The exhaustion snaked through his life like an old stone fence that divided the good days from the bad. Each lean night another misshapen stone tumbled to the field where his sickness grazed.  He’d learned to take the daily punch in the nose from the alarm clock like a back alley scrapper but the cumulative effect as the sunrises piled upon him was difficult to hide.

He watched the meat bob past the office window. Great ragged chunks dressed in spice and marinade swirled through the broth that raced along the gutters. Among the butchered lot of them there were riddles unspoken that he couldn’t understand, but he had riddles that he savored too. They were  encrypted in the artistry of the killing floor. Another world made of  all of the invisible things crafted beneath their darkened porches when the lights went out. Rare and bloody. Seasoned like raw game.

 He had his  purging rituals. Hobbies, the people he worked with called them. The disfigured world beyond his office window stormed his apartment in the wee hours. It never felt as quaint as a hobby when the ideas twisted his wrists  or squeezed his larynx. It was a struggle to convince himself there was catharsis in it, that it was the productive response. Catharsis wasn’t the right word though, distraction or obsession were more honest. Neither as cleansing as catharsis, rather, they were different types of frustrations. They were frustrations that meant something. Whatever the configuration a knot was a knot.

Those people beyond the window looked so gleeful in their insignificance. He interrogated their walk and posture and glazed eyes for anyone whom might be a co-conspirator. Someone with which to commiserate, caffeinate and adjudicate the world. Not that he’d have chased them down if one walked by, but one day someone finally responded to his questions with one of their own.

Beyond the bone and gristle of the streets, a lone fluorescent light glowed in a window of the building opposite.  Half its floors were empty. The parade of the newly unemployed shoved free of wheezing companies had been common place for awhile. At first it had humbled him to see the boxes under their arms and the stutter step of those caught beneath the sun of an utterly changed world. It humbled him until he realized there would be fewer people in line at the coffee shop.

A potato shaped silhouette fluttered about the vacant space on the 6th floor.  A ghost in the hive free to dance her silent, anxious waltz. This sliver of mystery in such a naked, vulgar world electrified him. Her arms flailed with graceful panic and the stumble of delirium radiated danger. He inched forward in his chair. She kicked at the cubicle walls and threw her head back to bay at the sole light source. He felt small behind his desk, almost naive.

She collapsed to the floor, and fell from sight. He waited for a moment for her to rise but she did not. The stillness of the moment skittered up the back of his neck and he decided he’d seen enough. For all the meat on the streets below it was his first glimpse of how the sausage was made.

Posted in prose
Tags: catharsis, creativity, empathy, exhaustion, myth, voyerism

I was in a cross between a gothic horror mansion and what was my house. I was being chased by some kind of menacing force. I ended up in the basement of the house where a giant beast was trying to kill me. I somehow pinned it to the wall and cut it’s head off with a shovel.

The body was still trying to to reach me on it’s own. The arms were groping but I was just out of reach of it’s clawed fingers. The head was still alive and gnashing it’s teeth at me as I smashed it in the face with the shovel. That stopped the head from threatening me so I used the shovel to try and cut off the monster’s jaw.

Once I finally stomped the blade through the jaw I saw that the beast was actually a giant puppet. I could tell the head was made up of material stretched over a cage. Inside was a tiny scared child who was still alive.

Confused, I left the basement and walked down a long hallway of mostly closed doors. I found that I was in some kind of medical institution. I looked around for someone that worked there. I opened a door to a room with two beds.

There were two little girls laying on cold white sheets. They both had red hair. They looked very sick and sad. I asked them where a nurse was. “We don’t like it when they come” one told me.

I quietly left the room and went further down the hall. I went into an old fashioned all tile hydrotherapy room. Two patients were chained together. One was in the water. They looked sick, insane and half dead from torture and neglect.

Suddenly I noticed a crazy looking girl bleeding out on the tile in the corner of the room. Apparently she was committing suicide. I recognized her. She was actually a big fan of my music. She used to write me letters I never answered. She would say things like “you’re my best friend.” I regretted not writing her back as I tried to find my way out of that place.

I see a pattern. The pattern looks like some kind of metal beast. My eyes focus to see it’s the door. Beyond it is only black.

