it's back again

[East Coast Hustle]

the style of it feels almost Bukowski-ish.

[Sepia]

Chapter Two: They were headed tha-


Pictures had to be shot in sepia if they were to be published in a magazine around here. The fields are ripe yet all machines stand still. There's a stand on the road it says 'LIMONAED' and there are plastic cups scattered around here. The winds drag them in circles like an old Uzumakian painting and the eerieness is to touch. We stop the car and exit it, all of us, Mary saying damn i'm thirsty and we head over to see if there's anything left of the lemonade. Little Timmy's lying there on the other side of the stand and he appears to have been scorched. He doesn't burn but he's making heat and every other minute a puff of smoke emits from his mouth. Peter takes a stick and gouges out Little Timmy's eyes. If we didn't know better, we'd think they were alive. Small snails in his sockets. We should have shivered by this monstrosity but we don't. Something inside us has died or turned into full apathy. We don't care about Timmy. Timmy was probably a douchebag and if we were his age we'd probably hate him cause I know I hated the hyperactive fuckfaces doing stuff like this. Lemonade stands. My grandpa always said that lemonade stands was only incorporated into our lives so that humanity itself would get more used to stand behind the counter of McDonalds, BK, Subway or a bar.

The lemonade was long gone and the lemons were husks with small creatures in them. Snail like, going in circles. It was like squeezing a bug. Small things popped out. An ignorant racist would have asked if they were negro eggs. They weren't. We understood something, simultaneously, there were no black people left in the world. There were no whites and no yellows either. There were no Whitecollar criminals and no rapists. The president had shit his pants as he died on national television talking about pre-emptive strikes, freedom and oil. The president was Little Timmy and vice versa. The understanding was there. We knew. As when you dream something and you know what must be done and what you've dreamt is the truth and nothing but the truth and you wake up and you've written 'PINEAPPLE' on your arm.

What if it's not said Mary, what if not everyone is dead? It could be wrong and we all agreed. But something had happened, something we'd understand when we saw it. Was it the world? Was that the answer? Was it the unhinge that had happened to the world while we were somewhere else? What had happened?

We got into the car and started driving again. The wind had accelerated. Dustclouds gathered. We passed another sign pointing to Avalanche Hill like a bad omen. Not as in 'I'm not going to get this girl home tonight' bad omen but as in 'the world was raped by the antichrist and forcefed to faceraping batmen with syphillis'. There could be no hope here now. There could be no hope in venturing to Avalanche Hill.

The Hillman cursed it's whalelike curse and we were yet again headed for Salvation.

[Bella]

a brief bit of advice?

compile and publish.

these are fucking GOOD, dude.

Seconded. I know you could get this published.

[Bob the Mediocre]

Thirded or fourthed, I can't remember. That last one gave me chills

[Sepia]

"the car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
and a dark wind blows

the government is corrupt
and we're on so many drugs
with the radio on and the curtains drawn

we're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
and the machine is bleeding to death

the sun has fallen down
and the billboards are all leering
and the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

it went like this:"

-this monologue appears at the beginning of the dead flag blues from the album f#a#oo; it comes from incomplete movie about jail, an unfinished film that efrim wrote and has been working on for the last five years.


Chapter Three: I don't believe you, he said, grinning.

A pale wind was blowing, grinding sand into the hillman's motor making it cough like an old man with a tobacco dependancy. It stopped and we left it for dead. We started walking, taking with us only our cigarettes and bottles of water. The Hillman caught fire after we had walked five hundred yards or so. It seemed the most rational thing to do. Spontaneous combustion.

I'm grinning sheepily, and that's what they do to. My partners in crime. Three minds tuned in, turned on and ready to burn out. And we're thinking, not talking, thinking about the combustion. What if everyone suddenly realized something? Their minds couldn't cope and everyone just caught fire and fell down burning? What if there really was a giant hivemind on this planet and it suddenly said 'does not compute'?

Today's postcard is full of holes. Memory holes, holes in the what the fuck do we do when we come down section and the holes in the policemen by their truck. The policemen aren't burnt. They're just dead and the blood has dried up and the husks of maggots are where their eyes should have been. We grab shotguns and revolvers. The fattest cop has a giant motherfucking hand cannon strapped to his thigh. It's heavy as fuck and these aren't bullets. They are small planets which would blow a tank off course. Giggling in a strange manner I unzip his pants and the smallest cock in the world rears it ugly head. Still giggling I think You were right, you were right.

