BRADKELLYESQUE

The gents discuss couches, Terence McKenna, butlers and the Great Game of Eurasian geopolitics.

With Kautzman in NYC, Kelly in Rochester (NY) and Slater in St. Paul.

a: It has been a migratory life, and I've been circling around this thing in such slow motion you can hardly tell. From Detroit to Boise, Idaho, to Austin, Texas, to Denver, Colorado and now on to Rochester, New York where I've only been once before—trying to see the place through a veil of snow, trying to imagine myself there come green grass and porch-weather if, indeed, it ever comes. This last place, I barely even tried to meet people and I don't know that the final record will register my presence there in mountains. A faint imprint in glacial mud that'll slip a little further each season. Back home, I suppose they still know me but the face I show them my once-a-year is growing indistinct. The Internet was supposed to fix that, keep me in touch, but it's only provided the means and every day that passes here passes there just as easily. Just as unremarked. Consider all hatchets buried. All water flowed under that bridge and its single rope unburned.

b: But you have to leave home. The thought of someone missing that experience fills me with the same kind of wintry sadness as it does to think of people who die virgins—to sex or books or apostasy. Now that we're almost past all that coal mining and truck driving, the only valid road to becoming a modern human runs through some far-flung city and stays there awhile. Considering all the things you are—some arrived-at solution to a biotic algorthim of environment and genetics—it seems the only thing you can change is your surroundings.  Anything to chunk up the grindings of destiny—isn't that supposed to happen no matter what? But here's the other thing: move far away for years, move to postcard states for a decade, and all those adventures will happen. Heartbreaks and promotions and hangovers and weekends-away and pivotal emails, urinalyses, and beverage choices. And when you come back, as I suspect we all do, even for a visit: what's remained the same about you is as close as the world will let you measure yourself. But then again, maybe you'll learn on the road that you shouldn't be measuring yourself to begin with.

Where the self-important rich go to die.

From Only WTF

Messrs. Kautzman, Kelly and Slater discuss the surrealist weekend past, so-called “royal” babies, and the epic realization that “The tendrils of darkness have crept in and permeated all levels of everything.”

For a limited time, I’m offering my weirdo sci-fi story--failed space missions, distorted time, and one strange version of the future--for the low low price of FREE. Check out this DISQUIET finalist, give me a review, observe the fifth dimension!

An excerpt: 

Kali, the Goddess of Destruction and Change. He might as well believe in her; he has the time. Kali's role in all this, among other things, is to obliviate you. And after you are stretched and smashed by the inevitable gravity of her black hole, you reconstitute dripping with the epiphany that nothing she has killed ever mattered, that all the things you were and wanted existed as mere illusion. He thinks the slow and long is how she works him and he waits for the realization. They say she is also the Goddess of Time.

It's hard to remember now, but Chip used to have fantastic dreams: buildings the height of mountains and mountains straining to poke their icy crowns into outerspace, blackwater swamps teeming with prehistoric life, holes in the earth that could carry him clean through to the other side, abandoned highways cutting some cursive protest to the cosmos in letters a thousand miles tall . . . But he never quite found these, out in the world, and Morgan said it was because he never sought them. One has to look in order to see just as one has to sleep in order to dream.

This episode of the Twilight Zone has a few uncanny similarities to my story Slow and Long (get a copy for your Kindle). Totes unintentional.

An Excerpt: