Truth

'Tis better to have loved and lost than to have loved and slept with and lost.

New Year's Resolution

Rather than trying to break any so-called "bad habits," I've decided to simply re-brand my bad habits as "traditions."  See?  All better.

An Old Person Losing Their Job

So a friend and I have started exchanging creative assignments to keep ourselves from falling into work-and-drink-and-go-to-sleep pits, which I think is a wonderful idea.  Her first assignment for me was to "write a short story about an old person losing their job."  I haven't written a short story about anything since high school, so I've been freaking out on it for the last several weeks, trying to work out some astute metaphors and drawing plot diagrams and blah blah blah.

Then today I'm kicking it with my most metal-head homedawg, and we're drinking coffee and we're listening to Necros Christos and everything is dandy, and when I tell him about the assignment and how stressed I've been over it, he goes, "dude, fuck that noise.  Why don't you just write about a fucking wizard getting defeated by this other fucking wizard?  Wizards are old as shit."

So with that, I give you my fictional debut.

The Defeat of the Good Wizard

 

The battle raged for three days, tumbled across wind-ravaged peaks and through the swampy plains where the Horg clansmen subsist upon the cast-off refuse of those more fortunate.  It's said that the howls of fury could be heard as far North as the Trogian fjords and as South as the mesas of Akkhema, that children awoke in the night from horrible nightmares only to find that the visions were real, that the desperate clash of good against evil was happening in their waking life as terrifyingly as in deepest sleep, and their parents' arms trembled and could offer them no comfort.  No birds would sing during those days; even the cruel and mocking raven held his breath.  The wind itself seemed to pause, fearful that the slightest move could effect the result, could lead somehow to that outcome so unthinkable that even the wise and warlike Aerethians dared not utter its possibility.

We wearied both, and both fought in the fatigue; we were both cut through the soul with magical lacerations and through the flesh with steel.  My mount fell before his but I was the first to puncture his thought-defenses.  I mustn't lose. 

At noontide on the third day, my enemy and I were locked in wretched battle deep in the sacred heart of the Pyrneen forest, a place so hallowed that my opponent's mere presence there would have been unthinkable but two years prior.  On that ground, ground that would henceforth be a place not of glory but of curse, the power of good proved too weak and I fell beneath the cold blade of Evil.

Here I now sit, locked fast in a cage of flame, beneath the bowels of the Earth, beneath the oceans of lava that feed the now-ever-flowing volcanoes, beneath the passage of mortal Time itself.  My fate is sealed; hope has been lost.  Earthly creatures know naught but blood and fury.  The reign of Kaan has begun, and the reign of Kaan shall never end.

The Future is Now

This is something I released as a zine a few months ago, now available in digital!

THE FUTURE IS NOW.

THE WAIT IS OVER YOU HAVE ARRIVED.  All prerequisites have been fulfilled and all forms completed and submitted.  Your teeth are brushed your socks are clean your resume is up-to-date and the weather is just fine.  Your acne has cleared, your broken heart has knitted, your addictions have faded to a manageable level.  You finally found a hairstyle that works for you.  All systems are go.  Three two one blastoff.

THE FUTURE IS NOW. 

The future, which you have been eagerly awaiting for 24 years, has proven to consist of mint juleps on the front porch with your mom, talking about politics, waiting to go to your job as a waitress at the café a mile down the road where you work with other local kids who aren't kids anymore and who, like you, have vague ideas about living at home while saving up for grad school or something equally definitive and good. 

THE FUTURE was once constructed of romantic fragments and images including but not limited to being a roadie for the Butthole Surfers, running away to live a life of punk rock in San Francisco, buying a van and painting it sparkly gold and driving around the country with your pet pygmy goat, WWOOFing for eternity, and generally sticking it to the man.

THE MAN has revealed himself to be not a figure but a continuum, someone who exists in varying degrees as an element of pretty much everything.  The man cannot be stuck it to because he cannot be pinned down.  See, it’s all more complicated than you'd thought.

THIS ARTICLE IN HARPER'S that you read recently describes how the trees closest to the blast site at Chernobyl are still in exactly the same condition they were in when they were knocked down.  See, the level of radiation is so high that the normal bacteria that facilitate decomposition can’t survive there, so instead of breaking down, the trees have been lying staid for the last 25 years, neither growing nor rotting, which makes people uncomfortable in about the same way that Botox makes people uncomfortable.  If something isn’t moving it ought to be falling apart, right?

