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Pandora’s Box

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This is for Shelly, if she ever happens to read it.

You know that feeling?

When you walk into a dark room with a sad person and the weight of their emotion has the density of a collapsed star, you know that feeling?

It hits you at the door, the seal has been breached and everything that’s not nailed down is being pulled into the vacuum. Information has run amok. To create evil that cannot be undone, this is the result of opening Pandora’s Box ill-advisedly. To the casual observer, it appears that something has come out, that facts have escaped, but this is incorrect. Like fruit from the tree of knowledge, the truth was always plain to see. It is interpretation that must be relied on to keep the plug in the sink. There’s nothing in that box. To crack the lid is to cause a shift in focus. The sour glow of enlightenment blasts everything in it’s path, coats it with radiation and draws it into the fray. You can try to resist but this rift in the fabric will drain the life force from anything it touches. The only thing to come out of Pandora’s Box is gravity.

Secrets are gate keepers, my friends.

Guard them carefully.

Owsley

When people ask me who Owsley is, I tell them he is my estranged web designer. I don’t tell him this though, because it’s not true.

I imagine that Owsley and I weigh about the same and, while 110lbs is a fine weight for a little girl of 5’2”, it makes it easy to count the vertebrae of a 5’11” man. I try not to notice his various bones sticking out all over the place and this is easy enough to do just by concentrating on his half of the conversation and trying to figure out what the hell he’s talking about at any given time.

Owsley knows a little about a lot of things and, like a human edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, he begins his monologue at A and continues until the sun goes down or the drugs wear off, whichever comes first. When Owsley really was my web designer, I let him do pretty much anything he wanted to my website because I was too polite to admit that his explanations sounded like gibberish to me. He doesn’t have a speech impediment, it’s just that, not unlike reading an Encyclopedia, I hear his words and fail to assign meaning to them. All I hear is words words words words words and his oft repeated phrase “if this, then that”, which in his mind explains everything.

Despite our failure to communicate, I actually do like him. We seem to get along better in writing as this gives my slow mind time to formulate a response before he’s ten topics down the road. What Owsley sees in me, I have no idea. Dry humor and the slow speech of a westerner, what’s not to love? I don’t pay him for stuff anymore so I can only assume he enjoys watching me bake in his pool and drink his vodka. Hey, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

Speaking of baking in the pool, I was sitting in a windowsill in Owsley’s living room. There are three tall windows side by side that look out onto the peach trees “that the drug dealers planted” he told me. “You mean the other drug dealers?”, I asked him. The property had been seized by the feds for housing a meth lab which later allowed him to purchase it for next to nothing. The tile floor of his home sprawls across 1000’s of square feet into multiple bed and bath rooms and what could almost be considered a commercial kitchen, all of which proved to be nearly impossible to navigate. I was sitting in the windowsill watching the drippers water the trees and Owsley said “we’re gonna get really fucking high.” Here again, I heard the words “really fucking high” but failed to assign meaning to them and, just like with my website, I went along with whatever he said.

I was still sitting on the windowsill when Owsley brought out a collection of baked goods and glass pipes. “Good god man, you’ve got a regular fucking bake sale going on here” I said. He told me I should eat a biscotti which would kick in in an hour and use the bubbler to fill in the blanks. ” This will be good”, I thought, “a twisted experience with the thin man…” Owsley was talking about drugs and pain and rubbing alcohol and since I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it, I did as he suggested. It was 12:30 in the afternoon.

Owsley does this kind of thing every day, it is his method of managing a chronic pain condition. I don’t. I wasn’t ready. I’m an amateur. Some people like to talk about finding god or opening the doors of perception but let me tell you: there is neither such thing.

Once, when I worked at Kline’s Photography, a shelf holding about 30 big Tupperware containers housing album orders for clients, tipped over and fell on the floor. Every one of those fucking Tupperwares came open; order forms and negatives fluttering together like confetti in a parade. The resulting mess took days to sort out.

I was sitting on Owsley’s windowsill trying to figure out what the fuck he was talking about when a shelf fell over in my mind, flinging boxes of grey matter against the wall and mixing their contents like a bad cocktail. The only thing on the other side of the doors is a whirlwind of doomed voices and blendervison, things you don’t want to see.

The dust was still settling when Owsley offered me more but, fearing for my sanity, I politely declined. “See there what you just did,” he told me, “people with no impulse control can’t do that, drug addicts can’t do that.” “Do what?” “They can’t say no to any offer, doesn’t matter what it is: weed, coke, crack, whores, vodka, they say yes until they end up face down in the pool.” I think this was a compliment. “You’ve no idea who you’re dealing with”, I said, but then realized he was still talking and I hadn’t said a word.

