The sea is a harsh mistress. She constantly asks you to leave your wife and cries incessantly when you hesitate for a moment. She calls you in the middle of the night and hangs up if the wrong person answers. She kills your pets,…
I am swabbing the deck, as is my wont, as is my duty, as is my destiny. The open sea is wild and foamy, the waves tossing salt-water and seals against the ship with cruel, indiscriminate abandon. The seals in particular hit with a…
Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared August 13, 2011.
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Sundry ships are crossing the seas, bringing us to the new wild shores. On each ship a cook, a baker, a captain, a whore. I swab the deck—wiping the footprints of each away in what I hope is a fluid and efficient motion. I love the whore but she is above my class.
1. a hookah bar is opening in our neighborhood and we young toughs flick our butts at the Coming Soon! front window shout while we smoke in the American way and burn and burn and burn 2. even now I cannot see her smile without…
The sales girl was generally pleasant, mild-mannered and dainty. Coming from a long line of sales clerks she had a genetic disposition for friendliness, but strange muscles growled at the back of her neck whenever the sea captain entered the store. There was something…
I was lying in the tub the other morning, trying not to contemplate the ever increasing amount of water I displace, when I chanced to look up at the bathroom ceiling. Believe me, this was the best of my chance-looking options.
And glancing at that ceiling I remembered as a young boy fantasizing about walking on ceilings in general, as if this would be the greatest of supernatural powers: to look at the world anew all upside and excitingly foreign. In my youth I could imagine happy day after day strolling along the ceilings of the family home, surprising my sister, freaking out the mail-man, finding out what all that stuff was that my mom put on top of the refrigerator.
3 There is turkey running loose on the deck of our ship. The crew has named it Socrates for reasons having vaguely to do with one of them having read a book once. The turkey is not full grown but neither was it a baby.”Too…
Her bath was spiked with water from the ocean, gathered for her in barrels by the one-legged captain. The captain was well know for both his seamanship and his romantic entanglements and she was freckled and fair and famous mostly for a profound lack of modesty, but a…
1. Sundry ships are crossing the seas, bringing us to the new wild shores. On each ship a cook, a baker, a captain, a whore. I swab the deck—wiping the footprints of each away in what I hope is a fluid and efficient motion….
Dear Reader: See the world by atomic train! (and by “world” I mean world in the sense of the World Series, the World Wide Wrestling associating, or any of a number of world championships and organizations which in actuality mean only the United States,…
Another mad inventor. Wild hair, thick glasses, a lab-coat with strange items poking and bulging from every pocket. His latest invention—the micro-text suit. See it hanging in its vacuum-sealed display case. He will move it carefully into a garment bag and bring it to the offices of the Board of Directors. They will finally see the fruits of their investment—of so many years and so much money. He will explain to them his brilliant concept and execution, how he has managed—through patented techniques—to molecularly print the text of any desired passage onto the fibers of this comfortable and stylish material.
Oh those men, those lives, those times, so fabled in song and story–a few stories, anyway, one or two songs; now they are mostly forgotten, but who were they and what made them do it? And what did doing it make them? Those sitter-outers of life. Those canny ostriches with their heads stuck in the soft sand of dreams while the earth changed and hardened around them. Those daring young men in their flannel pajamas. Sleepers we called them once, or VanWinkles, and once they did not mind such names. But eventually these labels struck one or more of them as derogatory.
This fall(ish) I have a new book coming out thanks to the good people at Red Giant Books. It is an illustrated novel(ish) and I am actually pretty proud of it. If you are interested in having me do a reading near you, know that my time and energies can be purchased for the small price of a place to expend my time and energies and a beer. And the beer is negotiable.