Heavy Bombardment

I don't want to go the the moon

2008-04-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

I don’t want to go to the moon
I don’t want to go to the moon
There is nothing there
You can’t breathe the air
But it’s not like a regular vacuum
which you would use to clean
it is not a machine
I don’t want to go to the moon
There’s nothing there but dust
There’s no one there you can trust
I don’t want to go to the moon
You can’t feel what you touch
I don’t want to go to the moon
Is that your idea of fun?
I’d rather shoot myself with a gun!
I don’t want to go to the moon
Just take a look up there, and you’ll see why
There’s nothing in the sky
There is no “pizza pie”
There’s nothing there but the night
Nothing in sight
I don’t want to go to the moon
The cold is as sharp as a knife!
I’d have the worst time of my life
I don’t want to go to the moon
Why do you want to get there so soon?
It’s so far away
I don’t want to stay
You’ll end up there alone
It’s the opposite of home
It’s just a prison, or more like a tomb
Where you are forever hidden in a horrible room
I don’t want to go the moon
We have nothing to fear but the pull of that sphere
We have nothing to fear but the pull of that sphere
We have nothing to fear but all the world’s oceans
We have nothing to fear but centrifugal motion
I don’t want to go to the moon

Chocolate Milk, Part Two

2008-02-25T07:17:00.000-08:00

The spire breaks its dimensional bondage and appears as a slender girl silhouetted by the dim sunlight sarcastically filtering through the greasy panes comprising the shop’s anterior. Her shadow is draped about her and pinned to her skin, a hood drawn to contain the aggressive outward expansion of gilded halo; that if left unattended, it might blind all assembled. Lucas interprets the cloying yellow of the walls, the floor tiles, and the counters as evidence that the container is inadequate, or perhaps has sprung a leak.
She approaches the table, moving like slow smoke in fast forward. “Hey, what’s up?” she utters breathlessly, with a fiendish smile. “Fuck, it’s cold.” Her shiver is strangely exotic.
“Maybe you shouldn’t dress like a whore in fuckin’ February,” Andy jawed, indicating the astonishing length of nylon’d leg, conspicuously absent a hemline, revealed by the parting of her jacket, a black, knit affair, ankle-length, trimmed with fake fur and buttoned just below her waist. She lets the hood fall, and Lucas, still possessed of sight, presumes to be immune to her pyrotechnic charm. This revelation temporarily emboldens him, though it is nullified by the severe handicap imposed by the drug: namely, that he cannot complete the process of formulating a thought and articulating it concisely.
“Fuck you, Snowman,” she says, without altering her expression to compliment Andy’s innocent snickering. She swiftly seizes the pack of Camels lying on the table, and taps a couple of smokes into her palm, pocketing one and positioning the other between her fingers. She lifts her wild eyes to survey Lucas. In a strikingly cooing tone, she offers, “Hello.”
Sniffing, Andy rummages through his bag of Funyuns, searching for an intact ring. “This is Lucas. The Prodigal fuckin’ Son.”
“Hey. Lucas. I’m Polly.” Her wicked, incomprehensible smile remained, as if at any second, a certain word she uttered might precipitate a burst of laughter or tears. “Snowden tells me you’re the Prodigal Son. I don’t think he knows what that means. Would you care to elaborate, in his, or your, defense?"
“It means,” interrupts Andy, “that this motherfucker tells me he’s skatin’ the dock behind the Publix in Highland Park. Calls me from a payphone, says he needs a ride. When I get there, he’s nowhere to be found. Not at the dock, not in the parkin’ lot, not in the fuckin’ store, nowhere. I drive up and down the goddamn strip three fuckin’ times trying to imagine where this little rep-ro-bate wandered off to, looking for any rail or drop-off or curb, gettin’ my mind in a fuckin’ panic. Then I find him in a fucking… ATM drive-thru, ‘cross from where they tore down the Sonic over there. Like, eyes glued to this pole they left standing in this pile of trash and shit, like there’s some sorta significance to it. And the fucker doesn’t even have his board, said he lost it. Said his friends left him, he drank a big old thing of cough syrup he ripped off from the pharmacy and has been trippin’ balls for the past half-hour. He lost his glasses, too. Pretty fuckin’ Prodigal, huh?”
“Holy shit, cough syrup?” Her eyes linger on Lucas, his complexion betraying his chemical tryst. “What’s that like?”
He swallows, fleetingly aware of every step in the journey taken by the glob of sputum. It’s like the world is at the end of a spring attached to the top of your head. “Uh, it’s like the world is a string.”
Polly lifts the unlit cigarette to a short distance from her lips as she gropes blindly for a lighter in her handbag, her smile broadening. “Fabulous! 'The world is a string.' Are you a writer?” Few others would’ve been able to posit that sentiment as a sexual threat.
“There he is,” Andy drawls. Miles emerges from behind the counter, toting a small cooler.
“Hey Miles, will you fix me a sandwich?” says Polly.
“Naw, I’m off the clock.
“I didn’t say I would pay for it.”
“Looks like Miles has got a little picnic dinner for us there, Polly,” Andy grins slyly, “Damn, dude, that’s some nerve bringin’ that shit to work.”
Miles indicates with his heavy brow that he wishes to change the subject, and shifts his dark eyes to monitor the behavior of a quiet middle-aged couple at the far end of the dining room. “The boss don’t mind; we got a lot of freezer space in the back. What do you want to eat, Polly?” He speaks so slowly that Lucas begins to hear him in reverse.
“Fuck that, man,” Andy manages from a mouth crowded with onion-flavored bolus. “Let’s go burn one.”

