A Christmas Goose

In the spirit of the holiday season I will share with you a tale of a Christmas past. I was invited by my friend and fellow patriot Tony to come over for the usual Christmas spread: a fine ham, a roasted and stuffed christmas goose with all the trimmings and a smorgasbord of other fixins.

Tony and I had been friends since high school. He was a pretty agreeable guy and he understood the truth in all its forms. Plus he cooked a mean goose, and the giblet gravy that he would make, was delicious. I went to Tony's house early that day to help with the cooking.

I drank a quart of brandy and he drank a quart of rum. The Christmas meal's intoxicating smell wafted throughout his A-frame cabin. Tony took the cooked goose, glistening in all its fatty majesty, out of the oven and set it on the table upon a silver platter. We guzzled more brandy and rum out of leaded crystal goblets.

Tony brought in the heaping pot of giblet gravy. The gravy was still boiling in the sauce pot. The dark brown color of the gravy was perfect. I could not stop thinking of how good the gravy would be atop the goose meat and how gluttonously we would eat this meal. That is when Tony's doorbell rang.

Tony carried the still-steaming giblet gravy to the front door. As he opened the door, I saw that waiting outside was the homosexual mailman, Rico. Rico stretched out his arm, his hand holding several envelopes. Tony quickly threw the entire pot of giblet gravy into the face of the homosexual mailman. Tony shut the door immediately afterward.

That gravy would have been spectacular.

We ate the goose while staring at each other silently. The pitter-patter of snow against the windows was the only sound. Sometimes Rico would yell from outside. Each time I would close my eyes and put another slice of buttery, succulent goose meat into my mouth.

The Forest

"The days are shorter. The nights are colder. Society is crumbling. The supplies are running out. The government is destroying us. The misery. We're dying from the inside out, because of technology. These are the elements of the "progress" that mankind wanted so desperately to achieve."

John knew that. The statement echoed in his very soul as he mouthed the words to himself in the darkness. The night was freezing cold and the forest was unforgiving. The noise of insects and the hooting and grunting of animals was barely audible above John's heartbeat. John's heart was beating like a helve hammer inside his chest. The adrenaline coursed through his veins and cold sweat soaked his clothes.

John was bleeding from running through the brambles earlier. His feet hurt from running and his thoughts were racing.

John was not much of a woodsman. He was a counselor for breast cancer survivors. Many of his clients were dealing with mastectomy procedures and he ran weekly group meetings at his office near the forest. The issues of loss of femininity and losing their sexuality plagued the survivors. John did his best in therapy to reintegrate them into the society from which the survivors now felt so removed.

John's life was boring but he liked it. Helping people was in his nature. He had a birthmark in the shape of the continent of Africa and he would rub olive oil on it at night.

But not tonight. Tonight John was running through the woods. Running for his life.

John blamed the whole situation on Cleite. Cleite joined the group on Tuesday. Cleite was depressed and unpredictable and she was turning the group against John with her headstrong diatribes against men. The cancer had made Cleite bitter, and her physique was as strong as her hateful feelings.

The meeting had gone awfully. John walked out to his car dejected. Cleite shouted from behind him, "John!"

As John turned to see what the commotion was about, he heard the distinctive pluck of a bow and the whizzing of an arrow past his head. John began to run and a second arrow flew past him.

John didn't have time to think as he ran into the forest. He weaved between the trees and ran as fast as he could. John had been in a runner in his youth but a car accident in the 90s had left him lame. The best John could muster these days was around 7 minute mile pace. No sense in thinking about that. Nobody can outrun an arrow.

John rushed and ran into the night.

These are the elements of the "progress" that mankind wanted so desperately to achieve.

John hid behind an oak tree and struggled to catch his breath. His eyes were watering. John gasped for air. He was dizzy and worried about passing out.

Just then, Cleite stepped out from behind the tree and saw John. She looked at John with a disdainful look and bent the yew of the bow. John clutched his chest. The carbon-shafted razor arrow protruded from his chest. The arrow punctured his lung. He was choking on blood. John fell to the ground and quickly passed out.

Then he woke up. Cleite was still there. She stopped doing CPR on him and killed John again.

