ice cream socialite

Gary opened the iron gate.  It didn’t squeak.  Gary thought that it looked rather dainty for an iron gate.  Iron, he thought, should be hulking and impenetrable.  (Oh, that precious iron gate) It only hitched closed with a latch, no lock, and it didn’t even squeak.  Briefly, Gary felt bad for the gate, and then continued his walk up the grey stone patch to his crisp neat home; clean as the day he had bought it.
The front door wasn’t locked.  It never was, not at least until his wife got home and chided Gary and his two children for leaving the house and all of their possessions so prone to the world around them. “Hi Dad,” Kaitlyn said.  Gary gave a small nod to his daughter, the kind that in his children’s youthful lingo would equate to a passable “Whussup.”  Kaitlyn giggled at her father in a high-pitched tone, one that Gary imagined driving the boys at her high school crazy.  The laugh reminded him of her mother’s in college, when he would get her stoned at his shitty off campus apartment, and hope she would forget her dorm curfew.  Gary had been chuckling along with his daughter, but the thought of her smoking pot made him stop suddenly and look a little harder at her.  Were her eyes red?  Was she chewing an inordinate amount of gum?  Did she laugh stupidly at her own stoned forgetfulness?  Gary watched in silence as his daughter pranced around the kitchen making an afternoon snack.
“What are you making?” Gary asked gravely, concerned about her wellbeing.
“Late dinner tonight.  Mom said she would be home late, so I am making a sandwich.    Do you want one too, Dad?”
Gary lifted his eyes, trying to get a better look at the type of sandwich, his eyebrows arched to an excessive angle.  “Is that peanut butter and bananas?”
“Yeah, and honey.  A classic Elvis.”
Gary took a breath in and pushed it out heavily.  Christ, she is definitely stoned. Gary looked at his hands defeatedly.  Where did he go wrong?
“Dad?”  Gary looked up at his beautiful Kaitlyn, “Yes, darling?”  His brain was running circles around a few key moments in her short life in which he might have blown it, and pushed her into a life of smoking dope before getting finger-banged by some greasy long hair behind the local bar that they were both (hopefully, oh God) too young to get into.
“Do you want a sandwich?”  Kaitlyn looked quizzically at her father, knife poised like a graceful sandwich surgeon, sticky sweet guts clinging to its serration.
“No, Kaitlyn.  I’m not sure I want to participate in what you are doing.  I just hope you’re actually hungry, and don’t just think you are.  I’ve got some other, more wholesome business to attend to if you don’t mind.  Excuse me.”  As Gary exited the kitchen, and made the turn into the family room, he heard his daughter’s high-pitched giggle again, fading into a hallway echo of “Dad, you are so weird.”
At the north side of the family room, marked above the old, ugly plaid couch by a decorative N,
sat Gary’s only son.  As Gary approached, Noah continued watching the television, paying no attention to his father.   Gary looked at his son, and lifted his hand for a half-hearted high-five, “Noah, my man! How it’s going?”  Right as he said this, the T.V. dad in the sitcom his son watched echoed word for word exactly what Gary had just said, replacing the name Noah with Tony.
Noah lifted his face towards his father, “Did you do that on purpose? Like, did you know that was going to happen?” Gary dropped his hand awkwardly to his side and shook his head with a grunt.
“Hmph, weird.”  Noah turned back to the show, his face alternately blue and white in the darkening room.
“Yeah, weird.”  Gary lowered his head and turned to leave to family room.  He looked back at his son to see if maybe he was looking at him.  Noah still sat facing the screen, now flashing images of a wild beach party.  Gary smiled at the television screen, Noah continued with his blank stare.
Gary climbed the newly carpeted stairs.  He thought they were ugly.  It wasn’t that he hated carpet, or specifically hated the color beige, if one could consider it a color really.  Gary just thought that when they ripped up the old carpet and saw the beautiful hardwood underneath,  they should have gone with that instead.  But, he understood that the carpet would preserve the stairs better than having nothing over the wood at all, with the wood getting all scuffed up and splintered; perhaps even rotting and breaking.  The stairs would need to be preserved, for the children, Kaitlyn and Noah, one of whom would inherit the house when he and their mother were dead and buried.  Gary stopped at the last step.  “I’m a father,” he said out loud, as if he was holding his first born in his hands for the first time.
I’m a father.  I’m a father.  I’m a father. I’m a father. I’m a father.  It ran like ticker tape though Gary’s head.  How the hell did I get here?  He felt disconnected from this life, and these little versions of people who he couldn’t recognize quite as miniature versions of himself.  Gary groaned.  Why was it such a big deal if Kaitlyn was high or not?  He’d smoked a ton of grass when he was her age.  Hell, he’d smoked it even earlier.  What was the big deal?  I’m a father.  It ran through his head again, more as a reminder, and not a mechanism of convincing.   The words felt heavy.
Gary lifted his hands, and looked at their large, manly stature.  His fingers were not the fingers he’d once used to explore the terrains of various bras, and to discover their secret, hooked or clasped, passwords.   No, these hands were covered on top with thick black hair, making them look more simian than man.  The skin around the nails cracked from work, and dry from age. These were the hands of a man, settled into his life, like the deep creases into his palms.  Gary lowered his hands, heavy with the weight of his 45 years, which felt to him enough time on earth to be considered ancient.
More as an act of mourning than anything else, Gary decided to spend some time poring over the few relics from his past.  He opened the door to the expansive walk-in closet he (was forced) to share with his wife.  He walked in and took a deep breath.  The tiny room smelled like a mother; the air full of powder and the musk of muted lipstick.  His wife’s clothes looked like the clothes of a mother; everything neutral in color, the rows of fabric dotted with a few completely coordinated, patterned outfits, which she would wear to Sunday brunch, with gold jewelry, and a charm bracelet.  She is a mother, and I am a father.  Turning to his side of the closet, Gary surveyed his own clothes.  A line of khaki pants (wow, the color really is quite similar to beige), followed by a like of cotton button up shirts, some with short sleeves, some with long, some patterned, some solid, all arranged by core color, their various greens, and blues spreading out from themselves in expanses of their dark and light relatives.  My father didn’t dress like this, Gary thought and shook his head, blowing the smell of perfumed linen out of his nostrils.  Quickly he searched for his box of trinkets, and found it among shoeboxes in the back bottom of the closet, as if the closet had been working to forget Gary’s youth.
The box wasn’t as heavy as Gary had expected, and when he dropped it on the bed, it didn’t make a sound.  He opened the four cardboard flaps, and without looking stuck his face into the top of the box and inhaled deeply.  Perfume.  Motherly perfume; it’s practical and adult lack of fruit undertones made Gary clenched his jaw.  Grumbling, but determined to get a taste of his former life, before he was a father, before he had responsibility, before his wife was a mother. Gary looked into the box.  Only a few objects sat in the box: A few ticket stubs to movies he didn’t remember liking or not, some pictures that he had developed incorrectly during that time he thought he was an artist, a backstage pass to the show of a friend’s old band, Marc Hamlet and the Days of Yorick.
A harmonica glinted in the dark box, the small light of the closet shining a spotlight on its silver.  Gary picked it up and blew into its slotted side.  It sounded like eight poorly tuned clarinets playing in concert.  The metal and plastic of the small instrument tasted salty, probably from the mouth and hands of whoever played it last.  Gary hoped it had been him.  He remembered the night he had won the harmonica, at the Fairfax Fair (what a perfect summer that was).  Gary chuckled to himself.  Tommy Montrose had drunk all that Boones Farm and spent the night trying to look up girls’ skirts in the funhouse.  When that didn’t work, he tried to make out with this carnie girl who must have been on display as the bearded woman, or at least that was what Gary and his friends had told Tommy the next morning when he was hung-over.  Gary blew into the harmonica again, it sounded sad and woeful.
He tossed it back into the box and began to dig around again.  The digging was hard because a large portion of the box was taken up by a partially inflated beach ball.  Who put this in here? Gary, irritated, grabbed the ball out of the box.  His large fingers pressed deep dents into the plastic of the ball, his skin squeaking against the shiny material.  Wait, he thought, the beach.  The beach.  The beach with Donna, that stone fox from down the road who he had dated the summer he turned 16.  Gary relaxed, his mouth open, the ball in his hands.
Sand, sun, salty lips, and her tan wet body stretched across the towel.  They had played tag, and built a bonfire, and rented surfboards and pretended they were in one of those corny movies that were popular then. Gary remembered building a fire on the beach, with Donna looking at him like he was a man.  The feeling of cold water on sun burnt shoulders.  Boardwalk fries.  Horseshoe crabs.  Starfish.  Broken shells.  The sound of seagulls.  Being alive and knowing it.
Gary, I have asthma and can’t always breathe right, can you blow this ball up for me?  He would have done anything she’d asked.
Gary stood in the middle of his bedroom and breathed out.  Lungs empty, he opened the plastic flap on the beach ball, and pressed his lips tightly around the valve.  Simultaneously squeezing the ball and inhaling he sucked all of the old air into his lungs.  It was almost too much, and although he felt like his lungs might explode, Gary kept squeezing, letting the air fill every small air sack in his adult lungs.  Gary dropped the ball to the ground, and held the air in, his eyes shut tight, trying to remember every detail from that day at the beach with Donna.  Finally, worried that he would pass out, Gary let all of that air out.  It tasted salty, like the beach.
Gary felt free, and wild and light and young.  He could hear the waves pulling themselves onto the shore and the sound of something forever trying to be where it does not belong.  His shoes seemed to fall away from his feet, and sand sprung up between his toes, where there had only before been toe jam.  Arms appeared around his waist, with dainty painted nails, ten of them, marking the end of the hands.  “Gary, I’m so glad we came here, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Donna, of course I’m glad.”
“Let’s never go back to school, summer should be forever.”
Gary turned around to face the girl, “What about winter? And our futures?”
Donna laughed, “You sound like my dad with that stuff about the future, and practicalities of winter.  It’s just a dream, Gary.  Of course summer can’t last forever.  I know that.  But wouldn’t it be nice?”
Gary felt out of his league.  “Right…dreams.  You’re my dream girl.”
Donna laughed, “Gary, you’re strange.”
The moment was gone for dreams.
Noah appeared at the door.  “Dad.”  Gary stood with his eyes closed, mumbling. “Dad!”  Gary opened his eyes, started, and quizzically at the kid, “What?”  “Dad, what are you doing?  Mom’s going to be home soon.”  Gary looked at Noah.  The feeling, suddenly, was gone.  He no longer felt youthful, and wild, and free.  He felt, instead, the weight of his middle-aged belly, and hulking hands.  “Oh, nothing.  Just going through some old things and then I was just…um…I don’t know.”  Noah raised an eyebrow at his father, and turned to walk away.  “Dad, you are so weird.”  Gary looked down at the box that was now empty, it’s contents spilled onto the floor (trying to escape, that would be funny).
“Wait!  Noah!  Come back in here!”  Gary stepped off the bed and grabbed the beach ball from its sad, deflated place on the floor.  Noah returned to his beguiled position in the doorway and coolly stared at his father.
“Here,” Gary thrust the ball at his son, “blow this up.”
“What?”
“Well, you know.  My old lungs can’t quite do it, you know…I need your young pink lungs to put some air in this ball.”  Gary looked at his son, admiring his youthful frame.  Reluctantly, Noah took the limp plastic from his father’s hands and pressed his lips around the valve and blew into the ball.  With every exhalation, and subsequent echo of it hollowly inside the plastic sphere, Gary could hear the waves from his trip with Donna grow louder and louder.  He grew more and more excited, ready to feel light again.  When the ball was half full, he tapped Noah on the shoulder.
“That’s enough.  That’s enough, let me have it back.”
Noah stopped doing the work of inflation and with one hand pinched the tube of the ball shut.  “But Dad, it’s only half full.  It’s not even a ball yet.  It’s just a pile of plastic pretty much.  It looks like a wet diaper.”
“I don’t care.  It’s fine.  I’m your father, okay?  I know what I’m doing.  Go back downstairs and watch T.V.”
Exasperated, Noah turned to leave the room, shaking his head.   A few moments later, Gary could hear his son, yelling down the hall, “Kait, dad has totally lost it!”  He didn’t care.  He looked at the half inflated ball, heart beating quickly.  He could imagine feeling the sun beating down on his face, Donna resting her head on his hairless chest.  Gary licked his lips, and opened the valve.  Again, squeezing the ball and inhaling, he took all of the air into his lungs and held it, tight, in his chest.  With a small sputter, he released the air.  It tasted like Doritos.  It was 7 o’clock at night, why was Noah ruining his dinner with such an unhealthy snack?  Gary dropped the ball and left the room, to find his son and explain to him the importance of nutrition.

routine is a
row of tines
lining up
to eat me alive

The earth was much as it is now, but buildings that have crumbled were new, and deep below the wicked surface of the sea, a shark found a magical cave. He didn’t know how special this cave was, so when he returned from a short venture into the vast chamber, it made no difference to him that the cityscape outside the water had changed from stone cathedrals to skyscrapers.

