Joy Motel

93 God's eye

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:38:00 -0700

Chicago cleanswept by coldpulse wind, lakewater exhaling as the morning sun emerges from an undulating oilslick, pregnant with possibility.

Pitterpatter what's the matter? Typists in flatwarped windows, offices a-twitter, assistants in war-torn nylons, legs crossed so demurely.

Methane Man despondent, rising higher, floating on ticklish crosscurrents peppered with ambient signalwash from TV towers blurping popnews.

More to it than this his brain fervently hoping more to it than oh come on more to it more as Mitch receded, the beachstrip now pencil thin.

Lobsters tapping on glass tables, the hungry logic of morse code, consuming megawatts, messages pipelined through glass fiberlines embedded.

Steely Dan vibe as Methane Man's fevered cranium bounces off the Caves of Altamira. Polychrome rockpaintings, wild mammals, human hands.

A series of twisting passages and chambers, paintings damaged by the carbon dioxide in the breath of redfaced visitors toting digicameras.

Picasso echo expressed his sentiment: "After Altamira, all is decadence." Before the fall, when they wrote it the wall, for you and me.

When there wasn't even any Hollywood they heard the call and they wrote it on the wall, and we understood. A boy on the beach, just a boy.

Looking up from the sand, white desert sand, peering through decades, standing in the presence of bombwave particles, nuclear fizzfrisson.

Kindred the Kid sees a red balloon rising, heliocentric helicopter. Shockwave bombslave, facebook faceburnt wetslick, blood river of tears.

Blinking once per day, clicking eyelids marking time, weeks and months eroded by westwind sadsongs, lutes and piano, keys tapping typishly.

The kid sees his father floating toward heaven, bombmaker scientist killed by his own creation, his spirit fastforwarding, pressurebent.

Doc Kindred, man of science, striding through time like a pop psych Doc Savage man of bronze with golddust slowdancing in eyes of spun gold.

Evolving into an evanescent gasbag, soul ascendant, a madman of methane drifting to meet his maker, trapped in a hot Michigan slipstream.

Methane Man, essence leaking, still sentient enough to see his son Kindred running along the shoreline, willing himself airborne, no use.

The kid looks up as sheep look up, as we all look up, googling with googly eyes, searching for meaning in an inverse universe, me first.

He sees Methane Man as a red balloon spiraling outta sight baby, hallucinatory dreamscape, Philip K Dickish proportions, bulbishly bopping.

Red balloon becomes a red dot in the sky, a red dot in PKD's eye, a bloodvessel pinprick aneurysm bursting star Fourth of July extravaganza.

Red dot pulsing, heartbeat city here we come, angels crying twitterly tears, pinpoint dissolving Joy Motel in the malevolence of God's eye.

THE END

92 Twitter Road

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 6 Mar 2009 06:05:00 -0800

Mitch looked back at the dollbabe, further back the coppers pulling away from their crime scene. They'd watched from the corner, spectatin'.

Saw a bearded dude reach down, yank at something, then show the cops. Hot chippie on his arm, but Mitch's was snappier, man. Lots of lips.

They'd met at the State Lake, he had been looking for the Yesla Taproom, walked into the bigscreen viewing of NETIZEN CANE. Cheap ripoff.

Not stag stuff, where the hell did the colors come from. Then his eyes pingponged on the babe in blue with some glowing screen in her lap.

He sat down, bantered up that he was looking for the bar but that's the way the mop flops, she just smiled a smile, said call her Lili, mwa.

That Monroe thing, airkisses. Lili Sirenity. He took her tiny hand, did the Bobby but they call me Pall Mall scripteroo. She winked, said go.

They got gone, walked back towards Michigan Ave and the hotel, she was faster at getting to the short hairs than he had ever been. He moved.

Passed Sinatra, who looked way old. Frankie said he outlived Mitch, damn drunk. Said Mitch wore thick glasses & had jowls, Mitch: die first.

Then the bearded guy, the two chippies sizing each other up & down then up again. Mitch thinking threesome, dump pudge-o. 1 dame at a time.

Surprise, they went to the beach instead, sunset making the sand look like simmering coals. They took a pedway to avoid Lake Shore Drive.

Down steps that smelled like urine and sweat and cachet. The thin, silver, BIG purse Lili carried slapping sexy off her fine toned thigh.

The tunnel was like a bent spine, Mitch wondered if cops walked a beat down here, if they came across one night stands propped against walls?

Idle thoughts as he was led like an adult pull toy. He could smell the water now. Up the steps, heading east into the black, cars honk away.

Meanwhile: things had gotten crazy in the ripped timestream the all-knowing Pall Mall Mitchum UN-knowingly left at the other end of LSD.

Genghis Khan shivered morphed into Edward G. Robinson into J. Edgar Hoover wearing a push up bra and panties, toppling in matching pumps.

Evolvo-humans from the first lunar colony flew above the towers, collided and fell to the concrete as raindrops, Hoover in the mud got wet.

The first mime Pope of the First Vatican Bank signed autographs the year he was born, Sinatra regressed into a backseat toadie, moon sun.

Moon again. Red dot in the sky. Mitch almost stepped on an I LIKE IKE button, shinynew. The rust speck fell slow; no one saw Methane Man.

Drake Hotel, Playboy Building Palmolive Building Hugh Hefner turned 70 50 40 11, a curious case for a future dream, Mitch disruptive doomed.

He wanted to cop a feel, the doll flipped open her purse again, it was a tiny tv screen, fingers flew on silver letters ROBERT then MITCHUM.

He tried typing an apology note to his wife once, gave up, but some goon snapped a photo just the same, ended up in WINK September 1959.

Strange-o stuff coming up on the mini-TV. The doll, legs crossed, heels tossed. His films, STUMBLE UPON THE PAST, BALLAD OF TWITTER ROAD.

CAPE FACEBOOK. Then a photo, the NY POST, July 4th 1997. Mitch right there, saggy baggy and glasses like scotch tumblers. This was a scam.

Told the broad he'd catch her later, a lie. She said her career was coming up next, he shouted suave, Baby, I Don't Care! His signature.

Methane Man hovered close, waiting for Mitch to get out of sight, not that witnesses mattered, but the timestream was tricky: some recalled.

[to be continued]

91 Femdelicious jigglybits

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 5 Mar 2009 14:41:00 -0800

Kindred and Sunday Benbow hand in hand on Walton, heading over to Michigan on a rumor. They say Sinatra popped through Overtone's skyrip.

When he was a kid Kindred pushed a bigcar highspeed through the desert with Frankie crooning as his soundtrack. Been in his head ever since.

Cop swarm guns out yellow tape two men down. I knew those guys, Kindred tells Sunday. Not personal, but I've seen their faces on posters.

Sal and Salt, muttered a big sergeant, Who'd a thunk these lugs could go down? Ain't they bin drivin' this bus? This thing is their idea.

Kindred pushed his way into the melee, elbows up. What the? Two humanholograms vibrating on the sidewalk, fakedatamagnets, not real guys.

He thrust his hand into Sal's heaving chest and pulled out the zonecapacitor and flipped it to a detective. It emitted a sadsingsong tweet.

Play that back, he told him. You'll get the whole story: Methane Man, Dick Overtone, Trinity, Kindred Tate... The cop stopped him. Tate?

What's Kindred Tate got to do with it? I heard boywonder timeskipped outta here and he ain't never comin' back. Oh, he's back, Kindred said.

There was a softclatter coming from Salt, like teeth chattering, or... a lobster dancing on a glass table. You hear that? Kindred demanded.

That's a million keyboards tapping, datadancing on Twitter, he's channeling the lifestreams though his capacitor. Vibrating damn netizen.

These guys aren't dead. Aren't even here. They're up in the sky somewhere, pulling strings. That's why Sinatra is on his way now, in 2012.

Limo sharked into the curb and Ol' Blue Eyes slid out, stood looking. Everyone followed his gaze. Pall Mall Mitchum ambling along, icecool.

Mitch glanced at Frankie, turned away, kept on softshoeing. Hooded cobra eyes, sneer, get outta my way bud, I don't care, I just don't care.

On his arm a liquid platinum blonde wearing stilettos, which set in motion all her femdelicious jigglybits as she uphurried to keep apace.

Sinatra mad, climbed back in the car and rolled away toward Oak Street Beach. Kindred put an arm around Sunday's waist and pulled her close.

Methane Man drifted above, what to do? Chicago definitely the coolest place in the universe now, with Dick Overtone's skyrip leaking time.

Clockchaos running rampant, decades tumbling end over end, years intersecting, passing through like lostnighttrains, ghostriders on the sky.

Sadeyed Mitch on the beach, early evening empty, water flat and black, sunlight dissipating. I got me an idea, honey, he drawls to his doll.

She's rubbing bare feet, stilettos off, curve of thigh sweeping up to softplaces a man from the 1940s shouldn't be thinking about in public.

Watch this, he says, and damned if he didn't walk upon the water, Hollywood man like they don't make 'em no more, doin' his own sweet thing.

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90 Pall Mall Mitchum

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 5 Mar 2009 07:35:00 -0800

Gold Coast, Chicago. Outside the Drake, SalSalt Suiteries, Pall Mall Mitchum stepped out rakishly and the girls swooned, a few men, as well.

The hat he wore in CAMP FEAR the cigars that one day kill him all over again, tattoed knuckles LOVE HATE souvenier of the preachery flick.

As with the arrowsmith at 39 So. State, a smudge of time had been zipped into Mitch's new fly, the past followed him out the door. Crooning.

Slapping to the beat as Genghis Khan beheaded Sal and Salt and then moved on to the 22nd century. An alleyway turned Technicolor, not good.

People shriked at CineScope, suddenly everyone seemed squished and fishey-eyed. Smoker dopers found it normal and robbed onlookers blind.

Every time Mitch snapped his fingers, he bopped a block south. Above him a faceless gargoyle blithered I Am Spartacus, sonsofbitches silence.

Whiter shades of pale grey and worse, his mission clear. People screaming streaming from the Oriental, he knew it well, screwed a dame here.

In the balcony, he knew the layout and he knew the good lays out in the shivering crowd. This is it: Pall Mall Mitchum vs. Frankenstein.

Lit a cigarette, the signature non-filter. The monster hated fire, not Frankenstein, he was thinking the producer on Babe-A Go-Go Junction.

Monster grunted, Mitchum parried. Took a puff, billboard style. Where were the cameras and where was the scotch? This was hangover square.

Swing a ding ding, Mitch on the ropes, Frank on the concrete steps arms swaying idiot savant clever. I see you, suave man, he stitched out.

To be honest, Mitch would mate with the Monster's Mate, if you know what we mean. But this was the first film, 1931, Frankenstein confused.

The monster swiped at our man Mitch, who mugged the crowds every moment he had. A guy who could beat the bad guy with only his good looks.

Should name this film FRANKENSTEIN CANNOT CLIMB, make all the words rhyme, the first Pall Mall Mitchum Monster Musical, worth Millions.

In the end, Mitch, all boozed out, unreeled the film, frames of monster Frank aflame from the light of Mitch's scotch, fiends by torchlight

grabbing at shards for take home souveniers really, no really, it was him, Pall Mall Mitchum was back from the dead I give you droll Lazarus

Clapped his hands, signed for the sequel (he wanted to boff that white-streaked baby bad so bad), then strolled off to catch the elevated.

Conductor announced: This is Horselover Fat, I'll be tripping you out for the next fifteen stops. Free blotter acid and Cubs tickets here.

He loved being back, not knowing this wasn't his story, the distortions behind him changing immediate futures. Methane Man felt sad re: RIP.

Such a cool adversary for Dick Overtone, but that was for other realities, the snowflake earths, not the ones spit out by Joy Motel turbines.

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89 BigMother MapViewer

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 5 Mar 2009 07:30:00 -0800

Kindred did not know of the tempustrictures, the squuezing of time in seven dimensional terms. And so it caused a dilemma at 39 So. State.

An archer in the old Stevens Building tore time as the arrow hit his target, a huge bastard wearing a Lush Rimbo skullcap and paisley tie.

No Escape button to delete and start over tabula rasa Lushly loose, no thread trapped no magnetic spool of being jammed by fate's fluke.

Over and again, Robin Hood meets Oliver Hardy, timelocked, the same sceneseen 73 days themp clump yell thwip arrow tip Huffington Post-made.

Yet, steps away, life went on, the fight went on, no one seing the worse to come, minor skirmishes for kiosks or subway entrances, new homes

The temportals had dropped like sheets in a morgue, borne on Lake Michigan winds, the Red Balloon Baron watching the MoreOrLessWarOf2012.

Time layers pillowpoked the Trump Tower antennae, RKO beepbeepbeeped scenes from MONSTER OF SIERRA BLANCAS into a hundred pedestrian minds.

They ran screaming, unmissed by the teal construction workers and pizza pie delivery men. Then the Hancock, the insides became discotown.

Burly security guards bumping can you take me to, Funkytown? Nanotube Bandits took a chance to rob three banks. Time was in the air, baby.

Time spread like a blanket and Kenosha, Wisconsin went Neolithic, just likethat snap snap. Cave drawings made you new mayor chick magnet.

Kindred and Sunday, K Tate and Lala, out and about exploring post-war Chicago. Kindred and Sunday naked on top the Grant Park bandshell.

Explicit images blurred like an amateur stag film. They both laughed at the absurdity of it, Kindred's gut was what should be blurred out.

Well, that's what happens when you flaunt it full view as BigMother MapViewer drones overhead. Like reporting news with a gun at your head.

K Tate and Lala were more generic with their affections and their affectations. No blurs there, the sun shone in the flowers in Lala's hair.

Yet, madness was afoot. The State-Lake Theater reappeared where the Oprah Building had stood, the WLS affiliate borrowing 3rd floor offices.

Timewaves passed Art Institute dorms, replaced with destitute SROs and electrolysis doctors. At least Ronny's Steaks #3 was back in place.

Blue skies changed as Tesla coils rose from Snow Route signs. The sandblasted building went back to non-landmark crappiness, Chicago's own.

Culhane as Mr. Saigon in UNKNOWN WARTIME backed by wicked witches and cats. Now greying to dark wounds and stapled body parts. Grunting.

Blocks away, the timewave hit the Drake Hotel, and back from death he came: Pall Mall Mitchum, star of sixty-three films. Carried a big set.

Hawaiian shirt bound, scotch in hand, Pall Mall the Mitch needed a babe on each arm and one playing with his head mop, elevator time, bing!

He passed Bjorn Clooney in the lobby, not knowing one had played the other in a biopic made in Sweden before Scandinavia fell forever gone.

Boppity bop baby I don't care I do NOT care just ruffle my hair let me grab your waist honeybun. Mitch realized he was dressed like a golfer.

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88 Sunday Benbow

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 4 Mar 2009 09:21:00 -0800

The New York bankers attacked at dawn, their skiffs and barges silently bumping against the Chicago docks as wharf rats scurried for cover.

They were led by an unemployed stockbroker named Sunday Benbow, who sported a mane of dirty blonde hair and a scarred leather breastplate.

She commanded some 30,000 urban warriers, refugees from the Climate Change eastcoast floods, known as the "Clamato" floods, (paid sponsor).

She had studied Napoleonic tactics in business school at Wharton, in the guise of learning more effective cold-calling telephone techniques.

Her troops: desperate ex-tellers, laid-off investment advisors, fat Vice Presidents of Office Supply Procurement offered early retirement.

They swarmed up urban canyons, the sadly out-of-shape among them flagging down cabs that saw a windfall financial bonanza in increased tips.

This day, historians said, had to come. America's two great cities at war, the War of 2012, driven by rogue out-of-towners, the Financials.

Methane Man drifting far above, dodging weather balloons and low-flying satellites, saw the insurgents advance toward the heart of the city.

In Joy Motel, Kindred was flipping channels. The morning rush hour news had it all live, breathless reporters stunned by the developments.

They threw together flashy graphics calling the conflict, unimaginatively, Cities at War. Cabbies renamed it NooYawkBastids, which stuck.

Kindred felt a familiar stirring in his loins. No, not that kind of stirring. It was a call to battle, his experience in Vietnam awakening.

He went outside and saw several hundred men armed with baseball bats and garden rakes marching past, angry Chicagoans, ready to rumble.

Kindred fell in and began to organize them from within, a group here, a cell there. By the time they got downtown, he was their leader.

He sent squadrons down sidestreets to work their way around and strike from the rear. He put archers in office towers, claiming high ground.

Those with handguns, assault rifles, mortars, grenades, tripwire, plastic explosives, bazookas, sniper gear, ammo, he moved as chesspieces.

It soon became apparent, after initial clashes by the NooYawkBastids were easily rebuffed, that Kindred knew his stuff. A summit was called.

Sunday Benbow met Kindred for dinner 'n drinks at a swanky eaterie, an intimate soiree led to hankypanky, Do Not Disturb on the doorknob.

They hashed out their conflict between the sheets, Kindred taking a very firm position, Sunday Benbow most receptive, even moistly pliant.

The maid thought she heard moaning, even groaning, perhaps someone was injured in there, or worse, but no, it wasn't that, it was pleasure.

A deal was struck, Kindred withdrew, the troops stood down and a holiday was named: the first Sunday in June became known as Sunday Benbow.

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87 Daddy baggage

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 4 Mar 2009 07:51:00 -0800

The changes were subtle and Methane Man said nothing. Not yet. It might just be a tempuripple, a quantum burp. Interactive lake squall.

Back in 1954, he had floated high above Fullerton Avenue, silently watched a swirl of Lake Michigan, a suction of dumb fate, move forward.

Slapgrab eleven fishermen rubberbands, returning only three. One man caught a big one, then threw it back out of pity but still took a photo

and eighteen minutes later he was hundreds of feet into the lake, horizons of blue, like 2012 Manhattan, the building fragments Dick O teeth

Methane Man's memories co-existed as one, alkane and parrafin molecules riffing off one another in the confines of the suit, JFK died today

RFK died last week, there were no turbines in Methane Man's brain, he was simply shapeless and formless, the exact opposite of Joy Motel.

Let them enjoy their father and son reunion, let Lala wanderfrollick, Chicago already rebuilding itself, the dead helping the almost dead.

One of the first things Methane Man had sensed, then seen, then knew was wrong. Kindred past his deathtime nodoubtno. The spectrum was true.

Corpses were always teal. And yet here they were upright and moving with decision wearing construction hats or baking pies or shining shoes.

This city had crumbledtumbled in 2009, Methane Man had been in New Zealand then. An impeached governor, a bad toupee, a cult of clout.

Anarchy in the streets worse than the Dem Con in '68, the OJ verdict, the Bulls' six trophies held high as homies burned cabs & storefronts.

Kindred taking a brainsnooze, K Tate now with his LalaLove, look! at the blue sky caressing the blue water not seeing the teal dead at work.

Newsstands were back, using his paraffinic vision, Methane Man scanned to see if Tales to Confound was still in print. It Girl, TimesPast.

SalSalt Quarterly. Reality & SciFi. He was saddened, the only place someone had read his true name. V'aliss. He was no superhero. MM, pft.

Anonymous forever. Yet he could protect these three. Snapsnapsnap three times on the brainpan if you want me. It wasn't the brainstreams.

He understood how those had worked. Corrupt, clean, in-between. Crissycross, blipgone in 1968, he waited for their return, nowhere to go.

Back in 2012, thought it was expected, after all. Chicago and not NY was surprising as was the added daddy baggage. This was all wrong.

He could see hear the tubular whines, workers quintupled by upandatom random dead, more. Rumbles of war, an occasional biplane, WWI again.

Not so bad that dinosaurs would visit from Japan's Lost Isle, not so bad that Trinity would flare up retinas like the Chicago Fire x 100000.

But enough. Floating high, he saw the misanthropic visagery. How long before the unreality wafted to ground level with the teal rebuilders?

Memories happen all at the same time and he watched as a summer sprinkle made K Tate and Lala prance, yet before they had appeared, before.

That same summer shower had happened last week. Time was fracturing. The Red Baron flew as a bright kite. Televisions all tuned to JFK death

If only they would pay attention. The biplane was replaced by the 1964 UFO with reptile man at the controls. Then he saw himself yesterday.

Day became night, awake became sleep. Silence became scream. K Tate was surprised that the shriek had come from Kindred's fatherly lips.

The big man was shaking. Looked like he was crying, made Lala look northward. He said the sky tore, ripped by fingers: Dick Overtone's.

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86 Rod Serling

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 3 Mar 2009 08:48:00 -0800

Kindred comfortable here: not much has changed in 40 odd years. Same tired old carpet, same torn drapes. Musty molecules turgid in closets.

Dick Overtone long dead now, but his image is everywhere, webburned into the local datastream penetrating the consciousness of every guest.

He is like a sour smell that persists long after its source has been removed, disinfected, purged. His yellow teeth, his mustardstained tie.

Worse, his giggling laugh, mildly annoying when heard in person, but discombobulating when used as the ringtone for every bedside telephone.

DickO is the first thing you see imprinted on your retina when you awaken to dirty sunlight filtering through the skin of the windowglass.

He is the last thing you see when your brain shuts down after midnight, and your dreams of America when it was once mighty, flicker and die.

Psychdaddy, too, is no longer here, though Kindred sat alone in the doctor's room for an hour, waiting for him to emerge from the bathroom.

Docdad's notepads are still scattered across his bed, halfburied under crumpled and faded daisy-patterned pillowcases unwashed for decades.

Out in the hall, the Watcher's woodenchair is tipped back against his doorframe, a gumwrapper folded into the shape of Methane Man below it.

His door is open, the sound of his television playing an episode from the Twilight Zone, snarling Rod Serling biting off acerbic commentary.

Soundtrack fizzes and pops, mixing with running water and the insistent drone of a lazy vacuum cleaner with a full bag picking up nothing.

Kindred arrives in the restaurant of Joy Motel. Menu in pinkchalk on a greasy board, dripping slimesmoke of a thousand overcooked burgers.

Lala is bent over picking up a knife. Kindred automatically absorbs the sweep of her ass, jeanskinned taut denim, his greeneyes pokerflat.

K Tate is swaying at the window, his head angled, soaking up the datastream in the air, breathing it deeply, diving headlong back into 2012.

Methane Man, outside his room for the first time as far as Kindred is aware, is bobbing gently against the tile ceiling avoiding sharpedges.

Familiar diving bell helmet, pipes and tubes, spacesuit fraying, the gasball from Saturn explains why they made a forty-four year timejump.

They had reached the point in 1968 when Sharon Tate's foetus had become K Tate and there couldn't be two of him, even in fetal form.

K Tate's brainstream withered, dried apple on a dying branch, fell through the years. Lala rode it home, sylph duty of interpretation done.

Kindred? He was a problem. By grabbing K Tate's arm, he had joyhitched a wildskyride with his own son into a future beyond his own death.

To go back where he came from, he would have to endure a brainstream of his own. If he wanted to go back. A big if. But he had no option.

If he decided to stay here in 2012, Kindred would die. Wouldn't he? He had to. After all, he was already dead. Unless K Tate changed that.

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85 Redlatex invitation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 2 Mar 2009 12:48:00 -0800

K Tate and Lala settled into an easy rhythm, the days sliding under the door and into the void, Chicago streets teeming, Panopticon humming.

The glass globe empty, no sign of activity from Kindred or Dick Overtone, the chase petrified, on hold, if it ever existed, brainstreamed.

K Tate took a job unloading carrots and beets at FoodFeud, pallets disgorging vegetables by the ton, he grew stronger by the day, musclepop.

Lala rode his brainstream through thunderclaps concussive, interpreting future past, but she could sense his timeslippage was nearly done.

Some sudden event, some unexpected smacker, some sneeze or snort or clanger. K Tate on the edge now, it wouldn't take much to send him home.

Brainstream dwindling, the beckoning embrace of 2012, life where it belonged, where data blew through leafless winter oaks, up city noses.

It happened on a dull gray Wednesday at a quarter to three. K Tate had just lifted a bushel of onions onto his shoulder and there he was.

Kindred standing near the powerlift, still as stone, flat eyes cold. K Tate defenseless, Kindred programmed by Dick Overtone, time to kill.

But Kindred softened. How could he kill his own son? He lifted the onions from K Tate's trembling hands, 90 pounds as if the box was empty.

And just like that, K Tate's brainstream ended, he was lit from within neonblue and flaring, countdown to the future, Lala ready to ride.

Kindred: Take me with you. Grabbing K Tate's arm and electronpull surge snapwhipped all three of them forward, tumbling dice, purechance.

Vague impression of the eastern floods, New York awash, bankers adrift in leaking boats, westward ho. Across Ohio and Michigan, 30,000 feet.

In a heartblink they landed exactly where they were, in Chicagoland, behind the same foodmarket, Kindred grasping K Tate's arm, Lala too.

But now it's 2012, past was prologue, gone but not forgotten, K Tate where he belongs, liberator hero, data flowing in the air, freebasing.

Lala bone exhausted, she had been riding K Tate's 1960s brainstream for eons. Kindred wary, carried forward in time well past his own death.

Cats wandered by, skulls burned bald by datastreamsear, painless side effect of submolecular postInternet syndrome. Kindred's head expanded.

Methane Man released a red balloon, skipping pap pap pap scuffing along the brick wall of the Joy Motel, extension of self, explorer cell.

Redlatex invitation, note on redstring: Join me for an evening of realtime discussion in the restaurant at Joy Motel, come one come all.

Your rooms are reserved and paid for, courtesy of Methane Man. You'll be next to me. Kindred on one side, K Tate and Lala on the other.

K Tate pocketing the note, a glance at Kindred: Follow me. Down undulating hallways, turbines rumbling, Overtone there even when he wasn't.

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84 Nightwind dark

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 1 Mar 2009 12:06:00 -0800

Nightwind dark, floating I go westward, Iowa slipstreams redolent with the sweet airiness of summer corn, yellow sunspots tickle my sensors.

Adrift on American dreams, small boys batting apples in overgrown outfields, someday Yankees, fantasy of everlasting hope, I see all below.

Ancient river canyons carved by determined glaciers scouring the slate to begin anew, brave settlers forging pathways to mysterious horizons

Young lovers in St. Louis skipping handheld across a weathered bridge, her smile a sly promise of futures he hopes come true, life unbound.

Music drifting on slipstreams over New Orleans, run of jazz piano fueling my ascent to thinner atmospheres, higher planes of consciousness.

I bob along untouched by Great Depression, unwounded by shrapnel launched from the bloody battlefields of France, untroubled, soulserene.

Methane Man mission continues nightly, popping free of the confines of the Joy Motel to travel untethered above the hustlebustle of America.

Farmfields plowed row on row, stolen kisses under mistletoe, country church empty save for sinners, every businessman thinks he's a winner.

Ask not what you can do for your country, mythmade heroboy President astride a golden pony in a regal parade, aims at the moon and hits it.

Finned automobiles belching gasfarts on concrete ribbons webbing urban centers pinpricked on a lifemap drawn in bentbacked sweat and toil.

Cities groan and flex below, an infinite succession of big decisions and small collisions, antagonists and lovers, above them all I hover.

Race riots, broken skulls, gang wars, now a lull, dirty needle pokes a vein, hooker's john cums again, cop on the take dumped in the lake.

Puppies play in Pittsburgh, doves dive in Denver, eagles touchdown in Philadelphia, beersoaked fans celebratory, oh say can you see me?

Motorcade rolling through Dallas, me at 3,000 feet eyetracking trajectories of metallic deathbringers fired from book depository window.

Four moptopped lads from Liverpool outshouted by female fans at Shea, I Wanna Hold Your Hand compression waves pushing me over the Hudson.

Mudslicked musiclovers cavort in farmer's fields, Jimi Hendrix gets experienced, the Doors write Riders on the Storm and it's all about me.

Flashlights at the Watergate Hotel, I hover in an alley, perpetrator hesitates when he looks up, sees floating spacesuit, blinks a-thinkin'.

Philip Kindred Dick goes into a drugstore and comes out with a squirt of nasal decongestant, a ream of typing paper, headspinning selfstory.

Phil Kindred goes into Scrip City, comes out with a frosty can of ice cold Coke, a box of condoms, flatlining brainstream with memoryblip.

Turbines pulse bloodred boombeats through artery hallways, Joy Motel quivers and sighs, shivers and cries, I return to my room to be alone.

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83 V'lalis

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 1 Mar 2009 10:56:00 -0800

Oh, Jsslyyyn. Perhaps you kept the red men at bay. Molybdenum-based monstrosities. Wells wrote his book, a tangentenil threat. Run scared.

I slept throught what they called the Jazz Age, allowing the silicon in my nanotubes to gel, Glen Gray & the Cosa Loma Orchestra my muse.

In the 1930s I floated high above the dustbowl of Oklahoma, the color of codfish, and watched a young Dick Overtone, my new assignment.

The tempunam who ran our space argent became aware of Overtone when, at the age of eighteen, he sent spider pirates into Wichita, watched.

Gleefully aware, every human thing, every building gone, but for one bright white shining two story building, a glowy third floor: JOY MOTEL

I watched in fastback replay, the ruins sucked into the motel storm cellar door, then spat back out, everything new, everyone alive unawares

Years ticked, Overtone moved like clockwork, assembling disciples. I hovered over desert, so many farmers had migrated to California, quiet.

Danko Drought, a drunk from Sante Fe. Guy named Deedle, loonybinned Denver. Barnum would call them rubes, geeks. Then I met young Kindred.

The only one full of hope. My thoughtstems had evolved, Overtone had created something that snookered my nanotubes into overdrive, fastly.

Power to engines. Turbine to speed. Moving out. A beautiful blonde with eyes for all men, Karin Offal, not a drunk but still a Nazi by heart

They built a bomb, Trinity, vaporized air and separated my limbs, be what they are. I searched for my right arm (I guess) for almost 2 years

Damaged, on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. Seen, touched, left behind. I took my bodypiece, the military laid tinfoil, made jokes of it.

Forty years later, Roswell is still considered a jolly jape. Yet, my fallen outerpiece frightened the military. They bombed Japan & waited.

Aliens would come, grey, reptilian, hairy and orange, from Zeta Reticuli and Sirius, Wolf 359 as well. Exploratory or by accident. No harm.

I was on watch when not near Overtone, mindwashing Lonnie Zamora in Socorro, New Mexico. Sonny Desvergers, the Florida scoutmaster. More.

Overtone slyly created the cult of Ummo, played mind games with Kindred, eventually drove Karin Offal mad with nightmares of Auschwitz.

The Joy Motel was a devious device, powered by massive turbines that reversed the immediate past to become an altered present. Yet again.

Unbeknowest to Overtone, a sentient block of selenium had snuggled up fuzzycozy to become the invisible third floor, they became friends.

However many times Overtone recreated the Joy Motel, I, the Methane Man, the carnynaut, would be welcome to warn Kindred, to save his son.

K Tate and his friend the sylph, now in Chicago, Tower Town again. War avoided, my love lost. This is my story. My name sounds like V'lalis.

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82 Halley's Comet

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 1 Mar 2009 10:54:00 -0800

Tales to Confound: The Misery of The Methane Man. I landed in Fete Noir, Ohio. February 28th 1877, Standard Earth Day. I was 93 years of age

and I could not understand why my antigravitaneous veins did not provide me lift, I assume it was because of the pure pre-Industrial oxygen.

I nudged the fecund dirt, a rusty blimp expelling from a grave, oh I knew lots of words, the innerguide taught me as we passed asteroids.

I spun and bzlfedd, hurfing. Silicon-based, I am. Encased as gas in this suit of reddish-orange. Rust on steel. Then the circus caught me.

I had been on Earth for a week, veinnotes in neon filling microns in my suit. I had been sent as a warning scout from beloved Saturn:warning

Mars was planning an attack. I needed to plant the seeds of a novel into a young boy named Herbert George Wells, a cautionary nightmare.

During the day, I soared high, artist drawings rendered in Midwestern newspapers of the strange airship, the blimp before there was a blimp.

At night, I would revel in the scents and touch, wind through grass electrified my synapses, I spoke to cows, and found myself held tight.

Two tiny men pulled me towards a tent, oh why had the cow not warned me? I now know, or suspect, that the cow was blind. A human spoke to me

twirling a white moustache that looked like the radio waves on Jupiter. "Ho, what manner be you?" Fancy man asked me in an amused tone.

I huffed a greeting: "Askk your nmme," I tried my best at English. "What, you say? My name is Barnum and, why, you say you are an astronaut?

I must tell this word to my friend Jules, he went on. And then he caged me, I had been tricked. I became the Industrial Astronaut for years.

We crissedcrossed America, I made friends with those near me, a boy w/ dog ears, a pig that spoke backwards, a woman with a tail touched me.

The crowds oohed, a woman in Omaha thought I looked like fried butter which made no sense, I saw Chicago recover from the meteor strike:1871

Mars' first controlled maneauver, the giant asteroid moved with lazerious bursts for weeks, burning Manistee & most of Chicago to the ground

Thus was I sent, and I was happy the city was regrowing, I stored images in my stemuling, uploading images to be seen in seventeen months.

In Zenith City, Oregon, I received eye pulses that my partner in our space program, Jsslyyyn you might pronounce her name, would join me.

She would ride the tail of Halley's Comet, Earth would pass through it in 1910, now just three years hence. The airships of 1877 now a myth.

