From A to C

He remembers when he was in that pickup truck.  He can’t imagine two lives this disparate (his own and his own) and has no way of putting them together.  The smell of the seats, long go, is like the inside of a leather glove used by an otherwise clean cowboy.  Fault lines spread over the dash and window-shield, as if the truck has been picked up by an errant god and tossed once or twice in its twenty five years.  They are parked on the edge of the forty five acres that are his father’s.  Her face is flushed.  She has no eyes for the turned hay, the fog, the dying of the day, or even ears for the tinny radio, though he insists on all of these things silently, there in the cab as the world cools.  Listening to the AM radio deep into the morning.  A horse sneaks up on them and noses the window.  This is after they have made love.  He feels envy for his own life.  He begins to shake. “Enough,” he says. “Enough.”

From Below

when the aliens came they were inconspicuous.  as a race they behaved themselves as if chided, or if a reprimand had not been issued you could say they were visibly restrained by some off screen authority.  it terrified you, that restraint, because the aliens were terrifying enough.  they looked vaguely humanoid, like abstract art climbed down from the wall of the neighbour’s house (the damnable neighbours that drank white wine with their tiny dinners).  there were never very many of them.  twenty at most and all misshapen in their own way.  they possessed no ship.  one minute they weren’t here, then eyes and ears and stultified mouths were telling a different story.  their leader had abundantly long arms and legs, seemed constructed out of clay, and in that bed that was [his] face were two deep crackling outlets, eyes whose way of sight could not be like ours.  eyes that had seen vast things unfurl like smoke (or melting cell phones) that carried what they saw back to where it was made sense of.  back to that hideous biological machine, technology none of us wanted to be adjacent to, let alone confronted by.  they didn’t speak or communicate much, the aliens, though there was a sense that they could understand.  they wandered at first in the desert they arrived in, at loose odds with all these conditions that were putatively new to them.  perhaps—as some speculators had it—these were not aliens from beyond our borders.  not infiltrators from beyond or above but beneath.  the crankers of those black machines that laboured underground toward bright red chaos.  but if these were those they did not indicate their lethality, only their menace.  why did we feel so menaced, our species?  this new ‘them’ was supposed to catalyze a more coherent ‘us.’ it was doing nothing.  were we so fragile then, during those first encounters?  did our tendency to identify qualities of our race (imagination, delight) and compare them to a hypothetical other (cold, mechanical, w/o emotion) finally encounter confrontation, now that there was something genuinely novel to confront?  so many of our imagined races—the Geiger-counter, our great comparative standard, that we built in the dark, after the light had burnt out from being left on but unattended—were cold and logical or had exoskeletal networks to receive and transmit things that could only be nominally referred to as emotions; were, in other words, perceived and derived through contrast.  these aliens were different, and only wanted one thing.  lottery tickets.  when their sojourn in the desert was complete, the Twenty wandered into the nearest city, Phoenix, and began soliciting cash from strangers by… robbing them.  all twenty of them went on a citywide crime spree.  a spree that went unprosecuted and even unresisted.  citizens offered their wallets in slow motion, riveted and scared, worshipful and amused. a mandate was issued (who knows from how high up) that the government replace whatever funds the Twenty took, so long as the Twenty were left uninterrupted for the purposes of science. so they were.  left uninterrupted.  and what they did was meander slowly from city to city collecting tickets, then rent hotel rooms and watch to see if they won.  was this game so fun to them they could not resist it?  why had they seemed at once hostile?  and what was this ethereal registration of restraint, this feeling we all shared that something was withheld, deliberately, something that could spell out doom.  what would happen if the aliens won the lottery?  would they spend their money on more lottery tickets?  they had access to as much cash as they could need.  they were instantly rich when they appeared in the desert.  it kind of makes you wish you had appeared in the desert too, doesn’t it?

Freewriting 01-03-09

You should have seen them.  You should have seen them in their twilight years.  Their twilit years, as it were.  You should have seen them with their fingers curled around fenceposts and their nostrils alive to scent.  You should been there when he went down on one knee.  You should have seen his knee.  You should have heard something.  A sound.  A whisper.  Didn’t you at least hear a whisper?

·

He only wrote letters.  His first letter began dear dad.  Dear dad, I know I’m only four years old but I guess this is it.  I guess I am in love.  I suppose I have fallen, like a tonne of bricks, for a chick with no name.  She has no name.  I asked her and she shook her head like a confused pet.  Like a pet that has wandered into a room it never new existed, a secret room in the family mansion.  She shook her head and looked at me as if I was crazy.  You know what a name is don’t you? I asked her.  Of course, she said.  And you don’t have one?  I was never named, she said.  I take for my name the things of this earth.  The things that move.  But everything moves, I said.  I know, she said.  So there you go, dad.  She went on to say a great many interesting things as we supped on biscuits and strawberries.  Wine?  Yes we had some wine.  It was distilled of honey, so its proper name was mead.  We enjoyed these refreshments on the top of a mountain.  I stared into her eyes and she strolled about the place informing me on topics I had hardly dreamt of prior to that afternoon.  I admit I drank too much, and yet I followed everything she had to say.  First she said, “It is a comfort to think that the entire world is preordained.  That we need not worry about a thing, that all of our trials and all of our expectations and hopes are caught up in a network so much grander than ourselves, that we can do no harm.  Or good, either.  That life is merely a spool that unwinds and uncoils until it is spent and lifeless on the floor.  At that point a photograph is taken of the spool and tacked on a clipboard and the universe restarts and yet more ribbons unfurl and slip to rest motionless on hardwood that yields no dust.  Is this not a comfort?”  I replied yes, but in truth I could only see her eyes.  You raised me well.  Your son, Bertrand.

·

You should have been there when the first stars were born.  You should have been there when the light from the stars touched the light in the eyes of the first sentient child.  But you weren’t.  Maybe you were away.  Maybe you had your back turned.  Maybe you were busy, walking, thirsting for the earth under your feet where it was.  All along.  Where the fuck else?

·

Dear mom.  I have to write several love letters and I need your help.  I know this puts you in a frail state of mind, the topics of love and my sexuality, but I need to tell you anyhow.  A love letter is such a banal convention, as I’m sure you’re aware.  Perhaps you’ve had a few directed your way?  God knows, I’ve received few enough.  In fact, come to think of it, I have only ever written them.  I suppose that makes me sad.  You’re probably getting a sidelong thrill out of it.  Yes!  In fact, I am celibate, if not voluntarily.  Anyhow, the clerk at the 7-11 would not sell me cigarettes.  I don’t blame her, I’m only seven.  Even so, I requested in plain terms over and over that a transaction be made: my legal tender for those paper tubes bursting with tobacco goodness.  It soon became clear that she was a festive old cheek.  Given to drink and merriment.  In fact she appreciated the view from behind that counter so much I suspect she will work there for all time.  When I was a young boy, I was always hounding the young women I interacted with for procreative genital interface.  I never realized that doing this—denuding the phenomenon of polarity-based attraction of its non-sexual by-products—was harmful to the ladies I was quote viewing.  After I made that realization I realized one further.  I was full of shit.  Girls wanted sex as bad as I did.  And maybe something great could come out of that?  Upon consideration, however, and upon reflecting on those pathetic eyes I gazed into all those years ago, I am forced to wonder if sex is not the first thing on a lady’s mind, and if the conversion of my nameless bride’s interest (in me) into a sexual game wrested the longevity of our relationship unfavourably into the fickle hands of physiology.  By that I mean, by fucking her, did I turn loose all the inviolate strains of a woman’s anatomy?  Did I engage the silliest aspects of our being by opening the catastrophic cauldron of copulatory complications, and were these primarily relegated to the realm of the body?  Of course no.  My point in saying all of this is that in addition to being ambitionless swine, the clerk thought I was cute.  In this case, my motives being manipulatory, I knew just what to do.  I lowered my shirt somewhat.  I revealed my nipples.  I massaged the meaty clumps that are/were my tits.  Am I not overweight?  Am I not?  Still, enjoying this, she bent over and said, “Aren’t you cute?”  I looked up at her and said, “I’ll suck your dick for a pack of cigarettes.”  She said, “You’ll do no such thing.”  I said, “I will so.”  She said, “Done.”  So after sucking her dick—which tasted of a thousand straining things, a pulmonary ailment looking for a train ride, fleshly elastic bands—I told her to quote put that away and realized I lusted, nay triple lusted, for her flesh in full.  By jove, woman, I said, you played the horny notes in my life orchestra.  What?  Imperfect metaphor notwithstanding I taste for your hunger.  Ack! but you have me confused.  Bring me hair-ily down to you again and urge something from the crick in my throat.  Make me scream like a hoary tree in a toddler’s dream-tornado.  Mush fruit into my anus until a dentist trip is in order.  Put a clench-fisted hurt on me.  Let’s listen to music while we do it, etc, I’m sorry mom I should have spared you all of these details, and would have too, were I not so young and impulsive and restraint-handicapped and bed-ridden with a million assorted infections, one or two of which having clearly addled my brains.  To wit: the love letter I have need of writing, which is where you come in.  May I ask for the funds necessary to purchase a suit?  The suit I will use to look upstanding and forthright, the faux-forthright looks I will use to gain admission into the most prestigious coffee shop on the block (yes, there are coffee shops featuring GOP (gradations of prestige) where I live now), and with access to said coffee shop I will ascertain focus, something funds cannot buy, save, as you have seen, indirectly.  Yeah yeah yeah???  Your hideous babe, spawn of a more sadistic creature than has heretofore been identified by myth, legend, etc, Bertrand.

·

You should have been there when I wrote the first song.  You, babe, should have sung along.  Now you’ve left me penniless and spent and bedraggled and in no great cosmetic or esthetical shape.  Dear one.  Dear sweet one.  Dear beautiful strawberry sweet one.  Was not the wind coined in your honour?  Are not the mountains my tribute to your perfectly symmetrical face and nightmare eyes?  I’ve seen photographs of you on Facebook where your optic cavities are watery pools of limpid uncertainty.  I have seen you gaze through the horror tunnel that is your own past and feign okayness with the staunch number of mistakes you’ve apologetically made.  I have seen you bite your lower lip at the Proustian recollection of this or that gargantuan fiasco.  I have seen you wince at a social debt that bites like digested mercury after a hundred days.  I have watched you debate gustatory options at the food court until you lost your appetite, I have watched you become prey to your own idiosyncrasies, I have seen you eat yourself, mind-first, and have been horrified and hurt.  Join me now.  Two steps down in total darkness?

?·?

At the mall she thought she heard Simon & Garfunkel coming through the tin speakers and wondered how she could have wondered about the legitimacy of that singer-songwriter duo’s bygone popularity, for she had questioned her father once, saying are you serious, after he said to her, yes, they were as popular then as any of the songs you listen to now.  The two of them were coming out of a movie when they had this conversation, although neither would remember.  The movie had been a post-apocalyptic drama, as opposed to a post-apocalyptic comedy—which there were a surprising lot of—or a film portraying an apocalypse that inadvertently parodied itself, and the air outside was a shock that each weathered in silence.  Her father’s car, their only choice for transport barring dubious and ignoble avenues, was ancient and maroon.  The seats were frozen or felt frozen beneath the thin nylon jackets they wore and the seatbelts stuck and took time to tease from their retracted positions; all the while there was cold and talk of cold and gloved hands were rubbed together.  It’s cold, said Sylvia.  I know, said the dad in an apologetic singsong that he, as a child, could not have dreamt he would later master.  I mean it’s really fucking freezing, she said, as if this fact were not relayed plainly to both of them via non-lingual means.  The windows fogged.  The car started and the pair sat and watched other twosomes and foursomes charge in absent haste—zealots for warmth, newly converted—toward their vehicles.  They watched these pale urgent others through small transparent circles rubbed into the window-glass with their mittens.  We can’t go anywhere like this, said the dad.  They’re going to think we’re making out or something, said Sylvia referencing the miasmal windows and there seemed no way to reply to this.  Instead the dad asked his daughter what she thought of the movie.  It sucked, Sylvia said.  You mean you thought it sucked, said the dad.  What happened at the end?  What does that mean?  The dad said nothing though he formed many responses.  He turned on the radio instead, talk radio, where a gardener was giving advice about the best way to store plants over the winter season.  The gardener sounded cheerful.  Joyful, even.  A man capable of taking delight in the attainment of money for an indefinite period of time, an indefatigable man.  After a while Sylvia asked if they could please listen to music.  They were travelling by then, daughter and father, and the dad changed the station without speaking.  Coming out of the mall, Sylvia Platt decided she understood how Simon & Garfunkel had once been on top of the world, though she herself would probably never appreciate their stuff.  Loneliness overtook her.  The sky was grey, it was March.  Her car was parked at the far end of the mall parking lot.  She faced a walk.  The bags in her hands were heavy and weighed on her fingers; they made noise in the wind.  Her hair blew also, and though her hair made no noise Sylvia felt it blow and experienced its movement in succinct audio signals behind her eyes, a small recurrence of the low-grade synaesthesia she had learned to suppress or ignore, or that she had never decided was a real thing, a phenomenon to which she, Sylvia, was being subjected.  And who subjected her to it?  None of these thoughts came close to her as she unlocked her car and set her bags on the passenger seat and turned the car on and waited for it to come to life and took the blessing of combustion for granted when it did.  There were containers that once held food or drink strewn across the seats with leftover odours, bottles whose contents were gas or soured air that sat happily mired atop others of their kind.  Her cell phone rang and she spoke into it as she put her vehicle in motion and tested herself against the roads of the city she would never leave or even develop the healthy want to leave, not once, not all at once either, in a panic after a birthday party while drunk, or while standing in a driveway.  The person on the cell phone was named Derek, a person well known to Sylvia Platt, for he was the guy she was seeing or pretending to see or keeping up a pretence of relational exchange with for reasons Derek (last name Brown) thought were clear (mutual attraction, conventional follow-up to a one-night stand, etc) and reasons that Sylvia could neither clarify nor be bothered to pay attention to.  She enjoyed the sound of his voice and the energy of the conversation, but such benefits might be here today and gone quite literally tomorrow, and Sylvia would endure the consequences of this without anticipation or remorse, because to do otherwise would be to risk a constant state of agitation, or consideration, or to transform and become wholly different.  And on the other side of such a metamorphosis?  Maybe nothing.  Maybe she would hate the things she thought she loved.  In a world where even affinities (the affliction of affinities) were mutable it was best to proceed without thought.  This was Sylvia’s motto, which she displayed fidelity for via action obviously and not articulation.  Her next stop was the grocery store.  That night there was going to be a party that Sylvia was looking forward to.  What happened at such parties was what replaced not merely life’s significance but the questions that produced the desire for a life properly beset with constant measuring.  So long as there was laughter, a chair in which one’s chin could rest on one’s chest, and eyelids permitted droopiness by virtue of the venue’s perverse ingratiatory gestures toward its patrons, or toward Sylvia, for being attractive and spending cash, than there was the dignity (and indignity) of celebrity, beneficence, and everything else that culture as a Morlockian engine (in which capacity it cannot act, for how can an illusion be said to behave?) promotes.  Of course in this case the venue was Sylvia’s own home.  As she walked into the grocery store she waited for a handicapped man to go in front of her.  The man limped and spoke to people he clearly didn’t know, greeting them and asking them how their day was.  His teeth were large and showed.  His jeans were the jeans supermarkets sold alongside poorly confected sportswear or winterwear, and his shoes were work boots, as if someone was planning to put this man to task or had already done so and here he was off duty.  His hair was thin on top and he wore an old style of glasses, large box frames.  He was unaccompanied, or had lost track of the woman or man meant to assist him, or his group.  He was making a loop of the automatic doors, entering and exiting the store and greeting grocery shoppers with an unaffected exuberance that belied forgetfulness.  The day’s light was nearly expended, and Sylvia moved with purpose.  Sylvia heard the man greet her as she walked past him but didn’t turn, then felt bad, though her remorse went nowhere, just cankered in her chest before dissolving or being absorbed.  By what?  What?  Before being absorbed by what?  Her forearms.  Her list: ice cream, soda, chips, beer, wine, liquor, pasta, pasta sauce, onions, carrots, green peppers, bananas, potatoes, tuna fish, cheese, rice, peanut butter, readymade oatmeal porridge, breakfast cereal, waffles, perogies, dog food, dog treats, yogurt, red liquorice, cinnamon buns.  There were other things.  Sylvia went aisle by aisle through the store, at some point she began feeling good.  It wasn’t the florescent lights or the other shoppers or the canned music that issued like contaminated or lessened steam from vents here and there.  I’m young, she thought.  I’m still very young.  Some day I won’t be.  Tonight is going to be fun.  When she got the alcohol line she spoke into her cell phone again.  Yeah, I’m here.  Do you want beer or not?  What kind of beer do you want?  What?  Are you sure you don’t want something a little more? you’re sure?  When she hung up her cell phone she slipped it back in her coat pocket and hefted a forty-eight pack of domestic product into her shopping cart.  She hemmed and hawed at other products before deciding on some cider for herself.  In the checkout line Sylvia became bored, but instead of pulling out her cell phone and playing with her apps, she looked at the faces of famous people that smiled from the glossy fronts of magazines declaring breaches of long-subverted protocols and accidents.  Well fuck it, Sylvia said without moving her lips, although her voicebox buzzed.  The faces of the famous rankled Sylvia, for they seemed to her to connote an amnesia not unlike the type displayed on the slack face of the man still making a tour of the grocery store’s entrance, though this was a prejudice she had come by in the same way the famous had acquired their much maligned pre-given world: via participation and wont.  That will be well over a hundred dollars, ma’am, much more than you expected to be paying.  Pretty much all of the money you made yesterday.  Sylvia pulled out her wallet and paid in cash, then accepted the help of a bag boy and together the two of them walked outside into the brisk night, smiling and nodding with abstract concern at the outsize adieu offered by the poor lost fellow in the entryway before being birthed back into March 2010 and nearly stumbling over the curb (that was demarcated with red paint).  The cart jounced.  Sylvia told the boy that he’d upset her beer and he gracelessly laughed as if she were making a joke.  It’s not a joke, Sylvia wanted to say but by then she was miles away.  It’s going to take him more time to learn, Sylvia said to herself.  That’s all.

