DELICIOUS TACOS

THE PUSSY

What Now, She Says

We go out a couple times. We make out, maybe we bone. Or maybe we don’t, and I just never call you. Or maybe we do, and then we get married and move slightly out of town to some place where people of modest means can get a pretty big yard, and we get a goat, but the fucking thing is too loud and keeps chewing through the fence- they are surprisingly clever animals. Maybe it actually figures out the latch. But point being the goat keeps getting out and getting into the neighbor’s yard and eating his heirloom tomatoes or whateverthefuck- maybe we laugh at this. Maybe this discord with our neighbors only brings us closer together, like, us against the world. Maybe not, maybe you never wanted to get it in the first place, maybe you never wanted to move to the suburbs, maybe you secretly blame me for everything moving too fast and now you’re stuck here out in Calabasas or something and now you’re like 33 and if you leave me you’ll never have biological children, but if you stay with me you don’t know how you can stand even one more fucking second in this house in the middle of nowhere and separating the bank accounts is going to be such a god damned pain in the ass, and the goat isn’t cute anymore, it was a stupid idea, and it has an expected life span of like 35 more years but any place you give it away to might use it for meat and that would pretty much be unconscionable. You don’t want it, but you can’t get rid of it. That’s what it’s going to be like with you and me in like four years. Maybe. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t have a fuckin crystal ball.

Sunday Call with Mom

Have to call my mother. Haven’t spoken to her in three weeks. This puts a lot of pressure on the conversation. No doubt she has done things in the past three weeks, and I will hear about those things. It will now take three times as long to hear about all the things. Meals she has prepared; Amnesty International meetings she went to. Things pertaining to yoga, her yoga instructor. Her yoga instructor’s husband. He is a musician. He plays in a band; perhaps my mother will have gone to see the band perform, typically at an Italian restaurant. I will hear about the quality of the show.

Then I will be expected to say things. My things should also, logically, take three times as long as normal to say because of the lacuna in our communication. But I don’t talk about work. I hate talking about work; I am ashamed of how menial and unrewarding my job is, plus, bringing it up in any detail makes the humiliation and trauma fresh to me, and I don’t want her to hear this in my voice. I don’t want my mother to know that my life is mostly horrible. I also can’t talk to her about the thing that makes me the most happy, which is having unprotected sex with women much younger than me, right after I meet them. I can’t tell her how I’m extremely good at this and I’m pleased that I have become so practiced at it. That I had feared that as my age advanced and my hair turned gray and yet I still didn’t have any success or money, that the type of woman I am attracted to, which is ones that are over fifteen years younger than me– I had feared that I would lose my access to these women, that they would see me as a gross boring old pervert. But in fact it is easier when you are thirty six years old to have unprotected sex very fast with nineteen year olds than it has been at any other time. It is unbelievably easy, like a joke, and I can see this going on for ten more years, and their bodies are so beautiful, their pussies just lightly musky and fresh-tasting; I love when I’m fucking them to pretend that I’m going to ejaculate inside them and my copious seed will find purchase in their fertile and healthy young wombs and they will be pregnant and their lives will be ruined; this gives me so much happiness and pleasure. I cannot tell my mother about this. She likes to hear about the cat though.

I can tell her about birds I’ve seen and days I’ve spent in the park or mountains, and meals I’ve prepared. We can discuss different techniques for roasting a chicken, though frankly, I have absolutely perfected roasting a chicken and it should be a one sided conversation. But she tipped me off to a side dish where you simply halve a baguette and sit the chicken right on top of it, allowing fats and juices to soak into the bread which becomes a moist, rich, crusty sort of toast. This was revolutionary for me because previously roasting a chicken was a day long labor due to the side dishes: mashed potatoes or pommes Anna; drunkenly wrestling with wet slippery tubers and sharp blades– having an effortless yet delicious starch means a chicken can be roasted after work on a Tuesday night. Just because you have a stressful career is no reason you shouldn’t live well.

I kind of want to tell her: Ma, I’m all fucked up, I’m trapped in this job and it’s crushing me and I have no way out, and I’m a sex addict and I always hurt people and I’m going to get AIDS; I drink like a hobo and wake up on weekdays so hung over that my eyeballs hurt; sometimes I get so drunk on work nights that I break things and cry. I don’t know what I’m gonna do and please please help me. And if she knew that was how I felt she would desperately want to hear it. But I don’t want to worry her. I don’t want her to be sad. And it’s true, you know, I do like cooking chicken and looking at birds.

I wonder what shit she has going on that she’s keeping from me. Maybe she’s fucking nineteen year olds too, who knows.

Tippy the Thirsty Squirrel

If I didn’t have to fuck I’d move to Montana. Get a cabin; some acreage. Out there you can own a pond. Maybe; I have no fucking idea. But I’m pretty sure you can get a place on a fuckton of land with a breathtaking view of snow capped mountains and possibly a creek running through it where you can flyfish, if you’re into flyfishing. Huge meadows, maybe lightly forested, that bloom in the spring with tiny delicate wildflowers. Songbirds massing on trees to pick berries in the fall; stopping through on their way to Panama. Elk. Deer. Wolves maybe. Bears. Maybe one nosy and mischievous bear with whom you are constantly in an arms race as he finds more and more fiendishly clever ways to get into your garbage and you find more and more Rube Goldbergian ways to keep him out, and you secretly respect and take delight in such an adversary until one day he mauls your dog and you have to just shoot him. Then he becomes an awesome rug for your hearth. His face snarling in the firelight, even though in life he just looked a bit curious and dumb like a gas station attendant who hasn’t done math in fifteen years trying to figure out a piece of long division.

If I didn’t have to fuck I’d move to Montana. Cold clean snows, a big garden; big blackberry patch like you would find in the woods when you were a kid and come out looking like the Passion of the Christ. A wife who would home can these berries. Scold me for eating too many fresh; that’s a jar of preserves you’re gonna miss in the winter. I will look up guiltily with my lips purple and give her one of those chimp grins with seeds in my teeth. Incorrigible. She’ll playfully bat me with her wooden spoon, which she has boiled to prevent botulism. My wife is no home canning slouch.

Little towheaded kids running around, swimming in the creek; I have given them a very serious lecture on staying away from rattlesnakes. Dad is usually jovial so it’s a little scary when he’s serious. The rattlesnake is more scared of you than you are of him. Freezer with an elk in it. My wife is sick of elk jerky; we all are. We are sick of elk stew and elk fritters and elk salad and elk whateverthefuck but it’s going to be the better part of a decade before we are done eating this god damn elk. Elk chili. She is sick of conscientiously braising game meats so it’s not like biting into a fan belt when you try to eat it. Just once she would like to fry something in a pan for five minutes and be done. Just once she would like to order some fucking Chinese, but it’s the god damn Pony Express out here. There are no Chinese people in Montana. A guy would have to haul those little paper cartons over a mountain pass on a mule to get Chinese food here.

But yeah… just a cabin in a big field surrounded by flowers and animals. Big clouds at sunset; big thunderstorms. Once I find a woman I’m going to take her away there. Live on a little compound.

That’s what I want. A wife and towheaded kids and we can talk to each other and then do the rest of our talking on the internet. Because the things that make me happy are the sky, plants, and animals. The squirrel who drinks from my cat’s water bowl, who tries to get her paws on the rim and her little head at water level but just ends up tipping the bowl over and drinking the runoff– work beats the shit out of me, and I’m always hung over, but this ne’er-do-well thirsty squirrel makes me smile every time. A hummingbird drinking from a flower. Hawks circling and they do that “screeeeeee” just like on TV, echoing through the canyons as though life were returning from a commercial break on Northern Exposure. Things that make me smile are squirrels and flowers and hawks; things that make me miserable are offices and traffic and phones. Liars and hacks; hustlers; loud pushy cruel Hollywood jerkoffs. Give me a rural mountain pastor with a secret small penis humiliation porn stash every time.

Now all I need is the wife. Someone who shares this dream with me. Wake up with the dawn, look out at the meadow, smile at our towheaded kids, fresh trout from the stream for breakfast; live a simpler life. Someone who wants to get rid of this corruption of the spirit with me and sit on the porch and sing and talk in the twilight; you home can the berries and I’ll protect you from the wolves.

Lunch Break Diary: What’s on Your Mind

Always something annoying going on. Never enough time. Feel pressured; the need to put something on the blog. But this god damn squeaky door opening and closing behind me. This slouchy unlaid nerd walking back to his car with his sneakers squealing. Two maintenance guys up on the deck of the bungalow above yacking endlessly about different kinds of caulk. This new caulk they have now, it holds good and you wouldn’t believe how fast it dries. Now they are joking about caulk. But not the joke you would think. I guess if you discuss “caulk” 5,000 times, making a “cock” joke is no longer funny. But I bet it takes a real long motherfucking time for that to happen.

People walking by with their stupid conversations. Nobody is ever talking about the thing they want to talk about: fucking. Or if you’re hungry, maybe chicken. Some guy walking by having to listen to a chick talk about her god damn career; how well she gets along with her various colleagues. He cannot say “I see your point, and also: you have large titties. I would like to see and hold and touch and suck on your large titties, please.” The only thing he really thinks, he can’t say.

That’s the only thing I’m ever thinking when I’m talking to women. I would like to see and hold and touch and suck on your titties. May I do that please. I would like to sniff your used panties, woman who rings up my hamburger. I would like you to gently fondle my testicles, girl who works in the upstairs office. I would like you and your female boss who is also attractive to lightly run your palms over my naked back and slowly encroach into the forbidden space on top of my buttocks and delicately stroke my ass crack and then flip me over and suck my cock in tandem, is what I would like, please. And, yes, it is also hot outside. You have a point there. But back to the thing I am thinking: I want to bury my face in your hot sweaty pussy and I know you’re gonna be nervous because it’s so hot outside that you think it’s got a little too much musk going on, but I love it. I want the smell to stay on my face for days so I can get hard just by taking a whiff of the air. God did a great job with cuntmusk, because you can’t really wash it off. You can smell a ghost of that scent on your hands for days. It is especially suited to guys whose hobby is playing classical guitar, since the strict nail requirements mean the hand you reach deep into a girl’s musky cooch is different than the hand you jerk yourself off with. You don’t have to keep stopping the action to smell it. I want your cuntmusk to be all over me. I want it to linger for days. OK, you have a nice night too. See you tomorrow.

I would like you to stop talking and come into my bedroom and have unprotected sex with me immediately, every girl I have ever known. I have jerked off to the thought of date raping you many times, and making you pregnant against your will, girl who thinks of me as a close and trusted friend. Any detail you have ever confidentially revealed to me that is related to sex, masturbation, or certain parts of your anatomy, I have incorporated into my fuck fantasies, even if you thought you were being gross or joking. When you talk about a gross shit you took it makes me think about your asshole and when I think about your asshole I think about fucking you in your asshole. If I could date rape you and get away with it– if some genie said go ahead, I guarantee you won’t get in trouble– I’m not saying it’s a “yes,” but it’s not quite a one hundred per cent “no,” girl who thinks nothing of being alone around me while drunk. When the bombs fall and we all turn into Mad Max, don’t think you’re gonna get my clean drinking water for free.

But instead we talk about what the women want to talk about, which is anything else that is ultimately nothing. It’s not even a compromise. If the world were equitable between men and women conversations would be fifty per cent “I would like to see and suck on your titties” and fifty per cent “I joined this kickball league, one of the girls is a graphic designer so she’s gonna make us awesome uniforms, etc. etc. etc.” and everything else. Instead it’s one hundred per cent things that don’t matter and zero per cent the only thing that does matter. And if you ever did talk about the one thing you thought, you’d get thrown in jail.

Anyway, back to work.

OKCupid: Terms of Service

Any girl who smokes will fuck you. Any girl with her body type facetiously listed as “used up” will fuck you. Any woman of Hispanic extraction will fuck you. Any Asian woman of any body type besides “thin” will fuck you. In fact, any woman at all with a body type outside of “thin” or “fit” will fuck you. Any girl who agrees to the first meeting place you propose, which is far from her but close to your insect-infested jack shack, will fuck you; any girl who says “that’s a little far, can we meet in (X neighborhood) instead?” will not fuck you and should be jettisoned.

Any girl who talks about “my son is my world and I need a man who is OK with that” will not fuck you, but any woman who has a kid and doesn’t belabor it in her profile will fuck you. Be sure to pull out. Any girl with pics of her tattoos will fuck you. Any girl with a picture of her dog will not fuck you. Dog dick only I guess. Any girl who doesn’t own a car will fuck you. Any girl who lives with her parents will fuck you, maybe just to get out of the house. Armenian girls will fuck you but only on the second date. Jewish girls will surprise you. Most of them are a pain in the ass but once in a while God’s chosen people will throw you a sexy little whore. Check how much she drinks. Black girls, I don’t know; all the ones on OKC are mutants or illiterate. We need to get word out to the community.

Every girl with weird teeth will fuck you, and they will make it apparent that they are going to fuck you at the star of the date. Every girl who mentions being insecure about being short will fuck you, not realizing that their smallness is a huge asset since all men secretly want to fuck children. Tall girls, I don’t know; tall girls disgust me. Girls who say they are into video games will not fuck you. Too many nerds coming at them maybe; they get stuck up. Girls who are into French poetry will fuck you till your sac falls off.

Shit Jobs: McDonald’s

I was sixteen and my mom made me get a job. Again. Learn the value of work. She was right, it’s a lesson I retain decades later: the value of work is less than fucking zero, a negative eating away at your soul and your life. So, thanks. I applied at the McDonald’s in Kingston, Mass.

You had to buy your own McDonald’s shirt and special synthetic pocketless pants so you couldn’t walk out with a ninety nine cent hamburger warmed to ass temperature. They took the money out of your first couple checks. The checks came three weeks late; they’d docked sixty eight bucks for the uniforms they’d sold you, and taxes were taken out, something like a third of your check. At that point you’d been working dozens of hours in the sweltering hissing clamoring kitchen, alarms constantly blaring, six hundred degree grills an inch away from the meat of your hands, swabbing the greasy tiles over and over with a filthy mop every time there was a two second lull in orders, getting yelled at– you got your check and it was fucking nothing. You had known what taxes were in an abstract sense, the ten per cent federal tax bracket, but what you didn’t know was state tax, city tax, FICA, SDI… weird acronyms… your check came an ungodly amount of time later and there was nothing left. The value of work. Cleaning the toilet, a filthy log of shit breaching in piss yellow water with toilet paper snaked over the bowl and onto the floor about one out of every four times you went in there– the value of work.

Girls were up front and boys were in the back. In theory it was an equal opportunity workplace free of gender discrimination but not a single girl worked the spattering grill or dollied sixty pound cases of frozen beef patties down to the dark freezer or hauled trash bags the size of refrigerators full of imperfect meat out to the dumpster. Not a single guy ran the cash register or talked to customers. People want to see a smiling girl with perky tits. I don’t blame them. The girls worked up front and didn’t flirt with us or really talk to us at all. They were the house slaves. They had to take the heat when we fucked something up; they were the ones getting scolded that “I told you no onions.” They must have seen us as fuckups and miscreants.

My job was the Quarter Pounder With Cheese and McLean grill. It is an excellent station, if you ever work at a McDonald’s. The volume is significantly lower than hamburger/ cheeseburger/ Big Mac and you’re not dealing with a big deep pit of face-melting frying oil. Plus, the Quarter Pounder was my preferred sandwich as a civilian. When people ordered what I made, I mentally congratulated them for making the correct choice. The hamburger is a trifle, not really food at all; you polish it off in two bites and feel like you’ve eaten greasy air. The Quarter Pounder is a real sandwich. A connoisseur’s sandwich.

You take the patties from the freezer to the left of your grill and drop them on the griddle surface frozen. They hiss and steam. There’s a clamshell lid with another heated surface that you lower on top of them, and the meat is done in ninety seconds. The clamshell grill is a proprietary McDonald’s technology that a training video has explained to you preserves maximum freshness and sanitation in the meat. A light flashes and a distinctive bell sounds and you lift the clamshell lid and spatula the burgers onto the buns you’ve prepared. You have caramelized the buns in a toasting unit which has its own distinctive lights and a buzzer that you will hear in your dreams. A training video has explained that you caramelize the buns to prevent them from absorbing the condiments and becoming soggy. I liked that they didn’t condescend to you– they kept the word “caramelize” instead of some proprietary corporate buzzword that was less hard to say. Caramelize. Ketchup, mustard out of big metal cups with handles where you pull a trigger and it dispenses the perfect amount; pickles laid with care not to overlap, onions. You drape two slices of cheese offset at a forty five degree angle so there is cheese in every bite. The videos are good at explaining why you do things. They didn’t need to; they could have just told me put the cheese at a forty five degree angle because I fucking said so, but they took the time and I appreciated it. Wrap the sandwich in the snug origami-like proprietary McDonald’s fashion. Quarters up.

You get a rhythm. Lunch rush comes and you are anticipating the buzzes and beeps and chimes and lights; you are ahead of the game and the heat lamp rack is not wanting for fresh Quarter Pounders for even one second. No shrill “WHERE ARE MY QUARTERS??!?” from the cashier girl and no quick huddles from the manager on how you have to up your game. I can’t have guys keeping us behind on this team, OK? “Grill orders,” which is the bespoke no onions type of stuff– most grill crew hated those. I loved them. You knew you were preparing a sandwich for one particular person just the way they liked it. A machine spat out instructions on receipt tape in purple ink and you had to run over and grab them and hustle to make the sandwich. When you fucked one up the manager would walk back with the tape and point out to you what it said and ask you: how did this happen? You forget that it’s McDonald’s; it’s literally the least prestigious job in the world, people laugh at you for having it, and your net income is two dollars and fifty cents an hour. You are terrified and you feel bad about yourself. The value of work.

You get a rhythm, and it gets fucked up by having to restock the patties, go to the back and get more buns, empty and sanitize the ketchup dispensers. If things slow down at all the manager will constantly bark at you for a sweep and mop. Wrestle with the filthy greasy mop in the sink and maybe cut your hands on some industrial tomato slicing device soaking there. Not one second is wasted; you are a perfect machine working constantly. McDonald’s is the best managed company in the world, right down to the slightly subnormal woman with a weird limp who smokes unfiltered Pall Malls who’s in charge of your shift– she has been indoctrinated perfectly in how to make your day tight as a drum. You aren’t grilling, you take out the trash, you sweep and mop. Drill sergeants aren’t this good. Her name was Wendy but she insisted on being called “Romayne.”

We would fuck with her. She hated being called “Wendy” so when she turned her back we would start singing “Wendy” over and over. Me and Glenn, a kid from Marshfield who ran McNuggets and french fries. Glenn was funny and smart. I was funny and smart too, and it was the first of many shit jobs where I’d find another funny and smart person and we’d kind of marvel at “what the fuck are you doing here.”

I’d be bummed out when I showed up for a shift and Glenn wasn’t there. We had an imaginary ranking system for all the cooks– you start out as a Grill Knave, moved up to Grill Apprentice, Grill Soldier, Grill Master, Grill Wizard, Grill Lord. The highest level was Grill God. Only one man had ever achieved it and he’d ascended into the Golden Arches and become a hamburger himself. You now know him as Mayor McCheese. We had long running stories about defending our McDonald’s from the conspiracies of the Burger King, Big Dave Thomas, and Colonel Sanders.

We’d get a really good riff going and then “Romayne” would come yell at us for a sweep and mop. Not one second wasted. They will get as much out of you as possible for as little as possible, and rightly view human interaction between employees as wasteful. This is good management. Some companies call this “time theft,” talking to the people you work with. They own time. They own your life, and you are stealing it. The value of work.

I took a week off because I was in the school play. When I came back they had completely gutted the store and reorganized all the machines. A new process had been instated by corporate for each food item, to insure that every McDonald’s meal was even hotter and fresher than before. They had installed something called a “Q’ing oven.” The “Q” stood for “quality.” If a customer asked what it was, you were to say “it’s just something we do to make your food taste better.”

The Q’ing oven was a microwave. But you were NEVER to refer to it as a microwave. In fact, they said, from now on, you are NEVER to use the word “microwave” while inside the store. Whether you are at the register, at the grill, or in the break room. Whether your shift has begun or not. If you are heard using the word “microwave,” you will be fired immediately and escorted from the building.

It was the “big” manager who gave this talk, Mark. The one who went to Hamburger University. The degree was framed in his office where there was a mop bucket and an ancient Tandy PC he would use to enter our hours to the second. That’s how you knew it was some serious shit– him talking to us was like a presidential address. And the word was so doubleplus ungood that Mark seemed scared of saying “microwave” even in the sentence “you must never say the word ‘microwave.’”

Mark wasn’t a bad guy, although I never forgave him for the time I fried my hand on the clamshell grill and got a blister from my pinky to my elbow, and he just scotch taped a bandage on it and made me work the rest of my shift. But he was human. He was just beaten down from fear of losing his job at McDonald’s, fear of bringing nothing home to his family. He just got so indoctrinated with corporate bullshit that he had to spend his days making a room full of teenagers terrified of saying “microwave.” The value of fucking work.

I left, but not before earning a ten cent raise as a “senior grill crew” member and a special pin for how long I’d worked there and how little I’d fucked up. Every job I’ve ever had since has been exactly the same. Someone clogged the toilet and some asshole is yelling at you to fix it, and you’ll get fired for saying what shit really is.

Epilogue:

I checked them out on Yelp. See how the alma mater’s doing. They have one star. “Order had errors. Fries were not warm. Sauce pumps were all empty. My meal came with a drink and I had to remind them. Counter was dirty. My filet only had half a piece of cheese and no extra tarter sauce like I asked.”

Fuckin Grill Knaves.

God Damn Do I Want to Fuck My Intern

Christina. Christina from Colombia. She is not hot, but she is 23 years old and looks 15 and wears puffy white skirts sliding down at the back to show half an inch of innocent pink cotton panties; sheer blouses where you can see the outline of her bra; she sits with her legs open. You can’t see pussy but you know it’s there. You imagine it under all that soft white fabric. The girl knows how to do laundry; her skirts are always white and fresh. There must be some pheromone going on because I just get this sense around her of wanting to fuck urgently, like a jackal. She is innocent; she comes off as a girl who hasn’t been with a lot of boys in her life. But that sexuality. Colombians.

I was fucking Gertrude drunk and half asleep and in the darkness I saw her face as Christina’s. She is in my subconscious. I was so drunk I really thought it was her for a second, and I was elated. The dream was coming true.

She is subservient. When she texts and emails she calls me “Mr. Tacos.” A little tongue in cheek but it gives me a deep and profound boner. She asked me if I ever get lonely. Every pore of my being was screaming that what would make me less lonely is you bending over this desk and giving me your tight little virgin cunt, but I was working too hard and just told her I didn’t really have time to answer the question. I actually prefer to be alone at work. Even with an office mate whose womb you want to plunder down to the very marrow of your bones, you know, if you’re not going to actually do that, better to have the quiet.

I could have her. If I wanted. But I can’t. I couldn’t make a move, and I couldn’t run with it if she made a move, which I think she would do if we were ever drunk together. It would be too weird seeing her at the office; we don’t connect like that. It’s not a flirty, sassy banter type relationship, it’s wanting to ravage a budding child. She must be ovulating today because it’s especially bad. I’ll need to cum into a Staples® brand C-fold paper towel in the office bathroom later, thinking of her. The seed that should have been hers.

I want her very badly, and I could have her, but I can do nothing about it. Sexual harassment laws— the Sharia of our times.

Autopilot

He was awake. Hands on a steering wheel. Trees rushing by. Most cars were self-driving these days but he enjoyed it the old fashioned way. Everything was coming back to him. He was on his way home. Emily was making a chicken pot pie. His favorite.

The day was over and he remembered nothing. The new stuff was perfect. Used to be you’d get an image peeking through once in a while, an emotion of some kind. The phone would ring and you’d get a little stab of fear. You’d still have no idea what it was about, but you’d flinch. Now, nothing. Waking up, nice hot coffee, kissing Emily goodbye. The drive to work; starlings swirling over the river. Pull up to his parking space– it was in god damn Siberia, but, who cared; he would forget the walk. Twist the dial in the crook of his elbow left, right, left again. Then he was awake and driving and the sun had moved. Ten hour shift gone by like it never happened.

People couldn’t ask “what do you do” anymore. That was almost the best part. He was old enough to remember the way things used to be, when that was everyone’s second question after “how are you.” He wasn’t exactly ashamed of his job but he never quite nailed down the one line explanation for it either. So he’d had to think about it in detail for a second, and thinking about his work made him remember his work, and suddenly his mind wasn’t at a party by the punch bowl but back under buzzing florescent lights getting reamed out by some prick.

Now, no one could ask because no one had any idea what they really did all day. It was like anesthesia. Count backwards from one hundred, you make it to about 96 and then you wake up and the work day was over. They put a reservoir of the medication right in your arm these days. You turned a dial in a combination only you knew, for safety, and the correct dosage dripped out for however long you wanted. Almost everybody had one, even Emily, who didn’t work. Just in case some trauma happened, or for a long plane ride.

He’d been in a sales gig when it came out. He hadn’t wanted to use it. But when it started to take over work itself had changed. They sold newspaper subscriptions over the phone, the Los Angeles Times. The guys who didn’t remember had nothing to lose, and were merciless. Screaming rejections were water off a duck’s back. They stuck to the script; they created a sense of urgency; they made a call to action. They crushed objections. They hammered the Ben Franklin close. Lonely old ladies who couldn’t afford it suddenly couldn’t afford not to buy the L.A. Times for more years than they would live, even if it meant giving up their cats to the kill shelter. The guys were machines and they were fucking the poor for something they didn’t need, but they didn’t give a shit. 7 o’clock rolled around and it was like it never happened. Except the big numbers they racked up.

Still, he had felt it unnatural. He enjoyed talking to people. He would draw at his little cubicle as the robodialer tried 323-462-0001, 323-462-0002… if someone couldn’t afford the newspaper, he wouldn’t sell it to them. He fell behind. His manager took pity on him and had him transferred to another division. Saul Krauss of the Connecticut Krausses, owner of The Los Angeles Times, had purchased America Online and merged the two companies. He was transferred to America Online Customer Retention. Just as well because the manager started forgetting right after that. He became a superboss and cracked down like Mussolini on the team. They sold the L.A. Times to every household in the state and were now calling through to sell every household a second subscription.

His new job was to handle people who called in to cancel their A.O.L. They provided a specific phone line for cancellations and at the other end of it was him. He got twenty dollars every time he talked someone out of cancelling and was docked five dollars every time they went through with it. What kind of stuff do you use A.O.L. for, he would ask. It was meant to sound like a technical question, like, maybe the web sites you’re looking at use up too much bandwidth, and that’s why your service is so terrible. Maybe you need to clear your cache. But really it was meant to get them remembering their internet fondly and start blathering on about their lives. The pictures of their grandkids they looked at. They would get a warm feeling, remembering a less lonely time, and a positive emotional connection to A.O.L. would be established. They had tried to ship the job to India but the Mumbai college kids weren’t able to establish the same empathy; there was something untrustworthy in their accents. At $199.99 per subscriber per year the stakes were too high. You had to pay an American.

The job got to him. Conning old people out of their cat food money. And of course the screaming, the cursing, the threats. God dammit you cancel this right the fuck away or I’ll call the Attorney General and have your job. There were follow up calls he had to make to people who’d backed out and it was always how DARE you call me during DINNER! Well don’t answer the phone then, jerkoff. But it hurt. To do the job well you had to open some part of yourself up to these people and when you were opened up they’d scream at you. Back then he was killing himself to get through those ten hours and get back home to her.

The new medications were covered by insurance. It was a pill in those days; you took it with breakfast and forty five minutes later you ceased forming new memories. He was nervous, but on the first day he came to swimming in and out of remembering in his car, and there was a post-it on the dash. He had beaten the office’s all time one day record for customer retentions. On the passenger seat was a joke trophy the guys kept in the break room. You knew, when you were “under,” that it all didn’t matter. You were the same person but you knew it would be like it never happened. You sucked it up and you kicked ass and baby got a new pair of shoes.

He had gotten ahead. Or so they told him. He was the top retainer of customers in the division and supervised a handful of his fellows. Emily didn’t have to work anymore. The cars got better and the houses got bigger. Every day he came home bright and fresh as a daisy, smiling. Emily was there with a chicken pot pie. The light of his life. She had cleaned the house and carefully rolled out a thousand layers of pastry for the chicken pot pie crust, which she layered in a becoming manner across the top. He was 44 now, although he hadn’t experienced about 10 of those years.

One day, about a half hour before his shift ended, his stent broke. And he was awake.

He was on all fours. His belly was full, impossibly full, something big and hot was pushing into him and it hurt. He craned his neck around. A black man the size of a Tyrannosaur was palming his ass with a hot hand while he forced what felt like a yule log into him. The man was covered in shiny black painted-on latex and was not smiling. He himself was wearing a dress, a ballerina’s dress, and there was something in his mouth. It was a ball gag coated in something like Vick’s Vap-o-Rub that made his eyes water. He scrambled away on his hands and knees, screaming into the gag. It took what felt like minutes to squirm off the startled guy’s member. He was in a huge room, impossibly huge, a cathedral lit by fire and all around him impossible horrible things were happening. A long dining room table with children eating from a tureen of human shit, an elderly woman skewered by a screaming stallion, everywhere dozens of people and animals were being fucked, being tortured, screaming, laughing, crying. High above at a podium Saul Krauss, of the Connecticut Krausses, Chairman and CEO of United Los Angeles Times/ America Online Incorporated, was overseeing it all, issuing commands, laughing and masturbating.

He got the gag off, screamed again, got up, tried to run, but found he had a diaper around his knees. Waddled wildly until he could get if off. There looked to be a door under a rack where a naked man was wired to a car battery, shrieking. He ran for it. Great Merciful God, it was unlocked. It opened into a beige hallway with synthetic carpet and florescent lights and acoustical tile. A poster of a man climbing a mountain encouraged DETERMINATION. He ran. He wanted the way out but realized he had barely ever seen the inside of his office while he could remember. Out a window he saw cars. The parking lot. To the left. Many stairs, and then he tripped and scraped his knees on the asphalt. He tasted salt. He was weeping, and the seed of many men was smeared across his face. He puked, and ran some more. The parking space, in fucking Siberia. He sped home, gibbering and crying.

She wouldn’t be expecting him for half an hour yet. He could smell the leftover chicken pot pie reheating. He ran up the stairs. He was still in the ballerina dress but he had to see her, had to tell her. They were raping people. There was no job, no company; the whole thing was just some rich guy keeping slaves so he could jerk off. We have to get out of here. Move to out to the desert. It’ll be hard with no money but I can live as long as I know you love me. She was in the bathroom; the door was half open. Her hand was in the crook of her arm, turning on her medication.

Tell Me Your Fantasy, She Says

I mean: I want to fuck you. That’s it. You know what fucking is like. The dick goes in the hole. Maybe I’ll put your wrists behind your head but I’m not gonna choke you or any of that shit on the first date. My cat will probably come in the sliding door I’ve left open, walk in the room, and meow. We’ll have a little chuckle. The mood will be ruined. I will continue shuffling my flagging erection into you in a workmanlike manner but I won’t be able to cum. I’ll jokingly apologize and get up and get more booze. Give the cat a can of food. Then you’ll stand behind me as I read shit on reddit. We’ll laugh but you’ll be thinking: what the fuck? This guy could have my wet young pussy and he wants to watch Russian dash cam videos? I’ll be thinking: who cares. I fucked her. Check. Now I can not think about it for a while. Also, unlike these World Star Hip Hop fights, the fucking Russians know how to break it up with a left occasionally. Black guys it’s just right right right right right.

I want to fuck you. I don’t want to hit you or pretend to rape you or shit on you or put an ice cube in your ass or dress you up as a pony or have you peg me. I want to fuck you. If you need an explanation of the mechanics I can direct you to many fine video clips.

The one thing I do want is for you to be sweaty from the airplane. I want the musk of your ovulating 25 year old cunt to have stewed and marinated on the long flight. I want your clothes to smell like Southwest Airlines recirculated air and the crumbs from the honey mustard pretzel and Doritos mix, now nut free. I want your mouth to be stale and I want you to be wearing shitty shoes and shitty jeans and I’m still gonna throw you on the floor and pull them off; give myself rug burn kneeling over you and slipping it in you too fast and laughing you off when you ask me to put a condom on. I want to nut in you without asking you if you’re on birth control but I don’t have the balls. I want to fuck you as soon as you’re off the plane and we’re in a room alone and then I’ll cum and realize I don’t know you and you are staying in my home for several days and what if you snore. I want you to spend money to get on a plane and come see me because you’re hot in your facebook photos and you were born when I was in junior high and how am I gonna say no. Then I want to fuck you for a minute and a half and sheepishly blow about 20 high pressure ropes of jizz on your stomach and think: now what.

Coffee Shop Diary: A Pretty Girl

Damn, this girl is really pretty. Which means she’s dating some guy in a band. Some guy with a job. Some guy with a smaller nose. A bigger dick. Some guy who is more confident. Some guy who would go talk to her at a party. Or perhaps this selfsame coffee shop. She sits there reading wishing a not bad looking guy would talk to her and one day one of them did and now he’s dating her. Listening to her discuss her boring schoolbooks, yes, but also fucking her. White skin black hair. Like she ought to be in a Frazetta painting wrapped around some barbarian’s thighs as he lofts a claymore over a dragon’s corpse, its eyes still glowing. Her fingers digging into the meat of your back. She notices the mass you have added to your rear deltoids. A tough muscle to isolate but you took care to hit it hard and now she notices. Her sweaty pussy on a hot day. She’s maybe 24. Young enough to have that glow, but an adult. Someone has her. Not you. You should have bought an amp and got in a band. Whatever. Her shoes are stupid.

Unemployment Diary: Want Ads

Are you PASSIONATE about finance? Rock star Executive Assistant needed for C-level exec at up-and-coming boutique firm. Ideal candidate is a detail-oriented, motivated self-starter. Thick skin and ability to handle tricky personalities a must. Salary standard with opportunity for growth. Bachelors degree, five years industry experience required.

They’re all like this. Because these people are all liars. In order for them to pay you they demand that you be a liar too. Are you passionate about finance? Of course not. No one is. No one is even passionate about money; they go after money because they have no passion and don’t know what else to do with their lives. But we want you to be motivated by passion, not a paycheck. Because we don’t want to pay you.

Rock star needed. Rock star. A rock star is a person who stays up freebasing until sunrise, whose herpes laden tattooed cock is never outside of some seventeen year old runaway. A rock star is a person who barely works forty minutes a day and then passes out in his own waste. Your job description is for a quiet drone who punches in early and meekly plugs numbers you dictate into an Excel spreadhseet. This is the opposite of a rock star. But “rock star” just means “something cool that everyone wants to be.” It means “exceptional.” We want an exceptional rock star to go above and beyond to find the best price on toner cartridges, to know that they’ll last little longer even when the printer tells you they’re empty, if you give them a vigorous shake. We could save point zero zero zero one per cent of the office supply budget this way. We want a passionate committed detail oriented motivated self starter who is a total rock star about getting the building manager to fix our toilet before the other five people with plumbing problems get their issues handled; who can outmaneuver the rock stars from that commercial real estate office on the sixth floor. We want a rock star who, when some miscreant has blocked the boss’ parking space, manages to get the offender towed and the boss’ car parked in his space and the seat readjusted to the boss’ height and lumbar curvature and neck angle and the keys back on the boss’ desk and when the boss gets out of his meeting it’s like the whole thing never happened, and not asking for credit for this, it’s just assumed. Just like Jimi Hendrix would have done.

Motivated self-starter. We fired the last passionate rock star without notice so there is no one to train you; we expect you to just know. Detail-oriented. We cannot manage you in other words, we whose job title is “manager.” I can’t be out there being passionately driven to develop new business for Wong & Goldblum Financials LLC if I’m here holding your hand through how to file my expense reports. I need a detail oriented motivated self starting rock star where you just plug it in and it works.

Opportunity for growth. You could be sitting where I’m sitting some day. Next year it could be you regarding some nervous schlump’s resume with your lizardlike eyes, tapping a pen on a pressboard desk like a fucking woodpecker on meth thinking how soon can I get out of this interview. Why does HR keep sending me these shitbirds when I asked for a chick. Sweating in a bad suit, bad shoes, eyes rubbed raw glaring at people’s stupid emails until you can’t read street signs anymore; you can’t focus on anything more than three feet away. Wondering if they monitor your internet; you’ve been reading hooker reviews, wondering if you can afford an appropriate tip for “Anastasia” who has received three point eight stars collectively and has “the cutest accent” according to whoremaster69. Bar girls are impossible, why not cut to the chase. Could be you, a rock star Account Executive flattering and simpering and Always Being Closing and terrified you’re not bringing in enough dollars, hoping they give you the option of a pay cut so you can keep the job, have somewhere to go ten hours out of the day; anywhere but your smelly beige apartment with a granite countertop that they didn’t tell you means you can’t put any fucking food on it. It’s a fucking rock, for Christ’s sake, but if you cut a grapefruit on it the imprint will be seared into the stone forever and they’re gonna take it out of your deposit. How then are the mountains not all worn down to dust by falling fruit. I paid extra for that fucking thing. How are you gonna make payments on your BMW that you dreamed about until you got one and noticed that everyone else has the exact same fucking car. Should have got a Prius, chicks would think I give a fuck about the Earth.

Are you PASSIONATE about finance? I can’t even conceive of the malformed subhuman who honestly says “yes.” If you are passionate about finance, about sales, about commercial real estate, about branding, co-branding, maximizing awareness in the branded space, about targeted apps, social media outreach, office solutions, personal finance solutions, human resources solutions, network marketing solutions, synergistic growth opportunities… you need to find a healthier passion, like molesting kids.

Anyway. Here’s hoping this place calls me back.

Product Review: Tenga® Easy Beat Egg™ Artificial Vagina, “Silky”

The fucksleeve came in the mail on a Tuesday. Just like a real woman it took forever to come, he thought. There’s a joke you’ll never be able to tell in public.

As promised it was in discreet packaging. A surprisingly small box. Within this was a plastic egg that contained the fucksleeve. While small, it could be stretched, per the pamphlet, “to accommodate any size penis.” There were also hints on how to maximize sensation on the glans and frenulum; some artist had been paid to draw a hand in various positions stretching this piece of silicon over a healthy-sized member. It’s a living. Inside the thing’s orifice was a single use packet of lube, but he opted for Curel Intensive Care instead. Save the special stuff for a rainy day.

I’ll spare you the details. It was the first one he’d ever used and he came almost instantly, grudgingly pulling the device off of him and spraying into the sink to avoid a long cleaning process. Just like a real woman it makes you nut too fast, he thought. Just like a real woman it makes you pull out.

He’d bought the cheapest one that got good reviews. Miserly. He hadn’t read the fine print, that it was so cheap and came with a packet of lube because it was intended for a single use. At the bottom of the directions pamphlet were the words “After pleasuring, discard. Try more of our 8 different textures.” After about the fifth time it began to get grippy and loose, and no longer excited him. He had one last hurrah, with the single use dedicated lube packet, which made his penis smell like almonds. He emptied his seed in it, imagined he was launching an unwanted baby into fertile young loins. He then threw it out with the trash on top of some coffee grounds.

**********

A few weeks later he was making chicken. He often cooked for dates, but this was a special dish he only made alone. A Vons Family Pak of 99 cents per pound chicken parts baked in Kraft barbecue sauce. His mother had always made it on his birthday, and now he would make it after a rough day at work. He would have been embarrassed if anyone saw. He liked people to think he was the type of person who seared locally caught fish with fresh rosemary. Then the doorbell rang. It was the Tenga® Easy Beat Egg™ Artificial Vagina, “Silky.”

She was crying. I’m sorry, she said. I just had a really bad date, I was in the neighborhood. I had to get away from him. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I should have called. But can I come in?

Sure, he said. He didn’t know what else to say. He’d been drinking wine. He was not prepared for his artificial vagina to come to life and stop by for dinner.

Thank you. It was raining outside; she was shivering a little. What are you making? It smells wonderful.

Oh, just some, uh… just some stupid shit. Something my mom used to make.

It smells wonderful.

Thanks. It’s not really, it’s uh… not fancy.

Can I have some?

He blanched for a second. He had never cooked for her, obviously. Only fucked her and rinsed her off and put her back in a drawer. He would never have even considered cooking this chicken for a guest, certainly not a date. But, so what if she thought it was stupid. Who stops by someone’s house unannounced. A guy who fucked you five times and threw you out. Who cared what she thought.

He served her. Then himself. She cut off a bite and blew on it. Tasted it.

Omigod… it’s soooo good!

Haha. Really?

It’s the best chicken I’ve ever had.

It’s just some stupid comfort food, my mom used to make it for my birthday.

Well your mother was wonderful.

They ate and listened to the rain. She finished her plate and asked for more. Girls never did that.

Listen, she said, I know this is imposing, but can I stay here tonight? I have a movie in my bag. I’ll stay out of your hair. I took the bus to my date and it’s raining and I don’t want to be alone.

It was out of nowhere but he didn’t know how to say no. The movie was Andrei Rublev by Tarkovsky, an epic about medieval Russia. There were sweeping battles and ancient vistas and they threw a horse down a flight of stairs. It was a masterpiece. He had never talked to her about movies, obviously. He hadn’t known she had such wonderful taste. They fell asleep on the couch together, her back warming his chest while the rain hissed in the leaves. In the morning she was gone.

**********

A week later she called him. He didn’t recognize the number but picked up anyway. Hi, she said. I don’t want to be weird but I’m going to the desert this weekend and wanted to see if you’d come with me. I rented a room at this place where there’s a natural hot spring.

He had been living in Los Angeles for eight years and had never seen the desert. Work had wrecked him; it was Friday night. She might be crazy but why not.

In the morning they drove out to Desert Hot Springs in her convertible. He watched the hills roll by, the plants and rocks change, and was excited. New birds circled the highway. New flowers grew in the ditch. He made her pull over so he could take a picture with a cactus.

