Farewell TransmissionBy Coleman Bomar
We took out the cat, a Main Coon with auburn fur, and named her Minerva. We stashed our cruel brains in the box with poison, neither alive nor dead, finally able to sleep.
___
Coleman Bomar is a writer from Middle Tennessee. He has a chapbook out with Gob Pile Press.
By Denise S. Robbins
“The Singularity will doom us all.” Samuel says this at a moment of conversational pause. The dinner party goes quiet, for swiveling heads make no sound. Everyone waits for Sam to explain himself. But he’ll wait. He’ll wait until someone asks. The windows are open and someone, somewhere, is drumming. Cars bring their own accompaniment in quick swells.
Polite little Ariana, in a quiet voice: “What does that mean?”
Sam takes a deep breath, making his mustache quiver. His eyes are still and serious, fixed on Ariana’s, who flinches slightly but keeps his gaze. “When AI intelligence surpasses our own,” says Sam, “there will be no hope for the human race. Unless we’re lucky enough for our superintelligent robo-overlords to be gentle. Perhaps they’ll let us, as slaves, have dinner parties, like we’ll let our future children play House, as long as they don’t get out of line.” He rubs his belly as if he were the pregnant one. The others glance at his wife Carmela, standing on the other side of the room, whose flowery wrap dress expertly hides any stomach bulge.
“Hey man, you shouldn’t say that,” says blue-haired Lennie. “The word slaves.”
“This may be my last chance for anything I say to mean anything at all,” says Sam.
Carmela shoots her husband an angry look. Earlier she had explicitly asked Sam not to talk about Doomsday during his birthday Shabbat. He ignores her gaze.
“Let’s start eating,” says Carmela, trying to remind herself how nice she felt ten minutes ago, when pockets of conversation hummed around the room, an underlying current of sound, like when you realize the fridge is churning, but it’s the way voices converge into a low, cheerful drone. When her guests poured their second drink and became flushed with happiness as they hovered around the fresh baked challah like it was a newborn baby. When she lit the Shabbat candles and the fire reflected in Sam’s eyes before he moved to hug her from behind and rub her newly pregnant belly.
“But Elias isn’t here yet,” says Sam.
“He’s never here yet,” says Carmela. “Food time. Plates on laps, I’ll bring it around.” A nice big dining table is something that can always be put off, the lack of it ignorable until you have a dinner party, so they are sitting on couches around a coffee table. Carmela removes the noodle casserole from the oven and scoops a hefty portion onto each plate, along with one ripped handful of challah. She worked hard on this dish, and expects praise in equal measure to the effort she put into it, but no one seems to notice as she hands them a plate, everyone now in rapt attention as Sam explains calmly why every argument against the Singularity is wrong.
Lennie says, “We’ll create a kill switch.”
Sam shakes his head. “You think they won’t foresee that and reprogram themselves for it not to matter?”
“There are four different cheeses in this,” Carmela announces, taking a plate for herself. “Mozzarella, pepperjack, gorgonzola, and bleu.”
“Isn’t gorgonzola a type of blue?” says Lennie.
“Bleu,” says Carmela, nasally, “like bluh.”
“So is it a type of bluh?” asks Lennie.
“I’m not sure,” says Carmela. “You could Google it later. Now for the Motzi.” She leads the blessing of the bread and everyone takes a perfunctory bite of challah. “Leave room for cake!”
“Cake?” asks Sam. “What flavor?”
“It’s a surprise.”
The AI conversation continues as if it never stopped. Ariana is unconcerned about the internet advertisements: in fact, she likes how the internet seems to know exactly what she wants to purchase next, and gives her good deals, too. Lennie jokes about a robot accidentally setting off a nuclear apocalypse. Carmela sits back and disengages. She’s scarcely hungry, after hours of taste testing, and it seems the others share her lack of appetite, except for Sam, who eats his dish in big bites between words. He goes back for seconds, peeking in the fridge on the way back. He sits next to Carmela on the loveseat and kisses her on the cheek.
“Chocolate cake! You know me so well, honey. Thanks for the party.”
“Why, because it might be your last before the Singularity?” Carmela says half-sarcastically.
Sam’s smile disappears.
There’s a knock at the door.
“Elias!” Carmela checks her watch. “Who had eight o’clock?”
“I said 8:05,” says Ariana.
“Cheers to Ariana.” Carmela pours herself another glass of sparkling apple juice. “Door’s unlocked,” she calls out. The knocking continues. “Okay, I’m coming.” She opens the door to see Elias, in a pea coat and baseball cap, dripping wet.
“There was a storm,” says Elias with a grave countenance.
“We didn’t see it,” says Carmela.
“It unleashed itself on me during my walk over.”
“It must have missed us. Can I get you a beer?”
“The strongest you’ve got.”
Lennie hands Elias his recently opened bottle of 9.5 percent IPA. “I took one sip but I hate this,” he says.
Elias drinks deeply, then removes his coat and hat, putting them on the floor in a corner. “Sorry I’m late. I fell into a deep depression after reading this week’s parsha.”
“The Torah portion one about Noah’s flood?” says Carmela. “Why should that worry you? Hashem said explicitly it would never happen again. The rainbow covenant and all that.”
“Just look at me,” says Elias. “I fell into a flood of emotions, then became wet to my core. The Great Flood is upon us once more.”
“Yes. It’s called the Singularity,” says Sam. “You’re right about the parsha. Doesn’t bode well for us! Hashem decided humanity wasn’t good enough and flooded the Earth except Noah. But Noah was a nobody.”
“He had faith,” says Elias.
“Sure. That was his only quality. He believed what he was told. He built the ark. He was like a robot himself. Is that what’ll happen to us? The only survivors will be mindless slaves. He knew he had no personhood. That’s why, after the flood receded, he became an embarrassing, naked drunk.”
“Or maybe it’s because everyone he knew was dead,” whispers Ariana.
“Drunk and naked?” says Lennie. “Noah sounds fun.”
“No more talk of floods or singularities!” Carmela stands up and claps her hands. “We’re here to celebrate Shabbat and Sam. That means relax. Everybody, why do you love Sam? Let’s talk in turns.”
The room is quiet.
“Don’t everyone talk all at once,” says Carmela.
“Come on, Carmela,” says Sam, “let’s just get back to food. How about the cake?”
“Yes! The cake.” Carmela cuts the cake but no one touches it except Sam, who stares with beautifully greedy eyes as she gives him a large piece. The conversation picks back up, the discussion flowing into divots and streams, veering around how to win the robot war and landing on they all plan to live their final day alive.
When Ariana returns from the bathroom, Carmela rushes over to grab her before Ariana can re-immerse herself in AI talk. Carmela tries to think of any other other conversation topic, and finds herself telling Ariana about childhood home movies her mother recently sent her. “I haven’t seen myself with such clear eyes until this week,” she says. “I was deeply afraid of being left out. Yet I always seemed to be sitting on the sidelines by choice. The funny thing is I’ve watched these videos before. Years ago. I used to rewatch them all the time. But I never got that feeling out of them, the one I have right now, where I understand myself. How much of who I am was shaped by the way I interacted with my brothers as a kid? I wanted to be one of them but I was too small. Then I spent my whole life trying to fit in, without thinking about any sense of individuality. Only in recent years have I found that. I had to push back against my own nature. It’s just fascinating—and terrifying—to think about how much can shape a child’s life.” She rubs her stomach. “So much is out of our control. Some of it is in our control, or at least we think it is. Like, I get to decide how many years until our second child. But I have no idea how much that age gap will affect them. Sometimes siblings are better friends the further apart in age they are. Sorry, I’m going on and on.”
“No, it’s interesting,” says Ariana.
“So what traumatized you as a child?”
Ariana thinks for a moment, then says, “A robot clown toy.” She shudders. “Horrifying.”
“Here’s how we do it,” says Lennie on the other side of the room with an empty beer in his hand. “We convert everyone to Judaism. Even the robots. Then we require all technology to shut down once a week. Then we’ll have Saturdays to plan the rebellion.”
“Not good enough,” says Sam.
“And Friday nights, too,” says Lennie.
“We’re not supposed to work on the Sabbath,” says Elias. “We’d lose our favor with Hashem.”
“I think Hashem would understand in times of war,” says Lennie.
“Robots wouldn’t believe in Hashem,” says Sam. “They only believe in themselves.”
“But we created them,” says Lennie. “What’s simpler than that? We are their creators. So they have to listen to what we say about Hashem. The idea of Hashem will be beyond AI comprehension. We know it doesn’t make logical sense. God. Robots are all ‘one plus one is two.’ That’s true when you’re talking about matter and particulars. But sometimes it’s more than that. We’ll know this. They won’t. Boom. We win.”
“It’s time for the game!” calls out Carmela. “Who knows Sam best?”
“Carmela,” pleads Sam, “can we play later? We’re kind of in the middle of something.”
“I’d like to play,” Ariana says feebly.
“What’s the point of playing when Carmela will automatically win?” says Lennie. “Obviously you know him best.”
“I’m not playing,” she says. “I’m judging.”
“Who died and made you judge?” says Lennie.
“Just pick a side,” says Carmela. “Blue couch or green couch.”
Lennie is sitting in the middle of the two couches, on the floor. Elias is on the blue, Ariana on the green. Lennie leans to the left towards the blue, collapsing on his elbow at Elias’s feet. “Dudes rock.” He holds up his hand for a fistbump with Elias.
“Two groups fight for honor bestowed upon by the Birthday Boy,” says Sam in a booming voice, joining Carmela to stand by the door. “Which side will win? Which will fall into shameful decrepitude?”
Elias’s phone rings.
“Shame! Shame! Shame!” says Sam. “Your team loses one point for breaking the Sabbath.”
“Oh, really?” says Elias. “Looks like your internet…box… thing is plugged in. Don’t you lose a point?”
“The Birthday Boy loses no points,” announces Sam. “He only grants them.”
The storm comes suddenly. A burst of rain enters the open windows, splattering the plants in the windowsill. Carmela rushes over to close the windows. The rain leaves angry wet marks on the stomach of her dress.
“I told you it was storming,” says Elias.
“No one doubted you,” says Carmela, flicking the water off her flowing dress, carefully, surrounding the spot where her future baby lives.
“I should be going,” says Ariana.
“What?” says Carmela. “The game hasn’t started yet. You’re going to walk in this?”
“My Uber’s on its way. My dog is scared of storms.”
“Okay, at least the teams will be even now. Elias versus Lennie.”
“Right,” Lennie scoffs. “And we are absolutely excited about playing this dumb game.”
“Hey, hey, HEY.” Sam stands up and puts his hands on his hips. “This is not a dumb game. This is the best game in the world. Once it gets going.”
“Right,” says Lennie. “We’re definitely going to start playing it.” He gets up and slices a piece of cake.
“We never sang the birthday song!” Carmela realizes with distress. “Don’t eat the cake! Don’t eat the cake! Turn out the lights!” Sam turns out the lights and hears drawers opening in the kitchen. “Sam, where are the candles? Turn the lights back on!” Carmela rummages through the kitchen drawers, then runs to the closet to search the boxes of knick-knacks. Old Halloween costumes and unused streamers fling to the ground, piling up at her feet.
“How should I know?”
Lennie’s already eating his cake.
“Don’t eat the cake,” commands Sam.
“Nothing in this house is organized!” Carmela cries, suddenly, bursting into tears. She’s never cried in front of anyone before, but now she can’t stop the angry sobs. She’ll blame the pregnancy hormones later. Hell, she’ll blame them now, and fight the urge to squeeze her stomach. The others grimace at one another, wondering if they should comfort her, leave, or pretend they don’t see what’s happening. They sit in silence as she continues to cry, turning boxes upside down, rifling through assortments of Tums and old journals. Sam directs his guests to their coats and offers his two spare umbrellas. Carmela hardly hears as the door opens and closes, wading deeply now into the suitcase closet.
Sam walks calmly through the kitchen, peering into the top shelf of the pantry, the one too high for Carmela to reach. The box of birthday candles is hidden behind a bag of whole wheat flour.
He brings it to his wife, now lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling with a blank look. Her cheeks are red and wet with tears. The windows in the bedroom are still open, bringing in small puddles from the storm.
“Hey. Hey, hey.” Sam leans over her and strokes her hair back. “Look what I found.” He shows her the candles.
“We need a real table,” Carmela says softly.
“We don’t need a real table.”
“Yes, we do.”
“Okay. We can buy one.”
“Better plates, too, and wine glasses that match.”
“Of course.” He begins massaging her temples.
She moans. “I’m sorry I ruined your birthday.”
“I had a great time. And now I get to go to bed early, get a good night’s rest? Score!”
Carmela moans again, but this time a smile emerges at the side of her lips. The modem beeps, complaining about a dying battery. “We’re terrible for not unplugging the modem,” says Carmela. “We’re the worst.”
“So said the man who’s never earlier than two hours late.” Sam reaches down to Carmela’s dress, pulling it up over her belly, exposing old white underpants.
“All my cute undies are in the hamper. I didn’t want to ask you to do laundry today.”
“These ones are adorable,” Sam says, and puts his ear on her stomach, as if listening to the ocean.
“Our son’s in there,” he says.
“Yeah.” Carmela picks up a strand of Sam’s black hair.
“Hey Mel?” Sam says into her stomach.
“Yeah?”
He squeezes her hand. “Let’s name him Noah.”
___
Denise S. Robbins is an author and teacher from Wisconsin. Her writing has appeared in Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast Journal, and more. She teaches a workshop about climate change fiction and has a novel and story collection in the works. Also a Substack. See more at www.denisesrobbins.com.
By Jon Berger
Valentine’s Day
Pothole emergence time
Miles Teller drives down to Detroit
Miles Teller refers to Detroit as NPC land
An NPC
Driving an NPC car
Ass packs an asphalt truck
You know the type
The road crew who shovels asphalt into the potholes on the highway
The asphalt is hot and steaming and molten and black
They take up a lane of traffic and have a giant blinking arrow sign on the back of the truck
But the NPC people cannot see the Asphalt truck
Miles Teller keeps driving on I 96
Because this happens all the time in Detroit
Miles Teller Hates Detroit
Miles Teller Hates Traverse City
Miles Teller lived in Traverse City when he was too young to remember
He moved because a bunch of Detroit people bought second homes in Traverse City
And Miles Teller’s family could not afford to live there anymore
Now
Driving in Traverse City
Is just like driving in Detroit
Miles Teller drives everywhere in Michigan
In every condition
Miles Teller can feel the curvature of the earth when he drives
Miles Teller drives a delivery van with over 300,000 miles on it
With brakes that go to the floor
Miles Teller delivers tools or parts or some bullshit to machine shops
Miles Teller does not know what he is delivering
Ever
Miles Teller’s boss
Sits in his office and watches
Right wing conspiracy theory videos
On YouTube
Miles Teller’s boss owns a bunch of tactical guns
Miles Teller’s boss doesn’t know anything about tactical guns
Miles Teller had to tell his boss which caliber of bullet each gun shoots
Miles Teller only owns two old hunting rifles
That were given to him by family
Miles Teller’s boss is an NPC
Miles Teller’s existence is an unbearable burden on the world
Just ask everyone in the world
Everyone yells at Miles Teller and tells him what to do
All the time
Miles Teller gets yelled at everyday
When Miles Teller gets back from Detroit, he has to figure out what all this paperwork from Detroit means
Nobody else knows what the paperwork means and the order for the tools is always wrong and Nobody knows why
Miles Teller is standing in the warehouse and all these people start crawling out of their cubicles To yell at Miles Teller as a group crucifixion activity
Miles Teller gets accused of stealing parts for CNC and Mills and Lathe Machines
Miles Teller doesn’t know what CNC, Mills and Lathe Machines are
Miles Teller did not steal the parts
And even if he did, he would not know what to do with them
Miles Teller imagines that if he did steal the machinist parts, he would try to create a giant mech Robot in his basement and use the robot to gain freedom
When Miles Teller gets yelled at, he doesn’t do anything
He just stands there motionless and without expression
But his eyes change
Miles Teller’s eyes sink in and become pot holes
They don’t see anything in front of them
Instead
They see tentacles reaching up from the dark below
They see a beast sunk so far down it has intertwined with the core of the earth and the earth can’t get rid of this beast and overtime the earth has learned to rely on the beast for survival
The tentacles shoot up from the core of the earth and through Miles Teller’s feet and then out of Miles Teller’s eyes and the end of the two tentacles have mouths and inside the tentacle’s mouths Are serrated teeth. The mouths open and hiss and venom drools down to the floor and one of the tentacles chomps off the head of a sales person and another tentacle chomps off the head of someone who works in the billing department
This makes everyone feel uncomfortable around Miles Teller
Miles Teller’s boss calls him into his office and tells him that he can’t shoot evil tentacles out of his eyes and bite people’s heads off anymore. If he keeps doing it, he will be fired
Miles Teller reminds his boss that he makes the same amount of money as unemployment benefits provide
The eyes of Miles Teller’s boss are not connected to the beast at the center of the earth. Instead, they’re connected to a cotton candy machine at a community center downtown
Hot Pink and Baby Blue cotton candy blooms out of Miles Teller’s bosses’ eyes. His boss screams in terror and tries to keep the cotton candy from spilling out
While this is happening Miles Teller begins to tell his boss how a junkie has recently stolen sentimental belongings from his mother, who is sick
Miles Teller’s boss is sobbing now and the cotton candy is coming out of his eyes and is getting wet and deflating kinda like how cotton candy does when you eat it. But instead of saliva its tears
Miles Teller tells his boss he needs to take a couple days off work to locate the junkie and get the stolen items back or get revenge
Miles Teller is good at locating people like this
Miles Teller still has lawyers call him and ask him to locate people for them but Miles Teller hates lawyers
Miles Teller is owed favors by the most bellicose spirits in the cosmos
Miles Teller’s boss wretches his head back, holds the sides of his head and screams in agony as more cotton candy comes out of his eyes and melts from his tears and runs down his stupid face
Miles Teller’s boss shoos him out of his office and tells him to do whatever he wants
Miles Teller leaves work
It is a blizzard outside
Miles Teller’s Ford Fiesta is stuck in the snow
Miles Teller furiously shovels snow out from around his piece of shit car
Once unstuck, Miles Teller drives down the decrepit and abandoned and snowy streets
The icy shovel is in the back seat of his car. Ice is melting off the shovel and getting the seats
Wet
Miles Teller has thoughts of taking the shovel and digging all the way down to the core of the Earth and untangling the beast and bringing it up to the surface
___
Jon Berger lives in Saginaw, MI. His short story collection GOON DOG is available at Gob Pile Press. His poetry collection SAINT LIZARD is forthcoming at Gob Pile Press. He tweets @bergerbomb44.
By Scott Mitchel May
Notes From The Scene
We found a pear.
We found it near the lobby’s desk and it was chewed.
Chewed and also rotten.
By the time we found it.
She was behind the lobby’s desk.
She had a gunshot wound to the head and the bullet was lodged in the wall behind the desk, behind where she was standing.
Unclear if she was given a chance.
Supine.
Peaceful.
I’m so sick of this shit, this cocked-up shit; the whole world is full of this cocked-up shit.
We found a tooth.
In a drawer.
Of the desk.
Renaud says it’s a baby tooth.
Bagged and logged into evidence; file #46568.
Other than that, nothing of note.
I hate
The Doins’ Within the Room
“He said he was comin’, so he is comin’. Watch cable and chill the fuck out.”
“My momma says don’t trust nothin’ you can hold and I can’t hold HBO and I can’t hold happy-horse-shit.”
“Your mama was an ignorant Gypsy whore.”
“Be that as it may…”
“He’s comin’”
“When?”
“When what?”
“When he gets back from the place.”
“What place?”
“Don’t make me say it.”
“What place?”
“The gettin’…”
A knock at the door snags his attention and eases her mind. There is a green-yellow light outside and the shadow it casts against the cement looks about right for who they are expecting. They hold still. Quiet. The rate is $7.50/hr. They are running low on time.
“Get it, damn you!”
“Well, now how do we know it’s him back from the place?”
“How do we know? Who the fuck else is it gonna be?”
“Intruders.”
“What do we got so good that intruders would want to intrude upon it?”
“We got the stuff; when he gets back.”
“He ain’t back. Or, he is but we ain’t let him in. Either way, we ain’t got the stuff.”
“They could know we gettin’ the stuff. They could be knocking and anticipatin’ us gettin’ the stuff. We answer, they hit us, we wait with them, then, when he shows, they kill us and him and take the stuff.”
“You are a dumb-fuck.”
“Ok.”
“Yeah, ok.”
He answers the door and when it opens wide enough he is hit on his head with the butt end of a Maglite Flashlight that takes four D Cell batteries and is knocked unconscious and They come through the room’s door with guns drawn which they use to glue her to the bed and they yell “Don’t move a fuckin’ hair or I’ll…” and the rest she misses because she’s watching him bleed and she’s thinking that this is the stupidest time for him to be fucking be right about something he speculated on.
Notes from the Scene
Her dress is hiked up and she’s not wearing underwear.
They never tell you how you’ll feel in the academy about such things.
Roderick finds a shed pubic hair three feet away but it’s brown and hers are yellow.
Fuckin’ hourly rate shit-hole.
A casing is found.
.22.
Varmint round.
Must’ve put it right to her forehead.
No explaining it otherwise.
A chill to the air.
Her face is pocked with a lifetime’s regret.
Her teeth are a shattered ruin.
No witnesses.
No one left around.
The no vacancy light is on.
The rats know when to do their thing and go.
Rm 465 has been swept.
A bowl of pears was found.
More Doins’ Within The Room
“I keep tellin’ everyone he ain’t back! He took the money and he left.”
“That he did.”
“You got money! You got dope!”
“We ain’t got shit!”
“He’s right.”
“Don’t you motherfuck to me!”
“I ain’t motherfuckin’ to nobody! If I was high, you’d know it.”
“We wait.”
“I told you…”
“Shut the fuck up, Leonard!”
“All I’m sayin’ is I never get credit for when I’m right.”
“I tell you plenty!”
“You never tell me squat!”
“I tell you all the damn time, you just ain’t listen!”
“Never say you’re sorry neither…”
“Well, I’m sorry you got us hogtied, that’s for sure.”
“I hate you so much.”
A knock at the door. He is back from the place from which things are gotten. One of them bites a pear. They answer.
Notes from the Scene
Three bodies upstairs.
All shot in the head.
Three .22 casings
Looks like four coffee mugs.
They were waiting a while.
No clue who did this.
Three males.
Drug-related.
Coke, likely.
Three out of state Drivers Licenses.
God damn it.
Nothing left to do but the paperwork.
See you down the road a piece, Scumbags.
___
Scott is the author of the short story collection DeKalb Illinois is a Paradise What Eats Its Own (Alien Buddha 22), the novels Breakneck: or it happened once in America (Anxiety Press 23) and Awful People (Death of Print Feb 24), and the novelette All Burn Down (Emerge Press Oct 23). His short stories and essays have appeared in many magazines across the internet.
By Michael McSweeney
The game started at the intersection in South Montford, the place where drunkenness and fire melted away James Rainville three months before. We called it Love Taps and the goal was to hit the car ahead of you with your bumper but not cause any damage. I drove the swamp-green shit-box sedan my sister smashed to hell before my parents gave me the keys. G sat beside me smoking the last of our junk weed out of a crushed and pocked cola can. P’s straw-blonde hair sprouted in the window of the truck ahead of us and the wind rocked the stoplight above the intersection. Zack Sweeney, you coward, G said. Tap that bastard’s bumper. Give it a love tap. I shoved deep the lingering anxiety of my father and his father, now mine, and nudged the accelerator. The shit-box scampered half a foot. Then G shouted, Just fucking do it. I hated the smell of the junk weed and I hated G for wasting our money on it. Then I kicked the gas pedal and the shit-box lurched and we banged against P’s rear. P twisted and I saw his foul fury face and then the light glared green and the school bus behind us bellowed and we raged up the long blight nightmare of old proud Montford Main. When we reached the baseball field, the only place that didn’t demand your money for a welcome, P was ready to rough me up until G calmed him down and explained the game. P’s scowl bloomed into a grin and that night we chased our tails north and south through Montford’s endless house-pimpled mazes. G’s girlfriend C got in on it, too. C was born for it, a hot holy maniac who’d banshee her dad’s busted-up minivan into the oncoming lane and hum a $15 throwaway cell phone across your hood. Those nights we built towering bonfires in the old construction yard and cackled when the cops failed to uproot us. My mind boiled and I never slept before dawn. C and I fucked atop the brick-and-mortar bones of the ruined middle school on the hottest night of summer, the night G’s appendix tore itself apart. Three weeks later G’s parents sold their house and he was gone, right before the market burst. Dissipation, everyone. I called the number C gave me but each time a confused woman asked if my name was Tom. I pushed the shit-box harder each night, 85 mile-per-hour demon runs down Montford Main. This has to be a record, I shouted, it has to be. I wanted to wrench the wheel leftward, one last love tap for the last driver alive. I wanted the difference between the machine and me to dissolve at the place where stop signs demanded my silence, far from the highway crossing that split my town like a crucifix, me just a foot and a final drop of gas, handbrake as busted as a young friend’s promise, dashboard lights too dim to be understood.
___
Michael McSweeney is a writer and editor from Massachusetts. His first novel, Heroman, is forthcoming from Expat Press.
By Bram Riddlebarger
Mariner Market
Cannon Beach, Oregon
“Why don’t you guys wait outside?”
Less question than directive.
“I’ll get the tide map and be out in a minute.”
I grabbed my son’s hand and left without any beer.
I saw a pair of seagulls in the parking lot in the back of a truck. The truck had a cap, but the rear window was missing. The gulls breached the entry. A mound of household goods filled the bed.
“Get all your stuff and get out!”
“But I don’t want to.”
The gulls rummaged the debris. The larger gull dislodged a package of Tide washing machine tablets. The gull tossed the Tide, but the Tide stayed in.
No one paid any attention to the gulls. Everyone in Cannon Beach was used to the tide coming in and out every day.
Making no headway the bird tried to fly, but the Tide was too heavy. The small gull got in on the action. Crows swooped down. A group of tourists murdered the saltwater taffy across the street.
I shooed the gulls away.
The gulls asked who was going to do their laundry now. I tossed the package through the invisible rear window.
“Get all your stuff and get out!”
She held the tide map in her hand.
“But I don’t want to.”
Buckling up I saw the owner of the truck, a case of beer like a household good, thwart the gulls of their soapy desire.
I wondered out loud what would make those gulls so fixated on that Tide.
My youngest daughter said
“They longed for that Ocean Breeze.”
___
Bram Riddlebarger lives in SE Ohio. He’s written a number of books including Golden Rod and A Settled Ship in an Ocean of Hills. “Gulls” will be in a forthcoming collection titled The Way It All Must End.
By Dan Leach
If you sit around thinking
about where all this is going
you will never do anything at all
___
Dan Leach has published work in The New Orleans Review, Copper Nickel, and The Sun. He has two collections of short fiction: Floods and Fires (University of North Georgia, 2017) and Dead Mediums (Trident Press, 2022). His first book of poems, Stray Latitudes, will be released by Texas Review Press in 2024.
By Yuu Ikeda
B, C, D,
B, C, D,
B, C, D,
B, C, D,
＿where is the start?
＿where is the next stage?
＿where is the end?
___
Yuu Ikeda (she/they) is a Japan based poet, writer. She writes poetry on her website. Her latest poetry chapbook “Phantasmal Flowers in The Eden Where Only I Know” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press. One of her big dreams is to write while traveling around the world. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram: @yuunnnn77
this land belonged to the
lenape, the Susquehannock,
the massawomeck — long
before you were born.
and they had names for water:
moi, oneega, o:ne:ka’. names for
mountain and for mud. they spoke
a polysynthetic syntax, now frag
-mented, not unlike their people.
but language, like the dinosaurs —
like parents — can become extinct,
can leave traces: the not-quite
noumena, the narrows, a word
water- wind-gap carved through
tuscarora quartzite, proving
presence with absence.
these same landscapes made
you. this mid-atlantic geography
of arundale clay and Gettysburg
shale — of fossilized stone of
star-tooth sauropod — built up
your bones. a bloodline more
ancient than the old line. for
you are of the sisku hanne, a
slow-moving muddy river
swirling with alluvium. you are of the floodplains embracing
a drowned river valley.
you are of the youghiogheny, an
affluent river flowing in a contrary direction. you are carving a waterline
of transgressions, with more twists and turns than an oxbow — and i’m
wading through your brackish waters, swept along the rapids toward a watershed-sink where everything you
touch inevitably meets its end.
and when you open your lips to speak, it’s with a tangled tongue heavy with words that spill like streams from your deepwater delta mouth.
***
The line “you are carving a waterline of transgressions” is adapted from the poem “exhibits from The American Water Museum” by Natalie Diaz.
___
Natalye Childress is a writer, an editor, and author of The Aftermath of Forever (Microcosm Publishing). She lives in Berlin, Germany. Find her at natalye.com or @deutschbitte.
By Wallace Barker
Levantate Campesino
zocalo draped in colored
flags and flashing
christmas lights
nativity feels near
emaciated beggars
we had mole three ways
and chapulines with pico
wide pedestrian boulevards
are a relief after narrow
sidewalks and coughing engines
i want to buy a t-shirt that
says “¡levantate campesino!”
