Read me, see me and hear me

Thanks to a publishing-savvy friend I'm getting all the stories from my short story collection, WEST OF YOU, up on Audible/iTunes. Via the Audible site I discovered some incredible, amazing voice actors who are producing the short stories. The first one, GATOR COUNTRY, is up and running on Amazon and iTunes.

Narrator John Tambascio does a flawless Canadian cowboy. Check it out.

The Rules Don't Apply to Him

Congratulations America, you did it. Once again, you proved to the rest of the world you are the functionally retarded kid sitting in the back of the class ... eating paste.

In January of 2003, when I was in the UK, I had to answer the same question over and over: "No I did not vote for him (George W. Bush)." Usually followed by "Yes, he IS a complete idiot, isn't he?"

Again, in late 2003 when I was in Australia for four months, I had to field all sorts of snide remarks about the Rodeo Clown and his burning need to impress his Daddy and Uncle Dick by invading a country that never attacked us (Iraq) and bombing it into a social stone age. The awful division between the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shiites is worse now than it ever was under CIA-backed, petty dictator Saddam Hussein.

I had to confirm for baffled Brits (there are a lot Down Under) and perplexed Aussies that "Yes, 'Murika really is THAT dumb!" Dumb enough to believe whatever lies the Republican party and FAUX News shit out every day.

Interesting side note: FAUX News, the LA Times, and I forget how many dozens of other Fourth Estate participants, are all owned by a white Australian billionaire who has publicly admitted his goal is to push politics as far right as possible to instigate some sort of global fascism so he can be the new Fuhrer's Joseph Goebbels. Anything to defeat the fake boogeyman of communism/socialism and any sort of labor organization. He bought nearly every newspaper in Australia and New Zealand decades ago. Ditto the UK. Guess what? All those gun-owning, Harley-riding, he-man Aussies -- none of them read the paper. They're too smart for FAUX News. As one said to me in Perth while pointing at the newspaper stand: "That's all bloody Murdock's crap. We don't bother with it."

Once again, conservative America's unexplainable phobia for women in pants suits, gay marriage and articulate black people has pushed the dumbest of us to elect an Orange Troll Doll and military school dropout who shamelessly dodged the Vietnam draft five times. A preening narcissist who refers to himself in the royal "we", has had every single opportunity handed to him on a silver platter, including the opportunity to not pay most of the construction contractors and service employees who have worked for him over the years. He's burned so many millionaire investors and Russian mobsters I won't be surprised when they finally come for his knee caps. Don the Con is a fat old man who has slobbered over so many wanna-be Miss America contestants and mail-order brides he makes Jabba the Hutt look classy. I would not want to be a female employee in the White House mail room come January.

The greatest tragedy to befall conservative America is the fact 90% of you are too poor and dumb to have ever traveled overseas, especially to another democracy. Too bad because you can't hear the roaring laughter coming from places like Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Canada, Japan, Spain, and yes, the UK, where 49% of their citizens allowed the other 51% mostly geriatrics to vote in favor of Brexit, a referendum that will surely be repealed in the next couple of years or England will face social and economic chaos. Just like we're facing now.

America: the only democracy in the world where stupidity is celebrated via millions of re-tweeted racist cartoons. America: where intelligence is viewed with scorn and suspicion and blustery 14-year-old bullies are elected to the most powerful position on earth. The Orange Troll Doll's sweaty tiny hand will soon be holding the "football", the brief case every president has held since the Cold War. The one that allows him to order a global nuclear missile launch.

The Donald embodies what our society has told white male heterosexuals for decades: that the rules don't apply to them. Rules are for broads, brown people, the handicapped or crippled, queers and other whiners.

If you think you've got it bad now, conservative America, what with the Affordable Care Act finally forcing your insurance provider to pay for your chemo, banks having to adhere to at least some vague regulations and the fact that the employees at your neighborhood WalMart are getting EBT cards so the Walton heirs don't have to pay a living wage and the employees won't starve, wait till we're all standing in a pile of radioactive rubble and neither Canada or Mexico will come to our aid. Because in the end, all you can do with the stubbornly stupid is leave them alone until they die out.

Misogyny compels thee!

