The Arthur Miller Bleeds Eternal Rainy Day Parade

9/11/01

2005-09-11T00:03:00.000-04:00

Omnibluster

2005-09-08T13:41:00.000-04:00

We leaned her brother forward. You could see his reptilian brain thrashing through his eyes. He let out an unearthly wail, choking out nothing into an already-full trash bin.

"How long has he been doing this?" she asked.
"About half an hour," I said. "He was completely incoherent right after you left, but at least he was staying put." I laughed. He fell out of bed again. I yanked his fingers out of his own mouth. "No!" I yelled. "No! There's nothing left in there! It's all already in your blood! You've got to wait it out! You understand me?"
"Ingounnhere," he murmured.
"What?" I said.
"Dounbheherne," he gargled.
"I think he said 'I don't want to be here,'" she said. I looked at him for a second. I felt her eyes on me. He sagged in my arms and his head lolled forward, showering me with flecks of bile.
"Let's get him back up," I said.

We threw him into bed again. She yanked his legs over the side, I hefted his body around and rolled him off his stomach. "Do you know the recovery position?" she asked.
"Not really," I said.
"No, me neither," she said. We watched him for a minute. She sat down in my chair. I leaned on his.
"You can sit down," she said.
"Not in this chair!" I said. She looked at it. It was suspiciously sopping.
She sighed. "I'll get him to clean your towels in the morning."
"Don't worry," I said. "Sooner or later we'll have to do laundry." I closed my eyes for a minute. I didn't really care how I must have looked. Silence. In the corner he let out a furtive whimper. I couldn't help but smiling.
"Last year," I said, "A guy lived across the hall from me who was six-five and who must've weighed two-twenty five - all muscle. Not a scrap of fat on him. Ripped. One night, he got so bad his legs stopped working in the middle of the hallway. I dragged him through the corridor and into his room. I'd had a few myself, so I was sweating gin, heaving this massive guy through the hallway, him screaming the whole way about how his legs just didn't work and how he'd never do this again. I slapped him in there and collapsed in the hall myself, just leaned up against the wall to make sure he wasn't puking his guts out. He started wailing in bed - get me some water! Get me some water noooowwww! at around three in the morning. Woke up the whole damn floor - those of us who weren't sleeping, anyway. So I ran over there and kept pouring him water the rest of the night... just to shut him up, you know? I can't even remember how I got him into his bed."
She laughed. "God, what a nightmare."
"Eh," I said. "It happens. People'll forget."
"Still, this early in the year, sets a... a..."
"Precident? Naw. Short memory. You'll all look back on this and lauuugh."
She gave up a weak smile, unconvinced. "I hope so."
"Yeah," I said. We both turned to look at our charge. He was drooling on his pillow. "He hasn't jumped in about five minutes," I said. "You should probably get on home."
"Thanks," she said. "Is there anything else you need?"

I looked at her. I was too damn tired to feel much of anything. "No," I said. "Take care of yourself. I'll have him call you in the morning."
"OK," she said. "Thanks."

I lay down and went to sleep. The next morning, he had no memory of the entire affair. I read the paper. He had something go down with some girl he didn't care about. I haven't seen his sister since. He told me she'd gone out with some fraternity kid. I watched the news and had a few drinks with the gossipmongers of the airwaves and press. "You look confused," one of them said, finishing some scintillating tale I didn't particuarly care about. "I'm always confused," I responded, grinning.

"Sooner or later," I told him one evening, "A change is gonna come. We've just got to hang on long enough to actually change it."

What's Left To Be Said?

2005-09-03T16:40:00.000-04:00

Holes in the head, holes in the mind, holes through the transubstantiated American fabric. Prefunctory words, visions of anger and hatred, and exhaustion. But above all, there is some hope. Hope from the children of the storm, that despite the best efforts of everyone around us from every political party and vague hack publication eager to blame everyone but the storm and ourselves, we will return to that land, like the Israelites from the Babylonian captivity, singing the songs of joy they could not sing in strange lands.

There's nothing else to say, really. All we can do is do what we must.

My City Was Gone

2005-09-01T12:52:00.000-04:00

Farewell, Nawlins, and from your corrupted, polluted flesh may Mardi Gras spring once again like the hope of a thousand children. We have lost the epicenter of Americana, and nothing but everything will be the same.

