Collage

“I won’t hurt you,” said the man. “But Trump’s North Korea strategy could cause a famine,” said the woman. The two of them continued drinking wine and eating cheese in the deserted park.

“Where are we?” asked the woman. “Neither here nor there,” answered the man. The woman looked at the sky, noted the fluffy white clouds and the bright blue sky. “There’s no air pollution here. I must be far from home.” The man let the words sit still in the air. He spread brie on a cracker and took a bite.

“Did you know that twenty-two percent of North Korea is agricultural land?” The man swallowed his cracker and sipped his wine, a Chardonnay from Sonoma. “No, I didn’t know that. However, I know that forty-four percent of U.S. land is agricultural.” The woman nodded her head. “We see eye to eye then, don’t we?”

The man threw his empty wine glass into a stand of bushes. “Don’t rush to judgment. We may live in the blank margins of printed pages, but we’re only the same in the sense that we don’t exist.” The woman ran her hand through the trimmed green grass at the edge of the blanket where they were sitting. “Perhaps, but I have no memory of not existing.” The man responded, “Precisely. If you had then you would exist.”

The woman considered this as she scanned the park, seeing the trees, the empty walking paths, the slight slope of the hill where they sat. “This is a pleasant place. Peaceful, too. I have memories of existing, though.” The man sighed. “How do you prove a memory?” The woman could not answer. Instead, she looked down at the flowered dress covering her legs. Her knees were resting together, and her feet were folded up to the side of her thighs. She had to twist her torso whenever she looked at the man. 

She felt ashamed as she didn’t know any answers to this question. She was thin in body and, she thought to herself, frail of mind. “Is it important to prove such a thing?” The man shook his head as he spread brie on another cracker. “No, not as far I can tell.” A thought occurred to her. “But I’m thinking and remembering, this much I know. I must exist.” The man crushed the cracker in his hand, leaned forward from his keeling position, his face inches from hers, and said, “That’s not existence.” He sat back on his knees, picked up a white cloth napkin, a fine linen, and wiped his hands clean.

The woman pondered aloud, “Am I asking the wrong questions?” The man shook his head again, but this time calmly. With disdain in his voice he said, “You’re asking too many questions.” The woman felt hurt and tears ran down her cheeks. “Why are you so mean?” The man sighed. “Another question.” 

…

On ESPN there was an attractive woman, a former high school football cheerleader, who had become a real journalist. After watching an old man falling and breaking his hip while trying to dance, she found her inner Robert Altman, and became a homely but wise Radio Shack salesperson. She found a second job delivering pizza on the weekends and then a third on Monday nights as a jazz music DJ at a local radio station. Wilson Wise Wilson, upon hearing her voice on the radio, fell in love with her, but he was never able to muster the courage to tell her because he had been worn down by an anonymous black comic who had followed him in public for years belittling his fuddy-duddyness. 

The woman interviewed a jazz musician on her radio show. His most memorable statement was that, “Jazz is about chill, cool, not the loud sarcastic arguments on Reddit.” She sprayed him with a squirt gun and he became melted cheese. She then told a story to her listeners about how her dad used to take her for rides on his moped up and down a desert road in central Nevada. He called her, “My beautiful girl,” but one day he left her in the middle of the desert as he rode away on his moped. She got a ride from a tall man in a pickup truck. He stopped a mile outside of Carson City and told her she needed to get out. She pleaded for him to continue driving her into town. He shook his head, reached acrossed her, and opened the door. As she got out of the vehicle, he handed her a squirt gun and said, “This is magic. It will do what it wants when you squirt it. I have no more need for it.” She held the gun in her hand as she watched him roar down the road, weave into oncoming traffic, and smash head-on into a beer truck. 

She delivered a pepperoni pizza to an old man who tried to pay her with a jar of pennies. She used her squirt gun again, but the old man simply got wet. Frustrated, she threw the gun on the ground and stomped on it, cracking the plastic gun and obliterating its magic. The old man scolded her, “That was a stupid thing to do. I will not pay you now.” Relieved, the woman gave him the pizza and returned to her vehicle. She drove recklessly through town, ran a stop sign, and shattered a porcelain woman who had been stranded in a crosswalk.

The woman stopped at the Radio Shack where she worked. The store was part of a strip mall on the main drag of the town where she lived. She unlocked the front door, turned to lock it again, and then walked to the manager’s office in the back. Her plan was to sleep just long enough to shake off the heebie jeebies. She was nearly asleep when the Ghost of Spock appeared to her. “Little one,” he said, “only smoke cigars with the windows open.” He vanished a moment later and she fell asleep.

…

Living in a car. “My aunt was a racist.” During the Vagina Monologues, Bill realized he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Still living in a car, but I wandered about the library grounds near the river. Jenny is one of the locals. She doesn’t think of herself as homeless. I’m disgusted by her; she feels threatened by me. A thuggish 20-something boy-man masturbated next to a dumpster. White boy tweekers with Southern accents have been riding the rails. Now they’re fucking with my car. I’m pissed off. I calculate numbers in my head; not as strategy, but as a means to calm the rage. 

Extrication, conversion, distraction. I drove the three of them to a showing of Clockwork Orange downtown. We didn’t have money so we just sat outside smoking butts we found on the sidewalk. These guys had a happy cruelty vibe, a sense of hurting a helpless thing with glee. I dropped a dirty handkerchief to the ground and walked back to my car. I needed to go before a meter maid threw a boot on my tire. The guys? They’d lost interest. I heard one of them laugh about rectum prolapse. None of them used those words, though. The phrasing was “shit your asshole out your asshole.”

