Often this is the most peaceful part of my day.

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Some Thoughts on Cannibalism.

Below is an unforgivably dumb “story” that I wrote this afternoon because why the hell not? Did YOU write an unforgivably dumb story today in the margin of your lecture notes? No? I thought not. So stop complaining and instead please just enjoy this brief little story about cannibalism.

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Awkward Elevator Cannibalism.

Awkward Elevator Cannibalism

by james bezerra

If there were three of us it would probably be less awkward to discuss who to eat first, if things come to that. But there are only we two.

So awkward.

It is made additionally awkward by the fact that he brought a kit of surgical tools onto the elevator with him when he got on, back when the elevator was operating. So obviously it would be his tools one of us would use to cut up and eat the other. I am so embarrassed that I do not have any dissection tools to offer up for the community good. It had seemed odd at the time, his old rectangular case of dark brown leather. It seems even ... odder now. Too much of a coincidence … He says that whichever one of us wants to go out first can use the chloroform he has with him. He seems very polite that way, and exceptionally well-prepared. Like a Boy Scout, or something.

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Thursday nights are my favorite nights because Thursday nights I have wine.

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Obviously this is how you notate the sounds trees make.

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Small Stuff.

For some weird ass reason that I can’t even begin to fathom, all day I have been writing stupid little throwaway stories. Not prose poetry exactly, more like the micro-narratives of Ben Loory or Alex Epstein, with a little Lydia Davis thrown in for good measure. Except that those writers are pretty good at these things and I’m just terrible.

Due to their brevity, stories of this sort often lack traditional narrative devices. Things like characters, plot, dialogue, quality, good sense, decency - you know - stuff like that. But who needs all that stuff anyway? Not us.

All that being said though, I genuinely had fun writing them throughout the day while I should have been doing more important things.

The day’s haul is all below. Enjoy!

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Necessary Lovers.

Necessary Lovers

by james bezerra

The lying swagger of the bees when they come. Their furry, sticky legs dangling. Our air shaking with a Flight of the Valkyries vibrating buzzzz. They act like its their own pollen they're bringing. As if they’re delivering the future. They are interlopers at best. Necessary lovers and nothing more. Busy, hurried, rushed, a tangle of sharp legs. Graceless. We tolerate them when the breeze isn’t strong enough to set our pollen sailing. So we tolerate and we wait. We wait with our petals and pistils naked to the sky. We wait to evolve and we envy the ingenuity of the dandelion and the determination of the burr. We wait like pine cones for a fire.  

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The Interdependent Independence of My Future Subaru.

The Interdependent Independence of My Future Subaru

by james bezerra

I am a comma splice. I tell the Yoda-looking lady at the bodega that I am thinking about buying a Subaru Outback. She rings up my coffee and has nothing to say about my future Subaru.  Her bodega does not sell auto parts, only air fresheners shaped like trees that smell like strawberries. “Because it seems like a reliable and all-around car,” I tell her, “all-wheel drive, you know?” She unfurls her reptilian alien finger and her yellowed nail points toward the air freshener aisle as if to say that is all she has to offer me.

I join independent thoughts, often incorrectly. I can sleep in the back of a Subaru Outback, after I buy it and drive it out of the city headed west where the sky is so big and blue and endless that it just rolls along like that story of the one long endless sheet of paper on which Kerouac wrote On the Road while on a three week bender in 1951. The sky rolls like that above me as I cross deserts and sleep on the sides of the roads in the back of my Outback out there in Utah or Wyoming or the Dakotas. The American outback and its wide smattering of stars that wait for me to see them.

Because I fight back the imposed loneliness of the city by pulling down on myself the voluntary loneliness of the empty roads out west.

I jam together those things which are incongruent. I can’t possibly afford a Subaru. I paid for this coffee in change. I go back to the bodega to ask Yoda how much the air fresheners cost, but I don’t buy one - just feel the cellophane between my fingertips - because trees don’t smell like strawberries. They’re incongruous ideas. Each is a whole on its own, but they don’t belong together.

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The Appalling Strangeness of the Inconspicuous Presence of God, or Possibly Just the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The Appalling Strangeness of the Inconspicuous Presence of God, or Possibly Just the Second Law of Thermodynamics

by james bezerra

A priest, a rabbi, and a Baptist minister walk into a bar. It is a very large bar and they all used different entrances. They all three order martinis, each from different waitresses. The bartender makes three separate martinis and thinks nothing of it, though his arm is a little tired by the end of it and his hand very cold.