Dogstero

2005-08-30T09:49:00.000-04:00

Perpend and consider:

Are there canine philosophers? Are they *happy* lying around sleeping 18 hours a day? Do we know? What ambitions do they have? Lo, we live in strange times for such things to be considered, but doubtless such things have been considered from day one, from the first rainy hovel in Africa when man looked down at the beast gnawing the bones of their mutual catch and wondered, "is it happy?"

And so strange times continue. When the apocalypse comes, what damages will the insurers estimate?

N.B.: The spottiness of updates is noted. It will most likely continue. Deepest apologies.

N.B. i. A. t. N.B. (YMMV): Doubtless doughty readers dote doubtfully on this. Doubtfully and dolefully anyone reading the AMBERDP would read it regularly. But in case I'm proved wrong, hello, regular readers, refrigerator raiders. Hope you are well.

The Iron Curtain Two-Step

2005-08-19T22:21:00.000-04:00

He walks down the clustered side street, channeling past tourists and pickpockets, his denim jacket peeking over his shoulders, barely covering the V-neck t-shirt covered in a scrawl illegible in any language. His aviators lend his world a crimson tint, and he checks his eyes surreptitiously in every shop window. He picks irritably at the inseam of his jeans, one size too small for a woman of his height. The telltale white buds nestle firmly in his ears, tuning out Eastern Europe with a vengeance. Every town, like every tchotchke shop along every cobbled street in every antique square, is exactly the same - another fading triumph of the once-mighty dollar. A storm gathers overhead. Some seek shelter in the mass-produced halls of pewter barroom trinkets, others in T-shirt hutches or ash-blackened churches. Umbrella vendors spring from the cracks in the sidewalk. He quickens his pace towards the club.

He checks his face in the jeweler’s mirror, and the man trying to pick his pocket smacks right into him.

The thief is clearly a professional. He should have known better. But the walking patterns of tourists are strange and erratic, and he is an old man in a young man’s game. In the old days, people walked straight for their destinations, heads down, eyes forward. Prime targets. Tourists were too individual. Anything could strike their fancy – but he knows the cardinal rule – there is nothing they enjoy more than themselves.

“Fuck!” howls the tourist, whirling, hand on his pocket. He rips the buds out of his ears. He knows exactly what this is, too. It happened in Vienna, it happened in Budapest, it happened in Warsaw – just never to him.
“Oh!” says the thief. “Oh!”

There is the uncomfortable pause.

“What the fuck are you doing?” says the tourist.
“OK,” says the thief. “OK” is the most commonly understood phrase in the world. The second most-common is “Coca-Cola,” but that, as the thief knows, signifies something else.
“No,” says the tourist. “No, not OK.”
“OK,” says the thief, smiling. “OK, buddy. Buddy. America. Yeah. OK.”
“No,” says the tourist. “Fuck, no.”

The pair take halting steps away from each other.

“Don’t…” begins the tourist. He feels a slight twist in his coat. He turns his head slightly. The thief bolts.
“Bye!” says the thief.
“Fuck you!” screams the tourist. There’s a frazzled silence. A drop of rain hits the Soviet manhole chiseled into the cobbled street. The tourist jams the buds back into his ears – but his iPod is gone.

The second thief buys a pair of headphones for a few dollars. More expensive than last year, he thinks. Not good for business. He strolls home in the rain, head down, eyes forward, listening.

Handsprings Eternal

2005-08-17T23:29:00.000-04:00

Who knows who lurks when and where and the miracles and mysteries of modern love (I know when to go out, I know when to stay in) when we are driving down the highway at a thousand miles an hour in our shiny death machines (did you know? SUVs support terrorism - also marajuana and liberals and conservatives and libertarians and authoritarians and eating red meat or reddening eaten meat or meeting read eat-ins) we become heroes of the radio.

In aviators reflecting the distorted truth to the sky I see the genetics of the radio hero bursting forth through unclear channels, sapped but never sappy, lifeless but full of hope of life, proof of life, life of right and wrong and the songs that will never once make a corporate playlist.
Down beaten abandoned highways and overtraveled excized expressways and marked metallic megaopolisi I see the foundations of a breakdown, a shakedown, a beatiful noise unheard since Arthurian legend. Spring, spring handsprings eternal in the springtimes of your lives for now is the time, and this the chosen hour. Stay awake! You know exactly when the hour of the Price Is Right will come, but is it worth it to light your lamp that long?

