Words to My Future Muse
2009

I want to crave the taste of your presence
The spicy salt of your skin
I want to become an addict for you

These are words whispered to the softer ears
Of she who shall be my Muse
Further out, in the black, as yet unseen

I will make monuments to you, for you
Future archeology
Touch you, hold you, kiss you, bruise you, fuck you

In the fog, cold sound breathes to me, through me
There is a deep hunger there
A grumbling murmur, do you hear it, too?

I dream of blackened ships and rose petals
Of lost poems I've yet to write
I awake alone and melancholy

I know now why the poets drink and die
They lose the taste of their Muse
Replace her with liquid love and whiskey

Jenny Holzer is probably my favorite artist living to day. Her work is highly conceptual but not overly cerebral. The best term I can use to describe her is a "poet" but that doesn't work, either.

Jenny takes words and makes them into art. This sounds very much like "poetry" - and, in fact, much of her work is collected into volumes that resemble little black books with poems in them - but the initial executions create what can only be described as an experience.

For example, her work Laments is a series of "poems" - but they are chisled onto stone sarcophagi. The same words are scrolled across LED light displays - which provide the only light in the exhibit.

She purchases billboard spaces in major cities to present a single phrase from time to time (called Truisms). The poetry of the words and the context they are displayed form the basis of her art.

It's plain brilliant.

She has a twitter account, and her postings there are good examples of the Truisms:

RELIGION CAUSES AS MANY PROBLEMS AS IT SOLVES

POTENTIAL COUNTS FOR NOTHING UNTIL IT'S REALIZED

GUILT AND SELF-LACERATION ARE INDULGENCES

Her work has affected my own meager pushings with a profound power unmatched by any other visual artist. Looking backwards, I can say with assuredness that I would be a completely different person today had I not been introduced to her art.

When I discovered her work (in or around 1993), I started thinking about the metaphysics of symbology. One of the things I was struggling with was simplicity. I was trying to create an emotion in the viewer of my paintings and prints something direct - something more controlled. I wanted to set people up and then punch them in just the right way so that they would think or feel exactly what I wanted them to.

My first attempt at this was a violent-looking, multi-colored print. I wanted to express a seething, bubbling anger, and once the first prints came off the line I realized that it wasn't working exactly how I wanted it to. So I made a second plate and struck it below the first one. This plate was a word, deeply scratched, very angry:

MOTHERFUCKER.

It did exactly what I wanted it to do. The print seethed on the wall. It was selected for a gallery show . . . and then promptly pulled from the wall after a complaint.

The next work I did was a stylized gesture drawing of Jesus Christ on a crucifix. It was done with very thick, very bold lines. Underneath, in block letters, said the following:

COMMUNIST

This, too, was deemed too controversial for show in the two-star West Virginian town I lived.

My next few pieces were less hostile to the viewer:





After this, I began thinking very deeply about language, metaphor, and the metaphysics thereof. So much so that I switched majors from art to philosophy - specifically so that I could learn the deep magicks of words. I needed to understand what exactly happens with this thing called "language."

Why, exactly, is it not a pipe?

When the digital age began waxing in earnest, I began exploring the nascent technology of hypertext as a medium. How brilliant was it that I could change the context of a word simply by "linking" it to another topic? I didn't have a Mac, so I wasn't able to create hypercard stacks; instead I found a compiler for Windows 3.1 help texts, which were also hypertext documents.

These were protoplasmic, experimental things, but in creating them I began to understand the how people viewed words and their contexts.

The word "Blood" means different things to different people. For children, it equates to pain. Women are far more used to blood than men. Surgeons more so. Soldiers look at blood with different eyes than me. And so forth.

Then came the world wide web, which opened a new playground to me. I made some more experiments, but the technology in the early years (1994 through 1996) was either too cumbersome for viewers to be expected to have or too obtuse to work in. But in 1997, the language of javascript reached a level maturity where it would do what I wanted and I created my first "digital experience" that I felt worth viewing: a b y s s.

a b y s s was a difficult thing for me to build for many reasons. I was part of a new movement in art and the tools to do these things did not exist: we made them up as we went along. But mostly, the subject matter was difficult for me to write about.

a b y s s was a series of images, words, and animations linked together to form a cohesive experience. The choices for images, words, and animations were designed to push the viewer's mental space into the area I wanted them to be in through a series of shared psychological associations (for the first three parts) and then in the final part I layed down the sucker punch: I was able to say exactly what I wanted to say and have it be understood within the specific context I wanted.

It was an extremely well recieved work. It won a lot of stupid awards when everyone was giving awards out for stuff, and earned me a spot in the hell dot com collective (a group of digital art people who were like me).

I had another work planned called shard but it was never finished. Other things got in the way: work, life, love, what-have-you. I began writing more, and the writing was less time consuming. This, too, was well recieved, but it has never scratched the itch that Ms. Holzer first gave to me.

The other night I was speaking with a photographer I met, and I mentioned Jenny Holzer to her as one of my influences. I like this person's photographs - a lot - and this reminded me of an idea I had that hearkens back to the some of my earlier experimentations.

Here, then, is the synchronicity of the moment:

This afternoon, I picked up my mail and inside was a small package, mailed from a friend of mine who is the only other person I know who loves Jenny Holzer.

Enclosed was a note:

I've been carrying this around for 20 years.

Some strange things have happened, I have strange affections for it.

I've been meaning to send it to you for a while; it just seems like the right thing to do, there is an interesting energy around giving it to you.

(If I am wrong please feel free to give it back.)

It was a bound copy of Jenny Holzer's Laments printed on onionskin.

It is difficult for me to describe how precise and perfect this is - how much it instilled me with a feeling of correctness. It completely changed the tone of my day - which has included my doctor telling me that he has some concerns and that they want to check for cancer.

I am not one to believe in signs and portents.

And yet, it feels like stars are aligning.

Then:

A crisp November air carries the dry, musky scent of the forest's leaves. I wander there, alone, as I am wont to do. I smoke cigarettes and stub the butts out on the corpses of ancient oak trees.

In the forest, I understand.

There, I remove a small pocket knife from the pocket of my faded jeans - a gift to me from my father, and to him from his father.

I carve our names in the trunk of a gnarled tree. My strength and dexterity are insufficient, and I spoil the letters as the bark crumbles away. Frustrated, I throw the knife into the leaves.

I am unable to find it.

Now:

I remember seeing you for the first time. It was a greasy-spoon diner populated by black-clad goths, khaki-covered neo-tech executives, hipsters showing off the latest in digital media devices. We were all so high on ourselves, our lives, excited by the promise of a future that never arrived.

Later, I'd hit on you at a bar in Alameda. I remember it clearly, though I was suffering deeply from international jetlag, my body clock stuck in Kathmandu, 12,000 miles away.

There were forests in the Himalayans. I understood there.

That night, on the island, my understanding was fading.

(I didn't know you were dating my friend at the time.)

(I wonder if that knowledge would have changed anything.)

There was no forest. I was unprotected

Then:

On a chill day in Feburary, there is a funeral in an old church. We are young, too young for the specter of a consuming cancer to be visited upon one of our own. My socks are two different colors - one black, one brown - and I feel guilty for not paying sufficient attention on the day that my friend is buried.

You came to me afterwards and we embraced, trying to hold on, to stand upright, to support. It was the only real moment to me amidst the surreality of mortality.

There was no forest. We were unprotected.

Years later, on a chill day in February, I will be unable to make a pilgrimage to the grave and you will go in my place. I never thanked you for this.

Now:

I greet you with a feigned nonchalance. I am scared of you, of a power I know you still have. I cannot touch you; I do not know what this moment means.

I never wrote you a love poem. I regret this. You told me once that you hated them. It was only later that I realized that I should have ignored you.

Now you are in the forest. You understand. You are protected.

I am not there with you. Someone else holds your hand now; someone else feels the electricity.

I am selfish; I remember touching you, touching primal thoughts, ego and id released from the shackles of now.

I remember standing in the forest with you. You wore white and pink.

I understood and was protected.

Then:

The leaves are thick and heavy with a wet, July dew. It is an early morning, dark, the sun a promise of fate. There is a crunching underneath our feet as we walk to the north, to the lights of the two-star town I called home.

