Road Trip

One day me and a buddy got off work after a long day of whistling shopping carts around in a parking lot, and we decided it was time to go for a Road Trip.

So we just started driving, and we took a wrong turn somewhere, and we ended up in Idaho.

Or mebbe it was Iowa.

Not that it matters.

But it was really weird there, man.

Yah, the place was beautiful, like a giant golf course, there were all these rolling hills, and some trees, but they were all perfectly manicured and landscaped and fake-looking, y'know, like lawns.

The sky was clear and full of stars, and the air was fresh, it was a perfect summer night, and there were all these Norman Rockwell White People from the 1950s, driving around on these shiny red old-fashioned bicycles with the little cha-ching cha-ching thingies on the handlebars, but there were no houses or anything in sight, there was just endlessly rolling golf-course hills in every direction, and a gas station, that we stopped at, 'cause there didn't seem to be anywhere else to stop.

When we got out of the car in the parking lot, all these big-eyed weird kids from the 50s came over and surrounded us, asking us questions, I can't even remember what they were asking, but they were very friendly and polite, and they were amazed that I smoked cigarettes.

So we decided to get back on the road, and head back the way we came, and just get gas later, once we found our way back to the planet earth we were used to, y'know, the one with messy trees and weeds and litter and broken glass everywhere and people with nose-rings and black mascara and tattoos on their private parts.

We're lucky we found our way out of that place, man, I mean, holy shit, it was really getting freaky there, for a second.

The Kiss

Everything has a tendency to become just another tired-ass ritual to perform.

The words dry up, their meaning wears thin and fades away every time we use them, until its all a senseless bunch of interchangeable garbage, greetings and grunts of acknowledgment, something so damn polite and predictable that it neither requires nor deserves any actual attention.

Just as the meaning of our actions wears away through use, until they become nothing more than gestures, the path to the temple is worn so smooth by the repeated shuffling of our feet that it becomes transparent, and it can take a great effort to remain conscious of it, and honestly, there isn't much of a reward for doing so, even if you did.

But if you've never had one of those kisses that is so deep that you teeter on the edge of consciousness, where you realize there is actually no limit to how far you can surrender yourself to someone else, to how deeply you can drink from them, or how deeply they can drink from you, where you draw each other's breath, and it feels like you have to travel for miles to pull yourself away from it, then you need to keep paying attention.

Just be careful, 'cause you can fall and break yer hip and shit.

Where the Fog Comes From

I grew up in a place that doesn't have a name, its just an empty place on the map, where the river bends, and there are many small bays where the river people cluster their homes and park their boats and put their backs to the dark woods that surround them.

We lived in a small white house on a hill, tucked away in the woods, and you could see our porchlight from miles away through the trees, sometimes, but the rest of the neighborhood could flood, and I remember how surprised I was that I could ride my ancient green bike through muddy water that came up to my waist, and the quiet-kids-who-weren't-allowed-to-play lived in stilt-houses on the lowest road, and sometimes they had to ride to the place where the schoolbus came for us in their parent's fishing boats.

I spent most of the time running around and exploring the wilderness, alone, a wild kid who hardly ever talked, with burs and twigs and leaves tangled in my hair, my arms and legs covered in scrapes and cuts and bruises and cold mud, and although there wasn't a soul who knew the woods and bogs and meadows and swamps better than I did, there was a lot I didn't know, there were directions I never explored, like the deep parts of the swamp, past the place where the reeds grow as high as trees, the place where the fog comes from.

I never went very far in that direction, because it gave me the creeps, and the deeper I went, the stronger that sense of the creeps got, until I had to turn back.

Too easy to lose your sense of direction in an endless forest of reeds that's taller than you are.

There's a part of this that is probably hard for some of you to imagine, I know it'd be hard for me, if I hadn't come from there, because it can be hard enough for me to remember how it was, nowadays, let alone describe it.

We all tend to live in places where everything has been discovered already, where everything has a name, where everything is known, and there are more people than animals, and more houses than trees, sometimes.

When you walk in a place where people have walked for many generations, the unknown is some immaterial thing, very far away.

