Brion Gysin + Doughnut Sex

Just reviewed the final final proofs for Scorch Atlas, it looks siiiiiiicccckkk. Zach Dodson ate himself alive making the pages so good. There are certain pages in the book that to make their texture Zach chewed the paper with his own teeth. This is an object page for page. Now on its way to printers. Boom.



Ravi Mangla asked me to contribute to Recommended Reading and I did that. Thanks Ravi.



Over the weekend I read this: Andrew Zornoza's WHERE I STAY. It is something else. A full review and thoughts are soon forthcoming, but let me just say: there isn't anyone who wouldn't get something out of this beautiful collage of sentences and image. I started reading it intending to just read the first few pages, and pretty much read straight through instead.

Blurb from Matthew Derby: "Consider Andrew Zornoza’s Where I Stay a loose retelling of Werner Herzog’s 1974 march from Munich to Paris to try to save a dying friend—only set in the arid, ominous nowherescape of the contemporary Southwest and composed by a strung-out W.G. Sebald. Zornoza dedicates the book to “all those he's lied to” before prosecuting a narrative in stark photographs and crisp, lurid text that will make you wish we had more liars like him in the world."

More on this soon, but trust me, just buy it.



Man, I can't wait for the new Michael Haneke film to come out over here: The White Ribbon.




This morning I woke up for the first time in my life actually chewing on my blanket. I had been dreaming I was eating a cruller covered in chocolate syrup. I was in this small kitchen that was connected to the parish hall of the church down the street from my parents' house, where I went to preschool and would spend the day. Strange how certain rooms, like this one, which I hadn't thought about in years, can stay hidden in your body like that, and are randomly right there. It was as if no time at all had passed since I'd been in that little kitchen, the same one off the room where we met for Boy Scouts, and where during one afternoon at preschool I was sent by the teacher to ask the minister of the church where his son was that day (he had not shown up for class): I thought that man was god.

In the doughnut dream there was a fat kid, I can't remember him now, maybe he was me, fat, Boy Scout aged again: the kid had pointed at the dougnut and said, "You know you want to fuck that doughnut." His tone was aggressive and ready to go.

Before that I floated through my backyard and to the church on a very small red balloon with my infant cousin, who I had to sling along with my arm to keep from rolling off and smashing on the ground. The infant could not stop laughing.




I want to build a Brion Gysin Dream Machine.

Massengil throat singing

* Jason Moore interviewed me for Bust Down the Door & Eat All the Chickens, about all kinds of shit including dreams, William Gass, editing, Oprah, lists




* Jimmy Chen reviewed my chapbook IN THE RAPE YEAR OF THE GHETTO TODDLER THE HOUSES WILL AWAKEN in a wonderful way, and also reviewed Nick and Brandi's chapbooks concurrently released. Thank you Jimmy.





* Pistachio pudding is fucking amazing, I had no idea





* U.S. Maple's TALKER or ACRE THRILLS is all I can listen to, antimusic, I had no idea Michael Gira produced TALKER until just now, I asked Michael Gira to blurb EVER and he said nicely that he had absolutely no time, at least he took the time to respond, if he was a language poet he probably would not have, I feel aggressive with no release valve, if anyone can get me a physical copy of his THE CONSUMER I would like to buy it but not for $50 like it always is on amazon used





* Yannick Murphy's STORIES IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE has me interested in writing short shit again: this is a magical book.



God Knopf made beautiful books, I wish there was Knopf in Lish ways now still, maybe some are close





* Last night in my dream I got attacked by several children, they forced my pants off and were biting me, a helicopter arrived outside the small room which had one large observation window, I was arrested, I was given a chance for freedom by escaping through a large labyrinth, there was a thin bald man in a red latex suit with a handlebar mustache looking for me, if I beat him to a checkpoint I would go free, I succeeded in throwing off my chaser by hiding in a large netted tub of styrofoam confetti while a group of honkies shit-talked me through a walkie-talkie, when arriving at the checkpoint I was told I'd come too late, I was ascended through a glass tunnel out of the ground into a point high above desert earth, my whole dad's side of the family was there, including my cousin whose children were the ones who'd raped me, the whole family's faces were flat, the men's hairs were combed weird, you could see along around them forever, there were a few oil derricks and growth patches but mostly just sand around the glass tower, they watched me get executed, I can't remember the method of execution, I woke up as I was killed





