A Cave

I’m in a cave. The cave is dark. The cave’s my skull’s
mammoth cavern full of tourists with torches
revealing my calcified glial cells,
my waterways, and those mirror-clear pools
laminated by the light, sold for a sou.
Memory and Dream live down here somewhere
waiting to draw me away from the crowd
to entelechies governing the evolution
of my experiences, not just my thoughts.

Is Memory not my home? There’s a kid
in the cave: He ducks behind stalactites;
he licks up the calcium drippings
and pretends to be stiffened to a statue
so what’s new, Kookie; Kookie, lend me your comb
and I’ll crank out a sitcom for your ennui.
Pull back and behave; there are readers around
They buy tickets, notice you into being.
They are also your home under the roof
of the covers of a book. Andy, don’t leave that cave,
you nitwit, don’t let the book fly away
on cardboard wings and leave you in the lurch
in the cave of your mind where it is quiet and dark.

Shadows #2

Shadows are like the clowns on the Champs Elysée who stalk-walk
in your footsteps a traipse at a time behind till crowds
in sidewalk cafés laugh so sniggly at you that
you whirl around but the clown has ducked into a patch
of sunlight like shadows disappearing at high noon,
only when shadows shadow us no one’s laughing.

Faithful as Fido, devoted as Spot, shadows
and their imaginary tongues tease our themes at some
gluesome distance, though closer than echoes, as we tether together
hand in hand into the mirror-smooth water of the past.

Shadows will haunt you for as long as you live.
They are a custom-tailored tuxedo-shaped precipice
into which you never want to fall or at last
the shade will hug you to death in the long lonesome valley
from whose bourne no traveler returns says Uncle Willy
and who’s to say “I don’t think so” to the great bard of Avon?

Mr. Kung Says

Let us relate
to the spirits
as if they were
with us:
Otherwise
we are ignorant
of everything
except the body.

Observation

Society is society:
Half asleep and half dead
yet all the rest is natural.

Persona

The apricot
knows
what the apricot
is all about:
What more
could we expect?

Oblivion

The blinding snow is
a glittering desert of
white oblivion

Peace Activists

Peace activists dance
around the whiteness in the
snow. I hear gunshots.

Dust

I eat the dust and
taste my dead past. I sleep in
the snow. I am dust.

The Book of Britney

Chapter 13

In the midst of Gomorrah,
Where sins rain like hail on school desks,
If you take my bloody wrists into your heart,
And cup your hands under them, and then
Clasp your hands together and holler my name,
I shall reward you and strike unto death
Those that mock and tease you,
And there will be a gnashing of teeth.

I shall carve your rights onto their bare backs,
And blood will soak their thighs,
And thou will cackle at their iniquities.

You will lie on the virgin grass,
While those that slashed away at you will be slashed at.
A devil will carve into their breastplates,
Making a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard.
A wind of sand will eat away at their bones
Like they were sandstone

No one will make fun of you anymore.
They will fall at your feet and offer up their lunch money and their lives.
They will lick you pink Keds sneakers,
And tongue your Pac Man shoelaces.

If you pray to me,
You will sink into yellow honey and locusts.
You will find yourself as mosaics in my book,
And preachers would sing your travails.
I will force these idol worshippers to
place their mouths onto gutters
On rainy days—kinda
Symbolic, huh.

If you take me as Christ the Lord,
I shall set aflame all that oppose thee.
The kids will sob for their mommies.
The teachers will yell for order.

My purple bats with veiny, translucent wings
Will swoop down and grip your torturers’ necks
With their demon red talons.

I, as your messiah, will rain down snakes
That will coil themselves around the necks of your murderers,
Suffocating them, and injecting poison into their carotids.

You will blaze down the hall like a comet,
Drawing an exhaust behind of you ice and kindle.

And my father will deem you The Good Witch,
Too bright to look at.
And you will wear a pink, jelly fish-like dress,
With five diamond rings on each hand.

Love is...

It’s really nothing
It’s just love, kid
Love is naturally sweet and bitter,
It stings and makes the heart flutter
It’s like a vivid dream on a spring night.
Let go of what you once admitted to,
That your love was once like a blooming flower
But now dying.
Take advantage of the time’s power to heal
The days of love, and the day of the farewell
Will only be left as a remembrance of scenes,
Just like the leaves fall as the seasons pass by.
You won’t long for that person any longer.
The only thing that will stay remaining in your heart is
The memories of the clear sky, the breeze,
And the flowers’ scent of that day.
So allow yourself to hurt as much as you have been loved.
That’s just the rule of love.
Don’t pathetically avoid it,
Even the flowers allow their petals to fall,
For they know spring will clothe them again.
Don’t make excuses about the love you had.
Those days will wither,
However, the new days are yearning to bloom.
Because you loved so purely and innocently,
You are beautiful, and you are proud.

Summer nights

As the sun sleeps, and the moon rises to its high and governing throne
The powerful waves rise,
But to their master’s command, they quickly die
The cool winds dance beneath the light of the moon
The strands of my hair join their rhythm and dance along
The cold sand clothes the earth from the waters
And holds the memories of each person’s footprints
The oceans greet me with its deep color
And shows me its ability to reflect the moon’s majesty.
Speechless once again,
I stand in awe before the beauty of nature.

a romance spoiled

i can’t touch this love
it’s not palpable
always slipping from my fingertips
it’s intangible as the concept
of oranges or their explanation,
and i hung our hopes on the stars to burn
like a sunset through this wasteland;
your lips are the laughter burning me up inside
bringing with them desire and lust, all i want
is for you to fall over me in your sweet
rain and wash all essences of he and she away
until we remain one forever —
yet you keep your distance, hands folded tighter than
the boughs of the tightest knit rosebud; you won’t
bloom for me the fragrance of love,
and i don’t know why —
love is a plant that needs to be nurtured to grow
she cannot bloom without provocation,
yet you simply stammer words
prettily enough to ensnare my heart then let me go
blowing in the wind a cold shadow of who i once was;
my wishfire is growing cold as cobwebs dance
in my hair spiders stealing away every
piece of my blood and passion
until nothing remains except an empty smile devoid of the light
in my eyes, and a love spoiled as troy rolling it’s fingers
forgetfully in the dust as it face paints,
miming incantations of romance
when it’s merely a flame of lust burning in a star.

burning the memories

i saw a robin with a worm in it’s beak
reminding me of you and the rare occasion
in which you would arise early, strategy
to face the day at hand; everything always
carefully planned out with no spontaneity
isn’t it boring never to have something random
leap out into the forest of your trees? or do
you prefer never having newness of brightly covered
leaves falling onto your desk or the song of birds
nesting in your ears? always there’s a time and a season
for you but one never spills into the next; always
ordered and acutely aware of everything you must do
i am just an afterthought that you keep around because i make
you feel good and offer you flattery you don’t always deserve —
silence falls between us hanging heavily as winter,
promised calls never come and i wonder if i shouldn’t bother
having expectations then maybe i wouldn’t be hurt so badly when
you don’t bother following through? i’m always the option
that you rarely have time to take, so let me make it easy for you
i’ll take that worm from your beak and we’ll call it even —
flying away into some sunlit oblivion of orange and crimson i will forget
all the places we made ours, and i will embrace the fragrance of pines
letting every bird of me you’ve grown in me fly away until all that
remains are the memories to be burned away by the sun.

The Fate of the Bloggers

The bloggers
found out no one was there
so they went to Facebook
to
find out that
no one is there

then they will
write stuff
and hang it in
trees and
wander the streets
stopping people and
trying to tell them
interesting things.
The police will arrest them
and put them in a
special place with
mirrors.
They will not forget
who they are and
will tell amazing stories
to the person
in the mirror

Lent

I knew my grandfather
wouldn’t come home from the hospital
when we found the naked
baby birds fallen, covered with ants
on his cold stone porch

Six of One....

Morally twisted,
corrupted by pain.
Crazy spins dreams spewing fear.

Vision is blackened,
shrouded. road closed.
Is waking the only way out?

But haunting comes early,
darkness retreats.
Refusing the night, day descends.

a Grin for Men

Clearly, our thoughts are weary.
Today is dreary, in my brain. Eyes lie to me with a crooked grin.
Reflections show sin by truthful men.
Perfect no more in the magnitude of my lens,
I capture your commandments, that leave you damned in heaven’s glance.
No second chance to repent, how poorly that time was spent.
Broken clocks don’t tick as they determine your fate, leaving you foot-less in a foot race.

Break-out Pains

Nail like knife, cuts deep. Eyes without sight, can see.
This darkness, surrenders a ray of light.
Without sight eyes entertain the light. Time dies as night is born.
My time will come after years of scorn. Pain is my coat, terror my cook.
Hourly meals keep the skin chafe. Pins and needles sketch on cold flesh.
Eyes of darkness violate the soul, blood descends the mouth of gold.
Penalty follows tears. Sadness decays over fear.
Read my open pages, my words are red ink.
With your gun, I’m forever imprint.

Shadow Key

Your eyes hide behind blinds,
counting all the lies. Disguised;
deceptive as a rigid key
locking away false memories.

Trying to comment at an AA meeeting

Trying to comment at an AA meeeting, but
it’s impossible because a guy named Joe keeps
talking thru me with “What does this have to do

about alcoholism?”/ in AA the person who’s talking
always says what he wants free of interruption, but
this is not AA/ I stop to obsess about killing Joe/ it’s

the disease of obsessions/ mine won’t stop/ the more he
destroys my comment, the more I want to kill him/ nobody
in the room tells Joe to shut up & let the meeting continue, &

I obsess/ I obsess/ I OBSESS/ I of course have been driven
insane & realize I have to leave & find an AA meeting or
for the sake of God, serenity, sobriety & decency, there’ll be

blood all over the meeting place/ Joe will be
dead, which would be good for one & all/ I unfortunately will
go to prison when there’s no room in the prisons for more prisoners; so

for the sake of my sanity, I have to get out of this
bedlam & find a real AA meeting; so I put away my old 44 &
get the Hell out of there por favor . . .

!

Contemplating my brains blown to smitheroonies

Contemplating my brains blown to smitheroonies, but at
age 77, I might as well not waste a bullet/ especially since
people find the bullet more important than I/ instead I’ll

write this poem about it that people won’t bother to ridicule because
they won’t read it/ it won’t be published because why waste the
ink when it could be used for a rorshack test or a flyer about

Big Mac’s/ & nobody wants to clean up the smitheroonies my brains
will be blown to when they could be watching a soap on TV or
even using the soap on their face/ mine I don’t wash because I

need the soap to wash my sox once a month before they smell too
bad for the boys on skidrow to tolerate me/ I still want to keep some
stench to discourage those who want to cut my throat/ I find

more & more lucky bastards who haven’t lived to 77, but
some poor schmucks live to over 100; so at least for now,
I REJOICE . . .

!

No Sweet Talking

Don’t sing “Babe” to me and tell me your life is in my hands
after you tell me to get you a beer and bag of Doritos
so that you can ossify on the sofa while watching the ball game on television.

Do not bother telling me that I am the most beautiful woman you have ever seen
after you spend several hours sitting on the can, looking at the women in fashion magazines that I buy.

Somehow you expect me to dress up like Lily Munster or Joan Crawford
since I didn’t quite make the Mae West imitation club.
With all your yapping you make me neurotic not exotic,
the “Mommy Dearest” of your worst nightmare.

Until you wake up every morning as if you recovered from a hangover the previous night,
telling me words that are sappy enough to fill a Canadian forest of maple trees.

Once you called me an enigma
Blinded by my lack of beauty
but impressed with my army sergeant toughness
which made you think I was just “one of the guys”
who really preferred hanging out with the girls.

The Party

If you went to a party,
and the first three hours
were really lame,
would you stay?
Would you stay,
just on the off chance
that the party would somehow,
magically,
“get better.”
And I mean,
this party
is really, really lame, guys.
Everyone’s drunk,
and people are vomiting
in my hair.
So I’ll ask you again,
and as you are all my friends,
I know you’ll answer me
honestly
and without judgment.
How much faith
do you place in magic?
Would you stay?

the Gift

So this guy, God, hands me a claim
ticket for a box with nothing in it.
“Enjoy.”
He yawned and life went on.
“What kind of gift is this?”
I asked my parents, as if they
might know or even think about it.
“It’s a whatchamacallit.”
My father said staring at the TV.
“Go ask the Rabbi.”
My mother frowned and glared at me.
“What am I supposed to do with this
empty box?” I asked the Rabbi.
“Put something in it?”
He shrugged and scratched his head.
Profound, I thought. I hustled and
bustled and tried to fill it up.
By the time I got old the box was
as empty as when I began, the way
the stuff of life came and went.
I used it for my coffin.

This is not a poem

Cold coffee, stale pastry, cheap whiskey,
as the winter sky slides by the window
of my cheap room.
This is not a poem. It is a postcard from
oblivion. Wish you were here, whomever
you are. Wish I wasn’t.
This morning I found a message in a
bottle floating in my toilet bowl.
It said: “Lost dreams, failed schemes,
unrequited loves, please flush after
using.”
The winds howl, the shadows prowl,
the walls shriek, the windows rattle,
the floorboards creak and the sewers
run to the sea – wait for me.

This Life Brought to You By...

Suppose a person,
and it could be anyone,
though lets, just for the sake of,
call this person “you.”
Now suppose one day “you”
find that you are a fiction,
an imaginary being,
the errant construct
of another person’s migrant daydream.
You are not acting out of free will,
your every thought and decision
are being dictated by some
ambivalent, capricious god.
Would you curse fate?
Wail and gnash your teeth??
Insist that everything
is meaningless, without merit?
That your very existence
is nothing but a mockery invented
to entertain a sadistic population of readers?
Or would you be gracious?
Take a polite bow to the audience
for a tale well told
and exit the stage with dignity intact?

Proving Points

Statements
Counter statements
exchanged
Quotes from internal rule books
He sends out emails for events
She’s reading on the living room couch

He finishes a short story in their bedroom
Hears her yawn while reading an essay.

He tries to sleep.
Her slow sigh
from the living room couch
holds his eyes open.

She walks in
Changes into her nightgown
He tries not to look
Turns over.

Linda

Sits and goes over
Her notes for a
Class
Long legs appearing
Like an invitation to sin
Her pendant sparkles
On her neck casting a spell
As the streets outside
Are hot enough to make me
See ghosts
I don’t know if she is
Real or an hallucination
But I like going
Crazy

Train To Lyon

Met an oklanhoma girl
Who looked French
Who was often mistaken
For Spanish
She taught English
And we talked
All the way to
Clement-Ferrand
It makes me glad
I took the wrong
Train

When You Get Old (V2)

When you get old
you leave everything behind?
present tense past tense,
hangers on refusing to turn loose,
high school letter sweaters, varsity
woolen jackets, yearbooks 1965,
covers that quickly open, slam shut?
high school romances only faces
where they were then?
ice cubes frozen in time.

No more teary eyes,
striking flames,
moist match heads
igniting bedroom sheets
and teenage bedside rumors.

You leave wife, or wives
behind toss out your youthful affairs.

All single events were just encounters,
cardiac dry ice, ladies with crimson clover eyes.

No more strings tightened, broken bows,
heart dreams slit vows, melancholy violin romances.

You continue leaving reading glasses, key chain, ATM card,
senior discount cards, footnotes are your history,
artificial sweeteners, doctor appointments daily,
keep touching those piano notes, phone numbers in sequence
in tattered address books, names attached to memories
hidden behind.

Everything rhymes with plural thoughts and foggy memories.

Youth was a bullyboy club-
the older I get the less I'm battered?
trust me I got witnesses in between?
saviors of wings, fantasies,
tense has no grammatical corrector,
it always dances around the rim of red wine.

Life now fills with silver teaspoons
of empty senior moments?
blank shells of present, past tense,
and yank me back recalls.

Do you remember those 1st 25 years?
Shrinking brain space remembers
dances of sporadic nighttime boogies,
sports, senior prom, Thomas's Drive-In,
Spin-It-Record Shop, Dick Biondi,
WLS Chicago top 100.

Remember the next 25 years?
high school reunions grow dimmer?
priest of the voodoo dolls punch in numbers
of once living and now dead?
undresses all.

Rise forward from your medieval pews.
Wherever you now live,
do you remember these things?
prayer, ghosts deep in the
pockets of our former youth.

Old age waits patiently in the face
of a full moon? a new generation.

When you get old
you leave everything behind.

Michael Lee Johnson Bio

    Michael Lee Johnson is a poet, and editor, from Itasca, Illinois who lived 10 years in Canada during the Vietnam era, published in 23 countries. He runs five poetry sites, his website: http://poetryman.mysite.com. His published poetry books available through his website above, Amazon.Com, Borders Books, iUniverse and Lulu.com.

Oh Father

This is my letter to you.
I cannot speak, I can barely write,
my knuckes are now white from the tension
and my hand shakes with fear.
My secret, the secret on this page, has lasted
twenty years, eight months and eleven days.
And it will probably last
until you are well beyond your grave.

It all started the way it usually does,
as I was showing someone
some of my poetry.
They were reading my writings,
the ones you never read,
although I offered them to you.
They would read,
they would compliment,
and I would blush,
for I could never understand
how someone could appreciate me.
Do you see
what you’ve taught me?
Then they’d read the poem
about my father.
You know the one,
the one where I imagine
you are dead.
I remembered when your daughter
phoned me to tell me you were sick.
And I didn’t care.
I just imagined you were dead.

But once
I was gripped with fear
when I thought of you dying.
Just once.
I don’t remember when.
But it bothered me.
How can I care about you? I hate you.
Why should I love you? You never loved me.

I felt weak
when I thought I cared
for a man I didn’t know.
Maybe I wanted to care,
to think that one day
you might magically turn into
my father,
pick me up on your shoulders,
twirl me around the room.
Maybe I didn’t want to accept
my reality.

I wanted to forget you.
I walked over to the liquor cabinet,
but I realized that that is what you’d do.
I wanted to yell
but then I remembered your temper.
Then I wondered
if this is why I hated myself
as much as I hated you.

I remember when I was five
you called me an ass-hole
for something I didn’t do.
And I remember that you never apologized.

I remember when you’d yell at me
for not smiling.
“God-damnit, you have nothing
to be depressed about,”
you’d say.
And I would just try to smile for you.

I remember when you told me
not to disrupt your God-damned life
and I just sat there,
speechless.
I was only trying to be nice,
I didn’t ask to be your child,
I didn’t ask for anything.
And now you say I ask for too much.
All I asked for was love from you,
you bastard,
but that was the one thing
you just didn’t seem willing to give.

So I’ll close this letter
knowing you’ll never bother to read it,
knowing I’ll never bother to send it.
I am stubborn, like yourself,
and will have to keep this secret with me
while I try to run from you.

even if the pope claims it

a past pope was just canonized
for sainthood
by the current pope
because he performed
two miracles

but Catholic school taught
that Jesus did the last miracle
by ascending to heaven
and there will be no miracles
until His return

so all miracles people claim now
are not the works
of the Lord Jesus Christ
but of Satan

even if the pope claims it

Flying to China

I’ll have to check airfares
to be sure,
but I think
that flying to China
for two weeks to drink there
may be cheaper
than drinking in Chicago
for two weeks.

Janet Kuypers Bio

    Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.
    She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.
    She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org and chaoticarts.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images.
    Since 2010 Kuypers also hosts the Chicago poetry open mic at the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting the Cafés weekly feature podcasts (and where she sometimes also performs impromptu mini-features of poetry or short stories or songs, in addition to other shows she performs live in the Chicago area).
    In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound cc&d ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook, , Chaotic Elements, and Fusion, the (select) death poetry book Stabity Stabity Stab Stab Stab, the 2012 art book a Picture’s Worth 1,000 words (available with both b&w interior pages and full color interior pages, the shutterfly ISSN# cc& hardcover art book life, in color, Post-Apocalyptic, Burn Through Me and Under the Sea (photo book). Three collection books were also published of her work in 2004, Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art).

Flash

    It’s not that I’d never been with a man before; I had. A few men. And it’s true that some of those experiences left me a little bitter, swearing off the whole sex, because maybe I’d been lied to or belittled the same as anyone else. Maybe it’s true that there was only one thing about me—isolated and idealized—that some of these men wanted. The foreign part of me, the hardest part to figure out. And I did a little of that myself—glorifying a man, taking the shape of him and filling it in with my idea of who I thought he should be. It was never long before these relationships collapsed in on themselves, sagging where there was no center.
    But some of those experiences were good. Positive. Like, maybe I was worried that my breasts hung too low or that my stomach pulled from my hips in a gross and obvious way, but that was on me. No one was putting that stuff in my head. No one was telling me that I wasn’t perky enough or that I was putting on some weight. That was on me, and these men, these positive men, were only trying to help, saying things like, “Baby, you look fine,” “You’re the prettiest girl in the room,” or “We don’t have to if you don’t want to.” Good things like that. Kind things. And I lived off of that for a little bit because at least we weren’t cutting each other down, wearing each other into these thin, translucent pieces of what we used to be to one another.
    And then there was one great love, which seemed to have been, at one time or another throughout its course, every kind of relationship, but because it couldn’t settle into one steady thing that we could both agree upon, it ended in a slow and miserable way.
    But this wasn’t like being with any of those men. It wasn’t like being with a man at all.

    I’d met Lucy at Montrose Harbor in the early afternoon. A sooty haze had settled so that the city seemed to move just so slightly in the heat. I had decided long ago not to be her friend, but I couldn’t follow through with it.
    “So, I was trying to study.” Lucy was stretched out on the grass next to me, knocking her knees together as she spoke.
    “Mhmmm.”
    “When all of a sudden this couple next to me starts getting into this, like, whisper fight.”
    “A whisper fight?”
    “Yeah, something about him not calling her back or he was hanging out with some other girl. I don’t know.” She began peeling the skin off of a grape with her teeth and spitting the thin strips into the grass, putting the fruit into her mouth only when the whole pulpy body of the fruit was exposed.
    “What’s a whisper fight?” I asked, turning away from her as she split the grape through its middle before swallowing each half whole.
    “You know, like if they’d been anywhere else they would’ve been yelling at each other. But they were in the library, so they had to whisper.”
    “Oh sure, sure. I’ve gotten into one or two of those I guess.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah, I mean, yeah. So what?”
    “Joe and I never fight. It’s almost creepy.”
    “Yeah? That must be nice.”

    Lately, Lucy was throwing up a lot of red flags, saying things I wasn’t sure I was hearing correctly, and what she’d just said, it wasn’t your typical response to happiness. I wanted to tell her that maybe things weren’t really so peaceful between them, weren’t really so harmonious. Maybe it was just silence. There’s a definite difference between the two. But I knew she’d take it the wrong way. She’d tell me I didn’t know anything about it because I’d never been in a five-year relationship, I’d never lived with a man. All of which was true, but I did know that they weren’t sleeping together anymore, only sharing a bed. I did know that she wasn’t spending a lot of time at home.
    “Yeah, well.”
    “Well?”
    “Don’t be mad, ok? But I have something to tell you.” She picked at the grass in front of her in a nervous way.
    “What is it?”
    “I’m asking you not to be mad.”
    “Yeah, alright.”
    “I mentioned you to someone. Well, I told him about you.”
    “What? What’d you say?”
    “That you’re quiet. But not because you don’t have anything to say. And that you get good grades. You’re smart, Em, that’s what I was saying.”
     Lucy could only see people as one thing, and I didn’t notice it for a long time, not until I started seeing myself as that very same thing whenever I was with her. It doesn’t sound so bad, having someone thinking that you’re capable, making you feel good about yourself in that way, but let’s say I wanted to go out dancing, or maybe I wanted to get a little high, she wouldn’t know what to make of that. It’s not an easy thing, trying to pull yourself, some idea of yourself, from all of these conflicting and colliding projections made upon you.
    “I don’t need you to talk about me, ok?”
    “I was just mentioning you, that’s all.” She took a grape and began her slow skinning of it.
    “Let’s go.” I stood up, not wanting to watch the process again.
    “Yeah, alright.”

    I’d heard it from someone who had heard it from someone else: a girl I knew, well, I didn’t really know her, but we’d gone to the same high school and maybe we’d had a class together. I remember the things that I heard about her. This girl I sort of knew had gone missing. And I know how it sounds, when I say that it happened in the night and that she’d been walking home alone; at least that’s what everyone was saying. I know that it sounds familiar. But she wasn’t wearing any shoes. I read that in the paper, that she’d been walking along barefoot, holding her shoes in her hand, and then she went missing. You couldn’t possibly know anything about that—that couldn’t possibly be familiar to you.
    Let’s say that your feet hurt, and you’ve been drinking all night so now you’re tired. Or maybe you haven’t been drinking, maybe you’ve been dancing or walking across town in these steep shoes that are pinching your toes, and now you just want to go home. It’s warm out so you’re not walking too quickly, you’re taking your time, but you never get to where you were going. That’s the moment when everything changes, nobody is around to see it, and you’re not even sure what to do when it arrives. Nobody prepares you for this, not really. You end up somewhere you didn’t even know existed, and everyone who loves you or even sort of knows you is trying to figure out where you are, although they know on some level that you haven’t gone anywhere, that you’ve been taken. Your parents are thinking it would’ve been better if the world had opened up and swallowed you whole. They’d rather think you were somewhere in the Earth’s core trying to figure out how to survive. But that’s not the way it went, and that’s all anyone can be certain of.

    You think you can do anything you want down by the harbor as long as you’re not near the boats. And you can get away with that for a little while, in the summer months, because worse things are happening around the city then. Families come down and take turns drinking from tall paper bags while their kids run circles around each other close to the water. Sometimes you’ll smell a pungent, forbidden thing in the air, but it’s gone by the next inhale. Most of it is innocent so nobody says much about it. Lucy was walking with one foot in the bike path, grinding the gravel beneath her heel and kicking up sheets of white dust.
    “You mad at me?” She was swinging the bag of grapes through the air, refusing to look at me when she spoke.
    “No.” And I meant it.
    “What’s the matter then?”
    I saw him from a distance; I thought my pupils probably had to swell just to take in the whole mass of him. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his belly was swollen and taut as if some hard tumor were pushing from the inside out. He was wearing sweatpants, and I remember thinking that he must’ve been uncomfortable because it was hot, and my own clothes were sticking to me in a needy, invasive kind of way. And then I remember wondering about his hands, because I could only see the fingers of one clutching at the band of his sweatpants while the other seemed severed cleanly at the wrist, the remaining arm swinging just at his waistline. I felt bad for him, standing there by himself, partially naked and partially whole.
     As we got closer, I could see the that his lower lip was sticking out from his face as if it were balancing some heavy, precarious weight, and it was so red, his bottom lip was so red and slick with a film of saliva, that he seemed starved in an animal-like way. And I could feel him looking at me, at both of us really, I could feel a hotness on the back of my neck that was nothing like the heat of the sun because it was coming from inside of me and spreading quickly.
    “Do you see that?” I turned to Lucy, wondering if this man was taking up her entire vision, too.
    “What?”
    “Ahead there.”
    “The man?” she asked, as if she were just seeing him for the first time. I wondered what else she could possibly have been looking at.
    “Yeah.”
    “What about him?”
    “He’s looking at us funny, right?”
    “He’s probably drunk. Just ignore him.”
     His eyes were round like open wounds and raw in the same kind of way, and when I noticed a quick, long movement happening over and over, just this quick, long movement behind the fabric of his sweatpants, I realized it wasn’t us he was looking at but some idea of us playing out in his head. I wasn’t surprised when he pulled himself out, erect and hooked at the top like a piece of hot bent metal, and even though I’d been with men, even though I’d seen before what I was being made to see now, there was something about his slickness that disgusted me. He shook himself at us and let out a laugh that seemed more like a growl, and the whole thing felt like a challenge, like maybe he really believed we’d walk over and take him in our hands and in our mouths. I just kept thinking why’d I ever feel bad for this guy? He’s got two hands. They work just fine.
    “Is that his dick? Did he just pull out his dick?” Lucy was squinting her eyes like maybe she wasn’t seeing things right.
    “That’s definitely his dick.”
    “Oh, what the fuck?”
    “Should we run?” I offered, because, really, what else would we do?
    “I don’t know.”
    “Maybe we should run.”
    “Look, just walk a little faster alright? He’s not going to do anything.”
    We headed for an underpass that would take us to the other side of the harbor, but we had to get closer to him in order to make our way to it. You’d think that it would be easy to look away from all the things you don’t want to see, like the stiff, unmoving bodies of crime scenes or men jerking off in public places, but, instead, some perverse curiosity pulls you into the moment, and you find yourself unable to turn away. I looked at him, his face twisted into a tight grin of anticipation, and I thought he’s going to do this to the wrong girl, some girl who can have her muscled-up boyfriend here in no time. And this boyfriend will have worked himself up into such a rage on his way to the harbor, thinking about another guy’s dick slowly becoming a part of his girlfriend’s memory, that this guy, this pervert, will really be in for it when the boyfriend arrives.
    I didn’t notice Lucy was laughing until we reached the underpass.
    “What’s so funny?”
    “Your face.”
    “What’s wrong with my face?”
    “You’re completely freaked.”
    “I’m not, I’m just—it was awkward, alright?”
    “Yeah well, he’ll be at it all day.”
    “Should we call someone?”
    “Who do you want to call, Em?”
    “I don’t know. The police?”
    “He’s not going to hurt anyone.”
    “I just think maybe we should tell someone.”
    The whole thing really threw me for a loop. Not that I’d never heard of this kind of thing happening, of men pulling out their dicks in front of women who’d just gone out to get some groceries, completely naked except for some trench coat they didn’t even bother buttoning up. Not that I believed it couldn’t happen to me the same way you might believe that the people you love can’t go missing or that you’ll never be taken advantage of in some raw, violent way. That isn’t to say that thinking something terrible can’t happen to you makes it your fault if it does, if it turns out that you couldn’t stop it from happening. Because, really, how could anyone accomplish anything if they truly opened themselves up to the possibility of their ultimate ruin or even some irreparable change?
    “You take everything so seriously.”
    “That’s probably true.” I turned around, worried that maybe he’d be barreling toward us, waving one hand in the air and holding onto himself like he were riding some wild animal, but I could only see the fat bulge of his belly sticking past the wall of the underpass.
    “Let’s just go.”
    So we went.

    I think about the girl who went missing, the one from my high school. I think they’re never going to find her. Later, when some time has passed but not too much, I think about mentioning her to Lucy, but I know she’d say that some guy waving his dick at us in public isn’t even close to a girl we didn’t even really know being taken in the middle of the night. I know she’d say that it was selfish of me to even bring her up, the missing girl, when we were fine. We hadn’t been forced into a situation that we couldn’t walk away from. Look, we were laughing about it now, already. That’s what she’d say.
    And I’d have to be really careful when I corrected her, when I told her that I wasn’t saying we were victims or that some terrible tragedy had just befallen us and that everyone we knew would somehow be affected by what we were made to see. I would tell her that the situations weren’t similar, but maybe there were similarities between them. That we had each been used to some end. That we hadn’t said ok, you can use me. That we had each been walking, that we had been spotted from some distance by those who would involve us in their fetish or their plot. That it was unfamiliar.
    But I couldn’t figure out how to say any of it in a way that wouldn’t make her laugh or scold. So I didn’t say anything at all.

Pinpoint

    Sylvester Vanboten stepped back from whiteboard and studied his theory. His previous improvements to Pinpoint Time Travel (PTT) had been violated by Gomez Miller. He took it and they let him keep credit for it.
    God, he hated him!
    He stabbed the board with the marker; he won’t be denied these new improvements he would introduce later. Relax, go take your meds. He stood in the mirror and looked. His enlarged breasts made him extremely self conscious. That lead to his Agoraphobia, extreme panic attacks; he was terrified to leave the house. Why him? His special chest straps hid them, but years prior a guy in the dorm shower saw them. He told him he wasn’t gay, but he tried to rape short petite Sylvester anyway, and got himself killed. That wealthy family did not appreciate that, but The Special Projects Section of the Department of Defense couldn’t let his genius be wasted in jail, so they took care of everything. And, for decades he reined as their top theoretical physicist and jokingly called him ‘Father Time.’ His phobia killed relationships; his work became Mrs. Vanboten. They told him to get out more often, not just the lab. Why should he? He lived in a state-of-the-art house and an apartment that was attached to the complex. Every conceivable gadget was at his disposal. And, speaking of gadgets.
    Dr. Vanboten, Director Penker is on the hologram.
    “What...is...it, Penker?”
     “Screw you too, Vanboten!” Vanboten grabbed at his holographic neck. “You wish, and then you go to jail. Pull yourself together the auditors are on the way. I know we have to come and get you.”
    Dammit, he forgot.
    He started to sweat, his breath got short. Relax...relax, Sylvester. He stumbled and held on to whatever he could to get to the closet. He struggled with the zipper to his white jump suit and then flopped back on the bed. The best way to get him out; sedation. He stared at the vent on the ceiling? He waited for the mist that would knock him out.

