Sleep and Tenderness

Preface: The threat of tragedy is what makes a romance significant.  Without the risk torn open by vulnerability, love would be without gravity.  You must risk something that matters.

Sleep 

I awake trembling to the scent of lily-white love.  The sun is surreptitiously streaming in through narrow glints that sneak past the heavy opaqueness of the drapes.  But it provides no warmth.  I can't stop shaking, even beneath the leaden blankets.  I cautiously, meticulously, move to my left, towards this monolith of heat on the far side of the bed.  He's so comfortingly warm; he's almost glowing.  I burrow and nestle my way in, eradicating any discernible space between, the contours of our bodies paralleling consummately.  Within minutes the heat magnifies to an unbearably beautiful pain, searing my skin at all contacts.  I endure as long as a physically can, to bathe in it; I'd just as soon stay there forever, but my body is red-hot with fire.  Fuck it, I think.  Let it engulf me in flames.  I want to feel that magnificent burst, that instantaneous powerful flash.  An event horizon.  The only stripe of white light to be seen in the piceous and necrotic universe.  I know not who breaks first, but I find myself staring at the opposite wall, huddled in a pitiful ball, soon enough.

I love the way he looks in the morning.  So genuine, so raw, so human.  Unspoiled by the rigors of the ensuing day.  His eyes, so brilliantly blue, are oceanic, with hypnotizing tidepools of aureated gold; chiaroscuroed tactilely against the freckled and sunken-in nature of his surface.  It hurts my heart to see him drip with insincerity and feigned pretension.  But the world demands it, or seemingly so.  His subjects eat it up like candy, leaving nothing but spent wrappers in its wake.  I want the goofy guy with the bullhorn, wearing my viking helmet, dancing around in his thick socks and fleece cargo pants.  That's the man of my dreams.  That's the man.  The man too busy living and loving to care what anyone thinks.  Wholly himself, genuine and selfless, innocent and understanding.  Courageous in his sincerity.  Real.  Alive.

If we are who we pretend to be then a frightening reality awaits.  So most people choose not to wake up.  They just keep pretending.  The more involved we get, the deeper I fall, the more I feel like I was sent to him for some specific purpose.   The universe continues our course, despite the obvious and more cunning diversions.  For better or for worse, I love him.  I can't help it.  Embracing the vulnerability eases the fear, somewhat.   The make-or-break point came and went and I was left in the lurches of love, with less of a choice in the matter.  But there's a thin line between devotion and chump.  But it's simpler to just fall all the way down the rabbit hole.  To live in a twisted dream where everything is sutured by love.

I'm almost in tears when recalling the strange and vivid dreams of the previous night.  I dreamt a before and after dream, but they are out of order.  I dream the after first: A little boy, maybe three or so sits at a picnic table with a few presumable friends some sunny afternoon.  His eyes are so brightly blue, with those familiar gold flecks.  Shaggy blond hair falls into his labyrinthine eyes and he smiles the most heart-melting smile, with a mouthful of adorably crooked baby teeth.  He's drinking out of a miniature glass, like a shot glass.  He's seated next to the little boy, almost uncomfortably.  The little boy I suddenly realize is mine and there are tears in my eyes.  He pours something into the little boy's glass and the little boy says, "I love you, Daddy," to which he can't help but soften.  I've never felt happiness like the happiness I felt in that dream.  Cut to a party a few years earlier, this strange woman won't stop asking him about having kids.  At which point, he gets mad at me for whatever reason.  I respond by saying I wasn't the one bringing this up, so don't take it out on me.  This sets him off on a ten-minute harangue about how he doesn't want kids because he's got so much going on career-wise.

I'm taken back to the present, to the intensity of the morning, when our bodies entangle like thorned vines in the twilight dimension between dream and reality, between consciousness and sleep, between cognition and emotion.  The only time I breathe in deep and securely.  "Sleep and tenderness, that's all I need," he says.  It sounds like a vaguely familiar song lyric.  I feel incredible.  All I need is to live right here in his arms.

Tenderness

I've never seen a human being so content before.  That look of sheer ebullience.  I'll never forget it.  I never want to.  It made me euphoric.  I was filled with pure delectation.  I'm tired of living in fear, waiting for it all to fall apart, missing out on even the lightest moments.  Constantly trying to fortress my emotions for fear of getting my heart ripped out.  I was so scared to fall again, I superficially cursed love, but never really believing it.  I wanted it more than anything.  And I was finally open to it, but when the going gets tough, old habits tend to die hard.  To my credit, certain fears were justified, but they took over.  They ran amok, Lord of the Flies style.  My pride or more aptly my survival mechanism masquerading itself of pride refused to allow me to do the things I so longed to do.  I longed to touch him, live in the sanctuary of his arms, tell him I love him a thousand times a day, which still wouldn't have been near enough.  I wanted to pine for him while away and dream he was doing the same.  I just wanted to love him, nothing else, but I don't have a balanced middle ground.  It's either all love, all the time, or I shut down.  I play the nonplussed, too-cool, don't-need-anyone, icy, sanctimonious loner.  The dictatoress, the one no one can touch.  The one that escapes into her head, instead of her heart. Where she truly belongs.  She dismisses all of mankind with a smug wave of hand.  But that negates the other half.  The undiluted lover, the self-less nurturer, born to make a man happy, even at her own expense.  She does need him.

Sometimes, I wonder if my clothes dictate my mood or my mood dictates my dress.  When I dress provocatively, I feel powerful.  I feel like I have something to lord over the men that leer and molest me, both past and present.  I am now in control instead of them.  They relinquish control as they are occupied reeling their tongues up off the floor.  It's simple misdirection.  Sex is an easy disguise.  No one gets to the sweet nature.  No one gets to the vulnerability.  They don't get the privilege of the real me, as if that's some great prize.   But it's all I have.  It's something to me, my core.  What was it I saw in those piercing eyes that chilly winter night?  It was as if only his eyes existed in the incandescence.  Just these floating orbs of cerulean light dancing and flickering their way to me.  They made what paltry breath I had left catch in my throat.  My heart sputtered and stalled.  Trying so hard to look slick, but his eyes betrayed him.  I saw right through, so glassine, they were.  It was as though each man I met over those nine months, were another premonition or hint at him.  Because something about each one of them wasn't quite right.  "I'll give you the nickel tour," he said.  It all felt so real, so unbelievably authentic, overwhelmingly so.  I never stopped for a moment to think that he might be insincere, using canned and rehearsed lines.  It was genuine to me, everything I felt, the whirlwind I'd searched for slapping across my flushed cheek.  Slamming like a neglected shutter as the hurricane raged through.  That night, that second night, after he came over and then left so abruptly.  I didn't know what to think. All I knew is that I was choking without him.  I couldn't breathe.  I was left feeling so empty.  I decided right then, that no matter what, no matter the bruise to my pride, I had to know whether or not is was as real as I felt it to be.  I figured it could go either way, completely fifty-fifty, but at least I would have settled the matter, so I could start breathing again,  however shallow and asthmatic the breaths.  It turned out in favor of, the universe working its cosmic voodoo once more.  I chalked up all the strangeness to fear and uncertainty; letting the disingenuousness wash out to sea.  I know I saw something luminous and fragile in that first second, it was only after that the posturing came into focus. But by then, it mattered not.  He just kept staring at me with no regard for decorum.  I found it incredibly infuriating and interminably sexy.  Of course I wasn't going to just let him stare without me staring right back.  But to his credit, he didn't look away much.  We kept our eyes locked on each other.  I remember saying to myself, "Who is this guy?" In part to ask, "Who does this guy think he is?" And in part because, God damn it, I had to know.  Once I laid my eyes on him, I knew I never wanted to stop. It took all I had to look away coquettishly; a patented move.  The repartee was ridiculously wry and tense.  Dripping with deadly serious innuendo.  The air was thick for being so dream-like.  It was all happening so fast.  There was no time to think, but then again enough time had passed already.  Thinking wouldn't have done much good anyway.  Primitive and visceral emotions were in total control.  I wasn't playing any game, despite the lethal roll of the dice.  I knew I was too eager, but so was he, so what did it matter?  "Can I just kiss you now?"  My heart was as fully realized as the low-slung moon that hung in the obsidian sky that night, casting the same eerie grey shadows of arcane romance.  It was never the smoothness that turned me on, that attracted me; it was the roughness.  The missteps, the weirdness, the goofy smiles, the stumbled-over speech, the lisp of a radiant heart.  The flaws he would never let others see, that's what I fell in love with.  When all the swagger and ego and oily cons drained away, what was left was so rich in beauty, so purified in sweetness, so distilled in innocence.  The innocence of a child filled with innocuous thoughts of model airplanes and catching frogs, and being tucked in at night.

Love is the only thing that matters.  When I turn away from love, for whatever reason, be it insecurity, paranoia, fear; my life commences to crumble and erode.  What motivates us to cower in fear, despite knowing better?  You have to risk something that matters.  Anything less is a waste of time and talent.  Anything worth anything is difficult.  For if it came easy, one could never appreciate it fully. And appreciation is the medium to lasting happiness.  Materialism , corporate culture, greed, all feed the beastly Cerberus.  The Tao says by quelling desire for these frivolities, we remove all reason for crime; crime of law or crime of spirit.  Coveting leads to the world's worst ills.  Why can't we just be happy with the things we already have?  What is this motivation for more?  It is never enough, so you can never stop.  The snake that eats his tail.  Materialism leads only to human objectification.  And inanimate objects can never fill the void of love.  Dissatisfaction only begets more dissatisfaction.  We are supposed to do our work and forget about it, according to Tao.  We are not to wait around for praise or exaltation.  The lure of  success is a tempting Siren, but it is a hollow endeavor.  It only lures man astray.  If we sync into the peaceful flow of the universe, we will have peace.  To paddle upriver is an exciting, but foolish errand. Peace and excitement are at direct odds with one another.  Lasting happiness is bore from peace, not excitement.  We need only food, water, and companionship to survive, not cars or phones or computers.  But yet working towards these materialisms is not only acceptable, but lauded under the guise of "success" or "drive" or worst of all "high culture."  I often dream of living in a hunter/gatherer society where everyone has their specific and necessary role to fill for the survival of the community.  You get a sense of self-satisfaction whilst contributing to the greater good.  The world is wrought with takers and only a handful of givers, read:suckers.  It's hard to balance basic human decency (assuming such a sentiment exists) with not being a mark.  It's a basic tenet of survival.  Take advantage when you can.  But there are those recherche few that embody altruism.  One-offs from the species, I suppose.

