Salt

After a Lethargic Breakfast

2012-01-07T12:16:00.000-08:00

After a Lethargic Breakfast
By
Todd Austin Hunt

After a lethargic breakfast, the sky exploded. My imaginary horse trainer wiped the grapefruit pulp off his face with a fire napkin he didn’t know was on fire and his moustache ignited. He jumped on the table, shrieking while the ground shook and the thunder from above subsided.

“It’s because I love the taste of horseflesh!” he repeated, pointing at three tremendous holes that had opened in the stratosphere. The holes formed a triangle, and beams of smoky orange light pierced through the apertures.

One of the beams hit a church on a hill, and the church POPPED and transformed into a bank with a vast chimney that spewed ghosts with expired smiles.

Another of the beams landed on my dear castle, and from the edges to its core, my home disintegrated inwards into a ravenous black hole. It ripped the flesh off the horse trainer’s bones, then took his bones as a token. It pulled at the chain mail thread of my imagination. The thread swooped down into a gigantic half loop as it retreated from my forehead, and I watched a flickering Goatman use the stream as a jump rope, skipping it without error as I became less and less interested and unable to foresee the outcome of such sport.

The last beam illuminated MARIO MARIA CHOMSKY’S FREE AND INFINITE HOT TACO STAND. Everything vanished except for Mario Maria. His head grew very large and his hair fell out. As his head swelled, the forms of all his customers emerged in miniature from his scalp, each one emaciated by a greedy disease. The Goatman leaped over the tail end of my imagination thread and Mario Maria’s head blew up, bathing everything in MYSTERIOUS TACO MEAT.

I looked at my hands. My thumbs were gone and I didn’t care.

Giant fingers filled the holes in the sky. The nails were long and dirty and they curved to clutch at the aquamarine roof of the world, causing cracks to radiate outward like poisoned blue blood.

The world moved away from its orbit in a deep arc, and I floated weightlessly above the black hole which was once my castle. The world shifted again in a reverse direction, and I hovered and watched everything roll and roll above and below me with the curiosity inherent in gravel.

The globe collided against obstructions and stopped. I plummeted to the ground next to the hole of my castle face first. My neck was broken. Things that understood that they were people but still looked like things emerged from the hole and began to gather around everything that was familiar, and devouring their familiarity until all countenances and structures became the abysmal Death of my eyes.

Obituary

2011-10-18T16:27:00.001-07:00

Early Friday morning, Officer Ollie Bilge reported the remains of local author, Todd Hunt, devoured by an alligator in the mud pits between West Ashley park and The Oasis housing development. Said Bilge, "I was really surprised to see a gator that big out of the zoo. I wasn't
nearly as surprised to see that Mr. Hunt managed to get himself halfway eaten. It wasn't my first encounter with Mr. Hunt. Just last week I saw him walking on the sidewalk in the Oasis development. I told him it was against the law to walk on the sidewalk or the grass. I told
him he could walk in the street, and he obliged. It's my general opinion that gullible cotton balls like him should be eaten alive by crocodilians."
Authorities agreed.
Professor Kerry Falkirk, Biology Professor at Charleston Southern, mused on the alligator: "Its size, 15 feet, was amazing. The scientific community owes much to Mr. Hunt for walking in the swamp at night, for we have never witnessed such a specimen. The gator's facial expression was one of true distaste and regret. I assume the giant was anticipating a treat like a Pomeranian or French Poodle. How could he have expected such a bitter meal? As for Mr. Hunt's expression–well, he just looked rather confused."
Asked about the fate of the gator's remains, Mr. Falkirk replied: "We will most assuredly have him stuffed and presented for display at the Biology Museum. Such grandeur cannot go wasted."
As for the remains of the late Mr. Hunt, Ruth Geberhadt, Dean of English at Charleston Southern, comments: "A fine idea would be to also have Mr. Hunt stuffed, and put on display at the Charleston Library during Banned Books Week. Banned for being really, really bad. But I
expect individuals, probably related by blood, would possibly object to the idea."
Mr. Hunt was the writer of several lurid short stories. "Mr. Hunt," said Geberhadt, "Was not even a minor writer. He can be compared to a dead planet that NASA has yet to discover."
His only survivor in Charleston, brother Godfrey, was given his shoes. The shoes had holes in them. Police speculated that the alligator ripped open the shoes, but Godfrey Hunt commented: "No, they were old shoes. He was too cheap to buy new shoes."
Lowcountry conservationists will hold a Candlelit Wake for the alligator. The alligator has come to be affectionately known as Mr. Bumpy. Professor Falkirk says to Mr. Hunt's survivors: "We in the scientific community give our heartfelt thanks for producing such a stupid young man without whom we would have never discovered Mr. Bumpy."

In This Room of Unenchantment

2011-08-29T16:28:00.001-07:00

In This Room of Unenchantment

I thought that the panoramic windows overlooking the other world had been painted over. Or, even worse, the concrete walls of a banal existence grew together like steel kudzu, forever hiding the Wonder from me.
And so, locked within this blurry room of Unenchantment, the captain of my ambition and hope, the steel of my spine, was swallowed by ennui and anchored by lethargy. The kudzu overwhelmed the window because the captain peered out less and less; his eyes were perusing dank corners where rot is infectious. Where lazy amblers crowd and fill the air with the stink of stasis, where streams are brackish and all decay of the fruits of the imagination lead to no new growth.
Thus, my brilliance, my raging captain so aware of that window, that gift of perception bestowed by God, began to fall away. He fell out of my head, plummeted from my shoulders, slipped from my arms and legs to splash on the floor in this room of Unenchantment. We became two, the corpse ambling on incomplete, refracted journeys, connected at the feet with the two-dimensional captain, puddled on the floor, mimicking the corpse like a shadow in the retreating light of Wonder.
But it was the recognition of that shadow on the floor by this aimless husk which lit an ice-encased flame within my blank outline. How can I see this shadow in the complete absence of light? How can I recognize my dissolving captain if the panoramic window has been completely overwhelmed? Guided by the frozen fire, I see that there is still an aperture of light steeling its way into this room. Slender, yes, but I can also see flickers of shapes moving in that other world! So I rush over to the aperture and grasp the closing edges with hands made strong with automatic labor. They are the edges of shutters, and the shutters give, just barely, but they do give. Although my vision is poor, I can see birds with wings that stretch eons beyond and I feel a presence in my ankles which I haven’t felt in too long a time. The captain has started to climb back inside the husk! I try to push the shutters back some more, but I am out of breath. I’ll have to push them open an inch at a time. I know I’ll get stronger, though; I’ll be able move them more than an inch very soon.
And I’ll open them until I am once again surrounded by the panoramic window, bathed in that brilliance, where the captain’s eyes are behind my eyes.
And all shadows are washed away.

Uncle Cleveland

2011-08-18T17:45:00.001-07:00

Uncle Cleveland liked the long, black cigars. Hand-rolled. He could care less if it actually came from Havana. I have several memories of my dear Uncle hanging from a miniature replica of his Mohammed Bridge in the greenhouse, cigar crunched between his simian teeth, while he growled, "I can get just as good a cigar from some pretty bitch in Ybor City than I can from Fidel's purgatory."
He inhaled then exhaled the heavy smoke from his flat, forward nostrils. I saw the beginnings of tar buildup in his ever-present mucus.
"Boy, pour me another glass of Sanity and Reason."
I left my respectful distance, crouching and brushing through ferns and flowers so dense with color, they painted my face with lush residue. Approaching Uncle Cleveland, the stench of refuse, human shit, animal sweat, cigar smoke and alcohol enveloped me. I did not gag because I loved and respected my Uncle.
A liter bottle of Banana Likker stood on a glass table beneath the replica, shadowed by my Uncle's swaying burden. The neck of the bottle towered over a carefully manicured banzai tree in the center of the table. I unscrewed the cap of the Likker and raised it to him.
Uncle Cleveland hung from one of the main girders of the miniature bridge by his left hand. The muscles and tendons in his arm throbbed. As usual, he wore rust-covered overalls and an old Yankees cap. "Never the Giants," he had once said. "They play a devolutionary game." I stepped a little to the right to better reach his left arm, dodging the huge drums of shit and garbage he clasped in each foot. The bottom of the plastic drums brushed vegetation sprouting from the greenhouse floor. His breathing was tight with exertion, but controlled.
Grinning at me, Uncle Cleveland lowered his pint glass and I filled it with the Banana Likker. "Always the left hand to hold the Sanity and Reason, cause it's the same hand I use to wipe my arse." Glass full, he lifted and emptied it in a few seconds, subsequently placing the glass above him on the bridge replica. He glanced down at me for a moment, at my smooth face so different from his rough and pocked and hairy. His brown eyes moistened, but not from the Likker.
In a fury, he shook and jolted below his replica, testing its strength. I heard a whimper from the construction after his tantrum, but didn't say anything.
He spat out his cigar.
"This bridge won't break," Uncle Cleveland sobbed. "No one's too heavy for it. No one."

