Machiavellian Trash

  When I think of Natalie, now, I think of the  little girl  who saved me from  a deranged father, and a neglectful  Mother  at the earliest, 4 o'clock  hours of scared, terrifying  mornings.  I think of the teenage girl  I watched The Simpsons with and talked about  what little I knew of the Dead  Kennedys Frankenchrist  Trial and her boyfriends,  Steve, that crazy hitchhiker guy  who stayed at our  Kent Cliffs house  and a papersack  full of condoms  and  when Natalie eventually  left for  Connecticut  and eventually Illinois  after that.  I think of the one  just six years older  than me, only daughter  of my Mother's  first failed marriage,  the first one who knew  how evil Betty is/was. I think of suicide  after suicide  after suicide  attempt  of different states,  different people,  different, usua...

  One More For the Old Man ~  I was born in '83, when my father was 40, didn't learn until years... after the fact that they  call that an old dad.  it meant I could  readily have something like  bi-polar disorder, schizo- phrenia, various forms of  autism, adhd, etc. etc.  I remember I used to   always have a running- joke with myself that  whenever some  caseworker, triage nurse, in-take sort of person  would ask me: do  you have a formal  diagnosis? I'd have it  somewhere in my mind  if not emerging  from my mouth:  no, I'm waiting for  them  to name a new one  after me.  I'm 43 years old, now,  he's gone, and they  wouldn't name my  luggage after me  if they didn't  have  to.  but that's alright.  there're no  formal names for  whatever eccentricity and talent ever or  are still tickling thru  the blood of Jame...

Randal woke up the following morning in the motelroom he'd rented from Carmel, New York, in all his streetclothes except one of his shoes, having rolled around in the bed & bedclothes during the night and currently facedown but beginning to shift and his breath was just slightly yucky and the familiar exhaustion of an hours' long binge of beer & booze & marijuana and a pack of cigarettes he and Baxter had split after Baxter insisted on paying for it seemed to ebb & wobble in Randal's porous, pleasurably delirious skull. Jut after 9 AM, judging by the light. He'd come to know things like the cycles of the day after being released from a ten-year stint in a medium-security prison for his part in a semi-armed robbery (the gun wasn't loaded)  and he took a certain pleasure in knowing these things...or as much pleasure as Randal took in knowing anything as his lifepath seemed to bait-and-switch his very heart with promise & delay at every turn.   It w...

Samantha had been feeling especially low since Sisyphus said the curious/flippant thing he said that ended up bringing a couple thousand people to their window & doorstep on July 8th, 2036. Her heart felt like a 200 lb. stone and her blood seemed to be a little on fire all the time. She'd been a native to the Landscape of Insomnia  since she was a teenager going into the 1920s, and in many respects she unabashedly savored and ingested rejuvenation like it were fruit or an indelible mixture of chocolate. But lately her super-centurion nerves were going down the quiet trail of entropy. It was a bummer.   Twice in the same week: Tiffany had seen and accosted her in the CVS when Samantha was just browsing the Seasonal Aisle for funny things to bring home to Sisyphus while he was going through one of his 12-hour a day sleeping-phases...and Tiffany, since Brittany was no longer with us, could practically smell the practically-ancient woman since either of them left their re...

The New Life Center of Brooklyn, New York was a place of deliberately elaborate policy, besides just being a theater of nearly-unbroken routine. On July 4th, 2036, of all days, Brittany was going to learn just how elaborate.  Her brother, Fred Daniels, had been profoundly injured during a sparring match at the gym he was a member of. He was training to be a boxer.  Brittany was one of his emergency contacts. The gym called her, delivered the news as gently as possible, and told Brittany which hospital he was staying in, assuming the well-liked athlete's only sibling would at least prefer the option of seeing him to not knowing anything about it at all.  She'd always known something like this was coming, or at least anticipated it. It is a direly underappreciated quality/condition of the female brain that not only can the most tragic and deplorable outcomes of any bad situation be foreseen well in advance of their actually occurring, but also that (almost) any combination ...

Detachment seemed to come unlocked from the interplay of what he'd understood as group-neurons. As though the momentum of select stimuli within the auditory & deeper limbic structures should choreograph a statement of Self remarkably independent and yet with immeasurable craving & yearning for inclusion to something higher yet. This embedded symmetry of a man to some cause, some fine pursuit, some hidden country without permanent flag nor border. He felt it coming down with an almost-crazy focus as surely as he felt himself, his hands wrapped upon the steeringwheel, the motor, the world looking North to New York in the late-evening blue, open canvas of possibility and the rumor of birds.  Louisville, back there, behind him, like some scared outlaw searching its belongings for trace of a world lost with sunshine & entropy. Madness swimming in the duality of names; not money, but a thing you wouldn't give a way unless you wanted to or had been denied all other recours...

He'd been rehearsing a brief series of mantras strategically memorized, legs slightly parted, feet set evenly, hands beholding each other like fists. The darkness inside him offered little of comfort but its steadfast challenge did meet the second-degree ex-con with a certain assurance, like a cold rain on the skin or using a thick needle to sew pieces of leather into a single composition. The other passengers on the train to Manhattan chatted and chattered among themselves and sometimes their sound awkwardly smuggled itself into the enormous vacancy of his interiority and sometimes his one-pointedness overtook the odds. When he thought of his heart as an organ, his memory would reliably & categorically shuffle through a kind of suggestion of a picture-show from the very go of his strongest, most vivid impressions, breathing and speaking and listening in-toward-for a date without color or number. As though within every man resided an homunculus approximation of his earthly demi...

While compiling the various stories, rumors and legends that describe this narrative, there have been things we were told, things valuable to insight, things terrifyingly strange beyond reproach that might offend a reader more than is necessary that we have chosen to omit or at least dramatically abbreviate. It's not exactly a well-kept secret that America has a violent history that our worst, inexplicably, insidiously inhumane leaders have harnessed without provocation to make an overeager voting-majority rabid with fear and self-importance in the cause of sublimating their own fear and self-importance. For as long as death-worship is regarded as the highest form of proclaiming one's personal gratitude to the astonishing and sometimes beguiling whims of life, this insanity will persist.  It took Thalamus Geary close to three (3) months to conduct his search/investigation of the Pacific Northwestern States while Charles Anthony drove eastward with almost no urgency or serious d...

She wrote: I've thought about this longer than I can really estimate or measure. Since at least he came back...or maybe since he left....maybe since I was a child, I don't know... I do know why people say they don't know like that, now, though. (You really have to be careful to count your small victories in life. Make a lesson of that. Plenty of people say that, but most of them don't have a drop of serious commitment to stand on. I think it's all the little victories we get to have when we're young that proffer any real chance of comparison for everything else--victories or otherwise--to make whatever sense it does. Like you have to have confidence to really have faith or else whatever faith you have will just be the fear you're born with pretending to be something else.--That I'm sure of.)  Start with this: last night was the final straw, or certainly close to it. There was a fire-drill in our building. They have them about every 3 or 4 months just to ...