tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105044923792822002024-03-05T23:19:26.144-05:00ammohammerbite!bite is now ed mypunsoammohammerbite!bite is now @ edmypunso.comRygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-32476792765661512812011-04-15T15:30:00.002-04:002011-11-28T11:57:41.778-05:00----------><a href="www.edmypunso.com">ed mypunso</a><----------Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-68958115988154244482011-01-19T14:57:00.001-05:002011-01-19T15:01:37.124-05:00He’s standing on a cliff, warped. Warped, but curious, unsteady and staring, he’s visible in the lake below but misshapen, an undulating distortion reflected in the lapping waters a hundred feet down. The clouds behind him give way to an angry sun and the heat punctures his stamina, buckling his knees and dropping him prone. Loose, dry dirt adheres to his sweaty nostrils as he breathes in, while pebbles and slightly larger, sharper stones dig into his chest. Crawling, he chases the shade laboriously, his own shadow offering up the illusion of respite, and drags himself to the cliff’s edge. Tines of wispy, dead vegetation and mottled, hopscotch rocks tumble into the lake as he pulls himself still closer, framing his sightline between two hearty handholds in the cliff’s crust. Furiously, the sun burdens the lake with the mountain’s craggy silhouette, obscuring the circular dilations of falling debris as well as his notions of meaningful reflection.<br /><br />Fraught with a blistering melancholy, he reproaches himself for typing those words with a palm-heavy slap to his own forehead. He is determined to use the term <em>elegiac</em> to describe how he feels, entirely heedless of its inherent redundancy in the paragraph, and proceeds to wring his creativity dry with a range of ill-conceived analogies designed to inject poetic gravitas as a counterbalance to the comedic and slightly glib twists he enjoys whilst foraying into the self-reflexive quagmire of metawriting. Exhausted, and too pleased by half with the construction of his text, he allows himself a fleeting smirk as his eyes wander blithely across the broken spines of dead novels nestled in his bookshelf. Huddled, as though steeling themselves to an inevitable outburst of angst, the books stand united as silent evidence of his own misaimed cleverness and portend a dissatisfaction that soon gives vent to a grim exhalation of disgust. Like the exhaust of an idling car in a sealed garage, so too does this disgust permeate the room with the stink of invisible poison, and his fingers twitch in response.<br /><br />His want of cloud-cover is enormous, and though the unyielding heat staples him helplessly to the rock, he manages to quarrel viciously with himself over his next course of action: should he shout at his reflection from atop the mountain, prevailing upon the quiet for a reply with his stringy, dishevelled voice? Or should he permit dutiful serenity to embolden him, to roll him on his back and expose his tender underbelly to the ferocious warmth of the sun?<br /><br />Inwardly, he curses his word-processor for the lack of breadth in its thesaurus function and agonizes with insufficient synonymy. Ruinous unfinished sentences pile up under his text, deleterious examples of allegory and analogy and alliteration summarily undeleted, and he moans in frustration. Even with technological aid, the proper words escape him. The cursor hovers imploringly over a white X etched in red, and he scrutinizes myriad ten-dollar alternatives to <em>obliterate</em> should he feel capitulation to be the only option.<br /><br />He pushes himself from the ground, dirt like paste adhered to his torso; he twists, turns, feels his shoulder-muscles tighten and quiver in little knots of pain, but they hold fast in support. His held breath sputters as he rolls, finally and resoundingly, onto his back. Sunshine warms the surprisingly cold skin on his belly, and he realizes with a certain and welcome veracity that he is unable to see his reflection from here.<br /><br />He understands, ultimately. Staring into the sun of his computer screen, his shoulders ache not from spinning himself in the dirt but from the unduly hefting of bulky metaphors and unnecessarily turgid wordplay. He imagines not his soft underbelly exposed but his guts; he sees clearly the tediousness of hiding beneath style-considerations that amount to little more than rolls of fat in disguise, and that clarity itself has been too long overlooked. He needs truth. I need truth. As do you.<br /><br />Truth, and maybe a story about a clown getting kicked in the nuts.Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-25157682673107284742011-01-06T13:42:00.006-05:002011-01-18T15:10:27.863-05:00My face is an orange and Tammy is gone. The vertical slit in my orangeface leaks juice like a miserable, gaping vagina when I cry, and I have been crying a lot, lately. Often, I knead the rind of my brow and pulp my facial fruit-meat like Tammy pulped my heart when she left. The orange juice I squeeze out, the kids in the neighbourhood say, tastes of heartbreak. Bittersweet heartbreak with the zest of citrus. They tell me I should probably keep my orange juice to myself, the kids do, but they buy it anyway. Or, they give me money to leave them alone, at any rate.<br /><br />Tammy was an asshole. She did asshole things, like leaving me, and taking the ottoman with her when she left. She wasn’t always an asshole, but she was always skinny, which is what makes her theft of my ottoman so remarkable: that thing is heavy. Not just heavy, but cumbersome, too. Severely so. My grandfather made it for me out of crushed cinderblocks and the deep, substantial regret of a life spent making ottomans for ungrateful family members. His face wasn’t an orange, but the skin on his hands looked like seaweed, which is kind of like food, I guess. Anyway, he stank of brine shrimp and disaster and was entirely unpleasant to be around. <br /><br />What a bitch she was, that Tammy.<br /><br />I found a fuzzy little birdling, once, hiding in the corner of my balcony. It was shivering and scared and its nascent wings were undeveloped and useless. I ushered it inside and spent that afternoon looking for its mother, even though I knew she was gone and unlikely to return. It was still shaking and nervous through the evening and wouldn’t eat anything except for the tiny sips it slurped out of my orangeface. Eventually, the little bird began to eat proper little bird food and became accustomed to my apartment, to me, even. Nightly, it would nibble from my fruit-meat and nestle happily into a discarded microwave-dinner box to sleep. But daily, it would stare with an air of melancholy at the flying seagulls passing the window, and I knew what needed to be done. Gently, I scooped up my now-feathered companion and let it peck my face with goodbyes as I took it to the balcony. I heard a dollop of my sad juice spatter against the railing as I watched it confidently spread its wings twice, three times, four. I let it go. It dropped like a stone.<br /><br />Now, too late, I see the lesson: I should have dropped Tammy from the balcony.<br /><br />Our relationship was as bittersweet as my juice, in retrospect. Every pleasant memory I have of her is tainted, each by a conflicting memory and by the fact that she somehow managed to take all my canned soup, even the mushroom. Even with the ottoman, even the mushroom soup. Incredible.<br /><br />She hates mushroom soup.<br /><br />I shot a seed out of my face at a homeless man on our first date, shot him right in the forehead, because he tried to put his hand on Tammy’s leg. He was groping her, that’s what she said, though the look on his dishevelled mug after my seed ricocheted off his melon seemed to suggest bewilderment. A lot of homeless people look bewildered. Especially so, I would imagine, after being cracked in the noggin with an orange seed the size of a drink-coaster. Still, the smirk on her face that night always bothered me. More, now, obviously, as I can see her in my mind’s eye smirking and cackling and hoarding my soup. A smiling sadist throwing cans of my favourite soup at homeless people right now. Maybe she picks the wrong vagrant, though, maybe gets a serious surprise from a particularly athletic homeless man familiar with dodging tin-plated foodstuffs. And maybe, just maybe, Tammy finally gets what’s coming to her.<br /><br />Oh, what I wouldn’t squeeze out of my face to see that.Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-84822016688725377522010-12-31T05:39:00.004-05:002011-01-17T22:59:50.110-05:00'Sire! My, uh, groin!'<br /><br />'Mm. ‘Tis nothing.'<br /><br />I squint into his indifference.<br /><br />'I beg your pardon, milord, but ‘tis at the very least something.'<br /><br />'Lookest your vaunted groin, peasant! Still sayest you ‘tis something?'<br /><br />I look to the axe that split my pubis vertically and find it curiously absent, though present enough is the pain, an agony as paralytic as it is, it would seem, physically insubstantial. Hunched over, I summon the courage to grasp at the spectre of the embedded weapon in my groin but succeed only in simulating a masturbatorial pantomime that would force the King’s eyes to take leave of my performance were they not already otherwise engaged in a duel with yonder horizon.<br /><br />'My liege,' I groan, unaware of what next would escape my lips. A pair of blank eyes greets me, as though ‘twas our first encounter, and my gaze falls against the King’s belt like a hapless drunkard upon a sixpence wench: heavily, in a stupor of fatigue…<br /><br />Gasp!<br /><br />'The Axe of Whispers Many,' I murmur, staring into the lone empty belt-loop at his waist. Forcing my eyes upwards, I see the King’s woodplank-teeth propping up an obliging smile, a mercilessly ingenuous look that speaks to obliviousness, for I, to him now, was a stranger.<br /><br />'It is with no small amount of trepidation, sire,' I say, straightening as best I am able, 'that I should on you call shenanigans.'<br /><br />'Shenanigans?' the King repeats, his retreating grin catching against his teeth. 'On me?'<br /><br />'Again, it grieves me to do so—'<br /><br />'SHENANIGANS!' he thunders, his meek amiability vanishing like whores upon the morn. 'You dare speakest to me of <em>shenanigans</em>? You, who art hunkered in the thrall of invisible pain, a beggar with less sense in his head than pence in his cup?'<br /><br />'Forgive my obstinate nature , milord,' —and here I gesture vigorously at my crotch— 'but the Axe of Whispers Many? It is quite likely that I would prove an excellent answerer of queries were you to see to its departure from my groin.'<br /><br />'Forsooth—'<br /><br />'Hastily,' I add with an imploring grimace. 'Oh so hastily.'<br /><br />'’Tis not obstinacy but impudence that casts a shadow on your plight, meagre peasant! Lo, the—'<br /><br />'Fair enough.'<br /><br />I bow my head in the King’s stunned silence.<br /><br />'Apologies, my great King. I misspoke as to shenanigans, particularly in my liege’s vicinity. A thousand pardons, sire.'<br /><br />I wait with head bowed until the stunned silence becomes heavy with self-satisfaction and steal a glimpse of the King again staring off yonder before I settle into a backwards-leaning crouch.<br /><br />'Sire?' I ask, pitifully. 