I smile at a shuffling old man passing by my table.  His weathered, but kind face lights up with a stretched and contorted smile.  He waves and I feel good.  It's these seemingly inane interactions that fill my spirit.  "I'm so happy to come home to you," he chokes out.  Is it raw emotion that makes him sputter?  He shakes me up, flips me upside-down.  I burn for the waves of his intensity to wash over me.  He keeps me taut with these currents of electricity sparking and coursing through my synapses.  I've never had what I wanted so dangerously close at hand before.  It makes for a strange and presumably poisonous cocktail, albeit an interesting one.

Post Script: If we are who we pretend to be (See Vonnegut's Mother Night), then we are just that.  Pretenders.  If we pretend to be smooth, or pretend to be cool, pretend to be callous, all that makes us are phonies.  Fakes. Prevaricators.  Nothing more. But what of those who refuse to pretend? Ah. For another time.

State of Affairs or Photosynthesis of Pain

What makes my brain run the way it does?  Strange mechanisms at work.  Beyond my conscious control most of the time.  Universally-leaning.  That metaphysical riddle for me to unscramble.  The great cosmic joke just waiting on the punchline.  Perhaps eternally.  A girl cannot live on tragic romance alone.  Not at all, really.  She needs real nourishment, actual physical affection, something vitamin-rich and soul-satiating.  Something to build a real life on.  Not just some novelistic fantasy a la Sylvia Plath.  Maudlin and bathetic are just fucking fine for a far away recollection of a past life, but it can never sustain a present.  With absolutely no hope for a future.  That's why so many writers are alcoholic suicide cases.  Tragedy is their only currency.  It's their most sacred creative catalyst. Pain is the rawest, most unfiltered emotion to drive the pen.  Everything boils down to pain.  Active avoidance or fervent seeking.  There are  too many pitfalls to morbid curiosity, the by-product of sadomasochism.  I continue to punish myself.  The ultimate sadomasochist.  I have to be the best at absolutely everything, don't I?  A perfect sadomasochist.  Karma is an interesting mistress.  People are so quick to attribute positive events to their own hard work or more likely their sense of entitlement, feeling they deserve good things, as if someone is up there doling them out to the worthy.  I suppose the exercise of free will can get things rolling in one direction or the other, but success and status is pretty much luck of the draw, deeming success and status seeking behaviors worthless endeavors.  It is an illusory and antiquated notion that one can achieve their "dreams" or "goals" or what-have-you simply by old-fashioned hard work and perseverance.  It's a business model dreamt up by the Walt Disneys of the world, a childish notion that good things come to the good and the bad guys eventually get their come-uppance.  If only the wheels of justice moved so swiftly.  And more importantly this internalization of positive events is completely socially acceptable, encouraged even.  But for as quick as people are to internalize positive life events, they are even quicker to externalize negative outcomes.  Not many want to attribute adverse events to their own nefarious actions or sinister thoughts.  And those few that do are considered mentally disturbed.  Only the neurotic, emotionally-scarred headcases, like me, internalize negative events, as part of our self-inflicted internal torture regimen.  For which we are sent to doctor upon doctor and given pill after pill.  Why can't you just self-medicate to the level of functionality like the rest of the world?  We neurotics have far too many emotions to handle; they seep out in dysfunctional gloops.  Glop-gloop.  Glop-gloop.  It oozes.  Glop-gloop.  As it starts to pool around my toes in a stinking, sewage-ridden blob.  Full of love and pain; it festers.  The flies begin to buzz about the bubbling muck.  Soon the rats want their cut.  It turns gangrenous and necrotic as it further putrefies and Stilton-like veins of mold form across the surface.  What evolutionary purpose does it serve?  Our we simply evolutionary defectives?  One-offs from the species?  Or are we the pinnacle?  Evolution run amok, taken to its breaking point.  The limb finally snapping under the psychotic weight.  The brain has evolved beyond its own good.  It's forsaken itself.  Much like man discovering nuclear power.  It's grown too big for it's britches.  There is no suitable containment.  So out pours neuroses.  Even selective breeding has done the same.  Whole industries were born out of the neuroses of domesticated animals, dog psychologists, horse whisperers.  Do we just see ourselves in these animals or is it over-evolution striking again?  Dolphins, elephants or great apes in the wild seem to suffer as well.  Anything with any higher functioning or advanced brain capacity seems to develop emotional problems.  Mo' brain, mo' pain is as a succinctly and flippantly as I can convey.  Vonnegut's big brain hypothesis seems totally credible (see Galapagos).  Horse-shoe crabs have made it millions of years because they never outgrew their reproductive purpose.  There wasn't anything to think about.  In fact, I've never seen nary a horseshoe crab on a therapist's couch.  But we'll blow them all to hell soon enough, nonetheless.

Yet negative emotions persist.  Melancholy, anger, guilt fear.  What purpose do they serve?  I find myself asking time and time again.  One purpose that guilt and fear serve is to forbid me from living like a crazy person.  That's something.  It keeps me in check; guilt and fear are life's cattle fencing.  Keeping me in the pasture, for some semblance of a life.  Some semblance of morality, some semblance of happiness.  Of a life that other people seem to lead.  My head is full of these little snapshots of what a happy life looks like: a young couple picnic-ing under the shade of a grand oak on a sunny spring afternoon, a grandfatherly figure carving a picturesque Thanksgiving turkey with a big, shiny knife with even bigger, shinier eyes, a child blowing out the birthday candles on his billowy white-frosted cake against a backdrop of cheering adults, an incandescently lit Christmas tree littered with meticulously wrapped packages, while a fireplace roars beneath a mantle dotted with handmade stockings. Fireworks exploding overhead in the July heat, illuminating the faces of delighted children sitting cross-legged on an oversized red and white checkered blanket, or an elderly couple holding hands as they meander down a rust and gold leafed path, smiling at each other after all these years, relishing each satisfying crunch underfoot.  This is my foolish, nostalgic, black-and-white movie, Rockwell-ian, Americana idea of happiness.  Anything less than that seems meaningless and trite.  Silly, I know.  I wonder if anyone else, like say under the age of 75, feels that way.  Should I even care about fulfilling such a specific and ridiculous dream?  Probably not, but yet I hold out some bantam shred of hope.  Pervasive idealism is hard to deal with on a day-to-day basis.  So few understand.  No one understands fully.  I've given up on being understood fully.  But damn, I've been close.  God, it was so beautiful and harmonious once.  I could almost taste it.  It was powerful, more powerful than either one of us was prepared to deal with.   I know it scared him.  Fuck, it sure scared me.  It all changed in an instant, without warning.  One omniscient look, the locking of eyes across a crowded room, that's all it took to seal our fate.  The universe smiled between us.  Poetically succinct.  The rest of the world needed not exist in that determining moment.  There was only us, perfectly in sync.  We had it all right there, in the lavender-scented, apricot-hued effulgence.  Just the right amount of sweat and passion.  An overwhelming amount of love.  My heart ached and lurched.  I trembled.  He trembled.  Tears welled in my eyes, but they refused to fall.  For it was too wonderful a moment for even a touch of sadness.  It was the most right I've ever felt.  The universe whole-heartedly approved.  The universe smiled between us.  His heart pounding out of his blond-grey lined chest.  My fingertips dancing lovingly among the brush.  I lived to count the freckles on his arms as they wrapped around me.  Never wanting to be freed from the prison of his love.  I'm a hopeless case, I suppose.  Anyone professional with any sense has already moved on to more receptive patients.  More often than not, instead of his arms, I'm locked in the padded cell of my macabre sadomasochism.   Never letting go of the moonlit memories.  The oxidization of brass leaving a rust-colored stain on my barely-beating heart.  Never to be cleansed of his sad, watery-blue eyes.  The way his mouth curves over his teeth to form the slightest lisp.  Jesus, that barely perceptible, sweet, inescapable lisp.  I had forgotten how strong a narcotic love can be.  God, the exquisite, immeasurable, insufferable pain I longed for.  La doleur exquise, my darling.  You have to die of something.  What better than love?  Real gut-wrenching, blood-boiling, mind-bending, vomit-inducing love.  The hardest drug of all.  The one you just can't quit.  There is no rehabilitation.  Diamond-strength, nuclear-powered, surface-of-the-sun, hotter than the hinges of hell kind of love.  That's where true addiction lies.  Addiction for the emotionally flaggellistic.  Drugs for the cerebral cutter.  I want to see those hot streaks of crimson flash onto my porcelain flesh, so tight and supple with youth, yet slashed and burned with the cynicism of experience.  I've lived a thousand lifetimes in my head.  I want to wear my wounds like badges; pin them to my uniform as commendations.  Survival commendations.  People should take more pride in what they've survived.  Those are the ones who should be rewarded by that great wheel of chance.  Look what I've been through and yet I managed to drag myself out of bed!  I have yet to jump in front of a train.  Let's celebrate!  An un-suicide party.  I didn't put a gun in my mouth today! Where's the limbo pole?  Congratulations, you made it another pain-soaked day without pulling a rifle on a random crowd of people.  Kudos, man!  You didn't go kill-crazy; here's a gift certificate to Crate & Barrel.  Treat yourself to a couple of those really fancy throw pillows to take your rage out on.  You deserve it! Positive reinforcement works.  A crooked and stretched smile is forming across B. F. Skinner's corpse somewhere in the depths.

