S.D., Halloween, 2007
Sean Dungan is a Los Angeles based writer, photographer, and a distinguished local in the world around this blog. I first came to know Sean years ago as one of LA's best and most revered artist/ photographers. I knew he wrote fiction because it had been highly praised to me by some of LA's top writers including Benjamin Weissman, Amy Gerstler, and others, but I hadn't read his writing until his first book Unwelcomeness was issued late last year by Nothing Moments, a fascinating publishing project instigated by the artist Steven Hull which is detailed just below. It's a total understatement to say I was incredibly impressed by his written work, which I think is among the very best fiction to have come out of Los Angeles in quite a while, and I want to share five selections from Unwelcomeness with the readers of this blog -- a few of the stories crowned with aerial shots/maps of the real locations where the stories take place -- as well as show you a small collection of some of Sean's photography work. Needless to say, Unwelcomeness is highly recommended, and it can be ordered by clicking this.'Nothing Moments is the newest project of artist Steven Hull, who has teamed up with Tami Demaree, Annie Buckley, and Jon Sueda for this most ambitious of Hull's projects to date. With nearly one hundred participating writers, artists, and designers, Nothing Moments embraces the disparate fields of visual art, literature, and design.
'Nothing Moments consists of twenty-three limited edition books and more than four hundred original drawings. The project expands on the relay-inspired process Hull has explored in previous projects, whereby the work of one artist is responded to and expanded on by another. In Nothing Moments, each book begins with a fiction text authored by a contributing writer. This text is then passed to a contributing artist who makes drawings in response to the story. Finally, the text and art are given to a designer who creates a unique design. The resulting books emphasize a fusion of writing, visual art, and design, inverting the traditional foregrounding of text over art in the book format.
'Some of the writers and artists with books published in the Nothing Moments project are Ben Ehrenreich, Andrea Bowers, Benjamin Weissman, Amy Gerstler, Jim Krusoe, Dani Tull, Amy Bender, Simon Leung, Lynne Tillman, Rachel Kushner, Glen Ligon, and many others. All the books in the series can be seen and ordered both singly and as a group by clicking this.'
NUMBER ONE NEARS the END
Adams was badly wounded and laid out on a pile of blankets on the ground when the stranger hiked unannounced into his camp. He was in the middle of deliberations with himself over whether to get up and walk until he passed out, or just stay were he was until something came along and ate him. For some number of days, he spent his time fingering the wound edges along his arm, gazing up into the tree canopy, losing and regaining consciousness. His small stock of dried venison had developed a disagreeable coppery flavor, and the strength to chew it was leaving him, but so was his appetite, so he decided that everything was counterpoised. The pain was almost ignorable, like the tickling sensation of the huge and glossy black ants walking over his lips and fingers. His arm throbbed somewhere in the distance.
----On perhaps the fourth morning of this, he heard heavy boots marching toward him through the underbrush. He gripped his Colt and waited. The intruder looked to be about six feet tall, 180 pounds, and from the way he walked on his right foot, Adams surmised that he had either a nail in the sole or a very serious plantar wart. His beard was long and matted, as was his hair, and his outfit was torn, but he carried a relatively new rifle and had a pistol in his belt. The skin of his arms was an unnatural bronze color, the same color as his hair. Adams slowly lifted the Colt with his good arm and drew a bead on the stranger’s face. The only part visible was an eye, the rest of his features obscured by beard hair, so Adams aimed somewhere into the thatch. If the intruder was stupid enough to pick a fight with him, then he planned on blowing part of his face off as an opening instead of killing him quickly.
----Adams tried to yell, but it came out as a wheeze.
----“If you like walking and breathing and shitting, you’ll stop right there and lay your weapons on the ground, be-cause Number One says you could die at any second.”
----Adams always called himself Number One. Everyone else was Number Two. If you crossed him seriously enough, before shooting, stabbing or clubbing you, or at least making you run away with no clothes, he’d say “You’re Number Two. Fuck off back to your shithole.”
----The intruder seemed impressed in spite of the command’s weak delivery and he slowly set the rifle, two pistols and three knives of various lengths on the ground. Then he pulled down his buckskins and unstrapped from his thigh what looked to be a short bladed sword. He told Adams that his name was Shasta, and that he’d been hiking down from his home in Idaho along the Emigrant Trail alone, seeking his fortune.
----“How old are you, twenty?” asked Adams.
----“Seventeen,” said Shasta.
----“You look just like me, only seventeen,” said Adams.
----“I know who you are,” said Shasta. “You’re Grizzly Adams, the famous bear-wrestler.”
----“Listen man,” said Adams, “No one calls me that. No one calls me Grizzly or Griz or Little Griz. My name’s John, and you can call me Mr. Adams, or Sir, or if you ever write anything about me, such as a biography or pulp novel, you may refer to me by my initials, JCA. The nicknames are embarrassing.”
----“I can’t write or read,” said Shasta.
----“Nonetheless,” said Adams.
----“Understood,” Shasta replied.
----Adams was an old man, and had recently returned to the wilderness of California to try to relive a bit more of the free mountaineering lifestyle before he died. In years past, he’s parlayed his supernatural wildlife skills into a sizable business, selling and trading bears, elk, cougars, wolves, deer and creatures Adams referred to as Black Hyena Bears. Alive or dead, he sold them first to local Indian villages, and then to white settlements, for ring fights and meat. He became a gifted animal trainer, so gifted it was spooky. Sometimes he scared himself when a bear looked him in the eyes and seemed to talk to him directly in his brain. After a questionable partnership with a famous circus promoter in New York, who robbed him and traded on his name, he finally realized how exhausted he was. He sold everything at a loss to the circus, left his wife, and rode a horse back across the country to the mountains of his youth in order to die in some kind of peace.
----“As you can see,” said Adams, “something tore up my arm.”
----Shasta pulled his pants up and sat across from Adams, Indian-style. Adams asked him to pour cold water on his wounds, which was the only treatment he would allow himself.
----“It looks bad from here,” said Shasta. “It’s like an anatomy lesson.”
