ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE

NO FUCKING WONDER I WANT TO MOVE TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST! AS SOON AS THE SKY OPENS UP, REVEALING THE COLD DEAD STARS, WHICH ARE PROBABLY NOT EVEN EXISTING AT THIS POINT IN OUR MEAGER HUMAN HISTORY, THE TEMPERATURE DROPS TO A POINT WHERE IT'S NOT UNBEARABLE, BUT ANNOYING. I FUCKING HATE EVERYTHING. LET ME MAKE THIS CLEAR. AND, BY 'EVERYTHING', I REFER TO THE UNERRING GAUNTLET OF STRIFE WHICH WE, AS MEMBERS OF THE UNIVERSE'S WORST PARTY ANECDOTE, MUST FLAIL OUR WAY THROUGH EVERY TIME THE SUN IS FINISHED BROILING THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THIS BRISTLING BALL OF IDIOCY. 

BLOOD IS ONLY AS THICK AS THE NUTRIENTS WHICH FORTIFY IT: PART 1

Hey America! 

How's about we find a fucking happy medium between callousness & compassion? What I mean is that we, as a culture (and I use the term as loosely as history will allow) tend to enable certain atrocities while simultaneously deterring others. I am not referring to anything happening elsewhere in the world because, although those things are definitely abhorrent, our own problems are much more urgent. 

Are we seriously going to allow this nation to be guided by a lying, greedy, fringe theology sycophantic hypocrite to be the spear's tip of our lives?

But I digress, since digressing is what I do best when the very concept of creationism is allowed to go unchecked within the public intellectual forum.

Getting back on point, I tend to have little to no tolerance for people who make epic lapses in judgment, directly leading to the harm of the loved ones in their lives, without any forethought regarding such harm. This includes both current unrecognized, and past recidivistic behaviors. 

[to be fucking continued] 

AN ATHEIST PARENT TAKING HIS CHILD TO THE PARK

I took my daughter to the park the other day. I wanted her to have fun. And she did, until another kid showed up. Of course, you would want a parent to be present. And there was a mom in attendance. So we, as parents, allowed our children to play together. 
My daughter is extremely extroverted, so she wanted this kid to be her best friend. 
I, as an enlightened parent, held my misanthropy in check, and allowed Aeva to have fun with this strange child. 
Meanwhile, I find myself in that awkward position as a parent where I must interact with the parent of the child  who is, at present, running amok with my daughter. 
Now, I am a civil, relatively intelligent man, but when I hear someone say the phrase, "The Resurrection", I tend to recoil.
So, when this lady told me, point blank, that the time her son couldn't wait for was the "Resurrection" so he could see his dad again, I politely & subtly called to Aeva, so we could leave.
She was a nice, albeit mislead, mother with obvious bereavement issues. So I was, of fucking course, reticent to look her straight in the face and say, "Sorry, but I'm an atheist and I don't believe in enforcing any mystical superstitions upon my child."
Did I do the right thing being polite? 
or
Did I just perpetuate too many years of mythological doctrine?

chasmcalling.claustrum #8

I'm packing up my t-shirts into a large black plastic bin & the street outside looks like a strip steak of dry-aged beef. it'll happen. somehow. the end of one thing and the beginning of another. stupid, spiteful Colorado winter be damned. I will be gone this time tomorrow. 

trailing behind me a half-chewed sinewy chain of mistakes & regrets, like some runaway victim in a bad horror film. a victim who has conveniently forgotten, through their terror, the damning errors they have committed. however, like any menial movie of such genre, said victim witlessly stumbled into the aforementioned circumstances, which are stuck in my back teeth like said sinew. 

the mileage from the creative fuel I've gotten after my random disease is sort of astounding, but in the end, means meager in light of....

I hate, in the smallest insidious ways. like nanobots of discontent, infiltrating the tiniest breaks in the fabric of daily  domestic human interaction. but my hate wears a mask of retail subterfuge. 

A Dispatch From ENTROPOLIS

Woke up swallowing my own blood again today. It made me gag and wretch so hard my vision wobbled and my skull felt like a fucking IUD went off inside it. I tore some tattered curtains into adhoc bandages so I could keep my innards from spilling out and tripping me whenever I moved. It’s funny that when one of us conscripts is in Entropolis we can be wounded as if we were alive, but back in the Fake we’re like fucking zombies. 

It’s impossible to tell how long I’ve been entrenched here in the Branch Inn. Time’s all fucked up in The Warzone. Seems that a cadre of pain-in-ass soldier demons took it upon themselves to claim this shitty little tavern as their own personal sadistic pet project. I’d come to this dive in order to “go AWOL”, so to speak, but when I got here, I was taken totally by surprise by them. The little fuckers. Visibility in The Warzone is shit under any circumstances, but it’s even harder to spot soldier demons. You can only see them when they open their hideous little maws. When the brimstone shines out like red-orange flares obscured by a forest of malformed teeth. And they only open their mouths when they attack. And by then it’s too fucking late; you might as well cozy up to the idea spending eternity in Il Purgatorio. And, since the nearest point of exit was about a mile west and up a bridge from here, the thought was looking sunnier by the eternal moment.  

  I don’t even know how I got past them, but once I was inside I hid in the rotted freezer for what seemed like an eon. Then I systematically tested every filthy inch of that condemned place for weaknesses in their blockade. Every door, every window, every possible hole. Hence the rotten bandages keeping my intestines from trailing behind me like something out of Clive Barker’s head. (I hear he writes propaganda for THE LIGHT, but it’s probably just more Divine bullshit.) 