…

To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I count that as something of a miracle.

…

As far as history is concerned, I’m already dead. If there is something independent of history I might be able to bounce back. I found God, but God was woefully insufficient. The world from which I departed was a menagerie. I am spiritually withered, physically alive, and internally free of morality. Dawn is breaking on a jungle world in which lean spirits roam with sharp claws. I could be a hyena, a lean and hungry one. If so, I could go forth to fatten myself.

I’m out of printer cartridges. I can’t afford new ones. The agencies want me to mail copies of my current income, but I can’t print out the documents I scanned or the bank statements I downloaded. I could make things work in this world if I had a video game console for life. 

…

Foucault identified the problematization of idleness as a means to manufacture a necessity of work for those who could not live without it—the poor—and to justify confinement for those who did not work, whether by choice, lack of opportunity, inability, or any other reason. 

…

“How many times have I told you?”

“Six.”

…

Will please stop turning the—

…

Condemned by law, disturbed by the peace, squandered of goods, throttled by oppression, scared without profession, and labeled “insane.” The truth of this person was answered by confinement, according to law and its practice. 

…

He fiddles with a guitar

And sings with a twang

He thinks this makes him country smart

But there ain’t much rhymes with “twang”

I swear he don’t know that

And never will I tell

Except I just did right there

So what the fucking hell

…

Being in the world is grounded on the land. God gave His only Son. A dream on anger masked was a way of clearing a sense of loneliness. The expression of this went unnoticed. A fundamental part of our constitution is connection to specific others so to experience separation is anguish. Love is welcoming otherness or else it’s devoid of existence. An emphasis on vocabulary is framework material. Intention external to oneself is an attempt at escape. The observer is participant and denial of this results in diachronic disjunction.

I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. I hear not a word spoken because she is beautiful. Bigfoot visits Santa Claus. My heart is Athena, Apothecary, Elderberry. One always has thoughts. The ontology establishing the subject “I” is based on the dialectic notion that certainty rests with the subject and uncertainty rests in objects. On the surface, language bears this out, but in the depths we find only that language is coercive in establishing a subject/object dialectic. The separation between subjects and objects occurs through perceptive schisms encouraged by language. 

These Cartesian linguistic intuitions provide a subject-oriented ontology that allows objects to come into existence as affirmations of subject/object distinctions. The relationship exists from subject to object, from source to result, and this demands a linear order of causality. Timelines are causal projections through which history is perceived. 

…

He was only partially affected by the year in solitary confinement. Henry, the man's name, didn't know whether he was in an American prison or if he was in a foreign land. He also didn't know who put him there or why they did. 

Henry was a banker. An investment banker. A damn good one, cutthroat, sharp, and intuitive with a massive well of knowledge combined with a relational understanding of the links between systems. He used algorithms and codes, but not by using a computer. His mind was unique and he could apply complex mathematical calculations faster than the most robust computers. 

The pity was that he went after a fund that served as a laundromat for unknown organizations. Were they criminal in nature? Drug lords or mafias? Shady Russian billionaires or even Russian government operatives (same thing, right?)? Maybe they were terrorist organizations or the Saudi government. These things he wasn't able to figure out. But he wanted to take over that fund and he nearly succeeded. 

Before he was taken, he had been in London. That was where he worked for an international finance conglomerate. He was drugged and whisked away in a van as he became unconscious. He woke in what seemed to be a basement, but more like a dungeon. He walked down hallways, turning corner after corner, passing doors that appeared to be cells. He heard nothing, though, and he was still in a dream-like stupor which made him think he was losing his mind, that he might be in an insane asylum, but not one listed on any registry anywhere. A CIA insane asylum or prison? A Russian intelligence experimental medical facility? 

He was finally thrown into a room and the door locked. It was similar to a prison cell: a tiny bed with stained mattress, a stainless steel sink and toilet, but no windows to the outside world or even on the door. He fell on the bed and passed out.

When he awoke he discovered that he was lying on a couch. A very expensive couch it seemed. As he looked around the room he noticed high ceilings, maybe 12-feet, and a grand piano in a corner not far from a bay window awash in morning sunlight. He looked to his left and saw a foyer with a chandelier dangling and an elegant staircase leading up to another floor. 

…

Collage is a perceptual tool of seeming randomness that obliterates the linear order of causality. Chaos theory and the “butterfly effect” are accidental reactions attempting to escape duality, but they fail to detach from linear causality. Instead, they reaffirm linearity more insidiously by covering the order of causality with a cloud of complexity. Rather than an escape, chaos theory creates only a more complicated trap. 

…

Jenny told her daughter, Sally, that she had “sinned before God.” Sally, just six years old and inexperienced enough with language to not make such egregious mistakes, interpreted her mother’s statement as, “I sinned before God sinned.” Sally was very impressed by this and thought her mother must be pretty amazing to have accomplished anything before God was able to accomplish it. She bragged about it to her friends, but they all thought Sally’s mom must be wrong. “God is first in all things,” said Betty. “Yeah, that’s what it says in the Bible,” said Maria. Sally thought about this. “Do you think my mom was lying?” Greta said she must have been. Sally walked home after school, slightly dejected by the idea that God had sinned before her mother had. But then she saw a butterfly and chased after it giggling as she did so. She forgot all about winning at sinning and lived happily ever after.

