Writings and Letters

A blog oeuvre… a "bloeuvre"

Tag: literature

July 1, 2017

What’s the Title? Tittle? Title.

We got stuck out near the desert with a flat tire. I was staring off at the sun and wondering why they say: “Caught a flat.” Why is that a turn of phrase? Term of phrase? Can that be right? Can it? What’s the term of a phrase? Fuck. What’s a turn of one for that matter. This language makes no sense. Who’s idea was the English?

Next thing I knew Merle was cursing the, uh, the… “Hey.” “What?” “What d/ya call that thing? Spigot?” “Spigot?” “Yeah.” “Who you calling Spigot?” “No. That thing.” “This?” “Yesh.” “I’m using it.” “What’s it called, a spigot?” “What’s a spigot?” “That’s my point. What the hell is that thing called?” “Aw hells bells, this thing here? It’s a doobermeringue.” “You’re shitting me.” “Like… literally? No.” “Of course not, unless we’re talking literary-rally fictionally. Then yes.” “Ah, you mean metaphorically.” “Do I?” “How the hell am I supposed to know? Aw, dammit! I swear—by the Stallions of the Valkyries!—I will shoot you in your stupid iron-wrought face, you goddamned double-crossing criss-cross abomination!” “Me, or the spigot?” “What. In the hell. Is a spigot?” “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I don’t know what you’re working with over there. I think the actual name for it is ‘spigot.'” “What origin is that from?” “Huh?” “What human spit that out of their mouth when they saw whatever the hell a spigot is? Hounds of Love! this thing is really driving me nuts.” “Merle, you’re loosing me.” “You mean losing.” “Hmm… no I think I mean loosing.” “Huh?” “What?”

She went back to cursing at the metal apparatus… and I was trying to figure out if I was upset with her for having a man’s name. Was it her fault? She was a legal adult. She could change it if she wanted. What’s that saying: What’s in a name? Does that apply here, can I applicate it, is it applicatory to the application of… “Hey, Merle.” “What?” “What’s in a name?” “Letters, what else?”

Why did I say “legal adult”? As opposed to an illegal one? I suppose I don’t know what one would look like. A child? “Hey, what’s an illegal adult?” “I don’t know. What?” “No. It’s no joke. I’m asking.” “No joke? This goddamned tire is no joke.” “Of course, but what’s an illegal adult?” “A criminal. What else?” “Hmm… no I don’t think that’s what I’m getting at.” “Getting to. And we’re not getting anywhere if this abortus of a doobermeringue can’t help me take these goddamb niblets off the tire!” “Sure, sure, of course we agree, but I think my point is that—Wuthering Heights!—it’s too damm hott!! to think.” “You’ve got one too many consonants.” “Where?” “Right…     here ^” “Ah, I see. I was kinda going for an affect.” “You mean effect.” “I really don’t know. I’ve never known. They can both literally—like literary non-fiction, real deal Magillicutty—be the same thing.” “You mean mean the same thing.” “What’s the difference?” “Well… being and meaning are rather different aren’t they?” “Are they? Like if they are the same thing, then why would they mean different things? Like what does Heidegger have to say about all this?” “No, that’s Being. We’re talking about being.” “So many B/beings!” “Tell me about it. Hegel, too. Only with ‘negativity.’ The negativity of a negativity is a negativity with low-grade high-functioning anti-social attention-seeking personality disorder, but it always bends towards positivity.” “So says you.” “Yeah, it’s a flab-nasting wonder any of this gobbledygook has been able to pool into some sort of logical coagulum. Seriously, think about it… Diamond Dogs! I think I got it.”

I took a picture of her after she finished changing the tire. “I’ll post this. I’m so proud of you. I want to share this will all my friends.” “Oh yeah, post it where?” “Instachatty, TwertFace, they’re all the same… Booktwart…” “Very cool.”

Then we got the hell out of there.

Anyway, what was my point?

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May 7, 2017

Infinite City: Kids Swimming (Outskirts of New Helm City Park)

42Kids

George Bellows

You came across a large group of kids playing about on and jumping off a derelict pier. You were walking along the path through the park as you do. The one that takes you along the outer reach of the park and exposes you to the ocean at times behind the thick vegetation. On days when the weather permits, like today, you prefer taking a slow walk up and down the path. You enjoy the songs of the finches and crossbills, and seeing the blues of male kingfishers in the sun. It helps you with your thoughts. Nature keeps you kind company as you wrestle internally with the eternal question. Today, you sat at your preferred bench. It proffers all the Flânerie the most-stunning view in the park to your mind. Yes, most like “Off Punk,” a point on the bayside of the park which gives the viewer a stunning look out at Hemlock Bay and the skyline of the city. Towards night is the best time to view. But everyone knows this. That is where the dilettantes and uninitiated visit and crowd around before park hours close. But here, on this nameless bench when the wind blows just so to push the cedar branches away, you can see down the slope at the brush below, which bleeds into the long beach shore that hugs the coast, and past it rise the crafted red and grey rock walls shaped by erosion of the vast blue ocean stretching out into the great beyond. Verily, there at dusk, no sight can best it. The rocks focus the eyes towards the horizon where, on certain days in the spring, the sun sets just so beautifully in line of your view. The daylight fades, triggering the colors in the sky to turn like leaves in autumn and reflect off the waters below. It all culminates to some unmeant telling moment, intensified by its transience. You capture this portrait for only a second or less at a time as the wind dies back down.

But today, you didn’t have the time to sit and wait, and it wasn’t spring. You only sat to catch your breath. It became a tiring walk up the incline towards that perch. As you rested with your thoughts, you heard noises. At first, it was curious, for you could not locate the familiarity. You looked around, but saw not another faces. It was communal like the birds. Sounds of distant play. But it was all too human. You got up from the bench and followed the calls. You realized they were coming from off and below the path, down towards the shoreline. You reached a certain point and left the trail, pushed your way through the shrubbery and came near the cliff’s edge. And there, to the east, you saw them. The children at play.

You counted thirty or forty so. They collected around the ruins of the abandoned pier as bees around an exposed nest. A great hive of spirit at play before your eyes. Some dove into the waters splashing those already in. Two of the bigger ones were swinging little ones in sequence. The Heaved swam back to the broken pier and pulled themselves up. A dark trail of saturated water formed on the deck stretching from the point of their reentry all the way back to the two Heavers. It was a whole organized state of affairs. An unspoken competition of frolic at work to see who could be flung the highest and farthest. Some lounged on the discolored boards, whose remnants of green paint withered to the edges and corners where agency and time had not yet effected them; their skin grew pink or darker in the sun. One relieved himself on a section of the pier where the boards had been removed exposing the ocean below. Another smoked a cigarette. Some were clothed. Others were not. Others more were transforming from one state to the next, or the latter to the former. A mix of fully-formed and maturing adolescents acting as it came to them on a sunny day in summer. This boho leisure class enjoying their current state, appearing to have slipped the bounds ever so briefly, to have escaped the atmosphere and felt the great beyond before retrograde clasped on and pulled back hard. To do so, though, is illusory. For appearance is all that there is. But it was quite beautiful to view, you know, perhaps (though not only) because it was so fleeting.

City Map 

CityMap

Berserks:

  1. Gorgon’s Alley
  2. Greenland
  3. Bloomland
  4. Oldsland
  5. Koossen
  6. Bayland
  7. Midland
  8. Renaissance (Ghettoland)
  9. Beauté (Booty, Bay-B)
  10. Hearts
  11. Parkland
  12. New Strip
  13. Deebs
  14. Oceanland (Ass End)
  15. Bergland
  16. Subland (the Sprawl)
  17. Riverland
  18. Coastland
  19. Charles
  20. Paladin Heights
  21. Links Island (Posh Town)
  22. Tri-Island (Posh-Annex) with Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Washington Islands

Major Parks and Islands, etc.:

  • A) Ludwig City Island Park
  • B) Hans-Johanns City Island Park
  • C) Chinnemuuk City Island Park
  • D) Othahathaway City Island Park
  • E) Bay City Park
  • F) Pearl Coast City Park
  • G) Founders City Park
  • H) Rutherford Chauncey Horthwright Welcoming Island Park
  • “NE” – North Eye Island
  • “SE” – South Eye Island
  • “NP” – Mond River Park, North (North Park)
  • “SP” – Mond River Park, South (South Park)
  • “WEB” – W.E.B. Du Bois Park
  • “PP” – Charles Prick Park (the Prick)
  • “NHP” – New Helm City Park
  • “OP” – Olympia Park
  • “KTMRP” – King Thelonius Mountain Range Park
  • “AP” – Arcadia Park
  • “R” – Roosevelt Island
  • “L” – Lincoln Island
  • “W” – Washington Island
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April 4, 2017

…Conquista Todo

El Hombre Que Cavó las Tumbas

 

The sun crawled toward the horizon causing the sky to turn a hideous cerise. As was unlike the occasion for the season, the wind could barely be detected in the treetops of the adjacent forest. Storm clouds held off in the periphery leaving the farmland exposed in the light, saturated red. The heat from the day was held captive in the thick moisture of summer air. The atmosphere was held in heated suspension above the fray. The chorus of the chicharras ran through the small village, whose emptied and silenced dirt streets echoed the haunting call. Now was the time of day when the sounds and smells of a tiny community entered its crepuscular stage. Instead, what was heard was the lamentations of women, the crepitation of conflict, and the scant laughter of men.

