..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

"Everyone wants to be the carnival queen..."
- Stereophonics

"I feel kind of...invincible."
- Jack Burton in Big Trouble In Little China


girl comes up to me at work and holds out an issue of "Cigar Afficianado" and asks "do you find this attractive?"
on the cover is a female chomping on a big-ass cigar. i study it a moment and decide, "no." you know why? three reasons. first of all, it was some actress so i didn't believe that she really smoked cigars and since cigars are kind of fake smoking anyway, this is like fake fake smoking. second, clearly this is supposed to be some phallic thing with the big shaft in her teeth and, if that's the case, it's not working because Freud would call that a big black dick in her mouth and mine ain't black. so i'm like left outside of that fantasy looking in, you know what i mean? and third, since it's clear what she supposed to be simulating, the biggest problem is that she's grinning at the same time so that means there's lots of teeth involved. teeth = bad. in this situation, very bad. i mean, teeth are bad if that's what we're supposed to be thinking about. now, i realize that they couldn't put a girl on the cover smoking a cigar on her knees while she carefully ties her hair behind her head. actually, if i ever saw that i might buy that issue, and i don't smoke cigars. i'm just saying...

meanwhile...someone read my story down there! i wish that i could send you a prize and be like Willy Wonka who waits patiently for the kid to give back the candy and then says "bam! the chocolate factory is yours!" but i don't have a chocolate factory to give. just thanks. feel good. someone actually read my shit. nodding and smiling. cracking my knuckles over the typewriter. i could stop a bullet right now.

::: david - 5:41 PM [+] :::
...

“Don’t fool yourself, she was heartache from the moment that you met her.”
- Jeff Buckley

the roads weren’t that bad.

so i try to download some songs to remind me of her. i leave it up to chance, i select every Jeff Buckley song that shows up on the search screen, then walk away from the computer to see what i get. kind of like cable fishing. you ever do that? leave a tape in at night, close your eyes and pick a channel, see what you get the next day? those tapes are more interesting when you don’t have any stations, like right now. you can put in an old tape and see what you caught way back then. watch commercials and news breaks from years ago. reminds me of “The Thing” when those dudes were watching stacks of recorded game shows and the one guy took out the tape and said, i know how this one ends. that showed their isolation more effectively than a hundred aerial shots of snow-covered mountains. anyway, point is i go back later to see what songs downloaded successfully and i only got one. not the one i was looking for either. five times over i got one song. it’s called “Forget Her” and i don’t think it’s on any of his albums. not sure though since i only heard him when she put the disc on in my car. and even though “Last Goodbye” and “Grace” will remind me of her for a long time, of course, it must remind her of something else and on and on and on. see, i don’t need to be hit over the head with a hammer. here i'm thinking "Last Goodbye" is the most appropriate thing i could be fishing for and i get something else. not just something else, i got five versions of this fucking song. for a reason, right? i’ll try listening to it once, right now, to at least get the meaningful quote for up there. and maybe to start doing what it’s telling me to do. i’ll try. it’s easy. i tell people how to do this all this time. just pretend you don’t care and eventually you don’t.

the roads weren’t that bad. even if they were on fire they weren’t that bad.

::: david - 9:07 PM [+] :::
...

“Girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors and the boys try to look so hard. . .”
- "Born To Run" - Bruce Springsteen



FICTION:



Swordfighting (part 3)



“True story. He’s only got one.”

The two boys were trying to play the lying game.

Ashley was in the car, on the way to their shipwreck, their secret place, their clubhouse, and they were all trying real hard.

“No shit. How?”

“You really want to know? It’s not a long story. . .”

Before they picked her up, Steven had told James about how he'd found her, and the way they'd played that game in her car. Steven told James that, even though he’d lost that game, he had somehow talked her into seeing him again. He didn’t tell James that he suspected that she was only coming out to see James again, to see what he’d tie to his fingers this time.

So, before they honked the horn and she came running out, they decided to fight for her, sort of. They decided that they were going to lie. Not about themselves, which was the way it was usually done, they were going to lie about each other instead. And the loser would be the first one to deny what the other one was saying, or the first one to have Ashley call him a liar, or the first one fuck up and tell the truth when they thought they were lying. The instant that this happened, the loser walked the plank forever and lost his half of the shipwreck.

Steven was hoping that James would try too hard too fast, and even if he had to back him up by nodding along with a few crazy lies right out of the gate (probably admit to fucking something dead on the side or the road, or getting caught with god-knows-what up his ass, or crying when there was a Tornado Warning on the television) it would be okay, because she’d start shaking her head and James would be the first one she called a liar.

"So. Ashley." James said, turning around to face her. "I heard you were creeping around a car crash with my boy. Did you know that ninety nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent of unexplained car crashes are caused by spiders?"

“I thought it was bees, go back to what you were saying about his-” she said.

“No, it’s spiders. And I’ll get back to that.”

"Where did you hear that?" she asked.

"You didn't tell her?" James backhanded Steven across the shoulder and he didn’t have a lie ready fast enough. "Okay, I'll tell her.” James went on. “I heard about it on TV, or in a movie or somewhere, and I never believed it. Until it happened to my best friend. Years ago, a bug got into his car, scared him, bit him or stung him, no one is sure exactly. He crashed though, and lost one of his testicles in a tree. Right Stevey? Tell her I’m wrong. Like I said. True story. He’s only got one."

"No, even though it’s true that I did lose one,” Steven corrected, “That only means I’m down to two. . .”

Ashely frowned and James looked over sharply. She was ready to call him out on a lie and Steven laughed it off, to show he was just kidding about have three testicles. James smirked and Steven could tell he was going to let it slide.

He knows I still had my hand on the chess piece, so it’s okay if I move it back, Steven thought as he steadied his nervous knees. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to game rained out in the first inning. Hold on, I got a better analogy that involves balls. It’s like I fucked up and almost sank the 8-ball after his break, and he caught it with his hand before it dropped. He doesn’t want to waste the quarters.

“Hold on a second,” Ashely said laughing as she raised up and dug through her pockets.

“Who’s got a calculator? One plus one plus one minus one equals. . .”

“Just kidding.” Steven interrupted. “Yeah, I’m afraid he’s right. One ball.”

Steven turned to the window to count mile-markers. James had scored right off the bat. He was actually kind of relieved that James had at least left one testicle. He tried to recover. He turned back around to Ashley.

"It doesn't look weird or anything. They gave me a metal ball to even things out and, um, the remaining one is three times stronger now, like when someone loses an eye and suddenly they can smell things far away...or underwater...or whatever."

"What? What are you talking about? There's no connection between your balls, eyes, nose and brain." Ashley said. "You really got one, though? Weird." She thoughtfully kicked around at the bottles and cans at her feet. "So where are we going to drink?"

"I told you. On my new boat." Steven said as he sat up straight. "I have my own boat." Then he realized that the lie had to be about James so he quickly added, "James doesn't have a boat." Pause. "I just let him hang out on mine sometimes, right?"

“That’s right.” James agreed with a smirk.

"There's no water out here." Ashley said as she hung on the back of Steven’s headrest.

"It rained recently though. You can smell it.” Steven said.

“So,” she said as James shook his head in disgust.

“You only need a mud puddle and you can-hell, you only need a bottlecap full of water and you can drown in it." Steven declared. "You never heard that? So where did I park my boat James? Right around here, ain’t it?"

"Yep." James smiled. "Hey, you wanna know how he got this boat, Ashley?"

"Don't call me Ashley,” she said, sitting back. “Suddenly I hate it. Something about how you guys say it. Coming out of your mouths, it sounds like an adverb. Call me Ash from now on, okay." James just stared in the rearview mirror and waited for her to answer his original question.

"How?" She took a long blink, tired of him staring.

Dreading the answer, Steven closed his eyes, rolled down his window and leaned his head out into the roar of the wind.

