LETTERS

The letters he had written to himself from prison were strewn piled in front of him on the kitchen table.

There were about fifty.
He had served seven years.

He hadn't seen them for quite some time. He had no family left so he had paid a friend to recieve them and collect them unopened. The friend had come through and had kept an eye on his mail for all that time - squirreling the letters away in shoeboxes as they came in.

Dear Me,

you're the only one who I can think of who might one day want to read what I'm going to write down. I don't know what exactly what it is going to be yet - but I know most of it is likely to be strange. I've arrived where I am today because of a lot of reasons. Some of these are pretty normal - many of them are strange. Overall the strange things, I think, outweigh the normal ones. But you'll be able to decide when you, er, I um...we get out, I guess.

When he had been released, the friend's house had been one of his first and least ceremonious stops. He had walked from where the Greyhound dropped him off, through sleepy, suburban neighborhoods, across the scraggly lawn and up to his friend's door - to knock loudly on the metal security grate.

After a time, he heard footsteps in the house. Then the door opened wide enough for one eye to peer out.

"S' you're out, huh?" was all he got by way of greeting. He expected nothing less.

" 'Peers so, I guess."

"Good! Uh,..good for you. (pause....pause some more...a breeze ruffles the trees.) "Reckin' y'all want what ah've been a-keeping for ya'."

"You reckon right."

Footsteps shuffle away and in a few minutes return.

"Here they are. Last one I got was last week. Should I be lookin' for any more?"

"Nah, that should be the last - for now, thank you again."

"Don't mention it...but we're done, yeah?"

"Yeah...uh....thanks?"

"I said don't mention it."

A package door opened in the security grate and three shoeboxes were fed out quickly. The door behind never opened more than just wide enough for the boxes to fit out. They were out almost before he could get his hands under to catch them. And by the time he had them stacked in his hands to carry, the door was shut ... and the eye and the arm that fed them out were gone.

The street was quiet. He began the walk back to where the Greyhounds stopped.
Friends like these....

ISLAND - Part 3

"Damn stick."

As Jerry worked his way deeper into the interior of the island, the jungle closed in. The damp air seemed to grow warmer and more stifling with each step he took away from the beach. As he walked, thorny vines tore at his tattered clothing and scraped past his exposed skin.

In his opinion, the thorns were one of the island's most ridiculous features. Which was saying a lot - since Jerry viewed the whole place as more or less completely ridiculous.

The snakes he could understand, having seen enough such jungles in movies and in TV programs to understand that they were lovely places for snakes to be. Without being particularly science-minded Jerry was still savvy enough to gather that oppressive heat, the high humidity, and the presence of a preponderance of hanging vines available for impersonation were all things that classy snakes looking for new digs would find attractive.

The island's interior had these in spades - marking it, as far as Jerry could tell, as an environment ideal for snakes looking to live their snake lives in style, have loads of snake babies with one another, and generally get along in various other snake ways together.

From personal experience Jerry could tell that impersonating vines was an activity that gave snakes particular joy - especially the large ones who, Jerry had discovered, were especially fond of hanging near steep or slippery spots on the trail where they might be accidentally grabbed by passers-by. Most notably those wearing loafers not particularly suited for off-road travel - who happened, for this reason, to often need help regaining their balance.

The results were usually hilarious, if you happened to be a snake.

So, while Jerry could accept that the snakes had a definite and particular place within the jungle's overall motif - he thought the thorns clearly exceeded the boundaries of good taste. They were emblematic, he felt, of a larger flaw in the overall design of the jungle itself - which he had found to be an almost gaudy celebration of themes of annoyance and physical discomfort in all their various shades.

A flaw he was going to be sure to bring to someone's attention - as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

He hoped that it might once things calmed down for him a bit.
He had been finding most of his free time lately spent wrestling with the issue of Not Being Dead, and had found little time for anything else.

COWBOY

The cowboy poked at the dying embers of his fire.
Mesquite scented smoke rose in wisps from the glowing coals.
The fire's light had dimmed, and the desert beyond the tiny campsite was bathed in the silvery-blue glow of night.

That was the thing about the desert, the thing about it at night. Darkness could never take it over.