but i am not a campesino
and my support for their struggle
seems theoretical at best
a wildman covered in grime
walks past us in the plaza
he is naked from the waist down
a tiny old woman sleeps
on the sidewalk within
a barrier of plastic bottles
a makeshift wall for her protection
***
Dios Nunca Muere
we walked down steep concrete
steps to playa carrizalillo
at the bottom were men in fatigues
carrying machine guns
the beach was hot and crowded
only shade from umbrellas
above greasy plastic chairs
we found a narrow dirt path
leading over beach rock to
a small cove shaded by palm trees
two young men with bleached hair
sat on a towel lightly kissing
i felt we were intruding but we snorkeled
and observed the tropical fish
i hit my knee on some rough coral
emerged with blood running down my leg
we took a whale watching tour
on a boat called “angelmar”
and found a pod of humpback whales
including two young calves
when they breached the surface
a fleet of tourist boats rushed over
we watched the whale flukes emerge
then disappear beneath dark waves
el capitan told us the fluke means
they are diving deep and unlikely
to resurface in such a crowded area
dolphins escorted our boat to shore
we walked across
playa manzanilla
to our rental house
we swam in the pool
just us this time
just our little family
***
Mazunte
clean light over the ocean
mesmerizing the violent surf
conjugating spanish verbs
sometimes current events
sneak into my consciousness
with the balcony doors open
i heard voices from the beach
in the morning we will return home
if god grants safe passage
we will leave the man who carries
a bucket around the tourbus parking lot
sits on the bucket to polish hubcaps
while the drivers read papers
the beach dogs skinny but
happy in a languorous way
they splash in the surf
scaring the gulls who peck sand
i wont sleep with the beach voices tonight
___
Wallace Barker lives in Austin, Texas. His most recent book “Collected Poems 2009-2022” is available from Maximus Books. His debut poetry collection “La Serenissima” is available from Gob Pile Press. More of his work can be found at wallacebarker.com
By Leila Register
There’s a lot of pressure on this thing to be no junk. That’s why I called it No Junk. That’s how life works. You name something the ideal name and it just happens that way for you. I feel terrible. I feel in trouble. I keep saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Keep messing up facts in public. Last night I was at a table with strangers. One man wore a suit. I told him he looked like the movie The Graduate. He said his mom recently died and then I felt bad about what I said about the suit. There we all were. His mom and the suit and The Graduate. I asked him questions about his life. He said he wants to write but can’t. I said what happens when you try. He said I just get stuck. Today was supposed to be scattered storms but I look up and see the tree in front of my window and above it the blue sky and below that some leaves that look more yellow than green because of how the sun works. I read a lot of things everyday. I don’t mean books. I mean the internet where people share their ideas and worldview and images and sounds and terrible events. I also read stories but I have trouble finishing those. Sometimes the stories are on a website that is so ugly and depressing. Sometimes the lines are arranged in a way that makes the whole thing feel cheap and bad. Sometimes the words are broken up by a square advertisement on the right side of the screen. Sometimes the square advertisement is flashing. Sometimes whoever made the website decided to get creative with fonts. Sometimes all of this is happening at once and it makes me sink into an awful sadness. It makes me ask why am I doing this. Sometimes I read a story and I get to sentence three or four or five and I have to stop because things aren’t moving in a way I like. It’s hard to describe what it means for things to move in a way I like. It’s easier to describe what I don’t like. I don’t like when someone in a story does something “exasperatedly.” I don’t like when someone in a story tucks their hair behind their ear or giggles or “smiles sheepishly.” I don’t like the phrase “nothing special, really.” I know these are things people say and do in life and in the world but when someone does them in a story or essay it sounds fake and embarrassing. What does sheepish mean? Why would someone smile that way? I can’t imagine it. I don’t like anything I can’t picture or imagine.
___
Leila Register is a designer based in New York. On her desk is a framed print of a speech bubble that says “As If I Wasn’t Embarrassed Enough.” Her writing has appeared in Hobart, Rejection Letters, and Maudlin House.
By Jack B. Bedell
****
Swamp Thing Dives into Psalm 69
Quicksand under me, swamp water over me;
I am going down for the third time
Daily, this is the dilemma I face—sink in the mess pulling at my feet here, in the evil and strife I face every day—or scream for help from a god that only wants me to learn to swim on my own. The fact of the matter is I am sinking either way. The swamp loves a fight as much as it loves a secret, so that’s no answer. Evil is a fire ant bed with too many mounds to burn. There is no help anywhere close enough to get to me in time to save me, so where is salvation in this swamp? For me? For what’s left of this land? Scream all you want. Flail. Turn onto your back and roll out of this trouble. It’s on you. Us. It always was. No pretty song can change that simple fact. No curse, that truth.
****
Swamp Thing Loses His Sense of Bearing
One thing’s certain. If you sit on this shore long enough, you’ll think about time. It’s unavoidable. The water comes in, goes out. Takes what it wants. Comes back for more. Sunlight, moonlight. Breeze, heat. Pelicans hovering over the barrier island offshore dance this dance, too. Even though their island’s completely rebuilt with barges of sand, they continue this cycle of sharing the space they’re given, like they know the water will rise again in time—is rising—to take it all back. Watching them glide overhead like this, it’s too easy to lose any sense of being on shore, or on anything, to feel the gulf swell until you are standing underneath a whole new ocean, the birds’ bellies riding its gentle waves.
****
Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, Autofocus, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain, and other journals. He’s also had pieces included in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.
By Sy Holmes
My car was a beat-up 2000 BMW that I got from my buddy TJ, who bought it from his buddy down in Dallas who had gotten it from someone else who had probably stolen it. He gave it to me, along with a couple tools, a pair of boxing gloves, and a set of Texas plates registered to a Prius “in case I had to handle business.” I got it for a song for him to get back to Houston. It had a white rattle-can paint job that was flaking off and showing silver in places, the oil was self-changing, and the seats got scorching hot. I loved it, even though my girlfriend told me it made me look like a failed molly dealer. It overheated one night in September for no apparent reason.
I went back in the morning and limped it over to the closest thing I have to a mechanic, my buddy Gage, who had full use of his landlady’s garage while she was away in Florida. We took a look at it, checked the codes, and decided we didn’t know shit so we should probably order the most likely parts and see what happened. In return, I reassured Gage’s girlfriend that the headache she had probably wasn’t brain cancer, my area of amateur expertise.
Two weeks later, I had a thermostat and water pump waiting for me at home. We popped the hood, changed the parts, and started to put it all together again, only to realize that one of the tensioner mounts on the serpentine belt had sheared off the engine block itself. This meant that we would have had to take the engine out, do some welding beyond Gage’s skill level, and trust the rest to Jesus.
“If we pull some real fuck-your-cousin engineering, we might be able to find someone to fabricate a new mount, reroute the cable, and stick it someplace else,” Gage told me, as I tried to overcome my sadness with a sandwich. I didn’t know. It seemed beyond both our ability and inclination.
Over the next few days, I scoured central Montana Craigslist for any suitable vehicle. Broke down enough to be affordable, but not too broke down. I finally found a late-’90s Ram that looked promising. Gage was out of town, so I called my friend Skycrane to help me look it over as a sort of combination mechanic and attorney. We showed up to test it out, and the steering was a bit wonky, but it drove. I said I would take it.
Once the price was settled, I had to figure out how I was going to pay the owner, since I realized I hadn’t had a checkbook in a good two years. Because I’m a dumbass, half of my life has been consumed by finding sketchy ways to do legit things. I suggested a couple different ways, which made me feel like a scammer, before we settled on PayPal. I didn’t need to worry, though, because when I met him to sign the title over, he told me that if I stole some government plates I could probably pass myself off as a federal employee and go where I wanted, since it seemed like to him the whole government drove white Rams. He might have been joking.
By the time that was settled, Gage’s landlady was back from Florida, and I had to find a way to offload the BMW. I put it online as a parts car and promptly got offered loot like a sketchy Mossberg rifle, an ancient Honda Civic with anime stickers all over the outside, and a couple gold chains. Anything but cash, which was what I needed. Finally, a guy from up near Fort Benton came down with his wife, who he told me over and over was “sickly,” and bought it. We pushed it out of the garage into the snow and up to his trailer, which had a frayed Harbor Freight winch that may as well have had an OSHA VIOLATION sticker on it.. I sat in the driver’s seat and steered as he pulled it up the equally-sketchy ramps he had brought, and looked at the gray sky that stretched over the plains. I pictured myself ascending, Grease-like, into the heavens above the river, entering the DIY gates of redneck valhalla in my broke-down chariot. Then it was on the trailer and off to a fitful retirement in a front yard. On the way home, my radio got stuck on the Christian channel and I listened to how God wouldn’t let the devil touch you if you just had faith. I don’t know about all that. Maybe he could stop the devil from fucking with my cars.
****
Sy Holmes is a writer from western North Carolina. He currently lives in central Montana with other people’s dogs.” Thanks again!
By Mike Andrelczyk
***
The Logrollers
The two of them are always there – eternally
In my mind balancing on a spinning log beneath their wooden shoes
Rolling on the river
Wearing green caps with feathers in them
Spinning their log
As I:
Season an omelette with fennel, dill and sage
Type the words “fresh heist”
Waive all inspections
Piss blood
Hit a ping-pong ball into the net after a thrilling 8-minute volley
Try to sleep
Leaf through an outdoor magazine
Call my dad
They keep spinning on the log with their funny little green hats
***
Tahiti 2134
aurora borealis but you have to listen to a car insurance ad to see it
the ghost of the gecko pasted to the anthurium
barking dog sample sneakers with flame resistant tongues
the translucent blue hockey player in the sea
of hovering hibiscus blooms
I’m gluing my disastrous shoe again
I’m wearing wraparound shades on an aluminum hydrofoil
I’m tranced-out and sweating bullets in the tranquilizer garden
as the fire ants swarm my strawberry-shaped wound
***
Soap Bubbles
I’m doing the dishes and I feel great
because you’re describing a meme you saw
and you just did that laugh style
I really love
***
Secret Poem (100 mph)
I saw a yellow gibbous moon on two legs sprinting between dark
hillocks
I saw a pigeon-colored crescent moon tripping down a spiral staircase
I wrote a secret poem called “100 mph”
It goes:
The sky has never been
Bigger and more meaningful
I am crying and driving
100 mph
And I’ll never be able to tell you about this
***
Cornflower
Speedwalking through the graveyard
into the cornfield and then crossing
the highway without watching the traffic
looking up at the chinook
forgetting to update
speedwalking through another graveyard
mumbling to myself “I don’t give a fuck”
stopping at the garden to register the blue and to scan a cornflower
always talking to myself
and maybe to you too
—-
Mike Andrelczyk is the author of four collections of poetry, including “!!!” with Ghost City Press. He lives in Pennsylvania. On Twitter @MikeAndrelczyk and Instagram mike_andrelczyk.
By Jessica Dawn
All the TikToks they sent in the group chat talked about hyperfixation, about all the things to hyperfixate on like games and fun facts and books and history.
“I think these are all just about spending too much time on TikTok,” I texted a friend.
“Do you wear your watch anymore?” my mom asked. She bought it so I could see that my heart was beating fine, that I was sleeping okay, that all the graphs looked the way they should so my body must be working right.
“Sometimes,” I lied. The last time I wore it was weeks before, back when I couldn’t stop watching my heart rate, couldn’t look away from it rising and falling. Kept trying to figure out how the numbers compared to the day before, to the week before, to an average healthy person, to an average unhealthy person. Which one was I closest to, how far away was I from normal, how far away from normal could I get before it was dangerous, how far away from normal could I get before I died.