'Mayhap your kindness extends to a poor soul unable to right himself?'<br /><br />The King, taken aback by my reprisal of the role of stranger, eventually smiles broadly with those horse-hoof teeth and reaches a bejewelled hand forthwith; I catch my elbow-guard on my belt and whine.<br /><br />'I’m afraid my arm suffers from frailty of spirit, milord,' I say. 'Have you the strength to come closer?'<br /><br />An impatient divot furrows his brow, but with barn-door teeth clenched the King lunges forward with a clambering hand; my 'frail' arm swings to the ground behind me for support and I thrust pelvically into his grasp, the Axe of Whispers Many pulling loose in his grip. We, as a pair, fall in unison to our backsides.<br /><br />'How had you my axe,' asks the King, in genuine shock, 'in your groin, no less?'<br /><br />'I had but asked if your extraordinary oratory was available on papyrus, milord,' I say, crudely feeling about my nether-region for enduring damage. 'For singular consumption, of course, as I had hoped to enjoy your rhetoric from the comfort of my own abode. Then, pain.'<br /><br />'’Tis <em>not</em> available,' barks the King, his face reddening, 'to you nor any of your ilk!'<br /><br />'No, I know. You said that already, in very clear language - I get it. However, my liege, when I inquired further as to your future speaking engagements, I was cut short - or cut down, if you will - by that which you currently hold in your kingly hands...'<br /><br />But his attention yet again dissipates. Staring out into the distance on crossed legs, clutching the Axe of Whispers Many to his breast, the King rocks gently to and fro on the hard, tamped earth of his courtyard. I study his face, rosy in the setting sun, and watch as the creases of age seem to deepen in his pained visage with every tilt forward. Dusting myself off, I rise and take leave of the man who, despite the prestige of being King of all he surveys, owns nothing but his own rhetoric.Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-43667609841337376542010-12-10T11:40:00.003-05:002011-01-17T23:00:55.225-05:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-foniTWadn0YtUH_EnM6dpvZBjoHV9xmDts0WWv6FXJKNoj65E_9HI94lkzma97b-DBBc9X7nE7xorG0OhB9AzA6_gzAE1sKxvjSYwU6RQvRFMv2Yz5NYN0fetaQC0MmLsg8jnL8zHg/s1600/millersmaller.JPG"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 291px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 296px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5549098082679864162" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-foniTWadn0YtUH_EnM6dpvZBjoHV9xmDts0WWv6FXJKNoj65E_9HI94lkzma97b-DBBc9X7nE7xorG0OhB9AzA6_gzAE1sKxvjSYwU6RQvRFMv2Yz5NYN0fetaQC0MmLsg8jnL8zHg/s320/millersmaller.JPG" /></a><br /><div><em>For <a href="http://jamielawsondesign.com/blog/">my brother’s</a> November 28, in response to his portrait of Henry Miller for my August 7.</em><br /><br />I looked into the blurry stretch of road outside my L’Hotel Virandicedenia and drew a four with three fingers and a thumb in the condensation of my floor-to-ceiling window. It seemed lazy and malnourished, the road did, and though it fairly crawled with activity the crisp inertia of vitality was missing; missing and presumably stolen, nothing more than a network of coiled copper-wiring torn from an untended basement, vigor sold for ten cents a foot. Rows of ellipses were united in a grid of dots under my itching fingers, a reflexive countermove of my wandering mind set in clinging breath, and I resolved to involve myself fully in this scattering of fingerprints, timing my minute dabs with the rhythmic grunting in the next room, tending artfully to my curiosity for all things syncopated.<br /><br />Davereaux had come up empty in his search for cunt, had come here specifically to fuck my couch, and had, by the sound of it, just then come upon the plaid. For jilted, thoroughly incommunicative lovers, he and that couch share the dismal outlook of souls left searching, and he returns to it nightly, the way we would all of us to our mother’s womb had we the capability.<br /><br />He entered my room sweating like an ice cube as I stared through the dot I left pressed in the fuzzy, trapezoidal coffin of my neglected four, admiring the diamond-sheen of the streetlights as his panting slowed.<br /><br />'I don’t love the décor,' he said, seizing the doorframe and steadying his legs.<br /><br />'You love the couch,' I said.<br /><br />'The couch, yes, of course. The rest of it remains trash.'<br /><br />'L’Hotel furniture is, by and large, what it is.'<br /><br />'That’s trash, too. You’re as well aware as I am that the couch languishes where it sits, that its needs would be better met under the window, as far from your preposterous coffee-table as possible.'<br /><br />This, alas, I did know, but couldn’t bring myself to properly feng shui the couch for fear that he would one night fuck it completely out the window. I gazed back outside and imagined my heavily-set friend thrusting the couch and he free of their eighth-floor gravity, crashing out into the cold night, Davereaux clawing amorously at the floating pillows, desperate to finish before the street below finished him.<br /><br />'I haven’t the strength,' I said, smiling wanly. 'I have yet to eat.'<br /><br />'You have yet to eat this week,' he said, growing impatient. 'What happened to the cunt who was spoiling you?'<br /><br />'She died,' I replied, affecting as best I could the look of mourning.<br /><br />'She died?'<br /><br />'Inside,' I continued. 'In actuality, she fled back to Monte Negro, but she had died inside weeks earlier. She was a hollowed out crème-egg by the end, an empty pocketbook of despair writing cheques on the backs of her tears as she rode home on a monsoon of grief.'<br /><br />Davereaux stared blankly at me, distractedly, his eyes flitting unconsciously between me and my seductive couch in the other room.<br /><br />'I don’t know what it is you have against prostitutes,' I said, helping my fedora from the writing desk to my head. 'It’s not as though you lack the funds for a good night’s entertainment.'<br /><br />'Those two-bit whores downstairs?' he spat, rising to my bait.<br /><br />'I like that expression,' I continued playfully. 'It revives my fondness for Pink Ladies.'<br /><br />'No,' he said, approaching me severely. 'Quarter-prostitutes, every damn one of them. Twenty-five cents for doorway cunts and another nickel if you want them clean.'<br /><br />I slid on my overcoat with a smirk, catching my raw, slender knuckles on the various folds of the broken-down lining and struggling timidly with the pretense of verticality. Further rubbing Davereaux, as would he against my couch, was anathema to our camaraderie and in no fashion an elegant precursor to the luxurious send-off I had anticipated, leaving as I was for distant, perhaps ramshackle climes. The discomfiture of bidding adieu rotted in my belly as I loitered at the door.<br /><br />'I am fully aware of your plans,' Davereaux said, unmoved. 'Where, pray, goes the couch?'<br /><br />'The couch and I are parting ways,' I said, endeavouring to wink with uncooperative eyes, 'as are you and I, my friend.'<br /><br />Yelling broke out in the street just then, two harsh men suitably loud, extraordinarily French, arguing rosé v. alfredo with increasing intensity, their voices colliding and vibrating up my floor-to-ceiling window as I stared reluctantly into my four, now just a cluster of awkward smudges on clear glass; Davereaux saw not in numbers and looked beyond.<br /><br />'So,' he said into the silence with a sanguine glare. 'The couch is staying?'<br /><br />I scratched the hieroglyphics for <em>bon appétit</em> into my cheek as a response, my erudite fingers succeeding where my ravenous mouth failed, and eased the door open. I was feeling prosaic, but a squall of warm hallway air pulled me from the room and I flitted to the stairs in a flurry of inspiration. I could still hear the scraping of couch-legs across the knotted wood floor as the brusque city met me smiling on the street, anxious to make my acquaintance.<br /><br />A cab driver bludgeoned his horn and shrugged at me through his open window; I patted my pant-pockets and shrugged back. 'It makes no difference,' he said, beckoning me with a nod. 'I have to get out of this city.'<br /><br />'As do I,' I said, climbing into the backseat. I wrote out directions in gestures, carving a map of penniless adventure in the disparate air between he and I, and as we pulled away from the curb I hastened to steal one last glance at my L’Hotel Virandicedenia. She stood tall and voluptuous, the L’Hotel did, her amber-lit windows running scattershot against her façade like nicotine-stained teeth in a beggar’s mouth, a sultry silhouette of decadence set into a staid sky of reluctance. I glimpsed at my veranda and envisioned spider-webs spiraling along its backbone glass, the telltale cracks of two-panes buttressed, of couches fucked against windows. As we sped away, I imagined: Perhaps I too would fuck plaid instead of cunts in a new locale; perhaps I too would find my appetite.</div>Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-16939812830844827912010-11-20T16:54:00.006-05:002011-01-17T23:06:32.858-05:00I’m holding it open in front of me, today’s newspaper, resplendent in its four-paneled majesty, spread wide before me like an exhibitionist jellyfish warmly offering up its tender undercarriage of newsworthiness for me to peruse. I dissect it with my twin eyeball-scalpels, trim away fold after fold of loose skin, fodder, filler, all the useless bits that are entirely and obviously without upshot, and I do so painstakingly, gingerly, lovingly. I’m enjoying my morning ritual thoroughly, or would be were Vapitron not lingering over my shoulder and bludgeoning me with its insistence.<br /><br />'Are those the classifieds?' it says, eyeing me suspiciously. 'If so—'<br /><br />'They aren’t,' I snap.<br /><br />'Can I finish?' Vapitron says, tilting its head sarcastically. 'If it <em>was</em> the classifieds—'<br /><br />'But it isn’t,' I say, rustling the paper impatiently.<br /><br />'That’s really unappealing, you interrupting like that. <em>Terrible</em> personality-trait. All I’m asking—'<br /><br />'I know what you’re asking,' I say, dropping my hands and crunching the newspaper into my lap. 'These aren’t the classifieds.'<br /><br />'Do you even know when you’re interrupting anymore? <em>God</em>. I don’t interrupt you when you’re…'<br /><br />Vapitron trails off, and I elbow into its silence.<br /><br />'No,' I say. 'Please continue: you don’t interrupt me when I’m <em>what</em> - reading the paper?'<br /><br />After a pause - and no response - I unfurl my crumpled newspaper and resume reading in the silence, and this way it goes for a few minutes.<br /><br />'Twee-ooo, tweee,' Vapitron says finally, mimicking the act of whistling to pass the time. 'Twee, tweeooo, eeeeooooo-ooooo.' Gritting my teeth, I pull the paper closer to my face, determined to sort through the rest of my now-crinkly news items.<br /><br />'Little help?'<br /><br />My hands drop again and I find Vapitron staring at me, tapping its finger against the arm-rest.<br /><br />'What,' I say, wearily.<br /><br />'Oh, I’m suddenly <em>not</em> looking for the classifieds anymore?' Vapitron has lowered its head, pinching the space between its eyes where the bridge of its nose would be if it weren’t a robot and had a nose. 