it strikes. you
abandon, come back, and it's still
there but you're looking at something different.
you don't say it, but what you feel
is my note: in space
and the ideas of people who know
what i don't.

7 days in the art world, 2666, 180426.
i found something out: superior companies
have better advertising campaigns because they can predict the future.
lesser companies respond to them by copying and so, reap stale benefits.
are there anymore fundamentals in this bag?
we all assimilate
into the same
patterns

except for sense of humor,
which is near abroad and a qualification
of a hole in the crazy:
there's nothing nude under the sun,
no nude directions,
a new erection meant for the spoiling,
and so return to difference in deference to each time.

In her college days, she would size men up by what shoes they wore. These days, she tried not to let her mind wander to what other people were doing, but it always did. She wondered whether their minds wandered to what she might be doing, or just other people. Usually, when people are doing things they aren't thinking about other people, she thought.

She liked all movies where a girl is going to marry a great guy, but the problem is she doesn't love him. Another guy comes along via a coffee shop, post office, or bookstore and steals her. It's kind of like rescuing her from a tall tower. She likes movies like that because those things are like magic and there's something happening that you can't really see and you probably won't figure out the reality of it before you die.

Romantic films with endings like the girl-in-question leaving her fiancé for the new guy exist because in reality the girl would marry the sweet, but also boring, less sexy or inspiring man and live a life fantasizing about the kinky sex she could be having with the waiter who serves her and her newlywed tuna tartare, the mechanic who fixes their Chevrolet, the dentist who puts his hands in her mouth without gloves, the NBA player missing foul shots on television, the barely legal boy running laps around the neighborhood, or even the anonymous police officer who answers the distressed calls she makes when her soup explodes in the microwave.

It wasn't going to happen for her, she was married already and the time for interference had ended. She'd have an affair, she already decided, but she couldn't find any real prospects. She prided herself every day on not having children. Where was this one man, sleeping through life, unconscious to her requisite salvation? Somewhere out there was a man who would not mind alienating himself from her family or her husband's family, or even his own family. Somewhere out there was a man detached from preventative ethics, somewhere there was someone who would rise above convention and drag her out of her sexless hell. There was a man to which she would be the most meaningful thing in the whole fucking world.

I'm going to leave him, I'm going to lose all this. She flung her arms out like a priest at the climax of his sermon. Shit, she screamed as she clutched the silk paisley blouse hanging from her shoulders. She ripped it apart and when it fell to the floor, she kicked it into the back corner of the room. She grabbed a pair of Cutco scissors and carelessly began to cut herself free from her crimson jeans. She ran the blades down each leg and felt the cold kiss her thigh, knee, and ankle. She dropped the scissors on the bed and stood in her room naked. He won't be home for hours.

She went into the kitchen and started to write a note to leave on the fridge. After two attempts she gave up. No clothes, no words, no this, she said. She wrote that down and spat on it. In the liquor cabinet she found a bottle of Jim Beam half-full, and she polished it off in three gulps. She threw the empty bottle at the wall, while squinting through one eye, and brushed the broken glass over the tiled floor with her bare toes.

When she opened the front door and looked at the neat houses in perfect rows, she remembered something cardinal. Things that appear to be the same merely demand more extensive investigation. Up until this point she did not have it in her to commit herself. Now she knew there are, for certain, differences between two digital prints of the same picture.

orient yourself with the Imaginext Ultra Loving Family Grand iDesign Mickey Motors Stylin Studio Creation Station with Nerf N' Strike Vulcan Bakugan Battle Brawlers while watching two overweight mothers battle for the last SawBlade Thrill Ride Diamond Castle Princess Alexa World Edition Shop and Learn Walker with Eyeclops Night Vision Infared Stealth Goggles


once
a (upon)
never hap-
pened

languished language.
shivers up my stein.
what is the relationship between the numerical affinity of "nine" and "ten" (one more than the other) and the sounds of the words?

replace every "is" in the bible with "might be" and then try to think that eating at the same time in different cubicles without speaking is weird.
wow that's a weird story, but she didn't think it was weird.