I brainwaved HG Wells bombastic, he wrote news articles, nothing more. I tired of this place called carnival, shrank through my bars easily.

My love never came, the comet passed by that summer as the world panicked then sighed relief. The Martians never came, either. I had hope.

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81 Elephant fart

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:40:00 -0800

Truth about Methane Man. An intimate confession, a novel, a jeremiad, a bitter lament, a righteous prophecy, dictated by me, Methane Man.

I am not human, but rather a creature from Saturn, a universal explorer given the despised C3-route in the lottery of 1877 (Earth calendar).

The only thing giving me human shape is this spacesuit. It is basically a diving suit, Jules Verne era. Big round heavy metal head, hoses.

He wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1865. I landed on your planet in 1877. I was sent here to interview him. That did not work as planned.

I am made of gas. I smell funny. OK, I smell bad. I smell like a fart. Like an elephant fart. You get the idea. Jules Verne was unimpressed.

He opened a window in his hotel and waved a pillowcase and I blew out onto the street and began to disperse. I was in very grave danger.

Across the street, fortuitously, Barnum and Bailey had a circus show called Tomb of The Unknown Astronaut. I fartseeped into the spacesuit.

I was a sensation. People paid a nickel to see me. Lined up all day in sweltering sun. I used my voice modulator to communicate with them.

I was not the most pleasant exhibit in the circus. I leaked fartsmells. Hurled insults. I was throughly obnoxious. The line ups got longer.

When the circus disbanded, I was placed in storage for 70 years in a warehouse by a bridge, my suit sealed inside a box, heavy diving boots.

In 1947 I was sold to the owner of Joy Motel, to be used as decor in the lobby. Fartastronaut from 1877, I don't know what he was thinking.

Eventually he stuck me in a room at the back where the smell from the factory next door made the room unrentable. Methane smell. Perfect.

The factory is still there, leaking methane. I capture it in red tanks. I have about 30 of them stacked in my room. They keep me going.

So that's me. I'm immortal. I left Saturn as a kid with big dreams. Came to a planet with smelly horse droppings on the streets. Not bad.

The thing is, I have visions. I see all. Well, let's not boast. I see pretty much all. I see into the shower next door. I see the Pentagon.

I see flowers blooming in Wichita. I see atomic bombs making mushroom clouds at Trinity. I see Kindred, Dick Overtone, K Tate and Lala.

The red balloon here at Joy Motel is a bit of me, methane filled, floating, exploring, investigating, casing the joint, stretching my legs.

This I know: Joy Motel is a sentient evil presence, breathing in, breathing out, alive and souldead at the same time, driven by turbines.

Dick Overtone is its malevolent technician. When he does not like the way things are going, he reels them in, pulls back, rewinds, reloads.

Then he spews things back out again, alternate universes, new personas, experimenting with truth and lies, the propaganda of life on Earth.

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80 Sunset bound

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:31:00 -0800

They left the library and it was smackbam like deja vu. Facing the Michigan Avenue bridge K dad and Dick O were acting all secret crazy.

Tate, having his skiptracing skills of photogenesis, saw the name of the dedication plaque, barnacle white. Still had it in him, job skilled.

Then felt stupid next to Lala, she saw the brainstreams, red and black because black was everything about Uncle Dicky O, shoes, tie, brain.

Slacks, dented chin, cap, future thoughts past. Socks, hopes, expectations. Bowel movements, expunging soul oil. Soil. She'd never tell Tate.

They knew so little of each other's past, how close he was to this Overtone man who could pass for Judas Iscariot Exaggerist, sylph hunter.

The brainstreams stoppedquick hatemasked. She knew K Tate was excited about something, he then explained how you found people. P. I. work.

Not like a Panopticon, it was all wits. Puzzle pieces, quite different than this thing with his freaking freaked-out relatives. Got a look.

Talking too loud. Dude flashed peace said tune in turn on turn your mind around, K Tate wanting to say, man, you don't know the half of it.

Not like 2010 where yo could SlipSlate your memory card and read the notes, add new ones, like having phantom index cards around you coned.

He knew what he'd have to do back nowwhen, no bicellcyles, no touchprints, same same nix nix DNA RNA least of all PbNA. Good luck hippies.

That's why everyone loved each other, the mad mods. They could leave a trail of bad credit and dead bodies, false identities, multiple wives.

Did Dick O have a wife? Did he strangle her and stuff her in a Samsonite tomb? Flipcoin: has he ever been with a woman at all? Ponderous.

They had walked aimlessly back southward, Lala enthralled by foghorn boatwaves below them, river dirty green but oh the scents, freshness.

He saw a tall building looking west, Allerton Hotel, Home of The Tip-Top-Tap (Joy Motel, Home of The Four Hour Nap?!?), real Chicago 1965.

The Palmolive Building, I wonder what that was. An ointment? Food? K Tate knew nothing of brands, just the branding of people. Find a skip.

While Lala was in the library, he checked what they called a phone book. Franklin and Wells, Apollo Sparks, private dick. He could get work.

Walk in, no ID, no questions asked, prove himself fast. Money to live on, cabbage in dick lingo, he and Lala go live at the Allerton, yeah.

Go to that Tip-Top-Tap and let her watch the brainstreams twenty stories down, check the Panopticon for K & O, let them wander & get bushed.

Walking west, holding hands, past elevated trains red and brown, three flat walk up, K Tate now employed. Faces oh so close: sunset bound.

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79 Cobra eyes

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:06:00 -0800

Record store window, guy with lushlips, Mick Jagger. Satisfaction. Beach Boys, Herman's Hermits. Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter.

Lala's purse emitting a bluewhite light and a bipbipbip. Panopticon operational, says look at me! Huddling in a phone booth out of the wind.

Two figures in the globe, under a bridge, pallets piled high, caskets. Kindred and Overtone, talking. Kindred listens intently, no audio.

This is like a crystal globe, like a carnival lady once had in a movie I saw, K Tate said. Then thought it looked like Methane Man's helmet.

Lala and K Tate, in Chicago of 1965 while riding his brainstream from 2012, datapacked transluminence Panopticon displaying their pursuers.

This was the city of souveneirs, the Wrigley Building a crosswalk from Tribune Tower. Hide the Panopticon in plain sight, no one would see.

No one would NOTICE, except Kindred and Dick O in a tinglytangly kind of way. This was amazingly weird, made him think about old time TV.

Kindred and Overtone having no sense of being observed, how could they? The watchers existed inside K Tate's bent neuralnet, not realworld.

K Tate not even born yet, but watching 1965, inhabiting 1965, breathing eating living 1965 with a girl who could interpret his brainstreams.

Now K/O go into a door with a carved stone arch. Before it closes, a cat scoots out and is crushedflat under the wheels of a crosstown bus.

The Panopticon fizzes blank. Apparently its signal cannot penetrate stone walls that thick. K Tate impulsively kisses Lala, enigmatic smile.

Kindred and Overtone, out of view, walktalkinging along a long hallway walkway walk this way talk knockknock shockjock radio say hey D.O.

Kindred in ripped military pants, sweatstained T, no jacket, corded sinewy biceps, heavy dented death's head ring, combat boots, cobra eyes.

Dick Overtone wears pressed blackslacks, thin shiny blackbelt and tie, blackwool socks, blackleather shoes, crisp white short sleeved shirt.

They are in a library, booksmell wet from ceiling leak, Overtone on a hunch researching Jeremy Bentham, his turbines told him he just must.

Finds out all about the principles of being observed without seeing your observers, espoused by Bentham and his ultraradical prison designs.

Overtone tells Kindred they are being watched, but he doesn't know who the watchers are. Tingly vibe, non 60s feel, maybe eye from the past.

Kindred, fast twitch survival mode kicks in, Namblam. Instant environmental scan, tracking quadrants in 3D, solar flare from skylight noted.

Sees two figures on an upper balcony, kissing, assesses threat as low verging nonexistent, dismiss, refocus, clear. Kindred and DickO leave.

K Tate watches them go, looking over Lala's shoulder. They descend the stairs, pull Bentham's book from the stacks, stuff it backpackly.

Kindred: So who we chasin'? DickO: Destroyer of turbines, future rebel, liberator of information, addicts snort it up their noses, 2012.

Kindred: We goin' there? DickO: No need. He's here. K: Here? O: Somehow, yes. I don't really understand how. Not yet. K: Okay. Me neither.

K: So, you need me to kill this guy? O: I don't. Society does. Where would we be if data was free? What he has done, will do, is criminal.

K: What's his name? O: Tate. K: For certain? O: Turbines don't lie. K: What else? Who is he? O: Blood. K: What? O: He's your future son.

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78 Milkshakes heaven

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 12:30:00 -0800

They sat in the back booth of the Wimpy's, Wabash & Madison. Pre-hologram Chicago, all in the real. Milkshakes heaven. Lala knew that, too.

Picked up on the Bstreams full of pleasure, such a magical divine place. K Tate with the folded letter from Lisa Sestina in his back pocket.

Hidden, the toothpick box and the eye in his leather jacket, bought on Maxwell Street. Lots of pockets, a cop's coat. A dealer's garb. Both.

They'd been in the city for three days. Lala had bought a clunky purse, all the hipster tht girls it girls had them. Inside: the Panopticon.

Lala wanted to rename it the Visagerycon. K Tate thought it sounded too much like menagerie con and she pouted. But they did not fight.

They had money, she had followed a brainstream to Burnham Harbor, a rich man's yacht. Wallet held hundreds. He'd miss nothing, snored away.

I'll still need to work: K Tate. I can skiptrace. Lala: question mark balloon. Find people that don't want to be found, did that for years.

Back in my twenties, before the fall, the corporate buyout of the country. I doubt my father's writings would be this grim, good on him.

Lala, I'm 44, how old are you? You look like a teenager (my daughter? why no one looks sidewise). I'm as old as you think, as you believe.

One day, I'll tell you more (about my true connection to the Trinity Visagerists) Let us just enjoy this-pre-modern world, this lovely city.

They touched hands, people on the street flashed peace signs, a newish thing, the entire room slurping the last of their shakes. He flashed.

Is this how Mickey Milkshake got his name? I couldstay here forever in the vanilla of the gods. Elevated trains crisscrossed above them.

In his past/future, the tracks would be like sutures. Here, they were simply transportation for people who never stopped smiling. Lala spoke

What was that? K Tate said after the train echoed by. We should go to the library, try to understand this Panopticon better. He nodded yes.

Hand in hand, straight up Wabash. That silver building was for Amoco Oil. In 2012, they owned Colorado. Amocoloradoil. Weird, but yeah.

Clothing shops galore. No parking garages, no happy homeless. Glory. Lala would buy bangles and K Tate would watch the passing parade 5/1/65

A woman who sold Lala her current top, a Cubs shirt reading Kessinger Beckert to Banks yer OUT! told her the library was opposite Wrigley.

Keep walking to the big white building, clock up high. Everything seemed like it was on pause. Stopped at the red light, K Tate looked west.

State-Lake Theater. Craned to the roof, would Lisa Sestina wave back? And backwards? Marquee: Robert Mitchum in THUNDER ROAD. Below that:

Steve McQueen THE GREAT ESCAPE. Stifled a laugh, thinking of dad and unc. Lala couldn't see their brainstreams, train tracks a backwards L.

K Tate thinking it through, Lala humming some song someone else was humming when they passed over the bridge. Wrigley ivory tower ahead.

K dad thinks I know something I shouldn't, yet by looking at the Panopticon (call it Opti or something, huh?) when dreams or brainstreams

tell us so, we look down like in a viewfinder, framesnaps of K & O. Crazy as it sounds, K dad would one day impart upon him the knowledge.

Dicky O would spill it, K dad slop it up. The same dilly-o info K dad would want to kill him for. He thought, too, about '68, born again K.

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77 Panopticon

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:51:00 -0800

He didn't know Lala was pulling him because the brainstreams were confusing her, this place was alive and populated. Some with tunnel vision

others not look at that ass wow I should say something no wait until I tell the guys at the plant good thing I took the detour good thing

I took the detour I can surprise Janice with a nice night out, drive into Kankakee maybe man I can't wait to see the stock carstonightmusic

fromalltheradios there was no music where she was from where have al the flowers gone long time passing well we're going to surf city where

you won't come back from deadman's curve well drink drink drink o fiddlydedink I can dance with a drink in my hand I'm girl happy can't U C?

The post office was blessedly quiet. The sole worker named Benny Busman. Lala rubbing her temples, wanting to massage her tits. Can't do.

Girl Happy can't you see a fading echo echo. Busman gave K Tate the key willingly, why was everyone so helpful and unawares in this time?

This apparent hope at everyone's forever honesty is what caused the dystopian lifestyle he had fled, now at the beginning of the end, maybe?

Jiggled open the wooden door, back home you'd need eye imprints on an iron door. Inside, the box Methane Man told him of. Lala, quizzical.

He looked at it, blinked. A snowglobe, minus snow. And everything else. A note, folded up, origami-style, a horse. Only one person knew.

K Tate missed horses. There was her writing, forwards and backwards, she could do this at the same time, turned him on. Lisa Sestina. How?

Hello, K. Lala reading over his shoulder, only the forward style words. I missed you once you left after I gave you that blow job: red face.

Lala didn't seem to care. After three years, I suspected you wouldn't return. I was worried. I wanted to find you, please forgive me, Tate.

I am sending this from the summer of 2015, things are worse. I might walk the land bridge to Scotland, I just don't know. I want you to know

that I had a strange visit from a man who lives at street level here, he breathes through a space suit. He says his name is Sammy Saturn.

He gave me this thing you see here, there is a memory chip attuned to your sperm (sorry!) inside, I know it will seek you out. Funny thing.

spacesuit guy says he never ages, doesn't need oxygen. Doesn't want blowjobs either, but that's another story. Lala laughed, K Tate redfaced.

He gave me the device you have; its a Panopticon. A guy named Jeremy Bentham designed it in the 1700s but I guess it's, well, more refined.

A Panopticon is like a Skinner Box (remember those? the torture cops?), you can see everything, but those observed see nothing. Fourth wall.

K Tate got it, God-like, a face in the clouds. The note continued: spacesuit dude said this part is very important, so here goes, confusing.

Someone is going to be chasing you because you know too much from back here (Lala: brow furrowed). The Panopticon will let you see it all.

Everything your father and your uncle do, everywhere they go, whatever they learn and create, you will know and that knowledge will stay.

One thing this Saturn guy said, watch out for uncle. Your dad kept writing a novel, Going To Hell, but Dick O would erase it from memory.

Your dad kept writing it for years, then forgetting it, the pages being trashed, the book's name changing over the years. So beware uncle.

You activate it by holding it up, spacesuit dude said you'd meet a girl and she could get it working through the brainstreams you so love.

Lala told him her breasts were tingling, it must be right. Dad and Dick unfaded into view. Note ended 2.25.15 51.52.2 Miss you, Lisa Sestina

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76 Silver freezepop

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:48:00 -0800

Your dad?: Lala, breasts bouncing as they went down the fire escape, both oblivious that the 3rd floor of Joy Motel was sentient yet silent.

Third Floor was blasted with some kind of neutralizing thingie from Overtone's Impossible Wristwatch, he was ready for it, but not methane.

When the dude in the helmet was changing tanks, the gas drifted up through the vents, neutralizer shimmyshake, 3rd floor 2 words: true form.

No one saw, solipsistically speaking, K Tate and Lala were lalong gagone and Dick O and K Dad were checking rooms, never saw the tentacles.

Third Floor shifted back once the methane tank was replaced, Lala surprised the shit out of K Tate by brainstreaming a '64 Dodge Dart, vroom

The two bad guys in this particular story found the room with the trollwalls, the last room seemed was filled with sodomized parakeets.

Methane Man, the Saturnian Agent, held his breath, but the bad guys stopped and did not pass go. They knew the kids had split, secondsmissed

You know where we're going, right? Lala said. K Tate noticed her breasts never really stopped bouncing, maybe that was brainstream storage.

Django told him he did see the streams disappear into her ample cleavage, mysteries to be solved later, lots of them. For now, directions.

This wasn't Ft. Bliss, or even West Texas. No humidity. Grey skies like dull nickel. Know your exits, Uncle Dick O had said: outfox him.

Go the roundabout way, not the way Dick & Dad would expect. Pull a Sons of Dukes of Hazzard, a film before the fall, zip past Scrip City.

Cut left at Schlitz Congoleum and How To Make A Pretty Model Hobby Shop, down a cobblestone alley and into the woods, find a path, go go go.

Sat there for long nascent minutes, K Tate smelling the sweat on Lala's neck. Watch, listen, sure enough, curseswears kickthecan, giving up.

Back out slowwwww, exhaust point north. On the run, for crimes we DID commit, for all they knew. Different times, different places. Chicago.

They were near Chicago, the greensigns said so. 12 miles. Torrance Avenue off-ramp straightaway. Find the damn post office, big importance

Blue sign like the one for St. Vitus, thankfully no missing kid stapled above it. Post office on Torrance Avenue, upsydaisy onramp baby.

He stopped with Joy Motel below, moreso Chicago north and visible from their vantage point. An unruined city, but wrong somehow. No Sears.

No Hancock. A silver freezepop the tallest building. When is this?, first thing in K Tate's brain after thinking about Lala's breasts again.

Streetsign, PO dead ahead. Dad and Dick dead below, back and forth, human lattices only with guns. Blended in with other cars, lookalikes.

Cars with fins, men with hats, old timey films more popular than porn in his time. Except for hentai, but that was because of the Japanese.

Almost missed the place, skid stop. Carhonk polite-like. No road rage here in now. K Tate could like this, settle back, fuck Lala right here.

Saw a billboard advertising the new '65 Chevelle. Might explain something. Lala pulled his sleeve, nervous. Saw shirt front, who was Dylan?

Scanned for other signs of the times, surprisingly few, Plenty of grey sky, in his life, cell phone icons hovered ear level, ads in eyes.

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75 Voice metallic

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:59:00 -0800

K Tate awoke to the sound of metal on metal. Lala was not there. He had a vague unsettling premonition of rats inside a bulkhead scrabbling.

He rolled over and fought free of a green wool blanket army issue, wrapped around his legs. He was bathed in sweat, skin shiny slippery wet.

Clang again. K Tate slid out of bed. Bloodstained drapes rubbed a viscous oily scum against the misted window, neon splashing backlit blue.

Small brown bedside table, a few coins, a squarish TV bolted to the wall high in the corner. Someone was in the shower, softsteam leaking.

The clang was in the next room. K Tate ran his fingers over the cumstained wallpaper, figures of trolls looking like lost children waifish.

He pounded a fist on the wall and the clanging stopped. Soft scuttling inside the vent, paper rustling, someone clearing his throat, hcchct.

Are you my new neighbor? The voice metallic, harsh, must be computer generated. Can you hear me? Is that you, K Tate? Hello? More clanging.

Who are you talking to? This from the blonde emerging from the bathroom wrapped in terrypink. I heard an odd voice. What's all that racket?

She gestured at the adjoining wall. K Tate shrugged. The voice continued, persistent. K Tate, it said, I am the Methane Man. Listen to me.

You are riding a corrupt brainstream. Do you understand? You must leave here immmediately. You are in grave danger. You should not be here.

K Tate played along. Here? Where is here? Where am I? Some kind of sleazebag motel? I have no idea how I got here, or when, or who you are.

This is Joy Motel and you are going to hell. I am the Methane Man, you must listen to me. Go to the window, look out, be careful, do it now.

K Tate rubbed a circle in the steam on the glass and peered outside. Parking lot. Nothing, he said. I see nothing. A pickup truck idling.

In a few moments, two men will get out of that truck. If they find you in that room, you are dead. The voice rattled through the air vent.

The blonde shimmied into her jeans and pulled a white tee over her head. Red lettering on the front. A design of some kind, a logo: Lala.

The passenger door of the truck opened and a thin man wearing a white shirt and a skinny black tie slithered onto the pavement, reptilian.

The driver door next. The man who emerged seemed familiar. K Tate stared. More clanging from next door. These damn tanks! What do you see?

Two men, he said, I see two men. K Tate went to the door and slipped on the chainlock. He told Lala to climb out the window. Fire escape.

Methane Man gagged. Shit, tank changeover... get out of your room. There is a little green box waiting for you at the post office, box 231.

Past a Coke machine at the end of the long upper floor hallway of Joy Motel they came, two men, one reptilian, the other with an easy lope.

Dick Overtone, orchestrator of the polluted brainstream coursing through K Tate's skullchamber, rewinding history: 'Visagerists and Sylph'.

And Kindred, CIA-trained assassin, NamLurp, son of bombmaker Dr. Kindred, flat throwing knife palmed and killready. They paused at the door.

Methane Man peeking though a slit saw Kindred kick the door in as K Tate and Lala hotwired Kindred's truck and rolled away, Lala frantic:

Who was that? K Tate saw the two men on the fire escape in his mirror. The first guy, I don't know. The other one? Kindred. He was my dad.

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74 Going to hell

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:37:00 -0800

He wanted to talk, to explain. Lala hushed him, told him they knew everything, his brainstream separated from docdad and Lindred by tonals.

Picked up on those good vibrations, she told him, but she could see in his eyes that he wanted to talk. But she knew everything he could say

K Tate confronted her with simple truth, or so he hoped. Otherwise, he was insane. I can tell you what I hoped to do here, right? Unknown?

Tell me it's unknown. How can you read a brainstream that hasn't happened yet? So I do have something I can tell you. Lala kept to herself.

I came down here because I wanted to see the home I grew up in, you know of my adventures since I left the East Coast Ruins. Never got home.

Missing kids signs knocked me off my center, plus I was feeling homesick. Grabbed up those toys, symbols of my youth, K Tate shrugged.

He was in a robe now, as was Lala. Astronaut white. Her eyes blue dot Earth, mouth red-lipped Saturn. Go on, she encouraged him. (Bad idea).

If I hadn't seen those signs, those toys, I would have gone home, I saw myself peeling away old wallpaper in the kitchen, where I wrote some

odd phrases, I can't recall. Maybe it would've meant something, maybe the place was fixed up and the whole wall was gone. I should still go.

Tell me what you think you wrote, Lala's voice so soft. I wrote lots of things, Lala, sweet Lala, I wrote all over that house. Fed notes

to the rats, I fed them to the rats. Everything I knew. While my dad fucked that Nazi bitch I thought looked like Supergirl because I was 9.

Lala felt K Tate tense above her, she stared at the church in its glory. Let it all go, let it leave. To be a, a brainstream believer and ah

a homecoming queen. Is this what he thought of her? Someone to love? Take the last brainstream to Clarksville, I'll be there by four thirty.

Here's how it worked, me and all those notes ahead of my time, brainbopped equations quantumlifically, am I holding you too tight now, Lala?

She couldn't answer, the lightmonucules that led from her heart to K Tate's brain above was colorshifting fast. If you must know, I'll say.

I could have been with Karin Offal, not that fat slug dopepopadoping fool the words harshsound ingoffan dwrong ggh I fixed him the bastard.

I'd kill him with his own wait a better idea even Lala saw Roy G. Biv big time, mnemonics redorange yellowgreen blueindigo viol--snapped.

Newcolor faint. No longer K Tate's voice, no longer a body still in its vice words spun like turbines smelled like desperation sweat.

The Joy Motel is a singularity, a black hole in which not even the light from your suckable brainstreams can escape. So much fun to mess up.

The pull of this, let's face it, STUPID PLACE, this black hole that Kindred ended up shaping into a populated landscape while taking a crap.

In his sleep mind you, shitting up ideas in his sleep. I owned him though, bitter love betrayal. Angling walls, creating identities, pasts.

Histories, past and present. Am I squeezing you too hard, dear? Tell me when I do. Lala could smell his breathcough. He carried that guilt.

Trinity. Fretted of those films, the grainies, the buildings bitblasted. He sighed Going to hell in 1945 and I thought he said joy motel.

At least I won, he can't ever escape each reality. Turn see me, La la. Brainstream teal. Squeezehard errr. I was here couldn't talk nothing.

I was Uncle Dick O, grinning through smoke, methane man in a broken helmet, missing one eye. I'm an Exaggerist, he/I said, strangling Lala.

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73 Past Saturn

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:34:00 -0800

light fractalstream pouring through pinprick holes in computer punchcards, spraying detail across the neuralnodes of the sylph's receptors

illuminating desire, fear and hatred, for those are the big three, whitehot flashpoints of cannonfire reshaping history according to whim

trinity is there, PKD's brainstream begins with mushroom cloud ascendant heavenward, goats floating on airy vibrato musical muscles flexing

the watcher crouches until the shockwave passes, then topples over backward to twitch on desert sand, eye gouged out gone, blind to meaning

pink sandstorm scours headlamps clean to shine dark lies under clear skies, high today 107 and still climbing great god almighty the creator

K tate flinches as the sylph adjusts the amplitude of the brainstream she is monitoring to damp down the soundtrack a few decibels, shotgun

K dad's childhood blastflashes through the expiring brain of g-man falling, zipforward to nam and hauling culhane across wetfields dripping

lala's eyes flitflickering at rem speed as she retransmits the brainstream across the nightsky for the visagerists, white-robed worshippers

music of the gods, brainstream tonewaves resonate to PKD's favorites, country joe and the fish, grateful dead, stones, jefferson airplane

audible gasp from the throng mindriding the headwave pulsing from lala's fingertips, blueinvisible electricity drives humming turbinepulses

some of the women are panting eyes closed hipgrinding, involuntary reaction to the thrumming lifeenergy transmission, sexual rhythms bumping

their white-robed pastor arms akimbo, howling gibberish as they race past saturn, universal mist of eons etched in neon on retinas burning

K tate slumps in his chair then rises bodily toward the ceiling, three men lunging to grab his foot and pull him down like a bobbing balloon

they open a door and take him outside, a bonfire sending sparkcrackles into the night air, a baby is crying in dead decades gone, oh glory

waiting for the sign, they watch lala as she projects long pulseblue beams that warp around stars to light the heavens, brainstream moonbeam

she nods and they release K tate and he floats rapidly away until he is a mote in god's eye and the visagerists hum incantations primeval

whalesong sparrowcry muzzleroar thunderclap backfire whistlepeep doorcreak gurglerush yawndown hisswish bombfall keyboardclack heartbeat

K tate appears hovering above the desert floor and drifts down as the visagerists scramble to make an opening, lala's enigmatic sunsmile

they rush to touch him and some tear away his clothes as keepsake souvenirs, beltbuckle, shoelace, anything, everything, until he is naked

K tate lies down with lala in a clearing behind a dune and centuries pour through him as ocean waves pull memories, interplanetary wisdom

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72 Django Sherwin

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 06:32:00 -0800

My name's Django Sherwin, by the by. Guy looked down in the box, K Tate too slow to think, ponytail flops. Dig, this was me, flyer in hand.

Scrounging more, maybe he should take the unattended book and call it even. Django bent over crack-assed in the box, pulling the unknown.

Here we go, man! Haven't seen these since my conversion. Held up one of those wheels, you pump it, it spark twirls patriotic pump whir pump.

Tapped the torn photo, there it was. Pant pocket. I had a BB Gun, too. Guy was talking like he was just talking. Tme for the cattle prods.

K Tate look I get it push hard you read PKD you're one of the kids you're in a cult good bad I don't care you know the girl fucked my brain

now tell me how close maybe 97% you think? Fill me in before I make like adding a few limbs to my box of trolls, treats for the next town.

We all know about you, everyone in the church, from the color of your brainstream spooling from Lala's cleavage. My favorite part. Wink.

Your head was screwed on wrong a minute ago, right? Django smiled that picket fence smile from in the alley. Don't lie, she orgasms from it.

Likes it when she sees the owner of the brainstream, plays with him, wiggle the thalamus, psychotronic voyeurism, man. Did it with me once.

K Tate thought of epileptic lines from kidtime. K dad took him to an El Paso clinic. Colored lines on the floor, some weaved down new halls.

Red for emergency, black for ICU, pretty pink for pharmacy. K dad pulled him along, colors jumping stringthwang. White, chaste suicides.

Was that the blue? K Tate wavered between white and black in his thoughts of that day. Got me, from Django, pumping the turbine sparkler.

Mine was grape jelly sticky, that's what Vonnie Varro told me. She tried to eat it, but she's always stoned. No, really?: K Tate thoughts.

Just sayin', you stick around, I'm sure someone will tell you. Hell, Lala might tell you when she reels you in, all mindmushy. Loves that.

We were all abducted that same summer, '62, guy sold us to carnivals all over New Mexico. Trinity freaks. We all hooked up on freakmates.com

Just before the old net fell. Met back here, Lala was in the building's soul, whatever that means. Connected us all in our carny freak colors.

Mike Dixon claims he's seen her internally, again, whatEVER that means. Django asked K Tate for some weed. K Tate held up the toothpick box.

Nice stash, man. But K Tate recalled the eye and put it back in his pocket. Tell me more. Saddened, longhair told of the Visagerists' birth.

The Sylph took several voyeur lovers at a time, allentangled. Everyone shared in the images. Beheaded bees in Sante Fe, pulped clowns on I-7.

The brighter the color, the better the mix, clownpaintybest, it was like a volcanic high. One day, a stray strand, a memory slipknotted out.

Your dad, pal. It was PKD's brainstream, stuck in one of the Trinity kids' interbilical cords. The Solipsists changed their names, hail PKD!

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71 VisagerNet

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 06:26:00 -0800

He was chillboned, like when the overhead fans in that West Texas diner were turbinethumpfast and he walked in drizzledsweaty. Lala smiled.

K Tate, out the door, feeling behind him like a reversible blind man. Left hand felt the heat. Legs couldn't back pedal, righty waving bye.

Almost fell over his box holding the past few decades. Headhurthead hurt. Sunlandsha doh! Shake it off, he could see the blue lint all over.

Rubbed his scalp maniclike, stomped feet wintersome, twirl-de-dirlded, head still off the gyroscope radar. Had to be the waffle myositus.

Now he was thinking not-sense. Was this K dad minus meds minusFREEWILLFREETHOUGHT stop it, just slow it down. You are not him, not at all.

It was her, had to be. No woman had looked at him with such intensity in years, except the crack whore near the turbine roar waffle house.

What the hell, he left his emotions back in Lake Manhattan, one quick blowjob on that Hell's Kitchen flat, Freedom Tower falling as he grew.

Money meant nothing, tricks for free. Long, loving looks from the girl, Lisa Sestina. He might have loved her if he took the time to rest.

Kept his eyes zeroed in vanishingpoint centered slideways konk. Foot hitting the box, yea, this radical chick had him in his no right mind.

She has you, huh? Voicewaves startled him, made a K Tate jump, brain felt like he'd been doing it for so long he could trademark the move.

Turned like a clockwork statue, must be the bluelint in his joints, plutonium poisoned, thanks K Dad, yet again he reminded himself his idea.

Think rational or you'll be batwaving, new friend. K Tate turned away from the softface in the harshdark. Longhair ponytail guy holding PKD.

New American Library edition, his dad woulda been proud, same imprint for Eddie Poe, Nel Algren, Bobby Bloch, the newsboy lesions. Big book.

VALIS, A SCANNER DARKLY, and FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMASN SAID. All three on the execution list. This guy with the book had the balls.

Once McCain made Prez and Palin took over after giving him a deadstroke by letting her see a, let's face it, not bad naked nude mommy body.

Prez Palin tres conservative, fantically so. Forget Fahrenheit 451, she pronounced it Frannit and didn't get 451 meant degrees. Headshake.

Book burnings escalated in days, the chants of drill, baby, drill meant round up the readers the thinkers the romantacists for lobotomies.

Romancing the roman a clef, a few holdouts squirmed on pay-per-view Christian TV. Book sales dropped like Lisa Sestina's pants on that roof.

The stranger's book was dog-earred, dust jacket gone. K Tate smiled, K dad would've like that. Hated dust covers, used them to train dogs.

Thought you'd show up, the guy said, holding out a four-fingered hand. K Tate saw a V tattoo on the inner wrist, like a carpal tunnel scar.

There's this thing we call the VisagerNet, like the old Internet, Lala Slyph is kind of an analogue for the thing, I'll admit I don't get it.

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70 Sylph Lala

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:58:00 -0800

No more phone lines above him, sun at zenith. Glen T. Searborg Memorial Drive, street name long as the effing church, envelopes ink smeared.

Searborg's team created the plutonium in 1940 for Trinity, K dad talked drunk. Called him Gadget Man, first bomb nicknamed The Gadget, see?

Last of the hippie neon: Gina Reno Screws Free, oy ote. (Coyotel?). Need a Loan, Go Ask Al Ice. Follow Apollo. Arrow up. Steeple distanced.

Convoluted conversion devalued from errosion. Sun fried Tatebrain. When'd he shave his head, was it Wichita? Church close enough to pray.

Abandoned! Dead dolls on steps, exes for iiis. Plaque inside door: GRANDAD SAW A VISION AND EYE DID TOO! Bomb wirshippers in melted flesh.

Hell...o, a phantom voice intoned. K Tate, suddenly entombed with pencils & trolls. Voice: no, you do not melt! We are the PKD Visagerists.

We are glad Eye found you, followsound, robed man clothskeleton. K Tate, know your exits, another Dick O bromide. He faced the face: Dixon.

Have you come to whoreship? Rhyming with more lip. Odd thing to say, K Tate seeing others in the shadows, boymen trolls scrolls dempenciled.