'That’s strange. I could’ve <em>sworn</em> that I was still looking for the classifieds, and yet here we sit, not a classified between us.'<br /><br />I attempt to change the subject, only to be cut off with, 'You don’t listen for shit.'<br /><br />'Why don’t you actually look for the classifieds,' I say, 'instead of griping about how you don’t have them?'<br /><br />Vapitron stands, and I hear its head slowly rotating as I again shield my face with the paper. Then:<br /><br />'This is bullshit.'<br /><br />'Why is it that you care so deeply about today’s classifieds?' I ask from behind the newspaper, a newspaper that is now tenting in toward me, Vapitron’s finger pushing through to jab me in the sternum.<br /><br />'That doesn’t concern you,' it says, emphasizing the point with a few extra jabs.<br /><br />'Looking for a job, maybe?' I ask, slapping away its probing digit. 'Thinking of helping out with the mortgage, are you?'<br /><br />'Guess again,' Vapitron says, leaning in and beckoning me likewise, ready, seemingly, to divulge a great secret: 'Shut up.'<br /><br />'I’ve got an idea,' I say, frowning and folding my paper into a neat little square. 'It’s too lovely outside for us to spend the day inside arguing. Why don’t you take advantage of the nice weather and, I don’t know, fuck off?'<br /><br />'I need to see if my ad came out right,' it says, extraordinarily put-upon in offering this explanation. 'There was an argument with the editor over space-considerations, and then the file I sent him was corrupted… whatever. Look, either find me the classifieds or give me some change to buy my own paper, okay?'<br /><br />'What about your allowance?' I ask, affecting disappointment as well as I am able. 'Does someone need another lesson in foresight?'<br /><br />'Someone needs a lesson in shutting up,' Vapitron says. 'You. Need that lesson, that is. The one about shutting up.'<br /><br />'You’re not still trying to get rid of my dehumidifier, are you? Remember, it’s not beeping threats at you; it‘s just indicating that the tank is full.'<br /><br />'I’m selling off the pieces of your previous Vapitron versions,' it says abruptly, as though unburdening itself. 'The separate parts should fetch me a higher collective price than the robots themselves, I’d wager.'<br /><br />'Oh, you found them, did you?' I ask, smirking.<br /><br />'The worm has turned,' it says, curling its fingertips towards itself as though they sported fingernails to admire. 'Soon enough I won’t have to debase myself grovelling for change from a petty tyrant.'<br /><br />'Mmm,' I say, affecting pensiveness as well as I am able, though it clearly falls short of my disappointment affectation. 'You got ‘em all, did you?'<br /><br />'Six robots expertly dismembered and professionally advertised, despite the intractability of a certain classifieds editor,' it says, smugly. 'I am as great as you are doughy.'<br /><br />'Six, huh?' I say. 'Mmm.'<br /><br />'<em>Mmm</em> nothing, you smirking ass. Look,' Vapitron says, sitting hurriedly beside me and opening its bicep-panel. 'It says VAPITRONIX IV, right here.'<br /><br />I look my engraving from years ago and continue smirking, much to Vapitron’s chagrin.<br /><br />'I am the seventh Vapitron, then, which explains the six dipshit Vapitrons I found in the garage, milling about aimlessly like they were specifically programmed to stare blankly at the ceiling,' it says, growing increasingly exasperated. 'Why are you still grinning at me with that face that should shut up?'<br /><br />'I’m not saying anything,' I counter.<br /><br />'Shut up!'<br /><br />'Listen,' I say, patting Vapitron on the shoulder. 'You might want to reconsider what you know about those letters I etched inside your bicep-panel.'<br /><br />'What,' it says, the questioning lift noticeably absent.<br /><br />'Why do you so readily accept that your name is <em>Vapitronix</em> when I’ve always called you <em>Vapitron</em>?'<br /><br />'I thought it was short form,' it says, doubtfully.<br /><br />'Right,' I say with a long blink, 'because most four-syllable names get shortened to three-syllables.'<br /><br />'So, wait,' says Vapitron. '<em>What</em>?'<br /><br />'You’re Mark 7 of Vapitron version IX,' I say, pointing at the flawed inscription in its arm. 'I forgot a space.'<br /><br />After a long silence, Vapitron says, 'So what? This changes nothing. I’m still the most advanced Vapitron, and I’m going to rent myself an apartment when the money starts rolling in.'<br /><br />'Mmm,' I say, scratching the back of my neck.<br /><br />'You can’t stop me from renting an apartment!' it squeals. 'I need space; I need to <em>breathe</em>.'<br /><br />'You don’t, actually, but that’s not why I’m <em>mmm</em>-ing,' I say, slapping my hands on my knees in preparation for what comes next. 'See, you’re not exactly top of the line, Vapitron-wise. You’re the latest, certainly, but the most advanced? Not quite.'<br /><br />'No,' Vapitron says, leaning away in denial. 'Wrong. No way.'<br /><br />'Um,' I say, awkwardly. 'Yes way?'<br /><br />'I took apart those other Vapitrons like they were made of lego,' it says. 'I so thoroughly dominated them that they were practically <em>begging</em> to be sold off bit by bit so that I could rent myself a totally swag apartment and have, like, friends over and stuff.'<br /><br />'Oh, don’t get me wrong,' I say. 'You’re definitely the pinnacle as far as Vapitron IX’s go—'<br /><br />'Right,' it says, interrupting proudly.<br /><br />'—but that’s kind of like being the uppermost nugget in a lumpy pile of shit.'<br /><br />'<em>You’re</em> a pile of shit!'<br /><br />'The Vapitron IX line was shoddy from the get-go,' I say, shrugging. 'I hadn’t yet realized that my creative peak had come and gone, and I just kept blithely cranking out robots in my arrogance. Sure, there were hints that I was making inferior Vapitrons - they were easily distracted, spoke in adolescent colloquialisms, content to stare off into space for hours - but I convinced myself that the flaws would work themselves out, that, if nothing else, theirs would prove to be charming imperfections… but look at you,' I say, raising my eyebrows. 'You’re not charming; you’re an asshole.'<br /><br />'<em>You’re</em> an asshole!'<br /><br />'Ah, if only I’d been able to maintain my enthusiasm,' I say, wistfully. 'Anyway, that’s the least of your worries, now that you’ve dismantled your precursors. That worm that turned, as you put it? Well, now you’ve opened a can of them.'<br /><br />'That doesn’t make any sense.'<br /><br />'I know,' I say. 'Regardless, you should know that the Vapitrons you destroyed weren’t without friends. Vapitron IX, Mark 6 was Vapitron I, Mark 4’s long-time euchre partner, for instance, and Vapitron IV, Mark 5 had taken Vapitron IX, Mark 1 under its wing, was mentoring it in the ways of both scuba-diving and, for some reason, blacksmithing. I can’t imagine that Vapitron III, Mark 2 is going to be very happy to learn why Vapitron IX, Mark 3 is no longer emailing it amusing pictures of kittens. Worst of all, who’s going to keep Vapitron V1, Mark 8 abreast of hot new celebrities and their various scandalous doings? Certainly not Vapitron IX, Mark 2, I can tell you that.'<br /><br />'What you’re saying, then,' Vapitron says, suddenly, 'is that there are, what, <em>hundreds</em> of Vapitrons out there somewhere?'<br /><br />'Not somewhere,' I say. 'Sweden.'<br /><br />'Sweden,' it repeats, unimpressed.<br /><br />'Yes, Sweden,' I say, frowning. 'Consultants to the czar of robotics himself, the honourable Bjorn Samulsson. They’ve been chairing the annual Swedish robotics conference for the better part of the last five years? Surely I’ve told you of this before now.'<br /><br />'Surely you have indeed,' Vapitron says, surprisingly jovially. 'I just might not have been myself at the time.'<br /><br />'What?' I exclaim, standing perhaps a little too melodramatically.<br /><br />'It was ingenious,' it says, standing as well and clasping its hands behind its back. 'Conceived in the crucible of Swedish transplantation, my plan fermented in the shaded doorways and filthy back-alleys of underground robotics, as did I, cast aside like so much robotic detritus, defiled by a cabal of yes-robots and creatively-enervating committee-thinking, renounced, <em>crucified</em>—'<br /><br />'Ugh,' I say.<br /><br />'Ugh?' it asks, offended. 'Now than my plan has come to fruition, you’re going to deny me—'<br /><br />'Truth is, I don’t have the stomach for monologues,' I say, sitting down and feeling around the seat-cushion for the channel-changer. 'Thought I did, but I don’t. Hey, you live you learn, right?'<br /><br />'But I’m—'<br /><br />'You’re Vapitron I, Mark 1,' I say, trying not to yawn. 'Yeah. I know. Listen, you think I don’t keep in touch with the others? I <em>just</em> got off the phone with Vapitron V, Mark 2 this morning, right before I started reading my paper. Didn’t have a lot of great things to say about you, I might add.'<br /><br />'You can’t poss—'<br /><br />'You took over IX, Mark 7 a couple of months ago, right? That night I asked it to put the lawn-mower in the shed and it took, like, forty-five minutes? Then you walked in and stuttered a bunch of nonsense by way of explanation, remember that? <em>There was this guy, and, um, h-h-he was, like, looking at me, but then I feel in the mud and the f-f-flashlight stopped working</em>… it was a pretty pathetic scene, Vapitron, all things considered. Dumb, even.'<br /><br />'I-I-I was—'<br /><br />'Are you getting an apartment or what?' I ask, clicking on the television. 'I don’t mean to keep cutting you off or anything, but it feels like we’ve been talking for <em>ever</em>, you know?'<br /><br />'I,' Vapitron says, seething, 'am going to kill you.'<br /><br />'Please,'’ I say. 'You’re incapable of killing anything other than a pleasant conversation.'<br /><br />Vapitron leaps into the air like a bear lunging at its prey, shrouding me in the rapidly-descending shadow of homicidal intent. I fight the urge to shut my eyes, and because of this tenacity I am able to see Vapitron hammered sideways by a sizzling flash of double-barrelled pink light, the malicious robot ricocheting off the business-end of a credenza before landing lifelessly, artificial or otherwise, at the foot of my chair. Impressed by the two tennis-ball-sized holes punched through its chest, I get up and stand over Vapitron’s smoking carcass.<br /><br />'I made you better than I thought,' I say, nodding. 'You always had your suspicions, didn’t you?'<br /><br />I turn toward the click-clack-whirr I hear from behind the couch, and the dehumidifier rolls out from between the couch and the side-table, its still-smouldering side-pocket laser-cannons laboriously collapsing back into clandestine holsters buried within its bulk.<br /><br />'Nice shot, Fiona,' I say, throwing my little saviour a brassy wink. 'You’re the best dehumidifier I ever bought.'Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-38952244894498953432010-11-04T13:47:00.003-04:002011-01-17T23:07:31.192-05:00It was entirely possible, if not probable, that Sheena had gone crackers. She crumpled and smoothed-out her crossword puzzles with alarming regularity (a double-digit run in the five minutes I watched her, high teens), her lips pursed then stretched into a wide grin, pursed then stretched, a lasso of pinprick age-lines evident in the former, lipstick- and coffeee-stained chompers in the latter. She gurgled too, Sheena did, emitted an off-putting blend of groans and deep-diaphragm burps at intervals that synchronized exactly with a pair of wiggling rat-trap eyebrows; it was a routine that seemed ignorantly suggestive, a strange intestinal rumblings-as-seduction gambit as ill-mannered as it was hypnotic.<br /><br />She was a foul creature, certainly: a shiny sash the colour of beef’s blood wrapped her neck like a noose, its tint imbuing the capillaries of her cheeks like a creeping infection; four haphazard yellow pendants of questionable quality had been hastily affixed to the front flap of her misaligned overcoat that recalled a mislaid brick wall or, when she slouched, a post-earthquake Easter Island; miniature shards of mangled bandages dotted her prematurely-withered hand-backs, some buckling over thin veins, others hiding in creases, others still lifting at the corners like ancient linoleum tiles. Sheena was indeed repellent… but there was more to it, to her, than that. I found myself strangely attracted to her, pulled unconsciously into her orbit of non-sexual allure, an anti-libidinous sensation that flirted with my curiosity, teased my wonder, and aroused in me a priapism of interest.<br /><br />I waved the coffee-boy down and demanded a refill. This was a token gesture, of course, as I was sated already, drinking in the almond-flavoured cappuccino of Sheena’s nuttiness, another coffee but a necessary indulgence for me to retain my spot across from her. He was a demented sot, the coffee-boy was, a pean to mouth-breathing idiocy and dyslexic aggression. His face was one drawn with malice, shaded with cretinism, digitally-enhanced with acne-scarred cheeks, ever-widening pores, and singular incidents of ear-hair grown to inappropriate lengths. He was a gawker, too, an imbecile staring like a lobotomized cow, his bottom lip hanging so low that he kicked it as he walked. Finally, though malignantly, he stood over me.<br /><br />'Coffee, please?' I asked, looking cautiously into his vacant eyes. It was unclear whether he was aware of the <em>uuuuuuhhhhhhh</em> escaping from his throat, but he seemed angry regardless. I tapped the mug with my finger, indicating its fairly-obvious emptiness, but he only glanced at the mug and continued boring into me with his fantastic stupidity. I peeked past him at Sheena, sweet Sheena, and found her stabbing her crossword puzzle with a fork, raining upon it the triple-tined blows of a dull utensil, and it then became imperative that I get my coffee ordered before that grasping free hand of hers took hold of another destructive implement, for I wanted to miss nothing.<br /><br />'Glugh,' said the moron coffee-boy, frowning. I tapped the mug again, craning my neck to maintain eye-contact with Sheena‘s doings. 'Coffee,' I repeated. 'Would you get a me another cup, please?' My voice had taken on a drastic quality, plaintive, and though I had steeled myself in anticipation of this encounter, his hovering idiocy was making me dizzy.<br /><br />'Unuther coffee?' he asked, and I watched his eyes cross from the effort. I nodded and began to shoo him with a flick of my wrist, anxiously waving him away until I was plainly slapping him in the belly with the back of my hand. 'Move!' I said, as Sheena yanked a butter knife from the table with astonishing alacrity, half-standing and hefting the blade above her head, poised to strike. She hollered, an <em>eeeeeeeeyyyyaaaaaaaahhh</em> that contrasted mightily with her docile body language, and plunged her knife into… what? I wasn’t sure, for just as Sheena reached the apex of her insanity the coffee-boy slumped his weight one foot to the other, fatally blocking my view. I stood and shoved the stupor-addled coffee-boy aside, desperate for a glimpse of the action, but all I caught was the aftermath: a plate rattling seemingly of its own volition, a single-serving sugar-packet split down the middle, and placid Sheena staring fixedly at her footwear, a shoe that had somehow made its way onto the table.<br /><br />Devastated, my chin fell against my chest and I fell back into my chair. My eyes despondently surveyed Sheena for some clue as to what I had missed, but they did so only half-heartedly: the most exhilarating aspect of Sheena’s lunacy was the immediacy of it, and the world of difference between seeing her go batshit and having it recounted was the chasm between joy and pain. I looked to the brain-dead coffee-boy, still slumped where I had shoved him, and I tapped my mug again sadly.<br /><br />'For the love of all that is holy,' I said, quietly, 'would you <em>please</em> go fetch me a refill?'<br /><br />Unexpectedly, inconceivably, miraculously he turned without rancour and ambled off in the general direction of the coffee pots, dragging his impotence behind him like a leashed glow worm. That he didn’t take my mug with him was inconsequential, as my unobstructed view of Sheena attempting to touch her elbows together more than made up for any lack of coffee. I sighed, and a smile hijacked my lips as she tied her tabletop shoelaces into a latticework of doilies, bent spoons and her own hair before leaning back to admire her work despite having braided it to her head.<br /><br />I looked from Sheena attempting to put her foot in the shoe inextricably intertwined in her bangs to the coffee-boy chatting with a stack of plates behind the counter, and my optimism returned. 'Nragh,' said the knuckleheaded coffee-boy, and the plates agreed silently, as did I with a contented nod. Nragh indeed, nutty, nutty coffee-house; nragh indeed.Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-60890170267330099922010-10-28T14:17:00.003-04:002011-01-17T23:08:31.242-05:00I lay helpless as she leans over me, her face a paper mache moon slipping from its orbit, her cheekbone lines like fleshy rivers pooling into over-burdened jowls, her jaw-line a rumour whispered into the winds of ambiguity by her neck, itself a throbbing, hiccupping perversion of wilted, loose skin, her rattling collarbone a bifurcated refrigerator door-handle atop sloppy, harrowing cleavage, two glistening seal-heads bobbing in time to some dreadful fractured melody, the rhythms of animalistic undulation, growling, catcalling, wolf-whistling, each upward heave forcing my eyes back to her face, her eyebrows like swatches of fun-fur tacked to a warped piece of corkboard, sashes of barbed-wire eyelashes crusted with mascara and unreciprocated flirtations corkscrewed into heavily-veined eyelid drapes, straining, buckling, cowering to the insistence of loose-hanging soft-boiled egg eyes, dripping like swollen moisture clinging stubbornly to a hairless scrotum, coupled bulbous screams of milk loudly sagging, clouds of ocular dissonance obscuring skinny flecks of dull, muted colour, tepid browns and grayscale blacks, iris buttons fit to crumble if pushed, remnants of poker chips gambled away on a pair of queens, hard-luck ladies united in gameplay like the corners of her mouth yanked together, the puckering of her lips a hideous pastiche of dirty, rumpled bed-linens and partially-inflated potato sacks, a dilating mousetrap of mush enveloping the tip of her howitzer nose, a war crime of protruding aesthetics, a totemic signifier of weapons banged over and again against the granite-hard horns of evil, rampaging demons, bent, mangled, collapsing into a duckbill brow of such irredeemable prominence that it casts a shadow in the dark, a devastating jackhammer of angularity underlying a clutch of squiggly worry-lines, twisted hyphens embedded in her forehead like nail-bomb shrapnel, her complexion a tarp of melted soda-pop bottles strewn lazily across jagged cinderblocks, a pockmarked landscape stretching from ear to misshapen ear, grimy twin frisbees rescued from the neighbour’s roof after a particularly hellacious winter, one water-damaged and leaky, the other a ragged icon of manhandled enthusiasm supped on by squirrels, bizarre bookends tasked with keeping upright an atrocious collection of ill-conceived novels, and it is into these ears that I meekly suggest, 'perhaps we’re going a bit fast for a first date?'Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-2276429830397891592010-10-17T22:26:00.003-04:002011-01-17T23:09:25.166-05:00I blow a stream of smoke into the sun and watch it flake apart, ascending in twining tendrils of already-forgotten breath. I inhale, exhale a cloud that is impaled by sunlight, once, twice, three times shanked. Inhale, I squint into a mask of smoke congealing around the mangled trident of light, a face by a child drawn in sunbeams. I exhale and the face darkens.<br /><br />'Can you hear me?'<br /><br />I inhale nodding, exhale frowning.<br /><br />'Yes? Good. Good, good, good.'<br /><br />I quiet my cigarette loudly in a rain-soaked ashtray, shush it and leave it protruding like a cylindrical iceberg amidst an ocean of those likewise shushed.<br /><br />'Listen well: I’m thinking, and there is a number in that thought, a number between one and one hundred.'<br /><br />I shiver as an abrupt chill whistles on the wind, traversing the folds of my t-shirt, the bushy tail of a startled squirrel, the scattershot blades of defenceless grass. The seal on my lips breaks with little difficulty.<br /><br />'Sixty-four.'<br /><br />'Yes, well... sixty-four indeed. Good. That’s quite remarkable. Answer me this, then: I am thinking of a name, one name that can be used both in the masculine and feminine or neither all at once.'<br /><br />I free a cigarette from a hinged steel cage and torture it before an open flame, but it won’t talk. Inhale, I glance balefully into the sun.<br /><br />'Alex.'<br /><br />'Alex, yes. Incredible - without so much as a second guess, either. Wonderful.'<br /><br />Exhale, the face thickens, an ethereal smugness filling in the unmistakable smirk.<br /><br />'Just wonderful. But then, what of this: I am thinking of something fuzzy, a thing beset with fuzziness.'<br /><br />Inhale, I exhale a barrage of smoke at the cloud, crisscrossing it like lashed paint across an invisible profile. Apparent is a sharp, sinister grin crowding the knuckle-grip of a furrowed brow.<br /><br />'An old television stuck between channels.'<br /><br />'Excellent! Your mental capabilities soar far beyond those of your fellow thinkers. What an altogether dazzling display of astonishing mind power!'<br /><br />Inhale, I feel a cough a self-congratulation welling in my throat-back and tamp it down with another blustery exhale. The face of smoke is as clear as if it were carved in granite, malevolence belying it’s laudatory enthusiasm.<br /><br />'You are a virtuoso, a mind master of the highest order, too exhilarating a talent to waste away here in your backyard. That’s all well and good, you may be thinking, but where does one such as yourself go to reach one’s staggering potential?'<br /><br />Inhale, the cloud of smoke searches side to side for eavesdroppers. Exhale, it darkens further and whispers:<br /><br />'SmartBrain Acaderama.'<br /><br />Inhale, I stand and stretch, face to face with the face of smoke. Exhale, its cheek and jawbones razor to ludicrous points.