trash, part one

A man in a slim black suit trailed the prison ward by fifty feet or so next to the highway. He observed thirty men poking at the ground with long metal rods, trash collecting at the base of their instruments, plastic, coke and beer cans, cardboard. Underneath the sun the men operated like drunken, aberrant ants, off the trail, poking here or there, seeking sugar. Every now and then one would pick up a cigarette that had been discarded prematurely from another capricious driver. The man in the slim black suit saw one inmate, large and overweight with maroon skin lesions covering his face, ponder whether or not he should tuck the remaining stem of a cigarette into his palm for later usage, but, the prison warden, disgusted and belligerent, shouted at the prisoner to put all of the litter into their plastic trash bags.

The man in the slim black suit was drunk himself, not deliriously, as these prisoners walking along the side of the highway were in their movement, but drunk off of creativity, off of his craft. He was an artist and he had found his landscape. The early afternoon sky, sparkling. Now, a sudden ubiquitous dimming of the light, the artist had crafted a cloak for the sun.

(The warden to himself) Must be a cold front coming in. Next to his foot there was a cigarette butt. The filter yellow and burned. The edges of the highway covered in trash. Bad enough that there are already animal carcasses to be removed. No caring community had adopted this section of the road, so here he is with his ward. It is good for them to be out and see the bright atmosphere of the world, but now, this sky, an errant observer of the scene, seemed restless. Soon enough the warden was influenced by the sudden purple of the evening (except it was two o'clock just minutes ago?) and he was disturbed enough in the transformation to take his eyes off of his ward. The trash once stuck out incandescently, but was now swallowed by the long emerald grass.

....

Icons

you do realize that all of the icons they have hanging in the church are not doing their job. there is no portal in the portrait that allows both parties on either side of the image to communicate. just an image. and you really should know by now that images are perceived and just simply are. there is nothing on the other side that can suck in your own image. don't cry for your reflection either. don't cry for all of the experiences it won't endure or the questions it will never ask. so maybe you observe the Sabbath. the image does not observe. [        ].

close your eyes and now no one sees anything.

a la moog

He is painstakingly careful in carrying each phrase to the moog synthesizer. There is love and patience in his handling of each note. Inside of the electronic music studio there is reverence for the virtuosity earlier master craftsmen had in laying out their works and also a devoted, caring irreverence in the structural transcription.

Carlos: there is a way to both laughat and pay homage to the structure. Carlos fervently tries to embrace hisCock in hand. The feeling of discontentment intensifies. How would his sex read through the moog?

The moog transcription is a cosmetic one, first requiring a translation in meaning of the composer's role  from one body to another. Inside the recording study, Carlos pokes at the buttoned, lit up boxes lining the walls: Is the framing of the older body already made to embrace that of the new? The inner physicality strangely resembles what he desires. 

His German love, Johann Sebastian Bach, is revived from the dead through this moog. For his technical command, Carlos reveres the late conqueror of many instruments. Carlos is delighted! The parts all interlock harmonically when played together. Isolated, one part--say, that of the violinist--is independent in its rhythm from whatever the cellist has designed. There are wires all over the floor, so the machinist is hard into his element. 

Bach's framework does not have many spaces for players to insert their own ornamentation. Carlos sees potential for a flourish here or there, out of reverence. 

Today his Love's compositions are often played through orchestras much larger than his originals. Already, the structure of the concert hall is expanding. 

Lightly, Carols pokes the dead into the moog from meticulous, obsessed strikes at the keyboard: love the loss and rediscovery of each phrase, love the surgery and the machine. 

A powdered wig, now electric blue. The machinist's sex left out of his trousers. Out of reverence. There is a phrase being transcribed. An incision down the shaft for ornamentation [a little, out of reverence (a little further)]. The dead is switch ed on, the shaft demolished, and the music breathes again. Hot and whirling, but not uncontrollably. Brightblue obeisance.

river panning children

The crookedly hinged man likes your perfume, whatever it is. It does not scape his debauched nostrils like a soapy washcloth, but its buttery base notes endure throughout the scene. He likes how your perfume is without rose petals. In fact, not one flower can be detected in the slightest. Again you do not smell soapy tonight, which is good, because they like their baths to be taken afterwards.

Go ahead and continue sobbing on the floor. This theatrical display looks to him like the cover of a great novella. His chums will be making an appearance soon. They are also handsome. Having business empires promised to them by fathers, they have commodity-reinforced confidence and big smiles.

The way they beam, the big boys, turns you on, but not one of them as invasively as Him. The others are fish chasing their own scents. He already knows his own scent. This is not to say that it does not turn him on, only that he does not swim in circles. Only that he does not swim in circles anymore.

They all enjoy this fairyland world of yours and how it is exceedingly fragile and forefront in your movements. They blow bubbles and scoop up the froth, tucking it away in their pockets like infantile kleptomaniacs set loose in a riverbed where gold has collected from a mountain vein. Mystified, they trade the scraps of joy, the precious nuggets.

He is inclined toward tracing back this music to the first wind.

You do not know, however strong the front from your angle, the delicacy in the way his muscles interact down his back and abdomen, underneath that dress shirt. His architecture buckles and twitches--not at all like a beast of virile maturity, but of a little child listening to the radio broadcasts at night that penetrate the living rooms of every home, addressing, maybe affirming all the whispers about a supposed dismantling of the empire. A child with his broken plaything.

His muscle face, it has been overworked. He was once an underwater infant caught up in a gold bed of his own. He had to be found out by his parents. It turns you on, the industry of it all. All of you now, shifting your pans from side to side in the stream, sifting out the unwanted. Back into the stream the pebbles plop.

In the room a train pulls out. With it goes the light.

drip-drop drip-drop.

Untitled Project on Sibling Actors, Part 5: We Now Go Into Laurent's Bedroom

It's been awhile and for that, I am sorry.


