Move-in day

My new apartment is dank. It is sordid. Morbid. Disgusting. The walls are white and dirty. It smells like paint. Sick.

Today was supposed to be our get together day. Our move in day. Our finish up day. Our get the fuck organized day.

I arrive at eleven o’clock in the evening and I am pissed. It’s still dirty, paint on the floors, dirt on the walls, roaches crawling everywhere. We’re still lacking a stove and a refrigerator. Fuck this. Honestly.

Today I have flown 600 miles from Kansas city AND opened a show. Yesterday was Yom Kippur, for Pete’s sake! Come on God! Cut me some fuckin’ slack! I atoned!

I’ve decided that god is an asshole.

WHY IS MY PLACE OF HABITATION A SHITHOLE?!!?

I am sick and tired of not having a home. I haven’t had a home since my parents were divorced, and that’s when I was 15. And now my new home is trash. It’s a bunch of pus in rotting vomit. Fuck.

Now the reason I say all of this is because I want you to understand my motivations for my actions following. I’m not crazy, I was just under a lot of stress at the time, and sometimes completely clear-minded people just snap. So sue me.

After my agony has overtaken me, I’ve collapsed in a heap in the center of the floor. My head sprawls out and I look at my boxes. Sticking out of the top of one of them is my black machete. The one I bought for camping and picking cacti. It’s a good machete.

My eyes also wander over to the 2-inch-long cockroach crawling across my floor. My Goddamn floor! So I do what any sane person would do. I grab the machete and cleave la cucaracha in two.

It’s still moving. La Cucaracha won’t sit still. I slice again. The head. I slice again, the thorax, I slice again, the antennae.

Why won’t you fucking die?!!?

Before I know it there are hundreds of ridges in the floor from all my thwacking and la cucaracha is now pureed.

My upstairs neighbor begins playing Ozzie Osborne with his bass turned all the way up and I realize that la cucaracha has a few brothers and sisters.

Thousands of roaches pour out from the ceiling tiles, escaping the bass from Ozzie’s double-necked 12-string.

And I snap. I’m not proud of my actions, but they were justifiable. I cannot have vermin in my house. And they always say “fix the problem- fix the source”.

So I went to fix the source.

I grab El Machete and blade gleaming, I walk upstairs and knock three times.

Knock Knock Knock.

“And we’re flying off the rails on our crazy traaa-aaaiinnnn!”

He can’t even get the lyrics right.

I knock again, this time louder.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

And as he opens the door, I slit his jugular. He falls and I smite his ribcage and cleave is heart in two.

I turn off Ozzie.

But the roaches are still there when I return.

I can’t have vermin in my house.

I turn on all the lights and they try to scatter, but there’s too many of them. They can’t scatter. The crawl on each other as a massive ball of roaches rolls across my floor.

My floor.

We have no stove, but we do have a gas line. So I light that instead, and burn La Cucaracha’s brothers and sisters into the Mesozoic era.

I exit the building just as the windows in my new apartment are cracking from the heat.

My next door neighbor whom I have not yet met is on fire and he flings himself from the second story window. He dies as he hits the ground beside me with a thud. His muscles spasm with the heat.

I guess I’ll stay at my girlfriend’s tonight.

The Shareholders

And the shareholders screamed

"We want Ice cream!"

With their eyes that gleamed

And their bellies that teemed

But no one listens to the shareholders these days

Well, not when they act like that, anyways.

The Washroom King

Gerald entered the washroom…

The scruff and grime of three and a half weeks on the street covered his face and body. He looked around, disgusted. There were no towels. How could it be a mansion if the washrooms had no towels?

Fuck it. He’d use their quilt. Yeah, that’s right. These fuckers who pretend to make the world a better place by taking in the local homeless for the night. Who the hell did they think they were, anyway?

The shower was bigger than any he’d ever seen. Made of stone and glass, it gleamed like an iceberg in the Caribbean.

He twisted the knob and the hot spray gushed out onto the polished granite basin, filling the air with steam and damp wishes.

He glanced at the soap, and out of habit reached to pocket it, but then realized he had no pockets cause he was nude.

He admired himself in the mirror. Glancing at his manhood, he flexed. Once, twice, cracking a smile at the handsome chap in the mirror looking back at him.

And he stood there for a moment, waiting for the water to get warm, feeling the spray every few seconds. Then in he stepped and the water burst onto his body and blessed him with a robe of steam.