OR,

The cave was a time machine. And when Shark swam out again, a million years had passed, but it was still silent at the bottom of the sea.

Illustrations by Robert James Algeo

Two bears lived together in a cave.  They loved each other, and all was well, except that one was a tiger.
They lived and loved for a long time, and it didn’t matter that one was a tiger, so Tiger never told Bear what he really was.
Bear and Tiger had a friend named Eagle, and Eagle was a wolf.  They had been friends for a long time, and everyone liked who they were, until Fox moved into the woods.
On his first day in the forest, Fox thought it might be polite to introduce himself to his neighbors.  Bear was more than delighted to meet Fox, because she had never met a fox, and thought his orange color was the most beautiful she’s ever seen, but when Fox left the cave, Tiger remarked to Bear,
“I don’t know what kind of game that Fox is playing, but he is certainly NOT a fox.”
Confused, but willing to learn, Bear asked gently, “Well, what do you mean? He was nice enough.”
“Puh!  Nice enough I guess.  I’ve seen foxes, and that was not a fox.  I don’t think we should have him over again.”  Those were Tiger’s wishes, and that was the end of the conversation.

Illustrations by Lila Patil

a drink, just one, between you and me
i think, might make us whole
to loosen up a bolt, or three,
before we both grow old.
they say that drink wastes time and love,
but i say that for it’s part,
a drink, just one, between me and you
would be good for the heart.

Act One

Some Bears and other animals (fox, snake, birds, deer, etc), are having a peaceful day in the forest. All is silent except for general animal sounds (growl, caw caw, twigs snapping). Several seconds.

The sound of something tromping through the woods becomes louder. The animals go about their business.

Enter Billy Bear, walking on two feet, wearing an I Love NY shirt, or a Hawaiian shirt. (Truth be told, it doesn’t matter what kind of shirt he is wearing. Or pants.)

Billy Bear: Ahhhh! Man, it is GOOD to be home.

The animals make no note of his conversational attempt.

Billy Bear: Really, though, it’s great to see you guys! You wouldn’t be-lieve the SHIT I learned while I was gone. Seriously, it’s pretty incredible.

The animals make no note of his conversational attempt.

Billy Bear: Guaranteed to impress.

General animal and forest sounds are heard. A cricket chirps.

Billy Bear: Um, okay. I can make it rain. That’s all. I learned how to make it rain. I figured that since the dry season is rough, I would try to help us all out.

As Billy talks, he moves between the various animals. He talks, and then when he realizes his words aren’t making an impact, he moves right along to the next animal. His sentences get more frantic as he goes.

Billy Bear: Maybe you don’t believe me. But you should! Cause, I really can make it rain. -Silence- Fine, then. I just won’t show you. I’ll just make it rain for me, and me only. I’ll be the one surviving the dry season. You just wait and see.

Billy moves to the edge of the forest, back to all the animals, who are all going about their respective animal business.

Billy Bear: (screams) What the FUCK!

Nothing changes.

Billy Bear: (growls with immense power) Pay attention to me! I CAN MAKE IT RAIN!

Thunder claps, and it begins to rain. None of the animals notice. Billy pouts.

Act 2

Some Bears and other animals (fox, snake, birds, deer, etc), are having a peaceful day in the forest. All is silent except for general animal sounds (growl, caw caw, twigs snapping). Several seconds.

The sound of something tromping through the woods becomes louder. The animals go about their business.

Enter time machine. Billy Bear emerges from time machine wearing a monocle, smoking a pipe.

Billy Bear: (With rolling R’s) Truly, it is grrrrreat to be home. I’ve had the most incredible adventure, and I cannot wait to tell you what the future is like.

The animals make no note of his conversational attempt.

Billy Bear: Hello? I’m home!

The animals make no note of his conversational attempt.
Billy moves from animal to animal in a panic. He whimpers at each failed attempt to connect with a fellow animal.

Billy Bear: I’ve invented a time machine! I’ve been traveling through time. It’s an incredible achievement for a human, let alone a savage bear!

The animals make no note of his conversational attempt.

Billy Bear: Oh Jesus, what have I done?! You can’t understand me can you? Oh God.

Billy paces.

Billy Bear: Wait! I can fix this!

Billy climbs into his time machine, and the lights go to black.
Moments later Billy’s time machine reappears.

Billy Bear emerges from time machine wearing a monocle, smoking a pipe.

Billy Bear: (With rolling R’s) Truly, it is grrrrreat to be home. I’ve had the most incredible adventure, and I cannot wait to tell you what the future is like.

Act 3

Some Bears and other animals (fox, snake, birds, deer, etc), are having a peaceful day in the forest. All is silent except for general animal sounds (growl, caw caw, twigs snapping). Several seconds.

The sound of something tromping through the woods becomes louder. The animals go about their business.

Enter Billy Bear wearing a T-Shirt that proclaims “Mustache Rides: $1″, and non-descript girl in skirt and shirt.

Billy Bear: Mom, Dad! I want you to meet my girlfriend, Shelly. Shelly, this is my mom and dad.

The animals make no note of his conversational attempt.

Shelly: Oh, um, hi?

Billy Bear: See? I told you they’d be cool.

Lights fade to black. Curtain closes.

The End.

1.
There are these girls on the flight going to Las Vegas for the 21st birthday of one of them. I can’t tell which one, even though the flight attendant makes note of the Birthday Girl over the intercom.  Because it is almost her 21st birthday, it means that she is still 20.  I am four years older than she is.  This means that when I was a senior in highschool, she was still a freshman.  This means that when I am 30, she will only be 26.  Two years older than I am now.  Really only a year and a month, but who cares.  Numbers are numbers.  When will four years stop being the definate measurement for separation?  Maybe I’m still focused on highschool.  What a terrible realization, especially because the fact that I think this way is a surprise.

I feel old.

Which in turn means that all the people who were seniors when I was a freshman are older.
Maybe not more successful.  I kind of hope not.
But what happens if and when we are all successful.  Then we will just be getting older.

2.
I thought a little about what would happen if the plane crashed.  How it would feel.  I would want to sleep, and we would cling to each other in the gravity bed, falling, covered in shit, and piss, for the only time in adult life that it could happen with any semblance of dignity.

3.
Ray stood in the alley feeling like a moron.  The sun was up, but hidden by coulds without shape.  There was no time of day.
There was nothing signifying that it might rain, but the sky had put it’s blinds down, and closed up shop for the day.
Ray walked to the mouth of the alley, toes sounding like tap shoes though the puddles of dish water, and meal leavings.
Ray stopped walking, and tapped his toe into the puddle for a few more beats.
Well, maybe I want to be a tap dancer, he thought.
No, it was just the sound that moved him.
Maybe I should watch more tap-dancing movies, but just the classics.
Ray looked down at his shoes, dampened by the puddle, and resolved to be a man for once in his life, and buy some tap shoes.

4.
Humor in Sci Fi panel
If humor is based on what we’ve grown up with, wouldn’t the future be so far removed that a writer is kind of tipping their hand regarding what they, in the present, find funny, and ruining the illusion of the futuristic setting?

Also, the human condition doesn’t apply to robots and aliens.  Then it becomes a type of ironic humor because it is the vaccum between humans and these creatures.

Note:  One human, all aliens, or robots…tragically funny.  Been done…probably- watch more movies, read more books.

Note: Intentional split- are actors probably the best writers?

Find the meaning of life and love in the universe?
One man travels the universe to find himself but just ends up more dejected and alone than ever.
Existentialism. Once we are not alone, the meaning lessens.

Perceived motive.

I suppose that for a person who more or less grew up around computers, and uses computers at work every day, I don’t have a real grasp on the actual “culture” that comes along with being a part of the World Wide Web. Is it even called that anymore? I mean, how far behind am I? The emoticon was invented in the Eighties for godsake.
I read Digg that’s cool, right?

In anycase, I was tagged by Ryan at Holy Embers of Dreams with a “meme”. Embarrassingly enough, I didn’t understand at first what it meant to be “tagged” and assumed it was like phone tag, so I simply commented back. It wasn’t until I did some research that I understood my faux pas. Now I understand more about “tagging” “memes” and “sousveillance”.

Sorry to keep using “quotation marks”, but as many of these terms are new to me, it is impossible to just toss them in with old friends like troll, or flame thread. They must be set apart.

I looked up the word “meme” because I felt that in order to really complete the task at hand, I should really understand the basics- and basically the term “meme” is used to describe something which forces culture to continue, no matter whether or not it changes along the way. It is the seed of culture.
It is, however, described in part as working like a “virus”, which was upsettingly fitting. Thank you Wikipedia.

Here goes. The “meme” is: List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now.

I spend all day at working listening to a few different iTunes radio shows, and it’s kind of like they play the same seven songs over and over and over again, which I don’t blame on THEM, as much as I blame on College Radio no longer being a place where early adulthood strife is blasted through speakers in suburban homes, explaining to adolescents that their aggression and confusion won’t ever go away entirely, but instead is an actual practice ground for working at Clear Channel. Also, iTunes shuffle is a piece of garbage, so radio stations banking on Turning On and Going Out are ruining my days one Folsom Prison at a time.
Anyway, here goes.

1. Hank Penny “Catch ‘Em Young, Treat ‘Em Rough, Tell ‘Em Nothing”
This song totally blew my mind when I heard it, and it’s been stuck in my head for days. It is so catchy, but pretty, you know…anti-lady. Love the art not the meaning of the art. That’s what they say, right?

2. Stan Freberg “Tele-Vee-Shun”
I feel like I missed out on something great by not knowing about Stan earlier. It’s funny cause it’s true. (Seriously, Weird Al is so jealous right now)

3. Black Kids “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance”
Think if the Cure put out an album now. Oh, right…
Songs with counting are great.

4. The Ting Tings “Shut Up and Let Me Go”
I don’t like their other songs that much, but I like this song because I like Tom Tom Club, and low-key, bored faced Electroclash.

5. Fatlip vs. Phantom Planet “What’s Up California?” Car Stereo Wars mash-up
I hate mash-ups. I mean if you like two songs so much, then put them in succession on a mix tape. Don’t ruin them by shoving them into one another. It’s almost like Radio-rape. Most of the time concoctions taste like garbage, but every now and then I guess something that doesn’t taste like shit comes out. Thankfully I never watched The OC, so the Phantom Planet song wasn’t ruined, and thankfully I did watch “The Work of Director Spike Jonze”, who directed the video for the Fatlip song.
I could listen to this song every day for the rest of my life and always laugh at “On Pico Boulevard I was regarded as a retard” while imagining I’m driving through the California that’s been made to clear to me by movies, it’s almost like I’ve been there.

6. Etta James “7 Day Fool”
Greatest devotional love song in history. I dance to this song a lot, in the privacy of my own home of course. I wish I could direct a video for it, because it would be tons of chicks in flattering pauper clothes, carrying bags of laundry to the chain gang beat of the song.
I might have just had an epiphany- This list is making me out to be a misogynist.

7. Smog “Dress Sexy at My Funeral”
A friend made me a ton of mixed CD’s for Christmas about three years back, and this song was on one of them. The song stands by itself so well, that I didn’t even look to see who it was by until about a month ago. It’s one of those songs that is so good, and so true and excellent that I didn’t want to muck it up with the possibility of another song by the artist being unlistenable.

( I know it’s supposed to be seven, but to clear my name I have to mention the Propaghandi song “Refusing to Be a Man”, because that song is super feminist, and it should really kind of balance this whole post out just by mentioning it.)

So, thus ends my first foray into the actual world of blogging…I don’t feel as dirty as I thought.
But, I should probably wash my hands anyway.

“The blow smashes the legendary ocean throughout the present.” I know it sounds strange, but those are the words of a dying man. So, it stands to reason that they seem strange.
None of us living will ever know what one sees upon that threshold. It’s like addressing a sleep talker, or trying hard to reconnect with a
past version of yourself in order to remember that elusive detail of the moment. The one thing that could have won the fight, or cured the
sick, or saved a dying man.

Tom hated the ocean because he had a sweet tooth, and it was leagues of salty. And he really hated the wind; claimed it had ruined his marriage from the start. I was there, and there is some truth to that thought. I remember the day was clear and mild, right up to the moment Clara was meant to say “I do.” But, right as her mouth opened to let out the two words Tom had been dreaming of since the night she roller skated over to take his order, a gust of wind came and stole those words away; off into the wide and wild west, where just about everything is stolen.
Tom tried to get her to say it again, reckoning that if he didn’t hear it, well the action wasn’t complete. The deal wasn’t legitimate, and they were still just two separate souls connected by hands and beds. Or, at the very least it meant that she wasn’t married to him.
But, his stammering was lost in the applause of family, and the rustling sound of her veil in his ears as she drowned him in her arms, squeals, tears and light. Tom stood limply in his tight tuxedo, simply unable to squeeze back.
A year passed before Clara started coming home after midnight, wearing other men’s shirts, and wobbling full of liquor; but Tom never really got upset, figuring that Clara had never really agreed to anything.
Yup, that next year was rough on Tom, but that’s not why he died. No, Clara was selfish, that’s a truth that’ll stop a breeze, but didn’t have the heart to kill a man. He didn’t put up a fight for her to stay when she said she was leaving, because Tom knew it was just a lease that was ending. After that she didn’t give him any hassle; she just packed up and moved, following her voice to the open west…
No, what killed Tom was time.

He wasn’t old. He wasn’t a kid, but he wasn’t old. No, it was just his time, and all men have a time. It’s why they sometimes call it an “appointment”. It’s just about where and when you can get scheduled, that upsets most folks- some get better days and ways. Fighting in a battle, or the day before a terrible storm hits. I even heard of a man who died while sleeping with a woman. Toes still curled and everything. Some just get lucky.
But Tom, like I said, it was just his time. We were watching the news, and the lady said something about the May-an’s predicting a hero, who’s story was remarkably similar to the life and death of Babe Ruth, when all of the sudden Tom just started breathing real slow and loud.
I moved aside my dinner tray and went over to him. That’s when he said it, “The blow smashes the legendary ocean through the present.”
Then that was it. He just stopped, like someone who lays a finger on a ringing guitar string.

And I swear to God I wish I’d written it down, because I didn’t think of the words again until later, when I signed for his things at the morgue.
To be honest it’s probable that he said something different, something more honest and true. Something about his life, or maybe something about the Sultan like, hell, I don’t know, “The show watches the legendary motion without reason,” or, well, who knows. Maybe it didn’t sound like that at all. But it’s all I can remember.
I’ll never really know, I guess. I can’t help but to feel, though, that I’ve let good Tom down, again; the words that could have meant to much, lost and never recovered.

They asked me to go with them, and so I went. Two men in suits. The married one, the one with the ring on his left hand said, not facing me, “We understand that you’ve been stuttering.” I didn’t say anything, because he was right.

When we got to the storehouse, after a warm ride in unremarkable silence, they held the door open for me to enter. There wasn’t much inside, save for some wires connected to machines I would never understand the use of, and a large black plastic basin, suspended on a loft, made of plywood, with a ladder leading up to it, like the one my brother had on his bunk bed when he was ten. Everything was dusty, and hastily put together. Unconnected wires, spitting weak sparks, and rusted nails, half buried in the dirt floor; mere feet from their rightful place, with no hammer in sight.

“We understand that there is something blocking the connection, and you have to find out what it is,” said the unmarried man, not facing me, hands tucked in his suspenders, leaning back on his heels. Shiny shoes, was all I could think.

The men positioned themselves on either side of the ladder, urging me, I suspected, to climb and investigate.

As I began to climb the ladder, words started pouring from my mouth.

“Hubble bubble.
“Rat king.
“Modern appliances.
“Rattattatattackcat, mousehouseholdbostoncrab.”

Neither man looked suprised, even though I was terrified.
So I kept climbing.

closerandcloserandcloisterandhoisted
andslowerandhigherand
byerandbyer.
Ireached

the top of the ladder
and looking into the tub
that I now saw was full of water,
I saw

brain.

Mybrain,nodrainsittingintheliquid, greyan dwarman dpinkan dstill
but
so
fffffffffullofmotion.
oceansandoceansofthoughtfulmotionrithingandtithingandGodwasthere,
butit didn tmatter.
becauseitwasme
Ihadtofindout
whatmatterhatterwas,
sointothedarkesteepmyhandreached
feelingeelinglingeringnear
athingthatdid
not
belongthere,
and
i
rippedtheterriblegrip
it had upon the brain and pulled it out of the water.
I didn’t want to look, but it was there, no mistaking. Eight arms, and a brain; a genius
brain, loving what it loved. I stared into it’s eyes, and it into mine, and we communed
for a brief moment before…

The men stormed up the ladder, trash bag in hand, and stole the sopping mush from my hands.

“Say something,” they said, not quite in unison.

“Tomorrow I will go to the park, and parade around in my most magnificent frock.”

“Just wonderful,” the married man beamed.

They drove me home, and on the way we stopped to get ice cream.

I knocked and it was hollow

shook, but nothing rattled.

I made a hole and hummed into it

a short sweet song

and it echoed back

empty.

It was a stupid idea. At least I thought so. Stupid in the way that you look at it after it happened want to be punched hard enough to yield a concussion.
It’s not that it didn’t seem possible. At least, not in a world where the future really is now, but I guess that’s how gaps are bridged.
Ideas so obvious, it’s painfully clear in the end that failure was inevitable. Take, for example, a man builds his own wings and dives off a building. It doesn’t work because it’s so obvious that it should. It’s never the idea that fails, but always the execution, I guess.

We’d been waiting for an opportunity like this forever, literally, and finally it presented itself in one quiet afternoon at a laboratory. Dr. Dingo and I put a monkey brain in a tank and attached it to a computer, mainly because we could. There was nothing stopping us. We wanted to see what would happen. And something did happen. Kind of. Maybe we made it up, but I swear to god, what that monkey brain dada machine was producing was pure artistic genius.

Ilustration by James Olstein

Dreams of whiskey and hooch
leave “kiss me” dribbling from my
loose lips- sinking ships-
adorned with a light glossing of lust.
Ghostly tries of trip-tumbling steps
paused in the dreary darkness of
wooden floors, creak-cracking
away the weak night, flowing to

more powerful days when
I forget social mores despite
the surgeon general’s warning.

Burned on the floor,
my steps are left
impassable in the night.

Miscellaneous Deceit

I was awakened this morning
by a stranger
warning me of deceit.
I just shrugged him off and left the house to
Reconcile my wonder.
I kept my eyes to the ground,
Keeping watch for the malignant matter.

After all, this miscellaneous afternoon was
my only life line.

And my mouth was overcome,
By a scream that ached
Like strawberries.
The pain licking my face clean.

I rushed through the day
Bargaining with the clock for it to
End my agony.
But instead it told me that all it needed in life
was more time.
So, I pawned the only watch I own
and crawled back into bed
Only to find that
My sheets were stilled disheveled.

Outcomes in Sample Space

Outcomes in Sample Space
can never by hypothesized
on anything but paper,
because today if awfully awkward,

and tomorrow is never here.
People always vary since
statistics never do justice
to the sadness that casually lives

in some amoebic form,
in the locked bedrooms
that blanket every street,
as fluid as the days that pass.

A Shit Ton of Lunes

The number eight
train will lead me places
I’ve been before.

Surely make no
hesitation to ask me for
one small kiss.

The longest winter
followed by strained rainy days-
a green city

Here is today-
on the neck of tomorrow
it passes by.

Changing timezones
too often causes my heart
to cave in.

Two hours before
I fall gently asleep he
is already dreaming.

Close to autumn
my round his hide from
this falls’ fashion.

Accident in puddle
lighting road like rainbow-
blood in sewer.

Eventually, once eternity
begins it’s kind retreat
and we are meant to live
all of this again

(but backwards)

You’ll be the kind of woman
(when I am a man)
that I will meet
and love
in college

Bobby Nickels enjoyed the walk to work, no matter what. If the weather was nice, he liked seeing all the people trying to cross the street in unison. If the weather was bad, he enjoyed watching the cuffs of pants get wet, or stockinged feet getting drowned in their homes. Walking to work was when Bobby felt the most free. Maybe it was something like the last walk of a man on his way to execution. Shackles and a tie. The notion that he could just take a turn down Left street and not go to work is the part that really tickled him. Real freedom wasted, he thought.

In the last ten minutes before I left work, I contemplated writing something. It’s kind of a big deal, because I haven’t written in months. It was going to go something like this:

Someone mentioned the name Bianca today. I’d never really thought about it, because who does, but I really hate the name. Probably because it reminds me of characters in various movies, always portrayed as spoiled rich kids who wear too much lipstick. But, the lipstick part might just be there now, because when the name was said we were all trying on deep blood red lipstick, that made us all look like girls with sloppy college breasts, and curly black hair, who talk about Ayn Rand. The worst is that it’s the things you don’t know why you believe that make you who you really are. And I am a person who hates people with the name Bianca.

I found a mouse on a glue trap today, and from down the hall it looked like dirt, which I guess is how we treat it. Sweep it up and put it in the compactor. Mice have become worms; eat dirt, make dirt, die. I watched it try to pull itself off the sheet, stuck with shit and real dirt, and old food. I started to wince and cry. I felt like a fake. I don’t even really care about animals.

Yesterday my back door was open and a stray cat tried to come inside. I closed the door quietly, like I would to a Jehovah’s witness. No thank you, not today.

Sometimes it’s all too much, but never ever enough.

***This story is pretty long, if you’re looking for something short check out the following tags: Small, Bobby Nickels, Rhymed

*I couldn’t finish this for National Novel Writing Month. Maybe someday…

Just like every other day since the beginning of time, the sun set at its own slow, knowing pace upon the fields of Iowa. The wheat and corn swayed with the wind, the same way they had done on the farm for generations. Everything was right. A perfect pendulum of creation, set into motion by whatever unfathomable thing or occurrence had thought about, or stumbled on the means to sire existence.

No matter where one looked, it was impossible to see this beautiful sunset as singular. It was the kind of day where you could feel everything happening, not just to ones self, but to all of creation. As if the sun were getting its last looks in before its boring retreat.

As the sun set on that field in Iowa, somewhere else two college kids celebrated an anniversary, a cat named Mr. Whiskers played with the tail of Scout, the dog. And in Kentucky, a man named Dr. Dingo sat, contemplating his true future, and drinking away his past.

Everything was happening all at once, and there was no denying or stopping it.

While the sun finished settling in, buried in the browns and greens of the harvest, a sparrow watching the solar embers was struck by the first conscious thought to grace his kind. He cocked his head to the side, and wondered, What the fuck?

I for one never really believed what they’d said about Dingo. I don’t believe what they say about him now, either. I like to think that we would be friends had we ever met, and I wasn’t just some oogling outsider waiting patiently to see how his story, this story, our story, history, the future all unravels itself, in the exact opposite of how we create it.

I’ve had time to think about it, and time to hear folks talk about it, and then time to think about it again. I think it’s like a spindle. Here is the present, an unformed mass of action, so big and bright and wild. We have no choice but to let it spin itself into the great yarn of time, which lay at our feet, useless but ever present to remind us of where we have been, but never truly why. Never will we have the time to stop and weave for ourselves the story of our accomplishments. We can only ever hope to ensure that the gin keeps on swallowing the unfiltered tufts, and hope we don’t clog the mill.

For most folks, seeing their lives as a blob of nothing isn’t so easy. Our lives, getting eaten by the machine isn’t much better. It renders lives useless. All the good deeds, only marks, never ends to the book of their lives. Nothing stops the clock.

But, the way I see it, so long as nothing we do severs our now from the length of then, I’ll be satisfied. More than happy to take my quiet proud place in history. Regardless of if they know me or not.

Dr. Dingo didn’t have that problem, the one of not caring to be seen, because it is a problem, believe me.

Dr. Dingo had the exact opposite problem. He wanted everyone to see him, and they sure as hell did. It didn’t mean they would have to like it.

Chapter One

When he was growing up, the man who would become Dr. Thomas Dingo, never gave a second look to anyone who didn’t believe in the future. As far as he was concerned, and according to the way he was raised, the future was the ultimate answer. It was like a wave that came and got you, whether you were ready to be swept out to the vast sea of history or not. Quickly it came, knocking out your knees if you weren’t looking, and spinning you into the undertow of time. It would be easy to become lost if one wasn’t prepared.

Tom had seen it happen with his parents. Old Maw and Paw Dingo had owned themselves a fairly good sized farm in Iowa. They raised cows for both milk and slaughter. It wasn’t hard in those days for them to do well with money. The town was still small enough even though the world, it seemed, was growing larger. And everyone in Gitchie Manito was fighting the good fight.