A Tale of Two Singers

2005-08-11T02:22:00.000-04:00

Out on the primrose path of dalliance paved with good intentions and a dizzying variety of other irritating metaphors, I've been visiting, watching, seeing, hoping, healing.

Tonight I saw two singers. One came out dressed in a series of belts and a skirt that was obviously not her own. She cavorted about the stage, singing a dead-on Gwen Stefani impersonation, each move coldly calculated like a crease on a carburator. The second who joined her roared "Are you ready to rock?" and ran idolatrous into the audience, assuming he had our trust when all he had was our laughter.

Both sang songs of misery and despair, and kept their eyes open. They were wallowing machines, begging for attention through a combination of chemistry, choreography and cinematography - lo! All have failed, and their graven idols were cast into the "that act sucked" pile for the eternity of memory imemorial, alleluia, alleluia.

Too often, singers keep their eyes open because they cannot see their targets without them and weep because they cannot truly cry. We are building a society of wallowing and nonchalance brick by social brick - lo, when the heart takes you it does feel good to feel sorry for oneself, to blame ones problems on the fairer sex or the fouler clique or the fashionable disease... ah, we are all slaves of fad diseases, fad diets, fadesticians, fadrigations, folderol and fandango! Close your eyes.

Mother And Child Reunion

2005-08-08T23:22:00.000-04:00

I die a little inside each time I pick up the paper, like a strung-out junkie wearily trudging towards his next ever-necessary hit, hating the drug almost as much as himself for ever doing it in the first place.

Welcome To The Terrordome

2005-08-04T10:50:00.000-04:00

Whatever became of the black CNN? Woe unbetide to those who dispose the toes of repose, for Chuck D and Flava Flav together and apart blown apart by the creme filling of creme brulee and ginful sin and ads for Belvadere and young men in designer clothes they cannot afford driving Escalades they cannot fill. O treble woe! Help them, Saint Augustine, they are the victims of a lesser purpose spawned by a greater purposelessness.

This is an era of voids, of lacking of information, of phoning it in because the phone is so readily accessable - the rap stars phone in their diamond teeth and overpriced glitz, the rock stars phone in their whining pity and idiocy, the politicians phone in their partisan hackery, and we are left to phone out for pizza. In place of voids must go purpose, for we must have purpose in our lives as we are purpose driven creatures.

Terrible creatures are born of purpose. Monsters designed to disengender those who have already found purpose or a lesser dream. The rise of irrationality to fill the void left by the lesser irrationals and domesticated internationals only serves to build back the battle-axe. Their cries are numerous. "Evolution is a lie." "God is dead." "God hates fags." "Republicans are scum." "Grad school is a necessity." "The government is a community." "I know what's best for you." "Fight the system." "Deus lo volt."

Machines, machines, conniving and contriving and surviving in the paranoid schizoid products of the twentieth century who looms like a dinosaur over our heads.

We march like clockwork towards the ravine because the ravine is all we know.

Gerardville

2005-07-25T16:00:00.000-04:00

Gerardville
an unfinished ballad in five parts adding up to a whole lotta nothing

1
You don't see the bright lights flashing outside the window and the door, walk down the stairs pick up the phone I'm fine I'm fine he's dead he's dead, stone-cold dead at 42, returned from the coal that built him a mangled hollow tomb in the ground, stone-cold dead at 42, stone-cold dead at 42. I'm sorry I'm sorry oh god I'm so sorry to hear it. Didn't know him.

2
Struck like being shot he stares in stunned disbelief, shorter yet taller, older yet younger, the light sings down onto his gently lined face and he is a child trapped in a spent man's body - nine years older, nine years older and his clock has struck forward another little chip off the shoulder they had come from nothing and to nothing they must return, will return, he sees her worn fingers dust the keys lightly, closes his eyes to hide the tears, his children will never know her as anything, the woman in the strange house with the piano in the cold, this was my mother's, this was my mother's, she was his aunt, doting and kind, carefree and wise, determined to leave the consummate consumer of her Mayflower-banned forefathers, the purgatory of the papists doomed in the halfway house of the western expansion, all alone, all alone, all together in faith and death the mines yawned beneath them. Like Jonah they were consumed.