(i am so scared do you not wish me to touch you?)

A creature

(a deer?)

stirs to the west, running, scampering

full of vigor

full of blood

full of life

among the moon's light, the sun unknown.

We stand in the forest and I can hear your breath come in waves and it reminds me that I am human, that I am made of meat, that we are wires suspended in the ichor of time and this will all soon be

gone.

Now:

"Write about nature," she says.

Internally, I scoff at the challenge: "500 words about nature?" Pathetic. A mere moment's reflection upon my love of color and I have completed my assignment.

Yet: I stop my fine fingers from twitching over the letters, the staccato sound of temporal thoughts captured by plastic keys. A question: "What is nature?" which leads to "What am I?"

Then:

In the forest, these are real questions - more real than the sound of meat.

This is a question for poets. In the forest, there is no time for lyrics and love; only for the now and that which bleeds.

Hear the sighs of the trees: there is a humid fog rolling amongst them, grasping trunks and branches like a lover, longingly, lowly, wet. The bark, the love, this is life, this is the Appalachians.

In the forest, I understand.

I never told her that I loved her. I never will.

Now:

We are figments clashing with the gods of Olympus, staccato heartbeats, clay creatures closing on creation. Here me now: I touch you, your breath quickens, I hear this, we are brutal.

Here, we peel back the skin of the universe. We are surgical poets. You grasp my hand and what was blurry becomes incalculable.

The taste of your being follows me through the darkness of my every time.

I understand this is not your desire, but when you touch me there is a harmony, reality rights itself along the Circle of Fifths.

In the forest, I am protected.

Then:

I hold her hand, her fingers grip mine, there is a reality here. This is the accent of the thick July air, destiny, lunacy.

We have been apart so long, for forever, for never, I hear her Alto voice in dreams, we are children of gods.

In the forest, I understand.

Her love is given freely but I am greedy. How can I cage this? In the future, I will make love to a guitar and bleed from its strings a tone that reminds me of this moment.

It will be raining and I will remember what it meant to be inside her life for the breath of the West Virginia storm.

Now:

Breathe.

Write.

(This work, The Machine, was originally published in serial form between February and March, 2003)

one

how long is it now?

people live in the bowls of the machine. they scamper and scurry, a society of rat reflexes. they exist at the mercy of the machine. they exist in fear of it, of its fickle nature.

if you peel back the edges of the machine, get underneath it's alloyed skin, there is a human heartbeat, visceral and wet.

alone.

the machine grows. it grows without design. it grows with only one purpose, one goal: to continue to grow. a mechanical virus, infecting,

polluting,

consuming.

uncaring.

grime covers every surface of the machine. the sharp stink of processed petroleum permeates the air, choking away memories of a sun long dead.

the sun is gone, you see. they killed it. we must take refuge here, in the machine, our protector, our armor.

our father.

yes, there are windows - but where they are, no one knows - at least, no one who will speak of this openly.

people have left in search of them.

they have not returned.

the machine killed them, maybe, as it kills so many of us: accidentally, always accidentally. it is blind, you see. it knows only growth.

the elders say that one day the machine will cause the sun to shine again.

two

in the end the rats tore him apart.

they came, soiled and stinking waves of manged and flea-infested fur, chittering,

fearless in their hunger.

they came from the deep places of the machine - it's black and oily piston-driven hearts, moist pockets of secret hate.

the machine bred them there.

we know the rats got him because we found his skeleton. it had been picked clean and gnawed to the marrow in places.

we know it was the rats because men do not do these things - at least, not human men.

the young people said that we should have gone deep into the machine to find and kill the pack. they said - i said, i was young then - they said that it was only a matter of time before the rats grow bold and sleek, fat from their victories. soon they would brave to hunt in the lit areas of the machine.

the elders disagreed. his death was a message, they said. a message from the machine: do not seek the sun. his quest had angered it, they said - and it had punished him as surely as it would vent its wrath upon anyone else foolish enough to stray from our habitat.

obey, they said.

breed, they said.

do not question the will of the machine.

three

you must tell them that you remember the stars, my son. you must lie to them.

i tell you this because i am dying. the thrumming of the machine causes my brittle bones to ache. i am tired, always tired,

tired of the constant clanging and the deep rumbling. it brings madness.

i have never seen the stars. i heard of them only from our storyteller. we sat in a circle at night and listened to the tales for hours upon hours, soaking up every word: stories of mythical forces called 'wind' and 'rain', of lost gardens and forests, and of the long dead creatures: dogs, cats, bears, birds.

i swore that one day i would see these things for myself.

we had already lost the use of the machine's eyes and image screens. they were fragile things and slowly the grime crept into their casings, freezing them with accumulated dirt and soot.

we, too, had only the oral tradition and the picture wall.

the sun was a dim, cloud-shrouded memory to even the eldest of the old. i wonder now, as i did then, if any of them truly had seen the blues of the sky. i wonder if they had not simply passed down the stories they themselves had heard - descriptions of trees and grass and birds and forests - and repeated the stories over and over again,

until they believe that it was they, themselves, who had walked the surface, and not some dead, forgotten ancestor.

this is the power of the storyteller, my son: hope. as i pass on, it is you who must keep the memory of these things alive in our children's children. you must make them believe that these things exist, that they are waiting for them. most important, you must make them believe that one day they will walk under the sky.

it is this hope that allows us to survive during the cold periods when the machine is fickle with it's heat. it is this hope that allows them to continue to harvest the mushrooms each day. it is this hope that gives the infirm the will to continue.

the hope that some day will be a better day.

you must tell them the stories until they, too, drink deep of your words and promise themselves and their children to find the way out.

it is there, you know. the outside exists.

i saw it once, long ago, when i was adventurous.

but that is a story for another day.

four

they will ask you "why," my son.

the young children are made of the hard questions. it is suffused in their blood, a sugar of difficulty.

you must recognize this and learn to direct the questioning sweet tooth into one that favors salt.

they will ask you why, and you can only give them the answer that you were given when you sat in front of the fire:

because it was no longer safe outside of the machine.

we do not remember the nature of our peril. we do not know the authority of our doom. we know only that there is solace within the grinding gears of the machine's bosom.

the more imaginative of the elders would tell you that we sought refuge from the terrible, radioactive results of war, or that we had poisoned our world, or that a new ice age had crept upon us after a comet's devastation.

i believe none of those things.

i think we are here simply because of fear and laziness.

fear is what brought us to the state where we would accept such a solution and laziness is what prevents us from seeking better ones.

in the eyes of my imagination, i see a statesman say, the machine will make you safe.

it is for your safety that we must do these things.

if we do not, if you do not accept this solution, then deaths will occur. our entire way of life will end.

but our way of life did end, and that is what they could not foresee.

we have become weak and lazy. we are no better than the vermin who scurry behind the panels in the corridors - meek, scared - terrified of the wrath of the machine.

i am sad to say that i have spent too many years of my life in that same mindset. i could not truly comprehend the meaning of the things i found in my youth and so i assumed they were beyond the grasp of my feeble intellect.

so i gave up.

i tell you know, though, as i prepare my last breath, that i know it would be preferable to die out there, in search of the truth, than lying here on this tattered mattress, choking from the sulfuric egg stench of our recycled air.

you must not let them fear. you must teach them not to give up - keep their hope alive so that they believe that they can change things. it may be that you, too, will die without seeing the results of this.

but you must carry on.

there is a great inheritance out there, beyond these humming walls and clanging ducts.

teach them to seek it.

five

i have one more secret to tell you before i leave forever, my son. it is perhaps the most dread truth that i am witness to, and one that i am only now, as the fluid of my life ebbs and my gears grind to a halt, am i able to understand what it represents - to me, to you, to us

our people,

the people of the machine.

i spoke to you before of a time when i was younger and given to adventure and exploration, and how i had seen the outside.

i tell you now this terrible thing: the outside exists and it is a great and terrible thing,

a smoking, churning hell,

and it is of our making.

i was perhaps only twenty years old when we found the endless stair. those were dark times for us. the rats and other, darker creatures from the machine's depths had been prowling along the edges of our society. from time to time they would attack us, out of hunger, perhaps out of fear, lightning raids to kill children and the infirm.

