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Tuesday, November 25, 2003

"Phone's ringing dude!"
-Big Lebowski
-My Paris Hilton Fuck Tape

if anyone is curious, here's the Paris Hilton video everyone is babbling about. yes, it is me in the video and i just have to add that she is quite an annoying fuck because she never stopped wiggling around and yappin' and messing with her goddamn phone and it got on my nerves something fierce and it's too bad that the battery dies on my camera before you get to see my inevitable dickslap that mercifully knocked her unconscious. the irony is that i banged this dunce named Paris Hilton...at a Best Western! now that's irony! i think. did i use the word irony correctly? don't worry about it, i said the same thing to her at the check-in counter and she didn't know whether i was being "ironic" either. course she wasn't the brightest thing in the world. poor thing believed that my camera was actually a humidifier. sucker! okay, enter at your own risk:

this is what it looks like when you fuck an idiot

like beth said, "joke her if she can't take a fuck."

so anyway, i was looking at the grad schools around here like Pittsburg and Carnegie Mellon and i hear that at CMU it's not just a problem of boy to girl ratio, there is a problem of girl to "Dave" ratio. this is an actual statistic (i read it somewhere so it has to be true): there are more dudes named "Dave" on that campus than there are girls. clearly this fact hits close to home and i won't be applying there.

oh yeah, as part of our all-request Tuesday night - this one goes out to Sean: another excerpt from my 57-volume work "Everything That Is Wrong With The Matrix." today's comment deals with the first film:

how come Neo-Geo never tries to unplug friends/family or girlfriends from the evil tubs of goo when he realizes what's up? obviously they aren't his biological mother or father or brother or sister, but they would be someone that he thought of as family or friends or whatever that you'd think he need to release at least one person he knew from his/her cannibalistic hell between kung-fu/bad techno/and K.D. Lang courting (oops i mean Trinity). but he never mentions or even wonders about these people? you know why he doesn't think of that? because this filmmakers didn't think of that! Ted just happily plays videogames and figures fuck 'em! let them go on sucking off electric machine teats in their tubes! living off the liquified dead ain't so bad! hey, check out my new sunglasses!

and if anyone can explain to me how Neo-Geo can stop bullets but not fists...please let me know. you know what else can't be stopped? a wet dick to the face! just ask Paris "crawlsaroundtoomuchinthesack" Hilton. POW! speaking of Paris: The Real World's on. score! i want to be on The Real World so i can spend the whole season making airplane noises with my pants around my ankles. i'd do it, i swear.

::: david - 10:25 PM [+] :::
...

"I have never seen anything like this."
-Sime Vuckov (head of pediatrics at a hospital regarding a one year-old patient who was attacked by fourteen other babies in day care. The children bit the victim more than thirty times when the supervisor briefly left the room)


anyone else hear about that? talk about a sign of the times. speaking of "Sign O The Times!" when i'm done moving all my boxes into my new apartment, i'll be able to get into my cds today and bust out Prince's masterpiece! thanks for reminding me kids!

out buying a sofa the other day (a bright blood red sofa to go with my new black leather chair) and i got distracted by all the props in the showroom. they have all these fake cardboard TVs and stereos and plastic fruit and bottles of wax that look like wine...and mixed in with these things:

real books.

i found this highly disturbing. most of the other fake stuff, like the stereos and TVs seemed to come from a place called Theater Props or something. but the books? they all came from libraries. all handcovers with that great book smell, some even with the library cards still in them. with name on them. doesn't anyone else find this shit utterly fascinating? i know these books were long out of print and destined for the burn pile and sold for a quarter at the most but still, someone spent months or years writing those things and that's the afterlife they get? props in a furniture warehouse? imagine that someday the author goes in there and sees the book he spilled his guts into sitting on the shelf next to a cardboard stereo with the knobs painted on. that would be upsetting i think. and some of these titles were good. i wrote the titles of these poor abandoned books down as fast as possible as the sales person showed me around. this seemed to confuse her. here's the best ones on my list (starting with the best one, really an excellent title for anything, song, movie, whatever) and what i think they might be about:

-The Blue Hammer (this is why you should talk to your hammer, and not just when you need it to hammer something)

-The Radical Alternative (whoa. this book should never be cracked. whatever the "radical alternative" is should remain a mystery)

-One Sunburned Week (aka "Men Without Hats")

-Over There! (what? where? sucker!)

-Grave Error (great drive-in movie title)

-Pop Machine (i once got in trouble trying to break into a pop machine in 2nd grade. they lined us up and went down the line asking every kid who did it. it was right out of a Holocaust movie. except for that fact that the poor little bastard i blamed for it didn't get shot in the head. i would have felt bad if that had happened and maybe i wouldn't have broken into at least two more pop machines later in life)

-Captain Blood (and the book was red)

-Damn Yankee (with Ted Nugent on guitar and crossbow)

-A Man And His Money (with his mind on his money and his money on his mind! at first i thought this said "a man and his mommy")

-Good As Gold (can't think of anything. this one probably sucks)

-Beggarman (wasn't that a Pearl Jam song?)

-Paul's Kite (i'm no expert, but i think it's safe to assume three things happen in this book. the kite is a metaphor. the kite ends up in a tree. Paul cuts down the tree)

-Where Are The White Woman At? (okay it wasn't called this, but it had "white woman" in the title and right now i can't read my own writing)

-Sledgehammer (notice how it ain't "The Blue Sledgehammer," that's because it has it's own song to keep it happy)

-Steel Birds (a pointy pointy, anoint my head, anointy nointy. name that tune)

-Come On By (on my way)

-Fly In A Cobweb (i take it back, this is the best title. isn't that the shit? fly in a dusty cobweb, stuck but it won't be eaten? shot in the ass by a monkey! oh the sweet irony!)

so there they are. i'm going to go back and rescue at least three of them when i go pick up a painting i got that they won't deliever. i feel like they were left at the dog pound, scratching at the cage. you can't leave them like that or they'll start biting each other.

::: david - 10:25 AM [+] :::
...

"Did you bring a horse for me?"
"Sorry, looks like we're shy one horse."
"No, you brought two too many. . ."
-Once Upon A Time In The West

"One point twenty-one jigawatts?!?"
-J. Robert Oppenheimer


When you get done doing the math with that first quote, you're left with Charles Bronson standing over three dead bodies, next to his new horse. Once Upon A Time In The West came out on DVD today. For anyone who doesn't have 4 hours to spend watching the most difficult western of all time, just watch the first ten minutes where the dude tries to catch a fly in his gun barrell. i say this all the time and i'll say it again:

i wish i would have thought of that.

saw the best name for a band i've seen in some time. didn't have any cash on me or i would have made a blind purchase. the band was called None More Black. and right when i thought i couldn't get any better, i look on the back and see a song titled, "The Ratio Of People To Cake." genius.

my daily Matrix comment (from my upcoming work "Everything That's Wrong With The Matrix Volumes 1-12") will deal with the second movie:

Ted walks into a room with keys hanging on hooks and covering every square inch of the walls. in this room there is a man sitting at a table, also covered in keys. the man is working on a machine with a key in it. the man removes the key and blows some metal shavings off the teeth of the key. Ted then asks, "Are you the keymaker."
what??? okay, i know the keymaker is a program but how can he resist the sarcasm?
"No, I'm the pizza maker. the keymaker is next door, making pizzas you fucking toolbox..."

