Desert Island Christmas Dinner

I considered, pondered, and debated myself for a while on whether or not I should post viable fiction on here. At length I decided that I would toss up a story or three that I might otherwise shop around. Sharing the weirdness is worth something.

As it turned out, this was my last assignment at Columbia College.


~•~
(2nd Draft)


FICTION II
5/4/08

Desert Island Christmas Dinner


Day 10:

I'm an American, damnit! That God-damn tour ship! This isn't supposed to happened to me! Damn Southern Hemisphere--Spring in November!--fucked up weather, ass-backward-seasons, and lame-ass tour boats that capsize in small storms. Now we're stranded on this desert island!? How much stupider can this get? Tropical desert island! If we were gonna be trapped in a --what's that word--klee-shay--why couldn't it at least have been the one where we get shipwrecked with the Swedish Bikini Team or something? But no...we had to be stuck in the klee-shay of having our companions on this remote-forsaken island to be a bunch of people who don't even speak English. Some Orientals who chatter on and on in their high speed way and look at us as if we're the funny ones. They creep me out. We keep wondering if they're talking about us, but none of us--y'know, the Americans--can make out a word of what they're saying. So we don't really know, but it sure seems like they are. We keep an eye on them, suspicious 'cuz we know they're talking about us.

Day 13:

The others seem to be in two groups. Maybe three. One group is these three guys, I guess they're Chinese or Koreans or some other slantys... Then there's the three French people. I hate French people. Think they're better than the rest of us. But they're French, so what do they know? Then there's this other guy. He's a slanty-eye dude, too, but he doesn't speak to the rest of them--sits apart from 'em and doesn't talk to them when they try to bring him into their chattering talks. He looks at everyone like he's about to kill us. Vicious, but he's a little guy. Then there's us--a couple of Aussies or Kiwis or whatever the fuck they are down here, and this Scottish "bloke" and then me and the three other Americans. We've been talking about what to do. Almost two weeks here. At first we were all out on the beach every night with a big-ass fire. But after five nights of that, the food that washed up with us on the beach was gone and everyone was getting hungry. That's when we started pulling away from each other. Forming these little groups. Not too close to each other, but not too far away neither. Them Orientals didn't seem to have much trouble finding local food. Fruits and roots and leaves, they ate it all. Dumb fuckers. Going out all day and finding food and leaving us sitting here hungry...
We watched 'em eat the next few nights and then, well, they offered us food a couple of times, but of course we aren't going to eat tree bark or whatever. Fuck them and that.

Day 18:

Finally got the French guys to say something in English. I knew they could talk to us but just wouldn't. Too good for speaking English like they should. They came over when we had food and just as clear as English can be, asked us for some. I wanted to tell them "no"--just 'cause they're French--but, well...okay it wasn't our food...if it was, I wouldn't have given them any, but it wasn't mine to keep. It's that one guy's food. That single Oriental dude. Nice guy, though, for being a little vicious foreigner. He killed a boar somehow and dragged it back to the beach where he skinned and quartered it. Even brought some of the meat over to us to share! Cooked it up all tasty and we all had some. Eating with us, he cleared up some things we didn't know. In real good English, too. No accent even. The other Orientals are Chinese, not Korean. He's Cambodian. Like that means anything to us. Says his name's Pray-Cha-Cha, or somethin', but we call him Bruce-Lee. Bruce Lee was cool. The Frenchmen aren't French, they're Belgian. Like there's a difference? Maybe if they had beer with 'em, or something. Belgium has good beer, I guess, for not being American. The Scotsman told us that French fries really came from Belgium, not France. Like we wanna hear about french fries out here on this island where we're starving? Okay, so we haven't starved 'cause this gook-dude--Bruce-Lee-Cha-cha--gave us some pig to eat.

Day 27:

A few nights ago, last week, maybe, when we were eating the last of Bruce-Lee's pig, he made the comment that wild boar was a lot like human flesh. Fuckin' cannibal! is what we all thought right away. But then we got to thinking about it. We've got no food here but there's plenty of people. So we've been talking about this. Seriously. There's some considerations to be made. Like that soccer team in South America back in the 70s or whenever. Gotta do what we can to survive. But none of us are sick or dead. Yet. Are we going to wait forever, or maybe take matters into our own hands? Skinny people are out, they don't have enough meat on 'em. No one here is really fat, so that doesn't matter. We decided that eating more healthy food would probably make someone taste better. No fast food junk in their bodies, and chemicals or whatever. Too bad there's no vegetarians here. Or those other ones...the really annoying hippy freaks. Oh, yeah, vegans.
I bet vegans would be good meat.

Day 32:

Well, it wasn't that bad if ya didn't think about. It does taste a lot like that boar we had a coupla weeks ago. And things are a lot quieter around here. Less chatter. Those French-Belgian fuckers sure aren't talkin' much now, but when they do, they always speak English. They know who's in charge. Bruce-Lee sure can cook anything, just like he said. We'll keep him around to keep makin' meals for us. He speaks English pretty good and tells some funny jokes and can find all the trimmings to make the meat really tasty.
Last night he had Christmas dinner.
We ate Chinese.

· • ·

Peculiar Crossroads

In archiving these papers, I come to find out I don't have a copy of the final draft of this one. A fact that annoys and pains me a little. I finished it at school, printed it, and saved it on a flash drive. That flash drive bit the dust and the printed copy was turned it. Being the final paper of the semester, it wasn't returned. [insert myriad frowny faces here].

This does mark (ha-ha) however, the first time i tried writing about the hitchhiking days and Yellowstone and Mark Em—I mean Marcus Amory...

Since we'd been writing parodies in Fiction II, I asked if I could make this assignment a parody as well.

(The references to Orwell in this concern Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma which we read for this class.)

The comment I remember most from Eric May (the teacher whose class this was for) was that there was no sense of Me in this story. I never had any description of Me-as-a-Character. Eric looked at me and, being a wide-girthed man, noted my height. "There's a low ceiling you talk about in the story, but was it a low ceiling to anyone other than you?"


~•~



CRW: Writers on the Road
4/17/08
Creative Essay: First Draft

PECULIAR CROSSROADS


I first met my Dean Moriarty not long after I came off the road. I'd been hitchhiking again--perhaps my longest single stretch of hitching I'd done then, from the magic sweltering Gulf Coast South out to the splosh splawrsh of the rocky coast in Bolinas California where Marin County sticks out its little finger as if testing the waters of the Pacific and then up the angled coastline through Crescent City and beyond--to Seattle where I turned away from the coast and came back through the flat plains of eastern Oregon where it seems that on a clear enough day you could stand there on that dust bowl prairie and gaze back east all the way to the hills and caves of Utah. After a series of flaming Roman candle adventures that took me through a hospital stay (from a motorcade inconvenience that left me with cracked ribs and a headful of missing time) and the hallowed halls of an odd temple in Salt Lake City where the people smiled entirely too much for my comfort, I sat recovering atop a mountain in Colorado with some mad people just burning to live--to move--to experience what the universe conspired to give them. Then, after a few sunrises from those mountains of madness and delirious delights I took my feet back down to the ribbon of highway and shook my thumb for another ride. A few weeks later I had circled around again and was dropped off on the side of the road outside Three Forks Montana and went east into the hissing steam and glug-glug-glugalling of the mud pots and geyser springs of America's own fantasy nature playground called Yellowstone Park. No stranger place had i ever seen--no more wide-eyed had i ever been than when I first set foot in and feasted my road-weary eyes upon the yellow rock veined with hues of blues and reds and obsidian cliffs and porous rock and the steam whispers of holes in the earth that said pssst, pssst, c'mere and I'll tell you a story you've never heard of before and the bubbling waters of iridescent springs that flaunted their abnatural colors like some prehistoric alien peacock strutting and preening across the basins and valleys between proud and protective mountains. It was here, in this almost unearthly landscape that I first encountered the man who would be my Dean Moriarty. Marcus Amory was his name and it was him who blazed like a candle flame everyone else fluttered around like a frenetic mothswarm. I first saw the brightness of his flame my first night in Yellowstone. I had stepped into the small dark smokey lounge that was the employee pub, a wooden bunk house out behind the grandiose log cabin-style Old Faithful Inn, and let my eyes run slow across the walls laden with an almost indecipherable script hand-written graffiti and simple drawings that amazingly never crossed the border from the absurd and vulgar into crass and disgusting. I sat myself down at a table in the middle of the small room and bobbed my head to the mad jazz riffs blowing from the small speakers in the four corners of the room. I nursed a drink of melting ice and wondered what it was that brought me into this place. That same sense of looking--of seeking--of plaintive searching and never resting, never happy with what I've found because I am never really looking for a particular something, just searching out that indefinable anything. It's the seeking that interests me more than what it is that I find. So I sat in this dim, bopping, smokey room and drained the last of the cold water from the remaining ice in my plastic cup and about to cut out of the word-scrawled pub when this fellow I hadn't seen before slipped himself into the chair across the small squared table from me as if he'd always been sitting there and I just noticed him. A bushy-haired nice-looking guy with long fingers that belonged to a jazz piano player or Renaissance painter. He tipped a beer bottle up to his lips, set it back down on the table with a quiet thunk and let loose a bright smile that was the spark of his candleflame. "Hi, I'm Marcus Amory," he said to me and added a little nod to his shining smile. I nodded back to him and felt right off that I was looking at a mad character who just hopped out of a beat novel and appeared in the chair across from me. I nodded and tipped my cup of water in his direction. Without a pause from him to await any comment I might offer Marcus spoke up again and didn't waste time, as if words for him were an inconvenience in conveying what he wanted to impart. "Saturday around noon we're going to be having some fun at my room." He tilted the beer bottle up to his lips again and his eye glinted with a delirious delight. I sat there and for a moment thought I was the mark of someone coming on a little too strong. Like a single pretty girl hanging out at a party that vibrated with too much testosterone, where all the young dudes swung their dicks around with a little too much ferocity. I wasn't sure I wanted to be a part of something as open an invitation as that. "Oh, yeah?" I raised an eyebrow and held a slight grin to show I took no offense even if the invitation was something a little too personal for my interest, "And what sort of fun would that be?" Marcus Amory tossed his answer right out with such an obviously discreet reply that I would either be hep to what he was saying or miss it by a mile and a half. "I just got back from the Jerry shows in Palo Alto." I already wore a Cheshire grin when I finalized the date: "Noon, you say. I guess I'll be skipping work on Saturday..." Marcus Amory and I burned across the landscapes of Yellowstone, the mountains of Montana, and the soft geographies far beyond the physical realms like two mad cats setting fire to the blue note highways of some past poetic time. And as I sit here now, distant and remote from our days together, I reflect on our trips and conversations and lysergic-soaked eep hours of bright dark nights of our souls that seemed to be poured from the eternal archive of mystic experience and steeped in the tea leaves from a lush and exotic jungle where ideas not yet conceived of grow wild on tangle vines before bearing fruit in our minds. I ask the ghost of this memory that is Marcus Amory about those days and nights we spent seeding precious singular moments so that they might flower and bring the beauty of our ideas into being. Marcus Amory moved through place and thought with a fiery intensity and latched onto me through some cosmological ninth sense that told him I would be a willing and able psychonaut to join him on his acid-fueled ramblings down mountain highway and up cliffside trails. I reflect, conjure, and speak to this memory of my Dean Moriarty and question what rules define telling these stories. What defines truth and fiction? What boundaries were breeched and what limits were kept constrained when Jack Kerouac became Sal Paradise and began committing the stories of his life to paper? Where does the thinly-guised fact become fabricated fiction? If I were to write of Marcus Amory and myself--committed in story as Syd Persona--what would I reveal of the psychedelic intimacies he and I shared. And what of the others were who passed though, went along for a distance with, and stepped back with quiet apprehension from? Would I be transgressing any sort of personal privacy they might have reasonable expectation of if I wrote them into the narrative of this slipstream story of hand-painted mini-vans, stumbling glorious wanton hysterical along the boardwalks of Old Faithful's geyser basin and driving, always driving--? Marcus Amory was the maddest beautiful driver I've ever known, which was only appropriate since I viewed him as my Dean Moriarty around whom I fluttered and flipped and kept up the pace with--driving with one hand one the wheel, one hand pinching a joint, his head nodding and bobbing to the music and his smile fixed bright on his face. I think about those times and those events and those people and find myself, even typing this, going back and deleting certain information, altering some truths until their are partial fictions and considering what might be added to this to make it no longer a recollecting tale with minor factual details excised or metamorphosed into subtle fancy. What choices should I make in recreating certain events on the page?—