What is happiness without pain, anyway?  How can we appreciate light without shadow?  How can one discern warmth without first experiencing frost?  If good exists, so follows evil.  Everything has its natural opposite.  Positive and negative charges.  To live in the neutral is not to live at all.  I want to experience the full range of human emotions.  Why was I given them to experience otherwise?  What is their purpose?  Surely, it's not just to keep Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline lining their pockets.  It does follow that that is one reason negative emotions are frowned upon, for as long as they are condemned, the patients will continue to pop their pills, so those yachts can stay afloat and those jets stay in the air.  Why is anesthetization so much more socially acceptable than experiencing negative emotions?  Medication, be it self, or prescribed just perpetuates and prolongs the cycle of pain.  It pettifogs the brain, so you can't intellectualize or rationalize the problem for any lasting relief.  It only temporarily treats the symptoms without attacking the cause.  If you allow yourself to feel the naturally-occurring emotion, you can confront it head-on, and work through.  That takes true courage, and it's wholly honest.  There is no need for delusion.  And self-medication only works for as long as you swallow it.  All that pain floods right back the second the drug dissipates, therefore you take another hit, and another, and another, until there is nothing but that ever-fleeting drug-induced stupor.  All you've done is kill time, at best.  At worst, you've killed yourself or any remaining facsimile of it.

People really loathe sanctimony.  Especially when it contains a grain of truth.  No one likes to be held up to the light.  They aren't the beautiful prisms they purport themselves to be. They are ugly, contorted, self-absorbed, fungus-covered, swarthy, volcanic rock.  No one ever likes what they see in that mirror.  It's hard to stomach a cold, hard look at yourself.  Where are those redeeming qualities you thought you possessed?  Just another middle-of-the-road, unremarkable, terrible asshole.  Barely a memory.  No one wants to be a dime-a-dozen kind of chap, but someone has to be.  Delusion is the opiate of the masses.  It makes the world go round.  Otherwise, I guess we all would be lying in mental hospitals getting shock treatments.  There are a few sapphires of existence, but they are rare, exceedingly so.  They twist and writhe and push themselves for the sake of others, for some greater good, but to no tangible reward.  Most often to their detriment.  These tragic, genuine, beautiful creatures are the only unsung.  Justice is propaganda.  You know why some people punish themselves?  Because the world is terrible.  It's full of terrible things; hate, murder, evil.  And some poor sap has to absorb and process those terrible things.  Emotional migrant workers.  There is no landfill for pain.  It has to go somewhere.  The photosynthesis of pain is a necessary torture.  Without it, how would the rest of us breathe?  The sun shines for thee.

Must Have Been a Train That Took Me Away From Here, But It's a Train That Will Take Me Home: A playlist for the dying romance of the rails.

   The once majestic and gilded splendor of these smoking monoliths, chugging people to and from their grandiose dreams in romantic scenes of uniformed men hauling steamer trunks and put-together ladies in wide-brimmed hats carrying leather train cases in their dainty lace-gloved hands waving goodbye and blowing kisses out of the half window as they train slowly pulls out of the station, have been replaced with utilitarian steel boxcars covered in scrawled neon graffiti, moving lodes of nondescript cargo and only coming to mind when stuck behind one at a dwindling railroad crossing.  I always look down the line with a faraway look and my pulse beats a little faster when I can make out that old Union Pacific logo on one of the passing cars.  In a full-throttle society, the public's patience wears thin in front of the clanging bell and flashing red light.  But a shred of grandeur remains with the train; their sheer power, the blaring cacophony. There is something unmistakably nostalgic and even utterly American about the train. The amount of train songs in existence is exhausting, even in the face of the train's fade into obscurity and relic-hood.  So here's a half-hearted attempt at throwing some of them together in a quasi-coherent manner.   Dreams die quietly without hope and adrenaline.  Here's to gaining a little momentum in our coal-fueled daydreams and because sometimes you just want to take the first thing smokin' the hell out of town.  It must have been a train that took me away from here and a train can bring me home...

Tom Waits- Train Song


Willie Nelson- City of New Orleans


William Elliot Whitmore- Lift My Jug


Woody Guthrie- Hobo's Lullaby


Jimmie Rodgers- Waiting for a Train


Arlo Guthrie- Last Train to Glory


The Flying Burrito Brothers- The Train Song





Steve Earle- Mystery Train Part 2


Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee- Rock Island Line


Bob Marley- This Train is Bound for Glory/Guava Jelly


Downbound Train- Chuck Berry


The Impressions- People Get Ready


Spike Driver's Blues- Mississippi John Hurt


Lonnie Johnson- Long Black Train


Leadbelly- Alabama Bound


Charley Pride- Atlantic Coastal Line


Johnny Cash- Orange Blossom Special


Woody Guthrie- Little Black Train


Hank Williams Sr.- Lonesome Whistle


Roy Acuff- Freight Train Blues


Boxcar Willie- Old Train Song Medley  (Some bang for your buck.)


Jerry Jeff Walker- Desperadoes Waiting for a Train


Hank Williams Sr.- The Devil's Train


Townes Van Zandt- Wabash Cannonball/Fraulein


Tom Waits- Down There By The Train

One for the Road

Another unfinished, partial-fiction, stream of consciousness written in third person to distance herself from the gut-wrenching content written some time ago.

She sat back on her haunches, huddled in the pseudo-industrial bathroom, trying not to touch anything. What the he'll was she doing? She couldn't keep her mind off of him, those few sultry  summer nights, the heat so intense they would both awake drenched in the most delicious sweat. That stupid Mohawk. Thank god for it. If he didn't have it, chances are she would have done something foolish, much sooner anyway. She could barely breathe as her fingers deftly scrolled to her intention. It was now or never, she knew, but she wondered if he did. Just pick up, you asshole, she thought as her heart raced to the ringing tone. The door to whatever semblance of a relationship or what-could-have-been was rapidly swinging to a close.  Of course it was his voicemail. Why did she even bother with this nonsense? Everything was always on his terms, she always acquiesced with him. He made her weak. Weak with desire, longing, weak with love. His azure eyes swirling and churning as the saline sea, that damn glint, as if the sun had a direct line. The slight lisp on his speech, like an adolescent wearing a much-maligned retainer. The ways his clothes hung ever so slightly large on his substantial frame. God, the way he looked in v-necks. That patch of blonde-grey hair, the way it sprung and wound around her fingers when she tugged at it. She couldn't get the slight-watery image of his eyes out of her mind. Why did he have to have such comedic timing? It's like he knows every time she is happy, and he swoops his tomahawk self in to throw a beautiful, romantic wrench into everything. To cast doubts and make her second guess. She shouldn't entertain such thoughts, but as the nights came on, she couldn't escape them. They crept in. He crept in. "you've got ten minutes to call me back fucker, it's now or never kid. This ain't a joke anymore." she didn't know whether she wanted him to call or not, as some of the fervor was draining out of her system.  She just needed a little fix, something to tide her over for a while. Just the inflection in his voicemail would do for now. This stupid lunch idea. Why was he obsessed with lunch? If only lunch could last forever, she knew which one she would pick. she was so close to saying "meet me, noon tomorrow, at our place," but something stopped her. Common decency, perhaps? Doubtful. What was it that stopped her? Was it love?  Devotion? Half a brain?  A taste of his own medicine?  There was something comforting about the red  battery light flashing in the corner of her device. It made her choice a little easier, she wouldn't have to employ her typical cognitive dissonance. What the hell made her even do it?  Seeing his mother didn't help. Rereading the frantic and obsessive messages certainly didn't either. She wanted to feel something harsh though. Something to contrast the marshmallow dream she had landed in. She wasn't used to such harmony. She thrived on chaos and pain because that's all she knew. Her defense mechanisms had no time card to punch any longer, she felt she was losing her edge, thankfully, but she had grown so accustomed, it felt foreign and naked. Maybe she was just looking for an excuse, something to order her world back to it's upside-down state. Because thinking back on when she first read that message, she didn't feel much. It grew more rose-tinted as the days and nights floated by. Was it just simple anxiety? Plain old fear, brought on by having this perfect picture,  perched so deliberately upon the mantle, smashed to the ground by past demons. Was that dream and that day the beginning of this?  It stands to reason. But the epiphany that night morning, what of that?  She cried and thought of Mabel. She felt her, she felt she was in the right place,

Bukowski Loved to Bet the Horses

An unfinished stream of consciousness from a while back.  A few notes: full moon, freak magnetism at cartoonish level, interrupted by some drunk and tragic asshole.  Come to think of it, when am I not...