We walk towards town, seeing it far in the distance but the morning fog makes it difficult to make out any details whatsoever. Avalanche Hill looms under the mountain and for the first time it's visible and it's pitch black. There's an old cadillac in the road, gleaming chrome and red metallic. The seats are white leather and unsoiled. Mary jumps in and revs the engine and we're headed that way again, making miles instead of yards.

We never saw the man that stood in the cornfield draped in black. Black, as in the abyss, black as in the only hope you see when you've already been shot to pieces or drived over by a tank and you can't feel your body. Black as in the way black should have been.

[Hoshiko]

Please, please do not self publish these. They deserve to be cleaned up a bit and submitted to a real publisher. I agree that the grammar adds to the flow and style, so I would be VERY light on the editing if I were you.

It might be hard to find a classification for this but you definitely have your own style and voice going on, and it's good. Really really good.

Whatever you do keep posting them! I'm such a junkie

[Sepia]

Emotional intermission

I can't hear the car anymore. It doesn't make the kind of sounds a car should. It reminds me of when I used to see a shrink. My dad used to say that I was going there to open up a can of worms I couldn't do myself and that something was faulty in my head. Faulty from his perspective I always thought because he couldn't comprehend what I was destined for. I believed in destiny and that I was destined for great things. They would fold for me, unconsciously. My name would be noted in the books. Never footnoted.

The shrink told me I had an angst problem. I was also way too angry for my own age but I though he overexaggerated. He told me to go deeper in myself and I replied that I couldn't. The layers of my mind's fabric were up in the day and I told him I didn't hide anything from him. He said I lied. He told me I had gotten better after I started taking the xanax. Problem was that I was selling it to a buddy of mine. So I reckoned if he was wrong in one thing, he could be wrong in several things.
I tolf him about a dream I had one night, destruction was the theme. It wasn't me that destroyed but I stood on the sideline and watched it happen. He told me this was insecurity and I said hell yes, it's insecurity. How the fuck can I feel secure in a world like this?

He said you gotta grow up, son.

After that his voice was droning, I didn't pay attention, it wasn't beneficial for me to go there. So I nodded, said no, yes and stopped caring. After a couple of sessions this way he told me that I had to pay attention if I wanted to rid myself of the teenageangst and angerproblems aswell as my obvious insecurity.

So he told me, you gotta embrace love. You got to accept it into your heart.

I was shivering with filthy rage and seething with raw anger. In retrospect, I wasn't the first to have thrown a tantrum like this. I yelled and screamed and kicked the cat that was on the couch and couldn't utter a word.

I turned away from love, imagining it a dirty feeling. I spiralled into apathia, returning only briefly in several years. Suicides that never got any way because the gun fired blanks, apartments flooded because I tried to hang myself in a water pipe and I never really learned how to go all the way down the road. It was after one of those sessions with a bicrazor that I woke up on the bathroom floor, the blood hardened just outside my veins and I'd grown so used to seeing some sort of light at the end of a tunnel and then it hit me like an ofcourse.

I couldn't die because I had a purpose. I had a destiny.

And it wasn't on some dirty floor, it would be glory on a gory field stained with blood and everything.
But now I wasn't so sure anymore. I was still alive but was it fate? One of the big words? Or was it something else? Or was this completely uninteresting?

I went for the last option and lit a cigarette.

--
This was something I had to get out of my system and is not a part of the book seeing as it's weak and generally quite shiet.


On a publishing note; Impossible to get this published in norway seeing as there is a nationalistic trend going on at the moment. No english whatsoever so I reckon if I ever should edit this and send it to a publisher I could use some eventual help from someone that knows something more about foreign systems than what I do.  Heh.

[Sepia]

Chapter Four: Officer, does it matter?


It hits when we see the sunrise. We've only seen clouds sofar, but we can't really remember, but it's gotta be two weeks that we've driven around. No real weather. Limbo. When we saw the sunrise, we knew. Something was quite fucked up. Every pulse fired from the sun throbbed in the air and we heard the grass sing. The paint on the barndoors joined in on the chorus and we had to stop the car to look. We closed our eyes and we saw the throb, all of it, we were the throb, one of tim leary's mixtapes, we were newage sewage tibetan music, squarepusher at 1800 bpm, elvis rapping and the soviet army's choir beatboxing. Slampoets versed us in wastelands and desert lives. god himself played the bongodrums and we were all the childrens choir at a catholic black mass. It felt natural then to scotchtape eachother and drinking gatorade and grapefruitjuice. We were on so many drugs.