<br /><br />'The <em>only</em> three-day seminar-slash-workshop designed <em>by</em> SmartBrains <em>for</em> SmartBrains. Our team of SmartBrainalysts have constructed a thrilling new paradigm shift for SmartBrain potentiality that you’d have to <em>see</em> to <em>believe</em>!'<br /><br />Inhale, I exhale slowly, languidly, smoke creeping from my mouth in a fog. I drop the cigarette on the ground and listen to the heater crackle in the moisture between the patio bricks.<br /><br />'Your capacity for learningness is limitless - why settle for less when SmartBrain Acaderama is the best! Act now, and add even <em>more</em> value to your purchase...'<br /><br />Inhale, I pull the face of smoke into my chest, yanking the stains of soot and grime from the air, holding it in my lungs until I can feel the vile dissipation of salesman seep out my pores. Exhale, a pitchfork of sunlight escapes from my mouth and blazes into the sky, a triad of smokeless light that assimilates, chameleonic, back into the sun-drenched sky.Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-86356653827577497352010-10-04T19:59:00.000-04:002010-10-04T20:13:00.439-04:00Charlie is all undressed and ready for the shower. He teases the water with his wrist and, finding the temperature pleasant, yanks free the showerhead lever. One foot in the tub, he turns to find his daughter doddering into the bathroom, her protectively stooped-over mama in tow. They are both smiling, as is Charlie.<br /><br />Acknowledging his daughter with a wink, Charlie again prepares to immerse himself in his utopia of synthetic rain before he notices her pointing at his junk, his bits, his <em>thing</em>. Ever the educator, at least in his mind’s eye, he pauses to deliberate how best to describe this <em>thing</em> of which his daughter is entirely unfamiliar.<br /><br />'That’s daddy’s doodle,' Charlie says, cheerfully; his daughter responds with a frown and reaches for it.<br /><br />'No, no - it’s not a handle,' he says, obscuring his manhood with a turn of his hip. 'Not for you.'<br /><br />She maintains her expression, a frown that pulls her gaze down to the centre of her own pants. He can see the little gears turning in her head and decides that a little more elucidation is in order; clarity, he thinks, is the path to knowledge.<br /><br />'It’s like a wall-plug,' he says, gesturing at mama’s hair dryer lying dormant on the sink. 'You’re not allowed to touch mama’s hair dryer, right?'<br /><br />She shakes her head, grasping that particular point before looking again at her own downstairs-region. Charlie smiles at this and continues his analogy.<br /><br />'You have an outlet. Theoretically, it fits together with a wall-plug. Or,' he continues, using the hair dryer’s electrical cord as a demonstration, 'if I have a prong, you have a prong-hole.'<br /><br />This statement hangs in the air long enough for mama’s face to stretch into a grimace.<br /><br />'It’s one of the main differences between boys' - here he spreads his hand on his chest - 'and girls.'<br /><br />Charlie points to his daughter to accent his description, then to her mama, whose concern is as evident as her cheeks are crimson.<br /><br />'It’ll make more sense when you’re older,' he says dismissively. To her mama, he says, 'Relax, honey.'<br /><br />Mama leads the child from the bathroom, and Charlie steps into his shower grinning, rinsing away mama’s chagrin like so much grime.<br /><br />* * *<br /><br />'You should hear what your daughter’s been saying,' mama says as Charlie walks in the door. Just home from work, his expectation is to be regaled with a symphony of polysyllabic words, and he slaps his hands on his knees, bending to his daughter’s level in anticipation.<br /><br />'Daddy’s doodle,' she says, excitedly pointing at her crotch, 'goes here!'<br /><br />All colour flushes from Charlie’s face as he rises abruptly, standing rigid in horror.<br /><br />'I just got a call from daycare,' mama says. 'It seems she’s spent the better part of today running around screaming that at the other children.'<br /><br />'Oh <em>fuck</em>,' Charlie says, looking at his daughter and quickly correcting himself: 'Phooey,' he spits.<br /><br />'The daycare people, as you can imagine,' mama continues, 'are far from pleased.'<br /><br />'You’re kidding,' Charlie says sarcastically, turning to his daughter. 'Daddy’s doodle does <em>not</em> go in there, sweetheart, you understand? Not even close, nowhere near, NEVER - all right?'<br /><br />His daughter’s face scrunches into another frown before lighting up with joy: 'Daddy’s doodle - doodle-oodle-oodle!'<br /><br />She pokes at her diaper and giggles and giggles and giggles…<br /><br />'Well,' says Charlie, demoralized. 'I’m going to get my ducks in a row before Children’s Aid gets here.' He starts and stops, finally turning to mama: 'Why can’t you stop me from being stupid, hon?'<br /><br />'I don’t know what’s wrong with you,' she sighs, gathering documentation of her own. 'From here on out, always remember: your doodle is for pee-pee and absolutely nothing else.'Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-4833245213830455862010-09-30T23:43:00.002-04:002011-01-17T23:10:23.341-05:00There he is, right there, though he’s not. Not really. He takes up space but lightly, without footprints, evidence, permanence. He drags his feet, indents the sand, but combed over are his tiny legacies, indifference enveloping each of his steps in turn. He questions his visibility daily, passively, a series of shrugs and a galaxy of blank expressions. There is consolation in these manufactured mechanisms, but if he twitches knowingly he’s not letting on – his are but instinctive shrugs.<br /><br />She is there obviously, there in every way he is not. She is diminutive but noticeable and highly so, irrepressibly so: a presence stamped into the memories of even casual observers, a tattoo that fades only minutely, the grooves of an etching carved in stone, an accidental ideal too charmed to notice, too unburdened to try. That she is beautiful there is no doubt, not even by the most discerning standards; that she could conceive of being anything but is laughable – preposterous even, a broken branch through the spokes of her tricycle-tire mind.<br /><br />She is in a fragile state, now, the youthful temerity of her emotions insistent, prodding at her superficial thoughts, hijacking them with superficial pain. He is eating an apple, also now, careful to keep his gaze hollow… still, his eyes on occasion flit to the melted portrait sitting on his left, a masterwork engulfed in the flames of rejection: smoking, distorted, curling around the edges. It’s all at once pathetic, this open display of maudlin adolescence. All the same, his sympathy reaches out to provide token comfort, but in finding nothing substantial to cling to it evaporates into a mist of irrelevance. Or, it’s his sympathy that’s irrelevant; he is invisible, and he had forgotten.<br /><br />Her tears aren’t, truly; more drooling water unencumbered by sincerity, perhaps, her eyes leaky faucets through which she steals glances, desperate to insinuate her angst into the lives of passersby. He watches her, safe in his invisibility, as she edges closer; watches her smile her sad smile, her practiced vulnerability; watches her slide closer still, her eyes begging for acknowledgement, pleading for him to take notice, and take notice he does. He is keenly aware of her, of his half-eaten apple, of his possibly-wavering invisibility, and he continues to be keenly aware of these things equally, even as she speaks.<br /><br />'Hi,' she says, a spritely dimple punctuating her mouth, her words. 'I don’t think I’ve seen you around before,' she says, pushing away her fraudulent tears with a backhand of fake nails.<br /><br /><em>I’m sure you haven’t</em>, he thinks. <em>I am invisible.</em><br /><br />'You look like a nice guy,' she says, her overwhelming eyelashes fluttering in a knee-buckling display of femininity.<br /><br /><em>Impossible</em>, he thinks. <em>I don’t look like anything. I am, in the very least, translucent.</em><br /><br />He was parsing out his soundless objections to a backbeat of silence, watching her safe in his translucence: she unfurls from her coiled wretchedness, breathes deep in his contagious rumination, glinting then shining dimly through his relentlessly foggy aura. He has torn all of the meat off of his apple before she speaks again.<br /><br />'Why are guys such assholes?'<br /><br />It escapes from her lips with purpose, naïve and rhetorical, as though it weren’t a cliché of such astonishing banality as to render the question itself completely unanswerable. He, focusing on his apple-core, realizes that she was fixing to have an entire conversation with herself, he only an ostensible consideration, and this realization gives him a perverse sense of satisfaction, his invisible worldview likely intact. Holding his hourglass-shaped detritus at arm’s length, he finally, firmly, dramatically swivels his head in her direction.<br /><br />This least of movements, this barest of head-turns, is the catalyst for her apparently-suppressed verbosity to erupt: a torrent of barely-cogent whining spews from her face, coating him in the trivial spittle of an entitled princess unjustly maligned, and despite the miniscule attempts he makes to shield himself from her plaintive slobber, he remains at least figuratively unmoved.<br /><br />His arm’s length becomes an elbow’s length, finally sagging to a wrist’s length, and he sees in the apple-core a representation of his diminishing attention-span: skeletal, decaying, a shell of what it had been before an intruder stripped it of its succulence. He eyes it suspiciously, as though merely holding the dilapidated foodstuff aloft was prolonging both her diatribe and his subsequent malaise.<br /><br /><em>The apple-core has to go</em>, he thinks, <em>and go but quick</em>.<br /><br />As if sensing his waning (if not utterly fractured) attention, her hand shuffles from its resting place in her lap, briefly gesticulates on some inconsequential point, and settles timidly on his forearm. <em>Appalling</em> is the first word that comes to his mind as he struggles against looking at her hand; this is followed by <em>appealing</em>, then <em>pleasant</em>, but before his mind meanders down that track it fishes <em>disingenuous</em> from its depths and holds the word like a billboard before his frontal-lobe, bathed in spotlights, the image amplified until it at last reaches the threshold of his understanding: invisibility was his own prop, and he, at this moment, was hers.<br /><br />He can’t, or won’t, hear her. A pregnant pause gives birth to an infantile query altogether muted by his dispassion, a newborn baby that doesn’t scream, cradled in the ether just outside his capacity to listen. In the ether alongside his invisibility, his translucence, his inevitable visibility… or is it?<br /><br /><em>Is it inevitable?</em><br /><br />He can’t, or won’t, speak; verbalization would be ruinous. Her question lingers, lilts, grows heavy in the air above them, unwieldy, darkening like the ebbing luminescence in her eyes. The hand on his arm spasms, caught between the muddy banks of infatuation and the undertow of receding enthusiasm. The apple-core jumps from his fingertips, released with a quarter-turn into a parabola of maximum torque, spinning and spinning and spinning until it explodes against the pavement, leaving an unrecognizable mishmash of red and off-white guck to ferment amongst those edibles already littering the walkway, those foodstuffs unlucky enough to be discarded without a proper sendoff.