Mabel rolls free at last.

The big green Mercury sat waiting, waitng and waiting to go somewhere down there in the driveway.
Not to the damn grocery store. Not to band practice, not to the big box hardware store, but somewhere, anywhere it could stretch it's legs.
It was made for the roadtrip. Like a cheetah is born to run and kill, like a mosquito is drawn to feast and spawn, like a republican craves a mommy and daddy who will eliminate possiblility and make all things right, Mabel the Sable craved a big highway and a long unbroken run down the road, chewing up miles and spitting out fumes.
If she could purr, she'd would never stop at a flat 70 mph on the highway. She needed it, needed that wind flowing over her roof ticlking her rear end, needed to spool out on the turnpike, letting the scenery slide by her windows, her quiet interior making a green velvet coccoon for her driver.
She'd been a rental car when she started her road adventures, been nearly wrecked by it too. Her grandmotherly previous owner hardly knew what the pedal on the right was for, but her current owner sure did.
She fidgeted all night long, waiting for five am, when ellie would stumble down the stairs, ready to spill coffee on her upholstery, then settle into a serious rythym of tires clacking on road joints, stopping only till she hit the southwest corner of Pennsylvania for a week.
Of course Mabel allways forot about those regular java and bladder stops. When she did remember the routine, she'd get all cranky for a while and not let the airconditioner work,
showing that bitch behind the wheel that she wasn't completely in charge.
Ellie didn't mind. She like her green machine enough to know no relationship worth shit is frictionless. She'd learned that from her bandmate, who shall go nameless in this missive.
See ya next week, my freakish readers.

e.e.

Holiday Un-fun

He hated fireworks. Every mortar, every firecracker, every loud flash and boom, the drifting smell of gunpowder on the wind all made him feel like throwing up or hiding under the bed.
Even his german shepard didn't get as scared.
As a kid, he loved fireworks, shooting, guns and all the wild energy that came with being a kid and being LOUD. Loud guitars, loud cars, the screaming of football games or the throbbing feel of a big Harley with a blown muffler rumbling along.
Now, every bam!, every flash and bang brought back memories of those days on the big highway, crusing along listening to the big diesel roaring, feeling naked, waiting for those horrible crunching noises, the peppery smell of blood, and the numb feeling his ears had for weeks after the roadside bomb went off, along with his left earlobe, half his right foot and his little finger on his left hand.
It sucked, having his favorite holiday destroyed, along with his self confidence, sense of saftey and large parts of his soul.

Stupid Bird or Messenger?

For three days, there's been a young robin oustide my upstairs window. It keeps flying into the window, falling to the ground, flying back to the branch next to the window, where it shakes it's shoulders, and then flies back into the window.
It does this about every two miniutes for an hour or two, then takes a break and starts over.
If I had a pole saw 15 feet long, I'd cut the limb it launches from off. I've stuck things on the glass to scare it away, I've blasted it with the garden hose, yelled at it, but still it keeps thwacking at my window over and over. Thwak! Thump, shake and repeat.
Maybe it's a message from the universe, but I'll be damned if I can figure it out. I'm not sure I want to get the message if it is one.

Monkeys and crawfish part two

Her voice always surprised him. It should have been as deep and powerful as
her swing with the bat but instead it round and fruity, a sweet chuckle.

"So.....watcha' doing, lover?" she asked in that sweet voice. She had an
unreadable expression on her face, and that big old Winchester '97 short
barrel in her hand. Donnie managed a mumbled something about coming' home
from work but before he could get it all out, she interrupted him.

"You been drinkin' some, Mr?" That little playful lilt at the end of the
question tied his tongue in a figure eight. His only answer was a very soft
belch, mouth closed. He eyed the bag, then the shotgun, then the bag again.
His eyes left the bag and traveled up the arm holding them: his gaze rested
on her brass name tag for a moment before meeting her steady gray eyes.
"Roxanne". the tag said.

The very corner's of the deputy's eyes crinkled down a bit, while the very
corners of her mouth turned up a bit to meet them in something resembling a
smile. "I'll bet you're wondering what's in the bag, aren't you? It’s just
a little something I've been working on for a while now, kind of a
collection, I guess you'd say. Care for a closer look?" She held out the
bag a bit, and took half a step closer to the Ford.

