The hair-thin towers, blipping lazily through the evening and the night; beautiful as they are. The docks and the boats and, God— the boat awnings, punctuating the far shore with their limp blankness; hard to find beauty in those. Something so sadly aspirational about docks, on a lake—these stubby fragile fingers, reaching out just far enough to attain a little grasp of the water's glory, the perfection that we're certain is hidden out there, somewhere, beneath the surface or far above it, or perhaps a billion years past. So we perch on our piers, just long enough to escape the tedium, the sameness, the ordinariness (because it was all ordered, had to be, by someone, some time) that lies behind in the houses, and the yards, and the roads. How much more perfect, it would be, without us here—or without all these things we bring with us. We down here are no different than those astro-nauts, those Super-Men, or the closest we've got to that, penetrating the perfection of space, the perfect vacuum in its perfect everlasting stasis, only with the necessary entanglements of their triple-lock suit, and their synthetic fabrics, and their nest of hoses, quickly tangled. Restricting. How profound, it must be, the urge to burst out of that face mask, to ignore the alarms and the building pressure and the utter cold, and to leap into the void, finally, at last, for real this time, and damn the consequences. I feel it even now, down here, parabolically at this moment five-hundred-twenty-six miles away.

Aborted theses/schizophrenicisms #1

The reason it sometimes has been called conquest is not because it necessitates an act of domination, at least not exactly; the allusion is not to Napoleon but to Cook, to Amundsen — to those brave, blatantly pointless men who charted the unknown of our earth back when it couldn't simply be said, "it is known", and in so doing excuse our personal responsibilities to know it. The female body, to the masculine mind, is a landscape far more mysterious than the tundra or the steppe, and more interesting not in its exaggerated variety but in the infinite inexplicable subtlety of its variations. This thirst to know her, to know all the hers, so flatly parallels the line of Human Progress, that with a start we must realize that it is of course not a microcosm of that grand struggle but a precursor. If man thirsts for knowledge it is only through abstraction of the carnal thirst, the urge to continue through physical acts of spirituality, through the only one thing we have always known with utter conviction to be true. To not recognize these facts of thought, the truths embodied in our collective earnest anecdata, and to nonetheless proclaim a revolution, a Philosophy, a system of thought for the relegation of human experience without the input of human experience — it is folly.

Strange, isn't it, that our homunculi so reliably take form as some sort of troll, a weak foetal presence, incurious and turned inward, fat-faced and defiant. And how revealing it is. These little men, these representatives of the corporeal, ever-underfoot and loud and insistent in that irritating yet undeniable way, crammed into the space of our minds, crippled like lotus feet, incapable, we are sure, of life in the world that lies outside the mind. And, we suppose like so many representatives in more noble times, such a pale image in the face of the serene authority on whose behalf they speak: and how sad, that the body, such a perfect and unimpeachable thing in this so thoroughly impeachable world, a thing so heavenly we needed only to collect its best specimens and graft the wings of birds to them to create a convincing representative of Divinity, a thing which can walk through the world of God proud, so proud it need not walk at all, as it has no need for the reassurance of earth beneath feet — that such a thing can be so debased, be made so crippled and weak and unadmirable, by a cage so complex and yet so simple in its purity of implication as the mind.

LTIG unspecified #1

4,

Nobody believed me when I said the flood was coming, least of all you, because you hadn't talked to me in a year or so and I can understand why you were shocked by my behavior, and maybe concerned. Even more so when you came to check on me and found me sandbagging my house, attaching water wings to my cats and praying the rosary. I warned you, a biblical flood is going to drown this neighborhood. But you didn't believe me, even considering the vorpal effect of my sunglasses was rapidly getting to you. An old friend from the shadowland with a grocery bag of cigarettes carefully ziplocked against the imminent rain. Afraid of heights you were watching me unsure if this was some sort of joke or scheme, a longtermer like I've been known to pull, but it wasn't. I saw all the bloated gentle dead facedown at a level roughly below my roof. And so I planned. Even though you were concerned, or appeared to be concerned, I noted that you had time to put on a sundress and perfume. I myself was too busy preparing. The decongestants in your purse rattled like bone dice, auguring black water, but you didn't listen. And here you are imagining I'm trying to fuck you while a truck dumps a ton of sand on my front lawn and the clouds overhead turning vindictive Olympian black. Ha! You followed me onto the roof and I was raving about mold and property damage and bereavement, not really listening because you wanted to peek in my room and see if any other girls had left their stuff there, and also to try and steal my blueprints for the Navel Stone. I told you, even though we discovered the capabilities of the Navel Stone together, I made the sacrifice and therefore the psychic data it collected belongs to me. It is proprietary information. That's how I knew about the flood, because the Flinski gauge on it noted a drastic rise in bedwettings over the week. Also when I went to get black beans from Joe's on Friday they were sold out. On Tuesday there were four cans. You should have known the significance of such subconscious hoarding. And you should have known when you asked me if I wanted to go to Manning's with you and I refused the flood was deadly, presidentially serious. The Navel Stone doesn't lie. Maybe you wanted to catch up but my cats can't swim and moving the Navel Stone all the way to the roof, and then recalibrating it to search for pretty brunette survivors was a labor of hours and I just didn't have the time to waste swilling vodka and making secret references to new sex friends. Rain had started to fall, and you left.

