town the next day and applied for a job as janitor at a community center. The interviewer said he was overqualified and asked why he was applying for the job. He shrugged and said he didn’t know. The interviewer said he had two other applicants to interview and that he would call him back when he’d made his decision. He said he didn’t have a phone. The interviewer said that in that case he was not hirable because the community center needed a means of contacting its employees in the event that someone got sick and they needed to call in someone to cover their shift. The next place he applied was Wendy’s, but they weren’t hiring. It was almost dark, so he returned to the ski area. That night, he forgot to lock the shack door and a cougar came in and ate the rest of his food. The next day, while driving back into town, his car ran out of gas. He abandoned it and resumed his job search, applying at several department stores and a hardware store. One of the department stores hired him as manager after reading his administrative qualifications on his resume. He got an advance on his first paycheck and rented an apartment in town. The job was easy and paid well; after a few months he had enough money to buy a new set of tools. He made several friends at his new job, one of whom found the impound lot where his car had been towed. He called a cab and went to the impound lot and paid the fee, which he could easily afford. It was winter now and the mountain was covered with snow, making work on the chairlift impossible, so he spent his free time researching chairlifts on the internet and posting on chairlift forums. He chatted online with several chairlift experts and acquired some valuable tips. Using his employee discount, he bought a desk and office chair and office supplies from the department store and set up an office in his apartment in which he planned the remaining chairlift repairs. When spring finally came, he moved out of his apartment and back to the ski area. The chairlift was just as he’d left it, aside from some water damage to the motor which he quickly repaired. The chairlift was almost in working order: he just had to adjust the tension on the cables and call the state chairlift inspector to inspect it for safety. For the next few days he worked feverishly from dusk to dawn. He initially miscalculated the tension on the cables, but with the help of one of his online friends from the chairlift forum he was able to correct his error. The days were getting longer now, allowing him more time to work. At night, he’d build a fire outside the shack and watch chairlift repair videos on his portable TV. He had no reason to fear animals now because he had several guns and a hunting knife. After testing the strength of the cables and running several other miscellaneous tests, he called the inspector. The inspector came the next day and was very impressed. It only took him 20 minutes to pass the chairlift, awarding it a score of 78 out of 80. He said it was the best chairlift he’d ever seen and that the restoration was very impressive. After the inspector left, the man got on the chairlift and turned it on. It worked perfectly, taking him up the mountain, then down again. The chairlift repair was complete.

Arena

2011-04-01T00:40:00.003-04:00

The Arena was created by post-post-structuralists in an attempt to prove that language isn’t arbitrary. Upon entering, the combatant must say a word; they then have to fight a physical version of that word in a gladiatorial match. Words with anthropomorphic letters that can easily wield weapons should be avoided at all costs – t is generally considered the worst.

I said the least fearsome word I knew: “Be.” The uppercase ‘B’ is just a sideways ass and the lowercase ‘e’ a half-circle with a tail that it hops around on like a pogo sperm.

Unfortunately, I forget about the IPA pronunciation symbols, which despite their small size are vicious. I was defeated quickly.

“To be or not to be?” Be said as it stood over me holding a spear. “Isn’t that what your William Shakespeare said?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“What if I told you that Shakespeare was missing something? That there is something in between existence and inexistence, something which holds the key to the ultimate mystery of the universe.”

“Why anyone would willingly listen to System of a Down?”

“You don’t take me very seriously, do you?”

“Well come on, you’re Be for Christ’s sake. Quit talking shit like you’re Chris Jericho.”

“The words or the wrestler?”

Be stabbed me. When the pain began I didn’t think it was the spear wound; I just thought I had a different perspective that allowed me to see some fissure in the human experience. I realized that at the end of the Western road there is just a cat. A cat staring at you. Either judging or forgiving you. I knew I’d never write poetry again, since poetry is dancing with language, and the pain of spear wounds prevents one from dancing. Sometimes the most powerful artistic statement is none at all.

After recovering from the fight I became addicted to painkillers, but I overcame the addiction by listening to music. It became my anti-drug. But like all things that have the word “drug” in them, anti-drugs can be dangerous in large doses. After suffering a near-fatal case of rickets at a Marilyn Manson concert, I vowed to never abuse music again.

If you ever think of doing music, think of your friends and family. If, while trying to think of your friends and family in a darkened room where objects lose their scale and deep structures and smallheaded owls scuttle down an ugly cave of words in fractured sirloin cadences, you realize you don’t have any friends and family, read a book. But not one with the following words in it:

Shakespeare Invented Diseases all the Time

2011-03-22T23:31:00.002-04:00

June died in a plane crash. Her parents donated a large sum of money to her college so they’d name a classroom after her.

She became a room.

Lana and I took our seats. The Homicide Survivors Support Group meeting was about to begin.

“There are two types of people in the world,” I said. “People who hate the Beatles song ‘Hey Jude’ and people who honestly respect it as a brilliant piece of propaganda used by people named Jude to assert their hegemony over us.”

“You shouldn’t obsess over the Beatles,” Lana said. “Romanticizing rock stars is a good way to end up like them: rich and famous but stricken with an inexplicable rock-star malaise like Pink in Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Or just regular Pink in that song where she’s all mad at her critics.”

Lana got up and walked over to a door and opened it. We walked through the door and down a staircase into a room.

“This is the room when we first met,” Lana said. “Its name is July.”

Inside Lana’s head there’s a wooden bench I’ll never sit on, even though I bought it for her myself. Her friendship had saved me, but only for a short duration of time. Then it had exhausted the extent to which it could save me, rendering me no longer able to be saved.

Now I spend my days writing modernist femdom fiction under the name Ernest Femmingway and I also use that name for my protagonists and the titles of most of the stories to get the most mileage out of it – as a distraction: my real mission in life is to serve as a fleshy buffer between a sheet and a mattress as an empty paper-plate moon climbs down the sky.

I’ll explain what hallways are for. They’re a testing ground for a new type of swimming pool, one that can be installed in walls and ceilings, allowing you to swim up the sides of rooms, as opposed to just doing that in a dream. Another thing I dream about is the girl who I love but who doesn’t love me. I used to idealize her to the point where I’d capitalize ‘her’ when it referred to her. But after she said she didn’t love me I stopped capitalizing it and then began capitalizing the last two letters just to emphasize the decapitalization.

July is a mess: the walls have shaped out, the floor is strewn with the carcasses of rudder rats.

“This place is a swamp,” Lana said as she first met me. “And for that you can thank me. Most places are too perfect, but mine has just the right amount of perfection, which is none at all.”

We’d spent the rest of the day listening to Lana’s mix CD of an obscure Egyptian techno genre called "Imhostep." We’d regretted nothing. Everything. The next day I’d logged into Ebay and found I’d started several auctions for “Amazing Carpet Sample: Morphs into whatever you’re thinking.”

After the meeting, Lana and I walked home. There was something magical about the Genocide City skyline at night. Some vespertine quality that blossomed when the sun burnt out. Then it struck me: maybe we were the last; to dare great things, to look toward the heavens with a hunger for knowledge. Maybe we were the last - and maybe that meant nothing.

(Written as the janitor’s closet closes and I know I’ll never see another mop bucket for all eternity, which is only a small part of it.)

Pawn Shop

2011-03-16T13:53:00.001-04:00

Once there were a boy and girl who lived in a pawn shop and worked there. Their father ran the pawn shop and was a bad man who abused his children emotionally.

One day the boy decided that he’d had enough of his father’s abuse and devised a plan to kill him by creating a monster. The monster would appear to the father as though it were not simply a generic monster that kills people because it has to but rather a monster that had known him all his life and had been plotting his death since he was born. The monster would be made of the stuff at the center of nightmares which isn’t just fear but fear aided by intellect and reason.

The father became aware of his son’s plan and made one of his own. He surmised that his son’s plan would probably be successful in killing him, so his plan was to make his last days on earth more bearable by finding some way to rationalize what he now realized was abusive and inexcusable parenting – he realized this due to the extreme lengths his son was willing to go to kill him; the son of a good father would never hatch an elaborate plan to murder his father unless he was a psychopath, and the father knew his son wasn’t a psychopath because he had compared what he knew of his son’s personality to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist and assessed that his son was within nominal levels for nonpsychopathy. The rationalization he formed, while asleep, was that it wasn’t he who was a bad parent; rather, it was his waking self who existed on the other side of the veil that separates the waking world from the dreaming world.

One thing we often fail to realize, both while dreaming and awake, is that the veil between waking and dreams is just the first of an infinite number of veils that lead to even deeper levels of dreaming. Why we fail to realize this is because the veils are horizontal, not vertical, like the false covering over a Vietnamese man-trap only with strange dreams at the bottom instead of spikes. Thus, while walking while formulating his rationalization because he was a kinetic learner, the father mistakenly stepped on and fell through one of the horizontal veils and into a frightening dream castle.

The boy had an almost identical experience while trespassing on the roof of an abandoned factory where he’d hoped to find some of the materials necessary to create a monster: he fell through the roof and into a room that was home to several types of rats and spiders, and since rats and spiders, according to some religions, contain the reincarnated souls of men, and a man’s home is his castle, the room was a castle, and it was frightening because of the rats and spiders.

Both the father and boy escaped the frightening castles and returned to the pawn shop. They saw each other and told each other of their experiences because talking about an ordeal is often the best way to overcome the stress caused by it. They realized, due to the similarity of their accounts, that they had a lot in common, and on the basis of this commonality decided that they should no longer be enemies and treat each other badly or plan to.

From that day on, the father and son and daughter had a strained but functional relationship. They weren’t happy, but they got along and made enough money through the pawn shop to survive. Many years later the father died of cancer. Then, because they inherited the pawn shop, which was now quite successful, the daughter and son were happy.

The moral of this story is that monsters – both the supernatural kind and the kind considered to be comprised of cruel, wicked people – don’t exist. Supernatural monsters can only be created by procuring items found on a rickety factory roof that you will fall through, making creating the monsters impossible; and cruel, wicked people are not actually monsters, since they feel pain like the rest of us and when confronted with the evil nature of their acts they feel remorseful.

Future

2011-03-09T23:06:00.001-05:00

In the future there is no propulsion. Anyone wanting to travel anywhere simply moves the universe until their destination arrives at them. Also in the future all of the world’s important problems have been solved, meaning that Death Cab for Cutie songs about being upper-middle- class and lovelorn are actually very poignant and moving.

Future Shack is the store where I work. Work in the future consists mainly of logging into Facebook every five minutes - one hundred times less than the average future citizen. So working conditions in the future are actually quite barbarous, causing many workers to unionize.

I joined the union, although not because I care about my worker’s rights. I just thought that by ensconcing myself in a larger problem (the plight of the oppressed worker) I could forget my own problems, such as my inability to start a conversation with anyone who isn’t on fire and not aware of it, which is the only non-awkward grounds for talking to someone I can think of. (Unfortunately though there is no fire in the future. Or if there is, no one has ever seen it. People and buildings are periodically found burnt to a crisp, but the source of combustion has never been seen in action. Some scientists theorize that fire has evolved into an advanced form beyond our comprehension. Others theorize that we see fire all the time, but simply can’t match it with the word “fire,” because like so many other words in the English language, its meaning has been destroyed by hyperbole. I personally agree with this theory 10^100 percent.)

I was reading Lana’s facebook profile when a robot walked into the store and I continued reading Lana’s Facebook profile:

About Me: I’m a swimming instructor currently taking classes in culinary arts.

About You: You’re an obsolete agglomeration of simian parts nurtured in a vat of anabolic steroids and testosterone, you wish you could be delicate and feminine, a pristine porcelain doll kept on a shelf away from harm, and sometimes at night, in a place where you’re alone and you’re pretty sure no one can hear you, you cry. I’m not sure why though. Next time you’re crying and I’m watching you cry, maybe include some explanation of why you’re crying. Shout outz to my coworkers at FutureShack, especially Jessica. Holla!

The street walks down me with an indeterminate listfulness. People stare at me, hiding their disgust in the syntax of a dead body language. The future breathes plastic and sweats chrome, like an alien monster that does those things. I’ve decided that I want to die like Aldous Huxley – on acid. What I really want is to die like the person who sold Huxley the acid, since he probably had access to more and higher quality acid, but the sadness and alienation of life in the global- village-turned-city-turned-megalopolis of the future has made me lower my expectations.

Walking home from Future shack I got mugged*. I would’ve called the police, but that would’ve been a projection of the fact that I blamed myself, since blame is a one-way street like the ones in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, so I went to see a prostitute named Prima Official Strategy Guide To.

*badly

“Today I saw these kids on the street kicking a really generic soccer ball and running around using the same 4 or 5 running and arm-flailing patterns that all kids use,” I said. “They were trying to be different but they were all the same. If we’re ever going to defeat the evil computers that have technopolized our lives, we need to think like humans, not machines.”

“Oh, that is SO something a human would say.” Prima Official Strategy Guide To waved her robot hand limply in a brazen gesture of strength and defiance. I wanted to tell her that I loved her and the Bluetooth Mindset she was using to talk to me telepathically was the one they’d just recalled because it caused mind cancer, but I had the feeling she already knew, since she was reading my thoughts. There was something soldered on her arm:

note: don't talk to/amke plans to hang out with joel ever again. i am writing you this note because you're an idiot and apparently need a written reminder of this.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a reminder not to hang out with Joel. The word, not the 3.5 million people. I really loved it, but it hurt me emotionally. I’ve sworn to myself to never date language again.”

It made me realize that cyborg prostitutes have feelings too, and even though you’re not supposed to look at sad, vulnerable person behind the curtain, sometimes you can’t help it, which is why the curtain should be made out of some invisible Predator-suit material or something, because it really ruins the eroticism of paying for sex in the future.

How to Talk to Your Mother (Ghosts)

2011-03-07T00:26:00.002-05:00

There are three theories on sexism. One is that it’s a gender-specific form of prosopagnosia. Hence sexists fail to see human faces on females and view them as objects. The second theory is that it doesn’t exist; instead nonsexists suffer from gendered pareidolia. The third theory states that sexism is a socially constructed precept of a patriarchal society, and then follows this concept of socially-constructed reality to its logical end and concludes that whichever theory on sexism is the most popular is the correct one. In other words, if the majority suffers from prosopagnosia, it becomes prosopagnosiactuality.

Unfortunately, this trifurcated debate will remain a quagmire for the foreseeable future, which is why I’ve stopped caring about it; however, every time I stop caring about it I always start again. My point being that I’m indecisive: I have decision-making skills, but they always get locked in a recursive loop of metadecision: in order to decide, I must first decide to decide; in order to decide to decide, I must first decide to decide to decide … Due to this infinite process, most decisions take me a long time, although thankfully not an infinitely long time. I’ve found that every decision, if stalled on long enough, will eventually be decided by someone else, or in the case of driving decisions, some law of physics.

Which brings me to my car crash of last week. I hit another car and in the process died and became a ghost and decided to haunt a gym. However, in the last words of John Lennon, death is what happens when you’ve made other plans. The gym I wanted to haunt was already haunted by the ghost of a gym teacher’s baby who died in utero when hit by an errant dodgeball, proving that fetuses have souls and that we shouldn’t abort them; so I had to haunt a library instead.

“Do you hate the ghost fetus for haunting your gym, or do you just hate the part of yourself that idealized gyms even though the idea of you haunting one was obviously unfeasible?” Lana asked.

“Who cares. The fetus may not be patient zero in this hatestorm, but she’s definitely somewhere near the epicenter.”

“He. He prefers to be called he, even though the newly-discovered objective medical test for transexualism identifies him as a transwoman. He considers himself trans-transgendered.”

A ghost librarian walks down the adjacent aisle, the empty space that her decapitated head doesn’t occupy obscured by a row of books.

“Can we not talk about sex disorders or anything involving sex? I’m afraid of sex after reading The Story of the Eye.”

“It was just a story. I know it looked real when you converted the words into pictures in your head, but it was just fiction constructed in narrative prose using rhetorical devices like metaphors and polysyndentation.”

“I know, but as pre-postmodern erotic fiction, it foreshadows the death of the fetish author, which is very troubling to me, even if it means the birth of the fetish reader.”

I know that I’m the only real ghost in nonexistence and that the entire netherworld exists inside my mind, although my mind also exists in a spiritual location within it like a supercomputer turned inside out and the computer is haunted. Think about things like this more and more as you enter menopause. Incinerate her skull in a fireplace.

Hijra

2011-02-28T00:15:00.003-05:00

We could laugh at slavery then. The word “nigger” should never be used out of respect to anyone who’s seen a major Hollywood motion picture and left the theater feeling anxious and disturbed. I use Hijra. I feel like a Hijra around women. We approached the hotel, which was somewhere near where the Boyscouts of America was founded. It was dark, but that was okay: vision was insubstantial (past tense intentional as this was written before destruction of universe and all its enduring qualities); fleeting and undifferentiated. It made me realize we’re all black when the lights are out, which is why instead of darkness we should have blacklights which would allow whatever unique qualities people have inside to shine assuming they’re written on their bodies or clothing in blacklight paint and only allow upper-class white males to buy the paint.

To jack up the price of the paint, we’d have to create an artificial shortage … The week before Halloween is its own lifetime that we drift through, trying on different masks, seeing which ones fit. November 1st: bitter, wind-ripped morning. Discarded masks tumble down the street, consorting in small groups in ignorance or perhaps spite of pure reason. Psychic tendrils snaking out of their heads, forming brief intrapersonal bonds. Each impression a frontier to be colonized with log cabins and fences and look it’s a half-smoked E-cig. A prime snipe. … lets his guard down and the tendrils impart their poison. Nothing personal; I don’t delude myself about my tendency toward prostitution. The free love generation was just a rotten dream coalescing around spoiled fruit like a flow chart hammered together in reverse. Nothing personal since empathy is the sincerest form of psychopathy and my projected pain overwrites yours. Death is where all paths diverge in reverse-time. Predate or be postdated. Peak Masks is reached and the world economy topples …

I pitch the paint idea in my accounting class. I use words like ‘pitch’ as euphemisms for the fundamentally obscene process of talking. Talking being a form of intercourse, which is something we’re supposed to be embarrassed by, except in commercials, where the hint of it is used to helpfully nudge us toward hair dryers and candy bars and maybe if we’re lucky a time machine leading back to the beginning of the commercial so we can try again. Talking being a shameful public orgy that I wish people would hold behind closed doors, specifically those of a gas chamber as the words evacuate their meanings like escape pods and the rotten sheaths of kindness are removed, antipathy shining like the light at the end of a vertical tunnel. A conversation is a fugue of violence or a cosmic error or both or neither. In the corner of the classroom, a football player talks to his girlfriend.

“I love you … It’s just that I’m obsessed with dark chaotic things. What if there’s this infinite grid of horizontal wipes and lens flares and product placement and station identification between every moment of our lives, and what if one day our brains suddenly lose their ability to compartmentalize that grid, bringing it to the foreground and making us scream really loudly and then die?”

“I knew this was too good to be true. Why can’t I ever meet what constitutes my definition of a normal guy?”

He shrugs and walks out of the room. The pain of the breakup hasn’t hit him yet. Someday, he’ll discover that all his emotions are being siphoned by thought parasites. Ideally, it will be during a routine sanity probe where the nature of and possible treatments for his condition will be explained in a friendly, supportive environment. In a less than ideal scenario, the parasites will all spontaneously die, releasing a flood of half-digested feelings that will prolapse his axons until his thoughtstream runs red with blood. But for now thoughts of death are far from the parasites’ minds. They’ll digest the philosophical content of the new Korn single and have an introspective night.

Finally, inside the hotel, we went to our rooms where we were told to go sleep.

“I’m tired of ghost stories,” my roommate said. “Let’s tell a story where there are no ghosts, nothing ghostly happens, and no one even thinks about ghosts.”

“What would the point of that story be?”

“Look, you’re my roommate. When I become overburdened with emotions, I talk to you and an ugly but necessary purgation follows. The point being that everything dies. Life ends.”

We both laughed at his perfect burlesque of the self-conscious word configurations we would later use when we shrank into neurotic life-worn adults. We could laugh at slavery then.

I-Cigs

2011-02-10T22:53:00.001-05:00

Over the last month I’ve developed an imaginary smoking habit so I can take cigarette breaks at work. It started at just two cigarettes a day but has gradually increased to the point where I now need one every half-hour. Imaginary drugs, I’ve found, can be even more addictive than real ones. Especially since there’s no conceivable limit on the drugs’ duration or euphoria besides your imagination. And the horrific side-effects and aftereffects I imagine following a binge.

Thus far, none of the other smokers in the designated smoking area behind the restaurant accept me as brethren. There seems to be an elitism among real smokers that precludes the acceptance of imaginary smokers into their ilk. That’s okay though because I didn’t start smoking to make friends. If that was my aim I’d probably be alarmed at how my imaginary nicotine withdrawals have been making me even more antisocial than normal. If I don’t smoke an I-Cig for an hour I get irritable and moody. If I don’t smoke one for an hour and ten minutes, I start to see people not as sentient beings but simply vegetative pools of numbers and language, screaming “I’m me! I exist!” in a voice no one hears.

Scientifically speaking, the innate bond between smokers is difficult to explain. Fortunately though, I’m not a scientist and got kicked out of 8th grade physics class for drawing boobs on an electron, so I can explain it quite easily. Smokers have a tentacle-like appendage on their head (usually concealed by a baseball cap, or in the case of pipe smokers, a fedora) that extends when smoking. It grasps the tentacle of a fellow smoker and transmits pheromones telling the other smoker where the nearest cache of cigarettes is located. If the tentacle is severed, it usually grows back. If it doesn’t the smoker instinctively takes to relaying cigarette information through dancing. The dance is poorly executed and indistinct. I’m convinced I could master it if I wasn’t so shy and self-conscious about dancing.

At my college, they don’t allow smoking. They don’t allow free thought either. Especially in the lines for the vending machines. Strung out on the broken-glass pangs of i-nicotine withdrawal, faces become blank keys awaiting cutting. Others, mangled by the cutting equipment, consort in fringe cliques, murmuring phonemes of pain and loss.

As this sad sketch unfolds, I realize I need to quit smoking. I think of my friends in the drama club who are noticeably upset at my addiction. I also think of my friends in the histrionic personality disorder support group, although they’re mostly the same people.

At least compared to some addicts I’m lucky, in that I have friends. A lack of them makes interventions difficult. Various agencies offer ersatz interventions where professional actors pretend to be the client’s friends, but these cost billions of dollars due to the actors’ exorbitant salaries. Also, some of the actors insist on method performances where they get to know you over a period of weeks to get a feel for their character. They generally move in with you and expect you to pay for all their meals and if you don’t have Netflix they get really disappointed and make snarky comments about it.

In drama club, the instructor gives a perfect description of why theatre is more alive and vital now than ever. Too perfect. Every metaphor concise and tailor-made for a college audience. People like him are the gears, the agents of torque in a rusty tank grinding toward the edge of a cliff and growing horizontally out of the side of the cliff is the global village.

I walk out of the meeting; I need a cigarette.

In the hall, a tracheostomized rapist shoots chloroform at an unsuspecting woman through his neck-hole. Smoking, I realize, is no worse than any other form of premature death. Life is essentially Shirley Jackson’s The Cancer and Mental Illness Lottery, so why not take control and die on your own terms? I want to tell the rapist his pants totally aren’t color-coordinated with his shirt but tracheotomy patients only communicate through ESP and so much of telepathy is just rationalizing with your mind moving.

Letters Comprising an Addendum

2011-02-06T00:07:00.003-05:00

1/24/11

Sorry, deleting you from my Facebook friends was out of line and I apologize.

I suffer from all-or-nothing thinking. It's mainly because I'm a technosexualist and fantasize about being a robot. Robots see everything in binary. When my attempts to solicit sex from you returned a value of 0, I took it as the ultimate rejection not only as a lover but also as a robot and responded in kind.

In hindsight, I'm glad you turned me down. Robot sex involves wires and vacuum tubes, making it really awkward. Awkward for me I mean. I had a sexually repressed childhood and get embarrassed just thinking about robot sex parts. I generally fast-forward all the vacuum-tube gags in Brazil, and seeing an exposed USB port always makes me blush. As our society becomes more techno-centric, I expect it will become increasingly difficult for me to occupy public places due to all the hot digital devices on display. Especially since most computers are tarted-up whores who flaunt their sexuality without considering the effect it has on broken virginal people.

1/27/11

I'm thinking of taking a women's studies class next semester. But I'm worried I might get medical school syndrome and feel my lymph nodes and think they've become ovaries. I also might think my penis has become a vagina, forcing me to Google 'vagina' and find out what one looks like. If my mental image is correct, it's a wet pink barnacle with serrated teeth that pop out of its maw on xenomorphic double jaws.

I really feel like I was meant to be one of those genetically-modified astronauts. The ones without legs that can crawl in narrow places to repair space stations. Maybe I'd meet an alien girl with multiple arms or breasts and we'd fall in love. My lack of limbs and her surplus of them would complete each other. Like we were made to be together, like fleshy malformed Tetris blocks.

Being born with parts missing, except for a reason.

Doom II, Video Games, Castration, Inflation Fetish

2011-01-31T23:34:00.002-05:00

After scientists isolated the McChicken gene – the gene that makes you inexplicably crave McChickens even though for the same price you can get a Double Cheeseburger that doesn’t taste like the dustpan at a slaughterhouse – the world was a better place for the people without the gene who weren’t chemically castrated.

I was one of those people. But I wanted to be castrated anyway.

“I can handle being alone,” I said to Lana. “I just can’t handle how un-alone other people are.”

“Castration won’t help with that. Body modification may feel like therapy for your problems but it’s really just a drug, a quick fix. You’ll become addicted to it like PCP addicts are addicted to medical procedures that save your life after you take too much PCP. You should take up a hobby instead, like vintage arcade machine restoration.”

“I’m going camping this weekend.”

“Huh?”

“I was switching the topic of the conversation to myself.”

“But we were talking about you.”

Switching the topic of a conversation to yourself when it’s already about you is the talking equivalent of a double ice backfire or dividing by zero. We both died and went to Doom II: Hell on Earth.

Level 1: Entryway

Lana has the type of body you might call “full-figured” or “a few extra pounds” or “Rubenesque,” depending on the decimal setting of your sugar-coated fat people descriptions. I stared at the center of her XL McDonald’s shirt, which was untucked, but looked like it was under no less strain for being untucked. I’d rather look at that than monsters.

Lana picked up a chainsaw and killed all the monsters, sending them to monster hell, where all you see is the first Google image result for ‘Rosenblatt Loop.’ “I just slaughtered the minions of hell,” She said, “And I’m thirsty.” She opened a can of Berry Bop.

“Can I have a sip? I’m really thirsty too because earlier I saw a 70s cartoon with an anthropomorphized car and cried most of the fluids out of my body. The thought of cars as living beings is so sad. We treat them so badly and yell at them all the time.”

“Any man sensitive enough to cry at something like that can drink from my soda any day. Except today. Today I’m really thirsty.”

Level 2: Graveyard

The graveyard is where people come to get turned into skeletons. The Japanese consider traditional graveyards wasteful due to overpopulation. Their answer to graveyards is small graveyard-themed snow globes where the snow is the ashes of the deceased. If you push a button on the bottom, they play “Monster Mash.”

Baseball players, by contrast, see graveyards as sacred. Due to my penchant for bifurcation, I felt compelled to adopt one view or the other. I chose the latter.

Instantly I morphed into a baseball player. I grabbed one of the flaming skull monsters floating around and slam-dunked it into a basket and yelled “Touchdown!” Back to the morphing process though. It was sort of erotic in what I imagine must be the way that an inflation fetish is. What it taught me is that an orgasm is a process, not a product – completely autotelic.

“When baseball players fight do they hit each other really hard? And sometimes during the fights do they just have orgasms and then call off the fight and sit down for awhile?” I asked Lana.

“Sure. I guess. I don’t know.”

“Do people who drink lots of soda, almost to the point where soda drinking is meaningless to them and a toxic asset, ever share their soda with people who’ve never had soda before out of pity?”

“How should I know? I don’t have all the answers.”

I sighed. Across the graveyard, crows were having their survival needs met by the flesh of the dead and aerodynamic laws being empirically proven by the flying of bats. Bagpipes were being held up in the air and played by skeletons, ruing their mandated backward-compatibility with the hardware of the flesh. Love is the only free morpheme in the universe. Hard and soft winds dance with a soda mascot’s hair.

People Are Spam

2011-01-29T11:14:00.001-05:00

I’ll be ready to die when the people I love know all my secrets. But since knowledge is subjective and intransmissible, I don’t think I’ll ever be ready.

I began writing to document the effects of being buried alive – emotionally – over a period of a lifetime. Since then, things have gotten complicated. I’ve developed Stockholm syndrome for the human race. The tumescent monsters who life-shit on me every day feel like brethren. Living forever seems like my only option at this point. Damn the consequences. I don’t care if my consciousness outlives the universe and goes mad, only to outlive madness itself. I need to watch the human race die, just to prove that I’m capable of getting over a bad relationship and moving on.

“If you don’t like people, instead of seeing them as obstacles or enemies, why don’t you just see them as living creatures like yourself?” Lana says.

“But I thought the idea was for me to like them.”

“Whatever. You only know a small percentage of humans anyway. Your perception of people is based solely on interactions within your own culture, race and socioeconomic stratum.”

“I don’t think you need to be worldly and multicultural to hate people. I think if you are person, you’ve done your homework.”

I found a decoder ring in a cereal box. I thought it would facilitate my lush fantasy life where I’m a secret agent and drive a fancy car and have 12” biceps and my own ice cream factory and dinosaur museum and a pretty wife who’s really good at kissing. Instead it started decoding things people say. So far I’ve learned that “it’s fine” actually means “I hate you,” and “I’m okay” means “please help.” It’s starting to worry me as I think it may be part of some global conspiracy by a mopey, passive-aggressive illuminati.

The movie Arachnophobia proved that spiders are the scariest thing in the world, making the title sort of a contradiction, since an intense fear of spiders isn’t so much a phobia as the only objective metric for sanity. Likewise, if sex really is the scariest thing in the world – which I believe it to be – then there is no erotophobia. Erotophobes are just virgins with access to all the facts.

I have in my library of thoughts the realization that I’m God, acquired during an acid trip gone horribly right. Like the diary of a girl I love but who doesn’t love me, I sometimes can’t resist the urge to take it off the shelf and read it, even though it makes me unhappy. I understand that everyone has to be God at some point in their lives – just as the concept of “clitoris” occupies multiple parts of the brain, making it impossible to excise unlike a real clitoris, God too dynamically allocates parts of Herself across the neural network of all conscious beings; acid just makes one aware of this. I just wish She didn’t have such an abhorrent personality. She’s like that pretentious twit in your philosophy class who considers herself a writer and makes sure to include that information in a subordinate clause of every sentence she says.

Every day I sink deeper into a reverse solipsism where I feel less existent while the world takes on a deeper shade of hyper-realism. I feel anymore like the 8-bit Mario making a cameo in Super Mario RPG.

Life is a jar. A jar all the way.

Let the Machine Live Your Nightmare

2011-01-25T14:13:00.002-05:00

I have a fetish for cross-filing (checking the opposite sex on a tax form). I often have dreams about it.

In them, my head is a city where shame cubes glide down the streets, checking and re-checking the locks on buildings like OCD patients. The buildings hold the definitions of words like “tax form” “female” “sexy” and “jizz tube,” which can’t be allowed to spill out onto the streets. The streets are dangerous.

The alley is shit-brown. A brown I can almost taste, because earlier today I read an article about synesthetes and got medical school syndrome. It’s littered with crates of all sizes, weights and densities. Volumetric odors comorbify the air. Cloudbursts of neotraditional jazz by Shadowchrist and the Digitones. Notes fall and dissipate like confetti.

I sit on a milk crate and wait for the Woman to arrive. My throat is dry, my insides are a mine shaft.

The city is a scary place at night, after the sun completes its slow burn across the west ventricle and a spiderweb of blacklit axons snaps on, subdividing the sky. Murders are common here, and while they rise and fall with the dopamine levels, their true cause seems to me rooted in some haphazard bloodlust older than the streets themselves.

I hear whispers down the alley. Shuffling shadows of some unformed language. I stare at my watch. This is not a place to let one’s mind wander. One wrong turn and it might find itself in a word ghetto, where junkies, tweakers, methheads, cake fiends, smack daddies, boz-bozes, partywhistlers, owlbears, dog punchers, and protoplasm uncles congregate around flaming trash barrels, speaking in hushed tones. Then yelling at a guy who’s sitting on the street corner with a tanning mirror and there’s something that looks like orange tang dripping from his mouth. Life is cheap and ephemeral here like newsprint, and also like newsprint sort of smells and tells you things you don’t want to know.

Something shudders through me like a ghost train. Sixth sense or prelude to a panic attack? I hope it’s the latter. I’ve learned to manage my panic attacks by reducing my attention span. Panic, after all, is just a thought and therefore contingent on one’s thought-retention rate. Lowering my span was difficult at first: binging on Family Guy, youtube and speed metal only whittled off a few tenths of a second. I tried seeking medical help, but clinics apparently don’t recognize “attention surplus disorder” as a legitimate condition, any more than a proctologist will write you a doctor’s note for “too much booty in the pants.”

Snap of broken glass. Neurotransmitters gush out of rain gutters in cobweb gradients. A dragon slouches on a golden rectangle, his eyes levitating in Cyproterone stasis.

I think about Lana and her vagina and crypto-humanist Bill Hicks. I try to remember the last thing Lana said to me and its exact syntax. Language doesn’t record reality, it mutilates it. It’s like a knife that cuts the future lengthwise into two semantic paths. So when you see a knife in the road, take it and stab yourself in your auditory cortex, so you’ll be blissfully unaware of women’s voices and the thousands of fears and doubts that coil around them like lichen.

The Woman’s foot appears. Then her leg, which I follow like a diagonal in a Baroque painting to the focal point of her belly button. She’s attractive, unlike men, which look like poop coming out of shirts.

She hands me a manila envelope of tax forms.

“How’ve you been?” I say.

“Good …” Her voice is raspy and opaque.

“I miss you. Remember when we used to go the zoo and laugh at all the caged animals who we knew were more or less like us but didn’t care? It wasn’t much, but it was something.”

“I guess …” She disappears in a Venetian blinds transition from Powerpoint. A streetlight shines through the blinds, painting horizontal bars across my face.

I open the envelope and look at the tax forms; feel their bumpy texture, whiff their fresh-printed ink smell. A drug score always evokes in me that feeling you get at the start of a relationship; a feeling of starting afresh, entering into a world where everything is new. New and unknown and horrifying, like you’ve totally gone down the rabbit hole into the desert of the Real. I close the envelope and walk out onto the street.

Delivery driver night 3

2011-01-23T18:50:00.005-05:00

My delivery route covers a poor, crime-ridden part of the city – its unofficial name on the map is “Little Gotham.” Fortunately, I possess a lot of street knowledge and take more precautions than most drivers. For instance, I always wear gang-neutral colors. Pink, I’ve found, is the one color gangs never use, so I make sure to wear a lot of pink. I also use confident, aggressive posture, which involves holding my head high and throwing my shoulders back like a runway model.

Although I’m somewhat confident in my street smarts - even to the point of being brazenly overconfident - I still, as Jim Kramer would say, “keep it real.” I don’t, for instance, pretend that street knowledge equates to the similar-sounding but much different knowledge of how to find streets, which I empirically lack. My process of finding an address generally consists of driving down every street in the city a la Dijkstra's algorithm until I’ve eliminated all but the correct route. This results in a lot of late deliveries, so I try to have an elaborate excuse prepared when I knock on the door. I’ve found that excuses diffuse awkward situations – they allow both parties to save face – and that most people actually prefer them over honest explanations. Or at least the ones I give, which generally involve how I don’t care about human beings at all and look forward to watching their civilization collapse brick by brick.

Despite my exhaustively researched, peer-reviewed excuses, many customers still dislike me. Their voices often become the mouthpiece of my own self-doubt. I’ll be driving down a street listening to a Dire Straits song about being in love and I’ll hear a customer tell me that I shouldn’t be listening to this song because I’ll never get a girlfriend. The words they use are primarily “my,” “sandwich,” and “late,” but I still get the implicit message.

Another troubling thing about this job is that it forces me to confront my intense fear of white people – I consider myself a draconic otherkin and not part of any human racial group. Today at one of my deliveries (Hampton Inn) a white guy in a Predator t-shirt tapped me on the shoulder and asked what time it was. I threw my bag of sandwiches at him and bolted down the hall. I honestly can’t fathom the mindset of someone who wears a dreadlocked vagina on their chest, and how that mindset could possibly not involve murdering me.

Also, while taking a phone order, I heard the movie Star Wars in the background and called the police because I thought a gang of white people was holding the person hostage. The police eventually came to the store and talked to me.

“You need to overcome your fear of white people,” the officer said. “I think with some cognitive behavioral therapy you’ll find it’s a reaction formation of some opposite fear. Like maybe fear of hipsters, since they’re the opposite of people.”

“I’m not afraid of all white people. It’s just …” I wanted to give my “there are white people and there are honkies” speech, but there were some Nascar fans and half of Rascal Flatts in the room and my general anxiety disorder makes me uncomfortable speaking in front of large groups. Fortunately, just then a Nascar bus crashed into a petroleum truck outside the restaurant, littering the parking lot with the charred remains of Tony Stewart, so the onus was on one of the Nascar fans to start talking.

“We’d better get out of here,” One of them said. “The world’s about to end now that the rapture which began and ended with Tony Stewart is over.”

“Tony Stewart is a faggot homosexual,” the police officer said. All the white people in the room laughed, recognizing his comment as not a serious attack but just good-natured ribbing of Stewart fans. I started laughing too. Immediately, everyone stopped laughing and glared at me. Apparently it’s not cool for other races to laugh at self-deprecating white humor. I spent the rest of the day hiding in the bathroom, crying and wishing I was a dragon.

Panic Attacks

2011-01-18T00:51:00.003-05:00

This morning I was awoken by an explosion from a movie happening down the hall. I tried to go back to sleep, but instead I had the thought that triggers panic attacks. I shoved all my thoughts to my front-brain and picked a random sentence to repeat until the attack went away:

There’s no Alt-F4 for rape.

Which is a true sentence when you think about, which by my count I did at least 4,000 times. The one exception being if it’s a fetish video of a simulated rape in Windows Media Player. Then paradoxically the opposite is true.

“Loveless is a good album as long as you don’t focus on the notes,” Lana says to me.

“I only like e chords ironically.”

Satan and someone we don’t know – an intern in hell probably – appear in the room. “Look,” Satan says to the intern. “This is what love eventually becomes. They were happy at first, but their relationship has slowly deteriorated. Now they no longer have sex and only exchange passive aggressive remarks.”

“Uh, we’re not in love,” Lana says. “We’re not even going out, right?”

“Right,” I say. “In fact I even hate you sometimes. Not as a person, but as an imperfect carbon of the larger thing you represent, which is punk rock music. I had a really bad experience with punk rock music one night when a teenager with spiked hair and a leather jacket walked into my McDonald's at 11:50 - ten minutes before we closed - and ordered a bunch of sandwiches and then called me a capitalist slut and drew an anarchy symbol in the lobby in ketchup that my manager made me clean up. Ever since then I've had a negative impression of punk rock, which is too bad because I like in principle everything about punk from its energy to its DIY aesthetic to the politics behind it. It's funny I guess how one person's insensitive actions can destroy your faith in a larger transcendent concept, one that might've at one point had the power to save you but now just feels stained with that person's latent image.”

“Yeah, I’m looking at my map now and I definitely appeared in the wrong apartment,” Satan says. “Sorry.”

He turns to intern. “Let’s go back to hell. I’ll show you the room where we torture people with their worst fears. We call it the Infernal Medicine Department. By the way, what’s your worst fear?”

“Bad puns.”

“Haha, of course. The room turns into whatever you fear the most. Even its name changes to-”

“No, I was joking.”

Satan touches the intern on the shoulder. He explodes. “He was an asshole,” Satan says.

The CD skips. I feel another panic attack coming. I try not to not think about it. Panic attacks can neither be focused or unfocused on. Like dogs, you have to acknowledge your terror of them without succumbing to it. Also like dogs, your heart becomes a fulcrum and your mind a seesaw board on which your sanity is teetering, trying not to have any oblong thoughts that will break the board and plunge you into insanity like Odie being pushed off a table.

Lana changes the CD and does some more moon meth. Every day is a labyrinth to find my way back to my bed. I watch the drool drip onto my Dawn of the Dead shirt – reverse water torture.

Erotic Rebus

2011-01-11T21:54:00.003-05:00

There’s only a 1% chance of me getting a girlfriend. In scientific terms, that means that every time I flirt with a girl only one of the 100 divergent realities created involves us going out. And if that’s not pessimistic enough, my science books also tell me there’s a good chance that in that reality the Nazis won World War II, as opposed to our current timeline where nobody won because wars are violent and brutal and no one ever wins them.

The girl and I are sitting on a bunk bed in a Nazi death camp. She’s reading an interior decorating magazine she smuggled out of the mess hall in the special hiding place that only women have: a gash in her left breast.

“I really like interior decorating magazines. They give me an intimate window into the rest of the world and how it’s decorating houses and having fun and doing all the things I’d be doing if I wasn’t in a death camp. In other words, it’s the ultimate voyeuristic fantasy and I’m probably going to climax before I finish this sentence.”

I’m starting to get annoyed with her. Our relationship started out good but now we don’t like each other and sleep on opposite vertical halves of our bed. Sometimes I honestly wish she’d get raped as a hyperbolic expression of what I guess is mild dislike of her personality. I often fantasize about it. She’s walking down an alley when her hyperbolic rapist who’s ten feet tall jumps out of the shadows with giant ninja sword and also something about Chuck Norris as is de rigueur for hyperbole.

