The apartment looked empty. Something undefinable had left, been taken away, and all the furniture now seemed without luster, devoid of memories and personality. Though the sun shone in through the windows, and lit the large space with light, the apartment seemed gray and quiet. Almost melancholy. Reaching up to place the keys on their hook, Reginald allowed the door to swing closed behind him with a soft click. Home. Their home. His home. His home. He almost lacked the energy to move forwards, to go through all the small routines that settling down to rest involved. He could picture them, the numerous small tasks, each step a still frame of himself, frozen in action, numbered, till the steps culminated in his sitting with a mug of tea to gaze out the window and into the world.

Pursing his lips, Reginald shrugged his long coat off, allowing it to slip down his arms and catch on the crooks of his elbows, from which he swung it around and bundled it in half, dropping it over the back of a chair. Unwinding the old scarf, he moved towards the kitchen table, a clear expanse of light, honey colored wood beneath the window out of which he'd soon sit to look out. How often they'd sat just here, early mornings, the quiet rustle of newspaper pages, the delicate clink of saucer on cup. The warmth, the sound of their hearts beating together, in unison, unheard but... felt. Feet bumping under the table, the casual contact that never failed to excite, if only the slightest stirrings of desire.

Reginald reached out and allowed his fingers to trace the striated surface of the wood, a light whisk, a palping of fingertips over the wood, eyes raising to gaze out and through, over the rooftops of the college and into the verdant quad a block away. Silence. Midterm break, the campus deloused. Silence and solitude, melancholy sorrow and regret. These were to be his companions for the next few days till Maxwell came up to visit. To visit and distract, to make him laugh and make it all more bearable.

Where was she now? Out of which window did she gaze into the world? Ankles crossed under the chair, long fingers wrapped around a cooling mug of tea? Eyes hard and flat, the gaze of a person who has been hurt, who has been hurt and grown hard so as to not shatter. She always did that, Susan. Always clenched, always tightened and twirled away, a dancer who could not be caught. She'd strike as soon as you tried to raise your fist, as fast as a cobra, a small ball of potential anger and fury that waited, almost suspiciously, for a sign of danger.

Reaching out, Reginald pulled his chair out and lowered himself into it. The seat was cold, comfortable, familiar. But no longer did it resonate, did it match its other that sat, silent, across the table from it. Kill the fancies, kill the idle thoughts. Send the Judas goat through the herd of half remembered romantic dreams and hopes, and lead them all, one by one, to the rusty butcher's blade, to the rhythmic, lulling sound of the chop chop chop.

"Give me a reason to love you," she had said, stepping back from his outstretched arms. Give me a reason, and he had dried up. The words, his words, that had never failed him, stepped away with her, and left him alone. Alone in his mind, a mind that failed to fashion thoughts and emotions and reasons. He'd opened his mouth, and nothing had come out. Her eyes had defeated him, his reflection in them, what he had become to her. He'd remained silent, and then had offered, "I love you." She'd laughed then, a bitter sound, the sound that could bring down walls and scald the clouds from the skies, and turned to leave. Picking up her coat. Taking her keys, opening the door and walking away. Leaving him here, alone, the words all rushing back to late, making him want to chase her, follow her into the hall, the stairwell, calling out poems and entreaties, pouring lyrical honey and the deep, imperious bass of command about her head like a defender raining down Grecian fire and boulders on an attacking army.

But she wasn't attacking, and his best defense had always been offense. And it was too late now, too late, and he knew it.

Leaning forwards, feeling old, feeling tired, feeling as flat as an old truck tire run into the ground till it had burst without a sound, Reginald looked out through the window, unseeing. A whole day lay before him, an afternoon of slowly sliding shadows and collecting dust. He could sit here, sit here for the whole evening, into the night, and nobody would stop him. Somebody might call. He's inbox was always overloaded with missives from around the world, both old friends and past students. But today, this one day, he was alone, and nobody would come.

She had been beautiful though. It was no excuse, but god damn it, he was a man wasn't he? He was made of flesh, and hormones could still make his blood boil. Great men fell, stumbled. It was part of being human. And ah, such beauty. Long tresses, rivulets of copper gold, clean and supple and smelling of youth and innocense and wisdom beyond his ken. And her skin, so smooth, that he'd spent hours afterwards just running the worn pads of his fingers over her declevities and curves. Along the flanks of her back, the rounded hips and the long, long thighs. Her hair spread around her head like some aureate aureola, a mediavel halo that outdid that of any saint. Tarnished gold.

Give me a reason to love you. Love. Beauty. Flesh. One so familiar and intimate, the other a series of unexplored vistas and hidden valleys. Sweet nectar and honey dew. He'd drunk deep. If you're going to fall, dive. He'd fallen deep, deep into the shadowed recesses of her body, and had revelled in what he'd seen as his rediscovered youth. For a night he'd risen, had felt his soul soar in the night's winds and eddies, and felt the moon bask on his immortality.

But. She'd known when he'd walked in the door. The sensation of impending doom had consumed him so on his walk back to the apartment that by the time he'd opened their front door his face had been consumed with what he'd done. Not sin, but his weakness, his folly. She had been beautiful, but ephmeral, and now she was gone, gone with all her hard edges and sharp angles. Gone, and his apartment was just that now. His. Looking at his large hands, once powerful enough to crush that of others in his grip, but now so weak, so mortal, the skin thinning, losing its natural elasticity. Gone, gone gone.