    “Wake up, Vanboten we’ve got work to do.” Penker shook his chief physicist and gently slapped him. Sylvester coughed and pushed his hand away. “I hate to go through this with you.”
    “So do I.” Sylvester looked into his dead eyes and pale wrinkled skin. He belonged in a horror movie not executive director of PTT. “I can do the same thing from my house.”
    “But, the money people don’t want to see a hologram.” Penker snapped. “They want you in the flesh to explain how this project works, in layman’s terms.”
    “Tell your boy Miller to fill them in, he gets the credit. Right?”
    “Wrong, it’s your baby...throw some water on your face, I’ll be in the control room.”
    Sylvester looked around the office; after a year everything remained the same. The vast suite’s custom shutters still covered the thirty foot opening that overlooked the main control room. Shelves of text books covered the wall behind a ten foot wide oak desk with custom mounted keyboards and monitors of all vital control room activities. He pulled down the whiteboards and saw he’d forgotten to erase some of his earlier calculations. He quickly replaced with the newer ones before he forgot. Several stereo components with tower speakers were nestled in a glass and chrome entertainment center. He pressed a button under the desk; the wall opened and revealed his art collection. His nose tickled, he sneezed and papers flew off the desk.
    How did Miller and that damn cat get in here?
    He hit the ceiling fan button and cracked the shutters. Several men and women in business suits stood around Penker and Miller. Miller stroked the facility mascot and grinned from ear to ear. They looked up and smiled. Penker waved and they headed his way except Miller. He’d have to explain PTT to them as succinctly as possible and send them on their way.
    Vanboten pulled the director to the side. “Your boy, Miller has been in here recently. That’s trespassing.”
    Penker put on a weak grin. “I’ll look into it; tell these people what they want to hear so we can go.”
    “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen...well you know who I am and I’m not much of a talker. Uh...sit down.” He walked them over to the living room like section of his office. The lengthy black leather sectional sofa easily accommodated the four executives. “Would you care for some coffee?” They declined. He sat and wiped his forehead. Relax and don’t panic. “I’ll get to the point about pinpoint. As you know we’ve been able to travel through time into the future for only an hour ahead in that same spot. The traveler is unable to move until the present catches up to them or it. And, this requires huge amounts of power to penetrate the continuum. One day we’ll be able to scale down the power consumption, but for the time being we need more. The one hour limit we’ve experienced is the primary envelope of the space/time continuum. For each hour or period of time we want to go forward requires one and a half times more power. Are you following me so far?” They nodded. Surprise; keep going you’re almost finished. “The new generators and accelerators coupled with an upgraded penetrator we requested will take us to this level. We are exploring other theories to solve the power problem.” They looked confused. He went and pulled down a whiteboard. “This figure is us; we walk around with no effort. It’s like space/time osmosis; we go through invisible barriers, back and forth, just like that. But with PTT we have to keep penetrating or you get caught in what we call bounce-back. That’s like a bullet ricocheting off rocks or a ball off walls. You’re stuck in that envelope of time; that one hour. We cannot stop now ladies and gentlemen. We are striving to go at least five hours ahead. Yes, we’re in time travel’s infancy, but PTT will have various application.” Sylvester smiled when Penker winked at him while he escorted the executives out to finish the tour of the facility.

    Vanboten stood at the entrance to the time penetrator. “Control, do you read me?”
    “Yes, Dr. Vanboten, loud and clear.” The technician said.
    “Go to full power in quarter increments on my mark...now. The penetrator halo will power through the purple, red, yellow and white color ranges. White is go.” He adjusted his goggles for the bursts of light.
    “Get ready, doc, we’re almost there. Seventy-five, eighty, eight-five...one hundred.”
    Vanboten stepped into the penetrator’s white light. He tried to turn and look back, but he couldn’t. They predicted that and then his feet stopped. He was in the space they theorized. Good, and ahead of him nothing but white space; as predicted. In one hour time would catch up and he would reappear. He saw something through the light. Beautiful...it looked like the control room. The hour must be up. He stood just past the threshold of the penetrator. His staff and colleagues clapped and cheered.
    He did it! The first human to go forward.
    When Gomez Miller hears about this he’ll flip.
    Now, rich frat boy, top that and you cannot steal the credit.

    “Vanboten are you crazy? Who do you think you are?” Penker shouted. “You broke every rule in the book. You ordered a human experiment and then you pull that stunt when I’m out of town.” Blasts of anger and the smell of last night’s whisky hit him in the face. He’d seen him turn red before, but not that red. So what, it was necessary. “You want to go to jail, idiot?”
    “Jail...where did that come from?” Vanboten asked.
    “See, that’s what I mean. When you are not on the administrative side of this project you don’t understand. You have to get permission to fire that baby up; guess who authorizes that?” Beads of sweat popped up on his forehead.
    “Uh...who?”
    Penker ran his fingers through his comb over and sighed. “DOD, that’s who and that stand for the Department of Defense. You better hope I can keep a lid on this mess.”
    “Let me explain, just listen a minute, please.”
    “Please...please coming from the epitome of scientist, this must be good.” Penker sighed. “I’m listening.”
    “Uh...sit down you’re making me nervous.” Vanboten pointed to his favorite white Barcelona chair. “I’m not being arrogant, but thank me for proving we’re right. Theory and animals is cool, but now we know. I know you read the report. We need that before we get the new lab.” Penker nodded with that you-better-have-more-than-that look on his pale face. “I’m done with your boy taking credit for some of my most important work and you say nothing.”
    “Wait a minute, I don’t like him either, but we need him. You love this place don’t you?” Vanboten nodded. “His political connections help all of us.”
    “You’re the boss, screw him; I’m senior to him. Don’t let him intimidate you.”
    “What...I’m still the director and don’t forget it. I go, everybody goes and I’ll talk to you later.” Penker snapped, and stormed out the door.

    Gomez Miller walked out of Penker’s office emotionally and spiritually fulfilled. Vanboten’s history making excursion had been erased from the record. Miller suggested that the DOD would be forgiving for the disrespect if the record showed; nothing. Now he could make history in PTT and get all the glory. The nerve of Vanboten; that mentally ill trash didn’t deserve a prestigious place in history. Miller was of exceptional breeding; he came from wealth, power, the best education, friends, good looks, athleticism and intelligence. He was proud he didn’t require assistance from members of the darker races. But, his philanthropic contributions to their causes showed his compassion for the inferior, or better yet, less fortunate, which was politically correct. Vanboten didn’t share his views; another reason why he loathed him. Miller successfully lobbied certain private financial institutions to build more sophisticated equipment, devices he and Vanboten theorized would be needed. While Vanboten clung to his agoraphobia in his elaborate suite the new penetrator will be installed and calibrated. He needed to get this done before construction of the new facility which included refurbishing this one. He couldn’t understand why Penker catered to that damn Vanboten. He knew PTT as good as he did.
     What the hell, he had to live with it.
    For two weeks regular deliveries of new equipment were installed. Vanboten knew nothing; he expected that, after all Vanboten only went from his place and to the control room. He kept the shutter closed and that was fine with him.

    “Well gentlemen, DOD gave us the go ahead, check everything and let’s get started. Oh, by the way they also gave us the new facility.” Penker clapped; Vanboten and Miller exchanged stares.
    “The system is not ready yet, it’s too risky use animals.” He cut his eyes at Miller.
    “I beg to differ, Dr. Vanboten.” Miller got out his seat and walked to Vanboten’s side of the conference table. Vanboten stood. Penker didn’t move, he wouldn’t make it in time to break them up, if it came to that. Miller’s six foot eight frame towered over the head scientist. “I know PTT as good as you.”
     “Maybe...maybe not, but pushing it past one hour, two tops is too risky. I’m working on some new calculations that need double checking. Not that I care about you, but a lot of good people’s livelihood depends on this program. Not some elitist prick’s ego.” Miller frowned and looked down at Sylvester. “Your size doesn’t intimidate me, Miller. If you ever want a good fight tangle with a short guy like me. I will break your—”
    “Listen you guys, don’t start!” Penker shouted. “If you care about the people, Vanboten work with us. We set it for an hour and a half. We go in two weeks so the system can be double checked.” They looked at him and waited for an answer.
    He sighed and tossed his pen on the table. “OK...but under protest.”
    Vanboten loved Saturday mornings. Nobody around, that gave him time to get some work done. He parted the shutters.
    Jesus, what are they doing here!
    The control room was busier than a beehive. Miller stood in front of the penetrator wearing a headset. He hurried downstairs and checked the power readings on a vacant console. Eighty percent! Oh well, Miller ignored the schedule they agreed too. Sneaky bastard.

    Gomez Miller crossed the penetrator’s threshold. The whiteness temporarily blinded him. His legs were heavy, frozen like Vanboten said. He only looked forward. What’s that ahead? Technicians in the control room came into view. He spoke into his microphone. No response. He heard voices; he was returning. The whiteness returned and the control again, but this time with people he didn’t recognize.
    What was happening to him?
    Whiteness again; now he knew what it was. Bounce-back, like Vanboten theorized, the power fluctuations kept him in a certain layer in the continuum. “Increase power!” He shouted. Wait a minute, it was bounce-forward he experienced. He felt light headed; his feet seemed to float; then darkness. More whiteness; a new scene came at him fast with noise that sounded like...construction. Jesus, he went that far forward. He stretched out his arms. It was dark, but light hit the top of his head. He leaned to the right and felt around; steel bars with ties on them...rebars. He struggled to look up; his eyes squinted from the light.
    Where was he?
    He heard the reverse beeping of a truck. Something started to drop around him and splattered on his head.
    Cement, it was cement! He was in a caisson. He bounced-forward to the new building being constructed. Oh no...concrete poured in like water.

    The first weeks of Miller’s disappearance were difficult for his colleagues and friends. Vanboten acted like he cared, but he didn’t. He told them to wait.
    Penker convinced the DOD he would reappear in the coming months. The system only had so much power. So they built around the penetrator’s location. Too much time went by and the DOD wrote Gomez Miller off. The order to finish the caissons came, but they still wanted answers.
    “Well Penker, your boy got his wish, he wanted to be part of the construction. If he isn’t now at some point he will be.” Vanboten smiled.
    “Is that supposed to be funny?”
    “Yeah, very funny...What will you say about Gomez leaving ahead of schedule?”
    “I don’t know, but I’m trying to figure out why did he use your new calculations that were left so conveniently around? Perhaps he got them from your apartment because he knew he couldn’t get in your house.” Penker gave him an inquisitive look. “Is that possible?”
    Vanboten shrugged. “That’s on him. But, he still needed the go ahead. Is that possible?”
    “So... what do we tell them, if they asked.” They gave each other that look. “I think we better work together on this. Two great minds should come up with something.” The director of PTT held out his hand.
    “Deal.” They shook and Vanboten poured them a drink.

Guerilla Farming in the Deep South Woods

    For nine years Amanda Rosaleigh Blake and her soul mate, Michael Demian Randolph, grew marijuana in the Alabama countryside. Occasionally they grew a few plants in their backyard garden after they were large enough to conceal them. The tomato plants are thick, and it was an advantage that the tomato plants looked a bit like the reefer plants. The Marijuana Grower’s Guide showed them that the two crops need almost identical soil requirements.
    Michael and Amanda were not habitual law breakers. They were progressives in their life styles and world views. Like many socially oriented progressives, e.g., Ghandi, Thoreau, Martin Luther King, they readily committed civil disobedience if a law, contract, or other policy was unjust. They did not take this lightly. Like others who had the courage to commit civil disobedience, they expected to pay the penalty if they were caught. They knew that getting caught growing or possessing marijuana could mean jail.
    Amanda and Demian felt strongly that the laws banning pot were unjust and unintelligent. They hoped they did not get caught growing or possessing; their growing activities helped many people in the university town in which they lived. Three of their friends had cancer and one had AIDS. Marijuana helps with the nausea that the people with these diseases often have, and eases less serious stomach upsets. Others suffered chronic pain which was helped by this sacred plant, a gift from Mother Earth. Marijuana provides pain relief for several conditions. A few examples are menstrual cramps, paraplegics’ pain, post-surgical pain, and headaches. The use of reefer for pain is especially dramatic for paraplegics who are in college. The narcotics that ease their pain make them “goofy;” they cannot study. Marijuana is non-narcotic. It allows them to control their pain and to study.
    They needed to grow the re-creational plant since the dash in recreation implies that recreation as play is not the only way reefer can help one re-create. It can help one break self defeating habits and come up with new ideas when one become stuck in his or her creative activities. When Michael and Amanda first began writing for publication, they could work for three or four hours. Then they often got stuck on where to go on the article or book. If they smoked before bed, it would breakdown the stuck structures. The two could sleep easily knowing where to begin the next time they wrote.
    They grew their plants a few miles from where they taught at Central Alabama University as Associate Professors. Amanda was thirty; Demian was thirty-one when they began their project in l979. They ended it in l988. During this time, Michael and Amanda had adventures which make good short stories. The two had lean years and others that were abundant in terms of their harvest of sweet sensimillia flowers, including one year where they harvested more than eleven pounds The difference between “sense” and imported reefer is that only a few seeds are allowed to form on the locally grown sense. This gives the plants a higher quality in two ways, potency and pleasant, intense odor.
    Eleven pounds is a large harvest when one has to go guerilla. This method has several disadvantages. It is hard to find places where the plants adequate sun light and water when drought came. These difficulties also include three kinds of poisonous snakes. There are millions of chiggers which burrow under one’s skin and leave itchy places that make mosquito bites look anemic. The itching is so intense it takes a will of iron not to scratch them and prolong the agony. Moreover, briars of many kinds are everywhere. They can tear the skin and cause bleeding. Guerilla farming in the Alabama woods is no easy task.
    Michael and Amanda had adventures which make good short stories. Some of them were potentially tragic. They were never seriously harmed but they did lose a lot of plants to theft and some to drought. Still others of their experiences were humorous. The accounts in this story happened in the spring, summer, and early fall 1986.
    Then both Amanda and Michael had been associate professors at CSU since 1976. Amanda took sick leave the fall, winter and spring quarters of the 1985-86 school year. She was feeling burned out, and feared for her physical and even mental aspects of her overall well being. The Reagan-Bush policies were doing terrible things to universities. Academic freedom was viciously and relentlessly assaulted. At times they felt as though they were going around in a state of shock or unreality. It was all quite nightmarish.
    By March of that year Amanda was rested and her burn out was gone. However, the therapist she was required to see as a condition of her sick leave wanted her to take the Spring Quarter off as well. She had been bumped off of the graduate faculty on some insane grounds. The requirements for continuation here were the frequent teaching of graduate courses which she did; serving on a number of graduate committees which she did, thirty-three in all; and extensive publications which she had many more than she needed. However, her progressive educational practices and politics threatened the reactionaries who controlled the upper administration and Education School.
    Amanda thought her therapist’s suggestion provided an opportunity for her to experiment on ways of stopping the thieves. She decided to conduct her experiment in the area where they had the most trouble with theft. This place was in and around a small village called Loachapoka about seven miles from their home. In the Loachapoka area they had bought twelve acres of rural farm land. Prior to Amanda’s experiment the two lovers had always used their Chevrolet Van to plant and care for the plants. After a while it had become a dead giveaway. Amanda decided she would take an old ford sedan they had to begin her project. She wore a hat under which she hid her long hair.
    She required an auto because she needed some large tools such as a hoe, a shovel, garden and leaf rakes, two kinds of fertilizer and some lime. Around her spot grew several huge wild azaleas. The flowers were fragrant and a lovely shade of pink. That year the flowers were abundant and in full bloom when she first began digging her sites. She stopped every now and then and admired the plants. Their fragrance pervaded the air and gave her a wonderful natural high.
    Amanda’s sites were near a branch creek which filled with water during the winter and spring rains before hot weather set in either in June or July. This creek which provided water for the young plants came from a larger one. This served as a cooling off spot each time Amanda tended the plants until it became too hot and infested with cotton mouth moccasins. It was never deep enough to swim in, but there were spots in which one could immerse one’s body.
    After the heavy work was done, Amanda began to ride her motorcycle, a black and gold 1974 Hondo 350 Four. Her hypothesis that no one would suspect that a person on a motorcycle was tending marijuana was proven correct. To further confuse things, she parked the bike in a clump of trees and walked a quarter of a mile farther in the woods. She checked the plants every week or two. Amanda planted ten plants in the area. Two of her plants died because she planted them too close to large trees. Their extensive root systems prevented the plants from getting enough water to survive a drought.
    One of Amanda’s near tragic experience happened in early July. That day when Amanda left her sites she felt a little ‘woozy.’ When she arrived in town she was feeling dangerously weak and drained. As she reached the middle of town, she pulled over to the side of the street, Glenn Avenue and laid the bike down. She asked the filling station owner, a gas station they frequented often, for help. The owner invited her to use his phone to call Michael.
    When he answered, Amanda began, “Michael, this is Amanda. I’m in a bit of trouble. Don’t panic I haven’t been arrested. I’m at on Glenn Avenue close to College Street. I’m too weak from the heat to ride the bike all of the way home.”
    Michael replied, “I’ll be right there. Get in the shade and stay quiet and calm. You sound as though you are close to a heat stroke. Be easy and this time I’m not joking. You have me worried. I love you.”
    Amanda said “I love you too, sweetness and don’t worry. I’m taking it quite easy.”
    After Michael found a strong board to use to roll the bike into the van, He went to where Amanda was waiting. As he drew close to her location, he could see her sitting on the curb in the shade of an oak tree. She was pale and appeared as though she could collapse any moment.
    “Hi lover,” Michael greeted her. “Are you alright?”
    “No, but I’m better now that you are here.”
    “Good, now let’s see if we can roll the bike into the van using the board.” His board worked beautifully. Soon the two left for their house about a mile away.
    When Michael and his damsel in distress reached their house, Amanda exclaimed, “Whew! I’m glad that’s over. I’m feeling better..”
    “Wonderful,” Michael said “I was scared there for a while. It’s an awful day with a heat index of one hundred and ten degrees F.”
    That night they snuggled in bed with their much beloved Feline Woody named after one of Michael and Amanda’s heroes, Woody Guthrie. The two lovers listened to music and made love. At nine o’clock one of their best friends, Alexander White, came over to watch Dr. Who, a science fiction series that aired on Alabama public television every Saturday night. This was a weekly custom in which the four engaged.
    Alex taught physical education a rural school. He was a graduate of CAU at both the bachelors and masters levels. He was appalled when he found that Amanda almost had a heat stroke. “On Girl!” he exclaimed. “Please be careful. We don’t want to lose you.”
    “Okay,” Amanda promised. “I’m good now and I don’t ever intend to go there again.”
    Two weeks later a humorous set of events occurred when Amanda went to tend her plants. When she arrived at the turn off into the woods, she put the bike in low gear and rode on dirt ruts for about a mile. When she was on their property she hid the bike in hard to see places. This time she was careless using a clump of trees that were close to the ruts and near their property line.
    When she returned from the sites and reached the place where she had left the bike, it was gone. Amanda was in a panic. She thought did I leave it somewhere else and forget where? This is truly insane. Then, she looked ahead. There were two young black guys stealing the Honda. The boys were probably rolling the bike to a housing development which was to the right of where one turned onto the ruts.
    Amanda yelled loudly, “Put that bike down, you brats.”
    The young men laid the bike down gently and fled. Amanda ran at full speed toward the motorcycle. She was thinking don’t let the engine flood. She knew the longer it stayed down the more likely it was to flood. When she reached the bike her adrenalin was pumping hard enough that she picked up the bike with one hand. Ordinarily, she would have had to strain to pick it up with both hands. She held her breath as she tried to start the bike. The bike fired up. She sighed with relief, amazed that it did not flood at all.
    After Amanda finished telling the story through which they laughed many times. Michael said, “That is one of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard.”
    “It happened so quickly I didn’t get a chance to process it conceptually until I was riding home. As I thought about it I decided with respect to the near motorcycle theft, I would not have changed anything about the way I handled it. It was done without thought in the traditional sense. It was happening right there with me in it. I had to do something or be in big trouble.”
    “You did well,” Michael assured her.
    A few weeks later, Amanda took Michael to her sites. The plants were ready to harvest. Amanda ended with five female plants after the others exhibited male flowers. They harvested the plants with some hand clippers and put the plump and resinous buds in some paper bags. That night the two cleaned the buds of extraneous leaves and hung them. After they dried Michael weighed them. Amanda had harvested a pound plus; not bad for five plants under less than ideal conditions.
    Amanda told Michael after the weigh, “I’m proud of this.’
    “You should be, Sweetness.”
    Michael had some plants growing at and near their other rural property. These sites were near a small village ten miles from CAU. There was a creek down the road from the town where Michael put some plants. There were several spots on their 22 acre that were hidden enough to set plants out. He got the ten pounds plus some that year from his plants it was a good year.
    Amanda said “Now that you’ve harvested your plants, we’ll give away some to our three friends who have cancer and one who has AIDS, to Rita in the psychology department who has horrible menstrual periods, to our pal who is cripple, and other persons with medical needs or who are stuck in their creative activities. We’ll give our best friends a half ounce. Some of the rest of it we will keep for our medical, re-creational, and recreational needs. The rest we we’ll sell to the undeserving for one hundred twenty dollars an ounce.
    Harvesting sweet sensimellia is, with respect to the visual, tactile, and olfactory, an intensely sensuous experience. There is a definite erotic element about the harvested plant. It made love making even sweeter and more frequent for the couple when fresh ‘sense’ buds were available. All of this does not alter the fact that it is a sin and a shame that marijuana is illegal in our society. We are making progress legalizing medical marijuana in some states and in some cases, re-creational and recreational reefer. We have a long way to go before we get Cannabis Sativa fully de-criminalized. There are thousands of people who are rotting in jail for minor pot offenses. This needs to stop. When it does, Mother Earth does not mind our getting some revenue for social services out of her gift to us.

