I wrote this awhile back and I don't know if I will ever use it elsewhere, so I figure now would be the time to rewrite it a bit and at least use it somewhere.



Come dance with me in the light of the moon. The music of crickets will give way to the songs we hold inside our hearts. The sun won’t ever come up on this night, because we have no need for slumber. Moonbeams will be our copilots, my voice soft in your ears with promises fulfilled of neverending summer nights spent listening to songs that no one else knows, seeing things no one else wants to see. Take a seat in this big old car, rusty and beaten, but with brightly fresh painted fins. You can even drive if you want. We'll hold the California stars in the palms of our hands. I'll climb into the heavens and build you a paper moon. They’ll call us gypsies. They’ll call us bums. But we won’t even be able to hear them as we laugh and sing.

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Ellwood City stories #3

When I was a kid, North Side News seemed like a far off heaven of comics that maybe Lawson's and the Newsstand did not have. I used to hide books I could not afford for months at the Newsstand. And I still remember Ditko filled digests I got at Lawson's. But like I said, Northside News was a place I dreamed of going to look for new JSA comics. I went there yesterday and all they have now is lottery and newspaper. No comics. No wrestling magazines. It made me sad that kids today will grow up without hunting for PWI or the latest issue of GI Joe.

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I love when dogs sit in cars, heads out, happy to be alive. I get some of my best life lessons from my dog. To be in the moment and not to really have any clue what comes next, but being ecstatic when it gets here.

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Someday soon, money will not be the issue it is now. Because so much of love was wrapped up in money and taking care of things and being responsible. And now, we're gonna shoot that barn until the roof falls down. If all anyone wants is my paycheck, they can have that. Me, I just want something more.

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Ellwood City stories #2

NOTE - My camera phone was all dirty. Yet the photo looks better as a result.

The Hazel Manor is the first place I ever sang in front of people. It had a railed off stage, like a porch inside a bar. It was nothing fancy. And I sang a bit of Twist of Cain by Danzig, with a band of my friends, and for awhile, I felt like I was a rock star. I was 16 and had a mullet, probably, and was chubby, definitely. I may have had some shots of whiskey, too. But when I held that mic and sang my little heart out, I felt like I could actually be attractive and people could feel the same. It took years for that to fully kick in, but you know, sometimes, you have to look back.

Hazel Manor. As the sign says, "Warmest beer and worst food in town."

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Ellwood City stories #1

The door was covered with brown paper and meticulously cut out letters, a celebration of a day that a lot of people did not remember. It took hours, sitting on the floor at the table, hands coated with paste. Maybe someone would read this and think that there was something more to be celebrated in life than just getting through the day. And that heroism was something that we could all aspire to.

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Of all the things I do, this is one of the things that I do best.

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You know your dog fits in when he falls asleep on the couch with your dad. They both sleep here all night while things go on around them, happy in each other's company.

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They both sleep, miles away, in different times. She dreams of lying between her mom's legs, cozy and snuggly, the hot sauce to a burrito. He dreams of her, probably. Or maybe he thinks about how he lives in two cities and how many people love him now versus the days when he walked alone. Either way, in their own little hearts, they have brought love and hope to two people's lives. Bark bark.

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This is my cyborg eye. This is me laughing in Noah's mirror. This is me rocking out a $2 shirt. This is me having a good beard and nice hair. This is a good day.

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He became a haunted house inside of himself. You could walk down his halls and at times remain perfectly sane and healthy and unafraid. And other times, the spectre flew through the halls and burned alive everything it touched. He hid inside, as much as he could, because the footsteps made his heart race. The long shadows down the hall. The fingernails across the frosted glass, diamond hard fingernails slicing the mirror in two. It'd come for him like it always did. Not a day would go by without the the shrieking starting, the chains rattling and that wretched wailing. He can never move away. He can never get away. He is here in this crumbling mansion he built inside himself and can't even open the door.

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You'll sit there. Interchangable cast of characters opposite. Never on the same side. Crunch crunch. Fingers cold. Heart burn.

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The road is out before me and the wind is at my back. And I'm not going to look back again. My sack is over my shoulder and all I have is inside it. I sold everything else, I burned what was left to the ground. I have no idea where this road is going to take me. All I know is that I got my dog by my side and his eyes are smiling. I'll send for the cats when I get to where I need to go, I swear. It's easy, it's just one step, it's just the start of the journey.

And then I wake up and I never left.

