Question

you ever have to do something so awful

that it repeats on you every night when

you lie down like gastric reflux all hot

and acidic and eventually it scars your

mind down so you can’t sleep at all cause

the pathways are all sealed up and diverted

into one common corner fresh with ghosts

borne on waves of smell and creatures

of the night flashback and you may look

grown up on the outside but you are just

a kid so how could anybody even think

to make you do that awful thing like it was

nothing it was something the catatonic

heart sees all through the dream cataracts

of glazed over eyes sees that awful thing

you ever have something like that happen

and just have to go on keep on living i bet

you did do you understand would you

tell me if you did?

I’m a little test monkey

Baby, I brought you home with me tonight because I want you to meet my mother,

somebody built her out of straw and a rusted out old stop sign, wrapped the whole

thing in chicken wire and plaid coveralls, and when I pull her left arm just right, candy

bars pop out through the gaps in the buttons in her shirt, and I love her more than you

will ever know or understand. I learned from a young age that she would always be there

for me, not least because of her lack of motility, and then when her scaffolds poked through

the softness and hurt me, well, she didn’t mean it, she really couldn’t help it. I’m excited

to imagine that one day you two might be great friends, that you might even call her “mom”,

opening your heart to her capacity for affectionate doting, she wants grandkids, you know,

little ones that we can balance precariously on her immobile L-beams, always extended.

Video Nasty

Look into this heaving chest,

this coffin full of awful, X-rated

Video Nasty disinterred from

a quiet crypt where nobody

knew to look, they don’t have

money in these seedy corners

of Eastern Europe’s fictional

evil twin, just buckets of blood

poured over meters of magnetic

tape, gaping eye sockets trained

on cannibal torture, hooked,

chewed up by the Video Nasty

machine and re-expressed in

spiral, all the no budget breasts

and creatures ask is look, this

ain’t your MTV, this is Video

Nasty, look because your sight

was stolen, look because that

hunger grows each colorless

day, look because you want it,

you need it, you love it, Video Nasty.

The vampire’s apologist

No, no, no, I get it is all I’m saying,

I just don’t think he’s such a bad guy,

right, because I don’t really think it’s

about the violence for him, or the sex,

the biting all up and down pretty young

necks taut and quivering like bowstrings,

I mean, that sounds good and all, but

really don’t you think it’s just about

life in the end, and come on, like you’re

planning on dying, like you wouldn’t do

whatever it took to prolong your life,

grow up, enlighten yourself or you’ll just

be partying down in neon corners with

Count Dracula and his cadre of blood-

loving necrophiliacs, you’ll just keep

on seeing what life you can glean from

your victims of natural selection that

you lovingly arrange on a series of hooks

beside your fireplace, that’s you, don’t

get down on the count, that’s you too,

the vampire, just sucking and sucking and sucking…

The Pizza Effect!

Oh my God, I remember Marcel,

back in the high school French

exchange student program, boy,

I sure did act like an asshole then,

oh my God, he must construe such

assholery as a part of American

culture and not just me being an

asshole, a-and he actually sort of

liked me, he must have gone back

to France and acted like an asshole

and when they asked him why he

was asking like an asshole he must

have said it was all the rage in America,

oh my God, and now he acts like an

asshole to other Americans and they

just think the French are all assholes,

oh Marcel, oh my God, and now when

he comes back to visit this week and

acts like an asshole to honor my own

assholery, well, what am I to do but

act like an asshole myself, who even

invented this awful hermeneutical feedback

loop, what an asshole, I bet he was French.

Hookman takes your questions

Yes: I do stalk young lovers to their promontories of choice.

I follow the scent of Axe body spray through the forest.

 

No: I am not evil.

Misunderstood maybe, but in fairness, the hook is scary.

 

Yes: I have a large, sharp hook as my prosthesis.

We’re talking probably a good 12 inch diameter if it were a closed loop.

 

No: I do not eviscerate people with it.

I find such barbarism unbecoming.

 

Yes: Freud was right, the hook is a phallic symbol.

Maybe I only follow them because I want to get in on the action.

 

No: I would not call myself “handi-capable”.

The double meanings are too intense.

 

Yes: I do think the vampire is my symbolic trope.

Like any good one, I’m just in it for the nocturnal thrills.

 

No: I couldn’t say why the hook needs to be so sharp.

It is inconvenient for handshakes and scratching my ass.

 

Yes: I like it here, in this dark, psychic in-between.

It gets lonely, but I’ll see you in your dreams, or the next time you go parking.

Tears for a quantum oscillator

How could they, how could they,

how could they just go on living

without me, I’m sure that I’m more

important than that, I myself could

never live without me, and yet here

they go just rolling through life as

a photographer or an architect or

basically any number of things

people really only ever aspire to be,

nobody actually gets to do that for

a living, don’t be naive, and tjey don’t

even notice my perpenidcular motion

through this timeline even one little

bit and that is just unacceptable, here

I am all kinetic energy and embarrassing

attention grabbing stunts and waves and

nothing, and the velocity is too much

for a sad little human like me, I’m gone

now before anybody realized I was there,

off on another trip to the point of maximal

amplitude and minimal usefulness, all

insane, maddening potential energy

boiling in my guts, waiting to be converted

into one more try, it’s a cycle, buddy, you

get to try it again, go for it, dive on down

into this world of friends and acquaintances

and loves, one day soon they will notice,

if nothing else, the beautiful mathematics

of the path, it surely won’t be any real love

or respect, but it will feel good, it’ll be something.

A Pathetic Story

Somebody help me, I mean, if you have time,

I’ve been possessed by a very apathetic demon,

he visited me in a dream and it took him twenty-

five minutes to even talk himself up into digging

into my cerebrum with his claws that he hadn’t

clipped in what appeared to really be quite some

time, I think apathetic is the right word, he surely

didn’t seem depressed per se, fuck it, it’s close

enough I guess, whatever, we’ll go with it, who

even gives such a semantic, you know, crap or

whatever, so there he was all invading my deep

dark memories lying on the floor moaning through

mouthfuls of gray matter, not sexy moaning or

nothing, just bleaaaaaagggghhhh, a real whatever

kind of moan, he kept talking like he was going

to give up halfway through and just leave but he

didn’t, inertia, now there’s a word, so now he’s

taken up residence in my soul or body or mind

and I guess it’s not so bad, he might be changing

my behavior like those demons are wont to do

and all but I can’t tell, whatever, no big deal, he’s

a pretty unusual demon in the first place, so yeah,

if you have some free time and any kind of, you know,

experience in exorcism, I guess it would be all right

if you came over to evict this apathetic demon, be

careful that he doesn’t jump on over into your brain

though, I don’t think you would like that very much,

or maybe you would, I don’t know, who can even say?

 

Share

This is a story about a guy on stage

at this open mic night I used to go to

fumbling this poem-y song all like I

don’t neeeeeeeeeed nobody all over

the stage and it didn’t even rhyme

it was like watching this skinny guy

masturbate and of course we all

loved it we all were going bananas

I was going completely bananas all

like snap snap snap Bra-fucking-

vissimo it like touched me man on

account of I don’t neeeeeeed nobody

either although I gotta say it’s a nice

luxury at times I guess I just wish

he could have gotten that idea into

that poem-y song cause it wouldn’t

even have been that hard anyway

since the thing didn’t rhyme like just

sort of clip it on the end like a tumor

or some such thing but he didn’t do

that whatever it’s his thing at any rate

Neoplasm

They say that if they let it grow unchecked,

this cancer would soon develop into a mass

the size of the Earth, and of course, science

being so positivist these days, how could

they possibly even know that, you know docs

don’t have to ask for your permission for

anything these days, I bet they just went

ahead and did it, shot that little piece of tumor

they whacked out of me into space and watched

it grow unchecked into a mass the size of the Earth,

you know, they say that every cell in the human

body comes from one single great great great

great great great great granddaddy, I guess

I could have just as easily grown up into

a cancer planet instead of me, but I bet that I’d

make the same choice if they let me try again,

I bet the giraffe still finds a value for his elegance,

even as the lion takes him down to earth for dinner.

Developmental Milestone: Formation of Personal Identity

Doctor says, J.F., you’ve regressed,

transgressively regressed when we

wanted to see progress, you can’t even

get dressed lest you obsess over style

that others possess, it’s a mess, I confess,

just give it a rest, that’d be best, let your

thoughts coalesce more or less, bless

your B.S.-ing little soul, there’s nobody

left to impress, don’t oppress your excess,

don’t stress, don’t take violent curves, ess

ess ess, I profess stress only leads to cardiac

arrest and subsequent eternal rest, I only

want to dispossess you of the notion that your

best days are long since repressed, beat your

chest, go west, young man, go get undressed,

you’re just depressed, just do that less, depress

less, yes, that’d be best, we’d like that best.

Focus

My eyeballs have left me in the dark,

packed their emergency duffel bags

and rolled aboard the first subway

train they could find, they left a note,

I think, but I couldn’t read it, I’m guessing

it was something about long work hours

or taxation without representation,

it hardly matters now because they’re

gone, off to see the world, their long

misuse now ancient history between we

three, I miss them quite a bit, you know,

there’s always a chance in these sorts of

abusive relationships, a chance they might

come back, I know that wouldn’t be any

good for either of them but that doesn’t

stop me from dreaming about it, picturing

them in my mind’s eye only, circling on back

into my empty sockets, coming to rest focused

in on a single point like we used to do in the old

days, and then back to it, to long nights, small

text, bleariness, pulsing blood percussion even

when they try to sleep, oh, they’ll get sick of it

again, they’ll leave again, maybe next time they

won’t come back, finally enticed by the lasting

freedom of sunsets over the Pacific, of  places they

never got to go when they were still with me.

D.R.Y.

Another night, another single source of heat and light

evaporating all the rivers that dare to course through

darkened fiber optic veins. Dry, dry dry, the desert skin

cracks at its moon-baked surface, desert lips to scrape

across the cheek of the alcoholic sunrise. Raspy voice,

so dry, evaporating from nowhere lungs buried in the

Earth’s core, coiling lazily through the corridors only

to coalesce at the door, red hot, in a single sorry mirage

of truth. Dust to dust to whirlwind to sky, a place for

everything, and everything’s skin desiccated, coiled up

into blistered reams of bacon. Now we are dry, in memory of

when we used to live, a time before the fossilization, a time

of soothing aloe, those days are over, the world’s water taken

by an angry sun, drawing all the essence from the souls below.

Popular Culture

Tenet number one, the media matters, one must not simply throw

in whatever chicken broth one finds at the downtown rescue mission

and expect the organisms to grow out of a sense of poignant duty,

a certain amount of bloodshed is often essential for success, sing

to the creatures, let them grow toward a voice, do not coddle, sprinkle

generous pinches of rat poisons and chemicals to make their walls

brittle and tragic, unable to accommodate the screaming struggle

to grow, this will breed that millennial resistance right into their

little plastic bodies, they must be strong yet detached, contamination

falls from the sky as it will, and the life can only be good for so many

in these United States of gelatin, natural selection, forget or be forgotten.

This colon’s solitude

Life is ribbit ribbit clllllkkkkk clllkkkkk

floating whorls swamp rosettes tssssss

tssssss ooAH ooAH life is so big ribbit

ooAH muffled underwater voices life

is shrunk down to the size of a pea

HUH– HUH– HUH– squaaaa squa

there is silence among the operatic

bog shushushuh goosh goosh goooosh

life is intricately folded life could stay

here forever hahchahchah the wind

whistles through the colon’s plains at

night ooAH lub lub lub tssss quink squa

quink quink hear the silence pour through

every stagnant puddle huh shuh life life

life is deafeningly quiet life has a heart.

And here’s your host…

Do as I say and as I do, my pretties,

my beautifuls, it’s not fascism if you

like it, you believe me, right, this

is what you believe now,  this here

is the season of the rats, dancing in

a highly coordinated burlesque

pastiche, I will give this America

direction, this America of singer-

songwriters led of out of town by

my swinging baton (ask Freud when

you’re older), led out of town to

the calm riverside, perturbed only

by hand after hand clutching for

the sky before sinking to the pebbles

forever, one last dream of Hollywood

that floats on the strains of pipe music

from the aching, voluptuous hills, you

don’t see it, here, you’re not doing it

right, let me show you what to see.

Unheimlich Night

I have begun a paranormal investigation

on the street outside of my apartment because

it was quite foggy today and it seemed like

a thing to do. Lo and behold, a severed kneecap

appeared to me out of the mist at the corner,

phasing in and out of existence. “Oooooooohhh,

I am the severed kneecap of a pleasant enough

Korean man who died in this very apartment

complex ten years ago to the day!” the kneecap

said. This of course made no sense, because,

I mean, if you’ve ever done any sort of anatomical

investigation, or honestly even just thought about

it at all, it would really take some doing to sever

a kneecap of, well, really any nationality. I tentatively

approached the kneecap, dripping with adverbs

of caution, to ask what I must do to set it at rest,

but then it turned out that it was in reality just

a rather small, smooth stone, the offspring of

circle and pentagon. I still hear that voice sometimes

though, and I figure the kneecap will reveal itself

to me again, when the mood is right. This complex

really is haunted though. I asked my across-the-way

neighbor and he said he hears howling, moaning

voices of pain and misery coursing down the streets

at night. Often that’s just me setting the mood, but

sometimes, you have to figure, law of averages

and all, sometimes there has to be something more.

Body of Work

I’ve got a Ford that smells like mayonnaise and a staple gun

and nobody with whom to share these simple delights, so I will

go to work in a lair stacked to the eyeballs with discarded Revell

model kits and daily pill organizers filled with acrid colors, I have

nothing but “An Eye For Aesthetics!” which will do me just peachy,

that and a rack full of rented DVDs never to be returned, veneered

with inconsiderate boogers of the ages, not mine, and so, now that

the vises are open palms ready to receive, now that the staple gun

(which belonged to Anton Chekhov and is sitting on my workbench–

THIS MAY BE IMPORTANT) is fully loaded, uh, let’s get sloppy, pump

in whatever poisonous gases can be carefully sieved from the eager

atmosphere, cobble, cobble, cobble goes the industrious turkey,

the point is BODY PARTS, I imagine the point here goes something

like stapling my eyebrows in a position that, if nothing else, at least

doesn’t look so bored, you wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve

found among the shredded medical record confetti and rotten eggs,

and from them I shall build —a creature— and in the biopic he’ll be

played by some other blasted Londoner and the auteur will bastardize

my bastard, falling into the trap that is so typical of stories as classic

as my own, leaving me to die of old age while my monster shambles

on, more notorious, more identifiable, and alas, more well-liked.

Another open letter

To the metallic blue mini-van at the intersection

of Ephesus Church and Farrington Road at 6:47 PM

on the button, the brunt of your alarming maneuver

was actually taken by the fact that I rather uncannily

anticipated your bad behavior, sneaking up behind

us on the right-hand shoulder while we waited to turn

and then darting out in front of me, the two of us each

swinging around the corner at our own lurching, seasick

radius, two street sign satellites, and obviously at some

subconscious level I must even have presumed such

a trick to be exciting and worthwhile, how else would

I have guessed somebody like yourself would have tried

it, but I of course laid on the horn anyway, there are few

things more gratifying when one knows oneself to be in

the right, but then something awful happened as I, now

behind you, followed you into the Hardees drive-thru

with no intention to harangue or intimidate, I just kind

of wanted Hardees and I guess you did too, well, now that

we had drawn attention to ourselves, everybody who cared

to see knew that we were both going to Hardees, and I wonder

if you felt the embarrassment I did, outed as a typical American

slob, I think you may have, for I certainly felt a secret between

us in that moment, we were complicit, and I looked at the back

of your windshield and saw oddly shaped smiley faces drawn

into the dust by your children’s fingers, and we were close,

at that moment, you waiting for two cheeseburgers alone in

your metallic blue mini-van on the unseasonably warm night,

me just hoping that, if your kids do end up growing up all right,

no premature atherosclerotic events from a childhood filled

with Hardees, well, if they do grow up and decide that they want

to learn to drive, I only hope that a better driver than yourself

might teach them.

Manse

This old house is senile,

demented, out of its gourd,

the comings and goings

have blurred into a fleshy

stop-motion rainbow,

the tendons are tenuous,

holding the doors, stairs,

and windows in a creaky

limbo, I hear the phthsis,

crawling through old,

wasted basement lungs,

this old house has meant

a great deal to each of us

over the years of storms,

holding its tenants tightly

against a warm breast,

muffling the screaming

wind, now who will save

this old house, I wonder,

even as it sways in an odd,

dusty dignity, giving even

in the last moment, rotted

but still standing, begging

us inside for one more meal,

one more song, one more

smiling family portrait in

front of the fireplace before

we pull the plug.

Life in this uncanny valley

The manic state used to dip me into grandiose delusions,

but now this depressive hangs like the Indian summer’s

uneasy mist and speaks only in affectless tones of flat

reality and corrections, it may turn out that people do

not avoid me for any aura of luminous subconscious after

all, the last empty seat on the bus to my side may be no

special privilege, but an accusation instead, I may never

be the Antichrist that I dreamed of and admired, it may

only be that I am so very close to human, resembling

it in every way save for those that you never could

articulate, that you are repulsed, disgusted, which

is fine, but it would be a lot better if I could transform

all the way to robot so I couldn’t feel this aching doubt,

so that my smile could be painted on in waterproof black.

Custody Battle

I had just lost track of time,

and now I suppose it is fair

after all that you should gain

control of our happiness for

this weekend, after all, I had

held it close to my breast all

week and I was really starting

to get a little spoiled, so take it

from me, there is no new life,

there is no regeneration in our

little zero-sum game, I will bear

your salvo on an igneous cheek

and never flinch, this is what I

deserve, what we both deserve

for being so foolish in the pageant

of our early days when some small

amount of joy could sustain us

all but indefinitely, when things

were equal and we scoffed at change,

before the sinister strings sang

out softly at first, but growing all

the time in volume: you could have

it, more, more, more, more, more

Austerity

it is time to reduce your life

down to all but the barest

essentials

 

sell the car and buy a bicycle

and sell the bicycle and buy

some shoes

 

and sell the shoes and just

go barefoot, better yet,

go nude

 

leave your house and live

under a tree, or under

the stars

 

or actually the stars are a bit

elaborate in these lean times,

sleep under a black

sky

 

gone are the days of beer and wine

 

gone are the days of cheese and grapes

 

gone are the days of gruel and bricks

 

leave your body behind,

dissipate and diffuse

into atoms

 

do this for your country

Takeaways! A statement of dubious sincerity…

I suppose I just don’t understand

what I am supposed to get out of

writing all of these poems, what

is the takeaway, the big idea, what’s

in it for me, how do I know that I

am superior to, for example, you,

there is a pretty serious cost-benefit

analysis at play here and I am losing,

you should be losing, after all, you’re

wasting your time reading poetry,

why don’t you go do something with

some takeaways, why don’t I go do

something with some takeaways, I

wish I knew what the takeaway was

here, is this frivolous, this is frivolous,

there’s got to be some sort of contract

we can draw up, for chrissakes, are you

still here, go do something, this is why

we’re losing to the Chinese, are you

Chinese, I’m sorry if that was offensive,

but whoever you are, can’t you go do some

math or chemistry or physics or something?

Big Ideas!

I am sorry to report that this young man’s

ideas have gotten too big for his head and now

they are really becoming unpleasant to some

unsuspecting passers-by, obeying even the most

obscure laws of fluid mechanics and slopping out

of his precocious little ears by the dumpster-full,

idea-plop-idea-plop is the noise they make, just

like that, a smarmy know-it-all drizzle into oily

sidewalk rainbows that bedazzle and, it must be

said, annoy, you can’t drive down main street

without squashing a shag carpet’s worth of little

leggy ideas, and the stench, hoo boy, somebody

really ought to come up with a big idea for how in

the heck we’re going to clean this rotten mess up,

now that would actually be useful, instead of this

putrid rubbish, this awful young man’s big ideas.

Nuclear warfare for absolute beginners

For a while there near the end, Bob was getting

pretty damn annoying if you ask me, talking on

and on about the theory of quantum immortality

like he knew something about it, which he didn’t,

he had read, no, like perused a damn newspaper

article about it and meanwhile this guy Everett

wrote whole books about it, but like I said, if you

ask me, anybody who believes in something like

that is on a pretty dangerously crazy ego trip

anyhow, and Bob kept telling us over plates of

greasy french fries how there would always be

a microstate waiting for him to experience out

there, someplace beyond the yellow horizon of

probabilities that we could even calculate, and so

he would just go on living forever, simple mathe-

matics, the asshole said, always a soft mattress

world to catch him when he fell, but he stopped

talking about it pretty soon because he died when

he fell down a flight of stairs in his apartment

building and broke his damn neck, and I don’t

even really feel too smug about being right,

I guess I might not even be right, maybe he only

left our world, or my world, or however you’re

supposed to say it, actually yeah, I bet there’s a

place right now where he fell just right and got

right back up, brushing himself off, maybe a pretty

girl even saw it happen and made sure he was all

right and they both had a laugh about it and went

off for coffee, every night I fall asleep trying to

calculate the probabilities, so many zeroes, this

world is too full of zeroes, maybe Bob was right,

the other guys tell me I’ll go crazy if I don’t stop

obsessing about it, they say that Bob is in a better

place, and I’m starting to think they’re right, I can

almost see the numbers in my dreams, almost see

Bob and his pretty little girlfriend climbing each

confident step at night, when there’s nobody watching,

when the walls between the worlds are thinnest.

This poem has a twist ending…

…which is that I am an unreliable narrator,

calm down, unbunch your panties, concepts

this high are rarely any great shakes in the hands

of a writer (like myself) of such amateurish

disposition, but also remember that some of

the great works throughout literary history have

featured tenuous tellers of tall tales, it would not

be inappropriate to associate me with that, even

if you ultimately find the attempt a little pathetic,

like the physics of a one-legged poodle, but OK,

I promised you a twist, and the twist is actually

that I’ve been pretty frank with you thus far,

except for when I said I was an unreliable narrator,

but I’d actually say that was fitting, think about it,

it’s not so hard, and also Soylent Green is people.

The time Joe fell off a mountain

Joe says he doesn’t believe in karma,

it is what it is, Joe says that a lot because

he hears other people say that a lot, and

the no duh simplicity appeals to him, “it

is what it is”, in this case the pronoun

referring to the fact that Joe is limping

right now because he fell of a mountain,

at the time he was on top of that mountain

to smoke some weed and dream about

girls other than the one he is currently

seeing, he doesn’t treat her too well, you

know, picture that, no, not the way he treats

her, picture the scene, I mean, that’s exactly

what Joe said, “I fell off a mountain”, and that

was the end of it, we never really spoke about

it again, but here I am almost thinking of it

like the sun was raw molten gold dripping

down onto Joe’s greedy skull, making him

heavy, so heavy, until finally, shit yeah, who

wouldn’t fall of a mountain, straight off, like

a shooting star going to seed in those lonely

Adirondacks, it was OK though, his cousin

drove him to the hospital pretty soon after

that in the back of his rusted out Chevy pickup,

now he’s OK except for the limp, it is what it is.

Fearsome

There are worse things to be than a cloud

full of lightning bolts drawn to the amygdala.

 

These days, though, inflation has taken hold,

with horrors too accessible and unsurprising.

 

It’s not enough to be a brick wall, dangling

Marley’s chains like foreboding fishhooks.

 

I will have to draw from every shadow, grow

four more arms and a hard whisky-colored shell.

 

I will have to build a precipice of sanity and send

the wisps beyond the edge to draw them closer.

 

Let me remind you that even the oddest phobia

was born in a roiling cauldron called survival.

Smart Guy

Smart Guy has a notebook filled with arrows

and Greek letters Smart Guy has one helluva

collection of numbers, they tried to make him

a bar code but the stripes just ran all together

like an angry black unibrow Smart Guy strung

together a necklace full of syllables and minerals

collected from his travels Smart Guy is feeling

kind of shiftless these days Smart Guy knows too

much for his own good Smart Guy has calculated

all the angles but finds himself spitting fire over

the execution Smart Guy is better than you and

good enough not to let you know that Smart Guy

believes he can beat the Chinese Smart Guy feels

pretty depressed these days Smart Guy knows a

drug for that Smart Guy thinks he’d be a lot Smarter

if it weren’t for his sinusoidal emotions Smart Guy

isn’t so Smart about that but let’s cut him a break

this time.

Some Thing about the nexus of all human decision making

So there I was looking at the Dirt Devils in my price range

at Sears when, believe it or not, I was confronted by a man

who looked precisely, and I do mean pre-ee-cisely, like me,

and he said that he was a version of me that, while the two

of us had come from the same starting point, had branched

off somewhere along the way, and he had an eye patch and also

carried a small toy pug crossbreed type thing in a little purse-

like hand kennel, and anyway (forgive the digression, but really,

you should have seen the guy) he said that he had somehow

psychically traveled backward, all the way back, to the nexus

of human decision making, and through an incredibly time-

consuming process of trial-and-error had found his way to me,

and this was significant, he said, because I was the worst, as in,

literally the worst single possible outcome for the little glowing

asterisk that was our starting point back in 1989, that’s what this

guy said at least, and I’m like, hey guy, if you don’t have anything

nice to say, well, why don’t you go fuck yourself, and honestly I

have to say that I did start thinking back at some of the, you know,

branch points, and I don’t really think I did too bad, I bet this guy

was just jealous and screwing with me, man, I ain’t so bad, yeah,

and at least I’ve got two eyes…