Nyquil

Surely the words that stepped forth from this mind
Must have known where they should go
When they leapt from the flow of the thoughts-
A river, a tumult tumbling, spring gushing gurgling
Vomiting the pure untainted from a root bound soul.

Surely when these brave lonely words stepped out of the safety
Of limbo, out of the safety of the herd of jumbled possibles,
They must have known they would arrive someplace,
Must have had some reassurance that they would not
Dry up in the air and snap off dead and forgotten.

Like pilgrims or tendrils or bums that go somewhere,
Must know where they are going. Surely when these words
Became words and set out as such, they knew where they were going,
But they didn’t tell me before they left.

Black Lung

Another zombie post tomorrow.  I already started it, but I think I’m dying, so it will have to wait until I finish with that.  I know you wait with bated breath.

Right?

Overambition or pride?

I think that maybe I was overambitious when I set out to write something every night. It takes too much to put out something good every night.

But then, the point was never to create something good, just to create. I'm not making finished products here. Rough drafts, pure thought, stuff to write about later. Ideas, and practice conveying them. I know I need practice story telling as well, but I can't put out a short story, or even a decent segment every night.

My purpose became lost, my objective warped. I started writing to impress, rather to improve. Well, then I'll say this to my imaginary audience: This is not the place to look for polished, or even mildly cohesive writing.

My new goal is to write a tidbit, an idea, an image, a setting, a character, every night. Once a week, I'll sit down and try to compile a short story... Something with all the elements of a story.

Short and Lame -or- A Night of A Thousand Journal Entries

The bowstring scraped across my arm and I was sure skin and flesh was going to roll off around the string. I was reminded of a cheese cutter. Good thing I'm not made out of cheese. Im made out of meat. If cheese came in a can, I'd eat it over spam.
My shirts:

Jesus probably wouldn't wear those shitty bracelets.

Fuck French Playwrites

English Major... (stop talking)

(clever shirt)

I like Gertrude Stein because I'm fake



Poets
Waste
Margins



(elipsis)


You know what? I don't feel like writing tonight. Whatever. Im totally in the mood for some stream of conciousness, but I have too much work to get caught up like that.

Whatever. Like people read this anyway.

The Hermit

“Yes, it’s a real childhood fantasy,” the ragged stranger said cheerfully.
“I’ve always wanted to live off the land, in the wilderness, just me and the trees.”

He grunted slightly as he tugged at the makeshift spear, which had previously been a particularly straight and sturdy branch, and was now sharpened at both ends, though one side was noticeably more pointy and bloody.

“I guess I didn’t imagine these buggers, but it adds a little spice to life when hermitting gets old. Hermitting. Is that even a word? I guess my language is slipping after spending three years talking to myself. No matter. It serves it purpose.”

He carefully wiped his spear clean and strapped it to his back with a thong of braided deer hide. Stooping, he picked up his discarded club. Carefully, almost lovingly, he wiped the gore off of this tool, which appeared to be a dense length of wood, split at one end and wrapped in leather at both ends. At the split end, an egg shaped river rock was bound snugly into the crotch. This he hung at his belt before grunting again as he bent down and grabbed the carrion by the legs and began dragging it.

“You’re lucky I didn’t kill you. It doesn’t happen very often that I run across somethin’ on two legs that isn’t one of them.”

At the word “them”, his body tightened and turned, and he hurled the corpse with surprising strength into a shallow ditch. “They” had been men once, but the blood-borne disease had killed them. The infected always got back up again, walking jerkily, the virus continuing to fire neurons in a grotesque and highly ordered twitch. The common pathways and well worn tracks in the brain were most frequently activated, resulting in the walking and sometimes running of the animated corpses. Other common activities could be seen as well. In my flight from the city, I saw a dead man playing an acoustic guitar. I caught a riff of actual music over the wheezing of the corpses. I saw another corpse attempting to masturbate, despite the fact that its bottom half had been hewn roughly away at the hips.

"Everything these things do, they do simply because they had done it frequently before. There is nothing human left. No thought or reason. These things are dead."

The twice dead corpse finished rolling into the ditch which, after a closer look, turned out to be filled with bodies in various states of gore and decay. Some had bulging bellies from gorging on human flesh. Nobody's sure why they hunger for the living. I suspect that common, everyday hatred translates a little more violently in the form of pure nerve impulse.

Many were missing lips, either chewed off by another zombie or lost in biting through things that aught not be bitten through, leaving the faces locked in a gruesome smile.

