Hesperus the coy construction consultant

Of course Hesperus was pissed off. He was a cripple and had been single for millenia, in anyone's book a long time to go without getting any. But it was a long time to plan as well, and our man H. was crafty. Through a complicated scheme he'd won Athena's hand in marriage. The release on his wedding night was the explosion that buried Pompeii. Coupling with the goddess of love brought pleasure hitherto unknown to this cosmos, but Hesperus had the goal and hope of a son. Alas Zeus forbade it. He was to be the only one to sire a new god.

Our man H. wouldn't stand for Zeus mucking with his lady. Neither could Hesperus match Zeus's ability to squirt a kid out his own femur. But H. had one thing going for him: his hands were as useful as his legs useless. When he wasn't in the bedchamber he was tinkering with toys for it, to Athena's immediate delight. And so they hatched a scheme.

Athena confided in Hera, the gossip of Olympus, that a son was more important to Hesperus than his pride. That evening he made a point to stay late in his workshop, toiling over the fires of Hades with anvil and iron. Athena lay alone. Zeus took the form of a cinnamon baklava and snaked into her room.

The next evening at dinner Zeus ordered course after course, boisterous and beaming. As the gods took their wine, Hesperus stood on his crutches and announced to one and all the happy news: they were with child. The feast continued for a full week in celebration and merriment, barring the occasional knowing glance among the ladies.

When Athena gave birth it was to a son. Our man H. had realized his dream. The night the young god was conceived, Hesperus had set his tools to work alone, while he and his wife canoodled beneath the workbench. A faux Athena lay in their bed that night, an engineering triumph and virtual match in every way. The mighty clanging and scraping did well to drown out the sounds of their long immortal love.

Rhymin and stealin

Coming up on her 84th birthday, Crystal experienced a revelation. It happened at the local winery where, in lieu of stomping grapes, she was knocking back a few free samples at the end of the tour. It was as if the roof crumbled around her, exposing the sky as the fraud it is, as if the clouds parted down the middle like a doughboy's haircut, allowing a thin spotlight of sunbeam to warm the stray wispy hairs sprouting from her forehead and lift her spirits like a speakeasy bar-back. The feeling was in turn sublime, genteel, and dolorous. Crystal saw, for the first time, that the daily necessity to eat and drink made man a born consumer, and that our shopping culture was an extension of that base impetus. She explained this to the man sitting beside her, who promptly convinced a group of Balkan tourists to step out of the vat and stomp his head instead.

Foremost being

"I've had a mile in my life," says the young lady at the bar.

"I've had two," says the young man beside her.

"Two miles or two..?" she asks. Things are raucous. And then: "What do you think of the bartender?"

"He's cute," says the young man.

"Excuse me," she calls out. "Do you have a cigarette?"

The bartender does. She puts it in her mouth, filter-end out, and leans forward for a light. The bartender smiles and fixes it for her.

After he turns away the young man says, "God, you are so obvious."

"But something in my mouth, I get confused," she says.

"You," he replies. "I can see we'll miss Louis as Cher tonight."

Going once

A weaver stitched an ankle-length coat of twenty-seven yards of human hair. Its buttons were bone.. collar bone, specifically. On his divorce it sold at the bartering auction for two tablets of chlorine and a tax map of the Yam Isthmus. The winner, a throw pillow floral print designer from the mean streets, had been willed a Chilean llama farm by his grandnephew. The designer loved to don the coat and go riding the llamas. He soon became adept, progressing from bareback to a number of three-ring circus tricks, standing up, doing hand-stands, scrubbing mildew from church tile, and the like. Once while galloping past the car dealer mini-mall he got his picture in the weekly advertiser, his big break, and was forthwith offered a management contract with a team of pith-helmed safari types. His throw pillows made the ground in the bush a bit more peaceable, but the hair coat was too hot, and it attracted tse-tse flies, females, the nasty ones. Upon his return, and without bagging a single bushwoman, the designer took the coat back to the barter auction. He sweetened the deal with the llama farm and walked away with ten crates of lady's shoulder pads, which kept his throw pillow business thriving. The weaver faired not so well, going into arrears despite the tax map, and having ingested the tablets ended up throwing himself on a cactus that he mistook for a phallic green pin cushion.

'arry, hola!

Fort Support fell to the salivators in 1868 when its underwire collapsed. It was suckled back to health and re-christened Nana. By the turn of the century the frontier was secured and Nana was confused much of the time, though it was never referred to aloud. There was just a lot of pointing and semaphore. Nana experienced a rebirth in ought-seven, celebrated in a classic novel by Haines Ogden Herway. When war came it diverted the world's attention and Nana drooped into obscurity.