you know, i was tearing apart this movie at work and this woman pipes up and says, "i don't care what you say, i knew i was going to love that movie before i even saw it." i was shocked into silence. i find this statement of hers very telling. this pretty much illustrates everything that wrong with this kind of shit. you can also apply this lesson to the Star Wars fans who can't accept how shite those sequels are too.

notice we've changed our clocks again? so it's dark at like 4:30? this is unacceptable. it ain't World War II anymore. the only argument i've heard that makes even a little sense is when someone says to me, "you don't want the little kids to wait for the bus in the dark do you?" but i've thought about that and wouldn't it make more sense to adjust the starting time for grade school, rather than having the entire fucking country pretend it just travelled through time!?!?!? check it out:

you're at the bar, it's going to close at two, it's last call and you look up at the clock and - POW! time warp! you lost an hour! then, just when you get used to it - POW! you just travelled an hour forward! Marty!!! It's 1955! why do we play this game? don't adjust the clocks. adjust the schedules if darkness is a problem. stop the madness. i will not accept this time-travel delusion anymore. go ahead, Morris Day. ask me what time it is.

::: david - 11:09 PM [+] :::
...

"For overspeeding--first offense - I would enlarge the numbers, and make them readable at three hundred yards - this in place of a fine, as a warning to pedestrians to climb a tree."
- Mark Twain on the subject of license plates, originally published in "Harper's Weekly," 11/5/1905 (from a letter to the editor)



FICTION:



Glass Car Crash (part 2)



It was cold out and she was back on the road, taking the turns harder and harder. The ice had cracked every branch it could, splintered sticks and limbs covered the streets and she thought it looked like something big had skimmed over the neighborhood, then decided not to land there after all. Distracted by the debris, she slowed down and took a wider turn on the next corner. She was worried that her car would slide, but she was grinding so much wood under her wheels that she didn't want to stop and deal with a punctured tire. The worst thing was, something in the air around these houses was blocking out the song on the radio. Too many TV antennas? She stepped back on the gas.

She was taking the turns faster and faster, her foot easing off for the stop signs, but still not stopping the car. She thought she might be able to round those corners at that speed forever. She rounded a corner and saw a rusted car in the middle of a farmer’s field. There was snow and ice covering the ground but she could see that someone had plowed around the car. She didn’t understand why someone would leave it out there and work around it through a change of seasons. She considered knocking on the door of the farm house to ask someone but then it was behind her and she was coming into town. She concentrated on speed.

Three turns after the field, her car started sliding. Even though she knew she wasn’t supposed to, she turned her wheel one way and felt her tires slide the other way. There was no control at all. More angry than scared, she released the steering wheel, crossed her arms and closed her eyes. Her bumper clipped a mailbox and the car stopped. She laughed to herself, as if another child had just tagged her and the game was over.

You’re it!

She opened her eyes and saw a small girl ten feet away sitting on half a snowman. She was staring at her. She glared back at the girl for a couple seconds, then reached over and opened her passenger door. She leaned outside and looked at her wheel where it had stopped. Her wheels were tight against the curb.

Then she saw the red.

Bright streaks cutting through the black and brown slush in the gutter. She blinked and took her hand off the door. It started to swing shut by itself and she quickly shoved it open again, hoping now the red was gone. It was still there. She slowly leaned out further and traced its trail to the source. She couldn’t tell what it was. The thing she'd hit wasn't recognizable. Blood. Fur. Cat? Dog? One thing she was sure of, it was that little girl's animal. Her elbow bumped the volume knob and suddenly the static on the radio was a white roar. She reached to turn it down and the door slammed shut.

Why are you trying to bite me?

She opened her driver's side door and put a foot out onto the road. She realized that, from her angle on the snowman, the little girl couldn't see the red comet trail. The curb was hiding everything from her. She was coming over, though. And she’d see everything in about five more steps. She watched the little girl slide sideways off the half snowman, staring intently at something else instead. The little girl started to crunch through the snow towards her car. Now she could see what the little girl wanted.

Her antenna was sticking out of the snow, two feet from the dead thing. And for some reason the little girl wanted it. She quickly got back in her car, started the engine and rolled back several yards. She swatted at the radio knob to turn off the noise and turned it up full-blast instead. In a panic, she opened up the passenger door again and reached out for the dead thing against the curb so that the little girl wouldn’t see it.

She stopped. It was still alive. A long tail was whipping and spasming wildly in the red slush around it. The little girl was two steps closer, and for a moment she thought about grabbing the creature and cramming into the broken mailbox.

The little girl was next to her now, only her eyes visible above a bright green scarf, not quite close enough to read an emotion. Then they were.

The little girl’s eyes reminded her of a time back in college when she was coming home from work and a football had bounced into the street. At the time, she thought that the best way to avoid the ball was by gunning the engine and timing its path to bounce safely between her tires. She was wrong. The football was chewed under with a squawk, gutted and mangled on the screws and works under her car, then left flopping and hissing on the road behind her. She knew how it must have looked, her speeding up like that at the last second. She thought it must have looked deliberate as hell. And she knew there was no way to explain anything to the ones playing the game. It was funny and tragic at the same time, only she realized it was a joke that only she would understand. So she stabbed the gas pedal hard again and tilted her rearview mirror to watch the boys walking onto the road, slowly approaching their dying football in anger and confusion.

The little girl's hand was reaching for something. It hovered in the air, then hooked down to grab the antenna from the snow. She got to it first and threw it back over the little girl’s head into a bush. Then she grabbed the animal, stuffed it into the mail, flipped up the flag on the box, jumped back behind the wheel, turned the static down to a hum, and stomped the gas. Even around the corner, where her heart finally slowed down, the song never came back on and she finally turned off the radio. Then she punched down the rearview mirror so she wouldn't be tempted to look back.

Hours later, red and blue lights on the horizon slowed her back down. She squinted and saw the flash of a yellow light mixed in with the colors. A tow-truck. It was a crash. She coasted into a line of cars corralled in a bottleneck of roadflares and her car was slowed to a crawl. For a crazy second, she wondered if the thing that had clipped those branches above the town had finally landed. She turned off the radio, forgetting about her antenna, then quickly turned it off again. She creeped by the crash, a metal pretzel of glass and metal that woke her up and got her blinking again. She decided to kill time trying to figure out what kind of vehicles were involved in the wreck.

Too many wheels for one car, too much glass for a motorcycle, too much chrome for an airplane, too much rubber for a train. . .

The cop up ahead slowed her line of cars to 3 mph so she had even more time to study it. She decided the crash was confusing her only because the cars inside the wreckage were all the same color. She'd heard somewhere about blue cars being the least likely to have a crash. Apparently that statistic wasn’t counting the times that blue cars crashed into each other.

She tried the radio again and heard a song trying to fight through the noise. She wondered if maybe it was conversations between the cops or firetrucks. Was that possible? She played with the tuner, hoping to decipher the words. She wondered if the cops and firemen ever sang their information like that. Then her line of cars stopped completely and the song was gone.

She slowly turned her steering wheel hand over hand over hand over hand, until her car was pointing at the crash. Then she raised her foot off the brake slow as she could, and started inching towards it. The line of vehicles was loose enough for her to slide out and she was convinced that she was moving slow enough that no one would notice what she was doing.