Official Police Business

If you are reading this, you have no doubt realized that lizardmen control America. They are well on their way to controlling the entire internet and shutting down this website. Enjoy being able to view the truth while you can. Until the lizardmen do ultimately prevail I will speak the truth about them.

The lizardmen are organized in a patriarchal society. Each band of lizardmen is lead by an alpha male who makes them submit to his whims with violence. The use of force is the only law that the lizardmen know. The individual bands are united by regional warlords whose ruthless brutality subjugates all the bands. And yet the multitudinous warlords work in concert, under the scaly thumb of the supreme king of the lizardmen. The most exalted high king of the lizardmen is truly the worst of them all.

He rules America from his foul nest in an earthen mound. He has taken all the powers from the Americans, if they even can still be called Americans. Today's American shames the notion of what it is to be an American. The modern American is a puppet of the lizardmen, who pander to his capricious nature while exploiting his inability to see the bigger picture.

It cannot be disputed that man exists to kill man. Man has done so from the earliest days. Think back reader, to a time when there were many fewer men. Is there any doubt in your mind that in that prehistoric time, when the first man came across another man, that he slew him where he stood? Of course not.

And this is man's twofold purpose: idolatry and killing.

But nowhere did God say to man to be enslaved by the lizardman. And so I say, tell a friend to tell a friend about the lizardmen, and their society, and their foul, slithering king.

Barack Obama is a lizardman. He is the worst lizardman of all because he dominates not only with shockingly violent force but also with skulduggery . Barack Obama, the lizardman, dares not to show his true form to the American people and the people of the world, but instead comes as a Black, giving false hope to the downtrodden and racially oppressed. He hates grenadine and the mere sight of it drives him to lie in a specially-built teak bassinet where he coos and whimpers like an infantile retard.

Drive him back.

2 oz. Dark Rum
2 oz. Orange Juice
2 oz. Pineapple Juice
1/2 oz. Lime Juice
Dash Grenadine
Orange Slice & Cherry for garnish

Hooked on a Feeling

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

That's what I keep telling myself. But things have changed a lot. Maybe more than we're willing to admit. I know I've changed. I tried not to.

The more I think about what happened, the less I know. Jackie. Jackie's girlfriend. Ayaz. The videotape. The meteor. Maybe I'm cursed. Maybe not.

I had a dream last night. In the dream, I stuffed a fistful of hundred dollar bills into a pregnant woman's mouth. The sound of the bills rumpling and crinkling was as loud as her muffled groaning. The total value of the bills was easily in the thousands. The pregnant woman's face contorted into a mask of ecstatic bliss as the money crunched between her teeth.

The human mouth is horribly unsuited to masticating dollar bills. They crumple and become thick with saliva, but they never truly become easy to swallow. The pregnant woman knew this.

Just then, I woke up from the dream. I was soaking wet with sweat and the bedsheets clung to my body. The humidity of the summer night was unbearable.

I sat down on the couch. I crudely rolled a joint out of an ATM receipt and some very old marijuana that I had stashed in a drawer. The TV was on, and blaring. I wasn't sure if I had just turned it on or if maybe I had left it on all night. I poured a glass of peppermint schnapps.

I thought about the pregnant woman again. And the hundred dollar bills. What a strange dream.

I smoked a few more joints. Some burned quickly. The good ones burned slowly. The room was hazy with smoke and I polished off the rest of the bottle of peppermint schnapps. My hands were sticky. Schnapps. I stood up quickly to turn off the TV. I lost my balance and fell back down onto the couch. The room was spinning.

I struggled, staggering across the room and up the stairs to my bedroom. Right before I laid my head down to rest, I shoved another handful of hundred dollars bills into the pregnant woman's mouth. It's expensive, but it works.

Casualties of a Misspent Youth

When I was a young man, I remember sitting with my father. I was 17 at the time and he was 65. He was a man of unusual stature, with the posture of a question mark and heavily worn hands that looked like tanned leather but felt like shark's skin.

"Son," he said. His tone was solemn, and I could tell something was wrong. We didn't have talks like this often. "There comes a time in a young man's life where he needs to see the world, to make an indelible mark on life so that when he is old, and crippled, he can point mightily and say that he achieved something. Some day when you are old like me, you'll understand the point of all this. Just remember: one day, you'll be an old man, and you'll say to your kids 'That was the high water mark,' and you'll be filled with the same degree of pride."