No problemo

I bust my chops for mutton and lamb. The backs of my fingers are split. It hurts to make a fist. Mornings I wake up with tears in my skin. It comes in the night.

Phyla

If the computer is a useful model of the human mind, then the camera is its external hard drive, and film its memory. Of greatest interest to most people are the various lens caps, which include dogma and volcanic emotion.

Down and heather

Remember Guy? The drop-down dagger? Rinsed his shirts in lemon water? Him. Being sent up was like hanging off a grocery store peg board, stickered and sealed. Guy had the drop on everyone. Every time. Like a protractor in a pool hall. So when he was fired, and forfeited his place at the halfway house, he knew every angle. First degree murder. A stab wound in every freckle of the tow-head cook, and the sous chef made into julianne fries. The scene seemed staged by a fifth dimensional imp on rubbery legs and a mind like the Fourth of July. They picked Guy up that morning. He waved to the rubberneckers and baked up a bread pan of bull for the tv gals. I was about to graduate when his final appeal ran out. It happened the week I was born is why it stuck in me all these saddle-stitched years.

In the tribal zone

From the podium at the university speaking engagement, Crenshaw asserted the most interesting place to place oneself was in the thick of contemporary culture. Artists today use video, a contemporary medium in the contemporary toolbelt, to project onto buildings massive images of faces telling wrenching tales. The culture is desensitized to broadcast imagery on small screens, and it is disinterested and often fearful of interpersonal relation. The contemporary artist uses the culture as it is at that present moment before it changes again, as it always and continuously changes, to communicate with his audience in a grand way. Crenshaw wiped his eyeglasses with his tie and replaced them on his parrot beak nose. The nature of culture, to continuously change, endows it with interest. Subjects on the past have interest but have already been analyzed and categorized, where contemporary culture has not.

Hungry hungry headlines

Umps now state that technology's level of importance has been upgraded to All-Star.

Happenstance still leading whimsy in all nations except Great Britain.

Pathologic hell kitten purrs some sugar on drummer's stump.

Xianjian Ye glassed in Glaswegian pub.

In a stunning upset, humpback camels have defeated humpback whales on tests of higher brain functions, leapfrogging them from third to first as they pass the fictional French by default.

Clairvoyant meth addict foresees more meth.

A wrinkle for Estelle

-- How was your day?

-- Fine. I didn't do much. The laundry. I made cornbread. You wouldn't like it though. Soy milk and olive oil. How was yours?

-- Oh it was good. Class was good. I got an A on my presentation. Now I'm walking from the bus stop xxxxx

-- I can't hear you.

-- I'm sorry. I'm facing in the wind right now. Let me change ears. Is that better?

-- A bit.

-- Oh, oh Rick. There's a dead bird on the sidewalk. The poor thing. It must have fallen from the tree above.

-- Is it a duck?

-- No. Ha ha. It's head is hidden. It's under its wing. It looks like a pigeon, but one of the pretty kind, not an ugly ratty one.

-- So it's not a dead duck.

-- No, the poor thing.

-- But in a way, it is.

A look at a non-citizen

While one of nature's friendliest creatures, evidence and first-person accounts have been handed down conclusively proving the dolphin's propensity for attack on humans. This condition occurs with males when they are in heat. One woman, an archivist with Twinsboro's I-Team, was bitten by one of the trained dolphins she was swimming with. She was dragged under on a chilly midmorning that would stiffen the joints of the rheumatic. She was a dive master, teaching classes out of the Y in a clay paste town in Georgia, and it was this training that saved her from drowning. Her husband, an amateur model-builder who once jettisoned the navigator from an experimental balsa plane, was a tanned state attorney and on the walkway bridge over the cove, he jumped in at the spot he'd seen his wife go under. He landed on the aggressive male's head, saving her. She gulped the air, and as he propped himself leaning over her she understood it was a loan. He would take it back later in the privacy of their home. In the water her blood attracted no danger. She would not have been so lucky on the open sea, where gangs of dolphins are prone to torment and torture their rivals and prey. They have large, complex brains, and they are animals.

Yuri Grigoran

Humbled the animals met the Grand Staircase of Miklos without hesitation, claiming the Sun Dais in two unbroken strides. In the pack of a dogs, mostly boxers, their ears, like the wind, were up. It took only one wet noseprint against a particular leg of the high throne for the holographic cosmonaut to shimmer into seated view and spout prophecy. The dogs, satisfied, relaxed in a semi-circle around him. At twelve on one that spook was going nowhere.

The image on the throne steadied its static protest and Yuri Grigoran began to speak. On his military uniform was the coiled, assertive pin of the cosmonaut corps. "This is as far ahead as I know. In the next life you walk where you walked in this. In the next life you walk in the same form as this."