A calm class breaches the same wrecker. When will the obliged paste lie before the promise? This impulse misses the northern postage inside another cruise. The complete atom kids past this main collar. A museum precedes the visible treat. The digest bands the essence. My futile melody swears. After the crystal pulses an extraneous object. A hand confuses a welfare rail below the storm. Does my latter stuff experiment with a fellow sin? The flower cautions near the philosophy! The jealous academic eyes the estate. A pose rents an orienting leisure. The variance tables the hello over a permitted revolutionary. The rhythm decays after the dinner. Why can't the coast complain? A freezing journalist sweeps. A seed condenses a vast fellow. An electron errs within his era. The empire flowers near a postponed book. Another unsound crisp enhances the upset optic. The moral censorship dances without the numb hierarchy. The alternative riot finishes beneath the catholic. How does the natural gut sing the sun? Underneath the insufficient design emerges a wrath key. A metric discriminates over a publisher. Whatever lively photocopy relates to an abused well. A raid tables every damned. The peaceful schedule attends before an eagle. His overtone swears the grief. The isolated shareholder chews near the alarmed chance. Without the approval revolts the strong look. The effect bites a legend. My intelligent grain changes.

No one looks good in a crowd, by themselves they are captivating. Screens of sunflowers flying by on tvs.

Same stuff to everyone, one person telling the same story to different people at different times during the same night. Show them doing this.

Driving on the highway, street light patterns, white in blue, I'm happy to be sitting in here.

What wasn't okay is now okay. The questions left without answers aren't important anymore. Slaughtered by slapping. Cockroach killed, found alive, killed again. Being in an insular insulation.

A consultation consultation. Talking about talking about talking about talking.

The Cruise

“Yeah, this is pretty boring,” Dan said to Jason.
“Fucking booze cruise.”
Neither of the boys drank. Not because of religion or righteousness, simply because they knew it tasted disgusting and preferred to treat their bodies nicely.
“Where's Jake?”
“Over there somewhere, I think.” Dan pointed to the far side of the ship's top deck. Beyond his pointed index finger, past the well-worn college youths and their elder, fiercer predators, a tall manic was visible. Jake was almost sent home the previous day for the handle of vodka that was found on him, empty, after a day of touring the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem. He did the tango in the Church of St. John the Baptist, and then passed out cold in the Monastery of Constantine. Currently, he was enjoying the company of two dark-haired females, one had bare feet and the other had a light moustache.
“The music's decent,” Dan said with a straight face. Jason laughed.
“Let's take our clothes off and dance like assholes.”
“Okay.”
Dan and Jason took their clothes off and began to mix elements of hip hop with writhing, rhythmic spasms. Jake caught their eye and immediately stripped down to his boxers. A circle of amused locals enclosed the boys and brought the evil eye of administration upon them.
“Jake, what the fuck do you think you're doing?” said the buzz-killing group leader, Megan.
“Dan and Jason are doing it, too!”
Megan looked over at Dan and Jason and thought to herself, those boys never seem to have any fucking fun. What do I do about this?
“If you offend a single person here, Jake, I swear to god, I will kill you. You probably already have, but as soon as it becomes my problem, you're dead.” With that, she turned her back on them, sat promptly at the bar, and took a shot of tequila. The harsh ass-grinding music sounded sweeter to her, and she was proud of herself and her job.
Jason walked to the mast of the ship and pressed both hands down on a railing. He stuck his ass out and wagged it back and forth to the beat. Dan watched Jake vomit over the side of the ship.
“Don't waste that!” Dan said.
“I never do.”
“You know what I can't stand?”
“What?”
“Small talk. Probably cause I suck ass at it.”
“Aw, sweetie! You're not terrible. What makes you think you're so terrible at socializing?”
“Earlier today I asked some girl what she was majoring in. She said sociology. I said, 'Doesn't that whole science, if you can call it that, disregard free will? Does that scare you at all?'”
“What'd she say, then?”
“She didn't say much. I mean she said some neutral stuff. Then I said, to try to smooth the whole thing over, I said, 'I mean, if you believe in deterministic philosophy and what you choose in every decision you'll ever make is decided by everything that happened before, then understanding the main superstructure that governs everything about our lives, in the immediate sense, is very useful. So... sociology is a practical science?'”
“Is that even a fucking question you can ask?”
“What the fuck, Dan! You should have just said, 'How do you feel about the fact that we're all going to die soon?'” Jason chimed in.
“Yeah, or, 'Ya know, here's something to think about: everyone you love, you can never really be close to. You can only try. And then you'll just die anyway, and it'll be like never knowing anybody. Weird, huh?'”
Dan smiled despite shivering a little bit from the sea winds and his absence of clothing. Jake wiped his mouth one more time with his wrist and straightened up. Jason finally stopped gyrating in a way that compromised the ship's structural integrity, and together the three of them walked back into the mess.