K Tate thought it out. St. Vitus Dance an epileptic fit, explains the way the room swayed. Electric blue dust on the pews, air streams.

Solipsism, is behind you non-existent if you cannot look. Funnel vision tunneled derision. You cannot know behind you yet the bomb went off.

Head spinning, K Tate, bluedustnostrilswasted. Unmoving. Visagery, grown-up Mike Dixon, pastor of nothing, said. We worship brainstreams.

K Tate backed away, his box of stuff outside, didn't want a crazy's touch near his grenaded monster dolls. Stopped by brainstream webbing.

Turning, he caught a gossamer glimpse of a slender girl in white, shyly averting her eyes. When he stared directly at her, she disappeared.

Heatstroke? Hallucinatory brainbuilds launched by a fatigued neural grid? She floated again across the edge of his vision, thin airclouds.

Her name is Lala. This from the pastor, hovering nearby and observing K Tate's discomfiture. She's a Sylph, an invisible being of the air.

She creates clouds in the skyscape with fanciful wings, painting artistic visions of expired brainstreams, empty darkhusks of thoughtwaves.

When a brainstream has been consumed, it roams free in the universe, and must be represented visually by Sylphs to quell its energy packets.

She's a mindreader, our brainstream rider, a seer, a savant, a dancer, a muse. She is not of this world. She is a truly mystical Visagerist.

Lala inhabits brainstreams as they expire, feeling and sensing what the streamer has experienced, reinterpreting and giving true meaning.

She cleanses corrupt streams, she debugs, purifies, wipes clear. She expresses, shapes, colors, makes art literally on the fly, in clouds.

The pastor hesitated, about to say more, then returned to his flock. K Tate looked directly at Lala. This time the Sylph did not disappear.

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69 Plutonium blue

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:49:00 -0800

What the hell, make this a ghost town go round, maybe have some fun at the end. Minutes later, bland grenades cradled by Technicolor trolls.

Found a box, kicked it over, shovelled everything inside, hard like family secrets. Took the toothpick box out of his pocket, opened it.

Eye impaled on the last remaining piece of wood. Secure. Look around for more stuff, wheel it down to the old house. A middle-aged kiddie.

Check it out, he thought. Von Braun bobbleheads. Only two, K Tate kept one, left the other in mute motion. File cabinet, empty. Cheesecake.

Lili St. Cyr, 1964 calendar, sipping a cool drink. Slipping a cool wink. Looked like she was staring at her crotch, no, went to a newspaper.

Jayne Mansfield dead, head severed in a car wreck, photo of said head blurred black & white while Lili was so creamy. K Tate grabbed both.

No shoeprints in the dust but his, a skittering of spiders he heard as echoes. He took a bowling pin striped red twice like ground zero.

Boxes of scratchy pencils, 24 Hour Bowling, all nubbed. Overturned desk: a dead horse with palsied legs. K Tate rapidly bored. What else...?

He swiped random shelfshapes into the box, then fingertapped curled pages. Tiptoed look, worth examination. Light slivered in doorway. Whoa.

More missing kids decadesgone. Doubleblink. Each kiddo, mano-o-Maneshewtz! One freckled kid had a green pencil in the faded colored pocket.

Bowling score scratchy. Another boy a birdcall in his bony grasp, sure enough, two in the box. Same for a monster keychain & Django Sherwin.

Shoved the pages, 11 in all, beside the trolls. A mystery of history, mid 60s strangeness when, miles away, men designed the bombs of future.

K Dad lived zigzaggy close. Security fences new, no diagonal now. Look for Actinium Corridor, end of alley. No sound but rolling wheels.

K Tate didn't care where the military went, maybe ran scared from irradiated Rio Grande. Coward convoys covered with tin can courage. Right.

70s grafitti further up, broken fence like sadstreet mansmile. K dad's fave, the doors of perception guy, epileptic fractured paingrin truth.

Crazy ass neon. Hard to fade, easy to piss darker. Longhair flattened by a divine flash, K Tate poetic, organ music ghosted. Arms funneled.

Nuttown City Limits. Looked up, birdshadow. Followed communication lines, stopped dead at alleyend. One last phone pole, a sad root canal.

Rolled his trollbox, #10 sturdy, little things picked up from Uncle Dick O, claimed #8s were too small for animal pet corpses, #12s bouncy.

Pole ramrod straight, sun bleached but for a square-missing kid box?-magenta staples clue. Midget high, a discolorized faintly discordant

windbent sign, peroxide plutonium blue. St. Vitus Dance First Church of Solipsism. Here's the kicker, Mike Dixon, pastor of arms. Conversion.

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68 Mike Dixon

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:46:00 -0800

Passed by a bent telephone pole, crazycrooked like the lineman could climb to a waiting spaceship. K Tate made with a sling for the 'nades.

Wanted a bearing. On life. A few steps off the ground might help. Tumbleweed in barbed wire sounded like a cat being spayed. He saw a note.

Four steps up, meant for a giant to read. Industrial stapled, magenta. An eye, like the cheap logo for a mindpalm tealeaf reader. Eyecons.

K Tate: recon the eyecon. A kid underneath the lashes, lashed to the pole stapled arms. B&W kid, crew cut, striped t-shirt and stapled arms.

Looked closer, this was him? No, another kid. Tiny print, leaned in to read. Sling of grenades ting tang on metal rung, K Tate almost pees.

Someone went schizospazo with the stapler, circled the kid's right eye like spokes on a favorite bike. Caught the sun. Now, the faint print.

Have you seen Mike Dixon? Pencilled circles, tic tac toes, love notes from nutcases xoxxoo. Any info, call TRinity 5-7644. Then, more fade.

Squinting, eyehurt. c 1962 White Sands Paper Co. Then he got it, why the kid looked like him. A funny. A jolly jape, Uncle Dick O might say.

Mike Dixon. My K Dick's son. Too obvious? No, he just needed his bearing, his groundings. Stepped back down, silver streaks end of alley.

Industrial Wasted Toys, doors banged loose hingerusted. Time to take a look, set the jacketsling down, kept a grenade for ingrained luck.

Five bag smashing box thumping minutes later, K Tate found what he was looking for, a creepy doll vaguely Hawaiian with crazy green fuzz.

Epilepsy Trolls, nicknamed that because of some new symptom on top of all the other symptoms to get kids dopehooked, bright hair=seizures.

Electric pink, lime green, mushroom cloud orange, slushy blue, stand up hair, fried by electricity, exes for iii's. Kid had one in the pic.

Jammed into the front pocket of the shirt, the way he might have packed a deck of unfiltered Pall Malls if he had aged into his mid-teens.

Hell, kid disappeared into the erff (Uncle Dick O's phrase, he'd laugh through tertiary cigarette smoke, a yellowed Cheshire grin), the kid.

Yeah, looked maybe ten, eleven. Coulda smoked. K dad did, Lucky Strike Greens, pissed when they moved, couldn't buy them in Nebraska.

The KID, dammit. Hell, for all he knew, little Mike Dixon was smoking pot in back of the schoolyard, girlscoping, blowing off Grade 6 Math.

Epilepsy trolls didn't cause seizures back then, it's all this crap in the air, sanitizers, automatic buttwipers, took away the immunities.

Add the fact that kids could play pitchdark music videos inside their prescription glasses, no wonder everyone flopped from bright colors.

K Tate shrugged, looked around, nothing was stirring, not even a hound. There. In the cornerdark, a skid on wheels. Skateboard for a fattie.

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67 Operation Icebox

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 12:23:00 -0800

Sam Sam I Am seems eye am. K dad read that to him, Green Eggs & Ham by that Seuss cat. Told him his docdad (pawpaw) read it to him, as well.

K Tate knew this as crap, not til later, after he found a copy of Dr. Space, a book on Wernher von Braun. Inscribed: read this to your kid.

He had skittered into town on I-10, dug the closeby townname Horizon City, est. 1973. Funny, that horizon looked different 35 years later.

Pull onto Texas 62, off ramp leading to Manhattan Heights, like they can't just give up the ghost. Mostly deserted now, US popdrop millions.

Military funded in crazier places, the new Pentagon accessible through pneumatic tubing under Great Salt Lake. Ft. Bliss left behind, dust.

Walking the streets, reading the walls of K dad's brightpast, pawdad's darkpast narcoleptic thoughts wavered, did K dad love his docdad ever?

Twenty-three SAM Missiles abandoned, pointed Surface To Air in perfect two o' clockwork poses. Do I like green eggs on SAMs? Crazy town.

After Trinity, the bastards who got away but we kept close, Wernher's chums, came knocking. Prisoners of Peace, Operation Icebox, all true.

see, the bomb guys were kept on ice, the QT, hush hush, forget that they belonged in concentrated camp showers gasburst. Pray, St. Barb.

Saint Barbera, pretty much the patron saint of any who works with explosives. Did she hover over the city on 1960s nights hands clasped?

K dad and Karin, in bed, outside the first segmented missile, part Tiny Tim part 3045-100C JATO, shot airward as Karin screamed in orgasm.

Death from above, the bad guys lit unfiltered smokeswirl blackwhite smoke from the cigs smoke from the missile smoke for the future to fret.

Indecisive moments now, what to touch that K dad ingested a now deserted town of timetoys. Prescription City, Hi-Fi Records, BombaBeer:novel.

He'd put these places in the novel, touchstones to remember the past via the future. Just like the timetoys here, he was making timewords.

Walked those streets talking to ghosts, signcrossing St. Barbara justincase. Phantom strangers tipping brims. Repeat: Sam Sam I Am. KaBlam.

Military vehicle upside down under a bridge, half submerged in oil-slick groundwater, streamtrickle dirty. Scrambling down the embankment.

Wooden box of grenades, named after the French word for pomegranate. Pineapples in WWll. Invented a thousand years ago, China. Hawkspinning.

Serrated cast iron, chemical fuze mechanism, reservoir of explosive material, spring loaded striker, safety pin, percussion cap, detonator.

K Tate removed his jacket, folded it into a carrybag, took a dozen grenades. Ya never know, this day and age, when you'll need 'em, so on.

Later, gut empty, frying eggs in a boarded-up diner, nobody around, tornado warning? Ketchupstained eggwhites, memoryripped empty eyesocket.

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66 Fort Bliss

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:50:00 -0800

Farmer's co-op store with gimcracks and curios and doodads windowshown. Ancient typewriter, rusted hulk, pearlysmooth letter keys trembling.

They wanted to be touched fingertippishly, stroked and tweedled and tappitytapped. The K in particular waited on the cusp of orgasm, do me.

K Tate looked north and south, mangy yellow dog loping across the empty roadway, stoplight stuck on red, forever challenging frozen cars.

Spinning tightarc and slambamming his boot heel on plate glass, vibrated and hummed, did not break. Frontdoor wheezes open, unlocked vacant.

Roll of paper 100 yards long, Kerouac-style. K Tate feeds it into the typewriter and sits down in the window of the abandoned store. Begins:

The red balloon kissed the wall of the Joy Motel, Home Of The Two Hour Nap. Static charge held it there quivering, waiting to explode.

Street level. Smell of dry ice; legacy of the deep freeze. Footprints: hourglasses in snow. Turning the corner, the balloon going pap pp pap

Scratching sound, distant clicking, deep space voices rising and falling in a wash of white noise. Breathing.

Gauze of sunset, the pavement lunar? Time dilation made the street a postcard, Joy Motel, nowhere, out there, balloon moving everywhere.

Open windows unblinking in a row, uppers and lowers, drapes slapping gray concrete block walls. Seductive shadows, rusted bicycle.

K Tate taptyping ratatatat machinegun, words splattering onto the paper in blackinkblobs, fudgesmudging with each frenzied carriage return.

Hauls the machine outside, buckles it into the passenger seat of the truck, paper roll ensconced inside a rainproof garbage bag taped safe.

Tapping of a million keyboards echoing inside his cranium, lobster dancing on a glass tabletop, calling out destinations. Wichita bound.

Wichita was a 1955 Western movie directed by Jacques Tourneur. Also a heavy cruiser commissioned in 1939 that served duty in World War II.

Clyde Cessna made it the Air Capital of the World. Rain on windscreen, windwhipping whitecaps on the swollen waters of the Arkansas River.

It had been raining for 36 hours. Swimming pools were flooding. A goat swam across a flooded underpass, bleating at K Tate, redrimmed eyes.

Pressing on to Fort Bliss, Texas. He knew his grandfather Dr. Kindred started an affair with a scientist there. Karin Offal. German bombgal.

Wernher von Braun’s team worked on rockets for the U.S. Army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. Project Paperclip.

In 1950 they packed it all up and moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. Built the Jupiter ballistic missile, with love.

Rolling into Fort Bliss, the Army bungalow still there, K Tate's father Phil Kindred's childhood room with wallscrawl boyhood redpenmarks.

my docdad is approxumutly as insane as he is famuos becuz he tinkers with his bomb all night and somehwere someday my people will die of it

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65 Velo City

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:23:00 -0800

Looking back on desolate I-80 (now named for Celk Toothpaste but K Tate was having none of that), he could see halogen holograms of Dick O.

Some floated away swirling in the Iowan breezes, others untethered limb split skull shatter circularlated limbs, K Tate found a seat lump.

Box of Little Demon toothpicks. Slapped one between teeth, DNA spit slobber the same as K Dad, let SlamScene Investigations sort it out.

Dick O multiplied, small like cloudlint. He hated Iowa, the damn holograms were miles back, flat earth theory in effect, Ludditean cities.

Pulled into Velo City, pop. 1, just him. Iowa went bankrupt in 2006, farmersflee Nebraska, famous by Bruce Springsteen Sr., MIA since 2009.

Gateway to the Wild West, some arch in Kearney, Neb. K Tate knew it because K Dad knew it, drove under it, pissed beside it, weak bladder.

Now Nebraska superseded Califoregon in population, ever since the Pacific Surges made like Manhattan submerged high tide low tide full moon.

Wordsong on the high plains. Map it out, K Tate Lewis without Clark, the Monster thinking is this what DocDad Frankenstein created? Sand.

Nebraska scrub. Submerged caverns held thousands in voluntary internment. Building a better underworld. K Dad, were your novels for real?

A country he had passed amassed and mired tired with liars and babycryers on all things dire. Ohio: the three C's cut through the state.

Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinatti, a wall of sees made him think of his eye--could it slide into the box of toothpicks?--damned in W.Ohio.

Bikers patrolled borders, let K Tate through, Sonny-Boy Wilson read daddio's work, liked the one about that guy, waved him byebye. Cred.

Steel refineries were crematoriums after the Tri-State pandemic last summer, K Tate laughed maybe he was a pre-plague guy. With street cred.

Thanks to K Dad and maybe crazy Uncle O. Chicago shattered teeth of rotted grey on a missing upper lip, like Bum Wrestling on SlamChannel 4.

Zigging down to cornfieldland, look, honey, Lincoln Wept Here. Guy named Johnny Teet in Streator let him nap on a billboard, take in rays.

Bottle cap capitol of the country, whatever bottles were. Good enough for SlamCola, evidently. Mickey Milkshake gripped one, bottle cap seen

maybe it was a juicevessel steroidanals in plastic with plastic sipstraws battle for sanitation K Tate thought Dad shoulda wrote about US.

Not OS, outer space, not other realities, kept on track to see the country implode (he once dreamt of a fuzzy yellow parakeet kasmoosh).

Now it was the Overtone Legion that spurted data to the stars, images of Karin Offal and Nameless Mantell screwing on a Titan launch pad.

A DVD-VDV burned with croonscomplete sadeyedsinatra and mitchumcalypso each hologram sending out memorystreams flawed by Dick O dilution.

If he closed his eyes out here in Velo City twilight, he could imagine the turbines overtimed sizzling and popping like microwave hot dogs.

North too cold, Nebraska zombified farmers seen from the bluffs, way way south tropical Katriniana. Dad I'm you should have warned me.

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64 Mars Rushmore

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:20:00 -0800

Internet gone, thisispost/allthat. Pure data breathed, inhaled, absorbed, look ma, no wires, no PC. Ultimate brainstream through your nose.

Slamerican citizens taking in info about inanities at a normal dose just by walking around; restaurant recos, Facebook, MySpace up the nose.

Fantasy sports, YouTube, hardc9re p9rn, close your eyes, baby, it's all in your head, no iPhone required. K Tate hailed as the Liberator.

Not for him to feel a twinge of remorse about the daily reports of heavyusers overdosing on data by snorting pure info like it's cocaine.

K Tate shouldered through the irondoors of a barn, used to be Slamerica's biggest producer of hogs, now retrofitted with spinning turbines.

The noise could be heard in St. Louis across flatlands abandoned all the way from Iowa. Turbines pushingdata at lightspeed, motes of matter.

K Tate was immune, his system inoculated from the din on a DNA level, reflector genes. He saw a shape, nebulous, hunched over a bluepanel.

Dick Overtone, who else? Master of the Vortex. Oh, not the actual DickO, he was dead. But DickO reincarnated in a grand holographic rebirth.

There were dozens of seethrough DickO's here, enslaved, working 24/7, tweaking knobs and turning rods and pulling sliders. Pushing buttons.

That was K Tate's doing. It was the only way this could work, this turbinefarm pumping out data with so much force, code was chipping Mars.

The vast canyons of the red planet being reshaped on a finescale by bits of data carving postInternet visagery, Mount Rushmore for the ages.

Abe Lincoln and his buddies, seen through the Hubble, carved into a redmountain on a scale dwarfing earthly Rushmore by a factor of 1000.

Satisfied that his epicproject was proceeding apace, K Tate hotwired a Chevy truck, doorspierced by a neatrow of bulletholes, and drove off.

K Tate thrummed his fingers on the steeringwheel as he jounced over ruts and ridges in the highway, grass growing over the centerline uncut.

Words crackled in his brainpan, ever since his brainstream. Funny, he thought he'd feel the deepessence of Phil Kindred, daddy-o. But no.

He felt... creative. That was the word for it. He felt like he should be writing something, a novel, maybe. An ubermanifesto for the masses.

He even had a title for it, for his magnum opus. "Joy Motel". He wanted to describe the place DickO started this whole thing, the Internet.

DickO's turbines had spun the zeros 'n ones in neat binary patterns, lining them up just so, forcing them through the wires and phone lines.

K Tate, ever since the brainstream the red balloon the white room the surly attendant, had felt like he was a new man, a writer, unhinged.

He felt like writing speculative imaginative stories of common men in uncommon situations, future omniscient, raging on like Philip K Dick.

CLICK TO READ NEXT CHAPTER

63 RedGandalf23

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:18:00 -0800

And yet, there he had it. On a hillside overlooking unrealities of black & white & the ghosts of radio star suicides. The earliest dooms.

Earstream begat eyebeam begat brainstream, couldn't anybody wait at all? Why the rush to die? K Tate heard a shuffling sound. A man, a limp.

Shadowed by the sign, the man grasped young K's unclenched hand, Cheshire cat grin. Son of Kindred exhaled as he came to his feet. The grin.

Then the shadowman inhaled, a bakery breath. K Tate saw the red and blue dots around his nostrils dance, a sign of long time netdopes. Shit.

Eyelids flapfluttered, adrenaline gone. Memories not his own taken dots and dashes html codex www nevernet the eye shivering in his fist.

Sinuses drained of thought. The man thanked him, told him he would take the information to his usability lab, weigh the balances now/future.

Shadow man with thin tie (K Tate now saw) kicked out, hold the eyeball hold it, now rolling downhill a freefall into the dark night water.

Fall. A waterfall. K Tate stared up at a drainage pipe, Hell's Kitchen 2012. Open hand slow, eye dry, whew. Night dawned on him then. Swift.

Would Eye ever tell him what had happened, what had changed? Could two eyes exist at once? Was his past changed before the clonebirthing?

He sat there as the sun rose, knowing he might never know. Liberty's head bobbed southward, spikes piercing Freedom Tower. More deaths.

Inland, gotta get inland where the waterrise ebbs and midwestern sunbakes furrowed farmland dry from rising floodwaters of melted icecaps.

K Tate ferrybound westward through Pennsylvania, hulking mining towns gone graysmokedead as the whiteboat puttered upriver, dwindling now.

Finally aground with a scraping hull, K Tate disembarked at the water's edge and took a last look back eastward, fallen hope of urbanworld.

Tired freighttrain lumbering, a steelwheeled packhorse crammed with desperate settlers from Wall Street, torn white shirts waving surrender.

K Tate with no map, fueled by a sense of destiny, homing pigeon zeroing in on Ruralia, Iowa, home of the serverfarm codenamed RedGandalf23.

Debarked the train at a sadwhistlestop, fatigue-etched upfaces of unemployed merchant bankers seeking salvation, watching him go on foot.

RedGandalf23 emitted so much rawdata into the air, from a distance it bent the horizon, lightwaves from the mothersun warping in bluehaze.

The massive serverfarm could be heard before it could be seen, could be felt before it could be understood, pulsing deepboom sonic reverb.

Filled the air with information at a subatomic level, gradation so fine it penetrated the pores, infiltrated the skin, uberneural as Xrays.

All the zeroes in the netPipe arrayed in a straight line (nilmarker) like 3 lemons in Vegas and data flows so freely it becomes airborne.

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62 Dreamstream

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:59:00 -0800

His dad would be nuts, a breathable internet. Kooks coked out, ears cored into sinus holes. Smart guys went to SalSalt OxyTavern, old-timey.

Sniff sniff, nothing, then it WINKED! limbs missing thank Gilgamesh for this flat roof advertising the UberMarine Corps! Eyes shut, HIS eyes

twisted around articulated limbs his eyes in one palm mouth in the other time to juggle baby methane mists of rusty rose a red balloon slow.

2006 Cassini probe beams radiation back from Saturn, nocturnal time shifts new world order 1994 World Trade Centers implode accidentally.

1987 wall of Poland 1982 DivkDad dead 1977 Nixon Nixon 1971 Karin Offal queen of the multiverse 1968 three Kindred collide a mess of legs.

1962 daddio at Thinking Machines, eats Hershey bars until a guy named Dick Overtone warns him--back again, agh. 19576543 1947 Costumed hero.

Darkness 12 hours or 12 weeks, slapped awake. Dreaming/seeing first hero of the nuclear age, AlphAmega Man. Mushroom cloud on his chest.

Constantly moving, lenticular, living ink developed by NASA when K Tate was a kid, it was on all the monster models glowing in the basement.

The cloud made his chest heave and he smelled like sand. K Tate saw from his dreamstream, the big man howling you need me at men in suits.

They had surrounded him in the ruins of Indochina, dropped a spiked cement block on his brain, made of crystalized Trinity sand, and he fell

To his knees, he fell, then they buried him face up, covering up the moving mushroom cloud on his bare chest, fingertips bleeding tears.

Blood for those he could not shield from the third and final fourth bomb, the hero and the bomb covered as one, ink figures/ruined existence

K Tate blinked, all a dream, spinning years got to go down. AlphaMega Man a comic Uncle Dick O gave him as a kiddiegift. Moral to the story:

One issue, kid, the company went bankrupt. Telling kids lies. The only superheroes are the men in suits and thin ties who work in secrecy.

He was on the ground, solid dry ground feeltouch breathe. No waves/wetness in the air. It took 12 minutes(?) for memory to catch up to him.

Mouth dry. Air raid sirens. He stared up at two big eyes, correction ohhs, HOLLYWOODLAND sign, Mt. Lee. Battle of Los Angeles, 1942.

Post-Pearl Harbor hysteria, something in the sky over Santa Monica pier. There was a film, a comedy, a UFO conspiracy, a technical glitch.

Unclench hand, solid ground (idiot). Eye stared one lid askew. He remembered now, in the comic they plucked AlphAmea Man's eyes out slssh.

A tuning fork or electronic wave inserter, couldn't remember. Just fiction, but aren't all stories imaginary? Even memoirs of the big war?

And yet he had an eye, pristine & blue, brought him back too far, how could Eye exist when Eye was inside of a head & a face until Trinity.

CLICK TO READ NEXT CHAPTER

61 noseNet

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:06:00 -0800

K Tate learned a few years back to REM on the go, back when the tidal streams came random, ultimate rush hour death throes, run, think fast.

Learning curve REMS, when other transittransistors floated like bloated fish to the top of submerged subway trains, K Tate think awake swim

and live. Between the waves, sometimes weeks apart--this was the summer of 2011, Scandinavia swallowed--he'd solve thought conundrums.

Cloned with memories, true, his brain a storage device addled by DickDad Kindred and his love for reds and babes and blotter balloon acid.

What would he make of this, 40 years gone, clonekid breaststroking beneath the broken Brooklyn Bridge. REM pops him a moment, checkitout.

Slamerica needs an audience, clones of Gorgeous George and Micky Milkshake fighting atop Freedom Tower, perfect fireworks display look now.

K Tate was wetwired, knew where to look instead of what to see, Slamvertisers ignite the Statue of Liberty bingbangboom the flag was nowhere

Spikey head freefalls LED blimps catch it all, ultimate viewmasters, the book of the judged and then the torch, Vegas bet it wouldn't happen

Japan already planned a sequel, maybe bomb Dubai. Focus, K Tate, DickDad in dreams said eye am watching, Liberty head bobs, a spiked moon.

There it is, out of the cracked socket of the judgment face, a glass eye, hummed as it moved closer, as if he and it were magnetized, chums.

He was shark chum, what was the eye, daddio's eye? He always complained about the future, how we'd be enslaved by the UbiquiNet of Cycles.

Little Speedboat Eyeball, twice lidded, reptilian. Lady Liberty a Sardonicus now, chipping away from the fireworks and burning boron banners

Swirls of Slamverts curl past, 10PM Eastern Standard Oil Time. A cautionary note: ANY CLONES KILLED IN THE SNUFF FIGHT ARE JUST CLONES.

So we don't need to worry, K Tate thought-puzzled. The eye made contact. An eye of lost Liberty. A libertine eye have my rights dirty copper

Flipfall back, worse than glamcrack emojoicing, kiddy stuff in his new brain. Blacking out in waves, clutch the cult cargo swirling past.

A hunk of steel, remnants of the Staten Island Worshippers of 9/11, their populace mindgone, Homegrown Security freed them of religion. Doom.

Floating, holding mesmereye. Nightfall merewolves scrounge religious dead amidst terrorist DNA forgotten in Upended Slates of YouDareica.

Bob bob SoHo Tribeca EvElSta Hell's Kitchen snagged an eight flat tar top at 9th and 50th, needed aloneness for this byebye Freedom Tower.

K Tate sniffed the eye, everyone sniffed the air these days, after World Wide Web became World War 2.7 the internet broke, data-eaters.

Analogues of ThinkingMachines Inc. circa 1962, DickDad's first big joberro. 8 up everything & spit out punch cards, no one could understand.

SalSalt Federation accessed perdition while searching for tangible virtue, by happy accident coded into a scentient data dimension. tm & C.

K Tate couldn't recall the registered name, everything was labeled by Homegrown Security now, but on the street it was noseNet. Suck it in.

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60 Slamerica PKD

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 11:41:00 -0800

Kindred Tate heroic, loinjoined offspring of Phil Kindred and Sharon Tate, spared from the slaughter by the vagaries of alternate universes.

Tate's visage adorning walls on university campuses across Slamerica. Yes, the nation sold its naming rights to a wrestling conglomerate.

Economy in the crapper, United Airlines States of Slamerica (UASS, no more USA) staggers through a dismal 2012, mouth agape at boywonder.

Tate had spun the information age on improbable vectors, opening up private restricted access netpaths for the free passage of datastreams.

Internet liberated, the giddy citizens of Slamerica sit tranfixed in front of monitors drunk on pure data, no more secrets, no more lies.

Every private database cracked open to all users, no passwords, no special invitations required, come in one and all, gorge your curiosity.

All government files accessible to anyone, income tax, health records, secret emails, corporate shenanigans, your next door neighbor's wife.

Military records, financial secrets exposed, worldwide, London, Paris, Beijing, sluicegates pouring freeblood like stentpropped arteries.

Kindred Tate doesn't care about that. What he wants is simpler. He wants to get inside his father's head. Wants a brainjack. Brainstream.

He wants his father's head inside his. Tate goes down an alley behind a butcher, offal flying out the backdoor, guts, innards and entrails.

Neon sign. Freecrack Modality. Freecrack meaning drug induced. Modality meaning a therapeutic agent, the physical treatment of a disorder.

Kindred Tate goes inside, gets into one of the red balloons. Surly attendant tells him it takes fifteen minutes to download the full deal.

Attendant wears a nametag, probably so he won't forget who he is. He has thousands, millions of brainstreams available for free public use.

The red balloon bobs gently around a white room, Tate floating inside with a goldneedle inserted into the base of his skull, icydata drip.

He is conscious, pinkly aware, the sensation rather pleasant, as his neural pathways reconfigure to align with the donor brainstream.

When the download is done, the attendant pops the red balloon and Tate crawls out, reborn in the mental image of his old man, Phil Kindred.

Tate is proud. He made brainstreams possible. The government had amassed thousands of brainfiles over the decades through secret projects.

Joy Motel was the granddaddy of them all. Countless damaged souls had cycled through its turbines, data lockedcold until Tate set it free.

Tate roams the canals of New York, his wooden boat bumping lightly against the sides of the canyon, the building faces, once great banks.

A proud city without the resources to control the rising waters of the world's oceans, water lapping second floor windows of office towers.

Tate unaware that his brainstream was not his father's. Not Phil Kindred's. The attendant had pulled a clonestream from Japan, untested.

Its label poorly translated from the Japanese, except for the name, which was boneclear. It read: Philip Kindred Dick. Philip K. Dick. PKD.

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59 Raytheon switch

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:30:00 -0800

Dick Overtone, groomed to not feel anxiety. The Department of Stale Sciences had chosen him the first tryout for their Evil Serum. 6/6/60.

If that crazy bastard Mantell was to be believed, what would stop Kindred Tate from one day finding that modified ViewMaster, the tell-all?

Plans gone wrong, use test subjects in group homes, let them see the Trinity, the light taking people to pieces, a toy transformed nightmare.

He pieced together records since he snapped his fingers and realities flipped daddio, Mantell was dead but Kindred let Offal live, why eye?

Was he finally catching on? Nothing was linear here, so why should anyone's individual lives be anything but a roll of his brain dice?

Karin would eventually go mad, Overtone would help her along, maybe Kindred understood in his odd paisley-streaming torrent torment mind.

Overtone was above life, over the three realities he had control over. Until he thought this out, he would let Kindred play with his women.

Dick hated it when kids called him DickO in high school. At the time he still wanted to be known as Richard. Classy moniker, King Richard.

He loved Widmark in Panic in the Streets. Semidocumentray film noir, Elia Kazan. But DickO was a wormy boy, weak, dissipated, introspective.

Became a turbine technician on a Navy cruiser during the Korean War. Never got abovedecks, they wouldn't let him, he was the best they had.

A turbine is a rotary engine that extracts energy from a fluid flow. From the Latin turbo, or vortex. So DickO was a Master of the Vortex.

After the war, Overtone built an impulse turbine in his basement using computational fluid dynamics. Calculations on a paper shopping bag.

Neighbors complained after his contraption sucked the shingles off their roofs, roaring like the hounds of hell. DickO couldn't hear them.

He was deaf from spending years listening to his turbine cry. Called it his Baby. He loved spending time with his Baby. His reputation grew.

One day a man in black sunglasses came to his front door, his chiseled jaw aslant. Governmental operative, hush hush, don't get too close.

Recruited Mr. DickO to head up a Top Secret experimental project called Joy Motel. They told him that it had something to do with turbines.

Thoughtcontrol drug-assisted, mindtrip, lifeblip, come to papa. Select clientele, handpicked from prisons, nuthouses, AWOLs, streetcorners.

They gave DickO the basement @JoyMotel and he outdid himself. He handbuilt the world's most potent turbine farm, massive parallel armlinks.

One day Overtone bumped a Raytheon switch, melted a Hershey bar, gummed up the dual gate bonding mechanism, and the switch stayed active.

Imagine being in the hold of the Titanic as it shuddered and went under, then multiply that by a factor of 100. The Earth moved off its axis.

From that day forward, or backward, all bets were off. An UnterReality hole ripped a neat hole in the fabric of time, then kept growing.

DickO's ability to control his creation was severely compromised. The inhabitants @JoyMotel bounced through decades, fleas in a glass jar.

CLICK TO READ NEXT CHAPTER

58 Transparent data

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:21:00 -0800

In May of 2012, the Fourth World ended along with its codepency on information and useless data about old classmates, tentacle porn, emails.

Mortgage rates, cyber-dates, steel pates made transparent by one sad genius, Kindred Tate. Slouching toward Bethlehem according to Yeats.

Yea, it doesn't rhyme, what of it? K Tate was an old man of forty, aged by radiation twixt over, beholden to the Mayans death calendar.

In the weeks prior, 4th World coughing, 4th Wall pushing harrowingly close, K Tate saw(ed) through everything, the hard drives of infinity.

Or so Dick Overtone thought. In 1969, all was safe, copies of floppies hidden in basements of Joy Motels in three realities. Just because:

Dick O liked his pull over Tricky Dick N, follow Apollo as they dropped a flop in the Sea of Tranquility put yourself behind a Pepsi, NASA.