When I was eight, The Exorcist came out in theaters in Reno, Nevada. The book had been floating around (no, not levitating) a few years prior. I remember my teenage neighbor showing me the passage of the book where little Regan masturbates with a cross. I couldn't comprehend it at the time but when I hit puberty I thought: a cross, really? It's telling that a man wrote this book and this was the worst thing he could think of happening ... to an object that hangs on a wall.

Years later, when I was in high school (after becoming well versed in masturbation), I finally saw the movie on cable TV. After years of exaggerated publicity it was a letdown. I don't know what I was expecting but a basic horror movie with dark lighting and a moody soundtrack just couldn't live up to all that hype. The scene where Regan is bowing down before the hazy green demon? I'd seen better special effects on Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

I now see The Exorcist for what it was: fear of a teenage girl's sexuality.

Correction: terror of female sexuality.

How many demonic possession films have been made since? Twenty at least. How many of these feature pubescent boys as the main possessed person? Almost none.

As recently as last year, a horror movie set in 1700's New England came out where the rosy-cheeked Puritan girl at the end not only has sex with Satan (who is dressed as Pirates of the Caribbean Jack Sparrow, go figure), she literally flies afterward. Flying being a clunky metaphor for orgasm. She also has to help kill her entire family. The bias is clear: female sexuality isn't just something to be feared, it drives people to murder.

In demonic possession films the victim is always female because teenage girls are terrifying. And the exorcist is always a man because he represents the dominant paradigm: white, male and heterosexual (yet weirdly celibate and supposedly immune to the girl's sexuality).

In yoga this is Seated Twisting Triangle pose.

There has never been a horror movie where a possessed male victim writhes and howls sexually while tied to a bed as a female exorcist watches. This is because male sexuality isn't feared: it's humorous, it's mocked, it's every day. Female sexuality is covert. Until the likes of Broad City, it was hidden, ignored or dismissed. All the way into the new millennium scientists and social commentators were questioning why women even had orgasms. What was the point? Female sexuality is that unnecessary to the patriarchy.

Possessed female characters in horror films are always restrained because their sexuality must be. Between being tied to a bed, "burned" with crucifixes and holy water and flat-out punched (see: Cinemax's Outcast) what happens to them isn't just sadomasochism, it's full on assault. And the assailant, the exorcist, is the hero! Violence against women is re-envisioned as religious suffering.

So it was with trepidation that I watched the first couple of episodes of FOX's The Exorcist. Once again a teenage girl is getting backhanded by grown men in uniforms. Uniforms which today are more likely to get them compared to pedophiles than angels.

Surprisingly, so far the show has not fallen straight into this misogynistic trope. I mean, it has Geena Davis in it.

Mind you, the trope is still there. The possessed, Casey, is harassed on a subway and nearly raped. In response, she lets the demon possess her and reek unholy vengeance on the slimy sports fan who gropes her. Go Team Demon! But afterward, Casey is so overwhelmed by her new found dark power that she wets herself. This is keeping with the scene in the original Exorcist where little Regan pees herself after mockingly telling a guest "you're going to die." Peeing is a metaphor for menstruation, the undeniable red flag of a woman's virility and sexual maturity. But it's also a sexual fetish for the Male Gaze, see: golden showers.

The patriarchy still needs to rein in Casey's sexuality via burning her with a curling iron but thankfully, the plot is not true and straight. It's serpentine and that's good. Father Marcus is so mistreated by the juggernaut of Catholicism, you wonder why he even bothers to do good. Casey's older sister might be a lesbian, a lipstick one at that, and that's something she could be ex-communicated for. Remember what Monty Python taught us: God loves every sperm.

The third episode introduced a whole bunch of new characters and I pray we'll see more of them. There's a bad-ass nun who performs exorcisms and encourages Marcus to get in touch with his feminine side. Hallelujah! And there's a New Age tour guide couple, Cherry and Lester Rego, who steal the show with their unflappable humor when dealing with homeless Father Marcus. Yes, the Church so mistreats him, the poor guy doesn't even have a place to sleep.

