Dreaming of water and other things

I came off the boat and stepped onto the land, where the land’s grass grew into the water. As I stepped thousands of tiny living things moved out of the way of my where my feet were to land. They were tiny and black and oily looking and resembled tadpoles, but larger, much larger that any I had ever seen before. The swam out as far as they dared from the shore congregating near the boat’s hull as if seeking protection from its giant shadow.

Feeding the Curse (Complete, all 5 parts)

You can call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess.

We were on the beach, five of us, walking near the surf as the sun set. The tide was going out and the sound of waves always sound like a lullaby when you're tired and buzzed after drinking in the sun all day. M, J, A, D, and myself were finishing the last of our cheap domestic beers and the dusk when we found a piece of string draped over some driftwood, half-buried in the dark, wet sand by the tide.

I've heard of a Native American legend that tells of how driftwood should not be burned because it caries evil spirits within it.

In Africa, some people believe that things taken from the sea bring bad luck.

I didn't know these things then, but I wished I had.

D picked up the string. A simple piece of string, just under three feet long, that looked like it had once been joined to a kite. It was a natural looking white from being in the ocean and being bleached by the sun. D said that it would make a cool bracelet, and in our young, wanting to be unique yet belonging way, we agreed and divied up the string into bracelet sized pieces for each of us to wear. We draped the string around our left wrists and tied it off into a loose fitting little string bracelet that was just tight enough to not fall off of our wrists.

And as we all tied off our bracelets, J said that whoever should have the bracelet ripped off or lost would have something bad happen to them. We laughed and thought that it was cool and scary because what scares you makes you braver. And we all agreed in some kind of pact as the last of the light left the beach.

We were eighteen and had no wars, no unknown worlds to discover. We lived in the suburbs, all of us mostly from middle or upper-middle class families and because there was no danger we created it for ourselves any time we could, being young and feeling immortal as we did. We just didn't know that what kind of bad luck we were unleashing upon ourselves through the simple act of tying on a ratty little bracelet and saying some foolish words.

That week during spring football practice, in the locker room after practice, our friend G noticed the string on mine, D's, and A's wrists. He started making fun of us and called us fags. And as he reached for A's wrist to rip it off, A pulled his arm away quickly and covered the string with his hand. And as this happened I covered my bracelet as well. So did D. I found myself, before football practice, securing the bracelet under my armpad that went from my wrist to my elbow. I would regularly check it during practice, or almost any physical activity, to make sure the dirty little string was still safely on my wrist.

Later that week, we'd joke with each other, sneaking up to one of our little group and threatening to rip the string from each other's wrists bringing down who knows what kind of malicious events.

The string had become precious to me. And I felt, as did all of us who had underwent the strange twilight ritual on the beach, that our fates were tied up in that little knot holding that string to our wrists.

A month went by and spring football ended and the seniors before us graduated, and all of our bracelets remained secured to our wrists. We started to forget about the power we had given the things, even when our mothers would stare at our wrists during Sunday evening mass and make a face and wish that we would get rid of the dirty little bracelets, which of course made us want to keep them on even more.

Then there was the pool party on the beach at our friend, T's house. T was a gawky girl who was relatively unpopular, but with our senior year looming in the short distance and that need for each of us to feel important and wanted and somebody, all kinds of people we had ignored were suddenly there like materialized ghosts we had always felt, but never really noticed. And at this pool party, A was in the pool messing around with a bunch of guys and girls, playing volleyball and chicken fighting when his bracelet had come off. A hadn't noticed it was gone until right before we left.

A got into his car, still wet from being in the pool all day. He had been drinking all day, just like all of us had, but A liked to drive like an asshole. And as he drove home that day with his new girlfriend, who was actually his old girlfriend who he had rediscovered in the last two weeks, A had an accident.

A had been driving down the causeway from the party when he had lost control of his car on a curve on a road that was famous for people driving like maniacs on account of its long intervals before lights and curves. As A lost control of the car, he headed straight toward a long strip of parked cars along the roadside. A regained enough control not to hit the parked cars head on and swerved at the last minute, scarping and smashing into three parked cars.

The collision was along the passenger side and his new'old girlfriend screamed as the cars collided and the sideview mirror was ripped from the body of A's car.

Luckily, no one was hurt and A drove as carefully as he could, glancing back behind him to make sure the cops weren't coming after his drunk ass in a smashed up car from a hit and run accident. Later, when we talked about it and me an M and called him a stupid asshole, J looked at A's wrist and remebered that A had lost it that very same day in the pool.

A had lost his special bracelet and had nearly totalled his car and injured himself and his girfriend after losing the magic bracelet. And an uncomfortable quiet came over the group as thoughts of what evil could befall each of us if the damned bracelets were to be ripped off or lost. We questioned if we had really cursed ourselve.

And then we wrote it off as just bad luck and wierd coincidence. I mean really, howw could something like a curse exist in the real world? this was the stuff of cheesy horror movies and short fantastical fiction. Yes, we agreed, it was just an unfortunate event tied to a strange coincidence.

About a month later, J was driving his brother to summer camp for his mother. The day before, he had been doing some work on the boat that he and his father had bought together. Only after finishing up working on the boat and putting their tools and equipment away, J had noticed that the string must have ripped off during work. I don't know what kind of foreboding he had felt when he found out, but I do know that he had just dismissed it as stupid suprstitious feeling.

After J had dropped his brother to camp and was on his way back home, J lost control of his car and drove head on into a parked car about five blocks from his home.

After the accident, J looked no worse than when his Cuban born Vietnam Vet father had punched him up a bit after mouthing off at dinner one night; that is to say pretty bad. J's lips were smashed against the steering wheel and he had a good sized bruise on his cheek below his eye. J said that he didn't know what happened, that maybe he had taken the turn a little too hard.

Then J mentioned the loss of the bracelet the day before the accident and looked at my own bracelet with in silence. And being the asshole friend that he was, he quickly hooked a finger underneath the bracelet and threatened to break it off if I didn't say out loud that he was the greatest in the world. I think he was half joking, so I said the words and he released the string and left it safely secured to my wrist.

Later that summer J invited us down to his family's condo in Key Largo for a weekend. M was out of town with his parents, but D, A, and myself decided to go. A quit his job at the supermarket and took off for the condo at the beginning of the week. D and I were both working for a friend of D's well-to-do grandfather and were able to finnagle a firday off.

We borrowed D's brother's brown convertible LeBaron and drove down south Friday morning. This car was very annoying in that it had a computerized voice that would inform you about different things, like telling you, while interrupting your favorite song, "The door is ajar," or "Washer fluid is low." It's only redeeming qualities were that it was a convertible and that it worked.

Our first day at the condo was speant on either J's boat or his cousin's boat waterskiing and waveboarding and innertubing, and drinking lots of cheap domestic beer while frying our young bodies in the sun and talking to whatever girls we could find on the water or back at the condo.

The next day we awoke to J's mom making us all breakfast. Then we went on beer runs to stock up the coolers on both boats. After that, we hit the water for more fun.

While D was waveboarding, he ran the board as far outside of the wake of the boat as he could and then pulled it back in. D jumped the wake at a fantastic speed, caught about three feet of air as he floated above the surface of the water strapped to the board, and then came down nose first and wiped-out very hard.

We circled back around to pick D up. He was floating in the water, hanging onto the board, all red faced from impacting face first. One of J's other friends jumped into the water to have his go at the board as I helped D up out of the ocean. And as I grabbed D's hand and pulled him up, I noticed that the bracelet was no longer on his wrist.

