Letters from the Future

OMG Everything Sucks OMG Everything Sucks - DRAFT TWO

2012-02-20T22:51:00.000-05:00

OMG Everything Sucks

DRAFT TWO

Narrator - This is Felix Grace. Felix Grace has a lot of this [piles of money] and a lot of this [clock ticking].

And consequently spent the last six years doing a lot of this [drunk party] and this [drunk party in fountain] and this [throwing up somewhere funny] and this [riding an ostrich].

As far as everyone who knew Felix thought, Felix had spent the last six years here [columbia] doing this [Felix in the library] and this [Felix studying at a desk] and this [felix in a graduation gown and cap with a diploma].

These things were not entirely true. Another thing that was not entirely true was the story that Felix was telling his girlfriend, Maggie.

[Felix Grace holding a coffee in one hand and cell phone in the other while driving his car]

Felix - I'll be back in Brooklyn tonight. I told you. I have to get some things at my parents house before we leave. [Maggie (VO)- what things?] Some papers, birth certificate, stuff like that.

[Cut to Maggie, Maggie is in silhouette with Vincent illuminated in the background facing camera with slicked back black hair and a mustache and a cigarette hanging from a huge grin while hula hooping ]

Maggie - well, how long are you going to be gone?

Felix - I fu- I told you at lunch - just a few hours.

Vincent - who's on the ringer Mags?

Felix - What's that? Who's there with you?

Maggie- oh just vincent

Felix - vincent? what's he doing there?

Maggie - you should come out with us

Felix - No, I've been on the road for three hours I can't just turn around. Why is vincent there?

Maggie - oh you know, he just showed up

Felix - uh huh, how long's he been there,

Maggie - oh, you know

Felix - uh huh. Thats great. no thats thats thats just great - really.

Maggie - Well, I have to to go - Vincent's taking me to the new Sophia Copalla film - [Maggie hangs up]

Felix - Maggie. Maggie. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. [starts dialing, waits for ringing 9annoying ringtone?)] Vincent!

Vincent - What's up pal?

Felix - Vincent what the fuck are you doing over there? Oh yeah? Hello? [Looks up] Fuck!. [slams breaks drops phone spills coffee] Fuck! what's this? [shot of traffic jam]

Short INTRO / THEME SONG

Felix - Vincent! [slams breaks drops phone spills coffee] Fuck! what's this? [shot of traffic jam] [Knock on window by Dylan Felko]

Felko - hey douch bag

Felix - Christ, Felko. [puts auto window up]

Narrator - Dylan Felko and Felix Grace had not left on good terms. [Cut to Felko lifting a cup in toast with banner behind him that says 'Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish']

Felko - c'mon man lemme in I havn't seen you in like six years. [felix is unresponsive] lemme in or I'll key your car. [Felko holds up keys. Felix groans/sighs unlocks the doors.]

Felix - What the hell are you doing here?

Felko - What the hell am I doing here? I fucking live here. What the hell are you doing here? Nice tie.

Felix - Mm, thanks. I'm just picking up some stuff from my moms house. My girlfriend got a job blanking for blank in Vancouver and I wanted to grab a few things I left at my parents house.

Felko - and you drove all the way back here to pick up your blanky? yeah, I don't buy that.

Felix [silent] i have to

get my birth certificate to apply for a visa

Felko - right. so what have you been up to all this time?

Felix - you know. school. studying.

Felko - Sure, right. Nice car.

Felix - dont touch that. it is a nice car. [motioning to the road] What's going on here anyway?

Felko - Some goats got out of a pen.

Felix - goats? so there's goats in the road?

Felkko - no there's goats in a pond up by the farm commune and there's some equipment and police officers up ahead in the road.

Felix - you're a goat farmer now?

Felko - [shakes his head] fuck you man. you know. you show up outa nowhere after six years of jerkin off in your fucking bullshit imported cars and your - your - ties. At least i'm a contributing member of society. I'm facebook friends with you. I see what you do.

Felix- oh and whats that?

Felko - Mostly I get the impression you smoke and drink and sulk around looking pissy in Brooklyn with you sulky pissy hipster friends.

Felix - so you - are a goat farmer?

Felko - no. no. i'm a fucking reporter for the Hampshire Post. i was interviewing the farmers. were trying to run a civilization here Felix. I have what's called a job.

Felix - yeah hows that going

Felko – Today it went fine.

Felix – Fine? Sounds like it went like shit.

[cut to felko with goats holding notepad]

Narrator - What Felko had actually been doing could be more appropriately described as attempting unsuccessfully to interview the young farmers [shot of farmers - shirtless punk kids working about the farm,feeding animals - fixing bikes].

Felko [loudly] - So...

[cut to car]

Felko -They were non talkers

Felix - non talkers?

[cut to interview]

Felko - so how do you think this happened?

[cut to punk tattooed shirtless man and woman farmers in the american Gothic pose w/ pitchfork and farmhouse behind them]

Farmers - [blank look]

Felko - well do you think the goats did it? do you suspect foul play?

Farmers - [blank]

Felko - how did these goats get into the pond anyway

Farmers - [blank]

Felko - you've got a good asthetic going there.

Farmers [blank]

Felko - i like your look.

[a third farmer approaches with beer and or wisky bottle and or gun - Third Farmer - shakes his head]

Felko- Ok, [lowers pad]

[cut back to car]

Felko - yeah. non talkers. it's like camera shy.

Felix - mm, except they're afraid of your face.

Felko - so - have you talked to Camilla?

Felix [silent]

Felko - smiles

Felix - get out of the car.

Felko - c'mon just give me a ride over to the middle school. I have to interview the principle about the thing about the girls softball coach.

Felix - yeah. i'm in kind of a hurry here

Felko - c'mon man, ill give you some money for gas.

Felix - thats. thats ok. you know what, fine. it's kind of on the way anyway.

Felko - [smiling] yup. River Valley is on the way.

Cut to Felix and Felko standing in a Hotel parking lot.

Felix - Where the hell is River Valley Middle School?

Felko - They moved it. It's over on Bridge now.

[cut to Bridge St. School] This was true.

Felix - what about the graveyard?

Felko - It's over on Bridge too.

[swing to graveyard] This was partially true.

Felix - Why?

Felko - Progress.

Felix- huh.

Felko - [smiling] So you havn't seen Camilla?

[Close up on Felix scowling smoking putting his sunglasses on.] Felix had in fact, not seen nor talked with his high school girlfriend Camilla Francesca Marie Santiago since his departure.

[cut to Felko's going away party, zoom out, Cam is standing there scowling shaking her head putting a cigarette out in an ashtray]

Camilla Francesca Marie Santiago [photo of Cam] - the daughter of brazillian prize fighter Eduardo Santiago [picture of boxer] and 80's B-movie scream queen Rachel Sprague Santiago [picture of woman screaming] had delt with her loss in the classical manner : Denial [Noooooooooooooo!] Anger [smashing] Bargaining [Cam on phone - just let me se you one more time! I just want to talk! I'll do anything! I'll cut off my pinkie!] Depression [Cam in smeared black eyeliner - noooooo - sob- noooooo] and finally, Lesbianism [cam making out with a girl].

She also got a job here.[the hotel]

Cam - Hey thanks for coming hang out with me Jenica. Its so boring here and I know your doing your whole sun to sun thing so you cant talk all day but at least its nice to have company.

Jenica -silent

Cam - Hey so. uh, wanna take this quiz in cozmo?

Jenica nods

Cam ok – (reads one of the questions)

Jenica Silent

Cam- sigh wanna hear a joke?

Jenica - nods

Cam - Knock knock.

Jenica [silent raises eyebrow]

Cam - you know this whole 'Sun to Sun Of Silence' hippie bullshit thing your doing today is really annoying.

Jenica smiles - shrugs

Enter Reggie rubbing his head- Cam I need you to empty the trash in the lobby.

Cam - um isnt that Gary's job?

Reggie - He forgot again.

Cam - so its my job?

Reggie - Look [looks up, sees Jenica] Hello.

Cam - oh christ.

Reggie - what's your name?

Cam - Reggie. Reggie. [snaps fingers] She can't talk. She's doing this sun to sun of silence thing for school. she's not supposed to use words from sun up to sun down.

Reggie - whats the class?

Cam - women's studies

reggie - look. gary's not the best worker. but he's the quietest. and that's good for business.

Cam. ugh. business.

reggie- right. business. so. the trash.

Cam - ugh.

Cut to Felix and Felko in the parking lot. Felix is taking in his surroundings.

Felix - This was a neighborhood. There was a Library over there. That was River valley Dinner. the Driscoll's lived over there. there was a graveyard here!

Felko [shot of each as he points]- Gas Station. Car Wash. Gay Night Club. ATM drive thru kiosk. Multinational corporate hotel. [pause sees Cam smiles] And cue ex girlfriend.

[Cam is crossing the parking lot with a bag of trash and Jenica behind her.]

Felix- Fuck. [to Felko] Hide. [Felix ducks behind his car]

Felko - Hey Cam!

Cam - Oh hey, how's it going Felko?

Felko - come see come saw

Cam - Nice car.

Felko - [smiles] it's not mine.

Cam - who's is it?

Felko - Felix Grace

Cam - [with doom] Felix. Grace? Is he here?

Felko shrugs, smiles

Cam - Jenica, go inside and get some spray paint.

Felix jumps up - Ok ok.

Cam - you [she grabs his tie, pulls him over the hood] fuck.

Felix - good to see you too Cam.

Cam drops the tie - you. me. talk. now. follow.

Felix - Look, I can explain....

Cam (OC) - Ha!

Exit Felix and Cam.

Felko [to Jenica] so, how are you. [to which she smiles and shrugs] What the hell is wrong with everyone today?

EXT. SWINGSET

Cam- Look. I'm not mad.

Felix- That- that's great because you, you know, You seemed pretty mad.

Cam- residuals

Felix- residuals, fair

Cam- listen, Felix, ending that facade of a relationship was the best thing that ever happened to me

Felix- huh

Cam- i mean finding out you were gay really made me think about, you know, who i was, why i kept falling in and out of the same shit relationships with losers and assholes and generally scummy low life degenerate…

Felix- ok ok

Cam- look, Felix what I'm trying to say is, your leaving opened my eyes, you know, i realized, i'm gay

Felix- wait a minute, im not gay

Cam- no I'm gay. i mean yes your gay but i said I was gay

Felix- what?

Cam- Felix I'm gay - just like you

Felix- But, I'm not gay.

Cam- What?

Felix- I'm not gay.

Cam- ok.

Felix- why would you think that?

Cam- that's - that was, you know, "the story"

Felix- fuck! I'm not gay. I left you for a girl! a pretty fucking hot girl too.

Cam- well that makes me feel better

Felix- How did this happen?

Cam- i mean its been a great change of pace and there's a really great supportive fun community what with the all girls college downtown, and its really cut down on wardrobe and i mean seriously, girls are way cuter when they're naked and sure at first it was kidna to just fit in but im really taking a liking to it you know?

Felix- I mean, who told you i was gay?

Cam- you know when i first started being gay i thought "man now i can ditch all the bullshit," y'know, the guy bullshit, but holy crap are chicks nutso too-

Felix - Stop it!

Cam- Eddie

Felix- Starfield, your brother?

Cam- yeah he said Nick Scott Peter told him who said that you said you "couldn't live the lie anymore." and were going to live with some flemish painter in SoHo that you met on DList.

Felix- wow - yeah - i'm gonna leave now

Cam - so no hard feelings?

Felix- Well, I'ld kinda like to talk to Starfield and this Nick Scott Peter guy.

Cam- they live together over on the other side of the tracks, in that apartment row on Western Ave.

(Felix stands)

Cam- hey can you give Jenica a ride over.

Felix- the girl that doesn't talk?

Cam- yeah, she and Eddie are dating and he's been calling her all day

cut to shot of Jenica answering phone silently, voice on other end says, "hello? hello?" – also she’s just buggin the shit outa me.

Felix- are they in a fight?

Cam- I cant tell

Felix- - fine

Cut to parking lot

Felix - (to Jenica) let's go Charlie Chaplin - (then pointing to Felko: ) and hey, thanks for the tour buddy, next time you'll have to bring me by back the lot of the Eckerts that used to be a my elementary school and show me where my first grade teacher Ms Kemetzki jerks off dudes for crank.

Felko - there's still time

Felix - (to Jenica who is waddling around spinning an imagined cane like chaplain) Get in the car! (Jenica wiggles her non existent mustache

and waddles to the car. Felix, holding the bridge of his nose getting in to the car) - christ

Cam- (from parking lot) bye!

ACT II

INT Hotel Main Lobby.

Cam enters the lobby Reggie is rubbing his head still. He has gauze over his right temple wrapped

Reggie - there you are. where have you been?

Cam - Christ - one of my exes showed up and

Reggie - Thats great, look, I need to talk to you for a minute

Cam - Ok.

Reggie - you wanna (points with thumb) - can we go in my office

Cam - ugh, i hate going in your office.

Int Reggies Office a very very blank room with a singular strange picture hanging on the wall there is an office chair and folding chair facing each other.

CAm- Where's your desk

REggie - well thats what i wanted to talk to you about. Reggie sits, puts his hand to his head.

Cam - what the hell is wrong with your head?

REggie - Well Vicky Rosenburg, you know, the Regional Supervisor? Well she came by earlier today and uh -

Cut to same office earlier in the day. Vicky walks by the empty front desk where a sign says 'back in five' she knocks quickly on the door before opening it and saying 'Mr Delaney?" The open door reveals Reggie is standing on the desk with his pants around his ankles pissing into a cup on the ground near the corner saying, 'new Record! Cam! Cam!' , cut to Vicky - "Reggie!" cut back to REggie who, shocked begins to spin around cut back to Vickey getting splashed in the face, cut back to reggie who slips off the desk hitting his head.

Cam - she caught you doing the cup thing?

Reggie - So they took away my desk.

Cam - thats all they did?

Reggie - No.

Cam - are you fired?

Reggie - No. (digs in his pocket and pulls out a party horn - blows it) Surprise! You're getting a promotion!

Cam - I don't want a promotion. I’m very happy right now in my position of ‘Girl who works here’.

Reggie- Cam, did you go to business school?

Cam- uh, No…

Reggie - Ah.

Cam - Did you?

Reggie - I'm not on trial.

Cam - What?

Reggie - Look, I put in the hours here. I've kissed a lot of ass to get where i am today. A lot

Cam- gross

Reggie- They can't fire me. Rosendburg just put my name in for Division 6 Regional Manager. If it came out I was

Cam - a complete idiot?

Reggie - thats not the word I would have used but If they though I was a "complete idiot," I would not bode well. it would in fact reflect poorly on my supervisors for putting me in a position of power

Cam- Uh yeah. and it does. and please. please tell me this is not where I come in.

Reeggie - This is where you come in.

Cam- (shakes head)

Reggie - Ta-Da! Congratulations! You’re being promoted!

Cam - Yeah, you said that already, but to what?

Reggie - I don't know, sacrificial lamb?

Cam - is that supposed to be a joke?

Reggie - Scape Goat.

Cam - This sounds like a nightmare. An impossible endless nightmare. Why would I do this?

Reggie - I'm just joking. They want you to be my assistant. YOu know help me get out of jams.

Cam- This isn't some lame sitcom. Im not getting into any antics on your behalf.

Reggie - Fair.

Cam - I still don't understand why they don't just fire you!

Reggie - We're all in this together! You can't fire your finger, or your, haircut. Even if it's really really un suiting to the shape of your face. It's just until I get the promotion and then I'm in Worchester at head offices and you'll never see me again.

Cam - REally?

Reggie - REally.

Cam - So. Do I get a pay raise?.

Reggie starts laughing insanely and Cam joins him. They calm and Reggie says, "Oh no no."

Cam - that doesn't sound like a promotion then. So I have to do all of my work and yours?

Reggie - Right.

Cam - What do I get out of it then?

Reggie - If it works, I'll be out of here by the end of the year, running tings from central office in Worchester. Oh oh! (reggie wags his pointer and index fingers)

Cam shakes her head. Do I have to do the schedule too?

Reggie - I thought you did that already….

Cam- no.

Reggie - Huh. Yeah.

Cam - fine, you hardly do anything anyway.

Reggie - high five ( goes to high five - cam stands and walks out of the room)

INT Eddie Starfield’s room. Eddie and Felix’s backs are to the camera. Eddie is pointing to a large picture on his wall of abstract colors blobs.

Eddie – Why? You know? Why do anything? On a long enough time line entropy reduces everything in existence into nothingness.

Yet perhaps we could rage against the inmosible. Wouldn’t that be the final rebellion, the final middle finger to the all of time and space and possible right? The final revolution. The final Rage against inevitability itself. Against immposibility.

But on the other hand, every act we make. Every way we participate in our society only serves to feed it. Everything we do here only serves to feed this vile mechanism of greed and horrors that we call America.

Felix – So your not working.

Eddie – Yeah I’m working. I’m working over at the MusicBin.

Feilx – Nice, so hey I wanna ask y-

Enter Nick Scott Peter from screen bottom.

Nick Scott Peter –‘ello

Felix – Who’s thi- where did you come from dude?

Nick Scott- What do a small jewish boy and a short Mexican man have in common? Well the boy was average sized. And the Meixcan, he, I mean he wasn’t that short.

Eddie – this is nick scott peter

Felix – You’re the asshole that’s been telling people I’m gay!

Nick – I’ve been doing nothing of the sort.

Eddie to Nick Scott – This is Felix Grace.

Nick – Oh. Nah, nah, I never told anyone you were gay. I said you had moved to florida, work the retirement community pool boy angle. Fluffin geriatrics for percosets right?

Felix – You don’t even know me.

Nick to Eddie – So, Mexican and Jewish child.

Eddie – Silent.

Nick – Yesterday I see a little Jewish kid shooting a water gun in the rain

Eddie – how did you know he -

Nick – he was wearing a yamikha. A little down the road I see a Mexican guy and he’s washing the windows on the bank. Also, in the rain.

Eddie – is this some kind of ethnic joke, because I don’t like it

Nick – whats the connection

Felix – they’re both idiots

Nick – Yes! They’re both acting in a comicly redundant manner!

Silence

Nick – that’s us, (slaps eddie on chest)

Eddie – Hey.

Nick. That’s us man. We are that little jewish kid and the Mexican window washer.

Eddie. Right.

