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Drama Beans/On My Way To Stud Wood




fig.35.45) lurch like a crime, student


Now when I hold a winners hand, spitting on their shoes isn't necessary. We trade barbs instead. When I feel there's a need for trout, I put some fish up on the table instead. Twenty-two fifty three and a nine, it's falling down around my ankles time. Damn, it's cold and alone out here in the dark. There's dirt in these flowers by this hole in the park. Too smooth am I, for you old danger man! Too smooth am I. Bam, that's the way it stands!


Way to underscore truth, its what they'd say if they still could. I went to this party at Donny's. There were a few of us together that night. Myko was back in Austin that night. She'd gone to visit hairdressers there and decided to leave her car in front of their place. I walked over from my side of Western, Montana was there already. He and Dallas were talking about TV Nation and the school's newspaper. It was hot out and I was hot from walking. Sweating, I joined them at the kitchen table.

"The car and the driver are entirely other stories for sharing. End times call for end ways, or so it seems today." 

"Soon enough the barn is empty and there's thick smoke rolling up into the sky. I thought it would be like the fat face of my regrets once they've gotten mixed with those truth sounds that a few screaming horses can make, but it wasn't. Not today."

No one ever felt as old as us. They never got as high or played their cards like angry deserting it's wife, not like we did. When we finally fell out of the car laughing, it was like the party had just ended. I just right got up and brushed the dirt off my knees. Here I was in the middle of this giant asshole of a block. All the same whiteness, everywhere stretching up and down the street for many days worth of miles. Wherever my eyes went, there were a dozen or more buildings beckoning me further north, each one just as tall and inflamed as all the others that stood around us. 

My cigarettes felt as crunchy as broken pills when I reached for one. Mint looks over his shoulder as though I was about to dry up and blow away, off to Turd-Land on the next limp wheeze happening through. While his shirt has these crazy thrift store collars, I'm dressed in rags, really just a switch of thin cotton and some sticky tissues that I found by my bed. They're hanging from me like crunchy cancer. But my belt, I got it after my grandfather died. It just broke, so I have it tied around my waist like some crude reminder. I smile at Mint and cough politely before lighting another cigarette. I really hate twill.

The thing about parties is that they all end too soon or not enough. They're like lottery tickets when I almost always wish that I bought the beer instead.

Here is a sidebar, an addendum really. It's from before so do with it what you will.

The four of us are hanging out. Sometimes we're in one of our basements if it gets too hot but we're usually right here in the driveway. A couple of us have our bikes but the little ones have plastic Big Wheels. Some of the older-older kids are in the back. They've stripped to their summer skivvies already, even the girls. All of them are sunning on top of the folded down Coleman trailer. A little radio is playing Elton John and Disco Duck between the car commercials and breakfast is a million miles away.

"I think I want a muffin with my banana today."

"I'd like to have some juice and then an egg."

"I want my breakfast to attain something better, something closer to greatness today. At the very least, it should avoid being enmeshed in a perversity of excuses."

"If only there were more time for poor breakfast? It really should be the most important meal of the day, don't you think."

"Yes, songs should be sung about it, go-breakfast-go-all-the-way!"

If my first meal isn't greatness itself then why not remain in the shadows all day? Ahead towards lunch, a swamp awaits!"

It might be right before the end of the world but our parents still have to leave. They're off building more cars or taking orders in the pharmacy downtown. It finally got to hot so we went inside. My neighbor's house has a shabby smell, it's little bit like kid pee and cabbage circling all around the richly sentimental furnishings. Her parents work opposing shifts at a junkyard outside town. One of them scraps cars during the day and the other one tallies it's receipts at night. But there's always cereal and milk to eat from the funny little cups we find inside their cupboard.

Sitting around the table munching on jac-jax, we talk about our bikes and describe the mediocrity of being like 8. Later on we're going to go over to the woods. We're going to build us something with the hammer That Myko found. We're going to hang out behind the school and fish out the old text books that were left in the dumpster. We'll burn them, once we're gathered under the sand hill beside the pine lot. I have my dad's lighter. It's metal is an alluring adult presence against the skin of my kid leg.

I'm talking to Myko about the pictures that we took in the springtime. The one's where I'm trying to look like a gunslinger. Al draws the best cowboy comics, until he stops drawing them that is. Eventually Al becomes this awful attorney and then drinks himself to death. Truly, there's only so much bourbon in Rome. 

I remember a lot of that still, Myko and I spent our time together very well.

I started to smoke cigarettes after my commencement speech. The first pack I bought was from the gas station I passed on my way home from the High School. That was a sweaty day for sure. I asked for a pack of Lucky's and the guy said, "these will keep you waiting until you finally quit." There were 200 of us on the football field that day, waving placards and waiting for our turn at the soup. All of us had wading through horrible speeches and testimonials about honor and glory, such long work. My Uncle never even tried to come, instead he tapped my keg early. Mom found him in the garage. Asleep in a garden chair, holding a copy of Depraved Gaze.

"Where goeth the river, right?"

"So goes the raft," she answers.

My friends and I stay up late listening to music. Each of us wearing our dirty cut offs and some kind of short sleeve something or other. Montana's has this crescent moon shape on it while mine is pink. The Mayor's daughter sneaks out and comes over. She brings us some dried out shake. Then at midnight we drive over to the disco. Inside the girls line up in the bathroom, taking turns and pretending to do blow in the tiny wooden stall. The rest of us sit around sloppy from all the beer we've been drinking.

Like dance, the act of drawing is also sensational. Owing to the rigor with which it's being practiced, the clarity of its articulation can seem either very profound or maximally horny. I saw the magnificent arc she so clearly executed as a sublime extension of her self. Suddenly realizing that her claw like hand, the terminus of her right arm was holding that ground black stump of charcoal as nimbly as if it were just a loosely rolled chaff of over dry tobacco.



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