Posted in prose
Tags: dreams, horror, institution, neglect, nightmares, puppets, shovel, suicide, trauma

According to their 990 form Greenpeace claimed $38,363, 322 dollars in direct public support for 2007. From May 8th to May 10th the new Star Trek Movie made $75,204,289 according to boxofficemojo.com. That is a difference of nearly 37 million dollars in favor of Star Trek/Paramount Pictures in 363 fewer days. I chose Greenpeace because they are a large non profit that most people have heard of, but I’m sure filling in the blank with another organisation would illustrate a similar or even more dramatic divide.

They say you can use statistics to prove just about anything, so… what does it prove?

Posted in question
Tags: economics, environment, Greenpeace, priorities, social commentary, Star Trek

 The serenity beyond the window juxtaposed with the fear beneath the news anchors make up was too great a puzzle to let go. I put on my shoes. In the hall, the televisions  from the other apartments bellowed like a choir out of time. A sterile requiem behind which people in suits debated when it would be appropriate to show commercials again. The war over those initial commercial spots were destined to become a thing of advertising legend. A thing that might never be transcribed if all were as bad as it looked.

I stood and watched the traffic light on the corner cycle twice. It was silent save for the mechanical click as the colors changed. With no traffic to regulate, it seemed an odd thing to have hung there above the street. The sun felt good. It was a still brisk out, but the makings of a perfect spring day were congealing. The birds in the city were loud when the din of humanity was gone. Was it always that way or  were calling out to each other that something black was going down?

I headed toward downtown on foot.  There was an organization that painted “chalk” outlines on the street when a pedestrian or bicyclist was killed by a car. You noticed them periodically out of the corner of your eye. Now though, with no traffic on the streets, it was remarkable just how many there were.  Every couple of blocks the outlines were there. Featureless ghosts on the asphalt, dated with stencils. Another death in the city. I looked past  the telephone wires, deep into the branches of nearby trees for the departed perched above their memorials but found only a pair of green boxer shorts camouflaged among the leaves.

The claustrophobic tenements that introduced the outer perimeter of downtown came into view. They were cheap, sweatbox apartments inhabited by immigrants, artists, dreamers and drug addicts.  An empty police cruiser blocked the street that carved a trench between the buildings toward the commercial district. The cruiser’s lights flashed dull blue and white in the bright sun of the day.  

I jogged across the street, hurried out of habit rather than necessity, and peered into the cop car as I passed. My attention was drawn overhead by an ill groan before I could catalog anything unique to the day inside the car. I looked to the sky to see a middle aged woman in a bath robe topple from the seventh floor. The navy blue sleeves of the police officers clutched at the air in her wake. She was a drift of limbs without resistance to the breeze that tore past her. The suspended moment deceived me. By the time I’d ducked into a doorway there was nothing left to fear from above. The birds were drowned out  for a moment by an invasive, dry pop when her head met the filthy concrete.  

“Shit. shit!” The clenched words followed her down and diffused in the slow fan of blood around the body.

Posted in prose
Tags: armageddon, beauty, birds, pedestrian deaths

I looked out my childhood bedroom window and saw it was raining hard. It became torrential and I watched the entire street flood. Then, right before my eyes, I saw the street completely wash away and become sand. The park across the street was now a beach with waves crashing on it.

It seemed that most people in the area had been washed away. I was the only person around. I was a child.

Apparently aliens caused the flood. They were like midgets but they had giant heads and were pale green. Their features appeared human. They could turn a human into an alien with a bite.

The lucky thing was that they were easy to kill. You could shatter their heads to dust by just hitting them or knocking them over. I had to kill a few aliens to save myself.

They destroyed all human languages. I went to talk to one of the aliens that was in charge. When I tried to speak the words were all in their language. I had a book with me of the English language and it disintegrated in my hands as I was speaking.

They had dressed me up for the meeting in a black ceremonial dress, pale green makeup, black eyeliner, black blush and black lipstick. I left the meeting afraid and frustrated.

Later I went to the home of the leader. He lived in a victorian type mansion and dressed in elegant human clothes. As I tried to get near enough to kill him he distracted me. He showed me a male and female alien dancing on a bed. They were wearing victorian clothes. It looked as if they were going to put on a sex show.

