--WE’RE ON A ROAD TO NOWHERE

…There’s a massive Block Party on Capitol Hill in Seattle this weekend.  Want to go with me?

I think there are over 100 bands playing.  It must be difficult to come up with a band name that isn’t already taken.  Look at some of these:

Wolfgang Fuck

So Pitted

Sex Blister

Blood Drugs

The War on Drugs

Gaytheist

Great God Damn

Childbirth

Dum Dum Girls

Ever So Android

Tacos! (that’s their exclamation mark)

We don’t have to see any of those bands.  There are others.  I did once go to a concert where The Dum Dum Girls opened for Vampire Weekend.  “Their songs exist in that gauzy space between languid and hazily upbeat, draped in black leather jackets and swaths of reverb.”  That’s how The Stranger described them, which is pretty apt actually.

After the concert we can go to Pioneer Square and eat at the hot new restaurant called “Damn The Weather.” (another great name.)

…I never know what to say on Twitter or Facebook.  I’m not clever enough and I don’t think anything going on in my life is interesting enough to share, especially not pictures of my food.  But there are some witty folks out there.

Take a peek:

-Life is as exciting as frozen blueberries in the fridge that used to be wild.

-I just did the one thing no depressive should do. I weighed myself.

-When you laugh, the world laughs with you... but when you cry, people want to send you to seminars led by an enormous white man with hirsute black brows, a maniacal grin, and oversized hands that are more visible than his head some one hundred and fifty yards distant.

-Never take advice from anyone wearing a wireless microphone and pacing the stage like a caged panther.

-She said: You are not beautiful but you're complex.
I said: And that's better, right?
She said: (dramatic pause) Depends.

-i wanna be adored.

-It's 3 am. Do you know where your poets are?

-I was in a super annoyed mood and then I saw the 50 Shades trailer and now I'm just cackling because holy shit I've heard better dialogue in actual porn.

-If you want, you could get a job at the dump and spend your lunch hour smashing stuff apart with a sledge for therapy and exercise.

-Since leaving the ex-boyfriend Mother's Day weekend I've added and deleted approximately 50 different men from my fucked up flip phone. I've had sex with four different men. They all had one thing in common: horrible breath. Thanks, ____ _____, for directing me to ashleymadison.com. It works. I said I was done. Taking a sabbatical for a while. Then I checked my inbox on a whim and found a cowboy. I've never had a cowboy. There's a picture of him in real rodeo action. So I sent him a stupid message. "Hey good lookin'...whatcha got cookin'? God I hope you have good hygiene. I'm tired of kissing men with horrible breath." That's one thing the ex has going for him. Excellent hygiene.

-Eddie Vedder, stop singing about hiding your love away. I don't fucking believe you.

-Fuck towing companies they are evil vulturous bastards.

-Never give up on a determined chicken.

-Today my 20 year old daughter, who takes the Metro bus home daily from her summer Chemistry class at the University of Washington, reported sitting behind a man who was eating an unpeeled banana. That's right, skin on, everything. Trying to get more fiber in his diet?

-The best part of my day so far has been chasing a cockroach around my apartment and successfully murdering it. How's your day going?

-I was just about to slam into this car when I saw a sign that said "Baby On Board." Then I was like, whoa, better go run somebody else off the road, murder them, and eat their heart.

-Turns out I am not very good at swatting flies.

--HOW DO I GET MYSELF TO YOU

…People still keep trying to give me scads of money.  A former military colonel wanted to give me $10.7 million.  A widow from Europe was left with $8 million she apparently couldn’t find anyone to take, so she wanted me to have it.  Do people really fall for these scams?  I suppose some must.  It’s funny, though, how crooks always misspell words.  Oh and here’s another one that just came in:

Good day

Private Message to you,

Greetings to you in the name of our heavenly God. This mail might come to you as a surprise and the temptation to ignore it could come into your mind, but please, consider it as a Divine Wish of God and accept it with a deep sense of humility. My Name is Isabella Caromel; I escaped tsunami disaster some time ago which affected my spinal cord, my ear drum and claim my entire family, my husband and two sons. It might shock you to know, I was eventually disabled as a result of catastrophe that struck me. Perhaps I’m now on a wheelchair after all form of treatment and to no avail. Because of my present condition I finally decided to give a better life to the poor in the society, since it has determine medically that I have only about a few months to live, according to medical experts.