During the hours that the dark of night held dominion in the streets of the towns, and under the boughs of the forest - The desert pushed back at it with a phosphorescence all of its own. The reflection of moonlight and starlight was enough to ensure that night would never rule completely over the desert's sand and rocks and scrubby brush.

From where he sat at the dying fringes of the campfire, the cowboy watched the desert's light creep in as the fire's light receded. The remnants of his dinner snapped and popped within the now empty can in the heart of the coals.

FREEDOM BALLOON (Yee Haw!)

"It's a freedom balloon," Bigby said and gazed proudly at the oval shape in the sky.

"A freedom balloon? I've never heard of such a thing before," I said back, squinting against the glare.

Above us the white shape hung motionless, high in the sky enough to be slipping in and out of view behind the clouds. from this distance it looked so very small but somehow the way it hung completely motionless above us as the clouds crawled by was eerily menacing. In truth, it looked like a giant white blimp - one that was in no particular hurry to be anywhere but directly above us. It didn't take me long to figure out what I thought about it.

"I don't like it," I said, still not quite understanding why.

"What do you mean you don't like it?" Bigby gaped. My response didn't sit well with him. He didn't often have to deal with ideas that were different from his.

It was because he was a real patriot, and he truly loved our country.

"I just don't," I said gazing down at my shoes now, "It makes me feel funny. Someone should take it down."

It made me feel silly to tell Bigby I didn't like it. Bigby always meant Business, and he felt things with Conviction.

He got a real kick out of my reply and slapped his knees,

"Funny? Ha! What would be funny would be someone actually taking it down. It's important. It watches over us. You know it has more than 10000 cameras on it don't you? Think about it, most casinos in Las Vegas have less than that. 10000 eyes looking down on you every day and night to keep us safe. - That's 5 thousand security guards - airborne security guards, isn't that something?"

I still didn't think so, but I wasn't about to press the point further.

NEW WORDS

These are some new words.
They are provided here for your enjoyment.
We thoroughly apologize for the recent lack of new words.

Our supplies had dwindled to a scary level - and we didn' t have many to spare.

BRANT

As he lay at the bottom of the airshaft Brant came to the realization that human beings are incapable of imagining hell while they're alive.

Having been raised Catholic, he had spent a fair amount of time trying in the past.

In Sunday school when the teacher was trying to tell them why it was so important to live a virtous life. as a young man trying futily to stop himself as he fell deeper and deeper a life of drugs and crime. As a man, bellied up to some bar, envisioning the fate he was sure waited for him just beyond the horizon - at the bottom of the next bottle or in the magazine of some other slimeball's gun.

But he knew now that all that time spent musing on what hell might be like was wasted. Every human has a mental failsafe that keeps them from even imagining true discomfort.

He now knew that the amount pain that was possible on earth, much less in the underworld, was so much more than any person could imagine without experiencing it for themselves.

The pain was insufferable.
Excruciating.
Like a being pricked by million flaming needles all at once -
vor being caught without your skin in a sandstorm of broken glass.

And he hadn't died...

He had fallen thirteen stories through a stainless steel tube. A set of ducts that met each other every 50 feet or so in a diagonal junction, polished to a featurless, gleaming, surgical finish. After the first wrong step there had been nothing for him to do but slip-thump, slip-thump, slip-thump, through a descending infinity of steep, slippery z shaped junctions - feet first, flailing for purchase while he still could.

Now Brant's body was bent and broken, crumpled in on itself, limbs curled and folded like a pretzel at the bottom, suspended on a grate over a fan that threw flashing shadows in the dim light of the chamber where he now lay.

And he hadn't died...
Why hadn't he died?

The lower half of his body must have cushioned the upper just enough to keep him alive, and protect his important parts enough to keep him from dying - but that was it. He couldn't move, he couldn't scream, but he could still breathe.

The light flickered through the fan, and all was quiet except for the wet sound of his own breathing. Brant waited for his time to finally come, he prayed for it...
The minutes like hours slowly ticked away.

THINGS

Things always change -

Mostly for no reason at all.

Except for the times that they stay the same.

Unfortunately, you don't usually get to choose.