“I burn them when I start smelling them back home. I don’t get many wandering through here, but they stink something awful. Their bellies swell up and burst open in the sun, and if you thought rotting dead people were odious, you should get a whiff of rotten dead eaten people.”

I noticed that every corpse in the ditch had died in a similar fashion. It seemed the stranger had developed a technique. I guess he caught me looking because he grinned and said, “I found a good way to kill ‘em. I think you might have noticed that they’re rather stupid, and if they’re anything more than stupid, they’re hungry. Shit!”

A sudden rustle to the right interrupted him. From behind a skinny tree, a considerably well decayed woman dragged her body toward us. The club leapt into the stranger’s hand and his body snapped around to face her.

“Oh good," he said, relaxing. "It’s a rotten walker. If it had been a fresh one, we would have been fucked. I haven’t spoken to a soul in ages, so I’ve been jabbering too much and listening too little.”

He returned his club to his belt. She shambled closer.

“No more of that. From now on, we’ll talk when we’re safe.”

She shambled closer.

“But this is convenient, because this means I don’t have to drag another body for a quarter mile. I was saying, I found a good way to kill them. They’re stupid, right? And second to stupid is hungry.”

I could here the wheezes. All the corpses perform this charade of life to varying extents.

“So what I do is take this pole here.”

He whipped the heavy bough from his back with remarkable speed and jammed the blunter side into the ground.

“I sink one end into the ground, and then I point that end at them and stand here.”

She was close enough that I could smell her fetid breath. I could see she had been a white woman of around forty, probably a middle class mother. She had brown, shoulder length hair, though a few patches had been torn out violently, and bloodily. On her left hand ring finger was a gold band. Her right hand ring finger was missing.

“I point this at their chest, at about shoulder level.”

The point jabbed the flesh, and the stink of stagnant blood filled the air as a near-black ooze escaped the wound. She continued walking forward, her light blue eyes locked on the bearded stranger.

“They have to push a little to get it in past the rib cage. This can take a little while.”

The woman jerked her body on the well worn spike, but the lethargy caused by her level of entropy seemed to disallow penetration.

“Sometimes they’re too rotten. You have to remind them they’re hungry. I like to talk to them. That seems to work well. Isn’t that right, you filthy cunt? Bitch whore horse-fucker shit fuck bitch cunt shit.”

The woman seemed to react slightly, almost animally, her wheeze becoming a grunt, her arms flailing forward, her eyes bulging and her broken teeth grinding. She thrust herself forward, and with a pop and crunch, the well worn spike slid cleanly into her chest. More of the black ooze spurted into the air. She was only four feet away from us at this point.

"The ladies seem to react to those words. I have a different set for men. Something about the way we're wired. Rage seems to be one of our more basic emotions. "

Then the grisly inward progress jerked suddenly to a stop.

“That’s the spine. I used to miss it a lot when I started doing this, but I don’t miss anymore. I do this whole thing as a precaution. These buggers can do some nasty surprising things, and I don’t want to get bitten.”

The woman struggled toward the man, eyes glaring now, teeth gnashing, rotten gore dripping down her lipless face.

“The angle of the pole reaches the spine just above the nerve branch leading to the arms, leaving her… WHORE!!! Paralyzed from the neck down.”

The woman gave one last jerk forward at the word, and a wet crunch filled the air and turned my stomach. I swallowed bile as the woman collapsed at the feet of the man, who drew the club once more, and took one stride forward, letting the heavy club trail behind his body slightly, as though winding up.

I never noticed how the grimace of these dead people can look like terror. The woman gnashed her teeth again, eyes wide, bulging, staring as the heavy stone head slammed into the right side of her head, shattering her skull, liquefying her decrepit brain, and sending almost the entire head (not the parts that splattered) spinning into the ditch. He tossed the club aside and placed both hands on the spike.

He grunted slightly as he tugged at the makeshift spear, and it slid wet and sticky from the woman’s chest. Carefully, he wiped the thick black blood from the spear, then stooped to retrieve his club.

“Yes, it’s a real childhood fantasy.”

Prowess

I shifted uncomfortably.  My knees had grown weary of crouching, and my fingers sought the dagger I usually carry in my soft-soled boot.  The skinny white man was proving to have surprisingly, and annoyingly, more stamina than I had expected and I had grown tired of waiting.  I was about to rise and slip into the next room and put the two to rest myself when a hand clapped on my shoulder, making my every muscle leap.  Before my lethal survival instincts whipped the dagger into the wrist (and then throat) of the person behind me, a husky whisper brushed my ear.

“If you kill them, won’t somebody wonder how they flew to Hollywood?”