From his bed Laurent sees a dark figure walk through the frame of his open door and stop near the light switch. He pulls the covers more so over his face and pretends that he does not notice his sister. He was thinking of calling it an early night. She flicks the light switch on and off rapidly to get his attention:
--Laurent.
Laurent shifts his eyes toward her and grunts to let her know that she has been heard. Sister leaves the light on and walks over to his bed, the wooden floor creaking under her feet. She sits down on the sheets where her brother's legs are withdrawn back to his curled body. Laurent, the fetus. Brother hears her handling something glasslike in her hand. A silver clutch rests in her lap.
--Laurent, we've got some really, really good weed left over from yesterday. If you're not asleep yet, we should load my pipe.
Sister holds out a glass smoking pipe. The bowl of the purple glass is filled with ground up weed and topped off with the light green crystal remains sifted from the bottom chamber of his sister's weed grinder. Laurent sits up in his bed:
--Thank God.
He takes the pipe into his left hand and wraps his thumb around the carburetor of the bowl. Sister places her Zippo lighter into his right hand. Laurent lifts the pipe up to his lips and begins to flick the lighter, but stops:
--Shouldn't we use the vaporizer? I don't have any incense to burn and I don't want our friends to smell the weed.
--Their room is on the opposite side of the house! I suppose I'll go grab some incense from downstairs. I think you should finish this bowl and then load another. Beforehand, if you would, get a bathrobe on or something and then go put on a good vinyl.
Sister slowly pats the exposed calf of Laurent's leg and sets off to grab the incense. Laurent goes back to lighting the pipe. He enjoys the way the top of the mound in the pipe lights up and the way the ground up bits of green bud shrivel as smoked. The harder his drag of smoke, the brighter the bowl becomes. He sets the pipe onto his nightstand and ascends out of his bed naked, an action performed almost as a seamless stretch. He walks straight from his bed to his bathroom and stops in front of the mirror above his sink. He spends hours out of the year just gazing. The body looks so much better completely naked. He thinks to himself how when he wears his trousers little love handles appear at the waist. But now, his frame is smooth. He never envisioned himself having a "chiseled" physique. He appreciates how some fat sometimes obscures his abdominal muscles. There is something romantic to him about how little effort he puts into his body. His chest hair is perfect now. He turns around then peeks over his shoulder to see his backside. A few hairs poke out of his upper back. I'll have to remember to shave these later. He goes further down with his eyes to his rear end, one of his favorite parts to his body. Nice ass. He then throws on a black bathrobe and ties it shut, so as to be modest.
Brother and Sister share much of themselves with each other. They are not quite best friends. Siblings cannot ever declare themselves "best friends." No two people under familial obligations can shrug of that unconscious sense of duty and that tug-of-war understanding of physicality and touch. So there are flimsy boundaries that are hung up every now and then to remind themselves that this should maybe be done this way and that, that way.
Sister comes back to the room waving the incense around in her right hand like she might be wielding a magical wand. She walks in cheerfully, but also somewhat dutifully, because she is his sister as he is her brother. Laurent walks back to his bed as she sets down the alabaster bowl that will hold the incense as it burns onto his nightstand. While loading the second bowl, she asks her brother:
--Have you decided?
Laurent sits down on his comforter slowly as he points out the remains of the bowl in her purple pipe:
--On what?
--On a vinyl, you freak.
Laurent says to his sister that she should put on whatever she likes. She tells her brother that she is always having to decide upon everything. She rants, but she does like being the one to always select the vinyls for Laurent to play on his turn table, as well as the food and the company they keep. Sister sees how withdrawn and, sometimes, even reclusive Laurent has become over the past few years. His inability to act with confidence is often disgusting in her eyes. Some nights she is cast under the magnetism of Laurent. Then, some nights she is so repulsed by what appears to her to be a bizarrely resolute laziness that she throws down whatever her hands are occupying--a vinyl, a book, a DVD she was excited about viewing with her brother earlier--and storms off to bed or to the backyard to let off some steam near the swimming pool. Lazy Laurent. That is what she would think if tonight was one of those times. Instead, she gives her brother a few options from which he can make a decision. The way in which she lays out the potential musical geniuses for tonight's program is very airy and bright with dada-esque flourish:
--We have Miles Davis' Feeling Blue. Well, actually let's not, it seems we have enough of that color hovering about you tonight. Let's see, there's Bitches Brew. Perhaps, but there is also Duke Ellington, Serge Gainsbourg, Charlie "Bird" Parker…
--Put on Bird.
Sister looks up from Laurent's stash of music with some surprise to his ready choice:
--Bird it is.
Laurent receives the vinyl from Sister and places it on the turn table. Sister climbs onto Laurent's bed with the pipe as he starts from the top of the record's A side. Sister lights the bowl and inhales the smoke. She tilts her head back and lets the smoke escape. It billows out slowly and thick under her nose. She takes a quick breath and the smoke cloud is swiftly sucked back into her mouth. Brother looks at his sites and acknowledges her good form. Sister than releases the smoke again. She swishes her head from side to side under the unpredictable, wicked scat-play of Davis' trumpet.
Brother:
--Nice ghost inhale
The two of them take in the erratic scales of the saxophone and become a single unit. Brother and Sister, content.
Sister is both drawn to and repulsed by Laurent's inarticulate sadness. Also, she is fully aware of his act. Only, she is not consistently able to detect the mechanics behind each of his gestures. What is the cause for Laurent's melancholy this evening? Is it a lover Sister does not know about?
Now there are just ashes in the bowl of Sister's pipe. Sister loads the next bowl. The breaths they take from the first hits of the new bowl are clean and pure. As they make there way down the bowl of weed, they space out. Laurent's bedroom grows vast and bright. Sister is mesmerized by the spiraling vinyl record that seems to hover above the turn table. Brother notices a gaping hole in the crown molding that blends wall with ceiling.
We've go to mend that crack.
Sister begins to rouse out of her ritualistic high as the record player's needle, having already moved into the most inward orb of the B side to Laurent's Charlie "Bird" Parker anthology, lifts its beak from the vinyl. A scene comes to Sister's mind. One of thousands she has a day. Just like Brother. She has fun imagining where this little tableau will go. She looks at Laurent (Right now she will think of him as another man named Frank. Frank might be a mysterious acquaintance whom she always took for a very furtive peeper). She gives to "Frank" what she practices to herself every evening in the mirror--the LOOK:
--Darling, do you sometimes think a saxophone is really just a siren meditating from within a gold sarcophagus?
Laurent turns his head to meet her eyes. Is that really one of the lines from the script? He can see plainly that she is now acting by the way that she slings her arms behind her head to play with a sensual pose in her making. How many times must she have read that line to herself today? Laurent:
--Darling, I do not. I appreciate the saxophone because it's more enigmatic than that. Its art is built from caprice and improvisation. If not that, then it is a window for the suppressed, but it's not stifled itself. Nothing about it sounds imprisoned.
--Is that so? (Sister suspects that Laurent's lecture is muddled) You know so much more about these things than I do.
Perhaps, so that he he will not be upstaged, Laurent also assumes a front. He looks at Sister's direction a couple of feet away on his bed comforter, no longer into her eyes, but into those of another women. A woman without transparent craft. He holds this image in his mind and, in the eyes of this new women he imagines an ocean tide falling back, crawling back to its mother and revealing glistening artifacts of earlier motion. And what evidence does the water in her eyes hold? She seems to pull him in closer with each breath she takes. He looks and sees fragments pointing back to prehistoric nebulae caving in and exploding in starlight cadence, luminescent jellyfish stranded by ocean tide. She hums along to the velvet improvisations and he wonders. There is not one reflection, but always an infinite number.
Sister feels that Laurent is winning this scene. Laurent looks smokey and tortured. Sister hurls her effort into a new direction:
--There really is nothing like having a really reliable drug dealer.
This gets Laurent laughing for a few seconds. He nods his head and sinks back into his pillows. His mind is elsewhere, as if what he performs comes from something adrift, something dreamy and torrid. His participation in the conversation with Sister is only surface level. Sister wonders on and on about him. He is her brother. The siblings are masters of feuding and keeping each other in check, sporting against each other. When they go to sleep, their own gods play against each other to keep the action in motion. The impulse cannot die. Some occasions call for their warring dreams to come together, unite in fermatas of sibling truce, if, say, for example, something outside of the family threatened to take this life away from them, the life they began building for each other two years earlier when Mr. and Mrs. Yardley went back to America and allowed the siblings to remain in this mansion. The summer excursion of two years ago became a suspended reality for the two.The impulse cannot die.
Laurent:
--Now you choose the music and give me a cigarette, will you?
--You must have been going insane for these past few hours. I offered you one after dessert tonight, you know.
Sister sees Laurent's craft as him wanting to appear perpetually absent from whatever room he finds himself. Come on. This act only works for a little while. You can't play the mysterious card over and over. Everyone gets so tired with the whole thing. Sister selects Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson.
Laurent satisfies his craving for a cigarette and grounds his high. Serge speaks seductively into the lush night. If Laurent had a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost to drive right now, he might go off into the night looking for his muse (she would be riding her bicycle) and then he would crash into her.  He looks down onto the bedroom floor. A stack of his own jazzy travel fiction lies tilted, ready to tip over onto the floor. With one struck match, the sprawl would give into burning devastation. So he would like to fancy. He thinks of this not yet materialized muse across the sea of his cushiony comforter. These are the depths he wants to explore.
But the siblings know that there is just Sister and Brother here tonight and there are boundaries. Reared competitively against each other, they both love and hate the other.
Throughout the night little snid-bits of conversation come and go. But, more increasingly, there are suspensions of sound that wear on the siblings. They begin to lack any attentiveness that would be necessitated to keep a night such as this burning. Eventually there is closure to this night scene. Brother sinks into the fabric under his bathrobe. Sister sinks into the fabric under her white frock. Laurent walks down into the basement of the day, the space underneath the drunken, sleeping giant of summer. How grand is this framework around their bodies, gilded with dragonfly mint! They call out to the night, asking it to last. The ceiling fan spins. They sleep, they sweat down on the comforter below.