But there are places that are not like that, places on the edge of the wilderness, where you not only get close to the unknown, but you can even enter it, and wander around inside it, if you dare, and it was daring, because if anything happened to you, there'd be no one but the animals to hear a poor kid shouting for help, and we'd all probably be living on the moon before they found your body.

You'd always be watching out for quicksand, and poison oak, among all the other things that don't even have names, like those vines that grow across pits and become covered in leaves, which can even be kinda fun, if you don't break yer balls discovering them when yer legs poke through the holes in the weave and you dangle by your crotch like an idiot over the unknown amounts of air below you, yah, they can be kinda fun because they work like a weird plant-trampoline, like one of those nets under a trapeize.

And there are strange, gray jungle-gyms to play on, formed by trees struck down by lightning, but you have to watch out for colorful snakes, and you always have to watch where you are putting your hands when you climb, because animal poop can carry something that works like heartworms for humans, a kid died from it when I was in elementary school.

I don't know if there's actually more ghosts in the country than there is in the city, but the people in the country tend to die in creepy ways, like someone's older brother falling through the ice on the river in the winter, and all winter long we all have to think about the bodies down there that can't be retrieved, down there in the darkness below the ice, when we drive over that spot on the bridge every morning in the school bus.

And then there's the Country Dark, on overcast nights when there is no moon, and you can't see anything but black when you wave your own hand in front of your face, and you have to just feel your way along like a blind person, to get home.

Even if you were smart enough to carry a flashlight when you went out to play in the light of the morning, on the way home, in the pitch blackness of the Country Dark, a flashlight can only penetrate the darkness so far, and sometimes you might as well turn it off, if you end up in the middle of a meadow, you won't be able to see the edges of the field, and it becomes super easy to lose track of the direction you are facing if you splash the flashlight around too much, because there's nothing but a bunch of identical pictures of grass going out in every direction to help you set a course, and even when you get to the edge of the field, where it meets the woods, you can no longer be sure of which edge of the field it is.

And the woods won't help you, either.

And sometimes, at night, you'd hear the screams of animals, when they were caught and being eaten by other animals, but you wouldn't know what kind of animal was screaming, because they don't sound anything like they look, when they die.

And the animals aren't afraid of you, either, because they've watched you long enough that they've gotten used to you, or maybe its because they haven't had enough contact with people to be afraid of us, yet, or maybe they can tell when yer a predator looking for food by how you move, or something, but yer just another animal, and a slow-moving one, at that, to them.

It can even be downright disney, when the weaker animals are scared, they tend to stay closer to humans, because their predators are more cautious of us, and so the little ones feel safer around us, they'll even rush at you when something else spooks 'em, and that can be a little disconcerting heh.

But there's also an even darker side than I've been talking about, there is a madness that infects the animal kingdom, where the natural order of things is thrown aside and it all becomes totally unpredictable, where the animals sit on their ass like humans and giggle out piles of saliva, and its called rabies.

And then there's the fog, fog that so thick that you can stand on the edge of a road, on the way home from afterschool detention (yer walking home fer miles and miles through the countryside, baby, 'cause there's no buses fer detention kids and you don't want yer parents findin' out you got in trouble heh), and see nothing but swirling milk when a car rockets by, three feet away from you.

Fog like that was common, there were times of the year when it came rolling in every day for weeks at a time.

On the bright side, cars passing by were pretty uncommon, we used to lay out in the middle of the road and drink the beers we stole and watch the stars spin past for hours, and we could hear the wet noise of car tires cresting hills in the road from miles away, if there'd been any, but there usually weren't any.

And, in the rare event that a car did come by, we'd get up and dive into the bushes on the side of the road at the last second, right before they'd see us.

Yah, that was called "car-dodging" heh.

Anyways, we moved away from there when I was in my mid-teens, and I went to high school in the suburbs, and eventually I ended up working way up in a skyscraper in the middle of one of the biggest cities on the earth, but over the years I've had the opportunity to go back there a few times, usually after somebody at a party decided they wanted to go on a roadtrip to the "scariest place" anybody knew about.

