From My Myspace Blog - The Perils of Polyamory

People occasionally ask me why I choose the bizarre sexual lifestyle I do. Like many other things, it really roots back to childhood daydreams, which I still refuse to believe to be invalid or impossible.

I have a lot of dreams like this, and with slight modifications I generally make them my goals. For instance, post apocalyptic warlordism is still on my list of goals, and every day I do a little more to make that dream possible. My plan is no longer what it was when I was seven or so (gather an army of kids, arm them with bolt action rifles I'd stolen from Wal-Mart, and take on the world) but it is still essentially a plan to ensure my dominion of the shattered post-zombie wasteland. I can't help that; I cling to dreams like that.

The two girlfriends dream is not that much different, and dates from around the same age. Like the zombie warlord dream, it probably stems from too much goddamn brain rotting material-in this case a small and rather obscure video game called Wizards and Warriors.

Frankly it's a crap game, though I still love it for it's bizarre nostalgia. For a long time it and Mario were the only games we had in the house. The basic premise is that you go around fighting various oddly colored bad guys and rescue princesses in bondage from terrible nasty bosses.

The game's premise was simple and as I played it in my youth, I came to a sort of conclusion-a man (a warrior) is entitled to as many princesses as he can rescue. Every level had one; every time you defeated a boss she was lowered to you on a rope and gave a little thank you speech. And in my head, this was right and good and made perfect sense-I never even questioned that Our Hero was now married to all 8 of these foxy princesses in peril, and naturally got to nail them every night.

It wasn't until later that it even occured to me that one girl was the norm for most people; I had always assumed that I got to keep any princesses I rescued for almost three years. No catch and release for me, hell no-I save your ass and it officially belongs to me.

And like most of my childhood dreams, it has evolved somewhat-I won't say matured, because the term doesn't work-but fundamentally, I'm still expecting to hack through some giant spider's neck and add another pretty girl to my collection. Not that the one that I have isn't awesome-she is frankly the perfect girlfriend for many reasons, not the least of which is she puts up with this crazy bullshit I'm always spouting-but to me, a man is entitled to what he can wrest from the forces of darkness. It's not very progressive, it's not socially liberated and it damn sure would drive any feminist nuts-but like all my childhood dreams, I'm going to cling to that fucker with both hands.

And my shining sword....er, AK...is perfectly capable of slaying whatever boss is necessary.

Last Call, Last Stand - Part 8

At first I had trouble figuring out what was wrong with Phebe. When you don't sleep much, you sometimes don't recognise exhaustion in other people very easily. So when she ushered me through her door, I had the damndest time understanding her as she mumbled something and then shut the door behind me, fumbling to lock the deadbolt. Her eyes were half lidded; in some ways a blessing, as I didn't get distracted by them.

"Are you okay?" I said stupidly, just as I realized how long she had been awake.

She took a deep breath, rubbing at her eyes with her free hand while still fumbling with the lock. "Yeah, just tired. It has been a long...fucking...day." She sighed, and I moved around her and handled the lock myself. For a few seconds I just stood there awkwardly behind her, trying to figure out what to say. I already regretted not grabbing a couple more addies.

"They changed your locks too, huh?" I said, also stupidly. I was kicking myself; the white was making my mouth run about ten miles ahead of my fogged brain.

"Yeah, right after they did yours. They got the power back on too." It had never been out in my apartment, though I hadn't thought of it at the time. I reached over her to twist the deadbolt into place, and she pulled herself away from me conciously; my mind conjured an image of an Indian woman recoiling from a poisonous snake under a pile of firewood, an image that stuck in my brain from my Jim Morrison esque experience on an Indian reservation trying to score some peyote a few years back. The fundamental look of disgust and controlled fear was the same. The thought bummed me out a little.

"Sorry," she said, flashing me her teeth. "Just a little inside my boundaries right now."

"Yeah, yeah, sure," I replied, smiling as well, though I didn't feel it. I took a deliberate step back from her. "Sorry." The lemon-yellow foreshocks of my comedown were looming; I started to think that maybe coming over was a bad idea.

The lights were on, but not the tv. There were still boxes and shit everywhere; grey rubbermaid tubs stacked up, each with a sheet of paper taped to it neatly. It made me alarmingly conscious of my own nearly empty fridge and cupboard. With a jolt, I realized that if the stores stopped functioning, the possibility of starvation became shockingly real. Starvation. Here, in Midwest USA-not some third world hellhole, but in a place with toilet paper and pay per view porn. That thought in itself was it's own jolt, a frigid icepick of fear shanking me like a Mara Sulvachtra in prison. I might seriously starve to death.

The human mind builds bulwarks against the obvious, sort of like poles propping up the big patchwork circus tent of lies we use to shelter ourselves from unpleasant realities. I had spent most of the past day and a half wrapped up in my own weird personal drama. Up until that moment the little social problem problem-the disaster!-was a distant and occasionally interesting thing that was happening on TV. But the poles holding me away from the truth-a drug pole and a self absorbed prick pole primarily-just snapped at that moment, when I looked at her big tubs of food, and and I realized that I faced the real possibility of starving. My buzz was gone then, and my stomach was rumbling. I fumbled for a cigarette while my big tent started falling around me, just another stupid gawker looking for the emergency exit in the dark.

"...a little safer now," Phebe was saying, sunken deep into the overstuffed pillows of her loveseat. I chose the chair I had slept in previously, trying to pretend like I knew what the conversation was about.

"So, uh," I said-Jon Mackey stumbling over his words, a rarity in any season-"how long do you think this will last?"

She cocked her head quizzically to the side, ponytail swishing across the back of the couch. "Just for like 8 hours or so, maybe ten. I just need to get some sleep, but I don't want to sleep without someone keeping an eye out...I mean, its okay if you can't do it."

"Oh, no, babe," I said, perhaps too quickly as she widened her eyes in surprise. That threw me for a moment; goddamned if a valium didn't sound good about then, and not just because of her shocked stare. "I don't mind helping you out. I meant, this, this whole situation..." I just sort of waved my arms as if to indicate the broader disaster, though I didn't really know if she was grokking me or not.

She looked puzzled for a moment; it made her eyes shine like sapphires. Delicious 25mg sapphires, ground up neatly between two spoons. Fuck it was going to be a long night. "Oh," she said after a moment. "Sorry, I'm just...losing it, Jon; I'm so tired." She paused, gave my question some thought while I studied the carpet. "I really don't know; the forecast for this week is rain, and I guess that's why people are freaking out-the riots, y'know, food and stuff."

I puffed my cigarette for a moment on that one, biting my lower lip. "Fuck," I breathed softly. "So it could get worse."

She sighed, resolutely, and touched the glock still under her stained left armpit. "It always does. So is it cool if I go to bed? Do you need anything?"

I chewed my lower lip, weighed my options. "Let me go back to my place and get a few things," I replied, dragging myself to my feet. My cellphone went off again; fucking Cesare. Didn't he know there was a fucking apocalypse on? Then again, I realized with a start, I hadn't known until a few minutes ago.

"Sure, just hurry," Phebe said. Her voice was a rich contralto. I avoided looking at her, though I told her to chill when she got up to help me with the door. I adjusted my gun in the back of my pants while I was walking out; I wasn't sure if she knew that I had it or not.

The rain did me good; walking through it sharpened my senses a bit. It was then I could hear the sirens, close by and loud. Every smart professional criminal knows the difference between the local sirens, from fire to ambulance to city police cruiser to sheriff's deputy. These were city cops, the worst of a bad lot from a scumbag's perspective-numerous, well funded and not very corrupt. I slowed down my walk deliberately, a reflex habit-I took up my unconcerned stroll by rote, even putting my hands in my pocket while I moseyed down the sidewalk in the pouring rain. Thunder shook the firmament behind me, an unhappy Zeus with a raging hardon breathing down my fucking neck the whole way there. Between thunderbolts I also heard at least one gunshot. That made me pick up my feet again and hurry.

I had left the lights on in my apartment before; I turned them off now. I grabbed a couple of spare clips for my pistol as well, and dumped them in my pockets. Then I dug into my stash, in that small wooden hope chest in my closet-four or five addies to keep me sharp, a xanny and a joint or two for the crash, a couple grams of yay for quick energy. I may have had no food in my fridge, but my stash was ready for a long siege at least. Sometimes I think my priorities might be off.

Goodies aquired, I made my way back to Phebe's place. She was already asleep on the couch when I came in quietly, snoring softly. I looked at her for a long time like that, standing awkwardly in her doorway while the storm thundered hot on my heels, dripping water on her welcome mat. In my strange, tent collapsing haze, she looked like a weird alien being to me, contentedly sleeping with her mouth slightly open and a fat black glock under her arm, in a small circle of yellow lamplight. She was beautiful, and strange, and so utterly different from every other woman I had tasted that her whitebread wholesomeness had an almost erotic quality to it.

I shook off the rain and shut the door behind me, taking care to bolt it and set the chain as well. I took my seat by the window again, popping an addie into my mouth and dry swallowing it while I stared out into the storm. My reflection in the dark glass stared back at me in profile. Somewhere in the distance, past the thin ring of scrub elm trees that surrounded our apartment complex, were those cherries n' berries every lowlife dreads; police cruisers, and moving fast. I gulped, my throat suddenly bone dry, and put off my next cigarette while I got up and walked past her into her neatly organized kitchen to get some water.

Ice clinked in my glass as I walked by the loveseat again, listening to Phebe snore, deceptively peaceful. I debated moving her to her bedroom, but decided I had no idea how to really go about being chivalrous and elected to wait, flopping back into her chair and continuing to stare out towards the now actively menacing storm. The rain came down in great snarling gobbets while thunder mixed with more frequent gunshots in the distance. Fear rose up like the taste of sour vomit at the back of my neck while the throbbing body buzz from the adderol began to exorcise the exhaustion demons from my body. My hands were shaking while I lit my next cigarette.

There was a family across the street rapidly moving boxes of stuff into their cars, even at midnight in the pouring rain. The mom, a slender black girl, was moving two sleepy kids into their carseats while the dad, an overweight white guy with a thick brown beard, shoveled things in the trunk. From where I was, it looked like a random assortment of junk-blankets, boxes of pasta, grocery bags, what looked like a heavy dufflebag. After a few minutes they stopped to argue with each other, their voices appearing intermittently like ghosts in the storm. Then suddenly I noticed two other people coming out of the apartment next door, a young professional couple that bought a dime bag of herb off me on occasion, beginning to load up their car as well.

Not knowing was intolerable; I flicked on the tv after some fumbling and turned the volume all the way to zero. The news was worse; I watched two pants-suited pundits silently go back and forth deciding who to blame while they replayed the Broadripple street riot footage, while watching the ticker carefully. A curfew was in effect for the whole county. Apparently, looters would be shot on sight. With my newfound awareness of the shitstorm I had suddenly found myself in, I found the hot sour fear taste was growing worse, my stomach actually gurgling while I worshipped at the flickering altar of our dying culture.

I decided to watch Phebe instead; she may have been an alien to me, but at least she didn't make my bowels quiver. Heavily aware of the .45 in the back of my pants, I leaned back in the chair and smoked a joint, hoping to grind the edge off my unease. I spent about two hours in an uncomfortable reverie. I was almost out of cigarettes again.

A shot rang out in the parking lot, alarmingly close. "Fuck!" I snapped before realizing it. I turned around in the chair and poked my head up to the window again. The rain made it hard to see, but I could definitely make out car headlights, a veritable train of them, all jammed up at the single exit to our parking lot. There was suddenly a lot of honking, all of it frantic, and a car alarm started wailing as well. Another shot rang out; I saw the muzzle flash in the treeline. It was then I noticed the mob.

Later I would discover the mob was essentially a mixed race pack of yahoos, only twenty or so. But as more shots started up and the shouts got closer, I swear I could see a hundred of them, a thousand; they multiplied like rabbits in my drug addled brain, and in the rain and the lightning they were all bleached a pale grey. "Phebe," I said once, to no response. "Phebe!" I hissed, louder and more forcefully.

She came awake at once, quietly. "What is it?" she said, but then she heard-the honking, the car alarms the gunshots. "Oh, Jesus," she breathed softly, and took a place beside me at the window, leaning over to stare into the darkness. Even in the chaos, I was uncomfortably aware of her body heat radiating into me again, warm sunshine on the ragged edges of my bleak grey conciousness.

"Yeah," I said. "Now would be a great time for him to show up." My gun was in my hand; I don't remember pulling it out. Hers was out as well, though she handled it much more professionally than I did.

Outside I heard the first scream. They were dragging a man from his car while he kicked his chubby legs in terror. Even through all the other noise, the distinctive crunch of his skull when someone put a shotgun butt between his eyes rang in my ears. My stomach lurched again, and I felt like I had three months worth of diarrhea backed up in my colon. I tried to keep the quaver out of my voice when I spoke, "We should get away from the window."

Phebe swallowed hard, with an impressive poker face. "Watch the door. I'll call 911."

I was glad to oblige, though at this point I was clenching my guts so hard my knees shook. I shuffled over in front of the door and racked my gun, the loud snick-snack drawing her eyes for a moment while she fumbled with her cell phone. I could hear the busy signal from where I was standing. "Oh no, no damnit," she hissed, and dialed again.