Language

BEWARE OF DOG

Language is the bitch that wanders off and then returns, begging for scraps. She snaps at my left heel. She is a bitch that I cannot shrug off. She is my pain.

light dimmers

        Mother is taking more and more intervals from her preparations where she goes to the bathroom and touches up her hair. The children listen to Mother's instructions frequently, but they can neither feel nor emulate. Randomly misplaced items, a stack of magazines strategically laid out in some order of incomprehensible order, a vase, a wine bottle opener. All of these objects threaten this woman. Mother hisses at the daughter: the napkins! The children do not realize that they are dealing with a professional. Mother's nose, her mouth--everything becomes an arrow pointing in one direction; it plows through the area as if to say: Keep moving. Father breathes heavily. Mother assumes a creative pose in front of the refrigerator. 

Sister holds the pan with the bunt cake to her nose. She deeply inhales the aroma, the fruits of someone else's hard labor. She longs for a poison cabinet, like in the movies.  Mother walks over to where she is at the dining table and snatches the pan away. She forgot to drizzle the Marsala pecan sauce over the cake. Her son lies on the couch in the living room. His mouth, lacking the fine creases of age, opens and closes effortlessly. Her daughter then walks over to where a new Cabernet bottle rests in the arms of a monkey butler (figurine designed to hold bottles of wine, not an actual trained monkey). Mother comes and holds the bottle in her hands. She will place it somewhere out of sight. No, that would be ridiculous. She will just place it in the cabinet behind the triscuits until the night is over and the missionary they are hosting this evening has left. 

         Sister shouts out in direction toward her brother, pointing out that God also created women. 

In the evening the adults of the house, who have to work hard all day, stretch out on lazy boys under the purply haze that fills a room whenever the TV has been turned on. This is the beginning of a chain that runs backward all night, until seven in the morning. Both Mother and Father have glasses of wine. Father's is poured generously. Mother's is a methodical and conservative glass. 

Sister speaks into the candle next to her girlfriend she had over earlier and who now must be leaving (before the missionary comes). She puts on a show, moving her fingers in and out of the flame:

feels right, honey, yes,

but don't go burning your big

fingers now (honey)

When the light of day goes out, adults start remembering their regrets. The night comes out with ambient light bulbs and paperwork or with instant coffee brass knuckles. It is accompanied by people who have lost out on life. In some corners decay knocks with scurrying fingers, like rats unseen between the walls. 

faces for friends

All at once!

Shout out to Kundera

Wear

like pigs

Earthlings make habit of mistaking shame chasms for the arms of their giant merciful Lord. The sun is so majestic, so holy. Way up high his soverinty rings out, but all the resonance dries the Earthling's skin way down to dirt (substance of their first holy making). The Sun shines--it beats--causing the earthlings’ pores to squeeze out what ever [ x (in a universe of infinite spaces, what can x not be?)] they have left onto their humble feet. They are marching and stomping for their holy master. Everything becomes thick and it clings. See it thicken and clog the city's drainage system like chocolate pudding? It slowly bakes into mud pies. The earth’s surface is slowly baked through this eternal dynasty. Filthy feet slosh around feeling into the ground; the land is no longer fertile. The earthlings are all filthy.

1.  Do Earthlings crave weightlessness or do they always dread the idea of floating up from the earth's crust--the suppression of gravitational pull? Do they want to float or keep on stomping?

hint: no one has successfully achieved that freedom, certainly no Earthling. People long for weight. When they sense that airy buzz take over and initiate a lightness of thought--that's when the fretting starts. That makes for some of the biggest squeals and oinks.

2. (But really) How can they even think to climb out of these holy trenches with the weight of the sun’s supremacy crushing their skulls into their brains?

well: they want to feel some sort of weight (anyways). On with the struggle! For some, they are still marching on toward that ripe and fertile land promised to them eons ago.

3. But, the FILTH! That nasty ass chocolate pudding mess all over their bibs!

Just a matter of biology (homeostasis): It helps to cool them off while they bake away under the Lord. Also, it's something tasty onto which they can latch, suckle, you know, it makes up for some really sweet dreams.

Maurice

My reading of E.M. Forster's tale of homosexual love in Edwardian England from almost two years ago. It's been awhile since I have read a Forster novel and I still believe today that he is widely under appreciated.

The Maurice Muddle
Fear of the “other” drives a compulsive need for the public sphere to reaffirm its own values, superstitions, and customs. E. M. Forster’s social commentary novel, Maurice, debunks the patriarchal homophobia and gender constrictions of Edwardian society. The critical provisions from the schools of Queer and Feminist Theory elucidate the problematic social positions men have and continue to enforce upon themselves through discourses on the male homosocial continuum, bodily politics, and compulsatory heterosexuality. Forster contributes to the progression of the collective British identity in charging his domineeringly conservative country with the task of deconstructing the body from which homosexuals have been marginalized.

The two selections from Maurice both portray scenarios where the two main characters distract themselves from any possibility of initiating an erotic connection. Eve Sedgwick writes that the continuum between homosocial and homosexuality is made even more apparent as participants of the homosocial bond are “drawn back into the orbit of desire” (2466-7). Maurice Hall and Clive Durham never reach a “potentially erotic” familiarity (2467), because of societal pressures and “political regression” (Rich 1591). In the first selection, Maurice alludes to their past to reminisce fondly of what he believes could still be a prospectively more intimate relationship: " 'You only think you've changed,' he said, smiling. 'I used to think I had when Miss Olcott was here, but it all went when I returned to you' " (Forster 128). Clive persistently insists of a new “change” in his self, groaning, "[b]ut I've changed, I've changed" (128). The character Miss Olcott was an "obligatory heterosexuality built into" their kinship (Sedgwick 2468). To Maurice's dismay, Clive brings in another women, Maurice's sister, into the triangle (Forster 129). Ada is the objectified female and homophobic impulse that forges the bond between the two men as merely friends. Forster includes the first triangle as a depiction of how evident attractions are thwarted from an instilled fear of being "othered."