Maxwell would be up soon. With his loud voice, his booming presance, his hearty laughter and propensity for drink. Maxwell would be up, and with him would come reprieve, understanding, back slaps and subdued silences. Understanding, and while Maxwell would never commend such a thing, in his silence at the end of the night, after a bottle of fine scotch, there would be understanding and through that, acceptance. Reprieve.

Give me a reason to love you. Because I want you to. Because I need you to. Because you have to. Because I'm better than you, and you need me. Because you should be thanking your lucky fucking stars I'm with you at all. Feeling himself collapse within himself, a slow crumbling, Reginald felt something undefinable being taken away, some small flame gutter and go out, and looking out the window, he felt himself at one with the empty apartment.

Nothing to say. Nothing coherent to add. Tumultuous emotional state in which eager and vapid thoughts surface into my consciousness, only to twist, glisten and sink back into the darkness. Desperate ploys manifesting in retarded child thoughts, brazen and half formulated, tremulous and bitter. Absinthe has failed me. Stomach fluttering with a vague expectation brought about by a sharp desire for some undefinable event that will culminate in my simply going to sleep, exhausted, frustrated and bereft. The sun always comes, inevitable, no matter how much one may protest at night, plead and wrangle, curse and sigh. Fulminate. Fuligan fumes. I would that I would that I were the Sultanate. I would that I could castigate, berate the opiates that singe the surfaces of my cerebellum. Casus Belli. That is what I christen my cerebellum. Casus Belli.

ca·sus bel·li ( P ) Pronunciation Key (kss bl, käss bl)n. pl. casus belli
An act or event that provokes or is used to justify war.

The war is righteous, and unfought, held off, the armies delaying engagement in order to prolong the pleasure that comes from the self denial of an expected good. The longer they wait, fists gripping their weapons, eyes narrowing as they scan each other's lines, the greater the tension, the higher the expectation. Why fight now, why rush into some heady, narcissitic self indulgence when, by holding off with bated breath, you can allow the inevitable orgasm to reach a crescendo of mellifluous proportions? Eyes lidded, lips glistening, cheeks flushed, body fluid and poised, the cassus belli remains undefined, but that bothers not the armies. They will fight, determined to find the meaning for their conflict within the very heart of their aggression. In death they will justify their urge to kill. Licking the blood from the serrated edges of their blades, they will taste the fruits of their endeavours, and know the certainty that has eluded them through all their dusks and dawns. In crimson it lies, the answer, in the ultimate act of self assertion.

Casus Belli. I hold off fighting because I derive pleasure from the expected self knowledge I will gain which will illumine the darkness in which I now reside. In darkness I exhult, complacent and puerile, assured of adult hood by the belief that I can grow at any time by exherting myself, but choosing not to, for the moment. I am the addict who believes he can start at any time, but sees not the reason for starting just yet, believing that his own belief is sufficient proof to prove that he is correct in his self delusions.

Come, let slip the hounds so that I may course with them in the Elysian fields of my own suppressed creativity.

Threats of hammer blows to the face. Tentative requests for company. Sizzling burgers on the skillet. We fear nussing, Lebowski, we fear nussing! The soothing tones of Eels as Mr E assures me that this could be my lucky day in hell. Back pains from sleeping on unevenly padded surfaces. Chess games in the park, with me coming through 3-0, victory Nixon style. Out of underwear, out of food, out of hard cold cash. New York City, a crucible for the weak, a mortar in which you are crushed down, all pretenses stripped bare by the unforgiving intensity of it all. Like standing under an extremely fashionable magnifying glass that seeks to determine your every fault and failing. Rise, stand tall, stare through the swollen glass and into the concentrated rays of the sun. Burn out your retinas, but find glory even as the sun begins to shimmer purple and crimson. New York City. The name itself dwarfs anything that can be found within its confines, it seedy, tumultuous borders, its desperation and strident beauty.

Hell fluid.

Stability, routine. Erecting structures around my movements so as to fortify my soul. Scaffolding, a series of ritualized actions and obervances from which I will not only draw comfort and continuity, but that might also serve to gently numb my mind. To dull the passage of days, so that each flows into the other, brothers, differances washed away, a gentle progression of ordered events with me as the boat, carried by the momentum I will generate.

Of prime importance is the need to regulate my sleeping hours. I clearly need about nine hours a night. Furthermore, I need to sleep during the same nine hours each night. From eleven to eight. No, I should try and sleep from ten to seven each day. It will be hard, but I can do this by focusing my efforts.

The goal of all this is that elusive, early morning clarity in which I can find a few hours to myself in which to drink a mug of tea and read or write. Let's work this out backwards - say I wish to be at work each day by nine thirty. I should therefor have to leave my house at nine. If I wish to exercise in the mornings, I would then have to be back from exercising at eight in order to shower, dress and eat breakfast. Let's slow things down - back by seven forty five. Which means I would have to be at the gym by seven, and thus wake up at six forty five. That means being asleep at just about ten each night.