She needed her car to be just a little closer. A road flare was snuffed out under her tire as she played with the radio knobs, convinced she could find the song coming from inside the crash.



-© 2003 david james keaton

::: david - 9:00 PM [+] :::
...

"They'd stick by you if they could. But that's just bullshit, baby. People they just ain't no good."
-Nick Cave

"Lighthouses are more important than churches."
-Ben Franklin

"Where are you from?
"Toledo, sir."
"How far is that from the river?"
"The Ohio River sir?"
-Apocalypse Now


finally saw Matrix Revolutions. It sucks. finally saw Terminator 3. it's much better than Matrix 3. T3 has some beautiful vehicular mayhem about 20 minutes in and some surprisingly powerful moments, like the Governor holding a coffin with one arm and mowing down LA's finest with his other arm. Matrix boast the worst quasi-religious shit dialogue since...the last Matrix movie. don't get me started on the plot holes. like why don't the machines tap into the solar power right above the clouds? like how do all the Smiths (meaning all the assimilated humans at the end) detonate without killing everyone plugged into the Matrix? why don't they have an EMP anywhere in the city for the last battle when it's the best weapon to fight the squids? where are the other 30 hovercrafts when the battle starts? why doesn't this movie end with a Rage Against the Machine song like the other two? how does Fishburne get so fat eating nothing but oatmeal? how does Ted continue to stop bullets with his hand but he can't stop a punch? fucking stupid. and that twist i thought i'd predicted one movie back when i emerged angry from Matrix Reloaded (which now looks like a fucking masterpiece compared to this mewling monstrosity) where i predicted it would be "eXistenZ Part 2: eXistenZZZZZZ?" turns out i made the same mistake i always do: i thought about the story more than the filmmakers did.

it does have a cool battle about halfway in with these Battlebot dudes vs. swarms of flying squid machines. but the whole time i was thinking it reminded me of something and then suddenly i realized what it was. and any child of the 80s will know exactly what i'm talking about. three words:

Galaga Bonus Round.

it's so true. i've never been so dead-on accurate in my entire life. except maybe when i called Rammstein "Nine Inch Nazis" and that phrase swept the country like a West Coast wildfire. serious. Galaga bonus round. watch it and you'll see what i'm talking about. no don't watch it. just trust me instead.

my step-brother gets on a plane for Iraq at 5:00 am today. if you're reading this, send me massive email bro. and that's all i'll say about this war because i don't need no Agent Smith-looking Patriot Act-enforcing dudes knocking on my door because of my rants. i'll just save them for a nose-to-nose shoutfest with the next drunken arm-chair general i encounter. you know, i'd pay real money to cross-paths with one in the next couple days. i will be taking the low-road on that political debate and i'll put that fuck's head through the floor faster than he can say "america love it or leave it." okay, this is my promise: i am putting my elbow through the window of the next car i see with a "god bless america" sticker on it. i'll take a picture of it too so nobody thinks i'm joking.
i'm in a shit mood tonight. i want to fuck someone up so bad right now i can hardly contain myself. where's my Grand Theft Auto? i think i just regressed about 10 years watching Jessica Lynch crap on CNN. look at that dull expression on her face. wait, that's Elizabeth Smart. Jessica just said that "god saved her." never mind what i think about those beliefs for a second. how does that sound to someone who's son or daughter was in the hummer with her and got killed (apparently they were all shooting while she was curled up in a ball in the back) and then she says that shit to the cameras? since she was chosen to be "saved" i guess she's also saying her god killed them. them being everyone else in the truck who wasn't doing the sandcrab manuever under the seats? i that's what she must be saying with her "god saved me" horseshit. believers and non-believers can finally agree! people shouldn't speak! stupid fucking bitch should have left her tongue over there. and hey! i just discovered a new commercial to hate instead of those smug "Truth" anti-smoking ads:

anyone catch the ones with the people wearing the words "Child Abuser" across their backs as they lead their weepy-eyed children in and out of resturants and elevators while a troubled bystander looks on? "trust your instincts" the commercial tells us. that's all we need, to trust the instincts of the same bitch who normally takes an interest in a mother and child when she's glaring down her nose because the child isn't being disciplined enough. got to encourage these people to trust those feelings that make them want to spank or rescue every child they see in public because they know what's good for everyone else. fucking psychics or something! they see words on people's backs! hopefully the letters on my back read "Chronic Masterbator!" goddamn these commercials piss me off. they know what's best, they're just waiting for this chance to make a phone call and turn someone in. the ones that will flood this hotline? you've seen them before. they're the ones that sigh oh-so-impatiently when someone's child is acting up in line at the airport. they try to let everyone know that they wouldn't stand for such behaviour. now it turns out those nosy cunts will also be deputized to weed out child abusers as effectively as they glare at parents who don't spank their kids hard enough in grocery stores, all with the power of their minds! it's a miracle! trust your instincts? fuck you. you know, i see words on people's backs too! you know what they tell me to do? and i wouldn't trust a stranger to flush a toilet that isn't their own, why the fuck would i trust one to judge someone's parenting skills after riding two floors with them in an elevator? goddamn people are worthless. i would destroy this TV right now if it wasn't mine. i'm like the descent of man over here, i'm like the first knuckle-dragger on that evolution chart - look for me about three dudes to the left of the upright human.

got a new apartment. small but it's got a view of the Ohio River, a view of an ancient train yard, and a view of a big green bridge. hopefully it'll be good for writing. i move in two weeks.

::: david - 12:54 AM [+] :::
...

"That's how I beat them, I learned to love the rope."
- Rolling Thunder

"Always use the right tool for the job."
- Rolling Vengence

"From the mountain springs to you."
- Rolling Rock label (it also has that inexplicable "33" on it)


been catching up on some things that i always meant to watch, read or listen to. first off, a friend of mine has been going on and on about the book "I Am Legend" since Jr. High so i thought i'd give it a day in court. actually it's much better than i would have thought considering the man who wrote it, Richard Matheson, was a master of the twist format for "The Twilight Zone" TV series, and although they were very entertaining, the strict formula probably would make for the most predictable fiction. this book is good though. it claims to be a vampire novel but in reality it owes it's inspiration to zombie movies. the experiments and biological explanation he offers for the vampires are straight out of the zombie genre. and the book's depiction of the last man on earth too. you know, one of the film versions was called just that. the other, "The Omega Man," is dated as hell but still fun to watch. this "last man standing" thing is what makes survival horror such a great subject. or at least a great day-dream. so yeah, this book was decent, maybe not good enough for my friend to still be talking about after all these years but i'll admit that the scenes with the "last dog on earth" were oddly touching.

also finally watched "Rolling Thunder," that B-movie that Tarantino brings up in every interview. he named some company after that flick didn't he? for the longest time, i never saw it because i thought i already had. turns out i was thinking of "Rolling Vengence!" a similar tale with one big difference:

"Rolling Vengence" has a hero who avenges the death of his family with a giant flame-belching monster truck with a drill on the front. "Rolling Thunder" he did it with a hook for a hand. way back when ole Q-tip would name-drop that flick at every turn, i'd think, "why does Tarantino keeps babbling about that monster truck movie? i mean, it was a good midnighter but does it did it have that much of an impact on his young mind?" guess i was off, and now i can see how the movie he was talking about would be very effective at a drive-in double feature opening-act slot. which is where a young Quentin saw it for the first time. turns out "Rolling Thunder" really is a great flick. it's got everything a B-movie should. goes places the A-movies won't go. basically it's a poor-man's "Taxi Driver" and clearly a warm-up for that movie since it's the same writer. also it uses the same theme song that Blatty used for "The Ninth Configuration." that threw me for a bit of a loop when it came on. i wonder who had it first?

what else? oh yeah, finally finished watching "Enter The Dragon." too bad he died. him and his son. they had skills.

p.s. notice the extremely short fiction excerpt. i'm putting it up in tiny bite-sized chunks to attempt to conjure up some readers. the last story was long as hell and i tried to keep a reader's attention by illustrating it with some links to make it easier to swallow. didn't work. this one is going up page by page as i type it.