Nick. Picture a little kid with a water gun in the rain squirting a window that another man is washing for all fucking eternity. That’s us man! We need to break free! We need Change! We need freshness.

Eddie. Ok. Ok. Wha- How?

Nick. I don’t know. Well if we were the type to believe in the nothion of Free Will, we should prolly get moving. However, Calvinism would suggest we don’t have to do anything. Everything is predetermeined. If we are destined to enter a state of grace or have beatification bestowed on us its already decided. Irresistable Grace.

Felix. My last name is Grace.

Nick, eyes Felix. Weird.

Felix – Eddie…

Eddie – Nick, hold on a minute ok, I havnt seen Felix for six years and we really should catch up.

Nick (lights a cigarette) Sure.

Eddie – Man, how have you been? What are you doing back in town?

Felix – Well the truth is – (felix’s cell phone rings) Shit. Just a sec. Ok, it’s Maggie. Ill be right back. (exit Felix)

Nick – I just don’t wanna end up throwing fuckin eggs at fuckin chickens on some fuckin cosmic old mcdonaldmotherfucker run ranch. do you know what I’m saying?

Eddie. No.

INT Hallway Felix on the phone

Felix - Hello? Hello? Fuck. (checks bars) I can’t hear you.

Maggie – Felix? Felix, will you be home soon?

Felix - Hello? Hello?

Maggie – Felix? Sigh. Felix….

Felix - Maggie? Can you hear me? I can’t really hear you.

Maggie – Felix…

Vincent – Who’s on the ringer Mags?

Maggie - I gotta go.

Felix - Hello? Fuck!

Felix turns to see Jenica on the couch reading.

Felix – Hey can I borrow your phone?

Jenica shrugs shakes her head.

Felix – great.

INT Eddie’s Room.

Felix pops his head into the doorway. Nick and Eddie are both sitting in the dark lighting candles. Felix raises his eyebrows.

Nick – you again?

Felix – I’m off.

Eddie – See you in six years.

Felix – Alright, you want to go to Hugos later and get a drink, ill drive back later…

Eddie. I don’t wanna put you out.

Nick. You buying?

Felix. Yeah, yeah. I’m buying. Cmon itll be fun, well catch up.

Eddie. Sure. (takes out his phone) four one three…

Cut to

Felix gets in car. Car drives around. Felix outside his Mom’s house, he’s texting as he walks up the stairs. Knock on door.

Narrator. Felix finally returned to his childhood home

INT SUSAN GRACE GRACE’S house.

Susan is sitting at the kitchen table she has a glass of wine in front of her. Felix is standing by the sink behind her.

Susan. You can’t call?

Felix is thumbing through mail from the counter. Yeah, I can’t really stay long.

Susan. I havn’t seen you in six years.

Felix. Well, I’ve been, you know…busy.

Susan. Mmm, just like your father.

Felix. Where is Dad?

Susan, takes a drink. Probably fucking his way through the Midwest by now. I can almost picture him - his tiny prick erected like some ghastly divining rod of whores and warm miller high life’s.

Felix. That’s pleasant.

Susan. The bastard.

Felix. I though you two had patched things up.

Susan. We did. Once you left things between your father and I really started to improve.

Felix. Well that confirms a number of fears.

Susan. I knew it wouldn’t last. Last week ago, he started acting like his old self.

Cut to Bill sneaking down the stairs. Susan turns.

Susan. Oh Bill there you are. Where are you off to?

Bill. I gotta tell you everything? -Mutters -(bill exits front door)

Cut to Bill’s back making a sandwhich Susan enters the kitchen.

Susan. Bill have you seen

Bill is so startled he throws the sandwhich contents everywhere. He turns breathing heavy.

Bill. Susan!

Cut to Susan with a suspicious look on her face.

Cut back to kitchen.

Felix. That’s odd.

Susan. Typical. When you were seven months old he propositioned your babysitter.

Felix. Valencia?

Narrator. This was true.

Cut to Bill offering a beer to a girl with a baby who makes a horrified expression.

Felix. Huh. Well – (drops the letters he was holding onto the counter) this has been wonderful but I’m in kind of a rush and –

Susan. That’s right, you’re moving to Columbia.

Felix. No. I’m moving to Vancouver. I went to school at Columbia.

Sus. So hat do you want from me?

Felix. Nothing. I just need to get my birth certificate so I can apply for a passport. Is all my stuff still in my room?

Cut to Felix’s room which has been converted into something resembling a garage/basement apartment for a homeless person w/ trash and beer everywhere.

Susan. No. You’re father sold most of your things when he moved back in – sort of used this as a ‘rompus room’

Felix. This is great. Look, all I really need is that weird Indian statue.

Susan. Of the two people having sex?

Felix. It’s actually Shiva and Shakti creating the universe, but yes, that statue.

Susan. Well you’re outa luck. I gave it to Camila.

Felix. Why would you do that?

Susan. Because she told me it was hers. How is that girl?

Felix. ahhh, good.

Cut to HOTEL

Narrator. Camilla Francesca Marie Santiago, was in fact, not good. The dual stresses of seeing her hoped dead ex boyfriend very much alive, and her recent promotion to position of office scapegoat… (cut to cam opening email from Reggie –a picture of a goat with the word ‘YOU’ scrawled across it.) had inspired in Camilla an attempt to take the edge off her afternoon (Cut to cam pouring Vodka nips into a Coke bottle) by drinking seven Coca Colas, 750 millileters of Shmirnoff Raspberry Vodka and sending twelve drunk texts – all before two thirty. Seven of these texts were directed at her brother Edward “Starfield” Santiago.

Cut to Starfield’s Apartment

Starfield and Jenica are staring at each other.

Starfield. Do you think I’m throwing eggs at chickens?

Jenica. Silent

Eddie. Quizical look.

Narrator. Jenica was still observing her Non-Denominational Spiritual excercize the SSOS and so was still not talking, a fact that nobody had remembered to tell Eddie.

(back and forth funny faces)

Eddie. What’s with you today?

Jenica.

Eddie. Are we not talking? Are you not talking to me?

Jenica.

Eddie. You do this every week and then we just make up.

Jenica. furrows brow.

Is this about Hazel?

Jenica. Surprised. shakes head no. crosses arms.

Eddie. Is this about Julia?

Jenica. Disbelife.

Eddie. Please just tell me. I’m really bad a riddles.

Jenica. Points to closed mouth.

Eddie. I get it, your not talking. Why are you doing this to me right now? I am in the middle of an existential crisis here. Fucking Nick Scot Peter is right. We’re so repetitive. I’m so repetitive. I’m almost 28. I always thought I would be dead and or famous by then. Y’know?

Jenica. Nods.

Eddie. Why wont you talk to me!? It’s like your not …even… really here….. (growing horrified)

Jenica. eyes wide.

Phone Chimes, Eddie checks it. Nick reappears in the doorway.

Nick. Did you just get a text from Cam?

Eddie. Yeah. “gt prm6ted. evryting suks8”

Nick. Mine just says, “FML FML FML”

Phone Chimes.

Eddie. wnt statu bk. h8 felix agn (looks at Nick) oh good.

Nick. What statue?

Eddie. That statue.

Nick. Shakta and Shiva creating the Universe? I don’t get it.

Eddie. Cam found it in a bunt down mansion on top of Hospital Hill.

Nick. What!

Eddie. Yeah Cam gave it to him in a pretty desperate attempt to buy his sympathies with sentimental trinkets. Well after he took off Cam discovered he’d left the statue so she went over to his moms with a bottle of wine…

Nick. Right. So how do we have it?

Eddie. Well every few weeks Cam used to take the thing to the top of Mt Tom and attempt to smash it (cut to Cam with the statue over her head) but she could never bring herself to (cam lowering staue beginning to tear up) and she usually spent the afternoon holding a stutue on a mountain crying for hours. (eddie picks up statue) she realized she couldn’t smash the thing but she couldn’t bear to look at it.

Nick. why do you keep it?

Eddie. I don’t know, Jennica thinks it’s hot.

Nick. That’s Wonderful. Look it. I’m gonna go into town.

Eddie. Why?

Nick. I want to be proactive about this ‘finding myself’ thing. I’m gonna go into town and look for myself.

Eddie. I think your being a little literal.

Nick. Anyway, Ill take the statue and give it to Cam. (grabs the statue and puts it in his red messenger bag)

Eddie. Yeah fine. I’ll tell her (eddie begins texting) yr bringin it over.

INT Hotel Lobby. Cam is talking to a child whos just picked up an orange from the bowl on the table in the lobby.

Child. do you have any apples?

Cam. What do I look like an apple making robot? Gimme that banana. spoiled little brat. People are starving. (the child runs off) I’m starving. (She peels banana and eats it).

VICKIE ROSENBURG enters.

Vickie. Camila?

Cam. Oh shit. (turns to face Vickie)

Vickie. What are you doing?

Cam. I was just, um, tidying up the Lobby. Kids, makin a mess. (she moves about picking up random things and putting them down)

Vickie. Where’s Reggie?

Cam. I think he went out for lunch.

Vickie. Well he has a meeting with the tri county board in fifteen mintutes. You know your supposed to be watching him.

Cam yeah I been meaning to talk to you about that. ( Cam moves forward towards Vickie but stumbles over the edge of a chair and Vickie catches her. Vickie sniffs as she lifts Cam.)

Vickie. Are you drunk?

Cam. Uh..

Vickie because you smell like a liquor cabinet.

Reggie enters. That’s my fault.

Vickie (turns to Reggie). There you are.

Reggie. I spilled a bottle of vodka on her this morning. (Reggie shrugs)

Vickie. You did what?

Reggie. It’s true. I was trying to –

Vickie. I don’t care! we have fifteen minutes to get to Greenfield. Why arnt you wearing a tie?

Enter Felix. Cam!

Cam. Oh dear god.

Felix. Cam what did you do with that statue you gave me?

Cam. I am at work please go away.

Felix. C’mon this is important.

Cam. Oh this is important? This is important?! This! is import-

Felix. Are you drunk?

Everyone looks at Cam.

Vickie grabs Reggie by the arm. Cam grabs Felix by the arm. Vickie and Cam in unison. You, come with me.

Cam. Are you emotionally retarted? Don’t answer. Look. You cant honestly expect to just show up after six years and start popping by at my work and making demands of me.

Felix. Your right.

Cam. No you listen. Wait. what?

Felix. You’re right. Look - I can’t keep apologizing for what happened back then.

Reggie. Cam your in charge!

Cam. I know!

Felix. Look. I’m sorry. But I really need that statue. What did you do with it?

Cam. Why? Why do you need my statue?

Felix. you gave it to me.

Cam. And you left it behind!

Felix. Do you have it?

Cam. No.

Felix. Where is it.

Cam. I’m not telling you. You still havnt explained why this is so important.

Felix. I hid something in it.

Cam. The statue?

Felix. fed up. Look, just meet me at Hugos later and ill explain. I just really want to find it before five.

Cam (thinking). Why are you going to hugos later? I thought you were in a rush to get out of town.

Felix. I’m having a drink with Eddie.

Cam. Oh so eddies good enough to stick around but you can’t even give me a simple explanation.

Felix. Camila Francesca Marie Santiago, please.

Cam. Fine. Don’t you think this is just because you used my full name.

Felix. Of course not.

Cam. Eddie has it.

Felix. Beautiful. I love you. (Felix kisses the top of Cam’s head)

Cut to parking Lot, Felix crossing towards camera.

Narrator. As Felix pondered the words that had just accidently come out of his mouth, he dialed Eddie Starfield.

Cut to Eddie Starfield still facing off with Jenica.

Eddie. silent then finally in frustration. I think about making out with your grandmother! I talk to that garden gnome you keep in the living room. I once used your toothbrush to clean gum off my jacket.

Jenica looks incredulous.

The phone rings.

Eddie answers. Hello? Oh God, please say something, anything. Hello? Hello?

Cut to Felix in car. Hello? Hello?

Eddie. Hello?

Felix. Eddie!

Eddie. Thank god.

Felix. You – ok, buddy?

Eddie. Yeah. I’m just happy to hear words.

Felix. Yeah’s hows that silent girl doing?

Eddie. You know about it?

Felix. Yeah her SSOS or whatever, for class.

Eddie (looking at Jenica) SSOS – for class?

Jenica nods smilling.

Felix. Yeah. Didn’t she tell you? Of course not.

Eddie. I just though she wasn’t talking to me.

Felix. Well she wasn’t.

Eddie yeah but I thought she wasn’t talking to specificly me not not talking to everyone.

Felix. I suppose that’s comforting.

Eddie. Yeah.

Felix. Hey, uh, do you have that statue of shakta and shiva…

Eddie. …creating the universe? Yeah. Well, no. Nick scott peter has it. He’s bringing it back to Cam.

Felix. Why?

Eddie. She texted me. said she wanted it back.

Felix. Really. Well where’s Nick Scott now?

Eddie. He went to town to look for himself.

Felix. Awesome sauce.(hangs up)

Eddie. We still on for tonight? Felix? Hello? (Looks up at Jenica who mimes ‘see’) Don’t you start.

Narrator. And so Felix was headed towards town when he noticed that his gas indicator light was blinking.

Cut to convenience store.

Felix. Ten on six.

Clerk. Slide your card.

Felix slides card. Puts card away.

Clerk. It says it’s denied. try it again.

Felix takes out card and slides it again.

Clerk. It says it’s denied.

Felix. What?

Clerk. It says it’s declined.

Felix. That’s imposible.

Clerk. Do you have another card?

Felix. No, I don’t have any other money.

Clerk. Then you cant get the gas.

Felix leaves, gets in car, parks it in a nearby parking lot, get out and locks the auto lock doors.

Narrator. And so not wanting to waste his little remaining gas, Felix left his car in the parking lot of WEB’s yarn and craft’s supply store and began the short walk into town.

Felix (Looking at a coffee place.) Huh, that’s new.

Cut to town, Nick Scott Peter is walking around looking at everyone.

Narrator. Meanwhile, somewhere in town, Nick Scott Peter was trying to decide where to begin looking for himself.

Nick Scott Peter. If I was me, where would I be?

Cut to Nick Scott coming out of a pizza place with pizza and a soda. He goes over by the sphinx statue outside R Michaelson and starts eating his pizza.

Cut to Felix walking down the street.

Felix. Huh, that’s new. (Yes Computers) Huh, that’s weird. (Newbury Comics) (Shots of “cool” dressed kids and store fronts.)

Cut to Nick Scott Peter. Felko enters from the left with Nick Peter Scott.

Nick Scott Peter. Hey Felko, whats up?

Felko. Not much, trying to get lunch. Imposible with the students everywhere. I hate it when there’s so many people in town.

Nick Scott. I like all the people.

Felko. well you’re an idiot. it’s annoying.

Nick Scott. Who’s this guy? (referring to Nick Peter)

Felko. Oh yeah. This is Nick Peter Scott. Nick Peter Scott this is Nick Scott Peter.

Nick Scott. What!?

Felko. Yeah that’s weird you guys have kinda the same name. Huh, so what are you up to?

Nick Scott. I was – I was looking for myself.

Nick Scott and Nick Peter are standing facing each other like a mirror. They are oddly similar. A group of laughing girls walks past Felko laughing, and bumps into him, causing him to spill his drink.

Felko. Come ON! Tell me this isn’t annoying. Tell me all this gentrification isn’t ruining this town!

Nick Scott. Progress.

Felko. Look around! There used to be cool places to hang out and get coffee and buy cigarettes and magazines, now there’s a bank on every corner. I can see three banks from where I’m standing.

Nick. I can see four.

Felko. Exactly! A lot of these places just barely break even the property values are getting so high!

Enter Felix. Thank God I found you guys. (to Nick Scott) Do you have the statue?

Nick. Yeah.

Felix. Thank God.

Felix. What’s up with Felko?

Nick Scott. He’s complaining how urbanized everything is getting.

Felko. And where there used to be banks there’s even worse things. There’s an Urban Fucking Outfitters in that old bank. There’s a Newbury Comics right over there!

Felix looks out over the town and says, Huh.

Narrator. Felix, hearing Felko disparage against the changes his old town was going through, suddenly realized that it was because of gentrification that his old town reminded him of his new town and the feeling he had been felling all afternoon had been homeseickness for his new home mixed with new love for his old home.

Nick. What’s up?

Felix. Nothing, it just, the way the town’s changed, it kinda reminds me of something.

Felko. Hell?

PAN BACK

INT Hugos – Night.

Felix, Nick Scot, Eddie, Cam and Jenica are sitting at the bar. Cam is holding her head.

Eddie, to Jenica. Do you want anything.

Jenica. Silent.

Cam. Isn’t that over. The sun went down.

Eddie. Yeah she’s just not talking to me now (to Nick) So did you find yourself?

Nick Scott. Well..

Cam. Fuck that. Felix what the hell is in the statue?

Felix produces a key. A key.

Eddie. To what?

Felix. My safety deposit box.

Cam. Why would you keep the only key to a safety deposit box hidden in a statue in another state.

Felix. There was another key.

Cam. What happened to it?

Felix. Well…

Cam. you know what I don’t even care right now. You’re still a fucking asshole.

Eddie. Isnt that your Mom Felix.

They all turn to see Susan grace at a table making out with a younger gentleman.

They all turn back.

Felix. Yeah.

BLACK

Narrator. Next time on OMG Everything sucks.

Felix discovers why his bank card was declined.

Felix. What do you mean empty? No that’s imposible.

And Nick Scott Peter meets yet another Nick.

Eddie. Oh yeah, Nick, this is Nick Nicholson, he’s a guitar player.

And Camilla Francesco Mari Santiago gets to like her new job.

Reggie exits with a tash bag. Vickie walks through the lobby.

Vickie to Cam. Wow its so clean in here. Who’s responsible for this?

Cam, smilling. Me.