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We recognize that your scent-laden commitments don't end when you start work for the day. We offer flexible floral arrangements depending on job responsibilities, generous bouquets of vacation time, and sweetened parental leave benefits — both to ensure that employees can arrange their workdays for ambrosial productivity and to allow savory time for tending to candy-coated, syrupy, and saccharine family and personal responsibilities.

I Found Love in the Bottom of a Wicker Basket

On his first day back from Halloween, New Jersey, Kyle insisted on doing things his way. No one else could persuade him to try conventional methods or apply standard practices. He chose his path and it was the path of indignation over the lack of deference to his real and perceived greatness. The greatness that was real was real. The greatness that was perceived may or may not have been real. It's not known with certainty, but it's widely believed Kyle is prone to self-deception so most have operated, for good or bad, as if Kyle's perceptions are not real. 

This was a real quandary, not just for Kyle, but for all those who knew him. Well, for those that loved him or liked him or felt he had a basic sense of human decency. But for those who did not know him at all, had never met him, had only heard rumors that became increasingly far-fetched and pert-near unbelievable by any person who had an above-Trump IQ. Unfortunately, most of the town had a sub-Trump IQ which led to belief in the most absurd gossip.

Nevertheless, for his friends and family, it was difficult to know how to properly respond to his very real and extraordinarily well-respected greatness while also dealing with what may or may not have been other great achievements. There was no way to know whether he could taste a woman's perineum when he savored a single bite of ranch-flavored Doritos. Still, this was the man who had invented the Ceaseless Orgasm Stick For Men, Women, and They, an accomplishment that was unquestionably considered the greatest technological achievement in human history. So if he said he could taste a woman's perineum when eating ranch-flavored Doritos, those who knew him felt themselves wondering if he really could.

The thing that almost calmed his family and friends occurred during a weekly Black Mass when Uncle Daugherty finally couldn't take it and threw out the goat's blood as he exclaimed, "What fucking difference could it possibly make for anyone other than Kyle whether or not he does or doesn't taste perineum when he eats ranch-flavored Doritos?!" He had a point. They all admitted it to one another. Still, he had thrown out the goat's blood before it had been used to purify the virgin so they flayed his skin from him while he was still alive before finally beheading him and sending his entrails to a second grade classroom at a local elementary school. 

Somehow, Kyle got blamed for this stunt and a posse formed in town as, well, they had disbanded the police and deputized each other to shoot on sight anyone who seemed vaguely weird or even just irritating. So now Kyle had to deal with the majority of town escalating their distrust, suspicion, and disgust of him to irrationally homicidal. 

Fortunately for Kyle, he had access to true greatness, a greatness that spanned much wider and deeper than a mere orgasm machine (*I say "mere" strictly as an emotionally uninvolved narrator. My non-narrator self would really like to see this particular sex toy developed for the good of all people). He had also solved the problem of insomnia and that ended sleeplessness. Kyle, however, was deeply pissed at himself for not thinking of a way to profit more from his discovery. 

As it now stands, Kyle is living in a safe house in rural Arkansas. In the basement. Of a barn. That had recently burned to the ground. He's thinking of burrowing to live with the Mole People thousands of miles below the planet's surface.

No one else is thinking about much of anything. His friends and family are still too shook up about Uncle Daugherty dumping out that goat blood. "What was he thinking?" was the question second on their minds. First on their minds was when the Devil was going to come to make them eat their own shit continuously every moment as if it was the first time ... eternally.

As for the locals with murderous intentions, the entire town was nearly wiped out as everyone simultaneously adopted an "every man for himself" attitude and each person started shooting at anyone and everyone near or far. Most of the town was dead by dawn.

The only exceptions were Kyle's family and friends who were spared because they slept in coffins on nights when they feared Satan might come for them. Which was quite often. Not that Satan came for them often; no, Satan never came for them because of the absence of Satan's existence. However, Kyle's family and friends often believed that Satan was coming for them. Strange group of people. Hard to believe they had trouble with Kyle's claims about tasting perineums when he ate Doritos.

Travel Diary of 2016

January 1: Still in Amsterdam. The election cycle in the U.S. beginning to heat up. No reason to return to America any time soon to be inundated by the quadrennial shit show.

January 2: Decided to leave Amsterdam for the hell of it. Spending several months there reinvigorated me. I had also fallen into the delusion that the rest of the world, besides the U.S., was probably doing okay by now. Time to find out. Train to Berlin.

January 3: Got off the train to Berlin. Changed my mind before leaving the station so took another train to Moscow.

January 4: Disembarked in Moscow. Got a hotel near the Kremlin. Super expensive, waste of money, but I’d made a small fortune over several months gambling in Amsterdam. What’s money, right?

January 5-10: Wasn’t sure if credit or debit cards were good everywhere so I got about 60,000 rubles through foreign exchange and decided to wander about to see some of the sights. Over the next several days visited the Kremlin, Red Square, Saint Basil’s Cathedral, the Alexander Garden, Gorky Park, Lenin’s Mausoleum—a personal favorite—the Bolshoi Theater to see a ballet, and much more. Such a rich history, grand architecture.