In the latest episode, were given all the tie-ins to the original film's myth arc. Casey's mother, Angela, is really little Regan all grown up. The ending is a nice kick in the nuts of the possession trope with Sharon Gless filling in for Ellen Burstyn as grown-up Regan's mother. But instead of Burstyn's shrill panic, Regan's Mom is now a potent force, a re-envisioned matriarch hiding under the cloak of the patriarchy. She looks completely masculine in the closing scene under the obligatory flickering street light.

I was ready to dismiss this show and it's tired old box of misogyny until this. Now I think I'll sit in the back of the Rego's bus and let the tour unfold. And I'll save my questions for the end of the ride.

Expose yourself ... to the library

I have no idea if this will work but I signed my short story collection up on SELF-e. I gotta say, the Washington state library system produced a super nice glossy tri-fold brochure ... that explained nothing. They didn't even get the damn website address right. Anyhoo, other authors might be interested, especially if they already did the Amazon thing and got a ISBN:

SELF-e Library Journal

Another freebie

My short story BRAVE SUCKER is available for FREE download on Amazon starting today. You don't even need a Kindle, an iPad, an e-reader, nada. Just a computer with a screen, download it and away you go!

Still more FREE !

My dark satire short story OBJECT OF DESIRE is available for FREE right now, right here.

Still more FREE

Starting June 22nd my short story LAND OF NOD is available for FREE on Amazon. This sci-fi near-future dystopian story is creeping up the Kindle download bestseller list. Snag it while it's free!

Free ebook, that's right completely FREE for 48 more hours

People,

Snag this short story collection while it's F-R-E-E. Don't need a Kindle, a Nook, a nanny, a hall pass, or even matching socks -- just a computer screen with which to download and read these totally FREE short stories.

Let's do this.

Au Revoir, Stump Town

After wasting 15 months of my life, I'm over Portland completely and utterly. No more Portlandia inspired daydreams for me. The last time I strolled across Burnside Bridge at sunset, it was not gauzy lighting and curious Hipsters on bikes. It was dirty, loud and dangerous, like I might be pitched into the beige cesspool of the Willamette the minute some aging infrastructure failed.

There were all sorts of red flags that I shouldn't try to live there, but I had my Carrie Brownstein blinkers on. My first mad attempt should have curbed all my future Oregonian ambitions.

I met a room renter on Craigslist in October 2013 and moved into her 3-bedroom, 2-bath condo the day I met her. Two weeks into our cohabitation, she lost her job thanks to the Government Shutdown and receded into her bedroom for two weeks of Zoloft-inspired texting to her online boyfriend. She emerged long enough to tell me -- without any warning -- that I had 48 hours to move.

Portland invented flakiness and shucking personal responsibility. Now throw in some real Great Recession angst and you've got a recipe for a thoughtless upper middle class ignoring a growing sea of working poor.

The second foray up to the Portland area was more promising. In January 2015, I had a temp job waiting for me and got into a rental share with a nice, level-headed lady who also had a 3-bedroom  this time in Vancouver, Washington, the suburban tumor that clings to the top of Portland like a plastic cowboy hat. All was well for the first two months. Then the elderly bat-shit crazy landlady below us decided on a Vicodan-induced whim that we had to move. This was my first no-cause eviction. I now know they happen all the time in the Portland area, which is second only to San Francisco in pitching tenants to the curb ... for no reason at all. (Really it's about money, rents are sky rocketing in the Cleveland of the Pacific Northwest).

I found housing in Portland to be depressingly like Seattle: slumlords were getting $750 for motel rooms with kitchenettes. First, last plus vague $400 "non-refundable" deposits. That's $1900 for a shed.

I scrambled to find housing, spent a while living with a mean dude who was a quart-of-vodka-a-day alcoholic and finally settled on the last room I rented for $600 a month: a 10 x 10 square foot in the basement of a 75-year-old tract home owned by an Asian Hipster chick who was the definition of Pretentious New Ager. One of her six day jobs was re-aligning chakras. Seriously.

At age 49, I took a job as a landscape laborer when my first temp job abruptly ended (they didn't want to spring for healthcare). I was 15 years too old for this dead-end job and Vancouver in June was 30 degrees too hot for that kind of work.