FIN

Moto Moto or: Let Them See What They've Done

2012-01-14T13:13:00.001-05:00

Aged Atomic Demons

2012-01-14T13:11:00.001-05:00

Cable News Creeps

2012-01-14T13:09:00.000-05:00

ACT II Begins, Fall of 2001

2012-01-12T19:19:00.000-05:00

sex

2012-01-11T00:40:00.001-05:00

Spread

2012-01-11T00:37:00.003-05:00

nights in northampton circa 2000

2012-01-11T00:35:00.001-05:00

aborted science fiction

2012-01-11T00:32:00.000-05:00

Real TV

2012-01-11T00:30:00.001-05:00

Subjective Objectivity

2012-01-10T01:05:00.000-05:00

Chapter Break

2012-01-10T01:01:00.001-05:00

Long Night's Journey Into Day

2012-01-10T01:00:00.003-05:00

The Sit Down Pt II

2012-01-10T00:56:00.001-05:00

The Sit Down

2011-12-31T22:29:00.001-05:00

CDD - Key

2011-12-31T22:24:00.001-05:00

1999 - Chapter 1

2011-12-31T21:51:00.001-05:00

1999.

“Thinking makes it so.”
- Madison Columbia Peterson paraphrasing William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

“It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a story.”
-Me.

1.

This starts track two white album disk two.

So.
It’s the future right? No one reads, no one even watches TV, everything is net based and entertainment has been allotted to flashes of lights and brief shinny moments and all the kids have fucking neural implants and telescreens on every fucking wall and iphoneX’s and the whole sci fi bullshit nine yards.
And I’m a fucking writer! Not a telescript writer either. An old fashioned long since acculturated words on paper writer.
It’s like a bad dream.
And there’s this story, an incredible story, maybe.
But no one reads books, and I don’t know how to make an appropriate telescript and fuck all to the internet.
It's most likely for the best as it’s a horrid story that never made much sense anyway.
It’s called 1999. Or it was called 1999 when I was still thinking of it as a book.
See I didn't write it because I was afraid it was going to happen.
Instead I found myself writing it by accident because I was a reporter and the whole damned thing had started to come true without my even having written a single word!
You can see how scared I was to keep going at that point, and further how scared I was to go ahead and publish the thing and not just burn all the pages.
At least I can sleep sound no one’s ever gonna read the damn thing anyway.
So.

®

1999 starts in the Wholesale Kingdome of the Righteous, New York City, in the year of Christ, Nineteen hundred and ninety nine, when, in the midst of gneral prosperity in America with a Democrat in the Whitehouse, the dead lead singer of the most popular band on earth seven years prior reappeared amongst the living, walking and talking, alive as you or I.
1999 ends in the same city, New York, or more appropriately - on the outskirts - out in the harbor - up on that giant copper statue the French gave us of the goddess Isis.
Why did France give us a giant personification of the feminine to represent freedom? I think Jenni Heart explained it best in a TV interviwew she did in 1999.
She said, “If the assholes had had any balls she’d be naked. The French. what the fuck do they care about Liberty what do they know about feminism about the sacred mysteries about Isis or Aset. Whats with that horrible dress over her beautiful natural tits? It’s just bad fashion. Didn’t the French invent fashion? Yould think so the way they fuckin price their shit right?”
So.
At The End of the World the dead lead singer of a Rock and Roll band called The Acme is hanging by one hand, out on that giant personification of the feminine, the embodiment of Liberty, chasing after the proclaimed flesh and blood incarnation of Isis herself in the form of a very alive 18 year old blond girl named Madison Columbia Peterson who with blond hair and sparkling eyes in the night and the wind behind her atop Lady Liberty was trying her best to do her best.
K, the singer in chase was 34 counting the seven years dead. His hair was matted in front of his eyes and under the brim of his hat. The hat said, “Amen.”
What was Madison really doing out on the crown of Isis?
Trying to tag the word ‘MYSTERY’ in giant orange highway paint florescent letters on the forehead of Ol’ Lady Liberty for all the World to see.
See, Madison was just trying to warn the world about Liberty.

In 1999 there was this retired writer who went by the name Casanova Rousseau. I mean, actually he would throw a Dr. in the front of the thing but there were dubious reasonings behind that. That was me: I was Dr. Casanova Rousseau. I’m not. I mean, I never was and I’m not anymore. It was a phase. Like being sad turned out to be for all of humanity.

The Beatles are playing. “I would like you to dance. Take a ch-ch-ch-chance.”

Just before the band plays and the end of the World happens, someone shouts at me suddenly. I’m watching TV in the green room of the Ed Sullivan show and it’s 1963 but I’m just imagining it sitting with the Acme in 1993, one year before K kills himself for the first time.
Really I’m in the green room of the Late Late Show with Conan Obrian. I’m excited to meet andy richter and suddenly realize that Conan doesn’t get a show for another couple years at least and I wonder where I am again. Am I watching TV? Am I lost in thought? Am I dreaming?
Then K shakes me and asks in a fke British accent, “C'n ah git 'a coke luv?”
“What?” I say and I’m not sure where I am.
“The Coca-Cola by your side, on the table there, can I have it?”
“Oh yeah.”
My eyes and general body posture fall over the coffee table in front of me. I must have dosed off while the TV in the Green room of Saturday Night Live flashes a retrospective of Beatles clips.
“Well we all know oblah di blah dah - but can you show me - where you are?”
And of course I’m thinking, “No, I cant.”
“Cry baby cry, make your mother sad. She’s old enough to know better. So cry baby cry, cry cry cry. She’s old enough to know better….”
“Can you take me back where I came from can you take me back. Can you take me back where I came from, brother can you take me back?”

It’s the end of 1999, New Years Eve 2000. Y2K. In minutes K’s dead body would walk out onstage and begin singing and jumping and generally acting as though it were alive.

The reason I’m there, in the green room of SNL was because I had received a letter tacked to my door one year earlier. On All Saints Day. The day after Halloween.
It was one of those tricks the Universe pulls. It (the Universe) was just trying to be clever by pulling it one day after Halloween. Trick or treat. Lol.

“She was a working girl, north of England way.
“Now she’s hit the big time,
“In the USA
“And if she could only hear me this is what I’ld say:
“Honey pie, you are making me carzy,
“I’m in love but I’m lazy,
“So wont you please come home…?”

®

See back in the early nineties I was 23 years old living out in Virginia in the suburbs of DC doing research for another book I never wrote. This other book was going to be an expose on everything. The whole vile mechanism of the guts of the American Political System splayed out in words. I was going to call it, “Founded Paranoia.” In my mind I was going down to Washington to root out the corporate war machine infesting our govermnment and lay it bare there on the pages of Moss Magazine. Ha!
The whole thing at Moss Mag was a stroke of luck though and I was beside myself to get it after maning a frylator out of a MickyD’s.
And after another year of filing captions and typing add copy they sent me out to Washington to review a DC hardcore band that went by the name Scream. This was in 1990, one year before the Acme peaked internationally. I found the band and the story and way more trouble then I had anticipated in the form of the daughter of a dubiously important Republican Senator.
She had (the daughter not the Senator) huge aqua marine eyes that darted left and right and never sat long on anything. Eyes that just shot out from under sharp straight white bangs sort of hung half over them. She lilted when she talked - smiling, falling invitingly towards me as she laughed her father’s secrets away in bars over Long Island ice teas.
The band I was sent to cover, Scream, was pretty good - for hardcore, which I was never that into. The Republican Senator from Wicsonson’s daughter, Margret Smith, was there for more mysterious reasons than she was willing to divulge, except she did say she probably shouldn’t have been there.
Funny coincidence. The guy from Scream’s drummer: Danny ‘Boom-Boom’ Rogers, would later leave the band and join The Acme. So, that would end up being weird.

So.

Margret and my whole bullshit scheme to “blow the lid off everything” got me into a real Ahab style mess. I asked too many questions to too many people about exactly all the right things. Margret seemed preternaturally good at supplying ideas for inquiry. She used to use her fathers’ deepest secrets as foreplay.
And one day I asked the exact right man the exact right question.
I don’t know who it was I asked but I was in a small waiting room in an office in the Federal Reserve and this guy came in. He was just wearing normal clothes, a white T shirt and blue jeans and he said, “Hello,” As I was pouring some creamer into some cofee from the coffee pot over by the receptionists desk.
The question I asked was this: “Where do they keep the real coffee?”
I was trying to make a joke.
Then the man in the white t shirt smiled and asked me to follow him and told me to write as much as I’ld like about anything and everything he would show me and he took me down a hallway that never ended filled with infinite doors all breathing and looking out into you as you walked by and the man in the white T shirt and blue jeans opened a door leading down a cement staircase and showed me the room where they kept the American Dream.
She was beautiful and radiant, pulsating love and light even as the wires dug into her. Above her head hung a television set flickering through every channel, like lightning, like a fire, like a Glory. Her face though, was pressed and torn in agony, as if she were in labor and her splayed midsection birthed red innards onto a table where six times six times six men in white lab coats studied and dissected her.
The man in the white t shirt said, “To know truth, we must know all of her.”

This was the first of the Seven Mysteries revealed to me that Sunday afternoon. Each more Awesome then the last.

And after, the man in the blue jeans and white t shirt handed me the realest cup of coffee I’ld ever tasted, and he smiled and said “Here.”
And he handed me a pen.

I did in fact get it all down. Hell if anyone believed me.
But.
Sales were splendid.
And I became the voice of a paranoid nation.
Albeit, under an AKA, which did help the conspiracy theory buzz. For a time I was rumored to be everyone from Hunter S Thompson to Linden B Johnson, who was dead, so, that was a stretch.

So it happened to be that along the time I began my ascent to fame by ensnaring myself in the Great White Whale of The Great American Conspiracy, K and the Acme’s smilling grimaces began popping up on the covers of the same magazines my name was.
The more famous I got, the more famous K got. When my own personal life suddenly became part of the story, K’s incredibly tumultuous sid and nancy style celebrity relationship with Riot Grrl punk rocker Jenni Heart, lead singer of Holy became a bigger story then his band’s meteoric rise to fame. K and tiffani’s lives were splashed in full color all over the tabloid news mags and even in the tween mags like ‘Twist’ and ‘Nickleodean Magazine.”

Another interesting coincidence revolving around the dual years 94 and 99 was the marriage of my old College Proffesor William Guttenberg III in July of 94 to longtime girlfriend, Ophelia Florence. Along with the announcement that Gutenberg would be joining Bill Gates in the construction of what eventually became Microsoft’s spelling and grammar check program.
At the time, I was simply happy for Guttenburg, but by 1999 I came to realize the full ironic symytry of 1994 and 1999.

And not just because they were separated by seven years.

By the end of 1999, Ophelia Prendergast, Guttenburg’s wife, was dead, and Guttenburg was using the core kernel of the programming from his Microsoft Word Spelling and Grammar check to try to bring God back to life out in the New Mexican dessert.
Hell, that old bastard Guttenberg eventually founded a cult based on the deification of the written word itself called, eloquently enough: The Word.
The Word and I eventually had a bit of a falling out - at one point they even declared a literary Fatwa against me. But that happens much much later.

So.

The real mind fuck, the real hardcore, “truth is stranger than fiction” part of this whole story, comes in the form of David Cain Galt who is the son of Adonis Galt, a guy who made his fortune during WWII as a vacuum cleaner manufacturer, then as an arms manufacturer and finally after the war as an Electronics, Chemical and Consumer Products manufacturer. Adonis Galt was just about the richest most powerful man in America, and possibly the world in 1999. Galt Industries pretty much invented some essential part of everything you can think of and owned outright NBC, The New York Times and GE. But, by 1999 the founder of Galt Industries Adonis Galt, was simply getting old and his 27 year old son David, was nipping fast at his heels.

And! Exclamation point. The very first week I started in Moss offices in downtown New York City, all the way back in 1988, I’ld met David Cain, who was only a kid at the time, in the office.
See, Adonis Galt owned Rolling Stone and so one day he showed up at our offices with this 19 year old kid, who turned out to be his son dressed head to toe in a denim and reeking of marijuana.
Adonis stood there quietly, waited for our attention and then said in a very firm authoritative voice holding a sulking David by the scruff of his jacket, “This is your fault,” and he tossed the boy down on the ground in front of the staff. Everyone started to sniker. “I am not amused!” Then he said, “Fix it,” and walked out.
I was busy, working on something, distracted. The kid came right for me.
"You the Dr?"
"Excuse me?"
"You the Dr, you know where i can get, yknow - ?" and then he nodded at me.
"No."
"My dad says you're editor says your fucked up all the time."
I looked up, A cigarette dangling from my lips, dangerously close to the boys face. To his credit, the little shit never flinched an inch. "What do want to know then."
"Can I have a cigaret?"
"Is you're dad still here?"
I followed his face over to the editor, Montague's office, where his dad and Montague were arguing ostensibly. "Yeah."
"Then yes." I said and handed him his smoke. "Light?" I asked him.
"i'm cool." he said and produced a pack of matches.
"How old are you?" i asked as he lit the cigarette.
"18. How old are you old man?"
"Ha. A hundred."
"Whoa."
"Tell me about it."
"So you wrote that thing? About how books are bad."
"Ha! Yeah but that was a satire."
"Oh I know man."
"Ok."
"It was just really, y'know, right on, y'know? Like about everything you talked about."
"Right but it was just a joke. You should read books."
"Really?"
"Yeah kid. Really."
Then he got real quiet.
"What's wrong?"
"Do you have any?"
"Yeah."
And that's when I gave it to him. I guess. I guess. FUCK. I guess this whole thing is my fault. I gave him the first book i saw. I gave him "The Grapes of Wrath."
It was a joke.

That was 1988.
Just over one year later, David Cain had bought a fledgling cable company and was running MusicTV studios. One year after that and he’s running the entirety of Visacom Networks, which by 1999 is the largest of only five Media companies on Earth and the fourth largest company period.
Despite his success however, David’s father Adonis seemed displeased by his son’s rocketing ascent and perhaps rightfully so. David’s first act upon taking over Visacom was to change the corporate slogan from “As fast as Ideas” to “Do No Evil.”
This was in stark contrast to the Galt Industries corporate motto: “Do It.”

In any case however, David Cain was building something his father hadn’t expected, honest competition. Visacom Network’s daytime ratings were consistently higher then GI’s network ratings and their late and even prime time powers were slowly being edged by David’s, and Visacoms, new brand of media: a more intense, more risqué image helped in large part to Cable TV’s limited censorship.
And the sound to David’s fury in 1993 was a popular punk rock band who’s heavy rotation music video on David’s networks for their song “The Great Rehash” sent their sophomore album triple platinum and who’s lead singer along with wife Jenni Heart were skulking their way across magazine and tabloid covers into the hearts of American youth everythwere.

Anyway.
Long story short, I’m creeping around DC and I get the snot kicked out of me by what might as well have been fucking aliens from another dimention cause I sure as hell still have no idea what exactly it is that I stumbled on out there in DC. And my Senator’s daughter? the blond angel, Margret? Disappears.
Dead. Relocated. Just plain done with me. I never find out.
I wake up one day in a ratty motel room in clothes that smelled and looked like they had been forcibly removed from a dead bum, with no identification, what looked like an ounce and a half of cocaine dusted all over the room and the cops kicking the door in.
I jumped out the window, called Montague, my editor at Rolling Stone and told him to cash in my chips, I‘d caught the fucking rabbit, I’ld gone through a door that led back where I came from.
And I was sure I was gonna need a few decades to process.

®

So.
I didn’t get a few decades. I got seven years. Not counting the weird shit. Seven years of virtual obscurity.
The weird shit?
That Damned Book.
That Damned Book, as I’ve come to refer to it, is the entire reason I’m Dr Casanova Rousseau in the first place. Or rather, I was Dr. Casanova Rousseau. See in this book I had written a hundred thousand short stories which had never been written. And by this I mean that I too had not written the stories. Instead I wrote cliffs notes versions. Brief synopsis. A hundred thousand great short story ideas all copyright me.
I published it under the pen name Dr. Casanova Rousseau. I never intended for that Damned Book to become first, an international best seller, reprinted hundreds of times in over in two dozen languages and second, some type of living religious artifact: a kind of divination tool with which believers would attempt to predict the future. How could I know? I was just trying to, as the Beatles might say, “write myself a swimming pool.”
It sounds crazy, but it is.
See, I wrote all these dumb stories down, just all willy nilly off the top of my head in a frantic three month period. I sent the thing off to my publisher and a few months later I got a check for an ungodly small amount and then I had to do book signings for half a dozen middle aged women. It was nice, it was fun.
But then, three months after the book came out, April 21st 1994, the same weekend they found K’s dead body in his greenhouse, god damn it if those fucking stories didn’t all start coming true. One by one.
Funny. Haha. Lol.

At first it was just a case of bizarre coincidence when a pregnant woman recounted an almost word for word tale of being stuck in her 78 Studebaker on the highway while a broken down circus train’s escaped rhinoceros birthed a baby rhinoceros on her steaming hood. She described the event as surreal. Claimed she had been listening to my book on tape right before the whole thing started happening. She said, “The last thing I remember was the man on the tape saying, “’God, Please just sit down!’ and then I turned around and Jeremiah was banging on the window and the hood started steaming and I just shouted, ‘God, please just sit down.’ And then, y’ know, it all just started happening. Y-know, with the voice over narration and everything.”
Sure, that was weird.
But it was even stranger when the short story synopsis of the couple from Arizona having relationship troubles recounted their story for the local news station.

“Gladis had been sitting in the parlor watching TV when her husband Bill, walked towards her with a glass of iced tea. She looked up and, noticing that she had just read a story which had begun like this, began to laugh lightly. Her husband said, ‘I didn’t think I was that funny.’
“That was when Gladis’ face sunk back. She found herself saying, ‘Where’s Vincent?’
“Franklin turned his head and his sight shot through the glass doors towards the in-ground pool. The glass of ice tea dropped, shattered on the floor. Franklin burst through the double glass doors and dove into the pool.
“The resulting fight had driven the couple to divorce.”

Vincent was fine. He smiled, played with a puppy in the interview.
Gladis just looked up into the camera holding That Damned Book in her hand and smiled and just said, “It was a Miracle.”

So.
Things wernt going well for my vacation.

And then Edger Ronald Connor tried to blow his brains out all over the evening news with my fictional name on his lips.