January 11: Had a few conversations with locals and ex-pats over the previous few days. No one had negative opinions of Putin, although one ex-pat whispered that no one speaks negatively of Putin. A scary guy, kills his political opponents, at war with Chechnya, Ukraine, Syria, something going on in Crimea. I didn’t think much of it; sounded a lot like the imperialism and political nefariousness of the United States to me. Pretty much used to despots hiding in an oligarchy pretending to be a republic. Mostly ate at restaurants and sat at cafes reading English translations of Russian literature, accepting my bourgeois status by ignoring the plight of the underprivileged and persecuted. I fit in well.

January 12: I felt the wanderlust and boarded a train heading to Europe. Berlin first stop. Next stop?

January 13-16: Next stop turned out to be Bucharest. I stayed for a few days and all I heard was, “Trump, Trump, Trump.” A small wave of nationalist fascism was headily swimming in the thought of an American president as cuckoo as one of their own. As fascinated as I was, I was sick of American politics so I fled.

January 17: I flew to Reykjavik thinking Iceland should be a peaceful oasis of calm and cold. It was cold, sure enough, and calm enough, but even in Iceland I was being asked about the “buffoon Trump” and why the Americans liked him. I hadn’t a clue why anyone liked him, though I guessed it was celebrity/idol worship. If Americans aren’t pagans … come on.

January 18-22: I had a fling with an Icelandic lighthouse worker. Perfect job for an on-the-job affair. Never have to get dressed!

January 23-28: Flew from Iceland to Dublin. Had a blast drinking with Irishmen and women. After several days, though, I got tired of hearing about how Donald was ruining the reputation of gingers everywhere. 

January 29-February 23: Spent a few weeks on a rustic farm in Scotland milking cows and helping with other farmhand work. Didn’t hear a peep about politics or anything else for that matter. It’s possible the old man was mute, but he wasn’t deaf as he always gasped when I used the Lord’s name in vain. While eating a supper she had made for us, I asked the woman if they were Calvinists. Unfortunately, she spoke so softly I couldn’t make out anything other than a few low moans and a couple sighs. What it must have been like all these years having sex with this woman. If they had sex.

February 24: I thought about Madagascar and then thought better of it. Wasn’t in the mood for Tasmanian devils. America was, though. Damn, I had picked a good three weeks to disappear from “civilization.” I stayed in a small family hotel in a small northern England town for the night.

February 25-April 1: Took a train to London and fly to Finland. Kept hopping, plane by plane, up north until I arrived at the last manned outpost. I had found a cabin to rent, online, during the travel of the day. Rented it for a month. Did nothing but write, sketch, ice fish, and daily chores. Ate mostly canned goods cooked over a wood-fire stove. Baked beans and generic-brand soup. When I wasn’t doing anything else, I went on cross-country skiing jaunts or, during blizzards, sat inside near the fire wrapped in a blanket starring out the window at the white noise.

April 2: Back to Helsinki. First fucking newspaper I see and there’s a gigantic caricature of Trump’s face. What the Christ? It was a foreign language newspaper so I couldn’t make out what was said, but I wanted to know so I found an Internet cafe and looked up news about Trump online. It was awful. Atrocious. Beyond imagination. Trump was winning the Republican primaries. Part of me was giddy. “This is what America deserves! Hahahahaha!” And America did deserve Trump. They’d become glib, shallow, careless, inconsiderate, self-absorbed, proudly ignorant, myopic, and dumb. The dumbness, that’s what got to me. The same people I had known 15 years earlier? They talked as if they were slower and dumber than they had been. I wasn’t sure if that was a cultural thing, a shift in norms: “Can’t show people you’re smart; be simple and down-homey and everyone will leave you alone so you can download barnyard porn in the middle of the night. Best we keep our peccadilloes under wraps. God forbid people know that fetishes exist everywhere around the world!”

April 3-6: I had enough of this. I flew to New York and stayed that night in the Trump Tower. Life seemed like it had been the last time I stepped foot in New York. Busy. Dirty. Smelly. After a few days in New York, though, I could tell there was a different vibe. No, not a vibe. Nothing that weighty. More like a mild fascination sweeping the city in slow motion, a Trump Category 2 gently blowing the plaque away from the routine lives of all the different cliques of New Yorkers so that they could move their lips and talk about something they haven’t already talked about eight million times since Saturday. Trump. That was the word. There was passion about him, love and hate, but a lot of buzz, a lot of hoopla, a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing (other the end of the civilization as we knew it).

April 7: Flew to Tucson and drove to a border town. Got a hotel and stayed the night.

April 8: In the morning, I went to the local diner and ate breakfast. I met two bonafide members of a citizens group that, along with about a dozen others, unofficially patrolled the border every night along a thirty mile stretch of land. They told me their biggest difficulties were with the Border Patrol. Turf wars, they called them. They said the Mexicans they caught hit the ground immediately when they shined their truck lights on them and yelled at them to hit the deck. “They know complacency, when to get into the fetal position. We aren’t the government. We’re not handing out diapers and snacks.” I wondered why they weren’t in prison.

April 9: I talked to James and Earl, the two Arizona border militiamen I’d met the day before, into taking me with them on one of their runs. They said sure. They were happy to have another member, although I told them repeatedly I was not joining, just observing. They didn’t seem to bother with intricacies such as the definitions of words. “Words and meanings, never the two shall meet, that’s what I always say.” No one said that, but if one of them had been more articulate he might have.

