Kill ‘em All

No questions this time.  Just one long pull up another prairie roller.  My shoes have a hard heel and I can’t really even out my stride today.  My shins are splinting.  But even heel jarring clacks of hard rubber and shinsplints are not enough.  I am running hard.  Hills.  Mud. Sludge.  Open fields.  Car exhaust. Oklahoma assholes.  Bring it.  

I have an idea for a book. I’ll call it Bring It!  and it will be moderately bad SciFi.  See, there’s this guy who lives in a metal box.  His society is a metal box.  His house is a metal box.  His future is a metal box.  Of course, only the metal box he lives in and works in is described, the rest is metaphor.  In his time, metal boxes are the rule.  I would make up a complicated religion around a one eyed red god with complicated idols and everyone wears a big red eye on their necks.  And the big red eye church runs that shit. 

But this guy has visions.  Not of a red eyed god, but of a vagabond who’s face was ripped apart in some unkown war and he sits in the falling ashes and he talks nonsense and bad ass philosophies and is anything but divine.  I don’t think I’d ever explain the temporal aspect of this motherfucker, from the past, talking to metal box man.  But this jackal covered motherfucker would influence metal box man, who thinks he is a god. When metal box guy asks what he should say to people who threaten him  when he acts up, the old man who is god says to tell them, “Bring it!”  This turns him into a legendary, badass man in the sheep society.  He would start to get irritated.  He would start fights at the water cooler with his paper moving punk-ass coworkers.  He would start running bleachers, like this motherfucker here.  He would break a motherfucker’s head open on the bus.  In his world of metal sheep, no one would be ready for a badass.  Of course, he would have to start physical training.  

As it turns out, the red cyclops was just the last survivor of a war.  And everyone that was left was mutant zombies and wolves.  You know, so he could be a badass.  He is also the father of the metal box race.  Guys like him are sort of useless in a metal box society, and indeed harmful to it.  But he has no idea his dreams are fucking up the future utopia (and it is a real, functioning utopia).  

Toward the end of the story, the former metal box guy is starting a fight with a shit ton of people and building a following.  His people are unreliable, shit is all fucked up, etc.  As the revolution he starts begins to collapse, the final vision is the one where realizes all the red eye churches are based on this psycho sitting in the ashes.  But he still trusts him and asks what to do when everyone is failing and some want to kill you and you don’t know who to trust.  He tells him, “Kill ‘em All!”  

Those are the last words in the book.  Also, they are the title to the sequel.  A badass back alley knife fight of a sequel.  And dude is never a hero and he never has a fate and it ends up just being a story about one guy deciding to be a badass who ends up running shit, motherfucker.  Maybe the final words of that book, when he’s in heated argument with cyclops dude, would be, “You think you’re God?  I run this motherfucker! You got me? I run this motherfucker, until the goddamn end! You hear me? Until the end!”

And then cyclops dude would be attacked by the circling wolves and would tear the jaw out of one and use it like a club to beat the wolves ass even though you know his shit is doomed.  And he would shout because he’s really just been a crazy, though insanely tough, old man all the time, “Unto the end! (smash) Unto the end! (smack)” 

Etc.  Those words are the title to the third in the trilogy.  It would be called the Badass Trilogy.  

And my lungs burn and my sides are killing me, but I will run five more minutes of these fucking bleachers in this nameless goddamn school.  I am Beowulf.  I am Spartacus.  I am Hiawatha.  I am the motherfucking man.  Click clack, I’m a fucking train, bitches.  And when I’m done, I stand up on top of the metal bleachers and suck air down into the bottom of my lungs and clench my fists at my side.  Breathe it in, blow it out. John Henry, Jesus, Casey Jones, whatever.

Bring it.  Kill ‘em all.

Quoth

“I would rather live and die without you than pretend to love you for one more day.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Fuck if I know.”

Session Work

She’s wearing color today.  Not much, just a little royal blue and green on her scarf.  It’s one of those non-functional scarves like professional women wear.  A silk and sheer thin skiff of throat clutching fabric, chocolate brown, but striped in emerald.  In this cold building, one of cinderblocks and government pile carpeted offices, she should be wearing a real scarf.  I have on a flannel shirt over my thermals tucked into my jeans and it keeps out the chill.  She’s sad today.  It shows in her nephrite eyes and her rising and falling chest.