Chocolate Milk, Part One

2008-02-25T07:13:00.000-08:00

The spire breaks its dimensional bondage and appears as would a pencil obscuring a photograph in a magazine laying open on a desk. It is a tall, narrow, red fiberglass cone, the tip of which is planted in concrete, encircled by a triad of silver rings about two-thirds of the way up. The top exhibits a slight grade, as if the spire were pruned periodically by some blasé specialist in olive drab coveralls, a cigarette balanced precariously on his lower lip, brandishing a peculiar apparatus like an enormous pair of motorized shears blessed with an opposable proboscis: that if left unattended, the spire might expand infinitely skyward.
The notion depresses Lucas. Worse, the exposed area at the spire’s crest conduces a pale, bland glow. From his vantage, it is unclear whether this owes to a reflective surface capturing the dim sunlight as it sarcastically filters through a thin patch of the icy, white sky, or whether the structure is hollow and lit from within, a sensor mechanism dutifully acknowledging a welcome descent into dusk. The quandary fails to prove a substantial diversion from the ever-escalating tumult high in Lucas’s guts, the fiery prelude of which had forced his refuge in the concrete arch of a bank drive-thru. Eyes still fixed on the spire, he doubles slightly and staggers towards the brick wall. His attention lapses only long enough to deposit three short heaves of stomach acid into the brown grass of the bank’s modest lawn. Raising his gaze, his periphery is raided by a vulgar, gesticulating marshmallow.
“What the fuck, man?” Andy assails, regarding his friend with incredulity. “We were supposed to meet up at Publix.” Palms against the wall, pupils like a horrible tandem eclipse, Lucas appears animally defensive, though the unlikely all-white attire in which Andy, a house painter by trade, is clad—down to his hi-tops—provides a mild, lucid diversion.
As the sweet, chemical stench of the boy’s discharge wafts towards Andy, his expression demonstrates comprehension. “Motherfucker, you’re Robo trippin’.” Lucas stifles a laugh. “Did you drink like a whole bottle?” Lucas stares, his slack mouth twisting like advanced lariat tricks. “Family size?” Lucas grins an affirmative. “Shit, dog, is there a merit badge for doin’ over-the-counter shit? You’d be like Eagle Scout for sure. I don’t know how you take that shit. Mix it up with some… Gatorade and Stoli, or somethin’. Let’s go, Miles gets off at six.” Lucas stares. Impatiently, Andy implores, “C’mon, man, we gotta get over to Subway,” then chides, “He’ll smoke us out.” He attempts to take Lucas by the shoulder, startling him.
“No!” shakily indicating the spire, “I wanna go over there.”
Andy turns his head mildly. “Where, Sonic burger?” He surveys a range of dirt mounds and concrete rubble littered with tangles of rebar, enclosed by a chain link fence. The spire alone remains, rising from the Cubist nightmare in unhappy triumph, a disused monument to misplaced nostalgia. “You’re fucked, man,” Andy chuckles, goading Lucas towards the car, although he is suspicious of his friend’s sincerity, one given to histrionics even when free of the influence. “C’mon, where are your glasses, man?”

Details

2007-12-03T07:55:00.000-08:00

Sketches from a very dull job I used to have.

Nativity

2007-12-02T21:23:00.000-08:00

Photos of a long-abandoned warehouse on South Broadway in Lexington, KY, taken in April 2007. A more substantial section of the building caught fire in October of the same year. I've spent most of my adult life living in this part of town, and the better part of my dream life lurking in these kind of environs. Nowadays, South Hill is being heavily developed, and sights like these are becoming rarer and rarer.

Tropical Depression

2007-12-02T19:02:00.000-08:00

It is a grey day in the city. A young woman is walking down the sidewalk. She is dressed in blue, an ankle-length ruffled skirt and a tie-dyed tunic-like top, of unrestrictive, natural fabrics. Despite the implications of her manner of dress, she is perceptibly self-conscious. Her hair is black and close-cropped. She wears thin-rimmed spectacles. Behind her right ear, there is a white flower blossom. She fidgets with it. The hair in the vicinity of the blossom is a flourish of white. It’s unclear whether this anomaly owes to the pigment of the flower, or some other means, organic or synthetic. She passes a window, the residence at the rear of a Mexican restaurant on the corner, and seizes the opportunity to stop and adjust the flower to her content with the aid of the reflection furnished by the glass. She regards the curtain, a threadbare wool sheet, presumably stapled to the window frame, bearing a pattern of anthropomorphic candies. The constant drizzle that she heretofore hadn’t considered a nuisance to her brief journey is now escalating into a steady rainfall. As she is not equipped with an umbrella and would prefer not to get wet, nor has she utilized the lunch hour allotted by her employer, she decides to enter the restaurant.
The dull yellow throb of the fluorescent lighting graces the interior with a peculiar warmth, a welcome respite from the tropical depression that had slogged inland. The girl surveys the dining room: a brown-orange scheme to the tiles on the floor, an abnormally high counter of roughly the same orange, yellow booths at the base of each window, the sills of which are adorned with planters of fake flowers… a TV set in a far corner, hanging precariously above a booth bearing the sole diner, whom the girl recognizes from her office, a mail clerk. The girl hypothesizes that he is younger than her, though evidently not by much, as he is drinking a bottle of Negro Modelo. They gesture salutations to one another, he more enthusiastically than her. She paces hesitantly towards the counter, which is now occupied by a Mexican girl with a round face and tired eyes. Her long, brittle hair is pulled into a loose ponytail, the remainder framing her face boyishly.
“Hello… you ready to order?” The server’s voice is listless but not unfriendly, thick with the accent of an inexperienced speaker more familiar with useful phrases than the drudgeries of grammar and vocabulary.
The girl grins abjectly, and replies, “Ahh… just a minute... sorry!” with fidgeting hands and an awkward obeisance. She surveys the backlit menu above the counter promptly before continuing, “Umm… what do you have that’s vegetarian?”
The server cocks her head towards the girl and, wearing a puzzled expression, coaxes, “Sorry?”
Nervously, the girl attempts, “Ahh… yo soy vegeteriano… ” She pronounces that deliberately, but a bit too rapidly, so it comes out sounding like "bay-hah-tah-ree-AHN-yo.” "¿Qué cosas... fueron preparadas sin carne?" She feels she's walking a fine line between condescension and exposing her own weak faculties with a foreign language.
The server thinks for a minute, surveying the menu. “Bean burrito, rice… chips…” she trails off, then shakes her head with pursed lips.
The girl glances over towards the mail clerk, who is wearing a cheap, old-fashioned pair of headphones and has progressed only a few pages into a thick novel. He appears to have finished eating. “Well, I’m really just waiting for the rain to stop, so I guess I’ll just have a Coke,” the girl mumbles amicably. The server misunderstands, so she consciously enunciates her second effort: “A Coke, please?”
Cup in hand, the girl descends warily upon the mail clerk’s booth. At once, his gaze rises from the book and he removes his headphones. “Hey,” the girl manages, “I’m just trying to avoid the weather and I thought it might be weird if I tried to sit across the room since you were over here.” Her right hand compulsively fusses over the flower.
“Hey, sure, not at all,” he replies cordially, “I’m actually just trying to avoid work, so we’re kinda in the same boat.” His grin is wide and sincere, though unflattering, causing him to squint severely. His face is long and flat, sporting a ratty, blond attempt at a goatee, and an oily complexion. His hair is mostly unkempt, but it seems that at one point, the plan was to grease it straight up, although whether or not this was successful is unknowable, since the devolution from a marked hairstyle is quite advanced (most likely, it collapsed under its own weight). He is disheveled, but his manner of dress is inconspicuous, in dark neutral colors: a hooded sweatshirt, a t-shirt, and jeans, absent of any brand identification and probably very cheap.
The girl smiles and wrinkles her nose. The expression is genuine, although not necessarily as endearing as one would think. The girl’s face bears small features: a small nose, small eyes, small lips. She is demure, bordering on mousy.
“Yeah, well…” she lurches on. She tries to summon some bon mots, straining to determine a punning relationship between his use of the cliché “in the same boat” and the ensuing rainstorm, before invisibly abandoning the effort. He gapes, still, grateful for the delivery from boredom and isolation, but clearly unable to maintain the concord. Her discomfort increases, and she considers that she has not yet seated herself across from the mail clerk as she had indicated as her intention, and began to worry what that might reveal. She retreats from the eye contact she had scarcely established. Craning her neck upwards, she consults the TV. It is displaying a Mexican soap opera. A man is standing, fully clothed, above a woman in a bubble bath in a luxurious bathroom. He appears to be threatening her, and she is, naturally, quite vulnerable. The man leans down and reaches into the water. The woman is crying and pleading with him. He is masturbating her, and she is at once helpless. The volume of the sound from the monitor is quite low, but when she climaxes, her cries are as audible as the insistent hiss of the shower outside the window.