----Adams had fought to the death a particularly vicious mother wolf with nothing but a small knife. He was not, as a rule, looking to tangle with man-eating creatures any more. Though he thought himself as tough as ever, he could sense that his reaction times were not as lightning-fast as they once were, as if he were growing foggy around the edges, with the center still clear. He was not as in touch with his surroundings as he once was, and no longer as quick, either.
----“These stovepipe legs of mine,” he said.
----The wolf had torn up his left forearm after he stumbled into the middle of the dinner she was sharing with her two cubs, each of which seemed to be about the size that she was, though it was hard to tell due to the fading light in the pine trees. All he saw were grey and white blurs. They were eating a deer, slightly rotten, and he knew that he should have smelled it before he was standing in it. He raised his arm to shield his face and the she-wolf tore through it, attempting to break it off. He managed to stab both cubs, then the mother. The pain in his arm, he knew, was amazing, but he couldn’t feel it. He was coated in blood and twigs. He passed out and dreamed some kind of continuation of recent events in which the screams of the wolves kept on screaming as he bled to death from his shredded arm arteries.
----“God damn,” said Shasta. “How did you stop it from bleeding?”
----“The second cub covered my arm with mud and spit. He wasn’t dead, just stabbed. I couldn’t move, and he made about twenty trips to a nearby creek. Before he went away, he looked at me and said, may you recover in a timely way.” “Hmm,” said Shasta. He bent forward to examine the gash in detail. It was bright red and black, with some crust of mud still adhered to certain areas of muscle tissue. It smelled like cheese. He poured more water on it.
----“If you were not my absolute hero and role model,” said Shasta, “I would be herewith convinced that you are fucking out of your tree.”
----“Listen up, whelp,” said Adams. “You are now reminding me of my father, who was an ignorant shoemaker, and an asshole. You kind of look like Dad, and it’s angering me. He never believed what I told him either. His way of showing affection was to increase the beating and fondling sessions from weekly to several times a day. He tried to turn me into a shoemaker too, even though I told him I thought making shoes was stupid, and that he was stupid. He’s how I got to be so invincible in spite of my small size. It’s the one gift that he gave me. Invincibility. Pain stopped bothering me. The ability to speak with animals came from a bunch of witches that I moved in with when I ran away from home. They lived next to a little pond, about a mile from my house, called the Dingle Hole. Everyone in town knew the place was haunted, perhaps by Satan himself, and stayed away from the whole area, so naturally that’s the first place I went. They had a tent and I slept in the bushes adjacent. There were five witches, occasionally more, and they all looked the same and gave me lots of hugs and too much food, mostly trout and squirrel. Contrary to popular belief, witches are nurturing caregivers. Every Saturday a man would arrive with no head. He walked up out of the pond and fucked all the witches at once, in a big writhing ball, like snakes. I watched. At night fiery orbs of light floated over the surface of the pond.”
----“Shit,” said Shasta.
----“Okay,” said Adams. “If you’re my father returned to me from the grave to torment me in my state of weakness, then what you’re going to do at any moment is punch me in the head so that I’m off my guard, and then move on to some molestation. Maybe we should get it over with.”
----“If I’m your father,” said Shasta, “it’s news to me.”
----There was a moment of silence, and Adams’ mind drifted, and he recalled a time during his heyday when he and a few associates had narrowly missed killing or bagging the strangest animal he had ever seen. It looked like a giant hedgehog with the head and feet of a bear. Adams was well ahead of the other hunters when he caught sight of the strange animal, and he decided to take it on by hand, so that he could get a better impression of how it would behave. When he charged up to it on foot, knife drawn, it raised its head from the muddy hole it was digging with its nose and claws and lifted up along its spine some short, porcupine-style quills. He hesitated, just for a moment, and the creature dematerialized into the underbrush through a puncture hole of shredded branches.
----Adams rallied his companions and they gave chase into the trees. The animal was easy to track due to the trail of destroyed foliage that it left in its wake. The men were quickly forced to leave their mounts behind because of the density of the vegetation and some big granite outcroppings, so they ran, Adams in the lead, trying to catch up. Unexpectedly, at the bottom of a hill, Adams looked up and through the trees saw the animal above them, breathing heavily, tongue out, looking back at them.
----“That’s a fucking coyote, you cock,” said a scrappy hunter named Redding. “You said it was some kind of monster.”
----Adams ignored him, transfixed on what seemed to be their quarry. It appeared to be getting bigger, walking its front legs up a tree trunk. It was stretching itself, but it was also shedding its fur at an amazing rate, the hairs falling around it like a heavy grey vapor.
----“What in the name of Jesus,” said another party member, “is wrong with that dog?”
----Then, there was a naked man standing in its place, teenaged, skinny, shivering.
----“A caterpillar,” someone said.
----Adams felt his vision going dark.
----“You are going to die,” said some one else, the voice very close.
----“You’re in my personal space, asshole,” said Adams. Some-one was feeding him carrion, the rotten deer. He opened his eyes.
----There was the stranger’s face, framed by trees.
----“Shasta,” Adams mumbled. “What the hell are you doing, still here? Get lost.”
----“You need nutrition,” said Shasta. He was forcing Adams’ own swollen arm into his mouth, and the vinegary flavor of sick blood flooded his tongue. The arm was bloated, the skin stretched tight.
----“The infection has spread throughout your body, into your eyes and brain,” said Shasta. “That’s obvious.”
----“Fine,” said Adams, and lost consciousness.