She had a hotel room in a little place that had hot mineral water, catered to German tourists. They sat in the giant tub, naked, as dusk fell over the desert and a roadrunner came up to drink from the pool. Crickets sounded and a coyote howled. A wind blew in from the mountains and shook a wall of bamboo behind them. He was the happiest he’d ever been in his life.

They stayed together for a year. He did not remove his OKCupid profile, and he did not list himself as being “in a relationship” with his former artificial vagina on facebook. He did not introduce her to his friends. But she came over three nights a week, or during the day when her air conditioning broke, and they laid around watching movies and drinking wine and talking. They camped in the mountains, cataloging the national forest’s twenty four different kinds of rodents. They didn’t fuck anymore. He cared about her too much. You have to want to hurt somebody to fuck them. They tried a few times and he would look in her eyes and it would make him laugh.

**********

In the spring she had a doctor’s appointment. She called him after, crying. Said she needed to come over. She had cancer, she said. There were going to be treatments but she probably wasn’t going to make it. We are going to beat this, he said. You are going to beat this. No, I’m not, and I need you to do something for me. She had no one. No family. If I get to the point where I might live but wouldn’t be me anymore, she said, I need you to have them pull the plug. He didn’t know how he would ever do it, but, how could he say no.

He would drive her to chemo, to radiation; she would tell him stories in the car. About her childhood. Things she’d never told anybody but had to tell someone now, otherwise it would be like they never happened. She had been through a lot, it turned out. Men passing her around since she was a baby. The life of a fucksleeve. The radiation burned her skin and the drugs made her throw up all the time and she started slipping away. He would sit with her under the IV bag and hold her hand. She was slipping but she was still her; she could still make him laugh.

The drugs didn’t work and she needed surgery. He was in the waiting room reading the hospital’s copy of Reptile magazine, for domestic reptile enthusiasts. The featured review was of the Tomato Frog. They may look drab when young, but don’t be fooled: they explode into a vivid red-orange in adulthood. Especially the somewhat larger female. An engaging and active amphibian. He wondered what it would take for Reptile to give a bad review. He moved on to The Hunt for the Dark Phase Everglades Corn Snake and noticed his hands were shaking.

A doctor came out. There had been a complication. One of the tumors was near an artery and they had nicked it. She was on blood thinners and was bleeding out. She might never wake up. If she did, her brain had been deprived of oxygen. She would not be herself. I understand that her wish was not to be resuscitated. We have some papers you’ll need to sign. They let him hold her hand while she died, with that stupid machine beeping like on TV.

She had been sick for a long time, skinny and gray with sunken eyes and no eyebrows and most days she could barely talk. But that wasn’t how he remembered her, driving home and trying not to break down and cry in traffic. He remembered the desert. The hot spring. Kissing her in the warm water, the wind whipping the bamboo back and forth. It would hurt him forever, the way she left him, but he wouldn’t trade it for the world.

In conclusion: five stars.

Coffee Shop Diary: The Smell of My Wang

I can’t stop fucking looking at this woman and I can’t stop being aware of what a fucking dork I must look like, resting my face awkwardly in my fingers. It is extremely uncomfortable but I can’t stop doing it. Because she’ll know I stopped doing it because I was afraid she would think I’m a dork. I can’t make eye contact but I can’t look away so instead I give her this squinty side-eye. And she knows, she knows, that I am supremely unworthy to ejaculate into her fertile young womb.

If I had a huge wang it wouldn’t be like this. I would just shoot her a glance that implied “hey, I have a huge wang.” I know I’m a jittery weirdo in a coffee shop at noon on a weekday but my member is unusually thick and lengthy. Therefore, nothing else matters. She could smell it on me. The smell of my wang. Her mind would try to resist but her loins would be inflamed by some pheromone and she would have to give me doe eyes. She would be forced to gesture that I follow her into the bathroom where she would “present” to me, bending over against the cardboard ass gasket dispenser upon which somebody has sharpied “Free Cowboy Hats.” Her cooch would pucker wetly in anticipation and I would slowly drive my impossibly thick fleshy snake into her hot meat tunnel and fill her with thick spurts of my manly seed. She would convulse, satisfied that I had given her a son who would also have a huge wang. We would shake hands, businesslike, and part company. Instead I look for something in my tea.

This Is All Your Fault Megan

I’m trying to masturbate to the redhead with the big titties from the Standard but the problem is, Julianne Moore has a movie coming out. So they interviewed her on NPR and I heard it and got her face stuck in my head. I get about three seconds of the redhead from the party before it becomes Julianne Moore’s pointy fucking Count Chocula face. Now you are cursed too. Go try to jerk off to a redhead and try not to think of Julianne Moore.

The redhead with the big titties wasn’t opening the door in room 413 and the party was winding down, so I admitted defeat and walked over to skid row to buy black tar heroin. The first guy I talked to just took my money and disappeared. He had handed me a garbage bag full of L.A. Kings T shirts as collateral, which I now own. Email me if you are extra large.

Eventually I found an old hooker who scored for me in exchange for two half pints of Kamchatka vodka from the convenience store. Got one for myself too. It’s actually not bad. I offered to get her high but she said no, I’m just a alcoholic.

You stupid, she said, comin around here with all that money. You a stupid motherfucker. Yeah, I’ve been briefed. I was wearing my tiny American Apparel swim trunks and one of those country western shirts with snaps. Black loafers. I was carrying a briefcase with my laptop in it. All around me were huge menacing black people. A man jumped off a kid’s Huffy bicycle to punch another man in the face. The origin of the dispute was unclear. No one paid attention. Cops would circle occasionally and they should have arrested me; there is no reason for me to be on that block except to buy black tar heroin.

This is your fault, Megan, with the red hair and big titties. Your cute dress over a bikini. If you had fucked me I could have let all my pent up energy out. I was drinking all day by a pool watching beautiful young pieces of ass saunter around in wispy wet bathing suits, grinding on girls on the dance floor with my half hard penis crammed in their ass cracks. I was wound up and it had to go somewhere; it was either gonna be pussy or hard drugs. If you had had unprotected sex with me on our first meeting like you should have, I’d have retired home quietly to a glass of chardonnay and a good book.

I can pinpoint the moment where I lost you. You were complaining to a bunch of dudes about how a guy who looked like Lenny Kravitz said he wanted to impregnate you. You started cuddling up to me and said you would rather have my baby. I went to get another drink, and saw Lenny. He actually looked more like a retarded black Robert Pattinson so I went back to tell you this. I should have stayed away. I had been playing it perfectly. Bumping into you around the party and saying a couple witty things and then taking off, leaving you wanting more. I lost it when I went back to make a lame joke about an old topic. You can never fuck up with women, not once. Meanwhile a gay guy invited me back to his room; I’m about 80 per cent certain I’ve seen him in black and white on a billboard with his shirt off. Maybe even Abercrombie and Fitch. So, I’m attractive apparently. Doesn’t matter. One lame joke and you’re done.

I have your number. Maybe I’ll call you. Take you out for a drink. I want to see your pink mouth around my cock and your bright red hair cascading over my hipbones.

The walk home was too long so I stopped to smoke my first balloon with a homeless guy, using foil from a discarded Philly cheese steak. Who else does this, I thought. Finds a down on his luck junkie and gives him free heroin. Dude better name his first child after me. I don’t remember feeling too high but it was three miles to get back in dress shoes and I couldn’t feel my feet hit the sidewalk. When I got home I called for the cat, I reached out to pick him up and I fell over into my neighbor’s rosemary patch. I fell pretty hard and it didn’t hurt. Now I smell like rosemary.

I got inside and smoked the second balloon and nodded off listening to Patrice O’Neal.

Shit Jobs: Telemarketing

You’re sitting there in a tiny cubicle in a moldy beige room with acoustical tile and you are separated from a bear sized homeless man with a loud booming voice by what is basically urinal divider. You have a headset on, an old one with one foam earphone and a curly wire going into a battered phone. You are listening to a cavernous hiss. And then it beeps and your back tenses and it’s showtime.

“….Hello? HELLO!!???!!!”

The person on the other end of the line has been listening to silence and clicks for five seconds. They are tipped off to what you are. Because the autodialer waits for what it thinks is a human voice to connect you. The person is already pissed off. You have a dumb terminal in front of you. It’s the 21st century but you have a monitor with green block letters on black from the 70’s with what is putatively the person’s name and address, but a lot of times it’s empty or some guy who was about to get fired had put in “Harry Stiffey, 69 Cumshot Drive.”

“HELLO??!???” WHO IS THIS??!!??”

“Good evening sir, is this Mr. Sti– uh, are you the head of the household?”

“WHAT ARE YOU SELLING?”

“I’m not, I’m not selling anything sir, this is Cornelius calling on behalf of the Firefighter Charitable Organization, we’re asking for your support in helping the Fi-”

“PUT ME ON YOUR ‘DO NOT CALL’ LIST AND NEVER EVER CONTACT ME AGAIN” (slam.)

And then the hiss again. Select “DNC” on your dumb terminal. “Do Not Call.” As mandated by law we will mail a mimeograph of our “Do Not Call” Policy to what we think is his address and take him out of the system. Wait for the next beep. If you get five human beings in a row you’re doing all right. The dialer waits until it thinks it hears a person but a lot of the time it’ll give you that three tone disconnect sound ten times in a row. DOO DOO DEEEEHHHH and you have your headset turned all the way up because the fucking old ladies all gargle softly around fifty years worth of Pall Malls and they’re impossible to hear except at top volume. This means the “we’re sorry, the number you’re calling has been disconnected” sound is like sticking your head in one of those horns that a lighthouse blows in the fog. Mark that one as a “Telco.”

Or you get fifteen minutes of no English. We would call through San Francisco and some number exchanges are nothing but Chinese fresh off the boat, or Chinese who’d been here for years but never got off the boat in their minds, or Chinese who probably spoke English like they were hosting Masterpiece Theatre but had a handy excuse not to talk to us. “WEI? BING WA?” “Do you speak English, ma’am? Are you the head of household? “BING WA YA?”

But these things were still better than getting an actual English speaking human being who was head of household. Because they all hate you. Every single person you talk to hates you and thinks you’re a piece of shit and wishes you were dead and even when they’re polite you can feel it. “HELLO???!!!?? HELLO??!!?? “Good evening, this is Cornelius calling on behalf of the Firefighter Charitable Organization, may I speak with the head of household?”

“Do you know you called me DURING DINNER?”

Then don’t answer the phone, you fucking chump. Let the machine get it and savor your fish sticks in peace. “I’m awfully sorry to disturb you sir, but I’ll only need a minute of your time. Would it be better to call back another night?”

“Well, I don’t know. Let me ask you something– WHAT PER CENT OF MY DONATION GOES TO THE ACTUAL CHARITY??”

Stossel had fucked us, right before I got hired. Blown the lid off the whole operation. We called for police and firefighter charities, which sell boiler rooms the right to raise funds in their name. Basically the cops in your town get ten or fifteen grand to help schools or disabled kids or whatever and the company that I worked for gets eighty grand for the people who own it to buy small airplanes and strippers for wives. The cops know it works like this. But it’s still more money than they’d get sitting in front of Safeway selling cupcakes. And it’s good PR for everyone in town to get a call telling them your friendly police force is dedicated to keeping troubled teens active playing tennis in the Police Athletic League or whateverthefuck. The company puts on a variety show, or a rodeo, or a charity basketball game or something and what you’re selling is a pack of five tickets to this event for 35 bucks. You can go yourself, but, as the script says, most people opt to donate the tickets so local disadvantaged youth can attend. Lots of the word “youth” getting thrown around, so much that it becomes hard to say. Most people donate the tickets and keep the sticker they think will keep them from getting pulled over.

“Well, sir, after the costs of talent for the show, lighting, renting the venue, postage, phone bills, and paying the fine people such as myself who are out here every day making these calls, there’s a profit of about fifteen per cent left over that goes to the charity. We-”

“I THOUGHT AS MUCH. This is a SCAM. I would like to be put on your Do Not Call list, and have a copy of your Do Not Call policy sent to me–”

“Of course, sir, if you’ll let me confirm your address…”

“WHY ON EARTH WOULD I GIVE YOU MY ADDRESS?”

Stossel had fucked us, and congress had fucked us, because like the day before I started telemarketing they passed a law mandating a Do Not Call registry. You have the legal right to be removed from a telemarketer’s call list and to have proof of this mailed to you. And good old John “The Stache” Stossel had hammered this fact into the minds of every schlub in America in a series of hard hitting investigative pieces that also highlighted what a huge scam every single telemarketing charity is. We were already hated, so much so that a legislative body in America was moved to pass a law making life easier on individual human beings rather than businesses. Perhaps the only time this has ever happened. We were already somewhere between the Gestapo and NAMBLA in the national esteem and suddenly this Do Not Call law gave everyone magic words to name the demon and Make It Stop. The Do Not Call request was always colored with triumph, delivered like they’d finally tracked down the murderer of their kids and were finishing him off with a shovel to the head.

Select “DNC.” Wait for the beep.

Meanwhile all around you loud booming voices are making sales pitches. People who telemarket are not normal people. The guy next to me is homeless, by choice; he lives at a campsite by the train tracks. He spends his check on bourbon and then once a week goes over the hill to San Jose to buy hookers. He has been in San Quentin, in Santa Rita; he once saw a man get his innards cut out and his gut filled with toilet paper and his still warm corpse tossed off a high catwalk to create the effect of streamers. He tells me that a Mexican ain’t nothin but a high yella nigger with an accent, that you can cry all you want in jail but don’t take nothing from nobody, that the Woods shot caller in Rita ain’t too hard. But he has been doing this so long that he sounds like the Frontline narrator or Walter Cronkite. He has the booming gravelly baritone and perfect Ivy League diction you want the president to have. When he tells you the black streetwalkers are down to fifty bucks for an around the world you can almost hear an orchestra behind him. Later he’ll get arrested for shooting a man in the face with a pellet gun in a bar fight. He will be looking at life in prison due to his record, and his own mother will fly out from Georgia to testify against him. He is actually a sweet man and does not deserve this.

Down the row is a man who tells you he is an ordained Eastern Orthodox priest, who won’t shut the fuck up about what Alcoholics Anonymous has done for him. Like everyone whom Alcoholics Anonymous has done so much for he is thin skinned and the smallest slight sends him into slavering rage. He is of Serbian extraction, and will go into a long loud litany of every grievance against the Serbs, if anything even remotely germane to Serbia is mentioned during smoke break. The Muslims cut off our skins and used them as drums! He says. Later when Wikipedia is invented I learn that he was talking about the Field of Blackbirds, which happened in 1389. The Croats were Nazis! We learned to avoid discussing Serbia but you’d be amazed at the Kevin Bacon game of things that can be connected to Serbia. He was an aspiring standup comedian.

Behind him is a jockey-sized man with cystic acne in a purple velvet waistcoat. He moves like a muppet and his sales calls are long rambling off-script improvisations. You talk to him a couple times and he reveals that he was kidnapped by the CIA as a baby, spent his childhood in a prison camp where they injected him directly in the spine every day with LSD. He says it gave him spinal meningitis. At some point two angels disguised as men came to him and told him he was the orphan prince of a galaxy called Lucifer 666 million light years away. He’d spent some time there vanquishing various evils on behalf of his subjects before returning to help the people of Earth. He felt he wouldn’t last long because the government was on to him. I visited his trailer once, was stunned to see that he had a beautiful nineteen year old wife. All you have to do is believe in yourself.

Everyone was fucked up, everyone had a drug problem or was in recovery or had a record too long and crazy for them to ever have hope of getting another job. So they had to come in night after night and listen to old people sneer that you’d called them during dinner, rack up three bucks a sale.

I got good at it. My voice got deeper. I started booming from the diaphragm, laughing off their perturbed “hello… hello’s” and connecting with them. Flirt with the old women. Joke with the men. You get on a roll and you get so much confidence going that the person who faithfully watches John Stossel and is ready to give you an earful of Do Not Call just gets hypnotized. You can’t fake this. You can go in with the same meter and the same pitch and the same words but there is something they can smell on you if you’re not confident, if you’re afraid. If you need the three bucks they’ll snarl at you and slam the phone down. But you get hypnotized yourself, when you get good. You are genuinely connecting with people and gliding seamlessly into the best way you can help is with our ten-pack for three hundred fifty dollars and your voice is saying I am so good at this I don’t need you to buy this, I don’t want you to, I am walking out of here into a gold Rolls Royce bought three dollars at a time and it’s just you and me talking on a lark here; it’s no big deal. If you need something, people will never give it to you. If you are weak, people will never want to help you. People are animals, they are evil, every single thing you ever learned about compassion is a lie and when the end of this filthy soulless sewer of a world comes I will stand outside and dance in the hellfire, the small part of me that was still human was thinking. I am a lying sack of shit selling you a scam but because I sound like I don’t want your money you will give it to me. When you are on that roll you could sell stickers that say “Fuck You Cop Pull Me Over” to the Chief of Police. The substance has nothing to do with it. It’s in your voice.

I became their top salesman. I beat homeless Cronkite and Alcoholic priest and a bunch of other guys who’d been in boiler rooms all their adult lives, always for companies with three letter names: BTS productions, CBL productions. Selling the chance to send five retarded kids to the Vaudeville Variety Follies in Oregon and Texas and Arizona. I locked on to something and walked in knowing I would kill and so I did. A woman gave a thousand dollars because she was mad at her husband and I was a man to talk to. A man started out screaming at me out for screwing real charities out of money and when I gave him the voice he calmed down and bought. The old codgers showed me respect. I started to think of myself as a salesman. I can close anything, anyone, I thought. Then some girl would ask “what do you do” in a bar and I would cringe. This was before I knew how to lie to girls. “I’m a telemarketer,” I would say. “Oh fuck, I hate you guys.”

No matter how good you are most of them hate you. Once in a while one of them will get through to whatever tender spot you have left. There are still two people, twelve years later, whose names, numbers and addresses I could recite for you. I’ve taken care to remember because I still might want to kill them some day. Do you know what a waste of a human life you are, one of them told me. At the time I didn’t, although I’ve since been briefed. No matter how good you are, and even if you act like a human being to them, every night there are enough of them being cruel to make you cry. I could stay on the phone with you and make you kill yourself, you think. Or at least tell you to go fuck yourself, but, the boss was very clear. They can say these things. You can’t. That’s what a job is. They can say you’re a waste of human life and you can’t say fuck off.

If you have a soul, there is a vessel inside of you that gets filled up with all the hate you take in. About a year in it hit the meniscus for me and I had to quit. I got a job selling ads for a newspaper. The same shit, really, but I was dialing the phone with my fingers rather than a machine and could tell girls I worked for something they’d heard of.

But I remember the lessons that job taught me. Because there are only two jobs in the world: “making shit,” and “selling shit.” Every white collar job I’ve had since is “selling shit.” Picking up the phone and asking people for money. Whether they give it to you depends on what’s in your voice. What’s in your voice depends on whether the last guy gave you money.

The world only rewards hustlers and liars. People will be cruel to the weak whenever they get a chance. Then they will roll over mesmerized for anyone who doesn’t appear to give a fuck. They’ll trip over themselves to give you anything as long as you don’t need it. As long as they’re not helping you. The job taught me that we are essentially evil. That every nice thing you’ve ever thought about humankind is a flaming crock of shit. That if a righteous God existed we would have been destroyed long ago.

There were, however, free doughnuts on Saturdays.

The Soap

There was thumping coming from the bathroom. Slow at first, then gradually faster, and then a big sound like a bundle of logs being dropped.

Where’s the soap? She called through the door.

I don’t know. Where is it usually?

The door creaked open and her head appeared, face slightly red. If it were where it is usually, she said, would I have asked you where it is?

Well it’s in there somewhere.

Are you sure sweetie?

Yeah, it has to be.

He stood up from the couch, walked over and stuck his head in the bathroom door. She was back looking in the cabinet under the sink now. Moving items around: toilet paper, baby powder, tampons. There was no available physical space large enough to be occupied by the 8-Pak of Lever 2000® Pure Rain™ bath bars she had instructed him to buy. But she kept looking anyway.

Are you sure you even bought it?

I mean, yeah.

She put down a half-rolled-up tube of triple antibiotic ointment and looked up at him. The triple antibiotic ointment had been purchased for their cat when it had been bitten by a gopher. Later their son fell off his bike and got a scratch. She had insisted on purchasing a new, separate tube of ointment, even though he had looked it up on the internet and the one for cats was the exact same ingredients as the one for people. You’re sure.

Look, I don’t have a specific memory of the soap among 15,000 other items. But I bought it. OK? It’s gonna be fine. Maybe it’s in the kitchen.

She followed him. Why would you put it in the kitchen?

I don’t know. Maybe I filed it under “cleaning products” in my mind.

In the cabinet under the kitchen sink, arrayed beneath the gooseneck, were the 3-Pak of duel surface dish sponge/ pot scrubbers, the new yellow latex gloves, and the Reduced Environmental Harm pine cleaner he had purchased. No soap.

Look, he said, I bought it. I remember now, because we had the coupon. I remember giving her the coupon. She said it was only for the 12-Pak and they were out of 12-Paks but the manager came over and told her to give it to me for the 8-Pak. So I definitely bought it. It’s here somewhere.

OK, “somewhere” doesn’t do me any good though. It exists, that’s great, but it’s not helpful. What I want to know is where did you put it.

I mean I thought I put it where the soap usually goes…

She put her palm to her forehead. Inhaled. OK, obviously you didn’t. I have to go. Can you just think?

I’ve been thinking. I’m not… we’d have to call in a hypnotist to reconstruct what I did with the soap. It’s gonna turn up honey. Why don’t you get in the shower and use shampoo. I’ll bring it in to you if I find it.

I’m not going to wash my armpits and asshole with shampoo. This is an office, I can’t start smelling like fucking taint halfway through the day–

Well you’re the one who’s freaking out about being late. I’m trying to be constructive.

Constructive? It’s not helping, OK? It’s not helping. It’s not like you have a lot to do around here, and the one fucking thing I want, the one thing I ask you for–

That’s not fair.

You have no job, you bring in no money, and you can’t even make sure we have basic things like soap in the fucking house. You can’t even–

Stop.

It’s not like you’re some emotional rock, either. My work is fucking hard and you can’t even listen to me–

Will you just stop please.

My sister says your lack of engagement is a form of emotional abuse. I’m starting to think–

Let me tell you something. Your sister does not give a FUCK about you or anything else that isn’t her. I don’t know what the fuck, she’s… abuse? Abuse??

Don’t talk about her like that.

No, it’s bullshit. She read about some new form of “abuse” on the internet and she thought: how can I get Astrid to move out so I can split the rent. She wants more fucking booze money. She does not give a fuck, she is using you–

Don’t talk about her– you don’t know anything about her.

I know everything I need to know and I know this is another fucking bullshit way she figured out to use you, so don’t start quoting her to me about– about the FUCKING SOAP. Jesus.

At least she listens to me.

FOR CHRIST’S FUCKING SAKE, HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU? She is a WHORE–

Don’t say that.

You know what? You’re a fucking whore too. You act like I’m some fucking bum who’s lucky to have you. I’ve been out of work THREE WEEKS, it’s not the god damn Great Depression. You were a WHORE. You came from NOTHING. You FUCKED OLD MEN for MONEY. You are LUCKY that ANYONE would fucking have you. And you bite my FUCKING head off about the… FUCKING… SOAP!

She was on him before he knew what was happening. She had a lucky hit, the chef’s knife went right under his ribs. It felt hot. He tried to breath but but only got half full; on his left side the air was hissing out of a wet hole and it felt like someone was standing on his chest in boots. He was sitting now. The room moved like when you’d had too many drinks and woke up on the couch in your clothes, trying to lift your head off the pillow. Moving like a boat. Then he was lying down. He was shaking but couldn’t feel it so much anymore. When he was a boy he saw a mother cat get run over, her body scissoring frantically in the street as the kittens looked on from the sidewalk. He must be scissoring like that. The floor was warm.

There was a lot of blood. Every book where someone stabs someone, she thought, they always remarked: so much blood. It was always more than they expected. But she was able to form a dam with some dish towels to pool it up, keep it on the tile and off the carpet. Her hands were shaking. She had read about this too. Everything was going down exactly as described in countless novels about murder. His blood was all over her forearms. If she could get his body on a dolly she could get in in the trunk, and she could burn it down to something manageable out behind the dump after work. After a day or two she would call the police and say he’d disappeared. Were there any problems in the home, they would ask. Did he have issues with drinking or drugs. Yes and yes. Eventually they would give up. He probably skipped town and went to Mexico. It happens all the time.

She would only be a little late. She went back into the bathroom to check on herself. No bruises, no scratches. Everything looked fine, except the blood. Fortunately the soap was sitting on top of the sink.

Can’t Live with ’Em, Can’t Live without ’Em

This is what I remember. I went back in to tell the crazy black chick with the fake blue eyes: come on, just give us a fucking ride two exits up the freeway. You promised you would drive us back, I said. I knew the whole time she would Welsh but I thought she could be reasoned with. She could not. She got angry, very angry, she was yelling at me to get the fuck out of the house and take that crazy ass bitch with you and I said all right, all right. And I’m pretty sure she popped me one. I have no marks on me but I remember laughing and telling her that if she was going to hit me she ought to put some body into it. When in fact it hurt, she had put plenty of body into it. She was African American and a “top” type Lesbian so even though she was a chick, you know, demographically she had the ability to punch. I went back out to the parking lot to find you and go. Figured we would split a cab, which would have taken up all the money I had left, but, we had to get out of there.

I went back to the parking lot to find you and you were gone. You had been lying on your face in an empty parking space against a cinder block wall one minute and then you just disappeared. The crazy black chick with the vampire-y blue contact lenses followed me out, yelling, motherfucker this, motherfucker that, nigga you better get the FUCK out of here RIGHT NOW and I was like, look, let me wait till Astrid comes back. We gotta get a cab. She kept yelling. So I thought: fuck it. I asked her to open the gate so I could go. She wouldn’t open the gate. She was calling the cops. She was telling them I was menacing her and wouldn’t leave when in fact I was prevented from leaving by the giant electric metal gate to the parking lot, which had no way of being opened without some remote of hers. Yeah, he has a plaid shirt on, she was saying into the phone. I was pleased I wasn’t wearing my distinctive blazer and pocket square or lavender cardigan. I imagined blending seamlessly into a sea of plaid shirts. Eventually I just jumped the wall.

Now I am in fucking Tarzana late at night, stumbling drunk, no idea if they even have buses this far out and not enough cab money to get to my house. But I was more scared for you, because you were doing that thing you do when you get drunk and you just shut down. You become this floppy corpse who only stirs for a few seconds at a time to slur a couple words and grind your pussy against whoever’s trying to hold you up, the way a dog in heat drags her crotch on the carpet. And you were out there somewhere wandering around this weird deep valley neighborhood and maybe you would pass out in a bush and choke on your own puke and die. Walking down the street I thought I saw you and I was thrilled and relieved. But when the figure turned around it was a different chick with strawberry blonde hair and all white on, seeing a drunk hollow-eyed stranger rushing toward her.

Then I turned a corner and there you were for real and I thought: great, this is finally over. We can go home. But you tried to run right past me. I was pissed. I grabbed you and said listen: let’s just call a ca– and you bit me. I kept trying to grapple you and you kept biting me. I think I threw you on the ground. Or maybe I just dropped you and you couldn’t stand up. We were in a patch of grass in front of an apartment building and a man was sitting on his balcony watching. I figured he would call the cops; I knew the crazy black chick had called the cops, now here I was, a serial psychopath violently terrorizing women all over this sleepy community. But no cops ever came. You got up and ran away from me and I chased you.

You wearing all white, so it was easy to chase you even down streets where there were no street lights. And it seemed like you kept slowing down so I could catch you. I think that’s what you wanted. You wanted to drag out this whole domestic violence type hell as long as possible. Some part of you needs to escalate everything, bring it to its worst, see how awful you can make people act. You would slow down seeming to think you’d lost me and look back and there I was. I felt like the Terminator.

You ran into traffic. I saw you get a car to stop and a guy to roll his window down and you pointed at me and were clearly telling him that I was a violent miscreant bent on killing you. He didn’t do shit. The other guy who saw me putting you in a headlock clearly hadn’t called the cops either, there were no cops on the streets. The good people of Tarzana would hear you screaming like Kitty fucking Genovese and just turn up the TV.

Eventually I lost you. There was a patch of woods with a big fence around it. The fence continued for a long way in one direction, and I realized it must contain some kind of train or busway. Miraculously, you had led me to the Orange Line, which I could take to the Red Line. On the bus a girl was yelling at a guy about some other girl who had been texting him. The girl was hot. I bet the other one was too. Five guys in the world get all the pussy.

It took hours to get home. The train stop is three miles from my apartment. Good thing I was wearing sensible shoes.

**********

One of you had a fishy cunt. I can still smell it on me. The same hand with your bite marks on the wrist. Souvenirs.

The girl with the eyes was actually a good host before she went crazy. She gave me a bullet vibrator to fingerfuck you guys with so I wouldn’t feel left out. Meanwhile she was wielding this weird loud salmon colored device with two menacing looking sci fi heads and the cute one was stabbing you in the pussy with two fingers while you were bent over. Do you know how to use this, she said as she handed it to me. What was I going to say, no? In reality I had no fucking idea. Turn it on and put it on someone’s pussy I guess. But it wasn’t about me anyway. I was baggage. The point of the party was for you to get laid and it was a courtesy for them to even allow me in the room. And I was too drunk to get hard. Blue eyes had a whole fucking retail display of Muscat grape wine lined up in her kitchen. It went down too easy.

In a perfect world I would have mounted up on the cute one and filled her full of mulatto babies I would never know about. But orgies make me uncomfortable. Even a multiracial four way with three hot women. The white girl is a redhead and the black girls are nice and dark; just watching your skin rubbing together should have been something but I couldn’t bring myself to give a shit.

Still. They were a nice find. We were at the downtown Standard. Pool party. The day looked like a lost cause; four guys for every girl and those guys were plumb ugly. We were both screwed. But then you came up with this black Lesbian couple and suddenly the day turned around. The cute one wanted my Adderall and the weird one, the one with the fake blue eyes and the titanium plate bolted on to her skeleton so she could have metal studs poking out of her skin– the weird one wanted your pussy. She wanted to take us back to her place in Tarzana. The drugs were at my place and I figured once we got high we’d forget about this ridiculous plan to go to the valley, but no. She insisted. She drove fast and she played dubstep music so loud it put my neckbones out of place. She was embarrassed about her Honda, had to explain that she’d had a BMW and a Ferrari before she’d crashed them into walls. She had been married to a rapper for years. Had kids by him. Before she turned gay. She was studying to be a lawyer. She wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it. Before the fucking and then after when you passed out and scared them and she kicked us out and was calling the cops. Somehow her legal knowledge would make them come faster, punish me harder, she was telling me. As I climbed her fence I thought: you got that and I got racism and let’s see who wins.

The night turned to shit when you started gurgling and flopping around like you do. You drink and drink and it always hits you all at once. The girls got spooked. Maybe you said something. Maybe I said something, I can’t remember. For some reason I’m only seeing myself as the hero in all this. I promised the cute one I could get her into porn. This was so I could get a picture of her tits. It’s been less than ten hours and I’ve masturbated to it five times.

When you ran away from me I called you and called you. Of course, your phone wasn’t working. I texted you that if you didn’t answer we would never speak again. When I got home I unfriended you on Facebook. Then I went to block you on Twitter. But I saw that I had exactly 400 followers and didn’t want to fuck with the number. Such is my commitment to principle.

**********

That morning you had made me a nice breakfast. A perfect plate of eggs and an English muffin with jam you made yourself. The day before that we’d taken the kids to a barbecue at someone’s grandmother’s house in Sherman Oaks. Tasteful home artfully decorated with Chinoiserie; people talking about their families and jobs. Kids playing Marco Polo in the pool. It was some Norman Rockwell shit and it felt good and safe. Like we were grownups.

But there was that thing hanging over us. It wasn’t going to be a weekend until we got drunk, until we got high, until we fucked somebody new and dirty, until we fought and maybe beat each other up and made strangers scared of us and did shit that might make us die. Something that would make a story.

Even so you didn’t want to come out. Pool parties make you feel fat, for one thing, and for another you have a job and a family and you need to hold your shit together now. But I have these speed pills, I said. We’ll have a good time. Come on honey– how bad could it be.

Anyway.

There Is No God, But

we still have the mountains and the hummingbirds. Or a good drink and a good fuck. Even a good shit and a good jerk. Try as you might, you cannot escape small pleasures. The flowers please you in spite of yourself, as you walk down the street muttering. Despairing over no text message from some girl you’d get tired of if she texted you back. Worrying about work. The clouds look painterly at sunset every god damn day and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. Even if you shut the blinds the magic hour light leaks through. A baby smiles at you in the checkout line. Sees something in your eyes. It was not lost.

Sunday in the Park

Out at the duck pond. Watching girls walk by. Many pretty young women with big breasts. Slutty teenage Mexican skater broads, like Hernandez brothers cartoons. Nice hot day; they strip down.

Girl kneeling in the grass, her ass sticking out. Tight olive drab shorts. A robust ass for an Asian woman. She looks like Gertrude. Maybe it’s her. She has a Skrillex haircut now, huh. I want to eat her out. Work my tongue all over her nice sweaty snatch. Now she’s leaving. She can detect my thoughts.

Sweaty thick Mexican running in a pink singlet with her ipod strapped to her arm. Her head shakes as she runs. Thick meaty ass. Weird little cone titties. I want to pin her down and rabbit fuck her like in a Japanese porno.

40 year old Thai woman walking with her toothless mother and her son. Mail order bride, was advertised as 23. Got some schlump locked in and then shipped her mother over. I want her to squat over me and clamp her pussy, use Southeast Asian hooker cunt tricks as I cuckold her pasty engineer breadwinner by blasting on her last viable egg.

A couple. Another thick Asian woman. Long braids. Black guy. Pushing a baby stroller. I want to force her head down on my cock with those braids as handlebars. Make her kiss her man with my jizz on her mouth.

Half white half Asian who looks 19, dressed like the squarest sophomore at Reed College. I have to crane my head around to look at her. She sees me. Yes, I am looking at you. I am picturing wrestling with your tight jeans. Struggling to get them around that bone in your ankles, finally getting just one leg off and holding the other foot up and climbing on top of you and pushing your panties to the side and plunging deep into your hot wet salty cunt. Thanks for smiling back. She is quite slim. Very well built. Hybrid vigor.

The small of the girl’s back in front of me. She has a face like Admiral Akbar but the small of her back has beautiful perfect dimples, visible as her tank top rides up. Try to see the good in people. Too tight daisy dukes choking just a little bit into soft back fat. Smooth legs. Long hair, that chestnut hair, I want to grab a fist full of it. Push her on her belly and open up her ass cheeks and grind on her clit upside down till she’s wet and tease into her pussy. Admiral Akbar face pushed into a convenient pillow. Her boyfriend looks like a dork. Good, I’m her type.

Punk girl, big, tall, with tree trunk legs like an R. Crumb drawing. Short black skirt, periwinkle streak in her hair. Taking a picture of the pond. She’s built funny, like a pear, but the wind teases her skirt a little; I want to lift it up and sniff around her ass crack to make sure it’s clean. She’s turning around now. Pretty young face, dark lipstick. Exposed midriff. She is studying her phone. Waiting for a text that will never arrive. Maybe if you were built better. He doesn’t appreciate you but I will. Put those huge legs right around my neck and plunge your fat ass full of babies. Smell your filthy punk pussy on my couch cushions for days. Tell daddy you’re a fat cunt, baby. How about it.

Nerdy Jim Henson looking guy with his fatassed Chinese girlfriend . They look happy together. Similar tastes in dress. I’m glad for them, that they found each other. Young love. I want to stick my face under her red dress and tongue down her musky cunt and asshole. They are walking with an ethnic Lesbian couple. I want them too. Answer their ad off craigslist for a sperm donor. The “boy” lesbian eats out the cute one for a good long time. Gets her all nice and slippery for me. Right on the edge of cumming. That way when I stick in my meatpipe and blast her full of goo she’s contracting my sperm up into her uterus. The partner supportively holds her hand. Looks in here eyes when I nut. Thank you baby for making this sacrifice. But the hot one loves it.

Some kind of school athletic club. Teenage girl in tights. They are strangling her very pronounced cameltoe. She has a skinny little cunt. Probably flappy. Great. I want to split it open Like a summer camp baloney sandwich and lick off all the mustard. Bend her over and watch her lanky ass cheeks slap together as I whack them hard with an open palm. She is probably fifteen.

Can’t arrest a man for dreaming.

Girl in the Window

Woman in the next building opened her blinds this morning. T-shirt and underwear. I was out smoking. She looked out at the morning sun kissing the trees. Surveyed the world for a moment. I was in the parking lot shooting lasers into her crotch. Scanning the slit of her skinny cunt like the Terminator, for later use. She looked down and saw my Kubrick stare. Neglected cigarette dangling. Recoiled in horror.

This is the second window shot I’ve got in a week. Another girl, same building, left her blinds open while lounging in a black bra on the couch. Her tits were…. there is no word for them. I saw the face of God. She saw me looking. There was a second of direct eye contact. I kept looking. I couldn’t not. Finally pried myself away, went back inside. Then I went out again. I’d remembered there was a recycling bin to be brought in. Thank you Lord for this luck. They had shut the blinds. “They” because they’re a couple; the guy was with her now. They shut the blinds but their dog has chewed off half the slats. Big gaps of visible space. They were laying on the couch entwined. The girl and her nice boobs facing outward. I looked again. They didn’t see me. Eyes on the TV. I looked and looked.

Nice people. I don’t think they’d get mad. And if they did, fuck ’em. If you are naked in a window I’m going to look. I’m not going to pull out opera glasses, set up a pup tent and camp out. But I am going to look a beat too long. I am not going to nervously look at the ground after, admitting transgression. There’s an art to leering at women, they say. Not getting caught. Well I don’t give a shit if I get caught.

I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable. But yes, I’m looking at your tits. Long enough that you will know. I’m looking at your ass, your crotch, straight into your pussy if it’s out. Sorry. But I’m not going to stop. Seeing that half second of panty-clad cooch, knowing it’s all musky and hot in the dawn– this is a million times more erotic than anything, in an age when every conceivable kind of porn is out there easy and free.

I think you are beautiful. I am not looking at it to gross you out, or scare you. I don’t want to hurt you. Well, OK– I kind of want to break in, hold my hand over your mouth and bend you over your kitchen counter and fuck you hard until I fill you with my seed while you cry and try to bite through my palm. Which is technically hurting you. But I don’t– I don’t really want that. That’s just some dark reptilian recess of my mind. What I actually want is to look at you long enough to memorize what the outline of your twat looks like. Savor the image when I’m masturbating. That’s all. You need that extra beat because otherwise your mind loses images while you beat off. God made us broken, in other words. So: sorry, but, I need to stare. So my dick’s testimony will be admissible in court.

Let’s not make a big deal out of it. I’ll see you on the street. We nod, friendly, like it never happened. Maybe I hold eye contact a second too long. Then you beckon me over and “present” to me like a baboon and we rut like filthy monkeys in the neighbor’s rosemary patc– no! Control yourself, man. We’re in a god damn civilization here.

Half naked in the window. Daisy dukes on the street with the fat-mottled bottom of your ass hanging out. Yoga pants pressing your cuntflaps into sharp relief. Loose low cut tops that let slip a half inch of nipple when you lean over to hand me my change, open toed shoes with toenail polish chipped like a little girl after a day at the beach… you drive me crazy, you god damned women. But please, please:

Never stop.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

There are ants in the bathroom sink. I keep jerking off into it. Trying to hold on to the images from porn. Trying not to get distracted by the nightmare Dali tableau of the ants, swarms and swarms of them picking at the crust of my toothpaste. When I nut the first drop makes them scatter, furiously. Then I wash my jizz down the drain and with it their colony. They quickly repopulate.

It’s too fucking hot and I’m hung over as shit and my bike got stolen. I need to call my parents. Tell my mom I’m going to Mexico City. I’ve been holding it back because I don’t want her to freak out. She’ll think I’m gonna get my head cut off, shipped back to her in a cooler. No, it’s fine, I’ll say. I was just in Tijuana, it’s not like you read about. What were you doing there? Uh…

Every half an hour I pull up craigslist and search for my bike. I found one yesterday, the same model. I called the guy; his name was Franco. He’s in a neighborhood controlled by gangs that are friendly with the White Fences of East Hollywood. I believe it is the White Fences who stole my bike. The photo was identical. He was having a yard sale, he said. Come on over and check it out. I was ready to go Rambo. This is my fucking bike. Give it back and I won’t call the cops.

I told El Chuco my plan. Are you out of your fucking mind, he said. You’ll get stomped. If you see the bike, get a picture of the serial number and call the cops. I didn’t know what I was gonna do but I drove out there. Little old guy sitting in a lawn chair. Are you Franco? I asked. I was rehearsing: that’s my fucking bike motherfucker, give it back or I’ll come back here with a shotgun. No, came a voice from behind me. I’m Franco. Danny Trejo’s head on Lou Ferrigno’s body. Tattoos all over his neck.

It was not the same bike. Different color pinstripes. This one belonged to his son who had gone off to college. I was relieved. Hot day; Franco gave me a beer. Bunch of nice shit at his yard sale. Quality furniture and art. A tasteful home.

It was stolen from a girl’s house. An OKCupid first date. Nice looking girl. Cute ass, big titties. Apartment full of beautiful things. Slutty girls love design. I’d biked over drunk. She had another girl with her, a neighbor. I thought I’d walked in to the jaws of a 3 way. But the neighbor was just the murder patrol. Once I was deemed safe she left. We got drunk, more dunk. We fucked. I came in two seconds. Slept next to her naked. I woke up at 3AM and I was trying to rape her. Wrists pinned over her head, legs open. Trying to get the tip in raw when she’d been adamant about condoms. She laughed it off. They always do. When it got light I redeemed myself with powerful and enduring morning wood. She made fresh juice with kale. I walked out triumphant. The day after new pussy is Christmas morning.

But the fucking bike was gone.

I loved that bike. I dream about it now. Speeding down the hills with trees flashing by. When I had it the tires were always going flat. I live at the top of a fucking mountain and I fucked up my knees and hips grinding back home from work. But still. I loved that bike. The White Fences were the big gang on her block, the girl told me. They steal a lot of bikes. Kidnap people’s dogs for ransom. I called the cops. Yeah, it could have been the Whites, the guy said. Could have been the Whites that stole your bike. I pictured the other cops behind him listening, without context. Thinking: what the fuck?

After the yard sale I went into Hollywood to file a police report. So I can call them when I find it in a pawn shop. Which I fucking won’t, it’s gone. But I keep looking. Like a mother who lost her child. I can’t stop thinking about it. My only comfort is to search uselessly. Driving the streets around the girl’s house slow, eyefucking everyone. Someone’s gonna beat my ass.

There was a girl in front of me in line at the police station. She had the best ass I’ve ever seen. Little daisy dukes, prefect orbs of meat hanging out the bottom. She was a victim of ATM fraud, she was saying. The cop looked like an owl. He kept explaining that she needed to call the bank. Just, call Wells Fargo. Just tell them what you told me. Say it in the same tone. I believe you. If you say it emphatically like that, the way you’re saying it now, the bank will too. She’d stop. Tell the story again. My friend pulled me out of the house and she was alone in my room and my information is in the top drawer there. It was her. I don’t know her name, just her nickname. Officer Owl was frustrated with her. Ma’am, I can’t arrest a person just because she was in your house. To his right was Officer Sanchez, talking on the phone. I kept trying to make eye contact with Sanchez. To say: is that not the best ass you have ever seen? His eyes never left his computer. Another cop came in . Six foot eight black guy. Here would be an ally. I shot him the eyes. Is this not, my countenance asked, the best ass you have ever seen? Hightower didn’t give a shit either. What do these cops see to ignore an ass like that.

There was a girl drinking her coffee on the stoop, when I came out to find it gone. She was gorgeous. Perfect. I’m so sorry, she said. If I see it, I’ll get in touch. Who were you staying with? I uh… shit. Apartment five? I didn’t know her name. I only know her internet name, I said. She laughed. I had to explain to my host that I had outed her. Your neighbor thinks you’re a whore now. Well shit, she said. Talk about a whore, you oughta see the men she has over. I made a mental note.

The bike is an all matte black Electra beach cruiser with subtle olive drab stripes on the sides, if you ever see one. Serial number EAC3A00464. If you find it I will give you a cash reward. If you see it on the street, if you see her, being abused by these miscreants, shoot me an email. It was stolen from North Kingsley Drive, near Santa Monica Boulevard. Locked up in a gated yard.

It’s just a piece of metal but it meant something to me. My buddy bought it as a gift. Old friend from up north, where I used to work part time and ride my beach cruiser around all day with my shirt off. Whales breaching in the bay beside me. It meant something. Reminded me of days when I was free. Now some cholo is bunny hopping her off a high curb, laughing at the jerkoff he got one over on. The streets are full of thugs. You will lose everything that isn’t nailed down. God damn Road Warrior universe out there with these dirtbags, their pregnant stretch pants sharpie eyebrow girlfriends, their un-neutered pit bulls chained to rusted out washing machines, their back yards full of stolen goods and roosters. Or who knows. I have no idea who took it. I shouldn’t stereotype. But still.

Fucking Whites, man.

Hangover Diary: Rocktober

Fuck. God damn man. Still hung over. 2 days later. I did cocaine and took valiums and drank a fifth of brandy. OK. It will be fine. Tomorrow you will feel better. Tomorrow. Go to work. Have a productive day. It’s cold, feels like winter, it’s sixty eight motherfucking degrees. Jesus Christ man, you have to stop getting drunk, doing hard drugs. You have to stop this shit. Eat a fucking salad and perform vigorous compound exercises. Read quality literature, watch birds in the forest. Clean your motherfucking act up and be a functioning human being. This is what happens. This is why people have to have kids. To have something to do all fucking day. Keep the thing from squirting roach spray in its gullet. Run around making sure he doesn’t jam his finger in the outlet. Or your wife does that, I guess. You go to work. Sit on a train in a suit and a stupid hat and read the financial papers. Martini at the end of the day, golf on weekends. Anyone under 40, your concept of normal life is from TV. A dead dream.

The other guy stole the second gram. I was pissed at the time. Now I think: good. I hope it’s really gone. Never again with that shit. From now on, fruits and vegetables. A nice beef broth. Put me in one of those FDR wheelchairs with the plaid blanket and park me in front of an old timey radio. Jesus Christ. I am too old for this. I’m too old for drugs, liquor and pussy. But what else is there. Jesus. Gardening, I don’t know.

Hold it together. Get in the car. Some nice NPR playing. It’s the stupid mid morning show they have, with “A. Martinez” or “Kye Risdall” or whoeverthefuck, they all sound the same. Milquetoast yuppies from Brown University. Their stupid bullshit show about business and finance. The Dow is up seventeen points, on news that congress is close to reaching a deal. Seventeen points out of fifteen fucking thousand. What use is this to anybody. “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing” plays saucily on the piano, since the NASDAQ is down. News of a disappointing IPO from a company that helps you send dick pics. Didn’t find enough suckers. Money you don’t have is being made by people you don’t give a shit about. Switch to music.

The classic rock stations are playing a cut from the first Boston album, something by the Steve Miller Band, something by Styx. It is Rocktober. Every single person in every single car on the freeway would be a million times happier if you loaded up some AC/DC you dumb sacks of shit. On the AM dial it’s sports or Rush Limbaugh. Ladies and Gentleman, the LIBERALS in this country… this is what happens when you do NOT have a real, conservative opposition. The LIBERALS in this country, well… I wouldn’t go so far as to say they EAT white infants. I would catch a lot of flak for that, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t want to go so far as to say that the NEGROES want to cannibalize your grandmother and shit on the bones they’ve picked clean while playing jungle drums and sacrificing your baby to an idol of a giant welfare check, but… Barack Obama, you have to understand, he has a plan here folks. You can get in a lot of trouble for saying something like Barack Obama HATES this country, that he worships the European Socialist model. That he wants to turn this great nation, ladies and gentlemen, into DENMARK, where black folks are encouraged to SKULLFUCK little blonde haired girls with their… ladies and gentlemen, the sheer girth of the, uh, the adult male members of this population, is, wow.

Back to NPR. Larry Mantle is having a roundtable with experts on Women in Tech. Why aren’t more women entering STEM fields, they ask. They have a point. There are more women talking about the lack of women in STEM fields than there are women in STEM fields. It is the sexist culture, they will conclude. Well no, I yell into my instrument console. Engineering is horrible. Coding is horrible. Math is horrible. Why aren’t more women hanging off a high steel beam shooting red hot rivets into a skyscraper frame — because it SUCKS to do that, I tell the windshield. Women are smart enough to avoid it. You think the Googleplex is all hipsters high fiving each other over ping pong– that building is a giant sweatshop of the unfuckable and it smells like unshowered fat people and farts. Women don’t want to work there. Me neither. Good for them. What then will they do in the coming knowledge economy, the panel contemplates. The same as the rest of us. Watch as the jobs are shipped to India. You want to talk about a sexist culture, by the way, go climb onto your husband’s burning corpse, I tell my glove box. A 22 year old tells an anecdote. A male manager didn’t like her code once. Mantle burbles sympathetically.

Relax. Thank God the valiums put you out before you could stay up till 4am jerking off to horrendous sexual tableaux out of Bosch. Be grateful. It’s just a hangover. This empty feeling, vulnerable feeling. Despair and fear. It is a sickness. It will pass. Get out of the house and do something. Put on your adult dress up pants and look at a spreadsheet and call phone numbers and discuss industrial real estate transactions. Permits for spray booths. Truck height loading docks. Power needs; recent improvements to the sprinkler system. A man needs twenty thousand square feet of refrigeration for his citrus packing operation. Let’s find it for him. He is doing well in this world. He packs so much god damn citrus that his existing Great Pyramid sized citrus cooling facility is inadequate. He is a success. When the world goes apocalyptic you can camp over there and live off tangerines. Nice guy. Immigrant too. The American Dream lives on.

Emily is moving in with some guy. She’ll be gone. Nikol got serious with some guy. She posts about him on facebook the way my aunt posts about abortion. The way a baby bird won’t shut the fuck up about wanting a worm. There is no one now. I will have to get on OKCupid and really try this time. You OKCupid girls are the worst of human schwag, you know. I hate having to talk to you. But you’re still better than what walks the streets.

Jesus man– if they’re schwag, what the fuck are you. You’re sitting here shivering over a 1000 word screed about your coke hangover and your eyes look like a fucking horror movie. Get up man. Go outside. The day awaits.

Tomorrow is Another Day

Yesterday was gonna be the day I stopped drinking. But I got stuck in traffic. Tanker truck caught on fire on the 60 freeway. It was carrying liquid hydrogen. Hindenburg. All lanes closed in both directions.

I don’t take the 60 freeway, but everyone who does jumped on my freeway of choice, the 10 East. It was my day to stop drinking. For the first hour I took it. Stuck with the plan. But I’d been driving all day. It got dark on the road. The radio just kept telling me about the horrible traffic conditions I was in, every channel. Defeatist messages. Folks, it’s gonna be bad out there for a while. As we’ve been reporting the 60 is closed. Of course you have your alternate routes, the 10 and the 210. But those are stacked up now too from downtown past Azusa. There’s a ripple effect going on here folks. The 605 and 710 are a sea of red. The 101 is stop and go through downtown past Hollywood. And the 5 is on fire, the commuters have begun torching their cars and eating passengers’ flesh. Trees blackened. No life left in the hills except one sinister looking cactus. Starved crows circling. If you’re an alcoholic, you’re gonna want to drink extra liquor tonight to power through the sensations you’re gonna be feeling for the next several hours. I am speaking directly to you, Delicious Tacos, the announcer said. You are an idiot for wanting to stop drinking. Why would you torture yourself further. Think of that first drink. The one that makes this all go away.

The 110 is backed up to Oregon and surface streets are a Bosch hell of shattered metal, folks. Bones meat blood and sinew in the streets. Insurance salesmen desperate to get home in time for the game, ripping babies out of car seats and holding them by the feet and slamming their little faces into light poles in a spray of blood and gristle to hear the mothers scream. Riot troops with flamethrowers just broiling people alive in their minivans, it’s a real mess out there folks. Why would you stop drinking. A crack in the earth has opened at the interchange of the 10 East and the northbound 605 and Satan has emerged 20 stories tall in flame to rape commuters with an ever-spiraling tentacle cock covered in poisonous barbs and there’s an accident in the carpool lane that CHP is busy trying to clear but it’s going to be at least an hour. CHP spokesperson Rick Martinez is telling commuters out there to stay put folks. Stay where you are if you can, you do not want to be on the road tonight. Truckers passing you will leer from high windows with the ghoulish face of your father. The dead beckon you to hell from twisted reflections in his hubcaps. Giant spiky lugnuts swirling, you feel the flesh ripped off your face, tongue torn out twitching on the asphalt, shredded throat croaking, wordless agony… it’s a real mess out there folks. Better buy as much liquor as you can as soon as you get home folks, you do not want to be sober out there. Traffic brought to you by Mattress Masters. You spend one third of your life on your mattress, why wouldn’t you choose the best.  Mattress Masters: sweet dreams.

I masturbated in the car to make myself feel better. Struggled with my belt in a fast patch, grabbed the gym T shirt I’d left in the passenger seat. Draped it over my penis. Thought of a blowjob Gertrude gave me one hot afternoon on a coke hangover. Do you want me to suck your dick, she said. I miss you, lover. Remembered cumming without warning her. How could you, you ruin it. Grab her head and force her to take you deep and shoot down her throat while she tries to wiggle off. You had a good one, she said. Like 8 spurts. I lost it in a slow patch when a trucker was right next to me. He’s seen worse.

That was good for 15 minutes. But by the time I got to the 5 interchange I knew I was going to the liquor store. 50 more minutes to get there. I bought a pint of Christian Brothers for $6.99. Maybe I can pace myself, I thought. It was gone in 20 minutes on an empty stomach. Barely felt it but woke up with a hangover. The only thing that’s gonna take the hangover away is another $6.99 pint of Christian Brothers.  If you got a better idea I’d love to hear it.

Seasonal Affective Disorder

It’s the light that gets me. Dark at 4:30. I just want to drink and sleep. You try to go outside but it’s cold and all the girls walking around have big sweaters on. No more yoga pants. Why go outside if you won’t see a fully defined pubic mound, the mathematically perfect curve of an ass crack jiggling. What’s the point.

Drink and sleep. Your hormones crash. Go to the gym and your strength has fallen off a cliff. Creaky joints. Every movement grates like bone on bone. I believe I tore my rotator cuff. This is another way of saying: my shoulder hurts. “Rotator cuff” is the only piece of shoulder anatomy I know the name of. Therefore I tore my rotator cuff. No heavy bench press, no heavy military. I now have the upper body of Barbie without the tits. It hurts when I hold the bar to dead lift. It hurts when I support the bar to squat. It hurts when I do a pullup.

Keep hammering on it anyway. Low weight high reps. Just to the point where it hurts but my arm doesn’t rip off my torso, spray onlookers with arterial blood. What are you gonna do, not lift weights? God made me to be a flabby pussy. I skip two weeks, suddenly I’m built like a white garbage bag full of jelly with willow branches sticking out. I am genetically half a man, it’s only with vigilant struggle that I approach the threshold of fuckability.

Cold and dark, cold and dark. I just want to eat a hearty stew of root vegetables and drink burgundy wine. Pass out to the TV. Mind you this is Los Angeles, cold is 60 degrees. But still. Something happens at the end of daylight savings time. The days are already shorter, shorter, the sunset starts at 3. The whole afternoon is weird cold queasy twilight. Then daylight savings ends. Lopping an hour off the light doesn’t seem like a big deal but it is, it’s like getting dropped out of bed into ice water, like throwing the emergency brake on the freeway. Every ancient gene that tells you to hole up with pelts and a fire kicks in all at once. White people are not meant to work in winter. Two hundred thousand years telling you if you go outside and do anything you’re going to die. No fighting it. You can only make it worse by trying.

You can drink your way through it, eat your way through it, sleep your way through it. But the phone is still going off, buzzing, telling you you have to work. Talk to people. The rent is due. The bills. If you don’t fuck soon you’re gonna feel ugly. Have to get dates. Go on OKCupid, go out to bars… work work work. Every conversation is an annoyance, a distraction from what you really want: to crawl in a hole and die.

The police helicopter comes at three in the morning. I am a nonviolent person. But I want a laser pointer. I want to get it in the pilot’s eye and have him flinch and lose the stick for one second. The bird goes down in fire, he burns alive, his children fatherless. Always at three in the morning. LAPD flies low, rattles the windows. Spindly spotlight fingers some cholo’s garage. Engine drone like a whole Stukka squadron, thump thump thump of the blades, the loudspeaker. “JOSE ECHEVARRIA, COME OUT OF THE HOUSE.” Excellent pronunciation, they roll the R’s and everything.

I want a Stinger missile. Heat seeker made to get planes on takeoff and landing. Turned the war around for the Afghan mujaheddin, took out the Soviets’ Hind gunships. I want a Stinger. Hot whoosh of gas out the end of the tube as I launch. Recoilless. The missile streaks across the sky, spiraling as it homes in on the LAPD’s heat signature. The bird spins only a few times since the fuckers fly low enough to almost touch. Plunges half cocked into my neighbor’s courtyard where the barking dogs are also immolated. The other neighbor’s truck with the variable-rhythm alarm that goes off if a dandelion petal lands on its hood explodes magnificently in flame. LAPD pilot emerging from the wreckage with his flesh burned off like a ghoul before he staggers and dies. Jose Echevarria sprints into the night, parkouring over fences, knowing he got a gift from God. He will live to steal car stereos another day. And I can go back to fucking sleep.

I am a nonviolent person. But I bought an axe for my Patrick Bateman Halloween costume. It sits on my air conditioner. I daydream about using it. Mexican kids come to steal my bike again but this time I’m ready. The porch light snaps on and the sliding door roars open fast and there I am swinging, laughing and taking limbs. The kid further from me with the bolt cutters panics as I dismember his buddy. He makes it over the porch rail but stumbles in the rhododendrons, I leap the rail and catch him. Big full body strokes that get him at the wrists and ankles. I daydream about the barking dogs; making meatballs full of poison, ground glass… find my hands pantomiming, forming the meat.

Dark dreams, dark thoughts. Wintertime. Even out here with sunshine and flowers, you carry the cold with you. No way to fight it. Like the man said, don’t try. Suck it up and kill time dreaming of the axe. Wait till it’s over. Two thousand more hours to go.

Underage Ass

Went down the block to get a Patra Burger. The Echo Park Christmas parade was going on. Teen cheerleaders shimmying down Sunset. Mexican Christmas carols play out of Mustangs. Short skirts. Yoga pants. Fifteen years old, tops. Like all straight men, I am powerfully sexually attracted to underage girls. Far more than to women of legal age. If you aren’t, say so in the comments. I’ll know everything else you say is also a lie.

It’s natural, but I feel like a miscreant. Three blocks to Patra Burger. Looking, trying not to look like I’m looking. Young girls shaking their asses in tiny skirts and little black underwear. Lifting one another up to give us all a panty shot. I strain to get an image I can remember. High school freshman’s sweaty taint up in the air with another girl’s hot palm jammed in it. Heaven. Clear skin, long shiny hair. Little budding tits. Firm little apple asses. The nineteen year olds taking veiny cock in porn look like crones in comparison. Any woman of legal age is already past her peak.

This is why I can’t be a teacher. This, and I hate young people and have no urge to help society. But mostly because I’d fuck my students. How could you not. Maybe you’d hold back for a year, two, ten. But one day one of them comes on to you. Every cell in your body was crafted over millions of years for the sole purpose of ejaculating inside ovulating young teens. The smell of her armpits after field hockey practice makes you a beast. You’d crack. Then live in terror. She’s gonna talk. She’s gonna write about her crush in her Lisa Frank diary that her parents dig up. She’s gonna tell a friend who tells her therapist who tells the cops. Suddenly you’re in the chester tank. Sex offender for life. A child rapist. Never work again, live in real danger of being flayed alive by medieval peasant mobs. Neighborhood brutes beat you with tire irons. What if it was my daughter, they say, but really– they’re jealous. You took that sweet pussy they can never have.

One of my art teachers tried to fuck me when I was fifteen. A woman. Not bad looking for forty. But I’m almost forty now, I still can’t fuck forty year olds. It was a boarding school. She had an apartment on campus. Her kids went there too and I knew them. I had a cold. She came up to me at night, in a room under the auditorium where they stored theatre props.

You feeling OK, she asked. Under the weather, I told her. Well, she said, if you want to feel better: come to my place and see me. I think you know what I mean. And she gave me the fuck me eyes.

I think you know what I mean. At first I didn’t. She was first person to ever express sexual interest in me. I was an unfuckable dork and thought I would be for life. What did she mean? Seemed to be something forbidden. Smoking pot maybe? I don’t want to smoke pot with a teach– OHHH.

Oh. I am a person that someone wants to fuck. For the first time ever. Holy shit. She is my art teacher. What do I say, I don’t– OK, yeah, I understand, I said. OK. Maybe some time. She turned around. Walked away. Swayed her ass.

Why’d she want to fuck me, I thought. I ‘m ugly. White. Flabby. I have a cold, my nose is all red…. well, now I get it. Work out all you want and get a nice haircut but you’re never going to be as good to fuck as you were at fifteen. Smooth skin, a little downy hair, a dick that gets hard fast and gets hard again and again. Pert little balls, not the H.P. Lovecraft flesh sac hanging off my battered and impotent member now. She wanted to taste my sweet smelling young dick. She wanted my copious sperm load un-mutated by decades of liquor and cigarettes. In adolescence we are made perfect. From there we slowly rot and decline.

There were handsomer boys. But she took a shot at me because I was lonely. Smart. If I hadn’t been such a cringing virginal pussy I’d have gone for it. If I’d been the way I am now. Do it for the story. For the infamy. Did you hear, Delicious Tacos fucked the art teacher. Rumors spread. Murmurs stirring something dark and unholy in the schoolgirls’ loins. Women only know to fuck men who fuck other women. I’d have been a legend.

If I’d been the way I am now. But no. My career as Brolita began and ended in ten seconds. Good. It would have been weird. Scary. I’d be hiring aging hookers now. Telling them to act like an art teacher. Some parts of sex you’re born with. Other parts are clay; they get misshapen when you get molested.

I remember that moment every time I think about underage girls. So: at least ten times per day. I’m glad it happened. If it hadn’t I might have gone for it when I had a shot. Might not have known I could fuck people up. But now I hang back. Look and look away. Head home, jerk the meatpipe. Thoughts of half-hairless Mexican baton girl snatch urge forth a furious load. Haven’t blown one like that since I was her age.

My thanks to the Neighborhood Council.

Drunk Thoughts on Global Capitalism

There are three people who want a job for every job. This doesn’t count people who said “fuck it” and just left the workforce. People underemployed, part time, cleaning toilets with a lit degree.

We don’t make anything physical in America now. The thing we do make, computer code– Mark Zuckerberg is lobbying congress so he can import labor for it. Otherwise he might have to train people. Those people might take that training and do something with it other than make him richer. Can’t have that.

It will get worse. Practically, there will be no jobs soon. First you will be replaced by cheap overseas labor. Then cheap overseas labor will be replaced by robots.

We hear this and we ask: but what will we do for work?

How will we be slaves?

Everyone is broke and underemployed. Leadership gets elected by promising them jobs. We’re gonna put this great nation back to work. America is a great nation. But Americans are fucking cretins. Who will create jobs? Nobody. Real jobs are gone forever. And all real jobs ever did was murder your life to make some jerkoff richer. Don’t demand jobs. Demand money. Take your jobs and shove them right up your ass.

Every other first world country, this is how it works: when people protest, they demand money. Social programs. Redistribution. We then look down on them. Lazy communist freeloaders. Not like me, I’m the most dedicated free market smoker of grisly millionaire cock in the world, sir. I’ll clock hours I don’t bill for, sir; I’ll get my hand chopped off by sheet metal and won’t sue. I’m happy never to see my kids, sir. To drink cheap beer in front of the TV as my dead-eyed wife snores under the Afghan; once she’s good and passed out I’ll sneak on the internet and pump one off to some Creampie Thais, sir. Thank you so much for making these quality electronic goods so affordable. I’m the best worker bee you’ll ever have, sir, not like these lazy Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese who want to take an hour– an hour! away from work and drink tea and have siestas. Not like these socialist bums who demand a pension, sir, sick time, sir, vacation, sir– I will suck your musky corporate dick and tickle your smelly gray balls for a free market driven wage, sir. A free market driven wage in a free market that now includes places where you can dump mercury in the well next to a schoolhouse. Places where the water gives you worms. Where young people fight to the death over the right to sleep forty to a room in windowless bunkers that stink of farts, spend their free market wage on speed to stay awake so their head doesn’t droop down into panes of iphone glass whizzing by, molten baths of solder. That is your wage competition. People one generation removed from their life savings being a water buffalo. Zero generations removed from selling their daughters. Their organs.

Well these people work hard, not like you coddled college kids. I dare you whiners to try picking strawberries for one day, ya bums! And we pay ’em two dollars an hour because YOU want cheap strawberries. They line up to get it! Look at your fancy new phone! Ha! What if that phone cost more? You wouldn’t like that, would ya?

Yeah, I’m sure picking strawberries sucks. And I don’t deserve to eat any more than the pickers do, or the kid at the phone factory does. But it’s a moot point. Once two lines cross each other on a graph at Consolidated Strawberry International, it’ll be a machine picking those suckers. Anything that grows on a tree they already shake off with a machine. They’ll make one that works on a bush. Stoop labor will be in the same boat as the rest of us. Useless. If you don’t work you are useless. It is useless to just be a human being.

Work will go to the third world, then to the machines. Then get one of them STEM degrees, why don’t ya? Tell the robots what to do!

That’ll last you for a bit. Then the robots will be told what to do in India. Then the robots will tell themselves what to do. The Prime Directive will be to get a hold of whatever anyone else has left and funnel it to the Walton family.

There is not enough work now and there never will be again. They will figure out how to ship everything to the Third World. Once they get uppity, everything that can be automated will be. Governments might resist. But corporations don’t give a fuck about governments anymore. They are global. They will take their money wherever they can fuck people the most. Plenty of hungry holes on this planet. Apple is an Irish company now. So is facebook. No taxes in Ireland apparently. Fiddle dee fuckin dee. Every cruise ship ad says “ships registered in Liberia.” It’s not because of Liberia’s rich naval history and stringent maritime safety laws.

Companies will go where they can, do what they can, to fuck the most people the hardest. They must. They have an ethical obligation to maximize short-term gain for shareholders. A fiduciary duty to screw their customers and employees as much as they can get away with. Cut costs. Cut services. Cut bloat. You are bloat. Labor costs are a thing they tear their hair out over. Used to be taxes, too. But they bought governments and laws. They made taxes disappear. Soon they will buy robots and make you disappear. You and your simpering demands for food, medicine and leisure. If they pay you, they hate you. They want to make you go away. They will succeed.

Then what.

Unless you inherited something, you own nothing. And you never will. You own debt. The bank owns you. You get a bill every month for what you “own” and you better work to pay it. So much for your assets.

What the fuck happens when nobody does anything anymore? We gotta start figuring this shit out now. You won’t be growing your own food. Every piece of arable land in the country is owned by one corporation. That’s an exaggeration, but just barely. So what will all these people do? What will they be for?

I don’t know– fucking. Singing. Swimming in the creek. Playing board games. Jerking off between rounds of robot built Playstation 15. This idea of the nobility of work– “the pride of having a job”– kill it. It’s a relic of the witch-burning 1600’s freaks who poisoned this country from the get go. The puritans believed toil was sacred. They also believed in the death penalty for masturbation. Fuck those Thanksgiving decoration-looking prigs and everything they stood for.

What will I do for work? Forget that. How about this instead– hey rich man: give me free money. Hey government: use your force monopoly to take the Waltons’ dough and guarantee everyone a living for doing nothing. Kill the welfare bureaucracy and replace it with a straight check. 25 grand a year tax free for every human being over 18. If you want more you can work. Good luck with that. I’ll be jerking off.

It’ll never happen. Capitalism will burn to its natural end. Five families will own the Earth. Rest of us will be fucked. You won’t get a job cleaning their toilet. You won’t even be able to sell them your daughter. There will be robots for that.

We’ll be useless. Worthless. Or, we’ll be worth the value of our organs to the Waltons and Mark fucking Zuckerberg the 5th. Christ wept.

Fuck man, I better get more booze.

Coffee Shop Diary: Megadrought

The coffee shop. It’s hot today. There was a fire. Big brown clouds out of Glendorra that make the light look like the apocalypse. It’s not going to rain, we are told. Ever again. The pine trees in the park are cracked and brown and the city’s going to come and raze them all. Their bark has been ravaged by the pine beetle. It preys on vulnerable pines in times of dearth.

What’s more this jerkoff’s gigantic head is blocking my view of the one hot Asian chick in the cafe. Do not sit between a man and a hot young piece of ass, if your skull is the size and shape of a wall mounted air conditioning unit. There is another girl across from me. Ruddy faced Irish broad but she’s wearing a low cut V neck dress and about an inch and a half of tit is showing. I’ll have to make do.

She is texting intently, one thumbed. Her eyebrows tell me that the text is really interesting. No girls text me like that anymore. Nikol has a boyfriend and Emily has a job. OKCupid is a god damn wasteland. This is the year Tinder broke it. For a brief shining moment you could get laid by typing interesting words on a keyboard. Now no one reads. There used to be blogs. Now there’s Buzzfeed. The dating profile of the future will be a column of GIF’s.

I should have settled down when I could have. But then I’d just be with some old twat. I want to be with some new twat. OKCupid, I pine for your golden age like a mother for her lost child. How is it that I can’t get a date now when I write for another guy on there and he’s killing it. He has a cool job. What if I need a “cool” job again. What a nightmare. What if to get women you have to be the only thing you hate.

Relax. Look at the titties. Like when you’re on acid at a concert and the trip starts going haywire: just focus on the band. Thank you for showing me your titties, miss. You don’t know the joy you’ve brought.

After this I’ll go sit in the park. School will have gotten out and I will leer at underage Mexicans. There was a purpose to my life besides this once. But no more. I will age and decline and be forgotten and die.

Here’s another girl. Big tits in a sheer white shirt and turquoise bra. Thank you for this clothing choice. Her face looks a little like Steve Buscemi had a baby with the Old Man in the Mountain, from the New Hampshire license plate. But big tits. I’ll take it. Floppy little ass. Maybe 35. Too old but she still has something. She’s fucked a lot of men in bands. She’s done slip and dips at hole in the wall art gallery openings with her belly full of Two Buck Chuck and cheese cubes. She has herpes, she’s had syphilis. She doesn’t give a fuck. Her hair is tastefully colored. She walks back, pulls her eyes far to the right to avoid making eye contact with me. Keeps her Buscemi perma-sneer on. To avoid looking at me she risks walking into a picnic table and taking the sharp corner right in the pussy. Worth it to her. I look like a serial killer. When a girl makes eye contact and smiles I feel like a romance novel cover. When she does what this chick is doing I feel like a slug on her sidewalk after the rain. An invertebrate. Not even. They pity the slug. I am beneath pity. Get a hold of yourself man. Look at the Irish girl’s tits.

She knows now. She is locking her knees. Awkwardly putting her elbow in front of the tits. To do so she has to fix her arm like a broken chicken wing. She knows. She would rather mate with a slug. Fine then. Fuck off, you Brian Cox faced cunt.

My thirst is so deep it’s permanently mutated my DNA. I can’t even conceive of speaking to a woman. Here’s another one, fat little blonde in a short short skirt sits down with her back to me. I just look at her flaxen hair. That Maurice Ravel song plays as I twist up a fistful of it and plunge into her fat white ass from the back. Looks to be in college. Her hair, her hair. Her jiggling white thighs. Please, Lord, just castrate me.

I have to piss. Ask the Irish girl, will you do me a favor.

… maybe.

Flirtatious. I am getting somewhere. I ask her: if someone steals my computer will you yell at them?

Yes.

Great. Thank you.

I piss. But first I fix my hair. After, I think of what I’m gonna say. When I go back she will tell me that Huns tried to take my 2007 Acer Aspire. She fought them off. Stay in the can till it comes to me. Yeah, I could tell you have a touch of Charles Bronson going on. Good. Head back.

I come out and thank her. She just makes a don’t talk to me face.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

‘Cuz a lot of my friends are really into like sculpture right now, the fat little blonde is saying. She talks like a sparrow. I’m putting together a zine panel at Headspace. Colleen McTits has to get up. She does not ask me to watch her computer. Tries hard to get up in her short dress without giving me a panty shot. Fails. They are black.

Check my phone. Lena Dunham favorited my twitter picture. Her with Nicolas Cage’s head. This delights me. I have been noticed by someone famous. I’m in an Echo Park coffee shop drinking a tea called “Spring Jasmine.” Grinning uncontrollably because Lena fucking Dunham knows I exist. I prayed for castration. God said: granted. Giggling at my own shit like a little girl being tickled. Colleen sees it. Can’t help laughing too. Looks up from her book. I’m just trying to concentrate on my work, she says.

It’s impossible, I tell her, to see someone laughing stupidly and not laugh stupidly yourself. You should only feel bad if your book is about the holocaust.

No, it’s about the mutiny on the Bounty.

Was that a book before it was 15 movies?

Well it was a historical incident.

But no, I mean is that book about the Bounty, or–

It’s about six of the sailors who weren’t the original, you know, the main guy, who just took women and sailed away.

Yeah, with like a breadfruit plant.

Right.

But Mel Gibson played someone in one of those movies. So it is tangentially related to the holocaust.

Ha ha, yeah. Very tangentially.

And it dies again. But I’ve taken it somewhere. Now it’s awkward if I don’t ask her out. I don’t want to. She doesn’t want me to. She would have kept it alive. Still. If I don’t ask her out it is a cruel indictment of her humanity and bone structure. She is wearing plastic sandals the color of band aids.

Lena Dunham knows I exist. Ha. Take that, with your stupid schoolwork. I called her show a trifle but now I’m thinking about her movie, which I loved. That movie was genius because she favorited my tweet. Fuck you, you Captain Bligh studying motherfucker. You should have kept the ball in the air. Instead she is clearly nervous I’ll speak again. She just wants to finish her paper and go home to her boyfriend.

Now I’m laughing again and I don’t want her to think I’m laughing because of her. I’m hiding my face with my hands to make it clear I’m not watching her unbraid her hair and put it in a bun. Who fucking cares dude. Let it go. Norman Greenbaum’s ”Spirit in the Sky “ comes on the radio. The blonde says she’s had internships where they didn’t know what to do with me, it’s silly. She is 21 years old. When she was born I was already a fully formed human being and now what.

Colleen has finished with her hair. Looks back at the book. She smirks at something in it. I say nothing and leave.

The Heart Touching Magic

I woke up and I was taking her from behind like a savage. She was black, dark black. Tattoos. I popped into consciousness out of blackness and my dick was pushing into her tight pussy and she was moaning. Eat your heart out, Quantum Leap.

She had flaked on our date. I showed up at the bar on time. Ten minutes later got the text that she forgot. Before that another girl “had her car towed” 20 minutes before our date. Before that a Manic Pixie Dream Girl emailed me 15 minutes before our date: her friends were throwing her a surprise party. But she forgot to put the “o” in “.com” so I showed up and sat there forever like a jerkoff. Manic Pixie Dream Cunt.

She forgot. She was at a happy hour in Hollywood. It was implied that I might join her. But the sun had been down for a few hours so my BAC was at felony level. I needed to draw her back. I needed a miracle. I needed cocaine. My dealer had been deported to Honduras. There to be ventilated by death squads no doubt. Sorry Manny.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I texted, how good is your coke dealer.

11, she said.

Thirty minutes later I was walking two miles down Normandie from the 4 bus with my rent money in my pocket. She was cute. We got high. Stocked up at the liquor store. We coke talked about the state of race relations in America. Listened to Band of Horses youtube videos. Her laundry hamper was in the living room. Every time she went to take a piss I dug for her dirty panties. Sniffed them like they were an oxygen mask and I was trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Center. We’re not going to have sex, she said, as we smoked out the bathroom window. Fine. But I kept pawing at her. Pulling up her shirt and pulling down her pajama pants to look at her ass. Magnificent.

She had pills too. Percocets. The pills and wine won their battle with the coke when I was smearing tangerine scented massage oil in her ass crack. I woke up and I was fucking her. She got on top of me and she could move. The state of race relations in America was improving. Next date we’ll have dinner.

Write Her a Lovely Message…

I accidentally saved you to my favorites. I say accidentally, because I didn’t know that little thing down there did that.

I hope you don’t take that as an insult. If you did, get over yourself. I don’t despise you near enough, at this point, for my favoriting you to not be ironic.

Your profile inspired me to write that. Have a nice day

* * *

Only a few people despise me nearly as much as I deserve.

You want to get a drink some night?

* * *

Possibly… We should maybe chat a bit and know each others names first, though

I’m Jess btw

* * *

Give me a topic and I’ll write something about it.

* * *

The topic is – “you”

Go!

Here’s the thing with me. I want to find a nice girl. But I also want to get you hammered in my filthy silverfish infested jack shack and rawdog you in the second hour of our first date. I’ll pull out. But maybe the one wild drop squirts in you and gets you pregnant and thinking about this is getting me hard on the train. This is not a proposition. I am not saying “hey let’s fuck.” You can’t do that. You have to pretend your conversation is about absolutely anything else. Your job, your TV, whatever. But what I am thinking is: hey let’s fuck. Then I can find out if you’re a nice girl. After. But until you fuck her you have no idea. All you’re thinking is will I fuck her can I fuck her God if I give her one more glass of wine she’ll fuck me. I hope I’m not blowing it I can’t afford this wine but I just need that ass so bad. One date, three, a year of friendship, whatever. Until you fuck you can’t turn that off.

And then you fuck. And it occurs to you that she’s boring. She laughs at your shit but never says shit that makes you laugh. She’s “feisty” and adversarial and you mistook that for a sense of humor when your ball sac was burning white hot through your bluejeans. But now she’s just a pain in the ass. You are probably one of these girls. All but maybe five of them have been. Nothing against you though. My definition of boring is most people’s definition of a happy, successful life. I do not have a happy, successful life. I want you to be a sad broke drunk like me but secretly think you’re some genius with a biting wit so having no money is OK. Compulsively tearing up meaningless pussy (or cock, in your case) on OKCupid is OK. Debasing people is OK, dehumanizing people is OK. Debasing and dehumanizing yourself. Because you’re a secret genius. Better than everyone else. And maybe the world will never know but you know and people can see it in your eyes. I want you to be like this. Then it will be us against the world .

But you’re not. I know already that you offer me nothing. But you are pretty. I want to have sex with you. I also know that you are blonde haired blue eyed slender traditional beauty with a college education so fucking you will be an extraordinary hassle. White girls are hard. It’s easier when you’re exotic to somebody. To you I’m just every douche on your high school lacrosse team.

And what a pain in the ass you are already. Your messages are nothing but “dance monkey dance.” Your profile is just one bit of banal self-aggrandizement after another. Like most women. If it weren’t for the genetic accident of your face looking like a small child I would have muttered go fuck yourself as I clicked OKC’s convenient trash can icon. But no one does that to you. They do it to the fat girls but never to you.

They do it to the fat girls but the fat girls still write one bit of banal self-aggrandizement after another. I love my job I love my school I am an artist I am “brainy” I am living my dreams. I am a yogini! I will whoop your ass at scrabble. If one of you had hemorrhoids and wrote an essay about groaning in agony each morning squeezing out hot bloody shit nuggets I’d marry her. If one of you said I dropped out of school and I work a shit job and I have to drink a pint of rotgut at the exact moment the sun goes down to keep my hands from shaking… where are you, lover. We drink tonight under the same moon. We could have top shelf liquor if you’d split the rent. Where are you.

It’s not you. Your shit is too together and no one ever tells you you suck. I’m not saying you suck either. You could be great but I’m never gonna know. You can’t know someone until you fuck them. And I think you’d take more than one date to fuck. Who has that kind of time.

You Should Message Me If, Part 3

I want someone to reenact Frazetta paintings with, basically. I in my burnished brass codpiece, chiseled deltoids rippling as I swing a double-bladed fire axe at a demon spider with sixteen cat eyes. You, astride the rampant beast in chains, nude but for a tattered bikini and a seal fur cloak that conveniently blows aside from your breasts and crotch in hot winds stirred by a distant alien volcano. Your buttocks could be credibly described as “meaty orbs.” My eyes speak of hellfire and lust as I land the killing blow. The unholy death shriek of the beast echos against the jagged black crags in the middle distance. Three moons look on. With another heave of the blade I split your chains. You are free, but your heart is my slave. I look around, furtively. I need a rag to clean off the stinging spider ichor. There is nothing. We are wearing virtually no fabric. I shrug, and we bone anyway.

How about it.

What Do You Do, Part 4

You know those Staples commercials where they show corporate board meetings. Where it’s clear that the people who made the commercial never had a job. That’s what my office looks like. Dark veneered wood. Gray file cabinets. A conference room where dumb platitudes are projected in Microsoft Powerpoint. I am wearing a bad suit. Other men in bad suits walk behind me chattering. They say numbers and facts about money into phones. They pause to listen to other numbers and facts about money. I look at a monitor. On it is a white spreadsheet with information about money. I look for the cell that tells me about someone’s money. Find it. I pick up a phone with many lights and buttons. Push numbers. Ask a secretary for the person with money. If he– and it’s always he– if he picks up I talk to him about his money. I do this for most of the day, most days, so my boss who is rich can be more rich. His office has golf trophies and two big windows. My office only has one window. But it overlooks a golf course. This is desirable. I have a view of a water hazard. It pleases me when the hazard disrupts a golf game. They look like ants from my window but I can read their frustration. Life is only good when someone has it worse.

What about you.

Something About Some Woman

You meet a girl. She makes you horny. So you like her. But you know she’ll bug the fuck out of you. Sooner or later.

How do you not push that moment. When you are “good with women” you force yourself to make it happen too fast. You look for flaws in her to gird yourself. Make it so she can’t get to you. Love is a fight and you stay on top by loving the other person less. You get to where it’s like this right away. From the first date. First minute. You get girls so you can feel something. But you can only get girls if you feel nothing.

This girl, though. It felt like nature meant for us to breed. Her armpits smelled like our kids would be immune to some ancient parasite. I want to rut with her and fill her soft belly full of babies. I like her accent. Her eyes. But she will bug the fuck out of me sooner or later. The “game” part of you pushes for that moment. Too fast.

Don’t push it. And don’t pull it back. Just feel what you feel. But you tell yourself: snap out of it. This is fleeting bullshit, your mind says. You know it will end so end it now. There’s no free lunch and you can’t break even. Love is a made up story. If you like them they don’t like you.

What can you do. God is evil. She will bug the fuck out of me.

Sooner rather than later.

Sobriety, Day Two

So as long as I don’t need sex, sleep or human contact, not drinking is gonna go fine. As long as my nights are just: couch. Tubes running fluids in and out of my mouth, dick and ass. Endless loop of Mythbusters on Netflix. As long as I can handle days pacing my apartment alone muttering half sentences, snarling in the mirror… sitting down to write but the words move too fast. This, and one hour a night sitting in a church basement. Me and the other weirdos glaring at two big vinyl posters of platitudes. Everything will be fine.

Went to my second meeting last night. Had a date after. Her house. She made burritos. We fucked. She was on top. There is a tapestry hanging over her bed, with an Aztec theme. My mind left. Journeyed in between the threads making up a slope-headed peasant carrying a water jar. I traveled through irregularities in the textured plaster ceiling. They were mountains on Mars, or some snow planet. Does this not feel good to you honey, she asked. Well yeah, it feels good on my penis. But the rest of me– my entire soul feels like you ripped off a scab too soon. There was not newly formed skin underneath but raw bloody twitching flesh. My whole being is made up of raw skinless meat and a cold wind is blowing over it. Except for my dick. My dick feels great.

I left. I felt bad. She brought up Valentine’s Day. She was a good sport about it. I will spend the night of Valentine’s Day in a church basement with weirdos.

The AA people told me it was a good idea to not be around liquor. I left my date and went to the liquor store to buy cigarettes. Imagined AA people spying on me. Watching me walk past the “LOTTERY, ATM” sign and the cutout of a leering Captain Morgan. Sadly shaking their heads. I made a show of walking out not holding a bag. The liquor store had fine deals on all my favorites, as is its wont. But I managed. I bought cigarettes and looked at the covers of old Hustlers. Law and Order Star Nude! Huh, I wonder which one– nah, I better get out of here.

Went home. Before I could fire up Adam Savage and Jamie “Cuntcrusher” Hyneman I got a text from the other girl. The one with the body. I saw you coming out of the liquor store, she said. Ha. I was just buying cigarettes, I promise. She was eating a truck taco by the Goodwill drop box on Sunset. Asked if I wanted to join her. I can’t, I can’t. I can’t join anybody for anything anymore. Either give me some fucking booze or go away and die.

I’m going to a date after this, I told the kind eyed AA woman. But don’t worry. There won’t be any booze. I showed up and the girl had a half empty bottle of wine sitting out and a half full cup poured. I was disappointed it did not come to life and speak to me. You ought to get yourself a sponsor early, the woman said. The guy who took me to my first meeting should be my sponsor. He was perfect. A soothing presence. But it’s too weird to ask. I don’t want to impose. Call me, he said, if you’re feeling squirrelly.

Well fuck, I’m feeling squirrelly. But part of feeling squirrelly is you can’t call people. Ain’t that a bitch. My sponsor is this document I am typing into. White page: I feel motherfucking squirrelly.

Deep breath.

Daytime went OK yesterday. Woke up not hung over. Weird feeling, but good. Long commute. Instead of NPR I listened to music. It was Threefer Thursday. David Bowie was winding down. Next up in just a second, folks, we got some AC/DC coming. FUCK YES I screamed at the instrument panel, and accelerated.

The ads started. I haven’t heard a full string of radio ads in five years. But with AC/DC you don’t want to miss the first riff. How bad can ads be. Skit after skit about Valentine’s Day. Awful actors, awful writers, awful production… people fucking get paid for this shit. I languish in obscurity. Take your valentine to Pachonga Casino and Spa. She will delight in 2800 different slots. Buy your special lady a Hyundai at Glendale Auto Mall. Pay only 279 a month. Take out an auto loan for your fucking girlfriend, a failed weatherman was telling me. Has no one ever seen Judge Judy.

Fifteen more ads. Finally the guitar kicks in. DUH NUH NUH– fuck yeah! It’s Highway to Hell, my personal soundtrack for daily living. No Brian Johnson era Adam Sandler soundtrack shit. This was Bon Scott, the realest of the real. Fuck yeah, I told the speedometer. Right then I hit that mountain pass on the 10 East. Lost all reception out of L.A. Had to switch to Inland Empire NPR. A journalist talking to two other journalists. They discuss how other journalists discuss Gay Rights in Russia. Gay journalist says: Western journalists don’t discuss Gay Rights in Russia enough. Ivy League woman who owned multiple horses in her youth says: well Larry, the reality on the ground in Sochi is more nuanced .

If I’d been hung over I’d have broken something in the car when Highway to Hell cut out. But I listened patiently. Did you know you can buy an NPR membership for your pet, a jovial man told me. You’ll receive a stylish pet bandana. I did not daydream about lining up every person who had purchased an NPR membership for their pet. Their stylish bandana-clad pets with them. Taking a Vietnam era napalm thrower to the group. Highway to Hell plays loud enough to mask their screams. This is what it felt like to not be hung over. The day was OK. Then the night. Like someone slowly peeled back my entire skin and hosed me down with ice water. And again today.

Deep breath. Jerk off. Everything will be fine.

Nature’s Miracles

At the beach. A woman with big titties walks into the cold water. Other things are happening too– the thunder of the rolling waves. A flock of shorebirds at the waterline. Ibises I think. Skittering at the edge of the sand, digging for clams. Scattering back. They keep a tight formation. Ancient instincts going back to the dinosaurs. Huge brown pelicans glide overhead like pterodactyls; their brightly colored beaks. The majesty of nature and all that other jerkoff shit. She has big titties. Big titties.

I need to have sex soon or I will die. Specifically, I need to have unprotected sex with a woman between fifteen and twenty seven years of age. A new one. No one I have fucked before. The phone is an elephant’s graveyard of girl numbers. Many of them are cute. Some are even funny. But, you fuck a chick three times, she’s expired. I could write more thoughts on the matter but this woman has big titties. Big titties.

How do you talk to her. She has a navel piercing. How do you talk to a person with a navel piercing. I have rediscovered myself in sobriety. It’s been sixty days now. Shit you pushed down when you were drunk grows back fast. The way Chernobyl is forest again. Memories come back. Knowledge. Emotions. I am a healthy and functioning human being. Honest in all affairs. Guided by a loving God to be of service to others. But Jesus, who gives a fuck– the one thing I can’t do is get pussy. Without pussy, why are you alive.

She has big titties, and she’s getting farther into the water, giggling as the cold waves lap up and up; one makes it to her waist and recedes and she shrieks and her bikini bottoms are damp and her cunt starts to suck them up into its fat little crack and I need to throw her down in the water and get on top of her, throw my forearm in her throat, pull the wet nylon out of that fat cunt crack and yank it to the side and just pump my evil seed into her furiously before the lifeguard can run over and pull me off. Women, you understand nothing. Have a kid and maybe you’ll know. Watch your baby get run over by a dump truck. The way you want to throw yourself under the wheels to save it is about the way I want to forcibly rabbit fuck this sorority girl on vacation. All men, always, are just walking around with this. You can’t jerk it out of you. It’s just raging constantly, bubbling agony in your guts now and forever. You need pussy like breathing. And the world just waterboards you.

Women. The fact that you are not brutally raped– not just every day, but several fucking times per day by gangs of engorged male baboons– the fact that your mailman just hands you the Crate and Barrel catalog and smiles instead of strangling you with his government issue fanny pack and throat fucking you, relishing your tears, spraying his triumphant mailman nut on the geraniums… we are doing you a huge fucking favor at all times. We are watching our baby get run over by a dump truck, and just hearing him scream and watching him die. Holding back every billion year old white hot urge so you can feel comfortable walking around. I’m not asking you to like it. But take some pity on us, you merciless shrews.

I asked my sponsor: how do you get women when you’re sober. I’m a nebbish now. I rediscovered myself. Who I really am is a cringing unmanned dork with a hunched spine and raisin nuts. Girls used to smile at me on the street. Now I’m a slug that came out in the rain. I mean, fine– I hate women anyway. Smug peabrained cunts, talking about nothing.

But that baboon urge shrieks at you like a car alarm going off– get laid get laid get laid. So how do you do it. Go do ten approaches, he told me. Neil Strauss game tips circa 2004. Motherfucker, do you know who I am? I fucked attack pussy on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

Tears in the rain. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Heaven is deaf and hell screams and screams.

Instrument of Thy Will

You know that feeling. Where you drank every day for 20 years. By the end you were blacking out a couple times a week, alone. You were yelling at cops, getting in fights with women– Lesbians duke it out; the straight chicks just bite you. That feeling where you had a solid 20 years of that going on. You accomplished nothing in your career. Your net worth is negative ten thousand dollars, despite your fancy schools. Your car is 35 years old. It cost $1200 on craigslist. The master brake cylinder’s about to go; the thing barely stops. Breather hose is disconnected and just spits blue smoke. The engine doesn’t turn off when you kill the ignition. You have to rev it up, floor it for about ten seconds to push all the diesel out of the fuel line. You have to do this getting home at 10:30 PM in your parking lot that is just under the window of the building next door, where a nice woman has a new baby. Floor your loud as fuck poison fume spewing 1970’s diesel engine late under her window, gas creeps up into the vent and fries the little fucker’s brain. He’ll look at his schoolwork ten years from now and the letters won’t form words, they’ll just dance. No money no job no wife no kids no art no nothing. You have done nothing with your life. Maybe you kept the cat alive but come on, a monkey could raise a cat. Even the cat would be better off without you.

Drank every day for 20 years, every 6 weeks or so you’d get cocaine, jabber meaninglessly at douchebag guys and girls who would never fuck you or if they would you couldn’t get a boner. Spend six hours when they go home sucking up your last bumps while making artificial pussies and jerking it to horse porn. Needless to say you were a pig with women. They hated you when it mattered and now you hate them and you just fuck your way through them like a machine. Internet dating was invented right when something in you cracked. Like a weirdo getting his first gun. From there it was just tear em up. You can’t talk to women for shit in real life but the internet, fuck man. They loved you, a lot of them. Why. Probably because you’re tall. No, no, see– one of the things you have to get over is hating yourself. Hating women, hating other people, hating yourself. You are worthy of love. God made you and God only makes things perfect. Well OK. You were worthy of love and got it. You didn’t return it and you only made their lives worse for knowing you. You took them on a date and got them drunk like a machine and then fucked them and never spoke to them again.

Pussy was just another kind of booze. You needed it to not feel ugly. To hell with the pain in the ass thing it’s attached to. You ought to go to the AA for sexaholics, too, you thought. Your home AA venue also serves as a Sex and Love Addicts room. Their vinyl 12 step poster is like the AA one, except it’s diagnostic. 1) We admitted that we used intimacy for (blah blah blah, some bad reason). A list of symptoms, kind of like “you might be a redneck if.” And if you compulsively use OKCupid for unprotected sex with strangers, no intention of seeing them again despite your “looking for” listing saying only “long term dating…” you might just happen to be a redneck.

You wanted to change. You stopped drinking. Which meant you stopped fucking. God became part of your life. Fuck off, He’s helpful. And you went three months and finally you thought: it’s time to date again. How do I do that without hurting someone, you asked.

Go have fun on your date, He said.

You went. She was cool. You were open and human with her. And she with you. And yes, you fucked her. Yes, you made her stand over the cat bowl on the porch on the off chance that your 70 year old neighbor would look out his window. He’s a sweet man and deserves something to look at. But it wasn’t dirty. It wasn’t bad. You were open and honest and vulnerable and it felt good, it felt good… this part of you was God-given too. It didn’t have to be hurtful. Mechanical.

And you saw her again, you spent the night in her clean girl house rolling around watching movies and having filthy unprotected sex. Talking in between. You liked her. Lingered in the morning; it was a hot day, she lives on a hill, you cracked the front of her neighbor’s new Audi backing up with the Benz’s creaky brakes… you were horrified, but it was OK. She didn’t care. Still gave you a long kiss goodbye. You knew you had something. You went home feeling possibility. You could see yourself with her. Dear Lord, thank you for letting me feel this thing even one more time.

You got home. Let out the cat. Headed to the toilet to take your shit of triumph. Ass burbling fire after the 16 oz sustainably harvested coffee with notes of raspberry you drank with her at the yuppie cafe, while the other dorks looked on jealous. Flip the lid, sit, drop your purple American Apparel briefs.

There is a beef gravy shart in them.

You sharted. You fucking sharted. And you didn’t know. Which means you don’t know when. Which means:

You might have also sharted in her bed.

You slept naked.

You might have sharted in her bed.

The worst is the not knowing. If I’d sharted for sure I could recover. But if I didn’t… I mean… you can’t text somebody:

Hey, did I shart in your bed? If so, I’m really sorry!

She has a dog. It sleeps under the covers. When you fuck and she’s on top the dog grinds its twat on your shinbone. Maybe she’ll think it was the dog. Except if the dog ever sharted you better god damn believe she wouldn’t let it snuggle up in her howeverthefuckmany thread count real job girl sheets. Fuck. You did. You must have. You shat in her bed. With the world the way it is, how else could it be.

You know that feeling when you’re a pig but you find God and open your heart and meet a nice girl and you get one more chance and when you do, when you do… you literally shit the bed.

Eloi… Eloi…

Ass

She’ll break my heart but I don’t care because my asshole hurts. She’s going on a date with another dude. I don’t want her to. There’s other complicated shit. Who cares. My ass.

I’m afraid it’s cancer. A polyp. Started hurting after four days of diarrhea from bad spinach. Figured it was the acid. My asshole was just overworked and surly. But it got worse. It hurts a little when I sit and a lot when I cough. When I adjust. Until your asshole hurts you don’t know how much you pucker it in life. Suck it in. It’s like a second mouth and all day you’re nibbling your lower lip. When I do that it’s like a rat’s chewing through it. Abrasive pain. You understand why Richard Gere pulled the gerbil’s teeth. It hurts when I shit, obviously. But also when I jerk off. Your asshole pulsates when you nut. Who knew.

I assumed it was a cyst. Whatever it is, it weeps. You feel just a hint of slippery blister fluid trickling in your underwear. The reflex that kicks in when you feel a wet ass: did I shit? All day it’s like this. I had to look. Assumed it was a cyst right over the hole and I could lance it. Got out of the shower, bent over in the mirror. Spread my shitpipe. You never look at your own asshole. But with porn we’re all connoisseurs now. It did not look half bad. If it were on a chick I’d fuck it.

The outside is fine, so whatever hurts is in my ass. Cancer. I spat on a finger, stuck it in. Started to feel something. Slimy cherry size lump covered in smooth wet skin like a salamander’s back. When touched it recoiled, like an animal. The finger made it angry. The burn spread from my ass to my guts to my navel.

I’m gonna ride it out. The doctor would be a hassle. But what if it’s infected. What if it’s a pus bulb from a wound from some shard of chicken bone I swallowed. What if the sharp end of a shattered party wing scratched a 300 yard track through my bowels… organs and blood stewing in half-formed septic shit… We can’t choose the form our death takes. But that would fit.

**********

If you don’t want her to go out with this dude, just tell her, my sponsor says. If you want to be monogamous, say so. If not, fine. But stop with this OKCupid pussy. Those girls are damaged. Go talk to girls in real life. You’re at the grocery store for instance. A woman contemplates celery. You go up to her, you say: I see you’re buying celery. I also like celery. Etc. Meet a nice girl this way.

And now an Isabella Rossellini looking chick with a band aid on her face asks to sit with me. She needs to charge her phone, she says. Right as I’m typing about talking to girls.

Message from God. So what the fuck do I say. I see you have books about art. I also like art. Here are some things I know about art. Anyway, you want to get a drink some night. Here, put your number in my phone. I want to hold a fistful of your hair down, look in your eyes when I’m about to cum. Make you think I might blast in you when you said don’t. A fan of medieval Japanese woodcuts I see. You have tiny arms like a child. I want you to put on Hello Kitty pajama bottoms and stumble squinty eyed from the bedroom and tell me daddy I can’t sleep. Too bad about your fuckin’ muppet eyebrows but I can look past that. You didn’t choose to be Armenian. I want to rut with you like a mandrill and I want it so god damn bad I can’t form a sentence, is what I’m saying. Anyway do you come here often.

Impossible. Impossible. I’m gonna clench my asshole so I don’t have to think about it anymore.

It Will Be Very Unpleasant

At the Mexican Doctor to get my surgeon referral. For the ass surgery I will need. Telemundo is on and the Copa Mundial is playing. Nigeria versus somebody. There’s a pressboard portrait of Christ on the wall, mounted on an oval piece of burlap, with the Oracion por la Paz. It feels like there’s a swiss army knife in my shitcave and all the blades keep flying open. The corkscrew.

Will he too have to finger my asshole. What will this accomplish. Someone needs to look. Feel is not enough. Especially with those gloves– maybe he could tell what it is if he went in raw. Yesterday the ER told me it’s a hemorrhoid, which it isn’t. It’s an anorectal abscess. I know from the internet. Sudden onset anal pain that escalates quickly. Coupled with fever and chills. Lethal if left untreated, but lancing provides instant relief.

**********

I had finally called the insurance helpline. Wanted the nurse to tell me it was not an anorectal abscess. Sir, please stop looking at WebMD and getting paranoid. I know it blows when your ass hurts, but suck it up for a day or two. It’ll just go away. Eat fiber, etc.

Nope. With the symptoms you’ve described, sir, you will need to get this treated within 1 hour. If you begin to feel feverish or dizzy, call 911 immediately. What? I asked, as the room began to spin. Sir, please hold the line; I’m pulling up emergency medical facilities in your area. Well fuck. My asshole is gonna kill me. Let it be fast.

The girl drove me to the ER. She wanted to watch them lance my ass. A keeper. At night I think about the smell of her neck. It’ll be over soon.

Two doctors. The “big” doctor sees you first. Asian guy who’s graying perfectly and has a tan like he paraglides. You tell him your symptoms. He types into a laptop. Severe sudden onset anal pain. Chills. Fever. A lump just inside my rectum. Ah, yes, he says. Sounds like an anorectal abscess. Lethal if left untreated, but lancing provides instant relief. We’ll just take you back and handle it. He adds one sentence that isn’t copy-pasted from WebMD. Maybe he scrolled down to the comments. “It will be… very, uh, unpleasant.”

Yeah, I figured, I tell him. But, you got a choice between puncturing your lethal ass cyst or dying from it, you know… you gotta play the hand you’re dealt. He laughs and the cute nurses do too. I want to seem cool to him. I can tell he gets laid.

The second doctor stuck her hand in my ass and her finger got right on top of it and I screamed and screamed. You could hear the whole floor go quiet. Even the cholicky babies, the death moans of the elderly. Well I don’t see any signs of infection, she said. You’re doing a great job keeping it clean.

Thanks.

It feels like an internal hemorrhoid. Are you sure? Well no, she says. Someone needs to look at it. I can’t really get in there. Go to your primary care, get a referral to a surgeon. They’ll tell you if you need to get it cut out.

Lancing provides instant relief. What a fucking tease. I should have known, I should have known– a doctor tells you to go to a different doctor who can refer you to a real doctor. I went to my new Primary Care. Named Cesar just like the last one. Ten nurses there but only the hot one gets to follow him around. Yeah, they should have just done a colonoscopy at the ER, he said. But now you gotta see a specialist. I’ll put in the paperwork.

Meanwhile I looked at my ass again. The cyst is unmistakable now. Small grape erupting through the hot flesh of my ass ring. The whole pulpy pulsating organ is turning itself inside out. Pain like flames. There are also hemorrhoids. She was not wrong. Hideously coiled blue worms just on the verge of prolapsing. You induce a narrative. Spinach diarrhea caused a tear which caused a fistula which caused a cyst which blocked my anus which caused the hemorrhoids. If I had known this one day ago I could have told them. Instant relief.

Understanding only comes when it’s useless. Now I wait for the insurance letter. Dear sir: we regret to inform you that your request is not authorized. Get a lighter and a needle.

But Enough about My Ass

No! Never enough about my ass. Typing this standing up. The pain spread to my balls. They’re a pair of brass doorknobs clattering on each other. I can stand so my balls don’t touch my thighs. I can avoid sitting. But I cannot prevent my balls from having contact with each other. Pissing is OK, until I get to the last “drain it all the way” squirt. You want to flex your taint, muscle out the last few drops. This requires your asshole. Everything requires your asshole. And now every nerve command stops on its way there. A bite of pain flares up. My body says are you sure. I learned how to cough without clenching my ass. How to clear my throat. Do you know if your toothbrush hits your gums too far back, you clench your ass? No? Shatter a beer bottle and stick in in your ass and then brush your teeth if you don’t believe me.

A fart is like a knife. A shit is not so bad, interestingly. Except my ass– it’s like an old movie where a cop is trying to talk to a hysterical woman and has to smack her. It’s so traumatized it just shuts down. And I can’t push. That will make the hemorrhoid pop out. You have to be patient. Just let it drop. The prescription strength stool softener does nothing. My stools were already pillow soft.

I can either sit in the bath or lay face first on the couch. Fine. What would I have done anyway. I have no job. But it hurts, it hurts. I should have taken the Vicodin script. Trying to be Dudley fucking Do-right over here with my sobriety. Nobody’s giving me a prize for this shit. I have a couple jobs lined up. I’m not following up on them, because of my ass. I will lose this woman over my ass. My life maybe.

Oh well. They made more.

Ass Part 4

I called 911 because I was in the bath and my legs started spasming. You could see muscle pulsing like a snake moving under the skin. First calves. Then thighs. Then my legs locked up and my belly started to go. My foot stuck twisted like the end of a chicken wing. It hurt. What if it went all the way up. Would my face just go in the water. Would I die naked with my hot bath ball sac spread over my thighs like a steamed tortilla.

While my arms still worked I hoisted myself up by the soap holder. My fucking thumb was twitching and the phone was wet. Many tries to get the passcode. When there’s an emergency, you forget you can just hit “emergency.” Then– no, you dumb fucker, I am not calling 921. Jesus Christ. That voice never goes away. The one that tells you of course it would be like this. Your ass goes out and it spreads and you die naked because your retarded thumb can’t work the phone. You went to the doctor and everything. They told you it was hemorrhoids. You knew it was an anorectal abscess. Septic cyst that infects and kills you. That other voice doesn’t go away either: ha! I was right!

The girl left work to take me back to the ER. Of course it would be like this. You meet a nice girl and then die from your asshole.

Then a lot of pain and screaming broken up by long waits. I needed an operation, I was told. The staff were all funny. The guy who checked my heart said they had me figured for anal trauma. The nurse used to be an EMT, talked about dead bodies on the toilet. I told the anesthesiologist I was nervous and he said haha, me too. Then he told me he was giving me Michael Jackson medicine. So it’ll make me rape little boys to forget the savage beatings my dad gave me, I should have said. L’esprit d’escalier.

The only stick in the mud was the surgeon. We drain it and then we wait, he said. See if a fistula develops. 30-50% chance. The cyst cavity forms a tunnel connecting your rectum to the outside. So like a second butthole? No, no, it’s a tiny… it’s a pinprick. It just causes leakage. That sounds like a second butthole to me, I said. A third nipple is still a nipple even if it looks like a mole. Look, I have other patients, he said.

I had to stay overnight. They had TV. Discovery Channel was running a show called Naked and Afraid. Two nude people are dropped into a jungle. It’s a stupid show but there’s a woman’s ass. Meanwhile people come change your IV bag and make you sign papers and pray over you. A man in a hair net brings fajitas.

The procedure was a success. I feel better already. Now we wait. Stay vigilant about changing the ass maxi pad as it soaks up blood and weeping pus. Color of the juice on the cutting board when you carve a rare London Broil. The incision in its raised red crater like the second asshole I’ll soon grow. Twin suns of Tatooine. They blasted me with antibiotics and now my eyes are blurry and the light hurts. They gave me an estimated bill. Twenty eight thousand and twelve dollars. I do have insurance. This is just the opening highball in a long haggle between bloodthirsty corporations. There will be a bill for my first visit too. When they misdiagnosed my agonizing lethal condition as a minor nuisance. Insurance will say no and the hospital will stick me with it. I’ll get robocalls from whoever they sell the debt to deep into middle age. What are you gonna do.

Look at it this way: a hundred years ago this shit would have killed me. Now it’s just a bad week. That and a 50/50 shot at a permanent second shitpipe. Maybe I can fit a cigarette in it.

The Wolf Witch

They were laying in bed. He had her ipad on his lap to watch Conan the Barbarian. Golden Age Schwarzenegger had fled across frozen wastes. He came upon a hut. A woman with 1982 plastic surgery stood in the door. Do you not wish to warm yourself by my fire?

I’ve been unfair to you, she said. He paused the movie.

What?

I shouldn’t even tell you this but I forgot my texts come to that fucking thing.

Well I didn’t look. But now you better tell me.

It might hurt you.

It’ll hurt me a lot more if I don’t know what it is.

I’m seeing other people.

Who, Judah?

Judah made Youtube videos. He ate unusual flavors of Japanese potato chips and commented on them. They had over 300,000 views. His parents had money.

No. I mean… maybe. I might see Judah again. But different guys.

Where are they from, he asked. Thinking: OKCupid. That shit is a gun in your house. You think it’ll save you but it gets used against you.

Friends of friends.

He’d met her friends. They owned homes and bought new custom sofas. The women looked good for their age and talked about men like dialogue from romantic comedies. The word “dealbreaker” was used. The men were Vice Presidents of Licensing Sufjan Stevens Music for Volkswagen. When he was with them he felt like he was in an ad in a design magazine.

Why do you have to see other men.

Do you want me not to?

Yes. Don’t go.

I can’t. I have to.

Why?

Because I like you, but I can’t date you.

He would have asked why, but he knew. She’d been his first date since he stopped drinking. His first normal person. She was Senior Vice President of Sufjan Stevens. She was 32. She needed to get married. The more time passed the more her children might be retarded. Her job was her life and her friends were job friends and she couldn’t bring him around. They had houses and were half famous. He had nothing and he was nothing.

If you’re gonna go, you’re gonna go. To be honest, I’m not threatened by these guys. We both know they’ll be dorks.

Probably.

And what if they’re not, he thought. What if they’re tall, what if they’re funny, what if they’re Disney Channel handsome. What if they take you skydiving. I could never take you skydiving. Why do you have to take this thing we have and kill it. Just let it have its time. Yes, you need to marry some dork. But why now, why now, when I have dreams about the smell of your fucking hair. I don’t want to lose you, he thought. I don’t want to lose you. He didn’t say it.

**********

In the morning he edited his OKCupid profile. Changed from “seeing someone” to “single.” His face would appear in a column of updates for age-appropriate women when they signed in. So and so answered a match question. He said yes, consent is sexy. So and so added a photo. Lit from the side this time like the internet told him. And him. “I’m single now!”

I’m single now.

He looked for women aged 18-22 and scrolled down to their “looking for” age range. If they weren’t ugly and they weren’t stupid and they said they’d date over 30 he hit Control-V and sent a message.

I want to go out with you.

How about it.

No question mark. A question mark makes the reader hear an upturn in pitch. This connotes weakness.

There were 5 of them out of 20 he looked at. It was enough. Like the world, OKCupid was 90 per cent men. But most of them were stupid and boring and not over six feet tall. And they smelled like need. He thought the idea of God was ridiculous but he believed that women could smell pheromones through phones and computers. That if he sent the exact same words but didn’t get laid the night before they could tell. Therefore it was important that he message girls today. The shot clock had been reset.

I think we’ll have fun,

one of them said back.

949-555-6879.

**********

They were at El Prado. He had mineral water. She had high alcohol content ale. She was maybe 90 lbs, Chinese and 22. So this could happen, he thought. He asked: how was your day.

To be honest, I just got out of jail.

Well it’s settled, he thought.

He liked her. She was a painter and she went to jail for stealing paint. A tube of cobalt blue costs $65 apparently. She’d had to spread her vagina and ass in a cold auditorium while sheriff’s deputies searched for needles. At some point a busload of black male inmates got carted in and started yelling at her, told her hey ninja I’m a eat that sideways pussy. Every other woman was menstruating. The jail toilet was clogged and walled in by a mountain of bloody pads. When the trustee came around with more pads she said no and got yelled at. People keep them as toilet seat cushions. You don’t say no to anything. If you don’t want Kool Aid, you keep it to trade. They mix it with vaseline and make lipstick. I never hated women before but I don’t understand them now, she said. Who the fuck are you wearing lipstick for. I’ve had enough period smell to get my ovaries cut out, she said.

The night wound down and he said: I walked here. Drive me back up the hill. He took her to the park in back to hear the owls. Got her tits out in the moonlight. Inside he put on “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” They got naked. He got on top of her on the mattress he’d put out for a kid he was babysitting. Got ready to go in.

What if I have AIDS, she said.

Well now you got it twice.

She told him don’t cum in me seven minutes in. Civilization has collapsed and I am a scavenger, he thought. She did have a sideways pussy.

**********

They were at El Prado. He had Kombucha. She had Sauvignon Blanc. He’d been fired that day. He’d been sober three months. It was his first date since he stopped drinking. His first normal person. He told her this. Well fuck, she said. What am I getting myself into.

I’m also on a new path of trying to be honest. And not use other people.

From AA?

Yeah.

Fuckin weird, she said. But I guess it’s a relief.

What do you mean.

I mean your profile makes it seem like you just drink and fuck skanks, and it scared me. My friends told me not to go out with you.

I can see why they’d say that.

Is that what you’re going to do to me? Take me home and fuck me on your couch and never talk to me again?

Not the last part.

How do I know that?

Look, I wouldn’t believe me either. But I’m going to be honest. This is my last OKCupid date. My sponsor told me to get off it. He told me not to go out with you, actually. But I’m glad I did. There’s a thing about you, fuck– I fucking suck at this. I just like you a lot. I want to see you again.

Are you saying this so I’ll come home with you?

No, he said.

You sure?

I’m sure, he said. I’m not like that anymore.

How to Pick Up Girls

The phone rings in your pocket and you think it’s her. “I went on that date and realized it was a mistake. Let’s move in together and never stop fucking” she’ll say. It’s Time Warner Cable. An urgent change to the status of your account.

You wonder how it went but you know. She took his huge meaty unprotected cock and came around it a million times until she breathed fire and was full of his offspring. She made that face you like when she’s on top. Weird look of concentration, like a sorceress. Better with him than with you. They have a mortgage now probably. In a year you’ll see her on the street gravid with yuppie eggs, pushing their firstborn in the number one safety rated sport stroller.

Call my sponsor. I gotta get this out of my head, I tell him. I know emotions are healthy but this is sickness.

Did you tell her how you feel, he asks. This guy and his Ward Cleaver pussy advice. Look, I’m sure she figured it out. Anyway I’m gonna get on OKCupid and go slay some ass. No, he tells me. Those internet girls are disgusting. You can go jerk off into some fat degenerate or you can find a real woman. Start a real relationship. Quality girls don’t have to go on OKCupid. They get hit on all the time.

Why then would I add myself to that dogpile. Plus, I don’t know what internet you’re on but mine is chockablock with nubile teen ass. But he’s right, he’s right. Go talk to a woman tomorrow, he says. This is your assignment.

Next morning I go to the coffee shop. It’s all men. Bearded whiteboys hunched over Tumblr. A fat guy reads Thomas Piketty’s Capital. The book of the summer. I’ve been waiting for someone to ask about it at a party. I haven’t read it, I’ll say, but I looked at a precis. I will pronounce precis like the douche I am. It will impress her. First I have to get invited to a party.

On the back patio there’s one woman. Gigantic ass. Face like a Mexican dwarf with Downs syndrome, but forgivable. I should talk to her. Check off my homework. Excuse me, miss. I couldn’t help but notice your fat pudenda clearly defined in your half sheer black yoga pants. Your chubby cunt crack looks like it’s about to come to life and say feed me like Little Shop of Horrors. I’d like to bury my raw helmet in those sweaty yeasty folds, all pungent in the summer heat. Let me know your thoughts. I say nothing.

Another one sits. She is cute, maybe 25. Before that awful dry season at 28 when girls have to get their shit together. Wholesomely pretty. Miss Clairol red hair. Not too red, just enough that she can call herself a ginger on the internet. Out of shape skinny but she’s feeling the top of her own tits, maybe taking a pet hair off her shirt. She has a framed canvas. She is drawing on it. Excuse me, miss. What are you drawing there. Is it my rigid purple cock spraying a hot salty load on your Miss Clairol hair, because if so you are really reading my mind. I say nothing.

Woman in purple yoga pants carrying a baby. The pregnancy weight made her ass floppy. I want to spread the crack open. Bury my face in it. Tongue out her hemorrhoidal postnatal asshole. Mount her and blast on her battered cervix so the kid has a little brother to grow up with. Her jiggly fat white girl thighs. Her soft functional maternity exercise clothing. Her war zone of a cunt. Something primal about it. Proof that her womb yields fruit. She is talking to the waitress, answering some question about the kid. His hair. She must get sick of talking about it. He can walk. He’s roaming free and climbing on the furniture. Clumsy. He’ll fall on the polished cement and crack out all his teeth. Permanently warp his skull. She has a fanny pack full of products for cleaning out his ass.

Now he’s making that baby eye contact with me. Awkward. Sorry for thinking those things about your mom. Enjoy that banana. He smiles at me. She looks. I say nothing.

It’s too hard. I leave and go to the gym. There are girls there too but headphones, iphones. Civilization was built to give women tools to avoid me. The day is a bust.

Try again the next morning. On the way to the cafe I pick up a copy of L.A. X-Press, the hooker paper. A girl works the counter. I have to speak to a woman. Jesus Christ, I tell her. I hold the paper up. These whores are disgusting.

Yeah?

Seriously, look at this. I show her. Sexy Alejandra has a 1/3d page color ad. She’s maybe 65. Body like a white tall kitchen trash bag after you’ve been stomping chicken bones down in it for three weeks. Her lips are full of sheep fat. I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick, I tell the girl.

Oh wow, she says.

And dudes are out there paying for this.

Wow.

I’m sorry for carrying this paper in here. But it’s interesting, you know, they have real world news. Like look, there’s an article about Honduras.

Wow, you never see that.

But you wonder who looks at the brutally murdered Palestinian teen and then wants to fuck a hooker.

Maybe, she says, the idea is that you get so worked up over the pain of the world that you need an erotic massage.

Could be.

I actually like the horoscopes in that one.

Against all odds she is interested. I should keep saying stuff. The Mamas and the Papas is playing. The next thing I would say is: I can’t hear this band without thinking of Papa John Phillips rawdogging his passed out daughter on her 18th birthday. He wrote all their songs, you know. But the girl, I can’t see myself fucking her. So what’s the point. I order tea and leave it alone. The paper tells me new friends could appear on the scene, Pisces.

At night I go to AA. Astrid comes too, because last time she drank she pissed herself and I had to put her in a chokehold to get her upstairs. Afterward a cute girl talks to me. You look exactly like a guy I know, she says. My cousin. You ever flick the bean to him after a family beach outing, I want to ask . She was across from me at the big church table. I’d been eyefucking her all night. Once in a while she’d look up and our eyes would meet. Well here, I say, let me take a picture of myself. You can send it to him. She texts herself the picture. We’re going to Two Boots after, she said. Do you want to come. But I had to take Astrid home. And showing up with Astrid was the only reason this girl spoke to me in the first place. This was AA meeting #150 for me. AA meeting # 1 where I showed up with a tart in a tight dress. #1 where a girl spoke to me after. I hate women.

Well good, my sponsor tells me when I tell him the news. You got a girl’s phone number in real life. Now ask her out.

But I don’t want to. She seems too normal. And I don’t want a girl anyway. Not yet. I want to sit at home alone a few more nights reading that stupid poem and being a pussy about it.

I go home. I have a facebook message from this actress my brother fucked back East. She’s out here now. Once every three months I look at her work on youtube. Jerk off to it and think: I should ask her out.

I liked your story, she says.

Thanks.

I don’t agree with everything you write about but you’re more compassionate than you’d think.

I try to be.

I love your brother to death. From what little I know it seems you guys had a difficult childhood.

Yeah, I tell her. Really my childhood was fine. Why kill the momentum.

I had a lot of that same shit too. A lot of abuse. It’s hard to carry the weight of all that around. I’m glad you’re doing the AA thing.

Thank you.

I’ve wondered if I had a sex addiction.

Yeah?

Like a lot of the time all I want is to fuck or watch porn and masturbate and it’s a huge distraction.

Is it fucking up your life? I’ve found the 12 step thing helpful.

Like last night before I went to bed I took a picture. In case I woke up and wanted to send it to a guy.

She’s a human being who hurts and you are too. You want another girl and you’re just using someone to forget that for a minute. This will help nobody. This will definitely fuck you up. You know this. You know this. You type “come over.” Do you hit send or what.

Take Me Home Tonight

He was lit and he went to the back patio for a cigarette. It was Monday and the crowd wasn’t bad. Two to one ratio but one cute girl smoking alone. Mexican in Converse. 1981 Love and Rockets.

You look like the girl who blew Eric Stoltz in Rules of Attraction, he said. He knew she would know it.

Haha– that’s not the only thing she did in that movie.

The less said about the rest the better.

I actually love that movie.

Me too. It was the first time I learned that people wipe their ass while they’re still sitting down. That split screen scene with fuckin cinder block head James Van Der Beek.

I thought he was hot.

You live around here?

Yeah.

With your family?

Why, cuz I’m Mexican?

Yes.

No, I have a job and I pay rent. I went to college and I’m not pregnant, Sean Bateman.

The night is young.

Haha. What about you?

Up the hill.

You here alone?

I am.

Why?

I’m an alcoholic.

Me too apparently, she said. So what, you come here to pick up girls?

I come here to get drunk. Sometimes shit happens by accident.

I bet you do OK. He took a drag. She did too. I used to go out to pick up boys too but I’m through with that shit now. You never know what you’re gonna get.

Usually I got a pretty good idea.

You don’t have any bad stories?

Not really. Actually– buddy of mine just told me one.

Oh, your buddy.

No, seriously.

Tell me.

He was on a rugby team back in Boston. They’d play on Saturdays and then go get wasted all smelly and covered in grass stains. Not just booze, they’d do all kinds of coke and special K and shit.

OK.

They were at one of those Boston places. I don’t know if you’ve been but there are a million bars called like Fergus O’Flanahan’s with shamrocks all over. And, like, murmurs the owner was in the IRA.

Yeah.

They’re hammered playing pool. And there’s one hot girl in the bar. By herself. She looks like 19, he told me, and fucking cute as hell. Little blonde girl. She’s got an Eddie Money T shirt on and weird eyes. So they think she must be an ironic art student and steer clear.

Haha.

But one of the guys starts talking to her, and she is fuckin shithouse. I mean, she is slurring the fuck out of her words and can barely stand up. And they’re all like this too, but they have coke, they’re still standing. She keeps talking to them. They can’t figure out what the fuck she’s saying but she’s laughing her ass off, like screaming laughing, having the time of her life. And they’re giving her bumps in the shitter stall in the men’s room and they ask her to come back to this apartment they had. A couple of the guys lived there. This is the 90’s before drunk sex was rape. They’re like 22 at the time so it’s a basement and they probably still had a beer pong table.

He lit another cigarette. She did too.

They get her back– they get her back and just immediately start running a train. She still has her socks on and one guy’s making out with her and another guy’s eating her pussy and then they put her on the beer pong table and one guy’s getting his dick sucked and the other guy’s fucking her. And my buddy goes in the bathroom and gets– this one guy has cocoa butter, they all make fun of him for it because he probably uses it to fuck his leather couch– anyway my buddy gets the cocoa butter and they flip her on her side and they go full air tight. He’s fucking her in the ass, another guy in the face, another guy in the pussy. These guys are jocks, they’re not afraid of balls touching.

Oh God.

He told me she had a shitty ass but he was so wasted at this point. The rest of the guys are standing around jerking off and he gets them in and they get it so she has no weight on her arms and they get another guy’s dick in each hand. There has to be some word for it, the pentagram or something. She has five dicks going at once. Face pussy ass hand hand. A dude runs up to grab the one roommate’s fancy camera he uses to photograph birds and takes pictures. They got a bunch of coke left and they just keep doing this all night until they finally pass out. I bet the guys who fuck her pussy just blasted in her, no questions asked.

And the whole time she is screaming her head off, even with a dick in her mouth, he’s fucking her asshole doggy style and she’s pushing her butt back, and my buddy, good looking dude, he’s fucked a lot of girls. Never in my life, he tells me, has a girl loved dick like this. She’s an animal.

Lucky night for him, she said.

Anyway. They all pass out. She’s on the couch. Next morning they get up and she’s still faded as fuck. Still slurring her words and shit and can’t walk properly. Still giggly. They’re gonna take her home and so one guy asks where she lives. And she says: I don’t know.

Haha.

They’re like what? How do you not know where you live? She just keeps saying I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. Someone makes breakfast and she’s eating and she gets scrambled eggs all over her face and she’s just– not recovering. And it dawns on them.

What?

She’s retarded. Like severely retarded. Actually– anyone who can talk is only mildly retarded, you know, clinically. But you get the idea.

Whoa!

And they keep asking her where do you live, where do you live, and she says I don’t know where I live. They’re trying to say it all slow. One guy draws a picture of a house with a sun and a tree and stuff and makes a shrug gesture like– “home? Where home?” Just, I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. They ask her so many times she starts crying.

Oh my God.

Finally they just drop her off at a 7-11.

Holy shit.

I know, right?

Did they feel bad about it?

He didn’t, but he’s a pig.

She laughed a little. That story’s kind of hot.

Yeah, I’ve jerked off to it.

He took his last drag. She did too. So what are you doing now, she said.

I don’t know. You want to come up the hill with me?

Mayyyyyyyyyyybe, she said. But I don’t want you to think I’m gonna fuck you.

No need to get ahead of ourselves.

I kind of have a boyfriend.

… how long?

Kind of long. But I kind of want to go home with you too.

Nothing bad’s going to happen.

OK, she said. Let me close my tab.

I’m gonna drain the lizard. I’ll meet you back at the bar.

Now you sound like you do this all the time.

First time the girl’s talked about her boyfriend though, he said. Feels a little unfair.

He saw her face change. He knew he’d gone too far.

Postmortem

They were at Brite Spot. His first date since he knew for sure the thing with the girl was over. Everything was fine and then the speakers played John Waite’s “Missing You.” 80’s night. After that, Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues.” He’d been told to pray when it hurt. Dear Lord, why not just have the clouds spell my name and form a middle finger. His date had the kale salad. Yeah, I went to a couple Sex Addicts meetings once, she said. Dear Lord, forget I complained.

He fingerfucked her against a tree by Echo Park Lake. They went to her house. Her pussy felt the same as the girl’s and he thought he was cured.

He was going to text the girl if the date didn’t pan out. what are you doing. All lower case no punctuation. Taking the capital “W” off “what” required more work then just letting the phone autocorrect, but gave the appearance of nonchalance. what are you doing. He’d been her fuckbuddy after all. That’s what he was for. She said he was built like a Ken doll. Meant as a compliment. She had black hair. He had a long haired black cat. At night he would wake up and see black on his pillow and think: thank God, she isn’t gone. He reached out to touch her. An asshole appeared by her ponytail.