::: david - 7:10 PM [+] :::
...

"A lie can drive halfway around the world while the truth is putting it's shoes on."
- Mark Twain



FICTION:



Glass Car Crash (part 1)



The girl was white-knuckling her steering wheel with her hands crossed at the wrists.

Her eyes wandered down from the vanishing point, down from the road, down to her fingers drumming against the wheel, the shadow of her knuckles the only thing moving inside the car. She imagined that shadow was a huge creature outside on the road, crawling fast down the yellow lines.

No, it was crawling too slow, too slow to keep up with her. She wiggled her fingers faster and her shadow ran to match speed with her wheels. She tried turning down the dashboard lights and that stretched the shadow of her hands out to the perfect length. Her knuckles kept a steady rhythm for several miles, switching hands when the one on top got too heavy. She watched the odometer. It was every nine miles that the weight of her arms where her wrists were crossed on the wheel would start to hurt.

Somewhere away from the city she drove past a burned out church with a glowing sign box out in front. The box was empty and she lifted a foot off the gas to look for letters that might have fallen off into the grass. Or an electrical cord.

Do those thing run on batteries?

Then something dead ran under the shadow of her drumming fingers. She saw a flash of the animal an instant before it was gone under her tire. She felt it in her feet and her fingers slowed down with her car. Another mile and there was another animal in the road ahead, something else that hadn't made it across the yellow lines. She nervously tried to think of some “chicken crossed the road” jokes. The thing approached in her high-beams and suddenly she imagined her drumming fingers running over it. The shadow of her hand running fingers through the wet red fur and disappearing inside the hole where the creature had burst from the pressure of traffic. She never stopped drumming, forcing her drumming fingers to crawl over it anyway. Then she swerved to let it pass between her wheels. She didn’t want to have to step on a roadkill with bare feet too.

When the shadow of her knuckles was forced to crawl over a third creature dead in the road, she wrinkled her nose and jerked her hands off the wheel. She scrubbed her palms on her knees in disgust, then rubbed the sore spots where her wrists had been crossed. She drove on with only the tip of her thumb steering the car from the bottom of the wheel.

Her foot came off the gas.

Eyes had reflected in her headlights. She was suddenly sure that when the eyes could still reflect back headlights or flashlights or fireworks, it meant that it wasn't dead yet. She thought it must have been a cat. Or do the eyes of every animal reflect back at night?

She considered a U-turn, not caring what animal it was, just wanting to know if it had been dead.

Eyes don’t reflect when they’re dead. She thought. That’s impossible. Those are not mirrors in their heads. The lights in the eyes snuff out like jack-o-lanterns smashed in the road on Halloween. . .

She wanted to go back to check the eyes.

She couldn’t. It was too hard to turn the car around with just her thumb.


* * *


When she was thinking about reflections and roadkill and her fingers running out in front of her car, Steven was ten miles down the same stretch of road, looking for a tree.

That crazy tree.

He was always surprised that no other cars were gathered around it. He was always expecting at least one car already there when he found it. He was starting to think that no one could see that tree except for him. Tonight he needed to see it, and this time he swore he draw a map in the dust of his dashboard so he could find it faster next time.

He drove past a glowing sign box outside a church. The letters were gone. His feet came up off the gas. They were cold and waking up with pins and needles. His toes wiggled around in the dead leaves and dirt under his seat, looking for his shoes to hide inside.

That mean one of three things, he thought. The wind blew them off. A man ripped them off. Or I’m driving in circles.

Suddenly he was sure there was a girl in a car, idling next to his tree right now. A perfect girl that he would never see because he couldn’t remember where it was. She’d stop to stare up at it for a while, maybe listen to the radio until she couldn’t find a good song, then she’d drive away. Or maybe she would wait there while the seasons changed and watch every leaf curl and fall to the ground before she drove off. Maybe she would tell herself to wait until the first raindrop turned to ice before she gave up.

Maybe she would do all of these things while he was driving the wrong way. Like a boy chasing the string coming off the baseball and missing the catch, like that poem about the falcon spiraling off into the distance until it couldn’t hear the man with the leather glove anymore, like a needle playing a record backwards. Until it finally screams in protest when the road ends.



-© 2003 david james keaton

::: david - 12:02 PM [+] :::
...

"J, a consonant in English, (used here in the word "jealousy") in it's original form, was that of the tail of a subdued dog, and it was not a letter but a character, standing for a Latin verb, "jacere," meaning "to throw," because when a stone is thrown at a dog, the dog's tail assumes that shape."
- Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary

"The modern woman has all her ex-lovers at her wedding"
-some chessy 80's flick, maybe called Staying Together?


was going to see Matrix Revolutions last night but the alarm system at work was fucked up and by the time we figured it all out i'd missed the launch window. i probably still should have went even if i missed the beginning because i'm sure it showed someone in slow motion jumping and shooting, then performing a completely fake wobbly backwards jump onto someone's shoulders while Propellorheads "Take California" pulsed on the soundtrack. never fear Taskashi Mike! i will see it by Monday to perform a full autopsy on the plot even though i know i figured it out when i saw the second movie.

to try to generate more interest in the fiction i post here, i'm going to put my new story up in three very short segments. we'll see if that makes it less of a chore to read.

so someone i know is getting married. i'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it so i'll just fire off a quick tribute rather than running my mouth about shit i'll regret like those dudes always do in the movies. it's all about me remember? so here are three things i always remember when i think about me and Holly:

1.) once when i went to visit her, i had a girlfriend and she had a boyfriend, and that was always the case without fail, but this time i was having more evil thoughts than usual and she must have been psychic because, after she showed me to the guest room where i would be sleeping alone, she walked out and then came back with a large collection of erotic lesbian fiction.

2.) when she went away to Cornell University i helped move her stuff in and on the drive there we stopped to stretch our legs at this duck pond somewhere off the highway. we were watching the ducks and all the people feeding them and there was this one big duck that was taking all the bread from the other ducks. this was making me very angry for some reason and after the big duck robbed one of the little ones of a potato chip a kid had thrown towards it, i grabbed a large rock and whipped it at the damn thing. people gave me the evil eye and Holly was like "what are you doing psycho?" and i explained loudly for all to hear that i "wasn't throwing rocks at the ducks, well, okay i was throwing a rock at that one duck but it was only for the good of the other ducks and that particular duck deserved it and..." eventually we drove off. then, after driving a couple miles behind her vehicle brooding about the duck controversy and how i was misunderstood, she stopped her car and pulled off the road. i rolled down my window and leaned out to see what was up and she walked back to my car and kissed me.

