In the years that come and pass, things come to fruition, whether they are gilded with golden fingertips, or if they are enclosed with ugliness. Lessons are learned, drama is settled, but some things are built to last, built to be mad at the world, delirious with grandeur, but fuming with anger. Especially in a young person's life when the years are so few, and the speed of which they move is everso quickening. Ambition, love, maturity, optimisim, ethics, morals: these all surface in the beginning and resonate. Life caters to your choices, your way of cracking the case. But never does it do you any favors unless it is seen as somewhat deserving.

I'm writing this now because, I myself am scared. I'm sick to my stomach, dreading the idea of things faltering, becoming maddening at sight. I have ambitions, I have needs, I have my own set of morals established under contexts of which are necessary to create. In words fewer than the ones I've used, a single listless word known with bitterness in tone, I'm stuck. Stuck in Jell-O, stuck in a glass Coke bottle, stuck in that bacon grease jar that you keep underneath your sink...stuck, stuck, stuck. Stuck in the modern-electricity-solar-powered-overwhelming world of death, taxes, and the obsoletion of jazz music, of long, sleak cars, of boxy television screens, of Paul, John, George, and Ringo living in my radio, of a president wanting to make a difference and having his life taken from him in response, of black and white movies, and of men wearing suits and ties like they were sweatpants and a hoodie.

It hurts thinking that time is passing and with it comes the death of others there to witness, to experience, to retell those stories to kids like me who are so hungry, they would rather push the future away and stare at those pictures of the past. I want nostalgia, I want ambition, I want something pure and awesome and geniune, instead of wondering what sort of chemicals have been stuffed inside a loaf of Sunbeam bread. I want to get married and drive a Plymouth and come home to my beautifully colorful house, with my family jumping in my arms. I want to place my hat on my son, with it being too big for his little six-year-old head, and have him smell the inseam, knowing his father was working hard all day to provide a good life for him. I want the little tabby cat to brush against my pant leg and lick his paws clean. I want to open a bottle of High Life and plop in my chair at the dining room table and scoop mashed potatoes on my plate. I want my daugther to sit across from her brother and make faces with her spoon at him, while they crack up and I join them soon after, with their mother giving me that wonderfully pleasant look of...of what? Of no regrets, no coulda-woulda-shouldas? I want to retire from the dinner table, after having helped my wife with the dishes, giving her a few playful shoves and a dollop of soap on her nose. I want to go into my office, located in the perfect corner of the house to where the children won't run on top and my wife won't throw her heels on the floor when she's concerned on what to wear the next day. I want to look at my typewriter, gleaming in moonlight, and rub my fingers against the keys. I want to create that pleasant, beautiful story in the typewriter, the one that will change the lives of so many who can relate, reform, and redeem themselves with it. I want to see my name bulging out of cornershop windows and shed a tear while I watch. I want to indulge in beer every once and a while when it comes to celebrating. I want to watch my son learn how to drive my stick shift and knock a tail light out backing out of the driveway. I want to watch my daughter marry a wonderful person and have them shake my hand with intensity. I want my wife to kiss me goodnight every night, even when I'm traveling for business. I want her to wink at me from across the living room, when my feet are propped up and I have the little yellow notepad sitting crooked in my lap, and the pen in my hands is moist from ambitious procrastination. GOD! I see this life in the movies I watch, in the books I read, and in the culture I indulge in, and it is not a culture of this time. This is a culture of many years ago, years when Mantle was swinging a hot bat and when Stephen King was a college student at the University of Maine. The 1960's, my wonderful audience, was the time of life when it seemed enriching, harnessing, carelessly unpredictable, and exciting. Geniune feelings and emotions not botched and bothered with social media and the political hoaxes that make up our climate now. I acknowledge that there were faults, but the turning point is only as powerful as the people who remember. Faults that turned into history books, that turned into entire libraries housing information.

I'm stuck, my fellow peers. Stuck in the sick realization that I can't relive this era. I can't smell the fresh, unpolluted air of America. All I know how to do is write those stories and tell them to others. It's the only thing I know how to do and do right. To dwell is to enrich as is to settle is to find no pure happiness. My theory may be unsettling, but why bother sugarcoating?

A short story about how a relationship can change in a flash...

And there was a place for him at the bedside, where the picture frame sat and the Zippo lighter leaned on the desk lamp’s post. She was busy cleaning the top of the table, leaving the small knick-knacky things on the bed—the dust particles transferred from the lamp’s cover and metal coating onto the clean comforter and pillow casings. All he noticed was that she had moved his brown slippers to her side of the bed, rather than the usual spot next to his dresser where he left them every day and night. It had been a long day and he wasn't going to use their few minutes together as an excuse to start a meaningless argument. To be fair, that had not stopped his feeble mind before. So the slippers had moved, and she was squeezing the spray bottle onto the wooden slat that made the top of the nightstand. It had been her idea to pick it up after a late lunch one March somehow ended up on the wrong side of town; and the houses were rough-looking. There was a collection of wooden furniture planted against the mailbox of a smaller looking house—it was, though, one of the larger houses on the block. There were cinder blocks stacked messily around the mailbox’s rotting wood beam. Evidently, it had been the victim (on several occasions) to a few swift innings of “mailbox baseball.” Next to the pile of furniture was a cardboard sign, withered from a few rainy afternoons, then the sun evaporating the water back out of it. FREE was spray-painted on the sign in bright neon purple. Before we traded in the four-seater for a two-seater, there was still room in my car for something besides two people and the occasional plastic bag of leftovers from an inexpensive restaurant. She had kicked her feet down from the dashboard and slapped at the window lightly—there was a shallow ticking sound that her ring made on the glass. Sometimes, she would switch the wedding ring from her left hand to her right when she was thinking about something enough to forget; he thinks it’s her envisioning her life if she had married that wad of paper from Terre Haute that she went steady with for a while. He meant to bring up the ring habit from time to time, but regardless of it being on his mind for long periods of time, He’d always forget to say something.