Nazi guards rape men. I’ve seen it. It isn’t because they’re homosexuals. They just realize that sex, like drugs, is merely a labyrinthine path to endorphin release, meaning it involves puppets and David Bowie and endorphins. So it doesn’t matter who you have sex with - as long as you don’t feel ashamed. If you do feel ashamed, you probably shouldn’t be fucking that person. Nazis combat this by taking their army-rationed methamphetamine pill, which makes them feel so sexually desirable that there’s no shame in raping men if there are no women around because it would be even worse to let their sexual prowess go to waste.

One of the Rooms in the death camp has low gravity and trampolines. The ceiling is only ten feet high, but each trampoline has a giant tube above it that goes up ten miles (the height of an average bounce) and is track-lit and covered with photos of Dracula. The prisoner on the trampoline only lands once every two days, giving him approximately .5 seconds to talk to the guard on duty if he wants to. What words he chooses to say during his only moment of human contact for the next 48 hours says a lot about his personality. The words are written down and fed into a computer that compares them to a list of acceptable words and determines how much longer the prisoner must stay on the trampoline. The computer is made up of vacuum tubes, punchcards, reel-to-reel tape and Ipads and is the size of a ten-story building. Hundreds of thousands of rats nest in the computer. To them it’s called Ratropolis.

“Isn’t this sort of torture inhuman?” one guard in the trampoline room says to the other.

“Yes, but inhumanity is the most human concept of all, as it represents free will. Don’t tell that to the Computer, though. It will explode trying to understand.”

“No it won’t. They just added a line of code saying that if someone says that sentence or a similar one to it, all it has to do is reply ‘I understand.’”

“Wow, it truly is the smartest computer in the world then.”

Inside ~~the computer~~ Ratropolis, rats scurry between objects and data packets and subroutines into nests of fuzzy logic. They know reality is eventually doomed because the tapes on which it is constantly rewritten are wearing out. Like if you record a Winger CD over a mixtape your ex-girlfriend gave you, and when you listen to it, you can still hear the original tape in the background and it makes you sad and ruins your enjoyment of Winger forever.

Personality Change

2011-01-07T00:12:00.003-05:00

My first delivery of the night is to a discount personality-change clinic. Personality changes allow people who feel like they were born with the wrong Myers-Briggs personality type to transition to the proper one. The receptionist rings for Judy – the Nurse who ordered the sandwich. She says she’ll be down in a few minutes after she checks in a pair of Siamese twins who want each others’ types and also something about how the clinic is doomed and I should get out while I still can. I sit down in the waiting room.

A 5-year-old girl sitting across from me picks her nose. “Don’t do that,” her mom says.

“Okay, I won’t,” she says, mentally adding, “When you’re watching, you fat whore. You’re not my mom and I hate salmofarious germs in the noran, breathe, oven; pour all to a thick enough, and half-an-hour in some marine crayfish.” I’m pretty sure the girl is schizophrenic. Or the telepathy drugs I took are wearing off.

“I’ve always felt like an ESFP trapped in an INTJ’s body,” the guy in the adjacent seat says to me. “Have you ever felt like something is wrong with you?”

“Well, earlier today I saw a woman’s sweater in a dumpster and I really wanted to take it because I have a wool sweater fetish, but for some reason I didn’t.”

“You can’t not feel like a sweater fetish is unnatural - at least not in our society that wants us to see sweaters purely in the context of clothing and not the infinite associative potential they have when stripped of that context. It simply isn’t not done.”

The guy’s face is pallid from the entropic free-fall of waiting rooms. He’s probably been sitting here all his life, waiting for that Something just around the corner that he can sense and smell and see but never hear and also never touch. I can’t imagine the hell he must feel, but I can imagine myself imagining and it feels terrible.

“Why is your eye all red?” he says.

“I damaged my optic nerve trying for three hours to remove a contact lens before remembering that I haven’t worn contacts since high school when I went through an image-conscious phase.”

“I went through the exact same thing in high school. I saw myself as an ESFP, but the world saw me as an INTJ. It resulted in several attempted suicides, and several more attempted poems.”

“That wasn’t exactly what it was like at all. High school was …” I try to remember something about high school, but my eye is so swollen that even thinking about images hurts, so I think about a Husker Du song instead.

By and by, Judy walks through the door.

The tip transaction gets fucked up – this often happens. Judy gives me a five and asks for three ones back. I don’t have any ones, but I have two twos, so I offer her those if she gives me a one. She says okay, but only if I give her back her five so she can give it to me along with the two twos in exchange for a ten because she doesn’t like twos. I tell her okay, but only if she gives me the ten back in exchange for her original five and one because otherwise I’ll be out four. She says that would take us back to square one, so I tell her that if she lets me keep her five I’ll give her an honest description of her physical flaws that only a complete stranger can give. She says okay, but only if I also recommend a good Willa Cather book about crime-solving ghosts. This goes on for ten minutes. In the end she gets all my money, and I end up getting a personality change.

“One thing you have to understand about personality surgery is that it usually takes months to take effect,” Judy says. “Anyone expecting a magical change will be disappointed. Except during the surgery itself, which does involve a lot of magic.”

I’m sitting on an ovular table in a postmodern operating room with found doctors and neotraditional equipment—on the table there’s an amputation saw and a bag of leeches. Judy is preparing a funnel to extravenously administer a sedative.

“After we summon the faeries, they’ll teleport into your brain and start rewiring your synapses,” She says. “It will only take a few minutes.”

“Sounds good. I know faeries – at least the ones in Anne McCaffrey novels – are really hard-working.”

“I don’t know if I’d say that. Some are, yes. But calling all faeries hard working, that’s kind of a stereotype.”

I nod. “Like saying all dwarves are good at mining.”

“Exactly.”

“Or that all Jewish dwarves have big noses.”

“Right.”

“Or that all black dwarves are good at mining cotton.”

“Sure.”

“Or that all female dwarves-”

She sticks the funnel in my mouth and pours in the propofol.

In the recovery room, I’m given an Adderall prescription to ease the transition into my new hyper-energetic extraverted personality. I doubt I’ll get it filled: I’ve already reached the crossroads of amphetamine abuse where I need to either quit or switch to Moon Meth--Moon Meth (so-named because it keeps the user awake for 30 days, the length of a day on the moon) is the strongest stimulant in the world. It causes death in 10 of 10 users, although the euphoria is so strong that most don’t notice and go about their daily activities even as their bodies start to decompose. All skeletons are Moon Meth addicts.

When I get back to work I don’t feel much different besides a vague sexual arousal. Maybe it’s because a fat woman in the lobby is wearing a sweater – maybe. I don’t want to analyze it too deeply like Myers-Briggs and their bullshit hexadecimal subdivision of the human thoughtscape.

skeleton THIS!

2011-01-01T00:53:00.005-05:00

I recently discovered my true calling. I’ve been rewriting Shakespeare plays to include jokes about vulvar cancer. I don’t think – as some literature snobs might say – that I’m appropriating high culture to bolster the humor of clit cancer jokes. I think that I’m appropriating clit cancer jokes to save high culture by reinvigorating some seriously flaccid plays.

So that’s what I’m doing for new years. Some of my friends tell me they’re staying home by themselves and drinking non-alcoholic drinks. There’s dignity in that. I can even see the appeal of the non-alcoholic drinking scene. There’s a certain camaraderie among non-alcoholics, a feeling of a shared identity. They’ve been through shit that non-non-alcoholics like you and I can only imagine, and then quickly retract our imagining apparatus in horror. It’s a lot like the unspoken bond between drug users. Whenever I do PCP with someone, there’s always an implicit rule that we stay together for the drug’s duration so we can keep each other from getting in fights with trees or eating police cars.

My new year’s resolution is to sign up for classes to become an acupuncturist. It must be great to get paid to stick needles in people all day. For me it’s usually the other way around. When I was addicted to heroin for example, people would pay me to stick needles into myself. At first. Eventually the dealers stopped paying me and in fact demanded that I give them money. And if you read a story in the paper about me being dead tomorrow, it’s because I just gave away the secret of how dealers get people addicted.

Or it might be because I committed suicide. Not because I’m depressed but because killing myself on new years would be a tidy conclusion to a rich and fulfilling life that’s come full circle. The only gaping keyring-style hole in this circle is that I’ve never had sex. That would be nice I guess. It would end the awkwardness I feel around hypersexual males comfortable enough with their sexuality that they pepper their speech with oblique sex references. Some examples: “I’m going to the bathroom.” (golden showers) “Kiss my ass.” (analingus) “Lindsey Lohan just violated her parole again.” (Lindsey Lohan) “I’m going to the centrifuge.” (plain vanilla sex (Note: “centrifuge” is a slang term used by people who’ve seen The Right Stuff and therefore understand the raw sex appeal of the space program. It literally means “the best place to have sex.”))

Back to the part where I mentioned non-alcoholic drinks. I just remembered something else about that. My swimming instructor Lana and I were sitting in a room doing LSD when we melted into the floor. We basically became the floor. It’s hard to explain to anyone who’s never done the drug and wasn’t alive in the 1960s like the people in Time-Life music commercials--the TV was playing a Time-Life music commercial. Also, the room wasn’t a no-room from Frank Herbert’s Dune that would prevent skeletons from entering it. This will be important in the next sentence. Two skeletons walked into the room and started setting it up for a porn shoot (all pornography is shot in the same room, it’s just that the location of the room keeps changing). One of the skeletons opened a non-alcoholic drink and proceeded to pour it onto the rug, presumably to honor one of his dead homies, which could have been any of his homies really.

“That’s going to stain the rug,” the other skeleton said. “You’re only reinforcing negative stereotypes of skeletons with that behavior. And you wonder why people buy so many racist skeleton lawn ornaments on Halloween.”

The first skeleton shrugged. “We’ll reappropriate those lawn ornaments some day. And I honestly don’t care if I’m an evil skeleton. Evil skeletons still get laid.”

The other night I had a dream about an ice-cream man. We were going to have sex, but with the mutual understanding that it was a purely physical thing and meant nothing to either of us. The upshot of this being that the concept of ice cream is a crumbling fucking House of Usher in my mind. The real-life ice cream man that the one in the dream is based on might be dead for all I know (update: according to the sparse results for the Google image search “autopsy photo of ice cream man,” he’s probably still alive) but my dream-backup of him is destined to live with me forever in a decrepit mansion made of boards and ideas.

Speaking of homosexuality, if emo music were any more conducive for me to project latent scads of mine onto, it’d be a screening of Top Gun. That isn’t meant as a dig at Top Gun, emo music or even homosexuality, just an observation. On the subject of homosexual haters: they’re dumb. Idiots trying to sloganeer “God hates fags” are missing the point. God hates fucking everyone. If you imagine that life is a deathmatch game, God is a cancer spammer who also spawn-camps babies.

Never try to overcome something by emulating people who've never had that sort of overcoming to do

2010-12-25T23:33:00.010-05:00

When I die I’ll have to meet all my dreams and apologize to them for letting them die, which will be awkward, not the apology itself but the facial expressions and body language involved in conveying the apology. It’s the opposite of what I imagine must be the awkwardness of having sex for the first time which isn’t the body movements but the words you’d say to your partner and the configurations of them. It’s easy to imagine a triangle, but try describing it to someone who’s never seen one before. That’s what I imagine instructing another person on how to participate in a 3-dimensional version of the things you think about while masturbating must be like.

Another thing that might be awkward about death is if you die and don’t even realize it for several years until finally someone else has to tell you. This is a real possibility for the majority of humans, since only rich white males know exactly what death is like since they spend so much time thinking about it because it’s their only real fear in life. Everyone else instead of death primarily fears sports losses, not getting the best deal on a big screen tv, not amassing sufficient credit to become a homeowner, and the villain in the Saw movies.

Which isn’t to say that I want to be rich as currency has no actual value except the periodic elements it’s made up of, which are either worthless or priceless depending on whether you think there’s an infinite amount of matter in the universe or that it’s a miracle that anything exists at all. Such is my mindset when I spend my entire paycheck on drugs and the more histrionic aspect of my inner monologue goes “that’s a high price for such a tiny sliver of eternity” and the more down-to-earth aspect just laughs because price is just the smoke-and-mirrors of semiotics. I like that aspect of my inner monologue better; I envision it as similar to the female character in a gaming webcomic who makes pithy incisive remarks and has both a penis and a vagina because they’re a portmanteau of the author’s feminine and masculine sides.

It’d be funny if cystectomy was called cysterectomy because then if a doctor said over an intercom to give someone a cysterectomy and there was a lot of hissing on the intercom it might sound like hysterectomy and the person would get a hysterectomy which would be unintentional and a hilarious mix-up.

Women are what will remain after all the hope is sucked from the universe, which could be interpreted in either a good way or a bad way, depending on whether meaning is sole property of the author or is licensed to the reader in exchange for desperately-sought attention – if it’s the former then it can only be interpreted in a bad way as that was my intent. I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships and how 9 times out of 10 they end in heartbreak. Relationship roulette I call it. Or if you’re deaf and can’t appreciate the alliteration, pretend it’s called GRANKLE CLAL CLAL, which sounds horrible when you say it out loud, but you’ll never know that, just like how women lie and you never know that either.

Reality Journal

2010-12-19T00:55:00.002-05:00

Day 1:
Saw all my nightmares today, except they were stuffed inside flesh cocoons with constant eyes and persistent geometric forms. Walked into a room and the walls didn’t assemble themselves in front of me; it was like they were already there. Pretended some people on the sidewalk were proles who’d redistribute my wealth if I didn’t reach for my car keys fast enough. Oddly enough, thinking about it didn’t make it happen. Weird day, wish there were some way I could fall asleep.

Day 2:
Slow day in reality news as I’ve only gotten 2 hours of wakefulness due to abusing propofol. I’m actually kind of worried because I took some while driving home from work. Whether my physical form is careening off a cliff in a car right now is anyone’s guess – except mine. I know for a fact that it’s happening.

In unrelated news, I’d like to talk to you for a moment about sex. Specifically, the importance of safewords. All of the violence in the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom occurred due to lack of safewords. Also, safewords have saved several astronauts’ lives: astronauts often have sex in centrifuges because the likelihood of blacking out at five Gs negates the need for a donkey punch. However, sometimes the centrifuge accelerates to a rate where it is no longer possible to lift one’s hand to push the “off” button, in which case voice recognition software is used to deactivate the machine when a safeword is uttered.

When choosing a safeword, make sure it’s something you’ll remember easily. But don’t make it anything too obvious like “safeword” or your birthday or you might be susceptible to identity theft wherein a stranger can hack into your body and at the moment your partner is climaxing digitally map their face onto yours so your partner associates their face with sexual pleasure and eventually no longer finds you attractive.

Day 3:
Cascade of revelations. World War II never happened. Neither did the Vietnam war. Neither did the civil war. All of these wars were just fabricated so that depressed people would see their own lives as bearable by comparison. Lucidity pierces the veil of illusion. I realize that my inability to accept my solipsism drives me to pointless pursuits like resisting the power elites controlling our spectator matriarchy and destroying the dwindling slave class through forced freedomization. It takes a scary kind of ego to regard one's perceptions as Concrete Things. Belief in other people is the worst kind of narcisism.

Day 4:
Delivered sandwiches to military base. Accidentally spilled soda on computer panel, causing nuclear warhead launch. It was weird because I knew it was going to happen, but couldn’t stop it for some reason, like I was outside my body watching it happen. Explained this to general. No tip.

Day 5:
Terrible hypersomnia. If I don’t get at least a few hours waking will be in bad shape for soccer game/beatboxing match with Eskimo vampires tomorrow night.

Day 6:
America is at war with Russia. No point in keeping this journal as hopes of participating in the Great Conversation of reality journalists dashed by nuclear holocaust.

That's Not Combustion

2010-12-16T08:50:00.003-05:00

I make enough money as a freelance organ donor that I don’t have to work, which is good because I’m hooked up to a dialysis machine, an artificial respirator, and various other machines that do most of my living for me … The girl I’m watching has short black hair. She’s wearing a clingy white knit sweater that really shows off her big breasts. I’m not actually all that into breasts, but I appreciate them. Kind of like how you’d watch a movie that’s won a bunch of Oscars and even though it’s boring as hell, you can at least see why a panel of movie dorks who jerk off to cinema magazines might like it. I’m actually turned on by pinky toes, appendix scars, and arm hair.

The astronauts’ homeworld is a planet-shaped life form exhibiting traits of both a mammal and a plant. In the northern sea, pink islands surface unexpectedly, stranding ships. The islands are erogenous zones: astronauts jump from the ships and roll around on the soft fleshy beach. Their bodies slowly dissolve in beachside mansions over cocktails and ambient jizz-wail … The astronaut looks across the shore at its wife, realizing they’ve reached the point in their relationship where everything has been said, in every language, with every possible word combination in every audible tone, pitch and inflection. The gun feels comforting in its pseudopod, like the contours of a familiar lover. The gun is its lover, after a fashion. It doesn’t have sex with it or talk dirty to it, although sometimes it thinks maybe it should …

“The Death of a Skeleton” tells the story of a skeleton’s Dante-in-reverse journey into heaven aka the realization that life is a superartery to eternal happiness, the universe is an erotic fantasy turned inside out and you will find true love tomorrow, in Her eyes the infinite God-helix of perfection.

Skeleton: “Would you rather spend a day in hell, followed by an eternity in heaven, or the other way around?”

Ari: “Other way around. To a person in hell, heaven is death, whereas to a person in heaven, hell is birth, and I have a diaper fetish.”

The elevator door opens. They’re in a warehouse getting shot at by a Strogg tank. The skeleton remembers the time he told a girl how alone and vulnerable he was and for a moment it sounded like she started to cry but actually she was just fighting off a sneeze. He runs behind the tank and snaps a rocket into its biomechanical chassis, taking advantage of its slow turning speed because weaknesses are meant to be exploited and if you find your lover’s emotional fulcrum you should forget its location and tell them that you love them because weaknesses are precious and should never be manipulated.

I put down my binoculars and go back to bed. Aftermath of destroyed keyboard. Stale coffee dusk; wan glow of depossessed dreams marching in rebound lockstep. Skeletons free-fall down a vertical meadow

Life Imitates Art Imitates Death

2010-12-11T02:50:00.003-05:00

... The field with a windmill in it is when the present ultimately goes where it can no longer be futurejacked. D and I walked up to the windmill and opened the door. Two minutes sideways Lana and I were walking down an empty street on a cloudy day.

“I think I understand why my first experience playing Quake 3 was a bad one: I turned God mode on. It turned my consciousness inside out; it became infinite and the universe became infinitesimal, which made me feel helpless as I watched reality collapse into a single globule that got sucked through a pinhole at the center of my mind like the last drop of a really good milkshake, one that’s so good that you need to suck up every drop, even though in restaurants you’re only allowed 3 slurps before the waitresses can legally shoot you. Just as infinity divided by zero is the same as its reciprocal, being God is the same as being dead.”

The song “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel used to give me panic attacks because the chorus reminded me of a really crushing loss to the blue team in a capture the flag game (the blue team logo is a sledgehammer) but then a friend suggested that instead of focusing on the lyrics I should just focus on the song’s intricate production since I’m an aspiring musician so now I can enjoy the song again.

D Sightings:

Primarily found in the center of my dreams now, just out of reach, since the dreamer is the dream and his dream-self the one uncontrollable aspect, meaning that the center is the periphery and vice-versa. She often makes love to me, knowing that in my arms she’s just outside my grasp.

Lana and I walked into a house – the only 19th century brownstone on a street of prefab apartment buildings – and found a decapitated corpse. Someone had written in the corpse’s blood “WE CONTROL THE WEATHER.”

“Life’s a punch in the tits,” Lana said. “I wish I was a moonbeam.”

“I wish I was the hair on the back of a supermodel’s neck at the moment where they step onto the runway.”

“We’re getting close to the nest. I recognize these markings. One of the Monsters did this. We’re probably a few rooms away. Either we’ll find happy or we’ll find Them. And I don’t need to tell you what the consequences of each will be.”

“I imagine it’s like a full-existence orgasm. Your entire life becomes a spear or arrow … How many rooms did you say?”

“See, you just comprehended something I said. And I kind of got your hair metaphor. We’ve started to brain-sync.”

“Back in the projects, you see, my family didn’t have any money. We didn’t have a dollar between us. We did our xeno zip through rolled up food stamps.” – Unknown standup comic, open mic night, Café Eclipse Concord, November ‘02.

Nightmares Are What We Don't Wake Up From

2010-12-06T21:32:00.005-05:00

(Spoiler: At the end of Stephen King's IT the protagonists open a door and see Pennywise the clown's real form, which is true freedom, because true freedom is terrifying.)

The evening hung in incongruent strips like mismatched wallpaper. I was sitting at a wooden table performing self-brain-surgery with a pocket knife and a mirror.

