"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - July / August 2o26

Started the bottom.  Now we here.

Re-reading heavy lately.  Could be because the present's so shitty the future looks like '72.  I may've missed some stuff.  You could maybe give-a-damn?  If my ass believed in patreon.  But, shit.  Started from the bottom, now the old teen's here.  Started from the bottom now we here:

Listings are in reverse chronological order, freshest-to-oldest.  Read the top five Just Today b/c have I mentioned quitting smoking has my голова crenellated like one of CF's typographical fugues of revelation...?

Distant Ruptures: A Selection of Comics (2000-'10) - written & illustrated by Christopher Forgues

Stormwatch #47 - 'Assembly' (1993) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Jim Lee + Richard Bennett

Dark Knight Universe Presents:  The Atom #1s (2016) - written by Frank Miller & Brian Azzarello, illustrated by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, and coloured by Alex Sinclair

Silicon Horizon #1-3 (1992) - written by Mario Bergeron & illustrated by Richard Forgues

Billy Budd, KGB, a.k.a. Bouche du Diable / The Devil's Mouth (1989-'90) - written by Jerome Charyn & illustrated by François Boucq

Secret Agent X-9 (1934) - written by Dashiell Hammet & illustrated by Alex Raymond

X-9: Secret Agent Corrigan (Nov. 1970) - written by Archie Goodwin & illustrated by Al Williamson

Blood Lines a.k.a. The Fury #1-7 (1987-'88) - written & illustrated by Rob Walton

night life #1-8 (1986-'91) - written by Derek McColloch & illustrated by Simon Tristam

Ring of Roses #1-4 (1992) - written by Das Petrou & illustrated by John Watkiss

Grendel #16-17 (1988) - written & illustrated by Matt Wagner, and coloured by Tom Vincent

'The Aerialist' chs 1-3, from Dark Horse Presents #40, 45, & the DHP 5th Anniversary Special (1990-'91) - written & illustrated by Matt Wagner

Stormwatch: Team Achilles #2-5 (2002) - written by Micah Ian Wright & illustrated by Whilce Portacio, w/ colours by Alex Sinclair, Jeromy Cox, Guy Major, & Whilce Portacio

Post-Mortem starring Savage Henry & Those Annoying Post Bros. (1977-'90) - written & illustrated by Matt Howarth

Introducing Postmodernism (2004-'05) - written by Richard Appignanesi, Ziauddin Sardar, & Patrick Curry, and illustrated by Chris Garratt

healthy inhumane services

Gov't websites with RFKjrwtf's sundried dessicated potato face on 'em should be a crime.

return to PROMISELAND

Another day off, another day reading on the beach.  Up a tree and beneath it.  A peculiar feeling, to be nearly fifty, sitting on a stack of books.  Not literally, but near as damn.  PAINLESS, AZURE PANTRY, DENIZEN, THE KILL HOUSE, and PROMISELAND.  Five of the fuckers.  Who'da thunk.

I keep saying, "I'm not a writer," and there's nobody to argue.  But the OCDemon in my head has different ideas.  Quite a few, if page count is any indication.  Not sure where the OCDemon gets them all.  I don't quite remember writing the possessed monologue toward the end of the PROMISELAND script.  Not entirely.

I do remember having Christian's Smith-Corona at the Hip Pharmacy, back in my late teens, early twenties.  He loaned it to me to fuck around with and clean up.  I used it for sure, but for what, who the fuck knows.  At some point he swung past, curious what I'd been up to, said no-one had seen me for two weeks.  Said Chris Neal told him "Dee is writing the great american novel," to which I replied "The great american novel is a rosy bucket of balls."  Which elicited a laugh, and he asked to swap the Smith-Corona (was it his dad's?  i think it had been his dad's) for his old IBM tower, which I guess was my first computer, after leaving home.  I'd had an Apple IIc in high school, and vague recollections of 'writing' / free-associating a freewheeling script-- about 60 pages, single-sided --with conceits largely swiped from Phantasm (1979) and teevee Peaks.  So I repeated that process of typing whatever the fuck seemed compelling, on the new machine, and the results weren't half-terrible.  There was a lot of Wild Palms (1993) and Destiny Turns On the Radio (1995), and not much else that wasn't swiped from Fire Walk With Me (1992).  Can't even remember the title.  Prob'ly best.

Christian was the one with the lit degree, and over the course of our time in Auburn-- 1994-99  --we were engaged in a friendly competition to see who could read the western canon of 90s hipness quickest, so his constant encouragement meant a hell of a lot.  I always expected him, or one of his friends (Christian was, is, a great collector of people with talent) to produce that Great American Ballbucket.  But, y'know, life didn't happen that way.  He went off to work for fuckin' Google, to drink and smoke his way across Europe, leaving me in Atlanta, having literally broken up his last home, 'The House of Slack'.  Twentysomething years in Atlanta was tailormade revenge for that wrong, I figure.