The scariest place I know about is a place we called the Ruins, back there in that place with no name, where the river bends, in the deepest parts of the woods, overlooking the swamp of high reeds where no one ever goes, where the fog comes from.

And that's where I'd take you.

According to the ancient raisin-headed farmers in the area, it had been a farm, deep in the woods on purpose, 'cause it was a place where some bad guys made booze, back in the prohibition times, but all that was left of it was some stone walls around a courtyard, and something that looked like a tower, which was probably the remains of a grain silo.

And there was a small stone room, off the courtyard, with a crumbling stone roof, and an area of the stone floor that was sunken, like some kinda ancient roman bathhouse.

And in the center of the courtyard, which was now completely overgrown with dead weeds and stunted attempts at trees, was a big square stone, affectionately referred to as the "chopping block."

The whole place was half-swallowed by a hill, so that the top of the tower and the top of the wall on one side of the courtyard was at ground level, and the ground fell away steeply from the bottom of the wall on the opposite side.

You could look down into the courtyard from the top of the "tower," and it was filled with dirt up to a point where the top of its wall made nice place to sit in a circle, so we'd always build a fire in the center and sit around, but depending on where you were sitting, you had to be careful not to lean too far back or you could take a nasty tumble off the wall.

Anyways, anytime I went back to it, the Ruins never failed to entertain, and by "entertain" I mean: scare the living shit out of whoever I brought there.

Weird things happen at the Ruins, just as weird things had always happened at the Ruins, from the very first time me and a buddy found it, in the deepest part of the woods, on the edge of the swamp where no one went.

Everything was fine and dandy that first time, until we decided it was time to go, and even though we could see the path through the woods we needed to use to get home from the top of the tower, by the time we descended into the thick underbrush at the bottom, we totally lost sight of it, and we ended up getting lost in the woods for two hours as we tried to get away from the Ruins, only to eventually find ourselves staring at its crumbling stone walls again.

My friend was so scared that second time we came across it with our slap-powered flashlights that he didn't even want to make sure it was the same Ruins, he was saying crazy stuff like "the Ruins won't let us get away! It won't let us leave!" and he just wanted to turn around and run back the way we came, but if we would've done that, we would've been heading deeper into the unexplored swamp, and farther from home, so I'm glad I didn't listen to him.

Yah, its weird enough, alright, there's a part of me that's glad I don't ever have to go back there heh.

The last time I went, which was many years ago, now, our fun kept getting interrupted by the unearthly screams of small animals getting killed by something moving along a perimeter in the woods around us.

But we were a tough group, and we stuck it out, for a while.

After the fourth or fifth animal died, the novelty of it was really starting to get thin, and the comedy was getting hard to come by, and suddenly there was an air-raid siren going off somewhere, far away, in the middle of the night, and that's when folks decided to pack it in.

It was very dark as we made our way to the car, so travel was slow, and by the time we got there, one of those thick fogs had decided to roll in, and to make matters worse, the fog was everywhere we drove for two hours, including the entire length of the tollway, which means it had spread through every town we'd passed and across at least half the state.

That's not exactly supernatural, or anything, y'know, but its uncommon enough to give you the creeps.

Especially since the Ruins overlooks the place in the swamp where the fog comes from, the place with the high reeds where no one has the balls to go.

Sometimes I wonder, y'know, with the way we keep spreading out and building homes and supermarkets and parking lots and shit, if the Ruins is still back there, exactly as it was, sulking in its creepy rat's nest of woods under the Country Dark, lonely, wishing it had someone to scare the shit out of.

But I only wonder a little.

Because I don't think I'd really like to know the answer, either way.

The idea of it still sitting there, the same as it was, in a place humanity has collectively decided to avoid, gives me the chills.

And I'd be tempted to go and knock on your door and warn you, and look like a crazy person, if you lived in a house that was built on top of that place heh.

Welcome to the Show

I can see our Silver Strings.

I know the Script.

I can diverge from it, if I wish.

And I can stare down Those Who Punish Those Who Diverge From the Script, if required.

I can play directly to the Great Cosmic Camera.

I can see into the Dim Darkness beyond its Lens.

I can wink at specific members of the audience, and warm their faces into smiles, if I want to.

