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!
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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