________________________
5 photographs
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PURITY
I am solid of stature, yet built to be swift, qualities I regularly display. I have a well-formed skull underneath which hangs a face that is like a wide, friendly wall, ready to converse, or explore, for example, you, with my long, prehensile tongue. I am a man of mottos. Mottos are thoughts reduced to their purest form, short sentences. I like to say that I believe that if you can’t sell it, then you should bury it in the ground and see if anything grows from it, or dig it up later and see if it rotted itself into soil, or changed into alcohol. This is a motto which can be applied to most things. Comparisons with inanimate objects are often favorably applied to people. I’m like a bilge pump, because I have the know-how and intelligence to get myself out of sticky situations, and in uncomfortable moments during which I am at a loss for how to extricate myself, I can switch on the reserve resourcefulness and evacuate the unwanted ocean water weighing down my craft. I have reasons enough to continue, in whatever sense you can think of, and they are none of your business, or they will be if I choose to tell you. I am a free, but grounded, spirit; because my essence has one foot buried in the concrete of life’s ass-kicking lessons, the ones that destroy your psyche and then leave you alone to rebuild it yourself. The concrete of the foundation of the school brutality. My spirit is free not like the spirits of hippies or others but free like an invisible bird, eating mice undetected by the about-to-be-eaten mice or other animals. It’s pure, as in undiluted, free of extraneousness. I am, almost above all, positive. Like an unstable element shedding electrons, positive thinking is liberated from my mind at any and all times because I can’t contain it within my skull. I could sell paper to a forest. I wouldn’t actually care if you wanted to buy my paper or not, which paper being a metaphor for my endless love; I’d just want the opportunity to demonstrate the product for you, and then you could fuck off if you liked. You could go back to your boring chore-life and I’d go back to my chalet of excellent soaring accomplishment. Nothing would give me greater satisfaction at any moment. I often feel tingly. I am an obelisk of enigmatic attraction. I present a pleasing array of challenges and rewards to my superiors, not the other way around. I believe that you can have efficiency, you can have a lack of suckiness, or you can have abundance, but you can never have all three at the same time. If I love you, this means that you are part of me, which means I own you, like I own my liver or fingernails. Even if we never actually speak, or see each other except via webcam or something, as if one of us were an animal who was only dimly aware of feelings of the other, loving one. I believe in the act of passionate love whenever possible between two or more consenting adults of whichever sex, or species, of your choosing. I believe that sex with animals is noble, as long as you are not hurting them, and mutual pleasure is of course that much more ennobling. I believe there is purity in love between species. If you’ve ever gazed into the eyes of a member of another species, maybe especially a mammal, but not necessarily, and felt a surge of recognition, seen something there besides blank functionality, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. I believe that dreams are important or unique metaphoric windows into our lives, or our thoughts, which are in fact our lives, through which we can discern our secret inner processes and feelings, which might be secrets from ourselves as well as other people. I was the gas-meter reader, but there was no gas to turn the dials, so therefore I was consistently disappointed. I was driving an old Volkswagen microbus over a very long bridge, sort of like the Dumbarton Bridge in San Jose, except over land instead of water, and it didn’t charge a toll, though the bridge I was driving over looked a lot like the Dumbarton Bridge as it appears in the movie Harold and Maude, before it was replaced with its new six-lane version. Below us (the van and I, the van was my love in disguise) we could see an evil Sasquatch-type creature throwing severed heads at us, some of which connected with the sides of the van, making dents in it, because they were thrown with such force, which means that my love was getting injured, or at least was in danger of getting dented. I believe that human-animal hybrids, such as the Sasquatch, are a noble scientific goal to aim for, because the Sasquatch, as a mythical being, is pure, like wax, which exists in many versions in the natural world but is best exemplified by honeybee-secreted wax, which is sweet-smelling and useful. I am what I would refer to as the entire ball of wax. That could be taken in a positive light and also seen as a criticism, depending on your view of wax. I mean it positively. I mean to say that I am complete, lacking nothing. Interspecies love with most kinds of whales might be difficult, because of differences in scale between whales and humans, but you could strike up a relationship with a dolphin, as has been done: a British woman recently married a dolphin named Cindy. Cindy’s penis is long, pink and tapered, slightly s-shaped, ending in a pointy tip. It would be almost impossible for Sharon and Cindy to actually share reproductive-style intimacy, because of the aforementioned scale differences. I believe that an individual is or should be free to marry whoever or whatever he or she wants to marry, including all members of the animal kingdom, and also inanimate objects. You could wed a subterranean fungus, or a colony of bacteria. You could marry a rock, all the while knowing, as most people would not know, that there are actually thousands of bacteria living inside the rock, and in fact you are married to those, or both things. This would be an example of the purest form of romantic relationship, due to the fact that it would also be the simplest. I believe that innovative thoughts such as these are created in my brain, which contains its own ecosystem of bacteria, like the flora in our intestines, living in a symbiotic relationship with human tissue, and it’s also true that cooperation between these microorganisms and your brain launches thoughts and ideas. Mottos are created in this way too, since they are also ideas. Perhaps I’m lucky, but I ended up with some really good bacteria. Like a glass of ocean water, I am complex and densely populated, undiluted, yet transparent. You might wonder about how people come by these networks of bacteria in the first place, like, where do babies get theirs? The answer is that bacteria transfer happens in the womb, which means that all of your starter-colonies come from your mother, and none from your father. Later on in life, these infant colonies can become corrupted by foreign, hostile microbes, but in the beginning they are pure, and some among us, for example myself, have learned to preserve purity indefinitely, or at least until death.
