September 7, Flash 41, a date which will live *dramatic pause* in infamy.

Un/surprisingly, this week's entry contains neither torpedoes nor dive bombing nor exploding.

Mercy me, no wonder humans are always going to war.

He walked in and slid the photograph across my desk. Silence sweat cool air, a slump & an elongated rustle. I watched him fumble through the hillock of envelopes to grab the letter opener, in the dark a surgeon's blade, ambling over my still warm form to clumsily cut through tough, wooden flesh to get at the punched sunlight within.

Of course the silence was probably split when the lock caromed off my leg & onto the hoary planks. He looked to be gently laughing as he fingered his prize, mock admirably exchanging its gleam for the dull contents of his pocket, a crisp, white handkerchief to calmly wipe his brow. The song of a passing wood thrush, the soporific buzz of the radio I had turned down after he called, his habitually muffled speech as he dialed the third man, nothing, I could hear nothing.

The lamp visibly crackled as he switched it off, continuing with the third man as his feet slipped in glee out into the narrow hall. I tried to follow, the warped frame's unseen gate bidding me stay.

You'd think as a reward for a poisonous betrayal the gods would grant a ghost faculties beyond the sense of sight. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but watching your assassin delicately gloat in the shadows, vital facts forever out of earshot, is colder still. Destined to be imprisoned in the middle of nowhere with your only companion a photograph of your murdered lover, forever, the coldest meal of all.

Wind power

I don't feel like bellowing about old cracker goopers getting their name in lights at the rock hall of fame, an idea that, aside from being a financial non-windfall, is inherently fucking stupid.

I don't feel like screeching about young draft picks ripping up the second knee in order to have a matching pair for nights out at Playhouse Square.

I don't feel like guffawing about the comedy of permission because, oh, what's the point, not as if the sun isn't going to go red giant & devour us whole anyway.

The Great Leveler

Big bucks with Public Square executions, Ted.

Harrumph. No wonder Ohio's freefall continues unabated. What self-respecting businessman would dare create jobs in a state of cowards?

At least my county's mien is threaded with sartorial bravery.






















Off to interview for the waiter position at Famous Ray's.

Nepotism, ice cream's real good, sun's up in the East, down in the West,
no big deal fuhgeddaboutit check out those threads, yo Paulie.

As much as I find Jupiterian (Jupiteresque? Jupitertastic?) jollity in these & other cracker oscillations, I can't say that these smart alecks are incorrect, but I'll let the final, bleak word go to DC United's angriest fan:

Clearly I am not the mediator for the job of uniting crackers and hippies against the financial elite, but say someone emerged, charismatic, eloquent, brilliant, passionate: neither party would endorse him (or her), the media would deride him as a lunatic, tribal dog-whistlers would have both crackers and hippies condemning him as a traitorous motherfucking CINO or HINO respectively, and if he still was succeeding, the elite would have him killed.

And that's why I spend my free time listening to Slayer.

Old school

Ask and ye shall receive.



Check out Kerry King. Once upon a time, I too was not fat(ter) and bald(ing).

Speaking of those large & in charge, here's some more past blasting caps:
















Given the song's subject matter, I suppose I should have thrown up the famous handshake, but when's the last time anyone saw Tip grace the internets?

You're welcome.

The rest is noise

Sure, I could have put up a video of Hussein X's televised vae victis in sober dress, with pungent comment following, but wouldn't you rather read nothing* while listening to sweet something?



La démocratie en Irak!

*I realize pungent commentary by yours truly would certainly count as nothing, but I'm not that** self-deprecating.

**I'm kidding. I'm awful. But the office of pretzeldent is still a den of yokelry, said the broken clock.

Flash flood

New sentence, same faded yellow bullshit.

I heard footsteps on the wet sidewalk and the sound of keys. Bare feet, a strange sound in this rain, for the summer of frolicking children was long dead. A grave tread, an off-kilter staccato riff of submissive plinks & thumps sad & autumnal as the date splashed on the screen of my cell, evaporates as soon as I turn around, the umbrella's ribs twirling drops into nothingness.

Today's special, pig in a poke, what I had for breakfast every Tuesday, what I had not ten minutes ago. I had gone around the block, passing the diner I had just left. Footfalls & jingling bearings, Mr. Jingaling in color & in black & white so good to see you, Gozer the Gozerian's keymaster wearing out its VHS stay, doors unlocked, snapshot snapshot, there's too many. Slow down! Let them linger a bit, please.