after many weeks of pointless bickering, the elders came to the conclusion that i and my cohorts had almost immediately: we must fight back. we must hunt down these menaces and destroy them or be destroyed ourselves. in this manner was every able-bodied male conscripted into a makeshift army.

we would become packs of hunters ourselves.

there were grand ceremonies made of this. we each stood before the story wall and were given praises by the elders and in a private and solemn session with the storyteller we received the last story, the one told to the dying.

because that's what we were, you see: dying. they did not expect us to return in the same numbers.

we were given weapons with which to kill: stabbing spears, slashing swords, mechanical contraptions that sprayed liquid fire. the smiths worked day and night, coaxing the machine to deliver the essentials for our survival.

we were sent into the deep warrens. i remember there being much discussion about what to do when we had passed beyond the edge of darkness, to those cobwebbed corridors where the walklamps were broken and dead.

they gave us torches and antique contraptions called "lamps."

the days i spent in the warrens are merely a smear in the dust that is my memory. i know we fought and many of our people were written out of the stories there; too many. i remember endless night, and camping in the darkness, sleeping back to back, or facing out from the fires we would make, praying that our feeble lights did not attract the curious and feral.

what i remember most is the grime. it was everywhere, the sooty leavings of the machine. soot and rust and oil - we wore it as a second skin after a time.

there are creatures of clockwork in the deep warrens, you know. magnificent and terrible things in all manner of shapes and sizes. the warrens are a mechanical garden of eden: the machine has been busy there. they clattered and rolled through the hallways and the ducts with no discernable purpose, never hostile, smelling of oils and smoke.

they ignored us just as they ignored the rats.

it was in the warrens that we came across the endless stair. we weren't even certain that it was a stair at first; the first steps were covered in what could be centuries of oily dust and rusted leavings.

once we had determined it's purpose, though, we had no choice but to ascend and see where it led.

we climbed and climbed. we called it the 'endless stair' for a reason; it spiraled forever and ever. we would climb for a time and then rest for hours and then begin our climb again, our feet leaving thunderous echoes through the iron in our wake. further and further we climbed, choking on kicked up rust, hacking at inhaled cobwebs. many times we thought of turning back but we would tell ourselves: it can only be just a little further.

each time we said this, we were wrong.

it was perhaps days of climbing, but eventually we came to the apex. we knew we were approaching the top because there was light there - light, in the depths of the abyss, floating dimly from above, sheathed in a fog of dust.

with renewed vigor we tackled the remainder of the staircase and emerged into the brightness, our light-starved eyes blinking, stinging, tearing.

we had expected to find several walklamps but we were unprepared for what was really there:

windows.

windows, my son. walls that you can see through, made of the same material that covers the walklamps and cracked screens.

and through the windows, we saw the sun.

it was too bright to look at. i fell to my knees and wept, exhausted. we all did. i am not ashamed to tell you this.

looking around, we found that we were inside of a rather large circular room, a room whose walls were made of glass. the room contained several pieces of furniture that had been covered in tarps; when we pulled the coverings away the room darkened from the dust we stirred up.

under the tarps were chairs, desks and many, many screens - screens of a type i had never seen before, but screens nonetheless. there were small artifacts of an impenetrable and complex nature made of plastic. they were soft to the touch, rotten from age.

staring at all of it i was filled with deep sense of horror: men had been in this place once and they had abandoned it, finding it unsuitable for some reason. but more: they had left it in such a way that led me to believe that they expected to return.

it filled me with a great sadness, my son. these men and their ideas, thier secret knowledge - all of it was now dust, lost to us.

it was then that i heard someone crying. i looked up and saw our leader standing at the room's edge, staring out the window. none of us had been able to do so - the light was too bright. he was full of despair.

in a dream, i remember standing and walking to the window's edge. i remember staring out the window and i remember my the muscles of my legs turning to jelly as i sank to the iron floor.

we were very high up. the stair had led to the heights of a grand tower from which we could see for miles and miles - until the horizon was a blur.

what we saw was the machine.

there was nothing there but the machine.

it stretched until it melted into the smog of the it's own breath. acres of nothing but rust-colored smokestacks belching fire and impossibly giant gears, turning slowly, oh so slowly.

a hades of iron and rust and grease.

there was a dread poetry visible in the machine from this vantage point. closer to the base of the tower the machine was orderly; obviously designed. however, as one's eyes moved further from the tower the less the world had to do with the concept of 'order' until eventually it was nothing but chaos - chaos bred by the machine.

the machine is designing itself, my son.

and it is truly mad.

as we left that accursed chamber and made our way down the stair, we made blood oathes to one another to never reveal this truth.

we returned to the low warrens and stood before the story wall and we lied to the elders. we wept for our dead and celebrated our victories.

of the men who climbed the stair, all are now dead. i am the last, and soon i, too, shall be written out of the story.

i tell you this secret because it must survive.

listen: you must move our people. you must spur them to action; they must migrate. the machine is insane and directionless. i have watched for many years, waiting for the signs that the low warrens will cease to be habitable. that time is soon: over the years the elements of the machine vital to our survival have decayed and died, never to be replaced.

the smiths are no longer able to summon all the elements they require. the screens are dark or speak only gibberish. the walklamps are dying, slowly. you yourself have noticed these changes.

our people will die if they remain here.

you must take them out from here. you must take them as far as possible.

you must seek an edge to the machine. i believe it exists - it has not covered all the earth yet.

find the edge, and you find the sun.

and if possible, my son -

you must kill the machine.

There was more blood this morning.

There is a snap of pain and vertigo, a shuffling sound from the horizon. Above me: cacophony, the beating wings of a thousand poison angels. It is a bloodletting of insanity, and I realize I am going mad.

Silence.

My eyes open.

I am in the past, walking my old neighborhood. The sun is casts a bright sky but the colors around me are muted and blurry. The houses on the street are painted in the style of the rusty 1970s. Their hues bleed into the air like gasoline fumes.

I am walking slowly, holding hands with a woman I do not recognize but it feels natural. There is the scent of hyssop in the wind.

We meet people in an empty lot down the street from where the house I grew up will be built. The house is not there yet; Cam Hinshaw will not set nail to wood, paint to wood there for five years.

They are people from my present life, in the here and now. Here is Aaron, laughing with Kristen. There is Jason, playing soccer. They are younger versions of themselves, and we will not meet for twenty years or more.

And yet, they know my name. This surprises them: I am a noun pulled from deep, forgotten memory. Or memories yet to be born. I am peripheral, a solidifying figment, a promise of fate.

As we walk, the woman and I pass a pair of addicts. They are eating oranges hungrily with bent spoons. The pulp dribbles down their junkie chins, making a mess on the sidewalk as they nod off.

Now we are in her apartment. There is an old-time phonograph player in the corner. Here is her son. His legs are twisted from a kind of bone disease. He is bright and precocious, with strawberry-blond hair. His name is Cole. I read a story to him before he goes to bed.

His mother grants him a lullaby:

Rise and shine and give God your glory-glory, give God your glory-glory, give God your glory-glory...

Existence is a mathematical illusion; it flows through my mind, water, marijuana stoned blur. It is the light reflected by the moon.

It is the beat of my heart, slowed by hydrocodone, accelerated by pseudoephedrine; my mind dis-engaged by dextromethorphan.

I feel it in my spine, a thousand fingernails, a million spider-legs. A handful of baby teeth scattered in the dust. Herein we dream, and we dream of arguments and funerals, lesser angels, blackened and burnt feathers.

You know that I love you, right?

This should not be anything in doubt. No dendrite in that wonderful brain of yours should return false with that equation.

These scents, these sounds, these tactile impressions: they are the skin of the universe and you are the succulent fruit beneath.

I do not believe in a god but if I did I would murder him for you.

Rise and shine and give God your glory-glory, give God your glory-glory, give God your glory-glory.

Give God your glory-glory.