3
Trinkets from the Yuengling factory and a ghost town unburdened by time, again he closes his eyes and weeps for his children - you should have seen the funeral, he says, you should have come to see, you could understand it, you think its the blacks and the hispanics, that they don't work hard enough (I don't think that, I can't think that, do I think that, can I think that, no, don't think that, it's not allowed, don't think that, think it a little, no, no, not their fault, get a job, get a haircut, stop talking so loud, learn to speak english, no, no, you have no idea, shut your mind and listen, listen) but you come out here to the coal country, you come out here to where your family started and you hearken here, hearken back to tales of deaths in the mills and the mines(you are the rope), running along the creek (you are the shot), bootleg whiskey in pre-war cars (you are the school), heads taken off by crank shafts (you are the house), dark arcane forests of the light and the dark and they are poor (you are the flight), dear god, they are poor and they are forgotten and you will never see them on the nightly news (you are the problem), so horrendous is the scope of their despair, so mortifying their decay do we not reach out to help because we would then reach in (if you were any whiter, you'd be clear)?

4
Alone at midnight I see her soot-stained fingers scratch the earth, in a blue spotted dress she strides towards the capital. I see her march down the avenue named for her state of such despair and disrepair, where not even suburbia reaches the depths of the soul's destruction, she clutches her West Virginian diploma and her hand-me-down bag and states that she will become what she is, she washes her hands in the front lawn's fountain and the dust seeps into the Lincoln Bedroom while she enters the State Department, she has passed her bar, she has jumped her bar, she swung the man who took her to the bar, she saw the war, she signed the deal, and under sweeping golden gates she brought about hopes of peace and joy from the assembled crowds, hopes of light and brightness and this time there would be no bootlegging in pre-war cars, no gods killed on African plains, no hope and harp standing by and tonight NEW CONFLICT IN SUDAN and tonight UNTOLD DEAD IN SUICIDE BOMBING and tonight TALES FROM SECRET TORTURE PRISON and tonight IRAN EXECUTES GAY YOUTH and tonight BOMB SCARE IN PENN STATION and tonight I mash them in a china teacup (stone-cold dead at 42) steeping in water and tonight METH-MOUTH IN RURAL AMERICA and let it roll back across the tongue (stone-cold dead at 42) in living fear of the painkilling binder, blinder and blinder, acute pain with a liver reminder and tonight PLZ H3R 4EVA V!AGR@ suck it down

flaotningo nothebreezeofi atoll

Silence from the ancestors - on the hands - knobs on the joints - knobs on the joints - genetic mutation - as they move to the type - black soot, black soot - staining, staining, the coal of sins young and old in a circle and a head caught by the crank and in the morning I see a face and cry out in a language I no longer speak.

5
they buried her near
the dorsey brothers
so when
the rapture comes
she gets to march
with the band

for catherine carey

"Next Blog"

2005-07-23T01:40:00.000-04:00

I have been busy.

There is a hiss, a sonic buzz of disbelief that palpitates the air as the words crack out into the night, ticking and typing and it's a fine line we walk between the cracks and across the tracks and yet it all smacks of a Kellogg's cereal that is probably now made with 100% whole wheat to appease the obese.

The machines have been cranking. The symptoms have been swelling. Over and abroad the messages have flown like rain. All is prepared for sealing and for signing. Following the daylight come the perpetua that are the minutes of evening sliding like a glissando of fire into a scale few could play on a blue-note dream of iron and halcystic bliss of Blistek.

Is blistek addictive? Film upon the alpha and the omega.

Who knows how many heads the dragon drags towards New Jerusalem?

Delacroix

2005-07-21T16:21:00.000-04:00

Harpies and swagger in the heat of Government Center Metropolitan Spaceshots Incorporated SAVE UP/TO $12 in the shadow of the Blue Line Burning stood a 40-year old woman, wrinkled and worn, wearing a glitter-bound "hot stuff" drab green t-shirt and I shuddered to the soles of my boots - for when and why and wherefore came this age?