Fifteen minutes ago I saw you float past, Opheliac and sadly dead. All I have on this roof are some soggy Camel Filters, two perturbed cats, and our Navel Stone, stolen so carefully and piecemeal from your father's laboratory. He's going to pissed when I deliver the news.

Regretfully (but happy the Navel Stone was correct and not a shared delusion), J.

"

Blogs like Daily Apocalypse and Retro '90s MADNESS remind me of my mother's best friend. My godmother. She'd discuss publically and voluably the present condition of her reproductive organs, bowel movements, the metric weight of snot she'd wrung from her hankerchief (result of dander allergies, number of cats in her household exceeding that allowable in Emily County building code) erotically-inclined mailman fantasies, envies and other sins venial or otherwise. She'd hit as many as five of the Big Seven during the brief ride from my elementary school to her house. Husband either in jail or otherwise engaged. If I had to live with choral mewing and a broadband connection into my supposed better half's Inner Monologue I'd also find re-shingling houses more interesting than home. Hardly connubial bliss. Even a little bit, no. He was vaguely Mexican and had erectile difficulty after X amount of cervezas. She'd always have 2 less than X in the fridge at any given time. Tetchily admitting she couldn't control his cerveza guzzling anywhere but her (very ominous smelling) fridge, a point she often shook her feathered hair and scowled to punctuate. I am reading a Goosebumps for Book-it and overhearing a basic equation for boning. Tell me this wouldn't damage you. Danielle Steel as far as the eye can see on the bookshelves but not one volume of Dr. Spock, or even any doctor. I was turning twelve in December. You really can't appreciate the indignities inflicted upon you in childhood until you pass the buck to the next generation. She was gainfully employed in technology or wore a headset or both. Eighty-five lbs of Meow Mix a week is a financial strain on a household, as is Negra Modelo, when you can't get a bulk discount because you can only buy enough at once to keep but not exceed (hacks, empatically stabs at record button with finger) ... but yeah Meow Mix is expensive, as are frequent OB-GYN consultations that even to this day keep me at an junior high understanding of women's sexuality for fear that learning more could birth a Biblicly punishing repressed memory. One so bad it would get an article in a journal or become a popular Wikipedia destination. These and frankly inappropriate updates on the advance of her father's cancer drove me into the living room for Fox 9's syndication of The Simpsons at 4 and 4:30 almost daily. I was sick at her house one afternoon because my mom had work, and I was watching Total Request Live. She walked in and made a noise indeterminate to an 11- or 12-year old's ears. She said, "Attractive people being mediocre. I could do that. How am I different from them?"

So that is sort of how I feel about blogs like Underwear Mattress and Last Night's Drug Abuse and White Privilege Irony.

"

-pgs. 2 and 7, "WATCH ME: CONVERSATIONS WITH MARTIN SNAPPLE," Martin Snapple, Gumshoe Press 2014

This is where I grew up.

The artless fools who took the photos and wrote the ad of course know nothing about the beauty of this place. It is an untouched corner of our country, the same place the indians knew. Every moment of my childhood which I remember was spent in these trees, bridging the streams and building cathedrals from logs and stones; sitting on the great boulder, big around as I was tall, which rests resplendent in the pine-filtered light, left there by the Wisconsin glaciation. That other stone, the great sheared surface hidden in the tall grass. The one where my sister and I would sit and play when it was warm with sunlight in the summer months, and the tiny little jumping crickets, the color of grass seed, filled the first few feet of air like dust motes. Fishing, with my father, when after several hours our dog would swim to the middle of the lake to join us for awhile, before swimming off again to the far shore to stalk birds or rabbits or do whatever it is that dogs do when left to their own devices. Maybe he just sat at the top of the ridge and listened to the wind in the quaking aspen, like me. I passed hours walking the well-learned trails through those trees, most of which were forged by the deer and the foxes, probably the same trails they walked since the lay of the land last changed; probably the same trails they've walked since that great stone was laid. I walked those trails, hunting for mushrooms, and for burial mounds, and I understood what it would be to die there. Sometimes, a holler would call me back. Sometimes it wouldn't.