April 10-15: Made nightly border runs with the guys (and one woman who loved to declare her hatred for Mexicans every five minutes). We saw nothing. I mean nothing. Not even a deer. Well, there were there two run-ins with Border Patrol. No, the U.S. Customs Department definitely does not like these guys. They looked at them as dangerously close to being outlaw cowboys and a potential lynch mob. I didn’t disagree, although I thought this particular group was a bit too lazy and incompetent to effectively get much of anything right. In the case that they found any Mexicans trying to cross the border I had to admit that was a potential bloodbath waiting to happen.

One night sitting around the campfire, I talked with a guy named Marcus, young guy, maybe 25, from somewhere back East. I asked him how he wound up in Arizona. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “A girl.” Ah. Of course. What better reason to join some sort of resistance than having been dumped by your true love after you moved across the country to be with her. 

There was another night when I asked Gloria Mae why she hated Mexicans. “Because they exist.” That was direct. “It’s a race thing. We’re white. They’re brown. They don’t belong with us. You can’t have no pure-ty and love with different colors of blood running around.”

“Well, I don’t think the blood—“

“It’s our God-given right as white people to bedevil the devil, be he brown-skinned or black.” James was wild-eyed, waving around a half-empty bottle of whiskey.

“Don’t we also have free will?” I asked.

“What has that got to do with anything?”

“If you have to hate people or think they don’t belong together based on skin color then it’s a race thing, but it’s not a choice. If I have the choice, as a white person, to say, ‘I want brown and black children to go to the same schools as my children,’ then wouldn’t it be my ‘God-given right’ to bedevil the devil by loving others to keep him at bay?”

The group sat quiet while James, seemingly confused, brewed for a minute. “Look, all I know is that you can choose God’s will or you can choose the devil’s. So, yeah, you got your free will. And what’s it going to get ya? A beaner whore of a wife and the devil waiting for your soul. No, thank you, mister. I am an American and I say ‘Fuck that!’” That brought out whooping cheers from the rest of them. I tossed in the towel and slept through the night.

April 16: Bid adieu to James and his crew before renting a car to drive to Vegas. I was wiped out when I got there so I just went straight to my room and crashed.”

April 17-26: I liked gambling. Made a lot of money gambling. Lost a lot of money, too. But when funds start to look low, it’s time to hit a gambling town, preferably one with chumps from all over the world. 

After losing nearly everything the first day, I got on a streak and just kept winning for days. In the matter of a week, I’d have money for the year, probably much, much more. 

April 27-May 25: Yeah, I made my money, fistfuls of it. Hell, a bagful of it. And that’s without all the money I used on escorts and blow. But, whew, I needed rest and clean, potently fresh air. I flew to Tahoe and rented a cabin on the lake for a month. I donated my old clothes, the ones that still had life in them, and bought new clothes at a local fashion shop, a woman who hand-sews clothing in various ways. From sports coats to socks, I bought a whole new quasi-funky, certainly eccentric, and ridiculously expensive wardrobe (“artisans,” am I right?). Made-in-house shoes next door. What was cool about it was the dude allowed me to have input on the designs so we essentially collaborated before the actual productions began. Then I got an eyeful of how he did it. I learned quite a bit, including the fact that the best changes made often occurred during the final composition. 

When at home, I typically spent mornings looking out a floor-to-ceiling window at the lake while wistfully applying paint to a canvas on an easel wearing nothing but my birthday suit, allowing the day’s sun to bathe my skin in its golden bounty of warmth and joy. I loved love. Love love. Love love love. I painted only in different shades of yellow as I couldn’t bear any other color in that morning environment. 

In the evenings, I sat at a large oak desk in the second floor study and hand-wrote fiction of the type most people find ghastly. Which, anymore, is all of it. I took breaks on the balcony, smoking cannabis, drinking Scotch, and watching the stars fill up the sky. In the afternoons, a woman I hired for cleaning came over. It was during her third day that we started having sex. 

I had rented a car. On certain days, usually during the week, like a Tuesday morning, I would go for a ride, somewhere I had never been, randomly choosing a direction and purposefully not looking at maps. These were what I called “desperate attempts to get lost.” I never got lost, and that was the pity. My visual-spatial skills were too well-developed from a lifetime of traveling. That feeling of “There might be a lost city of gold just after the next hill” was lost by the time I reached ten years old because I’d pretty much studied the geography of the entire globe by then. I knew there were special places, special cities, rare natural wonders, and all that. But a city that defied all of the norms of how the world is thought about in semi-literate popular culture narratives? That would be amazing. Especially the idea that no one else had heard about it. 

The Internet does the same thing travel does—you take the immeasurable mass of it for granted. Nothing’s unknown, nothing “surprising” like a lost city. You have to go to history or, if you’re a scholar, you’ve already been through history so you have to travel and experience what it’s like in the flesh. You can do that today, but you can’t do it in England during the reign of Henry VIII. So the imagination plays us off the hook and we travel to where no one else has ever been and we burrow into a hovel, strip naked, wait three days, climb out whilst voraciously hungry and pert-near dehydrated, make use of a nearby toboggan, slide downhill through the freshly fallen snow, the wind literally chapping your ass, and come to a skidding stop at the back door of a mountain chalet. Old Mother Wheeler comes to the door and wraps you in a warm blanket and fusses over you until she gets you sat down in “Granpa’s Chair,” which astonishes the little ones, Harry, just past five, and Lucille, a full-figured three, as they had never seen anyone sit in Granpa’s Chair!