One night, the news anchor from a major network pulled out a handgun on live television. He said, “Mother Mary pray for us.” And he pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. There was a strange echoing click and a light went out and the set looked awfully fake all of a sudden and the news reporter just sat there looking at the camera not knowing what to say and he took the gun down and he emptied six unused bullets from the canister on the news desk and he looked up and he kinda smiled and laughed. He said, “that was a test. Earlier this evening my wife Margret, of thirty years told me she was leaving me. She had outgrown me.” He smiled, “She said everything that Dr. Casanova Rousseau said she would on page 136 of 100,000 Short Stories Never Written. And then Dr Rousseau said I would laod a six chamber gun that my father had been given by his father who had won it in a fist fight in cincinate ohio with six bullets which had been kept in the case since my father had given it to me when I was seventeen.
“He said there in the short story titled, My Father the Gun, that I would then take the gun out to my desk here, and then half way through the eleven oclock news I would take the gun out and try to blow my brains out. It wouldn’t work. The bullets wouldn’t fire for some reason, mechanical falier. In the story, instead of painting the blue screen behind me red, I would tell a story about my father and how his father had gotten the gun and how it saved our family in more ways then one more then once.
“So I will.”
And he did.

Luckily, at that time, there was no such person as Dr Casanova Rousseau. Only Montague knew where I was and how to get a hold of me. Dr. Casanova’s only public response to the question of who he was and how he had done what he had done, written what he had written, was in the form of a video press release, which was leaked through Rolling Stone Magazine and dismissed by many as a hoax. It was a hoax. The man in the video is wearing a long grey beard a powder blue Vegas style frill tux and white gloves. His hair is wild and curly and unkempt. He resembles the long since out of print science fiction writer, Kilgor Trout.
In the video, he is smoking a cigarette. He is smoking a cigartte held in his teeth and smilling the biggest shit-eating grin I’ve ever seen and he says without cracking his voice: “I understand there have been recent allegations of my being some type of profit. I am here to refute those claims. I am no profit. In light of the recent events however there is little recourse of action I can deem logical except to assume that for the time being and for an undetermined future, I would guess, I'm fucking God.”

All and all I say I had had a pretty rough time taking a simple vacation from my life.
So in a final dramatic gesture, I unplugged the phone and I shot the tv in the backyard with a twelve gun execution style sendoff beautifully orchestrated by myself with a series of twine wires. I threw my radio in the pool still plugged into the extention chord hanging out my window and there in the circuit blown dark I drank bourbon and smoked cigarettes and listened to the Beatles off a cassette tape with soft foam headphones on. I invideted the neighbor girl over.
It was as good as Cancun to me.
Drinking, sleeping around, smoking too much.
And I did this for seven years.

“Can you take me back where I come from?
Can you take me back?
Can you take me back where I come from?
Brother can you take me back?”

Prolog to 1999: Youthtopia

2011-06-28T15:17:00.003-04:00

So, Dr. Casanova Rousseau didn’t want to write the story he was born to write, created to write. Dr. Casanova Rousseau had to be held at gun point – under threat of death – not to himself, but to his wife, his child, his loved ones, in order to coerce him to write the story of 1999.

Who can blame him though. No one involved had particularly wanted to live 1999 the first way through, never mind have to relive it on paper.

But they got him to write it.

By God, the bastards got it out of him.

It happened because by the year 2011 most books and almost all fiction books had been destroyed. It hadn’t been hard. They just offered boat loads of cash to recylce books and then proceeded to send them to heavan, as it were. Also - books started being uncool, and you know how that goes.

Thus it came to be that the President of the United States, a twelve year old boy named Theodore Couch IV, had demanded that Dr. Casanova Rousseau, the author of the Dictionary [Bible] and one of the last remaining adults not in captivity, write a book for him to read.

Casanova, eleven years earlier, had vowed never to write again - never to create. All the things he had written, ideas he had created, had all gone sour in one way or another. Casanova felt like a poison, like a disease.

So, Casanova, worried about his contagion level, buried himself 42 stories underground for a large part of the first decade of the twenty first century.

The children who found him came upon him by accident. They had wanted to turn the abandoned Post Office he was bunkered in into a water park.

While investigating the buildings sub basements they found the good Doctor. So they got him up out of his hole and they strung him up on a wall and they called their captain who called the Mayor who did not call the President. No. The Mayor didn’t call anyone. He was going to hand Casanova over himself.

The Mayor immediately accepted the call. Adults were largely thought extinct. A live adult could be a very dangerous thing to the Youthtopia that had been set up in the intervening time since Casanova’s self imprisionment.

Casanova, tied to the wall and held at gunpoint quickly became upset and confused and began to shout at the children.

“Where the hell did you kids get guns?!” He demanded.

“We bought them.”

“What!?”

“Y’know, with money.”

“Yeah, we have money.”

“Yeah, we’re the police!”

“Yeah! Shut up!”

“This is insane! You’re not the police, you can’t be! You’re children.”

“Oh Christ is this guy a relic. What year’d you go down there?”

“2001”

“Key-Riste! Hey buddy, I got news for you – we’re the motherfuckin children of the revolution.”

“Yeah, we run everything.”

“What happened to the adults?”

“There arnt any adults.”

“What!?”

“Who wants to grow up anyway?”

“What do you mean there aren’t any adults, what have you done with them?”

“Done? Haha, that’s rich, they couldn’t wait to go! It’s like the old saying, ‘children are the future.’”

“I don’t understand, where? where do people go when they become adults? What have you monsters done!?

“We legalized suicide old man. Turned it into a fucking fad.”

“Yeah, suicide’s big old man.”

“Yeah, suicide’s the new black.”

“Yeah, it’s like K said, ‘Youth is for the young.’”

Casanova had heard enough. “The expression is, ‘Youth is wasted on the young,’” he burst out, “Further, I know K, I know he never said that.”

“You disputing the Bible?”

“The Bible? Where is that in the Bible…this is ludicrous!”

“Get the man a Bible” one of the Police Officers said, casually swinging his gun around.

Another Police officer disappeared, only to return with a large book with the words, ‘The Bible’ written on the cover. The child Officer held it up to Casanova.

“Now show me where it says that.” the Dr. said.

“The child opened the book and leafed through it finally coming to what he was looking for. He held the open book up to Casanova.

“That’s a dictionary!” Casanova exclaimed when he saw that what he was looking at was in fact an alphabetized list of words and their definitions. “That’s not a Bible, that’s a dictionary. A Bible is filled with stories. Those are just definitions.”

“Stories aren’t true. This is the Bible. This is true.”

“What?”

“Just read it.”

The first entry under the letter K was in fact, K, the person Casanova had known in what he was beginning to fear was another life. Casanova read the entry aloud:

K (1969-present) former lead singer of the hugely influential rock and roll band, The Acme. K is most often noted as being the first to return from the dead immediately before what is now regarded as the End of the World. During the three years after returning from the dead and throughout much of the End of the World, K served as spiritual leader for what eventually became known as ‘The Revolution.’ K disappeared mysteriously in 2001, shortly after The End of the World. see also: End of the World.

Attributed Quotes: “Life is for the living.” “The future belongs to those who will live in it.” “Two plus two can be three if you want it to be.”

`“What!?” Casanova said again.

“Man you say that a lot.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s stupid!”

“Hey! That’s the Bible!”

“Yeah!” said the peanut gallery

“You blaspheming?”

“Yeah, huh?”

“No! Yes! First off, that’s not the Bible! That’s not even A Bible. That’s a god-damned dictionary!

“That’s right. That’s the Bible.”

“Says who?”

“Says the Word Party.”

“What’s the Word Party?”

“The Word is God.”

Exasterbated Casanova’s tone grew tight and gravely, “This isn’t making any sense. God. What’s happened?”

“You are buggin the hell outa me old man.”

“God yeah shut up.”

“I need to talk to an adult! There has to be an adult somewhere!”

“Yeah yeah,” said one of the Officers to another, “Get some duct tape.”

The kid with the Bible was flipping errantly through the pages when he suddenly looked up at Casanova, “Hey, Old man, what’s your name?”

“Casanova, Dr Casanova Rousseau.”

“No shit!” Said one child obviously impressed.

“No way!” said another.

“You kids, uh, know of me?”

“Fuck yeah! You wrote the Bible.”

“I did not.”

“Sure you did. It says so right here.”

The little officer opened the Bible to the title page. He held it up to Casanova. It read like this:

The Holy Bible

Dr. Casanova Rousseau

“Son of a bitch! That son of a fucking bitch Guttenburg!” Casanova began struggling in his ropes, for the first time attempting to free himself. He writhed as he demanded the children release him.

“I’m gonna kill him!”

“Who?” One of the children asked.

“William Guttenburg!”

“Is that another Old Fogie?”

“You bet your ass he is. God damn king of the fucking old Fogies.”

“Then you’re prolly too late. He’s most likely already dead.”

“Then I’ll dig him up and kill him again!”

At this the children laughed.

“Who buries dead bodies?”

“Gross.”

“What do you do with them?”

“Burn ‘em.”

“All of them?”

“Yeah. There’s hardly enough room on this planet for the living, never mind the dead.”

“Even if he had been buried, all the cemeteries were reclaimed by the Revolution after K brought the dead back life.”

“I remember that,” Casanova said, “That happened in 2000, during the – the Wicked Summer and that serial killer epidemic.”

“Yeah, the Big Freak Out. Why do you think adults went so outa style?” Only adults turned into crazy people – who wants that to happen to them?”

“Seriously, if I’m ever over 35, please put a bullet in my brain.”

“God, right?”

The three little police officers tried to set up a game of four square in the dirt and dust on the floor of the post office but they were at least two members short of a real game and so they only played half heartedly with a rubber hand ball until finally one of them spotted a television buried under some boxes of stationary.

The children found the TV still plugged into the wall but when one of them turned it on it only produced static and a blurry color image that flickered up and down the screen.

The children hudled around the box, hitting it, pressing buttons, checking and rechiecking it’s conections to the wall. finally one of them found the problem.

“Aw, this TV’s fuckin analog.”

“Crap. It’s not gonna work then.”

Another child turned to Casanova, “Hey, ‘dude who wrote the Bible.’ Why don’t you tell us a story?”

“What?” Casanova said, lifting his head with a puzzled look on his face, “A what?”

“A story!”

“Yeah, adults are supposed to be famous for their stories.”

“Yeah, what the expression? ‘Old Fogies, can’t live with ‘em, cant shut ‘em up.’”

“You kids have a saying for everything.”

“That’s what they say.”

“What?”

“Y’know, ‘There’s a saying for everything.’

“That certainly eliminates the need to think.”

“Well, you know what they say, ‘Ignorance is bliss.’”

“That is not what is meant by -”

“Hey! You gonna tell us a story or not old man?”

“What kind of story do you want me to tell you?”

“You said you knew K, right?”

“Yes, I did know him - very well.”

“What was it like, before?”

“Before?”

“When the adults were in charge.”

“Yeah, how did you all get along for so long with so many crazy people running things.”

Casanova chuckled and said, “That’s a good question, kid. That’s a very good question,” then, “You want a story huh? How us adults so thoroughly wrecked the place? Well you’re gonna have to dig up some other Fogie to tell it to you! I quit the story telling business. To dangerous.”

“C’mon man, you wrote the Bible.”

“Stop saying that. It’s not true.”

“Of course it is, it says so in the Bible, on the first page!”

Casanova’s teeth gritted. “Well, the rest of the story should be in there already.”

“Aw, c’mon old dude. Just tell us a story.”

“Yeah!”

“C’mon!” The children gathered around Casanova, pleaded, hopped in place.

“Maybee you shoudnt have gotten rid of all the books, you could read yourselves a story.”

“Aw, that’s not as good anyway.”

“Yeah, thats why we got rid of books in the first place.”

“Yeah, reading is BO-RING.”

“And dangerous.”

“Yeah, Ke-AY! let’s not forget dangerous.”

“Dear God.” Casanova said, suddenly, with the sudden look of dawning revelation.

“What?”

“It is my fault.”

“What is?”

“All of this.”

“What? Cause you wrote the Bible?”

Casanova shot the Officer a sharp look. “No. Books. There being no books.”

“You got everyone to get rid of books too?”

“I think so.”

“How.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason you just gave. The same reason I had for quitting story telling.”

“I don’t like riddles mister.”

“I’m the one who said books were dangerous. But - but I was joking. It was satire. And I meant dangerous in a good way – I guess…”

“I don’t get it. I thought you wrote the Bible. Why would you want books banned?”

“I told you already, I didn’t write the Bible. I haven’t written anything since 2001!”

The little officers stared up at Casanova for a long time before one finally said, “Ok, gag ‘im.”

“Nah, C’mon, I want a story.”

“Fine.” Casanova said under his breath.

“What was that?”

“I said, ‘Fine.’ I’ll tell you a story.”

“About what?”

“Cut me down and I’ll tell you.”

Two of the officers looked towards the taller child.

“Cut ‘im down,” the tallest boy said.

“What’s it called,” One of the Officers asked as they helped him off the wall.

“What’s it called? It’s called ‘Children are our future.’”

“Chee Riste you believe in Time too!?” And many of the children police officers groaned loudly.

Casnaova began:

“So. K was dead.”

The tallest officer interrupted, “That’s not how you start a story!”

“Who’s telling this story?”

“You gotta start right.”

“And how’s that?”

“’A long time ago, once upon a time, in the beginning, ” the child began reciting as though he had repeated it a million times, like it was the oldest expression in the world, “-in the beginning was the word and the word was with God.”

“Oh-kay.” Casanova shook his head.

He began again.

“A long time ago, once upon a time, in the beginning, was the Word and the Word was with God and the word was God.

Some time after that the person known as K was born, lived, died and lived again. When he was alive for the first time he was a world famous musician.

Many people at the time considered K to be the best musician alive. Hundreds of thousands of people came to see him and his rock and roll band, the Acme, play their songs. Some people were so affected by K’s music they would scream and hyperventilate and even faint when they were in the presence of the band performing. Some people, including K himself, felt his music may be having too strong an effect on people. K once said he felt, “stupid,’ and ‘contagious.’

When K died, he died for real. The body that came back singing and dancing was the vessel not the soul of the man who had once moved audiences around the globe.

When K died, most people, including K himself, thought that K had killed himself because he was depressed and ashamed of being so rich and successful and influential. When K’s body turned up at the bottom of the Wishkha river near his home town of Eastover, MA with a ziplock baggie pinned to his chest containing a two word note reading “All apologies,” everyone assumed that K was being dramatic and cryptic as always.

The facts surrounding K’s death, however, seemed to leave more open doors then closed ones. A self admitted heroin user, K, shortly before his death, had been self admitted to and subsequently found AWOL from a drug and alchohol rehabilitation clinic in Hanover, MA.

Two weeks later and K’s body was being dredged from the Wish-Ka river. Syringes stuck in each arm, hole in the head.

K described dying, being dead, like this, “There was no white light. There was only an enveloping blackness. And the feeling of falling. And, I fell. And I fell forever. And I continue to fall. Like after swimming at the beach, and your whole body still feels the waves pulling at you.”

The official story of K’s death, which was ruled a suicide without investigation, had been so easily accepted by the general public because even when he was alive for the first time he never seemed to be enjoying himself too immensely.

The Acme’s last album, resealed after K’s suicide, was to be called, “I hate myself and want to die.”

K claimed this was a joke. An ironic title set up by the idea he felt everyone had about him and his ‘angry’ music. K claimed that the notion he was depressed was simply not true. “Even the President said it, ‘It’s good for young people to be angry about something.’” K said, “Sure, life’s a crock of shit, but really, I’m quite a happy guy.”

Never the less the record company and his bandmates convinced him that people would not get his joke and so the album was actually released under the title, ‘After Birth’”

When K was brought back to life, after he found himself washed up on a beach on a levee in New Orleans, he had this to say about being brought back from the dead, “It was like waking up as a cold wet blanket, and no hot shower is ever gonna warm you back up.”

People took this statement as proof enough this was the same K they’d known and loved. The fact that he looked like K was, as they say, icing on the cake.

The first person who saw K, after he had come back from the dead, who watched K’s corpse struggle slowly on the shore, attempting to regain control of its arms and legs, spoke of the horror that came from K’s eyes as the boy watched K become fully aware of what was happening to him.

The boy described the mournful scream from deep in K’s salt water filled lungs. Coughs, sputters and girgles of brine, and pieces of seaweed and flotsam burst from K’s mouth.

“Aaargh!”

K was in a state of shock. Before him on the dark crest of land a small child was screaming, standing in a pool of piss dripping from his red running shorts. K attempted to calm the boy. He tried to raise his arm but failed to bring it above his head.

In his head, words came from somewhere far away. Calming soothing words towards the boy, reassuring him that K meant him no harm, that he should stop screaming, that it wasn’t so bad. But as K’s body began to attempt to speak words to this effect, the only sounds that came from K’s mouth were grunts and moans.

“Mmraagh! Rrraaaghh.” Water gurgled from his mouth.

K tried to stand and quickly fell again. His whole body was pins and needles, numb, asleep. K tried to cry, to scream. Only moans came out.

K tried to think.

His thoughts came slow, murky through a tunnel and from echos of his own memory. The last thing he could remember was jumping a retaining wall at the Hanover clinic and something about a gun. He needed to find a gun, but he couldn’t remember why. Then, darkness and the cold, and the overwhelming feeling of falling, like in a dream just before your fall asleep and you wake up and it felt so real that your sure you slam into the bed but the slam never came. And then, there on the shore, in his soggy Keds, K began to realize with creeping horror and certainty that he had passed over to the other side, that he had woken up on the shores of Hell – even then the felling of falling did not stop.

K’s head rose, his body came to it’s feet, K felt a deep deep pull to begin moving forward and when he looked down he realized his feet were in fact propelling him towards the boy.

As he lumbered, bobbing up and down, heavy legs in sea laden flesh and clothing, his mind suddenly came rushing all in and out of his head as though in a great wave against his brain, everything clear for just a moment and then rushing away.

K screamed his first string of syntax since awakening on shore and he screamed it with terror and blood in his eyes.

“Am I in - !” He screamed. “Is this -?”

And just as quickly K’s mind receded far far away from his eyes, recoiling from the realization that it had been forced back into K’s body but not given the controls.

Further, K’s eyes could tell from his rotting and peeling skin, the light growth of barnacles on his shoulder and the general white/grey/blue tone of his skin, that he was in fact, still dead. He had not come back to life.

“Once was enough,” K heard himself say, quietly in a heavy raspy voice.

The child had stopped screaming, only the gentle wash cycle of the ocean could be heard. The ocean and the creak and the groan of K’s body as it continued towards the boy.

K groaned again, thought, “Damn it.”

He tried to raise both arms but succeeded in only looking more like a zombie. K knew what he looked like - what he had become, and what his hiding mind had already begun to figure out had been done to him. He needed to find help. He needed to find someone he knew.