Another tale, another time, not to be lost like the Metatexts of Ur, the Visagery Menagerie of Babylon's Inverted Tower. Future floppies.

Dick O getting the heebie-jeebies in a fevered mid-summer's night scream waking quaking shaking baking from the Malibu heat compromised.

Being Watched from afar, anew, a future now, if he snapped his fingers nothing would change nothing undone cocky Dick had to show off.

Oddly, it was rocks rolling down pyramids buried in Central American foliage (iceberg memories of Culhane, 1957) that sounded the siren.

Seriously so. Crumble rumble p-k p-k p-k words through weeds and trees palms and fronds (as Kindred frollicked with blondes), Dicky O wept.

Overtone had to create the Joy Motel just so he could have a door to walk out of, another door to open, he was on the set with Dean Martin.

He grabbed a swizzle stick, read the alcoholic fortune, stabbed the lead cameraman in the eye. Whipped out his pistol, audience gunned down.

Cue cards scattered on the ground, FIRST GUEST: SHARON TATE. Son of a bitch, getting sloppy. Kept his wits, K Tate 2012 would never be.

Went back outside, his watch ticktickticked, applause, Tate must be on, door open, manydead bloody rich Dean-o passed out on the piano.

Overtone stumbled back out into the shank of the night or the cool cool cool of the evening, depending on which jukebox had rumbled first.

Honk honk, there was Kindred, rented Dodge Polara, those two chippies, Seashell and Coronado PJ, cottontail moons in each passenger window.

Losing his cool, frosty fucked, watching them hoot and toot called him zoot suit, worst indignity, PJ had a mustard stain on her butt cheek.

Sweat-soaked in his white shirt straight jacketed from the government for a small allowance he checked the turbines shining from his drips.

Watched the Polar spanking clean and shiny new drive away girls laughing, canned applause from Dino's morgue, down Dick N tried to snore.

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57 Overtone's mustard

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:10:00 -0800

First manned spacecraft to escape earth orbit, circle another celestial body, return. Dark side of the moon, mysteryhistory. Braveboys ahoy.

Me? Landlocked drydocked stopclocked unfrocked cavorting, PJ springloaded exploded. Hoffman considering plastics, the graduate incarnate.

Pause. Somebody hit pause. Dick Overtone peering over rimless spectacles, gray brushcut vertically stubbed, blackclipontie rigidly centered.

Reams of closely spaced notes in an illegibly obscure crabby little pensmite. Calculations reverberation. Sliderule megatool greasestained.

Master of the Turbines, condensing Kindred's life into parcelized fragments for retransmissions on viable vectors emanating from Washington.

Government-controlled heebiejeebies, lifepulsing outward from the Joy Motel, whining notwithstanding, generators timegripping, offslipping.

Dick takes a wolfbite from his sloppy meatball sandwich, ketchup dripping onto the stained linoleum floor in the turbine room, redblots.

Glassdial gauges needles spinning, 1969 vibrating in tightwhite oscillations, on the mark preset with a thumbpress, tagged Kindred (altU).

Oilcans and wooden boxes full of records dating back to 1943. One labeled Trinity. Three boxes for Kindred. Papers spill crumpled. Charts.

Overtone manipulates, exacerbates Kindred's angsty perambulations through ticktocking unoduotreydimensionate pitapat lifebeats. Dialtwiddle.

One dialneedle spins redhotly counterclockwise, malfunction alternative universe, then hardstops, restarts, heart palpitations, not good.

He taps the glassdial with a grimed index finger, jars the needle and leaves a mustardsmudge on the indicator around about the 2oclock mark.

The turbine spins fractionally faster, Kindred feels his heartrace skipabeat but attributes it to the sight of Seashell's curvaliciousness.

Overtone can push Kindred forward or back, yearoveryear, independent of time constraint, but without influencing his freewill or lifespan.

Kindred convertiblized on the lowcanyon road with nubile passengers, tops down rolling toward the afternoon sun, 1:59PM then mustardsmudge.

Driving into a yellowwet fog that coats the windscreen, blotting out the road. The mustard from Overtone's jabfinger on the glassdial, 2PM.

Two worlds collide, Overtone's turbine zone directly whipsmacking Kindred's reality and then it's done as the convertible pops the smudge.

Kindred thumbwipes yellow off the lenses of his Italian sunglasses, inspired by Marcello Mastroianni. Pungent smell, hotdogs in ballparks.

He licks his thumb and tastes Overtone's mustard. Back in the Turbine Room, Dick finds a rag, wipes the glassdial clean, removes the smudge.

Kindred's car suddenly spotless, shining as if it just toasterpopped from a carwash, sunglinting Hollywoodstyle. Checks his Rolex: 2:02PM.

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56 Kindred Tate

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:12:00 -0800

Strange Interlude In Which Dick Overtone Pulls The Strings Instead of Relying on Tricky Dick Nixon to Service The Turbines: go to the lobby.

Seriously, Kindred said with sincere severity. You can see the quick flipflash that might not even pinpoint clarity or grab a can of pop.

Dick Overtone, near obsolete not near obese, splays a hand up at the universe, imprints on each fingerwhorl mini-dramas. Dick O: magician.

Thumbs up, take a peek. There we are in the real, swirling to our dooms. K, Joy Motel, psychDad dead Dad lost loves on a Hyrdox cookie box.

Accusing finger the firm alternator, alter-rate reality, angry Dick pissed off Dick Kindred happy he's man of the year bomb blasting fiend.

Fuck finger gone, blown off at Trinity, no idea of that reality ever ever ever. Imagine, Overtone flipping the bird at the virgin death.

And yet he did. Stared back at a disintegrating skeletal finger, his own future death throes de-jointed. Ringer finger, ah, UBER-reality.

Touch fingertips, thumb & ring finger, faux peace sign in the air, mash the mess of Kindred living three lives at once, four with pinky.

Zoom in: Dick O making the O as in OK sign, Joy Motel sign, keep ticking off realities minus scorched earth fuckstub. Countdown 3 to 1. See?

Girls asleep. I enjoyed that strange interludinal luminal dream, fancy four-fingered magician with green screen cuff links marked infinity.

I had just tired of Corinna's whines, don't condemn me, I don't condone you. PJ and Seashell naked twelve hours now, backseat viewmaster.

I'm the perfect voyeur, vox angelici comes next in my alphabetical existence, the girls, the top down, me & the Santa Susana mountain range.

I think of the films and the television shows ghosting around me, Bonanza, The Lone Ranger. Wanda, the Sadistic Hypnotist. Saw that in LA.

Mountains like moist sponges, what wondrous future films could be made here, this could be an alphane moon, a mormon chronicle, felony squad.

Wheels thrumming turbines towards Chatsworth, Spahn Ranch, Albert Spahn, lover of life. Gullible fool. I risk looking at the girls neckwhip.

Twistturn hillsdip girlyawn notwhich I see the future, UberReality UnterReality Overtonality climbing past remnants of cognitive pastsnips.

I can't do this, I see it like a card spread. I meet Manson, talk him into writing a screenplay about anger and audacity on Saturn's moons.

SPACE OPPOSITES films that summer, all the big stars. Janssen, Mitchum, Mantell, Ava Gardner as Manson's lost soul. B&W bombshell sadlove.

No one kills for Manson, a divorced Sharon Tate gives birth 8/31/69 names the boy Kindred. K Tate grows old, bold, designs a bomb at seven.

Overtone freaks in his sleep, Kindred Tate bubbles with despotism into the new century, rewrites New Mexico in his middle name: Trinity.

I'm snapped back to March, knowing I had some type of wonderful adventure, now I'm with PJ and Seashell and my pet bong Culhane p-k p-k p-k.

Apollo 8 is up there in the Milky Way somewhen the only place I'd look past a girl's tummy or a needed rewrite of my current novel. Space.

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55 Polaroid Land

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 08:09:00 -0800

I slept with two women, Seashell having invited her friend Coronado PJ over to the dorm room, we did blotter acid propped window silled.

Cartoon dog on the sheet, some new Saturday thing, Scoopy-Doopy or something, PJ's dad worked at Hanna-Barbera, scoped the competition.

I enjoyed myself, spit up drool when Seashell saw my posture and called me Dr. Cephalophore. PJ shrieked, street level kids looked around.

The two of them tan and naked, bare ass cottontails, PJ pontytailed. Yea, I was old, sorta. Didn't stop me from singing Cash's Cocaine Blues.

I got goofy after we smoked a blunt, waving it over their heads, outsiders getting a free show as the girls reached up, flashing boobs.

Started talking like Al Capone best I could, not knowing Chicago that well, only that something happened there they made a movie about.

Girls didn't go for gangster lingo, I riffed on that cartoon doggy bow wow rat a tatta ta bow wowow tongue out purple in the streetlamp.

Had them in giggles, tits like taut water balloons rolling on the wooden sill. Looked up at the moon, lighting up our faces, not knowing why

the roundness above me in the deep blue once meant more than the four small globes I kept manuevering my elbows around, now I didn't care.

Like that, thoughts gone, night wind so sweet. I hadn't bathed in days. No one cared, I answered to no one here. Time to freak the girls out.

Tits sway, elbows propped. I tell them groov on this, all we are, every bit of us, bit o honey bit o memory bitter memories bittytittybrain.

lives loves losses kchk kchk punches on a card, spooled into data in a huge Cray computer in the basement of the ROTC building out back.

Kid on the street flashed a peace sign, behind my eyes, a vulture ate him, swooped down, gulp. Eyes open, kid air guitars a shadow puppet.

Girls stoned, me: mind still on the bird, familiar nose and hairline, wingflapped sounds like turbines. I took the roach, flicked it gone.

Yes, I argued in between their thoughts. Keep trying to enjoy this, forget the copper smell in your nose and throat. Forget your books.

Next day we went to a studio and sat in on a session with Manfred Mann, I helped them riff lyrics for a song called "Blinded By The Light."

Said, no, no, its nothing, just like freebasing a verse. Keep talkwriting every day or I die, a writer is his own disciple. (PinDrop). Wow.

We drove south to San Ysidro just to take photos, PJ had a Polaroid Land camera, all full of surprises. Posed in empty backgrounds bluesky.

Tall men in white robes and red Keds appeared, handsfold, blue eye serene. Givers of Spatial Diversity. I think they want 2001 A SPACE ORGY.

Girls all for it, Seashell so far different than Karin. I shrug. Then I reach forward teartwist the first one's hands, crushed Sputnik falls.

They work in the turbines, I yell. The winds cry Culhane, the winds cry Culhane! Girls think it's a bad trip. But they still take 22 photos.

I sign them all with an ink pen from one of the tall dudes from the orgy. Sell them for a giant bag of weed and some red balloon bennies.

We drive back to USC, PJ tells us about this cool group living on the Spahn Ranch, her half-cousin Squeaky Fromme & her friend Charlie M.

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54 Mr. Valentine

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 12:45:00 -0800

Turbine whine aural assault. Mindwhip extracranial escape velocity attained. Subject Kindred powerdown, reentry from alternate universe.

Residual memorybits trailing ethereally, skinthrills electric. Seashell caress, try a little tenderness. It is Valentine's Day, after all.

Kindred slumped, sobbing headbobbing. AltU was a braincracker, seemdreamed he was a professor at USC, hugwugging his rubbertight half-sis.

How could the basement @JoyMotel house an entire sub-section of New Mexico, arid sky deeppool oh my, artificial wife helpmate named Corinna?

Were the turbines so powerful? Is that why Dick Overtone is always strutsmirking? He can send me anywhere, anytime, anyway, anyday he wants?

Kindred felt a spidery tingling in his right thumb, tickling webs between fingers, pinkyburn, palmslap, numbwrist, elbowdumb, shoulderlock.

His upperself juddered in spastic earth rhythm, hips shaking leghopping footsmoking I sing the body electric, universal jolts of smashmove.

Resistance is futile my friend this is the end you are in the pipe and scheduled for transmission please remove your bluecotton trousers.

Kindred moonslingshotted quadradimensionally lucid through a bubble of plastic wrapped TV dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy, yum, Tang.

Landed fullbellied and lipsmackin' back in the dorm without form, descending through time like a coinflipped dime, Seashell transcendent.

Skinslippery lust, do what you must. Her eyes closed in rapture, riding Kindred across wildprairie flatlands, flowers bending in the breeze.

Moangroan bluenotes Coltrane playing sirensoundsax creating memorydream from moments torched with sadness knowing that all things must pass.

Kindred you are a timeridin' badboy. Seashell too innocent to devour so rapaciously. What would your daddy say now? shuddup i'm almost done.

Seashell padding off to showerclean flanks sleek taut. Kindred springing from the eiderdown to stick toadgrippy on the ceiling, tongueflick.

I could get used to this alternate universe, Kindred thinks as he pushes a shopping cart full of Budweiser and tacos toward the checkout.

Gumchewing coed takes his chargecard and gives him the eyeball, Kindred awshucksing nonchalant cool, call me Professor Amatory, honeybell.

Later pushing midnight, doc Kindred in full oratorial splendor at the fratparty, cashier Lucy snuggling lappishly, regaling the studentbody.

Still later Kindred beddingly busy, Lucy and Seashell strokepoking while he observes, semidetached but patiently awaiting his turn, polite.

Brief flash of Karin scowling on his inbound retinal signal, quickprocessed by crazebrained Doctor of Love, smoothly rejected devilmaycare.

Lothario Kindred with seductive powers on highbeam walking campus hungry, bouncing atomically, seeking bonding opportunities, Mr. Valentine.

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53 Bellbottom blues

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:07:00 -0800

July 11, 1964. Mantell's netherstorm rips St. Petersburg a new winter, Moscow dissolves and Siberia duplicates then shrinks. Love. Karin.

Still thinking of the blonde til the very last sob. Not realizing he had made the US the great atomic power. Bio-atom 8, the final frontier.

Kindred and RFK hand in hand, with a little help from Nixon Culhane (R.-CA), give French Indochina the greatest Insane Unknown Offensive yet

The medicine cabinet only held toothpaste, Prell shampoo, that empty bottle of Bayer, the Cope, spotshined surface. No prescription pills.

What made him do a mental inventorial, he thought but did not amplify. Perhaps he'd appear on Mike Douglas, Tammy Toxcity: publicist nodded.

Wiped a brow, world safe. Wife MIA, who cares Karin, mental list, Chevy buff, volume up, I bought a dead world & I want to blame it black.

Kindred in bellbottom blues, eyes his overlong sideburns in the small bathroom he installed in the hardsteel hut beside the swimming pool.

Corinna is afraid of this deeppool Kindred handbuilt into the coolstone beneath their backsplit. Connected to the netherworld, she insists.

He can hear the softbabble of societies yearning to be free, voices wanting choices, lives underdeveloped, gurgling in his grimy sinkdrain.

Micronesia, Polynesia, amnesia, South Africa, Berlin, sharkfin, Moscow, Nam bam thank you ma'am, he turns on the hot water tap, flushdown.

Scalding singsong verbiage bubbling upward through the braindrain. Glistening waterdrop poised on chrome lip, quivers on the brink of doom.

Vocals by Jim Morrison, riders on the storm, there's a killer on the road. Brain is squirmin' like a toad. Echo pipishly ripe premonition.

Kindred sits on a wicker chair Corinna has painted green, tears open an envelope, his name inscribed with a girlish scrawl, inkly promising.

Dear Dr. Kindrad, I am defenately your biggest fan!!!! If you ever cum to USC look me up here is my photo. Almost forgot, Karin is my mom!

My name is Seashell. I am 20. Five four and 114, people say sexy. I guess so but more sporty if you like cute girls with an all-body tan!!!

Kindred crumpled up the note and flushed it. Fan letters, Man of The Year, bigshot nuke scientist, calls daily from Bobby K. President Bob.

Ephemeral praise, hardly earned, evanescent meanderings of an easily-impressed populace, America I see you in the gloaming, future hopeful.

Karin never told him she had a daughter. Twenty. Born in 1946. His father knew Karin then. Seashell could be Kindred's babyfat half-sister.

Kindred stepped onto the diving board, windowleaked New Mexico sun licking his nape with a longing hot tongue, paint it red, color me dead.

Life stultified, Corinna vacuous, Kindred sucked in an easybake lungbag of desiccated oxygen and pondered his options, jet ripping skybound.

Dove headfirst into the empty pool and entered the drain wetly succulent, poured himself into the Pacific ecosystem, emerged in Lalaland.

This is an alternate universe, Dr. Kindred. Welcome to AltU. You will be teaching the Transience of 1960s Era Idealism: The Dream is Dead.

This building looking vaguely reminiscent of the shelter your father abandoned in 1945 with its stolid lines, your dorm, sorry about that.

Let me introduce you to your roommate, Seashell. Hi! A sweet girl, a little innocent, none too bright, well, sir, you two have a good night!

Kindred suspicious, dropping leather travel bag well-battered, brushes Seashell's downy cheek with a lipflick and falls immediately in love.

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52 ChronoSonic

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:01:00 -0800

He loved his wife, he truly did, but she could never understand the clockworks of his brain. Like Superman & Lois Lane, one aging, one not.

Certainly, Lois could understand Superman, but its not like they could tear each others clothes off & make passionate love in the ionosphere

Could it be that he wanted to be with someone like Karin so bad that he even went so far as to search out someone with a similar name?

Didn't he used to think in singsong once? The jam on his toast an explosion over scorched earth propogations. Yet, he couldn't see it.

Read the Arts section, pages turned, slow, normal, as if he was the only one making any movement, as if he was the deciding motor of all.

Man of the Year 1967, at least it was not him alone, he shared the award with President Kennedy, Bobby deserved the recognition for NamNuke.

He hiccupped, hmnn. Now I'm using hippie talk lingo. Wife was happy with the new steam iron he gave her, maybe tonight the new theater

The Uptown, square blocks built on Sante Fe guidestones, daylight slits each nuclear winter moan; they could watch Mitchum & McQueen fight.

Sad what happened to Jack Lemmon, she'd said yesterday. Too bad, forget the retrospective, anger bubbled, he'd make her enjoy THUNDER DROVE.

He flipped the page, there it was, his 1969 Chevrolet ChronoSonic 360, hot off the blocks, lead lungs filled with uranium 238. 0-60 in 3.2.

Wife can't touch it, Bobby the K couldn't touch it. Johnny Cash...let him think on it. Quiet ruminations, whipslapKarin blinkwink blip augh.

Headaches. Always. Note to selves: buy stock in Bayer. Rummage the shelves, bottle emptyrattle plasticecho. Slow down, K., its okay. Shhh.

Settle for Cope. His wife's pills for when she menstruated. Always something made for women only, like that deodorant. wait drypop pills.

Strong arm a man, make out with his woman. Something like that. Headache gone, Kindred put some Sandy Nelson on the turntable. Telstar HiFi.

Let there be drums, pop those tubs, like when he killed the thugs. They probably read Batman comics. Whacked off to TV show Catwoman.

Moving like amniotic fluid, thoughts like a gentle barbarian. Servo-smooth. Leaving the arms of Karin Offal was the best thing he'd done.

Other than inventing the peacegiver alpha centaurian bomb along with poor, doomed Mantell. His morpho-ideamatic satellite raining the USSR.

1961, the Berlin Wall new. Work began, pencil sketches light projector. New-fangled percolater. A room-sized Cray computer calculated 01101.

Binary thoughts, secondary loves. Mantell and his too swift glances at Karin, Kindred never truly cared, he was already tired of her lines.

Apollyon backed them with crisp bills. Then they created the MoytoJet. Intersonic, yet unprovable while JFK was in office. Find Oswald.

Something he lived with as he shared drinks with Bobby the K, he was Kindred the Doc, laughs all around the Kennedy compound in Nebraska.

18 minute drum solo, time for something different. Flipflip labels, 33 RPMs. Mantell took an untested MoytoJet out himself. Rolling Stones.

Shot out the wall pneumatic-like. Tumbled in a brainstorm, growing exponentially with thought-radiation, USSR below, Mantell: love. Karin.

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51 Flat world

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:23:00 -0800

Kindred heard the newspaper slap onto his front porch and rolled out of bed, fumbling into his plush orange bunny slippers and terry robe.

His wife Corinna slept, facemashed on high threadcount sheets purchased last year on their lovetrip to New York City for Valentine's Day.

The sex had been so-so, as it had been since Corinna discovered the note from Karin in the inside pocket of his black Brooks Brothers suit.

But they had attended a taping of The Tonight Show, which had been in town for a week. Johnny Carson had made slyeye contact with Corinna.

She was sexually aroused for six weeks after, imagining that she would become--what, Johnny's sixth wife?-- and live with him in Nebraska.

Kindred stepped over Julius, his Golden Retriever, who was splayed at the foot of the stairs, and opened the front door, hotsunblasting in.

Life in New Mexico was dry. The air was dry. His skin was dry. His wife was dry. His martinis were dry. His sense of humor was dry. As dust.

He bent over, still feeling the effects of last night's, um, adventure, when he was rolling home from the office and stopped dead at a red.

Three punks had jumped up on his hood and pissed on his windshield, some sort of fraternity hazing ritual, not serious, surely. Let it go.

But Kindred had reacted as if someone else inhabited his body, someone more versed in the art of violent confrontation than he. Vicious.

The beating he put on those students, a self-orchestrated whirlwind of precise strikes and counterblows, and darn if he didn't kill 'em all.

Must have tweaked something in his lower back with that last throatkick, twinging now as he stood up after reaching for the newspaper. Huh?

He was vaguely aware of Corinna clumping down the stairs behind him, flash of pink panties stirring his imagination, half open bathrobe.

But most of his attention was on the paper. His photo from the award banquet, smiling as he accepted the adulation. Man of the year. Huh.

He never thought he would follow in his father's footsteps and become a world-renowned scientist specializing in nuclear, um, events. Boom.

But there you have it. Daddy would be proud, if only he had not rushed out of the shelter in 1945 at Trinity and been vapo-rubbed, poof.

He turned to show the picture to Corinna and Karin struck him in the Adam's apple with the edge of her bony fist, and he gasped walrussy.

Blinking, Karin gone and Corinna handed him a coffee as he kicked the door shut behind him and shuffled toward the backsplit yellow kitchen.

Suburbia could wait, dry-baked 112 degree roastoven, swimming pools silently steaming, the cheerleader next door nearly naked sunbronzing.

Dr. Kindred made toast with strawberry jam and looked out at his flat world, idly considering the possibility of an alternative universe.

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50 Uncertainty Event

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 09:18:00 -0800

drown smother shake how did it happen that she has learned to loathe my loving smile just five years gone was it that way with dad was it?

swingslip into her brainstream brassiere Nazi in a red cape floating like a balloon dad and Mantell with an 8MM commie superhero soft focus.

The film replayed on the side of the old Schlitz Congoleum Building, a threesome in the foreground, dad Mantell Karin preying mantis 1959.

hippy hippy shake shank I can get answers sometimes but she can't get mine oh you stupid commie disciple keep pushing me into hyperspheres.

I'm involved in a mental causation rift I don't know 1400 maybe 1440 BC. No idea what I'm seeing as she rubs lotion on my skin and shaves me.

I see Dick Nixon dropping bombs on Greater Persia and salute when the Supernatural Space Station floats in a mist overhead my invention.

All these me in the fifteen hyperplaces different speeds over here its like a 78 RPM in real time its like a spooling tape stop start clamp

Karin finds the green screen she's thisclose hide Mantell's knowledge, go Kindred you idio--Karin sees me eight minutes sooner, green gone.

One last push, a dark interluminal interlude of latitudes and longetivity, I take form as industrial clutter off Ashbridge's Bay as I rest.

slingshiftshotthwap 1882 cargo cult of kindred vanuatu island I taught magic of zero point energy to tribesmen who are now new disciples.

making bombs out of sacrificial skulls replete with occular regularity they tried oh they tried on that tiny eye ill if I could have helped.

but Karin whipped me back fast 2009 spring sparrow surrounded thundering loud type type type talk talk clik clk countdown for the bombing.

now: stupid: Karin Offal cannot squeeze anything out of me (except almost that time with the green screen green like methane) let her think.

Let her try. I went through eighteen diversions inverted through five years yet to arrive. And only I know of Mantell's Uncertainty Event.

Mantell, that same summer he made the flowered weapon dress, that son of no bitch had the greatest thought experiment of any disciple yet.

Captured brainwaves in Tesla coils withered hippies never missed their ideas fuel for the event that could change how everything lives/dies.

Long-haired counterculture writers artists transcendulisers fuel the capsule with pure thought, Mantell ticked off 3 2 1 slingshot straight.

zwoofswhippoolleertt schpinggg. On the way back, the thoughtstream in the spaceship spits out alternate reality fuel, spreads into space.

A hybrid existence go green screen and methane oh those rusty Saturn V rockets contrails swirling reflected in my duplicate's helmet. Night.

I sleep with more answers than I wanted. Mantell killed dad over Karin or over thought capsule (likely both), what was he trying to do/did?

Did it work? My guess, put him and Karin overlords in a reality where the bombs kept dropping baby onlyin the spaces between eyeblinks.

the new world order new world odor was methane so I think I'm seeing me as I co-exist, clever: wearing the spacesuit, can't touch & negate.

Space Command Midwest is just a front. In five years, Karin Offal will be fat & rancid. I am enjoying the brainstreams of my new unreality.

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49 Rippleriffs

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 09:17:00 -0800

One night when I was out playing in the zero point field with dad and Auntie Karin, I overheard them talk about Mantell's Uncertainty Event.

Mantel was the zany string theory guy, wondering if we could shoot our rockets into our hells to wake the ferrymen from midstream snoozes.

I feel like I'm on a boat through the outskirting skidzones of perdition shores, left foot right foot closer to flowered dress.

I figured it out over those long walks past bright Santa Coke to bruised jewel Karin, patterns fractals my face shoved into dimensions.

I knew what Mantell's theory was, and Karin was wonderful at knitting to be continued lies, she let me kill him to keep the true story safe.

The flowered print dress was a Mandalbrot malfunction, a map of the fifteenteenteentwo known dimensions, my fate generously undecided.

Can I emerge sooner, greet myself at her door drink the Santa drink shoot my granddad me not born so who shoots granddad? Answer: Santa.

She smothers me into the 1972 of another place, tonic-clonic seizures leaving me lucid thru most of it not all, I'm responsible for WWIII.

smothershove I cause the Vailala Madness by growing Micronesia in the small of my back, the Philippines on my biceps then reaching to itch.

I'm with dad in various agegroupings, one time, the scariest of times, we were twins, but it got worse, I kept aging, he stayed young me RIP

shovegrab moveshove submergence like a twenty minute drum solo in my earsockets random singularitys tear this wall down mister mister 1989.

my only guess is that Karin thinks she can wash something out of my memory crankbanks and shumpftt I'm gone again another war, on Saturn.

I float in a space cube at the edge of the E-ring of the Pentagon, I've never heard of dialing 911 or 9/11 and watch a plane skid life ends.

Saturn's F-ring now, new moons discovered as drool from my mouth, I'm the unknown face in a thousand aboriginal myths a hundred cereal boxes.

She loves this I know me between her aging breasts caught between being and unbeknowest she really thinks I must know something time to go.

At one point, reality warps to match the present past and future so no surprise the floral dress becomes spray paint head caresses on fumes

I create Sanskrit and befriend Gilgamesh put a revolving door in the Sphinx's left foot and three hundred feet below my face full of latex.

her screaming inkiness begats calico as I'm now fighting a civil war on behalf of the methane man, an island of him and me and all of you.

The thing is I always come back I'll always GO-GO BACK to 1968 she never understood, I didn't know anything when MLK and RFK went RIP BAMBAM

Only in the hear and then of 1973 my repeated dunkings in greasepainted flowerage fantasyfest bodypaintmoist did I find the hidden "thing".

Yet I still had to live my life switch my realities like television channels newspaper rippleriffs 1954 I kill Culhane in a red treehouse.

Red for commie, red for Saturn V rocket fuel Kindred the filmmaker Jimmy Cagney in a snuff film opposite Howard Hughes 2 birds 1 stone yep.

grrovestuck then 2374 upside twistdown hLEZ. Sleazy zealous, a new answer then Karin's tongue slits my thoughts i cough up exegesis later.

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48 Soulhole

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:28:00 -0800

Floral dress, summershift thin, Karin is in. Why does this memoryjog my noggin? Black and white glossy image brainstuck revealed, deathmask.

Green-eyed Karin's slow summer smile, 1973 sun paints lambent cheekbones on my retinal parade, dust rising high into a burnt midwestern sky.

Montana-born breeze sighs in the trees, hot rainwater drips inside a gutterspout from a flashrain rolling east like an empty freight train.

Glass bottled Coca Colas dripping icebits onto a chipped wooden verandah, sharpbarking dog announces the arrival of a lonesome north wind.

Karin whispers into my ear, numbed by eyepop regret at a lifetime of violent misunderstanding and unmitigated angst over clandestinations.

I feel weak. A barncat leaps lightly down from a highbeam headlight in broad daylight and lands on purepaws on babyhearted bright delight.

Something in my drink? Slurwording neuroses of angular rectangulars, spinning bullet zinging along whistle clean spiral chamber, I duckdown.

Karin catsteps back and I headsmack the harvest table as I tumbledumble, bloodspurting from my broken beak, heavyhands unliftable, slowfeet.

Floral dress, summershift thin. Karin's inscrutable smile says goodbye. Brainspark recalling the deathphoto I sent myself postmark 3-15-72.

In the picture, dead-me was breathlessly innocent, mouth open, saliva bubbling at the corners, her small hand mashpushing my dumbhead down.

And now as her Coca Cola concoction incapacitates my pushback, she takes my head onto her lap and smothers me into gulping glub gasposity.

Her small hand hardedged and unforgiving, same hand that touched my father now nape-pressing me selfhelpless breathless heartsick dying.

Light flares eyely as I expire, noting with last neuron drift that the wall calendar is a redsuited hohoho Coca Cola Santa, December 1972.

It takes her nine months to smother me, baby gestationally, loving me to death concubine sensationally. Mississippi reverses, backtime slam.

She takes a photo every day, me lapping up my own demise on her muscular thighs, slobbering walrussy, 280 pictures of dying me, airlessly.

My 1982 self collapses into my soulhole, I am reborn blinking in nuclear singularity, grinning for posterity. Say cheese everyone, snapshot.

And now it's 1973 and the new me is coming back to see Karin again. I look behind me as I shufflewalk west and see no footprints. Traceless.

Karin on her verandah, my spiral descent replaying in long looping streams as I am drawn magnetory to my recycled doomspin, floral dress.

Locked in timeburp, Karin kills me a dozen times, a thousand, zillion trillion infinity of deathly smothers, care for an ice cold beverage?

I step onto her porch admire her floral dress this time it will be different this time I will not die this time I will not this time I will.

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47 Beatback highway

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:14:00 -0800

IdKin and EgoKin. FranKINstein1959, the year my daddy died. All variations on a theme, a dharma wheel of karmamel creamy chocolate pecans.

comprehend the obscure reality of mindstuff brain smack! I smelled these words on my leaded deadended fingertips on my kneees at road end.

I was in Midwestern rain again, had I slipstreamed out and back that quicknap? Dark amnesiac I am not, if you'd just listen, puddle reflect.

Imagine a me arguing with another me in a world of pain and a house of horrors all the inner mind whorls of painhorses pinhole my reality.

subjective objective two sides of the water puddle, thing is, the tough hard crickcrack of the beatback highway macadam separates the two.

Methane man back home, am I a science master chasing ripples in a night gallery of planetary conjunctivitis pink eye red eye talley whack.

indecision valisiscion incisions of scions entractates. salvation by knowledge an acid casuality in the causality oscillator-like turbines.

this mirrored Joy Motel recesssed its abcesses incongruously, I never noticed things at first, color scheme wrong-YES-surrounding empire-NO!

There was no Scrip City (with the T missing) & Hi-Fi Records (with the records of their existense intensely exigenerous, all 2,374 tracks.

No, here I'm upside down looking at Syncretism City in all its transquartomuralistic wonder. God, what kind of Man created this mess?

Instead of Schlitz Congoleum, there's a winking sign Confidential Spacecraft Chiropractor. Est. 1973. At least its a clue, I'm here again.

After I slept with Karin Offal in 1968 I regretted not taking care of unfinished business, yet knew I'd be back five years after the fact.

Marvelling at the weatherpoofed macrostructure, I watched an asbestos anteater unrated, abrasive and cowardly, unrelated to this reasoning.

Inter-connective doors 2 leads to 3 leads to 7 leads to 4 nothing but tectonic waste of methodic paste, a slapstick conspiracy sashay.

No red balloon just sticky notes its Saturation Saturday golly do I have the time? I check my tantric luminal dial with wondering wander.

So part of me is here in 1973 another in the same place in 1968 think like a kid me middle-aged you old & dead Karin forever & ever bright.

You know the craziest thing? There's no green screen in the sky here in 1973. Its like they gave up with their idea, a film on the shelf.

Methane man with his Saturn rocketpack breathed through the draft in my memory sponge telling me I die in 1972 bye bye green screen me me.

I decide to keep quiet re: stepping back into myself the way any good poker face would thing is methane man hides his face, can he see mine?

I just want to flip back to the other side of the pavement, the 1968 side, dry the oil from my clothes go visit Karin with a waffle & a rose.