I interviewed for technical writing jobs at places like Intel where I was told over and over, "it was down to you and one other person." Stable, good-paying employment in Portland was like the summit of Mt. Hood -- pretty to look at and eternally out of reach.

Everyone had assured me that Portland and its surroundings were chocked full of Liberals. People who were avid recyclers, organic gardeners, Unitarian Universalists and believers in book sharing. I'd say this was true about 25-percent of the time. The rest of the time? It was Sacramento with more trees and angrier NIMBYs.

For a town of 75,000, Vancouver had a lot of skinheads. And in retrospect, Portland is a city where someone in a coffee shop can say totally straight faced: I'm a vegan and a white supremacist.

Black Pussy. Yes, there's a band in Portland that call themselves this. Read the drama here.

Overall, I found Portlanders to be insular and pretentious on a level Seattleites can only dream of. They're certain they're doing the right thing (their "thing") and they're certain everyone else is not.

Childishness isn't just endorsed in Portland, it's a valid lifestyle. People don't go to parties to drink and hear bands. No, no. They go to "art parties" to "engage in new mix medias". Think: birdhouses out of Popsicle sticks in the second grade. There must be 20 or so Meetup groups in Portland just for people who play board games. Not kids, but adults in their 20s and 30s lining up outside bars to play Clue or Jenga.

Forays into yesterday's fads like 80s culture is fine, but devoting all your free time to a past you likely were never a participant in, is just weird.

Get your own fucking style, poseur.

At least people who were into swing dancing in the 1990s understood it would only be trendy for about 15 minutes and then we'd all move on from the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

I suppose I have too close a perspective on Portland and its Hipsters because I lived with two of them for nine months. But one of them was a trust-fund cunt who had a day job as a Pilates instructor despite the fact she couldn't get sober long enough to teach P.E. to fifth graders and the other was the High Priestess of channeling money out of rich housewives from Lake Oswego.

They talked about organic farming, helping the poor, seeing other people's point of view, blah, blah, blah. But scratch the surface and they were as typically bigoted and selfish as the yuppie Realtor in the Prius next to you in traffic.

Most people are generous and liberal until it's an inconvenience and then they're not. Ah, neoliberalism, you poseur,

Zombies: They're all in your head

I like The Walking Dead. I loved Max Brooks' World War Z, even met him and had him sign my copy of the book. I think Robert Kirkman is a great writer. I listened to his interview on Marc Maron's WTF podcast and he was interesting. And he's a talented storyteller who, unlike a whole lot of white men, has no problem writing about black characters, strong female characters, gay characters, any ol' kind of characters you can think of. Awesome.

She can't be hungry, no digestive system ... at all!

Here's the thing about zombies and the entire sci-fi/fantasy premise: It's complete bullshit. When people die, they swell up because of all the microbes and gases in their intestines, sometimes they burst, they smell real bad ... and that's it. Dead is dead. The very absolute end. Period. I've seen dead bodies a couple times in my life. I saw my grandma when I was 15. My aunt and uncle made the faux pas of having her casket left open. She looked well made up, hair neatly combed, slightly plastic and very dead.

Another time I was working in a retirement home for something like four dollars an hour and one of the long-term vegetative geriatrics in the retirement home died. The charge nurse didn't notice for several hours because, well, he never moved and was always asleep. His gurney was wheeled out of his room and into a hallway. His body was covered in a sheet. Aside from the fact his emaciated chest wasn't rising and falling, it wasn't much of a change from his prior state of being.

Dead people are without exception always one thing; very still. They don't get up and dance and they certainly don't rise up and start roaming shopping malls for human flesh.

If you are medically brain dead, you have no lower reptilian brain. You have no desire or compulsion to eat, let alone breathe. You can't see, hear, smell, taste or touch. Sorry Kirkman, zombies can't "smell" fresh human blood.

Prior to AMC's extravaganza, there was a plethora of zombie flicks. Like The Walking Dead, many take liberties with making zombies look as comically gory as possible. Zombies without limbs come out with their teeth gnashing. Zombies without spines slither menacingly toward the protagonist. Even more improbable, zombies without abdomens come lunging out of the dark, hungry for flesh. The trouble is, nothing without a digestive system, along with that all-important nervous system and circulation, has an appetite. Even invertebrates like parasitic worms aren't interested in lunch if you cut them in half in biology class.

