My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

So, I’m at this bar, a beer bar, with an outdoor stage for shitty local bands, stand-up comedians… Tonight, it’s stand-up comedians. Not my style. I don’t care if the beer’s from Ireland, brewed by faerie magic, you still have to drink two, three, five, just to feel anything. I want some clear liquid in a tiny glass that takes two seconds to drink and two more seconds to make my face feel warm and fuzzy. Drinks like that burn your throat, but that’s part of their magic, the whole pain heightens pleasure, I like girls who pull my hair while we kiss, thing. At any rate, yeah, beer bars, not my style. Neither is watching stand-up comedy, but I’m there doing that too. It’s kind of a downer evening, just a few evenings before Christmas. I’m at this beer bar, I’m stone sober, I’m bored, and I’m cold. Like I said, outdoor stage, late December. Even Florida gets bitter-cold a few times a year. One of the previously mentioned stand-ups is actually funny, but he’s the headliner, he’s up last. This leaves a solid hour of jokes about what is apparently the wannabe comics’ go-to topic, Hilarity Without End, Amen, the vagina. I’ve never heard the word so many times during what felt like an eternity, vagina as the Holy Grail of punch-lines. I guess if you’re 27, and you’re only with a woman, say, whenever an Olympics rolls around, you get a bang out of at least talking about it. I’m bored. Though, I’m less cold by the forty-seventh vagina joke, my brother brings me a heating-pad. Yes, I’m a giant sissy about being cold, and I really don’t care about looking cool at a beer bar. Warmer or not, I still want to go home, but I don’t.

After the headliner gives us a generous reprieve from the Vagina Monologues, the show’s over, everybody’s straggling toward their cars or cabs, or better bars. I’m just kind of sitting in my chair, staring up at the night sky, wanting to see stars rather than clouds, thinking about a girl. I haven’t seen her in a really long time, but she’s always in my head, permanently etched into my memory, a tattoo behind my eyes, a sometimes torture that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I’m thinking about how I wish she were next to me, that we were about to drive home together. I want to be going home together, crawling into our cozy warm bed, kissing and talking and kissing in the dark before we fall asleep, the unspoken promise of deeper intimacy in the morning, the sacrament we’d share, her skin against mine. I’m thinking about the way she used to look at me, all these years later nobody has ever looked at me like her. She saw past all my outward flaws, saw me the way only God sees me, into my soul. She saw the real me, the melancholy, happy, scared, brave, dark, light me, and in her eyes all I saw was love, love as simple and beautiful as summer sun shining through green tree leaves. I’m thinking about just wanting to have those eyes in my life again, if for only one night, one hour, ten minutes. Anything.

I close my eyes, head tilted toward the gray night sky. Cold air stings my face, cold air that scoffs at the heat draped across my chest. I focus on the heat, it reminds me of that girl, I see her, the tattoo only I can see. My sometimes torture that I wouldn’t trade for anything, she’s vivid and bright and so right there. I get this stupid feeling that if I just open my eyes and look next to me, she’ll be there. I don’t look, I know she won’t be there. I know and I’m scared, the lack of her scares me.

I open my eyes, the clouds shuffled off like so many drunks. I see stars, I know that they’ll be here long after I blink out and disappear.

I’m hearing my writer voice again, sort of this detached, unaffected voice in my head, a fellow who’s so beyond depressed that all that matters to him are words that are honest. I hate him. It’s a weird feeling, really.

So, I’ve been reading The Narrator by Michael Cisco, one of the most brilliant writers putting down words today. I’ve been reading The Narrator for… awhile. For me, Michael Cisco doesn’t write the sort of books one flies through. At least, I definitely don’t fly through them. His prose are thick, the words are almost heavy in your head, but this is because the images he creates with the words are so vivid, and real, and often yet so very dream-like, or nightmarish. He takes scenes of dream and nightmare, with all the inherent incoherence and impossibility that the human mind can create intimately, in the dark, and puts those scenes on paper in words. I don’t rush through words like that, I want to take them all in, to see the images they’re creating.

When I do finish The Narrator, I’ll review it, but really, just go buy it. I don’t think Cisco will fall on his face during the second half.

I’ve said that I admire Elliott Smith as a writer, I think he was a genius. He’s a writer whose level of brilliance I aspire toward. He captured human experiences so perfectly, told these perfect little stories of love and loss and sadness and loneliness and addiction in just a few hundred words. Theres’s a special skill in that, no less brilliant and beautiful than the tens of thousands of words that writers like KJ Bishop, or Michael Cisco, or Jeff VanderMeer put into their stories.  It’s not easy to capture how it feels to lose someone you love, to capture it in a way that is universally accessible, in just a handful of words. Smith’s Sweet Adeline off his fourth record, XO, is a gorgeous example of describing the end of love and the aftermath of that ending.

