Celestial Beings

God: Jealous and quick to anger. Passive aggressive. Likes to watch people suffer and become philosophical about it. Sends his children to do his dirty work and thinks its funny that this is widely considered virtuous and self-sacrificing. Known to kill on a grand scale. Thinks it’s funny to balance eternal souls on an impossible, endless enigma.
Hobbies include being vengeful and jealous, laughing at people doing odd things when they think they are alone, and working in the shop making incredibly life-like carvings of bizarre, impossible creatures to leave laying around on Earth for the inquisitive to discover and fight about.
Snickers whenever the phrase “All the World’s a Stage” is uttered.
Beer drinker, likes pills.

Satan: God’s wife. Thinks she got screwed in the divorce. The real talent in the family. God never gets her jokes, usually gets mad and claims she’s mocking him which she finds very funny.
Prefers the fashion of the Fifties. Invented the term “Nuclear Family”. Good friends with Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis and thinks Aristotle Onassis is hot. Likes powerful men.
Hobbies include being ironic, writing pop songs, and meddling with the subconscious.
Likes to shave her pubic hair into the goateed, horned, male image of the devil and make it wink at whatever young man is going down on her in whatever alley behind whatever bar.
Wine drinker, likes marijuana.

Jesus: Only Son. A disappointment.
Gentle and unassuming and often requires a Fatherly bail-out. Attention seeking. Will starve himself in the desert if things aren’t going his way even though his mother would give him the world if only he’d eat a little from time to time.
Has trouble negotiating the balance between his mother wanting him to simply give girls a chance, “Just in case this messiah scheme of your Father’s turns out like all his other cockamamie ideas” and his father pressuring him to smite and cast down people who pick on him.
Hobbies include, you know, just hanging around.

As we look in on these celestial beings, Satan has called God up to discuss Jesus' behavior on earth:


Satan: "I'm just worried about him. He's fucking up. I don't know what to do, I'm at my wit's end."

God: "Well, what's he doing?"

S: "Nothing. He's down there telling people to be nice to each other. That's it. That's all I get for my investment. It's not right."

G: "Give him time. I was just speaking with him the other day. He’ll come around. Believe me, these people won't know what hit them."

S: "Yeah, OK. I hope you're right. Anyway, want to hear a joke?"

G: "Not really, but go ahead."

S: "All right, here goes: How many of You does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

G: "How many of Me does it take to— I don't know, how many?"

S: "Ha! Ha! That's funny."

G: "What? Wait. Is that it? Is that the joke?"

S: "Yeah. Hee hee."

G: "I don't get it. That's it? What? I don't get it."

S: "Ho ho! It just gets better and better."

G: "What, goddamit, what? Dammit Lucrecia, you’re doing it again."

S: “You just have no idea."

So, Finally What Did Happen...

The night before the events that I'm about to describe occured, we observed this moon over the treetops of our neighborhood. No one there had seen a moon just like it before, not at that time of year. We were cooking out and drinking. Every so often someone would say that he or she heard something or some animal crunching through the woods behind the house. I heard it too now and then but figured it was a deer or armadillo and left it at that, and continued to tip my cups. It turned out to be a fun cookout despite the fact that the moon never left that spot in the sky. The moon never traveled. I noticed but didn't mention it to anyone else. I didn't want to party to end.



The next morning I went into the forest to see if I could find a hint as to what it was that was marching around during our cookout. I didn't find any tracks, but I did come across this un-natural pairing of a pine tree and an oak. They were intertwined from the roots to the limbs. It was strange because, where normally one tree would force out the other for resources, these trees seemed to gain strength from each other. In many places it was difficult to know where one tree would begin and the other end, as if the very fibers of the bark had come together somehow.



I heard this rustling noise to my left and when I turned to look I saw a small evergreen shake and suddenly appear to grow arms. It started to move toward me and said in a very big voice, "Believe it or not, you're under my spell, and until you're released, you'll do as I tell."

Obviously I turned to run without even a thought, but I tripped on a bramble and fell. The tree had made chase and was nearly on top of me when I turned my head. I rolled over to face it, but crawling backwards all the time.




Then this creature jumped out from behind the tree and hopped right onto my chest. He was about two feet tall and light as a feather. He grabbed me by both ears and kissed me on the mouth, which is the only reason I didn't scream.

He did a back flip off my chest and landed on both feet right into a deep bow with a flourish. He spoke in Old English, which luckily I had studied in school, and said (translated), "You've come across some old mates of mine, the ones that I did intertwine. Lovers they were and lovers they are; thankful they be to their lucky star."

I remained on the ground gasping, but over his shoulder I looked toward the two trees intertwined. His bright eyes, locked on mine, saw clearly what I did and he said, "Aye, they be the two, the two without eyes; but they see more than you do whether dark or clear skies."



I took a breath as if to speak, but he put a finger to his lips, grabbed me by the hand and (how shall I describe it?), he dove into the ground, right through the leaf litter and the dark mulchy earth, with me in his grasp. The ground broke before us like water until we reached a kind of cavity. We fell through and landed hard on hard ground, on our feet. I looked up and saw these gates, these luminescent gates that opened into what I hoped to never know. The creature leapt to my shoulder and whispered in my ear, "Oh, now that's where you'll go, believe me I'm sho'; I've done this befo', so down we shall throw." And so through the gates we went; him one way, me another.


