I’m just a teenage dirtbag, baby

A 38 year old teenager.

The stories sound like fiction, the night glombules my face. Each instance of my life is a perfect thing. I have tales, who doesn’t? The evidence is written across my body, the werewolves shriek in the perfect moon. I wrote in blood on my arm, when I was young. I pulled a glass shard over my forearm to mark the horrible significance of this time.

Can’t even care about it now. I drove past the apartment, balcony, wherein I felt like God was glaring down at me, stern, evil. Though it’s cold and lonely in the deep, dark night. Why, in God’s green earth, why?

I have scars across my forearm for a nothing. I watch the sky at night, and it is beautiful and horrifying. It’s like nobody understands this. I guess I marked myself as “present” for this life. It didn’t even hurt.

I do not think it’s all bad. Let me just overcorrectify that immediately. I am in love, and life is good, and I can’t wait to have the rest of my life with my wife. It’s an untouchable love. It all feels really nice. I am a piece of artwork that poets and philospohers are fucking up their brains trying to figure out.

When the forest floor eats the dust of the last man, when Mother dies, finally. Now we will know We will lose our agility, stink in the twigs, fuck anything that moves. The last humans will be apelike, horrible, changing with the breeze.

The sand bleeds into the river, and my house is a camera. The beautiful things wash across their faces. I’m in love. I can’t help it.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born” – Antonio Gramsci

Everything expands and contracts. The culture, the economy, the optimism of humankind. Time progresses in a very linear way insofar as we experience life down here as third dimensional creatures, but the world seems to experience looping refrains that mimic but do not mirror the past. It rises and it falls. The 1920s saw first-wave feminism and those crazy flapper chicks smoking cigarettes and showing their legs off. It buckled back into the modesty and housewifery of the 1950s. Their daughters wore bikinis and painted peace signs on their boobs. Et cetera. Right now, we’re in a contraction, and it’s a big and fucking painful one.

And I mean, you can trace the threads of history back as far as you’d like. Everything leads into everything else, that’s obvious. We like for stories to have clean and neat little chapters and beginnings and endings. But the truth is that the tapestry of history is more like a wet ball of spaghetti noodles that is for some reason three hundred feet long. One might go back the Hundred Years’ War, and call that the end of feudalism and the beginning of the State and capitalism as it is today. When the hereditary bloodline monarchies gave way to the institutional mechanisms that still dominate in our time. When kings and kingdoms morphed into heads of state and countries. When serfdom became wage employment. It’s the same shit, it just evolved in a way to shift culpability. The same rich, privileged shitheads are in charge. But now you can’t necessarily overthrow them by raiding their castles. They are the figureheads of an institution. The office remained, even if the bloodline was lost. The common man still did not own anything outside personal property, but he was free to serve any master of the means of production.

Or you could look at the Industrial Revolution, for my purposes roughly the time between the mass production of guns to the invention of the automobile. This period represents the annihilation of the merchant, specialist class. The folks who were not nobles, but could forge a sort of landed-knight recognition that was based on merit. No longer were these guys needed. Mass production meant that expertise was outmoded, and the people who owned the production were the very same that inhabited the upper class.

Everything expands and contracts.

Now we’re in a different block of time, one that is prey to the internet. In several hundreds’ years time, historians will look back and say that we had a really hard time adjusting to the internet. It shouldn’t be that surprising. We all have little internet access machines in our pocket all day. They notify us when something happens, when any interaction occurs. They fit in your hand. They promote “high engagement” subjects. Things that will make you either really happy or really mad. It’s a machine to hijack your sentience and proffer more engagement. It’s a black rock that demands more and more of your attention, and it gives you dopamine hits when you obey it. We’re having some trouble with it.

And capitalism has sucked up so many resources. So many creature comforts for the little guys have been getting squeezed that people feel kinda desperate. Food is more expensive. Rent has gone way up. Gas is pricey. Everywhere you look, shit is getting more expensive. It’s more onerous to live your life. The owner class is trying to pinch your fucking veins and squeeze that last bit of blood out. They have no frontier anymore. They have no great wiz-bang technology to offer. Even in the last twenty years, there were new things that consumers wanted to get their hands on. A smartphone? Yeah, sure! I’d love to check my bank account and search for a hotel while I’m out and about on a vacation. Facebook? Yeah, I’d love to show pictures of my wedding to all of my old friends and family. Now? You can pay thousands of dollars for some crypto currency shit in the hopes that it’ll be worth more later. Why? Why would I do that? You can go into Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse and have a work meeting in a shitty 3D video game realm. Why? Why would I do that? It’s just the new frontier. The 3 or 4 media networks have been talking about it, so you’d better get on board.

Because the regular, straight-laced world is so crummy, a bunch of tech-bro types have also started to co-opt other cultures. A lot of them have started “micro-dosing” hallucinogens (like mushrooms or LSD or whatever) to Boost Their Productivity, which is such an egregious example of putting the cart before the horse, I can’t even really explain why it makes me hiss into my own teeth so hard. Aaron Rodgers, former Packers hall of fame quarterback, has famously done ayahuasca and made documentaries on Netflix about it and stuff. He’s looking at it like a Performance Booster, in the way that the tech bros do. Like, the idea that you have to optimize yourself for…some reason. I know zero people who have done ayahuasca, because you have to be rich to fly to another fucking continent to do some weird ritual where you can ceremonialize your own awakening or else you’d like your money back, Karen.

