Tassels Are The Only Proper Send Off

I had decided my funeral would be some type of odd memorial where there was no body and no one was sure entirely that I hadn't just joined some random revolution. Whether or not I got euthanized by execution would be an enduring mystery. There would be rumors of me living in the hills of (insert country here), holed up with a new, young and native wife. Rumors would be that I was cavorting among the bushes and a new tribe of brown-skinned children with blue eyes and home-made rock hammers could be found nestled in a mysterious valley.

That was the plan.

Then I found a much better memorial arrangement. I obviously can never have my funeral in China now, but hopefully I can get the ceremonial ball rolling before it's illegal here, too.

Just send the one with the lop-sided implants my way and stick a rolled up dollar bill in between my blue lips one last time, please. If I'm already laid up, it don't matter how many pathogens she may be hiding in her person.

All I Can Do

I had a good buddy one time. He used to have a sweet tooth for some Wild Turkey and he had a tendency towards irrational behavior, we had a lot in common. Not that I would let him get into my Turkey, but the guy was huge; he sort of got what he wanted. He had an interesting part in my life for a short, and sometimes tragic, time. We used to enjoy eating dinner together and watching the paint on the walls fade to an even duller antiseptic white. He would wake me up for work and remind me I had obligations when I forgot I still had reasons to breathe in and out. He was a good guy. I would defend him to the last. When I had to leave, I told him to live with my mom and dad for awhile to keep them going.

I make him sound like some type of little brother. In truth, he was usually the grown up. He would take care of me and do the best an independent man can do for another independent man when comfort or a shoulder to cry on is needed. We were brothers without the inborn hierarchy of birth order.

He went on to whatever reward or anticlimax waits to meet us all when we lose our individuality to the engines of Life. I loved the guy. He died shamed and alone. He never knew what he did. His psychic pain took him out of civilization for good. He's been turned to ash.The crystalline structure of a diamond is that of an octahedron. They are octahedral in nature because that's all they can be. Carbon can only bond with seven brothers in such a way. Shoreline critters and plants in the fires of a subduction zone, the organic matter of a continental shelf, the Life, is poured into the forges of Vulcanus and catalyzed and purified into the basic building blocks of the one true individuality. In the loss of the temporal bodies to this terrible maw of famine and extinctions and illness, they prove that there is some order, there is some Platonic Idea of perfection. They never see it, but they prove the mystery simply by having existed to fuel the engines of survival for this little chunk of carbon we call life. Heaven may or may not be, but by passing on, Duck the Dog proved that he is perfect. In the gleaming white robe washed in the blood of time, he is one of the elect.I had a very close friend lose someone who was closer to them. Somehow, I don't think this is going to help.

Sorry.

Damn that guy

I have more than one voice in my head. While I am a ray of fucking sunshine at all times and only leave the world with the coziness of rose petals and tender Balian honey, The Devil's Advocate is a thistle and a skunk.

DA shows up when I'm riding high on a wave of undeserved euphoria to remind me that my rent's due or that my life consists of sitting alone in the dark studying shit no one cares about in a shitty, Boo Radley house on the Mesa That Time Forgot. Or that giving a girl your phone number is not the same as receiving her phone number. Or that my writing skills are so terrible I have to resort to italics for emphasis. He can really ruin a mood.

I was thinking of what to drink with my frozen pizza I scratched together the other day, and he made an appearance. He always does this when I have impressed myself with amazing cooking. I thought to myself:

"I need some beer. Maybe I'll run get some before the stores close."

Why buy beer if you're going to sit and drink it alone?

"Because I wanted to be alone tonight."

Did you?

"Fucker."

You know, you could open that bottle of wine. The one covered in dust.

"I told you, I'm not going to open that just for my own consumption, it's a five year old reserve Syrah. I'm not wasting it on getting drunk and watching SNL. I'm just waiting for someone who deserves it to come by."

How long have you had it now?

"A...while. I still have faith that someone will deserve it."

Before it's vinegar?

"Sure. That takes years. And years. No more wine talk, please. I'm getting depressed."

OK. So, why the frozen pizza when you have that ditalini in the pantry gathering dust and the pancetta in the fridge waiting for the next power outage to make a fool of you?

"We've been through this before the ditalini and the pancetta are not for me. Besides, a bolognaise would go great with that Syrah. I'm saving them and that's final. "

Do you realize how unlikely it is you will ever have anyone over in this shitbox house who would even appreciate it? Or the cook?

