1

SUBJECT SOCKED BY BRICKWALL OF PETIOLE OIL + PURPLE BUD N-BLACK LIGHT EXPECTING GOD KNOWSWHAT HERE, HE BUYS $4 BEER AND SETS IT DOWN, A CONFEDERATE DRINKS, AND CLAIMS BEER WAS HIS. NOTE : ELEVATED HORMONALS, SUPPRESSED TO MAINTAIN POST-DIURNAL GOOD-EVIL IMBALANCE. HERE ON EARTH, PEOPLE OFTEN KILLED FOR LESS-EVOCATIVE ACTS.

"Mutherfucker; I hope that poisons you!"

Inner diatribe disturbs PC vibe, already threatened by gang dropout red eye w/violent slow-shuffle SECURITY shirts on. People in magician hats and dreadlocks counteracting this negativity, busy forecasting a no nuclear war world police state peace with warm fuzzy-hug luvy-looks for everyone overtime plus superspacedoutcosmicconnect dancing whenever you feel like it. While rave music throbs, two floors down note sax hooked to computer-imaging bled blew and blasted below, amidst micro-orgonistic couplings in a six hundred stoned X massive throng moving. I was wandering around the Grateful Dead cover band, above the riot heads. An Old-genX new-gen sandwich in a huge warehouse with defunct sellers dolled up to nightly vibe, whatever it might be. Security uniformly-suited and apparently brain-dead from Crack and other steel-eating chemicals. Add Blood and violence. Damn! Nothing like a flat tire on a way to the gig and a stolen last-four-buck beer to sour your mood. Where did I think I was off to, 4 am flat no spare forgot the jack dead broke? Hard not to think about time, as its razing to meet you. Shit! The big nine mile walk home!? Just try hitchhiking a pitch black middle of the night big city all soaked! I assume against all known precedent, my spare isn't flat. Just to make myself feel better. Don't even check.

HE IS THWARTED, TRYING TO FIND HER.

Loud music : Shake like a small delicate tree in a fearsome windstorm. Hulks of flesh, jiggling some cosmic vibe Jerry left behind. Husks without grain inside, some of them-small predators hatched from within, consuming the spirit of spirits. Leaving minute cobwebs in steadwake. They feed off the energy mortal flesh drags around with it; their ancient Kimono Dragons, brightly colored spins invisible, and not. In the world without being completely. Scary carrion mongers, unaware nature's anything but right, creating them this way. After all, the reason people come here is to feed, or be fed upon

HE HAS JUST COME FROM WORK. HIS BOSS HAS A BULBOUS BROW, WITH A THICK DOUBLE ARCHED EYEBROW, EXTENDING EAR TO EAR.

Body set in excruciating concrete of charliehorsed muscles, unable to move when twenty-minute bell rang, a minor puddle of underarm sweat pooling beneath my stool. Lxxxxxx Hxxxx is dabbling his pencil to rough matte paper, still virile at 96, and I tell him I'm related to Ms Coit, and her tower where his somewhat bold 1936 painting hangs. He was my age, stroking her oils. Two hours to go. Time is crawling. One minute after another I'm aging. His hand moves slowly, ghosting my buck-naked image. It is hardly even here. Another man, a Surrealist runaway, boldly criss-collides charcoal, pencil and pen and I am trying to keep my eyes in one place, breathing slowly, as vision cross-eyes, and peripherals to granularity go. It is a strange form of hallucination, drifting shut lids-enlarged on two hours of sleep, stories of on-LSD abortion, trout with cranberry chutney-relish, small colored potatoes, chocolatie-passionfruit sorbet, and cocaine. Wind that slants rain up. Sounds of birds of early morning, witch's hat... the long kiss goodbye. Rumble of magnesium slip-on, idling. One-hour-fifty-minutes to go. Naked coil heater next to me. Hard not to think erotic thoughts. Feel the twitch of what will be an embarrassing situation. Any second now. Panic. Focus on drainpipe... think about sweatsoldering it. The sizzle of vaporizing flux; the supreme moment metal flows into fittings. Effortlessly-like magic. Rise descents. Plumbing sure-fire. One-hour-forty-five.

And counting

They stuck a beer company bracelet over my wrist, making point it allowed me to drink. I read its irony, which striking one out of seven patrons eating K-fried chix ignoring the warning. Who do they think

THEN WHAT?

THESE POOR LOST SOULS, WERE EMPTY, AND NOT IN A BUDDHIST WAY.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN? they are?!

-three like looking hipsters exuding slightly more (energy) than they gained. From the consciousness-bending light show fantastic thumping bass rock band, that is.

WOW.

That's when he handed it to me. I must admit, I'd been watching him make it... squeezing what looked like milky cerulean crystal, or little bits of translucent pussy willow, into meager rolling paper. It seemed rather likely, the whole skooch would split its sided cylinder, first attempt to roll. But marvelous deft fingers, moving across its length! Twice a normal Rastafarian scrunchin. At least. He admires the handiwork for a fraction of a second, lights and passes. To me. Who is looking for a remedy for a quickening bad mood. And to the girl. Dancing on my right foot.

which changes fate's gears. Over-Thinking makes isolation, and criticism occur. Mmmm. Interesting thought. Man passes me huge joint, containing goblin's egg, to make point. I hoover modestly. WHAM! HELLO? A door shut abruptly. I'm having a bad Kubrickian power dive, an outmoded HAL9000 chuckling evily in background. What the>...?

(What the>...?) "...fuck did you put in there?" hearing the echoes hit me, glancing off the now, extra-oblique walls.

"Nthin. Jut-Splum/y-knw."

I thought he said. Image wavering.

Splum?

What's splum?

Well, that's the rub of it. Splum. From the minor-something nebula,

he claimed.

Dad, you're joking me.

I wish I were, son.

Then what happened?

I'm not sure, even now. Next thing I know…

I was completely gone. Blat. Mozzie plus flyswatter. Shirtless, shitheaded, looped lasered lost and buttfucked all in one. He was a giant dirigible, tethered to earth with a helium string people paraded around, so they could talk funny. MASSIVE FLYING ARCHES, POSING AS EYEBROWS. GET SOME TODAY! I remember that scrolling across it. I'd ask questions, and it would interrupt the public disinformation, to answer. It was horrendously loud, but nobody said anything. I plugged my ears, and a variable resistor appeared. The kind that used to com-troll volumes on radios, before the insidious electronic tuner + - thing happened. WHAT'S SPLUM? reeled across the dirigible's plasma screen. I nod morbidly. Splum. SPLUM IS A MILD INTOXICANT UTILIZED FOR BETTER OXYGEN ASSIMILATION BY DEEP SPACE TRAVELERS. IT HAS THE DOUBLE SIDE EFFECT OF TELEPATHIC UNITY WITH ALL SENTIENT CREATURES ABOVE GRADE SEVEN, AND BELOW GRADE NINE. Amoebas and interling humans. The new iihb2 factor Xstrength sip-slowly cherub flavored supplement is available to upgrade certain high functioning quadrupeds to unity with lower plants, and other inter dimensional entities. There are however, strains of off-nebula contraband splum geometweaked for enhanced narcotic effect, and ensuing inter... I got tired of reading, it scrolled too fast. Something about the gills on his cheeks, really bothered me... moving in time with the eyebrow....

What's with this guy? I wonder if he's an undercover lizard.

"You'll have to get in back. Here's a garbage bag to sit on."

The Jeep's full of steam (a broken water hose?) or am I just high? This is the abduction people recall under expensive hypnosis, able to blame ensuing life ills-upon. Because, I can't see a thing, sitting on a swimming pool, courtesy of the rainiest winter on record; and tractor beams couldn't be this smooth. As he passes evil looking cylinder #2, cudgel to the back of a brain, my direction. Tip burning. (Smells pretty good though.)

And then, this nagging voice.

"In the environment of existence, collective consciousness quickly becomes a self-perpetuating entity, roughly paralleled by the growth of your internet. Its active memory creates Time, the feeling of existence, the subjective state we engender-requiring a stall before untime, or emotion we oust in favor of [PAUSE] … space-holders. It parts, and defines the interference patterns, constitutes our hiacity, and 'oneness'. Information is evolving its own way. It has become self-referential; it updates itself, in increasingly sophisticated, and more automated ways."

"Huh?"

Someone invisible is talking to me, from the back of my head.

Yea you.

Guess what?

No boys from the hoods, swinging rusty chains.

What's that supposeta mean? Is there more? Then what happened? What'd he say next?

Sorry boy; you have to go to bed now. Sweet dreams...

No; for you, dad. More tomorrow night? Pleeasse?

2

SHIPLEY AT THE BRIDGE OF LARGE SUPERDELUXESTRATOCRUISER. A TORTURED, TESSELLATING SYSTEM-CHECK SCREEN RUNS DIAGNOSTIC SUBROUTINES. AN ALTIMETER, DOING MASSIVELY-SCARY THINGS. CONTROL SURFACES, PEELING PAINT. LOUD, CONFIDENCE - ERODING NOISES. CLUNKS AND SCREAMS OF HYDRAULICS TRYING TO CONSUMMATE CHAOS. CAMERA DOCUMENTS TERROR ON DREAMERS' FACES, THEIR CONTROL STICKS IN HANDS.

Once, I took a little trip, an the strangest thing happened to me.

After the last strangest thing?

Exactly.

He drove a BART link shuttle ferrying bag-laden tourists to / from the Oakland Airport. I was the only passenger in his ultra-plush brand new European style double-high as he talked, the Grateful Deadathon fading.

"Yea/like to play them slots. Nothin dangerous no more, fast cars-n-faster woman. Know whaddI mean? Cept damned slats justbout killed me last time. Not outright... but afterwurds."

"What happened?"

"Playin' nickls, go the 777777 bells and sirens thought-ah-hell, wona cupplehundred r-sumthin. Man walks up to me, sez, 'Mr., yougotchurself fiftenn-gran. What'ch thinkboutthat?' and I said yur shittn me. Ain'tcha?" Fifteen grand ruined a life? [TRANSCRIPT: FIFTEEN EARTH GRAND'S A HUNDRED MILLION, TO SOMEBODY USED TO FIFTEEN GRAND ON A DAILY BASIS] I'm thinking. "Ahbought everything. Car, motorcycle, TV, stereo, new curtains, furniture, boat, tuk the ole-lady to Vegas, took the folks to NYC, but she wanted half. I said hell no you ain't gettin half! I had to drag your ass here [RENO], an it was my nickle. Then my parents wanted some, an ma first wife. Fuckinhell. It wusa nightmare. I bought the family a buchashit like appliances, outfittedt the girlfriends's place real nice, she takes off with anudder bruddr behind my back, an we were suppose to get married (but ah backed outa that one an hour before, afterdat shit)! So I walk in on em, the fuckedup dude pulls a knife on me-I had to defend myself! Didn't I? Mutherfucker so fulla himself, fell on the damned thing as I got the hell outathere, thinkin' Iz lucky to still be breathin', cuz the dude was big ugly anbaad; when the cops show up, said ahdid it-an they both backed em up, said-ahpulled the knife on him…! Bastards told me the dude was dying, an then he was dead, and I was goin' dowwn. I thought I'zburnt toast over fifteen gran anna loose-legged hoe. Fuck! Just about hung myself. But they let me out, lied about all of it-assholes. Dude's okay, he wasn't pressin' no charges… but those two stole all the rest of ma cash an made sure I wouldn't see my first kid no more. Bullshit! Couldn't wait to blow town on that business. Letemd-keep that money! Both of-em. Bitch came crawlin' back with a habit later, an ah felt sorry for her. Never again! Stay single, ma man! Mark those words! Now, you look fer me, next time youneed to get somewehr. We shook hands.

The way it meant something.

Where were you going?

Doors swoosh, star-trek style, people more agitated than happy to land. Look out there, give that boy some rooom! [NEWFOUND SLOTS FRIEND] He's goin' up Norht. Tathat snow. I'm little woozy, from the high of leaving while going to arrive so soon, wholenutherplacenewpeople, blurred lights through Oakland windows, a residual haute cocaine. Transporting chemicals across imaginary arboreal line for quasi-general enlightenment. Not selling to people bent on services, misusing Dow's better livin' thru chemicals to suture-shut wounds need to weep; feel, and burn. Crying kids and metal detectors. The ramp. Elderly first. Kids. Parents empowered, or encumbered with them. Hollow rinds of people, milling shepherd dreams. Waiting for the fall of the rope. Flashbacks of Grateful DEAD, milling to groove.

I was heading to the slopes. It had supposedly snowed two feet.

Snowboarding, or skiing?

Both maybe. Who knew?

"Sales. Here's my card."

Intergalactic Management.

I thought it was a joke.3

"Because we're all formed from the ashes of long-dead stars."

And besides, he said later, we're expanding into other universes" Which seemed like a concept. "Ha! They think there's nothing out there! You're expanding into us, and we're colliding with you, superimposing the realities, slightly." At our local supercluster's dire-edge. He quickly moves-topics to trees, claiming the largest old growth in this sector once flourished cross-bay, in Oakland, which I somewhat doubt, but what the hell do I know? He's probably right about star dust. And redwood dust. Our shamefully-smutty slumber… WANDERING A COSMIC OCEAN OF MELTED EMOTIONS. REFREEZING TO ICE, I forgot to add. Where you STRUGGLE to love your own death, as much as you do your life. Something like that. While I'm hopelessly enjammed in his wavelengths, entANGLED IN to and out of myself... his/my image in is reflection out. "Incapacitation, is protection from failure or success, because having never truly tried to succeed, there is no true failure. Throw a lit match into a human's capricious volatility, and watch his-her over-voluptuous bonfire blaze. We're mutating; going to heaven; living in hell.

'Fearing our own extinction' as he stated.

Star dust, re-orienting itself.

Dad?

Yes son?

Do you think space feels itself?

She didn't consider herself any hod pile, or stunner. A HEDONIST, most definitely not, she claimed. The girl had exquisite features; a small chiseled nose graced a face that somehow accented her strong fluid limbs. And although sexuality intrigued her, it also scared her. She thought it better-expressed through dance, all pent-up, and denied. In-between. The thought of self exposure-whiteout. Without a framework, or stage. Terrified. As

Deep easy chairs Plush with sinking eyelids, as poetry-mad

monotonous next X-gen hipster

drones perfect anthropomorphisms,

inciting REM sleep his egotistic monody mindfuck, devoid of

sweets and tears. Some tincture of a keener sense of the absurdity of human affairs...

(Lifted from the early-revelation oratory arcanna of Huysmans' hardbound edition.)

"Have you ever considered about how little we know about things?"

Out of the blue, as breath rate increases. A second or two after feeling slight wetness right thigh, where it wove a Vee of her legs.

"I mean, you or I could be space travelers, posing as earthlings, studying reproductive biology, or alien hormonal response. Anything! It's really wide open."

Not a good metaphor. Less than. I shift, to increase groin contact, simultaneously passing superlight caress over her lovely brown, highly-erect nipple. Trying to maintain turgidity.

I breathe viciously into ear, and probe the hard bits of her belly button.

