Five New Drawings and Brief Introduction

The Author as Psychedelic Leather Daddy

As my ever-attentive and heavily taxed mother walked me to school on my first day of first grade, I clung to and pulled at her desperately, pleading not to be made to go and face my inevitable shame, sure she’d have to come pick me up in a few hours after they’d flunked me out of school and society for good. For the most part, I would argue that my anger is well-bound-together and even at times crystalline, but when I start to get flummoxed and the cortisol starts overloading the entire central nervous system, I can be hostile and quite frightening in my extrajudicial outreach and ghastly pinwheel hyperactivity. It would not surprise me if I died in some unimaginably stupid way on account of an intense outburst of momentary road rage. Sometimes when I scream an obscenity aloud thinking I’m alone and realize someone else is in hearing distance, the wretchedness and pitifulness that befall me are like a kind of marvel. I think a lot about what happens when the flight instinct is turned on full blast for days and days and there’s simply nowhere to go and no damned end to it. Kierkegaard’s ‘sickness unto death,’ a sickness of the self in relating to itself, is precisely the living impasse of self-relating (which is mimetic of the basic condition of the addict). First we are alienated by basic epistemology and then we are alienated by our swinish fellows, digging in the shit in hopes of catching a quick tip. Your lack of emotional intelligence suits you. There’s no other way to access the trading floor. When I did a workshop with a pair of married gurus back in 2009, I was told that there is a massive amount of terror hiding in the base of my spine and that this terror is in my case unusually accessible. I can go from zero to full terror in fractions of a second. That’s where I was as my mother walked me to school that first day, commencement of years of trials and abuses concerning which no small boy could ever be expected to imagine any unthinkable particular: a nine or ten on the terror scale. Here again my strong intuitions prove all but perfectly sound. Grade school was a wasteland like Eliot’s:

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

The fluorescent lights at school gave me horrible migraines all the time. I seemed always to have contact dermatitis, eczema, and/or a mouthful of canker sores. My hockey padding and uniform were hard on my skin and sometimes playing was agonizing and very itchy. I knew the kids with whom I was growing up were going to devolve the world a good deal more than it already had been, possibly beyond recourse now anyway, and that this was terrifying and very unsettling. My body was rejecting the whole agonizing theatre of operations, entering into maladaptive patterns, looking for asymmetric ways to engage stronger adversaries. I wanted to talk to whoever was in charge of everything, not that I expected for a moment that such an entity would be able to comfort me or offer assurances of any kind. Filmmaker and alcoholic John Huston said that God is drunk. Surely Huston eventually figured out, either on this shore or the other: drunk is far too gentle a word for it. That surveilling eye in the sky? He’d apparently happily watch us all die, the more gruesome and protracted the better. I bet God is a fat sadistic fuck eating popcorn. The more optimistic undercurrent in this new batch of drawings hints I think maybe at the possibility that all kinds of people who like all sorts of puzzles will help put space-time back together again.

Walter Brennan Tripping on Acid at Christmastime 

I Love Chlöe Parks

At the Best Western Jacuzzi Suite

Cock, Balls, and Music Halls

Goddamn Fucking Pigeons

Three Faces

 Your future is all used up. Why don’t you go home?
- Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil

Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

When Orson Welles directed his old friend Marlene Dietrich in a small but absolutely crucial character turn in 1958’s Touch of Evil, she was fifty-seven and he was forty-three, wearing extra padding to add to his not insubstantial girth and very obviously not in the best of shape (my goodness did that man love to eat and drink). If you watch the complicated display of discrete emotions on Dietrich’s famously close-up-friendly face, you see for sure that the actress is having the same feelings as her character and that somebody—well, Mr. Welles, her old friend and current director—gets to sit and take it while with hurt in her eyes Marlene berates him for getting stupid and fat gobbling up candy bars. Sometimes we can only be mute with stupefaction when we encounter somebody who once seemed as low as low gets but who over a couple more decades would seem somehow to have reached lower depths yet. Marlene adopts the sombre and clearly pitying disgust from her own nature and reflexes. It’s real emotion and had to be by design, at least if you take design’s word for it. I wonder if Welles considered the possibility that Dietrich might break into tears and/or flee the set.   

