skip to the good part

So I saw a crazy pile of ants on my way home, and I composed an inane storyblog in my head, but I'm too depressed./lazy to actually commit it to writing so I thought I would just boil it down to the three lines I liked.

1. I wish I was that small. Lord knows I've felt it before, in shame, in pettyness... in the one that follows the other.

2. I step over the pile, as careful as a new Buddhist.

3. I wonder what compelled them up. Perhaps some rampagine earthworm below, or dropped cupcake above, long since carried away, maybe just a celebration of the moon, which tonight peeks through the clouds, looking like some veiled gypsy bride.

Fin.

compromises

I make bargains with God. I used to just ask for things. Two things, alternately.
Make me happy. Make me skinny. Make me happy. Make me skinny.
Boys wear depression better than they do body image disorders.

The problem is, I never trusted God.
I've watched too many episodes of the Twilight Zone.
I get struck by an oncoming truck. A happy idiot. A skinny paraplegic.

I bargain with God.
Happiness. Attractiveness. Productivity. Health.
I want to contribute to the greater good, but I want people to want to fuck me too. Give me three of those four things, and I will devote my life to making art, and things of beauty in your name. Maybe it's not a fair trade.

Another weekend pays the bills.

I spun music at a pub, and I didn't ask for any drinks until I was sure that people liked me. I went home drunk, but I didn't make any art.

I played the songs people requested.
Songs I thought I'd left behind with the last century.

Disturbed.
311.
Eagle Eye Cherry.
Buckcherry.

These aren't my jams, but I was able to put em all together alright.
Maybe God will answer my prayers, because it seems like the one thing I have to offer, is timing.

a draft from last night's workshop

There's a town in South America, one of those unincorporated villages where the stores have no walls, the doctors are all magicians, and the people can only move north. Of course they have all the traditional moving extremities. Feet. Rollerskates. Tractors. Physically, they can move in any direction that they'd like, but there's something about the town, something to do with lay lines, the Equator, magnetic poles and the way they affect brainwaves, that keep the people from moving anywhere but North of their own volition.

The people there are rarely disappointed wqith life because everything carries a sense of inevitability. Everyone has had that experience where they see someone on the street, or at a dance or bazaar, and they get that feeling in the pit of their stomach, it could be love or lust, but sometimes it's more than that, it's that feeling that this person is the one that's going to change their life in the way that their life is supposed to change, and they can never go to them.

My life is full of that, furniture decorated elegantly with notches for the ones that got away, and then reduced to splinters by notches representing the ones that never were. Like most people in this day, age and hemisphere, one not just of feet, rollerskates, and tractors but nuclear power, personal computers, and infinite regret, my stumbling blocks are mental, a fear of the imagined inevitable, so I drink my beer, sweep the sawdust into a pile in the corner, throw a mattress on top, and go to sleep. And I connive. I strategize. I invent reasons to meet someone where I don't have to tell them why I'm talking to them, I read and learn things in order to know a little about a lot, to have an opinion, a reason to butt in and expound.

In the town where people can only move North, a man may see a woman on the street and call to her, "You are beautiful, and I would like to know your name in case I see you again," and charmed or disgusted, her only option is to turn her head and respond before walking away, in the same direction as the man but too far apart to ever touch.

In this town, whose tribal name means nothing on my tongue but translates to The Place Where The People All Are Looking Toward God Always, the people trust each other. A person can turn a person, physically with their hands, to the shoulders or waist, in any direction. Once turned, a person can walk a straight line; away from God, askew from God, but possibly towards love, or home, or personal ruin, unril theuy fall asleep. In the morning, waking up, in a room with no walls, atop one of the beds that line the streets like bars and lampoasts here, stand and go North.

If a man and a woman and another see each other on the street, and the man has that feeling about the woman, or maybe that mysterious other, he will call out to her and she will respond, and put a set of variables into place. It is up to her now, to respond to the man or the other, to send them off in the same direction as herself, for better or worse, or to respond in kind, and ask the other to send the man to her, or her to him, to go off together.

In most cases, the other will oblige, but sometimes, when he or she is as cruel as the people you and I are likely to see on the street today, he can willfully keep them apart.

There's something about rejection there, the type of soul crushing rejection that keeps two people from being able to walk together towards God, where one must choose to go askew and the other must help them, that I find truly charming in the place where people can only move North, and look always in the direction of God, where even in rudeness, even in deceit, ecen in jealousy and selfishness, with fingertips pressed into shoulders or waist, that even in rejection, two people must embrace.

There is another word they have there, that makes an inelegant slug of my tongue when I try to say it, and poached, limping beasts of my fingers as I try to type it, that has no English synonym. Bo-Ouighyow, which translates roughly to, a little tango that means good bye.