I have never been to the town of Delacroix but would understand it to be in Louisiana, or perhaps on the Lusitania, or most likely you'll go your way and I'll go mine but I would love to see it, to drive from Memphis to Delacroix in a beat-up 1993 Volvo 850 with a spoiler and build a simple home with bright walls, wooden floors, throw rugs and a worn upright piano in a grassy field surrounded by a small wood in a neighborhood of people without care or concern for the McMansionian thrills of the filth of suburbia.

I would grow old and dignified in those hills and dales with the burning sun behind me and holler to the moon and teach English to the despondent poor of the rural South and play that old country waltz to the Delacroix citizens, though I know in cold reality that Delacroix and Durango and Irkutsk and Ulan Baator are as cold and as hard and as old as the drab-woman shelter of Government Center, in my mind they are shining citadels to one day open their gates, and I will ride into town on my dusty brown horse in my boots of Spanish leather and howl a hymn to the dawn that will shake the Earth to its core.

Attention: Space Pirates Who Steal My Wife's Laundry:

2005-07-20T12:53:00.000-04:00

OK, guys, stop. It's getting a little much now. Yesterday my wife did that thing she always does when she's mad at me - sat down, waited 'till about halfway through dinner, then let me have it.

"What happened to all my socks?"
"Hmm?"
"The socks. The ones I always wear to the gym. They're not in the sock drawer anymore."
"Check my drawer."
"I did. They weren't there. Did you throw them out?"
"Why would I throw out your socks?"
"I don't know! Socks just don't disappear."
"I thought that was how dryers worked. You know. Sock here, sock there..."
"Not five pairs at once!"
"Five pairs? Christ, you go to the gym a lot."
"This isn't funny, John. Where did they go?"
"I don't know! Honest! Look, I can't keep track of every single sweaty sock that goes into the hamper-"
"Well, they vanished somewhere. What happened, John? Did... I dunno, space pirates take them or something?"
"Possibly. I did see two or three on the way home holding their noses and carrying a linen bag..."
"Forget it. Forget it. I'll just... do the laundry myself if I want it done right."

I know it's tough. I know it's what you do. But can we come to some sort of mutual arrangement? You know, you can get packages of fresh socks real cheap these days. Not even wedged into little balls or covered in run-off toenail polish. I know you think it adds a certain spice, but it is toxic to most organic life forms, and I would think you guys'd be no exception, even with your helmets and air filters. So look. In the future, you've either got to stick to the one sock every-so-often plan, get some socks from Modell's or something, or just move on - because I couldn't tell my family I lost my marriage over a deficiency in gym socks.

Also, kindly stop pulling out the filter and banging it into the trash every time you go into the machine. It's a nice gesture, but then the lint gets on the clothes, and God help us all if she catches lint on her gym shirts when she's on the StairMaster.

I like where you parked last time. Don't forget to close the fire exit behind you. I've been able to cover up the marks by saying people've been having barbeques. Won't work in the winter - but by then, hopefully, you'll be out of my hair.

VICTORY

2005-07-18T22:28:00.000-04:00

We will have victory, they say, yea verily, victory from the clutches of defeat, obsidian stone towers stretching into the sterile void, gargoyles snatching the bastards of Madison Avenue from their cellular conversations and crushing their lives, yea verily in this era of moral relativism, what if all those with an unshakeable opinion had the wrong one?

Ivory tourists and doting idolaters perish alike, Sodom collapses heaving on top of Gomorrah and whispers "was it good for you, too?" in slaking the unquenchable thirst, those who sin and those who cast the stone all burn just the same, and shall be cast into fiery Gehenna, but you were born to rock, you'll never be an opera star.

I've Been Waiting For You

2005-07-17T01:05:00.000-04:00

This is a hymn to the hero of the mosh pit, the man who waits along the edge and pushes and pulls but is the one who catches the girls who fall, who jumps around but treads on no toes, the healing crusader of rock and roll for it's no secret, no, no secret at all that in a world of danger dangerous songs, sonorous siren's songs scream out in the night, seducing the massive with a feeling of pent-up unrepentence and lo, he cries, "it's only been thirty-eight years" but he is old, and enfeebled, and can no longer speak the truths of the tongue.