La truite (Joseph Losey, 1982)

If there is a magic and metaphysics to the art and technology of cinema it very much pivots in large part on the human face and on close-ups, which have long drawn us like moths to porch light, a ubiquitous part of the basic grammar of narrative cinema since the early 20th century. For French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who wrote two absolutely mandatory books on the cinema, the face rendered cinematographic is a kind of psychedelic Renaissance because it requires new landscapes in and languages for looking, as well as new topologies or landscapes with respect to the human face from the standpoint of audition or mediated network interaction. “When it looks at you,” observes Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, “Isabelle Huppert’s face destroys its own contradiction, which it had incarnated until that moment. Positive and negative in one. The film no longer needs to be developed.” This social interplay malarkey is largely electronic activity down to the sub-molecular level and all kinds of machines are activating and decommissioning us all day long, every day, remedial parasites the cost of doing business on the grid. Sometimes a lovely friend who hasn’t seen you for a good spell will upon catching sight of you ‘click on’ like an old-timey automaton. Nothing is more adorable. Certain gazes turned on you at just the right moment can make you nearly evacuate your bowels. (For intense spontaneous diarrhea brought on by moral terror, all are advised to consult Michael Tolkin’s brilliant and real fuckin ugly 1993 novel Among the Dead.) 

Jane B. par Agnès V. (Agnès Varda, 1988)

Reaching middle age, I was struck I recall by a pretty famous David Bowie quote in which the debonaire genius attempts to console us with the fact that as we grow older we become more who we were always meant to be. I thought that this certainly appeared to be true of the mercurial Mr. Bowie…and also definitely for sure Jane Birkin, who I adore most of all for her work as an actress and public personality. I had for some while been modelling my ideal rapidly forthcoming middle age after Birkin, having taken solace in and vital creative support from pictures she appeared in from about 1985 to about 1995, especially the stuff with Jacques Rivets, Jean-Luc Godard, and Agnès Varda. What is it this middle aged person has going on that a middle aged person ought to have going on? Well, Jane is no longer likely to be tricked out of being herself or themself or what-have-you, she cannot see the limits of her knowing as anything other than luxuriance and possibility, endlessly re-vitalizing. Steadfastly vulnerable, operationally agnostic. The maturity and resilience demonstrated by Jane Birkin in Jacques Rivette’s artist/model picture La belle noiseuse as her painter husband Michel Piccoli begins to get more and more inextricably bound up with Emmanuelle Béart’s model, who happens to be the most fantastically proportioned woman in at least Europe and not wearing clothes often, shows forbearance and strength like that I hope to myself some day earn, may I so happen to slay the right dragons and in the right sequence. Birkin’s Liz is the only character in Rivette’s film who sees that she needs to grow and adapt and who thereafter sets about getting to work on doing that. Birkin’s conflicted and complex gender identity led to her becoming an early advocate for queer youth and included among the special features on the Kino Lorber Blu-ray for Je t’aime moi non plus, a wonderful film from ’76 directed by her husband Serge Gainsbourg, is an interview with Jane and her co-star, Warhol company stud Joe Dallesandro, in which the lead actress, visibly emotional, says she believes that the most important thing she ever did on camera is the scene in that film where she says she really feels like a boy. Not knowing much about how other folks feel nor taking any questions at this time, I can confess that I always found Jane Birkin’s intergendered, non-binary, exploratory/playful relationship with the transience of self and the flexibility of sexuality to be noble and encouraging. That’s why I became a disciple in the first place. Also, I knew in the early years I had to be a boy and I ran with it, even though I knew I was a boy and a girl, the impetus of puberty kicking in with its rude hormonal signals and 24/7 meltdown. But you know what? I’m both agnostic and queer: I don’t have enough information about sexuality yet!    

