Meaningless Forward progression

I'll be posting sections of current prose I'm writing. Hopefully you'll be reading and critiquing. We'll make this interesting at very least.

[rookinabook-blog]

I looked up to the sky, saw the clouds backwards floating. 

On the road a roadrunner hauling tail first. 

Even my smoke grew longer with  every puff. 

I blinked my eyes and everything was right again.

Yet Detroit was still a white man’s city. 

[rookinabook-blog]

Part One

Chp 1

The world is changing, it would seem. Moreover, we are changing, faster than any of us saw coming and absolutely no one knows exactly what to do with that information. The realization of the futility of ourspecies is spreading like a roman virus, and existentialists can notrun the world. There are lines of territory and time, length and width, that chop and divide this rock in space that only exist in our collective consciousness. Invisible to the unlearned eye.  In the middle of one of those little flakes of humanity rests an era of transition. The leaders of middle north america are holding onto their old life as tightly as they hold onto their old money, unable to see the future. Decisions are not made with logic or reason, instead, the system runs on tradition and nostalgia. It is fair though, to be persuaded by the past, especially when one recalls the beauty of running down the quiet pavement of a small suburb toward the setting summer sun without the urge to stop and upload the picture onto social media or to ask why the sun is not as bright as it used to be. With every passing day beauty fades from the world as constant situational analysis keeps minds dull and eyes tunneled. Yet faster and faster we evolve, what once took centuries takes years, once days -moments. Speed and efficiency may just send us into the infinite depths of time and space but no one takes any time to wonder what happens now to the things that used to take moments. By moving everything up one speed did we forget the moments? It is fair to be persuaded by the past.

 I understand the new world, I don't like it. I don't believe in the old world, but I love it.

Though, the question was about god.

[rookinabook-blog]

I understand the new world, I don't like it. I don't believe in the old world, but I love it. 

[rookinabook-blog]

Mary-Kay//Elsie?

We lived together for a minute, Mary-Kay and I, she was an artist, she liked colors to spew out of her head in the mostfantastic of ways, bleeding her insanity onto the canvas. She did a lot of mushrooms. On the other hand, I was a writer so I much preferred to dwell in the dark places of my mind, so naturally I smoked dope. As one might imagine, our time together was amazing, until it wasn't. 'You've lost sense of reality,' I would shout to which she would reply 'You just reject my reality because it's not as bleak as yours!'

Or as long lived.

I would find little bottles of paint on the floor across our little flat, tiny trinkets of her mental breakdown. With each bottle, with each tube she squeezed onto her paper plates she squeezed out a little more of what was left of her. I often wondered if one day I would come home to an empty M-Kay all wrangled up and tossed on the ground. Though if I had, I would probably have left her there as to not disturb the organized chaos of our existence. But each bottle of paint, each tube of acrylic created another, yet more beautiful, piece of work. Each canvas hung brightened the place up as much as another window might. Funny how she became so dull.

All of my writing ended up in a small, two-drawer filing cabinet. One that I picked up years ago to funish my first stay away from home at a little thrift shop. It had one large piece of packaging tape wrapped around the outside, holding it all together. Worked fine. All of my finished prose ended up in the top drawer, all poetry and rough drafts in the bottom. Both locked up with a key.

I could never move any of Mary-Kay's paintings, and she never got a copy of my key.

[rookinabook-blog]

Shaky Slim and his damn old fashioned

Inside it was December twenty fourth, outside it was raining and forty seven degrees. While some might say that a rainy Christmas Eve is an unfortunate setting, for Seth it was quite a nice sense of relief for last winter started strong with a late October blizzard and stuck around long enough for a white Easter. This was not uncommon near the great lakes of central North America, but never welcomed. As it was said once by an leathered old black man in tattered clothes outside of a church on the east side of Detroit before Good Friday mass, 'I tell you what, if Jesus lived 'round here, he'da waited a few more days to come on back.'

So it was the holiday season again, and the forecast predicts a rainy sleigh ride for the big guy. This news bringing smiles to many in southeast Michigan, smiles through cracked lips still chapped from last years localized tundra expansion. The Motor city was dreaming of a gray Christmas, the storybook snow of the season was just not appreciated by folks around here. This year though, being already fourty four degrees warmer than the last, has brought out a special kind of Jolly Cheer. One bar in particular, Slims, was crowded with the spirit of the year end. Tucked in behind a furniture outlet between the expressway and the steel mill downriver sat a little brick building with two stained glass windows in the front. A large plastic light box -long since burnt out- was bolted to the west facing wall, written on it in translucent brown paint were the words 'Slim's Place.' While the exterior was stylistically conflicted and left much to be desired, the interior was exactly what one would expect a rich old mariners house to look like; the walls littered with photos and fabrics and shelves with odds and ends, the floor a warm patch work of weathered woods, the polished oak bar framed the plethora of whiskeys and malts offered. Every surface was individually fascinating but nothing compared the sum of the parts.