Bukowski loved to bet the horses.  Who is this man I put my money on?  All in. No safety net this time. You have to risk something that matters, but I risked it all on this absolute stranger. This stoic half dork, half stone cold fox. Dual natures the both of us. Living in a dream can quickly turn nightmarish. On a dime. I'm not looking for problems keeps echoing in my head. Maybe I am manufacturing them instead. Passive-aggressive is my nature. It satisfies my two halves, simultaneously. Ive always been a gambler at heart, for it is my legacy, but I let it all ride this time. Seventeen red. My whole stack. Everything I have.  I do mean everything both tangible and in. Maybe, I'm the one clawing at the freshly dug Earth. Maybe it's just fear's time to set in. To confuse and upset my happiness. Last week was too trying for the beginning. It threw a monkey wrench in the whole machine. I want to scream or cry or kill or smother myself with a fluffed pillow of my own design. I feel kill-crazy. My hands around a throat. Hands around my throat. Clutching, choking, squeezing the last ounces of life out of me. Do I feel it or am I dead already?  Is this dream really just a novacaine induced coma? Or is this what life tastes like?  What happens to the boy who gets everything he ever wanted? Does he really live happily ever after? Or does he live some illusion, some hologram of happiness? never to see his true reflection again. A delusion. Bukowski was onto something with this red wine drinking, I'll tell you that. I feel more open and ungated than I've ever felt. There are no inhibitions to work around. There are literally no cares to hinder the process. Fuck it. Fuck them if they can't take a joke. Fuck them if they don't understand me or my writing. Or if they can't separate my writer's persona from the real person, if there is a discernment to be had. It remains unclear. It's just a facet of me. The chameleon, the super-empathizer. Highly suggestible to the intense emotional lives of the living. Never quite knowing where the empathy ends and my soul begins. What is the percentage of evil. Is it constant or does it change? Which side will eventually win out?  I fear the nefarious always does. I wrote about past demons of others today, but what of my present demons?  They are not as far away as I would like. But they also keep me sharp like a knife steel. Like pull my emotions taut so they can be plucked and manipulated onto the page and smeared into my waking life. Like dripping, pungent and intense oil pigments on a freshly-stretched piece of gesso-ed linen. The gobs of color cling to the canvas with a tenacious fervor unmatched by any other paint. There is no running. Just streaks of madness across the mind, pressed so hard it leaves indentations on the other side. Can life be the dizzying and frenetic abstract that my mind dictates and the Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post drawing of my heart?  More like an oddly colored and slanted post-impressionistic landscape of my soul. I knew the lightning rod of freakishness was at full strength this afternoon, much to my relief, but perhaps to others chagrin. It fuels my writing, my honest, real, but seedy writing, but at what cost? Can the honest writer ever be happy? It doesn't appear to be if past precedent is to be believed. Hemingway, Tennessee, Bukowski, they all suffered, suffered not because of their art, but suffered because their neuroticism allowed them to create art. It is a by-product of madness. A worthwhile symptom of the disease. The only solace. The only solace afforded to the neurotic, hysterical, emotionally blessed/cursed writer. What a fucking night. I'm b

We Bury Our Dead 'Round Here

The old grey farm cat finally died that last frozen winter's night.  The temperature dropped too low to sustain another beleaguered breath.  They found the frozen, calcified mass under the porch steps the next morning.  Just a hint of a once-vital tail stuck out to barely signal its petrified presence.  It was rigid, as if bronzed, and curled into the smallest ball it could manage for any paltry amount of warmth.  The ground was too solid to bury it, so they figured they might as well take it down to the creek and let the icy current do what it willed.

The big farmer bagged up the gelid feline he once held a moody affection for and with his ominous black rubber Hunter boots and fur-lined parka, he marched the mile down to the creek at his wife's insistence.  The farmer's wife never did care much for cats, even if they did catch the pester-some mice that scurried about the farm.  The way they slunk and crept along so stealthily; she didn't trust them.  They seemed wicked and maniacal, always plotting something nefarious behind those shifty, marbled eyes.  She especially hated that old grey cat.  It never seemed quite right.  It lurked and stared at her, as if it knew a deep, dark secret.  It gave her an uneasy feeling whenever it slithered by. She was glad to be rid of it, once and finally.  She smoothed her apron in relieved satisfaction and went back to frying up the fresh-cut bacon for breakfast.

The big farmer finally reached the creek on that bitterly cold, overcast morning.  It was frozen over, of course, but he figured if he trudged down the bank a bit, covered it with a thick mound of snow, it would be, but a hazy memory by the spring thaw.  He found a suitable enough plot for his once-beloved pet, but he only felt the cold of the day and a maybe a touch of pity.  He packed the snow around the corpse tightly enough to pay reverence, said a quick prayer and began his trek back up to the bustling farmhouse.  There was plenty of work to be done.

The next morning, the farmer's wife stepped out on the aged, grand porch, with its weathered and paint-stripped planks creaking beneath her boots as it did every morning as she went out to feed the steadfast hound dogs.  As she turned to go back inside, out of the corner of her mahogany eye, she swore she saw a hint of that grey tail.  She skeptically, but cautiously peered over the flaking white of the railing.  Sure enough, there was a grey tail peaking out beneath the well-worn steps.  Son of a bitch.  Another dead cat, she thought.  She called for her husband.  His imposing frame begrudgingly lumbered toward the door, mumbling some low, agitated grumble.  The concern written all over her face stopped his knee-jerk crankiness mid-sentence.  He swung open the screen, still in his long johns and looked in the direction of his wife's disquieted eyes.  He swallowed hard and audibly.  What the bloody hell?  He stomped over to confirm his fears.  That wasn't just another dead farm cat.  That was the same dead farm cat.  He thought it best not to tell his wife of this revelation.  "Yep, honey, it's another dead farm cat.  I'll take it down down to the creek with the other one.  One hell of a harsh winter.  You get back inside and finish up breakfast."
She wondered if he knew it was the same dead cat. Her hands trembled as she cracked the eggs into the bowl.

The big farmer pulled on his old black boots and parka, once again, to make his way down to the creek with his old friend.  His mind reeled that mile down.  How in the hell did that damned cat make it back up to the house?  Did one of the dogs dig it up and drag it back?  It was possible.  That must have been it.  He convinced himself.  Or maybe it wasn't quite dead?  He pushed that thought out of his mind as strode to the burial site.  The snow was built up a bit across from the ash-white birch where he had placed it.  He dug down further and piled even more snow atop, mounded close to three feet high.  This time, he didn't feel quite so numb, he felt edgy, almost frightened, but not quite.  He recalled the day the old cat ran away.  Shot off down the road one spring afternoon, after some imaginary rodent, no doubt.  He wondered then if it ever would come wandering back, but he wasn't quite sure he wanted it to.  The cat seemed more trouble than it was worth. Sure it would catch a few mice now and then, and snuggle in his lap come evening, but it would howl and cry all night long, scratch and claw at the antique doors, leaving long and irreversible mars upon the wood.  And every once in a while, it would go into a hysterical fit for no apparent reason, only to end up in some precarious predicament, like up the old willow tree or or top of the barn.  And he was left to figure out how the hell to get her down.  The cat was gone for a season or two, but turned up shortly after he wed, scrawny and battered.  His new bride wasn't much a fan of cats, relegating them to out of doors, and he was starting to understand why.  He made his familiar, but addled way back to the looming farmhouse.

Neither one of them slept much that night.  They tossed and turned in their tarnished brass four-poster, but refused to acknowledge the others restlessness.  Before long, the old rooster was crowing from the coop.  It was time to start another morning on the farm.  They both moved a little slower this morning, cautiously, prepensely.

The farmer's wife made her way suspendedly down the groaning staircase to the kitchen.  Her heart rate quickening almost imperceptibly with each descending step.  She didn't want her husband to glimpse her ill-hid trepidation, so she tried to act as naturally as she could muster.  She unlatched the back door as her hands began to bead with sweat against the cold, tarnished knob.  Please don't be there, she thought futilely.  Oh God, don't be there.  She swung open the screen as it lurched and squinked.  She peered out over the railing once more, as her breath caught in her throat.  She called out to her husband.  His stomach dropped through the floor with an accompanying thud.  Fuck.  He knew. But he certainly didn't want to.  He pulled on his boots and parka for what was becoming his daily pilgrammage down to the God-forsaken creek.

This same eerie scene played out for close to a month.  Every morning the same story.  The farmer's wife would espy the frozen grey tail and the big farmer would hike down to the creek with the cat in a bag to mound it under an ever-mountaining pile of snow.  The precipice of frozen precipitation only growing more monolithic and mocking with each passing day.  Anger began to slowly replace the fear and pity once felt.  Each day, the big farmer's face reddening with a touch more rage as he planted each weighty stomp down to the creek.  Spring was almost here and the permafrost would soon melt, the creek would flow again, and then finally, maybe, they would be rid of this.

It was so perfunctory at this point, they hardly acknowledged it anymore.  It was just another part of the morning routine on the farm.  Get up, feed the dogs, find the cat, walk down to the creek, make the breakfast.  The farmer's wife's fear was replaced with exasperation, then quiet acceptance.  She was starting to understand.  Her husband's anger was always quelled by the last bite of breakfast.  They settled back in to their quotidian lives.