My life took on a strange stacatto rythym as I stood there watching the door, stoned out of my gourd and waging a never ending skirmish with my suddenly watery bowels. The harmony was the never ending wail of the car alarm. The melody was Phebe dialing, getting a loud busy signal, and cursing. And the solo was the screaming, puncutated with more gunshots, as the mob filtered through the pile of deadlocked cars.

At 3:04 AM the first shot shattered the window, and both storms entered our fortress at the same time.

Why "Last Call, Last Stand" is what it is

I started "Last Call, Last Stand" as a reactionary piece-specifically, my reaction to most of the fiction that exists in the survivalist blogosphere. It has other purposes too-mostly my way to express my diseased ruminations on modern drug culture and the larger American culture. But mostly it exists to combat the number of gruesome tropes that most people put in their zombie writing.

Point of fact: John Mackey is not a nice guy. The typical zombie story hero is always shown as a morally upstanding, righteous dude without the long train of personal baggage that accompanies most real people. So I said, hey, fuck it, I'll go with the abusive, drug addicted, manipulative sociopath as an archetype-hell, I know how to write from that perspective better than Captain America's whitebread perspective anyway. I don't condone the things he does, but damnit, that doesn't mean that his story can never be told.

Second Point of Fact: John Mackey is not a badass. When inserting themselves (badly) into their fiction, a lot of amateur zombie writers have a main character that is highly trained, well prepared, resourceful and intelligent. Mackey, on the other hand, doesn't even know what model of pistol he has, and will probably prove woefully inadequate in a firefight, when the time comes. He is a drug dealer, not an ex sniper survivalist with a basement full of high end rifles with thousand dollar scopes.

Third Point of Fact: Our dear Phebe is not just fan service. In some ways she is the ideal prepper's girl, a thought that I did not ignore when I was working out her outline. She has prepared due to parental influence, is competent with her own weapons systems, and is a level headed and practical person with a good heart. But I am taking care to make her human as well (though so far your only clue is that she gets pit stains, one thing that never happens to chicks in the movies no matter how many abandoned streets they run down) and she and John are going to have some hellacious conflicts in the story to come.

I tried NaNoWriMo last october, and failed miserably. But somehow this story kept lingering in my head, and it got to where I could practically taste Mackey's fear when the news was getting worse and the coke was coursing through his system, could hear the distant shouts of an approaching mob through the rainstorm. And now I think I have to finish it, for his sake if not my own.

So stay tuned, if you'd like. You will find, despite the cheap shock effect of the stripper abusing John Mackey, that this is at heart a story of redemption. When viewed through the proper filter, you might even find it is the story of my redemption, buried in metaphor. I hope you'll enjoy the ride. But either way, I'm going to ride it to the end.

A side note: You will find chapter links in the sidebar now, so navigation should be easier. Look forward to a new section soon.

Thanks for reading.

Random Thoughts from Disneyworld

You can really tell the native Floridians from the tourists. When the mercury hits 39 the natives are panicking like its Fimbulwinter, while the non natives are thinking "Hm, glad I packed a light jacket."

Jeeeeeezus, even the grass is scrubbed clean. I'm afraid I might get fined for farting.

No matter what they say, the "cast members" are employees. Very, very bright eyed and bushy tailed, pathologically helpful employees, but employees nonetheless. No one there is sweeping up streets or scrubbing toilets for love of the craft, thats for damn sure.

It must take a fantastic amount of work to keep this place going. I wonder what the price for cocaine is around here.

The smoker's gulags are all shoved off into the corners of the park. But at least they gave us benches; christ knows its the only time you get to sit down. Still, I wish all these motherfuckers would stop bringing their kids over here while they smoke. Its fucking Disneyland, you'd think they'd be able to amuse themselves somewhere. Then again, my presence here obviously means they didn't screen for perverts at the gate.

This street parade is fairly impressive; it's like a squeaky clean version of Rocky Horror. If one of those guys on stilts comes over here and tries to get me to dance, though, I'm going to kick one of the stilts and watch him topple over. Oh, shit, that one's a chick; now I feel bad. Well, not really. But it will look worse in court.

I bet they keep Walt Disney's frozen corpse here somewhere. That'll be just great, frozen animator zombie rising from under the castle to menace the living, and me sitting here completely unarmed. Fuckin' great.

Overall, I am very unimpressed with the burger of the future. Also, the lounge music is fucking stupid.

You know, I understand they need to make money with this park and everything, but I can't exit a single ride without passing through a gift shop.

Ozzy and Me

Welcome to the (other) recurring section of my blog, where I discuss my various relationships with celebrities and fictional characters (there is no difference between the two) in the context of giving you a little bit about my background. Tonight's edition: Ozzy Osbourne and Chris By-The-Throat, Wonderchums of the 90's.

My first exposure to Black Sabbath was when my Aunt Steph gave me a battered tape of We Sold Our Soul for Rock n' Roll, when I was about 12. It was summertime, and I was reading the Empire Trilogy by Janny Wurts and Raymond E Feist. I listened to that fucking tape on repeat while I devoured the entire trilogy, buried neck deep in the Tsurani empire's Byzantine politics and with the thrum of Geezer Butler's bass keeping time to the march of massive armies. I still hear the harmonica bwangs from "The Wizard" every time I think of that weird order of mages they have in that series. It was a mind altering week of laziness for me, as those halcyon summer vacation days rolled by, because my already ludicrously rich fantasy life made the leap from novels to music. It was like opening a whole new world to me. Before that year, I was aware of music but only of whatever crap was playing on the radio on the school bus or in the car-I never really listened to music by choice and was much more interested in books and video games. But the scary topics and powerful riffs awakened me; I was baptised in metal and would arise weirder than ever from below.

Fast forward two years. I was 14 and it was the beginning of my cousin Jake and I getting truly close. My Tio Jay, who would later influence my taste in music with various other bands, had given me a Black Sabbath CD I didn't know existed-one post Ozzy and Post Dio, called Forbidden. Don't look it up; it is the most retarded of their records, with the possible exception of the one with Ian Gillian (Deep Purple) as frontman. Anyway, that was the summer we got our Nintendo 64s; I was spending a lot of time at Jake's house. At the time we were feasting on snack cakes and drinking pepsi while we played Shadows of the Empire, getting high snorting his mom's pills and occasionally smoking her roaches, and fighting in the Intergalactic Civil War while "Illusions of Power" (with an appearance by ICE T) blared on the stereo. It was a good summer of wastefulness and youthful decadence, as well as dreams of conquest fueled by caffeine and video game violence. We talked about taking over the world, and the ways we might do it, many of which boiled down to "Build a Giant Fucking Robot and Stomp the School" in predictable teenage fashion. We snuck cigarettes and watched Heavy Metal about 400 times and plotted how we could get those three slutty girls a few trailers over to come over and fool around. We proudly knew nothing, and yet hated everything, and wasted our time while that god awful album played in the background, and I will always remember that summer interspersed with the weird, cheap, retarded lyrics, which always has the ol' star wars blaster sound dubbed through in my head.

It wasn't until I was 16 that I got the self titled Sabbath album. The On Cue had just opened in town and it was the best place to get music, since they were the only ones that sold anything uncensored (Well, the pawn shops carried a lot of uncensored records too, usually having been sold there by parents who disapproved of their kid's purchases) and I remember walking in there all excitedly, this being that fall's high school hotspot. I had wanted this album for awhile, and it would be the first CD I ever bought with my own money. For some reason no other media stands out in my head for this record; it lives alone there, all five tracks including the longest, most awesome gonzo metal jam ever written, standing out alone against the various other fluff media sewage that fills my brain. My mom and I listened to it together the same day; I went over to visit her apartment since she had a cd player and I didn't yet, and we listened to it over and over and just talked. It was the beginning of mine and my mom's relationship as adults, and we talked about the various slings and arrows of teenage life along with our frank, cynical views of current events. For me the album always conjures memories of my mom's fornica counters, lime green flooring and rickety kitchen table in her apartment. It was a good day, and the roots of the great relationship we have now.

My coke years (18-20ish) were set to the strident tunes of Dehumanizer. I had gotten the record off of, you guessed it, Tio Jay, who generally had no use for Sabbath that didn't have Ozzy. But the music was electric rape for your veins when you're on the yay; it blazes violently through your synapses like Mongol hordes through Chinese fishing villages. I still get a sympathetic rush from hearing "I" played REALLY FUCKING LOUD in stereo, one that conjures memories of artsy independent films and the cold feeling of a park bench against the side of your nose.

Fast forward another couple of years, to the worst year of my life bar none-living with the psycho ex in my dead grandfather's house, working graveyard shift beneath a giant trundling vat of molten metal that was one bad ball bearing away from Hans Solofyin' me. My good buddy Jess and I worked at the same factory (he had the equally dangerous job of flipping around large razors on a hanging platform) and he used to give me a ride there every day. He had a copy of "Heaven and Hell" on tape which I had listened to before but not on a regular basis, and then one day it got stuck in the tape deck of his crappy red van and basically for the next six months we listened to it every night while we shuffled to work (our only break from our insufferable cunt girlfriends) and toked up furiously in the car on the way home every morning. (Our jobs were too dangerous to get baked on the way there.) That sort of became our workin' man's salvation album by default, since for the duration of that van's life the radio didn't work and there was no way to change out the tape. That was a dark year, but there are good memories attached to it as well-shooting up alarm clocks, throwing spears at an old mattress, barbequeing every day so we wouldn't have to do dishes, and getting ripped on the roof of our neighbor's house while we blared the music from the van in the driveway. To this day I hear that song and I am transported down to those dark years, but I can see the light and the beauty and the truth in them now, so that's okay-it's my portal to my lowest point, and I believe we should never forget those low points.

So I guess this is really less Ozzy and Me, and more Dio and Me, but there you have it-I have always preferred the Dio sabbath to the Ozzy, and I'd say that at Ozzfest surrounded by poseurs any day of the week. The life of Chris By-The-Throat, as told by Black Sabbath. If you think that's weird, wait until Dave and Me-my relationship with monster magnet is much weirder than my relationship with Sabbath, and tainted with much better drugs. To say nothing of Alice and Me, which I might have to take to my grave.

Give me Cunnilingus or Give Me Death

So theres a lot of growing buzz about a civil war lately, in both the gun blogs and even the main stream media.

It puts me in an unusual position, as a gun nut. I believe that it is the right and duty of the people to overthrow any government they cannot stomach. If I thought that a) the government could not be changed by nonviolent means and b) that they were unfairly imposing on our civil liberties as Americans, I like to think I'd do my part to help out the effort to hang any and all appropriate persons. It may not be true; I'm not a badass operator and I don't pretend to be, so it's possible I would get stoned and cower behind my stack of D&D books. But I like to think it.

The conundrum is thus; a bunch of people are making a lot of noise about a return to the constitution. This is great, and I approve of their initiative. What I suspect are their motivations. Once the Big O got elected, suddenly every conservative, even the most repugnant of neocons, suddenly became a stalwart defender of constitutional liberty and limited government. It's the old saw that gets thrown in the Tea Partier's faces-where were you when Dubya was raping the constitution? The answer? Getting rich from various forms of war profiteering, playing footsie under airport bathroom stalls, and ramming domestic wiretapping through a panicked congress. But make no mistake-what began as a libertarian movement is in danger of being hijacked 9-11 style by conservatives who are so desperate to regain power that they will give sloppy lip service any crazy idea-even such radicalism as following the Constitution they swore an oath to.

It is this that concerns me. Let us suppose, for a moment, that our fearless general chris by-the-throat joins up with the budding revolutionary army organized to bring the constitution to a federal government grown too corrupt to safeguard our liberty anymore. By some miracle he comes through alive and is well liked and lauded by his peers, whom he helps put an emergency congress together along with a temporary acting president who promises to restore order and sanity to the governemnt. A crack team of constitutional lawyers and judges start rewriting the criminal and civil code immediately. The victors gather in the White House for celebratory drinks and cigars while they hash out a couple of PR issues. Our hero takes a seat at the elbow of one of his peers, a man whom he likes and trusts as they worked together during the revolution. The table grows quiet, and someone slaps a proposition on the table. "All right," he says, chomping his cigar, "about those goddamn homos...."

A general chatter goes up around the table, where Hollywood Homos are blamed for the stagnant government before, made into scapegoats. They are mostly unarmed, and make a good target for an America eager to lay blame somewhere after the chaos and violence of an armed revolution. Their weakness and decadence is blamed for corrupting the hearts and minds of our politicians, rather than the billions and billions of dollars being pumped into politicians bank accounts by people who want shit. Sometime before the camps are erected, our hero ducks out to start the whole goddamn process over again.

I believe in a free America. But my vision of freedom doesn't include rounding up my family and friends for the crime of getting hot over the wrong set of genitals, and I'll be goddamned if nothing has changed about conservatives. Terrorists are plotting to attack our citizens, debt is spiraling out of control, there's the ever present threat of pandemic, but these stone age fucks are still losing sleep because somewhere out there some guy is sucking cock.

Thus my dilemma. Put simply, I won't be party to hauling off my uncle, several of my good friends, my wife or anyone else off to reeducation camps so they can pray the gay away. I don't really have it in me to run a gay underground railroad, and I sure as hell don't have it in me to fight not one but two wars. But as more and more Conservatives, who haven't changed a bit beneath that fresh coat of constitutional paint, line up behind the 9/12 Tea Party movement with carefully constructed new rhetoric but the same old bullshit, I start to think that I should take a couple steps back from this movement.