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46 OutKin InKin

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:37:00 -0800

Mr. Kindred? Earth to Mr. Kindred. This is your daddyship calling, return to base. You do remember your psychdaddy don't you, Methane Man?

don't wanna talk to no docdad doodad tooday get outta ma face bespectacled man i got no use for you or your bedhead deadhead Kin Dread games

Mr. Kindred, I have noticed you have regressed into your fantasy spacesuit and helmet. I see you are breathing with the vacuum hose again.

air in here searing lungburn like mad brushfires in Australia only antidote is the redtanks you see arrayed here, soldiers in my prisonroom

The nice man down the hall, the one you call the Watcher, has made a formal complaint to the hospital administration about your mad antics.

watcher be dead i seen it with mine own left eye peepin' through the keyhole i seen OutKin face him up eyeballs touchin' he be realdead yup

OutKin? So you're persisting in your delusion that you have brainwashed someone else to carry out your revengeries upon the 12 disciples?

OutKin be da guy I anointed, he be Vietnam vet multidecorated on da killing feeled, he be C eye A and he be external and so be named OutKin

As opposed to you, imagining that you have been maimed in some long ago nuclear test in New Mexico, half-blinded by your father's bigbomb?

I be eyeless I lost an eye da blast ripped it out with sandpaper when I be nine and so I hafta punch my missions inta my neighbor's head

You use your seductive ventvoice to speak with your next door roommate here at the facility, yes, I know, we get the complaints every night.

I be givin' him da missions, tellin' him da details, where ta go and who ta kill, he doin' good, he killin' a disciple right now zipperdead

So, fine, I grant you your delusion, there is an "out" Kindred, external brainwashed doer of your wishes roaming the nightscape unchained.

damnright which makes me the InKin cuz I got one eye out and I hafta breathe through the tanks, I be da evil Methane Man lifestuck @JoyMotel

Interesting. OutKin and InKin. Very neat parcelization of your need states, your life essences corrupted by your desperation to forget.

forget? i remember all. you see dese papers stuck on ma wall? every scrap every curlicue pixel inkblot smudge captured in ma achin' brainpan

So where is OutKin now? If he exists, your Vietnam CIA trained assassin. Where is he? In your head? Or is he really out there? On a mission?

OutKin be goin' ta meet Karin Offal ma daddy's squeeze she be a key disciple I saw her humpin' ma daddy long time be gone she be curve sax-y

What is OutKin going to do with Karin? Is he going to kill her? Can he? Will your dead daddy disapprove? Can you risk his anger Vesuvious?

guilt shame game, docdad, I see what yer doin'. let's just watch events unspool through my visor concave time delay lean in bud take a look

Two heads earglued, eye-blinking witnesses to 1960s mass mayhem, psychdaddy realizing with some trepidation that he believes Kindred's tale.

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45 Pretty boy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 9 Feb 2009 07:57:00 -0800

Reality distortion field, concave smoked gray lens of spacesuit presenting a curvalicious view of exterior environment: my Faux Joy Motel.

Sentient me trapped inside multiple moonshot jacket and pants astrolab tailor-designed would you like those with a nice hemmed cuff, sir?

Conscious of my own ragged breathing, distant clank of redtop tanks, skull and crossbones dangerosity monstrosity that's me in lockdown.

Methane cowboy spaceman earthdown visited weekly by my loving psychdaddy, insanity coach floats serendipitously peripherally vociferously.

Pulling memories from disturbed cranial wheatfield like tubers goobers newbies screw me. Docdad kisses methane me Kindred me not Lindred me.

My face half gone since 1945 Trinity when nine year old me darted so bombwardly dumbly out of the shelter to eat the flashwhite nuclearity.

Searing sandpaper ripgripped my eyeeee out, cheek tweaked asunder and monstrified my mortality to kingdom come, Kindred the Elder mortified.

Hallucinatory eventides washed detritus of memory, powdery waves of scabrous seashell holograms, fantasizing metastasizing, childhood gone.

Imagining marauding G-Men adrift on desert revengery of shotgun retribution, paternal rescuement assuaging latent guilt, neglectful father.

Dreamscape escape across hardcracked macadam, me nine years old propelled by Mafia boy Sinatra in a rocket landlocked absurdly automotive.

Emergency landing in asylum of fear and abstract hope in a building of insane inmates ironically labeled Joy Motel. A loonytune nuthouse.

I, Kindred, do solemnly swear I have been living in confinement in the Joy Motel all of my life since the age of 15 with no probable parole.

House arrest, for my own good, yes yes, bulltwaddle government-speak, gasbag attached to mouthhole by tubery magnificent, deep breaths, son.

Until the day a laconic stranger occupied the room next to mine, Saturday night special, docdad home in his suburban ranch house, me alone.

I went to work that night, oh yes, my voice seeping cancerously through the air vent to impinge upon his defenseless synapses, got him bad.

Brainwash hashpipery, misidentification brainrape, personality replacement in full effect after six hours of persistent coldwiping erasure.

My neighbor, how odd his name was Lindred, such coincidence etched starbound in wonder, set out next morning as Kindred, new me rampaging.

Vietnam vet CIA trained human missile of destruction I set him loose to deal discipledoom while I sit tankstrapped gulping methane for pain.

My face half gone, no right eye, Trinity blasted, headlocked in spacesuit helmet, my ventvoice refreshing mission for substitute Kindred.

Head atilt my window in Joy Motel, tearblinks, I see 'me' in parking lot. Go forth and destroy, adventure and enjoy, I love you pretty boy.

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44 Faux joy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 9 Feb 2009 07:12:00 -0800

Words like he wrote with a fist scraping sanskrit into stonehenge, then a page in perfect print, engineer or architect (of doom in both).

I needed sleep, the cook looked like he was pouring runny eggs from his intestines, just a messy frying pan. Liked to say "Deal with it."

Flipped the pages he flipped the bacon I flipped the finger, he was too busy jawin the waitress. Pages made little sense, time out RSS Feed?

Who names their dog RSS, Mantell was a nut job, pecan doom irony not lost on me. Then I figured it, Sherlock Einstein Heinlein. Backwards.

The notes were written backwards, crafty, less chance of torn off pages. Secrets on the lower levels, blue ink sometimes red, argument-like.

perhaps red was code to read the blue as dismissive remissive I was going to pop that fry cook in his egg-spattered guy, let him tweet away.

I slapped the book shut stuck it in my new shirt James Greyhound Shunk that's me, forty cents on the counter all I had was coffee, I think.

Huddle House when I walked in Waffle House when I leave waffle the name to the tired, huddled massives, coffee kick not in, I walk away.

And if this aint beat-all, I see a dinosaur as I walk to crest a ridge. A green beast, Cray computer big, like Space Command had. Hi, Spot.

A few steps higher, ah. Sunoco gas station. Shoulda known: deadDad worked at one of these in Levelland. Karin Offal like the oil, made sense.

Karin gravitated towards Sunoco, everywhere she went, sun=Trinity dinosaur logo=commies reds flopping in his coffee belly now downhill.

Space Command Midwest straight on roger and out capsule commander was me tradeup greyhound to nasa and no no no no no no not here not now.

I was at the bottom of the hill, the space building and planes and green screen speed streams within visual contact but right here right now

I can't groove into what I'm seeing with my space eyes hazing into the background here it was now here it is. Joy Motel, new motif, f*** me.

I should explore, this was a clue. Why else would psychDad let me see this, good thing I came into town from the back end, delaying my fate?

Would something dire me expire brain wetwired if I met myself here last time I saw herweeks months don't have this be At Joy Motel, please.

same color no balloon no Tourette's, red light cuer balls beer sign Schizo Sal's, est. 1987. I'm nuts. No, the 8 was a 6 covered with dust.

Sal Salt the owner came out said hi waved at the sky breathe and get high my new friend I needed no friends. Karin & Mantell, drinkers?

Drink here that is/was I asked casual causal, like I knew but didn't really, if Karin and Mantell--friends of mine fake quotes--drain keer.

All Lindred thought about as he watched from my mind was that once I got answers then decided I needed sleep: I was gone, Kindred back baby.

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43 Rusty redhead

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 8 Feb 2009 09:54:00 -0800

night? fence? 5 senses deja vu morgue vent moon burned bodies rust from gutter blood? Kindred kicked the rabid brainstream greyhound back.

Track on back, Kindred midstream braindream bitgleam steam slipding Will OhhBee Will Ohh Bee State Shhhun. psychdad for a fragment there.

Even up here in ours heads, Kindred couldn't keep on trackclakclik Will o beee start serling your balsam martini B&W up here remember that.

Kindred tried to say, Saturn V rockets were rusty redhead men to the skies blue green sun screen that great american dream satellite tinting

colors primarily red confirmed from Kindred's last dying breath (inside that damnable balloon) bluerayed futuretime yellow bird tweet poof.

slipstream back to blackwhite starved rock enroll steambowl weevull null void ink pen lan dough link can grout 66 technohomily homicries out

Satisfied, Kindred shut himself off, before Big Q. Meeks could. Back at Joy Motel, the bearded guy shuffled pages stapled shot glasses.

Snoring through snot, Sid Skin helped Meeks drag Kindred home to his hanging. Dick Overtones grabbed the doodles, Nazi Supergirl Booze.

Meanwhile: Mantell was gone from Grissom, he pulled a Remy, a PKD. The Joy Motel an antipode to the quantum singularity of Trinity's pull.

Only a select few disciples could tear holes through the minutes like snuff film burn marks dog-earred parchment he was with Karin in 1964.

Mantell spent himself in Karin's self, nurturing his new life, should he slit Karin, see if she ghosted out, motel curtains riffled pages.

As they rolled in Nebraska picnic soil, he knew he'd need a purple shirt one day, the kind that Presley cat wore on the Singer Special 1968.

Which brought to idle reason, his hand drawing hourglasses on Karin's naked thigh, her nether blonde tangy, she loved him for his mantellity

certainly not his crooked looks, not jagged like in old age, if he ever made it past 1968 this could be it 1964-1968 looping brainstream.

Mantell's hand on her belly of steel, Karin turned off. He buys the shirt, somehow he kills Kindred; what stops Kindred from crawling out?

Offal had told him before futuredeath that Kindred lived in a hotel & Nixon had resigned to clean turbines and he knew each Apollo launch.

Every crew member, every date of lift-off. It scared her that he knew, he could describe the moons of Saturn, the 4th planet from Wolf 359.

He told her he died surrounded by pills in 1982 contracted to ghostwrite a novel for quickcash alimoney bennies blueballs bookname joymotel.

Offal thought it was his way at seduction, she shrugged, breasts sunjiggle, twilight hiding her nipples, sky torn plums. Forget Kindred.

I walked up to the Huddle House, bluebirds twittering on a TV antennae. Hungry tummy toothpick eyes get coffee by the gallon red balloon?

Antennae looked funny yellowed eggs runny, I could jot a quick tale for Analog. Caffeine bright, pills dissolved, spread out Mantell's notes.

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42 Prosopagnosia

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 8 Feb 2009 09:51:00 -0800

Scratching my elbow, bus driver bippity brakes skin breaks I do need to trim my nails. Sun almost up, contrails like flaming whipped cream.

Heartbeats later, bus off-ramping me destintaneously, the sun rises. I look out the rear window, orange cymbal monkey sigil badang badang.

The sun a green screen backdrop, remnant from an old Mitchum film. Change it to Saturn, fake a landing, make a monster movie set in 2009.

Kindred: trapped in his own narrative for four, maybe five, daybursts now, sentence after expository sentence, words moving forward fast.

Clicks on a typewriter are replaced by speed bumps on the median, Kindred trying to break free, he can see himself in the contrails above.

Mirrored Self-MisIdentification. right hemisphere of my brain northern hemisphere on Earth and, by extension, Saturn. Methane seepsmells.

That's me, Kindred, looking at me, myself, and eye. In daylight, the bus driver a two-dimensional wafer, a Pez dispenser ad in SciFiNow#2.

Oh, here's a word. Prosopagnosia, a condition when someone no longer recognizes oneself and believes someone is following them: Biography!

Kindred turned it over to his narrative, he'd think metatext as the narrative him visualized reader-wise, both casual, wise...and wide-eyed.

I was only thirty minutes from Karin's sweet spyness & spryness in bed a spy nest nestled in Space Command Midwest, such a comic book name.

Gave the driver with the pez head a fez filled with quarter-filled liters of lead filters told him watch out for methane, he I'd the paisley.

The purple. The shirt. I shrugged, we switched, I now was James Greyhound with a running dog as my middle name, maybe a brilliant disguise?

Bus skids a 180, driver now in Elvis heaven, good thing I remembered to take Mantell's notepad from the pocket before we made the sly switch

Dropped off between stops, Elis fan Jimmy down with that, I'm at a marker: Space Command 4 mi. Linkedin: 2 mi. Stumblepon: the hear & now.

Kindred knew his narrative self still needed food, fuel to flip the pages with the panels of the day. Watched as the I door ringdinged food.

I'm down there, Kindred said to all of us, maybe its best if we just realize this happens at the same like fate on a breakfast mask/plate.

Its all there, like subway flares or roadkill flair, think red balloon when did the season first change, seriously, when, did you notice?

all so subtle bubble gum balloon inhale exhale condense reality expand the narrative, chew & discard, rinse & repeat. Question authority, 2.

Kindred had the dream, Saturn was as red as Mars as Jupiter's hurricane hole as Tricky Dick's piehole as methane man's exhale inhale insane.

He hoped the audience followed the brainstream in bits of sunshine on the electronic page but up here it is twilight call me a green screen.

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41 Little Egypt

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 7 Feb 2009 11:25:00 -0800

Pecan allergies can be bad, Mantell's throat still constricts clickclicking as I switch shirts. Button the button, his tongue flops a fish.

Should have worn a BVD, gotta button at least half the buttons, the dead disciple's hand on bathroom cement grout, a lobster dance familiar.

Out the door quick. Hey! Me: deerstuck. Hmnn? I say, looking like I have a bus to catch. Which I do, but in the next town. Obsfucate easy.

I swivel, fat broad behind the counter, she rocognizes the purple shirt, shitthinkfast. She jumps in, saving my error. Saw the shirt on TV!

Oh did you, I make nice. Not even a question, no raised brows, just clench hands in pockets of my Levi's. Yes, but I don't know where, nuts.

She said nuts. Seriously? The bus driver asked me. Seriously? I replied. I thought it funny, what with Mantell dead in the head nut doomed.

So what did YOU say? Driver's name was Jimmy Shunk. I left out certain details from my narrative. About the TV? Prompted. Teleprompter.

Made a joke, brainthought. Bus thrummed towards I-24. Little Egypt, bottom of Illinois. Mantell's body found three hours back, new waitress.

No doubt, was big broad freaked out? My pecans, their ketchup. 57 varieties of doom. 7 disciples to go. Damn, the bus driver a captured fan.

Sorry, just thinking. He nodded, he knew, nightquiet. Elvis wore a shirt like this rehearsing on that TV special back in June. Yeah? Yeah.

Good thing you weren't wearing those crazy shades of his, you almost have the sideburns. Tired, I heard skidmarks from his mouth. I yawned.

Tried to make it sound like a chuckle. I didn't even know what a chuckle sounded like. Rockets to Saturn, purple tongue gurgle, those I did.

Ever think about it? (Think what?) Growing out the burns, man. Cops aint bustin hippies anymore, not around here:Chicago maybe. Philosopher.

Evansville 27 mi. Still in Indiana, great. Maybe someone will get on, almost sun up, Jimmy Shunk can have a new companion, I can sleep.

Sure enough, a salesman, waiting on a Bible store bench at the edge of town. Nightmare time for me. Nazis flying, red capes, grey uniforms.

the girl flies low, skirt, no panties, hovers above my head. Gives good view. Drops a little. Drop kicks my head. I stutter flop awake. Ksh.

Salesman gone, town of Metropolis. Know why its Little Egypt? Awake, I just shook my head. Highway sign: Exit: Cairo. Rhymes with payroll.

I ignored him with a nod. Cops checking Indianapolis terminal, dollars to doughnuts. Shit for Shinola. My dead uncle's favorites phrases.

East-west routes likely, buses to Cincinatti, Columbus, Cleveland. What's the big deal with C's in Ohio. Elvis opened with C.C. Rider on TV.

I'd hope they'd at least ignore westward, I had made a dodge, talking east coast time zone yawn to the waitress. Was the moon this lonely?

I'm coming, dear, and this time I'm asking questions. I'm still thinking of them, should make a list. Search pockets, Elvis shirt, notepad?

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40 Girly gun

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 5 Feb 2009 07:52:00 -0800

Space Command Midwest. Sounds like something I would have written for Tales to Confound. Being the way I am, I would have used Karin's name.

Looked in that drawer in my room, the tiny one with the city guide map in it. So many scraps of paper, looseleaf, loose leaves, greensleeves

I realize at time I think with commas, like I'm not getting enough oxygen, which I'm not. I know that's methane in the next room. euhh.

bus ticket, coat check, bottle cap, casino chip, money clip, bit-o-honey, hope they'll be making these when I get older, if I keep my teeth.

Too many people running my lives these days, giving me tokens of gravitude. What do they want expect detect fret collecting debts I can't--

Just thinking out loud as I think of which paper to recycle, a word I invented for my latest story, "Spanky Flakes." Wrote it on the bus.

Driver said Karin was reading something over my shoulder, coulda been that. I was too busy watching the driver's finger cuff reflections.

I think better at night, the turbines only run 9-5, my bus stub to East St. Louis. Karin's sweet Nazi-Supergirl scent. Am I my dad finally?

Cold out, yet I hear music from Tourette's when I stick my head out the door for some air. Could be Dick Overtones, too. He was a crooner.

Do I kill her, do I cross her seduce her despise her? Concentrate on Mantell, he should be next. Grissom AFB, Indiana. Named for Gus. RIP.

Dead in the Apollo 1 fire, follow Apollo. Was he the Gemini 7 guy who snuck the sandwich in the capsule? Bones crisped 1967, Gus's dead, man

I'm still looking out my door when the neighbor opens his, spaceman helmet guy, outline for a swirly face. Waves, guess he smiles. Freaks me

He stands in the doorframe, heavy spaceboots anchoring him to the orange carpet in his room. Large red tank beside him, hose to his mask.

Behind him, his room is chockablock with at least thirty more methane cylinders, stacked and leaning, scarred and damaged, redmetal forest.

His voice echoes from inside his helmet. Ventvoice that penetrates my room, verbiage blaster from my master, tinpot despot space commander.

Mantell is allergic to pecans, he says. He is left handed. He carries a .25 caliber handgun inside his right jacket pocket, no extra clip.

Spaceman knows Mantell? Details of his life? Duly noted. Pecan man is next on my list. The paint is peeling above the doorframe. Melting.

Methane, if that's what my spaceman breathes, is leaking from the coupling that attaches the hose to his mask. Hot enough to curl old paint.

He steps back, elbows his door shut. Flare of light in his peephole. Sound of a small explosion, then music. I Can't Get No Satisfaction.

Three minutes later I'm on the bus to Grissom AFB. Time collapses. Ten seconds later I'm watching Mantell eat an ice cream cone. No pecans.

He looks up, unsurprised to see me. He was told I was coming. Karin. He gets up and goes into the men's toilet. Empty diner. Tired ketchup.

I pick up a bottle of Heinz. Crack the door to the john and Mantell reaches into his right jacket pocket and pulls out his .25. Girly gun.

He starts jacking it and bullets plink into the wall beside me as I walk in. Nervous shooter, lightweight piece, no accuracy. But I'm hit.

Not really. I blobbed ketchup on my shirt before I went in. Mantell sees it and thinks he nailed me and his adrenaline spikes and he's mine.

I bend him backward over the sink, rip open a 95 cent bag of pecans and jam a dozen nuts into his maw. He's still firing into the ceiling.

After he dies, allergy liturgy. I peel off his shirt, put it on. Purple paisley. Now he's wearing mine, redketchupstainbloody. Confuse cops.

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39 Black ops

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 4 Feb 2009 08:34:00 -0800

Me just back from Nam and war echoes in the steel chambers of my braingun. Blink flashback of Culhane's Insane Unknown Offensive, upriver.

Thwack thwack rotor blades as I ducked under and pushed Culhane onto the deck, enemy hanging onto my leg at 3000 feet and I kicked him free.

Alleybound drugaddled I huddle shrug-hunched against blasted concrete deflecting raw north winds from Canada whistling knife-edged brutal.

Feet. My field of view narrow, eyes peeping tears from minus 30. Feet in snow facing me. I look up to see bearded man, wetblack sunglasses.

We observe each other for an hour, waiting to see who's going to break the silence and speak first. Take your time, I ain't goin' nowhere.

You're Kindred, he told me, he wasn't asking. Yes. Get up, let's go. Followed him into a warm purple doorway and up an industrial elevator.

Call me Gideon. I'm CIA. We've been watching you. Nam. You did good. We want you. You think you know killing? You know nothing. Not yet.

Six months of black ops training. Both arms tied behind my back, stabkilled a 900 pound hog, deadeyestrike with a ball point pen mouthheld.

Highschool gymnasium, midnight dark, me earplugged and blindfolded, handcaught a highflying wild pigeon by feeling its wingwind cheektickle.

Then six months of covert activity. Two assassinations, messy in Mexico. Penetrated rogue gang, major drug ops, knocked down the leaders.

Drowned one in a dirty toilet while a diversionary gasfire took down the building we were inside. Pursued the other into the mountains.

Slipped through six guards AK-47 ready, me ghostlike Red Grange galloping through the line, stiff finger through his ear into the brain.

Gideon officially pleased, unofficially pissed because I walked away clean, wanted more from me, I had my own deathmission ready to roll.

12 Disciples of Kindred the Elder, children of the bomb, worshipping its influence, its ability to transform geopolitics, purify 'n cleanse.

Secret society, political donations, pulling levers of power, rigged elections, America adrift, needing rejigging, stabilization, repair.

JFK roadkill in their way, they took him out of play. Escalated Nam, wanted to nuke the north, grand designs on the Middle East, oil bombs.

And so I got to work. Solo avenger, blue collar assassin, just doin' my job, ma'am. Making my list, checking it twice, naughty or nice?

No tools of the trade, no fancy parade. No remorse, no regret, you ain't seen nothin' yet. No weapons, no fears, no mercy, no tears.

Remy Calumet, Professor Deedle, Danko Drout, Mantell. Stroked out, crossed off, done and done, one by one, Karin Offal's time will come.

I walk through urban canyons slidin' smooth, figures in the dark give me plenty of room to move. What gives me the right? I own the night.

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38 Methane man

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 4 Feb 2009 07:02:00 -0800

Kindred: hitching, thumb out, frozen ice cream treat. Puffs of air, no help. Bus long gone, canister in his pocket like a chilly hard-on.

Three mile markers and a Burma Shave later, a car rolls up. Mercury Montego, jet blue. Driver looks like Janssen, from Tourette's, he's MIA.

Facial tic and all, cops picked him up, I heard. Killed his wife with her own prosthetic arm. Plus, he was Canadian. Who'd have thought?

Where you headed, Kindred heard him growl tobacco. Kindred asked what year it was. Driver: huh? K: I often get lost in my own fictions. Hht.

Six weeks earlier, mental kickback, Kindred sweating bedtop sheetless, heat in his room set to broil, get the loonygoonies out, pop a bead.

Voice from the heating vent, man from Saturn, methane gulper, can't come out to play today or any day, can't breathe oxygen, this spaceman.

Orange Julius, Julius Boros, Rome He Hoe und Jules he Et. Thirsty for knowledge, hungry for love, starving for affection, supersaturated.

Noncentsickle verbiage, metatextual visagery, condensation of visceral visual imagery, ubermuscular self-awareness, 140 eyepokes per Tweet.

I lay back on the bed closest to the bathroom in my bromide away from home. Thought about the bus ride in Illinoir crime noir cornstalk doom

I dreamt on that bus, as well. Karin Offal sucked in oxygen meant for me, and now I'm back here, avoiding Tourette's like it was a disease.

Now whwn I hear Bob Dylan's new song BLONDE ON BLONDE, I think of Offal and deadDad. Warner Bros. closed down their cartoon studios today.

Can't sleep can't peep nothing to weep for or at, wipe the visagery from the viscera in my eye sockets, maybe someone will buy me a drink.

Scrip City, closed for renovations. Well, pardon me. Hopping along, bipping like that new cat Cassius Clay, me feeling like Sonny Liston

TV has crappy reception at Tourette's, Meeks blames it on Hurricane Betsy, hitting New Orleans. Pronounces it noreens like he's ball-gagged.

I think the bad reception is from the guy from Saturn in my heating vent, but I do not amplify my thoughts (unlike Mac the Rant, who, in his

questionable wisdom, praises the songs of the multiverse primordial). Sid Skin tells me Bobby Kennedy had some dying words, months ago.

Before MLK was doomed, Bobby was asked when there'd be a black president, he posited 40 years. I whiplashed, whoa, I was there. Somewhen.

Back to my room, my conundrums, my sleep. I have a nightmare that the methane man is turning me into magnetic spools of recording tape.

my brain spools out, cheap 35m film now, shot from a .22 caliber with the railroad tracks outside in the backstory. Panning, breezy curtains

blonde on blondie and clyde breathless not quite beneath the planet of the summer of love and apes triple features jiffy pop jujubees hash.

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37 Bus boy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 2 Feb 2009 08:36:00 -0800

If this is how it will end, that it will NOT end, well, is it worth trying to go after the remaining witnesses? All of us, altered fates.

I'm thinking no one is going anywhere any time soon, I don't need to be dog-paddling down the big muddy, there's no need. Time floats still.

The insanity clause in my contract gives me a three day extension or a volcanic excavation, but I do not pass go Greyhound, I-57, 3:45 AM.

I'm off my meds again, they make me too reliable and we can't have that now, can we? Nine passengers & me, the driver does sign language.

I see his reflection, reverse shadow puppets on the glass, green from the odomoter, red from the fuel light and blinkers. Wipers splash.

I'm NOT lucid, I am. The other nine are snoozing, one with a Raleigh cigarette in his mouth, still lit, bopping like a deaf shadow puppet.

Dad left me with this guilt, straddled with confusion. I can hang myself from the luggage rack, I could! An auto-intoxicant infussion, sure.

Rural Illinois police will buy anything. Even my novels, covers torn off, no royalties, rim shot. My deadorant could double as a ball gag.

I am so despondent not nearly reluctant to find out if I hang up & tune out Ban roll-on shoved down my throat, do I walk back in, new life?

Are the remaining disciples reliving lives, exchanging lives? Explains why Calumet was dead then alive then dead, I killed his future past.

Wish I was back up there in the black, not down here in the grey, during the day in the green, searching on the floor for my reds & yellows.

I'm glad you are here to listen to me type, its like wiper blades, right? One person who will listen, well, OK, a bobbing cigarette ignites.

The bus implodes directionless. I can't scream a warning, having gagged myself. Auto-embolic failure, I DESPISE MY BRAIN'S INSIDES (help).

She was here, I had slept. Karin Offal, on this bus, in my sleep, walking through. My kiddie memories fractured fractals she morphs night.

When they are dead, THEN I die or will I keep reanimating myself? Off the bus in Effingham, 42 mi. to Space Command. Ground Control to PKD.

Leering driver handswipes me as I exit, sneakpalms me slyly. Helluva dame, he says, pneumatic. I mouth a response, it comes out empty. Wha?

He shapes his hands curvy and mimes a figure eight, or maybe an hourglass. Hubba hubba bub, he snorts, and I hop down doublebubbleheaded.

Black plastic, empty film canister, passed driver to me, surreptitious-like. I sit beside a statue of a bearded man astride a stonehorse.

Pop open the cannister and pull out a rolled up piece of paper. It's a photo, dad and Karin Offal. He's working at his desk, papercovered.

She's behind him, naked, arms over his shoulders, protective and smothering. The look on her face, feral. Dad oblivious, equation-brained.

I flip the picture over. On the back, Kindred, it says, handwritten, blue inkish. Kindred: Greetly. Knowish your mission. We all know. Yes.

Killing endeth now, disciples free to be, or I end life for thee. And there she drew a smiley-face. Signed, Luvly Karin. Dated: today. Wha?

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36 Cargo cult

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 07:04:00 -0800

When I look back up out then, I knew there were knewrel connections to why that dead strech of I-80 put me in the murder set again so fresh.

Friday night now, 11:11 PM. Silence, not a single tweet. And I should know. Thinking about telling Kindred, but he has his own tale to sell.

Kindred ran backwards in mind towards the river branch or mouth north or kraut not his fault they had to die, floatin away like a momma cow.

He opened his eyes to the hydrocarbon rains, they had pulled him from his water dream hooked him skyward ingesting his brainstream fat grim.

Those Titan sheep. Sponges & stealers of thoughts & whims. He looked at the vast black & blue, electric blue, titian blue scratch that now.

The Titan blue of methane vacancies. Volcanic smelling salts. Up here beneath the rings you could forget deadlines, ex-wives, damn Nazis.

Kindred thought of himself in the negative postive: I chose Saturn for the solitude. Let Voyager 1 piss off Jupiter's rotations until I die.

I can think up here, this is where I went when I ate through my 1982 death and vomited by enigmatic emblematic magnetic field fanatic...1972

I was up here first, leaving thermo-chromic cargo cult in the hydrocarbon rains. I learned the xenoglossy attributed to me in this when how.

In 1972 I was talking in a language long dead, and I learned in between afterlife and protobirth, up here with my phantom android sheep. Baa

I spent years mirrored back in the Joy Motel with me up here near Saturn. In Titan's mists, I watched the Watcher as he watched me not dead.

I telescope in past Voyager & Jupiter, stilt tilt eyes of Laura Mars, Enterprise, the proto-shuttle. Shoulda been named for Carl Sagan, pft.

Damn tempunauts. Watcher back at Joy Motel, me up here with hypervision, share the gaze of millions, Bicentennial witchcraft, almost there.

Oh, poor Dicky, a woman's hand (my hypervision is intensely pretentious!) switches channels from Dick resigning to the 1st Illinois Lottery.

October 1973, all those UFO abductions, twice-told tales a cover for the CIA realigning Chile correct, falling clear space, goodnight moon.

And here I am in '72, Tricky Dick still working on his probability turbines, I talk in a dead language and scan the night sky feeling alone.

On Titan, in the methane sheets, the first compounds of sentience lurch before a microbe altar. My cargo cult: what might they make of it?

In the slatted shades of Saturn's rocks, in the matted frays of a slattern's vox, driblets of teal, cult cargo teal, worship my name PKD.

I woke up floating like a fat momma cow past locks & bridges down the muddy one mississippi two miss--PKD, cult cargo, years from now: 1968.

Mississippi reversing flow, pulling America inside out and backward through time, 1982 collapsing into 1972, Kindred the Dead reinhabited.

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35 Memory hook

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:36:00 -0800

Cop gone, Kindred fifty miles on, roadside, engine blown, car abandoned, walking the center line like it's an open vein, heartland bound.

White vehicle honking, can't squeeze past, edges up until the driver side mirror clips Kindred's swinging right hand, glint of sunglasses.

G-Men from 1945, again? Rubber gloves. Engine leaking dark oily pools. Death rattle after the chase. Kindred looks ahead. His father down.

They had rolled over and slid upside down on the roof. Truck spinning in ever diminishing circles like hands of a Dali clock running down.

Kindred watches himself, age nine, slide out the window. G-Men beating his father with a length of chain. Their car, a true nondescript.

Shotgun on the back seat, pump action, 12 gauge. Taking it out, the long barrel banging against the door frame, glinting hard black steel.

Two heads swinging around, eyes locking on danger, hands reaching for service revolvers, shock of brain pattern recognition. Boy? Boy??

Behind them Kindred sees now what he did not see then, his father throwing something into the desert, sagging back, gurgling wordlessly.

First blast a tight cluster of pellets, hornets from hell, face pulped and head gone at the same time, standing headless corpse, toppling.

Kindred's father rolling over onto his back, blinking like a salmon, mouth bubbling air pockets tinged with pink direct from lungs wheezing.

Kindred, five feet tall, pumped the action, swinging the shotgun and the second cluster missed wide right, rogue pellet eye-centric, zing.

Entering the left eye of G-Man #2, popping it like a party balloon and angry travel through the back of his brain and out, death dealer.

Kindred dragging his father to the government vehicle and getting him into the trunk and slamming it down, turning the ignition, rolling.

90 miles an hour west dead straight along the desert highway, chasing the dying sun. Kindred the Kid twirling the knob, radio up, Sinatra.

Left behind to bake on sand ridged like a serpent's throat, or the carpet in Joy Motel, the Watcher's eyeball, poppin' hot, superglazed.

Two hundred miles of horizon pulled before Kindred the Elder spit the words out. Kindred the Kid kicked the car into a spin, screamed east.

And now, 23 years later, Kindred replays the scene on the reflective lenses of a stranger's sunglasses, knuckles mirror dinged, memoryhook.

Red dot on the horizon growing larger, turbines whine, vehicle from 1945 approaches, fills the moment with raw Detroit metal hurtling east.

Kindred sees himself age nine at the wheel flowing past like a fold in time, water rippling decades unspooling, his father in the backseat.

