For the record - and also to make a little space between the font-ness of the titles - I don't think these second-page posts are in any way inferior to those on the first-page, but I also may have contracted rabies from my calculator so, hey, all bets are off. Oh, and for those going in order, here's page 3.
A man dressed in a tuxedo stands below a hastily-fastened disco-ball and tugs at his collar; he is double-thinking this situation he finds himself in and how vastly different the reality is to his fantasy, and his flop-sweat is nothing short of remarkable.
Confidence looms ethereal and he must physically-restrain himself from grabbing at it; steadier now, he clutches a microphone in his trembling hand and reaches out to press 'play' on the karaoke-machine.
Maaaa-gic
Moooo-ments
When two hearts are caaaa-ring
The voice in his throat warbles, slowly smoothing itself into a nerveless-vibration, the words coming less from his mouth than echoing from the resonance in his chest.
Maaaa-gic
Moooo-ments
Mem’ries we’ve been shaaaa-ring
The man dressed in a tuxedo, without the benefit of conscious-thought, has begun to swing his hips, delighting, ultimately, in the conjoining of his fantasy to this brand new reality...
'Better Man!'
The singing stops, and the backing-track continues mockingly as the man dressed in a tuxedo wilts and half-heartedly looks for the origin of the interruption: the lone audience-member in a bar full of empty-seats is excitedly gesturing to the karaoke-machine, mouthing the words 'Better Man' to the man dressed in a tuxedo. Shoulders hunched, he presses 'stop' on the karaoke-machine while his microphone hangs limply by its cord.
'Do Better Man, dude!'
The man dressed in a tuxedo gently places the microphone on top of the karaoke-machine, pausing to look at the disco-ball and its oblong swinging-orbit, and begins to walk off the stage...
'Oh, come on, dude! You were great!'
Shivers wrinkle the spine of the man dressed in a tuxedo, and with renewed vigor he snatches-up the microphone and eyes the 'play' button on the karaoke-machine...
'Do Better Man!'
'I don’t want to do Better Man,' the man dressed in a tuxedo says from the lip of the stage, quickly flustered.
'What? That’s crazy-talk, man... just do it.'
'I want to sing Magic Moments.'
'Shit - how magic a moment can it be if you’re not singing Better Man?'
The man dressed in a tuxedo drops his head as though pondering the question, slowly shaking his head side to side as if the answers were loose and rolling back and forth like cannonballs on a lolling ship.
Finally, still looking downward, he walks to the edge of the stage with a gait that picks up speed incrementally and leaps into the air like a panther with an ill-fitting cummerbund, arms and legs splayed, digits curled, and lands on the lone audience member with his knees, sticking the heckler to the ground by his shoulders. In one rapid, deft movement, the man dressed in a tuxedo leans down and bites the nose off the man in the audience, spitting it forcefully onto an adjoining table and gnashing his teeth uncontrollably with the unfamiliar taste of blood on his gums, and flings himself backwards, impossibly landing on his hands, which spring him further backwards, directly back onto the stage.
Calmly, the man dressed in a tuxedo pushes 'play' on the karaoke-machine, frowning to focus on the opening lines:
Maaaa-gic
Moooo-ments
When two hearts are caaaa-ring
The words come easily, forcefully this time, escaping from his jaw like perfect-notes blatted from a trumpet, though between the gritty bites of cartilage stuck to his teeth, and his voice soars over the backing-music like an eagle over an eternity of sunlit clouds.
'Bedduh Ban!'
The lone audience-member is once again gesturing excitedly to the karaoke-machine, his palm fastened to the spot on his face that formerly held his nose; this time, however, with a smile caked in blood, the man dressed in a tuxedo just keeps on singing.
Moral: No matter how many noses you bite off, there will always be someone who wants you to do something other than what you’re doing.
[originally posted 6/20/2008]
I tend to misuse the word 'insomnia' when talking about my sleeping habits, throwing it around like salt on the snowy walkway of explanation, and I really shouldn’t. It’s unfair to insomniacs to insinuate myself into their ranks, and it’s unfair to the word itself, a miscarriage of justice for those, like me, who value precise definitions and responsible wordplay above all else. As such, I will no longer be party to such capricious misfunctionality.
