Back when I had a Blackberry phone, I would send myself notes:

In Chicago, but not Chicago. Children on leashes are a sign of the end of civilization. Indigenous peoples and others who live with the seasons understand that in the event of being raised by fools, a child may be carried or gently bound to delay the onset of walking.

* * * *

War with angels and epic battles for heaven and hell and the role of humans in the universe. Warm beds, soft pop music, and electric fans humming seem the kinds of things that prevent epics from coming near, adventure is a skittish woodland creature that unnerves around comfort and bolts at the first sign of complacency.

* * * *

Weary legs and snappish mouth
Crinkling corners blurry eyes
High red rosy once now past
Bursus burstus grounded goo

Peeling down degloving handtips
Flaking phalanges rubbed leather black
Haste-cut nails lengthen into obtuse angles and lonely, open triangles

Fingerprints lifted and filed on file
Whorls sworls stored as timeless as the budget as forever as long as technology recognizes hands

"Well all the time you spend trying to get back what's been took from you, more is going out the door."
-No Country For Old Men

It has never been a secret, my being a nerd. This can be detrimental to my social life in surprising ways. For instance, tonight I was late for a party because I was dreaming I was attending Bladerunner Academy.

As I said, surprising ways. Of course, the next time anyone needs me to figure out if someone is a replicant or not, I'll be ready. At some parties, this happens a lot. So I hear. Or I think I may have heard.

Whatever it is, I'll be ready.

Learning about the world mainly through books, as I have, leaves me stuck with a geography of time along with space. Traveling becomes difficult. Kelly and I went to Monterey, California. We visited Cannery Row, but it wasn't Cannery Row, not the place Steinbeck told me about. This was no bustling, stinking, raucous port of fishy industry. This was mostly a series of shops and restaurants and a really cool aquarium.

So now my Cannery Row became everyone else's Cannery Row.

My Los Angeles suffered a similar fate. It is not Philip Marlowe's Los Angeles, where if they look like a lowlife they probably are, and if they look high class then they're probably worse. I walked those streets at night and I didn't get hit with a tire iron, not even once.

What's this world coming to.

Historically, historians have realized that anything a writer writes while drunk is crap. For instance:

"Sir, I will punch you."

"Yes, but I propose that in punching me, you are really punching yourself."

"I accept this risk."

PUNCH

End Scene.

The other day I walked in the living room and found Remy sitting on the floor reading The Necronomicon. I have to remember to quit leaving that thing lying around. He looked up at me. "Monsters?"

"Yes, monsters. But those monsters are a bit advanced for you. Those are a bit advanced for me."
I put it back with the DVDs and we went off to find something else to do.

My mother took them to church with her on Sunday. I'm not a huge fan of church, but one thing the Catholic Church does pretty well is monster hunting. The Old Testament is wild times; there are magical creatures, talking animals, curses, and there was magic, real magic all over the place. Any king worth his salt mine had a few soothsayers, a couple of magicians, and at least one ancient evil chained up in the dungeons.

Jesus hunted monsters too. Well, more demonic force types, not the corrupted nature monsters we deal with nowadays. Jesus cast demons out of people all the time. He makes it look easy, but ripping a multi-dimensional entity off without destroying the soul is hard. It's not like you just show the demon the door and out it goes.

Jesus was something of a contradiction as a monster hunter, since there is at least one documented case of him creating the undead. Maybe he trained it or something, but I can't say I approve.

The Catholic Church may prepare them for monsters conceptually, but their methods are obsolete. Demons and devils and fallen angels and all that died out a long time ago. They had their heyday, but humans have gotten pretty good at this evil stuff all on their own. No demand, no supply. Capitalism strikes on the spiritual level.

Maybe this is why the Catholic Church is so intent on retaining its own monsters.

So no Necronomicon for the twins. They're not yet four years old. Then again, this may be the time to focus on the transdimensional stuff because they're nowhere near ready to engage any physical monsters. Mostly I teach them identification and evasion. Like the kelpie, common to Scotland and Ireland but they can turn up in any body of water.

The foolish wikipedia page does not say how to escape when you are stuck to their glue-like skin (besides cutting off the body part). The solution isn't pleasant, but a far sight better than being drowned and eaten. If you are stuck on the back of a kelpie and it is heading for water, you must soil yourself. You should be pretty terrified; use this to your advantage. Vomiting will also work.

The kelpie responds pretty much the same way anyone else would. Once you are tossed from its back, get as far away from that body of water as possible. Most kelpie can't get too far from the water. The kelpie is vain and will be furiously cleaning itself so you should be fine.

Have I mentioned this before? I may have. I have been focusing on monsters that are particularly dangerous to children. You're next, Church.