"What pride," I inquired, my voice squeaky and timid.

"The same pride I have when I talk about old cars that I have and all the times I fucked your mother!"

My father was cranky sometimes. I tried not to take it personally. But I knew what I had to do: I had to go out there and take life by the balls, to really do something so that when I died my legacy would live on.

It was a big task for a young man like me, back then. Some would say insurmountable. But, I am not one of those "some". I am a go-getter, and I was even then.

I thought for weeks about what to do. One day, while sledding with friends, I had the idea. I remembered a place my father had taken me in the winters as a kid. My father had a cabin in the Poconos for years when I was younger. We used to go there all the time and go skiing and hiking around in the snow. It burned down 7 years ago and he never rebuilt it.

I couldn't remember exactly where the cabin was but my father gave me an old hand-written note with the driving directions. He let me borrow the family sedan and out I went. There were some isolated flurries and a wintry mix of weather but it was nothing bad enough to make the roads impassable. After a few hours of driving I arrived at the ruins of the cabin, partially covered in snow. The sun was setting, and I got my flashlight out of the car.

The cabin burned down because of faulty wiring. The old man always considered himself to be a bit of an electrician, but the reality was that he had no more business wiring a home than he did flying to the moon. Because of that, nobody thought anything of it when the house burned down. Neither did I.

There was a cave behind the house that we used to hike out to. I figured I would check it out for old times' sake while I figured out just how I was going to rebuild the cabin to impress the old man. I walked and walked for about 35 minutes until I arrived at the cave. The weather was starting to turn for the worse, but I wore a large goose down jacket and thermal underwear because I was anticipated being outside for a long time. I wasn't hot by any means but I wasn't freezing to death, either.

The cave was in a large thicket of pine trees. I used to call it christmas thicket. The cave was offset and at the back of the thicket, and had a large entrance, with about double overhead clearance for an average man.

I walked to the mouth of the cave and then walked in, shining the flashlight so as not to trip and fall. The cave was remote enough that getting a twisted ankle could be a real nuisance for the trip back in the snow. Even in the cold of that winter day, the cave had a strong, musty smell. It reminded me of elephants at the zoo. And there was the strange, wafting odor of maple syrup.

As I crept in deeper, I thought of the old days of going in the cave and feeling like a real explorer, finding the uncharted interior for the first time. "How naive," I thought to myself. While I was thinking I scraped the edge of the wall with my shoulder and ripped my jacket, exposing some goose feathers.

The wind was howling around the entrance of the cave and it could clearly be heard even towards the back where I was. At this point I was about 200 paces from the entrance, and the area around me was illuminated only by the narrow beam of the flashlight. I heard something. Something different. Not the wind.

It sounded like snoring, but mixed with laughing. I quickly swung the flashlight around the cave looking for the source of the sound. That is when I saw him. The cave was now home to a massive beast, double my height and easily four times my weight. He was covered in long white fur, except for a bald spot at his belly, and muscular. The beast began to wake up and I began to panic.

As the beast came to and stood up, I could see plainly that he was a yeti. The yeti was massive, and he was too big for me to get around him in this narrow part of the cave. I was cornered. His breathing was deep, and the breaths he expelled were hot and smelled like spoiled meat. I knew the yeti would make a meal of me if I did not act quickly.

With the grace of a fetishist many times my age, I reached into the rip in my jacket and pulled out a single, long goose feather. And I tickled that yeti like no man has tickled a yeti before. The yeti bellowed deeply with laughter, shaking the cave and the ground. After several hours, the yeti pushed me aside, probably to go back to hibernating.

I walked back to the car, feeling dirty and wondering if this is what my father had wanted all along.

These days I wonder if the house burning down was really a wiring problem or something else. And I think about that yeti. What a weird yeti.

Habit Forming

I received a VHS tape in my mailbox this morning.

I sat down in front of my television and played the tape. A hazy black and white image appeared on the TV screen. The recording seemed to be filmed with an old 8 millimeter camera. It was a shot of a beach, at night. The ground was silt and sand, and the trees looked like tropical forest. It was a tripod shot, and nothing happened for the first few minutes of the video.

The recording was really grainy and shot without the benefit of the modern camcorder's night vision technology. I couldn't see that much, but I could clearly hear the waves crashing, and some garbled off-camera voices.

After a few minutes of the unintelligible voices I left the tape playing and made breakfast. I poured a large bowl of granola with dried strawberries and poured milk and peach schnapps into it. Mostly peach schnapps.

I came back to the television. The shot was the same, but the camera had been knocked over. I rewound the tape. Hastily, I shoveled some granola with schnapps into my mouth. The camera was upright again. I pressed play.

A figure came out of the tree line. The figure was shirtless, with pale white skin and wearing jeans. He was bald and looked at the camera with wild eyes. He was probably about 25 feet from the camera. His jeans looked frayed. His head moved from left to right and right to left like a bird's might. He took a few steps closer to the camera. I could see that he was extremely well-muscled.

Still about 15 feet away, he began to reach out with his arms. Long, long arms. His arms telescoped further and further towards the camera, intertwining and wrapping around each other. They twisted and untwisted.

I paused the tape to see a hazy freezeframe of the man's long, long arms.

I sat down at the table. I rolled a loose joint with some old marijuana and clutched it in my mouth. I walked to the bathroom to urinate. Just as I had finished urinating, a powerful piss shiver overtook me. I shook violently, and the joint fell out of my mouth into the urine-filled toiletbowl.

I heard screaming and moaning from the other room. I rushed in to see what it was. The tape had become unpaused and the volume was blasting. Apparently, whomever had made this tape had taped it over an 80s porno. The moaning and grunting of the blaring pornography eased my sense of alarm. Then I saw it: the man in the porno had long, long arms. They warped and undulated around the woman, and his misshapen penis entered her again and again.

I walked back into the bathroom and fished the urine-soaked joint out of the toilet. I broke up the joint and mixed it into my cereal. The man with the long, long arms was still fucking on my television. I left my house and went for a walk.

The Hobbyist

Part 1 Here

He spoke with the gargling, mucosal sounds typical of Egypt.

"Watch where you point that thing," Ayaz said.

I put the rifle back in the duffle and thanked Ayaz. I would have asked him to have whiskey with me, but I knew he was a Musulman and would refuse as a matter of principle. Instead, I shook his hand firmly. His hand was massive and hairy. He squeezed tightly. I could feel the tiny bones in my hand giving way under the incredible strength of his grip. Ayaz was the kind of guy that got off on that, I could tell.

"Until we meet again, Jackal."

I walked out to my car and drove home. I drove carefully because it was snowing heavily. I parked in my driveway and went inside. There was a bottle of Jack Daniel's still sitting on my oaken dining table. I poured what was left into a lowball glass that had been left out. The pour was just over a shot, maybe closer to two. The exact amount didn't matter anyway.

I unpacked the Jackal's bag and set the rifle on the tabletop. The rifle was clearly battleworn, but was in excellent condition and freshly oiled. At least I thought it was oil. Knowing Ayaz it might have been Astroglide. I shook out the bag to make sure there was nothing else inside.

An extra magazine rattled out and fell on the floor. I picked it up, and realizing it was unloaded, set it on the table. Something caught my eye -- there was a note taped to one side.

The note was written on white notebook paper, ruled with blue lines. It read:

The time is right. Something is going on.

de Jackal

It must have been about the meteor, or the lizardmen. Worse, it could have been about both. I took the note downstairs and stuck it on the meteor. The meteor was black, and grew slimier by the day. The slime was thick, and the meteor vibrated when I got near it.

I took out a fresh bottle of Jack Daniel's and sat with the meteor, sipping from the bottle. The meteor rattled and shook.

I thought about Jackie and his girlfriend. The sips were coming faster and faster now. The meteor's shaking became more violent and the lights flickered in the already dim basement. The empty liquor bottles on the floor clanked together.

In a way, I liked the meteor. There was something calming about being in its presence, like sitting around a roaring campfire with friends. I took a long look at the meteor, and its viscous slime coating reflected my face and the room around me.

