1) “How to Save America in Ten Easy Steps” – a collection of short stories
2) Farms. That’s all I’m going to say right now.
3) A collection of modernized old-time (note: not new-time) field recordings, called “Hey, hey, Pete Seeger. Fuck you.”
Worked proper ragged on a multimedia project that attempts to create a more dynamic relationship between actual text-based stories and other media (photographs, audio recordings, mixed media, so on, so forth, blah blah blah) that will hopefully act as the template for a new online magazine I hope to start when I have money and resources and fewer chemical dependence problems (kidding).
An article on performance storytelling coming out in an arguably major publication over the next month.
Will be performing in Grand Rapids on September 10th with Stephanie Lane Sutton and others TBA. More details as the show approaches. I will be doing something I have never done before.
I have not thought about the western Tour this fall but it will be happening. The problem being not all cities previously and hopefully mentioned will necessarily be included. More to follow.
Also please note that the rumor that I will read shitty stories at your venue for drugs and affection are 100% true. Please also note that most things that I tell you are true are not necessarily true in a literal sense but that truth is relative and blah blah blah blah blah. Please note that most of my notes are incorrect and covered with lewd renderings of Batman sodomizing Bruce Wayne.
Facebook conversation with local performance poet Shawn Guiney
you didnt say goodbye i barely saw you last night!!! WTF
I know, I’m sorry :)
:(
I am sort of like that random ethnic friend in bad urban-targeted movies about dancing.
I just come to make you feel rad and then I leave and no one knows where or why I went.
LOL awesome
Did you continue to enjoy yourself, in spite of my hitherto-unexplained departure?
lol yea till i vomited lol
why did you leave so fast?
Stephanie, Andrew and Emily were all leaving at once and you were presumably making out with that girl so I didn’t want to be all alone at a party in a strange house full of people I did not know.
Or was at least not drunk enough yet to think that was a good idea.
lol oh thats when it happened
I am actually mortified of large groups of people, especially people in the middle of an activity like pumpkin carving.
lol it is dangerous
It is brutal and arcane. Too much propensity for cutting out the hearts of things. Could have turned into the Manson family shit at any moment. I thought it best to leave.
I mean, they were even cooking the seeds. That’s like what warriors do in the old world. They eat their enemies to possess their power.
And pumpkins are mad powerful.
LOL you entertain me
I try. Really I am just glad that your vomiting did not drive the congregation into a frenzy
i watited till the end
The seeds we salt and eat are sort of like the vomit of pumpkin existence
it was the perfect timing
I like to vomit at the ends of bad jokes I tell.
LOL
If it doesn’t go over well, I must’ve fucked up the punchline because I was about to get alcohol poisoning.
right a book
And then I am the warm pukey nucleus of life that the whole world loves to gather around and clean up after
thats special
It is a good place to be.
pergitory
Purgatory is the most passive-aggressive of afterlife options in Catholicism
I have a huge problem with it.
hee hee
It is almost as bad as Ohio.
Almost.
i think you would enjoy hell to much so i think i will send you there instead
what about arkansas
Did you know that the actual theory regarding Satantic genitalia was that it was made of ice? Because in Dante’s circles of Hell, the final circle was actually quite cold, because it was so far from God’s light and warmth, like Pluto
interesting
So if you ever hear me cursing someone with the frigid dick of Satan, you’ll know why.
‘Cause it’s accurate.
thats hot
No, cold.
Quite.
Yesterday in Fiction 2, Lila decided we needed a brief tutorial in the proper usage of some common grammar mistakes. One of those was the difference between its and it’s. She asked if I could use the possessive “its” in a sentence, and this was our response:
me (surprised, having been thinking wicked things about the boy sitting across from me): uh, fuck… it ate its own head!
Lila (without missing a beat): thank you. Correct!
(my peers giggle a little)
Stefani: Did that just come to you?
me: I have really been into properness lately.
As far as salutations go.
Lots of Mr. ____s and Ms. ____s and sirs and madams.
But in sort of a serious way.
Matthew: godspeed, good sir
me: “Certainly, Mr. Uribe.”
It’s like I’m on some weird Streetcar Named Desire kick or some shit.
Like I want to live in a tediously witty english novel about affairs and carriages.
Matthew: and gardens
me: Like I’d like to be wearing a bonnet.
Matthew: and wearing entirely too many layers.
me: Actually, I would rather like a bonnet.
Matthew: i’ll make you one.
me: Facebook comes in handy because without it, I feel like I’d never know anybody’s last names.
I am big on full names, especially with men, because when I am pretending to be aghast or if I am sincerely appalled, I pull out the old full name/abhorrent-mother trick
And he gets that sad “what? what’d I do?” look.
Matthew: shrugs his shoulders
me: Like a puppy that I just hit with a newspaper lightly.
Or at least mimed the motion of.
Matthew: dogs are adorable when you beat them.
me: Dogs have eyebrows.
I love dog eyebrows.
Matthew: they’re the most expensive
Matthew: they say once a dog loses his eyebrows, he loses his soul.
me: it’s true.
And not just his own, but his master’s.
The whole house’s.
The soul of the world is in a dog’s brow.
Matthew: a great gust of wind blows through the house and steals all their souls.
me: That happened to a lot of people in Victorian England.
People were rushed to the asylums because a wind blew all their souls away.
Lots of women were in hysterics. I think the Jews were blamed.
Matthew: they were only hysterical because they never had orgasms.
me: They were too polite to have orgasms.
I love how fragile those women were emotionally.
You didn’t have to do much to them.
You could utter a dirty word and they’d be kept in a room for month, all robbed of their wits
Matthew: i imagine victorian female orgasms sounding like a soprano singing.
me: You win.