Many years ago, when I lived in Sun Valley, I had to drive some douche bags to L.A. for the filming of a porn flick. The scene: most extreme anal scene for which the girl was paid with tequila, was later nominated for an AVN award. She did shoot bananas and ice cubes from her ass before being gang raped by several guys dressed as circus animals but all I could see when I looked at her was her stubby little fingers. Those beeny weenies will never play piano, I thought, poor stupid bitch. Before I was to drive home by myself, I was laying on the infamous Mick Surewood’s bed in Van Nuys, listening to the sounds of his aquarium and worrying that I would fall asleep on the road. I played the resulting crash out in my mind over and over again. I knew the sounds and just how it would feel when the car landed upside down and crushed my head.

Owsley’s kids were coming to visit at 5:00 and it was already 12:30. With the contents of my mental shoeboxes now strewn across every surface between my ears, the first waves of panic began to set in. The imaginary car accident was back. I didn’t want to die but I sure as hell couldn’t keep the car on the road. 5:00 seemed impossibly early.

People have reported waking in the middle of surgery. They can hear and feel everything but cannot respond to the stimulus. “After I sew her up, let’s take turns eating her pussy”, says the doctor while licking his lips and making shadow puppets on the wall. Paralyzed in a cocoon of hallucination, that shit will never stand up in court.

“Four more hours of going UP!” Owsley gleefully reminded me. I put my sunglasses on so I could stare at his eyes without him noticing. “Let’s swim” he said.

I had already told him that I can’t swim but I had also promised to join him in the water. Were we supposed to fuck? I should really know the answer to this but had completely forgotten the pretense under which I had come over. I stared at his eyes awhile longer, looking for an answer. No, no, pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to be part of the plan. Besides, I might break him or something. Before heading out to the pool I had to change into my bikini and this involved not only remembering where I left it but exhibiting an enormous amount of dexterity. For this I credit my extensive athletic training. Surely only a gifted athlete could shuffle down the hall to change clothes in the bathroom without cracking a skull on the side of the toilet.

Owsley got distracted on the way to the pool. “My yard’s not square, see”, he said holding his arms at right angles, “so I made a zen garden over there.” I had no idea what he was talking about, it looked square to me, but I followed him across the grass anyway to a hole in the fence. “I just put all this together the other day”, he said, “bought it all at Lowe’s”. I don’t remember anything about it except that it seemed like a lot of money and effort to square a yard that was already square.

“Pain doesn’t respond to moderate use.” We were somewhere in the expanse between the zen garden and the pool. I worried that I would step on a bee. “That’s funny, you know, because I can’t respond at all.” I meant to say that but nothing came out. “Bee stings are used to treat MS”, Owsley said. Are we conversing? “Shut the fuck up, I can walk just fine.” I was not walking just fine but it didn’t matter because he was going on about the suspected link between naturally occurring high levels of Vitamin D in people who live near the equator and low diagnoses of MS, and all the while I hadn’t said a word.

“It’s so nice to bake in the pool”, he told me, “I’m going down the slide!” Well flutter by butterfly, I thought, not to Owsley but to the yellow butterfly making it’s way across the yard. Owsley hit the water with a huge splash and suddenly the butterfly was in the pool. Like me, they can’t swim. I wanted to help but ten thousand years passed while I just stood there watching it struggle. Finally Owsley scooped it up with a stick. The tiny creature crawled out of the water with a fierce determination but the butterfly’s wings were saturated and clung to it’s body like wet bed sheets. Owsley set the stick down in a shady part of the lawn.

The water was shockingly blue and up to my armpits. Chorline was leaching into my skin, I was very sure of this because I was once a test subject in just such an experiment. I looked calm but kept swallowing air, and continued to look calm because my other expressions were not working. “Here, take a noodle”, he said tossing me a pool floaty thingy. Dr. Owsley eventually prescribed two noodles and a kick board. It’s not true what they say, I was an island.