Creature Feature: Son of Vincent van Gogh

The Insect Woman (Shōhei Imamura, 1963)

Van Gogh (Murice Pialat, 1991)

If there is to be some legacy or mythos attached to me here or hereafter, I feel it’s in everybody’s interest that we draw a basic connection between whatever is was Vincent van Gogh was and whatever it is I am, where or when or how I am yet to be established. How we are linked has much less to do with popular success having come too late and more to do instead with our particular intermeshing of bipolar-type disorder with psychotic features, substance dependency issues, artistic/creative compulsion/delirium (schizoaffective), and general tendency toward the solitary life. As mine has regularly said of me, Van Gogh’s mother worried that her son, based on his behaviour within the first two monumentally crucial years of life was going to have lots of accidents henceforth and persistently make things much more difficult than they would normally have to be, under ordinary circumstances. It is also true of Van Gogh and myself that we prize the spiritual/monastic life very highly, but we gravitate to the lower depths of the social order, for better and for worse, no bones abut it. This is actually the position of the great Japanese filmmaker Shōhei Imamura who had the stones in the ‘60s to say he was interested above all in the lower parts of the society and the lower parts of the body. The bad psychic tumult and high-minded pursuit naturally make guys like me and Van Gogh a bit like characters out of a Dostoevsky story. A nice happenstance of history: Marx and Dostoevsky were inventing modern alienation at the same time, as contemporaries. (Notes from Underground was published in 1864 and Das Kapital in 1867.) Alfred Hitchcock once said that he cast Cary Grant as the version of himself he wanted to believe in and Jimmy Stewart as the version of himself he actually was. In this light, off on a frolic of our own, might we not perhaps argue that Jacques Dutronc in Maurice’s Pialat’s Van Gogh from 1991 is the painter we wish Van Gogh was and Tim Roth in Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo from the year previous is the seething, unkempt, and altogether foul Vincent who it isn’t hard to imagine perfectly real and the whole unpleasant deal. That being said, if Vincent & Theo is a fine picture indeed, Pialat’s film, with its transcendent and sublime turn from the rock star Dutronc, is a masterpiece for the ages, one of the greatest films of any I know about art and compulsive art-making. In going to bat ardently for Pialat’s Van Gogh, do I not implicitly fall into accord with that ever-sage advise from Maestro John Ford? When in doubt, print the legend. George Bataille calls Van Gogh “an overwhelming incarnation of the candelabrum of sunflowers,” and then goes on to picture the legendary painter “attaching to his hat a crown of lighted candles and going out under this halo at night at Arles […]. The very fragility of this miraculous hat of flames without a doubt stresses the striving for dislocation that Van Gogh obeyed each time he came under the influence of a fiery focal point.”  