The three separate waitresses deliver the three separate martinis. The priest, the rabbi and the Baptist minister all drink, sigh, pay, and leave out different exits.

The bartender’s cold hand is the closest thing to a sign of the presence of God and no one noticed it.

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Improbable Things Which Didn’t Happen.

Improbable Things Which Didn’t Happen

by james bezerra

The newly fingerless graphomaniac has had some trouble channeling his energies since the letter bomb. His deaf typist opens his mail now - for the thrill of it, and also - because there’s nothing else for her to do.

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Dostoyevsky and Ted Kaczynski met in a bar.

They drank vodka with cubes of machine-made ice.

“My work commands me to create it,” D said, “I have no control over it.”

“Me too,” K said.

They ordered another round, exchanged information.

“Mailing my work will require many stamps,” D said.

“Me too,” K said.

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The typist was standing near the open window when the package exploded, tuning the radio on the sill. One moment the curtains were billowing in on the breeze. The next, they were billowing out.  

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She is What’s Operative.

She is What’s Operative

by james bezerra

Metaphor is a substitution. It is like this: she is the pearl of the world. In the sweaty hungry ugly folds of the world. Metaphor is a switch being pulled. Three card word monty in the park.

She is what’s operative here. Replaced by a pearl. Like when she’d worn a strand of pearls that night at the restaurant with a view of Vltava. The strand of pearls, the only jewelry she’d packed; in a ziplock in the bottom of her backpack. I try to remember her the way she was that night. I call her Pearl now in my memories, because she was wearing pearls. That’s metonymy.

When she left, Pearl left an empty space. In me. Between the sweaty ugly hungry folds of my brain. An empty space that’s irritated. That I closed in upon. That I formed a shell around. That I tried to expel. A glistening sphere. A whole tiny world with a nucleus of nothing. That’s what metaphors are like.

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Debt, A Parable.

Debt, A Parable

by james bezerra

Due to a childhood misunderstanding, the Anglican Scrabble Player believes all phones to somehow be payphones and that she has run up a terrible bill with some public utility somewhere on account of the weekly calls back to her mother back in East Anglia.

Her fear of this presumably massive debt keeps her from sleeping the night before the Scrabble championship. She asks her tax preparer if this debt needs to be declared in some way or if she sound contact someone about it. Curiously, he does not reply to her.

She begins to save obsessively, out of apprehension. She ceases buying the newest dictionaries and her Scrabble game suffers as a result. She has difficulty completing crosswords. She takes a job as a school teacher to earn extra money. She saves all of her changes and washes her clothes the deep sink in the kitchen. After years she has grown skinny and is accidentally virtually wealthy. She still can’t sleep. She has stopped calling her mother, who lives alone in an old cottage near Winterton-on-Sea.

Her mother wonders about her. Wonders what she did to drive her daughter away. Her mother sleeps always near the phone, which never rings anymore. Her mother shuffles into town each day to the single internet cafe, so she can keep up with the latest news from the competitive Scrabble circuit, but her daughter’s name no longer shows up in the updates.

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The Anachronistics.

The Anachronistics

by james bezerra

Socrates never had a donut. Jesus couldn’t work a telephone. Helen Keller never played Tetris. Moses never saw a penguin. Winston Churchill didn’t even have an email address. Charlemagne couldn’t dunk. Karl Marx didn’t use credit cards. Galileo Galilei had never even heard of New York CIty. Thomas Jefferson couldn’t parallel park.

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Reading While Eating.

So you know how sometimes when you’re eating dinner you like to do some light reading for fun and so occasionally you’ll grab something like Henry S. A. Becket’s glossary The Dictionary of Espionage off the shelf? Well I do that too. Did you see the thing on page 70?

FRENCH ROOM

The conference room of the director of Central Intelligence, so named for reasons no one remembers.

I thought that entry was particularly fun. I also liked this one:

KING GEORGE’S CAVALRY

A British term meaning, in effect, when all other efforts fail, buy what you need (“Send in King George’s Cavalry”).

Lot’s of these are very British. I guess that that isn’t a big surprise. The British and the Soviets excelled at this clandestine intelligence stuff, but the British were funnier:

MISCHIEF, INCORPORATED

Left-wing British euphemism for “MI” the formal designation for Great Britain’s two major intelligence services, MI5 and MI6.

This is probably the best one that I can across tonight though:

SOUTH CAFETERIA

CIA’s “classified: dining area. Covert employees eat there, secure in the knowledge that no outsiders are permitted inside. Visitors from the “outside” - including such fellow spy agencies as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency - are shunted to the overt cafeteria. The food reportedly is better in South Cafeteria.