The boy, Jack Coleman of the 5^th district in New Orleans knew what K was too. Jack Coleman had lost control of his bodily functions when he realized it. He lost the ability to speak - to think. If he hadn’t he would have been saying out loud what was screaming in his head.

“A zombie is going to eat me. A zombie is going to eat my brains. A zombie from the ocean is going to eat me. Why did I take that stupid cell phone. A zombie is going to eat me. A zombie – “ and so on.

These were the words that the child’s silent lips were making when K’s body came up to him and grabbed him by the shoulders. K grew concerned he might indeed try to harm the boy, or hell, maybe even try to eat the boy’s brain. He struggled in vain to regain control of his movements. He spoke, “Phone.” He said.

The boy stopped and mumbing said flatly, “What?”

K’s mouth repeated it’s movements, “Phone.”

Jack was too scared to understand the words. they rolled around in his mind. “Phone.” The boy said aloud.

K’s arm released the boy.

In the pocket of the shorts was his sister’s cell phone but Jack was beside himself in terror, his hands couldn’t even find the pockets of his shorts, let alone the phone. Unable to find his pockets Jack removed his shorts entirely.

Between sobs Jack managed to squeek out, “There’s a phone in the pocket! Don’t eat me. Please don’t eat me Mr Monster. Please don’t eat me. You can have the phone. I’m sorry I took it. Please don’t-“

“Argh!” K yelled again.

Suddenly a shout came from up the beach a way. “HEY! Hey you two!”

K snatched up the shorts and began digging through them.

“Hey! What’s going on there?” The voice called out. This time closer.

K’s hand dropped the shorts, his other hand clenched tightly around the cell phone. He pulled it out and turned it over in his hands. “What’s this? Is this a phone?” He asked looking up. A police officer stood before him, gun drawn, he was shaking, sweating. K swayed lightly looking down the barrel of the gun.

K’s eyes blinked. His mind rushed in and out again, filled his head with clarity for a moment, flushed itself back out.

“Officer,” K said. “This is not what it looks like. My name – my name is – is K. I – I think I’m dead. Or I think I was. Look I don’t know what’s going on, I just needed a phone to –“

“Yeah, we’re gonna find out what’s going on- “ The police officers eyes widened as he really got a good look at K.

K’s flesh clung to itself desperately in the cold sea surf, like a childs blanket tattered and held with sheer will. K could feel the will holding his bones stiff. The will was not his own it felt like the undertow. K’s eyes stared back at the officer’s - dead black holes.

“What’s with the getup?” The officer said waving the gun.

Of course, at that time, Police officers were adults, and children still trusted adults so the child, Jack, was feeling relieved to be in the protection of someone larger, stronger and he surely figured, wiser. So Jack had stopped crying and was feeling braver. “The monster stole my sister’s phone.”

“I’m not a monster.” K growled, “I’m a person.”

K came forward towards the officer who stepped back shaking his gun like crazy.

“Hey! Hey stop it!” He yelped, “St-stay where you are. Put your hands behind your head. Drop the phone. Drop it.”

K stumbled backwards, “I – I think I’m dead.”

“What?” The officer asked.

“The zombie stole my sister’s cell phone!”

“I’m not a zomb- “ K stopped short, suddenly unsure.

“Look, just drop the phone and put your hand behind your head, we can talk all about this down –“

K began to back away towards the ocean until it licked at his heels.

“Hey! Stop!” The officer shouted. He didn’t move towards K though, he was too scared. “Stop!” He pleaded again.

K felt it fist. The first thing he’d actually registered as feeling since his eyes had opened to the beach. It didn’t hurt much, just a sting, but the simple shock of any feeling at all sent K’s mind spinning back away. Then he saw the officer’s face, twisted in fear and horror, flash in the gun’s discharge, and he heard the shots as he fell back.

“AAAGGH!” K screamed. He’d been shot. The officers shaky hands unloaded the rest of the gun’s cartridge into K’s body, throwing it back into the surf.

To K it felt like a hand full of bee stings all over his body. His arms, torso and legs all sent tiny shocks of pain up to his mind.

The officer was still clicking the trigger and Jack was still screaming, “Gimme my sister’s cell phone back you damned zombie!”

As he sank into the water, as the darkness swallowed him back, the last thing K saw was thick black viscous fluid draining from the bullet holes all over his body. It didn’t surge or flow as he sank but instead, slowly, like old used motor oil, oozed out of the holes.

Then there was the familiar blackness and the feeling of falling.

excerpt from 1999

2011-06-28T15:12:00.002-04:00

In the beginning was the word and the word was God; but first, a short film by Dr. Casanova Rousseau

FADE IN

A large crimson curtain hangs across the stage, filling the shot. It parts smoothly with a swoosh of heavy fabric to reveal...

EXT. BUS STOP. Seven people waiting at the sign. The seven are a pale man in a suit, a small child in Oshkosh, a woman and the child’s mother in a blue skirt and a heavy winter jacket, although the day was warm. There is also another man in a suit and tie, his hair is dark and he has a briefcase. The last three are a scruffy looking bunch of teens. The child in Oshkosh is doing a little dance.

Suddenly a bright light shines upon them and a female voice booms from the heavens. It is the voice of the Virgin Mary.

The Virgin Mary. I am the Virgin Mary, Mother of God.

The child stops his dance, all are silent and in Awe.

The Virgin Mary. I have come with an urgent message from the Son, your Lord and Savior, I will show you terrible things which will soon come to pass. The time draws–

A cell phone begins ringing. The man with the briefcase pulls his cell phone from his belt and checks the number. He puts his pointer finger on his lip, considers answering it, then finally, answers the phone and holds his finger out towards the light.

Man. Hey! Yeah, can’t talk right now. Something’s going on. Something. I don’t know, some kinda weird thing. I don’t know. I gotta go. Yeah, now.”

He closes the cell phone and puts it away.

Man. Sorry, go ahead.

The cell phone rings again. He checks it, turns it off and nod’s.

Man. Go ahead.

There is silence.

Curtain.

Credits Roll.

Twenty Five O'clock Chapter 1

2011-05-13T13:48:00.001-04:00

The clock struck thirteen.
It was one of those novelty clocks with words and letters and pictures and numbers all out of sequence instead of actual sequential clock numbers. Thirteen meant it was seven.

I don't like this story. I don't want to write it. I don't like writing in general and I've spent a lot of time trying to quit it. Robert, my couselor, says I should learn to control it instead of trying to suppress it or burry it. He says I shouldn't keep secrets. I don't want to tell everything though. I don't want to think about it.

Mostly, I don't want to hurt the people in this story who act silly or foolish or not perfect. If they read this story, I told Robert, they would feel bad. "They might likely be mad." I'ld said. But Robert said, "Lies are bad for you. Secrets make lies of the truth by keeping the whole truth buried." He asked me why I should have secrets why I should not tell the whole truth all the time.
I don't know, and I told him I wanted to keep some things inside for myself and that other people didn't have to take everything from me and he said I was being selfish and I needed to learn to share. Then he said, as he was checking his Pad, "There's no I in We."

I am a news aggregate copy re writer.

This means I take news written by a pool of people from the Associated Press Corp - and these people usually are writing based on reports by field workers and press releases - and I take these stories and I re write them in maybe five or six different ways each and then I send them off to various news aggregates and these news filters in turn send these stories in specific ways to users who sign up to have specific kinds of news filtered to them each day.

Lets say I get a story about a grove of trees being turned into a gas station. The original writer may have given the story a subconcious eco bent, with a title like, "Park Hill Grove razed for gas station," which i might turn into headlines such as, " Gas Station Construction Progresses" or "New Local Business Promises Revitalization to Ailing Franklin Rd." or "Dangerous gully, cleaned and cleared by local philanthropic buisnessmen."

The article may have aquardly phrased sentences in it as well, saying something like, "Private police firm Target Securities were authorized by Public Safety Officers to forcibly remove over a dozen protesters who had handcuffed themselves to a fence surrounding what they claimed was an ancestral graveyard." Which I might turn into something less politically volitile such as, "The construction crew reported minimal problems and operations finished as scheduled."

Then I shoot up to a half dozen (but sometimes up to double that amount in the weeks right before an election cycle ends) of these re-writes off to my various aggregate spools which are all integrated through a Cloud program based out of THEBOOK.

On average it takes me about three hours to finish my day's work. I am allowed to log up to three days loads in a given day. Last year, I averaged 18-21 work days a week. This year, I've been red flagged. I'm averaging 64.3 days a week. My councilor says it's a sign I'm headed towards a "psychotic break". He always says it in air quotes to take some of the weight off of it I suppose. I don't care. I told him to fuck off. I told him I wanted to have a "psychotic break," that I hated this stupid trutheless world.
He asked me, "What world would you like to live in?"
And I told him, "I don't know. Just not this one."

The reason I don't want to talk about or write about this story is because I used to be in love, and the girl I loved is in this story. But here in the future love is something stupid. And so this story sounds gross and stupid all exposed to the light of the Future.
And also its hard to keep track of when Im telling a story that happened a long time ago and one that just happened. And I cant be sure if that's because of something i've done, or something i'm doing.

Last night I had the dream again. I still couldn't see her face but the setting was the same and we were on an island - all around us the flames and the screaming - and her skin was white and smooth as silk and her hair was like flax in the sunlight. And we made love on a pile of bodies amidst the screaming of millions more.
I never see who she is. I've grown convinced ill figure her out from her collar bone, or the nook in her neck, or how her breasts lay on her chest, but to date, I have not seen her in my waking world.
In the dream it's not Belle. It's never Belle in the dream. The dream is not about love.

Writing is a dangerous hobby for someone with friends who can read. I never wrote. I tried not to at least. I tried not to write intelligibly, lest someone read it and, fearful it was about them, take offense. How can someone properly express reality then though, when all it's edges are so fragile. Sometimes it seemed the whole world was made of egos. Differn't egos. All of them making a giant wall. clashing at the edges, sealing each other in.
And art was reduced to functions of the brain, itself just a damp circuit board. And art felt delusory, masturbatory to ego exhalation - it made me sick to have feeling for inanimate objects. To love or fixate on anything now makes me feel nauseous.

things may not be what they seem , by Ryan Scott

2011-05-05T16:52:00.000-04:00

in betweens [by Michael James and Thomas Matthew Campbell]

2010-11-21T01:36:00.000-05:00

our composition notebook was torn down the spine
the forces of in out wash rounds
the sport was the combing of the detriment
so we spoke up as we laid ourselves down
stopped short of roaming the pavement
ice cream cones made on the front end of big wheels washed down with freeze pops
acres of wild grass and edges of woods waited, unknown
the sweetness washed down the bitter pill
spread out the lucid death that shook the town
scraped elbows, shorn skin, gravel, wicker chairs along the brick patio
the girls were waiting somewhere else, laughing, playing board games

Twenty Five O'clock Chapter 2

2010-11-13T22:51:00.003-05:00

2

It's sunny out today. I don't have to go to the office. I don't really ever have to if I don't want to. I can do my work from home. I have a four panel surround screen in my apartment and i can re target articles from there. I probably wont go out till night at least though.

When I was a little kid the future was a wonderful place. Filled with technological wonders that all but alleviated the suffering of man. When I got here though it was like all those dystopia novels they'd made us read in high school. I think they made us read them just so we would make the future like that. There were never any good stories about a good future.
Literature never presented us with a positive outlook on the future except in the Comic Books, if thats to be called any kind of literature at all. Which most would say, it outn't.

Shelly came over today. She sighed and lilted all across things in my room. She wasn't happy with the weather she said, it hadn't been warm enough for May she insisted. And at work she felt small. She wanted to do something that meant something she said. She was wearing a white dress that clung to her body and stopped just above her thigh. She talked liked she had a southern drawl but she didn't.
"How have things been otherwise?" I asked her while moving about my room, cleaning up piles of clothes and various consumer packaging.
"Oh. you know." She sighed with a limp wrist.
"Right."
"Oh. My aunt's back from Arizona, so you know there's that whole thing."
"What whole thing?"
"Oh there's this whole thing between my aunt and my sister."
"Kelly?"
"No my other sister, Jean."
"Ah."
"Haha. Never mind."
"I don't know your other sisters."
"I know. Yeah. Nevermind."
"Hh." I said, I loaded an internet music feed and Arab Strap came on.

Later, after it got a bit darker out, she left to get alcohol - returning with a bottle of gin and some tonic. I had finished picking up my room and i'd begun to skim the news aggregates, reposting funny stories to my personal feed and my work scroll. She poured herself a glass and asked me if I wanted her to mix me one as well but I told her I didn't like tonic and so I drank the gin over ice while we listened to old jazz on the Berkley College feed over the internet. After a few glasses she said, "Maybe we should go out. Out there."
"We can iBar here. I mean i have a set up in the living room." We were in my bedroom and I only had a one panel screen set up, and although I didn't tell her, I had purposely broken the camera part a few days earlier.
"I hate iBar."
"Yeah. But, y'know it's cheeper." I said and shook the ice in my glass.
"What's that a picture of?" She asked pointing to my wall, collaged with magazine and newspaper clippings.
"Which one?" I asked and moved closer towards her trying to follow the arrow of her finger.
"That one, there next to the red one. That picture of the ocean?"
"Yeah. That's Waymouth Point. On the Cape."
"It looks nice there."
"Yeah. I've never been but I thought the picture looked cool."
And she smiled and I was very close to her mouth by then and I kissed her because my body ached from sitting alone in my apartment and just watching the screen and talking on Facebook and iBar and from not having touched someone for so long and all I could smell was the slight acid smell of her skin and sweat and the light through her blond hair and everything felt very right and I felt uneasy about how perfect it all seemed but I kissed her anyway. And she was beautiful and her skin was pale pale white and the look on her face told me she wanted to feel connected so badly it didn't nesccesarily matter who with any longer.
And so we made love on the floor - half against the wooden planks and half against the prickly carpet, black with faded dark green vines twining up it's length.
And afterwards while I smoked and she did as well and I got dressed and she did as well and she mentioned again going out and I said probably and she stood awkwardly and waited and then said, "Well.." And I went over to her and kissed her and said, "What are you up to?"
And she said, "Oh nothing, Probably go home - change, then, you know, go out."
"Yeah." I said. "Me too."
"So." She said moving towards the door. "Ill see you later."
And she left and I went to the living room and turned on the cable news and my favorite newscaster was reading the headlines with her perfect white smile and I started checking THEBOOK and I changed my VisiTel Status to: "In a meeting," with a little red Away indicator so no one would know if I was really there or not and if someone messaged me I could ignore it and, conceivably, I might actually be Away.

I used to like going to the office. I still do. I found it intolerably tedious to stay at home. I felt inhuman, sitting alone in my apartment. Even though it was well lit and very colorfully decorated and there were plenty of comic books and musical instruments and i had a pretty good wifi. I could spend the whole day and not feel there wasnt something for me to do. But I was still bored. I just had to see other walls sometimes. I also enjoyed the feeling of being around other humans, I craved to see them and smell them and watch their faces glow or scowl and arms tighten up or wave or dangle or shake a little, uncomfortably and legs cross and uncross..
Nobody liked mondays so, they were often slow. Tuesdays and Wedsdays were best and Fridays often devolved into late afternoon snooker fests. I used to like a good snooker but, lately I havn't been as into it. Over the winter I even stopped going in on Fridays.
Scientists say it's good to have at least 20% of your day involve some kind of face to face human interaction. by face to face they mean in real space, not face to face chat. Most of the major news aggregate employers think its good for productivity and offer bonus' for high office attendance rates. Calculated out, I found, my earned bonus' each week covered exactly my weekly expenses for PallMall Blue 100's and gin.

Matchstick Kids Pt A

2010-10-02T22:40:00.001-04:00

She was buying a pack of squares. Sunshine Superman was playing through the Circle K speakers. A little boy peeked his eyes up over from behind the counter and his hand appeared with the pack. The little boy said, “buck fity”

I asked her what time it was - she laughed and said, “You know there’s no more time keeping. What are you, living in the 20th century?

I followed her a bit down the street. There wasn’t much else to do. She was a Matchstick Kid. I could tell ‘cause after the kid had given her a pack of squares she asked for a pack of matches. Matches came with condoms in those days and by the look of her outfit - leg warmers and a ripped t-shirt, black skinny jeans and big white rimmed square sunglasses matted oily hair and jangling plastic beads around her neck, and her age - mid twenties - she was headed for a Suicide Club. At the bus stop where she stopped to light a square I caught up to her.

“You don’t have to do that you know.”

“Oh Christ” she rolled her eyes to the back of her head, “you're not an MO are you?”

She meant a Modern Oblivionist, one of the only religions left after the

Wicked Summer. Modern Oblivionists were notorious for trying to get people to keep living. No one wanted to do that of course and MO’s were some of the most annoying people in the country. Only Word Party Members were worse - always pushing Dictionaries on people.

“Nah, nah, I’m not an MO.” That was a lie of course. I was more then just a member - I was a priest in the Church of Modern Oblivion. Surely she knew though, My white outfit and black collar gave me away. “I’m a Word Party member.”

“Nice get up then, you a RichKid too? you going to a costume party.”

“Can I CEO a square?” I asked.

“Christ.” She said tossing a square high into the air before crossing the street. I caught it and jogged up behind her. “How bout a light?”

“I’m in a hurry MO, get lost.”

“Where you going?”

“Suicide Club Nine.”

“Get out, me too.”

“Of course.”

Suicide Club Nine was uptown, about two blocks from where we were and as I trailed behind her the sun came out from behind dark clouds causing an unearthly glow in the neighborhood in dramatic contrast to the dark grey sky, like before a huge thunderstorm. Little kids in business suits rushed around us on their lunch breaks and children drove madly at all speeds swerving and smashing into each other in the streets. Some cars were so wrecked they couldn’t go forward anymore and the young occupants stood along side them screaming at each other. No words, they just stood facing each other, mouths agape, screaming at the tops of their lungs trying to get their cars to run again.

“What do you want MO? You wanna fuck?”

“Nah.” I said, held my palms up, “I’m clean, I’m a holy man see? I just want some company. I’m gettin’ old.”

“Yeah, we all are.” She kept walking, picking up her pace a little. I started to jog along side her. She said without turning, “Well? What do you want to talk about MO -about the nothingness of existence - about the syntax of joy? Maybe do a little Casanova Rousseau play?”