[Currently listening to Gza's Liquid Swords]

Dispatches from the End of the World

Day 21. Three Weeks.

I always thought we would go out in a bang. Maybe it was probably all those lies we've been fed all these years about creation in seven days, or the fact that I never really understood the theory of the Big Bang, but I thought we would end just as fast as we'd begun. Nuclear holocaust. The explosion of the sun. The explosion of the Earth. Instead we're just fading away, little by little, like guests at some overlong party.

Life hasn't changed that much, but I guess there isn't much of a jump from unemployment to quarantine.

On quiet days we're able to run out to the garden, rip out as many plants as we can and repot them on the deck. We've got mint, for mojitos, as long as the rum lasts. The tomatos are coming in better than we'd imagined, when we first saw them sprouting out of the weeds.

We drink. We smoke the hookah. We read books. We watch movies. We go on MySpace to see who's left, and we write.

I guess you could call it a meme, but I've never felt a meme before. The first day, three bulletins: I'm here.

The second day, one hundred bulletins: I'm here.
The third and fourth days, five hundred bulletins apiece: I'm here.
The fifth day: Four hundred and ninety seven bulletins.
The sixth day: Four hundred and seventy bulletins.
The seventh day: Four hundred and thirty three.

One week. Enough time to create a whole new world. The twenty-first day, noon: Just a little over two hundred bulletins, with probably another hundred before nightfall.

xx0xx: I'm here.
Party Pauper: I'm here.
Dori, an online friend from who I've only met once in person: I'm here.
Soul~Namaste, who is now ChiIll Zombie Hunter: I'm here.
Reverend Chyna is losing her Mind Alone: Still lost. Still here.

I read each one, or at least, I look to see who's left. The game has gone from having the most friends, to having the most friends alive. I never thought I'd be blogging with the world literally crumbling around me, but there's not really much left to do.

The power grids held. The water still runs, even if we've got no gas to heat it. Phones are down.

Martial law isn't as bad as I thought it would be, mostly cause I'm not leaving the house. On the first day, when real people still outnumbered the ghouls, we rioted. We looted. Power strips, canned goods, DVDs, beer, pills, paper. I got a lot of paper. I got a lot of paper and nice pens. No one will take them from me, not yet. There's no run on paper.

Romance. There's two sides to it. There always is. I run through a roster of girls I always wanted to fuck but never did. I think about how Sarah was more and more, trying to get me to consider living with her. If I'd felt ready then, we'd been together now.

Sarah always hated zombie movies, even the joke ones. She'd see that wide shot of that street, lined with people that aren't people anymore. She'd look over at me and tell me that she wouldn't be able to do it. She'd just off herself. So far she hasn't. More than anything else I've ever seen, it leads me to believe she has hope. Maybe she's just too afraid to do it. Maybe she's just too afraid to do it alone. We tell each other we love each other. We tell each other how much food we have left. We recount the distance between our houses. Twenty minutes by car. An hour by bike. An hour and a half by train. Three or four hours walking. An eternity.

The government tried to institute a draft. No one listened. Armored trucks went door to door for a week, building an army of people too scared to stay at home, or to brave for their own good. Our neighborhood gang takes care of us. Some variant of the Latin Kings. Folks nation. They shoot their way to California twice a week for the meeting. Three hours to get out of our house and talk to other humans. It's like a cross between a neighborhood watch meeting, a swap shop, and a singles mixer. Everyone is just so scared and lonely.

It's hot. I'm sweaty, and I'm glad that I have more clothes than I'll ever need, so I don't have to wash them that much. The casual encounters on Craigslist are still desperate and hilarious. People reaching out just to find someone in their building.

Guns for Ass - M4W - Homer St at Western
LOOKING FOR COMPANIONSHIP - W4? - 1517 W SHERWIN - LETS GET 2GETHER

It's my parent's house. They're doing alright. My uncle Lee sets the computer up for Bubbe to write a letter each week, and then sends the email. She still lights candles every Shabbos, on her Christian daughter-in-law's table. She still has faith. She wants us

Turn up the faucet and you can't hear the screams.
Turn up a movie and you can't hear the screams.
Turn up your music and you can't hear the screams.
Fire up a porno and you can't hear the screams.

Autumn's listening to Duane Eddy. I'm listening to Ghostface Killah.
The woman below us is fucking her husband like there's no tomorrow. The woman below her is holding her dogs and crying.
The birds still start chirping at three in the morning.

The bubbles gather in the tub under the faucet. The smoke plumed out of my mouth and gathers at the ceiling. As it passes by the window, I realize it must be beautiful out today.