Fiction Friday

The sequel to this.

The bus ground into second gear. The driver, short and ugly in the way of the unlucky, knew not to expect much from this particular bus. CCT No. 1125 was not known for legendary ability. The driver hated CCT No. 1125. This bus had a bad habit of stranding the driver with a couple dozen angry passengers along the trashy highways of his route. CCT No. 1125 smoked terribly, and the old sealing along the windows, long since been dried and rotted away by long, hot summers of dust and wind, let in exhaust fumes that had led to a number of vomit cleanups. The failures of the transit system, especially on this route, through this area where desolation sat on the terrain, were taken out on the driver. The driver by nature was a sensitive man. His wife had left him for a man less sensitive, but more assertive and exciting. Somewhere he had children who shared his eyes, his mouth and nose, but held the hand of an exciting (and taller) man.

He held the throttle down and cursed the Detroit 318 groaning and screaming against its governed maximum speed. CCT No. 1125 had no air conditioning. The passengers and the driver sweat in unison.

A passenger sat in the back of the bus, his leg over the faded green bag rescued earlier from the official carpet. A plastic shopping bag rested in his lap, still new. Inside the bag was a collection of the cheapest hygiene and food items that money could buy. When starting a life, the system of public assistance does not equip the journeyman well. John Pine sat straight and rigid, cheap headphones in his ears connected by a many times repaired wire to an equally cheap portable CD player. Music flooded his brain. Old Dylan tracks pushed out the cloud of angst and anxiety that wanted to erupt. John was not one to ride a bus. He had never attempted in his adult life, at least the last few chaotic years of it, to ride a bus, train, or plane without music.

Outside his window, the life and death struggle of CCT No. 1125 against the hill and the heat was ebbing down. Diesel fumes and chaos lingering on the fringes of his mind were giving him a headache. His sweat was not the sweat of uncomfortable heat. There was heat, heat from the sun beating down on the passengers; a beat up woman with bony arms and self-inflicted scratch wounds, a young boy of several recognizable races and probably one or two hidden, two skinny chocolate colored women in Wendy’s uniforms cooing softly in Spanish, a dilapidated waste of man wearing a white sleeveless shirt and an expression of either boredom or sadness, and a slew of the underground and unseen workers of every community. John’s sweat was of fear, and it soaked his heaving T-Shirt and ran down his pulsing neck. His eyes were closed against the onslaught of vision.

The driver, his charge rounding over Coyote Wash Hill spoke into his microphone, “Coyote Canyon, 3rd and Morrison.” Then went back to hating a man more exciting (and taller) than he. He expertly, but absently, pulled the bus into the bay of gravel and weeds that passed for a bus stop. A sign, long since riddle with bullet holes of various calibers, hung loosely from its post with a picture of a friendly bus welcoming the types of people who have to ride a bus.

John gasps, garnering the attention of a small child hanging on his mother’s arm. He stands with slightly more enthusiasm than most would have to leave a bus. The bag again makes a twisting journey on to the shoulder of John Pine. The bag speeds toward the front of the bus where a door, an escape, hangs open. The aisles trip him and cause stumbles that he does not notice. The door is closer. The last obstacle of the stairs flies past and he’s safe on the ground.

“You alright, buddy?”

The voice comes from the driver’s seat while John bends almost double panting in the dust and sun, his shaggy dust colored hair hanging over his face. A beaten and dried and cracked hand waves the driver off.

Thank you, I’m fine. Thanks. Sir. I’m fine.

Fuck a Lexus

I hate dumb hot chicks. They're like V6 Cameros. Sure they look good cruising around, but they just don't got it when your put your foot in them. Why is this important? By way of explanation:

A fucking Camero can lick my crack. All chromed up like some two dollar whore in Fresno who won't leave you alone because you're a white guy broke down on the wrong side of King's Ave. That shit is annoying. Shit, give me one of them Road Runners. Ass like a ton of bricks, nose like a shovel, hub caps off the county trucks, that shit is like that librarian chick with the horn rim glasses and the skirt down to her knees. She will destroy a Camero. Yeah, she ain't covered in chrome and metal flake paint, but she's got some hardware that will ruin your shit.