Next followed the ride, we took the highway and cut off, jumping through fields, picking corn on our way over, like children drinking lemonade that tastes like piss but we're smiling because this is bliss, everything is happening all at once but they're not, drugaddicts should shut the fuck up because what they see is for themselves and not for the world and people should become smarter to see who's fucked up beyond recognition and not label them as prophets, because we've had enough of that, we're tired of them because they mostly speak bullshit anyway like most of the world's population so we shouldn't reward them for it atleast and fuck them, fuck them really hard, the agony you've cause but we won't follow through because life, god, death and everything itself is nothing but a huge trip and I think I've got it now.

Peter speaks violently, furiously fast, almost in tongues, me and mary hear the same shit anyhow but our minds are racing aswell and we think he may be right before we know he's right when he shoots himself in the ear, missing due to the fact that he moving his jaw at fivethousand miles per hour and he's crying, salty streams headed for nowhere in particular, but they're there and I'm reminded why people cry and that people can cry and the whole aspect of emotions open up again but I harden on because in your own words Peter, they don't need you anymore and I'm stonecold when I blast your skull and nail it to the inside of the door.

We stop the car and we know we can't bury you. That's what they told us to do and all our options are something they have said so we sit down to think of something completely new and we spend weeks until Mary finds the answer, and we leave you before we're headed for the horizon. We hear you ignite when we leave and we've got the nastiest feeling that we were wrong because someone were obviously right. There's a phoenix somewhere and it's burning us all away so we gun the engine, we think it's time to change course, our hive mind feeling diminished but it's stronger. We've been reminded about the things we should have forgotten and we turn away from the road to Salvation and head for Avalanche Hill.



--
Gni trynet til noen bortover en ruglete mursteinsvegg, sliter hodet av, lille lag for lille lag helt til man sitter igjen med en r??d strek og litt gugge.

[Bob the Mediocre]

That last paragraph, ... damn

[Sepia]

Chapter Five: Do you need someone to walk into-


I don't know about time anymore, time's fleeting yet at the same time it isn't, it's like when you stare and stare at a brickwall long enough and the bricks sortof move, but they can't, cause there aren't enough space, but still they move and move and if you blink you'll miss it but you won't blink and I'm not blinking either because suddenly, time's gone.

I've had a smoke in my mouth for a long time now and I can't seem to remember when I took one of the gauloises out of the pack and lit it and I can't remember the last time I bogarted one of them, it's like we're out of the loop. We aren't affected by time, we're only affected by time in the sense at which our brains take it for granted that we are affected by time. We haven't stopped and thought things through, now, have we? I check the shotgun side but he's still dead on the road miles behind us and Mary's shivering in the back, not liking the thoughts we think. This isn't a controlled mission, this is a suicide plunge from the space station.

The road to the hill is muddy and in poor quality and I guess this is where the taxpayers' money should have gone but then I remember this country of mine and I start laughing. Mary isn't. There are signs signalling the sale of eggs, bread or gloryhole blowjobs but we speed on, up up up up, to Avalanche Hill, on the foot of that mountain and it looks demonic and it almost looks like Mount Rushmore as Rushmore did when it was a sacred place to the indians and not a sacred place for head. Bats are flying out of the noses of the presidents but they aren't sneezing, no longer human from years and years of petrification and these are the fathers that watch over us. Silent and petrified, these are our Gods.

I grab the ether in the front and hand it to mary before I'm shouting my brains out and waking every dead spirit in this place but for someone this would make perfect sense, for me, no, but after all, this is bat country.

[East Coast Hustle]

excellent as always, except for the last sentence....I don't know why, but somehow the reference in the ending cheapened it for me...I like your work a lot, and I think you don't need to use anyone's words but your own....[/pretentiouscritic]

you did say that you wanted honesty.

[Sepia]

I know. it would never survive an edit, the reference would be there, but much more obscure and only understandable by me.
been doing too much thompson stuff thinking lately so it gets mirrored in what i gotta get out..

thanks by ze way.