I can Turn Without Turning.

I can see into the Machinery of the Stage around me.

I know what lies behind the Curtain as well as I know what lies before it.

So do not be afraid.

Do not be afraid.

Do not be afraid until the lights go out and its time to get up from your seats and wander home silently through the dark streets where no one watches over you.

There is nothing to be afraid of, until then.

Welcome to the Show.

Amish Slasher Movies

The Opposite of Every Slasher Movie:

A pick-up truck full of good, wholesome, god-fearing amish kids from the country on their way to a sinfully delicious Forbidden Clog Dancing Party in the Big City take a wrong turn in Suburbia while trying to find a short-cut!

When their pick-up truck gets a flat tire after running over a suspiciously-placed lawn gnome, they become hopelessly lost in a senseless maze of side streets and begin to fight amongst themselves!

But their night of terror is only beginning, as they fall prey to copy-cat serial killers, policemen who were picked on in highschool, ADD kids who play too many violent video games and forget to take their medicine, middle-aged suburban satanists, self-mutilating goth kids who think they're vampires, road-rage lawyers, country-line-dancing prescription-drug-augmented soccer-moms, and a deformed cannibal mutant bowling team that lives too close to the power lines!

Their only hope is to follow the sound of a mysterious banjo-player and take shelter among the good militia folk of the local trailer park, who are armed to the teeth with flame throwers and semi-automatic rifles!

Will prayer and the stolen scientific technology of a fancy electrified fence be enough to hold the tide of bloodthirsty Suburbanites back until dawn?

Of course not!

P.S. The black guy and all the chicks that take off their shirts are the last people to die in this one, what a twist!

The Apocalypse of Love

What did I tell you?

I warned you that something like this would happen, that space exploration was too dangerous, but did anybody listen to me?

No!

So what happens, eh?

We make contact with our second alien species, and they promptly steal all our women!

Oh, of course they didn't actually steal all our women, but treating them better than we did amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?

Showering them with jewlery and chocolate and travel opportunities, talking about their feelings and how beautiful everything is all the time, being gentle, supportive, attentive, appreciative and understanding, sensual, sympathetic and nurturing, carrying their purses, washing their dishes, cooking exotic dinners, changing diapers, defending their honor, weeding the garden, sharing bank accounts, and listening to all that crap about their day!

Oh yes, we're in a pretty pickle this time, boys!

I just don't see how we're going to be able to win this one!

There doesn't seem to be any depths of depravity that these aliens won't sink to in order to claim victory over us!

They even love to work out and do sit-ups!

Well there's definitely no way we're going to be able to keep up with this particular nuclear arms race without completely sacrificing everything that makes us what we are!

And its not like we can rely on some dumb-luck meteor impact to save us, like we did the last time we ran into this problem with the god-accursed honey-tongued Elves!

Of course, recognizing the danger, our scientists have been trying to create a workable synthetic female substitiute in our laboratories for years now, but everything we've created so far isn't capable of even the most simple of traditionally female tasks, such as using a vacuum or doing the laundry, and they require even more energy and maintenance than the originals!

Yes, its far more expensive than sharing some french fries and buying extra toilet paper, and its still years away from deployment.

Well I think that the only hope we have at this point for the continuation of our species is to basically psychological and culturally poison the remaining females we have left through a planet-wide program encouraging repulsive behavior, so that they will become so horrible and annoying and hideously awful that nobody else will be able to put up their crap besides us.

Hey, wait a minute...

You don't think that our females could've been doing something like that to us, y'know, like back when we ran into that planet of Beautiful Amazon Women who didn't want anything to do with us?

Great Scott!

They could've just been biding their time all along, gradually forging a genetic "fallback" pool out of us unsuspecting fools, poisonous to everyone but themselves, operating like clownfish, just waiting for a chance like this to dump us and jump ship, knowing full well that if things didn't work out with their handsome new alien boyfriends, their artificially repulsive genetic pond of hopelessly weak and unattractive pot-bellied greasy-wife-beater-t-shirt-wearing ex-boyfriends would have no choice but to take them back!

