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!
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Visitation
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.
Results
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.”
The Novella is done!
Finally, I’ve completed the last revisions and I’m ready to call it done. Here it is, in PDF format:
I Want the Poetry Back
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.
Antarctica
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.”
Novella
I got schooled by Amanda last night and discovered I’m still about 40,000 words short of a novel. I guess my info was outdated. So I guess I just have a novella that’s almost 30,000 words long. Sigh.
2nd Draft Finished!
I finally got my act together and finished the 2nd draft of my novella! I added about 20 pages since the first draft! I’ve sent it out to a couple of people for review and critiques. If I end up doing a third draft, it won’t be as drastic a revision. Just tightening and tuning the writing.
We Are All in the Process of Leaving Wal-Mart
Fragments of an unfinished poem…
I meet my twin in the office supply aisle.
He is clean shaven, which makes me consider my own place in this mirror universe.
He says, “I just got here. I can’t find anything I need.”
“Try the automotive section,” I tell him. “It’s a good place to start forgetting.
Buy everything for that road trip you’ll never take.”
In the toy aisle, a boy and girl exchange volleys of Nerf darts
labeled with the names of places enchanted by past lovers.
No one else sees the children and their phantom friendly fire.
I approach the express lane.
10 Items or Less.
Both a welcome and a warning.
Coming Out Poem #1
Someone screams in the room across the hall,
His fever blasting into me with a mad resonance.
So afraid, we are all so afraid of the mint green hallways,
This zoo that M.C. Escher built.
“Do you understand that you are in an urgent care facility?” the nurse asks.
I nod urgently. I do now.
The doors to this hospital are locked, but I don’t know that yet.
I vibrate and twitch and chase my words around, trying to gather them in careful piles, like autumn leaves in a constant wind.
I answered all the questions honestly, so of course I’m igniting rows of little red lights on their warning panel.
Yes, I wanted to kill someone.
I have created a situation for them. They are now in damage control mode.
Yes, I hear voices.
In fact, that’s what I came here to talk about if…
No, I’m not planning on killing myself.
The voices have names.
No, I don’t know where the scars came from.
Sometimes I get really confused and the phone just scares the shit out of me.
No, I don’t know what day it is.
I don’t mention the animals, or my sister, or the blackouts, or use the term “occult”;
Poor woman’s so busy with all the other blinking red lights.
She doesn’t know the terror of having to choose the One True breakfast cereal at the grocery store.
They’re always talking, you see.
Romero says we should just get the fuck out of there.
We can take her. “You get the ankles and I’ll get the wrists.”
The nurse studies her notes and then retrieves a doctor.
The doctor offers her help in exchange for my agreeing to take some pills.
Damage control. Damage control.
Bottled fog to squash the voices.
The pills will make the doctors certain they are speaking only to me.
I came here drowning and they are throwing me Life Savers candy.
Can it be a woman? I will only speak with a woman.
Men are untrustworthy, they scare me
Don’t tell me it’s an irrational fear; turn on a TV – it’s just common sense.
I’m afraid of demons too, but that’s probably because of all the exorcisms.
Taran says taking the drugs would be like suffocating your brother with a pillow because he talks too much. Kind of an extreme solution.
A child is sobbing somewhere, but no one else seems to hear.
I come out of “screen saver” mode
To find a new office with a new doctor. A man.
The stagehands are so swift and silent I don’t notice the set changes.
How many times have I done this?
The doctor says I’m “borderline,” on the verge of “going crazy.”
I ask him if that’s the proper psychiatric term for my condition and what warning signs I can expect so when I finally “go crazy” I know when to mail the invitations.
He just shrugs as he takes my money.
Every dollar is a thunderclap when you’re paying someone just to listen.
At home I find sketches of still life and landscapes.
They are all full of faces.
Someone has forged my signature at the bottom of every one of them.
Someone’s been feeding the cats. One less thing I have to do.
The prescription the doctors gave me has vanished.
Someone else has left signs of their passing up and down my arms and legs.
Technically, the wounds are self-inflicted.
I can’t deny those are my fingerprints on the knife.
My friends laugh nervously at my “mood swings”
And we laugh back at them with lonely, angry laughter.
I gave up trying to put the mirror back together since I don’t know its original shape
And honestly, I’m used to my reflection by now.
I dwell in a world of fissures, of dreams within dreams, of time reft and distressed.
The journal of my life has a chasm between ages 3 and 12.
Guess nothing was going on all those years.
Guess I had nothing notable to say.
You could say I have a photographic memory:
Because without the photos there’d be no memories.
I memorize numbers, the answers to complicated questions like
How long were you married?
How long have you lived here?
Haven’t I always been here?
“Am I asleep? Had I slept? Are they my bad dream or am I theirs?”
The first rule of Dissociative Identity Disorder is you do not talk about Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Fuck the rules.
I don’t worry that I’ll wake up as Tyler Durden;
I worry that I’ll wake up as myself
And where’s that guy been?
A lot of people have been asking for him.
He’s been making a lot of collect calls
And signing a lot of checks,
And running up a tab.
And he forgot we were playing hide and seek.
These have got to be the best hiding places because no one’s found us for years.
But we just want to know if it’s safe to come out now.
We just want to be found.