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Eugene Lim's FOG & CAR + boinking in a baby year

Last night I sat down to start reading Eugene Lim's FOG & CAR, the other of the two debut books from Ellipsis Press along with Eugene Marten's WASTE, which I loved and talked about a while back, I hadn't meant to read for very long but found myself unable to stop reading the book. FOG & CAR is a strange amalgam of several ideas, it begins with a dissolved marriage from which both ends begin to branch and splinter and spread back into each other in weird ways. I was surprised to be so captivated by a book about a ruined marriage, which it is only on the surface, what it really is is a puzzle and a book of worming forms, sometimes the tense shifts or lines are layered and/or repeated, there is a lot of subtle innovation, refreshing.

The first section uses these calm and almost Lutz-like renditions of the two divorcees, Fog and Car, trying to smooth their lives out into something, Eugene Lim writes about the cleaning of houses, the method of a swimming routine, and all in this meditative, language-conscious but not overtly languaged and extremely absorbing way, the book also continues to evolve by stretching the forms of the way the words are delivered, but again, in calm and nuanced methods.



In grad school Amy Hempel had us read a Mark Richard story, I can't remember the name of it, I think it is the first one in THE ICE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD, Amy, in perhaps her only 'lecture-like moment' of the workshops talked some about how Richard was able to show the passage of time by using fields and dogs rather than talking about time, and how it opened the language and the feel of the words in this surprising way, I think Eugene Lim's descriptions here worked on me in that way, though rather than over the function of time it was over the function of distancing and grief, so much so that I couldn't stop wanting to propel through it, and I was so pleased to find myself reading a book supposedly about relationships about still feeling completely engrossed, as I hate relationships in books usually, for their wheel-spinning, I think people who get excited about Richard Yates would really enjoy the meditative stancing of the early sections especially.

Then there are two more sections in which Lim continues to open the way the story is built into an almost Paul Auster kind of maze, path-inducing manner, there is following and weird rooms and strange phenomenon that continue to be braided together but left open in other strands.

Here is a sentence from the book that maybe exhibits the balance of strange and familiar sense of both situation and language in FOG & CAR: "He forgot his name and became her bellybutton."

Then, in the last third of the book, which begins to develop into a really strange configuration of earlier elements and a linking of space, I hit a page, a strange development involving a man in an empty room and an elevator, and a little later, further linking, which made me stop and touch the book against my chest. I remember not knowing what to do having read it, it was very late by then and I'd stayed up longer than I meant to, and yet I wanted to keep reading, and yet couldn't the page had stopped me in a way that I felt I needed to think about rather than go on with the rest of the book right there, I went to bed. I could not stop thinking about the book in such a way that I stayed awake for several further hours, and when I finally did sleep I had a dream about writing about the book as I am now, and other dreams branching off from the book. When I woke I walked around for a while and then finished reading.

FOG & CAR is new in familiar ways and familiar in new ways, and altogether a thing that turned my mind on in such a mode that I could not turn it off.

Along with WASTE, if you haven't gotten on board already, both are available from Ellipsis as a package deal. I can't imagine an innovative fiction press with a better introductory one-two punch.










Right before I woke up for the last time this morning, I had a dream where Marilyn Manson was talking to me, he was speaking a quote, the quote, I knew somehow, was from someone named 'Vivino', talking about chess strategy, which Manson was applying to something about writing he and I had been talking about, I have no idea why I was talking to Marilyn Manson about writing, the quote was, "Begin with a false position & allow the position to become." This may become the epigram for RICKY'S ANUS, which I am deep in. Deep in Ricky's Anus.











I got a galley of Jesse Ball's new forthcoming novel THE WAY THROUGH DOORS in the mail today. Fuck yeah.











There is a new issue of BUST DOWN THE DOOR AND EAT ALL THE CHICKENS, I have a story in it, as does Sam Pink, Ofelia Hunt, Mike Young, Matthew Simmons, D. Harlan Wilson, Darby Larson and several others, I can't wait to read it, the cover is amazing. Thanks to Bradley Sands for his hard work and wild mind.