She meant the famous writer Casanova Rousseau who was famous for among other things writing a collection of extremely short plays consisting of only small talk.

“Nice weather.”

“Yeup, can’t complain.”

That was one.

“Nah, nah, I just want to talk, you know? Why you going to Suicide Club

Nine?”

“You said it yourself.”

“I did?”

“Yeah.”

“What was it? I forget.”

“’I’m getting old.’”

“Yeah, we all are.”

“That was my line.” She said.

“What’s your name?”

“Drop Dead.”

“Family name?”

“Mother’s aunt through marriage.”

“Are they old too?”

“Nah, they’re still young, dead you know?”

Suicide Clubs started getting big a few years ago. About three years after the Wicked Summer had extinguished the last bit of naiveté mankind had for making this world a place that made an ounce of sense. Nowadays everyone just laughed along.

As everyone knows, a third of all adults over thirty were tarred and feathered or burnt at the steak during the Wicked Summer. A third supposedly fled to south America. The rest all killed themselves. This left plenty of room for the children run Revolution to take control of America and turn it into the Youthtopia that it had become.

The new retirement age was moved down to twenty-five. The five years in between that and thirty were free. You could do what you wanted. For most people their twenty-fifth birthdays began what was referred to as “The Great Slide.”

Passive aggressive suicide was big. Cigarettes or squares as they were called were selling like hotcakes to children of all ages.

I was twenty-seven. In two years, like all aging children I would have two options: kill myself, flee to south America, or, and this was the kicker in my opinion, I could sign up for the Service.

The Service used to mean the army but now a-days it meant just what it said.

I would be assigned to be a servant to a child by lottery. My job would be to watch and care for my assigned child. Joining the Service meant I would revoke any rights which I still believed I had had. Further I would be responsible for the well-being of my assigned child. Should I fail to adequately protect and care for my master I would be arrested and executed to the preference of a Child Jury, which often included strange tourturous deaths only six year old could imagine.

The whole thing was a TV show too. So you were at least guaranteed a spectacular televised death.

I had a way out though. See, they weren’t going to swarm over me. I had a found a loophole. I could tell People on the street, “I’m a holy man.”

As a Priest in the Modern Oblivion I was protected by the second of the only laws of the land. The first law was that there were no laws.

The second law was that no one could kill a holy man. No one knew why there was second law. Especially since the first law seemed to outlaw its very existence. But then again no one really thought much about it. No one really thought much about anything nowadays.

Further, since first law was that there were no laws there were still plenty of things that were outlawed. Rules for one. Bedtimes for another. But, that’s what you get when you let children run things. Religion fell big time into the rules category and hence ruled out by he first law. So, getting to be a Holy Man was tricky.

Because everyone who was old enough to know better was either gone or dead or both, very few people had even tried coming up with a solution to all these problems. In fact most people didn’t even realize there were problems. Hell most people didn’t even understand what the concept of a problem was.

Despite all this nonsense though, at least two religions managed to spurt up. The first was the Word Party. They believed that the written word, all written words, were the manifestation of the old Judeo Christian ‘God.’ They claimed that the reason God couldn’t help anyone was because he had been stuck, entombed into literature. They offered no plan on how to free him, they seemed content to read him.

The second religion, The Church of the Modern Oblivion, the one I was a ranking official in - believed in everything. We believed everything anyone told us, even if they were outright lies, “Everything is true.” We went around saying.

And that is just what I said to the girl when she asked me if it was true I wanted to go with her to the suicide club.

“Oh Christ.”

“You keep bringing him up, do you know him or something?”

“Jesus Christ? Yeah, he lives up in my flat.”

“Really?”

“You don’t think it’s true?”

“I think everything is true.”

“Mm.”

“Could I meet him?” I asked her.

“Who?”

“Jesus Christ? I’ve never met God before. Suppose I’ve got a question to ask him.”

“I told you I’m in a hurry.”

“To the Suicide Club.”

“Right.”

“So you’re in a hurry, to – die.”

“Yeah.”

“C’mon, it’d just take a minute.”

“What do you know? I live all the way across town.”

“We’ll take the T.”

She stopped walking.

“You take the T?”

“Sure.”

“Wow you are brave.” Then, “Or crazy.” She looked me up and down, “Sure, let's go meet Jesus Christ.”

ok so

2010-10-02T22:39:00.001-04:00

OK.

So.

Summer’s over. The sharp dive the nights take into cold crisp air is proof of that.

The leaves have begun to change.

Everyone’s.

What pieces are left after the whirlwind of 2007?

Snow and I are still in love – but now faced with the adult situation of questions like, is it enough?

And she says all she can remember of it all is the hair pulling – the sickness and all I can remember is the small sweet moments.

Lying next to her.

Love? Love. Is it enough?

I met people – made – forged real bonds here and there– the best people I’ve ever met in some spots. All the Paradise Alley kids. Brilliant shinning kids trying so hard to hold onto those little pieces that they always held as who they were while simultaneously pouring drugs and alcohol down into the holes where those pieces they couldn’t lock down had gotten away. I use the passive ‘had’ here because those pieces always disappear during the passive moments - the moments if acquiescence that you don’t even realize your having until days or weeks or months later when all of a sudden you’re struck with this feeling that something and you don’t know just what but something is gone and it’ll never come back and there is that hole that void that all the substances the food the drugs the movies the lipstick the electronic toys the alcohol the one night stands the adrenaline rushes the fights the late night wandering the house cleaning the singing and dancing in the world wont fill up.

But they help.

And so you do them all pour them all down into that hole.

But during those moments when you can just barely live with the spots, the holes the voids and the loss for the things you’ve traded for them, that’s when the passive acquiescence happens again, when the thought floats up that Hell – maybe it’s not so bad – maybe I’ll be just fine.

And ffwtt! Another little piece you let slide.

Monday night at Hugo’s

I just want it to keep happening because when I don’t have to sit up there in my room I don’t have to look at it – sitting – waiting in the corners and spilled across the floor. all those broken pieces of my life – the molding problems that’ll take a miracle to clean up.

Thankfully.

I believe in miracles.

I believe in the impossible.

“I can be honest with myself – right?” I say.

“Yeah,” I reply.

“Well how can I trust you?” I want to know.

“You have to do it with blind faith.” I say.

“I think I can do that.”

“I think you can too,” I assure myself.

“There have been problem’s, in the past,” I come back.

“I know – God I know.”

Standing outside the bar, sucking down USA Gold Light 100s, my spit leaves splatters of abstract art on the sidewalk that I stare into it absorbed by it’s beauty.

Was that the lesson abstract art was trying to teach?

To get our eyes accustomed to the abstract beauty all around us.

Or was it the biggest Dada bullshit scam artists ever pulled?

Beats me.

Boston & the Yankees playing on the telescreen – 8^th inning it was all tied up 1 – 1.

Suddenly grand slam sends 3 Yankees home and Boston is down by three.

Then as if by some miracle – Bam one run and they only down by two.

This shit’s rigged if you ask me.

27 frightful things: 1 - 9

2010-09-26T22:34:00.000-04:00

liquid relaxation

2010-09-26T22:33:00.000-04:00

pitch back paper black four corner posts from the matchmakers hand
we'd like to introduce you to our studio audience
stand ovate clap for the flakes at home mr sanchez your our next big winner
weenier winner
take five guys
its the practical night life
that makes it happen

when do we feel the edges of the room
the corners crowded with spiderwebs
eating the flies the maggots born of the filth let accumulate over time
the spiders watching the corners
the spiders watching the filth, eating the filth

the broom handle is smooth metal painted blue and the spiders fall scatter across the floor towards the corners

its hard to find time to relax
this is why i take most of mine in a drinkable form

breathe smoke
three hundred miles away - bar harbor main fentworth 'day and night dog sitting' is turning their small business loan into a death knell -

the fear

2010-09-26T22:30:00.001-04:00

Im very scared
and it washes over me in waves
everything begins to collapse at the edges, everything falling off and failing suddenly,
everything ending dying
my arms reject myself i cant see my hands straight they dance in and out of smaller hands
someone's trying to time travel into me
and they're not happy
they're crying
i stare at the wall at the table next to the chair my grandmother gave me from my grandperents house, scared along the arm with cigarette burns and stains from spilled drinks
i stare at the things on the wall, tacked pictures, magazine pages, ink blots, a key chain, an empty picture frame hung over a poster of andy warhol
i feel tears welling that don't ever come for real
somehow, sitting here
amongst my things
suddenly seeing how they'll disappear
a trophy room
to hitting the dirt
a bright flash a cleansing palet
and whoosh
wasted days
grow a soul, ha!
a rolling stone
and a cell phone bill
the doors are open. the windows too. the veranda shimmers in the bright late afternoon sunlight. fall comes in sweeping and splendid this year. but something shakes on me.
what is the rattle, i wonder and all i can do is follow the trail, or look for one to begin with, and so i turn from the wall and the pictures and wreath to the computer
to the monitor
to the screen
to the keyboard
and I write it all down. and that makes me less afraid.

September Eleventh

2010-09-11T22:17:00.000-04:00

1.Slim Evans 2.Thomas Matthew Campbell 3.Tim Quinones

2010-09-04T00:58:00.001-04:00

so what are all the hipsters doing tonight
 in general yo hope everyones having fun
 mad luv to the earth to the heathens
 to the seeds in the sky  to the seeds in the books ...to the water from our eyes
 the electricity from our brains that lets them grow
 i asked an asian girl to get pitcher of beer with me  for no real reason
yeah she said no  it was a pretty good experience(1)

the hipsters dance in obligatory tribulation
white wine folded napkin place keepers
for the cosmic significance
tonight is the night
all in eternal consequence
...of the first begotence(2)

I can only do two things,
Say word up or not say word up.
Its a limited vocabulary but I can rhythmically alternate between the two to send simple coded messages.(3)

Van Gogh

2010-08-23T20:42:00.000-04:00

You know the early bird gets the worm
She’s fasting in obligatory menstruation of Altamont’s shadow
There wasn’t ever so much a sentiment
As there was a cattle call to the beautiful
We rocked our socks off in the ash baths
Of pure white driven fires
We dug up all our dead heroes
And burnt them to the heavens
So when the dead rise from their graves
They don’t have to see what we’ve done with the place

its not about commitment. its about survival.

2010-08-17T23:01:00.001-04:00

it's not just drunk
any late night
facebook turns into a bad habit
and i'm listenig to old music
thinking about old girls
still so young

a pencil
a tuner
an empty coffee cup
a million index cards
half a million filled with words
an off white speaker next to the off white computer
a lighter
a remote control
a one hitter
a pencil
another empty coffee cup
a pen
a silver top torn from the top of the inside of a pack of cigarttes
a pack of pall mall light one hundreds with the insignia
IN HOC SIGNO VINCES
which means "With this as your standard victory is assured"
the case for my contacts
a beer bottle cap that says
"A Beer Less Traveled"
a match book and another beer bottle cap
this one says: How did You get like This?

today i didnt go to work
they didnt call either
just figured
they'd never see me again
they should be so lucky

"when we get together
take apart my fantasy
and when we are done
we'll work on you"

art students post about new levels of commitment when they brush their teeth in the studio sink and I cant find the outside world anymore - the studio lines were erased in fits of acidic paint leaks, doors fell before syntax, and its not about comitment anymore

its about survival

in the dream, it's snowing

2010-08-17T22:57:00.000-04:00

In the dream it is snowing - a young girl with dark hair and light skin falls - the blood pools and runs black through the snow – tendrils creeping from her body.
Something about twenty two.
Twenty two minutes?
Was it twenty two minutes for her soul to leave her body?
Where she fell was outside, in the town square, in public, there were others. A small child behind the crowd on concrete stairs leading from a second story window. The boy watched - was the one remembering the events.
There was a piano playing, a young girl with sharp bangs and long white hair singing.

The boy, in the dream I had, woke up years later, a man in his thirties, looking very much like Robert De Niro from the Godfather II. He was remembering all of this.
Something about his boss or coworker or friend also talking about twenty two, or twenty two minutes.
“This is it. You see? The missing twenty two minutes.”

And then cut to a young woman with dark hair and much more flush skin in a big nice bed waking up next to a dead baby.
She’s screaming.
De Niro’s telling the doctor something. Then later remembering that scene too saying, “It was never the same after that.”

6/6/06

2010-08-17T18:26:00.000-04:00

And the girls walk by in their summer skirts and tight hip huggers.
We were never that conscious- it was mostly just a rouse.
When the light streaked in it felt like an expulsion from the naïveté and the nonsense.

from vast oceans of haze
to shores of sanity
night camp on crystal beaches
new paradigms aren’t worth a dime
I’ve got discarded and broken leaks in my bag
the shadows fall during the day and my mornings keep getting longer
its takes me hours to awake
if I do

tell me if you like this news
it’s all been revealed – little dog yap yapping to stage left
but it’s us shouting “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
we’re trying to watch the movie”
someones over in the corner opening the EXIT door
everyone’s shouting, shut it! your letting the light in

the water’s turned bad
the air, noxious
and the sun sickens the skin
the food is filled with drugs, chemicals and hormones
refined repossessed and homogenized
the rainy season’s come late to New England
news reports feature the weather as of late
Mother Nature’s no longer to be trusted they say between words

my allergies are killing me I think as I adjust my glasses
I am ill equipped for this world
logic puns only hint at something deeper
mirrors only show us what we can see

the fish are biting

I’m still in love, it’s not getting older, just better

and the Copenhagen effect is vibrating me, I’m bracing for the leap

6/6/06

it’s been a quiet unassuming day

where were we

2010-08-17T18:24:00.001-04:00

good god where were we? where are we?
year of our lord 2010 and two years left of the Great Cycle
hurricane Alex to visit the puncture wound bleed out of mother earth down in the gulf
how long did we think we could flush our shit down there
stuck another needle in
oceans turn black

summer solstice almost 7 full days ago
a week of violent reverberations
from every group a representative
some all the way from vision quest desserts in Texas
some time travelers people who don't exist in this time
and i got seven women on my mind

don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy

œ

get another record out (pass out in a meat freezer and fuck the revelation revolution)

2010-08-17T18:18:00.000-04:00

factory workers hearts explode
‘cause lighters catch fire in their chest pockets
in furnace work
robots sleep like men in dark
a lighter thrown against a wall
explodes like furnace tossed along
AND!
you always gotta buy something
and you know of it
through endless banter
we all identify with the never has been
never will be all time worst man
doing drugs helps crazy people understand each other
you walk into a CVS they know how you walk
how you purchase how you shake
your booty
“you and I
to a strange and distant land”
the albums almost over
get another record out

Punk Crust

2010-07-10T02:59:00.000-04:00

the hope or the dream or course

2010-06-14T00:10:00.000-04:00

The hope or dream of course was to write the whole thing down. All the wanderings and ramblings could be if not summed up then at least typed out in some kind of holy scroll testament to being alive. That’s what kept me wandering. There was the belief that there would come a confutation of the mundane and a storm of luck and happenstance might illuminate a road to eyes who could only see if they were looking. So we looked and looked. We hitchhiked every road we could find. Somewhere, we were sure, a road would lead somewhere where there revealed itself some sense or reason or encapsulated a feeling of an ending and in doing so would give frame to the entire sequence.
There never came such a time. Or perhaps there did and it simply passed, quietly unnoticed. Maybe we missed our exit. We became impudent actors refusing to leave the stage despite having no lines left. Our personal rebellion became Holy Revolution. Our professions and confessions became Beatific prosody in our eyes. Our world became illuminated by Holyness and Magik in a sadistic orgy of Dream and Potential over Real and Past.

is it low or high tide?

2010-06-13T12:41:00.000-04:00

speak full weariness
beached touch
final denouement
please allow me to introduce myself
I am Sparticus
the waves are my saddle
and the ocean is my horse
I am Sparticus
No, I am Sparticus
life lines
mount of lunar sings while
shasta sheen
reflected in the foam
of a glistening crest
at low tide

- campbell, lopez
June 11 2010

a page from the letters from the church of the modern oblivion

2010-06-07T11:54:00.000-04:00

a page from the letters from the church of the modern oblivion

2010-06-07T01:28:00.001-04:00

you say you want a revolution?

2010-06-02T21:54:00.000-04:00

if i were to ever find out this was all some kind of test i would be so fucking pissed off i would most certainly fail it.

strength of character eh?

“The lights are on, but your not home, your will - is not your own
your heart sweats, your teeth grind
another kiss, and you’ll be mine

you like to think that you’re immune to this stuff
it’s closer to the truth to say you cant get enough

might as well face it

your addicted to love.”

post script: devil told me, “aerosmith’s song ‘dream on’ is a cheap rip off of the sequal to “stairway to heaven.” which led zepplin lost in a card game to steven tyler. By LUCK!”

further, you want a revolution?

sneak into churches and slice the curtain behind the cross down the middle

its all a front, we're sleeping in a tent in your backyard for a reason.

2010-06-02T21:51:00.000-04:00

what did you kill?

The man in red lights a cigarette, the woman in blue looks away and begins weeping.

Man in Red. Well, Here we are again.
Woman in Blue. Do you believe in reincarnation?
Man in Red. I’m starting to.

Have I set myself up to specialize in the useless?

The computer is advising me to consider revising the phrase “Woman in Blue.” but not, “Man in Red.” What kind of fucking patriarchal, oligarchic bullshit is that? Huh? Microsoft Word? I hope your coding is corrupted with a thousand worms.

Where we in flight?