As I was watching this, the leader bit my neck.

I felt myself becoming one of them.

Things change around me. There’s that throb again. Darkness.

Posted in prose
Tags: aliens, dreams, language

I got a chance to check out the new IFC documentary New World Order the other day. The film revolves around Alex Jones of Info Wars and Prison Planet fame, and weaves in a few other side personalities through the piece. The focus here is on the personalities and not any sort of articulated concerns or explanations of what they are on about.

There are no arguments made, only characters observed. That was disappointing. I was hoping for something that would perhaps illustrate the foundations of the concerns “conspiracy theorists”  have. There is no case making for the layman that may not follow the various movements. What we get are a lot of shots of people protesting, hollering and appearing unbalanced without conveying any digestible information.

There is one scene that stood out for me though… after numerous shots of   9/11 Truthers hollering at people and handing out leaflets in New York, the anniversary of 9/11 arrives. They all stand silently at the reading of the names at Ground Zero clad simply in black “Investigate 9/11″ t-shirts. One of them who is followed throughout the film but whose name I forget realizes… “I think we are doing more good right now being quiet than we did in all the street actions.” (or something to that effect.)

Yes, yes you are.

I have said it before… the only thing raucous protesting changes peoples opinions about is the protesters themselves. It is not the way to convey information and change peoples thinking. Anyway, if you are interested in the subject, the documentary is sort of worth seeing. If you are curious what “conspiracy theorists” are on about however,  do a search for some David Icke or Jim Marrs lectures on YouTube. They convey the information in a much less hysterical fashion and neither were in the documentary.

Posted in diatribe, recommendation
Tags: 9/11 Truthers, Alex Jones, David Icke, documentary, IFC, Jim Mars, New World Order, protest

I was at a frat house party and people kept fucking with my beer. This led to me getting into a fight with the father who put the party on for his son. He ended up killing himself or committing a crime because I disgraced him in front of everyone. He was Japanese I think.

An MP came and confronted me about what happened. I started explaining that I didn’t do anything to intentionally hurt him. We were driving around and I started describing a non-existent scene from “Apocalypse Now” where it showed a montage of Vietnamese in horrible living conditions. Then as we looked out the windows of the truck it was happening outside. “This is the scene here” I said to the MP.

I saw a Vietnamese Non-Combatant in a Chinese-style house boat that was mostly submerged in a rice patty. He was rearranging a real human skull that decorated the canopy of his boat. He looked like one of those barely alive Holocaust living skeletons but he was obviously oriental. I made a point to the MP that things like this made me feel how fortunate I am, so how could I do the Japanese man any intentional harm?

The MP must have seen my point because took me to another party where Nurse With Wound was doing a power electronics set. The guy singing was supposed to be Steven Stapleton but he looked younger and different. They were playing behind some kind of barn partition. The audience was mostly young girls and on the partition were obscene drawings similar to Hans Bellmer.

Later I had a conversation with an old guy about the similarities between our current terrorist kidnappings and what happened in Nanking. It made a lot of sense at the time.

I had a discussion with someone else who said that Septic Death was a litmus test of anyones taste in music. Of course, I agreed.

As I nod my head I see the edges of the circle in the distance. Things go dark.

Posted in prose
Tags: disgrace, dreams, Hans Bellmer, honor, Vietnam, war

The About page to the right explains a lot of this, but here’s a great little 10 minute presentation on the intelligence and ingenuity of crows that is worth a look.

Posted in video
Tags: corvids, creativity, crows, ingenuity, Joshua Klein, TED

The needles entered him like sunshine. Thousands of them in tight rows laid across his back, their sterile tips blurred together into a single  immediate pressure.  It was Friday again, and it had been another week like the last. Each week he waited for this. If he wasn’t pining at his desk by Wednesday then something unusual had gone right for once. More often though the drudgery consumed him.

He was becoming dependent, he could admit that. The weekend had become a time to convalesce rather than enjoy. Without the treatments, he knew the pikes of the work week would run him through. Once he’d come to the conclusion that the violent day dreams were beyond him, he sought another solution.

