The morning begins with a mist draping the world outside just like it has for the last 70 days. It’s one of those heavy, pervasive sort of fogs that occludes everything further than half a block away. His mind automatically drifts towards numerous horror films he’s seen as he crosses the threshold from his warm living room into the chill, almost suffocating air beyond. The atmosphere is conducive to that particular variety of musing, and he finds himself catering to it quite frequently.
It is with these disjointed thoughts fluttering through his mind that he begins walking across the dead lawn towards his car parked along the curb. He is halfway across the distance when he catches a subtle movement with his peripheral vision.
He glances towards the skeletal hedge of branches that marks the property line and sees a piece of that must have blown into it with the breeze during the night.
He turns with a momentary surge of irritation from the worn footpath to the curb with the intention of pulling the garbage from the branches, there aren’t many things that annoy him more than having stray refuse blowing around and winding up in his yard. It looks so tacky.
The bag rustles a little bit more audibly as he approaches and he notices somewhere in the corner of his rational mind that there is no breeze that should be producing the apparent motion. There’s probably an animal of some kind in there, a rodent or something, he tells himself.
He decides to exhibit a bit of caution when extracting the trash.
As he reaches for it, a pair of large arthropod limbs extend from beneath the side of the bag, causing him to jump back, startled. He watches it with unwavering attention as the limbs probe around a little bit and the whole thing shifts just slightly as additional armored appendages stretch out before the trash creature scurries away across the neighbors lawn.
It is going to be one of those days, he thinks to himself as he returns to the path towards his car, his eyes scanning the visible distance in search of any other surprises that might be awaiting him.
postmodern
Without Substance, and Void (Originally posted July of 2006 on MySpace and salvaged for posterity)
And here I am, lost within the gap meant to hold the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, the picture left incomplete. The eyes automatically drawn to this glaring flaw in an otherwise gorgeous image. Like everything, cracks in the veneer expose a fragile and decayed substrate, flimsy enough to collapse at any moment, the whole picturesque grandeur transformed in the blink of an eye to indecipherable ruins. Perhaps there is a faint suggestion of the prior beauty, but more than likely not a trace remains to hint at what once was and should have been, the shape that was intended. How can everything be so brittle? All those lovely elements of life so dependent upon the termite riddled fabrications underpinning the faulty surface, just biding its time before imminent collapse ensues. It seems altogether too pointless, striving so hard to keep from slipping between the cracks. It can’t be any safer up above than here below, with the discarded fragments shaken free to plummet down upon my mercifully unsheltered head, waiting for that chance impact to finally arrive. I slip furtively from pillar to pillar, not actively inviting the disaster that I openly accept and hope to embrace. I witness the crumbling decay as the sky is falling. Scavenging through debris, eyes alert to any potentially useful discoveries amongst the overwhelming heaps of filth and wreckage. To sift is the dream of many, those lacking purpose grind themselves away at the rough edges of immovable objects, devoured between stationary gears, the forward momentum solely a product of a will bent towards the prize place upon the dinner table. Choice meal for a choice selection of the most tasteful and elegant of consumers. Nothing is mass-produced down here, all is hand crafted with loving care by the unloved and forgotten. Unnoticed and blissfully unaware of the ridiculous station they hold in life. All is a junkyard in progress, steadily in process of accumulation of degradation.
Metropolis (Written June of 2006 and originally posted on my soon-to-be-deleted MySpace blog)
A blank stare greets me and quickly hurries away to be reabsorbed into the mass of huddled flesh in steady transit to…somewhere. Feeling ignored and out of place, I step back from the blistered sidewalk, its meat churned beneath the careless feet of the amorphous pedestrian, a beast not known for its quality hide nor exquisite flavor, and thus left to its own devices as it wanders through the city on its countless shifting appendages, posing no threat but to those unwary enough to remain in its path as it plods along, its vague outline distorted by strobing lights of shopping facilities all around it, there to blind and distract, urging susceptible victims into gaping maws, like some displaced deep sea fish. Minimal effort producing maximum effective consumption rate, only rarely sliding their bulky forms to more suitable locations.
Though apparently stable on the surface, there is nothing so distant from the truth. Everything transient and shifting, a tapestry woven of multivariate ambulatory forms, shaping and reshaping itself according to some seemingly random, perhaps hidden design…the organizing principle as yet undiscovered.
Haunting images flicker perpetually in my periphery, enticing me to submit myself as sacrificial victim to one ever-hungry storefront or another, the terrible, all consuming predators of this decadent wasteland. I watch as prey is swallowed whole, allowed to devour the creatures’ magnificent innards, only to be spit back out again, feeling contented and fulfilled with recent events while oblivious to just how its own substance had been eaten away by the subtle inner-workings of the vicious predator within which it was provided succor while being suckered.
Too sly to fall victim myself, I slip in and out of these endless streams of sustenance flowing into and out of the ornamentally gilded yet threatening jaws surrounding me on all sides.
Not knowing where I’m headed, I wander aimlessly through churning waves of bottom feeders, noticing that I have become yet another appendage of the great amorphous pedestrian only after I’ve been swept away along its endless shuffling mass in its endless search for…whatever.
Domus Necrophagous 