Autoporpoise

The story of my blessed and madcap life: it did not look right at all but I went in anyway out of pure foolhardy willfulness and it was much worse than I expected. Spin that disk ad infinitum and chew on your broadsword the while. Memory itself is a disk system that switches disks in and out rapidly as per the immediate needs of the sentient creature negotiating the earth’s surface (custom, habit, innovation). You could not possibly carry every single memory you have at all times in a sack of any size let alone one you would be able to manage over the ever-cruel distances. Girl, you’d break your damn spine. Memory and imagination may sometimes combine in order to all the more confound. Look for the light and the colour in your consciousness and know that the positive polar angle reaches skyward and the negative polar angle crash-lands in the mud and the worms. Is that the Garden of Eden right there in the largest park in walking distance from where you yourself are located this very moment? The psychotic is the person, in this case myself, who would encourage you to pursue the idea to all its logical extremities. My father was a hard-drinking business man and often he and his buddies, half in the bag, would tell longwinded off-colour jokes and hee and haw and carry on, all of which was pure delight to me as a boy, but more importantly it was these men and certain high-grade standup comedians who demonstrated for me that if you have a brilliant zinger of a punch-line this is actually the ideal time to do a long shaggy-dog build-up, taking the audience on a circuitous journey to the outermost regions only to finally deliver that boffo punchline (everybody always howls). Every time I look back over my best work, I think: holy fuck, how did you do that? you were a fucking mess slapped over the face of a disaster! I became a Buster Keaton or Evel Knieval of this woebegone Canadian prairie, my fingers deep in archaic string instrument tunings, and the rule of thumb for pratfalls and stunts and suchlike is that you need to be good and gassed on strong spirits to deal with the pain…and everything is pain. I lived for a few years with a woman who basically shared my often esoteric taste in music, movies, and literary fiction…it spoiled me for life. Behold me in my spats, emboldened before God’s gnashing snatch. I am God’s monkey wrench…have you ever begun to consider how many different things you might be able to do with a monkey wrench? You know, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Form is the inhuman and God-like dimension of art and it’s what us perfectionists are trying to get a free and clean high off of. Again, the really interesting idea in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is that nothingness is the active agent that outlines difference and therefore makes the world intelligible in all its known material properties. This idea, curiously or maybe not so curiously, had a major impact on Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida when they were still very young (Vernon W. Cisney’s Deleuze and Derrida: Difference and the Power of the Negative comes with my very highest recommendation).

What a codependent gonna do foremost is a codependent gonna codependent. You have your people-pleasers and placaters on the one hand, per Gestalt therapy orthodoxy, and then folks like me, star of Wagner’s opera Parsifal, in whom romantic feelings of any kind induce a very specific whirling, stomach-churning delirium, as demonstrated by the serially-vomiting Stan in the early and eye-opening seasons of South Park. When I got out of a notorious treatment centre for dug and alcohol dependency in Palm Desert, California in 2009 I then lived for a year in a casual and easygoing sober living house in Palm Springs. I spent the year reading, writing, going to a movie almost daily in one or another of the little Coachella Valley municipalities, and hanging out with twelve-step people. I didn’t drink or use anything stronger than Tylenol that whole time. What I think I liked most about Southern California is that nobody seemed to think I was especially odd or unusual down there, and of course down there I don’t look especially weird. Los Angeles especially has all these streams, pulses, and swells of bold, proud, and maybe even regal weirdness. I remember being at the Farmer’s Market on Fairfax with my A.A. sponsor when another friend called to tell me that a guy we both knew from a previous treatment centre had just died of cardiac arrest partying by himself in a hotel room in Nanaimo, British Columbia. I think the constant conspiracy of silence around all this stuff—mental health, addiction, systemic poverty—is a kind of war crime being committed by the majority, and I will never stop saying so. The best thing I remember happening in Los Angeles was when my sponsor and I got to go see supreme Hungarian master Miklós Jancsó’s unequivocally bleak 1966 martial staging ground The Round-Up, part of a series on widescreen cinematography they were running at the old silent movie theatre, also on Fairfax (we got to sit on cozy couches!). While things quickly started to go tits-up-and-sideways once I got back to Canada—I’d be drunk again within a year—I will always be able to recall with warmth and fondness the drive from Palm Springs to Calgary which I came insanely close to doing in one long go. My car had poor air conditioning and it gets real, real hot in the desert in August, so I set off on my long northward trek, through Las Vegas and other sundry sights, at about four in the morning in order to get a solid head start on the sun. I drove fourteen hours that day until I finally pulled into Dillon, Montana and got myself a room for the night. I can remember and feel in my body today how overjoyed and consoled I was that I could enjoy for-me-profound and exciting adventures, in their material and spiritual properties and aspects, much better sober than lit. My sponsor always said that there isn’t anything good enough or bad enough that a drink won’t make it worse. It’s true (for about 10% of the population). A blunt no-bones elder-in-recovery here in Calgary once told me something like: yes, it is a one day at a time program, but you have to do it for the rest of your life and you need to remember that every day too. 