Unlike those actually suffering from sleeplessness, my 'insomnia' isn’t a disorder that stabs me in the ribs and laughs diabolically at my attempts to sleep; it’s just me, consciously, actively preventing myself from descending into the chilly tomb of slumber. I don’t enjoy going to sleep until exhaustion absolutely overtakes me, until the undertow of my subconscious yanks me, unwilling, under the lapping waves of oblivion. Otherwise, I feel ripped off, like being forced inside to practice the piano in July, enviously watching the kite-flyers and flag-football players as they cavort and caper through their sun-swept lives, playing grab-ass in the park and rolling down hills and breathing dandelion fluff into the soft, summer wind, doing cartwheels and handstands and playing tetherball even though the rules are ambiguous at best, and, sure, you can have some lemonade, but if you think you can get out of learning your scales, well, you’ve got another think coming, mister.
I don’t want to have to shut that window. You hear me?
As a night-person unconcerned with democracy, I will speak for all us vampires when I say that 'waking up' is actually just a polite euphemism for the startling, jarring full-system reboot we submit ourselves to, a perceptional resetting of previously understood realities that helps shake off the grimy film of dreamed observations. Suffice it to say, the process is a confusing one, and more so if immediately confronted with a pressing decision:
'What do you want to have for dinner tonight?'
'Dracula’s in the hamper.'
'Maybe I’ll pull out some ground beef?'
'Where will you put the laser beam? You can’t fight it.'
'Ground beef it is.'
The daily effort needed to even pretend to become a contributing member of society is arduous, what with all the tangibility and substantive linearity of existence like a gray-scale photograph compared to the kaleidoscopic fun and excitement of even the least imaginative dreamscape, and to throw all that hard-fought normalization away just because sixteen or twenty hours has passed seems, for lack of a better word, wasteful.
So, all that being said, let me disclose the epiphanic discovery that was the catalyst for this overly-long exercise in verbosity masquerading as an insightful exploration of the human condition: I, to be blunt, am The Matrix. That’s right. You, soulful reader, can take a second here to drink that concept in, to really let it roll around on your tongue, because it’s pretty big. It’s kind of huge.
I came upon this remarkable and unassailable fact whilst drinking coffee and smoking out the backdoor of my house yesterday, leaning my left shoulder against the doorframe and blinking away the last vestiges of sleep and all its above-mentioned baggage. As I tilted my head to the right, sharply stretching my neck as I am wont to do, and as the resulting crack loosened my bones and buckled my muscles, so too did it buckle the doorframe, bending it away from me as though repelled by sheer, spherical force of will alone. Sensing the enormity of the moment, I stopped and pondered the ramifications of what I had just done, mentally sidestepping the faint pops and whizzes of a spectacularly gargantuan head rush and allowing the dizzy spell to just run its course. To all rational forms of detection, the doorframe showed no indication of ever having moved at all; it certainly didn’t look like whitewashed wood that had vertically curled like a hammock, though I was almost pretty super-sure that it did.
The truth of the matter, as I later understood unequivocally, is that I didn’t bend the doorframe as much as I bent the world, curving this little fragment of reality to my whim, a whim that, evidently, called for a temporarily bent doorframe.
So that’s it. I haven’t as of yet explored any of the myriad godlike possibilities in the aftermath of this profound and deeply truthful realization, though you can rest assured that I will. Oh, yes. Be prepared, dutiful reader, and please, in the spirit of fairness, don’t say you didn’t see it coming after the sky turns plaid and everything you eat tastes like cotton candy.
[originally posted 2/5/2009]
After something like 300 hours of continual rain, the loud, blue-collar mood of the neighbourhood recoils like a scrotum in a cold lake, understanding its place in the galactic drama of existence as, at best, a tertiary concern. Brick and mortar goes soft under that type of duress, so inundated with water that houses up and down the street bob and bend in swollen protest, their aluminum-siding frowns a soggy testament to shoddy workmanship and this plague of environmentalism running rampant through the hearts and minds of even those thickheaded enough to fight it. We are the generation of sodden sacrifice, where moral superiority is painted forest green, and we’ll save the world ourselves; don’t worry your pretty little head about it, pops.
'I don’t understand.'
'Don’t you care about the earth? You should buy these coffee-filters.'
'Those are four times the price.'
'Yes, but they’re made from recycled material.'
'They go in the compost bin either way, don’t they?'
'You need to stop worrying about money and start worrying about the future; you have to be part of the solution.'
'By quadrupling my grocery bill.'
'Right.'
Of course, but what good is any of that now? Logic and rationality have no place in a neighbourhood like this at this best of times, and certainly not after it’s been violated by rain – attacked, if you will, by the very forces we’re bicycling to protect.
OHIO (AP) – Senator Howitzer Jackapple, the humanitarian crusader for deer and buck rights best known for his successful 'Hunt Not Lest Ye Be Hunted' campaign, was fatally shot by a deer this morning deep within what local residents refer to as 'The Toledo Badlands'.