ROBOT BABY - Part 3

So, finally, one or both of you figures out how to get the android out the door, and you go take a shower. You brush your teeth and take an ibuprofen 'cause you can already feel the hangover creeping up -

And everything is fine for a few weeks....

Then you start getting nauseous, and feeling bloated, and hearing servo whirring gear-grinding sounds through your stomach when you're trying to sleep.

You get nervous. You see a doctor -- who tells you to change into one of those ridiculous backless gowns before he pokes and prods you, whispers 'um hum' frequenly under his breath, and makes you pee in a cup - you're sure mostly for his own amusment.
After checking you out he announces, "I've seen this before...Can you give me the make and model of the, um, partner you've been seeing?"

Your reaction to the news will be boiler-plate, if hysterical... most likely including you bursting into tears and charging out of the office building in that backless gown while screaming, "That fucking overgrown blender, my life is ruined!"

You'll call up the android and, of course, he's no help.
Once he finds out who you are and why you're calling he flips out.

First he pretends that he doesn't remember you and then he acts like it's a wrong number. Finally, he starts pretending like he only speaks binary and hangs up the phone.

"0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1".... yeah, right buddy.
That's just so typical.

SOMETHING

"Ouch! Damn it."
He had been bumping around in the dark for what felt like forever.
In reality, it hadn't been that long.

He was looking for the Something he used to have
And while he knew he had his Something not long ago,
he didn't know where it had gotten off to now.
He wasn't even sure if he was looking in the right place anymore.

He could remember where he had Something last.
He was sure because the last time he had Something it was the most Something had ever been.

Then something happened to Something and now he had Nothing

Hence, the looking.

It didn't help that almost no one else had seen Something when he had it, and it really didn't help that everybody that had seen Something had thought it was Nothing already.
He wasn't really sure about it himself, anymore.

But he was pretty sure that if Something had been Nothing he wouldn't feel so bad about Something being gone.

He thought, 'Maybe I should call for help.'
'I could describe Something to the police - tell them that Something had gotten off to Somewhere and left we with Nothing. They'd help, I think.'

'But probably,' he thought 'Someone would say it really isn't up to me whether or not I get to have Something anymore. My time for Something might be over, and now it might be time for Nothing.'

'I still want Something back.'

He went back to scratching around in the dark.
The dark went back to creeping in on him.

ROBOT BABY - Part 2

Anyway, so you'd have sex with the android:

There would be that awkward moment at the end of the thing where you're both lying in bed and you want the android to just get out of there 'cause you're not looking for anything serious, and you just got out of a long-ass exhausting relationship and you don't want him to feel used, but you're not getting back into something messy like that again already - especially not with a toaster, even one that's anatomically correct.

Meanwhile, the android is lying there and he's freaking out because the last human chick he had a fling with was really clingy and kept calling him at work at the nuclear disposal facility or the car assembly line or whatever - 'cause that was the only number she had for him, thank god - and he really just wants to get out of there before you get the wrong idea. But of course, you have your bed all pushed up against the wall and he's on the inside - so he'll be trying as hard as he can to figure out when would be the earliest possible polite opportunity to vault over you and make a sequence of cute beeping noises before he gracefully says his goodbyes and his i'll-call-you's.

'Cause his robot wife might be an older model and kind of dim, but it's getting really late and she's definitely gonna start asking some tough questions if it gets much later.

DON'T BE DUMB

Matt (other matt, not the one now) was hanging out of the window with a baseball bat when Bill Rudolph pulled us over in his Volvo.

Bill had been following us for about two blocks and had seen it all.

"Destroying Postal property is illegal, and hanging out of cars like that is dangerous. You wrecked all of your neighbors' stuff. You boys know better than that." (quotation approximate - feel free to substitute any angry suburban dad rant you would like, as long as it gets the same general point across.)

"What do you think you're doing?" (this quote is accurate, so is the answer).

Matt replied, "Bein' dumb."

Obviously unprepared for the honesty of this response, Bill drove off and never told our parents.

ISLAND - Part 2

The water felt good on Jerry's skin, almost good enough to make him forget how much it stung his eyes.

The lagoon just down the beach from his sleeping spot was shallow and warm like a bathtub. Unlike a bathtub it was filled with little black crabs that made little clicking noises when they came up onto the beach. Jerry could see them scatter before him as he waded into the water.

The lagoon was also possibly the bluest thing Jerry had ever seen. He didn't know what that meant, exactly. He just knew that every time he looked at it from any angle he thought, 'Holy Shit! That's blue!' Which had never happened when he had looked at blue things in the past.

It was also a puzzle - which may or may not be why Jerry chose to burrow out his sleeping hole so close to it.

No, that wasn't true...he bunked on the beach because of the snakes. Stupid fucking snakes.

It still twisted Jerry that he couldn't figure the lagoon out. It was circular, about a quarter mile across and it was closed off to the ocean on its outward edge by a thin sandbar. The water of the ocean outside was rough, choppy and cold, and often raged with swells and frothy whitecaps. It was inhospitable and intimidating, and Jerry, not surprisingly, wanted nothing to do with it.

The lagoon however was always placid and warm - a perfect blue lens, unfazed by the weather or conditions in the ocean not more than ten feet away. Day after day, rain or shine, come hell or, quite literally, high water, the lagoon remained a polished opal. Not a drop of the ocean outside the sandbar ever seemed to intrude on it nor did a drop of the falling rain ever appear to disturb its polished surface.

It was amazing, it was astounding, it was miraculous -
It made Jerry very, very mad.
It made him pissed, in fact.

Jerry didn't undersand the lagoon and he didn't like things he didn't understand.

Far from awakening in him any sense of wonder or curiosity, they tensed him up like the sound of nails on a chalkboard; like the bracing cold of the water in the ocean that Jerry made it his business to avoid.

They reminded him of when people would whisper to each other when he was a boy on the schoolyard.
They reminded him of people making plans behind his back.

The last of the salt water dried on Jerry's skin and left a fine dust of salt on his shoulders...
Looking up at the height to which the sun had climbed, Jerry started.

"My stick!"

He charged out of the water towards the fringe of the jungle, leaving a wake behind him.
As he dissappeared into the trees, the waves were swallowed just an instant too quickly by the lagoon.

ROBOT BABY - Part 1

The consensus among the people I polled is as follows:

If you had sex with an android, and you were capable of having a kid the first place, you'd probably have a robot baby.

By capable I mean, of course, you'd have to be biologically set up for it. You know, like, you'd have to be a woman, I guess. And you'd have to have all of your baby-cooking stuff inside all working and ready to go. And you should be on vitamins - because I heard that proper nutrition is important.

You actually might want to start now with the vitamins, just in case.

HERE, HOLD THIS

1: Hold this for a minute.

2: Hold what?

1: This.

2: What?

1: This.

2: What is it?

1: Doesn't matter.

2: I bet it does.

1: Trust me, it doesn't. And it's probably better you don't know.

2: Why?

1: 'Cause you'll freak out.

2: No, then.

1: Too bad.

2: Too bad what?

1: You already have it. You have for a while now.

2: How's that work?

1: It just does. It's not your decision

2: Well then, what should I do?

1: Just ignore it. It'll go away.

2: Go away?

1: Or you'll eventually forget it's there.

ISLAND - Part 1

Living on an island is hard, thought Jerry, for the first of what would undoubtably be many times that day.

He blinked his eyes against the rising sun, then closed them tightly as he strained at the waist to sit up from where he had slept, lying prone in his body-shaped depression in the sandy beach.

As he rose from the beach his body curled slowly upwards, joint by aching joint. When he had grunted himself into a seated comma he paused, like he did every morning, to let the grains of sand fall from his back and hair, where they had accumulated through the night.

As they did every morning, most of the grains chose to reunite with the rest of their friends on the beach. But, also as always, a not insignificant number chose to make a detour on their trip downward, slipping between the tender patch of skin at his lower back and the waistband of his tattered khakis. Far from finding any shortcut back to the beach, these grains instead ended their trip lodged in and around his crack. Jerry assumed this outcome was as unfortunate for the sand as it was for himself.

Starting every day with this little tragedy was one of the reasons that living on an island was hard. The snakes were another.

Sighing gently - Jerry wiped the sleep from his eyes with his sand-covered fingers, and then attempted to wipe the newly deposited sand from his eyes with the same sandy fingers that put it there.

"Where's my pokey stick?," Jerry asked to no one, blinking back sandy tears.

As usual, no one didn't have much to say.

"Fuck it then."

He went to wash his abraided eyes in the salty ocean.

THE LAST FIVE

The last five nuts.
Waiting silently in their ziploc prison.
Sitting stoicly resigned to their fate.

On the one hand I admire them greatly. Their ability to bide their time, watching as their comrades were indifferently selected for consumption over a period of months. Day after day, a few at a time, until only the last five remained.

But at the same time they had months.

Months of time to plot, scheme, innovate...to lead their companions to freedom.
The plastic walls that held them were formidable but, at the beginning at least, the population of nuts was as well. You would think that after a while they'd realize what was going on, and have some desire to escape their fate.

My friends suggested that perhaps they achieved some kind of zenlike resignation in regards to their eventual consumption. That by ignoring their impulse to save themselves they were able to overcome their fears about their imprisonment and certain demise - and thus to renounce the drive to escape.

But I personally don't think the situation is anywhere near that poetic. I think that the last five nuts may have had balls enough to stick together, but not quite enough to stand up and fight.

Stupid nuts.

PILE OF PEOPLE

I was recently at the bottom of a pile of people.
How I found myself there is not important and frankly, I can't quite remember how it happened.

But I was most certainly there. It's one of those things you can be reasonably sure about.

I'm not going to recommend that anyone go out of their way to try it.
And, as my experience was unintentional, I don't think that I would be in any position to endorse it even if I wanted to.

But in the event that you do find yourself in a similar position, here are some tips:

1. Don't exhale - As you may or may not be aware, they don't put a whole lot of air under piles of people. You're going to have to make due with what you brought with you.

2. Leave your valuables at home - You won't need them, whatever they are. There's nothing under there for money to buy. Not even traveler's checks, which are usually safer to carry. As for family heirlooms, expensive electronics, autographed vinyl records and the like - nobody's going to be impressed by them and they'll probably get broken.

3. Check your ego - Being under a pile of people is humbling. If you're there on purpose this may, in fact, be the reason you're there. Regardless, don't expect to be able to impose yourself on the situation too much. The situation is going to be imposing itself on you until it decides otherwise.

4. Have a sense of humor - But don't be too joky about it (see rule 1).

5. Don't resent the people on top - (disregard if you are under the pile intentionally) Chances are high that they didn't have any more control over where they ended up than you did. Chances are also high that they are people that you might love very much in different circumstances. Don't let the current situation preclude future friendly overtures between you - that is assuming, of course, that the pile breaks up in enough time to allow for such thoughts to be more than simply academic.

TRILLIAN

Yesterday I was in the car with Trillian. Trillian is not a writer.
Trilian is my friend.

Trillian is a scientician, or maybe she's a scientologist, or...I'm actually not very sure.

She kills mice all day in the basement of a building that the government owns.
Sometimes, after she kills them, she takes bits of the mice's insides and messes around with them. She sometimes puts the bits inside tubes or in big machines.

Trillian says that when she kills mice for the government and plays with their insides it cures AIDS and maybe cancer.

I tell her that people still die of AIDS and cancer all the time.

I've asked her before if they're still working out the kinks.
That usually makes her pissed.

ICE BREAKER

Hello.

As you may have guessed, I'm a writer.

I became a writer when I decided one day that I wanted to be one, and so I wrote something.

that something turned out not to be very good
regardless, upon performing the act of writing, on that day, I became a writer and have been ever since.

In fact, I'm writing right now.
Well, not exactly now, I suppose. You're reading it right now, and the rest of the words are already there - so that must be impossible.

But, still, I find myself writing this line right now for the first time, and there is nothing in this entry beyond it. I'm serious!
Scroll down to glance at the rest of the text, go on, do it - then come back here. Huh? There's nothing there? This is the end?

Well, I guess you were right after all.

THINK ABOUT IT:

"Coherence in the absence of rationality is the essence of the rant. "

--ZB
overheard in Los Angeles, 2006