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Lights flashing on skiffs in the bay, and the rain pelts the waves in sheets. 

Concrete tunnels, lights flashing at the top of radio towers to ward-away low flying aircraft. 

The world may end when the supercollider is used on wednesday. 

dorm, cabins, campus warrens

My wife is in an etiquette class--she learns in cabins how to properly sit, eat, jump, back flip, tour and exercise. I watch her troupe back flipping in a cabin. Later I see her with a tour group--Japanese taking pictures of the lake front, as I'm driving out of the campus, through the woods and beneath a grey overpass.

The open doorways of neighboring dorms. Televisions on--the hive, the collective. Our family eats out at a nearby country ballroom diner. Other families have paid for private, closed rooms, while our table is semi-private, and shared with one other family opened to the hallway. Its Christmas dinner.

Our new house has four sets of stairs--each of which diagonally crosses the other, and is too long...I guess this is the appeal, but my dad and I comment on the stupidity of the arrangement. The new house is an investment house, and will pay off later despite appearances.

My father is sick in the bath tub--naked and keeled over, I try to comfort him--the feeling of things approaching their end.

Convention

His wife looked at books on the shelf as I observed her in glances. Out of earshot, her husband--unshaven hair crawling down his neck and up his nose, talked about short skirts and warm weather. A pendant for a politician hung blinking dumbly around his neck. A blank individual with a German last name...a someone or a nobody; probably both.

Numb-Leg

The nurse, speaking like a newscaster about my infection. A scrape in the middle of the affected area is bubbling at the core with watery blood, the round edges caramelizing with coagulant.
She begins plying at the outer ring of the infection, like a block of otherness lodged in with living flesh. Using a small dental probe, she etches into the side of this block wedging it out--Her index and middle finger are the fulcrum.
"Can You feel it" She asks puzzled, with the apparent ease of a Nazi eugenicist who's simply curious--lifting out the dead block. The Parasites inside of the block of flesh had made their nexus in that part of my leg--I see the earwax yellow residue honey-combed and broken as the nurse lifts out the main portion--The moon white of my shin bone stands out. I still feel nothing to indicate that a chunk is missing from my leg, save for the disgust and a throbbing numbness.

Life v.2

Wipers wash water drops distorting vision, flattening it back out to consistancy. I arrive here, at my place of work.

A nun was shot through her large fast food wax-gilt cup. She didn't realize she'd been shot until I pointed out the gunshot wound.

cracking slowly through the carapice. Reality dripping and globbing, the colors swirling in tight coils like goopy oil paint sticking to itself.

Living the life---Contained in it is the code of the maintained life that shoots up through the human-being’s back like the spinal chord; and segmented just the same. The human animal—this is conventionally refers to an authors sense that this idea is somehow ironical, which it clearly isn’t—is the driving force for all human action, and interaction. Art is sex, art is bodily hunger art is nerve ending disturbances, and left-over dream-cake. Life is also—as all things left to themselves for a great long time—cluttered, an absolute mess of images, feelings and sparks of empty-train inspirations, waiting for you to board. Who’s conducting? Where’s it headed—why are there so few on board (besides this woman in a black hat, and the teenage-baseball-boy in the next compartment)? So much of life is rooted in the fear that the living life might be hurt or pulverized in the train. Spiders down a secret tunnel, crawling, biting, laying eggs on the forearm—infection, abscess, gangrene, amputation, sepsis, death.

I knew enough about the destination to know it was not likely dangerous to my life. One can often see the habitable, nesting inertia of the longer life necessitates the hammer- smash of little jaunts such as this. I drink cranberry juice; the sun doesn't set as the aircraft travels with the day across the ocean--so I pretend, looking through the glass, and the warped fellow travelers, bloated male-flight-attendant, Sky-Mall Magazine Text--blazing red like auxiliary power on a submarine. Cleaning my fingernails. My shoes are uncomfortable. The man sitting next to me asked if I work for a famous IT company; I don't.

Everson

I Wrote This a While Ago:

The death of Everson was expected. His father died the same way. Sleepless nights and half conscious days, he drifted along until his death caught up with him—nothing dramatic. He was standing on a dirty side street, with Coke cans and cigarette butts choking up the sewer drains. Greasy uneven bricks surrounded him, and the recesses of the broken tenement house windows made him feel like he was in a soggy bird-cage. An immigrant boy sat on a green knoll behind a waist-high chain-link fence in front of one such house. With his drippy nose and scant clothing, the boy was like a fixture—more like the bricks than like me Everson thought. As he admired the boy’s head with its crew cut and sanguine unknowing expression, Everson began to die. The pain itself was not all that great. It was rather like feeling his body go to sleep—like a creeping nothingness. The pop which could have rendered him unconscious, instead greatly distorted his sight. The boys head blew up like some repugnant circus balloon. Confusion at this sight together with a diminished sense of equilibrium caused him to crash instinctively to the ground whaling like a stabbed animal. The man tried abortively to escape his confusion, as if waking up from all nightmares was practice for this moment. Slipping into his coma, he began to give up and make peace with the nothingness, as all dying things must do—in this regard Everson was certainly a pragmatist: if going with the flow meant less pain for him, then why fight it?
Everson was not an important man. His life was middling