I originally wrote and published this in March of 2003. While I was home, I ended up hanging out with the Linda described below, and she mentioned that she had read this and found it funny. I looked it up and realized it was one of my better pieces of writing, and decided to re-publish it.


in the here time we are mice in the walls, silent and subtle. we avoid the streets and stalk quietly through yards and between trees. the eye of the night is a moon near-full, gibbous and grey; she watches us, stone-faced and mute, without judgment.

the air is sharp, the snap-chill of autumn. our breath has shape but the months have not yet drawn into the deep of the west virginia winter. someone coughs, once, twice - and the column stops as a silent and unseen rebuke passes back through the ranks: shut the fuck up, numbskull.

no one is awake to hear us but we are young and stupid and full of juvenile criminality. it is five blocks to the park and the darkness that its pine trees will afford; plenty of time for us to cause some trouble - or get marked by a cruiser.

we play at being ninjas. somehow, aaron got a case of beer and we take turns carrying it. my turns are shorter than those of the others; i am the smallest, the weakest.

i am also the most clever.

part of me thinks that this entire ordeal is stupid. our crew is composed of outcasts - some are from poor families, some are from broken homes, and some are proto-nerdlings (like myself). we have a vain hope that if we act cool that we will be cool - and thus buy our way into higher social strata.

part of me knows that this will never happen but the part of me that wants to be accepted has the louder voice.

in the here time, we have managed to develop a somewhat stable pecking order. jason is the strongest, jake is nimble. aaron leads - but not because he is the best qualified; no - he wants it more than anyone else. i simply want to be accepted and in this group we are all equal in loserhood.

eventually we arrive at ritter park and cross into it's darkness. aaron has decided that we'll settle at the children's playground. it is a place that is set deeper into the ground and surrounded by trees. i think it's a bit too close to the street for my comfort but the others do not seem concerned so i take my lead from them.

we each crack open a can of beer. the snap-hiss they make is very loud in the darkness and i feel paranoid, unprotected. i find myself looking over my shoulder constantly, watching for strolling policemen. it's cheap beer and the cans have been chilled by the november air. they freeze my fingers. i don't like the taste but i drink anyway: i want to be cool.

jake doesn't drink. he has indicated several times that he thinks it is stupid. i am unable to determine if he has a moral objection to alcohol or not. i doubt it has anything to do with breaking the law: the boy is the best shoplifter i've ever met, capable of walking out of a hobby shop with not one, not two, but sometimes four dungeons and dragons rulebooks - the hardcover ones.

in the here time, he steals tobacco products for us since none of us can purchase them legally.

we talk, whispered voices commenting on the most important subjects imaginable: the ever-increasing size of linda's breasts, the upcoming motley crue concert, how much we hate our teachers and the bullies at cammack junior high. aaron and jason smoke crumpled marlboros fished from a jean jacket pocket. i dip snuff tobacco and spit into the dirt. i have a small bladder and the beer makes me pee every ten minutes or so.

aaron tells us lies about how he felt up alisha the other day and how his father is, in reality, a cocaine dealer. his parents are freshly divorced and he is compensating, though in the here time i don't fully understand this. i believe his story about his father but not about alisha - none of us do. she would never give him the time of day.

i have a crush on a girl named sarah but i don't tell them this. i keep this secret because i am afraid. if i tell them, they will tell her and she will tell her friends and then there will be laughter because she is as far away from me as alisha is from aaron.

in the here time, i have many secrets.

we finish just over half the case. aaron and jason have three beers each; i have two but only drink half the second (though, i secretly pour out parts of it during my innumerable trips behind the tree - it must appear that i drink all of it). no one wants to carry the case back but neither can we part with the beer: alcohol is like gold when you're fourteen. the remaining cans are secreted inside jackets, cold against our ribs.

we walk back to jason's house. we take the sidewalks this time. i am queasy but i am also walking straight; jason and aaron are both crocked. they could be (and probably are) acting drunker than they really are: it is "cooler" to be drunk than not. jake is annoyed at all of us.

jason's house smells like cat litter. he and his mother are host to ten of the animals. his room is unkempt and grimy. the walls are decorated with posters of black sabbath, motley crue, and david lee roth. we listen to the hardest metal we have on his cassette deck. the carriage is broken so we have to lay the unit on it's back so that the tape doesn't fall out.

we play dungeons and dragons for a few hours before aaron passes out. they are exploring the tomb of a death knight, hoping to plunder it and recover an artifact that will allow them to travel through time. i am the dungeon master but i also have a character. all of us are subtle cheats and fudge die rolls.

in the here time, the fantasy world is preferable.

by four thirty, both aaron and jason have fallen asleep. jake and i play nintendo and talk about comic books. his papers are dropped off at five so the two of us bundle up and head out to deliver them.

in the here time we are mice in the walls, silent and subtle. we avoid the streets and stalk quietly through yards and between trees. we talk softly as we enter apartment complexes; the snap of a rubber band as it closes over a folded newspaper is a gunshot.

down the block, light leaks onto the street from the storefront of a donut shop.

Yesterday I found myself trapped by TiVo watching The Right Stuff. It is a docudrama film about the rise of the American space program and the Mercury Seven astronauts. The entire story fascinates me, and the movie interests me. I've seen it maybe 20 times.

Here is why:

One of the film's subjects, Chuck Yeager, is probably the baddest motherfucker still living today. In fact, he's probably in line for being one of the Baddest Motherfuckers In the Fucking Universe. And few people know who he is.

I know, I know. It's a big thing to say that it's actually Chuck Norris is the baddest dude walking, but that guy, for all his karate, sushi, kung-pow, and other Asian words, is a pale fucking shadow to Chuck Yeager.

First off, Chuck Norris can't fly a plane. Second, Chuck Norris never really did shit except get his ass kicked by Bruce in Fury of the Dragon, star in a bunch of films where he wished he was Chuck Yeager, and inspire a bunch of young kids to take Tae Kwon Do for a few months before giving it up.

Also: Who fights in cowboy boots?

Now. Back to Yeager, since we've established that Norris is just a figment.

First off, okay, Yeager Broke the Fucking Sound Barrier. He is widely regarded as the greatest pilot of all time. Seriously: the best pilot who has ever lived, ever. Aside from his post-war test pilot accomplishments, during World War II he proved himself to be a total fucking bad ass by scoring an Ace in a Day - that is, shooting down five enemy aircraft in one day.

He did this before he turned twenty-two.

(Suck it, Norris.)

But wait, there's more!

He got shot down over France. This happens. But did he let that keep him down?

Hell no. The motherfucker's from West Virginia. Oh no; he joined the fucking Maquis and built bombs (which his dad taught him to make) to fuck up the Germans.

Later, and hand to $DEITY, this is the baddest ass thing ever, he carried another dude (who had lost his foot) over the Pyrenees mountains, evading German gunfire, in the snow, while barefoot.

( The Rest of the Story )

When he returned, he was one of the few people allowed back into air combat (policy was that pilots who had previously been shot down were not allowed back into air combat, in case they were captured, tortured, and could give up Maquis intelligence.)

(Suck it hard, Norris.)

Okay, so post-war. We all know that he broke the sound barrier in the X-1. (and if you don't know this, you should write a stern letter to the education department in your home state, because you are seriously fucking lacking in history).

Did you know that he did this with several broken ribs? He had been thrown from a horse two days previous and hid the injury from the Air Force so that they wouldn't ground him.

He was passed over for the astronaut program, despite being more qualified than anyone else, because he didn't have a college degree.

The motherfucker landed a plane in the streets of Hamlin, WV, just to see his lover. He could (and did) pilot on a dime and they turned him out for lack of a piece of paper.

One day, he took out an experimental plane (which would become the F-104 Starfighter) and shit went bad. He flew it into space. In hindsight, probably not a great move. It stalled, died, and went into a tailspin. So he ejected.

The ejection seat (which is on fire at the bottom, because it's got a jet on it) spun around and hit him in the face of his helmet, breaking it. This had the added effect of setting the rubber in his helmet on fire. So here he is, plummeting from 30,000 feet with his fucking face on fire.

He landed safely and they took him to the hospital where, for the next several months, he underwent an "extremely painful and experimental" procedure where they peeled any scabs that grew off his face in order to avoid burn scarring.

(Work the shaft, Norris.)

Oh, but we're not done.

After this, he took command of an Air Force base during the Vietnam conflict and by 1970 he had been promoted to the rank of Brigadier General. Yeah. A fucking star, bitches (he was later promoted to Major General in a post-retirement promotion).

(Don't forget the cajones, Norris.)