Footsteps on the wet sidewalk & the sound of keys, here & gone, there & back again. Not a ghost, because those you can see in their filmy, flimsy special effected glory. Hallelujah, maybe it was the food. I felt fine. My stomach was peaceful. Jingling keys all sound the same, there's either few or many. Yes, I know. Yet I've heard it before. Das Unheimliche. Many times, these few keys. I know them, a broken mechanical, a familiar out-of-tune tune on repeat, precision like big number karat Swiss clockwork. The diner's on the other side of the street. How I hated that jingling & how she knew it, reveling.

Yes, I know, I know. Why do I keep turning if I'm seeing nothing? I don't know.

I want to. So I keep turning.

Tectonic plates shift, attempting to catch my attention, a delivery truck vibrates blacktop to radiate crack, a cell set to rumble, the office wondering where the hell I'm at. I'll answer, but they won't hear.

Yes, a cup would be nice, the usual, why, work is fine, thanks. I wait, snapshot snapshot, more than I can handle. No matter, now I have time to slip past bars, to gaze & ogle & get lost running & falling in rolling, benumbed neurons. Free refills, Polaroid & digital, invisible carvings spread over greasy Formica, deep in fleshy, pulpy bark. I pass tick tock knowing I won't see my grimace mirrored by a grin. I bet she'd be surprised at my smile this time.

No, nothing else, thanks.

The Importance of Being Earnest

I shush because I care.

"This coffee's bitter."

C'est vrai. If I want bitter, I'll go home and talk to my wife.
Badabing, that's the end of this life. Let me make this

perfectly Nixonian, incoming freshman class:
you are the victim of deception, of agitprop.

The library does not guarantee free textbooks for all.
Free textbooks for all the library does not guarantee.

The bookstore guarantees textbooks for thee,
gold coin or pound of flesh, gallows or the axe,

death by desperate, knotted stomach, winded pipe
or bleeding through merry halls til thou expire.

Wars & security states ain't cheap, bub
but they sure is rub-a-dub-funny.

Shush! or you won't hear the laughing.

Where did you progress, Juan Valdez?

Not as catchy as the original, but this ought to catch your ocular.



That was my reaction, too.

If all the world were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work

I'll take my chances.






















What about Kenyan birth certificates? Please, not-so-gentle hippie, re-barn your pitchforks & dunk your torches in the sweet, sweet Cuyahoga. As if Puerto Rico is American territory.

Speaking of America, how come no American teams have made overtures to UEFA to join their Champions League? In footie, as in war, we're the best and we want to balance ourselves against those Hotspur usurpers who claim such bestery. Mighty Joe Public, thy vice, thy corruption scarest me not.

Speaking of corruption America redundancy, I had something else to post about, but since I've forgotten it amidst a frenzied bout of tried & true bibliothèque coworker solidarity, the comic behind-the-scenes story swap, enjoy the new rape vans.














Hey, if your naughty bits have nothing to hide. Oh, I remember.

Speaking of naughty bits & libraries -- now I've piqued your interest & in only six paragraphs -- our printing system is now BFF to that found in campus laboratories, thus non-current affiliates are disbarred from using 99.9% of terminals. Its first casualty, a prof emeritus regular who must now go elsewhere for his daily porn fix, the way it should be.

Why do you think they built public libraries in the first place?

Go ahead, Grigory, give our paymasters yet another bright idea.

Sure, the chance of America's cardboard box being patched is now a smidgen less, but with our judicious expansion of this, imagine the gobs of loot we, the unwashed masses, will scratch out via a vast network of toll booths.

Shitloads of dimes!

Cronos Quartet (and something about flashing so you know what this is without having to waste time reading you're welcome)

Under penalty of torture, our fearless leader has ordered that we compose in a literary genre exciting & new. I can't promise that Gavin MacLeod will make a cameo, but there's always hope & change.

She knew time was running out, fast, but opening that door was Pandora's Box all over again. The world could never comprehend how titanic a task it was shoving all the evils of the cosmos into a thirty-two cubic foot closet, how relentlessly numbing was the epoch-spanning sift through the asphyxiating detritus of a temple built with the woe-lashed clues of a thousand thousand years, tracking each malignancy regardless of dimension through long-crumbled bricks of an Alexandrian murder, Godfrey's bone-strewn prize, Ottoman bloodthirst, Mengele's blade, a script of ancient massacres & fresh-faced sequels, the Amazon stripped & replaced with a river of poison, every realpolitik assassination, every capitalist black ops & rote, mote interpersonal, interoffice dismissal to dig beneath the world's rib, dredge from the dissembling muck of a trillion pulsing organs their hiding places, bring their rot into the light & back into the magic Mason jar.