Donnie found he wasn't nearly as curious about the contents of the bag as he
was about the contents of the shotgun. Monkey heads be dammed! They were
one and the same with coconuts or acorn squash as far as he was concerned.
Only a fool would stick around long enough to find out first hand what kind
of load that shotgun was carrying too, and although Donnie Delacroix's mamma
may have raised some mishappened crawdaddies, she had raised no little Cajun
fools.

Donnie stabbed the gas pedal just as Roxanne took that half step. The rusty
door handle snagged the mouth of the bulging bag just as it was held out.
In one moment the scene exploded into a swirl of dust: the Ford made a
break, rear bumper bouncing like a concertina, the bag caught and spun and
tore, spreading it's contents in an arching cascade. Roxanne spun too,
clutching her dislocated elbow as the bag was torn from her grasp.
To her dismay, she would need a pinch hitter for the rest of the season.

The Wolf You Feed

One evening a wise old man told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?" The old man simply replied, "The one you feed."

Donnie and Darlene 2, Cops and Crawfish

It was not being a good week for Donnie. First, finding what looked like human bones in his compost pile threw him for a spin, and now, his head full of scary romantic breakup shit and the tail end of 40oz Mickey's malt liquor buzz, the last thing he wanted to see was that flashing set of blue lights in the rearview.
Mumbling a few prayers and a lot more curse words without even realizing it, he pulled the big rattletrap four wheel Ford over and waited for the inevitable ticket. There always was one, even when he wasn't cruising with a slight buzz and half a rear bumper.
To make matters even worse, this was one of those county assholes, all full of bloated self importance, donut grease and Rolaids, no doubt itching to take out his pad and fill up his share of the county's "revenue enhancement" quota.
It could have been much worse, at least he wasn't speeding. He knew the drill by now, and kept his hands on the wheel, and waited till the county boy shuffled up to make his life even harder. He still had nightmares about that State Trooper who not only whipped out that big service revolver and drew down on him, but also threw him over the hood of his truck, cuffed him and searched his truck the previous year.
That one was mostly humiliating, and he got off with a warning and a reading of the riot act about not leaving the vehicle. The county guys were meaner, and just had no use for him. Or his kind, anyway. He wondered why he had ever come back home.
He didn't intend to stick around after he dropped out of college and came home to work for the summer, but somehow, it happened. Being a transplant in a dink town is never easy, but being a southern transplant, with a last name like Delacroix, having a Cajun accent, and having a set of parents who were both notorious fuck ups didn't make it easier.
Sometimes he thought people were still mad about the smell his parent's failed crawfish ranch had thrown over the town, but mostly he just figured it was a case of northern polacks not having much use for outsiders. Even ones who had been there for half their life.
He realized with a start that he'd been daydreaming when he looked up and noticed it wasn't one of the usual pricks that had pulled him over, but a the cop, a big dyke who played on his wife's night game softball team.
She must have went about 220, and he'd been more than a little scared of both her ability to swing a baseball bat, and how much his darlin' seemed to be obsessed with her. It was just one of the weird vibes he'd been picking up for a while.He was more than a little surprised to see her standing there with a shotgun and a bag of what looked like big monkey skulls, though....

He fears Death

My pal fears death

it's cold stinky breath

it make him squirm

to think of feeding worms

Me, I don't mind looking

at it from a distance

when I get old enough

I'll offer little resistance

my joints will ache

my spine will break

maybe I'll burst a vien

better yet

get hit by a train

nothing makes life seem do real

like hearing loud brakes squeal

knowing you could be a done deal

so shut the hell up

play yer guitar

we're gettin' old

got no daylight to burn

a few more decades

it'll be our turn

livin' forever would get boring

millenia of listening to your

wife snoring

after a few million years

you'd be bored to tears

Donnie and Darlene, chapter one

Things in Donnie's life were getting ugly, and showing signs of a serious meltdown.

