Ballswell That Ends Well

Organ Donor

    Exiting the vehicle, Mr. J.S. M.; or Job Suited Man as the American Company would later refer to him, gazes across the wind-bent yards of green racing toward him from the entrance, his glass eyes reflective.

    "Ordel-Gott im Fleisch!"
    Job Suited Man turns to the old plantation columns stripped of white.  "Unangebracht, freund."
    A teetering round man in a white slacks with red suspenders and piddly little eyes found under inches of diamond crusted spectacles, makes his way down steep marble.  "Aber, du bist Johann Mittellos, mein freund."
    "Seriously, Doc, it's unnecessary.  Any way, your accent leaves me dumbfounded.  I cannot go home talking like you."

    J.S. Mittellos puts his hand on the bespectacled man and says, "Wir rich, my friend."  They go inside and lock the heavy doors shut with latches and bars and chains and bolts. 

    But let's come back to them.  Inside the mansion,  there is someone we should meet.

    A Clown repairman that repairs and installs organs into churches and bath halls.   He generally dislikes the religious blokes he mostly deals with.  Sometimes he enjoys the sound of a fine-tuned organ chugging away.  His favorite song is, "Something by Bach, in D minor," according to his best friend, an accordian playing Gypsy. 
    One time, she slipped and hit her head.  The Clown cried as he drove her to the hospital in an Uncar, a probably not street legal Smart Car competitor not found in the U.S.A.   It was raining and she was all lean, with no intention to ash out the cracked window her gaunt face then shone under. It was red and slightly wet, her hair stuck to her face down to her chin.  Then it turned green and her head rocked back up with the Clown's heavy foot pressed to the floor.  She smiled, then, and everything was alright.

    But it isn't.

    The Gypsy stretches out her web, a silk quilt draped over her back and head, and hands the Clown a wrench.
    The first time she handed him a tool, it was a screw-driver.  He had come over to fix her media station the night he moved into her building.  They laughed at tinkering and toyed with the idea of knowing each other. 
    She lowers her arm, revealing to the Clown his boss and his business associate, Mr. J.S.M. or Mitt/Mittens as the the austere two refer to him alone-- together smoking cigarettes and singing forgotten songs in bath tubs or across the emtpy gap between their facing windows.

    Mittellos stares through the Clown.  He sees the unrepaired valve, viscous from overuse with tears in the casing. 
    "You let our very own organ bleed like this?"
    "He's been operating for two hours,"  the gypsy sways.
    "This is bad, indeed.  As the first of any O.R.G.s to break down this way.  What can we do?"

    A nest of pipes above the two businessmen lead down into a furnace-like chamber behind the Clown and the Gypsy.  There lies a muscle, or pump, that all can hear going "Bub-bup.  Bub-bup.  Bub-bup," in the absence of their own words. 

    The fat man in suspenders is unaware of the silence completely,  more interested in eyeing the Gypsy.  Her outfit is tight which riles his unloved body.  Her mouth is wide and full but her eyes are hidden behind fabric.

    "Curious for such a well put together model such as yourself to hide behind cloth her most beautiful prize-- the eyes!" the fat man rolls off his tounge, through his white mustache.
    The Clown looks to the Gypsy and frowns, his eyes reflecting her shroud.  He remembers.
    "They're empty," she says, flat.
    "Empty, but any fool can afford eyes!"
    The Clown puts his hand on the Gypsy's as she says, "There was an accident.  I'm in debt.  I can't afford them."

    The night the Gypsy hit her head was also the night that the Ratan and Podrido Wards burned down.  As they drove away from their building on Podrido's Grace Ct.,  her accordian, his tools and unicycle, her tapastries, everything they shared or owned apart all burned.
    When they arrived at the hospital, the Clown carried her inside.  The doctors swarmed and she was sent right into the operating room.   Awhile after her surgery, the Clown was able to visit.
    "Hey," he whispered, holding his undersized rodeo hat twisted in his fists.  She opened her eyes.  They were wide and golden, tempered like little suns and almost reptillian.

    "Now I don't have them.  Can't afford the, how do you say, upgrade."
    "This is the assistant, boss,"  the Clown reminds, trying to change the subject he senses the Gypsy getting very upset over.   "We're almsot done patching the veins.  It won't be long."
    "Ah yes, very good.  Well, get back to it.  This fine gentleman and I have matters to attend to." 

