Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
Stones without Sticks
Thursday, July 5th, 2007
The Rolling Stone was his own man, so to speak, and traveled past lands unseen. The stone, being a stone, was stoned with the inordinate pride of having gathered no moss–his being’s essence unsullied by another being’s essence, which his most restless and rocky friends had firmly warned him against.
To scale new heights in his rollings, he started at the foot of a mountain that poked holes in passing clouds. For millennia (a figure rounded by reckoning since stones don’t count), he forded streams and outstripped boulders attempting the same ascent. Occasionally, a biped wandered by, and Stone leaped into the crack of its foot’s second skin. This saved him hundreds of years of bounding up the path. The free rides never lasted long, however; for in short order, the bipeds removed their skins (they obviously gathered another kind of moss).
Along the way, he heckled those stones who had given up the struggle–not only gathering moss but water, earth, grass, and trees, even! What odd, stiff, wooden creatures they were to stand heartlessly on his fellow stones. It served the trees right to die in a few hundred years.
The higher he climbed, the stranger the substances that his fellows had drowned in: water solid as stone! He chatted up a few, but they all seemed frozen in fear.
Finally, Stone reached the summit. He leaned over a steep precipice and roared his triumph at achieving his dream. That’s when he heard the triumphant yahoo of a biped which swallowed his pipsqueak roar. Before he could turn, the biped’s second skin kicked him over the ledge.
Stone cursed the biped–though the beasts’ lives were already abysmally ephemeral–until he realized this was another journey (if considerably faster) to tell his grandchildren about. Stone bounced and sparked other stones who, excited about Stone’s journey, joined him in the Great Fall. Despite the descent, it pinnacled Stone’s achievements: His fall was his meteoric rise: so many other stones leaping to join in Stone’s headlong, boisterously joyful fray–a veritable pride of the unmossed, so quintessentially, so unreservedly stoned in their stony abandon.
Panting and laughing, they landed at the foot of the mountain with a flurry of dust. What a rush! They spoke of the great race for eons to their children’s children. Eventually, Stone gathered moss, but it was nice not to be bald anymore.
The Rise and Fall of Minor Fiefdoms
Monday, June 25th, 2007
Thief Bowlsalot’s girlfriend dragged him to the artsy-fart reading at the Thebes gallery. He couldn’t even wear jeans. It was for some fancy-schmancy writer lady who won the Bigwad award, and his girlfriend had read him the Bigwad o’ crap and he’d wanted to say, “So what?” but said, “Oh, baby, that was great.” The things he put up with to get down a girl’s pants. Only she thought he liked novels that rich heiresses wrote–those who never dirtied a fingernail except as snot-nosed brats slumming it with her girls at the Everyman’s Mall.
Ms. Bigwad wore a pink feather boa and was trailed by a ham-handed, bodyguarding knot-head, who looked like he was itching to pound any one of these balding scrawny sycophants, and by a waiter with a tray of black goo on crackers, which Thief found more lively than anything else in the gallery.
Ms. Bigwad read. Nothing happened to the characters, so they never had to deal with anything: no air raids, no gun-toting fourth graders, no fistfights after a night of booze and schlepping through the streets with some other guy’s girl. They never disobeyed signs: no fishing, no hunting, no shoes, no shirt, no service. Just a dentist who collects famous photographs and trades them with friends who blow their never-ending wad at Macy’s and not at the hooker’s or on a line of blow, and the characters blab, blab, blab about zip–enough to make you gouge your ears out. Somebody gets a brain aneurysm, but fuck talking about that–too interesting. Who cares about death? What did Ms. Bigwad know of ticking time bombs ready to explode in her head? Thief’s granny died of one. That meant something–to the family at least: an inheritance of quilts, several dozen balls of yarn, and thirteen feral cats.
Thief tried not to snore as the writer lady droned in a voice parched as the Sahara. Thief’s girlfriend elbowed him awake before he’d been ready to, so he left the reading. No chick’s pants were worth that much.
The rich lady’s lousy limo was blocking the alley when Thief went to kick start his motorbike. A steel bar with a large knob concrete at one end got Thief to thinking: He’d give the poor lady something to write about.
With the first stroke of luck he’d had all evening, he found a diamond as big as the Ritz on the back seat.