More bad news about cell phones. The phone companies are manipulating your feeble, human brain.

This explains a lot. I can recall many instances in which I was directly frustrated by these exact issues: full signal, then when you actually make a call, no signal. Full battery all day, half battery for an twenty minutes and then no battery soon after that.

I shaved carefully and put on my suit. I had an excuse to look my best and I knew, I knew you might be there. I sat alone in the front row and examined the set. I was right, you walked in with a friend and called hello to some people in one of the rows behind me. I stood up then, and turned.

She looked directly at me and stopped. I looked her in her eyes as I've done a hundred times before and tried to remember to smile. She didn't recognize me, not all of me, and our eyes passed that millisecond moment when a glance becomes a stare.

Each sliver of a second was a shard of mirror. In one I was reflected as woeful, left alone and unknown, a stranger now to her memory. In another I am happy, looking in her eyes again and seeing something other than a woman wronged in heart and mind. I was just a vague familiar, and I confess I was satisfied with that, or at least I mean to be.

I've not experienced this before, this being forgotten. It's an odd satisfaction; I meant to stay away and I must have done it well. Of course it helped that I was long of hair and partly bearded, wearing glasses and not dressed like a scruffian.

But I needed exactly that, this time. Now I can accept that this, these dreams of her and regrets and wondering what I could have been, if I had left the best part of me when I left her, this is mine and only mine. She doesn't need to know these things. Time and a change of grooming habits have let me become nobody. And after years of being that other person to her, nobody is a name I accept with gladness. And if hubris does not bid me shout out my true identity, perhaps I can sail safely away to some port beyond where I will not break every promise to change.

Some place where it won't matter that I still love you.

I step out into the blood-warm night to smoke a cigarette. It's the slowest suicide I know besides getting up everyday to live my life. Clouds sit fat and heavy looking close enough to touch. The moon is somewhere behind them and they glow, faintly. They cover the whole sky except for one big hole where a god must have punched through on its way back to heaven. I'm no Christian, but I don't blame him for leaving. Anyone would leave if they got the chance.

I don't worry about death. There isn't much else worth more thought and I give it plenty every time I go out on a case. A slow death is all right with me. The quick ones don't give you enough time to say goodbye but it ain't like you got much time to regret that either. In those last moments when I know I've bought it, I suppose everything will seem so beautiful. Paying attention is good in my line of work but really I try to notice these things because on that last day one of them might be the most beautiful of them all. Maybe even one of the ugly, pitted memories that hunker down in the base of my brain and only pop up their head to kiss me goodnight or to blow laconic breaths at the trailing smoke.

I drop my cigarette out into the dead grass. It doesn't catch; it'll never catch. I grind it under my heel like an accomplice. The hole in the sky is smaller. Gotta get while the gettins good.

I want to kill myself a little more but the phone rings. I heave myself through the window and back into my office. I'm annoyed but that's good because whenever I get a call this late I don't have to feel bad about not being polite.

Nobody's ever paid me to be polite.

I snatch up the phone on the fifth ring. "Grim Reaper here, what do you want?"

"...Grim? What? I-I'm sorry, this must be the wrong-"

"Lady, it's a joke, and the best I got at this hour. I'm Jim. What do you want?"

"I'm...I need your help, uh, Jim."

"You got it. Come by my office."

"What? Now?"

"Would you be calling me right now if this was something that could wait?" There's a scuff while she puts her hand over the receiver. I hear another voice, maybe a guy. There's no response from her. I pull out a cigarette and kiss it between my lips. She takes her hand off.

"Okay. At your office?"

"At my office. Just let yourself in." She's quiet. I hold the phone up to my ear with my shoulder and fish in my pockets for a book of matches. "Ma'am, I'm sure I can help you. I just don't like the phone so much."

"All right." She hangs up, click. I leave the phone off the hook and stick it in the top drawer of the desk so I won't hear that droning alert. The drawer below that contains a broken revolver and a fully functioning bottle of Faust's Single Malt Scotch. I find them to be equally reliable.

I start towards the window and catch my reflection. I didn't shave today and around my eye is still yellow-green from my last satisfied customer. I straighten my collar and adjust my thin black tie. My reflection grins back at me; a shorn-headed brown guy who looks like he hits the bottle as much as the gym. Cigarette dangling from my lip, I salute. "James Reaper, Private Investigator, reporting for duty sir!" I give him the finger and clamber out under the heavy blanket of night.

How do I resolve my...mislike of Wal-Mart with my desire for fun new activities for the twins?















This is how.

We took it relatively easy on the poor, discriminatory corporation. It was a valuable field exercise. At times I would instruct Ender or Remy to put an item back where they got it, not to touch certain items, and to walk closely with me. Mostly they listened. I do not want them to assume that they can act this way whenever they walk into a store. That's another reason I chose Wal-Mart; nobody will give me a second glance if I whoop their collective butts up and down the aisles.