D sat down and I reached into the cooler for beers for both of us. As I handed the beer to D and J drove the boat, I mentioned to D that his bracelet must have fallen off when he wiped.

He looked down at his wrist and let out a long sigh. We drank our beers in silence, wondering at what the self-imposed cursed braclets of doom had in store for the next victim. We were, after all, in a boat, on the ocean.

Shortly after we pulled D from the water, both boats headed back to the dock at the condo for lunch and a break from the powerful Key Largo sun. Again, J's mom prepared food for all of us, and after we finished, we slowly moved back toward the boats.

Back out at sea, J attached a large, black innertube to the water-skiing line and dragged it out about twenty meters behind the boat. The tube was large enough for four people to be on or in it and be dragged, skimming across the surface of the water as fast as the motorboat was going. You see, when someone is wakeboarding or water skiing behind a boat, the weight of the person and the design of the ski or board cuts into the water creating drag that ultimately slows down the boat and the person enjoying the water sport to go not quite as fast. But with an innertube, there was no drag and wiping out from a tube would be the same as falling out of a boat at high speed, sometimes even faster if the boat was whipping the tube around on sharp turns.

And making sharp turns in attempts at having the tube riders wipe out was exactly what J liked to do.

D, J's another of J's cousins, A, and myself positioned ourselves onto the innertube with me and D straddling the tube as A and the cousin sat inside. There were conveniently placed rubber handles about the tube that we used to hold on to.

The motor started up and J looked back from beneath the Bimini Top, at the steering wheel, and ran his index finger beneath his chin and across his throat. The other people on the boats started to laugh as J yelled, "You guys are gonna get it! Hope you can hang on!"

I looked over at D and said, "You know the son of a bitch won't stop until we've either all fallen off this thing or he runs out of gas." D was about to say something as we heard the throttle go and the engines started quickly and the tube was tugged forward. We all hung on to our little rubber handles tightly as the speed increased.

As we came up on the first turn, we all gripped onto out handles even tighter than before. Luckily, if we looked at the boat that was dragging us; we could anticipate the turns and not be flung off due to inertia and sent skimming across the water. On the next straight-away, we all let go of the handles and put our hands in the air as if we were on a rollercoaster.

J sped up and cut the steering wheel making the boat go into a quick turn. We held on as the tube with its four passengers went flying out across the water faster than the boat had been going. It was as if we were on a rock that was not only being skipped across the surface of the water, but was zigging and zagging in different directions, too.

The tube skimmed and bumped across the surface of the ocean and I could hear myself straining against gravity and the other natural laws of physics as the horizon spun around me. Salt-spray stung me as we kept going faster.

I was loving it.

Then there was a calm as J had to circle back and there was a great deal of slack in the line tethering us to the boat. Snap went the line and we hung on again.

The tube was on a straight away, and then a sudden turn. I felt like a rodeo bronco buster.

After the second turn we hit the wake of another boat as we skimmed the surface. The tube nearly flipped on its right side and A's legs were dangling off of the tube and dragging in the water behind us, creating a huge rooster tail of ocean spray. Every time we bounced I felt like I was getting checked by a hockey player.

A screamed, "I can't....hold-" and he went flying across the water like a Frisbee skimming the surface, bouncing and sliding and tumbling. We were going so fast and I had to concentrate on holding on that I never even saw him lose speed and splash through the water's surface.

We had another respite from the speed and the turns as J had to turn the boat back around. I looked at D and told him, "Man! This is fun!"

The boat pulled the line taught again and we were off on another straight away. Then the turning started.

I held on through the first two turns, but my arms and my hands were hurting from holding on so tightly and being whipped around that I had a feeling that I'd be going down hard on the next turn. As we went into the third turn, J's cousin was screaming from excitement and D joined him.
Before we started to pick up too much momentum from the turn, I yelled, "Later," and let go. Even though we hadn't maxed out our speed, I was sent jetting across the water's surface. It felt like I went forever as I finally lost my speed and my body's weight broke through and I splashed not too hard and sank under the water.

When I came up, gasping for air, I looked around and could see the boat dragging what was left of the passengers on the tube. I noticed that the force of the wipe-out had nearly knocked my boardshorts off as the Velcro fly was open and my pants were nearly halfway down my thighs.

The decrease in the weight on the tube made the little rubber circle travel even faster across the water as their was even less drag. The tube was catching more air as it was pulled relentlessly around the island.

I saw A treading water about a 100 feet from me. I waved and he waved back and we started swimming toward each other.

Me and A were about fifteen feet from each other when we heard the screaming. We turned in time to see the tube about four feet in the air behind the boat, sideways. D and J's cousin were sent tumbling, rocketing across the water for a good twenty feet in a blur of legs and arms, both of them within a few feet of each other, and then they splashed down and through the water's surface and sank.

They had wiped out about forty feet from us. A few seconds passed and they did not come back up. Me and A looked at each other and started to swim as fast as we could toward where they went down.

After swimming a little more than half the distance I looked up and could see J's cousin holding onto to D. D looked out of it. The side of his face looked like he had taken a back-handed slap from a big guy with huge hands; the red went from his chin to his hairline. His mouth was open and his eyes were closed tightly in pain as he took breaths from his open mouth. We kept swimming...

J pulled the boat beside them when we had reached within ten feet of the last passengers of the tube. I heard D groan over the engines as he was pulled from the water. Me and A swam to the rear of the boat, where the engine was on idle. As I pulled myself from the water, tasting the exhaust of the fumes from the engine, I saw D laying, propped against the side of the boat. One of the girl's was pouring bottled water on his head. I walked over to him and knelt in a crouch. I took his head moved it to one side so I could see the side of his face where he must have smacked it against the water when he wiped out.

"Fuck me," I said! "He's bleeding from the ear!"

A small trickle of blood coming from his right ear hole.

A grabbed the water bottle from the girl and splashed water into D's bleeding ear before I could stop him. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

D screamed in pain.

"I-"

"You don't put water into people's ears! You don't put anything in people's ears! Especially when their bleeding from the fucking ear! Now step away doctor jerk-off before you hurt him even more."

We came in after that and sat around as J's mom babied D, giving him some more food and aspirin and a few cotton balls to hold against his ear. The bleeding had stopped shortly after we reached the condo.

I went to the bathroom to take a piss and as I undid my boardshorts I noticed the bracelet was still on my wrist. I remembered that D had lost his just a few hours ago and then look what happened to him. Look what happened to all of them after they had lost the bracelets!

A wrecked his car. J wrecked his car and ended up with a pretty messed up face. D wiped out so hard on the ocean that he was out of it and bleeding from the ear and in pain.

I freaked out for a couple minutes in the bathroom as I just stared and occasionally touched my bracelet.

My part of the curse.

We spent the night at the condo, where D drank to numb the pain and I drank because...Well, I was in the keys and cursed and lucky at the same time. In the morning, D and I packed our stuff back into the convertible and headed back to Miami. D insisted on driving because he had promised his older brother that he would not let anyone else drive the car. We stopped at convenience store and bought a two bottles of sports drinks to replenish our spent liquids and electrolytes from all of the partying we did over the weekend. We had exactly $2.75 to our name after we filled the car with gas.

On the way back to Miami, many more bad things happened to us, but that is a story for another time. What we did learn later that week after D went to the hospital was that he had torn a hole in his ear drum and lost some of his hearing, permanently.