Junior Teniente Coronel Antonio Luis Roman stood atop an M1 Abrams, one of many gifts from El Padre to the military. The hunter green and black striped mechanical juggernaut sat humming amongst the crops, the words: EL QUE TRAE LÁGRIMAS: hand-painted in white, the letters quickly applied and thence inchoate, giving way to an impression that they were melting in the tropical fever. JT Coronel Roman observed the landscape; his paunch looked ready to burst through his olive green shirt darkened by sweat. The top half of the shirt was unbuttoned (against protocol) exposing his browned skin and dark wiry chest hair. A pearl neckerchief found itself wrapped loosely around his glutted throat. It had small lines of roses diagonally printed across it. Antonio’s mother gave it to him before he went off to war.

Sargento Solos walked up to the feet of EL QUE TRAE LÁGRIMAS with a man in tow, held at gunpoint. He stood at attention and saluted. “Report,” the JT Coronel said. “Eighty to our fifteen currently. Most have fled into the trees. The rest are being handled.” JT Coronel Roman nodded. He then acknowledged the stranger standing next to Solos. The man wore an old t-shirt and shorts. He wore one flip-flop. His clothes were filthy, covered in dirt and a small trace of blood. He had a cut above his left brow; the blood coagulated into black crust along his rough, wrinkled eggplant face. JT Coronel Roman observed his cut. The man would not take his eyes from the earth. He was one of these outback bastards of the old world. The roots of his blood dug much deeper into the soil of the country than Antonio’s.  Heart of the jaguar. Soul of the raptor. The rest of the nationalist claptrap that was well familiar to him. The enchanted history El Padre invokes so often in his speeches. He came across so few of them in person. They regulated themselves mostly to the pastoral regions of the state, not urban locations like the capital where Antonio grew up. Though there was Chacha. She was part of his boyhood. She was half nativo.

The sergeant spoke: “This was the man you requested.”
JT Coronel Roman asked the man. “Hablas mi idioma?”
“Si.”

“Good. What is your name?” The man was silent. JT Coronel Roman looked to Sargento Solos. Solos asked the man in his natural tongue. Still silence. Solos grew enraged. He got in the man’s dark face, pressing his finger into his soiled shirt. He pointed back to JT Coronel Roman and flailed his hand about some more. The man remained mute. Antonio held up his hand to pause the sergeant. “You do not have to give me your name. But you do understand what I am trying to do here, don’t you?” The man stood still and remained focused on the ground. Antonio continued: “We have been given very explicit orders from the President himself that this area is to return to the order of the state once and for all, and to remove any belligerents in the process with the utmost hostility. Allies are to be pardoned and returned to the capital.

“On the one hand, you have assisted us in the duty of disposing of the traitors’ carcasses as well as leading us to the sites where our fallen brothers lay. For that, I could see to your absolution. On the other hand, Sargento Solos and his men here inform me you were seen burying soldiers of the state, while the terrorists stood idly by. It appeared you were operating in conjunction with the enemies of the state. This is punishable by death. So now you see the predicament I am in, no?” Silence. Antonio sighed. “You do not have to speak, but I will have to assume the worst as a precaution.”

The sun began to sink behind the tops of the trees turning them a dark green and casting the men in pale light. JT Coronel Roman watched what little of the man’s face he could witness appear to struggle with thought, or transforming such thoughts to words. Perhaps he did not know enough of the state’s language to translate his consciousness. JT Coronel Roman signaled to Sargento Solos who roughly translated to the man in his old tongue. The flamethrowers walked up to the tank. One of them said they were ready. The colonel approved their mission and they turned toward the village.

“I did what you asked,” said the man in the language Antonio understood.
JT Coronel Roman shared a look with Solos. The man’s gaze still did not break with the dirt beneath him, but his body implied a tremor. Sweat passed along his face; his hands clenched the sides of his shirt.
“Yes. You did. But you also aided the enemy. You see, don’t you?”
“I did what you asked.”

He wasn’t saying it as a question but JT Coronel Roman wondered if he meant to. It would have been understandable. It may have been all the JT Coronel was capable of repeating, too, if… well… but that was not the case. For only one was holding the gun, and in that moment history was on his side.

“If you were in my position, what would you do? Would you let a potential enemy of yours escape? If so, how would you explain that to those you answered to?”
Silence.
“I see.”
“I did what you asked.”
“Indeed. But one good act does not undo a bad one. If you have supported the terrorists up to this point, one afternoon of assistance does not change this. You agree, no?”
“I never hurt anyone.”
“That does not matter here. You did not kill these men. No. That is probably true. But you did dispose of them as if in alliance with the terrorists. And if you are not responsible for it well then, who is, hmm? This did not start because of you, yet here you are, in the middle of it. You are a participant. You may not be responsible, but you are guilty. And although the punishment for the guilty and the responsible should be different, here, now, it is not. We have orders after all. I believe you understand. I will promise you this, I will have them make it quick.”

JT Coronel Roman waved his hand. Soldiers grabbed the man and brought him to his knees.

“You will be cursed,” the man said. He looked up at Antonio. His eyes were beautiful, and filled with pity.
Junior Teniente Coronel Antonio Luis Roman laughed. He pointed to the horizon.”When the sun rises again, there will be nothing here to remember. Just crops and ashes. People will come and know there was a story to be told, but no one will know where to start it, just that they came after the end. And in one-hundred years time, I and all my deeds will suffer the same fate. So, we are all cursed, my friend.”

The sun was nowhere to be seen, but its light still fought back the darkening sky. The heat remained unbearable. A single crack split the air and then disappeared into the homogeneous sound of the chicharras’ chorus that enveloped the land.

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March 7, 2017

… Conquista Todo

El Pueblo

Once during the war, what my people now call La Agitación Civil, there was a small farming village unfortunately located in an important part of our country. The village was situated in the Valle del Universo, the cultural and historical birthplace of the nation, where the farmers tended the valuable soybean crop. It was also strategically located near the edge of the forest where the government believed a majority of the EEP guerrillas lived and operated.

Due to the soybean crop, the nation’s primary agricultural export, the land was of immense importance to the government. It was estimated that prior to and during the war, the soybean was almost as valuable as the country’s oil and iron ore, approximately responsible for three-fourths of all agricultural exports. (Not until the Great Chinese Panic would it lose its value.) As such, the EEP would perform small attacks to either steal harvested crops, or set fire to large sections of the farmland, often killing off many of the National Army (EN) soldiers in the operations. Since the Villalba-Peña government was fighting factions in practically every region of the country, the EN was not as effective in eradicating any of the factions. By the time the war reached its second year, and all sides realized the end was nowhere near its point, the EEP changed its tactics slightly. It focused on the export business, too, and stopped burning the lucrative crop.

It planned mostly successful missions to kill off EN soldiers and leach large quantities of the soybean crop through the blackmarket, which in turn funded its resistance. Due to the unorganized, chaotic command of the EN (by the President himself), it took sometimes as long as a month before new troops could return to the area and reclaim control of the land. This way, the village changed hands on a regular basis throughout the war. On one or more occasions, the EN would overrun the guerrillas and lay claim to the territory in the morning, only to lose it again that very night.

This carried on for some time.

President Villalba-Peña was convinced the reason for his army’s consistent failures and constant back-and-forth was because the villagers were assisting the EEP. The truth behind this was a little different and more difficult to determine. Setting aside strategy and just focusing on the relationship between the guerrillas and villagers, the complexities reveal themselves through the horrible poetry of this conflict. We will never know exactly how these farmers viewed the fighters on either side, or the war that pitted them in the center of a maelstrom.

In truth, they were most likely relieved when the EEP stopped burning the crops, which drove them into further debt with Monsanto and threatened to destroy their homes and livelihood; but this did not mean a majority of the villagers favored the guerrillas, especially to the point of becoming militarily involved. No, some were likely sympathetic to the revolutionaries while others were nationalists. At least one or two sons must have been drafted to protect the government, while others (including daughters) ran into the forest to join the resistance. More so, they were almost certainly concerned whether the drought would extend into its eighth year, or if those goddamned langostas would make their way further west through the valley towards their crop. They probably hoped that year would be a little less hard than the previous one, fully expecting the opposite.