One of the most difficult aspects of my relationship with writing is my inability to avoid the inevitable. Though I don't believe in Fate...well, I sort of have vague leanings towards reductionism and a clockwork universe. Though I don't believe in Fate in some romantic astrological way, writing feels like I'm moving along one linear timeline with a definite end. There is a finite amount (unknown, but finite) that I'm ever going to write (or live/laugh/love/what have you but here specifically "write") and I can only move forward on this line, writing along, a spider descending a single strand of silk towards the ravenous salmon of uncertainty.

What?

There are times, like this time, that I know what I want to write but I don't want to actually go through it. It reminds me of jumping off cliffs into water and I know I'll be fine hell I've already done it three times already that's why we drove all the way up here to Sedona...and there is always the moment of hesitation. Looking over the edge into murky green water, trying to remember to jump far enough to avoid the underwater rock, and hesitating, always hesitating. And the spiral of doubt because it is the hesitation that could make this all go horribly wrong this time.

I'm already up here, and climbing back down would be harder than jumping. I may be a coward, but I am a lazy coward.

Kelly and I had flown to Orange County to go to Disneyland with her mother and sister. It was Spring Break and many flights were full. As I fly on a space available basis, Kelly had gone ahead and I, as a single passenger, would be much more likely to snag an open seat. It worked out pretty well; I only had a couple of hours to wait before my flight. I enjoy the airport. I met people, we talked about spring training and the recent Paul McCartney show (which I did not attend but I would have gone with you if you'd asked), and local spots for drunken antics. I was an expert on exactly one of these things, but that did not stop me from giving my opinions and making claims about the way things were "back in my day".

A shiny metal counter with stools and electrical outlets was positioned awkwardly by an equally shiny metal pillar. It was designed for people with laptops, but as I am brown of skin and larger of bulk most people with laptops tend to let me sit where I want. It seemed like a good time to write. I pulled out an empty notebook and did so.

This is where it all ties in to what I mentioned in the beginning. All the things I'd only thought about writing queued up nicely and orderly, and then waited. They didn't have to wait long. Or it didn't seem long. I actually took a little over an hour for the few lines that follow and when I finished my hand hurt and my back hurt and everything seemed brighter in there.

Just two pages. Not even real pages but dinky little composition notebook pages. I snapped the thing shut and threw it back into my backpack.

We had a good time at Disneyland, as always. Kelly loves the childlike wonder, and I love pointing out the elitism, embedded racism, and anti-semitism sprinkled throughout the park. I didn't even look at the notebook until we were home and unpacking. I re-read it and sighed. Yes, this is what I had been avoiding. But now it is done and let's see if I cleared that underwater rock.

This is the content of those two pages:

When my little brother died, he left me alive with and with a sunburnt soul. Thirteen months have passed and still no tan. Sandpapered surfaces still surprise me in odd places. Bumps and brushes snag and smear. Dry, curling edges flake into my throat, suck into my lungs and take to the air again. Who I was falls like ash every time I use my new voice, the higher, huskier, revolution of a vinyl record left too long in the sun. Honeybee honey when the bees've all gone, pouring slowly with amber crackles. An over-aware voice finding its feet by coasting to subject to subject to subject. All the credible noises of interest belonged to the old voice.

Each day after his death, dawn finds a thousand archers stringing a thousand bows. At their feet are featherless arrows, straight as truth, with heads of rusting iron. Ever are they ready.

His death and my shrieking, blistered birth into an armorless world.

He would want you to be happy. It doesn't matter what he wants, he is dead.

Keep him in your heart. He is he is and there is no space for the blood.

Come to church to celebrate his spirit. Were I ever to meet your god, I would tear away his throat and stare as the blood soaked through his beard.

There is no balm here. The cure for the flesh calls for a poultice of bone.

My eyes see farther but no better. Death's passing smears a static blur to their edges and makes an abyss of their eyes. These are the traces of the oldest sadness. I still feel light enter my pupils but I do not feel it strike. Perhaps we are all sharing the same pupil, a massless dark that has enough for everyone.

It is harder now to be afraid. Fear still requires life, pain still requires nerves, screaming still takes so very much breath.

* * * * * * *

It was supposed to be about a pony.

So, yeah, that's out of the way and I can move along to the next bit of writing that awaits me. Not that it will necessarily be on a different subject or not use so many commas, but it won't be that. It's done, it is written, and now I can write the next thing.

What is written is always in the present, and this further confuses my timeline. Sliding along this path, turning everything into Nows before it can become Thens. These things I write pile up in my lap, in my arms, increasing my mass as I approach my ending. Well, wherever down the strand my ending is, I hope it is huge and maybe full of gasoline. If there isn't a kick-ass explosion that can be seen from space, know that I will be sorely disappointed and probably blame everyone but myself.