“Hey…hey!” she yelped, tapping and pointing at the mound of wood furniture. He was purposefully going slow because the roads were bad and he wasn't sure what kind of kids were raised around those parts. Whether it be the type that throws broken nails and rock clippings under their neighbor’s tires or the type that have parents that let their kids get hit by a long Cadillac. Always the babies that wander off down the stairs, grabbing onto the railing like their mothers did out of habit, and graciously work their way down to the concrete footpath. Their onesie’s grippy feet were grinded slowly as the baby shuffled its feet. A minute walking, a minute leaning forward to crawl and rest, and then back up to work again. Fortunately enough, the baby’s hands were made of the same stuff that Jell-O came from—at least that was what the baby’s older brother thought. And he told his friends such on the school playground when they inquisitively asked about the new kid brother responsibilities. Naturally, the metal gate was propped open from earlier in the day when the father had come home, half asleep, half drunk, and stumbled up the stairs, forgetting to latch the gate shut. Ironically, the baby had more stability from less than a year of walking than the father did from an unstable, disgusting forty-three years. The baby would make a cooing sound like that of a raccoon scratching a tree’s post for something to fall from it. And worse yet, the car would stop a few feet after impact so the baby would be pushed into the clear sky, making contact with the ground seconds later. And the onesie was no longer one piece of clothing.

So he reluctantly flashed his hazard lights a few yards away from the cinder blocked mailbox. Getting out of their four-seater, she was ecstatic placing her flattened wedges against the road’s rough patches. She could tell a car had been parked on that side of the road for a while because a few spots were sunken in and blackened from the skid marks. It was a miracle weeds hadn’t latched themselves onto the tires through the asphalt. Along with the battered nightstand, there was what appeared to be the top and bottom half of a china cabinet, a chair and its severed legs, pieces of an extendable dining room table, and a few wooden slats that had screws in their sides, so he assumed they were bedroom shelves. The pile looked more like a scrap heap for firewood rather than a petty charity giveaway. He wasn’t impressed and tried to visibly show it with his hands in his pockets, sticking out his thumbs like the orange flags in cones when you’re trying to find a parking space at a football game. The collar on his furry brown jacket was pointed forward, with the smoothness of the inner circumference hugging his neck hair. He swayed his head from one side to the other while his neck slowly popped in and out of place; it was one of those hollow cracks that breaks the tension inside, but can easily make someone’s head turn around to make sure your head has all of its wires still attached. However, she was uninterested with her husband’s bodily functions at the moment. Forgetting his manners of opening her door, and also because she practically shoved the door’s latch open, he traipsed behind her while she galloped to the mound, stopping as her shadow provided an overcasted shade to the wood pile. The pile was as dilapidated as the house looked from the end of the street. It was a one story house that was longer than it was wide. A window each flanking the glass screen door and a smaller, rectangular window tucked close to the rain gutter pipe: a bathroom window with the uncleaned frosted glass filtering the sunbeams hitting the ceramic tile. She leaned forward, almost with her knees scraping the concrete curb, and examined the pile: she went back and forth to the nightstand because [a] it was seemingly the only piece of furniture that was completely intact and [b] it was the only cleaner looking piece. There used to be rubber feet on the bottom to keep it from sliding too much and there were also drawers missing because the metal tracks were still drilled in the sides. The husband and the wife glanced a bit for the drawers but were greeted with no luck; and the wife was upset, but she put it past her and began to pick up the nightstand on her own. She felt that the back of the nightstand was held together with a microscopically thin slice of plywood, while the two pieces on the sides were thicker than any of the pieces of wood there. It was definitely handmade, with some chips on the top and sides.

“It needs a home, Chris,” the wife said to her husband. She looked at him as if he would miraculously just say no and walk back to the car. What he really wanted to say is that he didn’t want a trashy piece of termite-infested wood in his new house, much less her keeping those Neanderthalic ideas of taking old things and making them old things taking up new spaces. She talked about it like it was a lost puppy smothered in caked mud and didn’t have a tail anymore. It was lighter than she thought, but she still wanted to pick it up without either stepping on the wood, nor the grass. The grass was yellowed: there was a sprinkler next to the spigot on the side of the house, but from the naked eye, it was rusted closed. The sprinkler was over a foot long, but all of the rubber-ended holes were faced down in the ground and smushed closed, preventing any water from coming out. It was a new sprinkler from the hardware store, but all it knew was the dry dirt of a shady side of town and the cold reticence of the house’s shadow. Chris could also see long streaks in the grass from where a lawn mower had begun to cut the grass, but stopped in the middle, leaving it to grow unevenly. He pictured the entire lawn like a body covered in ingrown hairs: the cells just bubbling at the surface, putting pressure on the hair to just sprout out of the follicles.

“Don’t you think we ought to come back with some towels or something?” Chris said, “I mean who knows where and for how long this junk has been sitting here? And I don’t want dirt in my car, Grace.”

Out of all of his reasoning he attempted to do, all his wife, Grace, heard was him complaining about his car…all about his car, his car, his car.

“And that’s different from the containers of old drink cups and McDonald’s wrappers, how?”

