strange one.

squeezing foam through my hair I took time to make sure my sideburns were covered. My hair needed to be blond, my wife thought.

My father had just constructed a new bathroom within our old one, which was ornate and secure. The place was safer now, I suppose. Water ran from a collection of small drums out of a silver u shaped faucet. The table was made to look like an old paper-desk; such was the vogue.

Rubbing the smelly dye foam through my hair, towel wrapped around my shoulders like some bomb-survivor, I stepped down to my father who was watching a new action movie piped in over broadband onto our fixed computer.

The movie depicted blondie fighters sitting down to a meeting when suddenly a Mac truck smashed through the facade of their meet-place building and crushed their bodies under its wheels. The truck then backed up to smash the head of one quite surprised looking decapitated tyro.
One older blondie fighter who saw this horror from safe-distance shot a tackler rope into the back of the Mac truck, attached the line to a yacht toting trailer, hopped on the yacht and readied himself for battle.

"These new action movies are great", my dad said.

Brown Toad Incident

How much did this apartment cost, you think?
Probably around 1.5 mil.
Behind my drunk friends and their associates I could see the lights of Los Angeles twinkling through the smart apartment's windowpanes.Earlier today we had an unfortunate accident involving a roller coaster at one of the nearby amusement parks. Our black friend had tried to sabotage the trip by killing himself, somehow jettisoning is body from the coaster at a moment of high negative g. Thankfully he had landed more-or-less safely in a gigantic tar-pit, and had regretted his earlier decision--deciding not to finish the job yet in some lunatic manner.

These lights are quite beautiful. My friend was playing an arcade game the owner of the apartment had resting near the exit to the scenic deck and patio. In the game he was flying some kind of harrier jet, shooting and circle-strafing a stationary target.

Suddenly metal grating and steel doors shut all the windows and porticoes. We were stuck here. The apartment owner returned with a large aquamarine cage. The water inside the cage was dark and clouded ruddy brown. He crashed the cage on the floor and 6 or seven brown toads jumped on one of my friends and promptly tore his face off and started opening his thorax and underbelly to chew on the meat there. I ran into the kitchen to grab a knife, couldn't find one--but found a bag of bread which had a skull and cross-bones sticker attached to it. I threw a slice of this bread at one of the approaching toads and it ate it. The toad suddenly crouched, the way toads usually do, its cheeks cascading up and down; then it just froze, its breathing stopped and it was like a little toad statue. I threw slices of the bread just outside the kitchen door into the great room where I could hear hops coming after me. I told my friend and girlfriend to escape out the laundry hatch behind me. As they did so my friend let out a yelp. I looked back and his arm was deep into the gaping mouth of a large brown toad. Could this be the mother? Trying to move away my friend escaped minus his forearm, which the mother toad kept. I threw this mother toad the rest of the bread, as I undid my belt and tied off my friend's arm to prevent huge blood-loss. Behind the new brown toad mother statue, was a strange cave tunnel; not a laundry chute. The tunnel appeared to have multiple veins as we all crawled through, parallel-laterally we heard ruckus in the kitchen behind us. Was it the toads or the owner? As we approached the caves exit I saw a row of toads to my left. The sides of their body made for the texture of the cave-wall. Were the petrified or simply hibernating?

As I got up from my forced crouching position and ran out the exit of the tunnel, the owner stabbed me in the chest with a knife. Wrenching the knife from my bleeding chest I threw it directly into his eye.

As I lay dying, I dreamed of an airport with a nice Mexican bar. The drinks are half off today. What a nice place to get drunk and forget your flight!

Headless old man

There's nothing I can say. A headless body lay down on the roof of another building, a trip-wire sends its head rolling down a pair of copper beams; leads it down spinning rapidly. Its hair is long and white. The skin is white and dry-looking.




Blue water in the white ice as Peter and Satomi and I sail though south american beach areas.

What is it with Parking Garages?

So much of the modern world consists of driving cars and running across their related paraphernalia. I ran to the top of the parking garage. The fog was thick below the apex, but the top level of the garage peaked out above it. It was as if the top of this garage was adrift in a grayish white sea of cloud. I jumped down using a grappling hook, went into the arcade and found the door. The woman on the other side said "try your best to avoid this!" and jabbed at me with a syringe. She was beautiful. I was deft but stuck with the needle nevertheless.

Blue

Leaning against a dome carved rock a French veteran stared ahead with one eye at a bright red pole that shined back at him between the throngs of people walking through the memorial's pathways. His upper lip was a mound that curled over the usual dip, like an orange rind, exposing a nicely arranged row of white teeth. The nose was absent, the crater suspending the rind, and a custom eye-patch supported itself upon the lip's ridge with a small girder, a bird's foot perched on a ball. His navy cap read "Bordien", and although an incision's rivet bit into his eye's puncta he stared with wise intensity through the commotion; simply waiting for the initiation of some act which would be the consillatory or provocative end to his ownership of the scene before him. He stood grotesque and magnificent in a shabby oil-stained tweed jacket, the gravitational effect of wearing the Médaille militaire and Croix de guerre straightening out the patch over his left breast. If one stood directly before him he appeared like the keystone in a relief, a liminal welcomer to to the somber tended parade grounds and the dark unparallel strokes of the forest beyond. Seemingly preoccupied with his role as gatekeeper, the soldier cocked his head slightly when from behind the red pole he spotted the darkly tanned and mud spattered face of a vagrant. Immediately the two were entirely engaged with one another. The soldier looked over the vagrants face for signs of horror or disgust, either of which would satisfy his strange hunger. The vagrant upon studying the veteran's face stared back blankly with an expectant aire which circumscribed his métier. As the vagrant approached the veteran was struck by the wild stormy-wave pattern of hair, and an impasto of filth which striped the forehead's brow-lines and nose; this face was a rough churning sea. Pidgeon cooing relieved the two of their silent duel, and the connection was broke.
Below the pidgeons the vagrant settled amidst a pile of trash opposite a relief station. These streets, the avenues bustling with a happy city's retinue once lay shattered. Planks of wood, doorframes, tapering piles of mortor littered with clock springs and brick rubble; these erstwhile estaminets, cathedrals and brownstones were the clarion call of the trash in a veteran's mind. In a vagrants mind they were a boon, a source to sustain lifes condition, such as it was.

