Dave from Chub Creek was kind enough to mention me and plug my site in the latest episode (#9). I designed an ad that’s on their site now, the one with the light bulb. Dave and Gary have a highly amusing show full of great music, self-effacing humor, and an honest sensibility which I find very engaging. You listen to them and you just know these are good guys.
Check them out at the Chub Creek site.
It occurred to me the other day that I’ve taken on a freelance job where I am being paid to write fiction. I think this is the first time I’ve been paid for my writing instead of graphic design. The project consists of writing scenarios and dialogue for what is essentially a computer game. So it isn’t like writing a story; it’s very nonlinear. You’d think that with all my experience writing play-by-email games that this would be a snap. But it’s been difficult to get a grasp on it. I have to come up with these free-floating dialogues that may or may not happen based on the player’s actions. It’s a learning experience, at least. At best I get to say that I wrote dialogue for a game!
While I was tacking down some new carpet in the foyer I saw the gymnasium slide past the door. People I had never seen before were poking about the free weights. That explains the leftovers in the fridge.
Before leaving I double-checked the tripwires and the pressure in the helium tanks. Something scratched and mewled behind the boudoir door. Best leave that for the guests to find.
Got an encrypted message this morning from an agent at Cambridge. They are already working on an app to track the guests online. Excellent.
Had to go over to the compound today for a bit of consultation. Showed Jimmy my “magic eyeball.” He’s not too thrilled with the idea of having to replace all the retinal scanners. When I told him they’re as popular as Gameboys in Shinjuku and all the hep cats have ’em on their keychains, well… he just about flipped.
Anyhow… I wasn’t there to rap with Jimmy. Gossard wanted my opinion on the enzyme micro-tracers they were field testing at Hot Topic. When the natural oils in a customer’s fingertips came in contact with the ink on their receipt, the tracers activated. Brilliant. Now I can watch little pulses of light move from Coronado down to the Pulse and then back to soccer mom’s house in the heights.
The syndicate had moved the transmitter once again. Almost lost the breadcrumb trail this morning and ended up on the right side of town. I punched in the GPS coords, timestamped the packet and got out of there. Half an hour later the slot in the restroom of Dunkin Donuts spooled out a message: “Hope is the last train leaving the station. Faith says you can catch it.”
Finally, I’ve completed the last revisions and I’m ready to call it done. Here it is, in PDF format:
In the spirit of Songs to Wear Pants to and to expand my artistic horizons, I’d like to present a little something I call Drey’s Whack Graffix. The concept is this: you send me a request for some kind of graphic along with the medium/style or whatever other specifications you think of, and I will do my best to create that image. These graphics will appear in my gallery on deviantART.
While the graphic may be useful, it can’t be something I would ordinarily get paid for. For instance, I will not make a logo and/or business card for your company, but I WILL make a logo for a fictional interstellar warp drive manufacturer.
The request should be small in scope, like a single image, not “a graphic novel series about a family of magic turtles.”
I’m also interested in doing more involved collaborations of any kind with other artists, musicians, writers and creative types.
So there you go.
I have an art and writing gallery over at deviantART with all my latest stuff!
I was happier with the madness.
I watched the bridge burn from the highest window of my forehead and pulled the shade on my third eye.
Did a freefall backslide into the anesthetic blanket of an over the counter prefab life.
Now I’m shotgunning smoke from the lips of poets. Blowing rings around the moon. Making Saturn from a hubcap, until the orderlies graft the remote control to my palm.
Now my heart is plowed by Hallmark card commercials in the methadone clinic of Must See TV.
I begin to reminisce about spending days with my mouth stopped shut by a wasp nest until I burned it out with cigarettes.
Shaking the Magic 8 Ball and having it tell me “Fuck No!” one day and “Hell Yes!” the next.
I was happier when I took the pain from a hip flask
Spilling rainbow oil slick snailbelly juice on my forehead
Like an anointing
Like a warning
My day planner choked with blood and shit and the cryptic symbols from the Babylonian curse she tattooed around my heart.
Out the window I see a new bridge, a crystal cat’s cradle of voices inter-cut with heartbeats.
So I overpower the warden and finally break free
It’s easy to do because the warden is me
I want it all back
The spinning carousel face
Russian roulette with a scorpion jukebox
Tequila tango of tongues in the back alley of my mind
Always a step away from the mad shit
The breakthrough an ever falling star
Happiness a train I keep missing in a dream
Every day dying in a Maserati car wreck of ecstasy
But I want it, even if it eats my heart,
I want it.
I want the poetry back.
And she thinks to herself about
How much his sexual techniques are like the settings on her Black & Decker Blender:
Distinguished only by changes in pitch and intensity.
Yet they each had their own little name:
Grind, Frappe, Obliviate.
So too the bestiary of contortions in the copy of the Kama Sutra
She saw strategically placed on the nightstand,
Pages earmarked like a threat.
She feels her heat steal away from her body,
Condensing on the roof of his laboring chest.
“I’m in an oven,” she thinks. “An oven that feeds only twice a week.
I’m the loaf of bread.”
He had mixed her up, kneaded her, pounded her for good measure
And then packed her in a box.
She sees the coastline of Antarctica in the cracks of his bedroom ceiling.
She imagines Lilith’s outraged scream falling across the oceans of ancient earth,
Encasing it in a womb of ice that lingers at the poles even today.
Tomorrow she plans to call some travel agents and sift them.
The one who gets her the best rate on a one way to Antarctica
Will become her new shaman,
Her Pathfinder across a log jam of spinning chakras.
He rolls her onto her side so he can try out page 34.
The crease in the pillow is a mountainside in Antarctica.
A mountain of clothing, she decides,
Remembering the range of laundry waiting by the washer at home.
One pile for the business girl, one pile for the Sunday girl,
One pile for the party girl, one pile for the artist girl…
In Antarctica, she wouldn’t need as many clothes,
Just enough to keep her self warm.
In Antarctica she would rebuild the temple of herself
Seal it with a gate that opened only for her
With a sign out front to warn visitors: “No thank you. I already have everything.”
Far away, she hears a blender work its way up the scale
Until the pressure blows off the lid.
“When I go to Antarctica,” she thinks,
“I’ll need to bring an ice pick.”