Quite a Stumble

2007-12-02T17:16:00.000-08:00

I was taken to an altitude
Not at once familiar to those dispossessed
Of the gift of flight

Quite a stumble, I would say
If the catalyst for my condition
Were not so obscure

I admired the topography
Pavilions give civilians advantage
To admonish me

A living shadow cast on the ground
Form interrupts daylight for the sake of
A simple insult

The shape was not one I recognized
Had I altered my form to accommodate
My new circumstance?

Had I a vessel to aid my flight
Its contours might account for the amount
Of discrepancies

What is a shadow but a salute?
A million colors thus provide attributes
Of a simile

Excremeant

2007-11-30T12:17:00.000-08:00

Number One

No mirror in the men's restroom. A small, ornate one, however, hangs at an average height above the sink in the women's restroom. Predictably, I opt to use that one.

Number Two

Towards the ends of greater efficacy in interdepartmental communication, corkboards have been installed in every restroom in the facility, hanging above the paper towel stacks, perpendicular to the mirrors flanking the sink basins. Weeks go by without a single bulletin. At last, an anonymous transmission appears. In every men's restroom, someone has affixed, with the tacks provided, a single paper towel on each corkboard.

Number Three

Someone has butchered the meter of a classic bathroom verse in this manner:

I am
broken-hearted
cuz
I tried to poop
and only farted!

The more traditional rendering, in trochaic tetrameter, reads thus:

Here I sit
broken hearted
came to poop*
and only farted

So the author failed to dignify the widely-accepted manuscript, but what is truly remarkable is that this graffiti was printed on the wall only a few inches above the baseboard and several feet from the toilet; not only would this have been an uncommon feat (requiring contact with the filthy restroom tile), but the evidence leads us to suspect that s/he was not actually in the process of attempting to move his or her bowels when the poem was duplicated, depriving it of credence and sincerity.

*Alternately, "paid a dime," although the increasing scarcity of pay-toilets, especially in this particular region,rarefied this variation.

Solo

2007-11-30T08:38:00.000-08:00

"Gesture, and someone will notice." -Irene Moon

To shiver is to dance to the strains of your vitals,
As the chill calls the tune of your primal recitals.
Your extremities fair sheathed in goose flesh, lest
The moralizers decry that you’re much underdressed,
For they’ve failed to recognize your commitment to craft.
Where’s their critical darling who stretched and belly-laughed?
Once betrayed a humanity that could be controlled,
But this new routine has left your patrons in the cold.

