20,120,122

22SEP2011 – I was walking through Prospect Park.  I had my camera around my neck and I was enjoying an ice cream cone.  Completely at random, I decided to walk along the pond.  A two-man maintenance crew just a few yards away was hard at work pulling the red and green canoes off the water and loading them onto a large black truck in preparation for winter storage.  There was no one else around.

As they worked, I could hear weird chatter coming from their handheld VHF radio and it literally made no sense to me.  It was a string of words chosen at random and strung together without thought.  Complete gibberish, like the Latin filler you read in Word documents.

It made me think that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be in that part of the park at that place and time.  The moment was obviously not fully constructed.  Not finished cooking, if you will, just as it is impossible to travel into the future because the future isn’t ready to receive visitors yet.  It’s still blurry around the edges.

Construction on our reality continues during each and every minute of our existence.  Only in the final seconds of the next minute will the construction crews close the hidden maintenance hatches after themselves, allowing visitors into the world they have created, accurate down to the last detail.

18JAN2012 – I am commuting home on the Brooklyn-bound 5 train.  My headphones are in.  (I would be wearing them regardless if music was playing – it gives me a false envelope of privacy.)  No one in this car is talking; their eyes stare straight ahead or up at the shitty ads for sleep apnea, bedbugs and vacations to Italy.  Their faces are full of the stress of the workday.  Everyone looks pissed.

Casually, I look to my right; an elderly black woman wearing what looks like a tattered nightgown, a faded pair of blue Crocs and an open winter coat is seated a few feet away, talking to herself.  No one seems to be paying attention.

Suddenly, she leaps to her feet exclaiming, “Thus sayeth the Lord!”  She begins marching briskly along the suddenly-open length of the car — straphangers subtly turn aside — delivering a disjointed sermon at the top of her lungs and accentuating her sentences with a birdlike stamp of her feet.  She has a Jamaican accent and many of her consonants are mashed together.  Her words are like holy machine-gun fire, her eyes targeted on something none of us can see.

Three minutes into her increasingly frantic performance and her voice has gone hoarse and whispered, but she does not let up.  She passes within a foot of me and I can see that her fingers are gnarled, her nails are wide and there is perspiration on her face.  Her neck is thick and bulges as she shouts.  She clutches a battered, coverless bible with dozens of bookmarked pages as she continues to stamp and rush about, exclaiming, “THUS sayeth de LORD!  Thus sayeth the LORD!  Him make de man and de woman and de stars in the sky!”  As the train pulls in Franklin, her words cease to be coherent, merging into full glossolalia.  The doors close behind me.

–

In the dream, I am standing at the very edge of what I know to be an enormous wooded ravine, nearly a mile deep. The valley is completely obscured by dense fog.  There is a taut steel cable running at a downward angle through my chest, the sort of thing multi-braided thing you’d suspend a cable car with.  I am impaled on it.  I am not in pain.  One end of the cable is bolted to an eyelet on a telephone pole up and behind me; the other disappears forward into the depths of the valley below.  Someone is beating on the cable with a large wooden mallet once every few seconds.  The resulting sound is a deep, yawning roar, long, low and vaguely electronic, like the echoing song of a mechanical whale, like the Metatron.  It is an overpowering, overwhelming, all-consuming sound.  The vibrations echo through me, rearranging me.  The man with the hammer is summoning something from the valley floor, something enormous that lives down in the fog.  The crashing of trees can be heard…

–

At present, I feel the ‘pause’ button has been pressed on my life.  I am waiting for something, but I don’t know what.  I can’t see as far ahead down the road as I used to.  My plan is no longer clear.  Time is catching up to me.  Windows are closing; walkways are retreating.  Options feel fewer.  I made a few good decisions, but will they be enough?  Can’t stay here, can’t go back.  Sometimes I think about the years and the memories and they don’t feel like mine…

We’ve built so many clever things, so many amazing machines:
“Yeah, but we still don’t know how the pyramids were built!”
Fuck you, the Egyptians would have killed for a cellphone.

You need to solve one disaster before courting another,

Note to self.

Resume simulation.

30DEC2011 – Back from my bi-annual trip to Hoth to see the Padawan.  I gifted him with Diamond Age technology and in return I received a mild cold.  I managed to keep it from getting serious; I gulped down the Emergen-cee I carry in my bag and slept 12 hours.  And at some point during that endless night I dreamed I still hadn’t graduated from boarding school.

I was in the bedroom I’d occupied at student home Plainfield, a spacious ranch house with its own dairy barn and acres of punishment lawns located deep in Amish territory.  The desk was the same, as was the lamp, the too-thin bedspread and the cork board on the sliding closet door.  Every detail, preserved just for me.  Waiting for my return.  Oh, no.  Not here again…

Suddenly I felt as though I’d never actually left, as though I’d spent the last twenty years in a cobwebbed cryostasis, keeping mute watch over all the fictional characters I’d become as I evolved through the years, each one taking their shift at living my life for me.  There was a sensation of unfolding hopeless helplessness and it felt like “forever” in the way that holding a snowball feels “cold”.  There was no signal strength, no connectivity, and no memory.  I’d never traveled the world, I’d never actually written any of the words I’d carved out on paper, and I’d certainly never fallen in love.  There was nothing.  How many times had I dreamed I was waking up and getting dressed and taking the subway to the office only to wake up and discover I was still in bed?  My simulation had paused, allowing reality to come crashing in.

Presently I turned to the window and looked out upon a towering oil refinery that stood where farmland and cornfields once reigned.  I used to hide in those fields on summer afternoons, holding my breath and listening hard to the tiny rifle crack of the dried stalks beneath my shoes and the buzz of the insects swarming around me.  It was the first time I’d thought of crickets as tiny machines, built in a factory somewhere.

There was a great explosion somewhere to the right, and I could see clouds billowing and unfolding like a great flower, a shiny, shimmering burst of all the colors of post-rain oil sheen in strip mall parking lot.  Then I could see heavy oil surging toward me and I reached out to crank the window closed, knowing this fragile operation would be enough to hold it back.

One moment ended, the next began.

Then I was sitting next to Romero Alverez in the main auditorium of Founders Hall, a great marble R2D2 where all the big events and assemblies were held.  Inside the main rotunda were the flags of all fifty states beneath a vaulted ceiling so fucking majestic you could fly a UAV around inside without bumping into the great brass statue of Willy Wonka himself.

It’s not like Romero and I were friends, and I couldn’t tell you anything about him, really.  We didn’t travel in the same social circles.  (Come to think of it, I didn’t even have a social circle.  More of an elliptical arc, like the Hale-Bopp comet.)  I turned to Romero and asked him if he remembered graduating back in ’89.  “I think so?” he said.

Maybe that’s what happened to my graduating class; maybe that’s why we appear to have fallen off the face of the earth.  Because we’re all caught fast in the amber web of the same nightmare.  Sleepers, sleeping.

Bottom line, I was horrified to be re-living this event again.  How many more times is this going to happen?  What does it mean?  It was like climbing to the top of one mighty mountain only to open my eyes and realize I was still crawling around on the ground, and as I lay there panting with exhaustion I wondered how many layers I had left to go before the air tasted like air again, and the numbers on the clock would stand still long enough to be recognized.

We’re at the end of the year, now.  Tomorrow night, Mickey will bring his big hand and his little hand high over his head and clap them once, just long enough to propel the whole wide world through the doorway of the universal danger room of 2012.

Resume simulation,

20,122,011

30DEC2011 – The clock is ticking.  Very soon we will have turned the corner onto what some are calling the home stretch of civilization or at least the end of the world, as we know it.  I don’t think it means “destruction”, but I’m treating it that way.*  Plans, projects, and personal goals are underway.

Everything has changed.  I still struggle with decisions.  I often cannot see more than one year ahead.  Somewhere along the line I stopped asking myself what a great man would do in each instance because I realized I don’t know greatness from clam chowder.  I know what works for me, right here and now.  I feel like I’ve been slowly going nowhere, traveling everywhere.  Still, the plan is to keep moving.  If not walking, then crawling, but always forward.  I have nothing else to say right now.

*Time is running out.  You’re still an asshole.  Best see to that.

 

 

Entropy.

25NOV2011 – Outside tonight, Franklin Park.  Sitting at a metal table pierced through and through with dead brown leaves.  I’m finishing up a pint of stout, reading WSB and admiring the dregs of the pink coral sunset.  I’ve got a can of WD40, a bag of cane sugar and a roll of paper towels in my backpack.  Everything is cold.  My coat is warm.

A white cat wearing a grey mask slinks past.  Brooklyn is full of cats.  Some of them are cameras.  Children shoot each other dead with toy guns as their fathers sit sipping beers, talkin’ about their workday; one leg folded across the other.  This is man time.  One waits his entire life for these moments.

08DEC2011 – Colder out.  December is all done playing nice.  Bagged up my laundry and carried it to the drop-off service on the corner last night.  The moon was full, gleaming.  In a small town, I’d be able to see the beams, and experience these beautiful old buildings in natural light.  Skeletal fingers of sleepy trees overhead like black veins in a dark heart.

An expensive brand of moped was chained outside.  As I yanked the door open, a wall of washing machine din and the sharp jabber of Telemundo burrowed into my ears, flooding past the ‘phone I typically wear when I’m out.  A young male in his late teens dressed like ninja training camp with a grey crash helmet balanced on his head was selling knock-off DVDs to a group gathered around his backpack.  A thousand miniature equal signs of florescent lighting reflected in the glossy covers. The proprietor of the Laundromat peered anxiously at them from the other end of the room, wary.  I hefted my duffle bag onto the scale.

“No comforters, only clothes,” I declared.  I’d washed a blanket here before, I knew the drill.  They weigh them separately.

“No comforter!  Only clothe!” she warned, wagging a finger at me.  English was probably not her first language, she probably misunderstood.

“Uh, yeah.  That’s what I said.”  Sharp smile.”  Thank you.”  I printed my name and phone number on the slip – not sure exactly why, it’s not as if I’d forget a bag of my own clothing down the street – stuffed the pink copy into my wallet and stepped back into the night.  The boy in black had started up his steed and was revving away down the sidewalk.  An older couple were holding an animated conversation on the sidewalk.  The woman dropped her glasses.  Picked them up, looked them over, put them back on.  I stood against the wall of the Laundromat for a moment watching the reflection of traffic lights bounce and breathe in the stainless steel siding of the Chinese restaurant across the street.  Turned away, headphones, hands in pockets.

15DEC2011 – Seated sideways in a booth in a restaurant carved entirely made from liquid samba or maybe it’s disco, anything’s possible.  Whatever.  It’s the cook’s call.  If he’s feeling it, he’s feeling it.  (Another pen that can’t keep up, scratching and scratching with a papery rasp.  Letters missing here, half a word absent there…) A Sumi Naga chieftain walks in through the door, claims he lost his drum, but could he trade this shrunken head for some chicken pad Thai?  “It’s worth plenty where I come from.”  The cat on the counter hisses like a slashed tire, bearing a mouthful of jagged whites.

I always say the future will be here in five minutes, when I know damn good and well it will be here in three.

OLD FILM ONE DOLLAR

When I was a kid I would go with my dad to weekend flea markets. We’d load up his F150 on a Friday night and he’d wake me up the next morning for a trip to one of two local drive-in theaters. The South Drive-In is still in use, but the 3C was torn down years ago. This all might have been at the end of the 70s or the beginning of the 80s, I don’t rightly recall.

After I helped my dad set up his stall I’d run off to explore the grounds, the soles of my cheap tennis shoes stumbling across the oversized white gravel. I can tell you from experience that the sound of a rock striking the bottom of a drive-in movie screen not only sounds like laser fire, but if you do it hard enough, the kids gathered around the opposite screen across the grounds can hear you. SCIENCE.

We were pretty poor and I knew better than to ask my dad for money, so I looked through those stalls as though I were purchasing items with my eyes. I wanted to remember the stacks of Penthouse magazines, the Pink Floyd mirrors, the ninja throwing stars and the tables and tables of trading cards, the milk crates full of dog-eared books, vinyl records, velvet paintings, ornate lamps, enormous belt buckles, motorcycle and car parts, musical instruments, models of spaceships, giant bags of kettle corn — I mean the whole goddamned world was for sale in front of my eyes. It was something –

On Friday nights, we’d order pizza and watch Buster Keaton films on a projector in the back yard. Holy shit, I just remembered that…

Sometimes my dad would just give me stuff that he’d found in a dumpster, or picked up for five bucks at a garage sale. That’s how I got my first planner. When I opened it, I wanted to be able to fill the pages with interesting things and dates to remember and important cards for all the slots. But I was still a kid. I could have (would have, should have) filled those pages with entries like FUCK OFF ALL DAY TOMORROW – STILL ON SUMMER VACATION. I would have scribbled I DON’T KNOW ANYONE EXCEPT MY FAMILY in the address book and never even stopped to consider what it meant. Instead of observations on the human condition worthy of preserving, and lofty insights with which to inspire future generations in the notes section, I probably wrote “RODE BIKE ALL DAY.” I had no responsibilities. I was not yet in the data stream. What else was supposed to go on those pages?

The Navy has employed Smart Sailors as far back as World War II. One elite group of these trouble sniffers could tell how far off shore the German were hiding their U-boats by the flavor of the local fish. LT Chuck U. Farley picks up a chuck of sashimi with his chopsticks and takes a bite. “Thirty miles out… tastes like the crew might have picked up a flu virus in Spain.” He licks his lips, dabs at a morsel of wasabi on the corner of his mouth. “Now would be an ideal time to strike.” He licks his lips and slaps his hands together, barking and flexing his throat. The consultation is over.

Still remembers the first time he obsessed over the correct spelling of calculator,

Welcome to the Now.

28SEP2011 – Advancing the film while I still have a camera. The back of my head feels like freshly mown velour; the inside contains high-speed footage of plant tendrils whipping outward in ever-widening circles and tender leaves unfolding from careful storage with tiny clicks, tracking the sunlight across the mottled sky like ancient satellite arrays hidden deep in the jungle. (Thank you, David Attenborough, but just once I wish you’d swear…)

Magic is dead. That’s just my opinion. That was always the divider for me; the left hand versus right hand trade off in fiction between dragons and death stars. “One was, one will be.”

Welcome to the Now.

Somewhere in the distance a herd of wild motorcycles gallops down some temporary straightaway, tearing the air with a mighty roar, passage granted by a sequence of swaying green orbs, aligned like tumblers in the lock of the night.

There’s a church outside my window. It’s just across the yard, beyond the dead limbs, rasping leaves and sprawling web of ivy that provides this area with soft green silence. And through the doors of that church comes the voice of a kindly man with a winning smile and purple robes, professing his love for strangers from the safety of a TV screen. Syndicated salvation, savior songs and collection plates have paid for his designer eyeglass frames, the lenses of which are barely thick enough to physically restrain his eyes, which appear capable of growing teeth and gnashing hard at your face like a rabid weasel were the laws of physics not there to prevent such a thing. In between songs of praise, jokes are told. I’m too far away to hear them.

Saturday night: Operation “Explore Massive Overgrown Graveyard” was a wash. Razor wire encircles barbed wire which tops wrought iron spikes guarding three sides of the city block it occupies; the black windows of residential living rooms stare back from the full four like a panopticon for the dead. Plenty of gaps in the fence, but not enough opportunity for an unobserved entrance and I can’t say I was properly dressed to wade through brush and bramble.

A good assassin is always pregnant with another version of himself. In the event of fatality or termination, this second self will tear free of its protective shell and finish the mission.

Now on a train to Coney Island, watching the jagged shapes and shadows of the landscape rush past the car window, each tooth ripping another chunk of flesh from the prone form of summer.

Sometimes I can almost feel what Brooklyn must have been like twenty years ago, or thirty, or even forty. Light flashes through the trellis of a bridge and the red brick tenements float past. Flashes of fire escapes, rooftop hideaways and rusted graffiti tags. The moment is a yellowed zoetrope of crumbling memories and faded dreams, like radio signals expanding outward into the blackness of space. That was. This is.

Nothing stands still.

Nothing. Stand still.

Nothing stands. Still.

Welcome to the now.

Mind and Purpose

Approximately 345,125 days have passed since the Battle of Hastings…

Summer is officially over.  Earlier this hour I sat on the back deck of a nearby ice cream and confection shop and enjoyed the last double cone of the season.  Thirty-two minutes after the hour smelled like a lit match, and passed through my body like a lingering acid trip, casting echoes of anti-reality across the yard like ripples on a still pond.

As is my habit, I attempted to put the moment into words: a helicopter circles low overhead, fucking the humidity with five swords in a rough approximation of gunfire…  Navigation lights keep time with 80s era Depeche Mode leaking from a window above the shop where twin Caribbean accents clink and click away behind the dishes, chatting softly about the washing up…   Multicolored pendant lamps hang condemned from the underside of the deck umbrella…  Beyond them, rusted iron straps bolt across the back wall, supporting sagging sections of the aged brick structure and –

Yeah.  Okay.  Great.  “I marveled at the complexity of eternity and the invisible quantum orgy, and I reveled in the giddiness of the moment” — whoop-di-freaking-do! — before my euphoria was crushed by an avalanche of sad realization: I didn’t really know how to capture this.  I didn’t know how to make it stay.

I could give away my worldly possessions and forward my mail to a high mountain monastery, surrendering the remainder of my days to the relentless pursuit of truthful description and worshipping the holy fucking glory of the written word and still I wouldn’t be able to drive a nail deep enough to make this moment or any other linger longer, despite all my longing.

I sat in a Juneau bar one night many nights ago, teetering on the edge of fall-down-drunkenness and thinking carefully about what makes women beautiful (like you do), struggling to capture an ever-elusive essence in a haiku or some such shorthand measure.

What a fucking load of noise!  I might as well have tried to work out why light is bright or why it hurts when I fall down.  But I have no academic training, I (still) don’t know what beauty really means, and to make matters worse I suck at haiku.  Plus I was blind drunk and getting dumber by the shot.

Notes salvaged from that night: “Something about the eyes, some measurement of the face, some mystical number or secret formula.  Sometimes a rock climber’s fingers or the strong jawline like a bow across the strings (and the hips) of a cello, but now and again and again it’s the neck but it’s not always the body and usually the soul but frequently it’s just the way they carry themselves.  Is it this way for everyone?  Do others see them as I do? Am I crazy or just retarded?”

There are writers, and then there are writers.  Me, I’m just a guy who takes notes.  I try.  I really do.  Ultimately, my doctor says I suffer from a curious affliction experienced by a tiny selection of monkeys doomed to live out their brief and answerless lives anchored to a spinning speck at the ass end of an endless universe.

I’ve been given a pen, he says, but there is no ink.

It’s difficult to resist committing each and every mortal monkey moment to paper, documenting them in some electronic manner.  I want to show that I lived.  I want to demonstrate that I felt, that I saw, and that yes, I bought the ticket.  But I realized on that drunken night, and tonight — and probably I’ll discover it again tomorrow — how completely futile it is to try, but how addictive it is to keep going any damn way.

Not only am I shouting into a wind tunnel against the rest of human expression, but memories tend to fit the shape of our hands.  We scoop them to our perspective.  They are never as we remember them.  Flashes of unspeakable beauty happen like a gunshot.  They are vivid once and then they begin to heal as a puckered scar, closing the portal behind them.  (A captured memory would most likely rot like fruit in that well-intentioned bowl you placed on your kitchen table.)

Where is the proof of yesterday?  It survives as a dry cleaning stub in my wallet, right next to the the Metrocard I purchased from an underground kiosk twelve hours ago; close to the rats and upwind from the piss.  Yesterday is the delicious meal I recently shat into the sewer.

(Sometimes when a meal is really good, I laugh.  At least I used to.)

We inhale these spectral seconds in order to keep them close to us, refusing to let the flame flicker out, straining to hold onto important occurrences just a little while longer before coughing in to the basic need for air.  An explosive exhalation precedes an involuntary gasp for fresh O2 and then the moment is lost to the wind and the second hand ticks once like a bomb, never to return.  So many such seconds will fade like photographs on the wall, polished mute like the rocks I’ve gathered on walks without remembering why, or when, much less where they began.

(Morale of the story: Stop playing the movie.  The ending never changes, and the film gets warped the longer you leave it on the bulb.)

From Wikipedia: “The Finnish have an expression for the will to push forward.  Sisu, loosely translated, is defined as strength of will, determination, perseverance and acting rationally in the face of adversity. However, the word is widely considered to lack a proper translation into any language.  Sisu has been described as being integral to understanding Finnish culture.  The literal meaning is equivalent in English to ‘having guts’, and the word derives from sisus, which means something inner or interior.  However sisu is defined by a long-term element in it; it is not momentary courage, but the ability to sustain an action against the odds.  Deciding on a course of action and then sticking to that decision against repeated failures is sisu.  It is similar to equanimity, except the forbearance of sisu has a grimmer quality of stress management than the latter.  The noun sisu is related to the adjective sisukas, one having the quality of sisu.”

…

Hours later in the darkness, sitting in a large orange dish chair near an open window in my living room.  Cool air files in and takes a quiet seat.  A short glass of chilled apple moonshine rests in my left hand.  A man walks down the near side of the street repeatedly muttering something about real estate.  As you do.

Tomorrow I will write a letter to a friend and talk about the fire virus in the trees, and how Brooklyn is beginning to burn…

Tonight I am imagining things; a dark spot on the floorboards near my foot has crawled toward me, twice.  Each time I pin it down with my eyes, it reverts to being just a dark stain on the floorboard, the 78 of an old conversation trapped beneath the varnish.  When I turn my eyes to the laptop screen, it becomes a mouse again, or a roach, or something larger.

I’m not afraid.  I just wish it would make up its mind.

TWM

T-Minus 30

I dusted off an old Tastes Like Chicken favorite of mine from back in the day. Let me know what you think.  - TWM

…

My name is Neville Morris and I’m 19 years old.  No, wait.  I, Neville Morris, being of sound mind and body, do so… uh, shit.  I don’t remember how it goes.  Look, I’m just telling my side of the story in case I get dead.  Which, at this point, is highly possible.

Where do I start?  The first time I met Cereal we were squatting with some other kids in an abandoned building uptown doing whatever would get us through the long days and endless nights.  I started calling him Cereal because when we went “shopping”, he’d shove a box of Cap’n Crunch under his black-hooded sweatshirt.  I never even knew his real name.  He’s dead now, so what’s the point?  He’s dead because T-Minus 30 killed him.

Anyway, Cereal and I were looking to make some money and maybe get a place, just get off the street.  The homeless thing was getting old and I thought maybe I’d get a job, go back to college.  Just something.  I’d only just met Cereal but we jived right out the gate.  Together we were a two-man riot.  We were also tired of starving, tired of freezing, tired of begging for dimes, and tired of showing our dicks to dirty old English professors in dark parking garages for grocery money, so yeah we decided to go in on a place and get the fuck off the street.

It was then that we found the flyer, a want ad; some guy was looking for “healthy males” to participate in a “scientific experiment”.  He was offering a thousand dollars a go, with no questions.  Now, being a “healthy male” who just happens to travel in circles where the words “healthy males” and “party” are frequently used in the same sentence, usually by older men wearing makeup, I could tell you things I’ve done for money that would push your lunch to the sidewalk.  But I like to think I’m above that.  Still, let’s just say I’ve done things I’m not so proud of; I figured I could handle doing it one more time if it meant not doing them again.

“We should call him and see what’s up,” I said, handing the flyer back to Cereal.  “But I put my foot down at scat, and no kissing.”  Cereal laughed like a thunderclap and lit another cigarette, his eyes shining like wet tarmac behind the plume of gray.

Long story short, we spent the day begging and used the funds to purchase a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of cheap wine, a bottle of ephedrine, a deck of cards and last but certainly not least, four Trojans.  We ate a handful of the magic bullets and washed them down with the wine as we played cards in the back of the bus on the way to the thing.  The ride was nearly two hours long.

“You scared?” I dropped a five of hearts.  I had two aces and a pair of sevens.

“Shit, you kidding me?”  He tossed a jack of clubs and a two of spades, drawing two fresh from the pile.  “You?”

“Your mom’s scared,” I laughed, picking up a third ace, a ten of hearts and, as luck would have it, a fourth ace.  The spade.  I laughed triumphantly and snapped the set on the seat between us.  “Ha!”  I helped myself to three more cards with a shaking hand, hoping he didn’t notice.

The doors of the bus hissed open like the gates of Hell and the humid summer night air dropped four coins in the fare box and took a seat.

Fact: we got off at the end of a long gravel road, having followed the directions and arriving later that night.

Fact: it was dark as fuck out.

Fact: at the other end of the drive, just visible in the fading light, sat a ramshackle two-story farmhouse on an otherwise barren lot 50 miles from nowhere.

Fact: there was no name on the mailbox.

You do the math.

The facts, as they added up, should have put us back on that bus before summer’s coin stopped jangling.  I mean, we’ve all seen horror movies, right?  If you were sitting fat and sassy in a dark movie theater with a bucket of popcorn on your lap, what encouraging advice would you be shouting at me right about now?  Being as smart as you are, it’d probably start with “Get”, and end with “the fuck back on the bus!”  Am I right?

Cereal, meanwhile, had suddenly given birth to good sense and his voice shook like a spooked horse.  “Fuck this, Nev.”  The hand he placed on my shoulder brought me full stop in the middle of the long gravel tongue that led to the mouth of the house.  I could see one light in the back and a flickering blue glow coming from the second floor.  I shook his hand and started walking again.  I had it in my head that I had to play this cool.  Again, his hand found my shoulder and I whirled to face him.

“Come on, man.  You sure this is worth it?”  Cereal pointed off toward the house.  “We have no idea what’s in there.”

I followed his finger with my eyes and while I admit the house looked more and more like a sleeping thing with one sleepy eye watching us march faith-first toward the front door, I found it far more empowering to think about a one followed by three zeroes.  Thusly motivated, I proceeded to half-talk, half-bully, half-cajole (wait, that’s three halves…) Cereal into taking one step and then another, and another still.

If my reasons were Jeopardy categories, they would be as follows:

You Can Buy A Lot Of Mouthwash With One Thousand Dollars

Shit In One Hand And Wish In The Other

Fragile Old Queers I Have Stomped For Kicks

Things You Can Sell At A Pawn Shop Without Raising Eyebrows

What Percentage Of English Professors Have Degrees In Male Anatomy

We’ll Look Back On This Some Day And Laugh

We Might As Well Since We’re Already Here

As If You’ve Anything Better To Do.

Across the yard.  Up the steps.  Across creaking planks to the door.  There was some confusion about who would knock on the door and then I had to pound for a full minute before anyone came.  I thought I was handling this pretty strong but when the door swung in quite suddenly, Cereal had to grab my arm as I took two involuntary steps backward.

The man before us was basketball-player tall and crooked like his driveway.  Shock-white hair stood on end and a weathered face spoke his age, pronounced as it was by shadows from the porch light.  From six steps away, he smelled like he’d been drinking since noon, 1954.  He was dressed in gray pants and a faded red shirt that hung slack on his angular frame.  One pair of bifocals rested on his face, another hung around his neck.

Cereal got his second wind and set sail for business.  “Hi, we’re here about the flyer?”  He unfolded it from the back pocket of his jeans and took his time smoothing the creases on his thigh, making sure the man got a look at his legs.  Cereal was in pretty decent shape for someone who existed solely on Cap’n Crunch; good teeth, high cheekbones, curly hair and a lean build.  He did okay for himself.  “Is the offer still good?”  He held out the flyer with a smile and flashed his pearly whites.

The stranger took it, read it at arms length as though he’d never seen it before.  When he was done, he eyed us one at a time.  Probably sizing us up, fitting us together like some perverse game of Tetris, figuring out what piece would fit where.  Cereal rubbed his hands together and showed his whites again, doing his best to look charming.

Maybe this guy was having second thoughts.  Maybe he’d chickened out.  Maybe his wife was home and this was bad timing.  I closed my eyes and waited for his shouts. “I didn’t write this.  Now get off my property, you perverts, both of you, before I call the cops!”  I imagined him slamming the door in our faces.  I could almost hear the gravel crunching beneath my shoes on the way back into the darkness.  I imagined the wave of relief that’d wash over us.  I’d light a cigarette and say something like, “Man, I’m glad that didn’t happen!”  Cereal would agree and bum a drag from me.  Then we’d talk about how we were gonna get home.  On the long walk back we’d talk about how that was the last trick we’d never have to pull.  We’d dream about opening a comic book store someday or a head shop or maybe gets jobs in a record store or something.  By the time we’d made it home sometime afternoon, we’d already have a name for the place picked out.  We’d call it –

“Yeah.  It’s still good.  Come in.  I’m Max.”  He turned and led us through the house, dark and full of strange smells.  A TV blared from somewhere upstairs.  The kitchen was in the rear of the house, bathed in weak yellow light from a bulb covered in fly shit.  The paint on the ceiling was cracked and peeling.  There were dishes in the sink, but the floor was mostly clean.

Max gestured for us to take seats around the Formica table and began rifling through a cupboard near the sink.  I heard the friendly sound of plates clinking and wondered if maybe he weren’t one of those born-again types who rent young meat for the evening just so he can cook them dinner, buy them thrift store clothes and listen to their hard luck stories.  I hoped so.  I was hungry as fuck.

Instead, he placed a tray on the table which held a jar of cotton balls, a clear plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol, a length of rubber tubing, two plastic-wrapped syringes and a small vial made of brown glass.  So much for meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

As he began arranging the items according to some inner plan my mouth ran dry like the proverbial tit.  “Uh, wait a second.  What’s all this shit?”  I demanded, tried to sound tough.

“The experiment I’m paying you for, of course,” barked Max over the tops of his bifocals.  He had crazy thick eyebrows like antennae, or those things in the ocean.  Sea enemies.  “What’d you think you were here for?”  He took a seat closest to Cereal and gestured for him to roll up his sleeve.  Max removed a cotton ball from the jar and doused it with alcohol.  In the silence I could hear the liquid gurgle as he upended it briefly.

“Thought I was one of them old faggots looking for a hump, did ya?”  He snorted derisively as he swabbed Cereal’s arm.  The sting of rubbing alcohol cut my nostrils in the closeness of the room and my stomach slowly turned.  Cereal’s face went white and he looked at me with fear in his eyes.  He was still showing his teeth, but maybe he was just as scared as I was.  Sex was one thing, but this was different.  “Well, no — of course not,” I lied.  “But what’s in the –.”

Max looked first at Cereal then at me, exhaling a sigh and removing his bifocals.  “As I recall, gentlemen, the flyer stated quite clearly, ‘healthy males wanted for a scientific experiment’.  It did not say ‘lonely old fruit bat desires dirty dancing with young bucks’.  It also specified you’d be paid one thousand dollars a piece for not asking any questions.”  His voice box growled like a rock tumbler and I could feel the baritone in my chest.  My stomach grumbled in protest of the scent of the alcohol.

“As I am a man of my word, I promise you will be paid according to that agreement.  In turn,” he continued, forcefully turning Cereal’s elbow toward the floor and exposing a series of tiny scabs to the shit-stained light, “I agree not to ask you any embarrassing or obvious questions about what you do in your spare time.  Speaking of time, you are wasting mine.  One thousand dollars.  Do we have a deal?  If not, you and your friend here are free to get the hell out of my house.”  Max looked back and forth at us.  “Your decision, please.  Three… two… one… now.”

Cereal looked at me for a moment before nodding his head.  Then his eyes closed, his perfect teeth now concealed behind tightly clamped lips with nothing further to say.  “Fine,” I said, taking off my jacket.  “But I’m going first.”

Max replaced the bifocals on his face and repeated the swabbing operation on me before opening the packet containing a fresh syringe.  I remember thinking how silly this was; I was in the middle of nowhere with a strange man who, for all I knew, was about to inject me with cat piss and kerosene, and I had just insisted on going first?  I felt as though I were outside myself, watching.

Max grunted disapprovingly at the marks along my arms as he swabbed my arm.  Then he wrapped me tight, woke the vein and slipped me like a pro.  I watched him draw my blood into that tiny chamber before ramming the plunger home.  He placed another pre-soaked cotton ball over the needle and withdrew the syringe, all very matter-of-fact.  Before the empty syringe hit the empty can in the corner, a freight train chill was galloping down my spine.  I felt the room close in around me and for a moment, I knew no pain.

Now it was Cereal’s turn.  I vaguely remember him laughing as he held out his arm.  Max did him proper but as the needle slid out and the cotton ball began slurping at the pinprick wound, Max did something unexpected.  He began to talk about spiders.

“Do either of you boys know that the silk of the common spider is unique in all the arachnid world?  It’s incredibly strong and terribly resilient,” he said, gazing through the empty syringe at the yellowed bulb overhead.  Some well-sedated part of me was shouting out a warning as it fell backwards into warm gravy, but I wasn’t listening anymore.  I was riding down a river of light on the sound of Max’s voice, without absorbing any of the dangerous content.

“For example,” said Max, accentuating each syllable, “if you produce enough of silk and bind it with other like polymers, you’ll create a powerful kind of body armor, possibly ideal for military and law enforcement applications.  But you’d be ignoring the bigger picture.”

“I wanted to explore another possibility; I wanted to weave it to the human skeletal structure, to the muscle mass, or graft it to the skin.  It’s far more plausible than it sounds, really.”  He tossed Cereal’s empty into the trash and leaned back in his chair, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes.  “I had hard facts and the research to back it up but I was unable to convince my colleagues of my claims, so I decided to continue my work alone, out here, with a handful of silent investors and one diligent assistant.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Cereal stiffen.  His eyes went big like saucers and his mouth stretched tight in a ghastly O, as though someone has whispered something astonishing in his ear.  I’d seen that look before and I knew what it meant but for some reason, I refused to accept that it might be happening again, here and now.  If Max noticed this he seemed not to care, and instead continued speaking.

“Spider silk is a protein similar to goat’s milk, you see.  When the spider gene is injected into a goat, the goat in turn produces a protein identical to that found in spider silk.”  His puppeteer fingers danced back and forth describing this circular occurrence and his rumbling voice echoed off the paper-thin walls.  “It’s really just a simple chain of amino acids, primarily glycine and alanine.”  He leaned back in his chair.  Eyes on me, eyes on Cereal, checked a watch on his left wrist, continued speaking at us over his bifocals.

“Did you also know that spider silk is almost five times stronger than steel and twice as strong as Kevlar of the same weight?  It has the ability to stretch about 30 percent longer than its original length without breaking, which makes it very resilient.”

The room around me spun and fell like a knife fighter in a gunfight, and I followed it down.

“Now, theoretically this protein would then be extracted from the goat’s milk to produce silk fibers.  Ordinarily, the process stops there but I took it a little further and developed a way to hyper-accelerate the result to form a new compound.”  He glanced at Cereal again, checked a watch before turning to face me.  He pried open my left eye and clicked on a penlight, left, right, left.  Then he rose, walked around the table and did the same to Cereal.  Were I lucid, were I in any way able to speak I’d have told him not to waste his time.

“After that, I tried attaching it to a human enzyme for easier joining, and laced it with a strong sedative to take the edge off.  I hope you approve — although I’m guessing by the marks on your arm that you probably don’t give a shit what you inject into your body.  I call this batch T-Minus.”  Pause.  “I don’t think your friend cared for it.  Wait here, please,” and he left the room through a curtained door.

I slumped over on the table and stared; Cereal’s head was tilted back.  His eyes were staring up through the ceiling and out into the starry night beyond.  There was foam around his lips and a tear was drying on his cheek.  There came a noise like a high-pitched whine and I listened to it for some time before I realized it was coming from me.  I was whimpering.  “Cereal, Jesus, you gotta wake up…” I whispered.  I was treading water in lukewarm syrup and there was a weird sensation rippling down my spine, as though my skeleton was being rolled about in silk sheets.

Max’s voice reached my ears from light years away.  “Anyway, I was working on germline gene therapy, an additional step to PGD.  I was beyond screening embryos.  Any trait could be added to an embryo: cerevisiae, elegans, melanogaster.  Endless possibilities, really.”  I could only make out bits and pieces of what he was saying.  Something crashed and I heard him swear.

He continued speaking and his footsteps brought his voice closer.  “Ninety-five percent of the initial sequencing is finished, and I’ve got a ninety-nine percent degree of accuracy.  There’s just one problem — we have to test it the hard way.”  And that’s when Max padded into the kitchen through the dividing curtain behind a double-barrel shotgun, which was aimed at my chest.  I struggled to sit up right and raise my arms to shield myself.

“This won’t hurt a bit,” he said, stroking both triggers.  One for me, the other for Cereal.

The blast came with a deafening roar and I saw a flash of light leap toward me.  I felt the sting as the pellets impacting with my skin and the punch threw me to the floor.  From my position beneath the table I could see that Max’s feet were stuffed into bunny slippers and I lay there contemplating what that meant, waiting for the warm red voice of death to whisper gentle things into my ear.  Moments passed.  It never spoke.

“It’s all right.  You can open your eyes.  The experiment worked.  Well, for one of you, anyway.”   I blinked once and thought about moving my limbs. Then I sat up, unsure of what would come next.  I sure as shit didn’t expect to see what I saw.  There was about a hundred smoking holes in my T-shirt and there were a lot of metal fragments lying in my lap.  My chest stung like I’d done a belly flop and I trembled as I scooped the pellets and poured them through my hands like sand.  I ran my hands over my body, looking for blood but there was none.  I was unharmed.

I looked over at what used to be Cereal.  His lips were blue and the useful parts of his chest were missing.  I was too scared to move, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from the meat puppet that had once been the closest thing I’d had to a friend.

“Sorry, I had to make sure he was dead,” said Max.  “As for you, you’re a living god for the next half hour.  Enjoy it.”  He parted the curtain and glanced back at me.  “Oh.  You can sleep on the couch.  There’s food in the fridge.”  The curtain closed and I blacked out.  And that’s how I met Max.

…

I sat in the front room the next morning while Max and Irene patiently explained T-Minus to me after we’d buried Cereal in the cornfield.  Irene, the intern who worked for Max, was the first person to take a shot of T-Minus almost a year ago.

“Why didn’t it work on Cereal?”  I asked, staring woodenly at a cup of coffee in my hands.

Max just shrugged.  “I could give you a long-winded scientific answer that you wouldn’t understand, or I could tell you that his chromosomes zigged when they should have zagged–.”

“You fucking… bastard!”  The coffee slopped slightly under the force of my agitation.  “What if we’d both died?  How many fucking people have you killed out here?  And why the hell did you have shoot me?  You’re a fucking idiot.”  My voice broke, my throat constricting around the last syllable like a boa.  I cleared my throat.  “Where’s my bag?  I want a cigarette.”

“I can answer your questions,” he replied.  “But first, there’s no smoking here.  I have got a great number of chemicals in the basement, some of which respond poorly to fire.  Second, I hate the smell of cigarettes.  As for the money, you and your friend were willing to risk your health, to say nothing of your lives for a meager thousand dollars.  I needed your unwitting help to test a formula I designed to render the human body bulletproof for approximately one half-hour.  Who is the real idiot?

“Second, if I’d injected you and that batch of T-Minus had been a failure, it may have held some very unpleasant side effects for you, in which case, shooting you on the spot would have been an act of mercy.

“If the test was a success, which it was, and you survived, which you did, I could then persuade you to help me with my experiment, which I’m doing.  Right now.

“Here’s the deal, there are no riders or waivers, and no need to sign or consult your lawyer.  Live here, free room and board, meals provided and all the T-Minus you can stand.  I can’t promise it won’t kill you any quicker than the junk you were shoving in your veins.  But there can be no other drugs taken here, of any kind, unless Irene or I administer them to you.

“Absolutely no drinking, and no cigarettes.  I need you healthy or not at all.  I hate to sound so cliché but if I can’t use you, I will kill you.  You’ve been exposed to my work and I don’t want you blabbing to the world about what goes on here.

“Do what I tell you, pull your weight and I will make you a god on Earth.  On the other hand, if you lie to me, steal from me, break our agreement or otherwise piss on what we’ve got going on here,” he said, indicating himself and Irene, who just smiled, “and I’ll simply wait till your dose runs out and let Irene hunt you down in the darkness.  Or I’ll just shoot you myself.  Do we have a deal?”

I rose, walked to the window.  Outside, the birds sang stupid songs.  A breeze did something to the grass and stirred the dust in the driveway.  It was a gorgeous fucking day.  A little ways into the corn scrub, not 300 feet from the house, a fresh patch of earth marked the spot where Cereal was having a long and meaningful dirt nap.  He was a year older than me.  I didn’t even know his name.  I just kept calling him Cereal.  How many more bodies were out there?

“How many people have you injected with that stuff?”

“It’s called T-Minus 30, and that question’s not important right now.  I need your answer,” said Max.

“Well, what if the police come looking for us?”

Irene walked over and stood next to me, one hand on my shoulder the way you’d soothe a child.  She was tall and athletic, with arms like an oak banister and an Amazon’s physique.  The T-Minus probably had a lot to do with that.  “And what if they do, Neville?” she asked, leveling her gaze at me.  I couldn’t tear away from her eyes.  They threatened to swallow me whole.  “What are you going to tell them?  You’re in this, too.  You touched immortality last night.  Aren’t you curious as to what comes next?  Don’t you realize how lucky you are to be here?  I can understand your apprehension– it’s probably not the most effective way to screen applicants,” she said with another disarming smile, like a hostess at a party ignoring cat vomit on the floor.  “But we had to be sure the serum worked.  Try to see our side of it.  If we had just given you the dose, how else could we test its capabilities without — well, shooting you at close range with a shotgun?”

Of course, how silly of me not to see this for myself.  Jesus H. Christ, these people were stone-fucking insane!  I sat back on the couch and thought for a moment.  I had nothing else to go back to.  Hadn’t for years.  I didn’t have a job.  I had no friends and no mon –

“What about the two thousand dollars, mine and Cereal’s share?” I asked.

“I’m almost ashamed to tell you there never was any money,” replied Max.  “Room and board is free.  What is there to spend it on?”

Damn, this just gets better and better.  But what the hell else was I supposed to do?

“Okay.”  I took a deep breath.  “I’m in.”

12FL/OZ 355ML

Home: It's where you keep your stuff.

Pause from a sip of Belhaven on this hot September night in Brooklyn while the ghost party rages next door…

For three days they’ve been at it; Latino pop, an unfortunate backside selection of lesser known Motown hits, shoddy R&B and cheap reggae covers of even worse songs and now — for some entirely unholy reason — they’ve jammed the dial on “dance music of the late 90s” and abandoned responsibility for the jukebox entirely.  A giant treble clef in white rope lights adorns the chain link fence at the back of a yard filled with tables, a tent and a hit squad of ubiquitous white plastic chairs, probably hot stamped into existence by some vapor damaged 12-year-old in a far away factory where clean water is a fairy tale and Zouzou always needs more medicine. But until tonight, there were no guests!

Suddenly this end of the block has become a swirling stew of double-parked cars and unusual food smells.  People are eating potato chips and laughing at jokes.  Here and there, a sibilant ”s” slips out from behind a hand, denoting a polite aside or perhaps some private concern.  Crackling murders of teenage crows hop and cock on the steps, arguing listlessly about nothing essential, puncturing the dead night with shrill howls of o-shaped disbelief and “No, you didn’t!”  Staccato bursts of “um-hm” and “I was like…” dominate the front stoop.  Whiffs of this harmless patter force their way through the dusty grid of my windscreen and stain the floorboards below; layer upon layer of audio memories forever trapped in the varnish like insects in the amber, to be later extracted by an avuncular but well-meaning scientist figure and turned first into a theme park, then into a movie and perhaps, Hollywood willing, a sequel.

My previous apartment, the Fortress of Solitude, was surgically clean and hermetically sealed against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  It was a great granite haven, a solid silent place to make a stand, a posh pillbox in which to bivouac myself away during my initial year in New York City.  It was the ultimate shelter, designed to keep zombies out and my paranoia in.  It could even sustain a direct hit should the pigs ever lose their grip on the wheel of the nation.

The air conditioning always worked, the counters were pristine and easy to clean.  My landlord held all my packages.  My grocery store was just around the corner.  My local bar was one block over and five blocks down.  My favorite coffee hole was two blocks over and four blocks down.  The L, two blocks over and five blocks down, would take me anywhere I wanted to go and there was always eye candy on the train.

I was the first person to live in that apartment since the building was remodeled and I found it reassuring; no matter what happened, no matter where I roamed, I could count on coming home to immaculate granite surfaces, freshly laundered towels and thick walls designed to keep out the peals of wicked laughter and unexplained shrieks of the city until I eventually learned what was what and allowed them to drown in the background of the sea.  I don’t do so good with crowds.

Entering my incense-laden sanctuary at the end of any long day, I could drop my bags to the floor and breathe deeply of my governed space.  The clothes in my closet were always pressed, hanging on identical IKEA hangars and spaced exactly one finger apart.  The towels were folded boot camp style on a gleaming metal rack in a spotless bathroom complete with heated floors.  The kitchen sink was devoid of both dirty dishes and water spots.  The desk was exactly black.  The books were arranged first according to subject and then by alphabetical order.

I could hide here from the filth and noise.  I could do my laundry in peace.  I could do chin-ups while my dinner bubbled away in various pots and pans on a five-burner range.  I had room to pace.  The middle of the living floor was completely bare; I could swing a cat without hitting a wall and stretch my long-limbed frame in all cardinal directions.  My altar, a stack of military ordinance crates layered in incense ash and dried flowers, was adorned with candle stubs, sentimental rocks, statues of obscure deities, dog tags, spent rounds of ammunition and assorted skulls.  It held a place of honor at the center of the room beneath the main window.

Clearly, I had the freedom to express myself.  And I should’ve been churning out volumes of new material, but oddly there was nothing forthcoming.

I was too safe.

A ship isn’t designed to stay in the harbor and the Fortress wasn’t meant to last.  The rent was costing me an entire check each month.  I was hemorrhaging money and plugging the holes with sticky rice and red beans.  Poor is only sexy when you’re young.

I knew couldn’t stay there forever.

So I decided to move.  Moreover, I decided to get a roommate, someone with whom I could split the bills and the groceries and spend some time being human.  I genuinely love being alone but to tell the truth I was maybe getting kinda weird…

I weighed the pros against the cons and I tried hard to find a fault with my plan but it was just too good of an idea to fail.

First came the apartment hunt, then the logistical scramble followed by twelve hours of slave labor which took place on one of the hottest days of the year.  My new roommate and I first emptied her tiny fourth-floor Flatbush apartment before tackling the Fortress.  (Thankfully we were assisted part of the way by my boss and his always-smiling girlfriend.)  We finished the move, returned the piece of shit, graffiti-covered meat wagon at around eleven that night and ached like zombies for the next three days.

 

My new apartment is on one end of a shady street just three long, loping blocks from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.  The interior of this 1901 railroad-style Huxtable hideaway has been painted over so many times it’s probably lost an inch of actual real estate from the doors and walls.  The outlets, when and where they exist, are all two prong.  There are no outlets in the bathroom.  The honey-colored floors warp and creak like a fat man’s belt when you walk on them.  I need a road flare to navigate my tiny all-black closet.  There’s a three-foot patched-and-painted depression on one wall of the back room, as though something large from another dimension stopped by for tea one Sunday and left a crater-shaped ripple in its wake.  I drop my laundry off at an establishment on the corner; it comes back folded.  I’d need to clone myself and stand on my own shoulders in order to change the light bulbs in the living room, the double doors of which stick and drag against the friction caused by decades of paint and varnish.  There are bars on all the windows (though I’m not sure whom they’re meant to protect.)  The books are on the shelf with no particular care to their order…

But I like it.  There is life here.  This apartment requires me to relax.  I cannot control it.

Reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer on this hot September night in Brooklyn while the ghost party rages next door…  New York is practically built for writers and artists too (and I suppose even that poor, miserable, disgusting wretched subspecies of worm human, the fashion photographer).  All you have to do is close your eyes and listen.

Capture.  Import.  Decipher.  Interpret.  Express.  Repeat.

What one might first dismiss as the mindless chatter of ignorant gossip or uneducated bleating is actually the complex interpretation of the new battlefield translated by the secret medium that cannot and will not go away.  At every second, we stand on the gentle arc of the present tense and we talk about what Is.  As much as I hate gossip, it’s a fucking necessity.

In order to write about people, you have to put yourself out there in the biomass.  Find the words, capture the No Thing.  Get involved.  Stick your dick in the mashed potatoes.

William S. Burroughs referred to something called the restless word, a silent power that ebbed and ached and yearned to be described.  “Close your eyes for ten seconds and try to think of nothing,” he said.  “The word will still be there.”

Scott Adams wrote, [SIC] “We are the slowly reforming nervous system of a suicidal god.”  When we speak we convey information in rough tree shapes that, properly diagrammed, resemble a map of the human nervous system.  This is an offshoot of this, which relates to this, which is part of this larger branch…  We build roads and rail systems that branch like the human nervous system.  We should know better than to build mega weapons and super gases and ultra guns, but we do it anyway.  We give in to fear.  We cannot leave well enough alone.  It’s as though we were programmed to do these things.  As if we were not only marching determinedly toward the destruction of our species, but through it.  Beyond it, even.

We want to believe we were designed for something.  We’d like to think we happened for a purpose.  We can spend our lives guessing at why we’re really here, but I don’t think those answers will come for a long, long time and when they do we may not even recognize them for what they are.  We come, we do, we go.

We are only stories telling stories,