Only to let them out again, for time was running out, fast.

Long bubbled the ground & the fizz in the next table's glasses, the cthonic blood of slain gatekeepers & celebratory champagne, for every day was worth celebrating now, to the point of absurdity. She chuckled at the overt contrast found only in the pages of poorly written fiction.

Looking out the window, the surface of her drink lay as silent as her drab mask, the space above conquered now & again by the ghost of a cigarette no doubt celebrating the gift of a another new minute.

One by one she gathered her plan & her doubts, not with an Olympian rage but a Wertherian resignation, sounds & furies signifying time making corpses of us all. A shot in the dark can still kill, right? An imagined laugh washed down with a last swig, for tomorrow, she thought, we'll all probably die.

A thin film of creamy louche remained, a pale green become old copper in the diminishing light, quietly gurgling to an unseen turbulence marching beneath the nurturing topsoil, to the frenetic buzz of a nest of bowels. The jangling fifteen percent refused to settle, a quarter rolling off the table towards the door. She got up & followed, knowing there was a good chance, an excellent chance, that the coin would soon be spent not on vice, but on passage to the land of the dead.

Exiting out into the black, she strode past a choking, naive joy & over the angry earth to open another door, open the hope of man in stopping Time himself.

"I'm from a casino." "Good enough, let's go."

The signage & merchandise better be in comic sans.























One minor quibble, PD. Any particular reason you're using a file shot from last century? Are all staff photographers currently caught in the nefarious clutches of Gamblor?

Ho-hum.

I had pondered penning a wondrous proposition proving the complex perfidy that proudly preens past, pressed hungrily against the patriotic potboiler whose purloined pseudonym is the pernicious Victory!®

but

since everyone knows insistent Iranian influence shall illuminate Iraq with such incandescence as to incinerate our irises, thus further inculcating an insidious incomprehension of inexorable intensity,

we are left with

naught but an endless gnawing of bloodstained grout found glissando on the greasy ground of our own greatest generational grotesquerie, the gurgling groan of greedy gullets its grimy elegy. Whatever, let's

rock and roll.

Oh! hio! No!

One more state worker stealing from the taxpayer.

Hey, gooper, follow the money law. Not my fault you've never read Randal's Rules of Etiquette®: be overly concerned with proper clocking in/out & not-concerned-at-all between those boundary points, thus, having satiated your slacker skeleton, no personal leave is left to make trouble. Now, buy a 44-cent stamp, burn (more than) 52 cents worth of gas driving to the nearest post office two towns over because the one down the street was shipped overseas last year & pay the 96 cents like a good bipartisan.

Speaking of loot, is it me, or is it worthy of gusto-filled chortling that this meme

Strickland, like other governors, has been forced to cut services to keep the budget in balance.

has become something beyond the beyond beyond axiom? Mmmm.






















Imagination nation: land of chocolate & 90% top tax rates. Aside: right, like you aren't jonesing for a little class warfare entertainment. Furthermore, I apologize for the length of this caption, an affront to accepted practice.

Regarding Ohio's continuing centrality -- I dare say, the very spine of the body politic -- to the future of this great turd, from rooftops I shout: read my lips, no new narcissism. Shitty and/or choking sports franchises keep us humble.




























First responder.

Once humanity gets bored with warring over taxes oil & substitutes the object of combat for that most truly precious of resources -- outside the magical grace of sky fairies & the comfortably numbing exploits of wife-swapping bug eaters who think they can dance, natch -- it remains vital that us on the north coast begin girding our sweaty, buckeyed loins in expectation of coastal hippies, flatland rednecks & cracker retirees sending their collective private armies to steal our fresh water.

One way of such girding is through aquatic watchdogs.

You've been warned, bub, but why the hubbub over this?




























Don't get caught.

Naked lady or torture, it's common knowledge that, after the bed or the closet, underneath the desk is the most common place for analog porn storage.

Désordre

Today is a most glorious occasion, the annual celebration of the Great August Socialist Revolution, aka Shelf Reading Day.




















So while us civil servants are tilling the tomes, weeding out decadent Western art, put down the computer & be sure to plant enough rutabagas.

Today's dumbassery is yesterday's dumbassery. Trust me.