You’re supposed to relax yourself, so, needless to say, when someone defends their drinking by saying that it relaxes them, then you know that person is unhappy.  Sometimes Regina wished that happiness were outlawed so she wouldn’t have to compare herself to that which was doing better than she was.  Mark, ironically enough, was […]

     Mark turned out to be newscaster in the future, and Regina told him all about it.  Apparently, in the future, there was something called the program—meaning that, you could watch tv programs that came from outer space that were not created by humans.  They were a part of the universe—a universe that enforced physical

     Regina’s boyfriend, Mark McCord, was famous for one thing and one thing only: he pronounced “Nigeria” as “nigger-ria.”  He used to laugh about it—he probably picked it up from his dad, whatever that means—but he kept at it way too long, and people started to attack him when he did it.  So he quit

1      When Regina Whitaker wakes up with a hangover, she thinks, mainly, of getting a move on.  She wants to go to battle, she wants to secure land and wealth, and she wants to be everybody’s hero.  It never occurred to her that she might feel different if she wasn’t hungover, but it also

     But what if this wasn’t about Elvis—what if this was about me, and the desire I may or may not have felt for backup singer number two—not too mention backup singer number one and backup singer number three?  I don’t know what I was thinking—and I don’t know why I was thinking it.  Was

     Backup singer number one wanted to know what made me feel alive.  I think, for her, feeling alive meant feeling and or being dangerous to your self and or others—and, in my case, it was shameful to say that a cigarette, which meant turning from God, made me feel alive.  I didn’t need her

     Silas was calling Joe Biden, and everybody that worked for him, a monster.  He really rambled on memorial day, which was today—spouting paranoid jargon about rapists and killers from other countries getting into our country and raping and killing us—as if the white man weren’t doing that, too.  I’d like to reenforce the fact

     Once Silas finished up at the tanning bed—something that, in my opinion, had the strange effect of making him look orange, I met with him to discuss what we were going to do about Mary Lou.  Apparently, she’d sort of been making deals with people—people that didn’t use tanning beds, for example—saying that if

     I used to watch Dr. Phil and drink a cheap can of soda pop—I’d make the pop last the whole hour; I knew that I couldn’t go on like that forever—which is why, I think, I looked forward to heaven on earth.  I figured, if I could hold out long enough, something good would

5.19.25: a near finished novel       Kerouac was still present—and, the last time I saw him, he was voicing his opposition to the president of the United States.  He said a lot of things, most of which, to my surprise, sounded meaningful and informed.  Perhaps I’d been too hard on Kerouac; after all, he was