Best w/ Milk & Hunny

You think you understand me?

He is sick, and that is surely why he started this, but he started it and now that it is begun he can’t help himself.  Like bobsledding.

Well?  Do you?

Why, am I not allowed to? she asks.  He recoils, clenches his fist, doubles over, makes his veins stand out, grunts something.  A few uncomplimentary sounds escape him.  Like a bird in heat or something.  The sounds send a bright red tingle down the spine of his wife.  He yells.  They retire.  They go outside.  It is evening and it’s been years since that nasty business occurred (or recurred, even).

Did you have a bad dream? she asks him, last night?

No, is his response, as he refills his little mug that has inane lettering wrapped around it with whiskey.  The stars are out in full.  Here is an angerless world.  A world before anger, unless the ascriptors mistake motion for mood.  For that is all there is just now.  Motion.

Where is your heart? he asks the landscape.  They’ve been living together for a thousand years it feels like, because they never get into town, except to get groceries, which is way more eventful than it ought to be.

Were we presumptuous to think we could pull this off?

This is a thought from the mind of the wife.  Who sits and waits, and recognizes that all things are profligate and whole, or will be in the course of time, or when time has finished running… its course.

And she remembers a dream she once had, in which she’s an ant crawling around the floor of a barn, where she can hear the murmur of pigs and cows above her, discussing something that sounds too sophisticated for her to understand, even if she weren’t an ant, but as an ant has no hope of understanding, and as an ant she wishes she were her human self, so she could walk among the pigs and cows and get up from this thick scent of ammonia and galaxies of straw, apocalyptic in scope, like a crumpled city with its freeways all twisted and enmeshed, that meanwhile stinks like shit, and converse with these pigs and cows, whom she begins—in the dream—to suspect are communists. (Thought she will naively claim that Orwell had no effect on her, to this day.)

Then her dream-memory melts into a memory of a dream where a group of humanoid socialists are executing her family, though she doesn’t have a family.  Still she looks on (and tastes bile) as her family is gunned down.  Bullets that seem to peel the family’s faces and chests apart as if the family’s faces and chests are made of hot rubber, but she doesn’t have a family.  She keeps insisting on this, trying to remember the bit about the barn, and the huge pieces of straw, the fragment of the dream that came before.  Something stinks.  Overwhelmingly so.  She wakes up.  It’s the outdoors, here, during February.  That’s what stinks, but it’s not overwhelming.  Sun’s first light is a thing unto itself.  It’s not a greeting.  The horses (afield) make munching noises only they—the horses—can hear, themselves, amongst each other.

One doesn’t often think of horses listening to each other eat, does one?

You’re drunk again.

And what if I am? the husband wants to know.  As if this is some crime.  That he has committed.  As if she hasn’t come to expect this behaviour now after how many years.  Hasn’t crammed some other shit where expectations used to take up space.  Like… resentment?

Pain like gravity and anguish well up beneath the feet of the drunken husband and for the first time he wants to throw his wife against the wall.  Like a book that insists too much on a point that’s been made countless times (and more effectively) by all the masters that have come before.

I’ve made mistakes, he admits, but how long ago, now, is this?You think you understand me?

Why? am I not allowed to? she asks.  He recoils, clenches his fist, doubles over, makes his veins stand out, grunts something.  A few uncomplimentary sounds escape him.  Like a bird in heat or something.  The sounds send a bright red tingle down the spine of his wife.  He yells.  They retire.  They go outside.  It is evening and it’s been years since that nasty business occurred (or recurred, even).

Did you have a bad dream? she asks him, last night?

No, is his response, as he refills his little mug that has inane lettering wrapped around it with whiskey.  The stars are out in full.  Here is an angerless world.  A world before anger, unless the ascriptors mistook motion for mood.  For that is all there is now.  Motion.

Where is your heart? he asks the landscape.  They’ve been living together for a thousand years it feels like, because they never get into town, except to buy groceries, which is way more eventful than it ought to be.

This is a thought from the mind of the wife, who sits and waits, and recognizes that all things are lavish and whole, or will be in the course of time, or when time has run down: was it presumptuous to think we could pull this of?

And she remembers a dream she once had, in which she’s an ant crawling around the floor of a barn, where she can hear the murmur of pigs and cows above her, discussing something that sounds too sophisticated for her to understand, even if she weren’t an ant, but as an ant has no hope of understanding, and as an ant she wishes she were her human self, so she could walk among the pigs and cows and get up from this thick scent of ammonia and galaxies of straw, apocalyptic in scope, like a crumpled city with its freeways all twisted and enmeshed, that meanwhile stinks like shit, and converse with these pigs and cows, whom she begins—in the dream—to suspect are out for revenge.

Then her dream-memory melts into a memory of a dream where a group of humanoid socialists are executing her family, though she doesn’t have a family.  Still she looks on (and tastes bile or seamy penis detritus) as her family is gunned down.  Bullets that seem to peel the family’s faces and chests apart as if the family’s faces and chests were made of hot rubber, but again she doesn’t have a family.  She keeps insisting on this, trying to remember the bit about the barn, and the huge pieces of straw, the fragment of the dream that came before.  Something stinks.  She wakes up.  It’s the outdoors, here, during February, that stink.  Sun’s first light is a thing unto itself.  Not a greeting.  The horses (afield) make munching noises only they—the horses—can hear, themselves, amongst each other.

You’re drunk again.

And what if I am? the husband wants to know.  As if this is some crime.  That he has committed.  As if she hasn’t come to expect this behaviour after how many years?  Hasn’t crammed some other shit where expectations used to take up space?  Resentment for instance.

Pain like gravity and anguish well up beneath the feet of the drunken husband and for the first time he wants to throw his wife against the wall.  Like a book that insists too much on a point that’s been made countless times (and more effectively) by all the masters that have come before.

I’ve made mistakes, he admits, but how long ago, now, is this?

You think you understand me?

Why? am I not allowed to? she asks.  He recoils, clenches his fist, doubles over, makes his veins stand out, grunts something.  A few uncomplimentary sounds escape him.  Like a bird in heat or something.  The sounds send a bright red tingle down the spine of his wife.  He yells.  They retire.  They go outside.  It is evening and it’s been years since that nasty business occurred (or recurred, even).

Did you have a bad dream? she asks him, last night?

No, is his response, as he refills his little mug that has inane lettering wrapped around it with whiskey.  The stars are out in full.  Here is an angerless world.  A world before anger, unless the ascriptors mistook motion for mood.  For that is all there is now.  Motion.

Where is your heart? he asks the landscape.  They’ve been living together for a thousand years it feels like, because they never get into town, except to buy groceries, which is way more eventful than it ought to be.

This is a thought from the mind of the wife, who sits and waits, and recognizes that all things are lavish and whole, or will be in the course of time, or when time has run down: was it presumptuous to think we could pull this of?

And she remembers a dream she once had, in which she’s an ant crawling around the floor of a barn, where she can hear the murmur of pigs and cows above her, discussing something that sounds too sophisticated for her to understand, even if she weren’t an ant, but as an ant has no hope of understanding, and as an ant she wishes she were her human self, so she could walk among the pigs and cows and get up from this thick scent of ammonia and galaxies of straw, apocalyptic in scope, like a crumpled city with its freeways all twisted and enmeshed, that meanwhile stinks like shit, and converse with these pigs and cows, whom she begins—in the dream—to suspect are out for revenge.

Then her dream-memory melts into a memory of a dream where a group of humanoid socialists are executing her family, though she doesn’t have a family.  Still she looks on (and tastes bile or seamy penis detritus) as her family is gunned down.  Bullets that seem to peel the family’s faces and chests apart as if the family’s faces and chests were made of hot rubber, but again she doesn’t have a family.  She keeps insisting on this, trying to remember the bit about the barn, and the huge pieces of straw, the fragment of the dream that came before.  Something stinks.  She wakes up.  It’s the outdoors, here, during February, that stink.  Sun’s first light is a thing unto itself.  Not a greeting.  The horses (afield) make munching noises only they—the horses—can hear, themselves, amongst each other.

You’re drunk again.

And what if I am? the husband wants to know.  As if this is some crime.  That he has committed.  As if she hasn’t come to expect this behaviour after how many years?  Hasn’t crammed some other shit where expectations used to take up space?  Resentment for instance.