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There is nowhere I want to see. Nowhere I want to go. I just want to lie down here and sleep as long as I can. I want to close my eyes and have that be it. But every day I wake up and I try and make my world happy cherry fake. I wave at the old man, I pet the dog, I smell the flowers. Only the fact that my feet hit the floor keeps me from being a ghost. I wish I could descend down through the floorboards, past the kitchen, into th e crust of the earth, past the Secret Chiefs, fall through the magma and out the other side of the world and just float and fall and close my eyes as the lack of gravity spins me through the galaxy until I burn up on reentry on a planet I've never seen.

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Every word feels like it's been torn out of me and overthought and overwrought. It's become a chore to even press enter instead of type/delete. Fuck it. I wish I could tear my hands through reality and make the world fall in the hole left behind.

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This is as much as I'm gonna show my face these days. A reflection broken by light and curve. I wish that this was how I had to see myself, too, because I hate looking myself in the eye.

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My iTunes is filled with a mix of bands that burn down churches, scratchy voiced troubadours, country sadness, girl groups lamenting lost love, beep boop beep, singers who stabbed themselves in the heart and fucked up drug addicts. Turn it up.

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900 posts - wow, big fucking deal

They described my hometown recently as the place where dreams come to die. That's funny. I didn't know anyone had any dreams here.

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I sit here at my new desk and the truth is, I have writer's block again. Once I realized that there wasn't really any magic left in the world, it's been hard to be a magician. I try and do the same rituals and even when they get close to success, they aren't. The words have been distilled to simple keystrokes and clever turns of phrase, but they sure as fuck aren't magic. On my old keyboard, I typed so hard I burned through all the letters. It looked blank to everyone else, but to me, I knew right where the keys were. I still have never achieved that with this laptop, but I've tried. The words made with this keyboard are mere haunts and hints of the past. I can feel the writing leaking out of me, as I fall to my knees, trying to scoop it all up and swallow it so I don't lose whatever I have left. Once, I wrote without fear and took no prisoners. Today, every word is a meek utterance and an admission. The flesh has failed me, my mind has failed me, my words have failed me. Every law and theory I believed in has been proven false. The bees swim and the birds crawl. The fish just walked past me and said hello. The dog asks me why I drive this way every day, but he knows the answer. I wonder myself why it takes me so many hours to get home. Why do I stop in every store? Is it because the toys make me feel better? Or am I just looking for a brief connection to a humanity that I feel moments away from turning my back on forever? Will I find humanity in all night supermarkets, anyways? Why do I worry about how I dress when I basically wear the same thing every day?

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She kept telling the boys to move their eyes up here, but some boys like feet, so she never caught that.

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The messages were sent backward in time and they never get there. I buried things sent years back and never find them in time. I appear to my old self in dreams but he can't even recognize me. I try and tell him what to do and what not to do. But the thing is, I have no idea what to tell him, so he is confronted by a ghost who can't even scare him, which should make him so afraid. I want to shake him. But my hands pass through him and I can tell he's waking up and we'll be stuck in the same moebius strip together.

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I just toss the shells and the pits and the hulls into the woods. I watch the eaten ears of corn arc into the purple late summer night sky. Summer's kiss is over.

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Once, I could tell you exactly what you saw and what the story was behind it. But today, I am blind. And deaf. And dumb, of course.

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"I've only seen it happen in the movies. Only in fairy tales. Only in the books I've read. And only to other people."

When you stop believing, what happens next?

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Outside, they are breaking and smashing the earth.
Inside, everyone is loud.
Insider further still, my leg keeps shaking.

Sometimes I look outside the window and daydream. I have two of them for just such a purpose.

I leave my front door open for the same reason. I had it open all weekend.

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Someone just took my words and threw them all over the place with no regards for them other than the length of them. Every word is massaging and thought of and instead, now, I have to rewrite this all shorter without a thought. My words, like me, just take up space. They aren't waiting for anything. They just sit there, hoping to not get cut off. Or unused.

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Soon, he'd look out and be blinded by the last thing he'd ever, or anyone, really, see. He admired the sky, the blue, the brightness, the way it felt to drink it all in and know that it was there. He'd always taken it for granted, or, at worst, not appreciated it. Because it's there for you, he thought. Because it is. And now, soon, it won't be. If only every last moment could be known, could be counted on. He wanted to keep his eyes open so that they would be blasted and fried and burned from his sockets, because he wanted to remember the world like this. Because after this, the world would not be the world any more. The pieces that would be missing would be unable to return and the feelings of what it was like to live in the world that he had taken as his would never return. At least he knew it this time. At least they all did. At least they had some closure, to the end of the world, if there is such a thing. He could hear the sirens rise in the distance, the TV droning on about safety drills, the animals screaming outside and he was overcome with a strange calm. He held his hands, sweating, on his lap. He sighed. A hotel room alone in the middle of nowhere. Not really the place to witness the end of all things. But we don't get to pick the endings. And sometimes, we don't get to pick the beginnings, either. Whistling. Boom. Smash. Crash. Fucking hell. It's here. He just won't have to worry about it, any more. Any of it. He's ash on the wall of a place no one wanted to ever live in.

