and Sisyphus walks down the mountain

There is a story told by old men round fires, hinted at in words that never reach towards meaning and thus never fall short. We are but a weak and desperate people. We know of riches, greatness, power beyond compare. We have seen these things, we have lost them. The Universe is capricious and indifferent to the plight of her most vain of all inhabitants. Thou shalt not challenge the gods. Thou shalt not beat the Devil in a fiddle contest.

Give me words, give me space, give me lies and the inkling of meaning. And I will spin a web for you, I will take your trash and detritus and in return I will give you reality. I will tell you what goes on behind the curtain and you will believe me. If there is no meaning, I can say whatever I want. If there is no meaning, I will make my own. If there is no meaning, I will give you meaning. Take it or leave it, but lies are the only game in town. And I’d like to think mine are more fun than theirs.

Unspeakable horrors. Let us then tell. Doctor? … You must have me mistaken for my brother. I swear we don’t look alike. Then again, who can tell anything ever these days? Blending into the nightmares are dayscape dreamrunners with highlighter tinted sunrises blasting through the shower curtain covering my windows, drowning out the less than silent competing rooster cock bellows and alarm clock mating chants as I try to fall asleep once again on my one free day of the millennium. But we maintain, because it is all our kind can do. That or die. Suicide? I guess, but it’s not really my thing. I know we’re all dying, but it’s not my time to go yet. No, not yet.

I try to carve out madness from the wreckage, wrest it from the unholy grasp of the industry. But my only tools are literature and booze and whatever scattered chemicals wander in my direction. And I find no madness I find no rest no solace no grave. I just get tired and then the desperation comes on bitter and reeling and I just get drunk and drunker and the fall all over myself and others dance of pathetic dissolution peaks in a bitter silence and I fall, unknown, unblessed, unwanted, asleep to bitter silent empty dreams. I wake with no memory, no madness, no enlightenment. Just the melancholy knowledge that there is nothing left for us. Nothing left to get away with, no country left for us to run to. They have taken it all, they have taken it all back. There is no freedom, no escape, no hiding, no peace, no country for young men. And sometimes a hangover.

I’m told that reality is what you can get away with. Or maybe that it’s just perception. I’m told a lot of things but I never really remember them. With flash mad editors excising sensibility. I don’t listen much. Or at least nowhere near as much as I ought to and so I lose a lot and I forget a lot more. I just have this casual relationship with causality, a drifter’s sensibility of maybe this and maybe that and sleep when I’m tired and eat when I can find food. Maybe the world of life is passing away. Maybe. But I don’t figure I’m dead yet, so I guess I have to keep writing for a little while longer. As the Winter’s Death creeps closer and the deafening silences close in, stalking one more innocent helpless vagabond. It’s hard not to believe your own lies when they have been screaming inside your skull for so many drunken misplaced years. I was older once, wiser. Better. Such vast immeasurable potential. Lost, drowned. Forgotten. Forbidden.

… … Oh, I thought you said the Great Bambi.

It’s hard to trust a man that won’t dance. What’s he hiding? What’s he afraid of? That joyous release, the freedom of movement, the revelry (and the hints and possibilities of a return to a past long forgotten never remembered whispered in dark corners in twisted garbage strewn alleys in abandoned warehouses begging to be converted into first artists’ lofts and then upscale apartments for the fatuous yuppies of a brand new soulless generation). One hopes for such things, but one dares not speak of it. It would be blasphemy, it would mark it a lie, a snarling impossibility, the junkyard dog of shattered historical remembrance. I don’t like strangers though. I am afraid of what they might represent, of who they might be, of who they might require me to be. I haven’t practiced my routine for them, I don’t know my lines. I need someone to ground my reality, someone to make sure that I don’t drift off into the dead static white noise nether realms of urban screams. But I’ll dance with you, if only you’d ask me. Or else I’ll just bop along with the group, pretending that I am having a better time than I am, but still having a pretty good time. Because I’m here and you’re here and it’s a beautiful Friday night and what the hell else are we gonna do?

And Sisyphus walks down the mountain.

three feet deep in the desert sunlight i was todl of am amndlaktj

There is

“Inna gadda da vita” is playing on an endless loop, crushing my skull, frying my brains, freeing my decrepit soul. It’s not that the gods are powerless, it’s that they got bored of this game. Because even when you change the rules, the story’s always the same. A large caterpillar turns away from his bong and his haze of remembrance of things never was and asks me a question with no answer: “who are you?”

a house

She is the firestorm. She is the end of the world. She is the ghost on the whisper of the dying desert wind.

In New Orleans

Of course there are vampires, those around at the fringes of society to feed on the unwary, the week willed. Parasites that cull the herd to make it stronger, except that it doesn’t get stronger, it doesn’t get anything. the crippling mass of humanity is such a broken down mob of soulless drones and automatons that nothing changes anymore, nothing happens. They flicker on through life until they die and their bodies are reused by the system. There is nothing. If there ever was, it’s dead now. Dead, long dead. Only the dust and the desert remain. Only the dying and the oil. I have made fire. Now I will watch it all burn.

They call the Rising Sun

Well, demon blood of the orient. I am come again. I am born anew. I am going to have to get another drink. Bourbon. Neat, goddamn it, neat, you filthy fucking swine. But the lies… the lies? The lies. THE LIES!!! Oh, fuck. They’re all gonna laugh at you. Yeah, well, we’re still all gonna die. So what the fuck, man? what the fuck. “WHO’S THE BITCH NOW, YOU DIRTY SHEEP FUCKER?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?” “Deeper and deeper; way down.”

And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy

My pen keeps clicking; I don’t know where it’s heading. I don’t know what her name is anymore. Just that she was a lie from the beginning. More so that I was. As if that was possible. I still don’t believe it. And how could I? My entire public persona is constructed, a fabrication, a façade, what the French call a certain ‘go fuck yourself.’ How could she be worse? How was it possible that I finally found the one that was better than me and then got drunk and forgot about it all? Was I just drunk? Was that it? Or was there more? Again? Again>? agin?? Agoinds?

And, god, I know, I’m one.

But Wait! There's More!

The gods were not happy. They were not happy at all. Well, most of them were not happy. Jake, god of wine, women, and rock was still passed out and probably wouldn’t have cared anyway. In fact he probably would have just raised the devil horns on his right hand and exclaimed, “That is so punk rock.” Which he will do later on when he wakes up and has the story told to him by three naked virgins soon to be deflowered in a swimming pool of grain alcohol. But everyone else was pissed. This was the second time this week that Jeff Krol had stolen the flaming surfboard.

Jeff Krol, however, couldn’t give a fuck. He was too busy jamming on his guitar (fashioned from Satan’s own third skull so that it rocks harder than a masturbating ninja) and cruising around scenic Buffalo, New York picking up classy ladies to have sex with on the flaming surfboard and then leave at some random street corner where they may or may not be able to find their way home but won’t care because they just fucked the man himself. But then he saw the most heinous sight imaginable and couldn’t contain his rage. He stopped the rocking, stopped the cruising, stopped the fucking hot bitches, and straight up killed Matthew McConaughey with his thumbs in thirteen different and equally graphic ways. That will teach him to steal all the high school girls. Fucker. And then the real rocking began. Jeff Krol flew his flaming surfboard to exactly 1004 ft above the center of exquisite downtown Buffalo, very close to the HSBC Arena in fact, and proceeded to wail so hard on his guitar that every pane of glass shattered into three or more pieces even the bullet proof glass and shatter proof glass and a lot of miscellaneous plastic too. He wailed for no less than three hours while having a marathon sexcapade with a young 23 year old lady who he promised he would introduce to his connections in “the biz” later on that evening but who he would really just kick off the flaming surfboard after he was through rocking and watch her ignite and then fall to her horrific yet amusing death. What a man. What a man.

Better Nate than Lever; or, I left my harp in Sam Tran’s Disco and other antecedent lacking punchlines

We are all equally blameless.

good/bad/indifferent names for bands I came up with in five minutes

the good/bad/indifferents

Ezra Jetson, God of Rocks

Sunday Morning Exit Strategy

Brannigan’s Law

Bender is the Greatest

Unfortunate Tuesday

Afternoon Junky Dogpile

Toothpaste and Lies

the i coudn't think of anything betters

dialogue in one part (further development possible)

Hey. (Tosses beer)

Hey. (Catches beer, opens, drinks)

Sorry bout waking you up

Nah, man. Thanks for that. Can’t really afford to miss any more work.

Yeah. Taks ain't in yet. So you’re good.

Solid.

Bad night?

Eh. The usual.

Still hasn’t called?

Nope. (Finishes beer, cracks second.)

Fuck, man.

I know. (sighs, laments, fades to gray)

For Jeffrey Scott, in accordance with his wishes

In the crowd, in the story, but not of it.

Somehow we lost all the mystery in the world. Left it behind maybe as we hurtled headlong into the post-industrial post-capitalist post-postmodern iWorld.

Sage advice: learn to accept that sometimes you just won’t be able to remember.

Jacques Nouveau

Marcel Duchamp flipped over a urinal and called it art. I pissed in it because I was drunk and didn’t call it anything.

Deconstructing myself. Create an overarching absurdist surreal existential metanarrative the main characters of which will be a cat and a pair of brown shoes. Life continues.

There is nothing more detrimental to furthering the goals of society than pigeons. Not only do they “plot in secrecy” (Simon, Bookends) but they are miserable fucking bastards too. Going directly our reporter, a pair of old shoes left near a statue of a forgotten hero, we have this story:

Having served my purpose of covering the feet of a young writer/philosopher/poet/drunk/failure for a select period of time as was deemed appropriate (I found myself worn out and not longer fashionable), I was thrown out. In a despondent state I do not know what next happened to me or how I was transferred from a cheap black trash bag so full of holes as to be almost entirely useless but at least it served as an expedient and a means of getting the trash and me from the apartment to the curb to my current (or any possibly intervening) state. Rum soaked months later (for I did notice the surprising passing of seasons) I woke to a bitch of a hangover and minus one lace to find myself at the oxidized foot of this most noble of forgotten and unremarkable heroes. Then there were pigeons. I hate them.

Remarkable. Do you have a position, Cat? Ah, I see that we are out of time. We will convey the smiles and ridicule of the cat at some later date. Thank you for your consideration, and on the way home be sure to fornicate yourself with a decorative (fake decorative not quaint decorative or Orientalist decorative; and metal if possible) tree if you didn’t thoroughly enjoy the presentation.

( )

damn you, cineplex

The world is a dreadful, snarling place: umbilical … and choking. I left at last and laughed --/

Going to town on a Sunday is no more work than any other day, but the trains run different and the people are different and the rules change even though I don’t ... seem ... to.

The good mischief or the bad? The same in the the end or yesterday’s gone (tuesday) is the same day bleeding together like so many wasted corpses left out in the sun (to tan). Life is wasted on the living, as with everything else. and trying to figure it out is just so much wasted time and space and paper and language games that aren’t any fun and have no set rules and no one even gets drunk there isn’t a point take off your clothes or throw a pie or take a couple shots already!

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS!!?!! no. should i? it didn’t strike me as being important. in the least.

There was a story told in olden days about a man who went to market armed to the teeth but lacking severely in funds. He rolled into town without a care in the world just as the sun was cresting its peak in the glassy blue heavens; he probably was smiling a toothy grin (though one cannot be certain on this point). He killed one shopkeep and threatened the rest, ultimately leaving with all the goods that he desired (or at least as many as he could carry) proceeding to his hideout in the woods. Unbeknownst to him but knownst to us, the men from the market and the village and the surrounding farms got themselves together a posse/lynch mob and went after the murdering son of a bitch. Of course they all died because most farmers and townspeople are shit with the fighting (having only their young hos, sighs, and Satan’s hay tridents to fight with), the hideout was heavily fortified as per standard criminal forethought and as previously stated (in case you forgot or weren’t paying attention the first time) the man was a murdering son of a bitch. Lesson learned.

Chester A. Arthur used to be my hero, but now

“Now, that is a devil’s cup right there.”

I considered killing myself again. Or him. I think I would much rather kill him. But it would be far less economical. The world would replace him without trouble and I would have wasted a bullet on an assembly line douche. If I shot myself the game would be over. Simple. Mostly. I put the gun away and went back to listening to “Stairway.”

//

my thoughts come in fragments. they can build on each other, if i choose to take them in a particular direction for a while, but they are always undercutting each other. they are always subversive, as if they don't want me to take any one path, go too far down any one road. "It's my nature." - the Scorpion.

something about consistency. a story then.

In the half light of dawn, James almost mistook his hat for the garbage can and threw up in it anyway.

//

"To be a rock and not to roll." - the Led