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 Idiot's Guide to Fascist Dyke Motors

For more than four years, I have been telling you a story. It’s been a story about four people.

Very soon now, this story will be coming to an end. 

As we come into the home stretch, I thought it might be a good idea to review what has happened so far. You know, in case you have not been paying attention, or maybe you arrived late, or you have one of those degenerative brain diseases I keep hearing so much about.

So here we go! 

____________________________________________

Charles Bronson

“Ananders.”

It sounded as though a person was saying or an old hinge was squeaking, “Ananders.”  But when I looked out across the snow and around the back yard, I could not see a person or a hinge or anything at all that might have been making such a sound. Just snow.

I went back to committing my felony.

“Ananders.”

I set down the rusty green toolbox. “Okay, Harry,” I said. “Am I hearing things? I keep hearing like a voice from somewhere, or…”

Enemies List

Omaha. January. Under a gray gauze winter sky. Antony Anders steps out of a gas station near 42^nd and Harrison.

He is wearing blue jeans, leather boots, a hooded sweat shirt much too thin for the weather, and a Catcher in the Rye winter hat – the kind with those ear flaps, you know? In his left hand is a 12-pack of Coors. In his right hand is a plastic grocery bag with some potato chips, a roll of paper towels, and a frozen burrito inside.

He walks through the slush of the parking lot. Unlocks the door of a black 1991 Ford Ranger. Tosses in the things he bought and then climbs in after them.

He gets the truck started on his fourth try.

What is in Your Head? (Part 2)

These are Aesop’s eyes:

 This is Aesop’s brain:

Aesop’s eyes are connected to Aesop’s brain by two cords called “optic nerves.” This is a good set-up and it works pretty well for the most part, all things considered, except that at the place where the optic nerves connect to each eye, Aesop cannot see.

Don’t feel too bad for Aesop, though. At the place where each of your optic nerves connects to your eyes, you cannot see, either. And Abraham Lincoln could not see anything at those places on his eyes. And neither Leonardo da Vinci. Why, even Kanye West himself cannot see anything at that place at the back of each eye where his optic nerves connect.

Kanye West! (Please do not tell him I told you this.)

What is in Your Head? (Part 1)

I know we all know more than we know we know.

I know that it is just a matter of hauling it up. Bringing it out. Of getting it to the surface somehow.

Like an expecting mother is rarely wrong when she dreams of the sex of her unborn child. Did you know about this? She knows… but she could never explain how she knows if she tried.

How the hell does she know?

And like somewhere way down inside the sticky folds of your brain lives the combination to the lock on your locker from when you were in sixth grade. You could find it if only you knew how. Maybe with drugs. Maybe hypnosis. Maybe with electric prods poking directly into your skull.

It’s in there.

But be careful. You can’t just go around getting stuff out of your brain the way you get oil out of the ground. Popping holes. Drilling down. Washing the remnants out with high pressure injections.

Believe me: I have tried all that, and all it got me was these weird eye twitches and I can’t ever make right-hand turns anymore.

Aesop & me

There was the time when Dana’s grandmother died, and Aesop and I smoked peyote before the funeral. The funeral was in an old stone church and we sat pushed right up against one another during the service and I remember sweating a lot. We watched the spirits wriggling in the shadows reaching out for the casket and afterwards, we compared notes about what it was we’d seen.

Aesop and I used to record terrible, terrible ambient music together. We’d send our 4-track tapes off to Brian Eno and to Harold Budd, to Steve Stapleton and to Alvin Lucier, but we never heard back from any of them and Eno would return his envelopes not even opened.

I met Aesop in a dingy record store when I was fifteen years old. The record store was called Sound Exchange. Aesop was wearing a Silver Apples t-shirt. We got to talking about krautrock and about astral projection and about whether anybody had ever recorded a good album after age fifty.

My Possible Pasts

This is a story about a sock.

Or rather, it is not about A sock so much as THE sock. The sock at the beginning of the whole Universe, yeah, way, way back at the start. The point to which every line can be traced back, if you only had the patience to trace back every line. Why, even the things that look  like they came before it – the oceans and the canyons and the fossilized reptiles, the comets and the planets, old light and ageless black holes – those things were just thrown backwards in time from the story of the sock, instead of forward, like you and I were.

This is the way it all appears from my perspective, anyway, after years of thought and of measurement and research.

For you, maybe it is different.

I hope that I am not overselling this particular piece of men’s footwear.