Dream - Diaspora Doorway

2011-08-05T21:04:00.000-07:00

Dream August 5, 2011 Diaspora Doorway

I should have written this earlier, because it has faded.

I was standing on a barren beach, my head thick with memories of having walked for days and nights without rest. My knees made rending and cracking noises. Ahead, high on the beach near colossal sand dunes, was a small service station. The building was constructed of searing white concrete blocks and was bathed in fluorescent light whose source was nowhere to be seen.

A slender dark hand rose up from the sand at the side of the station, waving at me, then it vanished. Stepping closer, I discovered that the station had no doors, and the hand had emerged from a deep stairwell plunging deep into the sand. I descended the stairs and came out on a vast platform glowing with that mysterious light, a wide corridor ending in a glass wall that faced an indigo expanse bristling with stars.

“Where Earth and Heaven meet,” a voice said. A beautiful woman of African descent appeared before me. She grabbed my hand and led me through a threshold to the left. “I need your help.”

On the other side of the door, I was struck by the vision of mountain peaks thrusting up into the black of space through the glass, a column that seemed to stretch into infinity.

The woman faced me. Her features were mobile, shifting from one facial landscape to another, settling into hers for a few moments and changing again. She gestured to the wall opposite the glass. It was a bland, plaster surface; a small square with a burned out light bulb was centered low on the wall.

“Will you change the bulb?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said. From my shirt pocket, I pulled out an incandescent light bulb. I changed the bulbs. Once I screwed in the new bulb, it flashed on, a radiance that burned my hand. Its light was like the sun, and I had to turn away from the brilliance.

Something was growing from below the glass at an alarming rate and I stared in awe. Fifteen enormous chutes, or curved tracks, unfurled beyond the glass to the right of the mountain peaks. They stretched out straight for thousands of feet, then curved gently until the tracks were completely vertical, ending a few thousand feet into the abyss of space.

“Thank you,” a man’s voice said. A very pale man with red hair stood where the woman had been. He approached me and each millisecond a new form emerged from his body, human and otherwise. These life forms rapidly populated the station, milling about, then descended a wide stairwell that opened in the door, leading out to the chutes.

The pale man extended his hand and I shook it. “My name is D. D. Wilkinson,” he said. “Your assistance has been invaluable.”

He turned away to position himself before a control podium that had risen from the floor before the glass. His body drained familiar, but more strange, beings each moment. One of those forms was a professor of mine from Graduate School. She saw me and waved, smiling.

She said to me, “We’re ready to go,” and indicated two ghostlike women who had also fell out of Wilkinson.

I gaped. “You’ve known about this for how long?” I said.

One of the women, who favored Winona Ryder with too much makeup, said, “I’ve been visiting her room since I was a seed.”

They laughed and went down the stairs.

Outside the glass, the chutes were filling up with transparent bullet-like ships, packed with humans and alien life forms. Wilkinson pulled a lever and the first row of ships fired down the track and up into the inky black of space to homes beyond the scope of my understanding. After that initial departure, Wilkinson captained a continual succession of those ships into space, their coronas of atmospheric burning reflecting off the peaks of the mountain.

“I didn’t know that light bulb was in my pocket,” I said.

Wilkinson didn’t turn around. “I didn’t either.”

“What does the D. D. stand for?”

“Diaspora Doorway.”

Dream Over

The Irony Diet (an ode to farmers)

2011-08-01T21:09:00.000-07:00

On one of many rambles through the telepathic experiment we call the INTERNET, I came across a fairly recent approach to eating called the Paleolithic diet. I suppose it’s not that recent, some 250 million years old. However, most of humanity have long abandoned that menu. So, an old fad that found purchase again in the 1970s, like the future rabid fame of Vanilla Ice on Planet Badrap year 6500.

Endorsed by a gastroenterologist with a name almost as difficult as his career title, the diet is a reflection of what Paleolithic humans ate, the hunter-gatherer meal plan prior to the advent of the agricultural revolution (I always imagine corn and wheat and rye forcibly TAKING OVER). Choice foods include meat, fish, fruit, nuts, seeds and vegetables. If you eat grains, legumes, sugar, SALT, dairy, potatoes and alcohol, Slarbar the ascetic caveman will clomp you.

NO BEER AND PEANUTS SAY SLARBAR! YOU GET HEAD CLOMPED!

Of course, this meat rich collection is very high in iron. It’s irony. But it’s also full of irony.

Can you climb a palm tree and find a degree at the center of a coconut? Is it possible to learn how to create a written language from the heart of the elk you’ve just slain for dinner? While spending all day searching the woods for tasty roots and mushrooms, is there any time to reflect and measure your strengths and weaknesses and imagine what you want to be when you grow up? And without salt, brother, you’re forced to hunt again in a few days or your family will starve.

Scientists discovered the fossils and other traces of Paleolithic Man, not by reading the detailed journals of prehistoric humanity, but by inheriting the gift of expendable time made possible by civilization. Scientists revealed what Paleolithic humans ate at the peaks of mountains of history, peaks thinly supported by years of personal study and experience and time, but deeper and wider down by the written thoughts of countless predecessors encapsulated in ponderings which take time, time, time.

And from where does this bountiful time to think and build cities and schools and universities and hospitals come? Shaping the focus of the anthropologist?

The farmer is the base of the mountain, and the foods he plants are its deep roots. The barley, wheat, rye, corn, lentils, peas, beans and potatoes. The milk from the sheep, goats and cows. The salt to cure the back of the pig so the family can have bacon for days and days. Beer from the barley to enjoy and alter the experience of men.

The farmer and his crops froze time for humanity. These foods that the Paleolithic diet denies are the benefactors of modern civilization, science and specialization.

It's the Irony Diet.

I am laughing.

Modern mathematics did not arrive in a vacuum of constant hunger and the efforts of every individual to locate food. It emerged from a store of grain, olive oil, wine and sausages cured with salt.

Effectively, here’s an equation for the Paleolithic diet:

-1 + 1 = 0.

Libraries, Harry Potter, Lord of the Flies and Censoring Evilmother

2011-07-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

I worked in a children's and YA library for a year, and picked up lots of those books and read the first few pages. So many placate the reader as if placating an abysmally stupid little person. "Let's Junie B Jones them to death."

I recall several parents strictly forbade their children to open "the dark covers of Harry Potter." Because witches are evil and evil is contagious as influenza in a warm, wet climate. One homeschooling mother would bring in her child weekly. His legs and arms were shackled and pinioned by chains woven out of misinterpreted verses from the Old Testament. Kid made a racket coming into the library and up the stairs. His mother had a pale, stern face that promoted sterility and fear. In her spare time she tortured question marks.

One day while Mother was distracted by a fanciful picture of an alien, the kid drudged his way to the YA shelf where I was putting away paperbacks. He asked for a good story. I picked out Lord of the Flies and told him it was about a bunch of schoolboys his age who wash up on an island and then proceed to gradually go wackball nuts.

As soon as he touched the book, his Mother's question mark alarm went off. The poor kid's chains turned molten red, and he gibbered in pain, dropping Mr. Golding's wonder as he collapsed to the floor. A black shell like chitin emerged from a pore in the back of his neck and cocooned his entire head while he jerked on the floor like an epileptic cockroach.

His Mother glided over to us like a Sith Lord. She hooked a silver leash onto a loop on the cocoon and dragged the boy past me, down the stairs. She left an absence of curiosity in her wake. All of my good ideas were singed away like sweat in a frying pan.

Digression aside, I agree with what you wrote, Gary. Although I haven't read Twilight, I have read Rowling's stuff, and I'm guessing that it isn't just that Meyer's characters may have weak motivation, Rowling is probably just a better, more inventive writer. The Harry Potter books have tons of references and descriptions of humdrum high school moments, but Rowling's shining feat is weaving an original wind to revive that humdrum and make it quite, quite wonderful.

The best writers resuscitate.

Fat.

2011-05-24T18:50:00.001-07:00

This is the house we're going to steal.

2011-05-23T11:36:00.001-07:00

Labor Elves

2011-05-18T08:53:00.001-07:00

Dream: Beck Interview

2011-04-10T05:32:00.001-07:00

Had a dream that I interviewed the musician Beck while in a car which was driven by two chaps who had no idea who he was. Their idea of good music was discs one buys at the dentist. Beck was Beck in the dream, but he resembled the British actor Martin Freeman. I talked to Beck about the polarization of his music, how many of his songs trawl through a beautiful despair while others are light and ridiculous. He was reluctant to talk about himself; he briefly told me how he got his start in Libya, then put a Peter Gabriel CD in that had a Rolling Stones label.

New Yark – Tuesday – Part One of a Real Trip Mixed with Astonishing Bullshit

2011-03-29T18:25:00.000-07:00

Drove to Manhattan with my brother Zachary last week. Along the way, we passed buildings and fields and people with frozen heads.

