Free MySpace layouts - Wix.com

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz9F6l9ouC4

binding *
disparaging *
swept*
conditions*
comment *
overheard *
nighttime *

I stepped out of the subway station in those moments between daylight, twilight, and nighttime.  I stood at the top of the staircase to get my bearings before moving forward into the dark shadows the high rise building lining Market Street cast.  A sharp jolt to my back made me start as a young man wearing a ski cap and dungarees pushed past me onto the sidewalk.

Immediately, I knew the kid's story.  He was late, rushing from art school to his job parking cars at a fancy restaurant in the Castro.  He seethed nightly at the haughty insults and disparaging remarks he got from the businessmen and trendy club kids who saw a valet as something slightly less valuable than an empty can of Red Bull.  His art reflected this anger, poured out in bright reds and blues and chartreuses onto his canvases.  He had lost more than a couple of girls eager to see his paintings when they felt unsettled by the depth of emotion in that artwork.

This city street is my canvas.  It's where I find characters to fill my stories as I make snap judgments about a person's life from the few seconds I experience him or her in public. The end of the business day is prime feeding time for my character craving.

Walking forward now past the steam rising from the grate in the sidewalk, I glanced at the transient finding a place to put his bedding.  He's in his late 40's with a scraggly beard, a dark jacket that might have once been elegant years before it ended up in the Salvation Army thrift store, and a hat set at either a jaunty or haphazard angle on his head.  It's that attitude with the hat that pegs this fellow for me.  It wasn't that many months ago that people treated him with respect.  He had a wife, a family, and a good job selling sub-prime mortgages to people who couldn't really afford to buy a house.  He did what his bosses told him, came home every night to his cheating wife, and indulged the kids with just the right piece of electronic gadgetry.  Then you can fill in the story from there.  The market collapsed.  The drinking started to get more intense.  The wife took the kids and moved back to Topeka.  He lived in his car for a while before selling that for booze.  Now he's getting settled in for the night, unrolling his filthy blankets from their bindings and trying to avert eyes that know the meaning of real fear.

I looked to the left as a whirlwind in red swept past.  This woman was dressed for the opening of the design market from her petite white strapped shoes to the green scarf trailing from her neck.  The rest of the vision was red, indeed more than just red.  Her top was a patchwork of burgundy, maroon, vermillion with a dash of crimson.  Perhaps the get up was a tribute to her radical past.  Now she works as a buyer at the furniture market on 9th street but she first arrived in San Francisco during the Summer of Love as an organizer for Abbie Hoffman's Yippies.  She thought she was coming to sunny San Francisco so the 19-year old version of my apparition dressed for the beach.  She doesn't make that mistake anymore in the freezing conditions of mid-July.  She gave up on the revolution at about the same time that Johnny got the big inheritance if only he would cut his hair and become an investment banker.  It wasn't long after that that she gave up on men in general.

I had barely made it a block and already I had three characters ready for my stories.  I wedged my way into the backdoor of a passing trolley car and started to make notes.  I was just starting into the transient when I overheard a comment from the next row.  Most of the people sitting on the surrounding benches seemed oblivious but perhaps that's because the remark was in Russian.  I sat back and pondered what I had heard as I stared out the window at Lotta’s Fountain sliding past.  That's when I knew what my next plot twist would be.

I can't tell you how excited I remain about the new Shadows Fall album (look the old fart said "album") due out next Tuesday, April 2nd.

So what the heck am I going to do that day?  Well, since I already paid for the pre-order, I will likely rush to the mailbox and hope it's there. 

If not, as is likely, then I will probably donate more money to Brian, Jon, Matt, Jason et al by downloading it off iTunes.  All since my deadbeat friends weren't able to get me a pirated pre-release! fuckers hahaha

I can't fucking wait either way.

Shields

Robert Anton Wilson Meme-orial - Christina Pearson



Add to My Profile | More Videos

Complex *
Fading *
Clashes *
Dressed *
Portray *
Winds *
Cutting *


"Do you really think I have a complex?" our mother looked up at her children assembled at the foot of her ornate brass bed.  Twenty years later the same red canopy still hangs over that bed, the frills around its edges now starting to fray.

This was back in the day when psychologists like my youngest brother Rick routinely spouted pop psych words like "complex."  "Relevant" was also big back then.

"No Ma," I tried to keep the impatience from my voice, "the doctor says you have a compound hip fracture and part of your therapy must include complex vitamins."

"Oh, okay Frank, whatever you say,"  with that Amanda Gayle Bissett Throckmorton lay her head back on the silk pillow and fell asleep.

