Travel Greetings (part 1)

You have to let other people be right. It consoles them for not being anything else

-  Andre Gide

I am convinced there are events that occur only because we fear them. If they were not summoned by our fear, you see, they would remain forever latent. Surely it is our imagining them that activates the atoms of probability and it awakens them, as it were from a dream. The dream of our absolute indifference

 -  Carlos Fuentes

Prelude (Grotesquerie o’clock)

There is no sicker critter on this planet or any other than the human imagination. If the interior of our minds were visible to each other, we would all be mass murderers before we were old enough to eat hard candy. As it is, our minds and our mouths have learned to play Good Cop/Bad Cop with the wily expertise of a couple of Dickrock County deputies. Here lying before you, dredged from the benthic murk of a fully grown human mind, rendered in text, and quivering in its own filth, is one such imagination.  

 VJH

Washington, DC

TRAVEL GREETINGS:

(Hallucinatory Romps & Jet Set Waywardacana)

Skyfell

(accounts of Jason Skyfell, as written by Jason Skyfell)  

Tokyo, Shibuya-ku. October 6th – notes on DC (rendered aerially to counter the gravity of The Event)

I only ever cleaned my apartment when the nookiebots came over. I’d start in the bathroom, always the worst off, and then I’d move on to the living room and then the bedroom and then finally the kitchen. I didn’t so much clean my apartment as I did neatify it, or give it the illusion of cleanliness. Some people believe cleaning to be therapeutic and I’m not one of them. The act of cleaning strafes my psyche with a host of new neuroses. I make up new curse words when I clean, unconditionally. Stubby syllables squeezed through closed teeth. Beginner Cantonese, it sounds like, or the language of Dachau and Old Sparky. It was the kind of frayed garble of sincere electrocution. . . Alas, I would persist. I squelched my ire with Erik Satie. I pulled muscles I had long forgotten about. It’s tough stuff, this cleaning business. My efforts were haphazard and the results were shaky. Mainly because I had no proper cleaning items. All I had to work with was a washcloth, some “all purpose” cleaner that sure as hell smelled like it worked, and a little broom about as big as a paper airplane. The cost of a single nookiebot could buy me enough cleaning supplies to last three hundred years, but you could stick a Ruger in my face and I still wouldn’t be able to come up with anything more uninteresting than spending money on cleaning supplies. If I had any goal in life, it was to abstain from all things domestic. And if I skipped out on this, it’d just make me another fraud, all dorsal fin and no bite. Consequently all of my money went to booze and junk food and artificial sex and used books and endearingly trashy music.

Jason Skyfell: diligent bohemian, noble degenerate, accidental murderer.

(Yeah, more on that in a minute. . .)

Here we are a hairbrush through the twenty-first century and this tiny corner of the galaxy is already infested with nookiebots. (The geeks really revved it up, man, and I salute their ambition.)

Nookiebots are basically androids that look and act like real women—real women who give you whatever kind of nookie you want in exchange for, yeah, money. Of course they have aspirations of their own. They are never just nookiebots. They’re bloggers, photographers, writers, models, actors, and artists. And yet, they are not really any of these things. Not if you give them the Sartre treatment and define them by their actions.

They were young and incomplete (and sometimes old and incomplete), with jejune aspirations to be something more but unable to harness the focus or discipline to do anything about it.

They were waitresses and baristas and retail clerks.

They were in-between jobs or on hiatus from school.

They were artificial women who took money for sexual favors.

They were nookiebots.

The nookiebot, usually draped in a cascade of accessories, would eventually show up, we’d do our thing, then she’d split and I’d spend the rest of the night sitting on my bed smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and listening to music that made me nostalgic for girls of yesteryear whom I had never really cared about. This was a weekly routine and some weeks a daily routine.

This was more or less how the last two years of my life in DC went down. I mean, there were the jobs: contract roofing, doing bullshit in hotels and restaurants, scooping elephant poo at the zoo, but mostly it was just low-grade decadence, clinical and heartless, but largely free of consequence or any other words that featured more than four letters. I have few good memories from this period that don’t involve unfamiliar flesh.   

Now I’m in Tokyo. On the lam, as they say. Neon bewilderment, this place, endowed with the wriggling verticality of my fictional futures. At long last, a familiar future!

The Event (or why I am on the lam):

Books can kill you. I don’t mean in a roundabout Mein Kampf sort of way, but rather the book itself, the physical thing, if husky enough and used with proper force, can take your life. It’s true and I have proof. The nookiebot I bludgeoned was barely nineteen (allegedly). My weapon of choice was, aptly enough, the collected works of Dashiell Hammett. I’m assuming everyone—the cops, my neighbors, the victim’s friends and family, my friends and family—by now know it was me who killed her. My apartment building was populated and often astir with movement, even in the dregs of a weekday night. I had three options: I could just leave the nookiebot in my bed and flee; I could take the nookiebot downstairs and throw her in the alley at the high risk of being spotted by a tenant or passerby, or I could drop the nookiebot down the garbage chute, which was located only about eight feet from my door. I chose that last option. (What would you do?)

The languor would begin where the nookiebot ended—literally within seconds of her exit I would collapse on my futon and sprawl out beneath a miasma of cigarette smoke and residual Lysol. I would then lay there, robed, basking in benign guilt, for hours, getting up only to piss or get another beer. Eventually I would write the gal’s name down along with a convoy of adjectives that would allegedly spur my memory if need be on one of two lists: Nookiebots I had slept with, and nookiebots I had not slept with, but with whom I had done other things.

(Other things: Blow jobs, hand jobs, boob jobs, leg jobs, and foot jobs)

Both lists were decidedly Fordham Road, with the same manic multiculturalism of that polychromatic Bronx thoroughfare. There was a black nookiebot named China, a Chinese nookiebot named Kenya; a lone Salvadoran named Midori (who wore a green dress over green leggings, inadvertently coming off as some sort of equatorial Peter Pan). There were a number of places (Eden, Syria, Miami), plenty of rogue consonants (Marikah, Jamillah), names that had been nibbled on (Mita, Tesh), adjectives (Sunny, Jazzy). I figure about a quarter of the names were really real.

The nookiebot I killed was named Juni Juli (proud of her birth name, she produced an ID when I showed skepticism). Juni Juli Korba—JJK, I called her, or Double-J K. Like all nookiebots, she was modeled after an actual girl—an actual dead girl (SkrumpTech, the company primarily responsible for the worldwide epidemic of nookiebots, handed out big bucks to model their products after actual humans, both visually and behaviorally, but a countrywide antiquated blue law prohibited nookiebots to resemble living humans so SkrumpTech had to wait until they were dead and go from there). The real JJK had a Greek father and a Uyghur mother: an unlikely mingling of genes that produced, in simplicity, a psychotic that looked Persian. The four times I met up with the JJK nookiebot, three times she intentionally burned me with cigarettes. And she was the queen of unwarranted missiles: beer bottles, coffee mugs (filled not with coffee, but white wine), ashtrays, pillows, books, CDs, taquitos—it was all armament as far as she was concerned. My lack of action usually prompted it. She would start up with her fierce, outré rhetoric about Eritreans, mild salsa, the Cold War, minor league baseball, Fellini’s ‘80s films, carpet, pigeons—and I would not engage her. This would incite her. I would withdraw further. She would begin her Blitzkrieg, grimacing through her fusillade of estrogen punches.

(It really was that bad)

The night I did decide to engage her I had drank about a third of a very large bottle of Beefeater. I was not a gin drinker and had only purchased the bottle due to a suspicious discount. The idea was that the bottle would last a year and just be “good to have around”, when in fact it probably wouldn’t have made it through the evening had I not brained Juni Juli. The genesis of the argument had been The Thin Man—the book, not the movie. Juni Juli was “positive” that it had been written by, stunningly, Rex Stout (why not Chandler?). She would not take my Hammett book as proof of her defeat, so I gave it to her—with both hands, a la Albert Pujols (slugger). I sat there for a while smoking Parliaments and sipping my Beefeater, her lying next to me, preposterously motionless, her postmodern pallor impossibly aglow, before I did anything about it at all. I briefly acquired some self-respect when I acknowledged my calm and resolve. I contemplated walking her down to the alley a la Weekend at Bernie’s before realizing that I was too drunk to walk that far, much less in tandem with a dead girl. The stuff of nightmares, squeezing her into that chute. A corpse’s final revenge: its profound uncooperativeness.

I haven’t seen much of Tokyo. I stay in most of the day, dipping in and out of consciousness, staring out the window, or skimming over the Washington Post online. At long last I’m reading Don Quixote—a novel, the novel, as they say, that was, in fact, never intended to be a novel because novels did not yet exist.

 ~The following message is a paid advertisement by Brentwood Skrump, founder and CEO of SkrumpTech, creator of the Tell Me Tina, the world’s first fully functional nookiebot~

 “Are you tired of the #MeThree movement and its bland tantrums and stylized hysterics and manufactured strife and tireless crusade against your pecker? Vote NO!NO!NO! on Article 3186366310 and let’s preemptively strike down the proposition to ban our God fearin’ right to boink our nookiebots whenever we want and in whatever adventurous fashion we want!”

 “Aye, Stevie Boy, I bet you three thousand clicks my Tell Me Tina can whip the snot outta your Artifox3000!” - overheard in Café Bukakke, a popular destination for DC politicos

“The District of Columbia and State of Maryland and Commonwealth of Virginia hereby agree that the offense of committing murder against synthetic lifeforms that resemble and behave like human beings will be punished with accordance to the laws of first-degree murder” - District Attorney Isadora Jackson

October 8th—

Last night might as well have been a dream. The memories of it are about as sturdy as its unconscious brethren. I went to a bar buried deep in Shibuya’s bouncy dimensions, and drank Asahi, maybe eight of them, and bought a gal named Bigbig Sunglashes a Patron margarita and when I got drunk enough we danced to Ziggy Stardust and made out and her breath I swear smelled just like pistachio mint and then a brawny Nigerian named Norris turned up and we all went to another joint with a patio and an ambitious sun disapproved of everything we did or didn’t do in its jealous glare…

…I woke up with my clothes on and the lights on, and with no evidence last night was real, save the wayward kanji sprawled across my forearm in purple ink…

“What’s this mean?” I asked the concierge this morning.

He took my arm in his hand and strained to read the manic writing. I didn’t know Kanji but I could tell this was like using ALL CAPS. He loosened his grip (stature of grip: severely academic, ladylike) and said, “It mean somet’ing bad.”

“Bad like bad bad or bad like bad to the bone?”

This confused the hell out of the guy so I went into the hotel’s café and asked the little girl behind the counter. I knew she had lived in the States and spoke English without the schooly rigor of her starched coworkers.

She read it aloud twice in Japanese, once quickly, once slowly, and said: “Who wrote this?”

“Some girl I was hanging out with last night,” I said. “Your buddy over there said it means something bad.”

The girl looked like a mannequin made out of soft rubber. She had bronze bangs that trickled down her forehead and amiable eyes that suggested a sober intelligence. She was the kind of gal you marry, not fuck.

“No, it doesn’t mean anything bad. It’s just kind of strange. It says—” (she said it again in Japanese) “—which means be careful what you breathe life into.”

“Ain’t exactly Confucius caliber,” I said, flippantly.

“Maybe it means you shouldn’t have children.”

“Fine by me. No itty bitties on the agenda.”

A customer came in so duty dictated that the girl abandon me. I went upstairs and took a thirty-minute shower for all the wrong reasons and fell asleep to Japanese MTV.  

October 9th—

In order to thwart atrophy I have decided to invent imaginary pursuers, two of them. One is tangible, loosely possible: a bounty hunter I will call Mixon Clawwell. The other is more nebulous, its methods more oblique and needling as to inflate my paranoia. I can only describe it as Sentient Spam. For convenience, and with a nod at the prickly connotations of its acronym, I will refer to it as SS. These are essential inventions, as I am uncertain if I am being pursued—an uncertainty that could lead to laxity and thus apprehension.   

SS (observations of, in second person) 

Your name is Jason Skyfell. You are in a hotel in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. Your room is on the eighth floor. The overhead light is turned off and your room is as dark as the Shibuya skyline’s chronic flicker allows it to be. Your room is tiny and its dimmed austerity is smeared with patches of sourced lighting: pink and green and yellow. You are sitting at your desk looking out the window, which is to your left. You watch Shibuya’s illusory chaos bubble beneath you. The sink is full of bottles of Asahi and melting ice; a muted Japanese variety show persists on the television.

You open up your laptop and check your email. 

Inbox (1)

 ChoosyBlips1970 to me:  

こんにちは JS

You who you believe me which am continued to are able to trust me whether you are complied with that which is following you;;;;            ありがとう

“Choosy”

There is an attachment. You open it.

010010110100101010010110100101101001011010010110100101101001011010010110100101101101101101101101001011010010110100101101101101101101001011001010110100101101001011010010110100101101101101101010010110_J_10100100100100100100100100101101001011010010110011010011010010110100101100110100101101001011010010110011010010110110110110110000001011011010110000010110001011000101100010110001011010010110100101101101001010_J_10101001010101011010010101010010010110100101100010110001011010010110100101100010110001010110110110100101101101101000100101101101000010110010101011010101001010010110100101100111010010110100101101001011001110100101100010110010010110100101100100101101001011001001011000101000_K_1010110101011010010110100100010101010101000101010101101001100110011010100101101001011010001010101010

 You reply:

 Me to ChoosyBlips1970:

 Dear C, who are you and what do you want? - J

 The reply comes with suspicious speed.

 ChoosyBlips1970 to me:

 こんにちは JS

I am “Choosy” I am one of these good and I am your friend that which is trusting;;; It is here that I am that which is protecting;;           ありがとう

“Choosy”

 Inbox (1)

 Another message, from a different sender:

 BR1956 to me:

 lets chat JS

spandexperience.com register log in and meet me in chat asap

Brian

You go to Spandexperience.com. It’s some sort of softcore porn site for spandex fetishists. A cursory trek through its tour page contains slim gals, mostly ambiguous Eastern Europeans, sheathed in glistening outfits.  

You register and log in and go to the chat room.

[areaboy] 12:04 am: Brian?

[br56] 12:04 am: I’m here, dude

[areaboy] 12:05 am: What’s this all about?

[br56] 12:05 am: Listen, dude. I made this room so we can chat in private, but it’s looking for us right now so we have to be quick.

[areaboy] 12:06 am: What’s looking for us?

[br56] 12:06 am: There’s a thing that knows about you and what you did. It’s watching you, dude. It’s electric and it’s in all the cameras and it squirms around the internet looking for you. I’m pretty sure it knows where you are.

[areaboy] 12:07 am: What kind of thing is it? What does it want?

[br56] 12:07 am: Quick history, dude. Here’s what I know. The New Poles designed it. You know about the New Poles?

[areaboy] 12:08 am: No, nothing. Tell me.

[br56] 12:08 am: The New Poles are like cyber-terrorists. They’re based in DC—in Ivy City, this narrow triangle of brick and concrete out in northeast part of the city. There aren’t many New Poles. Hundred, tops.  Most of them were carpenters before they came over. The old Poles have been absorbed by the city. They’re now busboys and concierges and lifeguards and doormen. They’re Americans now. They’re only Poles during the World Cup. The New Poles are different, though. No loopholes for the New Poles. They went underground and now they get paid to fuck up air traffic control and turn red lights into green lights. Their insignia is a little coat hanger and nobody knows why. Weird bunch, dude. Somebody gave them a lot of money to construct this thing and sick it on you.