I can't write fiction about zombies or any sort of zombie-sponsored apocalypse because some part of me is still a 12-year-old biology student who is gunning for an "A". I understand the basics of biology too well to suspend belief and stop snickering over the silly premise.

 Totally REAL. Complete, absolutely real and occasionally ridden by Vampire Bill.

I would more likely believe in fucking unicorns living wild and free in Narnia or Middle Earth than zombies stumbling after their next "meal".

Now vampires, those I totally believe in.

"Wil" you write for free?

Ummm, no. I don't work for free. Awesomest post by Wil Wheaton in response to HuffingtonPost. This is great.

You Can't Pay Your Rent ...


And among the replies there was this awesome little social experiment:

Ask non-creatives to work for "free".

Object of Desire (a short story)

One of my short stories is going to be offered FREE on Amazon Kindle starting on Tuesday Sept. 15.

Science Fiction is B.S. - 1982

West of You: short stories

My short story collection is up on Amazon/Kindle and can be bought here: WEST OF YOU.

And two of my short stories are now available on Kindle.

BRAVE SUCKER can be had for the rock-bottom price of $1.29, less than a cup of coffee.

And LAND OF NOD, one of the short stories which previously ran in THE SUBTOPIAN: SELECTED STORIES VOL. 2 can be read for $1.59. That's less than the cost of bagel.

Subtopian

I've been published again. This short story anthology is an earnest labor of love on the part of Trevor and a couple of other people in Portland. You can find their online magazine here: The Subtopian and the print-on-demand/Kindle version of the anthology right here on Amazon.

Everything ...

... is now here on Word Press. I took a freebie class and discovered that Blogger is bad. :( That is all.

Four of the Worst Jobs You Will Never Work

I'm sooo tired of hearing the faux liberal Bourgeoisie expound on stuff they know nada about. 

They think $10 an hour is a living wage. Go get a job that pays $10 an hour and work it for a couple of months ... if you can find one. Make your house payment/rent and your car payments with it. Pay the sitter/daycare that watches your kid while you work this supposed living wage. Buy gas, buy food and watch your paycheck disappear literally overnight, a day after it deposits into your checking. Forget internet service, your phone, car insurance, etc. -- you can't afford that on $10 an hour.

Take the eternal We Hate Walmart gang. Listen, Walmart ain't that bad. If you tell me it is, you're implying that working for Bed, Bath & Beyond, Home Depot, Chili's or CVS is heaven on earth. It's not, it's just as shitty. Ninety percent of retail work pays less than $10 an hour and raises are fairy tales.

Before you get your bought online, hipster panties in a twist I'll enlighten you. There are much, MUCH worse places to work than Walmart. Day jobs that beat you psychologically so badly you have to go on antidepressants or you start engaging in Mad Max road rage, temp gigs so dehumanizing they make wiggling your tits in some slob's face at Hooters seem entrepreneurial. Jobs so fucking awful, office shooting fantasies are the norm.

Some of the worst places to work in America are right here in Reno. Not surprising, since Nee-va-Duh is one of those Bend-Over-For-Corporations stupid Libertarian states.

Take this place for example. On the surface, their website seems legit and they're an affiliate of Microsoft so what could possibly be wrong with working there? First of all, the entire reason this creepy German temp agency was appropriated by Microsoft is because of Enron and corporate accounting scandals which led to the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. Basically, Microsoft might not have been telling their shareholders how many millions they rake in every fiscal quarter in software licensing agreements, so Arvato-Bertelsmann was created as a way to "process" all licenses. The software and database the company uses is draconian, there are redundancies on top of redundancies, unreadable pull-down menus, etc. because it was created over a decade ago and has never been updated. While temping there I was 1) required to sit and take notes for 9 hours a day, 2) my notes could never leave the office, 3) if I went to the bathroom, I had to put my notes in a drawer or risk termination and 4) I wasn't supposed to "ask too many questions" about the archaic business process. I got reprimanded for trying to type my notes up, this was seen as a waste of time. This place has about a 50% turn-over rate in the first three months. I saw people get fired for refusing to work 16-hour days, failing to punch in and out for breaks and taking more than 28 minutes for lunch.