All the signs and omens were there to see, had been for a while, but he kept ignoring them, looking the other way.
There had been changes in the strange mental air he moved through, and he was just smart enough to know what was coming wasn't going to be fun. He kept hoping that his coming shitstorm wasn't as big as it felt from where he was sitting.
The unraveling of his home life started with little things that made him feel helpless, like not knowing where Darlene was, or wondering why she looked so sheepish when she rolled in hours late, and fell right into bed without talking much.
She'd been getting more distant from him for a while. Not so much in the way she showed affection, that stayed fairly constant, but in the way she kept dreaming up new things to run off and do without him.
She had became totally detactched from almost everything involving the plans they had made together, and the way she got that distant look in her eyes, like she was staring off at something further away than the eye could possibly focus, and the long frozen silences that had replaced her usual chatter.
Not that the chatter stopped completely, it did keep up, but only when she was on the phone, and it stopped dead whenever Donnie walked in to the room.
It had became obvious that she had been moving on, showing only a strange sort of lingering affection and a desire not to feel like a total asshole for being the one to detach first.
When the wheels started coming off, they did it with surprising speed, and an odd, and totally bland and unexpected way. Like most things, it was not very well thought out, and happened in the way a frog jumps out of a pot of hot water right before it croaks.
In the space of about two weeks, it went from being a comfortably numb life of drinking and desultory and unfulfilling sex into a full blown mind fuck of life changing events.
That was right about the time he found the first of the bones in the backyard compost heap, and when he noticed that she hadn't gone out in the daylight for months.

I started a short novel by accident last year, some of which was written by my pal Pat Webster. I'm going to post it here in a slightly re-written way, partly because I'm too damn lazy to write much these days, and partly because I don't suck as much as a writer. Hope you enjoy it, it'll be mixed in with other posts.

e,

Whiny Ass TItty Babies

You say "bleeding heart"
like it's a bad thing
you only notice yours
when it's pounding with fear
you say peace through strength
but I think it's all about
penis length
you talk about responsibility
and morality
but your thoughts about
dog sex
got you up a tree
screaming nuke em'

till they glow
is getting quite old

from your keyboard

you act really bold
whiny ass titty babies
scared and weak

and living on fear
you shout down the adults
every time one comes near
if I could pull a switch
and make you all disappear
things would a lot nicer
on this big blue sphere
what pisses me off
what makes me see red
is that you're shoving me
into wishing you dead
I'm not big on murder
hatred or guilt
and I won't stay in
the closet you built
so you better shut up
and back away from me
when I get mad
'cause it's in your pants

that you'll pee

when you come across

a scary dyke like me
whiny ass titty babies
whine all day long
singing the same
chickenshit song

Microfiction: Pissin' and Moaning

There were many things that Nancy missed in her new life. She'd taken so much for granted in her old one, and spent most of it bitching about traffic, people who didn't believe in her god, that damn Mexican office cleaning crew that came in nights and kept moving her collection of stuffed animals into what she could swear was a nearly pornographic set of poses.
She bitched about her dentist and the way his nitrous oxide smelled, she bitched about how cold the stirrups were in her gynecologist's office, about having to wait at least ten minutes to get into the doctor's office, about how her massuse seemed to ignore her sore spots, how her hairdresser had been not spending enough time talking over her fashion needs.
She had bitched about nearly everything, from the way the barrista at the coffee shop made her late too hot, with too much foam, the way the baggers at the grocery store never remembered that she preferred plastic bags, how horrible it was to have to stand in line at the big box store to get a refund for those horrible gift choices her husband had made, how ugly the homeless people had made downtown look, there was just so much to bitch about that she never ran out of things, ever. Her most common complaint was with her housecleaner, and she complained twice as much those weeks her checks bounced.
After the virus hit, everything changed. She made it through, unlike all the other people in her office, and most everybody else who had made her life a living hell with lousy service and rude manners.
Now she wished she had all those things back. Pulling your own teeth out when they became infected was a chore she had learned, and her constant scrounging for unburnt cans of food in the charred ruins of the grocery store was turning into a skill
Just avoiding the rape gangs and marauder packs and sleeping all day on the top of a 5th floor walkup on packing blankets was a full time job, and without her birth control pills, her non-stop periods returned and were making not having tampons and running hot water a special messy hell.
It never occurred to her that she never had the time or energy to complain anymore. Not that there was anybody left who cared about her to hear it.