Maw and Paw told the then young Thomas that he was going to grow into a good man, who would die having owned a good farm, and having married a good woman, and in turn passed this all on to his good son. So it would go on and on and on until the world was no more. It all made sense, and fit, and just plain would be, because there wasn’t a soul in their world that could tell them otherwise.

It seemed just as well to Thomas then, that this would be his future.

His routine did not change for many years. He would wake up before the sun, milk and feed the cows, walk to school, learn what he could, walk home and then milk and feed the cows again before helping his mother prepare dinner.

Every now and again it would dawn on young Thomas the futility of his life, but only under the quiet blanket of night in the country. Of course, because Thomas was young, none of these thoughts meant anything to him. It was just a cold shiver that visited itself upon Thomas’s stomach during the times wherein he felt the most comfortable. The notion would make Thomas toss and turn the rest of the evening, unsure as to what had made him feel so empty in a place that contained all he knew. It wasn’t so much the feeling that upset him, although that had its part in doing a number on his soul, but what really bothered him was how he could feel so devoid of something he had never been conscious of.

These thoughts worked themselves like a burr into his routine. He thought about it as he milked the cows. It pestered him on the walk to school. He sought answers in the things he was taught in school. But he never bothered to ask anyone about it until one night, when a silence had settled itself upon the dinner table, and across the home cooked meal he said to Paw, “There is something inside of me, sir, that doesn’t want to believe that this farm is all there is.”

Paw did not look up from his meal, and this alone bothered Thomas even more than if his father had began to scream and shout about Thomas’s duty to the family, and the farm, and the community. That would have made it better somehow, because those were the thoughts that kept Thomas on the farm anyway; the guilt he supposed would come from his family and his probable future. But Paw just kept on eating.

A few days later while Thomas was clearing out the floor of the barn, Paw grabbed him roughly enough by the arm to yield an immediate bruise and whispered, “Boy, if you think I don’t know about the long road the future is about to force us down, and the trouble we are about to incur, then I shoulda shoved you right back into your mother the day you were born. Until the day comes when what surrounds Gitchie Manito swallows us up into oblivion, you will stay put and wait patiently for your day. Now finish clearing that cow shit, and wash up for dinner. Maw’s made lamb tonight.”

Then, as time wore on, as it tends to do, it brought with it change, as it also tends to do. Along came radios, and televisions, and new products, and industrial boom, and strangers with things to sell. There wasn’t a soul in Gitchie Manito that had been prepared. In no time at all, the town had been swept clean of it’s purity.

*******************************

Tracy stared absently at the three things that were sitting in her room. Her eyes tried their hardest to separate the three of them, but there was no use denying that they were all connected, and that they all symbolized a type of forced significant change that she had never once seen the value of.

There they were: her desk, with its books, pencils, white out, her boyfriend, Tom, and the new computer. Everything just sat there, like a lump of clay, waiting to be molded, or the parts of a model airplane, waiting to be put together.

Tracy didn’t say anything. She knew she was supposed to add something of her own to the room, like a Thank you, but she just couldn’t find the gumption. She tried to muster a little bit of strength, not too much though. Not enough to say something like, Why the fuck would you get me this monster? But instead, enough to maybe get by with a Wow. This in turn could be interpreted as a positive astonishment, instead of an upsetting discovery.

Tracy and Tom had been together for two years, and though this gift cost more than they’d spend between the two of them, within the past two years, it didn’t add up to an anniversary gift. Tracy felt that this computer was the kind of thing she would get for her kids once they reached high school, because she couldn’t stop their movement into the future, the way she did for herself. Their life wouldn’t be the same as hers, and she knew she would have no right to ask anyone to live like her, anyway.

This thought made her extra angry with Tom, and finally the thought passed through her head, Maybe he doesn’t even know me at all.

****

Tracy looked disappointed. Tom figured the only way to go was foreword, and stuck by his gift decision. He let Tracy touch the machine, run her hands over the flat keyboard, and move on, to holding the flat screen like a vertical sandwich. It wasn’t the most romantic gift ever, no. But practicality was what held everything together. Tom was sure of that. So sure in fact, that for not the first, or last time, he was betting his life on it.

He knew that in the beginning she wouldn’t like the gift. That she may actually hate the gift, but with the only shred of faith he ever had in anything, he knew that she would learn to love it, and in turn thank him for showing her the light of the future.

After a solid country minute, Tracy opened her mouth to speak, and although Tom kind of knew what was coming, he let her say it anyway.

“Do you know me at all?”

Yes, Tom thought, I know you well enough to see what you need, even if you don’t. And that was his definition of love.

Tracy wasn’t really looking for an answer. Like all of her questions, the answer was implicitly “no”. She wasn’t the type to see the bright side, even though she always longed for the answer to be an obvious “yes”.

Tom smiled politely, and placed his hands delicately into his pockets.

“You’ll find a use for it, even if you don’t mean to.”

With that, Tom shuffled out of the room, leaving the computer in the care of its unexpected owner.

“I don’t like when you call me a ludite,” Tracy said into the intercom.

-Crrrccckkk- “What?” Tom blared back, causing Tracy to jump.

“I’m NOT a ludite,” Tracy leaned her whole body into the speaker this time, staring at the ceiling and feeling like an idiot.

There was no response.

Tracy gave up and sat back at her desk, crowded by the boxes of computer programs set to reestablish her as a woman of the now.

Tom shuffled into the room.

“You’re not alright?” He squinted at her, “What’s the problem? Is it the computer?”

Tracy looked at her hands, then down into her lap, and then briefly swept the room with her eyes.

“Me? I’m alright…Oh! No, no. I SAID I’m not a ludite! I’m not killing or sabotaging machinery. I just don’t like this frivolity that is suddenly labeled as necessity, gracing every home, creating his black hole of time. I don’t want to sound like some zealot freak but that,” She pointed to the computer, “is the work of the devil. You’ll grow donkey ears, and all that”

Tom had nothing to say. He had kind of been over being angry for a while now. He knew when they first started gong out that Tracy wasn’t a believer in technology, and at the time he liked that about her. She was so earthy, and easy. Grounded and humble.

They would talk at length about the differences between machine and man. It was something Tom needed, because at school he felt more like machine than man, trying to meet all of his deadlines and crunching numbers into equations. He felt free and being with Tracy helped him understand a little more about the organic nature of equations. How they just happened naturally in the universe.

But as their time wore on, Tom began to see Tracy as a simple animal, not as human as Tom had thought.

Tom began to feel stagnant, and vapid. Tracy didn’t know anything about science, all she cared about was how things made her feel, and about interpersonal communication, and being able to look someone in the eyes when you told them something important.

And when Tom responded with “the news for her” that some genius has invented the digital camera, and there was indeed a way to talk to loved ones far away while seeing a digital version of them on the screen, Tracy stopped talking about then versus now. She refused to debate him, would cringe at the thought of their children going to an elite online primary school, and didn’t care how late he stayed up running his hands all over that “digital jezebel”.

Tracy finally shut up about the world, and feelings, and this future that Tom had never deemed probable anyway because it sounded more like a collapse into the past instead of ascension into the future.

Shortly after, Tracy decided she needed a break and moved out, to live with her brother Wallace.

******************************

At 814 Millbrook Rd., Scout lay in the last triangle of warm sun that would spill onto the carpet for the day. Every few minutes, he would collect the saliva from the corners of his mouth, and make a sick swallowing sound that Mrs. Peters hated. She especially hated it when she allowed Scout access to the bedroom at night, and he would make that grotesque wet chewing sound. It wasn’t Scout’s fault, it’s not like he was trying to annoy Mrs. Peters, and she knew that, but would still yell at the dog anyway, until he sheepishly left the bedroom, and went to make his myriad of animal sounds in the family room, where nothing minded.

Scout had been lying in the same place for about an hour or so, but was beginning to get hungry, and as the routine went; Mr. Peters would be home soon. He would drop his keys on the table, loosen his tie, and let Scout sniff his hands. Then, only after the gentle hiss of a beer opening, and the gentle tap of it being set down on the counter, wouldScout hear the kernels of milled dog food pour into his bowl. He would crunch every morsel of food that had been placed before him, even licking up dropped crumbs. After dinner, if he weren’t too tired or full, he would wait for some scraps by the head of the table.

The thought of eating made Scout’s tail wag, but for now he was immovable, waiting for the jingle of keys in the door.

************************

Somewhere in Kentucky, Dr. Dingo sat with his head in his hands, unable to pinpoint where in time or space he was. It had been twenty-five years since he had written the book, hailed by what was left of the cannon, as a masterpiece.

They were saying that it was “the new 1984, which although brilliant, had lacked the fire to burst into possibility, to shed light on the definite fate of mankind, and it’s creations.” Dr. Dingo, who had once found himself an accidental genius, prophet, soothsayer, now found himself drunk, packed with remorse, and with the brain of his best friend and colleague, Dr. Whittier, hopefully still living inside the chest of a seeing eye dog.

Despite all his perfectly valid reasons for lamentation, Dr. Dingo was feeling a new burst of energy, the kind he hadn’t felt since he wrote his book.

The doctor finished the last swish of his eighth awfully warm beer, and placed his head slowly back into the cradle of his hands, the way a child might nestle into it’s mother’s lap, and tried angrily to regulate the breathing that by all rights, his brain should have been taking care of.

It’s incredible, he thought, what the brain thinks it wants.

Just as his anxiety began to melt away with the rhythmic in, out of air, Dr. Dingo started at a tap on his shoulder.

“Dingo,” a timidly nasal voice weaseled it’s way into his ear, “twenty five years, and I can still see the knife wound in your back.”

“Wallace,” Dingo breathed out, without bringing his head up, “it’s now or never.”

********************

Dingo’s forecast of the future had gone something like this:

“The essence of man cannot be contained by anything outside of what he crafts with his own hands and mind. What we have learnt from Frankenstein and his monster is to be wary of taking absolute creation upon ourselves, for we do not understand the full scope of possible invention. Our capacity for creation. “

There are things that we dare not seek, or attempt because those are said to belong to the machine of God. This has been a yellow, but practical way to exist for thousands of years.”

Yet, there is something to be learnt from Plato, scoffing at us from beyond for enjoying the fictional show that is projected for us. Afraid to see the true light. And Nietzsche, accusing us of murdering God with a dirty word like science.”

We are spread thin, six billion strong and brute, but docile and slow. It is too much for anyone alone to manage, and the only way to reign in our collective possibility is to use our most magnificent tool, which is no murderer, but obviously our last possible savior: science.”

We feel lonely on this planet, a monster in our own home. The only thing that can make us stronger, and to soothe these feelings of desolation, isolation, and emptiness is to bring about a unifying change by creating something that we can, as one giant and magnificent mother, foster and cultivate.”

We will have fruit for our toil again!…”

In the next twenty years, my scientist brothers and I will delve deeply into the technology of sentient science, and bring to you a new type of consciousness. We will make technology that understands us, sees us, and is us.”

Forget movies that you have seen, all about pitiful robots, and artificial intelligence. There will be nothing artificial about this; it will be born of our own hands, minds, and hearts. “

A stationary computer, with all the consciousness of you or I; a captive power of will.”

Can’t you just feel it? A child that is made of us all. A future we can see, and touch. The one great unifier.”

It will be beautiful.”

However; consider this, it must start with you. The energy we expend on thinking of things for our individual selves. Imagining your favorite football team winning, wishing for a raise at work, praying for Aunt Mary’s cancer to begin to remiss.”

This is energy that must be pooled, and spent drawing forth consciousness from one single thing. We are the most important sum in the universe, and if we all want hard enough, I promise you: Anything can be.”

It was a moving piece, and this passage floated like a beacon in what should have been described as literary garbage. In fact, later it was pointed out, after the limelight dimmed, and it was clear that promises made had not been made good, that Dr. Dingo had no business writing for the masses.

At the time however, no one would see or feel anything but a sense of hope, that there was a direction after all. That this idea, although vague, was brilliant and possible, and might show something for their Generation. Something incredible was going to happen in their lifetime.

Every person who had read the book believed it. And when they spoke about it, in college classes, or at coffee shops, or around water coolers, there was electricity in the air. The strong desire to bring about change, and there was nothing in the way, just a long road into the brightening future.

The book was Dr. Dingo’s idea. He was double majoring. Dr. Dingo was pragmatic, and liked to cover all his bases, not always well, but at least with a thin sheet of possession. Dr. Dingo’s dream was to be a world famous scientist that would go down into the history gin and be remembered for all time, or until humans stop remembering things based on an idea of time.

