There ain't no cure for the summertime blues.

[hooplala]

I sincerely hope you do something with your writing. Your visuals are uncanny.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

Thanks, Hoopla.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Sorry.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

Sorry.

Had a moment where it felt a little over-share-y in retrospect, is all.

[Reginald Ret]

Damn.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

It's dark. The air is hot, musty, and filled with muffled thuds; explosions that are gradually getting closer. I'm pinned by what feels like a immense wooden beam, to a dirt floor. I can't feel anything between the end of my sternum and my knees.

Every so often the muffled noises aren't so muffled and there's a shifty, silty motion overhead that is followed by dust and cobwebs drifting down onto my face and arms.

A bug crawls onto my ankle and starts its way up my bare leg but once it gets past my knee I can't feel it anymore. Something creaks overhead as the ground shudders.

Flashes of light appear, in the cracks between poorly fitted board walls. The air goes from musty to acrid as whatever is burning overtakes the scent of dust.

Along with the explosions there are now screams gradually growing loud enough to make the air tremble.

The shed that I am apparently trapped in, blows away as the shockwave from a larger explosion makes the ground move like a mud puddle being bombarded by stones. The beam is not moved except that it tilts to one side, putting more pressure on the left than the right.

I try to wiggle free, to dig my way out with my heels and my right hand. It doesn't work so well. I can't breathe, every time I exhale the beam settles a little lower.

The final explosion comes in slow motion. It's as if a star is falling directly overhead. I watch it arc across the sky, streaming crimson fire that illuminates a shattered landscape, until it seems to hover just above me. A sick illusion. It is growing larger and what began as a low whistle is becoming a deafening roar.

For one split instant its added weight is an agonizing burden.


Then I wake up on the floor because I whacked my head on the bookshelf when I fell out of bed.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

We're sitting down to what passed as a normal dinner during the teen years, at my house. Dad's at the head of the kitchen table. I'm at the foot. My brothers are lined up on a bench between the table and the raised TV stand. Mom is eating in the living room because Dad has made her cry with his bullshit incoherent screaming. I'm being forced to fetch and carry every time Dad decides his milk needs more horseradish sauce or he needs more Wonder Bread to scoop up his mashed potatoes and cottage cheese covered in black pepper.

The boys are talking about which girls in their classes are the biggest sluts and Dad is spraying cottage cheese-sprinkled spittle as he roars for them to shut the fuck up, he's trying to watch the fucking football game even though the game has been fucking ruined by all those god damn . . . .

Dad's a racist, enough said. I was once beaten for comparing his beard to Mr. T's.

The boys break out into a fist fight and food goes flying all over the piles of Mom's hoarded shit stacked against the walls of the room and the heaping pile of mouse-piss covered laundry in the corner behind my chair.

Everything freezes and seems to fast forward until I'm suddenly old and my brothers are all older, with beer bellies spilling out from under their stained and holey t-shirts and dried food matted in their snarled beards. Three women in Daisy Dukes and sheer halter tops have joined us around the table. There's another man who's taller and fatter than my brothers, with a nastier beard, winking at me across the table. Mom's piles of hoarded shit are now topped with new piles of shit that bear resemblance to things I own. The reek of the broken toilet and the basement flooded from our backed up septic tank and the mouse piss covering everything becomes more overwhelming until every bite of food tastes like ammonia.

I go to take a sip of my milk, noticing that everyone else is drinking beer, only to realize there's a dead mouse in my milk. I look at the table and all the food is covered with bugs. There are maggots in the cottage cheese. The mashed potatoes are smashed up with fruit flies. Pus is oozing out of the steaks.

I go to the bathroom and the floor is covered with semi-dry feces like they've been painted on the floor. The layers of mold and mildew and cobwebs on all the walls and mirrors and windows and counters have almost gained sentience. I start screaming and . . .


. . . wake up to my cat head-butting me on the chin because I'm making funny noises through clenched teeth. Everything all day long tastes like ammonia.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

You have a very interesting head.  I say that, being me, so you can do the comparison.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

You have a very interesting head.  I say that, being me, so you can do the comparison.

How . . . flattering.  It has mellowed out considerably. My nightmares are nowhere near as frequent or as awful. Just the summertime brings them on, is all. And around Christmas.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

You have a very interesting head.  I say that, being me, so you can do the comparison.

How . . . flattering.  It has mellowed out considerably. My nightmares are nowhere near as frequent or as awful. Just the summertime brings them on, is all. And around Christmas.

That kind of sucks.  But I am a man who treasures his screeching-falling-out-of-bed nightmares, even if it terrifies the dog.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

You have a very interesting head.  I say that, being me, so you can do the comparison.

How . . . flattering.  It has mellowed out considerably. My nightmares are nowhere near as frequent or as awful. Just the summertime brings them on, is all. And around Christmas.

That kind of sucks.  But I am a man who treasures his screeching-falling-out-of-bed nightmares, even if it terrifies the dog.

Well but on the plus side, now I just wake up on the floor or crammed in a corner beating my head off the wall. Which is preferable to waking up in the backyard or by the front door holding a bloody knife or standing in front of the open refrigerator standing in a pile of . . . stuff. So all in all, I think it's a fairly decent trade-off.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

It's snowing outside and the house is filled with cigarette smoke. It smells like unwashed hicks and scorched rubber.

I slip out of the house, making sure to tuck the newspaper back into all the gaps between the broken front door and the frame. I pull a shopping sack containing two tattered sheets out from under a pile of bloody and shit-stained farm clothes on the porch. Then I break a path across the yard, made mountainous with snowdrifts up to my knees, to the tree line in the pasture.

I'm well into the trees with a good mile of snow and frosty underbrush between me and the house before I can taste fresh air in my lungs instead of the foul stuff I carried outside with me. Each clean breath drains tension from my neck and shoulders. I rinse my mouth with snow, spitting it out and scooping another mouthful until all I can taste is the snow. What I have spit out is tinged yellow and is speckled with black flecks.

The less tattered of the sheets becomes a somewhat precarious hammock strung between two obliging young maples. It's slung low so I won't be easily spotted (and I've laid my track so this spot isn't the obvious spot for my trail to lead) but it's high enough to clear the snow.

The second sheet is packed around my ears and head. I don't need to worry about frostbite even wearing thin pants and a t-shirt, not for a few hour's nap. But earaches are the devil and burrow into my brain in an eyeblink.

Settling into snooze, tucking my hands under my armpits and crossing my legs so my feet are pulled up under my legs. It looks stupid as hell but it's relatively comfortable and I won't freeze any time soon. I'll be up in a few hours when the sun comes up, anyway.

Comfortable and relaxed, I fall asleep.

And wake up to cold metal smashing my lips into my teeth. My eyes open and there's a shotgun in my face. Now I know I'm dreaming. Until this point it could have been just another normal day. But no, it's another fun trip through Cat's Brain Blender.

Someone screams some regurgitated bullshit before the shotgun goes off and my head disintegrates into meat confetti, but fuck that noise.



I woke up pissed off, with a migraine.