They existed in the world at a time that was much like the rest: cruel and indifferent about it: and their lives ended in much of the same way as all the other nameless faces positioned out in that vacuum of the empty past. They suffered at the hands of the human struggle and their voices were never heard. Their stories will only be remembered through the conjuration of history.

And yet, this does not make their lives any less real, or what happened to them any less wrong.

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September 21, 2016

Barbershop off Main St.

For those who had even the most inchoate appreciation of spatial properties and crudest admiration for aesthetics, the barbershop was an offense to such attuned faculties. The locomotive design impacted all the contents of the room together into this long, strained hallway, without any of the pleasantries afforded by riding transit: mainly a sense of adventure: instead, what remained was the strong feeling of claustrophobia and decorative constipation. Checkerboard tiles spread out across the floor fading off into a blur, some optical deception, as the eyes hit the horizon. When buffered, which was rare, the floor glared back the light reflecting off it, day or night, to suggest a demur attitude towards cleanliness, preferring the soot-rich scrubbing of a years-old mop to crest its battered surface and expose blemishes in the dried remains of dirty water; most often, random marauding tuffets of clipped hair were noticed roaming across the barren plains searching for crevasses to hide in or shoes to fix under. Undusted frames of mass-produced prints hung scattered on the halogen-colored walls: Stuart’s unfinished Athenaeum, a detailed lithograph of Connecticut, bad Impressionists and Sargent’s divisive Gassed, ugly illustrations from obliged school children, a few covers of the Saturday Evening Post ripped straight from the magazine: their selection and level of skilled placement reinforced the banal eclecticism of Main Street. An overused broom and its mop companion leaned in a corner. To stare into the local parlor was similar to falling in it. One could not fight its gravitational pull.

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August 17, 2016

Time in the Fog: The Farm

(Previously)

THE FARM

 

The dying Virginian summer held on to its intensity in the idiosyncratic fashion of a Southern drawl, languidly carrying on towards fall. The heat hung in the air along with the thick moisture August provides. As the seconds dragged closer to midnight, the temperature still dawdled in the low-nineties. It had been this way for some weeks now, at least ten days. It was hard to keep track of time when each moment was just as oppressively hot as the next, and no degree of vegetation could shield one from the immeasurable radiation pouring down, trapped by the vapors in the air. Day transitioned into night and back again. The weather stayed the same. It became another obstacle for Agent Robins’s re-initiation.

The “field trips” ran some twelve to sixteen hours long for however many days until the mission was completed. The team might have to cover anywhere from eight to twelve miles a day through the heavy terrain. It had been almost fifteen years since she first stepped foot on the Farm to begin her training. Though she still maintained good physical conditioning on her own, returning to the field was a different matter all together. It required not only a special degree of corporeal attention, but cognitive as well.  

Her training returned within the first few hours of her inaugural day, though: how to spot markers of roaming enemies and avoid tripwires or makeshift landmines, the best field techniques for keeping the body temperature low and feet dry, how to stay agile and silent with fifty-pound equipment (most of it unnecessary in the real field, but added in training to antagonize trainees) and sift through the forest’s white noise to tune in on footsteps, and mostly, she remembered the importance of battlefield equanimity.

It was a simple mission: track a group of ELN fighters, maybe six to ten strong, and eliminate them. But the days were cruel. One of the recruits suffered a bad sunburn on his arms and neck, he never slept well as a result. Most were exhausted by the continuous deluge of thick heat and traveling up steep hills and back down into valleys. They never complained, to their credit, but they were too slow. They would never catch the target at their current pace, and they risked being spotted if they moved too slowly—there were always more. Agent Robins knew by the trail size (which also gave away the formation), and few bits of trash left behind, the enemy’s numbers were fluctuating wildly anywhere from ten to twenty or more. The new recruits did not notice. Outnumbered, they would have to use the environment to their advantage.

That night, she encouraged the team leader to press on. Brady Copeland, graduated from Stanford with degrees in International Politics and Botany, former wrestler, admirable IQ, considers himself a gentleman, the typical red-meat All-American attributes that get selected for the agency. “Genetically-Modified Boy Scouts,” her mentor used to say.

 

“But how?” he looked up at her. He was laying down, seconds from sleep.

“We’ll track by moonlight, and perform night raids.”

He thought about it. He looked over to the other team members, some already sleeping. It had been an especially long day, and even though the index was still pushing into the high-eighties, most fell asleep from pure exhaustion. He shook his head. “It’s against the mission guidelines.”’

“There are no guidelines. We need to move. Now. We’re too slow. The rebels heavily outnumber us. If they’re smart, they are routinely splitting up and sending out scouts to ensure they aren’t walking into something or being followed. Based off the trails, they are smart. So, the longer it takes for us to find them is more time we are in the dark, and that increases our vulnerability and likelihood of mission failure.”

That struck a chord. It usually did with types like Brady. She watched his eyes as his brain tried to process the hypothetical scenario of failing, then cross examine the ramifications with breaking protocol and heading out in the middle of the night with a team already depleted of rest and stamina, but his eyelids kept fluttering. He could not focus. He let out a sigh. “I disagree, Agent Robins. Get some sleep.”

 

The following day, over thirty ELN insurgents ambushed the team of five at dusk. She and another recruit, Kerr, were able to stay alive long enough and use the cover of darkness to slip away through a hole in the attack. For the next six days, she pursued the ELN squad. There was a main core of fifteen that would swell upwards to forty and then disband. She kept track of the main group with Kerr until the sixth night when they shrunk to only eight. She had Kerr stationed just on the outskirts of the camp with explicit instructions: “Don’t move.”

Slithering through the ground, she came upon the scout who was keeping watch. His name was Church, but for the purposes of the drill he smeared dark green paint on his face and was a firm believer in focalism. His black ski mask was pulled up on his head and he wore a boonie atop. He was comfortable. It was his mistake.

She snuck up on him and drew her knife. The blade made the lightest breath as it released from its sheath, the killing spirant. He was on his feet taking slow steps around the bivouac. He did not notice his boot almost kissed her knee. She rose behind him and in one muted glimmer had her hand on his mouth and knife on his throat. She whispered: “You’re dead.”

She then woke up the remaining seven in a similar fashion. The last was the team leader, Gibson. She tapped his boots for him. When he woke, he saw the other members of his team sitting around the fire. His combatant stood above.

 

“Evening, Robins,” he stretched out of his waterproof blanket.

“Evening, sir.”

He rolled his eyes as he sat up. He looked at his men. “I assume I’m dead?”

“That would be correct.”

“You all, too?” he asked aloud. The team nodded. He shook his head. “Goddamnit, Church.”

Church said nothing.

Gibson looked at Robins. “Knife?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “Good work. What about Kerr?”

“He’s securing the perimeter.”

“How is he?”

“Smart enough to stick with me.”

“You cocky bitch.”

“Easy, sir,” Church said. “That’s a real knife she’s wielding.”

The men laughed.

“All right,” Gibson said. “This op is over. I want to thank you, Myra. I was beginning to miss my bed.”

 

The next mission used a mixture of al Qaeda techniques and various tactics from sub-Saharan guerrilla outfits. She was the team leader. The initial testing was over. Now she was being prepared for what was to come.

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May 30, 2016

Infinite City: Berserks and Haunts, As Explained by a Sixzy

Yeah, so like, where to begin? The CC. What a furious dump. Started off with der German pirates Ludwig and Hans-Johanns, and then branched out from there. First it was a pirates’ joint, then eventually the empires came, the joint legitimized and shits and it become a trading port. Gross fertile lands to the east by the river and the discovery of coal and gold in the mountains southbound in King Thelonius’s Range turn the City into half-agrarian paradise, half-shady gang town (plus, you wise, descending from pirates and whatsnot) or so the legend goes—the one that examples the First Civil Unrest in the early 1700s—you’ve got a whole history of a city with people that don’t like each other, don’t even like themself much either. Can’t even settle on a name.

First it was “Dee O-zah” or some German shit like that, denn they changed it to “Noy Himmel” when the Calvinists show up and start causing a ruckus, denn they change it again around the early 1700s to “Noy Reich” which is like “New Country” or something and then when we all start speaking English finally by mid-1700s it gets ang- angli- oh fuck that word, it gets changed to “New Reich” but some just call it Riker City because it’s easier. Anyway, like you don’t know what happens next. The fucking—anglitized! that’s the word, they anglitized it—uh… yeah… where was I? Oh rights, der fucking World War Duo happens and like gross shit happens in the city. You gots dees nuts Nazi sympathizers all over Ghettoland and Booty (they didn’t call them berserks that back then, I’ll talk about that in a minute). Uh, uh, yeah, Nazis, man. All over what used to be the furious fancy tits part of the city, you wise. Had FBI and police all over the city busting Nazi cults left and right, Nazis putting bombs in Jewish mailboxes and phone booths in all over Ass End, shooting up cars they think got undercover police in them. It was gross. And all over the City, I’m talking: Flatport, Reeves, Gorgon’s Alley, Duchess, uh, uh, all over what’s now New Strip, uh yeah, and Axel South, and Merlin Square, and uh… Capital Hall, Capital Hall was a bloodbath for that whole time, man. Not even us in Sixzy were safe, well I mean we never are, you wise, but like we were caught in all kind of gross cross fire. Nazis and Feds going right through our neighborhoods to tear up the other sides. Bayland was borderland between. My old man used to tell about that when he was young, watching the shoot outs from his window.