Yeah, give me a Galaxie. Let me get a hold of that 390 HP split-head V8 with the high rise cam and the Holley pushing out four barrels of "this is the best damn country on Earth." I want that Gallie talking back. Take your "smooth throttle response" and "responsible torque curve" and shove it up your well formed ass. I want to feel the throttle arm moving and the cable sliding in its housing. I want to feel that power valve kick over and those back two barrels of oxygen and love and gasoline explode into the ports of the manifold.

I want to feel the pistons, that huge bored out beast of hell, come up and strike top dead center. I want to feel the power stroke live and die in the veins of physical reality. I want to experience that piston defying metallurgical limits to return on its charger of hot rolled steel. Let me hear the explosion of spent gas rocketing to its cooling doom out the valve and through a set of headers. Then I want to hear the cylinder reborn hard. I want to hear the suction from the valves through a carburetor, pissed off and starving.

Fuck your hot chick with her fuel injection and 20 inch wheels. I want my girl complicated and finicky about how I treat her, not about what I feed her. Take that Lexus and show it off to your office buddies. I'll be the one on the line. In the tubbed out flat black Ford. I prowl after your Lexus. I'll race you for pinks. And that pink slip you treasure will be mine. We'll go gun for gun. You can't appreciate my tastes. Unlike you, I can keep that ass on the ground. I can keep that dragon breathing fire. I don't need a hot PROM to tell my engine what to do. She does as she pleases.

And she pleases me. Only because I know how to work her.

Anthropomorphic Geology No. 3

Bad news. That was the last beer.

I think I’ll live. I’ve lived through worse.

The wind’s coming in tonight over the desert, in through the door and over me laying here. The night loves me. Maybe, anyway, it’s always tough to tell. She just might. One desert night I spent out in the middle of a littoral gulf. I built death. I sucked in sand and diesel and blew out the end of dozens, hundreds of people who never offended me. Another sort of desert than this one, blowing in the open door, wrapped me up in the eddying and heated wind. That war was odd in that the two sides claimed the same God to be fighting for both sides. Out there, with the sand and hail and the technological might, I could believe that God was fighting with himself.

Not to say I am God, but I can empathize with his plight. I often fight great and fundamental battles with myself. When I do, however, I rarely cause more than a bloody nose or two.

One night I sat up on the rim of the Grand Mesa. The vista spread out from the basalt cap that had once been the bowl of an ancient valley. Those mountains around that high valley are gone downstream now, but the basalt, all that damn silica, is not easily eroded. Now the river valley of the old Colorado and the new Gunnison flows and buttresses the West Rim. The vista is about one hundred miles of visibility and 1.6 billion years of geological history. The storms blew in over the desert six thousand feet below me in sweeping cities of condensed moisture. The trains of the water cycle fell across the desert with grand gray and dark flourishes. Lightning reached out into the mud shale.

A year or two later, I lay on a bed far away from the Mesa. My hands traced Her skin like those clouds over the desert. Instead of graying clouds and traces of rain drops, I had skin turned copper by the nature of nautical living and fingers battered by countless arming wires. I loved Her in a very temporary way. Her skin, instead of the pale yellow of shale, was all obsidian, charcoal, and cinnamon. Her back was a gabbro silvered river valley in the moonlight. The trace of Her spine told of a sinewy stream and her so very female bulges were the graveled mounds of some ancient confluence of curious genetic rivers. Her skin sheened by sweat and heat out there where humidity is a way of life rippled like a million years of a river’s journey under my light touch. In the blue and amber light of that city, her contours and monoclines and buttresses stood out with that light tracing them. She knew we were not forever.

I wonder sometimes if the Earth has some sort of sentience we are just not able to perceive in our perception of time. When the fragile and most private skin of her is brushed by the rays of the sun or the fingertip of a river, does she shiver like that other masterpiece in city light and moist air?

I hope so. I would hate to think that this memory is mine and mine alone, fading like a vapor in my short time here on this planet.

I wonder if She still remembers me. When she lays back on whatever bed she calls her own, does she lie back and remember my touch in spite of the ring she must have on her finger by now? Whoever put that ring on her finger must have been able to love her better and more permanently than I. Does she trace the places my finger tips were, all copper on her obsidian, charcoal, and cinnamon skin?

I sort of hope so.

I’m a bastard like that.