From the stereo on the porch I could hear PJ Harvey’s Down By The Water. I think it’s on the album called Songs Of The Drowned. Or not. Little fish big fish swimming in the water, come back here and give me my daughter. Fish, spirit animal of the disturbed and the subject of many a horrifying dream. Beta fish have magnificent technicolor fins. They fly in the water like silk ribbons and when I used to keep them as pets each of my fish lived in a color coordinated bowl and was named accordingly. I was cleaning Red Fish’s bowl one night. You can’t clean fish bowls with the fish in them so I had put Red Fish in a cereal bowl for safe keeping. I scrubbed the glass and changed the water but when I was ready to return Red Fish to his home the cereal bowl was empty. Beta fish jump sometimes, I was wearing cowboy boots and my heart stopped. My eyes swept the counter top and the stove: nothing. I looked down. A terrible painting. Long red fins coated the toe of my boot like wet tissue paper. Red scales and red blood coated the floor in a smattering of footprints. Red head and bulging eyes still gasping for oxygen.

“Why can’t you swim?”, Owsley wanted to know, “was it a sport’s injury?” “No, I just never learned.” My voice sounded dreadful but at least something came out, maybe. “So you were traumatized as child?” What? I never said that. “No, I have very dense bones.” Is there tree bark in my throat? Christ I sound awful. “Well maybe you could see a therapist?” he suggested. This stopped me for a moment. “I have a therapist”, I was going to say but didn’t. It’s too bad I don’t have any business cards for him, I thought. Dean Reynolds: Terrible Therapist. Owsley was jabbering on about who knows what and I decided it best not to refer him to my therapist after all.

I should have left Dean out of it because I suddenly grew very worried that his heart may have stopped and that I would read about it on Twitter. The meanest thing anyone ever said to me was “I hope you die alone because you fucking deserve it.” The asshole that said this and I were both childless only-children so this was a well thought out insult, a legit concern for people like ourselves. He said this in another decade but it still haunts me. As the elders in my family have died off, each of them had their turn in the barrel. Frail bones in beds that smelled of the end, searching the sad faces of their younger relatives and conversing with aberrations. I wondered how old I would be when the last of the people I care about passes away and how slow the days will click by without them. I need some younger friends otherwise, when my time comes, all my visitors will be invisible. So far I only have one younger friend and he’s a porn star. I mean, like, a bona fide, according to Hoyle, porn star. Will he sit with me when I’m old? Don’t count on it. Will he fly across the country, rent a car, and meet me in a ghost town while I’m still young? Probably. My Mom has already told me to meet her at the river. All of this is temporary, temporary, temporary…

“Hey you know, no one ever died from smoking too much weed”, Owsley said before going down the slide again. He was having a terrific time. “And”, he continued, “we still have at least another hour of ascending”. I really wanted to punch him for pointing that out, I thought we were almost done. “I’m the welter weight champion of not talking”, I did actually get the words out but it wasn’t pretty. “That’s ok,” he said, “you’re safe here.”

XIX – The Moon

Whatever happened here has long since blown off in the wind, like the smell of smoke that fades over time. The moon called on the ocean to wash it all away.

An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I’m just a sick clown and so is everyone else. -Jack Kerouac, king of the beats.

Another night at the Blue Moon jazz club, standing around with the band, smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk. They were on break from the stage but I’m always on break when I’m there.

I’m not much for the discussion of morals. If you want something, just go get it. The problem is not how to get what you want, it’s how to get away with what you want. I’m not hung up on morals but I understand the concept of a balanced scale.

We all stood around just outside the door. Smoking trolls under the bridge, keeping an eye out for radio listening skid row sages and making slanderous remarks about the baby girls dressed as whores out on a winter night. Some of the guys took Carl to the parking garage to get high with them in a truck. Only Dean stayed behind with me in the street light shadow of a rootless tree. This land has different rules. Eye contact and a quiet conversation, a meeting of the minds. We flicked our cigarettes against the tree and went inside.

Lights fell like a meteor shower over the dining room and quiet instruments rested on the stage. My friends sat in our booth, having no idea what kind of place they had come to. They sipped at their beers and wondered why I walked right past them and down the hall to the men’s room. Actually, they didn’t see me but they surely started to wonder where I was. Dean followed me in and locked the door to the stall behind us.

