The Depression is Hercules

A God Fearing Man’s Guide to the Complete History ofWoodrow Wilson’s Final Days in the Valley

This man is the professor of fine things. This man is Au, Fe and Cu. This man is the President. This man is a preacher. This man is nineteen-eighteen by nineteen twenty-one. This man is Governor for God’s sake. This man is the Federal Reserve Act. This man is the Versailles Peace Conference. This man is no conquest. This man is no dominion. This man is no desire. This man is the lucrative lug nut. This man is a reliable brand of chewing gum. This man is the three hundred and fifty seventh recipient of the Best Posture Award. This man looks like a communist reading at sea, background of waves and blue and thumbprints of white. This man is Spend $15 and Receive a Free Glass, a $5 Value. This man is the noose around the criminal and the author, the felon. They have his vertical leap on display, transcribed on a peach basket, on top of a granite pedestal in William Lee Hall, Davidson College, North Carolina. This man is the beautiful rush of a distant narcotic beach: tides of addicts of methadone, hyper speed and cigarettes beat themselves with their sharpened bones until the sun whips them back to their caves and huts where they have endless sex and observe how the night sky peels the hours slow. This man is a best-selling erotica novel. They say his roommate at boarding school was a Kennedy conspiracy theorist. This man is a name he acquired from town hall assemblies in Iowa also the same place where they branded him the man who drank five hours in four calories to which he replied in voracious oratory, what the fucking shit? They sealed his image for seventeen years on tape and showed the film at the ice cream social on the June-day parking lot of the prototype for a Pro-Wilson Presbyterian church in the city limits of Omaha, Nebraska, it was 1994 by then. He storms out the toilet with pants around ankles making locomotive vowels. He punches his mother, jabs his grandmother, stabs his father in the left leg and disassembles the family Au-en retriever into columns of shiny metals. He flounders down the hillside toward a sound that makes him think death, death, death, then Woodrow wades out like a trout cracking the river open.

Postmodern Social Quarrel

I deleted you from Facebook then I added

you back. You asked why. I said I was angry

and stupid. You said ok and logged off.

Like a broken existential toaster oven

I once again panic in the rain, lapping

every drop my metal tongue lusts. I let my

tongue do as it wants sometimes. Maybe

that’s why we ended up the way we

are now. We are two strangers in an

empty hall. Two uninterested strangers

uninterested in the cinder bricks behind

our heads that are the walls of an English

hall scared deep, deep red – the same color

I asked if your pubic hair was. That seemed

to matter on some dimension for me back

then but tiles apart our profile is now silence.

I Sit in Bracken and Think about My Life

I am four floors above, a view that makes them look like ants in wool.

It’s Monday. I return to the toll booth in my Neuron SR-X. The man

who grovels on duty looks a bit like me: stupid, facial hair that is thin

beneath the jaw, skin showing pink, and shaped like Sierra Leone.

His stupid fucking eyes are too fucking small; he has to squint at me

ensuring I’m safe and not drunk or anything, but he agrees and allows

me to roar the black-top questions again, lodging threats in daydream

skies that show rabbits lined like the gallows pole. I wander away from

the thought with waiting room music in ear, waiting for a representative

to pick up the line, then back to: once I read this manifesto penned around

Yuletide time. Its words wadded her existence north to south…I didn’t

know what to make of that. Simple as hurt people hurt people. How long

do you hurt? How deep can that muted blade cut? How does it hop through

time and space like bums grabbing free trolley rides? Will it ever dull?

Fuck it – I’ll file the claim, my address is blah. Zip code, blah, yes, blah.

I feel like the Peanuts parents are shackled in my wax and anvil. How I laugh.

I’m low enough to distract myself with only phantom views: carbon on snow

and ice, carbon manipulating movable displays, their carbon fingers flushed

like carbon flushes. My carbon forgets the month easy. My carbon consumes

the combustible. My carbon sees itself carried off to some throne of god.

These are my bugs. I am powerful.