What are you doing, why did you leave me, did you even leave me, are you with him right now. The tall guy with the drawl, she said I didn’t like him at all at first but you know four glasses of rosé; you and me shouldn’t have sex anymore, she said, and every time he’d ever heard that he’d got the best ass of his life after. This time was no different. She was hung over and they laid in bed all day talking. She told him a story. For a second he saw part of her she didn’t share. Like riding in a car in winter, passing a house with a window lit up at night.

He woke up with the new girl naked against him. That felt the same too. Sickness passing and in its place emptiness. I’ll take it, he thought.

**********

The night of Fourth of July her dog went crazy and when he parked three blocks away he heard her barking. When he got to the house the girl was in a towel and the dog was soaking wet and shaking. Distant booms rattled the windows. She jumped in the shower with me, she said. She’s never done that before. Never barked like that before either; it’s weird. I think she knew it was you.

Yeah, she smelled me.

He sat down and the dog sat with him and she wasn’t shaking anymore. She knows I’m the man of the house, he thought. Knows I’ll protect her. The booms kept coming and the dog wasn’t scared. Thank God she didn’t think I’d stop the noise. I’d really look like a douche.

They were going to go out but they stayed in and did crosswords. He picked her up and bent her over and lifted her poufy white rich girl towel and fucked her with her wet black hair sticking to her back. He could see her face in the dark glass of the door. Her eyes were closed. She was perfect.

The next day they went to the beach. Waves so big they’d knock you over. They were laying down finishing the crossword and the dog sat on his back. She asked: when can I meet your friends.

They all hate you, he said. I told them you’re breaking my heart.

Because I won’t be your girlfriend?

Yeah.

I was honest.

I know. They think you’re using me. I do tell them good things about you.

… like what?

You look 14 and suck a mean dick, he said. And she laughed.

He’d told them he liked her a lot. That he could see himself with her. That she was pretty and easy to talk to and had her shit together but not in a drink the Kool Aid careerist way that made you sick to hear about. How rare she was. How he hadn’t felt like this in a long time. Hadn’t thought it could happen.

On the last day, laying in bed, he asked what the tall guy thought of the dog. He hates her, she said. He’s insulted that I let her in the room.

Well he has a point, he said. She’d grind her cunt on my knee when we fucked and stick her face in trying to lick my balls. It’s distracting. And watching her eat my cum off the sheets. It bugged me too, he said. Thinking: when a girl brings up another guy, defend him. Do the opposite of what you feel. The game was over but his instincts had been beaten into him.

You were cool about her though.

She did bother me at first, he said. Barking her head off. Licking my face with that fucking garbage mouth. Now I love her though. I’m gonna miss her more than I’ll miss you.

It was true.

**********

By the end it hurt him to think about her. She took him to her boss’ vacation house in Palm Springs. Her friends came out. It was the weekend after her birthday. She’d had a party too but he opted not to go when she told him to act like they weren’t dating. Her boss was rich and famous and his house had a movie theater. All weekend they sat by the pool and when another guy would touch her shoulder it was like a cigarette burning the back of his neck. Someone brought a book by Ernest Hemingway. He read A Very Short Story and thought: I need to go get gonorrhea. But when they fucked he was back in it again. She got on top and when she was about to cum she made a concerned face like a baby about to burp.

**********

The morning after the new girl he said goodbye and put his pants on and walked out onto Alvarado Street. There was a wildfire somewhere and the light looked like the apocalypse. His phone vibrated. His heart stopped for a second. What if it was her.

It was a friend. A guy. It said This girl is driving me nuts. Men would text him their woman problems. He told them go fuck another girl. They thought he was a genius.

Why are we made this way, he thought. You like them and it makes them not like you. Find someone good and she ends up hurting you more. No free lunch in this world. But why do you get stuck with the bill when you’re still eating the fuckin meal.

He sighed. dude let it go, he texted. find someone else. pussy’s pussy

App Review: Tinder for iOS

I should tell you I’m married, she said. This after you’d taken off your expired Trojan, the ribbed kind that comes in a gold wrapper; it was so old the gold foil was flaking off so you took the condom and filled it up in the sink after and watched it for leaks. Your jizz chunking up and swirling around like a snow globe. If you had known you would have just stayed in raw and blasted in her. If you’d known some other guy would pay for it. Her husband must be white too. What Mexican married to a Mexican cheats on fucking Tinder. The plan could have worked out and your bloodline might have lived on. Not now that she waited to tell you. No sense of timing. But we’re separated, she says. Ah well, you were smart after all.

Why did you have a ribbed for her pleasure condom in the first place. Not something you would have bought. Not because you don’t care about her pleasure but because it would have embarrassed you to buy something for her pleasure. You couldn’t countenance the Walgreen’s morning clerk with the gauge earrings thinking your penis was inadequately textured. It must have been in a fishbowl in the AIDS testing place, some time in 2008. It was a thick one. You barely felt fucking her, but in retrospect, good, because it held up. Now you could tell the other girl you want that you did not have unprotected sex with multiple partners since you got tested. Just the one. Just the 18 year old and what could she possibly have. You would leave out the part where you went in raw to the hilt with the married girl, a couple pumps just to see what it felt like, which you always do and so does everybody else, always. If she has herpes you have herpes. Why worry, we’re all gonna get it someday.

You meet at a bar. You have nothing to talk about so you talk about Tinder. How long you’ve been on. This is actually my first ever Tinder date, you tell her. Me too she says. Fuck. I wanted a veteran. Now I have to do a bunch of god damn hand holding. Agnes does not want to be with me. She is overseas taking swarthy Mediterranean cock in all orifices. I want what was promised: Grindr for straight people so I can forget her for five minutes.

I miss her and I miss her stupid dog and I keep pushing it down and it keeps coming back.

Paul McCartney is playing at Dodger stadium. The traffic is crazy. Let’s go up to the park and maybe we can hear it, I tell her on her third beer. You still have to say stuff like that. You can’t just say anyway let’s go fuck. The park is behind my apartment. I put her against a tree and lift her up dress and fingerfuck her until she’s hot enough to start biting my lip. Paul sings We Can Work It Out. The old man sounds pretty good. We go inside.

Tonight I have another date. She is also married but up front about it. Open relationship. I want to meet a nice girl but instead I’m going to fuck seven girls in seven days. I start a new job Monday and it’ll kill my dating life. If I get that much new pussy it’ll last me until the stress passes, I reason. She has dreadlocks. She probably goes to Burning Man. Maybe she’ll let me hit it raw.

It’s OKCupid without the words. On OKCupid you scan through profiles. Murmur ugly, stupid, yes, ugly, fat, yes, stupid, stupid. Tinder is ugly, fat, yes, ugly, fat, yes, ugly. People are so stupid they had to make stupid stop being a dealbreaker.

You both hit yes and it tells you and you ask her out. You have one picture up. 21 words. Girls still match with you. You thought you were a wizard before. That girls read your words and saw something. No, they just like your face. You’re a worthless sack of shit and no one will ever love you. But hey, at least you get laid.

In conclusion: three and a half stars.

A Tinder™ Success Story

That Puerto Rican girl Cynthia. Perfect tits perfect ass near perfect face. I don’t remember if she had a perfect pussy but I remember after I came too fast the first time she got me hard again in five minutes by sucking me off and doing some weird trick with my balls. Kind of reaching through my sack and fiddling with something the way you would reattach a hose on a car engine and I got stiff like a reflex. The first time was for me, telling her to go slow, go slow, then blasting in her in two minutes when she was on top. Second time was for her, doggy style shoving her face in the pillow so she couldn’t breath and then letting her up and yanking a fistful of ponytail back, pulling her ass back into me, choking her, pounding her like a jackrabbit. Not my thing but it got her off. She’d been to Japan, she said. It’s so safe people sleep on the street. All their weird sex stuff is because there’s no connection between people sexually. It’s about the individual’s fantasy. E.g. you wrap me in saran wrap and tickle under my nose with fifteen year old girls sweaty panties while I shit myself. Really interesting stuff, she said. Why didn’t I call her– she was pretty smart too, and had her shit together. It was because she wouldn’t kiss me at first. She’d only kiss when she got really hot. Before that she would just nibble on your lip a little and then pull her head back and laugh. It takes all kinds.

Fetish

When I fuck a girl, to stay hard, I have to think about getting her pregnant, moving to the suburbs, having her quit her job, me making enough money for both of us. Having her love me, having us give up this war of dick pussy money. Just live in a house together. Nice yard with trees. Wake up beside her on a fall morning. Watch her while she sleeps. How her hair lies on the pillow. The smell of her neck.

When I fuck a girl, to stay hard, I have to imagine watching her age, her watching me age, still loving her. Loving the smell of her neck at 50. Taking care of her. One of us does the work, the other pays the bills. One of us cooks, the other does the dishes. Maybe Astral Weeks is playing as I pull the chicken out and then the pan I used to cook the stuffing outside the bird at the end so it gets that crust. Oh honey, this is the best one yet she says when she takes a bite. When I fuck a girl, to stay hard I have to imagine loving her, being loved, and then a little boy or maybe a girl with her hair my eyes having her first day of school and we’re nervous but proud. We can’t believe this is happening. I have to imagine coming home from work and she’s there watching some stupid shit like Pretty Little Liars and she’s embarrassed that she got caught. And I sit down for a second to laugh at the show in a mean way but end up getting engrossed and we spend all night like that on the couch together. I have to think about our kids and taking them back to the lake where I grew up and watching them swim, watching my dad watch my kids before he dies. Showing her things I never showed anybody. Her showing me things she never showed anybody. One of us dies with the other one holding their hand. The other one dies soon after, like Johnny and June Carter Cash. Scatter our ashes by the lake and our kids are sad but they grew up to be good people and their kids are good people too, because of us.

It’s sick, I know. But that’s what I need to stay hard. Right up until the last second, when I pull out and squirt cum on her navel while she laughs. And then I don’t call her, she’s too old. She doesn’t call me, I’m gross and have a small dick. Tomorrow we get back on Tinder. Find another one.

I Just Want to Eat Asian Ass Forever

Mary. Mary from AA.. She is 34 years old, she revealed. 34! She looks 14. Asians.

I need her to move into my apartment. Cocoon herself in a sleeping bag on my couch and not shower for 15 days. I come home and just sniff her armpits and we rut like demons. I need her to stroke my hair and tell me not to worry about my job. Fold herself into me while we fall asleep watching Game of Thrones. We smoke on the porch and then I bend her over the rail and breed her like a prize hog in front of the neighbors. I need her to crawl on my back after leg day. Oil up my ass and walk on my spine. Answer in garbled half-English when I ask if I should take my underwear off….

I’m getting her mixed in with the Thai massage I got yesterday. The masseuse was fat but she walked on my back anyway. Spine popped like a machine gun. She kept pulling down my underwear to get at my ass. I’d said my lower back hurt. And it did, from Romanian deadlifts. But Thai massage places– “lower back” means “stroke my ass.” “Upper thighs” means “please please jerk me off.” My lower back hurt like fuck and I told her so. But what she did was reach into my cat underwear and finger my crack. I got an erection. Asked her if I should take my underwear off. Not so she could jerk me off but because I like those cat underwear. They are my “date” underwear. I don’t want them to get oily.

She didn’t speak good English. It came off like I was asking her to stroke my pecker, which was admittedly hard. Should I, uh, should I take these off, I asked, trying to make it clear that I was not saying please rub this ragingly hard penis. Not that I didn’t want her to but they have a big sign; it says WE GIVE MASSAGE ONLY, NOTHING ELSE. I don’t want to creep her out. I want her to suck my dick but I accept that she won’t. She won’t suck me off but she will carefully cup and tickle my oily ass until my cock is so stiff it’s glowing and then stand on my spine and crush the boner she made into the thin prison mattress. I just need her to flip me over and squat and wrap her hot fat third world twat around my meatpipe. Let me cum in her raw in two pumps and bear my child and never speak to me about it or make me pay for it. Why is that too much to ask.

Anyway, Mary. She is 34 years old. I want her to plant her soft feet on my collarbones and spread her legs and wrap her cuntflaps over my mouth and nose like the alien facehugger. Get all my oxygen and nutrients from her salty pussy juice until I die of old age. Why is that too much to ask. I want my face to be sewn doggystyle into her musky Chinese cameltoe like Human Centipede. Crawl around for the rest of my life sniffing her taint and inhaling her dingleberies. She colored her hair. Put a blonde streak in it. She looks like the bass player off a Jem and the Holograms lunchbox now and that stokes my hard on for her with the nuclear heat of childhood boner nostalgia. I need to make a hundred billion dollars. Declare myself Emperor of the World for the sole purpose of making her my slave and broodmare. Why is that too much to ask. I need to buy her entire family. Hold them hostage so she’s forced to cuddle with me and watch Netflix with my warm winter boner ensconced between her tiny hot hams. I need to quit my job and quit my hobbies and quit breathing and merge with her flesh and die like an anglerfish. Why is that too much to ask.

Asian women. Why are white guys so into them, people ask. It’s because they are infinitely better. The other chick from that meeting, the Cambodian- she must be close to my age, when a white woman has skin like beef jerky and walks around talking about her job. Not Lilly. She is willowy and her skin is golden and her hair is the tail of a black unicorn. I want to die and come back as her tapeworm. Frolic forever in the H.R. Giger wonderland of her ridgy pink colon.

White women, any flaw becomes a dealbreaker. Asian girls get a pass. Mary’s head is shaped like the Apollo space capsule. Pointy on top and huge at the bottom. Her weird too small teeth like a pulp novel cannibal. She’s a 6 really. But the Asian 6 is the most sought after creature on Earth. I wouldn’t fuck a cankly white girl but I would graft (REDACTED)’s 1950’s elderly nurse cankles to my temples and plow her tangy cunt with the impossibly long untangled straight jet black pubes forever.

My Korean friend Cathy from college. She’s pushing forty but her meaty rippling thoroughbred ass makes me want to murder children. I want to wake up in a Twilight Zone episode where everyone’s face is Cathy’s ass because of some wish I made to an evil genie. Or no– I’ve told the genie: I want to have that ass forever. As you wish, he says. Cut to our wedding day. You may now kiss the bride. I lift the veil. Instead of a face it’s Cathy’s ass. Her crusty roadworn 40 year old asshole puckers for a kiss. In the pews the genie rubs his hands together, cackling. But I shoot him the double guns and smile. Thank you, I tell him. This is exactly what I wanted.

Letter to My 20 Year Old Self

It never ends. Just so you know. You’re almost forty now. Yesterday you nearly cried as you unfriended a college girl on facebook.* She wasn’t returning your texts.** She had a toad face and she was a shitty poet but she was the last girl who will ever like you. You still masturbate ten times a day and then go out and look at girls like they’re the last clean water after the nukes hit. They look at you like you’re an insect. It never ends. Text a girl to confirm a date and only then does she tell you OMG*** I’m stuck at work! Her friend has a concert she forgot about, or some shit, and you still think: I will be stupid and awkward and ugly forever. Or if the planets line up and you get her back to your house, you come too fast. Still.

You’ll be a hundred twenty years old getting sad from dumb girls on OKCupid.**** You could be Emperor of the planet with a fifteen inch dick and you’d still be ugly in the mirror. You depend on woman for happiness and woman is a treacherous beast. But what else are you going to reach for. Job, money, a nice hairstyle– all bullshit. There’s nothing but girls and girls are cunts from having it too easy, until they get old and turn invisible. It’s still like this 20 years later. On the plus side you’re not bald.

* an internet rolodex

** email you send on your phone

*** “omigod” abbreviated. People often abbreviate in texts.

**** personal ads on the internet

Her

She had a flappy pussy and her face was like a baby bird. Her teeth. The incisors pinched in. Modern people have too many teeth for the jaw. We’re meant to lose them. Get clocked by some other proto-hominid or drop one gnawing a hyena bone. The teeth get crowded; some of them fold in and go half sideways. With her it was the incisors. She let the cat in the bedroom when we fucked. She wasn’t that funny. She was on hormonal birth control and never felt anything. I love her I miss her. She is a cunt with no soul. Come back to me.

She was a yuppie whose job was her life; she was hired by an old perv to be a hot woman and her hotness was waning; she had good skin but you found out later it was because she sandblasted it; you caught her talking once with a coven of other girls about Retin-A, abrasives, lotions you have to get from overseas. She would come in in the morning and her face smelled like fruit. She was always putting something on her face, trying to hold it back.

She had a funny ass and she wore stupid pants and you were so unsure of yourself you could never relax around her. She was a cunt with no soul and come back to me come back to me. Come back to me.

Now these other girls, fucking them in my apartment and it’s too hot, they all have shaved cunts with three days stubble and weird razor marks. The sounds they make, not like her. Her little moans. Her eyes, concentrating.

The last time you fucked you saw she trimmed her pussy for him. She was lying the whole time. I should have lied to her. I should have fucked other girls. That would mean I killed it by my own hand, instead of: you are a worthless loser with no direction in life and of course a girl like her wouldn’t love you.

Come back to me, come back to me… if you did I’d just be scared again. Thinking the whole time how I’m going to lose you. I’d be right.

Be grateful for what it taught you, you think. You can feel something after all this. But for that to happen now you have to find someone else like her. What was it that made her like that. What was it. I only know when it’s not there.

OKCupid: What I’m Doing with My Life Part 2

I was unemployed for a while. Now I’m a gray corporate worm. I have a 401(k). I wear loafers. I use Powerpoint; Excel. Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite.

I’m in a small branch office of a large corporation. We share a bathroom. This means that the 4 times a day I piss, which should be a respite– 3 of those 4 times a man from another company will piss next to me. Often it’s a particular bear of a man. Six foot eight, fat, bearded, sweat along his widow’s peak from walking to the restroom. There are 2 urinals. I must stand right by him. The heat from his fat arms noticeable. One side of my face hotter. Unbuckle my reversible genuine leather belt, black on one side brown on the other. Unclasp my pressed business slacks which have a metal tab as well as a button. Withdraw my penis. Which had begun to recoil, already, upon seeing this man from 50 feet down the hall as he keyed in the bathroom door code. By the time I get it out it’s a shrunken acorn head. The other man is slow with his pants. He has only now released his member as he’s heard me keying in the code. His penis too has recoiled.

Your dick fights you. It gets hard in class but not when a girl you like kisses you. It yearns forcefully to spray hot gouts of piss when you’re in a meeting. But when you’re there at the pisser, and a man is standing next to you who you know will note silence instead of the music of fluid tinkling on porcelain– when your penis can hurt you by making it clear to another man that you’re a little girl chickenshit who can’t piss in public– it will. The petty cruelty of your dick proves God is wicked.

Eventually I go in the stall. I don’t want people to think I shit at work, but it’s the lesser evil.

Back to my cubicle. It looks like a cartoon of an office. Like an office from Staples commercials where it’s clear no one involved has had a real job. The walls are beige and the guy next to me has a poster that explains ATTITUDE. Black phone, black computer. With these tools I create Data Driven Solutions for Market Leading Brands. On Halloween, fake police tape proclaims my space a “Zombie Zone.” I am drug tested. I’m too uncool to do drugs so I pass. A portion of my check is withheld into a retirement account. This helps avoid taxes. By consenting to this I am consenting to a slow subtle scam to eliminate social programs. Turn the country into Ayn Rand anarcho-capitalism. When enough people have 401(k)’s they’ll take back old people’s government money because if I don’t need it fuck you. I am contributing to evil. But I want to avoid taxes.

These activities, and my commute, take up 12 of my 16 waking hours.

I don’t have a dating friendly lifestyle, is what I’m saying. No one who works does. First dates are OK. Maybe a new person will fuck you. A relationship is OK. Come over at 9:30, eat, watch a movie, fuck, pass out. Wake up at 6:45. I want those things. But to get from one to the other there’s the crucial burden of getting to know you. I have no energy for this. You don’t either. We’ll meet. I’ll pour cheap wine down your gullet and you’ll fuck me or you won’t. Next day, the better looking one won’t return the other’s text. We’re doomed to do this dance until we get so old we’re too ugly. At which point– what? What happens? I don’t know, but I bet it’s terrifying. In my leisure time I enjoy hiking.

Worst Case Scenario

Let’s assume I never get laid again as long as I live. What happens. I have no children. Fine. I die alone. Fine. Age slowly, rot; disease, brain turned to mush. I forget who or what I am. Trapped in a state nursing home. Surly orderlies snap my arthritic fingers to get my rings. Shitting myself, fed from a tube jammed in my throat, no one to hold my hand as the pain takes forever to kill me. Each instant containing lifetimes. OK– this exercise was supposed to end in “that doesn’t sound so bad.” Fuck.

Try to hang myself but my bony arthritic hands can’t tie a knot. Wallowing in weeping sores in a hospital bed; I roll out and try to aim my head at the floor but it only breaks my face, my pelvis, thick needles ripping out of my arms…. you lose your ability to move but not your ability to feel… Jesus Christ. A friend from the past shows up; I mutely plead to be smothered with a pillow. He just kicks me in the nuts.

Only way to avoid this is to have kids. Only way to make kids is to get some ass. Right back where we started.

Last night I met a girl at a party. Got her phone number. This is a big step. I’m shy since I quit drinking. My sponsor tells me: Tinder girls are maladjusted cretins. That I’ll meet my future wife in the real world. He’s right about the first part, so I’m trusting him. I met a girl in life. I texted and asked her on a date. She has not responded. If she wanted the dick I’d have heard back by now. Sorry, not the dick– if she wanted to settle down in a nice suburban home. I’ll die alone.

Fuck these girls anyway. I know what I want. I just keep not finding it. A girl who’s all right looking and kind of cool. That’s it. All right looking means under a certain age and not chromosome damaged. Or any Asian. Kind of cool means she likes good books, she’s a poet, something. They’re not out there. Every woman I meet knows nothing and cares about nothing.

But I’m thinking the wrong way. Focus on what you can give to someone, my sponsor tells me. Well: I hate myself. I hate my face. Giant nose cracked in half, huge uneven nostrils flapping open; impossibly long white nose hairs. You trim but always miss a couple. They snake out when you’re going in for a kiss like blind sea worms grasping for her eyes. I hate my body. Starvation level body fat but still, folds when I bend over. I work out like a convict but only look good lit from the side, flexing so hard I grind my molars out of whack. I have no job no money no possessions and my house is full of cat hair and centipedes. I’ll never have the kind of life your modern woman requires. My beard is patchy. I have too many moles.

I hate myself and how could anyone ever love me. If I could write something good I’d love myself. But you get a good story about three times a year. It comes in the shower on a day you have time. Couple hours to crank out, couple more to edit and there you have it. But you aren’t responsible. It’s from some antenna you put out and it happens to pick up a signal. Ideas sit for years before the way to crack them hits you. You can’t force it. All you can do is try not to fuck it up. Stay out of its way. Don’t slack off and erase your mind reading about rape on Twitter.

What are you gonna do. Fucking relax. It’s a beautiful day and you’re at the duck pond. You’ve seen a ring-necked duck and 2 kinds of egret. Cormorants, male and female; one of them carried nesting material. Rough day overall but on the waterfowl front it’s a winner. So there’s that.

Responsible Citizen

Look at you, they tell me. Look at you getting your shit together. Doesn’t it feel good.

Doesn’t it feel good to pay your bills. Finally open the overstuffed mailbox that has stood so long for your irresponsibility. Take out 11 pounds of flyers for the Mexican meat market. CMYK newsprint pictures of a flayed sheep’s head. 69 cents a pound. Fair price but the place smells like a mass grave; there are flies. Leaf through each page of sheep’s heads and weird spiky fruits and economy pack off brand diapers in case a warrant for your death got trapped in there, a letter from your dying father, your car registration, the bill for the overdue registration from your old car with a threatening letter saying the state will garnish your wages. Thing’s been in a junkyard for 3 years. Doesn’t it feel good to do that. To clip your toenails regularly. Wash your dishes clean the fish tank have a stilted 15 minute call with your mother, your father, your uncle. How’s the job going, they ask. How’s the job, the bills, the money, the job the job the job. Doesn’t it feel good to show up to work, to be of service. To make financial amends with your credit card company. With the hospital that charged 28 grand to lance a boil. To track down your creditors, call them, to sit on hold with the DMV, with traffic court. Call between the hours of 8:30 and 11:30 Monday through Wednesday. If you call at 8:29 please call back during telephone hours. If you call at 8:30:005 I’m sorry there are too many people in the queue please try back at a later time. If you manage to dial the last digit at 8:29:57 and have the phone company route your call in exactly three seconds, not 3.001, not 2.999– it took eight days of trying for that to happen. Just to get in the hold queue. Just to be on hold for 41 minutes and then get told they can’t handle this kind of issue on the phone sir, sir, at this time, sir, I do apologize at this moment I am unable to help with your query, sir, I do apologize the system won’t allow it, you need to mail the proof of ownership to blah blah blah. You don’t have the proof of ownership. You will just have to pay to register this old car forever. Fine. Doesn’t it feel good to have shit handled– no. If I’ve paid a bill I have the shit handled once. Before I didn’t have it handled at all. In both cases I still have to handle it constantly, forever, until I die. Nothing has changed.

Doesn’t it feel good to seek healthy human connections. You used to use people compulsively. Got 23 year old girls on OKCupid, they liked you and you fucked them and you never called them again. Now, now you can meet quality women in real life. Girls on the street look at you like you’re a worm.

Doesn’t it feel good to drop off your dry cleaning and eat your vegetables and jerk off to porn that isn’t underage Russian Stickam videos and watch Louis CK or some shit and pass out on the couch. Wake up at six god damn motherfucking thirty in the morning and get in the car, doesn’t it feel good that you had the brakes done, that you made the blinkers work, you had the tires aligned so it didn’t pull slightly to the left anymore; doesn’t all that feel good.? No. It doesn’t even make you not feel bad. The anxiety you used to feel just gets replaced with other shit. You used to worry about last month’s bills, now you worry about next month’s bills. There is no accomplishment. Just a constant firehose of tiny pains in the ass forever. It will never stop. It will only get worse as your body and mind fall apart and you stay alone.

Doesn’t it feel good to have a paycheck and medical and dental and a 401(k). No. No it does not. Take all this shit and shove it right up your ass. I’m fucking sick of being a good person. A good brother, son, friend, worker, being of service, not drinking, being an instrument of my higher power’s will. I want to blow a rail and pound a World’s Greatest Secretary mug full of cheap brandy and rawdog an underage Mexican god dammit. Fuck God and fuck the Earth and fuck my fellow human beings. I want to give some Tinder slut herpes; I want to kick a retarded baby and dump an old man out of a wheelchair into traffic. Anyway good morning.

Let’s Go Out for Coffee, She Says

Well no. There are day date guys who take girls to coffee and museums. Then there are night date guys girls drink with later. On your night date the How’s OKCupid for You talk happens. I actually went on another date today, she tells you. He was nice. He’s an architect. That text was from him, it says it was nice seeing you today, thanks for coming, I hope I can get to know you better. A nice guy but I just don’t think it’s going to work out. Later she’s at your place trying to pet your cat who wants to be left alone. She’s drunk and can’t read his signals. I’m not usually like this, she tells you. Don’t cum in me.

The Messiah

We were at dinner. And how’s your dating life, she asked. Well if I like them they don’t like me. If they like me I don’t like them. If they’re pretty they won’t fuck me. If they’re ugly they will. I spend my hours trying to find the prettiest woman who’s just ugly enough to fuck me. I can tell my worth from where the needle lands. But let’s be honest: I’ll fuck anything that moves; I’m an animal; I’ll jerk it to porn where the women look like something they pulled out of the Mariana Trench so why not fuck them in real life. Four months since you left me. I’ve been trying to replace you the whole time. One girl came close; she was 22. Her face wasn’t like yours but she had big tits. She left me too. I was hurting from you and I tried to fix it and now I’m hurting from both of you and the evidence keeps piling up that I’m unlovable. Why won’t you love me. What is wrong with me. I mean, my face, but you always said I was hot– Asian women can’t tell when white men are ugly. And vice versa. One of the few blessings God gave us, in dating. Otherwise, whether we’re loved is dictated by the shape of our skull.

You were with me for my body. She was too. She liked to get fucked bent over my bed because my closet doors are mirrors. I want to look at you, she said. You’re all hot. I looked at myself too. My ass pumping ridiculously, muscles upon muscles. It’s a fine body but it feels like a costume, or a parade float that I drive. It’s not me.

God I miss you so bad.

I’m trying to get over it. My weapon is prayer. Accept that everything is as it should be. Part of God’s plan. The closest I get is: I accept that I’ll die alone. With effort I get to where a couple holding hands on the street doesn’t make me want to hang myself. Try to give to the world rather than take. Be a source of peace to others. Don’t chase pussy, because pussy just makes you need more pussy. You accomplish nothing. Still, I’m gonna go to Thailand. They have temples and birds but I’m there to jerk off using other human beings. They are slaves who will pretend to like me due to poverty. I can’t wait.

You get closer but God Himself won’t stop you being horny. Being lonely. I’m a complex chemical accident honed by pure chance over a billion years and I exist solely to spray the goo from my ball sac into teenagers. That is God’s plan. I suffer for not adhering to it. And yet I suffer too when I comply. Women are awful. If you try you’re doomed. If you don’t try, there are no women to observe you not trying. I don’t hate women but I don’t blame men who do. When will it end. When I find a girl I love who loves me. For a minute I thought that was gonna be you.

Anyway, I’d rather not discuss it, I said. And I’m glad to be friends with you. But now I’m supposed to ask you the same question and the one thing I can’t ever hear is you talking about another man. So let’s move on to other topics. This curry, for instance. Spicy.

In the morning I went to shit out the curry. On the toilet tank was a Kafka book I found on the sidewalk. It said: the Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary.

Maria

She had big tits and she was studying to be a mortician. Her OKCupid was all about death. Guatemalan I think. She wouldn’t fuck on the first date. I fingerfucked her in her car instead. A black Camry or something with a tan or gray interior. Pink panties.

I fucked her on the second date and then a couple more times until we drifted apart. Last I heard from her she was getting married to another tall skinny white man with a large broken nose. He’s into guns.

I still jerk off to her occasionally. The fantasy is that I run into her at the Cha Cha Lounge. Fuck her on top of the dumpster in back. Either she’s sitting on it facing me with legs spread open or she’s bent over it. More the former probably, because of the tits. She wants to get pregnant but it isn’t happening with the husband or she doesn’t want it to, and she tells me to cum in her, to give her a baby because I look like him and he won’t notice.

This is from 3 dates 4 years ago. You fuck 200 girls but get all your jerk mileage from the same five women. Why is she the one that sticks. Why are the others written in water. Which one am I to them.

Coffee Shop Diary: An Armpit

Look– an attractive woman. Jogging outfit. Maybe 22. Even her dewy little armpit is alluring, popping out of a loose tank top. Contrast this with the waitress’ armpit, which has stretch marks. Jogger woman’s armpit is stunning in comparison. I want to tongue the lilac scented Secret® out of it while plowing raw into her hot yeasty jogger’s cunt and prematurely ejaculating. She sees me looking. I feel bad. My look can only mean one thing. She sees a thought bubble drawn over my head with a cartoon drawing of her own sweaty twat; my spent seed burbling out. There is only one thing a man looking at a woman ever means. And women never look at you except to catch you looking.

Normal Human Interaction

Some kind of mulatto chick sits near me with big Malcolm Gladwell hair. Pretty. She is reading poetry. So I should talk to her. Hi, what are you reading, I would say.

It’s a poem about how I want to suck your dick in front of these pleasant middle class families on their picnics, about your hot salty jizz rolling in thick spurts across my tongue, she would say. But leave something in your sack to squirt deep into my ovulating young cunt when you bend me over against the Virgin Mary Statue. It’s by Emily Dickinson. She’s wearing black yoga pants and laying back knocking her knees together. Rubbing one thigh against the other. As though anticipating my meatpipe.

And shit: she said hi to me. She wants me to fill her with children. I better say something. This is a message from God. Tinder is down, at the exact moment when a pretty girl said hi to me. But her back is to me now. And what the fuck would I say anyway. That’s some nice lasagna you have there in that tupperware. I see you like books.

Now I can’t even maintain eye contact. I’m an unmanly pussy. My face is getting flushed. I’m fucking terrified. A pretty girl showing interest is the worst thing that’s happened in my life.

OK: you must ask her out. Do it as you’re leaving. Be a normal person. Say normal shit. What is your name. Do you want to get a drink with me. I’ll get shot down in front of this smiling yuppie couple. Their detergent commercial looking kids and their fucking Welsh corgi will witness my ignominy. My voice will crack and my penis will fall off. I will shit myself. The shit will be made of acid and squirt in the kids’ faces. The ducks will storm me and chew off my nuts with their awful dinosaur beaks. I will be mocked and humiliated and my children and my children’s children. Anyway, here goes.

Slayer

I went to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. Because I was gonna have a mentally ill woman fly over the Pacific to move into my apartment. I’ve never met her. Our interactions are emails and skypes. I want you to fill my hot holes with your cum, she says. I want you to get me pregnant and call me daddy’s little cum slut. I think I’m going to take pills and kill myself. But she is 22 and Chinese and pretty. All that matters.

Also because I fucked that girl Sunday. OKCupid. It was the morning after my AA fifth step. You take your diary of the evils you’ve done out of hatred and lust and fear and read it to someone. I was with my sponsor inside a 3,000 year old hollowed out sequoia tree. The next day I woke up and meditated for an hour, per Bill W. in the Big Book. Crows cawed behind me and I understood their language. Creatures putting their song into the world. I thought on all my evils. What I’ve done and could still do. I understood that God was real and I was forgiven. I understood that I’d forget this truth but it would still be real. I was laughing and crying. I felt like I’d taken 12 hits of acid. One of the most significant experiences of my life.

Because of my spiritual awakening I moved the date from drinks to daytime. It is bad to use other human beings as fleshlights. We’d feed ducks at the pond. I’d go in with an open heart and get to know her.

The ducks got boring so we ate chicken tenders at Brite Spot and then I took her home and fucked her. I hit it raw and came in her in 3 pumps. Decent sized tits but they were spongey and her taint and inner thighs were woolly like an Armenian. She liked me. We will never speak again.

I am a machine and I can’t stop fucking people. On dates I feel like I’m watching a movie of myself. The whole thing is on rails and if I try to break free I can’t. The duck pond was supposed to be a pleasant G rated affair but now that it happened once, the duck pond is a fuck spot. It doesn’t matter. It could be a church. If I’m with you we are going to fuck. If you fuck enough women women can’t not fuck you. They’re just animals. If you smell like pussy they have to give you more pussy, the way banks give rich people money. As a man, you have no mechanism for not fucking. Not fucking is a woman’s job. The day after, I’m back to hideous thirst and the hole that will never be filled.

I was early for the meeting. Just me and one other guy and he kept eyefucking me. Gays. This is a valuable lesson, I told myself. This is how AA girls feel when I drill my laser eyes into them every meeting. Every woman I see anywhere I leer into her pupils and imagine that I’m pushing down on her collarbones and squirting a crawly unprotected load into her. Making that stupid hot sauce shit face I make when I cum. Hold the stare until she looks away. Colleagues, junior high school girls, the girl selling me cigarettes at the 7-11. The girl on the bus that I’m riding right now, who held my eyes for a heartbeat then scampered to the back like she was in sniper alley.

The meeting started. People talked. They bored the shit out of me and I left to go pull girls off Tinder.

Coffee Shop Diary: First World Problems

All right. New coffee shop. This place and Dinette and Ostrich Farm are all– they’re all the stereotype. 43 year old white people in tangentially creative fields with robust salaries. Drivers of unusual Mini Coopers with ski racks. Girls with weird old money inbred jawlines and purple hair discussing a Tumblr about Women in Tech. People using the word curate. Curate is the new monetize. Get paid for something worthless. I hate white people.

The feng shui is off here. Every seat exposed so everyone in the room can read your laptop. It’s hard to look at girls’ tits. So it was designed by an idiot. Then again, I’m not what they want here. Weird aging lecher who spends little and leers at girls and frighten them. Maybe it’s made so I wouldn’t like it.

Where the fuck is my hot chocolate, you cystic acne faced cunt. Well, who cares. I’m just renting the seat. And actually the counter girl is kind of hot. It’s just that her face is shiny. I wonder how much money, effort and angst goes into keeping her face merely slightly bumpy and oily instead of a Vladimir Harkonnen wasteland of infected roast beef purple pustules. She is trim. She has an alluringly tiny ass. The kind you can cup in one hand. I want to watch it winking in my mirror as she rides me. Try to see the good in people.

I wonder if they forgot my drink. I hope so. It’d be an excuse for self pity and another example of how I’m invisible. My life is Milton from Office Space. Muttering about how I was shunted into the roach basement. The other barista is back now, the guy who looks like the 20th hijacker, after a 15 minute absence. He was clearly taking a shit. Good for him.

Little mousy haired girl ordering. Baggy white pants. I cannot tolerate a woman who does not wear form fitting clothing on her lower body. In the age of yoga pants I must know every contour of your crack and cameltoe.

Still no cocoa. At what point do I ask. Unending stream of customers. Getting her attention is like making a tough left turn. I don’t want to loudly interject in front of them and look like an asshole. I should just meekly accept it. I should be a martyr for this cocoa. I don’t care about it; I don’t actually want it. I’m paying for it because I want to type in a place where there are girls. I’m afraid of losing ab definition and drinking a 400 calorie hot beverage at 11am will make me into a fat disgusting sack of shit. Let it go.

It is better for me, for the staff, for everything if I don’t ask about the cocoa. But I spent money, so I must have it. One of the purple hair girls takes out her phone and it’s Twitter. Hers looks like mine. Stock ticker of fraternity rapes and racial incidents and women in tech outrages. The Kardashians for college types. Though I’m next to the register the clerk still doesn’t look at me. Unfortunately I continue to exist.

Later a macchiato comes up. She looks at me and says hesitantly: I think this might be… yours? I’m forced to say no, I was waiting on a cocoa. Oh yeah that’s right. Her apathy, something I can only dream of. I need to work in a coffee shop.

The cocoa’s OK. On the way I out I walk behind the counter. Throw my gum in the private employee garbage. She looks at me askance. Take that, fiend.

I Can’t Tonight But How about Tuesday, She Says

Well no. I’m talking to you because you seem like you fuck fast. I fucked my ex. She only hurts me. I thought it would make it better to have another girl taste her cunt juice on me. The air next to me feels howlingly empty without her body in it. So I do not want to go out with you Tuesday. There is no Tuesday. There is no tomorrow. No later. There is now. You can fuck me now or never see me, and if I were you, 38 years old, I would take what you can get.

Let me know your number if you’re down.

How I Met Your Mother

We met on a web site. Computers still showed two dimensional images then. People would post their pictures and a few paragraphs about themselves, trying to get a date. A woman chose pictures where she looked thinnest and her face looked most like a child. A man said he was taller than he was and chose pictures where his jawbone stuck out. Men sent messages to women. Hoped the women would pick them. Women waited to be picked.

People had to pretend it was about getting married. Really it was about fucking. Men wanted to fuck much more than women back then. No way you could imagine it now. It was like a hunger where you’d kill a man over a Dorito. It was like being on fire and fucking was the only way to put it out. Women didn’t quite feel that way. They felt something complicated and weird until they met a tall man with the right size jawbone. Then suddenly their feelings were comparable. It was all a nightmare frankly. No one ever got anything done. No wonder the ugly people took over and had us all castrated.

First Date

They were at El Prado. He had mineral water. She had dry Riesling. So I have to ask you something, she said.

He knew what was coming but pretended not to. Go ahead.

Are you really as much of an asshole as you say on your blog?

It’s factually true. Things I say happened, happened. But I leave out the parts where I’m a functioning human being most days. It’s boring to say I woke up and took a healthy shit and earned money and paid taxes. Emotional reactions are heightened. Particularly with regard to sex. For instance, I don’t literally want my mouth and nose to be skin grafted onto a 40 year old alcoholic Cambodian woman’s asshole.

My friends told me not to go out with you.

Yes, I know, he thought. That’s part of it. Your friends will tell you not to go out with me which means you have to. Your friends will tell you not to fuck me which means you have to. Don’t think about elephants. Your friends will tell you I’m a pig but it won’t stick until I start liking you and that’s when you leave. And yet here you are, he said.

You know girls are scared of you and you love it, she said.

It’s true, he said. And it was. Or it had been for a while. Now, it wouldn’t hurt to hear something new. But this wasn’t going to be the night. Anyway, I walked here– did you drive?

Uh huh.

Where did you park?

Why are you asking me that.

Why don’t you give me a ride back to my place and we can take a walk in the park.

Oh, and we’re going to listen to the owls and you can try to fuck me?

Correct.

I can’t believe I’m doing this.

Let me close out my tab.

I can’t believe you’re doing the exact same thing with me that you wrote about 5,000 times and I’m fucking agreeing to it.

How do you think I feel.

Each time they had different drinks and stayed different lengths at the bar. But the tab was always 36 dollars. He still had to think to figure out 20%. The bartender tonight was the one from Bryn Mawr. A floutist. He’d talked to her about BWV 1013. J.S. Bach’s only solo flute composition.

She didn’t recognize him. He needed to spell his name to get the credit card back. When she took the receipt she said thanks with a hint of fuck you on her breath. He could never figure out his transgression.

On the walk to the car he held out his arm. She put her hand in the crook of his elbow. How gentlemanly, she said.

Notice that my bicep is like a cobblestone.

He pulled her in for a kiss on the corner. She didn’t smoke. He used to worry about his tongue tasting like cigarettes but it turned out the effect was overstated. Her car would be nice but ten years old and she would apologize for it. It would be clean but there would be one paper bag and maybe a notebook in the passenger footwell. She’d apologize for the mess. She would plug in her phone with the aux cable and play recent hip hop or R & B. She would apologize for it. This is me, she said. 2004 ML350, black.

I like this car.

It’s old, she said. I’m going to get a new one soon. Sorry it’s a mess.

My car is 13 years older than you. And my toilet is full of silverfish.

She turned the ignition and plugged the phone into the radio. Iggy Azalea’s Fancy played. Oh God, she said– this is a guilty pleasure. I know you like, uh… what’s that thing you always play.

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun by Debussy.

Right.

Don’t feel bad. I spent all day reading rape arguments on Twitter.

It’s funny that you listen to classical stuff instead of… like, a lot of guys like you play Frank Sinatra.

When Sinatra got a girl home he’d play Ravel.

and swear I meant that there so much that they give that line a rewind, said the radio. What did it mean.

**********

I’m gonna cum too fast the first time. But give me about 15 minutes and I’ll get hard again, he said. I’m sorry but you’re just too hot. She asked about a condom. I don’t have any diseases, he said. Have you been tested? Not since the Philippines. I can’t not tell you that I had unprotected sex with prostitutes over there. But it’s mechanically impossible for a straight man to get an STD.

I hope they were 18 at least.

I have no idea.

He did cum too fast. They kissed for a minute and then turned their attention back to the movie. The Baader Meinhof Complex. Young German terrorists suffer from brutality, paranoia and infighting as they campaign violently to end American imperialism over 10 years. The women were painfully hot. The message, therefore, was: become a terrorist. I need to wash your sperm out of me, she said.

When she went in the bathroom she was white. When she came out she was Asian. His hair was longer and he had the beginnings of a beard. The TV was playing Z by Costa-Gavras. He was surprised at how beautiful she looked naked. Let’s go in the bedroom, he said.

He did last longer the second time. He came on her ass crack and then kissed the back of her neck. Put his face in her hair.

I’m glad I met you, he said.

Yeah, I like you for some reason.

I like you too, he said.

I wonder what it is. You’re a scumbag but you surprised me with the Debussy.

You didn’t remember that? I talk about it on OKCupid.

We didn’t meet on OKCupid. It was Tinder, she said.

Are you sure?

I don’t have OKCupid. I don’t think anyone does anymore.

Will you go out with me again?

I don’t know, honestly. You’re hot but I kind of need a guy with a job.

Why don’t you just stay with me until you find him.

We’ll see, she said, and dug her face between his arm and chest. Let out a warm breath on his skin. They fell asleep with a big wind shaking the palms and the coyotes crying in the hills. He thought: please let her stay.

**********

When they woke up she was Mexican. Her eyebrows were weird but her ass was like a poster. His hair was short again. Hers was curly. I have to get home to my son, she said. But thank you. I had a nice time with you.

Yeah, me too, he said. Let’s uh…

You’re going to invite me over for chicken.

Correct. How about it.

OK, she said. Text me. She kissed his forehead almost like a mother. Started looking for her bra. The blinds were open. Outside a mockingbird sat on a wire with a blade of dead grass in its beak. It must be spring.

Philippines Vacation

The day after I got home I was sitting in traffic on the 10 West. Job interview. Temp secretary at an organic dog food company. Possible permanent hire if the woman doesn’t come back from maternity leave. Who knows what a young mother will do, said the office manager. Eight minute interview. I knew I didn’t get it when I walked in. From his eyebrows. Drive time: 2 hours round trip. Where do you make the dog food, I asked. I don’t know, he said. The Midwest somewhere.

24 hours earlier I was suspended in the Tanon Strait next to a sea turtle. Warm sighing ocean over coral reefs. You could spend a year looking at one pufferfish. There are a million pufferfish. A million wrasse and clownfish and nudibranchs. Watch out for deadly sea snakes. Back on shore the greatest danger is too many 19 year olds want you to impregnate them.

So who fucking cares that I didn’t get the dog food gig. Except: I need a job now. I need money so I can light my possessions on fire. Go live under a tarp in Negros Oriental. The jungle is warm. The girls all want a long nosed white baby.

I’m sick and it’s not going away. Maybe it’s AIDS, people keep joking. Well maybe it is. If you think I didn’t hit it raw with hookers in the Philippines, you don’t know me. Old expats warn you. Stay away from street girls. They don’t get tested. You don’t know how old they are. You’re caught in a room with an underage girl, you’re going to third world jail, long time. If you think you’re gonna hear that and then not cut to me washing my dick in a rusty garden bucket in a 200 peso per hour motel, jumping up backwards yanking on my pants when a cop blasts his siren to pass someone outside– you don’t know me. I asked if she had a condom. Is OK, she said. I no have a sick. Bad idea but I was malibog.

Angeles. Hookers don’t make you use condoms. They don’t use birth control. They don’t get abortions. They don’t tell you pull out. Single moms mostly. Father’s a local. When he heard about the blessed event he disappeared. Baby’s at home with mom or somebody. Home could be Angeles or it could be fucking Gilligan’s Island. The other johns are old Australians. They wear soccer jerseys and their eyes point in different directions. 2000 pesos gets a girl all night. Six minutes of fucking, nine hours of her murmuring at facebook. Their social media lives are like American strippers. Rage posts at the girl who stole her boyfriend. He’s an aspiring rapper. Gaga, gago she types.

The father’s a local, or he’s a client. Waitress at one of the girly bars was eight months pregnant. Serving swill in a club where every single person smokes 63 peso counterfeit Marlboro reds constantly. Dad was Korean. She’d liked him. He paid $900 for her cherry. They call Koreans 3 3 3’s. 3000 pesos, 3 minutes, 3 inch dick. Metric system for everything but cock size. When he heard about the blessed event he disappeared. Good luck tracking down Mr. Kim. Still, I ask: did you try google. She asks: what is google.

The girl I still jerk off to was deaf. Little beach town. 1800 pesos to bring her to my hotel and cum on her belly after 3 strokes. She couldn’t speak. She could only look in my eyes and smile and squeal like a baby. This made me think she really liked me. Fat belly with a bird tattoo. A kid somewhere. When dad heard about the blessed event he disappeared. After I came too fast we laid around making out. Watched a cartoon called The Amazing World of Gumball. It’s about a cat who goes to school with a retarded Tyrannosaur, a ghost made of paper, and a masked creature with antlers. The cat has a crush on the antler creature. The school was having a dance. Cat couldn’t bring himself to ask antlers to it. I could relate.

I can’t believe I didn’t cum in her. She’d be getting the news now. I’d have disappeared. My son grows up in the jungle. Rooster for a pet. His mother can’t speak but her sister’s English is pretty good. I know because she sold me the deaf girl. He has you until 11:36. She had to make her fingers go 1, 1, 3, 6.

Angeles. Sex tourists. Old white men, there on pensions, there on social security. Young fat men in that Tabasco Sauce branded Hawaiian shirt. Spiky haired men with lizard faces strolling out of an alley with two knobby kneed twelve year olds in tow. They’ve got friends, he volunteers.

Men in clothes so bad that jokes haven’t made it there yet. It’s not Tapout, Ed Hardy. Not fedoras. None of the shit where OKCupid girls say don’t message me if you wear this. Socks with sandals gets close. Crocs. A specific IT worker from Minnesota aesthetic. The Tabasco Sauce branded Hawaiian shirt is the flagship garment of this school. Sports jerseys. Men dressed like Kevin Smith.

And who am I to trash them. I’m there buying pussy like everyone else. Five minutes out of my airport cab in Manila I picked up a street hooker at Kenny Rogers Roasters. First girl I saw whose face was female. Ladyboys are everywhere. Gay culture and trans culture don’t appear to be separate. If you are gay, you dress up like a woman and fuck for money. I asked if she had a condom and she made a confused face. She had a kid. Dad disappeared.

When are you gonna write about this. When I can wrap my mind around it. I swam with the sea turtles. Facefucked a street hooker of indeterminate age who crossed herself and prayed before she put it in her mouth and squealed when I came without warning. I sucked another hooker’s tit while rawdogging her and got a mouthful of milk. I saw tall trees looming out of the rain forest mist above a 200 foot waterfall. Talked to the most open hearted people on Earth. Made friends with smart college kids who wanted to take pictures of me and practice English. I want to help them. Go back and start a business. So does everyone else.

Crushed an 18 year old’s pussy while she screamed in agony and her screams made me cum too fast. Then I did it again. She cost 20 dollars. Per facebook she found a sucker now. Fat man from Finland. I’m proud of her. Watched a cockfight. The poor bird ripped savagely, dying; the ref kept picking him up and dropping him down waiting for him to stand. He just bled out. They left him there a long time while money changed hands. Spoke to God in the jungle. Climbed a streambed miles from nowhere in flood waters, almost died. Almost died many times. Learned how to ride a motorcycle. Almost took it off a cliff, almost took into a truck filled with screaming pigs, into another bike with 3 generations of a farm family on it, old people on the back and babies on the handlebars. Swam out into Subic Bay 200 yards, put my hand on something sharp on a piling and it broke off in the flesh of my palm. I remembered the aquarium display: death from a lionfish sting is slow and agonizing. It was a sea urchin. Later I saw them in the reefs; they’re covered in spikes but they still hide. A good metaphor for something but I don’t know what it is. Talked to sex tourists, sex workers, sex trafficked children, trying to figure out what made the whole thing tick. How can I get those kids the fuck out of there, how can I make money so I can build them a home or something… five years later I’ll come back and fuck them raw. 20 dollars. Manila to Angeles to Olungapo to Cebu to Dumaguete in two weeks. Half the trip was transit, buses through the jungle. They play VHS tapes of Manny Pacquiao fights. Cab drivers ask if you like Manny Pacquiao. Say yes.

I was an openhearted ambassador for my country. I was a degenerate scumbag exploiting poor young girls. For five minutes I was a ”journalist” when I found two 12 year olds kept in a scummy apartment complex with a cat drowned in the pool. Doubtless hired out by an old Australian with eyes pointing different directions. Tried to talk to them about how’d it come to this but they didn’t tell me shit, just gamed me. They kept trying to sell me pussy and I was to afraid to be in a room with them while they did each other’s hair and watched porn. Well who needs an expose of the child sex trade. Everyone already knows. Cinder block sheds half built with tarp roofs, open sewers, weird karaoke huts deep in the jungle made of bamboo. Monkeys. Jungle birds screaming. Everywhere I went the kids wanted me to play basketball.

I need to go back. Warm rain hissing in the coconut palms. The girls. Start a business. I’ll be king of these monkey faced primitives. With the wheel and the sharpened stick I’ll be their god. Impregnate their teens. When the men get surly I’ll point at an eclipse. Tell them I’m eating the sun.

Need to go back. Make babies. The women don’t think giving birth is a fate worse than death. I’ll be a gross old rapist in crocs and so what. Now I need money. Time to make dog food.

On the Road to My Solitary Death

An unattractive woman I don’t like doesn’t want to see me again. I’m pissed. Because she has a perfect pussy.

All I need is one asset. Good face, nice body, nice pussy, nice intellect. Sense of humor, sense of adventure, an interest in Lake Tanganyika cichlids– PICK ONE. Well forget what you can take, my sponsor tells me. Focus on what you give. I got: OK face nice body nice intellect. Sense of humor sense of adventure interest in Lake Tanganyika cichlids. Well read. Minor internet fame, albeit among woman haters. I can play guitar. I can draw. My pecs have a zipper down the middle. My inguinal crease is so cut that when I take a shit a vein pops above my pubis. I can cook. I have a nice place next to a park. Down the street is another park with waterfowl and I can identify them. I know something of their lifestyles. Perhaps this will be of interest. My hair has perfect gray. I’m not short. Not bald. I don’t have big cock but it’s not… the situation isn’t quite clinical. I’m a good guy. Good to be around. People who know me love me. Still. This fat cunt with the one long nipple hair can’t sent me a god damn text back. And I’m too old to shoot up a school so I just have to take it.

Adulthood

Young girls only fuck at night, and I go to bed early. Before sleep I review my household budget. Murmur approvingly if I’ve saved on groceries. Electric usage dropped. Light touch with the AC. No cable bill but the internet I was paying 30 dollars for became 60 somehow, because I stayed with Time Warner Cable. Phone bill stayed 100 but only by fights and fights with Verizon. Bank fees successfully disputed but I could write an orchestral score of Bank of America hold music from memory.

My H & M slim cut wrinkle free dress shirts hang on the shower curtain rod instead of going in the dryer. I’ll get a year out of them this way. Then they’ll get a stiff yellow crust on the armpits. Some chemical my body makes to ruin shirts. Soon enough a year will pass. Buy more shirts. Old ones go in my car to wipe the dipstick. Soon I’ll have paid off debt. Saved money. A travel fund. A fund for my children’s education. But no vacation, no children. I’ll just watch the number grow and it will please me. I could take care to withdraw cash in front of a girl. Not palm the receipt with the balance. Leave it visible. But there will be no girl. I sleep at 9. Young girls only exist at night.

I’ll marry an old woman. As the drought worsens she’ll grow a hummingbird’s beak from her mouth. Suck the juice from my glands while I sleep. My bones will leak out and become stains on my shirts. I’ll be a pile of queasy shapeless meat and the squirrels will chew out my eyes. Who will take my compound interest.

My parents are coming. They live here now. I have a good relationship with them. This means my sex life is over. The life of money and bills and responsibility has begun. Prompt medical checkups and colonoscopies and the dentist. Classes and homework and extracurriculars and then update mom and dad over dinner. In the queue to die.

I threw out a box of old papers in honor of their arrival. Each week I clean one thing. My apartment becomes livable. Girls would complain about the dust, the toilet. But they stayed.

I stopped drinking. Made a list of my character defects. Prayed for their removal. A list of those I harmed. Prayed for the willingness to make amends. The prayers will be answered. What will be left.

Ideal Behavior

As a personal growth exercise, please answer the following question:

How would you describe your ideal behavior with regard to dating and sex?

I want to be a human hose. Permanently coupled to a never ending mountain of ovulating 13 year old Asian schoolgirls. Perpetually blasting hot yogurty goo into impossibly tight wet adolescent cunts. On the other end, my face, a team of servants stuffs nutrients necessary to continue pumping forth oceans of crawly ejaculate. Healthy foods such as blueberries and yams. Brussels sprouts. Doesn’t have to be organic shit. I’m not fancy.

I want to be an HR Giger flesh abomination rocketing my jizz like alien spores over a canyon of dewy musky unwashed half bald teen pussies forever. Preferably they are Korean. I want to be some kind of pulsating queen ant, or something like the Guild Navigator from the Lynch Dune. Some Lovecraft thing made up only of balls and cocks with thirteen tentacles on the end each of which reach up into virginal pubescent cervix and squirt gouts of bleach smelling nut that dribbles out into their white cotton panties, which I then wear as a mask. Or I want to be exactly as I am but with some super pheromone that forces high school field hockey players to breed with me bent over dumpsters after practice. I want to be reborn as an amoeba inside the sweaty twat of the magnet school sophomore I sit across from on the red line to North Hollywood. Her tennis shorts. Mexican girl,small teeth big gums but she’s diligent about her homework. Something about that makes me need to put another hideous thing like me into her belly and ruin her dreams and flee the country.

Every man is like this. Your father is like this. Your teacher and your clergyman. We are not socially conditioned to be this way. We’re born this way like a dandelion’s born for sunshine. Social conditioning is what stops me from becoming emperor of the world, enslaving every scientist, forcing them to engineer me into a bristly pink urchin of dicks rolling over a stadium piled with spreadeagled nubile teens. Again, preferably they are Asian. Preferably they have braces.

I should have been a jellyfish. Nut on a rock; maybe there are some eggs and you’re done. It’s a curse to be a higher primate. You need looks, clothes, money, hobbies. Getting laid is like applying for college. Passing a credit check. All I want is to impregnate thousands of young Japanese teens with zero consequences of any kind and die from chemical depletion. Starved raisin nuts meekly croaking out dust as I laugh and my soul screams into the sky fulfilled. That or get hit in the crotch with a log. Then I can stop thinking about it.

Anyway.

Mr. Universe

And now I’m shirtless in the park. Trimmed my chest hair this morning. Feel like a naked pink baby. Can’t tell if I look good like this. Sitting Indian style. Folds of fat choked out by my belt. At 9% body fat this still happens. By the time I get rid of my last chub I’ll be so old I’ll just be skin. There’s another shirtless guy and I keep looking over thinking: does he look better than me?

A girl is checking me out. I guess that means I look good. Now I have this flash of fear. A burning house feeling. A girl looked at me; I better do something about it. This is it, Rocky. Your one shot. She looks away, then back. I don’t have the courage to maintain eye contact. I’d like to think it’s because I’m too mature to pick up girls. It’s because I’m chickenshit. So I look up and awkwardly half smile, making clear that I’m a small dicked nebbish whose seed is unworthy of her loins.

Relax. She’s not that hot. She’s not Asian so who gives a shit. Little gut behind black high waisted pants. If she talked to me I’d talk back. But it’s my job as a man to talk first. If it’s gonna work like that, what do I get in return. She ought to to pay me.

She looks again. A giant invisible hand forces my eyes into my phone and mushes my face into a stupid smirk like there’s something amusing on the screen. I know smiling makes my nose looks big. This makes me smile more. I know my teeth are slightly out of whack. Somewhere in my eyes there is probably agony but she’s too far away for that detail. She’s still looking. I’m summoning material in case she talks to me. All those years of words. This is what they’re for.

If she talks to me I’ll have to ask her out. I don’t want to go out with her. I want her to come home with me and have unprotected sex right this minute. That or nothing. What I don’t want is to dance. Be funny. Have to be funny. Beg a merciless God for enough fucking funny to keep pouring out of me for the long hours it will take to get the pussy. Just please don’t let it lapse into that one awkward instant of fucking up that blossoms into a million dickshrinking eternities. If I have to do all the work why can’t shit happen on my terms. Lift weights, good haircut, couple jokes equals pussy. Jesus Christ, what more do you need. You have to be confident too. You have to keep that confidence in a world where you’re a worm.

Someone texted her. A shinier object. I’ve blown it. This is the last time I’ll ever have my shirt off and a woman near me. A comet will wipe out all women on Earth. I’ll be compelled to eat 15,000 burritos and get fat. She leans into the sunlight. She has bad skin. Thank God.

Jack

One morning he looked in his neighbor’s window and saw a picture of his own cat.

The guy had his blinds closed like always. But today a computer monitor was pressed up by the window and the slats were pushed aside. There was a narrow triangle of open glass, enough to see in the apartment. It was stacked high with crap. Old books and magazines. Old art on the walls. Prints of Hudson River Valley school paintings cut out of a coffee table book, taped to the drywall. Certificates and degrees, too far away to read, yellowed, askew in cheap frames. And a picture of his cat. It too was framed. A foot high. iPhone picture, pixelated a little. Fluffykins regarded the camera with a dead mockingbird in his mouth.

What the fuck, he thought. Well– he’s a cute cat. He got a bird. The neighbor wants a picture, fine.

He got back to work hauling trash cans to the curb. It was 7AM, garbage day. Every ten weeks or so he’d be a good citizen and take down his building’s cans. After that, work. Then home, eat, jerk off, sleep. Alone but the cat was there. The driveway between complexes was steep. He had to take care not to spill coffee grounds from the cans on his crisp white shirt. 65 per cent polyester. It needed no ironing. He’d purchased five. An investment in adulthood.

The man’s window faced his across the driveway. At night he’d hear him moaning. He sounded old, and like he hurt. On the way back up to get his briefcase he took one more look. There was an unmade bed against the wall. A duvet cover embroidered with parrots. A black file cabinet in back by the cat picture with a spindly cactus on top, hooked so far toward the window that the pot was about to tip over. A Brother P-Touch label on the top drawer said “BILLS.”

And a desk, with monitors. Three of them fixed to a jointed chrome arm bolted into the wall. They were beautiful. Broad and slim and gleaming with sapphire glass; nicer than any he’d ever seen. Placed with care at at different heights and angles like the flowers on an orchid. They must have cost thousands. Well to each his own, he thought. I’m glad the old man has something he loves.

He got his black pleather attache and his tupperware of leftover pot roast. Locked up and headed down the hill to the bus. When he got home the gap in the blinds was closed.

**********

It was a month before he saw inside the place again. This time at night. He was out calling the cat. Normally Fluffykins came in as soon as he got home from work. But once in a while he’d get in a fight with another cat. Spend hours squaring off with it under some car. Fluffykins won mostly, which made him proud. But out back was a big steep hill covered in tall grass; coyotes lived there. If the cat was out after dark he’d sit and think about the coyotes ripping him apart until he came in. The cat hadn’t come on the street out front. So he walked up the driveway toward the back lot, making a ch-ch-ch- sound.

He saw a patch of light from the old man’s window. Heard the groaning. There was the triangle of open glass. In it, a gnarled yellow dick in a gnarled yellow hand, the latter pumping furiously. The man’s pubic hair was a tangle of white like a wizard’s beard and he jerked and jerked and groaned and groaned. One of the monitors was visible. On it a Latina woman presented her ass to the camera and looked back, concentrating as she tried to stuff a half hard arm-thick horse’s penis into it.

The horse cock was white with brown spots. The woman mouthed something in Spanish or Portuguese and the man groaned again. Accelerated. His face was hidden, but there was the cat picture. And now next to it, a picture of a girl.

Well I’ll be damned, he thought. Heather.

Heather lived there before the old man moved in. Even though she was his neighbor he met her on Tinder. They’d walked out of their buildings to head to their date at the same time. She had blue eyes and looked like a painting on a 1930’s fruit crate. They got drunk and talked shit at the Short Stop. Her choice of venue. He invited her home for Scrabble.

She wouldn’t fuck him. He learned later she was fucking the Short Stop barback. He looked one of like Ed Norton’s rapists in American History X. He was married. His wife was cheating on him but he wouldn’t leave her. The Tinder date was meant to change his mind. Instead, he’d come up the hill the next night looking for the apartment with the cat, to kick that guy’s ass. No one was home. He left a note.

Later she came to apologize. He was alone, drunk. The best way to make amends, he said, would be some pussy.

No such luck.

They talked. Her dad was in prison for life, she said. He’d stabbed her stepmother to death. He was some kind of preacher and she’d followed him to Idaho; she was Heather’s age. Well I’ll never measure up to that, he thought.

Still, she kept coming over. They’d sing Grateful Dead songs then she’d get naked and he’d rub her back, her ass, her belly. She never did fuck him but one night she came over drunk and asked: why don’t you love me. After that he knew he’d won. He moved on.

In the old man’s picture she wore a white dress with the tops of her tits hanging out. Smiling next to her potted rosemary plant. It was extraordinarily healthy. She was a skilled gardener.

Well shit, he thought. I guess she left some stuff behind. Wonder if the old man has her dirty panties. I could stand a whiff. He fell asleep trying to remember the smell of her neck.

**********

The last time he looked in the old man’s window he saw a picture of himself.

It was sunset. He’d been with his upstairs neighbor by the trash cans, smoking. You know about the old guy next door, he asked.

You hear him too?

Yeah.

He lives alone. I think he’s on disability or something. He never leaves. We thought he was sick, like he had cancer. But I think he’s just crazy and sits at the computer jackin off all day. We call him Jack.

That’s funny.

How’s shit with you, the neighbor asked.

Good. Working. You know how it is. Beats the shit out of me. But I got bills.

Ayuh. How’s things on the lady front.

You know. Fuckin Tinder. Even that’s drying up.

Your girls used to make me jealous.

Well shit man, I wouldn’t mind what you have. I’m almost forty for Christ’s sake.

Yep. Hard to find in this town though.

They parted ways. He walked out front to look for the cat. There was the light and the window and the hand; no dick in it this time. The picture. It was framed, next to Heather. She had taken it one drunk night. He was naked on his couch playing guitar. His face looked fucked up but his shoulders rippled.

He looked at Heather, then at himself, then back at her. Her tits in her white dress with her rosemary plant. Her warm belly in his lap, her naked back damp in the summer heat.

Well I have to say something, he thought. I can’t have a portrait of my god damn ball sac in the neighbor’s window. Go tell him to take it down. Maybe I’ll get that rosemary shot too. She knew me at least. Whatever else he has of hers. I have a right to it, he thought. More than him.

He walked down the driveway and up to the black metal gate of Jack’s building. The buzzers weren’t marked but he tried the handle; unlocked. The old man’s door was first on the left. The rosemary plant was there in its pot, dead. He knocked.

Coming, said the groaning voice.

The peephole darkened. The door creaked open a crack.

I’m glad you’re here, said Jack. I’ve been waiting.

He recognized the sinewy yellow hand that crept out. Reached out to shake it out of reflex. When he woke up there were colors and lights in his eyes. Bright but blurry. He was sitting down. His hands felt wrong, like they were all tendons and bones; there was an ergonomic mouse in one and a warm wet weight in the other. He forced his eyes to focus. Screens. On the left was Heather with her rosemary. On the right, the woman with the horse, furrowing her brow as she struggled to penetrate herself.

This is Why I Can’t Have Kids

Meanwhile I have an infection that will eat my face. Rough spreading redness between the eyes. Lotion every day. By night it recedes. Then when I wake it’s worse. It will spread to my eyeballs and blind me. Die horrible from eye AIDS but first I’ll never get laid again and every woman will laugh at my small penis. And the cat will die.

This is why I can’t have kids. Every minute imagining a rapist vivisecting them. You make a kid, you make a target for acid throwers. Limb severers. As it is I spend at least ten minutes per day picturing a van fragging the cat with its back tires. That’s enough. I don’t need more things to love and be afraid of losing.

All your fears are true. You will die. You will die painfully. The least painful death conceivable is the guillotine. I bet that hurts like a bitch. The blade slicing through your neck nerves, fast as it is– time telescopes out and out and you’re in that moment for a thousand years. Like the stairmaster. Working off one Mrs. Fields Fucking cookie you follow a long train of thought about kneebones grinding. Run lost down long cornering corridors of hate, fear. pain, knowledge of future pain. Look up. The seconds digit hasn’t turned. Watch it laying still for a very long time. Only after does it seem like nothing. In the car with the NPR over the windshield wipers groaning in the cold rain. Cavernously hungry for a Mrs. Field’s cookie. You’re fat. You’ll always be fat. Your soul is fat. No matter how skinny you get people look in your eyes and see fat. Fat ugly stupid small penis long nostril hairs. You trim but you always miss one.

One More for the Road

She was a thick black chick and her cunt smelled like celery. Thicker than her pictures but I’m so thirsty I’d fuck a possum carcass. We met by the duck pond. She was leaving town that night. Whatever showed up, I was fucking it.

Now my bed smells like celery. There are pustules on my crotch. Not near my dick. Way off to the left by my inguinal crease. If I get some infection, fine. As long as it’s something condoms wouldn’t have prevented. Because then it’s like: what are you gonna do. I promised myself I’d never wear a condom again. After the Philippines. I put my bare dick in whores, in a country where the average net worth is a chicken. Came back, paid extra for the full bore VD panel. Nothing.

STDs don’t exist. Not for people like me. Every guy I know with herpes has five to eight lifetime partners. Got it from his Brown University econ major fiancee. Guys like me who creampie Throw Momma from the Train against a bar urinal with half a piss soaked pizza slice in it: nothing. Sewer rat immunity. These whiteheads are just a rash from her filthy summer cunt sweat.

She studied zoology. Knew a little about ducks. We saw mallards. They mate for life, she said. It’s romantic. Well yeah, but they also gang rape corpses. Look it up; it’s true.

We walked around the pond holding hands. There are no girls there anymore. It’s all families. 17 year old Mexicans and 45 year old whites walking with their 3 year old kids. Wheezing French bulldogs. Is there more than one kind of egret at this pond, she said. I perked up for a minute. A great egret stalked fish in the reeds, but I couldn’t see whatever else she was talking about. There’s a blue crowned night heron somewhere, I said. But she was looking at double crested cormorant. I pointed out the one pair of American coots left after the migration. They’re an interesting duck, she said. Well no. They’re part of the rail family. Jesus Christ, there’s no hope for anyone.

We got back where we started, by the lily pads. Two male mallards were trying to rip another one’s neck open with their rough snail crushing beaks. They got on top of him and held his neck underwater, screaming. Drive me home, I said.

I’d jerked off five times that morning and couldn’t cum. Had to say I needed a break. Pull out, go limp, rub her ass a little and look at her fat purple pussy so I could picture it. After that I put it in half soft and pumped for fifteen seconds until I shot hot ropes in her navel like a machine gun. She must have been ovulating. Ten awkward minutes and she left.

Sunday I went to a barbecue at a porno shoot. The best looking girl was half black. That’s why Monday I needed to fuck a black stranger from the internet. Director was an old guy; he was in Vietnam in the navy. He saw body parts float past his boat in the Gulf of Tonkin and it meant nothing. You could get a meal and a beer and fuck for five dollars, he said. If one guy caught the clap his buddies would all fuck the same girl out of solidarity. We were nineteen, he said. What are you gonna do.

I shouldn’t have done it. I’m meant to be past this. But if you don’t fuck for too long your spine starts to hunch. Your eyes get nervous and you smell like a leper. Your face looks stupid and your job starts to matter. What if I met my future wife but I was like that. She’d look at me like an insect. I can’t take that chance.

Shit Piss Cunt Fuck

We both know I won’t make 30, I told her. What will you put on my grave. “Kiss Joy as it Flies,” she said.

She died at 4AM Wednesday morning. 36. Heart attack. Drug related. Funeral is tomorrow. I think about putting a snow pea flower in her coffin. I think about her in the coffin and I have to cry.

She’s the other voice in my internal dialogue now. I have to write about you, I tell her. I don’t know what to call it. Maybe “Goodbye Baby” but I never called you baby. Yes, that’s stupid, she says. Obviously shit like “RIP” is out; “She’s Gone,” “She Died,” what the fuck. I can’t use your name. I’m afraid your mom will read it. She’ll think I’m spreading shit that you did drugs. Well you did– you did a ton of fucking drugs. Order an eight ball at 10PM and cook it all up and then another eight ball at 3 in the morning. I had work the next day. Woken up by your douchey fucking dealer from San Diego with the spiky hair. He wanted to fuck you but who didn’t. At least he was respectful about it. Just get a quarter ounce at the start of the night, I’d say. Trying to sound cool. Like I was top secret drugs guy too. Really I was scared.

Well what about “Kiss Joy as it Flies.” It’s too corny, I tell her. But it’s true, she says. Yeah but I can’t be titling shit after William Blake on my blog about fucking whores and taking shits. Stop being afraid to be corny, she says. Just share how you feel. Well then how about “Shit Piss Cunt Fuck,” I say, and she says perfect.

Why did you have to die, you bonehead. How did you go. Were you on pills like they said or did you slip on a banana peel. How will your mom react if she sees me at the funeral. What is this flower on this tree. Why are you not here to tell me. You always knew. Why did you have to die and now I can’t see you anymore. You’re in a fridge at the morgue. I don’t want you to be cold. I want to give you a warm blanket. There has to be a way to make it not true. Wake up. Reset everything. I want to just hear your voice one more time. Your laugh.

I was gonna do a ninth step with you but my sponsor told me not to. Stay away from the girls, he said. But you weren’t a girl that way. What if I’d done a good job. What if you came to AA and lived. What if a unicorn came out of my ass, we could hitch a ride on it, it would suck me off after.

I’ll see you in your coffin clothes and think what you might say about the outfit. I can’t let you go into the ground. Darkness and silence. I don’t want you to be scared.

There was a loose pit bull on the street this morning. Looked like yours. What if it was, I thought. You lived 15 miles from me but I chased him anyway. Because what if you warged into him like Jon Snow. Came and found me. The neighbor’s pit chased him away. What if you got hit by a car. I’m a sane adult and I’m scared your spirit is inhabiting a dog. It knows enough to get to my apartment but not enough to stay off Sunset Boulevard. Year of Magical Thinking shit. I wanted to reread that book before making this post, but I lent it to you I think. Little awkward getting it back.

When my cat is out at night I go call him. Coyotes coming; he’ll get shaken to death by his neck. Too long and every shadow starts to look like him running toward me. Same with you now. Every breeze is your spirit. Every animal possessed by you to look me in the eye, and tell me: what? What is the message from the dead? Would you really inhabit a squirrel in my trash can. Look up from worrying a Jack in the Box bag with one french fry in it. Wordlessly tell me the meaning of life. Knowing you: maybe. I saw a green finch and I stared and stared until I heard your voice. You said: retard, you’ve seen this same finch fifteen thousand fucking times. It lives here.

What can I say about her. She was smart. She was funny. She was pretty. I loved her as much as I’ve loved anybody. She loved me like that too. I’m glad I got to feel that. Now I’m glad I remember.

She took care of me. I took care of her. When she took too many pills I’d turn her over. One day I couldn’t. It hurts. I wish I’d said something. Told her life gets better when you stop this shit. The world goes deeper than what you know. What you’re running from isn’t so bad. But I can’t tell her now, so I’m gonna tell you:

Stay here.

Stay with me.

William Randolph Thirst

No matter how much pussy I get I’m Elliott Rodger. Couples on the street make me sick. Tepid Tinder response means I’m a chromosome damaged power line baby. My mom should sue a drug company. No response means I don’t exist.

Had a date yesterday. I liked her. She’s pretty. Likes the same books as me. She too is a writer toiling in obscurity. Worried about losing her voice in work, worried about time. We lock in on the same sentences in stories. I want a relationship. So I did what my sponsor told me: don’t make a move. Instead I said: I’d like to see you again. Peter Brady voice crack. She said yes but I think she was lying. At the end I gave her a peck on the bottom lip. We agreed to go to dinner this week. I felt like I had no dick.

Fuck right away or nothing. Fuck right away or they hate you. Fuck right away or you’re a worm, and the horror of seeing it proved over and over.

Went inside and tried to jerk it to her but I couldn’t make it stick. Had to switch over to the fat Chinese girl stuffing her grapefruit tits into a black bikini top in the Target dressing room. I masturbate to women I don’t like. That’s who I can build a story around where they’d fuck me. Hideous in itself, but also: she’s a human being. An artist. Worried about losing her voice in work. We share things but she looks a certain way so she’s a hole. She wouldn’t fuck me so I went into my “good” date with no swagger. I resent her for that.

In my heart I’m thirteen. The first age where you get girls or not. Whatever happens after, you’re stuck that way. You either get on the bus or the fucker pulls off and you’re chasing it forever. Making up for thirteen when you’re fifty.

Meanwhile girls fly to fuck me because of this web site. Mail me their panties. I’m fucking a Pasadena City College freshman with CUNT cut into her arm. She stops by, eats chicken, sticks her sweaty summer twat in my face, its fill-me-with-babies-teenage perfume. Sits on my cock until I cum like a machine gun. Leaves with a kind word. I like her spirit. Her perfect teenage skin next to my grisly middle aged sac with its snowy hairs like Kenny Rogers’ beard. She talks about her homework and it makes me hard.

If I text her and she’s doing laundry I think: she’s leaving me. Sometimes when she’s with me I think she’s leaving. I can literally feel thirst while my dick is inside a hot young teen.

This is why I hate women. They’ll leave me because I don’t like myself. Then I don’t like myself because they leave me. When does it stop. Maybe if I joined a band.

God

God will not get you any pussy. He cannot cure cancer. Or at least, He won’t. He won’t get your kids home safe; He won’t save your job; He will not affect your AIDS test. What He will do if you can get through to Him is remind you that it doesn’t matter. God is your insignificance. God is the knowledge that you’re already dead. The world moves on as if you were never there. One day it’ll be as though the world itself was never there. Your mistakes, less meaningful than the death of a liver fluke. Like your happiness.

You were never born. You never lived. When you’re dead things are just the way they’ve always been. Somehow by some accident you exist for half a second. Hear a woodpecker in the park. Take a couple good shits, beat off and die. Even if you’re Hitler– you were never there. Do what you want, or don’t. Fail. Never leave the house– or do, go nurse orphans in Somalia. Who gives a fuck; it’s all nothing. Your pitiful instant divided by infinity is so much of nothing that zero is too big a number to express it.

What a relief.

Second Date Idea

I want to chain you to a pipe. Stop taking birth control. Move into my sweaty apartment. Let go of your possessions. Your pets. I’ll ladle water down your gullet. Sop up your waste. You’ll live off fruits I baby bird down your throat as I impregnate you again and again. Build a bunker underground for our hundreds of offspring. With whom I’ll also breed.

Let me cocoon you to my futon in 1,000 layers of Saran Wrap until you’re an atrophied putrifying jelly. Just a mouth hole and a little bit of face poking out. Only sensory input is my Q tip tickling your eyelids.

Let me bang your fart gas into my aorta with a sharpened turkey baster. Let me war paint with your period. Squat over my face and give me your diarrhea as bronzer. Get AIDS and cut my name into your neck and let me roll in thorns and shower in your dripping AIDS blood. Chew out my eyes then spit them down my dickhole as we 69 to REO Speedwagon. I want to weasel my whole being into your ridgy colon. Shit me out on your palms and lick me off. I need you, I need you to need me. How about it.

Progress Not Perfection

Good morning. Tuesday. Desperately want to not go to work. Don’t want to go to the gym. Don’t want to write. Just want free money and pussy. Just want to impregnate a hundred teens, have everyone else pay for my babies. Worship me as a god. I just want blimps with 800 foot LED pictures of my face a la Blade Runner humming in the airspace over schools telling kids their highest ambition should be to take my seed and clean my stove and be entombed alive in my pyramid. I just want my face stapled to Japanese junior high muff with the long straight jet black toilet brush textured pubes while I’m fed by enema. Never work never pay bills. I’d still find something to complain about.

Last night’s AA meeting. The speaker was hot. Fat young Mexican from Moorpark named Stephanie. We flirted for two seconds after but then I got pulled into a talk with a guy. An alcoholic whose life is falling apart who actually needed help. The purpose of my being there. Talked him off a ledge. I feel no spiritual growth from doing this. I regret not letting him spend his child support money on crack. I regret not horning into a conversation with Stephanie instead. Laying groundwork for when I’d pump her fat bald Mexican Moorpark pussy full of babies. Trap her at home changing diapers and yammering in Spanish to some aunt in Pacoima about how I’m a bad man while I’m out drunk. Cheat on her with a bar waitress, a white one. Come home, give her a black eye when she tries to complain. Bitch, give suck to my kids and make burritos and be grateful. Why can’t I have what I want for once.

OKCupid: My Life is Perfect

They hit 30 and the profiles start saying:

My life is perfect. I just need a man to share it with.

At 1AM her chihuahua woke me up licking the back of my balls. I want to say I thought it was her, waking me with a blowjob. But I knew it was the dog. Been woken up by OKCupid girls’ ball licking dogs about a thousand times more than blowjobs. My life is perfect means she has a dog. Dog job BMW cocktails with the girls. Mid century modern furniture. A hanging copper fruit basket. Books arranged by color. She likes you, she says about the dog. She doesn’t usually like men. Heard this a thousand times. I’ve told a thousand women: the cat doesn’t like you. Don’t take it personally. He doesn’t like anybody. Once in a while he lets them get a palm on his back and I tell them this is exceptional.

I don’t give a shit if the cat likes you. It’s not a sign we’re meant to be. You could walk in the room and the cat could scream like he’s on fire. I’d still fuck you. I’d still care how fast you text me back for a week. I’d still stop caring after a week. The cat can run and hide like his back leg was crushed by the garbage truck or snuggle up to your neck. He’s not the one who’s gotta fuck you. True too with the dog. Your new man won’t like the dog. The dog won’t like him. You’ll still end up with him instead of me. Typically he’s British. I hope it’s the same guy with all of them. Same British guy doomed to wander the earth dating Korean yuppies who dumped me.

My life is perfect. Just need a woman to share it with. I have no money. I drive a certified pre owned mid size family sedan. When you lift any object in my house it’s like a log in the forest after rain. Hideous wet invertebrates with poison pincers scatter. Some flee to my underwear drawer. They’ll lay in wait to gnaw my sac with chittering H.R. Giger mandibles and give me instant flesh necrosis. Pots in the refrigerator with mashed potatoes from June blooming with delicate otherwordly fungus. Books covered with dust and old toenails and hollow dead spiders.

I have friends but never see them. Every day wake up alone. Write something not worth reading. Drive to work with the obnoxious radio. Work a job where saying my title makes my dick shrink like I’m eight years old in a cold lake. Collect a salary that puts me in the top ten per cent of all individuals in America, the point zero one three per cent of all people on Earth; I am one of the highest earning people who has ever lived, according to some dick measuring money web site that tries to sell me mortgages. I make three times more than the average family in my city, which is one of the most expensive in history. And my income is laughable. I own nothing but a pile of debt and a laptop. A couple guitars and a bike (edit: that got stolen yesterday). Middle class money is nothing. Even with no wife no kids, one bedroom in a stucco building with a cinder block wall and two wilting agaves in the dirt off the front porch– in terms of pussy, you’re a legless beggar in India.

Money is nothing unless you have enough to brag about. People think there’s more than there is. The median pre tax income for an American household is fifty two grand. To brag you’d have to pay ten times that in taxes. All books and articles and movies and shows are about rich people. All public figures are rich people. All sitcom apartments are worth ten million dollars as a convenience of set design. So being rich looks normal. Just like cop shows make competent cops look normal, because the case has to wrap after the fourth commercial. Really they just write tickets and kill blacks.

Wake up. Write alone. Write shit and spend the day ruminating how your writing is shit. Menial work, lunch break, menial work. The gym, where your pathetic genetic waste of a body groans on every joint with every rep. You’d like to think it’s aging but it’s always been like this. You were always a boneless gangly flopping marionette even at sixteen. The shape your body wants to be, if you skip two weeks of pro athlete level weight training, is floppy daddy long legs limbs hanging off a distended jelly gut. How did my ancestors survive. Why wasn’t my bloodline mercifully extinguished. It’s a gay gym, which means 60 year old steroid blasting freaks with bodies a thousand times better than mine. Fine. Motivating. But gay music. All gyms by law should only play AC/DC. Ramones, Motorhead, Black Sabbath, NWA. Mine plays the HIV remix of Miley Cyrus. The hepatitis remix of Ke$ha. Gay men’s interest in teenage girls: unseemly. I just want to statutory rape them like a normal person.