In West Virginia, we were chased by a coal monster for 89 miles. Zach silently screamed.

From ubiquitous signs in Maryland, we learned that deer and bears are mortal enemies. The bear and deer feud has been going on for thousands of years. Both of us said a prayer that one day the deer and bears will love each other and have a vegetarian picnic.

I don’t like Eastern New Jersey very much. I’m sorry, New Jersey. Perhaps I’m wrong.

Driving in Manhattan sucks, even with GPS. I ran over sixteen people and they dissolved into the concrete of Sixth Avenue. You better not tell anybody!

Zach and I stayed at the Eastgate Tower Hotel on E. 39th Street. It was clean and utilitarian and CAVERNOUS. Every closet had a descending stairwell to an alternate world. We knew this because the songs of the vendors floated up the stairs in alien script, permanently staining the air. But screw those other worlds! We were there to see NY. I locked those doors.

One of the reasons we were in the city was to visit our cousin Paul, who attends graduate school at Fordham University in the Bronx. He is very smart and he walks very fast. We had dinner with him Tuesday night at the Pig and Whistle in Times Square.

Times Square has lots of artificial light. People stop too much in the middle of the sidewalk to take pictures of an imagined wonder. Vampires are afraid of Times Square because the light makes tourists think they own the universe. Everyone knows vampires own the universe.

We learned that The Pig and Whistle in Times Square is a façade. The menu is like a casserole of what everybody expects to see in an Irish pub, with several Italians being pushed into the baking dish by administrative assistants wearing invisible capes. Falling, the Italians cursed in Gaelic about such a preposterous composition. Pasta is a strange shadow in Dublin!

Believe it or not, the day became over! That night, cold and wet enveloped the city while I dreamed of New Amsterdam applying for a credit card in Rotterdam.

Hey Soup!

2011-03-05T22:21:00.000-08:00

It's dark. The nocturnal animals are probably eating or fornicating or defecating.

I am making soup. Red clam chowder. A bit made from pigs that grow up from somewhere. And shellfish.

I do not feel guilty, because incomprehensibly small alive bits will devour my flesh after I breathe for the last time.

A square meal is a fair meal.

10 Things Not to Say to a Girl on the First Date

2011-02-11T10:53:00.000-08:00

10 things not to say to a girl on a first date.

1. Gaww, you eat pretty fast! You got any pictures of your Mom?
2. The lights in this restaurant are more flattering to you than the streetlamps outside your bedroom window.
3. You know, I bet that blouse would look REALLY good on me!
4. Sure, I loved Slingblade. Doyle was awesome! He reminds me of Dad.
5. So I told him , ‘Listen! I'd rather die alone than settle for some sloppy reject from the woman factory!' You know?
6. My first wedding? Who knows? It was a blur, I was WASTED!
7. What do you think about prosthetic genitals?
8. Yeah, I dream in color. The blood is always red.
9. When Jeff showed me your picture, I was like, no way, but this is like the hundredth time I've been wrong about some ugly picture!
10. People with multiple STDs have feelings, too. I just think that everyone deserves a chance at love, right?

What Not to Say to Friend After She's Showed You Pictures of Her Baby.

2011-02-11T10:46:00.000-08:00

1. He looks too much like your stupid husband.
2. Have you called a biologist? Is that even chordata?
3. How much vodka did you drink daily?
4. Why did you open the basket?
5. What was the stork's name?
6. No, she doesn't look like you. You're a lot prettier.
7. Well, he has your husband's chin, but my eyes.

The Title is Always Changing

2011-02-05T10:01:00.000-08:00

The title is always changing. Marching for the horizon, looking at the sun that is goozing all over the electric monkeypeople.

Do you feel no shame? You walk around the world as if you can take off your flesh like a dirty suit. And you love her because the stains of murder have made her face beautiful. Cavort. Cavort. Your footsteps together are interlaced chains, forming a thick circle around a deep hole of grief from out of which you cannot climb.

Blood in the paint on her face. So gorgeous, she.

A dead demon put that shimmer in her hair.

How many identical versions of myself have fallen from the tree? And where did they fall? Some are surely rotten.

I am sucked into the right angles.

He cannot be in the army because of the spikes on his ankles. Also, he shot out the sun warming the planet on which he was born.

Our heads are connected by cables we cannot see. And there are clusters that want to crush joy and genius.

Music is God’s voice, and it doesn’t need to vocalize the humanmonkey words for God.

Dream: Forgotten friends, megafauna and Mickey Mouse

2011-01-25T15:04:00.000-08:00

Dream 1-24-2011

I found myself in a convenience store, dressed in fieldworkgarb, helping the Virginia District Manager install equipment. The manager and the food manager constantly bickered over the placement of the food warmer. Our guy and the employees wanted it to block the food manager from customers, because he was unbearably gross and hurt appetites.
He had a routine of going into the back and returning to the front, face and hands and arms coated and dripping with off-color bodily fluids and solids. Once up front, he would proceed to make sandwiches, while the female employees gagged and vomited.

I began to grow weary of all this, so I took off my belt and gave it to the manager, as I no longer needed it. I left the store, carrying along two Playstation controllers. When I emerged outside, I was surprised to find myself in Paris, KY, my hometown.

I passed a bench in front of the FIRST!!!! Baptist Church and two girls shouted , “There he is! There he is!”

Yes I is.

Instead of going around town to get home, I crossed through the Church parking lot and then through the grounds of Paris Elementary and High School. From afar, the campus looked barren, but hundreds of students suddenly appeared once I stepped on the sidewalk. My legs stiffened, turned to marble, so I had to drop the video game controllers and manually lift and drop my legs to progress along. All the while, shrieking elementary kids pushed and ridiculed me.

I turned a corner, escaping the horde and bumped into an old friend.

“You think you’re better than me,” he said. “You never visit me and my girlfriend.”

“I’m sorry. I just like being alone.”

“Whatever. Go that way,” he said, staring at the grass and pointing ahead to what looked like a corral.

I wanted to go home, but I had no idea how to get there. So I went in his pointed direction, walking through the corral under a low doorway into a darkened kitchen. The kitchen staff all had long beards like ZZ Top. I passed through into a brightly lit alley that ran between low buildings and emptied into a vast meadow. In the meadow, an immense roar startled me.

The brother of a fellow student from high school rode up on the back of a gigantic alligator. He stopped the monstrous animal a few feet from me; its curved teeth towered over my head. He looked at me and yelled, taking his hat off and waving it in the air.

I had no response.

The ground shook and his brother approached from the opposite direction on the fin of a tremendous shark. The shark was even more huge than the alligator and glided on the ground as if it was ice. He called out my name and I saw that he was regressing in age by the moment until he was as I remembered from pre-school. Then he took his hat off and turned into Mickey Mouse.

“Hello Todd! It’s Mickey Mouse!”

Dream Over

Dream: Trying to Leave the Spiral University

2010-12-16T18:57:00.000-08:00

Dream December 16, 2010

I was walking along the inner radius of a spirally designed university at the center of which was an airport and space launching pad. The school was situated in the heart of a vast forest, and as I walked, I stared out at the trees. I was a few years younger and knew it, and the limp with which I had grown up was heavy on my heart and subtracted from my joy at being at the University.

Reaching into my pocket, I worried at the boarding passes there, then switched them to another pocket.

Elderly professors walked all along the cobbled path of the spiral, nodding and smiling at me. However, once I reached escalators that rose to the airport, the smiling faces were replaced by a clusterfuck of anxiety and confusion. Screams of children and sobs of forlorn women and growls of impatient men.

I rose on the escalator. Above was the airport, and above that was the interstellar launching pad. The airport gates were below a transparent dome of blue glass. I could see ships up there, amorphous forms taking solid shape at the hands of scientists.

A stranger whispered in my ear: “There she is, Todd. She won’t take her eyes off you. She’s lovely.” I turned on the rising stairway and saw a gorgeous young woman with blonde hair staring seductively at me. She reached for me, and I hesitated, then was forced onto the ticket platform. I fell down, and my boarding passes whistled out of my pocket and ripped and multiplied and ripped. A forceful wind tore through the platform, scattering the thousands of torn tickets around the gates. I scrambled to grab them, unsuccessful, while people pushed past me toward their gates, trampling on the passes, shredding them.

I looked up at the interstellar platform and saw a ship forming through the blue glass that I had not seen when at first entering the platform. Its hull bubbled out like an aluminum balloon, revealing portals and structures wonderful. A vessel meant for journey beyond this galaxy.

I had to get on that ship, and I realized that my multiplying tickets were akin to the loaves and fishes. It was a miracle for me to reach the heavens! I scurried around the platform, which was constructed like an M. C. Escher drawing, each corner an ouroboros. The stack of tickets in my hands became thick and heavy as I watched the vessel above me grow larger and closer to launching.

Through the knots of passengers I saw a man who talked to others as if he were in charge. He stared up at the vessel, then routinely checked a piece of paper he held in his hands.