Because I love my guns, and I love freedom, but if I have to live in a world without lesbian action to get it, that would basically be like losing. Maybe, you say, I have my priorities wrong. And I'll freely concede that I'm one of the crazy ones. But when it comes to freedom, I'm not gunning for a slice here or a slice there; I want the whole fucking pie, six feet by six feet, and I want two naked twins grappling in it. I don't know how the rest of America may sway, given the circumstances and lies thereof, but as for me-give me cunnilingus or give me death.

Last Call, Last Stand - Part 7

One of my favorite lines of bullshit in American Popular Mythology is the image of the modern day drug dealer. The modern day drug dealer on TV is a bizarre psychological artifact from drug PSA's in the 80's and 90's, lurking on the street corner next to a payphone with little tied off baggies and his hands in his pockets, looking back and forth and protected by a red slash of gang graffiti directly overhead. In this adorably folksy but gratingly persistent image, he is a black male with a tec 9 under his hockey jersey, or less often a greasy white guy with a skullet and a sawed off shotgun down his pants, calling out to random passers by "I got whatchoo need, I got whatchoo need." Like most archaic mental artifacts, it is woefully inaccurate, but creates a sort of hybrid truth by simply persisting as long as it does. This makes everyone happy. The users are happy because they learn a protocol that is instinctively adopted by undereducated, small time dealers in the worst of neighborhoods. The police are happy because it results in a predictable group of rubes doing exactly the same thing every time. And John Mackey is happiest of all, because he never gets caught.

My apartment is modestly upscale, nothing more than most other experienced telemarketer could manage. That's another important point-other than the bazillionaire tycoons, most modern dealers have a dayjob, if nothing else to cover their income. Other than an excessive amount of locks on my doors, nothing would distinguish it from the apartment of any other pink collar loser. Shaking off the rain in great glittering droplets, I shut the door behind me and slammed the chain into place. With one hand I flicked on the lights, revealing the neat interior, my other hand holding my cigarette and shaking badly. The itch was in my guts then; it coiled and snarled and thrashed against it's bindings, and I didn't even turn on the tv or radio, couldn't even bring myself to keep track of what was rapidly becoming dire news. All that mattered was the large plastic box in my utility closet, hidden behind the water heater. The world shrunk down to two very small, hazy orbs as I fumbled open the closet door and kicked open my treasure chest.

My phone rang again-Cesare's ringtone. Fuck him. I had more important things to attend to.

Most people also picture those tiny tied off baggies-what those who buy weed call "crack ties" along with other, less flattering racial epithets, mostly because it is used by dealers in the inner ghettos. The problem is that the cops have seen those stupid fucking gangster movies too, and anyone with a collection of small tied off baggies is booked for intent to distribute before you can say "reasonable search and seizure." A scale is much more likely to be written off, and so I tend to just keep my fine china in a small glass vial. My hands could barely work the stopper after I fished it out from among what Hunter S Thompson would call "a whole multicolored galaxy of uppers, downers, screamers, laughters" and I didn't even shut the box before I stepped into my bedroom.

Time tuned out to a vague dull roar as I went snowblind and resumed my favorite activity-pacing up and down my hallway and cursing. There was a well worn patch in my carpet already, and it was easy to slide back into the groove and let it all go away-the stripper ex, Crystal, Cesare, the fucking apocalypse outside my door. In fact after awhile all I could see and think about was Phebe's valium blue eyes-they haunted me from end to end of my little apartment, from groove to groove, from line to line, from cigarette to cigarette. Nothing else shone through that loud white wall, not for several hours. As I said before, it was past midnight before I even cared enough to flick on the news.

The thing about yay is that you focus on minutae a lot. The tv was flashing with a lot of big crazy movements, but all I could really take in was the ticker, which was scrolling torturously slowly across the bottom of the screen. It said "...MASSIVE RIOTING CONTINUES IN GREATER INDIANAPOLIS, GARY, BLOOMINGTON, FISHERS. TRAVEL ADVISORY: SEVERE FLOODING I-65, IN-465. GOVERNER DANIELS "STAY AT HOME AND REMAIN CALM." ALL EMERGENCY SERVICES PERSONEL..." My eyes finally unfocused enough to take in the images on the screen, sort of like a magic picture in reverse-as my vision sharpened, I could see a mob of people charging through the rain up Broadripple, filmed on a shaky handcam from the roof. Not gangbangers or malcontents, but folks in the uniforms of all those trendy cute shops and resturaunts, screaming in a mass hysteria and throwing bricks through plate glass windows. The handicam image was accompanied by a steady flow of inane reporter babble. "...sent into our station by a viewer at Pepper's on Broadripple, where the south side riots have spread to. Tom, what do you make of this?"