In order to maintain their position within the British hierarchy, heterosexual men embed a sensation of disgust into those possessing the "Oscar Wild-type" problem that had stained the Victorian society of the past century. The marginalized are excreted as filth; “others become shit” (Butler 2546). As Maurice is trogging through the grounds outside of Penge estate, the "the mist is thicker…[and] the mud stickier" (Forster 173). "Mud” becomes the filth Forster's Edwardian society associates with homosexuality. “Feelings of repulsion” placed into Maurice's consciousness are used by the oppressive force in Forster's society to facilitate its reign (Freud 817). Throughout the text, the Maurice and Clive situation is referred to as a "muddle" (128), further emphasizing its deemed sexual degradation. The "pollution" in which Maurice participates is dangerous (Butler 2544). Its manifestation is viewed by the conservative class as an attack on their position as primary holder of political and social power.

In Maurice's second interaction with Clive, he is reminded of "the muddle last year" (Forster 176) that, according to the more conservative of the two, was dealt with appropriately. Now both men feebly dismiss the muddy waters of homosexuality. Maurice brings up the topic of marriage to reaffirm their homosocial bond and their masculinity (174). The vocalized disgust Clive earlier displayed for his own sexual orientation disappears, and he convinces himself of Maurice's and his successful moral realignment. Clive is delighted and embraces his friend, "it's what I've always wished for you" (174). Happiness, though superficial, ensues with "heterosexuality…as a means of assuring male right of physical, economic, and emotional" power (Rich 1602). The muddle is openly set aside by both in order for them to maintain the "middle-class comfort" of their custom (Forster 127). Homophobia oppressively centralizes itself so that the two gentlemen can maintain political residence in the most dominant of Edwardian society's "distinctive node of organization" (Sedgwick 2475). When gender constructions and their implications are explored, homophobia is further understood.

Power is distributed on a base of gender. Patriarchal Institutions are able to withhold power from those they have labeled as weak or effeminate by utilization of "male tyranny" (Rich 1606). Adrienne Rich writes on gender assimilation: "sameness…is the most passive and debilitating of responses to political repression" (1591). Unfortunately, individuals who chose not to assimilate themselves into dominant culture or targeted more violently. The Patriarchy, similar to a homosocial bond, is a strengthened accumulation of the material and hierarchal "relations between men…that create independence and solidarity…that enables them to dominate women" (Sedgwick 2468). Maurice is structured to reveal domineering masculinity and its "horror[s]" (Forster 126). Forster's novel contains often aggressive and male-exclusive words that contribute to his ultimate exposé of Edwardian society. Clive "drag[s] in a woman" into their weak homosocial bond (129), the two confront each other with physical "hostility" (129), and the second scene follows a hunting game. Even the settings-the smoking room, the hunting grounds, dinner with the politicians-are strikingly masculine. There is literally no room for femininity or homosexuality, both have been squeezed out of the patriarchal society.

Contrastingly, Maurice is at times expressive and sentimental. Concerned for Clive's physicality after a brief row, he refers to Clive as "my darling" (129), forfeiting his masculinity. Of course neither Clive nor Maurice act from any literal essence of intrinsic masculinity; there is a bodily-regulated “illusion of interior and organizing gender core” (Butler 2549). The male continuum in Maurice is deepened by taking roots in Classicism, stretching back to times of Hellenic civilization.

The intimacy between Maurice and Clive is obvious. As Maurice insists they both consciously love each other, Clive hesitatingly replies, "I like you enormously--more than any man I've ever met" (Forster 128). To separate himself from the dangerous implications of homosexuality, Clive continues explaining his love. Evoking the classical concept of Platonic love, Clive remarks that between such close male friends "[i]t's character, not passion, that is the real bond" (128). From the first scene, it is revealed that Clive took a trip to Greece (129). What Clive meant in traveling to Greece is not relayed in the scene; however, the mere mention of Greece, the birthplace of Platonic love, invites the reader to fill the curious gap with his or her own projection he or she associates with homosexual and homosocial male continuum. Accentuating his homosexual tendencies, Clive, subscribes to a homosocial theory quite synonymous to that of Greek homosexuality; yet, Maurice was supposed to (conveniently) mature into heterosexual "manhood, the assignment of [earlier] roles was not permanent” (Sedgwick 2469). Crushing Maurice's hope, Clive calls the passions between men as solid a foundation as "sand" (Forster 129) and internally attempts to relinquish "the old Hellenic ships" of his youth (175). The defeated state in which society leaves Maurice is a stormy consciousness that Forster expands with graphic imagery.

Maurice's consciousness is projected into the weather and his periods of social discord are represented by contrasts between light and dark imagery. Women and Normativity together are dogmatically displayed as the light to homosexuality's darkness. Although there is an instance where Clive is shown wandering around the darkness, "enveloped" in the mist of the night (130), he is "promised a dawn" with the prospect of heterosexual marriage (130). Lacking the "privilege of a presumptive heterosexual" (Sedgwick 2474), Maurice is left in the muddle of the dark, "turn[ing] out the electric light" of hope during his solitude (Forster 130). Within his "nightmare" (173), he is temporarily forced to a “horror and self-punishment” with which others are unfamiliar (Freud 817). Maurice is an "animal" (Forster 126), dehumanized and "othered" by society for his sexual orientation and cruelly forced to an unsympathetic dreariness (173). Although societal pressures are overbearing to marginalized characters, the second scene does begin to pick up with a positive momentum. In the darkness and storm of Maurice Hall's night (176), he gives vocalization to the desires that for too long had been suppressed: "Come!" he shouts into the outward projection of his inner torments, as he finally begins to embrace his self and rid himself of the man whose social-consciousness prevented him from embracing what could have been (176). In giving Maurice an ending of encouragement, Forster conveys his own positive vision for the future of society.

Feeling and empathy are the answers for the hypocrisy and power incongruities in society. Although social reformation for the marginalized of Edwardian society would not occur for many years, E. M. Forster sets a foundation for its genesis. Not only does he reveal the incongruity of Britain's earlier cultural hierarchy in Maurice, but also, as an empathetic voice, he extends his embracing arms to the suppressed, invisible citizens, and those devastated by their inhibited prospect of love. His observations and charge of feeling to Britain's self-righteous, judgmental, and unfeeling citizen help to initiate a progressive process of deconstructing social obstructions and unifying a conscious, British body of sympathy.

Act

Guy's memories flood back. The audience spurs the scene on. There is not one heart in the house that beats evenly.

1. It's not as if the stage is framed with glass walls. He can easily exit. At least, there are no physical barriers, but it's always a matter of want on the tawdry little stage, and Guy wants. Does he want to leave?

But there is a "physiologicality" to the dimensions. Much more blood is being pumped into Guy's muscles and brain by his heart that is always accelerating to and from a pulse of a calming point of reference. This is, of course, after the release of adrenaline which comes after the stimulation of the adrenal cortex by ACTH to release cortisol (during situations of stress), which increases the expression of PNMT in chromaffin cells, enhancing adrenaline synthesis. His lungs are expanding, pushing down on his stomach so as to take in more oxygen and on and on...calcium through voltage-gated calcium channels...blood... moving fast...Then after reassurance by the crowd (you see this sort of glow on the face of Bogart and Gable) and the surge of confidence in one's own art there comes the suppression of adrenaline by its own intake back up to nerve terminal endings.

