Machiavellian Trash

As the morning forecast had predicted, the day's humidity has condensed into a cool front, the glass of ice type of cool that touches up against the skin in a godly, firmly tender way. The sounds of Brooklyn reach out of their own dimensions and toward one another with a kind of accidental generosity, implied understanding. As though the drivers of ten-thousand vehicles--cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, cabs, busses--enjoy a bizarre telepathy, a supernatural mutation of energy that even the most devout misanthropic breed of atheist would have to smile at without chagrin or bitterness or animosity.  Samantha is sitting with her beloved Sisyphus. The couch holds them well, Italian leather purchased on a 6-month installment plan. They are looking at the television, playing an old black & white movie featuring Marlon Brando. Neither knows the title, but Samantha has thoughts, partial memories of a world that can neither be confirmed nor disconfirmed. She has been brooding, of l...

the hassles of weather and people ~ the trouble with her is  she's carrying a 60-year-old wound  from childhood when  some brat called her a funny name.    there wasn't a murder, a bankruptcy, a kidnapping.  her patents lived through the Great Depression. they went to church when Kennedy was assassinated,  despite not being religious.    her sister, about five years older, was never married  but had a son, and he hasn't spoken to any of us since  he was about 17-years-old, in which time: 2020?  my aunt Laura passed away, went to Agnostic Heaven  with her parents, leaving Betty with a trailer-mate  (and my father died about 12 yrs. ago but I keep him  in a story for both of us I'll tell you later some other time.)    she's retired, now, with no tragedies save good old-fashioned death  and the hassles of weather and people.    she's very angry, a compulsive liar, keeps inventing  arbit...

The lights of Vegas burn through the last miles Charles Anthony drives in a rented car, a zillion tiny electric stars with the faint as dark cloud edges of buildings motionlessly skating between their marshmallow softness in a crazy morse code of fever dreams and psychedelic fantasy. His mind is on the counterfeit driver's license and matching credit cards in the new red wallet he purchased from a bodega in southeast Los Angeles. California back there like some tomb of apathy. It's a feeling like nothing else he's ever experienced. Every car and vehicle on the highway has this alien-charge of genesis and metal discovery. The desert as it was a million years ago and the future of a million more without concern, all etiquette and obligation simplified to the physics of driving and the requirements of a clear point of view. The steady manifestation of yearning to be capturing and re-editing the years, lives before this moment in a throbbing rush that inundates his heart with f...

Men like Thalamus Geary are rarely encountered in the organic world and scarcely taken to be genuine or plausible in the digital one. Not so much for their dissimilarity to whomever they might be compared to nor the logic they imply by presence & skill but merely for the successful execution of their goals & desires, the lingering aftermath nothing less than the hard scars of trauma and their cripplehood and the legacy of villains since time immemorial.  He was said to make devout nuns freeze in 2036 the way the advent of nuclear weapons authored the near-speechless fear of a generation in the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon-Ford years before him. A textbook giant in anatomy and form: 6"1' in height, nearly 250 on the scale: Geary had the ready, remorseless, powerful strength of a common street-thug loaded to the gills on PCP and the undistractible focus of any hubristic general who'd draft them into a war. This deplorable, inexcusable, thoroughly educated breedling of Golla...

~ you know, my mother told me when  I was in primary school  that one of my teachers told her  they thought I'd be the next  Martin Luther King, Jr.  I'm 43-years-old, now,  and I've neither the hubris  nor selflessness  to agree.  my race is just another box/ boxes on a form or application  and most people seem to listen to me  like a TED Talk or an overloaded calculator  all symbols and abstracted letters.  I'm a Buddhist, morally,  might as well be speaking  Hindu to a penguin,  just happy to have skin  covering bones, a heart, and a brain.  if you want to have a conversation like that  just have some dreams of your own  before you ask about mine.  **** 

~ equal parts the internet and the hundreds of thousands  of years leading up to it, there's this unspoken preoccupation  with intimacy, virginity, sex going around  just a little too long to politely ignore, these days.  clueless library veterans and 2026's equivalent to  hipsters crowd behind me in public places, gas-  station counters, supermarkets, Wal-Mart, bodegas,  from sea to lonely sea.  I'd sever the tip of my right pinky  to be done with it  if the sacrifice  had some guarantee.  but what they're missing  they already know  in spite of the empty chatter  in spite of the luck of company  in spite of who they are  or what they want.  no fucking around here, man: it's  like picking up an overcoat with  a toothpick:  you've got to see what people are selling,  if anything at all.  ****    

