An Unused Bit

Sitting in the Daison Lounge of the newly renovated Sanatine Center for the Arts, I’ve come to realize that my life is really less of a walking autobiography and more of a historical fiction piece written by smooth talking Lit students. I picture the person who wrote the things I’ve done as a hunched young man with a face dashed by pimples and marred by the rejections of a hundred or more women. He leans, each day that he wakes up in time to do so, over an old style typewriter and logs the hours that make up my life like someone might pay him for them and then drinks himself back to lonely sleep. With gnarled hands he lashes at the keys, gently saying to himself that it will all be ok, that tomorrow is the brightest its ever been, that he might get laid at any time some time. He is the phantom writing my opera, the shadow in my life who, lonely member in hand, writes about my incredible sexual escapades as though it were film noir.

The woman in the red dress lurched beneath me and I reached for the gun beneath my pillow. There were three shots in the chamber, just like the woman in red.

I like this young man very much.

Sitting in the lounge, staring at the lime green walls where brass light fixtures had been lazily tacked up next to modern art finger paintings, I started to really believe that maybe all of this was a dream I lived. I wondered if tomorrow I would wake up in a mental institution from a thirty year coma famished and insatiable. Maybe Sanatine's Golden Son was little more than a garbage collector who got hit in the head by a stray recepticle and now hallucinates a grandiose lifestyle of women and invention. If it hadn't been for June's softness that morning, the real warmth of her sleeping flesh, I might not have simply laughed that thought away. I need a drink.

Superbly Villainous

I wonder if it is appropriate to be daunted prematurely by the class list and itemized section of books I’m supposed to buy before they have even been discussed. I received two emails from my professors this morning with those things and, much to my distress, the old competitive rage erupted within me and I felt threatened on all borders like a polish president in the thirties. I wanted to mobilize immediately to stave off these foreign entities, to erect huge seawalls and anti-tank batteries on hilltops. I fought hard against doing this, trying my damnedest to remember that this is not a pissing contest but rather, a chance to receive help in my craft as well as help others in theirs. The Air Force, however, remains on high alert until further notice.

I suppose these lamentations are unnecessary and misguided, but if I cannot put them here where can I put them? And don’t say straight up my ass you cheeky bastards.

Also, as a P.S., I have not a fucking clue where this came from. As with all the things I’ve posted, it was written in one sitting while I drank coffee and listened to Sinch. Disclaimer over.



The seismic way in which my father walked through the house reminded me of a shelling in pictures of World War II. His feet arched over fallen toys, foot stools and wildly thrown legs, over discarded clothes and plastic soldiers whose bodies were broken in the hellish sandbox wars of the Back Yard, only to come crashing down in a land of toy trucks where the people would rather stay glued to their fake plastic seats than run for the safety of Batman’s cave nearby. Foolish.

Only the plush toys, much larger than their metal or plastic counterparts, survived such onslaughts mostly unscathed, something I blame on their incredible resilience. Only a truly superhuman entity could be crushed under fifty times their own weight and snap back into their original shape, their guts still intact, their eyes still light and genuinely alive in glossy black perma-wonder. Little do they know that I’m plotting to test their ability to regenerate, sharpening my scissors just a little each day to snip at the plushy fabric flesh.

“There can be only one,” I whisper to them amidst the scrape-scrape of the scissors against the stone, “I may not have been born with your immense survivability, but I know where you are weak. Tell me your secrets and I will leave some of your fibrous white blood behind to nourish what is left.”

I Thought I Had Nothing To Write About Today

The wide Olivetti typewriter clicked smoothly as James' fingers depressed the black keys. At first it was only a chore, but it had quickly become a devil's plod through eighteen hundred pages of research material on snuff films and cocaine nightmares. He'd greased his eyes with horrid pictures and graphic depictions written by what he could only assume were real monsters existing among us. He figured that the ones who collected this tribute for human immorality must be slouched individuals with shaggy locks and over sized, tusk-like, incisors. James did his best not to picture that slathering gape and what it must have consumed in order to write that which he was forced to review for the magazine, the way it must have split open in two thick bloody petals to laugh while it all went down, and decided it was best to just keep his head below deck and well into writing. Three hours into the march across hell a phone call shook him mid sentence about being shaft deep into a postmortem geriatric.

"Thank God," He said into the receiver, "I mean hello?"

"Donny?" said a woman's voice on the other side. An anchor was thrown overboard in James' chest and landed squarely in his stomach.

"No you have a wrong number," he managed, trying hard not to sound weak.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Thanks though,"

James leapt, "But maybe I could help you find him?"

There was a bit of a pause on the other end and James was suddenly aware that he was clutching the end of his desk hard enough to whiten his knuckles. He really didn't want to have to go back to work, and talking to a stranger, to anyone, was better than reading another hundred pages on penile skull insertion.

"Um, I think I'll be ok for now, thank you though."

"That's cool but we have two Dons here in the office you know, is that who you were looking for or maybe just Don is a nick name? Don Schafer or Don Williams, maybe? I could go look for them really quick," James said, making another pass. He knew he was the only one in the office, it was Sunday, but her voice was a light at night and he was running for it.

"Oh, um, neither of those but thanks for the help, I'm sure I'll find him, ok thanks, take care now, ok?"