The mirrors fogged up, and he was lost in thought for a while. He washed and lathered and rinsed and then repeated (for good measure).

He tightened the knob and the royal stream ceased.

Then he grabbed the quilt-turned-towel and mopped the lasting wetness from his body.

It took a while, cause he was pretty wet, and the quilt was pretty old.

Patches began sticking to his skin, peeling off the quilt like damp wallpaper, or pieces of American cheese that weren’t individually wrapped.

It disgusted him, so he threw it out the window where it spread it’s great billowing arms casting a morning shadow over the front lawn before finally landing in the briar patch below.

It caught. It’s gray patches pierced by thorns.

Then, still slightly moist, Gerald pilfered the soap and defiantly walked nude through the hallway to the room he’d slept in. A lone patch with pictures of dancing bears clinging to his left buttock, then rolling off, dejectedly. He entered the room.

His clothes were gone.

They’d decided to wash them, the fuckers.

Gerald grabbed his bag, which he could have easily used as a makeshift loincloth, but chose not to. Instead, he slung it over his shoulder like a continental soldier, and padded through the house hanging low.

Everyone was gone, or so it seemed. There was the dull rumble of the washing machines and dryers billowing away down in the basement. He walked past the maid, engrossed in her copy of “The Weekly World News”, the headline reading “Jesus returns and wins big at Vegas casino!”

He walked into the grand hall, the twinkling sparkles of the great chandelier casting little dots over his just-rinsed chest hair, changing him into a bipedal Dalmatian of light.

He grasped the brass handles of the front doors and threw them open, the morning sun crashing into the crystal walls screaming “GOOD MORNING GERALD!!! For you I will vanquish any demon!”

The maid shielded her eyes and turned away from the blinding light as Gerald ventured onto the front lawn, still wet with dew. He pushed into the briar bushes, cupping a hand over his genitalia, grabbed the quilt, and draped it over his body toga-style.

The Emperor had returned, and he was hungry. Very hungry.

And with the sun crowning him with it’s halos, he strode away from the house, in search of a royal breakfast.

Aphrodite

Aphrodite was in ruin.

…To her original inhabitants, anyways.

But to everything else, she was a world just like any other. A place to live.

Aphrodite was a planet just like all the others. She’d had her fair share of play, to be sure. Mass extinctions, explosions of life, ice ages, Pollution, global warming, more mass extinctions, more explosions of life…
Lots and lots of time was what she had. Aphrodite was all about time, and boy did she have it on her side. Her sun wasn’t even five billion years old, and her dominant species had already vanished…

Aphrodite was a planet to be jealous of, of that you could be sure. She had everything. Rolling deserts filled with honey amber sands flowing into dunes that were miles high. She had great rainforests where the emerald trees reached into the stratosphere, their topmost leaves dull and papery, existing out of sheer will. Rivers teeming with freshwater fishes and mammals with fur and skin that slipped through the leafy aquas searching for a meal or a mate. Grandiose mountains reaching high and wide, with snowcapped peaks and deep crevasses. Caves and caverns, but that was just the part of her that was above the water!
Her seas… Her seas were mentioned in tails throughout the entire galaxy, for they were undoubtedly her most impressive feature. They were relatively small in comparison to those of others, covering a mere 64.82% of her surface, but it wasn’t their size that was impressive, it was their saturation.
For you see, her seas were not regular seas, sure they were saltwater, and had many great currents and tides that ebbed and flowed all over, but her waters were something different… light and life penetrated them differently… That was what made her different from all the others, but it was not what the others saw. They saw the beaches. Aphrodite’s land and water seemed to be mixed together if viewed from on high (which they rarely were these days), and that was because her oceans ran through the continents just as her rivers did, giving an inland beach some thousands of miles away from her main bodies of water. Prime real estate some would say, and perhaps they would be right, but none of it mattered to Aphrodite, for her treasures lied deep beneath the seas, far away from prying eyes. But that was all about to change…



“Sir, there’s something here I think you should see…”

“Shit! What now Johnston?”

“Um, I’m sorry sir…”

The First official Lieutenant padded onto the main bridge in his tidy whiteys.
“I said, what is it Johnston?”

“I’m sorry sir, it’s just… a planet”

“Bullshit!”

“No sir”

“You’re fucking kidding me”

“What’s a planet?” Cheryl, the lunch lady twaddled in on her heels, looking surprised. “Breakfast on the bridge today? Is that the consensus?”