With my collected tickets, I ran to him. “Captain,” I said. “Captain! Here are my tickets. I have to get on that ship. You have no idea where it can be going if only I am allowed to board!”

He looked up from his paper for a moment, looking at me and my bundle of tickets with derision.

“I’m not going to let you distract me,” he said, returning his attention to his document.

Frantic, I rushed over to a long queue in front of gate counter. An unknown amount of time passed, but I felt my hair grow and the skin of my face loosen and sag. An explosion above startled me, caused me to drop my tickets on floor. Looking up, I watched the wondrous vessel disconnect itself from the launching pad and rise into an oblivion. Gone.

A young woman in front of me turned around. I recognized that she was the same one from the escalator, but strange and different. Her face was not real, but rather an imagined idea of a beautiful woman separate from any chain of DNA we knew.

“It’s you,” she said. “You look old and tired, you know? Everything within you is used up. Have a safe trip.”

I thought to say that she looked different, too, but did not say.

She grabbed somebody’s hand and walked through the gate door.

Stranger in a Strange Land - A Turd with a Plastic Halo

2010-12-10T19:41:00.000-08:00

Stranger in a Strange Land - A Turd with a Plastic Halo

Before I had any money to buy books, the library was my sanctuary. I especially loved to investigate the science fiction and fantasy shelves, marveling at the titles and covers. It was there I picked up Ray Bradbury's 100 Greatest Short Stories and many others.
Around this time, I checked out Robert Heinlein's To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I tried and tried to read it, but it was so awfully boring, I returned it. Twenty years later, with no Heinlein in between, I opened a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land a friend had given me. This novel won the Hugo; it's considered one of his best.

Nothing had changed. I had thought that maybe his fiction was at that time beyond my grasp, but having just finished the peripheral story of Valentine Michael Smith, I see that Heinlein failed twice by me to write a story that consistently compelled me to want to know what happens next.

Flaccid characterization and lack of immediate conflict are the novel's major flaws. 375 pages into the book, I realized that nothing of major import had really HAPPENED. Conflict does arise early, with Michael twisting people and objects into discorporation. I liked this. But Mike quickly becomes a dull character, with much of his actions told through Blah Blah Blah dialogue, interspersed with an over-preachy narrative style.

Granted Jubal Harshaw is an initially interesting character, but his sauciness becomes stock and repetitive, and he offers no surprises.

There are no surprises here.

The grokking and "Thou Art God" are definitely weighty ideas, but Heinlein fails to weave these ideas into gripping characters and a gripping story.

And the women. As Mike first views Jill and other women, they are difficult for him to distinguish from one another. Whereas Jubal has the most beautiful face he's ever seen. Well, all the women are good for GROKKING.

Michael's destruction at the end of the novel could have been lead heavy in a better writer's hands, but I had absolutely no invested care in what happened to Mike and what he did next.

Just altogther unremarkable. And even worse for the fact that the story offers promises that are never kept.

I grok schlock. No more Heinlein.

July 22, 2010 - Dying Young

2010-12-07T20:04:00.000-08:00

For some, dying young is necessary, for a life too long becomes a cavern of misery, with regrets roosting doublefold in the shadows like bats, forever splattering the thoughts with their guano.

London scribble

2010-12-07T19:46:00.001-08:00

July 18 2010

Flew into London with Dad and brothers. Spent a day rustling around this huge city, jumping on and off the Tube, drinking ale and eating food which hardens the arteries.
I really don’t think they noticed London. Too fast.
From London to Thornbury, staying in Edward Stafford’s Thornbury Castle. While at the castle, the BBC used it as a setting for the production of a comedy series entitled “Whites”, starring Alan Davies. We met a crazy lady named Lisa who wanted us to accompany her to a beer-soaked public named The Plough, where she would subsequently teach us Flamenco Dancing. I think she was riding some kind of narcotic lightning, for her toes splayed and unsplayed, as if in throes of some eternal spasm.
Left Thornbury to Eastbourne, stopping in Bath, Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. Stonehenge and the Salisbury Plains were as brilliantly mind-shadowing as I recall from seven years ago.
Did our British ancestors conceive of us? Some Bronze Age imagining of an Earth cluttered and drooling with homo-sapiens?
Salisbury Cathedral still so vast. Another structure making us seem like busy ants, but ants with some great power to suffuse mind and body for these minute beings to construct that hall of possible divinity.
And then Eastbourne, The Grand Hotel along the English Channel. Beachy Head, that chalk cliff breaking away into the salt water. Wow.
Now, Lomdon again. Reading Blood Meridian near Victoria Station, soon to grab a beer.

On a bench overlooking the Thames, I sat in melted Cadbury chocolate. I walked around London with Cadbury on my arse.

Big Truck Motherf***er

2010-11-07T17:16:00.001-08:00

At the Piggly Wiggly, I parked my modest Volkswagen at the far end of the lot, in a sea of carless asphalt. When I finished shopping, I discovered some watermelonbrain moron had parked his gargantuan pickup truck in the space next to mine. The tires were right on the damn line, and the expansive body of the truck bulged outward, rearview mirror casting a shadow on the hood of my car. I had to squeeze between his door and mine, and could only open my door a fraction.
I was sincerely pissed off. I pictured the driver, wearing the visor which hung from the rearview, his expansive ass planted in the seat while his meat-red face munched on a hot dog that dripped ketchup and mustard on his polo-encased manboobs, rolling down the parking lot in a pickup with a bed that has never been used, listening to some numbf**k sing about his daddy’s old boat, while the truck’s cyclopean gastank burned and burned swimming pools of gasoline, the map of his imagination and perception never inspecting anything outside of his skin as he parks his micro-phallic instigated purchase directly beside my car, ignoring the ocean of empty spaces around.

I hope he gets caught naked in a deluge of tasmanian devils.

Consider my magic solution

2010-10-19T14:07:00.000-07:00

Consider my magic solution.

Ever been to a Fairy Tale?

I have.

I walked around Snow White and her short friends. They were paper-thin. Every time I stopped, they began to move and play their games. When I moved, they just fluttered in the fairy-tale breeze like paper silhouettes thought up by some apathetic creator.

Rode a sailboat with Sleeping Beauty. She wasn't asleep; she was dead drunk from a pitcher of martinis. You ever seen somebody passed out from too much Grey Goose and olive juice? It isn't very beautiful. Doesn't even approach flattering.

The Prince was there pretending to be both the Captain and the bosun. I held the Book open for him. "Says here you're going to kiss her, wake her up and love her," I said.

The Prince just frowned and poked her snoring face with the end of the mop we used to clean the deck. She moved a little bit.

"I'm not going to kiss her," he said. "Stupid drunk bitch. She can't even afford Grey Goose."

Sometimes on the shores of the lakes and the rivers, blue people appear and smile. It doesn't happen as much as it used to. That fucker Disney invaded that world, made everybody wear white gloves and be happy all the time. He gave everybody the same script. "Do it this way and I'll have real people dress up like you in Florida and Anaheim. You'll be famous."

I guess it's not all his fault. Sure isn't my fault, though. When I visited, I gave chocolate to Goldilocks, so she wouldn't go to the Bear's House for fucking soup. I tried. She didn't like chocolate and got mauled anyway. Just for soup.

Nobody there likes to dream anymore. Too many folks getting hearing-aides to better hear what's going on in halls that smell like antiseptic and reality. Nobody likes to dream anymore. Yeah, I've been to a damn Fairy Tale.

I'm not going back.

Gandpa's Potage

2010-10-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

Gandpa's potage.
1. I mean, this was back in the day, Patsy.

This was back when the only connection between serfs and waves were the cascades of rye flowing right by the shadows of the Black Forest. When the Lord came to take your best-looking daughter for a private Maypole party. Here's what the Lord said: "Hey you! Serf! Ganpa Serf! Fetch me some of that butter. Fetch me that plump daughter; she's a barleycornfed lass. She will fetch me some pleasure, then I will cast her aside for the scullions to enjoy at the Manor. Fetch me a ladle of that potage. What's this? Is this a chunk of hare in the potage? You thieving Gandpa! The Medieval Rules clearly say that lowly serfs like you can have none of my graceful rodents. Illegal pottage. Fetch me a sword with which to disembowel you. Now you are dead. You were a faithful serf."

Yeah, Patsy. This was back in the day. Before freedom. Count yourself lucky. You see, Dinty Moore never needed to explain the beef in his stew.

Fetch me some sense!

Editor's Rant

2010-09-21T09:03:00.001-07:00

For 2.5 years or so, I've been editing for a self-publishing firm. Some of the books are good, some passable, but some are pure, rotting SHIT.

And this is shit that keeps on steaming, friends. Cause these good folks write books and stories, engorged with a passion for filling up the world with their lovely, broken-down ideas, cluttering bookshelves with pus, much like eight-legged frogs in Michigan and women's apparel made from pizza toppings and fucktours in graveyards.