The band was on break, like I said. The drummer was busy with his hands up my shirt and the music trickling out from the house speakers was not quite loud enough to conceal the sounds of my tree huggy shoes, clippity cloppity, must stand still. High on adrenaline, both hands in Dean’s hair and the rest of me dissolving in his mouth, I was already starting to cum. Dean unbuckled his belt and pushed me to my knees. Someone stood at the sink washing their hands and in between splashes I could make out the voice of Damien Rice mumbling in the ambiance. Though Irish, he follows me around: on TV, in my car, at the bar. What I want from us is empty our minds. We fake the thoughts, and fracture the times. Fucking poetry. We go blind when we’ve needed to see…

I stopped listening to the sink and the music and looked up at Dean while running my tongue along his cock. I reached up to grab his hands while taking in as much of him as I could. I can feel his heartbeat in his fingers and against my tongue. Like a doctor checking his pulse, “yes sir, you seem to be in tip top condition.” We have to hurry, this isn’t Motel 6 after all and someone is probably waiting to take a shit. His swelling has increased, almost too much. He grabs me up and bends me over. Clip clop, shhhh. I’m so wet and stifling a loud orgasm while he pushes all the way in with one stroke. He’s pushing me hard and I’m pushing back against the hand rail by the toilet to keep my head from bouncing off the tiled wall. His hands are on my hips, holding me still for this bathroom fucking, hard and intense, scandalous. Yes? Yesss. I’ve felt his penetration since the beginning of time. Only we know our history.

Dean grabs a handful of my hair, forcing my head back and exploding inside me at the same time. So hard to be quiet. I’m a screamer, you know. We stay the way we are for a moment, breathing hard, gotta switch dimensions and return to the world of the living. I’m looking back between all four of our feet and can see Carl’s shoes, slightly flawed and sold at a discount, standing in front of the sink. That song is still on and no one likes it but me. Killers re-invent and believe, and this leans on me, like a rootless…

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you and all we’ve been through.

Carl’s shoes exit the men’s room followed shortly by Dean’s shoes. I, however, am stuck.

Leave it, leave it, leave it, there’s nothing in you.

Men keep coming and going and Carl is hovering around the door. The pull of the moon has driven him mad and he’s looking for a place to hide.

And if you hate me, hate me, hate me, then hate me so good…

Texts from Carl and Dean are lighting up my phone.

“Where are you???”

“Stay in there, he’s by the door.”

More shoes and sink water, rattles from the paper towel dispenser. I need an exit strategy.
… let me out, let me out, let me out…

*song lyrics in italics by Damien Rice

Forgetting

Many times during my nightly ritual of washing my face and brushing my teeth, I’ll zone out and change the way I think about the passage of time. Instead of dwelling on what I have to do tomorrow or counting the shopping days until Christmas, I start to ponder my life in terms of the products sitting around the bathroom sink.

I’ll look at a new bottle of facial cleanser and wonder what news worthy events will happen during the time it takes to use it up. I’ll look at my tube of toothpaste and wonder if I’ll be rich by the time it’s gone. That bottle of hairspray is about half used up, maybe someone I know will die before it gives it’s last squirt. This mineral makeup seems to last forever, I wonder if I’ll still have it when I retire?

I pass long minutes mindlessly sawing a toothbrush back and forth across my teeth and wondering if the apocalypse will be upon us before I run out of dental floss. For all the time spent doing these meaningless calculations, I’ve never been able to say “Yeah, see there, I knew Grandma wouldn’t make it to the end of my eye liner”, because, despite all my hard work, by the time I walk out of the bathroom, I’ve totally forgotten what I just spent the last 15 minutes thinking about. For that matter, never do I even remember that I’ve contemplated such things until the next time I’m standing there, removing my eye makeup, and I start to wonder if I’ll still be driving the same car by the time I run out of eye shadow.

The only reason I’m able to think about it now is because something unexpected happened, an evolutionary twist of fate. I was debating whether the next Haley’s Comet would appear before I swished my last mouth full of fluoride rinse and I wondered why I only thought about this stuff when I was standing at the bathroom sink. Why don’t I wonder about it the rest of day?, I thought, and it was then that I realized: the rest of day I didn’t even know I had this weird habit because I forgot about it when I wasn’t doing it.

That got me worried about other weird things I might do and then forget about. What if every time I chewed gum, I compulsively stuck it to the inside of car door handles and then forgot all about it the moment I walked away? What if I like to sing The Star Spangled Banner at top volume in the grocery store? Do I give it a second, mortified, thought on the drive home? Nope, forgot all about it by the time my butt hit the driver’s seat.

Oh my, I thought, shit! How will I ever know what I do all day? I still don’t know what happens on my drive to work but this afternoon I caught myself standing in front of the fridge wondering: if I broke my arm right now, would it heal before mold grows on the cheese?

 

Dead Ringer

My Mom called me this morning to ask about the dead body I found last night.

“Yes, that is what I found, right in the middle of the road.”

“How do you know he wasn’t just sleeping?”

“Really?”

“Well…”, she pressed on, “you’re not saying much, how do you know he was dead and not just passed out?”

