We have been sitting at this godforsaken desk all damn day, staring at the blank white spaces and wondering when little squiggly lines will fall from heaven (or bubble up from hell) and choke this terrible emptiness. We have drunk all the liquor in the place, have had the kettle steaming for nearly seven hours, have let all the old tales race through our terrible putrefied brain so many times we may soon vomit until there is nothing left but the skeletal framework. . . .

This is here more for us than it is for you, but you may take something away from it if the hatches of your brain are open and ready to receive the world. And they should be. If they are not, then what in god’s name are you doing here, you beast?

Anyway, a little Hemingway to throw into the mind’s fire:

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.

Now, we put hands to keys—silent ones, damn them; no clacking at all—and perhaps a story will emerge from this godless pollution.

Mother and Father, forgive us.

And to the Oakland Police Department, we have just five words for you: It was not an accident.

No, no—it won’t do to go out. I will stay here in this sunken room and shield it from the sun.

Earlier in the butterfly room I swallowed a capsule with cranberry juice and sat around and waited for the light show. She had said, “It will take some time.” And I asked her if I could be off to get to my hole and she said, “I think so.” I rocketed to 34th in a car full of people who would soon be strangers.

Had I stopped working? I think I had. There were only weeks left until I left that place for-ever.

Rushing through that slanted house, watching it become more slanted, I put on a purple t-shirt and welcomed the strangeness. There were faces in the back yard and I wanted nothing to do with them. Instead I wanted only to sink to the bottom of the tank and stay where it was cold and blue.

Oh, the electricity!

Outside a woman is pushing a baby carriage. A band is practicing several blocks away. I open the door and when I breathe I feel heat fill the emptiness. I shut the door and in seconds I am empty again.

Something dashes by and I scoop it up. It is a creature I have seen before. In my arms it is grey and squirming. Big green insect eyes growing and shrinking like little balloons. My son! I hardly recognized you through the rot in my head.

Don’t come in here. For god’s sake, don’t come in here. I pay for this damn room and I want those doors shut as long as I am near them.

“I had waited a long time for her—or rather I was somewhere and she was somewhere else, and from time to time I remembered her and wondered if she liked me. She had told me something was coming in the mail and I knew that when it got to me I might find a roadmap for the future, if any, and however vague. There would be clues, maybe, if I was lucky, veiled behind a show of gratitude. Or perhaps it would be an outright admission of love. But more than likely it would be more strange indifference. And really it was all the same; whatever answers I would find in her words would not bring comfort to me either way. It was all just vapor that, when I was feeling rotten, I liked to believe was more.”

Tomorrow I will wake with the sun and descend into the cellar to work on my robot girlfriend. Soon—soon she will awaken for the first time and take my hand and we will go off together.

Our love will be strong and we will prove to the world that humans and machines can love each other!

We will be so happy! We will want for nothing!

I love you, Isabella, even though so far you’re just a toaster with googly eyes I drew in Sharpie.

I will for sure torture myself until the sun explodes because what the heck else am I going to do with my time!!!!

🙂

I don’t know what this is or why I wrote it, but it was definitely me who wrote it:

My favorite horror game is Kingdom Hearts. Nary a moment exists in my nighttime thoughts when I am not haunted by the deep-black images of this loathsome horror-fantasy. You control a floppy-footed little boy with gorgeous hair who wields a large key (keys scare me). Later, we are introduced to a talking mouse aided in his dark sorcery by his googly-eyed clan of miscreants. They are an insidious group of roughnecks, to be sure. A mentally deficient dog and a violent, alcoholic duck round out your so-called “party”, and the three of us explored hallucinogenic worlds glazed in every nightmarish hue of the rainbow. Oh! And up out of the ground come these goop-y creatures with bug eyes! Most frightening of all: they are without hearts! If this isn’t some sort of deep metaphor, I don’t know what is, but surely it scared the wits right out of me. These little horrors attacked my floppy-footed boy, and said downright nasty things to him in squirming, inhuman voices. So I hit them with the enormous key, and what a dreadful task that was. . . . Lord God am I ever shivering, just pondering this memory! I’m afraid I don’t have it in me to describe in detail the dreaded gelatin craft that I was charged with piloting. Such a thing might do this old heart in good (but at least I have one!).