Having read up on sleep, I've decided to adopt the following routines: take a hot shower just before getting in bed. All lights off at the same time, plunging me into darkness. It will also help that I am exercising just after waking up. So - waking up from now on at six forty five. My social life my suffer as a result, but sucks to my ass-mar, I don't have much of one anyway. And I rarely do anything of any use after ten anyways.

Sleep is the big one. Exercise should follow naturally from there - swimming, biking, running and lifting weights. I'll have to adapt Jenni's schedule to my own needs, but in short I believe that I will soon be excelling in all departments. Sleep, exercise, and the final element is nutrition.

Ah, nutrition. Breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, early dinner, snack. I shall endeavour to do that blood test thing, and to actually put some effort into diversifying my breakfast so as to maintain a healthy interest in it. Look into smoothies. Look into pancakes, and buying fruits. Honey, french toast, perhaps even baking my own bread.

But no more waste. I shall put into effect. I shall shower now, long and hot, and then read some Don Quixote before endeavouring to fall asleep by eleven. Set the alarm right now for seven thirty.

VVVVVVVV
VVVVVVVE
VVVVVVEL
VVVVVELO
VVVVELOC
VVVELOCI
VVELOCIT
VELOCITY

SHE CAME FROM THE OCEAN, A CREATURE OF VERTIGINOUS BREASTS AND FUNGIBLE ASSETS. THE OCEAN, IT KIND OF SWIRLED AROUND HER LEGS, LIKE WISHY WASHY WATER THAT DIDN'T KNOW IF IT WAS COMING OR GOING. IN THE END IT DID BOTH. SHE DIDN'T NOTICE THOUGH. NOT HER, OH NO, SHE DIDN'T NOTICE AT ALL. THE OCEAN WAS HER WOMB, HER POINT OF ORIGINATION, HER P.O.B. IF YOU WILL ALLOW ME TO USE APPRAISAL TERMS, AND HER EMERGENCE WAS WHAT MATTERED NOT THAT FROM WHICH SHE EMERGED. MY POINT IS THAT SHE DIDN'T LOOK BACK, SHE DIDN'T EVEN GLANCE OVER HER SHOULDER, FELT NO SHUDDERINGS OF REGRET AS HER LONG LIMBS SCYTHED - NO - STEPPED - NO - SLIPPED FREE OF THE FRIGID WATER. IT WAS A ONE WAY TICKET, A TRAJECTORY WITH NO RETURN, A FORWARDS MOTION THINGY WITH NO COUNTERVALING FORCE. OUT SHE CAME, FROM THE OCEAN, USING HER LEGS TO DRAW HER FREE, TOES DIGGING INTO THE WET, HARD SAND THAT SHIFTED AND ERODED INSTANTLY OUT FROM UNDER HER FEET, LEAVING THE WISHY WASHY WATER BEHIND TO SIGH AND SUSSURATE IN HER WAKE.

SAYING, COME BACK, COME BACK, COME BACK TO US THELASSA.

BUT SHE DID NOT RESPOND.

Oooohhhhhh I feel love I feel love I feel.... love.

I. Feel. Love.

Feel it, lift your arms as the euphoria gathers, your eyes closing, your mouth curling into an irrepressible smile, your body swaying with such sublte energy, so much that you can barely bother to express it, instead rejoicing in the power that suffuses your muscles and bones. You're riding the pegasus to the rarest heights, through into the thinnest air, the sun pared down, pure, white light that removes all imperfections from your soul and leaves you essential, without want or need, a simple ray of rising golden light, spearing up and into the very heart of all warmth and being.

Ah, to wake up feeling this way each morning instead of blearily slamming the alarm clock off and pushing the dead sheep carcase off the bed so that you can swing your legs around and look dumbly at the wall for five minutes before going to the shower to wash off all the blood so as to begin another day.

Feel love? I know the sheep did.

She came from greece she had a thirst for knowledge. She studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College. That's where. I. Caught her I. I want to live like. Common People. I want to do. Like Common People. I want to sleep like do Common People like you do. Do you common people too? I took her to a supermarket. Zuper. Started there. Why? Started there. Pretend. She just laughed. Like a fifty year old man in drag, swishing his hand at you, gushing, a straight man, straight laced, confident, a little desperate, feeling the years closing in around him like scalding waters. Pretending. Faking it. Faking it so hard that it's starting to peel off. Peel off like Common People Do. The moment he gets home he'll fix himself a straight drink, a stiff drink, he'll call it, a stiffy, a regular booze hound he'll call himself as he looks himself 'straight in the eye' cause that's the kind of guy he is. Building himself up with phrases and idioms. Affable. Impressed with himself, believing that he is able to pull this charade off because he is who he is.

William Shatner. Common People. Do. You? I took her to a zupertinni. Don't know why but I had to start it there. I had to. No choice. Zuppertinni. YOU SO FUNNY! YEAH? WELL I CAN'T - common people. Everywhere. Crawling out from behind the skirting boards, carapaces gleaming, legs clicking over the linoleum. Common People, everywhere, staggering around, blinded by their own communality, stunned by the very plebianosity of there lives. Never fail like Common People. Slide out of view. Dance, drink, screw, and all of this, all of it, the whole 'kaboodle' the whole effing inkydoodle taking place at the ZUPERTINNI.

