Semi-fictional Friday

This is neither purely fiction or purely journalistic. Some is true. Some is untrue. Some of it is both.

Into lives of no consequence friends come and go with the burning scream demon chemicals in our blood. Me and Andrew, friends of convenience and shared appetites for waifish addicted women and crystallized rocks of pure superman power, were of no consequence. We played with life and death as pathetic toys in the hands of giants. We were supermen, immortal in our young minds. The screaming noise of his 3/4 ton Ford truck cut through the dry and cold air.

The truck slewed around the turns down into the dry gulches of Mancos Shale that you used to be able to get by crossing the East Bridge over the EOM Canal at C 1/2 Road. We never knew how to drive our nearly identical behemoths without getting them a little sideways around the turns. How we survived cranked out and drunk and driving our souped up to all hell trucks, I still don't know.

As we cleared the bottom of the hill, a washed out section of road launched us skyward. In the cab we both hit our heads on the roof and crashed back into the sagging seat laughing like the morons we were. The truck slewed right on the rutted clay road into the side of the hill, rotating against the resistance. He laughed maniacally and gunned it sending the nose straight up the soft shale hill. The roaring truck cleared it easily dumping us down into another draw. The truck flayed into the creek sideways and tipped onto two wheels. We continued to appreciate the hilarity. In my hands I held a new Kenwood CD player jacked into a tapedeck adapter fed into his cheap stereo gaping out of the bare metal dash with wires swaying from underneath it. A band that shall not be named raged through cheap speakers we drilled into the doors.

I blame the artist for our manic attempts at proving mortality. Living fast and loose. I reached with my spare hand through the open back window of the truck and fished in the cooler bungeed to the front of the bed for more beer. I threaded my hand back through the gun rack and handed him a beer and repeated the process for myself. We were being dumb. I blame it on the artists invocation to live to win. I don't know why.

The shuffling CD player, held more or less steady in my hand as we rocketed out of the draw and back onto the road, found its next song about the time we were done gunning down the beers. The cans found their way back into the bed. We were not good people, but we did not litter.

Andrew shouted from his place behind the steering wheel, "God, I love this fucking song!"

I signalled my approval over my next beer. "Yeah."

"Listen to those drums!"

Andrew like to pretend he could play the drums.

I forget why we were out in the desert that day. I think it had something to do with shooting prairie dogs. I don't know, we were high. Lately I have rediscovered that particular artist and I always have semi-fond memories of that thoroughly retarded summer. We found our way in and out of trouble, living on whims and promises we did not keep. Everyday was an adventure in craziness and adolescent desire, but we eventually had to stop. He ran from the cops out to Nevada and I found my way into another desert far away from prairie dogs and Ford trucks. We both wound up with blood on our hands less than a year after this creek running. My hands covered in the mass killing of more or less innocent people I never met, his bloody hands eventually removed him from the dust of the chase. At least they never caught him.

He rolled into a speed metal high beating invisible drums with his foot burying the throttle into the floorboard. I see it in your eyes, take one look and die.

The truck departed controlled travel some time around there and my head hit the gun rack. The world exploded into white and jostled and quaked and gravity and mud could not come to a consensus on which part of the truck was facing the earth. The white flickered and revealed the brown clods of desert soil pressed into my window and then the sky and then the dashboard racing toward me. I was aware of a crack and burst in my nose, but I felt nothing but drunk and high. The truck eventually stopped. My feet were cold and wet. The door would not open and Andrew was gone. I crawled out of the open back window. Beer cans were everywhere. As was the remains of his .22 rifle and the gunrack.

I stepped up out of the bed and onto the dirt. I sat hard and looked at his truck half submerged. Andrew sat on the hood. Laughing. I laughed too, at the smeared and sticky blood on my face and the blood still running down his face. He smiled around a missing tooth, more blood pouring out and pointed up stream.

"Dude, the road washed out. That was fucking cool!"

Yea Is Not Exactly Yeah

So the guy next to me's getting saved. The guy next to him is using phrases like, "Are you ready to surrender control? Is that something you can do right now?"

He's got his Bible open, a tricked out signature model in a leather cover with gold leaf accents and (presumably) dual exhaust and a paddle shifting sport package interior. The other guy guy, Mr. Surrender, is following along in a bargain model, something youth groups and Churches hand out so they can keep their tricked out personal scripts in their lusty little polished hands. Judging by the Sesame Street wording of Paul, they're using a New Living Translation (NLT), New International Version (NIV) or something similar. New Expanded College Kings Holy Extended Amplified Translation (NECKHEAT) or some shit. I guess milking the hard parts down makes conversion a slightly easier task than something like screaming in pain while lions eat you¹.