Then drunkenness. A swooshed ecstasy that is very much so physical (Newman). A swooning stride, toward the front of the stage (Kelly).

Young opera stars have problems with this. They seem to start walking unnaturally with just a few drops of kind stage lighting. Maestro will tell them: I know that this libretto is thematically elevated and the music touches upon the sublime, but you are supposed to be reflecting REAL struggles within all of us. REAL people do not strut like velvet ghosts in their own houses.

2. Of course they do, from time to time. Guy knows this. He is real, sure, but there are times that call for pretense. Action is done under pretense. Hardly any of them are actually performed raw. Realism is an effort as well. The people are there. Even if they weren't, there is always an audience for Guy. That is why the gears inside Guy's actor head are always turning (Though you do now want for the audience to be able to detect all the mechanisms that go into a performance; during a performance, you do not want people to think to themselves, "Oh, my! That was a great crescendo!" You just want them to feel and register what you have achieved on the whole.)


So they all go through these surges. Glass is there, enclosing the characters there on the stage. Exposed, actors often assume their greatest characters. Exposure hardly ever reveals authenticity. So to the contemporary generation coming up under Guy that craves the "natural" and unaffected "reality" that the stage seems to be missing: (applause)

Guy applauds for his audience. (one plump little plumb of a lady to her husband) Why, this is absurd!

It is not, though. A ingeniously crafted performance of Guy's does not falsely claim to be something it is not (real, the REAL deal, Truth). It is always a performance.

So the audience, as it is being clapped for astoundingly, must decide how it will act. Guy toys with the reversal of roles and now sits down silently on a golden Throne. A golden throne of un-truth and ceremony. He meditates on the stage the theater. On the mark.  This is not a monologue. This is a conversation.

The Wasps

In the alley behind Stella's house, chips and strippings of cheap particle wood furniture are frequently discarded. This late afternoon, she takes out the trash from her kitchen upstairs in the studio apartment. First, closing the door to her place, she takes the precaution of locking her front door. There are the neighbors in surrounding units. This is not to say that she does not always assume a natural goodness in everyone (out of a billowy inner feeling that makes her see every person as a potential moral champion). She hardly knows these other residents. Crumbles of speckly brown brick pervade the lawn that separates the garage-turned-efficiency apartment from its master house (Inside the master house the monthly rent is almost three times the amount that Stella pays for her apartment. In the middle of that lawn there is a tree. A fully developed mesquite tree covered in wasps. A sappy tree surrounded by brick crumbs.

Underneath the brick crumbles the grass is parched. This is most likely due to the Mesquite trees that make harsh competition for the water in the ground. When Stella is done climbing down the cement staircase onto the lawn, she is met by the crunch of the lawn. The brittle strands of grass hardly succeed in covering the lot in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to the passerby; however, this lawn does not meet a front curb of any well marked street. This lawn lies behind the masterhouse (rent there is just about three times what Stella pays for her own space) and, really, is only visible from the alley (strips of wood await there for Stella), so no one in this town is offended. Also (Stella reassures herself), this property is not worth the time and effort to make into beautiful gardens. There is just Stella right now with her garbage bag.

A wasp or two will fly dangerously close to her face. Stella wishes that the city or someone would take care of these pests. It is not safe. There was that one time when I came home to find a wasp hovering above my bed. Stella walks into the alley behind the lot and lifts the lid up from a city-issued, 100-gallon barrel garbage container. Then there was that other time when a wasp emerged from my bathtub while I was on the toilet (the wasp floated up toward the shower nozzle so delicately and yet so threateningly, inhabiting its space as a standoffish roommate in a sort of tiff might do while in her own bedroom). The wasps do not belong here. Stella does not own the property she walks across through any sort of legal contract, but she does possess it in a way that a wasp cannot. She consciously inhabits her space. She tosses the trash bag down into the over sized trash container and is greeted in return by disoriented flies and the smell of rotten potato juice and scrappings of fish fillets. There was that other time...Stella slams the lid shut quickly.

Stella looks down to the pile of trash that people have lazily left in the gravel. Torn up window screens, a musty rug, and wood. Today there is a wooden chair, almost fully intact. Also--panels of wood that have been stripped free of their paint! Stella becomes dreamy holding the previously unwanted wood in her arms. What unbound creativity she has now! She will ask her older friend, Joe, (middle-aged surly bank teller) to come over and help her nail together a little parlour table. There will be coffee for Joe as well, in case he feels dragged into another one of Stella's seemingly fun and promising (at first) text messages (Stella's words are almost always misleading). Just what I needed! And, maybe, MAYBE, Stella might allow for Joe to have intercourse with her after the project is complete. But is this enough wood?

Stella walks back to the cement steps around the little efficiency complex and sees the tree ablaze. Wasps, red and orange, swarming and fuming, feeding upon the nectar of the mesquite tree. The thorns that protrude from the limbs of the Mesquite tree are illuminated in the magma-esque glow that comes from the sun setting into the dusts of West Texas. The hanging bean pods twists in the warm air. Wasps fly at astounding speeds from the tree to the master house to Stella's apartment to her neighbor's apartments and back to the tree. The tree looks itchy underneath the wasp carpet. Its shaggy strips peel off of the trunk and fall to the base where there are a few empty Heineken bottles and cigarette butts. Stella takes in a lungful of fire and walks back up her steps to find refuge in her own possessed space. There is fire underneath everything.

Problems and Siblings.

Wow, a month and a half since my last post on this blog? There must have been problems.

But don't fret; writers love problems.

John Updike loves problems.

Here's one problem with a novella I've been writing over this summer:

How do I tactfully craft a wealthy and cultured character who shelters himself from the outside world, but who also loves to endulge himself in the passtime of toking the marijuana leaf? How much "stoner" lingo can I use before a passage becomes more trash and loses its elegance? I feel like I can toke and be elegant. What's a classier euphemism for weed grinder? Does having both a vaporizer and pipe in the bedroom transpose my actor sibling duo out of their refined, but dangerous je ne sais quoi into something more of a squalid and overly aggressive foreigness? Exactly what am I wanting to stick out?

I might have to cut back on what may come across as pretentious jargon...

There's been some problems.

without proper air conditioning

the ceiling fan spins.

we sleep, we sweat--down

on the comforter below.

art nouveau

How grand is this frame

around our bodies gilded

with dragonfly mint!

Log on to Computer

Mind the gap.
     but first press [Alt-Ctrl-Delete]
Mend the crack.
Monday nap
     [system currently loading data]
     to flee this
Mundane rack.

Cracked

this is an old one, but I'm going to go ahead and give it some fresh air:

stepped foot out onto
the ice and slipped. head tilts back
so the ground can breathe.

Pottery 2

he places the clay mold
on a tray to glaze and bake.
can't mend that crack now

Pottery

muses, he groans, then 

the clay molder morphs the brim

of his vase with spit

while wheeling the base

around. the slightest pressure

his finger applies

against the body

brings vulgar alterations

he fingers with finesse.

love is a crude mold,

lubricated and made from

the most base of things. 