People started noticing. Looked like I was bored, I guess, distracted.
“Are you waiting for something?” my coworker asked as I checked my watch again. “No,” I lied, but I was waiting for it to happen, stroke or heart attack maybe, whatever was going to kill me, sure to arrive any second.
“When someone asks me how my hyperfixation from three weeks ago is going but I’m already four crafts past that” the meme said, and in the group chat they could all relate.
“How often do you think about dying?” my therapist asks.
“I don’t know if I ever stop thinking about it,” I tell him.
Too fast a heart rate can mean a heart attack. Too slow a heart rate can mean a heart attack. That’s what the internet told me, anyway. I looked it up again, all the links already purple. Clicked them again because maybe this time I could find the thing that would let me relax, see the note that said “look Jessica, you’re okay” that I missed before.
“Me talking about my latest hyperfixation to anyone who will listen,” the meme says, picture of Charlie Kelly waving his arms in front of a wall plastered with papers, all of them connected with red string.
I googled chest pain and arm tingling.
blood clot symptoms
blood clot leg pain
what does pulmonary embolism feel like
symptoms pulmonary embolism
lips numb
lips numb stroke
heart palpitations
heart palpitations dizzy
heart palpitations dizzy fatigue
how to prevent blood clot
how to prevent stroke
how to know if I’m dying
how to know when I’ll die
“I think we should take your phone out of the equation when you’re starting to spin,” my therapist says. “Put it out of reach. How does that sound?”
“That sounds good,” I say even though it sounds terrible. If my brain does not want it, it is probably the right thing.
I have a recording of myself to listen to when the feeling hits, when I want to start looking things up, when I want answers that are not out there to find. One little voice recorder lives on my coffee table, another gets carried around with me. Recorders because I can’t use my phone for this, because my phone is part of the problem. Because what I need is to hear myself say that it’s fine not to know, that I can’t know everything, because what I need is nowhere on the internet.
“It’s okay to feel uncertain, it’s okay to be anxious about it,” the recording starts. The rest is just for me.
“Are hyperfixation and obsession different things?” I asked the group chat. No one knew, no one could answer.
“My dad died of a pulmonary embolism,” I tell my therapist.
“Well, no wonder you’re afraid,” he says.
The recordings are just one part. We are doing ERP, which stands for exposure and response prevention, which means that sometimes we talk about dying and I cry. “There’s so many things I wouldn’t get to see if I die now, like my nieces and nephew growing up,” I tell my therapist.
“That’s the thing about being dead, though,” he says. “You won’t know what you’re missing. You’ll be gone.”
Maybe hyperfixation is just about crafts. A lot of the memes are about crafts.
I’ve been checking the ages in obituaries, in the articles they write when someone famous dies. Sometimes the age is in the headline, which is weird but maybe part of why it’s news. Sometimes I have to click the link, scroll until I find it, but it’s always in there somewhere. Don’t know exactly what number I’m looking for, just that numbers close to my age feel bad, and smaller than my age feel worse.
There is a part of my brain that wants to collect all these ages and causes of death into a spreadsheet, wants to graph them, and see the ages where the dots cluster like this will tell me something about myself. Doesn’t matter that it only comes from articles that I see on Twitter or that all kinds of numbers and graphs about death are already out there, and I just need to look up the right combination of words to see them. No, if I make the graphs, they will tell me something different, a statistical version of reading tarot cards, doing my own astrological chart, using data to divine how many years I have left.
If I’m being honest, I figured I’d always get a say in how and when I go. I am surprised to learn that might not be true, that there are other ways I could die, that I do not have the control I want.
“What scares you the most about dying?” my therapist asks.
It’s the negative space, not what will happen but what won’t. Feelings left unspoken, things left undone.
It’s not what others will remember but that they won’t remember at all. Books never published, nothing of me left behind.
It’s time spent in the wrong ways, ways I’ll never get to make up.
“I feel like I have to hurry up and do things while I have a chance.”
“Sounds like a lot of pressure to put on yourself,” my therapist says.
––
Jessica Dawn lives on an island in the San Francisco Bay with a failed farm dog. She writes fiction and non-fiction, she is querying her first novel, she is trying her best. Her work is in HAD, Rejection Letters, Autofocus, Pidgeonholes, and more. Find her on Twitter @JuskaJames
By Jack B. Bedell
“A problem is something which I meet, which I find completely before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and initial validity.” —Gabriel Marcel
I have no doubt. That day in the lab that turned me into this, that took Linda away and forced me out into this swamp, caused many problems. But I, myself, what I am, is not a problem. I’ve read enough Marcel to know a problem is something independent of yourself you run across in this world, something that can be solved with actions or tactics, or that can be totally abandoned and left for someone else to fix. What I am, because it cannot be separated from me, is a mystery to be puzzled over, possibly even be understood given enough time and acceptance. Oil spills are a problem. Resource depletion is a problem. Even this coast disappearing daily has a remedy somewhere one of us can find. What I am, though, what I am on my way to becoming, will always glow as a reflection right on the edge of the horizon. And should I finally face it one day on my wanderings around this place, there won’t be a damn thing I can do about it. Other than recognize it for what it is.
––
Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, and other journals. He has also had work included in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.
By Kate Oden
Today my boyfriend pulls up in the red mustang with the leaky soft-top. Other days, he’s arrived in a bronze Town & Country van, a Dodge Durango camouflaged with rust, a Ram truck crested with a rack of lights. What must the neighbors think – the Russian couple next door I never see: Do they look down at us from their green ranch on a grassy rise? Judging by the cars in my driveway, I could have four boyfriends. And that’s not counting the local foot-traffic.
I know they’ve divorced in the modified white cape, catty-corner. I saw him on Bumble years ago; I swiped right, which means “yes.” He’s an economist with silver-dollar eyes, cheekbones that sling a smile before it even happens. We didn’t match – he was correct, of course, not to swipe right on me. Imagine dating someone within hearing distance of your ex. Sometimes I see him walking down our street, striding behind his ice-cream belly. I remember when he had an operation and was on summer-vacation time, years ago, how they both came out of that cape that binds a hillock of tall ostrich ferns. They sat on the stairs, wanting to chat – the kids were gone at camp. “We feel like we’re back in college. We sleep til nine.”
Now I hear her chipping away at the driveway ice all winter: chit, chit, chit. She’s beautiful, cold blue eyes and black hair. She has a beautiful name I’ve never heard on anyone else. She once told me her mother had a badger living beneath her house. A badger or some beary mammal, pulling up in the driveway like slightly sleazy cars, seeking heat.
Every time I put the recycling out or shovel the driveway, I wonder if the cars passing have seen me many times before and asked themselves why my partner doesn’t share the duty.
Signs of divorce:
1. The sudden appearance of more cars in the driveway
2. One person doing all the outdoor chores
3. Sometimes a dog disappears, or appears
4. Sometimes newspapers pile up when someone like me vacates the house for the weekend – every weekend.
Sometimes I wonder if neighbors even overhear the phone conversations I have in the yard. They wouldn’t even have to decipher the words, just my tone, to sense that I was flirting with someone new. It’s amazing what we reveal to the curious.
All of my daughter’s friends are children of divorce. Well, Emma is the exception that proves the rule. All these households split and drooping their thread-bare connections across town, across state lines, a web of spray-confetti relationships. I feel sorry these kids have formed a de facto support group for torn households. Sorry and grateful.
It almost seems like for every intact household there’s another of divorce. We play Red Rover with our houses. There’s the jogging family who moved out of the modern behemoth up the street into a cedar-sided home vacated by a divorced couple. Red Rover, Red Rover… Where does ice-cream belly live? Does he rent from the divorcee I know on Park Street?
I’ve never been married, but I’ve done the traditional, marriage “thing” (if there is such a thing): lived in a home with a partner for years and raised a child, rescued pets, started home-improvement projects we never finished. I never wanted to make it official with marriage, though. There wasn’t enough there, there. Then I met someone divorced twice before who doesn’t want to risk a third time and of course I want to wed him, joke about it every day. The joking makes the angst funny, puts a leopard-print speedo on the elephant in the room. We’re both post-split; he sees little reason in marriage now, whereas I see more reason than ever.
Of course it could be, as my friend in Nevada says, we’re just not made for marriage. Maybe certain hearts have smaller tanks, hearts that need to fuel up at every fresh pump. I don’t mean affairs or cheating, necessarily, but the restless searching for more. The American disease. I am constantly asking my partner for commitment even as I am new to the idea, myself. I am constantly making dinner for a love that might not ever come over. There is a wonderful way that I don’t take my boyfriend for granted, however. He is no more tethered to me than the vermilion maple leaves settled in my driveway. Our relationship is built on choice, a certain wind that put us where we are and keeps us there only more or less.
The divorcee with the beautiful name used to have a barking hound and a sassy pug. She works at the retirement home. I’d like to give her a ride in the red truck, maybe the mustang top-down on a nice day. We are both more likely to forget when recycling day is, in the absence of another remembering head. But aren’t the leaves that blow here lovely.
––
Kate Oden is a German translator and ghostwriter. She lives in New Hampshire in a household with slightly more animals than humans.
By Dustin Strickler
I am a mobility practitioner whose passion is to improve the wellbeing of others. I spent the past 15 years researching movement by studying Applied Functional Science with the Gray Institute. The inspiration for my artwork comes from my interest in the human condition, observing and blending the worlds of music, movies, sports, and notable personalities around Lititz, PA.
My work is a blend of pen and ink, markers, colored pencil, and acrylic paint. There are underlying meanings deep within each piece of my artwork that tell a story. In some cases, my artwork is a tribute to those people, places, and poodles that I love. At other times, it’s my reflection on the injustices that I wake up every day to do battle against.
The Justice League is based on the 1970s Super Friends animated TV series that I watched as a child. Depicted is a Justice League comic book of friends and acquaintances who I feel live up to the opening theme of this program “Their mission is to fight injustice, to right that which is wrong, and to serve all mankind.”
Each person represented here depicts the concept of “Super Friends” because each in his own way contributes to the well-being of others within the community that I grew up in.
Stay tuned to learn who and why my Justice League kicks so much ass.