Pain like gravity and anguish well up beneath the feet of the drunken husband and for the first time he wants to throw his wife against the wall.  Like a book that insists too much on a point that’s been made countless times (and more effectively) by all the masters that have come before.

I’ve made mistakes, he admits, but how long ago, now, is this?

How A Real Man Writes In His Diary (fiction)

Write a story in which an author (me, essentially) gets famous, writes pop songs, makes movies, and has sex with celebrities, whom he doesn’t enjoy having sex with, but rather enjoys the emotional position that the sexual relationship puts the celebrities in, namely a vulnerable (emotional) position, which no layperson ever gets to see a celebrity in.  His favourite part (the author’s favourite part of the sex-with-celebrities phenomenon) is having the implausibly well-fashioned stars seated at the bar in his famous kitchen, playing with a fruit from [his] fruit bowl or running a finger along [his] granite countertop, while he sips whiskey (in the story, I don’t have health issues).  He asks them questions and treats them like test subjects for the sole reason that they are beautiful, more beautiful than him, or more beautiful than the scenery, which, let’s say, is tropical.  Over time, a female biographer follows him around for a year.  At first the author is very cautious and doesn’t want to have a biography written (about him), but soon realizes that this female biographer shares his tastes almost identically, in a way that suggests they (she and me, the biographer and the author) perceive the world along lines thought impossibly similar, so that the author winds up trusting the biographer kind of literally with his life, and gives her license to write whatever she wants.  While he, meanwhile, puts on his best face whenever she is around (although the need for this, at least in a social context, has passed), and the biography comes out good.  A standing achievement that in some ways outdoes anything the author has achieved in his life (so you see I am both humble and pro-girl); and this whole time the author and the biographer (who is astoundingly attractive and prohibitively sceptical about connecting and/or devoting/depositing deep sentiments into other sentient beings) suspends her scepticism and has a romance with the author that outrivals every sex act the author ever countenanced with a celebrity precisely because it is imbued with a love generated on account of the improbability of the two persons’ mutuality (mutuality gauged as improbable simply because both the author and the biographer consider themselves unique in more senses of the word than are typically employed).  But they keep the affair secret until after the biography (titled: Under The Weather for “idiosyncratic” reasons, obviously) is published.

Write this story, then walk down to the gas station to see if your money came through, then go to Jack’s and get a carrot juice.  If you still have energy, read.  Don’t forget to drink more water than it seems a human should ever need.  I don’t need to tell you to avoid tobacco.  If your stomach permits, daydream.

©

Tonight you’re going to an Armin Van Buuren concert.  At the concert the girl you’re with is going to ask you if you’re okay.  Actually, she’ll ask you if you’re happy.  The question will be prompted by your recent behaviour (pouty, detached), behaviour that she hasn’t witnessed firsthand, but has heard about from a reliable source.  The source is your best friend, whom you’ve been pissing off lately by being a mopey little bitch.  The parameters of your relationship with your best friend are in a state of ambiguity and stasis.  You’ve always been so functional and ebullient, there’s never been a need to define them.  The expectations coming from your BF seem to be a) that you desire being in the company of others, particularly he that is your best friend, and b) while in the company of others you maintain the ability to smile and sit upright and the ability to fail at insulting your longtime allies by being aloof towards them and being your old familiar self around relative strangers.  You haven’t been meeting these.

At the concert you’re going to feel a lot of things at once.  You’re going to feel distrust and distaste for the audience, who will swarm around you and occlude the brilliance of the music.  You’re going to resent your body, a little, and its apparently diabetic need for water.  You’re going to feel some pretty basic soma-lust for both the boys and the girls you’ll press up against all night, which is what it is, and shouldn’t be belaboured.  Most of all there will be nothing joy.  A simultaneity of infinite absence and painful happiness, touch-hunger.  The happiness will commandeer all your energy centers and co-opt all your thoughts.  It will be like talking to your mom, whom you’ve left behind and haven’t spoken to for years, and realizing that you love her more than all the things in this shitty life you’ve put together.  It will be like reading an e-mail from your mother that says, “You might enjoy playing some of the free games on this web site..” that seems to indicate (but really doesn’t) that she has lost touch with who you are to such a gratuitous extent that the bond between you (still there, and strong) is all hurting with stretch.  There will be nothing you can do, physically or otherwise, to requite the nothing joy.  There will be nothing, which means nothing, and there will be life, the only kind you ever wanted, held like a carrot centimetres from your lips.  And there will be nothing.  And there will be nothing, pre-time.  And you’ll put your hands in the air, and smile, and clench your fist, and you’ll sweat, and you’ll hate how mature you are.  You’re too mature already to throw a tantrum.  Or make yourself sick.  You’ll miss this day.

©

Are you okay?

[The stone bench makes his ass feel bony.  Or, from a different point of view, it makes his ass-flesh feel watery.  Either way there’s discomfort here bordering on pain.  She asks; there is no magical lull in the conversations around them.  A security guard is keeping watch over a door not meant to be entered by the plebeian effluvia that wander and smoke.  There are many people.  Seventy percent of them have dressed well for the event (designer suits, hats).  Two percent of them are male and wear baggy white tee shirts.  These smell—and the smell is surprisingly faint—of meal, two-day old tea bags.  To combat these eight percent there are another two percent of mill-ers, who are also male, and dressed in black wifebeaters.]

I’m not sure what you’re getting at, in this context.  Am I okay.

[There are teenage girls whose nubility smells (and this is not a difficult leap) like blood, and there are teenage girls whose nipples would sting like infection if they touched you.  Faces that lead unsexed kids, you can see it in their faces, to think, I’d be happy with her.  All I need is one.]

I mean are you happy?

[She isn’t angry or insistent-sounding when she asks.]

What are you after?

[She should know by now the answer is no.]

I’m simply asking if you’re alright.

I’m not sure.  Yes?  Most of the time I guess.  When I’m down I’m all the way down, obviously.  But what kind of question is that, though?  Who’s happy?

I’m happy some of the time.

Exactly.  Some of the time.  But there’s no person out there who is just happy, cut and dried happy, it doesn’t exist, that’s a child’s world.

There are those people.  They’re just not normal.  You don’t meet them.  They’re not us.

Well I guess.

Those people live behind gates, they make appearances.  Some people think that makes them less real, but the truth is, it makes them much more real.  Realer than we plebs.  In fact, they’re so real, it shows us that we’re all fake.

Really.

Yes?

Well, are you okay?

I’m not sure what you’re getting at.

©

Write a story in which a person’s actions are being dictated entirely by an entity that exists in their head.  A disembodied voice that bullies this already submissive-leaning individual into… well, everything she does.  And yet, suspiciously, all of the actions that the voice bullies the person into taking wind up representing the person as a totally sane and normal, even high-functioning.  And all of the folks who were friends with this person prior to this person’s transformation (via intracranial vocal bullying) find that whatever positive disposition they had (towards the girl, obviously) is improved, and whatever negative disposition: reformed.

Make up characters that are sympathetic.  Perhaps throw in a love story.  If you can, have a scene where the main character is sitting on a bench beside the person she has ostensibly initiated her transformation for (by triggering some pretty latent psychological gear), her would be lover, and have the intracranial advisor scream something at her, some essentially good advice, that nonetheless loses its potency in the stridence of demand, but have her follow through anyway.  End it there?

©

So there are going to be a lot of problems with the sex-with-celebrities/biographer-in-love story, from a critical angle (maybe??) and the only way to deal with these is to build in some reflexivity.  Make it seem like you’re aware of what all these problems are, even if you’re not, which you aren’t.  What you’re uneasy about is having a simulacrum of yourself going around fucking celebrities to put them in a tight affective spot, for the hell of it, to exploit their guarded ontology, and then having a super hot girl who is obsessed with you, and just so happens to be exactly like you, fall in love with you after writing a successful book about you.  Sure for you the impulses here hold no menace, but there are other perspectives waiting in line, looking to be taken.

©

[The Armin Van Buuren concert, in truth, made him feel more than ever as if there were a whole world operating adjacent to him.

That up until about a year or two ago, he’d been living in the correct world.  World one.  Where everything came out good.  Where, despite setbacks, international peace and harmony is eventually achieved, famine is stopped, wars cease.  A world in which he, the author, is sedate and earnest and good people.

But that in the course of his becoming gradually ill, and over time, he finds himself living in world two.

In world two the author loses everything, one big piece at a time.  His hopes, his dreams, they are stupid and lost.  His compulsion to do good yields to a compulsion to feel good.  To seek his own comfort.  All he wants is to brace himself against an environment that has turned hostile, the frothy tip of every heated trident spray.