[areaboy] 12:10 am: Who paid them? And where are you now?

[br56] 12:10 am: On a train. Got the Olympics on my left and the Cascades on my right. Going north, dude. Vancouver. I don’t know who paid these guys. You got rich enemies or powerful enemies or both. Gotta go. Time’s up. Be careful, dude.

[br56 has left the room] 12:11 am

[areaboy has left the room] 12:18 am

[SiP has entered the room] 12:22 am

[SiP has left the room] 6:22 am

Mixon Clawwell

Look at this makeshift congregation in Dulles airport. All women, 100%. Maybe thirty of them. There’s an air of celebration about them. The balloons and streamers are implied. There’s a chronic cascade of hooting, clipped questions, rowdy exclamations, fusillades of alto laughter; all of it atop a purr of awed contention…

It’s Mixon in the middle of them, cloaked in Saharan Banana Republic, sharp, symmetrical, with a GQ on his knee. Mixon looked good, and all this attention amplified his good looks. He was an ideal fifty years old: Six feet tall with an implied couple of inches stacked on top and he had the sturdy build of a baseball player or state trooper. His hair was the color of cement and just about as pliable, and his jaw line suggested liters of testosterone and was covered with journalist scruff. His big brown eyes and slightly puggish nose endowed him with a comicality that teamed up with his other features to equip him with a naturally strong charm. His personality, however, was 100% garbage, but he was aware of this so his communications were frugal, if not reliant on whatever company he was in. Altogether, he had the ingredients for a fine bounty hunter, a fine celebrity bounty hunter, whatever with this weirdo world we live in…

“Where you off to, Mr. Clawwell?”

“Who you after this time, Mr. Clawwell?”

“What’d he do, Mr. Clawwell, kill someone?”

“Did he blow somethin’ up, Mr. Clawwell?”

“Is he a terrorist, Mr. Clawwell?”

The girls were a mixed-up bunch: husky Virginians that reeked of double-digit years of married life, cute and sleek fashionistas, contrived cerebral types with rent-caliber eyewear…They were all taking pictures of him with their cell phones.

“Is that a Banana, Mr. Clawwell?” asked one of the fashionistas, indicating his Banana Republic sport coat.

They waited…………..

“A banana?! No, lady, it’s a jacket.”

Nature of laughter: lubed, profuse, lenient.

“Mixon. Mixon….What a cool name!”

“No, it ain’t,” replied Mixon. “It’s a dolt’s name. Like Davan or Naylen. Worse, even.”

Mixon’s phone serenaded him with Le Marseillaise. A message waited: Shibuya-ku. JS is in room 802 of the Smileflower Hotel.

“Who’s texting you, Mr. Clawwell? Your wife or your girlfriend?”

“Neither. My agent. Says I oughta start charging ya’ll for every picture you take of me. Fifty bucks a pop. Of course I’ll give to charity, since I’m a saint and all.”

“You are a saint. A saint and an angel.”

“Yeah?” Mixon said. “Who ever heard of an angel using Air Nippon to scoot around?”

On the plane Mixon drank four little bottles of Cabernet and went to sleep. The other passengers were all doing Tai Chi or something like it when he woke up. The nap made his brain soggy and vulnerable and these wild, bizarro thoughts that didn’t have any business showing up at 35,000 ft. began to fester, so he consulted his GQ and tried to wring a little normalcy out of it; tried to brush up on his sanity. He always read GQ when he flew, mainly because he couldn’t imagine dying while reading GQ. When he exhausted his GQ, he pulled out his book on the Cold War. Black and white facts: good for preventing any rogue existentialist tingles from seeping into your noodle—Didn’t want those while you were way up in the air. And nobody got The Fear while reading about Truman. He got restless after eight pages, though, and closed the book. His bookmark was a ticket from three flights ago: that goddamned trip to Africa. Bad Africa: the part of Africa where they don’t play soccer in the soccer stadiums. Two weeks in an old city with a new name in a new country with an old name. And a new flag, patched up on an HP or a Dell. Primary colors, a palm tree, and a Kalashnikov. Everything mired in nostalgia for something that never was. And everything in cinders. The whole area exploded ten years ago. Unmitigated war, for the same dumb reasons. Mixon had roamed around like a specter beneath the city’s charcoal skyline, looking for his man. Everyone over thirty was all banged up. They limped, jostled with crude artificial limbs; coughed incessantly. That whole terrible continent can sink right into the ocean. Africa is not improving. Sure, it looks like it is—laptops, cell phones, moving walkways at the airport—but when you adopt the way of the West you adopt all of it, including all of its seven deadly sins and its archipelago of honorable mentions. Africa got his man before he did.  Mixon did not like Africa for many reasons, but mainly because it kept him from collecting his $50,000 bounty.

And coming up shortly, the anti-Africa…

Japan: insane efficiency, failsafe safety, and every bit of it madly cleansed of yesterday. A satellite of humanity, le fin et le commencement du monde…

Mixon put on his headphones: Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love. He listened to Little Wing and watched the little plane on the screen on the back of the seat in front of him work its way south over the Arctic Ocean. Then the pixels wiggled like they shouldn’t. Something developed, deliquesced, developed again. The two passengers to his left were mired in sleep. He inched closer to the screen. Mixon knew that a decent percentage of the world’s paranoia was merited. Plenty of it had no basis, sure, but a good chunk of it did. Mixon was now 95% sure his employers were watching him from their triangular acre back in DC through the eyes of their Plan B or Plan C or whatever. He could almost hear their goofy tongue and their Schoenberg, see their constant eyes, juiced on new drugs, glazed and ambitious, pivoted there under the electric loom of their hectare spread of screens…

He gave a thumbs-up, as he does, and the pixels fell uniform with their peripheral brethren. He skipped tracks 6 and 7 and 8 and 9 and then reclined to the max and loosed a silent stinker.

Notes from the Underground

For a kid who spent the first half of his life swinging around magnolia trees, amazed and perplexed at what a self-proclaimed metro mutt/subway weyyy/luster of subterranea I turned out to be 🚇

Pics from various recent fuqroundery (Montreal, Paris, Madrid) + DC's own.

"That whistle ain't gunna blow itself."

To paraphrase that bloke from David Lynch's 1997 schizo-drama Lost Highway, "Captain, this is some spooky stuff we got here."

Last Tuesday, whenever that was, I got up early enough to tuck the roosters in and cut across deep night DC to go stand in line to attend a hearing held by the Congressional Oversight Committee on the subject of "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection" and behold, here a few scenes from that whole bonanza...

And, yeah, imagine a universe where members of the US military observe (in plenitude) red squares the size of football fields (an official metric in the UFO world) hovering silently above missile installations, Hellfire missiles bounce off UAP as if they were made of NERF foam, and even the sneaky fuggin' Russians admit to being outsnook by peculiar sky vessels that can breezily activate/deactivate their ICBMs as if they were buttering hot bread. This happens to be the kooky universe we currently reside in.

But don't take my word for it, get it straight from the horse's chompers at oversight.house.gov (search "UAP" and uncork your Carlo Rossi and get ready to gargle the word "wow" for an hour).

Massive accolades for the bipartisan effort to sick the hounds on what might very well turn out to be the juiciest story in the history of this corner of the cosmos. Excellent questions asked by @gopoversight & @oversightdems and I enthusiastically salute the trio of new whistleblowers, as well as the hard workin' @georgeknapp66 & @jeremycorbell for draggin' this critter into the spotlight. If you get the ganas to cannonball into all this, I recommend scopin' @newparadigminstitute + @mutualufonetwork + the folks at the #solfoundation + #nuforc + @international_ufo_bureau + @cife_ufo 🌀

The Development in the Chowder

It has grown to be a popular assumption that apparitions and similar paranormal events are to retain the size and scale of their flesh-and-blood yesteryear. I now know this to be false. I will hereby relate to you the events that led to this most queer discovery of mine.

Recently I had a late lunch at an ill-populated seafood restaurant that sits nestled between an old torpedo factory and a Nepalese silk shop. The place was named after a local legend, a whaling ship captain, who had acquired a good deal of fame due to his ability to place himself and his crew in all sorts of peril and then, against every odd known to humanity, emerge with only the thinnest set of casualties. His habit for recklessness and subsequent avoidance of catastrophe had provided him with a life of tiny triumphs and was therefore plush with cinematic anecdotes. His lone protocol is that he offload his calamitous jibber on any star-cursed bubba within back-slapping distance. 

The Captain, as he was simply referred to as, was also a self-proclaimed connoisseur of “old fashioned maritime instinct”—a trait that no one, including the Captain, could define without going full-blown lowland gorilla on their interlocutor with the kind of ectomorphic spectacle people launch into when they are in need of the Heimlich maneuver or an exorcist or both. The Captain’s distrust in nautical maps was so comprehensive that they were not permitted within “pootin’ distance” of his ship, and his disregard for compasses and all other directional instruments had surpassed the level of Apache League baseballers. I’m sure many are familiar with the literal tendency of the Captain to famously “throw the compass to the wind and make way by the stars themselves”—a popular phrase of the Captain’s that I am told has since been promoted to the role of barroom toasts. Saner captains have gained no such fame for their maritime foresight.

I also understand that the Captain, possibly unbeknownst to the proprietors of the restaurant that shares his name, enthusiastically boasted of a strict vegan diet. He had proudly and frequently (and incorrectly) insisted that man can live off kelp alone. Legend has it even that it was not uncommon to see the stuff severely entangled in the Captain’s famous smile. It was the Captain’s oft disgruntled crew that had formulated the idea that he painstakingly applied this kelp to his teeth before social events (usually fundraisers for new masts or bigger harpoons) or interviews with the local press (ordinarily conducted from the dodgy confines of life rafts or the naval hospital).

The Captain’s fate was one of severe ignominy. He had just arrived back at port after steering what would be the last ship under his command, the Benny Briggs, through a tempest that seemed to have flared up out of the Old Testament. ("Mountains and valleys of rabid waves, undulating like a swarm of pythons” was the description proffered by one of the more imaginative crewmen.) Despite the weather reports that he had disregarded (or perhaps never heard), the Captain had taken the Benny Briggs out to sea in search for a behemoth of a humpback whale that had been reported several days earlier by one Tuppy Q. Muldoon while at the helm of his Estrella. Muldoon had been the Captain’s fiercest competitor, and the prospect of besting his rival supplied the Captain with a gleefully wicked motivation. Rather than surrendering to the tremendously favorable odds and embracing a death at sea, the Captain, having returned with zero contact with the humpback, decided to lie down for his afternoon nap on a pier where a steamer called the Caddo Bossier had come to dock. The Caddo Bossier at the time was undergoing an intensive refurbishment, and the steamer’s crew, having retired for the day, had decided to relax with some good Bermudan rum and a tournament of anchor tossing. It would be a tournament whose wayward disposition would work its way into local lore. The Captain’s last words were “Sheathe your baton rouge, friend, or I shall dice thou into chum.” They had been spoken to his beagle Murray.

Conspiracy theories were quick to sprout, as they usually are when such an unlikely and misfortunate death is introduced to someone with the caliber of fame as the Captain. Local fingers immediately pointed in the direction of Muldoon, as he was the Captain’s most high-profile nemesis. It was an accusation that Muldoon cold-shouldered repeatedly and with aggressive brevity before finally getting tipped into the realm of indignation and countering (now bug-eyed with rage) with why anyone would think he’d ever feel compelled to take the time to orchestrate such a bizarre demise for a foe that possessed such popular incompetence. A biographer of the Captain’s later asked a long-retired and geriatric Muldoon what he had really thought of the Captain; Muldoon had replied with his famous smirk: “The Captain set a standard for all us captains! If you found yourself doin’ somethin’ he’d do, then you’d know you’d gone madder than a sprayed roach!—or were drunk!”

But, yeah, it was this day, in this restaurant of waning merit, that I encountered an alarming new development in my unconditional quest for a solid ontological perspective.

I was hovering over my lunch, contemplating the restaurant’s décor, which was a sort of Age of Sail bric-a-bric Valhalla—all dark wood and electric lighting that masqueraded as candlelight, walls slick with sickly-looking maps of lakes and seas that I had never heard of and portraits of admirals with smeared beards and seemingly AI-generated names like “Wanksmith” and “Luckdown” and vast cast-nets occupied by yesteryear’s taxidermy: a barracuda, partially gnawed on by indigenous vermin, a dogfish, tragically bent, as if he were pantomiming Ouroboros, and a trio of zero-gravity crustaceans that were frozen mid-scurry and guarding a way-too-big cardboard sign that instructed customers, in as many words, that they DO NOT touch the pufferfish—a warning-cum-aphorism since, yeah, there was no pufferfish. Not anymore, at least. A gumball machine with no gum held post near the entrance. A cigarette machine with no packs of cigarettes clogged up the little waiting area near the host stand. Anachronisma ruled supreme here… And the whole place looked like old books smell, if that makes sense. Years ago, I remember as if it were a dream, I once came here and steeped myself in Cutty Sark at the restaurant’s little bar and ended up on an explorative sortie to the restroom (an urban myth, I am convinced, since it seems one is liable to happen upon a minotaur in a moo-moo before finding this joint’s john) and wound up in a dark, damp, uninhabited private dining room that featured a hopelessly asymmetrical catamaran, roped off like it was the Wright Brothers Flyer. It was this sort of dated leftfield devilry that kept me occasionally coming back here…

(That and the okay food and, yeah, the fact that it’s supposedly haunted.)

But, yeah, I was contemplating all of that when I moved my contemplation over to more immediate concerns: what should I do with the pickle that had come playing sidekick to my shrimp po’boy? This restaurant, I had loosely been informed, had an almost obnoxious pride in the quality of its pickles. (When a restaurant boasts of its pickles you know you’re in trouble.) And this fact alone should have ebbed my zeal for this place, alas, a persistent growl in my stomach had squelched the voice of common sense.

I opted to bite off the ends of the pickle in oblique protest and then I balanced the newly deformed thing on top of a bottle of ketchup. The implied message of the spectacle being: don’t let this happen to you. I then turned my attention to the remainder of my Manhattan clam chowder. I am not known as one who pays careful attention to the contents of soup. For that matter I tend to disregard inspecting my meals before devouring them, as a blue collar decade of meals-on-the-clock has instilled a hurried manner to my eating: I eat with the pastiche of a Hollywood werewolf, and I am 100% certain I chew less than anyone in my social sphere…

So, yeah, it surprised me that I found myself staring into a spoonful of chowder, again contemplating. I remember thinking of origin of the word Manhattan: “Land of many hills” it meant in the language of the Delaware Indians. It only then occurred to me that the current showcase of dense verticality that is modern day Manhattan had settled for bona fide misnomer. Nonetheless, it was a good set of syllables. Man-hat-tan. Very user friendly and far superior to the sickly, lingering vowels of New York.  For it was impossible to say “New York” ten times in a row without feeling you’ve lost some vital handle on the ability to speak English or any other language. New York does, however, seem a more appropriate moniker when rendered in text, as the N, Y, and K do well to suggest height and severity. Still I couldn’t help but think that New York deserved a better name. Maybe this was where the allegiances to its boroughs derived from: Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx were all better names than New York. Nobody really ever referred to Staten Island, but even it possessed more aesthetic merit. I concluded that the City was sometimes added to New York not as a method of distinguishing the great city from the state that emanated from it, but rather as a means of providing an outpost for those seeking familiarity and sanity.