It is my legacy to build charity organizations for the less privilege since my health has finally confirmed deteriorated. In my present condition this project cannot be executed by me alone due to my ailment, so therefore I need your candid voluntarily support to execute the project to make this dream a reality. I have decided to invest my $10.6M USD to help the less privileged, therefore you are chosen from my heart to help receive the funds from where it was kept secretly to build charity organizations for the less privilege to have some better life…and on and on…

…Sometimes when I watch the news it seems as if the world is falling apart.

…It’s interesting how a sunny day can change your disposition.

…One of my favorite things is hearing a child belly-laugh.

…Why do people post pictures of their meals online?  Sometimes they look like cat vomit.

…Dogs are so loyal.  Sometimes I don’t know why they are.

…The other day the clerk at a store complimented my shirt.  “I love pink,” she said.  “I just can’t get my boyfriend to where it.”  Which made me wonder what kind of guy is afraid to wear pink.  Which made me wonder who gets to decide if a certain color is masculine or feminine.  Seems pretty silly to me. 

…One of these days I’m going to write something really great.  Until then, I wrote this:

In the Other Room

In the other room

something is burning.

In this one

moonlight falls like charcoal rain

through sheer drapes

that hike up their skirts

and dance under a vent

maybe mocking me

or not.

Our bed has never felt so vast,

so irrelevant and unused,

a raft adrift in some black ocean

where even the current has lost its will.

Soon you’ll be descaling yourself,

gargling in front of the bathroom mirror,

recounting kisses,

the different pressures of his touch,

his voice in your ear like a frustrated wasp.

At least that’s what I imagine.

Even a clever actress like you

turns see-through now and then.

When you slink under the covers

I’ll pretend to be asleep as I always do,

keeping my eyes shut

regurgitating the reasons for staying.

My mother always claimed I was weak.

You have no fight, she’d say.

Just like your father, she’d say.

In the other room

something is burning.

Listen with me.

Hear the wood crackle,

timbers spitting sparks,

flame tongues licking every appliance and wall,

everything sizzling with life

for the first time in years.

--I WILL BRING YOU STARLIGHT BY THE BARROW

…I feel a little blue today, a little sad.  Already this morning I do.  That’s not a good sign.  But it’s not anything major, nothing I can’t overcome.  I’m just not sure why I feel this way.  It may have to do with a friend’s blog post I just read.  She has Lyme Disease and has been struggling with it for three years.  So maybe that’s why I’m a bit blue.

…If you could change things in your life, in your past, would you?  Or are you a person who has no regrets?

…It’s not that early but it feels like I’m the only one alive on the lake this morning.

…I wrote this yesterday, intentionally trying to keep it at 200 words or less:

                                                                   Escape

                My brothers shared a girl the summer I turned nine. 

She worked the fields like we did, all of us on our knees in between rows picking berries for school clothes money.  Mother was sick and homebound, so my oldest brother drove.

                At the end of each day, my brother stopped off at the trailer park where the girl lived.  He’d tell me to wait in the car and then he and the girl and my other brother would go inside the girl’s trailer.

When they came out they were usually breathless and sweaty and disheveled.   Inside the car they’d trade high fives and say, “Oh, man!”

                One day the girl wasn’t at the fields.  Afterward my brothers drove to her trailer park and knocked on her door.  A brittle old man answered.  He said he didn’t know any girl, said he’d been living in the trailer by himself for over a decade.

                I figured the girl must have paid the old man to say that.  I figured she was tired of my brothers’ misery just as I was, only she’d found an escape.

                When I tell my wife the story now, she laughs and says, “You and your imagination.”

 --YOU DON”T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS

…Hey, Rainy Wednesday, where’d you come from?  That’s okay.  Come on in and dry off.  I’ll cook you up some soup and slice you some bread.

…Here are some things I like on a damp day:

-“To know a truth well, one must have fought it out.” Novalis

-“For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Roger Ebert

-“Do not falter or shrink; But just think out your work, And just work out your think.”  Nixon Waterman

-“Yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out into your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout about your coming when you return from your daily victory or defeat.” Robert Louis Stevenson

-“Someday, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long continued process.”  Phillips Brooks

-“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.”  Francis Bacon

-“I’m not an alcoholic, I’m Australian.”  Orange is the New Black 

-"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the common place, the slaves of the ordinary." Cecil Beaton

-"People will stare. Make it worth their while." Harry Winston

-"You will never find the best when you are always looking for the worst." Jeffery Benjamin

  

-"Just because we don’t talk, doesn’t mean I don’t think about you. I’m just trying to distance myself because I know I can’t have you." Wiz Kalifa

-"Your girlfriend wants me in her mouth like I’m her dentist." Wiz Kalifa

-"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes." Ghandi

--IN THE FUTURE I WILL NOT DISAPPOINT YOU

                                                          Missing Chance

            Here’s what she says, my mother says, “Get over it.  People are replaceable.”