Alright, alright, lets not all go into a panic, why don't you guys just go ahead and watch the football game while I take a trip out to the Amazon Planet and see if anything can be done to salvage our relationship there, in light of this grim new discovery.

Well, in my opinion, perhaps its time we consider the terms of our unconditional surrender.

I mean, the Amazons may force us to vaccuum and change diapers, but at least we won't have to listen to all that crap about their day when they get home from work, and they won't even think to ask us to change a tire when the car gets a flat.

What?

Hey, now, wait a second there, guys!

Guys!

Unhand me, you fools!

This is exactly what the women want!

Can't you see that?

They want us to turn again each other like this!

Gladiator

Sure, I still 'member my first fight, entering the Ring, lookin' out at this bloodthirsty crowd, seeing all these pinched faces and cameras flashing out there like stars in the darkness.

Yah, I din't have no little old bald-headed supportin-actor trainer-buddy spouting toughguy wisdom in my ear, like they always do in the movies, and I din't do that "float like a butterfly" foot-shuffling thing, and I din't make intimidatin' faces and stuff at the other guy, either.

I just sorta stood there, I guess, 'cause I din't know anything about fighting, since I never watched TV and I've never been to a gym, wasn't allowed to read no comic books or play any violent video games or watch the news like everybody else and stuff when I was a kid at the Mother of Mercy Orphanage, y'know, so I had absolutely no frickin' clue what I was doing, I know it sounds weird and shit but I honestly never even really seen anybody actually fight each other before.

Yah, I heard they improved the application process now, its not just some multiple choice thingie that you can accidentally guess your way through if you answer "no" to all the crane-kick questions.

Heh, yah, I was just answering "no" to everything 'cause I didn't "know" what the hell the answers were haha.

Well, I dunno, I think I was more confused than scared, really, when you don't know what to expect, you can't really be scared of it, y'know?

Yah, I just wanted to get the whole thing over with and get my money and get the heck out of there, man.

Well, I'm glad you find my honesty so refreshing, Barbara.

Anyways, the bell rings, and it din't take the crowd more than a half second to realize I din't know a goddamn thing about fighting.

Naw, it wasn't like that, it was weird, I think they actually felt sorry for me, I'm pretty sure just about everybody felt sorry for me, including the guy who was kickin' my ass, 'cause he was makin' really weird faces as he spun through the air and did all this whacko hollywood-roundhouse kungfu-pretzel-kick soccer-mom karate-class stuff on my defenseless body.

Yah, I could tell he was gettin' a little angry though, 'cause I guess I was ruining his photographs fer the newspaper or something.

Well, at first, I was just grabbin' myself in all the places where I got punched and kicked, screaming junk like "ow shit what the fuck you bastard that hurts!" and stuff, y'know, stumblin' and fallin' all around the ring, curlin' up in a pitiful little ball, tryin' to crawl away, and it seemed like an eternity before the bell rang again and the refs pulled the guy off me and dragged me into a corner where they just let me flop around on the ground like a stunned fish.

Well, I was pretty out of it, by that point, I was probably in shock or something, and I was definitely exhausted from screamin' myself hoarse, y'know, 'cause screamin' can take a lot out of you, and my arms were all sore and shaky from trying to drag my body away from danger, 'cause that's a real work-out, too, but I 'member one of my eyes wasn't all swollen shut, yet, and I saw this guy from the crowd come runnin' over to my corner, I'll never fergit his face, so long as I live, and he said, "hey! hey kid! wake up! what the hell's the matter with you, kid? you suicidal or something? you gotta start fighting back or something, man!"

And I tried to say somethin' like "dude, I give up, I don't think I could even stand up again if I wanted to, I'm just gonna lay down right here in this nice, cool, soothing place on the floor, the one place where the world wasn't spinning around so much, y'know, and I'll just let it soak up my juices until this guy tackles me and they count to ten, or whatever."

But I wasn't sure if the guy heard me, 'cause I couldn't really hear myself, y'know, I couldn't breathe through my nose and my lips felt like they were made out of hamburger and I was blowin' bubbles of blood and spit everywhere.

And that's when the ref in my corner told me the fight wasn't a wrestling match or a count-of-ten type thingie, it was to the death.