Once back in Miami, I waited for M to get back from North Carolina. When he was back in town, I went over to his house told him what happened to D after he lost the bracelet. M and I went back over everything that had happened to the three of us that had lost their bracelets. The coincidences were too coincidental to be chance, in our eyes.

Every time someone lost a bracelet, within few hours to a full day, some scary, unlucky thing befell them. And it seemed to the two of us that the results of the curse were worsening.

I strongly believed that the last one to lose their bracelet could possibly die from the curse. Die, or suffer a fate very horrible and close to death, or worse. M agreed with me. We also both agreed that we had to do something.

After a few minutes, we decided that the bracelets would have to come off without be broken or ripped. We would have to somehow roll the bracelets off of our wrists and still keep them intact.

We went into to M's guest bathroom and ran some warm water from the sink. Both of us placed our wrists under the warm water and soaped our wrists with the bracelets on it until they were covered with lather and slippery. And then we squeezed our hands as small as we could, pressing our thumbs up underneath the palms of our hands trying to press our fingers together, touching at the tips.

We started, and as carefully as we could, we rolled the bracelets off of our soapy, slippery wrists and down our squeezed together hands.

The worst part was when the grimy little cursed bracelet got to below our wrists and at the knuckles of our hands. Slowly we rolled the bracelets thinking of A, J, and D's misfortunes through the loss of the bracelets.

I really didn't want to be cursed: I had enough bad luck in my life with cheating girlfriends, SATs, and getting into college.

Later, at the beach, M and I stood as close as we could to the same spot that we had when we found the string draped across the driftwood near the shoreline.

We walked into the surf. The sun was close to setting again, much the same as it had when all five of us had thought we were doing something fun and weird, but in fact had only ended up bringing all kinds of misfortune into our lives. And standing there in the water at dusk with the waves coming in and splashing past our knees, we looked at each other and nodded and dropped the strings back into the ocean and hoped that as the tide took our bracelets away, it would also take our curse back with it.

Good Luck

"Kill it," she says with fear in her voice,
Then the word please
The spider moves like spiders do, like ballerinas on quantum acid.
Legs dance and pirouette and directions change.

Spiders are good luck, you tell her.
The moment before the kill .
The quick death of a mad dancer with too many legs.

And you wonder what it would be like to be a spider for a night.
To set the trap, to collect the food.
To patiently wait for the opportune moment,
To move in for the kill

My grip tightens on the heel-end of the shoe -
The moment before the kill.
To move in for the kill.
To patiently wait for the opportune moment.

Spiders are good luck you hear yourself say again.
Walking away now for the newspaper.
No kills for you tonight,
Only salvation.

The spider crawls across the white tile and up onto the front page
Across headlines and history the spider moves as you move toward the door,
Cold night air, winter
It's better than being killed you think.
Spider's are good luck.

Insomniac Daydream OCD

Couldn't sleep last night because I was up making lists. I was making little databases on notebook paper while lying in bed with only my nightstand light on. J asked me to either turn off the light or take it out in the livingroom.

Outside in the livingroom, with dogs on either side of me just lying there begging me with puppy eyes to please go to sleep like sad furry Sphinxes, I continued. This list making is a kind of OCD of mine, but it serves a purpose.

Last night's lists (I am a tree killing list maker) consisted of me cataloguing all of my tech skills. After that, I devised several columns to record; the joy factor of performing a skill, proficienciencies, learning resources on hand, etc. I did this over and over in an effort to focus my energy on a specific skill set. Then I started to create a list of the things I really like to do in life; read, write, watch movies, etc.

And then...After making lists galore, I started to rewrite the outline of my novel, the one story I've been trying to tell.

I've been trying to break life's experiences into elements of metaphor while world building. Trying to make the world as rich and intricate as the metaphors for what we have here in this world.

I was creating a universe and peopling it with characters and setting them against or for each other. I was playing God, or at some low points of story creation, Santa. I was making a list and checking it twice. I was weighing the hearts of my creations and planting obstacles in their way. I was wiping out entire cities and killing the innocent and making a Job (that poor, stupid bastard) of my antisocial but well meaning hero.

Why does God take away the faithful and the good more than the evil?

Because it makes for a good story. Bad people and catastrophes make the story richer. They are catalysts for a greater good while working against it. Yin and Yang and struggle and growth.

Natural disasters, accidents, greed, war, famine, hope, love...These events and feelings, the concrete and intangible make great story. I wonder how good of an author and how great of an imagination I/gods/God have? I'm not quite sure how it will end, but I know many things will be taken away, a few things will be given, and it will get very, very bad before it gets any better and people will have scars.

And maybe that's what I want to be when I grow up: God. Not "the God," as Bill Murray says in Ground Hog Day, but "a god."

Whole spinning universes in my head with people living, shitting, and loving and I can't sleep at night. I wonder if God has a day job he has to get up for in the morning.

Justice: Birth of a Superhero

They have taken things from me. People. My brother.

I hid after the beatings and the misery and the loss. I hid from my parents. I hid from that psychiatrist. I kept the hate down deep inside where no one but myself could see it. Late, during sleepless nights I would take it out and look at like it was some secret treasure sparkling and glittering in the dark.

Through college I learned anything that could be of use to me. I watched them go about their days walking in a cloud of ignorant apathy. And every night I looked upon my hate and basqued in its dark hot glow. And when I tired of looking at it all by my lonesome in the middle of the night, I started to take it out in public. And the blind fools never saw it, or if they did, they had no idea what it was.

I brought my hate out with me to the campus gym and when people started to try and talk to me about what exercises I was doing I hid the hate away and made banal conversation with whoever approached. The hate was not for these sleepwalkers. Only my contempt. Only my pity.

And after a while on the campuses and in the gyms, the hate started to crystalize into a sort of murky crysalis. The hate was changing. It was becoming. No longer could I drape myself in it between tears of anger in the lonely night. No longer would it lend me strength as I called on it during workouts. The hate was leaving. Changing.

And then, during that night on the way home from the library my hate was reborn as something more.

That man never heard me approach as he was too busy attacking the poor girl. This victim of a young woman had taken the path on the quiet side of the campus home. The side near the forest where supposedly they were going to build a new stadium for our school's winning football team. It was the perfect place for someone to target and defile an honest, stupidly unaware person.

I heard the muffled screams before I could actually see what was happening. I knew those calls for help, the sound of hopeless, panicked calls for aid. They had once come from my own mouth so long ago and they were being repeated by someone nearby and in trouble. I couldn't let this thing happen. I couldn't let this poor person suffer as he had once suffered.

I saw movement some ten yards into the treeline on a small hill. Just a shudder of darkness nearly lost in the green of the surrounding campus wilderness. Before I knew exactly what to do I had dropped my bookbag and was on the run toward the violence I could not see but only feel through memory and muffled cries. I changed direction, not slowing, and darted into the treeline a good thirty feet from the crime. I moved silently and as quick as I could through the barely visible branches in the early evening darkness. And when I saw the man, the shape of the beast, I ran at full speed as the branches lashed at my face and arms, tearing cloth and skin. I ran and hit him with all of my pent up rage.

The attacker was lifted off of the ground and hit a nearby tree square against its trunk with athud. I could hear the air escape from him as he crumpled to his knees after sliding down the length of the tree.

He was stunned and I didn't wait. I kicked up and through him, my foot connecting at his throat and sending this piece of trash two feeet back toward the same tree he had just bounced off of before. His head snapped back sharply from my kick and I heard the hollow sound of his skull smashing up against the tree.

I found my self standing above this degenerate. My skin felt like someone had poured gasoline all over it and had lit a a match and set me on fire. My knee stung in the hollow of the kneecap from exerting too much force when I kicked the bastard. It was bad technicque.

And as I stood above this assailant, this theif of peace and happiness, I remembered the pain. I remembered the hate. And I smiled as I knew I had finally, after all of these years, I had finally had my destiny revealed to me on this dark night on the lonely side of the world. I looked down and at my hands and could not see them, but I felt how my fingernails had dug through the palms of my hand during the attack. I could feel the hot blood spilling into the palms of my hands.

The girl sobbed in the dark behind me and my heart sank deep within my chest feeling as if the weight of a small building had been using it as a foundation and after many years it as crumbling. Tears spilled from my eyes running freely down my face, over my cheeks, spilling out onto the dead-leaf strewn hill ground.

I moved to help the girl as a release of emotion and relief spread through me. I was finally at peace. I would sleep like a baby tonight. I would never be the same again as I realized I was addicted to dispensing justice with a rihteous, vengeful fury.

I was going to make all of the bad men pay.

Transmission Burst on a Tuesday Morning

All around, all around
The birds flying, pyramid-like across the sidewalk
I see
I see the number four.
Everywhere.

She sings opera to me.
She moves to me in mysterious ways.
Achtung.

My dad and brother and I play poker late at night
While the British man on the television tells me something important.

My shoes squeak when I walk across the office floor.
Time to work.
Ring-a-ding-dig,
Time to work it, boost it, change it.

I see the number four everywhere.
Meaning? Don't tell me of you meaning.
Surrender. Surrender. Give in.

Beyond the Cube Cathedral

Alec walked out of the dorm building and the winter cold nailed him from across the quad in a wind that blew leaves and used plastic cups at him from the previous night’s partying. He was not hungover as he did not drink much during his preparation the night before. in the small backpack hanging off his right shoulder, he carried a floating lantern, his notebook, and chalk.
Alec squinted his eyes to protect them from the flying dirt and particles whipping against him as he walked north on the uneven brown and black cobblestone streets toward the edge of town and even further toward his destination; Boggy Creek Flatlands.

Boggy Creek Flatlands was at the edge of town, outside of the valley where the campus of Galbrek University made its home. He would be going mostly uphill through the winding streets of the town of Flahtsee, through its many closed bars and apartments and its many churches. He would even walk by the Cube Cathedral of Flahtsee, a square mass of concrete and spires that looked like most other Cube Cathedrals throughout the world, except this one being in Flahtsee made it a little smaller for this small college town.

Alec remembered the Cube Cathedral of Norsencia, the merchant capital of his corner of the world in Southland. The cube there was at least five times as large as the one in Flahtsee and it was lorded over by the Good Cardinals of the Blessed Savior as much as most of the country was.

Alec remembered when he was a child; he was allowed to wear the robes of a Minor Cardinal for a mock wedding ceremony for his Theophosophy class. He remembered the power that one inherited when you placed the great black and red flowing robe on, only to get another burst of the importance of the station that the order held in the world once you placed the small red cap on your head. It may as well have been a crown for all of the influence the Church and the Good Cardinals held over society, having controlled the major libraries and learning institutions during the second and third Green Death outbreaks. At least I don’t have to worry about my blood thickening into a gangrenous slime and killing me, thought Alec.

The sky was turning greyer now as it was known to do up here in the North Country and clouds like super large Man O’ War skycarriers started coming in from the Western Bad Lands and rolling over the valley of Flahtsee. Rains would fall for most of the day, and although too much would hinder Alec’s plan, it was also a blessing; the rains poisonous acid content and the stinging of the eyes, like chopping onions made of ammonia, that it would cause in anyone caught outside in it was sure to keep wayfarers away from his neck of the country in Boggy Creek Flatlands.
The sign at the ridge of the top of the northern valley wall was meant for him. The sign stated:

IT IS UNLAWFUL TO ENTER PAST THIS POINT. DANGER! YOU RISK HARM TO YOURSELF IF YOU ENTER THIS AREA! ALL TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW!

What did they know of laws, thought Alec, as he mashed and bullied his way over the ridge top and through the brush and small, leafless trees with their intertwining vines and little thorns that caught on his jacket, making little pulls in the fabric.

Haikus From Kung Pow Haiku

I am ending the Kung Pow Haiku blog and transfering all of my haikus to this page. Goodbye Kung Pow Haiku.

Driving highway roads
Traffic jam, my eyes squinting
Clouds over sunset

The little squirrel
In and out between the cars
Cheating death again

White light tubes above
Sounds of the city below
I miss the ocean

Little wings flutter
Glass prison, the ground speeds by
Two ways to freedom

Collar shake noises
Dogs announce the new day's light
Coffee, then Yoga

Dusk: Up go the wasps
Scattered from home, they patrol
Invisible now

Night, dark and quiet
Bugs gather on the glass door
Blue moonlight on grass

No sun this morning
Promises of rain and clouds
Reading books inside

Spider web near door
Hinged by the engineer
Everybody eats

The wood bars entry
And just out of sight, you wait
A hidden spider

Chittering squirels
Fill the park between winter cold
A calm, false summer

So many ripples
Grass blades break through the puddle
Waiting for the sun

Weeds all around
Ground a morasse of green, brown
Three flowers, beauty

4

Since the move to Miami from New York, Finn’s asthma had improved with attacks becoming less frequent.

One night the family, including Pops and Granma and Aunty Lucy, and mom and dad and Gerard, who was now bigger, but more annoying, all went the House of Crab for seafood dinner. Finn loved wearing the bib with the giant red lobster on it and could not wait for the garlic mash potatoes and his butter soaked crab dinner to come out.
Finn also liked the waitresses here; they all wore black fishnet stockings and short skirts and brought him Shirley Temples, or Kiddy Cocktails as they called it at this restaurant.

In the middle of all of the cracking and sucking of crab parts, Finn felt a heat rise through his face and arms. He began to itch and had a difficult time breathing. He tried not to pay attention to the feelings of discomfort that were coming over him as he hoped they would go away.

A little while later, his mother let out a gasp as she saw his red, hive ridden face and arms had to get his asthma inhaler from her purse to ease her poor son’s breathing. Finn didn’t like being babied by his mom and when he asked her why she kept bothering him, she told him to stay still and be quiet and drink his water.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Prisoner

He aches, stretched out upon the pallet on the rough concrete floor of the prison.

Outside the prison beyond his walls he hears the heavy machinery kicking in and piling on heavy metal and dirt and smoke and dust spewing into the air covering everything. There is always dust on his window sill in a uniform thickness that he can write his name in it with a finger. He knows he's breathing the decay and filth of the prison yard into his body and he wonders if all of this dirt is clogging in his lungs and will one day kill him. Probably kill him slow like everything else in this world. Chip-chipping away at his life, his soul.

He heard the sounds in the cell next to his: Heavy breathing through a gag and laughter. The sound of electronic devices recording torture and defilement with a click and whirr and a scream and slap and laugh and click and a whirr...And on and on infinity.

He lied there looking up at the ceiling and wondered when his time for an interrogation would come. His balls crawled back up close to his body as his sphincter puckered at the thought of being the bastard next door. Now the sound of flesh hitting flesh, more screams, cursing and huffing. His fist clenched in anger. He would show them what he was made of. Let them come. He would take one of them with him.