“I’m pretty sure that awkward ditzy girls with short hair are actually former men reincarnated as women for the first time,” Ari said. “I bet a lot of them have forced feminization fantasies and pulled some strings in the interlife to get this gig. Hence the eternal glassy calm in their eyes. Constant orgasm high. I’m convinced that our galaxy is just an island where high-credit souls get to live out some sexual fantasy or another.”

“I’ve never been happy with gender boundaries,” I said. “I mean, we need them, but the way they’re drawn … Men need a majority on this planet again so we can gerrymander that shit to include pantyhose and not having to take the initiative in courting.”

Ari’s face unfocused in wet explosions of veinlike Christmas tree lights. A neuron storm had razed my temporal lobe, destroying my sense of place-time. I could see my entire life in three-panel split screen, from its fiery inception to its pregnant middle to its barren futurescape. A million thoughts chattered like paranoid telegraph operators.

I propose a religion based on the dictum that every religion is correct (except itself).

Morning. The sun rose into the frozen anti-horizon, reverse-impaled by modest ziggurats of charity and good will toward men. The food court was a patchwork of unbuilt walls and half-formed logic. Crumpled wrappers blew across the floor in abstruse illegal patterns. I set down my blood speckled knife and reached for my hyperdermic needle.

Ari had an inoperable typewriter that had dissolved his lower jawbone. As he talked, the eleven shiny keys jutting from the base of his skull clacked in syncopation.

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one. God created man from an errant speck of dust that got caught in his eye and was laquered with a thin film of creation-stuff when he blinked. He immediately realized what a boner it was and was about to uncreate man when he tripped over a Higgs Boson particle (or whatever they were called before there were names for things) and fell to earth. He saw the ground approaching and knew that it would kill him so he created a handheld gaming system that would make his last seconds of existence an orgasm of gaming bliss.”

“So what happened to the handheld gaming system?”

“No one knows.”

We spent the rest of the day shopping. I bought some fire-scented candles and an actual-lava lamp that burned a hole in the floor and revealed an underground cave. A small child walked too close to the hole and tripped and fell to his death. There was a time when a child’s death would fill me with indifference, but I’d since become too emotionally repressed to express apathy, so instead I just left the store and went home.

“I wonder what prostitutes say instead of ‘This job makes me feel like a prostitute,’” Ari said.

“I don’t know. I’m reading this text file that I wrote while not on drugs and it’s really weird. I was so straight that night that I don’t even forget writing it.”

“I used to shoot cyproterone that I got off a dead transsexual who passed away quietly in his sleep dreaming about a world where the jizz-soaked tissues he flushed down the toilet after masturbating to tranny porn went through a dimensional wormhole to another world where a sterile race needed his semen to impregnate their women and they raised his children right and taught them that being fragile doesn’t make you inferior, it makes you special – but I never noticed any effects. Later I realized this was because I was making all the injections into a cyst in my arm. The cyst burst one day while I was at a football game and I transmogrified into a woman so quickly that it created a vacuum of testosterone that collapsed on itself and created a black hole that sucked everyone in the stands into the nexus of the universe. The best part was their agonized screams as their bodies spaghettified at the event horizon of my neo vagina.”

The text file read:

Ideas for multi-genre project:

relationship with girl – lie
childhood memories (beach ball?)
walls of room
movies – alien, blade runner, industrial pressure washer maintenance video I watch to fall asleep when out of valium, pulp fiction (last one would be hard)
walls of room
when people on the school bus flicked my ears – stuff that fell out from behind ears
walls of room
walls of room
walls of room
walls of room
walls of room
walls of room
walls of room
walls of room
walls of room
walls of room
...

Ari looked at me with hungry desolate eyes. Behind love’s curtain, base desires glide across the stage like targets at a shooting gallery. Life is but an Eulerian circuit of the bloodstream and death a chunnel between syphilitic ports of hell … Falling down the lighthouse stairs, bottle of Lorazepam in hand, wishing I had the key to _____’s heart just so I could break it off in the keyhole.

Delivery Driver: Night Two

2010-11-23T23:39:00.002-05:00

In a neighborhood this far below what middle class white people consider the poverty line, the streetlights look less like streetlights and more like a landing strip for broken dreams. People drift down the sidewalk with a determined listlessness. I sling the delivery bag over my shoulder like a sporty European homosexual showing off his purse where he keeps his makeup and Sega Master System cartridges and walk up to the house.

“Last week I ordered a small sandwich and got a medium by mistake,” the customer says. “I was so excited at the time … It’s funny how it sometimes takes the best experience of your life to show you how pathetic your life really is.”

“I wouldn’t be that pessimistic. I’d just be glad it happened.”

I say the words with a self-important tone, even though I have probably the most trivial job on the planet. The triviality of this job was why I originally took it: I thought that if I made myself insignificant enough, death would not look for me. Death, as I now know, is smarter than that. Even if I compress my existence to a single spine on a mandlebrot set, it will always have spies around the next bend, armed with railguns. Death can assassinate snowflakes in a blizzard.

The sun sinks into the city’s craggy tetris-block skyline. Sometimes I think the city is lonely like me. Other times I think it’s happy like me. It really depends on what mood I’m in at the time. Tonight the city looks mildly irritated, which isn’t my current mood but might be later tonight if I find out that someone erased my drawing of an owl from the soup board.

There was a time when I didn’t see the city at all – at least not as the living, breathing beast it truly is. I saw it more as a warehouse, a rough index of materials for inspiration. The people I’d meet, their faces, their voices, the slow vibration of their humanity, were all things I viewed as raw components. It wasn’t just an attempt to dehumanize them – although that was a large part of it. I just viewed life as a sort of assembly floor, an ugly but necessary workbench from which these shiny, pristine things called sandwiches emerged. I’d adopted this worldview about the same time I started sandwich making, but it seemed like whatever job I’d taken it still would’ve occurred to me; it just seemed natural.

But then, of course, Lana.

My car radio is playing “You Are a Light” by Pavement, which is my favorite Pavement song after “Gold Soundz” and “Frontwards” and most of the songs they did before 1997. Interference from another station punctuates the song with blasts of Led Zeppelin. Life, I realize, is just the past trying to force its way through cracks in the present.

“All the songs on indie rock stations are too good,” Lana once said, “too perfect. Life’s not like that. Life’s ugly. Last night I had to clean vomit off a table in lobby with a wire brush. Do you think Stephen Malkmus, for all his soulful street poetry and booty-shaking beats, knows anything about that? And if not, why should we listen to him? Do we really want to take all our advice from song lyrics?”

“Well, music mitigates the pain of life,” I said. “Sometimes I’d rather be comfortably numb.”

“See, that’s what I mean, you just quoted an obscure Pink Floyd song popularized when Staind released a vastly superior live cover in 2005.”

“Well, with the lights out, it’s less dangerous.”

“That’s another song lyric.”

“Half man, half amazing…?”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know. My psychologist told me to say it whenever I’m feeling anxious because it occupies my brain; trying to picture a man that’s half man, half amazing.”

Lana said that was stupid. Then she didn’t laugh at the Hitler joke I made. That was two hours ago, and I’m still pretty depressed about it. I return to D’angelos and my owl is gone.

Suspenders

2010-11-23T12:41:00.001-05:00

“I think suspenders are coming back in style,” I say to Lana.

“They never were in style.”

“They were in a divergent reality that branched off from our own in the 1980s, and the photos of hipsters on the internet wearing suspenders are that reality trying to force its way through the cracks in our own.”

The room rumbles. Objects pop in and out of focus. In Lana’s eyes I see empty desks and the individual fibers of the carpet in her apartment. The room becomes a submarine in a still sea comprised of just the right combination of sugar highs and MSG. I remember the nights I’d spend curled up in my bed with a bottle of valium, safe from the storm; both outer and inner. I feel the same way when I wear suspenders.

Meanwhile in the divergent reality where suspenders are popular:

“You understand why we have to kill you,” the ghost says to me.

“Yes, I understand. I became a millionaire by creating a renewable energy source powered by ghosts. But now the spirit world is displeased.”

Some students are sitting in a classroom when a tank crashes through the wall of the classroom. The students run away. The tank crushes the desks.

“It reminds me of … you’re aware of how in the 22nd century a scientist created a literal anima/animus projector that extracts the user’s feminine/masculine side and implants it into a cloned body, creating the perfect mate? I was working for an online dating site at the time and got laid off. I hunted down the inventor of the device with the intention of killing him … But then I realized I was in love with him. His name was-”

“Don’t tell me his name,” the ghost says. “Names make this job hard.” A glowing orb appears in the ghost’s hand.

I smile, because I know that in another life I or someone like me will kill the ghost and then feel a weight they were never aware of be lifted.

Nightmare 3: The one where you're getting chased by trolls

2010-11-16T19:47:00.004-05:00

I like antidepressants because they turn my dreams from a warzone into something more like American Gladiators: everything is safe and padded in Nerf foam … Lana and I are standing on platforms fighting each other with gladiator sticks.

“What do you think death is like? And I ask this because I woke up last night and my thought meats and bloodpump were in a race with each other to explode.”

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out some day. I got a Facebook message from a Monster who asked me for my email address.”

“Did you give it to him?”

“Yes. I did a cost-benefit analysis. Worst-case scenario, I get spam. Best-case scenario, the monster and I hit it off and we become friends and eventually get married.”

As I’m trying to visualize what the monster and Lana’s facebook page look like (she hasn’t added me yet and I’m afraid to ask her), she knocks me off the platform. I fall 100 feet and land on the padded floor below.

“Wow, you’re good at this.”

“I’ve always been good at dreams.” Lana hovers over me. “I can unlock flying, and all the hidden rooms with surprise orgasms.”

“I like to think I’m good at reality. I can unlock the mini-quest where you have to drive someone who you love but who doesn’t love you to the airport …”

“Where are you going?” The lady at the airport desk looks at me with unfeeling camera eyes.

“After this? Home. Then I’m going to look at pornography, which is its own place, as it is all shot in the same room.”

On the TV in the airport lobby Andy Rooney is talking: “It would be wrong for me to point out the unintentional humor in Boba Fett's jetpack malfunction that caused his death at the Pit of Carkoon last week. That is not the sort of humor I want any part of ...”

“I’m going to a field with a windmill in it.” D says.

I walk into the airport café and sit at a table. A beautiful woman walks over and sits down next to me. She looks out-of-focus, like the pair of pants I threw on the roof of McDonald’s when I tried to view them in Google Earth.

“I’m having a nightmare,” she says, “due to my fear of flying. So I was wondering if we could have sex so then I’ll have an orgasm and wake up.”

“I’m unattractive though.”

“Beautiful people fantasize about ugly people, just as ugly people fantasize about blurry agglomerations of beautiful people they can only half visualize because they’re afraid to make eye contact with them, as they should be.”

The room disappears in a revolving cube transition, accompanied by an explosion sound, because I’m now in a World War I trench. Lana is standing in front of me; she’s made out of polygons.

“We’re now in a video game,” she says.

“How’d we get from a dream to a video game? Are the two linked somehow?”

“No. Well, yes, everything is linked with dreaming; dreams are a universal thread that unites the universe, but if you’re asking me if there’s a more intimate link, some kind of second-level-”

Two soldiers run past us; one is chasing the other with a grenade.

“He’s having a fight with her over something he said when he got drunk. Well, their real-life counterparts, I mean. She was sitting in her living room and he came back to get his stuff and without a word they picked up controllers and started playing. This deathmatch has a hidden connotation: it’s being fought to save a relationship.”

“Add me to your facebook.”

Lana ignores me. I look at the soldiers, wondering if they know that after the war this trench will be paved over and become a strip mall. A McDonald’s, Zales. Kisoks peddling glowing pieces of coral. I wish I were a normal person and these were problems, not facts …

HalloWICKED

2010-10-24T18:25:00.001-04:00

My parents were really poor, so for my 8th birthday they got me a beat-up Sega Genesis salvaged from a landfill and one game: Madden NFL ’94. I didn’t know the rules of football – my dad was in prison most of the time and never taught me – so the game made no sense to me. My attempts to play it usually degenerated into shouting matches with the TV set, and then my mom.

Because of this, I don’t associate John Madden with football – at least not the type of football that most people know and love. I associate it with a type of football that destroys families and is emblematic of the decline of rural America. In other words, the XFL.

Fast forward a decade, add in socioeconomic factors, a troubled adolescence etc and, suffice to say, I’m going as myself this Halloween. I mean I’m really going to be myself, without any of the facades I put up to appease other people due to sociology, the mirror within, etc. I guess it’s sort of inverting the spirit of the holiday but whatever.

I discovered I have a fetish for fat women wearing tiny hats that are obviously too small for their heads. Normally, I’d attempt to analyze this fetish and view it as a sublimation of some deeper psychological phenomenon, but today that sort of analysis just seems like pointless abstraction. Why can’t a fetish just be its own end? Why can’t it literally just be about hats and getting boners over them?

I’m standing in line at Old Navy, listening to a Beyonce song on the speakers and wondering why kids listen to so much hip-hop - not that I hate hip-hop or anything; I just hate all the bad hip-hop that radio stations play just to cash in on this hip-hop fad, which will probably go away in a few months anyway. Earlier at work today I told a customer we were out of meatballs, because I just saw them roll into a bag one of my coworkers was holding over the meatball steamer. The customer told me the meatballs were rolling out of the bag, not in, and my coworker confirmed this, so I apologized; I’d seen the event in reverse.

Speaking of reversals, I wish there were hug retractions. My mom, or maybe someone I associate with my mom, which is everyone who traumatizes me in life, once told me you can’t unhug someone, which makes me long for a future where technology will make that an archaic statement like “there’s no cure for polio.” Also, you can hug children with nuclear arms, it just kills them. I know this because last week I got arrested for speciously dipping my arms in nuclear waste and going around hugging kids. I say "speciously" because, according to my lawyer, it doesn't matter what I say anymore, unless I'm Batman, because I've already been convicted. My lawyer likes movies about outer space and so do I.

“Thanks for your purchase,” the Old Navy cashier says, “And I hope you come back sometime.”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “Past happiness will destroy you if you try to relive it.”

“Well, buying more clothes is the antidote,” she says, perfectly summing up the type of person she is and why I love her so much but simultaneously know we’re incompatible and I have to move on.

There's no verb for cunnilingus, but there are poetry slams.

2010-10-05T23:18:00.003-04:00

I show up to the poetry slam late.

“What took you so long?” Lana says.

“Sorry, I was working on a log cabin made of popsicle sticks.”

“You’d miss this to build a popsicle stick cabin? Poetry slams are the most important thing in the world. Look!” She gestures toward the stage. A guy is reciting a poem:

“Long empty days chip away at my desire to twitter
Like a marble block with a sad, sepulchral statue of a guy not twittering in it”

“See? He’s trying to articulate his and, by extension, all of mankind’s pain. Will he falter, forget his line, maybe get distracted by the girl in the corner he’s trying to impress but who probably doesn’t notice him and has a boyfriend for all he knows? Or will he utter the perfect verse that will redeem truth and beauty forever? The fate of the universe hangs in the balance.”

“I still say popsicle-stick log cabins are just as important. They existed before there were popsicle sticks or glue to glue them together. They existed before the universe, and will still exist after the universe dies. Why are you looking at your watch?”

“This is the longest conversation we’ve had all week.”

“You’ve been timing them?”

“No, not really. See, this isn’t even a watch.” She holds up her hand. “Just some weird Sumerian bracelet I bought via the Sears catalogue and that’s supposed to be cursed.”

“That’s the third bracelet you’ve bought this week. You really like them, huh?”

“For now. Until I fall in love with one and the love slowly falls apart. Then I’ll have to find something else to idealize.”

Sweat beads on the poet’s forehead. The room is dark and wet and smells of perfumes and scented candles and axe conditioner. The masculine scent wafts through the room in fractalinear algorithms and lunatic gradients. I came here on the downswing of an emotional pendulum, tracing an arc from loneliness to nostalgia. I try to prevent the upswing – to greed, envy and hatred. Poetry is in our DNA. It’s the cuneiform our senses are carved in. Ghost scribes proofread the cotton candy of a synapse-well.

“Eh, this is no good,” Lana says. “I was feeling this poem at first, but now it just kind of sucks. Actually I don’t even know why I came here. Poetry is one of those things I avoid for awhile and sometime during that interim period I get the impression that it’s great, even though it’s not. Kind of like Pretty Hate Machine. I have to listen to that album once every six months, just to remind myself that it’s not as good as I think it is. How’s your latte?”

“I drank it too fast so I’ve got this intense latte euphoria. My brain’s basically a giant dopamine cistern and I want to stay up all night typing and deleting and retyping the same sentence again.”

…

I wake up the next morning and go to work. Pam is upset because someone got the wrong sandwich and I’m wondering if a sandwich bag with a hole in it is still a bag or if it loses some vital part of its essence. I notice there’s a slip of paper in my pocket:

A modern day retelling of John Henry.

I smile. I must be a writer now if I spend my free time drinking lattes and coming up with story premises like that in a caffeine induced frenzy and thinking I can make them fly.

Where Are You Going, Why Am I so Fat?

2010-09-27T21:43:00.004-04:00

“Don’t go out there,” Lana said as I was nailing together some boards into a crucifix

“Someone has to end this horror,” I said.

“Well, ‘horror’ is a pretty broad term. Who says what you’re doing will categorically end all the horror for everyone. I mean yeah, it might end it for some people, but you can’t just assume-”

I stopped hammering and looked at her. “Do you know what’s in that crystal? The ghosts of confederate soldiers harvested from a civil war battlefield. When they release them at a monster truck rally, do you think they’re going to be happy with how relatively racially diverse the audience is compared to the south in 1862?”

Lana threw her hands in the air. “Okay, whatever, go. And I suppose you aren’t even going to ask me about the new bracelet I’m wearing, even though I’ve been trying to get you to notice it all day.”

“You didn’t ask me about the magazine I left on the table open to an article about the 15 most common myths about mastectomy surgery. Even though for me it was a real eye opener.” I started nailing again.

“Yeah, if you’re living in some mastectomy shelter with no access to what I think is common knowledge on mastectomies at this point.” She walked into the living room and sat down on the sofa. “Do you know where I got this bracelet?” She held up her wrist. I was having trouble getting the nail to drive straight because it was one of those thin nails that don’t have a head. She turned on the TV to a talk show about mothers who hit their kids; but it wasn’t the mothers’ fault – the show is telling this from the mothers’ perspective now – because the kids were out of control; they yelled and fought all the time and sometimes it makes you want to scream, which the mother did, and then hit the kid with a broom handle which the kid basically had coming. I pried the nail out because there was no chance I was going to get it in straight at this point. I wondered if I should get another nail or just duct tape the boards together.

“I’m really glad we had that fight,” Lana said. “I feel like I got out some pent-up shit I’ve been holding onto for too long. That homeless guy in the park who says he’s Dr. Phil says that every healthy relationship needs fights.”

“That doesn’t sound like something he’d say.”

“Do you even know which guy I’m talking about?”

“The one with the limp, right?”

Lana didn’t say anything.

“Is it the one with the limp?”

“Shhh! I’m trying to hear this.” She turned up the volume on the TV.

“-INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM FOR A BREAKING NEWS STORY. Terrorists, apparently driven by an intense hatred for the freedom embodied by monster trucks, have released confederate ghosts at a monster truck rally. Eyewitness reports describe the ghosts as confused and disoriented.” I walked over to the TV, still holding the hammer. They were showing an interview with a monster truck fan.

“I’m pretty sure the ghosts are just confused as to how they got here,” the guy said. “Ghosts, in general, are more afraid of us than we are of them. If there is one thing to be afraid of, though, it’s getting a mastectomy before you know all the facts. Did you know-”

Lana turned off the TV. “Hey, I wanted to hear that,” I said.

Lana just stared at the set for a moment. “I really don’t want you to go,” she said.

Lana was fat. It was something we never really talked about. Whenever she said anything about being fat, I changed the subject, because I was pretty sure she was testing me. I’d change the subject even when the conversation seemed to be approaching fat. She had a nice face, though; it had all the right size facial features in the right shapes that corresponded with each other and came together nicely as a whole. Not like some faces where the features are too small and look stranded in the middle of the face, like you’re in a helicopter looking down on someone in a desert.

“Why don’t you want me to go?” I asked.

“Put it this way: what if our roles were reversed? What if you were sitting here and I was about to leave? Would you just let me?”

“If you wanted to, sure.”

“… Am I fat?”

Her oblique lead-in to the question caught me off guard. I didn’t know what to say; so I flung the hammer at the wall, shattering a picture frame.

“What the hell?! Why’d you do that?”

“A confederate ghost jumped into my body and made me do it. Now the ghost is telling me to go to the store because there’s a clearance on a kind of soda I like. Gotta go.”

I ran out the door. Not in a frightened or excited way, but in the default kind of way your body uses when it’s not quite sure where it’s going or what it’s running from; ran down the apartment stairs and into the night.

Nascar Race

2010-09-25T03:20:00.003-04:00

I’ve always hated Nascar races, but I’ve never understood why. A bunch of cosplayers dressed as Speed Racer characters walk into the store. Once, like them, I had the courage to look on the outside like I feel on the inside. Someone has been sending me death threats, but fortunately I’ve reached the point of abject loneliness where friends and enemies feel like two sides of the same coveted coin.