That’s an hour. Then AA. You’re there to be lifted spiritually by serving others. You spend 53 out of 60 minutes sulking over a better looking guy with the one hot girl. Newcomers identify themselves. You must help them. Get their numbers. Later sit through awkward calls with them like talking to your grandmother on Christmas. Go home. Read woman hating forums and reddit threads about A Song of Ice and Fire. Then bed. Somewhere in there beat off with the Powerful Male Stroker it took 20 years to get the guts to buy. About one day in ten you think about killing yourself. Get mad at your mother for being the reason you don’t. Typically that’s weekends. Typically after you haven’t written anything good. You’ve written a thousand things. Six of them are good.

What good are you if you’re not rich. If you’re not famous. If you’re not– not merely decent looking but exceptionally, freakishly good looking. What good are you if your penis is not nine inches long or more, which girls think is slightly above average. Which is in fact three and a half standard deviations above average. My IQ is probably three and a half standard deviations above average. But it doesn’t hit cervix.

She wants to write. She has writer’s block. An in. You have to know something she doesn’t. Have more money. Be better looking. Nicer car. You have to know more than her about her favorite thing that she spends all her time learning about. You have to be the only person who can solve the One Big Problem Otherwise My Life Is Perfect. Writer’s block is the only problem I can solve. God help me if I had to change a tire.

You solve writer’s block by eating shit and being in agony for years. Force yourself to hammer out worse than useless garbage for hours that feel like lifetimes. Every day, until something clicks and you suddenly need it as therapy. Sit there with a demonic inner voice shrieking at you for a decade. And remember: this is a decade of calendar time. In subjective time, one instant of writing feels like years walking dark mazy corridors of third degree burn self hatred. Like Stephen King’s The Jaunt. Come back with white hair jabbering it’s longer than you think.

Anyway, just do that. Your self hating voice never gets tamed. Even after you get a little known. Make a little money. Girls in different cities mail you dirty panties and buy plane tickets to fuck you and you walk around with a secret. I am INTERNET FAMOUS, god dammit. I am a REVERED CULT AUTHOR, fat Chinese woman selling me gas station cigarettes. That’s what you’re seeing in my eyes. Once in a while your gaze makes other men look down at cracks in the sidewalk. I have 22 “positive” Amazon reviews and my hundred thousand hours of work has earned me almost what I make in one week as a fucking secretary. Look upon my works and despair.

My life is perfect. Just need the perfect woman to share it with. Well she kind of is perfect. Asian with tits who does not take birth control. She’s 36. This means dropping sperm in her is like dropping a pinball in one of those Rube Goldberg animations from The Electric Company. God knows what unholy birth defect it’ll land on. But she wraps her legs around your back and grabs on to you like she wants it and I do find the dog charming.

I Am Not Allowed to Think about Hot Young Pussy

I joined Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. Day three of no jerking off. No looking at Tinder, OKCupid. No looking at women with lust in my heart. This means: no looking at women. No fantasizing. Which means: do not think about Lara. Our date to the bird sanctuary. Had to cancel. No thinking about her hair her tits her eyes her face. The curve of her jawline and her neck. Her voice. She likes me. I like her. Kind of a lot. She described me as “a staggeringly talented writer.” We share the exact same opinion on the one important thing.

Don’t think about the taste of her hairy pussy sweating in the summer heat. Her squatting over my face while her AC groans and does not cool the room. No writing about sex unless it’s necessary to the story. Sex is the story. There is nothing else on Earth. Birds, flowers, sunsets: go fuck yourself. Money work friends family sobriety service to other human beings: blow it out your ass. I wake up every morning so I can feel hot salty chowder spurt out of my dick. Preferably into the smelly cooch of an emotionally disturbed teen. Every other moment is just labor to support the meat sac that I am so it can fulfill this purpose. Why have a thoroughbred if you just keep it in the barn.

If you find yourself looking at a woman, look away. Typically I’d masturbate as soon as I got home. Take my vibrating Powerful Male Stroker and strap a medical glove over it. Fill it with Curel® Ultra Healing® Intensive Lotion for Extra Dry Skin, recommended by dermatologists. Tuck it between two pillows. Search Bing® , watch a fat Japanese teen skewered by impossibly long thick Mandingo penis. Jap girl sex sounds weird you out at first, but they grow on you. Plop the unwieldy vibrating pillow Frankenstein on my dick and let it milk me until I cum so fast I’m still only half hard. Then I can think about other things. Other worthless things like food, money, art, literature. And so forth.

Day one I went to an AA meeting. A girl was wearing lingerie for pants. Her boyfriend broke up with her. Her share about it, like reading a young adult ebook written by a Fiverr hire. But dragging my eyes off her succulent young kneecaps was like pulling a mother away from a burning house with her kid in it. I want Sharia law imposed. Burqas for all. The back of a thick nurse’s jiggly hamstring. Inch of a schoolgirl’s elbow, miraculously without that weird texture like the butt end of a baked chicken drumstick. You realize it’s because she’s twelve years old.

Everywhere. You don’t know how much you think about sex until you try to stop, they told me. Bullshit, I thought. Or true for every man but me. Have you read my shit?

I was wrong. I think about sex more than I talked about. More than is physically possible– I distort time to think about fucking. I think about fucking within fucking within fucking like Inception. Can’t have a woman in my peripheral vision without latching on to her like the Terminator. Picture my tongue on every inch of her skin. Lick off her makeup and her lilac scented Secret®, strong enough for a man PH balanced for a woman. Her half lilac half summer taint smelling sweat therefore clocking in at a perfect 7.0 as I feast on her three day armpit stubble. Don’t write about sex unless it’s necessary to the story. What else am I going to write about, the fucking economy? Guys chasing money so they can fuck.

No conversations with women. This is easy. If I don’t do all the work, nothing happens. Sometimes not even then. My sponsor shared an anecdote about his spiritual growth. His band had played a show. A cute girl spoke to him in a flirtatious manner. He turned her away. The shining trophy of sexual sobriety is: you can turn down pussy if it throws itself at you. Well what if you’re not in a band. What if you’re a conscientious hardworking reasonably well dressed taxpayer, aka: nothing. I’ve had two women approach me in my lifetime. One of them was a virgin who went crazy. Called me every day for two years. The other was a retarded Chinese Jehovah’s Witness. The week before she’d slept with a homeless guy from the subway. I took her bowling, then home. Pulled up her dress and licked her soft belly. Her little panties with a tiny salt crust from her fat cu– DON’T THINK ABOUT IT

My Brief Abstinence Career

What the fuck is a guy in a band going to tell me about pussy. I need a sponsor who’s also a pathetic nebbish. Someone who only barely gets laid through excruciating toil.

Went to an SLAA meeting last night. You think it’s gonna be like AA. Where you hear a guy saying woke up from a blackout in upside down in my flipped minivan… felt something warm in my face… it was my son’s blood… I crawled to the liquor store… and everyone laughs. SLAA is a bunch of weird old Lesbians talking about getting molested. 3 young Mexican bottoms with baby deer eyes always on the verge of weeping. One old bear who does, admittedly, have great stories about banging sailors on meth. But it’s all weepy shit. I shared. I hate this organization, I said. No jerking off and no looking at girls. I want sharia law to be imposed but I’d find a way to jerk off to a woman’s eyebrows. In conclusion: fuck all of you; this group just makes makes me miserable. No one laughed.

**********

Woke up not feeling so bad. Well, I’m agitated. But I was capable of reading Nick Kelman’s Girls. Long involved underage sex scenes without popping wood as hot sauce shit screamed out of my ass. Merely letting words pass through a shallow layer of mind without waking my sex drive. It’s been shut in some corner. A gorilla in a cage, quietly seething, waiting to rip the arms off the guy who comes to put gruel through a slot in the door. What happens when you starve it. Does it just die and go away. I have dreamed of this day.

Think of what you’d accomplish. I feel I like I could conquer the stock market. Crank out clickbait that got me a billion views. I could do all this because: who cares. No point to anything. Without sex no reason to live. So you might as well build an army. Might as well scrape the red phosphorus off a crate full of match heads with a nail clipper file, one little match at a time, a hundred thousand times, put it all in a water cooler bottle with a shoebox worth of screws. Do this fifteen times. Put all those in Uhaul. Park it in front of a school. What I’m not inspired to do is marvel at God’s creation. Help the elderly. Be of service to my fellow addict. I just want to beat up crippled people.

**********

I lost my only chance at happiness not going to the bird sanctuary with her.

She was the one. No question. I know she’s the one because of course I would find the one this week. The perfect date lined up with her and then my sponsor imposes Sharia law. Of course God’s plan– out of all the infinite galaxies, trillions of light years of space filled with uncountable organisms living lives of hope, fear, pain– all this was constructed solely to build me up slowly over decades and make me yearn for true love. Then briefly offer me a chance at it. Then pull it away at the moment of opportunity.

Of course I lose it by my avoidable choice. Some bullshit thing like joining a second twelve step program. I could have reversed this up until now just by beating off. I’d be out of the program. I’d have called her and gone. Held hands by the cormorants. Lived a perfect life filling her with beautiful babies forever. But now the weekend’s over. Now I’ll die alone. She’s at the bird sanctuary with another man. He has a huge, huge penis. They’ll have joy that should have been mine while I step on a needle and get AIDS. God laughs.

**********

Well I beat off. To Alyssa. After the AA meeting she started showing me her Bumble messages. She was fucking with some guy who asked for nudes. Her long black hair. She’s fat. Not great looking in the face either. But she’s a woman. Her fat Mexicanness brought to mind the fat 23 year old Taiwanese FOB I fucked two Sundays ago. White cotton underwear, pink rings around the thigh holes, some childish pattern on them. Hot loose slippery pussy with a little tang to it from walking around the park in the heat. Her fat belly under me. My sweat dripping into her eyes and her squirming, shielding her face and squealing with her stupid accent. Alyssa in a blue dress pink panties underneath. Fat little baby hands. She asked me for a high five and our palms touched. Hers was warm. It was over.

I decided in the middle of the meeting: I’m going to relapse. Sick of not staring at the tall black haired girl with the I got herpes from the band tattoos. The tops of Jennie A’s preposterous veiny jugs. Anna M in a little skirt, her tan legs crossed like they could open up any time revealing a tunnel of light and at the end her aging taint. Rachel P in her sheer heather gray cotton dress, little bit of gut hanging like she’s freshly knocked up by the six days of seed I’m sitting on. Listen Alyssa, I’m in the sex addicts thing now. I can’t talk about this stuff with you. Too late. He’d sent 20 pictures of his penis with well thought out composition. She’s proud of how she’s fucking with him. You want my nudes, here you go. Sends some dopey picture of Michael Cera. Do you ever really send nudes, I ask. She says I’m not that kind of girl.

It’s wicked to send pretty pictures and give a sad man relief. It’s virtuous to taunt him. Torture him. Not that kind of girl.

He didn’t want to meet you anyway, I told her. He just wanted to beat off to you into the bathroom sink. I beat off to her into the bathroom sink. Halfway through she turned into the FOB with the sloppy pussy. Six of one half a dozen of the other. I wanted 15 hot ropes but only the first one had any force to it. Wanted to feel like I’d crushed all hope for happiness. My future marriage spattering on the toothpaste crusted drain. All I felt was relief. The nut was abnormally thick and yellow. Took after its mother.

I’d Rather Watch Hitler Rape My Mom Than Date a Woman My Own Age

I have a date tonight. 38 years old. Look at her profile. Half Asian with excellent bone structure. But who cares. What am I gonna do, have kids with her? One quarter Asian kids with half a good looking face? She’s 38. Biologically useless. Fucking her, as productive as sticking my dick in a log. Plus she’s banged 10,000 indie rock bassists no doubt. Has herpes and the bad kind of HPV. The log it is then.

Still, she guards herself like her pussy’s a treasure. Habit. She disputed my choice of date venue. Jesus Christ, you’re 38. Whatever I say you say yes.

A 19 year old could tell me: to get a whiff of my cunt from 50 yards out, you must climb a high cold mountain harried by buzzards. At the top spend one night in a haunted house. I’d say sign me up. But19 year olds– you say El Prado, they say yes. Or they don’t have ID; you walk around the duck pond then fuck. See them again or don’t. They’re happy. 38 year old makes you crawl across nails. Interrogates you off her checklist. Things she dreams of in a man, which you’ll suffer for other men not providing. How do I know you’re not just looking for sex, she asks. Even I won’t know until I nut. If I did I wouldn’t tell you.

Am I just looking for sex. Yes and no. I’d love it if you were a wizard who made me laugh. But even if you’re a bore– if you said: want to go bowling and fuck, no man replies just bowling please.

Don’t you know how men are by now. How can you not after fucking us for a quarter god damn century. Thousands of us. You tasted the grizzled wangs of bartenders and bassists, senators and sewer scrubbers. Teenage twinks and haggard mummies wheeling oxygen tanks. There’s not one cute woman in LA who hasn’t racked up Wilt Chamberlain numbers. How can you do all that and not learn one thing about men. Or you unlearned what you knew. How does the 19 year old know more than you. She knows not to make me pretend.

********

She was the most physically perfect person I’ve ever seen. Half Nepalese half Danish. But I admired her like you admire a painting. No smell to her. She’s a human rights lawyer. A woman who knows what she wants. Not afraid to say it. To her credit, she also knows it doesn’t exist.

She checked her watch. I’d seen a blue crowned night heron at the pond across the street. But instead of taking her there I asked: drive me home. She parked. Want to come in, I said.

Are you being serious? You can’t tell me you’re feeling chemistry here.

No. But you’re hot. I feel nothing but I could push through it. We’re doomed but I’d still like to masturbate into your unfeeling carcass. How about it.

I’m a man who knows what he wants. She said no and we parted amicably.

Fuck Los Angeles

A four bedroom house in Hot Springs Montana is 99 thousand fucking dollars. Estimated mortgage: $382 a month. You get a separate detached cottage. The cottage alone, in this shithole fucking city I live in – this disgusting extension of Mexico but with additional loud helicopters and barking dogs and garbage taxes and women who’d rather be set on fire than smile at you– a cottage next to a stucco nest of murderous bike stealing cholos who grill cactuses and light off fireworks and gun Harleys 24 hours a day, as many of them in there as termites in one of those twelve foot mounds in Kenya– this shed costs seven hundred fifty fucking thousand dollars, plus property taxes to pay for schools with the literacy rate of the fucking Hills Have Eyes family; the mortgage after a hundred fifty fucking thousand dollars down is the entire pre-tax income of the median American household.

Have to get the fuck out of here. Battling for scraps of useless pussy with famous men. Men who direct Radiohead videos. Men who have three secret families holed away somewhere and once killed a man.* Men with nineteen inch smooth veinless cocks and tiny button noses and the cocks vibrate and another smaller cock deploys out from the nuts like the alien’s mouth and pleasantly tickles her asshole. Men with net worths like the amount of platinum they estimate is in asteroids. Car collections and horse collections and commensurate pussy collections. The smell of so much hot twat on them it draws bears.

If I have a Tinder match I know it’s fake. OKCupid: 0 visitors, 0 likes, 0 messages. Unless it’s a message from a fucking man. Give me advice on women, they ask. Here it is: get famous or die trying. Get famous a way women understand: music money or murder. James Holmes does better than you. Hot young girls will move mountains to get at him in prison. I’m human garbage; I pay taxes and work.

Summer in Montana. Winter in the Philippines. Both places I’ll be a god to bucolic primitives. The only man who can read. Every bison steak slinging blue eyed teen waitress trembling for my unholy cunning as I demonstrate an Earth-shattering technological innovation: the stick. Virgin cunts drool in awe at my vast cash hoard: $1700. I’ve grappled with civilization. I lost. Now to the trees. If it doesn’t work out I’ll fuck an elk.

Toxic Masculinity

She’s still in the shower. I just learned Hepatitis C is not transmitted sexually. Per the Hepatitis C Association, which I may now have to join:

1. Couples with one HCV positive partner had a 2.5 per cent transmission rate over 20 years of unprotected sex

2. HCV is not found in semen or vaginal fluid

3. Sexual transmission may be a factor among MSM (Men who have Sex with Men)

So you get Hep C if you fuck men. Your dick gets cut by his dry ass. His ass gets cut by your dry dick. But I fuck women. Therefore: call me sushi, I’m goin in raw.

A woman emails you because she likes your web site. Mexican with a luscious ass and her face is perfect, her skin is perfect. She’s in town because the man who invented (REDACTED) paid for her to fly out and suck his grizzled rich elderly cock. He and the wife are separated, he says. But plans have changed and instead of the house I got you a nice hotel.

This is her modus operandi. Rich men who make computers and spaceships take her out. Try to get her drunk on $3,000 bottles of wine. Promise houses and boats. I’m telling you this so you know how hot she is. I’m telling you how hot she is so you know how great I am.

Perfect face perfect teeth perfect eyes perfect pussy. Get her drunk have her sleep next to you. She knows you might have Hepatitis C. Might. Agrees you probably don’t. In any case she doesn’t care. But you can’t fuck her. It would be unconscionable. To hurt someone even if they want to hurt themselves. I don’t care if I die but dear God don’t let me take some poor girl with me.

You might have hepatitis. Or a bile duct blockage. A parasite. You might have cirrhosis. You thought you had pinkeye and a hernia so you went to Cesar Velez MD to get eye drops and be told your gut pain was nothing. But your piss test indicates a liver problem. We hear hoofbeats, says the doctor, we do not think it is a zebra. It is horses. The horses for this symptom are: colitis, liver stones, hepatitis C.

But, ahh,… the hep is pretty rare, right? I mean–

That depends. Have you had unprotected sex?

I’m a 40 year old man with a job and I brag about barebacking hookers in the Philippines. I go to bed at 9 so my Tinder dates are daytime. Walks around the duck pond. Meet at 1PM. By 2:30 I’m watching my chest sweat sting her eyes as she squirms under me, every time. Never use condoms, ever. Actually– once. She insisted. After I’d been digging her out raw and sloppy in the unseasonable September heat. Relishing how my cock would stink after. You use conn-domm she said in her Full Metal Jacket “shoooooot… meeeeee” accent, which would have made me cum too fast so I grudgingly put one on. It just trapped her chlamydia laden pussy juice against my dickskin. Rough latex shredding the twat I’d already soaked in a truck tank full of my AIDS laden precum. In fairness, she was more afraid I’d get her pregnant. I told her I was going to.

The girl extended the rich guy’s airline ticket so she could come up from Orange County. Sleep in my filthy apartment sight unseen. Because she likes my work. Suck on that, Jonathan Franzen.

**********

She lost her virginity at 15. Raped on a club dance floor. He didn’t get all the way in before he came but she got pregnant. The miscreant was never found. Biologically, he lived the dream.

She waited three years for the next guy. A TV star was in town. For a segment on exceptional teens. The network paid for his personal assistants and his personal assistants wrangled his exceptional teen pussy. He sent a car for her. He’s still on the air. I like his show. Less now that I know he used a condom. They still talk.

She married a rich guy but left him when she found his laptop. Investment banker. Big international deals. The sole purpose of these deals was to go to places where you can fuck 12 year olds. Entire economies are built this way. No other reason for Goldman Sachs to be in Cambodia. Third world money comes from horny fratboys impregnating child pussy. While you’re there, in the five minutes you tear yourself away from a squealing ringworm-infested meatpile of pubescent human beings sold to you by their mothers, their sisters… here’s a loan for your oil pipeline. Here’s a credit swap for the president’s cousin to invest the proceeds from de-nationalization of the national forest. 50,000 acres of teak becoming Suharto’s personal property, or Sukarno, or whoeverthefuck it is now. Some grinning squinting goblin whose grandfather played ball with Kissinger.

He bought a slave in Honduras. Shipped her back. She found a picture on his phone; toothless mother smiling as the girl held a suitcase with a bow on it. The girl would clean their house and then bend over. He’d leave $500 in the microwave. He got bored with her. She had to become a stripper. On his phone, long wounded text exchanges. You don’t understand how much I hate what I’ve had to do, the Honduran said in startlingly good English.

She found his laptop with a spreadsheet rating every teen hooker he’d fucked all over the planet. I assume he used color coded conditional formatting. I do.

**********

In the morning her tinder had 20 matches. 20 messages. 10 super likes. 9AM, radius one mile. Of the 20 one was good looking and had game. He made me jealous. The rest: hi, how are u, u are hot, u make me hot, let me meet u, let’s meet on your terms, an arrangement, ill do anything, why won’t u talk 2 me. Doctors lawyers CEOs, #founders and #entrepreneurs. I get on her phone and message with them. Just got in town, I tell them. What kind of doctor are you. What is the most common cause of abnormal liver tests. Will it kill a 40 year old man. Ur hot, they reply. Why won’t u see me.

**********

I have to finish this piece but I’m distracted now. I want to go in and fuck her. Spread open her golden ass cheeks and tongue down her asshole. Perfect like the rest of her. Symmetrical as a typewriter asterisk. Pull my face back and leave two shiny smears of pinkeye ointment. She’s ovulating tomorrow. Keeps track on her phone. My cycle is 26 days like a clock, she says. You could cum in me and it would be safe, she says. She’s doing the math wrong but I consider it. The intent would be to fuck up her life. Make her move in with me and wash my dishes. We’d have a good baby; she’s good looking and smart. Stays in touch with her family. I consider it with her like with every girl. Think about it right up until my orgasm comes on. I’m about to fire in her up until the very last millisecond. Then spray on her navel. If I catch myself, admit I’d never follow through– I’ll never cum. I could talk her into keeping it. Life would have some purpose. I could stop being like this.

**********

When I walk down the street with her I want other people to see. I look at her facebook and her friends are like this too. Flawless. All divorced, rich husbands. Big settlements dwindling down to 0 because they spend it on psychics. They get flown around. The men own sports teams. They’re in the process of separating from their wives but for this weekend I got you a hotel.

**********

Listen: I might have hepatitis C, I told her. It’s fine, she says. I didn’t come here to fuck you. I like your work.

Maybe this is a sign. Let’s just be with each other as human beings. We have a talk, a real talk. And then we lay on the couch and watch a film called Shame. A man plummets into ever-worsening acts of sexual degeneracy to escape a mysterious abusive past. It’s raining outside. I fall asleep with her warm back on my chest and the smell of her hair. When I wake up Michael Fassbender is getting blown by a guy and then his face is fucked up, possibly from hepatitis C. Film ends on a cliffhanger. If he continues his addiction he’ll lose his only human relationship. He’s on the subway. Has a choice to chase a chick or not. Cut to black.

We go to bed. I wake up at 3am and we’re both naked and her perfect ass against me. I’m raging hard. And I can’t, I can’t; it would be unconscionable. This is a moment for me. She was sent by God to break my sex addiction. I am not a bad person. I do what I do but I’d never hurt someone else. This is wonderful. Perfect. Having this girl here who I meant to fuck, not fucking her. Just knowing her as a human being. Letting her be less alone in the world. I’m one of God’s creatures, capable of love. In the morning she showers. I have time to google hep C. I push her on the bed and peel her towel off and cum in one minute.

**********

The old guys on her Tinder. Always in Tour de France gear. Kayaking. Arms raised atop a forbidding crag. I’m still a man, they insist.

The guy with game blew it. He had one good line but now: thirsty message after thirsty message. No other way. Girls just get carpet bombed. There’s no being coy. Hanging back, making her chase you. If you don’t constantly send thirsty message after thirsty message you’re not at the top of her inbox. You just disappear.

They don’t need you. Rich men, handsome men, men with cool jobs– doesn’t matter. It could be Barack fucking Obama. We’ve crossed the rubicon. Not even fame will save you. You must pay for additional Super Likes. Max them out every day. When you get one grudging match you must send epic poems of nutcrushing longing one line at a time. All day every day in hopes that the one moment she looks up, yours is on top. In the future men will dance around on fire burning money and ululating, for the one in one thousand chance of a slight eyebrow raise from a 6 with a BMI of high normal. If she’s Asian he’ll have to catch her eye while assassinating the president with his bare hands to get half a head turn. Merely curing AIDS or cracking interstellar travel– forget it.

**********

Meanwhile my liver tests. It’s what, the 7th now. Ovulation day. Results on the 15th. Eight carefree days of waiting. Thinking about surgeries, pills, procedures I’ll need. The cure for liver ailments is they open you up and implant crawling sea urchins, probably.

She’s still here. After we fucked last night I felt something. Contentment, connection. Like it was from God. She felt it too, I can tell. Some pheromone. She’s ovulating. I didn’t cum in her but close. One drop maybe. Wait for the test on that too. If I didn’t slip I’ll be half disappointed. I am not a pleasant man at all.

Don’t Take Your Love to Town

She came home in at four in the morning. Passed out with a desk lamp blaring straight in her eyes. She’d been out riding a motorcycle with a male model who tends bar at (REDACTED). If you could cheat you would too. What you’re mad about is you can’t.

She went partying with cute boys. Good for her. Can’t be mad for her being the animal she is. I go to take out the trash and find some fucking Chinese fourteen year old bent over in front of me, what am I gonna I do. The problem is: women live in a world of Chinese fourteen year olds bent over. Cock onslaught out there. Literal god damn male models working at the boutique gentrification restaurant that serves lion meat. Tinder, full of comedians from TV.

I don’t want you to feel bad, I told her. It’s just that everything I felt for you got shut off like a light switch.

But I’m happy you had a good time.

A halfway attractive woman’s life: men falling out of the trees. Men so handsome your own face is a cruel joke. They’re six foot eight. Ride vintage Triumphs. Women, if your life is not like this: you’re ugly. I was gonna throw in that they speak five languages but who gives a shit. Only your face matters. Women are like us. I don’t dream about some worldly polyglot. I dream of a woman who sees past shallow things to fall in love with the special person I am. And she better be hot.

I’m mad that I don’t have a motorcycle. Jealous and inadequate. Some oaf from Kansas can get pussy back to his place from his bar. I wasted my life in an office. Sad that a thing I built up deflated so quick. But also relieved. Now back to normal life. Sit with the cat. Bed at ten PM while down the street men with chiseled faces get girls wet on the back of their Bonnevilles. Men without fulminant livers. I should get an Xbox.

Dirty Mexican Cunt

I stole this title from some other writer she’s fucking now. She sent me one of his poems. I had to beg her. She does not want to discuss her love life. Afraid it will make me like her less. Well it did, but the poem didn’t make me jealous. That would have been a problem. He has another one called Dirty Mexican Twat, she said. Parenthetically: it’s not about me.

This one is about you.

What did you expect, you fucking fool. Can’t make a ho into a housewife. Well I’m a ho and someone could easily make me a housewife. Anyone under 35 without birth defects. Anyone halfway interesting. Who reads a book once in a while. Or even not. I just want a bedwarmer. A hole to put babies in. I don’t need a woman who speaks English, or even speaks at all. I need a woman from 1232 AD who can’t read. Stays home. Doesn’t go out taking every dick from every guy in every band, every fucking bartender. All I need is one woman who likes me more than other men. She doesn’t exist. I’m not special enough. The only one who feels this way is my mother.

You made me text that girl from AA. She has less than one year of sobriety. Off limits to the ethical alcoholic. I went after a newcomer once, my sponsor tells me. Two weeks later she hung herself. I held hands with a girl from the only place you ever meet girls. In the morning, a bloody hook hung from the car bumper. An AA girl takes a thousand lifetimes of gnarly dick but somehow touching mine will kill her.

Still, he’s right. Sobriety is good. My sex habits: bad. Don’t let them touch. Already things are fucked up in the rooms. Showed this site to one sober woman last year. She showed it to another who showed it to another and so on. One day I say hi to this girl and she gives me a look like I burned her kids alive. Is she telepathic, I think. How else does she look like she can read my dirty thoughts. What could possibly cause this. I’m a stupid, stupid man.

Had to text her because you walked off the plane and onto another dick. While my bed was still warm. While I was thinking: holy shit I can still feel love. Also: now I’ve fucked a pretty girl and I get to be alone without pain.

You tell me what I already know and I get to do what I want. Which is cry about what we had. What about what we had, you sex addicted semi-pro who was in town on some old guy’s money. But that’s bullshit, calling you that. You’re an extraordinary person. You’re just sick like me. What I felt for you was real. To believe otherwise is to believe love is impossible. Which is probably true. But comprehending it is like grasping the true size of the universe. Your mind isn’t built for it.

Meanwhile my organs are failing. Could be gallbladder worms from the Philippines. Swimming in the filthy river, legs lashed up from steering the moto into some brush thicket out of Predator. No turning radius on those things, and water buffalo in the road. I have not google imaged the worms. Don’t want to shatter my faith that they’re spiny armored things with pincers. Chittering abyssal monsters like from a black smoker, or something that lays in wait for a thousand years in the Marianna Trench. Waiting on a whale carcass to drop so it can feast for a century and grow five school buses long. Really they’re some featureless nematode. Still. They can impregnate themselves. Chew each other’s heads off when they mate; their five sets of hydra-headed squirming barbed genitals. Change sex if there are no girls around. Whatever it is has a better sex life than me. It should start a blog. Someday I’ll get a text from you, you’re engaged to a worm.

In the end you gave me what I want: to be miserable. So I can keep writing shit that brings more girls to make me miserable. Once in a while I think I can’t sustain this. Some day one will feel something back. Enough to not snap at the next shiny object. For your plan to work forever you’d have to live in some Twilight Zone hell where sexual anarchy had progressed so far it made human connection literally inconceivable. Well I’ve got good news.

A Rich Inner Life

Try to remember the dead can’t hear your thoughts. Try to remember there’s no hell. If there is, you’re not going there for writing on even numbered lines in a notebook. Your mother won’t get in a car crash with her face on fire because you didn’t climb stairs properly. All people must suffer like this. They just don’t talk about it. Most able to put it aside. No one goes through the day having normal thoughts. No thoughts at all. Minds just blank drywall. Everyone grew up picturing swarming heaps of black crustaceans. Centipedes under the table waiting for the edge of a finger to brush them so they can latch on. Crawl up your arms. Armored mandibles strip your flesh down. Not to kill you. Just taking skin so your face looks burned forever. Unimaginable pain over every part of you forever. Everyone thinks this constantly. Or is it just you. Anyway good morning.

Dear Angela

I wrote another thing about you. The point of it was I wouldn’t be jealous anymore. Jealous of your stupid friend who comes in my comments, hooting about how much he tears up your ass. You fuck men for cash and prizes. Some of them are famous. Inventors. Spies. I don’t care about any of them. But this guy got to me. He has what I want with you. Come over a few nights a week and party. I can’t party anymore. Too old. Have to get up early. Write. Then I can’t write. I feel like less than a man. Fucking another girl didn’t take it away. Maybe liking another girl would. I want to like a girl like I like you.

Thinking through this piece, I got over it. You’re a sick person. I’m a sick person. It’s not good for anyone, for me to feel this way. And besides– jealous over a drunken coke whore. What then is my spiritual growth for.

I made you into more than what you are. Really you’re an (REDACTED) (REDACTED) with (REDACTED and a (REDACTED). But then, there’s a reason men fall for you. And there’s another reason deeper than that, where we connected. I don’t want anyone else to have that with you. Because I don’t have that with anyone.

Wrote after meditating in the park. High wind in the sunrise and the tassels of the tall grass tossing and hissing. The pines creaking. Long yellow magic hour sun rays over all of it. A raven croaking somewhere in his language. I remember from my fifth step that they have words. Somehow I thought it through. I forgave you. Forgave myself. Loved you for who you are instead of what you are to me. And let you go.

I looked back on the material. Thought: this is a good stopping point for the schtick I’ve been dragging out for years. It’s dishonest now. Or at least, not always the way I feel. I have hope for things. People can change. The purpose of this hobby web site is to help other people feel less alone. You can feel less alone about good things too. Hopeful things.

Anyway I figured that out. Hit save and closed the laptop. Went to the duck pond to watch the coots. Back from migration. Opened the laptop to write more. The eight pages were gone. Only one sentence left. It said: I should buy an Xbox and play Witcher 3. There was no backup. I called a data recovery place. Irrecoverable.

So I guess you’re back to being a cunt.

Gender Studies

Weekend. What do I have lined up. AA pancake breakfast. Talk to my parents. Poor mother had a bad dream about me. Now I have to call her. Love my parents. But if talking to someone doesn’t get me pussy I’d rather play Xbox.

Clean the house. Everything is clean the house. Go to the doctor wash the dishes hang with my parents. Drive homeless alcoholics to the fucking pancake breakfast. Wash the dishes there. This pain in my gut is some cancerous organ. Tree fungus all over my innards. I’ll die in agony. This weekend, my last shot before my dick falls off. Spent it helping the fucking hobos. They all have 6 kids they don’t have to pay for and get more ass than me.

I should go to that whorehouse in Chinatown. Pay a hooker to touch me so I don’t go crazy. But it’ll be some 50 year old. What are the odds the Chinese rub and tug by the Sunset/ Beaudry Jack in the Box has a fresh faced junior idol teen. What are the odds she’ll lovingly stroke my ass crack with her hair. Why fuck a whore in America. In the Philippines they kiss you. Fuck you raw. Here it’s a medical procedure.

Pay to be masturbated by an old shrew who doesn’t speak English. Hint of repulsion in her eyes. The only crack in her Oriental inscrutability. If she liked it it’d be worse. You’d start wondering: does she think I’m handsome. Better not blow it.

**********

Less God more pussy. Less AA more money. Less driving fucking homeless people around. More horse porn and coke. I’ve been of too much service to society. I should get a free pass to take a flame thrower to the school gym while the kids are playing dodgeball.

Less humility. More arrogance. Less pulling out. Less condoms. Less comforting some dumb needy tinder idiot afterward. Less not impregnating Pinay hookers. More impregnating Pinay hookers. Less truth more lies. Less spinach more burritos. Less family more dirtbags. More cocaine. More of the girls who come with cocaine. I’ll get viagra so I don’t have acorn dick.

Otherwise what’s the point. I’m a machine for paying taxes.

**********

Someone used to clean your house. Cook your meals. Bear your children. Take care of them. Sleep with you. Sleep with nobody else but you. Hand you a drink when you walked in the house. All you had to do was what you do now. Get up. Go to work. Make money. All you have to do now is: all that. Plus what someone once did for you. What you get is: half what you got before.

Someone used to need you. Listen to you. Now you don’t make enough money. You don’t wash the dishes enough. Work used to be eight hours. Now fourteen. She works fourteen hours too. And proud of it. Someone used to put your kids’ drawings on the refrigerator. Now she emails you Slate articles saying even in this day and age men do 40% less housework. Wash a fucking dish you god damn barbarian. 45 minutes between your drive home and dreams of your boss’s lizard eyes. 45 minutes; how come the dishes aren’t done.

I’m a feminist. But feminism destroyed life. In return 2% of us get meaningless pussy. A woman was a house scrubbing ham baking slave, sure. That’s bad. Now we’re both slaves providing data driven solutions to Millennial brand engagement in the CPG space. Slaves to establishing ownership of the trans teen bullying issue for Johnson and Johnson’s Clean and Clear brand flammable industrial solvent for children’s faces. Twice as many people work. Shit just got twice as expensive. No house. No vacation. 14 hours selling shit to unhappy people who sell shit to stupid people.

Whatever. Things were never good. People were never happy. Why covet an ideal based on Donna Reed reruns. But now I’m nothing to you. You’re a fleshlight to me. This shit isn’t working. I’m not some reactionary. But I do think it would be better if you were sold to me at 13, couldn’t vote, work, read or drive. And if it were legal to beat you.

Finally, Some Good News, Part 1

He was on Tinder. What do you do, she asked.

He was a secretary. His company provided data driven solutions to optimize cross platform branded content. He might have done something else but he’d spent 20 years drunk. The want ad said room for growth.

He built Powerpoints. When a client was on the phone he hit spacebar. Today, a Webex with Wentworth. The media planning agency. They represented the the Clear and Clean Skin Care division of the Nonmedicated Facial Cleansers and Body Washes/ Poufs division of the Consumer Packaged Goods division of Johnson and Johnson. Wentworth was a subsidiary of UAG, which was a subsidiary of Group J, which was a subsidiary of PWW Group. PWW was a holding company based in Paris. Chartered in Ireland for tax purposes. PWW bought advertising time from television stations en masse. Sold it on arbitrage markets it created. The purpose of UAG and thus Wentworth was to help create demand for advertising time. PWW could then buy low and sell high. This was illegal in America. All advertising agencies were therefore subsidiaries of 3 conglomerates out of Europe.

The Webex was about Clear and Clean’s possible cross platform branded campaign with Ellen! Its thesis was that J & J should buy in, even at at Ellen!’s stratospheric-seeming 46 CPM. J & J’s own market research found that teens and tweens identified with civil rights and related ideals. Engagement hadn’t been this significant since Vietnam. Cementing the brand to environment and/ or social justice was correlated to a 38% uptick in urge to share branded content. Tweens were tough. But in CPG you got them through the moms. Ellen! had moms.

Ellen! planned to profile a transgender teen. There were two candidates. Candy, 14, was a figure skater from Oklahoma. Sparkle, 15, a cheerleader/ poetess from Utah. Sparkle was the new face of Clear and Clean’s campaign. Candy had signed with Unilever. Both CPG behemoths wanted in on trans teen anti-bullying. But Unilever’s Dove line was entrenched with overweight over 25’s. Plus, Sparkle was biracial. Her optics were better for Ellen! and frankly, Candy wasn’t hot. Ice sports don’t test well with Hispanics. Unilever would thus be ill-advised to match the 46 CPM Ellen! was asking. Even with the surge in show engagement from Ellen’s newly adopted Pomeranian, Duchess. But for J & J it made sense.

Clear and Clean’s flagship cleanser was a proprietary solvent derived from Butane. It had been used to hose out tanker trucks that carried juice and other food grade fluids. When it had been found to cause cancer in rats this use was discontinued. R & D tried it as an upholstery cleaner and a mentholated cooling wipe for genitals and armpits. Neither tested well. They settled on a new facial product for teens. From 12 to 17 many young people develop acne. Whether they use facial cleanser or not, it arises, persists, then simply goes away. But brand affinity established at 12 drives purchase through adulthood.

There were 30 slides. He only fucked up once. The pie chart over a photo of Sparkle. Ass aloft in a strong boy’s hot palm. Silky hair and pom poms flying. She was the spitting image of the star of a video he’d seen on motherless.com. Teen Tranny Gets Rock Hard Riding Bro’s Cock. A Mexican boy with the face and body of a 14 year old girl and a narrow hairless penis with an angry curve like a scimitar bobbed on another boy’s lap. She had moves. He’d been disturbed by his erection. Quickly x’d out the browser tab. He lingered a beat too long until the Regional Brand Outreach Manager impatiently cleared her throat.

It went well. His team knew Ellen! They’d optimized Target and Tide’s co-branded Ellen! cross promotion of Jane the Virgin. It told Hispanic moms about Tide’s soothing effect on neonatal skin. Tide was a viscous blue serum derived from volcanic ash. The co-branded online video segments garnered 2 million views per day. 1/10th that of motherless.com. If J & J bit: room for growth. A career. In ten years he could run the division. Fifteen more and he could die. It’s boring to talk about, he said.

Tell me

It has to do with marketing, he said.

What do you do exactly

Why do you want to know so bad

I’m rad and I deserve a guy who’s rad, she said.

She did makeup for infomercials. Don’t match dog pictures, he remembered. Small dogs replace a child. Big dogs replace a man. Women with dogs always die alone. She had a pit bull mix. It wore a bandana.

He messaged her “cunt.” Waited for the three dots in a bubble to know she’d seen it. Unmatched her and opened motherless.com. It was his birthday. He was 39.

Where the Heart Is

I was in Boston for my father’s death and I fired up Tinder. Girls there actually match you. Message you. Can you imagine. Enough to make you think: could I live in the cold. Sidewalks packed with surly oafs in puffy Burlington Coat Factory jackets muttering about the fucking Patriots. Their fat Irish faces. I’m stuck in LA though. My mother moved here. Too much of a twist of the knife to move back to the frozen hell I talked her into leaving. Cold ground so hard you fall and hit it like a car door slamming. Can’t leave my mother. Instead she’ll get to watch her only child die alone. Her genes extinguished.

Alcoholic Anonymous women need to stop being so ugly, frankly. Not you, one girl I’ve slept with from there. The rest of them. Cute girls under 30 don’t last in the program. Too many cool guys with free coke. Or if they do they form little packs. Them and five guys who have their look. Goth, punk, whatever. What the fuck happened to me. I used to dress cool and now I have five half cotton half poly wrinkle free adult dress shirts I conscientiously hang on the shower curtain rod. Tag says no dryer. I obey. I’m a sad old dork and I need a woman to help me dress. Without learning to dress I can’t get a woman.

I have no look. Or I look like the gray collar bootlicking office worm I am. You have to be in a band out here, or look like it. Should have stayed in my small town. My kids would be in high school by now. I could leer at their girlfriends from the top of the rumpus room stairs.

What the fuck happened. Work hard and I’m still poor. Dress like a schlumpy dad from a sitcom, own a certified pre owned mid size family sedan. Watch my puny retirement account rack up returns of 16 cents quarterly. This weekend I gotta go wash the pots at the General Service Pancake Breakfast– I have to get out of this. I need money to get back to the jungle and fuck underage teens in the face pussy and asshole. I need a chimp faced girl from fucking Palawan who can’t read and spends all day whipping a water buffalo. She thinks my hotel room is Hearst castle because it has a toilet. Or some plump guinea nurse out of Northeastern whose parents are blue collar drunks from Malden. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

My dad didn’t die. Now he’s waking up. Emotional roller coaster. Got back and went to AA. Saw my painter friend. He’s marginally famous. I told him I’d been in San Francisco, made an amends. Also I fucked this housewife who writes me emails in a hotel off Telegraph Avenue. I came in her. I hope she gets pregnant. How does that happen, he asked. Well I write shit on a web site. Some of it’s about sex. Girls then write me from various towns and ask to fuck.

So you’re like Tucker Max, he said. The truth is too complicated so I said yes and pictured taking the flamethrower from Alien to Tucker Max, his horsefaced wife and his stupid baby. It’s different. My shit is good and it really happened. Why then is he rich and I’m broke.

But my friend was impressed. I get more ass from this than he gets being Julian Schnabel junior. I can bitch but I have pussy lined up all over the world. Told my old man about it in his coma. Somewhere he laughed.