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Grandiose!

I think I just figured out how to post TWO pictures at once! (It turns out you just click the button again.) So now I am basically the master of all the Internet! Or is that too grandiose a statement?

Anyway, here is a wall I saw earlier that I think kind of looks like a face.

This is a weird yellow hill I found last month when I got lost on the way to a wedding somewhere outside of Filmore.

I'm a genius!

I have been trying to figure out an easy way to link my Instagram account to this blog (because I'm an Instagram whore), but it just occurred to me that I can just post pictures manually through the app on my phone. I'm a genius for realizing this and an idiot for not realizing it previously.

Anyway - as a test - here's a picture I took yesterday in downtown LA.

An Odd Dream I Had Recently.

An odd dream I had recently:

During a nap the other day I had a dream that I was a grown man in the house that I grew up in and that I needed to change my clothes because there was some sort of important party outside. So I went to my old room (the one that I shared with two different brothers at two different times). I knew that I didn’t have any clean clothes so I would need to dig in the hamper. In my room there was a bed blocking the closet (which was not actually in the proper place anyway). My father was laying on the bed playing a videogame and so I had to climb over him to him to get to the hamper. I was very apologetic about it. I started digging through the hamper and at some point it occurred to me that the party going on in the backyard was actually some sort of political nominating convention and everyone was wearing sleepwear with the names of their candidates. Well I found a pair of Obama long johns and tossed them aside. I was actually looking for my Hillary boxers, but couldn’t seem to find them. Well eventually I did (all the way at the bottom) and I tossed those aside as well. Then I turned back to crawl back over my father, but he wasn’t my father anymore, he was President Obama laying there playing video games and so I apologized appropriately as I crawled quickly over him. Then however I realized how awkward it was that right there with him in the room I was about to put on my Hillary boxers and go out to the party. I remember feeling very guilty and uncomfortable about this, so I stepped into a different closet (which is actually the closet that physically existed in that room when I grew up) and I changed into my Hillary boxers out of his eyeline. Then I was about to head out to the convention in the back yard but when I came out of the closet something had changed and even though it was still my boyhood bedroom, it was also the rehearsal set for the Jimmy Fallon show where I was working now, apparently. I like Jimmy Fallon and I think he’s a good late-night host, but I don’t revere the guy or anything, so it was weird that I felt so nervous. Quickly though I realized that I wasn’t me exactly, I was just some person who worked there and Jimmy was sitting there on the bed and I sat down next to him because I had been working up the nerve to tell him that I could do more on the show and that I wanted to work my way up. At some point while I’m telling him this though, the bed is not a bed anymore, it is some sort of flying steel craft, like some sort soaring garbage scow in the San Francisco of a Star Trek movie and Jimmy and I are both clinging onto its metal shell while we are whizzing through the air and I am yelling over the howl of the wind how hard I am willing to work, but this whole time we are also shooting Nerf guns at each other and neither one of us seems concerned about the height, and the speed we’re traveling at, but I have a tight black ball of nerves in my gut, as if this is the most important conversation we have ever had and I’m saying to him something along the lines of, “I can do really well as a PA and then I would like to start submitting pieces to the writers’ room because I think that you will all see that I can write good stuff and then I will be in the writers’ room and then I will pretty quickly end up running the writers’ room and then I will be the writer and I will do all of the writing.” At some point in all that I blinked though or something because I’m not on a floating garbage scow anymore, I’m actually sitting in a very dark room that looks like something out of Blade Runner  and it isn’t Jimmy Fallon I’m talking to anymore, it is actually Katie Holmes with a very serious face (though I suspect that Jimmy Fallon has simply hidden inside of her body) and she says, with a marginally surprised but otherwise emotionless face, “Oh, no. We’re not even considering you for anything like that.”

And then I literally woke up with a start. It was the way people wake up in movies. I woke up that way. I usually do not remember my dreams for more than a few minutes after I wake up, but this one stuck with me. I do not know why. All of my dreams tend to be this chaotic and exhausting though. Just once I would like to have a dream about taking a nap in a meadow.

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I DARE YOU.

Below is a short piece of writing I did for my Creative Non-Fiction class last week. It is not particularly good. It is tricky though because I DARE YOU to read it and not be fooled into thinking it is good. It has all the hallmarks of good writing, however, on the whole, it just is not very good.

Anyway, the writing prompt for this one was difficult because it was vague: write about a trip you took alone when you were young.