"You mean those interplanetary needles… the inquisition-cold operating tables and crude, post-bright light tractor beamatta shot by bad-sunglass extraterrestrials? They upset study-victims excessively?" she is being a trifle patronizing.

Hand at satin-smooth skin, edge of pubic zone.

Creeping across. Painful slowness.

"Well of course it was hatchet-science. More objective is less, we like to say now. Mostly, we did it for the tourists. Like throwing meat to alligators, in your male college admission-paid reptile farms." She's strangely detached, on one elbow looking out her window. By the fraternities, as if people never look in, her naked torso perfect build.

"I mean, if that's the way things really were; for instance."

ALIGNED NEURAL CORTEX GENITAL LINK SEVERS BEFORE INSERTION. ERECTILE FACTOR POINT SEVEN, ON SCALE OF NINE-[TEN ORGASMIC .] SUBJECTS CONSIDER CONVERSATION SLIPS OF TRUTH, OR CON-PLEX PROTECTION MECHANISMS. NOTE ELEVATED AWARENESS LEVELS.

Note Joe-Shmoe-thought about agains. One more time. And how it's better to do+act a first time around. About death, and how it's constantly approached. Like one minute, you're eating a hamburger, and the next you're shitting bright red blood internal organs scrambled by E.coli 0157:H7 while samesaid microorganisms go to work liquefying vital parts of organism's brain In-finito, AKA Toast. Black in the morning, smoke silting delta of your door. Lamp timer errs. Which jointers odd thoughts Like: if you were served a death sentence, you would try to escape. Wouldn't you? The hijacker, and parole officer expect it. Any way you can. But we're all served death sentences. Literally. So how come...?

Hmmm.

4

That's when I remembered.

FLASHBACK: The Grateful Dead Cover Band.

SUBJECT SPONTANEOUSLY INCITES HYPNOGOGIC MEMORY WALKING TO CAR, FINDS TIRE FLAT FOR THE SECOND TIME IN TWO DAYS. LOTS OF BACKGROUND NOISE AND PEOPLE LAYING ON BLANKETS IN BETWEEN SETS. A HEAVYSET MIDDLE-AGED MAN IN CHARTREUSE SEALSUCKER SUIT COMES UP, BEGINS TAKING OFF PANTS (REVEALING TIE-DYED PASHA DUDS) WHILE DISCUSSING THE MUFFIN HE PROCEEDED TO LITTER FLOOR, AND OCCUPANTS WITH, STUFFING HIS MOUTH BETWEEN WORDS, AND WILD GESTICULATION, FIGHTING KNOTTED SHOELACES.

BlahBlahBlah…

"And I was appalled to notice a glass of milk and a unremarkable choco-chunk muffin constituted half my scientifically - allowed calories for 24 hour period. Ipso facto, what the hell are you humans doing calling this a snack? You know what I mean?"

"I've never really thought about it."

Why would I want to? I like eating muffins. I'm thinking, almost aloud.

"Say, where's your ID card?"

His question takes on over-significance, given general merriment around us.

"I lost it."

(Me. Pointing to fray in front of the stage. Helplessly.)

"Oh, bad luck. It's a zoo in here. But just where do you plan on getting another?"

A little too coolly, like he's about to report me, or inform the next replacement processing center in the far arm of McVvbt1 [unrepronounceable] my account has expired, making me jump all the way to 002 [ditto] to get another ID card. Except I'm fresh out of luck, because nobody lets you into hyperspace without one. I shrug.

"Maybe I'll find it afterwards."

"Uh-huh."

He is looking at me with two rather solicitous eyes, and now that I notice it, a strange undulation forehead dead-center. You'll find it all right. Like a gold brick dropped on a free soup kitchen floor reappears at sweeper's broom front, later that night. An ID card returned. Sure! That's a good one.

FLASHBACK FADES OUT. LIGHTS DIM TO REVEAL

APPARENTLY-DRUNK MAN HUDDLED IN ALLEY REEKING SLIGHTLY OF URINE. MAN IS BEING TOLD ABOUT STRANGE CONVERSATION SUBJECT RECENTLY HAD. ['RATHER ECLECTIC, THIS FELLOW. NO REASON TO THINK HE WAS DANGEROUS-BUT I WONDER WHY THEY LET HIM OUT OF WHEREVER HE WAS DETAINED.] SUBJECT IS BORED. IT IS A LONG WALK HOME FROM WHERE JEEP THE PILOT DROPS HIM OFF. ROLLING HIS GREASY FLAT TIRE.

Where were you?

Howard Street, more or less.

He said it was them tourists, mostly. Hellif I know what he meant.

We've come here to check out the lasers.

The what?

Your laser weapon.

Oh.

[SUBJECT BLASÉ OVER ANOTHER SECRET THING GOVERNMENT SPENDS ENDLESS UNACCOUNTABLE FUNDS ON.]

Is it very powerful?

It's getting there.

By…. I mean, how…? (Tourists?)

SUBJECT EXPERIENCING RATIONAL LOGJAM

To the key step before the Hypercolloidal transdirection photonic pulse-drive. You know how particles can be in one place, and then another, in their same instant?

Yea. I mean, they've told me it's true.

They tell you, because we're giving you little pieces of a big picture, so you'll claim posterity later. You people need to sort things out still; but you'll see, a more appreciable majority of your species do not understand quantum phenomena. You are a race of non-adepts in an alchemy of your age. (Why am I listening to this?-a latent fascination, I guess, with educated, articulate gutter drunks?)

Why do you think?

[NOTE SUBJECT'S BELIEF IN THE CONTROL OF THIS INTERACTION.]

There's no immediate survival value in being able to do so. At least, not in your basic eat and fuck sense. But we're doing it at every level. For instance….

[BOTTLE SMASHES IN THE BACKGROUND; CAR TIRES SQUEAL.]

"Even those of you who dolly these concepts from one place to another, avoid the most basic askable questions, like : Why does mathematics even work? At all! You know what I mean? We grapple that concept every time we use this stuff (math?) before we get anywhere interesting."

"Ummm…"

(I'm trying to mice-around-the-cheese-Why are you here, laying in your own probable piss?)

…That's very interesting. Yea. [SUBJECT SO DISJOINTED, NOT FULLY COGNIZANT MIND WAS READ] I was one of those tourists. Jumped ship-good sex and all. And this super stuff. [HOLDS BOTTLE ALOFT] 'bout seven months ago. Bit of an embarrassment at home. Government turns a blind eye, really.... kind'a likes a show of force. And an occasional hands-up, when the psychofog rolls in. You'll see. Those days, it's all about the Providers. Their whole shmear those last church anstate [COLLOQUIALIMS] government n-corporationsdays. Tourists Funds Exploration in Multibillion Private Mars Venture. Just wait. It's coming. Government works it out real sweet, that one. What a deal! Extra payload of unc Sam. Thanks for talking; gotta sleep now. Atmosphere's hell on us.

Snoring champ, in five seconds flat.

Who was he?

A creative drunk, a lost Kansas tourist from upping Maddog stock, or a space alien.

WOWeee!

Groggily, I read about it, in de-classified false leads to throw off geeks with nothing better to do than search for national secrets on the internet, late at night. There must be hundreds (thousands?) of CIA-NSA apertures designed leak 'secrets' to hackers with modicums of internal gears churning, assimilating them in the meanwhile, hacker thinking they've unearthed conspiracy carpet sweepings (nasty pay-dirt). It's the government's disinformation web, minus all costly spies. General Shmeneral's comment on airborne laser weaponry "… potentially comparable in importance to the atomic bomb." Which suggests super-secret ground bases might be way more powerful in the old claimed speed vs. Classified Actual knottage-secretive Blimps and Blighs helming programs that can't actually disseminate their success to lure weighty, non-covert corporate funds without ace in hole kitty outta bag. Must be tough on dye-hards, the military-industrial steamblowers, having to suck to senile anti-tech naysayers and butter-not-guns greenies, when they're kicking every middle east ex-rooskie slant-eye proverbial ass! 'Well, it doesn't work yet." "It's still in test stages." "It's theoretically possible… if we only had…" Read asymmetrically as ampped-up boys with toys hands on genitals whack-off while photon beams punch nine inches of moving reinforced steel hundred something away. With shouts of glee, and nostril-cringing ozone fields. And the best part is, that was last year's Christmas show entertainment! Meanwhile, perfectly good millions divert to hands-n-knees parkajocks cold-fingering Antarctic nematodes. It's a crying shame rattle clank chains for untraceable cash, so secretive; with proprietary weapons of mass destruction. Etc.

[SUBJECT IS FANTASIZING. NOTE SEGMENTSTRINGS OF TRUTH, INFILTRATING]

I began thinking differently. Perhaps the whole problem with "science" is its reticence to invoke the supernatural. If that's what this is. Yes. A problem of definitions.

Didn't I vote on something like this?

[BIOCOMPUTER ATLANTIS]

(Didn't he say I'd forget this?)

Then what happened?

Right after I had the actual feeling this had happened before, I got a strange e-mail.

Dear Sir, you are in the emerald city and I'm in the city of rusted steel (and bricks and things Slavic) describing them as such draws forth the element of mystery tonight, (therefore) I shall try to write a missive, alike a 'tale of two cities' - you know words about travel and new lands and new people and other modalities of thought which warm the

ancient heart within us.

Yrs, with veins.

4TRANSITIONINGTO5

MAKES YA WANNA LIVE IN A STINKY OLD MONTANA CABIN ER SUMTHIN.

MAMA ALWAYS SAID IF IT DON'T WORK PROPER, POUR A SODA ON IT OR RUB IT

WITH SOME LIMBURGER CHEESE ERSUM OINTMENT STUFF... BUT THISS!! SHEET. I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TADO.

When a guy plays more instruments than anyone can count, screaming tortured air into a microphone tuned for subtle distinctions of human voice. That's carefully trained to probe the subsumed potential of the strange hybrid muscles to serve the language need we've adopted, vocal cords, etc. That's when. When the man with his French-slink girlfriend appears at he door steaming the so-called windows with heroine breath. Eyes all dilated to hell/back again. I tap on his object of cultural asphyxiation, and he thinks he reconnoiters me, though all that mist and whitewash. Who's … [playing] I couldn't really hear the last part. I can tell. I can see out, better than he can see in. I didn't know. I don't know. I shoulder-shrug him-kaput. No answer / is that good enough? I mean, I'm here, you know? Doesn't that say something? But he bottom line is, nobody knows anything. We only think we do.

I don't really understand this story dad. Every night it's different, isn't it??

No. It's just as complicated, and easy as real life. Imagine having to crunch a whole day's worth of our thoughts and actions into an hour.

It would be a fat hour.

And it might seem disconnected, or weird.

Like your story?

Perhaps.

I muss over grumpy no-sleep thoughts of Forban Project Lasers in military underground mega-tombs researching neutrinamatters for more virulent beams. Where big record execs blather small coffee shop schematta where nobody will recognize them one table away, dressed in workingman duds. Bet chits of what 'their' artists will-r won't do, as if they're what public jaw talks about. Albert will certainly… (Collins?) Tribute to. What arteestpeople dead would have wanted. Robert Cray is will can be counted on to… when you know he hasn't been consulted. They drop all-names meaningful to music at this particular juncture this particular end of the decade nobody will care or think about in twenty five years until genre retrosound makes a slight tremor on ever-increasing fad pinwheel latest salesmedium old videos dredge added to computer-readable whateveritis' currently the cutting edge making all-else obsolete. And they sip their coffees meaningfully saying how much each latest project really means to the them, as if they haven't said this a thousand times before. Like the lasers.

And then they see me.

Listening.

Because I saw them last night, exec suits' Name-that-Tailor!

In no-workingman's-land (where they stuff olives with sausage, blue cheese, a garlic bulb, ginger, smoke salmon you nameit Christ! Anything. You could butt into, a martini-dive.)-their past-precious laser micropored disks wobblewarp voice to incidents of squeaks and hisses; (Could you turn that machine down?) where I drank fish goblet wells, skulking [those] olives when wily bartender leaves to wipe star-ashes from overfilled, smoke-primordial tables. They're busted here. And those sweet cherries. Mmmmm. Little dishes of their treats, people gliding by the windows; as Artsy Movie Theater spits itself into the street… we're all thinking-So little time, so many beautiful things to experience. Thinking star thoughts. Gorgeous bodies seeking fulfillment, starving for touch, bumping elbows, barren desert, water everywhere. They refill my fishbowl, because my eyes wax wistful. Gets silent.

Alcohol. Savior. Devil.

My elaborate mood swings, and I mention a corny song, about being torn between two lovers, as she says she loves me-a joke, full of distilled juniper, and all the rest of supernal. [AT WHOSE MOMENT, SHE LOSES HER BALANCE, FALLS AGAINST THE TABLE, SMASHES THE GLASS ALL OVER THE FRESHLY WAXED FLOOR.] I save the shards,

to eventually make a collage

from the ashes.

Dad, you like girls a lot, don't you?

Now what makes you say that, son?

You're always talking about another one.

Am I?

Long, slightly curly sun bleached red highlights, streaked henna bronze skin

perfect, smooth flat stomach limbs used

to running, liking things, swimming in

tropical oceans, with dolphins effervescent

smiles, dancing whenever she walked

We sat facing each other in the near-scalding

hundred eleven degree water, sweat

trickling from temples. The slightest

movement, unbearable.

"There's something quite unusual about you."

besides your magnetic good luck; where genes get concerned.

"I agree."

There's honesty for you! I'm thinking - but she's not done yet.

"Ever since I learned how tenuous life is…

three weeks ago, when I nearly drowned. And had the vision."

Heard the story. Felt her cuts' hard edges, turning to scars. Drug over the rocks,

time and time again,

heavy wool coat,

hypothermia,

pulling her

down.

But, I suppose I do. I like anyone who's open son- it just so happens women tend to be opener, as a general rule I hope is broken in the next twenty centuries.

Inna Daze, after broiling in a hot water laying naked under redwoods. Finding the way to the hard futon, with the gorgeous cover, laying there… I dreamed, breathing her exact rate, in the same clothing we walked back in, the same room, where she tells me and I tell her the heart is the only place to reside. Feel what happens when we think about things. Sacredness drains away. Expansiveness recedes. Wake slowly, with the girl, the girl from the funny dream, the one I went to sleep with who almost died. Blood still in the corner of the sheet, by her lacerated feet. The way we were laying, breathing, feeling, in the dream. And I wonder if I'm in it, still.

You brought something back with you?

I sure did. I remember when I was your age, always finding cool things, like bags of gold or diamonds, knowing I was about to wake up, and salting them under my shirt, or clutching them like a game-winning-run football. I'd wake up slow like that, and feel around for the booty, which was never there. We slept in that gift, until I was really late for work. I didn't finish till well after midnight, and tried like heck all day to keep the feeling, I had with her. That night I went walking, seeing strange alien-like people everywhere.

[GUY WITH A RATTY HAIRBRUSH STICKING OUT OF HIS DIRTY-JEAN REAR POCKET] trying to hawk two vials of mysterious liquid chemical

to the half-retarded all night doughnut cashier

as a skin-bleached Chicano girl with a glorified lunch-box

orders an English Breakfast tea with

a fake accent, and we all can't help noting her

name [Brandy] scribed on her otherwise-lily

neck in flowing, carefully appointed

letters. Cops, hassling cardboard box

people outside. Radio, plays cheesy

early-seventies hits. HOBART mixer working

industrial dough overtime.

Inside the flaccid monument

We're all aberrant conformists to the

paramount reality

we avidly-avoid

recognizing.

AS IF THE ASSYRIANS DIDN'T PROPOSE GUM DISEASE CONTRIBUTED TO

HEART CONDITIONS, SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS BEFORE THE ONE THEY CALLED CHRIST WALKED EARTH! AS IF IT WASN'T PROPOSED BEFORE THAT. REGARDING THEORY THAT CAME INTO FAVOR RECENTLY. [FORWARDED FROM THE BI-ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM OF DISEMBODIED ATLANTIAN SCIENTISTS]

Because

we're all selfish jeans,

biologically driven to perpetuate ourselves.

That's why.

5

Look at it this way son, space is a tide. It has rips, and currents. It is constantly moving, and we are constantly trying to moor ourselves against the tug, suck and wash it creates.

What about black holes?

They rip form apart, like a terrible story.

Huh?

I mean, storm. That was a joke.

It was a dumb joke.

Okay, you're right. But what I meant to say, is a fine mariner, can use the force of a storm, to go amazing places, at amazing clips.

Like gun clips?

No, like speed. At light speed. Clip. You know?

Like gun clips. Same thing.

Maybe.

It was the one with the mass of three billion suns that alerted the scientist. We can actually measure it from earth, the force of time is so disrobed by it. That was the first clue. They used the abnormalities of the black hole, the supposed moments the body vomited up hot gas, to transition between our reality, and theirs. It had something to do with sonoluminescent bubbleworts, but I can't remember the correlation lecture now (though it made sense then). I think they were hotter than the sun, if that means something profound. Oh, and neutrinos. I looked them up (what little we know) and was gee-wizzed to discover in Italian, neutrino translates to small neutral one and the suckers routinely pierce light year thick walls of lead in some erector-set universes searching for and avoiding their correct antimatter "flavors". The funniest bit was the energy we put into "seeing" them, when a billion pass through each observer every cuppla seconds.

So a scientist that did a lot of research into this, has a nice office, but he can never get anything done there. It seems his best thinking, and most important research is carried out at local Chinese restaurants.

LATE LUNCH, CHINATOWN DIM SUM RESTAURANT. THE USUAL. DEEP FRIED BALLS AND DISKS, SWEET OR SAVORY, FIRST BITE DEFINES EXPERIENCE.

Horrible pop music, plastic [TORN] SEAT COVERS. Just nice enough to not be bad enough to be notable. Defies description for academics and affectanados when word "good" is searched for. Pork fat saturating one. Not crispy cookies, oil in vast reservoirs, under selections. Fortunes were hardly. Waiter automaton maitre de stare from the worst existential void, life signs suspended. Something on the dire edge, but not sure what. Cheap and glittery glass red lacquer poor-taste doesn't break bad taste threshold, and getting good again. Perplexing. As it rains outside. As people file to eat, not seeming to notice. Umbrellas drip in plastic elephant-foot stand. Like a stasis, noting drying though wet, never dry; but dry inside, about to go out and get wet again. Mechanical implement approximating dryness for user. We squirm with mediocrity, unable

to label, unable to find anything out.

"What would I be if I ate like this all the time?" she asks me.

"Fat and grounded." "And not in a good way." I add.

The woman cringes.

Leaves the rest of her meal cavitated-

ripped asunder

as a child might destroy a pillow, to find where its softness hides

or the nighttime closet, to ferret out demons.

What's the point of this story dad?

Several points. One : In every stuck place, there's something important to learn.

Two : The place was populated by hollow people shoveling hollow, but overly-filling food into unfillable voids.

You mean they're always hungry?

Yes, but for more profound things than dim sum.

And three …

6

We struggled to take a normal intraction, and transform it into something more sublime. As if this wanes, with time - an ability to connect deeply, through the overcoats of bustle and bullshit-those indexed roles and scripted responses we cram unceremoniously into the predefined concrete box of "individuality" and free will.

Basically son, she was the most beautiful thing I'd seen in a long time

Dad, what did mom think about all this?

Your mother is a very unusual woman.

It was the most peculiar thing - a huge metropolitan city, and we continued to see each other all over it, like some lucky run at dice, when the sevens roll out of proportion to odds, and you know they'll continue to for a while yet. So you make your big move early. Especially when you figure out her breath is the exact same cadence. You breathe in and out, without trying, together, and pictures form

Is this the lady that almost drowned?

Why yes! How did you know?

The way you're talking about her.

I was obsessed to figure out if our hearts beat together as well. Even though I liked the concept better, as a secret. We lay for hours together, after a 3am party meeting, hardly touching, reveling in the feeling of such unabashed synchronization. It was some crazy form of yoga, or meditation, breathing that way. --So immediate, and all-encompassing, for someone so oblivious of lungs, and what autonomic action means. Or where it can take you.

What did she look like?

She was very dark and exotic, with long wavy streaked hair. Her body was full of vast primeval forests, and waking dreams. Being near her was like talking a walk beneath a panoply of stars, near the ocean, its boiling foam flecked with moonlight, and sparkling spider's webs.

What's a panoply?

A lot of important people.

[SILENCE]

I still don't get it. Why are stars people?

It's like your question...

Doesn't space feel itself? I am sure it does. Now; we are traversing great distances, held aloft on breath, and electric touch. We are the ether we move through, alive with swirling vortices, each tangential to other times and space. We've been in bed thirty hours, haven't made love yet, so in the blissful state of it, miles above, and inside our collective body. 'Imagine if everyone could feel like this.' I whisper. With anyone! 'Society keeps this at bay.' she says. It gives us limits of marriage, and definitions of love. I love you I tell her. I know. I can feel it. Such a loaded, cliché term... I almost didn't say… (Hadn't been saying it, for six or seven hours. Wanted to. Afraid.) Invokes shitty feelings, expectations, fears. Burdened with media's fallout, these last ten million years.

Tell me more about mom.

What I'm telling you, is before your mother's time.

Before you got famous?

I'm hardly famous.

My teacher says you are.

I paid him to say that.

Really?!

I didn't used to let myself go here. She said. Too much pain. An old relationship? Yes. I associated this place with pain-of being alone, of separating, of (strangely) never feeling this place again.

Your mother decided pain and fear had more to do with hanging on to feelings of love, when the intensity of their immediate moment was over.

What do you mean?

Like when you're eating a popsicle, and it's the exact right thing because it's so hot and you're so thirsty, and it's your favorite flavor...

Okay.

And then it's over.

You mean I ate it, or the popsickle melted?

Whatever. Say if fell off the stick.

So I want another one?

Who wouldn't?

[BOY, THOUGHTFULLY] ... Maybe I've already had two. And I'm fulloposicle.

Your mother's point exactly.

We hang onto these moments, and identify them with things, or people outside of ourselves. I remember when I was breaking up with Wilhelm, and in sobs [WRACKED] I told him I was afraid I wouldn't ever feel like this again with somebody. He told me something profound:

It ain't the popsickle, it's your ability to experience it, that makes it so fabulous.

Like, the same as I'd drink Coke, or ... ride a roller coaster? [HESITANTLY]

You got it son. Very few people figure this out.

The only reason you can feel this between us, is you've allowed yourself to. Don't you see? (Which really surprised me, because Wilhelm wasn't often taken to such states of reflection.) It's not me - it's your ability to go there. Into that state of divine love. You will have that with you always, no matter who you're with, or where you go in the world. Whether or not you remember, or think you don't. I have little to do with your own internal state of grace.

So your mother was a rich woman, from that point on. She never worried about losing things, or hanging onto storm clouds, lest they pass, and show the sky again. She wasn't one threatened easily, or disarmed, by love. People showing it, reminded her she had it inside, and nobody had the power to take it from her.

So mom didn't mind you were with women before her?

You mother knows girls are smart about things.

Ick. Girls are yucky.

So are boys, if you ask girls.

I used to distance myself from the reproductive fairy tale dance game. But you see--distancing is a lack of introspection, to the extent you paalsy-waalsy around in reproductive step, all day.

Did she really say that?

She was more like a kid than you were, in some ways.

I used to get down on men for their fuck-everything-in-arm's-reach dick-headedness, till I realized my own fable. My biology-drove to have-kids, settle down nest fluffy pillows feedback loop (which I resisted tooth-anima-male on many levels) was as profound and mindless as men's wanna screw every cunt-insight thing. But I didn't want to admit that to myself. It caused a dreaded depression, where all sighs ran dark umber paints together into some horrible old cream--sunbeams mottled with sleep of soul, stashed sadness-union / in black corners of closed mind / dire yells, and little letters that glow before ourselves / eyes shut tight / we leave little tracers of our lives / so we may try to construct them / anew, with dignity and art. / Before they are thrown / to the flames … I filled a whole book with sad, melancholic tonality. I wanted to be the one who got off this ship everyone else was going down on. As far as I was cons-terned.

Tell me about the aliens, dad.

I thought you wanted to know about mom?

That's boring.

Eat the same thing in the same quantity buy the same car listen the massmedia music, read their popular culture papers... did you know I did a survey of empty sugar packets at a well-known affluent cafe and every one we looked at was empty?! Hundreds of paper pouches ripped by somewhat less than hundreds of people, and nobody thought they needed less than a prescribed one-packet pre-measurement? What about 2/3rds, or one and a half? But no. We are bombarded with sameness to the pants-line, to the point we can't even have sex in unique, judgment-free manners. I was off a rocker's deep end. Must'a been the runin with the splum dealer, at the dead thing. Hell if I know. My wacked-out acid girlfriend and me, digging in the quaint sanitary sugar and coffee-stick disposal tray, testing some extraterrestrial theories. Whoa. Loony tunes for lunch, and wacky wabbits for dinner.

But it's even more insidious than that. 7

THE ANTARES LASER RESEARCH PROJECT WAS LONG-AGO ABANDONED TO THE RESEARCH-FUSION CONTINGENCY-ITS STATE OF THE ART DECLASSIFIED TECHNOLOGY HAVING OUTDATED ITSELF THREE OR FOUR TIMES OVER. TECH HUNGRY CARNIVORES DOWN THE SECRET HARDWARE FOOD CHAIN CONGRATULATE THEMSELVES ON ITS PROCUREMENT, SEEING THIS AS NEW STEP FOR NON-MILITARY SEMI-PRIVATE SECTOR VENTURES. IN REALITY, THIS OLD TECHNOLOGY MECHANISM WAS WIRED TO RELEASE ITS FINDINGS DIRECTLY TO A LATEST FEMPTOFLIP PRESAGE OF THE MOST RADICAL PARTIALLY-BLACK PROCESSORS, WHICH IN A PROCESS SIMILAR TO INFERIOMETRY, FUSION DATA [GUIDED BY KEY-RESOURCE CO-PORT INFORMANT† ] WAS FED INTO THE GROUNDBREAKING LASER WORK AT THE UNDERGROUND HIGHLY CLASSIFIED COVERT FACILITY ORIGINALLY CONSTRUCTED MIDCENTURY UNDER AUSPICE OF LARGE SCALE EXECUTIVE CONTROL CENTER IN EVENT OF NUCLEAR ATTACK. A GENERAL PUBLIC HAD NO CONCEPT WHATSOEVER WHAT WENT ON DOWN THERE, LET ALONE REALIZING THE PLACE THEIR FILL DIRT CAME FROM, EVEN EXISTED.

subsumed

disingenuous

discontiguous

exteriorization

(the predicament)

of an all-encompassing,

ethnographically-discursive space.

I don't know if it was hark from heaven, or a sign of premature madness. I find myself concentrating on telomeres - these caps on the end of chromosomes - Mr. splum dealer'd been blathering about. Something to do with making them longer than humanly-normal. How it was possible to dive in there, and alter the shape of reality. With... and this part, for the literal life of me, I found missing …With your mind? But I don't think I heard it right. Probably with a grenade full of nano-TNT. Or a crazy machine yet to be invented, let alone conceived of by the next underpaid and unappreciated Nostrodamus. No doubt it had something to do with neutrinos. And highly powered laser blasts (for peace) from converted civilian airliners, originally funded for military-industrial radar platforms, or somesuch feat.

I don't get why the aliens came here. Just to look at things?

Well, I'm not sure either, but I've got a good idea.

The scanner was off its rocker, like part way through its cycle, it latched onto some other version of universe, some alternate femoral layer of rationality, that decreed entirely different shapes of letter, and pie chart. Sometimes, if it decided the material I scanned seemed particularly dry and humorless, it dispensed low-res photos of 1960s moon rockets, and tangled satellite data from stars. The trend, though amusing (to this day I attribute it to BACKGROUND RADIATION from NASA, fouling my works) put me even further on edge. I hesitated showing this effect to anyone else, lest undue suspicion occur.

It has to do with time tracks.

What's a time track?

A possible line of what will happen.

Like the weather?

Not quite. You know how farmers plant things like wheat or soybeans assuming the future will provide them with a profitable crop they can sell for a profit?

I mean, isn't everything like that?

You could say. But what I didn't add is, Nike makes shoes just like the ones you have on, because they think kids will want them by the time they're all made and ready to sell, stacked at your favorite store. And farmer Joe plants wheat instead of soybeans, because he's thinking (and this is his time track) wheat will be worth more when it's harvest season.

So the aliens are harvesting us?

Let me put it this way : Nike, through its advertising, told you what kind of shoe you'd want to buy a long time ago, to concur with a projection of what kind of shoe the boys in your age group will want to wear. In some ways, they altered the normal time track, to increase their profits.

And the aliens are harvesting us early, making us make lasers. Or making us want to make them?

This I the guy who brought home a B in world history? Gee. I'll bet you weren't trying too hard.

That teacher's boring.

It's hard to say why I was singled out. Everything as it is, but I suspect splum put some kind of psychic beacon on me, saying he's okay. Harmless really. The kind that walks the world between, facilitating certain difficult agendas, and procurements or cover-ups. Either that, or I was open from a state I was inhabiting, by questioning the validity of a crowd, and its soul-sucking tendencies-and just happened to notice some irregularity with the splum dealer, which he took as the secret handshake, to hand me the virulent intergalactic mindfuck joint. From that point on, my chemistry, or aura have changed. Like smack users, and crazy people recognize each other in crowds. Donno. The world was falling around me, being just the way it always was. People so shut down, they couldn't realize what already happened, quietly, but obviously, all around and through their lives. What you resist you become. Fighting oppression is creating oppression. Things zinging back and forth between my ears. A rusty paper-clip, staining the pages, creasing things. Drown sorrows buzzing a zillion miles an hour pager taped to my forehead, in case an important call. Fear the liquor delays awaking, magnificent omnipotence wearing off. Outside, a dim churning whiteness, in the sludgy morning light pouring in-window. Big futon-frame shudders, remembering… Head trickles distracting thought all over a perfectly sensuous situation, embracing three divisions of human existence, in a warm perspiring body. The heart is congested with metaphorical plaque, unable to fill another person, or open itself to the depths we are capable, every moment, every day. Frustrating-the breathing synch. All off. The bottomlessness impeded.

Did mom know about the aliens?

I think so.

Her thoughts ranged the prairie of life. She once pointed out an obnoxious loudmouth making everybody edgy at a party. "He's that witless on purpose." "What do you mean?" And she launched. "He's that insensitive, because it pays. In this PC crowd-look at all the negative attention he gets from us! All that energy. He's just less picky than we are." We want him to leave, and that makes him stay! [OPPOSITES] If we ignored him totally… He'd cast off. So we're responsible. We're feeding him, giving our CONFORM vibe. Stuff like that. The same hot-tub house, owned by (ex)hippie millionaire. Electro-self-serve codelock at the door-open silently. Don't talk. But it is sacred feeling there, so you have to hand it to whomevermakes the rules posted in the changing room.

She talked a lot about the scripts people play.

What kind of scripts?

Like, kids are suppose to be nice to their parents.

That's a script?

It's an expectation you kids are suppose to abide by. But who made it up?

You guys.

Exactly. Somebody else wants you to do something, and you do it. Perhaps without you ever saying this sucks, or asking why.

This sucks.

Very funny.

So there I was (lounging in this skin-blistering, scalding water, watching this satinsmooth black body, all slick with hot stifled screams fuck this water's hot! doing some sexy gyrations in front of us), totally unselfconscious about it, when I realized. She's acting. Eating out of their hands. Your hands… you men who like the moves with all that fuck-me sexual intent built in. Because this lady was with a white girl, and they had the all-wymn vibe surrounding them, but here was this move! The sort of move you'd glimpse on blue video, with no heart to heat in it, directed written and produced by men in stuck their heads. Do you see what I mean? We're acting you out. We're unconsciously demonstrating what you think you want-or what you think sex is, when we know better. But we don't! That's the thing! We're full of profound knowledge we don't even share with ourselves, acting like a shallow petré dishes in organic experiments. I mean - her movement, twisting around, was so out of place to her spirit, and yet - so demeaningly integrated on its surface… slick and mirror-like, her deep ebony skin, losing its observee inside.

Your mom had some very strong impressions about things. But they usually had some truth to them.

Here were sisters in active resistance to social impediments, and gender cages when the paternal structure erupts. We're all capable of so much more than this! But we're stuck in a state of resistance to what exists, and that condemns us to reside here, at incarceration, because the only true cage is the one we carry around inside us.

If not a lot of truth. (People were attracted to her fire, and simultaneously scared of it. She made people look at themselves, caught up in a net of severance from the knee-jerk bullshit, people bill as life.)

"We're so screwed up as a culture, because nobody wants to blow a whistle, by not blowing it, and using information - the fragile grace of seeing, to be in their hearts. With everyone. All the time. But especially, with ourselves. People would be lassé-faire about 'sex' if they got more raw, unadulterated, wide-openness from others. But we see sex as segue to what we're all starving for. And monogamy is the sure way there. You feel attached to having a known route to the feeling, not the objective body of love. The attachment is what makes us poor, thinking love is rare, and difficult to obtain. Love is the cosmic background radiation. It is everywhere, if you tune into its frequency. You can not hang onto what's omnipresent.

The futility of such an act abhors."

Did you and mom like each other?

That's an interesting question; what made you ask it?

I donno.

[LAUGHTER] I remember when she said, to a well-heeled member…

MISSING TRANSCRIPT SEGMENT. FILE RECOVERED TMP PROTOCOL 23®

-REF: ["How come we don't live together? Because unlike you, we hate to pretend."]

She was not delicate. I will say that for her. However; she was only indelicate where truth was required, which is more than I'll give most humans on planet Earth. At this juncture in time and space, anyway.

BACKGROUND CITE 223.3 SOME HUMANS APPEAR INSENSITVE TO CONDITIONING CODE 3.44.21 UNCORRECTABLE FOR .12% ERROR OD REMEDY IN YEAR 2112 HYBRED EARTHGROWN BOTANIC, REF: RESISTANCE PATTERNING-SEXUAL. 223.39 DNA MUTATIONS 223.399 EXAMPLE OF UNDERGROUND EARTH POETRY:

The thimbles of precise pharmaceuticals means and averages for the bloodstream walking fine edges of rationale, fearing abandonment of normal consciousness consumptive panicked bliss, the billboards, the radio commercials, the screaming Hawkin's DJs invoking high-end clipper distortion in the squawk of latest sales better than 50% off the deep subliminal pulleys and mud-empacked cables displacing waking consciousness to the shadowy workings of want, need, neglect. Those mitered angled dimensions of sleep, you wake from, having west west gone, and at he degree of the compass that meets endless water, collapsed, into crisp brilliant stormclouds, sumptuous cotton, dumping gobs of snow.

The grids of meaningless concrete sonnet

the son-Father conspiracy; vibrant chlorophyll peeking through bricks, walks in reality, question the very, and speedy cars holed up in dead-ends. Waiting lights inevitability. Echoes of memories of oceans, farmland, and stars, hidden beneath our careful feet, steep hills, garbage, stepping this way, and that.

My mind. Washed.

The spinal chaos, the reality non-sequitor, you will never… as a challenge, few meet. The pie charts and specialists hovering around bell curves, the careful lack of linger to meditate, on the one, or more issues. That we could sell those things - ferret out worries - where priests and psychologists meet, cobbling dreams to mush, in the vacuum of life, whereas flash! bespeaks our time, on earth. It was a bright-blue madness, sparkling evanescently, in a next-gen sun.

Those vicious tricksters! They are studying us like ants!

That's good son… Viscous tricksters! I like that.

8

A small electric shudder ran a length of his spine - the anatomical erector, a woman said was broken, when she was young, as three men attacked her - one karate-kicking, so she wouldn't struggle those endless minutes of turns, all bleeding raw. I glance at the clock, which reads 11.47, in old numbers and hands, to realize quite perfunctorily, I was born this exact moment. Whereas a ringing in my ears preceded some kind of auditory hallucination - a simple line from a song:

The man who holds high places, will be the one who falls.

That's a quote, son.

Dad, how come you didn't fight them?

Fight - like … ?

Waste them. You know, tear their masks off.

Guns and fists, when you're dealing with a race of highly intelligent, blackhole-traveling time tweakers, is probably a bad idea son. Especially when you're an army of one. I think they call that suicide in the dictionary. Remember son, I hadn't met anyone yet (besides myself, and barely that!) who thought there was any enemy to fight! We're all on the invaders' side, because these invaders define what a side even is!

This is a rectilinear argument you're making, dad.

That's a big word, son. What's it mean?

Not very square. We learned it in math class.

Your teacher's amazing.

Limbs drained of all useable energy, head pounding Japanese gongs, spine singing eye-crossing nerve endings to life, every step-fractured glass. Cuts and blood from martyr'd feet shuffling their autonomic movements towards the coffee vendor, no socks, couldn't reach the paper, stomach and bowel madly evacuated, some unspeakable AM hour.

"What happened to you?"

The usually-friendly, all smiles aghast. I mumbled something alltogether incomprehensible, grimacing at bright white aprons, catching incidental light.

"Oh. I see."

What did happen to you?

I reeled the events back in my mind, rocking autistically a mouth full of corn meal crumbs on a chair bent by blatant sidewalk parkers, while wind blew. My half-full paper cup swept to the gods, skittering across freshly steam-cleaned asphalt, with intriguing Rorschach results. There was that escarpment, and the fog blowing in. We were at this point in the conversation, when it got real cold; and I gave her my coat… Something about dinosaurs, and tilling pastoral lands.

Dinosaurs!?

Yea. She talked about them, when the mists rolled in…

And ?

I saw them.

TRANSCRIPT: WHERE? [SON] RIGHT UP THERE, IN THE OAKLAND HILLS. [FATHER] COME ON DAD. THERE AREN'T ANY BRONTOSAURS OR PTERODACTYLS IN THE OAKLAND HILLS. [SON]

But you want to believe there are, don't you?

Well, sure.

That's what bugs me.

The wind hollered thin pea mist soup over us - you could hardly see where you were stepping, and here's these cliffs around. Quite disorienting from the warm sunny evening we're enjoying, only minutes before I gave her my coat.

Who?

That's the thing …

TRANSCRIPT COP : FATHER: I DON'T REALLY KNOW. I THOUGHT I DID, UNTIL THAT STORM BLEW IN. BUT MORE CRAZY STUFF HAPPENED,

… right after I met her, a half gallon of oil blew up in my hand, draping all surrounding surfaces with a thick sheen of vegetable blood-glass bits thrown expertly, in every most inaccessible corner. As if some prankster shot it with a .22, through my cracked-open window.

How come?

I accredit it to our meeting.

You think she's one of them too?

No; I think she knows all about it. And they know about her.

Is she still alive?

Most definitely.

I'd like to meet her.

[PERHAPS YOU SHALL]

re 223.24

SUBJECT PERPLEXED BY LIAISON OFFICER - DETECTS GENETIC ABNORMALITY, SIGNAL, DISSEMINATES SDRUITUS-344 SURROUNDING INSENSITIVES TOTAL LACK OF COMPREHENSION - DIRECT OPPOSITION NORMAL HUMAN PERCEPTIVE MECHANICS. CITE EXAMPLE.

[FORWARD FOR STUDY] extirpated 2113

9

The steely, freckled shoulders of the cement worker twitch with fatigue, answering a grinding of his insistent, gargantuan machine, with another empty wheelbarrow. Lately, Doug Bandon's been experiencing a lot of shifts in the way he perceived things. Besides the fact he hated his job, and all that. (Not that he hated it, really, more like, he despised the people he worked for-Like the best thing in the world is to save a few bucks, and short-change material profoundly over-bid in the first place.) But what he meant to say, is they're barking up the wrong tree entirely, which worries him [DOUG] because he's employed by their wily means, which means he's party, in agreement to their barely-spoken maxims, on some level. Just this sort of thinking that let the front wheel wander off the narrow slippery planks, and dump a load of fresh concrete down the side of the building. Playing the faux-paw back …

… He toddles beer over his best God-given part of an hour, thinking about his life. Two or three times, the sooty room seemed to shirk the little light poeticizing it, and dropped him into a mighty abyss. This feeling was quite peculiar.

It sometimes happened before he got up in the morning, laying dreamily in bed, snooze button punched once, before alarm even blared on (a nice feature). Everything, he rallied logically, made more sense when he ate muffins. There was no accounting for this fact. He's not even sure how it came to be. You know? That thought about muffins.

No doubt about it. Larry the half-brother is zooming all over town delivering them right now. Minivan fulla that fresh-baked reek-both bong-tokes and muffin fare! Doug gets the extras, of which the work mates partook heavily. Gleefully, in fact. Every day. Took em for granted. Got mad at him when he didn't bring the box. Dunkin' Muffheads, the sub-subbies called 'em, squeezing their pneumatic nailgun triggers; shootin' the clip-head fourteens at lipstick targets. Doug is thinking about Lay-ree (affectionately called) wondering how he got into this muffin business? About how many he, Doug, ate a day, and it seemed like a lot. He peels an overly-sticky label forming half the wrapper, and attempts to read fine print ingredients without necessary aid of electron-scanning microscope. That was half a daily requirement?! [IN LEFT HAND] This little chunk… of dough? [NOW, RIGHT HAND] How can … [EXAMINES CHOCO-CHUNK FROM BOX LARRY DROPPED BY] … these things have so many calories in them? (Maybe…

As Lay-ree screams through the arterial barely hesitating at stop sign, slams wheel left, then right into a narrow slick drive. The smell of scorched rubber; the crick! of metal cool-down, one foot out drivers door.

…Nutty-cousin has more calories than… [DOUG GROPES THE BOX FOR DIFFERENT FLAVORS] This is crazy. No wonder Americans are so rotund! [NOTE : GUILT FOR CONTRIBUTING TO OVERLAPPING GUTS OF FELLOW WORKERS, PRECEDING CONCURRENT SATISFACTION FOR ADDING TO GUTS OF THREE IMMEDIATE BOSSES]

Two boxes, signed. Band-saw whines in background. One step-door, key, engine, reverse. Roar. Larry veers right, skids leg left to clutch, rams accelerator, tunes cranked. He's flipped the cheap tinny air cleaner cover, disconnected squiggly stuff hanging off carbs and manifolds, shaved the heads (too low) adding another hassle-free gasket to compensate. Just another minivan! Or so it would seem. G-Force rubber-anchored custom muffin rack creaks a flex-pivot self, rear end fighting an inclination to engage posi-traction, courtesy of a doctored axle clutch. Larry, as himself, through and through, muffins hot and steaming. Melted rubber right side, wafting through drivers door, freshly opened. "Your muffins, maam." Flourish. "From the Muffin Warehouse." First timer. Newbee gets red carpet. Whole gratis box, every flower in the orchidria. Special recipe, first three months. Then, the usual. Muffin Madness… muffin mania… he's seen it all. Big time. Shit that keeps getting deeper…

And Doug is perplexed. Given he eats approximately five muffins a day, how come he isn't bloated and beached like a whale on a krill-binge, compass gone haywire? Maybe it has something to do with shovels, and concrete.

But Doug doesn't think so.

… And deeper.

"'...Appalled to notice a glass of milk and a unremarkable muffin constituted half my scientifically - allowed calories for 24 hour period. Ipso facto, what the hell are we doing calling this a snack? You know what I mean?' [I COULD HAVE, OF YOU HADN'T EATEN THE WHOLE THING!] The fact of the matter is, " I can't really remember what else he said. The music was so damn loud.

Crossed that out, and try to concentrate. Immobile, rammed between stools.

Muffin-smeared paper all over the table.

Lots of it. 1001 Minerva Street,

I'm all greased on soul food n-beer, allaying All-Nite Diner fears by being the only customer at 3:45 am after having been kicked out of Caruso's Bar, neurons impinged on too many tall glasses people often steal to fill their transient shelves. Currently experiencing re-awaken post-midnight patron's special (gratis) for being warm body here. Erroneous thinking : customers discourage crack-crazed Get on the floor! gun-ta-head rogues. But I don't mind. Filling by-god's cup ever fifteen, and setting the table with slices of pies, and hot baked things. Until they brought me the muffin. Which looked a little sad, all wilted and almost day-old. Like a year-old prune collapsing into something even more dried. It made me loose track of my columns. The type that suppose you with a burgeoning hangover, before you've even made it to bed. Why in the world are they bringing me a muffin?

I mean, if you need to dunk, you use a doughnut. Right?!

Then the cops came in.