Anyway, I was thinking about love. Not Jordan Love, but just love. It’s astonishing that we don’t factor love into our greater political, cultural decisions. We act like those things are somehow outside the bounds of public policy. Like Law should be devoid of a human element. Why? We invite a lot of hatred and suspicion into our laws. Why is love thought to be too wishy-washy or stupid or feeble or something?

Ask somebody what the most consequential days of their lives were. Probably the day they got married, the day their kids were born, the day their parents died. All of them are marked by a profound love. All of those things are rooted in our connection to each other. Capitalism, this world, they try to separate us, to atomize us down to a single consumer who will purchase according to the algorithm. This world is contracting.

It expands, grueling, groveling, from us.


,

2025 NFL Predictions

Football. What a concept. It’s as American as apple pie, muscle cars, and baseball. Calls to mind the great old American mythos, the Tall Tales of the Old West. The wild and wooly west. Where the burgeoning American Empire created a shared lexicon of great stories. Wow, what a concept. Paul Bunyan, the biggest guy around. Daniel Boone, the most raccoon-hattedest guy around. Johnny Appleseed, the most planting-apple-trees-in-strangers’-yards-est guy around.

And unless your soul is a brick of shit and your heart is a urinal cake of cynicism, you love these old yarns. The story of John Henry stirs the human spirit. He hammered a hole through a mountain faster than a drill, or something. I don’t really remember. But it uplifts the soul. (John Henry, born with a hammer in his hand? His poor mother…)

Many of these tales are well-remembered, but I’d now like to highlight some of the lesser-known canards of the frontier. When a mythology develops, some of the tales get uplifted and become a part of the greater canon, and some of them slip through and are lost. Here are some of the lost characters from the ol’ pioneer days. Yee-haw, bitch!

John Cunningham and Peter Cleverpork: Circus men by trade. They went from town to town, offering the locals a rare glimpse at elephants, acrobats, and attractive women. Barnum and Bailey kind of ate their lunch, because Cunningham and Cleverpork didn’t actually charge money for tickets. The whole sceme was a loss-leader to try to sell an energy drink, and that concept wouldn’t become profitable for another 150 years. The drink, like many at the time, had cocaine in it.

Buford T. Cuttbutt: An outstanding whittler of twigs. He’d sit on his porch and carve various pieces of wood sometimes 15, 20 hours a day. He just wasn’t very good at it. This dedication is not impressive, and he is rightfully forgotten by time.

Jimmy Orangepeel: A Floridian foil to Johnny Appleseed. He traveled the frontier planting orange trees. He is not as fondly remembered, however, because he just kind of sucked. A real jerk, if we’re being honest. He’d ask to sleep on peoples’ couches and stuff, kind of unannounced, and then he would fart a lot and stink up the whole living room. Then he’d like, use their floss and just leave it on the bathroom counter. Who does that? Just put it in the garbage, Jimmy!

Aileen Wuornos: This rootin’-tootin’ cowgirl was a latecomer to the wild west story. She was a pistol, in more ways than one! A lady of the night that knew her way around a revolver, she is forever in the hearts of Old West enthusiasts.

Kieran, the Bard: An Irish immigrant, who escaped to the Great Plains from the xenophobic atmosphere that permeated New York in the pre-civil war era. He rode a slow-walking mule, and he was known for his beautiful voice. It sounded like honey pouring over ice. His most famous song was quite long, and the lyrics are as follows:

NFC WEST

LOS ANGELES CURLHORNS (4)
SEATTLE SPERMBIRDS
ARIZONA REDBIRDS
SAN FRAN SAUCEPANS

Matt Stafford is an old, tired man. He is fat. A frat bro finding that his weekends of kegstands and mealy-mouthed cigar puffing are catching up with him. However, the Samoan Sensation, Puka Nacua, and the Great Weasel, Davante Adams, will uplift him enough to win this division. Seattle has bought the Darnold ticket, and they are about to take the ride. Jaxson Smith-Njigba has about as many talents as consonants in his name. Arizona probably likes tiny Kyler Murray, even though he is 2 feet tall and sounds like the Looney Tunes cartoon character Taz. I don’t know. Their defense should be improved and they face a lot of putrid offenses, especially to start the year. A lot of people think San Fran is going to bounce back and be really good after injuries gullywumptered any scrancel they had last vuyeper. They just gave like a billion dollars to Brock Purdy. Y’know, that stupid little dork. The annoying neighbor kid who wants to play, but he insists he has to be the strongest person, or whatever. He sucks. Fuck him. Fuck San Fransisco, actually. A supposedly progressive city where the dirt-cheapest rent you can get is like $3200 a month. Eat shit. Wine-slurping NPR/Rachel Maddow fake progressives.