Which brings up my problem with the Church crowd. I mean no offense to anyone's faith whatsoever. While I never quite donned the pastel polo shirt of Post-Modern Christiandom, at one time I believed about 90% in a good 40% of that particular doctrine ±3%, so I can't say much about it, also 90% of my extended family ±3% believe a good 80% or so of the same stuff. So, there you go. At one time, I probably agreed with between .27 and .45 of whatever you might believe if you attend a mainstream Americanestant Christian Church, assuming your beliefs add up to one, which seems the whole point of that faith anyway. My family has a probability of between .696 and .744 of agreeing with you (but not totally).

Anyway, the guy over here, Mr. Surrender, is surrendering his will. That's fine, but I wonder if he'll stay up tonight wondering how you surrender your will to an omnipresent/omniscient being without having already surrendered your will, thus negating the process, and if indeed the entirety of existence is under the control of Mr. O/O, how anyone at anytime is not surrendering their will. Even if they don't. I know I would. So, anyway, his surrendering is wrapping up, I hope he feels some peace, but really, before my will gets surrendered (voluntarily?), I would expect some answers to a lot more difficult questions than he has asked. Or does the questioning represent a lack of surrender, thus negating the existence (at least in your head, which is a whole nother can of existential worms) of Mr. O/O? I mean, if I shouldn't be able to move "...outside the will of [Mr. O/O]", does any movement at all not knowingly acknowledged by me to be voluntary mean that Mr. O/O will get offended and possibly in a smiting mood?

OK, So Mr. O/O hasn't smitten in a while. That does not seem a real probability to worry about. I mean, even if you think that Mr. O/O smote Sodom and G-Town for Sodomites doing Sodomite things², then it would stand to reason that he would smite every town with an established YMCA. That has not happened. In fact, out of the high number of human settlements, only two have been so treated. This is fairly reassuring as their has to have been more than a million towns with greater than 100 people established at this point in history, and given that any group of more than 100 people has wildly less than a 1% chance of avoiding the scurge. So, a city has about about a 4,500,000:1 chance of being smote in its entire existence, usually hundreds or thousands of years. Or smitten. Smitten sounds more pleasant, not that those words really matter. Basically, it doesn't happen. And considering the downward trend in smiting since wide-spread literacy, I feel safe from random firestorms. The jury is still out on hurricanes.

I'm not saying Mr. Surrender is making a bad decision, I'm just telling you why I would find it difficult. Now, studying holy writ is a fun way to spend some time. I love it, actually. More interesting is to get into it. Seriously into it. Pull out your Unger's and your Strong's and your Placher. If you want to study the Bible, don't just study the words on the page, that makes no sense. Study the book. Study the canon choices and the individual personalities responsible for your doctrine (hint: the majority are nowhere in your Bible).

So, the guy is now surrendered and so forth, at least, he feels "it is all clear, now,"³ I assume he must have picked up something I missed over there. Selah. He is currently getting a lecture from Mr. Gold Leaf Pages that surrender today might be tough tomorrow. And that those doubts are just "feelings" and that "that's what faith is for."

Kind of a confusing phrase. What exactly is faith beyond a feeling? It is not a tangible gas, solid, or liquid. It must be a feeling, which leaves nothing else. So, if feeling is first (thanks, e.e.), is faith possible without doubt? Isn't faith defined by doubt, or more accurately, a persons response to doubt?

Now they are making plans for a coming retreat. For those of you not in the know about such things, a "retreat" is where everyone with the same beliefs runs off to the woods to agree with each other. Surrender one day, retreat the next. Onward Christian Soldiers must have been about a different breed. Somewhere St. George is cringing.

Quite the murky pool Mr. Surrender just stumbled into. I hope he at least asks enough questions to keep it fun.



<sup>1. I'm afraid it would be too offensive to say I hate the majority of Christianity's doctrines since they quit getting ate, so I won't.
1. And nowhere in the Bible says it was.
2. His exuberance is lost here.</sup>

Reclamation of the Relics

I feel I owe you all an explanation. It's not that I don't care.

Every so often for the last few months I have written about liquid feminine perfection. I have breathlessly and talentlessly gushed about a woman. I am sure you are tired of hearing about her. I know my friends are. At least I assume so.