I am solid of stature, yet built to be swift, qualities I regularly display. I have a well-formed skull underneath which hangs a face that is like a wide, friendly wall, ready to converse, or explore, for example, you, with my long, prehensile tongue. I am a man of mottos. Mottos are thoughts reduced to their purest form, short sentences. I like to say that I believe that if you can’t sell it, then you should bury it in the ground and see if anything grows from it, or dig it up later and see if it rotted itself into soil, or changed into alcohol. This is a motto which can be applied to most things. Comparisons with inanimate objects are often favorably applied to people. I’m like a bilge pump, because I have the know-how and intelligence to get myself out of sticky situations, and in uncomfortable moments during which I am at a loss for how to extricate myself, I can switch on the reserve resourcefulness and evacuate the unwanted ocean water weighing down my craft. I have reasons enough to continue, in whatever sense you can think of, and they are none of your business, or they will be if I choose to tell you. I am a free, but grounded, spirit; because my essence has one foot buried in the concrete of life’s ass-kicking lessons, the ones that destroy your psyche and then leave you alone to rebuild it yourself. The concrete of the foundation of the school brutality. My spirit is free not like the spirits of hippies or others but free like an invisible bird, eating mice undetected by the about-to-be-eaten mice or other animals. It’s pure, as in undiluted, free of extraneousness. I am, almost above all, positive. Like an unstable element shedding electrons, positive thinking is liberated from my mind at any and all times because I can’t contain it within my skull. I could sell paper to a forest. I wouldn’t actually care if you wanted to buy my paper or not, which paper being a metaphor for my endless love; I’d just want the opportunity to demonstrate the product for you, and then you could fuck off if you liked. You could go back to your boring chore-life and I’d go back to my chalet of excellent soaring accomplishment. Nothing would give me greater satisfaction at any moment. I often feel tingly. I am an obelisk of enigmatic attraction. I present a pleasing array of challenges and rewards to my superiors, not the other way around. I believe that you can have efficiency, you can have a lack of suckiness, or you can have abundance, but you can never have all three at the same time. If I love you, this means that you are part of me, which means I own you, like I own my liver or fingernails. Even if we never actually speak, or see each other except via webcam or something, as if one of us were an animal who was only dimly aware of feelings of the other, loving one. I believe in the act of passionate love whenever possible between two or more consenting adults of whichever sex, or species, of your choosing. I believe that sex with animals is noble, as long as you are not hurting them, and mutual pleasure is of course that much more ennobling. I believe there is purity in love between species. If you’ve ever gazed into the eyes of a member of another species, maybe especially a mammal, but not necessarily, and felt a surge of recognition, seen something there besides blank functionality, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. I believe that dreams are important or unique metaphoric windows into our lives, or our thoughts, which are in fact our lives, through which we can discern our secret inner processes and feelings, which might be secrets from ourselves as well as other people. I was the gas-meter reader, but there was no gas to turn the dials, so therefore I was consistently disappointed. I was driving an old Volkswagen microbus over a very long bridge, sort of like the Dumbarton Bridge in San Jose, except over land instead of water, and it didn’t charge a toll, though the bridge I was driving over looked a lot like the Dumbarton Bridge as it appears in the movie Harold and Maude, before it was replaced with its new six-lane version. Below us (the van and I, the van was my love in disguise) we could see an evil Sasquatch-type creature throwing severed heads at us, some of which connected with the sides of the van, making dents in it, because they were thrown with such force, which means that my love was getting injured, or at least was in danger of getting dented. I believe that human-animal hybrids, such as the Sasquatch, are a noble scientific goal to aim for, because the Sasquatch, as a mythical being, is pure, like wax, which exists in many versions in the natural world but is best exemplified by honeybee-secreted wax, which is sweet-smelling and useful. I am what I would refer to as the entire ball of wax. That could be taken in a positive light and also seen as a criticism, depending on your view of wax. I mean it positively. I mean to say that I am complete, lacking nothing. Interspecies love with most kinds of whales might be difficult, because of differences in scale between whales and humans, but you could strike up a relationship with a dolphin, as has been done: a British woman recently married a dolphin named Cindy. Cindy’s penis is long, pink and tapered, slightly s-shaped, ending in a pointy tip. It would be almost impossible for Sharon and Cindy to actually share reproductive-style intimacy, because of the aforementioned scale differences. I believe that an individual is or should be free to marry whoever or whatever he or she wants to marry, including all members of the animal kingdom, and also inanimate objects. You could wed a subterranean fungus, or a colony of bacteria. You could marry a rock, all the while knowing, as most people would not know, that there are actually thousands of bacteria living inside the rock, and in fact you are married to those, or both things. This would be an example of the purest form of romantic relationship, due to the fact that it would also be the simplest. I believe that innovative thoughts such as these are created in my brain, which contains its own ecosystem of bacteria, like the flora in our intestines, living in a symbiotic relationship with human tissue, and it’s also true that cooperation between these microorganisms and your brain launches thoughts and ideas. Mottos are created in this way too, since they are also ideas. Perhaps I’m lucky, but I ended up with some really good bacteria. Like a glass of ocean water, I am complex and densely populated, undiluted, yet transparent. You might wonder about how people come by these networks of bacteria in the first place, like, where do babies get theirs? The answer is that bacteria transfer happens in the womb, which means that all of your starter-colonies come from your mother, and none from your father. Later on in life, these infant colonies can become corrupted by foreign, hostile microbes, but in the beginning they are pure, and some among us, for example myself, have learned to preserve purity indefinitely, or at least until death.
________________________
SKI CLUB
The sport of skiing is really a club that rewards its most talented members with opportunities to get laid. I keep waiting for it to happen to me, this particular benefit of membership, but so far it’s been just skiing and no fucking. I have seen lots of skiing girls around, but the best ones are on the ski patrol. They are tanned as if by solar oven and they have blond hair that looks wind-blown and unwashed and they are all business. Which does not mean that they won’t smile, perhaps at you, but these smiles are really signals and are rare, at least for one such as myself, who is, let’s be honest, barely an initiate, practically a microbe. When such a smile happens it can mean many, many things, depending on its shape and intensity, and how many teeth are displayed. The kind of smile you really want to see is the closed-lip smile, with narrowed mountain-lion eyes, because this means that the smiler has chosen you as a sexual partner. You have achieved the highest level of score if you get one of these from a ski patrol chick. They wear evil red and black jumpsuits and they save unfortunates from suffocating in the snow after they’ve crashed and gotten buried, by grabbing them by the back of the neck or pulling them out with their teeth. On the back of the jumpsuit is usually a big white equilateral cross, which is the symbol of their coven. One of them was my ski instructor when I was a younger life form. Nancy, said her patch, which was directly over her left boob. I could tell that she thought that I was only cute, like in a protector sort of way, by which I mean she saw me as something to care for, like a puppy, not to fuck, like a male sex partner. I can imagine that being at the intersection of Ski Patrol chick’s care urge and her fuck urge would be maybe overwhelming. Even though I ripped and gave her a pink Giant Chewy Sweet Tart, only puppy-level status. The ski patrol girls hang around in groups and sometimes with the ski patrol guys, but are outnumbered by the guys and therefore are forced to kick a lot more ass, but they do it in an offhand way, like they are not trying to kick more ass. A ski patrol girl is hard and wiry underneath her layers of winter shell, and her legs are smooth, with a pleasing layer of fine down on top, like a dolphin’s hide plus an almost invisible fur coating. I keep trying to get in a gondola with one, but they seem to never ride the gondola. Some guys probably never end up getting laid, like I think Chris, who is, sadly, my friend, might not ever.