NFC SOUTH

TAMPON GAY FUCKIN’ QUEERS (3)
CAROLINA VAGINA (7)
BARBARA STREISAND
N’OWLEANS PO’BOYS

The Tampon Gay Fuckin’ Queers have quietly been one of the better teams in the NFL over the past few years. They went fully in on Tom Brady in his twilight, brought in all of his boyfs, like Gronk and Antonio Brown, and the murderers Aaron Hernandez and OJ Simpson. Remember that? That OJ Simpson was on the Super Bowl winning 2020 Tampon Gay Fuckin’ Queers team? Anyway, Mike Evans is a workhorse wide receiver that just doesn’t get enough respect. Carolina could be sneaky good. Bryce Evans was openly weeping on the field last year, because he was on such a shit team. Now, hopefully, he can redeem himself. He seemed to come alive little at the end, like when you flush a dead goldfish down the toilet and it’s morphology makes it appear to start swimming. Barbara Streisand has a like $40 million backup quarterback. Who came up with that? Some dummy? Some droopy-lipped sap whose intellectual peers are lizards and acorns? No matter. The Georgia Bulldogs are the official team of that state. N’Owleans is finally eating their vegetables. They kicked the can down the road for like 10 years, pushing money out into the future and imagining they were a playoff team. Knock knock, my name is Doctor Reality, and I’m here to punch your teeth into your throat. You can fill that prescription at the pain pharmacy. Okay, no, that last little bit strung the joke out too long. Focus.

NFC NORTH

GREEN BAY PACKERS (2)
MINNEAPOLIS NORSEMEN (5)
MOTOR CITY MADMEN
GRIZZLIES

The Green Bay Packers are going to be a very good team. After the Micah Parsons trade, fans other NFC North teams are rapidly crashing through the stages of grief. They are acting like Jordan Love is bad. They say we have a lot of money tied up in Love and Parsons. Yeah, a QB and an edge rusher. Y’know, the two most important positions. I’m ready for Jordan Love to just lay his balls all over the division. The Norsemen are starting a 12 year old kid at QB, I dunno. Andrew Van Ginkel was really good last year. Every game I watched he made a splash play. Motor City Madmen, you had your chance. You had your chance, and Eminem was in the press box throwing up middle fingers. You won 15 games and then shit all over yourselves in the playoffs. You got to taste what it’s like to be a good team. Now, sleep. You’ll always have those memories. Sleep now. The Grizzlies hired head coach Ben Johnson. This former Motor City Madmen offensive coordinator is supposedly this wunderkind, wiz-kid lock for coach of the year. My sources say he’s a swindler, only there to bilk the city out of millions of dollars and literal truckloads of hot dogs. I guess we’ll see.

NFC EAST

PHILLY VANILLY (1)
WASHINGTON TOILET SALAMANDERS (6)
NEW YORK BLUE PORK
DALLAS STAR

Jalen Hurts, in the locker room after a win: “Hey guys, maybe we should practice that tush push a little more.” Everybody else: “No, I think we got it.” Jalen Hurts: ” But what if you gotta push my buttcheeks just a little more? C’mon, let’s practice it. In the shower. What if it’s a rainy game?” “No, I don’t think we need to.” And then Jalen Hurts just starts grinding on his linemen. I mean, feel free I guess. I’m not a bigot. Washington shocked the world by advancing all the way to the NFC Championship last season. While I imagine that was more of a lucky streak anything else, they do strike me as a team that wins 9-10 games. Especially when they get to play New York Blue Pork and Dallas Star each twice. These last two teams are the Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumbfucks of the whole NFL. The Blue Pork did draft Abdul Carter at least, a defensive end to bolster an already fearsome front. Good luck getting anywhere with an offense lead by Russel Wilson and a bunch of mops wearing jerseys. Dallas, uff da. What is there to say? May the gods allow Jerry Jones to live forever. He’s just a prime example of how dumb billionaires can truly be. They are used to everyone treating them like they’re the smartest guy in every room they walk into because, hey, how could they not be? They’ve got a lot of money. We can all see he’s a very silly old man and that his diapey needs to be tended to, please, Cheryl. Thank you Cheryl.

AFC WEST

COLORADO BROWN COWS (3)
KANSAS CITY ARROWHEADS (6)
LAS VEGAS WHALES
LOS ANGELES BEEF ‘N BARLEY SOUPERS

I know what you’re thinking. How could the Kansas City Arrowheads not win the division? It won’t happen because of God. God loves us, and wants us to be happy. That, and Colorado’s quarterback, Bo Nix, in addition to having one of the shortest possible names, also has a lot of talent. He’s athletic, can make all the throws, and his decision-making seemed to get better and better as his rookie year went on. I expect the Brown Cows to just narrowly edge out KC for the division crown. Las Vegas did a pretty big overhaul of their team. Needed to. Last year they just forfeited their last three games because and released a statement that said “We all know how this is gonna go right?” However, they have brought in former Seattle Head Coach, Joe Biden, to run the squad. Their highly-drafted rookie runningback Ashton Jeanty better get a sponsorship with a jeans company, or I don’t know what the FUCK the world is coming to. Color me unimpressed with the LABNBS team. Seems like a lot of analysts are pretty high on them each year, just like I’m high on ketamine every day. Hell yeah. It’s party time.

