all the words

A communications director dies, goes to hell.

Flames. Devil. Pitchfork.

"?" he asks.

"All those words," the devil says. "Where'd it get you?"

"So what happens now?" the comms guy says, no good answer to the question, watching the pitchfork nervously.

"We write."

In hell they use Macs. Day 1 is free writing. Day 2: the same. The comms. guy, we'll call him RICH, he writes.

Day 3.

RICH: So I've been writing.

DEVIL: How's it going, buddy?

RICH: Relieved. I think it's pretty good, I think I'm almost done this first part. I think you might like it.

DEVIL: removing stray eyeball from pitchfork. Great. Sounds good buddy. Better save, our systems are a bit wonky since the last downgrade.

RICH: clicks save.

Macintosh pinwheel spirals

RICH: How long you think that'll take?

DEVIL: Not sure, chief. Maybe a few minutes, maybe forever, amirite?

Hell days pass. Double long to normal days.

RICH: File's lost.

DEVIL: Great. Time for workshop.

***

Workshop table stretches farther than RICH can see in either direction. Papers stack in front of each writer, further off the table's surface than his eyes can gauge. The writers have been coached to read slowly, to savor the flavor of their own cooking. The conversation is a closed loop: writer to self. Each, it would appear, is happy here.

DEVIL: RICH, my guy, it's an honor to welcome you. You read first for us.

RICH: reminds file not saved.

DEVIL: Happens, boss. 

Workshop proceeds counterclockwise.

RICH: How long does this go?

DEVIL: Sorry buddy... might be a few hours, might be forever (pops Diet Dr. Pepper, the Official Drink of Hell, and leans back to watch the expression on RICH's face.)

At first the words are words. But soon for RICH the words amount to something. Now the words are hornets stinging his heart. Now they are ash burying him alive. Now the words are hell words, each punctuated by fire emojis made of real fire.

Slowly RICH loses the meaning of the words themselves. And he comes to know them as demon's names, each an incantation, meaningful only for the hideous shapes their syllables can conjure.

RICH falls into his nightmare, without agency, without terminus. In the back of his mind, a story yearns to break loose, kept at bay by the shrilly certain noise surrounding him.

a trucker's view on the 2020 Presidential Election

I'm a trucker. Call it exposition. You got me. It's also the truth, and that has to count for something these days.

Yep, just a plain-spoken trucker. Steve by name. A simple man. Not a particularly hopeful or intellectual or depressive man. Kind of just a guy who shows up and does his thing. In my case trucking.

And sometimes: philately. A quaint hobby, an old-timey one. But it brings me peace, it quiets the war upstairs. All that artistic intent and goodwill on a tiny adhesive square.  It's hard to put a stamp on an envelope or in a book made just for it and then blow your fucking brains out. It would be hard for me to. And I like to put a lot of road between me and that kind of thing.

Plain spoken trucker. Don't much go in for talking politics, and more likely to let my fists do that particularly conversing. But when I picture the 2020 election I picture it like this:

I'm driving in dense fog, just before dawn begins creeping in, or maybe midnight. Definite: I can't see a single fucking thing ahead of me. Ahead of me there is a little bit of a glow, a smidge more than the usual glow on a foggy drive. A premonition so sluggish I'll get there before I decipher it. It might be some dumbfuck city nobody gives a rat's dick about flickering its last dumbshit bad idea of the evening off in the distance. It might be the gathering light of dawn. It might also be the glow of a fire from the most fearsome wreck Kentucky (? someplace) has ever seen.

What I know: I've got the music up to keep awake and I've got to keep driving or I'm going to be too late. And it'll be my third/fifth/whatever strike. But the road just keeps going, and there aren't any signs I trust. The fog is formless and from sleep deprivation it's also playing its own tricks. Like there are these fucking white coyotes and small-assed untidy polar bears running zigzags from the corners of the windshield.

Maybe that glow is nothing but hallucination in itself. Maybe I'm driving toward the edge of a flat earth, and past that final fake mile marker it will be nothing but the void of space.

In that final moment: one last sip of blatantly terrible styrofoam cup coffee, and a silent but highly enthusiastic scream.

cascading closed worldview

Barbed wire gloves and a bulletproof  visor and a thick mask and superobviouscompletelynonaerodynamic ear plugs. The latter not because I think that COVID shit's going to get in through my ears more that I don't want to hear what you have to say or even pretend to listen. If I see you on my side of the street I'll smile sideways at you no eye contact and cross to like 12 or 18 feet away to avoid being reminded of whatever point of connection there might be links you to I. If there are cars in either or both directions I'm willing to take my chances. I and not thou; taking special care to avoid special you.

In all this quarantine loneliness for a while I went around town leaving chalk messages for folks: You Got This! Motivational speeches spanning blocks targeted to the people I knew and loved. Then the same types of messages increasingly targeted to people I did not know or know whether I loved.

Then I started in on more ambivalent messages. Cheer up: civilizations die! If they didn't then new ones couldn't be born. Lucky numbers 20, 20, 5...

Then I decided that language itself was too clear whatever layers and rotations of irony I threaded through. I started in on geometric drawings full of noise and without symmetry, devoid of clarity. My hope was to freeze people in their tracks; to interrupt the interpretative process. If we all stay in one place, even if do so having made the cardinal mistake of ever going outside, the odds of transmission decrease significantly.

To be clear, the barbed wire gloves are in case anybody ever tries to shake my hand, I'll do it and then hack off both of my own hands for microbiological safety using a device designed solely for that purpose right after. I just want to leave a reminder or set of reminders if you will that such things as physical contact are unsafe and we're in distinctly more of an adapt or die situation, buddy.

I managed to avoid Walmart for the first couple months of this shit but I got there today because honestly there aren't a lot of other go-tos for DVD-R discs in the apocalypse. Place was hopping! But also big enough that it wasn't purely terrifying, except for the moment close to checkout when I imagined no felt no was certain that COVID-19 was crawling around behind my glasses and directly into my eyes. And the people, I don't know how to put it any other way, they were just distinctly nicer than they are at Wegman's.
 

 

a line, a segment

Every breath is one of a finite set. Every day is one of the same. At a certain point the available quantity becomes less certain. Every bowl of popcorn starts to show through what you thought was a full movie's supply. But what if the rest of the popcorn isn't popcorn at all? What if that shit is full of evolved scorpions with the perfect camouflage for killing fat guys from New Jersey. New Jersey seems big, too. When you can't wait to get out of the north, when you're driving across or down to Cape May. It doesn't seem big enough right now, especially if you play the novel coronavirus(es?) forward in 1918 terms. Everything changes (not the 90s Rodan scream of "EVERYTHING CHANGES," more an appreciative view). Children unfold to become themselves. Grown-ups get a chance to change meaningfully, to make amends, to not make the same mistake for the millionth time. Death folds us into the continuum, returns the raw ingredients back into the mix for future repurposing. Every breath is a point on a segment on a line. Or maybe the segment ends and the lines diverge, but there's continuity, right? Not necessarily a dualist construct, but a safe bet that the limits of empiricism aren't the limits of reality either. A prayer to keep you and me alive, to keep our families safe, to keep our frail ones ticking in protective bubbles. A prayer that biodiversity isn't out for us in some M. Night Shyamalan the-trees-are-pissed-and-now-murderous kind of way. A prayer that the dimwitted surface of our national policy response obfuscates a warm-hearted and sharply foresightful reality. I'm good to pray for miracles, each of us is one of those in our way. Each of those breaths, each of these days. Turn that frown upside down.

13 Variations on CORONAVIRUS: A Novel

1. An infuriating first-person account penned by COVID-19, in the vein of "If I Did It." 2. A counter-narrative perspective from multiple anonymous jealous alternate coronaviruses. 3. Political musings by an anonymous 21st-century commander in chief that if accurately-sourced prove said chief to be far more intelligent and prone to reflection than it would appear. Pandemics are a mere departure point. The novel explores humanity's darkest hours and finds levity and hope in the margins. The voice? A guy you would definitely want to have a beer with. But you don't drink beer, do you Gladys? Because last time you fucking drank beer, you ended up under a pile of cops. 4. In 2035, a government agent must prevent COVID-37 from being unleashed on an unsuspecting humanity by a punchy 4-year old who would very much prefer to escape quarantine and her family. 5. Wordless; violent Crayola scribblings by the same toddler. "I finished, dada!" Humanity: finished. 6. Novel opens under a pile of cops, either pre-social distancing rules or with same expressly loosened just this once for effect. Each chapter is the touching perspective of the next cop off the pile; their inspiration to serve, their highs and lows, the things that motivate and terrify them, sometimes at the same time. The ways they've coped, the bonds they've forged on both sides of the law and in the surprisingly foggy gray between. In the silent spacing of the final chapter, we are left to understand that either no one was at the bottom of the pile of cops, or the person in said position has passed out cold or become deceased, or they have been moved by the experience to take a vow of silence. 7. It is 2902. Zorfu, an alien detective, explores the remains of a centuries-gone civilization, lost to multiple overlapping pandemics and a fractured global ecosystem. Theorizing that variations on Snickers wrappers are less a marketing ploy than a coded message from a dying culture, Zorfu struggles in vain to separate intuition from empiricism. In a poignant final scene, Zorfu, himself deathly allergic to chocolate, reckons with his final clue by eating a small refrigerated surviving fragment of peanut butter Snickers. 8. It is 3502. Zorfu's granddaughter Klatu unearths his diary, but is quickly distracted by another more engaging project: the destruction of the sun and its surrounding planets and with it, an end to human history. 9. It is 3503. Zorfu's granddaughter contemplates chocolate and its discontents in the area formerly known as the Solar System. Criticized bitterly as a plot-free attempt to cash in quick on the novel set in 3502, it never saw a second edition. 10. It is spring 2020. An angry four-year old, a teething puppy, a disappointed spouse, and a preteen tangle with a disoriented middle-aged man. They share an apartment that shrinks by 5 square feet each day. Each chapter represents 24 hours, at the end of each the man will say: "Guys, um..." as if to reign in order. Reader, order does not reign. 11. It is 3504. A carnivorous planet-eating superblob challenges Zorfu's own world. Time-travel scenarios in the expensive computer reveal that a punchy 21st-century four-year old is her sole potential savior, but only under the condition that Zorfu will order her every Barbie toy ever created via Amazon Prime. The two trade largely unintelligible barbs and an obscenely-expensive number of Barbies before ultimately forming a snappy friendship and a wicked zero-gravity kung fu tandem and defeating the blob. In a triumphant closing scene, Malibu Ken arrives as hope fades to provide the killing blow. 12. Subtitle: A Pile of Cops. Each page of this coffee table edition features a high-resolution photograph of a pile of cops from a different unit in a different town. Piles range from 2 to 88, with personalities and appearances as diverse as the structural methods used to build each. With an introduction by Le Corbusier. 13. Summary and quality unknown. Only one review copy exists, and it has been shared person-to-person once per hour over the last 3 weeks. Handle with care.

a repetitious paean to the new Snickers

My recent journey in song: The song totters patchily to a modest momentum. Establishes movement for a fleeting middling few and the band disappears. Four measures of nothing. Four more: Nothing (x4). The drums return four bars on their own and things begin to build back a smidge, but over too long, over like 64 or 128 bars. The bassist sucks and steps all over the drums. The keyboardist is in his head. At bar 71 all goes quiet again. The track continues for days in absolute silence. To prevent distractions, the song is constructed so that any ancillary noise of substance in the listener's room will through phase cancellation be rendered fully silent. All but the most patient listeners break off and leave the room before lack of water or food or sleep deprivation do them in. That skeleton with the headphones is my goddamned best friend. -- My recent journey in epistolary form: To whom it may concern, I am wr -- My recent journey in painting form: Not an empty or abruptly-severed canvas: A canvas depicting a rotund man eating a bunch of some new kind of Snickers. He is so prodigious in his consumption of same that it forms a kind of impeccable camouflage. To the casual observer it is simply a repetitious paean to the new Snickers. To those wise to the ways of this writer, it is a man consciously drowning himself in the new Snickers. -- My not dying of COVID-19 gratitude list, take one: Nothing. -- My recent journey in movie form: John Wick 8 in which he has a total change of heart and swears that he will never hurt another human being. This time he means it. Knowing that he will be tempted by some soon moment to return to form, he exiles himself fully to Antarctica. He builds snowmen spanning a four mile radius, in a variety of peace-loving and joyous postures. As the film nears its conclusion, a penguin accidentally knocks one of the snowmen over. All is nearly lost, but self control wins the day. Roll credits over John Wick and the same penguin sharing Smores in the fading Antarctic light. -- Gratitude list, take two: The new Snickers. And the people I call home. And not dying.

down dark/the new Iphone/death as a mistress

What's that shit down dark, down deep, that shit that keeps me half-present in all of the most present situations? The stupid haunted shit that has me with a parachute ready to jump out of anything any minute no matter how relevant/fulfilling/positive? That's how they should brand the iPhone -- escape life constantly. Too negative? Fine, fucker, but test it -- see if that shit resonates with your core audience. Marketing relevance, dear reader, may be more questionable as I age out of a traditional target demographic and into something more appropriate for the subject of a late Saul Bellow novel, some paralyzed fucker midlife who can't get up off his couch and no one cares. The new IPhone X... this one's for you, middle aged douchebag. Yes, the new IPhone, and when all else fails you can chuck it at a window to ease the defenestrative process ahead. But more a comic defenestration really, something out of Vineland. Not South Jersey Vineland, I know you were wondering. But what is that shit down dark? On the most fundamental level it's that I'm in recovery and I've been trying hard to do the next right thing and yet only doing that sometimes on a good day and telling myself I don't need the basic supports of recovery. Yesterday I finally hit a meeting and it was wonderful -- it was a bunch of smart struggling people saying every single thing I needed to hear. and it stays here. here here. and for weeks prior the only little god shots I would get (above and beyond my daughter's wide and beautiful eyes, my son's humor, my wife and son's riffing humor) would be if I ran into a friend of Bill on the street, and how quick could I get out of that? (The denizens of this mystic place assault you without warning. You face: 3 well meaning travelers. Turns tail and flees.) Some part of me wants to live forever, some part of me holds out for the requisite improvements in technology to see it through ad infinitum. Some other part has begun to understand more the circle of life -- that i'm passing energy and love to these kids who can carry it forward better than I ever could. To the extent that I'm willing to accept death it's as a mistress, a sultry and cold and impossible mistress emerging in teasing glimmers over the decades ahead. i'll know her better by then -- i'll see her handiwork on others, be forced to admire it, be forced to accept it. And when my time comes, I want that last conversation to be erotic (yes, by that point, we realize, in the best outcome I'm demented off my head and like 108 years old and no more capable of eros than i am of drinking my own pureed dinner). But again, assuming the improvements in technology, maybe I've still got a brain, still got language... And the closing conversation is a long one, by turns breathless on both sides, and my final acceptance of it is with sharp teeth on neck, is with a smiling exhale into the pulsating dark... That's how they should brand the new Iphone. With Siri emerging from the shadows, scythe in hand, erotic, sharp-toothed, lithe and smiling, pale and whispering. And that delicious ending bite and what I thought was some masterpiece of erotic poetry whispered in my dying ear was I realize too late, her saying, "I'm sorry Ben, something went wrong, can you try again?"