Hah! I was such a newb that I didn't even know fights to the death had been legalized!

So at that point, I had to decide if I wanted to live or not.

Well, I'll be honest, it wasn't an easy decision, like you'd probably think, I mean, my body was really pretty badly busted up, y'know, and it seemed like it'd be an awful lot of work to get my feet under me, let alone stand all the way up and do anything else like try to fight back and stuff, and the idea of actually winning the fight was a like a hot-air balloon floating miles above some strange and silent country on the dark side of the moon.

Anyways I'm not really sure how I got on my feet when the bell rang, but there I was, suddenly moving across the ring toward my opponent, even though I didn't really want to be, like a guy caught in an undertow or something.

I was basically just like everybody else in the crowd, watching things I couldn't believe were happening, y'know?

I mean, there was this weird buzzing and whistling noise in my ears, and I could hardly see what was going on through the window-crack that was all that was left of my one good eye, I could hardly breathe, my limbs felt like they weighed five hundred pounds each, and I didn't have the strength to make them do anything, not consciously, but my body was makin' them all move anyways, somehow, and there I was, shufflin' across the floor.

There's been a lot of talk about my fighting style, the scientific conjecture and stuff, and I can't really speak to all that theoretical mumbo-jumbo kungfu-of-no-kungfu junk they say about me, but I do know that I musta invented it right there, on the spot, 'cause I handn't had any previous exposure to any sort of violence.

Yah, it wasn't pretty, the thing I 'member most was the roar that swelled up from the crowd like a tidal wave as I watched my own, out-of-control body suddenly lurch forward, my arm lashing out, slapping him in the face.

It was just the first of many such blows.

Yep, that's why they say I'm the first of the Girly-Fighters, and I'm not ashamed of it, either, heck, the fact that all them guys is copying my fighting style makes it less embarassing, nowadays, but I never really cared what other people thought of my moves, even in the beginning.

I just do what comes natural, y'know, I mean, its all I know how to do.

Heck, to be honest, I don't really think I even know what I'm doing out there.

Hey, you can say whatever you want, but it takes a lot of slapping to actually bitch-slap a man to death, that fight went on and on like that for thirty-six rounds, two people went to the hospital about half-way through from laughing too hard, and a lot of people had to leave before it was all over because it was just getting way too gross to watch.

Yah I guess I basically slapped his head off, in the end.

Well I feel sorry the guy, to be honest, but I'm glad to be alive.

Yah, it wasn't 'till a few matches later where I started doing the hair-pulling and the girly kicks, but that junk is really just some stuff I made up to spice things up for the crowd, y'know, because it takes me a really long time to kill people and I don't want them getting bored.

Yah, well, I can't say I'm sorry about that, 'cause y'know, its actually the length of my fights that gets me all that endorsement money.

Yah, apparently they had problems, back in the old days, with fights being over with too quick, or something, not enough time to pack in all the commercial stuff they could've, I guess.

Yah, I've heard all that humanitarian junk, 'bout how fights to the death is inhumane and against god and whatnot, heck, I used to be one of those people back in the day, y'know, 'til I realized the reason we have to do it this way was because people could "cheat" and put a fix on the game in the old days, y'know, throw the matches and have it be all fake and choreographed like a dance number stuff, but nobody can cheat when its a fight to the death, so its just better fer everybody this way.

Well who the hell wants to watch and gamble on some weird kinda fake fights, y'know?

Fights where some rich guy and all his buddies knows what's gonna happen ahead of time?

Yah, well, that's why their ratings used to be so terrible, the common man just couldn't get behind it, 'cause it was all corrupt and stuff, y'know, but I guess the industry is a lot more profitable nowadays, 'cause its all on the up-and-up and stuff.

Ah, well, y'know, Barbara, now that I've won the title, there's only one thing left to do, right?

I'm going to Disney World.

Yah, thanks fer havin' me on yer show, sorry fer all the swearin' and stuff, y'know, I tried to do it good, ah okies, was my pleasure, you guys got good donuts, wish I could eat more of 'em but I gotta ride the subway home and its better to do that on an empty stomach.