Fireland

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Sometimes the Paramount just lets out a sad, ragged sigh.

(previously)

Fellow Mortals

My friend Dennis is kind of infuriating. He’s smart and funny. He’s a good husband and father. He gets up early to work out. He’s really into boxing and Baroque music. He makes furniture. He grows giant pumpkins in his yard at a competitive level. He’s basically a man, which is gross.

Worst of all, he’s a good writer. And his novel Fellow Mortals is being published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I’m super proud.

But I’m even MORE proud of this Q&A he did with ME. Because it is about ME, who is a DELIGHT. I talk about regular centaurs and and normal cocaine and not being a man.

The song “Iron Man” was originally entitled “Iron Bloke.” Upon hearing the main guitar riff for the first time, Osbourne remarked that it sounded “like a big iron bloke walking about.” The title was later changed to “Iron Man.”

(Source: Wikipedia)

Angela Black awarded herself Best Girlf Ever for this gift but I must admit she did indeed nail that shizz.

She met the infuriatingly talented (and nice — barf) Scott C. at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and had him sign and doodle on his rad new book (made out to “Good Bro Joshy”) and this Twin Peaks print which depicts one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite things of all time.

It is tanfastic. Gaze upon it in the eerie light of constantly-on-fire Colorado.

I should know better by now, but sometimes the internet tells me to do something and I do it. Which is why I drank Mexican Coke with peanuts in it. And now my stomach is all: Why. Why do you do this to us. You are a god damn jagoff. And I’m like: The internet said! And my stomach just turns away, unable to even look at me.

This was sent to my phone Saturday night from an unknown number. I was in bed, wondering if I should take off my other sock or deal with it in the morning. Just kind of weighing the pros and cons.

┬┴┴

The folks taught her to erect a second roof when building a desert shelter. Balsam fir resin makes an excellent antiseptic for treating cuts and abrasions. Douse bait with cod liver oil. Disguise your scent with the smoke from green pine needles on a campfire. Cattails are one of the most abundant and best-tasting plants out there. The Pileated Woodpecker digs his home facing east.

Also: artificial accents and gaits. Breaking your fall from a significant height. Following someone who is behind you. Ventriloquism. Echolocation. Non-sleeping. Temporary heart-stopping. Basic grip-loosening maneuvers.

All learned between the ages of 0 and 13 when the family was on the run, never staying in the same town for more than a couple weeks, a series of B.O.-scented motel rooms, humidity and sore throats and ticket-takers speaking Farsi and Swedish and Maasai. In the evenings Mom would quiz her on exchange rates while Pop made phone calls in the bathroom with the faucet running.

╓╫╨

The thing at her bedroom window asks if she’s ready. She does a quick mental inventory of her backpack:

• Birdcall
• Compass/signal mirror
• Thomas Guide of the tunnels underneath Crab Mountain
• Mora knife emblazoned with her heraldic badge (merman impaling the sun w/trident)
• Midol Teen Formula
• The makings of a false nose
• Eight fortune cookie fortunes all saying the same thing (A smooth long journey! Great expectations.)
• Six darts tipped with curare
• A stack of Sacagawea dollars in a bottle of prescription medication (Ziprasidone)
• Three smokecherries constructed from her own recipe of sugar, gunpowder and finely ground conium maculatum

She nods. The thing raises its ghostly black skeletal hand for a high five.

It is mid-afternoon, mid-September. He drifts through the mining district where rickety scaffolds burrow down into the undercity. The southern stretch of bungalows where latchkey kids skin knees against sprinkler heads. The ports where tuna purseiners are just now returning home with sad exhausted diesel drones. The salt refineries along the estuary, flanked by stinking brine sluiceways and evaporating ponds. The manufactured neighborhood (“Trigger Corner”) built for a movie that ended up getting made in Vancouver. The pupusas and ceviches of Little San Salvador. Young men running their hands over the bra straps of young women in Arboreta Alley. The animal squawks and roulette clicks of The Hole. The city winding things down.

A wind picks up.

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The cover of my upcoming memoir I Would Prefer Not To.

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Has anyone written serious fiction about Bejeweled yet? I don’t want to be stepping on toes over here.

Hello I Am Your Grandma, Part II

For reals I just called Heath Ledger “Heather Locklear.”

(previously)

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Taken with instagram