The phone clicked off before James could have another go and he dropped the receiver onto the cradle, trying hard to keep his eyes away from the photos he'd been studying before the call. There were little pinups of rotting sheep, sepia tones of knife wielding men in black executioners masks, spreadeagled women leering out from the glossy paper drenched in fetish fishnets with latex cocks strapped to their foreheads. Looking at them earlier he'd been suspicious that somehow he'd turn fifty and they would come back to him in vivid detail. He'd be in the middle of pleasuring his wife when suddenly everything he was would go limp, an ulcer would form in his bowel and he would start the convulsions he'd somehow avoided when he was twenty. From then on, he decided, staring down at a particularly gruesome depiction of a man enjoying a cow drawn in red, black and peach crayon, he would cry every time he saw himself naked and would only get hard if he was wearing something one hundred percent wool.

He shakily found his fingers over the wide Olivetti and started again, trying hard to picture the food this article would buy instead of the trips to a counselor that he was steadily buying stock in.

Snippet Part Two

The party was elegant. A gathering of some note with men in hats and tails, women in long flowing gowns like they had plucked the fabric from the ocean or the windy trees. Black waiters in white tuxedos busied themselves with fluted glasses filled with an amber liquid and gathered dishes from silk draped tables where conversation was being made. It reminded me of the get-togethers my father used to hold in our house before he died. Maybe it was his memory that caused me to want to shoot the prissy thing that I'd brought on my arm in front of them all. Or maybe it was just that I thought shooting might get me to the cash bar faster. Drop a few suits and maybe I wouldn't even have to pay my tab at the end of the night.

I realized a moment later that I'd left my gun back in the hotel and would probably need that to do any shooting. Penny, the slim little thing I'd rented to come with me to this affair, seemed anxious to mingle with the higher socialites and I couldn't bring myself to tell her I wanted to go get something I'd forgotten back in the room. We found a table near the bar where two rich lushes were talking politics with a fat diamond drenched woman in a blue gown. Cinderella let herself go, it seemed.

Another Bottle Brings Another Day

Another thursday has come and gone mates, although I write this from amongst the goings on of that night, and I hope it was pleasant for all of you. Although I made it an early night, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I am happy to have been able to introduce a new drink to your repetoir. It is seldom I get to introduce new things to old salts, and it pleased me greatly.


When I was a boy, not more than fifteen, my brothers told me that if I continued to drink I was going to die. They said that if I didn't stop now the Lord God was going to take one of his famous ass kickings from out of his huge bag of ass kickings and hand one down to me. That my liver would give out and I would see the devil himself at the bottom of a bourbon glass before he took me to the place where souls are forgotten. I suppose the fact that I've outlived them all sort of put the cork in their asses didn't it?
Maybe I can make fun of them when I finally escape this walking corpse and die. If that was possible.

In all honesty I've outlived everyone I know. My wife and children, their children and the children that came after them. I've watched great-great grandchildren grow old in my front yard just to die of cancer in the hospital sixty years later. Every one of them calls me uncle, calls me cousin, never knowing that I'm really just a relic. Cousins and Uncles have a purpose, they can be capable of giving a shit about you. A relic just sits there and molds. A relic just acts as a reminder that there was a time before you existed and now no longer does. Its history. I'm history. Jesus.

I suppose I can't be bitter about living as long as I have. I've known a lot of men who have gone kicking and screaming to the gates of God. Men who have spit up blood on their wives while they are consumed from the inside out by age or plague or whatever the fuck kills people these days. I've seen men begging to be spared, sputtering at the hospital bed or the side of the road that it isn't their time. It couldn't possibly be them that has to go right now. But it always is their time, never mine. Maybe some day I'll go sputtering into hell, but I'd have to find something that can stop me first.

Cthulu Cthomes

Atop some floating wreckage,
A sailor came ashore.
He bought himself a tankard
And a burly surly whore.

In one gulp he downed the lager
And did likewise to the lass.
Told the waitress not to bother
And shot fire from his ass.

We watched as with one wooden leg,
He hopped upon the bar,
And beer flew from his ragged beard
As he yarred a mighty yar.

All you little bastards, said he,
with voice made thick with drink,
Are little shabby tarts and
land-loving cunts I think.

But if you'd like to change,
And clean the sand from out your slit,
I can give your life a purpose,
And a soul to go with it.

Just sign upon the dotted line,
Make sure your mark is neat and clear,
Kiss your wife and child back at home,
And leave your will and test right here.

This thursday we be leaving,
To drink on foreign shores.
To pluck the finest foreign skirts
From the finest foreign whores.

And if ye have the stomache
To see the voyage till its through,
Bounty can be yours,
From captain Cthulu.

Snippet For Posterity

"Do you believe in Angels?" Marly asked, her impish little face looking up at me with eyes that rose like twin brown moons over the peaks of her cheeks.

"Not really," I told her, trying to sound even, "the ones I've met really weren't worth believing in."

A Flash Feed

So I made it back from my vacation safe and sound with nothing truly worthwhile to drag on about. I'll just say that it was a good time and a slow time, which was exactly what I needed.

As soon as I am home, however, it seems that I am required of. Any moment now Keighdee should be here to pick me up and whisk me away to northern indiana where we will do our marriage counseling thing. Honestly it sounds like an event only a troubled couple would attend but it is a requirement that our pastor has, something of a couple's right of passage I'm assuming. There is a hope that I will have to fight thirty or more men in an earthen pit in order to prove my loyalty over lust. I will use a broad axe for the occasion, and it will be glorious.

My apologies to Chris for not making it to the fights tonight as I have to leave town again sooner than I wanted to. When shall we meet then, brothers? And to what purpose?