'Why?' asked Senator Jackapple just minutes before being pronounced dead by on-site paramedics. Why indeed: among the many mysteries surrounding this bizarre ambush, such as determining where a deer learned how to operate a rifle and how it became so fully versed in irony, chief among them is why any deer would assassinate the man Time magazine called, 'The Deer Jesus'; running a close second is the alarming question of whether or not the deer acted alone.
Unlike the vast underground network of highly-organized deer extremists, the forces of nature need make no such concession - there is no conspiracy of raindrops, just vengeance piddled out on a ghastly populace of reprobates and degenerates, the down and dirty revenge of Mother Earth designed specifically to trap her smug 'saviors' indoors where she doesn’t have to listen to them congratulate themselves.
Alas, not all of life’s ills can so easily be explained away by a leaky sky; if only the teeming rain could account for that grizzled old hag with the mummified legs who invades the street in her minivan at odd hours shouting over the kind of redneck rock and/or roll that makes Lynard Skynard sound like a squad of eunuchs singing Amazing Grace. Perhaps it’s a large-scale brainstem-soaking that’s to blame for two cross-street rivals angrily Eskimo-kissing in regards to who heard what said about whom, grown men with the collective common-sense of a greasy sponge bickering like weasels trapped in a transparent elevator.
If it’s possible that waterheads are made and not born, there is no evidence of it on this dead-end street of teenaged temper-tantrums and one-legged vigilantes waiting behind the curtains for crime to appear in the narrow focus of their garage-mounted video-surveillance systems. No, it seems highly unlikely that the pervasive wet weather is responsible for this constant showcase of idiotic skullfuckery, and even less likely is the notion that dampness alone has been keeping this group of grisly werewolves from succumbing to evolution.
Ah, but now, as the clouds part, the sunshine can’t help but reveal two essential truths hiding within the slippery wreckage of city life: embedded gangfucks of sillywitted dipshits cling to this street like piss to the pantleg of a reverend on a rollercoaster, and no matter how violent the storm, the rain never seems to wash away all the grime.
[originally posted 6/22/2009]
I’m standing at a crosswalk, waiting to cross the street. A bearded and bandana-ed man on a bicycle is leaning hard against the lightpost, and if he’s glaring through me instead of directly at me it’s impossible to tell.
'How you doing?' I ask.
'Terrible,' he says, focusing his eyes as best he can.
'Mm, I know what you mean. I’ve got a compost-bin full of maggots.'
It becomes apparent that he was, in fact, looking through me, because he is now definitively staring at me, and my confession seems to be grating on him.
'Maggots,' he deadpans.
'Not here,' I say, gesturing behind me. 'Back home.'
He grumpily turns towards the street and tries to ignore me.
'I don’t think the garbageman gave my compost-bin enough of a shake last week, because he accidentally left behind a rotting piece of birthday cake.'
I raised my voice as I said this, just on the off-chance he couldn’t hear me over the roar of passing traffic.
'I say accidentally because I can’t imagine a garbageman worth his salt doing something like that on purpose.'
Bandanaman cranes his head towards me and manages to look both angry and completely put out by the effort.
'So,' I continue, stroking my beard and looking off into the distance. 'I’m thinking, what if, you know what I mean? What if I’m actually dealing with a loose cannon here, some sort of vigilante garbageman with nothing left to lose and a birthday cake vendetta so forcefully ingrained in his subconscious that he’ll stop at nothing to have his revenge on those bold enough, those brazen enough to leave unfinished pieces of birthday cake in their compost-bins?'
He grits his teeth, the man on the bike does, and slowly looks back towards the road.
'Scary thought, that,' I say, nodding philosophically.
He lifts himself up on his pedals as the light goes green, balancing and readying himself to push off across the street; then, just before he begins his arduous climb to forward momentum, he turns and violently hocks a loogie at my feet. I laugh at the not entirely-undeserved reaction to my unsolicited chatter, and I laugh when I see him slice into the path of a turning van, and I laugh as he slams on his brakes and screams at the driver and pounds on the door as it passes, and I laugh as I start my walk across the street... but when I look down at the puddle of mouth-juice clinging to the ground, I stop laughing.
Shimmering in the afternoon sun, the pool of gob reflects a sliding rainbow across its length, colouring the drab sidewalk with its mercury-like viscosity and vibrant palette. I look up to find that I’ve missed my window of opportunity, that the light has changed again, and I take the opportunity to studiously gawk at the surprisingly jovial mess of expelled bodily-fluid the irritable bicyclist left behind. I can feel someone over my shoulder, and I turn to see a bronzed teenager dividing his attention between me and the mound of slop on the ground.