Christina's

2007-11-26T07:26:00.000-08:00

Contrails of satin or silk adorn the settlement.
Pink milk tresses, our horizons bless'd,
The carrion scores the mires suggest.
Fail the surge of spores in envy of jubilant replacement,
The solder purge achieved pastoral attenuation,
Concealed in the thicket, concealed in the bleak colonial shafts:
The gourmet furnished to the vulgar tastebud,
So the cool pink milk turns shed shingle black.

Descent

2007-11-20T08:35:00.001-08:00

We anticipate the transition will be an unremarkable one. Perhaps the departure will rend the consciousness from memory, retaining only the most germane, character-defining recollections for purposes of enhancing the execution. But of what nature shall the foregoing manifest? Should explicit, controlled performances of the most atrocious, unthinkable terrestrial terminations be perpetrated until their finite permutations are eventually exhausted, then repeated? Would there be an aesthetic climax in the sequence? How would such an arrangement be effective? Will the execution perhaps be of a more transcendent nature? Are there notions and sensations beyond our comprehension? Would this enlightenment be intrinsic to the execution, or a necessary consequence? In fact, is an arrangement of this nature self-contradictory? Could it be that the quandary in toto is indeed beyond our comprehension? It will become apparent shortly, as your circumstances present you no hope and no capacity to achieve redemption. Interminably, we anticipate the transition.

Unutterable

2007-11-20T05:30:00.001-08:00

It begins as a notion.

Its presence manifests so gradually and inconspicuously as to elude observation until it is no longer avoidable. And once acknowledged, a whole other host of uncertainties is presented.

At the very real perimeters of the corporeal, of the tangible, of the sensible, it dwells, incomprehensible and unutterable. It occupies a psychic intersection and a literal periphery, as per our current understanding. It is a parasitism lacking of life force, a purely unselfish malevolence. Thus, it defies our theologians and our scientists equally.

Nevertheless, we have determined this much: it seeks to occupy the senses without commandeering them. As I have said, it begins as a notion, a simulated heightening of awareness. When its grotesque visage begins its systematic, staged inhabitation of the visual field, one can initially disregard it as an apparition, a misfired synapse, a misunderstanding. Over time its corruptions of language become one’s own, its ghastly colors a grim filter upon the visible spectrum. Memories disintegrate, cognitive associations wither… even dreams are recast as transmissions from its loath agency; indeed, nightmare merges seamlessly with waking life.

So we endure. The more ignorant among us as well as the most highly enlightened have begun to regard the condition as a gift, claiming that it enriches one’s consciousness by helping to achieve a perpetual semi-detachment from the material sphere… to what lofty ends, I cannot conceive. Castigated daily in discordant, impossibly foreign tones, the wretched countenance writhing and churning like the crust of a young Earth, it is hard to accept this interpretation. It is rather a loathsome carrot on a stick forever beckoning its charge into their vacant twilight.

Nativity

2007-11-19T12:19:00.001-08:00

Pastoral photography of Central/Northwestern Michigan 1914-1918 from the archives of my great-grandfather Conway C. Tyson.

Interruption

2007-11-16T18:03:00.000-08:00

Shotgun to the horizon the swarm surges
abnormally diffuse in the languorous westerly glare
bathing their glass faces
What epochs of life begat
tamed by their parasitic progenitors
docile bearers now
One, otherwise unremarkable, defects in language
either by its own merit or the unknowable whim of its pilot
eschewing the familiar polytonal cry of its kind
for a more complex physiological gesture
engaging appendages with avenue
in sharp stops at semi-regular intervals
a violent shrill resultant
like a horrible cricket
demanding something ≤ understanding
requiring nothing more than some acknowledgement of such
Here, routine renders all impotent
saturation deprives us of definition
yet this new gesture is adopted and repeated
varying in articulation and intent
demanding simply to be heard