The nurse lowered the heavy metallic roller to the hard canvas backing that held the needles in formation. The mechanisms that control the roller whined a steady electric hum, that became meditative by the end of it. He usually went about 20 minutes with the needles, beyond that it affected the healing time and he needed to be back at the desk Monday.

The roller began at the small of his back, and moved toward his shoulders. At the base of his neck it reversed.  Back and forth it hummed with a steady even pressure that eased the needles beneath his skin and aerated the tension. He measured his breathing carefully, shallow, slow breaths. Breathe too deep and he would force the needles further into himself, a lesson learned very clearly during his first visit some months back.

The sensations evolved as the pressure migrated over him and the session progressed. Heat and numbness and chills and euphoria swept through his nervous system and mingled with the dehumanizing memories of the week. The catharsis bordered on hallucinatory.

A solitary ding sounded when time was up and the roller retracted . The nurse reappeared to ask how it went and prepare for the next stage. Through latex gloves she kneaded his back, squeezing and stretching the fresh wounds. It wasn’t pleasant, but the real pain came beneath the shower head at home.

Once his muscles were loosened and the pores and sores gawked wide, the nurse pulled a sleeping blindfold over his eyes. The new darkness filled with the the smell of earth and insects. It reminded him of catching lightning bugs in a coffee can as a kid. Mutiple patches of awkward cold materialized upon his grieving skin and then the heavy office door would click shut.

“Don’t move around, I’ll be back in half an hour,” she would say.

In the earthen fragrances of the dark he waited for the ugliness of the week to leave him. The movement on his back was slight and random but in the utter stillness it was unmistakable. He could breathe deeply now and imagined each long exhale pushed the vitriol out through the wounds on his back.

When the door opened again, the last of the process went quick. One by one the sticky, cold blobs were plucked from him, and dropped into a plastic tub with a dry plunk. It was his favorite part. The nurse would gently gauze his back before she removed his blindfold. His shirt was always right there for him.

The tub sat at the back of the small office on a counter. He took the  anxious steps closer and examined it with a grand satisfaction. Distended, corpulent leeches looked back, thick with the poisons of fluorescent light and traffic and clients and co-workers. Every common and uncommon horror the work week spit in his face was personified right there, too fat to move.

The nurse would push open a stainless steel door in the wall. Just a small one, below a glaring red and white placard that said “incinerator” and he’d drop the leeches into the furnace one at a time.

Posted in prose
Tags: alternative therapy, leeches, stress, tgif, work

The media has a bias.  It is not for the left or the right as much as it is for the status quo and the corporations that advertise through them. There are news organizations across the left and right spectrum that are of value, and there are a far more that are shills for complacency and consumerism. Alternet.org, could be pegged as a lefty site, but that doesn’t discredit out of hand what they report.

Jeremy Scahill recently wrote a piece for them called “Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners At Gitmo Under Obama.” Without the internet a headline like that might have to be edited down to remove characterizations like “Little Known Thug Squad” or “Brutalizing” so it would fit above the fold on a traditional paper. Point being, I know that headline is loaded to excite and titillate, but  it doesn’t nullify what’s in the report. Journalists don’t generally write their headlines, editors do.

Anyway,  read the article. It’s 6 pages of detailed information regarding the treatment we are perpetrating institutionally on prisoners of war. Some of you may feel that whatever it takes is ok, and some of you may feel that the treaties we sign mean something in the world and some of you may feel that the moral compass of our nation could hope for better.  This post isn’t about that.

As I read through it, I wondered what would happen if the videos and details of the incidents recounted in the article were splashed in high definition across America’s televisions. Would America stand up, grab their pitchforks, or their flags, and fill the streets? Not the professional protesters and contrived “grassroots” organisations we are all pretty sick of I think, but regular Americans who are disgusted enough, or angry enough, or proud enough to go outside and make sure someone knows about it.

That doesn’t mean window breaking or “What Do We Want…” chants or choruses of “USA, USA…” I don’t think a picket sign has ever changed anyone’s mind about anything but the protestors holding them. What I wonder though is what it would take to get a sincere and sustained reaction out of the population. At what point are Americans willing to take ownership of the things that happen in their name?

Posted in diatribe
Tags: abuse, conscience, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Jeremy Scahill, media, military, morality, priorities, protest, social commentary, torture, war