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.

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.

MOTHMAN SUCKS (AND OTHER POINT PLEASANTRIES): an excerpt from upcoming pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

June, 2024 - downtown DC.

“Not all heroes wear capes.” – Aquaman

I am preparing my brains out for another sortie into the luscious innards of West Virginia, where I shall attend the grand opening of the Grafton Monster Museum (in a kook-centric bookstore on the main drag of the Grafton Monster’s eponymous hometown).

Driving in West Virginia is not for the weak of spirit. There are biker gangs, falling rocks, potholes the size of fully-grown manta rays, a technicolor variety of aspiring roadkill, tar pits, sand pits, leftover pterodactyls, Middle Earth holdouts, and “blackout areas,” where wireless internet curls up into a whimpering little ball and you have to consult esoteric stars like Alpheratz and Zeta Fuqmuhlife for direction.

I was to launch my ex-girlfriend’s little Audi back and forth from Grafton, were it not for a recent G-rated liaison with her that inspired her current boyfriend, some thin-headed ratero type who looks like he’s not had a warm meal in six to eight weeks, to threaten to make manifest her secret mild salsa recipe so I will be taking my boss’s vehicle instead—a babyshit-blue minivan that’s old as time itself.

Of course, this is all assuming that I live through tonight…

“You goddamn sausage eaters!” my friend Michaela hollered into the phone. “We will invade the holy spirit out of you sons of bitches!—and this time we ain’t taking prisoners!” Michaela was the big kahuna at the Italian Cultural Institute and was on the phone with the Austrian ambassador, who had just informed Michaela that the Italians were to bring only cold food to the EuroAsia Shorts Festival, a film event being held at the Austrian embassy tonight. Not only will I be attending this event, but I am in charge of all the food for the Italian attaché. I manage a kooky little Italian joint in downtown DC and my boss had whipped up enough hot-as-lava polpettine al forno and arancini siciliano to feed the whole cast of La Citta Delle Donna and now here the Austrians were telling Michaela and company you’ll eat cold caprese and like it. “I’m a serious as a snake bite, you Crypto-Stasi spinster! Italy is the culinary capital of the galaxy, whereas Austria was eating bugs and tree bark until like three Thursdays ago,” Michaela said, bug-eyed with rage. “Oh, and sausage, you’re right. Sausage upon sausage upon sausage… Let me guess, you will be offering sausage at the screening tonight, Herr Ambassador? Twenty different types of sausage, and each link with that stupid little flag of yours sticking off it… Hello? Hello? Porca vacca, that son of a bitch hung up on me… Van, I regret to inform you we may have to go to war tonight.”

“Whatever you say, Capitano,” I said, shrugging. I am about as Italian as a bowl of Gaeng Daeng pudding but here I am about to jump boner-first into a shiny new continent-sized bloodbath. Ah well. Better people have died for less noble causes. Besides, I kinda always did hope I died on a Friday…

Okay, back to West Virginia. To paraphrase that slinked-out gringo from Talking Heads: How did I get here?

My infatuation with West Virginia began in 2015 at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, a living breathing Twilight Zone episode of a town that’s nestled into where the Ohio River meets the Kanawha way over on the western fringe of the state.

The Mothman Festival is a basically a flea market/jamboree for cryptidistas, ghost trackers, kooksters, ufologists, podcast bros, and every other strain of occupation that won’t win you any points on a Scrabble board.

The story of Mothman is well known, and it is a story with many exclamation points and question marks but few commas and periods. Sightings of winged humanoid critters reach back to ancient times, but Mothman’s main stage debut was in the guts of the late ‘60s, back when they called him Birdman and the Man-Sized Bird and other Sesame Street-inspired kookacana.

Every bag-of-bones in the Point Pleasant area seemingly saw Mothman, either reenacting the last ten minutes of Top Gun on desolate stretch of road, or skulking around in their backyard, or playing barnyard freeze tag with the family pooch, et cetera, et cetera.

The story famously ends with the collapse of the Silver Bridge, which spanned the Ohio River, while it contained a whole herd of rush-hour automobiles. In addition to allegedly being poorly maintained, the Silver Bridge was built back in the 1920s—an age where dainty roadsters and livestock ruled the roads. It was not constructed for the behemothic motherships of the late ‘60s American roadscape. Forty-six people died in the cold December waters of the Ohio. The word “Mothman” left the lips of every Point Pleasanter and was replaced by ominously practical phrases like stress corrosion cracking.

Aside from the spotlight abandoning him for more fashionable prey, Mothman has indeed discreetly still been popping up in West Virginia and Ohio and beyond.

So, yeah, in 2015, a couple of buddies and myself went clambering westward across the wily West Virginia landscape until, along with an unholy number of other paranormalheads, we reached Point Pleasant, where we planned to drink the town out of Yuengling (and Mothman IPA, et cetera) and possibly maybe get a sneaky peek of what makes this little town so desirable to undesirables like Mothman and his creepy brigade of enthusiasts, present company included.

We stayed at the Lowe Hotel, a charming establishment that’s older than gunpowder. The Lowe was vast, with nebulous dimensions. It was also allegedly haunted, which made me and my two buddies (to avoid being sued into silly putty, I shall call them Ned and Zeb here) bug-eyed with glee at the prospect of getting tangled up in something from the beyond, though several cursory chats with the locals revealed that everything from the UPS store to the Jamba Juice was haunted.

We went down to the hotel’s bar and inquired further with the Lowe’s proprietor, the lovely Mary Ruth, who was congeniality personified.

“Oh, it’s haunted, alright,” she said. “We had this old boy in here recently who had come to Point Pleasant for work. Kept getting late night visits with a strange woman in a gown who wasn’t on the payroll, if you know what I mean. He ended up skipping town before he could even clock in.”

We sipped our three-dollar Yuenglings and nodded in optimism. There was an implied commotion around the hotel. Something, it seemed, had happened to someone somewhere.

“What’s the rumpus?” I asked.

“Some fella drowned,” Mary Ruth said. “Jumped in the river for whatever reason and never came back up. That’s actually his glasses right there.” A set of wire eyeglasses sat on top of a neighboring booth. I put on them and took them off. Later, on the internet, I learned that a fifty-nine year old man had been found under fourteen feet of water. Neither suicide nor foul play was ever suspected.

The next day Ned and Zeb and I ambled around town eyeballing the cosplayers (guys and gals done up as Mothman and Bigfoot and Men in Black and other low-hanging cryptidacana), while every paranormal hack worth their hundred dollar fedora was camped out at a convoy of tables peddling their books and DVDs and trinkets and crafts. I bought a panel of sheet rock with caricature of Mothman deftly painted on it (which was later shattered into two dozen pieces on DC’s 18th Street in a late-night encounter with a malign ex-ex-ex-girlfriend—a variety of living breathing cryptid I know all too well).

Ned and Zeb and I drove out to the TNT Area, as it’s known, where Mothman allegedly still lays his creepy little head at night. We parked and got out of the car and ambled around, spying for any indication that anything had been there recently aside from 100,000 Mothman fanboys. We poked our heads in the silos, which were sepulchral and musty and as empty as a Buddhist monk’s piggy bank. “MOTHMAN SUCKS,” read a burst of graffiti in the interior in one of them. A tragically asymmetrical swastika adorned another one, as well as “ BURN BITCH 666,” “VOORHEES WAS HERE,” and the obligatory pentagram, of course. On a broken baseball bat, someone had magic-markered “MOTHMAN WEARS GRANNY PANTIES,” which was a statement I could neither confirm nor disconfirm.

“It is my understanding,” I said to my colleagues, “that Mothman keeps a little studio apartment in Cincinnati that he zips over to during this laffy taffy festival.”

“He sure as shit ain’t here,” said Zeb.

“We’ll come across Jimmy Hoffa’s false teeth before we find Mothman,” said Ned.

This type of cynical banter went on until we agreed it was time to go back to the hotel and look for ghosts.

We got back to the Lowe just in time to catch Mary Ruth in the bar before she closed it up. We gunned down an attack dose of Yuenglings and went skulking around the guts of the hotel, working our way from the lobby up to the banquet room, which was vast and dark and sufficiently spooky.

“I am 100% certain that if we find a ghost, it’s gonna be in this room,” I said, skulking around, bending over, and looking under the dining tables, all the while using our cellphones as flashlights.

Zeb scoffed and said, “Any type of a ghost or, you know, autonomous residual energy or full-blown poltergeist or whatever, would hopefully have the wherewithal to steer the heck clear of us three drunkards.”

“There’s an old saying,” I said, “I forget who came up with it—maybe me?—it’s simply, if you start blabbin’ about how drunk you are, you probably ain’t that drunk.”

“I am six wool blankets and a couple of sleeping bags in the wind,” said Ned.

“Me, too,” said Zeb. “I am loaded beyond belief.”

“Horseshit,” I said, strafing them both with spittle. “We’ve only had like twelve beers each. Nobody’s even cracked into that bottle of Old Muskethead yet.”

This went on until we finally wriggled our way back downstairs and into our hotel room, which, for better or worse, seemed to also be sans ghosts.

There is one prospective ghost that I was not at all interested in coming across, provided I wasn’t equipped with a proton pack: the ghost of Shawnee supreme stud Hokoleskwa, known as Chief Cornstalk to the palefaces, and who was buried right here in Point Pleasant. Chief Cornstalk’s life was not an easy one, which is basically where the facts stop and the speculation starts, but what we do know of his story makes the movie Platoon look like a spotted puppy on Christmas morning. After enduring a lifetime of headaches caused by being in the middle of the unceasing trifles between the French and the English in the 18th century, Cornstalk, his son, and two other Shawnee were shot at close range by a bunch of cranky American militiamen while being held in arbitrary captivity at Fort Randolph (a revenge killing, the militiamen called it, in response to one of their own getting offed in the vicinity by a Native American who had nada to do with Cornstalk’s diplomatic little visit, the purpose of which was to basically scope out the Americans and learn their handshakes and congratulate them on their breach baby of a new country).

Due to the humans again confusing reality with fiction (this time by way of a 1921 outdoor play, whose scripter decided to whip up some hocus pocus hubbub about Cornstalk applying a “200 year curse” to the whole creepy region right before the Americans plugged him), Cornstalk has posthumously been blamed for western West Virginia’s eerie disposition, setting the stage for Mothman, Indrid Cold, the Men in Black, Sheepsquatch, dogmen, the Grafton Monster, and ten zillion moving lights in the sky. In short, the world has always been sufficiently weird.

We checked out of the Lowe in the morning, all three of us wrangling with saber-toothed bewilderment that tags along with that ferocious variety of hangover known only to ambitious boozers like ourselves. We troubleshooted with coffee and pastries, wreaked havoc on every American inch of porcelain in the establishment, and then Quasimodo’d our way to the car, all stumpy syllables and dark sunglasses and missteps and directionless apologies to the inanimate objects that impeded our amble.

I expect the upcoming weekend’s sojourn to Grafton shall be a similar messcapade, thick with everything from despair to rapture. In fact, “expectation” is the only four-letter word the good people of West Virginia allow to cross into the state without a notarized letter from Yahweh or His attorney. And if you expect to roll into to West Virginia to just “take it easy,” you will be beetle bait before Wheel of Fortune comes on. With that in mind, I have packed a snake-bit kit, a “family-size” box of gauze, enough band-aids for the whole cast of the Walking Dead, a six-hundred-dollar crossbow and a whole gross of arrows, each tipped with freshly squeezed poison dart frog juice, eight sticks of CVS-brand dynamite, a helmet big and thick enough to midnight as a kiddie pool, an imaginary sidekick (Jiffy Hormel, per usual), a DIY hang glider, a taxidermized paw from a monkey that won both the Fantasy Five and the Powerball, some night-vision goggles, a few flares, and an unopened VHS of the original Red Dawn, in the event I need to barter with the natives.

For luck, which I will need in unlimited gobs, I have tossed a freshly minted nickel into every pond, pool, fountain, river, run, lake, and bayou from my doorstep to Planet X. I shall report back here from the bleeding belly button of the beast, inshallah. As David Bowie said, it ain’t easy….

SCARE TACTIX (prologue)

I can still hear our screams competing – a-ha

Nobody but the skipper has any relish for the sea – Iain Sinclair

Prologue: Barrio Ga Ga on the Magdalen Islands of Quebec

(Planet Vaan / Summer of 2032)

We ran out of Spanish wine before we ran out of Gaulioses and we ran out of Gaulioses before we ran out of hashish. Jean Louis and the Argentine girl had begun talking about Soviet art and the Senegalese boy with the motorcycle said we should all go listen to Dixieland at his flat in Trieste in exactly one year. Camilla returned from the beach, which was about a hundred yards beyond a hill on the other side of the river. She set down her flip-flops, which she had taken off to cross the river, and placed her coffee mug atop one of them and then unrolled her beach towel in the red sand and sat on it. Her coffee mug was filled not with coffee, but with the last of the Spanish wine that Jean Louis had stolen from his father’s café. The river was very shallow but swift and muddy from all the rain. An ambitious sun elbowed its way through a phalanx of dull clouds.