The idea for the redneck hottub was as all great ideas are, born from desperation and crafted in simplicity. Owen needed a hot tub. He had no money to make the necessary renovations to the house, but what he did have was cleverness and a spare bath tub, and before anyone could convince him to put his energy into something more practical, Owen was dragging the clawfoot tub into the backyard where he could create without being disturbed.
When I first met Owen he seemed like a man with a lot on his mind. He went about the farmwork with a sensitivity to the details and an ease about the machinery that was almost robotic in nature. In the evening, he would retire to the den where in the first few months that I worked for him, he would pour over medical journals and spiritual manuals and apothecary’s guides from the New Age market, researching every possible avenue for an explanation of his wife’s declining health. Sometimes he would ask me strange, loaded questions and I wouldn’t know how to answer him, questions like whether or not her complexion changed with certain colored lights or if the tacos I made for lunch were comprised of all organic ingredients. I answered as best as I could, knowing from experience that a man dealt with grief in strange ways sometimes, especially men as intelligent and naturally peculiar as Owen. As a live-in caregiver, I thought it best to put myself in friendly territory with the patient’s family, and in particular with her husband, who I knew would be in need of some help himself when this whole thing was over.
The redneck hottub was far from Owen’s first invention. Earlier in their courtship, he had concocted something called the Story Machine, a sort of music box that would actually tell you a brand new story every night as you fell asleep. He came up with the idea during the First Gulf War when he’d had to leave her to fight for freedom or some shit, when Sherry had told him that the hardest thing to do in his absence would be to sleep soundly with him a world away. I have never seen this machine or been able to ask Sherry to verify its existence, because the night the circuits in her brain began to backfire for the final time, Owen destroyed the thing with a large dull axe and vowed never to build another one.
Usually in cases like this, when there are no children to be concerned with, things become more complicated. Without other people to be concerned for, the couple is left with only their own sorrows to drown in, the air of impending death hanging awkwardly about everything routine. The strange thing about Owen was that even when we got closer to one another, he refused to sink into it at all. He would explain himself to me calmly and in a flat, even voice, describing the unfairness of everything and his desire for vengeance against whatever evil force had gotten hold of his wife. It was as if explaining the workings of a man’s soul were just like explaining the forces that drove his tractors through the fields, imbued with complexity and detail where others may just see mystery. He was willing to continue because whatever fuel God had filled him up with could not sludge, and even as he began to turn his research and his energy away from curing his wife’s ailments, he refused simultaneously to retreat into mourning or to turn himself off from it. I think that, more than anything else, was what made me fall in love with him.
The red neck hot tub was a simple but ingenious design. You start by dragging the bathtub out of the house onto the snow-filled lawn. You dig out a little spot for it and clear away a small pit beneath it, piling up the snow around the tub like buttresses where you can store your tools and cold beer to make your work easier. Pile snow into the empty bathtub, making sure that the snow you’re using has not been tainted with piss. Next, pile up some firewood beneath the bathtub. Get a nice fire going. Not too big, but a good controlled burn. You’re going to want to get out your self-starting butane torch, which is always good, Owen says, when you need fire exactly now. When the snow has sufficiently melted, you can collect the leaves and debris floating in it using your fishing net and skimmer, which should be resting upright beside you in your snow buttress next to your friendly cooling beer. Get the water to a nice boil first to sanitize it, then you’re going to want to let it cool off a bit. After all, it is metal, and it has a fire underneath it. Owen’s solution to this problem was to pile more snow into it to cool it down, and to drop a few pieces of wood into the bottom to sit on and to recline.
From the second story window of the house, we watch him drag tree limbs from the brush and pile them up in a dry spot near the tub. I’ve arranged Sherry’s hair to look fuller.
“He’s building that for you,” I tell her. “He’s been working on the drawings for weeks. You know he’s terrible at drawing.”
I show her some pieces of printer paper that I found taped to the walls of his study. They are crudely done, full mostly of geometric shapes with no sense of scaling. There are stick figures in them. The one with the long hair is labeled “Sherry” and the one with no hair is labeled “Owen!” with an exclamation point the same size as the O. There is one standing in the background, awkwardly holding a shovel and standing beside the wheel chair, and that one is supposed to be me.
“Are you happy?” I ask her, showing her the pictures. “He’s never stopped thinking of you.”
Her lips are wet with saliva that I cannot be sure is communication. I want answers but know they won’t come. In the yard, the smoke is rolling and the steam is rising from the water. He holds up a gloved hand and leans on the handle of his shovel, opening a beer with the other hand. I wheel Sherry to the stairs and carry her the rest of the way, to the chair that is waiting at the bottom. I fix her scarf around her neck loosely, open the back door and wheel her into the yard. I let him undress her and fold her clothes neatly as he hands them to me. Though her body is light and limp, we both carry her to the water and lower her in with the greatest and most gentle reverence. He arranges her head on the backrest and we both test the water to be sure about the temperature. Check her heart rate.
“Do you think she’s comfortable?” he asks me, worried. “Do you think she likes it?”
“Yes,” I tell him. “I don’t see how she couldn’t.”
me: I didn’t become pregnant by a priest or anything, although there is time.
Loyola just sucks so much, Chris.
chris: ha
the priests don’t like fucking?
1:52 AM me: Oh they do, they do.
But apparently it’s an “image” thing, I don’t know…
chris: but not girls like you?
me: They don’t like poetry or bad theater or Indians. I’m out of my league, a little.
1:54 AM chris: Columbia was founded by a man that said, “I’ll knife the eye of every Injun under 6 feet tall for the rest of my life.”
me: I was wondering why that was on all the sweatshirts.