I had hopelessly moved onto the word “chowder” when I noticed a tiny splash in the contents of my spoon. The splash was followed by a set of ripples—and then by another splash with more ripples. I brought the spoon closer and peered into it. I was beginning to second guess my eyeballs when I spied another series of splashes, just south of a small square of diced sautéed onion. At this point, I realized there was something abnormal about my chowder.

“Everything taste okay?” asked the waiter, who had taken notice of my wrinkled brow.

As a diner I had a bit of a reputation as a milquetoast. I had managed to work my way through undercooked omelets, overcooked steaks, and had even removed the occasional rogue strand of hair from dishes to avoid awkward confrontations with waiters. This lust for amity was easily satiated due to the fact that I usually approached my foodstuff with a trophy level of indiscrimination. I was neither finicky nor easily grossed out. My chowder, however, was beginning to weird me out.

“Something…” I said, “is wrong with this soup.”

“You want it hotter? I can heat it up,” he replied, too quickly, too loudly.

“No, no, it’s just…I don’t know, it’s just acting kinda kooky.”

This reply confused the Holy Spirit out of my waiter. He grimaced for a long five seconds and then asked me if I’d like something else instead. Perhaps the New England clam chowder. I looked up at him. He had the sturdy build of a baseball player, ambiguously cross-eyed, and probably still comfortably perched in his twenties, although his weathered face, with its indentations of premature grief and absence of steady hydration, insisted otherwise. He was wearing an oversized white vest that was stained with a potpourri of condiments. He was cleanshaven and his matte black hair was severely slicked back. An acrobatic tattoo lay claim to his left arm from its elbow to its wrist: Libre, Soberana e Independiente. The gaze he continued to fix upon me was the variety reserved for vacated wasp nests or spiders of suspicious disposition.

“Here,” I said, quietly, returning my attention to my spoon. “Check it out...”

I raised the spoon a little so he could see. He bent over with his hands clasped behind his back and stared into the spoon like he was looking at the tip of his nose. He asked me what exactly he was supposed to be looking for.

“There!” I said, pinky-pointing at a new series of splashes, “That. You see it? It’s like tiny little splashes…”

My waiter yelped in reaction. He had seen it. I shifted in my seat and peered deeper into the spoon. I could now see two small dots, each about the size of the tip of a ball-point pen, that were responsible for the commotion. The waiter inched closer. I realized he had sneakily commandeered control of the spoon and was fixated on it.

At this point a couple of other waiters had accumulated. One of them inquired in Spanish what was going on with the soup. My waiter filled them in hurriedly as they drew closer. After much time spent staring at the tiny tomato-based enigma, one of the waiters, a Caribbean-looking fellow with short bleached blond hair, sprang into garrulous animation. My perpetual beginner level Spanish allowed me only to understand that he had instructed my waiter to go fetch something and come right back. My waiter obliged and handed the spoon to one of his comrades and loped off into the restaurant’s innards.

For the first time I thought to look into the cup of chowder where I had retrieved this eventful morsel. After a solid minute of thorough study, I came to the conclusion that the cup offered nothing more than I should’ve expected of it: it was merely a cup containing a small sea of red punctuated by tiny bergs of onion, tomato, and clam. The action—I now knew—was entirely limited to the pool in my spoon.

I looked up and noticed that the two newcomers had exponentially multiplied. There was now a host of restaurant personnel as well as a few regulars that had heard the commotion from the bar. A weathered old timer, all wrinkles and out-of-focus facial hair and flannel, unleashed a fusillade of disclaimers about the quality of the restaurant’s food and said there was a reason he stuck to the tap beer and Saltines in the thirty years he had been frequenting the place. Then he started up with a big bout of chunky-style laughter, followed by an even bigger bout of uncontrollable coughing. He doubled over and sort of pinballed himself back into the bar. In a tragically rustic font, the back of his belt read: Honest Abe.

Suddenly a nearby door that I had not noticed popped open and my waiter came in, walking backwards in a hunch, pulling something: a wheelchair, stuffed to the max with a comically old man—he was at least ninety years old, and his head was tilted up at a forty-five degree angle, as if scoping the ceiling for mosquitos. His eyes, comically magnified by a pair of steampunky eyeglasses, were the color of turkey gravy, and I would’ve believed him to be dead had it not been for the tremendous outpour of snoring he emitted. The blond waiter shushed the peanut gallery that had gathered around, rolled up his sleeves, and adroitly removed the old man’s eyeglasses and then held them up high, displaying them as if they were a boxing title-belt or a king-size mackerel.

The blond waiter passed the glasses off to my waiter—Diego, I now knew him to be, via the chronic chatter now around us. Diego held the glasses up to the spoon. He stared hard at the chowder through the glasses, again doing that thing where he looked like he was looking at the tip of his nose.

“That him?” that blond waiter asked, fidgeting like a hamster. “Is that him?”

Instead of replying, Diego swiveled carefully and began to walk slowly toward the entrance to the restaurant. The crowd curiously accompanied him until he came to a stop at the hostess stand. Here, Diego, as if on cue, took the lamp that had been illuminating a seating chart on the stand and raised it up to the spoon. The staff and the an increasingly bigger nest of regulars all huddled tightly around Diego, peaking over his shoulders…

“I bet it’s him,” said somebody. “It’s him, I bet.”

“It’s gotta be,” said somebody else.

“C’mon, pretty please, pretty please,” said someone.

“It’s him, no doubt about it,” said someone else. “He’s due!”

Diego suddenly leaned back, as if in recoil. Then he sighed, laughed, and cursed in Spanish, all in the same breath. He carelessly handed off the spoon and its contents to the blond waiter and left us with a gesture that indicated he was done with this whole weird thing.

I was booted from my tentative, observational state by the distinct sound of broken glassware. A fight had erupted. Two members of the kitchen staff were going at it like stags. I later learned from the local press that it had been spawned by a verbal slight of the Captain. After tons of squirming around on the floor, the smaller of the two scrappers managed to get his opponent in a headlock, and the other, in a desperate effort to free himself, toppled the both of them into a table full of brittle-looking Euro-tourists. A partially eaten lobster was introduced to the melee. One of the waiters decided the lobster would be useful to quell the small uprising, as it made for a handy malice. The waiter, though, was blindsided before he had the opportunity to strike and the lobster was rendered airborne. Eventually it came to rest at the foot of the old man’s wheelchair, but not before doing extensive damage to his urostomy bag. A yellowish lagoon quickly formed alongside him and did well to ambush the blond waiter, who was holding the very spoon that had prompted the whole fiasco. The spoon, now minus its contents, took flight in my direction. I grabbed the thing out of the air and returned to my booth, where I finished off my chowder and my po’boy, left ample cash to cover the tab and well-deserved gratuity, and headed for the restaurant’s exit, while carefully avoiding the ruckus.

The old guy with the Honest Abe belt was lurking near the hostess stand, cigarette in one hand, beer in the other. He was observing the action, which had now grown to include seemingly the entire restaurant with the exception of me and him, with an air of laxity that suggested that he’d been in more prickly predicaments.

“They should rename this place Guernica,” I said, taking in a final look at the whole big mess before opening the door to leave. Honest Abe shook his head and did some testy gesture with his hand, implying that he had gotten my reference. I countered with a soft query of what they had seen in my chowder, and why it had provoked so much bedlam.

Honest Abe stubbed his cigarette on the side of the hostess stand and gave me his full attention—  

“I don’t claim to know much about anything these days. I’m plenty content to peter out here at this endearingly mediocre eat place or whatever they call it, griping my little head off to anyone who’ll pretend to listen. Hell, I’ll gripe if they don’t pretend to listen. And if there ain’t nobody around to gripe at, guess what I do…”

“Gripe to yourself?” I said, before I realized I was saying it.

“Exactly!” he shouted, poking me in the ribs. “You nailed it, buddy-boy. I gripe to myself, probably look like a damn nutter butter doin’ it but oh-fuggin’-well, right? No less dignity in that than if I were one of them poofed-out cranks who write books or blogs or whatever about what could have done, or what they should have done, and why they didn’t do it, yuk-yuk-yuk, right? No sadder sight in the Milky Way galaxy than these damn chimps with side-parts that come slinkin’ in here, all around my age, and every one of them with something to prove. Nothing nowhere sadder than an old man with something to prove.”

Like a surprise high tide, the ruckus of waiters and regulars encroached on us and ebbed just as quickly.

“No, sir, I don’t know much anything, sure, sure,” he said, lighting another cigarette, “but I do know I don’t have anything to prove to no one, not even myself.”

I could neither confirm nor disconfirm his statement so I just nodded like an idiot.

Honest Abe eyeballed the receding melee and lazily motioned toward it and said, “You know what else I know?”

“What,” I said, flatly. (What else could I say?”

“I know that I know all about what that boy Diego and the rest of ‘em saw in your soup… And I know all about what for the third time this unholy month—in the Manhattan clam chowder, in the New England clam chowder, in the Cream of Crab nonsense, and even in that puddle of mud here they call gumbo—they did not see. You listenin’, brother?”

I was listening and I told him as much.

“They saw a ghost. You hear me? They saw a teeny tiny little ghost.”

I was besieged by the spook mumps one gets when encountering the outré. My eyes widened as the cold wash of mild alarm settled on me. I had questions…

As if reading my mind, Honest Abe de-slouched himself and stood up straight and inched closer and squared up like he was about to throw a punch…

“No, no, my friend,” he hollered, all plosives and fricatives on a bed of death breath… “That was not the Captain and his Benny Briggs lobbin’ them harpoons at that beast in your chowder, you see? For that was the mighty Estrella down there in your soup, sir!—piloted by none other than that fink Muldoon!”

Make-Believe Shark

The turistas in the itty-bitty coastal city of San Pepito always blew their bucks chartering the boat captained by the guy with one leg. Then the boat captained by the guy with zero legs showed up.

Carla and I knew better and opted for the Sea U Later, a sturdy enough vessel captained by a haggard Bostonian by the name of Bud Plaquemine, who was still equipped with two fully functional legs. (Lucky for him, the maze of wharf we were entering still had plenty of wood to knock on.)

We waded through the Tropic of Cancer humidity, our dead friend’s eight-year-old daughter Joyita in tow. We walked cautiously, surveying the dilapidated boardwalk for any carpenter nails that might be trying to play Lazarus. The whole wharf smelled like mackerel innards and beer burps and freshly brewed Maxwell House coffee.

“You two been busy, eh?” Bud said, as we approached him and his vessel.

“Ain’t ours,” Carla said. “Daughter of a friend of a friend.”

“What’s your name, lass?” Bud said to Joyita, using the same kiddie voice he talks to his boat in.

“She’s deaf, Bud,” I said, doing that stupid thing where you repeatedly point at your own ear. “But watch out, man, she can read lips like a goddamn Apache League third base coach.”

“Loose lips don’t sink a goddamn thing,” Bud said, vaguely and grumpily.

The Gulf of Mexico was stiller than the Sea of Tranquility at 6:30 in the morning. I scoped its placid expanse for dorsal fins while Carla told Bud how little Joyita’s father, indeed a vague friend of ours since we began spending a loose quarter of our year in San Pepito, had disappeared in his 1977 Beachcomber while flying at low altitude from Miami to Port-Au-Prince last Tuesday, whenever that was.

“Y’all doin’ the usual? Riggin’ up for Spanish mackerel and bonita and that whole lot?” Bud said, troubleshooting with a rope as thick as a Burmese python. We’d been back in San Pepito for nine days, swimming, snorkeling, fishing, napping, eating, and watching the ecto-States variety shows that infested the local cable networks. (Old dudes with heroic mustaches patting impossibly boobed-out chicas on their fannies; then a song, then a contest, then a practical joke, finito, repeat ad nauseam).

“Well, no. This is gonna sound kooky as hell, but we’re looking for a Make-Believe Shark,” I said. No point beating around the bush, especially where there ain’t no bushes.

“Mako shark? Ah, you gotta skip across the states way over to the Atlantic to catch a Mako. And then you gotta go well out past the International Waterway, basically halfway to damn Bermuda… Mako’s the fastest fish in the ocean, you know. Slippery fuckers, quicker than a Kenyan.”

“Make-Believe Shark, not Mako,” said Carla. “Make-Believe, as in fictional and imaginary and not real.”

Bud, thoroughly confused now, looked at all three of us and said, “What are you talkin’ about?”

Carla offered to buy Bud a coffee and he accepted and they walked over to a particle board clad coffee kiosk helmed by a bored looking girl wearing a hot pink visor and a shirt with a sperm whale on it sayin’ Don’t Eat Us. Bud’s incredulous body language suggested Carla was explaining to him how Joyita has an extremely rare form of autism called Molecular Manipulating Autism (usually referred to by the used & abused acronym MMA) and that Molecular Manipulating Autism is precisely what it sounds like: a form of autism that can manipulate molecules. Joyita’s leftfield n’ way up in the bleachers imagination by way of the MMA has summoned what fringe scientists the globe over have already dubbed a Make-Believe Shark, henceforth colloquially known as the MBS (and in lesser social circles as “Mackie”).

Bud had known Carla long enough (“old friend of the fam”) to know she suffers neither fools nor foolishness and believed her impossible story with all of his heart and most of his brain.

By 7:20 the Sea U Later, containing Carla and me and Bud and Bud’s teenage deck swabber/rope tier/drink maker known only as La Cubanita, was a mile and a half off the coast of San Pepito.

“Can a Make-Believe shark kill you?” asked Bud. Good question. Neither Carla nor myself could summon a decent answer. “Maybe? I dunno. I imagine it could probably screw your day up pretty good, if you’re not careful.”

“Ten zillion ways to get bounced from this turdball planet, might as well go out doing somethin’ impossibly loony, eh?” said Bud.

“I don’t see why not,” Carla said. She had explained to Bud that we knew the Make-Believe Shark was within a square mile or so off the coast of San Pepito because Joyita, basically the Make-Believe Shark’s God, had pointed it out on a map and in salmon colored crayon had written today’s date on a piece of loose-leaf paper.

I stood up to nab a Coke from the ice chest right as the Sea U Later got rocked hard by something large and unseen to the eye. I hadn’t felt the cold wash of an attack dose of adrenaline in years and years but was now steeped in it. Miscellaneous shits and fucks and what the fucks from Bud and Carla and La Cubanita and then, bam, we got rocked again.

“Must be your goddamn shark,” Bud yelled, in a nervy tone that probably none of us cared for too much. He ran over the side of the boat and hung onto the rail and leaned over it and examined the point of impact on the boat’s hull. “This fella means business! Look at this… Smashed right through the wood… Dented the aluminum underneath.” All five of us looked at the wood and then the aluminum and Bud said, “Look, I didn’t wake up on a Thursday morning to have my boat get snacked on by some dickhead shark, imaginary or otherwise. I need to know what we are dealing with here.”

Before anyone could answer, something swished mightily in the water about sixty feet off the boat’s rear. I swiveled fast and caught a glimpse of a dorsal fin as big as a traffic cone. “Huge,” was all I could manage to say.

