none of this is any different from a broken bowl in a field of wheat

Lee Marvin Gets His Ass Kicked in Denver
by Nathan Tyree
All day I pace in my shit box apartment and smoke cigarettes and think that I shouldn’t have a drink even if I do want one. I play with ideas like taking a nap or cutting my wrists, but never quite get it together enough to do either. Then, all other options exhausted, I watch vapid teevee shows until I think my eyes will melt. Finally I decide to go out and see what the city has to offer.
It must be after two in the morning when I wander in to the quick stop to get a bite to eat. I can see the clerk behind the counter eyeing my long hair as if it’s a sign that I’m likely to rob the place and leave him gut shot and bleeding to death in the alley out back. His eyes are easy to read: spic is what those eyes say. I know that he’s wondering if I speak English and imagining me wading across the river to steal his job. I fix him with a cold stare and clench my jaw, then find my way to the cooler to get a can of Coke. With the Coke freezing against my palm I start looking for something substantial to fill the emptiness in my gut. For some reason I decide that a Mars bar will do the trick. Approaching the counter I realize that the greasy clerk hasn’t taken his eyes off me for a second and I think that it could be fun to fuck with this guy.
“Can I get anything else for you?” He doesn’t smile as he asks the obligatory question.
“Just all the money in the register,” I say under my breath.
I see real fear in his eyes as he says “What?” His jaw vibrates and his frame tenses, ready for the gun slipped from a jacket pocket.
“Pack of Camels and a box of condoms,” I say as if that was what I had said before.
“Oh,” he says belying a level of relief that he didn’t mean. He gathered my items and pounded the numbers into the register. “That’ll be ten seventy-five.”
I toss some bills on the counter, grab my stuff and walk out the door. I can feel the clerk’s eyes on me, taking not of exactly where I fall on the height chart. On the other side of the glass I turn back to look at him. He’s stopped watching me and picked up the book he was reading. I can just make out that it’s Music for Iguanas. I smile for an instant then head up the street. I need a shower, but don’t want to go home yet. Walking seems like a good idea, but I can’t think of any reasonable destination so I tear open the candy bar and begin chewing without tasting. When it’s gone I drop the wrapper on the ground even though I know that I shouldn’t. I can’t help it. Fuck the environment, I think, what’s it ever done for me.
I’ve turned south without realizing that I had decided on a direction. There’s a woman coming up the sidewalk. She spots me and hugs her purse close like a child as we pass. I consider lunging at her just to make the bitch piss herself, but I let it pass and keep walking.
I miss Helen. She’s been gone almost a week and I can’t get her out of my head. She’s most of the reason that I’m in the sort of shape I am. She always said that I was just too angry; too unsettled. Look at it, I’d say, I’m stuck here in this. Just because my skin is sort of dark, everybody thinks I’m an illegal. It never occurs to them that my parents were born here. And so what if I was a fence jumper. This place is all fence jumpers anyway. None of that could calm her. She just couldn’t take me being me. Anyway, she walked and I miss her.

Devs is presented as a mystery.  At the start of the show we meet Lilly (Sonoya Mizuno) and Sergei (Karl Glusman), a young couple who both work for a large tech company called Amaya. Lilly works in encryption and Sergei works in A.I.  Sergei is given a large promotion, the chance to work in a division called ‘Devs”. We learn that Devs is very secretive. No one knows what they do there.  Sergei is led to Devs by Forest ( Nick Offerman), the CEO of Amaya.

 

 

Past the alleys and gutters I’m still walking. There isn’t much activity this late. All the little insects have scurried off to their homes and only the predators remain on the street. A guy on the corner asks me if I want anything. A few years ago it would have been crack. Now it’s meth. I don’t want either so I just keep moving. When I landed here I thought this city was a mass of opportunity and chance. It isn’t. It took me a few months to land in a menial job that was supposed to be temporary. I’ve been doing that temp job for four years and I can’t see the end anymore.
My dad used to take me to movies when I was a kid. He loved westerns and action movies. Dad always talked about the rugged individual: the guy who was tough and smart and could accomplish anything if he tried hard enough. He insisted that those movies were all metaphors for that idea. Lee Marvin played a series of characters that my father made into personal heroes. Then he tried to make those characters my messiah. In the end it was all a bunch of bull shit.
Eventually I fall back to my apartment and crash for the night. Tomorrow will be better.

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Cigarette burns

The problem with punching yourself is that you instinctively hold back. Even if you don’t want to, you pull the punch. Your hand just will not hit your own face with the same force it reserves for the faces of others. This is a real problem. After awhile I gave up the hitting. For a time I toyed around with cutting myself. Apparently this is some sort of fad. Teenage girls compete to see who can inflict the most damage on their own arms.

Cutting, however, has a down side. It’s messy. Even a slight slice oozes blood. You have to bandage it right away. Then you must clean up the stray drops that have found their way onto the furniture. Then, days later you can accidentally re-open the wound, and you have more cleaning to do.

