Of course, the most futile thing of all, she says, is life: in the end you die and don’t get to enjoy your legacy, whatever the fuck that means.
Only our first date and already I want to marry her.
“The way you imagine god’s minty fresh breath smells is how good Ryan Gosling looks.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
You know, she says, you don’t really have to be such a dick all the time.
I look at her and wonder what she means. My mother and I don’t really get along.
“Yeah, sometimes I miss you, don’t you? I do that thing where I’m in one of those moods, you know, and I wonder what you’re doing, and I think about what we would be doing if things were different. And I look at my phone and realize how easy I could just pick it up (sometimes I do) and just call and I wonder - you’re going to think it’s so dumb! - if my picture will come up, you know, the one you took of me in, what was it? 2003? Yeah, I wonder, your phone will ring and you’ll see my picture, you know, and you’ll think for a moment whether or not you should answer it. I mean, I would if I saw your name on the caller ID. But you do answer, and I can’t hang up because you’ve seen who’s calling, and all I’ll be able to say is hi and how are you and can we talk…that sort of bullshit. And you’ll be great, and you’ll ask me things that I’ll answer and we’ll laugh - that’s the best! We’ll laugh and we’ll leave off saying things like we ought to get together and we should maybe see a film and get coffee and things we criticize people for saying because they don’t mean it because we don’t mean it, and we’ll each go back to our lives, thinking and feeling good things, but imagining we’re each better off without the other, still glad one of us reached out, and go and forget all about it in a few days or so. Anyway, that’s what I think. And I saw you walking across the Boulevard the other day (my god, I should’ve said something to you that day!). I don’t know where you were going. You had your headset on and you were fiddling around with your ipod. But I didn’t say anything to you and you were just across the way, and now, here I am, telling you I’ve been thinking about you since then and I feel a little dumb. But I guess that’s part of it, isn’t it, feeling dumb and stupid for missing a person? Sort of comes with it, I guess. Did you ever have the same feeling? Jesus, listen to me, going on and on. I’m nervous, what can I do. It’s been a while and you have this way of making me feel like I’m a thirteen year old boy at a dance: awkward and strange.”
He says, “You know, if you untie me, this would be a lot easier.”
A threesome with one woman and another man really gets you everything you could ever want.
Never worry, she said, everyone thinks you’re exactly as useless and impotent and pathetic and fat as you think.
Then, she sucked my dick but didn’t swallow.
I was saving up for a new brain but, man, try and get a loan for one of those.
My old brain started failing me. I would forget things. But I’d know I’d forget them. That’s the thing: I’d see a pen and I knew what it was, what I’d used it for before, but I couldn’t get my brain to remember. It was so frustrating.
Out in the street one time, a woman came running up to me and asked me how I was doing, and wasn’t it a long time since we’ve seen each other, things like that, but I couldn’t place her face. I think I remembered her hair color, and when I meandered my way through some nondescript answers, she went away, confused and probably offended. Hope it wasn’t anyone I cared about.
And it wasn’t just my memory, no. I think my brain stopped sending signals to the rest of my body at times. Like a hiccup and suddenly, after peeing, my brain would forget to tell me I was done, and there I’d stand for a while, dick in one hand, strangers thinking me a pervert on the other…figuratively.
Went up a several flights of stairs when my apartment building’s elevator stopped working for a while and at the landing for my floor, my legs stopped. I wanted to get going, I knew where I needed to go, but my brain wouldn’t tell my legs to do anything. It was really annoying.
If my brother were still alive, he’d lend me the money for the new brain. I know he would, even if I can’t remember his face right now. But my whole family’s gone. My mother also needed a new brain but died with her old original one in her head. We never knew our father, my brother and me, and I think he’s the reason why our bodies are falling apart. My brother, he died when his off brand legs broke and he fell onto the subway tracks. His legs made him heavier than people thought and he died when the train ran him over. His wife got all of his money and she doesn’t speak to me.