I try to think of an idea for my next tweet. Don’t write about your router and wireless printer problems. Don’t elevate pain. It may feel meaningful to see it on paper, the perfect distillation of your inner maelstrom. It may feel just as good as happiness. But that feeling, like frayed nerves ravaged on Code Red, numbs over time.

“I’ve never liked Nascar either,” my manager says. “I mean I felt bad when Earnhardt died and everything. I even wanted to leap off a cliff as a sacrifice to the Gods who have obviously forsaken us by taking the life of such a legend in his prime. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a car at the time and no one would drive me. I don’t have any friends.”

“Thanks,” I say. “I think you just helped me understand why I don’t like Nascar.”

“Because you don’t have any friends?”

“Sort of. Actually I think not having friends is symptomatic of a much bigger problem, which is that I don’t have any supermodel friends.”

“I’m a supermodel.” My manager pulls off her mask to reveal that she’s a supermodel. “And we can be friends. Oops, I just spilled your Mountain Dew.”

“It really felt like something could’ve been done at some point.” The Mountain dew flows into a drain in the floor. I’m considering becoming a janitor at a porn theater and mopping up semen as both a job and enthusiasm. Seeing my reflection in a pool of another person’s need for base gratification feels meaningful. As the Mountain Dew withdrawals set in, my skin formicates. The cosplayers are eating sandwiches and talking. I wish I could feel what they’re feeling. I probably could, at least vicariously, if I had empathy.

“You know that song they always play in the lobby?” My manager says. “The one that’s mid-tempo and poppy and makes you think of eating and good memories and following all the rules? I was wondering if maybe that could be our song.”

This job feels like rape, which despite how I just spelled it is a five-letter word. The missing letter is ‘U,’ because in our Kafkaesque society the rape victim doesn’t exist as a person so much as a statistic. I printed a bunch of shirts saying “The only thing missing from rape is u” and tried to sell them outside a feminist bookstore. While there, I met a girl I fell in love with. But soon our love fell apart. Relationships defrayed only repay postcards for letters. But the postcards are honest; your letters are glib lies, inked in denial, the Jaunty Alf stamp on the envelope betraying your secret agony.

Some more Nascar fans walk into the store. One is wearing a Godsmack T-shirt even though they’ve sucked for the last 12 years or however long they’ve been together. Somewhere inside me there’s a part that’s still waiting, hiding in his fallout shelter, entrenched in the belief that this is all just a passing storm.

Waiting for the all-clear. Waiting for the day he can live again.

Training Video

2010-09-13T20:35:00.002-04:00

A group of students are watching a video. In it, a boy dies in a hospital. The boy’s father watches him die. He leaves the hospital crying. On the way home, he snaps at a store clerk for ringing up his order wrong. The instructor pauses the video.

“Okay, now what could this man have done differently?”

“Not have been so thin-skinned,” a student says. “Life isn’t all about him.”

“Yeah, or realized that maybe the clerk was having a bad day too. Maybe his girlfriend broke up with him. Or he has college midterms this week. And they scheduled them during a rush.”

“Very good,” the instructor says. The next video is of a car crash involving a family of five. The wife and two oldest children are killed instantly. The father is pinned underneath the steering column - he’s suffered serious injuries but will live. He watches his youngest son – still conscious, but critically wounded – die in front of him. The video ends.

“What was the point of that video?” a student says.

“To show that life is cruel and meaningless,” the instructor says. Fluorescent lights hum. A man dressed in rags pushes a shopping cart down the hallway.

Dead Frontier Times

2010-09-11T00:22:00.003-04:00

Dogs are just tongues with eyes and feet … They've mastered ignorance to a science, which sounds reductive, but actually it isn't at all; it means they understand science. They probably know how the world will end.

College turns one into an effete ivory-tower intellectual - or so I’d tell my colleagues at the sub shop when white-collar workers would come in on their lunch breaks. “Nice Blackberry,” I’d say. “Did your OFFICE buy it for you?” Default faces pass me in the hallway. I can still hear the finger drumming of the person who sat behind me in math class; stamping out a neverending polyrhythm that follows me down the stairwell, out the door, past a group of kids. One has a face like a 4-dimensional magic eye painting where every feature is jutting out like it’s competing for most prominent part of the face. Streetlights stand like sentinels over the parking lot.

Life is a dead frontier. A demilitarized zone between order and chaos showing no signs of progress in either direction. Lana and I are walking through a forest. I’m telling her various pickup lines I’ve thought of to get her feedback:

“You have a choice: you can go out with me - or nothing.”

“Hobson’s choices never work. Period.”

“It isn’t a Hobson’s Choice; it’s a Morton’s fork. Either the girl can go out with me or I’ll destroy the entire universe – which exists purely as a subprocess of my mind – leaving nothing.”

Lana’s eyes look like distant lights at the end of dark tunnels made of way too much eyeliner. (I’m thinking about my student loans, and about water birthing.) I wish Lana would come over to my house and see my collection of anime swords; but controlling events in the universe is like shouting orders at mitochondria in a snowglobe. I can’t even comprehend such a miniscule task.

“The problem I think is that girls are frightened by my broad shoulders and confident posture,” I say. “Actually that’s probably not the problem; but whatever the problem is, it did make me say those specific words as a rationalization, so it’s sort of a distant footprint of the problem; it’s a start.”

I dig out of a pile of rubble, using a shovel made from a child’s femur bone. It’s the end of the world – which according to dogs has already occurred and humans are just slow in realizing it. I take the femur bone and write in the ash-sand.

Life is pointless.

I look at the words in disgust; they sounded a lot more poetic in my head. I rub them out.

Shatterdrunk

2010-08-29T13:07:00.002-04:00

The worst thing I can imagine is a world without alcohol and violence. Last night, (and this is still me imagining) I went out clubbing with my entourage of supermodel friends and all sorts of drunken adventures ensued, the kind that lead to property damage and barfights and yelling out the back of a car at the person who wanted to barfight you because you’ve got places to go so fuck his barfight-wanting ass. It also lead to conversations like this:

Brannen: Dude, put that crack pipe away. And tuck in your shirt. This club has a dress code.

Me: Sorry, I don’t believe in codes. Well, except that one that says I’ll die if I jump off a cliff or tall building. The code of gravity.

Brannen: Uh, I think it’s the law of gravity.

Me: Really? Okay, I don’t believe in that one either then. I mean I think it’s fine as an ethos, but I don’t think it should be forced categorically on everyone,

Brannen: Physicists should keep their laws off our bodies.

Brannen, in case you don’t know, is the alias of a platinum-selling hip-hop artist who I don’t like to namedrop when he appears in my lush fantasy life. Another thing you won’t see me revealing about my fantasies is how many of them involve a certain waitress at the coffee shop, and let’s just say they give a whole new meaning to “dunkin’ donuts” – although the old one they overwrite, “dunking donuts into coffee,” is more or less the same.

Probably the highlight of the night was when I was punching out our limo driver for saying something bad about one of my girlfriends. I was beating him to something resembling the guy who drank from the wrong chalice at the end of The Last Crusade when Brannen exclaimed, “Damn, bro. You shatterdrunk!”

“Shatterdrunk” is a new word meaning the drunken state where you want to punch anything and everything in your path. I think it both condemns and validates the human experience.

Etheropolis Zone

2010-08-29T01:25:00.002-04:00

The road to hell is paved in springboards and loop-de-loops and littered with broken TV monitors and broken syringes – broken everything. My job is so boring that tonight after I vomited because my job makes me feel like a whore* I just sat and watched the vomit dry for ten minutes.

*My job doesn’t actually make me feel like a whore. Well, it does, but only when I’m feeling really histrionic due to the aforementioned boredom. Whores evoke exciting images of fishnets and hotels and John Steinbeck novels and erotic abstinence. I hope they serve beer in hell (even though I don’t drink.)

A bunch of homeless people are gathered around a fire under a loop-de-loop. Lana and I are sitting with them.

“Sonic the Hedgehog would be no fun to play in first-person,” I say. “All that running and spinning. It’s probably the only game I would never play in virtual reality.”

“What about Tetris?” Lana says.

“I dunno, those interlocking blocks are vaguely sexual. I might like it.”

“Ironically?”

“Right, ironically.” I lower my head dejectedly. The night is a blank phonograph on repeat, revealing or hiding nothing. I watch a homeless person walking around over by some trees. He kicks a broken TV monitor. I listen to the conversations around the fire and play them back in my head, looking for something, a code. Everyone is hanging on what everyone else says. We’re all waiting for someone to mention drugs. I pick up an old newspaper:

Man Hurts Self Enough to Make Woman Love Him

A local man hurt himself physically and by writing soul-baring poetry to attract a woman’s love – and it worked, police said.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Officer Jeffrey D_____ said. “Because I mean usually making a girl feel sorry for you never works. You get like pity at best, but this guy-”

Someone mentions drugs.

“I know a guy who can get us some Flintstones vitamins,” a homeless person says. “All the kinds, including Bam-Bam and Dino.”

Writers eat life and shit words. The better ones do it regularly. I have the writer form of anorexia: I haven’t gorged myself on a good experience in years and consequently go weeks without producing words. And when I do they’re generally loose and runny, with half-digested emotions and metaphors. More figures appear at the fire. Or maybe they were already there. I’ve noticed a recent phenomenon where people – friends, coworkers, strangers - suddenly teleport into my field of vision – but only when I need them for something. I think my brain, maybe because I do too many drugs, is going into a power-save mode where it doesn’t bother processing the presence of other beings unless that presence somehow affects me.

I started drinking around 2AM. Then I took a bunch of Flintstones vitamins, which sent me into a hypermanic state where I sat at my laptop and typed a 300-page text file in two hours. Random sample:

alll vitamins yeah vitamins some person typing out this setence yeah yeah word ghetto wtf was i just typing realize that burn vitamins you god is pretty vitaminsable i'm sorrry sorrry i guess ? ha keeep typing help okay yeah ha ha ha tired tired tired tired yeah every word music time <<<<<<< is 4:39 vitamins vitamins vitamins vitamins ps. love jed dogs? maybe? vitamins ps saTAN love please sorrry there help yeah if it helps sure

Catharsis in Reverse

2010-08-22T20:08:00.003-04:00

While driving to work, I run over zombies on the freeway. I hate them for devouring my friends and loved ones, and also a large amount of my weekly paycheck through Obamacare programs designed to give them affordable education and health care. But the hatred quickly gives way to something else: a careful analysis. I find myself turning a microscope on my psyche, trying to uncover the inner workings, the smoke and mirrors of emotion. Where I once found meaning in the birth of feeling, I now feign meaning in its deconstruction. Every moment of my life is a catharsis in reverse.

The lobby is filled with hosts, who are gathered in a giant, shapeless protoplasm of hunger and impotent rage. One by one, I take their orders, longing for the passion I see in their eyes: the passion to fight or die, eat or be eaten, yell at the cashier or get cold fries and possibly a troll otter (note: a troll otter is fast food slang for a morsel of food surreptitiously laced with semen), which they usually get anyway.

When I started playing Sonic the Hedgehog on drugs I assumed that the palm trees in the Green Hill Zone were always melting, and drugs just gave me the ability to see them that way. In hindsight, I think I was right. The most intuitive impressions are always the most truthful. The most clichéd pop songs always the most honest. That’s why we fear them so.

So I’m done sending postcards to the people I should be sending letters. I’m done tearing up the floorboards to buttress the walls. I read webcomics about rape victims who fall in love with their rapists and welcome the characters into my heart. Why can’t I do the same when I see a young couple holding hands, instead of shooting invisible hate-beams at them with my eyes, or – if they’re at d’angelo’s – spitting in their sandwiches?

“Time is architecture,” I say to Lana. “Like a Quake 2 level. There are bright, attractive moments – rooms – and dull, uninspired ones – hallways. The hallways we never remember, which is fortunate, because they’re where-”

“What’s that beach ball for?” Lana says.

“Oh, I’m going to give it to Max, the new guy, and be like ‘Hey, wanna get on this?’ You know, get on the ball? Get it?”

“Max died last week. He fell down a lemniscate-shaped elevator shaft and starved to death while waiting to hit the ground.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Nah, it’s okay. I hated him anyway.”

After my shift, I take one of my Long Drives home through rural New Hampshire. Lovecraft country. I pass a rotting oak tree. It was such a tree that a balkiry landed on in my yard when I was six. The great bird asked if I could give him directions to the sea because he needed to go there to die. I just laughed. To a 6-year-old the notion of mortality seemed as absurd as the opposite does now.

But I’m not depressed. I’m thinking of Lana’s smile as she told me that Max died. And I’m not fighting it; I’m opening the krellium metal shutters and letting it in.

Tomb of the Astronauts

2010-08-22T08:33:00.004-04:00

The door to the tomb of the astronauts is pried open. The walls are stone with hieroglyphics carved on them. The floor is lined with blue track lighting. In the center of the tomb, there’s a stone coffin with spooky alien humming sounds emanating from it.

“What does the inscription on the coffin say?” the head archeologist says.

His assistant dusts off the inscription.

“’Life is a hamster wheel. Round and round it goes. Just don’t expect to get anywhere; you’ll just wear yourself out.’”

“Wow, that’s … depressing.”

“Yeah, I can see why the ancient parchment warned us not to enter this tomb.”

“Yeah, I mean I’ve always sort of felt that way about life. I’ve just never heard it put so eloquently, using a metaphor.”

The head archeologist stares at the wall blankly. The room clicks and rotates like a View-Master slide and he’s sitting in his bedroom with his wife. Love, he realizes, is just finding the right partner for an endless slow-dance that benumbs the soul. Outside, a group of kids with a megaphone is yelling at a guy to get out of his apartment because there’s a dog in the window. The dog barks and the guy yells at the dog and then pulls down the shade. Eventually the kids leave.

whatever happened just now

2010-08-22T06:22:00.006-04:00

In the darkened basement, a cloaked figure lays three syringes on the table.

“Choose,” he says.

One of the syringes, I know, is synthetic morphine; one is a deadly neurotoxin; and one is a time machine set to five seconds in the past, giving the person who chooses it a chance to choose again. I hold my ankh necklace over the syringes like a dowsing rod. I choose the middle one. I know it’s the time machine one, but I also know I’ve taken a benadryl, which mad potentiates time travel effects. I travel back in time all the way to the big bang.

“I’m not going to Anthrocon this year,” I say to Lana. “I’m just going to read the post-Anthrocon coverage on the Anthrocon website and various blogs.”

“Don’t say that,” Lana says. “This isn’t who you are.”

“No, it’s not who I am. It’s not who anyone is. It’s just a placeholder for when people can’t fight anymore.”

Looking at Quake 2 crate textures on opiates is much better than on weed; instead of shifting into crystalline relief, the pixels become a slow river that I float down acquiescently. The shores are lined with gallows with robots hanging from them. I grab a robot leg and break it off. The wires writhe in insect patterns.

I have really bad cold that I got from sharing a bowl with homeless people. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in life, but sometimes I feel like that’s the point, so next time around I can sidestep the homeless guy offering me weed, and circle-strafe mental illness and dropping out of college to work fast food jobs. Lana unzips her head into a spiral staircase that we walk down together.

“So that’s reality,” she says. “Was it what you expected?”

“It was … weird,” I say. “There were no hallucinations, nothing bled into anything, my brain never hemorrhaged.”

“It was like that for me too. The important thing is that you didn’t do it alone.”

“Yeah, thanks for talking me through it.”

“No problem. We’ll keep in touch, okay?”

On the way home from Lana’s apartment I stop at Burger King. There’s something I love about the ambience of fast food restaurants, the sterile atmosphere that says “Come for the cheap food, stay for the fake smiles.” Someone has left the faucet running in the men’s room. I turn it off.

TV

2010-08-20T23:29:00.003-04:00

Most people think that TV shows are their own insular worlds, but actually they’re all connected – literally. If you’ve ever noticed those doors on TV shows that you never see the other side of – those doors all lead to other TV shows. The only thing that prevents characters from accidentally walking onto other shows is that between the doors there’s an infinite maze of corridors filled with brain-eating monsters.

Lana is sitting on the couch, looking not-amused.

“This show is so generic,” she says. “I can already tell you what’ll happen.”

On the TV, there’s a static shot of a busy street corner at mid-day.

“These people will be born, have dreams and aspirations and work their whole lives to fulfill them. Some they’ll achieve, others not. Then they’ll die, feeling afraid and possibly alone.”

“C’mon, it’s not that bad,” I say. “At least not compared to the time I saw my mother-in-law in the shower.”

An audience of monsters, sitting in bleachers beyond where the fourth wall of the room should be, laughs. “Will you stop doing that?” Lana says to me.

“Sorry. I think this place is getting to me.”

“I think it is too. Is there any way we can leave?”

“Sure, we can walk through a door and through the maze again. But there’s no telling where we’ll end up. It might be a Sci-Fi channel original movie about giant bats. Or the Oxygen network.”

The audience laughs.

“How is that funny?” Lana says. “That’s not even – god, I never realized how much latent misogyny there is on TV.”

“I need a beer,” I say. The audience laughs again. I get up and walk into the kitchen, which is offstage. As I leave the audience’s field of vision, my body dissolves into a shapeless mass, held together only by the persistence of consciousness.

I used to have an affinity for astronomy, until one day I realized that as I was using my telescope to study outer space, outer space was using the same telescope to study me. After that, I didn’t use my telescope very often, or if I did, I made sure I combed my hair and wore my best shirt and took off my glasses, because I didn’t want space to think I was a nerd. Whenever I wasn’t using the telescope, I made sure to point it at a corner of my room I’d cleaned up and removed all the anime wallscrolls and Kleenexes from.

“Oh, check it out,” Lana yells from the other room. “There’s a suicide attempt scene!”

Mall on the Edge of Forever

2010-08-13T02:20:00.010-04:00

I spend roughly 45% of my life writing and 45% masturbating. The other 10% is a sort of transitional buffer between writing and masturbating. I call it the mall. It’s where I go to buy things, like pants, notebooks, designer wristbands and display cases for all my designer wristbands. It’s filled with a blue mist that looks like the fog effects in an old FPS game, which is only important because I can’t remember its importance, because the mist has an amnesia-like effect.

Figures brush by me, figures I don’t quite see, because their outlines are hazy, like half-formed silhouettes emerging from the primordial dream-soup of consciousness, and I’m afraid to make eye contact with them. The floor is strewn with makeup tubes and puddles of disinfectant. Up above, the holoscreen is playing a video from the Ministry of Fashion about releasing your inner slut. (It’s an old recording.) People hold liaisons in the ephemeral glow of fast food signs. Eternal sighs blowing across abandoned kiosks. Pneumatic sound of straws penetrating soda cups.

The store is called “Crates, Etc.” It’s where I go to buy crates for my Quake 2 level. It sells every type of crate you can imagine, and some you can’t, although when you see them you’ll wonder why you didn’t imagine them; they’re so perfect yet instantly familiar. As I walk into the store I’m greeted by an array of nice fragrances. The mall always makes you feel welcome, as long as you have money, or the ability to sell your body, which can sometimes lead to money if you carefully monitor the fluctuations in the market and sell at the right time. You need to watch Jim Kramer and read magazines to do that though, so to me it’s not worth it.

The receipts at Crates, Etc say the cashier’s name on them and then “Thank you for letting me serve you.” I want to say something to the cashier about how degrading that is, but then I notice she wrote her name in all caps with vanity tildes and dashes, so I don’t say anything; she’s obviously really self-obsessed and/or asking for it. As I’m staring at the receipt and shaking my head and hoping she notices me shaking my head, I notice that she overcharged me for my order. I’m about to tell her, but then the mist closes in.

…

“I figured out how they control us,” Lana says – we’re sitting in the food court eating cheeseburgers - “They supplant their essence into the moments of life we don’t remember. The tiny, insignificant … what’s the matter? Why aren’t you talking today?”

“Talking can lead to awkwardness.”

“Well, not talking can lead to awkwardness too.”

“I guess.”

Lana looks at me, starry, eternal. The mall is a maze of rugs and mirrors and smells and textures I can’t parse long enough to tell why they’re so perfect, so alluring. I want to die and turn into a million dead leaves that scatter across the mall. Lana, I think, senses this. Or has she known it all along? Has she known me all along? … The brain works 4-dimensionally, so maybe love is just the euphoria of future sex sent back in time.

“I love you,” Lana says. “You’ve known that, right?”

“I have.”

“I just need you do to one thing for me.”

“Anything.”

“It’s nothing major. Or I don’t think so. It’s just that I’ve been hurt in past relationships, and I need you to promise me, really promise me, that you’ll GO TO THE PHONEBOOTH ON LINCOLN STREET AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.”

The anchorwoman on the holoscreen forgets her line. She looks frightened for a moment, then something clicks and rotates and composure snaps back into her face: “Beauty is vulnerability; strength makes you hideous. That is why you’re a monster …”

Delivery Driver: Night One

2010-08-09T01:51:00.005-04:00

The city is a whore, a neon-speckled jungle where life is cheap and anything can be had for a price. I walk up to the house and knock on the door.