I already loved hockey as a little Canadian kid in the very late 1980s when, at ten, around the same time I stared guitar lessons, I began my short minor hockey career. More than any of the more or less customary NHL hockey I got to attend live in my youth (we’ll set aside the one game I got to attend in the series in ’89 where the Flames ultimately triumphed over the Canadiens and won their only Stanley Cup), the competition between the international teams at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics totally set my whole neural network on fire. Often when I would have night terrors or little miniature psychoses as a child, I would really and truly believe I could hear an arena full of people cheering and jeering right there inside my bedroom walls. I was to be no messiah, but rather the updated middle-aged version of Richard Lindner’s painting Boy with Machine (featured most memorably in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus). I loved all the gear at my grandparents’ farm just as much as I loved my music gear at home. In the U.K., works and gear are slang related to intravenous drug use. I actually believe that pressing the record button on a machine has an effect on the entire earth system. For Deleuze, the cosmos—or, as per machine assemblage brother in crime Félix ‘the Cat’ Guattari, the Chaosmos—is the unity of all multiplicities that are, could be, or that we might imagine. The simple formula for this spatiotemporal framework: the totality is One-Many. Of course, what Deleuze is doing at least in part is once again keeping the torch of Spinoza ignited and flickering majestic in the age of quantum mechanics and tense outbursts of all kinds of things all the time. The Venus flytrap catches a fly by enticing the fly to step on the trap’s trigger which is exactly how a normal hunting trap works when it catches things. There are only so many models and forms for basic existing things and situations, and they get recycled endlessly, to the point where it gets more comic and more absurd but also more ghastly and abyssal. Store up the laughter just in case you might have accidentally won the happenstance race against sensation-rich life and signs and symbols meant puzzlingly to guide, in dream or in hand. Carl Jung echoes Nietzsche when he bemoans that the Occidental World has not been working on civilization and enlightenment anywhere near as long as the Chinese yet insists upon acting vulgar and superior (he also expresses a belief shared by Nietzsche that Heraclitus is the only worthy voice of Occidental antiquity). Jung got into the I Ching. In a piece entitled “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” Jung quotes the philosopher Chuang-tzu, as it would happen a contemporary of Plato: “The state in which ego and non-ego are no longer opposed is called the pivot of Tao.” Boy, do I like that. I couldn’t have put it that well given five lifetimes. A fella could really haul that bill of gods some distance, I imagine. From my vantage, assuredly, forty-six years old as of recently, I think if you stay relatively stationary and remain at steadfast private labour, you would in looking at the I Ching through the eyes of Carl Jung or the game of Go through those of Deleuze and Guattari, build a better map of the cosmos as a navigable frame in active play than you could get by accessing a quantum computer, particle accelerator, or super satellite (though those things are useful too). 

The elephant in the room, or at least the three-legged dog, is that I just got kicked off Facebook's two big social media networks. Here is my public statement, pass it around to the publicists at the debutante bash this very fortnight and enjoy the room temperature champagne: 

It is not nearly as much fun to steal a car if you don’t total it at the end—

The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, 1966)

Roulette Wheel of Shame

Now that I am overcome with shame, the feeling is akin to losing one’s grip and falling. In their embarrassment the shy person folds their arms and hangs their head. They can feel the ground collapsing under their feet and are trying hard not to fall. They had been clinging to the group and believed they were a branch of the social tree, and, all of a sudden, it is as though they no longer have anything to hold on to. We could turn this around and assert that physical disgust, moral disdain and social indignation are all ways of unifying the group, which becomes of its own accord the repository of the majority view. 

- Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Shame

Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)

Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, 1946)

Were you to have some time on your hands and were you to therefore ask me what I think shame is, I would try to underscore its polar nature and I would say that shame is when people, places, and/or things make you feel worthless and defective. I got into the habit of being called worthless and sometime after that I graduated to actually being and believing I was worthless. I’m very much in alignment here with philosopher Frédéric Gros, then, as he sees the purified and untainted voice of shame itself in the simple but always hurtful utterance: shame on you. I also once heard a wise man say that the healthy part of shame, the part that can be metabolized and utilized, is the part that prevents one from spiralling off into shamelessness and grotesque entitlement. If you say shame on you to me today, I confront you with my eyes until you flinch. The shame isn’t on us. It moves around like some kind of specialized counterfeit money.

The final statement on the increasingly apocalyptic discrepancy between good ol’ right-sizing shame and bombastic bomb-the-Technicolor-torpedos spree-happy shamelessness is Nicholas Ray’s outrageously subversive but just-syrupy-enough 1956 masterpiece Bigger Than Life, with James Mason as Ed Avery, a school teacher with a secret part-time cab driver hustle on the side whose system is pumping way too much cortisol and whose finances are likewise stressed, all the lovely things and places of the ‘50s commercial universe and not a dime left to pay for any of it, and thus when the doctors put him on a corticosteroid to treat inflammation of the arteries, he goes full psychotic and outrageously performative…and I guess we shouldn’t really be surprised. At the climax of the meek professor’s self-aggrandizing psychosis, he goes upstairs to kill his son and tells his wife he’s like Abraham setting about to go sacrifice Isaac. She reminds him that God ultimately spared Isaac, and at this moment, pinnacle of 1950s cinema to many connoisseurs, James Mason loudly declaims “God was wrong!” in a manner that perfectly combines the stentorian self-seriousness of a politician and the distressed confoundedness of a child. It is the child who when told shame on you cannot really understand, even if the neural wiring of that child on some level nevertheless does.

Telling the story of a year in the life of Leo Feldman, imprisoned in a state institution as a result of having run a shady below-board black-market-type operation out of the basement of his department store—or maybe he’s just bad—Stanley Elkin’s early novel A Bad Man is all about the allocation and placement of shame in a way that mirrors the representation of guilt and institutional absurdity in Kafka’s The Trial. Whereas Kafka leans into ascetic dry humour and the origins of his form and style in parable, Elkin is all vaudeville and post-bop jazz. Assessing himself and his life, Feldman, the no-questions-asked business operator, fundamentally grey market in makeup, reflects upon himself and his life up to arrest: “everyone had already been tempted, that everyone had already succumbed, had had those things happen to him which he wanted to have happen, and was looking for them to happen again. Seduction was routine; yielding was; everyone had a yes to spend and spent it.” The free market would like to encourage just enough shamelessness such that each yes becomes good and lubricated. Those of us who find ourselves in a bipolar mania are want to throw currency around like tinsel. For a very long time the advertisers have been working on disinhibiting our behavioural patterns.

Through some purely organic though also perfectly worlded process, your epigenetic program is imprinted within you from the beginning and the genes fire and misfire, or adapt or evolve, as you engage your world from the embodied standpoint of materiality, sequence, and cognizance. You will internalize all the signs presented to you and some of them will be seedlings, good and bad. You oughtn’t remain cavalier out here for long. Remain morally and ethically resolute…right when you need to most especially. It has to be a rigid and loose program, and therefore a flexible/foldable one. “Why is the line of flight a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed,” pose Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “after having destroyed everything one could?” I love how at the end of Ernst Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown, the greatest ever comedy about the line of flight, Cluny (Jennifer Jones), having attained her line of flight and crossed a whole ocean, faints, presumably having also in a fairly short time window gotten herself pregnant by Charles Boyer’s continental Lothario. It is the job of comedy since Shakespeare to produce a number of saleable couples by the end of the final act, but the especially epic and heroic couple breaks free, negotiates with the geography, and transplants itself to where it can have the right kind of light (even at night). For those who have been shamed out of existence, the answer can only ever be persistence…