“Look in the viewfinder for yourself sir…”

Somewhat skeptical, he padded over to the tiny screen.
“it’s corned beef hash today, sirs” Cheryl chimed in, “Fix those rumblys in your tumblys nice and good!”
He looked.

It was blue.

He looked again. Still blue. Once more…
“I think our viewfinder is sad, Johnston, that’s the problem”
“No sir”
And that’s when he noticed it. The small lines of white, flashing in and out in the background… well maybe not flashing, more like bobbing…

“Can you put this up on the wall for me, Johnston?”
“Of course, Sir”
He pressed a button and a great white bed sheet flapped down from the ceiling and hung there, like a big wet sail.
An oval of blue, with the same white lines covered the wall and the sheet, filling the room with its hue.
“Hmm…” The First Official Lieutenant rubbed his earlobes, as he was known to do on occasion. “I can’t make it out, I still think it may be upset, maybe give it some rose colored glasses…”
“I don’t think that’s the problem, sir”

And then suddenly, without any warning, a gigantic creature, as tall as the bridge, began attacking the bed sheet!
“AAA!”
The Lieutenant screamed and fell backwards, bumping his bum on the polished acrylic composite.
The enormous creature had six legs, was a bluish grey, and had two humongous claws.
“Johnston, how did that get in here?!!?”
Then the enormous creature jumped, right at the Lieutenant.
“AAA!”
…and splashed into the ocean.

As a great wave came and splashed over the viewfinder, the ship tilted upwards, and there was the sun, shining above them.

“Sweet Jesus, there’s a hole in the viewfinder!”
“No sir, I think that a star”
“A star? You mean like Jesse Von Heiseing?”
“no sir, like a big ball of gas that a planet revolves around”
“Oh… Does that mean the viewfinder is happy again?”
“I think you better put some clothes on, sir”
“Don’t you tell me what to do, Johnston!” And with that, the First Official Lieutenant stomped off to his quarters to change.

“Corned beef hash today, Johnston?”
“Go away Cheryl.”

And there, in the middle of the middle of Aphrodite’s middle ocean, floated the spaceship CS1234. It bobbed up and down gingerly, as if waiting for permission, but for what, it did not know.
And the Harlequin Shrimp that had climbed over the viewfinder was now drifting back down in search of the coral it lived on before the great splash had kicked it into the air. It was frazzled, and quickly eaten by a passing octopus.
Sorry Harley.

Tall

Some buildings are tall
Some buildings are short

It's next to the mall
Or out on the court

But the think I love most
about high rises and quarries

is spitting into the river
from 29 stories

The Sparrow, The Sun, and The Moon

The sparrow gingerly alighted on a branch as the sun began to peek out from over the horizon.
He cleared his throat-
"A-hm-HMM"
and coughed several times (for good measure)
He filled his lungs with air in preparation for song-
...but this morning was different

something was askew...

Because on this morning, all the sun would do was peek. That was it.
The sun brushed back the curtain of clouds ever so slightly, just to have a look...
And then decided, to hell with this whole rising and shining at six business. The sun would rather have a sleep in... maybe breakfast in bed... yes, yes that would be nice

But still the sparrow waited...

And the moon, waxing gibbous, who had not yet set, peered at the sun cautiously...
The moon was wary of change. It liked to have things set and dry, even on rainy days.
And the sun, who was not at it's best in the morning, shot the moon a fiery glance that seemed to say
"don't mess with me, bucko, I'm only running on ten hours of sleep here, and I haven't had a decent cappucino in millennia"

The moon sank a bit on the horizon, perturbed at such an outward display of passive aggressiveness.

And once more the sparrow coughed

The seed

So this is what it's like...
The seed has been planted, it's been sewed deep into the mumbling thoughts and it's beginning to take root.
This could be a good idea...
So I went and checked out a new apartment this afternoon, and the girl there who I'd be rooming with mentioned that she'd be cool with pets, but she's allergic to cats
so I thought... I could get a dog!
And that was that, the seed was set, and it's been pushing it's shoots into the soil ever since.
It could be great! I set aside some money, and in return I'm never lonely! I could take it all around with me, it would be great...
I would definitely have to adopt... animal shelters are the way to go. Something small (ish?)
I don't know, I'd definitely want to take it for walks and things...
...I've always liked basset hounds
What am I doing? I'll get whatever animal is right for me when I find it... sure...
I find out tomorrow if it's a go for the place.
We shall see...