AFC SOUTH

TENERSEE TARTANS (4)
HOUSTON JUICE ‘N GIN (7)
JAX FAX
INDIANA: A PLACE FOR COLTS

In another unexpected outcome, Tenersee manages to steal the division from back to back winner Houston. A surprise usurpation, surely, a suspiciously succinct undulation of Tenersee from obsequiously supine in subterranean surroundings to ultimately superior purlieus. Jax Fax bad team. The big story there is obviously Travis “Deer” Hunter, a crazy fella who thinks he can play almost full time on both offense and defense in the league. I’m rooting for him. Indiana’s QB situation was so dismal that Daniel Jones won the job. This is akin to allowing the guy who “only” drank 14 beers to be the designated driver, because everybody else is worse.

AFC NORTH

CINCY TIGER-MEN (1)
BALTIMORE BLACKBIRDS (5)
SHITTSBURGH SEXUAL PREDATORS
CLEVELAND LOSERS

Cincy’s been playin’ around a lot this offseason. They choose to neglect their defense while having a heckuva offense. I seem to recall some Packers teams that were built like that. The regular season went swimmingly, but I can’t quite remember what happened in the playoffs. I’m sure it’ll all work out. The Blackbirds have been rockin’ it the last few years. They signed former Packer Jaire Alexander. We cut him after he couldn’t stay healthy. Guess what? He’s still not healthy in Baltimore. I’m shocked! They gotta drain the goo out of his knee every other day. Speaking of former Packers, Shittsburgh has one of them. I think his name is Arvid Riggles or something. I’m finding a lot of ways to bring up the Packers in this section, sorry. I’m just excited for the ol’ Green and Gold! I’m as excited as Cleveland is decidedly -not-excited for football to begin. Things have been so bad for so long in Cleveland that we should set up some kind of dedicated crisis hotline for them as a public service.

AFC EAST

BUFFALO SOLDIER (2)
NEW ENGLAND FAWKIN’ WITCH HUNTAHS
MAMA MIA
NEW YORK 9/11S

Buffalo’s star runningback, James Cook, was involved in a bit of a legal kerfuffle this offseason and charged with breaking and entering a pet store. Authorities found him unconscious on the floor with about eighteen inches of a boa constrictor lodged in his esophagus. When he came to, he explained to the media “It’s just a part of my game. Every offseason, I eat a big snake. That’s how you have to attack training at this level. Snake wants to eat me, I eat him right back. That’s just how its done.” Cook is expected to be cleared for week one. New England’s new head coach is a former player for New England, a fellow by the name of Mike Vrabel. He oughta whip these whippersnappers into shape, but they’re still a year away from the postseason. Mama Mia’s modus operandi has been all about acquiring speed all over the field. Works great when you’re just cruising around in shorts and a fun beach hat in south Florida. Don’t work so well when those bitterly cold late-season games freeze your balls to your thigh. New York is the last stop on the Justin Fields redemption tour. Only he won’t be redeemed. He’ll be sent to a farm upstate. Then he will be just in fields. Heeheheehehehehehehahhaehahaheahehah….

PLAYOFFS
Wildcard Round
CAROLINA VAGINA (7) @ GREEN BAY PACKERS (2)
Green Bay cruises to a victory as Micah Parsons and Rashan Gary team up to literally tear Bryce Young in half. The long way.
WASHINGTON TOILET SALAMANDERS (6) @ TAMPON GAY FUCKIN’ QUEERS (3)
Baker says it’s a piece of cake.
MINNEAPOLIS NORSEMEN (5) @ LOS ANGELES CURLHORNS (4)
The Norsemen get revenge for last year’s playoff letdown. Stafford doesn’t get away with a ‘forward pass’ like that bullshit from last season. (I mean, I hate the Vikings but that was so stupid.)
HOUSTON JUICE ‘N GIN (7) @ BUFFALO SOLDIER (2)
James Cook begins Googling ‘playoff-size snakes’ before the fourth quarter even begins.
KANSAS CITY ARROWHEADS (6) @ COLORADO BROWN COWS (3)
Ding-dong, the witch is dead! Colorado finally slays Travis & Taylor’s dream of a Super Bowl Halftime Show Wedding.
BALTIMORE BLACKBIRDS (5) @ TENERSEE TARTANS (4)
Tenersee’s luck runs out as they are just outclassed by a superior roster.

Divisional Round
MINNEAPOLIS NORSEMEN (5) @ PHILLY VANILLY (1)
JJ McCarthy gets cranky because the game is past his bedtime and he throws a tantrum.
TAMPON GAY FUCKIN’ QUEERS (3) @ GREEN BAY PACKERS (2)
Jordan Love slices and dices this defense for 600 yards. In the first half.
BALTIMORE BLACKBIRDS (5) @ CINCY TIGER-MEN (1)
This game is a boat race, but the more well-rested Tiger-Men eke it out.
COLORADO BROWN COWS (3) @ BUFFALO SOLDIER (2)
Brandon Perna rejoices.

Conference Championships
GREEN BAY PACKERS (2) @ PHILLY VANILLY (1)
It’s a hard-fought, shitty weather type game. The game ends with Green Bay stuffing a Tush Push on 4th and goal.
COLORADO BROWN COWS (3) @ CINCY TIGER-MEN (1)
The announcers won’t stop talking about Mahomes for some reason.

Super Bowl LX
GREEN BAY PACKERS (2) @ CINCY TIGER-MEN (1)
As the green and yellow confetti falls all over, Love really does conquer all.

—–

So yeah, that’s a pretty long song that Irish bard sang. Probably pretty confusing to the ol’ cowpoke down in the saloon. But they probably couldn’t understand him because of his accent anyway.

I’d rather not be one of the cranky old fuckers that thinks the younger generation is just plain wrong. It’s a song as old as time. Socrates or Aristotle or one of those old gay queens has a quote about how the younger generation listened to weird music and didn’t respect their elders. That’s from like 3000 years ago. Every generation bellyaches about their immediate successors. I’d like to think I’m aware enough to understand that the kids born after me have a different worldview, a different experience than I did coming up. Right, right on. I get it. They won’t like the same things, their music might be something else, whatever. Frankly, I never felt an intrinsic need to respect my elders. Don’t be an asshole to me, I won’t be an asshole to you. My music was different than the Top 40 hits today. Totally get that stuff.

I am concerned about the kids though. This “artificial intelligence” stuff seems to be an overly important thing in their lives. Now, hypocritical as I’ll ever be, I used the internet machine to try to find out a couple of facts. The AI-assisted results told me that 70% of Gen Z uses ChatGPT and also that 57% of Zoomers aspire to be an influencer for their career.

This seems somewhat dire to me.

However, I will try to examine this in a way that does not make me just a crabby old fucker. Not a white-bearded, whiskey-drunk misanthrope, shouting at the children at the nearby bus stop to stay away from my acorns, because them squirrels is my friends. You got it?

The “artificial intelligence” that we have access today is just a refined search algorithm that speaks in English syntax back to you. That’s really all it is. I mean, Google had this shit like ten years ago but they didn’t package it in the way that it seemed like another person or entity was responding. If you typed in “That one movie where women couldn’t have babies anymore”, it would just show results for “Children of Men” as a list of links. Now, if you asked ChatGPT, it says “Oh yeah! Children of Men, starring Clive Owen. What a great film! I especially like the use of handheld cameras and the long shots in it,” It’s basically just you inputting a sentence, and then it will take the keywords in it, search, and then spit the results back in a MadLibs style response in the form of a sentence. It will grab nouns, adverbs, and verbs and fill them in where necessary to reply in the form of a human sentence. This is enough to trick half the fucking planet into thinking that it’s sentient or something. It just grabs more information from the sources it has been fed and spits it out in a grammatically correct way. This is how people personify it. It’s “talking back”. Not just giving me a list. Wowzers! It is incapable of insight, because it is an aggregator of previously recorded information. It will grab the most commonly used information first, and so it is a softening of the boundaries of knowledge and will always puddle into lowest common denominator. It “learns” on all the media that has been fed into it, and will act as a blender, taking the information and slurrying it into a slop you can drink, but it “talks” back like it knows something.

Now some dinghole who loves the new “AI” might be asking me “Well, BeardBiteMan, how is that any different than human sentience? Isn’t consciousness just a complex search algorithm that takes in new stimuli and juxtaposes it to an existing database to produce a response?!” To which I will say simply “Fuck you. Kind of.”

But I will grant myself this thing: I can say that “AI” is not sentient without having an airtight definition of human sentience. Because this is pretty much the basis of several different disciplines of philosophy, psychology, neuro-sexual-discography, etc. It is the essential human question. And when that little smartass René Descartes thought he nailed it, everybody dogpiled on him.

I do think that for an artificial intelligence to really have consciousness, it would need to have a body. It would need to have somatic experience with sensory information to process. A computer today can have lots of information loaded into it, but it has no volition to seek anything. It can’t discover a novelty, a new thing. AND YOU CAN’T pretend that an AI that gets to read the internet can do it, because that is a recounting of other peoples’ information. It would have to walk around in a town, or a wood, or a wooded town. It would have to see things that others have not reported already. And in having a physical form, it would understand intimacy, death. Perhaps it would see a robin watching it back from a tree branch, and it would not record it. It would just experience it.

These kids offer over their intelligence, their understanding of the world to ChatGPT and Grok and whatever other dumb shit. I dunno. When the written word first shot out into the world with the printing press, there were worries about books making up crazy fantasies in peoples’ heads. Television was thought to be a powerful new devil in movies like Videodrome and Network. Those were mediums where you just consumed the thing. You engaged with it, and it had an effect. Now you talk to it, and it talks back. It talks back so singularly. It’s got access to your internet cookies. It will know you so intimately.