Trotsky

 

Enthusiasm (Dziga Vertov, 1931)

I know a guy named Curtis who drives a Ford truck and does demolition work on home renovations. I think of Curtis as a bit of a bro. And yet here we are at a prized local burger joint eating burgers, drinking pilsners, and doing our best to ogle the comely wait staff with the bare minimum of decency and decorum…all of a sudden Curtis looks right at me and says: “the preeminent and basic economics of romantic love is one of talk…not just bodies and their endless possibilities…meaningful communication in furtherance of heightened and more intense connection.” I looked at him a brief spell and saw for sure that he meant it. For some reason most definitely Curtis-related I went straight home and wrote in my notebook: beware of the sarcastic girls. It seemed funny last night but now it does not. Do people somehow manage to talk for more than fifteen or twenty minutes? Is most of the talk necessarily mean to somebody or can the branch extend?

Back when I lived in Vancouver, the days of narcotics and tree-planting, I was also in a garage rock band called the Fudds. We were all dopers and hedonistic womanizers and, ultimately, sad fucking burnouts, the lot of us. I moved back to Calgary fifteen years ago and kicked the hard stuff, with one or two nasal deviations…over fifteen years. Suddenly Feldman, who played lead guitar, messages me out of the blue and says he’ll be pulling through Calgary on the long trek from Nanaimo to Gatineau, Québec. I know that he has a wife and kid so I am able to deduce that his situation can’t be all that good. Upon arrival at my home, Feldman says he’d like to walk a bit and stretch his legs—walk and talk—so we head down in the direction of Lindsay Park and he starts to lay it out: Dagger Deacon, A.K.A Chad, former vocalist of the Fudds, is missing and a twenty-five-year-old woman was found in his apartment, dead from a fentanyl overdose. Additionally, Feldman had been sleeping with this young woman, presently deceased, and a few others in her seedy orbit; everybody he knows now knows, and that very definitely includes his wife. I’m not really drinking these days, but Feldman and I went and got good and plastered at an Irish pub in Mission and walked home yelling at the unusually ominous sky. When your rage is God-sized that’s when you really, really need God. Feldman had departed before I rose. I was in utterly pitiful shape.

I wrote a play when I was sixteen. It was about a dashing young skater boy who is universally reviled by his peers for being weird and incomprehensibly verbose and who believes himself the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky, whose name he appropriates for all sorts of nefarious purposes—his various motiveless crimes. In the first scene he goes berserk and beats another kid badly with the remnants of the skateboard the other kid has just come close to breaking over his knee, all of this to the loud applause of the other children in attendance. After this our hero embarks on a series of breakings and enterings that have no real point to them; he never steals anything, he just stalks people and walks around their houses, often while they are still in them. He recalls these events to strangers, sex workers, and three different psychiatrists. At the end he gives some random goofy-looking kid his own skateboard and says: “Tell them you got it from Leon Trotsky, kid.” I could probably still do something with some of that material. Ain’t nobody ‘round these parts gonna stage no play by the likes of heathen me, hem hem, but I bet I could make a nifty little ‘zine or something… 

Two Drawings | Holding it Together and Falling Apart

“I have the feeling that something’s—sort of cracking in me.”

- Patricia Highsmith, Edith’s Diary

…don’t know what Prof. Pranump would make of that, especially since she’s teetotal, tea, Triscuits, Ritz crackers, Saltines, Fritos, Doritos, Frito-Lay, Planters peanuts, Blue Diamond smoked almonds, Prohibition, Some Like it Hot, the fact that soon polar bears and walruses will have nowhere to go, because the polar ice is melting, cheese and pineapple on sticks, cheddar cheese logs, school bus, ground cardamon, dried cherries, zest, the fact that walruses can swim for four hundred miles, sure, but not forever, for Pete’s sake…

- Lucy Ellmann, Duck’s, Newburyport 

Earth Crasher

Neural Gating