Category Archives: shards

June 24, 2017 · 6:20 pm

superman caves in

Superman Caves In

Sometimes I arrive at work trim and dapper in my dark blue suit, other times I fly thru the sky at mid-day snatching planes from their flight pattern, but now and then I become disheartened (yes, me, man of steel who has no use for gravity) and take the bus to work, still in my pajamas, my sad cape from another planet hanging limp down my back, and that’s when children jeer and women look away.

Women want a lover who can bend their will like taffy, and kids want a role model they can–look! Up in the sky! It’s Superman!

No one wants a super hero with a weak spot.

Such is the lot of a lost child from Krypton.

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June 22, 2017 · 8:12 pm

i woke up dead

I Woke Up Dead

I woke up dead. I got out of bed and heated water for coffee. I lit a cigarette and left in on the counter top. I stared at my hands. The pot whistled and I turned the heat off.

I felt an absence of conviction, and I realized that life is propelled by conviction. Not what we call conviction, which is actually fear, but true conviction, which is a constant, underlying pulse.

I went into the bathroom and at the sink turned the hot water on and off twice. Then I flushed the toilet and watched the water swirl away. I walked around the house picking things up and setting them down again. I didn’t turn on my computer, the radio or the TV.

I was naked, but I had no desire to put clothes on. The house was immensely quiet.

I returned to the bedroom and lay on the bed on my back. I closed my eyes. The hands of the alarm clock moved past the time it was set for, but it didn’t ring.

This is how they would find me.

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June 21, 2017 · 2:50 pm

this & that

This & That

That was that and this is this. But if that was that, what’s that now? This? Is that an embryo for a robust, full-grown this? What are its proclivities, the this that once was that?

Language is a shortcut to hell, hungry for music and the sudden move, sometimes referred to as a lurch.

What was a close-call before language? A pounding heart and taut nerves, prelude to dance.

How did we ponder before language?

What made us pick up the club and roar language in the face of God?

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June 20, 2017 · 6:13 pm

the interview goes awry

The Interview Goes Awry

Thanks for granting us this interview. Thanks for giving us the time. Thanks for signing the waiver. Why don’t we start with: You used to write about what was happening in the world – why did you stop doing that?

To get at the heart of the matter.

That’s not what the critics say. The critics say you’ve gone off the deep end.

That’s where the heart of the matter is.

Well there you go. Talking like that, writing like that, it leaves people cold and confused. You’re destroying your legacy. Don’t you care about your legacy?

Piranha food.

We’re off to a bad start here. We paid you a good chunk of money to do this interview, we deserve better answers.

Then ask better questions. Or use the waiver. With the waiver you can leave out anything I say and pepper the whole thing with asterisks and hire a ghost writer to smooth out the rough spots.

They don’t come cheap.

Neither do I.

Cheaper than a ghost writer.

We’re not talking about the same thing.

How does your decline in popularity make you feel? Your overnight plunge from a New York penthouse into a walk-up flat in the Bronx? Tom Wolfe says it’s a pity, you showed promise.

I’m writing in a foreign language now.

What? When did you start doing that? What language?

The language of the heart.

Very funny.

Not really.

Let’s get back to what you used to write about – your screwed up family and demented friends. People ate that up.

They grew wings and flew into the sun. They burn brighter than ever. Read between the lines. Read my latest novel, Burnt Wings & Withered Prayers: Meltdown on the Psych Ward.

Which sold 600 copies and got remaindered after six months.

Time to come at things from a different angel.

You mean angle.

There’s no difference between a misspelling and a mispronunciation, but there’s a big difference between an angel and an angle.

Why won’t you give people what they want? They’re hungry for the old you.

Let them eat cake.

Okay, let’s take a different tack. Let’s talk about what you’re working on now. The scuttlebutt has it that you’re collaborating with Stephen King.

Steve and I play checkers on Friday nights.

No one calls Stephen King Steve.

No one plays checkers with him. And we play hopscotch, too. In Steve’s driveway on weekends. And we work crossword puzzles together high on acid. Steve is my last connection with the linear world. From here on out it’s all 3-D.

Is it true you’re planning to move to Prague? Aren’t you on the No-Fly List?

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Or get to Prague. And yes, it’s true. I met a woman in New York who is a torch singer in a Prague nightclub. She’s going to support me while I work on my new novel, which takes place inside an anthill and is 90% punctuation. It’s a stylistic breakthru. No working title yet.

We can’t use this. We can’t use any of it. Except maybe the stuff about Steve. I mean Stephen. Mr. King. Is it true? We don’t need a lawsuit.

How about an Armani?

Do you even know Steve? Stephen?

We met playing checkers in detox.

Oh, come on!

We got released on the same day. Steve had a limo waiting. He gave me a lift, dropped me off in Soho.

We need to wrap this up.

Go for it. Use string, masking tape, butcher paper – whatever it takes.

Do you have a closing statement?

My life is an open book.

That’s it?

In a nutshell.

Fine. Great. Do you want my secretary to call you a cab?

If it turns her on, she can call me a cab.

Fuck you, man. I know that’s not a very professional thing to say, but fuck you. You can ride the bus.

You’re either on the bus or in a cab, I said, and he said,

Get him out of here…

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June 19, 2017 · 3:26 pm

the good american

The Good American

Most people I do windows for take it for granted that I know what I’m doing and let me go about my business, but every now and then I run into a woman who follows me around wringing her hands and warning me about lamps and nicknacks or pointing out spots on the glass before I’ve even wet it down, and the other day the man of the house, recently retired and in an angry panic over the state of the nation, followed me from window to window letting me know that for thirty years, before they gave him the gold watch and the severance check, he’d flown all over the world for the firm, closing deals and setting up new accounts, so he’s seen first-hand what’s happening to this country, cameras everywhere, spying on us in airports, we’re more Communist than the Red Chinese. We started out becoming Socialists under Roosevelt, which was bad enough, but then Obama took over the government and now we’re Communists and Big Brother is watching us.

“Big Brother was more a Fascist than a Communist,” I said, and immediately regretted it.

“What?” he said. “Are you calling Americans Fascists? What kind of American are you?”

 

***

 

I’d said those very words over thirty years earlier.

Sometimes, sitting on a bar stool, I’d get bored and strike up a conversation with whoever was sitting next to me, push their buttons until they were on the verge of violence, and then bring them back down until they began acting like we were blood brothers.

But one night I miscalculated with a big lumberjack, and the next thing I knew I was out in the alley with him and a crowd of onlookers as he threw me to the ground, sat on my chest, and — grabbing fistfuls of my hair, which was quite long back then – began bashing my head against the blacktop.

He showed no sign of letting up, and I realized if I didn’t come up with something fast, he was going to bash my brains out. And so I said, one jerky word at a time:

“What…kind…of…an…A…mer…i…can…are…you?”

He stopped to consider this, and the crowd that was gathered around considered it too, and then someone said: “Yeah, man. What kind of an American are you?”

A murmur of disapproval of such un-American activity as the lumberjack was displaying went up from the crowd.

He got off me then, stood up and explained that he was a good American, and I got to my feet, the back of my head a bloody mess, and declared that I, too, was a good American, and then everyone began declaring that they were good Americans, we were all good Americans.

Someone lit a joint and passed it around, and we began shaking hands and hugging each other. We did everything but sing The Star Spangled Banner.

And that’s what I said to the retired globe trotter.

“I’m a good American,” I said, and he came close to tears.

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June 17, 2017 · 5:59 pm

the committee goes holographic

The Committee Goes Holographic

My computer geek’s name is Jimmy. I found him on a laundromat bulletin board, a hand-written ad on a sheet of typing paper (“Tired of being bugged? Call Jimmy”) with a string of tear-offs at the bottom with Jimmy’s phone number on them.

Jimmy hates computers, and so he learned all there is to know about them in order to attack them. He doesn’t have a computer himself, no home page, he works out of libraries and places like Kinkos. He lives out of his van and spends most of his time up in the hills. He’s stripped himself and all of his belongings of bugs or he’s subverted the bugs, turned them around on whoever planted them. He’s cyberspace’s worst nightmare. I was the only person who took a tear-off from his ad and called him.

What I wanted to know is if anyone was fucking with the Shards I send out to my email list, and in less than ten minutes Jimmy confirmed what I’ve already recorded in another Shard (“Writing with a Truncated Alphabet”), that yes indeed, they were.

“They’re using a program that randomly deletes selected consonants from your text, rendering it gibberish,” Jimmy said. “Do you want to retaliate?”

“No. Not right away,” I said. ”I don’t want them to know I’m on to them.”

“Good thinking,” said Jimmy.

“Maybe I’ll just disappear off their radar,” I said. “Go back to sending stuff thru the mail.”

“Won’t work,” said Jimmy. “They’ve got a lock on all your communication outlets. They’ll do the same thing to your letters.”

“How in the hell are they going to do that?” I said. “Steam open the envelopes?”

Jimmy gave me a tender smile. “No, they won’t steam open your envelopes, silly goose. They have a system that X-ray scans envelopes, converts the written content to text on a computer screen, edits it and transmits it back into the envelope.”

“Holy shit!” I said.

“Cutting-edge technology,” said Jimmy.

“Sweet Jesus!” I said.

“It’s not just the mail,” Jimmy said. “Everything is monitored and edited. There are monitoring devices in your food, your clothing, your credit cards, your driver’s license, your watch and your eye glasses—audio, tactile and visual monitoring. There’s no privacy left, not even in your most intimate moments, unless you know what to look for and how to dismantle what you find. Everything is recorded and stored holographically. They’re working on constructing a holographic world that mirrors the real world in every detail, and once that’s accomplished, they’ll pull the plug on reality and we’ll all vanish. But they don’t interfere with what they access unless something threatens to reveal their process, and apparently these things you call Shards have the potential to do this.”

“Who are they?” I said. “Who’s creating this holographic monstrosity?”

“The Committee,” said Jimmy, and a chill ran down my spine.*

 

*(The Committee has been harassing me ever since I began publishing, before computers and before the writing evolved into Shards. They’re a very sophisticated, very hush-hush corporate-funded organization of saboteurs and hit-men, its mission to rip out secret-life awareness by the roots.

There is a whole body of Shards related to The Committee; a good number of them can be found in The Book of Shards, a major collection available from Hcolom Press.) 

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