The zupertinni. It haunts me. The name. Zuper. It's so. Zuper. It's the center, the eye of the storm, the rum in the coke, the coke in the vein, the vein leading right out of the epicentral brain, each one a spoke extending out from my iris, my retinal gorging, my bridge and lording, my zuper - zupertinni. Take me away, away from here, and put me in heaven. YOU SO FUNNY. YEAH? WELL I CAN'T SEE - like common people? In the - in the - zuper - but she didn't - understand - she just smiled and held my hand. Flat, barber shop, hair, job, smoke some scratch. Never ever ever ever ever ever (x2) get it right. Make that a double. A double, on the rocks, over easy. Bring it to a boil, and then shunt it out the window, so that it falls, slo mo, cam revolving around it, till at the last moment the cam pulls back, wide vision, screen now showing the entirety of the buildings's first floor. Fine. Let it hit, let it smash, explode, burst, rupture, splinter and then freeze frame. Rewind. Delete. Take the tape out of the cam, place it in your mouth, regurgitate stomach acid and melt that fucker down. Chew, slowly, carefully, swallow. Burp fastidiously, wipe your mouth, dispose of camera, and then hit pause. Pause. Because we have to go. We have to go to the - to the - zuper - the zuper - the ZUPPERTINNI - because we have to - lie in bed at night and watch the common people. Watch them dance, slo mo, revolve, rewind, pause, delete, chew, swallow, burp. Fastidiously. Never get enough, never get enough, never ever clever trevor might he ever.

Ah, yes. Enough with the hyperbolic use of erratic grammar in order to prove eccentricity and brilliance. Time for the quotidian, to excel in the plebian, to become, in effect, common, and by embracing my very normality, excel. Embrace it, become it, become a paragon of commonality, an exemplar. Some people are more common than others. She just laughed and said you're so funny. I SAID YEAH? Are you sure? You want to see this? You want to pay $5 and step right up? You have that sick yearning for sights that are forbidden, for people who want to eat and sleep and feculate while you dispeculate their lower intestines for the amusement of them all? For the common people, all of them gathered, congregated, united, bound and held in the zuppertinni. The.

To contain a thousand roses in a closet of gold, shaped like a ribcage, scintillating and brilliant. A ribcloset of golden strands, surrounding, enmeshing a cacaphony of roses, beating and pulsating in the place of a heart; a thousand scented hearts in a bloodless void, encaged by a gilded strand, a castoff collection of sea worn sticks, a burnless pyre, a flameless heat, a magical source of goreless bloodflow. Let the music take your mind... just release and you will find... words can come and go, talking of Michelangelo, and you are powerless to do anything to stop them. Back and forth they stride, as proud as Napolean, as merciful as all the righteous, good nurses who strove so bravely during the Second Great World War. The War to End All Wars. A series of bloody interactions in which men sought to pierce each others bodies so as to lay each other low, the ultimate goal being the acquistion of land and cities, resources and airports, the machines that make and meld, that flow and glide. Espresso, the way that word rolls of the tongue, so silky smooth, like velvet chocolate, like raspberry sins. Esperesssso... I love you so, my dear Espresso. I love your soft declevities, your flanks and arms, the way your back rises and falls as you lie next to me, asleep, worn out, gentle and without edges. Espresso is besto when loved with complete assurity. Music was made for love. Cruising is made for love. Sepia tinted avocados, descending from the pelagic depths to the chthonic heights of the earth's vaulted tectonic reaches. Step to this tonic, tech to this elated chronic. Steelium chrome, ablative armor, ceramic certification of the most dubious kind. Step to this, like you have a problem with my Espresso love, my depressing obsession for you cappucino skinned amour. So what if you have exchanged vows of the most delinquent ardour; she is mine, and I declare her to be such, my conviction stemming from my irrepressable assurance - my complete assurity makes her mine. To run my fingers through her sable hair, to smell the warmth rising from her skin like odors rising from freshly baked bread, to knead the soft muscles that lie pliant beneath her skin, to feel the smooth ache fleeing from my touch, her exhalations and moans. Shifting her weight beneath mine, stirring when I press to hard. Inch by inch we get closer, and closer, every little part of each other striving to achieve completion, completion found only in complete adulation of our own bodies. Let mine be a temple in which yours is worshipped, let my tongue and finger tips be the acolytes who bow down and wash yours clean with water shipped in from Assyrian shores. Phoenicians silks shall drape your body as you sit, righteous and significant, in the atrium of my church. And I, the knave in the nave, the pestle without a mortar, shall watch from the shadows, cowled, bent over, alone, admiring the manner in which the sunlight, slanting in through the tinted windows, grace and hieghten your sibilant form. Planes, angled in a truly organic manner, shall hint at the joys and delicacies that linger beneath the draped purple folds that cloth you like the clouds clothe the heavens. I shall wait for the press and flow of your admirers to abate, and then, timorously, my advances sure to be curtailed by your stern and approbrious glances, I shall come to your base, you pedastle, you obelisk. And there I shall bow down, in all reverance and dutiful obsequience, and gave voice to my love. My sincere adulation shall find voice in my worldess ululations, my baritone bass, my moving eulogies and eloquent soliloquies. I shall describe your form in manners most bold, and then, at the long last, when words have failed me, when I have emptied out my mindless well, scoured clean my vocubularistic reserves, I'll reach out, fingers quivering, wavering, shaking, and touch your body. The pads of my fingers, cool and light, will ghost over your skin, barely connecting, barely alerting you to my attentions, my tender minisitrations, my sincere prevarications. The tautness of your skin over sleek muscles will drive me to abstraction, so that I'll contain my madness though sheer desire to continue my worship. The longer I love, the harder it grows to adore. Each second fans the fires, causes the dancing devil lights to leap up, so that my ardour is arrayed in vermillion garb, in azure flames and sepulchral tones. Crescendos, arpeggios, clarinet calls and trumpet cries. The clashing of cymbals, the beating of a thousand alligator hearts, clenched in dark triumphs at the bottom of salty wells. Crocodile tears for my disproportiante fears, empty thanks for that which I'll never perform. Tender absolutions for crimes I only dream of committing, for turns of phrase I'll never employ, for critiques and entreaties that shall never gain the use of my voice. Let's flow, let's glide. Step on down from your pedastle, and walk beside me, bereft of your pretentions and august glory. Humanize yourself, dispose of your mantles and titles, your raiments and finery. Come, walk on my horizontal, dispense with your verticality so that I may gaze in your eyes without craning my neck. Be one with me, hand in hand, yours cool against my heated palm, your steps measured and stately, mine hectic and foolish. How I shall prance and caper within the claptraps of my mind, each step causing a set of shutters to bang forth and allow the purifying fonts of sunlight to enter the stagnant depths of my mind. Illustrate yourself, each portion perfectly set aside for my delectation. I'll feast my eyes, feast my heart, and feast my stomach on your sublimity, for you shall be my meat and wine, my poetry and air, my north and south and space and void. Entreaties shall end in laments, for when all is done, I shall have consumed you in my passion and lust, absorbed you so totally, sublimated your perfection into my whole, that naught shall remain but my curdled memories of desires satiated past gluttonous might. I shall be left less than I was, your addition resulting in my loss, your passing an inevitable consequence of my extremes, your angles sanded down to smooth surfaces, bland and boring and dull. In sighs I shall express my regret, in bounteous belches shall I indicate my resignation, and in dutiful snores shall I herald the end of mine own consciousness.

