1 Minute Story For After 1

I left the spaghetti on the stove for too long and the house smelled like burning. I'm hazy on the rest of the details, but I think my dolls of the world collection burnt down.

Stuffed in the Attic Next to the Free Trampolines

“All these fucking dvds!”
“What’s wrong with having dvds! Everyone’s got dvds! It’d be weird to not have a single dvd lying around the house. You'd have to be some old biddie or a serial killer not have dvds and I bet even they’re into preserving home movies!”
“Its not that you have dvds, David, its that you pile them everywhere! Its like you’re trying to create some sort of, I don’t know, some sort of monument. Some sort of towering mountainous monument to prove to everyone that comes through here that you don’t ‘just dabble in films’”.
“You know Borges said he couldn’t sleep unless he was surrounded by books”.
“Well you’re no Borges”.
“Of course not he was a writer and I’m a…”
“A what, David?”
“A Jew!”

7 Minute Story for the Echos of Purposelessness

The first time it happened it was four in the morning and Liz was screaming. In the bathroom the light was on and Liz, fully naked, was scrambling around frantically tugging at her ear. "Tom," she screamed hopping on one leg. In a daze I asked her what she was doing. She didn't stop to explain continuing to bumble around the room like a dying fish. I turned on the bedside light. Liz had just showered. Her tiny white breasts were lightly misted. As she did this absurd dance in front of me, I couldn't help finding it somewhat erotic. "Tom, will you fucking help me," she screamed once again. I was tired and didn't feel much like getting up. After the initial shocks of rape and murder had passed, it seemed pointless for me to have to get up and deal with whatever woman problem she was going through. "Tom will you fucking help me," she cried this time falling on the floor, "there's a cockroach stuck in my ear!"

Unfinished Pieces from the Past

On April 19th 2011my lovely husband Richard Cassidy Boone went crazy. As is generally the case with these things, nobody knows why.
Sophia and I were cuddled up on the couch watching Looney Toons, devouring bowl upon bowl of rice crispies. Sophia loves it when Bugs dresses up like a woman. Every time he sensuously beckons Elmer Fudd she gushes out floods of chocolate milk sending rice crispies sailing every which way. She’d laugh and I’d laugh too.
A voice from up stairs:
“Sirrah, what made your master in this place?”
We couldn’t hear it of course. Even if we hadn’t been laughing so hard, we were lightyears away in a cartoon forest. We, the fuzzy two-headed beast stitched together by blankets and throw pillows, walked in place as identical redwood backgrounds looped themselves over and over. All we had to do was roar jovially at the tip-top of our lungs; everything else seemed to move forward on its own.
Even now there’s something very comforting about that image.
“Tell me in sadness, who is that you love?”
-----------------------------------------------------------

“Soft, I will go along. An if you leave me so, you do me wrong”.
Richard coos me his newest song. Since he’s been on this all expense paid trip to white walled Verona he’s learned how to play blues guitar. I’ve learned how to crochet sweaters for dogs in a local botique. The doctors tell me he’s a prodigy. Every so often they sneak him out to give concerts at special events and birthdays, “nothing too big,” says Dr. Cambell P. Boyle, head psychiatrist of the W. P. Boyle home for the mentally ill, “just a little bit of fun here and there”. I consent; the exposure to new people can only be beneficial they tell me.

5 Minute Story For Procrastination of Paper Writing

No time to explain!

Fortinbras sits listlessly at the computer clicking around through facebook. He finds it comforting some nights to wonder about his high school peers, see their pictures of new friends in new places. Looking at them makes him feel he's never left them, but rather been replaced by a sorting machine that places people in places and places in people, the balance always coming out just right. Its karma. Its a well managed assembly line. Its a database. In a way he's the Indian boy at Harvard with the pot marks and slightly spiked hair. He's the sorority girl in the matching blue windbreaker at Loyola. He's the hipster kid jamming on trashcans outside NYU. "God Bless America," he thinks to himself, "God Bless America".

5 Minute Story Based on the MW word of the Day

No time to explain!