Monsters

(Eggs and Biscuits. There is one mug halfway filled with warm coffee. Another, of water.)

M2 (Laughs while combing her hair with her fingers):
--So I have to be in this skit this next week in our bible camp. This is what I have to say. Well it starts--the two boys are named Lewis and Clark--Clark has just invited Lewis over to play his new football game he got for his Xbox. The game gets really close, there's a big build up. Finally, Lewis makes the winning point and he acts like a major douchebag about the whole thing. He starts yelling. And then the other one throws the controller and breaks the Xbox. I'm not sure how exactly. So then they start yelling at each other and Clark yells out ,"I hate you! You should just leave." Mrs. Smith (Now this is her queue) yells out, "Boys!" Gets their attention. She asks, "What is going on in here?" They start talking at once. Clark goes, "Lewis was acting like a big jerk when he got the final touchdown. Lewis is just jealous." Mrs Smith (Oh yes, I play Mrs. Smith) says, "Everyone relax! It's just an Xbox--it probably would have broken eventually anyway. You know (She Puts her hands on her hips. She's actually smiling now) there really is only one thing in life that can last forever and anyone and everyone can have it." Lewis says, "What's that, Mrs. smith.?" Mrs. Smith says, "It's called the Bible. and it contains all the plans and promises that God has for us. If we follow the bible, we will have eternal life!" And then one of the boys says, "Gosh, eternal life, it sounds expensive." She says, "Actually, it doesn't cost anything! All you have to do is love God and love everyone you come in contact with. It's that simple." The boys apologize to each other and then go play outside.

M1 (Laughs as his head drops backward into the couch cushion):
--WHAT!?

M2 (Giggles):
Oh, I know! Ahhh! This is not for the cat! The eggs and biscuits are not for the cat!

(The cat is sniffing the food on her plate. She pushes him away. Not actually touching the cat. It's more of a shooing away.)

M1 (To whom the eggs and cheddar biscuits look unaggressive, reticently pale and yellow):
--So weak. Cat wants his eggs. Give him his eggs!

M2 (Sillily and warped):
--Poor Puss looks Nonplussed.

M1 (Now takes on the persona of Catherine Deneuve as Carol Ledoux):
--Poor puss nonpluss-a-le-doo?

M2, an aside (French gibberish):
--Oui-a-le-doo-ahn-le-doux?

The cat licks his fiberglass sticker all over the eggs on the plate. He takes breaks and looks up at the siblings out of dubious appreciation. The apartment of the siblings is the setting for most of the play. Except for maybe the scene at the awards ceremony which will take place at Cannes film festival. Brother will read his script to his sister on the balcony of the master bedroom in the morning. What play should he be reading from? Perhaps a new play that the author will make up. The remaining eggs in the skillet on top of the stove are cold. There should be different mosaics around the apartment.

Mrs. Smith (While her appearance is Frazzled and crackly, she still exalts herself in her radiance):
--I've only got five lines. It's not like there's so much that any actress can do with this script!

M2:
--I never asked to be given the role. My boss said it might a good idea, however; so I obliged him.

Clark:
--And I'm some sort of monster!

(M1 has a clumsy hold of his mug. The kids are upset. M2 is the character charged with calumnies. Clearly, with Lewis and Clark, it's just a case of the "boys will be boys." Clark is not the monster. The writer does give away who she thinks is a monster. It's so obvious. Mrs. Smith must therefore be the recipient of this butterfingers-type of didactic mind work. The eggs look colder and more fragmented with each passing minute. Mrs. Smith is the one who takes blows and is made to be the fool, but she cannot be a monster when she has such nice hands and innocuous handling of the camp kids. Her arms flap about and know not what they do. It's all from the writer, anyway. She's the one writing in scores of scary organ work at every one of her stage entrances.)

M2 (Defensive):
--Don't put this on me! I didn't write this script.

Everyone (Together. Not exactly together, though, that would be cheap):
--If not you, then who did?

(Of course everyone knows)

(The plate on the floor is empty. And everyone is pleased to say that when they start the editing of the script, "there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occurrence of the eggs and biscuits." That dull business is to blame. Brother wants to kick Cat. Mrs. Smith tells the young boys that it is time for their bed. The siblings grow overly mettlesome, not yet decided on who will be their next monster. Mrs. Smith asks to be excused and is picked up by another camp counselor from another time. She will tell young audiences that is not okay to doze off in church or to turn your thoughts toward Sunday lunch while the preacher talks to you about reclaiming that infantile giddiness with the LORD or to think about Xboxes or girls or going to the bathroom. But she is not a monster.

Untitled Project on Sibling Actors, Part Two

Laurent rolls over on his belly to tan his back. Brother opens his eyes and gets a glimpse of the mosaic that is rigidly frontal. Space, especially the space of the mosaic's sky, is replaced here with golden square cuts of glass imbedded into the cement. The image of __________ is thus intentionally distanced from any correspondence with reality, almost more Byzantine in its transcendent qualities than Roman. Sister speaks again:
 --Oh, don't act so helplessly dejected.   
  Martha comes back to Sister with a folded white towel. Sister thanks their dutiful maid for all her hard work and tells her that she can take off early. She will not be needed anymore today. Sister gives up on trying to persuade her Brother to come claim his gin and tonic, so she brings it over and sets it down two feet away from his left hip at an easy arm's length.
 Laurent studies this afternoon scene in the backyard with his natural gift of rare attention to detail. He thumbs the bronzy-green abdomen of a dying Orange-spotted Emerald Dragonfly. He imagines that its large and bright, multifaceted eyes take in the image of himself, blown up into a gargantuan viewing angle. He wonders if the dragonfly dies in fear of Laurent the large and clumsy predator. Laurent fragments time and splices into the flow of what most would agree are trifling incidents his own discursive reflections and reconstructs a mise-en-scène that he can claim as his own.
 At a distance, Sister talks about dinner plans. She will tell the cook to pan-sear a fish and sauté some sea scallops. There is the tapenade from yesterday that surely has only gotten better overnight as the olive oil has had more time to allow the flavors of the olives, capers, and anchovies to blend more smoothly with the olive oil and garlic. Bread, do we have bread? Their friends, the Cornishes, are traveling from London and will be staying the night in one of the vacant suites at the siblings' mansion. Sister tells Laurent also to forget about the script. She probably will decline the offer. Brother takes a sip of his drink and hopes that he has not mistaken the day. 

Untitled Project on Sibling Actors

        After another dip in the pool, Laurent gets out and lies down across the Romanesque mosaic that Father designed and shaped into the patio last summer. His skin is now beginning to turn pink from all the laying about outside that he does during the summer. Laurent gingerly dips his fingers into the pool water. His fingers lightly tread among the slender, laurel green leaves of neighboring Picholine olive trees that were carried over by the wind into their backyard. He lifts his fingers up from the water as if absolving the pool of its daily transgressions and proceeds to run his fingers through his espresso-colored hair, pressing it back from the top of his forehead and continuing until it is all slicked back.
Nearby, Sister lies back in a wicker patio chaise lounge chair next to a smaller olive-green tea table. She twirls her pen back and forth with her fingers. Her eyes lazily register the words on the pages in her lap that their maid, Martha, handed her thirty minutes ago. A new part for her. She clicks the end of her pen in and out several times as Martha walks back to her with a tray of cocktail glasses filled with ice cubes. The maid sets the tray down upon the table next to the Tanqueray bottle. Neither one of the siblings are able to physically acknowledge the maids returns, they are too preoccupied with their own thoughts. Martha pours both of the siblings a stout gin and tonic and selects two lime wedges from a small silver container with her tongs:
--Avec or sans?
Sister keeps her eyes on the stapled packet and daintily points to the glasses:
--With, of course.
Laurent turns over and looks at his sister:
--What time is it?
--Just now five o'clock. Do you not want a towel?
She says to their maid:
--Could you bring a towel over to Laurent, s'il te plaît?
Martha nods her head and walks back inside. Brother asks Sister what it is she is reading. Sister sets the papers down onto the tea table next to the silver tray, picks up one of the glasses, and then takes a long sip of her drink with marvelous aplomb. She holds the glass under her nose and melts in its aromatic element.
--A new script.