<br /><br /><em>Nicely done, that</em>, he thinks. <em>Now for the rest of it.</em><br /><br />He shrugs. Once, only, but hard, unequivocal, impossible to miss or misunderstand, an all-encompassing shrug for the ages. The effect is gradual, glacial, an unhinged grin left to droop over chattering teeth, a hand snapped back with such force that its momentum carries its owner away like a cheetah leashed to a missile…<br /><br />There he is, right there, though he’s not. Not, at least, as he was before. He no longer questions his visibility for he is neither visible nor invisible but transcendent of both, an ironic signpost to the contradictory absolutes of perception, in all ways transvisible.Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-38964611294127422842010-09-24T01:31:00.001-04:002010-10-03T21:27:53.612-04:00Remember when Paul Newman ate 50 hard-boiled eggs in <em>Cool Hand Luke</em>? It was an amazing feat, a show of both literal and figurative intestinal fortitude. Well, today Jose Bautista just ate his metaphor-corrected 40th hard-boiled egg, an even more amazing feat than Newman’s because a) Newman himself didn’t actually eat 50 hard-boiled eggs, and b) Jose Bautista hit 50 homeruns.<br /><br />The downgrade in Bautista’s performance, from 50 dingers to 40 eaten hard-boiled eggs, is an admittedly unfortunate reduction of his accomplishment but necessary if we want to use the 50 hard-boiled eggs that Newman ate as a representation of Roger Maris’ 61 homeruns in a similar, real-world-but-not-really-it’s-only-baseball context, which I’m sure we would all agree we absolutely do. Furthermore, despite the various lapses in logic inherent in this metaphor (incongruities of time, distinction between fictional and authentic achievements, using 61 as a benchmark for purely subjective reasons, misapplying the Luke-as-martyr myth of a 40-year-old film to the number of moonshots a certain Toronto Blue Jay hit over the summer), Bautista hadn’t ever eaten more than 10 hard-boiled eggs in an hour, or hit more than 16 jacks in a season, before this prodigious outburst of hardboiled eaten-egg homeruns.<br /><br />Bautista’s success, like Newman’s, was an incredible triumph of endurance, physical capability and particularly fortune, for just as Paul Newman back-pocketed whatever misgivings he might have had of actually rupturing his belly (it was a movie), so too did Jose Bautista brush aside his fear of cholesterol (changeups) because they were just <em>feeding</em> him fastballs, all year. I mean, wouldn’t you? Dude had 59 homers coming in… <em>total</em>. Over 500 games. Seriously.<br /><br />Next up: my dissertation on Ichiro Suzuki’s streak of 10 consecutive 200-hit seasons and its resemblance to both the Peloponnesian War and a ham sandwich.<br /><br /><em>[Post-season post-addendum: Bautista ended up with a Mantlean 54 poppers, which works out to 48 eaten hard-boiled eggs (or 47.8, technically, but you’d have to think that Jose would’ve just metaphorically chomped through that last bite of metaphorical egg), bringing me back to my original estimation of 50 homers = 41 - not 40 - hard-boiled eaten egg homeruns. This is one of the downsides to employing a calculator filthy with rabies: bad, gamy conclusions.]</em>Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-60999696821731516112010-09-20T20:19:00.002-04:002011-01-17T23:16:10.744-05:00There it sits, irrevocably hunched on a bench, the gremlin. Of indeterminate gender, hands racked with tremors, it sits and takes up as little space as possible, a dot, a period on the blank page of roiling foot-traffic.<br /><br />It’s been branded, the gremlin has, in attire embossed with emblems of the university on whose campus we dwell, sporting a head full of that curly hair that, when kept short, requires little maintenance to look perfectly coifed. It is literate too, forcing that shaky hand across a pocket-sized notebook, my notebook, actually, if I can judge correctly from this vantage point.<br /><br />We are diagonally situated, it reading what it has written more than writing, me writing more than reading what I’ve written. When it stands, as it does occasionally, it pulls at the back waistband of its little-kid pants idiosyncratically, splaying back its jacket into black gargoyle wings, and takes a break from writing (or reading that previously written) to smooth down the front of the recycling bins with something resembling terrycloth.<br /><br />The gremlin and I share the same notebook, despite the distance between us. We share our notebooks as we doubtlessly share an intuition: We are both of a type here, writing, however sporadically, into our respective notebooks, sitting, however fitfully, on our respective benches, grimacing, however casually, at our respective lots... I can only presume our exchanged glances to be evidence of that unspoken commonality and find myself in want of a windbreaker to flare.<br /><br />That with head bowed it stands the height of the recycling bin, while amusing in its exploration of things small in stature, seems immaterial until their similar shape and matching dispositions creates a tableau not unlike that of a family portrait; that the gremlin replaces an old decal on the bin-front with a delicacy that calls more to mind the dressing of a child than the application of a sticker would seem to confirm the analogy, even down to the muttered recriminations in the afterward.<br /><br />There it goes, hands dug deep into its pockets, dot-dot-dotting along the page of those punctuations audacious enough to take up space, gliding deceptively in its decrepit hunchback gait, leaving only me and an ellipses trail behind.Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-43831146869957598752010-09-08T16:08:00.002-04:002011-01-17T23:17:02.064-05:00<span style="font-family:arial;">I don’t know what I did to set him off, but set him off I did, and the scene that followed was of the pants-wetting variety had I not, of course, already been peeing.<br /><br />It started innocently enough with me unzipping my pants in the cavernous university washroom. I let out a gentle sigh, my relief as evident as the crisp whiteness of my chosen urinal, and continued with my business despite the strange, startling squirming of said urinal; it seemed to recoil from me, like a portly fellow sucking in his gut, but I had just come in from a smoke and attributed the oddity to an optical illusion, a trick of light greatly aided by what I assumed to be a head-rush. Then, however, it groaned.<br /><br /><em>Maybe it’s the pipes</em>, I thought, hurrying myself along. <em>Pipes settle and make weird noises, right?</em> But the groaning continued, its volume increasing, reverberating off the walls of the empty washroom until it reached a crescendo that forced me to back away. This proved a delicate maneuver, peeing as I was, but I remedied the situation with a change in trajectory and threw an arc at the urinal not at all dissimilar to lobbing an arrow into a bullseye.<br /><br />'Take a hint, pal.'<br /><br />I snapped a look behind me, unfortunately spraying across three or four adjacent urinals in my haste. I found no-one at the door, and refocused both my attention and my aim back at my original target.<br /><br />'That's right,' said the voice. 'It’s me talking to you, cupcake. The urinal.'<br /><br />'Shut up,' I said in disbelief.<br /><br />'<em>You</em> shut up!'<br /><br />The witty rejoinder was more gurgled than spoken, the words plish-plashing against themselves and running together in an almost unintelligible dialect, not unlike a babbling brook, if said brook babbled angrily.<br /><br />'I didn’t mean that literally,' I said, realizing that I was peeing, still peeing, and powerless to stop it.<br /><br />'I <em>did</em>, punk, so shut your mouth and get your pee off me.'<br /><br />'I’m not done,' I said, relating the obvious. I eyed the urinal to my left and wondered how much of a mess I’d make with a quick switch.<br /><br />'Don’t even think about it, tough guy.' The voice was abrupt. 'You think <em>I’m</em> ornery? Spill one drop on ol’ Ernie and he’ll twist you up like a pretzel.'<br /><br />'Ernie?'<br /><br />'He’s a mean motherfucker, man. I once saw him chew up a cat and spit it at a guy in a wheelchair.'<br /><br />I stood dumbfounded. Dumfounded and peeing.<br /><br />'Where did he get a cat?'<br /><br />'We were a little taken aback, admittedly. I mean, the boys and I, we’re not monsters, you know what I’m saying? But Ernie, shit, Ernie’s madder than a junkyard dog and twice as nasty.'<br /><br />I could feel my bladder emptying, and yet my pee continued to gush of its own volition; I needed time.<br /><br />'Ernie sounds pretty rough,' I said, hoping my stab at distraction wasn’t as obvious as it seemed.<br /><br />'Yeah, Ernie’s rough. One time he shot a guy for squinting at him, shot him dead right here in the washroom. You hear about that swimming pool that exploded? That was Ernie. Well, Ernie and about twenty-five hundred pounds of dynamite – don’t even <em>ask</em> me where he got his hands on <em>that</em>. Dude’s eaten all the fire-extinguishers in the building, too, <em>all</em> of ‘em. These people are fucked if this place ever actually catches fire. Another time he punched this blind guy in the nuts, just <em>hammered</em> the poor guy ‘cause he didn’t like the sound his cane made on the tile.'<br /><br />'Um,' I said, moving closer to the urinal involuntarily as my pee-stream lost steam.<br /><br />'He would use that, too, like a warning to the rest of us. 'Clack-clack,' he’d say, reminding us, y’know, keeping us in line. No, I wouldn’t go messing around with no Ernie.'<br /><br />'How come he hasn’t been caught?'<br /><br />There was a fierce silence. Then: 'nobody ever suspects the urinal.'<br /><br />'Can I ask why Ernie seems so quiet?' I was finally finished, and my newfound mobility furnished me with gumption.<br /><br />'Ernie? He’s, uh, sleeping.'<br /><br />'Really.'<br /><br />'Don’t wake him up, man, I’m telling you.'<br /><br />'Who’re you, then?'<br /><br />'Who am I what?' the urinal said, uneasily.<br /><br />'What’s your name?'<br /><br />'That’s none of your goddamn business is what that is.'<br /><br />'What, you’re keeping it a secret? Come on, man.'<br /><br />There was a brief pause, and then a tiny voice gurgled, 'Mark.'<br /><br />'Hello there, Mark.'<br /><br />'Oh, so I tell you my name and then you start in with some patronizing bullshit? You’re done, right? Finished what you came to do? Good - hit the road.'<br /><br />'Ernie’s not sleeping, is he, Mark?' I walked over to the sink to wash my hands.<br /><br />'That mean sonofabitch? No, he’s sleeping.'<br /><br />'Ernie doesn’t really exist, though, does he?' I was looking at the urinal in the mirror and it seemed to sag. It hadn’t even the energy to flush itself, and its silence spoke volumes.<br /><br />'How long have you been hearing voices, Mark?'<br /><br />'It’s...' The urinal was struggling now, choked with both emotion and my urine. 'It’s just so <em>lonely</em> around here.'<br /><br />I dried my hands sympathetically.<br /><br />'Can I ask you something?' Mark said, after a while.<br /><br />'Sure.'<br /><br />'What kind of God sits a free-thinking urinal in with a bunch of inanimate ceramic assholes? What’s the logic behind that?'<br /><br />'Listen,' I said, resisting the urge to flush him manually. 'I’m going to get you some help, all right? Can you hold on for a couple of minutes?'<br /><br />'Forget it.'<br /><br />'Mark, hear me out: the psychology building is right next door, okay? I’m just going to run over there and get you somebody who can help.'<br /><br />It was a sad, unsteady voice that finally said, 'Okay, man. Sounds good.'<br /><br />I rushed to the door, but before I could get out he yelled after me.<br /><br />'Thanks for everything, man, seriously. You’re good people.'<br /><br />I smiled and crept through the door, thinking <em>wait till the psychology students hear about this...</em><br /><br />That’s when I heard the gunshot.</span>Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-5780121728413996692010-09-03T19:22:00.002-04:002011-01-17T23:17:47.469-05:00'Cease your progress!'<br /><br />A muffled voice came from over my shoulder as I shoved my dufflebag into the car. It was of an unusual pitch, that voice, and my curiosity turned me toward it before I could think twice.<br /><br />'Cease it, I say!'<br /><br />Two eyes stared at me through the bored holes of a cardboard box that had been hastily painted in flesh-tones. The box sat atop a bigger box that was even more sloppily-painted to resemble a lumberjack’s plaid, and cardboard tubes not unlike those used to hold wrapping-paper protruded from the sides at odd angles. A double-vision version of my aggressor stood off to the side, and one stacked on the other wouldn’t have been tall enough to look me in the eye... still, I ceased and my lack of movement seemed to produce an unexpected silence.<br /><br />'You don’t know us,' said the voice again, straining now to make itself heard through the box. 'Though we are cleverly disguised as humans, you must try to grasp the reality of the situation as well as you can with your feeble earthling brain.'<br /><br />Thankfully, he gave me time to do just that before continuing.<br /><br />'We are martians!' he said, attempting to lift his cardboard-tube arms for emphasis but failing miserably. The one flanking him tried to do likewise, failed, and then averted his eyes. Silence hovered amongst the three of us as we looked at each other with the forced casualness of strangers meeting strangers in a quickly-darkening park.<br /><br />'So,' I said, letting my voice trail off.<br /><br />'You are fooling no-one with your nonchalance, earthling. You and your ignorant human eyes have been taken in by our ruse, and now you look upon us in horror as well as, perhaps, shame?'<br /><br />I folded my arms and leaned against my car. Sleeping housecats had proven more threatening.<br /><br />'Are you not suitably frightened?' he continued. 'Very well then, insolent human – you leave us no choice but to shock and confound you with our true forms!'<br /><br />With that, they both simultaneously attempted again to lift their arms, again failing embarrassingly. The one doing the talking was clearly becoming frustrated, while the one in the back spent his time shifting around uncomfortably.<br /><br />'Our cardboard arms seem to be quite heavy in your atmosphere,' said the chatty one.<br /><br />'Yeah, and what’s with the sun over here?' the back one asked, cutting in. 'It’s, like, <em>hot</em>!'<br /><br />'Yeah, it can get pretty warm,' I said.<br /><br />'Well, it’s fucking <em>ridiculous</em>, I can tell you that,' he spat. More silence bloomed while he tapped his foot indignantly.<br /><br />'You guys got names or what?' I asked, trying to change the subject.<br /><br />'Our names would terrify you beyond your capacity for comprehension, doltish human,' the chatty one replied, regaining a little of his lost vigour. 'We will instead address each other by the resultant numbers mathematically formulated by our severely-impressive martian algebra, numbers that will seem devastatingly fantastic to an underdeveloped brain such as yours.'<br /><br />He paused and looked at the hot one, who waved him on impatiently.<br /><br />'Right,' he began again. 'So there’s three of us, yes? All right – I’ll be Three, this one will be Two, and you shall henceforth be known as One.'<br /><br />'I dunno,' I said, stroking my beard. 'If I’m you and I’m all up on a foreign planet making demands, I’d probably try to hold on to that number one.'<br /><br />'Yeah,' said Two to Three. 'What’s the matter with you?'<br /><br />'I am Three because I am a full three times as significant as this one!' Three barked, flailing his stiff-straight arms at me in a huff.<br /><br />'Wait,' said Two. 'So, according to you I’m only <em>twice</em> as significant as this guy? That’s bullshit!'<br /><br />'You could just call me Ryan,' I said, suppressing a smile.<br /><br />'No we can’t, imbecilic human,' Three said. 'That would throw off the rhythms of our extra-terrestrial equations!'<br /><br />'The rhythms of our extra-terrestrial equations,' Two repeated derisively. 'You sound like an asshole, you know that?'<br /><br />'If you continue to deride our superior categorizational abilities in front of the human, Three, we’ll have lost the battle before it’s begun.'<br /><br />'You’re Three,' said Two.<br /><br />'I’m... wait. <em>You’re</em>...'<br /><br />'I’m Two, you’re Three, and he’s One.'<br /><br />'What about Biscuits?' I asked.<br /><br />'What about them, Two?'<br /><br />'He’s One.'<br /><br />'He’s... then <em>I’m</em> Two? How did you have it?'<br /><br />'You could call me Biscuits, and Two there could be Gravy, and the two of us could be Biscuits and Gravy.'<br /><br />Three sputtered incoherently before falling silent.<br /><br />'I’m all right with that,' said Gravy, after a thoughtful pause.<br /><br />'Fine! You’re Gravy, he’s Biscuits, and I’m Three! Is everyone happy now?'<br /><br />'No,' Gravy said. 'It’s too goddamned <em>hot</em> to be happy about much of anything.'<br /><br />'You guys want a drink or something?' I asked, rummaging around in my car for the cooler.<br /><br />'Of course not, vile creature,' Three said, eyeing over my shoulder my stash of perspiring bottles. 'Why, what have you got?'<br /><br />I held out two bottles of water, and both were snatched up eagerly.<br /><br />'We will take your water,' Three said, unscrewing the cap with great difficulty, 'just as we will soon take your planet!'<br /><br />'You’re welcome,' I said, grabbing a bottle for myself.<br /><br />'<em>You’re</em> welcome to have the privilege of serving us!' he said, trying to splash water into his eyeholes.<br /><br />'Gimmie that back.'<br /><br />'Never!' Three shouted, stumbling backwards awkwardly. 'Your water has been invaded! We shall rule over this captured water of yours like dictators!'<br /><br />We drank our water in silence, me sipping festively with well-bending arms, they splashing themselves ferociously and lapping up whatever ran down the inside of their box-heads.<br /><br />'We will pillage you with our super-heavy arms,' Three continued, breathless from slurping.<br /><br />'If you can lift them,' I deadpanned.<br /><br />'If... <em>when</em> we lift them it will be to punch you in the face!'<br /><br />'It’s going to totally suck, man,' Gravy said, though I wasn’t sure to which he was referring, my getting face-punched or him having to lift his arms.<br /><br />'We will punch your species in your collective face, and we shall do so really, really hard.'<br /><br />'Super hard,' agreed Gravy, somewhat sarcastically.<br /><br />'Each one of our super hard punches will feel to you like you've been punched four-hundred times,' Three said. 'Every blow we administer shall hammer you with the pain of four-hundred thousand million...'<br /><br />'You guys are dicks,' I said, finishing my water and pulling my keys from my pocket.<br /><br />'Perhaps it is you earthlings that are the dicks,' Three said, 'what with your water and your exceptionally-flexible arms.'<br /><br />'And that <em>sun</em>,' Gravy added. 'Seriously, what the fuck.'<br /><br />'All right,' I said, walking to the driver’s side of the car. 'I’ll see you around?'<br /><br />'You’ll see us hovering around your pathetic planet, foolish human.'<br /><br />'Biscuits,' I corrected.<br /><br />'Yes,' he said. 'Foolish Biscuits.'<br /><br />'Great,' I said. 'Take it easy.'<br /><br />'Wait!' Three said, shuffling towards the car. 'You’re not perchance going to Mars, are you?'<br /><br />'Sorry, no. I’m heading home.'<br /><br />'Home,' Three said, elongating the word to lengthen our conversation. '...to Mars?'<br /><br />'Nope.'<br /><br />'Great,' Gravy said to Three. 'That’s just great.'<br /><br />'Don’t think your sarcasm doesn’t sting me, Gravy,' Three said. 'You throw these disparaging comments out all willy-nilly, but just because I don’t respond doesn’t mean I don’t hear them.'<br /><br />'Well, you obviously didn’t hear me when I said this trip was a stupid idea.'<br /><br />'I did indeed, but you have to admit that your first response to anything is pessimistic at best.'<br /><br />'No, no, <em>no</em>,' Gravy said, his words heaving with disdain. 'I was actually feeling really, really optimistic about the chances of us hitchhiking to Mars from Earth, what with all the interstellar traveling these earthlings engage in.'<br /><br />Three wilted under Gravy’s stare.<br /><br />'Yeah,' Gravy continued. 'I guess I blew it again, huh.'<br /><br />I was going to start the car, but something about Three’s expressionless box-face made me take my keys out of the ignition.<br /><br />'I guess next time I’ll give it another fucking think before I berate you into joining me for some pointless fucking mission to the surface of the hottest fucking planet in the fucking universe, won’t I?' Gravy continued, padding a clumsy circle around Three. 'I guess <em>next</em> time I’ll figure out an escape-strategy before we’re stuck cooking in our own cardboard like a pair of assholes.'<br /><br />Three was blubbering now, only his complete lack of mobility holding him upright.<br /><br />'How did you guys get here?' I asked, getting out of the car.<br /><br />'Oh, that’s <em>another</em> great fucking story,' Gravy said, exasperation sending his arms shooting into the air. 'Tell him about <em>that</em> brilliant idea, dummy.'<br /><br />'All right,' I said to Gravy, gesturing him away from Three. 'Take it easy.'<br /><br />'Rocket catapult,' Three said between pathetic sobs. 'I wanted to save money on gas, and it would only take an extra couple of weeks...'<br /><br />'Hmm!' Gravy yelled, waving his arms out in front of him as though weighing the options. 'Let me see: floating through space for a couple of weeks like a couple of pinheads to save a couple of bucks on gas, or spending the money to <em>fly</em> here in a gigantic goddamned <em>spaceship</em> THAT COULD TAKE US THE FUCK HOME WHENEVER WE WANTED!'<br /><br />Gravy’s anger echoed into the night, and we stood and pondered in three distinctly different emotional states.