I suppose, consider this in-flight word.

take what you want from me

2010-06-02T21:43:00.000-04:00

just shaved, it's getting near four thirty
the shadows on the lawn outside would be long if not for the partly cloudy skies
every once and a while the wind gusts the sea smell faintly
the floorboards creek
i dont want another cup of coffee
or cigarette
i dont want another life lesson just yet
no one ever said that life was fair
i never thought it mattered much
never cared to lose things
i never cared to let things go
i knew that days were blessed because they pass
i knew that love must be love free
i tried to live each day my last
but letting pass but leaving go
this now one thing
has changed the whole

could i let love I've barely known
just drift or dim or loose its glow
my lessons learned have come to blows
my solice lies as yet unkown
im weary still
but can't let go

i havn't spoke of love in years
but then i never knew her
but times change
i'm sick of it
me
sick of me
but i can't go home
it never was mine

im not sure i much like this ride anymore

"gigantic was playing"

2010-06-02T21:40:00.000-04:00

transgressions cackle despondent – resonant
solitude gives way under currents on top of columns in old worlds old ways
when it was time to go we were packing up fishing rods we were emptying boxes to fill them back up
the trees were wrung with sticks in the grass
mowed down scattered
hugs and cell numbers
we tugged away

love song for the teenybopper

2010-06-02T21:35:00.000-04:00

money, you want money
I aint even got no pants
old enough to bleed
old enough to butcher
hook up
hook up
fuck up
hook up, tonight!
the rich kid's crying
he had to take the bus
we have grown apart
my breasts have gotten larger
hook up
hook up
fuck up
hook up, tonight
I could watch someone die
in the street and not cry
no no you misunderstood
she's mre self concious
about her body then you
mark mark? my name is MICHAEL!
HOOK UP
HOOK UP
A heart to heart your not involved
Hook up hook up hook up
you're insecure

---

i wanna eat candy
then puke it up
rich kids rich kids real hot rich kids
this is how we do it
in the OC
we havn't had service
all night
we havn't had service
all night
my cell's on hold, please pick up
i wanna eat candy
then puke it up
let's watch Rich Girls
Mtv RULES!

Get Another Record Out or: pass out in a meat freezer and fuck the revolution revelation

2010-05-29T23:01:00.000-04:00

Note I found on the streets of Paradise City, over on Pleasant St

2010-05-28T13:13:00.000-04:00

Cathode Day Dreams Table

2010-05-27T03:08:00.000-04:00

Cathode Day Dreams Inside Front Cover and Title Page

2010-05-27T03:05:00.001-04:00

this is a classic top

2010-05-25T19:49:00.000-04:00

Cathode Day Dreams Cover

2010-05-25T16:40:00.000-04:00

bookmark

2010-05-19T21:55:00.000-04:00

The Holidays

2010-05-10T11:11:00.000-04:00

i. This was it, as it were.

Part I

Front to Back

1.

Monday nights it’s always Hugo’s
for some reason I can’t sit and
write in my room
the telescreen blare blasting American
football to the six or seven
patrons
“What are you guys doing for
thanksgiving?” asks the bartender
“Do we replay or no?” The TV
asks as an English
accented guy walks into the bar
asks for a scotch and three rocks

and the guy next to me
is waiting for someone to
sample the “Dun Dun Dun Dunn”
from monday night football.

2.

New Mondays
Smokin Lil’s
Side note: I worked for a year
in a kitchen in a restaurant called Amys place
where the original Smokin Lil’s had been previously situated
now I’m at a “Campfire”
sing along in the Northampton
version of Smokin Lil’s

But I’m not working in a kitchen
Not now
Not ever again

3.

Fortitude escapes through
pastel cadence
wicked
fastidious
easier then you'd think

I need an easy friend
one with an ear to lend
I do think you’ll fit this bill
I do want you to have a clue

4.

“It’s a very non threatening
version of this song”
“Doesn’t make me feel like I’m being
forced to be funky”

Mr Rogers wore long sleeves
to cover his military tattoos

As I’m walking in the rain
tears are falling and I feel a pain
wishing you were here by me
to end this misery
And I wonder
I why why why why wonder
just why
why why why why why
she ran away
and I wonder
where she will stay

5.

Sing alongs
I don’t know any songs
just mine

And now up
Across the Universe

I wonder
“Hi Nick...”
“Hi”
“What’s up?”
“Nothing...”
“Watcha doin? Bein a loner - a rebel”
“Uh...”
“...”
maybe I’m just shy
“Nothin’s gonna change my world”
“Jackaroo” indeed

6.

Last night I came to Hugo’s
with Randy who himself was
meeting Lela, Harely’s girlfriend
Elizabeth’s boyfriend was
here[ex] with a blazing hot punk
girl in leather.
Strange.
Woke up thinking about her.

tonight I’m at Hugo’s early
started at a quarter to 10

it’s quiet
Chris’s at the till
I figure I should go home
come back later
but it’s too cold outside
to go anywhere
Instead just gonna get warm

Football on the tele

7.

It’s 11 02
tonight I will perform
an experiment
I suppose in grammar
lets see how much
words affect our environment
I’m sitting by myself
watching TV in a bar
@ 11 pm Saturday
what next?
eh?
where does the story go?
I’ll tell you in a minute
my bet’s on lots.

8.

Tragic or funny all
depends on your sense
of humor
falling down always
takes the cake

maybe that's it
the folded instants
crackling over coals
of congruity

speak of the devil your heart
will release a depth charge
of misconception hanging
through the snow heaps
she was smiling
the whole time

wait!
I know the justice done
I seen the frontiers son

9.

Something is afoot

“I can’t believe Nike has gone post apocalyptic!”

10.

The bar’s abuzz
am I?
I could use a smoke.

TODAY WEDNESDAY
Haymarket
I’m back to exactly where
I was at the end of August
Peter’s back around
girl troubles
Snow’s not talking to me
and I’m on a down slope
But the difference is I’m not
so new to this party
I’m in the basement of
the Haymarket
spending my sick day
trying to find companionship
Tonight I’m off to open
mic at the basement

11.

Today will be the
second literary magic
experiment
I go searching for
a story today
a little adventure
girls
etc.
maybe love?
we’ll see!

5:00 PM
HAYMARKET
I was outside on the street
smoking a cigarette Belle
gave me
I in turn game a dollar
to a kid with a sign
saying he was hungry
and wishing a merry x-mas
it’s christmas time again
and I’ve been feeling

12.

deep levels of loss and
loneliness
I keep being reminded of
my favorite movie 2046
which also took place at
christmas time
some couples have songs
we had a movie
it was 2046
the entire relationship
was defined by a feeling
of approaching loss for me
I always felt I was
running out of time
but that didn’t help
comfort me when it did
end

13.

SATURDAY HUGOS
come around 10:30
spent last night at the
WWII club
karaoke

at the juke box a trio of
girls dance and clap to
the monkeys

at home today was a
brady bunch movie marathon
I suppose I should
think about the past
and it’s presence
and or intrusion

NEXT up on the JUKE BOX
“these boots are made for walking”
scorpions in the corner

14.

“Last dance with Mary Jane”
I’m back thinking about
the compulsion
can’t stop writing
I’m hunched over on
the bar scribbling madly
with my head down

On the TV - the Patriots are playing

and I’m thinking about how
America is football and
vice versa
sports in general
that’s our culture

“oh my my oh hell yes
honey take off your party dress”

and I think somehow there was
the key to the night - on the

15.

other telescreen the Wizard of OZ
is on
the flying monkeys are
tearing the straw man apart
are taking off with
Dorothy and her little dog

and Paradise City is blasting

mom and more liquor commercials

---

So someone says on TV
they have a chastity belt
style rape belt/underwear
when a shout comes up
from the bar
“You can still be violated orally!”

16.

*”I hope I die before that
happens -

that's why i drink by
the way I’m trying to
get all the good times
out”

+”I feel like I’m expected
to achieve great
personal whatever

I want to do math all
day and get paid for it
I’m such a lazy unmotivated
whatever”

*”Then why do you think
your gonna be the next
-whatever?”

+”I don’t I just want a job
where I get sabbaticals and paid vacations.”

17.

I’m 2 out of 3 with
the experiments in
magic prose
here’s 4

in ten minutes something
preposterous will
happen - wait for it -

12:10
|
v
12:30
it’s actually now
12:23 and nothing’s
happened
experiment 4 - FAILED

12:30
Sympathy for the devil
begins
I’m on my way out

18.

Wed at open mic
woke up from crazy
christmas night at Hugo’s
drunk fight
dandy girl
random girl
throw down post
christmas party out
on the sidewalk
work was insane
at least 5 or 6
people all looking at
the books at once
down the halls and
over in the other room
left early went to
get a converter for
my DVD/VHS player
and then to Christian’s
for comics
to pick up
and drop off

19.

Maybe I’m pushing the story
maybe I’m not pushing it
hard enough
I really would like to
introduce some new
characters again
the narrator needs a new
spin

PRINT IS DEAD

the host of the open mic
says “You don’t know what I
think in my head.

It’s like uh, a million babies
screaming in my head.”

welcome to the future
the singer
at the open mic’s
got a laptop on his knee

20.

that’s
the
Universe

-=-=-=-=-=-==-=---=-=-=====-=-=--=-=--=-=-=----=-==--=--=-===--=-=

WHAT?

21.

the snow settled
down or in
piled high
and I’m just getting
used to the frost
it’s far to cold

Lord Russ is gone for the evening
Amanda’s our host
no witty banter
no sexual innuendo

why did I come out comes
to mind

It’s because right now I’m
doing something
even though it’s nothing

take your protein pills
and put your helmet on

22.

Cell phone humm buzz in my
left pants pocket
I grab it - open it
Nothing
just a twitch in my leg
that feels just like the
vibrator of my cell

“DON’T FAKE IT BABY”

PUT YOUR ELECTRIC LIGHT ON MY HEAD
PUT YOUR RAY GUN ON ME

There’s no life here tonight
it’s hushed bustling and
note papers turning
a piano player steps up
to improvise on the
piano a bit
Long intro
then Ragtime in A Flat Major

23.

IS THIS THE LIVING ROOM OR
PARLOR OF MY SOUL

A man plays classical music
on the piano in the corner

there is a full bar
a rapper
various acoustic musicians
a blond girl who plays piano and cries
me somewhere in there
no host
just a girl who wants to be Bowie

am I out
or in

SOMETHING SAD LIVES INSIDE

I had this dream once where-in
a child in bracelets & glasses is
crying & crying & I try to console them

24.

All that’s coming out of the
corner
is piano
longing and snowbound

WINDSTAR
SHEATHED IN DUST TEARS
MOLTED FEATHERS
WHAT'S THE USE IN
BEING A DISPOSABLE
ANGEL?
WHAT IS THE QUESTION
AGAIN?

I’VE GOT A COLD
I’VE GOT A COLD

TELEPHONE }
TELEPHONE }- A GAME WE
TELEPHONE } WE PLAY
AMONGST
OURSELVES

25.

“’Keep the gimmick’”
“No. No - don’t write that down”
“What? ‘Keep the gimmick?’”
“That’s wrong”

“My day’s are numbered
cold and gray”
-singer

I’m alone
is this just how it goes
we’re all alone really in ourselves

it’s like labad a buh bad ah bu bu
badah dadadah da buh buh bad a buh
bad a buh buh buh buh bad abada
la laaaaa laaaaaaaaaaaa -------

PIANO
ALL PIANO
Then ------------------- cont...

26.

Something doesn’t feel whole

Me
Belle
Gaffney
everyone

“IS THERE TIME?
ALWAYS.”
-The Universe

Talking about Iraq incessantly
I don’t like this bull shit small
politalk
FUCK THE WAR
THE WAR’S ALWAYS BEEN - THE
RATINGS JUST FINALLY TOOK OFF

AND THESE KIDS THINK A NEW
ADMINISTRATION COULD SOLVE IT ALL

-HA!-

27.

OBLIVION IS LIKE A ROLE PLAYING
GAME.

Thursday @ Hugo’s
The final literary experiment
Q. Is there something
to come of all these
words - here - at the
end of this passage
A. Let’s hope

Pixies on the juke
rock and roll relic’s heels
click on the bar floor
in a leather jacket
my feet are wet
my bones ache
my heart has sunk, slunked
away
I want to smoke a J and
watch TV with my BABY
Instead - I’m alone at a bar

28.

FORTY TWO

42
its a funny numb.

WHAT DO YOU GET
WHEN YOU
MULTIPLY SIX BY NINE?

42

The Holidays: And Beyond

2010-05-09T14:36:00.001-04:00

Part II

Back to Front

1.

DREAM THEATER

mantra!
“I hold the pen.”

DREAM DREAM
DREAM LOVER SO I DONT
HAVE TO DREAM ALONE

what!?
what is it?!
there - in the immobile hours?!

what is it?!
who
what
where
when
why
!?

2.

FRIDAY @ HUGOS
STRANGE VIBRATIONS
I don’t want to be out don’t
want to stay in -
skipped the noise kid’s house
got a call from Ishmael to talk
comics and smoke cigarettes
A friend of his came in grabbed
me and said “Oooh, who’s this - Ishmael
you didn’t tell me you brought fresh
meat.”
wait
where was - am I?
Maybe there is one more
level to deconstruct
let’s hope it’s not our own
graves

Oh God!
I just thought the jukebox
speaker was a really loud cell
phone

3.

writing helped
calmed me down
the vibrations are quelled

GIRL PASSED ME SMELLING SO GOOD
little things make it worth it

Ferris Beullers Day Off is on
the tele
and at the same time
girl at the bar next to me
said “there’s Telly”

MANY PEOPLE WANT A HISTORY,
A PAST, A STORY, ANYTHING THEY
CAN BELIEVE IN - SOME CONNECTION
TO THE PAST. SOMETHING THAT GIVES
REASONS TO ALL THE EMPY PLACES
THERE SHOULD BE PIECES
THIS IS BECAUSE NOTHING
IN THE UNIVERSE WAS DESIGNED TO
MAKE MUCH SENSE.

4.

that girl that passed smelling
so sweet earlier
making out with a greasy
haired guy dressed sharp

Everyone’s gotta be people
to meet people they want
to meet
What model are you?
Am I?
It’s becoming a key question

What model am I?

Is it because I don’t have friends
that I carry a pen and paper
with me?
Is it just because I’m lonely
I write - primarily by and to
myself in almost invariably
crowded rooms?
OCD?
Do I think it’s “cool?’ -->
FUCK IF I KNOW - MAYBE JUST WHAT I DO

5.

DONT TALK TO ME ABOUT THE CIA
THE CIA’S BEEN WATCHING ME FOR YEARS
EVERYONE ELSE TOO, EQUALLY

IT’S 12:30, DIED OUT HERE
I DONT CARE
ANDY
BRIGHAM
SHOWED UP
LORD RUSS CAME & WENT

“No sugar tonight in my
coffee”
“No sugar tonight in my
tea”

6.

Saturday night
last night decided to fill
this small notebook up front
to back
Chapter One Cover to Cover
Chapter Two Back to Cover
I’m on the way back to the
front again now and looking
through the notebook I’m
noticing the general theme
in time to be this past
holiday season
it’s January 5th and I’ve
decided to go for it
make a mad dash to
the start.

Early this morning got a
call from Snow - ghosts
in the morning I fall
back asleep till 3

7.

tonight I fell asleep at
8 woke up to a phone
call from Brendan
I jumped out of bed
smoked some weed
left my house lit a
cigarette and walked
into the first bar
I saw
HUGOS
Sat night lets find
the plot points

I should get my head
outa the pad in order
to see around me
__

the TV says 80% of blindness
is preventable

I agree

8.

where were we?
hugos - now its 12 30
not so empty
and I’m not so worried
about ending up at home
alone

back to sitting alone at the
end of the bar
Johny Cash is on the juke
on the tele?
Batman

girls in the corner
first at the juke
then the pool table
full tables all around the
bar
Ladies and gentlemen it is now
one oclock if you leave you
can’t get back in ----------

9.

Help -
when I was younger So much
younger than before . . .

Q. What is the purpose
of art
A. To make people feel
better about being alive
Q. Can you name any
artists who have
achieved this
A. The Beatles.

10.

maybe still just having
a crazy dream
woke up abruptly
went to the 11’s for Monday
night

Saw:
Peter
pretty girls w/ boyfriends
Ishmael
Jimmy
Shehan

LAUGHTER
LAUGHTER IS THE
MOST IMPORTANT
THING
IF YOU LOOSE YOUR
SENSE OF HUMOR
YOU LOOSE YOUR
SELF

11.

Tuesday @ the basement

Adriana
Snow
___

Wednesday @ the basement

Adriana
Snow

Thursday I stayed in
tired - sick

Now its friday
woke up tired but
unable to sleep
thinking about Amy

I had a long night
Wed
hanging out w/ Ariana

12.

She was quiet
cold
didnt move at all
as we kissed
I felt empty and
forcing
she left early in the
morning 4:00 AM

Friday brought a
lovely longing
heartbreaking call
from Snow w/ the
deadline
FALL 08
She’s gone for good
to California
How many times can
you die inside
But the night is warm
a fog over everything

13.

tommorow
maybee coffee w/ Baby
some talk
a feeling of warmth
and sense for a time
Sunday i have to get
on stage and move
a crowd to tears
I could really use that
point of view gun

tonight over at a ghost
house
15 Williams St.
acoustic band in the
basement
the ecopunk kids
the noise kids
the basement dance night kids and dj
the previous occupants
used to have shows in

14.

the living room
once there was a big
show w/
mail myself to thoreau
slutty mandolin
the keilbassa sisters
someone maced the
place
everyone coughing out
the door
no such shenanigans
tonight

met w/ Peter to walk
over
left by myself after
an awkward session being
talked at by Haley

where do I find myself
Hugos - looking for a scene

15.

It’s January 11th
the holidays have come
to a stunning conclusion
unseasonably warm
beautiful night
I wanna write poetry
and drift away on
a pickup truck for
somewhere
and I also wanna
huddle up in a cozy
living room
with good friends and
drink and smoke and
talk
neither are options right
now

Blind guy next to me at the
bar talking to everyone
he’s on his third since
I got here - prolly more

16.

“It doesn’t exist”

social climbing
scene diving
slumming it in the subculures

“Georgia, Georgia, Just that old sweet song
keeps Georgia on my mind”

Grant Morrison, I read recently
has made comments to
the effect of
to the extent that
bassicly saying
he’s put himself into
comic book worlds
now he’s working to get
someone out.

I can’t wait
Fiction & Reality are the
same

17.

“I believed when I was 23
years old I would come
back Abraham Lincoln
style - y-y-you know
what i mean?!
I mean I dont’ think
Abraham Lincoln had
his beard trimmed like
me...”

and then the blind man
to my left at the bar
went into a long diatribe
about shaving
“I’m a street musician and
tuesday I’m gonna have the
beard shaved off.”
“Right”
“And grow a mustache
you know what I mean?
A handlebar mustache”

18.

this guy now sounds
the blind man
I ask his name
he says “Less”
“Leststicals”
then he’s talking about
a sitar album playing
in his head
humming

It’s after 1 now
no one who leaves
comes back
I’m ready to go home
smoke a J.