This was also tricky because I do not want to write a memoir and have no interest spending my time writing mini-memoirs, but I am a dubious student and I do what I am told and - to be honest - part of the reason I am in school is so that I will be forced to write stuff I wouldn’t normally write.

So then, please read on! (And remember that I warned you that it is not actually very good.)

Oh, and just to prove the veracity of some of the claims made below, here is a picture of me at Pear Lake in Sequoia National Park (See?! I do go on adventures.)

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Low Frequency Yellow.

Low Frequency Yellow

by james bezerra

The memories don’t seem to come to me with the same clarity and color that other people have. I remember the elements of fact. I remember in broad strokes. This is the quality that made me a good student of history. I remember how one moment flows into the next and I remember what was important about the moments. 

The moments themselves are rather flat.

The memories come to me that way. Flat.

They’re also liars.

I have trouble knowing what I remember and what my brain has colored into the empty spaces. My brain is just trying to help; making stereoscopic memories out of ones that might otherwise be only half memories.

It is like that with the bus.

Greyhound trips between home and the coast. Two hours by car, almost four on the bus. I remember those trips and I know that I remember them. Because I must remember them. Because I am remembering them right now. 

Only I’m not.

I would be lying if I told you that I remember the low frequency yellow smell of sweat that the blue seats gave off. I have no idea if they were even blue. I have no idea if they smelled like sweat. I don’t remember. Right now I can’t even summon the memory of a smell. I’m not sure that I ever can. I can recognize smell and that smell may ping the metadata of memory and bring something up on the dumbwaiter that we call ‘memory’, but is that the same as remembering?

I know that I used to hop the bus to my sister’s on the Central Coast of California. She was in school in San Luis Obispo. Her boyfriend managed the student diary and he lived there in a little foreman’s apartment off tiled the main lobby and I know that I would sit there in a beanbag chair on his little patio and I would look out west to Bishop’s Peak on the other side of the black ribbon of Highway 1.

But this is where the problems start.

Because that is not a memory. It is a construction. It is artificial. It is not untrue, but it also isn’t truth. Oh the dilemmas I have!

Here, watch this:

Dana was inside but she had Randy Travis playing in the little apartment as she washed plastic plates in the little stainless steel sink in the kitchenette. The slider was open and “Forever and Ever, Amen” was warbling out to me. She was into Randy Travis back then and he was at the height of his skill: a little country, a little bluegrass, a little bluesy. “You may wonder how/I can promise you now/this love that I feel for you always will be …” Plus he was good looking for a country star, then. That was right before country music finally got the pop music makeover. Blame Shania Twain for that.

I was about 13 and doodling my binder. Mom said I was burning through wirebound notebooks too fast so she’d made me start writing on loose leaf in a three ring binder. 

From the little concrete pad of patio out the sliding door I could see the freeway and Bishop’s Peak past that, the highest point in that skinny backbone of mountains that separates SLO from the true beach towns on the otherside

I heard Dana shut the water off and then she hollered out to me, “Hey ….”

Only I don’t know what she hollered out to me and I don’t remember if she was washing dishes just then when I was sitting out on the patio looking past the freeway to Bishop’s Peak. Though I may not have even been looking at Bishop’s Peak, because that was West of the patio but that exterior wall ran East-West, so to sit comfortably against it in a bean bag chair I would have been facing south.

These are the problems of memory.

I know that each of those facts is true. I know because I googled half of them.

My memory says, “What was that one Randy Travis song that Dana used to listen to?

My memory says, “Had Mom stopped buying me notebooks by then?”

An hour ago I couldn’t have found Bishop’s Peak on a map.

Are all memories this fickle? Trying to dig to the bottom of a memory and the walls start to collapse like the moat around a sandcastle. Memory just refilling itself and all I remember is the memory as if written on an index card: SLO-DAIRY-DANA-BEAN BAG-TRAVIS-BISHOP-PAPER.

I know that the bus was real. I remember those trips. Lemoore to San Luis on a bus was as much as my parents would allow me to do alone. I don’t know that I remember any one specific trip, but I remember the god almighty thrill of them. That feeling has never left me. Those bus trips were like hours with a slow tattoo artist while he inked the word ‘wanderlust’ across the red muscle of my heart. I remembered that thrill when I hiked the Waterfall Trail to Havasupai in Arizona. I remembered it when I backpacked above the treeline into the Tablelands above the Sequoias and stood looking out over desolate Moose Lake while the Great Western Divide stared back at me with all of its power and ambivalence. I remember that thrill every time I get on a plane and wait for velocity to collide with steel.