Lucille, or Celia as she was known to everyone, asked with great vigor, “Do you have magic powers?” You shake your head no, but smile, anyway, because, well, she is just so adorable. “How come you get to sit in Granpa’s Chair?” You don’t know so you say, “I don’t know. I guess I just do.” This response elicits a look of shock and the placement of palms on the chubby cheeks of either side of the girl’s face. You say, “Some day you’ll be able to sit in Granpa’s Chair.” Even greater shock! Celia ran off to find an adult who could make sense of such a convoluted disturbance of the previously very simple and seemingly sturdy tale of Granpa’s Chair as it had been understood by the smallest and youngest person in the house. 

When you think about it—taking a break from our imagination—children are remarkably well-suited to adapting to news that turns their worldviews upside down in an instant. Nothing’s concrete. Everything’s still a surprise, so a record-setting snowfall is just the amount of snow that fell and the first black president was just the most recent president. Seeing the Colorado Rocky Mountains for the first time, the New York skyline, the Eiffel Tower, Yellowstone National Park, a California beach, first taste of a peach, first touch of silk, … endless. But it becomes stale and thus … perceived as being ridiculously more predictable than reality actually is.

How? As I imagined James saying (even though he never did), “Words and meanings, never the two shall meet.” No. That’s not right. Even imaginary James can’t get anything right. Well shit. Time moves on.

May 26: Still had my rental car when my month’s rent was up. I packed up what little I had accumulated and hit the road. I knew the roads well from all of my excursions this way and that without any maps as guides. Just my senses and my wits. Shouldn’t it always be that way? Fuck no, you simple old fool! For fuck sakes, you want to live in a stone cave having to kill fresh food almost daily because you don’t have a fucking refrigerator or any other way to keep food from rotting? Okay, we got that out of the way. Point being, I knew the area well and so I set my car heading south through the Sierra Nevadas to Yosemite National Park. Weather was kind.

May 27: I didn’t have a camper or anything so I slept at the main hotel in the park. I got up early, bought some clothes for hiking, and set out to wander. I made my way here and there, but mostly followed along the creek, walked in the creek, climbed a few trees, threw rocks at squirrels, took a shit in a grove of trees with not much ground cover, talked to three women hikers, all in their twenties and decked out like they were going to film a climbing documentary, and I accidentally ate a butterfly because it flew into my mouth and down my throat. Crazy fucking butterfly.

May 28: Drove south to Fresno then east to King’s Canyon and Sequoia National Park. I paid to ride one of the park’s horses for the afternoon. Great way to experience the grandeur of the space. I took several shits during the day. No fever, no nausea, no stomach ache … I’m not sure what’s happening to my bowels, but I’m getting a little concerned.

May 29: Woke up on a sheet covered in shit. My shit, it appeared. What the fuck? My insides were screwed up. What to do, what to do? Showered, cleaned the bedroom, showered again, did a couple loads of laundry, ate breakfast in the continental room, and talked with an old woman about King’s Canyon in the 1930s. I didn’t understand most of what she said because she spoke while chewing with cereal in her mouth. It didn’t matter; I was imagining the universe as a room full of cluttered dust bunnies. As humans, we perceive through our senses and use our technologies—telescopes, etc.—to “see” or discover something either “there” or not. All of the universe’s galaxies are just little dust mites using gravity to suck the stars and other detritus found in the corners of rooms with hardwood floors, maybe an old Victorian that was rundown in the middle of the past century but was renovated in 2012 and is now a spectacular example of what the neighborhood had been in its heyday. Whether there or that old shed in the back of McCluskey’s yard. Shit, that hasn’t been used since the 1980s, but that don’t mean there ain’t no universe of forsaken cobwebs among the dust piled on everything, everywhere. Just means there’s probably a better analogy sitting around in someone’s mind right now. We can’t access it until the corporations implant wi-fi chips in everyone so that people can log-in to access one another’s thoughts and, if you’re willing to pay—there are plenty of someones willing to provide, the price is right—then you can experience another person’s dream as they are dreaming it. Oh, there’s more, but I was hungry for pancakes.

May 30: I turned in my rental car and was about to board a bus to travel out of the National Park, but a well-dressed man speaking Russian stopped me. I told him I didn’t understand what he was saying. He winked at me and said, in English, “Oh, but you will soon enough.” He walked away escorted by two gigantic thug-like men. It kind of freaked me out so I decided not to take the bus. I caught a ride with an elderly couple, Ron and Judy, from British Columbia who were driving an RV north to Lake Tahoe. We chatted about the weirdness of American politics for a while and then I slept.

May 31: Woke up in the morning and had breakfast with Ron and Judy. We were in an RV Park near Lake Tahoe. It wasn’t where I wanted to be, but at least I didn’t have to worry about the weird Russian dude. I told Ron I needed to get going so I called a cab from the nearest town and told the guy to drive me to San Jose. He said no way, but changed his mind when I unfolded a wad of bills. He threw my stuff into the trunk and we were on our way. I had friends there, but I needed to clear my head before calling them so I stayed in a hotel downtown.

June 1: I tried calling my friends, but just got voicemail. I forgot that no one answers phones any more, just texts. I didn’t like the custom so I decided to rent a car and head north to Oregon. 