But uh… what was I saying? What was this about? Oh yeah. So lotta, lotta shits going down, rich? And eventually most of the Nazis get killed or thrown in jail or move to Argentina and Brazil or just move over to Posh Town, but uh… the City loses its name again, and like we all vote for a new one. Well, no. We voted for one before. Like in 1939, or maybe ’40. Definitely by ’41. It goes from “New Reich” to “New Helm.” Now, a lot of people wanted it to be tied back to the Indians that lived in the lands before the pirates killed them all. Chthic City. I don’t remember what “Chthic” meant to the natives. I think it was a mutual harvest god or something. Something about dirt, I think. Because the land was so fertile, you wise. Wait. I already said all that. Uh… yeah… what else? Oh, right. So there’s a vote and some want “Chthic” and some want “Helm” because who fucking knows, they’re as boojie as all tits and the Nazis (who are still around at this point) still want to call it “New Reich” or change it to “Hitleropolis” or something Nazi like that. The votes come in and no two-thirds majority has it so—oh that’s right—they had to eliminate the Nazis and by like ’44, ’45 is when they finally get it to “New Helm” which I still don’t know why. The boojie racists still wanted to sound German, and most of the other whites agreed, or at least agreed more than calling it Chthic City. But you still had like a third of the city that wanted to call it Chthic, so some started calling it the one that won the vote and others didn’t and this shits still sits with us now: some people call it New Helm, some Chthic, or the CC for short. A lot of people call it the City because it’s easier. Plus you gots nicknames: Bay City, Bay Haven (boojie people call it this), and Hemlock City because of that dark-ass bay of ours.

What else? What else?

Yeah, so you, uh, gots twenty-two fucking berserks. I don’t know why. Actually, I do. We call them berserks because it got angli- anglitized from the German word for “district” and there are so many of them because peeps don’t like each other. I know I’m pissing you a little, but it true. First started back with those pirates. Hanzy and Lew-Dogg had some beef and then the factions started popping up left and right, and then Charles Prick (no bullshit, that’s his name) arrived with his Calvinist followers and then the Catholic monks about a hundred years later, and on and on and on, but ever since the pirate dudes split no one in the City has ever liked the other. Actually, ever since the pirates got there and started killing off them Indians, no one has liked anyone. Or actually… them fuckers didn’t like each other either, so I guess it’s in the water or something. But like the reason everything’s got “land” on the ass of it is because for a little while (like before the 18th century or so) there were like fifty little countries all run by different pirate lords or miner gangs, or slave holders, or whatever, and the German for “country” is “Land” so… there you go. Lands. Still sticks because of the boojie white people like the idea of tradition, even if its tied back to awful people doing awful things. White people. What else can I say, you wise?

Uhm… hmm… yeah. Wars popping up like gross all over. But not really wars, just endless battles between small communities. Like first it was the Ludwig faction against Hans, actually no that’s a lie, it was der pirates against them Indians, then the Pirate Wars, denn the Great Calvinist Inconvenience, then The Revolt of 1684, there some more in there… I don’t know… there’s a lot, you wise. Uh… the First, Second, and Third Catholic Purging, there were a few more of those… uh… yeah. Lots of “wars” over the years. But yeah, nows there like twenty-two berserks over the City. It all starts in Gorgon’s Alley, which is what the haunts and the berserk is really called. I mean you have North Eye and South Eye, those haunts, and then Gorgon’s Alley, the Greeks, Pincher’s Post, and the Reeds: those are all a part of Gorgon’s Alley the berserk. But that’s where it all started. That’s the origin of the CC. Then it all just kinda spreads from there. Bloomland and Oldsland are the next berserks. All that land was colonized after Gorgon’s. You got some historic haunts in East Stretch and Pixie. Southfoot, that’s where they hanged Charles Prick, and burnt the monks, and disemboweled Hans-Johanns. Rights out there where Baskin-Robbins and American Eagles hock shit. Eeyore’s got a-ton a-ton of bars, it is furious the number. We call its that because it’s East Oldsland. So mash that together, and get gross shit-faced: Eeyore. Then you got Koossen, which was named after one of the pirates. I don’t remember which though. Then Greenland. That’s like where a lotta, lotta pride is dumped into the City. Lotta Hammer shit out there. That’s where Mmm-Hat is. Right overlooking North Park. The Major Metropolitan Museum of History and Theory. MMM-HaT. My father used to works in there. That’s like where this all comes froms, you wise. Used to take all the boojie kids from their schools in Horthwright Manors and Fletcher Park and tell them all the bullshit you s’pose to, you wise, all that stuff that’s in the news now with the textbooks. Gross stuff. Gross amounts of museums, universities, all the sports teams play there, it’s all there in Greenland, in haunts like: Upper Face, Flatport, Reeves, Aubrey Hills, lotta tight neo-gothic architecture is all over Capital Hall, that’s also where der city hall is and lots of dees government buildings. Uh yeah… what else? I mean those five pretty much make up the Old City as it stood. The lines of those berserks are pretty much untouched. Fact. Du can find bits of the wall Ludwig built to keep the Indians out of his town. It now separates the boojie parts of Aubrey Hills from Sixzy, but it goes all along from the Mond down to Hemlock.

Then you got Bayland, my home. I’m a Sixzy, grew up my wholes life on or around Sixth Street. That runs right through the heart of Bayland, starts at der Pier where du get most of the jobs coming still for peeps, but it’s like heavily boojie now, you wise? Likes a-ton un a-ton of fancy tits restaurants and places like that. Lotta peeps working on staffs in there. Sixth is like a bigs deal for lotta, lotta us, man. That’s where they used to take the slaves in for sales. When the Uprising happened back in the 1800s, Sixth was where freedom spread from out. You had all kinda crazy number of slaves coming in from around the city, out from the fields in der east and flooding Slave Town (whats they called it then). But for likes six gross weeks, man, I’m telling you, Slave Town was Free Town and Sixth was where it was at. See like, the City was still very its own, you wise? Likes even the president didn’t want to mess with the City. But when the things got ugly, and the mayor was like: “Yo, dees slaves be shitting mad hate on us, you better come squash this right now.” But it was all horses and on feet back then. They couldn’t fire up the drones to blow the slaves out of the sky in a day, you wise? So whiles it taken them weeks to get to us, we were setting up a government un defending ourselves from the slave owners trying to steal us back and city police and whatnot. Then the military came and it was gross. Slavers didn’t want their property harmed at first, but by week six they were just like: “Try not to kill the babies if you can.” No bullshit. That’s like in der records un shit. Anyway, Sixth is der Hammer. That’s where we all comes from.

And then you go west to the other berserks from Bayland: Midland, Renaissance, and Beauté. All four are parts of the “Inner Berserks” which is just a boojie term for “where to put all the non-white peeps.” Both Renaissance and Beauté used to have all the wealthy haunts of all der Nazi supporters. During the War, after they kicked out the Nazi from CC, they tore up the area for more military barracks and bases. Then after that they kinda gave it all up and converted them alls into a projects for the poor and immigrant. When they renamed the city, they changed the berserks too, from “Reichland” to “Renaissance” and “Volks-shtott” to “Beauté.” I don’t remember all the old Nazi haunt names, but nows it all like: Liberté, Unité, Fraternité, Égalité, Rois, Bleu, Sérénité. I guess they thought changing shit to French was assperational or something. I don’t know. Uh… anyways, they shoved all the rest of der poor people there and forgot about all that goodwill aspirational shit and left us for dead while they built the Sprawl (more about that in a sec). But it’s like, uh… uh… we don’t even call it that. No one coming here to teach us French. Shit. Only reason I know how to pronounce them is because of my dad. Shit. Those are the only French words he ever knew, and same for me. Shit. It’s all Booty (or some call it Baby, or Bay-B) and Ghettoland for the berserks. And you think peeps from the Inner call those haunts that? Nah. It’s ain’t that at alls. It’s all anglitized, too. Or ghettotized.