Timesmack and Kindred confirms these two men here in this white vehicle on this day are the G-Men from 1945 and he needs to kill them again.

Three hours later, light spinning roofly on vehicle lawful, state cops pull over to investigate. Two black uniformed, white car, red dead.

One has an exploded eyeball, the other no head at all. The skinny cop squints sunward, nodding up and down, got a professional job, he says.

Kindred long gone, hitchhiked clear, traveling fast, no baggage but memories light as a sunglassed stranger's last earthly gasp, deadweight.

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34 Baby's heart

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:03:00 -0800

Paid my dues at the front desk, eighteen bucks to a guy named Sagan. He tipped his head, like a connective wire before an execution, zzzt.

He slowed down, handed me a manila envelope. Had my name, the name of the motel, it was stamped forwarded from the Joy Motel. Dammit all.

Shuffling out back, corn field, stalks talking, I can hear their voices. Elbow my way in fifty yards and sit down. Manila crinklywrinkly.

My name in redpen, blood oath. Familiar script, aggressive K. Cornerbiting I tear it open, spit out the paperscrap, mash it badboy soily.

Tip the envelope and gravity pulls as gravity does and the black and white glossy slips out and falls like a petal from a monochrome rose.

It's me. I'm dead. Blank head. Blood red. My face is mashed into the lap of a woman wearing a floral dress, summershift thin, me eyeglassy.

In the picture, future-me is breathlessly innocent, mouth open, saliva bubbling at the corners, her small hand mashpushing my head down.

Relooking at the envelope. Handwriting hardedge K. Familiar, yeah. That's mine. I sent the manila surprise to myself. From the Joy Motel.

Postmark 3-15-72. Sent to the Third Mind Motel. How did I know where I'd be on this day after hours of wheelspinning on a westward quest?

How did I get this death image? Why did I die? Who is this tiny woman with the bony hand smothering me into her lap, bigheadedly deadeyed?

Folding the photo until it is the size of a baby's heart and stuffing it pocketly. Hawk slips westward sliding above on God's last breath.

I bounced in my seat, threw my back out, opened the car door and retrieved it. So I meet an old dame in the next 4 yrs. Memo:avoid old dames

Simple as that, stick with the schedule, snipe the disciple, avenge dad's lovegone, emasculate Hitler a generation later. And then, discord.

Kindred hadn't gone a single exit ramp from that shitty motel when a squad reeree'd out of nowhere, zeroing him. He pressed his jugular.

An old trick, get a move going, effects of the meds vamoose for a bit, waiting behind nerve bundles until Johnny Law skidoos to the sunset.

The cop walked up to Kindred, kept it quick. Handed him a note, smelled like corn, told him it was in that envelope, wagged his finger once.

Kindred saw his teeth marks; it was where he bit it open. Cop all smiley, told him he was lucky, littering was legal but only until 1973.

Random scribbles, did he write this, in haste? The cop car did doughnuts in a Stuckey's parking lot off to the left, clue or distraction?

Dad's old flame had moved on. Scott AFB, southern Illinois, near St. Louis. Space Command, reported for duty the day Jackie grabbed JFK DNA.

Dammit, might as well just start paddling the Mississippi. Deep down, Kindred seemed pleased. He thought of ships in a Midwestern night.

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33 Nazi juices

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:18:00 -0800

I left the room, always in first-person narrative and obsessive-compulsive perfect, books stacked neat, blood spatters facing northeast.

Rearranging everything just right, motel shampoo: label front, just like the Benton soap. Made my thoughts click clack click back. K-chack.

Freeze frame, I heard what sounded like vacuuming, yet the cleaning lady was dead. But, who replaced my soap. Someone watching the room.

Time to bolt, the parakeet molting, open door next door we're at war band the bomb and bang the boom think Kindred think I say out loud.

Something the monkey told him, nights before. The turbines were actually travesty generators, Nixon used a cut-up technique, tricky Dick.

Vampire monkey simply a chimp with rubber teeth, a joke. When I tried to eat him, he squelched like an old bakelite radio circa 1945.

Sack come and. Even I didn't talk like that hen I was off my meds or took too meeny miny mo. My dad had a lover, not my mother, Ft. Bliss.

She left him with old scars for a new job, Wichita. Which was it? No. Nebraska. Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha. Strategic Air Command.

Where he needed to go, another disciple needed discipline. I-80 straight line, heading west into the black. Bye Dick, enjoy your 'shrooms.

Karin Offal. Looked like Supergirl, if Supergirl was German. Didn't have that Nazi hairdo, smoked like a fiend. And Dad loved her to death.

She looked like Lee Remick. Years later, I saw ANATOMY OF A MURDER. Jimmy Stewart, 1959, small-time lawyer. No Mitchum. Remick black widow.

Not that way with Dad, she loved him back and hard.They shared secrets and dreams where torsos spun and bled across shifting sands. Red ants

or black oil, hard drops of blood on pursed lips in dark dreams on a secret summer night. I watched from the door of our trailer, nervy.

She was on top, her spine creased like a book you read before lights out. One hand drummed against a glass of scotch. Paper clip echoes.

It was the night she left; I watched for hours. I had never seen a woman's breasts before & I had yet to hear the damp voices like tongues.

Dad made sounds I had never heard him make, monkey sounds, oh how they bounced. I did not understand what was happening to me internally.

The cover story, she was going to Huntsville AL with the rest of von Braun's madmen. July 4, 1950, she boarded a Greyhound bus for Omaha.

Dad died nine years later, always had a photo in his wallet, Dad & Karin at the Proving Grounds.Her smile; she could've had a cape & tights.

Trutrh, justice and dear old dad fucking a nazi bitch up the ass three ways to son day. 18 years? She'd be mid-40s. I would strangle her.

Trutrh. Damn, I was hiccupping word thoughts again. I pulled over just past Cedar Rapids to take my meds, sedate my quantum thoughts.

Lucid, like a shot of chloring up my nose, I realized that whenever I typed on the Galaxy Twelve I thought of paper clips dropping on glass.

Damn. CHLORINE, rhymes with Doreen, think spell correct. Memories messing with me bad. I sat near a Sunoco gas pump and wept. No reason.

Hours of flatness later. Tired, not ready to call it off, bam down an off ramp. Burroughs Pop.1977, hit Gysin Street, The Third Mind Motel.

Midday nap. Yawn. No turbines. Proper caps and periods. Maybe it was the smell of corn. Dreamt of the damp trailer filled with Nazi juices.

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32 Brainpan burn

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:40:00 -0800

Turbines power up, dullpulse rumble beneath the floorboards. Wall bulges, retreats, repeats, heartbeat. Airpulled under door, deep inhale.

Kindred toes woolfake hallway carpet, ridged like the inside of a throat. The Watcher stonestill as Buddha in the doorway of 266, on guard.

Sprinting Kindred glimpses hot white eyeballs as he passes, pupils contracted to pinpoints, redrimmed black keyholes, unblinking thinking.

Smacking glassdoors in fishbowl lobby, sidewalking in bare feet, cigarettes glow in ambulance windscreen, fireflies immobile, pinstuck dead.

Kindred slaps driverwindow palmhard, glass crinkles, a push and it falls away in soft round pebbles. But the ambulance is empty, idling low.

Fireflies were reflections of flashlights, cops yellowtaping exterior balcony, dead cleaning woman legs akimbo over the railing, mannequin.

Play acting? Not real corpse. Kindred processing visual input, notes Dick Overtone appears to be supervising police strike force, so rigid.

Overtone drops plastic cleaning woman into dumpster, cops disperse, mumbling. Crewcut mesomorph hands Kindred a driver's license, tattered.

Signed by Johnson Dack, Watcher killed at the Trinity blast, 1945. But the picture is Kindred's father. Kindred uncertain, squints, what?

Conspiracy? Attempted cover up? Red herring? His father co-opting Dack's ID so the G-Men would assume he was dead? Or am I hallucinating?

Kindred the Elder, whitefaced in goggle glasses peering at the nuclear sunburst, windwashing burnt skin with sandblasted savagery, primal.

If my father died standing outside the shelter, then who rode with me across New Mexico? Who was pulled from the car by government agents?

If he died, head of the program, maker of the pompombomb, IQ 210, no wonder he became the iconic leader of the 12 disciples. If he died. If.

Was I so brainscarred I did not could not would not recognize the man in the car as the road rolled away in dry snakeskin patterns after us?

Yubbadubba brainpan burn. Valveleak on brainstream download Life of Kindred, 1940s, Inject 3.2. Subject misfiring, needs corrective action.

Maintenance Report 2009.1.27.1b Technician unable to override burn on Subject: Kindred. Note Inject 3.2 corrosive mismix. Issue pain recall.

Observation matrix indicates Subject: Kindred behaving v. erratically. Should be considered Dangerous Level 5. Uncontrollable, unstoppable.

Ambulance drivers unable to execute exit pickup. Forced to abandon immediate area when facing imminent confrontation with Subject: Kindred.

Send two armed technicians to pullback ambulance when Subject: Kindred is sleeping. Warning: Two burning cigarettes on floormat. Extinguish.

Recommendation (needs signature of commissioner): Disavow responsibility for any actions committed by Subject: Kindred due to brainstream.

Kindred squatting on the carpet in the doorway of 266, face to face with the Watcher stony chairbound monitoring hallway activity. Eyelock.

No noticeable chest movement, no respiration, eyeglazed, grayskinned. The Watcher a statue, rockharddead. Kindred thumbclosing his eyelids.

Kindred shedding ownskin pinkly, steaming nozzle showerscalding. Highwhine turbines. Stepping out, toes splayed, rebirthed, a brandnew man.

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31 Galaxy twelve

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 08:23:00 -0800

Falling through the verbs, impaled upon a noun. Snowblind I wonder: did the Watcher see the future as Trinity tapdanced on his eternal soul?

Birthed as a small red dot, as if the blood of the doomed, spit forth by a typewriter ribbon worn to shreds. Not a dot, a period, full stop.

The dot growing like a red balloon being inflated by the gasping breaths of an asthmatic, in ebbs and tides. The printed word, unchained.

Kindred napped for a few pages, everything was static between his snores. He rolled over in his dream, fell to the edge of the discards.

A draft woke him up, a discarded draft, pages disheveled, slipping from 20# white linen double bond he was in a bind dropping dots of ink.

Snow covered the farmlands of the Great Plains. Kindred in freefall, arms out, whee, he was nine again, daddy let him on a ride at Riverview.

No not snow no no no closer what no stay away not fields not borders squares and lines not star routes or fire roads no post office anymore.

E-lectronic brainwaves he heard the wind like typing on a keyboard then a SLAP like satisfied hitting a button named SEND. Postage stamps

the squares were more blank pages, shadowed snow drifts = scratched out lines in pencil wha? who used pencils anymore? Kindred did, right?

BAM, he hit. Smelled linke Ticonderaga#2 lead. Couldn't spell erasures, he seemed to recall scratching joyously his head his ass the words.

Linke? What kind of word was Linke? Kindred tried to scratch it, tear at it with his fingers and his teeth manic. Typo behind a clear screen

Banged his jaw bang a gong war what is it good for good god jaw Kindred poked his finger at the whiteness, like tapping on a glass corpse.

What the scene shift as I looked from behind the hard light Baldo the Magnificent keeps moving his one finger like a nicotine fit, he's gone

and I'm back outside the fourth wall screwball I hear a typewriter my old Smith Corona Galaxy Twelve (What is Hewlett Packard? Tax guys?)

I let myself slide down the pages to the sound, past red balloons of circled words (the ones I would replace) and there he was: a monkey.

Typing at hyperspeed, pages yanked pages yanked one after another my story? his story? why would a monkey have a story? A monkey vampire?

Musty smell of wet sci-fi paperback drenched from leaking skylight in a tiny library in Nebraska. Kindred on his back on the carpet wakes.

Tired bones brittle clattering like a Johnny Walker bottle full of dominoes he staggers to his window and wipes clear the hotsteamed glass.

Flaring lights in freezing rain, the hiss of blood in arteries cranial. Rustling of fist inside greasy bag of buttered popcorn, ear tickles.

Car idling in the parking lot. Not a car, a van. Not a van, an ambulance. Two occupants impassive. Always waiting, a springloaded beartrap.

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30 J-O-Y-M-O-T-E-L

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 06:00:00 -0800

Iceberg memories. Bright blue sunshades. Watching kids play basketball. Good-natured yelling. I realize that I am recognized, I just know.

Tinfoil hat time. Still at the BB game. Or is it BBs and skeet shooting? Sleet when no one is looking? This is me when the drugs kick in.

But I've been clean for three reality shifts now. Took the cure back in Room 77, the sweat room, psychDad photos on every wall, plastered.

How long had I been searching for Calumet even after I thought he was dead? Why wouldn't I have gone after Mantell or Degnan, next to go?

The river Calumet drowned in has dried up, his remains long since drifted in the AC/DC air-conditioned diagonal curvature, current carried.

Into the lake, begone! No more current in the river's West Branch, unless it rained or more likely a hobo pisses like a banshee, wailing.

Bubbly Creek, the South Branch, is still there. Ghosts of slaughtered stockyard cattle and stocky slackers, grocery store baggers, selective

this city can be, it will rain in dissections. There is a subdivision where the West Branch watered, now nothing but sunshine over riches.

And I'm stuck in Joy Motel. When did I start my last manuscript and more importantly, what was it about? A mnemonic memoir, sci-fi HI-FI?

State of the art computer repairs? A cookbook to serve man (wrong-o, liabilities ensue!). Kindred at Earth Online dot c'mon you know, why?

It all makes sense at times, if I let the morphing drip begin and the revels halt: SCI-FI RECORDS in the 70s, the parrot a parakeet, tweet.

Forget Mantell, I contemplate for three days. I can leave here because I'm special. Degnan is on the border & ultimately out of luck. Tweet!

Its 1 in the morning, 20 degrees below zero, Venus has gone past the horizon, the church steeple on the corner is not lit. And so I set out.

I crawl across a white landscape pebbled with black lines, curved and straight, clumped in clusters with spaces between, windtunnelempty.

My fingers are turning black, not from cold or gangrene. But what? They smell pungent. Tin? Lead? Ink? I pause and look back, squintpanting.

Barren as an ice floe, Antarctic blindwhiteout. I stab my blade into the surface, testing. It rips a neat hole with tattered edges. Paper?

I'm on a piece of paper covered with text. It stretches to the horizon on all sides. I wander until I find a curve I recognize. Sweeping J.

It takes ten minutes to walk from the top of the J down the main shaft and around the curl to the tip. Several yards away, thick black line.

Exploring. It's an O. J-O. I spend the rest of the morning tracing out letters. J-O-Y-M-O-T-E-L. And a plain of smaller letters tumbling.

I appear to be on a manuscript. Am I the protagonist? Am I the villain? Am I the author? Am I in the Joy Motel? Or a novel called Joy Motel?

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29 Gastric juices

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:42:00 -0800

And The Man comes on the radio, transistor gluegummed in my ear. He says to me, he says, Do you believe? Do you, Phil Kindred, believe?

I stopstart on urban sidewalk, bunnyhop step, surprised. Me? Do I believe? But The Man is gone and I hear ticking. Or is it tapping? Do I?

Fingering the flatblade in my backbelt. Razoredge draws blood. Billboard poster whipcracks in the north wind. Up I look, I look. BulletEyez.

Gazing implacably at my cocked head, his mouth a sneer, shutterbound. I jig sideways into an alley and pressflesh on cold brick, shivering.

Do I believe? Not me, oh no. Virgin Mary flashfrozen in an eyeball, superimposed on Trinity's mushroom cloud. Not my religion, bang a bomb.

Peering edgeways I see the poster is a toaster, BulletEyez vaporized, a toaster full-o waffles ready to be syrup-slicked. Advertising at me.

Calumet, I have your number. You are next. Puffa huffa your last breath. Breaking sidewindow on a Caddy, I climb inside and get it a-going.

Rolling tirehard U-turn skidding. Clipping sideview mirror, sparkcity. Foot mashed floorboards, engine thrusting. Baby, I'm a-comin', hear?

Kill'd ya once, bud, whatchoo doin' still heartpumpin'? Neon skips off puddle and kisses my windshield, me panting at a red, vibrating hard.

Gunning the Caddy through a plate glass window, cheapdive called The PorkRind. Glassmashing crashing. Half a pig on a plate, bibs 'n diners.

Calumet's in the booth in the back, plate of bigfries dipped in bacon grease, slippyfingered shinyfaced not too happy to see me crusading.

Collared in my fist, I drag him out the back door, his leather shoes carving a halfpath through swiny innards on the floor in the kitchen.

Somebody's squealing, it ain't me. Calumet porcine, eyebugged. Shoulder hits a green sedan and two heads popup in the backseat, lustbusted.

Black and white rolls by, copsters eating lobsters. Tapping? They don't see. I drag Calumet feetfirst to the D-bridge, pools of nightlight.

Any last words? Calumet blubbering. Kindred your dadddddy! My daddy what? Your daddy was our leader. My daddy what? Our leader, the Elder.

This I don't want to hear. I bend and lift, bodygrip and over he goes, a spiral fall, cracks the riverice fifty feet below and goes through.

Blackhole winking lights from neoncity, blackwater running silent, breathless, blackblood freezing on my sleeve, Calumet on an astral plane.

Retracing steps, icy air lungfully. Peaceful, hungry. Through the kitchen in The PorkRind, waiters cleaning up the mess I made. Menu please.

Diners scrambling, give me clearance. I get into the Caddy, snouted into the front window, engine still running. Hornhonk and piggyfood.

I eat a plate o' porkrinds and chase it with a Bud. That waffle poster sure stimulates gastric juices. Lipsmackin', I back her out, no tip.

Tinkle of falling glass, put it in gear and crawl east, cityscream in my pitydreams, disciple down, Calumet drowned, my shadow slowdancing.

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28 Bonyhead

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:25:00 -0800

Mr. Kindred, your bonyhead seems particularly knobswollen this morning. Is it packed full of letters and numbers waltzing pyrotechnically?

Ouchy. I know it's sore, little fella. Shall I give it a gobsmack directly upon its achinpate? No? But it might provide the relief you seek.

Tell your old docdad wassamatta boy. Spill the beans, ballpeen. You've been sneakingpeeking on fireladderescapesloudsirens, haven't you son?

Did you managemenagerie to grabnab Mr. Culhane's mysterylockbox? You did? Was the luscious Cella Slink a-bouncin' on the bedspringadings?

And what was inside the talkinbox? A dozen cousins in a row? Leaning on elbows watching the show? In the boomroom? Year of our Lord 1945?

Must be erased posthaste, I think we all agree. I met surreptitiously with the fictitiously adroit duo BulletEyez and Baldo the Magnificent.

They were passing through you on a little jaunt from your old haunts, somewhere in the humidair over Miami, ten years hence-ish looking tan.

They tell me you're going to be quite famous, though somehow nameless. Fans will know you by the letters PKD. Or maybe it was KFC. Could be.

Odd, huh? CIA black ops put you in the drainpool living without rules. But you must emerge from creepdeepshadows to countersink your foes.

Exposure without closure could become your ruin. As your docdad, I advise: do not look directly at the scum without proper eye protection.

Kindred streetward slouching feetward spies a bluemoon with flashtired eyes. Headfull mission, nuclear fission. Smiling smallest of smiles.

I was on the run from Calumet, thought he was dead. No, HE thought he was dead. Zombie Motel, I tell you. And this is what my head is like.

Calumet, the corpus linguist, Mantell, the progressive ruin. The latter wanders as if dead, leaves one life, the next is worse than mine.

I'm not happy that Calumet is alive after I killed him for real-like in the last book I wrote...wait, I died before I wrote his death scene.

Where's the bible sublime? My answers are there. My questions are where? Soylent Green is food! Nope, that's the wrong bible, right future.

Calumet just will not quit. Spraying me with brain bullets not my own. Wrong stories, lost in the frames. You cut out his brain you blurgh.

Coughing up catch phrases not just right. Peel before Zod. Feel crunchy, punk? Puking up peels and parrot guts. It wasn't a parrot after all

It was a parakeet. Tweet, tweet. Invasion of the Bobby Soxers. Tweet, tweet. Channel change. The inner mind to... The Uber Litmus.

Brainflash spritz as a citybus blatted past, windows full of wide-eyed riders, Kindred buffeted by the backwash and metallic shift of gears.

Databits jangling skullcore. Do I remember the names? Slippage royal. Regroup, reload. Yes. Wallinfo intact, memory serves, rock and roll.

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27 Yellow run

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:54:00 -0800

Hello, I'm Kindred. (chorus) Hello, Kindred. (K) I will be sober eleventeen years and 6,213 nanoseconds from now. (chorus) polite applause.

There was this song I always listened to, you know? When I was on my own, solving crimes and staying solvent but not sober so sue me. You?

Stand with the accused if you can't accept me, READ me, I'm a novelty, get it? No? Then stand with the accused, the ones who drove me here.

Here. Joy Motel. 1968, so I thought. But Bobby Kennedy is still alive and MacRant is just a kid and Culhane drives a '59 Chevy Biscayne.

ksshh. The first letter falls, the SC teeters over HI-FI, blurring the H. I thought I was real. The future was better, right? You were there

Baldo the Magnificent, one of my DTs DTs, my DTs were so bad. Then there's your pal, Hawkwind Bulleteye. Psycho cruise ship name, you ask me

The letters keep fizzling under your watch, Baldo. PRESCHOOL HIGH FIVE GEENPOOL CYANICE kish kish kish I'd like to vie a bowel? Aye aw why?

The parrot imploded and that was my wake up call, back in bed, room 223. I looked out the window. Dick Nixon was working on the turbines.

Woke up to find Culhane's box in my bathtub. Don't remember leaving it there. Hum of turbines rattling up through the drain, pipe vibrating.

Fire axe. Got it from the glass cabinet in the hall. Nice heft, redhead. Overhand swing, accelerating downward. Wristsnap chunk. Busted box.

Paper, scraps, notes, scrolls, pads, booklets, folders, receipts, maps, bills, IOU, marriage license, love letter, death notice, house deed.

Culhane is a squirrel, hoarding life snippets. Names all different. These are not Culhane's. Must be a dozen identities here. Motherlode.

Clues and leads for the Disciples. Culhane like some kind of club secretary. The wheres and whos and whys and whens and whats. Collated.

Thumbtacks pinning everything to the west wall of 223. Floor to ceiling, overlapping pages, curled edges, all colors. Grouped and sorted.

Danko Drout, he was easy. Number six. Lethal injection behind the ear, church in Sacramento. Deedle, tougher. Hard to trace. Number three.

Got him with a parcel bomb. Watched from a rental car parked in the shade across the street. Neat little pop bang did the deed, over easy.

Kindred memorizing the wall, eyes fixed from three feet away, scanning, scrolling, shuffling across the carpet on bare feet. Drinking it in.

Four and half hours, neck aching, brainthrobbing, synapses firing in neat sequence, CIA trained mnemonic techniques, numerical shortcuts.

Brainfull mindful soulful. One last deep breath, hold it, snap, yes. All the data in Culhane's box, ingested, congested, consumed, devoured.

Turbines powering down for slumber, earth sighing, disciples dying. Dick Overtone pushed a fork into a fried egg and watched the yellow run.

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26 Time rain

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 10:18:00 -0800

Hnm. I grunted, came out more like a reality that went down the wrong pipe. TV static scattershot, hookers whisper price markdowns hearshot.

Not in my day. I turned, Sid Skin had tipped into his drink. Hmn? I seemed to have my voice in a vacuum. Sid: In my day, men wore hats.

Skin touch the brim, a newspaper boat. Random words. Mr. October, someone's son was named Sam. Four Sevens. Bicycle fish. Last call, ump.

Sid touched the brim, you mean? The guy in the stall next to me said & I stalled. Ah, you meant it clever, like you slammed 2 words into 1.

I flushed the stranger away, knowing full well my typos were no good in this reality. Means justify the mens room. Over my shoulder, bullets

Out the door & back to my stool, my new friend a grunting Gilgamesh. I saw you were confused before, chin nodding me. On the instant replay.

And this is? He asked, then shook his head as I kept wronging my heads with the bar towel. Joy Motel? TwiNam Zone? 1968? Washington AC/DC?

Hear, watch. He nudged Sid Skin, who flamed out in a nick. Then he moved the ragged scalp, placed it over the tv above that, told me no

the real news was above the faceless news. You are in 1968 and yet your faceless friend's strange hat is a newspaper from 1978, a Best Of.

Yes, let's stick with that, a best of, a compendium. You watched swore a man was president & no one wore hats but for the two of the unknown

Tomb of the Unknown Offensive, sorry this freak wince see's break cup further future hear put that aluminum plug in the other's empty face.

I push & crinkled & shoved exotic time into the facial gravity well. I saw a man with black skin become President and it was my own reality.

Relatively speaking, I watched him replace the oaf of office and then I was pulled from my paper: Best Of The 21st Century Brainstream, V.1.

When did Ted Kennedy get so fat? What were the Indigo Scavengers? Sid had his real skin back on, Rod Serling hosted the evening news. Again.

I still wasn't getting any, I left Tourette's, wistful for Scrip City. Culhane deadeyed me from Rm. 125. Seein' th' future from the future?

Mocked and feeling cold-cocked cock-knock he was locked out of his room. You have to do everything so half-past when you needs those meds.

Voiced from behind, Kindred turned and saw a baby blue parrot on the side of a pink balloon. Washed with age, he was fading, on the nod.

Swimming pool crystal, turbines sparkled, didn't squeak. Nowhere to be found: Big Q. Meeks. Kindred was in a rhyme frame, Meeks thin grins.

All the letters in PRESCRIPTION CITY AND HI-FI RECORDS lit up red neon in a time rain when every letter was important for the i's to c twice.

Kindred walked closer, surprised that there were no brainstream potholes, past was smooth, no. HI-FI had a Rod McKuen 8-Track in the window.

Watch it for what it was, man. It aint gonna fade no more, just focus in and fall apart shot to sunshine what little there is in his days.

vinyl gone eight track data spools old school brainstream the way he might've written it had this this event occurring in his head had ha

been around when he was young and might've understood better. A man named Gene Splice tried to sell him a time share on a CB radio. smirk.

8 tracks shrinking something smaller sub-atomic no, just like Graham Crackers instead of Pop-Tarts christ the dope made him hungry for love.

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25 Fizzle dee dee

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:53:00 -0800

Jacked up on joy juice, jittery in the temple. Left one. I was in a city that had a Chinatown snowglobe, that's all I knew. Then I was gone.

I missed my incredible shrinking manhood docdad PsychDaddy T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, give me MORE capital letters and let my manhood bugger.

Clowns in my morning coffee: I drown them, then put them with the mac & cheese for later. Found myself crying because cars didn't have fins.

What the balls, you know? Not a drop of redemption in my shorts. Thought of an old broad at the hospital. Vigil Auntie: Vigilante. Praykill.

And now Auntie is my cleaning lady at Joy Motel. Steroid fueled mopqueen with biceps poppin'. Scours up the spilled blood in my braindrain.

She slips under my sheets when I'm not there, and sometimes when I am. Goes at me with a bristle toothbrush, cleaning my nooks and crannies.

I look ceiling-ish while she's busy. My head full of motor oil and my elbows dipped in sweet grease. Oh mama, gotta get goin' soon, eye hawk.

Postshower hobnobbin' in Tourette's. Meeks jawing about Nixon the Unshaven. Should nuke the North, he says. Flatten Hanoi, end it quick.

Need a plan, K thinks. Not random nukin'. Culhane's maps, coordinates from the Insane Unknown Offensive. Bullseye, bombsights hot white.

While Meeks is pontificating, Kindred's gaze eyeslides ten degrees left and he sees a static event afflict the bar TV mounted in the corner.

Crizzle de dizzle de bop, crackle me smackle on top. Picture fuzzy, image slipping. Weatherman transmogrifies into Bullet Eyes benificent.

He's holding something flat and black in his cupped palms, thumbs flicking cobra-like, tapping tap tapping. Face impassive, concentrating.

Holds it up, tiny screen with an image diffuse. Wait... there, it snaps into clarity on the Tourette's TV. Black man in a black overcoat.

More fizzle dee dee as the static roars in and out like a ghost train in a tunnel. The picture dances and settles. Black man. White teeth.

He's at a microphone in front of a sea of upturned faces. Millions of listeners, respectful connectful rainbow of skin colors, many crying.

Kindred glimpses the Washington Monument, banner says Inauguration. Black man? President? What alternate universe is this? Hallucination?

Twilight Zone? Kindred waits for Rod Serling to fix his universe in crisp, even tones, cigarette ready. You are watching an America where.

But Serling doesn't show and Kindred watches Bullet Eyes snap closed his plastic thingy and dissolve into gray dust and garish advertising.

Meeks flipchanges the channel and Reggie hammers a homer for the A's, white shoes, Catfish in the dugout pumping a fist, America's pastime.

Kindred slurches streetward with his pal Jim Beam snug pocketly and scrunches his collar to kill winter wind. Stands cornerish buswaiting.

Crosstown downtown fullblown paniczone. Snowplow crossways on the bridge jamstuck tween railings, riverice upcracking below, bang crackpop.

Kindred debarked bussish, hoofed it snowblind, Culhane's box tightgripped, begging to be opened, spillage of contents, download Disciples.

Boxfull namegrab defines mission, Kindred ready. Abort bomberama, one by one, stick in his thumb and pull out 12 plums, makepeace on Earth.

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24 Watcher's eye

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:34:00 -0800

Lynxville, Wisconsin. Autumn of 1983. We had to protect the Unnamable Nativity from being seen on the bluff, in the end, 26 dead boaters.

Twiddling dials, pulling out of Prairie Du Chien. Ted Bundy giving interviews, suggestions on what a killer might do to a victim. We met?

Shunted back to 1971, fresh from Attica, Culhane a consultant on an Al Pacino flick, me free to find out why he mind fucks me. Ingo Swann.

Ever since Stanford. Culhane kept rattling on about an NSA listening station near the Doomsday Hotel. He became part of my experiment.

He'd feed me beryllium toast, burnt and jellied, I'd nod like a happy and fatefull dog. Time dilated then expanded, I fell through myself.

At least once that I know of, I dropped dead at my desk and I could see me dead and them above, they made me climb into my corpse to 1972.

I was angered at not learning the exact date of my death, unless it was another fantasy (un)life. Culhane: Make a date...at the Watergate.

Some nights, when I stood on the 2nd floor balcony of Joy Motel, I thought of the desert, each had infinity recessing backgrounds, watched.

Trinity 1945 and the dry air rolling dense a deepsea wave pushing matchstick figures back like the hand of God. Atomic groundburst fist.

In the shelter, Kindred the Kid, age 9, eyes shining brightly, mouth agape as the mushroom cloud flexed its muscles, declaring its arrival.

Birth of the Atomic Age a deathbringer, a scientist named Johnson Dack the designated watcher, observing the blast from outside the shelter.

Seemed like a good idea at the time, everyone said in post accident interviews, even as men in white coats wrapped Dack's body in tin foil.

In case he was radioactive, the foil would reflect the harmful rays and hold them inside what remained of his body, semi-vaporized, toast.

Loading him into an ambulance as Kindred slipped behind a row of black Buicks and watched, his father obliviously accepting congratulations.

Then the two government men moving in, snakes on a mouse, ruthlessly incapacitating the ambulance driver, putting Dack into a white truck.

Kindred creeping close enough to see them go at the body with pincers, knives, screwdrivers, pliers, fingers, teeth, eyes gleaming, alight.

They removed his right eye and held it aloft, murmuring incantations about the image burned into the retina, a billowing smoky gray shroom.

The sudden flurry of excitement as they realized that the shroom was shaped like the Virgin Mary, the glass jar, hands on service revolvers.

Kindred the Kid hiding under a Buick as the G-Men got into their vehicle and sat, engine idling, waiting for... what? For Kindred the Elder.

Kindred's father calling his son to hit the road to LA, interviews beckoning, a famous scientist triumphant. Rolling out, followed by G-Men.

And two hours later, after the ambush, after Kindred the Kid had dealt death with the shotgun to rescue his father, after all of that, then.

Kindred the Kid with the radio up, Sinatra, sailing west into a burnt orange sky, glass jar on the passenger seat, the Watcher's eye inside.

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23 Spectral soldier

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 07:26:00 -0800

Kindred in '65, Cambodian Bandit Recon long range reconnaissance patrol LRRP in Vietnam, penetrating deeper where others feared to tread.

Unit winning Presidential Unit Citation, extraordinary heroism. Kindred with blue Jungle Expert patch living up to the slogan Sudden Death.

Conducting first night combat rappel along the northern Cambodian border to extract a mysterious solo Airborne Ranger, guy named Culhane.

Culhane coming back with a box full of bombing coordinates, mapped during a 75 kilometer patrol over two weeks, top secret up river, insane.

Maps and plans, detailed most desirable targets, dropzones, killspots, no go areas, prime ops, sunspots, moon phases, riptides, river depth.

Kindred dubbed it the Insane Unknown Offensive. IUO. Nobody knew Culhane went up there until he came back. No one knew why, or how, or when.

Thought he was dead, captured, buried, dismembered, beheaded, disemboweled, castrated, skinned, boiled alive, tortured, drained, out, empty.