3.) the first time i saw her was after some fund-raising bike race in...7th grade? i think it was 7th grade. we talked on the bike ride and i was fascinated because she was the new girl at our school and she seemed to have an awareness and sense of humor that was ahead of the rest of them. she had this crazy head of curls and big glasses and i peddled furiously behind her all day. back at the end of the bike ride i remember us running around the hallway of the Jr. High and there were balloons everywhere and she was jumping up and down trying to stomp on one to make it pop. i don't know why, but this impressed me even more. we started an unlikely friendship that seems to have lasted longer than almost all of my childhood relationships. i spent an infinite number of nights in high school sitting in my car outside her house talking for hours before she went inside. i would even go see her to hang out after i'd come from my actual girlfriends house, who was actually at the end of the same street. is that why it's lasted so long? because she was never the one who was five houses down? who knows. i remember her trying to pop that balloon after that bike ride like it was yesterday though. the balloon was green because i say it was. guess what that means.

::: david - 12:10 AM [+] :::
...

"There's always one more town a little further down the tracks..."
- Nick Cave

"You better get your head and your ass wired together!"
- Full Metal Jacket


first i had quotes about quotes and now i've got blogs about blogs! that's as crazy as a soup sandwich! so i've been catching up on some peoples sites and found all sorts of surprises today. i can't put any names on here because apparently they spook easy. so i'll just look through the lens and describe what i'm seeing. okay, maybe they don't spook easy, maybe they're more like those ashes you try to pick them up and look real close and you end up crushing into nothing instead (what you say? i'm going to make less sense than usual because, as the song goes, "I drink alone!") either way, i'm going to tell you what i see without the burden of facts to back me up. this, of course, means that i'm not to be trusted.

anyway, the first surprise is this one blog i frequent is gone (?!?) no goodbye, no back-in-an-hour sign swinging on the door, no one playing hockey up on the roof, even the fucking roof is just gone. what the hell is up with that? the cynical part of me says that they bailed because they didn't like they way they were being portrayed through other people's posts and pictures and decided they'd sneak away and carefully reinvent themselves in some perfect way where all information can be more carefully controlled. this makes me angry because (egomaniac comin' through!) it's all about me! and i got left hanging! i want to read their shit and it's not there anymore, therefore everyone should know how i'm affected. sing this to the tune of Beethoven's Ninth: "Me me me me! I I I I! Me me me me!" that's what i'm saying. so seriously, where did you go? did we mean nothin' to you?

surprise number two is that i've been dropped off a list of links on someone else's website. i don't know how long i've been deleted because i don't usually look over to the left when i'm reading his stuff but this had a bizarre effect on me. i felt bad! how ridiculous is that shit? i suddenly wanted to know what i said to bore, offend, disgust, irritate or whatever. it's like the dude in "Tao of Steve" said, "we pursue that which retreats from us." i instantly was running over there reading that blog wondering, "did i say the opposite of any of these posts lately to get dropped off the list?" crazy thing is, that was always the good thing about me linking there and them linking here. it was kind of opposites. i thought it made for a good contrast. it was like me trying to prove i could communicate and connect with people that had very different beliefs and stuff. out in the world it's too hard but i figured on the internet, it's like the end of "Major League" when the punk with the spiked hair hugs the blue collar guy with the baseball cap, they freeze for a second, give each other a weird look, then they hug anyway! cause the dude bunted the ball (?!?) and the Indians win it!!! back to the topic, more than a few times i've thought about how out of place their link was on my site but i always left it on there anyway cause i figured all my links didn't have to be to some perverse or dark website, hey, i could keep a smiling family man on here and it would fit right in cause it's me! i can do anything! and i'll still keep him on here anyway. and i thought my link would be fine over there on his. i figured maybe my rambling bullshit would sit fine at the table at his house for Thanksgiving dinner even if my eyes wandered around the room during the blessing. hell, it's just words, right? not quite. i got showed to the door for reasons i'll never know.

oh, and THEN the fucking hat trick, surprise number three hockey fans: i go over to my favorite blog and she's talking about hanging up her gun and throwing her badge in the river and walking away from the job forever. what the fuck is in the water lately?!? again, it's me, ain't it? what did i do? and, more importantly, what can i do to keep her here? well, i resort to the oldest trick in the book, i taunt with "i thought i knew you better than that!" see, the brilliance in this tactic is that they think "hey! i'm being weak, or not the nearly as cool as someone thought i was! i will now change my mind because it's all about what this person on the other side of the world that i never met thinks!" sort of just teasing if you're reading. hey, that shit ryhmes! still, you really want to know what you're problem is? (watch this: those five words are the quickest way to get anyone's absolute attention. don't say "fire!" or "look out for that falling piano!" say "you know what you're problem is" and POW! they'll look right atcha. it'll can save their life.) okay, here's your problem: you wrote too many quality posts lately and you're afraid of the weak ones. (remember when you used to just put up a sentence a day? seems like years ago don't it) guess what though, it's those silly personal posts that aren't all brilliant that connect the most. i can prove it. i spend months on some shit i post on here but compared to the stuff that i throw up in five minutes, the masterpieces don't stand a chance. it's the everyday nonsense and confessions that motivate people to respond. my lectures and fiction almost never get anything back except crickets. and even those crickets are only talking to each other.

so here's confession for you: i have another website, another blog i've kept for awhile that is completely annonymous. i might even be helping out on a third very soon. i know this two or three site thing isn't that uncommon but it keeps me sane. on my annonymous site it's kind of like a lowbrow "Ulysses." makes even less sense than this one does and it's twice as hostile and/or pathetic. three times as confused and desperate. ten times as fast on the keyboard. it is a split that happened when i started to get to know readers and writers on this site. this place was originally intended to be that place, but this place got kind of weird and the mask comes off too much and something had to snap. so sometimes i'm off somewhere else bouncing around unknown on the power line, running around without a name under some crow feet and squirrel feet, saying things that no one that i know will ever hear. these are called secrets and it's a paradox but the secrets over there keep these confessions coming.

anyhow, goodnight to everyone who is still here.

::: david - 8:08 PM [+] :::
...

"insert ironic bible quote here"
-Jack 21:12



FICTION:



Ride The Ride



My five senses on the road.

What are they? Video, audio, olfactory, tactile. . .and what else? Taste? Isn’t there another medical sounding word for taste though? What the hell is it? Damn. That’s what I get for trying to sound like “Green’s Anatomy.” I’ll have to change my list. I’ll start over.

My five senses on the road.

Sight: The vanishing point. My eyes never stray far from the vanishing point. What would happen if things suddenly stopped growing from that vanishing point?

Sound: Squealing tires in the distance. Sounds of a high school football game somewhere out there. Could be seven states away, the sounds of a game played weeks ago still riding the wind. I hear those squealing tires all the time out here though, and I never see a crash. I want to see a crash. I tell someone that and they say, “no you don’t, just wait until it happens to you.” I don’t think I’d change my mind. Or is there something else that makes that noise? Some kind of an animal? Why would it do that?

Where was I?

Smell: I can always smell a skunk when I crack the window. It reminds me of driving, reminds me of the fall, like the smell of that tomato factory reminds me of football season. How come I never see a skunk? I want to see one. It doesn’t smell bad to me. Every time I tell someone that they say, “just wait until you get sprayed,” but how bad could it be? Do they smell like that after they get hit? How come there’s none on the road. I want to run over one and every time I tell someone that they say, “you don’t want one stuck in your grill, just wait until it happens to you.” I wonder if anyone knows this for sure. Now I’m thinking, are the sounds of tires and the smell of a skunk and never seeing either one grow out of the vanishing point somehow connected?

Where was I?

Touch: The steering wheel. Squeezing the steering wheel when I’m sweating. The noise it makes under my fists when I give it a snakebite. Or maybe the controls under my feet, the ones I work with my toes. A blind man could drive a car forever.

Where was I?

Taste: That’s a hard one. Maybe that’s why there’s no medical term for taste. Or at least, no crazy word that’s easy to remember. You really don’t taste anything out here unless you bite the wheel and that don’t taste like much. Of course, they taught us in school, that everything you smell is really you tasting it too. Maybe it’s true for the rest of the senses too. Everything I see, everything I hear, everything I touch. Car crashes, skunks and sweat on the steering wheel. It’s just like I stuck every single one of those things in my mouth. . .

Where am I. . .

He took his feet off the gas and the car slowed to a crawl. He checked for oncoming cars and then put his head between his knees and ducked under the dashboard. He grabbed the rubber tread on the gas pedal and pulled. It ripped loose and he cracked his head on the steering wheel. He laughed and looked underneath. It was better than he hoped. A small silver bar was protruding from the floorboard. It looked like the handlebar on a child’s bike. He excitedly took off his shoes and socks and wrapped his toes around the cool metal rod. It was the most satisfying feeling he’d felt since he was a boy, when he would reach into a cold mud puddle and press his hands deep into the ground. He’d look down at his hand prints and imagine he was strong enough to punch through to the core.

Steven was back on the road, looking for eye contact in a rearview mirror. It was dark, so it would have to be a car with bright gauges, extra gauges, RPMs. He drove slow under that hole in the fence and looked for the boy. For a split second he thought he saw a shadow and he wished that the boy would grow the guts to throw more rocks.

He passed a church and glanced at the glowing sign box out in front. It said:

“He died for your sin.”

Steven wondered if the “s” had fallen off “sins” or if that was really how the message was supposed to read.

He died for your sin? That’s awful specific. Normally those signs say such interchangeable bullshit I think I just read about a the “fish of the day” or the grand opening for a Car Wash. For my sin? Someone gave that sign some thought. I’m almost impressed.

His toes gripped the works and the night wind was just getting up enough speed for Steven to empty his head and start over when he saw the red eyes winking on the horizon.

Train. Shit. He thought. Sounded just like dad there. That’s why little kids learn those two words together. Shit. I can’t turn around, it’ll fuck up my straight line.

He started coasting, hoping that the train would be gone before he got there. However, his car and the train ended up stopping at the exactly the same time. He thought of a story from a friend of a friend of a friend who claimed to unhook stopped trains at the crossing so he could slide through as soon as it started rolling again. Steven never believed him. He punched off his headlights, left the motor grumbling moved to get out. He knew he was making a mistake as soon as the seatbelt he forgotten (and never even remember putting on) jerked him hard back into the driver’s seat. He frowned and untangled his arm from the strap.

He never locked his seatbelt. The only time it was over his shoulder was when he drove by a cop. Sometimes he would leave it there, sometimes he liked it there. The silver buckle under his arm would catch a flash when some head lights went by and it reminded him of the first time he drove a car and he did the same thing with that belt. He put it over his left shoulder and left it hand and he imagined that the strap was his holster and every metal flash was a reflection off his gun.

He walked up the slope of stones, carefully spreading his weight evenly across his bare feet as the stones bit into his heels. He leaned in close and looked at the rusted works and wires holding the train together. He saw nothing like the grenade-pin boxcar connection he’d always imagined. He always thought one good pull on the right something and they would disconnect. He looked under it the train and jumped back when a low groan traveled through the rail. He shook his head in disgust and rubbed his hands together.

"Of course it's stopped.” He muttered. “That's why they grind to a stop every fucking time. How long could anything drive on metal wheels? Metal wheels don’t roll. They dig."

Something whispered and wrapped itself around his foot and he kicked it away and stumbled back. He backpedaled down the stone slope before he could stop himself, hissing from the pain of the rocks stabbing his arches, then stopped and trudged back up to see what it was. An audio tape. Cracked and bleeding out long unbroken ribbons of tape off into the wind. A line of tape caught another gust of night air and made another grab for his bare foot. He let the fingers tickle his skin as he flicked away some stones and studied the cassette. Dusty and nameless. Split open down the center. He reached down and put a finger in the gear and turned the wheel. The crack spread and tiny tape-reel peeked out one side. He thought about vinyl records and compact discs and how they wouldn't be as interesting as an audio tape lying near the railroad tracks. There was nothing inside an LP except a spiral line of music, on the CD a tiny groove buried deep under glass that you couldn’t even feel with your finger. And once they were busted? That was it. Just shards everywhere like a broken window, the songs leaking out invisible. Not like the cassette, where you could see the tape unspool for miles, entrails catching the wind. Music following the ditch along the road, tying the cattails together with hours of music no one would ever hear again.

He thought back to the strangest thing he’d ever seen on the side of the tracks. It turned out to be nothing. Although, for a moment, when he was leaning out the window of his car and waiting for a train, Steven thought he was staring at the skeleton of a baby. He blinked and it didn’t go away and eventually he jump out and ran towards it. Halfway there it became clear what the baby actually was. It was a bundle of six-pack webbing that once held beer cans together. The light or the angle or his brain had turned it into a tiny skeleton and he shook his head and laughed at himself on the way back to his car. That night he dreamed of a perfect white baby skeleton with a red rubber ball bouncing around its ribcage. He woke up with a scream in his throat.

There was a loud rumble behind him and he turned to see a school bus stopping at the crossing. The door creaked open and he heard the driver yell for “silence!”

It’s too late for a bus. Too late to be taking kids home. Fuckin’ school buses everything today. What the hell? And why does the door open when there’s a train stopped on the tracks?

He saw the shadow of the driver’s head searching the horizon for danger. Steven started to wonder if he was the only one who saw the train. Then he saw that the driver was sideways, looking at him. He remembered one time when he was parked next to bar and waiting for someone to come out and he had to keep opening his door to see around a garbage can blocking the door. He would open his door and crane his neck out every time a new group of people piled out and finally cop sneaked up and yanked his door open so he’d fall out onto the street. The cop claimed he thought Steven was puking. Steven knew better.

That fucking cop just wanted to know what I was looking at. The same way they always ask “where are you going?” when they pull you over at four in the morning. It’s not part of their training. They just want to know because it’s late and they’re bored and they want you to tell them a fucking story. Just like a child at bedtime.

The door on the bus slammed shut and he snapped back to the moment. He looked down the side of the bus and saw all the children’s faces lined up, hot breath fogging their windows. Twenty pairs of eyes stared at him. He started to walk back towards his car. A sign on the side of the bus read:

“Caution: Kids Ride!”

Steven suddenly thought those words were a warning just for him.

