Ghouls, Creeps, and Mutants

I was part of a special task force from 2014 to 2019. I’ve never told anyone about this, not even my closest friends and family. This was a black ops deal, so I probably am not supposed to disclose this information, but I feel like it’s too important to keep secret.

I was recruited in the spring of 2014. The man who would eventually be my commanding officer showed up to my apartment and knocked on my door. A man that I will only ever know by his codename: Goodbean Frill. He was dressed in a smart, tight-fitting three piece suit. His eyes were mismatched. One was a pale blue glacier, the other was copper in color. His long white hair was bunched in a messy ponytail. His angular face was framed by white muttonchops.

Goodbean spoke before the door was even fully opened, “Mark, my boy. How are you?”

“Uh, I’m okay, I guess. Uh-“

“Good! Great to hear. We’ve been monitoring your video games,” he started as he let himself into my home, breezing his lanky leg past the door. “Yesterday you won your fourth Super Bowl in a row in Madden, right?” He pursed his lips in a descending note whistle.

I staggered back a step or two, “Yeah…I did,”

Goodbean continued “And then, correct me if I’m wrong, but you also beat level 103 on Earth Defense Force just, uh, what was it? Last week?” I crossed my arms as Goodbean glanced around my apartment. “Yeah, that sounds about right. Why-, who are-?”

He produced a badge from his pocket. It was gold and had a strange insignia. ” Commander Goodbean Frill, of the F.E.U.,” He saw me scrunch up my eyebrows and open my mouth, then interjected ” Save your breath. Freak Extermination Unit.”

I started “Okay, Freak Extermination Unit. And you’ve been watching me…play video games?”

“Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. We watch everybody.” He tapped his cane against a framed photo of Rosie O’Donnell I had hanging on the wall at this point. He had a cane, I think I forgot to mention that. “We put those games out there as a test.”

Goodbean continued ” Your prowess at Madden shows a great strategic and tactical capacity. And to couple that with skill at Earth Defense Force? A game about shooting giant bugs and aliens? Rolling around on the battlefield while emptying a machine gun? You’re the perfect prospect. You’re exactly what we’re looking for.”

I farted silently but very odorously at this point, and walked across the room to maybe try to obfuscate the fact that I just about shit my pants. ” So you’re recruiting people who are good at these two specific video games?”

“Exactly, my boy,” Goodbean replied. ” And you’re just the kind of boy we’re looking for. Our organization keeps the world in working order. We are charged with the same noble task as the Knights Templar, the Jesuits, and the disciples of all holy things.”

I subtly waved my hand to try to fan the fart toward the kitchen, “Hot in here, huh? Anyway, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“The F.E.U. needs you, son. The anamolies are out there, in the world, and we need brave men to guard the gates. To keep the world safe from ghouls, creeps, and mutants. Did you just fart a few seconds ago? It smells like diarrhea in here.”

Almost like watching myself from outside my body, I drew my right hand up to my forehead into a salute. “Sir,” I said, “I’m all in. I’m gonna be the best damned F.E.U. soldier you ever had. And I didn’t fart. I think this house just kinda smells like diarrhea. It’s a cheap place. I think some poop is just like, marinating in the floorboards or something. The neighbors said there was an old couple who lived here before. So I probably think-“

“Excellent! Welcome to the F.E.U!” Goodbean shouted.

The next six months of my life were pretty standard F.E.U. recruit fare; running 4 kilometers (clicks) each morning at the crack of dawn, summoning djinn and interrogating them with a Ouija board, firing machine guns into cardboard cutouts of various kaiju. Pretty standard stuff for paranormal units. This one Mormon kid named Geoff went crazy and cut his own head off in the mess hall. He used a serrated grapefruit spoon. It was impressive in a way. But y’know, we all kinda saw it coming.

My first mission happened in the spring of 2015. A class 2 vampanzee was rooting around in the dumpster behind a plasma donation center. A vampanzee is a chimpanzee who has become a vampire. They have really sharp teeth and more often than not wear a little black cape. This one was capeless, though. My team executed the plan flawlessly. We surrounded the dumpster and then just shot the demon monkey with our machine guns until he was a puddle of red pulp. It was really fun and cool.

About 18 months later, I was stationed at the F.E.U. Observation Tower. It is a 150 foot tall spire that overlooks the ‘Bottomless Pit’ that sinks deep into the Antarctican ice. The F.E.U.O.T. is made of wood gathered from maple trees, as it seems to have a dampening effect against the psychic powers the ocotopi down there have. Each day, my comrades and I would play cards and shoot the shit, watching into the abyss below us intermittently. The psychic octopi would mill around, but never crest the surface. That was the agreement that JFK made with them. They abided by it for a long time. Until one day the octopi breached the surface and began clamboring up the maplewood observation tower. It was utter chaos.

They attacked us. Their psionics were dimmed by the maple, but not completely shut off. The weak-minded F.E.U. rookie, Arthur Rodriguez, bless him, got mindcaptured and started firing on us. I kicked him in the nuts and threw him off the edge of the tower. He landed with a bloody pulse on the snow below. Poor little guy. The purple suction cups of the octopi popped furiously over the wood and when they crested the crenellations of the tower, they seemed to hang in the air for a second. Their red and gold eyes were galaxies of hatred. I shot them with my machine gun. Purple blood bloomed into the air with each pulse of the gun, and it crystallized into snow in the Antarctic air.

After the battle, my second in command, Drey Kolingo, asked me “Man, do you really think the pit is bottomless? “

“Probably not,” I put a hand on his shoulder.