See, I kind of ruined his room-mate situation, after he'd ruined the previous one, by not fucking the right room-mate.  We both fucked incorrect room-mates, which sent us caroming off into weird, wrongly-angled lives, billiards-style.  [Let us avoid the subject of Charlie and Kate, except to note how thoroughly frustrating it is to be a witness & interlocutor to friends fucking other friends over.  Which I'm sure Christian grokked, given what happened with me...]  I still haven't forgiven myself, exactly, for failing to fuck Saneesh.  I should have.  Instead I stole his girlfriend.  Typical ol' me.  To be fair she was only with Saneesh because she'd made a pass at me the year previous & I redirected her at Saneesh.  Then he left town, for several months; though she & I only waited a few hours after his car left the driveway.  Hyptertypical old me.  Zero impulse control.

Dennis Whorehopper: that shoulda been my name.  If I couldn't smoke it or drink it, for sure I'd eventually fuckit up, up and away.

I know the whole idiotic scene tore Christian up.  But he was tired of watching me be crazy.  I cannot disagree.  Crazy Dee wasn't great entertainment.  Witnessing me losing my shit over & over, destroying everything and starting anew.  It was endless.  If there was a sin committed on C's side it was simply that he didn't try to arrange psychiatric help.  He did every other damn thing he could think of:  including encouraging me to be a writer, whether I was one or not.

So hey.  Christian.  The g.a.n.?  Still a ballbucket.  But PROMISELAND is my ballbucket.

Figure I know who the dedication will be to.

dream - o82626: beneath the bridge

By night, dim streetlight trickling in.  The khaki of river mud.  The tricycle with its rainbow coloured appliques, its wooden panels and wheels, sunken.  Like nothing inherited, no known or secondhand known toy, but evocative of them.

So no surprise when I find him stretched out on our couch.  Elbows up, technician's fingers interlaced back of his skull.  Hair dark as his forties, drawn into ponytail.  The pooled light on his glasses obscuring his eyes.  He pretends to not understand my anger.  Not smiling.

He pretends to not understand.  But he sees its radiance in me.  A fury like hot asphalt, warping the air between us.  It flares, swells and distorts as I turn, my voice an eruption.  The accusation of abuse sliding off his pretense of ignorance, for but a second, as I pile it on.

I won't let him not hear.  I cannot let him pretend any longer.  He knew.  He always knew.  The living room feels smaller.  Or is it the heightened pulse of emotion that's reduced my surroundings.  The man on the couch, on the defensive, stony indifference downshifting to fear as he notices my balled fists.

No water beneath that bridge.  There was once.  That childhood belonged to another.

totes sobers, day four

Marijuana was part of my life.

Is that a sentence?  It feels incomplete.

Marijuana was part of my life for decades.

Yeah, still looks like a sentence.  Still feels lopped-off.

Marijuana was part of my life for decades, even when I wasn't smoking it.

Hmm.  Closer.  I dimly recall, at seventeen, trying (& failing) to smoke my parents' pot.  I wasn't a smoker, at that point.  I hadn't had my first cigarette with Cameron.  My first time smoking weed was with Chris Neal, probably 1998.  Had a little anxiety, got minor spins, but it wasn't any stronger--  or more pleasant --than alcohol.  I had convinced myself that since previous exposure hadn't done anything, what I smoked with Neal was laced.  And of course I was a human party foul because I expressed this anxiety to others, trying to convince them something was awry with the weed.

That put me off it for a bit.  I stuck to alcohol, when I was drinking.  Which wasn't infrequently, but it wasn't an avowed Habit, either.  The only full-on habit was cigarettes.  It wasn't until '99 that pot came back into things.  There was a band kid, James Blackledge, and a friend / neighbor, JoMichael Nelson.  Summer, we'd smoke up and listen to Massive Attack vs. The Mad Professor on the rooftop of the converted motel we were living in...  Take late night field trips to Auburn University's art department, or the practice spaces of nearby churches, and do guerilla recordings.  This was the first (adult?) time I ever flirted with actually Making Music, which speaks to how fuckin' high I must've been.

But still, not really a habit.  I didn't keep weed around the apartment.  In part because every time I ever sold anyone any mushrooms or acid--  my plug was my manager at CheeBurger, CheeBurger  --then every useless teenage waster in Auburn would somehow make their way to my door.  For a while there was a sign on my front door which declared "THIS IS NOT A HIP PHARMACY", to deter the dopers.  Just being around them made me want to be straightedge.  Which became the other extreme of the pendulum, for me.  Either I was amenable to altered states, or I was too wise for 'em.