His back up plan however, was to be a journalist. That way even if he wasn’t good enough to be a scientist, he could report to the world on what was happening in the science world. He wrote papers on elementary physics, and how the students at the school felt about tests they had taken, or recent theories. It was all feather weight stuff, and Dr. Dingo knew that. The problem was that none of the heavy hitting scientists wanted to reveal their recent projects to the paper. For the same reason, Dingo refused to write about his own work. Scientific publicity always lead to underhanded thievery. So, Dr. Dingo had to figure out a way to make it big.

Dingo’s break came in the form of a required creative writing class.

Dingo had been working on some theories in private. His former roommates Wallace and Stogey vaguely knew about them, and had only provided feedback and calculations on what, as far as they knew, had been unrelated topics. They hadn’t known about the project as a whole.

No matter how Dingo worked the puzzle, it always came up as incomplete.

He called the project Gin and Tonic.

*************

The past wasn’t something Dingo ever thought much about. He solely relied on the future for nourishment. After all, the past was wrought iron, and the future was malleable gold. The pain of unrequited loves, public embarrassment, death, and failures was all the past held. Everything that Dingo fear lay in the past.

Dingo poked at his sandwich. It’s so strange, he thought, these hands have created some of the most delicate instruments, and yet they can still be bothered to poke at this silly sandwich.

“Dingo!” Wallace demanded.

“You haven’t spoken a word since we got here, and if I recall one thing in our past correctly, it was you saying the words ‘It’s now or never’. And although I understand that time is a relative beast, the word NOW is right clear, and I believe you have grossly over exaggerated again.”

Dingo was furious, and although he refrained from showing even the slightest wince, he imagined murdering Wallace, and then using him in some terrible experiment.

Dingo looked at his hands again. A few more minutes went by in silence, only disturbed by Wallace’s heavy, pained breathing, which was closer to whining, like a child asked to do a chore.

Finally,

“You’re right, Wallace. We don’t have much time. But, I suppose there’s always an allowance for niceties, so say hello to Dr. Whittier.”

Dingo pointed at the dog.

Wallace sharpened his gaze at Dingo, clearly unsure of where he was going with this. Wallace had never enjoyed the company of Dr. Whittier, and that wasn’t about to change just because of some stupid dog. It started in college when they were roommates, and Dr. Whittier existed only as the name Joshua Whittier, written in ink next to his own on the dorm list. No one called him Josh then either, everyone called him “Stogey”.

Everyone called him Stogey because he was always smoking a cigar. The girls all thought it was cute, but Wallace thought it stank. Stogey was also known for his “sparkling cigars”, where he would grind up a lighter’s flint, and sprinkle the dust into the open end of the cigar. When lit it would produce a sparking effect that drew giggles from ladies, and pats on the back from gentlemen.

The distain Wallace had for Joshua “Stogey” Whittier wasn’t entirely petty.

As it often happens, the petty hatred sprang from something bigger and deliriously unknown to the hated.

Joshua “Stogey” Whittier was a cheat. Wallace had seen it with his very own eyes. Once, in the middle of an E Theory Tutorial exam, Wallace watched the great genius, Stogey Whittier, start to sweat. It began as a few beads of sweat, creating a shimmer along Stogey’s hairline, then the beads made their descent into the collar of his shirt. Eventually Wallace watched an ocean of sweat rise up out of Stogey’s back, soaking through his button down shirt.

Wallace was able to watch this because he, of course, had finished his test earlier than most students in the class.

Once it seemed as if all the liquid had drained from Whittier body, via his back, Wallace watched the young man pull a now damp piece of paper from his pocket, unfold it, and then slide it discretely under his test, and then begin furiously writing.

When asked later, how he did on the test, Stogey would draw from his cigar and squeak out “Aced it,” before he let the thick smoke pour out his nostrils.

Joshua “Stogey” Whittier was a fake, and only Wallace knew it. But because of his passive aggressive nature, never told anyone what he’d seen. Not even Whittier. So it was really no surprise how surprised Whittier was, every time Wallace made him look like an ass. At least no surprise to Wallace.

And Dr. Dingo was no fool, so it didn’t come a much of a surprise when Wallace finally took his gaze off the dog, and secured it back onto Dingo and sneered, “Well, at least he can still lick his own balls.”

“He was going to die,” Dr. Dingo shrugged. It didn’t matter to anyone in the room, the circumstances surrounding Dr. Whittier’s death, but Dr. Dingo said it again, more slowly, for effect, just in case.

“He was going to die anyway.”

“We are all doing to die anyway, but we are definitely not all going to end up in the gut soup of some pock named Stinky,” Wallace raised his glass to the dog.

Dingo rolled his eyes, “It’s Scout, Wallace, the dog’s name is Scout.”

Wallace thought for a moment, “Is the dog going to die after all of this?”

Tired of talking, Dingo just shook his head and scratched Scout behind the ear, and Wallace muttered, “Jeeeezzus, what a fucking cheat. Beat death this time.”

Here are appropriate places to grow,
Languid fields of desolation.
Applied green paint, to brown perforated lawns
Lined with grey cement;
Like tear-apart islands
Suited to float listlessly on a sea of agonizing grievances
(Arranged around Christmas,
and other such misconceptionsabout how the world began).
For who can, really, tether such a precocious place
To the same old tree
The same old fruit falling
Rotting under the same old branches.
Create no empathy for your past,
Forget all about long ago wars and liaisons,
Synchronize your death with the apocalypse.
Any other way seems abundantly immoral,
Disastrously indignant,
And perhaps, too patient
Since tomorrow is today, yesterday, and
Years from now
You’ll find yourself forever believing in
Some place the digs into skin
Like the roots of old flowers
Into the cement of your headstone.

on your hubris I wrote, long ago,
of circumstantial weakness,
by the fire and it’s ebbing glow.
in the winters; it’s pilings of snow, and snow;
while each flame rose to kiss, to kiss
on your hubris i wrote so, so long ago.  

Dear friend, where are you, if not here, aiming me? 

The drift made your hand on my back a dying fish.

 Why, we were just dashing through waves,
while you dug early graves
in places that shhhh about skin.
While we fucked until dawn,
half our monkey suits on,
(the other half strewn up the stairs).
You’ll call us tomorrow,
and we’ll say without sorrow, 
‘We’re not in cos we made ourselves sick.’

It took Steve a while to realize what was actually happening. It’s not that he tried to think of a ton of different explanations about where exactly this stuff was coming from. All he knew was that things from his dreams started showing up in his bed, and it took him a long time to understand that he wasn’t, once he woke up, dreaming any longer.

Steve woke up with a bat. A giant bat, in fact, with a wingspan of nearly seven feet. He had heard of bats getting into houses in the dead of night, and he took the fact that it was in his bed pretty lightly. It wasn’t the bat, or even the size of the bat that caused Steve to worry. Either of those facts could be linked to years of evolutionary anomaly. It was the generically large tits, resembling those of the first girl he had ever screwed that gave Steve pause.
The bat didn’t move so much as it saucily sauntered in a figure eight, around the room. It made no motion to attack the confused Steve; it just shook it’s bat ass, stuck it’s giant chest out, and made quietly it’s loop, smacking it’s mouth every now and then.
Steve stared at it as he dressed, brushed his teeth, and backed out of the small apartment, unsure of if this sort of thing warranted a sick day.

“What do the tits look like?” Carly asked, the sound of a nail file idly doing it’s work on the other end of the line.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Well, are they giant fake tits, or small and perky like mine?”
Steve couldn’t believe this was happening. “Um, well, they’re just normal I guess.”
Carly half yawned, “If you had to give them a size, what would it be? Mine are a 34A, which can also be a 32B, but I wear the smaller cup size because it feels more secure.”
“Ugh, Jeez Carly! I don’t know. Probably a C.”
The nail file stopped it’s dead cell sanding on the other end.
“Whose tits are they, Stephen?”
Steve knew exactly who they belonged to. They had at one point hung on his neighbor, Mimi. He had only seen them once, for fifteen minutes, when she had gotten drunk and invited a teenage Steve into her laundry room, sloppily making him a man.
But he never told Carly that story, and didn’t think this would be the best time.
“They belong to the bat, Carly. This fucking giant bat. A giant bat that is strutting it’s fantastic bat tits around my apartment. What am I supposed to do?”
“Well, that’s just great, Steve. Fucking great. Why don’t you just marry that slutty bat, and then you can look at enormous breasts all day for all I care!” And with that, she slammed down the receiver.
Steve looked at the bat. Everything in the room was silent except the gentle sound of the carpet compressing beneath the bat’s dainty feet.
“Well, Mimi, this is just great,” he sighed while picking out what he would wear the next day, and laying the clothes out on his bed.
Afterward, Steve put dirty sock on his hands, and corralled Mimi into his bedroom closet, hoping to get some sleep. With a gulp of cough medicine, Steve fell asleep quickly. Next thing he knew, it was morning.

Bobby Nickels hated tea, but liked to talk about it. Sometimes, he even liked to sit with a cup of hot tea in his hand, or within arms reach. It made him feel like an orphan who’d found a home. Smith had once caught him doing this, and perplexed, he’d asked Bobby to explain the full cup. Bobby hated to explain anything, so he took a pretend sip of tea.
Half an hour later, Smith noticed the cup still full and demanded an answer. Bobby shrugged, and in perhaps the most earnest moment of his entire life, simply insisted that he didn’t deserve it, and went on with his reading.

Bobby Nickels hadn’t fed his cat in three days. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t like the cat- if someone asked Bobby about his cat he’s reply that “He’s a decent guy and all, but just doesn’t really bring anything to the table.” Sometimes he’d imagine Harvey as a leech of a friend, sitting around doing bong-rips and oogling Springer tits. Basically he felt about the cat the same way he felt about his brother.
One time, trying to open up a little, Bobby explained this to a girlfriend. Afterward she looked at him as if he’d created a cure for yawns, gathered her things, and as she was leaving shook her head and said “But he’s just a fucking CAT,” as if that was supposed to make a difference. Bobby didn’t really like to pet his cat, he felt it was intrusive to the little guy’s life. So he just let the cat be.
Bobby Nickels really enjoyed Back To the Future, and was impressed with the mechanism that Doc Brown had created to feed his dog Einstein. Still, he felt the world would have been a better place if the dog had actually helped to create it. That would have given Bobby hope, but instead, he knew somewhere in the back of his mind he was just going to have to come to terms with the fact that animals are really good for nothing.

Bobby Nickels ate soup out of a can. The can was hot, so he wrapped it in a sweat sock. He had plenty of pots, but he also had a lot of ancient Christmas socks.

Only one dream had ever haunted Bobby Nickels. He’d had plenty of dreams, but the one about his grandmother was the one he always remembered. Laying down to go to sleep, it was the last thing he thought of most nights, and was the first thing he thought of when he woke up. Dread at night, and relief in the morning. Bobby nickels never shared this dream with anyone, and when a girlfriend once asked him what he worst fear was, he lied and said it was being forced to skydive.

She had a hard time being in a room with a lot of people who were excited. She would get so overwhelmed by the feeling of the room, that eventually she would break down and have to leave.
It was that way regardless of the feeling.
If the room was sad, she carried the burden. If the room was happy, she cried tears of joy, and if the room were scared she would cower. It was difficult for Tom to see movies with her for this reason, so sometimes he would go and not tell her. In fact, he lied to her and said he didn’t really enjoy seeing movies at all, when in fact, it was his favorite thing to do, except for spending time with her.
It felt wrong, not being able to combine his two favorite things, and sometimes he would forget how much he hated her magnified experience. He would invite her out to a movie, and she would sound relieved, glad that he may just be a normal person after all. But when all was said and done, he felt drained, cheated, and burdened by the whole ordeal, and would revow to never see a movie with her again.The truth was that he felt gypped. He loved movies. A love so strong that it became need. But he couldn’t need movies while she was around, because she needed him, and it was because of this that he tried his best not to be needed.
Gouged out her eyes.
Operated on her in her sleep.
Only watched boring movies.
Began going to see plays.
Found a blind girl.
Started dating men.
Began making movies.
Asked her to watch porn with him all the time.
Grew wings and flew away.
Moved to California.
Made her watch the movie about Sylvia Plath.

Coalmine Singer didn’t mind his name, not the way everyone else did, at least. The only thing about it that bothered him was that it bothered everyone else.
He despised quips like “That’s not a name you hear every day,” and had grown to seethe whenever he heard anything described as “interesting”.
His detestation for the word began when he was 14 and found twelve synonyms to replace the word, not to mention the eleven fairly reasonable antonyms that would easily replace the offensive word when dressed up with a handy “Un-“: Why sir, what an unwearying name you have.
Coalmine was positive that any “un-“ word in the world could be used to describe his name. He liked unwieldy, uncouth, uncomplimentary, unbidden unduly, unemployable, undesirable, and most of all, undemocratic.
But all of these un’s didn’t make a bit of difference, because the only word he ever heard was “interesting.” And it made him sick.
Coalmine would sometimes joke that his parents should have just called him Ask Me About My Name, and Coalmine’s sister, Betty, would always joke back, “But then everyone would have asked what it’s like to be an Iroquois.”

