“To new beginnings?”
“To new beginnings,” she said.

I wasn’t sure when we spoke the words, and now the weight of that unknowing is the ballast in my gut.

“I love you,” I said.
“I love you, too.”

But did she? Did she really?

I awoke to the diddle of a text; my blurred vision struggling with the electronic luminescence of the screen. There she was, in the top left corner among the widgets and hieroglyphs describing the phone’s current condition: the time, three bars of service, WiFi connection, battery charging and Jessie. I pulled out the charger cable and brought the phone back to bed. Dragging my finger down the screen, I saw the message:

“I can’t sleep.”
“What’s up?”
“My brain is just racing, and I feel terrible. I don’t know if I want to talk about it.”
“Alright, is there anything I can do to help?”
“I just don’t want to hurt you.”

There we go. I sat up in bed and grabbed my cigarettes from the nightstand. The clock burned a red “2:32” in my vision like a warning. I was well aware of every passing second as I felt for the lighter, formed a cautious response in the back of my head, prepared for the worst and lit the cigarette. The flame was brighter yet, and it hurt watching to make sure the damn thing lit. I took a long moment to inhale before pressing my thumb to the screen.
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“To new beginnings?”
“To new beginnings,” she said.

I wasn’t sure when we spoke the words, and now the weight of that unknowing is the ballast in my gut.

It’s Not for Me – Coming Soon

My partner in crime at http://ugisart.com/ painted this as the cover to a collection of stories. That collection is called An Inhuman Condition. The upcoming story It’s Not for Me is the last one I can write for it. After that I’m trying on some new clothes, getting a shave and really dolling up for the next bit. I need to get past this and move forward. I have to move forward.

To new beginnings.

The website is back and mostly working as it was in days past. If you end up at a non-existent WordPress.com site, just add “www.” to the front of the URL. I’m hoping it goes away after the Internet shifts for cleaning.

I have solved the hosting issue, and hope now to finally get on with The Important Work.

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The Vigilante Gardener is back with the edited, alternate version from Asylum Lake Magazine. It’s available on the Pages section, or right HERE.

This is my doing. It’s me, and I accept that. Sartre said our actions and decisions make us, and this war is mine. It’s inside me now, and I own that. The world, my isolation – it’s my fault. I’m not saying I caused the political bullshit, but it’s like the pieces of a puzzle. You start with these odd, disconnected bits and assemble the corners, work along the border and fill in the middle from there. At some point you should start to see what the photo is, but I didn’t. There was no box to show me the end goal; it was all blurred. I never even finished the damn thing, but they saw the picture first. Envisioned and given life through my work, there was no way to unsee it, and then they remade whole, damn planet in my image.

Looking back I feel like a naïve child. When we started using DNA to manufacture microprocessors, I should have made the leap. When we tagged ourselves with radio-frequency chips in the name of healthcare, people should have filled the streets in anger, but instead it was all a convenience. We were coddled at every step with the cushy blanket of progress. We dumped ourselves to the Internet, gave it our thoughts, wants, emotions – we became it. We reinvented ourselves as pixels communicating at unprecedented speeds. From the server room to the home then the coffee shop and the pocket, the next logical step was under the skin.

With rampant dematerialization and convergence giving us smaller computers, the lines blurred between our devices. The desktop computer was a television, the laptop made phone calls, the cellular phone checked email and our TVs browsed the Internet. People carried a record store’s worth of music on something the size of a cigarette pack – a library of books the size of just one. We could buy any novel, song or movie in the world and have it on a gadget in our pocket within minutes. It was the fastest and most effortless form of consumption our species invented – the Internet. Once the ones and zeros made their way into every home in the country, there was no coming back. The ease of consumption consumed us all.

Once we were all praying at the altars of God Internet, any advance that made it faster, shinier, more inclusive, involving was lauded as a step in the right direction. We laid bandwidth pipe as fast as we could, replacing old lines with faster ones every few years. Our wireless speeds lagged behind, but even they caught up in the end. The towers went up everywhere, and the signals only got stronger. Corporations spent billions researching and implementing technology to connect us as fast as possible. Once that began, the cell phone companies started selling full size tablets and laptops the same way they sold phones. Nobody needed a dedicated line into their home when they could connect from anywhere in range of a tower. They were obelisks of triumph, the final step to connecting the world and uniting it under one religion – God Internet. Read the rest of this entry �

I may from time to time be contributing with The Artist on nonsense over at http://bitterdick.tumblr.com/

It’s a Circus

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VII: Got Love?  completes my day’s work on the Blue Valentines page. Happy VD.

VI: Get Real

Beautiful women are like a drug. They make you feel good, and it’s fine every now and then but they can really ruin your life if you get addicted. You ever hear the phrase “I’m a sucker for a pretty face?” It’s a problem with men; we’re all suckers staring at the pretty girls begging to be fleeced. Like camouflaged predators, they wait to lure you in before pouncing.

It starts with dinner – you always pay for the dinner. Then you have to keep coming up with the endless series of trinkets, spending money to get her things or spending time doing things for her. You even “spend” time together. I know you’ve seen the clingy types who latch on and leech away all the other parts of your life until you turn into that guy who needs to ask permission to play a game of cards or go to the car show.

Sure they have guilt and other forms of manipulation to keep reeling you in. Even plain girls can use their tricks to keep a guy in line, but the most dangerous ones are always beautiful. If you find yourself with one of those, you keep asking how you got so lucky. It seems like a small sacrifice to be available for all her needy whims. I mean, you got a pretty one. You should be ecstatic. Don’t fuck that up, and you’ll be happy, right?

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V: Don’t Tell

She’s avoiding me. I can’t bear the thought of it, but that’s exactly what she’s doing. It’s so hard to communicate with other people that I don’t know why I give a damn half the time. This seems pretty serious; it’s not the usual doghouse, I-fucked-up, kiss-and-make-up kind of problem. I know her well enough to see that some serious shit is going on in those pretty, green eyes. It scares the hell out of me because I want this to work out. The way she looks at me has changed. There’s this deadness in her eyes where there used to be bounding excitement. They were bright, moist and magnificent before and now they’re dry and heavy and pale.

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IV: Good Bye

Twelve years later the song sounds so contrived. It was probably always that way, but nostalgia has a way of making the past better. Over the years, the details of a story change slightly – they become alienated from the event and mold into a version of things like a well-worn cushion or forged steel. With every retelling, a memory becomes a new thing like a game of telephone. We are revisionists changing our history into something more meaningful than it was.

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