[JUMP FORWARD: IM @ HUGOS]

19.

the people in mental
institutions are supposed
to rule the world
but they’re afraid to beacuse
they don’t want to die

FAMOUS SUICIDES
15 MINS EACH
-PLAY-

20.

I wake up from a beautiful
dream and it’s
March Second two thousand
and eight!
Where was I? Where am I?

Pinochios for Pizza
so I’m not drinking for
the rest of the night
on an empty stomach
I’m tired.
Rather smoke myself into
a good movie.
But
I’m out
had strange visions
last night of true love
to come
we’ll see
I’m ready to be moved
to be placed in the right place

21.

Where to?

The holidays have come &
gone
next up?
April fools day?
St Patricks day?
I wonder how groundhog
day went...

So then back to Hugos
Predator on the tellescreen
the bartenders sporting
a new cut
Amanda Jean’s here
Long Hair James

I’m out down the street
over to the elevens
tonight there are two
scheduled dance parties
-It’s monday

22.

the first is at the 11’s
w/ Justin Accident
drummer of Allie Justice
the second DJ is
DJ Cashman
of Tuesdays at the
basement
the second dance party
is over at Bishops
where I aint gonna
be getting
$2 Pabst

the Job is the Job
eh?
the fastidious currents
take us down
sometimes
I find sometimes it’s easy to
be your self
sometimes it’s better to be somebdy
else

23.

But inevitably
I will find myself later
@ Bishops

for now - whats around me

Riley
Josh

lots of people I don’t know

Artists are people
who can’t get the
tertiary reality around
them to act as they’d like

sometimes that means a lot
sometimes not.

24.

Part III. The Finaly

Well - here I am
@ Bishops
it’s ‘mini skirt mondays’

I’m feeling groovey
as in
stuck in a groove

all they’re playing is all
the music I love
Hip Hop
Golden Oldies Rock and Roll
R&B

I just wanna go home

to someone I love

“Baby --- where have you run?”

25.

What i wouldn’t give for
a chick to walk around
that corner and see me
sitting alone
-sit beside me
-ask me what I’m thinking

---

but
when was the last
time something that
serendipitous happened?

a long long long
long long long
long long long
time ago!

26.

I’m the crazy guy in hoodie
scribbling mad into
pad on bench on side
walk facing out into
traffic
first warm night in
months
the streets are
swamped
it’s 9:11 on a Friday

Got some mate
street lights going out
around me
couple
friends
bustle happy
shouting excited to
their friends about
window sightings
strange kids in
costumes congregate

27.

one page left and like always
I’m feeling rushed
__

I used to ask for vacations
from my life
I’m ready to go now though
I’m into it lately

12:32
No climax
No resolution
No story
No thing

“Jack be nimble
Jack be quick
Jack broke his dick!
Hey!”
“Little miss muffet sat
on a tuffet eating her
curds and whey along came
a spider and sat down beside
her and said, --> more

28.

“Hey bitch watta ya got
in that bowl?!
“Hey ----------! “
-guy@bar

THE

END

PS. Let’s end this how
we started it
@ Hugos
eating candy outa the vending
machine

there’s a girl here - short skirt -
fishnets - she’s with her boyfriend -

Vector graphs on the highways of dreams

2010-04-17T21:19:00.000-04:00

“Racial snobbery!” shouts the girl from behind the book

Eat it drink it smile and be full
The cold winds gonna blow but you got walls around you
Built of the outgrowths of the earth
Separated externalized extensions of self

Faster than water down waxed tile bathroom floors
What can you get for ten dollars he asked incredulously
I don’t know, she retorted, something

The future was born out of space ships and UFO crazies in the 1950s - sci fi writers all caught behind desks, pencil pushers

While the kids of America all cut their teeth on the WWII horror show
Came home to a country already changing faster then they could imagine
But they had no reference points save the breaking exploding dying suicide of the old world, of history

®

The socio economic underpinnings of Valentines Day all come to crystal clear perspective at just the right angle

See if our society is run by money then the exchange of gifts as a symbol of love is appropriate, your demonstrating faith in and supporting the societal underpinnings on which the person your giving the gift survives.
Without Valentines Day - or larger - without the spending of money on superfluous crap that we already have but in different shapes and colors, our society would collapse.
Hence tax refunds that come with instructions on superfluous spending.

The college kid. The t shirt and hip pants, striped, or tight, or bell bottomed. Scruffy long hair past his nose. That half hazard beard. He’s with the hipster princess. She’s cool, calm and beautiful. She’s wearing bangles and bracelets, a crochet hat, leggings and or a skirt - a flowery loose top that her small breasts seem to nestle in as in a warm bed covered in soft sheets.

I’m sitting in the scattering of half hazard moments on the side of the road
the children and the crazy people have nothing to do and so with common eyes break bread often
or beer cigarettes coffee and singing and notebooks
and were as good to them as these expired parking passes laid like Good Sunday Palms, at out feet

gigantic was playing

2010-04-11T20:29:00.000-04:00

transgressions cackle despondent – resonant
solitude gives way under currents on top of columns in old world's old ways
when it was time to go we were packing up fishing rods we were emptying boxes to fill them back up
the trees were wrung with sticks in the grass
mowed down scattered
hugs and cell numbers
we tugged away

on entering nod

2010-04-11T20:23:00.000-04:00

the great game of telephone
idea sharing, pacification, media influence, watching how we watch
the computer is in me and it's in the street
the echoing of freedom past this way about a minute ago
the junk of the world collected here sang the ghouls
mayhaps you shall
make your fortune but make your fort fast
i've got a palace in myself and all
but is it the mason who lays the brick

we still don't feel, as they say we do
that is the perfume we forgot
the oiled clothes, the rips where the hands rest
"the teeth gleamed" at this
that makes all the difference
so it's ok if the buffola are all gone
and if the railroad is deadend
there's new wounds to lick
for nothing may be able to change.
so if you can't change someone, then you are already done
he just sunk
blinked and sunk away
into the rust of carnivals
and the deep sea chains of lobsters
so that is it, a kind of look into the window
which is when we found the church
in the desk lamp, in the immobile hours
crippled in the rituals of a vase we call culture, we call order
this tape left after it all
the shreds hanging against the wall

said he was the devil

2010-04-11T20:21:00.000-04:00

he said he was the devil i said you don't exist he said to buy some time shares cause he’s banking on the best i said i’m low on pocket change and i sold my soul for mice when i gave it to a girl i new when i was younger its cause i have and never did no concept of time if that makes sense he offered me a bridge i told him it was getting old cause even if i had the time to spare i’ld save my change for turning cold cold hearts on so he made a studio audience for me and said lets ask the folks at home and they started screaming pick what's behind door number three what's behind door number three and again i said look i don't want your junk i don't have enough space on my back to carry much more, i’ve got to much shit i’ve been trying to loose to drag round a boat or new house or credit line of fifty billion grand beside i lost my conscience when i was growing up there’s just to much confusion i never came around i always take such time and schizophrenics often talk talk talk in rhyme they told me to walk along the straight and narrow so many years ago and ever since the day have stood along the sides yelling dancing screaming telling me its getting old told me ‘bout some guy who hung in the courtyard spreading peace and love, got shot in the head spreading peace and love told me to go spreading peace and love then told me I’m a radical for doing what I’m told, the devil said son you’ve got it all wrong, just settle down and settle down, I said i don't believe in you he said but I’m right here, I said you’re just metaphor and I’m just some old soul and just cause i can see the TV that doesn't make it real and just cause i can feel love that makes it so much more and the studio audience laughed out all together and started saying i was mad i stood for some time then just turned to walk, cause what's so funny bout peace love and understanding?

the social contract

2010-04-11T20:12:00.000-04:00

get your degree in any one of these exciting fields, aren't you tired of struggling to find direction in your life, this brave new world offers many exciting employment opportunities, you too can encourage the deaths of babies in order to end honest discussion, do you agree that babies should die? are you arguing that baby killing is ok? do you know he kills babies? babies will die if you liberals had your way, if you neo-cons had your way, and knock off pendents trying to convey and convert, get a little dirty, show a little ass, have a little orgie porgie, to get me off, to turn me on, emulating the death scenes from a Clockwork Orange and dancing a mosh pit ditty a choreographed fight scene, doing the windmill and feeling free, tight hip huggers, cute little tops, make up and accessories and this just in, there will be no peace in the middle east tonight, im closing my ears and bombing everyone who puts a wall up or uses a helicopter to kill my political comrades, communism is still a threat regardless and I hear Canada is planing a multilateral invasion of the US with France and Germany, first they’re gonna cut off our power, then they’re gonna force us all to read archaic texts such as the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King’s church door edicts and The Social Contract make us bow to gods of anarchy and atheism and tear town our Fascist regime, when we get upset that they ruined our theocracy, they’ll get indignant and call us on the hot wire to announce they dropped all our nuclear weapons on their own countries so we could rest easy, I’m going back to college to find where my mind went, I ‘m going back to school to see if I’m crazy, I’m crying inside with tears that are just clichés cause I aint the first to feel like a little bug or worse cause I’m a white suburban middle class kid in a prep school where they just relaxed their dress code, i don’t have to wear a gray flannel shirt no more, but everyone i know came in in jeans and a T shirt, at least they’re vintage, mine are just old.

more trash

2010-04-11T20:09:00.000-04:00

the twenty dollar bill is the new five

if you like money, climate has no effect on your emotions
at least thats what the girls from the clueless TV show said
what TV show do you want your hairstyle to reflect
or rather which thread do you want to post to on MOC
are you in the market anyway? who would you like your duet with?
wait hold up, am I making cents?

all these doodads are yours for free (don't you get it your our winner)

currently my title is office aid, I'm hoping to make it to ex-office aid

fidel castro was just an angry minor league baseball player
had he gotten his big yankees break who knows
we might be trading his card as opposed to trying to kill him

stay with cnn and see what happens next

investigators hope to have a full explanation monday

something to push or prove

2010-04-11T20:03:00.000-04:00

coalescence in the desperate straights of Gibraltar
sucking solo flights Earnest Hemingway and Amelia Earhart had something to push and prove
above the sickening neon flickering there's a sky of forever tarnishing bleeding holding it's dress down over the train air grate of humanity
looking up the skirt of Liberty pressing themselves down on Mother Earth with needles and knives and dresses and bar dives
gracious and depleted and sorry and defeated
all wes gots just whats wes needs and alls wes needs justs whats wes gots
"why arn't you listening to me?
"cause I'm listening to the radio"

Cell Phone Cells

2010-03-27T22:21:00.000-04:00

the cell phone cells of door room USA is happening
the sirens of titan are calling all about prophets and shit
"those were the interesting ones because they were really plain stories"
we're calling everyone we know on open lines
looking for contraband and the one last night night in illumination
"I only had a week,"
"I was just gonna tell him to call him..."
Ashcroft is watching
and in the year two thousand and three
we're all talking like, make love, not war
in the nineteen sixties the CIA created acid
mkultra is declassified now
but it's far too late
and this, can you just throw the door
the smoke comes out from all the shit I light on fire and I'm
worried about the smoke detectors
they can get spies close enough to know where they are but
they can't get someone to kill him
mentally and physically nothing
whoa I'm within half a foot
coughs and sputters
coming soon to a theater near you
life unscripted
supper cells and training camps
I can't spell and my typos put three year olds to shame
but I learned to type on a machine that checked automatic
I never had to care I could just run spell check
corporations just say I'll give you more money
if you just loosen a few laws
took votes stole votes shouldn't have run -
such an interesting theory
although the dems wanted to put more money in the military
and it would be more of a jumping off point to putting all these other good guys in.
If they just had more weapons.
------
so then we all go down to throw in
so then we all got down

subliminal messages do work, obviously
the advertising companies only work because of them

who likes commercials?
who buys useless shit?

Get The TV Rights

2010-03-27T22:08:00.000-04:00

Get the television rights, choking forensic evidence, silent secret documents, old men alone in their studies, getting drunk on gin and scotch in leather red upholstered chairs, maps on walls blue and green blue and green, capital buildings huge Greek, cathedrals Gothic to mid summer nights warm.

Capital Hill, damp from Potomac bay humidity, Senators and Emperors sleep, solstice for historians, hundreds of decimal places, ones and zeros, ethnic cleansing, soap and lye and fat.

Cathode bliss Letterman late nights, many many twenty four hour news networks,
cigarettes and box cutters are the implements of destruction, notebooks and e-mail, correspondence is dangerous, the phone lines are all tapped.

Old Glory yellows yellows yellows in windows, Emmanuel went up on trial for the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, it’s April and march was a storm, sitting by green hilled graveyards gentle sloping, drinking jugs of wine and toasting Van Gogh.

Hemingway in his African elephant head hung den by extinguished fire at first light with a pistol to his head.

Kerouac watching 1969 daytime TV drunk in the lazy afternoon dying in the glow on his mothers couch at 47.

F Scott Fitzgerald and wife devoured by decadence and madness and alcohol during prohibition 1920’s great jazz birth.

John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr.

The Pope is praying the Muslims too, the tides are tugging the moons pull, everything is water we are water, water always wants to go to the lowest point, lakes on mountains desperate to evaporate to skyline to fall to soak into the earth, and the thunderstorm’s season is on the way by now

New England summer prelude, statues of minutemen hang long shadows in dusk - still.

Thursday's Crowding Wednesday's Shroud

2010-03-27T22:01:00.000-04:00

lets draw the morning shackled bells
from ol' distinguished Washington Lane
memory in memoriam
silent silent Stockbridge Rockwell
drink the cup of morning's goddess
the stop and shop is silver sparkle
island oasis of forlorn forgottence

"the house was sold for one point four million dollars
we redid the plumbing and the floors
lived in the house while we worked there
my girlfriend and I sat golden
scamming a relater outa so much money
gettin paid five hundred thousand a week
to just sit by sparkle blue golden stream
paint a room and sleep inside"

the caucus rouses violent femmes
over summer downs
thursday's crowding wednesday's shroud
this is what we would sound like
if we had a CD
this is what it'd be like
if we were on TV
"hey, I'm starting to feel OK."

remember

2010-03-27T21:59:00.000-04:00

when asked where one goes when one acheives nirvana
the dali lama replied
where does a flame go when you blow it out
and there is no way
all the people i meet who tell me they're ready
are ready
to play their fiddles outside of rome
with nero and the band
but someday
we'll toast marshmallows
have a clam bake
and drink wine from a jug
even if you wern't ready
but for now
stop your protesting
and relize where you are
this aint sunnydale happy fun tuesday evening
and paranoia aint never strong enough
ignoring the governement warnings
and spending all my duck tape plastic funds
on cigarettes and lighter fluid
alchohol and mary jane

The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire

2010-03-27T21:55:00.000-04:00

watch only Mtv and cable news
for a full year see if that does this to you
and come out on the other side
of lightning fast flash dash sequence
fasting late nights in halogen cathode addiction purges
it’s pilgrim passage on tides of streaming light
“ride the wave”
it’s the dawn of the media age
she’s all grown up on girl’s gone wild videos
9.99 plus shipping and handling
Pundits and Teenyboppers
Kings and Queens of the land
and the Beatles sing
“I’ll give you all I’ve got to give if you’ll say you love me too
“I may not have a lot to give but what I got I’ll give to you
“I don’t care to much for money, ‘cause money can’t buy me love.”
war protests in the streets of cities
where roads ran red with blood from
Miami, Chicago, New York, Las Angeles
summer heat
cops beating the shit outa’ some negro
(this by the way is in the Microsoft Word dictionary)
the Atom Bomb is a second sun rising over the west
the summer of love burnt to the ground
in 1999, the kids were not all right
things are not OK
and tyler durden showed up
it’s three years later and outside
we’re coming out of a dream
of strawberry fields
to find ourselves in Persephone poppy fields
but coming up and out
splashes silent around poppy petal Technicolor OZ
and then it’s back to the commercial
inside
but
“I ain’t got nothin’ but love babe,”
which reminds me, I need to buy a new car
beautiful fire warmth on late nights
alone
“She’s cool and she’s free, like television
“She’s in my head”
I’m cool and at peace like a thunderstorm in heavy summer evenings.

roads run

2010-03-27T01:02:00.000-04:00

so fast lane highways
and watching late night Mtv
truck stop to bus depot
each nights a blur
of yellow lane ecstasy
and oppressive heavy sun on my arm

Gatorade and sleepy eyes
and pulling in as the sun sets ahead
cramping all down your leg
cause you been pressing a little black pedal all day

but the states
and the lights
and the mountains huge green spread mother earth like giant beautiful curves of women of land,
and the roads raised on white line black long snake scars slithered in tar across the land,
and the Rockies always far far in the distance heavy and stoic and tipped in white,
and the plains that are on both sides on both sides in front and in back that forces-shoves your head into impossible memories of being an Indian-lost on the shores of land each direction-eyes always on the horizon-eyes always minds eye contemplating ground & sky always the divided sign of the horizon and the plains! the plains,
everyday is a pure dream pillowed by the cheap hotel and food and drink,

the trip just streaks
and lays across five days
600 miles a day
80 plus miles an hour
one carton of cigarettes
at least 20 bottles of Gatorade
and nearly 400 plus dollars for gas
to keep you screaming
like a diamond on the crust of the earth
a speck of human fly
in a speck of metal
running in 5 days
across the new world
drinking America
the one I know
the one under mill town America
through Illinois lost in steel behemoths of cold
through sudden jutting-over the plain-exploding little cities a million miles in the distance then there-surrounded by nothing-ant hills-on the Idaho lines
then the emerald valley
and cascades
and the silent ghosts
of a lot of lost generations
its calm-the eye of a hurricane
and heavy
and 3 months later
turn east and scream home
leaving the buildings hanging hung
and the messes of one way streets
and soft soft town
leaving vagabonds who congregate in the park to buy and sell drugs and eat,
leaving lost ex-heroin poets to travel the coast up and down lost in the past and homeless dreaming of withering dieing wives disappearing flesh behind him,
losing thousands of dollars all replaceable and knowing worth the cost,
and the land coming back is just as it was left but feeling worn in
sneakers-socks-jeans-and an old baseball cap
my love sitting next to me
and the sun leaves behind you as the days grow old and the car shadows keep you blanketed till nights that make you cry under Dakota sky sat all we took and all the blood on the streets-and Pontius Pilate like just wash your hands and change the ways to look at the way this should go-the rest of the drive

and sink
into a house
no longer my home
have a beer
and laugh and laugh and laugh
and ready to go.