Contagions

2007-11-16T13:04:00.001-08:00

A sudden acute burning in her sinuses announced an embryonic sneeze, aborted before even that familiar reflexive gasp of the second trimester materialized, fortuitously, for the mammoth down parka swallowing her frame would have considerably impeded the speedy action of the hand necessary to capture the moist cascade before it could fleetingly impress its amorphous swarm of gentle pathogens upon the plexiglass canvas which firstly served to separate the dismal, untraceably yellow interior of that coffin of a waiting room from the grey, yet somehow warmer, expanse of the garage, littered with arcanum, unaware, or at least only subliminally aware, that such a failure would have been a conceit to the naïvely perverse whim of her sole companion there, the black poly-blend of whose slacks conversed with the red vinyl seat of the chair in the parlance of a squeak that possessed rhymes of a more vulgar sound as he leaned forward, doubling, feigning diversion by the progress towards the replacement of an alternator in his Dodge Stratus by necessarily peering around the violently intermittent visage upon the old neglected television angled against the corner of the room, because he couldn’t let on that he knew… an almost imperceptibly wrinkled nose and brief extension of the jaw betrayed her otherwise successful maneuver to that most sensitive eye, and his arousal was imminent, charging the dense, moldy air of their cell with an excitement palpable enough to touch her consciousness, perhaps due to the hyper-awareness, the vicarious vulnerability provoked by witnessing her hatchback helplessly hoisted upon that pneumatic lift at the sadistic fancy of those countless, prodding, grease-stained hands, and although the catalyst remained vague, she need not glimpse her cohabitant’s burgeoning erection (obscured, anyway, by the considerable length of a black p-coat) to comprehend the nature of this shared feeling, causing her to reconsider the impression of a charming, tragic innocence with which the earlier incidental fart-like emission had charged him, and the transfiguration was evident in her face, with considerably less subtlety than that halted crescendo to ah-choo, and now each imperfection her profile allowed—dark circles beneath her eyes, mild acne, wispy forelocks whose ambitious expansion could qualify them as sideburns—which once elevated her to exemplar of perfectly average femininity, a potential sweetheart as common as the cold, were now interpreted as threats, defenses provided by the failures of her ancestors to anticipate this dangerously lonely breed of predator, designs the likes of which no excessive dose of vitamin C supplement (his aqualung when daring these sick sprays in close quarters for the spoils of the virulent expulsion in slow motion on his video phone as he pretended to compose a text message, peculiarly, at an arm's length) could have prepared him, for her sympathies were no longer contagious and he was long-since immune anyway.

Pilgrimming

2007-10-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

I don't mean to say, "lost in thought;" that implies a weight and severity not common to my mental processes. "Daydreaming," too, is insufficient, in that it describes a fantastic element that I can't safely confirm my thoughts were then employing. "Dreamy" possesses the effeminate , aloof quality I seek to express, but to a greater extent than I quite intend, and the continuous "dreaming" is better retained for its literal definition, referring to an activity I find indispensable. The pejorative "absent-minded," as in preceding "professor," invokes too specific an image: a disheveled, middle-aged eccentric whose visage couldn't be more dissimilar from my own.

Best just to say my "thoughts [were] elsewhere." That's usually where they are. But occasionally there comes a piece of input from my immediate environment sharp enough to penetrate the dense, tumultuous troposphere of my consciousness and provoke my attention. Returning to my car, I passed the patio of a pizza parlour, upon which stood two figures smoking and conversing. Visibly, they impressed nothing upon me (as the term "figures" indicates), as the myriad candidates of foci in my immediate environment collectively fail my darting gaze, not necessarily because the quantity of sensory information overwhelms, but because most of it is unremarkable when interpreted correctly (additionally, eye contact--always a possibility, intentional or not--carries with it numerous and varied undesirable consequences). But audibly, and perhaps on some deeper intuitive level, their presence registered profoundly.

"Life's a journey, man," said one, and that's all. I walked on and savored the resonance of that powerfully banal sentiment, functioning as a kind of ironic commentary to my current situation, less like the voice of a narrator than an incidental verbal soundtrack. A full block-and-a-half later, standing in a parking lot, it dawned on me that I had forgotten where I'd parked. As if I were being filmed, I turned 360 degrees, straining to recall. At last, I decided I had been heading in entirely the wrong direction, and set off retracing my steps. Across a distant intersection, I saw my car. Of course, to reach it, I would have to pass by the pizza parlour again, and the existential discourse transpiring upon its patio. Shaken to an uncommon level of awareness by my slightly embarrassing predicament, I was this time capable of devoting greater attention to the exact dialogue.

Still on the subject, the same voice came again: "I'm just talkin' about livin' life, man."

And I thought, Is there really that much to say about life?