“Turista, baby, tell me a joke,” said Camilla.

I passed the fishing rod off to Jean Louis, and in the chunky-style squawk of his native province, he said, “Go tend to your little dead girl.”

In English, I told him, “I hope you get eaten by a shark.”

“In these waters the only danger is eels.”

“That’ll do.”

The Argentine girl was humming a kiddie pool Elvis tune and deftly playing along on her bongos, effectively drowning out the dainty soundscape of the river and nearby beach.

Quebec’s Magdalen Islands, an anorexic archipelago shaped like an upside-down semicolon, were located in the middle of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. I had been here four days and slept maybe twelve hours.

Camilla said, “Turista, I want a joke.”  

“I heard you. What kind of joke do you want?” 

“Any kind. Tell me something that’ll make me laugh.”

Camilla was blessed (or cursed) with knowing the exact date of her death: today. This was according to a month-old text message from an imp named Preston, who, in my opinion, ought to be skinned like a rabbit and stuck in a microwave for fuckteen minutes for bestowing her with this information. This had all happened here on my home planet of Vaan. Camilla, who was not only my doppelganger, but also my steadfast lover, was from Vaan’s doppelganger planet: EARTH.

I said to her, “All the jokes I know are long and complicated.”

“Even better.”

Jean Louis casted into the river and said to us, “What did Marshall McLuhan say when he went to Starbucks?”

I made direct eye contact with Jean Louis for the first time all day and said, “The medium is the grande.” French Canadian jokes were all the same: snobbish, wacky, and about as much fun as a head of wet lettuce.

Jean Louis mumbled something about me destroying his joke and how he was going to dice me into chum and then started troubleshooting with a perch he caught that was about as big as a paper airplane. He had hooked the thing through its eye and it was laying a very enthusiastic guilt trip on him. Finally, it wriggled its way off the hook and disappeared into the muddy water.

“One-eyed Willie rides again,” I said. That late afternoon murk of the body and mind that is so familiar to all inveterate day-drinkers was beginning to set in. “Camilla, babe, if we stay out here, we’re gonna need more wine, more beer, more cigarettes, more hashish, more everything.”

“And more tick-tock!” the Senegalese boy said, using a coin to scrape dried mud off the exhaust pipe of his motorcycle.

“Definitely more tick-tock,” I said. “But actual tick-tock this time, yeah? Real cocaine. No more of that nonsense we were brushing our teeth with earlier.”

“We had koh-keh-een-ah?” said Camilla. “Who had koh-keh-een-ah?”

“Jean Louis did.”

“Jean Louis did what?” asked Jean Louis.

“I was talking about that baby laxative you oinked up.”

This confused Jean Louis enough for him to reengage the fishing rod. He undid the red bandanna around his neck and folded it and set it next to his tackle box and then opened the tackle box and changed lures—losing the beetle spin and putting on a Hula Popper—and then started casting around a different stretch of the river. His dark brown euro-shag always looked wet.

“I’m runnin’ on fumes, y’all,” Camilla said. “Do we have anything to eat besides poor people food?”

The Argentine girl dug around in her wicker basket. “We have a mango, another mango, some sort of zombie plantain tragedy, and a plank of dark chocolate that cost me ten American dollars.”

“Bienvenido al Café Proletariado.”

“What happened to that little box of fried okra?”

“Gone like a train.”

We gave the Senegalese boy three Canadian fifty dollar bills and he motorcycled into town and came back an hour later with a flotilla of vice: drugs and beer and junk food. Camilla had fallen asleep and Jean Louis and the Argentine girl had walked over to the beach and not yet returned.

The Senegalese boy, who called himself Zing, gave me a big can of Beck’s.

We stood there by the river staring at Camilla, motionless in her sleep. Zing ran through those universal sound effects people squeeze out when they hear of someone who has died or is dying.

“Today’s the day, eh?”

“Allegedly,” I said. “Guess we’ll see.”

“How’s it supposed to happen?”

“I have no clue,” I said, lying through my teeth. “The little dude didn’t say.”

The beer was cold and tasted good.

“You two are very close, aren’t you?” asked Zing.

“We are as close as two people can be without being related to one another.”

“I figured you to be twinsies.”

“Everybody does.”

“You’ve known each other your whole life?”

“Nope. We joined forces about ten years ago.”

“You met in a bookstore, I reckon.”

“Exactly. I asked her to suck my coochie right there in the Occult section and the rest is history.”

And… Silence. If I was good at anything, it was putting an end to unsolicited interrogations.

I asked Zing for a bump and he pulled out a husky set of keys and strategically picked one out and then dipped it in a little baggie of coke and brought it to my nose and I vacuumed it up with my right nostril. The coke baggie looked like a little pillow

“Whoa. This shit’s the real deal. This shit’s got zing, Zing.”

“Only the best for mademoiselle.”

We were standing where the red sand meets the red mud near the bank of the river. Little weird birds near the water’s edge were either fighting or mating or both. Zing was wearing a white Tottenham Hotspur jersey that was dotted with dozens of small dark red spots.

“What’s going on here,” I asked, pointing at the cluster of spots. “You get in a knife fight with Jackson Pollock?”

“Ah, this…” Zing stretched his shirt out in full display. “This is nature’s way of saying: Don’t eat me, I’m poisonous.”

“Thou art a strange creature.”

“Nah, for real, it’s a souvenir from America. I got jumped by some guys.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be,” he said, grinning. “It’s not my blood.”

Zing reached into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out an unopened pack of blue Gaulioses and gnawed it open and took out a cigarette and lit it.

“It’s cool that you call it America and not the US,” I said to him. “You go down there often?”

“Only when I have to,” he said, holding up his little coke baggie and dangling it. “Or when I need to go to CVS, of course.”

“Ha… I have to admit, Zing, it feels real goddamn good to be away from the prickly vibe of modern day America… The United States of America, grown thoroughly exhausted with itself—grown bored beyond belief with itself!—has taken up the hobby of self-micromanagement.” I schnozzed up a husky bump off Zing’s key. The stuff really was strong. I took a big sip of beer to even it out. What was I rambling on about? Ah, yes, America…

“When I think of the current state of America, I am besieged with the impossible imagery of farts versus turds, ” I said, now totally steeped in the effects of the coke. “It’s basically a whole nation of snitches and trash zombies and unessential businesses and rock bands without drummers.”

Zing nodded in noncommittal accord and said, “In Dakar, my hometown, at any hour of any day on the calendar, I can go to the market and buy bottle rockets, cold beer, heavy-duty pornography, anything I want.”

“Well, see, that is freedom. In America, you are free to sit there and fuck around on your phone and, brother, that is it. You’re free to live and die by instant replay—you know what I mean by that, Zing? America is constantly rubber gloving itself, trying to see what it did wrong… Always trying to blast its own ass, always lopping away at itself like a damn maniac… Thwap! Thwap! Thwap!... The whole country has turned into an uninspired, uninspiring pile of rocks and garbage and dead bugs, which is a total drag, because it used to be such a hip spot, you know?” I said, gesticulating like a simian the whole time. I zipped my lips and took a sip of beer. My superpower was my ability to realize when I was talking a lot of bullshit about absolutely nothing.

Zing did a massive bump and sucked the innards out of his key and got bug-eyed with whatever emotion the coke was amplifying and said, “America is where you get overdraft fees because you have overdraft fees.”

“That is absolutely right,” I said, cheersing him. “You’re a cool dude, Zing… Tell me three things about yourself. Three things that I would never ever know otherwise.”

“Three things?

“Yeah, three things. There are no terms, there are no conditions.”

“Hmm,” he said, digging in the sand with his foot. “Okay… Number one, I have an irrational fear of cops in shorts.”

“Cops in shorts? You mean, like, police officers wearing shorts?”

“Yes. Gives me big time anxiety. Let’s see, number two, I slept with your twinsie last night, and the night before that, and the night before that.”

“I figured y’all scrumped that first night, but not those other two. Interesting.”

“And number three, it took me six and a half years to learn how to spell my name.”

“Z-I-N-G.”

“My real name. Souleymane.”

“Solomon?”

“Well, yeah. Solomon is, you know, the gringo version.”

Jean Louis and the Argentine girl came over the hill and waded through the river and dried themselves off.

“The little dead girl is dead,” Jean Louis said, talking about Camilla, who appeared to still be sleeping.

Camilla yawned and stretched and said, “I’m alive, you twink.”  

“Ah, too bad for us.”

She rolled over on her stomach and faced everyone and said, “Is there anything more exhilarating than letting people down? Turista, babe, how dare you direct your fly-by-night compassion elsewhere. Mama wants some zing, Zing. And bring me one of whatever is in that ice chest.”

The Argentine girl said, “Jean Louis and I were talking about taking the boat to the mainland tomorrow and going to a horse race.”

“There literally is no tomorrow,” said Camilla. “Not for me, at least. And why the hell would you want to go to a horserace? Racehorses are the prissiest bunch of psychopaths on the planet.”

The weird little birds had doubled or tripled in number. Their chorus of chirps was growing oppressive.

“Jesus,” I said. “What’s with these birds?”

“They’re called piping plovers,” Jean Louis said, rummaging through the freshly-stocked ice chest. “Endangered species. Only about eight thousand of them left on the planet.”

They had the stature of a sparrow but were white with orange legs and had this little black band around their neck and face that looked like a windy day scarf.

“There’s eight thousand of them right here,” I said.

The birds were all fiercely angular and manic in their motions… A swarm of a tiny little war faces.

“I’ve never seen them do this,” Jean Louis said. “Something’s not right.”

One of them buzzed us. And then another… And then they were upon us, everywhere, in full-blown frenzy.

“Oh my God,” someone said.

Something hit my head from behind. I touched the back of my head and looked at my hand. Blood. Someone started screaming through the cacophony…. Terrible, throaty screams…

The Argentine girl…

Where she had been was now a globular pile of feathers.

Zing king-konged at the birds: swatting, grabbing, stomping. Shit. I hope the little fuckers don’t eat the coke. He went to his knees… Was he crying blood?

I ran through the river, fell down, loped on all fours, fell, scrambled, ran… I used both my lungs to narrate my actions, all verbs and adverbs and no nouns.

Maybe I’ll reach the beach. The mad flurry around me persisted. Stinging sensation all over me… I reached the beach and ran into the water. Cold as anything ever.

My mind does this thing when it comes face to face with overwhelming situations such as this one. I think of chicken nuggets. Big juicy chicken nuggets, lightly breaded, and accompanied with an array of dipping sauces…

Someone plowed into me, reawakening my focus, and then others splashed down around me… I scrambled deeper out, grabbing at the others, pulling them, getting pulled by them, maybe four feet deep now, I baptized myself and stayed under… I held my breath for a shit ton of seconds… I resurfaced, gulping at the air… I heard the elusive, distinctly nightmarish sound of heavy hyperventilation. The sky was all birds.

“Not like this,” Camilla said, from somewhere. “Not like this.”

WATCH YOUR HIDE FOR THE WOMEN IN WHITE: an excerpt from upcoming work of pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

Occoquan, VA -

Windows started tremblin’ with a sonic boom, boom . . . A cold girl will kill you in a darkened room – Jim Morrison

 What is the opposite of Men in Black? Don’t overthink it, eh? There you go, bubba, you nailed it: Women in White.

So . . .

It was the middle of November, a comprehensively worthless part of a worthless month, and I was sitting in a fake Italian joint in the cutesy microtown of Occoquan, Virginia. Animated soccer was flickering on the boob tube behind the bar in front of me. The US men’s soccer team was pistol-whipping the Mexicans in the colossal slab of concrete that is Azteca Stadium and this has a stranglehold on the attention of everyone in the restaurant, including all six bartenders.

My dog was moored at my feet and was wearing a poutish expression. He is too old for people food—that most prized possession of all warm-blooded creatures—so he was laying a passo-aggro guilt trip on me.

I coaxed a kid wearing an apron to fetch me a bottle of anything with bubbles in it and he alerted one of the bartenders who passionately ignored him.

The US men’s soccer team hadn’t beaten the Mexican team in Mexico since they had orcs and wood dwarves in their starting eleven, so the bug-eyed raptness was merited, however I wanted a goddamn beer. It had taken an hour to drive twenty miles to this kooky little hamlet and there is no beer on this planet or any other that is more satisfying than the post-driving beer.

I left five bucks to cover the basket of bread and butter that I had demolished with Beyond Thunderdome panache and walked outside to a honked-out crowd of fellow day-trippers (it was some half-ass holiday, and every six-figures Harley Davidson cosplayer in the mid-Atlantic region had come here to do seemingly absolutely nothing aside from clog up the sidewalk). I immediately noticed a weird whirring sound. I turned around and behind me idling down the skinny street was an eggshell-white NASA-looking SUV thing with a pretty brunette at the wheel. She stared at me like I was her dead twin as she rolled past me. My dog was a steadfast connoisseur of the outré himself and displayed high alertness at the sight and sound of this weird vehicle. The thing had no license plates, and I swear I got an audio whiff of Golden Earring’s Twilight Zone as it whirred up the street.