"To feel embittered by it would be like blowing on cigarette ash", someone said from the shadow of a pin-stand a little down the avenue. All ages were here, and life was seen from many angles as the defunct and young held and assayed one another in capricious spells of regard. The carnivalesque impression was made a project by young boys standing grey and infantesimal beside gleaming convoys of cavarly come home from the Verdun. To a child's untrained eye, this terror combined with the streaming tears of wives and fathers equated roughly to a vision of manhood. But there were things missing as well. Where were the clean argent bayonets, the bicorns, and triumphant faces? After all, hadn't the War been won?
Had the children asked him, had they enough courage to ask him the only question of great import, the one both his presence and his chasseur comrades' collective absence incited in young minds, he would have replied simply: "No. War is cold", and let that fester. The veteran had heard from someone that the reason why murder was immoral was because it robbed a person of his or her future. Watching these young children, he was pained by the innefectual nature of his observation-- his field of vision such that focus was easier, the periphory less significant, but this clarity of tunnel vision only increased a sense of an overarching lameness and a surging calamity. Here in the spotlight was the reverent glaring of a girl of six regarding the roundly handsome mustachioed, face of a radiating young Dragoon patrol officer, having never seen combat himself in Armiens-- a fate to which he saw assigned the men who marched in his wake: pasty white, both eyes forward, dead, capped in fetching bearskin. Later, a young boy and his obvious demimonde mother's turn at concocting demigods to the tune of forty young cavalrymen gliding atop black bicycles--toys on review! In sometimes dizzying pangs, the eyes of others and the one he had left to witness them confirmed that his physical appearance couldn't show the depth of his wounds, it needed extracting from him. But why be serious? The War was over and the solution to the riddle presented by the veteran's appearance was thus paradoxically barred to children, the only recipient for whom his scars were designed.
The forest sighed through the crowd and the veteran flipped his collar, burying his head into his chest, while keeping his eye on the red of the pole. The world expanded, like drapery then cascaded back down as the gale passed.

A wooden framework surrounded an outlet from the cave and as we opened it we were treated to a great expanse of the Afghan mountain-scape, from a high vantage. The ten-or-so marines with which we were embedded, kept talking of a large movement of personnel that scouts and UAV's had observed and radio'ed into them. Our guide, a white haired, Indian looking and sounding wise-man sat quietly between their nervous ranks intermittently conversing with his assistant, our translator, as well as a plucky, bright-faced young television journalist. A rocky, natural out ridge served as the apparent path up to this wooden facade; a deck and several log beams and broken planks that nested between them, clods of rock and wild-flowers creeping up out of their gaps gave the location a decidedly ancient-Buddhist flavor; it evoked a time before Islam. Some of the soldiers perched from the edge of the deck began firing down into the valley at several clearly deleneated figures running back and fourth. I covered my mouth as the group voted to pursue these sporadic figures down below. It was decided that we would stay behind, the translator was given an M-16 and the journalist a handgun. As they snaked their way down the path we saw flashes of light from their guns like little lightning-bugs, and their poses and shadows were etched nightmarishly on the walls around them like huge caricatures of fright. Finally we glimpsed their small battle with a tribe of Taliban at the base of the mountain. Some had already fallen, and some were falling in the skirmish now. A cloud of dust soon enveloped their fast, bug-like movements and they had disappeared. The T.V. journalist was busy behind me, and as I looked back he was bare-chested, ripping the sleeve off his white undershirt and tying it to a long strip of a wooden plank which he had broken off. Our wise-man sherpa began adjusting the red-lit dials on a short wave radio, his hands slow and patient. Suddenly we heard cries of agony, a moment later arabic dancing music, and then silence again. His face was leather, frozen in a sort of amused countenance; he was not afraid of death. The dark haired, serious looking translator snatched up the machine gun as we heard the sound of falling rocks not too far down the trail.

A long night

When the pregnant woman stood up from the milk-bath she told me that it would be easier when she went into labor to be lubricated in such a way as to ease the passing of the infant at the canal. She had been a black woman that had sat next to me as professor Richard explained 'le raison d'etre' regarding the logic behind giving Finance students several levels of calculus during their matriculation. A fart had brought my attention to her--I did not notice it being emitted, but as soon as I had smelt it we were playing footsie at each other's loins. I was then lost in the engineering building trying to find classrooms off concrete dust spilling cliffs and empty warrens.

Once I was infected with the virus the other contagious persons who, for whatever reason, had joined each other in wearing all-black, informed me that it was my duty to execute the remaining members of my squad, in a ploy designed to prove loyalty to their cause. I looked at my teeth in the mirror and at will I could change their shape to my liking. Two of them were on the second floor spa-room which overlooked my doomed ex-partners in the courtyard. A small afro sporting black child was sitting terrified as we watched the water in his large placid jacuzzi rush from clear to black--a frightful thrashing ensued, akin to observing a dying snail.

I was sent running at the invitation of (professor) Richard and his wife--I ran so fast, and at such an angle that my speed was the result of a churning motion with the toes of my feet, like climbing a ladder. I was apparently unexpected--the furrowed brow of Richard's wife being my tip-off. I tend to land in this situation often--the reticent host, and me the clueless guest. Was it my physical appearance that lent itself to this constant ridicule?