Chance is a card in Monopoly.  It’s a probability.  Once it was even a boy.

“Don’t give me that attitude,” she says.  “Go ask your sister.”

            My mother wears a plastic, pastiche, diamond bezel watch that looks dusted with pie crust flakes.  The second hand sweeps.  It’s fake like her hair.  Her teeth.  The moons rising and falling beneath her sheer, see-through blouse.

My stepfather is passed out on the lawn.  He was sober once last year.  He’ll be a sunburned old bastard tomorrow.  For dinner he spits sunflower seeds onto other piles of shredded sunflower seeds beneath his chair.  I always think it’s his teeth he’s spitting out.  He has a tattoo of Satan on his shoulder from his navy days.  You should see the left hook he throws.

            Everything we own is out there for sale.  Amy says we should blow up pages of our diaries and sell those, too.  I tell her I don’t have one, a diary, and she says, “Sure you do.  Don’t be such a stupid asshole,” and punches my chest so hard I cough. 

            Someone pounds on the screen door.  It’s an Asian lady in a red outfit that looks as if it was just painted.  Her hat has a flippy thing, like on a graduation hat, a tassel that swivels around her bowl cut hair do.  Her teeth are long and smoky and sharp.  I squeal.  I think: Jason from Friday the 13^th only Asian and female.

            I give her everything she wants for whatever price she’ll pay.  “Here,” I say, stacking a barbeque atop her load, “Take this too.  Gift with purchase.”

            At dusk a car full of gangbangers pulls up.  I dare them to shoot me.  I beg them to bludgeon me.  “Shoot me, motherfuckers!”  They laugh.  They don’t even bother getting out of the car which is bouncing, exhaling and inhaling, taking a bong hit, breathing and hiccupping bass notes so low they’re under the buckled pavement.  When I scream, “People are replaceable!” they drive off terrified, no different than if a police siren had sounded.

My brother was there one day and not the next.  Who decides these things?  I suppose you’d say God or fate or no one, but that’s not a satisfactory answer.

I saw him kiss a girl once back by the tether ball pole.  She had kinky blonde hair and her hands looked like they were holding batons as she reached up and gave her lips away.  Afterward, he whispered something in her ear and she ran off.

I never asked him and I wished I had.  Of course I wish that now.

The winds came later, clever and full-throated.  Detritus, twigs and wilted flowers, insect husks and lies: I watched all of it swirl.  I opened my mouth and swallowed the gritty air.  I laid down on the ground and let it roll over me.

I Like You

I am not a stalker, but I like you.

Who wouldn’t?

Your choices are often odd but seldom wrong.  If there’s soup in summer, you’ll have it, slurping like a porpoise with that trilling giggle of yours.

You have a list of eight things you can never have too much of.  Seven of them make me quiver. 

You do not like animals other than stuffed ones, yet you pretend when your cousin, Pete, brings by his lab. 

You are strong yet lithe and unmuscled.  I have posters of women with your shape of legs and the same small hands, though not one of the models can match you whole.

 Your eyes are ceramic blue.

I have made many attempts, some quite despicable.  Sometimes I hold my breath.

A climax can be gory or glorious, both bliss and release, but it’s not pity I want, or even forgiveness.

You should know that you are a permanent stain, a scar, a sickle cell, a long-worn smoke smell on my skin which soap cannot conquer or rid.

This is not enough but it’ll have to do.  I watch you from a safe perch, knowing where you are and what you’re doing, full of joy and promise in a life where I have left one foot in, and one foot out, of the picture.

--I’M A BIG BELIEVER IN SECOND CHANCES

…TGIF.  Yep.  It’s going to be a good one, too.  And the day after that, and the day after that…

…Here are a few things I learned last week that you might already know:

-An average of 22 war veterans kills themselves each month in the U.S.

-Police are looking for a Seattle man who donated three skulls to a thrift store last week.

--Nearly 60 illegal immigrants, most of the children, have crossed the Texas border so far through the middle of July and are being retained there.

-2.3% of Americans claim to be gay or bisexual.

…And here are some notable comments from Facebook friends this week:

-Man in coffee shop: Are you Brazilian?
Me: Um, no?
Man: Yeah, well the world is ending.
Me: Oh, um...
Man: Well you SEEM Brazilian, and your people are dying in agony. ..

-Today I woke up as the aged, bitchy baroness in The Sound of Music. I look middle aged and mean, as though I have been eating MSG and smoking. Oh, and I am jealous of any young, virginal, perky Maria-types. My god, I am Auntie Mame.