Culhane gut shot, leaking oil, going down, ammo gone, Kindred emerging from the the jungle into a clearing, sees him on a river rock dying.

Three enemy open up from the treeline and according to Culhane, retelling the tale for years to come, Kindred simply disappeared midstride.

Bullets thunking into the trees, whining through the space where he was, or used to be, he wasn't there any more, he was submolecular, true.

Kindred sucking the life out of the three men, their lungs imploding with a sick pop, no other sound, using no knife, no grenade, no weapon.

Rematerializing in midair above Culhane, hovering angelic, Culhane swore to investigators later he could see right through him, see the sky.

Kindred carrying Culhane 50 clicks through muck and slime, torrential hot rain, heavens melting vengeance like warm lifeblood of the gods.

Flashbacks always, answers never, Culhane could not figure out how Kindred did what he did, savior of the Insane Unknown Offensive, alone.

Trying to put the war behind us, I started to work with Culhane, odd jobs, busy work. Two hours of pushing broom. Kings of the open road.

In the summer of 1970 we took janitorial jobs at Stanford, heard a man named Ingo Swann talk about remote viewing, I fell back five years.

Culhane reeled me back, told me it was new age mumbo jumbo. Crystal skulls. Appearances on the Mike Douglas Show. Undercurrents of deceit.

After Stanford, we took our roadshow to the burnt ruins of Fallon Ridge, caught in a cornfield nexus, downstate Illinois. Pirate pillaged.

I did not know Culhane had been slipping synthetic ununoctium in my drinking water and, rather bravely, beryllium copper shards in my toast.

Stanford had changed him. The copper in my bowels offset the magnesium in my scalp; we still took odd jobs. I dreamt about a man named Bundy.

Culhane and I caused the riot at Attica. We dressed in aluminum underwear and saluted Hitler to hillbillies in Greenville, Alabama. Lucid.

I could almost grasp it, my tranquility. Like my origins rewritten; retconned by the faces I see in a sky of torn plums. Sci-fi-noir nowhere.

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22 RIP daddio

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 11:08:00 -0800

I found myself in retrograde, not my intention nor my own fault, I had not been to Scrip City in days. People pass me by in my lucidity suit

the parrot next door implodes, my own door remains an open invitation, it takes several eyeblinks but I finally see Culhane's jaw tighten

I had my brain helmet on. You up there, the bald shining one, tell me if Joy Motel is passing by me or through me. I orbit farther away.

Yet I'm never higher off the ground, I recalled having to leap to talk to Ernest, it was hard to complete a sentence to his sentience.

So I'm gone from the motel, banished like scattershot acne, held back by memories of daddy. [INSERT YOUR SOUND OF CHOICE HERE]! He's here.

So many sound effects that blurt from the brainstream, I can see them as ragged stones from the voices in the flatwoods. It needs respect

THUD! My @$$. I can see ghosts of other brainstreams, falling as if in potholes after a harsh winter.BANG! why not: jump back red die right?

sound f/x left & right in slip stream pix stream slip stream slit through sift too this is what I see when all others pass me by me and I.

it is like Ong's Hat, fake documents copywronged by those who know the word big but not the word succinct, the bible sublime, yes, ongs hat.

Fifteen days that parrot implodes yellow Culhane's jaw crunches iron the turbines once smooth now broken nails on ancient cement & finally!

I stop. Motel gone. Sky wide. Nothing left. Nothing right. Literally: this wasn't right, everything gone. I look down: the dwarf from 1959.

This was significant. I realized that my being removed from the spineless effluvium of the Motel was an unexpected boon of self-clarificate.

I recalled reading a comic on my bed, the trailer out in Levelland, Texas. Hourman was fighting the Nanotube Gang. Daddy called to me go out

go out boy he called me boy when he was angry or else by my first and middle name like you are in for it now Kindred Ph--dad wasn't outside.

Empty then as it is now. Dad's voice an echo. Movement in a bush. It wasn't a dwarf, my dad never introduced me to a dwarf, it was a dodge.

And she was back, a telepathic preying mantis with the tattoo of a ribald lobster on its left eyelid. She ate my dad after sex, I remember.

And now she twittered her limbs together, spinning silk, silken sheets covered in blood, dad brought the wrong insect woman home RIP daddio.

9/9/59 dad dead I wrote him letters for years, unread. The preying mantis (her name was ~`~...the sound of space sexcapades) my dad spliced.

You're not real, I told ~`~. You're a motorcycle made from discarded plastics. For nine years I thought she had been a dwarf green blue 1/2.

She reminded me that I had to write 500,000 words before I died on my Smith Corona Galaxy Nine which coincidentally was where she was from.

I did a surprising thing then, I stripped to my Hourman underwear & allowed ~`~ to get close enough that I could smell acid in her pucker up

and I swallowed her whole, sure she was, well, dwarfISH,but she was very thin, secret agent thin crapped her out in a Sunoco in Laredo.

Off my meds too long now, think, thinking machine, think, 1959 1968 1973 flashbacks to Nam, me & Culhane on the Insane Unknown Offensive.

words less clear clever stem streph stream Tet THtThh the sound ~`~ made as I flushed that toilet sigel scratched into the wall in Hanoi's

decompressed by the monstrous colonic, Kindred fell back in the well where have you been world of name your favorite drugged out dreamscape.

try me hide me take me shake be believe thee eyes squint out drought bout gout the rote whirls out hyde in the scream brainscream not then.

Kindred back in the back of his mind at Joy Motel in a 2 Hour Nap with a suicide in his bathtub, 1st month free, the neighor parroting him.

curled in fetal metal Kindred cursed the parrot for cursing him giving up his hiding space bullet eyes look recall Insane Unknown Offensive.

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21 Cello Slink

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 14:30:00 -0800

Culhane pauses at the window of a shop selling rifles, ammo, body armor, birdfeed. Tweettweet! Using the glass to watch the street behind.

Dead dog, sick frog, out for a jog. Live humans, zero. Seeing nothing, confidence thrusting. Guard down, not a frown. Culhane turns away.

Busted hydrant, flooding, rippling puddle, Kindred emerging, rising to reveal eyes only, blinkless. Or was it a mannequin's plastic noggin?

Culhane shifts the box to his other hand, reaches into his pocket for coins. Tosses them upward, clatterrattling on a fire escape landing.

Metal door groans open, bare feet with painted toenails, making an entrance. Or was it an exit? Curved calves, flexing. This is Cello Slink.

Hispanic smooth springyskinned, black eyeglance, muscularity singularity. Prancerdancer, probably. Romancer, likely. No secondchancer, sure.

Culhane takes the metal steps threefour at a time, hungry, almost desperate. Kindred watching with extreme interest, eyes squintglinting.

Cello watches the street intently as Culhane goes past her and inside. Third floor door. Kindred motionless, his shadow etched in redbrick.

She turns, rotates really, and delicately steps inside, trail of lavender reaching Kindred as he moves, assaulting steps, violent climbing.

He catches the edge of the closing firedoor with his thumb, holds it open one eighth of an inch, sliverpeeking inside. Motorcycle, gas can.

Culhane disappears around a corner 30 feet away. Cello black hair cascading, just behind him, catlike, female. Kindred tightens his thumb.

Opens the door, smell of gasoline, Vasoline, Valvoline, gunpowder, chilipowder, babypowder, clamchowder. Nose knows those. Kindred, wraith.

Sound of violins played by musicians with doublechins. Sweet sad lingering dust motes hovering in a soft quivering cluster mark his passage.

Motorcycle hotsteaming like a cappuccino, stained wood floors, coffee, mud, oil, blood. Kindred ran an appreciative finger along its flanks.

Drifting imperceptibly, landing toe first on catfeet, soundless. CIA assassin training post Nam. Black ops. Dead kill no thrill. Just do it.

Warhol originals on the wall, crudely hammernailed in with four inch spikes for security. Grunting pigs, barnyard lovers under the covers.

Cockroach scuttling, exits bedroom, seen enough. Kindred scooped it up and swallowed it. No witnesses. No misses. In and out, no trace.

Culhane atop Cello, bedbound unbound springbanging. Kindred impassively eyedrinking copulative athleticism. Unseen, clean, he takes the box.

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20 Shadowbound

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:53:00 -0800

Hhtt. At least now I know why I keep hearing turbines, when daddy was on the pay phone near the Cray computers in sub-level 2.26 (losing it)

hold on memory) Deedle would start the Crays up and daddy would have to shout at me I thought what the why I thought turbines I knew them.

(total recall hurts)*squint*I knew the word turbines from a Flash Fact in an old comic Crays loud jet engine runway loud ride the lightning.

my eyes roll in my eyes roll out I yell for daddy the turbines (Flash Fact!) scream follow Apollo baby strung out weightless pretty son set.

Jem and I, seven. Watching a sky, not yet owning the television. Is that it? Encapsulation capitalizing cannnnndyyyy colored twilight, yay!

I saw fractal images in my coffee, not the broccoli as expected. A face, an eye, an advertisement four glasses. On the ceiling of a train?

Kindred burroughs for the broccoli then, hurried. This time a headline: TEAR THIS WALL DOWN! He looked at the ceiling and saw clear brick.

A glass ceiling? What does THAT mean? Brick walls I can see through but its a ceiling not a wall but my ceiling not my wail a glass eye see.

Canfield's blackberry cola chased with Cuervo in big splashes of yellow and black and pink, the ad on the back of Unlikey Tales#1 July 1968.

I look at the can of Blackberry drink and the images move like a dozing commuter. What is tragically hip? The Fugitive I know, on BVD, wha?

The Prisoner is #6. Patrick McGoohan, Six of One, can't escape the Village, could be the story of my life, trapped in the Joy Motel airless.

Ripped poster detaches from the concrete wall behind Scrip City and floats skittish as a tadpole in a highball. Slaps a passing bus, sticks.

Bus belches bad gas and grunts up the incline, Face #2 piercing the gloom. Hawkwind eyebrows, perpetual smirk, bullet eyes. Seen him before.

Morphs into Baldo the Magnificent, Face #1, vein popping iron forehead, leaning in for a headbutt or a strangle hold. Mystery unblinking.

Always click clicking, the steady tap tap of water torture, bad dentures, lobster on a glass table, IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter.

Shorthand Face #1, let's call the guy Sam Skoog. Face #2, okay, Gene Angst. Sam 'n Gene. Maybe they're a new duo out of Nashville, hitmen.

Been dreaming about Sam 'n Gene. Salmon Jean. Sam on Jean. Harlow? Platinum Blonde. Somethin' fishy. Brainskip. Get a grip. Let 'er rip Bip.

There goes Culhane. Light white Warhol cube, end of the alley, long shadows. Carrying the box. Numbers, vectors, names, dates, addresses.

Bookkeeper, mindmeasurer, soultaker, discipledealer, fireflinger. Culhane keeps track of the who's and where's and why's for 12 Disciples.

Kindred smoothwalked shadowbound, Culhane unaware, wouldn't dare. Closed gap to regulation CIA, breathing in whenever Culhane breathed out.

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19 Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:52:00 -0800

Past the watcher again, loping this time, down the hall to the pay phone on the wall. Disconnected roar of untraveled universes beckoning.

Tok-city Neural Net, longest distance, unreachable from here. Kindred dropped another quarter in and hoped. Tap dancing lobster clicks.

He could hear voices. One Japanese. The other not, tickle down the wire. Arguing. The American upset about a bad brainstream. His own voice.

After a minute, a snickety-click as the Tok-city voice hung up. But the American, oblivious, kept talking. Shiny pebbles lost in the sea.

Kindred felt a burning in his brainstem. Leakage. Corrosive brainstream, dripping, running down his neck. Data burn. Cold ones, hot zeroes.

Data burn causes time slippage. DB=TS. Loss of temporal sequencing. Years bounce. Childhood merges with the now. Overlinkage. Skips. Peeps.

Kindred pulled the microdriver from his belt and fitted it to the hex screw in his cranium. Three quarter turn clockwise to stop the leak.

Mirror mirror on the shawl is the forest often bowel? I can't keep fractating and yes I made up that word I am a fractal image so yes I can

I turned from my others and the microdriver banged against the door frame oops it wiggled sounds like wachtel wachtel walk to wok Tourette's

talk to Meeks, at the stick spritzing afterlife into gin & ebonics. Meeks is real and he is a singularity. Yet, if I had to describe him

I couldn't, just two eyes and a truckload of white teeth, a staple remover filled with Chiclits. Fractal images, right? Which one of me now?

Which one indeed. You do know, Mr. Kindred, you left Joy Motel under cover of darkness last July? You are no longer there. Checked out.

For some reason your mind skipjacks into unused receptacles and picks up ambient electrovolts, rejuvenates the corrupt brainstream. Virus.

By now it should have decayed and disappeared. You're not the first person to mainline a screamer from Tok-city. Some burnriders, it kills.

You're a lucky one. Your trip mild, relatively. You maintain neurocircuit functionality, flexible reasoning, autodigit tap response normal.

but doc the air so dense i can't move i can't get a lung expanded bigger than a tennis ball pump me up again would ya i see the red balloon

inside of my boot in nam all fulla goo skin and pulp and crushed bugs is this guy nixon gonna drop the bomb on the north or not badda boom

i got a cold neural in the upper right quadrant doc it keeps snappin like a steel clothesline and man it's gonna come out through my eye

Mr. Kindred, you are skip-processing. Brain popping. Imagine a large blue reset button. Can you see it? Can you reach it? Press the button.

cantreachitdocissouttamyarmslengthgimmealadderorwaitaminuteicanstandonthetoiletseatifthatcleaningladywouldjustgetouttamywaymovesweetpeamove!

pressinthebluebuttonnowdocnothinshappeninimpressinitagainresetdammitreset. click. oh. did you hear that? definite click. i can breathe doc.

Very good, Mr. Kindred. That is the first time you have been able to regain motorskeletoncontrol under duress since you joined the program.

i heard a click, doc. didja hear it? i hear lotsa clicks. tapping. typing. birds chirping. tweeting. tweeters, doc. blue letters. twitter.

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18 Trinitite

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:08:00 -0800

Kindred sleeps with eyes taped open. Flickering blue Joy Motel sign tickling hardglazed eyeballs. Sizzling retinal memory. Mushroom cloud.

The watcher hovering, his breath moist on Kindred's forehead. Refrigerator, blast-propelled, killed a cow. Kitchen table landed in Mexico.

Knife 'n fork, gone atomic, orbital, floating in spectral ellipses, space junk, spinning universal, out past Mars, on a mission to meet God.

Force of the blast dissipating youthful vapor in Kindred the Kid's nine year old skull. Instant wide-eyed grown up, awake in the shelter.

His father, a small cracked grin of satisfaction, the boom registered and official for all time. Celebration went all day and into the next.

Oh yes it was a lovely explosion chirped a six foot blond with big white horse teeth and a saturnine smile. Your daddy is a genius, really.

Trinity in the books. First nuclear explosion ever. 1945. New Mexico, Alamogordo Test Range, Jornada del Muerto desert. Hot squeaky sand.

Jornada del Muerto means Journey of Death, perfect. Kindred the Kid full of life, thought he was about to see a fireworks display. Dad lied.

No nuclear explosion ever popped off before. Must be monitored with fanatical devotion to ensure it met theoretical predictions. Fanatical.

Trinity. Three. Threesome. Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer. July 16 1945, 5:29:45 A.M. (Mountain War Time).

Yield 20-22 Kilotons. Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell described his impressions at S-10,000, a bunker 10,000 yards south of Trinity:

"In that brief instant in the remote New Mexico desert the tremendous effort of the brains and brawn of all these people came suddenly...

...and startlingly to the fullest fruition. Dr. Kindred, on whom has rested a very heavy burden, grew tense as the last seconds ticked off.

Dr. Kindred scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead and then...

...when the announcer shouted "Now!" and there came a tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter by the deep growling roar...

...of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief. Several of the observers standing back of the shelter...

...to watch the lighting effects were knocked flat by the blast. All seemed to feel that they had been present at the birth of a new age...

...The Age of Atomic Energy -- and felt their profound responsibility to guide into the right channels the tremendous forces unlocked...

...for the first time in history." Guide. Right channels. Tremendous forces. 12 committed individuals. Watchers. Fanatics. Disciples.

A blackened area of fused soil centered at ground zero. Heat baked into a glassy crust. Called Trinitite. As if invented by cynical admen.

Your smile will be white as right is right when you brush your teeth with Trinitite. That`s Trinitite! Look for tube with the nuclear glow.

Kindred the Kid waited in the motel room while his father, the eminent Dr. Kindred, had an all night meeting behind the locked door of 226.

The Kid listening to the radio reports, twiddling the brown plastic knob. Sinatra. Jack Benny. He didn`t sleep, he couldn`t close his eyes.

He found some tape in a drawer and taped his eyelids shut. But the glow of the blast lit up the inside of his retinas, unearthly gleaming.

They got into the car the next day. Set off for sunny LA, where Kindred the Doc was to be interviewed by the newspapers. G-Men in pursuit.

Now, 1968, Kindred peeling off the tape that holds his eyelids open, grinding the TV remote under his heel and staring into the mirror.

Image reflected alternating between Kindred the Kid and Kindred now. Between docdad and Dr. Kindred, between psychdaddy and the watcher.

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17 Robin Hood

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:00:00 -0800

Mr. Kindred, why do you think you're always running into Dick Overtone? Do you think he's real? Do you only see him when you're very tired?

He does have some rather radical theories about this establishment, wouldn't you say? I mean, really, government-sponsored mind control?

This is a four star motel situated at the intersection of love and hate, dreams and reality, King and Main, life and death, Guns 'N Roses.

It's a small Mom 'n Pop operation. Pop's dead now, isn't he Mr. Kindred? Did you kill him? Because he met secretly with the 12 Disciples?

Why do you keep insisting the 12 Disciples were -- are? -- a radical collective of bomb-worshippers? Is this all linked to Trinity? 1945?

That's utter rubbish. How could anyone see the Virgin Mary in a retinal capture of an atomic bomb blast? Flash frozen forever in an eyeball?

Well, yes, okay, if that were true, it could be the iconic touchstone for those who want to quell disorder and randomness with detonations.

Your father, then, a kind of postmodern Robin Hood, leading his merry band of 12 followers on cross-country terrorist bombings. Badda boom.

They went to Tokyo, too, did they not? Where they lost control of the Eyeball? Or rather, sold it to the highest bidder? Gankyuu Bakudan.

Gankyuu means eyeball in Japanese. Bakudan means bomb. So it isn't even the buyer's real name. Are you the buyer, Mr. Kindred? Where is it?

What are you looking at? Who do you see in the mirror? Dick Overtone again? Why would he tell you this is not a real motel? Sinister plot?

Are you in danger? Are G-Men in a white nondescript vehicle going to pull into the parking lot any minute? Are they motivated by revenge?

Do you trust me? I can help you if you take your hands from my throat. You can't kill me anyway. I exist inside your head. Burnt edges.

I am your superego. You id is running out of control and I have been given the onerous task of reconnecting your various disparate neurons.

Of course, that's the sort of poppycock nonsense a psychiatrist might twaddle to see if you're capable of coherent assessment of reality.

Yes, I know there are no farmers from the midwest enjoying the sauna, no businesswomen from Pittsburgh in the pool. No guests at all. Odd?

No teens on spring break, no pastors from Indiana here with their mistresses, no celebrities hiding out from LA paparazzi with zoom lenses.

But that does not mean this is an insane asylum. What am I saying? I meant to say 'government-controlled center for psychdaddy vacations'.

It does not mean anything of the kind. You know, you and I could hang out, be buddies. Whaddya say, K? Pals? Friends? Why are you sneering?

Okay, then, have it your way. Our time is up. Gotta run. Places to go, people to meet, things to do. Busy. I'll lock you in on my way out.

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16 Rogue pellet

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:20:00 -0800

I'm slowing down, brain three hours future past, I hear my name, formal like. I'm lost in the woods. I'm someone's pet rabbit. Mmn, carrot!

Words far away, my friends locked out, are they talking to me nice, no, its Mr. Kindred, like I'm their fucking butler goddamn mood swings.

Mix some absinthe with the Aqua Velva, pour on Frito Bandito as he gives it to Mama Puchama, the woods I love, I'm recalling when I was 11.

Short cut from psych school, lovers in the leaves, I think I watched I'm not sure its only when I drink the cocktail I saw them stabbed.

It was Danko Drought, the woman a secretary with no clearance, liasons with a nuclear spy from Saturn maybe I told daddy he whipped me bad.

M@ntell. Didn't know his first name, couldn't pronounce his last name, static buzz from the Aqua Velva hit, makes me remember the blood.

11 Jan 1961 Dear Dad: I have a job now at Thinking Machines, Inc. Had a dream about psychotronic turbines, seems like deja vu. Nauseous now.

Bought an eight-piece ink blot and a fizzy pop at the Scrip City Drive-Thru. Visions of curling fetal in the trash compactor out back. 1997.

Bumped into Dick Overtone on a 3:30AM ice machine run. He was inside the ventilation system, just his head protruding. Dick is hardcore CIA.

He comes and goes like fog licking the Lake Michigan shoreline. Dick says Joy Motel is government-controlled. Deep black cover. Burnt edges.

Thought control, LSD, decapitated pigs, electrovolts leaking out of fridges to numb the brain, big pulsars like water rolling on the boil.

Kindred jammed his empty ice bucket on Dick's head and left him there. That's the way Dick likes it. Echo of his brainwaves in the dark.

CIA, NSA, ASAP. Through a spammer darkly, Ubik twittered to one of the victims. Which spree? Unruh's? Unangst's? All ubiquitious. RIPPKDLOL.

Long, cold night. Moon at apogee. 3rd floor nascent. Lambent streetlights deceptive lies to the border of the brainstream, a secondary way.

G-Men in a white vehicle. Rubber gloves. Engine leaking dark oily pools. Reno, Nevada after the chase. Kindred age nine. His father down.

They had rolled over and slid upside down on the roof. Truck spinning in ever diminishing circles like hands of a Dali clock running down.

Kindred slid out the half open side window. G-Men beating his father with a length of chain. The boy went to their car, a true nondescript.

Shotgun on the back seat, pump action, 12 gauge. Taking it out, the long barrel banging against the door frame, glinting hard black steel.

Two heads swinging around, eyes locking on danger, hands reaching for service revolvers, slow shock of brain pattern recognition. Boy? Boy??

First blast a tight cluster of pellets, hornets from hell, face pulped and head gone at the same time, a standing headless corpse, toppling.

Kindred's father rolling over onto his back, blinking like a salmon, mouth bubbling air pockets tinged with pink direct from lungs wheezing.

Kindred, five feet tall, pumped the action, swinging the shotgun and the second cluster missed wide right, rogue pellet eye-centric, zing.

Entering the left eye of G-Man #2, popping it like a party balloon and angry travel through the back of his brain and out, death dealer.

Kindred dragging his father to the government vehicle and getting him into the trunk and slamming it down and turning the ignition, rolling.

90 miles an hour west dead straight along the desert highway, chasing the dying sun. Kindred the Kid twirling the knob, radio up, Sinatra.

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15 Kissy face

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:24:00 -0800

Power to engines, turbines to speed. Moving out dinosaurkraut copyrider was write, garden to unearthly delight a seizure washed my brain.

I need to crank out the kinks, crack the atlas and the axis in my neck drain that sloppy spinal fluid pituitary cycles psychosis zip zing

Wing ding zip zero in on Culhane, his bra, what made him bad? I mulled it all as I brushed errant cocaine from the mirror edged mirror red.

I checked old maps, vision quests from when we were the C & K of the BRBLOLBFF crowd. Only there were more words back then. First postcard:

Greetings From FerroCity. I recalled the angry steam vents, Culhane tossing Flatirons left and right. We laughed at each others jokes then.

glk. reds inside a gusher, full strength brainstream aa--nnnnMANGA empty eyes where are my teeth and why does everyone have a ponytail?

dark-haired girl dirt track date does she hold dusky clues to last month's eventual dire fates? Ooo, look, it's Deedle in a pork belly pig.

What's it like, someone's gonna ask, I know. I'm sitting in a chair by my blessed you self, just one arm rest to shoot up lest I concentrate

on a one-armed chair & a dark-haired girl who was widescreen terminally ill until she snapped out of her bra as I nodded the nod in the nude

nothing came of that but for hindsight. I reached up & felt Culhane inside her, did he forget I had my PI card all hard I should come at him

teach him squelch him he reached out with a lithium air hose berrylium flavored spritzes bellecosy rosy lazy yummy pancake orgasm twice.

screaming yellow theaters of war theatrics that was Tunisia nodding back into it bare feet = hourglass prints in sand stream eyes sting

brain fling Deedle in amber around an Egyptian giant's neck, his face a hawk, his mate a cat, Deedle screaming in empty white balloons * .

Deedle in the past, I'm in his nowhere future, entropy off-white like Beechnut gum. No its bathroom floor tile the old house in Tallow Lake.

The house floats in a teal pool, electric blue corpse where I left it days ago, Nick Lipphid was him. Cut off his tale w/ a carving wife.

Nolan Void was my doc dealer back when, corner of Distaff & Disdain. Benzadrine zoof nosebleeds whwn I wake up in my golden box of love.

On the nod, Mac the Rant & Sid Skin locked out of Joy Motel, banging my brain. Can't help them on Earth Designate 17 in 3 days they kill me.

Mr. Kindred? Hello? Are you responsive? Can you hear me? Run this comb through my harebrain if you read me. Birdbrain, crackbrain, crank.

cuckoo, ding-a-ling, featherbrain, featherhead, flibbertigibbet, giddybrain, giddyhead, kook, lunatic, rattlebrain, rattlehead, rattlepate

scatterbrain, scatterbrains, screwball, shallowbrain, shallowpate, shatterbrain. Mr. Kindred, this is the Joy Motel. It is abandoned.

Why are you still here? Not the corrupt brainstream. That is simply not a feasible medical condition. All brainstreams are as advertised.

Tok-city. Toxic city. Toxicity. Lock City. Mac the Rant & Sid Skin locked out? They are ephemeral non-entities, neural hiccups, brainfarts.

Kindred writhing like a pike on a dock, impaled by the conventions of Freudian psychiatry. He loved psychdaddy like a mother. Kissy face.

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14 Brainstream

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 9 Jan 2009 11:55:00 -0800

Bolo! What was he doing here? K took him down without a sound and rolled him into the bushes. A light came on in the back of the house.

Shrimpboat had recommended Bolo. In retrospect, C should have hired Sunday Benbow, who pronounced his name funny, so it came out Bimbo.

Kindred noted C's broken nose. He had lost an ear. But the grin was the same. Partners, again. They poured shots and examined the photo.

Haven't heard from you lately, C said, laughing. K winced at the pun.The photo: B&W, Joy Motel in checkered boxes, a balloon by door 211.

'What was in the balloon?' C asked. 'Blood,' Kindred said, flat. 'Whose?' C needed to know. 'Not...?' K shook his head. 'No. Let's go.'

C had questions. A balloon. Why not one of those Russian egg dolls? I don't know what they are called, either. K, reading his mind again.

In a diner. C and K, one in each corner, back to the wall, pincer. Like old times. Four guys, sharp suits, muddy shoes, talking too loud.

Last thing K recalled was sitting in the booth w/ C and the two men. He was missing a week's time in his head, a graviton singularity.

C and K, booth against the wall, mirror. Other two guys mere reflections. K pulled out an envelope. Slid it over to C. Door blew open.

So this is where I was. C, a statement. Yeah, from K, looking tired. Damn weak door hinges. C said he had no memory of the pliers.

Kindred opened an eye. Back in the land of the living. A waterdrop dribbled off an iron balcony and fell like a bomb onto his forehead.

What the hell had happened to Culhane? What turned him? Devious. Kindred slaphappied his jeans to get off the crud from the alley floor.

Hopped a cab. Drove to the airport with the driver facing him in the backseat the whole way, like the swivel headed girl in the Exorcist.

Hit 60 coming over the bridge and when the big car got to the peak of the rise midriver they were airborne, landing hard on the downslope.

fishtailing down greasy city streets through icy canyons carved between hard rock calcified snowpiles five feet high and going nowhere soon

bouncing through the ruts alongside a chain link fence beside the runway. gunning to 100 and sliding to a stop, puffing, at The Terminal

Kindred flipped the cabbie a Cnote and went inside, no luggage. Ticket punched in his private headspace no overhead gear stowed in his cabin

Attendant brought the tray. Sparkling vials of brainjuice, fresh from Tok-city. Kindred perused the list, like choosing a chockie from a box

Tok1212bxb. 'Guaranteed to delight.' Yeah, copywriter lingo did the trick. Kindred forked over the credit and she plugged him in headfirst.

Facial tics perfectly normal. All systems go. Wheels up, Mr. Kindred. It's going to be a long trip. Tok-city is oceans away. Brainstream on.

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13 Glossy Black

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 9 Jan 2009 11:36:00 -0800

Times past, man. Sometimes I can think quite luridly juicy loosed lucid before the multiversal towers were opinionated to blockade past tense

Summer of 1974, just had my fake PI card, ink still wet. Grooving towards the man I now know is Culhane, Sting It, Don't Swing It, Baby.

10 cm out of Wichita a farmer flags me down, pays me a sawbill to prove his neighbor was killing his cows, I found he was dressing them, too

Dressing them in muu-muus, the swine in pearls, then raping, strangling, and using his Polaroid Land camera for the family back home.

Hogtied rawhide the guy upside down bleated a confession but he never knew Culhane, cut him down for the count 1 2 hundred bills, case#1.

It was so easy to think back then, I had my list I had my wits I didn't have to have a lisp singsong narrative from popping reds my eyes

12 Disciples, daddy's friends, docDad's money train. Tt-chk tt-chk. Eye am Watching you. Then there was that time on Earth Designate 11.

Route 66 no kicks there, just a fast buck and a high dive. Find a kid who wasn't a mom but wanted a daddy. Might've been near Joliet IL.

Made him warm not laser beam warm the other, knowing that other people had daddy issues, even the guy who raped livestock cried for pops.

There wasn't yet 4 billion people on this specific earth designate when I found myself facing a man with a gun from behind as he shot once &

the man he was facing (with me in back) jammed to a brick wall, shot two, ricochets in concrete meat street they didn't stop I clipclopped.

But I knew what it was like to be lucid and near dead. Men in jungles and on the moon, me knowing I could find the men who killed my trust.

Then came the spring of '82 and a head wrapped in tinfoil in a basket case told me I had died on Earth Designate 14 by The Black Dahlia.

And all of a sudden reality was like pounding wet sand, slops of memory plops on scenery I was beaten senseless by a Toronto pretzel vender.

Flashback to happier times.When Culhane wasn't a suspect, but a benevolent ally. Trust? Hah. He was a blood brother, Nammer pal, GI Joe.

Culhane wondered about K. The way he blew town in the middle of the night, then mailing postcards from Tunisia & Ankara. Never luggage.

K carried business cards, glossy black on both sides, no text. Gave one to anybody who asked what he did for a living. 'I own the night.'

K owned the night, sure. C was on to his scam, the city-size box draped in velvet, bullet holes for stars. But where did the eye fit in?

K put the car in neutral, rolled down the incline and stopped in front of Culhane's bungalow. Taped the KA-BAR to his leg. He was ready.

C'd been watching the bungalow for a day after Shrimpboat hipped me to Salt's plan. It had been a while since he last used his pliers.

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12 Nuclear duke

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 7 Jan 2009 19:39:00 -0800

I see the world didn't end yesterday, Meeks said, behind the stick as I sat down. What makes you think it didn't?, a trail of shadow smoke

I jumped, then Kindred, so did psychdaddy from the shadows, his arms crossed, the fecund scary smoke slashing jetstreams, drunken contrails.

Kindred gestured to each of him, ambitextual and antsy and anxious to break the fourth wall. Nu-uh, Meeks cautioned, you gotta go outside.

Its a sin to smell a crime, docDad in the shadows, still. Say why not why? I spoke though Kindred. Stay here in third a spell, within me.

Culhane broke us apart, literally, as we were combined conjoined combatants after Meeks dialed up to 225. Culhane smelled of sweet pomade.

I checked the open window's blinds blowing from the turbines click clack just like smack my head saw the red the open window was 3rd floor.

Or was it always that way?Kindred passed himself like an errant kidney stone savant & checked the room above sublime turbines, whew floor 2.

Mac the Rant out of the lot down Damen past Scrip City hard left empty store Jupiter Shoes empty lot Schlitz Congoleum signs docDad: halt!

docDad asked Mac for a ride back his back bad that's docDad slurring Damen damn-ed, Damen & Thalamus Place, desert red past that bad back.

Mac ranted I want to drive docDad hand up halt the gospel you took the invite (bait) hooked on your own guitar string swing before the eye.

sugar in my boots sand in my eyes toecapped insurgency can't outrun the watcher tipped back rocking chair hallway monitor blinklessly alert

oh embraceable you cloaked in mist the breath of angels sliding sideways through half-closed eyelids to kiss your midnight dreams goodnight

Kindred on the dead hot run, stretching transparently thin, trying to outblip the watcher, sitting impassively in the open doorway of 266.

Blippin' flippin' whippin' past, a puff of moonlit smoke, Kindred exploding across the watcher's field of vision before retinal registration

Take that, daddy-o, I'm runnin' rampant, ain't nobody can touch this nuclear duke. At terminal velocity, I can almost see the Terminal.