He seeks exit.  But like a horse swimming around a drown city he has no idea how lost he is.  How deep the water is.  He bangs his feet on the tops of submerged buildings.  His cries are heard by no one.  He thinks he’s going to find land, that he’ll walk out onto it and shake himself off and revel in the solidness beneath him, but if he could zoom out he’d see the globe is an aquatic tomb.  The things he wants: food, shelter, somewhere to fully sleep, are memories.  He recognizes solipsism has always been a nightmare, but it does nothing to soothe him.  Now there are only the moments when he bumps his toes on a skyscraper.  His body is too dry to produce tears or sorrow.  Exit.  Exit.  World zero take me don’t delay.]

©

The intense and futile obfuscation of the impulse to simply love.  The intense and futile obfuscation of the impulse to simply love constantly shot through the barrel of a relative shotgun hurt by factors you can’t blame the fucking shotgun for!  It got thrown against the side of the building.  It got run over by a FedEx truck.

Write a story in which an author (me, essentially) gets famous, writes pop songs, makes movies, and has sex with celebrities, whom he doesn’t enjoy having sex with, but rather enjoys the emotional position that the sexual relationship puts the celebrities in, namely a vulnerable (emotional) position, which no layperson ever gets to see a celebrity in.  His favourite part (the author’s favourite part of the sex-with-celebrities phenomenon) is having the implausibly well-fashioned stars seated at the bar in his famous kitchen, playing with a fruit from [his] fruit bowl or running a finger along [his] granite countertop, while he sips whiskey (in the story, I don’t have health issues).  He asks them questions and treats them like test subjects for the sole reason that they are beautiful, more beautiful than him, or more beautiful than the scenery, which, let’s say, is tropical.  Over time, a female biographer follows him around for a year.  At first the author is very cautious and doesn’t want to have a biography written (about him), but soon realizes that this female biographer shares his tastes almost identically, in a way that suggests they (she and me, the biographer and the author) perceive the world along lines thought impossibly similar, so that the author winds up trusting the biographer kind of literally with his life, and gives her license to write whatever she wants.  While he, meanwhile, puts on his best face whenever she is around (although the need for this, at least in a social context, has passed), and the biography comes out good.  A standing achievement that in some ways outdoes anything the author has achieved in his life (so you see I am both humble and pro-girl); and this whole time the author and the biographer (who is astoundingly attractive and prohibitively sceptical about connecting and/or devoting/depositing deep sentiments into other sentient beings) suspends her scepticism and has a romance with the author that outrivals every sex act the author ever countenanced with a celebrity precisely because it is imbued with a love generated on account of the improbability of the two persons’ mutuality (mutuality gauged as improbable simply because both the author and the biographer consider themselves unique in more senses of the word than are typically employed).  But they keep the affair secret until after the biography (titled: Under The Weather for “idiosyncratic” reasons, obviously) is published.

Write this story, then walk down to the gas station to see if your money came through, then go to Jack’s and get a carrot juice.  If you still have energy, read.  Don’t forget to drink more water than it seems a human should ever need.  I don’t need to tell you to avoid tobacco.  If your stomach permits, daydream.

(heart)

Tonight you’re going to an Armin Van Buuren concert.  At the concert the girl you’re with is going to ask you if you’re okay.  Actually, she’ll ask you if you’re happy.  The question will be prompted by your recent behaviour (pouty, detached), behaviour that she hasn’t witnessed firsthand, but has heard about from a reliable source.  The source is your best friend, whom you’ve been pissing off lately by being a mopey little bitch.  The parameters of your relationship with your best friend are in a state of ambiguity and stasis.  You’ve always been so functional and ebullient, there’s never been a need to define them.  The expectations coming from your BF seem to be a) that you desire being in the company of others, particularly he that is your best friend, and b) while in the company of others you maintain the ability to smile and sit upright and the ability to fail at insulting your longtime allies by being aloof towards them and being your old familiar self around relative strangers.  You haven’t been meeting these.

At the concert you’re going to feel a lot of things at once.  You’re going to feel distrust and distaste for the audience, who will swarm around you and occlude the brilliance of the music.  You’re going to resent your body, a little, and its apparently diabetic need for water.  You’re going to feel some pretty basic soma-lust for both the boys and the girls you’ll press up against all night, which is what it is, and shouldn’t be belaboured.  Most of all there will be nothing joy.  A simultaneity of infinite absence and painful happiness, touch-hunger.  The happiness will commandeer all your energy centers and co-opt all your thoughts.  It will be like talking to your mom, whom you’ve left behind and haven’t spoken to for years, and realizing that you love her more than all the things in this shitty life you’ve put together.  It will be like reading an e-mail from your mother that says, “You might enjoy playing some of the free games on this web site..” that seems to indicate (but really doesn’t) that she has lost touch with who you are to such a gratuitous extent that the bond between you (still there, and strong) is all hurting with stretch.  There will be nothing you can do, physically or otherwise, to requite the nothing joy.  There will be nothing, which means nothing, and there will be life, the only kind you ever wanted, held like a carrot centimetres from your lips.  And there will be nothing.  And there will be nothing, pre-time.  And you’ll put your hands in the air, and smile, and clench your fist, and you’ll sweat, and you’ll hate how mature you are.  You’re too mature already to throw a tantrum.  Or make yourself sick.  You’ll miss this day.

(heart)

Are you okay?

[The stone bench makes his ass feel bony.  Or, from a different point of view, it makes his ass-flesh feel watery.  Either way there’s discomfort here bordering on pain.  She asks; there is no magical lull in the conversations around them.  A security guard is keeping watch over a door not meant to be entered by the plebeian effluvia that wander and smoke.  There are many people.  Seventy percent of them have dressed well for the event (designer suits, hats).  Two percent of them are male and wear baggy white tee shirts.  These smell—and the smell is surprisingly faint—of meal, two-day old tea bags.  To combat these eight percent there are another two percent of mill-ers, who are also male, and dressed in black wifebeaters.]

I’m not sure what you’re getting at, in this context.  Am I okay.

[There are teenage girls whose nubility smells (and this is not a difficult leap) like blood, and there are teenage girls whose nipples would sting like infection if they touched you.  Faces that lead unsexed kids, you can see it in their faces, to think, I’d be happy with her.  All I need is one.]

I mean are you happy?

[She isn’t angry or insistent-sounding when she asks.]

What are you after?

[She should know by now the answer is no.]

I’m simply asking if you’re alright.

I’m not sure.  Yes?  Most of the time I guess.  When I’m down I’m all the way down, obviously.  But what kind of question is that, though?  Who’s happy?

I’m happy some of the time.

Exactly.  Some of the time.  But there’s no person out there who is just happy, cut and dried happy, it doesn’t exist, that’s a child’s world.

There are those people.  They’re just not normal.  You don’t meet them.  They’re not us.

Well I guess.

Those people live behind gates, they make appearances.  Some people think that makes them less real, but the truth is, it makes them much more real.  Realer than we plebs.  In fact, they’re so real, it shows us that we’re all fake.

Really.

Yes?

Well, are you okay?

I’m not sure what you’re getting at.

(heart)

Write a story in which a person’s actions are being dictated entirely by an entity that exists in their head.  A disembodied voice that bullies this already submissive-leaning individual into… well, everything she does.  And yet, suspiciously, all of the actions that the voice bullies the person into taking wind up representing the person as a totally sane and normal, even high-functioning.  And all of the folks who were friends with this person prior to this person’s transformation (via intracranial vocal bullying) find that whatever positive disposition they had (towards the girl, obviously) is improved, and whatever negative disposition: reformed.

Make up characters that are sympathetic.  Perhaps throw in a love story.  If you can, have a scene where the main character is sitting on a bench beside the person she has ostensibly initiated her transformation for (by triggering some pretty latent psychological gear), her would be lover, and have the intracranial advisor scream something at her, some essentially good advice, that nonetheless loses its potency in the stridence of demand, but have her follow through anyway.  End it there?

(heart)

So there are going to be a lot of problems with the sex-with-celebrities/biographer-in-love story, from a critical angle (maybe??) and the only way to deal with these is to build in some reflexivity.  Make it seem like you’re aware of what all these problems are, even if you’re not, which you aren’t.  What you’re uneasy about is having a simulacrum of yourself going around fucking celebrities to put them in a tight affective spot, for the hell of it, to exploit their guarded ontology, and then having a super hot girl who is obsessed with you, and just so happens to be exactly like you, fall in love with you after writing a successful book about you.  Sure for you the impulses here hold no menace, but there are other perspectives waiting in line, looking to be taken.

(heart)

[The Armin Van Buuren concert, in truth, made him feel more than ever as if there were a whole world operating adjacent to him.

That up until about a year or two ago, he’d been living in the correct world.  World one.  Where everything came out good.  Where, despite setbacks, international peace and harmony is eventually achieved, famine is stopped, wars cease.  A world in which he, the author, is sedate and earnest and good people.

But that in the course of his becoming gradually ill, and over time, he finds himself living in world two.