No, the unsung hero dances wildly in the night. God bless that unsung hero, the boy who heard music and understood music, who joined together with the band, a cheerful jaunt into the limbic brain while retaining the human standard of compassion, where all that remains is a primal bond that reinforces that .001 percent of our genetic makeup that separates us from the cruel and the dead. Oh wanton T! Oh lystrogergic A! For what purpose did you switch your positions in our great genetic lineup to create love? Was A batting cleanup but the manager decided he needed a break and called up C? Batting ninth, third in the third inning, was U relagated to RNA in a sudden break for the truth? Who can say? Who knows? The fact remains, somewhere in the dictionary of the genetic soup lies the code that brought us out of the Babylonian captivity and how only nuclear war could kickstart a natural selection of the utmost exclusion.

And when the dolphins rise from their watery homes and squeak to the sky in their unintelligible tongue, what are they saying? Preparing? Or searching for that one guy in the mosh pit?

Live On Route 9

2005-07-09T23:59:00.000-04:00

Ah, the building blood of the failed highway, the passlane of Massachussetts eternally locked in combat with itself!

To a soundtrack of an engine's depressed 50 miles-per-hour hum comes the roar of discontented contaminant that is Route 9. Neither highway nor biway nor snow nor rain nor sleet, nor war of darkest night. Blinkard and alone. Eisenhower's bastard son. Every night in the rush hour traffic its stop signs and signals innumerable wail out: "Dwight, Dwight, kyrie eleison!"

Neither nor. Either or. Building eternal but stagnant. It constricts. It feeds. It is the lifeline of the lifeless, the splendid sprawl that we call home - and from its polluted flesh may McMansions one day spring!

Lying in the car at Sunoco, howling at the moon - you're taken with the redheads and the tomboys, but you'll never find them on Route 9.

The songs of the London Bombings

2005-07-07T15:27:00.000-04:00

This is a true story.

Every time an atrocity occurs, a senseless butchery, from September 11 all the way down to yet another explosion in Iraq, a song is born.

It is sometimes but not always the same singer. Sometimes the song is played many times, becomes a hit. Sometimes the song is played once, in silence, and stowed away for life. Forever.

I know the man who wrote the song of September 11.

There are many hits surrounding September 11, ranging from Sir Paul McCartney's vomit-inducing "Freedom" to Alan Jackson's vomit-inducing "Where Where You When The World Stopped Turning?" to Neil Young's vomit-inducing cover of "Imagine." Many many hits. All of them sickening. The only reason I know the song of September 11 is because the man told me. He said "When I got home that day, I sat down at the piano for fifteen minutes and played the song of September 11" and I believed him. I saw it in his eyes. That song was never played again. I doubt he'd remember it if you asked him to play it. But he has the memory of the song screaming out of his fingers, into the air. No one knew the facts. Everyone thought there was more. No one knew the death toll. No one knew the horrors of individual tales. No one knew where we would be four years later, or if we would be four years later. And out of that came the song of September 11. I have never heard it, but I believe it to be one of the most important pieces of music ever played.

And somewhere tonight, a soot-covered, tired man or woman will return to their home, angry and broken. They will not know the facts. They will not know how they will fare tomorrow or the next day or four years from now. They will take a deep breath. And using anything around them, they will play the song of the London bombings.

To the untold numbers who can no longer hear, and to those who will suffer without an outward scratch, may whatever you belive in convey to your ears the song of the London bombings. And may the song bring its writer the power to change their world for the better.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4661059.stm
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Dronten, Flevoland, May 26, 2005

2005-07-06T20:59:00.000-04:00

Jolner bent down and put his hand against the grassy soil. "Feel this," he said.
Sacha squatted and prefunctorally slapped his palms down, leaving a pair of hand-shaped imprints on the wet grass. "OK," he said. "So what?"
Jolner looked out to the windmilled ridges in the distance. "This is new land," he said. "Fifty years ago this wasn't here. We could be the first human beings to touch this soil."
"So?" said Sacha. "Look, that's fine. Yeah. But everyone's always making a big deal out of that point. There's probably a street corner in Amsterdam that no human being has ever stepped on in a particular spot. One little piece of land just like this. Isn't that just as important?"
"Naw, man!" Jolner shook his head. "This's man-made land."
"So's that street corner."
"But this was dredged out of the earth!"
"So was Amsterdam! So was Boston! So are sandbars!"
"Doesn't it mean anything to you that we can create land now?"
Sacha paused. He lowered his head slightly, closed his eyes and hummed. The grassy plain stood silent.

Abruptly, he snapped his eyes open."No. No, it doesn't do anything for me, Jol. Sorry. You want to see man changing the world, you go to Pittsburgh and watch a smokestack for five minutes."
"C'mon, you gonna pull this environmental bullshit-"
"It's all bullshit, Jol, I'm just saying, put it in perspective."
"Perspective? Fine!" Jolner kicked the moist soil, sending a small divot up into the faceless distance. "In a hundred years, we'll both be dead, in a thousand years, our culture'll be gone, in a million years, the sun'll explode, so why bother saving the whales, huh?"
"You're a real pleasant guy to be around!" chirped Sacha. "You wanna keep walking?"
Jolner sighed. "Yeah," he said.

They trudged up the steep slope towards the windmills in silence, broken only by Sacha's occasional irratible whistle that died out whenver he realized Jol was moving faster instead of singing the chorus.

They arrived at the windmills, scanning the valley below them.

"Whole lotta nothing," said Sacha. "Nice, though."
Jolner squinted. "What's that down there?"

A black blur charged up the slope towards them. They both stepped back.

Bounding up the slope was a black lab, young and spry, its legs pounding down into the moist earth. Its tongue lolled to one side of its open mouth, which was frozen in the traditional canine euphoric grin.

"Hey, buddy!" yelled Sacha. The dog pounded towards them, skidded to a halt, and leapt about with abandon, as if expecting applause.
"What's the collar say?" asked Jolner, bending down.
"I don't speak Dutch," retorted Sacha.
"That makes two of us." The dog's head butted Jolner in the chin during an ill-timed jump and the pair collapsed onto the grass. The humans laughed. The dog stood up, shook itself off, and proceeded to leap at Jolner again, panting heavily. Jolner threw his arms around the dog, still laughing. The dog immediately splayed itself out, thrilled with the affection. Jolner laughed harder and harder until Sacha realized he was sobbing.

"Hey, man, you okay?" he asked.
Jolner was wracked with sobs. The dog, realizing a problem when it saw one, licked his face apprehensively.
"Hey, hey," said Sacha, skanning the skyline uneasily. "C'mon, now, c'mon."
"I'm... I'm fine," Jolner said, between gasps for breath. He patted the dog. The dog licked his hand. "I just... I dunno."
"What?"
"I think the dog's got a better perspective on things."

Sacha sat down next to the odd couple and patted the dog. The dog squirmed around and nestled itself between the sitting humans. Silence rang out over the man-made valley, except for the gentle whirring of the windmills and an occasional sigh from one of the three watchers on the ridge.

Flash Flood Warned

2005-07-06T16:32:00.000-04:00

Between the River North and the Suburbs South hissed a blinding light, burning like the oil of a thousand unquenched Maccabean menorahs and lo! Lo, from the east he cried "A lion, my lord, a lion!" and from the ashes came forth the birds and beasts of the garden of Babylon, hissing and castigated from the realms wherein few spoke and fewer still read, wrote, or returned.

And in that day of broken lines came forth the voices of Apoplexia, her crystal palaces enshrined eternal in unmoving rage, cross-perpetual and ever-mongering, the sound of untold thousands crying in the desert sated with a Roger Waters serenade? Twas not to be, for they took from him his vococorder and demanded from us a song - but how can we sing King Crimson songs in a strange land?

The wicked carry us away, captivity, requiring from us a voice of misrepresentation and incommunicatation, vexing in the marketplaces of the Fertile Crescent and the infertile in the lines of the urban clinics and the abandoned parks and the shantytowns I shall never visit, for lo, they reject me, I am not of them, I can never be them, and even my addictions carry a brand and an inflated price upon the market - alcohol and folderol, a blissful mix in the chambers of the retiring justice retiring.

"It is time," she cries, and the machines roar out their assent or dissent or ascending descent in a decent fashion.

Do not ask, "who am I?" We define ourselves through others. Ask "Who are you?" I really wanna know. I really wanna know. C'mon tell me who are you, you, you, arrreee you?