She is in the room a few minutes before the two guys sitting on the ratty couch notice that she is standing there. They never knew how it exactly worked but that after a minute or so there was a subconscious urge to look at the shadow of the door. "I just watched that Facebook movie. You know, the one with Jesse, Jesse whatshisname, and I, I just...feel like living in a cabin." She paused to take the pipe, it gurgled like a bullfrog. "...and, like, not talking to anybody. Up in the mountains, my own cabin, all alone." She passed the green glass snake to the guy closest to her, leaning back on the couch, a desktop computer wired up to a LCD monitor showing The Gumby Movie.

Gumby is a being that exists in a higher dimension, and his world is much different from ours. He is amorphous, skillful and rather compassionate.

All there is to watch for all the depressed insomniacs

• Apocalypse bullshit
• Obscene comedy
• Partisan news commentary
• Hard time prison documentary shows
  
• Reruns of Man v. Food

Water rolls down my throat like an amphibian skin.

The Cranberries Have Gone Missing

Leonard Cohen knows how I feel about existence.



I keep a crowbar close at all times.




Some people say I'm grumpy, well, fuck them.

I Can't Wait To Have Tea With You

Have you ever crumbled a dollar bill before? Not just a dollar bill, but a ten or a twenty? Have you wadded a one hundred dollar bill up until Benjamin Franklin could be heard crying and begging for you to stop, to go no further, that he had had enough pain inflicted already? Money is just linen and ink that someone along the way said should be worth something. It's illegal to burn United States tender (I think that means currency) but some rich ass-holes still use it as tinder for their fat cigar. Paper currency came about in 1862, partially to finance the Civil War and also because there was a shortage of coins. People were hording them in their safety deposit boxes, keeping them hidden in secret caches maybe in the knot of an oak tree, among the dust and mice underneath the bathroom floorboards. This next fact is a zinger. The currency was first issued in one, five, ten, twenty-five and fifty cent denominations. The values seem so small when weighed against today's bills.

There was one night that Hitler demanded of his scientists to find out how much a million dollars in one dollar bills would weight. They came up with the figure of 2,040.8 lbs. Hitler said he didn't know what the fuck a pound was so he demanded the figure to be converted into kilograms, the only true measure of weight.

The lead scientist on the case stayed up a majority of the night working the conversion. He drank half a bottle of American whiskey to help, his kids begged to be played with, to be read a story before bed, his wife whisked them out of his office. "Ihr vater bedürfnisse zu konzentrieren," she whispered in their ears as they enjoyed the free ride back to their rooms on the seat of their mother's hips.

"Vat do I do? Vat do I do?" he seethed onto the paper and crumbled it up like the dozens of other sheets now forming a small hill in the corner of the study. During a break, it was 3 a.m., he worked a Rubix cube and smoked a little pot, careful to shoo the stench out the window with a table-top fan.

"Eureka!" he shrieked.

The next morning felt like the last of the long line of mornings he had experienced in his life. He found Hitler outside musing to himself and whistling the steamboat willy. It appeared that Hitler had not remembered his order last night to find the conversion and was now uninterested in the answer his Nazi scientist had produced.




Forty-eight percent of all bills are one dollar bills. The dimensions of the United States' present currency is 6.14 in. long by 2.61 in. wide. There has been only one woman on U.S. money, Martha Washington. No portraits of African-Americans have ever been displayed on government bills. I think Barack Obama would look ridiculously cool on a bill. Maybe one day he will replace a Franklin or Lincoln or Hamilton one day. Not that those men don't deserve it but new faces are always pleasant, and good for morale!

Take a long sniff off a dollar bill and you might get some cocaine residue! It is said that 97% of U.S. paper money contains traces of the nose candy.

Pocahontas flaunted her stuff on the back of the $20 bill in 1875. She made a return on the gold dollar that never caught on. Or was that Sacagawea?

My grandpa used to pass on two dollar bills. I still have about five of them. They are back home in a chest. I know exactly where they are. I probably have $10 in $2 bills. Hooray Jefferson! It will be about that time to resurrect the $2 bill once the price of 20oz bottles of vending machine pop hits two dollars. Yes and yes.


In my possession, I have six bills (1 ten...wait, I'm counting, make that five bills and 4 ones). When will they renovate the outdated-looking one dollar bill? George Washing is so small in his oval portrait frame while his other money pals have had security stamps and complete make-overs asserted on their appearance. The bills are from all over the country

1. Atlanta, Georgia
2. Atlanta, Georgia
3. Atlanta, Georgia
4. Richmond, Virginia
5. The ten doesn't say where it is from

Whoever thought that these bills were an honorable pursuit? Should I be driven to collect as many of these suckers as I can? It is my goal to be another cog in the machine of capitalism? Isn't that what university learning (though they don't say it) is geared toward? I am sure that lots of students are buried in their all night study orgies with the dream in their frontal cortex that they will be successful and make a lot of money. I am sure a lot students have found themselves working dead-end, shitty jobs just to earn a measly check to pay the bills, in turn they slave away doing menial labor to make sure their power doesn't go out.

I will not spend my life chasing a buck. You cannot interest me with money. I will not be swayed. I wish to have enough to live and for the majority of the human population to leave me the fuck alone. I believe that money can separate us from who we truly are. It can in turn lie to us, tell us that we are better animals than we actually are.

I agree that money is power but only if the population decides to see it as something of value.

goddamn man i was just trying to shave some grapefruits for a moment and then wha-BAM it was eastern standard dragon time

"First of all Richard, they're not breasts. They're not breasts, they're just big chemical balls, okay?"

just recently, that is the other day i, by happenstance, went to best buy and purchased season 7 of curb your enthusiasm, a killer program.

larry david gets into all sorts of trouble here. the plots are tight, so far, with that classic twist of LD's undeniably selfish behavior. all the characters are in the right place. larry is working to gather the seinfeld crew to do a reunion show in which jason alexander plays a man who is trying to get back his wife. while outside, larry is trying to get back with his own-ex. this creates the plot that runs through the entire show, in between are comic sprinkles of often laugh-out-loud worthy-ness.

the episode i just finished, LD gets into a strange love triangle with wheels with the goal of taking a date to a chee yun concert at someone rich asshole's home. i looked chee yun up and this is her


wikipedia informed me that she is from south korea and has been playing the violin since 1392, a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long , long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
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long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long , long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
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long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, love, long, long, long, long,
long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
long, long, long, lake, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long , long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, list, long, long, long,
long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, lore, long , long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, lure, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long , long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
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long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long , long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, lisp, long, long, long,
long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,
lineage of violinist. that badass playing the cello could have been me if i realized the workings of the world while in the second grade. a friend i have not had very long once told me he chose the violin because it would be easiest to move around from lesson to concert to car.

LD also tells Christian Slater he's eating over his allotment of caviar at an asshole social function. and he gets into a scuffle with Rosie O' Donnell. and i thought he was on good terms in the lesbian community? Larry David has really done it this time.

i hope the season gets even stronger. i am excited and will probably continue to watch more.

also on the docket is to read the forest for the tree by Betsy Lerner. it took me as odd as i read the introduction, thinking to myself god, this sounds like the first pages of a bestselling self-help book. then, it dawned on me. as a writer, i am a mess. maybe this is what i need. so i am going to read and keep an open mind. maybe some good will come of it.

here's a draft of flash i wrote when trying to draft a realism flash (ala kim chinquee)

Military Fungal Complex

The cosmic intermission of day and night, fine razors of light nick tips of grass. I shake my shoes, look behind me, then, enjoy the armies and their blades. I muse how to eliminate time and where in this country I can find the land. I think of distant scents of burning oil hanging in car-crash steam. I see myself old and when I’ll have spent all my money and have declared nirvana. I recall the troves of herbs Basil snipped and brought over this morning like specimens; he spoke a dialect of elegant particular: taste, cooking use, boiling points and lots and lots of other things. For a minute, I panic at being called dad. “Do you want some dinner?” That might be my girlfriend. “Yes I want some dinner.” It smells like lasagna. I snag my shoes with two fingers like hooks.