Bobby Nickels felt defective.
Bobby Nickels felt lost.
Both of which he knew in his heart he wasn’t. Typically he felt quite the opposite, actually. He was like a well-oiled machine that knew what it was working for. But, there was something at the corner of 2nd and 23rd that made those sureties abandon him.

Bobby had a brother who lived in Brooklyn, and was always trying to convince Bobby to visit, and learn how to be hip. “You work too much,” Tommy would mumble into the phone, and Bobby would always reply, “You have to work to get what you want,” with the same strength of conviction his brother had while deciding what to wear.

Bobby Nickels wanted to eat his sandwich, but there was something about the corner that put him off eating. His stomach wouldn’t cooperate, neither would his hands, or mouth. “What a waste”, his brain told him.

Naturally, Bobby wanted to stick around and investigate, but his neighbor with the dented up car told him that there was no mystery to solve, and scooted him off the stoop. Bobby shook his head as if he had offered his neighbor a million dollars and he’d declined.
All that night, Bobby sat in his window with a baseball bat, waiting for some young hoodlums.

Bobby Nickels deliberated for fifteen minutes on how to start the letter, eventually settling on “Howdy!” for it’s sense of timeless cool.

Bobby Nickels dreamt of waking up and drinking yesterdays coffee, black, out of the cold pot; and he did just so when he awoke.

Bobby began to judge how hard he was working by how often he required a shower. It was then that he realized living wasn’t hard for him at all, and he began looking down on people who showered every day. He didn’t like that feeling, so he began his every day routine again.

John is a large man.
A fat man.
With blonde highlights, blue eyes and a fucking attitude.
Everyone thinks that he’s gay, but no one really knows why. Maybe it’s the highlights. But the truth is that John isn’t gay at all. In fact, he has a girlfriend. She likes that he is a metrosexual. It turns her on that such a big man can still find it somewhere inside of his giant self to take the time to be fashionable.
John’s girlfriend has a name like a flower.
Petunia. Just saying her name makes John feel like a man; a strong, burly man, with a delicate flower of a girlfriend that he can care for, nourish, and protect.
Petunia hated her name until she met John. When her name comes out of his mouth, no matter what it’s following, or what it’s followed by, she can almost forget her past as “PeeYeww-nia, the smelly Unflower.”
John has just one suit, and he rarely wears it out of the house. But he wants to. In fact, although he doesn’t make much money, he always saves enough to take Petunia out for fancy dates that should by all rights require that he wear his finest suit. Petunia always wore her nicest dresses, and just a little bit John feels jealous. She won’t allow John to dress his nicest, because she insists that John do it just for her, in the house.Besides, she always says, it makes you look like a sexy mob boss, and I don’t want trouble from anyone that is trouble.
They are in love.
But no one knows of this life, and he likes it that way. No one knows that his attitude is reminiscent of the made men in mob movies that John watches in order to practice the voice that Petunia likes when he dons the suit. And those idiots at work can think he was gay all they want, while they go home and jerk it, thinking of girls who are only a quarter of the woman Petunia is.

Bobby Nickels has a common but important decision to make: take a shit or go to work.
On one hand, he might be late for work, but on the other hand he might have to shit in a stall next to someone like Fat John, so he opts to stay home.
Bobby Nickels shits with his sunglasses on. Not all the time, just this time, and decides that it’s the least awkward shit he’s ever taken, and keeps a pair of sunglasses in the bathroom from then on, for that sole purpose. The sunglasses make this routine experience feel so cool that he figures he may as well add this dimension to every task. He calls it “Seeing the real side.”

He couldn’t remember when, but he knew without hesitation that someone, at one point in his life had told him to live in the moment. He remembered the exact moment with such taunting clarity; the loose tie of his shoes, the brown patches in the grass, the dried up worms lying on their concrete bone yard…but that face from which the words had come escaped him. Although he knew that living in the moment wasn’t an idea novel to that particular one, knew that he’d heard it come out of many mouths in college; another familiar phrase- there’s nothing like the first time.
Smith never talked philosophy. He never really saw the point. His main philosophy dealt mainly with not forcing his beliefs onto anyone, and everything else he just kept to himself. There had never been anything anyway to make him suppose that living in the moment was a philosophy.

Bobby nickels felt his first boob on the same birthday that his mother had distributed flyers throughout the whole neighborhood with news of a party. It was his birthday, but he didn’t know anyone there. The Nickels family had just moved to Chicago, into a mid size house, with a back yard and a pool. Bobby’s mother was a proactive woman, although her plots were never fully thought out. Usually the grand scheme of her ideas blinded her to any sort of, often embarrassing, repercussions.
Due to Bobby’s new penchant for floating in the pool all day, using the water both as a thirst quenching aide and a urinal, his mother wanted him to make new friends.
Although he hates to talk about it, if asked about that summer he contests that: everyone pisses in the pool admittedly or not, and that he only drank the water once, on a dare that came from his neighbor. In exchange, Bobby won not only acclaim as “That Fucking Gross Nickels Kid,” but also a box of black cats that, as it turned out, had been left in the rain the night before and were all duds.
Bobby Nickels hated parties more than anything, except for barbeques, and this brought his father a certain amount of shame. In an attempt to moderate her husband’s humiliation, Bobby’s mother threw, at least in Bobby’s eyes, an unholy amount of barbeques. So many in fact, that the family stopped saying the entire word, and as a unit (except for one, of course) referred to them simply as “ques”.

Bobby Nickels didn’t know what he was getting himself into when he agreed to go with Caleb to the well. Caleb had asked him to go, and Bobby had said yes. It was as simple as that.
Caleb hardly said anything as they walked deep into the woods. In the afternoon light pollen filled the air, looking like mass of gnats.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Caleb led Bobby out to an old well to show him a rabid raccoon that he had caught. The thing was clearly hurt, and was quickly tearing apart the wooden crate it was being held in. Bobby Nickels had never seen anything lust for blood before.
Caleb quietly poked the seething animal with a stick, and looked to Bobby for approval. Bobby said nothing, but felt pretty scared about what was happening. He had just wanted to catch frogs or something. Caleb’s eyes lit up as he remembered the three inch knife his father had given him the day before, shoved into his back pocket.
He searched Bobby again, and poked the tip of the blade between the long slats of the crate. Although Caleb had deeply cut the beast, it didn’t seem to change anything, and his seething rage was as wild as ever.
Man, that fucker is pissed!
Bobby just shrugged, and idly looked around for some tree to climb that he would prove more adventurous to Caleb than poking a furious animal with a new knife.
But nothing else came remotely close.
Suddenly, all white vanished from Caleb’s eyes, and he plunged the knife deep into the wooden crate, splintering the wood, all the silver of the knife buried deep into the fur of the raccoon.
Bobby Nickels felt rigid, watching the raccoon go even crazier, getting loose and tearing apart Caleb’s arm. Bobby couldn’t move.

Minutes went by, and the fight between animal and boy was unbearable to watch, but Bobby felt as if there was nothing he could do. He hadn’t wanted to play with that stupid raccoon, he wad wanted to ride bikes, or see some bones, or shoot at some old cans or something.
Once Caleb had stomped the raccoons skull into a million bits, Bobby shoved his hands into his pockets and said quietly to Caleb, “We should really just say he attacked you for no reason. You’re going to need a doctor,” and then silently walked away, leaving Caleb covered in blood, and crying in the sunset.

He woke up and didn’t give a shit. He brushed his teeth and didn’t give a shit. Didn’t give a shit at lunch, dinner, or during Benny Hill, and for a moment before he fell asleep, he thought about how fucking great it felt to not give a shit, and then slipped off into blissful slumber.
That was the life Bobby Nickels wanted; but for all his might, he couldn’t help but give a shit that his name had been misspelled as “Booby Nickels” in a letter sent company wide.

He’d been replacing meals with coffee tasting like cardboard for eight days. He knew it was eight days because he had been keeping count. Sometimes he would pretend that he’d had a terrible accident, one that broke his jaw, and misaligned his senses, causing him to be unable to taste or smell anything. Then he would imagine that the coffee was actually soup, or something tasting like hamburgers. The satisfaction was never there, but he still felt that the attempt at delusion beat the taste of the coffee.
He had been out of milk for three days, it should have been four, but he reasoned with himself that the curds in the milk were still protein, and that they made drinking rotten milk pretty classy in it’s own right. Still unsure as to what to do about his quickly disappearing sugar, his deep sigh vibrated into the nearly empty canister. He began to growl an imaginary roommates name.
“God damn it all, John! Every week you use the last of the sugar, and never buy more!”
He looked around the empty apartment and smiled a little.
“Some day, just once, I’d appreciate if you would do something, anything for the commonwealth of this place! If I ever saw you pick up something that belongs to you, or bring home food for us I’d probably die of a heart attack!”
He began to stomp around the house, holding up his own shirts and blaming John for the disarray of the tiny tenement. Just as he was at the height of his tirade he heard a voice hiss from behind him, “What about you, sir! You’ve never lifted a helping hand in your entire life. For anyone!”
His heart nearly jumped out of his chest, and he twisted ankle turning to see from what accuser the voice had come. He fell into a soft pile of dirty clothes in time to see a mouse run off with his last piece of bread.

It had been half an hour, and her laundry was finished washing. For a Sunday the Laundromat was empty, aside from a woman folding an army’s worth of clothes, and an androgynous parent, ignoring it’s child who was busy trying to climb into a front loading washer.
Opening her washer, designated by a cloth bag embossed with apples and flowers, Sara noticed that the woman folding the troop of clothes had commandeered both wheeled laundry baskets.
Before Sara could ask the woman if she might use one, just for a moment in order to transfer her clothes from washer to dryer, the woman made sharp eye contact with her. Sara was only able to mouth the word “May…” before her eyes automatically shivered, and averted.
Holy fucking shit, I have no backbone! Sara marveled within herself, as if this were the very first time this epiphany had hit her. Trying not to dwell on the matter in any way that might mean she’d have to make a life change this time, she silently moved her load of laundry, piece by piece from washer to dryer. Shifting the weight on the balls of her feet, like a frenzied autistic.

No one knows where Lady No-English came from, but she shows up to the free seminars on Tuesday and Thursday to listen to Professor Face Beard talk about time and space. She takes notes, and nods her head at every seventh word, passing hands over her used physics books. The feeling of what we don’t know is limitless.

I had forgotten the rebuilding
the gentle touch
the jumping in, of double dutch.

The ship sailor rode the squeaky bike down the grassy hill, and back up the next. He had never felt so exhilarated on land, and tried to explain his feelings appropriately. “This is just like sailing!” he shouted to his lady, who stood on a far hilltop. She smiled behind her hair.
He hadn’t meant exactly what he’d said, though. And she hadn’t taken it to mean as such, either. Still, a small victory passed through her heart, hopelessly hoping that the bike and hills might be enough to stay him on land.

Penguin pouch

Lady raider

Beguiling bassoon

Sass slayer

Stare bearer

Wrinkly rhino

Brandy burrow

Hidey hat

We sat wishing for fish in the murky Potomac

Hollow hello

Lost in the forest, there was nothing left to do but lie down and rest. There wasn’t panic in his breath, but excitement to be sure.

Remembered like a dream was the youth that got them there; unforgotten, but misremembered.

He had forgotten writing the letter; it hadn’t been that long. But a crop had been harvested, and what felt like years of work had passed, so when she showed up with that paper, held up like earned gold, the farmer stumbled. He saw her from the field, knocking frantically on the edge of the screen door.

