The Atomic Man Pt. 1

(The other day sitting in class I thought I overheard someone say "atomic nights." This is the beginning of a story built from that phrase.)

Charlie couldn't get his bowl lit. He sat on the bare mattress in his bedroom, holding a purple lighter nearly out of fluid, trying to smoke the little bit of dope he picked up from his cousin last weekend. It would have been hard enough with the piece of shit lighter, but the ceiling fan was on, dousing every feeble flame he managed to coax from the sputtering lighter.

Charlie was getting angrier. Like idling at a green light. Nettles and stinging sweat.

He was tired of fugue days and atomic nights, blazed into fecklessness, nuked to sleep only to rise and face another inscrutable morning.

"Ahh, fuck!" said Charlie the Atomic Man, the housing contractor aging at quantum speed, 28 going on 40. He flung the lighter across the room.

An Abridged List

Must remember to stretch when I wake up.

Must remember to say "Bless You" when strangers sneeze.

Must remember to keep practicing my whistle.

Must remember to shave that weird hair on my nipple.

Must remember that it's all so funny.

Must remember to be grateful for misery.

Must remember the way the stars looked when I was drunk, like falling tears.

Must remember how happy that woman was when she found five dollars on the street.

Must remember: Mountains.

On a neighbor's front porch during a thunderstorm

"I know this black guy." Jason stood as he began to relate his story, eager for my undivided attention.

"He's a gangbanger, he used to hang a blue rag out of his left pocket, because he's a Crip. He could walk around all day and nobody would want to look him in the eyes." The tale picked up pace.

"I have this other friend, big fucking swastika right here." Jason slapped the spot on his bare chest, three times.

"We went to the beach in LA. He had his shirt off, he's a big guy." He knotted his shoulders to emphasize, looking like someone pushing a wheelbarrow.

"People would come up to him, ask him about it, make conversation. He talked to them, he's actually a nice guy. But it goes to show you, in this country, people are more afraid of a black gangbanger than a white guy with a fucking swastika tattooed on his chest."

A combination of driving through New Jersey, half-remembered dreams and frantic words scrawled in a notebook at 4 a.m. (Part One)

I awoke this morning stuck between sky and earth. As I began to squirm free, I realized I must have rolled over in my sleep and wedged myself into the horizon. For a moment, I stopped struggling and as I considered whether to go back to sleep I took a moment to appreciate the intimacy of the situation. My bed had been empty for some months, and the closeness of the eternal, inscrutable blue above me was comforting, though my back itched from the dirt. Half-imagined fantasies, like time-lapse videos of flowers, blossomed and withered in my sleep-drugged consciousness.

Several hours later I woke again. I was still ensconced, but the cool serenity of summer's dawn had given way to imperious noon: a bone-bleaching Sun had ascended to its throne and forbade a return to sleep. Licking parched lips, I propped myself onto my elbows and started to shimmy free. Scraping my knee against a sharp rock on the ground, I managed to escape, and set off in search of a cup of water.

Descending into a bowl-shaped valley, I saw a sprawling industrial town. Heralds of acrid smoke, burning plastic, rushed up the hillside to greet me. Great steam towers like ram's horns boring vertically into the earth emitted a drone which reverberated mightily throughout the town. Cathedral steeples in the distance roiled in the heat of the factories, like a reflection in dirty water. The whole scene was like an overexposed photograph, I could feel the dirt under my fingernails as I held it in my hands.

The American Museum of Natural History

Hunted
Shot
Bled
Disemboweled
Stuffed
Preserved
Put on display
With the descriptor:
"Savage."

Added A New Page

Just selected quotes from things I've read that I enjoy.

No Evil Part 2

Part 1


Stepping inside the tent, Andrei has the sensation of crawling inside an enormous kaleidoscope. Glittering butterfly-acrobats drift to and fro carrying colorful streamers; throngs of disfigured mortals rummage through gilded oaken chests like fevered hallucinations. Exotic monsters from alien shores mingle with man and man-beast alike in a spectacle of glamored biology.

"Theo told me you've got a bone to pick with Popa," said a startlingly corpulent mustachioed man wearing muddy slacks, suspenders but no shirt. Andrei had not noticed him a moment earlier. "Makes no difference to me, long as you've got the money. Better hand it over now, too, bub. Once Popa gets a hand on you you'll be out like that deadbeat Zoltan."

That deadbeat Zoltan rests blissfully, enjoying one of the long periods of heedless tranquility which are so frequent in his life. From an early age, Zoltan learned to live in brief sprints, interspersed with heroic naps. Growing up in the Ukraine he spent most of his time searching for comfortable places in which to lie down and rest, a difficult task in the small wooden farmhouse shared with his mother, grandfather, four brothers, two sisters, and six cousins. He developed a virtuosic ability to wake at a moment's notice: to bolt to his feet and grab a broom in feigned obeisance to his mother's shrieking orders or evade a salvo of rotting oranges launched by rivalrous kin. So exhausting are these snap reflexes that Zoltan spends almost all of his unsupervised time conserving energy with sloth-like efficiency.

Which is how he has spent the better part of this particular warm summer morning, snoring behind a stack of powder kegs in full costume, leather goggles strapped over his eyes. Zoltan the Human Cannonball is primed for action.

Popa is bored. And hungry. Hungry, warm in tent. Itchy-sticky.

"Sir I must say I am glad for the challenge," Andrei said confidently as he removed his hat. "Where is the unfortunate creature?"

"I'm looking at him. Waheee!" The fat man laughs like a donkey whines. "But if you're meanin' the monkey, he's back in wardrobe, getting ready. Wa-waheee!"

The jeers are like waves crashing against stalwart Andrei's mountainous ego. For he is not a fool. He knows well that the arm of human ingenuity is longer than the arm of bestial violence.

Andrei traces his intellectual lineage back to the great minds of the Enlightenment: Descartes and Locke. A train of thought which began with those geniuses who dared to claim, "God wants us to think" continued to the Galapagos where Darwin dared to say, "God weeds out the unfit" and made its final stop, by Andrei's reckoning, in the steam engines which carried him across the Atlantic to the steel mill in Pennsylvania where every day he goes to pray, in his own fashion, to the God-given human intellect which makes Man master of the elements.

Andrei melts and molds steel into the implements of ascendancy. His sweat and labor is a testament to God and to Mankind that he is fit; that of the natural world, his race is exalted. Sometimes Andrei offers this testament in other ways as well. At 19 he became a celebrity in his village for killing a wolf. The people of the town wanted the wolf dead because it had been taking goats in the night. Andrei wanted it dead to prove a point.