“I ordered two hours ago. What took you so long?” the man says. His voice is rough and haggard like burlap, but beneath it I hear another voice, one that sounds almost like a subdued scream, like someone else, someone moribund and terrified, is trapped inside his lungs and calling for help.

“I’m sorry sir,” I say. “I was attacked on the way here by a gang of street punks.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” he says. “Please, come inside for an ice cream bar.”

I walk through the guy’s door and notice it has several chains and deadbolts. My delivery route is the most dangerous one in the city. I like danger, although up until now I’ve only experienced it in video games. I chose this route because the danger here is real, like it is in video games, but with better graphics and a more intuitive interface, meaning it’s like a video game only better.

The guy is out of ice cream bars, so he offers me a freezer pop instead. I’m sitting in his living room eating it while he sits on the couch and does a word find. I feel bad for him, like I do for most old people. Just the fact that they have to stay alive after the thing inside them dies, like an expired freezer pop that sits in the back of the freezer and no one is going to eat it but no one throws it out just the same. I look around the house and it looks like a tomb: everything tidy and perfectly arranged. Too perfect. It doesn’t look like a house at all, just a museum of life passed. All the photos, keepsakes, past accomplishments neatly framed, waiting for an audience that will never come. This house already feels empty, already feels haunted.

“That’s a nasty cut on your neck,” the guy says. “One of the street kids do that to you?”

“No, just a botched attempt at a chondrolaryngoplasty,” I say.

“You need to be careful with transgender body modification. It always leads to two things: a newer, sexier you, yes, but also more transgender body modification.”

“Don’t use the slippery slope with me, or I’ll counter with a wicker man.”

“You mean a strawman.”

“No, I mean a wicker man. It involves putting my opponent in a bee cage until they concede the debate.”

Earlier at work today I was attacked by an Armenian death moth that flew out of a bag of lettuce and chased me around the freezer. I hit my head on a metal shelf and got a concussion. When I woke up, my manager, who’s either a lesbian or really bad at not being a lesbian, was yelling something about a sandwich and how it was either the wrong size or had too much mayonnaise or too much bread or the bread was burnt or someone farted on the bread. She stopped yelling for a second and asked me if I was okay. I looked at her and for a moment her brief display of empathy for my pain made her seem like the love of my life. That was how I realized that pain can be manipulated to make you fall in love, and when people say “no pain, no gain,” they mean get attacked by a killer moth and then fall in love with a lesbian who feels bad for you.

I take the delivery sign off my car and lock the door. I look up at the d’angelos sign in the parking lot, which for so many years has looked like a crucifix for my soul, but now just looks like a normal sign, due to the metaphor-creating part of my brain being damaged in the concussion. I wonder if my health insurance will cover a cat scan, or if it’s going to be revoked because I tried to file a claim for my chondrolaryngoplasty.

Diary of a Facebook Addict

2010-08-06T01:44:00.005-04:00

The basement smelled like a dusty urinal. It was lit by a single bare light bulb that hung in the center. Metal shelves with cups and French fry boxes on them stood around the light bulb like gatherers at a fire, the last fire on earth, emerging from the dark to tell stories in hushed tones and vowel sounds that were impossible for humans to pronounce, or if you did pronounce them you went insane or became a lesbian.

“Spencer said we can use his computer,” Lana said. She put her phone in her pocket.

It had been a day since I’d logged into Facebook. My internet service provider had suspended my account for downloading copyrighted material: jpegs of the Mona Lisa that I could convert, using a printer and ink and paper, into small, blurry facsimiles of the Mona Lisa and then possibly sell. Lana hadn’t logged in in 3 days and was in advanced Facebook withdrawal: her cuticles had disappeared and she was slightly irritable.

“Let’s go,” she said.

We were in Lana’s car. Buildings fluttered by in the night: department stores, gas stations, tattoo parlors, a 24 hour tanning salon. I recognized the salon as the one I’d once been thrown out of one night: I’d stumbled in drunk and got in one of the tanning booths, thinking it was a coffin – this was during a gothic stage where I pretended I was a vampire. Fortunately the tanning booth wasn’t turned on, or per the rules of simulated vampirism I would’ve had to have writhed around a lot and screamed, simulating getting burned to death, following dousing myself with gas and lighting myself on fire, the first and more important part of the simulation. I thought, after that incident, that my life had hit its nadir. But then I became addicted to Facebook.

“You know, we aren’t really people at all,” Lana said. “Just abstract concepts trying to perpetuate themselves in an ever-evolving mass consciousness.”

“What concept are you?” I said.

“It’d take an eternity to explain.”

“Well, put on a Mogwai song and you can explain it in the time it takes for the song to get to the rock part of the song.”

Lana didn’t respond; her advanced Facebook withdrawal was getting worse. I, meanwhile, was still in the early stages of withdrawal, which are actually much worse than the later stages. My skin was dissolving into a pink viscous ooze and my vision was blurred; I had walked into forcefields and no-walls several times.

Before facebook I used to have hopes and dreams. The dreams were erotic ones involving forced anesthesia; the hopes were that I could download as many forced anesthesia fetish videos as possible before the downloads stopped working because I guess I was downloading too many at once. Sometimes I still miss that life, but I know that’s just nostalgia, because actually it sucked: even when I was able to download all the videos there was still a guy in them who, just when the videos were getting hot, would walk into the frame because I guess he was the webmaster or one of the models’ boyfriends or something and say some undergraduate level bullshit about the eroticism of medical submission and how it was all about, like, trust or something and smirk a condescending smirk as if to say “I do this for a living, you only do it for a small referral commission by linking to our site in your forum signatures.” Undead children on tricycles with his face superimposed on theirs rode through my nightmares, which were as frequent as they were terrifying. I knew I was better off being Facebook-addicted, because it at least kept me off the streets, or at least you couldn’t prove that I was on the streets, not irrefutably anyway, in court, or with Google Street View, which I often used to vicariously experience the streets, since I was never on them.

“Shit,” Lana said. “Road construction. It’s going to take awhile to get there.”

“Can we listen to your Phil Collins CD?”

“I left it at home.”

No sooner had the words parted her lips than I felt like a marionette that’s strings had been cut. I fell deep inside myself, beneath the horizon of flesh, to some forgotten place where I hid as long as possible, until a sound, like an alarm bell waking me from a dream, forced me to resurface. It was the Facebook notification sound.

I opened my eyes. We were in Spencer’s apartment. I was lying on the floor. Lana was sitting at Spencer’s computer posting a status. She noticed I was awake and said, “We made it.”

I looked around. The floor was littered with crumpled-up scraps of paper. I picked one up and uncrumpled it and read it:

~~I feel guilty all the time. I just don't let it bother me.~~

~~Strawman, starring Nicholas Cage as a sophistic scaling argument~~

~~drinking some very plausible coffee~~

~~What We Talk About When We Talk About [thing] (ghosts maybe?)~~

“Failed ideas for statuses,” Lana said. “Spencer is an even bigger addict than us. Or I guess I should say ‘was.’”

“Was?”

“Yeah, the euphoria of logging into Facebook has cancelled my ability to process linear time and discern the past from the present. Also he’s dead. I guess he realized what a monster his addiction had made him and killed himself.”

I said, “Can we listen to Phil Collins now?”

…

Lana and I were at Spencer’s funeral. The casket was being lowered into the ground. A few professional mourners lingered by the grave, although most had gone into the funeral home for refreshments. Lana was dressed in black. She was eating a cracker with a piece of cheese on it.

“It’s all my fault,” I said.

Lana finished the cracker and wiped her mouth with her sleeve.

“Ghostface Killah-” she began, but her mouth was full of crumbs, so she waited a second and swallowed them. “Ghostface Killah said that all the hardships we go through, diabetes, for example, are all just the trials of life.”

I waited for her to say more, but then realized she was done. She drank some soda from a plastic cup and poured the rest on the ground.

“Do you believe that?” I said.

“Believe what?”

“What you said.”

Lana looked at her cup. She ran her thumbnail across the plastic rings, making a reedy vibrating sound.

“I guess.” Her voice sounded distant. She crumpled up the cup, then looked at it, as though it had suddenly taken on some significance.

“Well, I have to go,” she said. “But if you need anything, just let me know.”

“Okay. What’s your phone number?”

“I don’t actually have a phone.”

“Okay. I’ll email you or something. You have an email right?”

“Yeah!” She was walking away. I stayed by the grave for a few more minutes. The sky got darker and it began to rain.

A Tour of the Bluetooth SIG Headquarters

2010-07-30T22:38:00.007-04:00

I bought a Bluetooth headset, but when I put it on all I heard was a recording saying “Act like a self-important douche,” so I went to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group headquarters to return it. While there, I decided to take a tour of their factory.

“This is the assembly floor,” the tour guide said, “where we make Bluetooth headsets, Bluetooth watches and our upcoming Bluetooth mind control implants, which will link Bluetooth users directly to our hivemind of people who know they’re better than other people. As you can see, most of the work here is done by robotic servo arms, even though they’re probably the worst work force on earth and the only way to keep them from going on strike for more pay and longer coffee breaks is by lowering them into vats of hallucinogenic stroyent that makes them have soothing dreams.”

“What are dreams?” one of the tour group members – a spectral demonoid from beyond the afterfuture - said.

“They’re when you fall asleep and think about the person you feel unrequited love for. They range from prosaic self pity to panoramic IMAX epics where you enact your murder fantasies in lurid detail with savage cruelty.”

“Is that what your robots dream about?”

“No, of course not. Robots are incapable of love. Murder for them is just a cold pragmatic act, completely devoid of passion, hateful or otherwise.”

A klaxon sounded and the assembly line stopped. The robot arms sunk into vats beneath the floor where they dreamed they were predatory creatures on a distant planet, stalking prey in a jungle made of circuit boards and coffee cups. My Bluetooth flashed, indicating that I had 37 new voicemails. 36 of them were detailed instructions on how to disappoint everyone in my life. One was from Lana, asking if I wanted to come over to her apartment and play the Wild Zero drinking game, except with weed. I cringed. Trying to mock a bad movie with a head full of weed is the writer’s decathlon. But I loved Lana. The time I spent with her was neither pleasant nor painful; it just passed quickly and invisibly. Love, I supposed, was like anesthesia, explaining why I had a fetish for female anesthesiologists.

“This is our warehouse,” the tour guide said – we were standing in a gray room with crates stretching to infinity in all directions. “Like most warehouses, ours contains crates.” The guide gave us a deadpan look, then smiled. “That was a joke. Of course our warehouse contains crates. Why wouldn’t it? Sorry, I just thought it might ease the tension after that humiliating check-in process where you were strip-searched and then had to wait in an intake cell for several days and eat from slave troughs. Now you’re probably wondering: what makes this warehouse so special? Well, the truth is that all warehouses are special; they’re where we get the parts to create things. The universe itself is just a giant warehouse of parts – people, images and ideas – that tour guides like myself assemble into informative tour brochures and speeches to give during tours.”

“What’s that giant glowing-eyed rodent over in the corner?” one of the tour members said.

“Ah, I see you’ve noticed the mutated rats that patrol our factory, culling the sick and infirmed from our ranks. Concerns about rats are just one of the many sentiments that can be expressed via Bluetooth, in over a million different languages.”

The next room we toured was a plain white cell, with a man in it who was hooked up to a polygraph machine and typing on a keyboard. Both the keyboard and polygraph machine were connected to a shotgun pointed at his head.

“This poor man has to sit here typing for all eternity,” the guide said. “If he ever stops, or types something that’s a lie – to him at least – the shotgun will blow his head off.”

Everyone gasped.

“I know, it’s horrible. But it’s a pretty apt metaphor for life. We all live just a few words ahead of death. Cessation of communication is the cause, not the result of dying. We’re all neurons in a collective mind that uses language as synapses. And what better way to transmit that language than through Bluetooth?” The guide opened his briefcase and showed us an array of Bluetooth headsets. I looked up at the monitor that displayed what the man in the chair was typing:

… And there are lots of reasons to watch anime. The first is

“Fuck!” the man said. He stopped typing, triggering the shotgun and splattering his brains across the wall.

“Poor guy,” the guide said. “Never had the focus to write anime reviews.”

“Why did you make him write anime reviews?” someone asked.

“I dunno. One of our Asian workers suggested it. And I really like Asians. They’re so friendly and non-judgemental. Like dogs. Not that I’m saying Asians are dogs. That would make their dog-eating habits if not outright cannibalism at least very disturbing.”

The mutant rat we’d seen earlier scurried into the room. It leapt onto the man's corpse and burrowed into the neck stump.

“Oh look,” the guide said. “It’s going to attach itself to the spinal column, reanimating the corpse into a flesh-eating zombie. This is always so amazing to watch; the cycle of death and rebirth. It’s like seeing a newborn pony take its first steps.”

The rat-corpse lurched to life and shambled down the hall into the Blue Room, waving at us as it passed.

“Well, that about wraps up the tour,” the guide said. “You know this was actually going to be the last tour I ever did. Afterward I was going to kill myself. Not because I’m sad; oh no, I’m actually very happy. It’s just that I’ve accomplished everything I ever wanted to in life. When I was 8 years old I made a list of all my future goals, and being a successful tour guide for 10 years was the last one on the list … But since you’ve all been such a great group today, I’ve decided I don’t want to die. I want to keep doing this for the rest of my life - or longer.”

…

At 2am I woke up. Lana and I had been doing drugs all night and my brain felt like a string of dead Christmas lights wrapped around a burnt slab of meat. I wondered if I should trade in my Bluetooth-powered iphone for a Blackberry, which was powered by witchcraft. But then it struck me: neither phone was superior. They were both just combatants fighting for control of my life - but I could transcend them both and become God. I fell back asleep and dreamed about Lana as a sexy nurse erotically administering an IV of propofol.

Drugs

2010-07-27T01:24:00.007-04:00

I once knew someone whose life was destroyed by drug addiction. That someone was me. Or should I say was me. Oh wait, I did. Well imagine I said something else. Then imagine me saying “was me” in a scary Crypt Keeper voice as I pull off my face and reveal that I’m the Crypt Keeper, and spiders come out of my mouth, and you’ll have some idea of the abject terror I had in mind when I wanted to write a post entirely about the Crypt Keeper.

I know a guy at D’angelo’s who said that one night he did so much coke that it felt like he’d died and gone to heaven. Does that sound like fun to you? Of course not. No one should do drugs. Drugs aren’t a round-trip ticket; they don’t take you to magical fantasy world and then deposit you back in your existing life safe and sound. At least not yet. Scientists are working on drugs that will do that, but they’re a long way off and will only be administered rectally or by sucking them from Fred Durst’s nipples. And how will you get a date with Fred Durst?

Becoming obsessed with Italian horror films. Current favorite is Vittorio Basso’s “Catacomb of the Spinning Skeleton.” It has a creepy theme song with synthesizers, prog-rock tempo changes, and rattling chains. Thinking about that song keeps me up late at night. Insomnia facilitated by Berry Bop (note: Berry Bop is a Japanese cola comprised of 90% amphetamines and 10% berry flavor derived from amphetamines) and horrible smells coming from the kitchen – my dad’s girlfriend uses so much garlic in her cooking that I’ll get rebound vampirism if I move.

Shooting heroin from used cottons is like jerking off into snot tissues. And vice versa.

Work is like a dream turned inside out; my body is doing something while my mind is doing nothing. Last night I had a dream that I was at work and my manager wanted me to go in the freezer. I asked her what was in the freezer and she said it was all the models in bondage porn who smile despite not because of the fact that they’re tied up. (This can be a dealbreaker in a orgasm.) Then I woke up and knew exactly where I was but wondered where I’d been and if it was any nicer than this town with its sad lonely streets and wrought iron fences that impale the setting sun. Like the rotting oak on the hillside I feel like this town has withered my social development, limiting my horizons and sentencing me to lifelong exile among the dead trees and solitary creatures of the wood.

I’m starting a new religion called the C-sect whose religious rights include performing random cesarean sections. It isn’t that I support cutting random women in the abdomen – quite the opposite: I support movies of this activity so hardcore enthusiasts have a nonviolent outlet for their fantasies -; it’s just that in this age of nihilism where God is either dead or Morgan Freeman granting his powers to Jim Carrey I need some form of spirituality.

Free Weed

2010-07-27T00:32:00.006-04:00

At a comedy club a comedian was telling a joke:

“You know you’re getting old when you start turning down free weed. Because there was a time when if someone offered to smoke me up I’d be like ‘fuck yeah.’ It didn’t matter if I had work or a date. It didn’t matter if I had to pass a fucking drug test the next day. Never turned down free weed.”

The audience laughed.

“Of course that was before a paranoid monster made of pain and fear and laughter took over my mind. In my dreams the monster chases me through sewer tunnels, sealing off exits, flooding the tunnels and mocking me in my own voice. Desperately I try to hide aspects of the person I once was in places the monster won’t look. Although it’s annexed about half of my neurons at this point.”

The audience laughed harder. They turned into monsters that looked like glowing-eyed tumors with arms and teeth. “Thank you,” the comedian said. He exited the stage, wiping his brow.

Ministry of Fashion

2010-07-25T01:42:00.003-04:00

The past isn’t a code; it doesn’t break under scrutiny. It’s actually even more inscrutable than the present, and way more inscrutable than the future, which can often be predicted through witchcraft.

The Ministry of Fashion: an obscene sprawling network of buildings, people, annexes, sub-basements, nightmares, memories and hallucinations, tapering into a fearsome steel obelisk; a haunted house made of ideas. Ari looked out the window. “How do you feel about abortions?” he said.

Outside the city looked like a case of neon jewels. Signs gaily lit offering every form of pleasure and perversity imaginable. At the base of the Ministry zombies stumbled through a maze of twisted conduits with haphazard patience. The sky was nightmare-red and dripping with sweat.

“I’m pro-choice,” I said.

“Really? I’m anti-choice; I think abortions should be mandatory for all women.”

“You think that all women should abort their babies?”

“No, I’m in favor of zeroth trimester abortions, which involve killing the woman before she even becomes pregnant. Burn the tree before it bears fruit … Goddamn Steve Albini” – the speakers were playing a Big Black song – “So much fucking treble. It’s like being fucked in the eardrums with a razor dildo. Can you do something about this?”

I grabbed the radio panel attached to the intercom console and threw it out the window. It landed next to a zombie who grabbed it and slashed open its chest with the metal shards. It pulled out its large intestine, slung it over a pipe and hung itself.

“That’s better,” Ari said. “… Hey you look sad. What’s wrong?”

“It’s just people,” I said. “It’s like they won’t let me live. Like it’s against the law to live anymore. We’re all humans, right? We’re all – and this is I guess my theory of humanity – we’re all an intelligent form of combustion destined to destroy the universe – that is if we don’t destroy ourselves first. Destroy and let destroy. That should be the maxim for all humans to live by.”

“But what does any of this have to do with fashion?”

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know a whole lot about fashion. Not as much as I said on my application anyway.”

“I don’t either. This is why the Ministry is falling into decay. I never should’ve thrown out that purple monster with four arms and two mouths. He knew a lot about fashion.”

“Well can’t you rehire him?”

“No I mean I literally threw him out the window …”

The purple monster was sitting at his desk one evening at the Ministry when he heard a noise in the hall. He looked up from his paperwork, through the doorway. The hall was empty. The yellowed wallpaper and crooked maze of floorboards – pipes dripped overhead – neither admitted nor denied anyone. He looked out the window. It was dark and the city was shutting itself: barricading its doors, closing shutters, reaching in its pocket for the skeleton key. All the shops, malls and other orifices of commerce were occluded. At night the aisles would flood in disinfectant.

A group of employees were standing in a hardware store parking lot. The manager locked the door and faced the workers, telling them they had done a good job and could now go home to their loved ones. If they had loved ones. Some people didn’t; those people were destined to be hurt and alone, wandering through life, unable to pretend like they were part of something when they were so dead inside that they could barely speak; wanting so badly to reach out to other people, but knowing that those people were unreachable: locks without a key, cities they’d never visit. Even the closest ones were so far away … The speech didn’t come out quite the way the manager wanted, but that was okay; none of the employees were listening anyway. They were thinking about the night and the cold. Secretly each one promised to themselves that if they made it through this long, bleak winter they’d change their desktop background. Maybe to an English meadow or one of the other pleasant landscape backgrounds that came with Windows Vista.

The purple monster packed up its documents, its dress designs, its makeup, miniskirts … and stuffed them in its briefcase. It locked its office and walked down the hall. It didn’t see Ari waiting in the shadows; it didn’t see the flamethrower he was holding – until it was too late. Too late to tell Ari that the briefcase held designs for the next big trend in women’s fashion: jeans made out of a dream fabric that morphed into a visual representation of whatever the wearer was thinking and were also really tight. And the monster screamed - phantom echoes from a distant universe, emptiness of moments, wasteland of what wasn't. And screams continued, negating his flesh, grinding of teeth into old wounds …

“Well we need to do something and fast,” I said. “This place is literally falling apart. The walkway over the alligator pit is about to collapse. If one of our European models fell in there … Oh man, I’m picturing it right now … oh that’s awesome … What were we talking about again?”

…

I walked down the spiral staircase to the Ministry control room, where all the people the ministry had assimilated into cameras to watch and laugh at the unfashionable were directly linked to the room’s infinite wall of monitors. The staircase was made of a gray viscous material. Teeth jutted from the walls. This is the end, I thought. Something destroys tomorrow. Always does. I thought I had hit rock bottom with my addiction to Japanese cola, but if there was one thing that 8-bit platform games had taught me it was that there was no such thing as rock bottom, that every pit was bottomless, an infinite freefall into despair. Even if you did land on something, which you did from time to time, chances are it was just a breakaway ledge ready to collapse beneath your feet and send you plummeting even deeper into hell. Whatever, I thought. Destroy me. Kill me. Forever. I don't care anymore. Nothing was taken from me. I never had anything. I never had hope or a chance. It's always been this. Always will be. There's nothing to fear. Pain is a constant. It's the one constant thing. It's comfort …

Cats/Loss

2010-07-24T14:29:00.007-04:00

Next to Vincent was some trash – it looked like fast food wrappers and soggy newspapers. Rain poured out of a drain pipe a few feet away. A train rumbled in the distance. The street was a tiny yellow rectangle that looked miles away.

“Terrible…” Vincent thought – a thousand other thoughts were clamoring for attention, but the only one that made it through was “Terrible…” Finally another one pushed to the front of the queue: “I’m not giving up my cats…”

An hour ago Vincent was in his room when there was a knock at the door. Stormtroopers in riot gear were standing in the hallway. “We’ve come for your cats,” the leader said.

“My cats?” Vincent said. (For a brief instant an unknown thing shuddered through him like a subway train.) “What do you want my cats for? They’re just cats.”

“Just forget the cats,” the leader said. “You can’t have them anymore.”

“Why?”

“Well… for one thing, you should realize…”

A pause.

“They are letters of the alphabet - not cats. Not cats at all.”

Vincent felt sick.

“If that’s true, then… God, that’s terrible…why can’t-“

And then he fell on the floor, knocked down by a stun grenade, realizing the truth: that the cats were letters. And that was that…

…but was it? A wave of sadness shook through him as he – sitting in the alley – remembered the cats. God, he thought. God, they were such good cats. Why did this have to happen to them? What should I do? What can I do? And then: You know the answer. All the difficult questions in life, the ones that torment us, are the ones we know the answers to.

Fear shot through Vincent, fear that he could no longer reconcile with his growing certainty - even that wasn’t enough to stop the wailing sirens and dread paranoic vistas that played in his head in panoramic lurid IMAX. He looked up at the sky. The sky became a ceiling. The buildings became the sky …

The stormtroopers didn’t think of searching him for a weapon. They thought he was unconscious - which he was: but not unaware. Consciousness is just the most predominant world we live in. Although that predominance is superficial, really …

“Did you get the cats?” the leader said.

“Yeah,” one of the troopers said - they had been standing in his living room when they said that – wait, how did he know this? Or did it matter?

…but superficial or not, he had challenged something that he shouldn’t have. A line had been crossed, and he had known it; and reality could sense fear.

Now it was all closing in. The sky became a weight, crushing him. The walls were covered with wires. Spiders with egg sacs scrambled down the conduits, reminding him, reminding him of the cats --Of course! – it was never supposed to be a job; a TV would’ve been better. But now he was doomed. Sweat glistened in the phosphorescent gleam of the spiders exacting patience. Wires. Cats and anything would've bought him a little more time. A shard of terror slid its way through the calm of the night, wishing he had somehow had more time. But time was never what it appeared when you entered the sad contract of days and weeks, hospital heirlooms weathered from another day's sweat and cats rolled down the walls like a convex wineglass lens. Cat troupes paraded through the sunbeaten streets, confetti and children were cheering.

-stopped and overturned a trash can, took out a syringe with a plastic tip, tore it off and injected cat serum. He glanced around the corner, furtively concealing the catlike scent of forever and that was that - what the cats had told him he didn't care about anymore as much as just losing the round pangs of loneliness that made him think of the shore and mossy rocks where he used to collect hermit crabs and forget that his world was poised on the edge of a crisis he knew he would one day face. But now the rocks and the beach seemed far away; a distant prayer for some lost thing, half remembered, half imagined that seemed to him a sure sign of the coming blackness that seemed to suck his empty frame out of time and remind him that it was just a short oscillation of life and death he had to return to…

"I'm not giving them up," he said and rose to his feet. The night didn’t answer, but simply unfolded before him in a series of moments – battles – he knew he would face, and the outcome. He stepped out into the street…

This Belongs on Mars

2010-07-23T23:33:00.002-04:00

Lana was sitting at a table in the mars McDonald’s lobby, staring out at the Martian landscape. An alien sadness filled her eyes, a distant prayer for some long-lost thing, half remembered, half imagined.

“I’m here so much that it feels like I live here,” she said. “I wonder if I even exist out there, or if my memories of the world outside are just an illusion.”

I wanted to tell Lana that we couldn’t be friends anymore; that I was a free spirit like a unicorn or a trashbear and couldn’t be tied down in a monogamous friendship. You can put a bear in the circus, but you can’t make him wear stilts. I didn’t know what that meant, but I said it to all the girls who wanted to tame me by posting it to my gothspace profile, which I assumed was read by a lot of girls who wanted to tame me.

“I’m going to try something,” she said. “An experiment. I’m going to walk out the door and see if I disappear.”

Lana opened the airlock and stepped outside. She choked on the poisonous Martian air and died. She had shown me what love meant, and how the word was meaningless until its antecedent had detached itself. I spent the rest of the night throwing ketchup packets at the ceiling fan.

Straw in a Fast Food Cup

2010-07-20T15:28:00.003-04:00

God hates Nine Inch Nails fans. He makes it rain on them every day metaphorically and tonight he was making it rain on them literally as they stood outside the Verizon Wireless Arena. Brannen pointed to a goth girl and said I should go up to her and say something totally random like the tessellation algorithm from Shiny Entertainment’s Messiah, at which point she’d make a snarky remark that was the first of three snarky remarks girls make before they have sex with you. I said I needed a drink first.

“We can go to that bar down the street,” Brannen said. “They have a dress code, but if we buy some Calvin Klein designer shirts and then use the money we saved buying mass-produced clothing made in sweatshops to bribe the guy at the door, I’m sure we can get in.”

The jukebox in the bar was playing Closer, a song that reminded me of the moment I lost my innocence, which for most people was losing their virginity but for me was doing really awkward bondage roleplaying with my first girlfriend: After we were done we sat in my car drinking McDonald’s shakes. I looked at her; she was beautiful, more beautiful than I deserved. And then it hit me: the sound at the beginning of Eraser was a straw in a fast food cup.

Anime Convention

2010-07-19T01:41:00.005-04:00

Lana and I were waiting in line outside an anime convention.

“I can’t find our tickets,” Lana said. “A robot must’ve taken them.”

“Is the code to shut down the robot computer core and prevent robots from taking over the earth 5146?” I said.

“Is that really important right now?”

“If it distracts me. If it keeps me from dealing with all these terrible realities that are lined up in my head in a queue of horrors then yes, I’d say it’s pretty important.”

In college there was a guy named Marcus who lived across the hall from me and played really loud rap music at night. I’d listen to the subwoofer beating like a diseased heart that I knew I had to destroy but could only approach on the descending bars of a syphilitic dream washed like a badly-drawn robot head to a badly drawn beach. Outside mechwarriors destroyed the city. Tryants rose and fell in the 38th parallel of my mind. I registered on a hip-hop message board and asked how long Dr. Dre had been practicing medicine. A poster replied that time had no meaning to Dr. Dre because while serving a 3-month sentence in San Quentin he had beaten the time paradox and unlocked eternal life … People in line were huffing air freshener, filling their heads with a pine-scented bliss that made their lives seem long and their dreams feel buoyant like fleshy balloons, anchored only to the sound of the Cutey Honey theme song. Then, tucked somewhere between the notes, I thought I heard endless screams, cacophonous whirlpools of sound blowing down darkened alleys and washed out industrial corridors where dimensional transients in anime t-shirts huddled around barrels of temporal refuse, digging for clues of what they once were.

Lana found our tickets and we went inside.

“Wow, this is amazing,” she said. “It feels almost like a dream. Like it could disappear at any second.”

“Really?” I said. “For me it’s the opposite: I feel like I’m a dream and I could disappear at any second. Disintegrated by the awesomeness of anime.”

I was buying a shirt depicting an undead dracoid standing atop a pile of human skulls when I saw a crate arrangement that reminded me of my Quake 2 level. My Quake 2 level was the reason I’d dropped out of college and gotten a fast food job, although lately I hadn’t been working on it and would wake up in the morning afraid to face the angry white lines of the grid. I knew I was getting mapper’s block and in a desperate bid for inspiration I’d spent the previous night wandering through a deathmatch server on acid. It went pretty badly and after an hour I found myself crouched in a corner staring at a strogg crate and wondering where my life had gone wrong. Eventually another player came and asked if I was okay, just before just before shooting me with his rocket launcher and yelling “ch00nt!” which literally means “I just made you my bitch with my fleshrocket,” because when you’re on acid everything people say is literal.

Neither of us knew how long we’d been running from the robots. Or how we’d ended up in a bathroom. Neither of us cared. Except this wasn’t an ordinary bathroom: it had pink wallpaper and plush toilet seat covers.

“This is the bathroom I’d imagine in an ideal world where it’s safe to be vulnerable,” I said.

“In a world where it’s safe to be vulnerable, vulnerability, by definition, wouldn’t exist,” Lana said.

Once martial law was declared and the constitution rewritten, the robots were eliminated quickly. After this, a new sense of patriotism swept through America. It was a time of heroes, and of miniature flags that lit up and played country music. My McDonald's, which had lost three employees in robot wars due to low sales forcing a round of layoffs, was demolished and rebuilt as a giant skyscraper. Some people thought it was tasteless, and that the new layout wasn’t conducive to fast drive-thru service, but those people capitulated when we introduced snack wraps. Every year, on the anniversary of the robot revolt, the structure was destroyed again. It was a highly anticipated media event that generated tons of advertising revenue that went to the families of robot victims.

“So now that the robots are gone, but the world is still probably going to end due to global warming, what are you going to do?” I asked Lana.

“I think I’ll get wasted: snort about seven packets of Splenda. Then I’ll call my ex-boyfriend, the one who abused me, and ask him if he wants to come over and hate-fuck for awhile. At some point during this I’ll probably pass out. Then when I wake up I’ll watch Clerks 4 again.”

“Clerks 4? But that movie is terrible. Cinematic afterbirth.”

“If it distracts me …” Lana said. Our eyes met, then unmet. She walked away.

Letters to a Girl

2010-07-18T23:01:00.004-04:00

6/4/10

Just sleepwalking through a nightmare anymore.

Have you ever thought about killing yourself? I mean not in a physical way since the body is just a vessel that the soul inhabits in a waking dream but have you ever thought about doing it metaphysically by draining your chi or stabbing your power animal or pushing your aura off the astral plane?

On the way to work today I heard a song by Winger that reminded me of how i used to be happy, but then just as the guitar solo had me climbing the stairway to heavy metal heaven I looked down and saw the vast wasteland my life had become. Then I knew what I had to do. Then the radio said winger had cancelled their reunion tour and i knew i had to commit a suicide.

6/8/10

Tonight at work I thought about you and decided that after work I was going to kill myself, but then when I thought about how this was the last night I'd have to do my unpleasant job, I started to feel happy, so happy that I eventually decided not to kill myself, which is ironic because I was wearing a subversive Hot Topic t-shirt at the time.

Then the phone rang and I picked it up and said “Hello, you’ve reached Ghostbusters," remembering a prank I’d wanted to do for several years until I started doing it every night and it became an agonizing routine I nonetheless find identity in. Tonight I’ll be out driving, looking for pay phones I can prank call other people from, chasing the thing that was promised to me the first time I’d heard a Jerky Boys CD; the always-imagined-but-never-realized thing that can only be seen by the cold delirious few who understand and accept that to live in extremes means to die in them as well.

I did slash my throat when I got home, though, but only because I was performing a chondrolaryngoplasty. I've decided I want to be a woman now.

6/9/10

Death doesn't scare me, dying does. It's a painful, awkward transition. There are much worse ways to die than suicide.

One is that you're sitting in a hospital bed, hooked up to tubes and machines and knowing that you're going to die. Then the door opens and platinum-selling rapper Dr. Dre walks in to perform a chondrolaryngoplasty. You scream but all that comes out is a gurgling sound that sounds like some whack-ass M.C. trying to beatbox, so Dr. Dre takes the mic and freestyles all over you using the heart monitor as a beat. The freestyle is so tight that it summons the ghost of M.C. Eats 2 Much, an obese rapper who recorded all his songs in a hospital dissing the white blood cells that put his homies under cardiac arrest. M.C. Eats 2 Much rolls up a McDonald's gift certificate and does a like of coke, because all dead rappers are addicted to blow due to social inequalities in the afterlife that force them to enter illegitimate opportunity structures. Then the hospital disappears and you're in front of an audience cheering and holding up poster boards with your most despairing thoughts written on them in fluorescent markers and glitter. You scream long eternal into the abyss and then die. I once accidently bumped into a girl at a Nine Inch Nails concert and our eyes met for a second longer than they normally do when you're acknowledging a random stranger and that was how I knew we'd shared a moment.

6/9/10

Reminds me of my manager at McDonald's. She wouldn't let me go on break so I called her a bitch and then stuck the nozzle of the grease pump up my left nostril and tried to suck out my brains. Unfortunately it didn't work because our grease pump sucked ... or no, actually it didn't suck. That was the problem. Because if it did suck I would've died and they would've had to take me to a morgue and do an autopsy and eventually embalm my body for the funeral and my family would've gone to the funeral and cried a lot.

Anyway, that sucks. I wish I could give you a hug. In a friendship way, of course; not in a romantic way. Although I do usually find hugs romantic. Not because I'm a virgin, but because they remind me of a scene in my favorite anime, and "a scene in my favorite anime" is a series of words that my auditory synaesthesia associates with sex, or the nearest placeholder it can find for sex, which is currently the lyrics to Ignition (remix) by R. Kelly.

How's finding me a girlfriend going? I hope you find a girl who's attracted to gay men. Not because I'm gay, but because my skills at being a man are in a slump and I need a slow pitch.

6/10/10

I bought drugs from a homeless guy the other day. And I really respect homeless people, because life dealt them a bad hand but they do what they need to survive; they beg. This is the approach that I'm going to take to dating. I'm going to stand on a street corner with a sign saying "Free Blowjobs" and when people ask if I'm giving away free blowjobs I'll say no, I'm soliciting them because I've had a really hard life and live on the street where I've only had a handful of sexual encounters (this is a lie, obviously - I'm a virgin - but this version is more believable).

Maybe the reason I fear girls is the same reason I fear bacteria: because they're strange and alien and I can only study them through powerful lenses.

6/13/10

I must be gay. The homeless guy who I know through work and bought drugs from has a gay homeless friend who wants to fuck me.

This leaves me two options. The first is that I can firmly tell the guy that I'm not interested. Unfortunately this would involve being assertive, and I'm bad at that.

The second is to let the guy fuck me, multiple times, until he slowly loses interest. The logic being that forbidden fruit, once easily accessible, loses its appeal.

The downside to the latter, of course, is that it might take longer, so to accelerate it I have a plan.

I'll tell the guy my emotions, all my fears, hopes, dreams, everything. I'll invest massive amounts of hope into our relationship. I'll call or text him every day. I'll tell him that he, finally, is the guy who'll save me, who'll lift the weight of eternal loneliness from my life. This huge amount of devotion should set off his fear of commitment (hobos are free spirits, chained to no one save the call of the open road) and make him abandon me immediately. Well, not immediately, but relatively fast. Over a period of, say, a few months. He'll slowly lose interest in being together, stop returning my calls, and eventually start fucking another guy instead, discarding me like a tired plaything.

Then for the next few months when I see him, or another hobo who reminds me of him - maybe because they have a similar limp or bindle stick - my brain will be thrown into paroxysyms of hate and lust. I'll begin playing the "what if" game, blaming myself, wondering if I could still be with him now if I'd just done a few things differently - and there are no winners in the "what if" game; like a wacky 90's game show where you have a thousand points and the goal is to get down to zero, it's played to lose. Eventually I'll begin cutting myself, therapy will be sought, the doors to a mental ward close, and I'll be rid of my problem forever. The End.

6/14/10

Last night I dreamt I crawled through some sort of vaginal aqueduct to a city made of flesh and teeth and excrement but anyway my question is about sex.

(since I'm obviously going to have sex soon. I mean statistically speaking - since the average age for losing one's virginity is 16, and I'm 27 - my chances increase every day. Every second even. I might even get laid by the time I finish typing this)

So I know girls have vaginas, but I also know there's something else called a "labia". And since the names sound pretty similar there's a good chance I'd get them confused. The labia, I take it, is the interloper here, because I've never heard of girls wanting it in the labia, or there being a play called the labia monologues, so I'm guessing the labia is bad news. So how do I identify and then (hopefully) evade it? Because it sounds like a honeypot for sex dilettantes, and while I am one, I don't want to appear so.

My other question - and I'm sort of embarrassed to ask this one - involves sex being compared to chess. A lot of the guys at work do it and it always confuses me because I'm not familiar with the terms they use. What is the "King's Gambit?" Or the "Sicilian defense?" What does it mean to give your partner the "Giuoco Piano?" If it's really graphic maybe don't answer.

6/15/10

Okay, never mind the sex questions. I've decided to become a transvestite anyway, since I have a svelte feminine body and it might help me with my image problem, and wearing pantyhose gives me boners.

So if you're a tomboy that makes you my closest connection to the masculine world, so I have a question: How do men even live with themselves, knowing that they're horrible, repugnant brutes, stitched together out of simian parts, speaking in factory drones and detuned clavichords, longing to be precious, knowing that Jesus bled for their sins when he should have menstruated - how do they do it? It's something that I, following my recent apostasy from being a man, can't even fathom.

Also, eyelash curlers: yea or nay?

6/15/10

Really? Okay, maybe I won't wear eye makeup then because I don't want women to love my androgynous look - it's supposed to be a controversial statement on gender politics and if you want to be provocative you have to make waves. Is there anything else that women love so I'll know to avoid that as well?

Last night I did the drugs I bought from my homeless friend. It turned out to be DMT laced with Empathy - a designer drug that gives the brief sensation of caring about others, followed by disgust. Unfortunately I took too much and went into a drug coma. In the coma I dreamt I was trapped in a black-and-white tv show based on The Honeymooners except Jackie gleason was a 4-dimensional monster made of television static and Art Carney was a transsexual who instead of a lower jaw had a typewriter apparatus consisting of smooth metal keys that jutted from his skull on thin copper rods and chirped and writhed in insect patterns. The Jackie Gleason monster pushed me down some stairs and I hit my head and went into a coma-within-a-coma where I dreamt mostly about horses. It was nice after the first one.

Sometimes I think of the night you slept at my house and I think of you and you're sliding away from me across the floor like at that mystery spot in england where stuff rolls uphill ... you slide into the closet and get eaten by a mosaic of classic Universal monsters from my classic Universal monsters coffee mug that says "MONSTERAMA" on the handle in blood letters. I also have another coffee mug with a cartoon vampire that says "Gays and ethnic minorities drive me batty."

6/16/10

Remember the first night we hung out and played soccer? I get the feeling that that was the point of life overall - playing soccer. I hope it was. I hope I did a good job. If not I'm sorry.

They are beaches, and of them there are many ...

2010-07-17T00:17:00.003-04:00

This summer my platonic life partner Brannen and I went to Hampton Beach. To prepare for our trip we watched our favorite vacation film, Saved by the Bell: Hawaiian Style. In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a plot summary from the IMDB:

In Saved by the Bell: Hawaiian Style, Zack and his friends are expecting a marvelous time at the beach, but when they get there, they learn that the evil capitalist Worthington is trying to demolish their hotel. Then Screech professes his love for Mr. Belding, even though Mr. Belding only loves one person, and that’s Mr. Belding.

I altered that a little to show how if Saved by the Bell were about unrequited love between men it would’ve been more poignant and maybe won several Emmys and stayed on the air longer - and paralleled the start of our vacation, where I wanted tell Brannen I loved him (as a friend), but got interrupted when a parking attendant who looked like an extra from Saved by the Bell: Showgirls walked up to our car.

“That girl’s attractive,” Brannen said. “Do you think she’s a prostitute?”

“I’ll ask her,” I said.

I rolled down my window and asked the girl if she was a prostitute. She said no, she was a parking attendant. I apologized, but then saw she had a lot of makeup, so I asked her again.