Offensive Breast Tissue Image

Shockingly tasteless, isn't it?

Kill the Buddha

Fuck tasteful
forget what your mother might think
sometimes what you
think of those things
drives me to drink
I'm sure she's quite nice
but you're fortythree
you worry so much
she's got you up in a tree
someday we'll be dead
worms in our head
or old and in the way
tied to a bed
maybe then you'll be glad
you were so bland
rejecting outrageous things
with a heavy hand
thinking you're the big
leader man
conventional thinking is your forte
but when it comes to art it gets in the way
kill the Buddha
toss out magazines
reject all that dogma
make up your own scene
empty your mind
like a dump truck load
go out and
build you own road
make something real
nobody likes a pandering toad
Maybe I'm just being rude
but knowing your mind
it's also quite crude

The Farm Worker

The long rows of vegetables and potatoes stretched out in front of them for what seemed like endless acres, although it was really only about a 40 acre plot. It had been a cool, wet summer, and the beans and potatoes were heavy with thick green leaves.
All day long, he pulled weeds, picked bugs off plants and spread composted human manure along the rows, slogging up and down in the sun, stopping only to relive himself and fill up again on the water from the creek.
It was backbreaking work, and his hands were beaten to a raw pulp. The last few pair of moldering cotton work gloves had long been worn through, and the dirt in his cracked fingers had caused them to bleed and ooze every time he pulled another weed.
Being hungry all the time had been hard, knowing that he was surrounded by food that he couldn't touch was worse. Thinking about how many would starve the coming winter bothered him, and the fact that he might be one of them made it even uglier to contemplate.
He sure had lots of time to think, something he hated. From sunup to sundown, a long stretch of time in this northern climate, they worked the farm.
Even had he chose to run away, the guards on horses with the few remaining bullets would have run him down. They might not even waste a bullet on him, the last few escapees had just been knocked unconscious and had a plastic bag wrapped around their head, gasping out their last few moments without even being aware of it.
He thought back to his life before the virus. His memories had become sharper and less accurate over time as he took them out and rubbed the edges down. Lots of things had drifted out of his memory.
He'd tried to forget the months of hell that followed the dying times, although he often woke up with images from his escape bubbling up, shredding what little sleep he got. In the 5 years since he'd left the ruins of Omaha, he'd drifted around the Midwest from one ragged band of survivors to another, until he'd been picked up by the Collective's sweep crew. Just another indentured servant at this point, he'd been treated the way peasant serfs had for millennia. Work, sleep, plant seed crops and hope you didn't get beaten dead by guards or by frostbite or a broken spirit. Or worse, a broken anus, since many of the guards were rapists, and the older ones hated the former corparate executives who had shit on them in the name of money or "company policy".
But the worst part of this life was the boredom. He'd been somebody once. An important man in a big company, making life changing decisions for little people.
Now his biggest choices were between committing suicide by attempted escape, or how to kill the potato bugs he pulled off the plants. Sometimes he ate them. It was a protien source.
It was a form of culture shock he never expected. To be on the bottom of the ladder, all his skills as an executive worthless, miserable and bored enough to die.

Portrait of My Brain Today

I have been remiss. For the last few weeks I have been posting over at the Getaway Drivers Blog, but it has come time to return to Hint Of Dementia.
Mostly because one of my Bandmates has irritated me because he thinks his mom will be upset by a small and shapley breast photo, making me feel like there's not much hope for creativity and joy over there, but also because this blog is mine, all mine, bitches!
Here is a nice little photo for your enjoyment. I call it "A Portrait Of Modern Love". I shot it sometime around 1986, when Bruce Springsteen first got muscles galore, and my pal Skooby rented the house that had these fish nailed to the boathouse wall.
The fishheads are gone, but Skooby is still around. This is a good thing.

Flower Porn

Pike's Place Market, 2004
Please forgive this instrusion of beauty and plant sexual organs. We now return you to dark fiction.

