Soon…

I Shot William Burroughs

Culling

Grandma buys me socks for Christmas.

Just a package of socks, nothing fancy. Not dress socks, not those rainbow toe socks I love so much. She gets me plain old white vanilla tube socks every year without fail.

Eye

I can be anyone.

That’s right: I can be anyone at all. I can be a stranger. What’s stopping me? Why am I still being me?

Question of the Day

And now I have a question to ask you and I am hoping that you have an answer because it’s got me stumped.  

This question requires a little preliminary background. Just a little; please don’t run away! Please allow me to tell you a little about the place where I live…

In the place where I live, we have values. We are very committed to these values. They are what set this place apart from all of the other places. Our values are our pride and joy!

We value freedom. Freedom in our choice of religion. Freedom in what we can say. It’s probably not like that where you live and that’s okay. It’s only to be expected because no other place is a place like the place where I live.

Eat Your Heroes: The Ballad of Ray Hill 2

This is not the beginning. The beginning is here.

This is the middle.

Go. Begin at the beginning. That way, you’ll see the middle more clearly and anyway, the beginning’s the better bit.  

Here in the middle, we flash forward twenty years. Two decades since that dark parking lot with its red bricks and its singing nuns and by now there are two things I have learned.

First, Ray Hill made the world a better world. No question. The world is better for his having been here.

He’s a hero.

And second, you should never meet your heroes.

Meet Your Heroes: The Ballad of Ray Hill

This is a true story.

I haven’t always lived in Houston, you know. There was a time, many years ago, when I resided in a little Texas town known as Huntsville. Population 20,000, give or take.

This would have been back in about 1995. I was ten. Dad moved me and Antony up to this God-forsaken place so that he might attend Sam Houston State University, which didn’t work out as planned and then there we were. In Huntsville.

Now, Huntsville is exactly one hour due north of Houston and any way you slice it, it’s a town that is notable for one thing and only one thing: It is home to the world-famous Texas death chamber.

The Crown Princess of Pareidolia

Alright, now think about this:

A triangle. A dating meme. It’s probably sexist; I don’t know. I can never keep up with that stuff.

And this triangle, at its corners, it says, “Smart,” “Sane,” “Good-looking.” At its center, it says, “You may pick two.”  The implication being, I suppose, that every woman is dumb, ugly, or insane.

Thus my warning about it probably being sexist.

But still, if we can accept, arguendo, our probably sexist triangle as holding some tiny grain of wisdom, a rule of thumb or kernel of truth, then I ask you: Where does that leave me?

Hmm?

It leaves me at a real disadvantage, that’s where.

It leaves me two corners shy of a full triangle.

Blog Seeds

I jot down ideas on little scraps of paper. On envelopes. Sales receipts. Business cards. The backs of checkbooks and in an endless trail of notebooks. Folders and coupons and wine bottle labels, covered! I fill flash drives and I email myself. Leave voicemails I never listen to.

The blog ideas pile up and up.

Out at Dana’s storage space, cleaning out my stuff, I see that most of what I own is my idea pads. There are stories and there are quotes and there are opening lines for things I never got around to writing.

Until now, I mean. Until this week. This is the week I’m finally going to get around to writing them.

It will go like this: For the next month, everything I post here will come from a single sheet of paper I covered in ideas back seven years ago.

I’ve got them all typed out below and I’ll change them into red after I use them. See?

The Great Grim Reaper Challenge of 2015

I still remember the very moment when I became a Grim Reaper.

It was this past Thursday, November 5, at 8:45 PM, to be maybe more exact than is necessary. I had just run three miles and I was lying in my van in the Rice Stadium parking lot with my legs hanging out the back door, and I was listening to Jenny Hval’s Apocalypse, Girl, which was my favorite album in the whole world back in those days.

And all I wanted to do at that moment was to lie there and chill, listening to Jenny sing about Heaven and about wires and cunts, but my friend, Aesop, was in the front seat, smoking a joint and worrying about my dating life.

“I’m worried about your dating life,” he said.

“Don’t be,” I said. “I’m not.”

I wasn’t.

West Gray Multi-Service Center Blues

This is not like the stories I usually tell. There are no monsters here, no ancient cults, no demons. There is a whole lot of city bureaucracy, however, and as some of us know, city bureaucracy can be nearly as horrifying as the worst baddies the imagination can conjure.  

This is a story about the West Gray Multi-Service Center. The Center looks like this:

Or, well, it used to look like that, anyway.