However, I am an encouraging editor. I understand that Neil Young wants us all to keep on rockin in the fucking free world, and that includes all the Wombat McKenzies, Shortwit Joneses and Apple Oranges who want to see their stories and ideas in print. If I come across a vapid character, I politely suggest that the writer provide some dimension to make that character interesting. When a character suddenly sticks her head out, with no context, I don't write "Sticks her head out of what? What, is she a fucking turtle? If she's not a turtle, you must be one, cause you and turtles have about the same corn syrup ideas about writing a book!"

No. I am a professional.

I will not inform these writers that they put the "less" in hopeless. I will not tell them that they've turned creativity into a negative energy. I will not tell them that their books cannot even be helped by sewage treatment plants. I will not write, "John Lennon would laugh at you!" I do not ask them if I can use their vacant heads for storage next time I have to move. I will not even write, "So! YOU'RE the one who bought those new clothes from the Emperor!"

No. I am a professional.

A professional idiot.

Give me motley. Give me a cockscombe and I'll pull my rainbow wand from my ass, then dance and sing through your fucked February imagination. I have ascorbic acid for your scurvy sentences and prosthetics for your paraplegic paragraphs. Welcome to fucking first grade. Put that apple back in your pocket.

I fucking hate apples.

Achieving Polite Nirvana/ Room Wanted

2010-09-14T18:28:00.001-07:00

Achieving Polite Nirvana/ Room Wanted

About an hour ago I sat down in front of the Bizarro Factory and plugged my iPod into my ears to listen to some mind-moving tunes. See, this usually drifts me one thousand doorways away where my flesh is gone, but I forgot to lock the doorway of my apartment.

A few moments into the drifting, I heard a thump during a song with no percussion. Pulling the headphones out of my ears, I swiveled around to see that a man and woman had entered my apartment. She was wrapped in black cellophane and wore a rainbow baseball cap. He was dressed in a fine silk suit, but it was on backwards. I could tell they were angry with one another, so I hesitated. It's important to be aware of others' feelings.

He switched on the corner lamp by the door and plunged an accusatory finger into her breastbone. "!regoR ni depparw eb ot tiaw ouY !thginot hguone ton si citsalP"

"Oh, that trick is getting old, Bob! The party's over! Stop talking backwards! I want nothing to do with Roger. He thinks he's an amphibian."

I spoke up. "Excuse me, can I he . . ."

The woman glared at me. "Can't you see we're having a discussion!"

Bob's stare returned me to my seat. "How rude!" he said. "Lock the door, Marjory, and come sit down on the couch." Marjory bolted shut my door and followed Bob to my amputated sofa. They squabbled for a bit, and I tried so hard to zone out their conversation, but it was loud and juicy and I caught things like "giraffe", "rubber-band ball", "scientific calculator" and "Peter Travers." Once the squabbling softened into polite discussion, I offered them some Halloween chocolate I never gave away.

"You want some chocolate? I don't like it myself."

Marjory looked at me like I was a BM that she'd forgotten to flush days ago. "Chocolate makes us agreeable. No thanks," she said. "Do you have any wine?"

"Of course! I have a nice Shiraz made in Wisconsin! Do you want glasses with or without stems?"

"With," said Marjory.

"Without," said Bob.

I poured the wine and gave them the bottle, then returned to the Bizarro Factory and pretended to be invisible. Not thirty minutes went by before they were sloshy and all over each other.

"Come on love, let's go to bed," said Marjory. "It's time to make a baby, and there's enough room here for a little one."

Bob sucked in a growl. "!yletulosbA" He rose and picked her up, carrying her backwards into my bedroom. The door slammed shut. There were whispers and low laughter for a few minutes, then the door opened.

"Excuse me," said Marjory. "I think you should go. You've been here long enough as it is."

"But all my clothes are in that room," I said.

She looked me up and down. "What you've got on now looks pretty warm." She shut the door.

Luckily I have another sweater on a chair out here. It is the season of giving, right?

And I really like to walk.

Read more: http://www.myspace.com/filamentroad/blog#ixzz0zYcAcWfH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

2010-09-13T17:48:00.000-07:00

TODD AUSTIN HUNT’S BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Something Good to Eat” THE FORTEAN BUREAU 2003
“Thinking of Diane” LULLABY HEARSE 2004
“The Picker’s Harvest” NOCTURNAL OOZE 2005
SHADOWCAST AUDIO 2010
“Dr. Plato’s Surprise” BREATH AND SHADOW 2005
“The House Guest” DARK KRYPT 2005
“Auction” SINISTER TALES 2006
“What the Chickens Play Before Sunday” CHIMAERA SERIALS 2007
“The Old Ladies and their Beloved Children” ALIENSKIN MAGAZINE 2007
“Stuck” NEW GROWTH: RECENT KENTUCKY WRITINGS 2007 (2003 Honorable Mention Ray
Bradbury Writing Contest)
“No Travelcard” BREATH AND SHADOW 2007 (Nominated for Pushcart Prize)
“The Introduction of Phisto Realkind” ALIENSKIN MAGAZINE 2008
“Apparel for Hopelessness” SINISTER TALES 2008
“He Said Something” MORPHEUS TALES 1 2008
“A Confectionary Giant” ALIENSKIN MAGAZINE 2008
“Mural” WORDGATHERING 2008
“The Benefits of Public Transportation” FANTASTICAL VISIONS IV 2009
“I gave her the wrong flowers.” IT ALL CHANGED IN AN INSTANT: MORE SIX-
WORD MEMOIRS BY WRITERS FAMOUS AND OBSCURE 2010
“In a Community of Women” BARDS AND SAGES 2010
“At the Expense of Kings” MISSING PIECES 2010
“The Definition of a Line” SHADOWCAST AUDIO 2010
"Dirge in Alaska with an Organic Violin" BARDS AND SAGES QUARTERLY JULY 2011
"Inside the Actor's Studio" BOSLEY GRAVEL'S CAVALCADE OF TERROR JULY 2011
“The Little Girl Who Cried in the Back Room” SPACE AND TIME MAGAZINE
Forthcoming

Publishing News.

2010-06-12T18:02:00.000-07:00

For those of you who like my stories, I thought I should create and update a list of upcoming publications which will include my fiction.

NO YOU SHOULDNT YOU NEED TO CRAWL INTO A BADGER SET DRENCHED IN EARTHWORMS ASK THE BUS TO RUN YOU OVER AND DONATE TO FLATTENED LOSER MUSEUM GIVE UP WATER AND VISIT DEATH VALLEY WEARING NOTHING BUT A GALLON OF CORN WHISKEY IN YOUR HAND LEARN TO JUMP AT THE EDGE OF THE COOPER RIVER BRIDGE

Please shut up, Voice Who Hates Me.

Anyway:

August 2010 - at GenCon - "At the Expense of Kings" - DragonRoots Magazine Anthology

2010 - "The Definition of a Line" - Disgustipated Contest Winner - ShadowCastAudio

Late 2010/Early 2011 - "The Little Girl Who Cried in the Back Room" - Space and Time Magazine

IS THAT ALL? LOOKS LIKE YOUR ENGINE'S KAPUT, OR YOU'RE A DEAD TURTLE YOU NEED TO . . .

Again, shut up. Whitney Houston told me I should love myself.

More later, friends and volks.

Dream: The Mirror on the Balcony

2010-06-10T19:36:00.000-07:00

Dream June 9, 2010

The Mirror on the Balcony

I looked over the railing of the balcony and saw a vast ocean roiling 5280 feet below. The balcony floated, unsupported by any building. Filling up the horizon was a sizzling yellow sun, large and crude, as if drawn by a god with special needs.

I was here for the mirror. The tall mirror adorning the door that wasn’t there. It reflected the sun, multiplying the light and heat. I reached for the mirror, and a little boy stepped through, wearing a tank top and shorts. Instead of a hat, his head was covered by a janitor’s broom brush. He didn’t see me, but rushed past a table over to the railing to gaze at the water.

I saw the LADY on the other side of the mirror, peering at me. She knew what I wanted to do. I realized that the mirror was her favorite physical object in the universe, carried from generation from generation through the dying eyes of the MOTHERS to the DAUGHTERS. But the only reason I was here being to break the mirror. To crack to smash it, the desire like a dehydrated burning thirst for water in my throat.

A brick was in my hand.

The LADY clutched her face in her hands as I struck the looking glass again and again, shattering and pulverizing its surface. When just shards remained, the LADY walked through the door that wasn’t there. She wept, her eyes melting down her cheeks.

“Why have you done this? This was my window to eternity; this was my divine heirloom.”

I had no reason within my head for what I had done, other than I thought it might create something new.

She picked up broken pieces, trying to recreate the mirror on the table. She managed to assemble a crude circle with the slivers, and immediately images were apparent inside.