Later when getting back to DC, while stopped in a turning lane near the Lincoln Memorial, I looked in the rearview and saw the same weird vehicle stopped behind me in the lane next to me—and seemingly the same brunette at the wheel. The vehicle was about two car-lengths back, but there were no cars between us and no reason to keep such a distance. I took my eyes off it for a second or two and looked again and it was gone. I surveyed my surroundings for it, but it was nowhere upon nowhere upon nowhere. It could not have made a U-turn and sped off in the other direction because there was a low barrier in the median, nor were there any side streets that it could have turned off on. I am certain I had seen the thing and my still cannot summon an adequate reason for its disappearance.

I did not have supper that night. Why was this woman in white driving a weird white vehicle a la Atari’s Moon Patrol follow me back to DC and pull a Copperfield on me? I had gone to Occoquan for no legitimate reason other than to squander a few hours and cast around the Occoquan River for a little bit.

Later that week, I would at once gain more insight into strangeness and become even more baffled. I was driving up to Silver Spring, Maryland for band practice—I sing and drum in a local DC two-piece rock outfit called Public Figures—and I had pulled off in a little commercial drag of leafy Chevy Chase, Maryland to nab a coffee and, voila!—the same weird vehicle was parked there in front of the little café.

I walked in but there is no sign of the brunette I had seen at the vehicle’s helm the other day. It was nearly noon, but I ordered a coffee anyway, and I was fortifying it with an attack dose of cream and Splenda when I spy the brunette emerging from a hallway where the bathrooms are. She looks like she had jumped out of Cannonball Run—white jumpsuit, cascade of wavy brown hair, huge sunglasses . . .

She walked right up to me and said, “Where’s your pooch?”

“He’s home, probably snoozin’ for a bruisin’,” I said, displaying a coziness that surprised even me.

She laughed and said, “Do you live down in . . .” It was clear she had never said the word Occoquan aloud before either.

“Nah, I was just there screwin’ around for a bit. I live in DC.”

It might have only been for a literal quarter of a second, but I swear the lady’s eyes momentarily went completely black. Her face responded to my change of expression: one seized by bafflement.

She said, low, slowly, and in a brand-spankin’ new voice, “There are things that exist and events that occur only because you fear them. If they were not summoned by your fear, they would remain forever latent.”

I said nothing and just looked at her. I took a sip of my coffee, which was at once super burnt and not at all hot.

“Just about as grody as you thought it might be?”

“Yeah, and then some.”

She turned and started walking away. “Anybody who orders a cup of coffee at noon on the dot deserves what they get.” She paused at the exit and turned around and said, “I’ll see you around, Van.”

“Not if I don’t see you first,” I responded, as she was already three feet out the door.

Only when pulling into the driveway of our practice place did I realize I had never told the strange brunette my name.

I have yet to see her or her strange little eggshell-white vehicle again.

Data Science Fiction (notes & observations)

According to physicist/futurologist Michio Kaku, a *Type III* civilization is one where its inhabitants just sort of can intuitively figure out where out where the restroom, an inhabitant of a *Type II* civilization can breezily locate the restroom with a little guidance from their server or the hostess, whereas an inhabitant of *Type I* has to ask their server, the hostess, then the kitchen manager, both busboys, the valet, a whole fleet of chorus girls, the Coke machine, and still end up in the middle of the koi pond. We are a Type I civilization.

~~~

". . . And David Duchovny is in it but he's totally in drag and Ben Horne thinks he's General Lee and reenacts the Civil War in his office and fucking Billy Zane is there for some stupid fucking reason and then Josie gets turned into a goddamn NOB on a like chest-of-drawers or something and Cooper's still in it but he's all like Gap'd out in flannel and khakis and a poofy vest . . ."

Season 2 of Twin Peaks is basically the dream you have if you binge Season 1 and then snort a whole Red Baron Deep Dish Pizza.

~~~

Schopenhauer says false modesty is just a form of hypocrisy and l agree, which is why I enthusiastically proclaim l've eaten more crab rangoons than you've even dreamt about.

~~~

I would never ride in a time machine for fear it'd break down in that slice of the nineties when 10,000 Maniacs ruled the airwaves.

~~~

Saxony, 1850

“Last name first, first name last."

“Nietzsche, Friedrich."

“Shit, boy, how you spell that?"

*pulls out smart phone; Googles himself*

~~~

No one's ever gotten a Monte Cristo or Reuben or whatever and looked at their plate and go, "Welp, there it is. There's that pickle everyone's always carrying on about."

The average American spends over a hundred thousand hours every single year troubleshooting with pickles---pickles whose real estate could easily be taken up by an Oreo or Twizzler or plastic army man or something.

~~~

I drink ten thousand beers a week but here I am worrying if eating a red apple and green apple in the same day will explode me into six pieces.

~~~

Sonic Youth did some shit back in the day that today’s bands wouldn’t ever ever think of doing, like naming their band 'Sonic Youth.”

~~~

Breaking news: All I really ever wanted in life was a Lakers Girl, a red convertible Le Baron, Ed Furlongs haircut in T2, and some of those pills Gary Oldman takes all throughout The Professional

~~~

We'll never really know if there are elves in Iceland until we capture and interrogate every gnome, faerie, troll, and water spirit in the country.

~~~

What a drag it'd be to get a Ouija board and actually contact a spirit and that the spirit was just a goddamn awful speller.

~~~

Every time someone says "Friyay!", an angel gets held underwater for 90 seconds.

~~~

How long til international outlaw motorcycle club the Hell's Angels are officially sponsored by Under Armour?

~~~

There is only one truly dependable axiom in this universe and it is this: if you give someone ranch, they will ask you for blue cheese, and if you give someone blue cheese, they will ask you for ranch. (Same applies to grape jelly and strawberry jelly.)

~~~

On the Kentucky Derby: Race horses are the prissiest bunch of psychopaths on the planet. They should have a side bet---which horse will freak the fuck out and start biting itself and yelling about Dick Cheney & the CIA right out of the gate.

~~~

“I did not get my Spaghetti-O's. I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this."

~~~

Planet Earth to rebrand as Easy Does It

Planet Earth, the third planet from the Sun and the only known corner of the universe that can reflect on itself, is set to rebrand as Easy Does It by early 2023.

“We’re all very excited,” says Earth CEO Dex Chimney. “And we believe that potential customers, as well as our existing customers, of course, will share the same enthusiasm.”

Chimney, who heads the committee responsible for the rebranding, believes the new moniker Easy Does It is in tune with the recent market trends and the current consumers’ affection for establishments with cutesy, data-driven names that derive from low-hanging expressions and idioms such as Yours Truly, Loves Me Not, Mercy Me, Call Your Mother, No Kisses, Compliments Only, and Two in the Bush.

Will everyone embrace the change? Earth has been called Earth for a very, very long time.

“As much as we’d like to please all 8 billion bags-of-bones on this huge flamin’ ball of mud, we know that it’s just not realistic,” says Chimney. “Some customers are going to cling to the old moniker, and that’s just fine. Ultimately, they are entitled to call Easy Does It whatever they like, but I will say there will be no official name per se other than Easy Does It. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with a little benign discord to conjure up a little chatter on the internet.”

Why the need for a rebranding?

“It’s no secret that our planet had been steadily losing foot traffic,” Chimney says. “Downloads of the app were down, you’d see less buzz in all spheres of social media, be it GramaSpurt or Snitchster or Spaceface, there was considerably less action on Postblips and Boofdish….  I mean, the numbers don’t lie, and one could blame the economy, which is more fickle than ever, or the proliferation of options that customers now have, or the Covid19 pandemic, which, of course, was a huge challenge… But, whatever the case, after a careful examination of the data that our committee has collected, we decided to go ahead do it. Now or never, I say, which funnily enough, was actually one of the initial cutesy, data-driven expressions we thought might be useful in the rebrand before ultimately deciding on Easy Does It.” Chimney, who has been the planet’s CEO since 2018, goes on to say that the planet’s former name made sense at the time, but things can become stagnant, and sometimes a rebranding is necessary to communicate to the customer the fact that, not only are you still there, but you’re more vital than ever.

Will competitors follow suit? Are we to expect Mars and Venus to become Bend Over Backwards and Close But No Cigar?

Chimney chortles and says, “Look, what those other guys do is none of my concern. All I know is Easy Does It will be set to go by the spring of next year, and you can expect a full line of Easy Does It merchandise. T-shirts, jackets, trucker hats, visors, coffee mugs, patches, lapel pins, you name it! In fact, our preorders are through the roof and some of the items are already in danger of selling out. I encourage customers to download the Easy Does It app, if they haven’t already, open that sucker up, click on that little merch tab, put their accountability in zip-lock bag and toss it into a muddy river, and just buy-buy-buy ‘til their creepy little heart’s sated.”

What about the Moon?

“Oh, the Moon is staying the Moon, don’t worry,” says Chimney. “But we are installing 14.6 million square miles of faux boxwood flora panels—fake grass, you know—as well as conducting a largescale remodel of what used to be the Moon’s food court. We expect the new roll-out, which will be sort of a gathering place, culinary hub, and event space all rolled into one, and heavily featuring local merchants and local DJs, to take place by summer of 2023.”

The increasingly excited Chimney dreamily adds, “Oh, and the, uh, logos for both joints are changing. Easy Does It will be rendered in an adult cursive medley of electric pink, camembert yellow, and babyshit blue, while the Moon will be a QR code with a little moon under it.”

Hotel Narnia

Whether plausible or not, the Endless Doppelgangers of the Infinite Universe Theory has gained enough traction among scientific types to be taken seriously—or certainly no less seriously than Creationism and all the other equally Technicolor theories. It simply suggests that if the universe is infinite, which why the heck wouldn’t it be, then within its infiniteness are an infinite number of planets bustling with infinite scenarios. At first this sounds optimistic. For example, in one of these infinite scenarios on one of the infinite universe’s infinite planets, there is a you who has not only won the Fantasy Five Lotto but can also pump out the entire works of Erik Satie on piano using on your prosthetic toe—plus, you can also fly simply by flapping your arms. However in another one of these infinite scenarios, you have just thrown chunky-style cat vomit in the face of your lover and pummeled your piano teacher into a maroon lagoon, and all while glued to the boob tube, watching Wheel of Fortune, which you never ever miss under any circumstances—and maybe on another you have done these very same deeds while hosting Wheel of Fortune. My point is, the word outlandish is a bottom dweller in the lexicon of the infinite.  

For better or worse, most of these infinite scenarios are neither wondrous nor dire, but simply a little off.

Here is one such scenario . . .

In the farthest reaches of the infinite cosmos, way past the ambitious gaze of the Hubble and its brethren, there lies a planet in most regards identical to Earth, except on this planet—let’s call it Pearth—the prodigiously talented rock drummer Neil Peart did not join the Canadian power-trio Rush and Rush never became, well, the prog-rock juggernaut that we’re all familiar with here on this planet. (On Pearth, after original drummer John Rutsey left the band, remaining members Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson scrounged up enough dough to buy an old pool hall in the western fringe of Toronto which they presciently turned into a video game arcade and were both thick thousandaires before their thirtieth birthdays and abandoned music altogether and simply nestled into the cozy humdrum of a couple of your average Canadian dudesters).

But, yeah, instead of joining Rush, one day while vacationing in Tierra del Fuego, Neil Peart met a too-hip-for-their-own-good quartet of Californians named Don Henley and Glenn Fry and Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner and formed a band called the Eagles.

Let’s zoom in on one of their practice sessions . . .

1975, five men with shipwrecked shags done up with corduroy and flannel; particle board walls, gourmet carpet, instruments everywhere, a pinball machine and various tables and chairs and couches, a roiling loom of Winston Light smoke . . .

“Okay, check this out, so the part where ya’ll are goin’ You can’t hiiiide yer lyin’ eyes and your smiiiile is a thin disguise . . .” said Neil Peart from behind his hillside of drums. “I’m gonna switch over to sixteenths on the hi-hat and go into this neat little sort of raggamuffin groove—but in seven-eight. Wait, boom-boom-pot-boom-boom-boom-pot!… Yeah, seven-eight. And then same thing second chorus but with syncopated china boy on like every other up. So it’ll be like, Dut-dut-chee! Dut-dut-dut-chee!” Neil Peart’s long simian arms air-illustrated the drumline while the other Eagles, languidly perched on and around a couple of big couches, nodded their heads and emitted various murmurs of unconvinced accord.

“Whatever you say, skipper,” said primary vocalist Don Henley, who mostly played acoustic guitar, though sometimes switched over to bongos and other types of percussion.

“Also, hear me out real quick . . .” Neil Peart said, deftly shaping his hands into a steeple and putting on a gaze of either shamanic sensibility or hardened charlatanry. “Glenn, I know this is your song, but, just check it out… What if… What if instead of making the song about, you know, this little hunny bunny who’s all done up in tight denim and lace and going to the cheatin’ side of town to pick up any ol’ Jon with more than two greenbacks in his billfold, what if we made it about . . . a dragon?”