----I’m wearing my blue-and-black-checkered fleecy pullover, blue foamy ski pants with the zip up the back of the calf. This stupid kid started to make fun of my pullover this morning on the bus, but then I just pointed out that he was wearing one of those stupid caps with the two neck flaps that says Desert Dog on the front. He shut up. Once a sexually mature and knowledgeable youngish woman described for me what the act of fucking was like from her perspective. She said that it was like when you hold the veins in your neck and lean backwards until you pass out and fall over on your face. So I tried it, I grabbed the veins in my neck and held my breath and leaned back and blacked out, and I guess I had a seizure or something because I was told that I had been screaming and beating my fists against the floor, like in the movie Blade Runner when Harrison Ford finally kills Darryl Hannah, who is playing a death-dealing robotic punk rock chick; he shoots her and she falls over and starts banging her arms and legs against the floor and spinning around in circles because she’s so pissed-off that he’s killed her. When I woke up I had a busted nose from falling on it, and there was blood all over the place.
----I’ve got Diver Down in my Walkman. Van Halen is a good music choice because it shows that your tastes range freely into whatever area that they want to and are not bound by idiotic convention. I’ve got big fold-up headphones. I’ve got a reserve Giant Chewy Sweet Tart, which I am saving in case I run into a girl. The Giant Chewy Sweet Tart is the perfect thing to counter a you-are-chosen-by-me-to-be-my-fucking-partner-smile, at least for one such as me, because it is a fine offering to begin with, being mostly sugar, which can give you an extra burst of energy in an emergency, but two things complicate this practical usefulness. The first is that the Giant Chewy Sweet Tart is a piece of candy, which tells the receiver that I’m not afraid to admit that I know exactly who I am, an eater of oversized candy pucks. Which leads me to the second thing, its size, which is really big, and therefore formidable, and maybe a little intimidating.
----Diver Down is my favorite tape to ski to, and it ends up never leaving the Walkman. It actually got stuck in there not too long ago because an earwig had crawled in over night to hang out and then in the morning I put the tape in and smashed the earwig, whose squashed guts dried and made the tape stick to the inside of the Walkman. I got it out, but the rest of the dried earwig is still in there. I like to cue up the tape to the song called “Little Guitars,” so that the intro of the song starts right at the beginning of the run. I yell out Single at the chairlift line this time because I have lost Chris somewhere because he is a fucking dork and can’t ski any faster than an old lady. I end up sitting with some foreign lady encased in a hot pink puffy jacket and green stretch pants. She might be from Germany. The jacket is so bright that it makes the snow around her glow pink. She sits down next to me and looks over in my direction but I play it cool. I turn up the volume real loud and pretend that I am sitting by myself. I think she might be getting impressed by the way my skis say Head on them, I think she might be thinking dick head. I wonder if she thinks about dicks. She’s looking to be about my mom’s age. She seems to be vibrating, like she might be overwhelmed by my raw sexual potential and do something unbecoming while gripped by an uncontrollable middle-aged German female swoon. Her nose is kind of big, I can see it sticking into my peripheral vision. I’m trapped up here with her, many feet above the below-the-chairlift-powder. But I could jump and probably be okay. She smells sort of perfumy, like strong rotten flowers, and you can make out some serious B.O. underneath. There might be sweat beading up on her forehead.
----The song playing right now is “Hang ‘Em High,” which is an okay song but not the best on the tape. Eddie is such a kick-ass guitar player. I got in an argument this morning with Chris, who thinks that George Lynch, the guitar player from Dokken, is better, because he (Chris) is a fucking dork. The German lady just smiled at me, I must have been right about the dick head thing. She also said something in German that I couldn’t understand but from the context I can guess that it might translate to Hello, or, since many words in the Germanic tongue are condensed versions of complicated ideas, she could have meant something like You and I are both parts of the same continuum of matter, like air atoms, as if you were a swamp gas and I were a dust devil. So this being the case, let’s French kiss. She’s fishing around in her hot pink jacket for something, she’s probably going to yank out some kind of sausage and offer me some. Chris is always picking his nose and he smells bad. The ladies stay away from him, probably also because he won’t stop talking about George Lynch. I turn up my Walkman and Dave sings something like: He’s in a spangled net he’s headed for the moon hang ‘em high. Dave’s voice goes through some kind of echo box or something and you can’t really make out the words. Chris thinks it’s a song about getting laid, which only proves that he’s an asshole, because never in the song does Dave seem to be singing about getting laid or fucking or anything like that. I think the German lady has just inched a little closer to me. Chris would never be having this experience. His bad smell and nose-picking equals very little chick action. Even the middle-aged German ladies avoid him. Perhaps I should consider picking my nose in an attempt to dissuade her but I can’t bring myself to sink to Chris’s level of hopeless shitheadism. She’s messing around inside her parka, and I think she’s about to pull out a sausage. Maybe the offering of sausages is a female German pick-up. I think that a sausage and the Giant Chewy Sweet Tart would not make equitable offerings. I had a sausage plate once, and most of it was fine, various kinds of German-style sausages, cut into chunks, dippable in a cup of provided hardcore mustard, of which I am a fan, but there was one sausage variety which was dry and flaky, black, and tasted like a scab. I assumed that this was what is known as blood sausage. There is a bulge beneath her parka that is kind of sausage looking. The bulge is where there ought not to be a bulge. I can see that there are boob-bulges, big ones, where you would expect to find them, but the lump where her stomach is all wrong. I’ll bet that the sausage in there is a scabby blood sausage. I’m trying to ignore this whole situation. She looks like she might actually be a male, anyway, like maybe with a wig and a couple of cantaloupes duct-taped to her. Dave is singing something like: fearless he leaps out of bed one ear to the ground he’s listening to the dead. Sausage Lady has just put her arm up on the back of the chair lift so that her forearm is resting on my left shoulder. I get one glove off and start to fumble