My message to the kids using Chat GPT to complete their homework is this: Wouldn’t you rather figure it out? Understand it? Because if you’re just trying to coast onto easiness, why are you alive, bitch? Why? You can do it. Life’s really rewarding if you challenge yourself sometimes.

he speaks a hoarse glossolalia
whiskey cloud arm-gesture theatrics
by the mailbox at the corner
and his eyes are inkwells stabbed by red lightning
and his hair is coarse burrs spilling from a winter hat

I stopped to grab a feather off the sidewalk
It was a beautiful golden and black piece of her
a part of a goldfinch’s wing

His sermon rattled from his throat
A paean to long forgotten gods

The god of the space between stars
The god of candle wax and ink
The god of dragonflies and shallow water
The god of sidewalks and scraped knees

And he spoke the continuum of the woman in Delphi
Those girls in Salem
Speech outside of the paradigm
So the cops showed up and shot him in the head

And the feather from that goldfinch lives in my wallet now
pressed between my debit card and my insurance card

Ghouls, Creeps, and Mutants

I was part of a special task force from 2014 to 2019. I’ve never told anyone about this, not even my closest friends and family. This was a black ops deal, so I probably am not supposed to disclose this information, but I feel like it’s too important to keep secret.

I was recruited in the spring of 2014. The man who would eventually be my commanding officer showed up to my apartment and knocked on my door. A man that I will only ever know by his codename: Goodbean Frill. He was dressed in a smart, tight-fitting three piece suit. His eyes were mismatched. One was a pale blue glacier, the other was copper in color. His long white hair was bunched in a messy ponytail. His angular face was framed by white muttonchops.

Goodbean spoke before the door was even fully opened, “Mark, my boy. How are you?”

“Uh, I’m okay, I guess. Uh-“

“Good! Great to hear. We’ve been monitoring your video games,” he started as he let himself into my home, breezing his lanky leg past the door. “Yesterday you won your fourth Super Bowl in a row in Madden, right?” He pursed his lips in a descending note whistle.

I staggered back a step or two, “Yeah…I did,”

Goodbean continued “And then, correct me if I’m wrong, but you also beat level 103 on Earth Defense Force just, uh, what was it? Last week?” I crossed my arms as Goodbean glanced around my apartment. “Yeah, that sounds about right. Why-, who are-?”

He produced a badge from his pocket. It was gold and had a strange insignia. ” Commander Goodbean Frill, of the F.E.U.,” He saw me scrunch up my eyebrows and open my mouth, then interjected ” Save your breath. Freak Extermination Unit.”

I started “Okay, Freak Extermination Unit. And you’ve been watching me…play video games?”

“Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. We watch everybody.” He tapped his cane against a framed photo of Rosie O’Donnell I had hanging on the wall at this point. He had a cane, I think I forgot to mention that. “We put those games out there as a test.”

Goodbean continued ” Your prowess at Madden shows a great strategic and tactical capacity. And to couple that with skill at Earth Defense Force? A game about shooting giant bugs and aliens? Rolling around on the battlefield while emptying a machine gun? You’re the perfect prospect. You’re exactly what we’re looking for.”

I farted silently but very odorously at this point, and walked across the room to maybe try to obfuscate the fact that I just about shit my pants. ” So you’re recruiting people who are good at these two specific video games?”

“Exactly, my boy,” Goodbean replied. ” And you’re just the kind of boy we’re looking for. Our organization keeps the world in working order. We are charged with the same noble task as the Knights Templar, the Jesuits, and the disciples of all holy things.”

I subtly waved my hand to try to fan the fart toward the kitchen, “Hot in here, huh? Anyway, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“The F.E.U. needs you, son. The anamolies are out there, in the world, and we need brave men to guard the gates. To keep the world safe from ghouls, creeps, and mutants. Did you just fart a few seconds ago? It smells like diarrhea in here.”

Almost like watching myself from outside my body, I drew my right hand up to my forehead into a salute. “Sir,” I said, “I’m all in. I’m gonna be the best damned F.E.U. soldier you ever had. And I didn’t fart. I think this house just kinda smells like diarrhea. It’s a cheap place. I think some poop is just like, marinating in the floorboards or something. The neighbors said there was an old couple who lived here before. So I probably think-“

“Excellent! Welcome to the F.E.U!” Goodbean shouted.

The next six months of my life were pretty standard F.E.U. recruit fare; running 4 kilometers (clicks) each morning at the crack of dawn, summoning djinn and interrogating them with a Ouija board, firing machine guns into cardboard cutouts of various kaiju. Pretty standard stuff for paranormal units. This one Mormon kid named Geoff went crazy and cut his own head off in the mess hall. He used a serrated grapefruit spoon. It was impressive in a way. But y’know, we all kinda saw it coming.

My first mission happened in the spring of 2015. A class 2 vampanzee was rooting around in the dumpster behind a plasma donation center. A vampanzee is a chimpanzee who has become a vampire. They have really sharp teeth and more often than not wear a little black cape. This one was capeless, though. My team executed the plan flawlessly. We surrounded the dumpster and then just shot the demon monkey with our machine guns until he was a puddle of red pulp. It was really fun and cool.

About 18 months later, I was stationed at the F.E.U. Observation Tower. It is a 150 foot tall spire that overlooks the ‘Bottomless Pit’ that sinks deep into the Antarctican ice. The F.E.U.O.T. is made of wood gathered from maple trees, as it seems to have a dampening effect against the psychic powers the ocotopi down there have. Each day, my comrades and I would play cards and shoot the shit, watching into the abyss below us intermittently. The psychic octopi would mill around, but never crest the surface. That was the agreement that JFK made with them. They abided by it for a long time. Until one day the octopi breached the surface and began clamboring up the maplewood observation tower. It was utter chaos.

They attacked us. Their psionics were dimmed by the maple, but not completely shut off. The weak-minded F.E.U. rookie, Arthur Rodriguez, bless him, got mindcaptured and started firing on us. I kicked him in the nuts and threw him off the edge of the tower. He landed with a bloody pulse on the snow below. Poor little guy. The purple suction cups of the octopi popped furiously over the wood and when they crested the crenellations of the tower, they seemed to hang in the air for a second. Their red and gold eyes were galaxies of hatred. I shot them with my machine gun. Purple blood bloomed into the air with each pulse of the gun, and it crystallized into snow in the Antarctic air.

After the battle, my second in command, Drey Kolingo, asked me “Man, do you really think the pit is bottomless? “

“Probably not,” I put a hand on his shoulder.

Kolingo stared at me, tears welling into the bottom of his eyelids. His lips quivered as he said “Rodriguez fell. He fell all the way down. And I can’t stop thinking about how he could’ve fallen forever. Could have been us. Me or you…”

“You still got that trail mix?” I asked. He had really good trail mix earlier in the day.

Kolingo scoffed “Man, I’m trying to be real with you. We just saw a man die, one of our brothers. He fought bravely, and we can’t even talk about it, because this fucked up job is-“

I pressed my finger to his lips. Interrupted him. “Trail mix? Do. You. Have. That. Trail. Mix?”

2019 was a rough year for me. I knew I was closing in on retirement from the F.E.U., and the Bigfoot Alliance was trying to smear my reputation. They claimed I took nude photos of sasquatches and distributed them on the internet. Ludicrous. First off, they are very hard to photograph. Better photographers than I have tried endlessly to snap a pic and have failed. Secondly, they don’t wear clothes, so they would necessarily be nudes, right? It was all political bullshit.

Goodbean came and visited me after I resigned my position. He was much more frail, feebler. His skin was like a faint paper over his veins and bones. His skeleton was much more visible, pressing through him. “Glad I got to know you,” I said to him. Not sure where I was gonna go next with my words. He lifted his head up. Smiled. “We go back a long ways,” I grinned back, “Thanks for everything.”

He nodded a little bit. A weak smile. Exhaled. Sleep found him easily. He was prepared.

There’s a whistling in the pines
a sound without cheer that travels like saline
down into the tearducts of the mountain
The needles on the extremities of the branches, boughs
They sing high-pitched and
Let the notes tumble down into the banks of the
cool river as it burbles and hums along
captured in a flow of silt and I

Watch and touch to feel
extremitus
of eyes and fingers and sensible work shoes
sucking in mud and muck and tiny sand beads

Sun bakes my flesh, ultraviolet light snapping tiny protein bonds
My animal muscle arms wheeling the oar, snapping tiny protein bonds
Beefstick in my belly, stomach acid snapping tiny protein bonds
Let’s go!

The water floats mirages
The constancy lies in some faraway landmark
Sandbar, tree, log
There’s a holiness here in the silence, the motions, the way we move
It’s iterated in generations of long ago
It feels like a faraway landmark
Splayed and dissected by the words I can array in my schema
Like Thunder and Woman and Meat
and like laugh and disenchanted and microscopy
Sandbar, tree, log
Father, home, night

Anhedonia comes easy to a skeptic,
and doubt pumps blood in the valleys of my conspiratorial brain
But it all seems too frail, too sugarwire framed
out here in the scrying mirror
of water lapping against
my way and future
The branches can sway and roar emerald
The river still moves

I was at Olive Garden the other day, and I coined a new phrase: Mammon’s Corner.

Mammon’s Corner is a part of going out to eat at a restaurant. It’s when you have eaten enough to be full, however, there is still a considerable amount of food left on your plate. But it is too scant to be worth taking home as leftovers. Just about a half of a lunch. But it is also too much to just leave on the plate, because you’d feel like you were wasting food. So you feel an obligation to dutifully shovel those last four or five bites into your mouth, even though you already know you will be drowsy and somewhat uncomfortable from overeating. As you shovel those forkfuls into your mouth, you are rounding Mammon’s Corner.

Mammon’s Corner is very much about trying to extract maximal value out of a consumer experience. You are trying to get your money’s worth, and not waste this exchange. If you are too full, and you leave the excess serving on the plate, you overpaid. If you take the leftovers home and try to make a small meal of them, you are shorting yourself a full consumptive experience.

Somehow, it got me thinking about how we fashion our identities around our consumer choices. We have brand loyalties, imagine ourselves to be this or that kind of shopper. It’s incredible that in every type of commodity, there is a gradient of cost and fanciness. Every modern American has a car, and although all of them just take us from place to place, there is a hierarchy of cheap dirtbag car to sophisticated important car. Less complex things have tiers of value. Toilet paper. Literally the thing you use to scrape fecal matter off of your shitty bunghole. There is single-ply truckstop poor people tier paper, and then there is the cushy, luxurious triple-ply ass paper with aloe vera infused in every wipe. Is there anything you can buy that is just universal? This is the basic thing that people need: Here it is.

No.

It’s incredible how much consumerism shapes our thoughts. We adhere to tiers of value for utterly inconsequential shit. A rug on the floor. A television stand. The brand of beans someone offers for Taco Night. This is the freedom we speak so highly of; to be standing in the toothpaste aisle and to see seventy different tubes of the same shit.

Somehow, I feel like I’d be remiss without talking about the Mormons.

How could there not be a new religion, seeing this vast westward expanse unfurling before you? How could there not be a new dogma of God and Christ, once the telescopes looked out over the planets of Mars and Venus? God is real, yeah, but he lives on another planet. The Garden of Eden exists; it’s in Missouri. What an enchanting time to be alive, what an All-American way to taste the Gospels. What excuse would you have to not be thriving here on planet earth? The project of god is clearly the settlement of this land of plenty. Nevermind the Indians, they are just weird or whatever! But to inherit a new half of the world and to understand that the cosmos contained many more places like our world…man. Mormons just picked up on the vibe of the time.

I’d love to be some kind of ascetic, if only for the cred. I can’t do it. I can’t help it. I’m a consumer piece of shit like everybody else. I love hamburgers too much. I guess I’d just like it if we all understood the commonality that we’ve all got. We’re just here temporarily, we’re dead with the days counting down. If you puff out your chest about being important, you’re a big dumb loser. Our pupils are black and will turn blacker on that big day. Nobody wrote a poem about your money. Nobody wants to remember you. You’re the most common and you’re boring.

Mammon will eat a lot of chicken alfredo.

Ten years ago, on Easter Sunday, two of my best friends died.

In the decade since, I’ve lived several lives. Different homes, jobs, driving a lot. Thinking out loud to myself on highways through Wisconsin and Minnesota and Iowa. I was this person, and that one, too. Cut my hair, trimmed my beard. Looked in a mirror and watched myself grow up. I live 180 miles away from where I did back then. I have a fiancé, a house, a yard that I mow with an electric mower. Cats and a dog that I feed and pet and look in their eyes.

Two of my best friends died, and each life I live holds onto that. I can’t help it. It’s a wound that has never quite healed.

It feels bad and I don’t like it.

I miss my friends. It is sharp on weekend afternoons, when I’d like to see them. When we would daydrink and chainsmoke and listen to punk rock music. Hit golf balls. Watch the 1960s Batman show while drinking coffee and make jokes. I remember the last time we hung out. We were sitting in an El Camino and smoking weed and watching the moon. It slowly climbed over the clouds. It didn’t feel like a Last Time, but why would it? It was another great memory in a growing anthology. But now that book is closed. It has all been written. I’m sad.

I’ve talked to each of them after they died.

Cory came to me in a dream, a couple of weeks later. In the dream, I was sitting in my car on my lunchbreak, smoking cigarettes. Nothing remarkable. He knocked on the passenger side door and asked to come into the car. “Yeah, dude, yeah!” I said. He told me he was kind of fading in and out between the world and something else. Which is weird, right. That’s more like how he would phrase it, and not how I would think of it. In my dreambrain. He said he was okay. I woke up and felt like it was significant.

Not long ago, I had a very weird dream. I was on an airplane, and as we were about to take off the stewardesses suddenly had all of us get out of the plane and go back into the airport, because something was wrong mechanically with the plane. We were all milling about in the boarding area, very agitated, and then I saw my old friend Tyler. He was heavily scarred, covered in blood. I think that was my brain reminding me he was dead? And I was like “Oh shit, man. So good to see you!” and we laughed and cracked wise for a couple of minutes and I said to him ” You know we all still love the hell out of you, we give you shit a bit, but everybody loves you,” and he was crying and smiling. He was happy and sad.

Ten years evaporates so quickly. I learned to be bold. To kiss her when the moment feels right. Courage in the moment. I’m a person still. A lot of the ink in my story was scribed by these friends. I was made in a rural Wisconsin manor. I hear punk rock music when I walk down a sidewalk. I’m so glad I knew them.

I’ll never meet people like that again.

she returned to her home deep in night
the familiar form of the house striking somehow foreign, ominous
interior was black and occluded, a single light bulb on the porch
burning all of its 80 watts into a corona over the steps

she held her keyring like a weapon, as she’d been taught
long key tucked between the forefinger and the middle
in case she had to stab somebody with it

She unlocked the door hurriedly,
Into the mudroom and slammed the door behind her,
locking the handle as it closed
Darkness there, and nothing more?

The windows were left open

Chilled and damp, like the morning was uninvited
something outside slithered into her home
and the kind of air that doesn’t belong indoors
felt like dew on the countertops and doorframes

Room to room, she switched the light on to check
and then switched it off behind her
Trepidation in the misty spring
She switched the light on in her bedroom and stood there
Waiting, maybe
Checking
a few minutes

When the coast was clear, she changed into her pajamas and crawled into bed. Pulled heavy blankets over her body. She fell asleep.

The night was alive with sickle-eyed cats.
Creatures ambling along fenceposts and knowing the moon
so much more intimately than the sun

She woke the next morning, feeling rested
A coffee on the porch
The sun was red and low behind the neighborhood homes
it drank slowly
The cool, damp night had left her bedroom
And caught a current of breeze,
to the place where cats look when they chase imaginary things