As you can see, I've not gotten any more personable.  Or concise.

The Richmond & elsewhere years, weed didn't really factor in.  So there was roughly three, four years where drugs didn't happen.  Mainly because in the fall of '99 I overdosed on 'shrooms.  A violently unpleasant bit of psychic fragmentation, there; I got the whole "ego death" thing the heads of my parents' generation used to drone on about.  Put me off drugs almost entirely.  Encouraged me to doubt my sanity more than I already did.  The skittish look in people's eyes might have been projection, but there was no way to be 100%.  So I took it as a given that there was Damage, and to steer the hell clear for as long as was tolerable.

Ut!  But I tell a tiny lie.  There was some weed in the Richmond era.  I lived with a doorman at Bogart's, a lousy mob-run jazz club, and that dude smoked more than anybody you've ever met.  Pete was a True Loser, bombed-out ragged-out from heroin use (which he would never deny), seventy if he was forty-five, and a gross old freak like I've never known before or since.  Kept a television tuned to static in his bathroom, "as an art project", liked to sit and smoke on a stool by the vent fan in the terminally disused kitchen with his feet in the oven, and had an intractable attraction to using my toothbrush, which, given his bog monster dentistry, disgusted me.  I don't know how many toothbrushes I bought him, or why he kept losing them, and using mine.  I couldn't keep much of a stash around because if Pete ran through his, he'd sniff out mine, no matter where I squirreled it.

Eventually he pocketed all my-and-his-son's rent--  he rented an art studio to his kid, who lived elsewhere  --and fucked off to Newport News to try and scam his daughter into caring for him, leaving his kid and me cleaning up that rat's nest and getting kicked out.  Which was half a shame, because I liked the sound of the piano teacher, downstairs, and the widow's walk on the roof was my favourite feature from any home I've ever had.

Pete was an object lesson in what addiction looked like, and sometimes I forget what a warning he was.

But here it is, day four.  And I remember.  Lord.

Marijuana *was* part of my lives.  All of 'em.

on reading 'red x' by david demchuk

Not much to say here, apart from the epiphany that sometimes, when reading, a work does not sit well with a reader because they have their own book.  My experience of being queer in North America is certainly not this author's, and vice versa.  But he's using a familiar toolbox, the tools are anyone's to use, & I do not believe what he has built is very like what I have built.  It's been a couple years since I decided to create a queer horror novel; I think mine stands on its own, and does not make the choices made here, because--  I'm not writing for the marketplace.  I don't want to write for the market.  I think orienting oneself towards that goal neuters the actual emotions of apprehension, anxiety, nervousness & fear that power such work.  All that said, 'Red X' is not a bad book; but it is not a Great Book, as horror / folklore goes.  It reads like work by a writer who feels beholden to the broader history of horror, as chronicled in the twenty-first century; it feels like 'Danse Macabre' and many other King books besides; it echoes too many other things, and speaks not enough for itself.  It feels like a second novel, shepherded to print with the assistance of an editor who's looking to make their career off a Hot Young Author.  But mostly it feels like I need to stop reading it, soon, because I have forty pages to go and too little patience left.

why

"If you don't mind me asking," said Siegfried, "why did you decide to stop smoking?"

I don't answer.  Earlier, eliptically, earlier, I did.  But now that I could expound upon it, I don't, choosing instead to recapitulate earlier points from the same list of reasons.  So I don't say the real, 100% #1 reason for quitting smoking.

Because I have to stop self-isolating.  Smoking is a self-isolating, self-segregating activity.  It separates you from others, and it is a choice to be separate.  This process of selection is actually useful, in a lot of ways, because [the majority of] people need to find reasons to be selective with their company.  Nobody needs to, or wants to, be around generalized, undifferentiated Everybody all the time.

There are far better, far smarter ways to do this.  Carrying a book or newspaper, some kind of reading material.  Keeping a journal or notebook, writing in it regularly.  These are pretty foolproof props for self-selecting what company you want to keep.  A book is a Big Signifier:  the company a reader wishes to keep is one that's not a font of ceaseless chatter.  It doesn't say you don't like words, or speech, but it gives the observer, the observant, a guide to what type, kind, or mode of communication you'd prefer-- which of course goes a long ways toward indicating the content you prefer to be immersed in, and is a politer way of doing so than blasting your favourite drill rap on the train.

I have been self-isolating, and self-segregating, for my entire life.  I did it in the south as a form of survival strategy.  But there is absolutely no need for it now.  Smokers are--  listen, what I'm about to say might sound mean, but I'm allowed to speak for everyone in my former clan, since I've been finding ways to relapse into that camp for twenty-something years, and they were always only too happy to have me  --smokers are miserable cunts.  Only a miserable cunt wants to be around other miserable cunts, because that's where they're happiest.  They like a fag, and being around other smokers, and not much else.  If they're the sort that calls themselves a smoker, that's the brand.  A smoker is always looking around for indicators as to whether they can smoke, where they can smoke, the distance between themselves and having the next smoke, etc.  It's all in relation to the habit.  The context for the smoker is the ability to smoke, or the ability to remark on the inconvenience of doing so.  It's a grim state of necessity, not dissimilar to that of other types of addiction except inasmuch as it's had some measure of Cool, Roguish, Counter-conformity attached ever since before James Dean got his shit soundly mortalized.

Also, it's fucking expensive.  Whether you're talking tobacco or toking.  Which makes the chronic smoker, the lifelong jones-er, evaluate the smokeability of every butt in a locale.  Which is a really disgusting detail, which SHOULD shame me, but I was sidewalk surfing for so long there's no point trying.  Sidewalk surfing is the lowest of the low.  It's homeless turf, addict turf.  It's demoralizing, ultimately.  And it eats up a fuck of a lot of time.

Because, if--  as stated earlier  --the point, the goal, is to separate (as opposed to distinguish) oneself from the greater mass of humanity, well.  The moral of smoking is that it's there to pass the time until your time passes.  A smoker smokes because they like smoking, and sometimes what they love most about it is that it's bad for you.  In terms of health, and in terms of society.  The smoker is the Perfect Capitalist labor unit.  They work so they can smoke so they can die on their own terms.  If they articulate it.  And the most insufferable of us do articulate it.  It's why smokers venerate deeply abrasive comedians like Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks and (shudder) Dennis Leary and Doug Stanhope as basically saints.  The saints of the death drive.

I started smoking because of / with my first boyfriend.  But I kept smoking because I wanted to die.  That's not an exaggeration.  I had been suicidal, was prone to persistent suicidal ideation, and dying was the ultimate loner move.  If the goal was isolation, then it doesn't get more sealed-off than choosing to give your lungs more pinholes than a voodoo doll.  So yeah.

That's probably enough Why to justify quitting, to anybody.  Let's see if it convinces me?

giving yourself permission

It's not the physical satisfaction, it's the physical habit.

Having OCD & quitting smoking is...  I don't think I can tell you.  The physical habit is the thing.  Being a smoker causes a whole series of physical tics that the Art Brain becomes conditioned to; these manifest as tics and tendencies that are a bastard to get on top of.  They become determinants.  They determine the amount of time one spends doing anything.  They structure the day.  But no more.  It has to be me, not the habit, that does these things.  It was always me.  It must be my volition, not my addictive tendency, that organizes my day.  How else am I to admit joy into my life?  Where is the room for it to grow?  So.

Long story short I threw away my one-hitter this morning.  I've been using that thing over a decade.  Its case had been physically reshaped by the constant use; its base had been machine-level when purchased, but after ten years plus its posterior surface more resembled a well-tempered anvil than anything resembling flat.  A constant companion and witness to my degenerate addiction, that device.

Walked up to the end of Kathy Osterman pier and slung it as far as I could into lake Michigan:  my last act of pollution in this life.

With it I gave myself permission to let go of the behaviors I had taken on, in my adoption of the habit of smoking from my first boyfriend, Cameron, when I gave him money to buy a pack of cigarettes but then insisted on smoking half.  Just to be petty.  Made myself sick doing it, like a natural born idiot.  Smoking was a thing gay boys in the South did.  It became a socialization thing, a homosocial bond, especially at the time I adopted the habit, in the 90s.  It became part of being closeted, too.  And once the act of smoking became attached to my fondness for marijuana it became this ingrained, criminal, furtive behavior associated with a whole life that ended decades ago.  I am not a criminal, I am not a closeted scared kid, I am a well-adjusted angry old faggot who has to let the bad go along with the habit.  I'm holding onto a whole world that doesn't HAVE to exist, for me, in this life, any longer, by holding onto smoking and the little rituals of addiction and the self-segregation that smoking causes.  So today I gave myself permission to let it go.