One day, when they're ready, we three will get ourselves kicked out of Wal-Mart. And every Wal-Mart. When they're ready. I'm not sure what we'll have to do to get kicked out. I felt that I let them go much crazier than I've ever dared, but we got no scrutiny from the employees whatsoever. Some people remarked on their cuteness and asked the usual twin questions but that was all. I filmed a bit, also, and my plan at that time was to say I was doing a sociology project for class. If pressed, I would say my major was in Projects.

So the plotting begins. I think I can dress them up in Wal-Mart brand winter clothes and send them into the freezer section. Not the aisles, I mean opening the door and running around inside the actual freezer.

That may not even work, because I plan to hide immediately and watch. If and when some employee actually responds, I'll run up panting and say "There you are! I've been looking all over for you two! What in good heavens are you doing?!"

Another plan is to put them in little stained wife-beaters and jeans and then let them play with cans of beer. Once again, I'll be hiding.

I'm not sure what else to do, but the possibilities are as endless as the supply of Chinese children living in factory houses that produce most of Wal-Mart's crap.

I know it won't really solve anything, and probably only impact the immediate employees, and that essentially I am just being an ass and attempting to rationalize it, but hey, I have to set an example.

I'm not sure what the future holds for my twins, or what challenges they will face. One day, they will have to look into their own souls and decide if they will use their powers for good, or for awesome.

In the meantime, I plan to get them kicked out of all the places I don't want them to go.

I wonder if I could get them into a strip club. One by the airport, and I could say I flew in to spend my one weekend a month with my kids and why you giving me a hard time, half these dames got kids anyway?

The audacity of hope, indeed.

[from the journals: 7-18-08; 2115]

Pagan Angels slither underneath the cemetery leaves. Long sleeves and pants in the summertime. This is my stylistic legacy. Caked mud on my Gore-tex boots. This is not goodness. It is not goodness I seek right now. Tangled in my wires and mired in the conversation of others. My fingers do not want rings. Decorations are best kept under the skin. These still suffer damage and are seldom stolen.

Buoyant we.

Today while I slept and dreamt I had conversations I would have had on my cell phone, were my service active.

Vivid voices and likely words woke me with its conviction. To sleep, then, to continue our conversations.

Music drowns out the conversations around, avid discussions of which film to see or if there's time to eat before.

With my aural blinders on I imagine they speak of having dessert as the first course for the rest of their lives, in case they do not survive to the end of dinner.

That couple there speaks in hushed tones, planning a conspiracy of theatre, friends and family stumbling into passages of Borges.

Another calls a friend over to where he has been waiting and asks his help to shatter every mirror in his house.

A woman in a red dress licks ice cream off her finger. The evening is warm and the shop was out of napkins. My people today carry vast technologies in their pockets and no handkerchiefs. She listens to another woman monologue about her master plan to rule the world by controlling all vectors of disease and unleashing viral horrors on all who oppose her. The woman in the red dress has finished her ice cream and stares into her paper bowl, nodding.

Two boys swagger along with skateboards under their arms. A girl in a pink tank top clutches her purse, intent on a similar rolling along.

A brick fireplace fed by gas chatters angrily, a funeral pyre jailed by fountains on this side and sofas on that.

A man, stocky with small spectacles, points to the ground as he and his companion walk over it, noting the spot where on the exact opposite side of the world, his mother met the man who was his father, but is not his father now.

A girl in a striped shirt, jeans, and several strands of fat beads, glistening black plastic like spilt oil on a seal's coat. She paws at the air over her shoulder to beckon her friend along. She assures her that spontaneous combustion happens once every twelve seconds, but only once, so it may be years before one of them bursts into flame, if ever. Besides, she adds, milkshakes will lower our core temperature.

A woman in the movie theater points to a seat set apart from the others. "They usually don't last long after they've been separated from the herd>"

I hope this is not true of all things.

Perhaps when we are in our formative years, the teeniest tiniest babies, we need to love completely and without thought of ourself, so that one day, perhaps, when we grow up, we can recognize the feeling if it ever comes again.

I'm going to see The Dark Knight in the Cine Capri at Tempe Marketplace at 10:30 pm. I've seen the film once and now I'm ready to handle it in all its majesty. If all goes well, I plan to see it in the IMAX. If all goes well.

I'm going alone, because I'm lonely, and I hate being lonely around people. After I "officially" stop babysitting my nephews (during which I usually jackass around on the computer while they jump on my bed, on the dog, and steal things from my room) my solitude seems more profound. I'm enjoying it now, because it is a Special Thing when I open my door after a time within and the babies, thus hearing it, dash over yelling wildly and try to climb into my arms.

I try not to take it for granted. I look at my parents now and think how strange that they carried me once, that I would sleep in their arms and run to them when I was hurt. I suppose they changed and I changed both, but really I believe that I think I am above such things, too dignified to admit that I was ever loved them so, that they were ever my whole world, my titans.

Rather, I tell myself that if ever some extreme situation arises, I would rush to their defense, fight off villains and scale obstacles to save them. Why do I believe I can move mountains for them, then, when I do not move the pebbles in their path everyday?

I will think on this.