I wish I could remember the context. Maybe there never was any context. Yeah.

eightbroz

Pictured: two young men who will never, ever get laid again.

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This is some fine tobacco. I have been smoking it all afternoon and into this deep dark Oakland night. No snow tonight—no, they say it will never come. For god’s sake, why would it?

We have been warped on guerrilla sake and fermented arugula for days now. The tobacco is a new addition. John picked it up this afternoon on his way through Berkeley, from a tobacconist who will not allow us to smoke inside. That’s just the way it is in that godforsaken city, and we’re not going to challenge them. Hell, if we did, they’d have us in the lotus position with pistols pointed at our heads for the rest of our lives. We’d be dead men, for all intents and purposes. So we don’t question the rules: we take the money and we run.

In this case the money was tobacco.

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In Virginia, where we were born and figured things out, tobacco is king. Always has been.

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Last night, our kinsfolk collected us from this dark place where we dwell and took us to a fine new eatery on San Pablo Avenue. They had met the owners (we think (if it actually happened, we have chosen to believe them)), at a wine tasting in Napa Valley. The owners had said, “Come on by.” And so, hours after we had drunk the last drop of whisky we had in the place, we took a handful of barbiturates (god knows which) and were whisked away, not far south, to Uptown, which for some is a nice enough place, and for others is an invasive tumor which Oakland is sick with all over.

cough

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Maybe none of that happened. We did go to a restaurant. We’re sure of that part. It was called Mockingbird, and the decor was bright and crisp and the menu was small and probably perfect. It felt strange though, sitting there a few blocks from the Greyhound station where a man in terrible sunglasses had once asked me for $37 US dollars so he could get to Las Vegas. Another time I’m pretty sure I witnessed a birth on that sidewalk. I was on my bicycle, going someplace on an important errand (always important), at 15 mph, so maybe it was a mock-birth. It’s Oakland, man. Who knows.

Things are changing, I reckon. Mockingbird is new and beautiful. I am glad it exists.

I myself puff had the house pasta, which was good fun. John had strips of something—an animal, maybe, not too long ago—and the best-tasting French fries a man could ever hope for. Everyone except me drank merrily from the wine that had been hand-selected, days earlier, from a winery in Napa Valley—and I sipped a tall glass of water and pawed at the black rings under my eyes with whatever free hand I had available.

Pictures were taken for the matriarch in the east. John and I were caught off guard; the night was getting colder and our minds were dim. So we posed naturally, which is to say we didn’t pose at all, leading to the abomination you see at the top of this post. We look like a couple of psychos who live off caffeine and stay up until 5 am every single god darn night.

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In all likelihood, no sensible person will ever love either of us again. Especially if they’ve seen this picture. Our future was already doomed and I have doomed us further (and faster) with its publication.

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It’s a damn funny place, this world.

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Mockingbird is great. Try their desserts.

Before last week I hadn’t dreamed in two years. And now, suddenly, I am dreaming every night . . . and it is a terrible dream, because it is so sad, and because it is always the same one, and because it ushers me into a day that I could care less about.

In my dream it is winter and I am in Maryland. Outside it is dark and there is snow on the ground and I can see the smoldering orange lights of Baltimore above the black trees that encircle my yard. Dante and Virgil are curled up on a snowflake-patterned blanket at the foot of the bed. M is brushing her teeth in the bathroom down the hall. Gently I peel the comforter open and turn off the bedside light. The room is mostly shadows now but some moonlight makes its way through the grey sheet hanging over the window and casts a ghostly glow on M as she pads over the carpet in slippers. I touch her arm as she gets near and hug her—I almost never hug anyone—and she says something about Dante and Virgil and we get into bed. She is facing the wall and her back to is to me and I pull her close to my body and the dream goes dark.

The whole thing lasts 30 seconds and when it ends I awake in my own bed, in what I can only assume is the present, and stare upwards at the ceiling until I cannot tolerate another minute of feeling sorry for myself.

I am 25 years old and sleep doesn’t comfort me. I mean it really doesn’t do anything to my body. What’s going on? And now I am frightened of closing my eyes at night and going back to that person who no longer wishes to know me and to the place where I am no longer welcome.

Lord.