Don't stand so. Don't stand so. Don't stand so close to me. Don't stand so. Don't stand so. Don't stand so close to me. It's funny. Funny how things don't change. How old resolutions remain future promises, no matter how many times they are broken and remade. Sometimes, succeding at the smallest thing feels like the greatest victory, because it's an inch forwards in the constant slide back to where you've always been.

Phantasmagoria:
A fantastic sequence of haphazardly associative imagery, as seen in dreams or fever.
A constantly changing scene composed of numerous elements.
Fantastic imagery as represented in art.

Remains to be seen. My fever dreams. Fever fever dreams. Dipping your hand into the hot, almost scalding river of orange masala. Feeling your fingernails begin to glow white hot, feeling your bones within the flesh of your hand grow leaden, heavy, irridescent. Drawing your hand free, the orange dripping back into the flow, running down the blade of your forarm, your hand gorey with it, radiating power and intensity and focus. Focus. I was trying to. I'd like to. When? Now. How? Radiantly. Let us make love, radiantly. Let the heat of our passion ignite the dubious doubts of the doubters. Doubtful? Certainly. Without passion, there can be no heat. Without heat, there can be no way to survive the coming ice age. Only a passionate people can live in the snow drifts. Only a passionate people can thrive in a world of ice. Only a passionate people can fend of the freezing dark, by lighting funeral pyres in their souls and pushing flaming viking ships into the nether.

Sometimes, the sweetest moment of the day is when you lie back in the darkness, your sheets cool over your body, your eyes open to the dark, and you let out that long, pent up breath, and think, it's over, there's nothing left to this day but these final moments of thought, and then - sleep.

Imagine, if you will: you are a professional sandcastle builder. You build extraordinary sandcastles for the discerning client. One day, a good family friend of yours stops by, and in charming falsetto, asks that you build a sandcastle for a friend of his. Of course, you boom! It would be mine pleasure! You begin to take specifications from this new client as to the kind of sandcastle they want, only to find within a week or so having begun planning and designing that they have opted slyly to go with another builder, whom you know to be both a) incompetant due to the blueprints shown to you and b) planning to rip them off. But fine! Go, young ones, find the dwelling place of your dreams with my best wishes. Thanks for wasting my time.

Then, perhaps three weeks later, the phone rings. It's the client, the one who left you high and dry in favor of another! Oh no, they lament, we were screwed, jipped, bamboozled and hoodwinked. Alackaday! Can you save us, can you work a miracle, build a sandcastle in half the time it normally takes? The urge to say no, to tell them to place their veinerschnitzel where the albatross dare not roost is strong, but you remember that this is a friend of a friend, so you say, I will do my best. My best! For an exhorbitant sum! You burn me once, you pay good money to engage my services a second time.

But! They weep piteously and gnash their teeth as they explain they have no money to pay you. Work for free! Work for free! You throw your hands up. Do they know how much a professional sandcastle builder can charge for such a screwjob, in two weeks no less? Fine! I'll help you out because I'm a good guy, a chum, and you're best mates with a best mate of mine. Though I deplore his taste in friends (excluding moi). Fine. No charge. AND the finest materials that I can offer! No crumbly sand for you, but the ne plus ultra! They hedge and complain and start making you feel like you're doing them a favor, because they're still spending money, albeit in a greatly reduced form, but the game is on.