Uh… yeah. So then… you go all the way west and north into the WASPy berserks. You got Riverland, Coastland, Charles, and Paladin Heights. Well not so much Paladin. That’s where the Catholics came in. Lotta, lotta Catholics still around there. But yeah, that whole northern part of the city is where Charles Prick came with his Calvinists and started causing a ruckus with the generations that descended from the pirates. Lotta bad blood. Lotta wars. Lotta dead people during that time. It wasn’t until der monks show up. Denn you got them teaming up to slaughter dees monks. Fuckers never stood a moment on the CC and the WASPs and other white peeps coming to the port to beat them to death and steal their goods, grill ’em. Like five, six times this happens. Catholic monks come over from Europe, peeps come out to find them and kill them or send ’em back. Fucking brutal, you wise. They even sunk one of the ships before it could get to land, but it was a merchant ship. So eventually that stops. I don’t remembers, but it happened eventually. Military stepped in or something. No wise.  But yeah, that’s like lotta, lotta industry and factories and big cargo dumps and lotta lotta other stuffs all out there, rich. Like tonna working peeps, but now likes lotta Slovaks and Greeks and Taiwanesians and Persians live out in der parts because most of the others have fucked off to the Sprawl. Un, uh, yeah but most those haunts in der berserks are still gross nice. It’s not until you start touching the Inner do those parts get bad. But whatevers, it’s still like furiously better. Fucking boojie peeps.

What else? What else? Damn. Yeah. I forget how gross this city is with all these places. Gross big. Furious big, man, you wise? Like some twenty-thirty million living in this city—half of that shit in the Sprawl, but stills. So like all dees that I was talking about was the North End of the CC. Denn you gots the Islands. Most of those are boojie islands. You got Links and the Tri-Islands, but everyone calls thems Posh Town and Posh-Annex. Posh Town is where all the uber-uber boojie-time peeps are and their super fancy tits houses and other places. And Posh-Annex is like the step down, you wise? Like the Red Lion to the Black Lion in Voltron. Fucking Lance and Keith. So white. Where are all the black people? In a perfect world it’s all void of brothers? Damn, Japan. Why you gotta do us like that? Nothing about that show made sense. Why wasn’t that shit more orderly? Keith wore red but drove the Black Lion, and Lance wore blue but drove the Red. What the fuck? You mastered intergalactic travel and fight space monsters but you can’t help a kid out and where clothes that match your fucking lion robot? Color-coordinate that shit! And what the fuck with lions? Ancient space aliens know about lions on Earth? The fuck? And whatever happen to that German dandy motherfucker? Sven. Or was he Swiss? I don’t remember.

Anyway, yeah, Posh-Annex peeps are all stiff in the ass to the Posh Town crowd because during the War the military came in and started kicking Posh Town peeps out of their homes, creating a few officers’ barrack and headquarter and naval stations and whatever else, you wise, all that military bullshit, so they started kicking out some of the boojie crowd, others could stay because their land was more inland, or in less “strategic” area. So like the military was doing this to all the islands: Links, Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt (but then it was Cleveland), the free islands. So like anyone who got kicked out was relocated to Ass End, the New Strip, parts of Deebs. A lot of the Jews and Scandinavians that lived in those berserks got kicked out. The City then bought up land from the farmers east of the city, and that’s what was the start of the Sprawl. But then like after the War all the Posh-Annex people wanted to moved back, but what had happened was that some of the property remained under the ownership of the military, other parts converted into private industrial enterprises, or spots (for a lot of the officer quarters) were purchased by those Posh Townies who didn’t get kicked out. They bought up that real-estate and then charged outrageous amounts of monies to the “off-island” peeps who wanted their homes back. Poor boojies, rich? Can’t get their three-storey Victorians back the way they were? Furious, yo. Gross furious. So anyway, the wealthy pricks complained to the mayor and got the Tri-Islands redrawn into residential areas for them. Catch with that was those islands all had city-run facilities to take care of the bum population, the ‘tards, the seniors, all spots over those threes. So what did the city do? Well, they were financing the fucks outta the Sprawl, and the mayor made concessions to the industry businesses to cut back on taxes, so dudes were a little strapped for cash, so they closed all the facilities. The homeless went back to the streets, same with the ‘tards because there were no other facility that could care for or wanted to care for thems. Some of the seniors went into hospitals, or back to their families, but a good amount went homeless, too. You gots this uber flood of homeless peep, you wises. Uh… something like a hundred thousand, two-hundred thousand peeps out on the streets, un, uh, then like a freak winter came in and killed off half of dees peeps. We stills call that one “the Hard Winter.” Gross, rich?

Those the islands. The free ones were given back to the peeps, but fat-fucking chance a Sixzy can ever get over there. Du gotta take like six Metros to get there, takes like two hours. So whites go there. Them and der Puertos and Chineses that live over in New Hope and Little San Juan in der New Strip. Man. South City has all the Hammer shit. Nice parks, nice homes, everythings like a little nicer because of the land and those Lands were built on top of the miners’ towns, which were all just like wood. Most just burnt down in the King Thelonius Riots and the Miners’ Revolts, so they like just started building on them in the early-20ths. It’s all nicer over there, plus you gots the mountains and all that gross pretty shit. Make a Sixzy blush with rage. All dem berserks are furious nice and boojie-adjacent, you wise. The haunts in Ass End are real nice. Lotta Posh-Annex peeps used to live in Mame Loshn and Vidvelt after they took over, but dees used to be all the Jewtowns. They kicked them all the way out. But they are all pretty nice. Mostly Hasids now live there after they reclaimed it in the 80s. Actually I never stepped foot in there. Only heard it was nice. Don’t think I’d ever been invited, you wise? But Parkland, Deebs, and Bergland are like quantum leaps beyond the prettiest berserks in the CC. Deebs has got like the nicest park. Olympia Park. Was built in Glits for the Olympics back in the 50s. It’s pretty Hammer. But denn you gots all these tinier parks that spread across all over there. Same with Parkland. Arcadia Park was the first official city park. That’s where all the hippies tried to convert it into a “free town” but that didn’t last so long. And Bergland is right along the Range so all that haunts: Thelonius, Ashway, Matterhorn, Nord, Karling, Whimp: all Hammer as shit. Alls skis towns and whatnot. Not that a Sixzy gets a chance to ski all the time, a Sixzy don’t love the snow, but every now and again we gets out there.

No wait. Sven was Swedish. That’s right. And the fucker dies in the original Japanese version. But apparently kids can’t handle that shit stateside. Fucking Sven. You silly bitch.

But where was I?

Oh right. Yeah. Those are all nice places. But if I had to like choose. Like choose, choose. I’d probably live in Hearts. Shits got it all. It was likes the first suburban experiment for the CC by Hearts before he got his hands on the Sprawl. But you kinda see what he was going for, mixing the regular peeps with the hard shit of the city, tried to make it real nice and community-based, you wise. Then the Brazilians and Indians (like from India) moved in in likes der 70s. Yeah. Like the Rund or Lesser Thrash, Cubbiehole, Pyramids, all those places are real nice. ‘Course they are becoming real boojie again. Gardens and Dalegate used to be a place some of the Inner peeps were moving to, but not so much now. Shit. Even the other day I was walking through Nouveau Monde in Ghettoland and they’re tearing all that down for these fancy tits high-risers that’s likes three grand for a fucking studio. Who in the Inner can pay that shit? Fuckssake, rich? But don’t worry. They got vouchers for us to live in places like Meadow Lake and Free Forest in the Sprawl. Even though they’re moving all those whites back into the city and the jobs with ’em. And places like Prairie Valley and Hearts Fields have already taken measures to convert low-income housing into boojie spots, or requiring GEDs and some even college degrees for part-time jobs. Part-time jobs! I just gotta like laughs, you wise. Fucking whites. Fuck ’em. Who wants to live a shithole haunt named “Rolling Hills in Spring” anyway, rich? Like how boojie do you have to be to think of that shit?

Yeah… that’s der CC for you. Chthic City. What a Goddamn place.

But you find yourself in Sixzy, and shit I don’t know why you’d be there, maybe because you’re on your way to the interstate, but yeah if you find yourself there, hit me up. I’ll show you some of the places where Slave Town all started and how we fought back in the Uprising and made Free Town for ourselves. We’ll have a beer at this joint, Russ’s. I’ll show you ’round. We can play Zelda. Or you like Goldeneye? Trick question, who don’t?

Anyways, you can swing through, say “hi” ‘n’ shit. It’ll be Hammer.