Microfiction: Mad Man WIth A Bad Plan

Some of us define ourselves by who we hate, who is pissing in our sandbox, angry at the world as a way of life.
Marty was one of those people. He hated most women. The bitches out for his nuts, anyway. He hated people of color, any color, although he would be mortified to know that the office sysop knew he surfed to Asian she-male websites on his office computer in the mornings before anybody else came in.
He hated spics, Jews, blacks, queers and even tossed Unitarians in the mix because, well dambitt, you have to take a stand somewhere.
In the dead of night, he laid awake thinking up new ways to kill em' all. Mass murder, genocide, he would find himself finding new and better ways to get even with all those ball busting bastards, from his ex wife to his boss to that queer in the shipping department who he was sure wanted to give it to him up the ass.
He started stockpiling guns, ammo, knives and reading up on how to wage war, make bombs, booby trap houses and cars, and how to cultivate anthrax and other nasty things. He actually worked up a good napalm substitute one weekend in the middle of nowhere in the Nicolet National Forest, out camping and shooting guns and drinking heavily, far from his apartment. He thought of it as fun with gasoline and powdered Tide Ultra Clean.
He had a plan, and with time it became a mission, one that had as much urgency and importance as any suicide bomber's.
He was going to take out those fucks at the office, once and for all, and them commit suicide by cop.
He gave notice, sold most of his worthless crap, and headed back into the National Forest to train. He spent a month, the whole time studying commando skills from books, hiking, working out and shooting both his pistols and his AK-47.
He actually became something close to a real Army Ranger, in his own limited way.
He hiked back out to the camper, and headed south, the roads eerily empty, the power out. What the hell was going on?
No matter, he thought, and he kept on driving, playing the scenes from his office massacre to come over and over again.
He made it back to the office as dawn broke, loaded up his guns, strapped on his armor, and headed in, still obsessing over the sheer act of bravery and warrior like intensity he knew he could pull off. He'd start by killing the first ones in the door, and work his way up to as high a count as he could before the cops took him out.
He felt a little bad about making the cops shoot him, but it was worth it to clean up the vipers nest that his workplace had become. Insurance was a pure form of business evil, the thought.
The door was open, the lights out, and he started to get a glimmer that something was seriously wrong. Things he'd been ignoring all the way home finally started to fall into place, and he realized nobody was in sight, and that the glow he'd been seeing on the horizon wasn't the sun over the lake. It was fire, and a big one. headed his way, and there was not a human moving anywhere in sight.
Right before the fires took out the business park, he painted the walls with his brains using a single big, slow moving slug from a .45.
Not because he would burn, although he knew he would, given the wind, the fire's speed and the blocked exit roads, or because of joy over everyone being dead.
It was because he realized that without the rest of the world to give him something to bitch about, life wasn't worth living.

Microfiction God's Path for The Family

Matthew was a man of god, one who felt touched by his grace, in awe of the beauty of his creations, and well aware that life here on his earth was a gift, but not one without conditions.
He read his bible, followed the calls of his church elders, and kept all those things holy that the bible called for. His biggest concern was the outside world, and the many temptations that he and his family had to face in everyday life.
His wife had given him 6 children, and a lifetime of support. She was a quiet woman with mouse brown hair down to her back that she kept braided up most of the time, and he had never seen her naked. She was ashamed of her sinful body, even more so because she knew that the hips that made making babies so easy also gave her the kind of figure that other men liked to stare at, even in church.
They made their living selling honey, scraped from the many beehives that Matthew rented to area farmers, and lived very modestly in the hills to the east of Spokane. Matthew didn't allow much in the way of comfort in his house. The floors were bare, the walls decorated only with the crosses he had his family pray to every night. His life was a righteous one, and he kept his house and family in a way that he thought of as cruel but fair, like an old testament patriarch.
His children mostly loved their parents, and mostly feared both god and the secular temptations of modern life. Only his daughter Sarah seemed odd to him, and since she had become a young woman, he struggled with her on godly matters. He struggled with his on lustful thoughts, but so far he'd kept the devil in the ditch.
When the virus started sweeping through the cities, they were ready. They had barricaded the road into the farm, had posted big quarantine signs to fool the filthy heathen hordes from town into staying away, and were set with a year's supply of food and seed crops, a barn with horses and plenty of stored fuel and firewood. He looked forward to the return of god's rule, and no more visits from Family Protective Services, telling him what he couldn't to with his own family. Spare the rod, spoil the child was more than a bible suggestion in his book.
They even kept out other church members who tried to join them. He was happier being alone with his family.
The plague had run through several waves before one of the horses came down with it, picked up from a migrating bird or other animal's droppings. It had been hard, but he'd shot it and left it where it was, for the coyotes to eat.
That had been the last straw for Sarah.
She'd loved that horse more than her family, and she was sick of the beatings and
sick of her father's hungry and angry looks. Every time he gave her the eye, she could feel his tension, his lust and his need to beat her ass again. He seemed to enjoy it. Her mother was useless, sometimes egging her father on.
Her brothers just hid like scared dogs. So she snuck out, saddled up the big packhorse, and headed out before dawn.
She was just on the other side of the river, out into the open and fallow fields when she saw the wild fire tearing along the ridge, heading right for the farm.
With no fire department, nature had decided to take back some real estate, including the family farm.
She rode on, looking back only to make sure that she was riding parallel to the fire. She said a brief prayer to the god that had been beaten our of her for her family, and was glad she'd packed a lot of food and the highway map from her dad's truck.
Seattle might be dead, but she was going to see the big city one way or another. Maybe try and find a girlfriend if there were any dykes left, if just to piss off her dad in heaven or hell or where ever it is that god's bastards go.