I carried the meteor out to the backyard. It was heavy and hard to hold because of the slime. I beamed a wide smile at the meteor. I dropped it into the metal trashcan I keep in the yard. The can was filled with dry copies of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and all the mail I receive from the government.

The meteor landed in the pile of rubbish with a satisfying thunk. I doused the meteor with lighter fluid and struck a match. My eyes glassed over as the match hit the pile of periodicals.

The fire blasted out of the trash can. An incredible amount of smoke came billowing out of the trash can with the meteor in it. The smoke was acrid and choked my lungs. It burned in my mouth and nose.

The can rocked and shook. The sound of a cascading waterfall filled the cold night air. It was deafening, and the smoke became thicker and more horrible. I saw dancing vision. I took a deep breath, inhaling through my mouth.

The smoke tasted like pussy.

The Fertile Crescent

The sauna was very hot. I splashed water on the rocks. The water sizzled loudly and the steam rose into the air, twisting into thin wisps. Sweat dripped from my skin. My scrotum hung low and stuck to the side of my leg. According to the thermometer it was over 174 degrees.

The ambient air temperature was hot enough, and the loud arabic chanting piped in made it seem much hotter. I had known him for many years and despite my vehement protests he insisted on these sauna meetings. It was something about the cold of the Northeast maybe. Or maybe he just liked to be uncomfortably hot.

Ayaz was usually late. Today I hoped against hope that he would show up soon, because the heat was unbearable.

I had been in the sauna for over an hour waiting for Ayaz. By this point I was sweating profusely. Ayaz finally arrived and sat across from me in the sauna. He had a large duffle with him.

I greeted him with his nickname, the Jackal.

He nodded his head in acknowledgment.

Though the Jackal is a fierce and clever omnivorous predator in the Middle East, I knew him as the Jackal for other reasons. When we first met in Cairo, Ayaz approached me in a public market. He carried a grey duffle. We spoke briefly in english. Then, in perfect arabic, I said the code phrase.

"I need to take a leak."

Ayaz showed me to a desolate washroom. I was suspicious of him. Then again, I had said I needed to take a leak. He shut the door behind us and locked it. The washroom was spacious and dusty. The walls were covered with very old tiles, many of which had fallen off. The lighting was dim and every so often the lights flickered on and off.

Ayaz put the duffle bag atop the sinks and before he could show me what was inside, the powerful smell of polyurethane plastics and elastic rubber filled the washroom. I peered into the bag. Even in the poor lighting I could make out the contents: hundreds of different colored pocket vaginas. There were realistic molded ones, large ones, small ones, and a few garishly colored tubes of all shapes and sizes. Then, Ayaz spoke.

"Jackalate?"

He handed me a seemingly average looking pocket vagina. It was large, made of blue rubber, and reversible. The rubber was dimpled on one side. It felt strange, but good.

I handed it back to the Jackal. We left the musty bathroom and went our separate ways. I had established my contact in the fertile crescent.

Today, after a brief conversation, Ayaz handed me the duffle bag. It was heavy. I looked inside and saw a rifle. Upon closer inspection, I saw that it was an Armalite AR-15, well worn, with telescoping buttstock. Both grip and stock were covered in blue dimpled rubber. I held the foregrip and pressed the buttstock to my shoulder, aligning the sights. It felt strange, but good.

The Heartland of America

I woke up early this morning, like I always do. The sun shone brightly through the windows of my bedroom. I walked downstairs and began to read the newspaper. I was interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up my driveway.

I looked out the window and saw that it was Jackie, driving a late model Honda. I rushed out to greet him. By the time I had walked over to the car, Jackie was already out of the driver's seat and leaning against the automobile's champagne-colored exterior. He clutched his huffing rag in one hand with the desperate grip of a drug addict. He extended to me his other hand in friendship. We shook hands. He looked terrible, even for him. He was shaking and his hair was falling out in clumps.

Jackie began to explain what he was doing here. He voice quivered. He told me that he had been driving cross country with his girlfriend when he was run off the road by bandits in Oklahoma. There was red dust all over his car. I listened intently as he told me the story of how a gang of men dragged him and his girlfriend out of their car and took them to an encampment near Canton Lake. It was a nearly moonless night. The gang brandished shotguns and shackled them in manacles and leg irons.

Immediately I knew who Jackie was talking about. I had run into the same group of men in my travels west. I sneaked into their camp many years ago to investigate their connection to a series of disappearances of priests from the eastern seaboard. I wore black clothes and after observing them from great distance, found the right moment to walk through their camp. I never found the priests although I am sure they were behind the plot. What I did find was much worse.

Through the night optics I had brought I could see the burly, hoggish men cavort naked around a bonfire. They stomped their feet and shouted gutturally as their ritual went on. I could see through the binoculars the unmistakable logo on the tub of Crisco-brand vegetable shortening from which they each took handfuls before going on to grip and stroke each other. The sheen of their disgusting corpulent bodies reflected the light of the bonfire. Their genitals were gnarled and misshapen. They chased each other around the fire for hours.

The ritual ended when a meteorite crashed down nearby. The most clumsy and lubricious amongst them, Crisco still dripping from his loins, staggered over and picked it up. He held the rock above his head with both hands. Although I could see that the meteorite was very hot, he did not grimace from the pain. As the others of the gang caught sight of the rock, they were entranced. The man holding the rock began to grow even more fat. He chanted in tongues. His voice sounded like the sloshing of urine in a half-full milk jug. I had seen enough. I fled as quickly as I could from the sight of the ritual.

And now I knew that it was not a one time thing. Jackie had seen it too. As I recounted the story to Jackie, he nodded solemnly. A tear dropped from his eye. I handed him my hankerchief to wipe the tears and he coughed blood into it. As he was wiping his mouth, some of his teeth fell out.

I looked into the back seat of his car and I suddenly realized what had happened. There was a pile of filthy blankets, covered in ruddish soil. I opened the car door and raced to unwrap the blankets. Inside was the meteorite!

"Jackie, how did you get this," I inquired incredulously.

"They took her," He was sobbing. "They hung her from a meathook and cut off her feet and hands!"

Jackie was inconsolable. I did the only thing I knew how. I held the meteorite over my head with both hands. Out of my mouth poured the sounds of a washing machine on full spin cycle. The noise got louder and louder. Jackie opened his mouth and the roar of the sloshing water got even stronger.

Large, black wasps began to pour out of my mouth. I gripped the meteorite harder and we collapsed in laughter, the sloshing sound drowning out the world around us.

Healthcare

A week ago, I went to see my doctor because of an intense pain in my testicles. I thought it might be testicular torsion, or worse, syphilis.

I receive my medical care from a man named Dr. McBride. He practices medicine in a building on the outskirts of town. McBride is known to be the best medical doctor in the area, and more importantly, I trust him.

I drove out to McBride's office in my old Mercedes. The car has held up well over the years. The butter-colored interior still had the faint smell of leather. I parked the car and walked purposefully into McBride's office. I often wondered to myself if I was his only patient, because I had never seen anyone else coming or going during my trips to McBride's office. McBride worked alone. He answered his own phone calls on a heavy, black rotary telephone that still had his number listed partially in letters and the rest in numbers.

When I walked into the office, McBride was standing in the middle of the austere waiting room. The sickly, yellow glow of the florescent lighting made his skin look pale. McBride was a gaunt figure. His clothes hung from his bones. We went into his consulting room and I sat on the deli paper wrapped examination table. McBride went through a full run of standard check-up tests, checking my pupils for dilation and measuring my weight. Everything was normal. That was when I told him about the sharp pain in my testicles.

McBride's black, beady eyes shifted around in their sockets. He handed me a tongue depressor, a copy of the New York Times and a plastic specimen cup, and asked me to excuse myself to the restroom for a stool sample. I carefully laid the New York Times under the toilet seat, and after some straining, defecated on it. Steam wafted off of the bowel movement in the frigid air of McBride's unheated bathroom. I broke off and pushed a piece of the bowel movement into the specimen cup. I crumpled up the feculent New York Times and put it into McBride's red biohazardous medical waste jug.

I returned to the consultation room and handed McBride the specimen cup. He set the cup down on the counter-top and clutched his lapels with his spindly fingers. His brow furrowed. I had come to McBride because he was a well-known injectionist. I knew he would give me a series of shots of procaine for the pain in my testicles.