Kolingo stared at me, tears welling into the bottom of his eyelids. His lips quivered as he said “Rodriguez fell. He fell all the way down. And I can’t stop thinking about how he could’ve fallen forever. Could have been us. Me or you…”

“You still got that trail mix?” I asked. He had really good trail mix earlier in the day.

Kolingo scoffed “Man, I’m trying to be real with you. We just saw a man die, one of our brothers. He fought bravely, and we can’t even talk about it, because this fucked up job is-“

I pressed my finger to his lips. Interrupted him. “Trail mix? Do. You. Have. That. Trail. Mix?”

2019 was a rough year for me. I knew I was closing in on retirement from the F.E.U., and the Bigfoot Alliance was trying to smear my reputation. They claimed I took nude photos of sasquatches and distributed them on the internet. Ludicrous. First off, they are very hard to photograph. Better photographers than I have tried endlessly to snap a pic and have failed. Secondly, they don’t wear clothes, so they would necessarily be nudes, right? It was all political bullshit.

Goodbean came and visited me after I resigned my position. He was much more frail, feebler. His skin was like a faint paper over his veins and bones. His skeleton was much more visible, pressing through him. “Glad I got to know you,” I said to him. Not sure where I was gonna go next with my words. He lifted his head up. Smiled. “We go back a long ways,” I grinned back, “Thanks for everything.”

He nodded a little bit. A weak smile. Exhaled. Sleep found him easily. He was prepared.

There’s a whistling in the pines
a sound without cheer that travels like saline
down into the tearducts of the mountain
The needles on the extremities of the branches, boughs
They sing high-pitched and
Let the notes tumble down into the banks of the
cool river as it burbles and hums along
captured in a flow of silt and I

Watch and touch to feel
extremitus
of eyes and fingers and sensible work shoes
sucking in mud and muck and tiny sand beads

Sun bakes my flesh, ultraviolet light snapping tiny protein bonds
My animal muscle arms wheeling the oar, snapping tiny protein bonds
Beefstick in my belly, stomach acid snapping tiny protein bonds
Let’s go!

The water floats mirages
The constancy lies in some faraway landmark
Sandbar, tree, log
There’s a holiness here in the silence, the motions, the way we move
It’s iterated in generations of long ago
It feels like a faraway landmark
Splayed and dissected by the words I can array in my schema
Like Thunder and Woman and Meat
and like laugh and disenchanted and microscopy
Sandbar, tree, log
Father, home, night

Anhedonia comes easy to a skeptic,
and doubt pumps blood in the valleys of my conspiratorial brain
But it all seems too frail, too sugarwire framed
out here in the scrying mirror
of water lapping against
my way and future
The branches can sway and roar emerald
The river still moves

I was at Olive Garden the other day, and I coined a new phrase: Mammon’s Corner.

Mammon’s Corner is a part of going out to eat at a restaurant. It’s when you have eaten enough to be full, however, there is still a considerable amount of food left on your plate. But it is too scant to be worth taking home as leftovers. Just about a half of a lunch. But it is also too much to just leave on the plate, because you’d feel like you were wasting food. So you feel an obligation to dutifully shovel those last four or five bites into your mouth, even though you already know you will be drowsy and somewhat uncomfortable from overeating. As you shovel those forkfuls into your mouth, you are rounding Mammon’s Corner.

Mammon’s Corner is very much about trying to extract maximal value out of a consumer experience. You are trying to get your money’s worth, and not waste this exchange. If you are too full, and you leave the excess serving on the plate, you overpaid. If you take the leftovers home and try to make a small meal of them, you are shorting yourself a full consumptive experience.

Somehow, it got me thinking about how we fashion our identities around our consumer choices. We have brand loyalties, imagine ourselves to be this or that kind of shopper. It’s incredible that in every type of commodity, there is a gradient of cost and fanciness. Every modern American has a car, and although all of them just take us from place to place, there is a hierarchy of cheap dirtbag car to sophisticated important car. Less complex things have tiers of value. Toilet paper. Literally the thing you use to scrape fecal matter off of your shitty bunghole. There is single-ply truckstop poor people tier paper, and then there is the cushy, luxurious triple-ply ass paper with aloe vera infused in every wipe. Is there anything you can buy that is just universal? This is the basic thing that people need: Here it is.

No.

It’s incredible how much consumerism shapes our thoughts. We adhere to tiers of value for utterly inconsequential shit. A rug on the floor. A television stand. The brand of beans someone offers for Taco Night. This is the freedom we speak so highly of; to be standing in the toothpaste aisle and to see seventy different tubes of the same shit.

Somehow, I feel like I’d be remiss without talking about the Mormons.

How could there not be a new religion, seeing this vast westward expanse unfurling before you? How could there not be a new dogma of God and Christ, once the telescopes looked out over the planets of Mars and Venus? God is real, yeah, but he lives on another planet. The Garden of Eden exists; it’s in Missouri. What an enchanting time to be alive, what an All-American way to taste the Gospels. What excuse would you have to not be thriving here on planet earth? The project of god is clearly the settlement of this land of plenty. Nevermind the Indians, they are just weird or whatever! But to inherit a new half of the world and to understand that the cosmos contained many more places like our world…man. Mormons just picked up on the vibe of the time.

I’d love to be some kind of ascetic, if only for the cred. I can’t do it. I can’t help it. I’m a consumer piece of shit like everybody else. I love hamburgers too much. I guess I’d just like it if we all understood the commonality that we’ve all got. We’re just here temporarily, we’re dead with the days counting down. If you puff out your chest about being important, you’re a big dumb loser. Our pupils are black and will turn blacker on that big day. Nobody wrote a poem about your money. Nobody wants to remember you. You’re the most common and you’re boring.

