“I guess my main qualm with the fact that you’ve fucked a lot of ugly dudes is that it forces my imagination to concot ways in which they overcompensate for said unbearable homeliness. I just imagine this motley menagerie of punk rock scholars and pussy eating champions and it makes me want to take my own life with a novelty superman pen. That’s all I’m saying”

Posted under eric's blog, fiction

“First off, I’m a gay.  Do you understand what I’m saying?  I like girls”.

She takes a quick hit of her raspberry clove.

Her shoe makes a gentle clanging sound as it taps against the table post.

“And not in some ‘look at me, look at me’, Phi Beta Whatever-Whatever way, either.  Not to give your little dick a tingle, or to give you some story to tell your ‘pledge brothers’ (or whatever)”.

I can’t move.  I can’t speak.

Oh my God, please don’t let her see my erection.

“And, let’s just be honest with each other here…”

She ashes her cigarette nowhere in particular.  A couple of still-burning embers hit me right on the shoe and burn little mementos of this conversation.  I’ll throw them out when I get home.  Maybe before.

“Even if I wasn’t gay…”

She makes this awful little little hand gesture between us.  Heartbreaking.

“Do I really have to spell this out for you?  I AM FUCKING ATTRACTIVE”.

She touches my hand for a second, and I freeze.  (It doesn’t make any sense, because I’m sweating bullets, but still: chills).

She proceeds to roll up my sleeve.

“Aha! I thought that’s what that was.  A fucking “Batman” tattoo?  Really?  What are you, like…six years old?”

Her eyes roll.  (They’re beautiful.  Big.  Brown.  Sad.) .

I mumble.  The more I try to keep my voice from rattling the more it quakes and cracks.  I open my mouth three times before any sounds escape.

“I…I’m very sorry to…to have bothered you.  I just w-wanted to introduce myself”.

I start to gain confidence.  Words.  I’m good with words.  If she’ll just hear me out then maybe she’ll stop insulting me and we can…

No.  That’s really all I’m after.  I just want her to stop insulting me so that I can leave.  There’s a broken piece of me that can’t accept nonacceptance.  I need people to like me.  I need to please everyone.  The more insulted I feel the more panicked I am to turn their opinion around.

The more sure I am that someone would like me if they “just got to know me”, the more wrong I always am.

I’ve spent years in relationships like this.

I’ve spent minutes letting a stranger berate me in public.  A crowd is beginning to form.  I hadn’t even noticed until just now.

This isn’t even about me.  She’s performing.

“What were you going to do, ‘Bat-boy’?  Take me back to your ‘Batcave’ like some big, strong superhero?  Is that what you call your daddy’s basement, huh?  ‘The Batcave’?”

I think to say something about not having a father, and “that’s why I let people like you walk all over me”, but then I realize that it just sounds pathetic.  That sort of biting insight is only rewarding when it’s realized at someone else’s expense.

“Get the fuck out of here, you creep”.

Still holding my wrist, she pulls me down to her level, looks me straight in the eyes.

Big.

Brown.

Sad.

“I am not going to let you fuck me.  Maybe you’ll have better luck at the Starbucks down the street”.

There’s a quite swell of support for her as I turn and walk away.  Like an excited crowd at a golf tournament. Murmuring, subdued clapping, that odd raspy sound.

The youngish man who pours his complementary water on me as I walk past calls me “faggot” and no one says a God damn word.

I hate this town.

Posted under eric's blog, fiction

A sweet, more than slightly burned out ex-hippie of an Honors English teacher puts her pretty, time-worn face on her little, balled-up fist and poses the question: “What are your plans for college?” to the bright eyed, barely present “pet project” of a would-be-beatnik student in the shadows who (for the first time all day) looks up from his stack of Kirby and Keroac and mutters, flippantly: “Not goin’. What for? College doesn’t teach you how much will it takes to wield the signature weapon of the Green Lantern Corps., or how to make a girl love you using only the gentle staccato of your words”.

That boy grows up to be a bitter, unloved and uneducated coffee bar clerk who can’t handle the world unless he makes pretend someday he’ll be referred to as an “up and coming talent to watch out for” in some Marvel marketer’s Diamond Catalogue promotional copy.

Posted under eric's blog, fiction

Psychodelik yawns the way lesser men fuck: lots of groaning, stretching, flailing, a couple of tears.

The mornings are hard…if you know what I’m saying.

Awkwardly scrambling through a pile of beautiful young women and even prettier, younger men, he makes his way to the adamantium cage wherein he keeps “Mr. Marx” (the housebroken bald eagle he trained from youth to relentlessly hunt the wealthy), and feeds him his morning fistful of lysergic-acid- diethylamide-soaked sugar cubes.

After which he saunters over to the extravagantly carved french doors of his open-air patio, naked as the day he was forged, and kicks them down with the ferocity of a raped bear.

“Conan! What is best in life?” he roars, much to the chagrin of the neighboring tenants; “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women”.

Psychodelik has woken world. God help you all.