Greaser Brothers Tag Team Meltdown

(Excerpted from Kayfables: A Novel of Poems & Stories)

    Jack Leffing had liked August’s series of “Nopoems” from his eponymously-titled collection. That had surprised A Ra a bit; in his opinion, the poems had a slight taint of pseudo-Oriental preciousness. That was no surprise—August’s opinion of his own work was rarely charitable. He was working on the imbalance, trying to be neither a beggar or a braggart. The real surprise, and interesting synchronicity, was that Leffing had sent him an unsolicited Facebook message, a fan letter, really, after glancing at A Ra’s account of his year as a pro wrestler, Blue Collar Ballet. August had just finished reading Jack’s first three novels, and had almost been moved to write a fan letter, but his upbringing as a Wrestling Business & Music Industry Kid prevented that.
    “Don’t be a Squirrel and bug the artists,” August’s Father, “Cottonmouth” McQuarry, had told him on his first trip backstage at the Grand Old Opry. This was 1971, and the Opry was still held at the ancient, uncomfortable, badly insulated, un-airconditoned, and supremely soulful Ryan Auditorium in downtown Nashville. The place had originally built by a reformed slave ship Captain. It was all about redemption, tradition, and the self-validation of the country music community. It was about family.
    And family there was in abundance. In those days, before corporations from the Left Coast bought Nashville (“The Third Coast”), lock, stock, and barrel, the wives, kids, and various relations of each artist on the Ryman Show, plus those of all the side men and various hangers-on, were allowed to mill freely about backstage during the Opry. Somehow it worked. Major artists got their little cubicles, and their Zones of Respect; the mob flowed around the bubbles made by each artist’s aura. They were howdied and handshaked, otherwise left alone.

    August, just 14, into the Beatles and Creedence and shaggy of hair, wasn’t sure if he really belonged to the Opry. On the other hand, he wasn’t so sure he didn’t. The kid had grown up on Johnny Horton, Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash, Ray Price, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and George Jones—the usual Country suspects. Some of those artists had recorded his Father’s songs. When Cottonmouth McQuarry, former Heel wrestler in the Florida territory, had hung up his boots and gone over to music full time, he’d concentrated on songwriting and playing that difficult, versatile, virtuoso instrument, the steel guitar. Now he was a side man in P. John House’s band, The Storysingers.
     P. John was the sensation of the moment, written up in Rolling Stone and The Village Voice as a fresh new American voice, a sort of country Dylan Thomas crossed with Dylan, Bob. Ole P. was down home enough for the Ryman Opry audience, but progressively poetic enough to fill listening rooms and auditoriums in New York and L.A. He was one of August’s favorite artists. In vain, Aug had tried to get his sometimes-girlfriend Donna Sawyer to LISTEN to how DEEP P. John was, but the redhead was doubtful.
    “Come on, August, he just sang ‘he said he played the BANJER pretty good’! P. John House can’t even talk right! He’s unintelligent!”

    With all the infinite weary tolerance a 14-year-old intellectual could muster, August rolled his eyes and spread his palms. “Look, Donna, this is a song about P. John picking up some hick kid who’s hitchhiking, and he’s QUOTING the kid, he’s faithfully representing what the kid talked like, he’s BEING AN ARTIST, it’s not P. JOHN who said ‘BANJER’, it’s this poor broke sort of stupid kid, and P. John is just being a JOURNALIST and a WRITER—and hey! At least the kid can PLAY the ‘banjer’!”
    August didn’t add “Unlike YOU”, but it was on the surface of his brain. But then, he felt sorry for Donna. She had posters on her bedroom wall about the joys of Motherhood, couldn’t wait for a big Church marriage and a normal bourgeois life as a hausfrau. Donna couldn’t create Art, so she would create babies instead. And teach them to love Nixon and conformism.
    At 14 and three quarters, August was beginning to abhor knee-jerk snobs who just somehow KNEW, without any investment of experience, whether or not a certain kind of art, or a particular artist, was worth even a millisecond of their ever-so-demanding high-toned, snob-assed precious attention. Donna Sawyer might understand that the Prog Rock God, Sisyphus, was all about wonder and mystery, but she couldn’t hear the same thing in a progressive country song. Or see it in a comic book. Donna had bailed on him and Jacey Brentworth after 10 minutes at the 1971 Vanderbilt Comics Symposium, which ONLY had every important writer and artist in the comics business in attendance, and was being held at a UNIVERSITY—you know, a place where they don’t let STUPID things and people in (so August had heard).
    August hadn’t had any pussy yet, but he was already pussywhipped by Donna. Yet on that occasion, faced with being able to harass Stan Lee about plot points in his comics, ask iconic artist Jack Kirby why all his characters had square fingertips, bother Mad Magazine’s Dave Berg with impertinent questions about Roger Kaputnik, kvell over the actual living presence of semi-subversive Doonesbury writer / artist Gary Trudeau, and get to hear them all talk SERIOUSLY about the ART of the American Comics Book, OR Go Home With Donna Like A Good Boy and perhaps curry her future favor, August chose to stay at Vanderbilt through the entire program.
    Jacey Brentworth, only 12 then, had helped him terrorize the Guests Of Honor with questions like “When the hell are you gonna KILL Aunt May, Stan? The old bat shoulda been dead 20 issues ago!” It had been a Special Moment, and would not be repeated in August’s lifetime. To say he had been there, August later privately decided, was worth more than a dozen French kisses apiece from a hundred Donna Sawyers on a thousand and one Simon & Garfunkel nights.
    That Summer, just before his 15th birthday in August, August McQuarry would return to Lakeland, Florida, to see old friends like Big Rich Handy, Ronald March (a fellow Writer), and Tim Handy, Rich’s little brother. It was Tim who explained to him that only idiots who weren’t cool listened to Country Music now. August should be into, you know, Zeppelin or Sabbath, not hog-calling caterwaulers like Hank Williams or Tom T. Hall. Country fans were hicks who didn’t get it.
    In the meantime, during the SAME time, August’s second cousin Jerald Payne was telling him that only drug addicts and fools listened to hard rock. Hard rock was garbage. It didn’t tell a story, at least not one anybody could understand. So what if August liked listening to George Jones on the radio with Jerald while they were both working for Aug’s paternal grandfather’s used tire business? Listening to the Possum by day didn’t make up for listening to the Doors by night. If you listened to rock, you were a hippie, plain and simple. And hippies were the reason this country was a-goin’ to the dogs, etc...

    August decided there was no winning with Willfully Ignorant Blind Knee-Jerk Reality-Snobs. You had to be entirely on their side of the fence; the middle wouldn’t do. A reasonable mixture of styles and approaches was impossible—polarization must be zealously maintained. And so it continued into the American 2000s, where Politics is Professional Wrestling, and Professional Wrestling is a Corporate Concept. But on the night in question, his first night backstage at the Opry, a freshly 15-year-old August listened to his Father.
    Cotton had his insanely long length of hair wrapped around his head and sprayed into a shiny dark tamed-down shelf like most of the other pickers. He was a big man, 6’4” and 240 pounds, wrapped in a black-and-gold braided jacket and trousers like all the other Storysingers in P. John’s band. Ole P. would probably wear jeans and a white button up shirt, a battered straw Stetson. All would wear cowboy boots. The audience, the marks, demanded it—lots of shine and chrome and flash. They wanted to know they were getting the real Thing, Grand Old Opry Country Music.
    At one time, country people had lived far apart from each other, and the voice of WSM-AM out of Nashville was their musical hearthfire. It kept them all connected, in that each family knew other families just like theirs were listening to the Opry. They were part of a sonic community. The whole “Opry” thing, far from being some stupid hick spur-of-the-moment ignorant misspelling, was a tremendous but well-known in-joke. Back in the Day, WSM had played Grand Opera just before it went to live Country Music from Nashville, or some other hot Country town. It was called “The Hayride”, this Southern-American Saturday night live country radio show. But one night, the announcer ad libbed his segue, saying:
    “You’ve been listening to Grand Opera on WSM, friends. Now we take you to some Grand Ole Opry...”
    It was an instant catchphrase, a mediaeval meme. Because of the announcer’s gentle tease of the Country sound of talking and singing, whatever the show had been called before, it was now ineradicably “The Grand Old Opry.” And always would be. Names given in jest or in passing, sometimes become Names of Power.
    Cotton went on. “Son, I gotta go string and tune P.’s guitar—he hates doing it, and pays me 5 bucks—so you have fun, hang out. Say hey. Watch the Show. Remember that not everybody gets to see it from where you’re standing. But don’t go botherin’ the Artists, now. They deserve their space. Only Squirrels bug the Artists.”
    August didn’t want to be a Squirrel. Squirrels would pull a gun and tell you how much they loved you as they blew your balls off. Squirrels had no dots in their eyes. At their very best, Squirrels sucked up all the personal space from Artists. Artists had no real space. Everyone owned them.
    “I dig it, Daddy.” August was horrified at the thought of Being A Squirrel. In later years, it would keep him from asking figure skater “Little Kimmie” Meissner for her autograph just before she went on to win the World Championship in Calgary, Alberta.
    “Go on, just ask her,” said August’s wife, Dr. Marlene Llewellyn. “Scout” was a former skater and World level Judge. She had introduced A Ra to Figure Skating. It was very easy for August to see Pair Skating as similar to Wrestling, in that your bones were on the line, and you had to absolutely trust your partner with your body. He also liked the cool names the various skating maneuvers had, so like Wrestling with its breathless hyperbole—”the Backward Death Spiral”, for instance. August quickly caught on that Figure and Pair Skating, and Ice Dancing, were about both soul and technique. It was Wrestling. It was Prog Rock. Poetry on razorblades, a hyperbole of the Spirit.
     “Aw, honey, I don’t wanna be a damn Squirrel...” muttered August, as the pretty young skater cheerfully signed autographs for all who chose to approach her. A Ra didn’t get his signed pictures of Little Kimmie til later. He’d sent her pics, an SASE, an overapologetic letter, and Kimmie had returned them with extra pics, all signed in gold (he’d provided Kimmie the pen), and a very nice handwritten personal note, all of which August framed. He might not be a Squirrel, but he WAS a Mark, in this case, a Meissner Mark. Sadly, after winning the World Championship at 16, Kimmie dropped out of competitive skating. Peaking early is always hard.
    It was as this sort of person August began to respond to Jack Leffing’s messages on Facebook. A fan of Leffing’s who didn’t want to be a Squirrel. One who was a little star-struck when Jack suggested they speak on the phone. But also one who got over it quickly. After all, for his pro wrestling debut, August had been on the same card as Ricky Morton. Ricky, world-famous 45-year-old teenage wrestling heartthrob that he was, treated the new guy, Luscious, like anyone else. That is, he was quick with a verbal jab or a laugh, but with Ricky, the jab was never mean-spirited, and the laugh was always as much at himself as it was for the target. A Ra had also gotten shit-faced with P. John House on more than one occasion, at the Storysinger’s palatial estate in Franklin, TN. One night, John R. Cash had come to the Poetic Encomium at Ole P.’s in a tails-and top-hat ensemble that no other Man than the one in Black could have pulled off. August shook Cash’s hand and called him a helluva poet, knowing he’d been a Squirrel to tell Johnny something he already knew. It was hit and miss, but when you got them home, Famous People, Wrestlers and Pickers, were all pretty much hairy-legged souls like everybody else.

    As for Writers, August had been hanging out with Writers since his 15th summer, when P. John House had sent him to live with Arkansas Poet Laureate Hilliard Billings and his family in Fayetteville for several weeks. Fayetteville was known as a literary town, a Nashville of the Word. August met Larkin Garrison there, came back to her the next Summer to lose his virginity. Lark was Luke Garrison’s daughter. Garrison had written some Heavy Novels, also the short story that wound up being a popular SF film called Killball, starring James Caan. Prof. Hilliard Billings headed the University of Arkansas creative writing department with Luke Garrison and football player turned-poet & novelist David “Sonny” Hemmings. Writers got drunk and high, talked shop and bullshit. They wove elaborate fantasies and then laughed them to pieces. Writers, especially Poets, were not all in the real world. 2/3rds of them was turned to some other plane than this one, and there they did their real living. Writers were all different, of course. And they dealt with Being Writers the best they could.
    Famous People. Writers. Wrestlers. Pickers, Prog & Country. It seemed to August, that like Bruce Wayne putting on the Batman (or Batman taking off Bruce Wayne), many Artists put on Effective Personalities to do their Work. Like priest’s robes or warrior’s armor, these Masks or Personas were merely extensions of their genuine personalities, hyperbolized and polished, a few rhinestones added. And a Gimmick, of course. All Entertainers needed a Gimmick.