What choices did Jack make? What observations in On The Road are Jack's and which ones are Sal's? Like my ghostly memory on paper of Marcus Amory, Dean Moriarty was certainly a more beautiful, wild, be-bop-beat mad cat in many ways than Neal Cassady was. But then Neal Cassady wasn't Dean Moriarty anymore than Emma Larkin found George Orwell in her bumbling down the sweltering river of Burma (which isn't really a country at all anymore, except in the past of people's memories). Neal Cassady was a living breathing beautiful laughing angry asshole. Just like any person is. Dean Moriarty was a character, who really and truly existed only in Jack's mind, on the page, and in the hearts of anyone who opened themselves up to the story in which Dean rambles endlessly forever down some long lost highway of hope until he recedes to becomes but a speck on the distant horizon, and then it's goodbye to all that--at least, until the reader reopens the book and starts the journey all over again.


—I go searching, and try to find the truth in my own fiction, the fiction in my truth. And, in searching the canyons and highways of my memory and past I come upon a Southern crossroads, not farm from the ramshackle shotgun shack of Old Bull Lee and encounter Flannery O'Connor standing on the side of some dusty highway waiting for the Misfit to come back from the forest where he walked in with the Grandmother. Flannery tells me not to linger too long--and I don't. Crossroads aren't meant for lingering anymore than road novels are meant to leave their characters stationary for any span. But before I stick my thumb out again to catch a ride away from here and off to some place out there somewhere, Ms. O'Connor tells me, "The Writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. Their problem is to find that location." And then I know what it is I've been looking for all these years. Where I have sought to be. The peculiar crossroads where I will find my past present and future mingling with every highway road and trail I've even imagined, and the divine moment that lifts itself out from the swampy muck of confusion and obscurity and hangs there, just above the here and now, where it shimmers for a moment and then disappears as I keep going further. It's all a mirage, rising like heat waves on a desert highway. It disappears like a fleeting memory of the past that no one holds in their hearts anymore, no one speaks of, no one remembers. I think of Jack Kerouac, following me all these years since I first encountered him, and Sal Paradise who never quite existed for me even when I hopped in the car with him and drove out to San Francisco--him and Dean, Dean and Jack, Jack and Neal, Neal and me, me and Marcus Amory. Me and Jack. I grapple with my own secrets, my own untold stories, my own hesitations and I think back to Marcus Amory and the headlights showing only a small piece of the long dark night we travelled--only the immediate future of the road just ahead of us--and beyond that light only darkness and the mystery of what will be--what could be. I think of Marcus Amory, I think of Marcus Amory. I think of Marcus Am-or-ry.


· • ·

Broken Little Lies

Pen to the Page and Write.


~•~


In the beginning was the Word. The Word became flesh. Words to memorize and words hypnotize. Words make my mouth exercise. Words assemble, words be quick... Cast letters to spell words, and become sentenced by what is said; by what is written. Judged by it. Writing is magick, of course. And we should be bound by our words. The sentencing of our thought made word. A promise; an oath. Sending forth an affirmation; a troth of binding.

We should not promise something easily, nor lightly. And, once given, an oath should be kept except in extreme circumstances. Breaking one's word is a crime, a sin, against oneself. And should perhaps be viewed as a defeat in the ongoing struggle of attaining a life of compassion and brightness.

Of course, some persons derive pleasure from creating falsehoods, and inflicting them upon others. Place no faith with such people, yet they are not to be despised, merely avoided upon discovery of their false intentions.

Anything new or strange should be cautiously welcomed.

Once I dreamed I stood in the wreckage and debris of my own broken promises. They lay littered about my feet. I gathered the scattered pieces and threw them up into the sky where they stuck across the ceiling of the cosmos. And then I saw that they were not alone up there, for among them were the billions of glittering fragments of so many other broken promises.

The brighter the light shone, the darker the shadows cast.

When Love and Hate cease, there is but indifference. And that is truly far worse than either of the strong emotions. For in feeling angry or feeling concern, at least there is feeling. Without feeling, there is no care; no compassion. And then the Vacuity has overcome the Swell.

There is Truth. And there is Lie. In truth, is always faith. Faith is what you know to be true, even if you don't believe it. Lies, are the broken promises to yourself.


· • ·

A Tale of Two Lines

This one came about because I had just discovered the case of (Dr.) Brad Vice and the Flannery O'Connor Award controversy.

It's almost a compulsion with me to incorporate current influences on assignments.


~•~
(1st)


FICTION II
04/07/07
First Lines

A TALE OF TWO LINES
OR: THE FIRST LINE OF PLAGIARISM


First lines. Hookers. The tasty openings of a story or novel that are meant to grab the reader and all-but-force them to read on--the second, third, and all ensuing sentences until they have consumed the whole meal, paragraph by paragraph.

Somewhat recently, I read a short story titled "Tuscaloosa Nights" by Brad Vice. It was in a collection that won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. I was struck by the power of the words, structure, images, and just plain ol' deep dark story in the piece.

Here's the first line (two sentences, actually): "And that’s how it began. Three distant notes, high blasts on a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note."

I have rarely been so moved by a story as I was by Brad Vice's. Briefly, it's about a self-admitted Yankee in the Deep South who, one night sitting on the front porch with a couple of others, she asks about the bugle she hears blow those three notes. It's the Ku Klux Klan gathering for a rally in the woods. The young Yankee girl talks the guy she's sweet on to take her out to see the rednecks in their long white sheets burn a cross in the forest. She, of course, gets more than she bargained for.

I looked into Brad Vice and his work and was almost shocked at what I found. I love it when research opens new proverbial cans of worms. This instance of delving into background lead me on a path through the swampy area of literature involving plagiarism and how nasty accusations are sometimes worse than the crime.

"Tuscaloosa Nights" is a short story that opens Brad Vice's collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. The collection was awarded the Flannery O'Connor Prize in 2005, only to have it rescinded a few months later.

This is a tale of two first lines, and the murky area where "fair use" becomes an unforgivable act of "plagiarism".

The first of these opening lines comes from a non-fiction work titled Stars Fell on Alabama which is a collection of real-life (i.e. "factual") instances that were collected and published in 1934. It was written in a style not often used at the time, but which gained mass popularity when, thirty years later, Truman Capote would use the narrative non-fiction style for his book, In Cold Blood.

Carl Carmer was a noted professor at the University of Alabama for a number of years and who fell in love with Southern storytelling. He traveled the state and recorded tales and events he heard and witnessed, various myths, legends, and superstitious of the place he called "Conjure Country". One instance he wrote about was a Ku Klux Klan rally that he witnessed.

In Part I: Tuscaloosa Nights, is the chapter titled "Flaming Cross". This opens with the line: "We heard them coming long before we saw them — three distant high blasts of a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note."

70 years later, a student (and native of the town) at the University of Alabama named Brad Vice, wrote his short story called "Tuscaloosa Nights". This was the opening piece in a collection of fictional tales that was to become not only Mr. Vice's doctoral thesis in creative writing, but also The Bear Bryant Funeral Train received the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award.

Dr. Vice's story begins with the line (two sentences): "And that’s how it began. Three distant notes, high blasts on a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note."

I had a passing familiarity with Carl Carmer's book. Almost anyone from Alabama who reads history or local superstition literature has at least heard of the work. And for a student at the University of Alabama's creative writing program, it would not be something that could have been ignored.