It was finally spring, the snow had melted and the ground was softening as winter lifted its thick veil.  There was a lightness about this fresh spring morning.  The sun beamed its uncut, first rays through the filmy windows with a powerful warmth.  The farmer's wife almost half-wondered if that old grey cat would even be under the porch this heavenly morning. Yet there it was, just like every morning.  But the breeze blew warm across the seasoned porch and the fledgling scent of lilac buds filled the crisp morning air.  Something had changed, more than the weather.  The big farmer pulled on his black rubber Hunter boots, but didn't need his parka today.  His lambswool sweater would do on this sun-drenched spring aurora. Swallows perched leisurely on the branches of the antediluvian and elephantine oak to the right of the porch.  They filled the pastoral landscape with their saccharine and untroubled song.  He bagged up the old dead cat, almost jauntily and turned to make his way toward the creek.  But then an odd thought struck him.  He turned to the left and headed toward the barn.  He slid open the hefty wood door.  The hay crunched delightfully under his largish boots.  He got a devilish grin across his normally stoic face.  He spotted the rusty axe leaning against the brown-grey planks of the barn wall, almost immediately, as the streaks of morning light shining through the opposing slats pointed their phosphorescent finger.  He strode casually to it, as if to savor the thought, and grasped the smoothed and sanded handle with deliberate zest.  He grabbed the equally worn spade on his way out of the chiaroscuro-ed barn.  He made his way to the all-too-familiar creek, but walked his way further down to the makeshift bridge; an old board he used to cross the creek at its low point, axe, shovel, and bagged cat in substantial hand.  The creek was free-flowing now, but he had a better idea.  He untied the bag, and dumped the cat into the supposed regenerating field.  He began to dig in the just-yielding earth.  Further and further down he went. Dirt from his spade flew over his shoulder, wildly, fervently.  Just when he thought it deep enough, he dug a few inches further still, clawing at the cool loam and clay with his bare hands now.  He crawled out of the fresh grave and clutched the axe.  He raised it above his dirt-stained, sweat soaked head, the anger built up furiously from all the laborious digging and wasted time.  He was going to actually enjoy this.  A ghoulish and deserved smile formed across his face.  He brought the axe down hard on the rigid feline, severing its head clean off the body.  There wasn't any blood, so it wasn't as satisfyingly gruesome as he had hoped.  He took another swing, not much minding the idea.  He severed the torso in half.  It really was cutting up like a dream.  He was picking up some momentum now; each chop/thud sound so gratifying, propelling the next reinforced swing.  Pretty soon the old grey cat was in a thousand unrecognizable bits of fur and bone.  He looked about the scattered pinkish guts and discolored yellow end-trails with a smug and quenched calmness.  He readily scooped the indistinguishable old grey pulp and carcass morsels up with the spade and tossed them flippantly into the cavernous hole.  After every last scrap was in its plot, he, with seemingly boundless energy, replaced the moist dirt, happily, back from whence it came.  He packed and tamped it down tight and vigorous.  Once finished, he pulled a Marlboro out of his drenched, flannel shirt pocket and smoked it down to a nub. He flicked the butt onto the fresh earth, gathered his tools and muddying lambswool sweater from the dry, cool grass and knew that he would never think about that stupid decaying cat again.

He walked back to the farmhouse, with a lightness to his step instead of his usual leaden plod.  He was filthy and almost laughing.  The farmer's wife saw him striding his way back home from the expansive kitchen window vista.  A cold tingle of relief washed down her clenched spine.  He finally did it, she thought.  She knew he would eventually.  And she was seldom wrong about these things.  Another farmhouse breakfast awaited him.  Back to work, she murmured.  This breakfast wasn't going to make itself.

Garden of Eden or Come Here, Kiddo: A Scattered Continuation

I let the citrus crescent hang just a little too long above my half-cocked lips before I reach for it, camelopardalis-like, with my outstretched tongue.  It slides deliberately down the slickness.  I bite down on it slowly, consciously, only after scraping the white striations against my hard palette as I thrust it with my tongue.  I savor the fleshiness of the fruit as it mashes in between my dentition, allowing the barely-sweet juice to flood the cavern, mixing with my burgeoning saliva.  Within seconds, the luscious flesh and nectar have all but dissolved to hardly a memory.  And all I am left with is the tough, stringy skin to ruminate; my jaw tiring under the tension and torque.  But I refuse another segment until the previous has been swallowed to completion.  Once the fibrous vegetation has been sufficiently ground, I force it down my throat with the tenuous remaining spit.  The catch twenty-two of the mandarin.  It makes me thirst for more.  It lures me in with its succulent aroma and brilliant hue.  The color of the coruscating sun as seen through squinted slits, on the most relucent and cloudless August afternoon.  It hooks me with that first juicy squish of honeyed and toothsome flesh, but it is a decadent trick, an ambrosial ruse, for I am right back in that taunting, cotton-mouthed plight before I realize.  Oh you cursed, lovely, dastardly, beautiful fruit.  Your nefarious seduction is not lost on me.  The real sanctimonious genius of this citrus manipulation lies in the power of its allure. For even knowing this, I still open my mouth and beg for more.
"Come here, kiddo."


When the morose side takes control, there is no stopping its freight train of melancholy and reticence, except to choke and claw my way out.  When I'm in that lachrymose underworld, I forget entirely how happy I can actually be. There is a disconnect.  The demons take over and hold back the lightness with their maces and battle axes.  They don't allow those gossamer emotions through. I am forced to do battle.  But I've gotten good at fighting, expert, even. As what happens with years of practice.  For the pendulum always swings the other way.  But sometimes it needs a push.
I think knowing the things I know and having experienced the things I have, could work out in my favor more than I even had realized.  There lies the loftiest challenge of my life.  Not buying into a feigned positivity fantasy necessary for a shred of happiness the Xanxed set tries to shove down my throat, but machete-ing my way through the dense abhorrence with humor and philosophy; the only quasi-healthy coping mechanisms I can muster, to find a way to be happy in the face of undeniable gloom.  Laying to waste the torture, rape, and evil, of my mind and the world, leaving it slain on either side of the freshly cut verdant path.  Streaks of crimson smudged with ebony and snuff suffusing with the malachites and mosses of the once-fertile, now-impotent, beheaded flora; putrid and rotting in the Equatorial heat. It makes for arduous and sweat-drenched labor; wrestling and warring with these ideas in my mind.  But it feels good to not understand something right away. Finally.  It's like reading Camus.  It makes me feel human, instead of superhuman or more often, subhuman.  Happiness exists somewhere.  I've felt it; I feel it.  It's the only thing that makes me hungry, ravenous. It fans the fire in my belly.  Not darkness, not sullenness, not evil.  Love is the only currency my soul deals in.  Lovey-dovey is the only way I can survive. And unconditional love is all I have to give. I am wholly open to the flaws and eccentricities of the human race, and they sense it; those seedy, smokey, creatures of the night.  Therein lies the essence of my bewitching charm; that is the crux of my freak magnetism. Flaws are far more virtuous than perfections.  They are far more human.  Platonic ideals should never be realized.  Happiness lives in the endeavor.  For if all happiness is fleeting, we must be in constant pursuit.  It keeps stagnation at bay.  Spring is steadfastly approaching.  I let the wildflowers grow all around me.

Livin's Mostly Just Wastin' Time: Bits and Pieces of My Thread-bare Soul

Random musings, insignificant excerpts, and rambling notions of happiness or the illusion thereof.  But first...

"Your weirdness is beautiful."
"I don't know how you are the way you are, but the world is better for it."
"Not to sound piggish, but your writing is as sexy as you are."
"You love hard because love is fleeting. So you burn bright because you know you're going to burn fast."

There's an electricity about us/it/this.  An intangible, but very encompassing current that runs between, rapidly and naturally, like it was just taking its rightful place in the universe.

Man, I can handle this shit, but I did think I would get a bit more of everything before this shit came up.  We are going to have to battle the demons at some point.  Miserable people can't stand to sit idly by while happiness abounds.  It's their only motivation, really.  To my credit, in my darkest, most nefarious hours, I never wanted to piss on someone elses happiness.  I never saw the point.  I just wanted a little slice for myself.

Just as he was about to take the last drag of his Marlboro, a familiar visage strode toward him with feigned authority.  His stomach pulsated and churned.  The faintest taste of blood peppered his mouth.  Was it excitement or was it dread?

She almost wanted her to come. It was the little bit of excitement her evil half had been craving throughout this candy-coated dream.  Her stomach was in anxious sailor's knots.  That wicked half-smile was forming across her all-too-knowing face.

But the love side, the purity side, the happiness side just wanted it all to go away as quietly as possible and as abruptly as it came about.  She flashed back to a few days prior...This night was different.  There was an eerie, howling wind, rapidly changing directions through the weathered houses.  A neighbor was hunched over, banging hard and cacophonius with a sledgehammer at something on the cement.  And the putrid and unmistakeable smell of decay filled the night.

"They say if you get far enough away, you'll be on your way back home."  But what if you don't know where you are?

My perfectionism in itself an imperfection.  A fatal and dangerous flaw.  It is far more trouble than it is worth.  I hold myself to this superhuman standard that I can barely live up to, leaving me spent and doubled-over in pain, but it makes me look like some God-damned saint or superhero.  At first it's dazzling and intoxicating, but very quickly becomes a source of contention as no one likes to gaze into the face of perfection for very long.  It's nauseating and makes for far too much introspection.  Most people don't like the reflection staring back at them.

Oh, my Rule of Ten.  Be sweet and loving to me, I will be ten times as sweet and loving in return.  But be a dick to me, and I will be ten times the dick in return.  There is something really satisfying about running things into the ground. About blowing people out of the water, in either direction.  When will they learn?  I tell them of my dual nature, to polite, but dismissive head nods.  Only a rare few have understood what I meant by this.  Evil is a choice.  I don't have a depressed amygdala.  My emotional center is overly-active.  I can be held accountable for my sins.  I should be held accountable for them.  I should suffer for them.

Maybe he is just testing to see if I'm human.

I'm afraid of shattering the illusion.  I'm afraid of waking up.

He wanted me to need him.  To reach out for him in the night.  To level the playing field.  But pride wouldn't let me take the bait.  Maybe I'm the asshole.  Or maybe I'm not the scared little girl I once was, needing men to validate my existence at every turn to somehow make up for my severe abandonment issues.  I don't want to be that weak again, but I never want to be that callous either.

His love was so unconditional.  It's not fair to hold him up to that impossible standard, almost as impossible as the one I hold myself up to.  It's a cruel joke to know love that great, only to have the magic carpet ripped from under you.

We've been so conditioned not to believe in romance.  Life beats the romance out of any of those foolish enough to feel it.  That's why romance is always tinged with tragedy.  It makes the pill easier to swallow.

I told of my romance fraught with complication and stained raw love.  Fuck doleur exquise.

Is happiness my life's greatest challenge?  Am I so used to not being challenged in any real way that my brain doesn't know how to react and is blaming my heart?  Is that why I am acting like an indignant child?

There is no more exposed a person than the honest writer, and there is no more dejected a than the thoughtful comedian.  Why does everything I touch turn to dust and ash?  I fear I am cursed to forever wander in this moribund world.  Men love the idea of me more than they love me.  I live in a prison of my own making.  Barred from any kind of lasting happiness.  I am a fuck-up. It was said best with, "No one gets to be all three.  You're a witch that must be burned at the stake."  It's true, I am not of this world.  I am from some other planet.  Some other dimension.