-If I had a metal band, I'd call it Hot Pepsi. Nothing incites feeling of pain, dread, fear like hot pepsi.

 -I was JUST discussing society's complicated, and baffling, relationship with the word VAGINA.VAGINA VAGINA VAGINA.  It's a body part, guys. Roughly half us have them. GET OVER IT.

-brooklyn i need your colors.

-Man, this McDonald's manager really knows how to get her point across. This bitch don't mess around. I'm privy to the staff meeting at the ketchup splattered table to my left. I wish I had studied harder and masturbated less.

-Today while walking from Point A to Point B, kid in minivan calls me a whore. Twenty minutes later, still on my way to Point B, same kid, now driving in opposite direction, calls me a whore, again.
Either I need to start walking faster or kid needs to mix up that vocab a bit.

...So, hey, have a great weekend.

--THIS IS EVERYTHING THERE IS

…Oh, Wednesday, don’t you look good?  Yes, you really do.

…This week I’ve been struggling with a rewrite on my novel.  Apparently it’s in bad taste to kill a four year old off in your book, or so I’ve been told.  The problem is (sadly so) it worked on one level, but my writing friend is right that it swings the novel in a direction it probably shouldn’t go and it might be off-putting for readers.  So, the girl is now in a coma.  Will she come out of it?  We’ll see.

…I’m poised for a very fun weekend with my best friend from Vancouver coming up for a visit.  I’m a bachelor this weekend as well, so look out.

…I did an interview for Flash Fiction Chronicles that went live yesterday:

http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/why-i-write-flash-fiction-kuntz/

…And I wrote this very sad (shocking, I know) poem the other day:

Sediment

I sink down into a bathtub filled with milk

and it’s the closest thing I’ve ever come to feeling alive,

the cool, sluicing touch of ghost fingers fluttering across my skin,

whispering nothing,

wanting nothing

satiated by mere existence,

not caring whether or I am thin or large,

not minding whether I have ever kissed a boy or girl or

my father

whose open mouth was the black gutter

that filleted me.

Inside this milky cocoon,

I am just me for the first time.

I am finally sixteen

or eight

or infinity.

It doesn’t matter

because I am whole with the milk

unspoiled this once,

rich and thick as if drawn from the teats of a Guernsey cow,

sediment resting at the bottom of the tub, rough as bits of shaved rock,

sediment instead of sin,

perfectly natural.

When I go under,

I may not be able to breathe.

I may not be able to see what hovers above,

yet it’s safe here.

The lies and scars are--

for the time being--

washed away in white,

a Jesus-kind-of-miracle.

And if I open my mind

--even just a spec--

I can see the real me,

how I am not so bad at all,

not so different than you
or the little girl

who was never touched that way

by that man

in that room

all those times.

I just float,

or imagine I do.

I can do anything now.

You should see me--

under this ocean of ivory--

because I am smiling.

Yes,

smiling.

Drown me if you must,

but I am glad.

--DO WHAT YOU CAN AND LOVE WHAT YOU’VE GOT

…It’s Monday, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.  Maybe the 90 degree day outside has something to do with that.

…Other than car problems, computer problems are the worst.  I spent 2 hours on the phone with a helpful man in India who patiently and expertly restored by filed and Outlook.  But it was a pain in the ass.  Now I’ve got to do something similar to get my printer working.

…Here are some interesting/fun facts you may or might not know:

·         The loudest land animal is the Howler monkey whose deep growls and howls in the forest can travel clearly up to 3 miles.    

·         At 188 decibels, the Blue whale is the loudest mammal of all with its deep sound traveling hundreds of miles across the deep oceans.

·         The only state in the U.S that grows coffee beans is Hawaii in what’s known locally as the Kona district. Hawaiians usually call coffee Kope and hawaiian coffee is some of the most expensive in the world.

·         England is smaller than the U.S state of Florida by 15,409 square miles.

·         USGA regulation golf balls have 336 dimples which add turbulence during flight for more distance.

·         It seems strange that the Mona Lisa painting doesn’t have eyebrows or eyelashes.

·         Honey is the only food that doesn’t spoil. To make 1 pound of honey, bees would have to visit over 2 million flowers.

·         The Oilbird (oil bird) is the loudest bird with it’s high pitched clicking sounds.

·          Soreness after hard work or exercising can be greatly reduced by drinking watermelon juice according to researchers. Watermelon juice is rich in amino acid, vitamin C, Iron and Zinc.

·         It takes about 7 strawberries to equal the amount of vitamin C in one orange about 3 inches in diameter.