in my pocket for the Giant Chewy Sweet Tart. I am staring straight ahead, listening to the music. Then the lift stops and jerks us around a little. The German sausage lady and I swing backwards and forwards while bouncing up and down slightly. All the other chairs in front of us are doing the same thing that we are, bouncing, until I can’t see them anymore where they go over the top of a slope and disappear. My hand has left the Sweet Tart pocket now after failing to find the Sweet Tart but I haven’t zipped it back up again. I know that she is looking right at me now, it is not my imagination, and I can’t move, and Dave sings something that I can’t understand. And now she’s leaning over and sniffing me, and I’m still frozen, which seems totally pathetic and lame, being stuck here, unable to contribute to the situation. Her nose is smelling my neck area. It’s having the further effect on me of an extreme shiveryness. She gives me a tiny kiss on the cheek. She might be a man, there could be stubble involved in the kissing. Her mouth is covering mine completely, and I can feel some whiskers from her lip poking my nose. Somebody in the chair behind ours just yelled at us and is laughing. There is a flavor, or flavors, involved. My eyes could not be more closed, and in the darkness it seems like animated Hamburger Helper is trying to force its way into my face. And she’s goddamn strong for a lady. Whatever sausage-like thing that’s about where her stomach should be is pressed sideways up against me. Her boobs squish flat and cover my entire front, there is a tongue rubbing my teeth. Now Germany has ripped off my ski hat, and my head is bent sideways, and I can see she’s got a little brass tag hanging from a necklace visible through the front of her slightly unzipped parka that says PLEASE ALERT PHYSICIAN: I HAVE KIDNEY DISEASE. Her chest skin is pale and has freckles.
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5 photographs
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SUICIDE NOTE
What follows are the facts. At least I’m almost positive of their validity, and any resemblance to a complaint is purely coincidental. When reading the following information, please do not misunderstand and take what I say as any kind of complaint. I’m relatively happy, and the fact that I will have, by the time that you read this, killed myself, is another matter. Please trust me when I say this. And when I say almost positive, instead of not mentioning it at all and thereby implying that I know that the truth is represented, recollected or not, what I mean to say is this, in the spirit of honest communication: the details that follow, as I have recorded them, are recalled from memory (obviously), and may have been altered somewhat in storage. My hope is that they bear some resemblance to their former selves, and that you, the reader, may still be able to piece them together and extract the intended meaning. What I mean is this: events, etc. are short-lived things, and they should, as events, be happy with what they can get. Meaning: if a fact was to be resurrected, and the new body that it finds itself to inhabit is unfamiliar, even repulsive, to it, this fact should be grateful. It’s lucky to be seeing the light of day at all. Meaning: if, when recalled from the depths of my brain, translated from their poorly archived state as gobs of mucous and scrawled here in English, these facts are not quite what they once were, then that’s simply the way that things have to be. Also: He who dares to post his most personal death notes for anyone to see is probably not in the best of mental health. But I’ll trust that you, the reader, possess the basic logical equipment to figure it out.
----Nobody appreciates another human who happens to be complaining about themselves. Most of us, if granted immunity in the afterlife, would shoot a complainer on sight. Most of us would, after detecting the first hint of a whiner’s distinctive odor, grab whatever was within reach and begin stabbing. Just because therapists may lack the characteristic that triggers nausea in the rest of us when confronted with someone who is expressing self-pity, it does not follow that they enjoy their jobs. Because I appreciate this, I shall refrain. As I stated earlier, just the facts. My interest lies in you finishing my story. You, whoever you are. Almost unable to process this information, to make sense of it. But somehow you do, because you are sharp and intelligent. You tackle this strange and uninvited info, even after sleeping badly, crammed into an uncomfortable seated position. I want you to read it all quickly, barely pausing for breath, not leaving with the task half-accomplished. So: basic info only, unembellished. And maybe, via some unseen and romantic universe perhaps lying just beneath our own, underneath your feet, through this story my brain may touch you, and effect your life somehow, for the better or worse, why split hairs? Maybe beneath the marble tiles of this room, beneath the brown grout saturated with eons of urine and dirt and soot, maybe down there is a current that is still charged with my intent. Maybe it’s conducting itself up through the floor and into your feet as you read this, and your own body is being momentarily and in the subtlest of ways possessed by the echoes of my neurons firing. Maybe, in some sense, I am inside you right now, along for the ride. But let’s not dwell on this. If something like that could happen, it would be amazing enough. It might be worth your trouble.
----I imagine you at this point wanting to turn away, to flee; and so, in an effort to win you back, more interesting information:
----This very morning, here’s what happened: before I could make it over here to post my last words, before your arrival, and my end (somewhere else, in an undisclosed location), I had an entire morning schedule of things to accomplish in a ritualistic fashion. Which is to say that my every day is exactly the same, without exception, and so on, until I die, and this has been the state of my affairs for as long as I can recall. And even before I was born, some other person held my place for me, doing exactly the same things, performing the identical deeds, and when he died, I was just signing up for adulthood. And somewhere, at this very moment, another homunculus stumbles forward, ready to fill my shoes. So: this morning, quite early, in fact, I rose, by which I mean to say that I got out of bed, and put my feet into a pair of slippers. After moving my bowels, and showering very briefly, I dressed, warmed up a can of sausages, ate the contents, consumed coffee, and left my apartment. Meaning: like so many other humans, I readied myself for yet another day, handed out randomly from an infinite selection, and decamped. For reasons that space and time prevent me from discussing here, no radio or television or newspaper accompanied me on this exciting journey through the start of another day. Nothing but myself, my instincts, various smells, and a few Ice Age-style implements.