Cigarettes are better. The first time you touch a lit cigarette to your arm, you have to do it quickly. You will find that you pull away automatically. Still, it works well. The pain is searing. Intense. The skin melts. Even after the cherry red ash is pulled away, the pain remains. The blister rises immediately. Then, after it pops, a hole forms in your arm. It takes weeks to heal. The burn creates a lovely scar, which serves to remind you that you are still alive. Sort of.

With practice you can hold the heat against your skin longer. Do it slowly. It hurts more this way. It’s best to drag the process out. Pain brings a rush of endorphins. It snaps you back to life.

I was busy working on the cigarette trick. She was already half way out the door. It comes quickly. The darkness. The need. The hunger. She was talking, but I wasn’t listening. I had shut her out. It was better that way.

Standing in the bedroom door, her eyes sparkling with anger, cool, soft light streaming around her like some diaphanous corona, she looked unreal. She looked like some sort of fairy tale princess. Just a little goose girl, about to alight from her place, and fly away. She was really very beautiful. But I couldn’t see it. Not then.

I was shrouded by the darkness of the bedroom. Hunched on the floor. She couldn’t see what I was doing. She didn’t know. That was best. If she knew I was hurting myself, she’d try to make me stop. I couldn’t stop yet. It didn’t hurt enough yet. I had burned a hole deep in my forearm, and decided to work on another spot.
“Are you listening to me?”

I wasn’t. I couldn’t. Everything about her was bringing me misery. I  couldn’t smell her hair from where I was, but I knew how it would smell. Like violets. Depression doesn’t hurt. Cigarette burns hurt.

“I’m trying to explain. Listen to me”.

“No.”

“Will you please listen?”

“Why?”

Depression feels like nothing. That’s the part no one understands. It is deep, black, nothing. You feel dead. Empty. There really isn’t a metaphor that can do it justice. Pain is better. Anything is better. Drugs, sex, self mutilation, these are all just ways to stave off the hollow, rotting flesh, empty, dead skin sack feeling that drains all the color from the world.

“Damn it. John, I love you. I’m sorry. I just want to explain what happened”.

Suicide is not a real option. Death just seems like more of the same nothingness. Agony, now that is an improvement.

For a time I played with the idea of cutting off my own fingers. But eventually I’d run out of digits, then where would I be? I’d have to find something else to excise, and who knows where it would all end.

She turned. She had given up on getting me to understand. She was leaving. This was final. Gone. I didn’t want her to go. But, I couldn’t work my mouth to tell her to stay. I really fail in this area.

So, as she made her final exit stage right, I lit another cigarette, and went to work on the other arm.

-Nathan Tyree

This story has appeared in The Coffee Faucet and Dogmatika.

You won't believe where number 7 is now

Our good friends at This Couch Thing are covering Devs. You should check it out. You should catch up with all the cool stuff that This Couch Thing does.

Also, don't forget that the world is a weird and dark place filled with terror.Bloodfest

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Port is wine and zeus drinks it

camp in the
tree outside your window and shave with broken glass so that you wont hear the ants eating their way out through my skin. I want to apologize to my blood. It isn’t the blood’s fault that it keeps me alive. In fact, if my blood had any choice in the matter I am certain that it would flee my body and go live in a Golden Retriever on a farm somewhere. Through the window I watch you undress. Your body is too small for your size and I want to gut you, hollow you out and live inside your hollowed out body. Someday I will give up on this. For now I will watch you sleep and think about dismantling your eyes.
Listen to Elliot
Smith and think about how stars die alone in the vacuum of space. They must get terribly sad . Imagine their pleas to no one and find that you are well on your way to believing in nothing. Western literature has primed you for nihilism. Mort de Credit . You strip naked and walk along a wire made of walrus entrails and use an umbrella to balance. Below you is a flaming lake of dying stars.

I decamp from
your tree and move to Tupelo where the news tells of a rhinoceros escaped from the zoo terrifying the poorer residents of the town’s outskirts communities where they live in mud huts and shotgun shacks. To feel clean, even, straight, I shave my head and get a tattoo that says “There is No Magic” across my forearm. The tattoo artist has a lisp and almost misspells my ink. I want to gut him and hollow him out and live inside his body drinking cheap whisky all day. Instead I look for a job sweeping up after eyeless men in a bar downtown. It is my job to maintain the dank. It’s a decorating choice.

You will find
yourself looking out your window, naked and not hollowed out, searching your tree for my shape, which is your shape with more meat, and wishing that I was still there. Fuck you, though. I’ve moved on. I collect snakes and carnival glass and green stamps and dream of a day when I will be able to forget your broken, bruised, small frame. On the street a man with squid tentacles in place of his face asks me for a dollar to buy a drink and I give him the razor blades from my pocket. Every night, alone in my apartment drinking Four Roses I call the Eff Bee Eye and confess to being the Zodiac killer. This despite the fact that Zodiac started killing four years before I was born and despite the fact that I have never seen San Francisco. They want to believe me.