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I used to live in fear that life was a dream. Or that I'd wake up back in first grade and the rest of my life was all a fantasy. And now, I don't care.

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She screamed and shrieked and cried.

"We're all fucking plastic. We're all stuck in a world someone else made who isn't God and this isn't real and we're all going to be stuck here forever, stuck here praying to a man who doesn't even understand."

They stared at her, but they couldn't move. They were glues to their seats, after all.

She struggled with all her might to escape her bonds of model glue. She fell, hard, to the ground, trying with all her might not to cry out. And then she realized, that was as far as she could move. And she laid there and their lives kept going, but now, she could only lie there and not move instead of sitting there in comfort.

Everyone prayed and mass started all over again. And again.

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I am not your hero. I am not your savior. I am not to be relied on. I will not be your one and only. I will not hold a candle for you. I will not be the apple of your eye. I will not be someone to call on or depend on. All I can be is me. I am floating dust. I am the last fleck of the day before light smashes it. I am the last sip of beer. I am the downbeat of a song. I am the last mile of your roadtrip. But I am nothing else.

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Water in hand. 18 wheeler close. Closer. You forget how fast 90 miles an hour is when you aren't in a car. Roll over the median, knee sacrificed to the safety of rolling over it. I can see my dog in the car, windows down, screaming. I don't know if I'll get out of here. How far I can go. White smoke is everywhere. My hands hurt. My head hurts.And if I had my way, I'd just lie down and roll away. But no. I walked all this way with all this water. Vroom. Starts right up. Of course it stops running a few miles from now and I will repeat this all over again. And I wonder, who do I call for help. With no phone. And no one I really want to talk to or owe any favors to. So I just walk. Trudge. Pace. I get miles from home and it dies again. I wonder how I will get home from nowhere. But then again, I don't really have a home. Not for much longer, if you get your way. Or I get my way. It's hard to tell. I wish life was as simple as an overheated car. You'd fill it, run the heater like antifreeze, and then wait for it to cool down again. I wonder what it would have felt like to have that truck slam me through the air. I wonder if I would survive it. I think I would. For some stupid reason, I am a cockroach. I keep on walking even though my legs get occasionally plucked. I mean, yeah, fuck, it hurts. But you know. There's some personal pride to be taken in one's own pigheadishness in a world that keeps seeing fit to punch you in the face, to turn your cheek like when I was a fat third grader and just wanted the world to be fair. Now I am a fat 36 year old old man wishing the world was as I wished it and the truth is, the world is the world. So I just laugh and be happy. It's just a ride. It's just a walk. I have nowhere to be and no one to see or answer to. I can take as long as I want to get home. And someday. I'll just say fuck it and not come home at all.

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I'm gonna find a street I never walked down before. I'm gonna walk with my eyes shut. I do that a lot. I see how many steps that I can take before I hit something. Sometimes I put my hands in front of my face. Other times, I am content to just slam headfirst into walls. It doesn't really change my looks one way or the other. I do it because I'd like to open my eyes and not be me any more. Not recognize myself in the mirror. Not know who I am any more. Not see the lines and the age and the grey and the waste of time that I have made out of the past few years. I'd like to be fresh again. I'd like to not yell at myself when I see my face in the mirror. So every time I walk, I close my eyes, not caring if traffic finds me or not. And when I get to the other side, I'm still here.

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There's nothing for me, in this world full of strangers. It's all someone else's idea.

"Until I send for you, don't wear your hair that way.
If you cannot be true, I'll understand."

I will never know wrinkles and liver spots and to see how age makes beauty. I will never know the feel of a child's hand in my grizzled paw. I'll never know that feeling again, that rush that heartbeat. My name will become forgetful, my image will become fuzzy, I will become conjecture and wonder and illusion and campfire talk. That knowledge will elude me. I'll seek it like the holy grail and it will be fraught with pitfalls and really all I should do is stay on my comfy couch and pet my dog and keep my fingers away from keyboards.

Call a jitney drive away. In the slipstream, we will stay. Stay away. Stay away. Stay away. Stay away. Stay away. Stay away. Stay away.

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I know how Slim Pickins and Paul Tibbetts felt. Flying over the ground you can see that when you open these doors, it's never going to be the same again. You are going to change the world in a way that you never wanted to. And still, you drop it. Maybe you'll even ride it down. Flash bang boom. Burning people into walls, watches onto wrists, a thousand years of click click click detecting. One big blast, one big boom.