June 2: Woke up in a hotel in Ashland. I walked around the hippie town, scored some weed, rolled a fatty, got high, and wasted the day in the kid’s section of the local library reading Curious George books.

June 3: Ashland seemed to like me well enough so I repeated the previous day’s practices, the only difference being that I read Dr. Seuss books.

June 4: I don’t know how the fuck the Russian guy tracked me down, but he did. He stuck out like a sore thumb with his tailored suit. At least he didn’t have his goons with him. He invited me to have lunch with him at a local cafe. I told him the only way I would go with him is if he smoked a joint with me. He was apprehensive, but said, “If that’s what it takes for you to trust me, okay.” We got baked, ate tons of food, and laughed are asses off about shit I couldn’t remember. He had a room at the same hotel where I was and that sort of spooked me again, but I was too wasted to care that much.

June 5: Spent the morning masturbating to “grandma DP” porn on my iPhone until six NSA agents knocked down my door. At first, I thought they wanted to question me about my contact with the strange Russian, but it turned out they were concerned about my use of a hand towel to wipe away the cum. A female agent, about 30 years old, told me I should wipe the semen all over my face because the proteins therein helped eliminate wrinkles. I asked her why the NSA cared. She said it was a matter of national security. I asked her how that was possible. She said she couldn’t tell me why because it was a matter of national security. Then I asked how the hell they even knew that I was masturbating at all and she said that, too, was a matter of national security. I asked if they were watching me through my iPhone and she refused to answer that question because it could jeopardize national security. I asked if there was anything that didn't jeopardize national security. Again, she said the answer to that question was a matter of national security. *Sigh.* All of the agents left except for the female agent who had been speaking with me. She stayed and ordered me to eat her pussy the rest of the day. I surmised that cunnilingus was not a matter of national security.

June 6: In the morning, the NSA agent told me that she wanted me to work at a store in Ashland, masturbating into bottles that were to be sold to the public as healing facial lotions. I didn’t want to do this, but she said I had to because it was a matter of national security. So after eating her pussy and sharing a breakfast, she took me to a shop called Lotions in Motion in downtown Ashland. We entered through the alley door to a back room where eight other men were masturbating into bottles which were labeled Organic Facial Cream. The directions said to apply evenly on one’s face and to keep the bottle refrigerated. There were expiration dates put on the bottles saying the lotion was effective for only seven days. She allowed me to peak into the front of the store which was filled, maybe forty people in all, mostly women and a smattering of men. Some were applying samples onto their faces and there was a long line of women waiting to purchase the cream. She set me to work masturbating next to a very large man whose palms were red and raw. I told the woman that I really wasn’t all that concerned about national security, but she said I could either be renditioned to a secret prison or jerk off into a bottle for the rest of the day. Not much of a choice, really.

June 7: Spent day masturbating into bottle.

June 8: Spent day masturbating into bottle.

June 9: Spent day masturbating into bottle.

June 10: Spent day masturbating into bottle.

June 11: Spent day masturbating into bottle.

June 12: Spent day masturbating into bottle.

June 13: Spent day masturbating into bottle.

June 14: Was allowed to leave the store at the end of the day and be on my way, but not before signing a nondisclosure agreement. The female agent told me that I would be killed by a drone strike if I ever mentioned this to anyone. I asked how they would know if I had. She told me that she couldn’t tell me because the answer was a matter of national security. I shrugged and she took me back to the hotel where I had been staying. She told me to wait inside my hotel room for three days and order room service for meals before leaving Ashland. I was instructed not to masturbate for at least a week. I didn’t think that would be much of a problem as my hands and penis were raw and sore.

June 15: Stayed in hotel. Ate roast beef sandwich.

June 16: Stayed in hotel: Ate Fruit Loops.

June 17: Stayed in hotel: Ate tacos.

June 18: Checked out of hotel, got in my rental car, and drove north on I-5 to Eugene. Stopped there and stayed the night in a hotel near the Interstate.

June 19: Drove to the University of Oregon campus, walked around, and was pepper sprayed by a woman of indeterminate ethnicity who accused me of being white and male at the same time. I pled guilty and was carried away to an undisclosed location by a large band of women who said they were part of an organization called WHAMMO, an acronym for Women Hate Anglo Male Misogynists Openly. I tried to explain that I wasn’t a misogynist, but they claimed that I was in denial, like an alcoholic. I said, yeah, but some people who say they aren’t this or that sometimes aren’t this or that. They told me that would be determined by a WHAMMO trial the following day. They put me in a stable and had me sleep in a stall next to a donkey they said had been been rescued from a bestiality show in Tijuana. 

June 20: I was fed raw tofu for breakfast and then shackled in chains before being led by dozens of women clad in red robes and pointy red hats to an open field somewhere outside of the city of Eugene. They locked me into stocks that resembled those depicted in the Salem Witch Trials. Then the women formed a half circle around me and threw tomatoes at my face for five minutes before declaring that the trial was commencing. I thought it was decidedly unfair to unleash a punishment before a trial, but I said nothing because I suspected reason and logic were against their laws. One of the women stepped forward and asked me, “How do you plead?” I wasn’t sure what the charges were, but I was convinced I was guilty of whatever it was they believed was a crime. “Guilty,” I said. As an answer to that they all whooped and hollered while disrobing before running off toward a stand of trees. Well, all but one. She came over to me, spit in my face, and said, “Good answer,” before letting me go free. It took me several hours, but I made my way back to my hotel.