Whoever our father was, he was a cheapskate. That’s obvious by just looking at my mother and brother and me: we should’ve lasted a thousand years. We’re not robots or anything, but whoever married my mother, he was supposed to make sure our parts were maintained, and our original bodies were replaced as necessary. You hear about guys like him more and more: they literally build a family and then leave it when they figure out how to build a newer model.
Been saving up for years and I think by this time next month I’ll have enough for additional brain memory and a back up. But that isn’t the same as a new brain. A new brain means full functionality. A back up is just that because you’re anticipating the end. But at least I’m a wi-fi hotspot and it’ll take me a little while, but if we run into each other in the street, I’ll remember your face.
The only thing I knew I could change beside me was her.
Then, I finally fell in love.
[lcd soundsystem, I CAN CHANGE]
I am her mother’s age. But she isn’t her mother.
I thought it was an ingrown hair just next to my scrotum. I’d feel it, a little tender, just right there where sometimes I like to scratch just because if feels more than fine. It didn’t hurt at first so I figured it would eventually pop on its own. But as time went by, I’d forget all about it until I was in the shower, until I jerked off. And it was growing, but I didn’t pay it any mind soon after I noticed it … again.
Eventually, it was the diameter of a quarter and the bump felt hard. So I worried. Or began to worry. Whatever.
It didn’t hurt but I wondered if this was cancer. Should I take a needle soaked in alcohol and pop it? “Doctor visit?” I wondered once aloud while in line at the grocery store. I looked at it with a mirror, I’d lean in while sitting to see it, feeling around the edges of it - tender but no pain. It wasn’t red nor was it like a giant zit. Imagine a ping pong ball underneath your skin. Imagine those weirdos on the internet with implants.
And then I’d forget about it once more.
It became large enough for me to notice it when walking, and I decided, fuck it, time to see a doctor. Called my insurance to find a decent doctor, took the day off work, cancelled a date I’d made with someone whose name I couldn’t remember. I was readying myself for the worse, and the worse was cancer. I don’t know why, but that’s where my brain landed.
In the shower the day of my doctor’s visit, I was so nervous. I wanted to just take a knife and take care of it myself. The bump between my leg and nutsack still grew hair and still didn’t hurt and still didn’t just go away. I toweled off, and sat on the toilet naked, with a mirror to see how bad it must look. So strange, looking at myself this way, thinking that I don’t want a doctor to think this growth on me is strange looking. Fuck, right? So, I’m looking at myself in the mirror, at the cancer I think I have, and I can feel it more and pulsate with my heartbeat.
That’s when I dropped the mirror because I couldn’t take this feeling, and I couldn’t take the fact that as I’m looking at myself - lifting my nuts off to the side to get a better look - this bump that’s been growing painlessly on me opens up slowly but just natural enough, like an eyelid lifting open, and reveals a mouth with black teeth smiling at me.
She said if I looked in her eyes I’d see how they’re speckled with tiny bits of gold.
I leaned in so close our noses touched. She opened her eyes as wide as she could.
I looked in her eyes.
I said her eyes were brown.
She slapped me and said I was an asshole. She stormed off.
We married two days later.
The sheriff’s officer, he gives me a ride home from downtown because when he asks me where I live and tell him, he says he realizes it’s four in the morning on a Sunday and he’ll just take me home.
The entire fifteen minute ride, the police man, he talks to me about his wife and their sons, and how each of them must make their own choices. He tells me about his church and asks me if I’m Catholic. He asks me if he knows how lucky I am to be let out OR. I say yes to everything.
Nearly five in the morning, he pulls up along my street, in front of my building, and says I need to be more careful, unzips his fly, takes out his hard uncut dick, and says, “You never know what could happen to you,” and I say a little prayer.
[full disclosure. also, this.]
I’m glad I’m no longer young enough to still believe that forever means FOREVER.
Everyone shits, but when I shat out my heart, I worried.