A huge crush of people moved through and down the alleyways and concourses of what appeared to be an Eastern Bazaar. All the vendors and all the buyers were angry, teeth pushed out of their snarling mouths. All the people were tall and morbidly obese, which meant that nearly all the space between individuals was used up. And while each enormous body appeared to be flesh and blood, heads and necks were composed of cheap fabric, with bulbous eyes of painted burlap. Some of these angriest banged their wrathful, puppet heads together.
One small figure raced through the endangered openings, hurrying for something, someone. She was a little girl, and her regal face resembled the LADY’s.

The LADY was shrieking now, screaming at the little girl within the circle. Distracted, the girl looked, which caused her to bump into two gargantuan women yelling at a cloth vendor. Their burlap eyes found the girl, and they rotated toward her, slinging back pillar-sized arms to slap the girl, but she had already begun to run again.
The women missed the girl and slapped each other. Upon contact, they howled and their swollen eyes turned black and red. Each hunched over and scrabbled for the little girl. The small one tried to flee, but they grasped her tightly and shook her in the air above their horrid faces, holding her around the neck and squeezing, biting at her poor feet. They wrung her neck until her lovely little head popped off. Gouts of red yarn, instead of blood, exploded from her severed neck and head.

The LADY wailed. I turned away from the broken shards and saw that she had a long pole in her hand, at the end of which was a wicked hook. Her face was now dry; her eyes intact. With a quick, brutal motion, she pounded the boy on the head with the hook, piercing the broom-brush hat.
The boy turned away from the ocean, his face broken in surprise and horror. He removed the rectangular broom handle from his head. Trickles of blood came down from his scalp. The LADY tapped his head again. This time, the blood fountained. The boy cried quietly and somersaulted backward off the railing into the water.

I tried to close my eyes, to block away the broken mirror, to conceal from my mind what the LADY was now doing with the hook.

She stabbed the sun. Stabbed it and punctured it and gouged it until its moving insides fell out into the ocean below.

Dream Over

Claremont

2010-05-22T10:29:00.001-07:00

Claremont, North Carolina (Don't Go There) Part 1

One can discover the genuine roots of a town by walking its streets at night.

But in the morning, the sun shines. A light breeze that doesn't smell like death blows through the parking lot of Wilma's Barbecue Restaurant. It smells like nothing. Although it's early in the morning, the lot is full. Citizens will break their fast only at Wilma's. A cartoon pig on a sign benevolently looks down at the lot. This pig is gleaming happy and does not hold the knife and fork displayed by the Cannabalistic Barbecue Sign Pigs across the Southeast. This pig was drawn just before they told him the True Meaning of a Pig's Life.

Eggs and sausage and bacon and pancakes and delicious pan fried potatoes are eaten while laughter strikes around the dining room like vitamin C lightning. Nobody vomits. Laughter encouraged by coffee, but not addicted to it.

If the owner sees the scarecrow hanging from the ceiling fan, he should start playing poker.

Citizens walk in and citizens walk out. What a beautiful day. What a beautiful restaurant. What a beautiful town. Breakfast may be over at 9, but different parts of the surprised pig are served well after the horizon digests the sun.

But the night in Claremont treats the day like a favored but retarded child. When it's bedtime, it's off to bed for day in the dark folds of night to slobber in a pillow and dream about raindrops on the stove.

Wilma's is closed. Interstate 40 roars like the rush of blood in the ear.

In the darkness, it's time to walk.

Writing Assignment

2010-05-06T12:55:00.001-07:00

ENG 101
Fall 3051

The genetic scientists sat around the conference table watching the vid displaying images from the colonized planet of Yartopia. Their eyes reflected the horrors that flashed by, and their mouths sagged open, struck witless by what the Banana Constable of Space and Some Drive-Ins had brought to them. They watched a native of Yartopia being beaten to death on a basketball court by three fishermen. The weapon, a frozen leg of lamb signed by Roald Dahl. An albino Duckman gleefully dropping cannonballs from the roof of the Ossified Bone Tower on unsuspecting civilians below. A woman, crying hysterically, strapped down to a table while three bald men dressed in Barberstripes shaved her head. A little boy with violet eyes holding up a Heroin Snack Bar with his magic pea-shooter, screeching, "Gimme smack, gimme smack, smack, smack, smack." A city exploding into nothing. All very bad things. The vid ended, and the Banana Constable stepped up onto the table wearing a very grave expression underneath his rainbow kerchief.
"You see, gentlemen and women, Yartopia is in chaos. It will soon be devoured in its own muck, unless you create the ultimate cyborg to send as an emissary and leader to assuage the sin of Yartopia. I cannot go, because I haven't had lunch, but you must put your minds together and come up with ten characteristics, four of which are super, with which to program the cyborg to save Yartopia. Good luck!" The Banana Constable danced the teapot dance and disappeared for lunch. The scientists are you. Get to it.

Bucketdream

2010-04-27T10:50:00.000-07:00

Dream

I walked south, sunshine piercing my eyes, encouraging growth to the young wrinkles at the corners. Ahead was a sprawling apartment complex shifting like shadows of trees along a traveled highway. I was looking for somebody, engorged with an angry happiness. I didn't know why I felt this way. Upon rising out of thought, I found myself surrounded by the complex. Screams of children, barks of turtles( I know that turtles don't bark, but the dream was master) thrummed within my ears. I smelled beef being cooked and didn't feel hungry.
The individual apartments weren't so strange. Balconies and sliding glass doors on each one, the bottom floor open, a stone path leading to each slab of cement. But trying to look at all of them simultaneously made me dizzy. They connected to each other in a mazelike fashion, spiraling around each other, several levels high, connected by rope bridges with wooden slats.
I went around a corner and singled out an apartment on the ground floor. It was that one! I knew it! Running onto the patio I yanked open the sliding glass door. The air inside was so cold, snow fell when it came in contact with the heat outside.
Inside, the TV was on. Three women sat side by side on a very small couch. One was a woman I worked with two years ago. I hadn't seen her in a year and a half, but she smiled at me as if that time was five minutes ago.
"Hey, Todd. How are you?"
"I'm good," I said, just standing there, obsessively hating these obligatory greetings uttered every day. "How are you?"
"I'm good. How are you?"
I didn't say anything. I knew if I did I would be there forever. Instead, I noticed that her daughter sat in the middle. She was a big, tall girl who smiled at me frozenly, as if by the air or by the enormity of her infatuation with me.
The woman on the right was grotesquely fat. I had never seen her before. Even in the sterile cold her unyielding stink offended me. The end of the wooden sofa on the left was an inch higher than her side. She ignored me.
I took all three of them in a glance, feeling sourly disappointed. I was not looking for these women.
"I have to go. Bye."
She tried to pull me into her circle again. "Bye, Todd. You have a good day." The last syllable rose in pitch, expecting a response. I shut the door. I began to curse, and the viciousness of my language wounded the air around my head. Blood pattered on my shoulders, my arms. I shrieked, terrified, and ran down an enclosed corridor summoned from thin air by my fear. A small ramp at the end halted at the cross-section of one of the bridges. My chest slammed into the wooden slats, and the bridge swayed lazily. I looked down. The tips of my boots protruded over a white abyss. The bridge stretched the length of it, for the width was insignificant.
Several loud barks startled me and I glanced up to see an enormous dog running ahead of four others on the other side of the gap. They ran through thick grass of an untended lawn, around several vehicles bereft of wheels. The lead dog was bigger than a donkey, and its teeth made its head seem shrunken. An old man sat on a concrete block, yelling, "Get that shitblister, Bucket! Get him for coming round here!"
I started to back up, but Bucket growled and leapt onto the bridge, sinking its teeth into my forearm.
"Oh, God! Let go of me! It hurts!"
My stomach began to ache from the pain, and the old man, laughed, farted, laughed, farted. "How's he taste, Bucket? He taste good enough for me?"
Bucket made a noise. The top half of his body hung over the rope railing. I forced myself to look at my arm and gasped. No blood. Bucket's teeth had sunk in the flesh clean, as if I was made of clay.
"Sir, please call your dog off. I didn't mean to come down this way. I'm just looking for somebody."
"Bucket, don't eat him all up. Save some for me!"
I would get no help from that guy.
Gritting my teeth, I jerked my arm down, causing Bucket to flip over the rope and fall into the gap. His tremendous weight threatened to pull me with it, but my arm ripped away and the abyss swallowed the dog. The other dogs barked and jumped after their leader.
My forearm was gone, but the stump was smooth and pink, as if a year had passed.
The old man screamed. "Bucket's gone! I can't walk around in his head no more! Gone!" He got up from the block and began to run toward me. Each step shook the ground, my body, like a train. I pirhouetted and bolted up the ramp through the corridor, emerging into wonderful sunlight. The shaking had stopped and immediately I felt safe from any danger. I stood in grass in some sort of courtyard. A parking lot was in the middle, hosting a single mustang covertible. In front of the parking lot was a couch. Sight of the couch coaxed out overwhelming exhaustion, and I sighed and ran, jumping on it, falling asleep at once.
The sound of women's throaty laughter and whistles woke me. Four gorgeous black women sat in the Mustang, staring at me with aggressive smiles. Still half-asleep, I raised my left hand and gave them one of the grins that work. They whistled louder and the car backed up and left the lot.
My right stub bristled with needles from having been slept on. I sat up and shook it. As the circulation energized, my forearm and hand coalesced before my eyes. To me, it was ordinary. Another cup of coffee, another blink.