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Everyone needs something
to believe in. Even dying stars must think of something greater than themselves as they collapse into singularity. They can take solace in knowing that their mass will curve space-time and draw a colloquy of matter to its end. The crows understand this instinctively.

I deserve a little more.

I am trash, but
even trash needs to be wanted or loved. We discard it to the politic worm and the men who will siphon methane to power factories that make the machineries of death. Like the stars, your used cup from Starbucks deserves the belief that it serves a higher purpose. Maybe enough Starbucks cups could warp space-time and pull us all into oblivion.

Maybe we would
mistake all those discarded cups for God.

Seven times jon favreau

Don't worry, you're gonna figure it out.  That's what he said to me.

And then his head came right off.

Number five looks like you

Philosophers have long wrestled with what has come to be known as the “Mind-Body Problem;” the question of whether we, as humans, are merely physical, material creatures or if we are possessed of some non-physical mind (soul or spirit are often used synonymously with mind). This open question has developed into one of the greatest schisms in the history of modern thought.# The partisans in this battle are aligned on three sides: materialists, dualists and idealists. The eminent auteur George A. Romero has quite brilliantly aligned himself on the materialist side of this fight with the latter entries in his Dead film series. A careful watching of both Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead makes this point almost excruciatingly clear. In this discussion the first order of business is to define the sides in the ongoing fight over the question of the soul. As was stated earlier, there are three sides: Idealism, Materialism and Dualism. We will need to explore each of them separately. Idealism We will look at Idealism# simply so that we may dismiss it almost out of hand. The Idealist believes that there are only minds and thoughts created by minds. To make it clear, the Idealist denies that there are any material objects or physical beings in the whole of the universe. A cursory examination of the idealist philosophy reveals that it is largely absurd as well as being psychologically unsatisfying. Even if we were to ignore those two highly persuasive facts, we would still have to contend with the problem posed by temporal constancy. The idealist must believe that the chair that he sits in is not, in fact, a chair but rather merely an idea in his mind which he has mistaken for a material object in the shape of a chair. This seems barely on the outskirts of plausibility until we consider the following scenario: You enter a room and arrange the chairs in an odd configuration, then write down the precise location of each chair before exiting the room. An hour later a person that you have had no contact with then enters the room and writes down the location of each chair in the room. If the two of you come together and compare notes you will learn that you have observed the same configuration of chairs. If you have each only mistaken your own private thoughts for material objects shaped like chairs then it seems that you should observe different things. In this way Idealism knocks out its pins and collapses upon itself. It was never really taken seriously by anyone anyway and has few partisans. The other two sides in this battle have much more power behind them. Materialism Materialism holds that a person is an animal. We are, the materialist claims, merely material, physical beings. Nothing more and nothing less. The mind, the materialist says, is an effect of the physical brain. The materialist insists that there is no soul or spirit and that what we call ‘mind’ is merely a series of electrical and chemical reactions within that self same brain. Dualism The Dualist would agree with the materialist that man is a material being, a physical animal. But, the dualist claims, in addition to the physical components man also is possessed of a non-physical mind (spirit or soul works just as well here). The dualist says that it is this non-physical aspect that is responsible for consciousness, thought and our knack for ethical decision. Those are the three sides in the mind-body discussion. The Living Dead George A. Romero is a film maker best known for his zombie genre movies. Romero’s Zombie films are: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead. These films all take place in a universe where humanity has been over run by a plague of flesh eating zombies. These zombies are previously dead humans that have been resurrected by some process that is never explained to the audience. In each film a small band of human survivors attempt to outlast or out fight the undead cannibals# that stalk them. The first two entries in the series# are both extraordinary entertainment and fascinating satire# but fail to reach the philosophical heights that the latter films would reach. Day of the Dead features a zombie named Bub who is the subject of certain behavioral experiments. In the course of the film Bub demonstrates the ability to learn, to remember things from his past and to use objects (one is tempted to say tools, but that seems to miss the point of a phone in a world where there is no one left to talk to). Near the end of the film Bub even comes very close to speaking a word. In Romero's follow up, Land of the Dead, the zombies evolve even further. In that film, the undead follow a leader, Big Daddy#. Big Daddy not only displays the ability to use tools, but transmits and teaches that ability to other zombies. The film culminates with an army of the undead marching on the last human city. What then, does all of this have to do with souls? It seems clear that learning, memory and choices are actions of the mind#. If zombies can learn, then they must have minds# (again, soul works just as well). The problem this causes for Dualism should be clear: The Dualist believes that the soul (mind) is something non-physical which leaves the body at death. The zombies have died, and when that happened, the incorporeal part of them should have fled. When their bodies were re-animated, they should have become mindless automata. The Materialist suffers no such problem. The materialist claims (as we have discussed) that the mind is just a material function of the brain. As such, the re-animated zombie still possesses its brain, and so should be capable of thought (that these abilities are somehow diminished can be explained through the decay of brain tissue). When these facts are considered, it seems manifestly clear that Romero’s Zombie films belong to the class of philosophical literature and that they fit cleanly on the materialist side of the mind body problem.