And he never got a fucking New York City ticker tape parade.

Why do I know this? Because he's from fucking West Virginia.

And that's how we roll.

After last week's concert, I ordered a Dimmu Borgir CD from the interwebs. It arrived today, so I decided to give it a listen while smoking a cigar on the porch.

While doing so, I looked up the album and the band so as to be better informed about them as I listened. And, as completely expected, I found myself trapped in the internet.

It started with me trying to determine the differences between Scandanavian Death Metal, Symphonic Black Metal, Black Metal, and Death Metal. Genre splintering always amuses me; I don't really have the time or energy to follow it.

At any rate, there is a strange (to me) zeitgeist involving Scandanavia, Satanism, and Heavy Metal. And it is one of the weirder (and true) rabbit holes about this that I found myself falling through.

Dimmu Borgir's drummer is a man by the name of Jan Axel Blomberg, better known as "Hellhammer." He was also the drummer for a band called Mayhem, who epitomize the zeitgeist.

Let's start with Mayhem's best known vocalist, Per Yngve Ohlin, better known as "Dead". He is the individual widely credited with the "corpse paint" movement in metal performances (white-faced makeup). He didn't do it to be like KISS or anything; no, he seriously wanted to look like a corpse.

He would bury his clothes for weeks on end so that he could be more corpse-like. He cut himself on stage constantly. He would inhale the carcass of a dead crow before he went on stage so that he could do so "with the scent of death in his nostrils".

Then one night he cut his wrists and blew his head off with a shotgun.

He was found the next day by the band's guitarist, Aarseth, better known as Euronymous. The first thing Euronymous did was run to the store and buy a disposable camera so that he could take pictures of it - one of which would later become the cover for a bootleg album called Dawn of the Black Hearts.

After this, Euronymous collected several shards of Ohlin's skull. He would later make necklaces out of them, and give them to people he felt were "hard core" enough.

Allegedly, he also scooped up some of Ohlin's brain matter and made a stew out of it, so that he could taste human flesh.

Whether or not this bit is true we will never really know because Euronymous was later murdered by Varg Vikernes, another member of the band - a dude who also liked to burn down churches.

Why did Vikernes kill Euronymous? It's totally, completely unclear. A contract dispute, maybe? A girl? Vikernes had been planning to blow up a leftist enclave in Oslo (and probably would have, were he not busted for murder); some say the murder happened because Euronymous was a communist and would have opposed blowing up leftists. Or something.

Vikernes, on his personal website, says that he killed him in pre-emptive self-defense:

"He had showed his intention to kill me, and even though he was no longer a direct threat to me, there and then, I did not feel any bad for killing him. His cowardice had made me angry and I saw no reason to let him live, not when he had showed his intent to kill me. Had I let him live I would only let him have another attempt at my life, later on."

(The story as he tells it is long but worth the read as it is utterly fascinating.)

Vikernes got 21 years, the maximum sentence possible in Norway. He was convicted of murder, but also convicted on several counts of arson. While he admits to killing Euronymous, he still maintains innocence with regards to the church fires, though he basically says they had it coming:

"They [the Christians] desecrated our graves, our burial mounds, so it's revenge."

You'd think it ends there, right? Oh no. It gets better.

While in prison, Vikernes released several albums under the band name of Burzem. How and why you're allowed to record albums while in prison in Norway, I do not know. They are apparently very lax about that.

In 2003, he was given a week's leave from prison. When he failed to return to prison, they went looking for him. He was found in a stolen car along with a wonderful supply of toys: an AG3 automatic rifle, a handgun, numerous large knives, a gas mask, camouflage clothing, a laptop, a compass, a GPS, various maps, and a fake passport.

So they gave him another 13 months.

He was recently denied parole but is still allowed to go home and visit his family from time to time. As my friend Fuz says, "I don't think I've ever labeled anyone "soft on crime" before, but I think whoever's in charge of punishing this guy for murder now gets that tag."

You can't make this stuff up.

Dear Republican Party,

I am writing this to you so that you may better learn how to obtain my vote in the future.

I cannot begin to describe my feelings concerning the results of the 2008 election - I am still trying to process the phrase "President Obama". "Elated" may be a good word, but there is also a bittersweet taste to the chocolate, as Proposition 8 passed.

Which makes me want to kick a bunch of gap-toothed inbred religious fuckos to death.

I was listening to NPR today and the discussion was "what will the Republican party do now?" One of the talking heads said something along these lines: "It will be the first impulse of the Republican party to assume that they were not conservative enough, and that would be the wrong conclusion."

A+++ WOULD DO BIZNESS WITH AGAIN

Listen.

I am, at my core, a Republican. I know that sounds fucked up given everything I have ever said, but it is true. I believe in the following:

Smaller government
Fiscal responsibility
State's rights
Lack of government interference in private life

That is the definition of "Republican ideology" that I was taught.

But that is not the definition of the "Republican Party". The party has been co-opted. It is in the control of neocons and theocons. They have systematically destroyed each and every one of those principles. Somehow we went through a rabbit hole and the Republican party became the party for big government, federal mandates, unrestrained spending, and telling me what I can and cannot do in my private life.

So I am not a member of the Republican party because they do not espouse my real principles. Oddly, it is the Democratic party that most closely aligns to my ideals. Perhaps this is because they are the "lesser evil". Perhaps not. My father considers me to be "just to the left of Karl Marx" but I don't know that he really knows my political ideology simply because he refuses to discuss politics with me.

In my idealized world, "Republicanism" is not about being "conservative" (where that means "non-liberal"). "Liberal" is really about being "open minded" and "progressive". We have a goal. That goal is to be better people. That does not mean "stay the course;" it means "adapt and conquer."

I do not personally consider the words "conservative" and "liberal" to be antonyms.

I am still trying to process the phrase "President Obama".

Why is that, you think?

The answer is simple: Obama represents, to me, a true maverick. A move away from Politics of Hate. Which, in a nutshell, is why the Republican party does not hold my allegience.

Hate.

Regardless of the truth of the matter, the Republican party appears to simply pay mere lip-service to the ideal of "inclusion". If one reads the words of Republican pundits, of Republican news sources - the only thing you can come away with is hate. Hate, the child of fear.

Fear of change.

Listen.

Change is going to happen. You must adapt or die. We do not live in the world of the Christian Crusades. When a pundit refers to "liberals" as "traitors" - well. That simply screams exclusion. You cannot say that you are "bi-partisan" while also saying that those of us who wish to move forward are "traitors".

You gotta stop that shit.

Here's what else you have to drop:

The Jesus.

Seriously.

I, personally, do not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

However, I do believe there is sufficient evidence that a man named Jesus Christ existed, and that he did enact a great deal of change. Mostly through "community organization."

This man was executed by the Roman Empire because he was a political enemy. Because he was progressive and because he was liberal.

Listen.

Jesus Christ was a communist. At the very least he was a socialist. Throw all the Bible verses out you want; you'll be wrong. He was all about empowering the disenfranchised, taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, and taking care of those who cannot take care of himself.

So. What we have is this . . . thing. Where you, the Republican party, have been trying to draw the votes of the religious right. And you know what? Those people scare the living hell out of people like me. The opinions they espouse?

They make me hate them.

And when you support those ideals - usually those of hatred - you make me hate you. Throw up all the smokescreens you want, call yourselves "mavericks", whatever, I don't care - the hatred seeps through.

Drop the Jesus. Step away from the bong. Return to your ideals of not screwing with my private life. Seriously, truly. DISAVOW THE GAP-TOOTHED RELIGIOUS FUCKOS.

It will earn my respect, and that is almost equivalent to earning my vote.

Back in, oh, June, when it really looked like the election was going to be Hillary vs. McCain, I would have voted for McCain. I liked him then. He was a punk rock, no-nonsense, honest man. I liked that.

Then we introduced Palin into the mix. Holy crap. Fuck that! It was such an obvious pander to the "base" that any respect I had evaporated instantly.

You speak as if you are the party of the "common man" but you are not. These people are not the "common man"; they are the dregs of society. Ill-educated. Poorly informed. Racist. Homophobic. Close-minded.

This is not America.

Here's the next tip: stop spending my tax money to fund dumbass wars. So much has been said about this issue that I don't need to talk about it. But it leads into the next point:

Lead through example, not fear.

So much of the Republican message has been about being afraid of the boogyman that you forgot how to point the way to a better land! You keep trying to push us into bomb shelters. Stop that! Stop, stop, stop.

Moses took the Jews out of Egypt into Israel. That is being a leader. In the same situation, you are effectively telling us to cower under the pyramids! Stop that shit. Point to a better land.

Adapt.

As the election results came in, I was filled with a great deal of schadenfreude. I wish that were not the case. However, all I could think was, "take that, you pigfuckers!" I enjoyed every Senate seat you lost. I reveled in it.

That is not the person I want to be.

So help me help you. Stop being pigfuckers.

Love,

Jorm.

When I was young, I was going to be an artist. A Painter and a Printmaker. The arc of my ultimately-failed career began at the age of eleven or so, and all through middle school and high school, art (specifically drawing and painting) was my focus. I entered regional shows (and even won a fair share: the ribbons are slowly crumbling to dust in a box in my closet).

When I was seventeen, I was given the honor of being selected for the Marie Walsh Sharpe "Summer Seminar", which was (and still is, I suppose) a big deal. By my 18th birthday, my skills with a pencil were such that I could produce nigh-photorealistic works.

I went to college and majored in Printmaking (which was more like drawing) and minored in Painting even though, truth be told, I enjoyed painting more.

The chief painter-in-residence was a man by the name of Stan Sporny. Stan was politically conservative (which put him at odds with most faculty and students in the art department), had lived for several years in Sri Lanka, and possessed a humility that I found admirable.

I, being twenty or so, was not humble. I was a young, stupid kid who had been repeatedly told that he had a "gift" and a "genius". Which meant that, when it came to the "lesser" classes, I was also "lazy."

If the assignment was to paint a simple still life, I would find myself spending half the time and effort of the other students and still produce something that was var more technically competent than anyone in the class. I knew I was better than the Micky Mouse classes. I already knew this crap! Let's move on, I would be thinking to myself.

He would give me "C" grades for my effort. Other students whose paintings I could have done when I was twelve would get As and Bs; I was put out. I found this frustrating, and called him on it, and he very bluntly told me that I was under-performing, and doing half-assed, C-grade work, and that he was grading everyone according to their own ability, and I wasn't cutting the mustard.

And, truth be told, I was doing half-assed, C-grade work.

We always painted in oils. Acrylics were, according to Stan, like "painting with colored snot." So we learned about proper mixings, about great brush care, about turpentine and linseed oils. "If you're going to do a thing, you do it right."

It was from Stan that I learned color theory - not just which colors look good next to each other, but how certain splashes of color can affect other color.

One day he brought to class a painting he had done. It was of a swimming pool. There was a small piece of paper taped over about 2 square inches of the painting inside the pool area. What was striking to me was this:

Both the sky and the water in the pool were painted green. Not a light, almost azure green, but a true green. It was very surreal. We asked what was under the paper but he only said, "all in due time."

He talked about the colors; asked us why we thought the sky was green. We had a lively discussion about symbolism and so forth, and went off the rails for a while. Finally, he reached out to the painting and removed the bit of paper. It had been covering a bright yellow rubber duck floating in the water.

Magically, the sky ceased to be green and instead became a brilliant blue.

Color.

I was thinking about Stan the other day, actually. I was remarking to a few friends that the thing I loved most about being alive was, seriously, color. I love it. I love the sun perhaps not so much because it is warm but because it brightens the world and makes color more vivid, and brings joy to my eyes.

One summer I was taking a 300 level painting course. This was perhaps my favorite class I ever took during my entire educational career. We did not meet in a classroom; this was painting from real life. So every day we would go to Ritter Park in Huntington and sit in the grass and paint something that caught our eyes.

It was July in West Virginia, which meant that it was hot. We started at nine a.m., when it was relatively cool, but by noon the temperature in the sun had usually escalated to ninety-five or better. Heat waves were visible radiating from everywhere.

I produced a triptych of a specific tree. The first painting I did was straightforward, but by the time I started on the second, I had started painting the heat radiating from its leaves, and in the third painting I had stepped away from representation of its physical being and into representation of the idea of the tree. I loved these works. I spent time on them.

And he finally gave me an A.

Things move and time passes. I moved to California and promptly stopped painting at all: just a talent lain fallow for fifteen years. From time to time we would exchange emails: his son was becoming a bit of a technical wizard, and would contact me asking questions, and Stan would always include notes, or use his son's email account to communicate with me.

Last week, after thinking about him and color, I thought to try to get in touch with him. The address I had was dead, and he doesn't have a Facebook account. I decided that when I went home for Christmas I'd look him up and try to get him out for a beer.

However, that isn't going to happen, because he died yesterday from heart failure while on a hunting trip. Some of his works are on exhibit back home still.

I am frankly surprised that this news has hit me as hard as it has. I can only think to myself that given the sheer number of students he taught over the past twenty years came away with even 1/10th of the understanding I gleaned from him, that his legacy is far reaching indeed.

It makes me want to paint again.

I used to believe that my dreams were sometimes visions of the future. This belief was reinforced by the fact that whenever I experienced deja-vu, it seemed to me that I had dreamed the event before. I would recognize that I was in a "loop" of pre-determinism, and wait for it to finish.

Sometimes this was bad, because I would find myself expecting something horrible to happen once the "loop" expired. I had many apocalyptic nightmares that felt exceedingly real, and would serve as perfect steps along the sequence.

I no longer believe that my dreams reveal the future. I see deja-vu as a short circuit in my brain's temporal lobe. Perfectly natural and the result of chemical action rather than cosmic interference.

Once upon a time, I believed in Santa Claus. Now I do not. It feels sometimes as if my life were more vibrant before.

So it goes with no longer believing dreams are magical. If feels sometimes that much of the wonder I felt about the universe is gone - stripped away and left on the floor as pencil shavings.

I wonder if I am a lesser creature because of this.

I bring this up because last night my dreams were uncharacteristically optimistic. There were good things happening. I do not remember specifics but I remember the feeling that I was loved, needed, cherished, safe, and productive.

Today I woke up feeling none of those things, and I sighed, knowing that I could not blindly apply faith that the dream would eventually come true.

Normally, my dreams include some association with my "real" life, no matter how surreal they are.

However, last night I had a dream which was striking and memorable not because of any surreal moments, but because it was extremely real and utterly divorced from my real life. It was as if my spirit had been beamed into the life of someone wholly unknown to me, and I was living his life for a time.

In the dream, I was not a middle-class, mid-30s hacker living in San Francisco, born of an accountant and teacher. Everything about myself, my life, my career, my history - all was changed. Every person I encountered was unknown to me: moreover, they bore no resemblance to anyone I knew.

In the dream, my father was an extremely wealthy businessman based out of New York. So wealthy, in fact, that he owned an entire office building. I was a rich man's son with a Harvard degree in business administration, though I was trying to be a writer. I had just returned from living in Greece for six years and was staying in an apartment inside of the office building until I got a new place. I was extremely tanned and my hair was short.

There was a woman with me. Dark hair; very pretty. She was American - from Brooklyn, even - and I had met her in Greece and she had returned with me. She spent time going through boxes of my personal effects from childhood - photos, books, etc.

There was a man who I interacted with - a lawyer employed by my father as a "get shit done" guy. His job was to handle any problems and my return to the States was a bit unexpected. There was a conversation with him at one point where he asked me if I "needed any work" and I responded that I didn't need any but I was up for doing "whatever" as long as it didn't involve fraud. It was not stated but was implicitly understood that no matter what "job" I took I wasn't going to be really working; that it would mostly be a title with a paycheck.

There was food catered to the apartment. Sandwiches and burritos, and we ate them while talking about futures.

It was extremely bizarre.

The other day I found myself musing that the young peoples of San Francisco have never engaged in what I consider to be a hallmark act of being young, dumb, and full of cum:

Throwing snowballs at cars.

There simply isn't any snow here.

Back home, when I was growing up, where I lived afforded us a unique and powerful advantage geographically for this. Our house was at the top of a large hill. Behind the house, and down the hill, was about three acres of forest. If you continued directly through the forest, you would eventually find yourself atop a steep cliff that had been cut out of the rock, at the bottom of which ran one of Huntington's major in-roads: route 52, known locally as 5th street.

From here, groups of us (read: every kid in the neighborhood, about 15 or 20) would gather and spend a half hour stockpiling ammunition out of sight. Once that was done, we merely needed to softly lob our frozen missiles over the edge - almost dropping them, mortar rounds of ice - to be rewarded with satisfying "cluncsh" sounds as the snowball exploded across someone's windshield.

This was made even easier since, in the winter, the road was always packed was always slow going.

There would be thunks and then the sound of braking over ice. Sometimes people would figure out where we were shelling them from, and scream impotently at us. Some would even get out of their cars in a vain attempt to find a way up the cliff to "get us." This was a tactical mistake as it opened them up for a volley targeted directly at their personage.

We had the advantage of terrain and the protection of the forest.

My favorite memory of this goes thus:

Once, someone called the cops on us. This was rare to the point of unthinkability: most people simply accepted that they'd been 'balled and drove on, muttering about "lousy kids." This was not to say that cop cars (usually sheriffs) were uncommon on the road: far from it. We simply had a protocol when one was spotted: duck and hide.

So one day we saw a cop car coming and we did just that. There were maybe five of us that day, and we all dropped prone in the snow, waiting for him to pass. Only, he didn't.

Instead, we heard the sound of a bullhorn. He was telling us to stop and (most ludicrous of all) that he knew who we were (couldn't possibly: we were covered head to toe in ski gear) and that he knew our parents, and was going to tell on us, and that we were in trouble, and so forth.

It took all of thirty seconds of hushed discussion to recognize the bullshit of these statements. However, we also knew that our fun was done for the day. But there was a stack of snowballs left.

So we dropped all of them - maybe 30 or so - right onto the cop car.

thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk

I'd never heard a police officer curse before, let alone hear one curse through a bullhorn, and the memory of that alone keeps me warm at night some times.

Of course, we hot-footed it out after that, each splitting off in a different direction to our homes, where we were rewarded with hot cocoa and a warm fireplace. "Just having fun sledding, mom. Got into a snowball fight."

We loved this activity so much that we did it in the summer months, too. Of course, we didn't have snowballs. Instead, we used dirt clods.

The soil at the edge of the cliff was soft. When it was dry, it would crumble easily - more easily than a snowball - but it could be hefted and thrown. We used to throw them at one another. They didn't hurt in the slightest: just exploded on impact leaving the target in need of a bath.

There was a short window of opportunity for this every day, usually between three and four o'clock in the afternoon. That was when the earth was dry and cracked. After four o'clock, it would usually rain for ten minutes or so, turning our clods into "mud".

I wonder if the kids here use dirt clods instead.

Since Sarah Palin has made it awesomely clear recently exactly how poorly qualified she is, and McCain is being ever more revealed as an evil dustbag with strange teeth, I have come to suspect that the primary concern by most secretly-racist white people is not that Obama will raise taxes, or fail to fight terrorism, or destroy "family values", or that he's "inexperienced" or even a "community organizer".

Rather, they are afraid that his victory speech will simply be this:

"One word: Reparations.

Also, I'm installing Flava Flav as Secretary of the Interior.

Peace out, dawgs!"

Listen.

I'm a reasonably intelligent guy. I have opinions about how to do things. Most of them are wrong and ill-informed. Part of being "reasonably intelligent" is knowing that most of your opinions are probably wrong.

I do not want someone "just like me" to be President. I want someone smarter and better.

If the duties of being the Leader of the Free world consisted of playing Dungeons and Dragons, listening to Black Sabbath, over-indulging in whiskey, and rubbing one out*, then "someone just like me" would make an awesome president.

Bush II was elected in large part because he was a guy that Joe Average felt that he was a guy they could "go have a beer with" and look where that got us. Palin may very well be just a moose-killing (eesh) hockey mom, but do you really want someone who thinks it's okay for Alaska to secede from the union trying to drive constitutional law?

(Interlude:

A conversation last night about how people in Palin's church engaged in speaking in tongues:

Me: You know why all those Christians speak in tongues, right?

KBK: Why?

Me: Because they're fucking crazy.

)

No, no. We, as individuals, may like to think that we'd make good leaders. That we'd be fair and kind and solve the world's problems. But the truth of the matter is that all any of us would end up doing is fucking things up even worse.

Which is why we should never have the leaders we want. Instead, we should elect the leaders we need.



*(I was going to link that to wiki's article on "Masturbation" but seriously, you don't want to go there. Totally NSFW and made of fail.)

Today, for various reasons, I have been researching about "power of attorney" and the like. As far as I know, there is no one who has the authority to make command decisions in my life anymore, and that is a little worrisome.

This got me thinking about the fact that I do not have a personal attorney any more. I did, once: his name was Lafe Chafin, and he was a dear friend to me and my family.

He is dead now. Buried five years ago.

And today, thinking of him, my heart aches with a power as clear as it did then.

I am going to share two things I wrote about him. The first was written seven years ago, when he was still alive. The second, days after he died.

July 7, 2001:

I'm not a person who has a lot of heroes. There are a few people dotting the timeline of history that I admire a great deal but they are dead and we are cannot interact: unable to drink in the day to day of the person, they are defined by the major events in thier lives.

I do not believe that our souls are defined by the major events in our lives. At the end of time, all that matters is how we lived our lives day to day - it is the little things that are important.

So my heroes are not dusty skeletons locked in the tomb of history but rather they are people that I can meet with, people who I see breathing and living, men and women who are possessed of traits and strengths that I desire for myself. I see them and I say, "I like that part of that person," and then I endeavor to fold the idea of that person into myself in an effort to make myself stronger.

One of my heroes is a man named Lafe Chafin. He is my family's lawyer and one of the best friends that my father has had in his life - hell, one of the best friends that my entire family has been blessed with (and true friends are indeed a blessing).

From a very young age I knew that if I was ever in a rough spot I could count on him to step forward and beat the living tar out of anything that threatened me or mine - and he would (and did). He is possessed of an uncanny ability to cut through the crap that people hand to each other and distill things to thier essential truths.

If someone asks me, "what do you think typifies the idea of 'West Virginian?'" I say: filled with enough piss and vinegar to not have to take shit from anyone. Being able to read the pointlessness from things and focus only on what matters and having the force of will to do the right thing and not settle for anything else.

This is what I get from Lafe Chafin. This is what I have pulled away from him. When I shake his hand I can feel the iron will inside him. It radiates a heat that lesser men shrink from.

He is a bird-of-prey.

Even now, as he dies slowly from emphysema and a million cancers.

I went to see him in his offices; he still goes to work every day, unwilling to allow his illness to get in the way of what he loves doing or prevent him from enjoying his twilight. To say that I was unprepared for seeing him is an understatement; I am a reasonably strong man, someone used to dealing with surprises, and I was caught off-gaurd by his appearance.

I last saw Lafe in 1999 and while he was obviously ill - taking hits from small oxygen tanks here and there - he was much the same as I remember him being my entire life. Now, however, the evils have eaten away at his soul and he is thin, so thin - a startling skeleton, covered in paper skin. His suit hung awkward, oversized.

His eyes, however, were as bright and hawlike as they have ever been. Penetrating, intelligent, perceptive.

Seeing him like this broke my heart. Not only for me but also for my father, who will soon lose his best remaining friend. I can only hope that I did not betray my surprise as deep as I think I had.

We talked. We talked about a lot of things; he was interested in hearing about my life, what I was doing, where I was going. He was interested my constant adventures -

the man I had become and had yet to grow into.

He says: Your father has been a very good friend to me over these years. He takes care of me now. I want you to know that. and I saw this hyper-acute love there, something rare and something real, and I suddenly understood my father, what he loves and believes.

It's liquid, the things I understand and see, speaking with him and there is a welling of sadness as I realize:

he understands better than i do that this is the last time he will see me. this is his goodbye to me.

His eyes: hawklike.

I managed to hold it together until I got into the car.

There is a powerful rage in my heart - an anger born from a deep, black grief. A man such as this: this is unfair and I want to climb the mountain and scream and scream and scream -

I want to scream not for me or for him but for my father, who has to bury another of his,

I want to scream for the children he will leave behind and the grandchildren who will barely know his wisdom,

I want to scream for the rest of the world, this bastard, bloody place of dirt and pain because the billions of barbarians walking on its surface will not know or care what they have lost.

I know, in my heart of hearts, I know - I feel, I have faith - I know that this must be. That somewhere is a twisted, divine logic to all the horror and noise of life. I have a hope that someday we will rise above our brutalities and petty cruelties and be filled with enough piss and vinegar to cut through the bullshit that we hand one another and distill everything to its component truths. I have faith that we will. Maybe not now or in my lifetime, but perhaps in the lifetimes of my grandchildren or even thier grandchildren.

Until then, I can only carry what I learn forward. I can only be a pale shadow to the example of a man the Lafe breathed from the light inside, but I can try, dammit.

You can hear it in the silence.

Listen:

One night, two years ago, I had dinner with my parents and thier friends. Lafe was there, and as we were leaving he pulled me aside and said something that I hold inside as a beacon - a guide for whenever I find myself foundering in self-doubt and self-pity. He said to me:

you know how you left home and drove across the country, not knowing where you were going or what you were getting into? that took more courage than anyone i know.

you're one of my heroes because of that.

March 8, 2003:

On Friday morning I was woken by a phone call from my father. He was calling to inform me that one of our family's nearest and dearest friends, Lafe Chafin, had passed on.

I have written about Lafe before and about my feelings about the man. He is (was) one of my heroes - truly a man of great internal strength and vigor, despite having been crippled by emphysema and advanced cancer for the past five or so years. Two years ago, my father said, I wouldn't have given him two months. He held on. We all did.

He was that strong inside. An oak with deep roots.

No obituary could do this man justice. No words exist within my feeble vocabulary to describe what he meant to me and my family - and like my father, I feel a great hollowness inside.

Lafe was 74 years old. It was a long enough life - one that he filled with an uncompromising honesty, integrity, and deep resolve to help his fellow man (he was a pioneer in labor law) and generally make life better for people. Simply being in his presence made people somehow feel better about themselves - he had this uncanny ability to make a person feel that those things that were their secret weaknesses (and there were no "secret" weaknesses with him - he saw everything) were also their hidden strengths.

He wouldn't allow you to dish bullshit, either. Not to him, not to anyone else - and most certainly not to yourself.

I sit and I type this and it has been a few days since the phone call and I have not cried - until now. I had thought myself ready for this day - ever since two years ago when I saw that he was dying first hand.

I never really knew either of my grandfathers before they died. Lafe was, perhaps, the closest thing I had to one. He always seemed to have that kind of grandfatherly pride and interest in my accomplishments and what I was doing. It made me feel warm inside.

My last conversation with him was a couple weeks ago. He had been admitted to the hospital for a couple days for routine tests. I called him there and we shot the shit for a while, but he was tiring easily so we didn't talk as long as I would have liked. I knew then - as I knew with every conversation we had had for the past couple years - that this could possibly be the last time we would speak. We had already said our dark and serious goodbyes; what was left was laughter and enjoyment.

He said to me once that I was one of his heroes - and he had several reasons why. I was speechless.

I can only hope that I will be able to live up to the honor which that entails - that I, too, can become as regal an oak with roots only half as deep as he.

With my aforementioned game about being a rock star actually being something I've written a shit-ton of code for, I am now dealing with the entire "sex with groupies" bit.

This will not be an "explicit" thing. What is going to happen is you're going to click the "have sex with groupies" button, and then it comes back with something like this:

You succeed! There were $RANDOM people in your orgy (this may include other band members, and the text is generated based on character gender and sexual orientation).

Then we put up a list:

Implements Used:

• 1 Can of Chocolate Sauce


• 1 Traffic Pylon


• 7 Marshmallows

So, what I need is a list of crazy, random "sexual" implements. The *less* that they are designed for actual sexual activity, the better. Here is a current set of ideas:

Can of Tomato Paste
Length of Rope
Pencil
Motorcycle Chain
Set of Tattooing Needles
Cigar
Traffic Pylon
Can of Chocolate Sauce
Can of Whipped Cream
Jar of Honey
Bottle of Hot Sauce
Jalapeno Pepper
Rubber Gasmask
Rotary Telephone
Pair of Salad Tongs
Potted Plant
Marshmallow
Lava Lamp
Pair of Fuzzy Dice
Pack of 40 Watt Light Bulbs
South American Tree Frog

In my idealized universe, there are superhero teams made up of dead comedians.

The Fuck You Friends (pronounced like "Fuck you, friends!") has a membership thus:

George Burns, the grizzled, war-weary super-mind who leads the team remotely from a secret bunker in Beverly Hills;
Gracie Allen, George's most trusted adviser;
Lenny Bruce, the "bad boy" scrapper who keeps getting the team into fights with other super-teams (also thrown into jail);
Andy Kaufman, the alien from planet Bizzaro who thinks outside the box and is just as likely to punch his own teammates as the bad-guys;
Lucille Ball, the group's bombshell and mechanical genius;
Phil Hartman, the "Aquaman" of the group;
Bill Hicks, who is the non-superpowered genius of the group and lives in cave;
Sam Kinison, whose sonic scream can devastate entire blocks;
John Candy, the character who best embodies the teams 'heart';
Bernie Mac, the team's smooth-talking con-man type;
Richard Pryor, who can set himself on fire;
Mitch Hedberg, the guy with connections to get the drugs;
George Carlin, whose powerful fists can shatter steel; and
John Ritter, the team's secretly subversive PR man (who eventually betrays them).

The team spends their days doing drugs and committing minor crimes. Every now and then they come into conflict with other teams made up of undead pop/rock musicians and the corpse of JFK.

I would subscribe to a comic about this. crisper needs to pitch it to his people.

I am in Hell.

Or, at least, the closest thing that exists to a real "Hell" for one Brandon Bailey Harris, Esquire.

The construction along the streets, now in it's fifth week, has reached something akin to a malicious crescendo today. The various trucks and ferrous-oxide colored mechanized infantry units have multiplied. They are now a small military whose apparent purpose is to liquify the layers of solid asphalt currently laid on the street. They have a machine that does this with a startlingly degree of efficiency.

It is the more quiet of the machines.

Surrounding this beast are a series of machines (some large, some small, some driven, some held by men) that are effectively jackhammers with varying degrees of power. These are the loud machines. They are performing operations on all sides of my building.

However, the cacophony is not why I now believe myself to be dead and sent to my final resting plane. Oh no.

It is the overwhelming stench of brimstone. Of boiling tar. Of blackened air and pitchy-smoke. The asphalt machines are here. There are four of them.

I hate them. They make me sneeze. I produce a gallon of mucous. I take a fistful of anti-allergy pills. They make my heart race, which, combined with the coffee, my current stress levels, and natural accellerando of a metabolism, isn't much of a good thing. This causes my body to require additional oxygen, which makes me breathe faster. Which, combined with the aforementioned brimstone in the air, causes my lungs to fill up with mucous faster.

This is Hell because I cannot leave. They have blocked the garage entrance with their infernal machines and yellow cones.

I think that the old fire-and-brimstone catholics in the middle ages understood the value of buzzword marketing better than today's magical wizards.

Consider the originals:

1. Pride
2. Envy
3. Gluttony
4. Lust
5. Anger
6. Greed
7. Sloth

Very simple. Concise. Easy to understand and remember. There's a little overlap (I mean, gluttony and greed are kind of similar), but otherwise, a solid list of Shit Not To Be And/Or Do.

Now, let's look at the new list:


1. "Bioethical" violations such as birth control
2. "Morally dubious" experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

Okay. First off, good luck remembering this shit.

Second: shut up. Just. You know. Shut the fuck up.

Third, regardless of my opinions of the relative moral merit of any one item, it seems to me that numbers 1 and 2 are kind of the same thing ("bioethical violations") and 5, 6, and 7 are *definately* the same thing (which, amazingly enough, the old fire-and-brimstone guys had a word for already: "Greed").

Somehow I don't see Kevin Spacey murdering a bunch of people because they use condoms.

Are they trying to be "cool" and "with these modern kids?" Because, you know, epic fail.