“I’m not a prostitute,” she said, and pointed to her shirt, which said “Parking, not sex attendant.”

“Okay,” I said, and started rolling up my window. But then I saw she had a bruise on her temple that looked like it was made by one of those brass knuckles that say “PIMP” on them and only pimps can buy, so I asked her one more time if she was a prostitute.

“Yes!” she said. “If it will make you park and go away, then yes, I'm a prostitute!”

“We’re all prostitutes to someone,” I said and got out of the car and sulked down the street. Brannen apologized to the girl and explained we were having a fight.

The best thing about Hampton Beach is that it’s both a vacation and a whole bunch of reasons to feel better about yourself. You may have been depressed when you got there, but after walking down the street through a Diaspora of carnies, drug addicts and ICP fans you suddenly realize your life isn’t so bad. By the time Brannen and I reached the beach we were in a good mood, which became an even better mood when we saw a black guy in a trenchcoat who was selling drugs. Brannen thought it was pretty boss that he looked like Lawrence Fishburne and asked him for an autograph. The guy looked at Brannen disdainfully, so Brannen offered him $10. He took the money, but I guess there was a miscommunication because instead of an autograph he gave Brannen pills. He said they were Empathy, a designer drug that gives the brief sensation of caring about other people, followed by disgust. He also said they’d release us from the Matrix and free our minds, which we assumed meant they had LSD in them too, which they did.

“We’re definitely screwed,” Brannen said three hours later. “We’ve been walking forever but we keep ending up at that wild west arcade like it’s the nexus of hades or something. And did you see how that robot bird was staring at me? It was like it was staring right through me, although not through my soul because souls don’t exist and all conscious thought is just an attempt by the abstract part of our brain to interpret the chemical processes that control our actions, and furthermore the government should declassify the UFO files.”

“Calm down,” I said. “The bird’s weakness is its love of arcade games, so I say we challenge it to a skeeball match and then take the balls and chuck them at that girl who wouldn’t give you an airheads necklace for 100 tickets and then spend the rest of the day soliciting drugs and prostitutes because you’re right, we’re definitely going to die.”

“Wait!” Brannen said. “I think I see something.” We ran down the beach toward a doorway that looked like the meaning of life but quickly changed to a souvenir stand selling Juggalo merchandise. Seeing Jesus morph into a rack of ICP shirts is pretty unnerving, especially since the morphing effects at Hampton Beach are 90s CG the tourist bureau bought wholesale from the makers of The Lawnmower Man. The fact that Hampton Beach goes to such lengths to look like the 90s, even when you’re on drugs, is definitely a weird accomplishment that’s either magical or horrible depending on how you look at it and how much acid you’re on when you do. Since it didn’t look like we were leaving soon, I suggested that we eat something. Brannen agreed, and using his primitive survival instincts activated by the drugs and ICP, guided us to the Hampton Beach McDonald’s, where we got $4 hamburgers. I was feeling better until I looked at my receipt and saw it was dated 2045 and had a message from my future self in an apocalypse world where a sentient receipt-printing machine developed by McDonald’s had overthrown the earth:

Dear Jed,
This is your future self and I'm tired all the time now. Too tired to feel anymore; all I do is think. I started writing because of Dreams. I don't have them anymore. Where I used to see them I now just see ugliness and facts. My plan to do this for the rest of my life was like 40-year-old tranny porn: only attractive in the thumbnail version. I'm sending you this to warn you you're going to have an unhappy life unless you start Feeling instead of thinking and also that there’s a liquid metal cyborg standing RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!! Haha, just kidding. I’m not actually your future self, just an artificial construct of your mind sent back in time to murder you in a cyborg body made mostly out of wood and tin.

“Just to clarify something,” Brannen said, “When I told that girl earlier we were fighting, I just meant we were friends having an argument. I didn’t mean we were going out or anything.”

“Oh I know,” I said. “I mean I love you as a friend and stuff but I’m totally hetero. I might make out with a guy if I was wicked drunk, but it’d have to be a real effeminate guy. Way more effeminate than you.”

“Okay cool,” Brannen said. We sat on a bench and watched the sun set. I took out my tape recorder and recorded myself a note to design a carnival game based on Michael Crichton’s Westworld where the player sits on a bench and pretends to be a tourist sitting on a bench based on the wild west that’s malfunctioning and trying to kill them. The acid was wearing off, so we decided to go home. But first we stopped at a souvenir stand and bought a memento of our vacation: a miniature model of a boat. “This will come in handy for my job,” Brannen said. “I can put it on my desk and my boss will notice it and say ‘Oh, so you’re a boating man. What color is your boat?’ and I’ll tell him I don’t have a boat, just a model of one I bought at Hampton Beach. Then he’ll start laughing, thinking I’m joking. But then I’ll tell him no, I really did go to Hampton Beach, and then hopefully he’ll feel so bad for me that he’ll give me a raise.”

A fat guy with a surprisingly hot girlfriend walked by. “Oh man, look at that guy,” Brannen said. “He’s totally living the Dream.” I looked in the guy's eyes and saw Brannen was right: he was the happiest man on the beach because he knew he had climbed Mount Everest. It’s seldom a guy with the physique of a gnome lands a girl two tiers of hotness above him, but he had grabbed adversity by the tits and exploded like fireworks in the vagina night.

No Strategy Guide to Parenting

2010-07-15T23:09:00.005-04:00

The astronaut finished its sandwich so Pam sent the lobby boy to give it a free ice cream. Astronauts always got free ice cream, even though they were rude and messy and existed in a fractally dynamic reality that arced around our own. The astronaut ate the ice cream and killed the lobby boy and left a complaint in the suggestions box and ordered another sandwich. “Goddamn it,” Pam said.

I smoothed out my dress – it was Nascar weekend and we could wear anything we wanted as long as it was Nascar-related so I chose a pink dress that I felt best evinced the feelings of excitement I got from Nascar and how those feelings in turn made me feel about myself which was beautiful and delicate like a prom queen riding in a limousine, resting my head on my date’s shoulder and knowing that my whole life lay ahead of me like a Nascar track that stretched to infinity – and called out the next order. “Now serving host number 6366.” When no one took the food I looked at the slip. The time of the order was three months from now. I showed the slip to Pam who said to ignore slips from the future even if they contained fantastic descriptions of future products like a Ghostbusters answering machine.

“Excuse me,” a host said, “I ordered a chicken sandwich but instead of a chicken sandwich I got a black thing in a bun and the black thing had flecks of pink stuff in it and there was a note attached explaining my faults as a human being and how I’m going to die in a hospital afraid and alone, so I was wondering if I could get a new one.”

“Sure,” Pam said. “I just need to see the sandwich we gave you.”

“I ate it,” the host said.

Pam gave the host a new sandwich and printed a cancel slip indicating I’d be fired next week and took the next order and frowned because she hated her job and the hosts and their faces, their voices, the indelible stain of their humanity was something she could purge from her lobby but not from her mind where it always lingered in the recesses, just outside the periphery, playing hip-hop music in the parking lot or clogging the sinks in the women’s bathroom, pooping in trash cans. “Why are you wearing a dress?” Pam said to me. “Are you gay?”

“No,” I said, looking out the window at the McDonald’s parking lot and the city and the cold stars and cold moon and indifferent sky and wondering if they were the punchline to a mean joke or just driftwood on a chancre beach of forever and trying to decide which was worse.

“Okay good, because someone wrote homophobic slurs on the men’s room urinal and if you were gay you would’ve been too offended to clean them off and I would’ve had to clean them while you sat in a chair that gives oral sex. Cleaning supplies are in the basement.”

As I left the lobby the astronaut stared at me. There was something about the way astronauts stared at me while they ate, savoring the meat and zesty mac sauce that lingered in your throat like warm /// that made me feel like a prostitute, but in a good way because there was a strange romance in being a prostitute. There was a black dress at Hot Topic that I walked by every day without noticing but yesterday I tried it on. Looking at myself in the mirror I realized I looked perfect, so perfect that I didn’t even see myself which was the purest perfection of all, the perfection of nothing, but then I realized I’d had an allergic reaction to expired nugget sauce and had gone blind. The astronaut finished its sandwich. Pam sent the lobby boy out to give it a free ice cream. Astronauts always got free ice cream even though they were the rude and messy and existed in a fractally dynamic reality that arced …

I walked down to the basement where Lana was doing drugs.

“How’s it going?” Lana said.

“Really bad,” I said. “The lobby is full of hosts.”

“They used to be called guests,” Lana said. “But that was before we put an addictive metabolic virus in our food. Now we call them hosts because it sounds like ‘ghosts’ which are the first enemies the player encounters in the Ronald McDonald Haunted Halloween Funhouse video game.”

“I’ve never heard of that game.”

“Imagine Sonic the Hedgehog on crack.”

“I did once but it led to a paranoid hallucination of Tails threatening to stab me. I got so scared that I went catatonic and had to go to the emergency room, but while I was there they discovered a brain tumor they were able to remove just in time.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Yeah, but unfortunately after the operation a filing error got me transferred to the sex change ward where I got a sex change and then was artificially inseminated with a sperm sample belonging to Hitler and there’s no strategy guide to parenting.”

Lana nodded and gave me some drugs. I thought about the trays in lobby and how, when I cleaned them, they were covered in ketchup, but only around the edges. Everyone says that God is in the details, so if I were a scientist I would’ve used the ketchup phenomenon to disprove the existence of God. Discover the mathematical theorem behind it and publish it in Scientific American and then when God comes down to sprinkle miracles and burning bushes around to distract us from the fact that he doesn’t exist, shoot him.

Pam locked the door to her clean lobby, flicked off the lights and smiled. Rats in the parking lot fought over a chicken patty. The fluorescent strips on the roof looked like bleached bones. Lana looked at me, starry, eternal: “Reality doesn’t support happy. I never programmed it in. My beta testers told me that it would never happen, that no sentient being could ever be happy in a million years. Do you realize what you’re doing could crash reality, bringing an end to all existence as we know it?”

I scrubbed the tray with a blue cloth. After dropping out of college I became a Quake 2 mapper. To pay for my antidepressants got a job at McDonald’s. There was a dress at Hot Topic that I was trying on. It was supposed to be a temporary job but I became addicted to the romance of being a prostitute. Looking in the mirror I didn’t even see myself, which was the purest perfection of all. I’d spend days working on sewer corridors just so I didn’t see them. I bought the dress along with some fishnets. The girl behind the counter had piercings. I knew she understood my pain or even if she didn’t understand my pain I understood her pain because I could understand pain especially the pain of goth girls because that was an easy to understand kind of pain.

Tales from the Blogdead Zone

2010-07-15T14:59:00.002-04:00

A guy in a Marilyn Manson t-shirt and I were standing next to a door.

“Now that you’ve funneled thousands of dollars into our pyramid scheme to sell defective dreamcatchers that only allow nightmares to pass through, you can see what’s behind this door,” he said.

“Is it the true meaning of the sad, terrible symmetry that runs through all dark corners of existence?” I said.

“No, it’s a guy in a Dracula costume.”

I looked disappointed.

“And wait … what’s this in your ear?” the guy pretended to pull a Hot Topic gift card out of my ear. When I still looked disappointed he asked, “What’s wrong?” I told him that I have problems with girls and I’m addicted to analog Tetris – analog Tetris is a real-life version of Tetris played by dropping wooden blocks off a scaffold. My body anymore is just a fleshy avatar I send out of my room when I need more money or wooden blocks. I inherit the avatar’s knowledge and memories but otherwise have no physical or emotional attachment to it.

Grill is the most expressive position at D’angelo’s. Sometimes when I’m angry I take a huge chunk of steak and chop it with the spatulas until I’ve broken it down into the basic periodic elements of steak, and then I chop those too until I’ve basically destroyed the steak on an atomic level and my spatulas are just clanging against a bare grill, and I’m pretty sure everyone is hearing what everyone but an indie guitarist hears when he does an artsy solo where he bends a note and hits it 300 consecutive times. Everyone in the service area and lobby are gradually losing their shit, wondering what’s wrong with me, but mainly just wanting the noise to stop. Finally my manager puts his hand on my shoulder and says “enough.”

Enough.

Monsters

2010-07-13T12:43:00.005-04:00

The universe as we know it isn’t the universe as we know it. It’s actually a digestive tract for monsters. Monsters with enough teeth that you wouldn’t think they’d have trouble digesting. Except the stuff being digested isn’t food; it’s emotions. The monsters lack the mental enzymes to break down emotions, so they created us to digest them for them.

The first time I heard the monsters was at McDonald’s. I was refilling the shake machine when my drive-thru headset fell into the shake mix. When I put it back on it was set to a frequency I’d never seen before. Voices whispered through the static. Weird monstrous voices at once loud and soft. I ran and told my manager Jared who said to change the battery in my headset and then went back into the manager’s office where I heard him cry and do another line of coke. To some people the idea of monsters isn’t as shocking as it is to others.

I spent two years studying the monsters responsible for the voices. These were the best years of my life, although for unrelated reasons: I met a girl I liked. She was the center of the universe, the axis of all that was truth and beauty. Her supple breasts were the quintessence of femininity. Her tears were as dewy sweet as morning mist. She was once a moon princess. The planets were united under her benevolent reign and the courtyards did echo with laughter. In her flowing gown she ascended the grand staircase to the balcony. Her muted sigh floated across the gentle summer breeze. Her voice was like distant thunder, soft yet powerful:

“So apparently the moon is being taken over by giant spiders.”

“Spiders give me the willies,” I said. “It’s all those legs. No insect needs that many legs.”

“Arachnid.”

“What?”

“Spiders aren’t insects, they’re arachnids … It reminds me of the time my friend altered her gene structure with spider DNA and turned herself into a hideous spider beast. Isn’t that a weird thing to do?”

“I can sort of understand body modification. It’s like you’re making a statement to the world: This is who I am. If you don’t like it that’s fine, but I’m not going to change. What’s so funny?”

"Okay, this is going to sound totally random, but Ç? (┼ Ç┐ (E Ç? └├ Ç┐ └C B[x?B[x╛ ▒ºεD [x┐B[x> ▒ºε─ .∙d?.∙Σ╛ åC E .∙d┐.∙Σ> åC ┼ B[x╛B[x┐ ╥ E B[x>B[x? ╥ ┼ Ç? 8┼ Ç┐ 8E ∞ ■╜∞ ~┐ Ç ¿,E ∞ ■=∞ ~? ¿,┼ Ç? 7┼ Ç┐ 7E Ç? `─ Ç┐ `D Ç? X─ Ç┐ XD ≤ 5┐≤ 5┐0FΓC ≤ 5?≤ 5?0FΓ├ ≤ 5┐≤ 5?╬µxD ≤ 5?≤ 5┐╬µx─ ≤ 5┐≤ 5? ≤ 5─ ≤ 5?≤ 5┐ ≤ 5D .∙Σ>.∙d┐ ìhD .∙Σ╛.∙d? ìh─ Ç? C Ç┐ ├ Ç? ░C Ç┐ ░├ Ç? `C Ç┐ `├ Ç? D Ç┐ ─ τ 5┐ Ç 5┐╖├ç├ τ 5? 5?╖├çC Θ 5┐ ² 5?┬├çC \\"

A mouse walks up to my foot as I’m typing this. Studying me. I’m more an object of curiosity than fear to them anymore. Yesterday one stared at me for half an hour as I crouched in the corner lamenting my wasted youth.

I’ll make you a deal – it’s easier to laugh at something than it is to understand it, so pretend this is a joke. And a bad one at that. It goes on for a long time without a beginning, middle or end. Like the universe. And there’s no bigger joke than the universe, since jokes are by nature small blocks of text, and the universe is a huge mass of matter, antimatter and monsters.

D

2010-07-10T15:12:00.004-04:00

A pile of unopened mail on my table. I open a pink envelope with hearts drawn on it.

First the bad news.

I loved you. You hurt me a great deal. I know you didn't mean to, so it's okay. But I hope you understand that I don't ever ever ever want to see you ever again.

I realize it’s a letter I wrote to a girl, returned by the post office because my Alf stamp no longer has the proper postage ...

D and I were at a bar in Concord on New Year ’s Eve.

“This jam band really sucks,” she said. “They make me want to kill myself.”

“No one who commits suicide actually wants to die,” I said. “They just want to go back to how things were before. Before the endless torment and self-doubt.”

D wasn’t listening: “Earlier today while making a collage using the William Burroughs cut-up method of scissors and glue I found a love note a guy wrote in my high school yearbook that I hadn’t noticed because the pages got stuck together. Fortunately I found his phone number and he’s meeting me here tonight.”

Many great nameless writers have gone insane trying to come up with a perfect metaphor for love. Even more have gone insane trying to metaphorize an orgasm. I found them analogous to the explosion sprites in a Sega Genesis game that I couldn’t remember the name of and spent long hours on ebay and digging through Salvation Army dumpsters trying to locate. Maybe I had just imagined the game.

D walked over to the bar to get another drink. I looked at her legs - I had a hardcore leg fetish, the stage where the fetishist not only wants partners with long legs but also to feel what their partners – or specifically, their legs – are feeling. This is accomplished with sensory transmitters implanted at the base of the partner’s spine and linked to receivers in the fetishist’s brain. With a toggle switch, the fetishist can switch between their and their partner’s sensations, although sometimes the switch gets stuck halfway, giving the sensation of having four legs. At this point the fetishist thinks they’ve become a centaur and stabs their partner with a spear.

For my anxiety around women, my doctor prescribed a placebo consisting of sugar pills. I began taking so many of the pills that I became addicted to the sugar highs, which fuck up nerves and destroy dream cells. Entire regions of the brain reduced to dead annexes of consciousness. All synaptic pathways leading to dead neurons become, by default, pathways to another place, which I envision as a field with a windmill in it …

“I’d like to give you a kiss,” the guy said to D, “Except your boyfriend might mind.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I’m terrified of all girls due to animus projection. I look into a girl’s eyes and see the hyper-masculinity that never developed in my body or psyche and run, fearing assault.”

In the leg fetish room – a blue room filled with blue fog and long legs that extend from the ceiling to the floor like tree trunks – a stripper drinks from a bottle of absinthe and pole dances on a leg.

…

Masturbating is just erotic dry heaving anymore. All my sex fantasies have been depleted. Probably siphoned out by lack of sleep and astronauts (astronauts are cockroaches that live in the spaces between time). I’d go locate them if I had that ability anymore. Since D left I’ve lost faith in my level design abilities – a knowledge of level design is key to hunting astronauts; it helps one understand the architectural model of space-time and the ways they exploit it.

… Mice getting braver, increasing in numbers … Find the hallways. God is in the hallways.

(I love you more than hope)

Anorexics love food but only in a platonic sense

2010-07-10T14:18:00.004-04:00

I'm glad my brain has an open dialogue with the paranoid monster that wants to destroy it. It establishes a bipartisan forum where impulses are checked and re-checked against the monster's nightmare scenarios, which come to me in nightmares, and ensures that my descent into insanity is democratic, not bureaucratic like the movie Brazil or Ernest P. Worell being chased by a filing cabinet, which is one of the nightmares I have a lot (sometimes I'm Ernest and sometimes I'm the filing cabinet, or more specifically a kid that the filing cabinet ate).

My job making subs at a sub shop is important. And sexy if you have a fetish for being dehumanized, which some people I guess do. I imagine when those people are about to die they picture their corpse deteriorating into bones and dead flesh that looks like wet napkins and have a prurient rush of blood to their sex parts that makes them lose consciousness so they're actually asleep for their death. So those people pretty much win out in the end.

This is me telling you, a girl, that I love you, because eating and fucking are okay I guess.

But I'm just one man among the sea of people trying to control my head. I'm a permanent tenant in a haunted house with asshole skeletons breaking things downstairs and horrible malignant god-knows-whats in the attic doing things I can't even imagine. Maybe they're having parties, or maybe orgies, fucking neurons until they're withered and dead. All I know is they play some god-awful music. It's like the shit that Lovecraft monsters would listen to at a frat party and it drives me nuts. Sometimes I try to drown it out with the music in my earbuds, but then we get into system wars where they keep turning theirs up. And there are no winners in system wars, unless you count stereo manufacturers.

Dead baby jokes are sort of a sublimated misogyny intended to travel through the umbilical cord into the girl who totally doesn't notice the guy making them in philosophy class. My heart goes out to those people because I was once like them: sexually inexperienced. But a few years ago my then-girlfriend let me watch her use a vibrator that she bought with the weekly stipend I paid her for going out with me, so depending on your definition of sex - if it's a female orgasm caused by a penis-shaped object provided by a guy - then I've had sex.

So I guess what I'm saying is I'm pretty happy overall. Or at least half of me is - the naive child-me that's seeing this all for the first time and doesn't even know how he's going to die, which in the infinite realm is like not having seen Ghostbusters. Sometimes the eternal God-me, I think, tries to tell the child-me about his death, because if you have a friend who's never seen Ghostbusters you generally want to show it to them, even if they're reluctant at first, which the child-me is about death because, like Ghostbusters, it's ostensibly pretty scary.