In world two the author loses everything, one big piece at a time.  His hopes, his dreams, they are stupid and lost.  His compulsion to do good yields to a compulsion to feel good.  To seek his own comfort.  All he wants is to brace himself against an environment that has turned hostile, the frothy tip of every heated trident spray.

He seeks exit.  But like a horse swimming around a drown city he has no idea how lost he is.  How deep the water is.  He bangs his feet on the tops of submerged buildings.  His cries are heard by no one.  He thinks he’s going to find land, that he’ll walk out onto it and shake himself off and revel in the solidness beneath him, but if he could zoom out he’d see the globe is an aquatic tomb.  The things he wants: food, shelter, somewhere to fully sleep, are memories.  He recognizes solipsism has always been a nightmare, but it does nothing to soothe him.  Now there are only the moments when he bumps his toes on a skyscraper.  His body is too dry to produce tears or sorrow.  Exit.  Exit.  World zero take me don’t delay.]

(heart)

The intense and futile obfuscation of the impulse to simply love.  The intense and futile obfuscation of the impulse to simply love constantly shot through the barrel of a relative shotgun hurt by factors you can’t blame the fucking shotgun for!  It got thrown against the side of the building.  It got run over by a FedEx truck.

(heart)

A glade.  A pond.  Wind on water.  Wake up little boy, you had a bad dream.

Yesterday’s Daily Freewrite

Devin Forester wrote, The dog suffered, and, suffering, grasped for the passage of time, knowing that its heart would not ache, or mull, or beat languidly, if only the day were yesterday or years before now.  The sky professed a tragedy.  Limping, the dog fell out of context, and out of context disappeared.  These were the closing lines of the final short story of a collection called A Tealeaf’s Imagination that Devin self-published in 2002.  In his collection the word “love” was used seventeen times, the word “heart” was used twenty four times, and the word “soul” was used sixteen times.  The collection contained a total of eleven stories, each one about five thousand or twenty pages long.  In the first story two anthropomorphized fruits, an apple and a mango, lived a humble life among woodland creatures.  The fruits-in-love lived in a mushroom house on the borders of a swamp in a very large forest.  They spent most of their time indoors, trying to keep warm and to keep from going rotten.  In the end, one of their putative woodland allies could not constrain herself, and, while having tea and discussing this prosaic us-versus-the-elements romance the fruit couple were having, the putative ally—who was a robin—ate the apple, right in front of the mango, who looked on with wide seedling eyes, and performed the Ultimate Fruit Mutiny, which almost all fruit that humans consume have performed long before they are sold to stores: the denudation of their anthropomorphic identities.  And when the robin saw that fruit were capable of this intra-psyche suicide, she despaired, for it was not given to the beasts of the field to do the same, or so Devin had it.

The story about the apple and the mango would have sucked, if Devin Forrester weren’t so immaculately good at constructing scenes near swamps, and weren’t so erudite on the plant and animal life that grew there, and also adept at anthropomorphizing, cleverly, anything at all.  And so it was, the story succeeded quite well, at least in relation to some of the other stories, which were quite different, and left one almost wishing they weren’t so different.

The second story was about a homeless person who lived in the dank and unused basement of a suburban couple’s home and went through their trash and laundry (both of which were deposited down chutes on the first floor) and lived quite happily, quite happily that is except for the sadness and discomfort that the suburban couple’s troubled relationship caused him, for the homeless person could hear, every dinner hour, the bickering and backbiting the couple kept up constantly.  The homeless person had come from a happy home, and this contrasting reflection of domesticity was both upsetting and daunting in its totality, esp. in the way it commandeered all textures of waking life, for there in the wet and mildewed basement the homeless person had no other phenomena to fixate on.

The second story in the eleven-story-long compilation was the weakest, and ended poorly, with the homeless person confronting his hosts, but failing to have anything contradistinguishing to say (contradistinguishing to their present relational tones) on account of having been poisoned for so long by said tones, and the suburban couple reacting by simply kicking him out, and he the bum blinking once or twice at how much larger the world was than that not-so-idiosyncratic basement, as if this were something he’d forgotten or lost the ability to cognize there in the dark.  The truth was, Devin Forester had had several better candidates to fill the 2nd story slot kicking around the hard drive of his iMac—many of which were more positive and enjoyable stories, and contained much more urbane and reflexive uses of language—but neglected to judge any of them above Piling On Lives (the story described here, named after an obscure reference to the couple’s dirty laundry) because these alternative stories, in his estimation, lacked sincerity.

In 2002 Devin Forester was seventeen years old, and in 2005 he published a novel called Miracle Fears, through a legitimate publishing house.  The story was about a little girl whose experience of the world was so comprehensively unprecedented that she actually invented brand-new emotions, “revolutionized the heart-chakra” as Devin put it, and ushered in an entirely novel regime of ideation around topics like self-help and spirituality.  The novel was really more of a self-help book in disguise, crossed with a treatise on post-traditionalist forms of Eastern spirituality, that, if not because its subject matter was really (as it was epileptically assessed intra-novel) new, than perhaps because it was cheerfully presented, succeeded.

And in it there was a scene:

… the boy, who was timid and lacked for protocol, encircled his arms around the waste of the prophet child as they rotated like pigs from old Earth, themselves encircled in the transport tube, that, like a thread of  transparent cannula shuttled them slowly towards the city that hung like a Buddhist ornament in the active sky.  Active, I say, for the sky on this planet did not look casual, but involved, as if in its thinness it could impact its floating constituents.  The girl registered the feel of the boy’s embrace, and endorsed it by placing her hands over his, and rested, as she always did, in the origin of form, the moment before time.  Yes, she might be human 3.0, as these ambassadorial aliens were proclaiming, but she was still human.

Was it mentioned that Devin Forester’s first novel was also a work of speculative fiction?

When Devin turned twenty two he was still a virgin.  His virginity, however, had worn on him worse as a sixteen/seventeen/eighteen year old than it did now, and he was confident with the publishing of Miracle Fears that his time was soon coming.

During his teen years Devin had written essays on his virginity, and long stories cataloguing ideal mates, ideal settings for getting his rocks off for the first time, and fetishizing the female reproductive organ, yea unto the borders of derangement and criminality.  It was only by doing this and by, in Devin’s own profane terms “bleeding pecker snot” several times a day, that Devin succeeded in staying sane, not auto-castrating or any of that sort of business.

In Devin’s essays on his own uninitiated sexuality he broke virginity down into several stages, stages a person grew through, as a virgin, until they were just sick of being a virgin and got laid.  Devin as convinced that even kids who lost their v-card at excessively young ages still migrated through a version of these stages, or, if they didn’t, engaged a stultified and meaningless sex life.  The truth was, Devin’s stages were spawned in defence of feeling carnally and spiritually illegitimate at having never done what so many others had, namely stuck his penis in a breathing living woman’s vagina.  And so, week by week, he imagined the feel of a woman’s body, and imagined that when he had his own all-access pass to one of these he would go over every inch of it with both the tip of his tongue and the tip of his dick, and languor in the uncovered mystery.

When Devin finally met a girl that was willing to have sex with him he kissed her mouth a lot, and swished his not-totally-erect cock around the lips of her vagina, and, exhausted and drunk, fell asleep next to her.  This was how he treated his all-access pass.

Devin Forester wrote, The dog suffered, and, suffering, grasped for the passage of time, knowing that its heart would not ache, or mull, or beat languidly, if only the day were yesterday or years before now.  The sky professed a tragedy.  Limping, the dog fell out of context, and out of context disappeared. These were the closing lines of the final short story of a collection called A Tealeaf’s Imagination that Devin self-published in 2002.  In his collection the word “love” was used seventeen times, the word “heart” was used twenty four times, and the word “soul” was used sixteen times.  The collection contained a total of eleven stories, each one about five thousand or twenty pages long.  In the first story two anthropomorphized fruits, an apple and a mango, lived a humble life among woodland creatures.  The fruits-in-love lived in a mushroom house on the borders of a swamp in a very large forest.  They spent most of their time indoors, trying to keep warm and to keep from going rotten.  In the end, one of their putative woodland allies could not constrain herself, and, while having tea and discussing this prosaic us-versus-the-elements romance the fruit couple were having, the putative ally—who was a robin—ate the apple, right in front of the mango, who looked on with wide seedling eyes, and performed the Ultimate Fruit Mutiny, which almost all fruit that humans consume have performed long before they are sold to stores: the denudation of their anthropomorphic identities.  And when the robin saw that fruit were capable of this intra-psyche suicide, she despaired, for it was not given to the beasts of the field to do the same, or so Devin had it.

The story about the apple and the mango would have sucked, if Devin Forrester weren’t so immaculately good at constructing scenes near swamps, and weren’t so erudite on the plant and animal life that grew there, and also adept at anthropomorphizing, cleverly, anything at all.  And so it was, the story succeeded quite well, at least in relation to some of the other stories, which were quite different, and left one almost wishing they weren’t so different.