Vulnerable

Stanley began battering Plesia with a bar stool. She blocked her face well enough but her chest was left vulnerable. When all was said and done a leg was poking out of her heart. She collapsed. Stanley yelled at her "get up" but she didn't budge. "Get up Plesia!" he barked. She didn't move. "Get up you stupid bitch". There was no movement. There was no sound. There was only the silence in the room with Stanley and the shoddy stools bought off Craigslist.

Right as of Now

Right now isn't the best time to post.
Why?
Hopefully soon I'll figure that out.
Figure what out?
Failure is funny like that.
Funny like what?
Like a guy who only talks through two puppets on each of his hands.
What?
I don't know.
Who cares?
Who cares.

Reading List #1- Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood
By: Haruki Murakami

"It's a quiet place, so people talk quietly,"

1. It's pretty much a love story. Accessing it seems pointless being thoroughly unJapanese myself.

2. Murakami: "Norwegian Wood is, as you've said, the only one written in a realistic style. I did this intentionally, of course. I wanted to prove to myself that I could write a 100% realistic novel. And I think this experiment proved helpful later on. I gained the confidence I could write this way; otherwise it would have been pretty hard to complete the work that came afterwards. For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life. It's also a way of descending deep into my own consciousness. So while I see it as dreamlike, it's not fantasy. For me the dreamlike is very real."

3. Its gone now; tucked between the stacks. I can't remember the line that's been dicing up my brain. This place that is no place? This place that is no space? I can't remember. It seems irrelevant though; what the words are precisely.

4. Place: Easy to identify: 1960's Tokyo primarily, secondarily a few geographically insignificant countryside locales (something out of a Sōtatsu painting or a Hiroshige ukiyo-e: busy within the placidity of blank space; irrelevant chaos). In lieu of geographic purpose the primary and secondary function in orbit of each other.
Space: Does Tokyo even exist? Wantanabe walks through it again and again, but its vastness makes it slippery with nothing to hold on to. Incomplete memory? Maybe; the novel's tone echos through dreamlike whispers. Geometrically speaking however, the space, if we include the characters themselves as space, functions in perpendicular lines: Tangential from assumption, but examined beyond the eye separate with vacuous breadth.

5. "It's pretty much a love story". If so, what is the lover and what is it's the love object? Which characters are main, and which secondary? Who do we look at? but more importantly, where do we look? Are the absences of such distinctions irrelevant in the love story?

Conclusion:

A ghost town; here plants grow.

No one lives
under the wooden eaves
of Fuwa Barrier.
For years in ruins:
now only the autumn wind.

Cooling, so cooling,
with a wall against my feet,
midday sleep—behold.

When I awoke, I was alone
this bird had flown.
So I lit a fire
isn't it good Norwegian wood?

Artistic Manifesto

Today I picked up this book on drawing that's been knocking around my pockets for ages. Its short and out of print and was sitting at the bottom of an antiques shop wicker basket just outside of Micanopy. I stole it. I don't feel very good about this because the woman at the register was 83 and pinched my cheeks, but I knew at the time I wouldn't feel very good about it, so chalk this up to curious stupidity.

Before this becomes any more like a diary entry I should tell you about the "Principles of Drawing". As a 1920's approach to drawing the book had less to do with drawing, than on the mental and physical preparations one must go through before drawing. Chapter 1 deals with supplies, Chapter 2 deals with hand exercises, Chapter 3 deals with observation and developing "acute perspicacity", Chapter 4 deals with which artists you should be familiar with and which ones are "rubbish", and Chapter 5 talks about "Developing One's Art Manifesto". There is a Chapter 6 but its just a list of absurdly practical drawing exercises (IE: "Draw a Tree in Precise Detail Without Loosing the General Image of a Tree").

I can't say "The Principles of Drawing" was a bad book, it really wasn't. As you might be able to tell though from the table of contents, the book is covered by a thick historical dust that just begs me to draw a few penises in it with my finger. Chapter 4 especially. In it the author, who's name I never really learned, calls Picasso a passing fad and preaches about the new English Renaissance about to grip the world. His passion in this section breaks through the book's even tempered tone and causes nothing but a happy giggle fit.