Then the bus was driving down the stones next to the tracks. Steven didn’t understand until it began beeping and backing up to turn around. Steven finally understood that the driver wasn’t comfortable waiting for the train with him standing out there next to the bus, barefoot in a garden of swirling audiotape.

After the children were gone, he kicked the cassette loose from its nest of stones and watched more music ribbons unwind and float off around the wheels of the train. Then he took the heel of his foot and screwed it down into the rocks.

Steven wanted to take it with him. He knew he couldn't. He knew what would happen ifhe did. James would find it. He thought about how it might be enough to take a photograph of it instead. And he knew what would happen if he did. His roommate James would find the picture eventually and say, "It was too busted to play, huh? Too bad. Dude, first videotapes, now audiotapes. Look at all this crazy shit you're finding. What’s next? A nose in the bushes?" Then James would run off and come back with something saying, "Just say you found this one instead." He'd stand there holding out a tape, tearing a label off of it at the same time. A label with a girl's name on it. He'd catch Steven looking at the name and say, "No, it's not what you're thinking, it's nothing like that, just pretend it’s the tape you found. Look, you found it, remember..."

Something like it happened once before, when Steven couldn’t find a tape he’d saved from his answering machine. A tape that had recorded something a girlfriend had said, something that proved she’d been lying about something else. When he saw Steven looking for it, James ran over and stuck a baseball cap full of tiny cassettes under his nose saying, “Forget about it, we'll just say that you found one of these instead." He went on to explain, "They're old answering machine tapes, before they went digital, full of some serious shit, my brother found 'em all in a pile, under the machines at a recycling station, he swore that the machines would sometimes catch some of the tape just right in some gears so you could actually hear what was recorded on it. Right before the machine would smash 'em, like last words or something. And he swore someone was saving all the nasty ones to take home and listen to. What? You don’t believe me about the “last words” thing? Hey, it could happen, you can play a record with a fingernail can’t you?"

Kids ride? That’s right. They ride, they don’t drive. That’s the problem. It’s like the rollercoaster. You ride the rollercoaster, you don’t drive it. You get sick on the rides. And that’s why you get car sick too. ‘Cause you’re riding. Kids haven’t grown the brains for driving yet. A kid who drives when they should still be riding is very dangerous. . .

That night, even though it was too hot, Steven decided that everything was perfect enough. He stood there in the red pulse of the crossing lights and thought about the broken audio tape in the rocks and wondered.

What was on it? Music or something else? How did it get out there? Could it have come off a train? Or out of a car? Or a car hit by a train? What was the last thing that she heard? And you know what? There’s no way someone break a train in half with their hands. . .

He thought about other things too. He thought about how starting at one thinking while thinking of another would forever connect the two things in his head. He decided that a smashed cassette tape was a fine memory to attach to a stopped train, much better than a “friend of a friend of a friend” story about unhooking boxcars. He swore he’d never remember that story again.

Then the metal wheels finally started moving.

When Steven ran out of things to think about, he decided to drive harder and waste some gas. He drove as fast as he could. Fast so he wouldn't be able to look for anything strange along the road. That plan didn’t last long. He took his toes off the gas and read a sign posted by the gate of factory:

“Warning: Machines Without Drivers!”

He squinted through the fence, trying to imagine what the hell was going on inside. He laughed out loud and tried to find more bizarre signs. Turned out they were all over when you looked for them. A couple miles later he heard the sound of a rock dinging off some metal and turned to see a sign he’d never noticed before. He hit the brakes and hung out the window, searching the high grass for movement. Although he couldn’t see who threw the rock, he knew it had been a hard throw because the sign was vibrating like it was electric. When it finally stopped shaking, it told him:

“Watch For Children”

Seemed normal enough, only a closer look revealed that it actually said something else. The word “the” had been spray-painted over the word “for” turning this sign into something much more ominous. One word was changed and suddenly the tone of the message had changed too. Now the sign was whispering:

“Watch The Children”

And, to Steven, it made perfect sense.

Later, while swerving through a long stretch of twisted highway, and out of the corner of his eye noticing more than a couple wreaths and crosses marking impacts and holes in the guard rail, Steven saw another sign shouting at him.

“Beware Aggressive Drivers!”

He laughed again.

What is going on? That’s like saying, “beware cars with flamethrowers!” I mean, if there’s a problem along this road with cars and their flamethrowers, maybe they should just take the flamethrowers away, instead of hammering in a sign to warn me about them. Flamethrowers are still illegal, ain’t they?

He drove close to the rails, trying to count all the memorials along the sharpest turns.

Jesus Chrysler. This road eats fucking cars like popcorn. What else am I going to see?

About five turns later he got his answer. A sign he’d seen a million times before didn’t alarm him. . .

“Right Lane Ends”

. . .until he saw the sign about a hundred yards later:

“Left Lane Ends”

He muttered in disbelief and started looking for the next exit. And, at the bottom of the hill, when the road straightened out, Steven saw a pile of sand with several children wrestling for the top. For a moment he actually thought it was a playground that had been built next to the road until he saw the last sign of the day:

“Runaway Truck Ramp”

When the first red light stopped his car he cranked down the windows and angled an ear out into the night. His listened for anything different, like a cricket that was rubbing it's wings faster than all the rest. Or maybe he’d hear something else, maybe a new bug no one knew existed hiding down in the ditch (why are these ditches along every road? Is there an animal that makes them?) a creature holding a dead cricket, rubbing its wings so that no one would know it was dead. He heard nothing. There wasn't shit out there.

Then something buzzed past the car and his toe tapped the pedal to catch up with it. It was just a bug, following the same road he was. It was too dark to see exactly what it was. He tried to keep his eyes on it as he coasted along, waiting for the flash to proved it was a firefly. After a while he started to lose interest and picked up speed. Incredibly, the bug kept up. He could see it in his peripheral vision but when he looked straight at the spot where it should be flying, it would vanish.

He drove faster, taking the empty roads harder, still he knew that bug was keeping up with his car. He wondered how fast the world’s fastest bug could fly. Maybe it was trapped in the wind coming off the car, some kind of freak aerodynamic tornado that was carrying this bug along. He looked back for it and again waited for the flash. He knew it couldn’t be a firefly and still he waited for the flash. He remembered when he was a little boy running around the backyard in the dark and he thought that everything flashed at night. Every bug out there, the ants, the moths, the crickets, even the spiders. He didn't realize it was just the same bug doing it every time. They called it a firefly and it was harmless? He used to call them lightning bugs until he realized that name was even more of a cheat. After several nights of research, he discovered that they didn't even get hot when they flashed, and they didn't even burn your hand when you squeezed one to death. They didn't spit or shit or bite or scream when you caught one. They did nothing he wanted them to, and they sure as hell weren't as fast as a car.

His steering wheel started shaking and the car rumbled as his tires swerved off the road and started digging through the stones and he blinked and looked back at the road to straighten out. He tried not to look for that bug anymore. There was no way it was following him. He told himself he would not started thinking about that bullshit he’d once heard about all the unexplained car crashes being caused by a bug flying into the car. Was it was fifty percent of unexplained crashes? Maybe it was only thirty percent. He couldn't remember. When he'd heard that statistic, he always thought that it was have to be something with a stinger that made the drivers panic. Now he was starting to wonder if it was just some kind of crazy fast bug no one had ever caught, something that simply freaked drivers into the ditch by keeping up with their cars. Something like that wouldn’t need a stinger. He rolled up his window and started to swerve, barely keeping control, trying to shake it off the feeling of something crawling on his neck. His wheels threw a rooster-tail of dust. He heard a soft thud as something in the trunk rebounded around behind him. He smiled to himself, remembering what was back there.

A rabbit with rabbit feet. That’s what I found. Lying on the side of the road, one eye missing, tire-tracks across its fur. Normally I don’t stop for nothing but it was just the saddestthing I ever saw. Only one other stuffed animal almost made me cry like that. A little black and white cat that I had once when I was little that I called “Fast Eddie” even though it was a girl. It looked exactly like the real cat and that’s why I got it. And that’s why my brother used to pretend he was petting Fast Eddie and then suddenly throw the toy against the wall. I fell for that gag at least three times. My dad laughed and said we’d never know what effect that had on me until much later in life. Well, now we know. I’m rescuing stuffed animals off the side of the road.

Steven leaned forward and sniffed his steering wheel. When he’d had a long drive like this, the smell of his sweat on the handgrips always reminded him of a damp sneaker after a backyard football game. The memory was strong, even though he couldn’t remember the score of any one of those games. He wasn’t much into sports. Not like his brother anyway. Most boys played basketball from dawn till dusk when the season started on TV. Steven looked forward to that season too, if only because his brother would buy a new ball every year and he’d get to hold it up to his nose and take a deep breath. It was a rich dark smell. Like his tires after hours on the road. He also liked to roll the basketball against the side of his face. The texture was pleasing to his skin and he’d do it every chance he got. His brother caught him once and you’d have thought he’d been masturbating. Steven always seemed to use the wrong senses when it came to sports or toys. Even when the boys in the neighborhood would be racing, or destroying, their Hot Wheels, Steven would get distracted gently rolling the tiny cars down the insides of his arms, where the skin was the most sensitive. He had a similar feeling once when he caught a fly in his fist and let it flutter around inside his grip. For some reason it felt good in there, as if it didn’t want out and was writing a message on his palm. He didn’t understand why he enjoyed these things, until one day he saw two little girls hiding in the bushes, taking turns brushing their fingertips along each others forearms. Since they were hiding when they did it, and since they were girls, Steven never drove a toy car down the inside of his arm again. He started smashing toys and torturing insects like the rest of the boys.

Right before it hit his windshield, Steven was thinking:

How many wings would an insect need to fly faster than a car?

There was a wet pop on the glass and he locked up the brakes. The car slid sideways, chewed up some weeds and stalled out, one wheel hanging over a drainage ditch. His laughed echoed around inside the car, and he thought about how, with the windows rolled up, outside laughing would sound like crying. Sweat dripped down his lips and chin and he rolled his window down all the way. After a few deep breaths of night air, he opened the door.

Outside he could hear the crickets, and he was sure they were rubbing their wings faster than normal. He got out and looked close at the bug that had splashed on his windshield. Green. Just like a bug should be. He started to get back in the car then stopped. He looked at the bug again. Now it seemed too green, like a bug that a child would draw. He got in the car, started the engine and inched backwards onto the road. He checked the road behind him. No cars, no street lights ahead or behind, just the red glow from his brakes. He looked up at his windshield and focused on the bug a third time. Angry, he hit the hazards button, and stepped back out into the night.

How many wings is that?

Steven studied the insect, using a fingernail to move things around, drawing a tiny crime-scene outline in the dirt on his windshield. He started counting legs, wondering how many were too many. He counted too many wings. He looked for the head, then realized it was a lost cause since it would have popped on impact. He thought of the old joke, "what's the last thing to go through a bug's mind when it hits your windshield? Its ass!" He decided that counting the number of eyes, even if he could find them, wouldn't tell him anything. He was sure that most bugs had enough eyes for several head. Or maybe he was just remembering that multiple images of the girl screaming in bug-vision from that old horror movie.

He wondered if it was just two bugs fucking that he’d hit, and that’s why it looked all wrong. Hell, maybe it was three bugs fucking. Or maybe it was that bug that was chasing him, fast enough to circle the car. He smiled in the glow of his headlights, scratching and picking at the glass and trying to decide what would be stranger.

Stranger? That’s a strange word. A Stranger? Than me? Is she out there?

Steven drove on several miles, car slowly swerving across both lanes until he saw some headlights appear on the horizon.

Is stranger a stranger word than stranger? How about ride? Ride the road. Ride the rides. It’s like an amusment park. Smell the smells, eat the eats, drink the drinks, and ride the ride. If you get hurt, don’t scratch the scratch. . .

He thought of when he was a boy, in the back seat with his hand out the window, making different shapes with his fingers to cut through the wind. He always did this on rollercoasters but in the back seat he had more time to study his hand and fly alongside his parents car. He remembered one time when another car passed by and he felt something slap his hand. He quickly turned around and caught a glimpse of a small hand sticking out the back window of the car that had gone by and suddenly he was sure that they had connected. He told his dad about it and his dad insisted it had just been a bug that he felt. He said there was no way the cars were close enough. Steven was always convinced he’d touched that hand. Although sometimes he wondered if it had been a boy or a girl.

Maybe a girl’s hand writing her name in the sky. Maybe a boy’s hand trying to catch an insect. A girl’s hand reaching for his own. A boy’s hand slapping palms after a baseball game.

Steven lifted his fingers from the grip of the wheel and began drumming them slowly as his car began to drift.

Good game. That’s what they made you say, whether your heart was in it or not.

The other car was drifting too. Steven reached out and let his arm dangle out his window. He spread his fingers as the wind pressed his palm against his door. He squinted to see if the other driver had a hand outside too. He couldn’t tell. The cars were closer now.

One hundred yards. The length of a football field. . .

Steven’s toes curled around the gas and the needles jumped.

Fifty yard line. Right where the flip the coin. . .

Steven slipped his left arm from under the seat belt. He saw the other car drifting out with him, running with it’s tire on the center line. His left hand squeezed the wheel tighter.

That car looks just like mine. . .

For a second he wondered if he was going to crash through a reflection. As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened.

Goal line. Foul line. Base line. Here we go. Stranger? That’s a strange word. . .

The driver’s side mirrors on the cars collided as the cars slapped hands.

A shudder through his steering wheel, a loud crack like a baseball bat hitting anything except a baseball, and a small explosion of glass that reminded him of an old ice-cube tray that detonated when you twisted it too hard. Steven’s eyes registered a quick freeze-frame of the other driver raising an arm the instant he pulled his own arm inside to guard his face from the splinters. Tiny shards rained across Steven’s eyelids as he winced on impact and locked the brakes. After things stopped moving, Steven opened his eyes, adjusted his rearview mirror, then looked up to see if there really was another car back there. He expected to see nothing.

She was idling in the stones. Head out the window, long black hair hanging down over his driver’s side door and she examined the twisted metal and veins dangling from where her side-view mirror used to be. Steven turned to lean out his own window and hung over his own door looking into her eyes.

She wasn’t angry, he was in love, then she was gone.

Stranger and stranger and stranger.



-© 2003 david james keaton

::: david - 9:36 PM [+] :::
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