[Sepia]

Chapter Six: Time? Yes, it's time.


The climb becomes steeper the more we're nearing the foot of the mountain and I gun the engine making myself feel at one with the car, a humming bee covered in sleek chrome, headed for an unknown hill. Our speed increases in pace with the spelling errors on the roadside signs. Egs n chikin. The smell of burned inbreeds fill our noses as we stop infront of a caf?©. Caf?© as coffee and beef jerkies.

It's built as a saloon and thought strikes me. Everything important, every monument built to express the marvel that is the united states of america are miles away. They don't do any good anymore, they're far away, and me and Mary might just be the last humans alive. The phallic symbols scattered across the globe have no significance anymore. The theorization of the existance of the illuminti, big foot, the yeti, nessie or an intelligent crowd of more than fifty people aren't important anymore. From now on, we view ourselves as excavators, archeologists. We're here to determine what's what and we still haven't figured out whether it's us or the world that's on a permanent acid trip.

The saloon is what will be left in our minds regarding the status of usa. It's fair, we think, you wanted the cowboy image so now you can have it when you're in your shallow little grave aswell. We find water on bottles, a big pot, two mugs and coffee. There's no electricity so we set fire on the shack. 'Last coffi bifor avalanse hil' goes first.

We dance around the bonfire, waiting for our coffee to finish, dancing tribally as we imagine how the tribals actually dance and it feels like I'm on e again and it's some crappy goa on the speakers and the only thing keeping me from vomiting is the drug, the drug is keeping me alive and it hits us and we don't know if it's a thought or if it's a voice but the drug is keeping us alive. Adam and Eve, dancing around a burning coffee shack, high on acid and ecstacy and I can't help myself and we laugh and we think of the small martians, watching us.
We drink our coffee and smoke our cigarettes and it's starting to blow again, it's a bleak voice shattering through, to us, to anything left on the face of the planet. The coffee is bitter and it feels right. If the setting would have been different we would have called ourselves pretentious whores, but this is actually it. We're the only ones alive so we take the names adam and eve.


Adam and Eve leaves the burning shack laughing. They wonder if this is what the prolifers thought about or if it's too obvious. They proceed to laugh even more. It's a heartily  laughter as they head towards the little town. The shadow is moving with them and the Mad One steps forward and into the bleak light of this postapocalyptic world.

[Bob the Mediocre]

intellegent crowds of 50+ people? Now that's a heresy.

[Sepia]

Chapter Seven: The fabled femme-fatale

He doesn't speak. The words leave his throat through a smashed bottle of whiskey that's been smoking cigarettes made of pure tar. The drugs wear off when we enter the basement.
We came into Avalanche Hill and stopped on the town square. From one of the smaller shacks around here, smoke arose from the chimney, black and it smelled like the ground around auschwitz when it rains. I left my bogarted cigarette in my mouth and picked up my handcannon, mary picking up one of the jdbottles that wasn't really jd's but poor quality russian vodka coloured with caramel and pissed in. The Hill was a dysoptian place. It was dark and it seemed odd that tom waits wasn't sitting there singing and playing the harmonica and had a little freakmonkey on a leash.

The air was filled with music. Not the apparent rightaway to the ear music but when we sat down on a bench near the dried out fountain, the rushing of the wind and the beating of the panes made some sort of music. For the first time since we could remember we did something remotely normal, something remotely safe. We sat on the bench, drinking coffee and redwine, eating crackers and brie. We'd switched our cheap french cigarettes for cheap french cigarillos and we simply sat there.
We knew there was no point in talking because none of us knew more than the other and the cookies filled with gloom and doom and we foresaw our silent future, not even talking or exchanging lines when we die.

Then we headed for the smell, wet burned up death and we found a man that would have been warriorking centuries ago but nothing more than a simple grinder now. The basement was dry and the dust felt like cheaply cut cocaine, burning and making us sniff and sneeze.

He breathed words but didn't speak. He was a bonegrinder, following his shamanic legacy in the only way possible. Only way they would allow it. He hadn't been out for weeks and hadn't eaten either. He said he didn't need any earthly goods to maintain his life and spirit and we believed him.

He sat down with us at a small table and there was a loud knock on the door.