2010-03-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

My bones in a pawn shoppe

Overlooked by one who loved me

Discounted

Because the marrow's gone.

Nightmare

2010-03-17T12:32:00.000-07:00

Nightmare January 29, 2003

The nurse opened the door for me into the dark room. It was bright outside, but the light from the hallway was blunted fiercely by the inner darkness. I stepped into the room, unquestioning, and it was shut quietly behind me, manufacturing a quiet breeze against the nape of my neck.
In the dark, my shoes glowed, and my feet within them moved of their own accord. They led me to an aluminum folding chair. I sat down, and my left elbow smacked against the corner of the room. My shoes faded just as the front wall of the room was illuminated. The entire wall was covered by a white projector screen. The light allowed me to see that others were in the room with me. Clustered at the other side of the room, far away, were all the women I had been involved with in my life. They stared as one at the screen, feeding me only with their profiles. They were silent.
The screen flickered, and although I could see no projector, a slide came on. My heart jumped. It was me when I was six years old. I was small, with long, curly hair. A long-fingered hand held my arm. My mother’s. Another calloused hand rested on my shoulder, dwarfing me. My father’s. I was lying on a gurney and I looked terrified. Four brutish hands gripped the rails of my gurney.
My six-year old voice emerged from the still picture, freezing me. “Nooooo, nooooo,” it screamed.
The slide changed and I involuntarily jerked backward. My child-image was encased in two barbed platforms, stomach down, facing away from me. In an operation room. The image was three-dimensional, and my feet poked out into the dark viewing room. They spasmed. The four mean hands that had been holding the rails now all held sharp tools, which pressed into an unseen wound in my back. The picture moved crudely, hands stabbing, my body twitching in pain. My young voice continued to scream while the image unmercifully switched to a close-up of what the hands were doing to my back.
My spinal cord was open and four scalpels poked and jerked at the jell-like discs of my vertebrae. Amid my soft shrieks, I heard the doctors’ shadowy laughter. The image changed from the wound to me lying down to the tortured wound again. Back and forth first slowly, then the change quickened into a flash that bathed the viewing room in a wild light.
The pain became mine. I felt their cruel investigations chewing at my lower back and I bucked sideways, knocking over the chair and falling on the floor. I opened my mouth to scream and it emerged not as an adult’s, but the weary, horrified lament of a six-year old.
“Noooo, Noooo.” It said.
The screen blackened, and the agony left me. I sat up, disoriented, and another image arrived. I gasped. It was me, eight years old, staring directly at me. I don’t know how I recognized myself. The child’s hair was long, black, dirty and straight. His eyes were pinched, and underlined by thick stripes of coal exhaustion. He was starved, skin between his ribs like flesh runnels. Grotesque, ancient scars swallowed his entire upper body. He sat down, shoulders slumped. His attention on me was frozen, permanent.
Something moved at the four corners of the screen. Points emerging first, blades following, handles, then the wicked, gripping hands. Syrup’s progress, lazy but inevitable, coming for more.
I glanced to the right and noticed the women were staring at me. They opened their mouths in unison:
“So that’s why,” they said. “That’s why.”

Dream: Uninvited Refrigerator Cleaner

2010-03-17T12:30:00.000-07:00

I woke up early this morning to the whining sounds of a baby crying. I opened my eyes and noticed commotion in the kitchen. The pretty neighbor who lives above me stood in the doorway to my bedroom, carrying a sack of what appeared to be black feed. She spilled a little bit on the floor in front of my bookshelf, then came to my bedside. One of my eyes was still glued shut by sleep, but I noticed she was dressed slick, pressed blouse and business skirt. She gave me a dazzling smile and said, “Remember that Francis account I was talking about once last month?”
And I was thinking, WTF? How did she get into my apartment? What the hell is she talking about as if I would know? But, the girl was very pretty. So I nodded, sitting up in bed. “Well,” she continued. “The deal went through, and now I can do anything I want. Come look.” I got out of bed and followed her into my livingroom. A well groomed dog sat on my reading chair, making that whining sound. My kitchen was brilliantly clean. My neighbor said, “Because you’re so nice, and never complain to the man about my baby crying, I decided to come down and clean out your refrigerator.” She made a sour face. “It was disgusting.” I opened the fridge and noticed it was unusually clean, but she had somehow switched the freezer section to the bottom. Also, the entire appliance was filled with individual bottles of Corona in wet paper bags. I shut the fridge. “I was wondering,” she said. “If you could watch my baby while I go to Citibank.” I turned to the chair and the dog had transformed into a chubby baby that looked like my nephew. She grabbed him and put him in my arms. “For how long?” I asked. “I’ll be gone for a few minutes.” Grabbing her purse, she stepped outside and got into her car, which had “EUROPE OR BUST” painted on the back.
The baby cried.
Dream Over.

Limerick

2010-03-04T08:33:00.001-08:00

There was a young lass from Manchester

She’d lift her skirts if ye asked her

For a penny or two

Her skivvies off too

And soon she’s in her second trimester

Nonsense.

2010-01-12T19:18:00.000-08:00

They were captains at war, listening to nothing but screams. Majordomo, majordomo! Each in a floatboat made of rubberfoam and painted with the blood of the favorite children in symbols understood only by those dead for a thousand years. Between them a mountain of salt water, obscuring their view of each other, raised up by a hesitant leviathan, unsure of itself, frozen by hunger, self-rebuke and indecision. All the soldiers were dead, but because war was their only recognizable business, each was recycled a hundred times to try out new strategies of murder devised by majordomo, majordomo. All the gold was used up, all the precious rocks and fat from the ground, but the captains whispered into the air new laws to ensure that murder was its own end. And so this bubble drifted away from the heart of God and scraped against the wall of the universe until it finally slipped through. To a cavern unbeknownst to language.

Broken Stone

2010-01-05T15:03:00.000-08:00

Uncover the broken stone. Take not a basket of fruit to your enemies. Deceit drips most lively from a peach. They will tell you to look away from the broken stone. They will tell you to enjoy the juice of the peach with closed eyes. We are peach vampires and sunshine has lost its patience. The juice will run dry, and with vision shut, you will uncover a broken stone.

Marchdream.

2009-12-06T11:20:00.001-08:00

3-11-08

Dream: Stowaways in the sky force us to have an annoyingly extensive family reunion in a department store on a boat. Part 1.

Although I stood on the broad, cobalt steps of a Library, unwavering bastion of knowledge, the world listed and I listed with it. The tired pits under my eyes were deep and scraping the hollows of my neck. O, give me sleep! Give me sustenance! Give me equilibrium! Give me self-forgiveness!

Aside from the colored steps of the Library, the rest of my surroundings were bleached white. A round, black car came around the corner. The driver was an old friend of my brother's, a very intelligent stoner. Without stopping his vehicle, he stuck his hay-colored head out the window and shouted, "There is no cavern more wide, as filled with horrifying time than sobriety."

Before he turned the other corner, he said, "I will have been around this block a million times."

The world shifted, throwing me like a wooden doll to the right, past the corner of the Library where I smashed against the great, white wall that surrounded the road. I rose on vertiginous legs in a vapid corner. Far along the road, beyond buildings with scraped-away faces, opened automated doors. Laughter emerged from the doors, laughter sharing the notes of my own hidden joy, laughter of my family. At the crest of that hilarity walked a nun. Her black skirt moved briskly with her pace. She approached me, her eyes blazing with alarm. I moved like a struggling drunk, dancing to a tune nobody else could hear. I held up my hand to stop her advance. Without opening my mouth, I said, I don't plan to die. I only want to sleep.

She stopped. I collapsed in the corner.

Skydream

2009-11-20T13:50:00.000-08:00

Dream 9-17-08

This one was a wonker. I kept waking up and thinking the dream was a subconscious dramatic presentation of my story, “Auction,” but it was something totally different.

My family and friends were enjoying the pool, which of course had sprawled to massive proportions, with terraces and lighted balconies overlooking a dark and deep creek below. Lines of old, behemoth trees canopied the creek. We were having a pool party at night. Stars in incomprehensible patterns crowded the sky. Somebody asked, “Whose stars are these?”

While everyone enjoyed the pool and the wet bar which was situated in an alcove below the high-dive, I sat in an upright chair reading a paperback book containing one of my stories. A jolt of horror struck me as I saw something drifting down from the night sky and landing on the deck of the pool. I read a sentence in my story and felt a chill enter the back of my neck and slide all the way down to freeze my balls.

