Dear Reader

Dear Reader,

You can sit there , where ever you are, and stare at whatever you're staring at for a few more hours, or you can grab your walking stick and favorite hat and go for a walk in the wonderful world that your senses allow you perceive and marvel at.

Some of us like the comfort of voicemail and would rather stay on the line for the next two hours waiting for a company representative to help them with a password problem, a few million of us have a hankering to watch intersections through high powered binoculars as traffic going this way and the other runs over a plastic milk bottle until it's been crushed infinitely, bashed between lanes and lies wedged in a sewer drain grid, and I imagine the less nervous among us look forward the arrival of the mail with a letter stating that they've won a make believe lottery , wondering as well what all those coupons for magazine subscriptions are for.

Some of us would rather go outside and walk, twirling a fine cane and wearing the favorite hat at jaunty tilt, and traverse an empty city where nothing happens, where nothing will happen, and where nothing ever has happened.

It used to be that you didn't risky your life or that of those around you by checking the doorknobs on shuttered local businesses.

The fun is leached from the existence we paid for.

So how many photos of empty shopping carts and bus stops are on your smart phone?

Yours truly,

MOON GIVER

Jake wanted to drop his pants to his ankles and flash a vulgar proctologic grin at the world as it ambled by his second story apartment window, but he remembered there was an emergency in the great state of things. The street in front had all the usual objects that met his sight line every morning, a drug store with a striped pole hanging next to the entrance, a tractor -pull fan club headquarters, an empty lot enclosed by a cyclone fence which appeared to have been crashed into several times over several decades, with bent steel poles and snarky chaos of metal fence mesh bent and twisted like so much barbed spaghetti, a dead oak tree with wood plaques nailed into the dry, lifeless trunk that bore pasted magazine photos of the Dalai Lama smiling at a window full of chattering teeth. 

This was the usual array he witnessed after he finished scratching himself and drinking his third cup of coffee, but lately it was quiet, indifferent to his gaze, the street was empty because of the emergency in the great state of things. Everyone either stayed home or had been raptured , but there were no piles of abandoned clothes or crashed cars or airplanes falling from the sky, so he deduced that most of the citizens were home looking for an angry fix on the internet and had not gone to heaven or whatever engulfing void awaited all of us after the wind stopped lifting the wings we might have to live a day longer. 

Jake sighed and felt said because he really wanted to give the moon to the world that past his second story apartment, a studio above a jazz metal record shop that was a source of many obnoxious riffs and guitar smashing gang fights . Even they were silent. Jake thought he could hear the moronic drone of the electricity coursing through the transponders on the powerlines,those metal containers that made him think of crucified trash cans. He drank his coffee as he scanned the cityscape. Clouds hung on horizon as the sun rose over the skyline,

WEEKEND SURVIVORS

The city had survived its annual Insect Fear festival, a two celebration consisting of wandering drunkenness and random vandalism visited upon plastic lawn flamingos stuck in crab grassy front yards barely within the county limits, when a whole new thing emerged that caused the muddle- browed population to squint, squat and search their pocket for a quarter. It was a lovely sound, really, experimental music, a town of three million people,six million hands sixty million fingers crammed into every pocket of whatever the citizens might happen to be wearing, stubby, stocky, skinny fingers, long ones and short ones, reaching to the bottom seams of all those pants, jackets, skirts, shirts, blouses, some of them tearing through a casual set of loose threads and making a hole large enough for some creepy acne farm youth to stick his member through before asking his date to reach into the pocket and retrieve a can opener or a pack of Xerb Cigarettes or a plastic writing pen emblazoned with the name of Texas Liquor sequestered somewhere in a plateau strip mall just off a Rose Canyon access road, all those fingernails scraping for coin, quarters, pennies bright and rusty, an awful zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxvacating filled the air, a dull , droning grind as if the  twelve tiers of angels had all been issued velcro jackets and none of them could resist opening and closing again, the drag of dddddddddddddddddddddddddrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzp! continuing until the new thing of panic emerged over a neighborhood famous for the quality of elm tree disease .

"Man, this sucks" was all I could say about this whole deal, "Two dimes and three pennies."

"Suck it in , buster" said Jill, "we got ourselves a whole new set of dinner guests

to abuse..."

I ASKED TIM BUCKLEY

 I used to look at the sleeves of old shirts that were hung in the Goodwill Store. Most were frayed, discolored, suffered the rents and smears of a thousand barbed wire fences and running noses. It was something that Arthur Lee sang about when decades seemed to last forever because most of us were less than twenty years into this material grind. Something about cake and crystal. I asked Tim Buckley once if he knew what I was trying to get at and he told me seriously "I don't know here you're at, but the train doesn't go there anymore..."

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LESTER BANGS LIVES

Jackson realized no one was listening as he jabbered on about Geddy Lee's bass playing on the middle period Rush albums. 

