The Sentencing

It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was, at least until the rain finally stopped for a moment, leaving behind memorials in the form of countless pools of polluted water on top of which floated a flotilla of flakes of ancient rust stained the color of raw umber -- since retired, so we'll have to come up with something else but not its wild strawberry replacement, so eat it, Crayola, you atomic tangerine motherfuckers -- torn off the decrepit, cobalt blue building by the howling gusting of winds or the occasional hellfire stroke of lightning.

His combover blown into oblivion by said aerial cacophony, the manager managed to hand me a stack of rain-spattered video cassettes.

"I need you to take these to the second floor. That's where we put the deposit box, so get to it."

Knowing this made absolutely no sense since 1)no one puts a deposit box on the second floor except Ludovic Vaclav, proud yet crazy owner of Vaclav's Video Vignettes, and 2)we had yet to finish moving the rental operation from the shithole it currently resided and into our new digs next door in a McDonald's abandoned after the horrible e.coli outbreak of 2005 which the authorities assured us, with all the assurance of a veteran insurance salesman, was clean, I grabbed the tapes anyway and, muttering under my breath, the keys rattling in the wind with all the Dickensian fright they could muster, entered the building, its weathered brick sides pockmarked from too many drunken electric funky Satan grooves or however it is kids get their kicks these days. Since the entire structure -- once one of those pristine, gabled McDonald's, not those cheap-ass, single-floored 1970s models dotting dying American suburbia -- was ringed by a wreath of broken windows, it was a good thing I remembered to wear my shoes to work this time.

Pushing a hastily constructed mountain of broken chairs away from the staircase towards the dining room tables caked with years of dust and Big Mac grease, I trudged up the steps with the dexterous aplomb of a hallucinating sloth. My left foot landing on the penultimate step at the base of the second floor, I heard, emanating from beyond a door bearing a copper nameplate struck with the letters R. CHE and a thick smudge of reddish-brown filth obscuring the rest, a muffled noise reminiscent either of a few people mumbling to each other as if their mouths were stuffed with octopi, or zombies munching on some trainees McDonald's had left behind.

Overcoming my excitement at the impending hot sex action, which is what was obviously waiting behind said door, my hand trembling with anticipation ignored the rumble of sloshing gore and muzzled screaming to grab the knob and twist --

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

Fucking alarm. I hate work.

Well, no, that's wrong. Work is where I craft most of my wondrous blogging, but imagine if I could work from home. I'd be able to git r done and save on gas, and what is more American than weening ourselves off of fossil fuels controlled by Evil Islamist Jihadists?

"Don't you take public transportation to work?"

Shut up.

That bizarre dream capped my Sammy Hagar Edgar Allan Poe weekend of holing up for two days underneath a deeply overcast sky with headphones strapped to my skull, pen and paper on my lap and copious amounts of the best wine I could afford. No Ripple this time, chumps. I'm guessing the wife and kids were around somewhere. Maybe my sometimes-better-half screaming at me to get off my lazy ass -- hey, fuck you, I did some laundry -- was that godawful noise I had heard.


















Cooler than you'll ever be.

Hell, I didn't even turn the computer on and only found out this morning that Isaac Hayes had kicked the bucket, no doubt in a suave way.

Who's the white blogging dick
That's a sex machine to none of the chicks?
GRAVES!
Ya damn right!

Who is the man that would risk his neck
For no fucking man?
GRAVES!
Can you dig it?

Who's the cat that will cop out
When there's danger all about?
GRAVES!
Right On!

They say this cat Graves is a bad writer
SHUT YOUR MOUTH!
I'm talkin' 'bout Graves.
THEN WE CAN DIG IT!

He's a complicated man
But no one understands him -- no, really
RANDAL GRAVES!

Hey, keep it down, people, I'm busy with art, dammit. Don't make me sic Mr. Hayes' angry corpse on you. He can still fuck your shit up. I can only fuck your shit up if you're not home and you've left your apartment unlocked. Six thousand words, baby, about 5,990 of them pointless. Boy meets girl. One scene, only ten percent of which is dialogue, zero percent of which is boy and girl talking. Don't ask. After rereading and rewriting numerous sentences both before and after grafting further explication -- or ripping some off like an angry Frankenstein -- to each, I couldn't help but think of something Flaubert wrote in one of his letters, I can't remember to whom:

"It is easier to become a millionaire and live in Venetian palaces full of masterworks than to write one good page and be satisfied with oneself."

No shit. I'm not sure how healthy it is to spend dozens of minutes either butchering or performing delicate surgery on a single sentence until it feels perfect and is able to walk upright, imparting emotion and wisdom that I probably stole from a writer who's actually talented -- but not Flaubert, I've never borrowed from him, the stupid hack frog -- given that it'll probably be one million AD before I feel good about any of them and by that time we'll all have mutated through centuries of nuclear fallout into beings who've lost all higher brain functions and exist only to feed, shit, butcher our neighbors for their stuff, sleep and die. Which isn't all that much different than nowadays, except we at least attempt to prettify the proceedings with our illusions.