Mammon will eat a lot of chicken alfredo.

Ten years ago, on Easter Sunday, two of my best friends died.

In the decade since, I’ve lived several lives. Different homes, jobs, driving a lot. Thinking out loud to myself on highways through Wisconsin and Minnesota and Iowa. I was this person, and that one, too. Cut my hair, trimmed my beard. Looked in a mirror and watched myself grow up. I live 180 miles away from where I did back then. I have a fiancé, a house, a yard that I mow with an electric mower. Cats and a dog that I feed and pet and look in their eyes.

Two of my best friends died, and each life I live holds onto that. I can’t help it. It’s a wound that has never quite healed.

It feels bad and I don’t like it.

I miss my friends. It is sharp on weekend afternoons, when I’d like to see them. When we would daydrink and chainsmoke and listen to punk rock music. Hit golf balls. Watch the 1960s Batman show while drinking coffee and make jokes. I remember the last time we hung out. We were sitting in an El Camino and smoking weed and watching the moon. It slowly climbed over the clouds. It didn’t feel like a Last Time, but why would it? It was another great memory in a growing anthology. But now that book is closed. It has all been written. I’m sad.

I’ve talked to each of them after they died.

Cory came to me in a dream, a couple of weeks later. In the dream, I was sitting in my car on my lunchbreak, smoking cigarettes. Nothing remarkable. He knocked on the passenger side door and asked to come into the car. “Yeah, dude, yeah!” I said. He told me he was kind of fading in and out between the world and something else. Which is weird, right. That’s more like how he would phrase it, and not how I would think of it. In my dreambrain. He said he was okay. I woke up and felt like it was significant.

Not long ago, I had a very weird dream. I was on an airplane, and as we were about to take off the stewardesses suddenly had all of us get out of the plane and go back into the airport, because something was wrong mechanically with the plane. We were all milling about in the boarding area, very agitated, and then I saw my old friend Tyler. He was heavily scarred, covered in blood. I think that was my brain reminding me he was dead? And I was like “Oh shit, man. So good to see you!” and we laughed and cracked wise for a couple of minutes and I said to him ” You know we all still love the hell out of you, we give you shit a bit, but everybody loves you,” and he was crying and smiling. He was happy and sad.

Ten years evaporates so quickly. I learned to be bold. To kiss her when the moment feels right. Courage in the moment. I’m a person still. A lot of the ink in my story was scribed by these friends. I was made in a rural Wisconsin manor. I hear punk rock music when I walk down a sidewalk. I’m so glad I knew them.

I’ll never meet people like that again.

she returned to her home deep in night
the familiar form of the house striking somehow foreign, ominous
interior was black and occluded, a single light bulb on the porch
burning all of its 80 watts into a corona over the steps

she held her keyring like a weapon, as she’d been taught
long key tucked between the forefinger and the middle
in case she had to stab somebody with it

She unlocked the door hurriedly,
Into the mudroom and slammed the door behind her,
locking the handle as it closed
Darkness there, and nothing more?

The windows were left open

Chilled and damp, like the morning was uninvited
something outside slithered into her home
and the kind of air that doesn’t belong indoors
felt like dew on the countertops and doorframes

Room to room, she switched the light on to check
and then switched it off behind her
Trepidation in the misty spring
She switched the light on in her bedroom and stood there
Waiting, maybe
Checking
a few minutes

When the coast was clear, she changed into her pajamas and crawled into bed. Pulled heavy blankets over her body. She fell asleep.

The night was alive with sickle-eyed cats.
Creatures ambling along fenceposts and knowing the moon
so much more intimately than the sun

She woke the next morning, feeling rested
A coffee on the porch
The sun was red and low behind the neighborhood homes
it drank slowly
The cool, damp night had left her bedroom
And caught a current of breeze,
to the place where cats look when they chase imaginary things

It is the far-flung future: The Year 2031. Ever since The Anomaly appeared between the Earth and the Moon, things have been fucked. The affairs of humanity have been scattered to the wind, much like the mercury-rich dust of the Florida Desert. The best laid plans of mice and men have been cornholed into oblivion.

We all noticed The Anomaly at different times. It overlaid the moon, seeming to stay perfectly centered between our world and our natural satellite. It took the form of a glowing, blood-red dodecahedron. Well, at least to the human eye. If you looked up in the sky, night or day, toward the moon in whatever phase it was in, there was The Anomaly. An unnerving red geometry, seeming to pulse with your own breathing patterns. But it was completely undetectable by all of our scientific instruments. Spectrometers, radio telescopes, hell, even everyday cameras would show no sign of it. It was invisible to everything but the naked human eye. Regardless, it sat like a wound in the sky, pulsing crimson to everyone who dared behold it.

Since it’s inauspicious but undeniable appearance, the world has gone kittywampus six ways from Sunday.

The oceans have become a murky greyish goop. Mountains have become pockmarked and granular, particulating into little more than oversized anthills. Wisdom teeth are just gone; dentists have lost a major revenue stream. The First World governments have collapsed. It was spectacular and almost instantaneous once The Anomaly took hold of the world. Heads of state tried to give serious addresses to their terrified constituents, but their words tended to lose meaning once their teeth transformed into earthworms as they spoke. It was mostly moist slapping noises, which are not exactly reassuring to a panicked populace.

Now, speaking as one of the unlucky ones who lived through the Change, I can report on the current state of things here in the Divided States of America. I have been tirelessly chronicling the characteristics, origins, and lore of the gangs that now rule North America. I think of myself as a scribe. An instrument of History, cautiously optimistic that humanity will eventually have a need for records. From New New York, to New Los Angeles, I have been studying the gangs of the end times.