It's funny, I want so many things, yet nothing at all.  I don't know if happiness exists for me.  Some force just likes to taunt me.  Or I just like torturing myself.  I am the ultimate sadomasochist.  It's fun being the best at everything.

I felt that crashing sensation again tonight.  Where I just wanted to let the car run into something hard, looming and final.  I am too quixotic for this world.  I am too easily hurt, despite my collected, roll-with-the-punches demeanor.  Jokes deflect the inquiries into the real me.  The one that lies beneath the affability and the biting humor.  Pallacci Syndrome.  Humor's just another way to keep people at arm's length.

Negativity exists.  Horror exists.  Death, torture, rape, starvation, heartbreak exist.  You don't get to have your brooding moods at your leisure and expect it to not affect anyone.  I know happiness is work and some days I get tired.

I can't look him in the eye.  God, I'm a shit.  My brain is fried.  I can barely write.  I am on the threshold of sleep.  I feel like I may pass out right here.  Face down in the beans.  I missed him today.  I can't look that those damned things.  It's bullshit.

We did things and knew things about each other that would make an ordinary person's skin crawl.  Do you still like me? he asks.

I was in a throwy-smashy mood.

The less tired I become the more mad I feel.  The more tired, the more forgiving.  Probably because I just want to go to bed.

It was too intense, too deep to be maintained.  I don't want someone that makes me feel weak.  I want someone that makes me feel strong.  But I do feel a bit weak now. Maybe that's a good thing.  It's not an anxiousness, but a dull aching.  That dull ache, that level of hurt, that level of calculated slow-burning anger can only come from love.

There is something empowering about accepting your fate.  It gives you a say in it somehow.  The key to happiness lay in the realization there is no lasting happiness.  It is tempting and elusive, but all happiness is fleeting.  It is, but a hologram.  But once that idea is exposed, so comes clarity, followed by the most elusive mistress of all; freedom.  Existentialism once more reigns.

Post Script: Love is the ultimate and most befitting metaphor for my life. Like no other intangibility, it highlights the notion of black and white, the idea of extremes, polarization.  It can cause the greatest, most fulfilling excitement, satiation, happiness, but yet also the most intense, gut-wrenching, crushing pain, loneliness, and agony.  But you have to roll the dice to play the game.  The deadliest of emotional pendulums, love is still best when at one of the apogees. For resting in the middle is the true torture, where complacency and existential malaise lie. There's the secret.  Flying on either apex for as long as possible and riding that pendulum back the other way with the greatest of speed.  Either side is full of beautiful pain.  Without evil, there could be no good.  La doleur exquise.

Post Post Script-  Yeah, I totally get how fucking pretentious it is to do a piece of my own quotes.  Ugh, the self-indulgence, the ego.  I'm so fucking emo sometimes. Back to Dude.

I Wish The Orange-scented Morning Could Last Forever

Or maybe I don't. Fuck it. Fuck it all. I long for my old death-wish life. Where it didn't matter to anyone if I lived or died. Not really. Everyone would have gotten over it. I would have been doing them a fucking favor. They wouldn't need to worry about me any longer. I would be out of their hair. No more money, no more thought. They could just go live their lives. I refuse to make my pain others pain, until the final absolution of pain. I don't know if I can take the pressure of pretending to be happy all the time. I need an evil outlet. I can't deny that side of me. That's what took me down last time. Fuck my accursed dual nature. It's my cross to bear. Constantly warring inside my head, my heart, and my soul. There is no salvation other than the death. The pendulum always swings the other way. I felt so good yesterday. Then the oppression took over. All of my energy got sucked right down into the depths of my personal hell. Was it the house? Was it just an inevitable progression? Or was it more situational than I care to admit? I am over it? Not bloody likely. I never will be. How can one ever get over the crumbling of a monolithic mountain into the treacherous seas? Mountains shouldn't move, let alone dissolve, but yet there it went. Way down into the abyss; the Mariana Trench of our love. I wrote that tear-stained letter on the spot. I wonder if it's the last real love letter I'll ever write. I sure as hell hope not. But why do I keep sobbing uncontrollably at the thought of him? Is it because he has dug up these long-buried feelings? Feelings I never wanted to feel again. Or at least I thought I didn't. Fuck that. Of course I wanted to feel them again. Love is the only thing that makes life worth fucking living. Love has always ruled my life, but only because I have known unconditional love at such an early age. But like most beautiful things in this world, it is fleeting. It gets ripped away from our child-like hands, leaving us empty and alone. Instead of being such a neurotic asshole, I should probably start appreciating what the fuck I have. Once I figure out whatever that is. Happiness is a God-damned illusion. A hologram. Happiness will never rap upon the macabre's door. Am I destined to forever be unhappy? Am I too omniscient to be happy? Probably. Definitely. Why do I only get glimpses of happiness? That's it. Maybe that's how long excitement lasts. And when excitement fades, it leaves fear in its wake. Is this fear? Fear manifesting itself as sabotage. Perhaps my inner demons are not only evil to the external, but this evil knows no bounds. It is most malicious to its keeper. Like the tiger that attacks its doting and unsuspecting trainer. It's really planning that all along and everything else the tiger does is just biding time until that point. The lunge after the face is set in stone from the beginning. I do have evil in my genes. It's coursing through my veins. And someone must suffer at its hand. It's just a choice of me or them. Is suicide at that point selfish or is it then heroic? Saving my loved ones and society at large from my depraved madness. I am too quixotic for this world. Suicide is solace. Man, this morning sure devolved fucking fast. What the fuck is my problem? I am looking for things to be morose about? I seek out negative emotions. Like a God damned predatory bird. Swooping down and clutching a fuzzy life-filled woodland creature in my razor-sharp talons. Slicing the jugular of happiness with one deft motion. Letting the blood drip upon the town below. My eyes growing wide and satisfied with each plink-plink of crimson smearing the neutral landscape. Vermillion on wheat. Rouge on chestnut. Rust on pine. Vermillion on the face of the world. Vermillion streaming from my eye. Blood and gore, festering pus-filled happiness. I slice my own throat. Every fucking time. Hand me the straight razor. I want to be happy too. Happy like the rest of you baseless morons. Happy. Happiness is fresh. Virile blood spilled upon the earth. You can be happy too. Bloodlust is the only lust there is. All lust, all passion is fueled by blood. Dripping from my fingertips, dripping from my mouth. There is no need to come up for air. I smear it across my cheek. I will never be satiated, only temporarily full. It's the ancient evolutionary motivation to survive that doesn't allow for contentment. For if we are actually content, we become complacent. Complacency is death. The worst kind. Death by a thousand cuts. Death by chocolate. Death by sheer God damned boredom. What a fucking joke. A great big cosmic joke. It just dangles the threat of happiness in front of us. And like big fucking assholes we chase it round and round the fucking horse track. Thinking one day we will finally catch that stupid carrot in between our big horse teeth. Ha. The real key to happiness is knowing it doesn't actually exist. It only comes through in small and paltry laps. Just barely splashing over your toes. Tidal waves of happiness are a suspicious and cunning illusion. Be wary of them. They are not of this world. They are saline cons, set to knock us off our feet and drown us in a whirlpool of sorrow and disenchantment. It's all a lie. And it gets me every single fucking time. I'm drowning. In fear. In love. In hate. In banality. In illusion. Is there a rock to grasp onto in this swirling eddy? Maybe. It's up to me to let it reveal itself. To not try and move the rocks. To swim away from them in a rush of foolish pride and pseudo-romanticism. Fuck doleur exquise. Fuck this notion that love should equal pain or it's not "real" or worthy. Fuck that life should be tragic and tumultuous. A constant push/pull that inevitably ends in the rope breaking. Why can't love be quiet and sweet? Why can't it be subtle and slow? Pleasant and lovely; silly and light. Gossamer and ethereal. Instead of bitter and fiery. But that fire. It's that fire that burns white-hot in my belly. It's that fire that drives my machine. It's my only motivation besides time. It fuels my emotional firestorm. It greases my creativity and charges my freak magnetism. It lets my life stay interesting. It leaves the backdoor open for craziness. It allows a creative life. But the piper must be paid. Nothing's free. Neuroses, sadness, loneliness, misunderstanding, melancholy, malaise, torpor; these are it's only currency. Fuck you Kristoffersen. Fuck you for nailing that now-cliche line on freedom. I was free for ten agonizing months. With a blaze so hot burning inside of me that I could never sleep. I could never eat. The fire began to eat me alive. I was being burned alive. From the inside out. I was being burned alive. Yet, it was all so cold. The heat of the summer was no match for the iciness of my heart. My dual nature once more realized. My brain is the only thing inhibiting my happiness. It's the only thing standing in the way of living my life. It was easy to have fun and live my semblance of a life when I didn't give a shit about anything. There is no right or wrong in a death wish life. There is nothing. Ve belief in nos-zing. You don't need a conscience then. The crushing loneliness is your only combatant. But then you have your suicide fantasies to comfort you. The sweet midnight suicide fantasies; wild and out of control. Tying those cables around my neck I hung from the ceiling. Tightening it just enough so I could barely breathe, but still feel like I'm dying. Just a little.  Just enough.  The beautiful, tragic red lines it left around my slender porcelain neck. The image of my battered and broken body lain lifeless across a railroad track. My limbs contorted in the most unnatural and grotesque positions. With the most devilish smile smeared across my mangled face. Somehow a little life still twinkling in my big doe-eyes. Streaks of mascara and blood the only color left. But something stopped me. What was it? Was it the distant idea of this? Was it this? Am I just letting fear take over? I am. Because I know, better than most, how quickly absolute love can dissolve into absolute hate, and much worse absolute nothingness. I can't let that happen again. I refuse. I am stronger and better than that now. I know it's not easy. Nothing worth it ever is. Things scare me when they come too easy. I'm not used to goodness being handed to me. I'm used to having to claw my way, kicking and screaming to get just a little taste of pleasure. I feel like I only deserve it when I worked for it. When I've suffered for it.  Love is the only thing worth anything.  Buy the ticket.  Take the ride.  Well I already bought the God-damned ticket.  I'm too quixotic not to get hurt.  I'm too stubborn not to keep at it.  Happiness lies at the next oasis.

I wish the orange-scented morning could last forever.  Where no one could touch us.  Where the eternal madness doesn't exist.  On a plane where there is only purity and slivers of sunlight through leaden drapes.  There is no depression, no loneliness, no misunderstanding.  Just unspoken love in the form of citrus.  Red fingernails dancing among dirty blond curls.  A verdant field to lay my head upon.  Wildflowers and butterflies flood the landscape.  And booming bear growls fill the air with masculine contentment.  Nothing else matters in that incandescent world of our own creation.  It is a manifestation of our most longed-for desire.  What we've always thought we wanted.  Finally realized.  To exhale out all that toxic death we filled our lungs with for so long.  That black, gnarled, necrotic tar caked and encrusted on our most vital organs; choking and asphixiating the passion and essence of life out of us.  Out of me.  Squeezing, constricting me into submission.  Something just barely stopped me from acquiescing.  It sure as shit wasn't God.  But it was something inexplicable.  I was completely faithless.  But now I'm not so sure.  If God exists, then so exists the devil.  If the saint exists, as does the sinner.  More dual nature bullshit.  Bukowski had it right.  When the world makes you hate everyone, especially yourself, just go back to bed for three or four days.  Or longer.  Fuck the day.  I wish the orange-scented morning could last forever.

Together They Are Free

The morning was smeared with the colors of forgotten love. Old Chinaski's line echoed through her head on that wintry morning. It had been an unseasonably warm January, the fieriest she had ever felt, in fact, but not this morning. The algor of the old farmhouse was a welcome temper to the igneous night, alight with mania and sweat. The scuffed, well-worn planks that lined the creaky and warped floor were gelid underfoot, despite their caramel hue. The cloud cover cast a grey spell about the day, but inside the incandescent farmhouse, it only added to the fervor between them; a hard chiaroscuro, worthy of Caravaggio's hand. In a perfect world, she would have arose to make a proper and hearty farmhouse breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, from-scratch biscuits and sawdust gravy, but all they had was little brown envelopes of artificially-flavored oatmeal and hot water. It mattered not, as there was nothing artificially flavored about that morning, about them, about any of it. It was more authentic than any morning in its wake.
As she put the paltry spread together, organ music emanated from the drawing room. Is that the theme from Taxi? she wondered. It was. There was something oddly comforting about that particular piece of music, comforting and fitting; in consanance. It lent a romantic gravity to what seemed like a foreign-film dream. She peered down the length that the historied, mahogony swinging door afforded to find him with his back to her, gliding across the organ keys, against a bay of windows, letting in thin columns of grey light, casting beautiful contrasts upon the burgundies, chestnuts, and oaks of the drawing room filled with music and life. He was off in another world. Hell, they both were. They were elevated to a distant plane, some place, where for just the morning, no one could touch them. They were pristine, untapped, unspoiled; cultivating their power unburdened, untethered by a choking reality most can never escape from. There was an effervescence, an exaltation to the freshly chilled air; a purity, a happiness. A bounding, unbridled electric energy enveloped the morning in a viscous love. The crackle almost deafening. It wrapped around them with its unrelenting and capable arms. But instead of a stifling pressure or weighty shackles of iron, there was an inexplicable freedom. Together they were free. Two halves of an ancient brass key. The universe let them in on the joke, if only for a brief, ethereal moment, but they laughed nonetheless. It could have been two people anywhere, but it was them, right then.

Gettin' Fats: A "My Girl Josephine" Listening Project

So there seems to be three general schools of thought to this song penned and originally recorded by Fats Domino, straight covers in a jazz or blues style which comprise the bulk , much like Fats' version, then there are the rockabilly versions, and a handful of 60's mod/garage rock renditions with a few esoteric sub-genre versions peppered in. The playlist is flanked with the Fats Domino version, the original recording and a live version.

Fats Domino's original recording; I have a penchant for New Orleans jazz and Fats so his version is undoubtedly my favorite, but there are many interesting and worthwhile covers.


Charlie Feathers doing a very countrified take, more hillbilly than rock. Whatever they are doing with that guitar to make that "wah" saw-like sound is alright with me.


Lou Hobbs doing another country version, but getting warmer on the rockabilly front. I also kind of dig how he embedded "Your Mama Don't Dance" in there despite Loggins and Messina being pretty lame in my book.


Which brings us to my old frenemy, Johnny Rivers. Is there a song this guy didn't cover? Man. A whole career built on mediocre covers of fantastic songs. I know I use this guy as my musical punching bag a little too often, I mean he's no Pat Boone, but, seriously, nearly every listening project, this guy has covered the song. Every time his versions come on the radio, I just long for the originals, but I'll say this; he has good taste. Here's another tambourine-y Rivers cover.


Jerry Jaye does what Johnny Rivers couldn't with this purist rockabilly version.


Here's a straight rollicking rockabilly take in instrumental tradition, by Hank C. Burnette. (And yeah, I don't know what the stupid yodeling thing is at the beginning, if it's part of the actual track or not.)


Here's that kind of energy with the lyrics by Sleepy LaBeef. It's not groundbreaking by any means, but it's got a ton of energy and it looks like one hell of a concert.


Crazy Cavan and the Rhythm Rockers do their neo-rockabilly take, with a little Jerry Lee piana' thrown in.


Speaking of ol' Jerry Lee, here's a duet he did with the King sound-a-like, Jimmy "Orion" Ellis. Supposedly Lewis was the one that originated the "Ha-ha-ha" version of the song.


This is definitely moving into the 60's mod territory, but still has rockabilly tinges and the "ha-ha-ha" has turned into a maniacal cackle. Here are the Scorpions (the UK band, not be confused with the "Rock You Like a Hurricane" Scorpions.)


Here's a particularly shrill version by Billy Thorpe, with its unmistakeable 60's dance sound.


Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders try their hand more successfully at the tune, but it still has that clear early Beatles-esque/Dave Clark Five sound to it.


Chris Farlowe takes them all to school with this Animal-istic, darker 60's English blues slant with incredible energy. It's just layered with sound, it has both organ and piano, unobstructive percussion, great guitar picking and gruff and believable vocals. I am loath to admit it, but this version is probably the coolest of them all.


So I didn't quite know what to follow that musical madness up with, so here's "My Girl Josephine" in espanol. "Mi Chica Josefina" by Los Sonadores. It's about what you'd expect.


So, The Flamin' Groovies did a version, not all that notable, but it's included nonetheless. It makes you almost clamor for it to be even more 70's sounding. It's almost there, but not quite.


So here's a saxophone laden instrumental by Bill Black's Combo


An older reggae version to the Supercat one, therefore with less dub. Ken Parker doing a spin with "Hello My Little Queenie."


Queen Ida and Her Zydeco Band doing a full-on, zydeco version.


Taj Mahal merging blues and cajun' while slipping in some zesty French of his own. This is the tune that started me on this listening journey.


Long Gone Miles going straight blues, finally giving it that much desired blues harp the song just cries out for. (See image at around the 1:20 mark.)


Fat Domino doing a live version of his venerated classic.

Star-fucking Charles Bukowski

"You don't go on 'probably' when love and guns are in hand." -Pulp, 1994.

This is my homage to one of the greatest and most honest writers of modern or any time. The seed, the sleaze, the melancholy, the banal, the exhaustion; he nails it all simply and beautifully. “An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” I, in no way purport to have written any of this. This is all reprinted without permission (in full Bukowski tradition) and with the utmost reverence. To someone who has made me better, not just as a writer, but as an observer of the human race. Always on the outside looking in.

Tom Waits reads "The Laughing Heart" by Charles Bukowski


Bukowski on Love...


A smattering of quotes...

On Life
"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”

“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”

“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.” Post Office.

“The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.”

“The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.”

“We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting”

“Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.”

“dogs and angels are not
very far apart”

“For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter.”

“It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun”

"Without literature, life is hell."

On Death
“There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.”

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

“I was born to hustle roses down the avenue of the dead.”

On Love
"I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”

“Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.”

“A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”

“People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.”

“I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”

“Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.”

“She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn't have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.”

“your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn't help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over the river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you.”

“But now and then, a woman walks up, full blossom, a woman just bursting out of her dress…a sex creature, a curse, the end of it all.”

The written words of Charles Bukowski, "A Smile to Remember."


Charles Bukowski reads "Love," to a nitwit audience between belches.


I did not write the following story, but, man I wish I had. I did not write the following story, but I wish I did not identify with it so completely. I did not write the following story, but I wish it didn't have to comfort me so.

The Most Beautiful Woman In Town- Charles Bukowski

Cass was the youngest and most beautiful of 5 sisters. Cass was the most beautiful girl in town. 1/2 Indian with a supple and strange body, a snake-like and fiery body with eyes to go with it. Cass was fluid moving fire. She was like a spirit stuck into a form that would not hold her. Her hair was black and long and silken and whirled about as did her body. Her spirit was either very high or very low. There was no in between for Cass. Some said she was crazy. The dull ones said that. The dull ones would never understand Cass. To the men she was simply a sex machine and they didn't care whether she was crazy or not. And Cass danced and flirted, kissed the men, but except for an instance or two, when it came time to make it with Cass, Cass had somehow slipped away, eluded the men.