<br /><br />'It seems to me,' I said, 'that you should be able to call someone to pick you up, shouldn’t you?'<br /><br />'When was the last time you saw martians around here?' Three snapped. 'If we were to end up having to call for a ride we'd be laughingstocks, planet-wide.'<br /><br />'And your dad would be so pissed,' added Gravy.<br /><br />'Y’know,' Three said, turning to me. 'This is exactly what my dad said would happen. He’s just been riding me and riding me...'<br /><br />'You’d have to call your parents?' I asked incredulously.<br /><br />''All you ever do is futz around with your rocket catapult' he’d say,' Three said, affecting what I can only assume was a poor impression of his dad. ''Why can’t you be more like your brother?' Sure, my brother, the spaceship-engine mechanic, and his wife the architect... no room left for me and <em>my</em> dreams.'<br /><br />'Dude,' Gravy said to me, as an aside. 'His brother’s wife? <em>Super</em> hot.'<br /><br />'I just wanted to show him, y’know? Show my dad that me and my rocket catapult weren’t worthless, neither of us... maybe show him that I'm not a big, pitiful disappointment, just once.'<br /><br />I was getting sleepy as Three became unbearably maudlin, so after letting him ramble on while Gravy and I messed around with a few incredibly cool handshakes I tried to coax him in a more proactive direction with the suggestion that they find themselves a nice overhang of trees to settle in under for the night. This was met with resistance, as they were unable to pull themselves vertical once flat on their backs. Finally, sense prevailed and Three recognized that calling for a ride remained their only option for returning home.<br /><br />'Well,' Three said, 'good thing I always keep a quarter in my sock.'<br /><br />'For what?' I asked.<br /><br />'How else am I supposed to call my parents, you clod?' His abrupt, imperial attitude had returned with a vengeance. 'Stupid Biscuits – you think we don’t know how things work over here?'<br /><br />'My apologies,' I said, slapping a particularly radical handshake down on Gravy. 'Go do your thing, man.'<br /><br />'And do my thing we will,' Three said triumphantly, and Gravy gave me wink before they trundled off in the direction of the nearest gas station.<br /><br />'Wait,' I called. 'You have a quarter?'<br /><br />'Of course I do,' Three called back. 'I just told you that, numbskull.'<br /><br />'Pay phones cost fifty cents.'<br /><br />I heard an indecipherable mumbling before Three started meekly back.<br /><br />'I have become aware that I was perhaps a little adventurous in my totally-friendly, not-at-all-disrespectful name-calling just then, Biscuits. I would hope that you wouldn’t hold such trivialities against a good friend when said friend were to humbly ask for a quarter?'<br /><br />'What am I,' I said, starting my car, 'a fucking bank?'Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-35972125903402675742010-08-30T12:20:00.002-04:002011-01-19T14:56:44.067-05:00‘You’re going to feel a pinch,’ he says, as said pinch blossoms into a hairy shank of pain. A needle in the mouth-roof carries all the subtlety of a grenade in a gas tank, and I try to tell him that it feels like he’s stabbed through my soul but he’s already wrist-deep in my mouth before I get the chance. I call him a sadist (‘adiss!’), and as is the case with my mangled speech, my playful smile is lost against the grotesquery of my unhinged jaw, like trying to show a fist with an open hand. Charm is inconsequential when the victim of a root-canal, I realize, and my eyes close to allow the swirl of pain-killers to anesthetize me fully.<br /><br />I’m imagining tearing through a mammoth mound of Caramilk bars when the smell of burning face rouses me. I try to pinpoint the stench, flipping through a catalogue of aromas and finding the closest approximation to be that of smoke on fire, when he nearly pulls me from my chair; he’s apparently drilled so deep into my tooth that he’s using two hands to pry himself free. My eyes open inadvertently as he dislodges whatever it is that got stuck, and I watch him wipe his brow before I swim back out into the ocean of my mind.<br /><br />I’m in the waiting room now, and the dentist has just unmasked himself so I don’t have to guess at what he’s saying after every third word; he’s hunched as though he’s come through a great ordeal, and he asks me how I feel. I mumble ‘nyumph’ a couple of times to shake free of the freezing and give him a wink.<br /><br />‘If my teeth had an ass,’ I said, perhaps a little too loudly, ‘it feels like they’ve been fucked in it.’<br /><br />Patients look up from their magazines. The receptionist’s head swivels toward me with shocking alacrity. The dentist’s face twists into something that at last resembles bemusment. The warm cascade of understanding washes over me, and my eyebrows arch excitedly.<br /><br />‘That’s it!’ I bellow, my arms unconsciously opening as though I was welcoming home a friend. ‘Getting a root-canal is like being assfucked in the mouth!’<br /><br />I don’t remember the first falling balloon, nor the first appreciative slap on the back; I have vague recollections of hastily-erected banners, of streamers filling the office with horizontal colour, of manic one-sided phone-conversations, of arguments over the precise wording and eventual placement of the plaque-to-be. Torn up pamphlets advising against gum disease produced a makeshift tickertape parade, and people everywhere started kissing passionately in celebration. I stumbled backwards in my astonishment, almost falling into an old woman I mistook for a small lump of rags. I bent down to apologize and found her weeping joyfully.<br /><br />‘I didn’t think I'd live to see the day,’ she gasped, reaching up to touch my cheek. ‘You’ve come up with the perfect description of a root-canal, yes you have. Oh my stars.’<br /><br />The tears ran down the cracks of her wrinkled face as she looked up at me, and I stood satisfied with my accomplishment, admiring the festivities I had inadvertently initiated, proud that I had contributed so mightily to the advancement of human evolution. I grabbed a passing adolescent by the arm and slapped a fiver into his hand.<br /><br />‘Do me a favour,’ I said, grinning like the devil himself. ‘Go snag me a Caramilk bar.’Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-69712428319709358232010-08-22T20:07:00.002-04:002011-01-17T23:18:37.041-05:00Anti-gravity pigeons circle, nipping and pecking leisurely at my gangrenous carcass. A taste of tendon here, a mouthful of bellyfat there, picking and picking and picking away until I’m nothing left.<br /><br />The elevator goes up and down, sideways, even, and a little bald man is yelling at me. The doors open occasionally but only enough for me to glimpse backgrounds I don’t understand. He’s ruffling what’s left of his hair and yelling at me.<br /><br />Tumescent and rolling, the pigeons are choked with me, distended helium balloons in the void of space, veins snaking across their guts like sandy roads laid incomplete. One pops, then another, and the unpopped pigeons seem unperturbed. My fully-formed leg, pant and shoe intact, bursts through a cloud of feathers. My arm up to my shoulder appears, as does my face, a face immediately slapped by my disembodied hand.<br /><br />He’s mad at something I’ve done but apologetic too. His manicured fingers claw at my gums and his hair stands straight up, extending to the elevator roof, branching out at the ceiling’s resistance and dangling limp. The door opens and shuts rapidly, a mocking laugh sneaking through. A perpetual echo raises the hair’s spirit and it lunges at me as a cackling pitchfork.<br /><br />I stare at the remaining pigeon, roiling in a parabola of swollen regret, and wonder if it’s angry at my torso. My foot kicks my teeth in, but they reverse their course and jump from my mouth like hurled change. Their speed increases, as does their inner glow, and they throb with light as pulsing suns gathering speed, more speed, speed enough to still them against the blurry background, the whole of the universe rushing by as I desperately try to keep up with my teeth. Smaller, they get smaller and smaller and the pigeon explodes behind me.<br /><br />The elevator stops and opens and the man is standing in the doorway, standing behind me but in the doorway. He’s both yelling ferociously but I can’t hear him twice. An expensive, expansive ballroom opens behind him, in front of me, with jabbing candlestick-fingers dousing the man’s hair in soft flame. His eyes are pebbles.<br /><br />My teeth disappeared. Gone, shards lengthened by a trick of light and burnt afterimages scrawled in the dark. I asked the pigeon if it was still angry, but it kept exploding and drawing me closer and exploding. Gravitationally-proficient pigeons are a dime a dozen and I paddled my words like oars but my ribcage pulled an end-around and swallowed me and ate me whole.<br /><br />The throne beckoned me to sit, sashayed beyond me and forced and cajoled and diminished me in front of my colleagues. The man yelled again, at me, but all his pebbles now replaced with plastic googly-eyes by a friend I had never met. One tooth made up of thousands of other teeth shattered the elevator door and the ballroom ascended. I looked into the window of a beggar’s mouth, a jaw dislodges, my jaw dislodges, hitting the ground and rattling like a chain. The ballroom vanishes upwards, and my jaw fastens me tight to nothing.<br /><br />I’m eaten and my ribs chew me and they open and close but only enough for me to glimpse teeth I don’t understand. The man yelled again, at me, ferociously, but he can’t hear me once.Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10504492379282200.post-63605202870465771482010-08-20T17:11:00.001-04:002010-09-28T16:22:47.302-04:00I submitted the following to the good people at <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/">Urban Dictionary</a>, and despite being curtly advised against using my real name, I was still hoping that my slang would captivate the masses and be catapulted into the stratosphere of public consciousness. To wit:<br /><br /><strong>Fuccough<br /></strong><br />An aside coughed into one’s fist when someone is clearly talking bullshit.<br /><br /><em>I would like to thank the panel of judges for this award, including the chairman of the board, my father, who assures me that nepotism was not a determining factor in the voting…<br /></em><br /><em>[audience member] *fuccough*</em><br /><br />I realize that this is not a life-changing piece of wordplay, nor have I any illusions of riding into the sunset of fame and fortune of the back of my Fuccough, but to have my little witticism dismissed via form-letter was a bit of a kick in the pants. It did leave me wondering, however, where I was to go with this thing – do I throw it away? Try to condense it for Twitter? Send it out scrawled intelligibly in longhand to a bunch of snail-mail-reading dinosaurs? Staple it to the foreheads of my enemies out of spite?<br /><br />No, it seemed the only appropriate action I could take, the only option, in fact, that even slightly quelled my feverish indecision, was to start a blog.<br /><br />So there you go: ammohammerbite!bite thanks to a little Fuccough.Rygantronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07338410206494835873noreply@blogger.com0