A diabolic shot in the dark, and Chris was flattened and called out by his own wife. He thought it was a bit unfair, but he wasn’t going to argue with logic. She motioned him over, claiming that it really wasn’t that dirty, just dusty from the pollen in the grass. She smacked the back of it lightly to get a feel of the amount of pressure it could handle. He actually walked in the grass, around the dining room table pieces, and helped his wife take the nightstand to the car. It felt inhumane to just take it and leave, but the sign said for him to feel otherwise. Briefly stuck in a piece of wood, Chris unhooked his foot that was too close to the pile and managed to lift the drawerless nightstand to the right side of the car, hazards still flashing. The rigid corners of the nightstand slid, with inches to spare, in the car. They tipped it over on its left side, careful to not let it rock back and forth when they turned corners. As a safety precaution, and because Grace was a month pregnant, she got into the habit of buckling the seatbelts when something was in the back. Chris remarked on her doing that with the bags of groceries, talking to them like they had spit out their pacifiers and she had to clean the cat hair off of them. She buckled the passenger side and middle seat belts inward and secured the nightstand tightly. Chris managed to grab Grace’s hand as she began to make her way back over the pile for a possible round of seconds. He casually guided her to her door and closed it for her, remembering his taught manners at the opportune moment, drifting further away from a bad sense of disposition.

And there was Chris, acknowledging that his slippers were in the wrong place, and his wife cleaning the top of the nightstand promptly before they went to bed. He moved the slippers back, brushed his teeth, and exited the bathroom while his wife put the knick-knacky things back on. She kissed the picture frame, hoping her husband wasn’t looking, and placed it under the lamp’s light—it was a picture of their son, John. He was a baby in that picture: a curious, mindless baby that liked to walk more than crawl when he wanted to. The reflection made her grimace, noticing how blue his eyes had been early on. Once the lights were off, she was there, cradling her warmth in the fetal position, wanting to reach out and hold the picture to her heart until one day she would be in that picture with him. Chris was there to wrap his arm around her waist, feeling her heated pulse beating…beating…beating through her thin clothes. And as the people who were like clouds without rain gave away that free wood on that day with the clear sky, they were there to watch. A half dozen figures were watching in the dark while she rocked herself to sleep, making her body numb and her head spin like a colorful mobile above John’s crib. It played the music, whistling through the stillness of the house, breathing that dry, wooden air from the nightstand. The nightstand breathed right along with them, feeling and seeing things. And John was there with it, keeping an eye on his parents for a while…until things passed over. But how could he truly watch them when they were the ones that were twice dead. They would have been more careful had John given them a second chance to be.

(February 2024)

The first time I ever had any real life experience was when I first bumped into Montgomery Clift at a bar, down in Burbank. What the people said about his eyebrows was true, and I resisted the urge to laugh my ass off, until I could wet my pants. He was a slim fellow, smoked a lot during our half hour conversation, and seemed down in the doldrums, sulking like a miserable Hollywood snob, I’d say. The pair of us drank a couple of Manhattans, no rocks, and covered in three large red cherries, with the systems still attached like it was a chocolate sundae. He showed me this trick where we could tie a knot with the cherry stem in his mouth with his tongue; I was partially impressed and the rest, disgusted. In being perfectly candid, he was a fruity song, yet I was intrigued almost as much as when I played a chess game with Humphrey Bogart in the thirties—this was before he was the Humphrey Bogart of the silver screen, married to a woman twenty-five years younger than himself, and got away from a hysterically insane wife who did the beating of the family. After my conversation with Mr. Clift, I was left drunk, and blatantly pulled my pants down to piss on a fire hydrant just outside Paramount Pictures, and left my hat on top to claim the territory as rightfully mine alone. The hydrant never did what it was supposed to do, much less look good in color like any typical snobbish woman of the valley. I turned my head and saw Mr. Clift walked in the opposite direction of me, seemingly just starting his trek after a second of staring at me doing my dirty work; it was the last time I saw his face before he turned up dead a couple of months later, in the Times of the West coast. Poor sap, I thought.

Passing the corner of the city limits, I walked past a pay phone, hanging off of the wire, and I heard the faint dial tone; reluctantly, I picked up the receiver and hung it up, almost flinching to here the change drop down in the slot, but no change was there for my taking. After a few steps, the phone rang and broke a ring of silence due at any time—unfortunately for me, that time was in the broad darkness of California, where all there was was a selection of good clean turnpikes, and a couple of street lamps sprinkled in every ghost town. The ringing was like a throbbing heart, the way it filled my ears coherently. I heard myself move my feet, then reach for the phone; I hadn’t been in control of my body since I saw Clift’s cherry stem gimmick. It was all a revelation of a turning point—am I really capable of harnessing such a power as the control of my body? An operator greeted me with a rough how-do-you-do, and asked if I was accepting the call. I burped and said yes, feeling dizzy, and grabbing my temples as if ascertaining the dizziness with immense pressure can solve the problem of my irresponsibility to myself. The beginning of the phone call was a soft breath, eagerly wanting to say something, yet the voice was distant, immersed in a bleak facade of themselves. As if they were looking in a mirror for the first time, and hardly finding the words to describe the dangerousness they see—I was the first to respond to the breathing, feeling only obligated, and for it being tasteful. I said “hello?” about as clearly as the way I could see my feet in the darkness.

“I lost the baby, Pierce,” a woman said, dazed with spasmodic morose. I loved the sound of her voice when she was upset; it reminded me of a school teacher I once had—Oh! how I loved that school teacher like a girlfriend. And lo, the dense fog became an entity, shielding me from responding to the woman’s remark. I was in charge of answering for Pierce, whoever he was and wherever he may be. There was a little souvenir in my pocket from the hardware store just three blocks away: a pistol-shaped lighter capable of scaring some kids and lighting their smokes too. Fishing it out, I lit myself two: one for me and one for the woman, which I casually set lighted on top of the steel box the phone lived in. “Do you want a cigarette?” I kindly asked the woman over the phone. I was entirely aware of how loopy I sounded.