The first thing I saw was all these people worshipping a giant fish. They chanted, "Ooom a stasa, Ooom a stasa, Wasa Stasa, Ooom a stasa" over and over again, and so caught up in the groove that they failed to notice the great hook that would descend and lift them one by one into the tank to be immediately swallowed up by the fish. In the brief moments before the fish would swoop in, the chanting would grow louder and more intense, and then the person would be eaten and the chanting would quieten down again. The whole time the little creature watched my eyes intently. Finally he motioned with his hand that I should take a seat and enjoy the show, but I reeled in horror.


The huge fish lunged in and swallowed up a little child, a girl, and I began to beg the imp to take me away, to take me home, or anywhere else. I was crying and scared. The beast laughed a big laugh and jumped right up on top of my head and shouted, "Sum Tally Tally Poppa! Yum Umma Umma Drop!" Instantly we were transported.








I entered a strange world where children weren't born, but fell from the sky...









where giants would chase you down and force you to listen to their string duets...










where the Incredible Hulk ran a gallery and was a famous aesthete...









...where you would never get by without your tommygun.









And suddenly I was falling, falling. Everything went black, but the sensation of falling never left me. I was falling backwards, not tumbling and I began to find the sensation comforting...








...until I woke up in the bathroom of a working class rock and roll club, asleep under the urinals, covered in piss, with something colorful dribbling from my mouth. I stumbled out into the bar. The moment I was seen everyone began to applaude and smile at me, but no one would touch me. The bartender wouldn't serve me, so I headed for the door.








Just as I put my hand on the handle to go out I heard a voice behind me say, "For all ye been through, ye deserve to see, not both but just only one tit-tee. A journey it's been, but with a mouthful of bile, I recommend you go home and sleep for a while." And so I did. I never did see that little guy again, but if I ever do, I'm going to blow his head clean off, because I'm never going back into those or any other woods again without a shotgun. Oh, and I chopped those fucking trees down.

Interesting Post

It has been an interesting morning. I can't really go into it right now, but believe me, if I were to tell you about what's been going on this morning, you would be very, very interested. Let me put it this way: Your jaw would drop to the floor. That's how interesting you would find the events I've lived through today already.

Harrowing doesn't even start describing this day. Blood curdling is more like it. Like when you're watching one of those medical dramas on TV, like ER, and the swinging doors to the emergency room suddenly bang open and a woman pushing a gurney flies through real fast, shouting instructions like, "I need 50 cc's of pentathol and a nitrogen drip. Now Dammit!" OK, if you look on the faces of all the other people standing around in different shades of medical clothing just before they start to dart off and follow the woman pushing the gurney's instructions... That's what your face would look like if I were to tell you about my morning so far.

Obviously the person in this photo {removed} is telling someone on the other side of the lens to fuck off. Well, I ask you; is she telling YOU to fuck off, or simply the camera operator? How would you feel if indeed it was you who is supposed to fuck off? You'd probably feel nothing as you don't know this person, nor do you know what might have sparked her ire. Also, you instinctually know from markers in her facial expression that this particular 'fuck off' is performed with a certain since of what we now call 'irony,' but what we used to call 'love.' Also, the little head she has growing out of her hair is smiling which is also a good sign that what she means by that finger there is, yes indeed, 'fuck off,' but more in the sense of, "I hope you fart loudly next time you're in church" and not, "I hope you are drafted and have to die in Iraq."

I can plainly tell you that she was telling the photographer to fuck off. It was me, and I just didn't know when to quit. I still don't much of the time.

This is the view from my back door sometime this last summer. That is my cat, Monkey. I've since had to put Monkey on a diet as she is having trouble "reaching."









This is a flower on the campus of the University of Mississippi. I should say, it was a flower on campus, but the ravages of time and the inescapability of the seasons have doubtless reduced this flower into dust and other like particles. The bee is probably dead too.






This is August, my son by circumstance, fate, proxy or whatever. Do you see the look on his face? This is Christmas. He has already opened various gifts including a bunch of plastic things he asked for with blinky lights and so on and the real, wooden practice samurai sword that I bought for him to replace the shitty little wooden sword he has all but destroyed. The look on his face in this picture is as he is opening a tube full of gumballs. Not the samurai sword. The motherfucking gumballs.

Here I am

I'm starting to stress. How in the world does a 35 year old man find himself with the jitters at the fact that he's about to enter "the world" after college? I need a job and I want it to be in Austin from where I hailed more than a decade ago, and I'm concerned at the prospects like any normal 23 year old should when he leaves University. But what really kinda scares me is that all along in my life as I was cooking my ass off to pay the bills, I knew plenty of folk with no degree in kick ass jobs, and plenty of other folk with great degrees in shit fuck jobs and now that I've almost completed a degree in Philosophy I feel that I am more qualified that some to ask the question, "What the fuck is a job, anyhow?"

It's a funny little word. How can a word that works well prefixed with 'hand-,' 'boob-,' and 'blow-,' be such an angry thing when preceded by another little word, "No." Or put the word "shitty" in front of the word "job" and what have you got? You start thinking that Chris Walken's character in "The Deer Hunter" had a pretty good job there toward the end of the movie. Better than total uncertainty.