Humanity's Rivers Kept Unstagnated by the Disbandment of Separate Entities

Here is a podcast I made for Walt Whitman's poem, "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing," from his collection, Calamus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuZTdJgdogo

We're All Up At Allsup's

Situated in near proximity to China Express, a cheap Chinese take-out chain restaurant, and Abilene's Pet Regency, the Allsup's on Judge Ely has local, rustic charm that can only grow in time. What is almost authentic art deco tiling on the floor and the smoldering sausage biscuits to the left of the giddy cashier bring the visitor back to the exciting era of hustle and bustle that defined the 1920's American attitude. Yet, there is also something noticeably effortless in the Allsup’s aesthetic. Those other chains—7-Eleven, Kum & Go, and Flying J—those are all annoying fronts. Those are the pretentious convenient stores. Ask any of the employees at these stores and they’ll tell you, straight up, that they long deeply for a chance to switch to Allsup’s. Kum & Go has serious problems with its name and deserves all the jokes with sexual innuendo that get thrown back at it by drunken teenagers. And Flying J? Its whole marketing scheme is way too obvious. No, no, no, it’s really all about Allsup’s, a family-owned chain that stretches back to the year 1956 in Roswell, New Mexico, and luckily for us, has extended its branches all the way out to the Texas frontier.
Here at the Allsup’s, local patrons spill into the store at all hours of the day, paying cash in advance for their gasoline, for their cigarettes, and for the 40 oz bottles of Miller High-life they will tape to their hands later in the evening for a classic game of "Edward Forty Hands." The air is full of spices that sizzle out from the humble heat-lamped food section, where you can chose from comforting, classic goods, such as warm pretzels, breakfast taquitos, and, of course, those smoldering sausage biscuits; however, hovering around and above such comforting smells, there is always the same smell of cleaning fluid. As with other Allsup's convenient store branches, this particularly bizarre fusion of smells is part of what makes the store chain so charming. Enveloped in the peculiar aura, the two cashiers, both men in their mid-twenties chatter on to the costumers. The time is 11:30 pm on a Friday night.
The cashier with greased back, mangy black hair sincerely engages with his costumers in conversations that range from Star Wars trivia to "what sort of gar would you recommend for me to buy (that I will later use for a blunt)?" chitchat and all the way to enthusiastic debate on which Republican presidential nominee has been the craziest thus far leading up to the primaries. The cashier with blonde hair looks extraordinarily washed out on this evening. For some reason or another, he can barely keep his eyes open. Mostly, he responds with lazy grimaces.
The cashier with black hair:
—How are you doing this evening, man?
A slender woman with silver hair, blotchy skin, and saggy elbow skin responds:
—Oh, I am doing just fine.
—Is this Four Loko (an canned alcoholic beverage named for its four main ingredients: alcohol, caffeine, taurine, and guarana) an all you’re getting tonight, ma’am?
—Do y’all have any Marlboro special blends (the word “blends” squished out of her nicotine-stained mouth with an incredibly endearing diphthong on the “e” vowel)?
Throughout this discourse, the blonde cashier stands idle. The other slaps the counter of his register and swings his head up toward the cigarette rack:
—You betcha!
—Then I’ll have two packs of the special blends with the Four Loko.
—Alright. Can I see your license?
The woman scoffs in her sixty-something smokey rasp:
—Do I not look eighteen to you? I got a granbaby.
Always able to be light and merry, the cashier responds:
—I know, it’s stupid, but I gotta see it. Everyone’s gotta show some proof of their age now.
The silver fox whips out her license from her wallet:
—It’s the goddamn government interfering with everything.
She probably gets a nod or grunt of agreement from someone in the line. The cashier can only laugh. He’s not very political and doesn’t plan on responding with anything that might extend the conversation. The lady takes her purchases and walks out the glass door with the clearly marked sign that reads “Do Not Open. Use Other Door” and walks out in swanky strides towards her silver Lexus.
The cashiers stand in a square of countertops in the middle of the store. Costumers surround them.  The hustle and bustle of time surrounds them. Alcohol, Fritos, energy drinks, and lottery tickets surround them. Within the square they can relax, all the while not detracting from the store spirit. There are two registers—one on the left and one on the right. Only the one on the right is in use right now by the cashier with black hair. Perhaps the blond cashier would or could be managing the other, but he doesn’t seem up for the challenge of initiating conversation and scanning barcodes at the moment. It is 11:30 pm, so his demeanor is excusable. Right behind the backside of the square, a yellow bucket lies in wait with clean water, ready to be soaked up into a janitor’s mop.
Then, next in line a young, chubby white boy tugs on the sleeve of his mother:
—Mama! Can I get a different bag of Corn Nuts?
The Mother groans and lifts her arm away from the child’s reach:
—Which flavor do you want?
—BBQ!
—Hurry, there are other people waiting.
The more involved cashier bounces in his shoes with laughter. It’s hard to say whether or not it’s forced. His partner, arms consistently crossed, manages to pull of something like a smirk.
A tall man with a brown mustache walks over to the yellow bucket with a mop and stands as if waiting for something to happen or, most likely, for an opportune moment to start mopping the tile. There is not too much communication between the costumers in line, but every now and then there will be a man who looks at what a woman is holding in her arms to check out and then says something like this:
—You having a big party tonight?
The woman in front of the man might turn around and smile. She might be wearing hoop earrings and she might be midriffing. She probably is going to be clutching a six-pack of Miller Light and another of Bud Light with Lime. She will flirt back appropriately, so as not to offend:
—Maybe (she will also be thinking that it’s quite obvious she will be partying).
—Real cool! Alright, that’s what I like to hear!
The woman will laugh and turn back around toward the register and hopefully will not be bothered anymore. In front of her a slightly intoxicated high school student slides down twenty dollars in cash across the countertop to be put on pump four. The blonde cashier finally takes some initiate and opens up the other register. The line is beginning to lengthen unnecessarily.  Larry begins mopping the floor.
Outside the doors to the Allsup's, the neighboring locals congregate from adjacent apartment complexes, sometimes all crowding around the pay phone for a chance to call up their friends for grand old times of cruising out on Abilene's south first street, perhaps to share some Marlboro's, or maybe just to laugh and enjoy the peculiar pleasantness that, really, only Allsup's can offer.
Everything about Allsup's seems ingeniously picked, assembled and designed to create its fast-paced atmosphere, remnant of a time when the locales had their whole lives ahead of them, oceans and oceans, in fact. A time where no economic recession or depression lay as an imposing threat. Larry the janitor mops the art deco tiles cheerily and waves back to costumers who greet him. Larry mops the tile floor so well that the cashiers are able to work with clear minds and the costumers are able to forget about all the dirt in life and continue on in their wild, spiraling motions.
An old couple drinks coffee outside of their Volvo while their son pumps their gas for them. A gruff trucker tucks his big gulp Coke under his coat and walks out of the two front glass doors. This Allsup's store never sleeps, but breathes on into the night.