“The baby is gone, Pierce,” she cried, “floating with the Heavenly Father, if my prayers worked.”

I giggled manically, then coughed like a sick, wild animal thrashing around in a zoo cage, being mocked and given a casual middle finger—I would present them with a likewise altercation. That school teacher’s voice—and large bosom—filled my imagination with Independence Day fireworks, gleaming like the end of wartimes, sparkling like the top of a sugar-crusted creme brulee. Her patriotic lipstick was the color of freshly pricked blood from a rose’s thorn, dripping into her palm, and pooling. Her eyes were gumdrop-colored green, with a hint of fluorescent blue around the center of the irises, and she always wore a long sundress—even in the winter. I winked at her everyday when I left her class, constantly under the impression that her and I were unconsciously going steady. I found her crying once, with a Kleenex bunched up in her hand, and a smudge of lipstick where she wiped her nose. The last bell of the school day had rung, while I had left my textbook in her class, and I found her. She acknowledged me by name when I asked what was the matter. She embraced me like an equal, and I went home to write her a love poem, confessing my undying pledged fidelity to her, hath come the day we wed and create a family; I was widely delusional in the days before all things that are now considered serious. I switched ears for the receiver and wondered how melodramatic women could convince themselves of being—was it sane for them? Was I in the wrong for being the seemingly insensitive one?

“All right, doll, let’s take it slow,” I said, working up an edge, “what’s your name, and all that?”

“You know who I am,” she said, repulsed.

“I’m afraid you don’t strike me as distinctive,” I responded. “How do I know you, per say?”

“You’re the one who’s put me in this mess, you cowardly bastard,” she said, ominously calm—it was like chatting with a congregation of poets: all dull and understanding and having a putrid complexion.

“How’s that?”

“I blame your antics, you wet piece of slime-covered rubber, and that ain’t news to your sore ears, is it?”

“I think you better take it easy, doll,” I said, keeping a relaxed composure. “You’re slightly in over your head. Have you been drinking?”

I heard a wail of crying after going a few seconds without a response, clearly getting the idea that this woman was mentally insane. I lit her cigarette for her, yet she still wants to point fingers at the innocent one. It was all too unreal.

“You sound drunk yourself, Pierce.”

I froze, making a harsh realization… How did she know my name, and why did she speak it as if it were an inconvenient thread on her shirt? Was I really that loathsome to a woman? I hadn’t noticed her identifying by name until now.

“You left me this morning! And you didn’t even think about my well-being!”

“Paula?” I asked, repenting.

“Halle-fucking-luyah!” she cried.

“What’s going on, hon?”

She frantically started sobbing into the receiver, imploring me to come home and look at what I caused.

“Paula, you had better settle down…It’s not good for you to get hysterical this soon after.”

“How would you know?”

I didn’t respond, except for plucking the cigarette from the top of the box and having it for myself; it tasted like the people of the city: wet, malnourished, odorous, and sexy all balled and rolled up into one.

“Paula, what in God’s name is going on?”

She breathed unsteady, causing another loud feedback buzz from the receiver in my ear, to which I pulled away and looked at the dark outside surrounding me. I was alone.

“The baby, Pierce, he’s gone.”

“What does that mean? Gone where?”

I was unequivocally conscious of something being worse than how Paula was putting it on to be. Her voice was shrill, and harshly butchered by the connection of midnight. Blood pumped towards my brain like a railway station, fleeting in the glimpse of a second, making me light-headed with anxiety.

* * *

I had to hitch a ride from a speakeasy owner a quarter of a mile past the city limits; he was a poly-roly of sorts, yet drove like a racehorse. It was around one when I found the apartment in the glazed reflection of my thick intoxication—the key was indecisively not wanting to enter the keyhole, as if shaking its head no. After a few fumbled attempts, the apartment door swung open and I was greeted with an aroma of rusted pennies. There was a light on next to the kitchen, which was the bathroom’s. I threw down my coat and took a few large steps over to the light, cautiously avoiding the inside in case I didn't like what I saw. I cocked my head at an angle and slowly pushed my body in the light, and saw a puddle of water next to the pile of towels. I moved my eyes forward and saw Paula draped on the tub, feet on the ground and head in the water. Her back was bony, with her spinal buttons poking out of her nightie. A few steps closer, and there was the body of our baby floating, face down, in the water, bumping the side of the tub like a buoy. A half empty glass of some alcohol was sitting on top of the toilet’s water tank, with a pink toothpick umbrella balanced on its side.

“Get up, Paula!”

I screamed and aimed my pistol lighter at the back of her head.

“Get up!”

I reached for her back, and felt the coolness of her cold-blooded body—I glanced at the body of my baby again, wondering if the death was quick or slow.

“GET UP, YOU BITCH!”

Without thinking, I stopped shouting, put down the lighter, flicked the lightswitch off, and went into my bedroom—it was a time of procrastination of the highest variety. I started to jump on my bed like a child, screaming childish verses from nursery rhymes—I didn’t smile, but yelled to fill the uncomfortable silence. Yuck yuck yuckety yuck yuck—all my father claimed I did in a time of simplicity. I collapsed on the bed, and turned to lay on my fat stomach; I was dog-tired. The silence rang like an anxious doorbell, hanging out to dry, then never really letting out for a break until you’re comfortable.

As always, I wished my wife, Paula, and my baby goodnight, and went soundly to sleep like I was meant to do. Towards the third hour of the early morning, I heard a baby’s cry from down the hall—it was muffled and dry.