June 21: Driving north had been a decidedly bad idea so I headed south along I-5 and stopped in Sacramento to sleep.

June 22: I got up from bed in my hotel fairly early in the morning because there was yelling and screaming outside. I peaked out the window and saw a massive mob of people with protest signs. I made out a few of them, most of them lambasting Hillary Clinton or proclaiming a desire to make America great again. A Trump rally. Just what I needed. I showered, dressed, and went down to the lobby for a continental breakfast. I was the only person not wearing flannel and a red “Make America Great Again” cap. There was only one seat left by the time my bagel popped out of the toaster. I walked over and asked if I could sit down. “Sure,” said a very wide man with a scruffy beard so I took a seat. There were four of us, the bearded man and two women. One woman was middle-aged, dyed blonde, wearing a t-shirt with a red, white, and blue eagle on it. She smiled at me and I noticed one of her front teeth missing on top. The other woman was younger, blonde, with a beautiful face, She also wore a t-shirt with the image of Hillary Clinton on it and the words, “Life’s a Bitch. Don’t Elect One,” over the top of it. They asked me if I was going to march downtown along with the rest of them. I looked down at my clothing. White tennis shoes, gray cargo shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt. I shrugged and said, “Maybe.” The guy jumped on me and said, “You gotta come! We need as many red-blooded Americans as we can get. You don’t want Hillary to be the next president, do you?” Admittedly, I had no attraction to Hillary Clinton whatsoever. I would have liked Bernie Sanders to win, but he was already out of the running essentially. I wanted Donald Trump even less than Hillary, but I also thought it might be interesting to go to a Trump rally. I said, sure, I’ll go. The guy said, “That’s right. We whites, we gotta stick together, you know. We lost too many of our kind to the liberal commie faggots and those no good Muslim niggers. It’s gotta stop.” Huh. Well, it wasn’t like being surrounded by racists was new for me and I seemed to be a little safer with them than I was with WHAMMO. Plus, I wanted to see what a Trump rally was like. The guy said he had something for me and left the table to go up to his room. I sat waiting with the two women and thought it might be nice to fuck the younger one. She kept flipping her hair and batting her eyelashes at me. It seemed the only prerequisites for fucking were being white and racist. I had half of the equation worked out and figured if I went marching she’d probably assume the other half was true, too. When the guy came back down, he had four placards, one for each of us. “I always bring extras just in case we meet a like-minded fellow.” The one he handed to me had a picture of Hillary on it. She was bleeding from the eyes while giving a Nazi salute. I asked the guy—turns out his name was Gil—if this was for or against Hillary Clinton. He said, “Against! What the hell, man?” I pointed out to him that Nazism was a form of white supremacy. He looked at the picture and scratched his head. “By God, you’re right. Sends a mixed message, don’t it?” He ripped it apart and threw it in the trash and said, “That’s okay, you can use mine.” His happened to be a sign of a smiling Trump giving a Nazi salute. I didn’t even bother to ask him about it; I just took it from him and walked out the door with the three of them and joined the angry mob marching toward downtown Sacramento. … 

June 23-Nov. 2: Unfortunately, I was snatched on the way downtown. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I remember a van screeching to a halt and several masked men departing the vehicle and running toward me. That’s it. The next thing I knew I was in a torture chamber. Well, it turned out to be a sub-basement lair for a mad scientist. For months, I thought the guy was a serial killer, but he was more like Josef Mengele. First he flayed my skin, slowly, only strips at a time between days of recovery. That went on indefinitely as far as I could tell, but it was more likely a few of months. A servant girl brought me food, water, sponge bathed me, tended to my wounds, and sang soft, whispering melodies in a language I could not understand. They felt like lullabies and when I was in her arms she felt like motherhood. She was my light and he was my darkness. 

Nov. 3, 2016-Dec. 31: The thing is, though, his crazy medical experiments worked! By November of 2016, I was 6’3” tall, 205 pounds, total bodily symmetry, facial symmetry, everything. He had made me into a “natural” blonde-haired black man. Diamond back, eight-pack, pure athleticism, pure hunger, and pure sex. I don’t have a cock any more; instead, I had a multitude of cocks, cocks sprouting and slithering as if they were from Medusa’s head. Seems like it wouldn’t be a good thing, but, let me tell you, nine near simultaneous ejaculations is like nothing anyone else can imagine. Wow. Also, though, each cock-head is of a different thickness (not necessarily uniform) and length. One woman I seduced told me it was as if I had nine different dildos on offer. She said she could never go back to a man with only one dick. I don’t what she’s doing now, but I’ve never seen her since. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t abandon her. No, instead I contacted the doctor who had tortured me into who I am today. I said I thought she would be a perfect candidate to become a nine-vagina woman. I tried to get ahold of the doc after he took her in, but he never returned my calls. I even went by the place, hoping to at least see the servant girl who nursed me to health, but she wasn’t there. No one was there. Well, an old crone. Literally, a crone. I’m not using a derogatory term to label this woman. No, she fit the definition of “crone” to a “t.” An old woman, withered, thin, and ugly, not more than a week from death. She called me Stan, maybe her dead husband’s name, I don’t know, but I walked inside and went to the basement. The entrance to the sub-basement had been sealed with cement, now just part of the basement floor. It was depressing. But then the old crone came down the stairs with a grilled cheese sandwich and I thought, all in all, it had been a good year.