And now it's on the market for a cool million, someone who doesn't know the half of it struggling for words and giving into defeat with "YA JUST GOTTA BE THERE." You do, I suppose, but I hope you won't — I hope it languishes in these Difficult Economic Times, and is overgrown to the extent further possible, and forgotten by time once again. Then I will return, and it will be mine and mine only, once again, like it was back then when I was naive enough to not know all the ways in which it wasn't. My cynicism drives me, it is true, but I cannot escape this conviction that something awful will happen to this place, like happens to all the other places; some keen businessman will write that cool million in his ledger and in three summers there will be groves of vinyl siding sprouting from the soil, forty feet apart exactly, and they will sit there for a few more summers, losing fifty percent of the little value they had to start with. Then some desperate souls will file in, as this sad modern affair with which we debase the term urbanism encroaches a little further, and these people who had been living something they understood need to move a little further away. The place they knew will be paved over with a new version, which comes with all the usual promises but is so deficient in all the ways not easily marketed, and so as the dependence of these souls on this new promise is cemented, their hearts will fill, more rapidly every day, with the desire for escape.

So they move out to my eden, but they bring all those awful things they are running from with them, because they don't know better. And thus their fumbling hands crush the beautiful as they try to embrace it. I don't expect these refugees to damage beyond repair, because I know their intent is not malice, though they depend on so many who rejected their responsibility for good or bad long ago. I expect them to despoil, in their naive way, in a way not unlike the naivety with which I soaked this landscape into my bones. And then it will be finished, it's fate sealed when those new addresses are amended to the books, the ever-advancing Frontier advanced a few Standard City Blocks further, and regardless of what value is impregnated in it, if any, a wild place will never be wild again. I want to scream and throw fire, at these innocent hoards advancing down the line, advancing twenty or fifty years hence, advancing with greater speed and the same inevitability as the glaciations. I want to write letters to them, I want to listen to their stories and explain all the holes they contain, and explain how trespassing on my lost birthright will not fill them. And yet also I want them to inherit that splendor, which I tended to once and so long ago, and to know it like I knew. I want them to know, in that innocent way which you are certain is right, because you felt it even before you learned the rules of right and wrong. But they are human, they are old, they are defeated and resigned in countless ways. They are ignorant and beautiful, and this place is good enough for them, but they are not convinced, and never will be. They will be happy with the shreds which remain; not happy, exactly, but close enough. A forgotten memory will tell them, sometimes, when alone or troubled, driving in the car, that the feeling of wholeness sometimes accompanying the act of love used to be, could be, all around.They will feel that lack of completion, the missing something, undefinable. But that definition will elude them, because so few are bothering to define it, and so they will try to be good; they will try to respect what meant so much to me. But they will be incapable.

"The colonization of Como girls was not a project for the weak-hearted, and didn't really ever pay off, but the soreness from walking late and slow and the trepidation of waiting seems to be very golden, as if I were snowblind, in those early days before I understood how to act and cared enough, as every year passes.

Here I learned Condé, Beckett, Vandermeer; the Velvets, sweatband pedal heroes, Stax; Punto, Crain, Thome; Apatow, Carpenter, Brakhage; bourbon, Grain Belt, Franzia. But the best lesson there was to always allow every idea to gasp a little and die a quiet cradle death, under that big dry moon. "

-pg. 58, "The Navel Stone Handbook Vol. One" Martin Snapple, 2028 (Gumshoe Press)

A person built a city, tenderly, a daydream city, a block and ten minutes between classes at a time. First they materialized a field, and stood-while-not-standing-actually on the field, made an inferno and leveled it. A firestorm of white sulked and the person watched until their phone rang and then a person left the whiteness for their actual location, which was a room, which wasn’t near the field. Then they forgot about the bonflower until they caught the bus, which purred or waited.

The bus was full of strangers. A person looked out of the window, was borne back to the charred and buttery space by the thrum and hob of the bus, the animal and bent mustard diabetic smell of perfume and bodies. Charred from the fire, buttery from the butterflies a person popped into existence while imagining what the strangers they saw from the bus liked about themselves. The butterflies collapsed from the smoke. A person reached their destination,

And a person left the bus and a person dreamt roads on the field, in squares first, which wasn’t right, and then in circles, which also wasn’t right, so a person made his streets tessellated and rose half of the field to a hill, for contrast. A person likes contrasts. Sometimes contrasts are nice.

A person dreamt museums and libraries and people, bars, bicycles, willow trees. The people became planets, pregnant barren planets with their own gravity & some offered more comfort to life than others. Some planets vacuumed others in with their compulsive gravity and filled their lungs and arteries with poisonous gases. The alphabet died. A person could do that, walking home in the sunshine. Eliminate comma fevers, clause sicknesses, language. They didn’t have to be there. They could be corrected. A person, drinking coffee in their yard, could imagine a system of broadcasts where no language was necessary. In this play epoch of daydream everyone understood through morphic resonance.

A person dreamt this place inside their carriage of terror every once in a while. Sometimes it was a field of vegetables, or a BMX track, or ribbons of beauty. A person had to sleep, eventually. A person wondered if that this field was renewed in sleep; if the planets and fantasies and resentments became a garden of skulls and time to compost for the next day, every one an epoch, all forgotten but the soil rich for new flight.