"I think those likelihoods are on the rise. In fact, I think there just might be hope for it. See, you're going on some old intel, buddy."

Something I don't know about?

Morphology

The interaction between the mass populi and I has been altered. I walk into work and the men go out of their way to say hi. The women whisper, but are a little shy if I approach. A look of primal lust and titillating fear ripples over their calm facade. I have become some sort of god-man.

The change is subtle, but for someone who has a tendency to notice minute and unimportant details of all my human interaction, this new mysterious subethereal communication of status is a little disconcerting.

I stopped by the Ghetto Gas and Save on my way to work the other day. The section of town is known as Clifton and it is populated mostly by cars with tiny wheels and men in wife beaters and gaudy bling. The August heat was baking me in the cab of my old truck, I was flush and sweaty. I exited the truck and began the journey towards the door. I try to ignore people in Clifton. They, in turn, ignore me. I could feel eyes on me. I looked to my right to see several men of questionable moral nature leaning and sitting on an Impala. Their uniform white shirts and baggy shorts signaled that they were not of a type who would appreciate my company. I met their eyes. I had a feeling this could end badly. The loudest of the group returned the gaze and gave a slight nod. Not the polite society downward drop of the chin, but the pointing of the chin at some celestial body on the low horizon. I returned it. The others of the local posse of indigents mimicked the movement. Odd.

I walked in with my coffee cup and filled it full of black tar Sumatra. My skin still had the sheen of sweat, hilighting my sun-browned skin. Veins bulged tastefully from my forearms. I pondered my new Olympian limbs. I slapped the lid on my coffee and looked up at the mirrored display behind the tobacco. I didn't ever remember seeing those defined of shoulders hiding under my ears. I have always been stocky, but there was a lean quality, a mean quality. I noticed my plain T-shirt collapsing and bulging out where muscle tone seems to have excreted itself out of my pores. Under my chest was spare and desolate country where once a very minimal beer belly had resided. I have been working out, but not this hard. I scared myself. Even my two-day beard was intimidating as it outlined my square jaw and blocky cheekbones, somehow pulled tight like the cheapest chuck shoulder steak.

Confused, and a little arrogant, I walked up to the counter with my swirling oil to lubricate the skids of an ungodly shift. When I set it on the counter, the girl with the red vest and name tag looked up for the first time in our consumerist history together. She was openly staring. I greeted her as I do all counter help.

"How are you doing today, ma'am?"

My delivery startled her. In truth, it frightened me as well. She stepped back a millimeter or so, but her body leaned towards me. When did my voice acquire grit? It sounded like a cellist pedaling the C with his bow too heavily rosined. What was wrong with me?

She blushed, contrasting her nose ring against pale skin flaming in a state of fiery hemoglobular bliss.

She stuttered twice and then caught her breath.

"The Mountain Dew is behind you."

"No, just the special coffee, like always."

"You don't want Mountain Dew?"

No, never touch the stuff," I was positively rumbling, "I only drink water or coffee, really. As long as the coffee is good stuff and I'm not having a good wine or something."

"But...'do the DEW!', what about that?"

"Nope, I don't like the stuff."

"Red Bull?"

"No."

"Full Throttle?"

"No."

"A Jagerbomb?"

"Hate 'em."

"Well...", she was panting, "I guess just coffee then."

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you very much."

How could gratitude sound sinister?

I paid and stepped away from the counter. She followed me with her bloodshot and unremarkable brown eyes. A young girl walked in the door, caught my eye and tripped. The loud teenage boys at the end of the magazine aisle who began to laugh and belittle went silent with a look from me.

I looked back at my reflection.

I saw it. The change. The animal ferocity of uncaged masculinity was channeled by my sheened scalp into my distinctively broken nose to be radiated out by heavy-browed eyes. I had messed up my normal No.2 to No.3 fade with my clippers, so I slapped on a No.1/2 and went to town. It would be ugly, but it would grow back in a couple weeks, I thought.

I never anticipated the change when a person's civilization is left in pile on the bathroom rug.

I walked as unassuming as I could to my truck. The girl in the Lexus was unabashedly gazing. The man in the VW was trying not to. I began fueling the ugly beast and folded my arms as I leaned against the door. I couldn't help but arch an eyebrow.