Downtown Nudity

Once, long ago I was a photographer. This one is from the vault o' prints slowly turning into junk in my attic.
It's downtown Milwaukee, sometime around 1993.

Microfiction: Mary and the Dead Crows

Mary knew she scared people. Sometimes she scared herself. Skinny, trembling and dark eyed, she'd ghosted her way through high school and college without showing too many signs of the dreams and visions that haunted her, but the older she got the harder it became to stop the images that filled her waking and sleeping moments. They were getting on top of her most of the time the last few years.
She also knew she was a damn fine biologist. She saw through things her co-workers were to conventional to notice, and made intuitive leaps and observations that irritated them.
Leaps that bothered them even more when she turned out to be right. They figured she was off her rocker, cracking her nut and letting her elevator go past the top floor. They had lots of cute ways to joke about her steadily unnerving ways, and didn't care that she heard them using them.
She wasn't a team player, and didn't follow the rules needed to suck up.
But she did know her viral research, and her work with dead crows and other birds had been of interest to a few people higher up in the Lab. She showed enough promise to those who saw her results that kept her on that fine line between useful and too weird to keep around.
The people who didn't see her scars, self mutilated cutting, or have to be around her crazy eyes and neglected hygiene habits.
She was halfway through her fourth year at the research lab when she lost it. Or at least lost it enough to be locked up at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. They found her in the lab one morning, screaming, gibbering about the end of the world, some drug she had made that could save everybody. She did all this while waving a broken beaker around, and saying she had given herself the antiviral.
So they called the paramedics and cops and decided she was a danger to self and others, locked her up for "observation".
Everybody at the lab took a deep sigh of relief and went back to pushing grant proposals around and doing the tame and safe research that gave them a sense of place. Mary's research was cleaned out of the lab corner she had, her hard drives wiped and sent back into circulation somewhere else in the organization.
At the institute, they gave her a nice thick 400 pound blanket of Thorazine, little orange pills that took away all her demons. Kept her away from sharp objects, and gave her carefully administered shock treatments.
They put her on drugs that were supposed to stop the voices, the crazy fear and the paranoid feeling that the world was going to shit and she had to be back in the lab to prevent it.
The drugs made her fat, made her feel stupid and she hated every moment of it, at least the ones that she could feel when near the end of a dose.
It was the fat that saved her. For three weeks she had been locked up after the dying started, alone, living off tap water and the hope somebody would let her out. When the power finally went out at the nuke plant, the doors to her room unlocked, and she stumbled out into the light of day.
She started walking. Headed west and north. And all those old demons suddenly were quiet, pushed into the background by a world where paranoia and sharp intelligence were no longer bad things.

A Movie That Captures How My Brain Feels

For some reason, this struck me as one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time.
Mabye it's living in BushCo's world. But it captures how I feel too often.