"I'm not sure myself." James said. “I know it didn't cost him any money though. All I know is I get a call a couple weeks back to come down to the water where it's docked and I'm looking all around for Steven, and all I see is this dude standing waist-deep in the water, right down in the middle of the boat-launch lane. This guy doesn't see me coming and I get right to the edge of the water when splash! up comes Steven like a dolphin, coughing and spitting all over. I'm all like, "dude?" and Steven looks all embarrassed and stutters "uhhh, I dropped the keys, I was looking for them with my hands and he was looking with his feet,” and I'm ready to believe him, because the other possibility is to hard for me to swallow, when suddenly this other guy laughs and gives Steven a quarter, yeah, that’s right, a fucking quarter, and he says, "see, I told you that you couldn't breathe through it!" Now what does that mean? I still don't know what that means. Can’t be good though."

"That didn't happen." Ashley declared.

"Steven tell her..." He didn't know that he’d just lost the game.

"I dropped my keys. That's what happened." Steven said. He didn’t know that he just won the game. He looked up at her, suddenly angry about something. "Ash? That doesn’t sound right. How about if we just never say your name at all? Ever."

James was confused. He wasn't sure if Steven's answer about the keys was breaking the rules of their game. Steven looked over, then behind him, then bumped the rearview mirror so that they couldn’t see each others eyes and it reflected nothing except sky.

How do they make mirrors anyway? He thought. Why do they keep working, even after you break them? That’s how I met her. I’ll have to remember to look that up later. . .

James and Steven exchanged a glare. Steven knew that they were both thinking too much and neither could remember what the rules were anymore.

That’s when they finally ran out of road.

James stopped the car on an incline. The headlights had been on, even though it had only grown dark enough in the last five minutes. He left the car in gear so i wouldn’t slide and, as he reached for the keys, he stopped and leaned forward on the steering wheel to stare out into woods. Steven looked too. Even Ashley grabbed the headrests to see.

The headlights were angled upward. The road had stopped at the top of a hill that was just high enough to aim the lights into the top of the trees. It was something none of them had seen before, as if two huge spotlights had been switched on and suddenly the night had a roof over it that no one had seen before.

There was something else. A movement up in those trees, branches and leaves rustling and falling silent and still as they watched.

Then Steven reached over, turned off the light and took the keys before James could react.

The sun was going fast, the night a wave of black ants carrying it over the horizon on their heads. Three shadows, two boys and a girl, were crunching through high grass and weeds. Every so often the girl would stop and listen for a river.

“We should go back in the car. There’s no water out here.” She said. “Three is a bad number anyway. The only time three people can get along, is in a car. Because the third person is separated.”

“Don’t worry.” One of the boys said. “No one’s gonna start fighting.”

“And no one is gonna start crying,” the other boy said.

“You two make me laugh,” the girl said as she kicked down a cattail. “I remember back to a time when boys used to actually fight over girls.”

“Got a joke for y’all,” one of the boys called from up ahead. “Crazy man is walking in the woods with two little kids and the kids suddenly start crying. Crazy man gets mad and says, ‘hey, what the hell are you two crying about? I’m the one who has to walk out of here all by myself!’”

“I don’t get it,” the other boy lied.

“Me neither,” she was telling the truth.

One of the boys tripped over a shark’s fin as they reached a clearing. He quickly turned around with his arms out to stop the other two.

"Hold up a second,” Steven said, stepping out in front of them in the last of the light. “James? You owe me a bottle of Tequila. Go back and get one." Steven turned to Ashley to explain, still forgetting the game was over. "James lost to me arm-wrestling. He looks stronger I know. No one can figure it out. He loses every time and he bets on it anyway. You remember the bet right? Bottle of Cuervo. And you gotta run the whole way back."

"Aren't you going to say that you were arm-wrestling with your elbows in broken glass and scorpions or something?" Ashley grumbled as she pushed passed him and stumbled. "Where the hell are we?"

"Close.” Steven said. “Watch out for sharks. . ."

James ran to catch up with her, going out of his way to stomp some cattails too. He leaned over and whispered.

"It wasn’t arm-wrestling. It was thumb-wrestling."

* * *

When they finally saw the shadow of the shipwreck in the distance, Ashley crouched down and gasped when she saw the sharks.

Steven had dug long trails through the grass with his feet and fingers to give the vinyl shark-fins a wake behind them, a path of figure-eights where someone could imagine they were circling the boat. Ashley started to crawl after one, dragging a heel behind her to trace one of the trenches. Steven quickly ran over to get in James' ear.

"I'm serious. Go get the Tequila. Now. On foot. You know the rules. I got the keys, remember?" he said, patting a jangling wad in his pocket.

"That'll take three fucking hours.” James said, watching her with his arms crossed. “Fuck that shit. I could just lie and say the fucking place burned down."

"You mean you could lie and say I burned the fucking place down.” Steven corrected. “Remember, you can only lie about me, and me about you. So go ahead and do that. And I’ll just say that you helped build a new one. We could do that shit all night. Just go. I’ll be invisible again when you get back anyway."

James sighed, watching her run her hands through the dirt in the last of the light. Steven grabbed his head to turn it towards him. James shoved his hands away and his eyes flashed in anger. Ashley was walking towards the boat, squinting at the name scrawled on the side.

"What's that say?” She asked. “What’s a ‘road sword?’ What’s that mean?"

James was walking backwards back into the woods. He yelled at them, eyes still blazing,

"Steven didn’t name the ship. I did. I'm the only one who knows the story behind the name. I'll have to tell you when I get back."

He started back-peddling faster and faster and faster into the trees. Steven and Ashley both waited for him to fall and he never did.

"No, you won't." Steven called out. "That's our secret, brother. Remember? You swore."

James was gone. They could still heard him running in the distance, along with the first rumble and hiss of rain. Steven counted the crash of his footsteps and he told himself that James would have had to turn around to be running that fast and not hitting anything. He wasn’t sure though. It made him nervous for no good reason.

Steven thought about how he would stare at things when he was a boy. How he would get scared when his vision blurred and things faded away. Whenever it happened, he’d get scared that he was the one vanishing, instead of the world.

He felt a rain drop on his nose and suddenly he smelled everything so strong he felt drunk. The earthworms, the weeds, something dead until a fallen tree. An animal had shit somewhere to his right, another had pissed somewhere to his left. He couldn’t see any of these things and knew there was no way to prove they were even there. There was one though.

The girl behind him in the dark. Her hair, heavy and black. The dirt, sweat and grass-stains on her elbows, fingers and knees.

* * *

Her eyes followed a bright orange electrical cord and the rusty caged light bulbs that hung from it around the small cabin of the shipwreck. The cord started at a hole kicked into the floorboards, she put a hand near the spot and she could smell the gasoline and feel the pumping of a generator. From there the cord crawled up the wall next to the right side of the door and took a sharp left turn at the first caged light, hanging from a nail in a dog-eared fuzzy black-light poster. On this poster was a picture of a blue and black poisonous frog with the caption:

"Eat a frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen all day."

She looked closer and saw that the word “frog” was crossed out and the word "spider" was scrawled under it. The frog also had extra legs and eyes drawn over it. Under that, someone had written:

"Jerk-off first thing in the morning and nothing better. . ."

She followed the cord past the spider-frog to the end of the wall where the next caged light was tied around the handle of a tiny dorm-room refrigerator. The cord climbed up over her head where another caged light dangled at the top of another black-light poster. This one was something she’d seen on a T-shirt once. Tiny skeletons in "69 Positions." She wondered why there weren't any black light bulbs in those cages. Maybe they didn't know what kind of posters they had. Or maybe they weren’t even their posters.

Below the sixty-nine skeletons was a ratty green love-seat that seemed to be growing out of the wall. Hunched over so she wouldn’t hit her head, she leaned down and tugged on it. It slid forward and one side dropped down, the leg rolling past her shoe. She could see that they had cut the love-seat in half to make it fit. She stared at the springs and wooden ribs sticking out the back and was reminded of the split dogs from her biology class. Or maybe she’d seen them in a movie. She pushed it back into the wall and thought of theater props. Fake stereos and TVs and fruit that decorated the stage and looked real enough until you touched it. She backed up to the doorway to look for Steven and tripped as her foot came down into a milk crate full of cassette tapes. She shook it loose, noticing that they were too small to have music on them. She could see shards of broken records piled in with them. The cabin was so small that there really was no empty space to speak of. She could almost touch two walls, the roof and the floor without moving.