“Hmmm . . . Interesting,” said all the other Eagles except Glenn Fry.

“Right? And it’s not just any ol’ dragon. This is a metalloid space dragon, indigenous to the Moons of Meatzor, and his scales are as tough as the temperament of a Xuruvvian slime devil . . .”

“That’s wild,” said Randy Meisner. “I like that a lot.”

“ . . . And this dragon is comprehensively ailing for something more in life than the quotidian doldrums of, you know, just being Joe Proletariat day after uninspiring day.” 

“Keep it comin’, man, keep it comin’.”

Bernie Leadon lit up with epiphany. “Reminds me of that Working Man song by them twinks up in your neck of the woods. Zeppelin wannabes and such.”

Neil Peart ignored this and looked at Glenn Fry for his opinion.

“I don’t know, Neil,” said Glenn Fry, staring at the top of his eelskin cowboy boots. “It’s just, it’s supposed to be a love song.”

“Absolutely, my friend, I know it’s supposed to be a love song. And that’s why the narrative of the chorus shall be from the perspective of the girl dragon.”

“Hmm,” said Glenn Fry, fidgeting like a hamster. “Look, how ‘bout let me think on it and in the meantime, we can run through that sissyboy number that Don’s been screwin’ around with. Motel whatever.”

“Hotel California, dipshit,” said Don Henley.

“That reminds me . . . Hear me out, Don. Everyone knows California,” said Neil Peart. “But nobody knows Narnia.”  The rest of the Eagles strained their brains to place this unfamiliar word and Neil Peart said, “At least, not yet.”

“See, this one I don’t think can be changed. I already laid out the lyrics and had ‘em typed up and everything.”

“We’d just be lopping off two anorexic little syllables, Don. Your larynx will love you forever for it.”

“I mean, we can try it,” said Don Henley, using his old cigarette to light his new cigarette. “No harm in that, I guess.”

“Now we’re talkin’,” said Neil Peart. “Also, I was thinking, we oughta call up what’s-his-nuts and get him to throw down one of them sprawling epic solos he does so damn well.”

“Who, Joe Walsh?”

“Yeah, Walsh,” said Neil Peart, optimistically. “That boy can rip.”

“Joe’s the man,” said Bernie Leadon.

“I’m really diggin’ how this is really startin’ to come together. Pretty damn cool, ain’t it?” said Randy Meisner. He eyeballed his Rolex. “Whoa, it’s already a hair past a freckle, boys. Ya’ll ready to start jammin’? We can blow through Don’s motel thingy and then work on that tripped-out tune Neil was working on. What’s it called, Atlas Smirked?”

“Shrugged,” said Neil Peart, no longer smiling. “Atlas Shrugged.”

“It’ll be like part two of the Mr. Fountainhead song.”

“Man, you are reading my mind,” said Neil Peart, bristling with optimism.

Glenn Fry let out a huge sigh, so expansive and exhaustive that there was no way it was fake. “Look, ya’ll, I gotta say something.”

The other Eagles looked at Glenn, all of them placid with anticipation.

“I’m not really a fan of the Mr. Fountainhead song,” Glenn said, avoiding eye contact with the other Eagles.

They all looked at each other, subtly frowning but obviously displeased with this news.

“Kinda weird you’re tellin’ us this now,” said Bernie Leadon. “Typical singer.”

“I don’t mind playin’ it but I just don’t think it should be track, you know, numero frickin’ uno on the album.”

The other Eagles guffawed and chortled.

“No, maybe Glenn’s right,” said Neil Peart. “Out of sheer curiosity, what exactly about Mr. Fountainhead is it that you’re having issue with, Glenn?”

Glenn Fry didn’t care for Neil Peart’s patronizing tone so he let loose. “Man, nobody’s gonna dig this fuckin’ song but fuckin’ commie spinsters and fuckin’ forty year old creepsters who still whack off to Barbie. Period.”

Nobody said anything so Glenn Fry continued, “I mean, I’m just being honest, guys. Okay? I’m just sayin’ what’s in my heart.” He patted his chest. “I’d be lying to ya’ll if I said anything different.”

“Wow,” said Neil Peart. “Okay.” He stood up and began clambering his way through his hectare of drums. Eventually he reemerged outside of them and said, “Tell you what, I’m gonna pop out and smoke a cigarette and kinda cool off for a bit and then, I don’t know, maybe go find a new fucking band. See you guys whenever.” He did his ectomorphic lope to the door and opened it and disappeared into the yellow haze of the southern California afternoon.

“Jesus, Glenn,” said Don Henley. “That was pretty harsh.”

“Look, Neil’s a weird guy—and that’s one of the things I like about him—but I swear he thinks he’s a goddamn wizard. I’m tired of singin’ about orcs and labyrinths and mirrors and all that,” said Glenn Fry.

“Personally I think that the fantasy element Neil comes up with is a pretty neat contrast with how our music sounds and feels,” said Bernie Leadon.

“Do you now.”

“Yeah, man, the space thing is pretty far out, you know? It makes for a real interestin’ juxtaposition with that bluesy, jazzy, southern rock thing we got goin’ on. It’s like people almost expect us to write songs about, you know, drivin’ down the highway and scoopin’ up girls and drinkin’ beer, et cetera, et cetera.” Bernie Leadon stared at his Miller High Life longneck for a long second. “I think we kinda catch ‘em off guard when we, you know, lay the intergalactic stuff on ‘em.”

“I one hundred percent disagree,” said Glenn Fry. “I think that intergalactic stuff, as you call it, is where we fuck up big time.” He consulted his own Miller High Life longneck and shook his head with low-grade disgust. “I’d literally rather sing songs about garbage than goddamn flying saucers and all that.”

“Oh, come on.”

“For real, my brother’s in the garbage business because he says garbage never goes away. And people are never gonna stop wantin’ to make garbage go away so they pay my brother whatever he asks ‘em on a weekly basis. Real smart man. See, all that to me is way more humanistic than the damn space bullshit that Neil keeps tryin’ to load us up with. Way more.”

Randy Meisner pulled a joint out from on top of his ear and lit it and said, “This is all gonna blow over, ya’ll know that, right? This shit happens all the damn time. I guarantee you, every single day on the calendar some band somewhere is going through this same kinda bullshit. You watch, we’ll meet up in a couple of days and everything will be groovy. Don, we can knock out your motel song and then we can do that bluesy thing that you’ve been working on, Glenn, and next thing you know we’ll be trying to figure out where we can put all our platinum albums and our Grammies and we’ll be up to our bolo ties in babes and coke and whatever the hell else we want—and when we want it!”

The four of them smiled and loosened up a little bit. “Always the damn optimist, this guy,” said Glenn Fry. “I love the hell out of you, Randy.”

“Right back atcha, brother.”

“Tell you what I’m gonna do,” said a newly cheerful Don Henley. “I’m gonna walk over to that telephone and I’m gonna pick it up and dial 636-9660, which is the phone number for that Pizza Hut down the street, and I’m gonna get us two huge-ass pizzas with extra cheese and extra pepperoni and then I’m gonna play that pinball machine over there until my head explodes into ten pieces.”

Randy Meisner and Glenn Fry both hooted and did a spilly toast with their beers.

“Don’t do that extra anchovies thing this time, Don,” said Bernie Leadon. “That was funny the first time but it wasn’t funny the second time.”

Dialing the number, Don Henley said to him, “One of these nights I’m gonna write a song about you, Bernie, and you ain’t gonna like the lyrics.”

“Man, you gonna be a goober all your life or just most of it?”

Everybody laughed and then Don Henley ordered the pizzas and told them he’ll come pick them up in fifteen minutes and hung up the phone right as the door opened and in walked Neil Peart with a gross of comically big submarine sandwiches and two big plastic bottles of 7 Up. He was carrying everything like it was a bunch of firewood.

“Alright, gentlemen, who is hungry and who is thirsty and who is both hungry and thirsty?” he said, with an eight-inch grin.

Three of the Eagles said, “Me!” and Glenn Fry said, “Man, you trying to win my heart with a goddamn sandwich?”

Before Neil Peart could anything, Glenn Fry smiled real big. “I’m just shittin’ ya, brother. And I appreciate it but I’m actually good for now,” he said, rubbing his belly.

“You are neither a scholar nor a gentleman but I love you anyway,” said Neil Peart.

Glenn Fry started to say something but decided against it.

“I’m gonna run over and pick up the pizzas real quick. I’ll be back in a jiffy,” said Don Henley, frisking himself for his Cadillac keys. “Oh, ya’ll do me a favor and save some of that 7 Up and we’ll do a bunch of Slammers after practice. That bottle of Jose over there ain’t half empty, I can tell ya that much.”

“Heeeee haw, brother,” said Neil Peart, troubleshooting with his submarine sandwich. And then after Don Henley was fully gone, he said, “Okay, let’s channel the spirit of your forefathers and do this the old fashioned way. Raise your hand if you do not prefer Hotel Narnia to Hotel California.”

Nobody raised their hand.

Whip Appeal

At the request of the doctor’s assistant, Ron Verbish nestled into the big couch, as he had a hundred times before. The assistant exited the office, gently closing the door behind her, and leaving Ron alone. The doctor, she had told him, will be with you shortly.

After marinating in ten minutes of dainty blip-hop coming from an unseen speaker, the door cinematically opened and in walked Dr. Lewis Threedots, Ron’s zillion dollar psychologist.

“Nice day for a picnic, innit?” said Dr. Threedots. It was an inside joke of theirs of forgotten origin. Dr. Threedots was a big man, and he knew how to broadcast his dimensions. Big pants, big coat, big shoes, big beard, big hair, big voice, big breath . . .

Ron began nervously bantering about the weather—no rain for ages, hot in the sun, cold in the shade, yuk-yuk-yuk . . . Dr. Threedots eyed him suspiciously, so Ron propped himself up a little bit and said, “Doc, I got a problem.”

Dr. Threedots held his breath and maintained eye contact with Ron like they were discussing how to avoid an imminent nuclear war. Uh oh, the doctor thought. This man is the biggest milquetoast in the history of humanity. Basically sucks up the woes and trifles of the world like a hundred-dollar Hoover. Therefore if he says he has a problem, he has a problem—so I guess we’re not gonna sit around and yap about Milan Kundera and Caddyshack and the Los Angeles Angels, per usual, ad barfeum.

“For the last month, give or take . . .” Ron Verbish said, staring at his feet on the far end of the couch, “. . . since basically right after the last time I last saw you.” He sighed and looked out the office’s lone tiny window. “Shit, this is awkward. I’ve not talked to anyone about this yet and, I don’t know, it’s tougher that I figured it’d be . . .”

“Go on, Ron,” Dr. Threedots said, leaning in. “Lay it on me, bud.”

“Every time I take a shower, which is daily, and sometimes twice a day if I go biking or fishing or whatever, I get that Jon Secada stuck in my head . . . Blah, blah, it’s just another daaaayyy . . .”

Holyfugginshit, the doctor thought.

“Like, as soon as I turn the water on, it starts just starts blaring, right here between my ears,” Ron said, pointing at his head.

Dr. Lewis Threedots could not believe what he was hearing. For he too, had had Jon Secada’s Just Another Day start blaring in his head the second he turned the water on in his shower.

Ron’s lips kept moving but the doctor had tuned him out. Snap out of it, man, be professional. “For about a month, eh?” he said to Ron.

“Yeah,” Ron said. “I saw you last, what, the third Wednesday of May? It started like right after that.”

“Interesting,” the doctor said, nodding, hands clasped. What in the name of all that’s holy, he was thinking.

Ron continued, “It’s invasive as hell, doc. It just fucking lodges itself there and stays there. Over and over and over, ‘Cuz I…… Iiiiiii don’t wanna say it, I don’t wanna find another way . . .Make it through the day without youuuu’ . . .”

“Hmm,” the doctor said. Yeah, he was fully aware how invasive it was. He could sing the whole song using nothing but farts and burps if he had to. He decided this session would go nowhere unless he opened up . . .

“Ron, I’ll be honest, I’ve been having the same weird shit happen to me,” he said, throwing in an odd little chortle at the end.

Ron retracted his legs and swiveled and sat up facing the doc. “What do you mean?”

“I mean every single time, without fail, for the last twenty-seven god-awful days, I get Jon Secada’s 1992 summertime hit fucking single Just Another Day stuck in my head as soon as I get in the shower.”

“You’re joking,” Ron said, forcing a smile.

“I am not joking. I wish to hell I was joking.”

“Oh my God,” Ron said, staring at nothing. “Oh my God.”

The two men sat in silence for a long cold minute. The whir of the AC unit reduced the blip-hop muzak to a being merely implied.

“Have you ever had this happen before,” Ron asked Dr. Threedots.

“No, of course not,” the doctor replied, sharply. “Nor have I heard of it happening to anyone else, in my clinic or elsewhere. This is dragon country.”

Ron contemplated all this and then said, “I was thinking… Maybe it’s some place that I go a lot. Maybe the muzak at my CVS plays it a lot and I don’t notice. Or maybe at my Safeway or something.”