Her sisters accused her of misusing her beauty, of not using her mind enough, but Cass had mind and spirit; she painted, she danced, she sang, she made things of clay, and when people were hurt either in the spirit or the flesh, Cass felt a deep grieving for them. Her mind was simply different; her mind was simply not practical. Her sisters were jealous of her because she attracted their men, and they were angry because they felt she didn't make the best use of them. She had a habit of being kind to the uglier ones; the so-called handsome men revolted her- "No guts," she said, "no zap. They are riding on their perfect little earlobes and well- shaped nostrils...all surface and no insides..." She had a temper that came close to insanity, she had a temper that some call insanity.

Her father had died of alcohol and her mother had run off leaving the girls alone. The girls went to a relative who placed them in a convent. The convent had been an unhappy place, more for Cass than the sisters. The girls were jealous of Cass and Cass fought most of them. She had razor marks all along her left arm from defending herself in two fights. There was also a permanent scar along the left cheek but the scar rather than lessening her beauty only seemed to highlight it.

I met her at the West End Bar several nights after her release from the convent. Being youngest, she was the last of the sisters to be released. She simply came in and sat next to me. I was probably the ugliest man in town and this might have had something to do with it.

"Drink?" I asked.

"Sure, why not?"

I don't suppose there was anything unusual in our conversation that night, it was simply in the feeling Cass gave. She had chosen me and it was as simple as that. No pressure. She liked her drinks and had a great number of them. She didn't seem quite of age but they served he anyhow. Perhaps she had forged i.d., I don't know. Anyhow, each time she came back from the restroom and sat down next to me, I did feel some pride. She was not only the most beautiful woman in town but also one of the most beautiful I had ever seen. I placed my arm about her waist and kissed her once.

"Do you think I'm pretty?" she asked.

"Yes, of course, but there's something else... there's more than your looks..."

"People are always accusing me of being pretty. Do you really think I'm pretty?"

"Pretty isn't the word, it hardly does you fair."

Cass reached into her handbag. I thought she was reaching for her handkerchief. She came out with a long hatpin. Before I could stop her she had run this long hatpin through her nose, sideways, just above the nostrils. I felt disgust and horror. She looked at me and laughed, "Now do you think me pretty? What do you think now, man?" I pulled the hatpin out and held my handkerchief over the bleeding. Several people, including the bartender, had seen the act. The bartender came down:

"Look," he said to Cass, "you act up again and you're out. We don't need your dramatics here."

"Oh, fuck you, man!" she said.

"Better keep her straight," the bartender said to me.

"She'll be all right," I said.

"It's my nose, I can do what I want with my nose."

"No," I said, "it hurts me."

"You mean it hurts you when I stick a pin in my nose?"

"Yes, it does, I mean it."

"All right, I won't do it again. Cheer up."

She kissed me, rather grinning through the kiss and holding the handkerchief to her nose. We left for my place at closing time. I had some beer and we sat there talking. It was then that I got the perception of her as a person full of kindness and caring. She gave herself away without knowing it. At the same time she would leap back into areas of wildness and incoherence. Schitzi. A beautiful and spiritual schitzi. Perhaps some man, something, would ruin her forever. I hoped that it wouldn't be me. We went to bed and after I turned out the lights Cass asked me,

"When do you want it? Now or in the morning?"

"In the morning," I said and turned my back.

In the morning I got up and made a couple of coffees, brought her one in bed. She laughed.

"You're the first man who has turned it down at night."

"It's o.k.," I said, "we needn't do it at all."

"No, wait, I want to now. Let me freshen up a bit."

Cass went into the bathroom. She came out shortly, looking quite wonderful, her long black hair glistening, her eyes and lips glistening, her glistening... She displayed her body calmly, as a good thing. She got under the sheet.

"Come on, lover man."

I got in. She kissed with abandon but without haste. I let my hands run over her body, through her hair. I mounted. It was hot, and tight. I began to stroke slowly, wanting to make it last. Her eyes looked directly into mine.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"What the hell difference does it make?" she asked.

I laughed and went on ahead. Afterwards she dressed and I drove her back to the bar but she was difficult to forget. I wasn't working and I slept until 2 p.m. then got up and read the paper. I was in the bathtub when she came in with a large leaf- an elephant ear.

"I knew you'd be in the bathtub," she said, "so I brought you something to cover that thing with, nature boy."

She threw the elephant leaf down on me in the bathtub.

"How did you know I'd be in the tub?"

"I knew."

Almost every day Cass arrived when I was in the tub. The times were different but she seldom missed, and there was the elephant leaf. And then we'd make love. One or two nights she phoned and I had to bail her out of jail for drunkenness and fighting.

"These sons of bitches," she said, "just because they buy you a few drinks they think they can get into your pants."

"Once you accept a drink you create your own trouble."

"I thought they were interested in me, not just my body."

"I'm interested in you and your body. I doubt, though, that most men can see beyond your body."

I left town for 6 months, bummed around, came back. I had never forgotten Cass, but we'd had some type of argument and I felt like moving anyhow, and when I got back i figured she'd be gone, but I had been sitting in the West End Bar about 30 minutes when she walked in and sat down next to me.

"Well, bastard, I see you've come back."

I ordered her a drink. Then I looked at her. She had on a high- necked dress. I had never seen her in one of those. And under each eye, driven in, were 2 pins with glass heads. All you could see were the heads of the pins, but the pins were driven down into her face.

"God damn you, still trying to destroy your beauty, eh?"

"No, it's the fad, you fool."

"You're crazy."

"I've missed you," she said.

"Is there anybody else?"

"No there isn't anybody else. Just you. But I'm hustling. It costs ten bucks. But you get it free."

"Pull those pins out."

"No, it's the fad."

"It's making me very unhappy."

"Are you sure?"

"Hell yes, I'm sure."

Cass slowly pulled the pins out and put them back in her purse.

"Why do you haggle your beauty?" I asked. "Why don't you just live with it?"

"Because people think it's all I have. Beauty is nothing, beauty won't stay. You don't know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you you know it's for something else."

"O.k.," I said, "I'm lucky."

"I don't mean you're ugly. People just think you're ugly. You have a fascinating face."

"Thanks."

We had another drink.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Nothing. I can't get on to anything. No interest."

"Me neither. If you were a woman you could hustle."

"I don't think I could ever make contact with that many strangers, it's wearing."

"You're right, it's wearing, everything is wearing."

We left together. People still stared at Cass on the streets. She was a beautiful woman, perhaps more beautiful than ever. We made it to my place and I opened a bottle of wine and we talked. With Cass and I, it always came easy. She talked a while and I would listen and then i would talk. Our conversation simply went along without strain. We seemed to discover secrets together. When we discovered a good one Cass would laugh that laugh- only the way she could. It was like joy out of fire. Through the talking we kissed and moved closer together. We became quite heated and decided to go to bed. It was then that Cass took off her high -necked dress and I saw it- the ugly jagged scar across her throat. It was large and thick.

"God damn you, woman," I said from the bed, "god damn you, what have you done?

"I tried it with a broken bottle one night. Don't you like me any more? Am I still beautiful?"

I pulled her down on the bed and kissed her. She pushed away and laughed, "Some men pay me ten and I undress and they don't want to do it. I keep the ten. It's very funny."

"Yes," I said, "I can't stop laughing... Cass, bitch, I love you...stop destroying yourself; you're the most alive woman I've ever met."

We kissed again. Cass was crying without sound. I could feel the tears. The long black hair lay beside me like a flag of death. We enjoined and made slow and somber and wonderful love. In the morning Cass was up making breakfast. She seemed quite calm and happy. She was singing. I stayed in bed and enjoyed her happiness. Finally she came over and shook me,

"Up, bastard! Throw some cold water on your face and pecker and come enjoy the feast!"

I drove her to the beach that day. It was a weekday and not yet summer so things were splendidly deserted. Beach bums in rags slept on the lawns above the sand. Others sat on stone benches sharing a lone bottle. The gulls whirled about, mindless yet distracted. Old ladies in their 70's and 80's sat on the benches and discussed selling real estate left behind by husbands long ago killed by the pace and stupidity of survival. For it all, there was peace in the air and we walked about and stretched on the lawns and didn't say much. It simply felt good being together. I bought a couple of sandwiches, some chips and drinks and we sat on the sand eating. Then I held Cass and we slept together about an hour. It was somehow better than lovemaking. There was flowing together without tension. When we awakened we drove back to my place and I cooked a dinner. After dinner I suggested to Cass that we shack together. She waited a long time, looking at me, then she slowly said, "No." I drove her back to the bar, bought her a drink and walked out. I found a job as a parker in a factory the next day and the rest of the week went to working. I was too tired to get about much but that Friday night I did get to the West End Bar. I sat and waited for Cass. Hours went by . After I was fairly drunk the bartender said to me, "I'm sorry about your girlfriend."

"What is it?" I asked.

"I'm sorry, didn't you know?"

"No."

"Suicide. She was buried yesterday."

"Buried?" I asked. It seemed as though she would walk through the doorway at any moment. How could she be gone?

"Her sisters buried her."

"A suicide? Mind telling me how?"

"She cut her throat."

"I see. Give me another drink."

I drank until closing time. Cass was the most beautiful of 5 sisters, the most beautiful in town. I managed to drive to my place and I kept thinking, I should have insisted she stay with me instead of accepting that "no." Everything about her had indicated that she had cared. I simply had been too offhand about it, lazy, too unconcerned. I deserved my death and hers. I was a dog. No, why blame the dogs? I got up and found a bottle of wine and drank from it heavily. Cass the most beautiful girl in town was dead at 20. Outside somebody honked their automobile horn. They were very loud and persistent. I sat the bottle down and screamed out: "GOD DAMN YOU, YOU SON OF A BITCH ,SHUT UP!" The night kept coming and there was nothing I could do.

Poem from Love is a Dog From Hell

there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.

“If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.”