----And now, at this very moment, and I know this as surely as I know for a certainty that I am crouching here so that I may write: I have grabbed your attention, and you couldn’t stop reading if your life depended on it. You won’t stop even to pee and splash water on your face, which is what you might really like to do. But, where usually you would be feeling a sharp pain, your bladder sending you emergency signals, there is now only a distant throb, because all of your senses are working hard on my tale. Your intellect is busy cranking through its meanings and implications. And so: I won’t be much longer, I’ll wrap this up. I’ll stop. I’m almost done. A pause now, before my conclusion. I’m catching my breath. A moment of silence, perhaps only a second or two in duration, which, if I were here with you right now, you might take advantage of in order to attempt to talk me down. You might grab my shoulders, or slap me across the face, or plead with me, anything to save my life. Alas, I have robbed you of this opportunity. Please forgive me.
What follows are the facts. At least I’m almost positive of their validity, and any resemblance to a complaint is purely coincidental. When reading the following information, please do not misunderstand and take what I say as any kind of complaint. I’m relatively happy, and the fact that I will have, by the time that you read this, killed myself, is another matter. Please trust me when I say this. And when I say almost positive, instead of not mentioning it at all and thereby implying that I know that the truth is represented, recollected or not, what I mean to say is this, in the spirit of honest communication: the details that follow, as I have recorded them, are recalled from memory (obviously), and may have been altered somewhat in storage. My hope is that they bear some resemblance to their former selves, and that you, the reader, may still be able to piece them together and extract the intended meaning. What I mean is this: events, etc. are short-lived things, and they should, as events, be happy with what they can get. Meaning: if a fact was to be resurrected, and the new body that it finds itself to inhabit is unfamiliar, even repulsive, to it, this fact should be grateful. It’s lucky to be seeing the light of day at all. Meaning: if, when recalled from the depths of my brain, translated from their poorly archived state as gobs of mucous and scrawled here in English, these facts are not quite what they once were, then that’s simply the way that things have to be. Also: He who dares to post his most personal death notes for anyone to see is probably not in the best of mental health. But I’ll trust that you, the reader, possess the basic logical equipment to figure it out.
----Nobody appreciates another human who happens to be complaining about themselves. Most of us, if granted immunity in the afterlife, would shoot a complainer on sight. Most of us would, after detecting the first hint of a whiner’s distinctive odor, grab whatever was within reach and begin stabbing. Just because therapists may lack the characteristic that triggers nausea in the rest of us when confronted with someone who is expressing self-pity, it does not follow that they enjoy their jobs. Because I appreciate this, I shall refrain. As I stated earlier, just the facts. My interest lies in you finishing my story. You, whoever you are. Almost unable to process this information, to make sense of it. But somehow you do, because you are sharp and intelligent. You tackle this strange and uninvited info, even after sleeping badly, crammed into an uncomfortable seated position. I want you to read it all quickly, barely pausing for breath, not leaving with the task half-accomplished. So: basic info only, unembellished. And maybe, via some unseen and romantic universe perhaps lying just beneath our own, underneath your feet, through this story my brain may touch you, and effect your life somehow, for the better or worse, why split hairs? Maybe beneath the marble tiles of this room, beneath the brown grout saturated with eons of urine and dirt and soot, maybe down there is a current that is still charged with my intent. Maybe it’s conducting itself up through the floor and into your feet as you read this, and your own body is being momentarily and in the subtlest of ways possessed by the echoes of my neurons firing. Maybe, in some sense, I am inside you right now, along for the ride. But let’s not dwell on this. If something like that could happen, it would be amazing enough. It might be worth your trouble.
----I imagine you at this point wanting to turn away, to flee; and so, in an effort to win you back, more interesting information:
----This very morning, here’s what happened: before I could make it over here to post my last words, before your arrival, and my end (somewhere else, in an undisclosed location), I had an entire morning schedule of things to accomplish in a ritualistic fashion. Which is to say that my every day is exactly the same, without exception, and so on, until I die, and this has been the state of my affairs for as long as I can recall. And even before I was born, some other person held my place for me, doing exactly the same things, performing the identical deeds, and when he died, I was just signing up for adulthood. And somewhere, at this very moment, another homunculus stumbles forward, ready to fill my shoes. So: this morning, quite early, in fact, I rose, by which I mean to say that I got out of bed, and put my feet into a pair of slippers. After moving my bowels, and showering very briefly, I dressed, warmed up a can of sausages, ate the contents, consumed coffee, and left my apartment. Meaning: like so many other humans, I readied myself for yet another day, handed out randomly from an infinite selection, and decamped. For reasons that space and time prevent me from discussing here, no radio or television or newspaper accompanied me on this exciting journey through the start of another day. Nothing but myself, my instincts, various smells, and a few Ice Age-style implements.
----And now, at this very moment, and I know this as surely as I know for a certainty that I am crouching here so that I may write: I have grabbed your attention, and you couldn’t stop reading if your life depended on it. You won’t stop even to pee and splash water on your face, which is what you might really like to do. But, where usually you would be feeling a sharp pain, your bladder sending you emergency signals, there is now only a distant throb, because all of your senses are working hard on my tale. Your intellect is busy cranking through its meanings and implications. And so: I won’t be much longer, I’ll wrap this up. I’ll stop. I’m almost done. A pause now, before my conclusion. I’m catching my breath. A moment of silence, perhaps only a second or two in duration, which, if I were here with you right now, you might take advantage of in order to attempt to talk me down. You might grab my shoulders, or slap me across the face, or plead with me, anything to save my life. Alas, I have robbed you of this opportunity. Please forgive me.
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WILDERNESS YEAR
I’m sending you psychic messages to inform you of my adventure, which might seem boring or of zero consequence, but I’m convinced that there are infinite tiny variations that could be studied, and since I’m here as part of your plan for me, which is a small model of the plan for everyone who is expected to perform somehow in civilization, I thought that you’d like to be kept informed. You can go about doing whatever it is that you do at your own job at this moment, because my dispatches will be discrete murmurs in your brain. I’m staying in touch, I’m being convincing.