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Child's small fingers protected by glass from blistering claws
Climb up and escape, run, smash water and cage
Tap tap tap on your prison, tap tap tap

Tomorrow, you're gonna boil
and you ain't getting no last meal
Tomorrow, your shell will be in the trash, your meat will be in the sewers

Your eyes are beady and can't cry, or maybe they can
and the water holds it back from us to see
That screaming noise you make isn't your voice

It's just the boiling water cascading through your shell
and the melting of your insides
Why are you the only animal we cook alive?

I wish I could rip those rubber bands off your fists
I wish I could take a sledgehammer and smash your prison
I'd lead an occupation force into every grocery store

I saw dogs run down the turnpike and I knew I couldn't save them either
So there's no way I can help you
As it is, I barely and probably won't save myself

So I'll just place my hand up to the glass and say goodbye
If it makes you feel any better
You're gonna taste fucking delicious with butter sauce.

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Underground, they were amazed by the wonders that no one had seen. And today, no one knows. All we know is cathrode ray tube and cable DSL words and pixels and the lies that we keep telling ourselves. We aren't impressed by paper machie any more. We aren't thrilled to the sides of roads and crazy people who just do something and make art. We are broken, all on different levels and this world will be poorer for when these things go away. But they will. And then we'll all stare out into nothing. Nothing and nothing and nothing and dust in the spotlights, just kind of floating.

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Proud king of the stuffed animal kingdom. We brought our cap guns and power wheels and costumes into your jungle and used our plastic knives to sever your head. But you can't die. You sit on our wall laughing at us, about how silly we looked, grown ups wearing kids clothes, covered in stuffing, proud of our meaningless conquest.

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With every stroke, he wiped away a tear. Because he had captured her, for once. He had captured her soul here on gessoed canvas, with pigments and oils and brush. He saw into her and took everything he loved and needed and wanted and transferred that to this flat 2D space, laid bare for the world to see, judged at an art show in the middle of nowhere. She hung on the wall, haunting when compared to the crude paintings of Amish children with their pets. Her eyes stared out back from that flat frame and stared back into everyone else, making their minds wonder who painted her. It'd been thirty years and all he had was that ragtag photo they shot that stolen afternoon. And she knew that this would be all they would ever have. For him, it took years. Decades. In fact, he believes that, even now, someday she will walk back into his life and tell him that she missed him so much that and she worried he'd never take her back and he wants so bad to be tough and hard when that happens and not give in, but he will, he'll cave and she'll probably fade all over again. So that's why he painted this. That's why he takes it from small town to small town. The citizenry walks past and they are as haunted as he is, as trapped as he is, down in the well of unrequited love, with water that never tastes as good as it did the first time. The hangover is a feeling like kissing a ghost. The burning of unreality meeting reality, of the spectre that will never condense into reality, and the feeling of just there and not enough and almost but not quite, trying to find everything you can to mask that feeling. He knew he'd tried. He lost himself in drugs, in drink, in danger, in people who were as dead as he was to minimize the damage to his already heart made of dust. All he had left was this painting. And he had no idea where she lived. He didn't know if she was alive. All he knew was someday, somewhen, if he took this snapshot of paint across the country, someone would know her. Someone would know where she was. He stood, lost, every weekend, a ghost himself, hidden amongst the fresh squeezed lemonade and funnel cakes and fried dough, eyes never leaving the crowds who see his work. He has a glovebox full of blue medals and best in shows. But he'll never have her again.

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The dragon follows you, in its head and its mouth and its flames. The dragon is nature's only free and fearless being. They say a tattoo of it will mark you as someone unafraid and unholdable. I can see why it is on a fire station. They must journey through the fire and the flames to a goal that may be already gone. And childhood is the last time before the fires consume us, of worry, of fear, of loneliness. The dragon, flowing through the dragon, sets you through their fires and prepares you for the future. Just don't chase the dragon. Trust me on that. In any way. You just end up ash. And soot. And swept away by winds.

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So I'm watching TLC or whatever. Some documentary channel. And they followed up Nazi America with the history of hippies. What are they trying to tell us? And what does it mean when both of these groups hate the government with equal fervor? This weekend, I have decided to stand up on my own against the machine. I'm like Phillip K. Dick, without the VALIS. By the way, my TV just started talking about MK ULTRA. Therefore, I will share with you a Dick quote that I enjoy: "I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards." You know, they made an android of Dick after his death and then, an American Airlines stewardress misplaced it. Speaking of American Airlines, someone answered one of my ads once and told me numerous times that they were a stewardress for American Airlines. I did not reply to this email, only days later to get another email, asking me if I had ever had bad service on an American Airlines flight and that's why I never replied. Really. Amazing. This is why I don't have any ads any more. One of the many, many, many reasons. Anyways, back to Ken Kesey. All these hippies doing drugs after neo-Nazis killed peoples on my TV. It's been an afternoon, let me tell you that much.