The second story was about a homeless person who lived in the dank and unused basement of a suburban couple’s home and went through their trash and laundry (both of which were deposited down chutes on the first floor) and lived quite happily, quite happily that is except for the sadness and discomfort that the suburban couple’s troubled relationship caused him, for the homeless person could hear, every dinner hour, the bickering and backbiting the couple kept up constantly.  The homeless person had come from a happy home, and this contrasting reflection of domesticity was both upsetting and daunting in its totality, esp. in the way it commandeered all textures of waking life, for there in the wet and mildewed basement the homeless person had no other phenomena to fixate on.

The second story in the eleven-story-long compilation was the weakest, and ended poorly, with the homeless person confronting his hosts, but failing to have anything contradistinguishing to say (contradistinguishing to their present relational tones) on account of having been poisoned for so long by said tones, and the suburban couple reacting by simply kicking him out, and he the bum blinking once or twice at how much larger the world was than that not-so-idiosyncratic basement, as if this were something he’d forgotten or lost the ability to cognize there in the dark.  The truth was, Devin Forester had had several better candidates to fill the 2nd story slot kicking around the hard drive of his iMac—many of which were more positive and enjoyable stories, and contained much more urbane and reflexive uses of language—but neglected to judge any of them above Piling On Lives (the story described here, named after an obscure reference to the couple’s dirty laundry) because these alternative stories, in his estimation, lacked sincerity.

In 2002 Devin Forester was seventeen years old, and in 2005 he published a novel called Miracle Fears, through a legitimate publishing house.  The story was about a little girl whose experience of the world was so comprehensively unprecedented that she actually invented brand-new emotions, “revolutionized the heart-chakra” as Devin put it, and ushered in an entirely novel regime of ideation around topics like self-help and spirituality.  The novel was really more of a self-help book in disguise, crossed with a treatise on post-traditionalist forms of Eastern spirituality, that, if not because its subject matter was really (as it was epileptically assessed intra-novel) new, than perhaps because it was cheerfully presented, succeeded.

And in it there was a scene:

… the boy, who was timid and lacked for protocol, encircled his arms around the waste of the prophet child as they rotated like pigs from old Earth, themselves encircled in the transport tube, that, like a thread of  transparent cannula shuttled them slowly towards the city that hung like a Buddhist ornament in the active sky.  Active, I say, for the sky on this planet did not look casual, but involved, as if in its thinness it could impact its floating constituents.  The girl registered the feel of the boy’s embrace, and endorsed it by placing her hands over his, and rested, as she always did, in the origin of form, the moment before time.  Yes, she might be human 3.0, as these ambassadorial aliens were proclaiming, but she was still human.

Was it mentioned that Devin Forester’s first novel was also a work of speculative fiction?

When Devin turned twenty two he was still a virgin.  His virginity, however, had worn on him worse as a sixteen/seventeen/eighteen year old than it did now, and he was confident with the publishing of Miracle Fears that his time was soon coming.

During his teen years Devin had written essays on his virginity, and long stories cataloguing ideal mates, ideal settings for getting his rocks off for the first time, and fetishizing the female reproductive organ, yea unto the borders of derangement and criminality.  It was only by doing this and by, in Devin’s own profane terms “bleeding pecker snot” several times a day, that Devin succeeded in staying sane, not auto-castrating or any of that sort of business.

In Devin’s essays on his own uninitiated sexuality he broke virginity down into several stages, stages a person grew through, as a virgin, until they were just sick of being a virgin and got laid.  Devin as convinced that even kids who lost their v-card at excessively young ages still migrated through a version of these stages, or, if they didn’t, engaged a stultified and meaningless sex life.  The truth was, Devin’s stages were spawned in defence of feeling carnally and spiritually illegitimate at having never done what so many others had, namely stuck his penis in a breathing living woman’s vagina.  And so, week by week, he imagined the feel of a woman’s body, and imagined that when he had his own all-access pass to one of these he would go over every inch of it with both the tip of his tongue and the tip of his dick, and languor in the uncovered mystery.

When Devin finally met a girl that was willing to have sex with him he kissed her mouth a lot, and swished his not-totally-erect cock around the lips of her vagina, and, exhausted and drunk, fell asleep next to her.  This was how he treated his all-access pass.

For Reasons Unknown

Fred would stand, squinting into the seven am sun, with his boxers riding up his ass crack and his groin smelling stuffy, and lean, his feet cold and pricked by infinitesimal sand on the shaded steps, to recover the news, that lay flat against the entry, on those silent mornings. Stand and sniff and get as much out of the morning as he could, then sit and expose a bare knee and shin to the already too bright sun, leaving the rest of himself canopied as he smoked a chemical tasting Canadian cigarette. This was early spring. Caronport, SK. Land of the living skies, just the one big one, where a scant index of birds made dotted lines and mapped the place. Crows. His mp3 player was outdated and contained songs he’d been listening to since he was fourteen, but he’d lost the thing for over six months and having it back was a relief.

In the mornings he listened to it, so that the world around him was tinged by juvenile songs that upset his stomach. Songs that worked only if you were at a party and sleeping with a beerfully acquiescent stranger was immanent, which Fred had never done. Fred shuddered and flicked the nob to change the song and inhaled gratefully.

He lived in the trailer that loomed oppressively behind his back, alone. The place was an ungodly mess and he preferred his porch to the indoors where he went only to cook or abandon himself to pot and video games once or twice a day. He had no job. His hair was brown and short and greasy unto abstraction. He filed his nails and flossed, he’d always done so, but he abhorred showering. He couldn’t keep his eyes open in the shower, and groping didn’t suit him. Living alone without a girlfriend was a situation that did not prompt showers.

By his third cigarette Fred felt ready to go for his stroll, but remembered that he wasn’t wearing any pants, and retreated back into the sullen interior of his tin house to collect a pair. The place no longer smelled like the home it was when his mother had lived there. The domestic alchemy of laundry, dish soap and dusty sofas had yielded to one poorly concealed rot after another.

There was a pair of jeans crumpled and deposited atop a mound of wadded-up tee shirts and streaked underpants. Fred put these on and placed the cigarette he’d been smoking into a calcified plastic cup, his “finisher” drink from the night before. On his bed there were noises coming from his open laptop. Ding ding ding. Spaced out as if to represent tentative inquiry.

Someone was IMing him. He sat down beside the computer and rested his weight on his elbow to get a look.

brandys7: hello?

brandys7: is anybody there?

brandys7: you there fred?

These had been sent several seconds ago. The dings had been in real time. Fred debated whether or not to type back. His hands hesitated over the keys. Internally a switch flipped and he resigned himself. He reached for a bottle of whiskey that was resting on the edge of a book shelf. He took a sip while one hand typed hello. He was still resting his weight on his elbow, curved around the computer, his feet on the ground. His eyes stung and he coughed.

slashie08: hello

brandys7: Fred

slashie08: you’ve reached me

brandys7: what are you doing?

slashie08: bout to go for a walk

brandys7: meet me at the tennis courts?

Fred rolled his eyes at the jolt of life he received from the invite. He frowned at the excited thing his body had become. He took another sip of whiskey. This time his eyes didn’t sting.

slashie08: yeah

brandys7: cool like I am so not doing anything this morning so right away is cool

slashie08: i was just about to walk anyway.

brandys7: sweet. uh… see you there.

Fred stood up and made as if to run his head under the sink for a while. Then he did. The water was cold at first and he gasped but felt better for it. He went to the fridge where he kept a tall glass of water and peanut butter sandwiches in cellophane wrap. He picked up the water and drained it at a gulp, then started in on the sandwiches, unwrapping them as he hurried out the door, as if he needed to hurry. He berated himself for hurrying. Brandy would take a long time, he would get there way before her and stand around like a chump smoking until he lost his voice. None of these remonstrations altered his course. He arrived at the tennis court and Brandy wasn’t there and he twisted and progressed back and forth along the gravel that lay atop the road near the bike stand. His shoes—skate shoes that were a birthday present from too long ago—let in tiny stones that he ignored for as long as he could. He smoked some more, his fingers started to stink.

He saw Brandy coming from almost a kilometer away, she was wearing the same thing she’d been wearing when he met her, a maroon tank top and skinny jeans. Brandy was a short and small girl with a cute face and lively green eyes. She tucked her hair behind her ears as if compelled by a reticent witness. She was very outgoing, but never seemed to reveal much of herself, a product of her overdeveloped listening skills.

Fred wasn’t sure when to begin waving. He had an image flash through his mind that he’d left the stove on or forgot to let the cat out of the master bedroom. Maybe both these eventualities were true, he didn’t care. He finally waved. She was all of twenty feet away now and the new question was when to say hello and start talking. If he waited for too long he would appear like he didn’t care. It would be a false pretence. He cared a lot. Brandy did not seem like the kind of girl who made bullshit worthwhile, but all girls strived to give that impression.