So, cursing all plagiarists as vile and reprehensible people, I re-read Brad Vice's short story. I was still struck by the use he made of the descriptive sentences of Carl Carmer that Brad Vice used.

Okay, I thought, well how much of that is "plagiarized"?

I found Mr. Carmer's original work and read the chapter.

First line is lifted quite directly and deliberately, that much is certain. A few lines of dialogue in the ensuing scene. The closing of the story is closely mimicked:

"We rode on in silence. The lights of town seemed friendlier than the flames we had left behind on the river bank...." (Carmer)

"They were running toward the river, toward the orange light on the horizon, toward the burning cross, leaving us alone in the terrible silence." (Vice)

I thought, there it is. Plagiarism.

Then I read some essays on what legally defines plagiarism and what ethically constitutes it. Then I read both pieces again.

Nope, I thought, this isn't plagiarism.

Non-fiction work can only be considered legally plagiarized if it has been taken substantially in length without citation. And the events described in a work of non-fiction can be used in fiction without citing the written source. That;s the legalities of it.

Ethically, did Brad Vice steal Carl Carmer's intellectual property?

Dozens of authors copy Arthur Conan Doyle when they write Sherlock Holmes stories. Or Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. And, not to forget the extensive Lovecraftian circle of writers and their shared creations.

A cornerstone of my personal opinion that Brad Vice did not deserve the accusation (and I wondered about a possible personal vendetta in this situation), is that in the collection before it was published by the University of Georgia after winning the Flannery O'Connor Award, there was an opening epigram in the manuscript which quoted Carl Carmer's book, Stars Fell on Alabama. To my personal way of seeing (and I detest plagiarism), this is citing the source work of the single story, and backs up Brad Vice's claim that his short story is an homage to Mr. Carmer. The fact that this epigram was left out of the published book from the University of Georgia is something that goes beyond Dr. Vice's ability as an author to definitively control.

A number of people in the literary community came out cursing Brad Vice and at least one made the statement that his Ph.D should be revoked as well as the O'Connor Prize. But far more in number were those who stood up in defense of Dr. Vice's book. One story out of nine had an accusation made against it. An accusation that falls apart when looking at any of the other versions of the manuscript that have been published in one manner or another (appearance in Five Points magazine, inclusion in his doctoral dissertation), because the cited quote by Carmer is present in those.

A lot of fuss and fallout from what essentially is an admittedly almost-identical opening line in two written works; one non-fiction, and the other, 70 years later, in a short story.

Is this a case of a Harvard student claiming she "internalized" over 90 instances of sentences from numerous other writers in a single book? No. Is it a case of lifting the core elements in a written account of an actual event years later in a fictional story. That's certainly closer to the truth, but I think it overstates a few things.

Carmer's work is a narrative telling of a real event. Brad Vice used that as the setting for a fictional story. The story contains a number of elements, and about four to seven lines that are very similar to the non-fiction account, but there is another level of story being told in Dr. Vice's tale that is not present in Mr. Carmer's work.

What I take from this in application of my own writing are a few key notes to remember.

The Paradox: Never use other people's work--factual accounts or fiction--without making it evident that I am doing so. A line from a famous song or a certain phrase may be used, but make damn sure that it's apparent where they came from. On the other hand, if the story is strong enough as an original piece, I can't be overly concerned with doing such because there has been so much "mash-up" in modern culture that even citing the source of something may be a pitfall of having used something that has been taken from somebody else already. Mark Twain noted, "A bad writer borrows from other writers, a good writer steals." I never took this to mean that it's okay to steal something from someone else. I understand it to be take what you need from where you need it so long as what you use it for is YOUR OWN WORK. That means be original in usage and voice, regardless of using anything from a source not your head.

And since the contents of my head (I can't speak about the contents of someone else's head because I'm not privy to such information unless it's been spilled on a page or photograph or canvas or in a series of musical notes) are a mash-up of everything I see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and think about. Everything.

On the other hand...it's becoming more and more acceptable in publishing to lie, and so without the ethics of attaining your own voice and ideas and work, copping a riff of writing from someone else draws a writer towards the ugly morass of Plagiarism. And that's a death-knell for an artist.

Brad Vice last not only his award, but also his job as an assistant professor at Mississippi State University over the fiasco (he now teaches English at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic). As he quotes about the situation, "Wrote a book. Caused a lota trouble. Stay tuned."

This is what the opening lines of a couple of stories lead me to discover, think about, and articulate in a way I hope says something useful.

I don't know as the line on what exactly is plagiarism can be clearly drawn as Here It Is, No Exceptions, but I certainly know plagiarism when I see it.

If you steal something without altering it significantly, or placing it within a vastly new environment, you've probably plagiarized it. If you haven't ever "borrowed" a bit of this or that from someone else, you probably have never written a single thing.


~•~


WHERE TO FIND THE STORIES:

"Flaming Cross" by Carl Carmer:


"Tuscaloosa Nights" by Brad Vice:


· • ·

Irony Poisoning.

This was the third parody I wrote for Fiction II.

~•~
(draft 1.5 again, and no, I won't acknowledge it as a 2nd draft)


FICTION II
02/25/08
Parody III: The Metamorphosis


Irony Poisoning.


When Merald Kroach woke up at 4:19 on Tuesday morning he was still human. He slept in his own bed in his own room of his own apartment. When he woke up at 4:19, rolled over a little to look at the clock and make a hypnagogic deduction that two hours and some minutes between then and the time the alarm was set for provided plenty more time for sleep, he fell back into his fitful dreams which always seemed to be about things which eluded his conscious mind. But anyway--he reasoned while giving a few moments of thought to it when awake before getting on with important things in his life like crunching numbers at the accounting firm--dreams weren't meant to be understood at all, not by the analytical mind, and so he quickly dismissed whatever he remembered about his restless dreams.

When Merald Kroach woke up at 4:19 in his own bed, covered with green and blue flannel sheets and a thick pleated quilt his grandmother had made which kept him warm on even the coldest of nights, he was still human. The room around him was very much his own, with a few Spartan personal items; bare walls and a closetful of nearly identical suits, a night stand with most un-decorative lamp and simple digital alarm clock with buzzer and radio, simple wooden beige chest of drawers over in the corner held his socks and underwear, and a box set on top with his neatly-arranged tie-tacks and cuff-links. That is also where he placed, at night before going to bed, his wrist watch, cell phone, and PDA.

Everything in the dark quiet hour of 4 a.m. was as if should be in Merald Kroach's room. Ordered and neat and evident.

Nothing about the room or objects in it had changed during the next few hours that Merald Kroach slept. Although he had never done so in his entire life, last night before going to bed, Merald Kroach forgot to set the alarm on his digital clock. At 6:35 a.m. the alarm did, in fact, not go off, and for the first time in his entire life, Merald Kroach overslept.

Ordinarily, the alarm would awake him at 6:35 and he would be out of bed by 6:45 when the coffee machine started brewing a pot; shower and shave, 6:55; toast with butter and two cups of coffee and he was out of the apartment at 7:20 to catch the train into the accounting firm to sit down at his cubical desk at 7:55, where stacks of papers with numerous columns of numbers waited his attention. Numbers didn't leave any room for interpretations and comparisons. Numbers were factual and definite.

Weren't they?

This morning, 6:35 a.m. came and went without a sound, because he had forgotten to set it. It was 8:23 when he opened his eyes to the brightness of a day already several hours old.

Merald Kroach opened his eyes and the clock seemed indistinct and out of focus to him. He tried rubbing his ideas but his thought of doing so slipped into a foggy gray area of his head and he suddenly didn't feel like himself at all.

He felt like...like...like he was a bug, trapped beneath his grandmother's quilt, lying in bed; like he was a prisoner and his bedroom and the apartment and even everything in town was merely a façade meant to give him the false sense of normalcy; like everything was familiar but he was alien and foreign to it; like he was a stranger in a strange land.

Merald Kroach tried to roll over in bed but the best he could do was lie as he was and imagine jelly rolls and drums rolls and rolling, rolling, rolling down the river. His thoughts drifting from an old song to Mark Twain using the Mississippi River as a whatchamacallit for Life. A model or something, Merald thought, but was reaching for another idea.

But he felt helpless as a child; like a fish out of water; flaccid as an overripe cliché.

What was wrong with him? Why couldn't he move?

He tried to roll over again, or at least lift an arm, but found he couldn't exactly feel his body anymore. Maybe he was paralyzed?

Frozen in place like a wet tongue to a metal pole in subzero weather, heavy as a lead elephant. With every thought, his mind would slip away from the subject he tried to focus on, but it would slip away from anything concrete like water glistening off a rainbowed-surface of oil--like three hillbillies in a mud farm trying to catch a greased hog.

The clock showed 8:51, and Merald Kroach still lay like a stump on a log, unable to move beneath his pleated quilt blanket. Usually by this time of the morning at the accounting firm he'd be as busy as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest.

This was insane! Why couldn't he move? What happened to him?

Even though he felt unable to move, Merald Kroach wasn't in any actual physical pain. Just frustrated by his thoughts not being able to focus clearly on anything, and the growing concern that such abstract mental processes were certainly going to be a hindrance at the accounting firm.

Perhaps this was one of those--what do you call them?--lucid dreams? That's it! He was awake inside a very vivid dream. And that meant he must still be sleeping.

He suddenly felt very reassured. Yes, that was it...this was one of those minute brief dreams he sometimes had between snooze bar hits. The alarm had gone off and he fell back asleep immediately and he was dreaming that it was after 9 a.m. and he had transformed from being a human into being some sort of ghost of Christmas past, shadow of a thought, will-o-wisp of the mind.

Any moment now, the alarm was going to go off again and Merald Kroach was going to get up and get on with his morning as usual--shower and shave his very human face--then head off to work at the accounting firm and crunch the numbers that define finances and business and politics and news and life and important things like that. He had no time for pondering silly ideas and allusions.

Numbers were what mattered. Good, concrete, invariable numbers----like the Square Root of Negative One, Gauss's Constant, Pi, or Zero...?

Merald Kroach's brain itched like a ten-year-old with chicken pox and ants in his pants. He wasn't used to having circular thoughts that slid away from things like snot off a doorknob. Every time he'd think of something, his mind would tangent off into some sort of similar comparison of what he wanted to think of, and wind up wandering a starry desert looking for the trail of where he began. Trapped like a rat in a cage he made and now he'd have to lie in it.

Stop it! he wanted to shout, but the best he could do was briefly form some sort of analogy to what he wanted to think about.

Then the dawning awareness struck him like a ton of gold bricks.

Merald Kroach woke up to find himself transformed into an alliterative metaphor! He'd become some sort of allegory typed into the lines of a structural parody!

The thought was insane, crazy as a loon, mad as a hatter. But what else could it be? His mind raced down a white-water stream of consciousness, flushed into a swirling spiral of similes into the rhetorical murk and muck of anthropomorphic pathos. His proverbial blood froze at the flittering metonymic thought: What if in his being transformed into an allusionary idea in a work of metafiction, the Author-Creator never hit SAVE? What would happen to him?

He had to escape from this pastiche world...break through the Fourth Wall and return to his analytical life. However this happened didn't matter any more than growing a third testicle, but he needed to find a way out from this story before it fell into a mess of plot holes or infinite recursion.

How would McGuyver get out of this? What about James Bond? Indiana Jones escaped dire situations dozens of times, but he had a whip and a hat when he did. And a human body...

Since his thoughts seemed to be his body, maybe he could imagine a place, really see it, then think of some words and they might become the reality of what he imagined they could be. He'd imagine himself out of being a metaphor.

However he was going to do it, he had to make it quick. What if he lay here like unnoticed McGuffin and starved to death? Or worse, what if someone from the firm came over and found him like this? A mere figmentary parable, a rhetorical trope, a literary device...

What were those things called that always seemed to come in and save the day at the end of thriller stories?

The Calvary? No. Superman...? Han Solo? Chechov's gun?

He wasn't sure what Chechov's gun was, but if he had it, he'd be sure to use it!

Enough of this! Merald Kroach imagined he yelled, tasting the bitter irony poisoning of his situation. Then the idea fluttered past him like a drunken butterfly stumbling home from a three-day bender. The way out! He thought of the thing that could get him out of this...this whatchamacallit!

That was it, he finally decided, clutching to the epiphany before it had a chance to slip away like a squiggling fish and turn into something else...

Since he was a metaphor in a short story parody of some Phildickian-Kafkaesque piece of fiction, he was going to need a Deus Ex Machina to get out of this.

English or Latin -- it was all just Greek to him.


· • ·

Jack Kerouac's been stalking me...

Journaling. Instantaneous writing. Free writing. (Free Writing? Who's gone and imprisoned Writing this time!?) Whatever it's called, it's great sometimes when the pen takes off and you're just along for the ride...

For Writers on the Road class with the very funny Eric May. Amazing teacher.

(1st draft, of course)


~•~


He's been following me since I was 15.

You'd think that schmuck would find something better to do, but I probably won't shake him any time soon. I've gone back a forth and few times on how much I actually like the guy, regardless of how much influence he's been on me. I mean, following me around since I was 15, there's no small amount of influence, but still, it's not like I'm entirely comfortable with this been stalked this many years...who the fuck is Jack Kerouac and why does he follow me everywhere I go?

My best friend is this feller named Sean who I first met my sophomore year in high school. After we established that we both were bone-sucking bored with the Classics and read on the periphery, if not right out over the edge he suggested I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I said sure, and already establishing a pattern, bought the book and left it to sit on the shelf for a few months before even sampling. Like a fine wine that you leave for a time before drinking. When I tried out The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I first met Jack. At that point, he wasn't in such good shape, nor really any hip disposition. As I recall, the scene wasn't pretty. I didn't really care for Jack when I met him. Alcoholic, bitter, resentful, intolerant.

I learned a lot more about him--how could I not with him following me?--over the ensuing years, and understood all four of those conditions and would forgive him three, but first impression really are indelible. And having made the journey so far with the Pranksters--hmmmmmmmmmmmm--suddenly running into a living myth and finding him so fucking dour--the most apt word really would be "bummer"--that first image never left me.

After the Acid Tests, the bus ride, and Graduation with the Pranksters, I went On the Road the first time (I'd made more than a few hundred miles of travels already in my life by then). That first read I got about halfway along--Jack...ehem...yeah, Sal...Sal was hung up in California and it was getting mopey again so I gave up and came back home. That was the year I went to Atlanta for the summer again and started meeting some gawd-damned freaks. That was the summer I met another influence, one that Jack didn't quite approve of. No matter. Just because a feller dogs your path for years doesn't give him any soapbox to dictate his morals on another.

I guess I could associate this new acquaintance with the Grateful Dead. I met them through the Electric Kool-Aid, too, but our relationship was much different than the one I had with my stalker, Jack Kerouac.

It went from there. Allen Ginsberg showed up in Mobile, Alabama to perform and we ended up talking over red beans and rice afterwards, then slip off from his university hosts to share a smoke and he pointed out the FBI offices in an iconic building in Mobile where I'd end up working in radio a few years down the road...

Ginsberg on several occasions, Wavy Gravy a couple of times. The Pranksters themselves at an Oregon County Fair. And many many miles of standing at the side of the road and waiting for the next ride.

Jack was there with me every mile. Every weird encounter. Every ride and trip along the way.

My first really good story--"Flashcut"--opens with the luring highway Jack rode with Neal driving..."It was all heat and flash," the story opens, "That weekend I stole my sister's boyfriend, we killed my parents, and hit the road."

The story was inspired by the girl who taught me to hitchhike (what, did you think there's nothing to it? just go stand on the side of the road and stick out your thumb? that's novice thinking, there's a range of subtleties to learn about hitchhiking); Jenny was certainly not unencumbered by knowing Jack either. Did I really know anyone who wasn't?

I thought I shook him after that. Stopped traveling by thumb. Settled in a bit. I thought I'd finally shaken off Jack.

In Boulder, Colorado. Running into Allen Ginsberg. And the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets. Yeah, sure, I had shaken Jack.

By that point, I'd grown to kinda like the guy. He wrote some damn fine haiku, that's for sure, new style, really... American haiku. I'd come to understand why he was bitter and dour and resentful. Always being ripped apart by critics. Falling into your own mythological bullshit. Pushed in when you try to get out. Poor schmuck. I feel for him.

Recently I went hitchhiking in a short story and was picked up by Sal and Dean. Quite a journey we had. Carlo told me all over again that there are "no ideas but in things" (a Walter Carlos Williams quote), and then the three of them dropped me off by in some fictional childhood and before I realized it, the story became my first professional sale.

It's irony poisoning, really. He was there in the earliest true(ly) weird book I ever read. He was there two dozen stories in with my first sale. Full circle motif and all that. Right back where it started. No matter how many times I turn around, there he is, right behind me.

Jack Kerouac has been following me since I was 15. It hasn't been the best relationship, but I think we've found each other to be pretty good friends.

So if you happen to see him around, tell him I said thank you.


22 Feb 08


· • ·

The Night Auditor.

In Fiction II, parodies are attempted. There's three or four stories you can opt to parody, and as I remember, two or three had to produced. Then one of those was completed by the end of the semester.


~•~


FICTION II
02/18/08
Parody II: Bartleby
(first draft)


The Night Auditor.

I forget his last name now, Tom Bartholomew, maybe, but I can't be sure. TOM B. is what the gold plate name tag showed, and that's how I remember him. We all had name tags, but no one else really went by what they showed. So it's kind of odd that I remember Tom B.'s name tag but everyone else's nicknames. I guess because I knew everyone else so much longer. Tom B. only worked at the hotel for six months. The last six months the hotel was open.

I supervised three other people on the midnight shift. The night auditor, the maintenance man, and the lounge bartender. Once autumn, the night auditor quit and the hotel searched for a new auditor. Turnkey and Nausica, the maintenance man and the bartender, and myself took out guesses at the sort of person would take the job.

He was like none of us expected.

The hotel was a grand display of crimson red carpeting and wooden gold walls. A massive stone hearth stood in the center of the room reaching the three-floors up to the ceiling of the octagonal lobby. The hotel had been around for almost a century before it had electric light. The lobby was lit with light bulbs that look like flames, but they are in wall sconces where torch and oil lamps once were.

I'd been with the L'Éminence Rouge for a seven years before I was given the position of overnight concierge, which I then held for the next ten. Right up to when the hotel closed.

But however long I had been with the L'Éminence Rouge, Turnkey had been there more than a decade longer. Turnkey was good at fixing things for the first half of his shift, but by midnight, Turnkey would take his lunch break--which consisted of propping himself up on the bed in a vacant room with a bottle of bourbon and a pack of cigarettes and watch t.v. until he passed out around 4 a.m. Around 4, Nausica would have closed the lounge and counted out with the auditor and gone off to find where Turnkey had taken lunch, then wake him up, and go on her merry way by 5.

Turnkey pushed the limits of employment and tolerance only because he got the necessary things done in the short amount of time he actually devoted to work, and because he had worked at the hotel for so long, no one could imagine not seeing him chain-smoke an entire pack of cigarettes in the span of an evening.

Nausica worked more than Turnkey, certainly. More than she maybe should have. It became apparent slowly over her time at the hotel that she had another job as well, one which clients showed up for at the bar from time to time. They'd drop by for a quick drink and leave shortly after, a few grams heavier than when they arrived. But, like Turnkey, Nausica kept her job because she was good at what she did, completed it within the alloted timeframe, and didn't crack up always working opposite the sun.

On the midnight shift, each hour has more significance than during the day shift.

Especially for the night auditor. Each hour meant a different set of reports, a different audit to be conducted. The job went something like this: run a series of reports, and while they're printing, start checking over the house and people count. Then a run down of various accounts and expenses, and everything needs to balance, as close to possible to zero. Then, after hours of printing hundreds of pages of reports, the auditor separated them into various piles to send off to the accountant and the sales office and the front desk manager and housekeeping and maintenance and the food and beverage manager, and so forth and so on. The paper-trail that is the foundation of business operations itself.

Tom B. was hired on as the night auditor, responsible for the meticulous and detailed work of printing and checking the hotel reports. When he first started at the hotel, Tom B. was amazingly quick, accurate, and precise. He ran and checked reports in a third less time than his predecessor, and accurately checked them quicker than seemed feasible. His attention to filing was no less incredible. For the first few months no one could have found a bad thing to say about Tom B. He was the best night auditor the L'Éminence Rouge Hotel had ever had.

So it was immediately strange when I noticed the expanding piles of paperwork that had sprung up around the front desk office; unfiled audit reports dating back a full week. Tom B. had simply not been filing any reports for five nights in a row. He ran them and checked their figures with as much skill and detail as he always had, running a long ruler across each row of numbers, but he just didn't file them.

The next week several departments complained about it, asking why he refused to do his work.

Well, refused isn't precisely accurate. Tom B. never actually refused to do his job. He checked and balanced every report, he just wouldn't file the paperwork. The only response anyone would get from him was, "I'm not ready to do that yet."

Each department of the hotel began to print out their own copies of the audited reports, so after the initial drama of it, no one complained very much about not receiving any filed reports. Yet the number and height of the growing stacks of unfiled paperwork was growing. It had filled an office closet already and stood, floor to ceiling, in some dozen or more stacks. And they kept growing.

Tom B. would take his time, sitting in his office chair, going over each line of every single report. But never file the papers when he was done. Every few days someone on the morning shift would ask Tom B. about why he hadn't filed the reports and he would always respond in the same slow tone, "I'm not ready to do that yet."

It was about a week before the fire that we found out he'd been living at the hotel from the very first day he worked there. Tom B. had taken up residence in Room 18 just a few doors down the hall from the front desk. Room 18 was where we put half-broken things. Lamps that flicker when they're on, a t.v. that won't change channels. The hotel didn't like to throw things away. I guess that's why Tom B. was never actually fired for not doing his job. He showed up to work--never really left the hotel--and that was good enough.

That was when I started looking into Tom B,'s background.

I called his former employer and was mildly socked to learn that in his previous job Tom B. filed paperwork for a crematorium. The death certificate, funeral home contacts, the bill for services rendered.

A job like that was bound to change a man. It seemed to be that it was no wonder Tom B. was a bit odd, even considering the sort of people one encounters during the small dark hours.

I looked at the stacks and stacks of unfiled and reports and wondered if maybe Tom B. didn't file them because that might remind him always of death. Perhaps not filing the audit reports was his way of reminding himself he was still alive.

There was one night I was going to asking him directly about that. But that was the night of the fire.

The fire was caused by Turnkey.

Around 4 a.m., April 19th. When Turnkey passed out that night, his bourbon spilled over the bed and the cigarette in his hand when he fell asleep sparked a flame...

Nausica had just begun her Where Has Turnkey Passed Out Tonight? game. She found the fire before it spread from the room, but Turnkey had already become charcoal and the flames were licking at the edges of the room.

Within minutes the entire wing of the hotel was blazing.

As the fire devoured the hotel, I made sure all the guests were out and striding back through the lobby after directing Nausica and the baker-girl, Pumpernickel, out. Turnkey was gone, his burial in a flaming rented bed, but everyone else had gotten out. Everyone except for the night auditor, Tom B.

I found him sitting in his office chair, the fire crawling with branching red fingertips up the floor-to-ceiling columns of unfiled paperwork all around him.

"Tom," I shouted to him above the roar of the flames, "Everyone else is out, come on!"

But he just sat there, holding a ruler to the page of report on the desk in front of him, his head turned to me for almost a full minute before he turned away. I felt my hair singeing in the heat.

I wanted to turn and run out of the burning place, but I couldn't just let him sit there and be roasted in the fire--I was frantic, "Tom, this is crazy. We've got to get out of here!"

Even with my hair sizzling, I was drawn to stand there staring at him. How calm he was, sitting in his office chair. "No," Tom B. said to me, the heat peeling back the upholstery of the chair around him, "I'm not ready to do that yet."

Tom B.'s skin blistered red before cracking, engorged by the flame of his paperwork crematorium.

I ran from the tinderbox lobby and greedily gulped in fresh air when I stood outside far from the fire and smoke. The red-orange glow lit the rest of night, the embers dying only when the sun finally chose to begin the day.

The L'Éminence Rouge Hotel burned to the ground.

It was never rebuilt.


· • ·

What is "Good" Writing?

This brief essay is particularly cringe-worthy. Perhaps not objectively, but certainly from this vantage point on the inside looking back in at a piece several years old. Whereas my fiction has involved significantly since 2007-8, it was already "good" and thus, improvement is a small percentile compared to the leap my academic writing has done in the past two years. I thank the challenges set forth by Dr. Boren [English Dept. UNCW] and the memoirist/guest teacher at UNCW last year, Peter Trachtenberg.

The second assignment from Fiction II (taught by the underestimated Jeff Jacobson), was to define what is that ephemeral and very subjective creature called "good writing."

Returning the paper Jeff told me it made him pull out The Big Sleep and read it again. Reference to Chandler tend to do that to some people. :)


~•~
(1st Draft)


FICTION II
2/18/08
Journal II: What is Good Writing?

Ehem, let me get up on my soapbox for a couple minutes about this:

What is Good Writing?

Good Writing is when you can smell the mold growing on the floorboards of the room in the story.

Good Writing is when you forget all sense of self and know nothing more than what is passing through your head and heart via the words printed on a page.

Good Writing asks questions, it doesn't give you answers. If a writer has the answer, they usually end up lecturing you. They should probably skip fiction and go right on to writing religious tracts (Crews).

Good Writing is something that might not be evident upon first read. If the writing calls attention to itself with deliberately pretty words, it's probably veered over into the Bad Writing side of things.

Good Writing doesn't need to call attention to itself--you-as-a-reader are too involved in the story of what the words are telling to notice how pretty they are or how well constructed the sentence is. Which, as course means, that the words used are fitting the story they tell and the sentence is structured well, without grammatical problems.

Sure, cite Shelby all you want in regards to why you shouldn't be constrained to using the commonly accepted rules about punctuation and quotations marks, but chances are great that you don't have as strong of a narrative voice, internal consistency, and as powerful subject matter as Shelby did. Sure, you probably do within the confines of your own genius head of yours, but queers, transsexuals, junkies, and whores was new in literature with Algren, Selby, and Burroughs, and Irving Welsh managed a go of it, but only two of those four ventured very far from the accepted rules of grammar. Unless you can lay down your pedigree as powerfully as they did, you might want to learn the rules before you break them. Find/Replace is a brilliant feature of word processors.

After the grammar-thing, one of the next flashing neon signs advertising a piece as Bad Writing would be the use of adjectives and adverbs. Bad Writing is often carelessly, needlessly, atrociously rife with myriad, horrid, eldritch, and often incomprehensible adverbs and adjectives. If you spot more than a handful per page, you've probably veered off the Good Writing highway into the purplish vistas of pedantic typing. Which doesn't mean don't ever use them, it means ration them. They're powerful things, like compost. A little bit helps make a garden become lush and beautiful. A lot of them together creates a pile of shit. The road to hell is paved with adverbs. [King gets credit for this, but I've seen it written previous to his On Writing. Aw, hell, he can have the credit if you're gonna argue about it.]

I can think of at least one example that violates a lot of guidelines I have for Good Writing, and which I still found it to be one of the most amazing bits of writing I've ever read: Nabokov's Lolita. I don't remember exactly (and don't have the book at hand to check) but there was a passage about the dandelions in the yard turning from suns to moons that just floored me and then continued to kick me with poetic words while I was left drooling in amazement.

That's Good Writing.

One of the most dangerous aspects of writing, and a particular razor's edge between Good|Bad Writing (and one rife with potential for cliché): Metaphors.

Ah, the foetid cliché. A bad cliché sticks out like a sore thumb. A red-headed stepchild in a black family. Clichés are horrible. Their use without precise care is a huge indicator of piss-poor writing. Not unlike showing up at a klan rally in a Boy George outfit (Hicks).

Which brings me back to metaphor. A poorly wrought metaphor usually doesn't travel alone and falls upon the reading psyche like a rapid ton of bricks; knocks the clipper ship of Good Writing right off its hinges. Some Bad Writing not only mixes metaphors, but cross-breeds those suckers. ("Damnit, Jim, I'm a wordsmith not an ontological geneticist!")

On the other side of that, Raymond Chandler spun some of the greatest metaphors in the English language:

"She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight."

"Her voice trailed off into a sort of sad whisper like a mortician asking for a down payment."

"A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly on the carpet."

One of my favorite things about a story is the opening line. Not every good story has a good opening line, but maybe the great ones do.

"It was Friday the thirteenth and yesterday's snowstorm lingered in the street like a leftover curse." William Hjortsberg, Falling Angel.

"Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phone call from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals." PKD, VALIS.

Perhaps one of the most quoted by the under 30, 40, 60 crowd, "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

One more: "What's the worst thing you've ever done? I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing..." Peter Straub, Ghost Story.

There have been a few books over the years that I read in one sitting because I couldn't pull away from it--in one case staying up all night before having to start a three-day road trip. The first time this happened, I was twelve or so. The culprit was Douglas Adams's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Years later a book I've read more than a few times, including reading it aloud as a serial on two occasions. Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg. Then I picked up Lewis Shiner's Deserted Cities of the Heart. Shiner got me again a couple years later with his next book, Slam.

A book that can hold you in it despite what is going on outside of it is a fine example of Good Writing.

So I guess that's what Good Writing comes down for me.

Story. Storytelling.

Good Writing has nothing to do with good literature. In fact, good literature is sometimes completely at odds with Good Writing.

And Good Writing has everything to do with good storytelling. If your story's good enough, and told well enough, it can break any rule there is and be, not only Good Writing, but Great Writing.

Good Writing is when there's magic in them thar words. Words are magic. Why else d'ya think it's called spelling? (Barrett)

Of course, asking the question, "What is Good Writing?"(a question only slightly more interesting as being asked, "Where do you get your ideas?") has as many different answers as there are people with vantage points atop their proverbial soap boxes.

And it's time I hopped down from mine.


· • ·

This Ubiquitous Apocalypse

The pinnacle of the semester for Rhetoric class. Any topic was fair game. I sketched the beginnings of a couple others, but being an eschatographer, this was the one that got written.

I love the fact that into the bibliography I slipped a conversation which took place at a most curious and delightful monthly gathering in Chicago. Of course, I gave the Holder of Court a pseudonym to protect the guilty.


~•~


Writing & Rhetoric I
Opinion Research Paper
Final Draft: December 13, 2007 (1.5 Draft; okay call it 2nd draft if you must)


THIS UBIQUITOUS APOCALYPSE

Apocalyptic thought permeates Western culture. Despite repeated prophecies concerning the end of the world, so far there has not been a consensually noticeable Armageddon. From the Y2K Problem back to early Zoroastrian cults, we experience this astounding religious and political expectation. From these repetitious cries of imminent doom we could suppose that Belief is far more powerful than Experience; no matter how many prognostications that the end is nigh come and go with so much fanfare, the impending Apocalypse never quite arrives. And yet this repeated failure doesn't stop us from collectively being taken down that road to the end of the world again and again.

So welcome aboard the Armageddon Express, we'll be making a few stops in our brief examine of Apocalyptic beliefs before we reach the End.

2012 is coming. Are you ready?

•

Humans have long been fascinated with the end of the world. For as far back as records existed of thought and belief, eschatological thought has existed. The world's first single-god religion, Zoroastrianism, believed that there were two forces in the world, one lead by the Supreme God of Light, Ahura Mazda, and the other by the destructive spirit, Angra Mainyu. According to Zoroastrian theology, the two forces would eventually have a sort of a show down between the Righteous and the Wicked, and a Final Judgment of all souls would be leveled upong all humans, living and dead. This is clearly the foundation for the future eschatological beliefs of Judaism and Christianity, which both include a Judgment before God, and a personal penance, punishment, or exaltation of the soul.

This divine judgment in Zoroastrian belief was that each "person is accountable, eschatologically, for his actions" in life (Lampden, par. 4). This is the foundation of other Apocalyptic belief systems which hold that one's faith would not always supersede their actions in life and a last-minute conversation might not save them the damnation which awaits non-believers of whatever eschatology might be the case in point.

Prophets of Zoroastrianism proclaimed such a battle and judgment would one day befall human, but records left us do not declare they ever set a date for such an event, and, it can be surmised from the state of the world today, that this Final Judgment probably did not occur. But it did give rise to the three most dominant religions who focus a great deal of theological attention on the on-day-soon-will-be-here Eschaton.

With Judaism, religious belief and politics would become forever intertwined, and despite six thousand years of denial, it has never been untangled. According to eschatology student, Eric Redding:

Religion and politics are, and have always been, one and the same. Communism, Capitalism; Socialist, Fascist; Democratic, Republican; Lords, Commons -- these are the bodies of theology and politics. Communism died a rapid death. The infection of Judaism and Christianity are slow, lingering illnesses. The American religion, Capitalism -- worship of the Bank Accounts and Bottom Line -- is a virus that has almost vectored itself out of existence ... killing its adherents with extreme indifference and vitriol prejudice.

Although this is seemingly stated in an empirical and sarcastic manner, it rings true to the nature of belief, if not absolute veracity. But we might be jumping ahead a bit in our tour of the end times. Let's step back from talk of American Capitalism and consumerism and return to early Judaism and examine their end of the world beliefs.

In the Babylonian Talmud -- the Hebrew Book of Law compiled during their exile in Babylon -- it states an early example of the belief that the end times are near and a savior will come to smite the evil which stands against True Belief. "When thou seest a generation overwhelmed by many troubles as by a river, await him, as it is written, when the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him; which is followed by, And the Redeemer shall come to Zion." (Talmud, Sanhedrin 98)

So eager were the early Hebrews to have their Mashiach, their anointed Messiah, appear, that prophecies and foretellings are sprinkled through the books of the Torah. Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Zephaniah, and almost all of the Book of Isiah contain references to the coming Messiah. They believed that the human soul was immortal, living on beyond the death of the body. When the Messiah arrives, those of the Olam Ha'zeh, "this world", alive or dead, would be transported to Olam Haba, the "world to come". The coming of the Messiah would also result in destruction to, if not the entire world itself, then the power structure which is in place at the time the Messiah appears. This expectation of upheaval reveals itself in the very word we use for the end of the world. Armageddon comes from a Hebrew word that names a specific place. The valley of Meggido, beneath a mountain peak of the same name, Har Meggido ("Mount Meggido"). Armageddon. The place where the end of the world begins. Or at least, the end of the ruling class.

This returns us to touch again on the point made connecting such religious beliefs to political ones. Even if the entire world is not destroyed when the Messiah battles the Adversary ("Ha-Satan", in Hebrew, meaning "accuser", "adversary", and "wanderer") at Armageddon.

Not all of the various sects of Judaism believed this way. The Sadducees, for example, did not believe in the afterlife, which put an incredible kink in their believe of the Messiah coming to bring a Judgment upon the world. But one particular sect of Judaism could be considered an Apocalyptic cult. The Essenes saw the world in much the same way the Zoroastrians before them did. Light was the representation of God, and Darkness was evidence of the Adversary. It is widely thought today that the Essene cult was the origin of many teaching later attributed to Yeshua ben Yosef, more commonly called Jesus Christ.

Even making a cursory examination of Christianity and Apocalyptic thought would take up the pages a a lengthy book, so for our Express ride through the sights of the end times, we will have to make only very brief mention of several names, and only a pause for one or two events to look more closely at them.

In the first 1500 years of Christianity, there were no less than a few thousand declarations that the End had come. The early Christians believed their Messiah would return in their lifetimes, and such expectations continued through the next generation. This is when the most famous work about the end of the world was written.

The Book of the Revelation was penned by John of Patmos sometimes between 68 and 96 CE. It's unforgiving tone and blood-thirsty images of torment, torture, and destruction became the template for Apocalyptic belief which followed. Visions of half-human, half-animal beast, swarms of insects, rivers and oceans of blood, and crumbling mountains and towers would become the benchmark for all future attempts to describe what was going to befall this world, if not tomorrow, then very, very soon.

Following John of Patmos in Christian millenarian prophecy were the sects of Priscillianism, Montanism, the Cathars (to name but a very few), and eventually the Millerites, which gave rise to a number of Christian sects and religions that are still dominate today.

For brevity's sake, this Express view of the Apocalypse will not be stopping at the stations between John of Patmos and the Millerites, but suffice it to say, the Cathars, in particular tie together the past of Zoroastrianism, Hebrew sects, and early Christian belief with the threads of modern millennialism, connecting the Templars, the Crusades, and our modern obsession with conspiratorial beliefs.

We stop again then with the Millerites, a Christian denomination that began in the early 1800s in New York State. Adventists, Millerites, and Mormons all began at roughly the same time, in the same general vicinity, leading historians to deduce that so many versions of Christian religion sprang up at the time due to people applying the ideals of democracy to religion, bringing us back to the point made that religion and politics have long been intertwined.

The Millerites believed that Jesus Christ was soon going to return, and His return would mark the beginning of a thousand year earthly reign in which evil would be purged from the world and a new age of God-fearing (i.e. loving) people would be the only ones left. This is a direct association of the end of the world with the imagery within the Book of Revelation. The leader of the Millerites, John Miller, had picked/deduced a specific date for the return of the Christ. October 22, 1844. More than 100,000 people sold their homes and land and worldly possessions in order to be unencumbered when the Savior arrived.

When this date came and went without Jesus Christ showing HImself to his followers, the event became known as the "Great Disappointment". Many reasons were cited as to why Jesus hadn't shown up, but the result was the same. The Millerite movement was ended, but it gave rise to a number of other denominations in its place, including the Second Adventists, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Seven-Day Adventist Church. It also did not stop further prognostications that the End was still so very nigh. It also marked the modern age of what might be called obsessive insanity concerning the end of the world.

From Montanus with Priscilla and Maximilla to Joachim of Fiore, through the ultimately infamous Templars and the oft-misquoted Nostradamus, to the modern day rantings of Lahaye, Robertson, Lindsey, Clare Prophet, Applewhite, etcetera etcetera religio ad nausea -- the attraction of the chiliastic myth has experienced a spectrum of cries and warnings and prognostications. Such experience might show us that another call that the End is all kinds of Nigh is just so much millenarian myth and mirage. Yet there is something about an Imminent Apocalypse that makes most people hope for themselves to be numbered with those who will be "saved" -- who would survive and find the world a living paradise, free from those they would deem as reprehensible people -- whatever qualifies as reprehensible according to their cosmological framework. Through a belief in such a Final Judgment that will befall others (but never those who are truly saved), history and current events both assume meaning, and the horrors of both become bearable. Wether it is by fire, flood, famine, virus, extraterrestrials, or asteroid impact, the end of the world is always said to be near, but so far, despite constant calls that the End Times are here again, they have never quite arrived. So, as can be shown by this repeated cycle of Armageddons -- when people clamor about living in the Last Days like so many moths fluttering to a gasoline-fueled flame -- Hope is a far more powerful force than is Experience.

•

In our generation today we have seen a plethora of Apocalyptic proclamations, and our popular media has been inundated with it. From Orson Welles narrating a documentary film on Nostradamus through the run of Hollywood films in the late 90s, such as Deep Impact and Armageddon, to more recent television fare, The Invasion and Jericho. Media programs and audiences never tire of being told the world might end tomorrow. More importantly than popular shows, the dire side of Apocalyptic belief can be seen in the Heaven's Gate suicide cult with their belief in UFOs landing to save the chosen people to the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, burned alive because of their so-called "fringe beliefs". In 1999, millions of days and countless amounts of time was devoted to fending off the possible massive, world-wide computer failings due to the Y2K Bug. And our next Western Pop Culture End Times date has been linked to the Maya Calendar, which New Age thought has told us to expect another end of the world on (or around) December 21, 2012.

2012 is the next stop on our Apocalyptic Express. But if we miss that one, don't worry. Another end of the world date will surely follow.


Bibliography

"Apocalypse!" Frontline.

Dir. William Cran &. Ben Loeterman.
PBS. 22 Nov. 1998.

The Holy Bible: King James Version.
The Tanakh: International Jewish Library Edition.
Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy:

Apocalyptic Visions
in Contemporary America.
Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2003.

Boyett, Jason. Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse.

Orlando, FL: Relevant Books, 2005.

Grosso, Michael. The Millennium Myth:

Love and Death at the End of Time.
Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1995.

Lambden, Stephen. Encyclopaedia Iranica:

"Eschatology." Ed. Ehsan Yarshater.
1996-2007. 19 Nov. 2007 .

Nelson, Chris. A Brief History of the Apocalypse.

"1999-2005." 19 Nov. 2007 .

Redding, Eric.

"Putting out the Fires of the Apocalypse
with Rhetorical Gasoline".

Synphoria Discussion.
Chicago, August 18 2007.

· • ·

Gulyás

This was the Big Essay About Food for the semester. I'm not a person deeply involved with food, for the most part (although I miss having full access to a good kitchen where I currently live), but when this assignment came along I thought back to one of the finest meals I ever had, late night and very hungry(!) in Budapest.

Notice, if you will, the subtle insertion of a Lovecraftian line in an early paragraph. If ever an entire country was primed to be a Lovecraft setting, Hungary would be it.

~•~

Writing & Rhetoric I
Essay #2: Writing to Explain and Support an Opinion or Belief
Final Draft: October 23, 2007 [3rd draft]

GULYÁS

Since arriving in Budapest, I've found Hungarians to be a baffling portrait of contradictions. Is it possible that a meal could be a metaphor representing an entire county and its culture? I look at the plate of gulyás set in front of me, smell the rich spices in the steam coming off it. I've heard stories of this country's history for the past few days, and yet I still can't figure out what I think about Hungarians.

Where the dark hills rise wild outside of Budapest, it is not difficult to imagine the herdsmen with their open fire-pits, boiling boar meat off the bone. The flames curling up around a huge black iron pot, a shank of boar stewing in water drenched with capsicum peppers, and if a caravan had come or gone through the area recently, salt and onions. The herdsmen would boil the spiced water for hours--until the meat melted off the bone--and then pick out the tender pieces leaving the water to boil down into a broth. The meat would be laid out and dried, then cut into small cubes and then reintroduced to the broth water. More capsicum peppers--dried and cut, called paprika--and the dish would soon become gulyás, the most commonly associated food with the Magyar nation. Ethnically distant from their surrounding neighbors in Central Europe, even the English name of their country conjures thoughts of food. Hungary. And their culinary staples reflect well their wild, and often extremely violent, history.

The Magyars came to this valley and began conquering the area and its surrounding regions, and have ever since been struggling to keep the place they carved out for themselves in the midst of Slavic people. I admire them and feel reviled by them at the same. I think this paradox I feel towards them is inherent in their own personalities. They see themselves as conflicted by opposing natures.

This becomes evident to me when I sit down to have dinner. Their food and drink reveals something of this paradox to me.

It's pronounced goo-yash, and in English it sounds much more frightful: goulash. Gulyás is a meal comprised of tender chunks of meat stewed in fat stock (cooking oils will not render a similar taste as fats will), spiced with salt, pepper, and the mainstay of Hungarian food: paprika. Along with garlic, onions, and red peppers, gulyás is served on its own or over pasta noodles. It is one of the simplest of foods to make, and one of the most difficult to get right. And the complex flavors it provides belie the simplicity of its preparation.

Paprika is a powdered sweet spice made from capsicum peppers, and can be found in almost every Hungarian dish. Most red sauces in other countries is formed from a base of tomatoes. In Hungary, the red sauce is a result of meat fat seasoned with paprika. Like the national character, the spice is both peppery and sweet at the same time.

Heavily spiced food and a history of brutal violence. If it were that alone, I wouldn't find Hungary so perplexing. The hook, as it were, in my opinion of them, comes from the sweet white wine from a region called Tokaj. Tokaji is a sweet white wine that differs from other desert wines in that fine Tokaji doesn't leave a sugary aftertaste. King Louis XV of France called it, "Vinum Regum, Rex Vinorum"; "Wine of Kings, King of Wines".

This leads me back to the paradox I see in the Magyars. Spicy red peppers and sweet white wine. Hungary is comfortable in this schism. It is a country which continually rates among the top ten in both sexual satisfaction, and in suicides. The passion and self-hatred struggling within. The Magyar people who came to settle this region have given birth to legends of ferocity and savage murder, from the fictional character Count Dracula (who was of Hungarian descent, just living in Romania), to the non-fictional "Blood Countess", Elizabeth Báthory, who killed perhaps more than two hundred young girls because she thought their blood might keep her youthful. Some of the most impassioned, powerful music I've ever heard comes from Béla Bartók and Franz Liszt, but there's also a signature song of lost love and suicide written by some almost forgotten Hungarian composer and made famous by Billie Holiday; "Gloomy Sunday".

Beauty and suicide. Gulyás and sweet white wine. Every nation has its share of violence and bloodshed, but few live so comfortably with it as the Magyar nation of Hungary.

After walking the ancient streets of Budapest, hiking in the mysterious hills outside of the city, and seeing a lot of the passion and anger of the people here, I think their food and wine speak of the country's sins, past and future. I smell beauty and passion in the scent of the chilled Tokaji in front of me and think of contrasts as I look at my plate of gulyás. I imagine the taste of bittersweet passion as I bite into a mouthful of history.


· • ·

Gratitude

This Rhetoric assignment was to write a letter to someone in order to thank them for helping us in some manner.

I immediately composed this note of gratitude. It still slams me in the chest and leaves me staggering for breath when I think back to that evening and how many seeds were planted, to be cultivated with experience and travel, and the harvest coming only years afterward...

The synchronicity of composing this at a building which overlooks Grant Park was not lost on me.

~•~
[second draft]


33 E. Congress
Chicago, IL 60605
October 16, 2007

Allen Ginsberg
245 Mount Olivet Avenue
Naropa, Earth


Dear Allen:

Thank you for asking me to join you for dinner. It was one of those uncanny synchronicities, of course, you recognizing me. After a five minute phone conversation the night before, it was damn eerie when you stopped to talk to me after the poetry reading. I only called the radio station where you were being interviewed because I knew the dee-jay, but then suddenly you were on the phone and I just stumbled through my silly question. A real question. "What are you doing before the reading?" I asked, "I'd like to hang out and talk." As if we had know each other for years. We hadn't ever met.

I enjoyed your poetry reading, of course. Best public reading I'd heard then, or even still to this day. Afterward, everyone milling about here and there, I clutched my notebook and hovered around where you were talking to some stiff academic types. Suddenly you stopped in mid-conversation and turned around to face me. "You called me last night," you said, with absolute certainty. I clutched my notebook of poems a little tighter; seventeen years old and talking to Allen-Fucking-Ginsberg!

"Yeah, that's right," I replied, and then without further comment, you asked what I had to show you. The poem I had my notebook open to--with back story ready to tell--didn't thrill you at all. Grimace beneath your long gray-streaked beard and screwing shut your eyes as if to obliterate some Lovecraftian squeamish thing from memory of your sight. Then, instead of a signature, you autographed the page with a quote in your tiny lettering: "No ideas but in things." W. Carlos Williams.

I have to admit, when I saw that, I was crushed. I muttered something to myself and perhaps you saw the sting in my own expression. "Listen," you said, "we're going to get a bite to eat, you can join us if you want." I almost said no.

Can you imagine where I might have headed in the greater scheme of things if I hadn't gone out that night? I wouldn't have the same reflection in my rear view mirror as I traveled on down the road from there, that's for sure. Well, probably. I just wouldn't have done it with the same lessons in my head.

So that was me, then: eating red beans and rice with Allen Ginsberg in Mobile, Alabama. I couldn't believe it, though I was much too cool to ever let on as to how I felt. It was all just so...like old friends hanging out. You had this habit of closing your eyes when someone was speaking to you. It was more than a little disconcerting, but you explained it as being a means to shut out distractions so you could focus completely on what someone was saying to you. Not paying attention to this or that nor thinking of what you were going to say when they stopped talking, but really listening to what was being said. I liked that, having never been much of a person for chit-chat anyway. Not thinking about Back Then, or Maybe Tomorrow, just right Here and Now.

Which was why I leapt right in with the magnitude of my question from the start--

--You who had been on the road with Kerouac and Cassady, on the bus with Kesey and the Pranksters, hanging out with Tim Leary, and Abbie Hoffman, and in Ashrams in India and Communes in Poland...I thought for certain you'd have something to say in response to my Great Question: "What do you think happens to us when we die?"

Without hesitation you snapped your reply, "Absolutely nothing; we turn to carbon and nitrogen and feed the earth."

Second time in one evening my expectations were crushed. I was still dazed from that comment when you managed to slip away from your local guides and snuck out the back of the café. Someone brought a joint and we shared a smoke outside in the alley. Laughing about serious things and being serious about the humor in the world, you pointed out the building where the FBI had offices in Mobile. The very same building where you had been for your radio interview when I called, and--years later--where I would work at that same radio station; WZEW 92.1.

Even if we had never crossed paths again, it wouldn't have made the lessons I learned that night any less profound, but running into you again some years later--you remembered me, again--and we talked briefly. Like running into an old friend. And that's when I learned a little more.

You were not someone to provide answers for others, especially poetic seventeen year old kids just starting out on their own paths. Your quips to me were a way of saying, "Do not follow in the footsteps of the Masters; seek what they sought." And from my hurt responses to such comments, I developed my own Buddhist Truth: "If you have no expectations, you cannot be disappointed."

How much I've learned since then. How far I've come. Coast to coast hitchhiking. Beyond this country's borders in travels on my own. Never satisfied with having learned enough; seen enough. And now, in one of your old haunting grounds, I'm in college in Chicago. At Michigan and Balbo, just across from Grant Park. And I still reflect on my conversations with you.

My ontological spiritual quest: regardless of what we believe or place our faith in or hope or dream or love or fear about what comes after this life, there is at least one fact in nature. When people die they become (something akin to) carbon and nitrogen and are gone. Anything beyond that is our conjecture, our faith, our prayer. What will happen other than that is for each and every one of us to find out at some point. Anyone who tells you different probably wants something from you.

I've often refer to the quote you scrawled in my notebook of poems. I didn't understand it for several years. "No ideas but in things." I think I have learned it now. Ideas should be represented in the manner of what they are. Allusions and metaphors and symbols are fine, but what of the thing which lies beneath the image? Direct experience of something, rather than experience by proxy. And sometimes, I think maybe the there are no things but in ideas. Whatever meaning it, or anything has, the important thing is not in discovering the answer, or even an answer, but in continuing to ask the questions.

Anyway, it's not been fifty years since Howl was published, and even in this day of crass vulgarities spewing forth from prime time network television, your poem is still considered to be too obscene to be read on the radio. I'm not sure if that's funny because of its pathos, or if its pathetic because its so funny. The power of words on paper. But more important to me, personally, are the words we shared together. They are a major reason of why I not only write what I do, but also why I breathe and think and love and continue to believe.

Words are magic. Why else would it be called spelling?

I just wanted to express my gratitude for the magic you brought all of us; left for us.

Your words mean a lot to me.

Thank you, Allen.


your old friend,

~kírk~


· • ·

"Two-Thirty in the mornin' & I can't sleep..."

This was about the eighth assignment from Fiction I Class. We were to write "a letter story" (not that the fiction program at Columbia thought enough of us mere freshmen to actually tell us to write an epistolary tale, but that bleeds over into a philippic I will undoubtedly add to this blog at some future time concerning creative writing programs in general, and more specifically, my thoughts on the two I have personally been part of.

As for this piece, the teacher replied to me with, "You shouldn't write about something as complicated as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

At no point in this tale is there any mention nor even hint of Hebrew-Arabic strife, and, in fact, since two of the characters have Persian names (incidental to the point of the story), I really wondered if the teacher had actually read the piece at all.

Alas! Not the first time i would clash with the heirarchy of academia, especially in those aforementioned two creative writing programs.

The story here was triggered by a writing prompt: What you do at 2:30 in the morning.

~*~

FICTION I
October 4, 2007


"Two-Thirty in the mornin' & I can't sleep..."

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Salaam! Shalom! And all other manner of salutations, O Grim One, my brother from another mother.

Insomnia again, so I'm doin' what I do. It's 2.30 in the mornin' and I still can't sleep. At least the paranoia's subsided a bit; it's all just anxiety and edges now.

The front room here is cramped and stuffy and smells like rotting lemons. No one's showered in a couple of days, but then again, no one is complainin' since we all equally stink. Ghada comes from downstairs and complains in her motherly tone about how typing in this dim light is gonna ruin my eyes. I've got my little desk lamp on that spills a tiny circle of light on my desk by the Underwood typewriter where I've been hammering out the manifestos. She reaches up under the thick woolen lamp shade and twists the little black knobs until it clicks twice and the stuffy room is filled with dirty yellow light. She looks down at Syd on the floor in front of the couch and just shakes her head. That's about the only expression anyone ever has for Syd.

Syd pulled the ugly green couch cushions off the couch and laid them out on the floor. With a faded brown crocheted blanket tossed over the scratchy hounds-tooth cushions, he spread out on them about an hour ago and now he's passed out. He's been doin' dex for a couple of days and ate a bunch of valium a few hours ago. He was readin' and now Hitchhiker's Guide is folded open on his chest, rising and falling with his erratic pharmaceutical sleep. We should maybe turn him on his side, but it's not a priority on anyone's list. Kira was matchin' Syd's intake, but she's farin' better than he is. A short nod in the recliner, but now she's awake and all fidgety, watchin' some black and white movie on tv with the sound turned down. Neal's in the other room with El and Fen and a couple of others whose names I don't know. El & Fen. Yeah, that's really their names. 'S what happens when you're "in the field", as it were, as opposed to just holdin' the safe house.

We were all freakin' out just after they got here this afternoon because about a half hour later, all the cops in the world showed up outside. We all went into defense mode, but it turned out their target was the house across the street. They were bustin' some dumb ass with a meth lab in his closet. Kinda funny, when ya think about it. Not funny, ha-ha, but funny, like, well, like the sort of funny where cops are bustin' a meth lab when right across the street. Freakin' meth lab! There goes the neighborhood, right!?

After last week's Thanksgiving bombs--a dozen chain store coffee shops were all blow up within sixty seconds of each other, coordinated terrorist attack, the news called it. The brand name coffee stores were closed at the time, of course, it was a holiday, so there were only a few people injured by the blasts. One person died. Anyway, I digress. Constantly. But you know that. As I was sayin', after last weeks' Thanksgiving bombs, the cops are naturally a bit jumpy. Witness the heavy response to the meth lab across the street. Ironic place for a safe house so close to a cop show like that!

Some cat I don't know comes in from the kitchen and asks me if I want to join them. "Zak'?" he called my name a few times before I noticed. I've been typin' out plans and peakin' out the window between half-open curtains at the chem suits across the street and tryin' to ignore the commotion from the kitchen. Dorian, that's this cat's name, Dorian Gray, just like the book, he's askin' me if I want to join them in the kitchen. "What's cookin'?" I ask. He tells me. Kira jumps at the offer. Absinthe, speed, and now they're fixin' some hot knives to smoke some hash. Strange safe house we've got here, but it's never drawn any attention in three years. I guess all safe houses could say that; they're safe regardless of what goes on inside them until they get raided. I look forward to staying at a place where these sort of things are the standard behavior.

The blend of spice smells is odd, anise and sweet tar. I'd like to, but I need to finish the outline of plans before I get any more fucked up. Not that they shouldn't be, right now. Hell, most of 'em have just finished their end of things for a while, so it's a good time to celebrate, I guess. And a few of the others don't have to be clear-eyed until tomorrow afternoon when they take out the children's gifts. But my end of things has to get done right now. Guidelines. Projections. Organizin'. Mappin' routes. And a couple other things. One of which I have just appointed for myself; that's to be paranoid enough for the rest of us. We had the obligatory visit a few hours ago from the cops who said all houses had to be evacuated because...well, he didn't say aloud why, but it was clear from the chem suit guys across the street in their big trucks. Explosive hazard, they said, and I laughed behind my straight face. I spoke with the cop and told him my elderly grandmother was an ornery ol' crone and said she'd be damned if they moved her out of her own house and where would she go anyway if they did. He bought it with change left over and told us he'd come back if necessary. It wasn't, of course. They hauled off the poor dumb kid--not yet twenty, from the look of him--who'd been cookin' meth in his closet or somethin'. Who'd have thought? Right across the street! It's just a quiet neighborhood.

Anyway, the smells from the kitchen was enticin', but I had to pass for now. Even when I got through writin' up the guide for everyone, and mappin' the routes and placements and such, I still had to go over the various drafts we had for the press release and finalize it. Then there was the finishin' touches to be done on the gift packages.

Ghada comes back in and asks when the Hanukkah gifts are goin' to be ready. The hash smell clings to her beautiful dark skin and bald head and I tell her to just be patient. She abstains from the absinthe and wine, of course, the Prophet speaks against intoxicants, but somehow, by the measures of her mosque, such abstinence doesn't include Lebanese hash. She takes a look over my shoulder at the maps and things I've already finished and seem to be pleased with the dropoff locations. She tries to take a gander at the manifesto, but until I'm finished with it, no one reads it.

The anxiety in the house is turning to excitement. I ask 'em if I could get just a small toke of somethin' before I finish wrapping the presents and they head off to the kitchen and I push my laptop (and this email to you) away and peer out the window again. The last of the chem trucks pulls away and I sigh a deep breath of relief. I didn't want to leave my window seat until they were all gone, so I guess it's time to play Santa Claus.

Does Santa come around on Hanukkah, too?

This year he will, I guess.

Ghada brings me a small hookah and I take a few quick puffs. Plus one more thinkin' of my distance brother. Kira gladly takes over the hookah. A thank you to Ghada and I'm off to the basement where the Hanukkah gifts sit in wait. Even when I smoke hash or even opium I can't sleep.

Just like Thanksgiving, we'll make sure our light display is afterhours. Collateral effects are always a factor in any human endeavor, but our show is not meant to be waged with flesh and blood. The manifesto cries for something beyond that...I triple check the wiring and it is all perfect. The taggants and detonators and caps. Everything is ready. I sit down in the small concrete cellar and smile at my array of Hanukkah gifts to the world. A two dozen packages of T4. The canvas, brush and paints for our masterpiece of fire, glass and stone.

Our Christmas party will be even better.

This is what I do at 2.30 in the morning when I can't sleep--

--Mondays will never be the same,

L. Zakariyya, Nepenthe


· • ·