The issue is only $5 plus a little shipping, 'the squarest price in town.'

'Earl the cockroach knew of all this, however, because he was one with Wowness powers'

At my part time job at this public art gallery this week I got asked to judge a contest called Reflections, it is done every year in Georgia, I did it when I was in elementary school or something, kids enter for their school and then the winners go on to compete at state level I think, I was judging 6/7/8th grade writing. The theme of the contest this year was 'Wow!' which is a pretty bad topic, most of the kids writing either ended with the word 'wow' or was about a time a kind of weather made them saw wow, one kid included the Flavor Flav 'wowwwww' in a rap he wrote, it talked about him getting emails from girls, the majority were either about sports or 9/11 or weather.

This one kid, I read his story, it was untitled, it is the most insane thing I've read in a long time, it had all this-meta stuff going on, the narrator gets sucked into a muffin and fights Simon Cowell and switches dialects while referring to how he's switching dialects, one of the dialects is 'olde english,' the British people say 'wot wot,' at one point a nerd kills another person by reciting the periodic table in order and it lists out the elements, there is a number that takes up a whole paragraph, the kid uses the word 'octosyllabic' and 'razor-backed,' one of the characters is a 'mattress named Zem born on the plant Sqornshellous Zeta,' another character is 'Bob the multicolored brown clown wig,' holy crap, I would publish this story in a real magazine, if I read it in a real magazine I would say holy shit, I am having trouble believing the kid is 11, but I am also having trouble believing if a parent wrote a story for a kid they would be this balls-out about it, because it's fucking insane.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, the best story I've read since Rachel B. Glaser's PEE ON WATER is 'untitled' by this 11 year old from Alpharetta GA, I may see if I can publish this. I want to like call the parents and tell them their kid is brilliant or they are liars, I don't know, it put me in a good mood.








While I was at work I was reading Sam Pink's YUM YUM I CAN'T WAIT TO DIE, I had it out on the desk, I am allowed to do whatever I want at work, I just have to be there, I had the chapbook on the table, this nine year old kid was hanging around waiting for his mom, this kid talks a lot and says crazy shit whenever he comes in, his mom brings him by a lot, the kid saw Sam's chapbook and said out loud the title, "YUM YUM I CAN'T WAIT TO DIE"? Then he looked at me weird and said, "That's kind of stupid." in this incredulous way, I was afraid he was going to pick up the book and see curse words and things about having orgasms, he didn't, then he started repeating the phrase, "I'm not the only thing you can't stop." over and over and over again while he played with these poetry magnets on a file cabinet to spell out some sentence about MR. REAGAN AND MR. GORBECHEV doing something weird to a POTATO and HIS HEAD, I wish I had the sentence, kids are cool, I like other people's kids.









I am reading Nick Antosca's new novel MIDNIGHT PICNIC, it is brilliant, it is like CHILD OF GOD and William Gay but updated and easier to read, and really really fucking heavy, and with sex, I love it so far, I will have a review coming soon, it is coming out at the end of this month from IMPETUS PRESS.









I hate that if I don't drink a pot of coffee every day now I feel like my head is being crushed by rocks.








Last night I dreamed I had a CD slimline case full of the first disc of Smashing Pumpkins MELON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS, there were like 19 of them, the disc with red smiling sun on it, the rest of the cd case was empty, I can't remember anything else.

Oh boy the debate oh boy beer oh boy talking oh boy what is going to happen oh boy where is gas oh boy they are both talking and the same things are

Where is 'Couesin Larry'
Where is 'Coursin Larry'
Nothing happened to it yet yet
Where is 'Couesin Larry'

I saw a guy get hit by a truck last night, his head made a flood of tea, there were dogs lapping at the tea, the glare in the McDonald's sign went tinted slightly from the gyration of the blood on the air







God, RICKY'S ANUS, Ricky's body is becoming









Got 2 new books in the mail yesterday, one pornographic novel I should have read by now that I will discuss once I have an opinion, I have high hopes, I am a doubter, I haven't been able to pay attention to books lately, I hope these will help, the other is James Boice's MVP, I read an excerpt from Boice's forthcoming novel in the new Salt Hill, I really liked it, it actually felt DFWian without trying too hard to be DFWian, I had had MVP on my buy list for a while, after I read that excerpt I made it happen, I have high hopes, I am trying not to be a doubter








I REALLY WANT TO WRITE A LONG DIATRIBE-STYLE POST ABOUT HOW THE NEWEST RELEASE BY THIS ONE INDIE PRESS WHICH IS A WORK BY A SEMI FAMOUS AUTHOR IS AN EXAMPLE OF INADVERTENT REPRESSION AND ANTI FREE THINKING AND DESTRUCTIVE TO THE GENERAL WAY IN A MENTALLY DAMAGING QUASI BARACK OBAMA FAUX GLIMMER OF LIGHT, I'm not going to do it though because I don't want to get my panties dirty and I don't want to make so much noise now, I just want to be inner-violent in a pastel condition which will divert itself through my mental sternum








Rewatched Todd Solondz's PALINDROMES the other day, it is supposedly a sequel to WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, it has recurring characters, it did the 'several actors of varying size and shape and gender play the main character' before I'M NOT THERE did it, the character ranges from being played by a very young black girl who talks with an extreme lisp, an effeminate young boy, Jennifer Jason Leigh, an extreme large black woman, a preteen white girl, another girl, it had a lot of laughs that would make other people uncomfortable, I like how Solondz is the only director I know of who can have characters who talk in extreme POV ways on 'issues' and yet it doesn't feel like the director is trying to be something, I wonder what he is doing now, PALINDROMES features a rescue home of malformed or sick children who form a Christian pop group, moreso it is about abortion, it has Dr. Dan, it was fun to watch some










I watched the titles to the Shining in HD last night on an hd TV I need an HD TV it was totally wowwww owwwww I fell asleep to NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5 and had a dream that all of my dvds were on the lawn at my parents house in long racks because we'd moved the house innards outside, I wanted them back in, no one would help me, the sun was low in the sky there was a weird light, a van full of men pulled up and got out, I knew they were going to try to take my DVDs, I put one of the racks in the back of a white Jeep Cherokee, the men were all standing around me on the driveway not saying anything and not going for the DVDs, they were just looking at me with no expression, there was an extreme anxiety in me, they would not act and yet always seemed about to, I found an aluminum softball bat, I hit one of them in the face, it impacted the middle of his face and made a soft nudge between his eyes under which there was metal but he didn't flinch, the impact made a steely sound but did not bowl the man over, the bat shook in my hands, the men just kept standing there, I hit another one of the men, the same thing happened, there was something in their white van, the light was weird, I couldn't make anything happen, they were just watching me and I was afraid for my DVDs the most



Then they were gone and there was a guy I used to know in the street, I was dressed in a suit to go to high school, I was late, it was raining in the weird light now, the guy in the street wanted me to stop and talk to him, he was angry at me and seemed unraveled as if he could do anything at any moment, we talked, he maintained neutral anger, I was afraid he would do something to my parents when I left, he started up a hill and I got in a car and followed him trying to talk, we were both going very fast all of a sudden and shouting back at each other, the guy had a weird smeared look on his face, like he had hives, we came to a curve in the road and I turned but he did not and the wooden lip on the street threw him into a person's yard, in the yard there were little girls playing with their mother, the guy was bleeding, the wooden lip of the yard had these huge nails in it that had ripped his clothes and ripped huge gashes out of his flesh, he was bleeding from the head, the girls and the mother were looking, my friend got up and started toward them, he was naked from the waist down, his dick was hanging out in front of the girls, I saw him from behind him with the dick hanging down between his legs and the girls thereon further and his blood in his hair, I didn't know what to do, the mother went inside and left the girls outside, I made the guy sit down the blood was coming out of him a whole lot I used these cloths that were all over the place, I couldn't make the blood stop, the guy was watching me smiling, the girls were coming toward us in the yard

I should probably keep the dick/head dream to myself, the dream dictionary threw up a little