“Oi, Cubanita!—what’s the Mexican word for taxidermist?” Bud hollered.

“Get us the fuck out of here before it charges us again.” This was Carla now, trying to spur Bud out of the daze he had settled in. “I don’t wanna die dog-paddlin’.”

“Righto.” Bud gunned it and we all lurched as the Sea U Later committed to a fierce angle and made a wake big enough to make a surfer cream his wetsuit. We were a slender hundred yards from the wharf when we got rocked again, this time on the other side of the boat. “Jesus,” Bud hollered. “What’s in it for this thing?”

“Guess it don’t wanna get caught,” said Carla. “Can you blame it?”

We docked and jumped off the boat and sat down at a big wooden picnic table on the boardwalk. “I think our only solution,” I said to Carla, motioning to Joyita, “is for her to like dream up a porpoise or dolphin or killer whale or something big enough to muss this Make-Believe Shark’s mane.”

“That is the worst idea I’ve heard in three hundred years,” said Carla.

I tweaked like a spritzed cat and said, “What do you propose?”

“I propose nothing,” she said. “Let it be—or let it don’t be. We confirmed the thing exists—or doesn’t exist—and that’s good enough for me. You know what I mean.” I got a whiff of sex from one of us, even though it’d been three hours and two showers since we had had sex.

I said to her, “I have no clue what you mean.”

Joyita made a sound that could maybe masquerade as Look! and pointed out to the Gulf. Hovering about six feet above the water, maybe forty yards out, was the Make-Believe Shark. It was twisting terribly like some huge invisible hand was holding it around its torso. The shark was the most sharky-lookin’ shark I had ever seen. A caricature of shark. Basically the shark emoji rendered in three dimensions. Joyita pantomimed squeezing a banana. And then the shark was about 30% transparent… and then 40%, and then 80%, and then it was no more. Joyita had exiled it back into the murk of her imagination.

“Sayonara, shark.” For ten long seconds I stared at where the shark had been and took off my hat and scratched my head and said, “I’ve seen way too many Twilight Zone episodes for this... If she can just like create a shark out of nada and then just poof it away, what else can she do?”

“Who knows,” said Carla, cuing up a vape that said Lockheed Martin down the side of it. “Maybe she can make us some corned-beef hash and some fried eggs and some toast with apple butter and some plastic cutlery and a couple of paper plates and a bucket of coffee that don’t taste like mud chowder.”

“I’d settle for any bit of that.”

Bud walked over, having witnessed the whole thing with Joyita and the shark while tending to the brand new king-size dent in the Sea U Later. “Weirdest day of my life and it ain’t even noon yet. You think Broom Hilda here can conjure up a new hull for me?”

“No, but I can walk over to that ATM and pull out one thousand American dollars,” said Carla. “Will that cover it?”

“Yeah, and then some. Five hundred’s plenty,” Bud said. “I’ll buy about an acre of aluminum from that gypsy in Fair Oaks, patch it up myself.”

“Works for me,” said Carla.

We said bye to Bud and Bud’s helper and walked over to a diner that served ten dollar pancakes shaped like stingrays and drank enough coffee to wring out our waitress’s inner passive aggressor and then deposited Joyita at her auntie’s place and went back to our hotel and submerged ourselves in a glade of clean sheets and blankets and napped for endless hours and woke up in time to hear the drunkies slink back to their wherever and then eventually dozed back off and each dreamt our melodramatic dreams about everything and nothing until the sun did its thing and we awoke entangled and stayed that way until the tsunami siren started throwing its first and last tantrum. 

Flight Time

Carl and Tara didn’t really start talking into each other until about thirty minutes into the actual flight. They were flying direct from Texarkana, Arkansas to Las Vegas, Nevada, where they were going to get married, despite their vast difference in age.

Carl was hunched over looking out the window to his left. He patted Tara on her knee, which made her jump a tiny bit, and said, “I’ve ridden on these puddle jumpers probably three hundred times and they still scare the you-know-what out of me.”

“See, I like them because it feels like you’re actually really flying,” said Tara, folding her flimsy Wired magazine and sliding it into the back of the seat in front of her. “Those gigantic jumbo jets feel, I don’t know, super stationary the whole time, except for when you’re taking off and landing.”

Carl turned and looked at her. “When the hell did you ride on a jumbo jet? You’re barely old enough to eat hard candy.”

“My dad took me to Lisbon for my sixteenth.”

“I bet he did,” said Carl. “When was that, last week?”

“You better hope not,” Tara said, elbowing him a harder than she intended.

“Last thing in the world I need,” Carl said. “Another free trip to the zoo.”

They held hands and their collective hand dangled awkwardly over the edge of the arm rest between them until Tara unclasped her hand and lifted the arm rest and then reclasped Carl’s hand and let their collective hand rest on his knee.

“Does this mess up your probation at all?” Tara asked him.

“It does if I get caught. But the only person who’d catch me is Danny, and I got Danny right here until I decide to let him out,” Carl said, patting the buttoned-up top left pocket of his rodeo shirt. Danny was Carl’s parole officer and also the boyfriend of Carl’s sister Gina, who was, in turn, was married to Tara’s father Gideon.

“You know you never did tell me what you got in trouble for,” Tara said.

“That’s what you call a deliberate omission of information, sugar booger,” Carl said, flipping their hands over and stroking her palm with his thumb, which looked at once long and stubby.

“Don’t call me sugar booger.”

“What’s wrong with sugar booger, sugar?”

“It reminds me of Dad. He calls cocaine booger sugar.”

“Your daddy has used every slang syllable for cocaine under the sun, moon, and stars at some point in his life. Back when we were doing our thing, we used to mostly call it Benny Blanco, from that Pacino movie with what’s-his-nuts in it as the cokehead lawyer who gets blasted at the end.”

They drifted into a little swath of silence. The midday clouds below and around the plane looked impoverished and ugly.

“What did you do?” Tara said.

“What did I do what?”

“What did you go to jail for?”

“Shit, I don’t know…” Carl said, fidgeting like a hamster now. “Okay, you want to know the truth? A bunch of boring-ass stuff that just kinda collected over the years. There was no like major offense or anything. A whole bunch of too much this or not enough that. Stupid stuff, really. Kind of embarrassing, to be honest with you. I wish I could just say, yeah, I robbed a bank, but then that’d just make me a liar, which I guess ain’t a crime, thank fucking God.”

Tara contemplated this. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“Oh God,” Carl said, beginning to enjoy this. “Ten-way tie, really.”

“Just like a shitty horse race,” Tara said, smiling.

Carl loved Tara’s smile. It was the smile of someone who was twenty-one on the dot but already well aware of the bare-knuckle ruthlessness of life. Tara had asked Carl a dozen times over the two months that they had really come to know each what the favorite thing was that he liked about her, and he had lied every single time and said something other than her smile, for fear of introducing any self-awareness to it, which might mess it up somehow. He had said, her legs was his favorite thing about her, or her ass, or her boobies, or her eyes, or her hair, and he had even thrown out a few super specific things (the back of her neck, her upper lip, how her ankles segue into her calves real nicely, et cetera, et cetera), but it was her smile that at once made him feel like he had won the lotto, and it also instilled a fiery lust in him.

Tara said to him, “C’mon, Old Man, tell me one real bad thing that you did.”

Carl did not at all like it when Tara called him Old Man because, at the age of sixty-seven, he was indeed an old man.

“On Christmas Eve, 1984, I beat a guy to death with a golf club in a pool hall in western Massachusetts.”

“Bull-fuckin’-shit.”

“I am as serious as a brain tumor.”

“How did that happen?”

“Long story.”

“Long flight.”

“Not it’s not,” Carl said. “We’ll be on the ground before you can say Hocus Pocus Abracadabra.”

“Yeah, maybe if we crash.”

“Planes don’t crash at this altitude. Unless they’re zapped by lightning or another plane goes slammin’ into them.” Carl said, punching the palm of his hand for effect.

Tara very briefly thought of what it’d be like if another plane flew into them right now at this moment. Probably your brain would just go haywire and none of it would really register. It was horrifying to think about, that’s for sure. Her thoughts ambled elsewhere.

“You ever seen a UFO?” She asked Carl.

“I’ve been staring at the sky my whole damn life and I have not seen one flying object that I could not identify. Plane after plane after plane after satellite.”

“Bummer. Any ghosts or Bigfoot or anything?”

“Nope. I had a TV turn on by itself once and that is about it. How about you? Ever been ab-ducted?”

“Yeah, but not by aliens.”

Carl did not at all like it when their cartoonish conversations veered into the realm of seriousness, so he changed the subject.

“I really do like your hair. Bold burgundy.”

Tara had chopped off her hair two days ago and died it auburn, or, yeah, bold burgundy, according to the box.

“Oh, you like it now. Two days ago you said it was interesting.”

“Where I come from, interesting is a very positive adjective.”

“Where do you come from?”

“You really wanna know? One day many, many moons ago, way back in the 1953, my mother was out shopping for a new car, and she thought she really had to go to the bathroom…”

“Shut up. God, you’re such a cornball.”

“I’m serious! What do you think Carl is short for? Car Lot. On account of that’s where I came squirtin’ out. Car Lot Jenkins.”

Tara wished he had not reminded her of what will be her new last name sooner than later. She started chewing on her thumbnail.

“I’m just fucking with you, baby,” said Carl. “I was born on Barksdale Air Force base in Bossier City, Louisiana. Right side of the tracks, wrong side of the river.”

Tara leaned up in her seat and turned to face him and said, “Do you think I have a shitty memory or something? Do you think I’ve just got rocks and garbage and dead bugs up here?” she said, tapping her head.

Carl was taken aback by this question, but he kept his cool. “I think you make that ol’ boy Dumbo look like a shoebox full of pistachio shells, that’s what I think. You got a spooky good memory, baby. Freaks me out sometimes, to be honest. And I think that brain of yours is probably the most adroit critter in the galaxy.”

Tara smiled and settled back into her seat, loosely wondering what the word adroit meant. Carl did the same and discreetly sighed. A hokey duo of esoteric dings sounded from unseen speakers, probably indicating either you could move about the cabin or not move about the cabin.

“It’s weird…” Tara said to Carl. “Because of the glow, you look sort of pixilated right now.”

“I look pixilated?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“Maybe I am pixilated. Maybe that’s all this is, just a big computer game or something.”

“Just as viable to think that than think whatever else, really.”

“Amen.”

Tara further contemplated all this and said, “What if we’re stuck in a video game that our, like, I don’t know, future relatives come up with, and the name of the game is Faith, and the whole game is just everyone running around trying to make each other lose faith or gain faith…”

“Faith in what exactly?”

“Faith in religion,” Tara said. “Faith in the Christian God, you know, faith in God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and all that.”

“Gotcha. Continue.”

“I mean, that’s it. I’m just saying, it’d be kinda weird if all this was a video game.”

“It’d be a goddamn nightmare is what it’d be,” Carl said, wrangling with the tiniest shard of a nascent existentialist crisis.

Tara noticed his mild but visible discomfort. She was about to open her mouth and change the subject, but Carl said, “Did I ever tell you that me and Gina have a half-sister named Hope and another one—from a totally different mother, of course—named Faith?”

Tara could tell when Carl was joking or being corny and when he was serious.

“Ain’t that some shit?” Carl said.

“Hope and Faith,” Tara said, pondering this. “Do they know each other well?”

“No clue. I haven’t seen either one since Super Bowl Thirty, whenever that was. 1996. Downtown Larry Brown was the MVP. God…Thinking about Diana Ross doing her little shimmy during halftime still gives me a little bit of a baton rouge, if you know what I mean.”

Tara knew what he meant. She leaned over him and looked out the widow and said, “How high do you think we are?”

“High enough to make a big-ass splat if we fall out of this sucker.”

“I’m serious, what are we, like, thirty thousand feet?”

“Probably about that, yeah. Thirty thousand feet.”

“How many miles is that?”

“I have no idea.”

Tara chinned at him and said, “Diana Ross, huh? You like hanging out in the spice rack, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“When was the last time you dated a girl the same color as you?”

“Baby, I glow in the dark. Nobody’s the same color as me.”

“When was the last time you dated a white girl?”

Carl tilted his head at her and said, “You ain’t white?”

“Nope.”

“That is what, in some social circles, they call a big fat bummer.”

“Oh, hush,” Tara said. “No fault of mine my ancestors weren’t squid people like yours.”

“No, I guess not. I was wondering where your tan lines ran off to. Guess that explains it.”

“Babette, you know, my actual mom, is from Trinidad by way of basically everywhere, and you know what Dad is.”

“What is Gideon? I’ve known that prick for forty years, and I know where he grew up and everything, but to be truthful, I don’t know basically nothing about where he’s from.”

“He was born in Curitiba, in Brazil, but his dad was allegedly German, but nobody really knows. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

“Ah, not all panthers are pink,” Carl said, half cryptic, half joking. “You ever take one of them spit tests?”

“Nope.”

“Hell, you ought to. Be kinda neat just to see where you’re from.”

“I crawled out of a test tube in Bethesda, Maryland.”

“Yeah, you did,” Carl said, glancing over at the flight attendant’s legs as she glided down the aisle, head swiveling. “I actually took a spit test year before last.”

“Oh, yeah? And what it’d tell you?” Tara said, playing along.

“What I already knew.”

“And what’d you already know?”

“That I am one hundred percent Comanche.”

It took Tara a second to remember what a Comanche is and then she made a fake laughing sound.

“I’m serious, Kemosabe!” Carl said. “I go to pay the ol’ boy that gave me the test, and I ask him, straight-faced and all, just like this, I ask him, Dr. Clay—that was his name, Dr. Morris Clay—I said, Dr. Clay, you prefer cash or check or women or stolen horses?”

“God, shut uppp…”

“But, check this out, that ol’ boy threw it right back at me too. He goes, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Jenkins, but we only accept scalps and thundersticks,’ just like that. I’ll never forget.”

“Elle-oh-elle.”

“I mean, it is partially true. According to my saliva, I’m English, Irish, Scottish, Choctaw, Cree, with some Mediterranean stuff mixed in.”

“Typical American mutt.”

“Pretty much.” Carl said. “You got, what, four brothers and sisters? Gina had two, I think, before she met Gideon, and Gideon had, what, two also, correct?”

“I have six brothers and sisters, not counting the abortions.”

Carl wanted to maneuver away from this topic carefully and speedily but Tara beat him to it. “If there was one thing you could go back and change,” she said. “What would it be?”

“Probably proposing to you over a goddamn bowl of cold miso soup.”

“Aw, that’s sweet,” Tara said, kissing him on the cheek. “It wasn’t cold, though, it was room temperature.”

“Must’ve been a cold room,” Carl said. “I just wish it could’ve been something, I don’t know, more special. Something memorable, like the swordfish at that joint in Destin we went to that time.”

“I still can’t believe that motel.”

“You and me both,” said Carl, following it with a sleazy whistle. “Of the seven zillion bags-of-bones on this planet, I guarantee you I’m on the only one that ever had to declare bankruptcy because of period sex.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“Looked like the last five minutes of Jaws in there.”

“Hey, that was your idea,” Tara said. “I warned you.”

“I know you did, baby. I’m just giving you a hard time,” Carl said, wincing at the memories of the smell of blood. “The thing that pissed off was that little passo-aggro poofer working the front desk. He was about one thank you sir from getting the snot bubbles whipped out of him.”