Fiction Friday

This has been a plan now for months. On Fridays, not every Friday, but more less around the end of some weeks, I want to post a quick fiction. Not stories, necessarily, but maybe parts of bigger stories. Or something. I don't know. Whatever.

The bag had seen better days. Time had worn worried furrows and the sun had licked off most of the drab color. Dust had reclaimed the bag, run its fingers into the folds and flaps and pores, and marked its ownership with shades of neutral brown and gray. The bag let a small cloud of dust escape into the air of the Office. The thick pile neutral maroon of the carpet with vacuum cleaner tracks visible told a tale of care and cleanliness that had escaped the bag, and its owner.

The owner of the bag had fought a war with decades and was still in the process of losing it. Around thirty hard years had come and sat their trains upon his paths. The years had not been kind in the sense of being undamaging, but had been bountiful in experience and in fullness. Sparseness possessed him throughout, his clothing, his grey eyes, his dust hair, and his wiry frame. Farmer lean muscle deferred to the cheap pocket T-shirt tucked into the worn and faithful jeans clinging to his frame. He and his faithful bag had lived a thousand miles of rough road and a thousand nights out on the outskirts of humanity. They did not belong in the Office. They were an insult to all that offices stand for.

Shuffling papers cut into the dry heat and uneasy silence. A pair of soft and milky hands with reasonable and painted nails riffled through the paper. After the official looking text had been sorted, parted, laid flat and stacked, the voice of the woman with the hands spoke through the silence and swirling dust.

“Last name?”

Pine

“First name?”

John

“Middle?”

None.

The one line questions came out with the familiarity of repetition and were answered with the sparseness of the man. City of birth? Permanent residence? Felon? Veteran? Service? Discharge? Date? Last mailing address? Mental health issues? Can you read? Are you willing to find employment? Do you want housing?

Monument, Idaho. None. No. Yes. Marines. Honorable, Zero Five June Zero Five. 386 Oak, Lodi California. No. Yes. Yes. Yes.

The rapid-fire questions and tapping of plastic keys stopped for a moment. The woman’s hands found each other and folded together. She leaned back in her sensible chair. Her eyes searched the man until she found humanity. The eyes of her face, aged by two boys with no father around, wrinkled a little and a kindness crept into her official face. She hated being official with her skirt suit, official haircut, official nametag, and faux-wood desk and faux-wood life of moving people and paper. She had to find reasons not to be official. Her eyes locked out the official story of John Pine, veteran, non-felon, homeless John Pine, and look at him through her human eyes. A pastor tells her and her sons every Sunday about how Jesus saw others. Maybe John Pine was Jesus, not likely, or remotely possible, but the thought helped her love her neighbor.

“So, Mr. Pine…”

John, ma’am.

“John. What skills do you have?”

I spent a few years before I was in doing some carpentry and construction, a little mechanicing here and there. Not to brag, but I can do anything, really. I mean to say I ain’t picky. Ma'am.

“Okay. We have some more paper work to do. I’ll be giving you a voucher for one month at Coyote Canyon, alright?”

Sure.

The bag hefts up out of the jungle of piled maroon. The dust of a dry summer breezes around the swirling figure of the bag as it makes its twisting journey from the floor to the spare and hard shoulder of the man. The weight settles onto his right shoulder with familiarity. Papers shuffle on the desk in a poker hand of bland bureaucracy. Twisted into a sheaf and stapled together, more added with paper clips, the paper takes the form of a packet that is slid into a manila envelope.

“Alright, Mr. Pine. Let’s go next door to the Job Center and I’ll get you started on your new life.”

Appreciate that, ma’am.

*************

If you see anything glaringly stupid I did, let me know. Thanks

I Am Not In The Cult Of Genius

Note: This was written while I was in a very hostile mood, I might not really believe all of this here in the morning (Update: I don't). Also, I borrowed heavily from Ray Wylie Hubbard's version of This Mornin' I Am Born Again.

I despise drama. The sick whining and pathetic grind of a thousand little and insignificant monkeys with their little boxes of music digs into the bullshit of all the goddamn drama.