    The Gimmick could be that you were Charles Bukowski, hulking drunk one step from sleeping on a park bench and always vomiting whiskey while pawing at women, though Charles Bukowski wrote about this very different character Hank Chinaski, who said of Humanity: “You never had it from the beginning.” Some unhip folks had thought Bukowski meant “I never had any Humanity”, but the Smart Marks knew that Buk meant almost all of Humanity had no soul, no intrinsic decency. They were all phony assholes. He, Buk, and a selected few of his friends and lovers, well, THEY had soul. They had Humanity. Until he got pissed at one of them for “being a phony asshole” and turned them into pigeons in his personal literary shooting gallery. That seemed to happen with fair regularity during Buk’s career, especially when it came to this Prof. Corrington dude.
    Prof must have pissed on Buk’s cat or fucked his trophy woman. Buk really let him have it. But YES, Old Hank seemed correct on the details of the facts as he saw them—Corrington was a Blind Ignorant Knee-Jerk Reality-Snob. Like Everyone In Academia. Like everyone but Henry Chinaski, who admitted to hating Johnny Cash because “too many people like him, and the only thing you can do for a man in jail is let him out of jail.”
     If Bukowski’s work, his poetry and prose, had helped keep you sane and alive, and had made you laugh even on the worst days of working a shitjob and trying to keep 4 walls and the lights on so you could pursue pussy and Art (or cock and Art if you were a woman or Gay, sorry to leave out the Lesbians), then by God, you had all the makings of being a Bukowski Mark. Did you REALLY believe he was ever sleeping on a park bench or living in a paper shack in Atlanta? You were a Mark. You might as well be the kind of person who believed that The Undertaker from WWE wrestling lived in a graveyard and had magic powers.
    
     This was, in any case, the impression August “A Ra” McQuarry got from his new Brother in Pen and Arms, Jack Leffing, re: The Legend of Hardcore Bukowski. “I was never much into Bukowski. And I can’t stand any living writers except you and myself.” said Leffing. “By the way, I have less than zero interest in wrestling. I liked Blue Collar Ballet for the writing only. Just like I dig Stephen King for his writing, not what he writes about.”
    August was fine with that. He himself was interested in wrestling, if only for how it had declined, and in the entire Mythos of Steve King, which he considered part of his own Personal Mythological Universe. A Ra’s “inscape” was damn huge. But really, it WAS all about the writing, wasn’t it? He tried to make the kid (Leffing was 43; August was a doddering 56) understand that for young aspirants of HIS time, finding Bukowski had been very important. There was nothing else like him; you had to ORDER his books, just as Aug had been forced to order The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley back in 1972. Bukowski was likely to pop up in Hustler magazine with some fiery and fresh new poems, surprising you as you searched for the proper jerkoff partner. Next thing you knew, you had a Bukowski book and were reading about horse racing, a subject you had no interest in. Until Buk made it come alive for you, rather as Dr. Marlene had sparked August’s interest in Figure Skating.
    August had missed meeting Bukowski by two weeks at Hilliard Billing’s house in Fayetteville, Arkansas during the summer of 1972. It was just as well. Like his Daddy Cotton said, if you wanted to keep your heroes, it was best not to meet them. Cotton himself had turned down a chance to be roommates with George Jones in the 60s, saying “I like George too much to do that.”
    The two Writers, Jack Leffing and August “A Ra” McQuarry, seemed miraculously well met. They had both been enraptured with SE Hinton’s iconic book The Outsiders as kids. Now they nicknamed each other Sodapop and Ponyboy, after characters in Hinton’s book. They were the Greasers, the Outsiders, despised by the social set (the Socs, pronounced “Soshes). It was a delightful bitterness of outlook to share, if only as a Friendship Gimmick. Sodapop and Ponyboy were cool and tuff, a bad tag team to tangle with. Soda reformatted Pony’s sloppy version of Blue Collar Ballet for the Kindle; Pony was old, drug-blasted, and tech-deprived. But Pony was still a speed-reader; he helped copyedit Leffing’s insanely powerful new book, Hercules Shirt, giving the manuscript 7 merciless readings to help correct typos and glitches. August felt deep sympathy with the true story of Leffing’s ordeal by accusation of a hideous crime, his worse-than-prison county jail crucifixion. A Ra himself had once been accused of the same crime, and now he knew it could have been worse. He could have been locked down like Jack. That Jack wrote the book partially in jail with pencil stubs left-handed on crappy yellow paper—well, SHIT. Here was a writer with a real work ethic. He made A Ra feel better about the “younger generation of writers.” Up until now, he’d figured most of them for vacuous knee-jerk ironists, slackers of the spirit. Jack Leffing was no slacker. He was a working writer, 4 books under his belt, a growing fan base.
    August wrote the majority of the back-cover synopsis for Hercules Shirt for Jack Leffing. He gave it his best effort, which was normal. To A Ra’s mind, in doing this kind of thing, you let your talent run, held nothing of your abilities back, and were pitiless with yourself, chopping and hacking viciously until you had what both you and the other writer wanted. A Ra had done it many times, for other writers and poets, notably for Captain G. Roland Fallon’s Vietnam poetry collection, Bamboo. In the end, Jack was well-pleased with “Ponyboy’s” synopsis, and added only a very little to it before publishing Hercules Shirt to Kindle. Both of the “Greaser Brothers” were proud of the Shirt blurb. It was tuff.
    The relationship had been young when Jack Leffing offered to be August’s Editor for his own new and fast-growing first draft, Kayfables: A Novel Of Poems & Stories.t August had eagerly accepted, knowing he’d want to hold back the manuscript until it was through first draft before giving it to Leffing. Jack, he knew, was busy with other matters, very real and commercial and practical in nature. No point in being a Squirrel. Aside from a few poems that he thought would strike Jack’s fancy, and two paragraphs from a short story that featured Leffing’s character Jake Blanton, he messaged nothing literally ‘literary’ to Jack.
    August did eventually provide a nearly completed manuscript of “KF” to Soda by e-mail, saying “Read it when you’re ready. I just wanted another copy of the manuscript out there.” Pony also kept his Editor up on what it was like emotionally, physically, and otherwise, for an old, ill writer who had resigned himself to dying quietly in the dark, and who now, though challenged by infant twins and the agendas of the Normal Daylight World, was just about done with the first draft of something that might be worth a shit at some point.
    Soda and Pony were shaping up to be a literary dream team. Jack and August had different looks and gimmicks, but their gimmicks somehow clicked. Still, by now, even the average Mark has begun to suspect inevitable trouble rushing toward this stellar tag team relationship. It was just TOO good—too much mutual respect, too many offers to help accepted and performed. Jack Leffing had given August a little push at a time where he’d been caught between believing in himself as a writer, and hanging it up to play video games and be a Father. As a result, August (or “Pony”, as Jack called him), wrote one short story, then two, then five, then finally, fourteen and a half. He sequenced the stories with pre-existing, already-polished poems from his 25-year career as a poet. It was coming together VERY well, miraculously well, it was impossible but true—after 8 years of Writer’s Block, and a lifetime hampered by the belief he really couldn’t write, you know, SHORT stories, August had a 525-page first draft. His old poems had been sequenced to fit the book, segue in and out of the stories. Finally, it was being Done Right. All it took was everything he had.
    August’s veins now ran with purple euphoria; he was working 12-24 hours a day on nothing but pure adrenaline and literal enthusiasm, plus a few Percocet for his neuropathic foot pain. And sure, some palliative cannabis. A Ra was aware that the first draft wasn’t even finished, a long road ahead, but surely it did no harm to crow to your Tag Team Partner, your Editor, your Greaser Brother—
     “Soda, I was stuck in a hotel room with my screaming kids all weekend in Jasper, but I kicked ASS, dude! I pulled off the pivotal story, the crux, the one where I hook all the loose concept-ends together. I think you will really like it when you finally see it. It’s fucking FUNNY, man. I never thought it would turn out FUNNY, you know...?”

    “I’m REALLY worried that you might be becoming an Ego Asshole, Pony. Or that you might already be one.”
    So began Jack Leffing’s response message to August. At first amused—because, sure, everyone gets hazed and teased, it’s standard locker room procedure in Show Biz of any kind—August suddenly realized that his tag team partner had broken Kayfabe. Leffing, who in ‘real life’ could easily pass for an elaborately tattooed MMA fighter, was throwing what wrestlers called ‘potatoes’, unpulled punches that were impossible to roll with.
    In the ring, some potatoes were accidental, to be shrugged off and forgotten about. You had to have a sense of humor. But when the other guy landed his third or fourth potato? Well, for one thing, you shouldn’t have even let the second one land. If you were Gypsy Joe, you made your block into a counterpunch, put the other Worker on his ass. Match over. If you were Joe’s student, Luscious, you reflexively blocked the second punch, were called “defensive” by the guy who threw it, then wondered...
    Is this guy really just trying to help me out, make me a better Worker, do both of us a favor by working a stiff style? Or has he suddenly started believing he needs to “win”?
    Hard chops to the ego were one thing. Good Workers took them like open hand blows to the chest. Endure the sting, suck it up, give it back. Keep the show going.
    Luscious tried to roll with Leffing’s potatoes. Then came the nut shot.
    I want to think you’re a solid dude, but Pony, you keep talking about your writing. I thought you knew only phonies and assholes do that...
    Suddenly, without conscious effort, August imagined an entire page of words. It was a parody of Leffing’s book Bottles on the Tide, with Jack at some LA party chock full of phonies and assholes. He, his character Jake Blanton, anyway, former pizza guy turned literary cause celebre, was being rudely treated by some soulless phony—
    “So I hear you’re a writer, Mr. Blanton, and that Vonnegut is doing the intro for your new book. You must be excited.”
    “Only assholes talk about their writing. I never talk about my writing. Who told you to ask me about my writing? Was it someone who had sand in his vagina? Or is it just you, because you’re a vapid hipster who wants to get in on whatever seems cool at the moment?”
    “Gee, that’s kind of presumptuous, Mr. Blanton...”
    “What’s the matter, pussy, does your vagina hurt? Take a Midol, faggot.”
    
    While Jake Blanton delivered this speech, August imagined him standing between his Perfect Girlfriend, Francine the singer / songwriter, and his Perfect Friend, the unbelievably talented painter, Basil Copper. At one time, August had been able to see and believe in both characters; he especially liked Basil as a person. But now, Jack Leffing was beginning to lose something that is VERY important for the success of a Wrestler, Writer, Actor, Dancer, Skater, Picker, or any other Artist. That is, the Willing Suspension of Disbelief of his Audience.
    Considering the possibility of his worst fear being true, that he was a clueless ego asshole who was too far gone to even know it, August began to feel physically ill. Yet, an alarm was now going off inside him, telling August he’d once again met a person like his old crank connection, virtuoso guitarist Luther Short. Incredibly talented. Passive aggressive. A bully. Quick with the insecurity-based, just-kidding homophobic insults. It seemed all too familiar.
    August had dared to be enthused at not being dead, to talk to his EDITOR about WRITING. In return, Leffing had implied that August might already be a Phony Ego Asshole. Feeling as if he had been legit kicked in the balls, no kayfabe about it, August reached for his office wastecan. He felt he might puke. Legitimate nut shots had that effect.
    Somewhere in there, fighting down the nausea, August Randall “A Ra” McQuarry lost his belief in the reality of the characters Jack Leffing had created for Bottles on the Tide. Now and ever after, the characters of Francine and Basil would remain for him cardboard cutouts with handles in back, easy to transport, not real people but wish fulfillments written into existence by Jack Leffing. August had promised Jack a new synopsis / blurb for Bottles, and wanted to cite it as the least formulaic book he’d ever read. But wait. Wasn’t this Talented Hot Intelligent Girlfriend actually a prop? Or a plant? Francine no longer seemed true to August. She was just a Physically Perfect Ever-Agreeable-to-Your-Agenda Girl, like none who existed or ever would.
    On the character of the painter, Basil Copper, August reserved judgement. He couldn’t “hear” the fictional songs Jack Leffing had Francine “singing” on the pages of Bottles. Somehow it never came across. Maybe because Leffing himself wasn’t a performer, and suspicious of anyone who enjoyed performing. A Ra could still see some of Copper’s fictional art. Especially his b&w spontaneous cocktail napkin work.
    But it wasn’t enough, not to write an HONEST blurb for Bottles on the Tide. August’s usefulness to Leffing was now much less than whatever it had been before. And there was the question of being a Phony Ego Asshole. Which, according to Jack, he might already be. His “uncontrolled egotism” had already “dampened” Leffer’s “enthusiasm” for reading his manuscript. Jack had connections. This might be August’s only chance. His last chance. To do, to be...whatever.
    August asked himself what a Phony Ego Asshole would do in this situation, and attempted to do the opposite.
    Jack, please delete the manuscript I sent you. I’m withdrawing the book from consideration by you or your publisher. You won’t hear me talk about my writing again. Win what you can.
    A Ra then made a binding Magickal Vow never to find a loophole through which to come back to Jack Leffing. There would be no “what ifs” or “maybes” now. Right or wrong, August had made a choice based on his personal code. When you started looking for backsies on your own Word, you could pretty well hang it up as a man, much less as a Magician.
    It DID make a bit easier to see that Leffing, in reply to A Ra’s Final Word, had sent him a Message which began “Take a Midol, Pony...” August deleted the note unread. It was funny when Cartman did it on South Park, the whole “free-floating animosity to women and queers” gimmick, but only the first few times.
    So it was finished, the promising Literary Tag Team of Ponyboy & Sodapop Curtis, The Greaser Brothers.
    Because of Ego. Self-Importance.
    Show Business.
    Wrestling.
    Illusion.
    And it was a shame, a loss. Wasn’t it? On TV, doing color commentary, wrestler Dirty Roades was famous for saying, when someone had ‘lost’ the bout: “He won’t be goin’ to the ‘pay-windah’ tonight, Brother!” Big Dirt sold it like there was a physical window where envelopes full of cash were being given out to the “winners”.
    Take the word of The Only Real Man In Professional Wrestling—The Luscious One has left the ring area. He is now headed to the pay-windah. Because a writer wins whenever he writes, just as a wrestler wins whether or not he ‘loses’.
    It’s the Kayfabe Truth.

            —Luscious Leslie Love
    former IWA Television Champion

Unclaimed

    Most of the passengers on Delta flight 0028 were sleeping, especially those in first-class. The plane, flying over Greenland, was approximately half-way through the trip.
    Jacob Wyatt, sitting in between two strangers in economy seating, was not sleeping. Instead, Jacob was using the tray-table to draw in his sketchpad. The bottom of his right hand was smudged with graphite. He worked quickly, and every so often his left hand would change the angle of the paper, but the movements of his right hand were so fluid it might have looked like Jacob had picked up an already completed drawing and was simply pretending to be the one who had created it.
    Jacob withdrew his hands and looked at his drawing. For a moment, he smiled. Then, almost immediately, he looked sideways to his left. The older man who had been reading Game of Thrones earlier was sleeping. He even wore a sleep mask. Jacob shifted his eyes to the right. The girl with the University of South Carolina sweatshirt was sleeping as well. Her head was leaning against the window, her mouth open.
    Satisfied, Jacob looked again at his drawing. Of course, it was just a sketch, and it was not easy doing so on a plane, in between two strangers, but Jacob smiled again. He had drawn a man in a suit walking up a winding staircase into the sky. The stairs were laptops and tablets, and the sky too was a giant tablet. The man was trying to reach the sky, trying to touch it, to open one of its apps, but his right foot had sunk into one of the “steps.” Already, his right leg was becoming pixilated. Jacob had drawn the staircase in such a way as to have the man’s face visible to the viewer. The man’s cheeks still showed corners of a mouth tightly pulled back from a smile, but the mouth was open from a shout of horror, and the eyes were wide in sudden revelation.
    Jacob saw that the assistance light in his row had turned on, but he hadn’t pressed it. He looked to his left, the man was still sleeping. Jacob looked to the girl on his right, but as he did so her left elbow nudged against his right arm as she stretched and yawned.
    Jacob closed his sketchpad and turned off his overhead light. A few moments later a flight attendant arrived. Her eyes were puffy, and her bleached hair was coming out of the ponytail like strings of angel hair pasta.
    She leaned down and asked, “How may I help you?”
    “Yeah, um, how much longer do we have left?” the girl scratched the back of her head and covered up another yawn with her hand.
    The flight attendant closed her eyes for a second and breathed in. Then, she leaned across me and turned on the monitor in front of the girl.
    “If you select this option, it will tell you the remaining flight time and show you how many miles we have already covered. It also shows you where we are in the sky. Can I help you with anything else?”
    The girl, still yawning, just shook her head in response. The flight attendant smiled and walked back toward the front of the plane.
    Jacob looked over at the monitor and saw that the remaining flight time was four hours. He locked his tray-table and put away his sketchpad. He knew he should try to sleep, should do his best to avoid jetlag. He closed his eyes and leaned back his chair.
    Before boarding the flight, Jacob Wyatt had just finished his sophomore year at Gainesville Community College. Currently, he was studying business administration there, but he really wanted to drop that and study painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In fact, he had never wanted to start taking classes in business administration at all. Straight out of high school, Jacob had wanted to go to SCAD. He had even toured the campus several times, and the school’s website was the number-one site in his browser’s “most visited” list. Still, Jacob had not even managed to apply, for a portfolio and list of awards or achievements were required. He had not been able to compile anything that he felt was even worth submitting.
    Well, one time, in March of his senior year of high school, Jacob had put together a portfolio to submit. He brought it to his art teacher, Mrs. Cahn. Though she would never have said this out loud, Jacob was Mrs. Cahn’s favorite student, the very favorite, out of over twenty years of teaching. She admired Jacob for his talent, of course, but also for his unique vision and perspective. Also, she admired his humility. Even though Jacob was the most talented high school student she had ever seen, he had never seemed prideful or treated the other students’ work with disdain.
    Mrs. Cahn gave Jacob a few tips on how to organize his portfolio better, to make a stronger impression. She also suggested he add a few of his pieces that she found extraordinarily striking, but she did not suggest he take anything out.
    “You will do great,” Mrs. Cahn told him then. “I know you’ll make me proud. Just don’t forget me when you are a famous artist, okay?” Mrs. Cahn laughed and gave Jacob a hug.
    Later that day, Jacob took the portfolio Mrs. Cahn helped him compile and burned it in the woods behind his house. Then, he applied to Gainesville Community College for business administration, was accepted, signed up for classes, and when graduation came, he did not look Mrs. Cahn in the eye.
    So, two years later, aboard a flight to Germany, Jacob hoped that spending his summer break touring Europe and painting would allow him to produce something, at least enough for a first-year student’s portfolio. Otherwise, it would be back to business administration and internships.
    Before taking off, Jacob had decided on staying a maximum of two weeks in each country he visited, and whenever possible, to keep his visits to a week per country. He would stay in the cheapest hostels that provided him with a private room.
    Jacob stuck to his plan, and on his tour of Europe he visited Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, the Ukraine, Hungary, and Austria. He stayed longer in Russia than in Belarus, and in Austria longer than in Hungary, but most importantly, Jacob had managed to produce one painting for each country he visited. Out of the eight paintings, Jacob liked three the best, for he felt they were the least forced, the most honest, and they made him smile.
    The remaining five Jacob thought he would keep just in case his opinion of them changed, but he felt they lacked the originality and unique perspective of his favorite three.
    The first of the three was inspired by the Berlin Wall and an observation: sex sells in Europe. Really, Jacob thought, sex sells everywhere, but especially in Europe. So the first painting Jacob completed, he titled “The Wall of Shame.” In the painting, a wall made of flatscreen televisions starts in the bottom left corner and curves out of sight behind some charcoal-colored buildings. The perspective is such that the televisions seem to bulge in the center of the painting. It is night, and the bright colors from the screens illuminate the sidewalks and viewers, of which there are many. From both sides, crowds of viewers with bright red, blue, and green faces watch the screens, their mouths slightly open, and their necks straining forward. All of them are naked. Women on the left and men on the right. They are watching a pornographic film that spreads all the way across the screens until they bend behind the buildings.
    From Germany, Jacob took a train to Krakow, Poland. The city has its own mascot, so to speak, a green dragon. Jacob first learned of the dragon’s importance when he toured Wawel Castle. There, a metal sculpture of a dragon actually breathes fire, and it is under the castle where the dragon’s den is said to have been. Some legends say that a man surnamed Krakus defeated the dragon, built Wawel Castle, and established the city of Krakow. This legend inspired the second of Jacob’s paintings, “Photodraconic.”
    In the foreground is a huge statue of a dragon, surrounded by tourists taking pictures and posing. A few daring children hang on the wings of the dragon while their parents photograph them down below. In the background are green rolling hills, and on top of one in the right third of the canvas is a real dragon fighting a knight. The knight is down on a knee using his shield to block the fire spewing from the dragon’s mouth. No one in the painting notices the epic battle.
    Finally, Jacob completed the third painting in Budapest, Hungary. As in many of the cities Jacob had visited, graffiti stained the facades of the beautiful buildings like ink splatters on an old document. On the subways, graffiti. On the trams, graffiti. On the statues, graffiti.
    The painting is a sky at sunset. Purple, pink, and orange burst through holes in the fluffy, multidimensional clouds, which look almost like islands in a sea of pink. The clouds are covered in graffiti tags and mottos, and Jacob named it “Sky Scribbling.” It was not a very complex painting, but Jacob liked it.
    Jacob spent his last day in Europe back in Berlin. In his hostel room he packed his paintings. He put a cloth over them, bound them in bubble wrap, put a foam lining around them, and slid them into individual boxes before packing them in his suitcase. This task took hours, but Jacob wanted to keep them safe because, for the first time since he left high school, he was excited about applying to the Savannah College of Art and Design. Jacob could think of nothing but compiling his portfolio as soon as he landed, and he dreaded waiting through the nine hour flight back home. He also dreaded waiting another night before heading to the airport.
    He walked through his room and checked under the bed and in the bathroom one last time to check for any of his things he may have forgotten to pack. Then, he decided to walk outside for a bit, to get one last view of Berlin, before leaving.
    In the early evening of a clear day, Jacob walked to Brandenburger Gate. A man carrying a British flag and a megaphone was giving a tour of Pariser Platz in English. Jacob kept his distance but followed near enough to the crowd to hear at least a little of the information the guide presented. The guide directed their attention to the bronze statue that sat on top of the gate. The statue was of a chariot drawn by four horses and commanded by the goddess of victory.
    “The Berlin Quadriga was designed by Johann Gottfried Schadow in 1793. It originally stood for a symbol of peace, but one little man from France didn’t like that at all. This little fellow—anyone know his name?”
    After a few members of the tour looked sideways or at the ground, one man volunteered an answer, “Napoleon?”
    The tour guide dropped the megaphone to his side, peered at the man who had answered, and smiled. He wagged his finger for a second and said, “You’ve been on this tour before haven’t you?”
    The crowd laughed. The man shook his head, turned slightly red, and looked at his hands.
    “Ja, Napoleon, during the French occupation, took the Quadriga to Paris in 1806, but that did not last long either. You see, you have a saying. What did Napoleon meet? And don’t answer if you’ve been on this tour before, you!”
    A different man gave his answer, “his Waterloo?”
    “Ja, that is correct. Napoleon met his Waterloo, and the Quadriga was returned to Berlin as a symbol of Victory. ‘V’ for Victory, right?”
    Jacob stopped listening to the guide. He had done it, he had pushed himself and his creative ability more than he ever had in the past. He had completed eight paintings. And what was more, he liked them. Some more than others, of course, but he liked them, and he was excited to include them in the portfolio that would get him accepted into the Savannah College of Art and Design. Yes, Jacob thought, this was an appropriate way to end his trip to Europe, feeling like he had conquered himself, while standing under the Quadriga of Victory.

    Most of the passengers on Delta flight 4569 were awake, especially those in economy class. Once again, the plane was flying over Greenland and was close to half-way through Jacob’s trip home.
    The flight had taken off in the morning from Berlin, so for most of the passengers’ internal clocks, it was just around lunch time. They were watching various movies on their monitors, headphones in, laughing or crying.
    Jacob’s screen was off. He had his sketch book out again, but the woman next to him was awake. Her screen was off too because she was reading. Jacob grinned when he noticed that she was reading Game of Thrones. Then, he looked back at a blank page in his sketchbook.
    What to draw? What do I want to say? Ah, yes, I can draw a man, talking on his iPhone. I’ll keep enough features so the viewer knows that it is a phone—roughly the same shape, buttons on the left side, home button—but the phone itself will be twisted and have the features of an insect. That’s it—I’ll make the phone an insect, an insect that crawls into the man’s ear as he is trying to make his phone call. Should the man scream? No, he won’t notice. He won’t notice the insect crawling into his brain. No one does. Okay, here we go—
    Jacob picked up a pencil and moved his arm toward the paper. As he did so, he bumped the lady next to him. She looked over at him.
    Jacob dropped the pencil to the floor. “Excuse me,” he said.
    The lady nodded her head and waved her hand a few times. “Don’t worry about it, dear,” she said. “We don’t have much space do we?”
    Jacob closed his sketchbook. “No, we don’t. Sure don’t.”
    “What do you have there?” she asked as she pointed to his sketchbook with her paperback.
    “These, these are just some sketches I do. Sometimes. When I am bored.” Jacob took his seat belt off, put the tray up, and leaned down to find his pencil as he spoke.
    When he returned to his seat, the lady still had not resumed her reading.
    “May I see some of them?”
    “Of what? Oh, my sketches?” Jacob scratched his leg and then the back of his head.
    “Yes, some of those sketches. I’m bored too. I’ve already seen the first season of the show, so reading the book is a bit boring.” She pointed to the title on the book cover.
    “Well, um, sure. I guess you can look at them, but they are just sketches. I actually am more of a painter.” Jacob handed over his sketchbook.
    “I won’t judge,” the lady said.
    Waiting for her to finish thumbing through his work was torture for Jacob. Each time she turned a page to look at a new drawing, Jacob stared at her face, her forehead, her eyes, her eyebrows, her nose, her cheeks, her lips, her neck. Every detail. He thought he wanted to see her smile, but that might mean that she was laughing at him. He thought he wanted her to be stoic, but what if that meant she was even more bored with his work then her book? He wished her lips would part even just slightly to show surprise at his skills, but, he thought, what if the jaw dropped in disgust?
    The lady had, quite simply, looked through each page, without a word or question. When she handed Jacob back his work, she said, “Very interesting drawings, young man. Thank you.”
    Jacob put away his sketchbook for the rest of the flight and pretended to sleep. For the next four hours he repeated back to himself the same questions: What did “very interesting” mean? Good interesting? Or bad interesting—like when a parent tells a child that something is cute? What kind of interesting were my drawings? Did she like them, or did she pity me? Worse, what if the highest praise my work will ever receive is “very interesting, young man”?
    Jacob was still, more or less, going over the same questions while waiting for his luggage at baggage claim in the Atlanta Airport. He had been waiting for about half an hour after the other passengers’ luggage had first appeared. Now, he did not recognize anyone from his flight.
     Jacob sat on a bench near the conveyer belt and waited another half hour.
    “Shit,” Jacob said aloud. A little girl with a pink backpack looked back at him with a scrunched face. Jacob shrugged his shoulders.
    “You’ll understand one day,” he said, more to himself than to her, and he walked toward the Delta Baggage Service Center.
    They better not have lost my bags. What if my paintings get ruined? What if someone opens up my bags and looks at my paintings? What if that person laughs at them? What if that person hates them? What if someone at SCAD laughs at them? What if someone there hates them? What if someone says, “very interesting, but no”?
    At the Delta Baggage Service Center, Jacob spoke to a representative, filled out the paperwork, and got a file reference number. They told him to fill out the online claim form and they would return his bags as soon as possible.
    Jacob returned to his apartment, showered and ate a late breakfast. Then, he got on his laptop, checked his email, looked at the Savannah College of Art and Design homepage, checked out a few samples of student work, but Jacob Wyatt never filled out his online claim form.

Holding On

    She drives, clenching the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, keeping the car on a steady and resolute course, aimed like a bullet in the center of the lane, speeding down the freeway at speeds she has never before reached, the asphalt of the freeway crumbling beneath her tires, the colors, white and yellow and black, coalescing into an abstract painting as the speedometer reaches 110 and the night and the road and the lights blur together into one entity as she steals a glance in the rearview mirror, the police cars still behind her in steady pursuit, relentless and implacable, trailing her like the past, like regret, and she knows that they will never give up, the lights of their sirens washing the night sky in broad brush strokes of blues and reds, a swirling, tempestuous maelstrom of authority and order, the force winds of a future blocked, stillborn, denied, dreamed but never destined to materialize, and she pushes her foot down on the gas, and she leans back in the seat, an inertia forced repose, her arms outstretched and taut, locked in position like steel support beams, and the needle on the speedometer pushes forward with a mechanical obstinacy, as gears redline and pistons scream, 125, 140, the needle pushed to its limit and her pushing as well, forward, obstinate and determined, evading both the past and the future, but especially the present, hoping to collapse the three together into a new sense of time and place, a new life, and she checks again in the rearview mirror and sees that the police cars are falling behind, she is gaining ground, advantage, if only for an instant, but she will take it, dwell in it, in that instant and its promises, and entertain ideas of hope and victory, and she hears a faint sound invade the interior of the car, almost silent, quiet, at first, but growing in intensity, a steady beeping, an importunate and consistent sound, louder now, demanding not to be ignored, and she realizes, as the sound increases in volume, its familiarity, recognizes, in a slow and stifled cognition, that she has heard the sound many times before, everyday now for eight years, every morning, and as the whites and yellows of the freeway and the blues and reds of the police begin to fade away, she realizes she is waking up, stolen from sleep by the steady, invading sound of her alarm clock.

    Elizabeth stands in her kitchen. Pots and pans sit on the stove. Pots and pans that cooked breakfast and are now empty and encrusted with the remnants of eggs and bacon. Plates and bowls and glasses sit neglected on the table. The thin remaining film of milk and orange juice and coffee coats their inner surfaces. Elizabeth sees a table that needs to be cleared. She sees a labor an hour in the making and gone and consumed in half of that. She sees herself as the unsung hero of the early morning. The underappreciated. The help, sometimes it feels.
    It is Monday and the kids have just left for school. It is the start of a routine that is a seven day cycle. Elizabeth starts to clear the table. She piles the plates and bowls and glasses and pots and pans into the sink. She stands at the counter. Her hands on the marble surface. Her head downcast. She sighs and walks away.
    Through the sliding glass door and into her backyard. She takes a pack of cigarettes off a wrought iron table. She pulls one from the pack and lights it. The smoke from her cigarette plumes skyward. Elizabeth follows her first exhalation with her eyes. The dawning sun ascending in the sky. The oranges and yellows of the early morning becoming the blue of the afternoon. Her gaze retreats to the table. A collection of beer cans. Thirteen to be precise. Evidence of her husband’s night last night. Evidence of his own private revelry. Left for the help. For her. To clean up. Not asked. Not implied. Expected. She expects the pile will reappear tomorrow morning. Is certain of it. She crumples her still burning cigarette in the ashtray. She sighs again. She walks inside the house. It doesn’t feel like a home. It feels like walls. It feels court ordered. She grabs a few white garbage bags from under the sink. She grabs some cleaning supplies. She grabs some yellow plastic gloves. She sets them on the counter. She sighs. It is the start of a routine that is a seven day cycle. Endless and thankless.

    She runs, down dimly lit hallways made of rock and grey stone and wet with the water that trickles down the crevices from a ceiling too high to be visible, her legs and lungs ache, red with pain, the tendons of her calves tight like coiled steel, hot with friction and movement, something is behind her, pursuing, something not seen but felt, shadowy and clawed, behind her in the labyrinthine corridors, unrelenting, she knows that the beast will never stop chasing her, like her shadow and perhaps it is, something from the darkness immemorial, intrinsically and irrevocably attached to her, but she must try, she must run, evade, persevere, she must find the strength, her lungs and legs enervated, her body weak, it all happening so fast, and she swears she wasn’t here a second ago, but has been here before, turned this corner, collided with these walls, felt the water on her shoulder, gazed down the hallway that stretches into the blackness of eternity, the first black, and she tries to pick up speed, to reach the end, and time slows to a crawl, she is running through air, dense and stifling and impeding, and she calls on energy that she knows, fears, is long depleted, and tries to run through the density, her hands feeling the walls beside her, steadying her, and she feels the breath of the beast, cold and hot and mocking, the weight on her chest, and she turns a corner, quickly, stumbling, meeting a dead end, the large grey wall, her hands pressed against the cold and wet stone, the numbers 6:30, as big as a billboard, displayed in an iridescent and glowing red, pulsating in rhythm with her breath, as she inhales and exhales, and she wakes in her bed with the wet of the walls on her chest.

    Elizabeth sits in her SUV. Plastic grocery bags fill the space behind her. Eggs and bacon and cereal. Bread and meat and condiments. Orange juice and coffee grounds. Everything it takes to sustain a family. She will stock the commissary when she gets home. The mess hall. There is detergent and all-purpose cleaners. Brand names like Joy. Sparkle. Pictures of happy women and their plastic-gloved hands. Their smiles admiring dishwasher-fresh wine glasses. Smudge free. This is your life. A packaged existence. A marketed reality. This is what you should care about:
    A husband and a family. And a house surrounded by a white picket fence.
    But the American dream is shattered. Rudely awakened to an intoxicated and inattentive husband. To importunate and demanding children. To mounting debt. The bank owns more of the house than you do. The white picket fence is not painted at all. And no Tom Sawyer in sight. Mark Twain and Norman Rockwell’s lies. The fairy tale we were all force fed as children has turned out to be more like castor oil and less like birthday cake. And there are no princesses or knights in shining armor. Only ugly reality. Only housewives and factory workers.
    Elizabeth lights a cigarette and looks in the rearview mirror. She angles it to better frame her face. She scrutinizes. Her forehead. Her cheeks. Her chin. It is an obsession. It is a symptom of a greater disease. She discovers a few bumps on her forehead. Above her left eye. Blackheads. Embryonic pimples. They will go away on their own. But Elizabeth cannot help prodding. She takes a drag on her cigarette and puts it down in the ashtray to free up her hands. She takes a blackhead between her index fingers and squeezes. She squints her eyes and purses her lips. And then she squeezes. Squeezes until the blackhead bursts. She feels the pain and the pop. The release. The pain. She feels. She squeezes until the white string has stopped and is replaced by blood. She squeezes in pumps. Until there is no more. Until her index fingers are stained and coated. She rolls her thumb and index finger together. Until the blood is dispersed. Until it is less the red of blood and more the pink of her fingers. She looks in the mirror again and resumes the search. One on her cheek. She presses and squeezes. Burst. Pain. Feel. Squeeze. Pump. Blood. Is this your life? Is this what you should care about?

    She sits, on a chair in the sand, facing the ocean, the waves lapping the shore in a steady cadence, the crash and the fizz, a comforting static hum, the ebb and flow, white sand stretching endless and flat, the sun midday in the sky, shining golden yellow rays of warmth and heat on her bikinied body, her skin browned and shiny from a mixture of lotion and sweat, breath it in, the beach, the sand, the lotion, she leans up from her repose, supported by her elbows, and takes a sip from the martini glass on the table in the sand beside her, the cool and refreshing vodka flowing down her throat, the warm burn of liquor, the numbing, and she looks around the empty beach as a breeze blows slowly across her body and her hair, the scene, the blue of the beach and the yellow of the sun, subdued and diffused through the lenses of her sunglasses, the silence, the calm and the serenity, the crash and the fizz, she is young again, she will always be young, and the future is as vast and mysterious as the ocean before her and its depths, it is a feeling, an epiphany, she wishes to hold on to, but it will not last, cannot last, it is not in the nature of things, it is antithetical to the procession of time, she realizes this and damns the architect of time, the nature, or at least the state, of things as well, and she looks at the ocean and sees that there is no ebb, only flow, the waves not receding, never going back, only forward, moving in on the beach, on her, resolute and unstoppable, they are getting closer now, increasingly, the waves, and the crash drowns out the fizz, becomes louder, a sonorous boom, a steady pulse, the amplified tick of an everlasting metronome, and the translucent diffusion of her sunglasses progress to a black opaqueness, and she cannot see, not the waves or the yellow of the sun or the white of the sand and all of its purity and promise, she can only feel the waves as they reach her feet and progress, move up to her knees and then to her chest, cold and salty, up to her throat, her chin, and a voice whispers softly in her ear as the waves inch to her mouth, ‘Mom, wake up’, and she does. Her quick and heavy breaths slow into one final sigh. And she smiles. She rolls over and picks her daughter up with both arms and throws her onto the bed. And they both smile and laugh. Her daughter resting on her chest, she holds her tight and strokes her hair. Elizabeth looks out of the bedroom window, continually stroking the blonde hair of her daughter, the hair that is definitely her mother’s, and she sees the early morning dawn. The warm yellows and bright oranges blending in the sky, Elizabeth continues to smile and hold on.

A Realization About Custer

    “He’s dead.”
    “Who’s dead?”
    “Custer.”
    “How did he die?”
    “How do you think? He got shot full of arrows.”
    “Oh shit.”
    “Yes, oh shit.”
    “Did they take his scalp?”
    “Probably. If you were an Indian wouldn’t you want those blonde locks on your wall?”
    “I suppose I would?”
    “You suppose right.”
    “I wonder what he looks like bald.”
    “Who gives a shit?”
    “I do.”
    “I bet his pants do. I heard they were filled with it.”
    The wool was hot on William’s back. The wool was hot on George’s back. They scratched at their irritated skin. The skin was bumpy. It was not pleasant.

Let’s Start With The End And Close With The Beginning

    I am dead, although I don’t know it, because I am dead, so maybe I’m not dead.
    I am old and have a hard time driving and remembering things like the names of my kids.
    I am in my seventies and many of my friends are dying or dead. My wife is still alive.
    I realize that I am getting old when my daughter tells me that I need to get hearing aids.
    My kids are grown and married, although neither one has kids yet and one of them, the boy, has a drinking problem and a shit job. The other one is too Christian for Christ.
    I just bought myself a sports car and I like to drive fast.
    My son and daughter have started dating people and I can still remember what it was like to have sex for the first time. I am worried for them.
    My son is born.
    My daughter is born.
    My wife and I move far away from our family for a job that will possibly support an upcoming family.
    My wife, then girlfriend, and I get married. We have sex on the night of our wedding because we are supposed to.
    I graduate from college with a degree in English.
    The world is on fire because I am young and I am worried about why people are doing crazy shit for seemingly no reason.
    I graduate from high school and think about college, although I’d rather fuck, and drink, and write. I do that for some time and enjoy myself immensely.
    High school is high school. I am on the baseball team, only because I think I should be. I am good, but could be better if my heart were in it 100%.
    High school starts. I have my first encounter, sexually, with a vagina.
    Middle school sucks. It does for most. Even the popular kids who eat golden flakes for breakfast. Hormones cause problems.
    Elementary school is all right. Let’s be straight. Elementary school is all right for everyone unless your parents are assholes. Mine are not.
    My parents prepare me as best they can to send me out of the house.
    I am shoved out of the womb.
    I am in the womb, although I don’t know it, because I’m in the womb, so maybe I’m not in the womb.

New Pen

    Have you ever been excited about buying a new pen?
    The damn thing looked like something a lawyer in the 70’s would have purchased.
    It had a silver top.
    The base was blue.
    The tip was silver.
    The pen came packaged in cardboard and plastic that was impossible to get in to. I used a razor blade to extract it.
    I got my pen out and held it in my hand. I looked at it. It felt so good that I wanted to kiss it with all of the love that I had (I didn’t).
    What amazing worlds I could create. The many signatures I could sign. There is nothing like a new pen.

Something That People Read After The Fact And Talk About On A TV Show Regarding Your Murder

    A man walked by my apartment tonight looking at his cell phone. I got the strange impression that he wanted to murder me, rape my wife, eat my cats, and steal my TV.
    He was wearing a blue t-shirt and blue jeans. His hair was short and black. He was either a tan white man or a pale brown man. His shoes were white and I think they were Jordan’s.
    If you see this man, and I am dead, my wife raped, my cats consumed, and my TV stolen, please contact the authorities.

Upper Lip Hair

    I grew a mustache. It took me about three weeks to grow a respectable one. It is funny though; nobody takes me seriously with hair above my upper lip. I don’t know why. Maybe it is because I am a joke. Maybe it is because my mustache is a joke. Maybe we are all jokes. People laugh at me because it is easier. I laugh at them because it is easier. I think we are all just afraid of dying.

Scientists Had it Coming

    Political Correctness (PC) in the United States mandates conformance to orthodox liberal opinions regarding ethnicity, religion, occupation, gender and sexual persuasion. Because PC is not universally applied an occupation providing ambiguity challenging the norms of PC is science.

    “Good evening ladies and gentlemen. The United States Home Services System (USHSS) is proud to present You be the Judge. I’m Tom Playfair tonight’s moderator. The program is sponsored by the Real American Civil Liberties Union (RACLU) which distinguishes itself from the other union which unabashedly never met a liberal cause it didn’t unreservedly support. The RACLU has no agenda other than examining both sides of an issue.”
    “Tonight’s topic was based on listeners’ polls. Do scientists deserve the protection of PC or are they fair game for foul play? As per our practice the audience will score the participants’ performances.”
    “Scientists regularly feast on global recognition and rock star acclaim associated with Nobel Prizes at the annual ego orgy in Stockholm Sweden. Still, books, movies, plays and TV depict scientists as insensitive, arrogant, egotistical, self-indulgent megalomaniacs with no social skills; obsessively seeking knowledge about arcane and obtuse processes and events; totally oblivious to obvious risks to self and others; secretly planning to overthrow the established order with their singular view of a brave new world.”
     “Supporting fair play for scientists is Dr. Woodrow Wilson Wormwood. His research area is astrotheology. He serves as Director for Life of the prestigious Institute for Scientific Credibility and Integrity (ISIC). Representing the opposing view is Mr. Maxwell Candor. He’s a freelance investigative reporter, a relentless advocate for truth, justice and the American way.”
    “Mr. Playfair. I’m disappointed you give credence to the pitiful outcry from a small group of know-nothings and jealous underachievers,” Dr. Wormwood opined.
    “There’s no basis for their petty putdowns of illustrious personages.”
    “In view of tonight’s debate that’s a rather self-serving, premature opening statement,” Maxwell Candor countered.
    Wormwood ignoring Candor’s riposte asserted. “I’m offended you’d even offer the topic for the program.”
    “Dr. Wormwood. May I remind you our audience selects the topics. Further you knew the topic when you accepted the invitation to participate in the debate.” Wormwood settled begrudgingly in his seat. “There have been some examples where scientists haven’t been all they can be. Do you remember when the Mars Climate Orbiter failed to correct units of force into metric ones?”
    Before Wormwood could respond Candor quickly asserted. “An $87 million spacecraft passed into oblivion. Men and women with advanced STEM degrees and no one correctly programmed the computer.”
    “The mission was victimized by demonic possession,” Wormwood glibly replied.
    “Demonic possession!” Playfair and Candor chorused.
    “Yes. Sometimes a nanosecond of a random electronic surge or a solar flare can play havoc with a computer. No reason to cashier the entire program.”
    “You’re reaching Dr. Wormwood,” Candor exclaimed. “Hope they don’t miscalculate the path of the next asteroid heading our way. Think Russia.”
    “Then there’s the curious case of Kurt Godel the Austrian mathematician considered the world’s foremost expert in logic,” Playfair asserted.
    “Of course I know Kurt’s work,” Wormwood smugly answered as if he had been on a first name basis with the famous man.
    Before Playfair could continue Candor interjected again. “Except Godel had this little problem. Was a hypochondriac for much of his adult life. Went paranoid and became convinced he was being poisoned. Eventually stopped eating and starved to death. How logical was this from the world’s foremost logician?”
    “Godel was victimized by shepherd pie,” Wormwood confidently responded.
    “Shepherd pie!” Playfair and Candor chorused.
    “Common knowledge that shepherd pie can carry a prion producing Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease,” Wormwood defiantly rebutted. “The latter underwent a series of foldings. Centuries of eating shepherd pie and haggis in that looney United Kingdom caused Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease. Anyone with any cultural background would know that evidence for this condition is provided by all the mad men in that consummate, plagiarist Shakespeare’s plays.” Playfair and Candor looked at each other in wonder.
    “Wait a minute Dr. Wormwood,” Candor exclaimed. “For someone who has five W’s in his name you sure ... Whatever. Godel lived in Austria eating wiener schnitzel, sauerbraten, kartoffelkos suppe and rotkohl. No shepherd pie for that boy.”
    Playfair closely following the exchange between Wormwood and Candor intervened before it got nastier. “Our first quarter audience rankings indicate a slight edge 52% to Mr. Candor.” The latter smiled modestly which was definitely against type whereas Dr. Wormwood frowned questionably.
    Playfair diverted Candor’s recent salvo at Wormwood as quickly as possible. “Albert Einstein belongs to the panthenon of physical science greats including Galileo and Newton. Still the Danish physicist Niels Bohr haughtily referred to Einstein as an alchemist. How big an ego do you have to possess to do that?”
    “Bohr was no shrinking violet himself,” Wormwood knowingly replied. “He recognized no peers which became very boring.” Wormwood was disappointed Playfair failed to acknowledge his clever pun.
    Playfair finally recovered home court advantage before Candor could start another polemic. “Perhaps the next example might persuade you that scientists can error. A researcher requested a permit to study the civet’s last known habitat in the Keralia Forest in New Delhi, India. Experimental design called for a viewing time from 0600 to 1800 hours. To the dismay of all civet lovers none were reported.”
    Shrugging his shoulders Wormwood snidely inquired. “How many civet lovers can there be?” Candor promptly fielded this question. “But civets are nocturnal. There would be no trace of them during the day. A little embarrassing for an ecologist studying natural history.”
    “A small glitch for a minor study which barely qualifies for science these days. You’ll have to do better than that Mr. Playfair.” The latter grimaced at Wormwood’s put down. He was rapidly losing any sympathy for his lame defense of the night’s proposition.
    Playfair continued. “Gentlemen a purloined copy of a study secretly transmitted from India found its way to our purview. The study revealed that six out of ten Indian men have the world’s smallest penises.”
    “What’s that you say?” Wormwood’s interest peaked. “Imagine that!”
    “What’s even more amazing than embarrassing is that researchers were found to measure them,” Candor offered.
    “Were the researchers men or women?” Wormwood innocently asked.
    “How relevant is that Wormwood?” Candor snapped derisively dismissing the former’s honorific. Wormwood ignored his query.
    Barely managing to implement the night’s topic Playfair plodded on. “Here’s a hypothetical scenario on the experimental design. Scene: A local tavern. “Hey guys. India’s getting a bum rap about its lack of success in Pakistan. And we all know what happened with Kashmir. Frankly men we’ve been charged with a lack of cojones. We need to change that image. The India Department of Defense has sponsored a study measuring the size of our penises. We want to demonstrate we can hang in there with the best of them. Hold our own with anyone. No pun intended. This is no laughing matter. This is for truth, justice and the Indian way. Okay guys. Line up. Drop your drawers. I’ll just get out my steel calipers ...Oh! This isn’t good. Several volunteers fainted on the spot.”
    Unfortunately the results of the study did not support the researchers’ expectations.
    “The experiment wasn’t for the faint-hearted or the undeveloped,” Wormwood defensively exclaimed. “Should’ve been a psychological screening process and control group.”
    “Psychological screening process!” Candor erupted. “What sentient being would volunteer for such a debasing and absurd experiment? Control group? Who are you going to compare intromittent organs with? No other nation in the world would tolerate such an invasion of privacy or private parts.”
    Playfair, who was jealous of Candor’s more delicate selection of intromittent organ over the more commonly used word penis, gathered himself. “Gentlemen it seems this last study has pricked a lot of interest from our audience.” Candor could barely refrain from laughing whereas Wormwood produced the mother of all scowls.
    Hiding his embarrassment from his unintended Freudian slip which was a fait accompli Playfair gamely motored on. “The phones are off the hook. We’re inundated with e-mails, twitters and texts. Right now Mr. Candor’s percentage has risen to 58%.”
    Wormwood shook his head in disbelief.
    “Wormwood you showed some interest in the study of Indian intromittent organs,” Candor charged continuing to commander the debate.
    “What nonsense. I categorically deny that,” Wormwood righteously answered. Playfair blanched at the acrimony generated during the night’s debate. The program was receiving an all time high audience response but at the risk of alienating USHSS and losing sponsorship from RACLU and the loss of his position because of the open antagonism between the two participants.
    “Wormwood since your area of research is in astrotheology, this next topic should be of interest to you and your colleagues,” Candor inserted. “By the way you and none of your colleagues from prestigious ISIC are listed in Who’s Who in Science.”
    “A careless misprint in the edition you examined. We’ve already sent a letter of complaint to rectify this oversight.”
    “How did he know what edition I reviewed?” Candor mused. Aloud. “Perhaps you’re familiar with Wilhelm Reich’s Doctrine of Orgone Energy?”
    “Where’s he taking this now?” Playfair said to himself.
    “Orgone was featured in Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm. Title’s a real attention getter. Audiences love the topic.”
    “I’m not familiar with that work,” Wormwood indignantly and too quickly denied.
    “According to Reich orgone is the fundamental motive force of the universe.”
    Candor persisted. “Neuroses were the result of the individual’s inability to achieve a satisfactory orgasm. Too little orgone would reduce having a successful orgasm. A lot of disappointed people out there.” Playfair secretly agreed with this notion but also feared that officials of RACLU may be monitoring the program.
    “Moreover, orgone energy occurred not only in the bodies of sexual organisms, but throughout the universe,” Candor asserted. “It’s main source being the sun and the stars. I’m kind of surprised a professional astrotheologian isn’t familiar with orgone.”
    By this time Playfair was frantically signaling the cut throat sign to the video man calling for an impromptu advertisement. The latter missed the sign, busily chatting up one of the many obligatory, slithery, willowy or full bodied weather women passing by. He would’ve scored better if he called them meteorologists. Still he was committed to determining whether their orgone levels were simpatico.
    Candor marched on. “Reich sought a way to concentrate natural orgone energy.
    The result was his famous orgone box – or more properly the Orgone Accumulator. The box was large enough to hold a seated human.”
    “Mr. Playfair can we move to something more relevant and meaningful,” Wormwood pleaded nervously.
    “There’s little more relevant and meaningful than a successful orgasm,” Candor insisted which tells us more about the investigative reporter than we want to know.
    “In fact I’m not sure you’re leveling with us about Reich’s work.”
    “What are you insinuating Mr. Candor?”
    “Not insinuating anything. Isn’t it true that some years ago you reviewed The Function of the Orgasm for the Journal of Really Aberrant Psychology. You concluded that Reich’s research should be supported by all responsible scientists. Further you recommended extensive experimentation of a delicate nature which he might perform.”
    “Mr. Playfair. I don’t have to listen to Mr. Candor’s baseless ramblings and outrageous accusations. Regain control of your program.”
    “Too late for that Wormwood,” Candor chided. “I have a picture of you being fitted in the Orgone Accumulator. Do you deny that it’s you?” Candor passed the photograph to Playfair who in turn showed it to the TV audience.
    Desperately treading water Playfair stated. “It’s a very good likeness Dr. Wormwood. Indeed you’ve never looked happier.” Before Wormwood could answer Candor, Playfair found some hidden reserve of temerity. “Gentlemen the RACLU enthusiastically embraces differences of opinion civilly expressed equally eschewing rancorous confrontations.” Clearly ignoring Playfair’s weak attempt to promote harmony Wormwood and Candor openly glared at one another. Playfair filled the verbal void.
    “Did you know that Cambridge Massachusetts awards Ig Nobels in its Annals of Improbable Research for accomplishments that can not or should not be reproduced.”
    “It’s certainly reassuring that our best and brightest are pursuing such cutting edge research,” Wormwood affirmed. Candor rolled his eyes at this absurdity.
    “The physics prize for patience was awarded to a team monitoring one drop of sticky black pitch dripping through a funnel every 9 years since 1927?”
    “A worthy project to be sure Mr. Playfair,” Wormwood solemnly intoned. “Perseverance is necessary in science.”
    “Maybe the best and the brightest could persevere to learn to accurately predict the day’s weather,” Candor complained.
    “The chemistry prize was awarded to a team determining that people can swim as fast in syrup as in water,” Playfair offered.
    “Useful information generated by creative and productive scientists,” Wormwood asserted.
    “Yeah! Michael Phelps will be reassured. The next time you fall into a vat of maple syrup, no problem,” Candor replied. “If you can swim, you can make it in syrup.” Wormwood was uncertain whether Candor was supporting him or being sarcastic which tells us more about him than we want to know.
    “Seriously Dr. Wormwood science has to do a better job disseminating its findings to the public to earn their financial support,” Playfair suggested.
    “Maybe the lack of social skills cited at the outset impedes the process,” Candor gleefully added.
    “Biased ignorance from liberal arts students,” Wormwood answered.
    Playfair doggedly pushed on. “One team blew away all competitors. They calculated that penguins build up 450 mm mercury of pressure in their bellies to expel excrement the consistency of olive oil away from their nests.”
    “Imagine that!” Candor exclaimed.
    “The team missed the 2012 meeting because they couldn’t obtain visas to attend the awards ceremony. They hoped their failure to receive visas had nothing to do with the explosive nature of their work.”
    Candor looked quizzically at Playfair and mused. “Was he unwittingly committing another Freudian slip or was he really a clever punster?”
    “We should thank the Department of Homeland Security for averting a potential disaster,” Wormwood ponderously proclaimed.
    “Not to worry Doctor. The penguin paper cited above served as a catalyst for additional research.”
    “A keystone attribute of science is that one scientist stands on the shoulders of their predecessors,” Wormwood pompously announced.
    “Gentlemen the award winning penguin research established a safe distance between avian zoo enclosures and visitors. This work prompted other workers to ask whether penguin calculations could be used to protect transmission lines damaged by defecating vultures.”
    “And just how many vultures would that be Mr. Playfair?” Candor incredulously asked. “You’re saying that defecating vultures are a threat to national security?” “How did I ever get conned into this ... pitiful debate,” Candor mused. “Have to get a new agent.”
    “Playfair indomitably continued. “The new research determined that a safe distance from penguins was one meter whereas that for high perching raptors demanded a wider berth.”
    Wormwood noticed Candor’s hesitation to co-opt the conversation and did so himself. “The next time you visit avian enclosures here’s a useful rule of thumb. Ground birds don’t splatter more than a meter / high flying birds are much less neater.” He waited expectantly from Playfair for appreciation of his clever mnemonic. He waited in vain.
    Candor was no fan of Ig Nobels. They merely supported the view how snotty and elitist scientists can be trying to be so clever wasting time.
    “Gentlemen Mr. Candor’s score is now 85%. Dr. Wormwood you’re going to have to rally a bit in this last quarter.” Candor recognized that beating Wormwood in a debate wouldn’t be much of an achievement and certainly wouldn’t advance his career.
    Trying hard to re-engage the scientist’s lost interest and tepid participation in the night’s debate Playfair posed the following question. “Dr. Wormwood. What’s your take on global warning or climate change as some people prefer? Some scientists strongly support the process. Others vehemently deny it.”
    Wormwood immediately warmed to the question. No pun intended. “I’m not sure you’re aware of this research Mr. Playfair and I’m sure Mr. Maxwell Candor isn’t.”
    The latter ignored the put down.
    Wormwood continued. “When herbivorous mammals belch, they provide measurable amounts of methane. A powerful green house gas. Driving large herbivores like mammoths, mastodons and other megafauna to extinction, deprived earth 10 million tons of methane per year that had been contributing to the natural green house effect of trapped carbon dioxide. Minus those mammoth-size burps, climate would’ve cooled.”
    Even Playfair, who had tried to be the voice of reason and objectivity for the debate, was taken aback by Wormwood’s defense of science’s probity.
    “Still the world readjusted back towards the last Ice Age as per Milankovitch’s calculations.”
    Stonewalling both men Wormwood exclaimed. “Researchers concluded that human hunters influenced methane flows and accordingly climate. This occurred long before agriculture and industrial activities. Natural processes (mammoth burps) other than the industrial revolution warmed the earth.” Playfair and Candor looked at one another shaking their heads in wonderment. Wormwood was very pleased with himself for putting both of them in their place.
    Playfair broke the silence. “At this time I’d like to thank tonight’s participants,” struggling to find the right words, any words, “for this ... this very provocative and singular ... edition of You be the Judge. Listeners awarded Mr. Candor 100% for his position that scientists do not deserve the protection of political correctness and therefore are fair game for satirists and nay sayers.”
    Candor surprisingly assumed a gracious posture acknowledging Playfair’s announcement. In contrast Wormwood nearly swallowed his tongue, frightening the moderator who didn’t look forward to emergency mouth to mouth resuscitation for the shocked scientist. Candor reasserting his usual alpha persona had to have the last word. “I think Dr. Wormwood and scientists in general would benefit from a regular regimen of Reich’s orgone. You be the judge.”
    After this program Dr.Wormwood was stripped of his title as Director for Life by his outraged and not so prestigious ISIC colleagues for his pathetic performance.
    Tom Playfair never presided over another program sponsored by the RACLU. He was last heard subbing for the regular agriculture announcer reading pork belly forecasts in Cheesehead, Wisconsin. In contrast to Candor’s earlier misgivings he made out very well joining a team of judges evaluating TV dancing, singing and comedy routines. He was obnoxious enough to unequivocally challenge even the most self styled celebrities posturing on these shows.

cc&d: a Link in the Chain
a letter to C Ra McGuirt, of Penny Dreadful Press

    Hi there... It has been so long since we’ve talked, and since I was going through more changes to cc&d (and since you talked about all that cc&d had been through when the 20 year anniversary issue was coming out at your house open mic in Nashville for “Tag Team Poets” 5/18/13), I wanted to share even more changes with you about cc&d magazine in 2014. I think you liked what you heard about cc&d issue releases as ISBN# books in 2014 through amazon.com sales more globally, but since you’ve even been in the earliest issues (back when cc&d was starting in 1993 — you even have a “nopoem” poetry collection book of your writing in past issues of cc&d, with old covers sprinkled throughout the book), it got me reflecting over all of the changes we’ve done over the years with cc&d.
    Looking back, I wonder if cc&d magazine has had a sordid past, or one more comparable to that of a child, who has grown over the years... In the beginning of cc&d (way back in 1993), there weren’t that many contributors, but it was awesome having your writing in there, C Ra. But after only two years (and people discovered that “Children, Churches and Daddies” was a magazine with a title from a poem that talked about the dysfunctionality of those things at time, ergo the byline “the UN-religious, NON-family oriented literary and art mag”) we found ourselves releasing two to three issues monthly because we had so many good contributions.
    So with volume 75 (January 1996) we changed our format from 5.5"x8.5" saddle-stitch issues to 8.5"x11” (and held together with brad clips), adding an expanded news section, a political news section, a letters to the editor section, a lunchtime poll topic section, and a philosophy monthly section. (C Ra, I remember that you loved that I included the Unibomber Manifesto in cc&d in 1997 — and the hysterical kicker is that we only included it in the Internet issue, when he was so anti-technology.) We even started including sections of Scars books in issues, so print issues on average were around 100 pages. But when I was leaving to travel the country for nearly a year starting in the end of 1997, I decided to produce 6 issues of cc&d released in 1998 in advance, so I wouldn’t have to worry about the production of the magazine.
    But after traveling the country until the summer of 1998, I was driving to visit my parent’s house and was almost killed in my car while stopped at a traffic intersection. I was unconscious for 11 days, and had to relearn how to walk and talk and eat. And in all of this time (including my travel time), submissions were being emailed to me for cc&d. So because of my condition (and because working on cc&d was one of the things that kept me sane in my recovery, so I didn’t want anything to happen to stop the printing of cc&d), I decided to release a book of the 1999 cc&d issues, in the end of 1998.
    After the book release (and while still recovering), I produced two Internet audio issues, and then cc&d was only released as Internet web page issues (C Ra, I know, cc&d started releasing Internet issues via eworld.com in 1995 and aol.com in 1996, but this hiatus from being able to work on cc&d forced me to only release Internet issues temporarily). For the years 2001 and 2002, issues were only placed in collection books (in the book “oh”, we even used a more innovative poem design layout); as I had worked on expanding cc&d and Scars? Publications, a few issues were released as audio issues on line.
    And as a side note: back in 1994, we ran a supplement section in cc&d of poems called “Down in the Dirt”, and while we were working on making changes to cc&d (in print and on line), Scars Publications also decided to get an ISSN# for a new magazine named “Down in the Dirt”, designed similarly to cc&d. Sometimes the same writers from cc&d appear in “Down in the Dirt”, but all of their accepted writings appear in the “writings” section at http://scars.tv/cgi-bin/framesmain.pl?writers where all writers are sorted alphabetically (as are their writings under their name).
    Speaking of issues online, it was around this time that Scars Publications finally decided on a domain name for this enterprise (and trust me, other places with the name scars took up all common Internet extensions like .com or .org or .net, and http://scars.tv made complete sense, since Scars also did CD releases and videos of performance art poetry and prose readings). So it was cool that cc&d could have it’s own web address that fit the magazine in http://scars.tv/ccd that anyone can go to to get to cc&d magazine.
    But by 2003 cc&d started quarterly print issues as we went back to the 8.5"x11” format. But after the one year of quarterly large-format issues, we opted to bring cc&d back to its original 5.5"x8.5" format... I think as editor that let me down a bit, because that change back to a smaller issue size and format seemed like we were going backwards, but at the same time I kept in mind that we were removing the additions that lengthened the 8.5"x11” issues in this change as well, and that was in the hope of getting the magazine back to it’s literary “roots”...
    In the beginning, I occasionally ran essays in the front of issues in “the Boss Lady’ Editorial”, and with the new format of the issues of cc&d through the 2000s (and probably because of the issues many people had with the President, along with the war efforts and the failing economy), more editorial popped up in cc&d issues. These editorials ran for years, and sometimes an Internet-only editorial would appear in more recent issues (because of the timeliness of editorials and the advance filling of magazine issues).
    After the re-emergence of the 5.5"x8.5" format issues, a performance art section started cropping up in occasional issues, with poetry and prose (and sometimes art) from live Chicago performance art shows. (These were also later released as supplement ISSN# “issues” to cc&d.) But as more people were rapidly filling print issues, and with the max page size we could effectively saddle stitch at 44 pages, we found that in order to fit all of the writings, I had to stretch margins to the edges of the page and make margin space as small as possible, I reduced the font size, and I put multiple small poems from different authors on the same page.
    And I realized that I had this similar problem when I released cc&d issues 2 or 3 times a month in the 1990s before changing the format of the issues. So by 2010, we brought another change cc&d — that’s when we starting releasing issues through a formal printer, so 5.5"x8.5" issues then had full bleed full color glossy covers. Also, all page lengths increased from 40 pages to 83 pages, so there was a lot more room now to better showcase writer’s work.
    By July 2010, 5.5"x8.5" perfect-bound ISSN#?issues were also released as 6” x 9” perfect-bound ISBN# books (available at online book stores like amazon.com — but because these were available only at a higher price, few of these issued-as-books were sold).
    So yes, there have been many changes over the years, including the most recent change in 2013 to release issues every other month instead of monthly. But yes, we think it’s time for another change — and most definitely another growth — with the emergence of ALL of the issues of cc&d to be released by a different printer same printer that releases our ISBN# collection books. With that, we will make two major changes to cc&d... One change is that we are changing the size of the pages from 5.5"x8.5" to 6"x 9" (which mean writing will have more space again in the magazines). We have never released cc&d in this size before, so this is an exciting prospect for us, but with this new printer, we are able to have varying page lengths in some issues (since 2010 issues have been 84 pages, but if we need to now, we can have more than 84 pages if we choose, and it won’t effect the price per issue). One more big change for 2014 is that cc&d magazine will now be released with both a cc&d ISSN# barcode and an ISBN# barcode.
    This printer change and ISBN# use for cc&d took some time to decide upon; the main reason we chose this move was to make print issues more widely available for sale to the U.K. market and the European market (since the printer we switched to for this has printing facilities across the pond for printing issues, saving money for accepted writers from England or Austria or Germany or Italy or Malta or Slovenia — I know, I know, I still have no local way to print for contributors in Argentina or Brazil or China or Japan, but cut us some slack, we’re doing the best we can here)...
    We here at cc&d have tried to get the word out about this magazine — this is why, in light of keeping full issues of cc&d on line since the domain address http://scars.tv/ccd started, we have also started reading accepted writings in recently released issues of cc&d at the poetry open mic I host in Chicago (a long list of video clips of my readings from cc&d, “Down in the Dirt” and collection books, at http://scars.tv/kuypers/poems/kuypers-reads-other-authors.htm). We have tried to get accepted writings from cc&d out into the world in as many ways as we could. Although reading cc&d accepted writings at a Chicago poetry open mic is one way, and broadcasting YouTube videos of cc&d poetry readings to the world is another, we have also looked for different ways to make the print issues fit the needs of our readers.
    We could have continued to run cc&d issues as 5.5"x8.5" perfect-bound books with their usual ISSN# barcode, but we knew that for our print magazine, we were essentially losing out on a more global market. We know we keep our issues online as well, but they do not look or feel like our print issues. And if there is a market in the U.K. or continental Europe for our magazine (especially for our contributors from across the pond), we wanted to find a way to make print issues of cc&d more available to them.
    And C Ra, I know when you first heard of this idea you loved it, especially giving people outside the United States more access to the print issues. This way, we are also keeping all of our printing (of issues and collection books, as well as books published by individual authors until the Scars Publications umbrella) at one printer, and people will be able to find not only our books, but also all of our new magazine issues through amazn.com any time.
    Because cc&d magazine has been growing over the years. I don’t know if it was a sordid past, but in light of health issues of my own, the past has really given cc&d a tumultuous upbringing. It’s also great that I have stayed in contact with poets from the early days of cc&d (like you C Ra, and like how I still have artwork from Cheryl Townsend that appears in issues — Lyn Lifshin even just recently sent a submission to Scars Publications). And when it comes to cc&d, we’ll continue to look for ways to get the great writing that has graced its pages out to as many as we can — in as many ways as we can.
    Thanks for being with me on this journey. It’s been a long ride, and we hope you enjoy the ride with us.

This editorial is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Janet Kuypers Editor in Chief