Waiting for sedation to disconnect my head, for any situation where I’m better off than dead.

He felt that, put it into words, perfect words. It’s how I feel right now, and a thousand times before right now, and probably a thousand times after right now.

So, the last two posts are some nonsense, but it’s grammatically correct nonsense. I’m just trying to write, anything. Elliott Smith has this song, New Monkey, and the one line that always really gets me goes, “got a whole lot of empty time left to go, now you’ve gotta’ fill it with something…” Then it ends, “Anything is better than nothing…” It’s a very autobiographical song, a big theme is the idea of being unhappy, being fucked up, but writing anyway. He was a musician, but his songs are often about writing. I see him as a writer, his writing is tattooed all over me.

Anyway, I’m trying to fill that empty time, and trying to be me again.

I’m maybe going to finish this story.

There was once, many years ago, this turtle named, Kurt. Kurt was very slow, and very melancholy. He was the slowest, most melancholy turtle in all of Turtleeville. Turtleville being the largest settlement of turtle-folk for a thousand miles in any direction.

The story goes that a group of turtles, just ten friends, five ladies and five fellows, decided they’d leave home and walk to The Edge of the World. They were, of course, mocked, as no such place could possibly exist. Every turtle knew that the world went on forever, forever and ever. These ten turtles, however, insisted that, if they just walked long enough, and far enough, they’d reach the much laughed at, Edge of the World.

So, they said their goodbyes, some called them the stupidest turtle-folk ever to be hatched, others called them whimsical adventurers, brave enough to follow their hearts, and with such chatter at their backs, they walked. They walked for what felt like a century, they lost count of how many starry night-skies they slept underneath, and how many orangey sunrises they woke to. They just walked, and walked, and kept walking, determined to prove that they were whimsically brave, not stupid.

Being turtles, nothing particularly exciting happened, as nothing particularly exciting ever happens to turtle-folk. They just walked, and walked, and walked a little more. I say a little, not because they did, at very long last, reach the Edge of the World, but rather, they just stopped walking. One day, they stopped to graze on the green grass under the shade of a majestic oak tree, the largest, most magnificent oak they’d ever laid eyes on. After their lunch, which was delicious, they went for a drink from a nearby lazy river, the slowest river with the clearest water they’d ever so seen. This river was so clear, the turtles could plainly see, and have conversation with, the river’s resident fish.

So, I’m not entirely not writing. Us Mac people recently got the Mac App Store, it’s built into OS X and it’s a one stop shop for buying Mac software. It’s basically just like the iPhone App Store, click, buy, run.  Anyway, the day the store opened I HAD to try it, I get ridiculously excited about these things. The first app that caught my eye was Evernote, it’s this cloud-based notebook app. You can create different notebooks for different subjects, like, I have “Thoughts,” ” Writing fragments,” “Dreams…” All your notebooks are stored online, so you have access to them on practically any computer, or smartphone, anywhere. It’s a really stylish, easy way to turn thoughts into words that you can always keep with you. You can also create shared notebooks that people can read and even write collaboratively. I totally hadn’t planned on writing this little review, I just think Evernote is so fucking cool.

I love the idea of writing in notebooks, pouring thoughts onto paper, it’s very romantic. It’s also something I’ve never been able to do. Aside from blogging, I’ve never kept any sort of notebook or journal. I mean, if I have a little one paragraph thought that only means something to me, I’m not going to blog it, and I’m not going to save it as a single text file. Before Evernote, that thought would simply fade until it disappeared. There are also thoughts, no matter how invested I am in transparency, that I just can’t share right now. Evernote lets me keep all my thoughts in a nice safe place, to be shared, or not. That’s where I’ve been of late.

So, Rigor Amortis launched today, the collection of zombie erotica and romance flash fiction which contains one of my stories. It’s a really good collection, stories ranging from sweet to sexy, disturbing to terrifying. Rigor Amortis mixes horror and love, death and sex, it bends genre barriers until they break, creating unexpectedly wonderful stories. If this sounds interesting, pick up a copy on Amazon. I’d love to get some feedback on my tale sex and the undead.

So, the trailer for Rigor Amortis is live and eating brains! In case you missed it, Rigor Amortis is an anthology of flash fiction, tales of zombie romance and erotica, and it includes one of my stories. One might see “zombie erotica” and be a little taken aback, but trust me, zombies and sex are like chocolate and peanut butter, they just work. I can’t really explain why they work, they just do. You could buy the book for yourself and find out, that’s what I’d do.

Rigor Amortis comes out this Friday…