“And those Mexican dudes in the Porsche who thought we were drug dealers.”

“Those dudes were not Mexican, baby, they were Salvadoran. And that wasn’t a Porsche, that was a Nissan 370Z, which actually does kind of look like a 911. And we are drug dealers, baby. Or at least one of us is.”

Tara worked as a bottle girl on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at an overpriced club called Score, and she made additional dough selling a brand new designer drug called Quetzolethalcol, or Lethal, as it had been mercifully shortened to on the street. Lethal made you feel like a winged jellyfish for about six endless hours and then it dropped you into a sea of battery acid. The sheer brutality of its comedown was responsible for about one suburban suicide a week and, according to the few eager beaver scientists that were studying it, Lethal killed somewhere between one million to two million human brain cells per dosage. It was not a good drug, but it was cheap to make and you could sell it at a high price. Carl had worked seven different jobs in the last six months and had not had more than five thousand dollars in his bank account since 1988. It was his idea that Tara start peddling Lethal. “Your teeny bopper amigos will go nutso for it,” he had told her, over a bottle of Crown Apple, which he had requested Tara swipe from her place of work. “I’m just saying you might want to get yourself a bigger piggy bank.”

That had been back in November. And now it was April and they were on their way to Vegas to get married. Tara’s ears popped. The plane was beginning to make its slo-mo descent. The captain got on the horn and started mumbling something about the arrival time and the outside temperature in Las Vegas.

Tara stretched and yawned real big so her ears would finish popping.

“The golf club you killed the guy with…”

“What about it?”

“What kind was it?”

“Like, what brand was it?”

“No, I mean, was it a 9-iron or a putter or what?”

“Oh. It was a 3-iron,” Carl said. “Only reason I ever knew it was a 3-iron because I had to memorize that crime report like it was the damn Canterbury Tales… Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Three strikes, he’s out. Just like MLB.”

“Interesting.”

“That it was.”

“My brother-in-law got killed with a bowling bowl in a batting cage in Cairo, Georgia.”

“Did he now?”

“Yep. It was pretty gnarly,” Tara said, nodding her head.

“I don’t doubt it,” said Carl, half-turning to face her. “Look, baby, you ever hear that expression, don’t bullshit a bullshitter? One of these days, I’m gonna sit you down and teach how to tell a proper lie.”

“How did I mess this one up?”

“Well, first of all, the six or seven people who live there don’t call it Kie-ro, they call it Kay-ro. And second of all, there’s an old antiquated Biscuitville County blue law that prohibits bowling bowls in batting cages.”

“I’m gonna barf all over you one day,” Tara said. “Just giving you a heads up.”

“I will most certainly deserve it.”

Tara leaned over him and looked out the window again. The ground way down beneath them was khaki colored.

“I wish it was nighttime,” she said. “America looks so fucking stupid from way up here at night. Stupid towns, stupid cities.”

“Spastic asterisks, every one of them,” said Carl.

“Ten-lane roads to everywhere and nowhere.”

“Zillions of lamps and lights, illuminating precisely nada.”

“Everybody in their car or on their phone or both.”

“Total detachment, AKA the American Dream.”

Tara kissed Carl. It was an arid, directionless kiss with travel breath and smacking sounds.

“Let’s go fight some battles together,” she said.

Carl grunted in accord. They settled into their seats and each of their minds drifted into the pseudo-consciousness that rules supreme at high altitudes.

The Flatwoods Monster Mash

Braxton County, WV, summer of 2022

I launched my girlfriend’s little Audi across the plush, hilly interior of West Virginia until finally mooring it in front of the Flatwoods Monster Museum in the living breathing Jim Jarmusch film of a town that is Sutton in Braxton County.

I walked in the museum and was immediately flanked by a good-natured cat and an affable gentleman, whom I recognized to be the owner of the establishment. We yapped about everything under the sun and moon and stars until my belly started growling so loudly that it was mistaken for a passing mud dragon (—the creepy hills of Braxton County are not for threadbare imaginations). I asked the man where I should have lunch and he directed me to a Flatwoods Monster-themed joint about six miles north of us that had homemade ice cream and burgers as big as box turtles.

I drove up to The Spot, as it is called, a self-proclaimed restaurant/dairy bar, and upon entering was ambushed by a wiry fellow with the indiscriminate zeal of a car salesman.

“Aye, man, great to see you again!” he yelped, as he walked past me and began opening the door with his back.

I looked at him like he was covered in grape jelly, so he said, “I didn’t just see you in here yesterday?”

“No, sir, you did not. I just peeled into town like fifteen minutes ago on the dot.”

“Damn… You sure?”

Was I sure? Yeah, I was sure, and told him as much.

“Well, then you got a double to end all doubles,” he said. “I’m tellin’ ya, man, same fruity little hat and everything!”

This encounter would not be my last with someone who had come across my doppelganger, who, it appeared, was a good twenty to thirty steps ahead of me.

Two hours later, on a sidewalk up in Morgantown, a guy with a meaty face and neon green fatigues came up to me and said, “You from the Isle of Mayo or what, brother? Don’t you know you gotta tip around here?”

“What are you yammering about?”

He ground his teeth audibly and said, “You gotta tip, man. Gratuity, you know? Twenty percent! Or fifteen percent at the very least! Or, you know, ten percent if you’re a total fucking shithead.”

I was certain I had never seen this man before, but he had clearly seen me. “You’re telling me I ate at your establishment, you were my waiter or whatever, I paid for my food, and I didn’t leave you a tip?”

“Yeah, that’s about the size of it. Dick.”

I took a big loud breath. My doppelganger was apparently trying to out-asshole me. “I think I know what’s going on here,” I said to the man, gravely. “I regret to inform you, sir, that you have been stiffed by my doppelganger.”

The man huffed and started to walk away.

“Yo, what did I eat?” I hollered at him. “At your restaurant, what did I have?”

“This a pop quiz?”

I pulled out a five spot and handed it to him. “That’s exactly what it is. And if you ace it, I’ll give you another one of these.” The prospect of cold cash tidied him up.

“You had a tuna melt with a basket of curly fries.”

Well, shit. My doppelganger had done his research. I gave the guy another five.

“Did I use a lot of ketchup?”

“You used half a whole thing of Heinz and pretty much a damn rainforest’s worth of napkins.”

I gave the man one more five and asked him where I had lunch, et cetera, et cetera… My doppelganger had apparently dined at O’Flannel’s Bubbles and Grubbery a couple of loose hours ago. Hmm… Where would I be right now had I eaten a whole tuna melt and a bunch of curly fries two hours ago? Probably rising from a wayward power nap, halfway under the covers in the cheapest hotel in town. But I was staying in the cheapest hotel in town, so...

I stopped by a gas station and got an eighteen pack of Coors Banquet beer in cans and went back to the hotel and poured half of the beer in the bathroom sink. I walked down the hallway to the ice machine and used the empty beer box as an ice pail and came back and poured the ice on top of the beers in the sink.

I heard my doppelganger laugh—my own laugh—before I saw him sitting in a chair over on the opposite side of the room from the bathroom.

“That’s wild, man,” he said. “I did the same exact shit, except I got bottles of Bud.”

“You must’ve got the last of the Bud because there wasn’t none left.”

“No, you just didn’t look hard enough, per usual.”

I opened two cans of Coors and then seeing that he’d brought one of his Bud bottles with him, I nestled one of the cans back in the ice.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and held up my beer and said cheers to my doppelganger.

“I kinda wanna smoke,” I said. “Can you smoke in here? Homeboy at the counter apparently learned how to speak English from watching Mr. Bean.”

“Yeah, I asked him earlier and he nodded no which I think means yes in his country.”

“I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“You and me both,” my doppelganger said, unbuttoning his black Banana Republic blazer. He lit an American Spirit and offered me one. “Man, ain’t it weird that we could boof each other and it’d only be considered masturbation?”

“Gross,” I said, squeezing three syllables out of the word.

My doppelganger eyed me suspiciously. “How’s it gross?”

“You just look like me. You’re not me.”

My doppelganger flashed me with a smug smile that I did not at all care for and said, “You went into my mouth and fetched every one of them damn words, didn’t you?”

“The last thing on this planet or any other I’m gonna do is Hulu ‘n’ chill with my goddamn doppelganger,” I said, crossing my legs like a schoolgirl.

“Hulu ‘n’ chill is what—dry-humpin’ an empty pizza box?”

“Yeah, maybe.” I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to stand up and kick my doppelganger in the face or just walk out of the room.

So I threw my half-empty can of Coors at him…

It whizzed by his head and thunked into the wall. “What the heck?” he said, bug-eyed with confusion.

“Sorry,” I said, stupidly holding my hand over my heart. “I’m sorry.” I walked over to the blinds and opened them. A couple of methheads were shakily standing too close to the Audi for comfort. I knocked on the window and they skulked off, gums smacking up and down like Muppets.

“Thou art forgiven,” my doppelganger said.

“So what is your deal, man,” I asked my doppelganger. “Why are you following me around?”

“From the looks of it, I’d say you’re following me around.”

He had a point. I decided to change the subject. “You heard any good jokes lately? I’m all dried up.”

“Hmm… What did Buddha say to the hot dog vendor?”

“Make me one with everything.” I had told this joke maybe a thousand times.

We sat there drinking beer and telling jokes and swapping anecdotes until the sun started peeking through the blinds. It was a wholesomely narcissistic way to spend a Saturday evening. Eventually my doppelganger wandered back to his room and probably spanked his monkey into oblivion and I passed out watching Predator 2, a woefully underrated flick which fully displays the perils of being a Los Angeles police detective.

A month later my girlfriend and I went back to Braxton County for the Braxxie Bazaar. Cryptidistas twerked with the Braxxie mannequin that greets you upon entering the Flatwoods Monster Museum, cryptid-centric films were shown in a theater as old as Noah’s teddy bear, and sullen paranormal researchers daydreamt about devices that could read debit card chips… Charismatic uncoolness as far as the eye can see—and the nose can smell. A coterie of kooksters and dreamers. Swell company, for sure… There was talk of a haunted house. My girlfriend and I, soundly loaded by that point, opted to go back to our little time capsule of a motel and get even more loaded… She passed out immediately upon entering the room, so I sat on the little porch drinking beer and watching the shadows play freeze tag with each other. Sutton, West Virginia is a dark place. Even the moon steers clear of this spooky little corner of the planet.

An extended-cab Ford F-150 pulled into the gravel parking lot and out of it stepped a huge hillbilly and two banged-up lookin’ dishwater blondes.

“You here for the Donkey and Mule Show?” one of the women asked me, as her two companions staggered into their motel room and shut the door.

“Not that I know of,” I said, stifling a beer burp. “Is that a real thing or some sort of innuendo?”

She lit a cigarette and momentarily checked out. That word innuendo, I could tell, was terra incognita for her.

“Hell yeah, it’s a real thing! Premo donkeys and mules are bussed in from every neck of this God-fearin’ hemisphere!”  

“And, what, you look at them or you buy them or…?”

“Oh, you can do pretty much anything you want with ‘em! Look at ‘em, buy ‘em, swap ‘em, paint their portraits—whatever your little heart desires!”

I pondered all this and said, “Why no horses?”

The woman let out an awful sound, kind of a cough/sneeze but rendered in hideous octaves, and then she started tweaking like a pygmy wren. It was clear that I should not have mentioned horses.

I went back inside, leaving her there to tremble in whatever regrettable yesteryear in which she was now mired.

Madrid, late December '24

1-800-GIRLS at Club Malasana

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Edificio Cubos

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Hotel Leonardo, Chamberi, Madrid

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Bernabeu Stadium

As a longtime fan of 12th place and sinking Tottenham Hotspur, God only knows what kind of hideous juju I’m offloading here

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RIP, cast of Animal Farm

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Brutalist Shell in my frontyard

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City of brunettes

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Edificio Mirador (adventures in postmodern living)

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“Croac croac!”

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What’s in that Grinch costume, tall kid or short adult?

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Casa Carvajal, Somosaguas, Madrid

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World famous electric bill

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They’re barely old enough to eat hardy candy, and yet they were inhaling tequila shots like Pac-Man wafers

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The poltergeists here accept Cashapp, Venmo, Zelle, and Paypal

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I like my coffee like I like my women: heavily accessorized

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Metro mutt for life

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Yeah, gran via of people shoppin’ their brains out

Casa Carvajal, Somosaguas, Madrid, Spain, (Dec., '24)

I'd stereotype myself as someone who'd oink up a Hulu series called Brutalism Bros. (Don't look it up, it does not exist—yet.)

Hypothetical episode 1: our boy shotguns a whole washbasin of Tinto de Verano and visits Casa Carvajal: a slab kollossus of sharp symmetry and brutalist boner fodder whose eponymous creator (Javier Carvajal Ferrer) designed and constructed for he, himself, and him.

If you'd like to putter around in this house for about 2 hours, dial up Carlos Saura's domestic creepo-drama La Madriguera (1969).

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Torres Blancas, Madrid, Spain (Dec., '24)

Massive anachronistic structures are as common as field mice on the European continent.

Not many people know this, and I'm definitely not supposed to say anything, but Madrid's Torres Blancas, designed/constructed by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza in 1961, was built entirely out of paper mache.

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Geeky Blinders

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; dogs with “people names” like Wilson, Robert, Chance, or Melissa live a mindblowing 4-6 years longer than dogs with “doggie names” like names Hubcap, Orzo, Woofie, or Meatball.

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Gulf of Tentacle Hentai.

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I regret to inform you that the people who go see a movie and get anything less than this were those kids that wore diapers until they were like 6.

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Guess who came about one burned-out neuron away from spending one hundred twenty American dollars to see Riverdance 30: the New Generation tonight?

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Seen here: the clouds your mother warned you about. I seem to be flying over Fury Road or the last ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark or both.

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100,000 BHMs (Big Hairy Monsters) are crunched by American automobiles every single year.

Pikes Peak, CO.

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My theory is that Planet Earth has not made contact with extraterrestrial civilizations because it does not see likes, it only sees pings and superlikes.

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Describe this look using only pizza topping emojis.

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La Défense, Paris, France (Oct., '24)

I'd stereotype myself as someone who goes to Paris and just hangs out in La Défense the whole time.

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Boulogne-sur-Mer (Oct., '24)

The vibrations of the semi-lost city of Boulogne-sur-Mer (see: ex-hoverport) generally emanate from one of two clumps: Corbusierian marzipan or Orc-adjacent Middle-Earth.

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WHAT’S UP UNDER BUNNYMAN BRIDGE?—an excerpt from INDRID COLD IS DEAD

Fairfax County, Virginia

I can’t fully explain this, but there is one name that is substantially less trustworthy than all the others and that name is Clay. If you are named Clay and you want to approach me for discussion, I will need six laminated forms of identification, three recent drool-free paystubs, and a notarized letter from the county sheriff. This distrust of people named Clay was based on loose evidence I had acquired throughout my life. A stolen Atari game here, a pellet in the back of the neck there. I have yet to meet a Clay that didn’t have prison yard eyes or smell like a vintage Burger King.

The mayor of the little Virginia hamlet that Bunnyman allegedly sets up shop is named Clay Klaysome. Not so much a big red flag, as much as it was a big red circus tent.