In the far right corner of the crowded box of a bar sat Seth. This is where Seth always sat, beneath an obnoxious display of signed hockey player portraits ranging from black and white to DSLR. This is where Daniel walked to the most.

-You could sit at the bar you know?

-You could stop saying that you know.

And thus began the night.  

[rookinabook-blog]

Our Little Monster.

Right when you are furthest away. Right when you realize you have stranded yourself on an island facing away from everything you did to become what you are. Right when your headlights are the last ones illuminating the pavement ahead, behind, there's Chuck. Good ol' Chuck, like a beacon in the fog.

It was three twenty one in the morning, Wednesday morning, and there were three people awake within eye-shot of my motorized scrap yard: Myself, the gas station attendant in the florescent castle to my left (past the most useless red light one can imagine), and Chuck- the friendly moat creature. He slithered around the pumps in his polished white leather bowling shoes, blue jeans, and white oxford on top. Most moat creatures feed upon foolish knights but not this one, he sticks to the plethora of garbage pails placed around to reduce the amount of cigarette butts on the ground. Raging success. Chuck lived in his car you see, not a bad car though, and he owns one outfit. To his credit, those shoes? Always polished. The oxford? Pressed to match.

I met Chuck during my brief stay at a local diner serving folks Sunday brunch, often chewing it too. He would meander in around seven in the evening on any given day and have a cup of black coffee "no spoon," and stay until close. If you need nickels, pour a fresh mug, he'll toss you a few. It's what he's got. Tough to get much done around him though, once I heard a poor young girl on her second shift on the floor make the mistake of asking Chuck why he had a new package of socks on the counter in front of him. This is not something that has every happened before, never has there been a package of new socks on the counter, but we all knew better than to ask Chuckles why. Do not get me wrong, we all loved the guy, he was our friendly moat creature, but you never ask questions. She ended up knowing more about the sock and underwear market than she ever signed up for. As an aside, she did not make it one week, a shame too. She was easy on the eyes.

If we lived in a culture of speaking freely, I would suggest a legal name change to 'Chuckles.' The man sounded like piglet, all dressed in white. Coworkers would linger out of sight to hear the words giggle on down from his mouth onto the sap who decided the diner bar counter would be a good place to post up for a meal. With this said, nothing is better than pulling into a florescent castle beyond the stubborn traffic light in the dark of the morning and being greeted by a friendly moat creature, dressed in white, doing his best piglet impression. Whether it is the nostalgia or the sheer uniqueness of this man that does it I'm not sure, but it is something sobering and grounding in the most existential of moments. Without meaning to suggest regularity or accuracy, Chuckles would appear from the murky waters every six or eight months during my drives. Each encounter would bring about a 'Chuck, well how the hell are ya?' followed by an elongated jitter of the throat 'long time no see!' From there each went on going on respectively. The man in the tattered jacked driving a mobile metal-shop class, and the elderly gentlemen dressed to kill in the not-a-bad-car-though.  

[rookinabook-blog]

Untitled Intro

A young woman once said to me she was looking for a beautiful soul, I asked her if broken counted as beautiful. Caught off guard, she let her face show the shallowness of her statement, she let her face show me that she had no concern for a beautiful soul or souls at all for that matter. Right off the line I had a feeling about this girl, a feeling that stuck deep down to this day. That she was awful. Some people in this world spend their time thinking and some spend their time trying to convince people they do. She was the latter. 'I'll think about it.'

Neat.

To be fair, I met that girl on this website where you can pay a nominal fee to meet single people who also paid a nominal fee just to ignore you, so you can't really expect much from her. I bring this up so as not to give any false pretense about anything that I am about to say, I tend to judge, folks. I like to think that I fall under the above category I just made up as someone who spends most of the day wasting time thinking about things that are never relevant to anything important. In doing all of that thinking though, I often realize that I am just peering at my peers, prying into their personal ideals with my own imagination. In my own defense, it is a really fun pass-time. I would recommend it to anyone.

What I would not recommend to anyone is spending all of that time thinking, thinking about anything other than the little things about people that you can poke fun at. Throughout my stay on this planet I have learned three things, I will share the first one now. Feel free to write it down; thinking is deadly. Deadly, friends.

Since we are on the topic, I know a lot about wine. I know way more about wine than will ever be applicable to the world. If you hand me a glass of wine, I'll tell you exactly what I'm holding. Garnet in color, Pinot Noir. Tight, pale orange rim indicating a cooler climate, France. Ripe cherry on the nose, definitely Champagne region. Earthy notes on the back end, very medium bodied even for an old world Pinot, Louis Latour, twenty-ten vintage.

I have no applications for this.