“Because his legs were on backwards” I told her.

“Yeah, but how….”

“ He was dead”

“But…”

“Dead”

(silence)

“Why don’t you have anything more to say about it?”

here we go

“Because there’s nothing more to tell.”

At 3:00 this morning, while speeding along at 75mph, I swerved to avoid hitting what I thought was a laundry bag of clothes, but what turned out to be a clothed bag of meat, sprawled in the middle lane of I-16.

A man wearing all black, who was apparently walking down the middle of the highway, was struck and killed by a passing vehicle.  Not my vehicle.  The cops checked my car for guts and hair. They didn’t find any.

Some folks really know how to ring in the new year.

Auld Lang Syne.

Farewell stranger.

Girl Business

I’m pretty sure a mule kicked me in the back while I was sleeping. I had designs on today and they did not include hoof prints or unleashing the viscous mega-bitch within. My plan was to meet Dean at a seedy and undisclosed location for a little quality time, e.g, uncensored conversation and a roll in the hay, while pretending to be “at work.” My work is complicated and, you know, I have needs.

In the past, I rarely gave much thought to this kind of unplanned interruption. I was on the pill for 20 years, having devised an impressively ingenious plan for convincing my mom to let me start taking them at the age of 14. My gears turned like clockwork and life was good until one day, two years ago, when my hair started falling out. By the handful, by the brush-full, by the drain-full and by the trash-can-full; it wasn’t funny. In a blind panic, I rounded up all the prescription drugs cluttering my bathroom sink and banished them to the trash. While continuing to shed like a cancer patient, leaving a sad trail of hair everywhere I went, I decided that a copper IUD would be the best solution to maintain my lifestyle without the risk of coming home with condoms in my briefcase. Ten years of no-brainer birth control; for a $1000 it seemed like a steal. Babies, after all, cost way more than that.

The doctor warned me that some things would change. “Most women complain of heavier periods and more severe cramping” she told me. “Good, fine, whatever”, I said, “When can you get me in?”

I honestly had no idea that she was being serious or that I could undergo such a freakish transformation without ending up in the hospital. What used to be a minor, two day annoyance has now become a week long blood bath that descends on my lady parts like a chapter from the Old Testament. It comes and goes with the ferocity of a biblical plague, showing no regard whatsoever for silly little things like my plans. I never used to worry about rescheduling my shenanigans but now I would surely leave any motel room looking like a crime scene and I certainly wouldn’t want to go swimming in shark infested waters.

Gone are the days of being carefree, here now are the days of living in constant fear of a mortifying “incident”, a tampon failure, an unexpected disaster; the kind of thing I used to fret about in middle school. I drove to Boulder a couple months ago and 7 hours into the trip, while inching along through Denver during rush hour traffic, I began to suspect that trouble might be brewing. Two hours later, when I finally made it to the Days Inn, I practically fell out of my car and, to my horror, realized I was sitting in a saucer sized red puddle. I had driven nearly 500 miles, my back was killing me, I was dizzy and hungry and now I had to try to speak coherent English to a hotel desk clerk with what was sure to be a matching stain on the back of my pants. I was tying a jacket around my waist and Carl was like “ummmm”, I cut him off in mid-mumble, “You say a word about this to anyone and you’ll be hitchhiking home!” The desk clerk was rambling on about the pool and continental breakfast while little birds tweeted around my head. As the world started to black out, I snatched the key from his hand, staggered to the elevator and collapsed on the floor of my room. This is my life now; wearing bloody clothes in public and complaining to my friends who look at me like I’m embarrassing them. On the upside, my hair grew back and has now returned to it’s former unkempt glory.

When I first told Dean about the IUD, I said “Don’t worry, the brochure says you shouldn’t even notice it.” “I bet I can dislodge that fucking thing”, was his reply. Turns out he was almost right. While nothing has officially been “dislodged”, he routinely complains of being jabbed. I suppose I should feel a degree of empathy for his ordeal but, being a bit of a sadist, it really turns me on so I order him to fuck me harder. He’s a big boy, he can take it.

The Rose

A stranger walked into the woods and away from his life. He had given up on the world of the living. He walked with an empty heart, deeper and deeper into the forest, paying no attention to any compass; there was no reason to go back the way he had come. He walked until the sounds of the city fell away; until the sun faded and the moon shone with a fierce white light. Wolves howled and night birds screeched. The sounds of water could be heard, madness descended on the land and into the stranger’s mind. He found a place to sit and wait for the forces of nature to take him to another plane.