after your travels

            As a traveler you've had a great time and, now, you feel guilty in not having yet shared the moments, the cafes, the strange smells absolutely or as freshly as you were able to experience them abroad. You should, anyway. Traveling is always a privilege, and you know that. So, you must write to relief yourself of the guilt in leaving the common rabble back at home and going off to better things. Bring new eyes, or whatever you can back to people who are unfamiliar with the culture or obscure locale. After seeing world renewed soprano, Ana Netrebko, in the role of Mimi from Puccini's La Boheme at the Met or the toothless patriarch of some obscure, isolated, Indonesian jungle tribe wail out a folk song that has been passed down through family generations, spanning hundreds of years, next to a campfire, sit down and recreate the experience as best to your ability.
Perhaps at this moment you don't feel guilty at all in knowing that others have not seen of heard or tasted what you have (If so, what is wrong with you?). Maybe you're still relishing in the sublimity or absurdity of those special moments. Well, then take personal time to write so that you can remember, so that you can relive the expeditions and learn how to bring closure to them. Seems a little self-absorbed, but, hey; you are still emptying your travel from your body in ways that upon revisitation will add nuance and layers of meaning to your memory. It's you time.
But even you will get tired of you time. After landing back in your hometown, the travel experience begins to shake itself up inside your body. If too much time goes before you write, the stories will find a way on their own to seep out of your body. The stories will push up at your head, twist it around, and come out in an outstandingly inarticulate way. These regrettable and completely avoidable moments can be annoying for you and your friends (who are also your fans, naturally). The travel experience is a soda that would lose its fizziness if kept contained, except that because you are, really, so ready to share and revisit and empty yourself, the stories never (rather, they should never) lose too much of that special carbonation before you start talking; however, so as to pound in the point, here is an imaginary portrait of someone I know and perhaps you all know who is now unfortunately an exemplar of the flat soda syndrome (FSS):
Sally McGee is a young woman who recently hosted a fun little gathering at her studio apartment downtown. On that day she had been saving a two liter bottle of Coke she bought earlier for the party, but a few hours before the guests arrived she went ahead and opened the Coke bottle to make herself a small drink. She wanted to live a little, so she had her drink. It was refreshing and delicious. So delicious that she didn't think to immediately recap the bottle, and when reruns of COPS came on the television, she bolted into her living room and cart wheeled into her couch. The act of recapping the soft drink was completely forgotten. Consequentially, the soda sat out for hours. Later that evening, guests sat around in their own frothy conversations, talking about this book and that girl, and the Coke remained shoved back on the kitchen countertop. You can imagine Sally McGee's disappointment when she found the bottle early the next day. The soda was completely flat. Flat and as profoundly useless and absurd as turkey gizzard-genitals. Sally was dramatically forced to throw her bottle away and she never got to taste the sweet, gritty softness that is Coke. She had let her friends down. This is the story of Sally McGee, who did not cartwheel, but crawl, miserably and guiltily, towards her grave. This is the story of Sally McGee.
Yes, of course, in order to retain as much of the experience as possible, go ahead and write it down. Enjoy recapturing the way you beamed when you walked up the Spanish steps or the way you gawked during your first encounter with the Thai transvestites. Write before you forget the names of hotels, villages, and foods and your photographs start to all blend together as mumbling starchiness. Before the moments begin to shed off flakes of memory that will be too difficult to peace together again. Write because people are always searching for new ways to get closer to authenticity outside of their own bubbles of comfort. Just realize that there's an important underlying self-interest in your work and that what you're doing is a good thing, not only for others, but also for you. You don't have to go on in your guilt any longer. You can write and, please, do so! It's for your own wellbeing.

Little Piggy

I remember last summer when you sat in your lazy-boy chair and you would snort in jest at politicians squabbling on the television. Made me cringe. God. Last summer you sat like lard, spilling over the sides of your dinner chair with your odious ooziness. It was embarrassing. We all sat with our heads lowered toward our bacon-wrapped venison--and why on earth were we stuffing you with bacon, I don’t know—waiting for the grueling meal to be over.  Whenever you laughed I could see all of your crumbly yellow teeth. I wanted to hit you, but at the same time I did not want to touch your stinking skin with my own. Maybe I could use a very long pole? Swap you off your chair from the dinner table so we wouldn’t have to look at you. What did you even do with the hours of the day? Just sat there, reading blogs, reading your Bible? God, I wanted to just put a bag over your head. God. I can’t see you so must not exist, sort of thing, you know, God. I know, I know.
I’m trying my hardest to piece together an image of you that doesn’t offend me. You’ll be innocent, content. A pig? Snug and without aspirations that crawl beyond your farrowing crate. Here you are again, snug in a velvety red blanket. Same crate, really, you’re just waiting now to decompose. I think the slaughter’s over, but the grease will remain. That’s how you’ll be remembered. Then this really funny image: you are up there and in the middle of his speech, you go oink, oink, and we all laugh. Well, only I laugh. It’s so funny, or maybe I just no longer know what to do with you, so I suppress my uncertainty with laughter. This is how you'll be remembered.

the new 2012 Shinnery Review

http://blogs.acu.edu/shinnery/2012/04/27/announcing-the-2012-shinnery-review/

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For great creative works by ACU's undergraduate literary arts magazine, The Shinnery Review

Plasmapheresis Take 2

New ending for the piece.

The process of plasma extraction is complete. After another few minutes the mousy brunette comes back around and asks me for my name and last four digits of my social security number to verify the account to which CSL Plasma will send funds of roughly twenty dollars. As I bid Rhonda adieu, I try to fathom the existence of the everyday CSL Plasma donor, but it's hard to abstract the character in question.

Simply put, we're just all plasma donatin' lookin' ass mothafuckas, looking for a break, trying not to get stepped on, and trying to earn some cash. I write my signature at the bottom of my letter and climb off the leather bed, my elbow wrapped tightly in sand colored bandaging. While heading back through the waiting room, I notice that the waiting room is full of an entirely new crowd in muddy tank tops, flannel, and medical scrubs. Right now the world demands twenty million liters of our plasma, so it's a good thing that the human body regenerates blood plasma so quickly. I walk outside of the facility's front doors. They always wrap the bandaging too tightly. Two more hours and I'll be able to take off these bandages.

There are a couple of men smoking cigarettes in front of the brick wall. They laugh and joke. They both wear shirts with their names and different company names stitched into the front pocket. One has considerably more stains on his shirt, black and oily. Neither of them seem to have noticed me. Maybe the two men met at the CSL Plasma center awhile ago and have become friends in their common plasma donating experiences. I walk through a very full parking lot under a very bright sky. The sky is always so dizzyingly bright after walking out of any clinical sort of establishment. I slump forward and slide into my car's front seat.