Todd spent every day of his life not unlike the rest of the world. There was nothing special about him. He worked in an office that was no different than any office around the globe. Maybe they don’t have cubicles in India, where he calls to find out what’s happening with his credit card bills. This prospect bothers him so much that he asks if they do next time he calls to find out why they charged him and extra fifty dollars this month.
He speaks with a man named Jaleu, and they have a conversation about the same things, but find it obvious that they are called by different names. They talk about the walls of their cubes, and Todd is jealous that Jaleu’s are made of Formica that looks like plywood, while Todd’s are made of carpet. They talk about what bullshit college was, and then hang up the phone.
Todd didn’t mind typing for eight hours a day, although it wasn’t really so much that he typed for eight hours daily, but that he had a keyboard in his vicinity for at least seven, and was expected to utilize it for at least five. He tried to type for as long as he could, even if it was just for practice. There was something about making his hands feel useful that felt especially good.
Okay, that isn’t entirely true. Todd had felt for a long time that his hands were kind of uncontrollable. They did what they wanted, especially during his tour of colleges in the North East. He tried his hands at everything, but no matter what he was thinking about, his hands always took the lead, and this far they hadn’t let him in the wrong direction. They taught him how soft cats were, and hot to use the remote. How to masturbate, and how to pop zits. They taught him hot to fold a slice of pizza so that the grease didn’t drip all over his tie, and they taught him how to throw a dart so accurately that he hadn’t paid for after work drinks in years. They had never led him astray.But he told people that he just liked to keep his hands busy, because the truth pissed him off.
His hands just wouldn’t stop typing. They weren’t even typing anything at all. There were no words, and no patterns, just nonsense. Sure, they did the works he asked them to do, but that involved him asking them to do stuff, which was definitely not the deal they had agreed upon silently years and years ago. Todd wasn’t really to learn how to use his hands, and more than that he didn’t want to. How would he explain to his friends that he wasn’t goo at Mario, or foosball. How would he get out of playing guitar at his grandfather’s birthday, and what the hell was he going to do on his Friday date?
Let’s not get too ridiculous here. Todd was in full control of his body. Just not his hands, which had never presented a problem until now.
Later on, during the make out part of his hot date, Todd found his hands tip tapping on Jenny’s back in a way that reminded him of typing.

what we’d seen upon the streets each night
is not the part that mattered
the ladies walking, barefoot strays,
the late night pitter-patter.

all around convenience came,
sneaky, slither-slathered
us with thoughtless urgency
causing hearts to feel battered

in the end we did sleep soundly,
resting rusty bones,
dreams of glassy fantasy,
rebuked in hushed tones

don’t worry, it’s a joke

i’ve spent some lonely times in life
more than you could know;
all the while echoing
hello ‘ello ‘lo

don’t worry, it’s still a joke

what does it matter,
we’re all going to die.
cry cry cry, cry cry cry cry
boo, hoo is half a ghost.

Everyone wears cowboy boots now. It’s not just about the cowboy boots, though. It’s the pocket knives, the feathers in everyone’s hair, and it’s this new, peculiar brand of mystical rock. Most disturbing, though, is the bloodlust.
It’s impossible to walk down the street without coming across the small, lifeless bodies of decimated vermin. Blood and fur gets tracked into coffee shops, record stores and bookstores all over town, and you can tell who goes where.
I can just imagine the new after parties; drinking to the point of anger, and rushing the streets to fuck up nature’s last ditch effort to eek a way into the hard pushing future.
Dancing in clubs, on floors slippery with the perfect embodiment of everything we took for granted, and fucking hated. Laughing hard, sliding across floors, covered in the guts of everything weaker than us.

Steve started waking up next to stuff that appeared in his dreams.
Every night he lay in bed thinking hard about gold, or world peace, or beautiful ladies. But he dreamt of giant bats with giant tits, mangled dogs, and sharks in itchy wool dresses.
Once his apartment was full, Steve felt he had no other option except to line up these monster fucks and drown them, one by one

There are things, and then there are things. Sometimes I have difficulty separating the two. Actually, I’d be surprised if there was any difference between them at all, except to delineate them as this and that. Generalize them as items. I personally suspect that very few things in life are real, and anything falling into that tiny division consists of items I’ve touched, or for that matter, am touching.
For this reason, there is only a minute fraction of the world that I care about at all, and it can only ever be one thing at a time, maybe two. Three if my hands were bigger.
There was this time that I emptied an entire packet of Skittles into my small hands, and until they were gone, that was all I cared about. It took three mouthfuls to devour the candy, but my hands contained the future for those fifteen minutes. And afterward, each sticky, colored memory continued its legacy inside my palms far into the rest of the day, reminding me of all the good in the world.
And for that time, nothing else mattered.
Perhaps it’s naïve to experience things with such exclusion regarding the other senses, but I’m pretty sure that my eyes, ears, nose and mouth are all basically gullible liars. Those other four organs are just playing supporting roles, but my hands are the big bosses, deciding my fate.
These hands help me do everything, like little silent sidekicks, forever ready to jump into action, or warn the rest of me when I am in danger of pain.So, I’ll allow these friends to throw away all of the bullshit crap that I’ve collected, and let them continue to tell me what is meaningful by what they choose to revisit.

I spent a summer on a ship. We didn’t sail to the Indies, or anywhere exotic. Mostly, we traveled from a port in New Jersey to a small town in Rhode Island. The trip didn’t take more than a day and a half, but often the captain would ask the crew to circle out from the shore more than required.
The captain always seemed sad until the shore was just far enough away that if you squinted, it might just be fog and waves.
I never asked him, but by the end of the summer I had decided that his untoward attitude was likely due to having never fully developed into a successful sea captain. Probably he blamed it on his crew- full of criminals on probation and college students looking for interesting summer work.
Our cargo wasn’t anything worth stealing, not like other ships that sent fabrics port to port, or fishing ships that harvested caviar, we just carried heavy duty bolts for heavy duty machinery. The probationers hated this aspect and usually only worked for as long as their contracts dictated, then asked to be placed aboard cruise ships as dishwashers hoping to rob vacationers. Because of the staff turnover, the captain was lonesome. He had no first mate. He had nothing, except for his ship.
Toward the end of my contract, insomnia settled in. There was something about the sound of the waves, the long moans of early morning fog horns, and the constant movement of the ship that caused my guts to turn solid. It was as if my body wanted land so badly that my stomach became its own island.
One evening, bored with counting the times the ship rocked, I decided to suit up and sit on deck until dawn. As I climbed the steps from the cabin, I heard the voice of the captain speaking. Nothing he said elicited response from a listener, so I continued upward. There on the deck was the captain, sitting on a coil of rope and speaking with ferocious anger. My stint almost over, I found no reason not to inquire as to what was going on, so politely I asked
“Captain? Who are you speaking to?”
Clearly drunk, the captain seethed
“This rope.”
It had been years since I found myself with nothing to say, and no matter how many times it may have, and will end up happening; this was by far the most earnest that silence has ever been.
The captain told the story again, not so much for my benefit it seemed, as it was for the rope’s.
“See, as far back as anyone can remember this thing, this rope, has been passed down from the father before, with the hope that each new man may become the captain.No one knows for how long, or where the thing came from, but with all the sincerity of the world, as my grandfather told my father, and as my father told me,
‘It is my wish that you become a ships captain.’”
I sighed, still unsure as to where the trouble came from,”Well, was your father a captain?
The captain let out a tiny yelp
“No, my father was a baker!”

“And was his father was a captain?”

The captain now began to wrestle with the rope as he howled.
“No! He was a dentist!”

I sighed and tried to look anywhere but the tired mess.
“Well, was anyone in your family a captain?”
That was all the captain could take

“I was.” He sputtered,
and in one motion tied the rope around his neck and threw himself overboard,
feet kicking against the ship’s hull.

In time they came to understand that their world wasn’t going to get any better. That they may as well sink into the soft downy couch of ennui. They would always be lonesome on this planet. Haggard, spread too thin, left feeling like an old country and western song, moving too slow only to relate one sad and deepening point. Sick of working, they weren’t sure what to do with their hands anymore; feeling each stretch of tendon to be in vain. So, they carried their hands around in rings of remorse, constantly brushing off the dead cells, jumping at any chance to change. They knew now, after so and so many years that things would always be this confused. The dreams that they dreamt were the only points of consciousness left, and impossible to share in full. No one touched anymore, for fear of retribution, being marked as the vexed; knowing too much to be safe. So the world loped around in its orb, spinning inaccurately and lacking preciseness. But it didn’t matter anymore, because speech was fading, barriers were breaking down; the sharp blade of distant future cutting less and less often through all of their todays.

shiver, shiver silver wolf,
the winter does not know you
but in the spring the birds will sing,
“danger’s gone, cuckoo.”

shiver, shiver, silver wolf
the winter wants your blood
but would the spring
woo, love and save you
even if it could?

When we got to the museum, a man in a hat with a shadowy face leaned out from between two pillars, and whistled us over to him.
He confided in us that there was a secret exhibit called The Painted Mirror, and it would show your past, present and future.
He drew us a map on the back of a cocktail napkin, and as we looped our way through the corridors, past the armory, Asian displays, and past the bummer wing, where the sad faces of bedroom eyes Jesus will get hung on crosses for all eternity, to a small room where nothing hung, except The Painted Mirror.
Sure enough, as we stood there, our past, present and future began to unfold.We walked into the room, waited with expectation, and like always, left defeated.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2007

I don’t know if you have ever been to Canada. I have. I went to visit some idiot that, one night after a party, turned on a porn called “Cherry Pie” in which Archie and Jughead tag team Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and then tried to have sex with me on the couch in his mother’s living room. Aside from that part, which I blame on sweet Canadian hash oil, and teenage hormones, the trip wasn’t a bad one.

But, I was feeling kind of guilty the other day, because while I was there, walking down a street in Toronto, I opened a pack of smokes and dropped the wrapper on the ground. A local saw this and began berating me, but because I was young and American I lost my shit on him, and probably called him a “hippie fag.” I never forgot about that, and now I feel really awful for disrespecting someone and their country.

Well, I did until Monday, when I found out that some Canadian fucks stole my debit card number and spent a thousand dollars of money I didn’t really have on what my boyfriend suspects was probably Hockey Jerseys, Molson Ice, and Bryan Adams albums. This week has been an absolutely terrifying experience…but not nearly as terrifying as terrors in the terrible horror flicks I watched during my Haaauuunnnted Couch Halloween Movie Week.

1. The Invitation

Yeah, I know it sounds scary (no it doesn’t), but like this poster, it is clearly a tool for learning how to care about yourself, your partners in business and life, and your father, whom you never knew until he tried to poison you. It stars Lance Henriksen, best known for his portrayal of Bishop in Aliens. He also played a character named Frank Black in an X-files episode. That might be useful wanking information for any Pixies superfans you know. The Invitation also starred a group of people you have probably seen in amateur porn. Listen, I don’t really have anything to say about this movie except that it wasn’t funny, and there wasn’t any blood, no one died, and it didn’t seem to think very highly of our neighbors to the south.

2. Slumber Party Massacre

It’s like a merry go round of tits and blood.

3. 976- Evil

This movie is a dark horse, but I don’t understand why you aren’t watching it right now. It was directed by Robert Englund, better known as Freddy Krueger, and stars Stephen Geoffreys, better known as the guy from any one of these gay films…
Hunk Hotel
Virtual Stud
Leather Buddies
Cock Pit
Gay Men In Uniform
Seamen Training Day
and
Guys Who Crave Big Cocks

Bravo,
But seriously, the movie fucking kills any other movie I’ve ever seen.

4. Return to Horror High

I was a little worried going into it because I hadn’t seen the original Horror High, but then I found out that there wasn’t really a first Horror High, so….you know the first ten minutes are worth it for George Clooney’s eyebrows and tunnel haricut, but after that…it’s pretty fucking hilarious.

But, again, I think no one really dies. Except Clooney…

5. Phenomena

Everyone kept talking throughout the whole movie, so I didn’t really know what was going on. But, I think that even if everyone had been quiet, I’d still be pretty fucking lost.

Directed by Dario Argento Starring Jennifer Connelly, and the sweetest fucking Chimp that you’ve ever seen.

Jennifer Connelly talks to bugs! Man, this movie was awesome. If you’ve seen Suspiria, then you know where I’m coming from. This soundtrack not only has Goblin but also Iron Maiden, and Motorhead. And a Chimp.

Imagine Project X, microcosmos, Requim For a Dream, a guy in a wheelchair, Flowers in the Attic, that one Twilight Zone episode, and teenage bulimia.
Yes!
Yes!
Yes!

6. 30 Days of Night

I read this comic, so I was pretty impressed with what a number one  job they did with the visuals in this movie. Everyone else was blinded by the amount of blood. One part was so needlessly gory that I started to cry a little, but then couldn’t stop laughing hysterically for five minutes.

$9.75 at the Riverview, and totally worth it.

7. The Adventures of Pete and Pete; Halloween Special

I wish I had been this fucking cool when I was 12. The episode also has Iggy Pop in it, who calls someone a “Stooge”.

I’m glad I get that now.

8. X-Files: Excelsis Dei (Season 2, episode 11)

Okay, I know that this isn’t a horror movie, but this episode features something I’ve been joking about for months-
Ghost rape.