He sat on the damp ground with the tendrils of a vining weed curling around his boots.  Footsteps of nocturnal predators surrounded him and bats flew silently overhead. He sat and waited, knowing that the claws and teeth of a hungry beast would be upon him soon enough. A tri-colored snake sat coiled on a branch above his head. He beckoned to it with his broken thoughts. A lightening fast strike from the serpent would be followed by an eternity of peace. He waited.

The stranger waited for death to find to him but on this night he would not be found. He laid down and did not object when spiders crawled onto his face. Sleep came over him and when the first rays of morning sun touched his eyes he was startled by the presence of a tiny rose. An unlikely plant to be growing there, it was barely alive from being choked by the vines but, even so, had managed to send up one tiny bloom that glowed red in the sunlight.

The stranger stared at the tiny flower, his face reflected in a single dew drop clinging to it’s petals. He sat up and cleared away the vines so that the little plant could get more light and air. It rained often in the forest and all green things grew very rapidly, especially the vining weeds. By the time the sun was setting in the west, the tiny rose had become more robust and vines were once again curled around it’s base.

The next morning, and for countless mornings, the stranger awoke on the ground next to the rose. He would tear the vines away to give it room to grow. With the help of the stranger, the rose flourished; turning it’s velvet blossoms towards the warm rays of sun.

The stranger no longer waited for death to find him and he became intent on serving the rose. Though it never thanked him, the stranger desired only to sleep under the stars looking forward to watching the rose unfold in the morning light.

The rose did only as it’s nature intended it to do. It fed on the sun and the rain; growing stalks of deep green leaves and razor sharp thorns, topped by silky red flowers. The rose never knew the perilous nature of it’s existence nor did it give any thought to the assistance that made it’s life possible. It did not feel for other living things, it knew only warmth and growth, it did what roses do.

Seasons passed and the stranger grew old. But even in the autumn of his life, with gnarled hands and bent knees, he fought the strangling vines; tearing them from the ground so that the rose may live.

One morning the sun burst over the horizon, illuminating the rose and filling all the dew drops with rainbows of refracted light. The forest shone like a cathedral but the stranger did not stir. Light fell on his face but his eyes did not open. His chest did not rise and fall. He did not wake from his slumber and clear away the vines.

As the sun moved across the sky, the vining weeds wrapped their tendrils around anything they could reach. By noon the stranger’s face was obscured and his arms bound securely to the ground. Carnivorous insects marched to him in straight lines. The rose continued to flourish and bloom even as the vines began to curl around it’s thorny stalks. It did not know to be afraid or to mourn for what had been lost to it. It knew only to grow in the sunlight and so it carried on. By the following day the strangling vines had wrapped themselves through every stalk of the beautiful bush yet the rose felt no sadness. The great stalks began to wither, leaves turning brown and perfect red flowers falling to the ground as the vines choked the life from the rose.

The rose did not grow angry at it’s fate. It simply was and then it was not. It did what roses do; returning to the forest floor with all the living things that had gone before.

Pactiser Avec Le Diable

Look it up if you don’t know what it means. I would also like to point out that French is the language of skunks. No joke, it really is. I once knew a skunk and, while many people mistook it for a kitten, a brief interaction, and a translator with a keen nose, is all that was required to pick up on a refined sensibility and impeccable manners.

Hello Tribe.

I thought I would dish up something nice, something to get you inspired to go bleed some ink; to splash your thoughts across a page that, in an unnamed time frame, will be retrieved from a landfill and cataloged as evidence of our great demise.

Is it working?

I don’t write in notebooks because I live with people who can read! Think about that.

The truth is; I don’t have a method, I don’t write a certain number of words per day and I certainly don’t write them on paper. I did, however, take English in high school, so there’s that at least.

I type with three fingers and, whatever gibber jabber comes out, it doesn’t come from me. I consult the tarot, commune with the dead and channel ideas from other dimensions.

I once recounted the details of a horrific murder to which there were no witnesses. I knew the victim and, after her ghost scared the shit out of me in the middle of the night, I spent three days asking her what she wanted me to say. At the end of the 3rd day she started talking and I tapped out 3471 words on the screen of my iPhone while laying in bed. You can read that story here if you like.

I am of the opinion that practice makes proficiency but it doesn’t make art. Genius can be facilitated but not taught. Don’t take my word for it. I’m just a smart ass with a sinister gift, after all. Try it for yourself. Forget all that brain-space wasting shit that you know and let a dragonfly alight on your finger.