At any rate...Chapter 5 claims that the most essential aspect of learning to draw was developing an Art Manifesto. This was somewhat shocking after Chapter 4's fit with the avant garde and its masturbatory praise for classical pieces, but I decided before laughing at it I'd see what he had to say. Artistic manifesto by his definition "implies the creation of one's artistic aims through its statement in a lucid though dynamic prose".

I turned that idea over in my head for a bit. I ended up writing a page long manifesto but unsatisfied I slipped it between pages 87 and 88 leaving "The Principles of Drawing" in the library restroom attached to a post-it note that read "please steal me" in red ink. In a strange way I felt like I'd done something worthwhile.

Walking out I came up with a new artistic manifesto that was precisely detailed without ever loosing the general idea:

Manifest of the ? Style

1. Lightening my pockets.

Charles Brocken Brown is My New Best Friend

I did the calculations just now, and realized that officially I now spend more time with old CBB than I do with an single person born after 1771. Somehow I'm not bothered by this. In fact, so little am I bothered by it that I think I'll even donate this precious post number 20 to him and his cause.

Take it away Charlie:

A Receipt for a Modern Romance
Charles Brockden Brown

TAKE an old castle; pull down a
part of it, and allow the grass to grow
on the battlements, and provide the
owls and bats with uninterrupted ha-
bitations among the ruins. Pour a
sufficient quantity of heavy rain upon
the hinges and bolts of the gates, so
that when they are attempted to be
opened, they may creak most fear-
fully. Next take an old man and
woman, and employ them to sleep in
a part of this castle, and provide them
with frightful stories of lights that
appear in the western or the eastern
tower every night, and of music heard
in the neighbouring woods, and ghosts
dressed in white who perambulate the
place.

Convey to this castle a young lady;
consign her to the care of the old
man and woman, who must relate to
her all they know, that is all they do
not know, but only suspect. Make
her dreadfully terrified at the relation,
but dreadfully impatient to behold
the reality. Convey her, perhaps
on the second night of her arrival,
through a trap-door, and from the
trap-door to a flight of steps down-
wards, and from a flight of steps to
a subterraneous passage, and from a
subterraneous passage, to a door that
is shut, and from that to a door that
is open, and from that to a cell, and
from that to a chapel, and from a
chapel back to a subterraneous passage
again; here present either a skeleton
with a live face, or a living body
with the head of a skeleton, or a
ghost all in white, or a groan from a
distant part of a cavern, or the shake
of a cold hand, or a suit of armour
moving—fierce “put out the light,
and then”—

Let this be repeated for some nights
in succession, and after the lady has
been dissolved to a jelly with her
fears, let her be delivered by the man
of her heart, and married—Proba-
tum est.

As in medicine there is what phy-
sicians call an elegant prescription to
distinguish it from those incongruous
and absurd mixtures of the ancient
empirics, so, lest any one should think
I have put too many ingredients into
the above recipe, let him take the
following:
A novel now, says Will, is nothing more
Than an old castle, and a creaking door:
A distant hovel,
Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light,
Old armour, and a phantom all in white—
And there's a novel.
ANTI-GHOST.

Everything I Write

Everything I write nowadays is about sex; I wonder if that's indicative of me or of writing.

If it's indicative of me, which it undoubtedly is, it's because I want my work to be less serious and sex makes it more pornographic.

If it's indicative of writing, which it may or may not be, it has to do with the fact that all writing wants to be taken as serious pornography*.

"In any case" (IDIOM), Porn "is the way of the future" (IDIOM), "haven't you heard" (IDIOM)?

*If I could muster up enough musicians I'd start a band called "The Serious Pornography"; we'd play home style folk and sip sweet tea between sets. You can play the washboard, but only if you have a 4 year rhythm degree from either Julliard or Berkley.

Sex is the Key to Inertia (Portrait 2)

"Please let me whistle bang your howdydodad"

Repeating this mantra over and over
she rubs her bare breasts across the hard wood floors
waxing them reflective of the waning moon.

I'm watching T.V., something pornographic:
Now two girls are dragging their tongues across opposite sides of a dachshund;
I reload my emails to the soundtrack of a saxophone moan crescendo.