The doctor eyed him optimistically. “Which CVS, which Safeway?”

Ron told him and Dr. Threedots said he had not stepped foot in either place in probably a decade. The two men lived in opposite parts of town and therefore conducted their daily business in unneighborly spheres.

“Perhaps we should conduct an experiment,” the doctor said, dreamily.

“I don’t wanna be a Guinea pig.”

“You won’t a Guinea pig, don’t worry,” the doctor said. “C’mon, Ron, I wouldn’t do that to you. We can just keep it real simple, okay? We can meet at a place with a shower, maybe that Planet Bareflex over on Corbitt, and, you know, just see if it happens, and document the whole thing.”

Ron thought of the two of them standing naked in the shower, both unconditionally humming Jon Secada, and he grimaced. The doctor detected what was going on in his head so he said, “Look, we meet there—or wherever we decide—and we wear swimming trunks, and I’ll set up my equipment . . .”

“You know it’s going to happen, so what’s the point? We’re obviously both doomed to have this stupid fucking song stuck in our heads the rest of our fucking lives—unless we decide to stop fucking taking showers.” Ron felt his face turning red. “I fucking love showers. Long hot wonderful showers. And my water pressure is a goddamn beast. I could sit in there all day. Except I can’t. Now I can’t. Because of…,” he trailed off and steeped his head in his hands.

Dr. Threedots leaned over and patted him on the back and said, “I love showers too. Favorite part of the day, no doubt about it. I’ll stand in there ‘til my wife has to knock on the door and check on me. Only, yeah, I can’t anymore either.”

Ron, head still in hands, began rocking back in forth. The doctor hoped to hell he wasn’t crying. “At least it ain’t that bad a song,” the doctor said, chummily. Ron broke out of his weird trance and looked at Dr. Threedots like he was a bowl full of ear cheese. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he wanted to hit someone in the face, as hard as he could, with bad intentions.

The doctor winced and leaned back and said, “Could definitely be worse, that’s for damn sure. Imagine if it was Aqualung or, I don’t know, Pancho and Lefty.”

Ron would in fact prefer either of those songs to Jon Secada’s melodramatic turdball.  

Their time expired. Dr. Threedots made vague plans, which Ron Verbish dully acquiesced to, and the two men agreed to discuss these plans in more detail on the phone within the next few days. In short, they would pretend none of this shit was happening, secretly hoping the song would disappear from their lives and they wouldn’t even notice, and they’d joke about it in their session a month from now. But both men knew that this would not at all be the case. They were, in fact, as Ron suggested, doomed to have the song stuck in their heads for the rest of their lives while they showered.

Ron said bye to Dr. Threedots and left the office, also saying bye to his assistant on the way out. The doctor sat there for a while and then readied himself for his next patient.

 An alarm. Triplets of sonic awfulness. An alarm clock on a cell phone. On his cellphone. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk! Dr. Lewis Threedots opened his eyes, ran his hand along the side of his bed until he located the cord on his phone charger and then traced it back to his phone. He wrangled with the phone until his alarm was silenced. Awful damn alarm. He had chosen it solely on the merit of its name: Hitchcock—nestled there between Hillside and Icicles.

Jon Secada.

What was that all about.

What kind of evil fucking dream . . .

Had he heard Jon Secada recently? Probably. Maybe in that corny beerhouse or whatever his wife had dragged him to the other night. O’Flannel’s Bubbles and Grubbery. Or maybe, yeah, in the CVS. Probably the CVS, he thought optimistically. Still, what a damn nightmare. Did he know anybody named Ron Verbish? He certainly did not have a patient named Ron Verbish. Dumb name, like out of a low-hanging Vonnegut book, or, yeah, a shitty dream.

Dr. Threedots slouched his way into the bathroom and peed his guts out, as he does, and then put on his robe and went into the kitchen and grinded a big handful of coffee beans and started his coffee and then went back into his bed and cheek-smooched his wife, who was still sleeping.

His coffee machine sounded its triumphant little chirp, so he went back into the kitchen and he poured himself a cup of coffee and put two Splendas in it and some creamer and then went into the bathroom and plopped down on the pot and let his bowels do its thing, all the while sipping on his coffee and checking emails on his phone.

When he finished, he opened the shower curtain and turned on the water—and, holyfugginshit, right there between his ears, with a sort of dazzling but hellish absoluteness, Babyface goes, “Keep on whippin’ on me, work it on me, whip all your sweet sweet lovin’ on me . . .”

THE CREEP WHO KILLED THE POWER: and excerpt from upcoming pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

Leesburg, VA

 The month of January in Washingtonland (I’ve always preferred this moniker to the more commonly used “DMV”) has about as much charisma as a head of wet lettuce. Nobody coming, nobody going . . . Federal government workers and students alike do their little snowfall tarantella, tongues anointed with glossolalia, praying for another full day of doin’ nothin’ . . . You could cut the collective sloth in the air with a plastic spork.

So I decided to dip out to the closest ecto-Beltway cluster of civilization that I could, a town that straddles the region’s perimeter: Leesburg, Virginia.

Leesburg is a scrunched-up little place that looks cute and quaint and cheap, but it is not. The burgers in Leesburg are still eighteen American dollars and the local beers are all named after Italo Calvino short stories and the films of Jean-Luc Godard. In short, it’s infested with the same hyper-scholastic fervor that keeps the good people of the District of Columbia from being able to enjoy themselves.

“I’ll have a coffee and a menu,” I said to the big blonde waitress at the Leesburg Diner, an endearingly anachronistic little magnet for froot loops like myself.

Within seconds of my plopping down in a booth, the power went out, killing the lights, the music, the cash register, and presumably all the kitchen equipment.

“Well, that ain’t good,” the waitress said, dropping off my coffee and a menu that was a vast as the universe itself. A quick flip through it suggested it offered ten thousand variations of yellow and brown food.

“I’ll be sixty in twelve years,” I said to her, “and I’ve never seen a menu even half this big.”

She shrugged pitifully and said, “Well, I might not be able to serve you,” and then went around the restaurant addressing the heavy unrest that was building up. “We’ll wait a few minutes and see if it comes back on.”

A fat man in slacks and a bath robe angrily slammed his fists down. “How the hell am I supposed to eat if I can’t even see what I’m eating?”

“You’ll figure it, hon,” the waitress calmly replied. “Blind people do it all the time.”

The light from outside trickled in through the blinds, but it was not a sunny day, so the diner was creepily crepuscular.

“Anybody else think it’s weird that the power went out as soon as that guy sat down?” said some ghoul in a Harley Davidson vest.

I wondered what unlucky soul in which he was referring.

The waitress shushed him and said, “Oh, he don’t have nothin’ to do with it.”

This egged the Harley guy on further. “I wonder what suspicious devices he might be concealing under that goofy hat,” he said pointing at the top of my head. “Nobody wears a hat of such enormous dimensions unless they have something to conceal.”

“Something big!” said a skinny guy in goggles. “And going tic-toc-tic-toc!”

“Easy, fellas,” I grumbled back at them, avoiding eye contact.

“I bet he’s got it pulled down like that hide his third eye—or maybe his antennas,” said a woman who looked a little touched by the angels. Someone else started quoting scripture. A dog barked from somewhere in the back of the house. What was up with this place?

“Yeah, maybe all the above!” hollered the Harley guy, now ten feet closer to me.

“Everybody hush!” the waitress snarled. “Y’all are giving me a headache.”

A West African gentleman in track suit walked in and the waitress got all buggy with the prospect of having to explain why there were no lights on and the stove didn’t work, et cetera, until she realized he had a big manilla envelope in his hand.

“Can you sign for this?” he said, dully.

“Oh! Of course, hon. That I can do,” she said. “I thought you were a customer, ha-ha-ha.”

She signed and the guy gave her the envelope and turned around and walked out. The waitress eyed the thing dubiously.

“I hope that ain’t the electric bill,” I said, prompting of chortles and snickers around the restaurant.

“No, no, I paid the electric bill on Monday!”

“That’s what they all say,” said somebody from a nearby booth.

“The whole damn block is without power,” said the bath robe guy, his fat face illuminated by his cellphone which he was gazing into. “It ain’t just this place. Hell, I don’t think there’s any juice in the whole town… My wife’s two blocks down getting her hair done and she said everything’s off everywhere.”

One by one everyone in the diner swiveled their gaze from the fat man looking at his phone to me. The waitress slinked off to back of the house, leaving me alone with an audible membrane of Dada-esque murmurs, featuring a cast of exclusively four-syllable words. These people, I could tell, wanted to toss me like a frisbee into the nearest me volcano.

I left a five-dollar bill on the table and said thanks to the gumball machine and exited the joint.

The sidewalk was packed with people looking around at each other and fucking around on their phones and chirping about the subject on hand. “Why no power? yuk-yuk-yuk,” was the collective mantra.

The traffic light was completely off. A chubby cop had stationed directly beneath and was semaphoring with great effort at what little traffic there was.

I walked in the direction of my car, which was a few blocks away. People were everywhere. The chatter intensified…

“This guy pulls into town…” said someone into their phone.

“… and like as soon as he parks, poof! no power nowhere,” said another.

“You know who just walked right past me,” said another.

“Yeah, white Audi, DC tags…”

“ . . . has this occult look about him.”

“I’m tellin’ ya, it happened as soon as this creep rolled into town…”

Menacing glances everywhere. The whole town had turned into a living breathing Ralph Steadman painting… Dozens of pinched, bitter faces, getting more sinister by the second, and steadily encroaching. It reminded me of a bad acid trip years ago on a lonesome Florida beach deep at night. That awful sand, with its myriad of sneering little faces. Pure unmitigated evil as far as the eye could see…

The cop under the traffic light stopped gesticulating like a chimp and stared right at me. I could not discern his expression beneath his aviators and his mustache, but I could tell it was not an affable one.

Suddenly my nostrils were besieged by the smell of Nag Champa incense… A Himalayan shop sat snookered between a café and a hookah bar. I ducked into it real quick. Lit candles were all over the place, illuminating trinkets and incense and rugs, everything teal and purple and pink. Some sort of weird flute jazz trickled out of unseen speakers.

“Helloooo, can I help you?” said a pretty brunette in a moo moo.

“You don’t by chance possess the ability to transport me safely to another time and place, do you?”

“Come again?”

I paused to rethink my question and then said, “You don’t by chance sell smoke grenades, do you?”

“Smoke grenades? Is that a type of incense?”

“Yes. Kind of. Actually, skip all that. Let me get six bushels of Nag Champa and one of those Dhaka Topi hats.”

I handed the girl my debit card and winced for ten straight seconds. Then I took off my Sterkowski leather “Brando” hat, hid it in my jacket, put the Dhaka Topi hat on top of my head, and then applied a tragically fake mustache that I always kept in my wallet. I thanked the girl and went outside into the crowd…

“Attention, comrades! I just saw that slinked-out gringo in the sissy headgear go scampering into City Hall. Let’s go smoke him out and then boot his creepy ass all the way back to Dee Cee!”

Cheers and hoots and tons of clapping everywhere. I dumped off all the Nag Champa on a trio of bugged-eyed teeny boppers armed with rolling pins and muddlers and they lit the whole thing with great enthusiasm and marched off toward City Hall, with the whole crowd in tow.

The prospect of peace on Earth shrunk deeper into its scrotum that day . . . I ended up inching out of the whole terrible scene, tip-toeing backwards like a French general, all the way to the safety of the Audi. I cranked the thing up with bad intentions and shot out of town, as one does when faced with the prospect of getting strung up like a buck and skinned alive by a bloodthirsty mob.   

ANTENNAVILLE (A FICTIONAL INTERLUDE) — excerpt from upcoming work of pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

ANTENNAVILLE (A FICTIONAL INTERLUDE) — excerpt from upcoming work of pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

Here is where I put on my Milan Kundera hat and insert a few pages of fiction inside of a book of (mostly) nonfiction. (Kundera often did the opposite, tossing whole philosophical chapters about the difference between rocks and pebbles into the belly button of his novels about boy meets girl, boy cheats on girl, boy knocks up other girl, boy tragically dies in a robbery gone awry in some syrupy backstreet of Phnom Penh, et cetera, ad barfeam . . . )

This little story, I believe, could easily take place in real life—and probably one day will, if it hasn’t already. If you want to pull something daffy and try to rip this idea off, knock yourself out, granted you might probably maybe 100% get a visit from my old pals Gino Scarlotti and Joey Three Flushes, who won’t kill you with kindness as much as they will turn your kneecaps inside out with kindness. (It’ll warm my creepy little heart if you think I’m bluffing.)

Okay, here goes! (and rendered in second person so you feel like you’re part of the action).

Your name is Shayla Wayward, and you are the founder and unconditional/nonnegotiable supreme dictator of Deep Woods, Inc., a guerrilla marketing firm that specializes in fabricating cryptids and bringing their “legend” to life and then perpetuating that legend so to draw attraction to whatever American town desires it. Basically for three hundred fifty dollars an hour, plus tax and gratuity, you will turn someone’s busted-up little jerkwater town into a primo attraction for paranormalheads and kooksters. You basically do what Mothman routinely does for Point Pleasant, West Virginia, or what them little green men do for Roswell, New Mexico.