––
Dustin Strickler, Artist
2022 Original 10×16
Pen and Ink, Copic Marker, Acrylic, and Colored Pencil
Carson Illustration Board
By Alan ten-Hoeve
Matt’s fat, pimply ass slid out of his pants as he searched for the smoked cigarettes his older sister buried behind the garage.
“Ain’t no way The Rockers could beat The Hart Foundation in a real fight. No way!”
“I dunno, man. They’re pretty fast.”
Matt rose hiking the back of his cutoffs with one hand, holding a squashed orange and black curl of a thing with the other. Held it out like he’d just found a ten-dollar bill. A trace of Liz’s lipstick stained the filter.
“Don’t matter. They fly around too much.” He stuck the crushed cig in his mouth. “When’s the last time you seen someone jump off a top rope during a real fight?”
The match caught on the fourth try. Matt pushed out his lips. Eyes crossed as he tried to line the match up to the remains of the cigarette. The flame touched Matt’s nose. He flinched, corrected the distance and the blacked end chuffed back to life. Matt shook out the match before it reached his fingers, inhaled a long drag, then doubled over coughing.
I took the butt. There was hardly anything left. Just a little ring of crinkled dirty-white paper before the filter started. I put it to my lips anyway, tried to imagine it was like kissing Liz, but Matt had soaked it with his spit. I dropped it back in the weeds where it belonged.
Matt wiped the drool from his lips. “What the fuck, that’s still good.”
He pinched the butt before I could step on it. Puffed like he was giving it little fish-kisses. The ember went down to the filter. It sizzled and smelled like burning plastic. Matt doubled over in another coughing fit. I almost didn’t hear Jimmy dragging the heels of his combat boots up the driveway.
Jimmy was the biggest kid in the seventh grade. He’d been left back twice and was one suspension away from permanent expulsion. It was only a matter of time. Everyone knew he’d started the dumpster fire behind the courtyard, and all the kids in town were afraid of him, even high schoolers. A good guy to have on your side, but not always good to have around.
“Better put your dicks away, girls. Though I’d probably need a microscope to see them anyway.” Jimmy cracked up.
Matt offered him the fried butt.
“Get the fuck outta here.” Jimmy pulled out a full softpack of his mother’s Dorals from the cargo pocket of his camo pants. The gold foil crown on the pack flashed sun “Swiped them before I left.”
Matt dropped the charred filter, toed it under the dirt, and reached for the pack. Jimmy pulled it away.
“Uh-uh, not so fast! First I wanna see.”
We spent the next half hour in Matt’s garage, leering at nudie magazines his dad kept hidden in a broken minifridge blocked by his rusty tool chest.
“This is a treasure trove of fine trim,” Jimmy turned a magazine sideways, cocking his head at the same time so whatever he was looking at was still right-side up for him. “Huge fuckin’ titties, a natural redhead. Fuuuck! I might have to whip it out right here and take care of things.”
Matt peeked over a magazine with a french word on the cover. “Don’t get your jizz on my dad’s shit.”
Most kids wouldn’t dare tell Jimmy what to do with his jizz, but Matt’s dad, a former golden gloves boxer who could rip a telephone book in half, was someone even Jimmy wouldn’t cross.
Jimmy laughed. “Y’know I’m just playin’. I gotta fuckin hog anyway. I wouldn’t want to scare you.”
Jimmy tossed the magazine down, took out the pack of Dorals, shook one out.
“Not in here,” Matt said. “My dad’ll beat my ass.”
Jimmy had a plastic Bic lighter with a peeling American flag on it. He lit one cigarette after another as we walked around town, smoked them halfway down, then passed it. “You guys see wrestling last night?”
Matt took the cigarette and pointed the cherry at me. “This guy thinks The Rockers could take the Hart Foundation in a real fight.“ He took a big drag, coughed, and passed me the butt.
“That ain’t what I fuckin’ said.”
Jimmy made a face. “Who gives a shit? Ultimate Warrior would kick all their asses in less than a minute.”
There’s no arguing with idiocy, but I hadn’t learned that yet. “No way. He’s got too many muscles. He can’t hardly move around the ring.”
Jimmy poked a new Doral in the corner of his mouth and flicked his Bic. “That’s cuz he don’t have to. He’d fuck anybody up if he wanted.” He pushed his palms up and down over his head like he was doing Warrior’s gorilla press slam. Dark yellow ovals with rusty centers stained the pitts of his white t-shirt.
I let it drop, took the cigarette and puffed, trying to remember how many that made. I was lightheaded. My chest hurt. It felt like my mind wasn’t connected to my body. Arms and legs moved all by themselves. Carrying me down the Boulevard. So many cracks in the sidewalk.
We followed Jimmy into Krauzser’s where he stole a bag of beef jerky, then turned up a side street. Everyone was quiet as they ate. I was thirsty and wished Jimmy would’ve stolen a soda too. After a few blocks, Jimmy slowed. A familiar look on his face. He stopped in front of a house, jerked his chin at it.
“Let’s do that one.”
Jimmy’s favorite activity was ringing people’s doorbells and running away. Ring and Run, he called it. Harmless fun.
Only once did we have any trouble. We hit too close to Matt’s home. Rang one of his neighbor’s houses. A geographical error. Matt didn’t want to do it but Jimmy had a way of phrasing things that made it hard to say no. “C’mon, don’t be a gay pussy.”
As soon as Matt pushed the bell he vaulted over the railing. There weren’t any bushes or cars close enough to hide behind so we followed him around the side of the house, running as fast as we could. When we got into the backyard we froze. The whole family was in the middle of a barbecue. For about three dumb seconds we all stared at each other, blinking, mouths hung open. We ran off but it was too late. Matt’s dad gave him a good one for that. Not for what he did. For getting caught. After that we learned our lesson, and agreed on some rules, like not hitting houses within a three block radius of our homes.
I tossed my cigarette as Jimmy walked toward the house all nonchalant. When Matt and I gave him the clear sign he went up the stoop, rang the bell. We hid behind a parked car as a bent old man answered the door. He looked up and down the street.
“Hello?” He had a shaky old man voice. “Who’s there?”
We slapped our hands over our mouths so we didn’t laugh too loud.
As the man went back inside, Jimmy mimicked him, “Hello? Hello?” and all 3 of us broke up.
After Jimmy it was Matt’s turn, then mine. That was the order. Sometimes we’d get a dud but with it being a Sunday most everyone was home. One guy got so mad he came out of his house and walked up and down the sidewalk cursing for like five minutes. He passed the hedges we were hiding behind twice but eventually gave up. We hit a few rich houses. Girls we had crushes on. The convent where the nuns lived.
The fun started to fizzle about an hour or so later. My head hurt from all the cigarettes and my legs were tired from running. We came up to a two-story house with peeling paint. We’d walked by the place many times in the past but deemed it too risky to hit. To get to the doorbell, you had to enter a screened-in porch, and there was a BEWARE OF DOG sign taped on the screen door.
Jimmy handed me the jerky, flicked his chin. “Let’s do this one.”
I paused mid-bite and looked at him like he was crazy. “You’re kiddin’, right?”
“C’mon! I’ve seen the lady who lives here.” Jimmy held his hands out from his chest and made a pinching gesture. “Big tits, no bra. She’s not as hot as Valerie Francesca but I wouldn’t kick her out of bed.”
“There’s a fuckin’ dog sign right there. Breaks our number two rule.”
Jimmy waved his hand at it. “That’s just to scare off burglars. Ring and run.”
“Harmless fun,”Matt finished.
When I didn’t say anything Jimmy got annoyed. His face darkened and he got up close. His large body blocked out the sun. “Don’t be a gay pussy.”
I turned my face from Jimmy’s bad breath. “I’m not a gay pussy. I just don’t wanna do this anymore.”
“I don’t wanna do this anymore.” Jimmy mimicked me in a high-pitched girly voice and gave Matt an elbow. I could feel my face get hot. I wanted to hit him but I knew he’d kick my ass.
“Yeah, c’mon, just once more,” Matt added. “Don’t be a wuss.”
Two against one.
I folded the bag of jerky into my back pocket and stared at the house. “I don’t know—the porch—I don’t think I can open and close the door fast enough to get away.”
“That all?” Jimmy said. “I’ll hold the door open so you can just run out. Easy.”
I looked at Matt.
He smiled around a cigarette. “Just this last one.”
I snatched the cigarette from Matt’s mouth. Took a long, slow drag, inhaled deeply, then tossed it on the sidewalk. Matt quickly picked it up and gave it his fish kisses.
My head throbbed. I wanted this to be done. “Alright, fine. Let’s get this over with.”
“Yeah, that’s what I like to hear.” Jimmy grabbed me in a bear hug from the side, lifted me up, and humped me like a dog.
I climbed the crumbling front steps, wondering if I’d be able to clear them in one jump when it was time to flee. As I reached for the screen door I hoped it would be locked.
It wasn’t.
The spring groaned a little. I looked back over my shoulder. Matt was on the sidewalk, one foot in front of the other, ready to run. Jimmy had come up the steps behind me. He took the door handle.
“Be quick.”
There was a ratty couch inside the porch. Old shoes and yard stuff littered the floor. Recycling bins overflowed with beer cans. The air smelled sour and musty. From where I stood, the front door looked about a mile away. My mouth was dry. The aftertaste of too many cigarettes mixed with jerky stung my throat.
Jimmy pushed me. “Go on!”
I gave him the finger and took a step forward. Floorboards creaked. Sweat broke out on my forehead. Halfway inside I leaned toward the door, stretched my arm out as far as I could without getting too close, and pressed the bell.
I prayed that the thing was broken, that it wouldn’t work, but I could feel the electrical pulse hum under my fingertip. In the tense silence a bell chimed inside the house.
A dog barked and all the hair on my body stood up. I whipped around to bolt out the screen door only to see it slap closed. Jimmy was on the other side holding it shut. Below his evil eyes a huge grin split his face in half. I could hear the dog snarling on the other side of the door.
“What the fuck are you doing let me out!”
Matt was still on the sidewalk. Panic on his face. He glanced up and down the street. “Jimmy, what are you doing, we gotta run!”
I put my palms on the door frame and pushed but Jimmy pushed back against it, leaning all his weight on the other side. Laughing. He lifted his head, about to say something, then his evil eyes went wide. Without a word he let go, sprang down the steps, and took off with Matt trailing behind.
“Who the fuck’re you?!”