There I am, minding my own fetid business, and I feel it you know? Sort of like when you’ve not been to the bathroom in a while, and sort of pressurizes shit in your bowels, and when you relax and let go, everything comes out of you and you feel lighter. That’s what it felt like … almost.
How do I know it was my hearts bobbing up and down in the yellow-turning-brown water of the bowl alongside the turds? Well, I fished it out because it looked like a fucking heart! And it was still beating.
And I felt some sort of emptiness? In my chest. Yes. I don’t know how else to describe it. And I was alive so what the serious fuck, right?
So, I fished out my heart and it stunk.
Obviously, I didn’t even bother to notice then that there was no blood, but it looked like the human heart I remember seeing in my biology text years ago. My heart. Smeared in shit, wet from water and piss, out of my body, sitting in my bathroom sink, staining everything brown (including my hands), beating away as if connected to anything, my pants around my ankles.
Panic isn’t the right word for how I felt when I was poking it with my finger, with a q-tip. I ran water over it to scrub it clean. Is that weird, doing this instead of, I don’t know, freaking the fuck out.
But I did worry.
What did this mean? Where did this come from? I couldn’t feel my heartbeat. Why was this happening? I used a bar of hand soap to clean my heart in the bathroom sink.
I looked up and I think I was pale.
What I didn’t do is worry to the point that I ran out of the bathroom screaming and telling my husband what’d just happened. That was crazy. It is crazy.
[shout out to the short story by warren ellis & marcello fruisin from HELLBLAZER #143 (i think!).]
In my dream - the same dream I’ve had for years - there is a dog running next to me, as if we’re racing. I think we’re racing. I can’t tell how old I am in the dream but I feel young. Is that something you can feel? In the dream I feel like I’m ten years old but when I think about it afterward, I never see myself in this dream; I never look at my hands, never see myself reflected in the water. Nothing. But the dog and I are running. And it isn’t really a dog but the idea of a dog, something vague and a little off, but I’m confident this is a dog running along next to me. The kind of dog I always wanted when I was a kid but my parents couldn’t afford to get me. The kind of dog you see in commercials, playful and big enough you can roughhouse with. We’re running.
In the dream, it’s like one of those places where there is nothing but grassy fields and a small town off in the distance, but that isn’t where we’re running. We’re not running away from anywhere, either, or anyone. Sometimes I look up at the dream sky and it’s so blue it reminds me even while dreaming of the way my little brother would color with crayons, hard and with so much force the blue crayon would stick to the paper and leave a thick coat of wax and crayon bits all over.
Although in the dream I’m not scared nor excited, and the phantom-dog-thing next to me is friendly enough, whenever I wake up from this dream, I feel this uneasiness. As if something’s out of place, as if something’s become disjointed somehow. As if the world is an elbow or knee and it’s been bent in the opposite direction, broken, and healed, only…wrong. But the feeling passes and I never lingered too much on it, then.
Now that I’m older, and I have the dream, everything is the same as ever, but I wake up feeling a little sad. Maybe it’s a weird psychological thing about never having a dog, or feeling like a wanted to grow up so bad when I was kid, or about always wanting to be on the move. I’m not sure. But I wake up now from this dream I’ve had for years, and I wonder what it means now, what it meant then, the dream. I linger around this feeling a lot more than when I was younger.
Maybe I’m just getting older and I want to wake up running.
Maybe that’s all there is.
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Fresh cut and beard trim (Taken with instagram)
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original wacom sketch from valentine’s 2012 drawing
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Ghetto Booty
Photo by Trevor Brown
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Four Eighties Rogues from memory.
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THRUST A FRIEND A photograph by NASA astronaut Don Pettitt offers a previously unseen view of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft as it...
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The Kiss of Death
“This astonishing sculpture forms part of Barcelona’s Poblenou Cemetery. ”The Kiss of Death” (El Petó de la Mort in Catalan and...
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Wolverine by Bill Sienkiewicz