They were hulking around, pouring cups of three-hour caffeine, berthing glass displays with savage thoughts, and breathing heavy mist. Three am, they kicked my ass out-table littered with undigested detritus strange dark numbers lavishly carried to three decimal points ostensibly saving five cents from clutches of IRS. Straggled, jagged columns-off moments of alcohol taking effect, and monetary rev-service fictions born. Not necessary to my better interest. Who the hell did their taxes, beer sweat all over vitally important papers, ink-starting to run-at a BAR?! Beginning to wonder. How this would ever work out. High octane micro-brew polluting bloodstream, curtailing kill government employees wasting the money I barely earn thoughts. Necessary to do tax with good cosmic vibe, I vindicate. Before lowering myself twenty nine IQ points (falling tests). All those empty form lines of paths un-taken. Beer foam dying on pint glass three. Waitress feels sorry for me. Mr. Tax.

Brings me

another.

She says she

writes her dog off. Somehow. Sitting at my table.

GoD knows/(cares?). Therapy for having a need to settle down

single mom reproduce welfare.

Fuck if I… Reading between lines.

Government should be happy I have a dog, instead of that.

Dogs don't need diapers, and daycare.

So they threw me out, finally. When the chairs were up and the lights…

"How can you see anything?"

were off. I landed three black streets future on at

the cop rendezvous.

"Hey! Aren't you…"

After doughnut four-

Reality seems a little different, now I've stood up. Man. Shit. I must be ex-rational, post rationality, whatever it's called, doing my taxes here. And there. At this drunk hour. Powdered sugar floating all over the forms. This fucked up. That guy doesn't even resemble a splum dealer. [NOTE NO TRUST OF INTUITION, SPEAKING FIRST] Not even vaguely. An something's evenmore fuckedup here, besides my bladder. Like that feeling at the fauxdead concert, walking the fine light mud. Because I'm certain that's the dude. Because of my double-take at the bar! My illusions, piled artfully in a city of an unknown universe, reassuringly abandoned to the seamy dreams of hyper-real dusks, where laser light pours from uncounted sheaths of time. In other worldly splum-centrals. Like the I didn't know the dude!? Grabbed his gun like a bone-dry junkie, resembles my Marine Corps neighbor-all straight-cut jaw, and silent malevolence for unseen tree snipers. Orders patrons to the ground. Splum central! You

got it.

Suddenly, there's drunk aliens sprawled all around, rather 'artfully' I might add, in fat seventies ties, shaggy sheepskin coats, seersucker suits, and even Armani blazers. They are reevaluating their allegiance to the home world. It's not nearly as fun as this. One could imagine abandoning the accursed vorted twissers, and skiypickld metalskins. Tobacco smoke yawned the annals of cigarettes marching, while impending dark promised to absolve the dreamtime percolated thoroughly throughout. Aye!-Those minds of conquerors! Gotta hand it to them. Awash with fame and the latest-greater holographic visors. One is reading another-some scrunched piece of paper-drawling his(?) words revealingly.

Dad?

Yes?

Tell me about the lady who almost drowned.

"Hours. What's time ? The never-ending, a slow motion car accident. The fall from

life's lemming-cliff. Hands too cold to… even move. Theater frills, ground away-heart slows to save itself."

Don't you want to hear about the aliens?

Not yet. It's too confusing.

"Water red with blood. Another [WAVE]. Another.

He's dragging her. In … the shore. He and

his friend, sucked out, trying to save her.

Almost drowned themselves.

Hands raw, tearing the leaden coat off her

foot gashed almost

un-conscious."

Okay. We'll make this a story within the story. Pretend you're her. Say you've just run into one of the aliens, and are totally disoriented. Now imagine treading barefoot amidst sharp Point Rey rock, El Niño wind crashing waves many times larger than you are. You're all wet pants and cold spray-when the wall hits. A freak, where amplitudes collide to a looming monstrous caldron, pinpointing you with its frigid, boiling foam.

Yuck!

As it hits, your breath is bashed from you; you're sucked under-thrashed mightily. The long wool coat you were wearing, with the difficult buttons, pulls you down. Your rag doll body, a hydrodynamic zero.

What's that mean?

Catches water. Like a sail, furled for rips. And the barnacles… your skin, corners of it, torn from hands hanging desperately, to slippery jagged cold. Another break, and another! Waves are crashing over you. You have possibly gulped your last breath of life on Planet Earth.

This is scary!

You bet. You're in it now, sucked from the rocks relative safety, fighting water one more time. For one more moment of life, as you dream of mermaids, hissing small trails of bubbles-a resignation, from minutes, to hours. It is your never-ending, slow motion car accident. "… Coughing water from lungs- From whose moment, your life would never be the same." She told me, having just been through its wringer.

Can you breathe, if you've got water in your lungs?

Barely.

Wow.

You've just been in truth, and it's almost enough to kill you. They barely pull you from it, before you drown

Is that … [STORY] true dad? I manage.

True and

fast, son.

HE SAID11

The van scrunched down low on its gas-charged Bilsten shocks before springing out like a cat into oncoming traffic, from a neck-popping left hand corner. Larry was beaming a broad metamphetamine smile, romping a ferocious little engine for all its worth. The leer at the corner of his sunglassed mouth, told the entire story. This was man with a mission. He had clocks to beat, and people to bear witness to. Larry was a chosen man. And he lived its hilt, to prove it.

The van, as usual, smelled like a bakery gone mad. Where all the automated machines, by some untold electrical fluke, received twice normal voltage, dough churned things jammed in conveyer screeching-hot bearings. Ovens cooking overtime. Larry taking a piss, the smell of his windows-down vehicle attracting not a few bystanders' attention. One even stole the gap, and pocket a few specially-wrapped ones, in frilly gold-foil container.

I mean, who cold blame him?

MAN FOUND FROZEN, NAKED EXCEPT FOR LACE SOCKS, IN SOUTHPARK INDUSTRIAL FREEZER LAST NIGHT. POLICE SUSPECT… No one seems perturbed by this headline. Especially the news of the socks.

12

The thing they never tell you, is it's all metaphor. ALL of it. Every bit. You know what I mean? Words, objects allude, but you never get the full impact in positions of time and space one instance to the next; our actions-the entire lot. It's a form of language we have only a dimmest awareness of. And what's the point of this, perhaps you're asking? I'll tell you. They come from beyond the ignorance of moments not connecting to higher principles, and synchronous places. They are the inverse of us, with our limited concepts of social structure, and causal-rational communication through pre-established sets of symbols.

That's a mouthful dad.

You betcha son. The guy was off his rocker about it.

Are you both with me? (we nod our heads in dumb unison) There is not a true meaning to anything, in the way we understand fact. The truth to daily events, the way our outer space friends unravel them, can not be articulated in a rationale of mathematics, or words.

"Then why are they so interested in the lasers?"

I blurt, quite rudely (he is instantly aghast...) "Who told you about that?!" "I figured it out." He eyes me suspiciously. "Nobody just figures that out." regards me with caution, as if I'm some kind of double agent. "Please, continue. We're fascinated." I try to re-engage him in his diatribe.

He asked me a lot of odd questions. Then rattled on again.

The mad transience of tears for beauty, lost in the moment of a perfect instance, knowing it won't last long, and sorrow the death is before you, but you're there in it, nonetheless. Or when you're faced with pointless rules. You're sitting at a stoplight in the early morning, without another car in sight. In a traffic snarl, when the lights run irregardless, whether you move, or rot.

I must have looked perplexed.

Look; he assays me with one judgmental glance, perceiving my woefully-confused core, it's like this... You live in a house where the owner has a set of futile rules about what you should and shouldn't do. These rules are carefully designed blankets to smother personnel fires, regardless of magnitude. Small or large! Lukewarm embers or conflagrations! One act fits all. They are meant to address completely different situations with blatant irreverence to magnitude, or volatility. With a rule's relative framework in place, the rule-maker won't have to tailor each set of controls to a situation developing - thus avoiding human interaction, intuition of what's happening inside him or her, and secondly, you, and your situation.

(I nod the rote dumb I GET IT s. Finally, perchance, doing so.)

Let's say you're living by a set of rules, like stoplights, you don't necessarily agree with, but try to abide by anyway. For instance, the owner of the house you rent that room in has a rule that guests can only stay three days, for obvious reasons of past renters, and live-in, or nearso, boyfriends and girlfriends. And you have a friend coming from Tel Aviv for a week. The owner feels he or she must not budge this rule, or its integrity will be broken. You feel the rule is too confining, and should flex to meet circumstances. What's a week, this one time? When the owner is actually having a very difficult life at the moment, and any visitor at all is too much. In fact, your presence is also too much. But the rule also implicitly states you're allowed at the house, for paying rent. So the owner, abiding his own set of limitations, is miserable, and is making you and your friend miserable, vibing you out of the house on day one point five. When some other week, the friend could stay two weeks, and the owner might actually like it. But the futilty! Our owner feels powerless to tell you he needs you plus friend out of his house, just this once. Because then he'll feel better, he'll relax the rule in the future, and because you were open to changing your expectations, you'll feel better, in a different, hopefully non-toxic environment, instead of constantly scheming ways to linger more than the three day allotment, while resenting an odious, recalcitrant landlord for undue steadfastness, through a case of extenuating circumstance. You see? For rules to bend, you have to bend too.

Does that mean your rules about bed time have to bend, dad?

They do sometimes.

How about the rules for everything else?

If you're ready to bend too, son.

What does that mean.

You think about it, and maybe things will get easier for you.

But each party has to have the guts to explain themselves in each moment, and ask for what they need. One party has to realize that giving something up, may mean gaining unexpected boon. You and your Tel Aviv friend have an unprecedented adventure, removed from the pattern of staying at home. Or the owner meets a fascinating human, who may later become a generous host in Israel. Nobody ever knows what will happen without organic communication. And intuitive, timeless, nonverbal versions of this example, are preceded by verbal realms. Now do you understand? We're back in the stone age. Our attachments to the science of rules, protect us from the ineffable, where the aliens roam.

Home, home on the range, where the muff-fins, and aliens roam!

That's what I thought when he said that!

I guess we read each others minds, dad.

Guess so, son.

But it felt like a snow job to me--some hype prepared for him alone, doo-doo on the carpet cleaned by Miracle Rug, he could tout as the new great snake serum. Oh, not the stuff about rules--that sure was true, but the benevolence of an intelligence that figured its way through the chaos of it all, attempting to guide us, (by some labyrinthine method), to their state of non-linear jump travel; their government and private sectors fully synched. Muffins and tourist castaways, down and out on easy sex, florid, high-buzz atmosphere, and cheap MadDog wine.

I decided, about the time your mother did (by some kind of coincidence) that attachment to things like rules, roles and individual people, is the stuffing in the word incarceration. There were iron bars the attracted attacked - not knowing if they were in or out, while in a middenstate of either.

I don't get that at all.

I'm trying to be poetic.

It doesn't rhyme.

Not everything poetic has to rhyme.

Yes it does!

I'm afraid it doesn't.

Then it's a DUMB POEM!

And so I thought about what this guy said, for maybe an hour.

It's not a dumb poem. It just doesn't follow the rules. And besides, I said poetic, as in trying halfheartedly to be. I never said it was a poem.

Poetic hasn't got poem rules?

See? We're talking rules here, and how they might bend.

"They understand other life forms are a divine lens, to view the rosary of the infinite through." He finished his lecture with a belch, engendered from his undoubtedly tepid diet Pepsi. I'm pretty sure it was the last thing betrayed, before he remembered he didn't trust me,

because I nixed him with top secret lasers.

13

In the house, I noticed a Dear John letter, based on some kind of fling. Keeping it pinned to the single pane sill, from the increasing wind, was a book with a bright blue jacket. Its title was : Holding onto the Love You Find. And in violation of all friendships, I read her letter. Or at least part of it. The section about how she wanted something more serious, with expectations and boundaries. Where she felt safe to explore intimacy. Which struck me as very ironic. Which rang a bell... based on what the professor said. Her rules, keeping at bay the very thing she desires, ostensibly to give her those desires. Fear attracting the weird vibes love+sex clings to, throwing desires away. Or something like that. As the wind riffled its pages. Threatening them with dispersal. The book holding onto her love, the letter wants to give away. Rules =

Roles.

The muffins full of

Spiny-Cactus words.

Every object is a potential shrine of worship, willing to tell you things.

Larry noticed three muffins missing from his special box. The ones he offered to potential customers, who might be big accounts. Inevitably, he'd only cut small sections, and leave less powerful versions, if they wanted more. In the beginning.

When he'd worshipped them.

Rubber hot. Always stinking slightly, of reckless, adrenaline corners. "Airing elastic lines in Euclidean space." he thought, jerking the wheel intuitively, as obstacles arrived. He like to say, sometimes. Whenever people marking time reading newspapers commented on actresses being 'plump'. And how the public is more open to seeing them that way, on screen. Usually chimed by bloated feminists, with muffin layers surrounding them from such misogynies. 'Can you bell-eeve this shit?' As he delivers their undoing. In new, freshly-rowed boxes. Like cells, in molecular prison, all steaming hot and irresistible. Those snippets of conversation, as he ran past. Talk of dee-luxe vacuums, with grinder attachments; questions about oak gall ink (which magic spells do you reckon they used?) and debates about the stock market, as if we didn't know better. But he just happened to catch the headline, about the freezer, and the socks. Stopped him cold. "Muffin wrapper found in pocket."

Did Larry do it?

Hard to say.

Why is it hard to say? You know what happened!

Believe it or not, I don't. Yet.

Might either be good, or bad for business. Hard to tell really; impossible to decide. Worse than a Dow going up or down. Far worse. There's higher, non manipulated forces at work. Talked to himself, constantly. Decided to visit his brother, next stop. Left his trademark thin black line, port side, pulling into the driveway ... that brother's breaking out. A therapy, you realize, for cement workers' days off. To relieve tension, and ponder things carefully.

Car door bangs. Front wheel jams against chunk, sharp re-bar stick'n out.

"What the hell?"

Larry / surveying the wreckage.

"Cracks, buckles, too much aggregate and calcimite. Poured the shit in the rain. Was drivin' me crazy, every thing all wrong, whenever I looked at it. It was either a skim coat, or this. B'sides, I wanted to widen it for my boat."

"You don't have a boat."

Yea, but I'd like to get one someday. His answer. Nutty brother, reinvents therapy. No cheaper than anyone else does it, but gets full driveway out of the deal. Larry's mind thinks fast, fueled on high-octane acceleration from engines soon illegal to possess. You wanna help? he naively asks. Can't; I'm still working. Larry's natural comeback. I mean after. After work? Go to work? Jeeze man, you gotta be kidding. But I'll watch you here, sweating. While I drink this soda pop. Okay? Brother sighs. 'Can't interest Larry in plain-ole work.'

Larry tells him about the letter, and signals an opinion is in order, by clanking a nearby shovel blade, on the ground. The rubble, we should say. What happened next, came as a big surprise to the brother. "Larr, yakno--Ah need yur ears fer a moment. Been thinking."

Have you?! (Larry all ears eyes and muffins.)

"Ya. An gimme one of therm-chochunk ones, huh?"

Why is breaking out his driveway?

He doesn't know what else to do.

Why does he have to do anything?

He doesn't.

Then why is he doing it?

It's one of adulthood's mysteries.

I don't get you guys.