Delmar Loop sat on his stoop, crossing his fingers and toes

He gave such a laughter when he got home right after

The great wonderful news

He would be the best man of the wedding

Watching his friend wither away

The wife was a soul sucker

It would be a wonder if he lasted more than a day

Ole Delmar Loop grinned a hearty parade

Forcing himself to dance on the dusty old stoop

He noticed a small spider, coming for his lighter

So he lit the spider all up with a big whoop

The woman was fascist

All covered in white and ivory lattice

Her mouth was well and poised

For the hypnotic trail into the brattice

Soft and comfortable did his shoeless feet feel

For the wonderful recital for one

Ole Delmar Loop groaned with pleasure

But realized he didn’t want to do this a ton

The letter was tucked in his pocket

Gracefully torn from the top

The words were printed with leisure

And his thoughts were coming nonstop

The rail of his apartment was covered

In rust of another century

His feet were starting to get cluttered

Like those rough boys in the penitentiary

What was the social resonation for this?

Why ecstatic, was he so?

Was the downfall sort of a craving?

Like watching leaves fall while the wind blows.

And by God it was going on noon

How could time find its way so soon?

Why waste all the time, when the time wastes itself like a loon?

Ole Delmar Loop would fly home in no time…

To be the one who clutches the moon

Delmar Loop cackled on his stoop, wandering the steps up and down

Much like a fighter, he cradled his lighter

And let the bygone feeling pass him and drown…

(June 2024)

Alright, sure, let's talk asshats. One of the prime suspects for someone of that particular nomenclature is none other than the crashing-meteor-on-a-stick Norman Mailer. Let's talk Norman Mailer for a second. When I was first introduced to Norman Mailer, it was by a story of one of his earlier marriages---told to me by a teacher I think---about how he managed to stab his wife with a penknife at a party in November of 1960. Red flags were there, but maybe not set up to be flown just yet. Story arc, cataclysmic event that framed the next decade for him as a raging, sexist, homophobic dweeb that often found himself gargling his spit rather than spewing words that were of health to him. He had a rather intriguing rivaly with journalist, Gore Vidal, who was perhaps one of the saving relics of the controversial literary era of the 1960's, but nonetheless had things to say that maybe I didn't agree with all the way. When hearing these things, I first decided to judge my opinion based solely on Norman Mailer's writing as it was his main source of income and main source of hate---go figure. The first novel I read of his is probably one of his less famous ones, but I thought it excellently written all the same---it was a novel that barely let go of the throat when it came to both the enhanced writing flow along with the memorable characters. A smaller novel called "An American Dream" about this man who performs a sort of Holden Caulfield, impulsive decision to kill his wife and relive the consequences for a while while he shows aspects of Raskolnikov of Dostoevesky's "Crime and Punishment". I also don't mean to say that he plaguarized the characteristics blatantly, but they are both the best examples I can think of as far as describing the main character, Stephen Rojack, to the best ability. The best way I can explain Norman Mailer as both a writer and also as a person is that he is a frightened, catatonic harbinger of hate and also rich ambiguity. He writes until his ears pop, he speaks until his mouth is full of saliva, and he crosses his legs so tightly that he can barely get up to shake a person's hand when on an episode of "The Dick Cavett Show." Witty, dauntless, and charismatic does his face often show, but he dare not use his words: rather his actions he let take part of his freaky frenzy of a charade he puts up to hang. He's a sexist, racist, corrupt, wannabe politician that envies himself in the bitter aspect of craving more and more at a constant rate. In the midst of being the heart of the 1960's counterculture era, he had many controversial things to say about practically everything. Highly intriguing individual---though as one can say about anyone---he often assumes me in the way he talks, the way his brain processes thoughts like clocking in with a ticket punch: so monotonous and so sinister. A true asshat, blatant with indefinite ignorace, and pallid with unholy nomenclature of what a person should never want to do in life: become a writer, and then become famous for something that isn't writing but talking. I mean, he can't even accept his own introduction on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: there has always got to be a problem with the way his name is enunciated, the way his life's achievements have been laid out, or even just a simple gesture suggesting that the inviting handshake wasn't firm enough. Gore Vidal tops the ice cream sundae with a bit of his own little cherry, covered in his own personal relish for the casual, crucial comeback of the decade. At a party in a time long before cars had electric engines and when television shows were censored for saying things lewd things, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer had a small scrap (mostly Mailer). Norman let his temper get the best of him and threw a punch in Gore's face and Gore responded with such cold, dense-hearted words like: "Once again, words fail Norman Mailer." Mailer, though completing quite the saga of life's formal applications of tenure, as well as unexpected life choices, he died a man of little power and great impactability. There was always a depicting illusion of both honest-to-God culmination of events, along with the utter dismay of how little his words floated in water.

In the art of being a well-rounded person, there is always that lingering consciousness that hangs its hat to dry on the coatrack and sticks around a little too much in your head; and the things he makes you say are sometimes not worth it in the end. When asking to forgive someone, there is a mulitude of algorithum that goes into any sort of unjustice, uneven situation. Whether it be my friend stole a book from my shelf, or whether it be someone stole my car, the whole act of forgiving is definitely created to make us feel better as people. Now, of course I have someone in mind, regardless of the candid jargin I infatuated myself with, and I don't have a problem acknowledging that I have a problem. Being honest, I have a disappointing amount of problems, as I am sure others can formally relate to in all ways and all aspects. What reason have I to forgive this person? Is it because it happened almost two years ago? Is it because there have been others that put them in a situation where I don't think about it as much, or is it because I'm simply just tired of drilling a hole in the ground just for me to uncomfortably sit in where the worms squirm near my ears and the pounding in my head is cataclysmically driving me insane. In case one hasn't figured it out yet, the person--at hand--that I am describing the problem about is a woman. Lo and behold the greater witness, who could have suspected it? Anyway, I think in two years, I have done a great deal of maturing as well as experiencing new ideas and finding new ways to pursue inspirational tasks rather than let rumination come to fruition. I graduated high school, I had an entire summer to dictate who I keep close and who I discreetly keep my distance from, and I have now completed an entire year of college which in turn gave me absolutely no reason but to let old memories die and then reincarnate into new, nostalgic wavelengths. I have a problem, I admit that, but there shouldn't be a problem with me having one, should there? In the end it would just piss her off more, given that the last time I tried to talk to her, she didn't say anything. Today is her birthday, and this the first time in eight years that I haven't wished her a happy birthday, and the reason for that is because that this is the first time in eight years that she didn't wish me one either. Yeah, you go! Give her a taste of her own medicine! That will learn her! Oh the barraic voices that cradle my brain so tightly always know how to kiss me right. I'm glad she's gone because all she did was cause trouble, but at the same time, I liked the drama in my life. I mean, who doesn't like having a small fight with a friend for the first time, and who doesn't love worrying about their sanity on a daily basis? All this because some guy (me) couldn't take a damn hint---or rather wouldn't. Nothing personal to her, but I did love her, and she didn't reciprocate when I told her so, only before when I was busy wandering off in the beginning of high school. This challenge definitely lets me ball some of this up and store it away where no one should ever see it. So yes, I forgive you, but I will not forget you. Peace be with you all, Prose Community.

I'm not sure what this is... A cry for help, a beating on the chest, or just some given reason to believe I'm going crazy. Life has a peculiar way of winking its eye at you like you're some circus act, supposedly meant to make people happy, but at the cost of making you into an empty, hollow shell of a person. Read with caution, I didn't stop until I reached a thousand words, and I didn't edit beforehand. I have no other way to categorize this besides calling it what it is...prose.

The cascaded force, truculent in fluency, rebounded and caused me hyperfixation. I was there, washing away my sins like the bible commanded me, exuberant with new life, telling of any living bodies willing to pass me by to seek the help they need to manage. I was the fly, with little to no meaning in the root of the world, cruising into soft completion; there was a dark crimson light flashing from the fly’s eyes and into the cream-colored pallor of my skin. And how dare there be such an obsessive cascaded force, willing to try and put a stop to my intentions, thrilling the possibility of me actively coming to a halt. What cost would that do me, but the worst? The clacking sound of my brain caressing the varicose veins in my hands, plowing the fields that they are so apt to harvest; and the blue tools are slicing away at the God-woven weeds, polluting my garden of passion. My hands flee away from me, far away from my body’s control. I fear my hands are more powerful than I can handle. The rest of my body is here—in the flesh?—feeling the soundwaves of chords swooning over my naive persona. And suddenly, I’m back in the dark-bricked building down the road from the downtown nucleus. There is a woman there, waving her hand to me, hoping I notice her streaky, anxiously-applied polish. There were stripped pieces hanging loosely against her cuticle that she tried to pluck, but dangerously chose to just drink her dirty martini and wash away her sins. I pull her in close to me, feeling the warmth of the alcohol dabble its hand in her drab idiosyncratic tendencies. Her eyes are like pieces of a washcloth, covered in sudsy backwash, chilling to the bone in chemicals and abhorrent joviality… The mind I thought I once had, now just a fever-dreamed memory away, glides away from the dark-bricked building. It’s quiet when he leaves his house, goes down the street, and accompanies himself without me. Only my hands, that of which are holding that woman drinking her drink, he uses to extrapolate the truth. He wants to dig for the truth, desperate for an answer that he does not want to hear. The fields grow longer and farther, absorbing the sun as it melts into the purple darkness. The weeds grow long fingers and hold hands with each other, terrified of losing one another. A dog-eat-dog world clutching at the very well-being of a person when they feel the most happy about something. And the terrifying truth only thrusts itself onto me, like I hold that woman, hoping to keep that warmth around me for a little while longer. My hands are getting older, but still so full of youth—the veins create a prevalence against the skin of my body’s liking. I watch the balls of my knuckles roll around the finger, feeling the pressure of every key as its soft-colored dwindling leaves my thoughts for moments at a time. It takes too much time to realize the importance of the craft, the charisma that witnesses the creation of the craft, and the groovy sliminess of what exactly I am doing with this…here and now. Why here, why now, why this? Why not figure-skating, or baking, or painting, or teaching? I want this all to make sense, want God to show his face and scowl at me for not truly harnessing this sooner—I can’t get the right hang of it. All there is is a hormonal ecstasy that overtakes the adolescence of fictitious departure, and the molding together of my hands and mind. Two prominent figures that seldomly intertwine with each other's affairs, but commonly create substances good enough to eat and refreshing fluids swell enough to bathe in. I eat too fast with these kinds of uncommon, unprecedented periods of solace to which I absorb and spit out like a bulimic. I want to sleep away the rising pain in my belly, I want to cradle my words like a newborn, burping out the bad, and petting the good. I pick up those words created by me, read the large purple, red, and white letters on each of the covers and wonder how it all happened…and why so fast…? I wish John was here to help me out. I wish Stephen was here, and Norman, and Jerome, and Kurt, and Dean, and Papa, and Ralph, and Willy, and Ed, and Jim, and George, and Ray, and Jack, and Fyodor, and Scotty. I wish they were there, destined to press the luck, dubbing me a knight of the round table of literate prophets. They’re all gone, except one. Who knows how long Steve-O has got? I want an answer to add to my correctly-portioned plate. All I have are a few dozen side dishes that spit out the questions, but I want the solution to all of them. I want to vomit out the impure and relish in the pure: I want to grapple with the fruitfully unknown and practice into the new era of evolution. Yet, all I have are my hands to guide me. I’ve done an unerring abhorrence with my hands in the past; and I do not forget the past as easily as the future will try to persuade me to. My hands tangle against the silvery-plated panels like a string of Christmas lights, shaking as they hover over the batter’s box of what can truly create a modern-day prophet. A gaudy passion that only a writer can possess; and it’s only up to him to master and utilize the cat’s cradle of an abomination. Am I the overlord willing to take over the modern-day literature movement, or am I just a mindless spirit flooded with all of the geniuses and their immoral minds holding me hostage? I have twenty-two words left and I still haven’t conducted myself an answer. I want to feel the warmth without so much suffering involved.

Sal Paradise from On the Road by. Jack Kerouac is truly the first character I've met and knew instantly that I related to on a spiritual level. Sal is a young writer, fresh out of college, waiting to take off on top and soar into the sky of fictional fantasy. He's hungry, innocent, infatuated with girls, and loves to write whenever he can, no matter the circumstances or the materials he scraps together. Now, with me living eighty-five years in the future, I have a little more of an advantage when it comes to writing resources, and the ability to keep my information stored in a computer rather than a few scraps of paper in a notepad in my pocket. But, like Sal, I enjoy writing and it almost takes over my body when it comes to the rush I get when the words are just right and the story is open enough for immense expansion. Sal has a recurring habit of always hesitating about doing things he knew he shouldn't like taking drugs, or sleeping with multiple women in a night, so I can testify that I am exactly the same way. Sal wants to make it on his own; at least to be given a few chances at making his way at life, and wants to know the true hardships about why life is set out to be so hard at first. Sal lives his own novelistic storyline throughout the three or so years that he sticks around in On the Road, and he loves the women he met, and the friends he made, and the writing he did. I know truly that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road as an autobiographical piece, making me seem like I relate to the author more than the character, but Sal does technically count as his own character. I love Sal, and I love his ambition and his conquests, and his friends and neighbors and women and his aunt and anyone else that comes in contact with him. Kerouac wrote this character with intriguing memories of his own fruitful experiences, and the ability to conquer that in so high a magnitude after nearly ten years of passing, it can go without saying that it truly was incredible. Sal Paradise is forever now one of my favorite protagonists from novels, going on the same list as Holden Caulfield, Jonah (Cat's Cradle), and Dennis Guilder (Christine).

In the midst of things, I’ve made up my mind on several sloven ideas that could potentially affect everything moving forward.  Gruesomely speaking, it's for the best, and metaphorically speaking, it’s more beautiful than having to suffer, doncha think?  How can you characterize the idea of suffering in just a few words?  Life on a tree branch; hanging on the edge.  One swift blow from mother nature’s breath, and you’re stuck drifting onto the wrinkly roots of a spruce tree, wondering if your life would amount to a hill of beans, or if a landscaper would pass you over with a leaf blower and you would continue your flight in the air, only to be sat in a pile of other deceased, rotting away into a brown pulp in the ground.  Spring comes along and you’re forgotten; the rebirth of dormancy, but at what extent was this rebirth cradled and brought forth?  I picked up my tab from the little silver tray with a pen, and scribbled a name at the bottom, hoping to sit in the presence of natural sounds for a little while longer.  Dense rain clouds rolled through the moon’s face, showering the streets, enigmatically, with a blistering melancholy, creating distress for the wanderers finding their way home from work.  I dropped the pen on the ground, intentionally, waiting for a response from the beautiful waitress walking by; she noticed me leaning over to reach the pen in the middle of the small aisle separating the row of booths against the wall and the streaky, sticky countertop.  My fingernail scraped the side of it, but I only managed to push it farther away, cursing while I did.  The beautiful waitress—who remained nameless by association with the diner’s policy and her own personal ethics—picked up the pen and handed it to me, making sure to smile and she made sure  I noticed it.

“Thanks,” I said, clicking the pen a few times.

“No worries,” the woman said, looking me up and down.  Before she walked away too far, I touched her sleeve, having a thought and not wanting it to flee.

“Hey, wait,” I said, as she careened across the aisle a little more.  She glanced back, seemingly confused from another interaction.

“Yes?”

I fished out a few coins, dumped them into my left hand, and stuck it out, careful not to let the coins roll out and hit the ground.

“Play your favorite song for me, would you?”

Another confused look and the woman walked back over, pocketed her pad of paper, and took the coins, smiling again.  The jukebox was near the bathrooms about thirty paces away, and I continued to slowly sip my drink until the ice was cracking from the lack of liquid.  The last of the sun was down behind the world, showing a ray of orange and purple like a ruffled flower: I watched the headlights flick on, and the street lamps ignite.  A young girl had slipped stepping off of the sidewalk and onto the crosswalk.  There was blood on her knee and on her fingers where she rubbed it.  Her mother walked off, not hearing her daughter’s cry for help against the blaring engines of the anxious workers leaving their jobs.  She cried and cried for her mother, with sweat forming on her little, round face.  I was rooting for her to get her attention; practically waving a large orange foam finger with a number one painted on it like I was at a football game.  Eventually, there was another man a few steps behind them, headed down, and noticed the girl crying her heart out.  The man’s deep bellow—from what I could comprehend from my seat—got her attention, and the mother sprinted back across the crosswalk, and ripped off the bandana she was wearing to wrap around the bloody knee.  The mother picked the little girl up, holding her head against her chest, and shed a tear at the thought of near negligence.  Even children carry the worth for salvation, it seems.  They live sanguine lifestyles, with little to no worries about a house eviction, or an arrest, or getting addicted to drugs; in the midst of things, a child is innocent to a world of churlish, counter-cultured delirium.  Once the people moved along and any recollection of that ever happening disappeared, I noticed a small blood-stained section of the white-painted crosswalk.

“That’ll Be the Day,” by the great Buddy Holly began playing loudly across the diner; it was swell.  I glanced back at the waitress glancing at me, wondering if I secretly approved of her song choice.  I bobbed my head and mouthed a few lyrics in a response.  I ate the few remaining fries on the side of my plate, barely dipped in ketchup.  They were cold and hard, yet I let them collect some moisture in my mouth in order to not so much as suffocate myself.  Once the song ended, I got up from my booth, left a tip, and went up to the waitress again, hoping to make this conversation seem more innocent and cordial, rather than racketeering a few forced words from her mouth.  I touched her shirt sleeve once more, grazing it like passing my fingers through weeds in a meadow.

“I’ll be back again tomorrow,” I said.  She looked at me oddly, probably hoping that I wouldn’t remember having said that.

“I’ll be here,” she said, making the words come out unnaturally.  I walked off, got my coat from the booth, and popped up the collar to protect from the incoming rain, or hail, or snow, or whatever Illinois felt like performing that night.  Just outside the diner, there was a man sleeping sitting upright on the bench, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth.  As if common courtesy was absent from my mind, I walked on, listening to the whistling of factory horns, car wheels, grumbling people, and jingles of bells from doors opening on the strip.  Mt. Delver was a large city, but not quite as large as Decatur.  The street signs were smaller and the sidewalks were thinner and rougher to walk on.  Then again, I’ve only heard harmonic stories about life in Decatur;  I’ve never really set foot in the city.  We populated 70,000 of Illinois’s twelve-and-a-half million.  We had a courthouse, some churches, restaurants, a movie theater, a park, a few high schools, a recreational soccer field and baseball field, a bowling alley, a shooting range, a harbor connecting to the lake, and even a hill where the most expensive houses were built.  I’d only seen one other relatively average sized city like this one before, and it was when I was eleven and I visited my uncle Gary in Tennessee.  He lived on a hill similar to ours, except the land stretched more, and he owned fifty acres rather than my family owning a half acre plot with a house taking up most of the space.  It was the summer, and the sun hit the ground harder in the south.  We’d take trips down to the gas station for a fill up and a Coke, sipping the foam off the top of the bottles.  He smoked nasty old cigars, and I watched him cough a few times.  Whatever change he had left over, he’d always let me buy a Hostess Twinkie or Ding Dong, depending on what they had in stock.  After nine, Uncle Gary showed me how to mow the grass on the (what I called) “Driving Mower.”  It was a Snapper, and had a good kick to it—the engine was older than he was, but the paint job was still clean surprisingly.  He promised to give me a sip of beer if I managed to mow half the land by lunchtime.  I took him to that bet and sweated like a pot-bellied pig, dying of thirst, and managed to mow more than intended.  A few moments where the grass was driest, I had to put my shirt over my nose to protect myself from summer allergies that I tried so hard to avoid.  My mother would have had a clinical fit if she heard me talk with a stuffy nose on the phone.  I had my few sips of beer over a plateful of bologna and mustard sandwiches.  Around two o’clock, Uncle Gary flipped on the TV and we watched the Red Sox play the Orioles at Fenway Park; towards the seventh inning, they were tied, and there were a lot of stolen bases.  Unofficially, there was a selection of Boston fans from eastern Tennessee that never congregated, but secretly liked Boston only when the teams played well.  This was explained to me, and I never fully understood the purpose.  There was a homer and the game was over, with the Sox claiming the win, per the usual as my uncle had said.  It was weeks later that I began mowing regularly and hearing stories about my uncle’s jobs working on trains and in factories throughout his twenties and thirties.  He shuttled around boxcars of things all around the tri-state area, along with some long distances here and there along the Mississippi and other smaller cities up north.  I didn’t care too much when he acted interested in telling me these stories; all I really cared about at the end of the day was going to sleep.  About three years ago, Uncle Gary got cancer in his liver and died a year later.  Mt. Delver was just the same as any other drab city, and it wasn’t really a discussion worth having.

Farrington Road became the intersection of Crouch and 28th; and with it came cars performing an array of rolling stops, blowing horns at pedestrians crossing with the right of way, and at least three curb-hoppers—and all of them women.  I passed by the high school where I attended, and saw their baseball field glowing with large fluorescent lights, as one of the rival team’s basemen struck out and another moved to second when the shortstop hit a sacrifice fly into right field.  A dull cheer erupted over the sounds of clouds rumbling like an empty stomach.

“Hit ’em hard, Devil Dogs!”  I screamed, cupping my mouth with my hands.  One of our basemen saw me walking and gave me a thumbs up, running the bill of his hat through his fingers.  Its purple highlights glistened in the mystifying night.

Once I went inside my house a few blocks later, I was home alone; my mother was out and my father was out working.  When I went upstairs to my room, I saw that I’d left a small notebook on the edge of my desk from the night before with a number written in the top corner of the page open.  That number was:

2,401

That number represented the number of days since I had fallen in love for the first time.  A little under seven years ago…and I was still starstruck enough to keep track of it.  Thus, I began today’s query in my notebook that would be the most difficult thing to write in short detail due to lack of space: my suicide note.  I want to make it clear that I don’t want attention, or sympathy, or therapeutic help, or drugs to compensate for the dreary mindedness.  I am completely well off without the uses of psychological blockades; what matters is getting something like this note right on the first try.  This wasn’t the typical thing that you go to your parents to ask how to do.  You can’t ask for help from anyone except yourself.  You have to make it deep, and powerful, and aggressive, and passive, and full of contradictions that confuse the readers.  That’s the point, right?  What is the point?