I've been pounding the beers pretty heavy. I have a swath of modernism to sift through and find at least something worth keeping. I hate poetry (outside of a few). I hate it with every fiber of my being. If you wish to communicate, form sentences, form statements, form a point. Communicate something. Don't tell me how you feel, tell me what you think. Don't wallow in your condition, improve it.

Why the tirade on poetry? Long story, but suffice it to say I have been drug through the mire of a bunch of goddamn whiners from the turn of the century. Please God, never let me be one of those.

Perhaps the meanest thing I can say is the truest. I hate them because I have known them all. Here, at the turn of this century, we have another grasping group of pretenders who know how to complain, but don't know how to do a damn thing. Give me all your drama, I'll ingest it and secrete sweaty work. Tell me your problems and I will find solutions. I have been born again complete. I stood up above my troubles and stand on my own feet.

Poetry, at least the poets that are not Noyes and such, annoy me. Find your feet, stand and be counted for something more than your supposed genius. Let your past be dead and gone. I've sat here blistering my brain with all this goddamn ramble for a grade, and because I hope soon this modernist crap will go away. Thank God.

I hope never to sit in my room complaining, whining about life with nos solution when I could be outside. I could be running. I could be fixing. I could be changing, out in the sun with a young sun. I could work outside, muscles working while I breathe like a sledge-hammer man, I would feel the sun upon me and its rays crawling in my skin. I could drink the blood of Jesus and old John Henry in. Fix yourself.

There is no heaven in the land of drama. The pearly gates lead nowhere. They stand at the vestibule of a land peopled by those too weak to believe in hell. Poetry is a process that is not a solution to a problem that does not exist.

That's why I hate it.

Long Post, Full Glass

So this was going to be one of those witty posts. You know the ones. The posts that people read and say, "Wow, that guy is something."


Then I started sliding down the low road. That road leads nowhere, beloved. At the most, it leads into a low spot, where stagnation and rot occur. In the heart of all human trouble lies the road to nowhere that I now sit in middle of with dull apathy.

I'm afraid people think I'm an asshole. I am most definately not an asshole at least a good 95% of the time. My writing style hints at someone I am not, not really. My style, or voice or whatever English major types like to call it, is not a friendly one. People do not read me and say to themselves, "Now this is a guy to trust with nice thoughts of puppies and such."

My friends, and this term I use in this instance for those who have actually heard me speak and enjoy the practice, generally tell me that my prose style or writing voice is very masculine. I guess that means I don't sound like a girl. I find that fascinating. What do women "sound" like in the theatre of pointless blogging bullshit? I have no idea. I can tell with some certainty when I read a man's writing. They usually talk a little too much about beer and hint a little too much about some scandalous hooker who destroyed their faith in femininity. I hope I don't do that. I talk as much as I can about whiskey, not beer, and don't even bother hinting about that damn scandalous hooker. That was in jest; I am not aware of anywhere on this little corner of CSS that I have ever said a disparaging utterance about a woman. Perhaps I have voiced some perplexed frustration, but I have nothing but love for any written of here.

I forgot where I was going with all this. The cold and brown and toxic beauty in my hands has made me a little too speculative. The flow and ebb, the neep and spring, and the general psuedopodia movement of the universe is displayed in the slick of ice melting into the 50.5% death by Turkey in my clear sweaty glass. None of the movement is with purpose and none of the movement is with cause. The water and alcohol mix swirl in the random eddies of life.

In that life I find something soothing. I will be sad when this glass is empty, but were I not to drink it, the ice would eventually melt away and the water and alcohol, being the same temperature (I refuse to take the tangent of the inexact nature of measurement), will be able to blend away into homogeny. The beauty I do not want to destroy will destroy itself by the very nature of that pulchritude. Am I hinting at a scandalous hooker? No, not this time. Though I hope to one day remember the analogy.

The glass has more or less emptied itself into me. The ice remains along with whatever pretty little brown passengers managed to avoid their metabolization. I love me some pretty little brown passengers. Also not analogous, at least not this time.

The brown, such an ugly adjective for so golden and beatific a shade of caramel, cascades slowly down the monsters of ice in the glass. The flattening of the liquid against the glass, testament to the unending truths of hydrology, is beautiful.