If It Flies Floats or Fucks

She has nowhere to go. Stop making your readers think I’m a hooker, she says. Will you please buy me a plane ticket.

And I do. It’s cheap, a hundred bucks. And I’m a trick for doing it. But who fucking cares. In six weeks I’ll turn forty. Nothing left to prove with pussy. I look like the fucking chamberlain from the Dark Crystal. Never had money. I’ve had the shittiest, most debased jobs; spinach pickers are cooler than me. Went to the shittiest schools for pussy. Lived in the shittiest towns for pussy. Walk around feeling my gangliness, ugliness, stupidity, weird voice weird face small penis like a cigarette burning the back of my neck since I turned six fucking years old and I’ve still got more pussy than anybody. I’ve fucked like god damn Caligula. The Floyd Mayweather of pussy. No fun to watch but I am un fuckin defeated.

Now, ease into being a sugar daddy. A hundred bucks. Unquestionable grade A piece of ass in my house. She grew up middle class but fucks like a ward of the state. Walk with her down the street. Have guys look at me, think I’m cool. Pretend she’s my wife. Have her listen to me. Tolerate me. I get to sleep next to somebody and be touched. A good deal.

We’ll say I love you. Talk about making it work. Pretend it goes somewhere. That’s what I’m paying for. Feeling that it has a future. Paying for pussy: absurd. When my last date told me her dad beat her I took her home and choked her out with a finger in her ass. Made her look in the mirror. We’d known each other sixty minutes. Pussy is free. Love you have to buy. Buy it with charm, fame, or just money. Whatever it is, better have more than her.

I make her write every day. Only way I know to help her. Only way to make her respect me. She’s good. And she’s a hot girl. Year from now she’ll be famous. I’ll wave as she rolls up the limousine window. She’ll forget me when she eclipses me. Women have to lose. When they win you make them sick.

Relax. Channel your love into compassion. Be a good host. Show a good time. Get her mind off problems. Love her like a friend. Like someone you can help. If you love her like a girlfriend she’ll kill you. Last time she almost fucked the guy who wrings out dishrags at the corner bar. Broke your heart a little. This time, who knows. She could get hooks in you. Destroy hope that you can love again. After all it’s full GFE.

One Small Act of Kindness

He lived alone. Every morning the same spider had fallen in the bathtub. An elegant silvery-looking affair. He’d pick her up carefully by three legs (one leg would have just snapped off). Place her by her web in the corner behind the shampoo bottle. Every morning she’d be back twitching by the drain.

One day he fired up the hot water, slipped on the soap and fell with a crack. And there she was. She was a woman now. Tall and elegant in a silvery dress with the mist shrouding her in rainbows. She held him. Stroked his chest with her soft palm while the hot water hissed on the tiles. I’ve traveled a long time, she said. Looking for one small act of kindness. Finally I’ve found you. She bit into his head and began sucking out the juice.

That Pussy Will Cost You

The last thing I haven’t given over to God. Women. I’ve surrendered work money emotions friends family… everything. Go out in the park in the morning, hear the wind hiss in the leaves. Know that I’m a puny mote in the universe. All will be taken care of. Or it won’t. And I’ll die. And it won’t matter.

But women– there’s no let it happen. I’ve been waiting 40 years for fucking reverse Cinderella to come knocking. And– well shit, it happened once but, a) because of my web site and b) she fucking took off.

Women. If you don’t do absolutely all the work, if you don’t make yourself absolutely exceptional, if you’re not handsome, not tall, not rich– if you don’t have absolutely everything, work for decades to get it, grind yourself down to nothing every instant of every day to maintain it, and (in spite of all this) if you don’t appear to just have it effortlessly– you’ll have no women. Once I’d have said “no woman” but I know better now. “Women,” a substance.

No women would be fine. The dream now is Ted Kaczynski. Shack in Montana; bighorn sheep regard me impassively from the hillside. Blue-white mountains. Tall creaking pines. Except you need to be touched. You need people like you need air, or at least it’s a difference of degree not type. So you have this need that squalls 24 hours a fucking day, never gets sated. And if you don’t work– it will never just happen. There’s no good luck with women. Only the luck you make. If I have to do the work I’ll chase what I want. Rawdog moronic teen poets.

The fucking argument I have to have with my sponsor over Angela coming. He’ll be right; it’s indefensible. Stupid on its face to have this insane thirty four years old and therefore not the mother of my children whore come and stay with me. Except: a) it’s cheap and b) my other option is more Tinder dates. Every woman on Tinder is an idiot who will make you sick. There are no exceptions.*

Or have a leathery old Chinese woman gently hoist my balls skyward as she mechanically chokes my raging purple member. If they cleaned you off with a hot towel it’d be OK. But she takes a wad of toilet paper and smears the fat thick fishy smelling drops off your belly and then sprints to discard it in the bathroom wastebasket. That jizz is my DNA. It is me— treat it like it’s something better than dogshit.

He’s concerned that she’s a coke sniffing drunk. Which is true. That she’s insane. Which is true. And last time she went to fuck a god damn bartender named Chase who rides a motorcycle and auditions for CW shows and works at (REDACTED local restaurant). That was the killer. She’ll fuck another man and can I take it. I think yes. If I can keep my abusive stranglehold on her mind.

She’ll give you STDs, he tells me. Normally I’d say impossible, buts she fucks black guys and black people are where STDs come from. They pick them up in prison, spread them to hood skanks who spread them to that one gateway guy who can’t rap so he does slam poetry to white girls in coffee shops. Or no, I’m being racist. Some STDs you catch from being in a band. Syphilis comes from black people. Herpes from wiry punk singers. I’m sure she fucks them too.

*Except you, honey.

Sugar Baby

She was in Mexico and she’d left him. He’d bought her a plane ticket to visit him. She said extracting money from men made her feel love. He acquiesced. Then he said a mean thing on the internet. She read it. I don’t think it’s a good idea to see you anymore. Take care, she said, on Whatsapp. Above it her picture smiling like the sweetheart of Sigma Chi.

What to say back. You don’t mean this. You’re crashing off ecstasy, off coke; you’re drunk and fucking some meathead but you’ll remember you love me when you’re back.

Or: fair enough, give me back the plane fare money.

Or let it hang. Always the best answer. Say nothing. Let her fight it out in her own head and come back to… what, the truth? No, this was a woman.

But she was different.

She was leaving him or not. Either way, fine. But the first time a girl says goodbye is a fakeout. Responding makes you look weak. Buying into her world which she knows is crazy. She wants you to not take her bullshit. But I want her bullshit, he thought. Don’t leave me. I want her to be with me in my bed while the cold rain shakes the trees outside my window, I want that to be happening now instead of her being in Mexico with some 2d tier city stockbroker listening to his jaw shiver as he yammers coke talk about the Dave Matthews band or whatever Texas finance people talk about. Big game hunting. Church.

He got on OKCupid. Sent 20 messages as welcome as an Adobe Flash update and one that stuck. He’d wanted a break from this but now a firm hand was needed. She had a body like a fat little boy and her teeth were planted by a drunk. I don’t want to sleep with you, she said when they got back to his apartment. No one does but somehow it happens. She was 20; her cunt was dirty; she’d been out drinking and hadn’t showered in 36 hours and he knew he’d be smelling his left hand jerking off for days. Nature accepts no substitutes. He went to look at Whatsapp with the feeling of just having fucked new pussy. Her message still hurt. I’m sorry, he texted. Then erased it. Then he called her a retarded cunt and erased it and then he had to drive the 20 year old home. They all live in Koreatown now.

What’s the worst case scenario, he thought. She never comes back. What you had was nothing. Or worse it was something and you ended it hurting her. You let it hang, you’ll never know. Text back I’m sorry. Text back: donate the plane fare to the retarded cunt foundation. I’d say make it in your name but that’d be redundant.

She’ll get over it when she gets over it. Women are like the weather. All you can do is get under a roof. You’ll never see her again. This was your last chance to feel something. She’s pretty but that’s just inconvenient. Every rich prick on earth chases after her. She’s compelled to be with them like me with the college girls, he thought. But they don’t have what we have.

But what if they do. What if she has 20 men she shares herself with and there’s enough to go around.

She believed in God and helped disadvantaged teens. She did coke and fucked married men and got rape me drunk four nights a week. She was a good writer. That alone, impossible. What did I lose it for, he thought. I didn’t mean anything bad. He’d written ten things calling her a cunt and each one got a text saying: I loved it. But the last one didn’t have the little hook. The bit about this is why I love her. It had a title with the word “pussy,” ensuring many views. People like to read fuck cunt pussy.

She never loved me. She was just bored. Now she’s not. You can have her as long as she doesn’t have a better offer. Or a job. Her own money. A Nintendo. A dog. A Netflix show she likes. You can have her for as long as she’s desperate as you while everyone offers her everything. You need a woman so damaged she drives everyone else away. A woman as lonely as you. You need a retarded woman, he thought. A woman who had her legs chopped off. Not an inspirational one who runs marathons on carbon fiber sticks either. A woman with chopped off legs who’s miserable. You need Terry Schiavo on full life support; spoon her pureed butternut squash, watch her squint trying to comprehend Dora the Explorer. She’d still find a better deal. Good luck out there, he texted, and erased it.

Now she’s not coming and I could text her back but it’s gone too long. Anyway she’s getting fucked in Mexico, he thought. Good luck out there. I must admit I’m half in love with her. More fool I.

Tell Me You Love Me

Tell me you love me. Come see me, stop drinking and start going to bed at 9PM, get over your need to be with rich guys; stop fucking douchebags and doing cocaine but don’t ask me to stop fucking Tinder cretins. Live in my apartment like an appliance. Be a refrigerator for my dick. A dishwasher for my balls. A garbage disposal for my ideas. Tell me how great I am and that my chicken is delicious and then leave. Come see me and stroke my ass like the old Chinese lady who jerks you off at the shady massage place but do it for free and let me beat you at Scrabble. All you have to do is be pretty. And want nothing, or want so little that what I have is enough.

Write Some More You Lazy Fuck

I had a new OKCupid message. Got excited for a second. It was a man. He said: write some more you lazy fuck.

My dad died Monday morning. I was fresh off the plane back in LA. Made amends on his deathbed. He was in and out of consciousness. Who knows if he heard what the fuck I said. You sacrificed for my education and all I did was get high. You wrote me letters and I never wrote back. I blew off my brothers. Patrick went to college in California and I only saw him twice. This was selfish, isolating and disrespectful of me and I want to make amends for it.

He’d come in and out. A tube dripped vanilla Ensure straight into his stomach while a pump breathed for him through his tracheotomy. Hoses and catheters and his feet raised up on cushions to drain his swollen ankles. They gave him Haldol; he was struggling. His kidneys were shot so the drugs didn’t fade. He just kept nodding off. Dad I want you to know that I’m gonna be closer to my brothers. My stepmom. That I’m gonna be there for them.

He died. I was at work. Kept working while white noise filled my head and chest and I couldn’t cry until I got home and saw a picture of him on Facebook. Finally that site was good for something.

The Dirty Mexican Cunt is living with me now. She was a professional grief counselor. The old joke is: whore in the bedroom chef in the kitchen. I forget what the third one is. Should be whore in the bedroom, grief counselor every other place. A whore for five minutes and then it’s OK baby it’s OK. She’s with me because of this web site. Haven’t posted in two weeks. Write some more you lazy fuck.

He’d wake up restrained and start screaming: hide the guns. I didn’t shoot anybody. Thought he was in jail in Texas. On the trip out West with Santangelo and O’Hara– I’m using fake names, but they’re actually less guinea/ mick than the real ones. Fakes because Santangelo killed a (REDACTED) and he might still be alive somewhere. Dad had cops in three towns plus the staties after him because he (REDACTED). I don’t know what O’Hara did. Back then you could just leave town.

Tonight, back on a plane for the funeral. In between– work, come home. The poor girl– I brought her here to party. Get some drama. Last time I got four good posts out if it. Now she holds me at night and I cry. I think about impregnating her. Have a kid I can take to the lake.

Maybe I’ll get some ashes. On Christmas I’m climbing Mexico’s tallest volcano. Seems like his speed. But when I go, take me to the lake where he took me. We watched the rain beat the water flat. Crouch down, line up your eyes right and see the curve of the Earth. I need to get back.

40

Of course I can’t fucking write this morning. Needed to prove something to myself. I’m fucking 40. 40. I’ll die young. Dad died at 67. So did his dad. His dad and his dad and so on. 27 years left.

Whatever– that’s a long time. Three weeks would be a long time. 57 minutes until I have to leave for work. Feels like planets could coalesce out of space dust, go through volcanic cataclysms, roaring flaming atmospheres. Sentient algae come into being. Form civilizations. All that could happen in the eternity it took me to write that fucking sentence. By the time I go warm up the Subaru, sixteen pages of this stream of consciousness shit. Maybe one sentence usable. People say life is short. It isn’t. Not even in retrospect.

40. The whole time broke. Didn’t write for ten years. When I started again it was garbage. Still garbage. No one reads it. And that zero cut in half since I stopped telling bald dorks how to get OKCupid pussy. No one’s interested in my shit. Except–no, I get emails occasionally. Keep at it man. Your shit saved my life. That feels good. Or, better still: I’m a girl, let’s fuck.

Lately though it’s people wanting work on resumes. Here’s a resume tip: jam a fucking AIDS needle in your eye. You read how I hate work. How the only thing I hate worse is job seeking. You think what this guy needs is to work on my resume. Go back in time, become a fetus and get Zika. One of them was a Viet girl. Thought it might turn into pussy. But she’s gay. Go get a job being gay.

Here’s my advice. Burn your resume and never get a job. Never. My mom inculcated the value of work by having me get a job at McDonald’s. It taught me I’m a piece of shit. Worthless meat occupying space to– I want to say “flip burgers” but I stop myself. The McDonald’s clamshell grill sears both sides of the patty simultaneously. I’m meat taking up space at the Quarter Pounder station until they can figure out the robots. A liability sucking four bucks an hour from the system.

All I wanted was to write this morning. Plus at least $2 million for free and to impregnate a fifteen year old Asian. It’s my birthday and it sucks and I’ll be miserable. Have to go to fucking work. A mountain of tasks. They may or may not throw me a surprise luncheon that I don’t want but if they don’t do it I’ll be pissed. The staff– women who won’t fuck me so why are they alive.

Don’t ever work. The Earth used to provide for you. You were made to wake up, spend a few minutes impaling one animal that would feed your village for a week. Then lay around and fuck all god damn day. Look at the stars. Make up stories– there’s the Great Buffalo. The Great Crow. The Great Squirrel, whateverthefuck– hey let’s fuck some more. There was no get sick suffer long die old. You got fucked up a little bit, you were dead. So if you were alive you were perfect.

Now– the opposite of what you were made for. Work, stare at a screen, worry about your god damn 401(k). Will it be enough to sustain you and your wife and your kids whom you spent a million dollars college educating so they could have enough to sustain their wife and kids. You inherit nothing. Everything must come from the sweat of your brow while hustling liars steal it from you.

I’m fucking 40 years old. A middle aged man. Live alone in an apartment with cat hair in the rug. Half cotton half poly wrinkle free dress shirts. I’m an ordinary working American they talk about in campaign ads. Except I’m alone, no one loved me, no one married me; the only thing that could be worse is if someone had. I have a stupid web site nobody reads. This is the standout achievement of my life. I tried to turn it into money by asking three dollars for the shit that was the pinnacle of my inspiration. It did not make me famous. 40, running out of people to compare myself to. Houellebecq and his god damn too hard to spell name– at 39 he’d written Whatever. A revered cult sensation.

Then again it wasn’t until The Elementary Particles that he could even quit his job. You can’t write for a living. People whose sixteen hour days are Taylor Swift is Problematic and Top Ten Tips to Market Money Management to Millennials barely get by. People who actively sell out their dream can’t get paid. Too many people want to write. Life’s work worth less than laying cheese on Quarter Pounders.

One person writes good shit on the internet. Cat Marnell, who had a trust fund and a free apartment and unlimited speed. A room of one’s own. She could barely crank out ten columns for Vice. Her XO Jane shit still had to be half about mascara. She got a half million dollar book deal that will never earn out and God knows if she’ll even make the book. Will it be pure raw brilliance like her rhyming Vice piece or will it be fucking garbage like 99% of her shit and yours and mine. Anyway she’s younger than me. Someone gave her half a million to write a book. My book made one month’s rent.

Can’t make a living. Society: complete shit in every respect. We worship money grubbing lying hustling Ryan Colin Kavanaughs. Mothers tell their children: grow up to be Mark fucking Zuckerberg. Other days what saves me is: it’s just another day. Today’s the fucking day I turn 40 years old.

Hadn’t expected to be this miserable. I’d heretofore considered my job a “good” job. Now it’s killing me because I’m good at it. They heap on responsibility. Fine. I’ll leverage it into money, which I’ll hoard and fucking hope to God it’s enough to take some god damn time off and write before my mind goes. Already slipping. Thoughts eyes muscles leaving me. I’m turning slow and stupid and I forget big words but on the other hand when I’m rawdogging a fat 22 year old half Korean off Tinder I instantly get hard again after nutting in her navel. My cock still works. Will 22 year olds still fuck me since the odometer rolled over.

Don’t want to turn 40 this morning. Take stock of my life. Not rich not married no kids. I have a mildly popular blog and I can play Bach on guitar– the achievements of a 17 year old. Help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety– for what. So they too can be platitude spouting jerkoffs.

Don’t want to turn 40. Turn back the clock. Yesterday I was working. The day before that and the day before that. Then I was at dad’s funeral. Shaking hands with my cousin Steve. Been 20 years. He went bald and his face turned into a cave man from the museum. He’s cockeyed now. He once set himself on fire trying to illegally burn garbage. He has a girlfriend and a kid. I’m less than him.

It’s over. You’ll never achieve your dreams. Thank God. Relax and beat off. Being 20 wasn’t so fuckin great either.

It’s Over Between Us

It’s over between us, she says. She’s mad about this thing again. Where are the girls who don’t dredge up old shit. Just because it’s time; you haven’t fucked up in a while. Girls who don’t make you prove it. Girls want you to love them but not so much it’s clear they can do better. Listen: I love you, cunt. Leave it alone.

I’m tainted by the the manosphere. I think it’s a “shit test.” My internet peers hate women but just want a wife and kids. You stay home I go work. Saturday I cut grass in the cul de sac while you occupy yourself with weaving. But women work now. Jobs pay half as much. We have the same money but the work just multiplied. And besides you’re fat and you hate me so I might as well just jerk off into other people till I’m dead. A bad belief system but what else is there.

Meanwhile girls ask where are all the good men. Smart funny stable tall handsome rich men with no ex wives and kids. Well where are the big tits big ass perfect teeth child’s face Asians. The ones who turned 18 today and aren’t already a side piece for Vincent Gallo or Devendra fucking Banhart. Where are the girls who play chess at strong expert level. Any level. Where are the girls who identify hummingbirds based on a vermillion versus magenta gorget. Its neck’s 3/8ths of an inch thick and she can tell watching it drink from my neighbor’s hyacinth at 20 feet. Or at least, where is the girl who thinks anything. About any topic. She was it. It’s over between us.

Well good luck out there, numbnuts. I don’t need you. I’m a 40 year old male secretary and I go to bed at 9PM and I still shred two new pieces of ass a month. Inner life is sadness, dreading the morning, scrutinizing my widows peak; watch my eyeballs turn permanently red like I’ve always just had an airbag deploy in my face. Giant scrotum; weird bulky potato nuts. Dick a shriveled blue acorn at temperatures below one hundred eight degrees. While my nuts expand, expand, seething and squirming like a gypsy moth tent in the trees.

Face coming to resemble a bad Halloween mask, body unmistakably dying and it wasn’t much to begin with. I consider myself smart but at this age smart better mean money. A professorship. Something cool a girl can tell her parents and her cunt friends. Anyway I still shred pussy so you better keep your ass in check. Don’t make waves; I’m not afraid of the punks you date in Texas. See if they can write three paragraphs about the skin of their balls at 6:30 on a Monday morning. Cut it down and down. See if they keep you interested with something that’s not money. They talk about football. They wear white tube socks. They are white tube socks.

I can take you or leave you. Made peace with my genes being extinguished. Dying alone. Living at fifty, sixty in this same – I was going to say squalid apartment but there are flowers in the park. Good neighbors. Redtails, goshawks, owls, a kestrel. Many hummingbirds. Woodpeckers thrushes robins blue jays; mockingbirds, of course, but also still song sparrows. An unkindness of ravens who have words. Butterflies, gophers, fat underage Mexican teen cunt cracks in yoga pants. All this when merely the clouds would be enough.

I’ll never get married. Never have children. I’ll suffer and die alone and I’ve made peace with this so go fuck yourself with it’s over between us. You emotional terrorist. It’s over between me and the fucking planet. I love you baby but don’t push me. What holds people together anymore. All I can do is tell you take a fucking walk. I’ll fuck a hummingbird.

Art Review: Self-Portrait (Performance with Object) by Emma Sulkowicz

She thought you were hot, my date told me. Well shit. Could I pull it off. I’ve beat off to her rape video 15 times. You stand on a plywood box; she stands across from you on another plywood box; there’s a painted line between you and you talk but you’re not allowed to touch her. Close by there’s a mannequin of her called Emmatron hooked up to an iPad with canned questions. If you ask about the rape she directs you to the mannequin. The iPad says why didn’t you go to the cops right away. Why did you Facebook message him: fuck me in the butt, and so forth. You pick one. Her recorded voice comes on. Fuck me in the butt is an expression like shoot me in the head. If I told you shoot me in the head, would you literally think I want to be shot in the head.

My date blew it with her. I couldn’t hear but you could tell Emma couldn’t stand her. I’m glad she went first. I had a plan for what I’d say. Bunch of banal shit then one real question.

Yes she does get tired. But she’s able to sit down. The show’s gotta be very different at 7PM the last day than now, I told her, trying to sound cool. At some point you must start thinking: oh, blow it out your ass. That’s why I made Emmatron, she said.

Yes people cry like with Marina Abramovic. People come up and look in her eyes and cry and also, a lot of people want to talk about their own rape. Just to tell somebody. It got to where she had to hand it off to Emmatron. Well your work is so much about people’s baggage, I said.

You ought to take this on tour, I told her. Colleges have money. Five grand a night and seems like they’d be into this type of shit. Maybe but I can’t spend my whole life doing this, she said. I said something about her in in an RV on tour, out in the Nebraska cornfields with the fuckin robot in the passenger seat. She didn’t quite laugh. But I got that feeling of making a girl laugh.

**********

Have you been accused of rape, my date asked in the car. She reads the manosphere. Well no but the day is young. Really, I said, I’ve never raped anybody. I’m the world’s horniest man and I’ve been in bed with blackout drunk hot naked teens, drunk and on speed myself. I know I couldn’t do it. But then sometimes you don’t know. I keep thinking about one girl I fucked off OKCupid in 2014. When I looked down she was crying.

At lunch she asked why don’t you apply to the Iowa Writers Workshop. This girl found me when someone emailed her one of my OKCupid stories. Why don’t you submit that to Paris Review. I don’t want to be in Paris Review, I said. I want young girls to think I should be in Paris Review. And it’s working.

Really it hadn’t occurred to me. I think my work is shit. Later I looked at Paris Review. The first story is by Chris Batchelder. I remember a plaque with that name at my prep school. Flint Batchelder, captain of the 1902 lacrosse team or something. Now his descendants are in Paris Review. My father was a pipefitter. He did jail time for stealing tires in Alabama. I was at that school on scholarship, to get bootstrapped out of 10,000 years of pregnant teen alcoholics. I had impostor syndrome. And rightly so. Look at me now. My writing is bad and I’m bad and Paris Review would laugh at me. I literally want to be shot in the head.

Paris Review can suck my balls, I told her. More people read my shit than Paris Review. That night I took an at risk teen to a Clippers game. The Staples center is so big it gave me vertigo. Twice as many people as can fit in the Staples Center have read my story about an artificial pussy, which is in some ways amateurish but also ought to be etched into titanium and launched into space for aliens to find. But then that was 2013. What have I done for me lately. Can’t write good shit because now I have to work. I could barely do it unemployed.

Chris Batchelder does not have this problem. Emma Sulkowicz does not have this problem. Like Cat Marnell she’s the daughter of two rich New York psychiatrists. But also she’s brave enough to sleep in a garage. And look, I don’t know if she got raped or not. If it went down like the video then yes. That’s why it’s so hot. Even with the Shaw Brothers sound effect when he hits her.

**********

Do you read all the shit about you on the internet, I asked. At this point is it white noise to you. Or can it ever sting. Well I do and the answer is yes, she said. She was telling the truth. I also put this one in Emmatron, she said.

I tried not to think: I’d like to put one in Emmatron. But I’m a robot.

I got the girl home and got a finger in her jeans. Her pussy was hard to navigate. I’m 40 and I still need the beginner model. Please stop, she said. I don’t want to sleep with you. It felt good to be surprised.

In conclusion: four stars.

Bud

I was with a girl, this was maybe 2007. We went to the county shelter in Burbank to get a cat. A young male because my last cat was cool. The cat room there is a long row of tanks with plexiglass in front, air holes. 30 cats but no young guys until the very last cat in the very last row. Black and fluffy with a white star on his chest. Who’s this handsome fellow. He’s one of the bucket cats, the woman said. Two kittens found in a sealed paint bucket. The sister adopted already. This guy was aging out of “cute kitten,” maybe headed for the firing squad.

I put my finger on the glass and said: hey, bud. He put his paw on my finger. On the way out the clerk with the paperwork said do you know his name, and I said: Bud.

I got a call at work. Someone at the neighbor’s left the gate open; the pit bull got out. Neighbor took him to the vet. They thought he might make it. He didn’t.

Nine years it was you and me. Now you’re gone and without you I’m gone too. I can’t move your food bowl. I hear you outside wanting to come in, get brushed, sit next to me on the piano bench while I look at stupid shit on the internet, you groom yourself. That was what we did most nights. You just sitting with me. Just being with each other.

We’d go out in the park in the morning. I’d sit and write and you’d rub against my legs and stalk things in the grass. Puff up when a dog was coming but stand your ground. You knew I’d protect you. I’d walk back toward home and you’d wait for me to get twenty feet and then run after me, try to catch my legs.

My cars came and went; you knew them all by sound. Come running up the street when I’d come home from work. Run along the high cinder block fence at eye level with me. I’d go in the door and you’d run up the stairs outside. I’d go to the base of the stairs and you’d run down them and run into the door. You loved that game.

Cars broke, girls left me. Hard jobs, hard days, and I’d put my face in your fur and you’d purr and it would be OK.

When I first got you home I let you out of the box in a dark quiet room. So you wouldn’t be scared. First day or so I’d just sit there and talk to you. When you trusted me enough I put out my hand. I don’t think you’d been petted before. You walked around me in a circle with your tail up, beside yourself with pleasure. Six weeks ago I started brushing you at night to entice you in earlier. You’d act just the same.

When you were little and I fed you, petted you, I’d make that ch-ch-ch sound so you’d know it meant good things, and I called you in with that every night. I want to make that sound now. Have you come in. Where are you, I can’t sleep if you’re out. Coyote might get you. I’ll go out in the dark and walk around. Call for as long as it takes for you to come. You’d come running up, follow me inside. Get in bed, knead the blanket with your claws and lay with me in the cold. Bud you can’t be gone. I come home and it’s not home now. Just stuff. Coming up the driveway without you running in the corner of my eye, scared of running you over. You weaving yourself into my legs while I was on the toilet. You crunching Meow Mix next to me while I was in the bath. Rustling the blinds perched in the bedroom window sill, always next to me. You stayed with me.

I moved your food bowl and I want to collapse. Leaving the door open waiting for you to come bounding in. You can’t be gone. Don’t be gone. They let me say goodbye but you’d already left. Brain swollen up from being shaken, on a respirator with a clip holding out your tongue. They let me touch you but you weren’t there. They’ll give me your ashes in a clay pot. It will have a nice paw print, the vet said. An expert at watching people cry. But I don’t think she’d seen anything like it.

God, I wish it was me. But then how would your life be after. I was the only one you trusted. It was a joke with the girls: the cat hates you. The man across the street came with a card. He said Bud was in my yard for years but never let me pet him. When you got fleas I gave you a bath myself because you’d have hated the groomer. I didn’t want you to be scared.

I’m sorry you were hurt and scared when you died, Bud.

I moved your food bowl and I want to put it back. Closed the door and now you can’t come in. I’m not ready for you to go. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. I love you forever and I can’t let you go, I can’t.

You were a sweetheart. You were a tough bastard. You were a lap dog. You were a wild murderous savage; you’d uproot the gophers with their earth mover claws, laugh off the mockingbirds dive bombing you. You gave the dogs hell until they moved in with that killing machine. I think about killing him but he’s just an animal too.

You had a good life and a good home. You loved me and I loved you. I’ll let your ashes go in the park. When night comes and the wind blows in over the grass you’ll come home.

Just Stroke My Butthole and Tell Me How Great I Am

I had a Tinder date but I canceled and went to get jerked off at a whorehouse in Rosemead. I’d heard it was a hooker town. I was there already, for Alcoholics Anonymous’ General Service Area 5 Assembly All Districts Pre-Conference Committee Workshop… the real title’s even longer but I stopped reading. It’s two days long. You sit at a table with ugly old men with white nostril hair. Discuss how AA can reach more psychiatrists and clergymen. The girl was pimply and probably 30 but she had big Chinese titties. Ass like she deadlifts regularly. And she wouldn’t even jack me off.

She drizzled hot oil on me and stroked my ass crack and inguinal crease for an hour. When it became clear that she wasn’t grasping at my angry red penis in its little sheet tent I asked. She said eef I do that I go to jail. Instead she swabbed my balls with her palm while I jerked myself off. Cupped her cinder block ass in my other hand through her knockoff Juicy sweats. White terrycloth.

Cops cracking down in Rosemead. God forbid a man gets what he wants. But then who cares about a handjob. She tickled my oily asshole. Told me I have a nice body. I can’t believe you’re 40, she said. I do have a nice body. I do look fucking good for a middle aged weirdo who’s smoked for 20 years and did black tar heroin under the freeway overpass with homeless wife killers. I know this but need to be told. Dates never say it anymore. They’re too busy with I’m not usually like this. Have you been tested. Shut up and savor my magnificence.

The date– she was a student of Hugo Schwyzer. She’d have fucked me. I could text her now, have her come out to the duck pond. But I don’t want the hour of talking before my apartment. I don’t want a date and I don’t want a hooker either. I need girls to want me but I’m sick of dancing. Only ones who come right to your place are mannish pigs built like Artie Lange. Giant sweaty pubic fat pads with razor bumps.

Even this would be fine, if I didn’t have to chase it. But Vladimir Harkonnen makes you message first.

What do I want. My mind wants a smart girl like Nikol. My body wants a 15 year old who picks rice, cries because deek too long. My heart wants Angela to tell me I’m sick of these other guys. Let’s buy a house in Montana and you just fill me full of children. I’ll stop sending cunty texts that I’m leaving you every time I have PMS. Maybe she’s right, it’s ending. We’ll be friends. She’ll marry a rich guy. Too bad. You turn 40 and start making a little dough, your dad dies, your cat dies, you realize the only thing that matters is taking care of someone else. At that moment there’s a pretty girl in your house. You want to take her out to a cabin in a meadow somewhere. The smell of her neck makes you want to merge with her on a cellular level. Forgive everything. Work hard make money change the tires and cut the grass forever if she was just there and it sure feels like it was meant to be but it isn’t. Nothing’s meant to be. The universe isn’t even cruel, just random. And you lost. The work hard part will be there. But the coming home to someone: you’re fucked. Now and forever. Your kid’s college fund money chopped up into eighty bucks after tip until they pass some new sex trafficking law and then to the robots. Plus she’d bug the fuck out of you after 3 weeks. Who are you kidding.

I’ll never be a young man again and soon I’ll be dead. Let’s face it: I have nothing to live for. I exist because my sudden death would make other people sad. I’m of service to other alcoholics who are probably lying and using me. Showing my letters to the parole board. Having me meet their rehab counselor so they can get checkout privileges and go smoke speed. I’m alive to not ruin my mother’s life with my suicide. I’m alive to contribute to the tax base by working diligently until my body is broken. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. And now my watch begins– and it keeps fucking going and going and going. At least the Night’s Watch can suck each other’s dicks. At least the rent’s free.

Shit’s bad, then it’s good, then it’s bad. It all doesn’t matter. You can attach feelings to anything. Money, women, food, body image, whateverthefuck. I have more money than I’ve ever had. I feel poorer than ever. I’ve gotten better pussy than any man on Earth. Young Vietnamese girls coming over fucking me raw for hours and then moving in because they like my stupid web site and non-best-selling ebook. The unsurpassable pussy dream. Now I fight for an obese Mexican to let me get a middle finger in her yoga pants after a walk around the duck pond. Doesn’t matter.

Wherever I go would be a prison. But even as I’m typing the feeling passes. It’s enough to go out back, see the grass toss in the wind. Hear the hummingbirds. Their crazy one note flute chirp like blowing in a tiny bottle. Didn’t know hummingbirds could sing until I was 40. Imagine what else is out there. This is enough to live for. To see even one bird, one cloud. Know for one moment you are part of God’s creation. But Jesus Christ do I need some pussy.

I’m Too Compassionate, Is My Problem

You used to own a house. You used to have a pension. Now every ad is DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH SAVED FOR RETIREMENT. Check this chart by age. Yes, fuckstick, it’s better to have money than nothing; I’ve been briefed. They want you to start saving at 20. Why not 10. Why not as you’re squeezed of a slimy cunt, your mother’s screams still echoing off the tiles. Two commissioned salesmen from Morgan Stanley catch you. Explain compound interest and logarithmic growth. Hand waves over the assumption that the stock market will climb forever.

It’s coming to a head. Now I’ll invest in 55 gallon drums of water. Old Kalashnikovs that fire after you drop them in a swamp. Manacles and whips for the junior high school girls I’ll capture the very instant shit hits the fan. Chain them up in back of a taco truck, take it up into the Angeles Crest and from there up to Banff. Somewhere there’s a river and meat. Josef Fritzl it into my old age until one of my sons gets bad enough to kill me. I’m too compassionate is my problem. I could never torture anybody, rape anybody, enslave anybody. Those will be the key skills of the new world. The way coding is now.

Fuck the Future, Burn Your Money

I need to fail. When good shit happens it hurts. I asked for a raise. Had to wait two months to know. The whole time thinking don’t freak out. God remove my obsession with money. God let me just show up and be of service. God remove outcome dependence. Let me be patient. But that’s not how it works.

You wait patiently for the bus but it doesn’t come until your patience breaks. Only shows up after you flip out that you’re gonna be late, stomp on your phone. A quantum thing. Can’t have what you want until it means nothing. I’ll find a mother for my kids the day my last sperm cell dies. Get a 500,000 advance for Hot Naked Tits 2 the day Weimar inflation hits. Good for half a heel of bread.

This raise was gonna save me. I got the raise. Then I knew it was nothing. Still poor forever. Eke out a niggardly existence in a town where fire comes out of the tap. You have to drink it because that’s all there is. A town where six foot four single moms from Denny’s fight videos with that weird downy back hair; women with hormone levels like Lyle Alzado beat me. Break my brittle old bones. Rip off my colostomy bag. Empty it on my face. Passing teens laugh at my shriveled penis in the cold. Turkey tendon arthritic hands flailing. Poor old and alone. I can never have kids. College tuition 68 grand a year. About twice the median pre tax income of an American household. Never have kids or if I do I’ll give them nothing. Cycle starts over again. They too age poor. Catheters yanked out in the street by hooting teen mobs from World Star.

Fuck education. College is a scam. But my kids not going to college: unconscionable. I went to fancy prep school. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. The education was seeing how rich people live. 5,000 families in the country get relief from money fear. It takes four generations living off the interest of the interest. By the time the panic’s bred out of them they’re 1/16th owners of islands off the Connecticut coast. Grandfathered in before some law that no man should own that. Dozens of horses in their name. Second cousins gifting them nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars every Christmas birthday graduation that they don’t even notice. It just sits somewhere accruing money and money and money. When I worked in real estate I’d look at property titles. Every single one under some family trust. Wealth must be multigenerational. If you’re not born rich you’ll never be. Unless you’re the sacrificial lamb who grinds yourself to the bone hustling so thankless descendants can forget you. People don’t talk about how fucking hard making money is. Whoring lying hustling to outcompete other hustling liars.

I’m about in the top ten per cent of income earners now. The top quarter of households. But a house in LA costs half a million at least. Rent is fifteen grand a year at least. On a block where if your bike isn’t embedded in a cube of solid steel it will instantly vanish. The median income of a household where I live is like 38 grand. How the fuck does it work.

We do have Weimar inflation. “Inflation” only counts off brand TVs made by Bengali slaves. Not food housing healthcare and education, not taxes upon taxes. It all goes up and up and up until you absolutely must inherit Saudi money to afford a shack. A textbook. A tongue depressor. The government will never save you. Capitalism is pure evil shit but anything the government touches, worse. Public schools just packed with MS13 face tattoo illiterates, grizzly bear sized microcephalic Denny’s fighters who’ll machete my gangly meek children. I’ll get out, you think. I’ll go to Couer d’Alene or some shit but the only job up there is jerking off donkeys. California money moving up into the mountains fleeing Mexicans, everywhere just rich old bastards ruining it. Wherever you go they suck so much out of you that your wage level means poor. To be upper middle class they make you move where the neighborhood association charges 20 grand a year to chide you about lawn ornaments.

I got the raise which means I suck I’ll fail I’m doing a shitty job they’ll fire me. Retroactively suck back my bank account. I can’t work anymore. I fucking hate this job, all jobs, but I need twenty god damn years of money to retire. Every year save enough to live half a year. So I need to work forty more years. That’s alone. No wife.

No kids to get scholarships to fancy prep school, where I learned how rich people are. Also Latin. Reciting the Aeneid. Something to keep my mind occupied the summer after, working third shift in a candle factory. That Cape Verdean bank robber who’d done 20 years for murder said he was gonna fuck me up. I’d lost a trick in the spades game on our 1AM lunch break. He kept glaring. Virgil kept me focused whacking the label gun on crates of Yankee Bayberry votives instead of panicking. Nine dollars an hour minus two bucks to the temp agency. Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris. I’ll have to work in a candle factory again at 80. Be a janitor again. Reach my hand into back office toilets again, dislodge black tar streaks of fat grizzled insurance men’s long thick greasy fibrous all meat diet logs. And every girl asks: what do you do.

This money is a curse. I’ve seen the poor. They’re happy. Every person in the Philippines, a joyous idiot. God give me specific brain damage that renders me unable to work. God make me a drooling twitching vegetable. Vaguely aware that it feels nice when an orderly balms my sores. God let me not dream of freedom. It kills me.

Copyright

delicioustacos.com

Cover design by Matt Lawrence

mattlawrence.net

Content

DELICIOUS TACOS
THE PUSSY

What Now, She Says

Sunday Call with Mom

Tippy the Thirsty Squirrel

Lunch Break Diary: What’s on Your Mind

OKCupid: Terms of Service

Shit Jobs: McDonald’s

God Damn Do I Want to Fuck My Intern

Autopilot

Tell Me Your Fantasy, She Says

Coffee Shop Diary: A Pretty Girl

Unemployment Diary: Want Ads

Product Review: Tenga® Easy Beat Egg™ Artificial Vagina, “Silky”

Coffee Shop Diary: The Smell of My Wang

This Is All Your Fault Megan

Shit Jobs: Telemarketing

The Soap

Can’t Live with ’Em, Can’t Live without ’Em

There Is No God, But

Sunday in the Park

Girl in the Window

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Hangover Diary: Rocktober

Tomorrow is Another Day

Seasonal Affective Disorder

Underage Ass

Drunk Thoughts on Global Capitalism

Coffee Shop Diary: Megadrought

The Heart Touching Magic

Write Her a Lovely Message…

You Should Message Me If, Part 3

What Do You Do, Part 4

Something About Some Woman

Sobriety, Day Two

Nature’s Miracles

Instrument of Thy Will

Ass

It Will Be Very Unpleasant

But Enough about My Ass

Ass Part 4

The Wolf Witch

How to Pick Up Girls

Take Me Home Tonight

Postmortem

App Review: Tinder for iOS

A Tinder™ Success Story

Fetish

I Just Want to Eat Asian Ass Forever

Letter to My 20 Year Old Self

Her

OKCupid: What I’m Doing with My Life Part 2

Worst Case Scenario

Responsible Citizen

Let’s Go Out for Coffee, She Says

The Messiah

Maria

Coffee Shop Diary: An Armpit

Normal Human Interaction

Slayer

Coffee Shop Diary: First World Problems

I Can’t Tonight But How about Tuesday, She Says

How I Met Your Mother

First Date

Philippines Vacation

On the Road to My Solitary Death

Adulthood

Ideal Behavior

Mr. Universe

Jack

This is Why I Can’t Have Kids

One More for the Road

Shit Piss Cunt Fuck

William Randolph Thirst

God

Second Date Idea

Progress Not Perfection

OKCupid: My Life is Perfect

I Am Not Allowed to Think about Hot Young Pussy

My Brief Abstinence Career

I’d Rather Watch Hitler Rape My Mom Than Date a Woman My Own Age

Fuck Los Angeles

Toxic Masculinity

Don’t Take Your Love to Town

Dirty Mexican Cunt

A Rich Inner Life

Dear Angela

Gender Studies

Finally, Some Good News, Part 1

Where the Heart Is

If It Flies Floats or Fucks

One Small Act of Kindness

That Pussy Will Cost You

Sugar Baby

Tell Me You Love Me

Write Some More You Lazy Fuck

40

It’s Over Between Us

Art Review: Self-Portrait (Performance with Object) by Emma Sulkowicz

Bud

Just Stroke My Butthole and Tell Me How Great I Am

I’m Too Compassionate, Is My Problem

Fuck the Future, Burn Your Money

Copyright