And then did the little act of necessary defiance and sacrifice and consign a physical manifestation of a decade and change of my life to the sedimentary floor of a lake greater than any I have heretofore known.  That part of me can stay there, down deep where nobody will find it but me, when I think on all the little wasted seconds that went into that stuff.  Smoking is a motherfucker.  I won't miss it.

ocd vs plastics

today's ocd clean was a bit of improv.  walking the breaker wall between foster & monstrose beaches, spy a shelf filled with detritus, so out with the materials:  gloves, trashbag, patience.  the sorting is impossibly tiny, as foam of all types (styro, polystyrene, fill foam, insulation) is chunked up amidst the natural flotsam of driftwood, bark, feather, straw, dried seaweed, etc.  this is all leavened by shredded straws, kite string, balloon ribbon, plastic forks, chip bags, and of course, bottlecaps.  every type shape and make of cap for every bottle you can imagine, from the humble disposable water bottle to milk caps to pill bottles to wine corks-- every size conceivable, plus washers, pull tabs, and sundry seals for all the aforementioned

it is no exaggeration to say the scale of the task is barely conceivable.  it takes forty five minutes to clear a twelve-foot stretch of breaker shelf, going through all the middens of flotsam & jetsam.  there was one dead fish, a goodsized fucker.  surprisingly few glass bottles.  one tequila bottle, one agave, some broken basic beers.  a pair of sunworshippers thank me for taking the time & ask if i'm with a crew.  "no," i tell them, "this is just how i manage my ocd"

it's true.  at multiple points i found myself wondering why i was doing it.  and why i couldn't stop.  but it's what i do.  i just finished sweeping & vacuuming the house.  same syndrome.  i just get started and it's fuck you, entropy.  there's no real choice in it, for me, beyond picking a starting point

i can't remember who it was that first identified the issue.  probably christian wanakmaker & charlie bennett.  i was living with them at the house of slack, in atlanta.  the fuckers were confirmed bachelors and a total wreck when it came to basic upkeep.  they relied on my couchsurfing ass to keep them from rotting.  one day i found out my father was going to be passing through atlanta, and i thought i'd make an effort.  so i started cleaning.  did christian or charlie try to help?  no.  they just... watched me.  remarking on my obsessive-compulsive disorder, with amusement.  treating it like a novelty.  my father showed up and i wasn't done, and i couldn't stop myself, either, so i kept hacking at the kitchen, bathrooms, and floors.  christian & charlie were genial hosts, chatted with him for a bit.  i completed all my tasks at last and spent ten, fifteen minutes talking with the man i hadn't seen in six years, and then he headed on his way

my "friends" and roomies kept making little remarks about my ocd afterward.  at no point thanking me.  i've gotten the same treatment from coworkers and exes, over the intervening decades.  it used to rankle me, peeps calling me obsessive-compulsive.  "does this happen often?" a co-worker may ask, seeing me losing my mind.  but they generally don't offer to help.  they just watch.  it is what it is

i did get a formal diagnosis for o.c.d. sometime around 2013, or so.  for what that's fuckin' worth.  but it was my so-called best friends who named it.  bugged the shit out of me, at the time.  i didn't like the label.  now it's just something i do

re-reading / up a tree

a good sign, when re-reading & you no longer see things to fix.  all the gaping wounds & obtrusive scar tissue have been elided and there is now a flow whereas before it was ALL roadwork, to my weary eyes

edits are coming to an end

i have of late been doing a lot of my editing in a tree.  this isn't gonna be one of those posts.  it feels good to climb a tree and sit and think.  i feel like i've re-discovered something.  i've always done a bit of climbing & perching, but it's been years time since i've felt confident enough to really Climb.  apparently i have the upper body strength for it, whereas in my youth-as-a-squirrel my arms were flabby & tremulous

also i have no fear.  which i keep noticing and wondering at--  it should bother me, or there should be some leeriness, some anxiety over imbalance, but i just look down with unarticulated certainty that i'm secure.  you'd think i haven't been afraid of climbing stairs or taking a tumble...  which i have, rather significantly, since cracking my skull.  i've had a veritble case of the Mortals ever since the skullcrack.  a stair without a banister spooks me.  and since my right knee started giving me grief i've been rather reliant on banisters.  but this tree climbing thing is instinctual, apparently, and does not strain the joints, somehow

maybe tree climbing reverses aging.  what's the harm in believing that?  don't answer

anyroad.  a photographer noticed me the other day and asked "why" and i didn't have an answer since it was an impulse.  but...  it's nice to be in a public place and people simply either take you for granted because you're not at eye level, ergo you're out of mind's reach, or when they do notice you, it's with a pleasurable envy.  that look that says "fuck, i wish i'd thought to climb up there".  it's a nice perch.  good shade.  great spot to think & read.  reading in a tree is the fuckin' best

my favourite tree at the moment, to be completely honest:  my editing suite