Free Bee Stings! (A Prospectus)

“Careening. Yes, that’s it. I like the word ‘careening’ for this. I am a twin and my twin’s name is Antony and the two of us forever risk careening off into literary cliché.

“I assume you know what I mean here. Abel and Cain? The good son and the bad seed? Darkness and light? Yin and yang? Cage and Travolta swapping mugs in that old action flick?

“It’s a really well-worn trope.

“I’ve never liked cliché and I never wished to go careening off into it. I never wanted it because it is bad: Bad to be only half a person. Lousy to possess half a soul. To bomb science class while the other one excels in it. To be the slightly-too-boyish sister of a slightly-too-girly brother.

“I said ‘No thank you’ to that. Never out loud, of course – that would be crazy – but in my life, my actions, my thinking? I said ‘No thank you’ to that from the start…

“…and wound up constantly careening into bad twin clichés.

The Heroine, Victorious

I voted today.

The sun came up this morning and it was the first morning for early voting in Houston. And so from my office on Brazos and Dallas, I walked the blocks all the way down to 1001 Preston and voted. Then I walked back.

It felt like some kind of victory.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E

This was the week when I got divorced.

Sleep Tight

Last week, the kids got sick. Then they gave it to me and I got sick, too.

Now, this really never happens. I never get sick. I am immune to everything! But this thing the kids found and dragged home last week, it even took me down. Our fevers climbed so high that music turned architectural and our iphones looked like blurs.

What else could I do? I tucked the kids into bed and I pulled up a chair and told them stories.

I told them stories I’d written (and some that I’d stolen) and I described worlds I’d made (and some I’d visited), and I gave them the sorts of warnings that good parents give their children at one time or another growing up.

One of the things was a story and a world and a warning all in one.

This is how it went:

I Believe in Everything; Nothing is Sacred

Strangers send me messages. It happens all the time.

Every morning, I wake. I stretch. Then I just lie there in the dark to see how long I can lie there. In the dark. Lie there NOT checking my messages.

It’s all about discipline.

Sometimes I go a whole minute. Sometimes two. I hold out for as long as I can and when I finally give in, there they are. Sometime in the night, strangers have sent me messages. Again.

The people I know hardly ever bother with me, but these strangers? They really seem to care.

Some are sending me grammar corrections for the blog. Some just want to share the music they’re listening to. Recipes. Rumors. Photographs to turn me straight. I get damned to hell at least one time every week.

There’s an Elvis impersonator in Ohio who links me to clips of all his shows and a girl in Tallahassee needs help coming out to her mom. This one guy sends me pages and pages of angry emails. Every day. Without fail. He calls me a slut and tells me I am going to pay for what I’ve done.

Keep in mind these are strangers. 

Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams

Even though I know I shouldn’t, I’ve started to worry about what my next girlfriend is going to like about me.

Waiting for Alex Trebek

My great grandfather – my father’s mother’s dad, who we call “Papa” – turns ninety-three this week.

I visit Papa a lot, every week in fact, which is a lot to visit a ninety-three year old great grandfather who never speaks and rarely moves and only lives to watch a tv game show called “Jeopardy.”

He lies in a hospital bed in his bedroom with three pillows under his head and the rose-print bedspread pulled all the way up around his neck. And his body is so withered and so thin that the bedspread covering him looks perfectly flat. He doesn’t even make a ripple. So every week, when I walk in to visit him, he looks like just a head sitting there on a pillow, all by itself, smiling.

You can go ahead and laugh but it is an unsettling sight to see.

Oh, Huma

I leave my cell phone lying around a lot. I am told I ought not to leave my cell phone lying around a lot but still I persist, which means I keep on doing it.

I leave it right out in the open where everybody can see it. I leave it right out in the open so everybody can see it. Face up on conference tables during meetings. Next to the sink, at work, at lunch hour. Or out on the coffee table when I have friends over. Or up on the hood of the van while I am attempting to walk in a straight line for a police officer late at night.

And so forth. And so on. Et cetera.

Emergent Phenomena Exhibiting Novel Regularities

This is not a good place to be creeped out in.

Many people have been creeped out here before me, sure. It’s a cliché. But that does not help when it happens. And it’s happened. Now. To me.

I am all creeped out in New Orleans.

This hotel room is creepy and the lobby is creepy, and I can’t find the man I came looking for. But I can’t get drunk in my room, either. For me that is not an option. For standing with one’s back to the wall – my back – and scanning for something to be creeped out by is no way to get drunk. Not even in New Orleans.