Of course, no professional sandcastle builder is without a professional sandcastle material provider, so the first thing you do is call your erstwhile buddy and say, Hello! I need double fast expidited materials! Ne plus ultra! Can you do it? Why sure, buddy, sure I can. No problemo. Coming down the pipeline right atcha!

Phew. Ok, good. But then! Shock shock horror horror, shock shock horror! The material guy's boss comes back and says, sorry, my underling was wrong. Go to hell. Fuck! The clients are on the phone, screaming and acting as if you were making a thousand gold ingots off this deal, as if you were personally turning the dagger in their bloody, ruinous, collective eye socket. You throw yourself into this, try to work out deals, try to find a way, for free, mind you, and then - at the last minute - the client pulls the plug. I think they went to another sand castle builder.

The long and short of it? Never work for free, with only half the normal time, for ungrateful fruit fuckers. Sandcastle? Pah! They can go live in a ditch. A dirty one.

Today: Gut! Waiter, throw an umlaut over that first 'u'. Thank you. And less Jack Daniels Sauce on the burger if you will, my good man. Sharpish, now. Gut indeed! A quick list: met with an investor who wants to invest a cool million; had a crisis over a deal; cruised around town having power meetings with executive real estate agent Grand Bosses; ate a fabu lunch; ate an even fabuer 3 hour thai dinner with mara; had fabu ice cream with mara (4 different kinds of chocolate); got chased off a beach on key biscayne by rats armed with syringes (not kidding, no joke!); drove mellow style over key biscayne bridge at super slow speed with emergencies flashing so as to enjoy view and listen to jazz; had the worst backrub of my life; enjoyed reading a passage about sex on a bed covered in kittens to the world.

I wish Tuesdays were always this grand. Grand like a Duke who's hard up for cash but insists on doing his shuffle dance at the balls for extra cash from pitying Duchesses, that is.

Turn on the music. D'Angelo, Cruisin'. Put it on repeat, slip the headphones on, and allow the velvet sounds to slide into your mind. Just release and you will find... an endless spinning center of grooving funk. The kind of mellow kit kat flavor that rides the slipstreams of your tongue, that percolate down your fullsome throat into your soul. Feel it grow, feel it swell with health and subdermal vibrations. A soft, glistening thing, tonsil red and enshrouded in brown cigar smoke and the smell of alcohol. Waxed wood, sweeping bars sliding around the corners of the room, light scintillating in a million bottles of distilled spirit. The sound lulling you, pulling you up and out of your seat, slinking and jiving as you cross the floor, small steps, shucking your shoulders,  snapping your fingers, feeling that electricity thrumming along the nape of your neck and down the declevities of your spine. A coy smile on your face, self satisfied and confident, yet demure, engaging. The kind of smile that intrigues and makes one scoff. The kind of smile that is impervious to the world, neither defense nor offense, neither a shielf nor a knife, but a smooth acceptance, a simple state of being, a complete immersion into the fun of being yourself, the play of muscles, the slide of the smooth soles of your shoes across the gleaming boards. Moving from one side of the room to the other, through the crowd that ebbs and flows around you, a thousand hot bodies, warm with sweat, eyes gleaming dangerously, hunger, and you the biggest cat prowling through it all. Pushing through the vibrant verdant verbiage, the heady smells of love and sin, sex and strife, hope and fulls gold in the making. Just grooving, going nowhere, slowly, and in style.
 
Be My Girl by Jet. Fingers snapping quicker. Head swaying now, feel it, don't hold back, let it go, let it rip, let that crazy mutherfucker do what he does best which is beat his mind against the corners of your sex appeal. Thrust it out and bounce it back, stop and stare, gape and drool, turn that vacuous urge into a pointed appeal. C'mon now, it ain't so bad, we're just going to play it safe and have sex with out shoes on. Running is for monkeys who want to keep it... hot. Hot hot hot and if you don't know what that means then baby you just been kicking it with the wrong crowd. Black jeans and silver belt buckles and hair gel and flashing smiles and beckoning fingers. Accelerating into turns, corners and curves, feeling the tires grip the road, feeling the tires begin to slide out from under you, knowing that you're about to lose it, about to go freefalling away and then you just begin to scream and you yell fuck it and slam that damn accelerator down and boom! Your back end fishtails out and people are screaming and you're gripping the steering wheel as hard as you can and laughing your fat monkey head off, lights spinning around you and the shriek of abused rubber and them the shuddering clash of road guards whiplashing you back out and all the time you ask - is it one for the money?
 