This place is one of the shining jewels in Reno's light industry crown. It's an example of how well things can work out for a tax-revenue bankrupt state with zero social infrastructure when they fling the gate wide and let any old corporation slink in during the night when OSHA isn't looking. It's a massive refrigerated food processing facility that, until January, paid it's employees $8.75 an hour. They work in a 37F (2.7C) environment for 10 to 12 hour shift while wearing many, many layers of  safe food handling gear. Here's an abbreviated list of the Dos and Donts at SK Foods:

No earrings

No jewelry

No wedding rings

No gum

No hard candy

No water

No drinks of any kind

No piercings of any kind (including earrings)

No iPods

No radios

No talking

If you sneeze, even while you're wearing your "beard net", you have to leave the food assembly line. If you fail to remove the right gear when you go to the bathroom, you're fired. Although they don't pay you, all employees are required to show up 30 minutes prior to their shift. That means if your shift starts at 5:30am, you have to be there at five or they fire you. They have conservatively, a 70% turnover rate within the first week. There are labor temp offices that do nothing but advertise for them. Constantly. One former employee described it as "like prison". Anyway, it's something to think about while you're eating your low-fat egg sandwich at Starbucks which was made by this place.

 

Yes, this is what a call center looks like ... one that
has clean cubicles and chairs that aren't broken.

This place has been up and running since the 1990s. Everybody in Nevada was jazzed when it opened. I've met people who were fired because they were late for work due to a car accident. I knew one person who worked on one of the loading docks during Xmas. He got pneumonia, probably from breathing the frigid desert air mixed with diesel exhaust. They fired him for being sick. I met a young woman who worked there for six months. She was tough-as-nails, a real company person and even she described Amazon's fulfillment center as horrible. She worked 10-hour shifts and got two 15-minute breaks and one 30-minute lunch. If it took her 14 minutes to walk from her picking station on the lower level to the break room and back, guess how long her lunch was? Whatever your quota is at Amazon, it doesn't matter. You will be pushed to always do better. There is no acceptable quota. Everyone is in a constant state of 'not good enough'. Oh, and they strip search people. At random. All the time.

In the rush to condemn Walmart most upper-middle class people are unaware that some of the worst job environments are call centers. They're stressful by design. You're dealing with pissed off customers because their phone, TV, car, internet service, etc. doesn't work right. AT&T runs some of the worst in the country. They have chronic turnover, won't provide references for their former employees even if they leave on good terms, and their pay and raises are laughable.

This place is -- hand's down -- one of the worst I've ever worked for. They psychologically abuse their new hires starting on day one. As a long-time call center employee put it: "The whole thing is a hostile work environment." We were told not to wear jeans or tennis shoes ... by supervisors wearing T-shirts and flipflops. We were given a giddy rundown of who had been fired that day by our trainer at the beginning of every shift. And they fired people every single day I was there. If they fired someone who had been there "a long time" (more than five months) they high-fived each other. Supervisors regularly cruised the break area (a sort of pen with a tiny awning in the parking lot) to eavesdrop on new hires' conversations. People were fired for saying "crap" during break while they weren't anywhere near a phone line or an incoming call. People were fired for using their personal cell phones ... in the bathroom while on break. People were fired for "having a bad attitude" or "asking too many questions" about AT&T's absurd 20-some different databases and software we were required to use to answer dead-simple questions like "how can I order a new phone?" The call center insists that they "want you to succeed and become long-term employees." This is a lie. They only really make money if their workforce is in constant turnover. 

This corporation makes money by billing AT&T every quarter so many thousands of dollars because they "have to train more new hires". It's this silly pyramid scheme where new hires lose every time. The whole thing from start to finish is designed to either get you fired or make you quit. When I was actively encouraged to rat out my fellow workers by telling supervisors if someone was "using their mute button too much" I quit.

Actual note forbidding personal cell phone use in the restrooms.

