Speak to no one about this.

15APR2012 – Part of this is my job description, part of this is a dream. There are moments in the light of day when I cannot tell them apart. Sometimes, I travel from place to place at the direction of (a certain government agency) and perform tasks — which began as uncomfortable and tedious but have grown progressively more rewarding.

“Head south, drive for twenty miles. Pull over at (a certain gas station) just outside (a certain town). The station will be abandoned. Open the envelope located under the passenger seat. You will find a pair of gloves. Put them on and pocket both the lighter and the box containing paraffin-soaked cotton. You will break into the office at the back of the building without being observed. Force the lock on the top left-hand desk drawer. There will be a large square package wrapped in plain brown paper. Do NOT open it. Instead, carry it with you to the lot behind the gas station and look for an old rusted drum. Place the package in the drum and set fire to the package using the lighter and paraffin, making certain to scatter the ashes thoroughly and bury the fire. Once you’ve finished, return home. Speak to no one about this.”

Next. “Catch the first flight to (a certain place). Rent a car and drive to (a certain pier) and wait there for six hours. Purchase a sandwich from a food cart at the end of the pier if you get hungry. When (a certain vessel) moors to the pier, board and ask to speak to the captain. When you meet him, hand him a one-dollar bill and take his picture. He’ll know what it means. Once you have his photograph, return to the airport and fly home. Speak to no one about this.”

Next. “Travel by train to New London, Connecticut. Be at (a specific address) by 0800 Wednesday. Someone there will give you a large green bag containing a knife, a compass, a space blanket, a warm coat and a whistle. Purchase sufficient food and water. Then, drive to an old airfield at the edge of town. There you will board the large white military aircraft with an orange stripe on the side. They’re expecting you. It will take you to Newfoundland. When you arrive, walk to the end of the runway and board another white plane. This one will have the word ‘surveillance’ painted along the side in big red letters. They’ll be expecting you. They will fly approximately 375 SE to position 41° 46′ North, 50° 14′ West. When you arrive, there will be a boat waiting. Photograph the boat and any activity you observe. The aircraft mechanic will jettison an object through a drop tube located in the rear of the aircraft. Photograph this event and anything you think might be of interest. Return home. Speak to no one about this.”

There’s never a definite end to the tasks. Sometimes they come in the middle of the night. Sometimes they come very early in the morning. “Tomorrow at 0400, you will don this dress uniform complete with colorful ribbons, insignia and a fancy hat. You will travel to attend (a certain function) at (a certain place). You will be introduced to (a certain person). When you meet him, take his picture. Wait twenty minutes. When he is introduced to (a certain person), you will photograph them together. The photograph should appear natural. It must NOT appear posed. After this, you are free to go. Speak to no one about this.”

Next: “Catch the first flight to New Orleans. Rent a car, drive to (a certain place) and wait for instructions. After two weeks, you will drive to an airfield on the edge of town and board a helicopter. They will be expecting you. It will take you to an oilrig located in the Gulf of Mexico. Upon arriving, you will photograph the drilling equipment, the interior of the control room and anything you think might be of interest. Once you have these photographs, board the helicopter and return to (a certain place). Speak to no one about this.”

Sometimes I receive these instructions in the middle of the task I’m completing ordering me to drop what I’m doing and begin another task, or walk from it away entirely. The standard guidance is simple: “Travel light. Pack a duffel bag of clothes, a laptop, a camera and your passport. Use this card for expenses, and present this piece of paper when challenged. Speak to no one about this…”

TWM

The Phone Call of Cthulhu

Deployment of World Ocean Circulation Experiment buoy, one each.

27JAN2012 – I’m in an office on the second floor of a shoebox-shaped building on the southern tip of Manhattan. It’s raining; the background hiss is partially clouding my thinking. I can’t help but wonder if the static-based sound of falling water impacting like gentle ordinance on filthy concrete might have the same effect on the human brain as noise-cancelling headphones; impeding one’s overall ability to think or act clearly.

I wonder about a lot of things. I’m not saying any of the questions I ask are valid, or even that important in the greater scheme. In this day and age you can ask all the questions you want; the answers are probably out there somewhere. But what you do with the result is up to you.

There’s no one else here at the moment, so I’m listening to Pigface (rather loudly) and packing for my trip. I’ll catch a train to New London, Conn., and then a military C-130J south to Elizabeth City, N.C., before heading north again to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where I’ll be flying further still out over the North Atlantic with a crew whose job is to spot icebergs orphaned from Mother Greenland and translate this information into assorted charts and helpful warnings. I’ll be taking photos, handling the media who’ve signed up to fly with us, re-reading Neal Stephenson’s fucking awes*me work of maximum geekery, Cryptonomicon, and fighting to stay awake whilst the vibrating tremors from mighty engines work themselves under my skin.

Camera bodies, batteries, cables, lenses, chargers and a MacBook Pro are shoved into my camera bag with all the enthusiasm of the “gear-up” scene from a Rambo movie. All that’s missing is a fuck-off big hunting knife in the sheath at my hip, a red headband made fast around my brow and some heavy-lidded mumbling about war, weapons and drawing first blood. I’ve got enough equipment in this bag to document a revolution and I’ve planned my trip to the nth degree. Nothing to it but to do it, and hope my planning reveals no signs of potroasticus cerebellum.

29JAN2012 – Amtrak 160 headed northeast, easy like Sunday morning. The shifting perspective of the countryside as viewed through the horizontal arrow slit of this shiny metal worm reveals a large-scale zoetrope of naked trees and pulsing bursts of sunlight. It’s giving me a fucking Japanese seizure is what’s it doing. That, and allowing me the rare opportunity to experience e-ink properties in my actually-analog book which I can’t seem to concentrate on, so I close my eyes.

Blood-red shockwaves inspired by the flashing sunlight pulse violently against my lowered eyelids, which keeps perfect time with the dated sounds of Ministry’s ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod’. My ear goggles are flooded with the warm honey of crashing bass. Turns out I can’t sleep either, so I open my eyes and look around; first at the slumbering Asian girl with the British accent and gentle overbite sitting across the aisle from me, then back out the window again, and finally down to the much-abused notebook on my lap. The rocking motion of the train has transmogrified my commonly-careful cuneiform into a document prophesying the coming of what appears to be multiple earthquakes.

The landscape rolls and yaws like a fighter jet alongside our forward surging inchworm, affording the passengers on the right side of the car with fleeting glimpses of backyard wealth and modest prosperity; seasonally-stranded fishing boats, multiple modes of muddied transportation and sprawling houses with oversized windows, each overlooking bodies of water — no matter how insignificant. These are the outward symptoms of a fortunate soul in an uncertain economy. And where there is stability such as this, there is typically found the Bounty of Favor and the unspoken Marital Return On Investment.

What I’m trying to say here is that the MILF of a rich man probably fucks like she owns the place. She knows from whence her bread is buttered. With her primal needs and American dreams of food, shelter and matching drapes fully realized, her nesting instincts rev right into the red faster than a NASCAR Napoleon on nuptial night. She’s met a man she can depend upon; a steadfast sumbitch who can help to unclench her ovaries, change her flat tire, slap her up a spice rack from leftover floor shims and drive her to the hospital with one calloused hand tied behind his L.L. Bean red plaid shirt…

–

Where the passing riverbeds are revealed, the smoothed earth echo of mental mud is exposed as the individual folds of a great brain. This section of the Earthbrain’s purpose is to do x. A few miles over, that dry winter lakebed’s folds are designed to execute function y. The Earth is alive, its cognitive abilities spread out over its entire body like skin. (If someone cuts off your hand, you can’t think clearly. Follow?) People still wave at passing trains, swaying their limbs overhead like friendly flags of surrender, a gesture one doesn’t see much of inside the 11216 zip code.

30JAN2012 – I haven’t flown aboard a C-130 since my days in Alaska, but the sensation comes flooding back; I’m buckled into a row of surplus theater seats (my luggage is strapped to the deck about where the orchestra pit would be) and I’m facing a wall of tool chests that would make the eyes of any self-respecting hillbilly gearhead turn green with envy. The seats are bolted to a large slab of aluminum locked partway between a series of rollers, further attached to the floor of what appears to be an immaculate but highly complicated basement workshop during a long and gentle earthquake. You’d need a plane this big just to cart around the instruction manuals that go with it. There’s likely to be a jargon-rich chapter for each and every screw, bolt and wingnut aboard.

Warm wind blowing across my face from an overhead vent makes my eyes heavy for a time, and I remember nothing until our overfed tires punch the earth in the face and I am jolted from my slumber. Presently the engines wind down; the rear ramp of the plane performs a complex raising and lowering procedure and fresh North Carolina night air boards the aircraft, chasing away the sand of sleep. I blink myself awake and assist with the offload process inasmuch as it involves helping the other personnel with their luggage before jumping down to the tarmac for a look-see. The tail of the aircraft towers above me, lit in false moonlight generated by the white lights from the hangar. I can see the stars and you have no idea how happy this makes me… I gather my bags and we head for the gate, we head for the hotel, we head for dinner. Later, I head for a bed.

–

01FEB2012 – We stop off at a Food Lion for sandwiches and lunch supplies enroute to the airfield. The store is full of nourishing foodstuffs but my needs are specific, bordering on demanding.

The item must be small in size, marginally ruggedized and reinforced against accidental mashing. It must require minimal preparation (i.e. unwrap it), and offer maximum protein output when weighed against the aforementioned size and weight guidelines. After a considerable amount of clinical analysis, I select a turkey and cheese sub from the deli, although somewhat wary of biting into moist bread later…

Now for the important stuff. I carefully select my fuel cells; a pair of 355ml aluminum cylinders containing a highly-caffeinated and sugar-free substance, the packaging of which features a duel of blood-red bovine engaged in violent conniptions at the center of a burning star. (Red Bull doesn’t give me wings so much as it allows me to vibrate my way into other dimensions.) Just tell them, “I wanted to go higher.”

I score a Skor bar and a pack of gum while waiting in line. The man ahead of me is buying a case of Coors and a generous supply of Sparks. It is not quite 8:30 a.m. Shine on, you crazy diamond…

–

One hour later, our baggage and equipment is aboard and we’re at last preparing for our departure to St. John’s, Newfoundland. I’m seated closest to the door. It’s not by choice. It was the only pair of seats left available, and my camera bag requires a crush-free zone of its own. My legs are longer than Beowulf so I have to sit sidesaddle in order to keep my giraffe knees clear of the narrow aisle as the air crew rush back and forth shining their lights into overhead spaces and checking things off their lists. That’s what aviators do.

The engines kick in and the lonely patch of tarmac still visible outside the open hatch begins to flicker and blur as the props gain speed, turning faster and faster until their shadows fall away, dissolving to nothingness, evaporating in the sunlight. Suddenly the ground becomes crystal clear again. Wheels up at 1007. Time to read.

Welcome to Gander. Abandon warmth ye who enter here.

1700: Welcome to Gander, Canada. We’re here for a quick “how-do-you-do” with the local aviation authorities and a perfunctory conversation with customs officials, who give us the once-over for cash, knives and guns. (Fuck! I left my passport on the plane. I really wanted a new stamp…) We’re waved through regardless. The airport is deserted – and I mean literally. It feels like the setting for a video game. I pretend we’re being watched. It helps pass the time.

I ducked away from the group to use the restroom and as I stood there, imminently vulnerable, ejecting five degrees of my core temperature into a ready-made sculpture, the following thought crossed my mind: “This is it – this is the scene where the Red Shirt wanders away from the landing party and gets his face chewed open by a toilet-squatting zombie.” Figures it’d be the photographer who gets it first. The others will no doubt pilfer my supplies and reach the objective without me.

The waiting lounge, however, was sumptuous; a full-sized pool table, a full-sized coffee maker, a big screen TeeVee and a generous selection of video games, none of which we had time to enjoy–

“Say, how much time do we have?” One person answered five minutes; another replied with half an hour. Weighing the difference, I plopped down in a leather chair by the window and called AT&T to request a Canadian phone plan. (Or maybe it was a firing plan. Sometimes I have these unfortunate moments where I black out and ask Santa for what I really want:

“Come on, lady. The code is Almighty, coordinates 090264712. It’s all in here!”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t do that! I’m going to need to speak to my supervisor…”

The air traffic control center was a bit more populated; grizzled old men in tucked shirts with carefully trimmed beards and the look of church about them sat in glad adoration of enormous monitors bursting with crisscrossing neon lines. They spoke strings of alphanumeric incantations into headsets, pronouncing the magic spells necessary to guide multiple aircraft safely toward their destinations: “Alpha Charlie one Tango, I have you at two-six-seven, request you two-seven-five northwest at five-thousand…”

We were wheels up an hour later.

–

The runway at St. John’s, Newfoundland, was under attack by a squadron of tiny tornadoes of dry white snow reminiscent of hourglass sand, and the wind gnashed blindly at our props. Once we’d come to a complete stop and the hatches were open, I grabbed my camera and hustled to the hangar hoping to catch some shots of the plane being towed to shelter.

“This is the worst part of the trip,” said the pilot. He’d appeared behind me undetected while I was framing images in my viewfinder.

“Oh? Because you’re not in control?” I asked, turning to face him, realizing this might have been a presumptuous thing to say, and regretting it immediately. Sometimes I clear leather before I check the safety on my mouth.

“Exactly.” He either didn’t hear me or he ignored it. Or I was right about something for a change. “Last time we were here, a jet blew past us on the runway and the wash almost knocked an empty box into the side of the plane. The nose cone is where all the radar equipment lives and it’s worth at least $500,000. I love to fly, but this is really the only part that makes me nervous.”

St. John’s appears mostly deserted. Minimal traffic, fewer lights. A skewed yellow trapezoid announcing the Best place to Buy electronics burns bright like molten gold against the swirling mass of starry ice. Apparently Bryan Adams is playing a show here this week. Somehow this makes sense.

Once I’d checked into my room and changed into clean clothes, I headed for the hotel bar for a salad and a pint. I was tired and stretched a little thin but genuinely happy to be on the move again.

The waitress was wicked cute as waitresses go, but I think she hates Americans. (Hates. Present tense. Pay attention. She’s still out there… waiting.) I say this because I was the only person in the room she didn’t smile at. She smiled at the dopey guy with matching hair, a gold chain and no chin who was drinking white wine and reading a book at the next table. She smiled at the old codgers in ball caps talking about tractor parts. She smiled at the two older ladies in — I mean, she literally stopped smiling when she saw me! If she remembered me from a past life, I had no idea what I might have done to piss her off.

“Hello! I’d like a beer, please.” I placed my hands palms down on the table where she could see them. No sudden movements. She could probably smell fear.

“Well, we have sixteen of them on tap.” Her voice was frosty, her body language clear: Take your pick, fuckstick. I’ll personally pee in whichever pint you choose. Hesitantly, I glanced over at the bar. There’s no way I could read the labels from here and she didn’t appear to be forthcoming with name brands, so…

“Okay, I guess I’ll just wander over and pick one out…?” I was preparing to slide out the booth and review the selection myself if only it meant we could end this uncomfortable standoff. I was hungry and my brain was being unusual.

She repeated her previous statement but slower this time, as though she were addressing a partially-deaf dog rapist who suffered from a terrible learning disorder, and she couldn’t decide between abject hate, or burning pity. How could the number of beers on tap possibly apply to my inability to visually discern between the labels? On a whim, I asked for Guinness. The fates smiled upon me.

Presently my food and drink arrived. I sipped at my (pee-free) stout and devoured my salad, jotting impressions in my notebook and humming quietly along to The Clash’s “London Calling” when it came up on the jukebox.

–

02FEB2012 – Next Bat-night, same hotel Bat-bar. Today was all about gym, pale, and laundry. Clean clothes, quick workout. Read a lot, wrote more.

Somewhere to my left, the synthetic blue thunderbolt of a camera flash erupts in the brown wood darkness of the room. Morrissey howls piteously from the stereo. Just doesn’t fit the vibe of the room.

Spent all day alone. It felt good, like when your doctor and your priest and your boss and everyone else tells you the next drink is going to kill you, but you drink it anyway because what the fuck do they know? Solitude only hates you when you’re new to the game.

You know what’s weird? Accepting that a place like St. John’s is populated. It’s the edge of the world. I mean, sure it’s the year 2012 — people have to be born somewhere and I bet it’s drop dead gorgeous in the summer — but it feels small in a way I can’t properly describe. And it’s back-dated somehow, like maybe the city was founded by visiting aliens who’d gleaned all they could about Western Civilization from television signals they’d intercepted on the way here and thought it’d be a hoot to build their own ant farm, so they placed a sizable credit card order with some sort of aliens-only, Wile E. Coyote-based Acme City Store in order to bring their creation into lockstep with the 21^st century:

“Oh, look! It’s finally here! Let’s open it!”
“Wait — do you think we should maybe do this outside?”
“Good idea!”

These far-born city planners eased their giant wooden baby onto a dolly and together they cart it to a nearby clearing, eventually dropping the handles with a joint huff of exertion. One of them slits opens a document pouch on the side of the crate with a trusty penknife, dons a pair of reading glasses, licks a thumb and begins reading the first page of instructions:

“Congratulations on your new future, it will bring you years of enjoyment… all new, lifetime guarantee… let’s see here… yeah, it says here we get a Best Buy, 2-for-1 pitchers of Budweiser and something called… Sirius XM radio?” He peers over the top of his reading glasses and licks his bottom lip, eyes full of question. “Does that mean it’s big?”

“No, dear. You’re thinking of XL.”
“Huh.” Reads some more, rubs hands together. “Well, here goes nothing!”

On the count of three, they tug hard on the bright red handle marked PULL ME and take a few careful steps back as the gossamer gold balloon begins to expand at a terrific rate… highway off-ramps, strip malls, strip joints, breakfast shops, lunch specials, fine dining, small businesses and hotel chains—all of it begins somersaulting its way free of the confines of the box and sliding into position, clicking and whirring and turning this way and that with a terrific amount of rushing wind and noise, finally locking into place with the imperfect click of casual Chinese craftsmanship, bristling mazes of big screen TeeVees, and clone-grown actors destined to run screaming for New York City just as soon as their legs finish cooling—

“Did you want to order something, sir?” I’m jolted from my reverie by the earnest expression of the winner of the 2012 Cutest High-School Senior competition (Runner-up: Best Rack). I have no idea how long she’s been standing there and I’m taken aback by her display of sudden ninja trickery, but I manage to stammer out something that sounds an awful lot like ‘chicken garden salad with no dressing and black coffee with one sugar, please,’ but it could have been – well, it could have been anything, really…

I glance up at the TeeVee screen while I await my repast: a sporting team consisting of giant people from the newer city of York are scheduled to engage in a mock land war across a mighty lawn with a group of patriots in the name of lucrative contracts. The winner of this contest shall be eligible to have their likeness displayed on cereal boxes across the land. Apparently these contests take place annually…

Huh.

–

03FEB2012 – Flew today. Somewhere along the line the plane became 250-plus-pounds lighter; minus the weight of a current-tracking WOCE buoy; minus the weight of foodstuffs and sandwiches purchased from the local Sobe needed to feed thirteen people; minus the amount of fuel burned; minus the amount of engine heat and carbon dioxide lost to the *fuck-you-cold of the North Atlantic (*that’s metric, by the way), but plus the infinitesimal weight gained across three flash drives by taking photos and videos of the aircraft. In another lifetime, I’d kick the shit out of pure math. Not this one. Next time, maybe.

So. Today. What a weird state of affairs. Three or so hours into the flight, the tail of the plane yawned awake with a high-pitched whine. One section raised, the other lowered and between them the cold air of the North Atlantic bum-rushed our show. I was about six feet back behind the buoy crate, one arm wrapped through a loop of cargo net, crouched low and braced for stability whilst trying not to fall against the leg of the CBC cameraman I’d positioned front and center of the action.

Seconds later, two members of the aircrew shoved the box into the wild blue yonder. A peppermint parachute snapped open and the box disappeared into the frigid waters below. A successful launch.

An estimated eighty percent of an iceberg is below the water line and, much like a sailboat, they are pushed along by ocean currents. These buoys, part of the World Ocean Current Experiment, will allow scientists to track said currents in the areas where icebergs are typically found, giving them a better idea of where to look and thereby keep mariners safe. But you probably knew that already.

–

04FEB2012 – There are no flights today. In fact, nothing is happening today. St. John’s is being audited by a blizzard. Or maybe it’s more of a snow transfusion; out with the old, in with more of the same shit. Knowing in advance that this was going to happen, I stayed awake till 5 a.m., writing and consuming Red Bull like it was my job. This morning, as I sat in the hotel restaurant, someone brought me a Denver omelet and a pot of black coffee.

Minus 24-hour access to the pool and an unlimited supply of fresh Alaskan halibut, brown rice and steamed spinach, this, my friends, is my American dream!

There’s a young boy sitting at a table across the restaurant with two older men. I can remember what it was like to be that kid; I’d rather have been outside playing tag until dark, riding my bike, reading a book or dreaming up reasons why a salt shaker would make an awesome spaceship (figure out the propulsion system, locate the bridge, decide upon a classification and determine if it was built on Earth or in orbit), versus wasting a perfectly good snow day being held captive to the natural ebb and flow of boring adult conversation. The nearer of the men appears to be the boy’s father, as he is looking down at the child with an unmistakable love and pride. The shortest member of the three is busy sipping different liquids through his straw, oblivious to the gaze of admiration.

I watch as a young girl loads a spearful of prostrated chicken bodies into Hell’s Ferris wheel. She performs a last rite of sprinkled herbs and spices before sealing the door of the inferno. Immediately, the tiny cube is filled with hot light and every aspect of the birds’ bodies is revealed. The slow orbit begins. In ten minutes time, the tender pink of their skin will turn a lazy golden brown, like the tan of a college girl with time on her hands and too much rum in her system…

To Be Continued…

In The Future We Will All Have A Chance…

12JUN2011 – The last of the great mindships had sailed from sight and his shoulders were sore from waving goodbye when he noticed the blank sheet of paper lying on the patch of sunlit grass at his feet.  Reality gathered like a cold grapefruit in his gut; the visitors were gone, but the page was still there.  One was a dream.  The other was very much a fact.  Days after the incident, he still couldn’t write.  Nothing made sense anymore and the ideas he’d birthed a decade ago were useless children to him now.  Meatland technology had caught up to his imagination rendering him null, if not void…

2004 – That late night December flight to Dutch Harbor really did it for me.  In the weeks preceding the wreck of the Selendang Ayu, I’d been reading a Ray Kurzweil book, one I own but cannot remember the name of.  It prophesied the impending Singularity and spoke of a fantastic host of futuristic possibilities that set my hungry brain spinning in more directions than I could count.  It was the right tool at the right time.

During that skeleton era I was writing for pure escapism; my boss wanted me dead and I was experiencing my first Alaskan winter on the poor.  The credit wolves were sniffing constantly around our door, although the use of the word ‘our’ in this sentence is questionable.  My already-troubled union was falling further and faster apart and, adding insult to injury, the fridge was always empty.  I was down to my high school weight.  (There was always milk and peanut butter for the young John Connor but Sarah and Reese were left to fend for themselves.  Once close friends, they now hid behind library books, reading an odd or amusing passage aloud now and again from opposite ends of the room.   There was no Internet, no television and nothing resembling a social life to distract them from the awful glare of silence.)

I looked forward to Friday nights; I’d put the Padawan to bed, fix myself a cup of heavy fuel and descend into the dusty black of the basement to a red-lined writing room in the bowels of the House That Drunk Built, armed with a stack of burned CDs, a piece of shit IBM ThinkPad and what was left of my imagination and I wouldn’t leave my desk until the morning sun insisted upon it.

It was during this time that KnoWare Man was born.  I genuinely believe that book saved me.  I put everything I had left into it and it made for a good read.  It began as a short story in 2001; the dialog took a few years to focus and the plot was streamlined over the course of a hard winter or two or three.  Or four.  I finally released it in November of 2010 while working a case in Grand Isle, La.  There were no trumpet calls or angelic choirs when I hit the ‘send’ button.  Instead, I watched this video and took a moment to imagine I’d be rich someday.  Then I took a healthy slug from a box of wine, made myself a bologna and mustard sandwich and began writing cutlines for work photos I’d taken earlier that day during a trip upriver in an aluminum boat.  I’d already outlined my next novel so I thought I could just “whip another bottle into fire” while the crowd was still laughing, shocked by the explosion of breaking glass.

Not so fast.  It turns out I’m too comfortable to write now.  I live in a nice apartment on a nice street in a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn and my bills are paid in full each month.  My boss is only half kidding when he says he wants to kill me, and my credit score is good.  Really good.  I drink coconut water like it’s my fucking job and when I get antsy I do chin-ups on the bar above my bedroom door. (Sarah and John are taken care of to the best of my ability.  She wisely decided we should part ways for the continued preservation of our little tribe…)

“Caterpillar to Agent Monday.” – A man spoke those words into the cuff of his jacket one afternoon last month during my subway ride home.  He was standing about five feet away from me and just to my right.  Maybe he was crazy, or maybe I misunderstood what he’d said.  I misunderstand a lot of what I see, hear or read.  That’s not a flaw.  It’s a goddamn gift…

//

The sign on the truck said Green Renovations:  An old man with wild eyebrows wearing a painters cap and a work shirt that’d seen better days stepped down from the cab of the truck and blinked for awhile, double-checking the address.  After a smoke break, he supervised the offload of a cumbersome grey box and an industrial-strength tripod from the back of the truck  as it was carried up two flights of stairs to a room at the back.  The gear took a little time to set up; measurements were taken and calculations were made, switches were flicked and dials were turned.  The warming machine reeked of hot ozone.  Goggles were donned.  When all was ready, the tech took a remote in his hand and depressed a single button with a gnarled thumb.  A pointed apparatus at the business end of the device flashed once, twice, three times before a bright red line leapt horizontally across the top of the wall, leaving a hint of shadow across the paint.  More adjustments were made and more dials were turned.  Another trilogy of flashes filled the room before a second vertical line was scored across the left edge of the wall at a right angle, intersecting with the first.  This careful procedure would be repeated for the baseboards, ceiling and remaining edges of every wall in each of the empty rooms, wrapping around doorframes, windows and outlets. 

Across this burn line, the nanites would not venture.  This was important.  Once they were let loose, they’d eat everything up to the line and down to the treated plaster — nails, scraps and all, smooth as good whiskey.  Renovation without the fuss, dust or noise.  Care must be taken, however.  If the box of lines weren’t properly closed off — if the lines didn’t intersect, if they didn’t go deep enough – well, there’d be almost no stopping a swarm of nanites.  Accidents were common in the beginning.  An inexperienced tech was responsible for an entire block being consumed by nanites thanks to a tiny gap, a simple miscalculation.  Fortunately, the lifespan of a nanite is less than twelve hours so the other side of the street was spared.  There are very few businesses in this city permitted to practice Green Renovation but their reputations are gold…

In an apartment down the block, a child strokes and plays with her seedCat in the triangle of sunlight pouring in through the open window of her bedroom.  As the animal purrs and arches contentedly beneath her hand, small puffs of dander are released on the breeze, clinging to the splinters on the windowsill and the burrs of the brick wall beyond but not taking root.  Not here.  It isn’t safe.  The stronger seeds will drift out to the buildings and rooftops below where they’ll begin to germinate.  In just five months, a squat thorn bush with dazzling green flowers will produce five small pods the size of walnuts.  Two months later, those pods will erupt with a slight pop and a crop of seedCats will tumble to the ground, blinking, mewling and ravenous for flies, leaves and twigs…

Sign on the walk: “Grand Ma Seizure’s Chicken Shack.”  A line of ambulances as far as the eye can see….

Ben-wa Albuquerque, the exquisitely spoiled teenage daughter of a mega-wealthy businessman saunters down Fifth Avenue wearing little more than a smile, led along by a pair of Bengal tigers adorned in matching diamond collars.  She rents them by the hour from the estate of the deposed Queen of England, who packed her bags and boarded a fast freighter for Brazil in the dark of night with nothing more than the clothes on her back and the Royal Pool Boy in tow when the shit got too real.

Ben-wa gestures and points at every object she desires in a dreamlike, languid manner, every detail of her experience having been addressed to the nth degree.  Ben-wa doesn’t look at price tags, she doesn’t speak to a sales-anyone and she damn sure doesn’t want to damage her two-thousand-dollar manicure by carrying fucking parcels.

This week’s hot item: sex slaves built from salvaged vagabonds and rehabilitated paste junkies.  Hose ‘em down, clean ‘em up, give ‘em their shots, get ‘em to a gym and feed ‘em a steak now and again.  They’ll gladly withstand the excruciating pain of the gold-leafing sessions on a steady diet of Betty Ford’s Ashes.  Frequent use turns the pupils of the user a soft, milky white.

Ben-wa’s purchases will be airlifted by silk dirigible to the roof of her enormous handcrafted Manhattan loft and arranged to perfection by temperamental interior decorators with one-word names; prepubescent protégé’s who panic and flail like windmills in a hurricane if they’re not served a brand of Swiss mineral water so exclusive it doesn’t even have a fucking name.  Each portion is filtered through Natalie Portman’s twat and served in a one-of-a-kind crystal decanter made by a blind French designer whose name is far too A-list to be listed here, and chilled with icy blue shavings from an endangered Alaskan glacier…

It’s raining outside.  I’m waiting for a friend in an oxygen and blood boutique on the Upper East Side.  The room is populated by three scowling androgynous bicycle messengers, two Greek housewives and one trans-gendered DJ with LED sub dermal implants that jump and flash like eels in a fish tank.  A nice girl-from-next-door type serves mood-enhancing ice cream behind the counter while hololamps alter the decor to match the mood of the music, pouring forth from liquid glass speakers painted across the ceiling.  From where I’m sitting, I can see an old woman exiting her luxury apartment.  She’s wearing the pelt of a freshly-slaughtered hipster; the empty eye sockets, the intricately tattooed flesh and magnificently waxed moustache perched high on her left shoulder as his draining irony gland weeps down the back of her dress like the trail of a snail.  She’s assisted into a white stretch hansom drawn by a team of black supermodels…

R.E.S.C.U.E comes to the aid of an advertising executive who finds himself pinned down in a daytime firefight between warring cabdrivers while he’s enroute to a planning meeting.  Seeking cover behind a rusting dumpster, he winces at every ricochet, emptying the contents of his regulation-issue stainless-steel briefcase onto the filthy pavement and cowering beneath it while frantically pressing a small red button on the handle, praying to fuck that his recent work on the SupraTec account has been up to par.  (Employers reserve the right to discontinue their employees’ Esc@pe accounts without prior notification.)  “Welcome to R.E.S.C.U.E.  Please wait while I triangulate your position and plot your escape route.  If you are presently in a situation which threatens your safety, please seek suitable cover…”

15JUL2011 – Good morning from 42nd gear.  I am:

Listening to: Iron Maiden, Fugazi and KISS, three of the four basic food groups.  Speaking of the fourth, I’m:

Drinking: Venti iced coffee (black-eye, sweetened) made with average care by some cute little barista who slaves away at the corner Starbucks.  She’s got big brown eyes, perfect teeth and the good graces to laugh at my dumb jokes when I’m in the mood to make them.  I like my coffee like I like my women: way too young to interest me.  (I am to 4 p.m. what 3:30 is to 1:15.)  And I’m:

Functioning: But barely.  This week has been an experiment in sleep deprivation.  I’ve been awakened every morning at 3 a.m. by the chirp of the Batphone.  Sometimes every half hour.  And each time I’d settle back into the soothing syrup of slumber, the motherfucker’d chirp with news of an oil sheen or a vessel collision, a swimmer lost to the appetite of a rogue wave, a jet skier grounded on a sand bar, a report of a bridge jumper or a body in the water.  The lines between sleep and awake have begun to blur…

Outside my window, sunlight-dappled Battery Park is full of well-rested tourists going on about their happy affairs, expensive cameras slung around meaty Midwest necks as they pause to take snapshots of the first skyscrapers they encounter when they step off the Staten Island Ferry — which is weird, because there’s nothing on Staten Island to draw them away from Manhattan in the first place except mafia housing, sandwich shops, a methadone clinic and a boat rental agency.  The once-idyllic fishing village has earned a bad reputation for being the Island of Misfit Toys and brother, when those Toys come a-charging out of the ferry tunnel like B-Boy baby bullets with bad attitudes, you don’t want to be standing in their way.  A parade of used-up harpies, strung-out scarecrows and burned-down buildings of human beings trickle into the heat of the morning sun like blood from a gut wound, searching for a free cigarette and a park bench to snuggle up to, squawking at each other across the busy pavement about nothing you’d ever want to hear once you’ve washed your face and hands…

In the future, we will all have a chance to bite the hand that feeds us,

TWM

Stevie Wonder, Me, and The Death of The Fightin’ 88th

So, there I am at my favorite diner in the valley.

It’s a bright Saturday morning; I’m tucking into a stack of Silver Dollar pancakes smothered in blueberry syrup and a damn good cup of coffee, and enjoying the company of the man seated across the booth from me – one Stevland Hardaway Judkins, born May 13, 1950. You know him better as the genius who wrote ’Higher Ground’, released on his 1973 album ‘Innervisions’.

We were talking about this, that and the other thing and before long the conversation turned to dreams, so I told him about the time I dreamt I was being chased across the Gobi Desert by a vengeful Mariachi band…

I ran until I could run no more and when they finally ran me down, they marched around me in an ever-tightening circle, blowing their mighty trumpets as if to crumble the walls of Jericho.  I lay where I fell, battered by the force of the angry sound, balled into the fetal position and doing all I could to protect my head while they stomped ever closer.  Spikes of hot sunlight glinted off their polished golden instruments and the sequins of their exquisite costumes; their brown leather sandals kicked up mile-high plumes of hot dust and desert sand like explosions in an old war movie…

It was a dream within a dream.

I can see it now; the four of us, the only ones left from the Fightin’ 88th - Little Joe, Arizona Frank, Mikey-from-the-Bronx and me, the MoPic – running like Hell while the Devil took potshots at our unprotected backsides.  We dove as one for the relative safety of a foxhole, blown over the top of the uncoiled concertina wire by the force of a nearby explosion.

“Well,” gasped Little Joe a few moments later, ”Whadda’ we got left?”  We dumped out our bags. It didn’t look good. We had 40, maybe 45 rounds of pistol ammo between us, 23 rounds for a Thompson with a jammed feed, three hand grenades, two canteens of water and no rations to speak of.

Arizona patiently counted the ammo a second time.  “We’ll be fine,” he says looking at the rest of us with a bemused grin, ”so long as there’s only 39 of them left and none of us miss.”

As for me, I’ve got three frames left on this roll and a bagful of stuff that will probably never see the inside of a dark room.  I snap three quick portraits of the other men – something for grieving widows to frame and place on the mantle right next to the wedding photo.  Hurriedly, I jot my name and rank, the date, I.D. for each of the men, my serial number, press affiliation, and some final ironic observations about the brutality of war into my field notebook before stuffing it and the camera back into my old canvas bag, covering it with my pock-marked helmet and covering the whole thing with a pile of stones and a white handkerchief.  Hopefully one of our guys finds it. Looks I’ll have to accept that Pulitzer posthumously.

The eyes of the haunted stare back at me, their faces drawn.  It is silent for a moment, save for the boom of distant shelling.  The minds of the doomed men reach out to the friends and families they know they will never see again.

Little Joe suddenly grabs the radio, twisting the crank on the front like a man possessed.  Arizona slowly reaches over and points out, yet again, the gaping bullet hole in the face plate that prevents it from working.  Disgusted, Joe casts it aside.  “This is it,” he fumes.

“I reckon yo’ right about that.”  Arizona speaks slower than a sunset.

“No way!  We’ll get out of this! Right? I’m supposed to get married!” That’s Mikey-from-the-Bronx, dumb kid, still green.  Brand new to the unit, barely 17, lied about his age to impress his old man, killed his first Kraut about an hour ago.

The explosions creep closer, slamming into the ground like a giant’s footsteps… closer, closer still… I jump with each blast, as dirt and debris rain down around our heads.  They’re zeroing in on us… better this way, I guess.  Faster.  A mighty pressure builds in my chest, and try as I might I cannot breathe… we’re not gonna make it out of here, not this time.  We’d pushed our luck taking out that machine gun nest.

Suddenly the air is filled with the Doppler scream of an incoming round.  This is it.  Without thinking, I light up a smoke and jam my fingers into my ears – I don’t know where I’m going next, but there’s no sense in showing up deaf… I close my eyes, shouting to be heard above the banshee wail of the mortar shell.., louder, louder!  “It’s been a hell of run, gentlemen!”

I awoke with a start to discover my own hands clutching my pillow tight against my face and my alarm clock beeping like a dump truck in reverse.

Stevie clapped his hands and laughed with delight, swaying back and forth the way you imagine he might.

We called for more coffee, and continued to talk as the morning sun shone brightly.

 

 

WE ARE HERE TO MAKE WORDS.

I wanted to be an astronaut until I realized that I sucked at math.  That was the fourth grade.  I’d failed the same stupid test for the third time in a row, consequently developing a deep, psychological hated for red ink pens…

My next “when-I-grow-up moment” didn’t really come until high school, when I decided I was either gonna be the guy who made monster suits and spaceships on movie sets, or I was gonna be a writer.  I’d been writing since I could hold a Crayon and figured it was as good a destiny as any.

I was still a freshman in high school when I typed up a nine page short story about a guy who drove around the country hunting down the losers of a state-sanctioned lottery as an alternative to global thermonuclear warfare.  I sent the story to my parents, who unbeknownst to me sent it to a publisher, who in turn called me up and told me that if I finished the story before the end of the summer, I’d have myself a book deal.  I panicked, blindly polishing every spark of creativity out of the story, missed the deadline and shelved it forever.

But the experience gave me a real push toward words.  From that point on, I became obsessed with writing.  Maybe this was a doable destiny!  I started forming the idea in my head that if I just focused on this lone and immaculate objective, I’d someday perform a great and magnificent feat: I envisioned doing something amazing, something that could change the course of history and unite the world in a common emotion, like an athlete who trains their whole life for one shining moment while overcoming great obstacles along the way.

I decided that I wanted to be able to express human emotion in a way that no one had ever done before.

Still in high school, I looked into haiku on the advice of a much-respected English teacher, quickly becoming a fan of the medium’s prison shiv beauty — short, sharp and, inserted just beneath the ribcage, designed to take your breath away.

In just seventeen
syllables, I swore I could
smell cherry blossoms.

As you can imagine, I was crap at writing haiku.  Everything I wrote looked suspiciously like something someone else had already written a long time ago and I felt ashamed.  Plus, I’d made the mistake of telling the wrong people my dreams.  Presently I gave up on haiku.  Why not?  I was nowhere near a temple, and there were no monks to guide me.  Sweeping the floor was just sweeping the floor, and a glass of water was just a stupid fucking goddamn glass of water.

Still obsessed with words, I then had the notion that a person could somehow open their mouth and let brand new sounds tumble forth — words and phrases never before spoken by a human mouth, in any language, by any race, anywhere on the face of the Earth.  Beyond dead languages, beyond glossololia.  I thought that maybe the key to expression was locked inside this new box…

Except I had no database or monthly scientific journals to base my findings upon.  So I made a lot of retarded noises and jotted them down, hoping one of them might be even slightly virginal in nature.

(It’s no wonder that I remained in a similar physical state until I was in my early 20s.)

After that, I wanted to come up with an answer for the question of why we find some people more attractive than others.  I thought that maybe it had something to do with the measurements of the human face — the height, width or angle of the nose, the spacing of the features, the length of the jawline, the width of the mouth, or the specific color of the eyes.  What if all these factors added up to some sacred number, one that doomed a small group destined to succumb as prey to holy integers?  Years later, I would find this on the internet:

It’s nice to know that as an adolescent, I wasn’t completely off the mark; just off my rocker.  And understandably horny.

Following high school, I gave up on my dream of being a special effects artist.  It seemed the only way to achieve this was to move to Los Angeles and hang around on movie sets until I found someone to teach me.  Instead, I applied and was accepted to a prestigious Midwest art college.  I was hopeful — until they told me how much it would cost.  So I revisited my writing dream and, after reading too much Hunter S. Thompson, decided I wanted to be a war correspondent.

And Uncle Sam was gonna fund it, because I sure as fuck couldn’t.

At first I considered a stint in the army, or maybe the Marines.  I’d need to learn some very valuable survival skills before setting out into the wild.  I had a vision of myself in four or five years time; a half-smoked cigarette permanently attached to my bottom lip, a gaggle of battered cameras slung around my neck, an ancient carbine across my back, dust-caked goggles pushed high on my forehead, and an ancient Underwood under one arm.  Once I finished my enlistment, I’d take any assignment, no matter how dangerous.  And wandering to some of Earth’s far-flung shit holes, I’d explore the last remaining exotic lands still hidden from the light of Western progress.  I would write stories about the things I saw there, and take photographs of the fascinating people I met.

And one day I would simply miss my deadline, never be heard from again.  That was my retirement plan.

I was not yet 21.

So I approached several recruiters and attempted to make an intelligent decision based on the horrible lies they were paid to tell me.  I tested well, and applied for jobs in photography, journalism and for some reason, cryptology.  But the recruiters all told me those fields were closed, and that I should pick something else.  We went round and round in this manner until finally, disgusted and hopeless, I stormed into an office and spoke thusly to a Navy recruiter:

“I want the most far-flung, whacked-out job you have, something that will take me to the far side of the globe, without threatening to bring me one inch closer to the chair I’m sitting in.”  And that’s the story of how I never became an astronaut, or a war correspondent, or the guy who makes monster suits or spaceships for movies.

Had I known that recruiters are instructed to ‘guide’ people into certain job fields where their respective service was experiencing shortages, or had I only been willing to wait.  Well, the outcome might have been different.

Instead, I went to Europe and built bombs for four years.

I’m pleased to say that the desire to write came with me.  I started keeping a journal just after high school, and I took it with me where ever I roamed.

Journal writing frustrated the fuck out of me at first.  I lacked skill, and I was impatient.  I was in a big damn hurry to write perfect things and powerful sentiments.  I didn’t know the first fucking thing about real writing but I still wanted to do something amazing, something so insightful that it could lift the veil of reality, and part the curtain to another world.  I wanted to write modern spells and conjure new truths.

I wanted to surpass all previously written works for their ability to inspire and split foreheads with the lightning of the profound.  I didn’t even know what the fuck I was gonna write about, but I figured that once people read these holy words the message would spread like wildfire…

The world would lay down arms.  Millions of people would wake from a terrible dream, weeping and gnashing their teeth.  The leaders of the world would turn to one another and exclaim, “Goddamn, but we’ve been going about this all wrong!  The last book has been written, all words can rest!  We must now aspire to fuck one another with the cock of peace and harvest grain together under the same sun, washing our clothes together in the great river and turning our swords back to plowshares yet again.  God won’t save the world.  Science won’t save the world.  The earth plain-ass wasn’t meant to be saved.  This book has said everything we’ve been trying to say, everything we ever thought about saying, and everything we probably would have said in the next ten thousand years, but didn’t know it yet!”

Sure, I was a pretentious ass.  I wanted to write magic holes through mountains, and weave spells, blah, blah, blah.  But I also genuinely wanted to understand beauty, and lust, and savagery.  I secretly hoped I’d go crazy when I got old so I could map my experience in a journal, holding on clarity like a fading lamplight as I ventured down that last and darkest of tunnels.  I was convinced that there was so much more to the world, but I didn’t know how to express it beyond my diet of tabloid headlines, song lyrics and science fiction movies.  Sometimes the words were right there on the tip of my tongue.  I wanted to be able to communicate anything to anyone, and make the whole world understand everything.

But how could I?  I didn’t understand myself, and I couldn’t separate myself from what I wanted to write about.  I didn’t know where to begin, or where I ended.  I didn’t know jack shit.

So I kept writing.

I continued to write through my early twenties, but without success.  Journals came and journals went.  I wrote letters about this, that and the other thing.  My friends were full of praise, and they let me live in the world I’d created.  I was The Writer.

I devoted years of attention to the recommended greats – the Beats, those who’d come before me and who by measure of their poverty and fearlessness were far more devoted to the craft than I knew how to be, each of them a pioneer in some regard.  They explored and exploited their own wormhole, staking their claim to a particular voice or style one step ahead of the gold rush.

The voices that called loudest to me were: drugs, music, sex, and road trips – oh, my!  And the strangest of those voices?  Assassins.  (Giant fucking millipedes??  Really??)

I wasn’t prepared to give up on writing, but I also realized I wasn’t very good.  Still, I promised myself one drunken night in a land very far away that if I ever became homeless I’d still carry a pen and a piece of paper.  “You can abandon your work, but your work will never abandon you.”

Years passed, and I thought that perhaps stronger measures were called for.  Suppose I made a Robert Johnson deal with You-Know-Who, and waited my turn at the midnight crossroads, armed with the wing of a bat and the eyes of a newt.  Would the Horned One grant me my deepest desire based on the strength of a pinkie swear, or was I going to have to slit my palm with a crude dagger carved from the jaw bone of a murdered stag?  Headless hooves stomping in the bloodied winter grass, the end result of my quest to harness above as the below…

But I didn’t believe in the Devil, and I didn’t actually think I could murder a stag.  So that plan was out.

Time passed.  Journals were purchased and filled.  The majority were dog-eared, covered in duct tape and existed pretty much as ad space for my ego, their pages weighted with stapled concert stubs, proclamations, one-liners written on airliners, photographs of models, quotes torn from magazines, strange things and coffee rings, but mostly drunken heartache.  Twenty years, nine countries, five states, three islands, one Indian reservation, and one snow globe later, and still I have no idea of what I was trying to say.

My apartment is pitch black tonight, and my hands look so much older by the glow of this laptop screen.  Time is out there, snorting and stomping the snow, exhaling demons from its nostrils, waiting… sometimes I think I can almost feel it at my elbow.

Like right now.

I’ll be 40 in a few months, and no closer to writing anything more powerful than a good one-liner.  In the absence of my all-powerful epic, I’ve managed one novel, sixty short stories and thanks to a second enlistment in the other nautical-sounding of our Armed Forces, a stack of official-sounding press releases — none of which has ever escaped being disemboweled by a red pen.

There is the known, which we sometimes tire of.  And then there’s the rest of it.

All I’ve learned about life is that I don’t know much.  And from what I can tell, neither does anyone else.  Everything we think we know takes place on this planet, and in this dimension.  We are born here, and we die here.  We are bound to this rock.  The stories we tell are of this world, for this world, and by this world.  They describe our experiences in this dimension, and how we live this life.  And we know only these stories and their endless spin-offs.  We’ve described our home to death, and pretty much worn out our tongues.  I don’t think there are any virginal sounds left.

I recently deleted The Doors from my music collection, but I’ll give Jim Morrison one last nod: “No one gets out of here alive.”

There’s no such thing as magic, only science we haven’t figured out yet.  Emotions are not facts, and love – as much as you wish it wasn’t true – is purely chemical.  Relationships are all about timing, security and chemistry.  And one man’s words aren’t gonna change the world, so long as there are people around to disagree with them.

Being successful in this life only means that your physical needs and comforts will be taken care of while you’re alive; inhabiting your body, existing in this dimension and playing your role in this traveling production.

The pawn and the bishop go back in the same box when the game is over.

But there has to be more!  Something just beyond, something left behind, maybe something we’ve forgotten?  I feel as though we’re living in a collective dream, standing tall on the edge of a trance:  All the while you thought you were having a lengthy conversation with Iggy Pop in a half empty bar late one summer night in 1993, in reality you’ve been standing in the checkout line of a Memphis convenience store for the past ten minutes, transfixed by the mutated face staring back at you from a Pringles can on the conveyor belt, and frankly people are beginning to notice…

In the end, maybe Words have failed me.  Maybe I failed the Words.  Maybe there was nothing to fail.  George Washington Carver once said that if you love something long enough, it would give up its secrets.  Was I deemed not worthy to peek behind the curtain?  Did I perform the wrong spells?  Whatever the reason, whenever the moment, when it came time to select my Holy Path, I chose the soft option.

And so my reward was a different life.  Instead of leaving this world on a pillar of fire to walk among the stars; instead of traveling to distant lands and capturing beauty reserved for only the bravest; instead of a day-to-day fight for survival and a life lived on the edge of a fast-moving knife; instead of summoning sentences both sage and surreal, crafting tales with the power of the Old Gods like the Jackie Chan of Juxtaposition, or the Wolverine of the Who, What, Where, Why and When…

Instead, I’m writing this blog.

Thanks for reading.

(There may be secrets left, but I’ll be damned if I know where to look for them.)

Operation: Sweet Tea – Dispatches from Dagobah

The Inner Voice is never quiet.  It creates characters, it writes dialog.  When it can’t think of anything better to do, it writes letters.  It fills a legal pad here, a Post-it note there, or the glossy back of a drink special menu swiped from behind the bar of some REDACTED roadside attraction, the glossy surface of which is valued for its ability to work well with Sharpies.

EARLY SEPTEMBER 2010, LOCATION UNKNOWN

Nyx,

How goes?  Things here are ramping down.  Word on the street is that I’ll take over for REDACTED and then transfer to REDACTED or hopefully REDACTED.  I’d like to spend a week in REDACTED before I REDACTED, however.  (Ha!  I bet you thought I was gonna say REDACTED.)  Things to do on my off-time: visit Cafe REDACTED, get photos of buskers, drink absinthe, and browse the dusty knot of voodoo stores orbiting REDACTED Park.  I need something suitably ugly and unspeakably disturbing for my work desk.  A shrunken head, a fertility doll perhaps, something along those lines.

I can’t imagine what the REDACTED was like during the apex of the thing.  They should have called it OPERATION: MONKEY FUCKS A/N REDACTED COCONUT. I’ll just say that and change the channel.

But heavens, people do a lot of “turning around” down here!  The following are examples of their quaint speech patterns:

“Well, this fella turns aroun’ and sez…”
 “Now, mah daddy turns around and sez…”
 “Well now you turn around and just drive down to the Piggly-Wiggly…”

Oh, and this one! “…‘Well mebbe if’n yoo gotcher head outta yer asshole yoo woodn’t smell shee-it.’”

Time: slows to a crawl. Think ‘Matrix’.

I swear to fuck, that last line was delivered with so much weight and solemnity, and infused with Southern wherewithal: It’s as Bubba had personally re-invented fire and was awaiting my unbridled praise, or at least a retort.

In the mind’s eye, I could see him leaning back, crossing his mighty arms over his barrel chest and slowly nodding his head, further treasuring the weight of his corn-fed decree… Seconds passed.

You know what I’m like: My brain — furiously struggling to diagram, dissect, connect, detect, analyze and reduce the hundredfold layers of subtle communication in this simple moment to a Lego-simple observation (or better still, a haiku!) designed to knock his fucking socks off and demonstrate my mental prowess — takes just a cunt-hair too long to export viable verbal content, and the moment passes.  This strategic error is misinterpreted as dumbstruck idiocy and Bubba walked away, the victor by default, mumbling and slowly shaking his head. “That feller ain’t got no sense no how.  Must be a Yankee.”

Side note: I’ve passed along my thoughts on the iPad to you.  It looks like a wicked good travel tool, but the governing principle of my life is LESS NOT MORE.  I can’t justify owning an iMac, an iPhone AND a laptop, etc. (And planning to reward myself with the iPhone 4 upon my return!)  And yes, should I decide to ditch my iMac/television set, I’ll certainly let you know.  We’ll talk money, or trade.  I’ll need to wipe it dumb and sort out shipping, unless you get the urge to visit your brother in REDACTED.

Ultimately, I’d like to own only what I could carry around in an old Army half ton: Move all of my books into the clouds.., reduce my bags down to two or three.., move to a warmer climate and ditch my winter gear.., keep a loaded .45 under the seat and make my coffee over a different fire each morning.  You get the idea.  I feel we amass far too many things in our lifetime, and that we expend our limited and valuable energy trying to move, store, protect, purchase, dispose of, maintain and figure out how to upgrade to MORE THINGS.

Right.  I’m off the soap box, I’m sure someone else needs the firewood.  Bravo tango whiskey, it looks like I’ve got a few more weeks ahead of me.  You know how our Uncle works: “Hey! How far would you be if we hadn’t called you back?” And yes, per our texts from REDACTED: Look into Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” (the first book I ever stole!), and seek ye also the clever, clever writings of Grant Morrison.  And Warren Ellis.  The foul-mouthed comic book genius, not the wild-bearded manticore who plays git-fiddle for Nick Cave.  A different Warren Ellis. Although Grinderman will blow your shitting mind just as well. (Click it. Trust me.)

Many thanks for the BBT infusions, BTW! A little nerd in the Savage Land goes a long way.

Go, see, do.

Yours in Christ,

TWM

//

11SEP2010

Dear Cass,

Fuck, yes.

Hello from a Chili’s somewhere in REDACTED after a two-day sick fit full of fevered dreams and fearful images; I’m drinking cold beer and sweet tea like they’re going out of style, but I’ve always got time for coffee.  The sharp laughter of sassy black girls rolls out of the kitchen in a tumbled wave, shrill gossip and delighted decadence bursting through the double doors dressed in the metallic jangle of empty pans and the steamy clink of hot flatware.  I’m reading, writing. I’ve ordered as healthy an option as can be expected.

September 11^th.  Nine years ago to the day, when certain buckets of excrement were striking the blades of certain exhaust systems, and certain planes were hate-tackling certain buildings in the East Coast concrete convention I temporarily call home, my life was at a perfect stand still. I remember launching pine cones from a leaf blower in the parking lot of a tiny rescue station on an Indian reservation somewhere in the REDACTED REDACTED thinking that my life as I knew it was over; that I was free to fail, and that I would probably go nowhere else in life because I simply wasn’t in a position to assume differently. I hated my life, hated my decisions, and despised my surroundings.  I had way too many regrets and not enough good stories to tell.  I was no longer relevant.  I was removed from the equation.  My, how things cha– Oh, hey.  My food is here, we’ll talk later.

19SEP2010

Dear Cass,

Hello again from REDACTED.  I’m writing this from the weathered grey deck of a beach house.  The surf roars and the gulls scream and the wind is warm and sweet.

Ten minutes ago: The door was open, so I walked in holding the key in one hand.

“Hello?  Don’t shoot, they said I could live here…”  I walked from room to room in search of what I felt would be angry (or at the very least confused) homeowners and listened carefully for the click of a rifle bolt, but the place was empty.  Nobody here but us aliens.

Five minutes ago: The front of my rental car was encrusted with dead protein, so I hosed it off while I considered my options.  I decided that my options included relaxing, so I hauled my gear onto the porch, kicked off my shoes and put my tired feet on the rail.  Took a beer from the fridge, left a dollar. Goddamn, it’s good to smell the ocean again.  (It’s like having your face buried between the thighs of Mother Nature. It’s a briny, primal smell. Makes me feel like a centaur, or some such…)

Two hours ago: My drive from REDACTED was uneventful, unless you count knocking off the passenger side mirror and putting a tiny gouge in the door of the rental.  Oops. It was purely accidental.  I’d parked the car at the side of the road to photograph a mural in REDACTED and when I was backing up to turn around, I was only watching the oncoming traffic side – not the side where that no-good, goddamn egg-sucking sumbitch Murphy up and decided to install a speed limit sign. Glad I had insurance.

Yesterday: I woke up at 0630.  Showered, shaved, brushed my teeth.  Filled my pockets with small black rectangles: my wallet, my iPhone, and the pretty-much useless REDACTED cellphone.  See also: Keys, gum, a scrap of paper to write on, and a pen.  Out the door by 0700.  I was told the helicopter would be taking off at 0800, so I felt I had plenty of time to get where I was going.

Except I didn’t.

Twenty minutes later, my phone rings.  It’s the REDACTED producer I’m supposed to meet at the airfield.  He wants to know where I am.

“On my way.  Why, what time are we taking off?”

“Uh, probably in the next few minutes?”

“Uh, I’ll call you back?” I stomped hard on the gas.

The drive from to the REDACTED airport was only twenty minutes, and the map showed a straight line.  Unfortunately, my GPS put me in someone’s driveway and then took me through the only underground tunnel in the whole fucking state of REDACTED.  More wrong turns took me more wrong places before I whipped around the corner onto Main Street where the airport lives, all four tires squealing like fucked pigs.   Things were getting tight, but I was in the home stretch.  Almost.  There were no cars on the road at this hour, which explains why I was traveling at speeds of 75 and 80 and running red lights like it was election year in a brothel.

The producer called back.  I was screeching around a corner at the time, so yeah, maybe I shouted into the phone a little.

“HELLO?”

“Uh.., where are you?  We’re ready to fly.”

“Sorry, on my way, I just came out of the tunnel.”

“There’s a tunnel in REDACTED?”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you all about it when I get there.”

I finally found the airfield and slid into a parking spot, tires skidding to a ragged halt on the dusty gravel.  Popped the trunk, grabbed my camera bag and started for the gate when a older woman in a shabby security guard uniform and a slow Southern accent appeared out of thin air.  She spoke so soft and slurred that I almost ran past her.

“Now, sugah, I’m ahfraid you cain’t park yo car heah, because you’s taking spots away frum t’others who work heah.  You just pahk it two blocks over thatch way, ah’m sho yo’ little friends’ll wait…” (What did reality look like from inside this woman’s head??)  I tried Reason, I tried Manners, I tried Jedi, and I tried to explain the tight schedule and complicated mechanics of the fantastic flying machine that was, even now, spinning up for take-off.  But she would have none of it.

Fuck.  Sometimes you gotta let the little old lady win.  (And sometimes you gotta jump back in the rental cars and stuff it three spots to the left when the little old lady isn’t looking.)

I ran for the terminal, slapping the open thigh pockets of my pants.   Something felt wrong.  Nothing says ‘sloppy’ like Velcro that refuses to close and — shit did I just lose a REDACTED cellphone?  No time for that now.  As long as I have my iPhone, my wallet, the car keys, my camera gear and my GPS, the whole Western world could bake itself into an apple fucking pie.

Seven minutes later: I’m stuffed into a black and yellow Sikorsky 76-C that resembled a giant carpenter bee sitting on the tarmac.  There would be no window seat for this trip.  “The needs of the many,” as Spock said.  No, I was informed that this was a media escort, first and foremost.  Whatever I snapped or captured on video was strictly for documentation.  The co-pilot seated me in between the REDACTED camera operator and a REDACTED photographer.  On-screen talent rode in back on the right opposite the sound guy, and the producer squeezed in front left, with the REDACTED liaison opposite him.  The passengers were separated from the pilot and co-pilot by a thin curtain but thanks to the headsets we all wore, we could carry on a conversation.

A moment aside: I’m really not comfortable with video and I’ve had less than zero experience in using one.  Framing is different, the controls are awkward, there’s the constant jarring, you can’t turn it over for vertical shots like you can with a still camera, and you always have to worry about the sound.  Yet they insisted I bring one, so last night I opted to drive all the way to REDACTED to pick one up from REDACTED.  The understanding was that I’d meet some of the REDACTED staff for dinner, and I based my decision on this.  I arrived at the city limits with no problems, but I got turned around in all the construction and the traffic surrounding the REDACTED.  I ended up turning off the GPS and hanging half out the window of the rental, driving it like I stole it.  By then, it was getting late and my calls inquiring about dinner plans had gone unreturned.  Found the address, got the camera bag, tossed it into the trunk and, pretty much disgusted by this point, hauled ass back to my hotel in REDACTED before I turned inside out from hunger.

Back on the helicopter: It was a long flight out to the platform and I nodded off more than once, swaddled up safe like a crash test Jesus in my kapok life jacket that felt like something out of WWII; I was further snugged by the radio headset pinching my skull, the five-point safety harness collapsing my lungs, the D700 snug around my neck and the Sony HD video camera on my lap.

Once we arrived at the platform, I listened as the pilots recited the necessary spells and incantations to get the bird on the ground, or in this case, a tiny green hexagon balanced on the edge of the platform which stood like a steel tarantula in the middle of the REDACTED REDACTED.  The pilot powered down the engines, and we shrugged out of our many restraints.

At this point, I was only vaguely aware of my directions.  Had we come from this way, or that?  The water stretched out in all directions.  It was a surreal experience to say the least, and I half expected a bald man in a wheelchair with a white cat on his lap to meet me on the deck.  “We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Bond.”

We filed inside and I dropped my bag, making a beeline for the coffee to clear the fog of sleep.  Safety brief: No rings, no jewelry, no weird piercings.  Hardhats, gloves and hearing protection were issued; tiny bullets of yellow foam that fill my ear canals like the larva of some strange insect, growing slowly, devouring all sound.  Suddenly, I could hear myself think and breathe, and my voice was clear in my head. I was well into my Darth Vader impression when I looked up, noticing the puzzled expressions of the rest of the group staring back at me. Way to be.

Up a flight of stairs, a few lefts and rights and suddenly we came to the drilling deck where a giant robot arm called an “iron roughneck” was unscrewing hundred-foot sections of pipe fresh from the seafloor, as another arm high overhead stacked the pipe snug into a vertical rack.  It was an awesome sight.  It was also screaming loud, and everything was covered in the mud of a ten thousand hunting dogs.

Time for work.  Out come the cameras.  Right off the bat, I’m frustrated by the safety gloves; a size too small, depriving my hands of complex motor function. Plus, every time I lined up a shot, the sound guy would step in front of my lens, or drop the boom into my frame. (I would mention this to him a few times, but receive only blank looks in return.)

Next stop, the control booth where two men are seated in front of what looks like the most expensive flight simulator I’ve ever seen.  They sip coffee from white paper cups and make small adjustments to the iron roughneck via joysticks in their hands.  A row of computer screens above their heads tells them everything they need to know about return rates, fluid viscosity, and bottom pressure.  The room was crowded. Got a few good shots, though.

More tours, more wonders, and more “holy shit” moments from me.  Helicopter rides!  Robots!  The REDACTED!  Later, I ate freshly grilled steak  from a barbecue deck on the back of the platform and drank wicked good sweet tea.  I gathered more footage, and took a few more shots.  Then we got back in the helicopter and returned to REDACTED. Conversations clicked in and out in my headphones, but I was silent during the trip, thinking about this, that and the other thing.

I drove back to my room, stopping only for more coffee and quarters for the laundry machine.  I had just five hours to write my cutlines, process, edit and upload my video before I’d need to wash my clothes, pack my bags and make prepartatins for the morning drive to REDACTED.

Right away, technical difficulties were experienced.  My camera wouldn’t show up on my laptop.  Tried different things, tried downloading drivers. Nothing worked. Grabbed the camera body and my 8GB flash drive and headed for the hotel business center to coax their tired-ass PC into moving my files. Thirty agonizing minutes later, I had the images transferred.  “The faster technology gets, the more impatient we are for it.  (Note to self: Stop shooting in RAW until you get your photo editor sorted out, and never leave home without a card reader!)

I spent an hour making sense of my notes and handouts from the platform until I had something decent, before turning my attention to the video.  And then, horror of horrors: I discover there was no audio on my footage.

A thousand foul litanies.  I shouted and punched the air in frustration, but I knew there were no options and fewer excuses.  I’d just have to transport the video with me to REDACTED, dodge the embarrassing phone calls asking for product, and figure a way to salvage this horrid fucking mess.

20SEP2010

Dear Cass,

Experienced a moment akin to “Apocalypse Now” today; a long ride upriver in a barebones metal workboat toward a place called REDACTED.

I’d neglected to acclimate my camera to the humidity, and as I opened the door of the air conditioned trailer and headed for the pier I watched the lens fog over like San Francisco, my glasses included.  Nothing says sexy like being blind as a fucking bat.  Once aboard, I used an old rag from under the seat to wipe my camera down.

Then I spent the next few hours on the receiving end of a shouted, albeit fascinating education on pirates, illiteracy in southern REDACTED and the mating habits of bald eagles from the animated old skeleton at the wheel, shouting to be heard over the roar of the twin outboard engines.  He had the strangest, most expressive hands I’ve ever seen, the sort of thing you can’t ignore once you’re aware of it.

His earlobes flapped in the wind.  I’m not making that up.

It was a long and droning experience, even at safest speed.  Occasionally we’d catch air on the wake of another fast-moving vessel and come down hard enough to rattle the teeth in my head.  It sounded as though something very large and very angry was trying to tunnel in through the bow of the boat.

The trip was part of an area familiarization tour, the idea being that I’d photograph REDACTED as he handed out awards to two men who’d worked hard, done their part, and were ready to go home.  The ceremony was rushed, mumbled and everyone squinted in the sun.

Frustrations were mounting; first I’d failed to bring what I felt were the right lenses for the job, and I only brought one camera body.  Second, the boom microphone on the video unit failed to work, and then the media encoder on my copy of Premiere had failed to load, meaning I couldn’t export product, and now, decent subject matter was getting harder and harder to come by!  The REDACTED in REDACTED were screaming for imagery, but seemed to change their minds about what they wanted day by day.  I’m not one to use sports terminology to express myself, but this trip was filled with strikes and foul balls. I desperately needed a base hit or, dare I hope, a home run.

22SEP2010

Dear Cass,

Drinks tonight at Artie’s, a rundown road house about four miles down the road, listening to Pantera. That’s the secret purpose of loud bars.  “Shut up and drink up.”

23SEP2010

Dear Cass,

I've always wanted to pull over and take a picture.

Hello from an alternate universe, where Hiroshima never happened and Glenn Danzig found his true calling as a summer camp counselor.  My nails are in rough shape.  Chewed up, dry.  Everything down here is covered in dust and pollen.  Had to rinse off the car again this morning just to see out the windows.  Sent you a picture of the sunrise, hope it made you smile.

This morning: took a drive to locate the airfield in anticipation of an event scheduled for tomorrow.  I amused myself by doing funny voices as I steered the car along the rugged asphalt and long-neglected potholes as I made my share of wrong turns.  Still, I’d rather fuck up today on no timetable, than screw the pooch tomorrow when it really matters.  I read the names of the streets aloud in a high-pitched voice and tried to use each of them in a sentence.  I began a monologue about a poor little backwoods girl with an abnormally strong Southern accent who lived alone in a cardboard shack with her determined, albeit slightly psychopathic father:

“Mah daddy’ll gut you quicker’n sheeit… Ah seen ‘em skin a rev-uh-new-er man and burry th’ body out near Hog Lake, quick as you puhlease.  Made me a pair uh shoes from his hide, too.  That was the first pair o’ shoes I ever owned, and I liked ‘em real well.  My daddy looked at me when he wuz guttin’ that man and said ‘Ah got to fend for me an’ mine’. Yessir, he said that.”

Then I found different ways to pronounce “hog jowls” for the next twenty minutes.  Made me laugh, anyway.

Half the streets on REDACTED Isle are named for trees, and the other half are named for berries or other random words.  At the end of REDACTED is a large dusty compound presently occupied by a number of trailers.  Prior to the month of REDACTED, it was an empty lot.  Now it’s populated by ATVs and massive pickup trucks, and a large white tent in the center, where the food comes from.  I’m pretty sure the swamp wants the land back though, because the plywood threshold of the tent sinks a good inch into the gurgling ground when you step on it.

My office is in a small utility trailer along the left side of the compound, just past the porta-potties.  Step out the door and everything goes white hot in an instant, the heat punching you square in the face.  I can be at the pier in 15 seconds, my car in 30 seconds, taking a piss in 10 seconds, or back at the beach house in about three minutes.

Most of the people here work on the REDACTED response teams.  Their job consists of accompanying the boat crews out to document REDACTED, and ensuring that REDACTED in the field are equipped with water, safety equipment, and other supplies.  REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED.

24SEP2010

Dear Cass,

We picked up some REDACTED from REDACTED today; met their helicopter at the airfield, then took them on a boat ride out to REDACTED, an island a few miles distant from here, where a lot of people are working very hard to clean up the REDACTED.  White tents dot the horizon, and Day-Glo orange is a fashion accessory.  Forklifts cart pallets of supplies from place to place and everyone travels around in all-terrain beach buggies. There is nothing ecological about a REDACTED. You’ve never seen so many water bottles in your entire life; plastic bags of disposable gloves and disposable tyvek suits. The whole thing is like some weird deleted scene from Dune.

I carried two cameras this time; a D700 with a monster 80-200mm lens, and a D200 with a 28mm wide.  Vast improvement to my mood! (Note to self: arm yourself with two bodies from here on out, plus the SB-900 flash.  Uninstall ALL your CS2/3 software, and replace it with CS5.  And learn the shit out of Premiere.  Do it now!) I rode along in a separate ATV, calling out instructions to my driver, bracing myself against the rollbars, my dusty boots wedged hard against the dash.  It felt like a fashion shoot on the Kalahari Desert: “Closer, okay now get me to the left side– hey, what’s their driver’s name?  Ask him to point over there, yeah, by those gulls. Great, thanks!  Now swing in behind them, slow, good, hold that!  Awesome!”  I probably seemed like an asshole, but I got the shots I needed.

(Don’t try to go all fucking Aslan on me/ I’ve been outside the War Drobe a time or three…)

Later, now, night: The moon is lightly clouded, and the small part of the sky still visible peeks down at me, her eyes full of little stars.  I’m upstairs at Arties, pretty much the only bar in town.

Downstairs is for the roughnecks, the last of the hippies and the surviving tribe of classic rock fans.  Pimps and animals take the stairs in the back and party on the open deck where autotuned dance and gangsta jumps and throbs, and four barely-legal cherubs dressed in their sluttiest denim skirts try their damnedest to play the part of jaded, worldly sirens while serving modestly priced drinks to the thirsty citizens of an REDACTED-impacted, shrimp-fishing community. Everyone has a role to play.

Artie’s is where REDACTED parties when it’s not spending all day, every day on the water, in the marshes or slaving to clean up REDACTED beneath the glaring REDACTED sun, REDACTED REDACTED of the biggest REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED in U.S. history.  Which is an odd statement to make, because I can’t think of a bigger REDACTED anywhere else in the world.

Now: I lean against the hexagonal wooden bar and sip my devil gin while observing the bright lights of the shrimp boats anchored out at sea, and the mothership glow of a REDACTED about a mile down the beach to my left.

Artie’s, and REDACTED on the whole I suspect, has a decidedly poor male-to-female ratio.  Great for the girls, hard luck for the guys.  I’ve got a strong drink, a good vantage point, a freshly unfolded drinks menu, and a new Sharpie.  I take a sip, uncap my weapon, and wait for the words to arrive.

Looking around the bar: “These are the people who make things happen.  They live fast and bright and blind to their own terrible beauty.  They turn the wrenches that file the forms that bus the tables that serve the burgers that tend the lines that fish the waters that Jack built, and they keep the Great Machine running full tilt boogie, despite the inevitable fact that said Machine is headed straight for a real Fall of the Roman Empire kinda showdown when all this lovely REDACTED REDACTED is extracted from the ground.  Nothing lasts forever except nothing and forever, but there’s no talk of that tonight.  Here and now, these folks plain ass don’t care; so long as the music is loud, the drinks are moderately priced, and hopefully, maybe they can find someone to love them back…”

(Three Bombay gin and tonics with squeezed lime later… necessary cohesion fades, switching to inner dialog…)

At some point: the music fades quietly away and the old familiar curtain lowers and your drink loses appeal, and once again you find yourself staring at your surroundings in mild confusion, not entirely certain of how you arrived on a scarred wooden stool at the edge of the Gulf of REDACTED.

You observe the measurements of timeless impossibility etched in the faces of strangers as illuminated by cheap cigarette lighters; you gaze at each of them in turn, and wonder who they were as children.  You’re searching, as always, for meaning, seeking the Ancient, the Hidden, the spark that will at last make sense of it all.  It’s damn sure not gonna be found in a bar, but it seems to be the only time you look for it anymore.  Drink is no decent way to take your brain off the hook, but for the moment it’s the only option you have.

You watch and you record and you commit to present tense the various acts of the macro-theater playing out before you in this tiny REDACTED bar, trying in vain to make sense of the patterns, until you remember once again that random is just shorthand for a pattern too big for our monkey brains to comprehend.  It is what it is, and what will be will be again.  Sometimes it’s the same time all over the world:  All the Friday night smiles and scowls, the closing time rejections, the tiny victories and desperate lonely movies have happened before: here, there, and there.  This moment is happening at every bar at the same time; wherever there is darkness, wherever Friday night draws a breath, there is celebration and hope and drinks and music and wisdom and magic.  Yet, without fresh external stimulation, you feel the human race is destined for stagnation, eternity spent beneath the muddied boot of the Overlords who drive the Great Machine.  We’re like dolphins in captivity, each sequestered in a separate tank, bouncing our forehead-emitted radar off the circular walls of our prison and slowly but surely pinging ourselves to insanity.  There’s got to be something more out there, buried in space, asleep in the sheets of forever.  If we can see it, why can’t we touch it?

I wanna walk way out to the Hut at the Edge, where the Old Man tends the Flame, and I’ll show my soul and he’ll cut my writing hand with the edge of a sharp tooth and smear in the Ashes; so empowered, I promise not to die until I can write something so almighty powerful that it makes wood melt and the stones burst into flame, and every hunting dog from here to Glasgow will sing your favorite song…

You slid gracefully from your stool around 1230, popped in your headphones, and did a high-speed drunk march three-plus miles back to the beach house, pausing only to dart across a partially-lit lawn, scale the grassy dunes at the edge of private property and carve the following the polite request in giant letters in wet sand with the heel of your Chucks:

ALIENS PLEASE LAND HERE.

25SEP2020

Dear Cass,

Got the day off.  Literally nothing happened.  Starting drinking Southern Comfort around noon, and spent much of the day typing up my notes.  Then I went for a walk and thought about the epic feel of the right words in the right order. Must have listened to this song about 25 times on this trip:

Harshly awakened by the sound of six rounds of light-caliber rifle fire, followed minutes later by the booming of nine rounds from a heavier rifle (but you can’t close off the wilderness).  He heard the snick of a rifle bolt and found himself peering down the muzzle of a weapon held by a drunken liquor store owner.

“There’s a conflict,” he said.  “There’s a conflict between land and people.  The people have to go.  They’ve come all the way out here to make mining claims.., to do automobile body work to gamble.., take pictures, to not have to do laundry, to own a mini-bike.., have their own CB radios and air conditioning.., good plumbing, for sure, and to sell Time/Life books and to work in a deli.  To have a little chili every morning, and maybe… maybe own their own gas stations again.  And take drugs, have some crazy sex, but above all, above all, to have a fair shake.  To get a piece of the rock, and a slice of the pie and spit out of the window of your car and not have the wind blow it back in your face…”

–Wall of Voodoo “Call of The West”

TWM

26SEP2010

Dear Cass,

An hour ago: I did it.  I finally launched my book.  The initial thrill was a rush but after a few minutes, it was all over.  I had a glass of wine and listened to a few specific songs to celebrate the closing of ten years worth of work, and then I turned and walked away from it.  Now I can worry about the next one.  I doubt it will sell, but now I can say “I’ve written a book.”

It rained last night and it looks as though it might do so again.  I took a walk on the beach today; the water was warm and the sand looked almost artificial, raked smooth by big machines that sat silent about a mile down the beach. Hungry, more later.

01OCT2010

Dear Cass,

Now in REDACTED. (Hint: It’s French-sounding.)  Notes from this period are hard to come by.  I remember it as bits and pieces of shiny crazy, bright seconds of screaming laughter, uncomfortable wooden stools, the drunken stumble of cobblestone streets, the clatter of beads skidding across ruined asphalt, candle-lit basements, one million tasteless t-shirts, endless excellent jukeboxes, and the omnipotent stench stench of the REDACTED.

Mommy drinks because you cry.

If REDACTED were a real person, it’d be best embodied by an unemployed uncle who; drives an LTD, is missing the majority of his teeth, sleeps on a thrift store couch above an auto repair shop, and has predictably vomited into his own lap nearly every night since May 7, 1718.

These moments dwell in contrast to the cold black blocks of solid concrete and the geometric shapes of authority, acts of soul-sucking drudgery committed while toiling away on the 14^th floor of an anonymous office building somewhere in downtown REDACTED, and the real reason I was in town…

My creativity lives in a small village somewhere on the fall side of the world, and it is only when I sleep that I am able to have any communication with it. A hatch on the top of my head yawns open in the night with the quiet whine of hydraulics, and a long, golden tendril of monofilament line yawns forth, uncoiling itself from a tiny spool; winding this way and that, it crosses the ocean, drifts over fields, mystifies cows, and is largely invisible to all but buskers, fools and unemployed uncles living in the streets below.

Said filament knocks on the door of my creativity and forms an outstretched palm, as though begging for alms. Sometimes my creativity has something to offer, and sometimes the tendril comes home empty-handed. My first impulse, upon waking, is to check my mailbox and see what treasures await. Nothing makes my day like a good breakfast, a solid cup of coffee, the right song playing in my headphones, and a tiny parcel in the inbox of my dreams.

Unfortunately, society has seen fit to schedule me to show up at a job during my peak creativity period. This must be kept a closely guarded secret from REDACTED, lest a ham-handed conversation threatens to begin with, “Well, why not use that creativity to [fulfill dull task X]?” as I’m being hipped to death by Cool Hand Douche and his twin fingered six-guns.

I get it, REDACTED.  You win at parties. I can’t swing a cat within your city walls without hitting a place to drink, eat, or lose track of the time.  You’ve got absinthe and hand grenades and Scotch and all my favorite foods, and some I think you made up.  (Fried macaroni? Who the fuck are you fooling? Didn’t stop me from eating it, though.)  Your architecture, enthralling; your history, visibly evident. You win, REDACTED! Isn’t that what you wanted to hear?  You’re a town full of spooky hippies and beautiful gypsies and starving dancers and I could probably spend the rest of my life trying to separate your magical madness from your common trash for the sole purpose of preservation and documentation, but I’d probably self-destruct inside of five years, if I didn’t get diabetes or go broke first. I know there’s more to you, REDACTED, but I can’t help running to the bad parts first…

Wish you were here.

10OCT2010

Dear Cass,

I miss you, and I’ll see you soon.

TWM

“KnoWare Man” – my debut novel available on Lulu

It’s taken me ten years, six computers, five drafts, four states, and two operating systems, but the big day is here.

My first novel is available for purchase.

Time to start the next one,

TWM

STANDBY TO DEPART CAUSAL LOOP

23AUG2010, 1730 – Riding home on the Brooklyn-bound “L”, midway between Lorimer and Graham, I experienced a sudden and overwhelming sense of deja vu.

The car was slowing down, and I moved toward the door.  Looking down to my left, I saw an olive-skinned girl in a black polo shirt, unbuttoned. Black hair pulled back in an end-of-the-day ponytail. Blue jeans, battered Chucks. Eating pretzels from a brown bag. Me, I’m listening to Lamb’s “Lusty”:

When the echoing sound from 1:58 began to chime, everything hit me at once. I had been here before!

When I move to a new place, it is understood that a significant amount of time has to pass before I start to get the feeling that everything prior to that moment was just a dream, and that I’d always been there. Getting it this early isn’t a good sign; it implies burnout. I’ve been in NYC since June 3.

As soon as the car stopped and the doors opened, I did something I’d never done before; I stepped out of the car and walked to the left, knowing full well and good that the exit was to the right. Then I halted, right-faced and without thinking, I walked over and touched the wall. Turned back around and walked toward the exit but stopped short again, sat down on a bench, pulled out my notebook and began to scribble furiously: STAND BY TO BREAK CAUSAL LOOP. Stupid Uni-Ball let me down, threw it at the tracks, dug out a felt-tip, kept going, waiting for something…

Looked up. Checked my watch. Nothing happened. The ragged tunnels were as unapologetic as ever: no back-masked dwarves, no parquet floors, no red curtains. No offers of coffee:

Instead, I was alone on the platform. Just me and my dementia.

I stuffed my notebook back into my bag and capped my pen. The next mechaWorm had arrived, and I joined a fresh wave of tired bipeds as they shuffled toward the turnstile. We climbed the steps to the street. We waited for the light. We crossed Metropolitan, but I headed home alone.

I keep trying.

TWM

Aliens Prefer Americano

06JUN2010 – Hot as fuck outside, and I’m not in the mood to sit on my floor, pace my floor, sweep my floor, or get into a mental wrasslin’ match with my inner accountant about my lack of groceries as I wait for the Big Fat Paycheck that isn’t due until the first of next month.

Instead, I told myself that, historically and artistically speaking, it’s all the rage to be poor and hungry in New York.  I think I bought it, so I decided to step out for a stout.  Presently holding court at the Barcade, brushing up on my Galaga patterns, and penning nonsense in my ubiquitous journal, as follows:

What do the following have in common?

- Any liquor store

- An aisle of a bookstore devoted to bibles

- The cereal section of your local grocer

- Gun shops

Give up?  Variations on a theme.  How many different bottles of booze can one person possibly crawl into?  Why are there so many versions of the Bible?  How much Muesli do we really need?  Isn’t one gun enough when you catch your wife making magic monkeys with your best friend?

“Well, people need choices.” No, we fucking don’t.  We don’t need leopard print cell phone cases.  We don’t need peanut butter AND jelly in the same jar, and we sure as fuck have no business sipping anything from a can marked JOOSE.  Call me crazy, but sometimes I think free will is a loaded firearm: something best kept under lock and key, especially when there are children in the house.

P.S. Crocs were conceived as a dare.  Ha, ha!  Fooled you!

Common courtesy is a disease we could all stand to catch.  Don’t get the sniffles, or a weekend bug.  Catch a fucking plague of it.  Lose your leg, if need be.

[HHG SHIPMENT ARRIVED SOMEWHERE DURING THIS TIMEFRAME. CASUALTY: ONE FLOOR LAMP]

08JUN2010 – MEMORY OF EARTH: 8^th Ave subway stop, hot summer night, drunk on tequila and red wine.  Across the platform, a beautiful young black girl with Cappuccino skin plucks wandering melodies from her acoustic guitar, the notes lost among the cocktail din of the other commuters waiting for the Brooklyn-bound L.

09JUN2010 – Tired from walking, stopped into Cho’s for an iced coffee.  It’s just around the corner from my place.  Don’t want to go home, but I’ve been wandering for a few hours now.  No money, no friendly faces.

You: “Oh, but there’s so many free things to do in New Yor–.”

Me: Shut up.  I know.  None of them include eating.

Planet WillBurg is kinda weirding me out, anthropologically speaking.  I’ve been dressing like a power nerd since Christ was a messcook: thick black glasses, courier bag, tattoos, camo shorts.  It’s been my thing for years, and I’m great with it.  Imagine my reaction — nay, my chagrin! — when I roll off the train to find these irony-based motherfuckers dropping out of the trees, and all of them look like me.  There’s probably fifty-million dollars worth of India ink walking down Metropolitan Avenue at any given point in time!  So much for being different. Not sure how I feel about it. Safety in anonymity?

I tried to strike up a conversation with the barista.  It went like this:

[brief introductory chatter here, blah, blah]

Her: “So, what do you do?”

Me: (pausing, not wanting to mention government because it always gets a weird response; not quite ready to say, “I’m a writer” because my book isn’t published yet; not wanting to say something coy and asinine like, “Oh, this and that,” because that’s a fucking retard movie dickhead answer; and definitely not wanting to throw down my entire goat-choking title: crisis communications, risk management and media relations specialist…) “Uh, I’m a photographer…”

Her: (dismissively) “Oh, just like everyone else.  That’ll be three-fifty.”

That’s right.  I look like everyone else, and I’m here to open a gallery, just like everyone else.  My mom’s paying for this coffee.  I’ll be over there taking MySpace photos of myself and trying to look poor.

Guess I should go home.  And do what?  (Image of an action figure in blister packaging, sitting erect on the edge of a perfectly-made bed in an inspection-ready apartment.  Towels folded to crisp precision, fridge gleaming – albeit empty.  Glasses and plates washed, dressed to the edge of the cupboard.  Floor swept, files organized by color, trash empty.  Room suffocatingly silent, except for the air conditioner.  Cursor blinking, awaiting further instruction.)

Part of me is thrilled to the gills at not having a social life.  No distractions.  Nothing to do but learn my job, aspire to greatness and write my ass off.  That part of me knows I can survive for extended periods of time on nothing more than beans, rice, tuna, coffee, Sharpies, music, and social media.  But there’s another part of me that knows that first part is a lying motherfucker.  “Friends are a form of wealth, as is knowledge.  Likewise, health.”  I don’t know who said that, probably me.  Plants need food, sunlight, water.  Human beings need their Maslow’s met.

I have dreams where I can fly, or move objects with my mind.  And in these dreams, I can feel the part of my mind that knows how to do these things.  I understand the weight of the object on some deep level.  I feel it rising up, moving toward me, coming to rest in my hand.  But on awakening, that part of my brain reads as 404 FILE NOT FOUND.  It feels like something in me has died.

I wonder what will become of these journals.  Used as tinder, perhaps?

All my travels and
years set free in the tears of
slowly rising flames.

Maybe they’ll put stretch marks on the bottom of a trash bag.  Guess it doesn’t matter, brevity of life, Pale Blue Dot, blah, blah.

Relax, people.  I’m not looking to conquer anything but myself.

26JUN2010 – I’ve fallen into the Pit of Quiet.  I go for days without saying much.  Don’t feel like speaking.  Took everything I had to dress myself and wander into the sunlight this morning.  New York might be safer, doesn’t make it any friendlier.  Found a series of coaxial adapters approximately three inches long on the sidewalk near my apartment.  Walked along twirling this tiny technological sword of state in my fingers, hefting it, feeling the weight of the thing.  Remain silent, stay hidden, Ghost Dog my way through my environment, wait for the map of familiarity to reveal itself.  Muscle memory takes time to form.  Someday I will think to myself, “Remember when this was all brand new?”

Sometimes a woman is a beautiful painting.  She doesn’t need your consent, she doesn’t want your admiration, she doesn’t care for your conversation, she doesn’t require your loyalty, your chivalry or your complication.  Sometimes she just wants to walk down a sunlit street in a pretty dress, wearing her favorite sunglasses and the sandals that took her forever to find.  Sometimes she just wants to be pretty.  Let her.

I’m still afraid of ending up broken and homeless; filthy and terrified, hungry and wasting, begging for the change you got from your latte and have nothing better to do with, but still won’t give it away.  All my clever will be for naught, my stories will fall upon deaf ears, and that will be that.  We leave this world the same way we came in.

The music is this place is god-awful, unless you’re a raging fan of Christmas 1985 Casio keyboards and tone-deaf, two-chord sorcerers wringing every nuance from a simplified rhyme structure, where every line begins with “I feel”.  Makes me want to punch a goat.

Fascinating to consider that people make a conscious decision to dress as they do.  Observe the wild-haired man passing by the window: “I WILL leave the house today dressed in camouflage trousers, a red tank top, worn leather sandals and a healthy stack of ‘rock guy’ bracelets on each wrist.”  There must be an anthropological study on why people dress as they do.  We’re like pirate radio stations, walking the street, broadcasting our likes and dislikes, wearing our hearts on our record sleeves, staying awake on strong coffee and cigarettes, exhaling into the microphone and wondering if anyone is still  listening.

A song is like a piece of software, or a tool.  Someone has to dream it up, write it, assemble it from the tools they have on hand (and hopefully have a working knowledge of).  Then they send it out into the world.  Their user/audience learns of this product, using his/her own personal network to acquire it, and is forced to make an ethical decision:  “Hey, my favorite (programmer) has a new (meme/abstract analogy/external emotion experience/brain virus) available! I will (or will not) engage in the exchange of valued currency to obtain it.”  For some, these programs are just background clutter, and they interact with the program on a very basic level.

For others, the program becomes something like a theme for their computer; it changes the color of their background, selects a complimentary font, or has some other effect on their overall system.

And for still others, the effect is all-consuming: it becomes a photograph, an envelope, a time capsule, a shorthand statement, a bookmark, a reminder of the state of their perception and senses during a moment in time.  “Yes,” we imagine them saying.  “Song X reminds me of time period Y when I was in a relationships A, B, and C with the following objects, systems, or people: [DESCRIBE FURTHER]”

S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y! NIGHT!

TWM