Finally got to sleep 4-5 hours last night after about 60 hours of being up. Had one scene of a dream so awful it made me come through my sleep and force me to wake myself up. Basically I was in a small room and there was a small person who had a head in which there was an impression of a dick. By that I mean the head was meant to hold a dick, there was an outline for it, and it fit inside its skull. Ok. Then there was this really huge fat muscle man with weird hair and he took the small person by the skull and was putting his dick into the head, but his dick was too big to fit inside it the way it was supposed to. The balls clicked into the mouth, but the center of the head had to like split open to receive the shaft and the face stayed intact in halves, eyes blinking. The large man continued to force his dick into the head receptacle. Like pulling on the small person's face and ramming and making it stretch and rip. It was a massive, weird looking dick. The small person was screaming and crying in pain about the way the dick was fitting into his head receptacle. I mean screaming in such revulsion, and the skin on him was ripping and the big man was sort of grinning in this expression of weird insistence and he had huge fat teeth with all this shit on them, and he kept fitting his dick into the head with all the damage. I was just there seeing it, I don't think I was actually in the room with them but I could see it. The sound of the small person screaming was so awful. Somehow I forced myself to wake up, I just stepped out of sleep, and I felt so disgusted and awful I felt afraid to go back to sleep though I knew I needed to, I was so tired. I thought about what if my dreams became so that I did not want to sleep. I don't remember what I dreamt about after that.

Nightmare, Novel, Allen Ginsberg

I am addicted to em-dashes. I have about half of a novella I was working on before the novel and it is stuffed end to end with those fuckers.

I am (I think) done with a good draft of the novel. Now.

Night before last I had the worst dream of my life. It lasted three days in dream time (though only about 2 hrs in real) and had thousands of scenes. The one scene I most vividly remember I was in a very large building with many floors that only had one glass elevator. Everyone knew something bad was happening to the air. Everyone was acting however they wanted as they thought the world was ending. My girlfriend was several floors up in my room. I knew men were doing things to her. I was trying to get on the elevator to go up and stop them but other people, including friends of mine, were intentionally jamming the controls so that they could keep me away. People all around me were beating the shit out of the walls and each other and breaking shit and taking shits and squealing and the building was huge and flat on the inside. My friends were laughing and sneering and they were waiting for their turn. I knew more of what they were doing but it is too disgusting to repeat.

The world did not end. Near the end of the dream I was given a reparations package containing $30.55 in loose change and a cookie sheet. There was a station outside my new shitty apartment manned by a small black man in a bellhop coat who gave me the paperwork I had to fill out to get the change. He was very polite. There was a small swimming pool right behind him. Then I was told to go pick up my car and they dropped me off in a lot where all the cars in the world had been relocated and I was supposed to find my car in the lot and it was very hot and I had a tricycle to ride. The lot went on forever in all directions, all cars in the light.

I think those are 2 scenes out of several thousands of scenes. I was trapped, and could not wake up and it all felt very real. I felt sick when I did finally wake up, really fully ill.

I swear the door just opened in the room where I am typing and there was no one there.

Adam Robinson is now offering a free copy of EL GREED by David NeSmith to the next 10 people who buy my chapbook from PUBLISHING GENIUS. I am still offering $1.50 toward the $4 price.

I watched I'M NOT THERE last night. I don't like Bob Dylan, but this movie was really good. Epic in a Scorsese way. It had Heath Ledger in it, that seemed somehow weird. Randomly, David Cross appears as Allen Ginsberg. He looks just like him. It made me laugh. I had to rewind it. Allen Ginsberg was the first writer who made me want to write. I am going to go read KADDISH again right now. It's been more than 10 years.

Here's Bill Burroughs and Ginsberg in their pajamas (photo by Patricia Elliott Marvin):

Bear Parade & Pushcart 3 & Dream

The new Bear Parade book small pale humans by daniel spinks is now released and it is excellent. You should go read it right now. It will take about 15-20 minutes and is very worth it.

Here are some of the lines I liked best:

'"You kept saying masturbate a kitten. Did you go on the internet again."'