    The Clown's heart slows, and the pressure in his back eases.  He slouches.  The Gypsy does whatever the blind equivalent of staring is, at him.   Him, the clown of amalgamation.  Every little part of his body, sewn together by the organs he creates. 
    He's the one who starts it all, with one idea, one dream.  And here he is, wasting his time fixing that dream, patching it up, here and there, installing it into other people's lives.  Just fucking giving that muisc away.  

The story you just read is not about making music with someone you love, but about a future society in which nearly everything is available to people who can afford it.  Or I have no idea what this is about and I just kept typing for some or no reason.  
    

 

        
   

Mañana

plant

button

trick

fly

     I run my tongue across her chest, stop atop a rib and kiss.
She swallows. 
    I graze my lips upward against her skin, closer to a nipple.  I rest my chin there, on another rib.
She sighs as I lap the soft, raised flesh and suck on it before biting.  She gasps, "Ah!"  The nipple stiffens and I make my way backward.  My chin and free hand ride ribs along the way. She makes the corresponding notes like I'm playing a xylophone.  A much more beautiful sounding, human xylophone.  
    When I reach the warmth with my mouth, she throws her head back into the pillow.  The pale pillow pushes her Cimmerian hair over her eyes as a gasp pushes her lips apart.

    I lick and lap and slurp and press until my tongue's muscles fail and twitch.  She doesn't even have time to reciprocate before I am above her.  She grips my shoulders and pulls me into her slightly, whispers in me ear, "Love me."  I push myself deeper.
I move slowly, rolling my hips 
She moves slow, squirms, runs a hand through my hair.
She stares at me.
I stare back.
In silence we move, connected.  Like a proboscis inside a flower.  A flitting wing, a cool gentle breeze.
 
   Is this what love is-- a simmer or a long, drawn out sigh?  We can't seem to answer this--  we begin to boil, now a  mess of sweat and scratch marks, moving fervently as if she had squealed "Yes!" or demanded fucking.

    Maybe the nozzle of a gas pump inside the gas tank.  Maybe that's what this is.  Glug glug glugging away, a mechanical click-clack-ing.
   
    I roll her over and reposition her legs toward my head so she's in a sitting position, like my groin is the seat of a chair.  I grasp each cheek of her buttocks and lift her up and down, slamming myself into her.  I roll her over again and lift both legs upward, parallel to my kneeling body. 
      We grunt, even growl.  I hold her down and she wrestles to bite my neck but can't reach.  My hair is wet and dripping on her reddening body.  At some point I finish and collapse on her, sliding from the sweat.  My exasperation and failed climax duet embarrass me.  I take a breath and try to let it pass.  I don't want to seem weak.  I'm not weak, I think. 

    "Perform in Vegas, stay in sleazy motels and have a problem with whiskey?"

    I don't respond.  Silence.  Not the type of silence that cut me.  I think to my childhood.

    I sat in the next room, alone for hours staring into a screen, clicking.  The occasional weeping upstairs played over the constant fly-buzz of my father's single florescent beam in the next room, the one he did all the bills under after work.  The one he was asleep under that day.  
  
       I guess two weeks isn't long enough to know that story.  It's not long enough to know someone in their entirety.  In fact, eternity wouldn't know entirety entirely if they spent time together eternally.  Regardless,  I smile and my head bounces up and down. 
    Neither of us have the talent or the know-how to perform in Nevada.  Or anywhere.  Not with the busted acoustic I bought, not with her sense of pitch.  I chuckle out loud at the image of us struggling on some dusty stage in a dive bar.  A bunch of cowboys or out of town downers throwing half-empty bottles of booze at us.  Us shuffling to escape-- the guitar shielding us and her swinging the mic stand like a mad batter. 

    I hadn't seen my mother for a week, only heard her.  I imagined her under a pile of throbbing blankets.  I couldn't ignore it any longer.  I reached in my pocket.  That familiar cold against my hand, a comforting tool-- my knife.  My sleeping father bought it for me once when we were camping.  Years ago. 
    Half of the tools were missing, gone somewhere, off rusting or something along with the faceplate.  It didn't matter.  The tool I needed was there.  I opened the blade.  I could barely see my reflection.    
   