 

 

City Map 

CityMap

Berserks:

  1. Gorgon’s Alley
  2. Greenland
  3. Bloomland
  4. Oldsland
  5. Koossen
  6. Bayland
  7. Midland
  8. Renaissance (Ghettoland)
  9. Beauté (Booty, Bay-B)
  10. Hearts
  11. Parkland
  12. New Strip
  13. Deebs
  14. Oceanland (Ass End)
  15. Bergland
  16. Subland (the Sprawl)
  17. Riverland
  18. Coastland
  19. Charles
  20. Paladin Heights
  21. Links Island (Posh Town)
  22. Tri-Island (Posh-Annex) with Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Washington Islands

 

Major Parks and Islands, etc.:

  • A) Ludwig City Island Park
  • B) Hans-Johanns City Island Park
  • C) Chinnemuuk City Island Park
  • D) Othahathaway City Island Park
  • E) Bay City Park
  • F) Pearl Coast City Park
  • G) Founders City Park
  • H) Rutherford Chauncey Horthwright Welcoming Island Park
  • “NE” – North Eye Island
  • “SE” – South Eye Island
  • “NP” – Mond River Park, North (North Park)
  • “SP” – Mond River Park, South (South Park)
  • “WEB” – W.E.B. Du Bois Park
  • “PP” – Charles Prick Park (the Prick)
  • “NHP” – New Helm City Park
  • “OP” – Olympia Park
  • “KTMRP” – King Thelonius Mountain Range Park
  • “AP” – Arcadia Park
  • “R” – Roosevelt Island
  • “L” – Lincoln Island
  • “W” – Washington Island
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March 13, 2016

On Parenting, and History

So we’re all sitting here in the backyard while the kids play around. Little Olivia is shouting at Arie to “get out of the tree!” Arie has, in fact, managed to get himself up in the tree, wedged between some of the Dalmatianesque limbs of the birch sprouting out of the earth. He’s all smiles as he dodges his head from side to side behind one of the limbs, teasing the poor girl. The protestation continues and brings on our full attention, but Arie’s lack of ascent (only a few inches off the ground) renders Olivia’s concerns absurd. Her father calls out: “Honey O, cool it with the screaming. Let’im play.” He’s got all kinds of neat appellations for his girl: Honey O, Little O, Baby O, O, and my personal favorite: Cheeri-O. “Arie,” (which is his nickname, phonetically based off the initials of his first name: Reginald-Ernst) his mother says, “you don’t go any higher than that, understood? And no teasing.” Arie seems not to listen, but he also isn’t climbing any higher, leaving me to infer he either got the message, or is already wise enough to know he can’t possibly climb any further without risk of injury.

Sick of Arie’s shit, Baby O picks up the toy lawnmower and walks off saying something to the effect of: “Fine, but you can’t mow the lawn then.” I’m not certain as she still mumbles a great deal of her words, much like her mother, and her knowledge of English syntax is still lacking, but that’s the gist. Arie watches her from the safety of the birch, clinging to the smooth trunk. The game is afoot, though it is still clear neither child is quite sure what the rules are. Olivia starts humming a nonsensical tune as she continues to pretend-cut the grass. This reminds me I have to pay my gas bill for some reason when Arie decides to dart for the toy. Little O spins to avoid his slow advance, his chubby legs and flat feet let him down in the chase, his sprint some form of unrefined motor skills. She makes an about-face and takes the offensive. The first rule becomes realized: whoever has the plastic mower has the power, and quickly the second: the tree is the only salvation. They chase, back and forth, expanding and creating new rules, evolving along the way.  

Not sure how, but the conversation I return to involves what my friends are reading their respective toddlers. More precisely, the two are talking about their astonishment over just how horrifying older versions of the beloved children’s characters are.

“I was reading O one of the original stories of Bugs Bunny the other night. My mother dumped off a huge stack of my childhood books. I couldn’t believe it.”

“What’s that?”

“Bugs Bunny.”

“Oh I know—“

“Bugs Bunny is a real asshole.”

“Yeah, total bully.”

“They really altered his image when it came to the cartoons. But when I was sitting there reading that stuff to O, I was like: ‘Goddamn. What a fucking asshole.’ Without saying that of course. But the way he instigates and taunts Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig, I’m like: ‘Christ, someone please pistol whip this guy already. What a dick.'”

“And it doesn’t just stop there, you have all those horrible, racist cartoons through the 40s and 50s.”

“‘All This and Rabbit Stew'”

“Sure. Is that one?”

“Well, Bugs always seemed inspired by Br’er Rabbit to me. Which makes the appropriation of him into racist cartoons like that extra painful when you think about it… at least to me.”

“Yeah, all these children’s books are so troubling. I’m reading her these Disney works.”

“Oh don’t get me started on that.”

“I know, I know. But I’m reading her Snow White, right? The young, pretty chick gets slipped a rohypnol apple by the jealous older witch lady, who later turns into a fucking dragon, and has to be saved by the prince. She literally does nothing the whole story except run for her life and get knocked out, then everything turns out OK.”

“No. You missed her most important contribution to life: she stays home and cooks and cleans for the seven dwarfs. That makes her a compelling character, apart from also white and pretty. At least Cinderella was a sweatshop worker.”

“Little Mermaid. My girl loves that story. It’s a story about a girl who changes her body image in order to get a guy. What the fuck?”

“That’s why I can’t stand Disney. I mean that and the shameless marketing to children. “

“Yes, let’s not forget the shameless marketing.”

“It’s not like any of those other children’s stories out there are that much different.”

“I know. I’m reading Arie the story about Little Red Riding Hood. What I remember about the original story was the wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, and The Woodsman has to chop The Wolf to pieces before the two can be saved. Luckily, this book I’ve got for him tones that all down. The Woodsman ‘scolds’ The Wolf to spitting the two out. And then there’s Goldilocks and how she ‘forgets her manners’ when she is breaking and entering the Bears’ house.”

“It’s nice that they tone them down. All these ones I have from when I was a kid are terrible. What’s the name of that collection?”

“You had Disney princess books as a little boy?”

“Oh I don’t know. I’ll find out and text you.”

The conversation turns as my friends start to converse over the silly idiosyncrasies of their kids—at which point I tune them out and start thinking about an article I read not too long ago. The report concerned a series of psychological studies that used false images of Bugs Bunny mascots in Disneyland. The psychologists showed these doctored photos to test patients (them with the rabbit), who upon seeing the photos, claimed they remembered meeting the costumed Bugs in the land of the Mouse—which never happened. This idea of false memories was particularly intriguing to me when placed in the context of these fairy tales. Was this revisionist approach to these children’s tales in a sense providing a cultural false memory for the next generation, and was that a good thing? What would their kids’ futures look like if they never learned their beloved Bugs Bunny, or Mickey Mouse, or other earlier cartoon hero was once a proxy for an entire group of people who were trying to indoctrinate their younglings into a vast racist narrative of superiority and minority debasement? Would it be better? Or, in another case, is it possible that Little O and Arie’s generation will thrive in a community that never grew up listening to the time-honored tales of little children being massacred, or doing the butchering, that they never had to learn these were all narratives told at their outset by a much larger, impalpable hegemonic force we commonly refer to as CULTURE to help ease them into their quotidian existence with relative ease and acceptance. How best to teach them all this? I imagine Cheeri-O’s dad might say: “They’re just too young to learn that. They’re three for Chrissake. Now’s not the time.” Fair enough. No need to expose them to all these matters we adults regularly avoid with boldfaced ignorance verging on beast-like stupidity, let alone actually comprehending what any of this bullshit means. But I can’t help but wonder what implications lurk behind these signs of progression. Do my friends’ children no longer become educable to these pasts, or just as bad: do these histories become a novelty, something reduced to a trivial level? What happens to our futures when we occlude the understanding of our lineage?

I’m not sure. But, being both black and a Jew, I can’t stop myself from thinking about American slavery, and the Holocaust while my friends continue some impassioned conversation of whether or not Tupperware is still a valuable appliance for housing leftovers. I think about the totems to white supremacy. The ones that have vanished, and the ones that remain. I think of the celebration of “Dixie” at high school and collegiate sporting events, etchings on the side of Stone Mountain, the doubly offensive statue of Nathan Bedford Forest overlooking I-65, and the statues and engravings and names that behave as emblems to this country’s known, yet mute identity. Then I think of the only remnants left throughout Germany, Poland, Austria, and other formerly-occupied territories are the ashes. Grim sepulchers that set inside the bucolic countryside, left to help bridge the gap between what was and is. No horrid tokens of the apparatus that conceived, implemented, and executed such doom. Instead, back home, we’ve buried the ashes and obfuscated why the relics remain. Heroes everywhere, and God on everyone’s side. No wrong. No shame. Nothing.

I remember reading about some American taking a selfie at Auschwitz, her face beaming with joy as she stood on the path to the gas chambers. About a year later, people are raising holy hell, crying about “Heritage. Heritage!” as Confederate flags are removed from state grounds.

The meanings behind these symbols have become so recondite they have lost their focus, allowing new narratives to claim authority. I think of this type of revisionism; I think of the Southern apologists, and how few shits Lynne Cheney gave about this type of storytelling influencing the American mind, what the impact this kind of inculcation might wreak on the social fabric.

So why even keep these tombs if we don’t care to acknowledge what lies within?