I would say that being in Entropolis is like being in Hell, but the only ones who know for certain what Hell is truly like aren’t talking. Maybe the SubRasa has some kind of nondisclosure policy? Maybe that’s what keeps them in business? The only thing I know for certain, squatting here in this fucking umbral wasteland, is that Nick the Black better send some fucking help, or I’ll never see another sunny day, even if it’s only an illusion of Divine Providence. 

About what seemed like the 1000th day of my internment, if that’s even the right phrase, or even the right estimate, there was a peculiar light shining through one of the western-facing windows. It reminded me of every description St. Elmo’s Fire I’ve ever read; a sort of ghostly flickering campfire. When I went to the window to investigate, I heard the unmistakable sounds of battle filtering through the broken glass. There was the sound of a gun, only it was drenched in some strange flanging cadence. Also, I heard shouting from a throat that was definitely not that of those trying to end me. The conflict seemed to go on for days, and at several points, I thought I heard my own name being called. 

It was all so surreal to me. I mean, who knows how fucking long I’d been absconded in that place? The shifty smoky bastards had plenty of time to work up a fantastic mindfuck in order to confuse me. So I stayed put, until I heard that voice, the one that sounded human and not like some steel barrel being torn apart by a chainsaw, shout, “Bella, are you in there?!” There was no way that these demons knew my name, being that names are unimportant to their agenda. Following an immeasurable moment of consideration, I finally screamed, “Yes! I’m in here!” 

Another eternity passed before the man outside shouted, “I think I can keep them off, so get your ass out the back exit!”

“Then what?”

“Then we’ll do a round of ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’, what the fuck do you think?!” a brief pause, then, “We can run up the alley and get the fuck--” he paused, and I heard a loud noise like the hammer of a blacksmith on molten steel, “GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!”

I ran around the right side of the bar, made my way through the restaurant and slammed my shoulder into the rear eastern exit, taking me outside. I could see the sun in it’s half-eclipse directly overhead, and then a sudden flash of that eerie light as a tall man in a dark trench coat ran around the corner of the building from Union, that same light blossoming from his hands. I heard him scream ‘RUN!’, and I did just that. We ran around the corner of the tavern, turning west down the alley in the rear. The stranger’s hands flashed wildly behind him as we did so. In the peculiar half-light, I could barely make out, in my peripheral vision, the blurred cobalt smoke of our pursuers, as we both made a mad dash for the end of the alley, which was a few blocks from the bridge that meant our salvation. so to speak.

Almost comically, the smoky fuckers seemed to lose interest in us the closer we made it to the bridge that spanned the Rio Grande River. And once we were over the river entirely, their pursuit was stopped completely. We jogged a few more steps before we realized that the skirmish was over. After sucking in a couple of deep breaths, I finally was able to take in face of my liberator. He was nearly two heads taller than me, wearing a black knit cap on his head. He sported a narrow soul patch running the length of his chin, and looked like something out of a music video. The kind of video you’d see at 1AM on MTV in 1996. Long dark coat, old ratty T-shirt that said something like Warlord Piñatas, but a Raiders logo & black cargo’s tucked into worn military issue boots.

“Hey, what’s your name?” I asked the guy who pulled me out of my last stand.

“Doesn’t matter”, he said, looking down at my midriff, diagnosing my wound. He then slipped off his shirt, being careful not to upset his cover, and tore it in half. Wincing regretfully, I might add, and wrapped it around my stomach like an adhoc bandage.

“Thanks.” I spat through my teeth, as the pain melted into me like a spider-bite from hell. 

“Yeah”, he said, pointing up the hill from the bridge, “see that weird light coming from around that corner up there? That’s where we cross over.”

“Okay man”, I gritted, “lead the way.” I felt like I was going to pass out.

Without another word, he slipped his arm behind my wobbly legs and picked me up like a sack of potatoes and started up the hill.

Everything from then until now, as I became numbly awake, is a black mark on my memory. My eyes opened onto bright light, which made the scene a blur of dark moving shapes. I heard a muffled voice tell me to may bill, or was it lay still? 

As my vision clarified, I recognized one of the dark shapes hovering over me. It was Nick.

“You’re free and clear, Bella.” 

And, for the first time in years, I felt the sensation of warm tears run down my cheeks. 

dunking booth

I'm not sure that I've reached the precipice, because I'm terrified of heights & I've stayed far back from the edge. However, from my pusillanimous perch, I can sort of see the night-time landscape stretched out beyond the ledge I avoided. 

It looks like a circus tent, viewed from the vantage of trapeze flyers who know the game already. They know that their net is beneath them, whereas the audience knows no such safety. 

The audience is lost to their terror, borne of the unknown enforced upon them by the seemingly flailing performers above them. The performers who, due to the nature of their performance, gleefully, nay, willingly inflict said terror upon the paying masses below them.

  

E X I G U O U S

drifting isn't quite the word. I lack the vocabulary to describe my current frame of mind, and I pride myself on my fucking vocabulary. You ever feel like a dust mop in a gravel pit? Masking-tape in a junkyard? Here's one: have you ever felt like the one cracked wrung on a wooden ladder? 

it may sound melodramatic to you, but I honestly hope that the Mayans had it right, and not just some fluke of ancient superstition, combined with antediluvian mathematics. Let's put some much-needed punctuation at the end of this run-on sentence, shall we?