'But I thought of my poor sperm just lying there on the Berber carpet. I couldn't abandon them. I took them and put them in an empty pickle jar, which I hid on my side of the closet next to all the Christmas gifts I still had to wrap.'

'She cut off a part of her pancake that had not been touched by syrup and wrapped it in a napkin. She held it with two fingers and made a face like she wanted to punch something in the throat.'

Those were actually chosen pretty arbitrarily. Most every line is excellent.

Go fucking read it, damn you.

While you're at it, if you haven't yet, read Tao Lin's essay on modern fiction, which is one of the best things I've read in a while.

3 AM nominated me for the Pushcart also this year, for my poem 'eventually i will be mostly lipid.' Thanks to Tao and the someone that helped him.

I have had extremely violent dreams the past two nights. They have been very long and realistic seeming while in the dream and emotionally assaulting. The last thing I remember before I woke up today was my father, who looked like Hulk Hogan, was in a dimly lit room where he'd been assaulting some woman who was supposed to be my mother but looked nothing like her. I'd been hiding in the other room watching him attack people and show his teeth for several real time hours in the dream. At the very end he saw me watching them and had an apple he was holding and was being very casual about how he had my mother straddled on the ground and was beating her and making her scream. He was trying to force the apple in her mouth but being all teasing about it and he let her take it away from him. She thought she'd gotten the upper hand. She was beating with him with the apple while I laid on the carpet near them watching and the light was still very low. My father looked up at me smiling while my mother beat his head with the fruit. Then he took out some matches and lit the stem of the apple and grinned even bigger and the stem of the apple started to burn like a fuse and my mother who did not look anything like my mother could not get the apple out of her hand.

Old dream log

I used to write down all my dreams as soon as I woke up. I need to start doing that again. I just found a log of dreams I wrote down from 2002 & 2003. I can surprisingly remember many of them very vividly. Certain scenes are still embedded. I can remember certain people from the dreams even though they were not people I knew in real life. Here are some I rather like:

(1) MALL WHERE THE WORLD ENDS
I am working as a security cop at a store in the mall. At some point I go down under the store to use the bathroom, and then receive an announcement that the world within a 5 mile radius of the store is going to be destroyed by radiation. I lead a crowd out of the store into an open air mall. We break into a candy store and begin hording food, then get on a subway train that will take us away from danger. The train runs over numerous people walking on the tracks, including a mermaid that is somehow swimming there. On the train Kid Rock and some other musician are sitting with a naked woman, who shows me her ass, and they tell me how good she is. When the train reaches its destination, we begin walking along a strip next to a number of people going to opposite direction very slowly in their cars. I talk to numerous people in the cars about what’s going on. My mother and sister are with me now. We run into one kid who has lost his mother. One of the men in the car with a huge family says they’ve been there for 3 weeks. Another large family is explaining to the whimpering children how they will have to eat tents to stay alive.

(2) CRUNCHES AND CARDBOARD CAR
I’m doing crunches on a cement block in front of Wheeler High School, waiting for people to get out of class. Finally they do and begin crossing the street to get their cars from the middle school across the street. I watch a guy and girl ride on a motorcycle and have an accident right in front of my parents' house, and they don’t get up. I try to go call 911 but they get up before I make it over there. I offer to take them home and go get in my cardboard car. By the time I come back they are gone, and it is night. I start going down the sidewalk to look for them, but can’t find them, and then start coming back. At some point I rise in the air and then turn around and see myself sitting in a line with 5 others on the sidewalk, playing wind instruments.

(3) KKK
On my way to school, I stop in my car in the rain to have lunch at an outdoor table. I run into Lindsey from Wheeler and two other girls on their way to class. As I am eating a group of black guys come up to me and start a conversation. Eventually they ask to see my driver’s license. I give it to them, and they make me get up and get in a black car. I think I am being kidnapped, but in the car I am told to put on a black uniform and facemask, and am then given a mace. We drive to a huge Waffle House and tent where there is a KKK / White Power rally going on. We are going to attack them. There are about 30 people with us, and we infiltrate through the crowd and begin hitting random people. Eventually I get separated from the group and go through a long path of trying to find them, including going through a plastic lobby that is too small for me.