She's supposed to send me something,
but her promises were vague, early in the day...
it's gotten pretty late, I'm sure it's not coming.

I try to imagine her as some missed casual encounter;
all I find though are their shadows: husky data encrypted binaries:
the people I know pretending to be all the people I don't––

A wooden moon looks me up and down; its glow chirping softly.

Masturbatory Habits

1. The usual struggles with self denial–– occurring after meals, breakfast primarily dinner secondarily (lunch and snacks are temples within the daytime), when I begin to check my thoughts (are they too British? Too scientifically(which isn't to say necessarily scientific) oriented? Too out of touch)–– tend to engender a certain breed of self doubt wrought, like all self doubt, by the unfortunate combination of anxiety and angst (one in the same?––((perhaps))).

2. Confidence, the voice of struggle, steps in with its well placed arguments; the ego's resistance to change one may suppose if one is to suppose self doubt is an instrument of change (Adam goes into a bar and drinks a hunched beer to enjoy, but not particularly watch, whatever game happens to be on new the 60 inch Samsung plasma. Eve, a big breasted buttery bob of red hair, sits down in the stool adjacent indicating she'd like a campari and soda. Adam, gobbling peanuts as if they were brains, notices, but pretends not to, the stunningly attractive woman sitting next to him. He is pasty. He is underweight. He has unfortunately greasy hair. A point is scored on the new 60 inch Samsung plasma but it goes unnoticed. He isn't so bad. In fact he's sweet; once called a poet by his 5th grade English teacher. (No chance) why not? Adam makes a decision, "an appletini, for the lady" awkwardly vibrating the words as they reach his lips. Eve smiles with gracious delicacy. They talk about small things: the dramatic weather, his favorite pizza place, her failed relationship with Yakov the up-in-coming inner city soccer star. Snake, the sociopathic bartender with a Godzilla tattoo on his right cheek, slides Eve the shimmering neon drink; she sips gently. The conversation gets more animated: "Didn't go to college, went to a trade school" "I'm a photographer" "What made you want to live in San Salvador for a year?" "You play the piano?". Eve starts feeling sick suddenly; she'd just gotten over a cold, maybe she shouldn't be drinking. Seconds pass with a languid crunching sound. "Are you alright?" "Listen, I know we just met, but do you think you could give me a ride home? Its not too far from here". Adam confidently puts his hand around her shoulder lying her prostrate in the backseat of his 2002 Corolla. At some point during the trudge up the narrow, urine stained staircase of Eve's building she passes out. Adam carries her the rest of the way, gently resting her on the overstuffed magenta couch in her living room. At the door he notices her legs frailly accentuated by skin toned nylon stockings which converge at the very tip top to reveal the petals of her bare off-pink vagina. When will you get this chance again poet? She wants me, She wants me not.)

3. Breakdown, blinds closed, boxers off; a story about anal sex (Right Up Her Alley) shines brightly off the screen. His eyes glance down the scroll bar partly skimming, partly savoring the erotic discourse on the roof of his mouth. What happens, why he might enjoy it so much, is fiction in its greatest sense, shallow underdeveloped characters with the freedom to do or say anything, invites him to actively be apart of the fiction as if he could almost touch it.

4. I regret my lack of self discipline strolling through online catalogs of crap I don't particularly need while I watch a video on you tube, something funny. I check my thoughts (too one dimensional? too unimaginative?) I am immaculately impregnated with an unreal language I now have to laboriously abort.

5. A rag, hard mucousy blue cotton blend, waits patiently in back of the underwear drawer to clean up the many messes to be made.

Portrait 1

Nights I dream Novocaine
in pillow forts cellophaned––
"effluvia chimed, cellphoned
txt waged, bitter brained, batter broke––
(Excuse me, was you saying somethin?)
"uh-uh,"––snarled shoe strings,
sweater snot shirtsleeves,
shriveled suit shrapnel: Cheetos,
Cheerios, Pringles, Ding-Dongs––
"I'm tired" you say, "maybe tomorrow".
"A bird on a dead tree laughing" replies
she fucks him softly into the plaster cast pillows.