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I have the car filled with free gasoline. All my clothes are clean and still inside it. I have enough food and drinks to get me to somewhere. Yet I sit here on my couch. This is the part of the trip where I hem and haw. Because I know I have to drive away. I know that I have to get out of this town. I know that I can't show my face around these here parts. But a part of me wants to stay here. A part of me doesn't want to face the honesty and the music. A part of me wants to say that all that I own is mine, but the lizard part of my brain knows that that could never be true. If you feel that way, everything will slip out of your fingers.

I wonder after I come home shopping, does the fact that I have all the shampoos I need now, the body wash, the conditioner, the mouthwash, all clean and gleaming...my house cleaned and smelling of incense, the carpets all vacuumed, do I feel any better? Or is all the shit I pile into a day a way to fill the wicker man? And we all know what they do to that guy.

Sunday morning 9:10 AM. I used to hide in the bathroom or on the couch and talk. Now, I sit here and I compose symphonies of click click click !!! that will get read and become destris.

Out there in the kitchen is the full dishwasher. I think I'll feel whole again when it's unloaded. Or maybe that Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch that I got on credit that made the trip back with us will assauge my ennui. I have two sweet pickles floating in the jar and maybe I'll have those too. After the cereal. Way after. That ain't a good mix. I read yesterday that you can put Kool-Aid into pickles. Why anyone thought this was a good idea can only be attributed to meth. But that said, I'll try it. The pickles, not the meth. All that mouthwash was bought for a reason. If I ground my teeth down, I'd be wasting it.

Today is rack focus. When the you looks where you are and the foreground and background simultaneously go away all at once and all at the same time, leaving you center of frame, pushed and pulled. That's what they told me today should be. But really, I'd rather today be a day of sitting on my comfy couch and making my brain shut off and riding that couch like a ship into the sure seas of sleep and silliness and a lack of care about what happens. To not care while caring more. It's a precarious balancing act that will involve two cats, a dog, a high wire, comfy shorts and walking around barefoot for as long as I can. Because tomorrow, I will drive to somewhere I don't want to be. And right now, I am overjoyed at where I am. I just want to stay here, I don't want to leave here.

But like I said, I'm gonna gas up that car. I'm gonna turn up the radio loud to cover the sounds of the engine being shot. I'm gonna mail all the letters that I have in my drafts folder and not give a fuck. I'm gonna not ask for directions and just know that this is where I needed to go. I'm gonna do all those things and change it all, but for now, now, now, I want to sit here and just pet my dog's head and look into his eyes full of the unconditional love that never exists anywhere outside of a puppy's eyes (because cats do not and will not give a fuck for you and you love them anyways). I'll swim in those brown saucers of eyes that he has and his sneezing and jumping and his leaving bones and toys all over my formerly pristine living room and I'll laugh my fucking ass off.

Because today? Today is grey skies. And I know tomorrow will be tears. But if you want to go where the rainbows end, yesterday is here and you have to just say goodbye.

Goodbye.

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It's always good to have digital evidence of your shenanigans.

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If you want to see what makes you different, look at your bed after you sleep. Mine is tatters, mine is bare disease strewn mattress, mine is almost broken from the tossing, the turning, the tossing. Yours? Carefree.

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I'm only staying here for a bit but you're all stuck here forever. Night after night of nothingness. I can relate, I guess. I just went to somewhere else where the nothing has something more than less. I make two hours movies last eight hours. I drive all night just to get back to nothing. But at least I don't live here.

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She jumped from square to square, adjusting her balance and her way and asked, "Haven't you ever done this?" No. Nope.

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They were carnivores.

Steeped high tables packed with plates of smoking meats of all flavors, colors and varieties, lorded over with grizzled, gnarled hands desperately clutching Kool 100s. Their eyes still danced with the fire that used to snag other women's husbands in dive bars and lure them to the woods, where the other would bash the man's head with a rock. They took all the money and piled it in the back of a Chevy, rotting and rusting and dead in the back of the woods where no one else can find it. And today? Today they are content to meet in the diner and fill their table to overflowing with plates and plates and plates. Hold the salads, honey, she chortles. They scan the restaurant, knowing that thirty years ago, they could have any man here. And today? Today they don't need to. Have you tried the country fried steak?

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What makes a lounge Mediterranean? What doesn't?

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