Kitchen

"Uh huh, yeah. No, I'm listening; stuck at the office; broccoli in the steamer in half an hour; asshole boss - you said it first -; deadline at nine so no later than ten; chicken breast thaw in the sink." Mumbling on the cordless, wipe afternoon Koz-Zone cartoons out of my eyes. Mom's staccato instruction, as though it was not mantra every other night this month. "No. I did my work already, Jesus." Homework's unblemished fill-in-the-blank Spanish 1 workbook nestles safe in the nylon nest of my Jansport. Big toe nail scrapes on the white/blue plaid gray linoleum of the one man kitchen; shuffle, shuffle through white tube sock into kitchen, shielding eyes against the halogen track lighting. First light since the last light of dusk set over the Torco building, diving behind the Chicago Public Library; jumping turn-styles at Jackson Blue Line, the dusk heads to the West-side. Read more [...]

emale

I know that you won't get this until Monday morning, at work. Not until you get through your Monday morning client status meeting. Not until you get your coffee -- heavy cream, heavy sugar -- and a bran muffin. I think that's why I'm sitting here right now. I know that Monday morning everything will be different between us. After we meet for brunch tomorrow at Leo's there will be compromises. There will boundaries. There will not be ambiguous phone calls of formality; "How are you holding up?" Followed by tumbleweeds of silence. There will not be anymore backdoor landings, 3a.m. with a sixer hanging on your hip and six more in your gut. In it of itself, not wrong. I just can't take much more of this out(law) communication. Read more [...]

Oy Vey

Levi Leviticus, L.L. for short, sprinted away from the lot with the pace of quicksilver. He was late, he knew it, his mother would wag her thick arm at him and say things like "A boy your age needs study as recreation, this 'stick ball', playing in an abandoned lot, this is fun? After I slave all day mending the hemlines of half Madhatan, you spend your afternoons playing in the dirt with gentiles? Oy Gavot!" She would prattle on until her wind was gone, at which point she would use the remainder of her energy to shake her permed head and sigh. "Look at this!" She would exclaim to the ceiling of their Brooklyn cold water flat. It was up until his ninth year that L.L. was under the impression that God lived in their cracked stucco ceiling. "Look at what this boy of mine runs through the streets in! I spend hours scrubbing your slacks and you gallivant through the neighborhood and God knows were else in this running suit like those Negroes on the basketball court!" and then she'd stare down at him with those cold, mahogany eyes and say "Are doing that dope? Tell me! Lord give me strength of Job for this one!" Read more [...]

Can You Speak a Little Louder

Speaker Tweakers are by far the strangest sub community in the rave crowds. They are more often than not males between the ages of 16-24, though I have seen exceptions to this in every set. Regardless of the age or sex they are always thin (which is not to say I've ever seen any of their waistlines) and they are ever decked in enough cloth to smuggle in a caravan of gypsies. Unlike other attendants, the Tweaker's clothing is devoid of the typical garish colors, are without pacifiers, and never have excess amounts of hard candy. The Speaker Tweakers--for as anti-social as their public disposition is--are found traveling in packs, never speaking, but usually just passing the indispensable hollowed out compact and straw. Their poison is almost always K (Ketamine, an anesthetic for animals) whose reverie effect without euphoria allows them to keep their heads in the floor to ceiling 1200-watt speakers all night. The effect is called being in a K hole. Imagine what it feels like to be a Praying Mantis having an indifferent dream about not possessing a sense of equilibrium on a floor made out of oatmeal and getting the slight recollection that you've been there before--that's being in a K hole. Like I said, K is only the staple and it's a downer. Most Tweakers have to mix in an upper into the K so that they can keep up. The archetypal cut is glass (the purest form of crystal meth, refined more times than most vodkas) with a dash of coke if available, for a mix called CK1. Read more [...]

Alchemy And The Pillars Of Christianity

There are little nooks of backwater retention ponds in every major religion. In the east, Hindu's had their Buddhists, Buddhists then in turn had their Vedicts (extreme reformers) and then their anglo Steven Seagal infusion. Confusionists had their Taoists, who then had their Shintoists into Capitalists. Jews had their Christians who then had the Muslims and Mormons. I used to think that Alchemy was such a place, a surreal little forgotten offshoot from mystical and scholarly Christians. I thought that it had long been the science of God, a way for those of us who have difficulty comprehending the concept of faith to access the Christian deity with rational actions that prove the might of the creation. This independent knowledge on the subject came to from hearing my Grandfather (who is actually a Free Mason, which was birthed from Alchemy) from the "old country" (the Netherlands) telling me about his Grandfather who was one of the last practicing the alchemist in my long family history of alchemists. Then I procured various bound galleries of alchemy chart work that had little explanation with its great works of symbolic text (making for great wallhangings that I could not quite explain), most ascribed to practitioners of mystical Kabbalisim or Christianity. Also feeding my finite understanding (which I took to be infinite) were numerous novels that incorporate the subject as fictional pretext, i.e. [i]Diaries of a Drug Fiend[/i] or [i]The Alchemist[/i], both of whom's authors pretty much made it up as they went. All of these things misled me until I found out through personal investigation that there is a distinct possibility that Alchemy may have in turn led to Christianity, instead of the other way around. Read more [...]