It was a shame that he had been captured alive. He was supposed to be dead. He was supposed have died in the explosion that ripped through the cafe as he was waiting for his espresso and getting a strange feeling about the day.

He remembered he had checked his pistol and saw that it's clip was full of the tiny orb bullets that could be jettisoned like a beam in strings of little balls flying through the air at subsonic velocity and exploding in gas and acid upon contact with whatever it hit. He had just reholstered the pistol and noticed the young girl smoking a cigarette as she worked on some kind of paper for university when he heard the screech of tires, muffled from outside the front of the cafe's giant plate glass window.

The car hit the breaks at a great speed and was sliding sideways into a parked set of three red scooters as the boy behind the wheel was wide-eyed with orgasmic glee at the reward awaiting him in the afterlife.

Crash. Metal on metal on concrete.

He reached for his pistol and ducked as the car disappeared in white and green light. Extreme heat on his face as flame pushed glass and metal toward him and he couldn't hear himself scream as the ground buckled beneath him.

Another customer closer to the front of the cafe turned to a mass of soft burning flesh and broken glass and blood. He couldn't breathe. The fire was consuming the oxygen in the room.

Pain. His blood. His hands on fire. Lungs drawing in super-heated air. Burning.

He couldn't even hear the discharge of his weapon as the roar of fire and fast moving earth, glass, and air ripped across what had been a calm little cafe and he flew like a super hero, he didn't know how far, until he landed hard above the floor against a wall with flame and the smell of burning hair and flesh and drywall all around him. Fade to black.

After A Hard Night, Thoughts

Internal dialogue running nonstop. Fights and arguments. Tears. Things said and the hating of having thought them, having released them into the world like some kind of mad science that can destroy, annihilate miles of emotional territory into a nuclear winter wonderland.

Thoughts of black sky, black clouds move low and fast against blacker sky. Dirty rains released poisoning the earth as flowers wilt and the dirt turns to ash. Play it back faster.

Now go in reverse. Farther back to blue skies and sunshine. The heat on your face. Smiling. Freeze frame.

This is a memory you have put in with the imagined destructions. Feeling the heat of the sun on your face after a night of restless sleep and nightmares. You drove over the causeway to the beach. Took your shoes off at where the boardwalk met the sands. Wet sands. The sand looked dirty and dark, not like it usually does in the middle of a beach going day where the umbrellas are up and the bikinis are on - Cuban music spilling across greased bodies baking in the earth oven. RGB colored beach ball half inflated because you're not a pessimist.

Out of memory within memory and back to the original memory of the beach with the wet dark sand at dawn. Dawn is when god comes out and says hello. You sit on the wet sand. Can feel the dampness through your jeans as the sand is under barefoot and easing in between toes. You wonder at what a grain of sand would look like if you were smaller than the grain of sand. You think it would look like a giant glass pebble-boulder.

The word silica in your head in white letters.

The sun breaks the horizon. Vampires in death throes. The sun on your face. This is where hope is born. The sunrise brings heat and hope and the day doesn't seem all that dreadful anymore.

Remember the sunrise. You must remember this. Come back to home. Home is where the dawn breaks the horizon over the ocean. Welcome back home.

3

Finn used to go to the kindergarten a few blocks away from his family’s old apartment in Brooklyn. It was a Jewish kindergarten. Jewish like Pops, his cigar smoking grandfather with the hairy chest.

Pops, AKA Mortimer Bloomenstein, is his grandfather who is not married to his grandmother. His grandmother’s living with this loud, scotch drinking Jew does not bother Finn at all. It wouldn’t because they are family and Finn, being only a child, knows love when he sees it, and sees it in his grandmother’s eyes when she looks at Pops.

It is the same love he sees when his dad holds his mom close. It is the same love that Finn has when he holds his younger brother, Gerard’s foot while he lays in the crib smelling of baby and powder and clean, soft cotton.
Finn loved his teachers almost as much as he loved his parents. He loved potato pancakes and applesauce. Finn loved it so much that his mom learned to make it for him, getting the recipe from Finn’s favorite teacher, Deborah.
Before the move to Miami from Brooklyn, Finn loved everything a bit more.

Part 1
Part 2

2

He sees a column of living fire and destruction with a cap of flame and smoke and dirt and souls filling the sky and hovering above the world as the radiation burns through him, altering cells and bringing death, atomic style. This is Finn’s dream.

Finn Harrington knows they built the bomb on Einstein’s theories and Oppenheimmer’s drive from his endless hours in the small library on Second Avenue in the reference room. They devised it in the desert under general’s eyes while people killed each other in a chess game of moves through islands and continents and across oceans. He’s learned this from books and from watching Midway and the Big Red One on the pay channels on cable, wishing he was Charlton Heston with his strength and American good looks. And the fruit of their hard work of flaming death are his insomnia nights; the short sleep of dreams of mass destruction and slow death come night after night.

When Finn was really small his parents would kneel with him by the bed and help him say his prayers before bed time. If I should wake before I die, the Lord I pray my soul to take. Not really, he thinks. Finn thinks why should God want to take the lives of children. He asked his parents once and they told him that God sometimes brings people to live with him in Heaven with the saints and His Son, Jesus. Finn remembers Jesus. The skinny guy on the cross with thorns in his head and the blood all over his face in apparent agony, nailed up onto that wood in his underwear. Finn is afraid that his father will love him the same way Jesus’ Father loves him. Finn doesn’t want to be in his under wear nailed to a cross for his dad. He worries even more because of the story about Abraham and Isaac and when he looks at his dad in church he remembers the painting in the large, gold-edged Bible of Isaac about to get knifed to prove his father’s loyalty to God. Then the picture changes and it is his father in Abraham’s place holding the knife high as the angel reaches for his arm while Finn is held down against the rock altar, a boy afraid of the death his father is about to give him as a sacrifice to someone who never shows himself.

Finn does not like God, but he is afraid of him. Afraid of God and the bomb.

Part 1

Number 1

1
Finn thought that if he went down the attack would stop.
He crumpled to the cool, green stone floor near his locker falling on the multicolored paper folders and his composition book that had fallen before he did. The two boys, David and Michael, continued the attack that had started with an ambush.

The attackers had walked up to Finn while between classes and as Finn turned and saw Michael first, he did not see David approach from the opposite side. Michael had ketchup on the corner of his mouth from lunch and also on his white Catholic school crest emblazoned white shirt.

The two boys said nothing to Finn, they only started with the knees to both of Finn’s thighs immediately bringing pain that burned from the point of impact and flowered up through his legs. He heard David yell, “Doubbbbble Kneeeeee!” as he tried to hold his books and folders and papers together in the middle of the onslaught. It was a professional hit arranged in the middle of a crowded private Catholic school hallway and every child surrounding Finn moved aside from the open lockers, holding their books and watched the beating take place.

The only thought going through Finn’s head was I will not cry I will not cry over and over again as the assault commenced. He felt the tears in his eyes gathering like fat black clouds before the rains came and he tried not to cry as he dropped his remaining books and papers to the ground and brought his arms up to shield himself from the double knee attack. Navy pants covered knees shot toward him as he tried to protect himself and his anger and frustration grew into a ball of emotion and spit and blood at the back of his throat and he wondered where the damned teachers were while the two richest, most popular boys in the school were killing him in broad daylight between classes.

Time slowed as the pain increased and his nervous system sent messages of more pain coursing through their electrochemical pathways.