    I look up with eyes alone. This angle plays a trick on me-- her body a landscape, a horizon to the stars in her eyes.  She giggles and my head bounces again.  An earthquake. 
   In the absence of laughter I hear her heart pinging around somewhere in her stomach.  I want to plant myself there, in the cracks of her heart.  I look at her in a way, I guess, because she asks what I'm thinking.  Weeds just crack the sidewalk more and more and more is what.  I just say, "Nothin'," and kiss her belly button.

   I had unplugged all the cords and sawed through them with my knife.  This was my immediate commitment.  I dragged the keyboard behind me with the flat screen in my arm.  Past the then snoring role model to the stairs.  I stopped at the bottom.  Not a sound from the dark hollow at the top.  I thought maybe things can change, like maybe things just get better.  Then I heard it again, that first little bubble of sadness popped- a whimper. 
   I made my way to the kitchen and stood there with frayed wires all prickly against my skin, staring at the fridge.  I opened the door.  

   "You want a cocktail?"
   "No thanks."
   "Alriiiight," she says, luring me.  She gets up and goes downstairs.  Before long I hear the creaking steps, the clinking ice.

   I opened the fridge with vigor.  All the glass clanged.  Taboo rushed over me, but the pandemonium was ignored- slept through or wept above.  I waited several seconds before taking an unopened wine bottle and shoving it under my free arm.  I had never opened one, but had a corkscrew on the knife and knew it could be done-- though it was done shoddily and half the cork fell into the bottle.  I left the house.  I went to the woods.

    "What'd you make?" I ask. 

    I threw the monitor against rock and it splintered with a loud crack.  I swung the keyboard over a small cliff.  Down it went--sploosh!  I crumpled to leaves and they shushed me-- shhh! all around.  I opened the bottle and chugged.  Glug-glug-glug.  Spilled some on my face.  Not a sign of hair there and drunk for the first time.  Click-clack, a learned reaction.  Inescapable.  
 
    "Cranberry vodka with a lime.  Some soda water and cherry schnapps.  It's really good.  Try?"  She holds it out, almost perpendicular to my line of sight.  It looks like a blood filled telescope.
 
    "No thanks," I say over a faint howl in the distance.

 

  

 

 

 

On Missing Things, Both Celestial and Deadly

    Cinco de Mayo is exactly how I expected it would be.  Minus missing Venus.  She comes around next month.  Also, no one invites me to go to a bar.  We just get sent home, staggered, one at a time.  I hobble out when it's my turn and buy some beer down the street.
    Damp asphalt causes hazy reflections of green and red everywhere.  I always feel so aloof, or forlorn, or something, seeing stoplights reflect poorly.  Like they're off-brand clones.  The red black turns green and I hit the gas.

    Nothing exciting happens on my way home.  Just the grumpy growl of the Volvo.  In some other play of tonight's variables, where I get out much later, some very drunk college student with a bright 4.0 future T-bones me at sixty miles per hour and there's nothing my steel cage can do to save my skull from splintering and my scalp from sliding across a shredded white paint job turned red.  I guess I should be thankful for an uneventful drive home.

     I climb the spongy stairs to what equates to a safe house.  I am in the witness relocation program.  Or a refugee.  From where, I'm unsure. 
    Inside, I remove my shoes, which settles the sadness in my feet.  Then, of course, I realize I have no lighter.  The stove now doubles for that.  This destitute refugee's fuego. 
    I grab an ice pack and head for the couch, my home away from no where.

    I pull this up, to write here about something that inspires joy.  Instead, I'm left with nothing but thoughts of things outside my reach.  All the once-in-a-lifetime celestial transits I'll miss because of clouds or cities I'll never see because they're sinking into the ocean.  Or, of course, seeing someone I, in some other playing out of the universe, would otherwise marry and be buried with, walk away. 

    My cigarette burns down, the cherry kissing the filter.  The ash trey is too small.  Not enough depth to it.  The fan just blows the ash around, and the smoke circulates.  I can see it like dust tossed in water.  I want to reach out and feel the current.
   

You Can't Save Them All

    I wake up to the sound of intense drilling.  Three voices rise from the junk yard next door.  One of the voices is yelling about bits over its body's own drilling.  Planks of wood keep PAP-PAP-PAP-ing on the concrete, that violent contact after the board pushes all the air to the side on its way down. 
    Somewhere else in the alley, behind Davis St, a guy hammers away at a deck.  I want to push the stilts I imagine he stands on out from under him, telekenetically from the couch where I toss and turn. 

    I get up to close the window facing the junk yard.  I look down across the brick wall lined with broken bottles, cemented sharp side up.  The three men, weathered, move cinder blocks and empty propane tanks.  I burp at them and close the window.  Problem solved, now I can sleep.

    Of course, then my stomach starts growling.  Oh, I must be hungry or something, I think.  Sleep will cure that, I think.
    I feel like a barrel full of guts, rocking on some fast current headed for an edge. Then it happens.  That acid that rears you.  Upright I go, drumming my chest with a fist, trying to relieve the pressure.  I feel unprepared for this, like I should have some effervescent base to cancel this out.

    I stand up, not of my own volition but because there's something I have to do.  I march to the bathroom.  Before getting there, I puke in my mouth, cartoonishly ballooning my cheeks out full.   In the bathroom, it happens again and there's no room, so it births itself into my hands.  I turn my hands and dump it into the toilet and puke uncontrollably.  It is mostly blood.
    Thick mucus runs from my now burning nose as the drilling goes on outside the window, without notice.  "These fuckin' guys," I say quietly to myself.

    I start the shower and struggle to remove my clothes.  The water's cold, but I don't care.  I guess this is the kind of man I am-- hands pressed up under the head, mine all hanging down soaked. 

 

Things that make you smile, what numbers to dial

El Dia de la Batalla de Puebla

    Sunset, alone, save for the Spring flies that hover about.  The painted concrete walls conceal me from the partying I hear down the block.  A man yells from a window five stories above, a woman responds from an adjacent window.  Someone activates the trash compactor, drowning the noise in a metallic hum and staccato splintering of glass. 

    The blazing sun watches from above.  Its tiny black pupil turns its gaze.  I want to travel to Japan, and see the whole thing, from beginning to end.  But Venus, she leaves.  The sun sets and I get back to work.

    At the end of the shift, my friend asks if I want to go to the bar.  Fearing I will only go "home," where I am basically camping indoors at a friend's, and do nothing but smoke and pass out; I agree.
    By the time we are there, my friend's people are already drunk and none too happy about the complaints of loneliness and longing that keep coming out of me. 

    "It's Cinco de Mayo," someone says from their nose, disapprovingly.
    "That just means 'Fifth of May,' you know," I retort.
    "You're so literal."

    Later,  I leave.  I hobble around the block to where I am staying.  The amount of alcohol I can afford or weasel out of others is not enough to make the pain subside.  I get to the apartment and climb the warped stairs.  Inside, I push at the walls for support, trying to get to where I sleep.  I pass my "room," which in it there is none.  Just boxes full of what few things I own.  Clothes, kitchenware, electronics, books.  Everything in boxes, to be stored until I find a place. 
    Beside my bed, the couch, there is a coffee table.  On it are essentials.  The first is a lantern in case the electricty goes out due to late payments.  Next to that is a thermos.  Beside that, an alarm clock, which I set for five hours from now. 

    I hear sirens and yelling.  "You're the loud sound of fun when I'm trying to sleep," comes to mind.  I put on my headphones and play that song.  I close my eyes and dream.
    I am a French military man.  I have a mustache and a bayonet, which I use to charge at a man.  I stab him in the chest.  I feel a great force behind me, like destiny is pushing me to victory.  I hear horns over Guadalupe, a place I've never been.  I begin to realize I am an invader.  I don't belong here, on this ground.    I begin to fear I will lose it.  Lose something that was never mine.  I fall backward into the ground atwain, all this sediment and rock rushing passed me, then corpses-- morose ghoulish walls of death. 

    I wake up in a cold sweat.  I go for my phone to text someone but it's dead, and they're unreachable. 

This is how I imagine my Cinco de Mayo will go.
WC:500

A Supposedly Dangerous Thing I May Have Done

    "Nice shorts, faggot,"  some under-loved, small-dick-having guy yells from a car.  

    I am running down my street in my super tight and short, bright blue running shorts.  I am near the Catholic private school, planning on running through the park around the museum like I always do.  In the moment between "shorts" and "faggot," I  smile and imagine this path is the plan.  Once that quick, harsh "t" punctuates the stranger's confusing compliment, I am chasing them.   Nobody calls my shorts nice, without a high five. . . FROM MY FIST!

    I chase the car, running on raised ground. When I catch them, they're at a red light.  At this point I stop to consider the outcomes.  I ignore the possibility of them being bigger than me, because I'm all jacked up from running and I've been working out a lot recently.  I decide I can at least damage their car and safely get away.  I aim for their roof, because I am totally going to land on the top and smash it, like Batman would do.  

    I aim my body at an angle and jump off the raised ground, which is about a six foot drop to the sidewalk.  While I'm in the air,  I realize the light is green.  The car speeds off, the driver of which never notices I'm even chasing them, because I'm trying to be all subtle and scare the shit out of them.  But now I'm on the ground, crying and screaming for help because I just broke my ankle.  

    That was well thought out.

Posting From E-mail because that's a thing.

The following is something I wrote, probably on LiveJournal on my beliefs concerning the soul. I was coming out of a long positivist/deterministic based depression that only affected emotional faculties-- meaning, I didn't act depressed or feel depressed but parts of my mind, like the part that loves or chooses to love, didn't work. The fixed ideology I had enervated decision making and clouded my heart, which had been without any semblance of love for over two years.  
     When I graduated, self-reliance gave me a new sense of importance and purpose. I was now tasked with surviving. Granted, I wasn't on the streets and I had help in the way of meals and transportation. But man did I self destruct.  
     Before that happened, though, I was realizing that the pool of women had increased. And that I was attractive. Somehow I found myself rationalizing everything I had denied in the year previous. I tried to take "love isn't real," to "love is," or, "there's no soul," to, "look, there's a soul based on science!" Everything I believed could be re-written to fit my new sentiments toward other people.  
Because I never really expand on the soul-mates portion, I'll attempt to add something at the end. Something more than an anecdote a friend told me creek-side as kids. If I don't, oh well.(Edit: I didn't, oops.) I am only reposting this after discovering it on my external, for purposes of completing TypePad's set-up process that I could have done like forever ago.  
The Nature of Souls and Soulmates

When I started seeing the world through the eyes of
science, I was initially depressed at the thought of having lost mystical
things such as God, the soul, and love. They all adhere to rules and physical
law, bringing them from idealized highs to realistic lows. Imagination
destroyed, the physical control. But it's not all that bad.

This past year, and now more than ever, I have
begun to understand the beauty that lies in scientific complexity-- the utter
incomprehensible infinity that is coincidence, chance, and probability in this
universe.

I believe in a soul. Not the type of soul that
floats out of your physical shell and journeys to some distant and metaphysical
locale to live a life of eternal happiness, or, rather, eternal damnation. No,
what I believe is the physical composure of the soul. It's hard to explain, but
physical beings are not limited by what contributes to their existence, because
everything ever having existed affects the state of a soul and, in the
end, contributes to its being. They are made up of rates racing towards
infinity, like an asymptote, and, after all, the past never stops affecting
the future. This relates to determinism,
but we'll avoid that because it's depressing and not what I'm focusing on.

To explain further, let's look at our understanding
of microphysics. A basic understanding contends that there are protons,
electrons, and neutrons. Okay, great, if that's all there is, then, with such a
limit, one could say that "Based on my physical structure, I am not unique
and therefore reproduceable." This statement is false because, after all,
there is much much more to it than simple protons and electrons. I won't delve
too deeply into it, but let's just list off a few smaller particles(in no
particular order): hadrons(fermions and bosons), leptons, photons, gravitons,
hyperons, and neutrinos. On the note of neutrinos, you should check out this article and
see what we're currently doing to understand them.

Throughout the evolution of our understanding of
subatomic physics, it has been ever expanding, leading one to believe that it
will keep doing so. Though that seems like a weak argument(because it
is), take, for example, division. Divide by two over and over and over again.
You can always get a new half, despite what some say about a "number
barrier." Barriers such as 0 are simply for practical applications, not
theoretical or true-to-the-universe ones. So, everything is infinite.
Infinite space, infinite surfaces. This is important.

Now, look at the way chance works in
evolution. Survival is important to understand also, in understanding the
soul. Although I won't get into survival in evolution, I will give some
statistics to guide your thought and understanding: The average human
ejaculation contains 280 million sperm. That's a 1 in 280,000,000 chance that I
had of coming to fruition. So, I think that's like 0.000000003% chance of me
existing. So, I'm basically better than 279,999,999 other possible creations.
Now, consider the chance of me being created when accounting for my father's
chance of survival, and his father, his father's father, and so on. Then
account for the chance of each female in existence now existing.

So, the soul, the unique crescendo of the universe
in human form, exists by virtue of near-impossibility.

When you cast one stone into water, the water
ripples out relative to the size of rock and force used. When two stones are
cast into water, the ripples reinforce eachother and expand twice as far as they
would alone. This is what a soulmate is-- someone of a similar core of nature
and nurture. The chemicals behind love may drive this, maybe
pheromones will help, and past experience, but all in all, it goes back to the
complexity of the universe. It goes back to the interconnectedness of all
things. It goes back to the center of all things, the purpose of life and the
meaning of existence.

That's just a rough explanation of how my mind
perceives it. That is, the beauty of it all. I am in love.

TypePad Help Post - Finding Blogs

So I'm finally getting around to filling that stupid bar under "manage my blog." I'm at 60% and one of the things I want to complete is adding people/blogs to read. What are some good ones on Typepad and why the fuck won't "Find people to follow >>" work? It brings up some flash-looking bullshit with a list of options that seem to cut off. When I click them nothing happens. Thanks, anyone.

Left of the Low Sun Glows

    Everyone makes a big deal out of it. You know, send her flowers, cards. Everyone worries she won't make it out of surgery for whatever unspoken procedure she needs.  Turns out it's a boob job and essentially the nadir of her life or just another thing she can't afford but manages to pay for.
    She returns home to  latex-trapped helium and cut fruit arranged like flowers.
    
    Down the street he sits against the sink cabinets in his kitchen, a sip left in a fifth of whiskey.  He fills his mouth, holds it, slips a few wide pills labeled "Watson" passed his lips.  He swallows.  
    This bearded sack of shit sits, legs spread, in sweats, sweating--  waiting to die.  His eyes move around not really seeing the walls, but rather passed them.  He sees meeting her.  He sees her first show, her first fan letter.  

    She looms over and shuffles a stack of envelopes.  They are mostly medical bills.  Those slide to the side of the table and accumulate like one of those coin games where the coins amass impossibly on the edge, and you keep feeding it more coins in the hopes that you'll get all of them.  Then they fall, unlike in the game, to the floor.  She grabs what's left on the table and moves to her kitchen.

    The light flickers on.  He squints and stares up.  What's left of the low sun glows against the blinds above.  An orange shadow reflects off his pale skin.  He wonders if this is her look now, Aerosol Orange.  He sees her naked, unloading a can of the stuff onto her chest as she swings her dark hair back and forth in slow motion.  
    All the human skin and hair, whatever generates dust, he sees it now.  Every particle illuminated by the setting sun, a column of gold effervescence.  

    She sips champagne.  She deserves it.  Her fans adore her, she reads in one letter.  They've been doing her routine and it works.  Whatever they want, they get.  All thanks to her, one letter says.  She smiles through another sip, her teeth clink the glass.
    She then notices a letter.  It is unsealed.  She peers inside.  It is a photograph.  She removes it.  It is of a green, 2001 Ford Explorer.  Around it are three people.  Two females and a male.  She is one of them, her hair lighter and her chest naturally curvaceous.  The male smiles wide in the picture, having just purchased the vehicle.  His arm is around her and the other female-- a pregnant woman in a dress.

    His breathing slows.  He wishes he had put Vivaldi on repeat.  Winter, of the Four Seasons, seems fitting to him despite the 102 heat index and broken thermostat in his main hall.  His stomach hurts and he is too dizzy to stand.  This is how he imagines he will die.  But it was not always.
    The first time he thought he would die, he was swimming with his father.  They went out to a sandbar one year on vacation.  The tide came in and swept them up.  He was afraid, and kept one arm on his father the entire swim back.  His father kept urging him to swim for himself, to not make him carry both of them back.  When they got to shore, his father was sputtering up salt water and chunks of "nabs," those orange crackers with the peanut butter in the middle.  
    The second time he thought he would die, he was skateboarding down a wet hill.  He stepped off the board going fifteen miles an hour and fell.  He must have slid five or ten feet, leaving a trail of flesh and blood, before he realized he was alive.  Very, very painfully alive.
    
    The first time he actually sees his death before him, in his adulthood, he is driving.

    She flips to the back of the photograph.  "Buckle up," it says, right above an address down the street.  She sees it now, the two in the front hitting their heads as the vehicle dips violently forward.  The front right wheel torn asunder, the driver loses control.  The top-weight of the vehicle causes everyone to shift forward and to the right.  In the adrenal filled moments leading to the final collision,  she flattens her hands on the ceiling.  Her hair all in her face, she barely sees the driver and front passenger gripping hands.  The vehicle rolls and all noises cease.  Glass floats, frictionless through the air as they slide.  

    He sees meeting her.  Loving her, knowing her.  He sees her before the fame.  He closes his eyes, tired and barely breathing now.  
    He sees her on the floor, crumpled up and weeping.  He gets home from work and notices her car cockeyed in the driveway.  He wheels his bicycle up to the front door which is ajar.  He enters and she's just there, in the middle of the floor, hunched over a city of tissues.  He kneels and pushes her occipital bone with his open palm.  Her face compresses up against his chest.  
   
    She calls his old number, hoping it's the same.  She wants to ask him how long he's lived down the street, why he's fucking with her again.  The phone rings and rings.  She gets a woman's voice, that of a robot or ghost, informing her the inbox is full.  She calls again.

    A phone rings somewhere in his mind, blending with his memory.
    The phone rings, and rings.  She answers it bland and then speaks rapidly, increasingly excited.  She begins to yell and thank the person on the other end.  He rolls his chair backward and leans back into the hall, looking at her.  She turns and smiles, cries.   

    She runs down the street crying, her stiff tits wobbling at the seams.   
    
    "What's up," he remembers asking, like he didn't already know.

    She gets to the door.  It's locked, so she bangs and bangs until her hands are bruised.  She goes to the window and breaks it.  One thousand shards descend, a cutting curtain before her.  Some pieces bounce up and slit her shoulder.  She jumps through.

    "We found a surrogate mother!"

    The light in the kitchen flickers as she enters.  His head is low and his eyes closed. 

Three-Oh, First Post St.

    I love that I don't "write," on the internet.  I compose.   And this is exactly what I want to do.  So thank you internet, for knowing me so well.  

    Thank you, for knowing.  
    You know the static force, the shock. 
    You know the dust that settles.
    You know the pull I feel, that desperate gravity that moves my feet down the sidewalk.
    The smell, of course.  That sense from afar.  
    These basic things.
    This composure.  

    So thanks again, internet, you know,  for that.  This is my 301st "post," and I wouldn't want to spend it with anyone else but you.  I can look at pictures of other groups of people and not feel like I want to be a part of it.  Or like I need to experience that.  Like I'm jealous.  It's not that, anymore.      

    Instead.  

    I realize how awesome I am, despite the various set backs, let downs, and injuries both physical and mental that have accumulated over the years.  Can't say I'm overly impressed, but nonetheless it's a fun and challenging road, no matter which direction I look down the path.  
    The lights aren't as bright at either end, just here by the fire-- the fire being an occupational "moment" in some sort of path analogy, as it were.   The comfort of just sitting and looking into it, deep passed the dance, down, further into the embers--  the emitted photonic ambassadors arrive at your eyes and, you know the fire's not burning you, but it does-- right there on your retina a great big fire, like a drive-in projection for all that inhabit your eye.  
    And the time to lie is now.  The path stretches in only two directions for the moment and rest is needed.  The sky shuts its eyes and the trees bow their heads.  Everything falls dark and silent.

 

    Speaking from somewhat of a turning point or milestone, depending on how you look at it, I quietly suggest to myself the obvious:   
Write more.  Did you notice the 300-plus entries you have on this piece of shit blog that no one reads.  
    Ah yes, write more, the brain says.  No one reads, the brain says.   I can't write.  It's too difficult nowadays.  Not enough strife.  Hasn't been, save for bursts, in a long time.  The words just aren't in me.
    And the 361 words you've written so far?  You can do whatever the fuck you put your fingertips to.  You can make a woman squirm and purr, type a thousand words a day, and. . . anything.
    As in I can do two things?
    You can make up conversations with yourself for the internet to never read!
    Maybe that's why no one reads.  

    Schizophrenia aside, I guess 301 means something.  Most of those accounted for came from the before-times.  Of Livejournal and VOX.  Let's not even talk about Deadjournal.  

    This electricity now, the same energy that is writing this, will never die.  Even if I'm not writing with it.