I spun around and saw an enormous man standing in the doorway, holding one of the biggest dogs I’d ever seen by the collar. “I said, the fuck’re you?!” He looked around the porch. “Tryna steal my shit?”
I glanced at all the trash on the porch, wondering if he was joking. Before I could think of an excuse, he reached out with his free hand and grabbed the sleeve of my shirt. I turned away, heard a ripping sound, and pushed on the screen door. It was jammed. The dog barked viciously, pulling at its collar.
Without thinking, I jumped through the steel mesh, tripped and tumbled down the front steps, and ran as fast as I could down the street. The dog’s paws galloped on the sidewalk behind me. A low, sustained growl rose from between a set of viselike jaws full of teeth the size of kitchen knives.
I pulled the bag of jerky out of my pocket and let it fall to the ground. The galloping and growling stopped. I could hear the man yelling something about calling the cops.
When I caught up with Matt and Jimmy they were standing on the brown lawn of Jimmy’s crumbling apartment complex. “What the fuck was that?”
“I swear, I didn’t know he was going to do that,” Matt said. He was bent over, hands on knees, trying to catch his breath.
Jimmy had an amused sneer on his face. “It was just a joke. You better relax yoursel—”
My fist crashed into Jimmy’s face. Pain and wetness on my knuckles. He staggered back then balanced. His lip was split. He wiped it with his hand and stared at the blood. Then at me. “I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you.”
Jimmy charged low and tackled me to the ground. I felt like I’d been hit by a rhino. The wind left me like a departed spirit. I saw the sky, big and taunting in its blueness, then a salvo of softball-sized fists rained down on me. I tried to cover up but Jimmy was quick for a big kid. His knuckles found their way through. My face and head went numb from the blows. Colors flashed across my vision. A strange taste filled my mouth.
I could hear Matt screaming in the background but was unable to make out what he was saying. In an act of desperation, I blindly thrust my arm up and felt my knuckles connected with something pointy and hard. Jimmy went limp, slid to the side, and clutched his chin.
I rolled over, jumped on top of Jimmy, and swung wildly. I didn’t care what I was hitting. He covered his face, but after a few stiff shots his arms fell. Something crunched. The sight of blood spurting from his nose fuelled my rage. It was like I’d left my body and something else was controlling it.
Jimmy lifted his knee into my tailbone. A shockwave of pain shot up my back. My limbs tingled and went numb. Jimmy heaved me off. We tumbled over and over. When we stopped, Jimmy was on top of me again. He drove another fist into my face. I tried to lift my arms but they wouldn’t work.
Then the blows ceased and a high-pitched screech broke through the haze. Matt had two handfuls of Jimmy’s greasy hair, pulling him off. And another sound cut through the frenzy. A voice.
“One on one, Matt! One on one!”
Everyone froze. Jimmy’s mom leaned her bulk in the doorway of the apartment building. She calmly sucked on a cigarette as if she was just watching something on TV. Massive breasts strained at her shirt. She blew out a plume of smoke.
“One on one, Matt. You gay pussy.” Jimmy’s little sister Katie peaked around her mother’s hip.
The fight went out of us. Jimmy and I got to our feet. His face was bloody and swollen. The skin around his eyes turning purple. I couldn’t see my face, but it felt the way Jimmy’s looked.
“See you at school tomorrow?” I said.
Jimmy rubbed his side. “Yeah, see ya.”
Without another word, Matt and I walked away. Jimmy went into his building. His mom stood there watching us until we turned out of sight.
I touched my head and face and winced. Hills of pain rising all over my skull. “I feel like I was hit by a car.”
Matt was suppressing a smile.
“Glad you think this is funny.”
“You shoulda jumped off the top rope.”
I started to laugh, but it hurt too much.
Matt held out the soft pack of Dorals. “Jimmy dropped ‘um when you were fighting.”
I poked one between my swollen lips and winced.
––
Alan ten-Hoeve wrote Notes from a Wood-Paneled Basement (Gob Pile Press). @alantenhoeve on twitter and ig.
Jason Sebastion Russo interviews Bill Whitten.
JSR: I had a first draft of questions for you about our mutual friend OD’ing in your band’s hotel room one long ago evening at SXSW, but I felt it was too salacious, even though it ends with me walking past the hotel gym at dawn and seeing you lifting weights in a black t-shirt and pair of jeans. I was still wet from having given our friend (no Narcan in those days) an ice-cold shower. I also had a couple of false starts about seeing you play guitar with Shady at the Knitting Factory (where we were pointed out to each other but not introduced, and you told Grasshopper I looked like a “young Kerouac” much to my great pride). I also wrote the story of Grand Mal playing at the Rhinecliff Hotel—which ended with you rolling around that filthy all-ages room without a shirt, and passing out at my and the late John DeVries’ couch in Poughkeepsie. But these questions were all starting to head into Hubert Selby territory; debauchery, treachery, substance abuse etc. etc. Should we pursue such a line of discussion?
BW: I feel somewhat queasy directly discussing (without the screens of fiction or abstraction) tales of past depravity. It’s probably best to take the Wittgensteinian approach: What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.
JSR: Fair enough. Ludwig missed his calling, imho. What is a central metaphor in your life? I’m obsessed with the image of a plant slowly growing toward a window, for example.
BW: Waking up drunk in an enormous, empty, windowless, dark, locked room in a stranger’s house. After a period of time (hours? days? who knows?) finally escaping. Penniless, walking for miles trying to find to my way home, vowing to change my ways, to begin again…
`
JSR: Word, or amen, to that. Do you have a common, almost trite, saying that you’ve thought to yourself most of your life? For example, I have been saying, “live by the sword, die by the sword” to myself my entire life. And/or, “garbage in, garbage, out.” Direct quotes from my father’s childhood in the Bronx. You?
BW: Again and again, the words of Divine come into my brain: Kill everyone, kill everyone right now.
JSR: An enduring, undeniable platform. We both lived in the same Brooklyn building for years, yet I was surprised that as soon as you left NYC, you immediately started writing and singing about exile. I get it now that I spend 80% of my time in central New York. I assume the shift in locale impacted your creative life. Can you describe how?
BW: Being something of a pessimist, I expected, from the moment of my arrival in New York (America’s insane asylum) in 1990, delivered from a Peter Pan bus into its cold, dingy glitter and trash-strewn streets and neighborhoods, that my stay would be short-lived. Back then (maybe now?), it was a city of fugitives, of pilgrims – men and women like me – on the run from their families, from themselves, from their origins. I navigated it according to maps I’d brought with me, drawn by its victims and castoffs. I was fascinated with both the strange, vacant-faced men crouched in dark doorways and the glamorous youth who arrived en masse from every corner of the world to take part in the vast, industrial form of human sacrifice known as the ‘arts scene’.
I have notes from the first party I ever went to in the City:
How to pay attention to her words when the muscles jumping in her jaw, the blue veins pulsing beneath her eyes were all clearly visible beneath her starveling’s translucent skin. She ran her hands through her hair, touched her nose, her ears. “I’ve become (mumble) fixated on the (mumble) fact that a kind of apocalyptic menace follows me around (mumble), the City is on the verge of destruction, I can feel it.”
I moved constantly from neighborhood to neighborhood, borough to borough, always in search of a cheap apartment. Whenever I found one, there would be constant rumors among the tenants about imminent eviction, about the landlord’s desire to sell the building to speculators. Expulsion from NYC was always inevitable.
In 2018, as I stood on the stoop of my apartment in Brooklyn for the last time, I wondered what real difference would there be between NYC and a city in the Midwest. No matter where you go everyone is glued to their phones (an apparatus designed to enslave it users). The restaurants serve the same food, the same coffee. The men have the same haircuts. True, the people are more beautiful in NYC… but the world has been flattened and everyone on it made the same.
In any case, my only plausible claim to exile is from the bookstores of NYC (currently as close to extinction as the Yangtze Finless Porpoise); my true homeland. How great it was going from bookstore to bookstore like a pub-crawl and discovering Roberto Calasso, Jacques Ellul, Bruce Chatwin, Mavis Gallant etc etc. Of course, there are a handful of bookstores where I live now but none pass my personal test (a pretty low standard) of what makes a halfway decent bookshop – i.e. it must carry titles by Marguerite Duras and Giorgio Agamben…
Finally, circling back to your question, leaving NYC has had no impact on my creative life. I continue to pursue a bad idea (a life devoted to making art) stubbornly and against all reason.
JSR: What percentage of the world is evil?
BW: An ever-growing percentage. But, I believe in apocatastasis i.e. universal salvation, which means that when we die we all go to heaven. So evil is of less importance if we all will spend eternity in paradise.
JSR: Can people change?
BW: People’s actions can change, which is all that matters.
JSR: Well said. What percent of your personality can you choose?
BW: The easy way out is to proclaim that humans are purely determined by exterior forces i.e. people are social constructions, and their personalities are fungible. But if you’ve ever witnessed the birth of a child, you know that they come equipped with an already existing personality or what people used to call a “soul”. So the correct answer is zero.
JSR: I helped you move out. You were the only friend that showed up to move me into my first NYC apartment. We were an excellent moving team, in fact, and did a ton of moving gigs together; always glad to combine working out with making rent. Why pay for a gym when you can get paid to be a mover? Bonus: being a furniture mover is one of the best ways to get to know the five boroughs of NYC.
I spent a lot of time on your stoop before it became my stoop too. Before I finagled my way into the top-floor apartment of our building—no small task—thanks in part to you and Parker Kindred (one of the best drummers alive, who’s played with everyone from Lou Reed to Jeff Buckley to Cass McCombs etc). Something Parker probably regretted when I added to the guitar overdubbing, kick drum sampling, bass rehearsals competing in the hallway, the first time I dropped an amplified bass guitar on my floor/his ceiling. Ours was the kind of building that a body dropping past the window would have been noteworthy but not that shocking.
Our stoop was one of those easy-to-mythologize places like a Sesame Street set or Scorsese b-roll. During that very specific era of Brooklyn, at the decline of its vitality, in the heart of doomed Williamsburg. Thanks to our sweet landlady’s charity, we got a front seat to Rome’s burning. (“How will they be able to afford milk?” was how she explained keeping her tenant’s rent at one-third neighborhood’s market value.) We stocked the building with bandmates and friends, all of us touring and recording as the music industry turned to dust beneath us. Thank God you guys got me in. I was indeed running from the Minotaur, having just been evicted from my tiny basement apartment around the corner, in a building sold to developers by the owner’s son. Developers that turned it into a condo overnight. I was only homeless for a month before you and Parker convinced our landlady that I was good people… you threw a rope and hauled me up to safety.