·         The very first food eaten by a U.S astronaut in outer space was applesauce which was prepared along with aluminum tubes of beef stew.

·         Did you know that the very first lemon seeds were brought to the Americas by Christopher Columbus?

·         A Clark’s Nutcracker (bird) can store up to 30,000 pine nuts for the winter in over 6,000 different locations across 300 square miles and remember where at least 70% of them are, finding them even if they’re snow covered. Special thanks to the visitor who pointed out a spelling error on this interesting fact.

• Foods that taste great in a restaurant tastes totally different in an airplane at 35,000 feet in the air. At 35,000 feet your taste buds are dramatically decreased making food taste bland and dull.
• The automatic popup bread toaster was patented before the bread slicing machine. 1919 and 1928. That’s right, people sliced their own bread for the toaster for almost a decade before sliced bread was sold.

--I’M LIVING HOPEFULLY

...Oh my, it's a beautiful morning.  The lake is a flat mirror.  There are no boats out yet.  I wish you could see this  There are a couple of waterfront homes for sale if you're interested.

...This (below)  is a story I wrote that was just published in Cape Fear Review.  I wrote quite a while ago and now after reading it again i realize it's a tough story.  The thing is it's pretty much a page taken out of my childhood.

                                                       Love Like a Crooked Spine

            She does not notice, but we watch her for signs of explosion.  At the dinner table it’s Rex, Jerry, me and Mom.  Mother chews the way a large hamster does, chubby cheeks crimping.  I hold back a flinch when her fork tine screeches on the plate.

            Though she did not say it, we know Mother thinks our dad died because he was weak.  Her own father was made of cast iron, and a sawmill amputation hardly held him up from running a twenty acre farm.  Her brothers, one in prison, and one that died in Vietnam, look down on us from the picture frames that hold their steely gazes.

            We eat slow, the half-raw potatoes becoming oatmeal rocks in our mouths.  We don’t want the meal to end because we don’t want what comes after.  One of us will be guilty, one of us will have to administer punishment, and one of us must watch so that the lesson is learned by all.

            Last week Mother found a pair of light purple panties in Rex’s dresser.  She might have planted them.  Either way, Rex pleading ignorance didn’t help matters.  She shouted at me to use the end of the belt, the end of the belt, the end with the buckle, and when I didn’t, couldn’t, Jerry did so on me, as ordered.

            I suppose we could stop it, the madness.  We’re young boys, but there are carving knives in the butcher bloc.  Even a paring knife would do the trick.

            Mother looks up from her plate, a drool of gravy sludge on her jaw, catches my eye, forcing me to claim hers or else.  She looks disgusted, yet says, “Do you know how much I love you?”

            A girl I’m in love with says we were fated to each other.  She’s a bit crazy, Wendy Adams, which is why I like her.  Really I like Amy because she can stand the sight of me and where I live and who I belong to.  Wendy believes everything happens for a reason.

            I know she’s wrong.  You can make up rationales, but if it’s just clever lies, then nothing was really planned out to begin with.

            I don’t have friends, only Rex and Jerry.  Still, I eavesdrop on the bus and at lunch.  We’re not normal in this family.  If there’s love here, it has a crooked spine.

            The one thing I do agree with Wendy on is, “Tis better to have loved, than never have loved at all.”

            I just drop the “d” and think, “Tis better to have love.”  To have some of it, even the warped kind.

            As I wash the dishes, Mother comes up behind me like a heat shadow.  She says, “That plate there.  Right there.  It has a crack that wasn’t there before.”

            When I nod, she says, “You’re right I’m right.  We’ll see about that when you’re through.”

            I always wonder if it’s the same stars and the same moon people see no matter where they are on the planet.  Sure, I know they’re physically the same, but I wonder--if our moon is full tonight, is it that way, say, in Barcelona?

            When I lean over my bunk and ask Rex that question, he calls me an idiot.  He says, “You’re the reason she hates us, because you look like him.”

            I don’t sleep.  I keep hearing my brother’s rationale for Mother’s madness.  I hear Wendy saying everything happens for a reason.  I ask myself: is that why I look like my dead father, so we can be stripped and beat each night?

            In the morning, I wake even before the rooster’s crow.  I withdraw the biggest blade from the butcher block and slip through the screen door as quiet as I can.  There’s a tall hill a mile behind our back yard.  It’s a fine place to stargaze, to listen to the winds sweeping through the evergreens.  It’s the kind of elevated spot where ancient Aztecs might have thought up the notion of sacrificing to the Gods.

            The moon gleams off metal when I raise the knife.  I’ve got time for one last question: Does this make me strong then, or weak?