~ up with the dark and the fugitive stars  hanging over the rural landscape,  I'm young/old enough to know insomnia  like a second body-language, knowledge  as firm and ubiquitous  as the disparate cars' headlights  running down the county road.  I've been walking, walking, walking  miles every day about a week, now,  and my body's missing the stuff  to keep my eyes closed, I'm like  an elephant or an insect in search of  fingers or a god who wants my prayers.  listen to smoke, to neon print  on electric-signs, listen to the friendly  pain in your gut walking on the traintracks, it's slender paws owing nothing to no one  if you know this resignation without  hints or second-chances.  yeah...when the juice runs clear out  of all the people around me I'll be  like that character whose name I  can't remember in Set This House On Fire,  survivor of various motorcycle crashes,  ...

~ I was with Chuck Palahniuk  through Haunted Rant Pygmy: his first books'd been waiting after  Orwell and punk rock like champagne  sex after a wedding. it's not just  the underwhelming after the life- changing impressive. it's  the faith required for  strange, unlikely causes.  and laughs like those that  Beautiful You and Adjustment Day provide  can protect your fragile soul  in times like the obedient hysteria  characterizing events like the Obama Years  and the incomparable fear & entitlement  practically shot with needles and gamma rays  in every photo of President Trump and  the millions of equally worthless fuckheads  with- and without cheesy slang spoiling  libraries and various other public spaces  so bad I can almost hear the trees  and the grass crying.  I lost whatever that thing/feeling  is  when my generation's Kurt Vonnegut  was patronizing King Imbecile...

Back in Brooklyn, New York, Sisyphus was getting acclimated to life in Samantha's apartment and the nursing home and the neighborhood they sat in. He was dearly perplexed about 90% of the time, but he had his love for her to ease the burden. She seemed to grow softer and wiser by the day, if only for the reaffirmation of those qualities, as though the very soul of the Goddess Persephone had willfully detached its ineffable shape from the fabric of the cosmos in order that his troubled, overwrought bones, form be promised to persist another day.  At least once a week, after a morning of delicious fucking, shared showers and clean clothes, they'd make their way down to the nursing home's community center to join the affairs of their senior neighbors. The air shimmered with a palpable awkwardness as the same dozen or so residents & staff shifted from whatever they were doing to delicately stare or take notice of the strangely authentic pair. Everyone referred to them as pa...

It is the steadfast opinion of the creators of this document that one never quite feels their youngness as much as Americans (and perhaps all people) do in their 20s. Charles Anthony Gollander was nearly t the end of his 20s and he was feeling his youngness as vibrantly as a stroke or a guilty-verdict of some unclassifiable felony.  Ambivalence saturated, enveloped the most trivial, ephemeral things, interactions. Every request or offer was answered with the seriousness of a sacred oath, absurd and sarcastic comments were considered with calm and dire humility. The days when radio was surpassed by television, when roller-rinks faded from popularity and skateparks were assembled as fast arrived at a social plateau as the stoic charm of a word like 'cool' was challenged by the collective, desperate authors of the term 'rizz'. This nationwide embrace of forced meaninglessness made him feel like a hologram of himself. People were always telling him he was afraid of somethin...

skeletal enlightenment  ~ I'm building some sort of castle, now,  with smoke and food and  maybe some resilient bones if  I exert myself  carefully.  I take this pill that's supposed to put me off  of drinking -- and you can get nicotine  gum just for  mentioning  a song.  plus, panhandling.  plus, collecting cans.  Abstinence plays as  fast as the Dharma  but the wet meaty insides  of your lifeforce's carriage  will provide what strength  its conditions inspire.  go.  the birds are talking and  the night is warm and  those shadows of people moving  on another planet, somewhere-- that caravan of fragility.  so many bones.  ****  stealing tranquility  ~  these perfectly useless trees more like  giant weed/houseplants  cut out of the ground earth like  predators -- a dignified bodhi tree  by any standards, or a car-thief with ...