How did I gain this knowledge? The answer, which is to be expected due to today’s college drive to teach useless information, naturally, is college. More specifically there was this nice combination of genes that I met in college named Kathy. Kathy knew a lot about wine. How did she gain this knowledge? I'm not sure, but what I did know was that she had damn near edible legs. Volleyball. So when Kathy Legs invited me to Sequoia Grove Valley, I had to learn a lot about wine. I had to learn way more about wine than will ever be applicable to the world.

Kathy Legs, come to find out, did not know one thing about wine. She was just rich and had a wine cellar. Legs was not her last name. This is the last mention of Kathy Legs.

I loved Sequoia Grove!

I would return there a few years later with an okay set of genes with nice legs. Soccer. Professional woman’s soccer. She was almost famous, so I took her to Sequoia Grove to get drunk and show off everything that college taught me.

Almost Famous did not know one thing about wine. Did I menion is not applicable?

What is applicable is that I am from a little town called Rouland, I had three friends growing up there. I am going to tell you about two of them. What happened to the third one? Nothing! He is alive and kicking.

Kicking is a word.

He has no legs.

Johnny Antonio did however, and I met him when I was nine years old. He was an odd kid, meaning he threw rocks at squirrels and ate dirt. Funny story about the former later. The day that I met him, I was riding my bike down Sunberry Blvd. for no reason, I was only nine after all. Johnny was wearing sandals, I note this because on principle I have never worn a pair of sandals in my life, though I've owned two. About six yards aware from his sandals was a possum, in broad daylight, how fun! Johnny Antonio did what any nine year old boy would do, he threw a stick at it. Much to his (and my) amazement, he hit the thing, right in the damn eye. I introduced myself as the general of a stick army and asked him to join me as an archer.

Johnny would later be my best man.

Before the wedding I invited him to my family reunion that I must attend to represent the rest of my family that is choosing not to attend. It's a nice gathering of old folks and familiar faces in what looks to be a scene from a hover-round commercial. My favorite part of this whole event is dinner of course due to the silence that rises from these fat sea muscles feasting on their lifeblood. This year they really outdid themselves with the 'bring a dish to pass' model. Dinner at the seventy fourth Seymoure reunion was fourteen buckets of original recipe and a batch of grandmas meatballs.

Can't forget grandmas meatballs.

Luckily for my dignity the man that was going to stand beside me on my wedding day would have done the same for a crispy ten piece were that ever to happen, marriage I mean. Oh my, we can only hope that does not ever happen. So there he was, my best man, making great company with the people who can hover around as far as and in any direction they please. Let me make one thing very clear, if you're not on a board wearing McFly's jacket, there is no reason for you to need to 'hover.'

Back To The Future was my favorite movie growing up. Which according to Johnny was 'dumb as a cracker in the CPT.' He was white. His favorite movie growing up was Back To The Future II. We stopped talking once because of that, that guy had the audacity to say that he would sue me and my family for my incorrect opinion. At the time I had no real concept of what suing someone meant but I was mad, so I just refused and said 'you can't do that!' I was in fact right, even if unknowingly, which makes me happy and I worry about that sometimes. Add it to the list.

Of course we became friends again, all it took was one day of watching too much television before I called him and we went back to beating the hell out of each other with sticks. Our parents deemed this a worthwhile activity because it kept us out of the house and away from the video games. Instead of pretending to hit each other with real swords, we actually hit each other with tree branches.

But hey, we were outside!

Do you ever sit around and think of all of the things you did as a kid that you'd never dream of doing now? When I was preparing to apply to university, the current trend in my generation was to jump head first from brick wall to brick wall, all while avoiding concrete roads by flying, suspended by nothing, thirty feet above them hoping they didn't make a single error. It was called free running and it was the real reason that nobody tested well enough to get into good schools that year as opposed to the reason that our parents came up with: overabundant and under regulated Attention Deficit Disorder medication distribution for the past sixteen years. To be fair, the father of ADD was in bed with the pharmacy companies, he even came out and said he made the whole thing up. It was the most widely appreciated and most profitable lie told to the public ever because it was a medically backed scapegoat for every terrible parents' terrible kid.

Alienated yet?

I never ran free, but I sure as hell ran a great drug ring at a nice bar outside of Detroit. Johnny had gotten a job there busing tables and washing dishes. He didn't get paid much but the redhead bartender was payment enough for him. He was either a pervert or getting laid, I never asked. I was down there all the time with him because Mick, his hipster boss, would let us buy drinks at full price even though I was seventeen and Johnny was just recently eighteen. That same year I had started smoking pot and doing heavy doses of methylenedioxy methamphetamine. Molly. My boy at school had a solid stash of anything, always. Don't know how, haven't once cared to know to this day. I started getting him all sorts of business and I charged a very reasonable finders fee. At first Johnny gave me a hard time about my lifestyle, which was before he never paid for a beer again.