Stacey's Mom. Yeah. Bright sunlight, the fresh gleam of astroturf after you've given it a good soaking out front the house. Red shorts and gleaming expanses of tanned skin, covered by a light down of golden hairs. A paddling pool off to the left, filled with floating toys. Identical red cars parked in every driveway, to the point where it makes you want to go mad and run down the street painting them all black. But there's a focus, a center, something around which your thoughts orbit, stemming from your pants and oriented towards an older face, a wiser face, filled with subliminal wickedness that only you can pick up on. God damn baby, I'd sleep over just to run into you in the corridor, brushing past with a muttered apology, elbows touching, eyes flitting back to see if you're watching me go with those half lidded eyes, so lazy cool I want to shock you awake, make you see me in all my vibrant youth, make you feel the electric tango that is pulsating through my million miles of arteries and veins. Disqualification is for fools who accepts limits, and given that my love, this summer, is infinite while it lasts, you cannot help but be swayed by my pressing need for the smooth slopes of your inner thighs, the heaving sighs of pleasure and -
 
 

I think angles have energy. When I look at a straight piece of wall, I feel nothing, but when it suddenly deviates from its linear course and strikes out at either a 90 degree or better yet a 67 degree turn, I feel like that crook manifests a certain personality, a certain energy. The corners of rooms are even more arresting. Three planes, intersecting, with one point being on all three planes and on none at the same time. That convergence point - it can't be on three planes at once - and while it must have some sort of finite mathematical value, to me it is infinitely small. But I'm not here to talk about the finite corner spot. I'm talking about angles. I'm looking at one right now. A polished cement floor sweeps up the the white, scuffed skirting along the base of the bay windows that form the front of the office. There's a part where the window suddenly cuts inwards, away from the street, to where the front door is set against the far right wall. Right there, on the floor, where the white skirting board meets the pearl gray concrete, is an angle with attitude.
 
It hooks the eye. The shadows make it distinct. It has personality. This one is smug, indifferent, kind of down on its luck and yet still retaining some good nature. The kind of angle that would loan you $20 if you asked, but only after making you beg a little.
 
Anyways, if one angle has energy, imagine several vicious ones placed close to each other. The inside of a small cube, though I find that regular angles - 90 degrees - are the most flavorless of the lot. If you were to fill a 3d space with angles - or find just the right kind - could you build up a field of angle energy? Lovecraft believed so. He thought non Euclidean angles could present us with entry to other dimensions. Witches would use them in boarded up old garrets to escape into the nether regions of the void, where they would worship the blind, idiot god Azoth.
 
I don't want to travel across the planes - but perhaps you could thicken reality by catching it with angles. These intangible nooks and crannies, if brought together with mathematical perfection, would make things sharper, more acute. The only thing that would be able to contain this buildup would be a sphere - no lines through which to travel. A perfectly smooth sphere, inside of which would be a honeycomb of shafts and planes, miniature and constructed with Escher like precision. An angle bomb, that could be cast into the midst of something diffuse and sophomoric, like a bland office room, and then - boom. Sharp relief, sudden intensity, geometry taking control and asserting itself to the detriment of all vagueness and boredom.
 
I wish I had an angle bomb with me.

It be drizzuling on South Beach. The sky looks like the chalky insides of an old iron kettlepot. The palm trees are dejected, and the water on the pavements bring out their many cracked imperfections. The beach, is which two blocks away, must being the color of an old camel, and the sand must be like an unbaked cake. Clingy. Like an unbaked cake girlfriend who keeps showing up at the bar when you want to just have one fucking drink with your boys, holding her purse with both hands and smiling and giving you this oh-so-cute excited little shrug of surprise at seeing you there, as if this was a fun and unexpected but wholey welcome turn of events. Pracitically a stalker. Sheesh.
 
But anyways, the beach. I'd like to walk down to it with a huge towel, really huge, like the size of a sail, and wrap myself up in it, and lie down on the wet sand, so that only the top of my head and my shoes are showing. I'd crunch up and take a nap, the towel slowly getting damp, the inside of the towel warm, alone before the great gray beatified ocean.

The needle tears a whole; the old familiar sting. Try to kill it all the way. But I remember everything. What have I become my sweetest friend every one I know goes away in the end. Everyone I know goes away in the end. What is there, when all is said and done, when all actions have been performed, when all vows have been made and forgotten, when the trees have split and then rivers run? When I stand at my last, when I stand at the end of my personal infinity, when I stare into the chasm and see only darkness, what shall I do? What shall I say? What words shall I throw up to protect myself, what pranks and gestures shall I perform in order to confound the muses? Whom shall stand by me, whom shall witness my final fall, who will turn away and walk back to their lives, my own shattered at their feet? When the night is in full bloom, when you stand alone beneath the stars with the waves crashing at your feet, when you feel the enormity of living in the most visceral manner, when all beginnings are irretrievably over, when all that remains are the finishings, the end, what then?
 
Opulence, magnificence, laughter and love. Revolutions and art, wine and gold. The jaded cries of the masses, the gilded facades, the basted piglets and the sweetmeats. The racks of lamb and the joyous satyrs, the turgid limbs, the honeyed smell of sex, the boasts and cries, the cacaphony of life, of endulgence, of frantic thrusting, the swimming over the corpses of great beasts, the endless repetitions, the blind mistakes and snuffed candles. Marble statues, lying broken in ruined temples. Prayers thrown up to the stained heavens, the blood throbbing and ebbing, running like filthy water from a thousand shallow cuts. Layers of skin blasted from the surfaces of us all, lies wearing us down faster than sandpaper, truths flitting and sullied, resentful at being finally bared, people turning away, eyes closing, mouthes settling into hard, resilient lines. Hands pulled back, footprints leading away. Cattle lowing, ribs gaunt, the fields of golden wheat lying fallow, draught and famine cast over the land like a black cloak over the bodies of the dead.
 