Currently you are in a log cabin/city hall, sitting across from a new client, a corpulent gentleman by the name of Garnet Dukedom, mayor of Saskwelchahawhaw, South Dakota.

“Mister Mayor, as you know, all of this is 100% confidential,” you say. “I encourage my clients to really let loose and provide me with as much information as possible, whether it be facts about your town or just ideas you have stampeding around your noodle. Does that make sense?”

“Yes, ma’am, it does,” Mayor Dukedom says, creaking his chair up a little close to his desk and leaning in. “I’ll be candid, our economy here in Saskwelchahawhaw is as dead as yesterday’s bread. We’ve exhausted about every option on the planet to get out of the red, and we currently sit about one dead donkey away from total financial collapse. Which is, yeah, where you and your team come in.”

Ah, yes, your team. Dex Chimney, the ideas man, and Case “Land Line” Bossier, the techhead. They were currently in your 2018 Jeep Guzzler, probably listening to Rocket from the Crypt and snorting high caliber cocaine.

“And, I might add, why we have agreed to the exorbitant fee you’ve thwacked us over the head with,” the mayor says, sulkily.

“My fee is high because my results are guaranteed. My work is one hundred percent effective.”

“So far.”

“Well, yeah.”

The mayor clasps his hands and rests them behind his head and leans back. “Fear not, Miss Wayward, I have no interest in squabblin’ about all that. I understand your price is high because the quality of your work is high, which is why we’re sitting across from each other and not playin’ tiddlywinks on Zoom or whatever.”

You mentally clocked in as soon as you sat down across from the mayor. Thirty bucks you’ve made before either one of you has even had to stifle a poot.

“I’ll be candid, sir, I’ve already taken a look around your gorgeous little town. You’ve definitely got a lot of necessary ingredients to make this thing work,” you say, sincerely. “I’m confident I can secure some quality lore for you to, well, nurture.” That’s spook-speak for you’re pretty sure you can cook up a bullshit monster for the mayor and his little froot loop coterie of pinched-face spinsters so they can swindle the rubes.

“That’s music to my ears and nose and everything else, Miss Wayward.”

“Good to hear. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to start with a line of routine questions.”

The mayor nods in noncommittal accord.

“Are there already any sort of legends or myths or, you know, just plain ol’ spooky stories floating around town? Any alien abductions or haunted properties or unusually large hairy beasts or anything like that?”

“Oof.” The mayor tugs at his little mustache and leans back in his chair. “As far as I know, nothing at all. Zilch.”

“Weird lights in the sky, phantom dogs, unusually large birds, haunted train tracks . . . ”

“No, ma’am. At least, no that I know of.”

“You mentioned a donkey. Was that just an expression or do you have a lot of donkeys around here?” In your cursory tour of the square mile yawnfest that was Saskwelchahawhaw, you had seen zero donkeys—or cows or chickens or sheep or, yeah, people.

“Well, I was jokin’, but now that you mention it, Old Man Barksdale has msybe a dozen or so donkeys crawlin’ all over his farm. He uses ‘em to haul grain around.”

“Interesting,” you say, optimistically. “That there is excellent news.”

“Why is that?”

“Donkeys are not indigenous to the Dakotas, correct?”

“No, definitely not.”

You draw a little picture of a donkey in my memo pad.

“Oh, before I forget, how married are you and your fellow townsfolk to the name, um, shit . . . ”

“Saskwelchahawhaw?”

“Yeah, that,” you say. “Are y’all stuck with that name or do you think you could maybe change it?”

This question appears to truly perplex the mayor. He zones out for a long second and says, “To be honest with you, I have no idea. Personally I’ve never cared too much for the name. Years and years ago, before my time, Saskwelchahawhaw was simply known as Dickrock Bend. But, you know, times change, womens’ lib and all that, which is totally fine,” the mayor says, fidgeting like a hamster. “But yeah, make a long story short, Gus Crampton, my predecessor, got bullied into going down to the Clerk of Courts in Butterburg—you know, the county seat up the road—and officially changing the name from Dickrock Bend to Saskwelchahawhaw. Real boneheaded move, if you ask me, but, as I said, this was before my time.”

“So that’s a yes,” you say, with an affable chuckle.

“Yeah, that’s most definitely a yes. I’ll personally look into it on Monday.”

“It’s just that Saskwelchahawhaw is an absolute six lane pile-up of a name. I have to do Zen and watch Jane Fonda for an hour before I even think about saying it.”

“Tell me about it,” the mayor says, probably picturing Jane Fonda doing her shimmery little spandex spread. “Apparently, it means ‘death by ennui and malaise’ in the local yahoo language. You know, Native Americans and such.”

“Hmm.”

The mayor clasps his hands together like he’s about to pray. The smell of Certs and Polo Crest marauds your nostrils. “Lemme ask you, if we can change it, what do you think we should we change it to?”

“Hmm . . . Anything in the English language but Dickrock Bend,” you say, thinking. “Is there any sort of, like, structure or monument or mountain or anything at all notable at all around here?”

“Well, we do have the biggest antenna in South Dakota. In fact, it’s the second biggest antenna in North Dakota and South Dakota.”

Your eyes bristle with epiphany. “Mayor Dukedom, you are a genius.”

The mayor immediately loosens up upon hearing this. It’s almost certainly the first time in his life he’s ever been christened with such a champion of a noun. “How’s that, young lady?”

“Antennaville,” you say, and snap your fingers real loud for effect. “Pure uncut gold.”

“Antennaville . . . Antennaville . . . ” The mayor goes full mantra with the word for a little bit, fucking around where to put the accent (“AN-ten-na-ville, An-TEN-na-ville, An-ten-na-VILLE”) . . . You text your team a convoy of Simpsons-yellow thumbs-up emojis as the mayor pulls out a checkbook big enough for a Sikorsky to plop down on.

Fast forward to a couple of years later. . . . You and your crew and Mayor Dukedom are cheersing each other with barrel-aged Manhattans and watching a hundred or so cryptidistas deck out the town square with all sorts of bug-eyed, kookcentric crafts and trinkets, all underneath a huge sign that in dainty cursive proclaims: “WELCOME TO ANTENNAVILLE! HOME OF THE CHUPABURRO!—AND THE WORLD’S ONLY CHUPABURRO FESTIVAL!”

ALL HAIL THE SNALLYGASTER: an excerpt from the upcoming work of pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

ALL HAIL THE SNALLYGASTER: an excerpt from the upcoming work of pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

~Washington, DC / Frederick County, Maryland

Maybe the closest I ever felt to being culturally appropriated is when a bunch of slinked-out gringos decided to name their beer festival after my personal favorite DC-area cryptid: the Snallygaster.

“THE EAST COAST’S GREATEST BEER FESTIVAL!” reads the header on the Snallygaster Beer Festival GramaSpurt page.

See, beer festivals are unique in that you take two positive words—beer and festival—and combine them to create a huge dogshit-sodden plank of unfun awfulness.

“Ew,” said one beardo, sipping his dixie cup of Punxsutawney Phil’s Early Spring Ale. “This is way too rambunctious for a pale ale. I was expecting something, I don’t know, crisper and more caramelly. Pass.”

Ten thousand beer snobs descend on downtown Washington, DC to show off how deft they are at having a dull time. Tents and picnic tables and makeshift bars as far as the eye can see. And dudes: legions of fat skinny dudes with beards and Bullets hats and yesteryear’s eyewear, most of them in tow with an equally uninspired/uninspiring ladyfriend.

“What’s the ABV on this milk stout?” another asked the bartender.

The bartender shook his head dunno.

“Oh, really? That’s disappointing.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about this name,” said another to his buddy. “Uncle Spearchunker’s Boat People IPA sounds problematic at best, in my opinion. It’s like they are trying to be controversial.”

His buddy’s eyes lit up. “Maybe that’s their schtick.”

Nobody nowhere actually intoxicated, except me. I had found the Coors tent and was sucking down Coors Original like I was getting paid fifteen bucks an hour plus tips to do so.

Another scrawny beardo sidled up next to me and waved his iPhone at the bartender and said, “Hi, may I please have a Coors Cutter?”

The bartender replied that he did not have Coors Cutter, nor did he have any other type of non-alcoholic beer; his disposition suggested that he’d been besieged by this question since the beginning of time itself.

“Oh, wow, okay . . . Um, well, may I please just have a soda water with lime. Actually, never mind, I’m good, thank you.”

I tried to jumpstart a conversation with a few of them with a little aimless chatter. “Hey, you know what they call English muffins in England?” I asked one.

“May I ask why you are asking?” he said, squirmily.

“No reason. Small talk and such, brother.”

“Interesting. I presume they call them muffins?”

“Nope. Sissycakes!”

He did a little chortle and started fucking around with his phone.

“Isn’t it weird,” I said to another, “how we can drink like thirty different types of beer in one sitting, yet if we eat a red apple and a green apple in the same day, we’re like, holyfugginshit, hope I don’t explode into six pieces!”

More silence. I decided to turn my attention to the dogs, of which there were plenty.

The world is full of bored cuties walking thousand dollar pooches. And since the Snallygaster was a dog-friendly festival, they were seemingly all here.

“C’mon, Riley!”

“Logan, c’mere, boy!

“Murphy, NO!”

“Finn, let’s go!”

If you walk into any of Washington, DC’s million dollar dog parks and close your eyes, you could easily pretend you’re in a 19th century pub in Ireland, and that same rule applied to the canine scenario here at the Snallygaster.

I walked over to a border collie with a spiked collar and looney tunes eyebrows. Its owner, a Daisy Duked-out little bag of skin and bones, eyed me suspiciously. The dog seemed to take a liking to me though.

“Cool little dude,” I said. “What’s his name?”

“Seamus.”

“Ah, that’s neat,” I said, petting little Seamus. “Reminds me of my former lives . . . I was a woodland elf named Seamus . . . Man, that was a weird one. Basically spent half of all twenty-six years of my existence negotiating with trolls and dwarves and water spirits. Let me tell you, if you ever come across a saber-toothed squirrel, run like hell and don’t look back. Whatever you do, don’t climb a tree. Mean little suckers.”

The girl mumbled a string of non sequiturs, and I was about to reach for my crucifix when I realized she had ear buds in the whole time. She mouthed a sorry and gave her pooch a couple of tugs and they walked away, disappearing into the sea of gringos.

The real Snallygaster is a huge piece of pure unadulterated chimeracana. It is sort of a living breathing Rorschach test. Some people see a bird, some people see a reptile, some people see an octopus, but most people see all the above and then some. The easiest way for me to describe it is, break out your headphones and crank up Jethro Tull’s 1979 proto-dragoncore album Stormwatch and shut your eyes tightly and, voila!—what you hear is pretty much what the Snallygaster looks like. Cthulhu vibes and such. Or, yeah, like some five-year old took a stab at sketching the Welsh flag from memory.

The Snallygaster has allegedly conducted its creepy business around the hills of Frederick County, Maryland. Sensible move, as DC proper is a strictly enforced no-fly zone. If the Snallygaster so much as pooted in the direction of Our Nation’s Capital, it would swiftly find itself in the company of a dozen pissed-off F-15’s. Guns and missiles, repeat, oh my . . . Ain’t enough Talking Heads lyrics on the planet to fenagle its way out of that scenario.

The etymology of “Snallygaster” is not as algebraic as one might think. It is my opinion that the German immigrants who settled the area were simply too stubborn to learn how to wrangle with the word “pterodactyl” and I salute them for it. Even for a native English speaker as myself, “pterodactyl” looks and sounds like Mandarin from Mars. In fact, “Snallygaster” comes from Schneller Geist, which means, yup, “quick ghost” in German.

I shot up to Frederick, Maryland, the eponymous county seat. I had noodled around these parts before while grappling with two hits of high octane white blotter. Acid: the gateway drug to a swirling sea of gnostic bedlam. There is one part of the human body that is way more vital than the brain and all its squishy amigos that loiter around in the torso and that is the cerebral reducing valve. Without a cerebral reducing valve, you would be tuned in to all the sights and sounds of the cosmos—and the cosmos is not a congenial place. You would be marauded with the sound of wailing gamma rays and basically feel like you were skinny-dipping right smack middle of the Book of Revelation. Acid takes your cerebral reducing valve and pushes it in front of a speeding car and then pours gasoline all over it and sets it on fire. Total obliteration for anywhere from eight to thirty awful hours.

Anyway, I had made a few enemies that day in Frederick so I decided I would need to whip up an alias, just in case.

The most common way for people to get outed using an alias is because their chosen alias simply sounds too cool. I mean, you get to choose your own fucking name. Who wouldn’t want to be Vicente Fox Mulder? Or Meadowlark Lime? I let sensibility have the floor and went with Steven James McDonnell—a name so boring it hurts.