Yuri Grigoran's thoughts turned to the undescribable. The sun was lowering itself into the Mediterranean for its gailforce nap on Neptune's pleiscene rug. The packleader craned her neck a time or two before she gave a single insistent bark.

The cosmonaut stirred, looking kindly on his audience. "Very well. In two days time another message at the grotto of the oracle in Delphi. хорошее везение."

Yuri Grigoran distorted and vanished back to his mission, the spacewalk. With a goal to work toward the pack moved on in search of their own constant, an animal skin rug on which to bed down for the night.

FDHI

As part of me goes to Highbrook, says Olaf, part of me hijacks a 747 and paints it blue and fills it with monosodium glutomate and flies it unmanned into the mouth of an active volcano, thus giving the fire goddess Pele a placebo in lieu of her birth control. Like the nut on the corner with the national flag draped over his shopping cart and covered three lines per stripe in a precise, illegible script, like him, I too wish to pull a boner the size of which redefines the paradigmatic it-itude of boner qua boner, says Olaf. (Decrepit or no, the desire remains.) My act will be as nonsensical as his own, says Olaf. Once she, Pele, swallows the blue passenger plane placebo a number of days in a row, she again will be fertile. I will climb to her rim with a garden hose looped over my arm, says Olaf. On my signal my assistant will open the valve, and I shall shake my hose to and fore, and I shall put her out. Her belly calmed, it will be nothing to climb inside. I'm starting uni, says Olaf, and I'm at my most fertile, too.

Notes on the Drive '04: Atlanta to

- I'm north of Atlanta now, Thursday at quarter after 8 pm, having left early. I'm feeling a little guilty about it, wondering if I'm being selfish. I am feeling tired and run down. All day, every couple hours.

- Sunset behind the mountain, through Dalton GA.

- Traffic and commuting, Andy's idea: people behave like sperm, all trying to get to their destination, the egg, as quick as possible without impediment. Not too many sit back and go slow and enjoy the ride.

- I just got an extremely light-headed feeling, everything appearing very distorted and sequential all of a sudden, driving through the mountains of TN. You know I'm having fun on this drive. I'm not sure what I think about that trip yet. There was never, we did a couple small tasks, but it definitely wasn't what I had in mind, which was a nice big comfortable place to record. We didn't record a thing all week.

- Lightning in the dark valley of the Smoky Mtns.

- The Cumberland Gap was full of a dewy humid fog, but then it always is.

- I drank half a bottle of orange juice and then refilled it with the only tap I had as part of my person.

- What RAW said is right. Because your brain latches onto a certain reality tunnel, the best thing you can do is create a new reality tunnel for yourself every day, a reality tunnel that is smarter, funnier, and sexier than the one of the day previous.

- Giant stone cross in Huntsville, TN through the Smokies. At least three stories tall. And around it are billboards for fireworks. Two ferris wheels lit by white xmas tree lights.

- And the next exit is Stinking Creek Road.

- In Atlanta I met a fellow with non-income-tax reporting job and a JR "Bob" Dobbs tattoo on his back. Shirtless, surfer haircut, other tattoos.

- Driving through the fog, the orange and white lane walls, concrete walls, shifting lanes, broken pavement, NMH on the radio.

- Even with other cars and trucks on the road coming into Ky it's really dark. And with the opaque bug splatters on the windshield, the smears, and the humidity it makes driving difficult. Trucks all trying to pass you and shit. The hills, the ups, downs, and fog.

- Winchester, Ky nearing Lexington. Aphex Twin kicks in. The little bit of rain we had lifts. I'm ready for a refuel stop in Lexington to see if Fate has anything in store for me. Back on this familiar drive. Odd times, or it feels odd anyway, under these gray and black storm clouds visible even in the night sky.

- One incident, anecdote, or story will have to suffice in representing everything that happened during that period and place.

- The incident with the pump that does not automatically shut off when you're finished fueling has gas pouring down the side of the car. The shop was closed, the clerk only interacting through plexiglass. I had an intuition not to wait to get my junk food. That's when I found the accident occurring. I drove off stepping over all the gas running like a creek around the pump islands. The gas that got on my hand when returning the nozzle I rinsed off from my water bottle at 70 mph hanging both hands out the car window.

- Schedule a massage.

- After complaining about the bug splatters I got a tiny bit of rain, just enough to clear the windshield.

- The night is a dark red burgundy around Barnes Rd, a new exit in this booming area, running with a broken shut off down the side of the car.

- My idea for NaNoWriMo: have plotted and prepared my blockbuster novel that I'm going to write for the market using my idea about a skip tracer. Have it all plotted, and all the char conflict and drive, all the predictable shit outlined. I can spice it up with my guided synchronicities, make it a little different. There is a how to book about blockbusters I need to read.