“Do I believe in Bunnyman…” the mayor said, contemplating my inquiry. We were sitting across from each other at the only eating establishment within thirty square miles that had glass on its windows. My recorder purred beneath him. “My quick answer is, yes, I’d like to say that I do believe in him.”

Yeah, no duh. I had zero doubt that Klaysome wanted to believe in Bunnyman since Bunnyman singlehandedly accounted for half of the town’s tourism, as every cryptidhead in the contiguous states had stopped off here at some point or another to jabberjaw with the natives. There was no other reason to sink this deep into Fairfax County unless you were in the business of making huckleberry jelly or participating in an egg-tossing contest.

“You see, it’s complicated,” Klaysome said, nervously fingering the little US flag pin on the collar of his baby-shit blue blazer. “I think Bunnyman—or, you know, something like him—used to exist back in the early ‘70s when he was popping up all over the damn place all the time, you know, chewing on stray cats and freaking people out and such… But I think whatever the heck it was either kicked the bucket or picked up and moved elsewhere.” Klaysome took a big pull from his sweet tea and started nodding his head like a Rain Man outtake. “But the legend of Bunnyman still exists, that’s for damn sure, and that’s the only part that really matters—to me, at least.”

I asked him if any weird happenings had transpired since that last Bunnyman sighting.

“Nope, not really,” he said, his body language now in three different time zones. “I mean, it’s an unusual little town anyway so Bunnyman would really have to go out of his way to get any sort of legitimate attention. Every now and then somebody will come across a partially gnawed-on squirrel or a deer that looks like it got Dig-Dugged to death, but we attribute most of that stuff to either wild dogs or maybe some bored-as-shit cult or perhaps even some form of intelligent life from beyond the stars.”

The waitress whizzed over. I ordered a Rockabilly burger—whatever that was—and a side of onion rings. Klaysome ordered a gross of fresh carrots, a side of diced turnips, and a whole head of wet lettuce.  

I decided to cut to the chase…

“It’s you, eh?”

“Come again?”

“You’re the Bunnyman,” I said, optimistically.

Klaysome’s face turned as red as a bug bite… My sixth sense went haywire… I heard the taser before I felt it and then I tasted the blood on my lip before I felt the whack on my face. Splayed out on the floor of the restaurant, I considered my options: remain flat on my back or roll over on my belly. Above me was a group of dudes who looked like they just saw The Blues Brothers for the first time. Before I could make some quip about being here for the harmonica audition, somebody’s loafers started playing footsies with my ribcage. I curled up and started whimpering like a newborn puppy.

“Get this fraud out of here,” I heard Klaysome say. “Take him down to the you-know-where and do you-know-what with him.”

Next thing I know I’m nestled between the chunky-style contingent of the Klaysome’s henchmen in the back of a dark sedan. Two dudes up front and one on each side of me. All of them were more or less wearing the same ill-fitting dark suit and the same dollar store fedora and the same gas station sunglasses.

“Driver, I’d like to go to the Waffle House,” I said.

Silence.

In front of me was a cup of little individually wrapped Certs.

“For real, though, I’ll give you five stars and a twenty-percent tip if you whip in a 7-11 or any place I can buy some gauze, some BC powder, and maybe a time machine and an Uzi.”

One of them hushed me. My low-grade sense of peril gave way to anger and indignation. I weighed the odds of jabbing my elbow squarely into the side of the head of the one to my right and then successfully making my escape out the door. The one to my left looked like he had the wingspan of an albatross. The odds were not good…

—So I reared back and kicked the one driving on the back of his head as hard as I could and then elbowed the guy next to me in the head. His sunglasses made a crunch sound and he yelped like a winged dingo. So far so good. And then that damned taser again. Apparently, the guy in the passenger seat had been keeping it discreetly trained on me the whole time. Bzzt!... I melted in my seat. They didn’t seem angry about my little outburst. Someone even turned on the radio. Pink Floyd’s Have a Cigar.

“You know, most people—present company included for many years—think that this is Roger Waters singing,” I said, out of one side of my mouth.

“It is Roger Waters singing,” said the one that I elbowed in the head.

“Walk towards the light, brother,” I told him. “It sounds like Roger Waters, but it is not Roger Waters. It’s this folk singer named Roy Harper.”

“That’s actually true,” said the big one to my left “Roger Waters got all sorts of hung up on the vocal line, and David Gilmour didn’t want anything to do with it, so they nabbed this bloke who was recording down the hall… Harper, yeah. Roy Harper.” I looked at him. His suit was dark blue. The one to my right was wearing dark brown. The one in the passenger seat who had tased me was wearing gun-metal grey. The one driving was wearing the closest to black, but it was still a charcoal.

“If you guys are supposed to be Men in Black, you gotta at least cover the fundamentals,” I said.

Silence all around. The real story of the Men in Black, I knew, was a real whirlybird of a case. Some accounts might have been CIA or FBI or the USAF, sure, sure, but many encounters seemed to suggest an otherworldly or perhaps supernatural agency. Folks who encounter these Men in Black talk of threats of bodily harm, glowing eyes, putty-like skin, robotic voices and unnatural movements, the smell of sulfur, and displays of sorcery that would make David Copperfield cream his britches. International Flying Saucer Bureau founder and proto-UFO nut Albert Bender, a sort of Lovecraftian Walter Mitty, had one of the first documented high profile MIB encounters way back in the ‘50s and it was not a feelgood experience. It culminated (Bender claimed) with a free trip to the interior of Antarctica and back, just to prove their point. (Their point had simply been this: shaddup about flying saucers or else, mister.)

The dudes I was being kidnapped by were no way at all affiliated with the real Men in Black. They sure as hell wanted me to think they were, but, yeah, they didn’t smell like sulfur, they smelled like a pish-posh of Armani Emporium, Funyuns, and ill-conceived scare tactics.

I eyed a potential soft spot with them, so I jettisoned my Gen X gruff, picked out a cuter tone, and said, “Hey, who do y’all think would win in a fight between Frito and Lay?”

No answer. They pulled the car over. We all got out and they walked me over to this bridge—Bunnyman Bridge, I recognized it to be.

The story of the pseudo-cryptid and proto-nimby known as Bunnyman is not a happy one. Imagine this: it’s 1970 on the dot and you are a teenager in a parked car on the side of a desolate road in Fairfax County, Virginia. You and your hunny bunny are sitting there, smooching, doing what teenagers typically used to do in parked cars, when, all of a sudden, a young gentleman dressed in a white suit with long bunny ears runs out from some nearby bushes and shouts, “You’re on private property and I have your tag number!” and then throws a hatchet through the right front car window. The hatchet hits neither you nor your companion but you are both pretty shaken up so you peel out and go notify the local authorities.  You give the hatchet to the police, which they still have in their possession to this day.

Fast forward two weeks… You are a private security guard for a construction company and there is a “rabbit” standing on the front porch of a new, but unoccupied house. The “rabbit” is wielding an axe and whacking away at a roof support. You approach him and he says to you, “All you people trespass around here… If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to bust you on the head.” Roger that, thumper. Gimme a second, I’ll be right back. You go back to your car to retrieve your handgun, but the “rabbit” bounds off into the woods. You tell the police the rabbit was about 5-feet-8, 160 pounds, and appeared to be in his early 20s.

Who was Bunnyman and what was he up to? For better or worse, it is probable that the sun will fall into the sea before anyone on this kooky plane of existence knows.

Without touching me, the four Men in Charcoal, as I henceforth derisively referred to them as, sort of corralled me into the tunnel beneath the bridge. One of them pulled out an old timey remote control and pointed it at the wall and clicked out “Shave and a haircut” on a it. A secret door whirred open.

“After you,” said one who had tased me. I walked through the door and one of them gave a me big schoolyard push in the back. The door slid closed behind me and the lights came on. I was now alone in a fusty room with no sign of nothing, except for the electric light bulb above my head. I pulled out my cellphone, which was at thirty seven percent and had no wireless signal. Presumably, they had deposited me here to rot to death, and I don’t really blame them.

“Well, shit,” I said to myself. Then I cupped my hand and said through the door, “Gentlemen, I have a request.”

“We ain’t no cover band,” said one of them.

“If you open up this door, I will allow you to take me to the nearest ATM where I shall pull out one hundred-forty-six dollars and eighty-seven cents, which the four of you can then divvy up however best you see fit.”

As I stood there and began to think about what a hopelessly long shot this was, I heard one of them say, “What’s four into a hundred forty-six?” to which one of them replied, “Thirty-six dollars,” to which another said, “Hey, that is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT more dinero than what I got in my wallet right now.” This kind of optimistic bandying went on for a long minute. Finally the door slid open and we all went for a joyride to the nearest ATM and I paid the boys thirty-five bucks each (leaving a few dollars in my account, so I didn’t seep into the endless glade of shit putty that is overdraft) and they all started whooping like they’d won both showcases on The Price is Right… I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing, but that’s sort of the status quo in my line of work. They gave me a ride back to my car, which was parked by the restaurant they had scooped me up in and then I high-tailed it back to the District.

Schrodinger's September

I call this look "Five Dollar Milkshake".

The back rooms of Dave & Buster's are full of unsuspected depth. 

#Fortfest #ArundelMills

Air hockey, this ain't.

#Fortfest #ArundelMills

The tuba player always goes down with the ship.

#NavyMemorial

This should prevent further late night chewings-out by Siri, Alexa, et al.

#Klingon

I'm just here to use the Coke machine.

#NationalGalleryofArt

Street food roulette.

#kwekkwek #deepfriedwatermelon

Never not neato.

#kennedycenter

Woe be this skyline if CVS and Walgreen's ever break their armistice. 

#rossyln 

Julieta Venegas gives me them Bjorky tingles.

#wolftrapamptitheatre #julietavenegas

Everything but the Louisiana license plate.

#theWharf #OldTownAlexandria #Jaws

Bernard of Muriel, or the Time of Return. 

Basically Fellini in Wolfords. 

#Fellini #Nine #KennedyCenter

Florida

My name is Lunch. I am the captain of the M.S.S. Honest Abe LXXVII. The ship was commissioned by my company, Mealtime Incorporated. I have two crewmates, Mr. Breakfast and Miss Dinner. We are still waiting for the sea. We are still waiting for our ship to become a ship instead of a Jeep without wheels. 

There’s this theory called the Cultural Thermostat Theory. I forget who developed it—maybe me?—but it claims that UFOs are a product of the world’s collective unconscious; that they are catalysts for a desire for change and most frequently sighted when the people of the world are burning to oust the hegemony of the current collective mindset—that rigid, dualistic, and boring creature that now seeps through most of our interactions—and bring in something new, or rather something prehistorically old. I thought this theory was crap. Yet I did see enough possibility in it to want to appropriate some its fundamentals and use them to patch together a theory of my own. So now the three of us have been sitting here for years, collectively desiring this rust-covered 1980 Jeep Renegade to change into a ship.

Mr. Breakfast was the oldest of us. We were all three but he was the oldest three-year-old (by a slim number of days). None of us were really three. We were all actually about twelve times that, but here in this timeless place where so much metal had come to die, we had decided to be three—hopefully with every bit of that age’s benighted confidence. The way we saw it, confidence had more physical sway when it was unaware of its limitations. Ask a cheetah why he thinks he can run so fast. (Don’t expect a reasonable answer.) Ask a three-year-old when his jeep’s going to become a ship. (He’ll tell you “any day now.”)

Our habitat was once a junkyard—a twenty-acre yard of junk, to be exact. Now it is simply the place we live and the only thing we really know. Because of the pollution in the air, the early twilight clings to the sky all day here. Our world is crepuscular, barren, and woefully unhealthy. It is also very quiet and very peaceful.

Mr. Breakfast was cooking dinner. Rotisserie toothcat again. Toothcats were neither cats nor did they have teeth. They were instead a sort of hairless rodent with a mouth full of what I swear looks like some curious form of baleen. They actually tasted pretty good. I could never figure out what they subsisted on, though. Miss Dinner proposed they ate rubber or maybe the contents of our latrine (which did seem to be a quite popular place at night). Breakfast says they eat each other.

My crewmates were beginning to argue with each other more and more often these days. Breakfast had become increasingly insistent on denying Miss Dinner permission onboard our ship.

“It’s bad luck. Any scientist knows that,” said Breakfast.

“Misogynist opinion noted,” said Dinner. “Sex turned off!” 

“Don’t give me that, bitch. You haven’t boinked me in—what, Lunch—months?”

“Longer than months, right? Years…So lots and lots of months.” Breakfast and Dinner were not quite married, not quite divorced.

“Two years and eighty-seven months!” said Dinner. “And no less than two thousand days.”

“It’s of no matter as I have zero intention of embracing compromise with either of you on the subject. Miss Dinner, I encourage you to acclimate to the fact that you are not coming aboard our ship…Besides your duties are needed elsewhere. We need you stay here and be in charge of land operations. Maybe make us a flag.”

“I’ll make you flag. On the ship!”

“You will not make us a flag on the ship because you will not be on our ship. Immensely bad luck. The absolute worst luck. Albatross in a skirt, that’s all you are.” He then turned to me and said, “You know how fast we’ll get torpedoed if she’s on our ship?”

“Relax, man,” I said. “Women aren’t bad luck on ships. It’s two-dollar bills you’re thinking of. There’s a two-dollar bill behind every single nautical nightmare in all the Seven Seas—”

“Eight Seas.”

“—Eight Seas…Two-dollar bills are dreadful luck, man. Even the mention of them is of ill benefit. Women on the other hand are superior luck. And statistics view them favorably. Ships that contain women are far less frequently torpedoed than ships that contain zero women.”

Breakfast, grumbling, retracted one of his arms into his jumpsuit, then using the other arm he removed his goggles and began to buff them with the arm-less sleeve.

“Scientists are not going to like your opinion,” he said at last.

 Miss Dinner, whose moniker was derived, along with mine and Breakfast’s, from her original duty, had excused herself from cooking dinner again because she was “uniquely tired.” Miss Dinner was often “uniquely tired”. In fact, she was always “uniquely tired” and with little success I had once tried to explain to that she was, in fact, simply habitually lazy. Mr. Breakfast had petitioned to have her name changed from Miss Dinner to Miss Blow-job but was able to attain only one signature (his own) instead of the minimum requirement of three. On several occasions, all of them in the loose hours of the casual pre-dawn, Breakfast had offered up questions of Dinner’s worth as a living person. Once, while drunk on sleep-deprivation, he’d even lobbied an inquiry about what I thought Dinner would taste like. He has subsequently, and with much repetition, dismissed this occasion, only to thereby attach more relevance to it than he probably intended. I’d be lying to myself if I said that I hadn’t become aware of the increased amount of lip-licking Breakfast partook in while in prolonged company of Miss Dinner.

The hills of metal and rubber that surrounded us were not the post-apocalyptic monochrome that one might imagine. Quite the opposite, really. Breakfast and I had long ago painted much of our periphery the color of the essence of the tropics. With wide smiles and sincere abandon, we had splattered our hills and valleys of debris with varied hues of orange and pink and yellow and green to constantly remind us of our destination: the land of Citrus.

Originally we desired to find Citrus because of our scurvy. Now it was the only thing we could say we were doing without hesitation. What are we doing in this place? We’re waiting for our ship to become a proper ship so we can go find Citrus.