Marine Engineer, Savior of the Universe

There's something I've played around with for a while now. It's not really an actual project, it's just me having fun practicing writing in the first person. It's fun, really. I also started writing on this before I had any formal writing instruction (my one comp class counts as formal writing instruction in my world), so its rough. I used to have a little better inspiration living in a sunbaked alkaline sink called Lemoore. Luckily, I have escaped there for good, and this project suffered.

Anyway, this is not a promise that it will be updated with regularity, so comments over there may be ignored. The plot has no plan whatsoever, so don't bug me about it. In fact, don't even read it. No, don't even look at it. Just forget I said anything.

Billy Hodges.

First Commandment of Blogging:

Thou shalt give time for readers to comment and comment alike before adding a new entry.

Fuck that. See, I was sitting here puppy sitting, and came to a conclusion.

Before the conlusion reached en utero thoughto, a brief story.

Years ago, I was standing outside my little Government issued family house, the house absent of a family at this point, drunk as all get out. In this case, "all get out" must be defined as "hell." I am rural and use terms such as this when I try to make polysyllabic points. I also inheritted a baritone voice free of gravel, but towards the left hand of a piano's scale.

To continue:

I was not sober. I was pontificating, as I am wont to do in states of any "all get out", when I stretched the definition of death, hell, and the grave*. I remember beating on the hood of my Scout to drive home every fourth or fifth gerund as my strange haiku unfolded. I told of dancing demons and firy graves of innerspace galactic drama. I called down pyrological deluges from heaven and pummeled the disgusting draw of our humanity towards our fellow man as a photophyllic ameoba towards the pond-water sun. I decried the Whore, yet called also for empathy and a small touch of the calming ethylene-glycol of masculine reason and masculine acountability. Hell was not merely in my words. It was a real sulfur proceeding from my mouth to kiss and fondle my gathered friends at the temple of closing time. My rumbly voice, product of too much alcohol and too many preachers in the gene pool, wooed their senses into my state of being and made them agree with the hateful lies I tried not to believe.

My rant and rave and sermon was nearing its climax wherein I no longer cared whether the stupid children who rode out into the street may get run over or the dirty tramp thumbed her way across the West Coast for a blowjob and a bump of rock, when I noticed the wide eyes and slightly hypnotized stares of my compatriots, my brothers in arms. They held their beers at waist height, frightened at the world I weaved out of my phonetics. They believed everything I said. I saw whites of eyes making room for irises. I knew the look. They might as well have been sitting on a church pew listening to my father.

Thus, I shut up and threw my two-pint glass over my shoulder. My keen hearing, conditioned by a few too many years at the business end of super sonic death machines, heard it obliterate the cross-walk behind me. They snapped out of the stupor.

One of my best friends, a guy named Baron Peter Christian von Blah Blah Some Elitist Horseshit, looked at me as an alien creature. I was no longer his friend but a Sunni mystic, one hand pointed towards the mysteries above and one pointed below to the dirty soil of life as I spun our way to freedom.

"Dude, you should fucking write."

He had honesty, and frankly, good taste in literature.

My papist wop friend, Fabian, agreed with a solemn hush and a heartened nod.

The conclusion:

To answer a quick question I get asked with remarkable frequency, that is why I write. Maybe if my shared thought is nothing more than ones and zeroes, it won't be an hypnosis. Maybe it won't be a sermon.

Sermons scare me.



_{*This is a Pauline term I had hammered into me, "...triumph over death, hell and the grave." One of those letters to Corinth, I believe.}

I'm Fucking Crazy

I've been thinking about a girl. Actually, she's one of the letters. Her name means "beautiful."

In this life, it seems like all our little inconsistencies and hatreds build up into more than we are. She made me face the truth. We weren't made of the same ethereal bullshit as most others. Our selves were not little pretty things, or little ugly things, simply the product of worlds gone mad. There was no miracle to our destinies. We were just animals trapped in the vestiges of polite, sane humans. We were the darkness that makes up the majority of the universe.

She picked up, dated, and betrayed my best friend. A couple days later, I was in her bed. Honestly, the world was backwards and confusing when I knocked on her door by semi-Freudian accident. I bottle of Sailor Jerry and enough despondency will do that to a guy. Her liquid fingers in my beard and her words in my ear were salves on psychic contusions I don't think even she fully understood.

I had a dream about her last night. A confusing dream of apocalypse and famine. We had to run away and build a fortress. That part of the dream was vaguely frightening.

The rest of the dream was not frightening. In fact it was so unfrighteningly pleasant as to be none of your damn business.