CHRIST’S ARMY

Demographic: Previous Evangelicals, who are super-psyched about the state of things. Formerly well-to-do white Southerners who feel like they’re a whisker away from vindication.
Strength: Great in numbers, but mostly overweight and elderly.
Stronghold: The formerly affluent suburbs around Atlanta.
Weakness: Putting up a sign that says “Free McRibs this way!” with an arrow pointing toward a cliff. They will walk of the edge of the cliff every time and then fall to their death while asking to speak to a manager.

THE DOG TOWN BARKERS

Overview: The employees of various dog shelters and pet stores, who because of The Anomaly have been merged with their dog counterparts. Half-human, half-dog humanoids.
Strength: Being very alert. Barking at anyone who approaches their stronghold, especially mailmen.
Treats: Yes please.
Territory: Wherever they manage to pee, after sniffing around for rival gangs, and then pissing right on top of their marker. That’ll show ’em. This is MY yard. MINE.

SILENCE COVEN

Racial Bias: No.
Philosophy: That we should have probably anticipated that subjective reality would overwrite the objective.
Powers: Creating an interminable paranoia in those who are not initiated.
Weakness: Communication. They’re silent, after all.

NAMELESS BABY ARMY

MAKEUP: Not so much a gang but an inchoate horde of marauding babies. A force of nature comprised of 0-3 year old humans, who have all of the instinctive needs and ambitions of humans, but none of the empathy or decorum. Easily one of the most terrifying forces ever unleashed on this earth.
MUTATION: Yes, they are all 4-5 feet tall but just still act like babies.
FAVORITE BEVERAGE: Milk.
BATTLE TACTICS: Using their really sharp little fingernails and teeth.

THE SNAKEMEN OF WAUSAU

MAKEUP: Eight guys from Wausau, Wisconsin, who for some reason became immense godlike naga creatures.
QUEZTLCOATL: Perhaps.
TYPICAL CONVERSATION: “Oh hey dere, do ya tink we oughta go out dere and do a big cullin’ of da weak, er no?”
“Oh yaaah, I s’pose it’s ’bout dat time.”
“Yaah. And it’s so nice outside today. Be a shame if we just sat on our keisters dis whole day.”
“Oh yaah. Gotta cull da weak on a day like today.”
FAVORITE APPETIZER: Cheese curds.

PHOENIX SOCIETY

Leader: An impossibly positive man, one who can’t admit defeat.
Project: To restore the old world order, Capitalism and all.
Dress: Polo shirts and buzzcuts. Easily the worst look of all time.
Adherents: The easily duped, the get-rich-quick type who quickly check out whenever questions of mortality or morality come up.

Eventually, one of these gangs will inherit the earth. We’d like to imagine the eschaton coincides with or own death, but this is probably not the case. The end of the world happens very slowly, and it’s laborious. The world has in fact ended several times, but its’ so gradual that we don’t even realize it’s happening. The Anomaly watches into us as we try to go about our day to day lives. The strange becomes familiar and we watch the sky as it loses answers, tries to tell us that we’re not equipped to understand it.

The world has ended many times. Maybe once it will end for the better.

You ever find yourself in a strange place and with strange thoughts? Like in a terribly sun-filled laundromat at 2 PM on a Saturday afternoon. And of course there’s a family in the corner doing a heap of laundry that’s seven feet tall, and the mom is talking on speakerphone with someone while not paying attention to her five kids, who are chasing each other around and eating handful after handful of years-old Reese’s Pieces from the little vending machine. In the corner there’s a TV mounted up by the ceiling that is playing like, ESPN4. And for lack of anything else to occupy yourself, you end up watching it. It’s playing something so narrow-interest and odd that you are a bit dumbfounded that it even exists. Something like “The 2024 Medium Craft Motorboat Racing Finals Presented by Liquid Death.” And you go “What?”

The announcers are talking like it’s a real thing, too. “Here we are in beautiful Clearwater Beach, Florida for the time-honored tradition of the Medium Craft Motorboat Racing Finals, brought to us this year by our friends at Liquid Death Premium Beverages. Of course the atmosphere is electric here, as the great Swede, Wolter Ruhndt tries to win his unprecedented fourth consecutive championship. But nipping on his heels is Italy’s favorite son, Vincent D’nofrio. No relation.” The water a harsh contrast of blue and blazing white reflection. All the boat racers have on jumpsuits with corporate sponsor patches and also sunglasses and spiky gelled hair. On the shore there are bleachers, and people are in the bleachers? People go to watch this shit? Who buys a ticket for a motorboat race? Surely, this are all just like, immediate family members of the participants, right? As the camera pans over the crowd, you can see all of also sunglass, spike-haired family members lean to each other. If you can read lips, you would see they’re asking “How long does this go for? This is like a 2 hour deal right? Are we gonna get something to eat after?”

Who is this for? And how do you even discover that you’re a world championship caliber boat racer? Maybe I am. Who knows? Maybe I have the prototypically perfect genetic disposition to be an elite boat racer. But I just never tried it. Instead it’s all these strange European trust fund kids. These fourth generation descendants of some long-dead aluminum baron from Brussels, who made his fortune selling low-quality canteens and chow trays to both sides of World War One.