YOUR HOME WHEN YOU ARE NOT IN IT is something that makes you deeply and inexplicably sad.  A lot of people say that they find comfort in that image when they're away, in the thought of their personal spaces waiting patiently and statically for them to return, maybe a few dust motes drifting or a fly thrusting at the window providing the only evidence that time is passing at all.  There is a sense of servility in this image that you hate.  It's the thought that these spaces exist for one reason and one reason alone: to serve man.  In the absence of man they are utterly worthless.  The same thing occurred to you when you waited on the porch for a taxi at 4AM and watched the streetlight on the corner cycling through its colors, even though there wasn't a single car anywhere and its sad efforts were doing no good for anyone.  By making things for one singular purpose we deprive them of their dignity because once we leave they're doomed to just do the same shit over and over and over again, aware that they're worthless but unable to do anything about it.

I mean, at least in your imagination.  You consider all the things in your storage closet.  You think about how every single moment of your life when you aren't looking in the closet, every second that closet door is closed and you're busy doing stuff and seeing stuff and living, all the things in there are in pitch blackness, just waiting in the dark for you to need them.  The fact that people find comfort in this thought, find it pleasing that all their possessions do nothing but wait to be activated, seems to you weirdly tyrannical and disturbing. 

This is in some way related to more general and more human notions of anticipation, of waiting patiently – doing some Sudoku and slowly ripping up your coaster – for the future to arrive and active you.

THE FUTURE IS NOW and you are useful in the sense that you bring people food and that's good, and you know, maybe you bring a smile to their faces with your witty repartee and semi-problematic tendency to flirt with absolutely everyone.  No type of usefulness should be totally dismissed.

UNLIKE YOUR THINGS, you have the ability to make your own usefulness.  You know your Sartre, though, and you know that the freedom to construct your own sense of purpose is laced with evil free-floating anxiety and angst and the desire to go play Peter Pan at your mum's house because the responsibility that goes along with that freedom is sometimes daunting, when you think about it too hard, which is all the time.

THEY ALWAYS TALK about "grabbing life by the balls," and you always hate that kind of adage because it doesn’t fucking mean anything.  Advice should be followable.  Where are life's balls?  You will grab them if someone will show you. 

THE FUTURE IS NOW and it is to be savored and sucked on and gnawed lustily, because the future is Now and Later.  The future is in fact a lame pun, and it needn't be more.

THE HATERS GONNA HATE and you best pay them no nevermind.

THE FUTURE IS NOW AND YOU ARE FUCKING ROCKING IT.

The Amsterdam Airport

Each toilet stall is like an individual room and there aren't any black people anywhere.  Everything is a little bit cuter than it is the the United States for no reason.

I noticed flying in that all the land around the airport is being put to some use.  In the U.S. airports tend to be surrounded by a weird no-man's-land of weeds and overgrowth, but here the farmland runs right up to the runway.  Nothing is uncultivated or underutilized. 

Also, the runway ran over a tree-lined canal that I guess was there first.  They made a little bridge over it for the airplanes.  It was lovely.

I also keep having this urge to grab everyone and go "DUDE WE'RE IN FUCKING EUROPE!  ISN'T THAT AWESOME?" 

Ode to the Old Man in a Speedo

I seem to have nothing to say lately, so I'm going to relive the glory days and post this poem that I wrote when I was in eighth grade following a trip to a local hot spring:

Ode to the Old an in a Speedo
by Alexis Morgan, age 13

You're too old for this
You're just in denial
Shrivelled up and veiny
Like something from the X-Files.

Some people stare at car wrecks
And they try to get a view
People like things gory
That's why those girls are looking at you.

Try changing your diet
If you want to wear a Speedo
You get another chin
With every beef burrito.

You need to get over yourself
Before I start to vomit
But on the other hand
I guess I'm glad you didn't thong it.

Springtime!

Even the plants are thinking about sex right now.  All those sprawled-out blossoms put some kind of reproductive vibe into the air, I think, in some universal-consciousness kind of way.  I keep thinking about the sexual nature of flowers while I walk down the street, and it kind of creeps me out, mostly because it conjures up so many icky, traditional metaphors – women as flowers that gussy themselves up with colors and scents to attract the man-bees; the beauty of a woman as budding, blossoming, wilting, going to seed; men as mobile bees that go from stationary flower to stationary flower spreading pollen; good lord is that what I'm doing when I put on perfume and eyeliner, trying to get my ass pollinated?  Ew, am I, at age 23, a "Woman in Full Bloom"?  Ew ew ew.

But seriously, I really do believe that part of the reason everyone gets so horny in the springtime is that the rest of nature, even the plant life, is in its mating season, and all the blossoming throws some kind of sexual energy into the air.  Plus of course there's the reemergence of limbs, and bodies that are just visible enough to picture naked.  And your arm hairs are getting brushed by the breeze again in an almost-too-chilly way, and that air on your skin makes you aware of your body as something that exists in space and that interacts with the world (when I'm all bundled-up I feel like I'm traveling in some kind of puffy car because my skin never gets to feel the outside world and it's like being in my own little transit-universe).

This is my favorite time of year.  All those splay-legged blossoms seem a little ostentatious, but they smell great and it's fun being one of them.