“Everyone stop,” I shouted. “Listen to me!”

The laughing and talking was absorbed in a shocked silence. I didn’t shout much.

“I know this ends unless we do something about it.” I pointed to a sheet of the debris on the deck. It looked like a swath of cloth. “Everyone must shred that stuff and throw little pieces in the pool. If we don’t, the beginning of the end of the world starts here tonight.”

My aunt walked over with a concerned look on her face. “What are you reading?”

“It’s one of my stories.”

“But it’s not the Bible. That stuff on the deck is mere Starshed. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She turned and dove into the pool.

Immediately I could see that most of the faces staring at me were blank with either disbelief or fear of me. My brother and friends of his were talking in the wet bar, and they got up to investigate the debris. My brother believed in me. I threw the book down and grabbed a piece of the fiber. It had the texture of imitation crabmeat.

“Like this,” I said and ripped it into small pieces and threw them into the pool. My brother and friends frantically followed suit. While we rushed to tear up all the debris, the party resumed with drunken, careless laughter. Many of the small pieces were thrown back on the deck in irritation.

Someone shrieked. Near the darkness of the wetbar, one of the pieces that had been tossed out of the pool had shifted and ballooned. It whiplashed back and up into a thin curve like a capital C, then assumed a knotted form with a flattened head filled with too many carnivorous teeth. Its shifting happened faster than thought. While we stared on like grains of salt in oil, the thing jerked out a claw and snatched a little cousin of mine. Her arm was ripped off by the force and the world erupted in shrieks and static crackles from all over the deck from the debris not shredded or thrown out of the pool.

They crackled and shifted and I MOVED.

“Hurry! Cover them with water! WATER!”

We scrambled across the deck, kicking the forms into the pool, where they lost shape and fizzled out. I snatched a pint glass from one of my uncles and dipped it into the pool, splashing the water on the one which had grabbed my cousin. Its form retreated into shapelessness as it chewed on the arm, leaving her in a puddle of blood. Its form fizzled in a shape of a softball trying to be something else. I grabbed it, revolted by the writhing beneath my fingers, and kneeled on the deck, immersing it in the water, where the writhing slowed and stopped. I released it and watched it dissolve in the pool.

My brother and his friends had cornered the last of the ambitious fragments, sweeping all of them into the pool. The father of my cousin held his daughter and glared at me. “How did you know this was going to happen? What did you write in that book?”

More shouts. “Why didn’t you try harder to convince us to do what you said?”

My brother shouted, “Look at the stars! Oh my God, they’ve TRIPLED!”

The sky was bristling with strange pinpricks. Each pinprick dribbled a little more madness into me. A closer light arced across above, followed by a storm of lazy debris. My bowels clutched. I picked up my book and read the only sentence that made sense to me, the only thing that could possibly help us. But I didn’t know why.

“Down the creek they floated, wherein the canopied darkness strange death does not know.”

We started down to the creek, and for the first time in my life, with rancor and resistance in my heart, I was leading the way.

Dream: The dogspirit and the inorganic plant

2009-10-27T11:32:00.000-07:00

Dream.

I’m laying in bed when the property maintenance guy comes in to fix my air-conditioner.

“I’m sleeping,” I tell him.

“That’s okay,” he says.

My apartment has been reversed. He starts moving furniture and boxes, and pulls out a vacuum cleaner. What this will do to repair the cooling system, I do not know. Of course, the noise disturbs my sleep, so I escape into a deeper room my dream has invented to play a video game.

The sound of cleaning is replaced with ripping and tearing.

“Boy, you’re a loud maintenance guy,” I say.

He walks through the threshold, whose frame now looks as though it has been gnawed on by a colossal mouse. With a self-satisfied smile bigger than my face, he gestures for me to follow. I oblige.

Hanging from the ceiling on the other side of the door is a massive, sprawling, inorganic plant. The flowers are a dripping purple, and I can see the vines are composed of what appears to be wire-casing. The vines race across the ceiling and walls.

“I’ve found it!” he says. “And it’s 12 miles long. 12 miles long!”

I fall on my back, passing out, and when I open my eyes, the maintenance man and the inorganic plant are gone. All is quiet and clean. The carpet is furnitureless and bare. Still, I watch the door, waitng for something, someone.

A fur-lined coat is hanging by the door. In this breezeless room, the arm of the coat lifts and points in my direction. From inside my apartment comes child’s laughter and the padding of a dog’s feet on the floor. Suddenly, I am being licked in the face by the ghost of a dog I can’t see.

The licking stops and I stand up, using the counter for support.

A gun is in my hand and it is pointed at the ceiling. It fires, blasting a hole above. I am stricken with terror at what I have done, because the hole is where my neighbor always stands. Blood pours through the hole; it comes like a fountain, pooling on the floor and then covering it. The level of the blood is rising, rising.

“I cannot swim in blood,” I say.

Dream Over

New Recipe: Rhinoceros Pancake

2009-10-04T16:30:00.000-07:00

Rhinoceros Pancake

Ingredients

1 Rhinoceros
1 Field of sweetgrass
1 salt block
1 sugarlump

FIRST, MAKE FRIENDS WITH THE RHINO! IF NOT, HE WILL BE NERVOUS ABOUT
YOU FOLLOWING HIM AROUND WITH A SKILLET AND A BATTERY-POWERED
HOTPLATE, AND HE WILL PROBABLY TRY TO KILL YOU! TELL HIM HE HAS A
FINE NOSE. RHINOS ARE SELF-CONSCIOUS ABOUT THAT.

Be patient throughout the day. Bring plenty of sunscreen, because you
will be in Africa and it is hot there. Make sure the rhino consumes
the salt and sugar as well as plenty of grass and water. Offer him
other spices for varying tastes, BUT NOT CAYENNE PEPPER BECAUSE THE
RESULTS OF THIS WILL BE HORRIFYING! Your patience will eventually pay
off with an exceedingly large pancake.

Ten seconds on both sides. Serve to lunatics.

Mexican Notepad Story

2009-10-03T15:20:00.000-07:00

I found this piece of paper between some books as I was packing to move. Just a tiny thing I must've written in Jalisco a few years ago:

He found the stain. It was underneath the rafters, between rusted ends of nails, and the spikes were too close together, preventing him from scratching it out with his sandpaper hands.

He swung his legs in irritation.

Crackers.

2009-09-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

Monday, November 12, 2007

Stupid Things on Packaged Foods.

I bought a box of crackers today and I'm really struggling with the message on the back of the box. It says: "Celebrate the Season with Rachael Ray and Nabisco crackers."

To whom is this addressed? The collective consumer, or me in particular? If it's just me, I don't know what to say. That's kind of a big jump to tell a guy to change his holiday plans and spend them instead with Rachael Ray and a box of crackers. I mean, she's kind of pretty and is rich and all, but what will we talk about? Right now, the only thing we have in common is that box of crackers. I imagine the box of crackers will stand on a stool between me and Rachael in my apartment. I'll have to buy the stool, because I don't have one. We'll kind of stare at one another over the crackers, not saying anything. It wouldn't be so bad if the crackers could talk, but hey, that's probably asking too much. Maybe Rachael'll be dressed like an elf. She'll look around my spare, bachelor flat in disgust, then look in my refrigerator and think I drink too much beer.
Can't I invite anyone else? And what about her? Doesn't she have a boyfriend, or a husband? She must be pretty damn dedicated to those fucking crackers to give up Christmas with her family to spend it with me.
Honestly, I don't think it's a good idea. I'm certainly not looking forward to it.

2009-09-11T09:46:00.001-07:00

There are some girls
About whom I can no longer dream
My ascetic advocate
Spears those fancies
Halfway through the reel
Lays them on the night-grass
Under whatever proffered moon
And while I watch the mist rise
The age of morning perforates my hope
Prophesied by circling carrion birds
Dawn's reflection on feathers black
Come to feast on the impaled dream
Which is no longer mine.

Sailing

2009-05-02T10:25:00.000-07:00

Cursor said I was a liar. I am a plague. My mind is punctuation. I have drifted away from system vitality on a sea that wasn’t there.

Said Captain, “Welcome to my ship. You are a lad on the ladder to latter life. On this ship, you will be best friends with the corners of death. I suggest you drape those corners on your shoulders when you walk the deck. Be stately; allow the wind to spread death behind you like a cape. Allow the empty wind to make you beautiful for everyone who isn’t here.

“Because between the waves ridging this invisible ocean, the vacuum has imagined a vacancy so deep to render your memories into dead breezes. On this ship, we will be still. However, we are moving assuredly, and each pace you make on my deck will dissolve another bridge between the islands of your spirituality.”

I said that the sun was going down.

Said Captain, “To navigate my ship, I need not that close star nor the far away night shiners. They are gone, anyway. You are my chart. You are my path to darkness.”

Silence was then cradled in silence. A thieving wind billowed my cape, and the ship rolled on an absent salt-water abyss.