Years later, when asked why I started wheelin' in the first place I gave the only answer I could think of. The one that my mother gave me the last time I saw her.

"I didn't make enough money to support the addictions I have to fight the depression that slips through the fingers of the little blue pills I take everyday to stay on this earth."

Some good those little blue pills did. Is what I used to think before I started pounding one hundred milligrams a day myself. They go down best with a fifth of single malt and two capsules of color enhancer. Just drop the needle on the record.

Johnny recommended I talked to a therapist. So I got one's number at the bar, later that night. She had freckles, I told her about my favorite one. She told me I shouldn't have a favorite one so soon, and that maybe I should spend a couple more nights deciding. Much to our pleasure I spent exactly fourteen months deciding. This is not what he had in mind.

I did see a therapist though, after mine left me for a drug dealer.

No class.

Therapy was a hoot, though. I would babble on and on about beliefs I no longer have, and pay money to do so. I've paid money for that more than once in my life, which I think is unfortunate.  

[rookinabook-blog]

From: Tell Me Something About Yourself

 Dust settles while the smoke rises, a beautiful representation of the good and the bad. Even more beautiful when the universe gets it backwards.

I look down at the lovely oak casket that I had specifically ordered for my late wife. When I look up I see Scenar's long dark hair wetting her shoulders like the waterfall it is, glorious. I might start calling her Taquaminon. Though, when her eyes met mine a small smirk crept across her face. I responded with thin eyes, this is my wife's funeral after all, how inappropriate. She corrected her mistake and just gave me the eyes that I love to see.

Mischief.

I smoke cigarettes strictly for the poetic cliche that it is, I'm a stickler for tradition. That and the ravenous nicotine addiction. To be exact, when it's four in the morning and I end up at 7eleven somehow, the box that ends up in my pocket is a little green pack of Marlboro Menthols, for alliteration of course. It also has a lot to do with Elsie. Elsie was this mentally stimulating and just edible girl I knew in high school. When she found a niche in my life she opened my eyes to a whole different world of dark book stores and windy fields. Contrast is beauty she would say, usually after stepping out of the dark room. Whether we spent an afternoon at John King's or on the shore of Lake Superior, we conversed in verse and wrote stories together through small talk over the course of hours. Elsie could get me on my back feet in the battle of words, and I'm fairly certain that she'll be the only person that ever will. That is the same reason that when I would finally muster the gumption to lean in for that important teenage kiss she would light a cigarette and stare out of the window. She was always a step ahead, the girl that held leaves on her lips.

Dodge.

Burn.

Scen smokes my cigarettes. Someone with a wandering mind might say that Scen smokes because of a mentally stimulating and just edible girl I knew in high school. What's life without drawing the dots?  

[rookinabook-blog]

Section from Crystal Field

Something about the dew makes the sweet spot feel better when the ball leaves your shoe. It could be the mist off the spin that chills your face, or the way it sticks to your toe for a fraction of a second so you can really feel the contact and the control over the angle. After all, hidden in the shape of a hexagon is the entire range of trajectories needed to get the ball to the back of the net. The trick is finding it while mid-pivot, center of gravity moving, and the incoming hexagon is tumbling over grass at high speed. For me, it is always easier with an early morning glaze. I'm better when the air is crisp and the sun has yet to pierce the overcast or burn the fog. When the crows call out their wicked poetry and the streetlights guide the small critters across the empty road, when goosebumps crawl over tight skin and water seeps into the holes of worn out souls.

This is my game.

From eighteen yards out, the sound of the sweet spot echos off the nearby floral shop and hits my ears just before the first shot of the day breaks the plain. Goal. Granted I'm alone out here in this field, this makeshift pitch, but every shot feels right and every goal makes the heart beat a little faster. This is my home field, manned or un, this is Los's turf. Shot two will start fifty five yards back. I always start my breakaways with a little hop to get into the action. Hop, step, hesitate. Tap, two steps then another tap of the ball. Two more steps then stop, spit the ball out left behind the heel- round off the left back defender, step step. Shoot, post, goal.

I've only just gotten my blood pumping and already the spatter of the wet ground has decorated my calves and spotted my forearms. One more shot then it's time to get to work. Ball back on the eighteen, standing one pace back and two left, I run and clip the lower right to get a good arc on it, and for a split second I start the day three for three, until it sails over the bar and off target. Put too much on that one. Fetching the ball from the median past the parking lot will be a good warm up before drills.

This unsanctioned soccer pitch, Crystal Field as I like to call it, consists of a one piece steel net frame that I stole from an elementary school two cities over (we'll talk logistics later), a net fashioned out of roll up plastic construction fencing, and perfectly scaled touchlines, goal box and midfield line done in white spray paint. The only thing it is missing is symmetry. I cannot express my happiness that I find myself in a town with a vacant lot and a lazy or perhaps even generous group of city inspectors.