'How you doing?' I ask.
'Fine,' he says, a little taken aback.
'I know what you mean,' I say, nodding. 'I’ve got a compost-bin full of maggots.'
[originally posted 9/4/2009]
My pen wasn’t cooperating this morning and neither was my thumb – both seemed to be caught in some sort of lockdown-paralysis, the former inklessly denting the page like a stick through soft sand, the latter shooting spasms of pain into my wrist and souring me to the pleasures of the day. It was nonsense, of course, for despite the pen’s unsurprising demise, I hadn’t injured my thumb in the least and was roundly perplexed by its stubborn irritability...
Just then, I heard the whispering tendrils of anxiety drilling into the base of my skull, tensing my muscles into knots and forcing sweat through my pores; I stole what should have been a deep, calming breath, but the resultant absence of sound soon gave way to an uncontrollable jackhammering in my chest, an ungodly pummeling staccato that seemed more akin to the sustained output of an uzi than anything even remotely healthy or rhythmic; I tried to catch my pulse in my wrist but it was too fast for me, racing past my desperate fingers and leaving just barest of flutters in its wake; my veins seized suddenly, turgid and distended from the onslaught, pushing blood through me quickly, too quickly, tripping the fuse on a cluster of fireworks that exploded in an incandescent halo of confusion around my head. I braced myself against the desk, trying to shake off the double-vision and tremors snaking through my arms, but darkness flickered around the edges of my sightline and I dropped my notebook, holding myself steady with two hands, all at once keenly aware of how far away the floor was.
You fool, I thought, gritting my teeth and balling my fists on the desk. I swallowed heavily and looked skyward before squeezing my eyes shut, tightening every strained fibre of my being with an implosion of grunts; I felt new lines ripple down my face and a tremendous pressure pushing through my lower abdomen before a welcome sag fell against the back of my pants. My body flaccidly succumbed to relief as I undid my belt, positioning myself over the rolling chair and lowering my jeans just enough to hear a familiar THUNK; I turned with the languid precision of a child finally willing to listen to reason and faced my bearded conscience.
'Ye shan’t be forgettin’ about me, shan’t ye?' chirped the leprechaun, resplendent in his flowing silk vest and glittering camisole. Weary from fatigue, I shook my head and inwardly applauded myself for making the extra effort in expelling the rascal, and we both eyed the two-foot golden scepter he wielded like a trophy before he shot me a wink of gratitude.
'There’d have been hell to pay had I left this up there,' he said, pulling his sleeve across his hand to polish the decorative yet bulbous headpiece. 'Still, ye be deservin’ of me appreciation, for what it be worth to ye.'
'No worries,' I said, noticing that amongst the pervasive smells of sweat and ass, my wee leprechaun actually carried an aroma not unlike that of fresh-cut roses.
'Aye, no worries,' he said sarcastically through a tight grimace. 'I’ve been up there for months, and ye should know as much.' He sighed deeply. 'Ye can’t live with ye bonnie sphincter all clenched up like coins in a pot o’ gold, laddie. Used to be I’d slide right back out o’ there, but lo these last few months... ach.'
'You’re right,' I said. 'Loose ass, easy pass.'
'Aye,' he said with gravitas. 'Ye need to smarten up, ye bozo – ride the wave o’ crazy, don’t avoid it. When it all be crashing down, don’t ye be divin’ for cover – grab ye surfboard, ye loony.'
I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about, but I knew I needed to hear more of that butchered accent before he darted away, so I feigned comprehension as best I could, nodding and squinting as though rolling his indecipherable ideas around in my head, wondering if it would have been out of line to ask him to record a greeting on my answering machine. He must have sensed my motives with whatever supra-leprechaunic-abilities he hid within that magnificently form-fitting bodysuit, because the look he stared me down with wasn’t so much an aggressive 'no' to my unasked question as it was an uncomfortable end to our heretofore civilized conversation.
'Take heed, boyo,' he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. 'Be seein’ ye.'
The leprechaun bolted for the back door with the speed of three cheetahs, and by the time I wheeled around the corner, he had already scurried up the fence to the corner of my property. He paused briefly for a small wave goodbye, twirling his scepter fiercely like a helicopter blade, and, just like that, he was gone.
Godspeed, li’l leprechaun, I thought. Godspeed.
[originally posted 7/24/2009]