Citrus: it wasn’t that the three of us had forgotten what Citrus was, it was that we’d forgotten was Citrus was not. We did know that it wasn’t here. Nothing in the place could be considered Citrus. We did know that oranges and grapefruits were types of Citrus, and then we figured that lemons and limes were also types of Citrus, and then, after some time, we decided that strawberries, apples, avocados, trees, plants, flowers, and some insects could be considered Citrus. Now we believed that everything not found here was Citrus.

Although our faith and desire for the Honest Abe LXXVII to stop rusting and start floating was impeccable, I did admit I was confronted with much skepticism and difficulty when I initially announced my plan to Breakfast and Dinner those years ago. They had countered with plans of their own: Breakfast had wanted to walk away from this place, while Dinner had proposed using one of the CB radios to get in touch with someone who could rescue us. Only after considerable time did they display any conviction in my agenda. And only then did we christen our ship with a name. We had originally simply called it the Honest Abe but quickly changed it to the Honest Abe II out of concern that some seafaring president-enthusiast had already beaten us to that name (the last thing you want to deal with at sea is a copyright infringement). And then out of worry of there already being a second Honest Abe, we changed it the Honest Abe III. And then out of worry of their already being a third Honest Abe, we changed it to the Honest Abe IV. And then out of worry of their already being a fourth Honest Abe….

Miss Dinner was in her car. Her car was also her house. It was actually neither. She was sitting in the back of it stroking a toothcat. Her toothcat. In a remarkable display of apostleship one day, the thing had begun to follow her around, seemingly dry of any reason other than some form of fondness for her. At first, she was baffled. And then at bit afraid after the little fellow (I say “fellow” here loosely since toothcats display no visible form of genitalia) had continued to shadow her for much of the day, stopping only occasionally to peer up at her with its expressive eyes and then tilt its head before resuming the chase. Dinner finally dropped her inhibitions, picked up the thing and cradled it, prompting it to purr and halfway close its eyes, clearly contented by Dinner’s acceptance of it. A collar was out of the question, so Breakfast and I painted the little bastard pink and named him (with the tiniest degrees of animosity and/or foresight) Snack Attack.

Snack Attack, it had been confirmed, was a cannibal. He was also, like his comrades, an excellent swimmer. He would not, however, fetch or display the slightest interest in obeying commands. I had developed a theory about names (which, ironically, I did not have a name for). I was convinced that names have the ability to sway how a person (or toothcat) looked and acted. I recalled the Brads and Chads and Brians of yesteryear and their natural prowess in the world of sport. I also remembered all those Ralphs with their crooked smiles and their softcore unkemptness, each of them always two weeks deep in need of a haircut. I’d never met a Jack that didn’t possess that combo-trait of simple coolness and amiability, nor had I a met a Lisa that wasn’t a slut. And one hundred percent of the Bridgets I had met in my life look like they slept on their face. Miss Dinner, however, would find nothing about my theory convincing when, weeks later, and due to a sudden and mutual faim terrible, Breakfast and I allowed her little friend to embrace the full potential of his fateful moniker.

I’ve noticed a change in the past few days. Not the ship, there was nothing new there, but with the ground around it: It had grown darker. Maybe damper. It was difficult to say because everywhere around this place was already damp. I brought this new development to Breakfast.

“It’s happening. Slower than we thought, eh?” Breakfast said.

“That’s the way it goes with seas.”

“But the ship—it’s changing or no?”

“Well, the sea comes first and then we get the ship. There’s an order to this. Unsaid rules and regulations and such.”

“Ah…” said Breakfast. “So, the sea grows and grows until it’s a legitimate sea and then we sail.”

“That’s the plan.”

“Without the woman.”

I turned to face him; an air of gravity debuted. “We are not leaving Dinner here.”

“If that bitch boards our ship, I’m staying.”

“C’mon, that’d be terrible. Who would I play Frisbee with? Dinner? She’s incapable of proper technique, Frisbee and otherwise.”

“Moot point, friend,” Breakfast said, solemnly. “I fear that Frisbee has merged with the infinite.”

“Why, what happened?”

“I ate it.”

Startling news, that, but only obliquely. “That’s weird. I was thinking I ate the Frisbee. I guess I just dreamt I ate the Frisbee.”

We sat in our collective state of muse for some time before Breakfast said, “We’ll decide on what to do with Dinner when the time is appropriate.”

“I’ll yield to that statement.”

“I’ll yield to my hunger,” said Breakfast, optimistically. “Let’s eat!”

Years have gone by. I’m not sure how many but I know it’s been a lot. Miss Dinner is gone. She disappeared way back. I’ve forgotten what she looked like. And I’ve forgotten what she tasted like. Breakfast has changed, too. I know this much: he’s a totally different guy. I’ve also changed. Physically, mentally, I’m all new. Of course it was a gradual thing. Nobody can just change themselves spontaneously. They may look changed or things may change around them but they’re the same. But I’ve changed a lot through the years. I’m a reduced version of my former self. I occupy so little space I’m hardly there. And my thoughts don’t follow each around anymore. They’re like a band of rogues in an old western movie: distrustful, menacing; always looking over their shoulders.

Breakfast asked me something recently. He asked me either who we were or what we were. The sign language we use now is tricky. Pronouns don’t work so well with it. I responded that we’re Breakfast and Lunch (we have good, easy, kind of fancy signals for those words: our timeless and irrefutable monikers). Then he showed me all his terrible teeth in some kind of smile and asked me where we were.

After much deliberation I have an answer. I captured and interrogated every word in my head until I found one that wasn’t affiliated with Citrus. The word I found strictly summons images of a paved expanse, enriched only with heaps of vinyl siding, shards of particleboard, and tombstones made of ersatz granite. Yes, I finally have an answer for Breakfast—and I’ll whisper it into his rotted ear.

The Kid Named Labrador

The kid named Labrador did not change my life. The events that surround his introduction to my life did, sure, but the actual kid didn’t have much to do with it. What I mean is any kid with any kind of name could have produced the same results. At least I like to think that’s the case. As it is, “the kid named Labrador” has become a kind of code phrase or euphemism for this new chapter in my life. The chapter I would otherwise dub “the minimum-security prison years.”

Labrador was a boy. I could just as easily say “the boy named Labrador,”  but that’s too peaceful and too specific. Boys do boyish things. They have boyish smiles and boyish hair. The connotations the word “kid” brings about are much more appropriate. “Kid” denotes a raucous, menacing motion that zips around two or three feet above the ground. Kids are more prone to flurry, to playing the roles of harbingers of irritation. Boys don’t try our patience, kids do. Labrador tried my patience, alright. He called me a “shitface” and bit the hell out of my leg. Then he sprayed me with a water hose and popped all my balloons.

 My balloons—yes, I’ll explain: I’m a clown. Or I was a clown. I was a new clown, an amateur clown. A professional clown probably wouldn’t have reacted the same way I did. A professional clown might not have thrown Labrador—Oshkosh B’gosh overalls and all—into a swimming pool. The deep end, no doubt. I was spared the embarrassment of having to perform mouth-to-mouth on this little fucker, though, because, as you might expect, a kid with a name like Labrador could swim like a goddamn Polynesian. Labrador shot like a hooked mako over to the ladder and climbed up out of the pool with nimble aggression. He casually picked up his towel, dried off his little play cell phone, stripped to his undies and draped his overalls on the fence to dry—

 —and then started up with the wailing. He wailed for his mom. Too bad for me his dad that got there first. The black eye’s all better, but the insult still lingers: Labrador’s dad called me a “fucking clown.”

 What an unlikely situation I’m in here for, but let me tell you what lead to that day at the pool. It all started with an epiphany…

 An epiphany, I now know, can sometimes be a real rotten thing. Thanks to epiphanies, those supposed lightning storms of glorious genius, bursting through the rigidity and mediocrity of our day-to-day, brandishing what-the-heck-ever in the name of fortuitous, glamorous insight—yes, thanks to one of those bastards, I found myself at the age of thirty-five enrolled in clown school.

 Who am I? I’m a clown. That was the result of my epiphany, or, if you get down to it, my moment of existential trepidation

I was on the Metro one day, heading back from Old Town Alexandria. I’d had a smoked salmon wrap drenched in creamy onion/dill sauce at this French restaurant there. The thing had wreaked havoc on my breath, so I sat in my seat, nestled into the window, trying to shield the vaguely pretty woman next to me (my peripheral vision is always quick to give the benefit of the doubt in these moments) from the toxicity of my breath. I passed one of those sleek electronic ads they put in Metro tunnels now, the ones that seem to supernaturally hover outside the window. I forget what the ad was for, but remember quite clearly what it inquired of me: Who are you? Actually it was in the form of some queer statement. It had periods after each word just like this: Who. Are. You. It didn’t register at all at the time, but that trite, contextual little phrase took a nap in the corner of my brain and awoke a little later as a ten-foot-tall monster, all claws and fangs and supercharged with violent mischief.

 Who am I? I’m Benny Caddo. Who am I? Ah, let me think about it. I have different identities, therefore I have no identity. Bona fide shapeshifter, this alleged identity of mine. My identity, just like that troublesome little phrase hovering in the Metro tunnel, is totally contextual. It’s all about perspective. Different people know me as different Bennys. I’m a lot of things, and all of them are not so solid. Not even so much a person as I am an event. Motion all over me, cells are falling off, new cells replacing them and then new cells replacing them. I’m different everyday. I play different roles for different people. I leave movies verbally and mentally influenced by a good protagonist. These flashes of supposed insight led to the mother lode: I began to fear that deep down I did not like who I was therefore I took every opportunity possible to not have to be myself.

 I nearly lost my head because of that seemingly innocuous inquiry. Some might even say I did lose my head. But my new colleagues tell me that this is good news because losing one’s head is a prerequisite to becoming a clown.

 So there you have it. I questioned my solidity, my presence, and ended up in clown school. What kind of job title has presence? Instead of the words “culinary artist” or “massage therapist,” my mind had simply exclaimed “clown.”

 You have to fill out an application to enroll in clown school. Did you know that? I didn’t know that. Do you consider yourself funny?—that’s one of the questions on it. Have you ever been charged with a felony?—that’s another. I was there six weeks and I took not one pie in the face. And my shoe size didn’t increase one bit.

It’s true: People are not just afraid of clowns, but goddamn terrified of them—especially kids, which is a real drag since they make up an overwhelming majority of our demographic.

 And contrary to popular belief, this is also true: Clowns and mimes are actually allies. Like aging pugilists, clowns and mimes have shed their differences and formed a sort of amorous camaraderie amidst the collapse of their collective sphere. Mimes aren’t the best of company, I admit. But I’m able to relate to them better than say a bank teller or an accountant…or a defense attorney or a prison guard.

 Part of the program was my complete immersion into clown culture. No amount of anything could have prepared me for this. I now know everything in the world there is to know about clowns. And my default emotion is now melancholy.

 Being a clown put me in perpetual proximity to children. I never liked kids which is why I never wanted to have one. There are already seven billion people on the planet: an airplane crash of a fact for a softcore sociopath like myself. Some kids are ok, granted Labrador was not one of them. Eight years old, I think he was, but seemingly much dumber than his peers (these things are difficult to tell as any kid anytime, without warning, can brandish a flamboyant lack of intelligence). Labrador had all sorts of problems with making an “R” sound. And he had a terrible stutter that he unleashed freely and loudly and with a kind of myopic confidence that prohibited you from feeling sorry for him. He was severely freckled and had a set of ears that wrapped nearly halfway around his head. And the clothes he wore were the obvious residue of his nouveau riche parents’ desperate attempt at making him look like a somewhat normal kid. Labrador’s hair was boot camp all the way and did well do showcase his swollen misshapen head. When Labrador was completely still you might mistake him for being handicapped in some way or another.

My colleagues at clown school told me that Labrador’s mom always wanted a dog but an allergy to furred beasts prohibited her from ever owning one. They said she birthed a child to compensate. I’m not sure I ever believed these colleagues of mine. Clown gossip, I’ve learned, can be comically unreliable.

 Minimum-security prison is actually not that bad. There’s tetherball, a couple of rugged pool tables, and even a little trap kit I bang on every now and then. Altogether it’s kind of like an enhanced vacation bible school for adults. And there’s no barbwire to be found anywhere. In fact, technically we can leave anytime we want. Just like that, we could hop the little fence and trickle into the horizon. Only problem is when we’re caught—and we would be caught, with their dogs and their choppers—we get shipped to a medium-security prison which is a heck of a lot worse than a maximum-security prison. Let me explain: In a maximum-security prison, all the serial rapists and wife murderers are compartmentalized—their crimes so respectfully and transcendentally terrible to merit them their own solipsistic little worlds. Not so with a medium-security prison. A medium-security prison is like a zoo where all the animals are thrown together in one giant pin. Not much fun if, like me, you’d find yourself playing the role of some timid round-eyed herbivore.

 I’m set for release in 2027. I look at those numbers and, man, they seem distant. I’ll read a lot until then. Maybe wrangle with those classic cinderblocks of yesteryear that everyone aspires to read but never does unless they end up marauded by a surplus of free time. Maybe I’ll finally learn how to play cards. One drawback about this kind of prison is that there are no criminals around. It’s embarrassing what most these guys are in here for. I’ve learned nothing about gang, nothing about the mafia. No one here has ever smoked banana peels or constructed a bomb out of household appliances. No one even reads the Koran. I lied for a little while about what got me in here, but like loose change in a dryer, the truth has a way of coming on out and making its presence known. They laughed about it at first—maybe the first genuine laughs I’ve produced as a clown. They’re not an imaginative bunch hence my nickname is indeed Bozo. But they’re amiable enough and, like I said, they’ve got their own flimsy renegade personas to deal with. Porn got a lot of them here—porn and marijuana and manslaughter.

 I can wear a belt in here, and I have access to all sorts of screwdrivers. At first, I approached this fact with optimism. Surely, I thought, it just means that they trust us. I mean, who would want to kill himself because he got busted with some stacked-up misdemeanors? Now, I think just the opposite. I think it means: Go ahead and do it, jerk-off. See if we care.

 The guards here are a dreamy, humorless bunch. They carry themselves with an air of mild concern, like someone who has just drank a glass of questionable milk. I think they’re actually worse off than us in a lot of ways. Essentially they do the same thing as us except they can run off at night and make love or fuck somebody or another. They don’t carry batons, but they do have whistles. Supposedly there’s a guy with a rifle somewhere, but nobody’s ever seen him.

 I’m going to go to sleep now. Some high school kids are coming by tomorrow for a field-trip. The guards told me not to smile or laugh so much while they’re here. They even confiscated my fake doggie-doo and all my balloon animals, granted they’ll give it all back as soon as they get burnt out on their blackjack.     

Muriel, or the Time of Return: a dreamy overview

Sept. 3, 2024 - Washington, DC

I can remember sixteen-digit codes from thirty-fuck years ago (see: Castlevania II) but I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. This may or may not explain why there don’t seem to be enough B vitamins on the planet to help properly etch Alain Resnais’ 1963 new wave psycho-drama Muriel, or the Time of Return—a syllabic tank battle of a name—into any of my more trustworthy brain cells. In short, I had to tulpa up the mnemonic “MOTTOR” to come to the rescue, and it has done so aplenty, mainly while discussing Muriel with the benthic cryptids that I tend to schlep with in those slender hours of the night that sort of seep into each other, that ephemeral opening act for the all too often bad idea sunrise.