The beauty, not only the beauty here, but the beauty of all things, rushes through me. The beauty needs an evangelist. I have not the words. Beauty is such an odd word in that its state defies its definition. Perfect imperfections and crooked smiles and so forth. I am failing beauty, and I am afraid if I fail it, it will leave. Beauty is a fickle lover, never tolerant of those who are unwilling or unable to love her with words that are true. I fail beauty, so it leaves. The golden caramel is nothing more than booze. The sunset is nothing more than deflected light. I have failed beauty and it has left me. Also not analogous, at least not this time.

I am saddened that it is not.

Another Lame Attempt to Help Someone

I've been thinking lately of goodbyes. I can't claim that the thought occurred spontaneously. The weaving thoughts of goodbyes come and gone spilled over into my life because of another who requires in her life a goodbye.


I remember a time or two I had to write someone's epitaph in my life and their birth certificate into the pantheon of those gone before and gone forever simultaneously. The ghosts of that life and death struggle in your head to resurrect the dead or dying flit across your mind like demons of some pathologically flawed hell. You lay awake and dream dreams of a future you will never realize.


Then the inevitable confrontations. You offer them the questions that you have carved out of your dying flesh where they used to make a home. You offer them the sacrifice of your teary and unanswerable questions at the alter of all they used to be. You walk up to them on your knees with a little silver platter of all you have left of their person, the hows and whys. The unrealistic hope that this is just temporary. When all else has failed, you begin the whens: when did you stop loving me? When was the last time you still cared? When did the last straw hit your back?

The questions are placed onto the alter and burnt up to that dead spirit in the air, the spirit of their memory. Never again will that memory live on this Earth. Like God leaving the Earth forever because he could not abide the world once it had died in the sins of Eden. And like the original sinners, you wander the land of Nod, always east of Eden with your mark. The stigma you carry is to remind you and others that you have lived and died and sinned enough to be human.

Life is murder. Murder of all that came before today, and sometimes murder is fun. Occasionally, you murder an abusive spouse or an insane dictator and the Justice flows in your veins like a burned rock in a tin foil pipe. Sometimes, you have to murder a child who made the mistake of standing too near a tank with the wrong flag painted on it and the Justice burns your skin and the tendrils of your conscious thought. And in this way, the love and hate is balanced.

In this way, all life continues on, murdering the past. The blood will wash off, and the sacrifices of your own dyed flesh where another moved in and loved you will burn away. In the crucible of time, we're all just carbon. If you're lucky, maybe some day your bones will be subducted and you will emerge more beautiful. If not, the silica will be pulverized to sand in some future desert. Time will murder your bones.

This may not help, but at least it's here. All we can expect of thought, really.

With A Little Help From This Friend :)

I've decided that the blogosphere needs some direction. There are way too many people that just don't seem to know what the f*** they're doing. Don't try and lie to me, I have seen your blogs. Informative, provocative, life-affirming. You are doing it all wrong. ^__^

Rule one: Profanity is fine, but only if you couch it in friendly looking letter replacements. F*** is OK, as is S##t. Phonetically spell F as a verb for added emphasis. Some people incorperate the standby @ss or A$$ variants. Never ever use profanity as it may offend someone who would rather be...

Rule two: Looking at Kittens

People love pictures of critters.

See, this is a kitten:

How much lighter do you feel now? It's easy to do, I just google image searched for kitten and found dailykitten.com. Sometimes you can use puppies. People will laugh and comment. Speaking of comments....

Rule Three: You must comment everyday. On everything. Did you read it? Then you must register an opinion, no matter how insignificant. Feel free to copy and paste the following:

OMG! SOooo True!!!!!
You are so lying ;)
AwwWWww.
Effing Yeah!!

If you cannot muster it inside of yourself to think of something to say after you read a post by anyone at anytime, you must delete your Blogger/Typepad/Wordpress account immediately. You have let down the blogosphere.

Rule Four: Strive for a picture to word ratio of at least 1:3, since if the blogosphere wanted to read, it would go to one of those book places. If you do not mathematically understand ratios, you most definitely belong in the blogosphere. I was most impressed once by a post about intelligent design (ID) which had a ratio of 48:1. It was astounding, you could not even understand the opinion of the blogger the post was so convolutedly covered in photoshopped pictures of George Bush and random endearing shots of monkeys.

Rule Five: Change colors randomly.

I don't know why.