Everything was touching everything. There was nowhere to walk, one full step in any direction was denied. She thought about a game she'd played when she was little. It was called "hot lava" and she played it with her three cousins whenever they spent the night. The idea was that the red carpet in the living room of her parents house would kill you if you touched it. So you jumped from tables to cushions to chairs to bookshelves and you tried to knock someone down into the "lava." It was a dangerous game and none of their parents ever knew they played it when they were gone. The girl always ended up breaking something while they arched their backs and twisted their bodies to keep any part from touching the floor. They took the danger so serious that they never even tried to push each other down.

She found the orange cord where she’d left off to finish its journey around the room. It stopped dead-center on a wall. There was a peak in the cord where a light and a nail were sticking out of a broken record. Someone had nailed it up for a fin, then drawn the rest of the shark on the wall around it with crayons. Crayons? She looked close at the drawing and saw that someone must have peeled the crayons to roll them and make the shark's lines thicker. Something a child would do on a wall. The caged light was the shark’s eye. She saw that this bulb was black. Of course the posters and the shark wouldn't glow unless the all the other lights were black or busted. She wondered if they knew that one black light was a waste of time.

There was a blue extension cord coming from the shark that she followed down to a stereo behind the open cabin door. It was a large stereo that looked even larger with the steering wheel someone had somehow attached to the volume knob. She reached down and turned it on. Nothing but static. She smiled and cranked the wheel like she was a getaway driver taking a corner. Steven quickly pushed his way in behind her to turn it back down.

“None of this is yours, is it?” she said, falling back onto the arm of the love-seat.

"What are you talking about?” he said, not answering the question. “Do you want to listen to music? There’s no reception out here."

"No.” she said, feet restlessly kicking at the air. “So what does the name mean?"

"What? The name of the ship? It means nothing." Steven admitted, giving up the secret in record time. "It just came out after we got drunk. It means something to James for some weird reason. It’s just two words that sound good together. Road and sword. Sword and road. . ."

“Not that. The “S. S.” thing. I always wanted to know what that shit means.”

“No idea.” Steven muttered, angry that he’d broke his promise with James for nothing.

“Then why did you put it on there?”

“Ask him. It’s a little boy thing. The make up words for no reason. No one stops to listen or they’d hear a whole string of nonsense every time one of them climbed a tree.

“Why just little boys?” Ashley’s feet started peddling the air as if on a bicycle. “Little girls are even more misunderstood.” Her feet slowed down, then started peddling in the other direction.

“I doubt that.” Steven laughed. “So what do you want to-”

"Tell me a story about you." Her feet suddenly stopped and she was crawling across the sofa, careful not to touch the ground.

“What are you-”

“Tell me a story.”

Ashley was licking her fingers, trying to unscrew one of the white bulbs without getting burned. She hissed every time she touched it until finally she turned it enough for it to flutter and wink out.

“Can’t think of one right now.”

“Which one is harder to think of? A true story or a lie.”

“A true story.”

“Then quit it. Keep playing the game.” Ashley stopped unscrewing a bulb and looked around the cabin. “You know what? You three should have a mirror in here,” she said. “To make it look bigger inside. You gonna tell me a story or not?”

“There’s only two of us.” Steven climbed up next to her and moved in close.

“You sure?” She asked as her hand came up between their faces. He breathed in deep, smelling the burn of bulb mixed with the grass and soil on her fingertips.

"Back up.” Ashley said quietly. “We aren't going to do anything."

"Why not?" Steven asked, reaching out to follow her lead and unscrew another bulb.

"Why not what?” She sighed. Then she saw what he was doing. “No, not that one!"

His hand slipped when she yelled and the black light shattered over their heads, a puff of glass and dust rained down as they pinched their eyes and mouths shut.

"That's the only one I wanted on." She said after a moment, then gently picked a piece of black glass out of her hair.

"Don’t worry about that bulb. I got something else that makes the posters and the shark glow better than any black light. So why can't we do anything?" He repeated.

"I'm bleeding."

Confused, Steven quickly grabbed her hands and held them under the shark’s eyes.

"Did I cut you?"

“No. That’s not what I meant.”



-© 2003 david james keaton

::: david - 9:02 PM [+] :::
...

“It’s late September and I really should be back at school...grad school...truck driving school...any school...”
- Maggie May (as performed by The Bucketmen)

“Why does he have nine fingers? Where is the ring of doom...”
- Return of the King cartoon

“Because. That. Would. Be. A. Waste. Of. Time.”
- Point Break (spoken by a Chili Pepper who is gesturing way too much between words)



restless lately. think i need to get into grad school or something. something. i'll get back to that by the end of this post.

so here’s the movies i’ve been watching this week since i still don’t have any cable or local stations over here:

“Lost Highway” (aka “Do You Remember What This Was About? Fuck It. Keep Going”)

“Point Blank” (no, not “Point Break” i’ll get back to this one in a second)

“Payback” (excellent cars, blue filters and funk music. required viewing after “Point Break,” i mean, “Point Blank”)

“Get Carter” (both versions. required viewing after “Payback”)

“The Limey” (required viewing after “Get Carters” and those “P” movies. tell you why in a minute)

“Ghosts...of the Civil Dead” (no, not “...of the Civil War.” worth the time just to watch Nick Cave draw skeletons in blood all over his prison cell)

“Slacker” (his first and still his best)

“Waking Life” (aka “Talking Talk.” just “Slacker” all over again except not switching main characters when they cross paths. a fatal flaw. also with some Phil Dick and “Vanilla Sky” thrown in to fuck it up more)

“The Vanishing” (both versions because there’s things i like and dislike in both. i like the original ending in the first. i like the extra time spent with the nutjob in the remake)

"Naked" (some of the best dialogue ever, one of the best openings ever, starting with the main character raping someone then spending two hours with him and impossibly he becomes sympathetic. i’ve tried the “point of no return” opening several times. The dead baby story is one. i also did a “Crash” inspired knock-off in a loooooong story called “Perfect Jealous Soldiers” that opened with a moment so disgusting that two girls in my writing workshop protested it)

so yeah, the revenge movies up there? here’s the chronology as near as i can figure:

- Donald Westlake (aka George Stark) writes the book “The Hunter” way back when.

- some British dude gets inspired by the simple (Stark!) hard-boiled tale and writes “Jack’s Return Home,” a book with similar names, situations and style.

- 1967 - John Boorman makes “Point Blank” with Lee Marvin as the character “Walker” who gets shot in the back and decides to rampage through some psychedelic late-60s shit. based on the book “The Hunter.”

- 1971 - the brits step it up and Mike Hodges makes “Get Carter” based on “Jack’s Return Home.” Michael Caine’s finest moment by far. and that’s saying something considering he’s done, what, six thousand movies? check out this flick and be amazed at how nasty that motherfucker is. watch for him to smile when he realizes he left his girlfriend in the trunk of a car that’s going over a cliff. oops.

- the same year “Vanishing Point” and “Two Lane Blacktop” come out suggesting that there was a “little black spot on the sun today...” or at least an eclipse or something that conjured up all these existential masterpieces.

- 1988 - “Point Break” comes out and its biggest impact on me (besides me calling everyone “Johnny Utah” for about a
year) is that i will forever get this movie confused with “Point Blank.”

- 1999 - Brian Helgeland and Mel Gibson remake “Point Blank” with Gibson playing “Porter” instead of “Walker” but obviously basing his charter on “Carter.” the movie is way better than it should be considering the studio tinkering after audiences didn’t want to “root for the bad guy” (like the poster said). things that saved the movie: the cars, the music, Kris Kristofferson saying “talk before you find out what your left nut tastes like” and the hammer party the goons have on Gibsons bare feet: “this little piggy stayed home!” squash.

- 1999 - Steven Soderburgh decides to pay tribute to ALL these things by cramming them all into one surprising slooooooow movie called “The Limey” he uses Terrance (“kneel before Zod!”) Stamp to play an obvious Walker/Carter/Porter character, and also hired Barry Neuman (the guy who finally found “The Vanishing Point” in the movie of the same name) and Peter Fonda to stack the deck for 60s/70s nostalgia. he also uses clips from Stamps movie “Poor Cow” (aka “Poor Man’s Get Carter”) as flashbacks for Wilson (aka Walker aka Carter aka Porter) and this turns out to be the best idea he ever had. the movie is slow as snails fucking and somehow excellent in spite of it. just like “Two Lane Blacktop.”

- 2000 - “The Limey” up there is where it all should have ended. in a perfect world maybe. however, someone shat out a “Get Carter” remake with Stallone as Carter and actually it wasn’t as awful as expected for a couple reasons: strangely pleasing techno soundtrack. lots of rain. Michael Caine (the original “Carter”) shows up to tower over everything. Sly don’t talk much. Mickey Roarke. specifically, Mickey Roarke actually breaking Stallone’s ribs. true story. see number twelve on this list.

i like those movies. they make me write better. watch:

See Jack run.

See Jack get revenge.

speaking of movies. enough time has passed and everyone agrees that Lord of the Rings is the greatest thing since that new tuna in the pouch so it’s time to criticize it!

what’s up with all that whining Frodo does in those movies? listen to that little bitch for five seconds:

“the weight of this ring is unbearable....oh the burden is heavy...oh it tugs at my very soul...oh i cannot continue Sam I Am, i cannot eat green eggs and ham...oh the weight on my shoulder is like a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters....oh when does this burden end...oh how it pulls me to the ground as if i had a brick tied to my balls...”

for fuckssake Frodo, suck it up. it’s just a ring. i mean, maybe if the Hobbits were like, mouse-sized i could see how heavy it is. because then it would look like he was dragging a hubcap. but since he’s is NOT mouse-sized, he needs to suck it up and quit the whimpering. wait, i’ve got it! or put the ring on his toe! there you go! problem solved! i mean, they got those big hairy hobbit feet, stick the damn thing on his big toe. bam! skip all the way to Mount Doom. and that would throw everyone off too. the bad guy would be all confused at what he was seeing, and hell the ring probably wouldn't have any effect on a toe. less “unbearable” weight. i’m serious, the toe is the solution. did anyone try it? nope. and it automatically adjusts for any size so i say stick it on his Hobbit dick if he has too. those big-ass feet probably means Hobbits are hung like race-horses. give me the damn rign, i’ll carry it. i’d have all sorts of fun with the “Ring of Doom” to break up the monotony of that trip. give everyone a surprise when they look into those crystal balls:

“i see the end of the world and the city of Gondor in ruins and-whoa-what the fuck is that? damn Halflings are high again...”

just like the good old days when you sneak someone’s camera at a party to stick it down your shorts for a surprise snapshot when they get their memories developed. i’m thinking maybe we’re not getting the whole story about how Frodo came back home with nine fingers instead of ten.

speaking of “Vanishing Point,” time for a road trip. gonna hang with some college friends. i’m still going through these phases where i don’t really feel like i live here and i jump on the chance to drive to Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Detroit or Millbury to do things i could easily do right here. maybe it’ll wear off eventually. i don’t know. okay, my first song for the drive is on deck and ready to go. Social Distortion “Down Here With The Rest Of Us.” off “White Heat, White Light, White Trash.” i highly recommend buying, downloading or stealing it just for that song. it’s perfect for pulling out onto a gray slush-covered road.

hey! speaking of Cleveland, remind me to tell you the story of the mental patient i used to live next to back in school. this dude was actually insane and it ended up being an infectious condition. i don’t have time to type it out today.

one more thing. as i do hundreds of push-ups between paragraphs and look forward to driving today with a smile, i realize that i think about things too much and, even though you would think that would help with creativity and writing and my mood, it actually makes me less productive and dark. so it stops now. no more pondering things six ways and feeling bad when i see someone hating their life while they watch the clock at the gas station and ring up my ice cream. i will set a new level of detachment that anyone who knew me will find familiar. this is “the new way.’ check it out. i’ll just be doing shit from now on with little or no reasoning. like putting this small rubber globe on top of my left speaker. see that? no telling what i’ll do. and more driving. yeah. driving good.

ready.
set.
go.

::: david - 4:25 PM [+] :::
...

“Shake it like a Polaroid picture.”
- Outkast - Hey Ya!

“It’s all true: Oz is over the rainbow, God is an astronaut, and Midian is where the monsters go...”
- Nightbreed (spoken by the Rastafarian-looking creature that kept yapping about “meat for the beast!”)


notice how fast i throw up a post after a story since i know my fiction is like kryptonite to my readers. here’s a picture from the bar/crawl Christmas Caroling session. i’m the poltergeist in the background, the ghost of someone who died in that bar last Christmas. normally i haunt the end of the bar, arm wrapped around a drink like a prison lunch, but here i’m hovering over the revelers all happy ‘n shit. not sure what bar that was. that night we hit seven total:

Piper’s Pub
Zythos
Smokin’ Joe’s
Casey’s Draft (aka The Shire)
Mario’s
Jack’s
and finally some place called Bar 11?

a bit disappointed that the last one wasn’t actually the eleventh bar of the evening but what can you do.

somebody was saying (or maybe i was reading) about the Outkast song “Hey Ya!” causing a normally sour-faced thug in some bar to smile and hug strangers. apparently Andre 3000 aka Billy Ocean brings everyone together. i agree that his picture on that cd (the pose with the pink gun) is much more interesting than the other dude doing the pimp act. his music too. more Prince than Prince lately. hey, anyone remember the end of “Major League” though? when the spike-haired punk hugged the construction worker, looked horrified, then hugged him again? funny shit.

speaking of music, the Darling Nikki remake? and that Baker Street remake? and that Behind Blue Eyes remake? and that Drift Away remake? new rule:

no one is allowed to remake songs that i’ve always liked. so stop doing it. and what about Audioslave using all the good scenes from “Vanishing Point” for that highway song? something really wrong with that. not just when he says “This radio station is named “Audioslave” instead of “Kowalski” but because they ruin a movie by showing too much just to make their song sound good. makes me angry. that movie is on my DVD wish-list with “Wild At Heart” and “Lost Highway (aka “Plot Be Damned”). “Naked Lunch” was up at the top until it finally got crossed off this year.

special award to “J” for infecting my vocabulary with his phrase “smash that shit” which roughly translates as: “do not give it too much thought, my brother. just fuck her.”

this has since morphed into the likes of “smash that shit with impunity,” “no i didn’t see that red light officer, i had shit to smash” and “like Shakespeare once said, “smash that shit, good sir, lest another man smash it instead...”

and why i’m thinking about it, let me defend myself because i guess i’ve been giving the impression on Fishfry’s website and other places that i’m this surly relationship-hater. not true, i’m for all for all kinds of relationships, i just don’t want to read about them. or at least the happy ones. because it’s kind of like watching cars driving instead of crashing or a clock running smoothly instead of going through the window. it’s just not as interesting. and when someone starts talking about that on their site and all that it just reminds me of what comedian Bill Hicks said about “the miracle of birth” he was saying how everyone always says “it’s a miracle” and he would go into this rant where he crouched over the stage and acted like he was some trailer-court idiot squeezing out offspring like someone taking a shit and saying stuff like, “there you go! another miracle! we’ll call this miracle, son of forklift driver....”

and he’s got a point (i mean, he had a point, he’s dead now). seriously, fingernails are a fucking miracle if you think about it. and how about the way our eyeballs work? that whole “green to me is green to you” mind-scrambler is much harder to understand than birth, love and relationships. i mean, c’mon. you all over someone guy or girl at a party because of the position of their mouth in relation to the position of their eyes and the large breasts that can suckle your potential offspring and the large genitals that are more likely to impregnate? hey, i’m all for it too, and i’m just as much a victim to the ole “survival of the fittest” mentality, i just recognize how ridiculous that shit is when people talk about it in spacey emotional terms. you can pretend you want a soul mate but your migrating towards strength and beauty every time. but i swear i’d take a dark sense of humor over a perfect body any day.

that’s where Fishfry had a good point, when she said that someone that’s physically perfect can be the “no spark” thing. and she’s right of course. it can also be referred to a “meat for the beast” (spoken in creepy Hellraiser voice). i hadn’t thought of it that way when i was ranting about someone using the “no spark” excuse when they really want to say, “funny looking” or “ears all fucked up.”

that reminds me, speaking of babies (to show that i’m still the hypocrite i’ve always been, the exception will always be anyone i know personally): congrats to my friend Dan and his new daughter who gave her a perfect three letter name that is also a palindrome.

back to speaking of relationships for a second, then i’m done. i think that internet ones might last the same length of time as ones out in the real world. is it just me, or do people get less interested and drift away from regular websites right around the six month mark? sure, they get replaced with new bright-eyed visitors, but maybe that’s a set length of time for anyone to invest in another human and learn all they care too? just a thought. i try not to do it, but i wonder sometimes. i’ve only been on here for about six months so, if i’m still around, i’ll see if it cycles through like that again. right at the six-month mark every time, people start to fade away. freaky deaky.

letters from my stepbrother in Iraq. troubling, interesting and a relief. all wrapped up in one package.

a train is going by with boxcars stacked on the boxcars. it looks like two trains got stuck together. like they were magnets. hopefully the day will come where there’s three boxcars stacked up like that.

i want to work on a train. that would be like being paid to be in a car, without having to worry about driving. all the momentum, none of the responsibility.

::: david - 5:31 PM [+] :::
...

“If you need a different face, it’s definite time to destroy this place.”
- "Brand New Love" - Debadoh/Deadsy



FICTION:



Sword Fighting (part 2)



That night, Steven's uncle drove for a several hours along the river to find someone he used to know. An old man with the improbable name of “Joey.” He owned a marina and he owed his uncle at least one favor.

“That's right,” Steven’s uncle told them. “Joey, not Joe. Even though he’s way too old to be carrying that “y” on his name. I think it means something in Australian.”

They finally found it, a small pier and a hanger, no lights, boats or little boys in sight. They stepped from their vehicles to stretch their legs, then jumped back when the garage door flew up fast like a map in a classroom. Joey limped out into their headlights and began to circle the boat with a keyhole-saw in his hand, ready to go to work. The man was old. Gray and sunburned at the same time, and after his third lap around the book, Steven was sure that one of his legs was at least a foot shorter than the other, giving him more of a skip or hop than a limp.

He got close and his red face looked like it hurt. Steven thought he looked like he'd been outside in the sun for the first time the day before. The sixth time around the boat, Joey was laughing and swinging the saw by the blade instead of the handle, like there was no reason to use it.

Steven’s uncle shrugged as if to say “you’re each other’s problem now” then unhooked his trailer and drove away.

The boys explained what they wanted. Joey pinched his face like an angry baby then sighed and said that they first needed to cut out the rotted sections and plug the hull the cheapest, easiest way he knew how. Joey pointed them to a stack of plywood against the wall, then dropped the keyhole saw, tape measure, hammer and nails in a pile at their feet.

They worked for six hours.

Joey drank the beer Steven's uncle had left for him and barked orders for the corner. He watched them the entire time, never yawning once. He leaned back on a three-story stack of beer cans he'd arranged on the garage floor. He'd pull one out and drink it, then work the empty can back under his ass and into the aluminum pyramid where it had come from. He said he'd stay up and “help” as long as he didn't fall off the cans.

And he never did, even after he’d emptied them all.

Steven's job was cutting square holes around the rot and prying out the damaged sections. James’ job was measuring the new holes, cutting matching pieces, nailing plugs over the gaps and sealing the seams with black tape.

“Imagine the ship is bleeding.” Joey told them. “Imagine you got to work fast to plug those holes before it bleeds to death. Imagine you got one chance.”

When it was too dark, and they started slowing down, Joey brought out a string of rusty caged lead-lights, hung them along the rail above all the holes, spit on one of the bulbs and smiled while it sizzled. They speeded back up.

While they were patching the last hole, Joey walked out, then came back with a handful of chocolate cake in his fist. He watched them, amused enough to drop his cake and spend the next fifteen minutes trying to pick a piece up off the floor big enough to eat. Steven turned to watch the struggle out of the corner of his eye. Joey’s thick red fingers turning every piece of cake into a rain of crumbs before it got anywhere near his mouth. He finally caught Steven staring and wiped a shaking hand across his cracked lips and grunted:

“Fuck you lookin’ at? That was my birthday cake. No candles but guess what I wished for anyway?”

“For a piece of plastic fruit your fingers won’t crush, Frankenstein?” James called out from under the boat.

“Fuck you, boy.”

Steven went back to sawing into the hull, imagining those fingers trying to eat an orange, juice blinding him as he squeezed it to pulp trying to peel it. He imagined him bringing a styrofoam cup of coffee to his mouth and his thumb popping through the side with a splash. He imagined him trying to clean a cat box, piece after piece of clumped litter exploding into a rain of urine with every touch...

Then a red hand covered his and he looked down to see the blade dangerously close to his fingers. The red hand was steady as rock five miles underground.

“Watch what you’re doing.” Joey’s voice in his ear, swirling around the hot exhaust of alcohol, cherry cigars and chocolate cake.

The last hole plugged, the boys backed up from the boat, wiping sweat and sawdust onto the clean spots on their arms, blinking at the work they’d done.

"Can we drop it in the water tonight?" James asked.

“Nope.” Steven shook his head and said quietly, almost to himself:

"It's too hot out for night. . ."

"What? Shut up dude." James blew something off the end of his nose. "Wait, what did you say? You sounded like a girl just then. Serious. Never whisper anything again, okay?"

Joey sighed and spit at James’ feet then walked back to the pyramid of beer cans. He dragged the side of his foot through the stack to finally bring down the impossible structure crashing down. The empties rattled and rolled away, filling the garage with a blast of noise. One can was left wobbling where the pyramid used to be, like a stubborn five pin in the last frame. Joey grinned and quickly picked it up, cracking it with a hiss.

"Last man standing." He said. "I do the math in my head. Always know when there's one
left." He took a long drink, then answered James. "No."

"Why not? What's left to do?"

"Nothing."

Steven turned away and climbed aboard. He started banging around inside the cabin, looking for anything.

"Then when can we float it?" James whined.

"Never."

"Why the fuck not?" James was stomping over to Joey.

"’Cause it'll sink dummy. Those holes ain't sealed. They just make it look better."

"Then why the fuck-"

"Listen. I don't know how to fix a boat."

"What did we just do all night, asshole?"

Joey bounced the last can off James' chest.

"Work."

Steven's head and hands suddenly sprang out of a window. He was holding a stack of old records in one hand and a stack of broken records in the other.

"Look what I found! Labels are all scratched off though. What do you think that little bastard was doing? Who's records was he breaking? Maybe he was flinging them off the boat at birds or dogs or. . ." James rolled his eyes and turned back to Joey.

"I said, what did we just do?" He stepped forward, inches from Joey’s red and gray face, the smell of sweat and coughdrops coming off him in waves, making James blink.

"Work. I said."

"No. We just wasted the whole fucking night." They were nose to nose. Steven came out and started to climb down.

"No. You didn't" Joey explained, still smiling. "You boys worked hard. You worked for something. You can't dock that thing here anyway. It's not my place. I just keep that pier out there sunk in the mud. Something about this place, nothing ever sticks in the ground. That’s why no one ever docks here. Every night I hammer the four-by-fours with a sledge. Worst job I ever had." He turned away and started rounding up the caged lights, wrapping them fast around his forearms. Elbow to thumb. Elbow to thumb. Elbow to thumb. He stopped to retrieve a thin cherry cigar from the corner of a toolbox. Half was ash, hanging and ready to fall. He tried to reach into a pocket for a light, arms bound against his chest from the electrical cords like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Incredibly he came up with a lighter and sparked the flame. James slapped it away.

"Hey motherfucker. . ."

Before he knew what had happened, James was ten feet away on his back. Joey grabbed a fistful of cord and snapped it high above his head like a bullwhip. A wave traveled down the line of lights to where James was rising and a hot caged lightbulb came off the boat and caught James in the chin. He stumbled backwards feet slipping in the grease and oil on the floor as he tried to keep his balance. He went back down, the back of his head mercifully connecting with the rubber bumper on the garage door and then he was gone. A grumble of disgust outside in the dark. Joey turned his attention to Steven, and even through the beer, he spoke clear and strong.

"Listen up. You boys aren't sailing anywhere. I know your type. All you wanted was a treehouse without the tree. Then you surprised me. You did something tonight, you didn't really fix it, you worked on it though. You did some work. You earned it. Don’t ya get it? You can pretend you built the whole friggin' thing now. And I'll tow it anywhere you want, and that's where it's gonna stay. On dirt, on grass, on the road, where ever. Never water though. That don’t matter. It's yours now. That'll have to be enough. You did something here tonight. You ate up six hours with hard work just like that." He snapped his fingers in Steven’s face then turned his attention to the floor. He started to bend down and couldn’t with the tangle of yellow cord and lights around his arms so he walked to a dark corner and started kicking around junk and cans on the floor. After a moment, his feet found what they wanted and he kicked something outside to where James was sulking. It rolled and stopped at James' feet and he kicked it back into the light. At first Steven thought it was a beer can until he heard the balls rattling around inside. Spray paint. Steven thought back to a time when he’d put a can of spray paint into his father’s vise to crack it open and see what those balls looked like. Just as he turned the crank, his dad came into the garage and tackled him before it could blow up in his face. Steven couldn’t understand why he’d been so angry.

Joey said, "You can spend the night on it now. It's yours. Spend the night on it tonight and paint a name on it. Raise a flag."

They stared at him as he turned back to the cigar nub on the toolbox and picked it up. The tube of ash broke off and started to roll. Those red fingers snatched it up before it fell to the floor. He held the ash up to the light, fingers so steady, Steven thought that the clocks had stopped. The ash never broke as he inspected it, then dropped it into the front pocket of his overalls and walked away. Steven was the only one who heard the last thing he said to them.

“Wasted on you.”


* * *


Steven and James creaked around on the deck under the sun. Throats stinging from vomit, smelling like bar rags, sweat rising off their shoulders like the shimmer of summer on asphalt. James stopped and stared down over the rail, confused at what he was seeing. Then he remembered. They had broken most of the records Steven had found in the cabin. Cracked them into black triangles and then stabbed them into the ground. They had tried to imagine sharks circling their ship, fins cutting through the grass.

"What did we name it?"

"I can’t remember. I thought you named it. You're the one with the purple fingers."

"Wait, I remember now. I think. . .” Steven said, staring at his stained hands. “. . .so what the hell is a 'roadsword'?"

"You spelled it different. It just sounds like ‘roadsword.’ Only our ship is called 'r-o-w-d-z-o-r-d' or something equally Lovecraftian."

"Why?

“I said I don’t-”

There was the sound of a gentle metal chime in the sky above their heads. They both looked to the top of the pole and blinked. Steven hooded his eyes against the sun, then closed them when he saw it.

"What the fuck?” James muttered. “Who raised that little fucker’s pirate flag again?"

"I don't know. You did. Or I did." Steven lied. "I still want to know why we named it what we named it?"

"Who knows? Who cares? Do me a favor? Put your fucking hand down. You look like you’re saluting that flag." He looked down over the rail again and started picking at a splintered section of the hull. “What the fuck did you do? This was one of the holes that I fixed."

Steven came over to look. It was the spray can, stuck in the side of the boat. The wood was cracked and splintered all around it. The can had burst into a flower of metal and surrounding the crater was a bright supernova of purple.

"You christened it, remember?”

“No.” James corrected him. “You christened it. And you wouldn’t stop. You said you were trying to get the metal balls out of the can. You said that you put a paint-can in a vice once when you were little. To get the balls out. . .”

“Yeah yeah. And he ran in and tackled me. I was just thinking about that.”

“No, that’s not what you said. You said that your dad was standing behind you, waiting to see if the can would really explode. Then, when nothing happened, he shoved you too the ground. You said he punished you by taking the vice off the workbench forever and keeping it in his trunk. No more toy crushing for you! You were almost crying."

"Fuck you, I wasn’t crying. So where's the balls." Steven asked as he turned away, choking back something hot in his throat.

"You swallowed it." James suddenly pulled his T-shirt up over his head. "Pull that can out of the hull, dude. We need to raise our own flag."

"C'mon, let's just keep that boys flag up there. His was good. We got to name the ship. What kind of animal do you think that skull was..."

James wasn't listening. He leaned over and wrestled the burst can from the hole. He paced the deck, scraping his fingers around inside, trying to find spots where it was still wet. Then he got down and pulled his shirt off over his head. He stretched his shirt open with his knees, trying to smear their new name onto it. He spit on his fingers to keep it going but about halfway through he ran out of paint. His mouth was too dry to keep spitting and he was close to puking again so he stopped. James jumped overboard and started pulling up handfuls of grass.

"I gotta at least get the S.S. on there." He explained, grinding grass-stains into the shirt.

"You don't even know what S.S. stand for."

"Neither do you." He stopped and looked at it.

"Looks like shit." Steven offered.

James stood silent, his eyes creeping skyward again to the sound of the boy's flag catching the morning wind.

"You're right dude.” James said, voice muffled as he pulled the shirt back on over his head. “That one’s good enough. You know what? I think you were right about those records. He never listened to them. I think he was making sharks out of them too..."

As he was climbing back onboard, Steven grabbed him by the elbow.

"Do something for me, " Steven said. "If anyone asks what the name means, swear you can't tell. Say it's a secret. Our secret."

"Who is ever going to see that stupid fucking name? Who's going to care what-"

"Just promise me.” Steven said. “Please? C'mon. We'll have a secret. Best friends last as long as their secrets."

“Fuck off.”

“Dude, I’m serious. Secrets are good. I’d say ‘shake on it’ if there were enough flies around to tie on your fingers. . .”

"It's not a secret.” James said, pulling away. “It's bullshit, dude. You're saying that best friends last as long as they lie about having a secret. You're not my best friend and you know it. We're just bored together, stuck together. . ."

"Forget it then." He leaned out and stared into the grass, listening to the slap of the flag. He whispered to himself. “Don’t you wish there were really sharks out there in the grass?"

James ignored him.

Later, when he was alone on the ship, he found a spoon in the corner full of dead flies. Even though the spoon was dry, Steven knew that they had drowned.



-© 2003 david james keaton

::: david - 5:16 PM [+] :::
...

“They say they found my high school ring clutched in your fingers tight...”
- Teen Angel

“They say they found my high school ring...imbedded in your eye...”
- Teen Angel (as performed by The Bucketmen)


i like it here. another boat went by outside. this time at night. it’s not like a car, not nearly as many lights or noises. i had to look twice to make sure that’s what i was seeing. something big, slowly creeping by in the dark. cool. as. fuck.

got to hang with some ex-college friends this weekend. mostly females which is always worth the drive. just the opposite of Carnegie Mellon University and it’s notorious Daves-to-Girls ratio. but as smart and interesting as the females are that i like to surround myself with and made friends with back in the day, they sometimes will revert to talking about (sigh) relationshits. i mean, relationships. problem is, my perspective sometimes hurts more than it helps. that reminds me of a story a girl was telling me about how her dude proposed to her:

she said, “we went on a hike, climbing hills for hours, we were actually lost for awhile, sweating and coughing when he finally got down on one knee..."

i interrupt to say, “well, at least he didn’t try to make shit all perfect, at least it was a more interesting situation, with you sweating and all that.”

she says, "yeah, it was cool. he found an arrowhead and gave it to me and said that it was symbolic and that’s why he’d decided to-”

red flag. my bullshit detector is in overdrive.

“wait, hold on.” i say. “so he wouldn’t have proposed if he hadn’t found that arrowhead?”
“i guess. so what?”
“what did it look like?”
“huh?”
“big? small?”
“this big.” fingers 3 inches apart.
“what color?”
“rock color.”
“did you see him find it?”
“yeah.”
“did you see him pick it up?”
“i think. why?”
“nothing. go on, you were saying?”
“anyway, it was cool because the last time we went hiking out there i found an arrowhead. and he said he almost proposed to me back then.”
“whoa. back up. he found one years before? okay, remember when you said you were lost? who was lost?”
“he was. he’s the one who goes there.”
“yeah, no shit. think about it. don’t you think that he might have been lost looking for the arrowhead he stashed so he could find it in front of you and then act like it inspired him to-”

angry looks coming my way. people seem to think that it’s cool that he went to all this trouble to make this moment but i contend that this manufactured moment, and therefore the entire proposal and resulting union, will be based on a LIE.

(by the way, “relationshit” was a typo in a script i was writing with my friend Rachel and, when she circled it, it wasn’t to correct my grammar, instead she thought it would make a good name for a band. she also thought of “Toxic Shock Syndrome” for an all girls band. seeing how i wrote a story based on the instructions to a box of tampons, i thought that was a brilliant idea. i hear there is a band with that name now. she thought of it first. i was there)

anyway, don’t think that i ruined everyone’s night or anything. drinking and college flashbacks can erase any memory of me potentially fucking up someone’s beautiful pink memories. hell, at least that dude was trying right? at least he gave it some thought, right? wrong.

arrowhead my ass. i'd take that thing to the fucking lab. try to find “made it Taiwan” or a barcode on that back of it. he was right though. it is symbolic.

i should talk though. i remember giving my high school class ring to a girl by sticking it on a teddy bear. i think that ring ended up coming back to me by being bounced off my chest in the lunch room. now that’s a break-up. ring rattling across a lunch tray. where’s the 80’s music for that scene? still a fond memory though. the things we used that teddy bear to clean up...

in other news:

- S.W.A.T ain’t good. change one letter in the title and it would be.

- i just realized i've passed ten thousands hits to this site. thanks. please continue to read.

- a girl’s apartment, hands, car keys and cds all smell good. even when they have cats. their cats must shit bubblegum and rosebuds or something.

- i've rewritten the opening of the short story below (above?) so that it makes more sense when no one reads it.

- there is a creepy red glowing cross on the hill overlooking my apartment.

epilogue:

just got back some pictures from our night of Bar Christmas Caroling. i'll post some later (i can only do one at a time) but let's get this out of the way. for the ones out there who doubted the existence of Santa, Jesus AND the midget that lived on the bar at a place called Casey's:

here he is!

check him out, all small. did he sell his soul? you decide. that red curtain behind him (next to his right elbow) is the entrance to his little treehouse at the end of the bar. hey, what if there's another little house in there, with people even smaller than him??? madness! ain't he cute though? don't you just want to run around with him under your arm like a football?

::: david - 4:47 PM [+] :::
...

" When suppertime came the old cook came on deck sayin' "fellas it's too rough to feed ya. . ."
at seven p.m. a main hatchway caved in, he said "fellas it's been good to know ya."
- "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" - Gordon Lightfoot



FICTION:



Sword Fighting (part 1)



"It's too hot out for night."

That's what the little boy said when they walked up on the shipwreck in the grass. The boy's small round head was framed in the one window on the boat where the glass was still intact. Even though he was hiding inside a boat in his yard, and even though he was just a little boy, his voice was huge and startling, echoing out of the other busted windows frames like they were stereo speakers.

"You can't come aboard. It's too bad ‘cause you know what happens when it’s too hot out for night? It means a storm’s comin’. Big waves. You'll all drown out there. . ."

James actually glanced down at the grass before he caught himself. It made him angry, as if the boy had lied to him about his shoe being untied when actually his zipper was down.

"Listen you little punk, we're miles from water.” Steven said, looking to the house for grown-ups. “Where's your daddy? It’s his lucky day. We want to buy this pile of shit."

The boy disappeared, then popped up out of one of the broken cabin windows. He pointed at James and looked to Steven for help.

"Tell him that you can drown in water out there,” the boy said. “In any amount of water." The boy grinned. Front teeth gone. "Tell him that he could drown in a frisbee full of water. Tell him that's all you'd need!"

Steve nodded at this and turned to James.

"He's got a poi-"

A huge silver disc suddenly cracked Steven upside the head. It came hard with a splash that, for an instant, Steven mistook for blood. He wiped his mouth. Just water. He looked for the object, it was too heavy and hard to be a frisbee.

"You little fucker!" He sputtered. "Go get your fucking dad!" He rubbed his head and picked up the boy’s weapon. It was a hubcap. Steven turned it over and angled it to catch the moonlight. A pirate's skull and bones were drawn on it in black.

"Do we really want to buy this thing?" Steven was suddenly uneasy. For some reason he was disturbed with the boy's first words to them.

Too hot for night?

The words suddenly took Steven back to when he was little and worried about everything. For some reason, he always thought that any record high temperature in the summer meant the end of the world. He smiled at the thought and walked towards James, shaking his head and trying to spin the hubcab on his finger like a basketball.

"Seriously dude. I mean, we'll never get it in the water. It would sink sooooo fast if we did. And aren't we too old for a clubhouse?"

"No." James snatched the hubcap away, shook out the rest of the water, and side-armed it as hard as he could. James was going for the one window on the boat, but it didn't catch enough air and it went straight down, hitting the ground at his feet then rolled back past him. His bad throw seemed to change his mind about something.

"Fuck this shit.” James mumbled. Then, to the ship, “Yo kid! Just wait, I'm going to get real bored sometime, then I'm gonna come back here and burn your boat down. . ."

He trailed off, the reflection of something metal and new and gold catching his eye from somewhere on the ship. Steven followed James’ slack-jawed stare and blinked when he saw what he was looking at.

A brass flag pole. Catching the last of the sun. Bright, gold and burning in the twilight. And something was climbing to the top. Something black and boiling on the end of a rope. Something twitching to fly. All three boys knew what it was before the wind finally unrolled it with a snap.

The boy was raising a flag. A skull and bones, of course, except this version was more bizarre than the grin on the hubcap. The boy had spent more time on his pirate flag. There were more than five crossed bones behind the skull, and too many eyes to count. And the skull wasn’t human. It was a drawing based on the bones of some crazy animal and it make Steven wonder if the boy had peeled the head on some creature to use it for a model.

What kind of beast had a head like that? He thought as he checked the horizon for smoke stacks or power lines or cooling towers. Mutation? What is that boy hiding in there? Finally another boy besides me that actually hides things worth hiding. . .

Steven and James stared at the skull for several seconds, listening to the sounds of it whip-lashing in the wind. It reminded him of the time he tried to pitch a tent in his backyard. He snapped the tent over and over, trying to unroll it, and every time he did, his neighbor’s cat pounced on top, or ran under it to hide and he’d have to start over. He remembered how he sneaked back inside as soon as it got dark, how he ended up sleeping on the floor next to his father’s bed after he’d planned to sleep in the yard for weeks. He smiled and locked eyes with the boy. He was leaning against the brass pole, arms crossed, still daring them to climb aboard.

Steven turned to James and watched the anger drain from his face as the hubcap dropped to the grass. He knew what he was thinking. Together they started walking towards the house.

The boy screamed in protest. His flag had backfired. The flag was strange and beautiful and perfect and it was enough for Steven and James to change their minds right there on the spot. They weren’t too old to sail a pirate ship. Never too old to raise a pirate's flag.


* * *


The shipwreck in the grass had no engine, no wiring, five shattered windows, an advanced case of dry rot and a sag like an injured athlete in triple overtime. The hull looked like it had been constructed with a bug-infested forest dryfall. The boat moaned even when no one was touching it.

They didn’t care. All they wanted to do, even if it was just for one day, was to get their ship on the water. James decided that their “one mission” was to spend the night on it. Wake up on it. On the water. Just one time. Steven corrected him and said that was actually “three missions” if you thought about it.

The day after they got the money together (pooling cash that would have been wasted on bills, selling some books, movies and music) Steven had his uncle follow them out to the boat with his trailer and slide-track to haul it to a garage or dock for repairs. The boat had been sinking into the soft ground for years, and it took the last gear on his uncle’s truck and five dollar's worth of gas to wrestle it out of its grave. While the truck struggled, Steven could hear the boy crying somewhere in the trees. Steven cracked his knuckles nervously, half expecting the
boat to disintegrate at any moment.

Or explode.

The boy had stopped crying. Steven studied the trees and saw nothing.

Steven waited until James went inside the house, paying someone for the boat, before he grabbed the lines on the pole and brought the boy's flag down. As soon as he started to pull, he caught a glimpse of a small rock skipping across the deck. Then another. Then one clipped his ear. He ducked and spun around to look. Nothing. He finished bringing it down to untie the jumble of knots, then whistled as he threw the flag over his shoulder in an exaggerated motion.

He felt eyes on him. Hatred on the back of his neck like a hot driver’s seat in the summer.

Steven opened his mouth to curse or apologize or challenge the boy to show himself...

Then James came out of the house, smiling when he saw Steven waving the flag triumphantly around his head like a giant party favor. Suddenly Steven saw something and stopped twirling to let the flag float down over his head. James turned around to see what is was.

A boy was watching them from the roof of the house. Arms crossed, half as tall as the chimney, wind tugging on his clothes, pulling his shirt forward on his small frame.

“Is that the same. . .” Steven started to ask.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Steven muttered as his uncle came around to motion him off the boat with two thumbs over his shoulders.

“Quick,” Steven said as he pulled the flag off his head. “Help me with this, dude.”

James climbed aboard and held the corners as Steven slowly walked towards him, folding the flag with each step. He carefully folded it into tight triangles, as if it was a military funeral. James lost his patience and snatched it away before he was done. He rolled it into a ball and threw it threw a broken cabin window. Steven waited until he was climbing down, then leaned into the hole to retrieve it.

For the first time, his head was inside and he could smell everything. The sweat and rot and burn of a little boy’s hiding place. He breathed deep, nostrils flaring, and wished he had a squadron of electronic flies-on-the-wall to dispatch into secret hiding places to record the activities of every boy in the world.

Not every boy though, he thought. They ain’t all that interesting. Under ten years old. That would be the age. Otherwise they’re thinking about girls. And one parent. More solitude, more creativity. And no sports. The boy should be weak or missing a finger, or have a problem with bloody noses. . .

As Steven got in his car, he told himself that he shouldn’t feel guilty, that a boy that could create a pirate flag like that would have other places to hide, other places to play, other places to plant flags. He told himself that this old boat wouldn't be that boy’s only clubhouse. Maybe there’s another one in those woods. He told himself that they must have at least two sons, maybe three. That would explain the boy on the roof. He told himself that there were boys all over that neighborhood. Under cars, sleeping in satellite dishes, hiding in stacks of tires in the junkyard, even crying in every tree.

Fuck that kid. That's why flags go up and down on those poles . All pirates eventually lose their ship. Time for the boy to grow the fuck up.

Steven watched the boat turn the corner, swaying alarmingly with every bump. He started his car to follow his uncle. Then he stopped and leaned out his driver’s side window with the boy’s flag in his fist. He pulled the broken end of his radio antenna towards him and pieced the flag three times along it’s edge. He sat back hard and put the car into gear.

The wind straightened it as he drove away, the flag beating a satisfying rhythm against his windshield. He swerved to avoid a small piece of their shipwreck on the road and stabbed the gas to catch up. He couldn’t wait to start working on it. Couldn’t wait to get back inside. He hoped the boy had forgotten some of his toys. Or treasure.



-© 2003 david james keaton

::: david - 7:16 PM [+] :::
...

“Dude, I’ve seen a lot of spinal injuries and this guy is a fake. This guy walks. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life...”
- The Big Lebowski


i will now produce evidence to blow the lid off a ruse that’s been perpetrated on the American public for years. you’ve seen these everywhere. The "Truman Show" poster made them famous, that Elvis Archive poster got some press on the anniversary of the King shitting himself to death, hell, i even saw one of these done as parody for the poster for the classic "Dumb and Dumber." sure, they seem harmless enough, and maybe i shouldn't be wasting my time throwing back the curtain on this fraud, and don't i have anything better to do with my time etc etc. however, a lie is a lie and i now have proof!

(waving an ominous looking manila folder above my head)

Photomosaics are a scam.

it all started when i was staring at one of these things one day, much like the fat dude in "Mallrats" (although that was a Magic Eye picture and something completely different, and so far i’ve yet to prove that Magic Eye pictures cause nosebleeds, a project for another time) anyway, i noticed something. the fop who invented this crap looks just like David Blaine! check him out! coincidence? okay, that wasn't my revelation. this is what i noticed:

three of the little photos are repeated and......wait for it......they’re different colors!

think about that. that punk's whole point was that you could take a million little pictures and, by using the computer from the movie "Wargames," you could place these tiny photos in a certain order, and by taking advantage of the light and dark spots on all these little pictures, you would create a larger picture that would become visible when you looked at it from a distance. sounds good huh? problem is, that ain't what they're doing. You don’t need all that technology if you're just shading the existing pictures to make them form the larger image and THAT’S what these fuckers are doing. okay, check this out. if you look at some pieces i’ve cut from that dude’s own book, you’ll see that i’ve circled the smoking gun. correction:

three smoking guns

busted! those are the same little pictures, but lighter and darker depended on how they needed to use the shadows to make the big picture. that’s a fucking cheat and they are fucking busted and this dude should be running like roaches when the lights come on. and if that’s all they've ever been doing, then they should admit it. instead they keep pretending they're using unaltered photos to make the image. i think by showing the same picture with different colors and shading to it, i've proven that they are using a much easier method. fuck man, i could make one of these photomosaics right now without the patents and MIT degree and insufferable quotes like "the most innovative and accessible artist of our time." okay, watch me:

i just took five pictures of my cats and drew a smiley face over them with a magic marker. POW. took me five seconds and i gots me a photomosaic. using their same technique i could make over ten every minute. and he's getting commissioned by Newsweek and Bill Gates and the King of Jordan to do portraits??? i'll do one for you for 5 bucks, people! you could do it too! the marker i use? it isn't really "magic." this hoax is unacceptable. basically, all Rob Silver is doing is a high-tech version of the old moustache over an existing picture gag. how come people aren’t marching on this clown’s house with pitchforks and torches???

time out. sweet! there’s a boat going down the river out my window! i’ve been waiting to see one since i moved in this apartment. okay, so it ain’t the Edmund Fitzgerald but it is some sort of big metal industrial-looking vessel! cool. okay, back to business:

so am i the only one who notices this shit? rise up people! next stop, Magic Eye crap. then that sleepy-eyed faggot David Blaine! then i will go on to prove that, not only was Ron Kovac never shot in the spine, and he can walk any time he wants, he was not Born On The Fourth Of July either. then i will go on to prove that Charlie Sheen deserved the Oscar for his garbage-man movie. then, if i got time, i will prove that Meatloaf's “Bat Out of Hell” is every inch the masterpiece that “Sgt. Peppers” isn’t. then i will drive back to Indiana to collect pictures of the “Amish” (notice i use quotes around “Amish” to show my righteous doubt) watching TV and listening to rock and roll just like the rest of us. then...

never mind.

in other news today:

Geeks Don’t Know Their Shit!

true story. you’d think that dorks would need to have studied their Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Star Trek or Babylon 5 but every time i dissect their crap, they don’t have the stats to back anything up and i send them home to their mother's basements crying. i mean, don’t you have to take some kind of test to wear the pointed ears? what the hell. a novice like me spanks them on plot inconsistencies and continuity problems every time i overhear a conversation. and not ONCE can they defend their beloved nonsense. they should be ashamed to wear the uniform.

also, i’ve been keeping a cricket alive in the lizard tank, just to see how long it will last. kinda like when the kid dies in the movies and the parent keeps the room the same. except this cricket won’t shut the fuck up. i feed it apples and in return get to listen to it chirp 24-7. i used to think this was a noble cause, turning the food supply of my former pet into a temporary pet, but now i’m just trying to keep it alive long enough for my next creature to rip it’s noisy ass in half.

and finally, you know how some people see something like a little kid picking a flower or a chimp holding a kitten like a baby and it makes their day? with me, it’s when i overhear some guy say, “that bitch last night talked just like Cousin It!” heard that around noon and i’ve been smiling ever since. at least until after my chicken and beer tonight. reminds me of some lyrics by Pulp:

"This is the music from the bachelor's den, the sound of loneliness turned up to ten..."

scratch that song. how about "Gasoline" by Catherine Wheel instead? can't sleep. time to drive somewhere. i've explored three towns in every direction. it reminds me of the movie "Gattica" when the two brothers are swimming and the one brother can't understand why he beats him every time, in spite of his heart problems, the brother says, "because i never saved anything for the swim back." i think about that alot while i'm driving. which is why i've run out of gas in every car i've owned.

::: david - 6:39 PM [+] :::
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