She was here. And there. In the vermillon red moderately high energy fluvial deposits of Onion Creek and Castle Canyon. And I have nothing. She went back home and I am beer drunk and whiskey high. See this: there are big thoughts and heavy words strewn about in my cluttered head.

We went to see Nina Storey, the sort of woman I would find myself powerlessly attracted to in a normal state of affairs, but I found myself distracted. Turned away. She tore the songs up and proved she deserves to be making money at being awesome, but I was only semi hearing her. I was distracted by candle light and brown eyes. Not really brown. More of sphalerite. Not the clear stuff. The rich and earth of virgin soil mineral full of zinc and (astounding) crystalline (perfect) beatific (indescribable) beauty.

My sister, whom I would hastily die for, got married this weekend. Her moment as a princess reclaimed seems such a minor footnote to the amazing central plot of the weekend which was a body in a blue dress and a neck wearing jewelry crafted by thin perfect hands.
I feel so fortunate. I have ignored you all. Sorry.

Not really.

Sleeper

I heard back East they got sections of the paper called “I saw you.”

I'm not sure what exactly it's for or why anyone would care that someone seen them walking around a park or feeding birds top-end sourdough breadcrumbs around a statue or running with the blue shorts and the tanktop t-shirt flashing mineral sweat through small groomed pores and meditating on concrete and trendy mp3s. It don't make any sense to me, but I'm not a huge fan of bulk-lot quantity humanity. Noticing anybody at all seems a waste of sensual apparati.

But I saw you, you fucking punk.

About the time I agreed with an untrendy mp3 about making a pretty woman love me, no matter what I do. My sweat was wet through with the hot sun and darkened by work. A broke car, a wounded beast of unnecessary burden, lay without the ability to generate 12 volts of alternating current to power its heart next to me. My knuckles bled into the yellow dirt and into the greasy heart of one of Dodge's biggest mistakes. The bass player pedaled the fifth for an interminable moment while you drove by and then Albert King rewrote the fucking book of Genesis with stars screaming flashing woman's hips bends of detuned steel gut guitar string. Not a huge deal, really.

I built a motor once. During my summer of speed and cheap women.

The 400M hulked on the engine stand while me and Jake run a hone up and down the cylinder jackets. We had the block stripped naked and dipped and bored thirty thousandths of an inch over the old cylinder radii. The air conditioning pump, smog pump, and any other extraneous homage to comfort or ecological responsibility was left in the mud. We loaded the heavy steel crank, the longest stroking crank offered in a Ford V8, and the rest of the rotating stock into the block. We dropped in the RV cam 12 degrees ahead of the factory timing, Nader be damned. We had the heads polished, satin in the intake ports, mirrored in the exhaust. The heads got stiffer springs to fight back the power of larger cam lobes. The rods were manganese steel.

The manifold was a Wieland aluminum piece of industrial art. The carburetor was an old school Holley with four barrels of 950 cubic feet a minute air delivery, manual choke, stainless steel fuel line. We took out his bondo, primer, and oxidation red Torino's tired 302 . We locked a 2100 RPM stall converter on the front of the C4 transmission since the Ford Motor Company's four hundred cubic inch displacement modified block is a goddamn torque monster with a habit of eating drive lines for lunch. The 400 barely fit in the engine compartment, the headers barely cleared the crossmember. We ripped out the electronic ignition modules, vacuum choke controllers, sensors, and little Detroit mystery boxes from the firewall and fenders. The entire electronic compliment of underhood electronics consisted of ten wires.

The posi rear end turned a couple 235 45 R 16's on black spoke Kragers. We prowled the streets in that monster. We rumbled and screamed down the country two lanes that now sport turning lanes and stoplights and subdivisions with streets named after the flora and fauna and streams they displaced.

That car was an ugly stripped down straight line machine with a fire breathing monster under the hood. That's what you call a sleeper, kids.

I saw you drive by, and I'm pretty sure you saw me. We didn't wave. I think I saw you the other day, too. With your thin wisp of English major goatee on that cherubic marshmallow face. I didn't recognize you right away, and honestly I was distracted by pumped and strained muscles I had been pushing to their limits in the gym and sore hands from working the heavy bag into a pulp.

I saw you. Anticipating what you probably knew would be your fate the day we met again. We have history. You went white. Whiter.
You've always been a bitch.