Then Finn freaked out. No longer able to control the rage that had built with the pain and nonstop attack from the two prettiest, popular boys in the class, he screamed as he swung his fists connecting with a thigh and heard air slip one of his assailants mouths with the connection. He heard himself screaming like an animal as he lashed out at whatever he could hit that was navy blue and wearing brown topsiders with no socks. His sounds echoed in his head as if he was no longer in himself, but a bystander in the hallway looking on at the beating.

Finn saw through the distorted vision of tear-filled eyes as he swung not hitting anything now, only the screaming filling his ears as tears started to fall down his fat little cheeks and spit flew from his mouth and he wanted to kill the world, burn it like in his dreams of nuclear destruction.

Finn wanted to hurt someone, anyone he could find, boy, girl, anyone who in the last three years had made demeaned his light brown skin and black curly hair with the words nigger and spic.

He wanted to hurt every rich little white kid in the school who his parents reminded him everyday that he came home bruised and beaten: These little spoiled, cruel brats were no better than him. Hate like pure, white hot metal filled his heart and his chest started to feel heavy, weighted down.

When Mrs. Gore came running out of her classroom in her brown sundress, her loose fitting shoes clacking on the stone floor, she found Finn on the ground. She could not calm him down. He was like a hurt animal in the wild, crawling on the paper littered floor in front of the lockers holding his right leg with one arm and pulling himself up with the other as tears and spit covered his West Indian and Chinese face as he could not breathe.

The asthma he inherited from his dad had started and his lungs filled with mucous, tightening the airways of his throat. He wheezed in gasps between the long crying and tried to stand on legs that would not move or hold his weight. Mr. Wolven, his homeroom teacher, came running from his room, his wiry wrestler’s frame and bald head flying out of the classroom yelling at the children to get to their rooms and in their seats. He gripped the boy by the arm, the grip hurting Finn as he hauled the pudgy boy up and leaned him against the lockers with a clanging of metal. The locker felt cool against Finn’s heat radiating face. His tear-wet face slid along the cream colored metal as he commanded his legs to keep him standing up. He did not want to go back down on the floor again.

While on the floor, the cold hardness beneath him felt like death or dying.
Mrs. Gore and Mr. Wolven gave him a minute to gather his strength, and then they walked him down the hall and around the corner to the Principal’s Office and sat him down in a red, plastic chair in the waiting room.

Finn waited for someone in authority, one of the nuns or priests, to come out and ask in their cold, unforgiving manner like they usually did, what had happened.
Finn thought that the clergy that taught at St. Rose’s Catholic School (A Presidential Merit Awarded School the semi-permanent banner across the front of the school proclaimed) acted like they were aliens from another world. They acted like black and white clad clones, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and treated all of their children, except the ones whose parents donated, or were capable of donating heavily to the Church and school, like little slaves that were not worth much at all.
He waited holding his legs, squeezing the thighs and hoping for the pain to stop sobbing in short breaths, his chest still tight from the asthma attack. Then, through the tears, he saw the crucifix on the wall, it’s cold, rough metallic Christ hanging from the pretty, neatly sanded and finished wood and he cursed God for ever letting him be born. He cursed God for his life and wished he could die as he struggled for air to fill his lungs, the high whining sound of his wheezing fading out to a slow whistle.

What Scratching Brings

The writing itch is back again, irritating the edges of my my mind and razing the walls of my subconcious. I've been pouring through my old writing and probing for weaknesses like some rebel come down from the mountains looking to infiltrate an enemy position.

I made a promise to myself. I intend to fullfill my obligation.

Excuse me while I scratch.

Learning to Cook

My mother taught me how to cook. I had come home from playing soccer and was stinky and sweaty. My mom told me to help her. When she saw me and probably smelt me, she told me to wash my hands.

My instruction started with meat. A big bloody slab of raw red meat. My mom told me to get the garlic powder, onion powder, salt and black pepper out of the cabinet. Then she told me to evenly sprinkle a good amount across both sides of the red meat.

I asked her with a good amount was and she sighed and explained that I should cover it with a little bit everywhere like this, and she grabbed the garlic and showed me. Then she told me to go easy on the salt because we could always add more salt if it needed it.

After I seasoned the steak and we had put it into the broiler, my mom told me to start washing the dishes. She explained that if you cleaned as you cooked you wouldn't have as much to clean up at the end of dinner. I grabbed the plate and saw the blood and the left over spices gathered at the bottom of the dish and I wondered what it would taste like. I dipped my finger into the bloody juices and sucked my finger and it tasted great. Like steak and garlic and salt and pepper, but cold and thick and bloody and I enjoyed. I wondered if this is why vampires drank blood if they seasoned the stuff to taste.

On my second attempt at a bloody finger tasting I was caught by mom. She asked me what I was doing. I smiled and told her I was drinking blood and as I dipped my finger into the juices again my mom stared in disgust and awe as I licked the deliciously spiced juice from my finger.

Mom taught me how to cook lots of things and I learned and continued to gross her out in the kitchen. Poor mom.

Fathers and Sons

My dad wanted me to play a musical instrument when I was growing up. It was one of the many of things I denied him, not because I didn't love him, but because I saw what tortures the musicly inclined children underwent at the hands of their classmates and I had enough on my plate being an outsider with a mutt racial heritage in the predominantly white, middle to upper class neighborhood we moved to in Miami.

Now, knowing what I know about myself, I see I denied my father out of fear and a particular disgust coagulates in my gut because of it. Maybe an eleven year old doesn't understand these things, but he can understand fear.

That was the first time I denied my father a wish.

The second time I denied him was when I went to Trinidad for my grandfather's funeral.

In Trinidad there are a lot of people who look like me and that was comforting. To not be an alien, an other, and unkown gives children a feeling of safety. And as my grandfather, who I did know from his time living in New York, lay lifeless somewhere beyond the inquisitive eyes of a child and I played in the third world streets outside of my grandparents house with my cousins, my father decided that he wanted me to read at his father's funeral.

Maybe he wanted me to read at the funeral because it would be a kind of reckoning of his relationship with his father, which was strained near the end of our stay in New York due to some falling out within the family which led to my grandfather, Pappy, flying back home to Trinidad. People stopped talking to each other. Communication breakdown for my father, a man who worked, and still does, for major a telecommunication company must have burned slowly in some kind of fire, using irony as kindling, at the pit of his stomach on cold nights on the job doing the graveyard shifts that young tech guys with families take to for the extra cash.

So, my father asked me to do this thing for him and I said no. I asked him why me and he told me because I was his son and he wanted me to. I did not understand the true meaning of those words when he said them. I remember being dressed in a navy blue suit with gold buttons and my clip-on tie hanging from my neck. I know the reason he asked me was becasue I always read at church because teachers and children thought I was smart and good at it. I remember my grandmother and my aunt crying together. This is what comes of phone calls in the middle of the night.

Dad asked me again that night and I told him I didn't want to do it. He asked me once more before the funeral and I denied him again. I had no idea I denied him three times like in the Bible.

I am Peter, see me run in cowardice.

I remember the anger and fustration on my father's face, and after that, the quiet disappointment. I remember being ashamed of my cowardice. Things were strained between my dad and I after that. And now that I'm thinking of having a family of my own, I wonder how hard it will be for my son/daughter and I to love and understand each other when I've seen plenty of people go sour on each other for all of the wrong reasons and some of the right ones.

After the funeral we had sat around my grandmother's house with the sounds sadness and loss, of weeping and sobs and stifled sobs with the smell of delecious West Indian food in every corner of the house. The adults drank rum and cokes. After a while the stories came out about my Pappy. How he used to be a salvager. How he was imperfect and human and good, like us all, but now he was in the ground.

As I heard many times that day, "The Lord took him away. He's happier, now." Even as a child, that thought, those words, seemed...useless. I don't know about the Lord taking us away for happiness, but I do know what the sun feels like on my face. I think that's the closest I've come to god. I guess it will have to do.

Infinity Beach

We were on the beach in Puerto Rico, J and I before we were married, and we had just moved our chairs in from sitting in the surf; the tide was coming in and would in time erode us away, washing us out to sea in the undertow like so much sand below our chairs, when I held her hand I looked over at her sunning herself.

And there, enjoying yourself on the beach, in the sun, you don't think that the sun can give you cancer. You don't think that a short while later a crazy bisexual stripper will come on to both of you. You don't think that one of your parents will not come to the wedding. You don't think about anything.

You only lie there with the warmth on your body drying the salt of the ocean in little lines and the cool rum-filled drink betweeen your legs and hope that this moment would never go away. You want to imprint this spacetime on a cosmic sillyputty and stretch it out as far as it could go.

And that's why I love to travel and go on vacation. Time stands still the longest when you're far away and in love.

Posted from "Then There Was the time..."

I'm reposting this bit of writing here to save as I'm streamlining my Blogger Blogs.

All my life I've been wondering how stupid I could be. Then there was the time when I was a boy in Brooklyn. We were playing with a ball. A red ball typical of what little children play with that had little starburst-like texturing and made a hollow rubber whoompf noise whenever it was bounced or punched or kicked.

All of the kids from my apartment building were outside past the stoop playing with the red ball. The building next to our apartment was gated by a fence that was comprised of long, black metal spikes that ended in sharp spades at the top. On the other side of this fence was a large dog that was not very happy as he had to live outside in Brooklyn. I had asthma and it was very rare for me to go outside for too long in New York. This poor bastard dog had to stay out all of the time, but he didn't have asthma, I think.

Anyway, whenever we'd play with the red bouncy ball, all of the kids were careful not to bounce the ball over toward the fence with the large, angry dog on the other side. We had already lost a few baseballs and softballs to the dog. We absolutely could not lose this great bouncy ball.

So we're playing with the ball and some schmuck kicks it over the fence. Whooompf! It goes over. So all of us kids are standing there on the sidewalk staring through the deadly spears that comprised this fence of death and watching where the ball settles; next to a car that is so old and quasi-futuristic looking and has never been seen to be driven by anyone.

The dog is under his usual piece of shade near the building staring at the ball also.

After much yelling at the idiot boy who kicked the ball over the fence, we sit around drawing designs on the sidewalk with pieces of stone and chalk, biding our time until the beast goes to sleep. I can occasionally see my mother staring out from our fourth story window to check on me. Sometimes she calls my name. I answer to let her know that my breathing is not bothering me.

Now that the dog is sleeping, we decide that we need to get that ball. But no one wants to do it.

Since I am ususally not allowed to play outside for too long and I am so happy to be out, I volunteer for this suicide mission.

I can see the ball at rest next to the wheel of the once proud, hulking American piece of motor vehicle machinery. The dog is still asleep. I climb the black spiked fence and am very careful when I reach the top. I have often looked down on the kids playing on the street below when I could not and wondered if I could survive the jump from our fourth story window to the sidewalk below without hitting the fence. I used to think that I could, only if I'd push off enough to clear the spiked fence. Impaling is an ugly, painful way to go.

I land with a light thud, my sneakered feet taking the brunt of the landing as my legs buckle and I land on my ass with the palms of my soft, kid hands scraping against the gravelly ground. The dog still sleeps. I can hear the gasps of he children behind me and I feel like Evil Kinevil. Oh yeah!

I run to the ball and grab it and run back toward the fence and heave it over the spade spikes to my friends. Then I chugg over to the fence and started climbing. The kids are chasing after the ball as I get halfway-up the fence.

And then I hear the chain that holds the dog rattle against the concrete and my heart feels like it stops as my hands get really sweaty as they grip on to the black spikes of the fence and slowly start to slide down.

Wrestling

Last night I couldn't sleep after J woke me with laughter and something about a joke that she mumbled in her sleep. Whadda ya gonna do?

After wandering around the house in the dark with the beasts stirring on their beds and sighing at me, as if to say, "Can't you just go to sleep? It's late and we're damned tired," I went back to the bed and tried to sleep, again.

I lay there in the dark counting my beaths and using an old Yoga technique of relaxation where you start at your toes and, while breathing deeply the entire time, you relax all of your muscles slowly working your way to the top of your head. It worked and after about a fifteen minutes of this deep relaxation exercise I was back off to slumber land, population me.

And then I dreamed.

I dreamed that I was going to a National Guard exercise camp, although I wasn't officially in the Guard. J was driving me there and worried that I'd be sent off to the war where I would die. I had to reassure her that I wasn't a full-fledged member of the outfit and not to worry. What followed after I arrived was maddeningly real: I was surounded by familiar people and the indoctrination began. I felt like the world was closing in on me and I couldn't breathe as the drill instructor screamed at me to get with the program.

And the drill instructor especially looked familiar to me.

Finally I could take no more. I grabbed my bag and told everyone I was leaving. A fight broke out between the drill instructor and myself after he called me a pussy and I called him and asshole. In the fight, I tossed the other soldiers off me with great ease, but the drill instructor fought me hard and put up quite the fight. And he stole my wallet and left the room.

As I looked for my wallet in the barracks/office, I came across plenty of useless junk on the instructor's desk. Everything was either a complete waist of time or half-finished. The instructor found me searching and came at me again, but this time as we wrestled I noticed that the instructor was a bigger, more brutish version of myself. And when I realized that I was wrestling with myself, I started to win the fight.

After the fight the instructor disappeared into thin air as he ran from the room. I reached back to feel my back pants pocket and could feel my wallet. Maybe he had returned it in the fight.

Or maybe I had given it over to him and had surrendered my drive and future in the process. Maybe only by conquering myself could I recapture my drive and the ability to take care of myself, which I believe is what the wallet held inside of it.

I grabbed my bag and walked out the door and woke up feeling strangely content and looking forward to the day ahead.

gold door

A gold door on an ancient holy site holds the reflection of the dead god that once healed a sick man king that lived here.

Dreaming

On Sunday morning I awoke from a dream: I was Frankenstein's Monster and people were after me, except this version of the story took place now.

The dream got me motivated and after I awoke, I started witting right away and tightened the plot and cut the fat.

It was a good day.

Excerpt from Chapter 3 part 2

And like the cueing of a film in a dark theater, his mind opens; everywhere there is light.

Floating in a sea of light.

And right now, in a room with walls the color of midnight and lit as if by a full moon on a clear starry night, there are three large tanks the size of a large American luxury vehicle, but white in color and shaped just like a capsule. Each one of these capsules has several pipes and some wiring leading into them and along the floor and coming from the ceiling. The capsules hum like bees hard at work, low in tone but high in pitch.

Inside each of the three tanks are the Three. The Three people or what used to be people are housed here for several hours a day. Each of these used-to-be-people, two women and a man, the man dark skinned, are completely naked and floating in heavily oxygenated water that is as gentle as a pool on a breezeless summer day. Their heads are larger than normal and too heavy to be supported by a normal human being's neck.