It’s actually very serious, and you can read all about it in

9. Theatre of Blood AKA: Much Ado About Murder

This movie has some of the best gore and worst acting I have ever seen. But, it’s got Vincent Price, so you know, it’s credible.

Side note: I was very opposed to watching this film, and kept giving my friend Dustin a hard time about how gay he was for wanting to watch a Vincent Price movie. When he invited me over, the conversation went like this…

Dustin: Are you coming to watch the movie, or not?
Me: Nah, but I might catch the tail end of Vincent Price, like so many young men.

Anyway, eventually I felt bad about razzing him, because the movie was actually really great. But then I was validated by IMDB that sites HOMOSEXUAL as a keyword in searching for the film.

Suck it, Dustin.

See you next week when I will write about something else.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2007

Getting me pumped for Halloween is like giving a fourteen year old a boner: easy as shit. My mom and I used to work as haunters at the Strausburg Railroad Museum when I was little. Then, all through middle school and high school, we’d all load up in someone’s parent’s minivan to get dropped off in the middle of nowhere to smoke stolen cigarettes, and get the piss scared out of us on haunted hayrides. Then that stupid paradigm shift happened in college, where everyone forewent driving fun for drinking fun, and suddenly there were Halloween parties. I once dated a guy just cause he made such a convincing Rod Stewart. It didn’t last long, but that was like the last fucking sweet Halloween.

My first year in Philly I had my own Halloween party. I had made this excellent mummy costume. Unfortunately, I later decided wasn’t conducive to partying, so I went as a sorrostitute instead, which was convenient, because a friend went as a frat boy, and had a beer bong. By midnight, before the party even really started I was wasted. The last thing I remember is spraying fake blood all over some people who hadn’t worn costumes and screaming: “I don’t know how any of you are drunk, because I am already ALL THE DRUNK.” That night I earned the nickname “Passout Polly,” but not before ruining a lot of things in my room with a sweet Linda Blair impersonation.

Last year was better, I think, except that I forgot to turn my clock back, and ended up working a full shift cutting fruit on only two hours of party sleep instead of three. I guess all I’m trying to say is that the years since the devil’s drink has taken over my devil’s night have fucking been more and more lame. So! This year, I thought I might get back to basics, and try to see the dark light that I once found in Halloween once again.

Part 1:
Six Flags: Asshole Adventure- Fright(ning douche) Fest

We spent six hours at the park and rode four rides. One of them was the teacups (which are hilarious and awesome, so don’t be “too cool” to spin, okay?) We could have ridden more rides, except for all the swells that shelled out the extra $40 (on top of the $30 to get in at half price) to get this thing called “FlashPass”.

Okay, so here’s how it works: you get this little beeper thing that you scan at these kiosks at the gate of the ride line,

Then it tells you when to come back so you can go get a blowjob in the bathroom or count your gold coins or whatever while all these other honest idiots are waiting in line, and then just stroll back in and onto the ride. So, if you don’t have the FlashPass, you wait in line for an hour to ride Skull Mountain, and then get to the front only to get FlashPassed, and have to wait some more! I’m not insane about class dilineation, but like The Game says in How We Do: “Bougie ass bitches you can kiss my ass”. And yes, we did boo some ten year olds with FlashPasses off the ride. But! Seriously, Kingda Ka was totally worth the two hour wait. I know it only lasted for 50 seconds, but it goes from 0-130mph in 3.5 seconds, and made the whole day worth it. P.S. Should I have been surprised that Six Flags would pit us park goers against each other for a quick buck, when there’s product placement like this?

Part 2:
Haunted alley! I’ve never lived in a city where the residents love to decorate as much as they do in South Philly. They would decorate for Wednesdays if you gave them garland. I love ooohhing and ahhhing at the lights at Christmas, so I figured I might be able to find my holiday spirit on Tasker st. Some decorations that seemed strange, but pretty popular were these plastic sheets that no one seemed to know how to hang straight.

In fact, everything seemed to be lacking in true respect for the meaning of Halloween

Except for the windows. All of my favorite spooks were featured:

Ghosts

Black Cats

Witches

Skeletons

Zombies

Anyway, here were some of my favorites:

Part 3:
Tame-itentury: Terror without the Balls.
Our groups weren’t spaced out enough, so our group kept getting the tail end of the boo! Gags meant for the group in front of us, AND in the group in front of us, someone kept laying these super gnarly farts, but I shouldn’t complain, because the company was good, and our tickets were free… So I won’t. Besides, the parts that were really good, I don’t want to give away.

Whatever, fuck it, despite my adulthood trying to harsh my Halloween high, I am still super pumped. Take that!, responsibility, pride, accomplishments, rational thought! Fuckers. Until next week, when you can see pictures of me in a body suit, and I’ll write about something that won’t be as exciting as whatever else you’re doing that weekend, like my new iTunes account, or some movie reviews. Probably some movie reviews.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2007

I love the morning, but I hate getting up. True story. A few summers ago my friends and I were rocking the stoops pretty hard. And with the glorious invention of Sparks Black, we were rocking the malt pretty fucking serious too.

One day, I was kind of over it. I don’t remember why, maybe it was just time to stir the pot. So, as a way to keep myself from staying out all night living the life I love, I took a job that began at 6:00am, which meant I had to be up by 5:00. It didn’t change anything except that instead of hung over afternoon bike rides to work requiring sunglasses, there were twilighted and swervey rides to work still wearing sunglasses from…why the fuck was I wearing those? Maybe it was my lack of sleep and intoxicated state, but those bike rides to work were so surreal in their nature that I figured, hell, I should really do a story on that creepy wrinkle.

Caveat:
The entire day before I got up for this mess, I was thinking about how to start the story. And it seemed like Iron Maiden was as good a place as any. “Two Minutes To Miiiiiidnight” raged through my head for 24 solid hours. I was all set to talk about how Bruce Dickinson was a pansy for thinking that Midnight was the scariest time of night, and that he should try his throat at the Gayborh- oops! I mean “Midtown Village” early morning scene, and then see what scares the shit out of him. BUT, (and as you’ll see, disappointment is a common theme in this narrative) THE SONG IS NOT ABOUT MIDNIGHT AS WE KNOW IT. It’s about the fucking atomic clock, and some anti-war shit. I didn’t know Bruce changed his name to Bono, did you? A more appropriate song to listen to while reading this article is Ghost Town by the Specials. So, put it on, and let’s go.

You know, I was totally pumped to get up at 4:30am for this. Like when I went to see that new Stephen King stinker, 1408. I mean, King’s got some sweet fucking films, but then the movie sucked. It wasn’t scary. I thought that riding around the city between the hours of 5:00 and 7:00am was going to blow my mind like an American seeing pictures from Vietnam for the first time. Really though, the scariest part was seeing how empty the city was.

In space, no one can hear you scream. That kind of feeling, except less like a tag line, and more like real life. And maybe like the few chapters of “House of Leaves” before it gets boring.

So, just a few blocks in, I was ready for breakfast. There weren’t too many people at Little Pete’s, just the staff, some woman that looked like the ghost of an art teacher, and some Greek dicks with their prize ladies (Who were all perfectly made up, except that the make up around their nostrils had strangely worn off. What was that all about?), causing a ruckus. They all lit up cigarettes, and didn’t give a shit when they were asked to leave. But, actually, as I was making notes about them, right in the middle of writing the word “dicks” they offered to pay for my breakfast. I let them. Dicks.

After breakfast, I went to Rittenhouse 1715. It’s a boutique hotel over on Rittenhouse Square Street that offers an all night concierge service.

I spoke with the guy on duty, and asked him a little bit about what it’s like being awake every day at such an eerie hour. He said that he doesn’t know why he works at night like this, because he can’t even sleep with the lights off at home. “This time of night isn’t like in New York where it’s still all these partiers out and about,” he said. “It’s more of the unfortunates roaming around. Everything is unnatural and aimless.”

And that was about it. The morning did indeed feel unnatural, and aimless. I didn’t see anything sweet, like that Rittenhouse rodeo cowboy, or dead animals, or bloody drunks, or beloved prosties of any gender. To be honest, it was kind of a bust, and I am kind of pissed. Don’t get up before noon, lesson learned. This wound will take a while to heal. So, until next week, when I’ll be poking fun at Halloween decorations, and making you super jealous with my fun Halloween week of Frightfest at Six Flags, VIP tickets to the Eastern State Penitentiary, and pissing off that guy at CVS by trying on all the costumes, but not buying anything.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2007

Years ago I thought I wanted to be a comedian. I even began to write some jokes. One of them went like this:
“So I’m a mother now. (applause) Wow, thank you! I see there are some parents in the audience. Yeah, I just adopted an ugly 17 year old so I could finally go out and be the ‘pretty one.’”
It’s a terrible joke really. Me? A Mother? That isn’t funny. I didn’t realize how unfunny it was until I became a nanny.

I didn’t really mean to become a nanny. In fact, I hadn’t hung out with kids since I was a volunteer at an after school program when I was in high school. That ended with getting my ass handed to me by two ten year old kids.

Then two years ago I moved to Philadelphia, and some stranger asked me to watch his kids. I accepted because I trust myself, and I needed extra money. Also, because I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. It’s not that babysitting, or nannying isn’t fun, because it really is. I mean, you get paid to play. It’s the walking into someone else’s life that is really fucked up. Oh, bummer alert.

Moving on…Nannying has become so popular that I’m actually starting my own Babysitters club: Great Nanny Alliance Redux (GNAR) Squad. It’s kind of a cash cow. Seriously though, in Philadelphia, nannies are the stewardess’ for the 21st century. There are tons of women, ages 20-25 rocking the city on a daily basis with someone else’s kids.

I guess I could go real deep into the societal implications i.e.: daughters of career women are lashing back with having a career as a mother, but I don’t really feel like doing that. Dismantling societal constructs by way of feminism or capitalism is a real fucking downer. So, why not just check out my day as a nanny.

This is Emma.

If you live or work anywhere near South Street, then you’ve most likely seen her around. She’s probably the cutest fucking thing I’ve ever seen, but seriously, all kids are kind of the same. Really though, my kids will be different. Duh.

I made sure to bring snacks with me, because strangely enough, parents don’t always have food around. But it didn’t matter, because she totally ignored the lady code and went through my bag!

Good thing I brought two apples.

Ugh.

Does she think I’m made of apples?

Well, after a good snack, I asked Emma what she wanted to do. The obvious answer was “Go to the park.”

Johnny Depp once said that hanging with a young kid is like hanging out with a drunk. I’m kind of inclined to agree seeing as how Emma can’t walk a straight line.

Not to mention her willingness to trespass.

Once we got to the park, Emma was pretty much into checking out the other kids, while I was kind of checking out this dude that was obviously living the dream.

We hung with our imaginary friends.

And then Emma wanted to swing. Ha! I mean, not to turn this into a competition or anything, but she couldn’t even climb onto the swing!

Whereas I can swing like a fucking champ!

And P.S. Swinging is sweet shit.

All that swinging makes a lady thirsty. But, water? Kid, are you crazy?

I mean, that was totally my water in the first place, but kids backwash, and I’m tired.

It’s 4pm and time to take it Steazy.

Turns out that it was also snack time.

But I swear if she had eaten that apple earlier, the situation wouldn’t have seemed to dire. So, like any good nanny, I took her to Whole foods, where the food is not only healthy but also, moderately priced. Emma wanted a banana cookie, but all they had was a banana chocolate chip muffin. I handed the muffin over and told her to party hard, but for real, that girl parties a little too hard.

Oh well, the day was almost over, and it was time to go home. But before I left, I asked Emma to do a banana phone interview with me, and she politely agreed…

The Interview

Courtney: What’s your name?
Emma: Um, Alison
C: Oookay, how old are you?
E: Three.
C: Are-
E: My name is Madelyn
C: Um, do you know what Multiple Personality Disorder is?
E: I don’t know

C: Who am I talking to right now?
E: To me.

C: What did we do today?
E: Play.
C: Did we have fun?
E: Uh huh. What are you writing?
C: An article.
E: Oh, okay.
C: Do you know what an article is?
E: No, I don’t know what an arcle is.
C: Do you know that you are absolutely covered in chocolate?
E: Yeah.
C: What do you think about Brit getting her kids taken away?
E: I don’t know.
C: What about Brangalina and baby Zhara’s hip surgery?
E: I don’t know. What are you saying?

C: Who do you think will win the election? Obama or Hillary?
E: -Silence-
C: You’re smart for not wanting to talk politics with friends. Well, who do you want to be president?
E: A dog.

C: Good answer.

Finally her dad came home, and after getting PAAAIIIIID, my day was over. All in a day’s work. Thursdays are awesome.