Posted under eric's blog, fiction

LEADER:
Attention, females: We are the Jet Propelled, Anti-Woman’s-Suffrage Brigade. Surrender your voter registration cards and illusions of gender equality, or face our steam guns!

Posted under eric's blog, fiction

I made a mini comic about how paralyzingly terrified I am to work the night shift at Safehouse for the first time.

It’s free, and available for a limited time only at Tucson’s favorite nighty time rendevous:

Safehouse E Bar
4024 East Speedway
Tucson, Arizona
85712
520-318-3090
www.safehousecoffee.com

That mini is going to be my “daily contribution of fiction” for the day; ’cause it took all god damn day.

Do you know how hard it is to get to Kinkos when you don’t have a motorvehicle?

Posted under eric's blog, fiction

Completely unbelievable.

It’s astonishing, really.

Nobody ever expected they would really come.

I mean… Martians? Really? From Mars? It’s something out of a penny dreadful, or some nonsense B-movie.

Which is precisely the problem.

Everyone assumed that the folks of Mars would come to Earth ray-guns-ablazin’, spider-legged spacepods screaming through the midnight sky. When they showed up in retro cadillacs, waving cease-and-desist orders and employing lawyers rather than building-sized Fire Ants, the nations of the world collectively shat a single, shocked brick.

The Mighty And Respectable Tribes In Alliance Navigating Space (”M.A.R.T.I.A.N.S.”), disgusted by their various gross misrepresentations in Earth Media (WAR OF THE WORLDS, MARS ATTACKS!, MARVIN THE MARTIAN, BUCK RODGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY, MARTIAN MANHUNTER, BIKER MICE FROM MARS, SANTA CLAUS CONQURES THE MARTIANS, BUTT UGLY MARTIANS, etcetera) have filed a class action lawsuit against the third planet from The Sun on December Fourth, 2009; claiming that such depictions of M.A.R.T.I.A.N. foreign policy are damaging to their planet’s stability.

Johnnie Cochran leads Earth’s legal defenders, claiming “if it’s entertaining fiction, you must acquit them”, but that doesn’t even truly rhyme, so they’re probably going to lose.

In predicatbly dramatic fashion, the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

Says <>, head representation for the M.A.R.T.I.A.N.S. : ” <> <> <> grape in just us <>. He is presumed to be mentally retarted by Earth standards, allegedly having won his right to rule by means of coming first place in a gaming tournament. The game, called “<>” appears to be not dissimiliar to POGS; a Hawaiian-based game that reached the peak of its popularity in the 1990’s.

If The Earth is found guilty, its atmosphere will be rendered completely uninhabitable to any of the six hundred and sixty six known forms of life (in accordance with Martian law).

Posted under eric's blog, fiction

His belly full of the flesh of his former captors, the beast swaggered into the wild for the first time, sure it was the biggest, baddest predator around–untill it saw the sun: that monstrous, flesh-searing, ever encroaching, ever burning ball of righteous hate hanging in mid-day’s sky like some ominous warning of imminent peril.

It tired its haunches running for hours. It wore away at its claws climbing the highest trees. It wracked its simple mind for any possible method of escape, but the flaming totem was omnipresent as fear itself.

Spiritually broken and physically exerted to the point of which there was no return, the beast’s last thoughts were of the familiar comfort of its cage.

Posted under eric's blog, fiction

Jonathan “Next One” Navarro sits in an underheated, concrete slab of a studio apartment with the barrel of a shotgun fit snugly between his teeth. His heart pounds deep and hard in his chest, like a South African Ndebele drum. Bum bum. thump thump. thump thump.

Jonnny Boy is far from suicidal, though. And miles away from depression. Continents away from self-hatred.

Next One loves life. Loves the seemingly endless bounty of the good times, and the beautifully incisive revelations of the bad times. He has sipped coffee with poets. climbed mountains with sherpas. Hunted wolves with blowhards and tended gardens with the salt of the earth. Made love to some of the most beautiful men and most interesting woman the world has to offer.

But that was ages ago. Before the weak knees. The sensitive stomache. The little patches of hair that grow in his ears at the rate of an inch a day.

However, a curious phenomenon has come into play as Mr. Navarro ages: his mind seems to pick up the slack of his other atrophying organs. His mind has turned from matters physical and sensational to those of a more illusive, metaphysical nature.

His friends and family tell him that it’s senility kicking in, or the hopeful wishes of a human being closer to his end than his beginning, but Jon knows better than that.

He has spent his entire life, made it his business one can say, to experience events and sensations other, perhaps more polite members of society would scarcely care to think about.

Of course someone who has never seen the sun set in the Saharra struggles with issues of post-mortem identity. It’s no wonder that an individual unaccustomed to waking up under the stars in the arms of freshly christened lover, baptized by his sweat, cum, and story grapples with the idea of eternity.

These people, with their careers, their genders, their mantras and philosophies, how could they know
–feel– that divine presence lingering just beyond the material facade of quotidian life?

With one sharp sigh and a silent, wordless prayer, Jon “Next One” Navarro releases himself from the tyranny of matter and embarks on his latest, grandest adventure.

Posted under eric's blog, fiction