McBride released his grip with his right hand and reached into one of the drawers under the counter.

"Great. Relief at last," I thought.

McBride produced a heavily tarnished pewter spoon. With the speed of a man half his age, he tore open the specimen cup. The doctor eagerly spooned a walnut-sized piece of the tarry stool into his mouth. He chewed rapidly. I could hear the preternatural grating of his teeth against one other. The bowel movement was as black as obsidian, and had an oily sheen to it in the flickering light of the room. It looked like a shiny, meatball-sized lump of opium. McBride spooned another heaping nugget into his emaciated maw, and somehow, I felt greatly at ease.

I can still feel the overwhelming feeling of tranquility that I felt on that day.

A Man A Plan A Canal Panama

It was raining again and I was having a bad day in a filthy bar downtown. The bartender was a girl in her 20s. I didn't know her name and I didn't ask. Maybe in my younger days I would have fucked her on the bar top with a mouth full of whiskey and a vas deferens full of lust. These days, though, I just wanted another drink.

I was rattling the ice in my empty glass when he stopped me. It was Juan Carlos. He was a slight man with dark hair and an ugly face. I had first met him in Panama on business. Being that we were thousands of miles from Panama, this seemed like too much to be a coincidence.

I told Juan Carlos that I was leaving and that I would see him around. He didn't say anything and his eyes returned to the cup of blended fruit swill that he was drinking. He had a sweet tooth. I hurriedly walked home while the raindrops soaked the city. The newly re-hydrated city streets reeked of shit and garbage and the scum you'd scrape out from under your fingernails after a long night at a whorehouse.

As I got home I unlocked my door, sat in my velvet-upholstered recliner and smoked a blend of treebark and pulverized wood beetles. After a few puffs, I dozed off.

A loud and distinctive pounding on the door roused me from my slumber. The oaken door shook from the force. I had heard that knock before. It was the knock of the Panamanian. I opened the door to see Juan Carlos standing there, soaking wet. There were red lipstick prints on his clothes and he had bite marks all over his face. His skin was hanging off in some spots and I could see the scaly coating underneath.

I invited him in and I reached for the satchel I kept hanging on the back of the door. In the satchel was a bull whip that I had bought from slavers in Bangalore. As Juan Carlos came in, I shut the door and lashed him with the whip, again and again. The heavy, braided leather tore his clothes. Juan Carlos hit me with a powerful hay-maker. The force of the blow made me vomit beer and liquor onto my carpet. I ran after Juan Carlos, lashing him with the whip.

Juan Carlos fled to the bathroom and locked himself in. My blood boiled with rage. I thought of Panama and how we got to these circumstances in the first place. I kicked the door down and grappled with the Panamanian. The smell of him was worse than I remembered. He was slicked with sweat and blood, but my grip was strong. I plunged his head into the commode, banging his skull against the porcelain. After the repeated blows against the hard, ceramic toilet his reptilian brain gave out on him. He slipped into unconsciousness. Juan Carlos began to look more like a lizard by the moment, and he made terrible gurgling sounds while I held his head under the water for what seemed like hours.

The Panama Canal had been completed only 66 years earlier. Most of it was built by reptiles.

The normal are not detectably sane

I spent my new year's eve with Sheila and Abner, a young couple that i have befriended over the years. They live in a modest log cabin in the icy wastes of Nunavut, Canada. Sheila and Abner are a great couple and about as normal as they come. Although it was new year's eve the real reason I went to visit Sheila and Abner was because they were expecting a baby, their 6th.

On new year's day they had an unremarkable home birth. Sheila's vagina looked like a well-worn catcher's mitt as its leathery folds undulated and pulsed, expelling the baby. The baby was followed by a blast of cottage cheese and a placenta that writhed as would a struggling one-legged octopus, shimmering in the reflection of the cabin's gas lamps.

We cut the umbilical cord and had a champagne toast while Sheila held the baby. "I am the first and the last," Abner exclaimed as Sheila walked outside into the frozen winter, grabbed the baby by his tiny ankle and dashed out his brains against the frozen scree.

I drank a quart of Jack Daniel's and thought of bygone presidents and what it would be like if my car had sexual intercourse with as many women as I had.