Which reminds me, did you know that the Illumanti have a weather control machine? The power elite who secretly run the world have some sort of a mechanism that can control the weather around the globe. I’m not sure how it works, but they use it for nefarious means like to start the wildfires in Los Angeles, and to direct hurricanes at cities like Houston. Makes me wonder, though. Who, exactly, is in charge of it? I mean, it’s the New World Order, sure, but like, who has final say? Or is it like a conference room in an office building, where you book it by making an event in a shared Microsoft Outlook calendar? Like some dipshit son of an arms dealer tries to reserve the weather control machine with a note like “I’m taking my mistress to Madrid from May 3rd through the 8th, so I need it to be about 75-80 degrees, sunny, and with whatever humidity is comfortable (I don’t know that shit I’m not a nerd lol!) Thanks in advance!” And then can he get overruled by some higher-up in the world Satanic cabal? Like some Canadian tech billionaire who is higher in the ranks can be like “No, I can’t let you take the weather control machine for those dates. I need it. This jackass that I was in Skull and Bones with who always made fun of my weight is getting married in Aspen that weekend, so I need to make it freezing rain. Request denied.”

Makes life interesting, I guess. Interesting in the way that so much is mundane, but there is always something just a little bit out of sight that is truly strange. Know what I mean? Like there’s a lot of boring, ho-hum stuff but then every once in a while something completely novel shows up and you go “Woah!” That’s terrifying! That’s beautiful! Aaah!

Let me explain by way of example; The Sandown Clown incident occurred on the Isle of Wight in the UK back in 1973. Most people haven’t heard of this bit of High Strangeness, but it’s up there with Mothman for one of my favorites. See, these two little British kids, who were no doubt quite pale and had bad teeth, were playing around in the woods one day. They ventured a little bit farther into the wood than normal, and crossed a wooden footbridge over a stream. There, in a clearing, they saw a very unusual being.

He was like a psychedelic wiccan Tinman. “A cross between a clown, a robot, and an alien,” according to the reports. About the size and shape of a man, but with a perfectly spherical head on which his facial features seemed crudely painted on with bright primary colors. His “skin” was like off-white paper, and his clothes were like a ramshackle scarecrow’s. A motley of vibrant mismatched patterns and patches. His hands and feet were round, with only three long digits protruding out of each, like a child’s drawing.

The freakish British children approached this equally freakish creature and cautiously asked who he was. The creature replied “Hello and I am all colors, Sam.” He seemed to speak through some kind of a microphone or vocoder type thing which he held up to his mouth, and then the speaker was in a satchel that was slung over his shoulder in a little messenger bag. The children described Sam’s demeanor as one that was reserved but friendly. He was shy, but not cagey. They interacted with him for about a half an hour. The children left, going back to their house, hoping to get their equally pale and freakish British parents to come meet this fourth dimensional harlequin. But when they brought their parents to this magical clearing, Sam was gone. No trace of him was left.

I’m giving a very brief rundown of the Sandown Clown mythos, but it is really interesting. The kids were trying to work out what exactly he was, and one of them asked “Are you a ghost?”, to which he apparently replied “Well, not really, but I am in an odd sort of way.”

Now the logical part of me knows this story is probably hokum. A story made up by some goofy kids. That’s probably what it is. But I do think it’s interesting in two ways. One, there’s a lot of detail in it. Two, there’s a relative level of restraint if it’s a kid making stuff up. Like, at no point does Sam take the kids on his rocketship to the moon where they meet a bunch of giraffes and eat ice cream, or whatever. Know what I mean? It was probably just an imaginative kid spinning a well-told yarn. But maybe it wasn’t. That maybe is what’s lurking just outside of the mundane day-to-day.

It’s just like the other day at work, I went to get a cup of coffee. I went to the machine and it was empty. Now the impetus was on me to make a new pot. As a new employee, who doesn’t now the foibles and charms of this coffee machine, it means a lot of guesswork. How many scoops of grounds? Do they want me to use the filtered water out of the Brita in the fridge, or is this iron-rich tap water good enough? Can I just stick the coffee pot back in it’s normal place, or is there some trick to where the coffee-drip nipple has to be aligned a certain way? I imagine burbling black water pouring like tar over each side of the coffee pot onto the nice hardwood breakroom floor, the overhead lights flickering just because, and one of my coworkers turning to me with disdain screaming “How could you do this?!” as I helplessly gasp like a shorecaught trout.

So yeah that’s why I’m glad I don’t have to go to the laundromat anymore.

Clearly, a squirrel jumped from the fence, down into the snow here. There can be no doubt. You see the impact crater in the snow of a squirrel, tail imprinted into the white powder and all, with no footprints leading to it. This crazy little rodent belly-flopped down onto that snow from the fence behind him. There’s no other way to get that impressive front arm/back-of-body/tail splay like that just showing up right there.

Clearly something like this.

Then he ran down toward the porch, got maybe a little discouraged by the rough snow pile caused by our shoveling, made an about face and hopped his way back southeast a few strides, before noticing the tree branch in our brush pile. He considered this maneuver only for a second, then veered to his left, to approach it at an optimal angle…

Like Family Circus only funny.

The squirrel, realizing that dragging your hairy belly across 7 inch deep snow sucks, decided to go airborne again, and to ascend the tree branch back up to the fence. Gotta get up into the sky, use that third dimension, gotta have a higher vantage point to navigate this cruel February. The tracks lead to the branch, and then disappear.

Well thanks for stopping in, little squirrel man. Next time you’re in my neck of the woods, just ring the doorbell and we’ll have some beers and pizza man. We can listen to some squirrel music, which I can only assume is insane. We can crack a couple of acorns open and reminisce about the old times. I know all of our cats and our dog will try to kill you but I can just yell at them. Stop in man, it’ll be chill.