(4) NAKED APARTMENT BUILDING
I am moving through a huge collection of looming apartment buldings. When I go into them, trying to find an old friends room, all the rooms have plate glass viewing windows, and inside them there are extremely gorgeous and overly tanned girls lying naked asleep in white sheets. Anytime that I stop to look at one of them they wake up and turn away from me or begin to scream out. I continually get lost in the halls and am told to leave by numerous random girls that somehow seem to be the leader of their areas. At some point I end up under an overpass and a Jamaican man comes to my window while I wait alone at red light, and taps on my window, tells me to watch myself.

(5) STRIP BAR
I’m working at a warehouse on the first day that it is being converted to a strip bar / music venue. I’m helping this redneck line up girls and bands to audition for performance roles. One guy is hired to beat the shit out of bands before they are allowed to audition, to make sure they are rough. I talk briefly to a girl wearing all brown and eating a root beer Dum-Dum.

(6) DEHYDRATED BABY
I am walking through the halls of my elementary school, waiting for a bus to come pick up and take me to my high school graduation. I am carrying a cup full of water with my infant son inside of it. Outside of the cafeteria, the cup is accidentally spilled and the baby begins to shrivel on the tile. I try to rehydrate it in another cup of water but it is too late, the baby is dead.

(7) TV CLASS & STILT WALKERS
I am guest lecturing at an elementary school on the benefits on television consumption. The kids, lined up against one wall, watch me unresponsively, not bothering to respond to my attempts to engage them in questions. They seem either sedated or scared. I rattle off propaganda about how memories are related to television programming in the mind. After the class, I go out into a Wizard of Oz type world, and head under a large bridge to a place where people are waiting outside of an open air stadium for a concert to begin. Three of the performers, Marilyn Manson, and two members of N’Sync, come out of a back entrance near us on stilts that literally make them stand almost 250 feet in the air, but they seem to have no trouble walking on them. Everyone gets excited and follows after them as they head down the street. A group of high school age girls call me over and one of them begins asking me a lot of questions, but it seems they are doing this to make fun of me. To try to impress them, I show them that I have Brad Pitt’s number in my cell phone, and then call him, only to find out that he is also outside the concert watching the stilt walkers.

(8) DRUGSTORE
Rolling around in the floor of a drugstore with a girl who is trying to get me to kiss her. Then sitting on a curb with William S. Burroughs, having a talk. He mentions The Wild Boys and I tell him that it is my favorite novel of his. He thanks me kindly.

(9) TEENAGE MASSACRE
I am walking down the street from my parents house, and I pass St. Catherine’s church. Their lot is covered with stacks of bloody teenage bodies, all dressed in blue jeans and t-shirts. People are walking around the yard of bodies, which must be in the hundreds of thousands, taking pictures and posing with the corpses. I keep walking past as if this is normal sight. I get to a mansion in the middle of a moat filled with pudding. Miriah and Lee are on a dried part of the pudding, painting it different colors.

(10) DISNEY ASSAULT
I’m at Disney World by myself, but it is more like a bunch of huge office buildings clustered together than how the park really is. I have all of my possessions carried with me in bags and its hard to walk around. I go down a flight of stairs to get to the AMTRAK, but instead it turns out to be a ride and people fill in behind me. I end up in an empty room where about ten other people come together and we start talking about things. Everything I say makes everyone laugh a lot. Matthew Broderick shows up and sits naked at a table. Then one of the girls there starts trying to assault me, and she has to be restrained. I fend her off with a torn bit of an aluminum can until she is put away inside a glass jar. Then I take the jar to be given to my lawyers.

(11) DREAM SKETCHBOOK
I fall asleep in an unfinished basement with an empty notebook in my hands. When I wake up the book is filled with all kinds of elaborate sketches that I must have done while I was asleep. The room is now filled with numerous people that I went to school with. I show them the book, then go upstairs to find my mother and show her. The sketches are all very odd (one of a parade of figures on the globe including multiples Jesuses, one of just faces in a flock floating forward, on and on). Then we try to go to a college campus, but the area between the campus and the house is overrun with bums who make it very dangerous. Riot police jumpkick certain bums in the face. One grabs my ass until I give him two dollars.