"GREEKA CHUNKBOTTOM BLOOMP BONERIFIC GLATZ" he screamed a greasy wall made of smashed tile siding that someone in some design school thought would make people think it was actual carved and polished marble. His  glottal scraping echoed just enough off the cracks and graffiti that he realized all at once that he was in an alley in downtown WhereAmI? , California, messed up on Meth, Mushrooms and Romilar. It was the third day of an indefinite quarantine against a plague of fatal cooties.  He was alone and the son shone down on him hard and heavy. Jackson curled his fist, lifted toward a passing raincloud . "Curse you all. GIMMEE SOME GEEZER BUTLER CHUNK."

It started to rain and now the world became very sad because the world always becomes very sad when it starts to rain.

GET ME SOME GRINTS

He just stared at the cashier, studied his name tag, "Bert" over a smiley face spelled with  dollar sign, and lifted his again to the store employee's twitching eyeballs. He had a body that was crooked , stooped, like a balsa wood model left in the rain and dried out in a twenty year old microwave oven for  40 droning minutes spent in the Metro Deport Airport. The staring man poked the cashier in the chest.

"Go get me some grits" he demanded. The cashier lurched backwards, held up a flat palm to indicate "whoa." He was a hapless fellow, the rail thin speed freak fried of a friend but enemy of all you took an instant dislike to because he made you think of someone who stole bottles of vintage wine just to smell the corks. He drew back his shoulders as if to throw a punch or receive a kiss from a foaming St.Bernard.

"We are out of grits " said the flustered shopper," and don't touch me again or I will have to something not covered in the Customer Care Manual."

"Don't give me that" said the cashier", said the man, "This is America, this is Chow Town. Go get me some grits."  The store manager walked up from three cash wrap stations down the way, a woman in a blue sport coat with gold trim around the lapels and cuffs and around the button holes. She was of generous build and seemed able to lift live cattle off a South Bend semi.

"Is there a problem here?'" she asked. Her voice had the personality of a large rock meeting the back of a moron's skull. The man and the cashier pointed at one another and spoke at once in an overlapping haiku of accusation.

"He won't get me some grits" said the man while the cashier said "He poked in the shoulder and looks stupid besides."

The manager put her hands on her muscled hips, took a deep breath and seemed ready to say something blunt and final when she stared beyond the two men and through the store's front window, which faced  the large parking lot outside. Bat winged demons were swooping down and picking up shoppers with their gnarled claws while a gang of teenage Grelb Worshippers  roamed among the parked cars with baseball bats playing spontaneous games of Dodge Ball with headlights from some of the uglier autos.

"Goddamnit" said the manager," this again."

She pointed to the cashier."Go to the LIQUOR DEPARTMENT and tell them to
do what needs to be done."

"What about my grits??" demanded the upset customer.

"What about them" the manager replied.

Grand Avenue

Every corner was a ghost town, all the bistro seats upside down on the tables, a good many neon signs still promising "open." Traffic lights continued their three-bulb cycle, stop, stop, go, wait, commanding even spirits to wait their turn. The main street was slick with recent rain, and the lack of cars made it possible to hear the sticky hiss of tires three blocks away, rolling through the downtown area. This is a boulevard of locked doors. There was no one crossing against the lights, looking in store windows , cracking their knuckles, and rubbing their necks. The lack of cars racing from one stoplight to the next made the lowest tone and timbre louder, brighter, more definitive in how the sound seems to explode with expressiveness. The breeze sang shrilly over the rooftops, the power lines snap like whips in the draft. A car alarm screams bloody murder in a strip mall parking space. It all becomes orchestral, arranged, discordant sound insertions over the asphalt, cement, and short-circuiting neon signs.  Each building was for sale, and there was no cure.

Stupid Smoke

It was raining again, too much tapping on the windows, stupid smoke coming through the heating ducts. Rotten time to get the flu or the blues or get one of those thoughts in your brain that just rotates like one of those apple and cherry pie slices on the counters of the lunch counters your uncle took you in the formative Sixties, one of those ideas you play with uselessly while trying to grab some brief period of sleep before you awake to rain rattling the roof . 

You want a cigarette but you quit smoking twenty years ago and yet you still want a cigarette because it would make you look noir and sexy and like a man who had a hard night and was facing a more brutal day that would be fierce with fists to the gut and the jawline. 

Here, let me reupholster your face you could hear someone say. Pow! Sapped like a punk trying to sell dirty pictures of your grandfather shaving in a wifebeater, his face lathered in spunky foam, a blade to his cheek, his head turned toward the camera with a tilt of his head, smiling through the shaving cream. He had no front teeth, but he could say cheese.

Still raining. Damn. It'll be a brutal cup coffee after a shower . Yes,  you live alone and you are  talking to myself. But  you don't listen to what you're trying to say. No one does.