Thanks for being a Beard Bite Man reader. I really appreciate you. I’d put my hand on your shoulder and say “Yeah, thanks, brother.” Or whatever. I’d like to take you on a tour of BBMHQ (Beard Bite Man Headquarters) now, and show you the backrooms of all this stuff. Sometimes, I will write something and it doesn’t make the cut. It happens. I get the germ of an idea and then the antibiotics of common sense squelch that fuckin’ thing. But I haven’t written a new thing in a few months, so I’ll dredge up this old crap and submit it. Why not? Please give me money. You can tell I’m a real artist because I am constantly begging for money.

SPOKEN WORD

The casino on the reservation
is a house of lascivious and licentious
mirth and whimsy of an un-Christian sort
Spades and hearts foretell
Your body going underground with a shovel
and you walk into a club wearing diamonds

wishing for something
anything
everything
it all

But the house only brings booze and bad odds
A man can thirst and drink
and only end up more dried out
as he tries to call “hit me”
his lips purse into puffs of talc
and it clouds to obscure everything
it all

The roman soldier
Vaginus
flopped on the riverbed,
turned in his guilt
wishing that river would wash him wayward

he hoped it would all be over

but the mollusks and clams and other bivalves
rested against his pale skin as he awoke

clearly oyster season

i’d love to have another chance
he said
i’d really like to wet my whistle
back there
at The casino on the reservation

MEDIA THAT MISSED ME

We’re living in an era that the media has called “Peak TV”. A sort of golden age, where there are seemingly limitless options of streaming services and each one is competing to be the head honcho. And movies, well, honestly, movies have seen better days.

But there’s myriad choices for streaming content for you to put on when you get home from work, as you decompress on the couch and fart and relax.

Almost too much. So much that a lot of it just goes right on past your awareness. I’m not going to sit down and start watching an 8 season TV show just because somebody said it starts getting kinda good in season 4. Are you crazy?

So this column is about that. I’m going to bring up various TV series and movies that I have heard about, but have not consumed. Consumed. Christ. I mean viewed. Imbibed. Drank, whatever.

Because of general cultural osmosis, because of the connecting viscera that is the internet, I probably have a baseline knowledge of most of these intellectual properties. So I will make an educated guess about the plot, tone, and general vibe of the thing. If you are a fan of one of the things listed below, and you want to give me some feedback on my guess, please send a telegram to Beard Bite Man Headquarters, care of Beard Bite Man, in Two Harbors, Minnesota.

Shrinking, Apple TV 2023

Jake Harding (Harrison Ford) is your everyday man, more or less enjoying retirement. He was a psychologist in his working days, but he’s glad to have moved on. He can tend to his lawn and watch his re-runs of Cheers. His world is turned on it’s ear when he discovers he can read mind. That’s right. Not a typo. he can read mind, not minds. His daughter comes to Thanksgiving with her new beau, Jimper Flousette (Ryan Gossling). Jake can read Jimper’s mind, but only when his daughter is not close. Oh yeah, and Jimper is unfathomably wealthy; the heir to the Flousette Mayonnaise empire. He’s an earnest enough man, but he’s dumber than a dog. In an iconic scene, Jake says “You’ve got more dollars than sense!” and Jimper says “Haha, yeah.” Then ten minutes later, Jimper follows up “Actually, I have more cents than dollars, because there’s a hundred cents in every dollar, so I have way more cents.” Jake tries to mold Jimper into his perfect son-in-law, but he has to take him away from his daughter, so his mind-reading will work. This leads to fishing trips, poker games, and other wacky things while he secretly hates the guy. He always can tell that Jimper truly loves his daughter though. Cause he’s psychic for him.

BLOOD

wait like lightning
mother of gods
with blood in her teeth
the silence cannot hope to reach
what is coming

it will not hold
the animal ignominy
pause before the thunder
clenched teeth seeping blood
this thing will end it all

it is the new universe
it is blue

PAPAL CONCLAVE

THE PAPAL CONCLAVE OF 2324

Cardinal Khloe Uno shifted uncomfortably in her chair. It was probably one of the last wooden chairs in the world. The Vatican had kept a stash of them, like they stashed all kinds of antiquities. Mostly useless but somehow priceless relics. Fingerbones of saints, strips of cloth that an angel supposedly farted on, and now little wooden structures that survived the Beetle Plagues of the early 2200s. Frankly, it sucked. The chair was uncomfortable. She would have much preferred to be conferencing in from her home on Cathedral Station 434, her ass floating on her new I.O.Flo Suspension Grid. But if anyone clings to old traditions, it’s the Catholics. They were all ordered to come back to Earth, back to Vatican City, to sit in congress on these shitty wooden chairs to elect a new Pope.

Cardinal Catprince Dunkers, a man whose skin was somehow visibly flaking and still shining with oil, was droning on and on and on. He had the floor, and was pointing out how Cardinal Dreef McDougal was not fit to be the new pontiff because of his stance on Space Abortion. He much preferred Cardinal Riffik Qibbin for the post. Riffik had never wavered in his convictions, and had shown nothing but compassion for the Afflicted.

Khloe Uno was about sick and tired of hearing about the Afflicted. You made you own bed with those brain implants, she thought.

Maybe she was just crabby because she had to sit on a solid chair. Maybe she was just wishing she hadn’t inherited her position in the church when her father died. Maybe she was just a bit hungry.

She had a pack of Skits in her robe pocket. Skits, of course, was the new name for what was once called “Skittles”. We all know that the suffix “-ttles” is now highly offensive because of all the horrible, horrible speciesist things that happened around it, but anyway. Khloe wondered if she could sneak a few Skits in this very solemn and serious Papal Convention without anyone noticing. Her F.U.K. interface gave her a 79% probability of being able to sneak a few of the candies without being found out. So she blinked twice to summon them from her pocket to her hand.

ALL GOLD PLANET

an all-gold planet don’t mean
a dick in a divot
if you can’t sell it to people

he said, rubbing his hands together

so you go out there
and you tell the people they want it

clapped his hands, standing

they gotta have it!

CAMERA OBSCURA

Camera Obscura

The highway is a hundred yards away
I hear the trucks
through my cracked window
the sound carries in the cold
Interstate driving is good for thinking
I could drive somewhere far away
Let’s see how much gas I can afford

I could quit my job
change my whole life
Every morning i wake up and look in the mirror
chapped lipped and bag eyed
Sunshy mornings of dry heaves
Downdraft

Each day my darling
is a gift
A white elephant
I want to see into you
I want empty roads and
Your thoughts escaping my lips
The sun may never come back
Pellet rain bounces off the windshield
as we hammer over the roads
toward whatever destiny we make up

The window is cracked
and the light from the outside
upside down on my wall
I have to get up to go to the bathroom to puke
Oh darling
we’re only happy every now and then
because of brain chemicals
the rest of the time
it’s tough sledding
time cannot be loved
only earned
I say as I kiss you on the forehead
and
we wait for the next chapter

“This sandwich will have three slices of chimkin, and three slices of roast beef,” I thought to myself. Yes, a combination sandwich. For the road. The long journey ahead. Each sandwich I prepare will have a slightly different combination of ingredients. Chimkin or roast beef as the meats. Cheddar or muenster for cheese. Mustard or mayonnaise for goop. All on wheat bread. I will not compromise on the bread. White is for babies. Wheat is the Adult Bread.

A tiny swirl of anxious and unctuous thoughts spiraled around my brain pan. Too shallow to ladle any sort of deeper meaning but deep enough to redden nerve endings and dendrites in the gulliver. I had taken long road trips before. To the west coast, twice. I flew on an airplane from Minneapolis to London. I took a boat from Florida to the Bahamas. Traversing the globe was not a new thing. I recently had a birthday. Turned 37. I didn’t think I was the type to settle into a routine, put on a pair of slippers and drink a hot cocoa and fear the wider world. So what was this little tingle of dread? Why did a finger of unknowing work it’s knotted knuckles into my brain’s bum? Was it because I was travelling with my girlfriend and future wife? I wasn’t the freewheelin’ Bob Deelan of my younger days? Was it a cultural memory of a Wisconsin boy travelling to the Confederacy, but without the fearless leadership of Sherman?

We were headed down there for a wedding, and for a vacation. One of my girl’s college friends was getting married to her longtime beau, and we were also going to explore another part of the country with our paid time off.

The next sandwich I made had six slices of roast beef and cheddar cheese and mayonnaise. “I feel like I’m forgetting something,” said my beautiful wife as we were about to disembark. “Probably nothing that we can’t go a couple days without or buy while we’re there,” I replied. She nodded. We left.

We rented a vehicle for the drive. A mighty steed, a great black beauty of a Jeep. We didn’t want the miles on our own vehicles. I sat in the drivers’ seat. My daily vehicle is 20 years behind in technology. This thing had a tablet affixed to the dash, and many buttons. I sat high-up, as though upon a horse. My mighty steed had very touchy brakes. Well, probably normal brakes. My car has a very different sensitivity. The giant black Jeep even had little lights in the side view mirrors to indicate someone was in your blind spot. We listened to podcasts as we departed Minnesota into Wisconsin. We had a paper bag of snacks (chips, trail mix) and a cooler full of snacks (sandwiches, beef sticks).

We drove through the familiar Northern Wisconsin wilderness. The pine unknowing. Unknown. However, because of our lifestyle of being long-distance lovers of nigh-unto two years, we were quite well-acquainted with this coniferous plantation stretch of US highway 53. The first several hours were routine.

Somewhere around Tomah, cop lights started flashing in our rearview.

“Is this fucking fascist pig, this fucking instrument of capital, this goddamned foot-soldier of the Shit Empire attempting to detain me?!” I asked aloud. At least, that’s what I felt in my heart. I actually asked my wife “Is he pulling me over, really?” I looked down at my speedometer and I was going 73 miles per hour. I rolled over to the side of the road, in a very cool way. I opened the windows and waited for the cop to address me.

“Hey,” he said, rosy-cheeked and probably 24 years old.

” Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

” Your tail lights aren’t on.”

“Oh, okay,” I replied.

I started fumbling around on the steering column of this rental. Jeri explained that his was a rental, and we didn’t know the workings of this machine yet. He was grinning and shining a flashlight around in our car. I eventually found the lights. He went to the back of our car to make sure our back lights were on. He smiled, cutely, and then told us we were free to go, but also he printed out a written warning for me. I could write a written warning for him for being a fucking buzzkill. But then as he was walking away, we made sure he confirmed our booty lights were on. You’d probably imagine my mood was all sorts of fouled-up by this encounter with the police. However, I was relieved. Because he didn’t arrest me for being Too Punk Rock. I didn’t have any warrants for being too much of a rebel.

And darling, I’d love to tell you that was the nadir of the journey. However Hurricane Helene was riding the Appalachian ridge and circumstance was about to bite my buttcheeks. I had eaten about 3 sandwiches by this point. They were pretty good. I think Jeri only ate one of the six sandwiches I made. The mustard was good. Hot in the way that horseradish is, not that jalapeno funk.