"She thinks you're daddy," my youngest sister Sarah gripped tighter at the white dress shirt sleeve that covered my right forearm.

"Her delusions are hardly relevant to the problem at hand,"  Rick stroked his prematurely graying goatee, his deep black whiskers fading into the paleness of age, as if he were Sigmund P Christ himself.

"Shh," Sarah hissed at Rick, "she can hear you."

"The old bat's passed out and she hasn't been able to hear a thing without her Belltone for years anyway."

"That's enough, Ricky," I looked him straight in the eye.  My little brother stood as if preparing for a fight, then his shoulders sagged and he collapsed into the Louis XV armchair our father had brought back from one of his buying trips to Istanbul.

I'll always remember the day that chair arrived.  I was only eight but I can still feel the cold winds in my bones as I trudged up the hill home from school.  My heart sank when I saw the moving van in front of our house.  Papa Frank had been gone for almost a month and I was sure this meant we had to leave his house for good.  

"Hey, it's awfully early for you to get home, you better not be cutting class," I jumped since at first I couldn't figure out where the voice came from.   Then out popped Papa Frank from behind the giant moving box.  He was dressed in full Tyrolean outfit complete with lederhosen not that I knew what those were then.  He just looked silly.

I hugged him and then whispered in his ear, "I knew you would come home to us."

"Of course," and with that he hoisted me on his shoulders and led me into the house right behind the workman carrying the big box.  
"Where are we going to put this thing?" Ma had her hands on her hips staring in mock disgust at our stepfather.  "And the color is hideous.  It clashes with the wallpaper."

"We'll get new wallpaper, sweet pea," Papa Frank had that twinkle in his eye as he looked at Ma.  It wasn't until many years later that I learned what that meant.

"Earth to Big Brother," Rick was taunting now from that chair, his excess weight causing the fragile piece of period furniture to creak slightly.  "Where the hell have you been?"

I snapped back to that tunnel of reality and focused on Ma asleep on the bed she loved so much and thought about the ungrateful jerk now sitting in what had become her favorite chair.

"I don't know why anyone pays you $125 an hour for your bloated self opinions," I thought but didn't say to my little brother.

Instead I said, "if you want to portray a real member of this family, get down on your knees with his and pray for your sainted mother."

Explore
Water *
Freshest *
Flourishing *
Secrets *
Restaurants *
Lively *

            "That horse has always had a lively gait," I could scarcely make out Julia's remark over the clatter of horseshoes on the cobblestone street. 

            "Just like you," Perhaps I should have said this louder since any response was lost in the clouds of Julia's red hair flowing behind her.  As we both reached the edge of the sand dunes that obscure the beach from the town's infrequent visitors, our horses accelerated together into an easy trot.

            Suddenly my mind flashed to that day in these same dunes.  The day that changed us all forever.  We were both twelve that day and I was as obsessed with Julia's flowing locks then as I remain today.  My love, no at the time it was my infatuation, was in its infancy.  It was only years later, after we had both come to terms with that day in the dunes, that we allowed any of our secrets to come out.  We couldn't risk anyone knowing that the friendship we maintained to the world hid a flourishing love affair that transcended sex or romance or even death.
            My mind snapped back to the present as Julia squeezed her mare's flanks ever so slightly prompting the horse to move into a canter.  My mount didn't wait for me before matching the pace.  Now the dunes were passing more quickly on my right while the ocean's water dampened more sand as high tide approached to the west.
            We were getting closer to the spot where we found it that day.  It's a spot to which I had never returned despite the prodding of those shrinks my mother hired to make me better.  I turned my head back toward the ocean willing the spot to recede physically as I had tried for all those years to make it do from my memories.
            I urged my horse on but instead the animal slowed.  I turned to see Julia dismounting right at the base of that dune.  My mind screamed "no" but my legs followed the same command my horse had followed.
            As I walked in a daze following Julia to the base of the dune, suddenly the sounds and odors of that day came rushing back to me.  I smelled rotting fish mixed with the mesquite barbeque wafting from Terry's Grill, just one of several restaurants lining Willow Street on the far side of the dunes.  That smell marked the bridge between the world everyone else thinks they know and the one we experienced that day on the dune.
            Suddenly time merged for me.  My 50-year old legs were carrying the torso of a 12-year old boy up these dunes.  That is by far the freshest those memories have ever been for me.  Why was Julia doing this to me?  Why was my body following her, again?
            I may never know.  Maybe somewhere, if someone braver than I were to explore the depths of my memories, the terrors of my conscience, he or she might find answers to what we did that day on the dune as children and why I don't remember killing Julia at the same spot, all these years later.