Then Arie and Little O call out to their parents: “Come play, play!” And Little O’s dad gets up out of his chair and starts to pretend he is a big bull chasing after them, and Arie’s mom tells them to: “Run, run!” The two children dart off with the 40 year old man-bull charging after them. They keep twisting their bulbous heads back to see which one of them he is chasing as their untoned legs move with all the gaucheries of young speed. And I start to get it—I see the danger implicit within its wordless rhetoric, but I understand its necessity. It’s the same that propels me and mine from a separate view.

All these ghosts, arms out-stretched, dying to be remembered, and we in turn look back while lunging forward, wondering if we too have some connection with the intangible, something other than ourselves to tell us to go on, to tell us we are good, and we belong, and are worthy of not being forgotten.

February 7, 2016

Palpable [Poetry]

Some five years ago I was strolling towards a precipice. I was on my last lunch break for my old job. They were laying everyone I knew off in a restructuring strategy. It was going to save the company millions, you see. Millions that would allow the company to go on—for at least some months until it was sold and restructured again (entailing further massive layoffs), only to be rendered defunct a few years after that.

I walked over to the nearby five-tower glass monolith, the Westin Bonaventure, which stood like an onyx power-structure in the Los Angeles cityscape. Something borrowed from the future of a Power Rangers world. Staring at it as I approached, I saw the reflections of the city in its glass face, distorted by its curvature and scope. I witnessed how its material manipulated the images of the outside world projected on it.

I crossed a bridge into the outdoor courtyard, which was a glorified plot of grass with concrete-potted trees surrounding it, and pool. A few people sat outside at the tables of the in-hotel brewery restaurant. I passed them without making eye contact and walked into the atrium of the hotel.

The atrium felt much like an inoperative botanical garden. Dark glass ceilinged the place, pouring shaded light down into the cavity, and I was environed by six levels of honeycombed rock. A giant spiraling nest of cement sprawled out before my eyes, like the city itself, in this inspirational and foreboding fashion. I walked along the outer-portion of the grey-tiled passageway observing the cavity’s innards. Remnants of the lingering recession were still present—an air of tired optimism, or obstinance about the place. Most of the store fronts that lined the balconied walkway were closed. Looking down at the lobby level I saw what was meant to be a man-made “lake” with fully-functional fountains, but instead all that remained was a dry bed of smooth blue, gray, and black rocks.

I felt the odd contradiction of familiarity and strangeness as I rounded the third level. The hotel was suffering from a time-spatiality error. The businesses that remained were in a state of aesthetic paralysis. I passed the single hair salon that sported but one patron. The posters of hair models that skinned the windows outside looked aged–as if someone fleshed out Patrick Nagel’s work. This clinging to the bygone made me a little disheartened.

I kept walking, eventually making it over by the small corner of independent restaurants in the yellow section of the hotel, or was it the red, or blue, or green? I cannot recall. You see each pillared section looks the same from the inside apart from the scantly colored corners. Every time I had visited the hotel, I would have to walk in a circuitous manner until I stumbled upon a familiar location. (Ingenious for commerce, if only there was any to be had.) The restaurants that remained looked like they were on their last days, too. If not today, then soon. Who would come here? I wondered as I walked around. The customers were few. Some were older guests who were overwhelmed by the prospect of venturing out into the great wide metropolis, most were staff either from the hotel or nearby offices like myself. There were perhaps six of us total in the entire hotel there to eat. The word desolation came to mind. Then Detroit. Then suburbia. Then melancholy.

A few years later I recalled the above scene after reading Federic Jameson’s words about the very same hotel: “…[it] aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city…”

Back to the moment: A sad song came on, or maybe it was a happy song that made me sad—I forget which now—and I began to think about the dance the space had between the interior and exterior realities, and then I began to think about how my inner projections might be affecting the outside world, and the external projections affecting me, and I tried to focus on consciousness and understand what it meant in the moment, but instead I was too upset and too hungry to think any further. All I wanted was to sit and eat a sandwich and feel the moment.

So I went to Subway.

I came across the establishment during one of my previous walkabouts through the atrium. Located on the highest level (the sixth level) of the atrium, it just appeared one day, out of the blue—or maybe it was always there and I just forgot about it from my previous trips. Typically, I ignored the sixth level because of its drab nature. It only contained a Pho restaurant and closed storefronts. It hurt to see the failure and potential most evident in that barren space.

One of the closed fronts was a Japanese Shabu Shabu and Barbecue restaurant that had shut its doors before I ever came around—or perhaps it never opened. Maybe the story behind the restaurant is that it was going to open before the Crash, the business owner was very excited about the new venture. The restaurant engrossed about a quarter of the business space on the sixth level, with a capacity to seat over two hundred people at any given time. The restaurant was a hybrid of the best of Japanese cuisine: a section for shabu shabu, teppanyaki tables for the more popular crowds, and a sushi bar. A robust menu that would satisfy any ravenous hotel guest, or city dweller. Waiters and waitresses adorned in traditional kimonos and haoris. An entire replica of feudal Japan, famous sites and battles, tales of moon princesses and further lore all strewn across the lower third of the restaurant’s windowsills. If one travelled the length of the establishment from the green (or blue or yellow or red) side of the sixth level to the blue (or green or red or yellow), the entire ancient history of Japan was on display in the little fitting. All these great possibilities, and endless spectrum of positive futures. It might have been grand. But then the subprime mortgage crises. Then the money dried up. Then the owner never got to realize the dream, and instead took a dive over the nearby 5th St. bridge onto the 110–caused a sixteen-car pileup and seven-hour traffic jam. Or maybe not. Probably not, but that’s where my head was at then: bleak.

The Pho restaurant, Mr. Baguette(!),  which when I first visited used to be the Happy Cow pho spot, was another of the random establishments that appeared on the verge of collapse. It was a chimera of “French” sandwich shop and pho cuisine–meaning one could order an assortment of twelve-inch deli sandwiches on a baguette and/or classic pho bowl, all for unbelievably cheap prices at the same location. The establishment was so clean. I assumed because of the lack of use, and well-maintained care it received from the staff. The owner, or maybe he was just the manager–but the story is stronger if he’s the owner, so–the owner stood alone behind the counter awaiting for someone, anyone to come in and order food. A lone cook stood staring into the nothingness of his pans hanging above his head. I made eye contact with the owner/manager. He smiled. I nodded and kept walking. I felt ashamed, but accounted it to my general mood.

Minutes later I sat with a twelve-inch Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sandwich, chips, and 24.oz soda-pop in front of me. I noticed the Subway was installing a few draft beers, and had some other bottled brands on display. It was a technique to get more customers. I wondered if it would work, or if the establishment was going to go under like everything else. Then I started thinking about the past, and wondering about the future. Slight misery crept into my mind as I took a bite. I turned my attention to one of the two televisions.

The daytime show from one of the broadcast networks was interrupted when a car chase broke out somewhere in Torrence, or maybe it was San Bernardino, I don’t remember anymore. Guy in an SUV was hauling ass through the city streets trying to avoid the cops. He got onto the interstate, then got off. He drove fast up the shoulders, crossed briefly into on-coming traffic, ran a red light or two, but for the most part was a pretty respectable criminal. The nice cashier who made my meal and tried to interest me in a beer instead of soda was emptying the garbage (or sweeping the floor) near the television. He looked up and watched for a little bit with minor excitement. “Rapido, rapido!” he joked, laughing to himself before going back about his business. Not too long after, the SUV made a wrong turn in front of a high school and the police blocked any chance of escape. The SUV then came to a slow, respectable stop. The driver put the car in park and then tried to make like hell out of the scene on foot. I can’t remember if he made it to the school doors and they were locked, or if he never made it past the steps. Irrespective, the cops were on him quick. He dropped to the ground and they jumped on him.

Things could have been worse I supposed. I could have been that guy.

My lunch finished, I walked back to work. I lingered a bit, walking slowly back down each level, passing the empty stores, trying to avoid the eyes, trying not to give any unnecessary hope. I saw a future for them, as I’m sure they saw the same for me. We were mirrors to one another, unable to give the other anything more than themselves.

All that was left for me was to brave my fate. Questions remained as I walked out the doors for what I knew would be the last in a long time. The answers were as likely to be found outside as they were inside.

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December 13, 2015

“Ur-uh… the Start of a Writing Project: Ruminations on Historicity and Mission Statement”

Just the other day a video was brought to my attention. It concerned a particular filmmaker (T Patrick), who claimed he filmed Stanley Kubrick some sixteen years ago in 1999 confessing (before his mysterious death) he helped President Nixon, NASA, the United States stage one of the most (I’m told) profound, important, moving moments in human history: the 1969 moon landing. There, in the crudely edited video, a man sat in monochromatic orange, or soft red (I’m not really good with colors) and confessed to the off-camera filmmaker that he, Stanley Kubrick, helped the government stage the moon landing.

Needless to say, I was intrigued by the possibility (though highly unlikely) that the moon landing was, in fact!, a staged film operation to dupe the world into believing the United States had won the Space Race. So I watched the fascinating work:  https://vimeo.com/148297544

Though immediately, as the large text of T Pat’s presumed production company came on screen, I could not shake the feeling I was being had. Perhaps it was the amateurish nature of the 45+ minute documentary that I could already perceive some sort of joke being played on my wits, there was a disturbance in the force–so to speak. Perchance it was the element of truth! about to be imparted to me. So… I pressed on.

Seventeen minutes into the documentary, before getting to the confession, that coveted payoff I was waiting for, the overtones of duplicity were stirring. The word “FRAUD” crept up in the background of my mind. It was visible throughout the video like the unspoken violence witnessed in the aftermath of a crime scene. 1) the very deliberate, at times comical, disjointed “rough” editing style, 2) the insistence of T. Patrick to inject himself into the documentary again and again with his voice-over to tell this overdrawn 48-minute story that easily could have been five 3) the terrible lighting of Kubrick that suggested chicanery, half his face cloaked in the dark (why? for shame? for shame!) 4) in conversation Kubrick had lost his typical low-end New Yorker timbre, 5) even poor lighting aside, Kubrick just did not look like himself.

After about 20 minutes, I had enough. This could not be true, right? So I did a little further digging. I found a second video that claimed to be a “raw” version (even though there are edits) of the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR4pf6pp1kQ  This time without the sophomoric editing and heavy splash of Orange Crush, the argument grew slightly more compelling. Partly one must wonder why not release the first five minutes or so of this footage and call it a day. That certainly would capture the imagination of all those who watched it: though it would still have to answer for the fact that (gaudy aesthetics cleansed) the Kubrick in this interview still did not look, or sound (essentially “act”) like Stanley Kubrick, and even more there was a type of playacting, a sense of improvisation afoot. T Pat would egg Kubrick on with a question that would lead Kubrick to answer exactly what (one must assume) T Pat and the rest of the audience wanted to know.

Still unsatisfied, still dubious, I marched forth through time.

After perhaps a minute longer, I found yet a third video concerning this confession. It was titled (most aptly): “Beware of the FAKE Stanley Kubrick confession” and consisted of about 18 minutes of my now favorite filmmaker (T Pat) instructing Kubrick–actually his name is Tom–on how to best tell the story of the faked moon landing.

So problem solved, it was all a lie. But it got me thinking.

I cannot recall the moon landing. I was not there along with the millions of upon millions of other human beings, sitting/standing in front of their television sets around the world all those years ago watching the moment happen. Even more, some of those people who were there might not even remember, they might lean back hard on the footage they have seen time and time again, letting that become their memory, their historical consciousness, their truth when in fact they never saw the event, only read about it in the newspaper the next day and then later seen the footage retroactively reconnected the two and thought: I was there, I knew what it was like. So when the moment this video came along, I could not rely on my own personal memory to say: “No. This is bullshit.” before even watching it. I had to do some research. I had to stretch back into the past and dig up some bones on the Internet that might help paint a more accurate picture of what was happening. [Of course, the part that is so fun to me about this Kubrick “confession” is the idea that no one, presumably besides the astronauts that were there, can be absolutely certain there was a moon landing. Similarly, no one can know for certain that this interview was inauthentic other than those involved. Such a wide gap between the primary and secondary memories is what in part allows such “theories” to arise and threaten the authenticity of the historical narrative… and that’s fun to me.]

So what was happening? Setting aside the fact I believe (like many hoaxes) this was created in jest. How else does one explain the overall incoherence of the editing, or the obvious self-aggrandizement of the filmmaker, the humorous likeness to Kubrick’s own idiomatic lashings when the actor does not execute his vision of the scene or dialog (seeing the un-edited version where poor ole Tom is chided for not understanding what he is saying reminded me of the real Kubrick verbally working Shelley Duvall like a punching bag on The Shining), how to explain the ease with which one can refute the evidence with its own extended rawness in the matter of an hour or less? How indeed. What I am more interested in is what this fake-documentary (“fokumentary”) means to memory, then therefore historical consciousness, and ultimately historicity. How this fokumentary was able to use film to alter (for however briefly) a consciousness of the public (however few) and open a niche for an alt-narrative to fester in the historical understanding of that thing in the past we call “the moon landing.”

I immediately thought of Stalin–because that’s appropriate. I thought of how he manipulated photographs and literally eliminated political adversaries (or more accurately perceived adversaries) from the picture. In other words, when Uncle Joe was tired of the Old Bolshevik comrades, not only did he have them liquidated, but he also purged their very existence from photographs, as well as included himself in a few. Then I thought of the Egyptians–because whatever. How Hatshepsut claimed to be the rightful heir to the throne. She created images of herself with more masculine features including the manly pharaoh regalia of a false beard, and insisted the gods intended on her to be ruler. This was all evident in the art and writings that were created during her reign. A great deal of which was almost destroyed by her stepson, Thutmose III. He tried to destroy or alter all the iconography and written word about his former stepmother-turned-regnant-turned-pharaoh after she died (of cancer it is believed).  

In all three instances, mediums through which we recall the past (tools on which we are so dependent, especially when we ourselves cannot recall, or recall accurately) were manipulated in and effort to force the narrative in an alternative direction: a “revisionist” approach to history in all three cases. And that is really where the similarities between these three disparate characters begin and end (unless you want to say both Stalin and Hatshepsut both worked in government–be my guest).  But it brings to mind this notion of historical fragility.

I recently read a novel by the late, great EL Doctorow: Ragtime. I highly recommend it. I had been thinking about the fragility of history, how difficult it becomes at times to be able to separate fact and fiction, and then I came across the very first few pages of Doctorow’s work in which a fictitious New York family has their summer day interrupted by none other than Harry Houdini as he crashes his car in front of their house. The beauty and genius of this simple moment when the historically real (Houdini) crashes into the world of the fictive (Doctorow’s imagination). From there onward the book is an amalgam of these two seemingly contra styles of narrative playing together on the same page. There were moments when reading I had to stop and think: “Is this a real person?” Some were. Some not. “Did this really happen?” Some did, others no. It was this great expression of the duality in our doxa.

What’s more is what can be said about the novel when considering its depiction of the past (the novel being set in pre-World War 1 New York) through the contemporary understanding when it was being written. When Doctorow wrote Ragtime (presumably between 1971 and 1975), he was diving back into the past to write about this “Progressive Era” United States. But because he was writing about the past from the present, he could not help but inject his time with that of Ragtime‘s. In trying to write a story concerning the past, he had to leave his present finger prints all over it, tainting its authenticity along the way. Using facts until they no longer served his purpose and allowing fiction to carry on forth. He had to cut corners, fill in the gaps, elongate and contract in order to tell the story. In part because he is a novelist and Ragtime is a novel. But also because he could not recall the early 20th century, but (more importantly) no one can. [Fredic Jameson explores this at more depth in his exhaustive book: Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Don’t let the title scare you away, the prose will do that just fine.]

It is difficult to understand the past when the ground on which one stands is so loose and ever-shifting, and so goddamned expansive! To put it another way: If you throw a hula-hoop into the ocean, everything inside the hoop is HISTORY and everything outside it is PAST. There is a great deal of the past that is not being accounted for, and therefore the fragility begins to play. Furthermore, even when we start to dip into the past we begin to taint it with our contemporary state. The further we become detached from a person, moment, event, and/or the further the gap between actual and collective memory becomes, the more we begin to place ourselves into that past and erect a narrative called history.  So in this sense, we cannot help but create “story” in our understanding of the past.

This is not to suggest that all history is lies (like the fokumentary) or historians liars (like our friend T Pat), but it tends to point in a direction that capital-T “Truth” is very hard to come by and the lines between reality and fable can become quite roily. It is better to understand history as the best attempts by humans to connect with the specters and try to make the most sense out of them, and that’s not easy. But it’s important work goddamnit! We need that connection to the past. We need to have an understanding (however partial and imperfect) of our origins and hope that will provide in us a sense of closure and comfort for our mortal selves. We know there was a person, or a place, a moment, an event that occurred out in the distance, we know “it happened” by virtue that we are here now. But to reach back into a cognitive void and pull forth an understanding of it requires story.

And I like that idea. It’s fun for me. It’s fun to think about, write about, discuss.

So, I imagine, in a very strange, circuitous way this becomes a bit of a mission statement as well. Here at “Writings and Letters” there will be, with any bit of luck, a “pious yet playful” approach to the real and unreal. There will be fiction, non-fiction, stories from the present, the past, some maybe even the future! and political or philosophical musings (why not?), then right back to talking about slaying dragons, and a review of an obscure General Public album (just kidding, it’d totally be on All the Rage), and… others…

A panoply of pastiche.

Join me, won’t you?