This company mismanages its workforce so badly that one of their call centers in the Philippines filed a labor suit against them. The Philippines! A part of the world where teenagers are regularly chained to sewing machines to work for pennies a day making clothes for rich Westerners.

I'd like all the people Thom Hartmann calls the "Bourgeoisie petty rich" to please shut the fuck up. If you and your spouses' combined income is $75,000 to $250,000 annually, just shut up about Walmart. You don't know what it's like to work at one of these places day after day, month after month, to have to choose between worse and much worser, to have to choose between crashing at a relatives indefinitely until this Recession (read: Depression) subsides, if ever, or checking into a homeless shelter (if they aren't already full). 

If your annual gross income is between $75,000 and $250,000 you have no idea what life for the working poor is about. Poor is something you drove by in 1989 on the way to your graduate classes at a prestigious university your rich uncle or generous grandma paid for so you would never have to endure this kind of slow spiritual death. If your dotcom startup has finally taken off, if your career as an anesthesiologist or a real estate agent or software engineer is stable, you have no idea what I'm talking about. Poor is just a bad rumor to you. Poor is somewhere you went slumming in 1992 when you worked for Cinnabon for a month between semesters at that nice private college I never so much as toured. Poor is something you contemplated when you pulled $15,000 out of your $300,000 trust to get yourself through that "rough patch" between 2009 and 2011 when you were trying to find gallery space for your performance art.

P.S. I hate the Waltons and everything their grasping, despot family stands for but they are not the only monsters in this new Gilded Age. The real Godzilla is what it has always been, apathy.

More online publishing

Two of my short stories have been published in two different online lit sites.

They're very different sites. One is very hipster-ish and the editor is very Los Angeles.

The other is survivalist-meets-vegan-sci-fi-fan and is rather Portland-ish.

Grays Harbor at Subtopian.com.

Love You Long Time at the Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles.

I take no responsibility for layout, readability or art work though, these two are actually quite tasteful.

Thank you Trevor and Robin.

Dystopian on Subtopian

I'm published again. No money for any of this but it's still nice, especially when I'm getting shot down for day jobs right and left.

http://www.subtopian.com/?p=65915

Ironically this story is about real class warfare in a dystopian America 50 years from now.

Existential attitude turning on a dime

When I was backpacking through Australia a dozen years ago, I saw something early one morning that has stuck with me for years. It was maybe 6:30am on a Sunday. Sydney was still waking up. The hostel I'd been staying at was in Potts Point, north of the crazy vibe of Kings Cross.

I was walking near Bourke Street which is kind of steep and overlooks the Botanical Gardens to the west. It's an area with elite cafes and arty gentrified Victorian townhouses most Australians couldn't begin to afford.

I was coming up this steep section of old sidewalk using all the physical fitness I'd gained while working for the Forest Service in Colorado earlier in the year. The morning light was golden and everything was misty and haloed, even the parked cars. The numerous cockatoos and parrots that permeate the city were making their wild morning ruckus. The air was cool, limpid and the harbor gave everything the exotic tang of salt air.

At the top of the hill I was scaling were a pair of birds making a joyous clucking and buzzing sound as they pecked at something on the asphalt. They were dandy creatures in neat brown feathers with neon-bright yellow beaks. They kept pausing in their pecking to squawk at each other as if they were having an intense conversation.

Indian myna birds are one of many invasive non-native species in Australia.

This was one of the few times I've felt at peace with myself and Sydney was one of the few cities I ever felt at home in.

When I reached the two birds standing in a pool of gold light I realized they weren't eating crumbs from a sandwich or something equally agreeable. They'd found a puddle of puke left by some blind-drunk tourist and were nimbly eating it.

I walked past them carefully, suddenly feeling like I'd mistaken some gauzy spiritual moment for another crude foul example of human imperfection. It was like witnessing two people in a graveyard and assuming they were mourners or relatives paying their respects only to realize they were grave robbers looting the dead.

I've been juggling the contradiction of that scene in my head ever since. On the one hand, it was a beautiful morning and the birds did look sublime. Everything looked right. On the other, the ugly reality of vomit in the streets.

If I ever meet the Dalai Lama I'll ask him what he thinks of this.