February 2012
5 posts
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Mountain Meadows
A little while later we were driving through the woods and came upon a summer camp. Cabins on stilts. A bridge over a creek. Blackbirds sitting on a ramblewire fence. A meadow. A barn. An archery range. Haystack targets.
In the cafeteria the campers were eating lunch. It was noisy with plates and cups. Someone was playing a guitar. The children looked wild and hungry. They ate any food they saw....
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Valentine's Day
An advertisement depicting a woman who scorns traditional Valentine’s Day gifts favors a sixfoot tall ruxpin teddy bear.
The roses go in the trash. A box of chocolates upended.
Does she want those things?
She does not. She wants the ruxpin teddy.
Pirouetting in stilettos, cheeks flushed from hefting teddy’s weight.
This is the man. This is the man for me.
Teddy in the car, teddy...
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1/28/12. Organ practice. Palm Beach. Florida.
January 2012
6 posts
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From the Origins & Namings section of Technicians of the Sacred we have a list of Aztec Definitions:
A Mountain
High, pointed; pointed on top, pointed at the summit, towering; wide, cylindrical, round; a round mountain, low, low-ridged; rocky, with many rocks; craggy with many crags; rough with rocks; of earth, with trees, grassy; with herbs; with shrubs; with water; dry; white; jagged; with a...
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7/4/2009. Rooftop. Madonna. New York. New York.
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He stayed the night with a friend in Port of Spain. They went to a club and looked at girls. They drank vodka in a roped area. Some kind of birthday party. People promising to learn Kung Fu. Tomorrow, they said. I’ll start learning it tomorrow.
Tourists swelled the room. His friend disappeared with a British girl, six foot tall, wild titted, her face streaked with mascara, slurring marriage talk,...
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At the Hotel el Rancho in Gallup the snow was coming down and to the east the cloud ceiling dropped down black on the horizon. We ate hamburgers in an empty dining room next to an empty dancehall. The waiter was a young Indian. He spoke Indian to the dishwasher and Spanish to everyone else. We asked him what he thought our chances were making it to Albuquerque. He said they could close the...
December 2011
6 posts
2 tags
Breakfast
This morning at breakfast a man crosseyed in a Yankees camp spoke of cinema from the kitchen.
That movie I saw, he said. Don’t go see it.
What did you see? someone said.
I saw that detective movie. The one with the Iron Man. Don’t go see it. Don’t even go.
No good?
The crosseyed man shook his head. Teardrops tattooed at the corner of his eye.
Someone asked if he’d seen...
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Beer spoke of his father. How it had been in older days when Arizona was still dust and empty tracts and roads scraped through the ruins of Anasazi pueblos. All was construction. Resorts and ranches grew up out of the desert ahead of the city. Indians delivered water in dromedary sacks on carts muledrawn to feed fields of cotton. Prospectors raked the red cliffs and foothills for copper. The soil...
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6/17/2009. Notes on the future. Brooklyn. New...
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Near the entrance a legless convict circled the bargain bins in a wheelchair, his mother following behind, a woman, skeletal, sipping a synthetic orange soft drink. The convict hovered over a crate of bargain mayonnaise. He hefted a tub onto his chair, calling out for an employee to acknowledge him. He lifted the tub over his head and called out, a pair of eyes tattooed on the back of his neck,...
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10/1/09. Taxi cab. Brooklyn. New York.
November 2011
6 posts
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All morning he smoked weed and played the lottery. Before he had scratched half the roll his winnings were upwards of fifty thousand dollars. He brushed the silver shavings from his knee and sat back on the couch. The gasoline jugs arrayed red in the living room. Petrol fumes. Dizzy water.
In the afternoon he drove into Phoenix and bought a case of whisky from the Arabs at the drivethru liquor...
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“Then he fell asleep in his chair, with the book in his hands. Maybe he dreamed...”
– Roberto Bolaño. 2666.
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Untitled Barack Obama Fantasy Adventure Film
In which Barack Obama is the protagonist of a fantasy adventure film. Set in modern times on another Earth locked in eternal winter. Mankind has become feudal once more. Warring factions settle grudges with black magic, swords forged from cold. Most people worship several gods. Monsters are common as are the bounties offered for slaying them.
Obama wanders bearded from town to homestead claiming...
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Holiday
In the dream I am asleep. I am asleep in my bed in the kitchen of a large and airy house. The rooms are open, divided by low partitions. Bright daylight streams through the windows.
In the kitchen Galinko is making a feast. Some kind of Thanksgiving. Bird and yams. Succulents. Gravy on the stove. A roast in the oven.