“Where is your rage?” she asks me. 

Normally, I ignore questions like that, since I assume they’re useless.  But here, after months of talking, I can say I have never heard a single frivolous question escape her.  She works with questions the way I used to work with trowels.  Wasted movements make for repeated work.  She is as much an artisan as any mason.  I do not, however, understand the question.  And  tell her so.  

She expands on the original query, adding chunks of Boolean logic into the wording.  And interpolation into the background noise of supposition that would lead someone into asking me that.  I have every sign of being a rage filled person at times.  I have shown evidence of explosive and destructive temper.  I have layers upon layers of shit I have dealt with and still deal with.  I had told her about the parting of my former wife.  I had told her about the injustice.  I had spake unto her my history of death.  And so she wondered where the rage had wandered off to.  What wide open sage brush and cedar plain it roamed packing Colt iron and taking blood vengeance on all beauty of the fields.  

I told her I had no idea.  It’s there, and it comes out.  But rarely.

“When was the last time you really lost it?”

She knows not to word her questions softly to me.  For whatever reason, I do not respond well to the kid gloves her profession requires.  When she says I’m crazy, that’s the word she uses.  When I’m fucked up, those are her exact words.  I told her about a night when I did lose it.  When I broke down drunk and screaming, but quietly and sullenly, and turned into a stuttering falling apart mess.  About the quaking emotion that would not leave.  And about finally telling someone the wrong things I had done, and about the friends I had lost, and about the self I had murdered over and over again.  The next day, I pretended not to remember and she was kind and gentle enough to lie and say she didn’t either.  

Normally, my crazy is all my own.  It’s something I keep to myself, and I cherish it as the evidence that I never succumbed.  That I never quit being human, not all the way.  But that night, and only that one time in all the years I have been crazy, I let it out.  All of it at once, so it had to be incredibly confusing and nonsensical to the one who I trusted that much.  

I told all of this to the woman with the scarf and the chair and the scratching pencil on the paper.  And she scribbled notes or drew bunnies or something.  Her eyes are older than her smile and her body is lithe and svelte and feminine and everything I hate myself for loving more than coffee and cigarettes.  

So I have rage, I summed up, I must have rage in me, but it only came out then.  

She asks me to describe the girl, the friend I dumped my heart and soul and memories out on in the freezing cold in her car.  We had got too drunk to ever get home.  So we sat and I talked about the day, Veteran’s Day, and she let me get hateful and she asked the right questions to draw me into my first honesty about any of that shit.  It was a waste.  It was murder.  It was wrong.  I was used.  Life means little to me after those years.

The scribbling is furious and when we talk, candidly and with a friendship.  And when I describe the woman in the car, I sense some hesitation in her.  Jealousy?  Is that allowed?

I wonder what would happen between us, me and this woman here, outside of these cinder blocks and cheap pile carpeted offices.  And I notice her neck and curvilinear sinewy goodness drawing my eyes down from her ear.  Down from her neck.  Past that scarf, with just a little color, just for today.  Into the cleft of that sensible suit, open a little as she leans toward me to write another set of notes.  If my hand could stay on hers just a touch too long in the goose feather snows of a full moon winter night.  If coffee turned into wine turned into coffee turned into breakfast the next day.

I am incorrigible.  

“Yes,” she says, “you are. “

Xenocide Or Christmacide?

I ate dinner Christmas Eve by myself at a high grade Pan-Asian place. While I put down my unagi roll, I wondered why I have only felt comfortable with my own company lately. And how that may have driven one person I could have conceivably cared about away. And I thought of who I was this time last year; available, serving, supporting, open, social. I was all of those, but to a fault. That person is almost unrecognizable to me.

I think of who I was two years ago. Still waking up sweating. Still guilty. But I woke up Christmas morning with a woman. I’m not sure I did right by her with who I was then. It was probably unfair.

She was also the first in a string of three women who turned to me after being burned by men coming out of the closet. It’s a sort of fetishizing I was subjected to. I was safe. Rough and tumble and a little homely maybe, but most definitely not going to leave you for a man. If it happens once, it is strange, if it happens twice, it is funny. If it happens more than twice, it’s farce.

So I told my parents and my siblings and my friends that I wasn’t home alone. They wouldn’t understand. They would think it was something sad or some deficiency in my life that would have me eating alone and staying in a mostly dark house by myself on Christmas Eve. I told them all I would be hanging out with friends. That was partially true. I consider Ender Wiggin and company a pretty decent set of friends. And I wonder whatever happened to Bean.

And Jane sounds fucking hot as far as digital life forms go.

It’s rough, you know. When you tell them to move on. And they cry. And they hurt. And you burn. And then they do. They move on.  That’s rough.

I walked through the mall and saw the empty shelves and the angry children and the tired parents and the exasperated workers. The men looked haunted and the women look strained and the kids looked like red eyed devils eying the new crop of souls in the plastic packages that defy opening. Even our toys are packaged and unavailable to us. The lockdown packaging keeps them from getting carried off. Just like the people who buy it. I went to bottle the wine I made for family and friends but the hydrometer said I would be handing them all a potential hand grenade that could blast apart sending glass flying. So it turned into a New Year’s present. The packaging is strong, but the contents are volatile until they’re done boiling off the life inside. If the packaging of the gifts from the typical middle class gift giver reflect their sealed off bodies and their aesthetic devoid of any conceptual value, then what does my present say about me? Are analogs ever really analogs outside the origin of perception?

Like Jesus…Or John Elway

I got nothing.  I haven’t got a single word to write.  

I haven’t got a thing to talk about.

I ran about two miles the other day after taking about two weeks off from the gym for finals.  I hate myself when I get lazy, but I just had no time.  Now I go every day.

There’s no work in the valley, and I have to find something to consume my hours, and quick.  

There is snow on the ground, it rests in a solid blanket on everything, turning to drifts during the days out on the high ground plains and cooling the valley at night into an icy, frozen, knee aching cold. 

When I do have something to say, I have to save it on to a flash drive or something because the cable company needs another two weeks before I get my media on in the new place.  The furnace functions in this house.  The dirtiest aspects of the old house are left behind.  There isn’t even a single sloppy mess for me to clean off the stove when I give up on common courtesy forcing them to take care of it.  

When I drove up to Devil’s Kitchen yesterday, the snow burned the sun and lit the red cliffs.  My footsteps were the first up the trail.  It was cold, and the wind blew heavy up on top, but I climbed it anyway.  Even up the tree to grab a hold of the last ledge to pull myself to the very top of the Monument monocline.  The valley was tired and sanguine, and the river, boiling over with steam and fog, was a languid trail in the white sand of the snowed in valley.  

I have decided what I miss.  I miss the train rides.  I honestly don’t like anything that much on that side of the Divide, and I really don’t miss the company of the one person I knew over there.  I do miss the train rides through the snowed in canyons and along the rivers and over the ridges.  More than I want anything else right now, I want a train ride.  I want to see the places the Interstate, so cleverly engineered, would never attempt to go.  I want to see the dirty industrial hearts of cities from the shell of windows.  

It reminded me, sometimes of being on a ship at sea.  I enjoy driving, especially the dark interstate community of green lit road trippers, but I enjoy more the rumble and transport of ships and, if no ships are available, trains.  There is something blissful in powerlessness.  I never understood why someone would visit another country and rent a car.  I knew lots of guys that would do that when we hit a port.  I preferred the trains.  I had a very long and beautiful conversation with an Indian women flying over the streets of Singapore on a sleek and startlingly clean train.

Nobody believes me, but once I met a girl with a mid-priced mountain bike on a train in New York City and then met her again three months later at a house party in Wichita Falls, Texas.  If I believed in fate, and I absolutely do not, then I would have believed I would meet her again after those times.  As it stands, the random just handed me diamond from the morass of subducted carbonates.  It happens sometimes.  That fate pretends to exist just long enough to fuck with you.

I have ignored six phone calls this morning.  I know who five of the callers are, and mean no offense in my muting of their call.  I just want to be alone today.

I lied about that.  I just answered the phone.

Go on a hike or earn some money?  Either are good.  Both are better.  Spend the day in the Dominguez back country walking in some fresh snow with her?  Easy decision.  Sometimes life hands you a nice package of awesome, friend.  

But today, I think I’ll sit in my bar, where they know me and wildly undercharge me, and I’ll watch the Bronco’s playoff hopes live and die on this game.  My dad called from Cortez this morning to make sure I was checking up on “his woman.”  He had to head out of town and he wanted to make sure my mom was having nothing short of a perfect, effortless weekend.  Of course, both me and my dad know a perfect weekend for her is anything but effortless.

He said to me, with his Southern Colorado drawl, “So, you get them breaks bled on the Scout?”

“Sure did, but I have got to replace those cylinders soon.  I think I may rebuild the master cylinder while I’m at it and just make it a whole damn weeken’ a’ suck.”  We don’t believe in emphasis as a rule, so if it slips out, it denotes exigency untold.

“Well, do me a favor an’ call an’ make sure I’m gonna be outta town when you do it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, well I figgered me an’ Sean could pretty much do enough damage on our own til you get back from wherever.”

“Sounds good, buddy.  I gotta get to Church, they’re startin’ it up in there.”

“Later, Pop.”

“Go Broncos.”

“Go Broncos.”

When I lived in Hawaii, it confused me that Aloha was hello goodbye and I love you, all in the same word.  

That’s odd since I grew up using “Go Broncos” the exact same way.

Later, folks, probably until after New Years.  I like you guys.  Well, except for you.  And you know who you are, stalker.  You know I love you.  

Go Broncos.

Gone

She was laying outstretched on the bed, all psychopathy and beauty and poor decision making. It’s never a good decision that gets her naked on your bed. I still have a tiny scar under one eye from a shot glass hurled by this one. I got one set of claw mark scars down my forearm from one of the times she went off her meds. I have always been drawn to interesting people.

I opened the window, the one that let in the electron gold glow of sodium lights out of the common. A rectangle of orange chased the blue shadows up her body and rolled over her curves and bulges and every other corner of her I knew better than myself. I lit one and let the breeze pull the smoke out into the night.

So you smoke, now?

Only when I drink.

How often do you drink?

Depends.

She chuckled and raised up on one arm, the naked of her glowing toward me. She kicked down one leg and rolled up off the bed. She took the cigarette out of my mouth and took a long drag. Then another. I knew I wouldn’t get it back. When she breathed it in, her shoulders sunk and her eyes closed. An addict. She put a hand on my chest and worked her fingers into my moderate coat of fur.

You doing good in the girl department, you know, with all the muscleyness, she asked me.

That’s how she talked.

A shrug. Sometimes. I just don’t give a fuck. I tell her.

She runs the hand up my chest and over my shoulder and up the back of my neck. She pulls me to her and I taste cigarettes and cheap bourbon.

She tells me, I don’t want to think of a world where you’re gone.

Baby. She liked to be called baby. I take her hands off of me and push her back a little.

What? she asked.

Baby, I been gone.

When I got out of the shower, she was gone with the bottle and the smokes.

I never saw her again.

Harmonics

It’s something like love.

I told her once I didn’t believe in it, in love, and I still don’t. Love is some sort of bland delusion of greater consequence. Like religion. Like hope. Like voting. But it’s something like love.

Smooth and together and just a small touch evil. Brown eyes with gold and curly black hair sort of evil. She moves like something out of a sepia movie. We lay sometimes, together and alone. In the field of stone that is a single unaccompanied life. Her shape is nothing like perfect, and probably cliche. Overstated contours and grooves made to fit another warm body in close. There is a sweetness. A resonance. Some day I may want a forever girl, one who I can count on to be there when I falter and fail and time murders my bones and my final rest is had. Some day I may want assurance. A forever until I’m dead sort of assurance.

But for now, I want this body. The body I run can my hands along.

She’s not for everyone. She may break out Cissy Strutt once in a while, but she’s more about Ten Long Years. And never about some garbled yell and groan of metal. She just isn’t that kind of girl.

She watches me play some music sometimes. I work into a groove and forget everything but dusty backbeat and analog. It’s a wood and string thing. There’s a sort of sensuality, but to call it sexual would be both wildly inaccurate and horridly inadequate. She’s a blue period, not a lithograph. She has movement, but its a movement of quietude. It’s like the ocean, not like a bullfighter. The moon comes in the window and washes us in silver and gold and I have to touch her again. Walk my hands through our communication.

And sometimes, when the tubes are warm, I let it scream; let it bleed. Because you have to. I’ve never known emotions that I cultivate, nurture and burn to the ground when I play. Sometimes, you have to turn it up. You have to let the harmonic resonance possess you and the sustain steel the dark hearted corner of your mind. And so you tell the world, you tell your dark room, you tell her: that you love them, that the world is more profound than love, that love does not exist, that I live on.

Shocking fuzz of electric fur, the muscles better and nerves more, not for you. You have none of that, it’s a sentimentality you are not afforded. And when I tell you by saying nothing at all that I love, do I sometimes feel empathetic pangs that you’ll never even know what that is? Some days.

I was talking to another her about something unimportant and my hand found her firm and cool skinned leg. Holy sweet goddamn, that woman’s got some legs. They’re like two braiding channels of a river, and fuck if I don’t want them forever mine to map and explore and, shut your ears kids, conquest and lord over. Those kind of legs. But I have a date, and it is not with her legs. It is not with her eyes. She smells like vanilla and cinnamon and beer, but I have someone who smells like lemon oil and the earth to get back to. Sometimes like whiskey. Depends on the kind of day I’m having. She sees me waiver and my finger trace out her knee and she feels what I am and what I should never, ever be, and we chuckle.

Go home, she says. Go home to your wife.

And I do. And I plug her in and the tubes warm up slow, glowing orange, and I work chords into melody and melody into emotion.

And fingertip alchemy and muscle making art. Movement, grace, and quivering firmness of sine function. It’s not art. It’s not science. It’s a half pint of gin, a blond telecaster, its long gone lonesome blue.

And let it bleed, you got to move.

Cold

The days crawl by like weeks and when I stand on the point and and breathe heavy steam into a cup of wonderfully awful camp coffee, I think of you.

The Colorado Plateau is a formal term for a large, diamond shaped mass of precambrian metamorphic basement rock underlying the Four Corners states. It acts independently of the rest of the old Laurentian and later North American chunks of buoyant crust. It uplifts and rotates and buoys around on the mantle independent of the greater continental crust of North America, which more or less dies out in Nevada. I have heard someone tell a story of the Plateau being the final resting place of the Yavapai, a string of islands similar to Indonesia that was never quite swallowed by the Laurentian shield. It’s a good story.

The closest analog would be the swallowing up of the Marianas plate under Asia, all those islands to eventually be sandwiched between Australia and whatever Asia will be calling itself then. If people are around, they’ll be much changed and I doubt old words will mean what they do now.

I read a book once on geologists going to other planets to find the First Sun People. I never can remember the name of the author, and I can never convince anyone to read them. The premise of the book revolves around an alternate universe where the Americas (Inca, if I remember correctly) had risen to prominence and the Pacific Rim had run the show through human history, not the pasty pretense of Western Europe. It was its own kind of pretense and genocide.

The sun went down and the fish got cleaned while I stoked up the fire. Tonight, good, cold water trout would have a rare opportunity to live on as human. Inside human, at least. These were hard earned trout. Pulled out of the cold, mostly frozen water. They required sacrifice and maddening precision. Men catch these fish, not homogenized, coddled, waddling balls of pork rinds and cheap beer casting for the dumbest fish on earth in the warmest climate around. These fish took some goddamn skill. I caught very few. I am terrible at fishing. Eventually, I just kneeled down and started grabbing them.

Predation looks a lot easier on the Discovery Channel.

The Plateau is rotating today. Driven by forces very much in dispute, it rotates around, compressing and uplifting and popping up the northern borders of its mass, rifting apart in the south, where the Rio Grande flows by unearthed eons of information hidden in sediments collapsing inward.

My brother came up to the fire with a bucket full of freshly disemboweled fish and he sat it next to me. I looked down and saw the sheen of ice. It had formed in the screaming dense wind trading the cold and ice for the warm and lower.  It had also formed in the time it took him to walk five hundred yards.

We’ve done dumber things than camp in December.  Like me missing you, and him missing her.

Luckily, cold and whiskey and talking to a brother kills most memories.

We may have been raised wrong.

Later. Love.

A couple of beers are going flat and she has tears in her eyes.  The leaves outside have long since surrendered to the tides and currents of the seasons, fallen, withered, and begun to clog storm drains and contribute to the loam of a riparian valley.  She isn’t letting them fall.  Because she never does.  They hang there in her eyes, tempting gravity to surround us again with all that it has to offer.  Time. Death.  Down.  

You know, I tell her, I hope you know that you are the only woman I know who has absolutely nothing to work on.  Her lips tighten into that smile and her eyes squeeze a little at the sides.  One drop breaks free, fighting cohesion and adhesion, to trail down her cheek from behind her sensible librarian glasses.  I tell her: you are already the best a man can do.  You’re a beautiful woman, you’re strong, you’re an amazing mother…

The words are maybe getting to her.  But I know they’re just taking their place there, in a head full of words, in a memory full of men saying things.  The particles flowing from my mouth to her thoughts are there only to annihilate the words of another. One who had no idea what he had.  Who had no idea what a universe of everything right with femininity he had the privilege to draw near.  Her dark hair, sensibly bobbed and her eyes, all tourmaline, green, and shot through with gold, frame her face.  And I see it there.  We two proud souls share more in common than possibly two separate people can.  Another tear falls farther down and she prosecutes the target with extreme prejudice, attacking it with a napkin.  Not before the one on the other side can make the trip all the way down her face and off her chin.  It impacts the table and spreads out to the limits of its volume, but never past its cohesiveness.  She is indeed beautiful.  

I grab up my beer, a little cooler than dead warm, and smile at her while I drink some of it down.  She would say thank you, but she can’t talk just now.  I know.  We two proud souls have lived and fought and sometimes died bravely on the gilded plains of the Illium of love and promises.  We are warriors, true, but battered.  We both know, more than most, that we are forever damned to be nothing more than what we always are.  We know we will never escape ourselves.  I hope one day, after enough words and thoughts have annihilated those bullshit petulant words spoken to her by a spineless fraction of a man, the ones she carries with her, we can both face each other as some sort of victor.  I love her, that is true.  That we are not destined by the springing and neeping tides that push us through our lives to be together is no less obvious.  

Her hand falls in mine.  She’s not one to be shaken.  She’s forever poised and controlled, a sort of classy cool, even when she’s crying in a bar.  Some part of me will always be hers.  A large part, maybe the best part.  And I know I carry some of her with me.  We two proud souls are forever shackled to each other.  

She has seen me, all the parts of me I normally hide.  She has seen me break down and rage about injustice and murder.  She has seen me cling and need.  She has seen me falter and fail.  She has seen me mourn.  I tell her: believe me.  No man will ever do better than you.  No man can do better than you.  

She believes me, but those other words, the ones that make me want to destroy him, still float around in her head.  I love her.  It kills me.  I know with every word I tell her, I am also telling her to go on past me.  To find some other person.  I won’t lie and say it doesn’t hurt to think about that.  But she needs to.  

What we have is not romance.  It is not any sort of sexual relationship, though it has been there a few times.  We are undefined.  When one of us makes a venture out into another shot at loving or whatever may pass for it, we root for each other and are happy for each other.  I’m not sure what that makes us, more than simply saying friends.  Not many women challenge me.  She does.  And she will one day have no more of that fucker’s words in her head, in her heart.  

Out at her car, she’s turned to me and we hug a little longer than most friends would.  She kisses my cheek and pulls me into her.  We both breathe each other in and remember.  Remember days and nights and the time we thought we were ended and given a death sentence.  We remember other things.  Things which are none of your business and positively immoral.  And then we pull apart and she kisses me again on the cheek and says she loves me.  She tells me: you be nice to the girls.  

I always am, you know that.

I know, she says, and then gets in the car and I wave.  And walk away.

That’s the best I can do for her.  That woman is always the ocean to me.