Teaser

Last Tuesday

It’s 3:30 A.M. and I’m racing down Broadway on a bright yellow Schwinn10-speed, recently liberated from a bike rack outside a deli somewhere near 207th Street. Weaving through the network of potholes spilling over with water from the melting snow, hollering profanity over the howling wind, my eyes are tearing up and turning the road ahead into a pixilated mélange, blinking lights, red, yellow, green.

It’s a nerve-wracking operation (made none the easier by the roughly fifteen pounds of homemade explosive concealed in the Jansport bag strapped to my back), only slightly ameliorated by the gallon or so of gin churning in my stomach.

Venetian Bells

Incessant, ambiguous.
A white chime
high as the sun
but low like a motor rumble.

Pavement fraught with noon blaze.
A man kneels, arms outstretched.
Hands cupped. Palms cracked and soiled.
A white glare leaps off

the jumble of coins. The clatter
returns – ten, twelve, nineteen times – and fades.
High as the gathering clouds,
low like the chink and chatter of change.

A Brief Encounter

A boy and girl sit across from one another at a small, candlelit table. The boy drinks Scotch, the girl red wine. The boy leans back in his chair and speaks. The girl leans forward to hear him over the surrounding din.

BOY: I have an artistic temperament. I can write, that’s my talent, it’s the one thing I can do well, the one thing I really believe in. That’s all there is to me.

GIRL: That’s all I need to know.

The girl stands up and walks away, leaving half her glass of wine unfinished. The boy drinks the wine for her and resumes sipping his Scotch. When the Scotch is gone he asks for the check.

Wide-Eyed Like Diamonds

Oprah Winfrey, matriarch of putrid afternoon television, welcomed as her guest a local billionaire renowned for his terrible taste, marital woes, and unfortunate comb-over. The front rows of ABC's studio audience overflowed with women, pert and vacuous in their sensible pastel-colored blouses and pearl necklaces, grinning ear to ear at the sight of the archetypal "man o' their dreams." This man, more than secure in his wealth, cut-throat, self-assured maybe even arrogant, representing some infantile notion of the American dream just as much as the idea of protection and stability in marriage (emotional or financial, who is to say?). One women, light green shirt and middle-prarted straight brown hair, took one look at this rich man seated on a plush sofa next to his eager and simpering son, both adopting the same legs wide open "come on and look at my cock" posture, and her eyes widened to the point of explosion, only they didn't explode, they just kept expanding and expanding, crushing the people around her under throbbing ocular blood vessels, fat people, delicate people, people in 3-piece suits, expanding and pulsating until they reached the stage and began to ululate threateningly at Frau Oprah herself, who recoiled in horror and threw her billionaire friend an anxious glance. He, with an almost insouciant nonchalance, removed his diamond-studded cufflink and in one smooth motion punctured the poor green shirted woman's seething eyeballs, covering all and sundry in some sort of ungodly substance resembling egg white only much less savory and perhaps lacking in protein. The woman, her errant eyeballs vanquished, uttered a gasp of mortal embarrasment and cried out repeatedly, "I'm sorry! Oh, I am so sorry!" before she died, slowly yet unceremoniously.
I change the channel and discover that I can now cut a perfectly straight line with scissors with the utmost ease.

Disclaimer

I've decided to revive this blog, albeit in a modified version. From now on I'll use this space for fictional pieces, just little toy airplanes of prose. I hope to keep it as un-pretentious as possible. I just think it'd be useful to maintain some sort of steady writing schedule.

There will definitely be no what-I-did-today, public diary-style entries about whether I'm sad or not. All previous posts in the archives are being slowly, steadily deleted, so it will be (at least on appearances) a fresh start.

The change of heart is, in some obscure way, related to the recent spate of literary figures taking leave of this planet, among them Hunter Thompson, Spalding Gray, and Arthur Miller. It's a shame that it often takes someone's death to find renewed interest in their life's work, but in any case it seems appropriate to do something rather than simply review past achievements.

I'd like to develop a voice, and maybe this forum will provide a record of that development. Hope you find something to enjoy.