We don't get you guys either.

But at least you were one of us, once.

Still are, mostly. That's why we fight it.

Why? If you still are us...

We're afraid to feel you, in us.

That's dumb!

Yup. You're right.

"The mind-heart dilemma. Thinking. Fear. Order. Leads us where?

Embracing expectations (love), and this muffin here. You know what I mean?"

Larry is dumbfounded. His jaw's agape. Had his big brother ever mentioned anything about muffins, and conspiracy before? His mind races back, assembling possible puzzle theorems. A driveway engendered this? -Or vice of that versa? "Well, been wondering why everybody gets fat eating these things but me. It is a bit strange, wouldn't you say?"

(That's what got him thinking?)

Larry said slightly out loud.

"Huh?"

"Ohnothing. Please continue; I'fascinatd."

But if adults are kids, how come...

I probably don't have the right answer to that. Why don't you tell me?

Daaad! I haven't even asked the question yet! How do you know you don't know?!

Thank-you son. That's the answer I needed.

I don't get you sometimes.

It's okay. Adults are weird.

There's a hissing noise. (Sound of dark chocochunk crumbs, falling to the ground.) Larry realizes his tire is flat. No spare. To speak of. He sighs.

"Might as well tell me the whole story."

Larry, and his keen sense of timing.

14

My dad's telling me this cool story.

Yea? Whatisit?

S'about these aliens who're all over the place, drinking wine and causing trouble.

What kind of trouble?

Making us make lasers, and think everything's okay.

How do they do that?

With muffins. I think.

With muffins?!

Yea. But he hasn't quite gotten to that part yet.

How are muffins making us do things?

I think there's something in them.

What?
Some kind of aliens stuff. Maybe Splum.

Splum.

Yea. That's the stuff my dad got, by mistake.

Is this a true story?

I don't know yet.

Didn't he tell you?

Sort of.

I'd like to hear this story too. Can I come, when he tells it?

He only does it at night.

Maybe I can sleep over.

Are you two comfy?

Yea dad.

Totally.

Now you're sure you want to hear this? I mean, it might not make a lot of sense to you, if you haven't heard the first part.

I told him about it dad.

Ok. Let's get back to it then.

'The guy's articulate, you know?'

'Is that before you put the chemical in the pot?'

Who's talking here?

Give it a minute. You'll see.

"Way before."

"So you were impressed with him?"

"Very. He had some mind-blowing thoughts."

"Like?"

"Shit! I can hardly remember now!"

"So you thought he was about to assault you?"

"I was scared."

Now , I forgot to mention you can't tell your parents about this, unless you think they wouldn't care, of course. Parents get very exited about aliens, and swear words, and not necessarily in that order when it comes to their youngins. So I can say shoot instead of shit to make your mom happy, but then I wouldn't be telling this tale correctly, now would I?

No sir.

So it is true!

Unless that's part of the story.

But what he said - about saying the thing the way it was said...

Maybe he said that just to get you going.

Why would he do that?

Makes a better story.

I gotta tell Scott about this.

He stalked her. Reeking of cheap wine.

"Oh, there's one more thing. He said he's seen you before."

"How'd he know me?!"

"I don't know; but he described your car to prove it."

"Maybe he just saw me visiting you once."

"Maybe. All I know is, the experience gave me the creeps. I wanna move, knowing he's lurking around, watching me come and go."

That's when I filled her in. He's the guy who gave me this stuff, at a concert-that...

Did she believe you?

I think she was still in shock. And all I did was add to it.

It was the splum dealer, watching both of you?

The very. He must have figured out he'd made a mistake, dosing me with it.

He though you were one of them?

Exactly.

Maybe he is one of them.

He's my dad, bozo.

Yea, but maybe before that, and they made him forget, for some reason.

You're weird.

No, listen! How come he knows all this, and nobody else seems to?

How about the cement dude??

Yea, but he doesn't really know.

Not yet, anyway.

And Larry! He's doing something with them.

Maybe he only knows there's something in the muffins, but he doesn't know what.

If he'd a hubcap left, it'd be skitterin' cross the intersection just-freshly four-wheel drifted.

Smell of muffins. Small self-inflating tire, heating its joke of a rim. The thought of it, looking so dumb there, threw him off. Breathing slow, bleached white flowers in cellophane wrappers. Hot pressed oil. Tried not to think about it, too hard.

His poor brother!

All the cement must have gotten to him. All those forms to fill. Must have over-metaphor'd something upstairs. Imagine! 'Judgments of others signal self-judgment.' Like... what does that have to do with muffins? Christ. He'd listened for over an hour. Captive audience. Universe flattening the tire, to keep me there. "Larry, I was all over the place last night. Went to a bar, with all these couples necking..." I mean, when was the last time anyone used that word? "...and I was watching them do it." Yea, so now it's getting interesting. "But something was all wrong." What? You didn't have one, and they did? That's what I'm narrating, silently. "They were in love with some self image-projection into future." Huh? They were riding parallel tracks of isolation, looking out from cars of insulative metal, speeding pavement between." Which really got me going. I mean, he's talking my language now, but he's saying diddlysquat. "You mean, they weren't connected, in a deeper sense of the word?" I clarify. "More or less, I guess." He's got his hand over his brow, processing something completely archane. As I'm wondering how he switches so fluidly between guttural constructu-speak, and more refined cerebral-isms. We have "... Nothing to lose, air bags, seat belts, metal superstructure..." mumbling to himself. As I wait for the main shunt to couple.

So stay with me a moment. Sloan's gonna let us look back fifteen million light years, and I underline back. We can't look out, without looking back, the way the Hubble Constant works things. What if some other race figured out a way to look out, without looking back in time? Or what if they haven't. He adds, quite to himself. What if they can come, but they can't look first. Shit. I bet lasers have something to do with this.

I left his silly philosophizing there, W.P.A.ing the butt of a shovel, propped reverie-daydream. And went to the bathroom, beneath the basement. The crypt, as we called it. Only used as an act of emergency, when extra fifty steps to the house is inconceivable. Back when the garage had been a house, a hundred years ago, before its top floor burned off. It was actually an heirloom--an original Thomas Crapper porcelain, flushed by a sweaty old pipe on its rusty squawky bellcrank, made you cringe Nightmare Theater thoughts, all claustrophobically-surrounded by powdered stone hewn from some terrifying earlier age. It was the worst conceivable place to be on an acid bender, or a nasty case of the runs. But it was highly gothic, and somewhat notorious amidst connoisseurs of such oddities. Occasionally, strangers with crossed legs appeared, gasping, and gazing its direction. We usually ushered them in. No dry toilet paper, the unspoken rule. As I returned, wiping my hand obsessively on my once-nice trousers, he's still there leaning. Mr. Tripod himself, working something out.

Maybe they're coming back in time, to get us up to speed with laser technology, and celestial tracking technology, so we can aim this soon to be developed secret bemoth on their little world, and deep-six their problem. Hell; it's our problem too. (Audience of three says nothing.) Don't you see? They'll have the goods on both ends! The beam ... coming from a time and space they defined, will be the answer! Two of us shook our heads.

"Okay Larry, this is it. Remember that time we were racing the pseudo-European LeSport car on the motorcycle you borrowed?" Like wow. How could I reorder that memory? (doesn't wait to hear my answer) "You remember what we were wearing? T-shirts and shorts. And you were riding like a demon. Like a possessed man. My thongs were dragging around the corners." Yea. That was some pretty fun. Huh? "Our lives were right on the line. Perched on the deep abyss. One slip, and currtains! But the jerk-off behind us had a crash-resistant car all around him, and the girlfriend he was trying to impress. They had two extra wheels, better brakes, seat belts and steel between them and a double-death we were gliding above. So what were they actually risking? But here is the curtain--they thought they were in our league. They assumed we were riding the same experiential groove. Do you get it? Like the lovebirds, in love with their projections of what the other person reflects back to them. In love with their plans for the future, the person becomes an embodiment of."

"But... [ANTSY-CONTEXT: TAPPING FINGERS AGAINST ANYTHING HANDY] ... I still can't quite figure, what this has ta do with splum."

[THEY'RE GETTING CLOSER]

15

That's when it hit me.

The miles of clues, riding up against themselves.

I tried to tell Layree, be sure of it.

But he was off hawking muffins to some pent-up precept, or another.

Things were getting bad. I was seeing them all the time. Every time I turned another corner one was there, begging. Or putting money in the parking meter (pretending to). You could tell there was something odd about them, because they never wore the right amount of clothing. Either too much, or too little, as if their climate control had gone mad. I remember being invited in for tea by one, who didn't seem to notice I was human through and through. The inside of that house was ninety-five degrees--as if the owner had meant to flip the furnace off, and cranked it full on by mistake, never even noticing the difference. I lasted five minutes, before my host(ess) got suspicious. Sweat forming on a tense, wrinkled brow.

'Wouldya like some-nuffins, withyur tea?'

she said.

So this is true, right Mr. Desmond?

Doesn't it seem like it isn't?

Well... [CONSIDERS ROUNDABOUT LOGIC]... yes. I mean, no.

True is a funny word, Timothy. Ask my son here. He'll tell you.

[SON LOOKS PERPLEXED]

It seems ominous. Don't ask me why. I just know things sometimes. I gulped the tea, and stood up, thanking her. Late for whatever I said it was. Very. Haveta run. Ta. I din't know. The idea of muffins right then, gave me the creeps. Right outside, a guy with shorts. Down the block, a woman with two ski hats on.

... hit me all right. Like a fast ball whacked center mound. Knocked my intellectual wind right out. Left me there, clutching my nuts. Shit. It was bad juju. All over home plate.

So they're all over the place, Mr. Desmond?

You could say that, Tim. You've passed hundreds of them, without even knowing.

Dad says they have a way of looking at you, so you can tell.

Tell what?

That they're aliens.

I like to think of them as opportunists, son. They're no more aliens, than you or I would be, wading through the Amazon to observe native water nymphs, or twenty thousand year-old tribes.

Hit me hard. Knocked me flat-out. We're libbing this illusion, as we go. We're projecting our desires, which reflect off of things, and then - on the principle of radar - we pick the signals back up--minutely changed by recoil off energetic and topographic objects, think this is unbiased information? In fact, it's nothing but us and all our deceptions, amplified! so we can see them. And then there's those damn muffins, making sure it says that way. Christ. I knew they'd think I was crazy, spouting this stuff off.

I ran out, and took the first side street I could find, promptly stepping in fresh concrete, as if no yellow caution tape existed. Like a ninny, just stood there, stared at my genuine cowhide shoes. All gangsterized. This guy waddles up, smiling, eating a big-ole chocochunk. Like a double demonic dram of black-strap molasses. 'Gonna be hard to dump yoz-in the water, with all that sidewalk attached. Doncha think?' something like that, obviously reading my mind. 'Name's Inky.' he says, extending a crumb-specked hand.

Inky?

Short for Ingelbert.

Was he black?

No; but his eyes were very dark, and mysterious. Actually, he was Irish.

Ingelbert is an Irish name?

Nope.

Then how come... ?

Do you think Timothy is American?

"Because judgment signals self-judgment. Because we're in love with the image we projection into the future, thinking it's somebody else, our amour surrounds. Because we're riding parallel tracks of isolation, looking out from cars of insulating metal, pavement speeding between. Face it. We have nothing to loose, with air bags, seat belts, and emotional superstructures, encasing the pliant, perceptive, self." They were all over me. As soon as I figured it out. Sent an agent after me, they did. Smoke curls from orange-hot barrel, his finger wove trigger beneath-my existence, generally, enjoining morose thought of graves, and worms. I was a holographic figure hovering in a small metal vee, and a blued-steel tab designed for finality. There was no eye darker than the depths of his ocean, I can assure you. Squinting towards me. With that fucking apparatus.

"Don't move."

: The exact thing, that didn't need to be said.

They took my wallet, and my car. Generally made life difficult. And then, that episode of the cement truck. Some ugly business, really. Those drunks squished. But something had to be done.

He did what?!

I told you, you wouldn't believe me.

Why'd he do that?

He thought God said to.

Musta been amess.

A mess? You should'a seen it!

You saw it?!

Only the pictures, after it hit..

16

PLEASANT DAY. SUN SHINE BETWEEN BROKEN CLOUDS. SIDEWALK CAFE. EARLY LATE AFTERNOON. OCCASIONAL SPLATS OF RAIN ON SHINE REFLECTED OFF WHITE PORCELAIN DISHES. PEOPLE SITTING AROUND, TALKING. THE OMINOUS SUBJECTS, SKIRTED. CEMENT TRUCK POKING OUT OF A MUFFIN FACTORY'S OTHER SIDE. NEWS CREWS PUTTING FINAL TOUCHES ON STORY AUTHORITIES ARE LYING ABOUT, UNAWARE [CONSCIOUSLY] THEY ARE LYING. A LINGUISTIC ANOMALY AT WORK. HALF-LIES BEING DISSEMINATED FROM THE BODY OF RULING MEDIAL ARM OF EVERY PLOT SUBTERFUGE AND AHEM EARTH CONSPIRACY THEORIES SUCK-TIT FROM. [TRANSCRIPT : THEY DON'T KNOW HOW DRIVER IS, BECAUSE THERE WASN'T ONE. AND YES, WE'RE LOOKING INTO IT, RIGHT NOW.]

( The thing they'll never tell you: )

"It is actually possible to go back in time, and send yourself a message. Or go forward. But hindsight is usually more accurate. Unless its the kind of spiritual message, that wakes you up. The kind that's an echo of what you've not yet forgotten, or congenially covered with base materialism, styrofoam peanuts, or vapid well-wishes. It's actually quite easy, all things considered. But there is a bit of prerequisite. That minor volley of insights and events to render, which have to do with ... You guessed it. The present. The now. You will notice … " The professor waited till everybody noticed his arms, released from animated presagistics, to look this way, and that. " ... that we tend to miss the obvious facts of everyday life, that are very much in our best immediate interest. Our indispensable intuits, and hints of tact and jibe through the otherwise-murderous winds of events. For instance: [CITES SMALL EXAMPLE; PEOPLE NOD HEADS IN UNISON. ON SOME-LOST TRANSCRIPT-LEVEL, WE ALWAYS KNOW WHAT TO DO] we just don't want to acknowledge it. That we do know, I mean." Which broke the mesmerism he'd created, ever-so slightly. The professor, slightly flustered by his own poor timing, trying to recoup loss.

The facts of our own natures are everywhere.

That's what he said?

If I had to sum it up, yes.

You mean, I look at one thing, and it tells me something else.

More like, you look at something, and you notice some aspect of it, that reminds you of yourself.

So you have to see that, before you can time travel.

Maybe. I'm not sure. The professor thought so.

But what if you have a big machine?

They might be a short cut.

The machines?

No, the...

Aliens. All you ever talk about is aliens these days. Haven't you seen anteing more terrestrial lately? Come on Gertrude. We used to discuss talking cats, and trees that whispered. Now it's nothing but sessions on aliens. Why would aliens want to come here and get drunk? Doesn't that sound a bit strange? All this way to become street people, and die of eventual liver collapse? Gertrude screwed up her mouth furiously, to tame the expurgate, brewing inside. I can't help what I see doctor. I wish I didn't see these people! My life would be much easier if I could drive a minivan around like you do, and think everything's going just fine 94% of the day.