The night turned into day, and the rain was falling hard. I had been awake for a long while. We stopped at a sketchy gas station somewhere in the middle of Illinois. I wanted to get gas and smoke a cigarette. Some methed out weirdos appeared at the gas pump next to ours, and I waited for them to leave before going in to pay for my gas. Why? Because I was certain they would ask me for a cigarette, and then also try to sell me some heroin. That was the type of gas station we were at. This was a place where the hard liquor was behind locked cages and there were rolling papers in a display stand at the front counter. You understand.

The rain fell like Noah’s deluge. I drove on. Jeri and I listened to the audiobook of The Mothman Prophecies as the pancake of middle Illinois rumpled up into Appalachia. I only hydroplaned a couple of times for a couple of seconds in our big fat black Jeep.

As we rumbled on into the former confederacy, passing towns with names like Peach, Grampaw’s Pipe, and Black-People-Don’t-Deserve-It, we eventually found a slight clearing in the rainstorm. A six-lane highway met me, and some goddamned trucker’s blown tire sat in the middle of the road. I swung wide of the obstacle as best I could, but a coil of wire somehow found our tire, and we got a goddamned flat tire on our 2000 mile road trip.

The modern Jeep is smart enough to alert the driver “You are losing tire pressure,”. “Fuck,” said I. “Goddamnit,” intonated Jeri. Not good.

We were losing about 3 pounds of pressure every half mile. I calculated in my mind that we could probably make the next exit and ask Enterprise for help. Jeri wasn’t so sure. We managed to bomb our mangled Jeep into a Speedway parking lot and call the owning company. “Hewp,” we said. ” Some wires fucked up our whole thing,” It was again raining hurricane shit, there in that bullshit town. Were we going to make it? Well yes. Obviously yes. Obstacles tasted like candy to me at this point. “We’re gonna make it,”

We went to a new Enterprise location after a beer-bellied boy put a donut on our Jeep. Just to clarify, I know how to change a tire. I could’ve done it, given the proper tools. But we didn’t have a jack, or jack-shit in the back. I was fucking soaked at this point. I’d been outside in a lot of rain.

We went to a new Enterprise location and the guy there was like “We have a very small, tiny, little, itsy-bitsy car for you, if you want it,” Yeah. Whatever. I’m fine with it. And it was some gold-colored little Mazda thing. It was incredibly small.

“Oh, Jeri!” I ejaculated, and then I exclaimed, ” It’s low to the ground, a quick little fucker, like my everyday vehicle, except not shitty.” Jeri was not in love with how small it was. But it still fitted all of our shit.

We got to the wedding venue, and it was really nice. I had been hallucinating just a little bit on the long drive, the red warning lights on radio towers far in the distance turned into angry eyes, as the divots in the landscape were jagged tooth mouths, etc., but eventually we made the scene in Tennessee. The couple that was marrying were cute and sweet like a fine peach cobbler. The husband ranted an 8 page typed speech that he swore he pared down from 17, and the wife had a speech explaining her vows as well. But it was cute, you could tell they were in love and destined for each other for a long while. The venue was a little valley in a wooded area you could only get to by gravel roads.

I ate some fried chimkin and Jeri had the brisket. It was a dry wedding reception, which explains why 90% of the crowd had left by 9 PM.

The next day arrived on schedule, and in our little yellow dart of a car, we went to Rock City, Tennessee. Or no, I think it was Georgia. It straddles the border.

We tried the regular road to the place, as described by our GPS. However, what with the hurricane and all, a giant tree was splayed across the road, making it impassable. “Jeri,” said I, “Try a different typing in that machine. Let’s go up north of here and then swoop back down,” Jeri held her lip in consternation. “Fuck this tree,” she seemed to say, “And it’s road-blocking shit.”

We made it to Rock City within an hour, and in doing so had bombed around little weird streets the likes of which I have never encountered in a proper city. A big ass tree was laying across the road and they just chainsawed it in half and spraypainted orange on either end, like “yeah, whatever.” “Don’t hit this tree limb, we are not paid enough to move it off the road.” The road names were seriously things like “Princess Blvd.” and “Fairy Wy.”

We got to Rock City before anybody else. We were the only people in this place. It was foggy, a mist obscured everything. It was an interesting mixture of geographical oddity and curated camp. The landscape was great slabs of stone and twisting trees. We walked down into moss-hewn caverns. Hidden speakers played sparse acoustic guitar music. I was walking into a dream. Each earthen step lead to more grey crevasses, and we walked up and down the trails to find lichen and swooping trees over the trails. Blinking red lanterns hung in places just out of sight. I felt the mystery of the world again like when I was a child. Something wonderful and profound was happening. I crossed a hanging rope bridge. I stood at the edge of cliffs. I squeezed my body between great walls of grey stone and all the while I was looking back into the beautiful blue eyes of my wife.

Then there was some trippy weird fairy tale underground hell world

Don’t want to talk about that much

The next day was beautiful as well,

Makes sense to have Giraffes as the first animals you see in a zoo. They will necessarily look down their nose at you. Look a bit like they are judging you. They are telling you they are not amused. You’re there to see them, they’re not there to impress you.

I also had beef with an exotic bird, and felt a humanoid connection with a gibbon. We ogled their many tortoises and turtles and terrapins and Teenage Mutants. It was a good time.

We drove back home, many hours. A thousand miles in one crack. I’m not afraid of it. I’ve found I can drive a long time if I’ve got the right circumstances. I need to break about every three hours for a smoke and to stretch my legs. I need a really great person in the passenger seat. I had the best co-pilot on this odyssey. I’m lucky to know her. I’m lucky in a lot of ways.

Here’s a lizard I saw: