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…

12FL/OZ 355ML

Home: It's where you keep your stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was too safe.

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

I knew couldn’t stay there forever.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are only stories telling stories,

An Explanation of Subway Stickers and Additional Information

Please refrain from A) the use of a phantom fetus-conjuring blunderbuss B) the levitation of more than three novelty-themed Rubik’s cubes during a single séance, and C) the piloting of a square-wheeled tank boasting ineffective armaments in public places.

We’ll have more news of this at eleven. And now, tonight’s top story:

There’s something living behind the walls of this Brooklyn-time summer moment that paws, sniffs and stamps restlessly at the scattered ground, sifting through the raped and littered soil with a decidedly pointed hoof for telltale signs of a missing future.  And as it just so happens, this creature and I are hunting the same mouse; a secret stashed safely below the surface of the immediate past and cleverly camouflaged by the present tense.

Imagine if the universe worked differently; suppose every minute in history is essentially a separate world which must be built, maintained and torn down once the world finishes with it. And further contemplate that somewhere, someone decided that this particular instance, one containing a living photograph of alien world, needed to archived and viewed again for whatever reason. Okay, but why? What was so important about that moment, that planet and that dimension? Was it worth saving because it wasn’t ours? Was the archivist hoping to somehow rescue this civilization and provide a how-to or an example of how different life could be if it were DIY’d in another part of the universe?  Was this about “art”? Perhaps it was the archivist’s job to catalog civilizations and somehow this fragment was inappropriately absorbed by the bandwidth of my dreams. I have no fucking clue.

What I do know is this: I’m attempting to reverse-engineer a fragment of a memory using the mnemonic equivalent of a gasoline-scented scratch-n-sniff sticker, an oft-folded illustration torn from a science-fiction magazine and a die-cast metal toy.  And someone off-camera is demanding that I use these items to return a forgotten city to its former glory. The simplified instruction manual provided to me was downloaded as a zip file and stored somewhere in my skull but the link is 404’d, and now I’ve got this… thing bumping around in my not-so-big upstairs with a case of amnesia, creating unwanted bulges in my reality.

Anything I attempt to do while in this state becomes ten times more difficult; everything gets sped up and pinched, as though one were fishing for a shell fragment in a bowl of yolk. Time (yolk) is distorted, flowing faster between the outer shell of this 404′d object (thumb) and the walls of my perceived reality (bowl); images of some mysterious and misplaced Martian market become momentarily visible, projected against the ghostly flicker of heat waves of this New York Minute, brought to you in part by Friday, June 10, 2011, the letter thirteen, and viewers like you.

The good news is that I can almost feel what it was like to live in this place, but I can’t put the experience into words. Not yet. The bad news is that it has to come out.

The key to unlocking this thing’s got something to do with the way that Kanji seems at once ancient and futuristic (likewise Arabic, likewise the art of Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest), so I try to focus on that.  It also smacks roundly of the early issues of Heavy Metal magazine I devoured as a teen, the art of Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius), selected writings of William Gibson and the feel of films like Fifth Element and Blade Runner, where the overt alien undertones are just part of the experience:

- a Bodega cat seeks relief from the summer heat on the lid of an ice-cream freezer.

- a matronly Ugnaught of a woman, with cast-iron breasts like matching Civil War cannons, stomps and sneers and stabs at her sequined-pink cellphone with the gold-painted nails of a velociraptor, talkin’ ‘bout how she gonna “fuck that dumb bitch up!”

- a hovering trade ship from some dusty distant world waits patiently above the East River for permission to land.

… and it’s all part of the Mise-en-scène.

Primarily, it’s got something to do with that fucking sticker.

I scratch at it furiously and press my nose against it, breathing deep. It works, albeit feebly. Something churns in my stomach and my field of vision becomes momentarily faded and narrow.  Encouraged, I scratch and huff at it some more. This goes on for about ten minutes. Beads of sweat begin to form along my arms and a rising sense of vertigo develops in my stomach. Now I’ve got the half-summoned memory of a lost alien world caught like a cat hair at the back of my throat and I’m desperate to cough it loose.

I cram my fingers down my throat and after a moment’s salivation I begin spewing forth watery chunks of buildings and backgrounds which slap at the pavement like horse piss on a flat rock before standing up slowly on their own, like a prizefighter ready to talk serious business at the end of the seventh round. Slumped against a wall with one hand on my knee, the sensation rises up again, coursing through me like a tidal wave as a half-completed grid of city streets soaked in stomach acid snakes forth like umbilical ropes from the enraged space between my lips, anchoring themselves to the soil like plant tendrils and immediately taking root, unfolding like ugly flowers. My jaws are pried open against miles of sewer lines and buried electrical cables and in a brief reprieve I take a few breaths in through my nose. Soon, my abdominal muscles are convulsing and contracting again as the five o’clock skyline of a world I’ve only imagined rockets the wrong way up my esophagus and my mouth gives birth to an alien sunset. It splatters first on the sidewalk before instinct drives it to its feet on doddering legs and it takes its place at the top of the page.

I gasp air for few minutes, wiping the puke from my lips and spitting out the taste of concrete and anodized metal, surveying the half-formed thing that I’ve made.

I’m obviously not done yet, but it’s a start.

TWM

Charlie Sixteen

14OCT2010 – MSY – I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy to leave New Orleans…

The piece of paper that sent me down here in the first place clearly stated that I was to be “(*)repeatedly stretched to the breaking point, ground into paste, ingested and excreted from the assholes of both September and October for a period of no less than sixty days at the leisure of the King of Hawaii for no good goddamn reason at all.” That I should find myself in the departure lounge, boarding pass in hand forty-four days later is a lucky break, and I have no true business staring into the mouth of a gift horse.

Howe’er.

I arrived at Louis Armstrong International only to discover that my 1130 flight back to LaGuardia had been canceled, and the next one wouldn’t depart until almost 17 p.m., getting me home at 21 p.m.  Lesser men would have screamed, possibly taken hostages.  And still others might have hailed a cab and headed back out in search of debauchery.

But in some weird and admittedly perverse way, this makes me happy. I’ve got the entire gate to myself, I’ve got a seat next to an outlet, and I came prepared: laptop, iPhone, headphones, journal, Sharpies, a brand new copy of Cory Doctrow’s “Futuristic Tales of The Here and Now”, a lightning fast Wi-fi connection, and a damn good cup of coffee.

Pending a zombie invasion, a Die Hard-esque shootout between a burned-out cop and Ze Germans, a colicky baby or some other natural disaster: I’m aces, thanks for asking.

One hour till departure: Seat near the window, bonus! Listening to: Dead Can Dance, Led Zep, Deftones.  Charging: my gadgets.  Checking: my email. Watching: Several hundred tons of taxi gather the much-needed speed to fuck its way into the unresisting sky.  Gravity, lift, drag, and thrust.  Peanuts and Sprite.  Over and over, these common theme of my travels.  All those people, all those aliens, all those dress shirts.., (X) ft of white headphone cord, and (Y) lbs worth of “Compounded Negative Body Issue Monthly” being spread like a fucking virus, their once-glossy corners now gently bent and fetal against the protective interior leather of designer carry-ons.

My eyes move around the room, mining the details, but wholly unable to keep pace with the flow of arriving passengers, the rolling rectangles, the designer sunglasses and three thousand other items of little to no consequence. It makes me wish I could sketch.  Finally, my oculars come to rest on the matched set of thigh-high silver cylinders guarding the entranceway to Charlie Sixteen, my home of record for the next hour.

Trash cans they are, and trash cans they will stay. When one finishes ones damn good cup of coffee, one is expected to do the decent thing and force the empty paper cup into the mouth of said cylinder, where it will tumble briefly southward before coming to rest in the whispered clutches of a petroleum-based, quasi-disposable stomach lining, later to be gutted and gathered by minimum wage taxidermists whose first language is probably not English.

Look at the trash can, now look at me, NOW BACK TO THE TRASH CAN:

Out of sight, out of mind. But when you throw something away, what does away really mean?  The more I stare at the cans, the more I begin to see them as something else, slowly rebuilding them in my head, swapping the plastic intestines for something else:

Suppose that when you tossed a piece of trash into the can, it was instantly incinerated, and that the energy extracted from the incineration process went toward creating the energy required to incinerate the next piece of trash, and so on, and so forth.  How far ahead in our technological evolution would we have to be to pull off a stunt like that? Get back to me on this.

There’s my flight,

TWM

(*not really.)

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

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

Take Me To Your Leader – An Alien in New York

03JUN2010 – On the train to NYC, slowed to a near-predatory crawl beneath a railroad overpass somewhere south of Pennsylvania. If this train had a long furry tail and a thing for yarn, we could expect to come bursting from this tunnel within seconds in hot pursuit of fuck only knows.

Speaking of improbability, if you’d told me six months ago that I’d be moving to New York City and furthermore, that I’d be excited about it, I’d have recommended you for a straight jacket and a cameo in a Quiet Riot video. And yet, here I am; packed, racked and rolling north on a true blue summer morning. Our ETA is approximately 1040, and I plan to be in my new apartment by noon.

The movers came yesterday; it felt rather strange being on the other side of the paperwork. I saw myself as a fresh out of high-school kid in a bland grey t-shirt with a truck on the front, the sweat wrung from my body by the gallons and the doomed feeling of being completely spent before discovering the pool table in the basement, which won’t fit on the truck. I think being a mover was what drove me to a life of minimalism. I mean, who needs all this shit?! Just ‘cos they sell it doesn’t mean you gotta buy it.

Time passes, and I sit watching the scenery rush past. My thoughts are an indistinguishable roar. I feel like a blind man at a cocktail party, unable to draw one voice from the multitude. Sometimes words fail me. I could live for a thousand years and still never reach the mastery of language that life and experience deserve. “Sometimes,” it has been written, “a hundred thousand volumes of knowledge aren’t enough, and sometimes one word is too much.” Yeah, I get that. Holding the cosmic unfathomable in one hand, and the Oxford English dictionary in the other doesn’t quite weigh out. It’s a like hunting for fireflies with a bear trap. I stare out the window some more, watching the graffiti evolve as we near the cradle of Krylon.

LT: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds “Abattoir Blues”. Sudden hunger and a craving for caffeine propel me from my seat and I hum a little tune as I amble toward the cafeteria car. “I went to bed last night and my moral code got jammed/ I woke up this morning with a frappuccino in my hand.” The lurching and bumping of the train reminds me of being at sea; taking three weeks to cross the Atlantic Ocean on a three-masted barque. You’ve not properly lived until you’ve spent hours vomiting over the side of a confiscated war prize in heaving seas; strapped into a safety harness and clutching the rail for dear life, shivering uncontrollably in the freezing wind with the salty taste of ocean water on your lips. Eventually I got my sea legs (and some rather strong medication), but like the man said: “The future’s uncertain, and the end is always near.” He also said, “Never vomit into the wind.” That’s good advice, too.

Moving forward along the train now, counting up the number of doors as they spring open like the jaws of a hungry thing until I arrive at the dining car. One Alexander Hamilton later, I’m the proud owner of a breakfast sandwich, a can of Red Bull and, ha ha, a frappuccino; this in addition to the large cup of black coffee purchased at Union Station about an hour ago. A writer’s mind must remain limber. It’s not my fault that Amtrak doesn’t offer quality speed at a fair market price. I work to maintain balance with a flimsy cardboard tray in my hands, contemplating the rushing ground and churning steel going clickety-clack just beneath my feet as I move between cars. Headed aft and aware of the math, I make way back to my seat with my precious breakfast treasure, counting back down the doors and checking off the human landmarks as I pass them by: Sleeping Girl in Bright Blue… check. Grown Man Watching “Garfield” On His Laptop… check.

Fresh off the train, I was following the herd across the platform, thinking that very soon this city would become second nature and muscle memory, when my leg experienced a mild earthquake. I fished my vibrating phone from the thigh pocket of my cargo shorts and read the message; a rather random text from my old friend Katie Orlando welcoming me – sort of – to NYC: You’ve got to go to Au Bon Pain! she insists.

Me: Why? (I text back) Are you there?
Katie: No. They have the best food. Seriously.
Me: (stunned.) You so crazy. I just rolled into town, and you want me to try out a chain restaurant??
Katie: See if that contortionist guy is down at South Street Seaport. He performs daily in a neon tiger print outfit, ha, ha.

Forty-five minutes later, I’ve picked up my keys and turned them in the lock for the first time. I put my bags down in the middle of the room and wander through the apartment, turning on the lights, turning on the water, opening cabinets. Time to work: I set up shop on the granite countertop. Open my laptop (free signal from somewhere!), take out a pad of paper and find a pen. I call the electric company, the gas company, the internet company, and set up new accounts with each. I play “Simon Says” with FedEx and my bank; they blame each other during my attempt to locate a certified check for $1,000 I’d sent to my broker several days earlier.

Simon Says I sent the check from the bank’s website. Simon Says FedEx neglected to give the bank a tracking number. Simon Says someone at FedEx couldn’t find the very visible Madison Avenue address it was intended to be delivered to. It’s being sent back to me and then back to my broker. Oops! You didn’t say, “Simon Says!”

Next, I empty my backpack and head out the door. Objective: Find a local coffee house (check), a deli (check), a proper grocery store (check). A shopkeeper with one leg, glittering eyes and a grip like cast iron gives me a free pint of Manhattan espresso coffee cola because I had no cash — only plastic — and his ATM is down. I’m about to put the bottle back in the reefer when he smiles, bags the bottle, and hands it over. “I’m Timmy,” he says with a thick Brooklyn accent while pumping my hand vigorously. “You look like a decent guy. Just come back some other time.” True story! At this point, I’d been in New York exactly three hours. I think I’m gonna dig this place.

SATURDAY – Boneshakers for breakfast; coffee, and a vegan sandwich named after a bicycle. (Stopped off at the deli and gave Timmy the three bucks I owed him, promising to return for my butcher needs.) The day is getting sticky and the streets are full of trucks. Some of them are bringing new things, and some are hauling the spent remains of other things away. A cool breeze flutters down from the ceiling fan and sits on my shoulder like a small bird as I sip my coffee. My apartment is bone empty at present; a wooden wasteland populated only by what I carried in on my back. I’ve been sleeping on the hardwood floor, eating on the floor, pacing and washing the floor, dusting the counter tops, polishing the chrome…

Went into the office yesterday to see what all the fuss was about. It’s strange to see my name outside the door. (Just means they’ll know who to throw against the wall first when the revolution comes to town!) My desk looks out over a quiet park of oak trees, a colorful playground and beyond that, the towering fingers of the financial district. I can hear the mournful bellow of the Staten Island ferry as it departs the pier, and there’s a place less than a block away that serves ethnic food and strong coffee. Slowly, the pieces come together…

Seated now at a weathered wooden table, looking at the bicycling paraphernalia that lines the walls, and an outdated exhibit flier affixed to the window with loops of yellowed tape. Good sandwich! I chew slowly, gazing out the window at the ink-saturated street urchins passing by. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. I’m not on vacation, and this isn’t another travel gig. I live here now. For the moment, this is everything. On the plus side, Boneshakers has tons of electrical outlets and strong, cheap coffee. I’m told it’s important to establish ones haunts early on.

Observations and eavesdropping: I read somewhere recently that 90 percent of conversation is gossip, the passing of memes and the transmission of vital information which affects ones social status and therefore their ability to survive and provide.

I wander the streets of Planet Will-burg for several hours, taking lefts and rights as they seem relevant and scouring the walls, doorways and other vertical surface areas for stencils and graffiti. It’s powerful fucking hot. I’m glad I chose a neighborhood with shade trees! By accident, I happen to meet one of Boneshakers’ owners. She was sitting alone on the wide steps of a church a few blocks away from the café with an empty drink cup at her feet, taking a break from a challenging morning. Turns out the refrigerator had come unplugged in the night, and all the milk had spoiled. Apparently this Yelp-approved café was originally designed as a bike repair shop that served coffee, but customers wanted a place to sit down and surf the internet. Same as they do anywhere else, I guess.  We shake hands, and she goes back to work.

Will-burg appears to be putting on a city-wide production of some sort, which calls for the cast of thousands to be adorned in old school tattoo flash, facial piercings, thrift store clothes and ironic t-shirts as they crisscross Brooklyn astride their duct-taped ten-speed bicycles. The only other explanation would mean such items were a prerequisite for citizenship, and that’s too just silly to be true.

Later, I sit on a random bench with a bag full of coconut juice and fresh oranges, jotting observations in my notebook and getting a feel for my neighborhood. Makes me wish I could draw. “Well, why don’t you start?” No thanks. That’s why photography was invented. Took a ton of pictures today, although all of them have been with my cell phone as I’m leery of waving my G-10 around. Maybe later. I look forward to cracking open my camera like an oyster on the rocks and prizing the treats from within.

Birds sing. Trees sway. I sit, I look, and I write. I think about the places I’ve been and the sights I’ve seen. I think about the here and now. When I get tired of sitting, looking, writing, and thinking, I find my way to Barcade. Fifteen dollars and several stouts later, I feel nicely disjointed from the present tense. It’s a nice place. Well lit, cheap drinks, and two long walls of my childhood friends, although none of the ones I was really good at.

Apparently the world record holder on Donkey Kong hangs out here on the regular. Dr. Hank Chien, 35, is a Queens-based plastic surgeon who, on February 27, after a 2 ½ hour marathon session, racked up a score of 1,061, 700 on the classic arcade game, besting the previous record by 10,000 points. I plan to make it a point to meet the legend.

At this moment, I can’t see very far. I’m butted hard against the plate glass of the Now, with no idea of what the future will bring. This is it. This is as far ahead as I’d planned ahead for. I feel a piece of machinery vibrating somewhere below my feet, and I take another sip of my stout. I should go soon, since I don’t have the funds to make this an all-nighter, but I don’t want to go back to my empty apartment. (No internet after the first few hours. The Wi-fi well’s run dry, boys…) The situation is hopeless, but not serious. At least I have the job needed to generate the dollars to fill my pockets to allow me to sit on this torn-to-shit barstool in a refurbished warehouse space in Brooklyn getting ripped to the tits on powerful stout. And yet, the voice of financial responsibility nags at me from the back of my mind. I really wish it would shut the fuck up. I’ve paid all the bills, I’ve drafted to-do lists, I got a haircut, I set up the utilities, and I’m TCOB as the King used to say. I’m taking care of me and mine. “Would it spoil some vast eternal plan/ if I were a drunken man?”

I wrestle with new ways to describe the silvery ping of quarters striking the polished steel diaphragm of the change machine. They make a scraping rasp as they’re scooped out and forced between the narrow red lips of the nearest game just a few feet away by a barrel-bodied man of an indeterminate age dressed in – wait for it – an ironic t-shirt. (Don’t get me wrong, I really like this bar.)

I can’t wait to get back to some serious writing! I’m way overdue for a maniacal burst of pure genius, a go-to-hell story cranked out in the darkest hours of the night; my eyes redder than the Communist threat and my brain fueled by hot water and xanthine alkaloids (see also: C8H10N402.)

MONDAY – Woke up. Turned on laptop to write while I waited for the movers to show. Found that I had just enough signal strength to post this! It’s not quite done, but it’s better than nothing.  Gonna rush up the block and grab an Americano.  Can’t wait for my stuff.  At last, something to sit down on!

Down to my last $500,

TWM

Control.

It really *is* just out of your grasp.

See You in Hell, Daniel Webster

01JUN06 – Midnight. It’s early, or maybe it’s late. Depends on your perspective, really. Got paid fifteen minutes ago, celebrating with a cigarette on my tiny porch, watching the rain claw half-heartedly at the smoke while hot chemicals invade my bloodstream, all the while wishing I had something stronger to wrap myself around, but you know what they say about wishing in one hand… Solitude is a hard won ally, one who never puts down the knife.

Not exactly a day to live in infamy – I had a headache that refused to die, so I ate enough aspirin to dissuade a charging horse and drank coffee until things looked normal without squinting. It bothers me that good writing comes so slowly to me now, and I cannot help but ask – are the Fun Times truly gone? All my life, I’ve chased pretty phrases the way Indiana Jones follows statues, slinging sentences like punches in a Kung Fu double feature. I’m a gunfighter, a hired Geek, and I get paid for what I do. It pleases me to know I’ll be doing this forever, provided this new definition of Forever means anywhere between 11:58 p.m., April 6, 1971, and a similar point on a calendar not available for sale for many, many years to come. (Fuck you, Daniel Webster. I’ll see you in Hell!)

The further inland I travel, the longer I stare at the shadows, the deeper they grow, the more obscene their contortions, the more lewd their description. Pretty soon, I’m lost in a land without landmarks. Seems I’m forgetting just what it is I’m walking after, distracted and diverted by outside forces. For whatever happens, I must not turn away from the Prize.

We live our lives walking wicked, talking heavy and working ever forward, accepting the gifts of possibilities and refusing others, like the unrequited love notes of some fumbling grade school crush, before some day arriving at a Western Lands of our own design.

Expand your consciousness to include everything, or annihilate your consciousness and experience nothing, the decision is yours, but the collision point in the middle is the place where the Universe divides by zero, where never becomes infinity, and where nothing lasts forever except nothing and forever. And then you go through that.

So baby, if the gate to that Land is worth anything to you, anything at all, then by all means walk toward it, but do it with certainty. And if your purpose is to serve as a bad example, then serve that purpose well as you are able, and shine as brightly as a bad penny ever has. Make them remember you, dammit, because this is all there is. One life, one shot, one kill. Block out the distractions, bite down a little harder on the Third Rail, and wait for the Juice to lock tight your jaws.

Good night.