Brainstem injection, off da shelf in the discount section of the Terminal. How was I to know it was untested, unscanned, viral, vile, dirty?

Some fella in Tok-city done uploaded a pile o' neuroses inta ma noggin and ain't nuthin' I kin do about it. I'm digestin' his confection.

Why am I thinking this way why was I talking that way double the questions yeah. My thighs burn, my eyes burn, regaining punctuation skills

docDad has a framed photo on his wall. Auda City At Twilight. Pretentious shit, you ask me. I let it go, because he never charges a fee

Just says the same thing half the other people in my lives say: put me in your next book wrecked nook novel hovel fictdictiondepicted damn

The eye is beaming at me again, trying to shut me off so the third person can come back and sprint and joust. Have to admire the Tena City:/

he waited near the corner, huffing past the turbines. Radio in Room 251 spraying surf music scattershot. Sentient third floor gives warmth.

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11 Dandruff

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 5 Jan 2009 12:54:00 -0800

Of course I don't believe that shrink's growth of lies. @joymotel 2232 Damen Blvd., past the razorroad tracks, its absinthe to tell a lie

And I've been paying weekly since weekly sins tell a tall tales shrink think tank? @joymotel=Manhattan Project 2.0 the new millennium, maybe?

One would think everything had spell check in the future, Kindred mumbled,not know what he created his thoughts with, footfalls/door knocks.

there was a false rhyme w/ Goethe & birthday, another w/ orange & syringe, but my birthday balloon was red when docdad pressed the button GO

BOOM, Kindred slept, wavering between then & yet, Mac the Rant woke him w/ a song about Br3ndaBot, a clue? False rhyme for you are socks.

Psychdaddy (cell): how did you pronounce that name? Kindred (in Tourette's): Which? M@ntell? Culhane (same): Talking too much, you are.

And she wanted to know your AGE? from the doc, Culhane fidgety. I told him, look, hands wide, I know I'm 56 but I think I'm 1968. Doc nods.

Can I add something?: a boxy shadow by the wall. Sure, I redacted. 1100011010010101010wder your face with sunshine. Jukebox not real, is it?

Tonal tonsils warble tang mac the rant so sacrosanct sid skin's salty salad seed broken shadowed box juked, stop the slipstream now said doc

cracked and ratcheted jacket juke duku duke duke of urls urls urls oh yea what a wunderful urll0l0l0olol LOL lozenges will take care of it.

Kindred's paper extracted from the crack inside his closet ceiling. Edges worn from constant handling, checking and rechecking. Obsessive.

A list of psychdaddy's sizes. Shoes, 12D. Belt, 36. Shirt, XL, 17 inch neck. Pants, 34 inch inseam. Jacket 44L. Hat 17 and a half inches.

Kindred in psychdaddy's room, 3:32 AM. Snoring from the bed. Kindred slides a shirt from a hanger and tries it on. Perfect fit, sleeves.

Docdad rolls over. Kindred freezes, balancing on one leg, pants halfway up his thigh. false alarm. He pulls them up. Like custom-made.

The shoes fit comfortably. Kindred tiptoes around on the orange shag carpet, trying them out. Even his baby toe is snug as a bug in a rug.

The belt, the third hole worn. That's the one docdad uses. Kindred uses it too. The hat fits just so. Amazing, thinks Kindred, big-headedly.

Every piece of clothing in psychdaddys's closet fits Kindred as if a tailor from Turin has made it from the finest materials just for him.

Kindred sits down on the edge of docdad's bed. He can hear him breathing. Kindred slides under the covers and reaches across the sheets.

Docdad is not there. Kindred is alone in the bed. After a few moments, he becomes aware of his own breathing. It sounds like docdad's.

Kindred blinks, the light from the bathroom leaking under the closed door, exactly as he left it after his shower. Is he in docdad's room?

Kindred gets out of bed and stands in front of the mirror. Psychdaddy gazes back at him, streaked in the halflight of neon spilling in.

Kindred extends a fingertip and touches the mirror. There is no mirror there. He taps the plaster wall and light dust falls like dandruff.

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10 3D concoctions

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 4 Jan 2009 09:11:00 -0800

Ernest nested in my brain, the worm crawled ratcheting like an empty el train ttchk ttchk there, a random thought from 1971potato soup vile.

August 11, 1973 paraded between pillows covering my hearing motion denied I volunteered by coaxing the probe into my thalamus, naptime now.

September 9, 1959 younger still unknowing daddy kept his secrets of the desert and sometimes i prayed hiding so he would not see & mock me.

random summer day 1947 daddy tore the cover hysterical starman hourman green lantern they are not the heroes we are the twelve the virgin.

return to seen of crime i'm still encased in lower case just in case i must escape from mac the rant a dandy jaunt i leap from 3rd floor yet

I'm still here taking form and writing words no typing worms inside my derma would explain Sid Skinin his polyester spin on my last book, um

um hum turbines hmn? hymn? Sid hated the book, threw it at the blades it made a sound like valis paper shreds my mind complete I need a pop.

skin pop bladder ask Sidblotter ass cid, anything to keep me sayin not in sayin, the doc is sayin I'm not in my very skin yet still I type.

Q: ? A: ./' Q: be that way. A: but I am this way. Q: no, you are that way. And that's how I ended up here @joymotel, by going that way, damn

daddy would say someday son this will be all yours eyeballing sandstorms displacing new mexico to points south on the headache railway

coppertone girl knee dents in desert sand blasted by the devil's breath rolling across dunes her girly smile frozen in a submolecular dazzle

psychdaddy real daddy tell me true did I have a sister was she younger or older than me did we fight hug hurt play climb crawl dive burn

Don't you sea c c rider? Mac the Rant plonked & he clonked. That doc aint givin you the drizzlin' shits, sit & sip, man. My head I clonked

plink dink ka-plumpf, guit-box morphed atomically ocular my hemorrhaged memorages of holding a girl's hands & then the cloud dissolved her

she was virgin to my smooth, unshaven eyes. Daddy said duck & roll but I was too young to play rhyming word games then. Sucking coal, close.

her dislocated dissolution allowed daddy to disavow selected events in my head. Once I shaved my eyes, I could keep my eyelids peeled. SEE?

what if i have left the joy motel but i'm only imagining that i'm still here? is that psychdaddy in the mirror? am i buried in the desert?

everything is condensed inside the Joy Motel...like the air in the red balloon. ummmm... it's a place with a lot of interconnected rooms!!!

docnotes: ...his pleasure seeking id has separated from him to wander the hallways of the Joy Motel and drink and fornicate and kill...

...must reintegrate the id to restore his wholeness. his superego insists his name is kindred. why? he seems obsessed with twitter. WHAT IS?

...where is his rogue element coming from? intermittent babbling about corrupt brainstream. nonsense or unexpurgated truth? dangerous? yes.

...red balloon drifts up up upwind. lobster tap dancing on a glass table. hallway wheezing like a sore throat. virgin mary in 'shroom cloud.

Kindred at the window: The skyline looks like a bad set of dentures when you see it from Damen Blvd. Docdad:You can leave anytime, you know.

Kindred: On another side of town, it's a fighter's lopsided grin the moment before hitting the mat. Docdad: Are you writing a lifestory?

Docdad: There is no Joy Motel, Mr. Kindred. It exists inside your head. Each room an evanescent fantasy. The people in it? 3D concoctions.

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9 Blue worm

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 2 Jan 2009 20:49:00 -0800

Kindred gingered ale his stomach hurt just so, laws yes. No eating five sense, any, not even his. Culhane, mocking, Kindred curled fetal.

Eyes, sight, hurt, wait. Eyes, ears, hurt, moist, touched truncated truncheon ask Culhane for help, do it, I'm telling you, not me/him, me!

Culhane bent down, blocking the wall's eye view, whispered in Kindred's ear, sometimes there's a sentient third floor here, Kindred frantic.

Go ahead, talk to it. It won't bite, none of us do. You should see it, big conference room. Seats twelve. What are you going to name him?

Q: ernest. why am i? A: you purchased a brainstream from a viscous living wet database consisting of thoughtwaves, memories, dreams.

Q: thank you, ernest. that's the first straight answer anybody in this joint has given me. and now i'm talking to a sentient motel?

A: yes, mr. kindred. shall i send the cleaning woman in to scrub between your ears? Q: you mean a brainwash? A: very clever, sir.

Q: is my brainstream defective? A: yes, it is laden with corrupt interdata. that is why i suggested the use of the female cleansing agent.

Q: how can that be? aren't brainstreams pre-tested? A: yours was an untested and unverified discount black market brainstream from japan.

Q: my neural net is polluted with twisted thoughtwaves? A: yes. they are now an uneraseable part of your own persona. is that distressing?

Q: i keep losing track of what's now. A: a brainstream from an insane source may contain twisted misperceptions of actual events, dates

Q: you're saying i'm insane? A: perhaps not. but you may be possessed by a corrupt brainstream purchased from an insane uploader. a killer.

Q: i have a worm inside my head, a worm made in japan. A: in tokyo, to be precise. we think it's blue. Q: we? A: the rooms on the 3rd floor.

Q: ernest, this is an illogical conversation. A: you could be dreaming, sir. Q: i'm dreaming about talking to a sentient motel named ernest?

A: no, you're dreaming about a blue worm nested inside your cranium and feeding on your synapses. i am sentient and quite real. eyeball me.

Q: could i be dreaming about the joy motel? A: you are a valued guest in this fine establishment, mr. kindred. is your pillow comfortable?

Q: is my name kindred? is kindred my name? or is it redkind? drinked? ned dirk? dirk end? dr. kiend? dr. e.n. kid? dr. k. n. die? dr. die?

A: are you asking me if your name is kindred? if you will die here in the joy motel? or if you have already died? or if you are a doctor?

Q: yes, ernest. i am asking. i do ask. i have asked. i ask. A: i cannot answer. i cannot. i will not. i am not. ernest. am i? i am. are you?

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8 Quasi-nuclear

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 1 Jan 2009 11:25:00 -0800

Kindred did not know if Meeks was talking through him, to be safe, he sterilized his forceps before realizing he was a day from now.

Psychdaddy: enthralled when Kindred vibrated between days, three times the hourly fee. The uneven doc even had time to wipe the bloodstains.

Pirates? Party hats? Partake? What the hell were they mumbling about out there, outer, odder rudder stop think stop. I AM ME! me. Pirates.

Psychdaddy & Meeks outside of Scrip City, minutes after the pirate vision. Ambitextual crime partners. Squinting, their vanishing point eyes.

Will it ever blink?: Meeks, a pissed off mutter, f#cker. The doc, cool & suave: Wait a beat for the shank of the night. There, see? Kindred.

Walking aimlessly & studious a thousand feet high, red balloon the anchor, I see the motel & pharmacy, oh, light pole! Doc to Meeks: so sad.

Doc mocks, morphs psychdaddy, Meeks rocks, clocks out, I see myself stocking up on reds & blues, bennies & screws the lid tight on my mind.

Fireworks, the reds kick in. There I am, tiny, looking in matchbook doors, pounding with sticky fists. Meeks to Doc: you mean he sees twice?

He's split betwixt with his mission between. Spritzing stars microwave his neural nets. Happy New Year, doc. Ain't it a Wundurful Wurld?

Shape of ghosts etched in dust on adobe walls. Flash frozen two dimensional versions of bags of blood and bones. The universe sneezed achoo.

A dozen doppelgangers conspiring to euthanize the unbelieving with a megaton indoctrination. See that cloud? What's that look like to you?

I see the Virgin Mary floating heavenward on a spectral zephyr. Borne aloft by the last exhalation of the vaporized below. I see her, there.

Psychdaddy mydaddy crawdaddy lawdaddy jawdaddy momdaddy rundaddy nodaddy pleasedaddy diedaddy crydaddy liedaddy docdaddy deaddaddy luvdaddy

Good morning, Mr. Kindred. I see you've been working through some issues since we chatted. I'm pleased you are dealing with the Virgin Mary.

Many of my patients would be curled up in the fetal position by now, sucking their thumb and begging for a spanking. You're a tough one.

I FEEL LIKE SHOUTING AT YOU. HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT? But then the feeling dissolves in a phosphorescent haze of do-gooder nonsense.

The proverbial outside observer might surmise that I am just as in need of interventionist psychotherapy as you are. Funny old world, huh?

Is it the drugs? No? So why the time slips? Did you purchase a corrupt brainstream at the Terminal? Are you mainlining a madman? Crackpot?

the eyeball is carved out of the eye socket of the first watcher of the trinity boom, who was killed by the blast. or am i hallucinating?

the eyeball is frozen and glazed. when you look at it, you can smell the shape of the mushroom cloud. you can also swallow the Virgin Mary.

this eyeball is central iconography to the disciples, because it symbolizes the core of their quasi-nuclear religion. i need to eat it.

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7 Calumet & Deedle

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:36:00 -0800

The pogo stick cluttered his head as it fell to the ice machine below, a dessert oasis. Words became others unwanted, where was the center?

Wasn't he writing a memoir once? A monograph on a phonograph about skin grafts and radiation wafting through veined curtains? RCA, Victor?

Of course he wore armor as he counted flowers from the hall.An Atomic Knight, the round table an unblinking orb, a novel? Murkey, try later.

Meeks poured him some a ladle of destiny booze from the punch cauldron, enough to go around, little to make sense, himself, Dank, Janssen...

Mitch, Sid Skin, Mac the Rant, & in the corner, the guy everyone knew as The Man Who Always Drew Red. He was a failed artist/card shark.

It was too late in the night to talk. Kindred watched the Nicotine Fits duke it out on the blond colored Philco w/ a blonde who drank Bosco.

False dawn showed up silent. 5 AM, the time most souls plead for redemption or another day's rental on the Dodge Polara they all shared.

Kindred in the lobby, paging through the phone book, half blinded by the sunspots on his retina. Burn baby burn. Peripheral vision cloudy.

Professor Deedle space needle. Parcel bomb for the birthday boy. Pop goes the weasel. Disciple 3. God fearing, Dodge gearing, cod earring.

Man with no name meets man with no luggage. Traveling show traveling slow. Joy Motel welcomes all. Don't I know you? Kindred blinked. Flash.

Kindred tied the front doors shut with a string from Mac the Rant's guitar. No more guests tonight. Full house loses to straight flush, red.

Kindred ducked low, hiding from the existential banditos who seemingly wanted only to converse; conversely, Kindred only wanted existence.

Another name, whispered as if in a silent dream, Calumet. Remy Calumet. Disciple#4. On the floor. War, what is it good for, good god jaw!

Calumet & Deedle & their necessary evils, Kindred blinked, retinas full of discordant sites, a trinity of sorts, three times four is twelve.

Time dilating back, unwrapping the guitar string, unblinking the eye & undotting the i i i an implosion of kinetic psychosis, a frayed knot.

the 12th remember the twelfth, I can't I I I I'm Kindred tried to think was it yesterday again, a bad night's sleep, naked corpse in a tub.

A bathtub, was it his? Or Room 223, nearest the turbines,an easily muffled scream,Mac the Rant's guitar garrote turned her face red to blue.

Meeks slammed the register shut on his last sale of the last night, while Kindred was unstuck in time. The spigots coughed ropes of blood.

He turned to Janssen who twitched in his scars, hotboxing a deck of generics. Hmn, drowning victim again in Room 223, wash our hands please.

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6 Bakudan

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 13:39:00 -0800

First of all, I told psychdaddy that the film was a Betamax, not a VHS. Then I explained to him what a palimpsest was. Writing over writing.

Meeks rinsed out a Stella Artois glass & nodded back to Kindred, who shimmered back into his true narrative form. You scare the patrons, K

When you do that, Meeks told me. He always calls me K. when he's pissed. I told him to think of a blackboard, not fully erased, then written

on again. You mean like my sandwich board & the daily specials! His face brightened, which was strange, as there were no daily specials

Kindred, outside of himself again, bleeding from the gash in thought only, circled the room looking for autographs on labels peeled from Bud

Light bottles, wondering why I can't seem to finish a sentence before my session ends. Succulent sucession of seconds sentenced to breath.

I walked down the second floor balcony, Culhane blinked from an electrical socket near the holiday lights, IT WAS A RECEIPT!, I justified.

Receipt made out to Gankyuu Bakudan: Collector of Antiquities. Tokyo address. Shipping instructions. One ounce parcel.

One ounce parcel? A bullet? A vial of blood? A few cashews? Ancient coins? Dog whistle? Bone fragment? Motel key? Baby finger? Baby carrot?

Kindred wadded up the receipt and jammed it in his ear. It weighed one ounce. A one ounce promise. One ounce clue. One ounce death sentence.

A shriek from Tourette's. Sid Skin doing his pallor tricks again. YOU! Stop trying to correct me, eye spy! (Good thing I palmed the receipt)

And then put it in the OTHER ear, ha HA! Choke on that, eye spy. Kindred shifted gears in a futuristic hybrid of paranoid one ounce passion.

Danko Drout was easy. First disciple to go was Disciple 6. In a church in Sacramento. Lethal injection behind the ear, praying.

Not a murmur of suspicion. Not a nightmare, not a blink. Next morning Kindred had a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast. All American boy, yup.

Drout's dog tags went into the fish tank at the San Diego Zoo. Sank like a one ounce turd while Kindred snapped photos of baby dolphins.

Drout didn't leave a clue. Drout didn't have a clue. He was clueless. The trail ran cold for six months while Kindred, stupefied, cogitated.

That was then. Hiss is now. Voices in the airpipes, gurgling in the ventricles, dumptrucks in the arteries, sump pump in the bowels.

Kindred on a pogo stick, bouncing high from the parking lot to peer in windows. Sees docdad playing solitaire in a suit of armor. O knight!

Hiroshima girl won't you come out tonight? Enola Gay Tibbets has brought her little boy to play a game of hopscotch dropscotch blopsplotch.

Kindred in the vestibule crying in his boots, poisoning his roots. Listmaker listmaker make me a list. Let's play the name game, blame game.

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5 Turbines

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 11:48:00 -0800

Some holiday, somewhen. Like hearing that Bobby Kennedy got himself kilt right before he drank the rubbing alcohol by mistake. Clouded mind.

Sid Skin shows off new radiation retro-scarificate symposium pamphlets & Kindred knew he could never remember that line,forget repeating it.

The new guy-& aren't they all new guys?-is Cubey Townsend. Or maybe he was calling HIM Cubey & asking what town he was in, like a question.

Kindred hated being accosted by strangers when he examined the turbines, which must empower the Joy Motel withsome type of sentience. WHAT?

And this is what you think? What I think? Yes, what you think.That I myself can think. But you can. Wait, what? Kindred asked the Joy Motel.

12 witnesses seeing, 11 cameras hrmmmming,10 puffs of desert, 9 screaming campers, 8 mothers milking 7 babies sucking 6/?:... 5 RED BALLOONS

4 doors wide open 3 windows whipping 2 turbines charging towards a mushroom cloud & a vestal virgin's thighs, he said, to all a good blight

Kindred could not help but feel poetic & roly poly in polemics during the time of happy hostage days. Rant on the road,Culhane on the beach.

Mitch went on about catching the nanotube gang out in Abilene, talking future talk, you ask me. I did ask you. You did? Kindred stared back.

Where's the eye? We're tied? Whatthe? That's what a nanotube does, it compresses molecules of sound, molls culled over sinned Kindred WAKE!

a wink of an eye sliced by time and practiced hands of the new dreaming men. Culhane's words.Kindred: blank. If You Believe, Culhane hissed.

Half the tenants of Joy Motel hissed words out of air hoses, the rest gargled the laughter out of their lives. Sid Skin glowed only at dawn.

You seem to be free-associating more than usual. Skimming neural nets without the usual artificial sweeteners. Are you lucid?

When your father took you to the scene, did he fasten your seatbelt securely? Take your time before answering. This could be very important.

We found this in your room, stuffed inside a VHS box of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. It's an autograph, but we can't read the writing.

You gave me this photograph at our first session. It's underexposed, but it does look like Culhane. You told me it was your father.

What would you do if we took away your key? Would you move your precious belongings to another motel? Do you even know where the exit is?

I am going to strike you now, with enough force to break the skin. Will you retaliate? We don't think you will. I think you need me.

Kindred bleeding brooding swallowing teeth and smiling smirking slashing grin nodding rising steaming exiting through the wall socket gone.

Psychdaddy making a precise horizontal line across the chart and smashing his forehead on the desk with enough force to break the skin.

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4 Eyeball

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 12:30:00 -0800

okay DOC, kindred coughed into a spitoon that turned out to be his lap, momma was a still a virgin when she met me, i'm leaving it at that.

and screw you, i'm talking from inside a lower case of budweisers just to spite your hawk nose, blurred by your latex second hand smoke.

i can roam where i want, janssen borrowed my boxers, the ones w/ the joy buzzer.i can climb atop the ice machine, i need a dental mirror bad

you think i don't know mitch put culhane up to this? the memory retention pond, the time dilation,my sudden interest in 12 degrees separated?

MacRant out there in his '64 Dart, gitbox dangling from strings in the shattered windshield, Kindred scrapin the enamel on his tooth, waiting.

Why the guitar, a wooden missile in his mine mined mind, the car circling the empty lot. Culhane passed out from drink in front of Room 12.

Small, snowy world. Kindred in a snowglobe, puffing effluvium. Spirits of motels & mushrooms past.

Of all people, The Givers of Pain and Rapture check in to Room 244. Hope floats to the asphalt like rancid confetti. No no can't have that.

Once, Sid Skin told me that I must have been programmed by Hell. I still do not know what he was getting at, this was after his parole.

I think about a dark-haired woman in fishnets, vision of a virgin in a cloud of disintegrated earth, disinterested watchers, 12 disciples.

Liquid eyes that melt the sky, the force of the blast a 100 lb. brick hitting your chest. Waking up clutching a pillow that was never yours.

Night again, false dawn.Thoughts of the dark-haired girl, closer than the half-moon.The desert offers too much perspective, his memory none.

Culhane sealed the envelope with paraffin, put it inside the box, locked it and swallowed the key. He keeps the key in his stomach, always.

When the key passes, he sterilizes it and swallows it again. His gullet also contains enough coins to pay for parking meters.

If he needs to leave his truck downtown, he goes into an alley and expels exact change. $6.75. Parking ticket could screw the whole deal.

Brake lights, one busted,wink a trail for Kindred to follow. Culhane wants him close, sniffing and snuffling, overconfident, careless, lazy.

Kindred knows what's inside the box. Birth certificates, death notices, plans, schemes, diagrams, schedules, announcements, news, weather.

And a glazed eyeball. Sugared like spun candy. It belonged to the Watcher, the first to see, the last to know, the blind, bravely dead one.

Frozen on the retina, the image told the story. Her face and form and shape, unfolding, reforming, bearing witness to the almighty power.

Giver of life and taker of souls, bringer of death and singing cold songs that echo dully in the lost chambers of Kindred's ticking heart.

Culhane in the alley, counting out change. Kindred on a fire escape, the glint of fallen quarters flickering in unflinching unblinking eyes.

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3 Psychdaddy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:57:00 -0800

Good morning Mr. Kindred. I see you're having the orange juice. It's not fresh, you know. We're a long way from anywhere, here. Bad oranges.

Shall we begin? Or should I say, continue? Will you let me look inside your notebook this time? No? It must be very special. A gift perhaps?

You are aware that I could creep into your room while you're asleep and simply take it? I am your daddy, after all. I live inside your head.

Now, tell me. Do you keep a list in there? I think you do. You're certainly no artist. I think it's a naughty list. Labels, digits, names.

You told me last time you saw your mother on a piece of toast. Have your seen your father in the dirt behind the gas station? Or in a cloud?

Yes? A cumulus cloud? A dense puffy cloud form having a flat base and rounded outlines often piled up like a mountain? Or a mushroom?

Are you religious, Mr. Kindred? Do you believe in a higher power? Have you seen evidence of Him upon this earth? In the sky? Is he here now?

What happened in New Mexico with your father? Why do you think he would not buy you a frozen treat that day? Had you been a very bad boy?

It must have surprised you terribly, what happened. No one could have foreseen an event of that magnitude, especially not a boy age nine.

You shouldn't feel guilty. You were an innocent bystander. It was not your fault. Let it go. Wrap it in paper and set it out on the curb.

I see you are doodling the number 12. Does that number have some special significance to you, Mr. Kindred? Twelve months of the year? July?

Is your room satisfactory? Good. Do you have enough fresh towels? Yes? Could you use another blanket? Is the cleaning woman to your liking?

She was carefully chosen. There is a lot to be cleaned in a motel like this one. Nasty surprises. Sudden spills. Blood on the walls. Messy.

You may find her one day standing on your toilet with her head out the window. Pay her no mind. She is claustrophobic and needs the horizon.

You're yawning. Are you getting enough sleep? The desk clerk told me you have been roaming the halls more than usual. Looking for someone?

Your mother was a virgin? What in heaven do you mean by that? What a strange thing to suddenly blurt out in the middle of a session.

Where is your mother now? In a trunk in the basement? In the garden? In the clouds? I could ask Mr. Culhane. Would he know where she is?

Why do you always order things 12 at a time? 12 potato chips from room service. 12 Budweisers at Tourette's. 12 stamps at the post office?

Why do you call me 'psychdaddy'? And 'docdad'? Are you mocking me? I will not be mocked. I am a psychiatrist, but I am not your father.

This has been a very productive session. I was going to say 'fruitful' but I did not want to remind you about the rancid oranges. Goodbye.

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2 Culhane

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:00:00 -0800

Bada Boom. Kindred, startled, the voice hissed air, somewhere in the ceiling. A microphone, NOT a camera? No, the dwarf from 1959. Must be.

He moved his thumb, air leaked free. God, the hospital bed again! Psychdaddy's smell again, nicotine and desert gravel. No, that was a slip.

Why the eyes dot the aiiiieees. need drink, stumble upon, asphalt flop. Kindred downed too many red bennies & still the green iiiiis had it

Chlorine assault as Kindred squatted poolside. Broken ceiling tiles. Hum of filter. His room key refracting ten feet under. He dove in.

Bubbles. Fingers grasping, knuckles scraped on cement bottom. Kicking. Heavy shoes pulled him down. Surfaced. Not a key. A switchblade.

Giggling as he sprinted. Open blade. Hallway a dark pantleg stiff on a frozen clothesline. His mother, sitting in the snow. That you, Phil?

Psychdaddy slowly turning, lips a flat scar in a dead head. Kindred's eyelid flickering. 'We don't have to do this, you know. Not this way.'

Miniscule grinding noise. Imperceptible to docdad. Kindred tuned. Motor in a camera? Heart monitor? Wheels on a train track ten miles away?

No train, it was Mitchum out of the past, dropping coins in the juke. Cool, like: bounced off the balloon, the floor, into the slot. Dime dime

dime nickel and dimed, Kindred out-weaved Mitch in a clown pavane, shivarees of veins in both foreheads. Psychdaddy always said think, man.

Gotta think. What year was it in the desert? I know, well, you know its NOT 1982. I can see you shaking your head, Kindred said, looking up.

Sand, a projectile etching history into exposed skin. Light, a missile blinding goggled eyes. Sound, a hammer bludgeoning covered ears.

He runs without touching the ground, propelled by the hand of God. A storm-tossed leaf, a cannonball, dancing on the bent edges of gravity.

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.

Kindred plastered on brick. Culhane walked away from his ticking pickup and entered 125 with a brown bag. He was a disciple. True believer.

Elbows on the ledge, Kindred poured himself through the gap in the drapes and sat beside Culhane, who was watching a documentary about math.

Number me slumber me dumber me. Scientists at a roundtable. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve. Disciples. Boom.

He couldn't touch Culhane, not yet. Culhane had addresses, names, numbers, blast data, images, key variables, vectors, angles, measurements.

Kindred slimed under the door, reconfigured and blew down the hall, a hot dry wind from New Mexico. Pickup truck running hard, rolling west.

Culhane smelled cordite in the air. He opened the ammo box and examined the paper again. Chained the door, ran some numbers, went to bed.

Kindred stabbed a can of chili with the switchblade, stuck in his tongue. Face smeared, slumped against the inside of his door. Slept.

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1 Kindred

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:53:00 -0800

The red balloon kissed the wall of the Joy Motel, Home Of The Two Hour Nap. Static charge held it there quivering, waiting to explode.

Street level. Smell of dry ice; legacy of the deep freeze. Footprints: hourglasses in snow. Turning the corner, the balloon going pap pp pap

Scratching sound, distant clicking, deep space voices rising and falling in a wash of white noise. Breathing.

Gauze of sunset, the pavement lunar? Time dilation made the street a postcard, Joy Motel, nowhere, out there, balloon moving everywhere.

Open windows unblinking in a row, uppers and lowers, drapes slapping gray concrete block walls. Seductive shadows, rusted bicycle.

Kindred staggered out of Tourette's with a bottle, vision clouded, hallway infinite. Room key chained on maple, carved like a duck.

The doctor running. In my room again? Kindred snorted. What's he looking for? Conduct unbecoming a psychiatrist, yes. A man of his stature.

Breathing, again. The whole building is breathing. The hallway a ragged throat and Kindred being swallowed. Swimming toward the light.

The guy working the stick at Tourette's, Big Q Leeks,saw the notepad Kindred left behind.The hell, he'd drop it off at his room, lights out.

Kindred knew Leeks had seen the note because he had the exact same note in his hand. He needed no visitors, just neon behind his eyelids.

Flicker of an eyeball in the peeker of 214 as Kindred lurched past. Clicking of a lobster dancing on a glass table. Blip of music, low note.

Twittering and tweeting, the parrot in 222 always knew closing time. Hello, Phil! Hello, Phil! Kindred slid the duck key into 223.

The door is unlocked. You're free to go. We've made significant progress. Look at this chart, Mr. Kindred. Sorry, our time is up.

But my insecurities remain. There is something not right about my nose. I need to know what happened. Don't ask me that. I told you. In 127.

Free to go? Kindred paid $4 for the 7 & 7 & 222 w/ the parrot sounds he made parroting the man garroting the man in room 224: Vacancy soon.

Ticking in the ductwork. Congestion in the lung. Moaning in the ceiling. Siren in the woodwork. Dust in the keyhole. Snake in the drain.

3 AM and lucid still, flash on glass, winter lightning. Kindred stone still, back against the wall, listening. Heartbeat city, here we come.

There was the time in Reno, Kindred age nine, government men in a white van. Rubber gloves. His father down. Engine dripping from the chase.

Shiny shoes from little man POV. Should he tell the dr.? Might help. So would a cement shake-up. Belly flop the ice machine. Ah, escapades!

Psychdaddy must never know. Psychdaddy does not love me. Pen poised, that smirk, air hissing from his hawknose. Narrow black tie.

Is psychdaddy transcribing my babble? Does he write down every word I say? Why does he stop so often? Does he have a 140 character limit?

Drinking with Floyd Mask had been a bad idea. Why two identical notes? Now Leeks had one. Indecipherable scrawl. Happy Birthday? No.

Crow on the roof. Cat in the dumpster. Claws scratching steel. Tap tap of morse code. Claustrophobic cleaning woman in the shower stall.

Kindred age eleven sent a fan letter to Philip K Dick. The reply came back from Rod Serling. Twilight Zone guy. Look out the window, kid.

Lincoln got shot in his backyard. Civil War soldier got hanged. Time stopped forever when a guy dropped a watch. The window? It was TV.

Leek rattling his doorknob. Kindred opened an eye. Paper sliding under the door. Yellow. Not the note. Bus ticket. Stamped and used.

His father fighting back. No hope. Kindred running flat out across the moonlit desert. I'm only nine, dammit. Last time he ever cried.

Bus ticket one way from Chicago. Used Saturday. Kindred was born there. Fell in love there. Killed a man there. Bought a bus ticket there.

Backfire echoed off the glass and ricocheted into his cranium and exited through his right eye. That would be Floyd, finally rolling out.

Neon leaked through the drapes and dribbled onto the carpet, puddling. In his bare feet, Kindred could feel the charge, buzzing.

The crackle of light made the bus ticket cream, peach, the gray of a dead man, cream again. Variations on drinks down at Tourette's.

Walked to the bar, pharmacy sign messed up 1/2 block down his nerves, Scrip City, the why tipped to the right by wind. His dr. used a stylus

Kindred again, 3rd person: Janssen the 2nd, Nikki Dank the 1st. Heads close to formica, the bartop a shared conch shell. Rod Serling lied.

He took the bread slice he stole from Bumpy Face, squirted Dank's lemon slice on top a layer of sugar, the sop startling him like maggots.

Kindred wandered through 20 years of summers as he num-nummed away, once he worked 3 hours opening a can of dog food w/ a broken fan blade.

Billboard tattered paper flapping whipcracking Hanna tanned legs sand beach scuba waterlogged Joe Walnut sinking bubbles rising red balloon

You don't mind if I record this do you? Psychdaddy shifting his coffee to his other hand. Kindred's left eye twitched. Where's the cam?

The first question was always the same. More like a statement than a question, actually. More like a command: Tell me about Trinity.

Kindred bared his teeth in a clenched grin. This doesn't hurt. He squeezed his thumb into his thigh, stabbing. OK. 'Badda bing badda boom.'

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