The sun can only rise so many times in your life. There are a finite number of times that you will do anything. You may have five hundred and two visions of the ocean left. You may have seven. Each glorious rainfall may be your last, the thick, heavy drops, falling down in selected beats, plummeting down towards you upturned face, your eyes pressing closed, your mouth open, your mouth a crimson pit that devours them.
 
A study, carpeted, panelled, dark. A feast, a table laid out for one, enough food to feed a nation, but unable to nourish the basic needs of the man who sits, gaunt and haunted, at its head. Fingers splayed out like the legs of a crushed spider, eyes jaundiced and poached, mouth tremulous, resenting everything, himself, the world that resides, indifferent, outside the many windows of his castle. The urge to rampage, to upset the golden dishes and the tabernacles of sauce, the desire to scream, to let loose the belly cries of hate and despair over what has come to pass, the inevitable arrival of mortality, the death of a dream, the finishings.
 
Your heart it beats and as long as it does there is a light that illuminates the inside of your mind, that casts wavering shadows of hope and fear against the corners of your soul. Potential, imagined futures, a million paths that you may yet walk, may yet explore. Each new room can hold a new friend, a new mate, somebody to cry with, somebody to love, to fuck, to resent. Infinity lies in each step, a myriad possibilities with every breath. Driving in a convertible in the sun, listening to loud music as the palm trees pass by, the ocean glittering, not knowing where you're going and not caring. Listening to a song that elevates you beyond yourself, that cause you to fear not death but living.
 
Life is an ocean, rising up, each wave seeking to batter you down, draw you out in the riptide, press you down into the darkness, tumble you into the corals and weeds, hollow out your eyes and erase all memory of your being. You have to stride into it, each thrust of your legs causing the water to crash up around your shins, each step accompanied by a cry of defiance. Lust, love, hope, vengeance, thirst and hunger. Beat it back, beat it back with balled fists, bloody knuckles and a hoarse throat. Refuse to turn away into the shadows, force yourself to stare into the sun till the tears are mixed with blood. Feel the pain, allow it to echo in the chambers of your heart, reverberating till the world must collapse around you like the shards from a shattered stained glass window. Never let it become too much, never let it overwhelm the essential fragments of your mind and soul, never buckle, never grow weak. Fight though you know you must lose, relish every sword thrust that penetrates your armor, and get up, get up from your knees when you slip and go down.
 
Nobody, nothing, never, anywhere, forever. It's a glow you're fighting to preserve, a torch that gutters in the empty corridors of the world, winds pressing in from all corners, howling and tearing at your hair, seeking to bowl you over, cast your light into the depths of the void, laugh at your memory and face, erase your features from where they're scrawled in the sands of life. Another snuffing in an ocean of dead candles, another ingot of gold cast lost into the aphotic realms of the deeps.
 
 

Amusing in a chillingly frightening way:
 
http://www.theillustrateddailyscribble.com/daily.scribble.pages/07.16.04.html
 
Cheney reminds me of Darth Vadar. Sweeping through the halls of power, sustained by medical apparatuses and able to command vast amounts of authority that should by right belong to the President, who is in this case a truly crippled and inadequate Emperor. Bush is more like the Emperor Who Wore No Clothes (EWWNC), and even though more and more people are pointing fingers and hooting, he's still strutting and doing his thang. Probably cause to admit nakedness is death, and Cheney would throttle him before the outraged public could storm the White House in order to drag him to the guillotine. Not that I'm drawing a direct parallel between Bush and Luis XVII. Cheney is also like Cardinal Richelieu, though a lot less refined and much more creepy in an infinitely less cool way.
 
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not a big fan of Cheney, and like comparing him to scarey, powerful people who have been portrayed as villains in both history and movies.  Though without Cardinal Richelieu, who would the Three Muskateers have fought against? Which brings me to the question: who are the three modern day muskateers? Aramis, Porthos and Athos... hmm.

Listen to Fred Viola's Sad Song: http://aviola.com/the_sad_song.html
 
It's brilliant. Quoted from his site, "This is a video I made for my song entitled "The Sad Song". The video was created entirely using 15 second jpg movies from my little Nikon Coolpix 775 still camera, reconstructed in AfterEffects."
 
Five panels, soaring vocals, simple images that contrast and compliment each other in the most serene and wonderful of ways. This is what I call an artist - somebody who threw sheer effort and talent is able to put together a work of art that inspires and thrills.

I tried seeing someone's face today as merely a facade of sensory organs and orifices that lay before a brain. It was very hard; I kept attributing self to the eyes, the expressions, the play of muscles across the skull. But ignore it - imagine the brain, soft, corrugated gray matter, esconced within the cranial cavity, billions of synapses firing, neural networks assimilating and processing and creating. Imagine that center as the real core of the person's identity, attribute self to that and not the face. Look through the face, focus the eyes within. It was hard, but a couple of times I managed to do just that. The result? An abstraction of the entire body, and an assualt on my conception of others. I'm a visual person. To me, a person is represented by their exteriors, with the rest of the information filed below that appearance. To place an imagined brain above the face and body, to file the other information below that, and demote the face to just another aspect of the body, resulted in my suddenly losing touch with the concreteness of people. I wonder what would happen if I tried to see people like all the time. People would most likely stop talking to me due to the funny face I'd always pull when I looked too closely at them.