I think some of my favorite stoop moments were your and Ken Griffin’s (Rollerskate Skinny, Favourite Sons, August Wells) endless debates. We’d gather around like Athenians and discuss books, film, music, television, romance, drugs, religion, politics, metaphysics. Everyone in our building was or had been in a band that I’d been a fan of prior, and it was nice to be amongst musicians that didn’t only want to talk about guitar pedals. So, here is my question: did our tight-knit cadre of NYC friends/reprobates impact your creative life in any way? Other than the obvious fact that you were constantly luring us to your living room to track vocals or guitars.
BW: More than one woman commented that our building resembled a barracks, or a halfway house for aging rock musicians or some kind of disreputable all-male commune. Of course, for me, my fellow ‘inmates’ were an enormous influence. Yes, I did get everyone (including yourself) in the building to play and sing on my albums Clandestine Songs and Burn My Letters. Collaborating with friends is an incredibly intimate, somewhat risky venture that requires trust and generosity. As the lockdown taught the world, interacting regularly with friends is indispensable and beneficial to the body and soul. I learned a lot from everyone and miss them all. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could sit down and have a cup of coffee with one of you guys. It goes without saying that texting and emailing and zooming are not in any way commensurate with in-person interaction.
JSR: Why do you get out of bed in the morning?
BW: To drink coffee, read, write, plot.
JSR: Is everything singular or plural?
BW: To believe everything is singular, you’d have to be a Spinozaist (a Pantheist) and believe God was/is everything; trees, dirt, air etc. Against this idea of a monad as the totality of all things, there is the transcendent, for example, Christ (a being not part of our material world) exploding out of eternity, desacralizing the world, ending animism. I prefer the latter to the former. Lately I’ve been thinking that interdimensional Ufo’s rising out of the ocean/descending from the stars and acting as divine intercessors to prevent nuclear war…could fulfill a similar function.
JSR: Would you choose to live again without knowing you were given a choice, if you had the choice?
BW: Yes. The prime directive of every living creature is to persist by any means necessary.
JSR: Is belief in God a choice?
BW: Not when someone is pointing a gun at you or punching you in the head or you’re suspended in that prolonged interval of time called a car crash. In those situations, appeals to god come forth unbidden from one’s lips. You realize (and then if you survive, forget) you’ve always been a believer.
JSR: Which percentage of utility have you lost from the internet?
BW: In 2023, everyone is brain-damaged. Paul Virilio was often attacked for being too pessimistic or even reactionary when he detailed, way back in the ‘90s and early ‘oughts, all the damage that technology – by marooning in us in an eternal present – had rendered upon our senses. In America, 54% of the population now reads below the 6th-grade level. We can’t see, think, remember, move, write, or talk as we once did. And we’re all under 24/7 surveillance.
JSR: Is it safe to say music was your primary pursuit at the beginning of your creative life? Why or how did it surpass writing? And where is that balance now? Do you feel the same amount of excitement about both? Does one eclipse the other?
BW: I wrote when I was a kid and hid my stories in my underwear drawer. But writing was always unsatisfying and deeply shameful. I didn’t really want anyone to know my thoughts. I picked up a guitar pretty late, around age 23 or 24, driven to provide accompaniment to the songs that were (are) banging around in my head. Kandinsky described the compulsion to create an ‘inner necessity’, which sounds right to me. Whether I write or play music on any given day is dictated by the fact that I live in a small house with my family. Making music is noisy and disruptive, while typing into a 2008 Macbook is not. In some ways, these activities seem pretty much the same to me – they involve the constant erasure of bad ideas.
JSR: Can you describe the very early years when you were forming St. Johnny, and you were roommates with Dave Baker and bandmates withHartford Grasshopper? The stories I’ve heard remind me of living with John Devries in Poughkeepsie, where I apprenticed under Agitpop and Cellophane, incubated Hopewell, and got involved with Mercury Rev., which is to say, total chaos. What pushed you forward? How did you escape the chaos and make it to the big city? Music?
BW: Growing up, the key idea I learned from books, magazines, film was that all the best musicians and writers were insane, and they lived as outcasts on the margins of society. When I developed an ambition to be a rock musician, the first thing I did was try to become like the people I’d read about. As if a curse had been placed on me, I took Johnny Thunders as my role model. Naturally, I tried to find others who had similar interests. I moved to the nearest city – Hartford. I put an ad in a local ‘arts’ newspaper – “William Burroughs-style bassist wanted”. Grasshopper answered. He was working as a court reporter in Hartford and divided his time between there and Upstate New York, where he and the other members of Mercury Rev were working on Yerself is Steam. He played bass for a while in a nascent version of St. Johnny before disappearing (I learned of his departure from the note he left under the windshield wipers of my Chevy Nova) to go on tour with the Flaming Lips as their ‘lighting and explosives’ technician. Unlike myself, he was a college graduate and had a greater knowledge of music, film, and literature than I did, and his influence on me was not trivial. He eventually moved to NYC, I followed not long after, eventually landing in an apartment in Carroll Gardens with his bandmate Dave Baker. In those days (early 1990s), I was a terrible roommate. Evidence of this can be found written on the inside back cover of one of the books (Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty) I purchased around that time: 1) A man can never really know a woman, he can only pursue her indefinitely. 2) My musical instruments are razorblades that leave wounds on my body. 3) These wounds are the aesthetic models for my music. 4) My music is filled with hidden holes. 5) Things left out (the holes) are as important as what remains.
Bolano wrote in Savage Detectives: We were spectral figures, on whom you wouldn’t dwell at length without turning away. It is a nice description of my friends and I at that time…
JSR: That reminds me. I found your copy of Bolano’s Distant Star when I moved, I swore to return it, and one day I will. Glad you mention those holes; that’s a good way to describe a distinction I loosely subscribe to, that there are two kinds of creative people: negators and cheerleaders. Both are generative, though negators rely more on preventing or removing what doesn’t work. Discernment is central to the process. I’m married to an incredible negator that makes a fine film editor as a result, and I usually partner up with them creatively when I partner up at all. I require them to sift through the sheer amount of crap that I, a cheerleader, am always swept up in. I used to outsource a lot of my discernment to you, arriving in your kitchen stoked on a dozen ideas about all manner of everything, and you’d weigh in, reliably. It’s the case with many negators that they would never make or release anything if they didn’t work with a cheerleader. So, both sides of the coin have their merits. My creative relationship with Justin (younger brother and frontperson to the very amazing Silent League) is emblematic of my theory. He kept me in check, and I made sure he released things and had content to play with. I’m using some hyperbole here to make a point because of course he generates content on his own, and I am able to cut things. It’s more of an orientation than a hard and fast rule. Would you say your aesthetic sensibility relies on discernment?
BW: I’ve never been smart enough to have an aesthetic. My goal is usually: try to create something that does not make me ashamed or want to blow my brains out after playback or re-reading.
JSR: Has having a family changed or cemented your worldview?
BW: Christopher Lasch once said: a parent looks at the world and all its events in the darkest possible light. Deep pessimism and rage are feelings I experience every day. I’ve never known a more sinister time than the time we live in now.
JSR: Another important marker, I think, is when I started hearing barroom piano bounce off the wall of the building behind ours. Instead of electric guitars. It provided a soundtrack to the building’s bathrooms, all situated in the back of our apartments. You serenaded us all. Happily, you bequeathed that creaky old thing to Chuck Davis and me, and I’m staring at it while I type this. It’s the sound of your William Carlos Whitten records, some of the finest rock music ever made, in my opinion, ragged, dignified, and mastered to perfection by our old pal Dave Fridmann. A perfect third act to your musical legacy.
BW: In 2008, someone from Our Lady of Mt. Carmel on N.8th Street left a perfectly good upright piano on the curb. Incredibly, our mutual friends Kenneth Zoran Curwood and Adam Marnie put it on a pair of skateboards and wheeled it four blocks to my apartment. Luckily I lived on the first floor. I’m an autodidact in all things and thus completely self-taught when it comes to the piano, and naturally, play it all wrong like an aphasic chimpanzee. To me, my piano is the black monolith at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. When someone who can actually play a piano comes over to my house and unleashes all the magic stored within it – it’s always leaves me stunned, amazed. As a side note, I’ve always had ambivalent relationships with musical instruments. My piano has never been tuned, I’ve only ever owned cheap, barely functional guitars. All my gear – recording devices, pre-amps, guitar amps, and effects, the computer I’m writing on now – are usually half broken and on their last legs.
JSR: You and I subscribe to the same school when it comes to gear. My guitar tone depends on what pedals are discarded or forgotten by other players in the rehearsal space. The people that can afford really nice guitars are generally not the people who create music. But beyond all that, crappy gear is a form of limitation. Of boundaries. Which, as I get older, I realize is one of the most important aspects of the creative process.
I remember being handed a leaflet or missalette at a St. Johnny show- maybe at the Mercury Lounge or the old Knitting Factory- that was kind of a zine of your writing, which read like William Burroughs in my memory. Did they pre-date the band? Had you always been writing them? Care to describe what you were writing back then?
BW: I don’t remember, lol, and I regret the enormous influence William Burroughs (a pedophile and murderer) had on my life. I should have been reading Proust or Leopardi! The Beat Generation was a psyop! What a waste! Haha!
JSR: The Beat Generation is basically a dorm room poster at this point. Speaking of psyops…do you think the post-Nirvana-1990s indie rock explosion, which we were both part of, was a psyop?
BW: If it was a psyop, what would the goal have been? To transform (in tandem with other cultural engineering projects) the population of the West into solipsistic, nihilistic, porn-addicted drug-takers, incapable of reading a book or watching a film in its entirety, compelled to stare helplessly at electronic devices 20 hours a day while fulfilling their role as the world’s consumer of last resort? Is there a clear trajectory from Kurt Cobain to the Strokes to Occupy Wall Street…and then…to Bernie Sanders and AOC advocating for vax mandates and nuclear war with Russia? Was/is Williamsburg, Brooklyn a CIA outpost, a Bermuda Triangle of transhumanist-mind-control-pseudo-left-lifestyle politics?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯…
Bill Whitten has written a book called BRUTES and recorded many albums.