----I’m going to get something to drink. I’ve been given a break, along with all of the old ladies. Even though we are inside, it’s as hot as no shelter because the only air-conditioning is the cooled air that has spilled out of the freezer cases. The air-conditioning system is broken today. I have to buy a drink, because there are no drinking fountains in or near the Commissary, and the florescent tubes that hum over us all seem to speed dehydration, so that all you think of the whole time you have to be here is fluid and desiccation, your brain monitoring how fast it dries out by sending itself increasing-frequency headache messages. The opening to the aisle marked Bottled Juice/ Sodas/ Canned Vegetables is clogged and I have to walk down the next and then back up. Everything on the shelves is too large, gallon-sized, or stuff I can’t or wouldn’t want to drink such as little six-packs of Meeter’s Kraut Juice in cardboard packages. Juice from cabbages, though in all probability mostly water, would be a last resort. I choose from a limited selection of cranberry juices in little boxes.
----This is my first job ever, which you set up for me, and you got me a military ID, and there I am in the picture on it, with an appropriately shaved head, though that was a coincidence. It’s not really the job I had in mind, because I didn’t really have a job in mind. I don’t have a boss, I have a commanding officer. He’s the Commanding Officer of the Commissary. When he’s briefing me on the first day, I’m wondering what kind of military pinball machine pegs he smashed into on his way down to become the supermarket sarge. Also I got zero instruction about the right way to bag groceries, which I think is strange. I thought that there would be an official system, but each bagger is left to invent their own, using common sense, and since nobody checks, you could do it differently each time if you wanted to. All the other baggers, the old ladies, look like they’d have it down by now, through years of experience and by sharing pointers in their own language, which I think is Korean. The CO looks at me as I pass him on the way to the automatic doors but I pretend not to notice, because I’ve decided that, since I haven’t been paid, I haven’t been paid enough to talk to anybody. You are temporarily satisfied that I’m now employed, even though, as a grocery bagger, I’m not going to be paid, and neither will any of the old ladies. Signs hanging from the ceiling inform shoppers that baggers work for tips only. I’m assuming that the ladies who work as checkout clerks get paid something, but it can’t be much. There’s nowhere to sit outside, and more importantly, nowhere to sit that’s at least shaded by something, except for one spot of curb underneath a military landscape tree, which is casting a flickery shadow on the sidewalk below. I can see it, the shadow, though a gap in parked cars. I’m walking down a row of gaps. The parking lot blows heat straight up, not on moving air, but on superheated rays of asphalt atoms.
----Sitting on the curb in front of the Commissary, I’m focusing on the little box of juice. It seems to require a sharp implement to be opened. I unfold the top and try to tear off one of the corners, but the cardboard has been soaked in plastic and won’t rip. The day is unclouded, heatproof birds are singing. I open the container finally by scraping one corner against the curb until it is gone, but the juice inside is thick and syrupy, a concentrate. I toss it in a trashcan next to the commissary doors and buy a Pepsi for a dollar that one of the old ladies is selling from a cooler.
----As you know, grass is always cropped short on military bases. Skinny runners of lawn line everything, stripes of molded vegetation on the sides of the gridded streets, the base looks like it was assembled from a kit, buildings arranged efficiently, planted on rectangles of grass. Assembled in layers. First a large expanse of asphalt, then the grass, then the buildings. If I were to wake up here suddenly, without knowing how I arrived, I’d think I was being punished for something I’d forgotten I’d done. It would be a purgatory; ways out would not be immediately apparent. A dangerous place for amnesia. Hopefully the brig is cooled, because if you got caught out here wandering around, and didn’t have any ID, for example, they might throw you in the brig until they could figure out who you were.
----The commissary is a giant version of the slop chest on a ship. Every sailor gets to remove something they need from it every so often, and some corresponding amount is then deducted from his pay. Except that the supermarket-style commissary system was at first intended to replace the military-base black market. In our case the prices are pretty low, because you could easily drive off the base and buy stuff somewhere else. I’m sure that I’m right about the black market thing. Unless you figure out how to return my transmissions we’ll just assume that everything I think is correct. The commissary’s not a company store; it’s a benign place, unless you’re a bagger. I’m heading maybe east, up a crew- cut median of grass, which emanates humidity, unlike the asphalt, which repels moisture, and absorbs heat. I’m not a sailor either, but I could become one. Eventually a bagger could work his or her way up to cashier, then maybe sub-manager, under the CO.
----The driving range is pretty crowded with men with white hair wearing baseball caps, and everyone has a sunburn. Out at the end of the green and brown grass of the range, right before the tall net that would stop an extra-powerful drive from leaving the range, and potentially ruining the order of things, a kid is steering a little caged vehicle around. The vehicle appears to be collecting golf balls with either a vacuum or some kind of scoop attached to the front. Every so often one of a white-haired men manages to hit the ball collector vehicle, which makes a muted bell noise as the ball ricochets off.
----You are thinking that this will be my taste of the military, a stand-in for what in other countries is a mandatory chore, a year or two in the service of the state. In the absence of any draft, this might be it. In your mind, it’s a great combination of things: first job, a brush with the armed services. You are wondering about me, in the commissary, working, wondering how it’s going, maybe a little anxious. Don’t fret, I’ve just changed course. I think the officer’s club is a beige building on my right. A drink sounds good right now. I might be able to get in there and get something before anyone notices me, a penetrator. Shirt off is much better than shirt on, mostly because the shirt’s really sweaty and sticking to skin, and in spite of the fact that now the sun can irradiate my pale defenseless back freely. Maybe you’re roller blading on your lunch break, or eating a lunch out of a thin cardboard box, a box-lunch. The midday meal. I left mine in a locker back in the stock room of the commissary. It was half a leftover burrito wrapped in foil, stuffed in a paper bag, inside a blue JanSport backpack, in a locker cubicle with no lock.
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4 photographs dreamily related to 'Wilderness Year'
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1 comments:
Great stories SD. Ski Club cracked me up, AND made me shiver. An excellent combination. The press sounds really cool too... I definitely want to check those books out.
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