"Well, uh, I can't say for certain Andrea, we've never seen rioting on this scale without an underlying ethnic cause, and, uh, most studies say that riots like this are highly unlikely in the rain..." The image had looped itself again; now I saw the beginning, which differed only a little from the end except that a few loud gunshots could be heard in background. The guy talking, which the subtext identified as a "Social Psychologist" which I liked to interpret as "Professional Bullshitter," continued in his bland academic monotone while I bent my head to ride another rail all the way across my mirrored coffee table, my own reflection wild eyed and flushed with excitement. "I think we're seeing something new here, Andrea, and I'm really uncomfortable with it. Ethnic tensions could be to blame; Indianpolis has always stood out as a starkly divided city, uh, I mean economically of course..."

An unpleasant thought occured to me; Broadripple was right in the guts of Indy, and thus right between me and the always unpleasant south side projects, where I had expected the riots to be confined. If they were rioting downtown, with it's heavy police presence and a fucking rainstorm on, it could easily spread to where I was. Paranoia spiked hard in my gut then, though the bottom didn't quite drop out of my razor sharp equilibrium. First thing I did was go and check my locks again, though I did look uncomfortably at my large picture window while I finished a roach from my ashtray to calm my nerves.

Second, I went and reached under my bed for my gun. If I was inclined to educate the younger generation in Illegal Business 101 (that is, if I were interested in competition) I would probably start with this truism-if you need a gun on you all the time, you are dealing with the wrong class of customer. Most of the time this thing, a heavy steel brick of a .45 like they use in old war movies, just collects dust under my bed. But the fact of the matter is that I can't go to the better business bureau if I get screwed over, so I have to plan accordingly. It had never been fired in anger, and in truth I wasn't that great of a shot, but I felt better immediately once I had it in my hand. Lacking a holster, I tucked it in the back of my pants and went back in the bedroom to do another line.

Afterwards I smoked a cigarette and watched some more of the news; predictably it was mostly replays of the Broadripple footage with more retarded voice overs from so called experts-I figured nobody could get a news chopper in the air with the rain still coming down like it was. The ticker spat doom regularly, a long purple ribbon of alarm scrolling just underneath the carnage. I was starting to get nervous, mostly from not knowing, but I insulated the feelings well with a higher-than-usual drug intake. Still, I was strung pretty high when my phone went off again in front of me, nearly buzzing off the side of the coffee table, and I almost jumped through the roof.

It was Phebe-her name was entered in my phone's contact list now, though I still didn't remember doing it. I snatched up the phone, thinking of her eyes again, that old terrible, womanizing Jon Mackey hunger only heightened by what I still couldn't quite admit was fear.

"Hey, Johnny," she said. I was impressed by how well she was hiding her own jangled nerves. "You watchin' the news?"

"Yeah...it's bad, isn't it?" I said, in a low, serious tone that sounded oddly unreal coming out of my blasphemous mouth. My buzz was holding at a high hum, and it was a little hard for me not to giggle or curse.

There was a long pause before she continued. "Listen," she said, and in her tone at the first word I could already see her pants tossed casually aside, though a strange new voice inside me seemed oddly offput by the idea, "I am going to fall asleep really soon, and I really don't want to get caught by surprise...did you..." Her voice dropped to a whisper, though on the razor's edge of my fresh coke high I could hear it easily "...did you see what they did to that girl in Chicago? I was hoping that, well, since you slept over here earlier, that, uh..."

"...that I could return the favor?" I supplied the response, sensing how uncomfortable she was asking for help, and laughed a bit. "Yeah, yeah...no problem. It's only fair, and I'm up anyway."

I could practically hear her quizzically cocking her head. "Really? It's 1am."

"Oh, I'm a night owl," I lied, and added quickly "Listen, I'll be right over." In fact, I was in motion almost before I realized it, pausing only to grab a pack of stale rolling tobacco off my dresser and some papers from my treasure chest.

"Thanks, Johnny...I appreciate it." Her blue eyes burned in the back of my brain while I stepped out into the unyeilding rain. Maybe that was what blocked me from hearing the nearby sirens, but I don't think so-the dull roar in my ears was all my own making.