If you want the alias to be successful, you have to take your ego and put it in a zip-lock bag and toss it into a muddy river. That’s the only way these things work. Criminality, in general, is usually done in because of ego. The perfect crime is that one that no one but you knows about. But that sure as shit ain’t much fun, is it? So you get zinged up one night and deliberately proffer to your ladyfriend some oblique business about how you know exactly what a butter knife will do to a fully-grown man’s eye socket—and how a corpse’s final revenge is its profound uncooperativeness. (“Lemme tell you, sister, dead people are cumbersome!”) . . . Fast forward to a year later and your ladyfriend is neither your lady nor your friend and you get a knock knock knock on your door at 7am on a Monday morning. Handcuffs and bars and lawyers, oh my . . .

Steven James McDonnell. A name so dull it makes you want to barf backwards. A name nobody could remember an ounce of if you pointed a loaded Ruger at their ballsack. And the name pretty much comes with a box of gift-wrapped Saltines. It’s a benignly honked-out moniker, which fits the script with me and my cave-dwelling jellyfish-people ancestry. That’s rule number two: choose a name that generically summons up your genealogy. Your will find a white rhino fist-fucking a California condor before you find a black Finkelstein. And if you want to get cute and take on a Latino name like Garcia or Santos because it lends an air of mysterious exotica, you sure as hell better not still be gargling Kitchen Spanish.

Frederick, Maryland is a satellite city of both DC and Baltimore but claiming allegiance to neither. It is its own weird thing, and the final outpost of civilization if you are heading westward into Maryland’s undomesticated schnozz.

The Frederick area contained a notable Snallygaster expert by the name of Sarah Cooper, who is also the creator, curator, and owner of the American Snallygaster Museum and basically ground zero for all things Snallygaster. Miss Cooper happened to be on a safari in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, so I was stuck with a leading brand Snallygaster consultant by the name of Dr. Missy Puddles. I arranged online to meet Dr. Puddles at a Mexican restaurant and squeeze the scoop out of her.

I got to the restaurant early and Dr. Puddles was already sitting in a booth waiting for me. We shook hands and ordered margaritas from an overly alert waiter. Someone somewhere smelled heavily of Drakkar Noir. I read on the back of a cereal box once that wearing three or more spritzes of alpha male cologne was, what they call in some social circles, a power move. The Drakkar Noir was successfully advancing on my three spritzes of Polo and this did not sit well with me.

Dr. Puddles was a friendly woman who was about as pretty as a bowl of ear cheese. Her appearance is difficult to explain without semaphoring like a flight deck chimp. She looked halfway melted, if that makes any sense, as if she had spent much of her childhood stuck in the microwave—and come to find out, this was not far from the truth. Her father, she explained, had been a disciple of early twentieth century Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, who, in addition to winning the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with wireless telegraphy, later on, under the menacing eye of Benito Mussolini, accidentally invented what they call in some social circles the Death Ray. Her father, Noel Puddles, after blowing through countless sheep and cows and goats and other expendable animals, began secretly blasting his own daughter with his inventions. In his will, he left her forty-seven fully grown aloe vera plants and a whole broom closet full of band-aids—as well a potato sack full of gold coins that he had unearthed in his adventures in the parts of South America you won’t find cutesy descriptions of in the Time Out guide or Lonely Planet.

A small mariachi band was quivering its way around the restaurant, pawing at the air for one-dollar bills between songs . . . The plume of mystery Drakkar Noir had seemingly ebbed—either that, or I had acclimated to it.

“That’s pretty harsh, by the way,” Dr. Puddles said.

“Salt overload?” I said, implying her margarita.

“No, that you think I’m hideous.”

Ho-lee shit, this goddamn thing can read my mind.

“Yes, I can,” Dr. Puddles said. “It’s okay, though. I’ve heard it all before—in a sense.”

“My excuse, my lord, is that I have no excuse,” I said, paraphrasing some Sufi poet. My thoughts strayed to more pleasant places . . .

“No,” she said.

“No what?”

“No, you’re not taking me to Vegas.”

“Drats,” I said, brattily. “C’mon, why not? If you can read minds, then you know I thinking we could bankrupt the whole damn state of Nevada inside an hour.”

“I am blacklisted from every casino this side of asteroid belt.”

“That is a big fat bummer,” I said. “Does your, uh, voodoo work from long range?”

“It’s not voodoo. And no, it does not work from long range. I have to be within about ten feet of the person for it to work.”

“What about, like, cats and dogs and birds and stuff?” I asked.

“Why in the world would you want to read their minds?”

Good point. We decided to carry out the rest of our conversation using only telepathy, which must have looked weird as shit to the wait staff, since my face was hosting the same emotions had our conversation taken place in the land of the verbal. Lots of headshaking and smirking and wide-eyed incredulity. The Snallygaster had long retired, according to her, and he now spends most of his time marinating in low-hanging algorithms and basically voicing every pleasure and displeasure on his various social platforms, and all under the pseudonym Film E. Noir on the popular social media app Snitchster.

I paid the bill and said adios to Dr. Missy Puddles and went back to my motel room at a nearby Econo Lodge.

I made a Snitchster account (SJM2112) and did a search for Film E. Noir.

Whoa.

The Snallygaster, it seems, had become a right-wing fearmonger’s soggy pillow.

Blah, blah, hobbyist outrage, blah, blah, manufactured strife. Don’t blame me, I voted for blah, blah, blah . . . Shameful stuff. The Snallygaster, it appeared, had indeed become infested with every low-hanging algorithm in the galaxy. Wackadoo supreme, chumming up with the likes of Congressman Jim Jordan, that thin-headed mutt from Ohio and easily the most terrified-of-everything little man in America, as well as what’s-her-nuts from Florida with the Pall Mall voice and the Whitesnake hair, and, yeah, that machine gun hussy from Colorado who looks like an evil Lisa Loeb. For some reason, the Snallygaster had plunged boner first into the trash zombie brigade.

“DON’T COUNT YOUR CHICKENS BEFORE THEY GET MOWED DOWN BY MACHINE GUN FIRE!!!” exclaimed one cryptic post. “LOOSE LIPS SINK SUBMARINES!!!” said another.

The only hope for the Snallygaster, it appeared, is that he starts dating a nice pretty woman of liberal/moderate disposition who can get him to swing back a few clicks left of the Reichstag circa 1933.

It was around this time that the Washington Football Team, known as the Washington Redskins since basically the Paleozoic Ear, decided to consult an extremely well-paid panel that consisted of a flurry of Ritalin-stiff six-year-olds and a few retired space chimps and rename the team the Washington Commanders.

Damn, I thought. Why not the Washington Snallygasters?

If you’re going to Bukkake the household of every Midatlantic nuclear family with unnecessary syllables, you might as well go all out, eh? Besides, the Commanders will assuredly be relegated to “the Commies.” (“Hail to the Commieeees! Hail victory! Reds on the warpath! Fight for CCCP!”) . . . It was a deluxe failure, but what do you expect from Chief Slimester Daniel Snyder?

Only a year earlier, when all the Big Tech opportunists flexed their Bowflex muscles and bullied Snyder and the gang into changing the team’s name or else (or else, yeah, they won’t peddle his shit on their zillion dollar platforms “Look, ma! I’m woke!”), I had visited a men’s club where Snyder is known to loiter around and I’d stuck manilla envelopes under the left windshield wiper of every Maserati in the parking lot, each containing the same handwritten letter, from moi, that explained the high prospect of civil unrest if Snyder were to choose some generic Hasbro name like Brigadiers or Admirals or Drill Sergeants, et cetera, et cetera. Snyder, probably realizing civil unrest would do well to muddy the view of the sundry conduct investigations in which his company was routinely besieged, went with the most Saturday Morning Cartoons-inspired name that his fleet of sea level IQ, data-slurpin’ apparatchiks could summon: Commanders.

*barfs in Comanche*

You see, in my little letter, I had suggested the Dukes (after DC’s own Duke Ellington), the Champs (the Washington Football Team were NFC champs their first year without the Redskins moniker, so why not choose a playful, user-friendly name that perpetuates this success?), the Icons (visually/phonetically very neighborly with Washington; can easily shapeshift into an adjective: “An iconic sixty-yard field goal as time expires gives the Icons an iconic win over their archrival!”), and the Legends (remind your dejected, fledgling fanbase that the team used to indeed be legitimately successful).

In the company of any of my four suggestions, I believe the name Commanders would get up off the sofa and leave the room without bothering to put its shoes on. But, yeah, as a lifelong Dallas Cowboys fan, am I really gonna saw fewer logs because of this? Nope upon never, boys and girls.

 WHY DO YOU DO IT, VAN?

I'll tell it to your face, for once and for all, my life is anti-strategic, lying between comic and tragic – Marie Davidson

For many people, the idea of scrambling around trying to prove the existence of a cryptid—be it one of the old timers like Nessie, or one of these newly reported critters like Mothbunnydogman—sounds like an absurd way to spend a life, and they are not wrong.

If I had a nickel for every time some bub asked me why I spend my time sniffing around for impossible creatures, I’d be wearing Bugle Boy cargo pants and six fanny packs and weigh seven hundred pounds. I reply to this sea-level question with one simple grotesque word: martyrdom.

Literal millions of people die every day across this planet. I personally know people who have yawned themselves to death, while others get crunched by city buses or choke to death on six-dollar hot dogs.

My aim is to get killed by a cryptid. Not exactly suicide by cryptid, because, yeah, I get the impression that my nervous system ain’t on board with any of this, and I will no doubt spaz like a banana spider and succumb to the outpour of expired adrenaline that implodes within me and high-tail it to Tierra del Fuego if I do ever wind up face to terrible face with a Glawackus or Wendigo or a Slide-Rock Bolter or whatever.

But if it takes me having to end up in six mason jars and couple of zip-lock bags to prove the existence of a cryptid . . . Yeah, if it takes me having to get notably snacked on by the Muck Monster or end up on the unfun end of a bunch of Puckwudgie poison arrows, then, inshallah, amigos! I enthusiastically consent. All I ask is that you build at least a five-foot eleven-inch statue of me outside of the International Cryptozoology Museum there in Portland, Maine. I have already consulted with my witch doctor, who has promised to do his thing (for an already paid undisclosed amount of crypto currency) and breathe just enough animation into the statue for it to come alive at night and help keep Portland’s population of rats, pigeons, stray cats, and runaway teens at bay. Bon Appechomp!

Area Man Collection

Area bartender not really good with names

Lance Plaquemine of Germantown, MD freely admits that he is not all good with names---and especially poor at remembering the names of his customers.

"It's weird," says Plaquemine, while setting up his bar for the happy hour rush. "I mean, I'm perplexed. Like, this dude here . . He comes in every day like right around now and fucks around on his phone and eventually orders a Cutty Sark Rob Roy on the rocks, which is gross as shit, and sometimes will get like a side of fries or something and pays using the same busted-up lookin' Bank of America card and tips like 20% on the dot, which is fine, and he's been doing this for like a hundred thousand years and I cannot for the life of me remember what his fucking name is. I'm pretty sure it's something lame like John or Chris or Mike--or Mark, maybe? I think it actually might be Mark--but I don't fucking know. Actually, before you leave, when we're like done doing this interview, go over and introduce yourself and when he tells you what his name is, try to remember what it is and let me know, cool?"

Plaquemine has been bartending at Gringos & Gaijins, a popular eatery in the newly fashionable DC neighborhood of Parkbrook Heights, off and on for about three years now.

“And this chick here," says Plaquemine, indicating a young woman sitting down at the bar. "You watch, she's gonna ask me if I have an iPhone charger and I'm gonna say, No, lady, all I have is the charger I use for my Samsung and that's it, and then she's gonna order a Rockabilly Burger, medium well, with a caesar salad instead of fries, no croutons, dressing on side, and stupid soda water with two slices of lime and light ice and I cannot at all fucking remember what her fucking name is. Julia, maybe? Or Julie? I don't fucking know."

Could Plaquemine simply ask what their names are?

"No way," he says, caressing the counter with his wet rag. "Way past the point of no return. That server over there, for example . . He's been working here like basically as long as I have, and I have no fucking idea what his name is. When he rings his drinks in, it comes up here on a little ticket but it just says Sol and, I mean, that could be short for fucking anything."

Soloman, perhaps?