This was all going to blow over, Fred knew. He imagined himself stoned and playing video games that same afternoon, burying his many social mistakes in incognizance, his house feeling emptier than it ever had. The whole town a Christian mockery. He the witch. The outcast orphan. Ha-ha. There was nothing funny about it.

He imagined himself standing on his front porch again this morning, he took himself back—or forward, to the next morning. When it would all be the same again. His damned fourteen year old taste in music shuttled into his ears by an outmoded artefact. The sky, the one big one, conspiring when and where to shunt him, based on where was shady and where was not, as the day wore on.

They’d been talking for a few minutes before he let it go.

Brandy, Fred gathered, wanted to hang out. And the longer they hung out there more that Fred learned about the world. It was as if all the world had been obfuscated and he, in talking with Brandy, deciphered its code.

“Well so now you were a coffee shop employee in Moose Jaw?”

“Yes,” Brandy said, coyly, leading him.

“And now you turn sheets at that Christian hotel?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“But you don’t go to Briercrest?”

“Not yet.”

“You mean…”

“Well I might some day. I told my parents turned Christian as hell. Here,” she smiled, “give me one of them.”

Fred handed over a cigarette. They were walking in the direction of his trailer. Loose shale made swivelling noises beneath their feet. Fred read all kinds of meaning into their walk and talk, as if reading it out of a book.

My God, he thought, she’s just as lonely as I am.

He kept coming back to that. The afternoon waited, poised. Wind played like an lost melody through the tips of crops that pressed like an organized flood around all Saskatchewan towns. Tethered dogs reserved their vitality for when their families woke up. Once an hour a car drove by, and the person in it waved. The air carried a scent like a day off worry, that made it difficult to feel depressed unless the drone of that buzz-saw cut above everything. For some, it did. When they got to Fred’s porch he slumped against the screen door and unfurled the tightly bent paper. The news was of sports in other parts of Canada. Brandy sat to his right, hunched over herself, her arms resting on her thighs, one hand brought a lit cigarette to her lips. Her back looked small, almost like a child’s or an old woman’s from the angle that Fred viewed it. He adopted a similar squint, off into the distance, like he’d done on gods knew how many other mornings. Which was how he missed it when she leaned towards him to kiss him. His physiology leapt and he leapt to accommodate it, to moderate the damn thing. She had a grin on her face, which made her easier to kiss. Okay, Fred thought, so this happens. This happens.

The Boston Pizza’s OPEN sign made nervous electric noise and flitted on and off so that those driving by might have mistaken the place for closed. The road that curved past the Boston Pizza was covered in brown snow except where black ice showed. Daniel Dearborn waited for his date in front of the manic sign. He shivered in the dying of the day and shifted his weight. He was wearing Italian shoes with a pointed toe, an overcoat and a scarf. He was nervous. It was November 23, 2003. His breath was visible against a backdrop of shopping center lights and sky. In the entrance of the BP’s there was a choice between going to the Lounge or the Restaurant. All of the doors were glass; there was no welcome mat and the tiles held a film of grit. Daniel spent some of his time waiting there, his shoes made wet scratching sounds as he paced. Outside, large vehicles could be heard attempting to clear and salt the streets. Their gravely engines signified progress to the empty sidewalks. There was a warm wind. Calgary felt still and orange as the sun made last call. It was dark.

At this point Daniel discovered I was narrating this scene for him, though I was squatting at quite a distance. He narrowed his eyes, then, and glared at me as if I were no more than a camera lens. He kicked something, a clump of ice it looked, and yelled, “Is this all there is for you?”

They Came, They Cleaned, They Got Paid: An Epic in 3 Parts

PART 1: THE MAID WITH THE HARD ON POLISHES A SURFACE

in this sequence the audience is meant to latch on to the idea that a female can’t get a hard on. it’s a scene designed to disclose a literalistic surrealism, so to speak. there will be an ample protrusion jutting from the MAID’S cunch [a word signifying that weird grey area when a woman’s midsection seems to grow over her genitalia, cunt + ponch = cunch].. it is clearly an erection, this protrusion, and so the audience is led to wonder if there is a metaphor at work here, or if they, the audience, are meant to be taking this visual as literally as possible, and if so, what that all portends, etc..

PART 2: THE KITCHEN SERVANT TRIES TO FIND SOMETHING UNDER THE TABLE, BUT IN THE PROCESS OF LEANING DOWN EXPOSES HER BUM TO THE MAID WITH THE HARD ON, WHO HAS A DIFFICULT TIME POLISHING THE SURFACE THAT SHE WAS POLISHING

make sure when casting to slot a mega totally hot girl for the role of kitchen servant.. it’s also important if you’ve done your casting right for the MAID to never get naked. the hard on, as well as the cunch, must remain in ambiguity at all costs. I repeat this is a PRIORITY #1 MANDATE that the cunch and the hard on [inevitably a prop, in case I actually had to tell you] be obscured by clothing at all times. interest from the MAID in the KITCHEN SERVENT needs to be demonstrated, not consummated. and never explicitly. the MAID with the hard on could be pining for ice cream. or for her puppy back at home. or for a party in which upwardly mobile lemurs distribute affection by writing down their feelings on pieces of note paper and passing the papers around. for all we care. the only thing sexual about the MAID is that she has a hard on. but girls don’t get hard ons. okay?

PART 3: EVERYONE FOCUSES ON THEIR JOB LONG ENOUGH FOR THE BOSS TO COME OUT AND WRITE THE CHECK

people going into this are going to be convinced that the first line of the title, ‘THEY CAME’ is a double entendre and are going to be winking and nudging each other waiting for you the filmmakers or producers to wink and nudge at them by having a scene in which one of the cleaners does in fact come. but it’s important that this never happens. the important thing with PART 3 is to illustrate that tension of a decently unambiguous nature (remember, though, females don’t get hard ons) is IN THE AIR but is not being CONSUMMATED. that’s the whole point. they came (as in physically arrived) they cleaned (just that) they got paid (you see the pattern)

Earthbound

This is the story of a song that begins humbly.  It is the story of what it means to mean well, of mothers who choose to begin life, of lives spent well and wrapped as gifts only when they are ended, when cloth enshrouds the descending casket, it is story of thin, white notes.  The song is weary, it is returning home.  The song is breathless, it dies finally in the arms of its maker.  The song is you, the song is me.  The song sums up and the song dissolves.  The song is unsingable, unhearable.  No wracked shell, no crying body expresses it.  The song fits nicely in a three inch cherrywood box in the chest of this young man who walks now up the lit thoroughfare, slowing his gait to take in the banter of the three scarred black men who sip their chai tea and nip from flasks and speak profoundly on the girls their lives have left behind.  He overhears, “for years I gained the happiness of another man, guiltily sneaking a thought of her during the day when I paused in my work.”  These men will talk the day through and the night through; they have never stopped even as the clear purple tune of our cherrywood song will not cease in its too-small box, for the song needs the constriction, and the boy, whose complexion is angelic and blessed, cannot attend to its overabundant thrumming for his footsteps have slowed again to hear the mucous play of a baby girl from underneath a door.  I spy with my little eye something that is orange.  I spy with my little eye something that is peach.  I spy with my little eye something that is colored like the early morning.  The pants of the boy listening in from the other side of the door.  Presently, he knocks and the door is opened by long wet eyes.  Mom’s not here, out at the store.  She begins crying, the girl, swaying with the open door, back and forth like a lost sailor.  It’s because I cannot play eye-spy properly.  All of my guesses are no.

This is the story of a song that begins humbly.  It is the story of what it means to mean well, of mothers who choose to begin life, of lives spent well and wrapped as gifts only when they are ended, when cloth enshrouds the descending casket, it is story of thin, white notes.  The song is weary, it is returning home.  The song is breathless, it dies finally in the arms of its maker.  The song is you, the song is me.  The song sums up and the song dissolves.  The song is unsingable, unhearable.  No wracked shell, no crying body expresses it.  The song fits nicely in a three inch cherrywood box in the chest of this young man who walks now up the lit thoroughfare, slowing his gait to take in the banter of the three scarred black men who sip their chai tea and nip from flasks and speak profoundly on the girls their lives have left behind.  He overhears, “for years I gained the happiness of another man, guiltily sneaking a thought of her during the day when I paused in my work.”  These men will talk the day through and the night through; they have never stopped even as the clear purple tune of our cherrywood song will not cease in its too-small box, for the song needs the constriction, and the boy, whose complexion is angelic and blessed, cannot attend to its overabundant thrumming for his footsteps have slowed again to hear the mucous play of a baby girl from underneath a door.  I spy with my little eye something that is orange.  I spy with my little eye something that is peach.  I spy with my little eye something that is colored like the early morning.  The pants of the boy listening in from the other side of the door.  Presently, he knocks and the door is opened by long wet eyes.  Mom’s not here, out at the store.  She begins crying, the girl, swaying with the open door, back and forth like a lost sailor.  It’s because I cannot play eye-spy properly.  All of my guesses are no.