The food smells wonderful. I am so hungry. I want nothing more than to sit at...
October 2011
6 posts
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At night the lights in the big dark green trees and the trees moving and the lights moving between the leaves. On the lawn a white table and white chairs and someone talking on the phone. I can hear his voice and I can hear someone playing the drums on another patio. He puts the phone away and moves off the grass through the lights into the shadows. Probably he was talking to his mother. No one...
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Oceans
In the dream I am in a cathedral or a chapel. The pews are full of people I know. They are dressed Sunday best and sit facing forward, waiting for the preacher, the man of experience.
It is very quiet in the church but for a kind of resonance in the room, a fading hum. Perhaps the afterglow of the organ. No one speaks. Women fan themselves, shift on the lacquered wood.
At some point I begin to...
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The Forest
In the dream I am in a dark forest. The pines are very thin and very tall and very dense. The pines are as tall as mountains. It is night and the sky is dark but even if it were not night the forest would still be dark for it is a dark forest.
I am alone in the forest. The wind moves the tops of the trees. I am standing on a bed of pine needles and I am waiting for what is coming.
In the...
September 2011
6 posts
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A new movie
A film that opens with two friends, Jack and Evan, watching a baseball game. Jack goes to the kitchen to get beers. When he returns to the living room an absurd Who’s on first? routine ensues.
Who’s on first? says Jack.
Hu’s on first, says Evan.
That’s what I’m asking, says Jack.
Hu is, says Evan.
This goes on for several minutes with Jack becoming angrier and...
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August 2011
4 posts
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The Neptune Society
In the morning when I wake up the commercials are on. The apartment smells like fish and the commercials are always on.
In the commercial a black actor is talking to a bottle of beer. The actor is famous for his membership in a rap group from a depressed Los Angeles neighborhood. In the 1980s the rap group sang a song about the police in which they expressed what everyone from the depressed Los...
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Untitled Eastern Project
We went to the Antique Mall to buy buffalo teeth. The old women at the counter were watching an internet video showing a blond child rolling in the grass with a golden retriever. The women’s eyes were wet behind their glasses. An old man sat on a stool bent hunched over his cane keeping time with the tip to a windup toy marching across the glass tabletop. When the toy died he hung the cane...
July 2011
7 posts
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For several days they followed a river. There were fish in the stream and speckled stones. Hens pecked along the banks, swallowing grasshoppers from stems of alfalfa and hotgrass. Bullfrogs croaked and fireflies popped dizzy in spats. The water ran thick and dark and all night they walked into a warm headwind. Green light gleamed within the riverbed and underwater thermal vents bubbled liquid...
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Tacklebox
In the dream I am standing on a marble pillar surrounded by dark water. I speak magic words and creatures conjure from the deep. They come to me jumping, seals and dolphins, porpoise various breaching the glass deck.
Though the water is dark I am not afraid. I say the words and the animals pass under my hands. I do not know what animal will next emerge but I know that they will keep coming and I...
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Lacrimosa. Zbigniew Preisner. Requiem for My...
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The Fourth of July
Last night a brawl in the street.
A man walks into a steakhouse drinking a forty, a drunk whore tottering on his arm.
A few minutes later he flies out the front door, rolls through a flowerbed, pinwheeling into traffic. A minivan stops short.
The restaurant empties onto the sidewalk. Line cooks and chefs. Bartenders.
The man is wailing in the street. Calling out. Crying.
The cooks fall on...
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June 2011
13 posts
France
I haven’t watched television in five years. Now it’s on all the time.
There are many commercials. Like for money and how to get it. People singing to get money. People singing on busses to get money.
Go to college. Be somebody. Be a dental hygienist. The world is yours.
There is a commercial about a flash mob that is actually a commercial for cellular phone service.
Grand Central...
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Strawhecker led them through an alpaca field. Crias newborn stumbling on bandy legs, sagskinned and wet, bleating for milk. Around the perimeter were basecamp shanties. Slave hovels hung with rotten curtains, fungal cots, hay beds. Smell of sweet sweat, group sex. Beer stood in the doorway. A llama licking itself on the floor. Tables strewn with antique farm implements. Docking shears and horse...
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“Sometimes he went out and watched the teenagers and the buildings.”
– Michel Houellebecq. The Elementary Particles.
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The Mexican
My uncle died in prison. He was a bank robber. That was what he did for a living.
Kidnapped the bank manager the night before the robbery. Hideouts in the woods, disguises, fake legs, night boats off southern coasts.
This is in the sixties. This is in the seventies. This is in the United States.
When he found out he was dying he went to Canada.
Last job.
He let himself get caught mugging a...