“You like this flick a lot, eh?” asks one such cryptid. We were hunched darkly at a stoop outside of my apartment building, drinking gin out of coffee mugs and trying to avoid eye contact with those weird daybreak joggers that infest the sidewalks of the District of Columbia. 

“I’d friggin’ boink it if I could,” I say, dreamily. “Seen it damn near ten times since Memorial Day, whenever that was. You know, piecemeal and such.”

“Interesting… What’s it about?”

“No clue, brother.”

In fact, I do know what Muriel is about, but it’s impossible to offload it on someone without sounding like you’re making it up on the spot.

Roll film…

Here we are in Boulogne-sur-Mer, a small coastal city that received the Rotterdam treatment during World War II by, yeah, getting bombed into goo and then hastily resurrected via hard drab symmetry and glass. Its streets are wet and gray, often reflecting the neon lights of its boulangeries and shops. Boulogne’s inhabitants seem neither here nor there. “Where is downtown?” someone asks somebody later in the film. “You’re in it!” somebody responds.

We begin in Helene’s apartment, where everything has a literal price tag hanging off it. Most of the film takes place in this apartment, which basically plays hangar for the old English furniture, plateware, and bric-a-brac that Helene tirelessly tries to sell to whatever well-to-do couple comes knocking. People eat off plates and nestle into couches that are to be picked up by buyers “tomorrow”. Helene is about forty-five years old and mired in the trembles of some regrettable yesteryear. She seems to stay busy just to stay busy, either by peddling the contents of her apartment or by gambling (for all the wrong reasons).

If the manic montage of the film’s first sixty seconds doesn’t convince you that Muriel is going to be a bona fide weird flick, the introduction of Helene’s twitchy son Bernard, our protagonist (if only by default), will obliterate all doubt. Bernard, played by Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée—a sort of Madame Tussaud Scott Baio, is himself trapped in the past, albeit a more recent past. He was in the Algerian war, where he and four other soldiers interrogated and tortured to death a young woman named Muriel. (Bernard, who is courting an actual girl named Marie-Do, additionally, has an imaginary fiancé named, yeah, Muriel)… To better understand the appearance of Bernard, imagine the faces you see in the sand while on two hits of high-octane blotter acid. Strychnine smiles for miles…

Now we’re at the train station (nobody coming, nobody going) where Helene scoops up her old fling Alphonse and his ”niece” (discreet lover) Francoise. It becomes clear Alphonse and Francoise are broke. In fact, everyone in the film is broke (with the exception for Helene’s in-and-out lover, the kind-eyed Roland de Smoke, Boulogne’s very own Robert Moses). Alphonse is built like a former professional athlete: tall, sturdy, fifty-ish, but his charisma is betrayed his white jellybean of a voice: uncertain and higher-pitched than his appearance would suggest, a mismatch that pre-chews for us the fact Alphonse is an inveterate fraud, bridge burner, deadbeat, drama queen, and proto-fuckboy (and, as we will learn later, absent husband). On the other hand, the voice that comes out of the mouth of the very young and very pretty Francoise is much deeper than you’d expect. Francoise is an aspiring actress (thanks to Alphonse having summoned up just enough residual sway to get her a bit part in whatever wherever). She walks through the world like she’s strolling through one of those tubular glass walkways at high-profile aquariums, rubbernecking at her surroundings like a navy aviator and constantly remarking on every pleasure and displeasure. Francoise, we come to quickly realize, is basically a first-generation vapidista, her thoughts unoriginal, her gaze severe, her movements robotic, and it’s not at all surprising when she immediately takes to the equally synthetic-looking Bernard (to no avail), both of whom wouldn’t make it through the opening credits of Blade Runner.

If you watch Muriel out of the corner of your eye, it looks like an adaption of any given nouvelle roman, where allegorical figures sit around all day, sucking on vermouth and puffing endless cigs (there is mention of Winstons, Pall Malls, and Gaulioses within the film’s first five minutes) and wrangling with softcore trifles that they’ve patched up for themselves for no good reason other than to keep from capsizing in ennui—but, what’s this? the modernist mush shushes itself when, while watching his grainy films of French soldiers in Algeria with a friend, Bernard describes the details in which Muriel was tortured, primarily by another local boy, Robert, who Bernard still occasionally bumps into around town. “Robert takes a flashlight, uses it on her… Her mouth is foamy, she couldn’t talk if she wanted to… Robert lights a cigarette, walks back over to her… Muriel screams.” This is just a kiddie cup of the details of the living breathing nightmare that would be the last day of Muriel’s short existence, its hideousness amplified by the manner in which Bernard plainly narrates, as if he were reading off the back of a box of Frosted Flakes.

Helene and Alphonse spend much of the movie reminiscing, sometimes fondly, but usually with a low-grade accusatory air. They mentally tiptoe around each other—for all it takes is one wrong answer or one wrong question by one of them to send the other scuttling off to the next room to sulk and pout. Lots of “I should have never come here” or “I should have never asked you to come”, etc., etc… In the age of cellphones, this movie would be about thirty American seconds long, since these two surely would have long ago blocked each other into oblivion. But it’s 1963, and here they are in Boulogne-sur-Mer, up to their nostrils in regret and both getting by on nickels and trinkets. There’s mention of a letter that Alphonse long ago sent to Helene, confessing love and the desire for them to be together. Alphonse, as we learned in the first five minutes (when he says Francoise is his niece), is a liar. But there really was a letter. Alphonse had given the letter to a competing girl’s brother (why do that?) to drop in the mailbox, and that brother, Ernest, as it were, dutifully tossed said letter into a muddy river. We know all this because Ernest, on behalf of Alphonse’s now wife, Simone, comes calling and knocking. Ernest catches Helene, Alphonse, Bernard, Francoise, and various guests at dinnertime. He sings them a song (Dêja) before abruptly letting loose with why he trekked all the way out here to Boulogne-Sur-Mer: to gather Alphonse, of course. Time to go home, buddy boy, is the general message, before serenading the room with what he really thinks about Alphonse. Understandably, Alphonse is not into this. He grabs Ernest and the two men paw at each other and tussle awkwardly until Alphonse eventually acquiesces and agrees to go back to his wife, only to ditch Ernest (“I’m gonna get some smokes”) by ducking in and then discreetly out of a market and jumping on a bus to anywhere but home. This whole undoing of the stratus of bonhomie the film had been coasting along on proves to be the straw that punctured the camel’s aorta for Bernard. When Alphonse and Ernest start fighting, Bernard starts snapping pics (he spends the whole film armed with a muscular-looking camera— “collecting evidence”) and hollers at Francoise to grab his camcorder and start recording. She accidentally presses play on the thing instead of record and suddenly loud metallic sobbing/whimpering fumigates the room—the sound of Muriel, we assume, based on Bernard’s reaction. He begins crying his innards out and excuses himself out the front door and basically out of the film, but only after going full blown Menace II Society on Robert, the villain in Bernard’s constant mental stream of awful memories. “Robert, come down!” he hollers at Robert’s apartment building, a big beige Corbusierian Kleenex box. Robert pokes his head out of a window… “No, don’t come down!” a still weepy Bernard says, but, yeah, too late, Robert’s already ambled out of the shadows, so Bernard plugs him in the stomach. No more Robert. Helene hears the gunshot, and her motherly wile knows exactly what’s going on. “Bernard!” she says, jumping up and running over to the studio Bernard uses as a second home. No Bernard. She panics. Bernard appears in the doorway. Helene embraces him. He tells her he’s leaving. But you have no money, she says. It doesn’t matter, he replies, as he walks out of the frame and out of the movie.

Helene, too, leaves. She hurries down to the train station, looking for the train to Paris, presumably to snatch Alphonse, since she carries no luggage. The train to Paris no longer stops here, a bored station attendant tells her, it now only stops at the new station. Things change, he tells her.

It is unclear what happened to Francoise. Roland de Smoke takes her for a suspiciously long walk to “see the beach” at one point in the film. And we do know she’s grown tiresome of Alphonse’s antics. “When we get back to Paris, we’re done,” she tells him, to which he has no response.

The film ends with the introduction of Simone, Alphonse’s wife, as she goes to Helene’s apartment, its door ajar. “Hello?”, she says, entering the apartment. We follow her around via a handheld camera as she goes from room to room, calling out for Alphonse, but Alphonse, as we know, has hit the road, and there’s no sign of anyone else in the apartment either. Just a phalanx of dirty dishes, empty brut bottles, and some flowers that are a little droopier than they were the last time we saw them. Simone takes it all in, does the math, exits the apartment. FIN. The cinematic tinkerdom (“Look, ma, I’m makin’ a movie!”) ebbs here at the caboose of the film and this final scene does well to line up the film’s previous 115 minutes or so and wallop you in the chest with the whole big thing.

According to the script, Muriel takes place over two weeks in late September/early October. The only indication of time passing at all is that the characters are sometimes dressed differently than they were in the previous scene, and of course the occasional beddy-bye.

I’ve seen a lot of stupid-looking words, but nothing could have prepared me for “Fantabulous”, and yet I feel that’s the best descriptor for the outerwear featured in Muriel. Bernard bikes around town in a cyberpunky raincoat/windbreaker that you’re more likely to see on Korben Dallas, meanwhile Alphonse and Helene putter about draped in half the African Savannah.

The musical score of Muriel will drown out the most inveterate popcorn crunchers. Violins and an electric organ jump out of nowhere. It sounds like a bad day at the office for the Kronos Quartet—angry strings duking it out with menacing keys. Occasionally there’s opera. And then Ernest’s Dêja.

The movie’s real star is the town of Boulogne-sur-Mer itself. Historically, this area is where England (a mere 25 miles north) plays footsies with France. A region both ancient and modern on the dot, which, sure, is half of Europe (see: World War I and II), but it seems almost caricature here: one scene we are in Orbit City, and the next it’s Middle Earth.

Joining the ranks of Zazie Dans le Metro and Red Desert and Robocop 2, Muriel has become one of the default flicks I put on to sort of flicker in the background while I heat up leftovers at the homestead or to play on the boob tube at the bar. “What in the name of all that’s holy are we watchin’, guy?” asks a customer, as Alphonse wipes shandy bubbles from his mustache and troubleshoots with his copy of Le Monde. “Ah, it’s this real neat French flick called, eh, shit,” I say, gesticulating like a maced chimp. “Any chance you can flip over to, hell, anything else at all?” they ask. “I don’t think so,” I tell them. “Maybe later.” After all, yeah, things change.

The Georgetown Lighthouse

The first thing one generally notices about the Georgetown Lighthouse, apart from its considerate height, is the absence of a nearby credible waterway. The second thing is that it is composed not of bricks but of books.  

The Georgetown Lighthouse sits atop a small but ambitious hill in an otherwise lackluster residential area of northwest DC where Georgetown seeps into Glover Park. Realtors affectionately dub the area Lighthouse Heights, though residents refer to it as either Georgetown or Glover Park. It was designed and built in the caboose of the nineteenth century by one Tuppy Muldoon, an Australian who immigrated to the US to open up his own clipper ship business but failed to do so because the US was already a score beyond the Age of Sail and cozily nestled in the Age of Steam. Muldoon, who had never eaten a fruit or vegetable in his life and even boasted of clobbering a man into three wee men for gesturing at him with a fully grown eggplant ("Malice or no malice, I still got me dignity!"), became mired in a severe strain of scurvy at the age of thirty five and began succumbing to the hallucinations that would hold considerable influence over the final five years of his life. Many a citizen was to be woken up with Muldoon's midnight yelps of "Shiiiiiip! Shiiiiiip!" only to see the vociferous madman pointing not in the direction of the thoroughly distant Potomac River but rather. . . north? Muldoon, on the other hand, was at once perplexed and appalled with his new countrymen's apathy on the matter and decided to take accountability for maritime safety into his own hands. He built his lighthouse inside four years, using the bricks of its original composition, though reports on exactly how Muldoon built his lighthouse vary greatly. Muldoon's journals routinely make reference to his enlisting the help of a forty-man crew, as well as six African elephants, four white tigers, three "elvish types", a pair of languid harpies, a giant squid named Cecil, a wingless albatross, and three gilled but humanoid figures from "up 'round Bal'mer", though an issue of the District Gazette from June of 1896 contains an editorial piece about a "muttonhead Aussie git hollerin' orders at his shoes all day." Friendlier accounts claim of "a garrulous Australian fellow who built a lighthouse with his two hands and using nothing more than his own blood and sweat and tears and fecal matter."

These days the Georgetown Lighthouse is routinely given a flimsy benefit of the doubt since it can technically be seen from the Potomac, though any further speculating is quick to suggest the two have zero camaraderie. Earlier in the century the Lighthouse's popularity was stuck at a perpetual state of wane, and was said to be about one loose brick away from being officially condemned by the US Park Service.  

Then came the only credible ally of the Lighthouse since its creator. 

"I just took out the bricks and put in the books. One by one by one. It was easy." Mimi Octopus has been living at the Lighthouse off and on since 2012, when she purchased it for an undisclosed sum that consisted wholly of three dollar bills, a legendary transaction now steeped in Georgetown lore. 

Miss Octopus is an ideal sixty years old. ("It's the stairs. These things don't have elevators.") Her age is only betrayed by the swathes of grey in her long black hair.

And how many books does it take to make a lighthouse? "I lost count at forty thousand. Virginia Woolf's The Waves. That was number forty thousand. Had it been To the Lighthouse I would have flipped my lid." 

When asked about the future of the Georgetown Lighthouse as well as her own future, Miss Octopus, a self-proclaimed connoisseur of puns, abstains from any claims of waiting for her ship to come in and simply says, "This is my corner of the universe." 

 And when it is no longer her corner? 

 "The lighthouse goes away and the invisible ships will have to look out for themselves." 

 And, according to the wishes of Miss Octopus, the DC public library will inherit a joyous dilemma.

On Litter and Littering

Okay, sure, littering sucks, but, man, sometimes you just gotta.

Here are a few 100% acceptable ways to go about littering:

~ Passive littering, where you “leave” your litter on the top of your car or cab or whatever and simply drive off. If you’re on foot, gently place the litter on your shoulder or atop your head and walk off. Whatever happens next is beyond the realm of your control.

~ Throw your litter up in a tree or in a thick bush. Litter only counts if it touches the ground.

~ Dress the litter up so it doesn’t look like litter. Get artsy with it.

~ Turn your litter into a statement. You’re not littering, you’re proclaiming, “Hey, man, I wouldn’t have to fuckin’ litter if there were more fuckin’ garbage cans around here. What the hell are you guys doing with my tax money?”

~ Littering doesn’t count if your litter is biodegradable—but technically everything was stardust and will end up being stardust again. Your empty box of Hot Tamales is ultimately just as ephemeral as bee spit, echinacea leaves, and banana peels.

~ The brazen litter, where you litter so brazenly and openly that people are like, “Well, I guess that’s protocol here. You just toss whatever wherever and it’s totally cool.”

~ Sometimes the universe demands that you litter. Any cursory trek to any food court in basically any mall in the galaxy will reveal an astonishing number of garbage cans that say NO GARBAGE. This is the universe texting you a little thumbs up emoji.

Thanks for reading—and I hope this helps.