The bulbous, misshapen heads are wrapped in a breathing mask apparatus that does not cover the eyes, which have been sown closed, and is much like a bicycle helmet except for the monitoring diodes and wires that thread from the helmets to the tops of the tanks.

Each of the tanks is soundproofed and as quiet as a mausoleum from a long extinguished family line that has no one to care for it any longer.

Each occupant of the tank's mind is on another plane. They are always here when they are in the tank. Floating in a sea of white light.

Excerpt from Chapter 3

The rumbling sounds of bass came through the walls of the house at five in the morning, vibrating windows and furniture in low frequency booms that brought to mind the farting of an elephant. He cursed the noise, which was not very good for what he was doing right now.

Alec was in Down Dog, his head down toward the floor, his hands and feet flat on the ground, his body bent at the back in an upside V. He concentrated on his breathing, but could still hear the sound of the music reverberating throughout the house and down the street. He tried to only think of deep, even breaths like waves lapping a shore coming in and going out again, but the frustration of the invasion of his morning solitude grew at the base of his neck and his muscles were tightening and he was lost in his anger.

Also, in Down Dog, the blood rushing to his head made his bruised cheek throb harder, with little stabs of intensifying pain that shot up and down the length of the right side of his face from his jaw line to his eye.

Alec's mouth frowned and his forehead crinkled in worry lines as he breathed and jumped his legs forward into a standing back bend, the fingers of his hands almost flat on the floor, always breathing, and on the exhale coming up into a standing back bend with his arms above his head. Another shot of pain ran along his face and the idea of embarrassment from explaining what had happened to him to everyone started annoyingly distracting him from his yoga routine.

He surrendered as his hands came down into a prayer and he whispered Namaste with his head bent in reverence. Then, he thought, it’s not like I can hide my stupid face. He exhaled, willing the thoughts of what was to come this day from his mind. He only wanted to live in the right now.

Recycling is good for you

I've been told by teachers and other writers that you shouldn't trash your writing because you may have some good ideas that you could use later.

And they were all right.

I am salvaging part of the beginning of A Glimpse of Paradise that was character heavy, but fits more appropriately in Awake. This is a good thing too, since I spent a lot of time writing those words. It would have been a shame to not let them add to the story and bring up my word count as well.

So, learn from me if you can: Do not throw out your old writing, even if you don't like it.

Like Malone says to Ness in the Untouchables, "Here endeth the lesson."

Now, back to writing.

More from Chapter 2

Then someone tapped Alec on the shoulder and he turned to face them; it was a security guard from the department store of the world. The security guard wore a grayer than gray uniform jumpsuit, void of all vibrantness and hue except the drab grayness that seemed to seep into the large fleshy face between the collar of the uniform and a gray hat with a gray band and a small shield, like badge, with a gray fist on it.

The guard did not speak, nor did he open his mouth, but he did smile a toothless smile that reminded Alec of the sadistic nun that taught his third grade class at St. Sebastian's, Sister Annie Xavier. It was a smile of thin, wrinkled lips with no color and it seemed to not be a smile at the same time, but a setting of the mouth in determination, maybe even anger.

The guard grabbed some extra-large, bright felt green t-shirts in his large fist from a table nearby and threw them into Alec's cart. Then he gave Alec a reassuring push as he gestured that Alec had the run of the store before him. Alec only stared at the man with a look of annoyed shock and shivered from his icy cold touch. His feet did not want to move forward, but the guard's cold, coaxing push leaned him into his cart and the cart moved a little bit forward with a high-pitched squeak. Alec stopped the cart and tried to speak, but he couldn't. He brushed the guard's hand off of him, which made the guard's smile fade like the sunset and the white lights overhead seemed to flicker in a sentient rhythm of peturbedness.

This is why people go crazy

Remember all of those dysfunctional, drunk, crazy authors you have read about? You know, going up to the cabin on the weekend to do a little writing, drink some bourbon, and clean the ole shotgun.

Well, I am getting frustrated, but I will not quit.

I will not start over.

I will keep moving through this, like the time I got stuck in a small crawl space in cave and started to feel panic setting in. I have to just relax, concentrate on finding a handhold and foothold, and work through to the other side.

Right?

Excerpt from Chapter 2

Alec lied awake in bed with the predawn light filtering through the dark blue curtains in small slivers that cut the room into swatches of oddly shaped geometric light. He turned to check the time on the clock and its red digital numbers read 5:16 AM. He still had nineteen minutes before the alarm went off and he mutttered a curse as he spun in bed from laying on his back to lying on his stomach, burying his head into his pillow face first. Next to him on the bed, Chloe stirred and mumbled from the commotion.

Alec wasn't getting a good night's sleep in the past year.

When the sleep troubles started, it was from dreams. All sorts of dreams invaded his mind and he was amazed at the imagination and outright weirdness of the nighttime messages of his subconscious. He dreamed of the world as a giant department store with rows and rows of unending merchandise, all endlessly unclosed under bad, fizzing and vibrating fluorescent white light. All around people were shopping, mindlessly grabbing at merchandise that varied and placing it into these large, red, oversized shopping carts that were the size of small automobiles.

The people shopped and Alec stood there in his pajama pants and no shirt, his hands on the push bar of his giant, empty shopping cart and watched the people shopping. One lady bumped him with the edge of her cart as she brushed by him and grabbed a large box that had the words "Your Stuff" written on it and threw it into the cart with ease, the box landing on top of about twenty boxes of cereal and a two giant slabs of uncooked, bloody steaks. The woman, who's face was non-descript, only feminine in death mask creepiness with lifeless eyes and a mouth open in a constant gape, had a child that looked like a two year old but was twice the size of one, almost like a giant cupie doll version of a living toddler.

The child screamed at Alec and yellow snot and spit flew from its maw landing on Alec's bare feet and polluting the floor around him and his large, empty cart. In his dream, Alec grabbed onto the bar of the cart for a feeling of safety, which was surprisingly plastic-like in its hardness.

My NaNoWriMo

Awake is about Alec and his wife Chloe and how imagination, love, and magic can create a universe of endless possibilities. But of course, there are those out there who want to limit your freedoms and your choices. They will go to frightening lengths to make sure you stay a part of their System; as far as taking out a small town with a bioengineered bacteria that kills and turning two lovers against each other.

Beware: Nothing ever changes because the Omnicrom doesn't want it to.

This is the book I'v always wanted to write. It has big ideas and wierdness and horror and action and I hope you like it. I'll be posting excerpts here on a daily basis.

I hope the flow doesn't stop. Later.

Awake Excerpt

Alec knew she would be home waiting for him to get there so she could kill him. He didn't think that the Omnicrom had given her much of a choice, but after all, that is what they did best: Limit your choices, limit your freedoms, and make you a slave to their isms and religions.

He really hoped she wouldn't kill him. He loved her. Alec truly loved her and new that they belonged together. And he'd be damned if he was going to let a little thing like saving the future get in the way of him and Chloe being together. When they were together before, they used to think that they were one, always finishing each other's sentences or saying the same thing at the same time, and even wearing the same shades and colors of clothing without planning it or recognizing what they were doing until it was too late to change. They were one and would be again, soon. No government, god, or secret organization was going to stop Alec from being with his one, true love.

Most of the world understood so little about love, passing off gifts and compliments and sex as love, but they really didn't know what it was all about, Alec thought as he made his way up to the house.

But making people understand was what I am about and what I was born for, he said to himself, and he was going to show them what love was, what death was, and everything in between. And it all would start with his wife.