“I don’t fuckin’ know,” says Plaquemine.

~~~

Area man cannot fucking believe no one got his Short Circuit joke

Justin Billings of Rockville, MD cannot fucking believe that none of the other customers at a local Baja Fresh got his Short Circuit joke.

"I'm not gonna lie, I'm disappointed," says a dejected looking Billings. "Real disappointed."

What happened?

"Well, what do you think happened?" says an indignant Billings. "The little chica rang me up and gave me my ticket and I'm like standing there waiting for my nacho burrito mojado along with everybody else and I notice on my ticket that I'm Number Five and so when they're like, 'Number five? Number five?', I'm like, "NO DISASSEMBLE! NO DISASSEMBLE NUMBER FIVE!" and all of a sudden everyone's looking at me like I squirted diarrhea outta my face." Billings grimaces in obvious despair. "It was a real brutal experience, I ain't gonna lie."

Perhaps none of the other customers had ever seen Short Circuit? Or maybe they have not seen it in a very long time?

"How can anyone not have seen Short Circuit? I mean, I've probably seen it thirty times just on accident," says Billings. "In the month of February alone!"

Baja Fresh employee Katrina Hernandez was the cashier who rang Billings up for his nacho burrito mojado. "Yeah, this white dude comes in around noon, seems all normal or whatever, orders his food, pays with his credit card, all quiet, you know, and then when we give him his order, he's all of sudden like, "JOHNNY FIVE IS ALIVE! NO DISASSEMBLE! NO DISASSEMBLE NUMBER FIVE!" and, I don't know, it was weird as fuck," says Hernandez. "To be honest, I just thought he was a little, you know, touched by the angels."

Short Circuit is a 1986 sci-fi comedy starring Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy. The film's plot is centered around an experimental military robot that is struck by lightning and gains a humanlike intelligence, with which it embarks to explore its surroundings. Nobody nowhere aside from Steve Guttenberg and Steve Guttenberg's mom and Justin Billings has seen it since the late nineteen eighties.

~~~

Out in Maryland

Colt Rasper walked into the M’s Pancake Shack, like he’d done a thousand times, and sat down at one of the big booths near the window. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and M’s was desolate. Puddin and Cher, the two waitresses on duty, were marrying bottles of Heinz ketchup and windexing the menus. M’s was the only restaurant in the whole the area (unless you want to count the Dairy King and the Mack in the Box), and its proximity to a motel and a truck stop/gas station kept it astir with customers. This was all way out in the part of Maryland that doesn’t really have any allegiance to the rest of the state—the part of Maryland where they play the Steelers and Pirates on TV instead of the Ravens and Orioles.

“You rollin’ solo, handsome?” said Cher, cruising over with a huge iced water with an upside-down bendy straw poking out of it.

“Got someone joinin’ me here in a bit,” said Colt. “At least I hope I do. We shall see.”

“Ain’t seen you in a minute,” said Cher, reaching over him and straightening the little flotilla of diner condiments/accessories.

“I was here last night but you was off.”

“Yeah, I don’t do Fridays,” she said, fidgeting with the triple-knot on her apron. “Date night.”

“You still with that knucklehead?”

“Who, Slim Jim? You know it. Goin’ on six months.”

“That is the most cuckoo thing on the planet,” said Colt, leisurely sprawled out in the booth.

“I’m gonna tell him you said that.”

“I hope you do.”

“You want coffee?”

“Pretty please.”

Cher whizzed back into the kitchen. Colt looked out the window. A gun-metal grey Audi TT was now moored in the dirty parking lot right there next to his Jeep Guzzler. That’s gotta be her, he thought, right as the door opened and out of it stepped a slender Caribbean-lookin’ girl in pink acid-washed jeans and a turquoise tank-top. Krissy, a girl Colt had recently met online and finally coaxed into coming out and meeting him in person. He wondered if Krissy was her real name.

He watched her thumb something into her smart phone. Two seconds later his phone lit up: Here. He texted back, telling her to come into the restaurant.

“Colt?” she said, right upon entry.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, standing up to sort of give her a half-hug and a handshake. “Great to finally meet you. Officially, I mean.”

“Likewise.”

“Pop a squat. Let’s do this thing.”

Krissy sat down across from Colt and rubbernecked at all the bric-a-brac around her. M’s was basically decked out with the whole Beyond section of a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Lots of cheap prints of what algorithms probably reckoned wildlife to look like, plus a few aphoristic exclamations here and there. The only thing left from previous ownership was a huge taxidermied largemouth bass that the rats had nibbled on here and there throughout the years. (The original M was Miriam Schnellegeister, an entrepreneur from Morgantown, West Virginia, who specialized in designing fishing lures. Miriam owned M’s Pancake Shack from its genesis in 1954 until very recently, when she sold it to another M—a retired stockcar racer by the name of Mehdi Nabil. M’s new owner did what most new owners usually do not do and enhanced the overall quality of the place without compromising any of its vital essence. He retained his staff but thickened it up a bit so they didn’t get overworked and jaded, and he did a little adding and subtracting on the menu (adios, pork platter; hello, meatloaf sandwich), as well as lower the prices a smidge. The only change he made that the locals mostly snubbed was getting rid of the haggard jukebox that had wheezed its way through nearly seventy years of existence, playing old 45s of Bobby Vinton and Lesley Gore and other Boomer fodder/promacana a la David Lynch flick [though with a little Saturday night ruckus-on-the-bayou jingles mixed as well—Hank William Jr., Toby Keith, Alan Jackson]. Mehdi had replaced the jukebox with a playlist that was basically a simulacrum of the jukebox but peppered with a few breezy cabana crooners like Sade and Astrud Gilberto).

There in the big booth by the window of M’s Pancake Shack, after a few more introductory quips about nothing, Colt Rasper twisted in his seat so he could face Krissy and said, “With all due respect, but you are truly gorgeous. I mean, your pictures were pretty, but man-oh-man . . . Dig your style, too. You look like how soft candy tastes.”

“That’s very sweet. Thank you,” Krissy said, stretching that final syllable out until it turned into ambiguous irony.

Cher came over, did her thing at the table, and then Colt and Krissy sat there for a while, drinking coffee, and basically verbally confirming stuff that they had chatted about online. Krissy had recently moved from outside Philadelphia to western Maryland to spend some time with her father, who had recently been diagnosed with three different types of cancer. The doc had recently told him to don’t bother buying any green bananas.

“You hungry at all?” Colt asked her.

“Kind of, yeah.”

“You wanna split some chicken wings?”

“Are they super spicy?”

“I wouldn’t say they’re super spicy, but to me nothing’s super spicy. I’m an inveterate eater of spicy stuff, so nothing really musses my mane unless it’s just like out-of-this-world spicy. I did get a hold of something one time—little Cambodian joint down over in Frostburg—made my whole damn face explode. My pee smelled like two percent milk for a week.”

“Yikes,” Krissy said, holding up the menu and squinting at it. “I’m okay with spicy. Let’s get the wings and some onion rings.”

Colt looked around for Cher but he didn’t see her, so he waved Puddin over. “How you doin’, babe . . . May we please have a basket of onion rings and half-a-dozen chicken wings? Extra spicy.”

Puddin nodded and scampered off. You could hear her relay the order to either Cher or the cook in the back.

“This is where it gets interesting,” said Colt.

“How’s that?”

“I will bet you everything in my momma’s wallet that they send out somewhere between seven to ten wings even though we ordered half-a-dozen.”

Krissy just looked at him, waiting for further explanation.

“This cook they got, some ol’ boy named Terry who’s been around for years, cannot count to save his life. He got in this four-wheeler accident when he was a teenager and it just kinda screwed him up a little bit,” Colt said, tapping his head.

“Aww, that’s sad.”

“Them four-wheelers will mess you up big time if you ain’t careful,” Colt said, “which, I guess, Terry was not.”

“Poor thing.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t call him that. He’s fine in most other regards, but everything to him is a baker’s half-dozen, if you know what I mean. You ask him to hold up four fingers and you can go ahead and expect to get a nice big close-up of his thumb, too. Something about numbers. His brain just ain’t havin’ it.”

Cher came out with their food and a big roll of paper napkins. She set everything down and grabbed the coffee kettle off a nearby ledge.

Colt counted the wings. Six.

“Terry ain’t back there today?” he said to Cher and she refilled their coffee.  

“Oh my God, you didn’t hear?”

“Guess not,” Colt said, looking up at Cher. “Hear what?”

“Terry got hit by a bus up in Pittsburgh two nights ago.”

“Holy shit. He okay?”

“If you call being dead okay.”

Colt winced and said, “That’s awful. I’m sorry, Cher.”

“We wasn’t that close or anything, but still, it’s weird when somebody you know dies, no matter who it is,” Cher said, standing there in waitress limbo.

Krissy sat there nodding her head in solemn accord.

Colt poured a lagoon of ketchup on a little side plate and dipped an onion ring into it and said, “What happened exactly?”

“All I know is Terry was crossing the street, and Pittsburgh has them little electronic signs at crosswalks that count down, you know, letting you know how much time you got left to get across, and my guess is . . .”

Krissy exploded into laughter—a cinematic cascade of laughter, in every shade of octave on the planet. The outburst startled Colt and Cher. They both got bug-eyed and stared at her in perplexment. She could not seem to stop laughing.

“Well, I’m glad you think this is funny,” Cher said to her.

“I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry,” Krissy said, still unable to reel in her laughter, which had turned into a crazy person’s laugh, all squeaky and squawky and very loud.

Colt started laughing too. Cher skulked off, befuddled, probably wanting to be mad at them but not really caring enough to do so.

The cook came out to Colt and Krissy’s booth and filled them in with the details. The bus that had crunched Terry had been done up like a big Snickers bar as part of this citywide advertising campaign. This knowledge amplified their laughter to where Cher and Puddin had to come out and scold them. They went full-blown manic when the cook told them that the street Terry had been killed on was called Harms Way, named after a nineteenth century Dutch settler named Luuk Haarm, who had been just impressionable enough for prosperity to name a street in Pittsburgh after him (though anglicizing his surname a la Haarlem-cum-Harlem by lopping off the second A). Eventually Colt and Krissy’s laughter fizzled and Colt paid the tab and they went out into the parking lot and did some rated-G smooching and made plans to do something tomorrow night.

Colt had Krissy meet him at this popular bar with a big deck that was over in a neighboring county. He got there early and she showed up early as well and they picked up right where they left off yesterday, smooching, holding hands, rubbing up on each other. They got a pitcher of Coors Light and sat down at a picnic table on the deck and slowly drank the pitcher down while yapping endlessly, getting increasingly comfortable with each other as the night went on. A dozen or so locals around them, all decked out in denim and flannel, were socializing and playing on their phones.

Something was going on on the other side of the deck. A meaty guy in desert storm camouflage seemed to be getting a lot of attention from the locals, and it only took Colt a couple of seconds to recognize him to be Terry’s older brother, a truck driver named Dustin, who was always sort of in and out of town. Colt never knew Dustin particularly well, but he always thought he was a decent dude.

“I’ll be right back,” Colt told Krissy and then went immediately over to Dustin.

“Hey, brother, good to see you,” Colt said to Dustin, as they embraced.

“Good to see you too, man. You look good,” said Dustin.

“You do too,” said Colt. “Cher told me yesterday about what happened and, well, it’s just goddamn awful. My sincere condolences. If you need anything at all, just let me know, okay? Seriously, anything.”

“I appreciate that, man,” said Dustin, looking Colt in the eyes and nodding his head slightly. “I really do.”

They hugged again and patted each other on the back and Colt went and sat back down.

Krissy went up to the bar and came back with a couple of huge frozen drinks in plastic cups. Bushwhackers, Colt recognized the drinks to be, mentally saluting Krissy’s leftfield choice of beverage, especially considering they just drank a small aquarium’s worth of beer. The place was really packed out with people now and it wasn’t even ten o’clock. The music was loud, which made the people even louder.

Colt got up and went to the men’s room. On the way back, he bumped into Dustin again. They went through their lubby dubby routine, both of them now substantially buzzed, and started doing a little shallow-end reminiscing about Terry.

“The thing about ol’ Terry,” Colt said, now flanked by Krissy, who had come to find Colt, who had been gone from the table for longer than he realized. A bunch of drunkies annexed their table as soon as she had gotten up. “The thing about ol’ Terry,” Colt said, repeating himself, “is that he just wasn’t never the same after he wrecked his four-wheeler.”

Dustin grimaced and mouthed a harsh unpleasantry. Colt detected his change in demeanor and said, “I’m sorry, man. I don’t mean nothing by that.”

“Who told you that?” Dustin said, getting a little up in Colt’s face.

“Easy, Dustin,” Colt said, backing up. “Who told me what?”

“Who told you Terry wrecked his four-wheeler?”

This confused the hell out of Colt. He finished his Bushwhacker and set the empty cup on a nearby wooden rail. “Well, Terry did. He told me years and years ago.”

Dustin put his hands on his head and rocked back and forth a little bit. He was now steeped into the advanced level of drunkenness that only massive amounts of sleep can tidy up.

“Number one, Terry didn’t wreck no four-wheeler and, number two, it sure as hell wasn’t his vehicle to begin with!” Dustin said, almost yelling now. A few dudes around them noticed the commotion and were gauging the prospect of getting into a fist fight. “And number three, that wreck didn’t have shit to do with how Terry was or how he wasn’t!”

“Oh, okay, brother. I didn’t know all that. Again, I’m sorry,” Colt said to Dustin, trying to settle him down. Krissy whispered let’s go! into Colt’s ear. “We gotta jet, brother. I’ll see you around.”

Colt and Krissy started to walk away. Dustin made this horrible sound, like he was trying to squeeze out a huge turd. They stopped and turned around and looked at him.

“You see, that was my vehicle my dead brother Terry crashed all them years ago!” Dustin hollered at them. “And I know for a fact the only reason he crashed it in the first place is because it wasn’t no four-wheeler, it was a three-wheeler!”