There's a buncha people who can see them?

Some. It turns out a splum shipment was confused with the terrestrial stuff sometime the year before, when the creatures were a little more narcoleptic from the atmosphere.

Narco... ?

Sleepy. Apparently, the atmosphere gets them high. But they get used to it eventually. And the splum acclimatizes them, in time.

What happens next?

We're zipping cross-country.

For long?

Until you go to sleep.

Mike, who once lived a love life with a beautiful actress, was down and out in his acting career. He currently fixed flats on West 89th street, waiting the next big gig. She'd gone on to Broadway and left him behind, when he couldn't do the commitment thing. Like a lot of guys; wha the hell? But he loved her still, and tired denying it. Whenever possible. Tragedy, off the acting stage, which as all actors secretly know, is total misnomer. Her heart was so warm, it scared him. So he broke it. To kill the potential. You know. So you don't have to mind the gap, between knowing and being. You fill it in. No tripping anymore. He sighs, fingering his muffin. Goddamned things. Seems like it's all he ate anymore.

"The teramiso in Cafe Reggio is incredible. Forget all the friggin glitz and glam of the new, sparkling clean places with headsetted employees talking lightning orders like fast fools' gold food. You have to sit there, and luxuriate in waiting. You may have to converse with the waitress, or waiter. While others are waiting and too damned bad if they don't like it. After all, you go to a house to coffee and cake to relax! But tragically, Americans are puissant relaxers, evidenced by the lack of real, kick-back cafes where nobody hustles you out no matter how long you linger. And note the tangible lack of muffins at these places. Not decadent enough. You should go and enjoy yourself, not order faux pastries, and skinny lattes. It's a question of priorities. If you can't afford the real thing, perhaps you shouldn't be indulging at all."

That's how they were different.

One liked muffins and one didn't?

No; one knew the value of muffins, and love.

I don't get it. And where are we now? You keep switching around.

We're in New York City.

Doing what?

Meeting some more people who are figuring the story out.

She used to meet him everywhere, by purest coincidence. Both of them resisted these meetings alternately, dismissing their magnanimity with scorn, and previously-hurt feeling. She counted cracked paint ceiling tiles in Cafe Reggio, the ominous feeling approaching, that he was near. The dreaded. Two blocks east, as he threw himself into fast walk, leaving remnants of cranberry choco-chunklatte on nearest trash receptacle, for drunkhungry passerbys. Not the faintest idea, where he was going.

She closes her eyes, sure he's about to walk past. He turns the corner and feels a mysterous need for a drink. Brief stop, on meander to nowhere particular.

"Hi Darlin."

"Oh jeeze."

And they laugh. For some refreshing reason.

"I knew you were out there."

"You did?"

Vast NYC tractate, and this happening. Twice a month, sometimes.

"Yea. It's always like that. As you know."

Which he did. But he like to hear it anyway.

"I have a present for you."

"What?"

He's not entirely sure, but sounds so good, he rummages his pockets for one.

"It's in here somewhere."

With a lot of total junk. Little pieces of other people's lives. Cast the-ways. Art in the making, maybe. And he finds it. Perfect, though the paint is chipped ever so slightly, you see? adds to the character. It was a dove, on a broken key chain.

"Now watch …"

Not sure what's next, but pulling keys from his pocket, removing his one and only. Front door. Lost all its copies. Using it to bend mangled clip straight, then thoughtlessly adding it, on spring-steel circle.

"What's that to?"

Fascinated. He can tell.

"Don't you know?"

He hands it to her. Fingers' recognition-the rubbed brass. Those groves. Its back, pried all those beer caps, and screwdriver slots they laughed over.

"It's symbolic;" he quickly adds. Trying to catch her eyes

looking deeply at his hands. "For peace."

Is this gonna be a yunky love story?

It is already. Haven't you noticed?

No. I wanna know about the aliens again.

But neither of them understood the privations each one suffered. Yet. Soon they would experience each other's versions, and begin to understand. Her cats the surrogate children she hoped (i.e. projected) having with him (add ring and vows) constantly attacked whatever object she tried to protect. Their lesson to her. But she didn't get it. Yet. Her hard-assed one-oh-five pounds of Don't mess with me! fire covered a soft gooey core cats loved to fuck with. Eventually. Curiosity getting the better of them, favorite glass pitcher of flowers falling way of brick-hard floor. Smash. Kittens chomp top-heavy blooms, a mite too high to satisfactorily paw. Put there, to keep claws at bay. Strange girl. Fascinating. As nice, as generous as anyone you'd ever want to meet. Don't get her mad. Don't cross her. Projects plans. Can't let go easily. Flees from people actively doing same. Just... hides it better. But her supersecret insides know things. Things 'bout muffins, and love.

He knew she knows. He didn't have to ask anything.

Pleads silently: No rules. plans or projections. Please!

She is trying. Afraid to be hurt, doing so.

Stays shut down, instead.

Where it's "safe".

But it isn't.

I miss you.

I miss you.

Has to be said. Conviction not there.

Authenticated. Think they aren't strong enough to

bear acts of transgression from war. Looking for open gears. For mondo-sized

monkey-wrenches. "But this is your only key, I'll bet."

Because she knows him more than somewhat.

"Yea. So?"

She always liked that about him. Not practical to a fault. Willing to do stupid things for her. Without forethought. Unplanned foolishness : the best kind.

"You know, I've been thinking." he begins.

"About what?"

Glad to lay puzzling emotionality-issues to rest, for the moment.

"Promise you won't laugh."

"I won't. Promise, that is."

"You'll have to. It's more fun that way."

"Okay. I'll try."

"Ready?"

"Yes."

"No smiles."

"Not a-one!"

He takes one deep breath, and looks around.

"I think pastries have some kind of mind-control drug in them."

She explodes, her face cracking loudly.

"I tried; really I did!"

"Then you think I'm nuts, right?"

"I thought that already."

"Great. I though you were on my side."

"I useta be, 'fore you dumped me, that is."

He didn't want the cut feet, of walking on her glass. In his mind, she dumped herself. She forced him to leave, encumbering him with all those silent projections.

Dad, this part doesn't have enough aliens in it.

Visitors, son. Visitors.

They're aliens if they're trying to take over things!

But do we know that yet?

Sure we do!

No, we don't. And believe me, New York is teeming with aliens. Even the natives know it. They suspect it consciously, in fact - think the thought tangibly on average twice a fortnight.

A fortnight is two weeks!

That's right son. Good job.

How come you didn't say once a week then?

Tragic really. She hardly has any dates, and was slowly losing her ability to cuddle. Not enough sex--and she's the master of it. But he didn't know this. They'd been separated for years. Maybe he assumed, she's tearing the town down. And was afraid to examine he wanted to, and also wasn't. For some inexplicable reason.

"You know, I only laughed--but it was only because I've been noticing some equally-strange things, and have been too shy to say it to anyone."

Which made a boy trapped in emerging adult, beam. The calcification of age was gaining ground, His friends amazed how long he'd staved it off. Vindictive, and gregarious about it, to be truthful, behind his back. Jealous, on some level. Looking at the fugal melodies, offered by everyday lives. Glaucous with fetishistic charms, claiming to wipe weight away. Porches, and dreams of them. Another child, dreams of one! All those things beings project, and acquire, unstintingly. Emboldened by retail therapy claims, more neostuff = less weight, yoking tired shoulders.

"I think we're being deceived."

"So did I."

he echoes.17

Harlem.

From 5th and 47th.

Taxies with you in their headlight-sights accelerating to gory glory, ramped on life-giving Percodans n-Colt 45 from a paper bag bottle, giggling manically at pedestrian scatter. Among them, Dannie Franjesco. From the Spanish side. Professional driver, opening the 125th to 179th street swath. In his tagged-up station wagon, with the 454 Olds shoe-horned in. A mere two hundred fifty bucks it cost him. A few skinned knuckles, some beer and vexation. New tires five-finger discount. Rims painted black, works like a charm. One a little out of round when donor got dropped, jack skitters out, hitting curb with sparks. Pretty exciting. Pulled out just in time. Mare wares than one. Do say. A fucking wild ride, she was. Metal-pedal roaster, running radiator hot, heater blastin full, most of them stoplights. When he bothered to. Taxies knew, and hated him. Made them look like fools!. Drivers! they call themselves. Sheet. He's gonna make it big. In muffins.

Did you know the biggest cathedral in the world is on Manhattan?

No.

It's so tall inside, the statue of liberty can fit there, with room to spare.

U-huh.

And the organ is famous.

So?

The biggest pipe is made of sugar pine, is square, and weighs a ton. You and I could fit inside.

What's this have to do with...

And the sound is so low, you don't really "hear" it, per-se. More a sublime visceral rumbling, they say. And that's a hint, Mr. Detective.

About Dannie?

No; about what he delivers.

It's called a thunderstop. When you four-wheel lock, for an instant, then hit the gas. Hard. Full-G, four barrel workout. Auto trannie clank! Only for extreme circumstances, of which, many arise. Daily quandaries of places to go, time ticking, and not enough space to gas though. So alterations occur. Don't ask him why it works, it just does. Holes open; he moves into them. Almost ecstatic (and sexual) if you like to think of it that way. Which Dannie dies for. He loves the idea of traffic as sex. One big fossil fuel orgy. Yassir!

Is Dannie tough?

I was one of three white dudes in Harlem that day, roaming around looking at burned out squatters buildings that used to be sumptuous mansions. Windows boarded, smelling or looking of urine. Waifs of cats prow garbage heaps, and wind blows ragged plastic bags through the air. Drug deal auditors hung out disarmingly, on corners, ARRESTING UNSUPERVISED TRAFFIC IN INTRAGALACTIC WARES, I suspiciously thought. Matrons of bus-segregated days, wheel walkers slowly through a warp that landed 1950 squarely in 1998. UNESCO should develop this site. The buildings were unbelievable. I don't know what age I inhabit, poking down these streets. Something seemed monstrously wrong. Time seems broken - a hundred streets down, the twenty-first century emblazoned all over Times Square. Lights and modern high-rises. Billboards of animated buy-mes. Little of architectural note, or quality in sight. Damaged, leaning tenements uptown, still reeking of something profound - and I'd seen people living like this, in India! No less! Trash everywhere rags holes blasted in brick walls, for unauthorized doors windows long-ago cement-blocked and forgotten. I wondered if this anomaly, could be preserved.

What were you doing in New York City?

Looking for Dannie.

Did you know him?!

I didn't.

Then... ?

The tragedy of once-grand mansions, falling to ruin. Bituminous tiles, peeling the lair of their roofs, tore your gut - made you pinch yourself - is this real? Could this still exist, in/on this itty-tiny cosmopolitan world famous island? Where some paltry number of blocks South all-white money-men push careless wheelbarrows of daily take to their banks? This was a trap. If you passed this zone without being shaken, you were blind to all hiacity. They could pull any wool over your eyes. Especially aground, your ship floundering on a few doctored muffins. (Or bagels?) I walked a hundredtwenty five blocks, looking hard both ways, for Dannie.

Went back to my seventh story, cockroach-littered room and collapsed.

In the gorgeous last light of a turn of century building, facade crumbles in weight of the rain, sirens scream and prostitute's heel click, cigarette butts all ova the sidewalk, litter of broken sleep, and waylaid dreams. The sailor uniform, on the waif model, bitter dregs of last job festering between her sore legs. The firetruck, barely negotiating the parked cars. There's a tree growing from the abandoned mansion, up the street where, developers are counting offers to raise history, razing history. The taxis vying for customers, smoking imported tobacco (itself a mixture) of tobacco imported from America. Photographer snatches the last light, imprinting it, his soul on the picture, native tribes assumes steal - men aware of the wrong sensations, watching the focal plane slide. And he smells sex around the sailor, in an altered 20's suit. As the temperature drops. And boys play hoop through the bottom rung of a rusty fire escape, dreaming of status, in the genetic venue open for men, of their particular collar. One day delivery man paces the late sidewalk, filled with crinkling plastic wrap packages, still to find home. He longs slow, and chairs, with thick papers, plus nowhere to go. All-day-lengths, taffy of nothing to do. No people to sign electronic dotted lines.

Dad. How come you went there for Dannie?

I heard a drunk grumbling about him.

Where?

In the Palace of Fine Arts.

Do they let drunks in palaces?

The drunks'r running the show, remember?

I thought they were tourists.

That's true too.

The empire state building just had a facelift, shined a blue streak of cobalt sky, against brightly polished metal. "What are you going to do when you're sixty?" She asked her ex-lover. "I don't know. I don't even know where I'll be tomorrow." Which was truer than he liked to admit, considering he had no key to his apartment any more. "But doesn't that worry you?" "It doesn't when I think in that way." I heard him counter, sitting in the folding chair painted army green, by the steamy window. "But you know what? I have thought the future out lately. Since I met this madman named Dannie." "Who?" Dannie. I overhear. Ears perk like a kitten, about to pounce. As bag lady wheels spoils of war by, casters screeching. So THE NEXT THING HE SAID - I totally missed it. Listening like a piranha, about to feast big. Smelling flesh, my teeth will expose. Etc.

Where's Dannie live?

A broken-down brownstone in Spanish Harlem, with his mother, and spinster aunt.

I eavesdropped their zone. Went to look the next day. Found the boy in less than an hour. Howiss that wagon?! Sounds like a great white shark, if such a beast made noise.

"Why do you believe him? Some wacko from Harlem?"

"Because he gave me one of his bagels."

"And...?"

"And nothing."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I felt nothing. I was sentience poking from of a robot, walking around automatically."

"Was it pleasant? Or not?"

"I'm not sure. It was subtle. But it screamed, somehow."

"So the bagel was laced?"

"With what though? I've made the rounds of alterants, and nothing's ever done that before." Mike whispers, setting statement off as if he's routed it. While stars came out. Some of them moving. And lasers we tested. Bouncing off the moon, where Leonardo thought water reflected sun, to superstitious plebes on Earth.

"Aren't you cold ?"

"Not yet."

"I'm frozen."

She looked him sideways, like : Where are you spending the night. Wondering slightly, if only key was a set-up.

"Can we go to your place?"

Feeling him, in her.

Dad! This story is nasty!

It's not nasty; it's reality. You want me to change it?

Yes!

Okay big boy; I will.

What day is it?

Tuesday.

Shoot.

What's wrong?

Only one more day to go.

Till what?

The muffin week is over.

Then what happens?

You'll see.

18

The slice of pizza was something you'd get at a circus, from a bulbous-nosed clown. As a joke. It dwarfed the plate, sagging off it in every direction at once. I thought the employer was trying to make fun of me, serving this obscene slab of cheese on crust, for a mere buck-fifty. As outrageous, than buying gasoline for eight cents a gallon. But then I noticed others, jockeying melted cheese, and structurally-buckled crusts. Fighting their way out the door, before they had an accident all over other hapless consumers in line. I considered it a cosmic payment, for handing over my key. Except the misanthrope, who in too loud a voice, announced a patrons death, from a heart attack. "He always ate here." somebody whispered. Which gave me the creeps, long enough to order feta, instead. Then reconsider. The guy before me had a feta, and it collapsed instantly. But it was most likely, his technique. The server straight-faced it. All the way down his down parka, mouth roof blistered. No patience, people - these days. Humans jammed the Good-Friday sidewalks, prancing latest fashions, and carnal hungers. Shirts unbuttoned one extra notch. The Felicity of religion, notwithstanding. Quite literally so. Greenwich Village, and Soho were hopping.

I could feel it. Forty blocks, and walking fast.

He was close. Very close. Any minute, I'd trip his path. He bent over to pick up a roll of Wild Cherry Lifesavers, somebody dropped. She unwittingly stepped on a hand. Yeeeow, lady! Jesus! Nice legs. Not a bad skirt vantage, either. Forgot about the high heel, in the palm. For an instant. She's so stunned, she doesn't move her foot. He can see, she's so preoccupied with some thought she doesn't even recognize him. This second, is a juncture, he realize. I could say nothing, and she might walk on.

"Sorry!!"

embarrassed, she looks away.

He chooses to say nothing.

Dannie skidded from the alley, to the corner recently soaked with blood. The chalk had been replaced by a R.I.P., spray-painted by some local artist, age fifteen. It was a good likeness, so people left it alone. Unfortunate business, that bullet. Man never should have been waving that thing around, 'specially with the infighting, right n-Theater Street. But what happens is God's will, so preacher says. Whenever something shitty goes down. And the sand from the long list of things being fixed in the street grabbed the friction of hot tires, spinning his rear end around. With a cop watching things, sneaky, from the trailer of the construction site. Verifies the license plate. Radios. Hard to outrun them, no matter how big your pistons are. Not that Dannie even knew he was fingered. But he bribed his way out, miraculously, with a dozen hot muffins, and a day old cinnamon raisin bagel. Could hardly believe what was happening. To tell the truth. Fed the charmed life, marked-human for greatness theory, pejoratively stashed in head. "Cop even told me a joke!" as he regaled his Main Man. Said-"What's the insensitive place at the base of the penis?" elicited guffahs. "Tha man!" "Thawasa lady cop, right?" MainMan wanted to know. "Yea-mostly hadta not make a crack-bout the bagel - yuhear me?" "Ah do!" But maybe she ain't jokin! Slap-slap, high low, back spin. Providence paying out, all sevens lined up.

Dannie. Is your name Dannie? Sure nuf. You need somethin'? I hear you're all over. Tryta be. you need some product? Ah might. Depends. You gotta store, or what?

Dannie, was a very reasonable man.

"You heard anything more about them?"

"Nope. just that they're infiltrating."

"What's the political beef this time?"

"That's good ; been poking vernacular dictionaries lately?"

'Visitor' takes long hit on his bottle, slumps back further.

"What have the cosmic brigands got against telescopes?!"

"Nothing, really."

"Then why monkey-plyer the project?"

"I think it's another philosophy, they're pushing."

(Belch.)

"What? Make new business, by fouling established business up?"

"A lot like war."

"True/false: War is profitable."

"Not sure if it's a relevant question, in this case. I believe we're fighting a coalition for

the non-malleability of time. Incredible; sin't it?"

"How can you stop the rules of the universe?"

"By not believing in them any more, I guess."

The second visitor ponders, taking a twenty second nap in the process.

"Well. The tact has some validity, I suppose."

"Sure it does! Look around you! Its proof is everywhere."

"Sound argument you got there. So... "

"That's right. We better watch out, or we'll be marooned here."

"Nice place to visit..."

(Shudder.)

"But … "

Let me get this straight. There are two different factions - one deprogramming, and one programming. So how are they getting anywhere? Donask me! It's way beyond us man! WAY beyond. Yaknow what I'm sayin'? This izthat fuckin' space aliens shit fer real! How'd you get mixed up in this? And he told me. I felt like I was trippin', hearing a sane man spout such hoopla. It completely fucked me up.

Dannie revved his engine at the unmoving traffic. The wiper squeaked chalk on a hard school board. Brown brick facelifts barely keep pace with decay - scaffold themselves permanently down every city block - providing extra scant shelter from the famous wind, and biting rain. That's what I think back on right now. Because every moment is now, according to the sign in Soho on the ultra-chic gallery of three hundred dollar scant clothing one-pieces, prying philosophy from profundity to make marketing with it. Mad-Ave style. Haze softens already-mute light; a madwoman walking into the cafe, immediately applies foaming fistfulls of mousse, her bright beige pumps four inches from her pants legs, "...feet killing me." as if it explains, the couture. Empty shopping bags under arms. Listening, while people snicker, the latchclicks, she enters the bathroom-observers glad they maintain the wherewithal of normalcy, in plush places. Thinking of trying not to think of times they were screaming lunatics, breaking plates. In privacy of their own-what-ever. While sun dips below tall Riverside buildings. And trains crunch garbage, thrown on tracks. Dannie eyed a parking place he knew he wouldn't fit in, wanting it. Families peering out their windows, at the Passover parade. Mothers and daughters. Meeting for tea. The madwoman emerges from restroom; a mysterious fresh change of clothing. Pigeons coo directly over the doorway, making nice entrance, and exit.

Dad?

Yes son?

Old Jewish belles, peering from the seventh floors of their sand castles. Their never-leave strongholds against the crime and change that's always been scouring the neighborhood. Look up, to see their lives, trapped but for small windows onto streets' dirt and grime. As the parade, with lazy-sureness, passes. Hand-roped crosses, carried by kids.

Dads helping out.

Who told Dannie about this?

So he took me there, where he got the stuff. Just a big happy family, making muffins n-bagels in a warehouse. Place smelled pretty-durn good. Almost a little too good, but perhaps I was a freshly re-hydrated barramundi, hungry after a stint of mud-mummy, in a porcelain goldfish pond. Probably it - now I think about my condition. They recognized me instantly. Treated my worn out self like half-breed kin, showing me around, and the rest of it. It seemed assonant to believe, this might be so simple. No way. Truthfully. This is an advanced race, we're talking about.

His mad uncle did errands for one of them. Apparently.

I never trusted her. I was sure she had ulterior motives, cultured me towards domesticity, no matter how much gypsy flowed in my veins. It's a woman's prerogative to get a mate, build a nest, and procreate. They won't even fess to it, because they doesn't want to know. The depth and strength of it. How would a subtle, open-hearted scenario ever play out, if they knew what they were doing? No; she must be a mystery even to herself, or the seduction into partnership would fail. Of course she vehemently denied it all. Through and through. I was basically terrified you'd get pregnant, and want to keep the kid. Because you believe in : Shit Happens. I know. I've seen you manifest it your life, countless times. And there I'd be--a financial slave to a few squirts. Me! Who thinks the world's too full of overtly-active cerebral bipeds already. I'm being selfish!? Can you imagine?! Selfish, is adding to this army of humans devouring the world! Ho! We'd get in some arguments about it. Real shit-kicking matches. If committing to bankroll, and be there for an accident child is one of the consequences of birth-control blowout, I'll be celibate. Thank you. Nothing personal, I don't happen to believe human babies are any more valuable than ancient redwoods. If you have to know. Given six billion of us already. But of course, we had sex anyway.

Now things seem to be different. He never was this honest before. And that stranger at the cafe--what did he say to us? You're either brother and sister, or in love. We both began to laugh, but when we looked at each other... I don't know. It was strange.

"Stay off the muffins." he joked, as he left.

I wonder how he knew.

And that's what I finally figured out, son.

Whaat?

[SLEEPY, TRYING TO SAY WITH THE STORY.]

I'll tell you tomorrow.

19

In the Acropolis of NYC, foreigners gawk at massive looming structures, feeling puny and Lilliputian in face of all that toil, height and brick. History hangs over, its momentous magnitude stilling your breath, making all earthly accomplishments empty, before the sheer mass of structure stuffed on an island you can walk the length of, in less than a day. Like a holy place, in that way. Buddhist city of temples, far as the eye can see. Dwarfing scales, reminding you of the celestial-the scale of beyond. Because it's so easy to lose perspective. And shit barely matters, in case it happens. Never mind-stay in eternity, where the heart is not obsessed with bigger-betters. With lifetime accomplishments. Because the most important thing you can do is be open with everybody who comes into contact with you. And there you have it! What the splum did. As a side effect.

As an antidote, to muffins.

The weight of history tears you from yourself. The fear of the future, shatters peace of mind. The entire product line reinforces there, instead of here, and now. The saying is cliche'd, used by the product mill that deadens us, to render itself harmless, along with other, heat-provoking thoughts. You digest what media presents, and think you're being enlightened. Sorry Charlie. Couldn't be further from the truth. You create a clever virtual world of spirituality, you sagaciously inhabit. It has nothing real, or feeling in it. It projects an outside world in keeping with its rules, you so carefully constructed. Or rules' askance, constructed for you.

How did you find the other kind of alien? Visitor … I mean.

He found me.

What did you do? Hold up a sign?

it windows silhouette naughtiness

Curtains down, drawn slightly ... aside

Makes the curious wonder if ...

(On purpose?)

Her Fire Escape

Beckons.

They're infiltrating the pleasure zones. The booze shops, and prostitution dens. I knew it, because I smelled splum. My body freaked out, just from the contact high. Like a cellular memory, shooting off. Internal fireworks. No wonder they keep the stuff under wraps - it tweaks earth consciousness. Only smells like pot, to people who've never had it. So I went in there, and this elderly gentleman pinpointed me, instantly - waiting in their anteroom.

"Oh, the laser project's still on target. It's a technology trade, you know? We can hardly turn it down. After all, it was the down and out tourism that caused most of our problems. And the anti-time coalition is relatively small, so when the supercolladhalhiperri got under way, they had to pull out. The thing's a quarter light year across! Takes a lot of being-power to monkey-plyer something on that scale! Plus, there was an election, which always sows moneysaving oats. Crazy to remember it now. Throes of madness, most people would claim. Funding cut for a time being… But it's going to happen, believe me - those problems on the home world mold their teeth like Cbanagals, to take a mighty bite out of this project - they'll only set it back a year, maybe two, our time. And what's that, to Epops? Another calculation, that's all. Light still has to trace a path, my goodman! By the way, she's the beet of the garden, that one. I'd taker. His idioms all over me, ebbing and flowing. I musta looked berry-berry confused, when led to the den by the beet lady, because she noticed something was wringing wet, 'shen-shen'… I think she said, like she knew me or something, forming scrunchy noises with her mouth, like mouths shouldn't. My horror, must have alerted them.

Or maybe I screamed, a little. Not sure.

1000111010001110101011110100011010001000000000000001000000010101000111100010101000101001001000011111101010100010101010010101000000001000000001000000111100100100100101010011001010010101000010100100100100101001110100100101011011111001001010010101010010100101001010100100101010100101010010101001010010101100101000101011001010 Transcript interrupt : UNCOUTH VERSIFIERS - CORRUPT NARRATION. Run interference filters. Code three-one.

"You are not of them, are you?!" This probably has pronounced wrong, and right answers attached to it. Interview three, on some kind of something. That made me feel pretty good, I might add. And then, I was… somewhere. God knows. With this contraption all over me. At least it made nice music, when it ran. Our minds should be so brave, inventing un-ominous high-tech.

Probably some advanced virtual world. Real as real couldn't be. Made you pay attention to everything. Teeming masses. Stairs that creaked, just so. Smells of old rat droppings in the corner. Echoes of voices long since spoken. Ring of dollar fifty in the small stainless steel tray, check the glaze on the donut and muffin-blasted eyes, grab the single soon to be antiquated token with the geometric shape in the center and imagine a time super-secret laser's hit that photocell on some other world. Wonder if the man behind the counter is a soul-less type of humanoid, and generally, what are they doing here!? Bio-plastic black holes, into archetypes? Sucking in energy, and perception? I mean, somebody has to fill the energetic saprophyte slot, considering all these emoting beings, constantly sloughing off volatile, high tension vibes. Or good ones, too. Like the Grateful FauxDead, where I first got splummed. Not that that, was the last time. Mind you. I probably told them everything. Not that everything, is much.

Ode to this experience, (unless I'm still in it) came a box to my hotel room. Cockroaches from miles around appeared to munch on its cardboard. I had to scuttle them with a sad starving broom, minus most of its straw. Inside were twenty cardboard boxes, each, with a vial inside. I fed the inner wrapping to the roaches, and hour later… I only did it to see what would happen.

Maybe I should have patented the result.

Then I burnt some. Splum all right. Oil of it. One whiff knocked me out. And I was trying hard not to get any. For or five hours, reliving sap rising from trees, and space journeys I hopefully never had. Called Dannie-told him to scoot right over. Gave him a good wallop of this (holds up half-empty cylinder) and told him what I had in mind. He was all over it. Top to bottom, you know? Had the spinster aunt working in the muffin factory in a week, dosing batches. Portions for all takers he touched. Fuck-one of these friggin' vials! Probably enough ration for a whole city's water supply. Dosage was tricky. Almost homeopathic-the more we cut it, the stronger it seemed to get. And the slightest bit on your hands! There was a lot of downtime,

trying to recover.

19

All the pomp, gitter and glitz, the circumstance surrounding. The opening. Of the project. You'd think it a royal ball. The well dressed (in sub-celebrity status) linger outside as maven paparazzi scout teeming masses breaching the perimeter of police barricades' vain attempt to stem the one-inch-closer hoard ooze, ever-hungry for proximity to stardom. Inside, suited courtesans sip expensive mixed drinks from plastic faux crystal, lingering the mezzanine resonant with sonorous knowyou slaps to bygone backs-only audible at TV events as these, to ease creeping senses of monotony that cohabit all aristocratic escape. They dim the lights near exit 12, announce : 'All Cell Phones Off!" (As if they confiscate them already!) … Or maybe the house lights dimmed, because our laser was up.

The moment we'd all been waiting for.

Thanks to :

Dannie Franjesco:

129^th

w/its warehouses

and 1920s fronts

yellow painted bricks

at bottom

for safety

blind man's cane

tapping old days

where the reservoir by

the university used

to see

midnight jumpers

naked suppressing

screams of

delight.

145^th and Broadway

Howl in the dank staircase of cracked

tiles, and falling plaster

grabbing slippery handfuls of banister

with its bulky coat of paint

passing sooty, chicken wire windows

looking out on dreary fire escape

courtyards, hemmed in on all sides

by coat encrusted brick, collecting

pollutants through the ages.

Daniel Sapp, Mortician-on reading first thirty one pages of Cosmic Muffin Week

Walking around the Bronx car alarms wailing the pit bulls slavering on the ends of glazed-eye leashes, I stare out at unseen stars and pinpoints of light adjusted for innumerable gravitational anomalies, thinking about choco-chunk muffins, cement trucks, overpowered mini-vans, and a freak encounter, that night of flat-tire entendre. Downtown. That week.

All time ago.