Hollywood

Tonight’s excursion has been one of my finest. I can tell that I am growing fitter, more lean and powerful. Leaping fences is a simple task now, requiring little exertion, and I can spring the distance between rooftops with particular ease. My training has also made me extremely self aware. I am close friends with every muscle and nerve in my body. I know the beat of my heart, and the softly passing breath, and the rushing of blood in my ears. I have grown silent. My feet fall as though padded upon the ground, and the only sound that betrays me is the whispering flow of air filling the space where my body had been.

I had never dreamed of such vast improvement under that fraud that had been training me just a month ago. Who would have ever though that he would die so easily? And what an embarrassing thing to be killed at the hands of a fledgling student. I didn’t even assassinate him in his sleep. His fat wife’s mole encrusted face should have been enough to drive him to suicide, and her gurgling snores would have masked my sound completely, so strangling him in bed would have been a singularly easy task.

No, I faced him in his own dojo. I even told him my intentions before smashing my knuckles into his hairy neck, leaving him choking on his own throat. He died a slow, miserable death, involving a great deal of twitching, frothing, and color changing, but the fool deserved no better. I left his grimacing corpse in the shadows of his own training room, beneath the eyes of the practice dummies, who might have been smirking at their former abuser.

I had been a fool myself, when I allowed myself to fall under his tutelage. It should have been clear from his soft mass, from his clunky walk, from his ever vacant expression that he was no master. But I was new to the idea that there are men that live their lives invisible. Secret societies and secret lives were beyond my range of usual thought, and all of this was so novel to me that I failed to remember that there are scoundrels and liars in every walk of life.

I’m not sure what my particular scoundrel was after. It might have been money, though I had none to give when he took me in and introduced me to the darker world. There is, however, plenty of money to be had for a man that goes as he pleases, and I would be lying if I were to deny the petty robberies I committed as part of my ‘training’. I more strongly suspect that having an apprentice was gratifying for a man who had done such a stellar job remaining of mediocre talent. My devotion must have covered some of his shortcomings, though now I see that they were so gross that had I worshipped him as a god, he still would have sorely felt his deficiencies.

But that is not important. The dunce is dead. I must admit that he taught me many things, though they are considered mundane in more authentic schools. And he did introduce me to the secrets. One could say that he was my door, and it does not matter which door one enters.

My new teacher is a true master, and has turned my body into something different.

But my mind is wandering from the task at hand. I must secure airplane tickets for my master and myself. I have nothing but my skills. No money, no computer, no useable identity. This challenge pushes me far beyond simple physical feats.

I am currently crouching in the darkened living room of a nice suburban house, waiting for the owners to finish fucking and fall asleep, so that I can steal their money and identities, and use their computer to book two tickets to Hollywood.

Steps

I have been walking, I think, for a month. My flapping shoes slap the sidewalk, and my knees creak with each reach of the leg. Each step sends a pace-length of ground falling into the past, into memory, fading and unreal before the next step is even begun.

I remember every step I’ve taken. I remember every tree I’ve passed, every crack in the sidewalk, every unpaved road. Every house, every town, every city through which I’ve passed. I remember because I am not going to anywhere. I am simply going. If I were to place my finger on a map, and say, “I am going here,” then what is the journey but an obstacle? One does not savor a hurdle. One does not relish a pitfall. We jump over these things, walk around them, move on as quickly as possible. I go nowhere. No, not even that is right. I can't say anything more than, “I go.”

I might have been walking for a year, wandering, but not wandering because wanderers are walking and hoping to find. I am not a wanderer. I am not an adventurer, or an explorer. I find without seeking with every slipping moment of time. I was There. I found There. I am Here. I have found Here as well. Here is there, and That… is Here, and here I am, and there I was, and it is all what I was looking for. A journey, and nothing more. Nothing more? Nothing at all? A journey, and everything more! For what is not here is what I was not seeking.

Have I been walking only an hour? Already I have found such treasures that I turn back to where I began, wherever that was, that I might share my discovery, only to realize that I don’t know where I am. How long have I simply been, without any knowledge of the passage of place or time or self or world? There is no home for me now. I might pass that place a thousand times before my legs sag and back breaks, body crumples to lumps of dust, but it is no longer a place of comfort or sentiment. It is a place. Celebrated, delighting, absolutely, but naught beyond that. I have no beginning, because all the world is a memory. I have no end, because to have an end is to miss the middle, and the middle is all I have. All I am.

I think I have been walking for all of time, and my mind cringes at the thought of immortality.
Men die chasing dreams, but what of we who have chosen no end?

(Fiction)

It’s wrong. It feels all wrong, like I accidentally slipped on somebody else’s shoes. Like my skin was tailored for a different body, rubbing in all the wrong spots, hugging across my shoulders. Irritating. Bone deep agitation. I look down at the water running down my bare legs, the soap between my toes, the blood that isn’t there, but would be if my nails were long enough. They’re never long enough. I could never peel this rind away. It traps me and crushes me and chokes me like the steamy heat that has filled my tiny bathroom. I know I’m sweating, despite the water on my skin.

My shower is broken. It knows only one temperature, and that is one drop colder than scalding. My bathroom could be a coffin if I were two hundred pounds heavier. The door to this room is the only one in the damned house that could stop a draft. I hate this room. It’s as though hell is reaching out, forming a portal in my moldy bathroom to unleash the demons that rend my flesh the way I do in my imagination.

I want to scream. I want to sob. Sob until my lungs squeeze and stick, collapsed, unmoving. Its too hot to scream, or sob. It is all I can do to breathe. The air is heavy.

Why don’t I leave this place? Behind the old oaken door, behind that ancient bronze knob, I know lies cool relief. What is this door doing here? The rest of the house is cheap, flimsy, rotting, splintering. The doorknob to my bedroom is plastic. The doorknob to the side of the house is missing. The front door is hollow, and I’m sure I could put my fist through it if ever I felt so inclined.

I never do.

The crusty mirror is beading with condensation, the water mixing with the years and years of shit and grime that has accumulated there. I cannot see my face, only the hazed outline of my naked, boiled-red body.

My hand grasps the heavy, well worn knob. I breathe once more the air, thick as water, and surely drowning me. It will still be wrong out there, but with mildew instead of mold, and with clothes on top of the flesh that I’m sure hates me.

A Result of Poor Judgement

I had been walking toward the door, following intently, curiously, following like magnets follow, chasing as if drawn by the lines that that form the mathematical topographical existence of the equation that is all.

I can feel the microwaves in my skull, roasting my brain, riding up the cranium and sizzling like the sun on a corpse as his head sticks into the air and dries and rots and roasts and attracts scavengers with the smell of a delectable decaying barbeque. My brains are sparkling with the burns of agitated molecules. My hair falls from its skull and my leg twitches as the broken home appliance cookeds my flesh. Oh thank the lord. The caramel popcorn is done. The machine is beeping. I can feel the sizzle reach into my auditory controls and fry my ears with the sound of hissing hissing whisper whispers, ghosts?s?

The an alternate dimension lies behind a veil of logic, unable to exist with us, it being the true absolute opposite. We are closest in observation to this dimension in silence, all negating qualities of this reality largely removed—not gone, but diminished—shrinks the mathematical distance. A mirror image, the opposite must also move toward center. If our reality is on the other side of zero from this dimension, and our value is 4, then the other value must be -4, and if our value, as determined by level of perceived (we’ll call it) positive --- I think stimuli--- were to drop the 3, then the other dimension would raise to -3, bridging the distance between two entities… Opposites

Silence is the zero. nothing is the zero. Nothing is not often attained. A few individuals must have come close… the ones that might be said to have found the peace in unity of existences, to have found enlightenment. Nirvana. To rid themselves of more than the sensations of the worldly world, of good food and drink and movies that set the mind aflame with positive stimulation, but also the desires of the (positive) body as stimuli, one hovers on a buffer of flesh from true unity.

Inner peace, yin, yang, nirvana and enlightenment

Good versus evil, fortune and disaster

As common themes in life

And theater

or theatre

or basic concepts and ideas forming

the basis thereof

theater, that is,

what else?

The rising from sorry state to one of good fortune,

Falling from good fortune to disaster,

The teeter totter

Kind of

Or the idea,

The concept, or maybe you got the metaphor

Without this.

Yin and yang, you say. Balance, you say. We’ve all seen this before. Nothing new, nothing new.

But its math! Its math. Its an equation dictating everything

That’s enough of that.

Metamucil?

I'm going to try to leave something new here every day: nice, fresh, and steamy just for you. Its going to be uneditted, which I don't mind so much, but might drive you, my friend, to rage and infuriation. You might stop reading. You might murder me in my sleep. I'm going to have a hard time being heart broken about either one.

Please comment if you feel so inclined. I'd love to pretend like I don't care what other people think, because that would make me cool. I'm not cool. I'm needy and shivering like a beaten puppy.

That being said, I'm going to post this and hope I remember how to get to this thing tomorrow.

woo.
hoo.