The low frequency yellow smell of twenty-year-old bus seats isn’t the thing then; isn’t what makes the memory matter. What makes the memory matter, then, is what it makes us do tomorrow. I feel the ink in the tattoo slosh with every breath I take and I think it is asking me, “Where to next?” and that’s what what matters most: the making of the memories, the next set of sweat-smelling seats on a bus to who-knows-where, the next move, the next adventure out there beyond the comfort zone and above the treeline.

From time to time though - I will admit - I do still hear a little ghost echo, “You may wonder how/I can promise you now …” it sounds like music from another room that has grown scratchy with age, “this love that I feel for you always will be …” but it does make the trip a easier; memories pack light that way.

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THREE HOURS!

I had to write another one of those infuriating “constraint” exercises for one of my writing classes.

This was the prompt:

Mapping the world:  Take David Shumate's micro-narrative/prose poem, The Bible Belt (below) and replace each of its words with one of your own (and of the same kind—nouns for nouns, verbs for verbs, etc.) using a title taken from your neighborhood of Los Angeles.  

It has taken me THREE HOURS to get through the 135 words. I am not a happy camper right now. I have many very important other things to be doing right now!

Anyway, Shumate’s piece is below (his is actually quite good) and mine is in the next post (it is not very good and yet still required a whole lot of grammatical cheating.)

The Bible Belt

By David Shumate

It's a vast and fertile land. Soybeans and corn grow in this soil. Wheat and tobacco. A little sorghum. It's not dramatic terrain with ocean waves crashing against the cliffs. It's mostly gently rolling plains. Long stretches of prairie. You know you've entered it when the signs along the highway begin telling you what God wants you to do. Those who live here regard it as their duty to make these things known. Otherwise the rest of the country would be left in the dark. The bibles in this region are larger than elsewhere. Most weigh over a hundred pounds. It takes two strong men to lift them into a pickup truck to haul off to church. All the women dress up on Sundays. And all the white men shake hands.

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An Adjacent Metropolis.

An Adjacent Metropolis

by james bezerra

We are the hot and cramped stipmalls. Spray tan and mascara smear in this heat. Asphalt and concrete. The thick 101. This isn't Hollywood dreamscapes beneath palm trees swaying over our success. We’re usually quietly mourning something. Potential pornstars among the homeless. She thinks she’s making it because her agent down in Studio City starts convincing her that directors need her to strip. We that survive this scab over as our penance and exploit the amateurs casually. Patiently a anxiety in the periphery will be pushing on the heart. A BMW on these streets is better than grace. Many fuck away the empty feeling. We drive three clogged freeways to move ourselves through the gaping Pass while going broke on gas. All the water disappeared down into pools. But all the starving potential lies here.

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All Your Badger News.

It is very easy for us to get caught up in our own busy lives and to miss out on the important things and to forget that there is a wider world out there that needs our attention. Sometimes even when we want to keep abreast of the affairs of the world it is difficult to know where to even start; the world is a daunting place right now: Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, the Ebola outbreak, ISIS. There’s the independence vote in Scotland, the upcoming midterm elections here at home, the economy is still in a slog, the wealth gap is as large as it has ever been and the western US is basically out of water. Like I said: daunting.

In light of all that, the editors here at Standardkink want to do our part and keep you up-to-date on one of the important issues you have probably not paid any attention to, that’s right: badger murdering.

For those of you who grew up in urban environments, this is a badger:  

This is an angry badger:

This is a skeptical badger who has lost his optimism and sense of purpose because he just read some Camus or something:

This is a still from the upcoming Quentin Tarantino children’s movie “Furry Friends Who Grow Up and Try to Eat Each Other”:

This is a badger who just wants you to rub his tummy:

This is a story about how the Brits are near a complete social collapse of the sort not seen since the War of the Roses on account of a government-sanctioned experiment to murder a bunch of badgers. It has something to do with stopping the spread of bovine tuberculosis. Well Britain has unwashed badger-loving hippies too and - god love them - they are threatening to hide in the bushes and throw themselves between the hunters and the badgers when the shooting starts. I imagine it will be something like the end of “In the Line of Fire” when Clint Eastwood throws himself between John Malkovich and the guy playing the President.

Some of them are, apparently, also infiltrating the groups of hunters, to what end I’m really not sure.

You can read about it all right here.

Also of interest: there is a surprisingly wide array of pictures of badgers on the internet. For instance, here is a badger in a helmet:

 This is a badger who is too close to the camera:

This is a badger who is alone. So alone:

This is a baby badger who wants to know why you let them murder his mother:

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